Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
August 2007 activity
Total Log Entries: 52
- Adam (9)
- Andrew (0)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (1)
- David (0)
- Eva (0)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (5)
- Jenny (3)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (5)
- Megan (2)
- Rumsey (4)
- Teddy (3)
- Thomas (5)
- Timothy (0)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 35
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1)
- Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy (2)
- When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts (0)
- Eastern Promises (0)
- The Departed (0)
- Knocked Up (5)
- Little Children (0)
- Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer (0)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (0)
- Transformers (0)
- Being Michael Madsen (2)
- The GoodTimesKid (0)
- Carefree (0)
- Music and Lyrics (0)
- Inland Empire (0)
- Why We Fight (1)
- Paths of Glory (0)
- Hannah Takes the Stairs (0)
- Superbad (2)
- Jesus Camp (0)
- Titicut Follies (0)
- Ultraviolet (2)
- Eyes Wide Shut (1)
- Seraphim Falls (0)
- The Puffy Chair (1)
- Red Dawn (1)
- Robot Monster (0)
- Touch of Evil (1)
- A Clockwork Orange (7)
- Les Misérables (0)
- The Magnificent Seven (0)
- Nighthawks (0)
- Slaughterhouse Five (0)
- Hot Fuzz (2)
- Sunshine (0)
- Rescue Dawn (0)
- The Wild Blue Yonder (0)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (0)
- The 11th Hour (0)
- Shanghai Express (0)
- Trasgredire (0)
- Faces (0)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (0)
- Viva Baseball! (0)
- Holiday (0)
- Cloak & Dagger (6)
- Oepidus Rex (0)
- Dead Man’s Shoes (0)
- Sunshine (0)
- This Is England (0)
- Sweet Smell of Success (1)
- Once (0)
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Les Misérables / France / 1934
I can’t say I ever heard of director Raymond Bernard before this Eclipse release, and while we’re not dealing with anyone operating at the level of Vigo or early Renoir, there’s plenty of interest here. Certainly the almost five hours taken to adapt Hugo’s novel allows it to spend more time on eisodes that other shorter versions skip over – it’s fascinating, for example, how much time is given over to the student revolutionaries’ construction of their barricades. But this is a film that you have to make allowances for because of its age. It suffers from the slow pace of early mainstream sound cinema where huge pauses sit between simple exchanges of dialogue. And although the male leads are great – Harry Baur’s huge hulking Jean Valjean, Charles Vanel’s tightly wound-up Inspector Javert, and Charles Dullin’s wonderfully theatrically villanous Thénardier -, the female roles are all played awfully, with an unbalanced emotionalism. Given that Orane Demazis, for example, is so different in the Fanny films, it seems that Bernard simply couldn’t get as good performances out of his females actors as his males ones – or perhaps he concentrated too much on all the cantered angles the film is full of.
by Ian Johnston | Source: Eclipse Series 4 DVD
18 Aug 2007 7:10 AM | Submit Comment