The wife has been grabbing random weekly handfuls of cinema from the library. We've been using Netflix for meat-and-potatoes viewing (currently the 1981 Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons)and the library for spice, with results as varied as you would expect.
This week she dragged home The Ascent, billed as the "greatest Soviet film of all time".
I liked it in spite of this bit of ironic salesmanship, at least until the Nazis captured our intrepid peasant heroes and dragged them in for questioning and we turned it off. The wife has few hard and fast cinematic rules, but "no torture" heads the list.
I think we made it about halfway, and I liked what I saw quite a bit.
It was cold in a way movies almost never are, I think because it was filmed in an actual frozen wasteland, not in a groomed, manicured, filmmaker friendly landscape impersonating a frozen wasteland. The ideology was predictably lugubrious but fell short of killing the momentum of the story.
And there are a couple of amazing scenes, one tracking shot through a dense forest that recalled the dreamiest corners of Cocteau's La Belle et la bête and a part where the handsome peasant ponders suicide in a snowbank as the Nazis close in.
If anyone finishes it, fill me in.
I'm wondering how they pull off "ultimate transcendence" without dragging religion into the picture.
/edit
The Criterion page has a cool section for people's top 10's, and it's not just the usual critical suspects.
Comic artist Mike Allred
Director Jane Campion, auteur behind Sweetie, one of the wife's all time favorites.
John Lurie, jazz musician and my Facebook crony.
And Ricky Jay, who's literary taste is such that I mistook him for a book dealer for many years.
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