Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#3 in my ranking of Jean-Pierre Melville's filmography. It's rare to find a final ten minutes that adds as much to a film as the last ten minutes of Le Doulos. Up until then, it had been a twisty, intentionally and occasionally unclear narrative that got sorted out with a quick bit of exposition near… Continue reading Le Doulos
#12 in my ranking of Jean-Pierre Melville's filmography. This is a serious step back for Melville. It's not bad, but this is the film that feels like it was a promising young filmmaker's first film not the follow up to Bob le Flambeur. The exteriors were filmed in New York, and the interiors were filmed… Continue reading Two Men in Manhattan
#6 in my ranking of Jean-Pierre Melville's filmography. Quand tu liras cette lettre was a transitional film from Jean-Pierre Melville's earlier, less distinctive films to what he would become known for, introducing motifs and visual elements that he would mine repeatedly for the rest of his career. In his next film, Bob le Flambeur, Melville… Continue reading Bob le Flambeur
#10 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. This is a mixture of two film genres that end up complimenting each other rather perfectly. The main character disappears from half the movie, and yet it still works. This is one of Kurosawa's most experimental films, and it's couched in seemingly straightforward styles of storytelling, a… Continue reading High and Low
#9 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. One of the earliest buddy cop movies, pairing up a young police officer with a more seasoned one, essentially Lethal Weapon but postwar Japanese, Straw Dogs is basically a police procedural about the search of a lost police pistol. What makes it really work is twofold: the… Continue reading Stray Dog
David Vining, Author 