Steven Rubio's Online Life

what i watched last week

L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962). This movie, like many others, benefits from the intelligent guidance of someone who “gets” the movie. You could say this is always true, but for many/most films, the pleasures are available from the start. It’s not that we wouldn’t benefit from watching, say, Goldfinger alongside an expert on Bond movies, and some films (the best Bonds among them) retain a lot of their pleasures on multiple viewings. But a movie like L’Eclisse has a built-in inscrutable surface, and that surface makes the movie a candidate for further viewings, perhaps especially after reading through some of the best criticism of the film. One of my flaws as a critic is that I resist works that don’t make themselves immediately apparent. When I hear that a movie must be seen more than once, I get cranky, thinking if that is the case, the movie hasn’t done right to begin with. I don’t think an inscrutable surface is evidence of depth. But I can go too far. You will get more out of L’Eclisse, the more you put into it. Antonioni doesn’t do all the work for you. Having said that, I remain puzzled why I find L’Avventura one of the greatest of all movies, yet find the rest of his word admirable at best, and barely watchable at worst. I find Blow-Up fun, if silly, and Red Desert only worth a single viewing, if that. #106 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time. 7/10.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Revisiting a classic film from a classic director. One problem is that I think Kubrick is overrated, and I think 2001, rather than marking his peak, marks the beginning of his decline. My favorite Kubrick films are Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), with Spartacus (1960) after that. I intended to write about this movie in a separate post, but I think it slides right in to my comments on L’Eclisse. 2001 has a built-in inscrutable surface, which makes it a candidate for multiple viewings. I think the cosmic themes of the movie are perfect if Kubrick wanted to seem deep ... there is no explanation, Kubrick resists explanations, but in a true cult-film pattern, the vagueness only increases the interest of its fans. I don’t like this, but perhaps 2001 is the kind of movie where the absence of explanations is the proper approach.

I was a big fan of 2001 when it came out. We all watched it more than once, usually when high. We didn’t see the “Star Gate” sequence as needing explanation ... we just laid back and let it wash over it. There is something to be said for that kind of response, and it’s true, I never liked 2001 as much as I did when I was young and high.

The special effects hold up remarkably well (not talking about the Star Gate). The enormity of the space vehicles is impressive, and everything moves slow ... I think if they zipped around, we’d see the effects as primitive in comparison to what is possible today. Instead, they are lovely and elegant. The Star Gate stuff is less impressive, but at the time, we were blown away.

I can’t say too much about the importance of the music. Most of us owned the soundtrack album, which we played far more frequently than we did any other music-only soundtrack. (I mean, we played A Hard Day’s Night more, but that was a Beatles album, not a soundtrack.) We’d hear the music, and see the scenes in our heads. Kubrick’s use of music was remarkably on target ... everything fit perfectly with what was on the screen. So when we listened to the soundtrack, we felt fond feelings about the movie, which led us to go watch the movie again.

On the other hand, Kubrick’s disdain for actors is evident. Actors like Kirk Douglas and Peter Sellers had such strong screen presences that they couldn’t be held down, and Malcolm McDowell dominated A Clockwork Orange. (One reason for that is that the other actors were awful.) In 2001, the most interesting actors are the guy who does the voice of a computer, and the ones who play apes. I understand that Kubrick is emphasizing the banal ... I suppose Keir Dullea is the perfect actor, in that case. The performances we remember most from later Kubrick are the ones where the director allowed the actor to do whatever he wanted ... McDowell, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. There isn’t a lot of subtle acting in Kubrick movies, which may matter more to me than to others.

If you had asked me in the late-60s, I’d have given 2001 10/10. In more recent years, I’ve decided on 6/10. But, for whatever reason, I felt more kind this time around. #3 on the TSPDT list of the top 1000 of all time, above, just to list the next three, Tokyo Story, The Rules of the Game, and The Godfather. Honestly, I’m feeling generous to 2001, but it is not in the league of those other three. I wouldn’t place it in the top five of 1968. (Monterey Pop, Rosemary’s Baby, and Night of the Living Dead come to mind.) 7/10.

film fatales #7: jeanne dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles (chantal akerman, 1975)

I admit to some trepidation as I approached this film, which runs for 3 hours and 21 minutes and which, to the best of my knowledge coming in, consisted mostly of a woman doing dishes and making dinner. A friend said I shouldn’t be scared, just set some time aside and take it in, and it turns out she was right. I might have taken 4 hours to watch it ... there are a couple of convenient places where a break can be taken without doing too much damage to the film. But watch it I did, and it is very impressive.

So much of what Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte present seems off-putting. There is no camera movement ... once the camera is placed, we see only what it sees until a new shot begins. Akerman doesn’t rely much on quick cuts, either, so Jeanne Dielman is static for much of its running time. Which doesn’t mean “nothing happens”, but the audience is forced to slow down to the pace of the film. At one point, I imagined my wife at a baseball game ... she’s not a fan, she finds it boring ... if she had to watch a 3 hour and 21 minute game, she might try to find something to grab her attention, but eventually I’d guess she’d just give up. You will be tempted to give up on Jeanne Dielman if you decide to watch it. And I wouldn’t blame you at all if you did decide you had better things to do.

But the boredom is necessary, as is the length of the film. The boredom is cumulative (which is another reason why a person might want to avoid it) ... you are more bored after half an hour than you are at the beginning, more bored after an hour than you were thirty minutes before. Much of the boredom is due to the repetitive nature of Jeanne’s life. She makes breakfast, wakes up her son, makes and drinks coffee, sees her son off to school, cleans house, goes shopping, entertains clients at home (she works on what seems to be a part-time basis as a prostitute), cleans up some more, makes dinner, welcomes her son when he returns from school, eats dinner with him, puts him to bed, goes to bed herself, and gets up the next morning to make breakfast again. She is very compulsive, always turning lights off when she leaves a room, then turning them on again when she returns. Her coats are perhaps the most interesting aspect of her compulsions. There’s a housecoat she puts on when she gets out of bed. There’s a coat-length kind of apron that she wears when she’s got good clothes on and wants to make sure they don’t get dirty. She has a coat she wears when she leaves the house. And every time she puts on a coat, she buttons all of the buttons, and when she takes it off, she unbuttons all of the buttons and hangs the coat up. The buttoning gets annoying after awhile ... OK, we get the point, she’s compulsive, do we have to watch the entire process every single time?

And then, in one scene in the second half of the movie, she forgets to do one of the buttons. It has about the same impact on the audience as Norman Bates turning up in the shower with a knife. I worried I was going to spend the rest of the movie wondering about that button, but luckily, her son notices, saying “your button” ... she fixes it, to the relief of everyone.

As the boredom accumulates, our understanding of Jeanne also accumulates. For whatever reason, she is defined by her routine. The film is broken into three segments, each showing us a day in her life, and by Day Three, you know that she is different. But if you started watching at that point, you might not notice anything was wrong at all. The differences are subtle, and the only way you can spot them is if you’ve been paying attention the first two days. I won’t say she’s going crazy ... whatever plagues her, it was there before we meet her, so “going” isn’t the right word. But once you see how she is changing, you realize what came before was far more troubled than you might have thought. Her insistence on routine is no longer quirky ... now it’s a sign that she is barely holding things together.

My favorite line came after the Potato Scene. She puts potatoes on to boil, but neglects them for too long. She throws them out, then finds she only has one potato left, so she goes back to the store and buys a bag of potatoes. When she returns, she starts peeling the potatoes, but she no longer has the obsessive precision we have seen previously. She seems frustrated by the potatoes, she stops and starts ... something is clearly wrong. Her son comes home and notes that her hair is a mess. She replies, “I let the potatoes cook too long.” I’d say it was the funniest line in the movie, if it wasn’t so obviously sad.

Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne is, to my mind, the best and most important thing about the film. It’s Akerman’s idea, and Mangolte has a strong effect on the finished product. But Seyrig is given an impossible task: to portray a woman (who is on screen for virtually the entire 201 minutes) who puts on an armor to prevent us from seeing the “real” her inside the shell, but gradually giving us peeks at what is going on in her head. The differences are subtle ... like I say, if you hadn’t already watched her for two hours, you might not notice right away that she was faltering by that third hour. This isn’t Carrie Mathison, leaping from one side of her bi-polarness to the other, always getting our attention (and ensuring that Claire Danes will always have Emmy-winning material). As Seyrig plays it, Jeanne is more like Edith Scob in Eyes Without a Face. Jeanne’s face is nearly as inexpressive as Scob’s Christiane, only Seyrig isn’t wearing a mask. She’s acting. And as the movie goes on and on, it is Seyrig that gives us the gradual, if minimal, progress in Jeanne’s life.

Jeanne Dielman let the potatoes cook too long, and that was one of the most important events in the movie. At the beginning, you can’t believe you’ll still be watching 3 1/2 hours later. But by the time she over-cooked those potatoes, they had me. #90 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time. 9/10.

(Explanation of the Film Fatales Series.)

film fatales #4: wendy and lucy (kelly reichardt, 2008)

There were several warning signs ahead of this one. First, it’s not encouraging when a dog’s name is in the title. More importantly, I had only seen one Kelly Reichardt film, Old Joy, which came just before Wendy and Lucy, and I was, to quote from my comments, “bored shitless”. I wrote at the time that nothing happens (I’m erratic about this ... I usually hate it ... on the other hand, I love L’Avventura). What’s funny is that my memory in retrospect (some seven years since I saw it) is that I found the relationship between the two men at the center of the film made me very uncomfortable. The guy who was still a hippie gave me the creeps, and I felt bad for the guy who had “sold out”. Yet all I talked about then was how bored I was.

Wendy and Lucy is not boring, at least not to me. Apparently, I am less bothered by a relationship between a woman and a dog than I am about two men, one of whom seems to make demands on the other. (Wendy doesn’t make demands on Lucy, and of course, Lucy is a dog so she doesn’t make many demands, either.) The style of Wendy and Lucy is similar to the earlier film ... a good feel for nature (and the beautiful cinematography to go with it), a lack of a narrative thrust, the willingness to take the time to let the film develop (if “develop” is the right word). Both films are very short (76 minutes for Old Joy, 80 for Wendy and Lucy), but here the running time seems just right (whereas Old Joy seemed endless, even at 76 minutes).

Michelle Williams has to carry the movie, and she does, which is no surprise, given how often she is excellent. She doesn’t overplay, so she fits right into the film’s tone, and when she finally breaks for a moment, it carries extra weight for being rare. People took note of what Williams did to her looks for the movie ... four of the five trivia items on the IMDB are about her appearance (she went without makeup, didn’t wash her hair, didn’t shave her legs or clean her nails, slept in a car for a few nights, and “was so scruffy during filming that when bystanders came up to chat with the crew they totally ignored her.”). But Williams doesn’t let her makeup (or lack of same) do her work for her. She creates a real character that isn’t purely defined by her looks. (Think of her in My Week with Marilyn.) #148 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of the 21st century.

what i watched last week

The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993). (Siu-tung Ching must also be mentioned from the start for his work as “martial arts director”, i.e. wire fu.) I don’t remember exactly when I saw John Woo’s The Killer for the first time. I know we rented the VHS video from Palmer’s Cameras, so that might narrow the time frame. I knew nothing about it, but the in-store advertisement looked interesting. About halfway through the movie, I said something like “holy shit”, and became an instant convert to Hong Kong movies. It was a good time for such movies, and one of the pleasures of finding something new-to-you is that there is already an established batch of things to watch. (Binge-watching TV series carries some of the same feeling, or reading the first book in a series.) First I watched Woo’s classics, then Jackie Chan, then anything I could find. The UC Theatre showed HK double-bills on Thursday nights, which meant there was always something new. Michelle Yeoh was a particular favorite, thanks to her great beauty and terrific ability in action scenes (she had no martial arts training, but used her past as a ballet dancer to good effect). There was Yes, Madam! with Cynthia Rothrock, Police Story 3: Super Cop with Jackie Chan, and Wing Chun, which she carried largely on her own, although Donnie Yen was along for the ride. The Heroic Trio came between Super Cop and Wing Chun, and it’s a truly loony piece of work. The plot makes no sense, but it doesn’t try anyway so that doesn’t matter. The laws of gravity are broken with regularity, as is always the case with wire fu, so there is no reason the laws of narrative would fare any better. There is a surprising amount of real grossness to some of the violence, which needs to be mentioned for folks who are squeamish. But the hook for Heroic Trio is the actors who play the titular characters. There’s Yeoh as “Invisible Woman”, Anita Mui as “Wonder Woman”, and Maggie Cheung as “Thief Catcher”. I don’t know if I can translate this cast to an American production … maybe if they made Charlie’s Angels with Sigourney Weaver, Madonna, and Michelle Williams. Yeoh would become famous in the West as a Bond Girl, and later for her part in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon … Cheung is loved worldwide for movies like In the Mood for Love and Clean (for which she won a Best Actress award at Cannes). In Asia, Mui was the biggest star of the three, often called the “Madonna of Asia” for her music, which placed her atop the charts for many years. But Mui was like Madonna, if Madonna could act … Mui won awards for acting as well as singing. In short, these are three of Asia’s most honored and respected actors, and they show up in a bizarre wire fu movie. It’s quite fun, if you’re in the right mood. You can tell Yeoh is handling most of her own action work, but To makes Cheung and Mui look good, too. Yeoh also has the most showy role as far as acting goes, and she makes the most of it. (Cheung is often comic relief, as she was in the Police Story movies with Chan.) Perhaps Charlie’s Angels is a good comparison: three absolutely beautiful actresses kicking ass. But Charlie’s Angels didn’t have Siu-tung Ching. 7/10. For a follow-up, you could catch the sequel, Executioners, which I haven’t seen but which isn’t highly regarded. For Yeoh, try Wing Chun. I never miss a chance to tout In the Mood for Love with Maggie Cheung, although it is nothing like this movie. Finally, Mui won awards for her work in Rouge.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011). The viewing experience isn’t always relevant, but in this case, I need to state upfront how I watched this movie. I watched the first half on Blu-ray, but the disc kept screwing up, so I finally gave up and returned it to Netflix. They sent me a replacement, and I watched the second half a couple of days later. (Creepy sidenote: when I put the replacement disc in the Blu-ray player, the movie started up where I’d left it with the other disc.) I mention this because Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a long movie (a little more than 2 1/2 hours), and it is built to be watched in one sitting, so that it will draw out a cumulative response. Since I took a break in the middle, I was able to put off some of the possible boredom that might have ensued otherwise. (Mick LaSalle called it “colossally, memorably and audaciously boring”.) I could certainly see why some people would be bored … “nothing happens” for long stretches of the film, and the first two hours offer multiple renditions of the same events: police are driving a murderer around, looking for where he buried the body, but he was drunk at the time, can’t really remember where the grave is, and many places in that part of Anatolia look the same, so they drive to a spot, get out of the car, look around, murderer says that isn’t the place, they get in the car, drive to a spot, etc. As they drive around, we listen to their conversations, which seem extremely mundane (click here for a discussion of yogurt). It all reminded me a bit of L’Avventura, where the characters wandered around, seeming aimless, while Antonioni turned their lives into something bigger. Anatolia is designed to frustrate your expectations … it’s a police procedural, it’s noir, it is, in Andrew O’Hehir’s words, “like an episode of ‘CSI,’ scripted by Anton Chekhov, stretched to two and a half hours, and photographed against the bleak, impressive scenery of Turkey’s central steppes.” There are no clear solutions to anything, and what we learn about the characters lacks clarity as well … what you think you know could slip through your fingers. It’s not a movie for everyone. #116 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 250 films of the 21st century. I give it 9/10. I haven’t seen them, but Ceylan’s earlier movies Distant and Climates are also highly regarded. Or you could watch my 17th-favorite movie of all time, L’Avventura.

Spider Baby, or, The Maddest Story Ever Told (Jack Hill, 1964?). Another one of those movies where it’s as much fun talk about the extraneous stuff as to discuss what’s on the screen. Let me get the latter out of the way. Spider Baby is a low-budget Inbreeding Meets Lolita story that is part horror film, part comedy, and overall better than you would expect. One poster read “Seductive Innocence of Lolita, Savage Hunger of a Black Widow!” It will never rise above cult status, but within that context, you could do worse. Now to the fun stuff. It’s the first film directed by Jack Hill, who gave us such classic 70s exploitation movies as Coffy and Foxy Brown. It stars Lon Chaney, Jr. who actually does a decent job. (The above-mentioned poster says, “Starring Spider Baby and Lon Chaney”.) The cast includes cult faves like Sid Haig, Carol Ohmart, even Mantan Moreland. It was filmed in 1964 for around $60,000 … the title at the time was Cannibal Orgy. The money men behind the production went bankrupt, so the film wasn’t released until 1968. The song that plays under the opening credits is performed by Chaney. One of the actors, Quinn Redeker, went on to some success as a soap opera actor, and also was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay to The Deer Hunter. Jill Banner, who plays Spider Baby, died in a car accident at the age of 35 … at the time, she was working with Marlon Brando. A lot of cheapo movies are incompetently made. Credit to Jack Hill for making a movie where the camera is where it belongs, where the performances are reasonably OK, where you’ll see something a little bit different. Doesn’t mean it’s a good movie, but relatively speaking, it’s fine. 6/10. For a companion, you could watch one of Hill’s Pam Grier movies. There’s also Chaney in The Wolf Man, which is very good, or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which also features Chaney (and Bela Lugosi as Dracula!) and which is very very good.

The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958). I originally intended to give this movie its own post in the Blu-ray series, but I don’t think I can do it justice, so I’ll just attach it here. It’s almost universally admired as one of the greatest films of one of the greatest directors, but it mostly left me cold. I’m willing to accept that I just wasn’t in the right place to appreciate it. It’s an hour shorter than Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but I found it much harder to get through. Again, the might be my own fault … I didn’t realize half the film is a flashback until I read it in reviews after the fact. I get the comparisons to King Lear, but this movie is far too quiet for the comparison to work … the main character never explodes against the world the way Lear does, and in fairness, emulating Lear is not likely to have been Ray’s intention. I can’t blame him for what others said about his film. Perhaps because I was bamboozled by the time frame, I never found the main character to change. It could have been a 20-minute short and worked just as well for me. For now, I’ll file it under “watch it again in a few years”. #218 on the TSPDT list. 6/10. I obviously don’t have any recommendations for similar movies to watch. Perhaps Charulata, another Ray film that I saw 40+ years ago and remember liking.

by request: au hasard balthazar (robert bresson, 1966)

This wasn’t exactly a request. Jeff Pike had it at #16 when we did our Facebook Fave Fifty lists, and I’m trying to see all of the movies Jeff and Phil Dellio chose that I have missed.

Jeff isn’t alone in ranking this one so highly. The most recent Sight and Sound critics’ poll also had it at #16. (Among the critics who voted for it: Manohla Dargis, Molly Haskell, Wesley Morris.) It came in at #21 on the directors’ poll (for some reason, I’m not surprised that Béla Tarr had it on his list). The just-updated They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films saw Au hasard Balthazar rise from #60 last year to #33 this year.

So, of course, I didn’t connect with it.

I don’t think it went over my head, as often happens with subtle films. Much of what its devotees like about it was apparent to me, as well. It’s just that I didn’t get that devoted feeling.

Take Bresson’s famous method for using actors, or, as he calls, them, “models”. He used mostly non-professional “models”, and in the process of making films, he would repeat take after take, until the performer disappeared and became a conduit for the words and actions Bresson wanted. The result here is that the performers’ looks are the totality of their work. Anne Wiazemsky, who plays the leading human role, has pouty lips and a certain near-insolence that comes across equal parts submissive and innocent. Her character does good things and bad things and things outside of good and bad, but she always has the same look on her face. Bresson is letting the audience experience the emotions of the characters, unfiltered by actor’s technique. Yet all I could say at the end of the film was that Wiazemsky’s lips were nice to look at. (Unlike many of the people in the film, she went on to have an acting career, and was married to Godard for a dozen years.)

I also fear I took everything too literally, which is something I’m susceptible to. The donkey (it occurs to me I’ve gotten this far without explaining that the Balthazar of the title is a donkey) is believed by some characters in the film to be a saint, and I think Bresson wants us to feel the same way. You could say it’s all just metaphor, but I found it literally true: Balthazar was a saint. And perhaps I’m too human-centric, but the idea that a donkey is a saint strikes me as nonsense. Which means only that I’m probably not the right audience for the film.

Having said that, the notion that a donkey could be an exemplar of saintly behavior seems more understandable, although in that case, Balthazar is perilously close to that idiot Forrest Gump, another supposed role model. Bresson does not turn his donkey into a human in animal clothing … Eddie Murphy isn’t on the soundtrack offering wise cracks. Balthazar plods along, often mistreated, always overworked, and he seems to take everything in his life with equanimity. Roger Ebert pointed out that, given Bresson’s theories of actors, “a donkey becomes the perfect Bresson character. Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it communicates its physical feelings only in universal terms.”

I could say a lot of positive things about Au hasard Balthazar. It affects many people on a very deep emotional level, even battle-hardened critics with tough hearts. Bresson has an individual vision about film, and his films are very clearly “his”. He is one of the few directors who truly deserve the title of “auteur”.

I’m not sure this says anything useful about my own reaction to Au hasard Balthazar, but on my own Fave Fifty list, I had four French films in my top 14, including one by Jean Renoir, for whom I felt some measure of guilt because I didn’t include more of his movies. Renoir seems very different from the Bresson of Au Hasard Balthazar, and I wonder how many people love the work of both directors.

#17: l’avventura (michelangelo antonioni, 1960)

(This is the 34th of 50 pieces that originally appeared in a Facebook group devoted to three of us choosing our 50 favorite movies. I’ll present them un-edited except for typos or egregious errors. I’ll also add a post-script to each.)

I’ve never been quite certain why I think L’Avventura is Antonioni’s one and only masterpiece. In many ways, it’s the kind of movie I’m always complaining about. It goes on forever, and nothing “happens.” But for some reason, L’Avventura hits me directly on my existential bone. The lives of these characters, upper-middle class at the least, are largely empty. Not completely empty, since they work at finding ways to fill the void (most of them seeming to involve sex). But ultimately empty, which is perhaps even harder to take than complete emptiness, because of the self-awareness of that ultimate journey.

Claudia (Monica Vitti) is the one character who is able to stand apart from the others. At the beginning of the film, every character is self-absorbed, except for Claudia, who loves her best friend, Anna. L’Avventura is about Claudia’s slow slide from someone who can love, to someone who is just like all the rest. Anna disappears on a visit to a craggy volcanic island. Everyone commences trying to find her, but it’s clear soon enough that only Claudia and Anna’s fiancé Sandro actually care enough to keep making the effort. And it doesn’t take Sandro long to join the rest of his friends. On the surface, he continues to search for Anna, but it’s all for show; he is already trying to pair up with Claudia.

Claudia is horrified at first, but gradually, Anna fades in Claudia’s memory, Sandro persists, and he and Claudia become lovers. When Claudia catches Sandro cheating on her, she runs off crying. But in the film’s final scene, she lays her hand on Sandro’s head. They have come to a reconciliation based on their mutual pity for each other, and their own self-loathing. The Claudia who could love is gone. All that remains is a shadow Claudia, who will go on to live the emptiness implied by “ultimately.”

As to why Antonioni’s other films don’t appeal to me as much, I have one idea. Antonioni followed this up with two more films, La notte and L’Eclisse, and as I re-watched L’Avventura for this essay, I thought back to those other movies, which I haven’t seen in a long time. Perhaps my problem is that L’Avventura’s greatness lies in part in the way the emptiness is ultimate rather than complete. Claudia’s journey takes us from a place of hope to one of pitiful acceptance, and that journey is key to L’Avventura. In the other films in the trilogy, the emptiness is there from the start; it is complete, and there is no journey. But I’m grasping at straws, and as I say, it’s been years since I saw those other films.

 

This one got more comments than just about any other movie on my list (close to 30 … too lazy to count). There was a discussion of “slow cinema”, and more than one person agreed with me that it’s odd I like L’Avventura given my tastes in general.