The Big Sleep is a great movie, but I’m not sure the joy lies in its complexity. You will never understand everything that happens, and who does what to whom, because the director himself did not know. In fact, Howard Hawks and Humphrey Bogart had a disagreement about a particular character, whether he was killed or committed suicide, so they asked the author of the book, Raymond Chandler. Chandler said that he didn’t know either.
And you will love this movie when you realize that it doesn’t matter. The dialog has rhythm and wit. Humphrey Bogart plays the toughest gumshoe you’ll ever see and Lauren Bacall is the woman of mystery. It’s a style that’s been parodied so often you forget how good the original was.
And no one’s mentioned one of the real classics yet, Sleuth. It’s stunningly complicated, with crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses, which is a hell of a trick since there are only two people in the entire movie. Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine were both nominated for the Academy Award.
Cervaise, you didn’t used to own Scarecrow Video, did you?
Um, (cough), I think you meant three. Only two major stars, maybe, but three people in the movie. Let’s not spoil this excellent thread by posting incorrect information.
That’s right, I forgot about him. It’s been at least ten years since I’ve seen it. But the third person doesn’t really do anything on his own. He’s just being manipulated, put through the motions by somebody else.
I just remembered another good one, The Sting. There’s a lot going on in that movie, more than you think, and it has a fantastic ending. Great music, too.
I recently watched Following. This is the first film by the director of Memento. Following is really very good. The acting is at the same level as Memento, (really it’s a bunch of friends making a movie) but the plot is just as complex.
The City of Lost Children is absoultly fantastic.
I’ll also recomend The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen and Time Bandits. (remember they are ment for children)
> [Speaking of Picnic at Hanging Rock:] Because it’s based on a true story and no one really knows what happened so they gave no answer.
Actually, it isn’t based on a true story. That was part of the pretense of the movie. People have checked it out and it turns out that there was no real event that inspired it. It’s like Fargo then, where there’s also a pretense of it being based on a real story.
Really? You know I went to try and find more to read on the case but could find nothing. I guess that explains why. I think you can blame AMC or TCM for passing that myth on to me.
Picnic at Hanging Rock was based on a novel but, if I remember correctly, the author on the novel deliberately created the (false) impression that the book was based on fact. I remember taking my (fifteen year old?) daughter to see it. She kept saying (WHOOPS: SPOILER ALERT…)
“but they don’t tell you what HAPPENED!” Yup.
END SPOILER ALERT
Oh! Speaking of Fellini: Juliet of the Spirits. A woman loses her husband and her mind, or does she. And the star (Fellini’s wife) is a delight. I just kept wanting to give her a hug and tell her everything would be all right.
Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT is one of my favorites. (A director, played by Truffaut, starts out trying to make a great movie and ends up trying to make ANY movie…) Twenty-five years after the first time I saw it I’m amazed at how many scenes still run through my head. But the opening scene is absolutely unforgettable.
I would recommend The Hustler. The plot itself isn’t complex, but the characters are. The interplay of the main characters is fascinating and deep. Great movie.
I would actually recommend real period noir movies over The Usual Suspects (but only because TUS is very much like the book ‘After Dark My Sweet’ but not as complex). Like The Maltese Falcon.
I’d also recommend Dark City. Opinions vary widely on this one; some people hate it. But I like the way the story unfolds in a pattern different from regular linear storytelling; at the end you might have the impression that you’ve only gotten glimpses of the whole story, like people seen in a passing train. Or you might hate it.
I recently saw some of this Japanese movie called Cure. The copy we had was pretty fucked up, so we stopped watching it after about half an hour, but it seemed really good.
It’s all about a rash of murders that have been occurring recently in Japan, all committed by different people, but all with very bizare similarities. The victims all are killed by an X cut giong from the top of the shoulders, across the neck and down to about the mid chest; the murderers are all just average people; they remember committing the act, but have no recollection as to why they did it (“The Devil made me do it,” and “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time” are common responses); the victims are all sick in some sense (flue, common cold, etc.); there’s always a mysterious man suffering from amnesia wandering around before or after the murder.
I didn’t get to see the whole thing, like I said, but from what I saw, it looked mighty impressive, and this weekend, we’re going to rent a decent copy and watch it from start to finish. It looks really good.
I had a really wonderful experience last night. I had taped Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup when it was on TCM a while back, and finally watched it last night.
Man, what a movie.
The first time I saw it it went right over my head: I literally had to struggle to stay awake. But something about seeing it again–after having seen a whole LOT of movies in the meantime–and it was magical
A mystery that’s really a mystery; we’re finally not really sure if there WAS a murder; and then we’re not even entirely positive there’s even a witness. But the mystery somehow makes the film so much more powerful: ultimately it reminds us how ephemeral the medium of film is; and then how ephemeral life itself is.
I might even watch it again tonight, though some parts of it gave me a hankering to rewatch Tarkovsky’s The Mirror.
