Calamari Union. Aki Kaurismäki. 1985. ⚃

Yes, indeed: I bought a box set of Aki Kaurismäki’s movies on 2K. Here’s the first one.

[five minutes pass]

Oh, man, this takes me back. Not that I’ve ever seen this movie before, but the humour is so intensely 1983. Very bizarre and pretentious, but in the best way: It’s made by someone who has indeed seen a bunch of Nouvelle Vague movies, but also Eraserhead, and who’s just goofing off. A movie for teenagers.

[an hour passes]

OK, I was really into this movie for … forty minutes? The shots are meticulously filmed; just gorgeous, and the restoration on this 2K edition makes everything look so wonderful. But it’s becoming clear that they used all the idea they had in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and now they’re just padding until they have a feature length movie.

I mostly wonder how he got money to buy all this negative… I’m guessing the er actors are friends of his? Which would explain the extreme gender disparity, looks-wise, between the male and the female actors in this movie.

[the end]

The two horrible, horrible music numbers (used as padding) don’t help.

It’s not a good movie, but the fun bits are brilliant.

La Collectionneuse. Éric Rohmer. 1967. ⚄

I’ve sort of put Rohmer on the back burner… It’s because I love watching his movies while flying: They have that distracted quality that make them perfect to watch while eating bad airplane food and getting totally sloshed on bad airplane wine.

Oh, writing that makes me regret putting it on, because I’m so nostalgic for being on airplanes… and I always thought I hated flying! I must love it secretly!

But, well, once I’ve started watching this movie…

[the end]

Wow! This made me want to be on a plane to… Hawaii…

Anyway. Brilliant movie. That is, until the final… fifteen minutes? I loved everything about it until then: The colours, the sound of the swifts and the crickets, the amateur actors who are smiling most of the time, the gorgeous, languorous shots of the beautiful countryside, the vague non-storyline…

But then that Sam guy shows up and somehow all the charm goes out of the movie. Very strange.

So how to score that, then… it’s like a ⚅ until that point, and then it’s like ⚁…

Cover Girl. Charles Vidor. 1944. ⚄

Put the bass in your walk! Head to toe! Etc!

I guess Charles Vidor isn’t King Vidor? I’m so confused.

[twenty minutes pass]

This 2K version has been nicely restored, although they’ve gone a bit overboard with the film grain: The backgrounds look like angry bees swarming.

But very pretty otherwise.

Oh, and the movie? It’s a lot of fun so far. Very classic plot.

It’s kinda odd for a movie made in 1944 not to mention the war, even obliquely, though.

[ten minutes pass]

Oh, Hayworth character got a telegram, and the Kelly character quips “perhaps it’s a draft notice”. That’s a reference.

[fifteen minutes pass]

This movie’s got a lot of charming little details, like the woman who answers the phone with “Sure, I’ll marry ya. Who is this?”

[the end]

This could easily have done with shaving off about half an hour. It’s not that any of the scenes are less than amusing, but it loses cohesion by just going on this long — the plot is super-basic and we know exactly where it’s going, so keeping things snappy is vital.

Still… there’s just some extraordinarily exuberant scenes in here, so I love it anyway.