Category Archives: 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Nosferatu the Vampyre (“Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht”)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Written by Werner Herzog
1979/West Germany
Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/Gaumont/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
First viewing
#668 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDb users say 7.5/10; I say 8/10

[box] Count Dracula: [Hearing howling] Listen… [More howling] Listen. The children of the night make their music.[/box]

Werner Herzog’s homage to Murnau is a visual feast.

Renfield sends Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) on a dangerous but potentially lucrative journey to Transylvania to try to sell a house to Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski).  Harker’s wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) has a bad feeling about the trip and urges him not to go. When Harker returns, he is gravely ill and demented.  Dracula arrives to occupy his new house and brings with him a ship full of rats and an epidemic of plague.  Doctor Van Helsing does not believe in the occult or vampires so it is up to Lucy to slay the fiend.

I love Werner Herzog’s sense of lighting and framing so from the opening, in which a shot of books, fruit, and kittens looked to me like an Old Master, I was hooked.  In addition, Klaus Kinski may make the very best Dracula ever.  He actually looked like a bat to me and was scary and pathetic at the same time.  I had not known that Bruno Ganz was in this film.  He is one of my very favorite actors and he is wonderful, as always, here, especially as he transitions from before his encounter with Dracula to after.  The score, done by frequent collaborators Florian Fricke and Popul Vuh, adds to the atmosphere.

That said, the story started losing me about the time Dracula arrived with those rats.  Oh, how I hate the creatures!  I don’t know how Isabelle Adjani could stand to walk through them.  But it wasn’t just the rats.  The film starts getting more and more surreal to the point where it lost some of its earlier appeal.  Nevertheless, I could have looked at the pictures for another hour.

BFI Trailer

Song at Midnight (“Ye ban ge sheng”)
Directed by Weibang Ma-Xu
Written by Weibang Ma-Xu based on the play “The Phantom of the Opera” by Gaston Leroux
1937/China
Xinhua
First viewing
#115 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] “If I am the phantom, it is because man’s hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me.” ― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera[/box]

After it got going, this early Chinese romance/operetta/propaganda/horror film kept me interested, even though it’s not something I will watch again.

(Note:  I cannot find or remember the exact character names) The opera “ghost” assists a young tenor to improve his singing.  After the man makes a hit, he goes to thank the cloaked figure, who proceeds to relate his sad history.  Let us call the “ghost” Song.  After fighting bravely for the Kuomintang, Song went to sing at the opera where he fell in love with one of the other performers.  Theirs was an eternal passion on an operatic scale. The dastardly “Tang” also lusted after the young woman and told her father that Song was a dirty revolutionary and low-life actor.  The father rounded up Song and had him beaten to within an inch of his life.  After the woman refuses to have anything to do with Tang, he decides Song won’t have her either and throws acid in his face.  Horrified when he saw his face in the mirror, Song made his friends tell his beloved that he was dead.  The woman went crazy from grief.  Song tried to comfort her by singing when the moon was full.

After Song is finished telling the story, he tells the young tenor he should now comfort the woman.  The tenor goes to her and for some reason she convinces herself that he is Song.  However, unbeknownst to Song, the tenor also has an epic love.  Tang, now the owner of the opera, tries to seduce the tenor’s lover and is rebuffed.  Tang tries to strangle the woman but the tenor walks in and the men start brawling.  As Tang prepares to stab the tenor, Song appears and after a battle kills Tang.  The townspeople see Song’s horrible face and chase him through the town with torches until they corner him in a tower which they set on fire (shadows of Frankenstein).  The tenor goes to Song’s beloved and tells her not to grieve.  Song would have wanted them to fight on for freedom and liberty in the Kuomintang.  The two of them stand looking toward the rising sun as the film ends.

It was a little hard to wrap my head around the Phantom being the most noble and heroic character in the film!  This movie truly has a little bit of everything.  Western classical music is used in combination with the Chinese opera music and the men largely wear business suits while the ladies are in traditional attire.  The acting is very, very histrionic and flamboyant, as I imagine it might be in traditional theater.  It all took some getting used to and was not assisted by the dark and grainy print.  I can’t say I’d watch again for pleasure but I’m glad I saw it.

Clip

Rosemary’s Baby
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Roman Polanski based on the novel by Ira Levin
1968/USA
William Castle Productions
Repeat viewing
#500 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDb users say 8.0/10; I say 9.0/10

[box] Mrs. Gilmore: We’re your friends, Rosemary. There’s nothing to be scared about. Honest and truly there isn’t![/box]

There’s nothing creepier than gynecological horror unless it’s gynecological horror with old people.

I’ll make this short. to keep the story fresh for those who have not seen this classic film.  Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is married to up-and-coming actor Guy (John Casavettes) and the two are ready to start a family.  They move into the historic Bamford Building, with its gothic layout and history of murders and weird occult activities.  Soon, the two are befriended by their elderly next-door neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon).    Minnie is nosy and bossy but Guy takes a liking to Roman and starts spending quality time with him.  Suddenly, the couple are in charge of Rosemary’s pregnancy, which rapidly develops alarming “complications” …  With Ralph Bellamy and Charles Grodin as obstetricians, Elisha Cook Jr. as a real estate agent, Maurice Evans as Rosemary’s friend, and Patsy Kelly as a friend of the Castevets.

My husband calls this “idiotic” but I think it is practically perfect.  Roman Polanski did an awesome job of creating a realistically eerie atmosphere in his first Hollywood film. Likewise Mia Farrow turned in what may be her best performance ever in her screen debut.  It seems like Polanski had his choice of all the great classic character actors to fill out his cast and they make the movie even more fun.

Netflix sent me the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray.  The film looked beautiful but sometimes high-resolution reveals a little too much as when it highlighted the make-up used to get Farrow’s warmed-over-death look.  It contains a 2012 documentary with Roman Polanski, Mia Farrow, and studio head Robert Evans talking about the making of the film, a radio interview with novelist Ira Levin, and a full-length documentary about Krzysztof Komeda, who wrote the haunting score.

Ruth Gordon won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her work in Rosemary’s Baby and Roman Polanski was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

Theatrical Trailer

Earth (“Zemlya”)
Directed by Aleksandr Dovshenko
Written by Alexsandr Dovshenko
1930/USSR
VUFKU
Multiple viewings
#55 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDb users say 7.4/10; I say 6/10

I last saw Earth on October 10, 2012.  At that time, I was relieved to know that occasion would be the last time I would view it before I died.  Fortunately I have preserved my review.  Here it is.

Sometimes I don’t know what is wrong with me. This is perhaps the third time I have watched this widely praised Soviet silent film with the same results. I think I am possibly too influenced by film scores. This one has the same effect on me as fingernails on a blackboard. I’m sure other people would think it was fine. Then too, while I can recognize that the images are powerful and beautiful, the whole just doesn’t do it for me. There you have it. Meh.

It should be noted that I have a decidedly minority view of this important film. Per Wikipedia:

“It was named #88 in the 1995 Centenary Poll of the 100 Best Films of the Century in Time Out Magazine. The film was also voted one of the ten greatest films of all time by a group of 117 film historians at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and named one of the top ten greatest films of all time by the International Film Critics Symposium.”

Clip – Birth, death, and the whole damn thing

Koyaanisqatsi
Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Written by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio, and Alton Walpole
1982/USA
IRE Productions/Santa Fe Institute for Regional Education
Repeat viewing
#731 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDb users say 8.1/10; I say 7/10

[box] It’s not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It’s that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life. — Godfrey Reggio [/box]

I have a few nits to pick with this heavy-handed message movie.

The film has no dialogue and only a brief textual note defining the title at the very end.  Yet its message could not be clearer.  It opens with beautiful scenes of natural landscapes, many of them taken with time-lapse photography to show clouds moving through.  Most of the landscapes seem to be in the American Southwest of desert and strange rock formations.  We move on to mining, industry, atom bomb tests, etc. blotting those landscapes.  From there, the film spends all of its time in cities.  There is still heavy use of time-lapse photography that emphasizes speed and crowds.  Cars, mechanization, skyscrapers, and commercialization predominate.  There is no middle ground in this story.

The filmmakers clearly intended to convince viewers that modern life is seriously out of balance and that we are headed toward our doom.  The only way this could have been made more obvious is if they had been able to reach out from the screen with a sledge hammer.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that this film had very little to do with life at all.  The natural vistas at the beginning are all strangely vacant.  Aside from a few fleeting birds, there is no trace of animal life and scarcely any plant life.  Although Reggio quotes from the Hopi language and legends, he doesn’t show any people anywhere living in harmony with nature.  Then, when he moves to the city, we get people only in crowds or, very occasionally, staring at the camera like expressionless automatons.  The subliminal message seems to be that humans are the root of this evil.  How, then, to bring life back into balance?

For me, an empty landscape barren of life is not beautiful but dead.  Although I agree that modern life is out of whack in many ways, I can’t buy into Reggio’s world view or enjoy his film much.

I saw this for the first and only previous time when it originally played in theaters.  My main memory is of being slightly bored and annoyed with the music.  This time through I thought the music was very effective but I still kept looking at the clock – something I couldn’t do in the darkened theater.

Full disclosure:  My rental DVD didn’t come in time for this review.  I watched the film on Hulu Plus.  Since it was not part of the Criterion Collection which has no ads, I was treated to interruptions about every ten minutes.  It was pretty bizarre especially the first time when I was watching night passing over the desert and out of nowhere came “Take a mouth trip!” with a giant Big Mac.  Never again.

Trailer