Criterion Channel’s got a huge Hitchcock collection for December.
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Damn, wish I had known that earlier today. Was a slow day at work.
Hopefully this will still be true this weekend.
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I would guess it will be. At least Rear Window is hosted by YouTube itself, so it’s not an overlooked copyright claim waiting to happen or anything.
hell yeah
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I wanted an HBO and Twitter universe. Instead I live in a Max and X world.
Was gonna cancel Max because I haven’t watched it in six months, but that’s at least interesting.
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Wonder when the effective date of that is. More people need to have ready access to Past Lives.
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It has less than 10,000 votes. That particular fact isn’t going to hold.
Watched Bicycle Thieves (1948), an Italian film considered to be among the all-time classics. For what I’m guessing are thematic overlaps to the plot point that now make a bit more sense to me, this film gets referenced in The Player when Tim Robbins follows Vincent D’Onofrio to a theater showing this film to try to catch up with him about some messages he’d been receiving.
The basic outline of Bicycle Thieves is that a man in a desperate financial position is able to score a job that shows promise to give much-needed stability to his family’s situation, but the job does require the worker to use a bicycle to get around. Shortly into the job, the protagonist’s bicycle is stolen, and much of the film revolves around his attempt to recover it.
Being a modern viewer who expects most films to revolve around plot movement, I became impatient for a new pivotal thing to happen for a large portion of this movie, not realizing that it was putting most of its artistic vision into simply acting as a portrayal for the realities that someone in Italy’s working class was facing in the immediate period following WWII. While this film puts the “slow” in slow burn, I will say that the final act paid off incredibly well and made me feel a lot more charitable toward the time I had put into it.
After watching, I saw this review on Letterboxd:
Woof. Wikipedia does appear to largely back this up with sources, so it seems true. And if so, seems like quite a bleak bit of additional context to the film.
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Cheers, saw this in a cinema history course in grad school. What’s next on the list? Last Year at Marienbad?
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Can’t say I’d ever even heard of that one, but I see that it’s rated pretty highly. I added it to the watchlist.
No idea on what’s next. Rather than planning next watch in advance, one of my most common ways of picking next movie is to dial up my Letterboxd watchlist, filter by what’s available on my streaming services, and then sort by “shuffle” to give myself a random selection and pick something off the page based on mood, etc.
Just looking at the synopsis of Last Year at Marienbad did sort of remind me, though:
Motivated in part by this post, I did catch up with more David Lean a month or two ago in the form of Brief Encounter. That one was great.
It did cause me, mid-movie, to go running to Google to go, “Uhh, is the Eric Carmen song ‘All by Myself’ a lyricized version of the score from Brief Encounter?” Didn’t realize that both were directly sampling the melody of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
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Is this the same as The Bicycle Thief? Looks like it. Also the movie that Vincent D’onofrio went to see in The Player before Tim Robbins killed him.
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It is. I take it the choice was because Vincent D’Onofrio’s character, struggling desperately as a screenwriter to get his break, was probably identifying himself with the lead of this.
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Lol I just noticed you also mentioned The Player. I really need to stop skimming around.
On a meta-level I also think the choice served a few purposes:
- The Bicycle Thief is a classic movie snob movie.
- Show D’Onofrio’s character as a bitter perfectionist in a world of sellouts.
- Show Tim Robbins’ character as actually knowing a little about classic movies, despite being a sellout.
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Doesn’t he just turn up for the last five minutes of the movie so that he could confront D’Onofrio? I didn’t think it necessarily said anything about Robbins’s character. Possible I’m misremembering.
I thought another thing about it was that the cops found it to be an odd story about his evening that piqued their interest in him further. “You went across L.A. late on a weeknight to watch Bicycle Thieves?” I remember it coming across like a WTF to them, that it was more than coincidental that he was in the area where the murder happens.
I’ve only seen The Player the one time so far, so you might remember better than I do.
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Bicycle Thieves is great, big recommend
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