my favorite movies

As I explained in class, I didn't want to post to the blog about movies until I knew what kind of films you liked. Now I don't know what to say because you have some very diverse tastes in film. Well, so do I.

My favorite director of all time is definitely Akira Kurosawa, who directed Ran, The Seven Samurai and many other classic films. He was a big influence on such famous Hollywood directors as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. He and John Ford were also fans of each other. If you haven't seen any of his films I hope you will watch some. It's not widely known, but he was also an editor, and edited his own films. He originally trained to be a painter, and thus his mise en scène is very well composed.

My favorite Hollywood director is (or was until he died recently) Robert Altman. Altman was famous for directing films in which the characters didn't read formal lines, but had to improvise a lot of the dialogue. Many famous actors looked forward to working with him for the freedom his style gave them, and I think it would have been a nightmare to write subtitles for his films because the conversations are always moving in and out of microphone range. His most famous film is probably MASH (which was made into a TV show) but his film 3 Women is ranked higher at the Internet Movie Database. That's kind of a quirky, director's indulgence film, but its being higher rated only highlights his being, like Kurosawa, a film-maker's film-maker.

Altman had a love affair with American music, which I share, and made many films in which great music is important, for example Nashville (country music), Kansas City (Jazz), and A Prairie Home Companion (Folk). In The Long Goodbye the title song, written especially for the film, is played over and over again in a variety of musical genres, from Jazz to Folk to Mexican Mariachi music.

Both those directors are dead, and while I like old movies (if they are good), especially classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane, I also like more recent films. I enjoy the films of the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, very much, especially O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which also has great music). It's based on Homer's Odyssey, which it sets in Depression Era Mississippi. I also like Roman Polanski's films (no Polanski jokes please - I know he's in the news a lot these days) such as Chinatown, Frantic, and Rosemary's Baby. I think his version of Shakespeare's Macbeth is the best ever filmed.

I do promise we'll watch a film in this class, but I don't know what film it will be. There's no obvious choice that would appeal to everyone in the class together. Do any of you have suggestions?