Oh man, it has been a productive week this time, folks. I ran through live-action classics, horror standouts both cult and critical, and even continued my journey through Hayao Miyazaki’s remaining films. I also put in the ridiculous amount of work necessary to pull together a fresh Evangelion writeup, so you can look forward to that coming down the pipeline soon. I also re-stringed my guitar for the first time in longer than I’m comfortable admitting, so the echo of Mountain Goats songs has once again been haunting my housemates at all hours of the day. Getting a little off track here, so let’s loop back to the subject at hand – from Hollywood’s golden era to Canadian slashers to world cinema classics, it’s time to break down another Week in Review!

First off, my rampage through the classics continued with It Happened One Night, a 1934 romantic comedy that snuck in just before the Hays Code censors, and my introduction to both director Frank Capra and leading man Clark Gable. Considering the stiffness of some contemporaneous films I’ve watched, I was expecting some degree of dramatic translation would be required to enjoy this one. But as it turns out, the fundamentals of the romantic comedy have apparently held steady for a century – It Happened One Night didn’t wasn’t just perfectly approachable, it was genuinely delightful.

Gable and Claudette Colbert possess an immediate, electric chemistry that lets each of them play up the fun of their contrasting archetypes – Gable playing the dashing yet sensitive rogue, with Colbert as the sheltered heiress who keeps stepping on rakes, but maintains her pride and sharp tongue through it all. And the film is littered with scenes so iconic they’ve essentially become genre standards – Gable establishing the “Wall of Jericho” as a sheet between their beds, Colbert hitchhiking with her leg rather than her thumb, etcetera. Basically the only element of this film that feels dated is the patriarchal skew of its romantic beats – as far as comedy, chemistry, and cinematography go, It Happened One Night is still terrific.

I followed that up with a very different take on romance, the slasher quasi-classic My Bloody Valentine. My Bloody Valentine is a sturdy, familiar take on the slasher model, featuring a memorable villain in full mining gear, who pickaxes the hell out of a bunch of foolish victims. Look, if the town sheriff says you can’t have a Valentine’s Day party or you’re all going to die, maybe you should just pick a different day for a party.

In spite of largely sticking to the genre’s fundamentals, I appreciated My Bloody Valentine’s efforts to create a richer social dynamic within its main cast, as well as its sense of place. My Bloody Valentine takes place in a quiet, slowly wilting mining town, centering on a crew who’ve likely known each other since elementary school, and will probably know each other until they die. The main character actually attempted to leave this town some time before, and the film begins as his return spikes unrest between him, his former girlfriend, and the mutual friend she’s now dating.

This specificity of character and place gives the film a welcome sense of underlying sadness and fragility; unfortunately, the third act trades character work for cheap surprises, with a series of reveals that frustratingly discredit much of its earlier success. Still, as a pure slasher, My Bloody Valentine hits all the beats you’d hope for, and occasionally gestures towards being something more.

Next up was The Wailing, an epic Korean horror-thriller encompassing occult ritual, possession, plagues, zombies, and even some ghosts thrown in for good measure. Though it’s certainly flush with horrors, The Wailing proceeds more as a meditative, consistently gorgeous exploration of its rural setting, building up a sense of unrest and distrust within a village in much the same way Shiki accomplishes. And with Hong Kyung-pyo (Snowpiercer, Burning, Parasite) attached as cinematographer, the film is able to capture both the beauty and the isolation of this place with incomparable grace, drawing you in with its beautiful images and intricate layouts even as its narrative turns your stomach.

The film’s title is well-chosen – its entire story feels like a slow, grief-stricken exhalation, rising to a hysterical intensity, and fading with no hope of release. In spite of its imposing running time, the combination of its incredible cinematography and diverse array of setpieces kept me enthralled throughout, and the various strands of horror present all mingled together with remarkable grace. I felt the film leaned a bit too heavily on arbitrary mystery rules near the end, but the character arcs all land where they need to, and the end result is characteristically as gutting as it is beautiful. An easy recommendation for any prestige horror fans.

At long last, I also continued my journey through the Miyazaki catalogue, checking out Nausicaa for the first time since I saw it as a teen, maybe fifteen years ago. Having recently watched so many of Miyazaki’s later films, Nausicaa feels like a clumsy yet passionate template in a thousand strange ways.

On the whole, the film feels like a first draft of what Miyazaki would later achieve with Princess Mononoke. The remote village under attack by the overreach of mankind, the protagonist representing a union of the human and natural worlds, the swarms of savage yet noble beasts – heck, there’s even a Lady Eboshi parallel, though as with most of this film’s cast, her role here is a fairly simple caricature.

As a young creator, Miyazaki’s thematic perspective here is transparent and charming, though also pretty simplistic. Nausicaa’s reverence for nature is the Correct Way, and everyone else is wrong, and she solves every problem as soon as she comes across it, and has an intuitive understanding of the cycles of the natural world, and can effortlessly communicate with any animals, and is also the best warrior and scientist and aircraft pilot. In Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki would construct a dialogue between a variety of incompatible yet equally compelling viewpoints – in contrast, Nausicaa feels like a film written by Mononoke’s San, which assumes from the start that San’s way is correct.

Nausicaa is also a rougher visual experience than the formal Ghibli catalog, though its very roughness encompasses some welcome aesthetic variations. While later Miyazaki films would come to possess a fairly consistent geographic and architectural style, Nausicaa is loose and strange, with backgrounds that shift from abstract color arrays to intricate, otherworldly forests. Miyazaki’s love of mechanical design comes through clearly in the film’s intricate ships, and I could have sworn some creatures felt inspired by Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. A creature like the Hideaki Anno-animated God Child would have no place in a later Miyazaki film; only in a production like Nausicaa, with its grotesque insects and haphazard animation direction, could a monster like that feel appropriate.

All in all, I felt Nausicaa was pretty easily the weakest Miyazaki film I’ve seen, but still a fine watch and a fascinating time capsule. It’s always a rewarding feeling to so clearly witness an artist’s development over time.

Finally, I also checked out one more classic that’s been high on my list for months: Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, wherein a man returns from the crusades uncertain of either god’s love or the promise of heaven, and desperate to find the truth before Death takes him. The Seventh Seal is an absolutely gorgeous film, using its contrasts of light and shadow to masterful effect, and emphatically demonstrating the value of black and white photography as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Shot after shot, Bergman constructs beautiful frame-in-frame prisons, capturing his characters behind bars of light, through forest foliage, or between the pillar-like figures of the Knight and his opponent Death.

In spite of its perhaps intimidating reputation as one of the Citizen Kane-esque Great Films, The Seventh Seal is actually a propulsive and even funny watch, while nearly every scene simultaneously works as either a debate on or practical illustration of the nature of mortality. Max von Sydow’s performance as the tormented knight is simultaneously mythic in its affect and range, and painfully relatable in its grounded particulars. The film even works marvelously as a traditional horror movie, reveling in ominous marches through haunted woods, and maintaining a perpetual tone of hunted inevitability. I didn’t expect The Seventh Seal of all things to qualify as breezy entertainment, but the film rewards however much investment you’re willing to put into it, and proceeds with remarkable efficiency throughout. I’ll definitely be returning to this one!