doco about 1970s films
I haven't seen a lot of the biggest 70s movies: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Jaws. I have seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather Trilogy, and Star Wars. Mixed bag. I find it to be a dark decade in film and I don't really love it. It was interesting to hear these big filmmakers talk about moviemaking then versus now. For decades, film students have watched and been inspired by their movies but the chances of them making a movie the way they did isn't likely: the industry is just too risk averse to put millions of dollars into a project that they think isn't guaranteed to be a runaway success. But there's still hope for art to be made. TV is offering storytellers plenty of opportunities and people are filming using their phones, editing them on their PCs and releasing them on the internet.
Uplifting movies
I find death and resurrection uplifting. If the stakes aren't big, how do you know that anything has been won?
Dancer in the Dark
Beautiful music with the use of objects in the environment to create the percussive sounds- trains on tracks, factory machines and footsteps all come together with Bjork's haunting voice to make her death at the end of the movie sad, but also worth it because her sacrifice means that her son gets the eye operation and will not go blind like she did.
Life is Beautiful
An Italian Jew romances a woman with "Buonjuorno, principesa!" in 1930s Italy. Years later, he and their son are sent to a death camp where the father hides the grim reality of the war and protects his son by promising him a tank if he doesn't cry. At the end of the movie, after the father is executed, the boy comes out of hiding and sees a tank rolling into the camp to set them free. "It's true!!" the boy shouts.
and because I'm apparently the only one that finds dignity in certain death uplifting:
Babe
Won as a piglet at the fair, Babe becomes a "sheep-pig" and proves the doubter's wrong at the trials. Farmer Hoggett doesn't talk much, but "That'll do, pig. That'll do." is plenty.
Recently, I found the reboot of the Star Trek franchise to be so personally uplifting, I cried both times I saw it in the theatre. The first ten minutes sees the USS Kelvin destroyed, the future Captain James T. Kirk born and his father blown up. Then the Star Trek logo spins around!!! And that new music starts to swell and drums start to pound. Good stuff.
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