I stopped by the nearest county library on Saturday to peruse its little-known gold mine of DVDs. Really, if the region could wait a week for materials transfer from one branch to the other, nearby Blockbuster and Hollywood outlets would be boarded up by Christmas.
The magic is without fail: walk up to the shelf holding no more than one hundred movies, open your eyes wide and pick up a "Never did see that one" film or three. For me, it was From the Earth to the Moon, Tom Hanks' television follow-up to Apollo 13. I've yet to see the latter but if it's anything like the miniseries, I'll be enjoying a spectacular viewing sometime in the near future. Twelve episodes (nine of them I caught a couple of months ago); some familiar faces, some talented unknowns, all portraying the men and women of the moon program. Universal and timeless as the series may be, it's so very Sixties. Suits and ties; thick, black-framed glasses; every other man smoking a cigarette in a board room or from behind million-dollar NASA communications and telemetry equipment, or just about anywhere else that's at least ten feet from a giant tank of liquid oxygen. Women on the cusp of discarding hats as regular formal wear. Excellent.
No, From the Earth to the Moon is not a thriller. After searching the shelves, I picked out LA Confidential, one I missed from the Kevin Spacey salad days; and Rear Window, classic Hitchcock I managed to only see once.
I watched LA Confidential late Saturday night and Rear Window yesterday evening over dinner, enjoying both. Keeping in mind that they fall into the mystery-intrigue-murder genre (and time periods only a decade apart), I couldn't help but compare the two.
Valuing a movie's ability to keep my eyes glued to the screen and teeth chattering, Window swept, second viewing notwithstanding. Hitchcock at his mastery is tough to best; in fact, the more you know about the tortuous suspense sequences, the more they terrify you. Hitchcock's psychological magnifying glass is unmatched, every odd little vignette between minor characters a piece meant to define the whole. I looked forward to Thorwald's staggered lurch towards the helpless L.B. Jeffries through the whole movie and still white-knuckled my armrests in joy. I'd forgotten how early Grace Kelly sees for herself the disturbing departure in routine from across the back lot, or how impulsive she becomes to bring the murderer to justice. To top it all off, the rear window could just as easily be one at my Grandmother's house in Queens (sure enough, the last time I slept the night there I checked for murders in progress - all clear.)
I didn't realize Confidential was set in period - save for Danny Devito's tiny, corner smudge, you wouldn't know that the movie's setting was anything but modern. All the better: back fifteen years and they would have been using tommy guns. Abundant shotguns worked just as fine. The movie was far more baroque than Window, trading depth of character for story saturation. It worked - when the three hoodlums on the run were downed and the crime "solved," I wracked my brains against when and to where the plot was sure to twist. Though nowhere near as explicit as a film like Goodfellas, Confidential grew to be a bit overviolent by the end of the movie; less in terms of red than a slightly rushed string of keep-quiet murders. And the script could have been sharper in a few places.
I was still impressed. Side note: ten dollars says a blooper take caught Spacey's dying character muttering "Kaiser...Soze."
Good flicks. I knew I'd started a smart tradition a couple of months ago. Rediscovering a competitive collection - waiting at the library for free - was even smarter.