Le petit soldat (transl. The Little Soldier) is a French film, written and directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1960, but not released until 1963.
So is this his first movie? Hm… no his second.
This DVD transfer is absolutely horrendous. Hm… Oh! Criterion released a blu ray version of this last year… should I bail and get that one instead? Hm…
I kept on watching, but … I shouldn’t… I mean, I think I’ve really enjoyed all of Godard’s other films from the 60s? (This is the final one I haven’t seen.) And I’m just not connecting with this one? At all? It may be due to the DVD transfer. Or… not…
But the movie’s picking up now. The photoshoot scene with Anna Karina was great.
The scenes of torture aren’t a lot of fun to watch. And they’re like… very… didactic. “Here’s how you waterboard, here’s how you electrocute.”
That song basically recaps the entire movie. I had totally forgotten.
Oh, yeah — Robert Wise did the first Star Trek movie.
Well, there’s a trigger-happy asshole if I ever saw one.
This is pretty good. I mean, as 50s sci fi movies goes, it’s really well made. But the central premise is kinda, you know — hokey: Why send one single vulnerable guy (with a robot sidekick) for a mission like this anyway? They could have worked around that by making Mr. Carpenter less human, but… he just seems like a normal dorkish guy, so…
Such matte!
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert Wise. 1951. ⚃
Oh! This is an anthology movie? I just noticed all the directors…
I’m pretty sure I watched this on VHS back in the 80s, but I have no recollection of what the movie is about. Or movies.
Was this primarily a showcase for super wide screen movie technologies? The super-wide lens here (with a very deep field of view) seems almost supernatural.
How the West Was Won was one of only two dramatic feature films (the other being The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm) made using the three-strip Cinerama process. Although the picture quality when projected onto curved screens in theatres was stunning, attempts to convert the movie to a smaller screen suffer from that process’s technical shortcomings. When seen in letterbox format, the actors’ faces are nearly indistinguishable in long shots.
I’m assuming they’re talking about on small screens?
I mean, look! That oars bent! This is so otherworldly — everything looks subtly wrong… like I’m on acid or something.
AM I?!?!1!
So that’s what a Cinerama camera looks like, and explains why the angles are off.
The odd angles here means that they try to keep the actors in the middle third of the screen all the time. It looks so obsessive! But it’s for technical reasons — when people move around between the lenses, it looks all wonky.
So no wonder this was only used for two feature movies — it must have been a nightmare to film.
But it looks really cool!
I’m guessing this ditch is really straight? Cinerama!
Ouch!!!
For most of the movie, the camera is totally stationary, but a couple of the directors try to move it around a bit (bit not a lot, because that’d make people sea sick). But putting the camera on the train, for instance, in an action scene, totally works.
Still that symmetry.
I don’t know how to throw the dice on this one. It’s such a delight to watch — just because of the Cinemascope which makes everything look all wonky (in a good way). Every scene is like “yah”.
And the action scenes are amazing.
But the storylines are pretty… er… basic… or barely there.
So it’s lovely. But is it worth watching? I’ll give it a weaselly:
How The West Was Won. John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and Richard Thorpe. 1962. ⚃
