Vertigo (www.derf.net)

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movie reviews

Vertigo ... movie reviews , spoiler_verylow
thu 2005-aug-25 01:42:27 pdt ... permalink

I'm not sure how many data points I actually have for this theory, but I'm going to go ahead and boldly claim that classic films tend to defy my expectations of them. Last saturday we saw Vertigo, which I'd never seen. Not sure whether I'd seen any Hitchcock at all, in fact. Anyway, so I guess I didn't really know what to expect, but I'm pretty sure that, to whatever extent I could have verbalized any expectation at all, I would have been wrong. Heck, even during the film, it continued to defy my expectations.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I liked most of the story, and I liked that the direction it took surprised me a few times. And I think I thought the acting was decent. But I thought Hitchcock beat the audience over the head a bit more than necessary with certain things. <spoiler detail="verylow">And I'm afraid I was fairly disappointed by the ending.</spoiler>

Certainly worth seeing, anyway.

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reader comments on this entry:

sat 2005-aug-27 12:49:59 pdt
posted by IPHY

Yeah. When watching older films one has to remember that the whole freaking industry was a lot less mature. So, you get things like the long, long, long look at the hair on the woman and the hair in the painting. And then someone mentioning it later, just to be sure.

I remember a friend of mine showed Casablanca to a young woman he was courting at the time. Afterward he asked her how she liked it and she remarked that she liked it fine "but it was very cliche." How do you explain that all those cliches are cliches _now_ of that movie?

For the record, I like the ending. But it would be hard to explain why without serious spoilers -- something I tend not to avoid doing when talking about movies made in 1958, but I'll respect your lead in your journal.