My Week of Movie Watching

Night Tide – Interesting little low-budget horror flick from 1961 stars Dennis Hopper as a sailor who falls in love with a mysterious girl who works as a mermaid in a sea-side midway. The trouble is, she may in fact be a real-life siren who kills her boyfriends. This works well mainly because of the location. It is all filmed at Venice Beach in California, and has a neat visual style. It would make a good double feature with Herk Harveys’ Carnival of Souls, which is another memorable bargain basement horror classic. Recommended.

Nostalghia – Andrei Tarkovsky film from 1983 involves a Russian writer who travels to an Italian spa village to work on a biography. There, he falls under the spell of a local lunatic who locked his family away for 7 years. Like everything Tarkovsky does, this is slow and hard to penetrate. I’ve finally figured out that it is best to not try to follow every nuance of the story, and instead just let the images and sounds wash over you, because from that standpoint, Tarkovsky is without equal. He likes long, static takes and slow dolly shots, and often lets miscellaneous ambient sound flood the composition. It’s a bit of a different movie experience, but his films always stick with me.