L'Avventura: (1960. dir: Michelangelo Antonioni) See it for some of the most gorgeous and mesmerizing photography ever, both in use of landscape and in love of the human face. A boatload of healthy, vital, rich and sun-soaked Italian people go for a cruise, and they are like a swarm of little kids: too restless and bored to do anything properly, to take a swim or have some sex or even argue well. One of them gets so bored and restless she disappears into the cosmos, just disintegrates without a trace, like those girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock who implode and vanish out of sheer sexual frustration.
On the surface, this is a movie about relations between the sexes, and I think it wants one hand in Fellini (the absurdity of the whore/crowd sequence) and the other, believe it or not, in Bergman. There's something sweet about watching these bronzed Italians trying to convey despair and being just too damn healthy to convince. You see Liv Ullmann or Max Von Sydow stony-faced on a rock in the North Sea, you see despair; you see Monica Vitti or Gabriele Ferzetti weeping on a similar (but warmer) rock in the Meditteranean, you feel like you're watching a kid with an emotion passing across him before, I don't know, a herd of cows or something distracts him and a wholly new emotion sweeps him away. There's probably a moral in it, and I suspect it is, "Don't fall in love with Italians unless you are one," but these people are so endearing it may be closer to, "Just be in love with your Italians while you're there and make sure to take your heart with you when you go home."
Anyway, the McGuffin is the missing girl, and the search goes on intermittently for some 18 hours or so of screen-time (fear not: I exaggerate), but she's easily forgotten and the time passes hypnotically because what you're looking at (both Vitti's face and the scenery) is so gorgeous. It's a lot like that other 18-hour existential Antonioni travelfest, the Passenger, which has that EXCELLENT long end-pan in which the camera moves slowly, slowly across the room, through the grille, and around the courtyard while Jack Nicholson sleeps his last sleep. I'd suggest you watch them as a double-feature, but that would be heartless: NOBODY has that kind of patience. Do watch them separately, though, when you're in a slow, still mood, and maybe complete this particular film-fest with Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a film that really does achieve a measure of the narcotic, existential delving into Life and Death And Their Relations To Love in a way that L'Avventura I think wants to but can't because it's just not sufficiently sere and etiolated, not ready to give up living long enough to do it.
Bang the Drum Slowly: (1973. dir: John D. Hancock) I loved this movie when I was a kid, watched it anytime it was on TV, which was a lot. It lent itself well to the small screen because it felt like a movie-of-the-week, and I guess that's why I never thought to revisit it as an adult. Now that I do, who'd have thought it would be not just good but bordering on great? It's got the movie-of-the-week thing, sure... sentiment (baseball player with incurable disease and buddy who sticks by him through thick and thin), swelly music, low budget... but this is the one that every movie-of-the-week ever made WANTS to be, the supreme acme to which they aspire. This is the real mccoy upon which all the cliches which followed were modelled.
For a start, it's got a simplicity of story-telling. There are visual moments that break your heart: the slow-motion final play of the big game in which De Niro (yes! De Niro!) has flipped his catcher's mask off and is trying to find the foul ball while simultaneously fending off the sickness that's been threatening to fell him all day is a thing of beauty. It won't surprise anyone when I say that De Niro gives a brilliant performance, since this was just as he was gearing up to conquer the world, but the egolessness of it is astonishing, its lack of vanity, when you figure that he was young and hungry (Mean Streets came out this same year) and looking to make an impression on the world. The idea that this is the same man who'll show up in Godfather II in a single year is nuts. What did he do with all that charisma?! How do you turn a charisma like that on and off? And yet he does it. And it's not just De Niro. Michael Moriarty is riveting as the star pitcher who takes care of his friend, and if there were nothing else to recommend it, the movie would be worth watching for Vincent Gardenia in perhaps the role of his lifetime as their growling and bear-like coach.
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