Rebecca

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Yesterday I did a massive overhaul of my Netflix queue. I threw out a lot of the old, stagnant ones that had been sitting on my queue for fucking ever, their chances of of being bumped to the top ever-diminishing and basically just taking up space. I did add some newer releases (Untraceable looks awful, but I can't help myself), and a few random things (horror movies) that looked cool. But mostly what I did was browse the internet scour lists of great movies and (especially) directors and load up my queue with some of the most interesting suggestions. Maybe this will kick my K2K up another notch. I mean, I'm sure I'll fall into the same traps of fixating on a particular director or actor or genre instead of trying to be more broad (hell, I plan on watching Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress tonight), but I still think this is a step forward.

I have also made a change in my Netflix strategy. Whereas I once kept a (sorta kinda somewhat relatively) smaller queue, I am now overloading that bitch until it bursts. Before, my thought was that I didn't want to overload it because I would never get to all the movies and maybe it would start to feel like a burden. But you know what? I plan on having Netflix for a long time, and any way who cares if I don't see them all? What used to happen is that I would look around my queue and not be in the mood for anything on it, so I'd just end up finding something to add. Now, with my supersized queue, I should always be able to find something I'm in the mood for.

So what I'm saying is that I'm ushering in a new era of my K2K. Okay, well, actually I've done alright so far and this probably won't effect my viewing habits much, but it's at least the dawn of a new K2K day. And how did I celebrate this momentous occasion? By continuing that Alfred Hitchcock catch-up I kinda half-assed last month, and probably won't follow up on right away. Sure, not a good sign of reinvigoration, but this bastard had been on my Tivo for fucking ever and needed to get watched.

This is a good one, not a favorite, but definitely upper-shelf Hitchcock. It's more subdued than many of his other films, a psychological thriller to a dgree, but more of a drama with a lot of tension boiling under the surface. Maybe one of his best shot, at least from a "pretty pictures" perspective.

It seems to be well regarded, yet conversely not as famous or as often mentioned as many other Hitchcock classics. This had struck me as kinda weird, as it stars Laurence Olivier, is Hitchcock's first Hollywood film, and is I believe the only one of his movies to win Best Picture. Now that I've seen it, though, I have an idea why. There aren't any classic Hitchcock set-pieces/sequences. Nothing like the Psycho shower scene, or the Mount Rushmore sequence in North By Northwest, or running up the stairs in Vertigo, or anything like that. Rebecca is an excellent movie, but there's nothing iconic about any of it. And when you're the director of some of the most iconic scenes in film history, I can see why this one wouldn't end up in the collective conscience so much.

I'm glad I finally got around to watching it. I liked the story and the acting, but mostly I responded to the look of the film, how Hitchcock films the eerie old castle that most of the story takes place in, and the way that an ineffable tension keeps building under the surface of day-to-day life.