Gigi (1958): Eitan's Take

With all due respect to Gena's lovely mother, Gigi is just not my thing. At two hours, it was two hours too long. These French parlor movies are just miserable for me; take everything I loved about An American in Paris and everything I hate about the Princess Diary movies, mash them together for a 116 minute homage to manners, big dresses, gentlemen in tophats and canes, cheese, fountains, and how to turn women into coffee-serving machines for a man's infinite pleasure, and you get Gigi. Shira seemed unsurprised to find that I was far more interested in playing with our kitten Leroy than actually watch the movie.

After the complex moral fables woven through The Bridge on the River Kwai, Gigi is not just a letdown because it is so empty and trivial and garish; it is a letdown because it advocates ridiculous and offensive morals. Early in the film, Gaston is congratulated for his amazing achievement... breaking a woman's heart so badly that she commits suicide. "Congratulations on the suicide!" all his friends cheer. This is not only bad plot. It made me ill. Ditto to the opening and closing song, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," sung by Honore with such pedophilic glee that I would have turned off the movie the first time had I not committed myself to watching the it for this project.

The movie also sets a really poor example: listen to your nitwit grandmother and great aunt, commit yourself to a life of corset-bound unhappiness, obsess over emeralds and pearls, lose your ENTIRE sense of fun and spunky attitude, and maybe -- just maybe, if you compromise everything that could make you a fun and NORMAL person -- you'll get to wear a big purple dress and ride around in a carriage while an old man sings about how he spies on young girls playing in parks. The rest of the songs are awful and unmemorable, especially the one where the "chorus" whispers nasty things about Gaston and his first girlfriend while they pass through a ballroom. Hideous tempos, awful lyrics, and even more ghastly melodies.

I was told to look out for this movie, and now I know why. 3/10, ONLY for the impeccable production design and lush cinematography, as well as for Leslie Caron's eyelash-batting.

Cavalcade (1933): Eitan's Take

Nearly every review you can find of Cavalcade is quick to mention that this film -- this abysmal, miserable, death march of a film -- has fallen into complete obscurity and watching it, it is completely obvious why. The film is a rather gloomy affair, a sort of Forrest Gump-style epic sweep through the changing times surrounding two families on supposedly different sides of the class spectrum as they grow old, get married, die, and in general act like boring, prissy thugs for 30-odd years. Oh look! There's the Boer War! And the Titanic! Oh, how about that, the first solo flight across the English Channel! And World War I, complete with lame montages, preachy speeches about the meaning of war, and woozy victory parades! Well, gosh, I feel like I've just gotten a complete history lesson!

The absolute lack of grace, subtlety, wit, and style doom this film from the very beginning. Characters are hard to sort out; there is almost no plot development other than the changes forced upon these cardboard characters by placards indicating that -- snoooooze -- three or four years have passed and now it's time to be dragged along for another obligatory moment of early 20th century history. While we're at it, how about a few more montages. Oh, hey, another montage? And another? Thanks. I really feel like I'm being swept up by the currents of history... Honestly, I would have much rather read a dry British history textbook than slog through this movie again. There is clearly no accounting for taste; incredible that the same Academy that picked the subtle, evocative, and harrowing All Quiet on the Western Front (a truly moving epic of WWI) and Cimarron (a smart and bittersweet meditation on the sweep of American history) could just a few years later think highly of themselves for picking this terrible movie. I'm sure they thought they were picking something "important," but 70 years later, it's clear they were just picking a real piece of shit. 3/10