Lundi matin [Monday Morning] 2002 - Directed by Otar Iosseliani, whose work most often causes people to draw comparisons with Tati for its mild deadpan humor and precise sight gags - though gag is a rather strong word for the calmly surreal juxtapositions that occur. A man gets off his bike to move a big square rock out of the path, just in time for another man to come along and sit down on it. That sort of thing. Less outright surrealism than his previous Farewell, Home Sweet Home!, this is a picaresque wandering meant to be slightly amusing. It is. 7/10
The Cheat (1931) Most of my experience of Tallulah Bankhead comes from the latter end of her career, as a Noted Personality with no real evidence of why she was noted. This is from the other end of her career, and having seen her in the pre-brassiere era wearing a sating evening gown in a cool lakeshore breeze I know a little about her that I didn't know before. It's a lurid melodrama ending with a courtroom scene - Bankhead's gambling on cards and the market put her in the power of an orientalist lothario, with startling results. I have yet to see the thing that makes me "get" what her deal was, but this was interesting to see. 6/10
It seems you can't get away with anything any more. I heard from Donald Sosin, the noted silent film composer whom I cursed below. He kindly let me know that, as I suspected, others assess his work less brutally. I acknowledge that my opinions are mine alone, and often result from meanderings down an obscure byway unknown to others. As an amateur of popular entertainments of bygone days I sometimes know more than is necessary for enjoyment. I not only recognize background music, but sometimes know the names of the composer and lyricist and the Broadway show it's from and who starred in the heavily rewritten film version. I could tell you that the snappy melody in the party scenes in both Merrily We Go To Hell and Hot Saturday is One Hour With You, from the Lubitsch film of the same name, Jeanette MacDonald's first movie. When I see recent period films, like the 2008 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, I can tell that the soundtrack's scholarship is more from common knowledge or from period films of the '70s when it was sufficient for a hippie in a rented tux with his hair greased back to sing Baby Face through a megaphone - whereas I would try to determine what was actually played and popular IN BRITAIN at the time if they asked me to score a film set in Britain in that period. A friend of mine used to describe this sort of thing according to his pet peeve - Nazis with blowdried hair. This is all just my own bag, and Sosin's thing is his own bag and I acknowledge that for him it's groovy. I would like my few rare readers to know of his gentlemanliness.
