"I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same." - 8½
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Diary for My Children 1984
Interesting from a historical perspective and because so much of it felt as if it was drawn directly from real memories -- not only the flashbacks with Juli's parents and the bigger moments happening in the film's present, but even tiny things like encountering bananas for the first time and paying for a public toilet with a handkerchief -- yet somehow it left me kind of cold for the most part, especially where János wasn't involved. I had a similar reaction to Adoption, so maybe I'm just not on the right wavelength with Mészáros.
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Mexican Bus Ride 1952
The synopsis and Buñuel's name led me to expect something significantly stranger and more surreal than this turned out to be, so I probably approached it with the wrong mindset. I did really like the low-key oddness of the bus driver insisting that all of the passengers attend his mother's birthday party (the whole party sequence was the high point for me), and if that sort of thing had happened more frequently throughout the movie I think I would have enjoyed it much more.
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My Dad Is 100 Years Old 2005
Somehow, Isabella Rossellini looks less like Ingrid Bergman while playing Ingrid Bergman than she does normally.
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The Quadrille 1950
This is a nearly forty-minute (even Rivette's shorts are long!) silent, scoreless, intertitle-free (apart from an epigraph) film in which nothing happens, and yet I was inexplicably engaged for a good bit of the runtime. Was it the mystery of what was going on in the characters' minds? Was it the sense of suspense, wondering if something might happen even though I was all but certain that it wouldn't? ("Hey, that guy's standing up!") Was it just the rough charm…
