The Writer's Poke

Interesting to pair this one with a reading or viewing of 1984, which I've been studying and teaching to students at the time I watched this one.  It's frustrating watching Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) for the first 50 minutes of the film. She's so monotone, so lifeless, so robotic. This is all on purpose, of course, but as a viewer, it's not very much fun to watch.  Ninotchka is a special Soviet agent, sent to Paris to check on three Soviet agents sent there to sell the former jewels of a Russian duchess. She arrives, and the men are surprised that Razinin (Bela Lugosi) sent a "female comrade." She tells them not to see her womanhood, and she clearly tries to see herself simply as a "comrade," not as a woman.  Nevertheless, Leon (Melvyn Douglass) immediately becomes attracted to her. He's close with the duchess, but neither he nor the duchess believe in love. Later he suggests to the duchess that he always thought love was "too middle class....

The movie starts with a montage sequence, with both Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicolle (Scarlett Johansson) telling what they like and appreciate about each other. This seems really cute, until it becomes obvious that there must be a reason that they are saying nice things about one another, and then the film cuts to the couple sitting in a room with a therapist (Robert Smigel). In other words, this was all just an exercise assigned to them by their marriage counselor, with the expressed purpose of reminding them that, at least once upon a time, they liked -- maybe even loved -- one another. And maybe they still do, because all of the stuff they mention is nice, and it remains to be seen why they are at a marriage counselor, or what secrets they're hiding that they didn't want to write down on notebook paper at the shrink's request. Wrong. They aren't at a marriage counselor at all. They are at a mediator, preparing for a separation and amicable(?) divorce. They've w...

Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) first met at some random party. They're both in their early twenties. She's an aspiring actress, and he's, well, we don't really know much about him. He's just a guy who works some random job. Later, we will learn that he had briefly been in the military and had seen Paris. At first, it's not clear why she would like him. She seems to have hopes and dreams. He, maybe he's just a conventional guy who will work a job, get married, and have a few kids. But what apparently attracts April to Frank is the fact that he had been to Paris, and when he talked of that experience, he was full of energy and life. Maybe April imagined that both of them were special, designed (or destined) to live extraordinary lives. Not just the typical lives of married couple with two kids in the suburbs. Clearly she wants him to want more to life, too, and she wants to feel what she first the first time they made love... she wants to f...

Part of me wants to look through Garbo's catalog to see what roles she played. In the last few Garbo movies I've watched, she was a courtesan, an erotic dancer, and in this one, she's a prostitute. Did she ever play a scientist or a school teacher? Must she always play "indecent" and castoff women? When Anna's (Garbo) mother died, she was only 5, and her father, a sailor from a long line of sailors, decided that she should stay with relatives in Minnesota. They were good farm people, he said, and if we are to believe him, he thought she would be much better off living on the Minnesota farm than with him on the sea. He's a sailor and doesn't think much of his profession and the lifestyle of sailors. His one hope is her, that she will marry a farmer and escape the fate of being attached to a sailor. Now 20, Anna meets her father for the first time in 15 years. Her life on the farm wasn't everything her father imagined. She was forced to flee the farm...

  Ideally, I would only watch good movies. This is, well, it's not good. Not even close to being average. It might be worth watching for historical value. but even that's a tough call. The historical value is that this is Greta Garbo in her first talkie. But boy is this movie slow, awkward, and boring. The camera shots... the cameras must be trees. They're stuck and don't move. It's a talkie, but it still uses written cards on three occasions for transitions -- when probably no "transitions" are actually necessary. Just switch to the new shot, director. It's okay. I promise the audience can follow along, especially at the turtle's pace this movie is going. And, it doesn't help that the movie is based on a Eugene O'Neill play, so that all the scenes are talk-driven and stationary. I just watched Mata Hari (1931), and I wondered in my review of that film if Garbo was still finding the proper use of her voice in talkies. Probably so, because s...

In Camille (1934), which I just watched, Greta Garbo plays an older woman. A younger man falls in love with her, and she eventually falls in love with him, even though she should know better. Well, that's essentially what happens in Mata Hari, too. This time, instead of a courtesan, she's a German spy. Set in 1917, she's "stationed" in Paris, and in flies this younger Russian airman, Lt. Alexis (Ramon Navarro). Hari wears these elaborate outfits, and when Lt. Alexis sees her at the casino, he buys a ring from another woman who needs money to gamble, and then he gives the ring to Hari, a token of his affection. Originally, you can tell that Hari knows better than to get involved with this guy, but he's persistent, and she's weak. She could have flown to Amsterdam and got away before getting caught, but she refuses to leave Paris, and that leads to her downfall. Like I said, they fall in love, but there's no way for them to be together, and unfortunately...

This one is included with on the Camille (1936) DVD, and its runtime is just over an hour. Nicely preserved. I had no idea what I was going to get here. Nazimova -- did she just go by her last name? -- plays the role of Margueritte. What stands out about her in this performance is her wildly bushy hair, as well as the way she kind of slinks around a room. Based on the Alexander Dumas novel, we already know what the plot is -- especially if we've just watched the Garbo film version on the same DVD. Overall, I like the concision of this version. The black and white looks sharp. Those interested in Nazimova might find her Wikipedia entry instructive. In it, we learn that she's a Russian-born American actress. She appeared in 20 films, and her sexuality was apparently open. Born in 1879, she is about 42 when she portrays Margueritte, about 11 years older than Garbo was, and more appropriate to the age that I imagined Marguerite to be. I noted that a few Letterboxd reviewers wanted...