Faces, A Woman under the Influence, & Colossus: The Forbin Project

Faces is a hard to watch film, although in this case, it's not because of its uncomfortable subject matter or because it was bad. It's because it's intentionally shot mainly handheld, but also a lot of closeups, which were very distracting. The acting is outstanding, and it was so strange to see Seymour Cassel as young, because I really hadn't seen any of his earlier films when I knew who he was. But really, it's because he always looked old. I don't remember his small role in The Killers, even though I saw it very recently. It's a powerful film, worth seeing if you can handle your films depressing.

A Women under the Influence is from a similar emotional place as Faces, although it's far more polished. Some of it may be the higher budget and the use of color, and some may be that Peter Falk is a good actor. Although his eyes will never stop being freaky. I know it's very superficial, but they're just freaky. The movie is just outstanding. Definitely one you need to see. I'd like to thank TCM for having a little John Cassevettes mini-fest last week, and I'd like to thank Comcast for stopping the signal for around a minute right after the ending of the movie, so I didn't actually miss any of this film. Otherwise, I would have been pissed, since TCM never replays films within a reasonable time.

Colossus: The Forbin Project is a precursor to Wargames, but without the goofy Matthew Broderick fooling with NORAD. It's also very late 60s/early 70s, not quite as paranoid as mid-late 70s films, and there's a little bit of flower power anti-war thrown in. Not that Wargames also wasn't anti-war, but this one is more explicitly pro-peace. I don't know any of the actors in it (although most main people were in other films I've seen) besides James Hong, who's there so you have the token Asian, and there's a token black guy (who, of course, dies), and a couple women, making sure that all races and sexes are well-covered. Wouldn't want to suggest that all scientists are white men. Pretty progressive for a film make in 1970. Anyway, it's sort of like the difference between Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove. Both about similar plots, but they take very different approaches. At least we should be pretty sure that giving all power to a computer to control nuclear weapons is a bad idea. I mean, is there a movie where that ends up where a computer controlling things doesn't go insane? At least the nude scenes were very tastefully done, up there with those early ESPN the Magazines.