I’m not quite sure why I have this DVD… perhaps I bought it for the 1940s movie project, but didn’t use it?

It could be the Raoul Walsh connection — he’s pretty spiffy, isn’t he?

Anyway.

So this is Errol Flynn as Custer, the guy who had that stand. Hm… West Point? Is that a southern or northern thing? Oh, it’s in New York.

And then they play “Dixie” while they let the officers that have decided to fight for the secessionists march off south. This is portrayed as the heroic thing to do.

Well, yes.

Flynn accidentally negs Olivia de Havilland, so: Romance.

I guess the point of this movie is to stir patriotism for the fight against Nazi Germany, but it’s a bit annoying: There’s a stirring orchestra er stirring all of the time, and I’m getting a bit stir crazy.

Flynn’s pretty good in this? He’s convincingly jaunty.

What… is that Hattie McDaniel? She looks so much younger than in Gone With The Wind from a couple years earlier.

She’s totally hamming it up. I love it.

Callie tells it like it is.

McDaniel’s got all the lines.

I started watching this movie in a kind of bad mood, but it’s really winning me over. The funny scenes are very amusing indeed, the action scenes are plenty exciting, and the romantic scenes are very awww.

It’s firing on a lot of cylinders.

He’s a celeb now.

He’s so evil!

Anyway, I assume that this is all a fantasy, but it’s a pretty nice fantasy… but… it’s really dragging in parts. I feel like an hour could have been cut without losing anything of value.

They Died With Their Boots On. Raoul Walsh. 1941. ⚃

OK, I’ve started watching the DVDs that are at the bottom of the stack of unwatched movies… and they’ve sedimented there because of various reasons.

This one is there because I have absolutely no idea why I bought this movie. Neither the name of the movie nor the name of the director rings any bells.

But that’s a stylish opening sequence.

This is really fascinating. They’re really emphasising the format of the movie — everything is all horizontal and symmetrical.

And then there’s these.

I’m really digging this. The only thing that’s … disturbing is the guy reading the text. He’s got such a deep, sonorous voice, made for reading poetry, that it just seems fake.

But then we get into… boring stories about drugs and stuff, and while the cinematography is still wonderful, it’s just kinda not very interesting?

Nooo! Now they’re doing Like a Rolling Stone on the soundtrack.

This really took a turn for the horrible.

You don’t say:

It was selected as the Luxembourgian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, but was not nominated.

The first … ten minutes? are riveting. Then it all goes almost unimaginably wrong.

Never Die Young. Pol Cruchten. 2013. ⚁

I remember Béla Tarr being hot shit in the 90s? It least I can remember his movies being a thing at the Cinematheque…

But there isn’t much talk about his movies these days, are there?

This is a very pretty movie, at least.

There’s a lot of soup in this movie. I love soup.

It’s a soup kitchen!

I think my problem with this movie is… that I can’t really tell what this is supposed to be … is it a “this is what it felt like during the Eastern Bloc years” kind of thing?

That is, it’s all symbolic and stuff? Or is this supposed to be more realistic?

Of course, I’m kinda drunk, so take that into consideration.

But it feels like some of these scenes wanted to have more resonance than they’re having.

And instead they’re kinda random. Like they’re trying too hard, what with the naïf as the protagonist, and the scheming aunt, and the whale, and…

It feels like it’s almost a parody of this type of movie.

Hey! This reminds me… did I watch a Tarr movie before and wrote exactly the same sort of nonsense? I DID!!!! I had forgotten!

Perhaps I just don’t like Tarr. It just feels like somebody that’s trying to tap into the Bergman/Tarkovski nexus without having anything interesting to say.

And without having their amazing cast.

This is close to being a parody of European art movies. The scene where they’re beating everybody up in the hospital, but then two guys see a naked old guy and suddenly realise that beating up people isn’t nice, and then everybody slinks out (all five hundred of them, only two of which had seen the sad naked old guy) while bad, sentimental string music is playing…

That’s fucking weak, man.

Is Béla Tarr just a fraud? I realise that people are really impressed with the long takes (I think it’s mentioned a dozen times on this page), but…

Werchmeister Harmonies. Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky. 2000. ⚁