Andrei (movie discussion)

[RiverNotch]

Andrei Rublev is in a class of films I rewatch fanatically, and it's in a class within that class that I watch devotionally -- in that class within a class I'd count Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew and The Lord of the Rings, though LOTR gets docked two points for when it fails to follow the book too egregiously and for when it gets too Hollywood, while Pasolini gets docked a point for being less epic in scope. 

One of y'all's critiques -- I think it was TranquilityBase -- noticed something that I never truly noticed, which is how *violent* the movie is. The violence, especially the raid, is *traumatic*, and has always been traumatic for me, but not until my current rewatch did I really *connect* that trauma to the violence. Before this, I'd thought the trauma came from a somewhat deeper place, but now I see just how full of humanity this movie is, how much it concerns itself, not just with the spirit or with the movement of history, but also with such supposedly base concerns as hunger and pain.

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Not coincidentally, Tolkien we all know is a poet (or at least a student of poetry), Tarkovsky's father was a poet and his films are poetry in and of themselves, and Pasolini really is just a poet. And, fun fact, Pasolini is gay, atheist, and communist, but he shot his Jesus film as devotionally as I tend to watch it -- also, try watching his Jesus film next to his most notorious, and imo his second best, film, which is *Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom*. Totally worth discussing here.

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A girl I like apparently loves The Rescuers, which I loved as a kid and still love as an adult, and also recommended to me The Aristocats. After this rewatch, I'll probably rewatch/watch those, as well as The Day After.

[busker]

Where would films like, say, Rashomon or The Bicycle Thieves fall in your classification?
It's a great investment of time and effort to watch a film that's not about superheroes, natural cataclysms, or rejuvenated dinosaurs, and I want to know which ones are worth watching.

[RiverNotch]

I haven't watched The Bicycle Thieves, but I should.

I like Rashimon -- watched it in a class -- but it's not among my favourite Kurosawa films. There's three kinds of films of his I like to watch the most: the fun samurai swashbucklers, the pinnacle of which is the often-imitated (from The Magnificent Seven to, yes, Marvel's Avengers) Seven Samurai; the sweeping and colorful tragedies, of whom the pinnacle is his adaptation of King Lear, Ran; and his somewhat one-of-a-kind film Dreams, which is about, well, his dreams. Come to think of it, I mean to rewatch Dreams, too: I caught it on tv as a kid and it's haunted me ever since.

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Also: Jurassic Park is great, and I love that film. Jurassic World? Crap. Hated it when I watched it on the cinema xD really had no redeeming values, and its attempts to be "feminist" and "woke" are epitomized by that twitter classic, "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss".

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What "good" action it had was derivative of its actually-good predecessor and it stars Chris Twat. I really don't like that movie xD

The MCU is fine. And that's about it. It's fine. I liked Black Panther and Winter Soldier and, no joke, I cried at Endgame. Haven't really watched any of the movies past that.

[TranquillityBase]

My favorite Tarkovsky film is Stalker, but that's a very different film from Andrei Rublev.  AR is really unique among his work, though I think Ivan's Childhood is somewhat similar, only set during WWII.  But yes, he's a poet of film.

I was interested to hear you mention Pasolini's Salo in the same breath as Gospel of St Matthew, which I have not seen and will now seek out (St Matthew that is).

Salo is impossible to find except I suppose as a rental DVD these days.  Not sure why.  I would like to see it again.  I actually found it a bit tedious first time around.  

If you could bear it, a triple feature about Mussolini's Italy would be The Conformist (Bertolucci), 1900 (also Bertolucci), and Salo.