1. So many many years ago, I watched Blue. Weirdly, I remember liking it a lot better than you’d think from that LJ entry. Which: a thing I have noticed is that my long-term judgments are often much more reliable than my immediate ones. Consider what I thought about Stranger than Fiction and A Clockwork Orange, which I saw on the same day. On that day, I lightly preferred Stranger than Fiction. But in retrospect, A Clockwork Orange is absolutely brilliant, and the other movie is absolutely mediocre. So I guess you shouldn’t trust anything I write about movies, since I’m always writing it immediately after I see them? Anyway, before this point got away from me, what I was going to say is that I saw the first movie in this trilogy like five years ago and remember it not at all, so if there are actual connections between the two, they are lost on me, and I’m just assuming there aren’t.

  2. So I’m given to understand that White is widely considered to be the worst of the three movies, to the point that Slate recently had an article talking about how it’s underappreciated (never change, Slate!).

  3. If there is one thing that immediately marks a movie as twencen, it is the lack of cell phones. If there are two things, it’s the lack of cell phones and the ridiculously lax airport security (they don’t even X-ray luggage?!?).

  4. For whatever reason, I really like Julie Delpy. Probably from watching those Before Sunset/rise movies. But even though she’s a horrible character in this movie, I still like her.

  5. So the actual plot of this thing is a kind of revenge story, and from beginning to end, it involves horrible people doing horrible things to other people. This is precisely the sort of character and plot I hate, and if this had been an American movie set in Baltimore starring Al Pacino or whatever, I would have loathed it. BUT there’s something about the foreign-ness of foreign movies that makes it different. When you have to read subtitles to understand what people are saying, and when they’re saying it in Paris and Warsaw, it feels different – less sleazy and more “making a point about humanity” or whatever.

  6. Or maybe it’s just a style thing, where anyone making mannered, heavily styled movies gets a pass from me. Because really, Tarantino is doing similar revenge-movie stuff a lot of the times, and yet Kill Bill doesn’t trip my sleaze wire. Anyway, yeah, this is a very stylized movie, the photography on the Blu-ray is just gorgeous in a lot of places, with the subtlety and tonality of the low-contrast shots (it is, shockingly, a very white movie). Anyway, this isn’t my favorite movie of all time, but I did enjoy it.

  7. Enough to watch Red and finish up the trilogy. I don’t have nearly as much to say about this one; there wasn’t a lot of plot, but it was pretty good.