At the movies

Melody convinced me when we first moved here to buy an UGC Illimité card, which allows you to watch an unlimited number of movies at most movie theaters in Paris for a yearly fee of about 240 euros. At 8 euros a movie, we would need to watch 30 movies to make the card worthwhile, and I think we accomplished that in our first couple of months here. Most awesomely, there was a complete Rohmer series at La Filmotheque in August, so we saw all the subtitled versions they showed:

-Le Genou de Claire
-Pauline à la plage
-L'Amour l'après-midi
-La Femme de l'aviateur
-Les Nuits de la pleine lune
-Le Rayon vert
-L'Ami de mon amie
-Conte de printemps
-Conte d'été

We just watched Barry Lyndon at La Filmo as part of their Kubrick series. I had seen BL on video, but watching a projection of it made it clear that it is the most beautiful looking movie I've ever seen.



We also recently saw Sailor et Lula (Wild at Heart) at Le Champo, down the street from La Filmotheque.



It seems there is always some Lynch playing somewhere in town, always some Hitchcock, always some film noir, and always some westerns. So, for example, we saw To Catch a Thief, Lifeboat, and Strangers on a Train at La Filmo, Melody saw Kiss Me Deadly there too, and I was giddy watching The Wild Bunch at Action Christine and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid at La Filmo.

Some others I can remember:

-Rio Bravo (La Filmo)
-Les Felins (La Filmo)
-An Affair to Remember (La Filmo)
-Now Voyager (Action Christine)
-The American Friend (La Filmo)
-Badlands (La Filmo)
-Thin Red Line (La Filmo)
-The New World (La Filmo)
-Bad Lieutenant (La Filmo) (this was part of a Harvey Keitel series!)
-Klute (La Filmo)
-Manhunt (La Filmo)
-Ninotchka (La Filmo)
-Hombre (La Filmo)
-Minuit à Paris (UGC Danton, which appears in the opening montage)
-You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Mk2 Quai de la Seine)
-Source Code (don't remember where)
-Paths of Glory (Le Champo)
-Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (La Filmo)
-Black Swan (Mk2 Quai de la Loire)
-King's Speech (Mk2 Quai de la Seine)
-The Fighter (somewhere on the Champs-Élysées)
-The Social Network (Mk2 Quai de la Seine)
-Reservoir Dogs (La Filmo) (also part of the Keitel series)
-Crimes and Misdemeanors (La Filmo)
-Femme Fatale (La Filmo)
-Charade (La Filmo)
-Breakfast at Tiffany's (La Filmo)
-An American in Paris (La Filmo)

Cinémania

La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin is our favorite movie theater. Since we've been here, they've played complete series of Eric Rohmer and Terence Malick, a series of movies featuring Harvey Keitel (including The Border), movies featuring members of the Fonda family, a series of movies set in Paris, and now they're in the middle of showing a ton of Peckinpahs. Last night we saw Pat Garett and Billy the Kid, which is the best Peckinpah after La Horde Sauvage.

The Filmotheque is great, but if you want to see anything you need to get there early. These pictures show the queue-jumping mob outside the theater on a Monday night at 6pm. The crowd is fighting to get a place to see either Manhunt or Straw Dogs.

Indiana Jones: The Adaptation

The Hirschhorn museum in Washington D.C. occasionally screens free movies in its auditorium. When Melody and I were undergrads, it was a reliable source of contemporary avant garde film. We saw Michael Haneke's original Funny Games there and one of the Cremaster series, for example. A couple of weeks ago, while browsing its film series, I saw that they would be screening Indiana Jones: The Adaptation, a more or less shot by shot recreation of the first Indiana Jones movie, made on a BetaMax over seven years (1981-1988). Both Melody and Zed predicted that the screening would be popular, and Melody recommended that we show up several hours in advance. I thought that was absurd, considering that I had never seen the auditorium more than half full. But when we showed up two hours in advance, there were already about 50 people in line ahead of us. Eventually the line grew so long that it coiled twice around the inside of the circular Hirschhorn courtyard. So many people showed up that they had to show the movie twice that night.



The filmmakers were there to introduce the movie and answer questions. They apologized beforehand for the terrible sound, and opened the movie with the invitation to "Let the Beta wash over you". You can get some idea of what the Adaptation is like in these clips.

The opening jungle sequence is recreated remarkably well, including the scene of the porter reaching nervously for his gun and Indiana Jones knocking it out of his hand with the bullwhip. The sound was indeed awful, and it was only because we had watched the original a couple of nights beforehand that we had any idea what anyone was saying. We also debated about whether the grainy, blurry picture helped or hindered the experience of the movie; it was often hard to tell what was going on, but otherwise mundane settings were concealed and made mysterious because you couldn't see much of what was going on. Most importantly, though, the low fidelity made what otherwise would have been glaring continuity problems easier to accept: characters' hair got longer and shorter, depending on the changing styles between 1981 and 1988, voices changed, actors got acne, grew noticeably in height and weight, and so on.

The only scene that was completely left out of the Adaptation was the fight with the strongman around the airplane. During Q&A Melody asked why they left that scene out. The director said that he still has nightmares about not doing that scene. He said that they had prepared to shoot it, with a big fan painted silver for the propellor, the most muscular kid in school ready to play the strongman (complete with a bald wig), and a mock-up of the plane that was to be blown up with a pipe bomb. But some undisclosed problem with the pipe bomb ruled out shooting the scene as planned, and the director said that the idea of blowing up a model with an M-80 was thought to be "too cheesy".