Goin' Through Films #1

For the first time in years I've decided to write about films. I've failed in the past by trying to be too ambitious in my film efforts. At various times in the past tried to articulate my feelings about movies in review and star rating, 1-10 scale form. But my mind just ain't built for criticism. My mind liquifies thoughts as they come to, so they are always shifting and changing (and unfortunately they sometimes, like water, have the tendancy to movie to travel the path of least resistance). That's great if you like pondering things and seeing them from all sides. Not so great if you're attempting to rate every movie you see on a one to one hundred scale. I'm not even gonna try to do a scale time. As some who likes to know little more than a movie's title when going into the theater, I find rating scales an invaluable wheat/chaff separation tool. But as a means of making the definitive stamp on a movie, they are fairly flawed, especially when historical works of art are considered. For instance, Tartuffe is considered one of the greatest plays of all time (at least when it comes to high school English classes).So, should it get a 97 because it's a well written, brave work that had the balls to say something in the face of repression? Or should it get a 67 because, well, the ending kind of comes out of nowhere and its a pretty big cop out. Also I don't think people should even attempt rating scales until they get a fairly comprehensive understanding of film history. To get myself going, I'm going to start with the last movie I've seen and work my way towards the beginning of the year. The last movie I saw is F For Fake. I liked it a lot, but I've only seen two other Welles flicks (Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons), so I can't really say whether it deserves an A. What if I see all the other Welles flicks and they leave it in the dust? I mean, it'd make sense that cinema's oft-cited greatest director's movies should all get A's, but F For Fake is a cinematic essay and I've only seen a couple of those too. And what if, after seeing a bunch of those, I come to the conclusion that Welles was really just kind of coat riding on a bunch of other superior cinematic essay composers. I mean, the dude wasn't really a documentarian, so it's not that hard to imagine. Should it still get an A? Even if I still like it over the movies it copied (I'm not saying Welles was copying anyone with F For Fake, I'm just saying that with my limited knowledge of documentaries, it's fairly possible). I remember seeing Dog Day Afternoon in high school and not being able to really process it because so many movies since 1975 had copied the flick. I wanted to grade it well, but the movie didn't seem very fresh because I'd seen so many imitations. Since then it's grown on me, but that's only because I've learned to appreciate things like originality since then.

F For Fake
dir. Orson Welles, 1974

Man, it's a pity that immortality isn't more common these days because I could listen to Orson Welles just riff on this and that for hours on end. It's a pity that naturalism has lowered the effect of a person's voice in the movies. Where are all the people who you just want to sit down and watch them talk for an hour and a half?
When the jazz music comes in a few minutes into the movie, it's pretty clear that the theme of this flick isn't the ever blurry line that separates truth and fiction, but the beat. If Orson Welles were a jazz musician, he'd be Dizzy Gillespie. As an aspiring editor, it's just dazzling to watch how Welles will take fairly straightforward material like sit-down interviews, painting demonstrations, and voiceover narration and then chop it all up so that on a cut to cut basis it makes no sense, but, does make sense on a rhythmic level and by the end, the overall effect of the flick does make me reconsider how perception affects art and the world at large.