“Totally spaced on writing this up last night. When it was over, I called the ‘rents and then got caught up cleaning up the Hellmouth. Didnt realize it until I was getting ready for bed.
I think this brings the grand total of silent movies I’ve ever seen to 3, the other two being City Lights and Nosferatu, and I saw all three within the past two weeks (although I had seen City Lights before). As someone who is very dialogue driven (Im often content to just listen to a movie while Im multitasking, and I’ve been known to skip non-dialogue bits when reading), silent movies are really tough for me to get used to.
I did have some issues with the story. I could follow it well enough, despite my aforementioned dialogue driven-ness, but I just didnt buy parts of it. The first third of the story was very much my style–guy plots to kill his wife so he can run off with other girl, well the murder thing is my style. But when he changed his mind and ended up having the most wonderful “”date day”” in the city with her, it lost me. I could not understand how she could forgive him so quickly. He almost threw her off a boat for \m/ sake. And that’s that I absolutely loved him. I was sympathetic toward him while he was pleading with her, but it was when she did take him back that I realized how much I disagreed with that.
I really wasnt into the next section. It felt like we’d gone from this dark, intense drama and stumbled back into the slapstick part of City Lights, but with much less beautiful imagery. Once we got to the end (I’ll try not to be too spoilery), it made sense why that whole happy chunk existed, but I still didnt believe it.
I understand why this movie made the list. It won some of the first Academy Awards ever given out, and there were some breakthroughs in their filming technique. They had these really well done overlapping shots, that apparently were done by exposing the film and then filming the next scene over it, or something. IMDB trivia sorta explained it. But ultimately, its just not my type of movie.”