Billy Wilder

First entry for "Teeth on Film", maybe a stupid title for a blog. But who cares.

My writings on film now include four pieces:
1. The documentary films of Werner Herzog
2. Woman is the Future of Man, by Hong Sangsoo
3. The films of Luis Bunuel (a man whose films I had never seen until approx one week before the assignment was due)
4. Ace in the Hole, by Billy Wilder.

I freely admit my ignorance when it comes to film. I've read too many books in the past to have time for films. Plus it makes me feel a bit lazy, watching movies. I always feel as if I should be engaging more with the screen, helping it along, but it does everything for you. The film will play itself out regardless of whether you're watching or not. But it's fun. Watching the way the plots move, the way the director's transition from one shot to the next. Films are getting more and more interesting too, it seems. I'd rather watch a new film than an old film, that is. As long as the new one is decent. I can't say as much for books, novels. The technology - and the same goes for music - is just so much more enticing nowadays. Anyway.

Recently watched:

Sunset Boulevard
The Apartment
The Seven Year Itch
Ace in the Hole

And then read some of Cameron Crowe's book of interviews with Wilder himself. Crowe offered the mentor role in Jerry McGuire to Wilder, who vociferously turned him down. Sad. Would have been fun to see him act.

I've been having trouble writing about Bunuel. I'm taking the piece too seriously. Whereas my 500 word reviews are almost sassy, the Bunuel thing comes off as if I really want you to know how much I just learned about Surrealist film and Bunuel's influence on such contemporary Surrealist filmmakers as Michel Gondry and Matthew Barney. Pompous you could say. But when the piece comes out it comes out, and changing the entire scope is nearly impossible without writing the whole thing again from a completely different angle.

I'm going to start reading more Pauline Kael, who "reigned" over the NYC film reviewing circuit for like two decades. She said of "Maidstone," one of Mailer's strange movies in 1968, that it's "the worst movie I've ever stayed to see all the way through." Ouch. I wonder what she was like in person, what she looked like, why she chose film reviewing instead of, say, short story writing or the personal essay form. What makes a person a film reviewer for life? A fondness for dark theatres?

Anyway. So ends the first film entry. Hope to watch "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Ratatouille" pretty soon.