There’s probably another two or three of these posts to come before the year is out. I’ve yet to decide if I’ll carry on with them next year – I might choose to just write about a single film in a post, as I’ve done in previous years. We’ll see. Of course, there’s still a good 300+ films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. But meanwhile…

Sleeping Beauty, Clyde Geronimi (1959, USA). There was a trailer for this on a rental DVD, I seem to remember, and something about it persuaded me it would be worth watching. I might well have seen the film as a child, but I have no memory of it. A Blu-ray copy appeared in Amazon’s Black Friday sales, so I bought it. And… it’s probably one of the most Technicolor movies I’ve ever watched, second only to The Adventures Of Robin Hood. So, of course, I loved that about it. I also liked that the songs weren’t intrusive – the cast didn’t break into singing per se, the songs sort of grew out of the background music. And the style of the animation is that sort of stylised 1950s, er, style which I find much more appealing than the normal Disney style. So, despite the over-done Disney DVD cover, Sleeping Beauty is actually a gorgeous piece of animation. But, interestingly, it’s an odd take on the story, because it’s told through the viewpoints of three meddling middle-aged women, the good fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. They hide Princess Aurora from bad witch Maleficent, although, of course, fairy tale curses have a way of coming true… But that sleeping bit, it’s only like part of the final act, it’s the shape of Aurora’s life which is the backbone of the film. And it works really well. As does Maleficient’s actually quite scary transformation into a dragon when she tries to prevent Prince Philip from reaching the sleeping Aurora. Without watching all the other Disney animated features films, and going only on what I remember of them, I think I can safely say Sleeping Beauty is the best of them. Although I would like to watch The Jungle Book again…

Night of the Comet, Thom Eberhardt (1984, USA). I suspect this may be the most eighties film made during the eighties. I remember first seeing it in the mid-eighties on television – it was introduced by either Jonathan Ross or Alex Cox, as part of a cult film series, I forget which; but I’ve always fancied a copy of it… and then late last year Arrow released a dual-format edition. So I bought it. And… it’s pretty much how I remembered it and, as I mentioned earlier, so very eighties. It’s not just the soundtrack – little of which was actually familiar to me even though I remember much of the decade, although the songs did sound very much of the time. Nor the clothing. But I seem to remember Valley Girls appearing in several cult films at the time – the other one that springs to mind is Julien Temple’s Earth Girls are Easy – and the two main characters of this, played by Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney, are pretty much perfect casting. There’s a sequence in the film which more or less defines it for me – and certainly proved the most memorable – and yet has nothing to do with zombies. (Oh yes, the plot is: a comet flies close to Earth, all those who did not spend the night in something with steel walls turned into dust… or a zombie.) Anyway, the two girls decide that since they’re now apparently the only inhabitants of Los Angeles they can do what they like… which includes trying out everything which takes their fancy in a department store – all to, of course, the strains of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Fun’. Anyway, the pair have their ups and downs, their moments of jeopardy, being rescued and as well as rescuing others – they’re good strong female leads… and it’s a shame films like Night of the Comet are not bettered remembered. Worth getting hold of.

The Great Train Robbery*, Edison Manufacturing Company (1903, USA). To be honest, I don’t remember much about this – it was one of about twenty or so films on a DVD collection of early cinema, Primitives and Pioneers – a mixture of US, French and British movies, all of which were identified by the company which made them rather than the person who directed them. Some of them were quite good – ‘Explosion of a Motor Car’ by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company was pretty good, if surprisingly, and comically, gruesome. Some of the others were mere fragments. However, one thing which did stand out – and I suppose The Great Train Robbery is as good an example as any – was the desire by the film-makers to tell stories using this new medium. So rather than documenting the world around them, they staged little vignettes and scenarios. A train being robbed, a woman’s baby being stolen from its pram, even the use of fantasy (hand-coloured too) in some of the early French films. In fact, while there’s little to say about the movie which appears on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, the actual collection itself is totally worth watching.

Blue is the Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche (2013, France). There was apparently some fuss when this won the Palme d’or at Cannes, although I was not aware of that until after I watched it. But having now read some of the criticisms of the film, I can understand what the critics meant. The film is based on a well-regarded French bande dessinée about a young woman’s sexual awakening and subsequent lesbian relationship with a blue-haired artist. And, of course, the homophobia she experiences – from family as well as school friends. Much has been made of the sex scenes in this film, and it’s certainly true they play far too… straight to be convincing. It’s hard to explain, and I’m no real position to judge the veracity (although plenty who are have said what I am about to), but they don’t ring true, in the same sort of way that sexual encounters in pornographic films don’t ring true as real sex. The two leads, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, are excellent, but the whole films still feels like a mistreatment of its source material and the lifestyle on which its source material – Julie Maroh’s 2010 Le bleu est une couleur chaude – is based. I can understand why the film has proven controversial, and I can’t help but agree with those who find fault with it. I’ve seen it now, but, you know, it wouldn’t have bothered me if I never had… and I can’t really recommend it to anyone.

Happy People, Werner Herzog & Dmitry Vasyukov (2010, Germany). The subtitle of this film, “A Year in the Taiga”, pretty much tells you all you need to know about this documentary. Assuming, of course, you know what “taiga” means. I admit it, I think Herzog is a genius, and while not all of his films are great, he’s never made a dull film. And that’s as true of Happy People as it is of any film he’s made, even if it’s just a documentary about the inhabitants of Bakhta, a small village in the middle of Siberia, which can only be reached by air or river (and the latter only during the summer when the river isn’t frozen solid). It’s a hard life that Herzog and Vasyukov document, but appealingly simple. True, the values and attitudes of the village’s residents are equally simple, but they seem to suit the lifestyle. There is, for example, one moment where one of the native Ket people accidentally burns down his house because he’d been drunk and left a cigarette burning. But he and his mother are more concerned about the loss of their home’s fetishes than anything else. There’s a sad overtone to much of the proceedings inasmuch as the Ket’s traditional lifestlye has been overwritten by the USSR, but the film’s title is no lie and all those involved seem to be inspiringly happy despite the hardship of their lives. Another charity shop find that’ll be a keeper, I think.

The Purple Rose of Cairo*, Woody Allen (1985, USA). I am not a fan of Woody Allen’s films. Actually, I can’t stand them. But this one was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, so I sort of had to watch it. (He has several – and far too many – films on the list.) From what I knew of the film, I guessed it would be less irritating than most of his oeuvre – he’s not in it, for a start. And the central premise sounded quite good: a character from a film steps out of a cinema screen and runs away with a lonely woman, only for the actor who plays the character to come searching for the pair. That description, however, proved somewhat incomplete. The woman, played by Mia Farrow, is a battered spouse. And she goes to the cinema to escape her husband as much as she does to watch movies. On the plus side, the idea of a character stepping out of a film, leaving the remainder of the movie’s cast to figure out how to proceed, is handled well and proves mildly amusing. The fish-out-of-water romance by the film character and Farrow is less amusing and trades a little on cliché. And when the actual actor turns up and proves to be self-centred and career-minded, well, that is an actual cliché. My opinion of Allen’s films remains completely unchanged having seen The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I still don’t understand why so many of his movies are on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 688