My Five Year Plan

Brief thoughts on a few of them:

The Black Dahlia - If the film has some narrative failings (profound), it makes up for it with some startlingly effective scenes. The film’s not very interested in the actual case of Elizabeth Short so much as it is using that case, and some bizarrely uninteresting twists surrounding its investigation, as the locus for a really twisted domestic melodrama. The film’s early scenes of peace - Lee (Aaron Eckhart), Kay (Scarlett Johansson), and Bucky (Josh Hartnett) smiling around a dinner table - almost bring to mind this eerie sort of forced construction of the domestic sphere, with Bucky as child tagalong. In a lot of ways, this image - which echoes the Dean-Wood-Mineo triad in Rebel Without a Cause, haunts the whole film for me, and greatly informed my reading of the text. I shan’t spoil for those who haven’t seen it, but despite the reviews from America’s most boring critics, all of whom decided long ago that De Palma was someone to cut from the canon, this is definitely one to see. It’s got some hellishly wrong-headed structural choices, but it’s also got some of the strongest moments you’ll see in a theater right now.

Love Me Tonight - A bit of a disappointment, mostly because I had heard so much about the formal elegance of the piece. While I appreciate the hell out of the film’s Eisenstein homage (which actually felt to me like a Griffith homage in disguise), ballet-mecanique of Paris opening, and resounding charm and wit (it is, to be sure, one of the most romantic and dreamy little pictures), I guess I just wanted a little more. Maybe a crane shot or some sort of hand-held thing. I know this would of course be anachronistic, but the film itself is so ahead of its time that I guess I just wanted to see how much farther Mamoulian could’ve pushed it. Nevertheless, a more-than-fine show. If I had a girlfriend I’d watch this with her.