Steven Rubio's Online Life

sabotage (alfred hitchcock, 1936)

This is the second film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 2 is called "Anxiety Week":

“Anxious-nervous, like he’s dreading it or anxious-excited like he’s looking forward to it?” I, like Nick from The Parent Trap, am anxious-excited for this week. Last year we featured the Polish Moral Anxiety movement, which featured films made in response to real-world anxieties. This year it will be the films themselves that provide the anxiety. Here we celebrate films that get under your skin and keep you on edge, whether it's action, horror, cringe comedy, or, uh, Stuart Little 2 apparently? I haven't seen it but I can only imagine the tension.

This week we invite you to make yourself uncomfortable and watch a previously unseen anxiety-inducing film.

I can't be particularly fair with Sabotage. I didn't realize it when I started the film, but I was tired, and soon I was struggling to stay awake. It only lasts 77 minutes, and I did manage to keep from falling asleep. But I'm not sure I really appreciated the suspense ... I wasn't anxious enough.

Sabotage was adapted from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and is considered by some to be Hitchcock's finest film from his British period. That feels excessive to me, even if I try to be kind in order to compensate for my sleepiness. It's certainly worth a second viewing after I've had some caffeine. But I found the buildup to the suspenseful scenes to be draggy, such that even at 77 minutes, it felt long. Sylvia Sidney and Oskar Homolka are fine in the leads, and I wasn't annoyed by teenager Desmond Tester. But I didn't care enough about the characters, the setting, anything. Still, as with even the worst Hitchcock movies, there is one classic scene, when the teenager is unknowingly sent off to deliver a bomb to Picadilly Circus station. For these few minutes, Hitchcock delivers the anxiety.

enter the dragon (robert clouse, 1973)

Pauline Kael once referred to Bruce Lee as "the Fred Astaire of martial arts", and that's a good call. There is something so aesthetically pleasing about Lee's fight scenes that you watch, not just in awe, but with a sense that he is elevating the genre. There are limits to this ... as David Thomson wrote, "He seems to me to celebrate a spur of cinema that separates violence from life, and revels in it." Lee's movements are otherworldly, and we react to the violence the way we might to a Road Runner cartoon. When I am watching Lee, I barely think about the damage he is doing to others, because there is such enjoyment in just watching him move.

Lee's place in movie history goes beyond Enter the Dragon, but it remains true that if you only watch one of his movies, this is the one to see. Wikipedia lists the inflation-adjusted worldwide gross revenue at $2 billion. It's his most "Western" movie, an American-HK co-production with actors like John Saxon and Jim Kelly. It looms large in his legend because he died at age 32 just before the film was released. It's a genre classic of crucial importance, although I'd argue it doesn't really transcend the genre. Lee is great, the movie makes the most of his presence, but the action takes a while to get going and the plot is pretty standard. Certainly everyone should see it at least once, and if the genre appeals to you, you will watch it again and again.

[There is a lot of great trivia about the making of the film. My favorite is this: "Bruce Lee had laryngitis for three days of the shoot. The production team did not have vocalisations with the right intonation from Bruce to re-use in the fight scenes, so instead used stock sound clips of animals, including adolescent seagulls, for Bruce's vocal sound effects."]

music friday: stevie wonder

Rolling Stone has a new list put together by Michaelangelo Matos, "The 50 Best Stevie Wonder Songs". Tip of the cap to Matos ... it's a great list ... but what else do you expect when the artist is Stevie Wonder, and you don't wonder how they could possibly find 50 best songs, but instead wonder what they had to leave out. Here are #3-1. First, #3:

Next, #2:

And #1:

Bonus, the song that got our attention in 1963 ... it's #9. I don't think there was another song so exciting on the radio when I was 10 years old: