However, I couldn't resist the play on words in the title of this post.
With apologies to the Rolling Stones, Tuesdays are indeed a good day to go deep diving into MUBI, to see what weird and wonderful thing I might be able to uncover. You may recall, I previously considered Tuesday to be the ideal night to watch a new documentary every two weeks, an exercise I did for a full year ending last July.
I eventually felt a bit imprisoned by the regularity of that commitment, breathing a sigh of relief on every alternate Tuesday and then feeling like I had to sit down and figure out which movie I was going to watch on the following one to meet my self-imposed commitment.
So I won't watch a MUBI movie every other Tuesday, or God forbid, every Tuesday. But I do think Tuesday is a good day to periodically sample my new subscription, with no commitment to write about it here.
Since many of the movies on MUBI will not fit my description of relaxing weekend viewing, that pretty much takes out Thursday through Sunday, since I often do consider Thursday night to be weekend adjacent enough to watch something less taxing on my brain. (For example, last night I watched The Forever Purge.)
That leaves Monday through Wednesday for more challenging, cerebral material, and Monday I often still feel like I'm recovering a bit from the weekend. Tuesday and Wednesday both work for MUBI but then with Wednesday you don't get the Rolling Stones reference.
I started this past Tuesday night with a French movie from 2011 called The Red and the Black, or more easy to find on sites like IMDB, La Rouge et La Noir. It was the film of the day about a week ago. In fact I've also seen it as Red & Black. And it's so obscure that the image you see above was the only thing I could get in terms of a proper poster.
This, I tell you, was the full MUBI experience.
I'm currently reading a book where I never really got my bearings in the story and am now just looking at all the words until it's over. It's a 280-page book and I've been reading it since November. I should just stop. Instead, I have a hundred pages to go.
The Red and the Black was like that experience except writ small. Writ very small, as in only 74 minutes.
But what the hell was going on in this movie? I could not really tell you.
Here's what I can tell you:
French director Isabelle Prim presents a variety of images that appear to include documentary footage of a real French camera designer at several periods of his life, scenes of a hybrid cat and dinosaur being rendered by a 3D printer, and POV angles of two thieves trying to steal a camera. The language is not actually French. The two thieves -- never seen, but ultimately revealed as a mother and daughter -- speak a made-up language that is, fortunately, subtitled. There are also shapes on the screen in a kind of old school digital animation.
I really don't know what happened in this movie but I did watch all 74 minutes.
And I can't say there wasn't an odd sort of hypnotizing quality to the experience. I did not hate watching it, not by any stretch. But I never from one moment to the next had a single idea what was going on.
It really did show me what kind of doors have been opened to me now that I'm subscribed to MUBI.
I'll try to get something more coherent my next time around ... which will be on some upcoming Tuesday no doubt.
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