1/11-1/20

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura //

I gotta be honest here and acknowledge that I never quite granted L'Avventura masterpiece status, and upon rewatching it, I still don't. It divides its energies between two main tasks: charting social changes in a modernizing Italy, and following two people (Gabriele Ferzetti's Sandro and Monica Vitti's Claudia) bouncing around together in the wake of an inexplicable tragedy (the disappearance of their friend Anna). Thematically these two strands work together OK, and they harmonize beautifully on occasion--the scene where Sandro and Claudia come upon a desolate modernist church near Noto stands out--but ultimately I feel the film doesn't pull off its balancing act, and it's easy to think of films that handle the individual themes more effectively. Fellini's La Dolce Vita charts the sexual and cultural mores of postwar Italy far more thoroughly and indelibly the same year, and a whole host of films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mulholland Dr., Clouds of Sils Maria) have leaned more potently into the theme of the irrational disappearance, pushing it nearly into the domain of a kind of arthouse cosmic horror, which I can get behind. I'm willing to work with what we've got, but Sandro's character is so stubborn and insistent that he comes off as one-dimensional rather than dynamic, and Claudia, by contrast, ping-pongs in her wants and desires so unpredictably and with such a thin throughline that she comes across as flighty rather than torn between her possible courses of action. Neither character really serves as a masterful embodiment of midcentury ennui, despite the film's reputation for this, and by the time we pass the two hour mark, my patience for seeing whatever else Antonioni might have up his sleeve has grown pretty thin.

George Hickenlooper's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse //

Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo //

Still not totally sure if this is, like, a rebuke of colonialism or, like, an advertisement for colonialism, but it generates some of the 20th century's most astonishing footage along the way to whatever it's doing, so.

Chris Smith's American Movie //