The Young Girls of Rochefort. Jacques Demy. 1967. ⚅
I was like… is that Gene Kelly? It can’t be Gene Kelly! It’s just some French guy that kinda looks like Gene Kelly. I mean, he doesn’t even look that much like Gene Kelly. Is that Gene Kelly? And then he danced a bit, and yup it’s Gene Kelly.
Anyway!
This is probably a less personal movie than the Umbrella one, but it’s fantastic. It’s got better tunes, and incredibly enough, it looks even better: It’s got the best set design ever. Every scene is a delight to look at.
It’s also a much more traditional movie: It’s got a clockwork logic where it’s obvious that everybody’s going to end up with each other. It’s got I don’t know how many star-crossed lover pairs, and you root for every one of them, and the movie delivers.
I’m usually liveblogging these things, but I couldn’t this time. I was just too into the movie to do more than take a pee break.
I don’t think there’s many movies that are more… just what they aim to be… than this movie. It’s totally on point: Envision a coked-up distillation of all undercover cop movies ever, but with surfing, and this is it. It’s got everything: The mismatched pair of cops; the angry sergeant or… whatever he was… giving them a hard time; the love story entangled with the villains; the show-downs; the…
It’s all those clichés: But perfectly made. In addition, there’s a bunch of skydiving and surfing scenes. There’s not really any plot to get in the way of the sheer rush of watching pure, unadulterated idiocy: It’s the perfect movie that sums up Reagan’s 80s better than anything else.
It’s so stupid! I love it!
And I haven’t even mentioned the sick action cinematography and editing: That chase scene (on foot, even!) has to be the best one ever. It’s all so perfect: The pacing, the stupid dialogue, the casting, the line delivery. It’s all flabbergasting: You can only sit there and take it in in slack-jawed wonder.
Now, despite all that, it’s not totally perfect. It sags a bit in the last… third? Last quarter? I mean, it’s fun all the way through, but the moronic grin I had on my face for the first 90 minutes kinda wilted for a bit and I started thinking a bit about fixing Emacs bugs again, but only for short stretches.
And… I’m guessing Swayze did all his own stunts and Keanu… didn’t?
I’m not quite sure why I bought this move? Because I’ve been watching a lot of werewolf movies lately? It might just be associative thinking.
But this is definitely not a movie I saw as a teenager… and I can see why. It’s a very 70s movie — not a slick 80s American horror movie at all. There was a phase change at some point, where they learned to powder the actors’ faces so they didn’t look shiny any more, and they told the actors “pretend you’re not in a Robert Altman movie”, and then suddenly! the 80s had arrived.
But this is a solidly 70s movie, with shiny faces and all.
And it’s a low-budget little movie and all.
[forty-five minutes pass]
OK, I was kinda onboard with watching a low budget horror movie… but this is incredibly tedious. I think I now remember why I bought it — I watched a DVD extra where one of the special effects guys said that this was the best werewolf movie. And, yes, the werewolves (and prosthetics) are pretty nice (for a movie of this budget), but the rest of the movie is…
I mean, there’s sort of a plot, and sort of a drama in here, but it’s just really hard to care.
Perhaps the nudity is why this movie has got a 6.6 on imdb. It’s a kinda repulsive movie?
[ten minutes pass]
That’s a really good werewolf! Really good!
[the end]
The featured review on imdb makes a case for this movie being all subversive and referential and stuff:
I think they’re reading too much into it. It’s a plotless werewolf movie that has a bunch of references to other (were)wolves in it, but that doesn’t really make it clever or interesting: It just makes it a plotless werewolf movie with a lot of references to ther (were)wolves. That’s easy and simple to do, and they did it. Obviously their focus was on making the werewolf transformations fun to watch, and they are.
