Roy William Neil
1946

At the end of the screening, my prof (who is my favourite prof ever and I'm in total awe of) said, "So, this was an ordinary film." I laughed and said (oh so wittily) "It sure was."
Ugh. He knows who I am though.
At one point, I leaned over to my film class friend and said "Apparently everyone in England thinks Sherlock Holmes is so smart because they're all idiots."

Conan Doyle? I don't think would be so proud.
(I was never really into Sherlock. I've read a couple of short stories. I guess they were all right. I like my detectives much more hard-boiled and bitter and less smug. I do want to see the Billy Wilder one though.)

Wong Kar Wai
1995

It's Hong Kong at night.
There's lots of blurry camera. And that waterfall sequence with him just looking at the girl and she's just sitting there, oh, oh.
And the masturbating? Showing it from her feet. Good.
The guy who played the guy who was mute from eating a can of expired pineapple (which came from Chungking Express, sort of)? So good.
Wong Kar Wai is awesome. So best.

Robert Flaherty
1926

It's subtitled "A Romance of the Golden Age."
It's very pretty and relaxed, could almost be called lyrical.
But it's also pretty dull. Those Samoans sure do lead an idyllic life. And the women's traditional costume, it shows their boobs.
Seriously, so boring. Also, the big painful tattoing ritual that Moana undergoes at the end of the movie? The practice was dying out. They staged it specifically for the movie.
This was the first movie to have the word "documentary" attached to it.
Michael Moore doesn't seem so bad.
I think I hate Robert Flaherty.

Robert Flaherty
1922

It's about Nanook. He lives in the North. It's cold. He hunts a lot.
A lot of the scenes were staged. They pull a dead seal out of the water.
Whatever, they can do what they want.
You don't really get annoyed about how exploitative this was until you find out that Nanook died of starvation two years after the movie came out.

Rebecca Miller
2002

This is one of those movies where it's actually just three vignettes. Separately the vignettes were all quite good and there are definite linking factors in the structures of the vignettes. But still. Vignettes? I don't know. I wasn't sure of the larger point or if there was one.
Also, I think I liked that there was a male narrator. As if even though it's a woman's movie, there's still the sense of male authority. (The same male authority that the woman variously are chafing under.) I think.
All three of the leads were really good, even Kyra Sedgewick, which surprised me because I didn't know she could act. My favourite was still Parker Posey (natch).

Michael Almereyda
1995

It's about vampires. In New York City.
It's very ironic.
It has Pixelvision.
I think I liked it.
The director went on to do Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke.
Seriously.

D.W. Griffith
1919

Good melodrama. The print we watched in class was gorgeous; I love the colour tinting in those old films, the whole thing looks so lush.
Lillian Gish was amazing. She is what Gloria Swanson is talking about in Sunset Boulevard when she said "We had faces then."
The only thing, the thing that made it hard to watch and took away from the still-charming sentiment, was how much its attitude toward race has aged. For one thing, pretty much all the Chinese people in the film are actually Chinese. Except for the hero, Cheng Huan, who is referred to in the intertitles as "The Yellow Man" and is played by . Richard Barthelmess. He looks even less Asian next to all the actually Asian extras.
Lines like "Why are you so good to me, Chinky?" Meant to be affectionate. Now, kind of horrible.
Visually beautiful though.

Richard Kelly
2001

Good as always.
"Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion."
I'd forgotten how good Drew Barrymore was in it. Maybe all she needs is the right director and/or script.
Question: does Jena Malone always basically play the same character, or is that just me? Something about school uniforms. I dunno.

Samuel Fuller
1963

Constance Powers x awkwardest striptease EVER + feather boa + racist black guy + nympho attack! + fake incest / electroshock therapy x 60s asylum + murder + Pulitzer Prize = AWESOME

Michael Mann
1981

There's some crazy pacing issues with this. I noticed the same thing with The Insider. Mann is very intent, but it always feels like his movies are much longer than they actually are. The story of this (and say, something like Collateral) aren't really that different from any other Hollywood stuff, it's just the way it's presented.
The score, by (seriously) Tangerine Dream, hasn't aged well, making it feel even more like a product of its time.
Everyone's really good in it: James Caan is always good, Tuesday Weld is his wife and Willie Nelson plays his prison "father-figure." (I think there's some homoerotic subtext there.)