I’m having a hard time concentrating these days; the radio is on more often than video. Nonetheless: Saw five movies to completion (started a dozen more I couldn’t finish. Yikes.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netflix, Swedish and English title cards<\/em> Cable, original English<\/em> Arte, original Deutsch<\/em> Amazon, original English<\/em> Sharing some lived experience with Henry Miller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-radishflix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":554,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radishthegreat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The Swedish silent film of the week, again presented with no music. The “hero” is a priest who marries the elderly widow of his predecessor to get the house when she dies…but she’s also using him, to stay in the house where she loved her first husband so much. And she’s using witchcraft to stay alive, denying the man his chance to marry his sweetheart, who he has “cleverly” brought into the house, claiming she’s his sister. I am rooting for the widow the whole time, but of course to get the a “happy” ending she must die. The gloom is broken up by some slapstick; there is a scene in the church where congregation members who have fallen asleep during the service are bopped on the head by an elder carrying a large stick that made me laugh so hard the cat woke up.
The real star of this one is the open-air museum in Norway<\/a> where it was filmed. As the movie is set in “the distant past”, they use the oldest carved wooden buildings, and they’re all beautiful. In many interior scenes the walls are hung with tapestries that reminded me of the ones I saw in Akarshus<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\nNeptune’s Daughter<\/a>\u00a0(1949)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This is the kind of movie I need more of. Can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I laughed at Red Skelton trying to mount a horse. Ricardo Montalban was quite easy to look at, good music, and the women glittered even in the daytime.
Bonus<\/strong>: I thought “hey, that groom sounds like Speedy Gonzales” and then in the credits–the groom was Mel Blanc! Actually on film, not just lending his incredible voice talents to animation! Incredible.
Glad I got to see it before it gets banned and memory-holed.<\/p>\n\n\n\nLeningrad-Sinfonie – Eine Stadt k\u00e4mpft um ihr Leben<\/a>\u00a0(2018)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
From the listing I expected a Spielfilm<\/em>, scripted drama, about Shostakovich writing his Leningrad Symphony and its premiere, but it’s actually a documentary about the the Siege of Leningrad, with re-enactments and interviews with survivors. You never forget the day your aunt cooked the family cat.
Hard viewing, but well-made and worth a watch if you’re interested in the Soviet view of WWII. Or Shostakovich.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDaisy Miller<\/a>\u00a0(1974)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Americans, living abroad and being awful. *mwah*
In general the movie was meh. Some nice costuming, and beautiful scenery in Switzerland and Italy, but the title character is shallow and annoying, and the supporting characters are shallow and annoying, and the whole thing was shallow and annoying. I found myself watching birds out the window.
Avoid, unless you’ve been assigned to write a paper on Henry Miller and too lazy to read the novel, or you’re a Chloris Leachman completist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"