The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp - 1943 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr
Director:  Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

I imagine this film is adapted from a novel, and one of the trickiest things about adapting novels to film is showing character changes.  A novel takes days to read, in which the characters stew about in your mind - they coalesce and evanesce.  Here you've got less than three hours to show the journey of a man from early manhood to old age - how do you make the shifts in his life not seem forced?

Blimp... has some masterful montages and monologues that help it tell this story.  Very little in the plot seems contrived - this is to say that at no point do you think 'the story has to go here' and then it does.  We don't know where it's necessarily headed, and if you're telling someone's life story (fictional or actual), that's the best job you can do.

The Comedy - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim
Director:  Rick Alverson

Most of what I've heard about this film beforehand is that the title 'The Comedy' is misleading, but it's actually pretty accurate.  This isn't to say that The Comedy is funny, because it's not (nor is it anti-comedy, despite the Tim and Eric starring roles), but it could be - it's more an examination of comedy.  What if someone was trying to be funny, only he didn't find himself funny, nor did he have an audience for his humor?  That's The Comedy.

There's no real arc to the film so it's hard for me to rate it any better than this.  It's sort of an anti-Samsara - we need to get Heidecker's character into a theater so he can check that one out, and maybe riff on it a bit.  To a degree, it's a film that doesn't need to be watched, just explained to other people; it may be better as a concept than an actual piece of art. On the other hand, a non-watcher would miss out on Heidecker's performance, which is quite good.

Samsara - 2011 - 4½ Stars

Subject:
Director:  Ron Fricke

Ron Fricke was the cinematographer on Koyaanisqatsi and in the 30 years since that film's release, to my knowledge, he has directed 2 feature length films and one short film.  All have had similar themes and similar use of images as Koyaanisqatsi, but neither Baraka nor Chronos came close to that film's power.  Not so with Samsara, which marries stunning images to a wonderful narrative, expunging (most of) the cheap ironies which marred Koyaaniqatsi.  Music is the only place where this film lags - it's largely unobstrusive, sometimes propulsive, but nowhere close to Philip Glass's scores for the Qatsi trilogy.  I'm likely overrating this one, but it'd be the first film I'd show extraterrestrials upon arriving on this planet.

The Spectacular Now - 2013 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley
Director:  James Ponsoldt

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

Adolesence lends itself to film because there's a natural tendency for someone to guess at what a high schooler will become as an adult.  Thus there's an inherent dramatic irony to coming-of-age films - the characters typically see life's infinite possibilities, whereas we see the forming of habits and personality that will put them into a certain box.  The walls around their life are getting tighter just as they think the walls are getting looser.  The Spectacular Now uses this dramatic irony quite well, without necessarily resorting to high drama or other classic tropes of teenagerdom.  Often silence (or deflection) says more.  Ponsoldt also employs more long takes in conversation than would be customary in a film like this, which enhances the reality of dialogue.

One of the conceits of the film is that Shailene Woodley's character has never had a boyfriend - this gets into tricky territory for films, because filmmakers want to cast attractive people, but on the other hand given her looks, this is somewhat ludicrous.

Two-Lane Blacktop - 1971 - 4 Stars

Actors:  James Taylor, Warren Oates
Director:  Monte Hellman

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

Two-Lane Blacktop's characters don't have a backstory, nor do they have a destiny.  I've been thinking a lot about why Hollywood films these days are so long these days, and it's often because we need to find out the character's backstory and their destiny.  Otherwise, why are we watching the movie?  We need to find out who these people are and what motivates them.  Two-Lane Blacktop says forget all that - you just need some fast cars and some barely-scripted dialogue, and you can make a movie out of that.  Two-Lane Blacktop comes from an era that the film is so revered as a form of entertainment that films didn't have to compete for your attention - they didn't need to justify your time or its existence.  It's a movie, you should watch it.

This film either has something much deeper going on or it has literally nothing going on at all.  I imagine some would find some of the choices pretentious or awkward, but most of them worked for me.