30 Day Movie Meme, Day 4

( Day 1-2 )

Day 03 - A movie that makes you really happy --  For this one, I nominate The Thin Man.  It's pretty hard to stay in a bad mood after a good dose of Nick and Nora Charles, if only because they're so fun.  William Powell and Myrna Loy have oodles of chemistry with each other, and the mystery isn't horrible.  I'm also a sucker for "get all the suspects together and explain everything", because yes, I am an Agatha Christie fan.  The character interactions make me laugh, and the dialogue is always snappy.

Day 04 - A movie that makes you sad -- Now it's time to revisit something from my days at DLI, because there aren't many movies that make me sad and leave me that way.  Plenty of Disney movies have those moments, but generally they have happy endings.  This one doesn't have a happy ending, but that's because it's about Russian history under Stalin.

The movie is Nikita Mikhailov's Burnt by the Sun, a story about 1936 Russia.  It has pretty much everything - moments of drama, comedy, passion, tragedy, Stalinist repression, and the general sense of dread that seems to be in a lot of Russian history.  It also takes a couple go-rounds to really get it, but when we finished it,the class was quiet enough that you could have heard a pin drop in our class.  There's a love triangle, between Mikhailov's Colonel Kotov, his younger wife Marusia, and Mitya (now an NKVD man).  There's a lot of symbolism in the movie, and a lot of confusion, and one brief moment of uplift at the very end, but not enough to lift the depression that comes from knowing these characters were fictional, but that they were based on so many that were not.

Of course, the second runner up for Day 4 is Old Yeller.  I think that one's pretty self-explanatory... 

( 30 Day Movie Meme )