Rewatches September 2021

 I rewatched Jackie Brown and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (the latter because of its new, and very excellent, novel adaptation) from Quentin Tarantino.  In hindsight Jackie Brown is absolutely the beginning of Tarantino's mature career, when he wasn't just trying to be cool but make truly great movies, too.  The detour into Kill Bill led into a string of movies that truly went for the gusto.  There's no one who makes such complete statements as Tarantino, maximizing the skills of the considerable casts he assembles with the best storytelling and dialogue possible.  Visually there are better filmmakers, certainly, but Tarantino has been so consistent for so long and can do whatever he wants, and has.  And that began with Jackie Brown.

Also unofficial entries this month were Bram Stoker's Dracula (a highly underrated piece of Hollywood art) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (an undeserved poor reputation, though Robert De Niro again proves he's a great actor with a fairly limited range).

Now onto the catalog rewatches:

Red Cliff (2008-2009) John Woo's epic two-part meditation on the causes of war, including a defense of its necessity at times, is probably going to be very tough to top as my favorite Chinese movie.  I hadn't watched it since the first watch, so it was very much like watching it again for the first time, and again well worth it.

Rent (2005) In college the musical made sense, and in 2005 the movie did, too, but in 2021 it seems like a whole experience that was only possible from a community that only gazes back on itself, which at this moment feels too insular for me.  Still the right call to plug Rosario Dawson into a cast otherwise comprised of the original Broadway actors, including Idina Menzel before Frozen.

The Right Stuff (1983) I think even counting this one I have not technically stayed awake for the whole thing, which the filmmakers clearly saw as a potential problem the historic figures it chronicles couldn't figure out; the excellent cast makes them as lively as they can, but this is a long slog and most of it heads in a direction where the piloting skills that make these guys stand out isn't even necessary, so the story is one long effort to make the audience forget this.  But it's a worthy experience full of real heroes, including the guy who didn't even get to be an astronaut, Chuck Yeager, who drove an author and a director to distraction anyway, and rightfully so.

The Rocketeer (1991) After Tim Burton's Batman, comic book characters were seen as the next big thing, so Hollywood instantly sought whatever was available, and filmable, and the result was a decade that never once lived up to the potential, thanks in large part to relying on nostalgia acts with no connection to what people actually wanted to see.  Rocketeer is great, but it's exactly old-time movie serial material, with no effort at all to update it.  Indiana Jones it is not.

Russian Ark (2002) In the years since, Hollywood has been chasing the continuous tracking shot trick with increasing eagerness (Birdman, 1917), but this is the film that got there first.  Funny enough, it's exactly as Russian as you might expect, even going so far as to feel more like a Russian novel than a film, so keep that in mind (although in this realm you're probably more likely to be interested having it described that way, if you had any interest already).  For non-Russian, non-European audiences (read: American audiences) it's somewhat impenetrable.  But it's still a considerable achievement, and well worth experiencing at least once.  Like The Right Stuff, I still haven't technically made it all the way through, but this viewing left me more confident that I would be interested in doing so at a future date.