Listen now | Finally we’ve come to the final film of Nautical Month: The Hunt for Red October directed by John McTiernan. This submarine spy thriller from the early 90s is a solid, enjoyable movie. It’s always clear exactly what is happening, which is not an easy feat for a plot this complex. There are also some really good performances, especially from people like Sean Connery and James Earl Jones. Our biggest complaint is with the handling of the main character, Jack Ryan - played by a rather hammy Alec Baldwin.
There was a comment in the podcast about how the last scene was the only one with bad CG but I'd like to point out there were at least two separate raining stormy sea scenes and in both of them the rain is very unrealistic (changing directions frantically) and the waves vary from almost perfectly flat to very mild rollers signalling a nice windless day.
For themes, we could do a Pynchon-adaptation and\or "Pynchonesque" month. I found a list with some recommendations. https://letterboxd.com/dandanmolloy/list/pynchonesque/ On the list there's Out 1 which is a 13-hour long movie by Jacques Rivette (I have not seen it). I don't know how it could fit the format of the club but it could be interesting. There's also Death and the Compass by Alex Cox that could fit this theme.
Also I would suggest a "New Weird" month. We could watch Stalker by Tarkovsky, Annihilation by Alex Garland and also Adieu au langage by Godard.
Desolate rural movies is another theme that could be interesting, there's Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, Denis Coté's Elle veut le chaos, Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold...
For me the first half hour of the movie is as good as movies get. The pacing of the shots, the editing and the cinematography are absolutely incredible. I think McTiernan has a great sense of rhythm, but then the rest of the movie does not keep up with the same drive.
For movie suggestions, there's Dancer in the Dark that combines musical and Stellan Skarsgård!
Patrick Willems has a good video essay about this film’s use of subtitles and the language change (fair warning that his videos also include a lot of weird serialized antics. Feel free to skip those): https://youtu.be/2A2qBcjb6Ic
To summarize his reading: the subtitles intentionally keep us at a distance and frame the Russians as being an untrustworthy Other. The switch from subtitled Russian to English mirrors the way we go from distrusting the Russians to empathizing with them. It’s a clever way of turning Americans’ resistance to subtitles into a feature rather than a bug.
Unrelated: If you’re looking for more monthly themes, you could pick films from the AFI Top 100 that you haven’t seen before. It’s always fun to get a first time impression of something like Casablanca or Gone With The Wind from someone who hasn’t seen them a hundred times, and there are some deeper cuts on that list if you’ve seen all the major ones.
There was a comment in the podcast about how the last scene was the only one with bad CG but I'd like to point out there were at least two separate raining stormy sea scenes and in both of them the rain is very unrealistic (changing directions frantically) and the waves vary from almost perfectly flat to very mild rollers signalling a nice windless day.
For themes, we could do a Pynchon-adaptation and\or "Pynchonesque" month. I found a list with some recommendations. https://letterboxd.com/dandanmolloy/list/pynchonesque/ On the list there's Out 1 which is a 13-hour long movie by Jacques Rivette (I have not seen it). I don't know how it could fit the format of the club but it could be interesting. There's also Death and the Compass by Alex Cox that could fit this theme.
Also I would suggest a "New Weird" month. We could watch Stalker by Tarkovsky, Annihilation by Alex Garland and also Adieu au langage by Godard.
Desolate rural movies is another theme that could be interesting, there's Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, Denis Coté's Elle veut le chaos, Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold...
For me the first half hour of the movie is as good as movies get. The pacing of the shots, the editing and the cinematography are absolutely incredible. I think McTiernan has a great sense of rhythm, but then the rest of the movie does not keep up with the same drive.
For movie suggestions, there's Dancer in the Dark that combines musical and Stellan Skarsgård!
Two theme suggestions:
- Taking matters into your own hands (eg. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri)
- Underrated or misunderstood films when they were released (eg. Starship Troopers)
Patrick Willems has a good video essay about this film’s use of subtitles and the language change (fair warning that his videos also include a lot of weird serialized antics. Feel free to skip those): https://youtu.be/2A2qBcjb6Ic
To summarize his reading: the subtitles intentionally keep us at a distance and frame the Russians as being an untrustworthy Other. The switch from subtitled Russian to English mirrors the way we go from distrusting the Russians to empathizing with them. It’s a clever way of turning Americans’ resistance to subtitles into a feature rather than a bug.
Unrelated: If you’re looking for more monthly themes, you could pick films from the AFI Top 100 that you haven’t seen before. It’s always fun to get a first time impression of something like Casablanca or Gone With The Wind from someone who hasn’t seen them a hundred times, and there are some deeper cuts on that list if you’ve seen all the major ones.