(2016) Taxi Driver

Initially, Taxi Driver seems really vague as to what is terribly wrong with with Travis, but it's painfully obvious from the beginning that something is. Him acting like “just a freak” didn't help much, although in hindsight, I suppose how he behaves should be a good clue. But it wasn't a good one for me, and I was left perplexed after he took Betsy to a porno theatre. Why would anyone do that to a woman he wants to date? Then, everything is explained very briefly: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. […] I'm God's lonely man.” There's very little about Travis that can't be understood along those thoughts. He is mentally able, but his social skills are based mostly on mimicking, so his behavior is a strange combination of confident, goofy, and mannered. He wants to conquer women by saving them from things they don't even want to be saved from – a lonely kid's unconscious idea about making a girl grateful. He is talking to himself in the mirror. He blames the “scum” for all of his problems because he don't even have personal enemies for this purpose. Most of his issues and actions seem like illustrations of his condition as it gets worse – or, rather, as he intentionally dives deeper and deeper in what seems like madness, in a seek of redemption. I was very much surprised by Hoberman briefly comparing Taxi Driver to Apocalypse Now, but it makes great sense: both lonely antiheroes Travis and Willard seem to spiral down in chaos, but there's something quite conscious about their descent, and they don't end up insane, but rather find their redemption – even if we are left with a feeling that they have a long way to climb black from “the heart of darkness”. What makes it really hard to find them similar at first is probably that Travis is embarrassingly realistic. We might have liked Willard and maybe even Kurtz, too, but not Travis. He is some of both and even worse, or at least that's how we feel about him.

(2016) The Graduate

I watched this film for the first time in class, and I thought I didn't understand Elaine because I've missed a few lines. After all, there must have been at least some reason for Elaine's decisions (even if it's just for the sake of the movie making sense.) Ben's motives weren't clear either, but if he were simply a young man desperate to marry his love without any further reason, that would have been, at worst, only banal. But it turns out (thanks to both rewatching and Roger Ebert) I didn't really miss anything. These two had simply no idea what they really wanted, and that might be the most important theme in The Graduate. Benjamin is so anxious about his future (and probably so frightened from Mr. And Mrs. Robinson's marriage) that he's adamant in marrying the first girl he falls in love with, although they don't even know each other. Meanwhile, Elaine is playing the (still) traditional female counterpart, remaining passive and clueless about what she should do, more or less accepting things as they come. She doesn't really have any reason to forgive Ben after the strip club or after his relationship with Mrs. Robinson is exposed, and neither her marrying nor leaving Carl was much of a decision either. Benjamin (probably along with Elaine) being “utterly unaware of his generation” is a nice touch that signifies that all this wasn't about the hippie problem; it wasn't exactly a cultural issue, but one that affected the whole generation. In fact, it's still relevant today – the way subsequent generations were thinking and living since has been essentially experimental. Their children are known as Generation X, then Gen Y and Z arrived, and they (we) still don't know what are we supposed to do about certain aspects of life. I also liked the symbolism of the church scene: Ben fighting with the cross and using it to banish the older generation's will is a statement that the old values are obsolete, yet the last scene ruthlessly exposes the lack of new ones.

(2016) Rear Window

One could wonder what makes it possible that Rear Window's viewer is locked in with Jefferies for almost two hours in his apartment, and somehow, it still doesn’t get boring. Having Grace Kelly as a guest and a murder case in the neighbor certainly helps (among other things), but I didn't really recognize the real engine of the entertainment here, being too busy with, well, peeping with the others. If one thing is really genius about this film is how it shows to everyone how much they really like peeping – at least if they have no reason not to do it. The cinema is the perfect place to trap the latent voyeur: there's no risk of getting caught and no moral obligations against watching fictional people; what's more, a decent viewer is supposed to just sit and watch. And there, the affinity for peeping is lured out from basically anyone. The guests of Jefferies go through a change of attitude, too; first, they all judge him more or less, but they give in the moment they find a good excuse or even just something they “can't help” watching (Miss Torso for Lt. Doyle). Stella doesn't even hide her voyeurism from the moment the Thorwald's trunk is exposed, and Lisa even expresses it the phone after she's told to go home: “Alright, but what's he doing now?”

We could even argue that Doyle was technically right, and Jefferies only got “lucky” that his poorly based suspicions (fueled by his excuse-seeking voyeurism) turned out to be right, after all. No wonder Doyle almost convinced him and Lisa at a certain point. From this aspect, an alternative ending – with Mrs. Thorwald turning out to be alive – might have been a more obvious, if a little spoon-fed conclusion. However, it would have ruined the message about the community. Thorwald is able to murder, chop, and smuggle out his wife (including burying and digging out one of her body parts in the courtyard) without anyone getting suspicious – except Jeff, in his special condition. But even Jeff wouldn't suspect anything if it wasn't for his entertainment. Just like all the other tenants, he doesn't know his neighbors, and don't really care for them either. He happens to find out a murder simply because he was desperate to make his peeping more interesting, and the others followed him when he was able to provide a half-baked murder case.

(2016) Sunset Boulevard

At first, I didn't really get Gloria Swanson's acting in Sunset Boulevard. Even if I considered that Norma Desmond was supposedly more or less deranged from the very beginning, her odd manners just didn't make sense to me, at least not as a good performance. Maybe it could work without further explanation if I saw Norma as a kind of vampire in her castle (with her somewhat Igor-like servant), but her situation didn't feel magical enough for that Neither the reviews helped me find out how is it supposed to be good acting, until I've read that of James Berardinelli, who illuminated to me that almost every single moment – except for her “rare times of lucidity” – Norma is acting theatrically, like they did in the silent films. She missed acting so much that her life turned into a never-ending act, but her neurotic refusal to behave normally may also stem in the despise of the “talkies” that moved from the theatrical acting style of silent films to more realistic acting. It's a little surprising that she's even willing to talk, but the movie wouldn't have worked with a mute Norma, and she isn't supposed to make perfect sense anyway. The chimp is another interesting element that usually isn't discussed too much. Maybe there isn't more to it than what Joe's dream implies – that is, he becomes a kind of amusement for Norma –, but there’s another, possibly unintentional parallel between them. Even though chimpanzees are still occasionally kept as pets, they're inherently so agressive that there's practically no way to raise them as peaceful adults. Sooner or later, they have to go. Joe described the chimp as an old one (which is possible if Norma got it old to begin with, or it wasn't not actually a chimpanzee), but if he was mistaken about it, the chimp might have been ended up just like Joe: maybe it was shot down for refusing to be Norma's obedient companion. A pet chimp is usually disposed of by being sent to a zoo or a lab, but Norma isn't the kind who likes being left like that.

(2016) Casablanca

It's hard to find out what made Casablanca age so ridiculously well. It's the movie that feels like something I watched at grandma's when they still had a black-and-white TV. While there's a chance I have actually seen Casablanca with its censored Hungarian dub, and the music probably evokes nostalgia in me, it still wouldn’t explain why does it feel fresher and more dynamic than anything else I've seen (and enjoyed) so far from the black-and-white era. The reviews didn't help me much on this matter, but I Umberto Eco's essay was well worth reading. While I'm not sure if I'm affected by the “cult” aspect (I don't even have favourite parts or quotes), his ideas about the massive appearance of filmic archetypes make a lot of sense. Personally, I'm not sure if it's really about the interaction between – and the cumulative effects of – these archetypes, or there are simply so many of them that they practically make up the whole movie, so at any given moment, no viewer is left without something they can closely relate to. Even though Eco explicitly refused to claim any psychoanalytic connotation to the term “archetype”, I'd think there are several Jungian archetypal images involved in very clear, idealized forms, which would give further explanation as to why Casablanca moves us more than other old cinema, more or less regardless to cultural background. There’s also one aspect I didn’t find in Eco's paper: the older the movie gets, and the further we get from 1942, the less obvious the mannered acting becomes for the casual viewer, who may find it increasingly easier to believe that people actually behaved like that in the 40's. Several years ago, when I was watching Casablanca for the first time, it was that mannered acting that I found really captivating, and it never crossed my mind that it might not be realistic. I bet this mistake was at least a bit harder to make in 1942.

(2016) Citizen Kane

Finding my several years old last entry here about Citizen Kane surprised me quite a bit, as it reflects less understanding of this movie than Stroheim's review. But even now, when most of it makes good sense to me, it seems as if it conveys two parallel, yet somewhat contradicting messages. On the one hand, it looks like a criticism of the American dream and the self-made man. Kane, in a sense, is portrayed like he could be any American, almost to an extent that he feels like a papier-mâché figure, and that may indeed give him a touch of implausibleness, at least as a normal person. Maybe Welles was trying to say that no person is supposed to be normal under Kane's conditions (even Kane hints that when talking to Thatcher), but Kane is crippled by this Rosebud thing that makes his condition highly personal and his character realistic. Rosebud is not a big riddle: the answer is almost spoon-fed to the viewer, though some basic knowledge in psychology (which was supposedly fashionable at the time) certainly helps. Kane is grabbed from his family at the age of 8, so suddenly that his childhood and his playing with his sledge “Rosebud” is interrupted literally at the same moment. Little is shown about the following years, but the Christmas scene strongly implies that from that moment, he had no parent figures to speak of. That is certainly not the right condition for a child's emotional development, and if it wasn't obvious, the old Leland eloquently explains that Kane was, simply speaking, emotionally retarded. Maybe you could argue that it somehow fits in criticising American magnates and their glorification, hinting that most of them are just sociopaths, but it rather could be a harsh insult against Hearst, basically telling “the poor thing must have had no childhood”. In his foreword for Marion's 1975 book, Welles explains item by item how the key motifs in Citizen Kane are clearly different from those in Hearst's life, but I'm not entirely convinced. Hearst Castle and Marion are perfectly recognisable – and thus, Kane, too –, and those differences turn the former two and Kane's childhood into things that, while admittedly untrue, still recognizable and rudely insulting for Hearst. It seems to me that Kane was supposed to be both Hearst and and a generic successful American, but it's hard to tell which (if any) was supposed to be the main idea.

Film: Citizen Kane

You generally wouldn’t disagree after watching that this film is a classic, but if I’d been asked about why is it really great, I’d have to admit it may not be really great on its own. The story is interesting, the picture is fantastic, the director did a good work, and the protagonist is eccentric; it’s good to watch, especially if a previously unknown era fascinates you, but deprived of its sensational features – not as if a film should be judged without its best features – it appears there wouldn't remain much to talk about. It all seems superficial; no great characters, no deepness of any kind, not even in portrayal – almost as if it wasn’t really intended to be a movie. Hence it may be a tool of expression. Citizen Kane is, after all, a story about a business magnate who raced Pulitzer with sensationalism which thus rightfully pervades the whole movie, and that seems to be completely intentional. Even the plot is driven by a gimmick that neither makes any sense in the film, nor it is really supposed to reveal anything relevant (as admitted also by the reporter in the end). Implying that last words like ‘rosebud’ could summarize Kane’s life and resolve an essential mystery of it ultimately turns the film into an odd parody of yellow journalism and its practitioners (it could have, of course, happened in reality, but it doesn’t make the display of subtle ridiculousity any worse).

Kane is depicted a flawed personality, perhaps due to his parents’ curious decision: since they suddenly got rich, they decided to leave their son’s education to a bank, so he would be able to use his money well when he grows up – further suggesting that what Kane does must be a work of a sick person.