1950: I Confess

Visually more refined than most of Hitchcock's earlier work I've seen, this movie - another take on the innocent-man-under-suspicion theme - suffers from a complete lack of suspense or surprises. (5.5)

1966: Persona

Ingmar Bergman's film about two women in a country house, one of them talking, the other shutting up, probably looked modern and daring in 1966; in 2010 it's dated and pretentious, more like. At least no one's playing chess with Death. It does have strong bits, but I found my mind wandering. (4.5)

1956: The Searchers

Two men go to search for a woman abducted by Indians, shooting quite a few of them, as well as a few Nonindians, in the process. I'm not someone who thinks all people must share his taste, but even leaving aside all moral issues (discussed by Roger Ebert with a lot of sympathy for Ford, Wayne and the film), it is still a bit of a mystery why this movie should be considered one of the very great works of cinema. Ebert mentions some shots he finds beautiful, making the film sound like an American Lawrence of Arabia, but I don't see it. The Searchers is unusually good in no department and generally seems to be aimed not so much at children, but at simpletons. (That's 5 points on purely aesthetic grounds.)

1933: Duck Soup

Not nearly as good as A Night at the Opeara. (6.5)

1932: Vampyr

Though the recency of the sound film invention still shows in this 1932 sort-of-horror film, it manages to create a somewhat Lost-Highwayesque dreamy athmosphere and is much more convincing as an aesthetic exercise than the similarly-themed 1922 Nosferatu or 1931 Dracula, both of which are nothing but unintentionally funny today. (7)

1953: Stage Fright

This Alfred Hitchcock film, featuring his usual tropes, benefits from a tightly-written script and uses Marlene Dietrich to full effect, but indeed suffers from the famous construction error later acknowledged by Hitchcock. (6.5)

1983: Brainstorm

Ah, science fiction - it doesn't age well. This flick revolves around an invention by which people's expriences can be recorded on magnetic tape. On magnetic tape! This anachronism goes well with the general trashy early '80s look of the film, which is somewhat surprising coming from director Douglas Trumbull, the man responsible for the special effects of 2001 and Blade Runner. One character has a space-themed vision towards the end, and it doesn't look like the star gate sequence at all. As for the plot, well, there's the military getting interested, etc.

I can't say I recommend it, but I certainly liked it. (7)

1963: Shock Corridor

Anticipating David Rosenhan, a journalist, hungry for the Pulizer Prize, fakes insanity to be admitted to a mental hospital and find out who killed one of the patients in a case that remains unsolved by the police. A nice idea for a film, but it's given the trashy treatment here. Neat rain effect towards the end, though. (5.5)

1959: Anatomy of a Murder

A nice enough courtroom drama - a bit like magazines, this is a format I'm generally fond of, but there are hardly any outstanding specimen - but isn't there supposed to be some twist at the end? Well, maybe this wasn't the case in 1959. (7)

1944: Laura

There's little to say about this conventional 1940's murder mystery, which is competently done but not very exciting. On the superficial front, Gene Tierney's hair is always impeccable and Dana Andrew's jackets are always too large. (6)

1978: The Deer Hunter

This is probably the best-known film I was going to see but hadn't yet, but even so I learned I knew very little about it: Though I was aware that the film started in the soldiers-to-be "real" lives in the US (which is a nice touch) I was surprised to learn it takes almost an hour before we get to Vietnam (which is too long, given that the "American opening" isn't all that interesting). This is the best section of the film, featuring a really gripping Russian roulette scene, but then, after another forty minutes it's back to the USA and then back to Vietnam and back to the US again.

During this whole in-out, accompanied by the kind of sensitive problem music Liberace might have come up with, we learn that the Robert de Niro character was really into shooting deer before he went to Vietnam but when he comes back, he refrains from doing so. This is meant to convey either that he has learned violence is no fun or that the Vietcong have antlers; I'm not sure which.

In the end they all sing "God Bless America". Amen to that: Let's hope that in the future America gives its Oscars to better films. (5.5)

1957: Sweet Smell of Success

How's that for a setup: One man - a press agent - is constantly being humiliated and commanded around by a second man - an influential, and hence powerful, columnist - but you can't really feel for the first man because he is just as big a slimebag as the other one. Between the two of them, they try to break up the relationship between the columnist's sister and a jazz guitarrist, a client of the agent in this excellently constructed and fast-moving drama, which is notable for its razor-sharp dialogue. (7.5)

The Greatest Films 2000-2009, #6: Cidade de Deus (City of God) (2002)

Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund; written by Bráulio Mantovani, based on a novel by Paulo Lins; cinematography by César Charlone
130 mins.; 1.85:1; colour; language: Portugese
At Wikipedia, IMDb (8.8), Metacritic (79)

Starting in the mid-1990s, world cinema has seen a series of films that achieve a thoroughly pop feel by employing techniques quite possibly inspired by music videos: A high frequency of cuts, hyperrealsitic colouring, quick camera movements and extensive, expressive use of pop music, to name but the most obvious elements. This school of directing has produced excellent pictures such as Requiem for a Dream, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Romeo+Juliet, but the textbook specimen - in the sense of most clearly exemplifying the style we're talking about - must be City of God.

Much in line with another trend in recent years, City of God is episodic, telling a number of related anecdotes. But this film, unlike Magnolia or Amores Perros, has a narrator as its center of gravity, our hero Buscapé, who lives in Rio de Janeiro's government-constructed slums the film's title refers to, where crime isn't a disruption of the normal course of life, but rather the normal course of life itself. Though that's where he lives, Buscapé himself quite clearly isn't cut out for crime, which makes him an insider-outsider and hence the ideal narrator for the film. And so we learn about drugs, revenge and the ever-prevailing need for honour and respect that fuels so much violence. While our hero finds - modest - success in the face of adversity, the narrative makes it quite clear that there is no development for the better in the City of God - nor for the worse, for that matter, things will just stay as fucked up as they have always been.

If that sounds like depressing viewing, it's not. The movie has been compared to Scorsese's Gangs of New York for the subject matter and Goodfellas for style, but it is more akin to the film that had a large hand in starting the wave of pop looking films, Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. As Trainspotting makes great entertainment out of heroin addiction, City of God allows you a look at the grimness of Brazilian slum life while keeping it a lot of fun. It's verging on the immoral, really.

1964: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

From the first minute, the unnamed Clint Eastwood character in Sergio Leone's first famous film is presented as supercool - cool meaning that you don't blink an eye while you're shooting people. I don't mean to critique this on moral grounds or offer a general discussion of gender roles: I find this kind of thing a bad choice on aesthetic grounds. (I think it's uncool to try to appeal to twelve-year-old boys of any age's idea of coolness.)

Once I got over this, however (which took about twenty minutes), I started to really enjoy this film which moves slowly and presents a series of excellent visuals - Wikipedia likens Leone's close-ups to Renaissance paintings, and they have a point. Shame these scenes have been parodied to death. (7)

1950: All about Eve

As soon as a theatre star (Bette Davis) and her best friend (Celeste Holm) take a seemingly fawning fan (Anne Baxter) under their wing, the scheming and bitching and general meanness - what psychologists call relational aggression - begins in true female fashion. Indeed I was surprised that the screenplay had been written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz - after all, men would never say such nasty things about women - until I found out it was based on a short story by one Mary Orr.

It's a bit like a war movie, really: Quite entertaining as long as you don't have to be part of it. (7)

1945: And Then There Were None

Director René Clair decided to cut out any nonsense and instead concentrate on the story, which, if you have managed to forget all the details (as I had), is good enough to carry the movie. (7)

1997: Hana-bi (a.k.a. Fireworks)

Nishi, a policeman, has a dying wife, one partner dead and one in the wheelchair. He also has debts with the Yakuza and a taste for violence. But the plot isn't really important in this sparse Japanese film which puts most violence off-screen and works mostly through the interplay between Joe Hisaishi's brilliant score - the theme repeated in different versions, really -, the monochrome pictures and main actor Beat Takeshi's stoic one-note performance. In the last third the slow pacing is taken a little too far for my taste. (7)

1973: Badlands

Charlie Kaufman is right to criticize (in Adaptation) the advice sometimes given by screenwriting teachers to never use voiceover, but when watching Badlands, you can see where those people are coming from: It's 8th-grader-prose voiceover almost all of the time, to the extent that I kept wondering why they bothered to shoot any pictures at all - but then, the truly magnificent visuals are the one great redeeming quality of Terrence Malicks otherwise pointless boy-meets-girl-and-they-go-on-a-killing-spree story. (6)

2004: Sideways (Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #9)

The film about two middle-aged buddies who go on a trip to the Santa Barbara wine country before one of them gets married only to predictably become involved with two local ladies is well written, well photographed, well acted and succeeds all around in what it's trying to do: to provide an entertaining, easily digested film for people with brains, the kind of moviegoers who fancy neither the usual blockbusters aimed at their children nor the Masterpieces of Finnish Existentialism currently playing at the local arthouse. (7.5)

1976: Halloween

It's set on the kind of America I think I have seen on the screen once or twice before: Everyone lives in the generic suburb, the boys play football, the girls are cheerleaders. The story: A dangerous madman escapes from an institution and proceeds to kill people in the suburb. That's it. No plot twists, no nothing. Great cinematography, but apart from that it's a bore, and I don't think that's because it has served as a template for so many films that came later. Oh, and, as usual, director John Carpenter wouldn't let anyone else compose the music. Bernard Herrman he is not. (5)

2002: 24 Hour Party People

The story told of the Manchester music scene (with particular emphasis on Joy Division and the Happy Mondays) told as the biography of Tony Wilson, founder of both Factory records and The Haçienda. The film constantly violates the rules of traditional storytelling - such as Wilson turning to the camera to point out that some people insist the events just depicted never have happened - so you can call this postmodern if you like, but it is certainly an easily digested and fun ride through the years with a somewhat weird yet likable host and a visual style befitting the topic. (7.5)

1934: Fétiche (The Mascot)

To simplfy the dream-in-a-dream-in-a-dream-type of plot greatly, a toy dog ventures into a world inhabited by lots of strange creatures, only for a fight to break out over the orange that he brought. The reasonably charming 26-minute movie which combines stop-motion with a little conventionally shot film (6.5) was made by one Ladislas Starewicz, who, if Wikipedia is to be believed, was inspired to do stop-motion because as the

director of a museum of natural history in Kaunas [...] he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on.

Opportunity knocks!

1944: Ivan Groznyy (Ivan the Terrible), Part I

Featuring great frames but suffering from overly expressive acting, Eisenstein's picture about the first Russian Czar looks like what it is: a talkie by a silent film director. There are also major issues with the screenplay: the lack of any narrative arc to speak of and, relatedly, a lack of characterization. There is a common view about film and narratives more generally that you need a likable character you'd like to identify with, but great films like A Clockwork Orange or Goodfellas do fine without one. What you really need is an interesting character you get to know. But we never get to know Ivan. Why does he choose to alienate powerful cliques left and right once he's made Czar? We never learn. Why does he start another war? It's a mystery.

All in all, although Eisenstein overdoes the shadowplay at times, worth a look for the visuals. (6)

Wish Fulfillment

In my short review of Caché, I opined that the film is based on

a good premise [...], the story has some nice twists and it's good to see this not develop into a Hollywood-style redemption movie, but the screenwriter Haneke decides to piss the story's potential up the wall in favour of artsy cleverness and the director Haneke, it appears, does not realize that film is a visual medium [...]. Badly in need of a remake. Even if it features Bruce Willis.

Now Roger Ebert mentions that "Martin Scorsese has optioned it for an American version." It seems, though, that it's going to be DiCaprio instead of Willis.

2002: The Pianist (Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #8)

Yes, it deals with grave matters, but let's not fall victim to the pro-problem bias in movie ratings, but instead point out that this film, which is decent overall, suffers from decorative cinematography, grave structural problems (after a good beginning) coupled with the fact that it's hard to make a good film about someone who is on is own (has it ever been done?) and Adrien Brody's eyebrows. (6)

1989: Crimes and Misdemeanours

It's about an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker shooting a film about his successful filmmaker brother-in-law and a doctor whose lover won't let him go, but what it really is is another Woody Allen picture. I haven't seen all of them, but compared to most I know, this one suffers from poor cinematography (1989!) and a general disregard for the visual side of things. (6.5) That's regrettable from the man who gave us Manhattan, and I'm not just saying that because that one's in black and white.

The Greatest Films of the Noughties, #7: The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Directed by Sofia Coppola; written by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides; cinematography by Edward Lachman
97 mins.; 1.85:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (7.2), Metacritic (76)


A group of men remember the events that transformed their lives forever, and not for the better: Back in their youths, in a 1970s US suburb, there were five unattainable girls, and they killed themselves.

The film starts with a suicide attempt by the youngest one, Celia, and once she succeeds, the girls' parents isolate their daughters even more than they had before. Later, after the girls have broken a curfew, they'll take them out of school. The unattainability, of course, only heightens the boys' fascination with them. And that's what the film is about: Despite the film's title (identical to that of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel it's based on), the film is not so much about the five sisters but about the boys' fascination with them, or, to be more precise: their memories of their fascination with them. "Some readers (in my experience they were mostly women) were frustrated with Eugenides' book for the way it fixated on the men's view of the women instead of the women themselves," writes Stephanie Zacharek. The film does not change this focus. Complaining about it is a little like complaining that Einstein made no contributions to the theory of evolution. The 95% of the film that are set in the 1970s should be seen not as a depiction of reality, I think, but rather as a depiction of rememberance.

That interpretation is certainly fueled by the film's atmosphere: Drenched in pastel and accompanied by the ambient music of brilliantly chosen collaborators Air, the movie's positively dream-like, seeming at times to be set underwater. I've seen a thousand pictures set in American suburbs, but none of them made them look like a world apart. This one does.

In the film's most impressive sequence, we learn that one of the young men finally attains what he desires, and that it fucks up his life forever. Take heed, o young ones!

2003: Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) (Best of the Noghties Lists and Suggestions #7)

Two boys meet their father for the first time for years after he has been away without explanation. When he takes them on a fishing trip, and his sons and the audience wonder about his past, it quickly turns out he's not your modern "let's discuss why you and I disagree" type of dad. Photographed with a heavy emphasis on the green-grey part of the colour spectrum, the film confirms westerners stereotypes of Russia as beautifully bleak. Though not too slow, this movie is not for you if you like yours moving at a breakneck pace, and it's not your Saturday night feelgood film either. Maybe most remindful of Jarmush's Dead Man, but set in contemporary Russia, shot in colour, and better. (7)

1973: Amarcord

For his memories of a small town in pre-war fascist Italy, Fellini didn't bother to come up with a plot, instead presenting a series of vignettes. Very well photographed by Guiseppe Rotunno, the film, though entertaining, ultimately suffers from the internal contradiction of trying to make a grotesque and a poetic picture at the same time. (7)

1946: A Matter of Life and Death (a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven)

From a burning airplane, and thinking he is about to die, a British World War II pilot gets in touch with an England-based American radio operator and the two fall in love during a few minutes of conversation. As it turns out, he survives and, naturally, meets the woman right away, so they can fall into each other's arms. Meanwhile in heaven, they're missing a scheduled new arrival. Yes, this Powell-Pressburger classic has a totally bizarre setup, but once you've managed to switch off your higher reasoning faculties, it's possible to appreciate it as a nice-in-a-stupid-way-for-a-rainiy-Sunday-afternoon-way film, in particular for its rather decorative Technicolor (though the technology isn't used nearly as effectively as in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes). Unfortunately, it contains a twenty-minute segment about how great it is to be British towards the end. Might make a nice UK Technicolor Trash double feature with Peeping Tom. (5.5)

2007: Zodiac (Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions #6)

Zodiac is a film about the real serial killer of the same nickname and, like most of those films, it has someone else at its center. In this case it's Paul Avery, a cartoonist whose newspaper receives mail from the killer. Not unlike Spike Lee's Summer of Sam (but better), the first 90 minutes or so of this 160 minutes film chronicle the mood in the San Francisco area where the killer plies his trade, while Avery tries to find out who the killer is. And then - the murders just stop. The rest of the film is concerned with Avery's attempt to prove his guesses about the identity of the killer were right - a kind of man on a mission to make a point story.

So, it's basically two films. That worked very well for Vertigo, arguably less well for Psycho, and it doesn't work here at all. Which is a shame: Use of music, acting and, first and foremost, the production design are excellent. One just wishes the parties responsible had had a better story to work with. (6.5)

2006: Little Miss Sunshine

Steve Sailer is probably right that the movie about a family who go on a road trip so that the daughter Olivia can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine contest was such a surprise success because it showed people, and maybe mums in particular, that other families are just as crazy as yours, or maybe more so. It's quick-moving, easy to watch and amusing, too, although for my taste it was a little too mainstream, especially the ending. (6) From a social science standpoint, I wonder why not more movies like this one get released - after all, they're cheap to make! According to Wikipedia, Sunshine cost 8 million (presumably not including marketing and related costs) and earned 100 million (presumably before profits from DVD and TV rights). Even if your average film in this vein is a third that successful, that's still a handsome return.

The Best Films of the 2000s, #8: The Pledge (2001)

Directed by Sean Penn; written by Jerzy Kromolowski, based on a book by Friedrich Dürrenmatt; cinematography by Chris Menges
124 mins.; 2.35:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (6.9), Metacritic (71)


Jerry Black, a homicide detective is about to retire as the mutilated body of a young girl is found. He is the one who tells the dead girls parents the bad news and her mother makes him swear to find the killer. Soon a suspect is arrested, a mentally retarded man who sort of admits to the murder before killing himself. Jerry doesn't believe the dead man was the killer, but is told in decreasingly uncertain terms that he is now retired and the case is closed. He (a) lets it go and spends the rest of his days gardening or (b) can't forget the pledge he made and tries to find the real killer? Come on, make a guess!

The film's plot has a somewhat winding history: The screenplay for the 1958 German mystery Es geschah am hellichten Tag (recommended!) was written by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. However, he thought that the story was too obedient to the conventions of the genre and reworked it into a novella with the telling title Das Versprechen: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman, adequately translated into English as The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel. Which is the source for this film.

It's a bit hard to explain why this film is great. For one, it doesn't have any weaknesses one might point out, which you can't say about most films. It also has the finest Jack Nicholson performance I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few. But maybe the key lies in the trailer?



Like no other trailer before it, the clip tries to make it look (and sound!) as though the film becomes all fast and shocking and dramatic towards the end. I think even if you haven't seen the film but look at the trailer really closely, you can see it's a pretty desperate effort: He's taking a gun! He's talking to someone! The truth is that the ending of the film isn't like that at all. Slowly and painfully it grinds to an end. In that it is violating the rules of its genre more clearly than Dürrenmatt's novella ever did.

That may still not make it sound like a great movie, but that's the best I can come up with. Alternatively, maybe all the people who thought it was so-so are right. But I doubt it.

2003: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions #5)

There's too much fighting in this film. Why can't these people just get along? (5.5)

2007: Michael Clayton

Micheal Clayton, a man with a gambling problem, works for a law firm as the trouble shooter - he's the guy they send if you're a CEO and got caught shoplifting. His company works for a multinational that's under fire because its products, it seems, cause cancer. Things start to heat up during the four days covered by this film which, on the one hand, is just another bad big business flick, but on the other it produces an impressive athmosphere of coldness - mainly by means of cinematography (Robert Elswit) and music (James Newton Howard). In that sense you could say it's the 2004 Crash's little brother. (7.5)

2009: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Terry Gilliam's film about an old carnie who made a deal with the devil suffers a little from banana-peel type humour and underuses the plot device of the imaginarium, a world created by the imagination of the person inside - when a posh elder lady enters the imaginarium, we see shoes, shoes, shoes, ha, ha, ha. Even so, it's nice enough while it lasts, but entirely forgettable. (6)

Film Links #2

1. Neven Sesardic: "Gattaca", from The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Cinema (pdf)

2. The best and worst movie posters of 2009? (Pointer)

3. Avatar: Pocahontas in space? You can see the same idea elsewhere on the web, but this execution seems to make the point quite succinctly.

1942: To Be Or Not To Be

The famous comedy about a troupe of actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw is cleverly constructed, well-paced and generally charming, but after all, it's nothing but a comedy, so I really don't see the need to put it on par with the likes of A Clockwork Orange and Once upon a Time in the West. (7.5)

The New TSPDT 1000 Is out

The latest version of They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s list of the 1000 most critically acclaimed films is out. Here's the introduction, here's the full list.

Most welcome addition: Requiem for a Dream (#804)

Most regrettable addition: Million Dollar Baby (#937)

Most welcome omission: Happiness (formerly #825)

Most regrettable omission: Arsenic and Old Lace (formerly #868)

1948: The Red Shoes

As young ballet dancer Vicky makes a brilliant carreer for herself, she attracts the interest of both ballet company director Lermontov and composer Julian. Conflict ahead! - Really, the melodramatic story of this film isn't much to speak of; the movie thrives, however, on the cinematography by Jack Cardiff, using three-strip technicolor and making this one of the best-looking colour films in the history of cinema. (If you don't want to take my word for it, take Martin Scorcese's word for it.) And the dance scene in the middle belongs in the museum of great movie sequences. I'm saying that as someone who usually has no time whatsoever for ballet. (8)

The Greatest Films of the Noughties, #9: Ocean's Eleven

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Ted Griffin, based on a screenplay by Harry Brown and Charles Lederer; cinematography by Steven Soderbergh
116 mins.; 2.35:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (7.6), Metacritic (74)


As suggested by the distribution of Metacritic and IMDb scores, there seems to be some general agreement that this is a good-but-not-great movie, nothing but director Steve Soderbergh clearing his throat before producing another one of his Great Masterpieces of American Cinema. Fuck it, I say. Give me this over Solaris or The Good German any day.

The setup is simple enough: Just out of prison, Daniel Ocean (Clooney) seeks out his old chum Rusty Ryan (Pitt) to suggest they rob what is repeatedly described as the world's safest vault, one holding cash for three Las Vegas casinos. As coincidences go, they are owned by the man who is now with Ocean's ex-wife Tess (Roberts), Terry Benedict (Garcia) - the latter exhibiting a hefty dose of arrogance and the mediterranean looks that pale Englishmen, distgust written all over their faces, sometimes describe as "Italian waiter". ("He is good-looking in a gloriously smarmy, Italian-waiter fashion," wrote a Times journalist when trying to explain why he and fellow English football fans dislike Cristiano Ronaldo.)

And so the fun begins. The film goes through all the standard elements of heist movies, driven forward by a tight screenplay and a score that is truly in the service of the picture (David Holmes). It also capitalizes on the screeen presences and comedy talents of the leading men Clooney and Pitt, with the likes of Matt Damon and Don Cheadle serving as glorified extras. At times it comes across as a toned-down screwball comedy: Roger Ebert recalls "the conversation involving Clooney, Roberts and Garcia, when the casino boss finds the ex-husband at Tess' table in the dining room. The two men of course despise one another, but are so smooth and cool we note it only in the precision of their timing and word choices, leading up to a final exchange in which Danny, leaving the table, says 'Terry' in a way that uses the first name with inappropriate familiarity, and Terry responds 'Danny' on precisely the same note." But the film's most prominent feature is certainly its lushness, almost every frame packed with bling, blong and blang. You can see Ocean's Eleven as a kind of anti-Reservoir Dogs, and the two would make a great double feature.

The film really made me appreciate the arts of screenwriting and directing. Director-cinematographer Soderbergh composes every frame meticulously, and the screenplay by Ted Griffin suggests to the first-time viewer she knows exactly what is going on, only to reveal at the end that she's been led astray - and I'm not talking about someone waking up and realizing it was only a dream.

It's easy enough to miss that when you see it for the first time. It's just too much fun.

Trailer:

1936: My Man Godfrey

Though shot (or preserved?) in the grainy grey typical for 1930s films and suffering from having a social message, this screwball comedy about a rich daughter hiring a homeless man to work as a butler for her excentric family is reasonably entertaining, not least because it's occasionally funny. (6.5)

1984: This Is Spinal Tap

I found the fake documentary about a British hard rock band on tour in the USA not nearly as funny as I expected due to its fame, in part, I guess, because I am not a fan of the school of humour that makes fun of people's stupidity. Even more surprising: Everybody knows about the amps that go to eleven, but in the movie it's but a sidenote. Very decent diversion (6.5).

2007: There Will Be Blood (Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #4)

Paul Thomas Anderson made Magnolia and Boogie Nights, two of the great movies of the 1990s, as well as the not-quite-as-good-but-severely-underrated/criminally overlooked Punch-Drunk Love. There Will Be Blood is his shot at teaching Orson Welles a thing or two concerning films about American magnates. On the upside, we have Robert Elswit's beautiful cinematography, some memorable dialogue-driven scenes and a very good performance from Paul Dano as the fanatic preacher Eli Sunday (admittedly the kind of role that makes it easy for a good actor to shine). On the downside, however, the film is too slow in a way that, say, 2001 or Once upon a Time in America aren't, and the fifteen-year break in the narrative about two hours into the 150-minutes-film is a simple flaw rather than some bold artistic scoop. Most importantly, however, we never really get to know the film's main character's character. To paraphrase Steve Sailer's view: It is obvious that There Will Be Blood is made by a superior filmmaker. But. (7/10)

1934: The Thin Man

As you might expect from something based on a Dashiel Hammett novel, this mystery-comedy is confusing at times, but the point of the movie isn't the plot anyway, but the display of wittiness in general and the back-and-forth between William Powell and Myrna Loy in particular. Which is decently done, but Bringing up Baby this is not. (6)

The Greatest Films of the 2000s, #10: Intimacy (2001)

Directed by Patrice Chéreau; written by Anne-Louise Trividic and Patrice Chéreau, based on stories by Hanif Kureishi; cinematography by Eric Gautier
119 mins.; 2.35:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (6.3), Metacritic (69)

Imagine a world in which films didn't show people eating. You could show them talking about eating or trying to get food, you could show them getting ready for eating or munching after they'd bitten off a piece, but never, ever, were you allowed to show food entering the mouth. (If you wanted to show people while in the act of eating, you'd have to show them from behind or only shoot them from the neck down.) Sure, there'd be specialised eating pictures, but not only would those be strictly for adults, but they'd never been shown in regular cinemas. Many would point out that these pictures are only for you if you find watching people eating interesting because in terms of witty dialogue, gripping plot developments or interesting camera work they'd have next to nothing on offer. As far as characterization is concerned, well, everybody in those movies would really be into eating, all of the time.

That, of course, is what we have today with regards to sex. So when director Patrice Chéreau decided to include in Intimacy about four seconds' worth of shots of an erect penis, in one case entering a woman's mouth, it was a talking point at least in this country, giving the film free extra PR (not that that helped an awful lot).

But the way the film shows sexuality does not come across as a PR stunt at all. The sex scenes, which are far from erotic, fit seamlessly into the aesthetics of the film, which just seems to passively observe. It's natural that we'll see an erection here and there as sex is at the centre of the story: Jay and Claire meet each Wednesday in Jay's rundown London apartement - a shithole, really - and fuck. When they're done, she leaves. They keep conversation to a minimum. They don't know each other's names. But Jay gets curious and follows Claire after she leaves. This leads him into the basement of a pub where Claire and her amateur troupe perform The Glass Menagerie. Back upstairs, Jay strikes up a conversation with Andy, a pub regular. If Jay were played by Michael Douglas, you could see where this is going, but he's not.

The seemingly detached was the scenes are filmed goes along with a script that doesn't explain an awful lot. How did Jay and Claire meet? We never learn. We get a few flashbacks into Jay's past, but they're not particularly helpful, only showing us he used to be happier. This is the kind of thing that drives critics into creativity: Roger Ebert develops a theory on why Jay hates women, but, unless I've missed something, it is never established that he does. Edward Guthman informs us: "'Intimacy' tells the story of two people wishing to escape themselves and the burden of their memories through the purge of sex." Maybe.

And that's where the film leaves you: Without any answers, on the most anonymous, loveless London streets I've ever seen depicted in a film. And by that I don't mean it was shot in Tottenham.

***

The trailer, being a trailer, makes it look a little too dramatic:


#9, due on Wednesday, will be a star-studded, feelgood blockbuster. Promise!

Films Not Finished: Best of the Noughties Lists and Suggestions #3

Donnie Darko, Into the Wild, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, Serenity, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Yi Yi

The Best Films of the Noughties: Intro

Everybody has a "best films of the noughties" list and they all suck.

So here comes mine. Earlier this year, I asked readers of the other blog to provide me with the titles of movies which ought to be considered for a best of the noughties list - thanks for responses! Having excluded films actually from the 90s, those I had already seen, those I knew I did not wat to see and documentaries and after adding the movies from this incarnation of the IMDb 2000-2009 Top 15 and the few 2000s films that made it onto the TSPTD list of the 1000 most acclaimed pictures in history I didn't know, as well as a few other titles I thought might make my top ten, I came up with a list of 29 films to consider. Of those I started 26 and finished 20. None of them actually made the list.

I have already reviewed two of those (Where the Wild Things are and Avatar) and will post reviews of the remaining 22 (preceded by an enumeration of the films I didn't finish) throughout the coming weeks. I'll post reviews of the actual top ten one at a time on Sundays and Wednesdays, starting tonight.

For the purposes of this list, a film is from the 2000s if it was generally released in theatres anywhere in the world for the first time in one of the years in question - festivals don't count (hence #7 counts as a 2000 movie). We're talking about fictional films of at least 45 mins. length. New versions of older films don't qualify - no Apocalypse Now Redux (which otherwise would certainly have made the list).

When I call this a list of the best or the greatest films of the decade it should be understood that we're talking about (a) the best of the subset of films I actually saw (b) according to my own personal taste - it emphatically is not a list of the most important or innovative, let alone the most popular or best-reviewed films.

Follow using the Best of the Noughties and the Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions tags.

1971: Klute

The thriller about a private investigator and a hooker that's being threatened has a number of frames with great early 1970s looks in it, but also long stretches of unmotivated, fuzzy-looking darkness and suffers from slowness and, what's worse, characters it's hard to care about. (5.5)

1978: The Fury

Not the sequel to The Sound, hahaha!, but a Brian De Palma thriller combining the topics of secret government agencies and extraordinary psychic powers, culled, it seems from a million B-movies. The acting's o.k. and the movie's not too impressive visually, but it still manages to entertain: A tight script goes a long way! (7)

1961: The Innocents

It is set in a 19th-century English country house and it's a good old-fashioned ghost story, complete with moving curtains and a little girl humming an eerie tune. Excellently filmed in clear black and white by Freddie Francis, the movie's a thoroughly stylish experience. Early on, The Innocents reminded me of the 2001 The Others with Nicole Kidman and I suspected that the latter was a a remake of the former. More accurately, they're both based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Both films are about equally good. (7)

And while we're at it: The job interview scene early in the film with its oh, there's another thing I feel I must tell you bit is strongly remindful of The Shining. Did Kubrick and his coauthor Diane Johnson take that trick from The Innocents? Or was it in Stephen King's book? And if so, did he get it from James? It seems I have a bit of reading to do.

Film Links #1

1. Why shoot a gun with a side grip? Because they do it in the movies!

2. An aggregation of "best of the noughties" movie lists at Slate (pointer: TSPTD, which links to many more lists than Slate used and will publish its own aggregation later this month) and a similar list at Metacritic

3. From Wikipedia: A list of films which are in the public domain in the USA

4. A seventy-minute explanation of what's wrong with The Phantom Menace. Tyler Cowen recommends it despite moments in poor taste, and I agree.

2009: Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze's film about the mildly unruly boy Max's adventures in a land of benevolent monsters manages some moments of beauty and is otherwise professionally done (although Jonze should have cut down on the shaky camera in my view), but my enjoyment of the film was marred by observing how right down to the last stain on Max's face the product was painstakingly geared towards the target audience - not young boys, mind you, but the kinds of parents that don't allow plastic toys in their homes and will no doubt reach the conclusion that this is the kind of film young boys ought to like. The boys themselves, one imagines, would rather watch Transformers 2. (6)

2009: Avatar (in 3-D)

The main thing most people are going to watch this for is the new 3-D technology and this works really well. I didn't find it as impressive as I thought I would (presumably because I've seen a lot of 3-D in the real world), but it looks realistic and is quite a bit of fun to behold.

Apart from that it is really not a good movie. Early on, we learn that the humans/Americans (often the same thing in this kind of movies) are on that planet because there's a precious resource to harvest (some stone). If in the process of getting it you have to kill some of the natives, so be it. But throwing bombs on their heads is maybe not the most clever way of making the natives voluntarily letting us harvest their planet, someone opines. Hmm, is it just me or is the screenwriter trying to make a comment on recent US foreign policy? (In general, the dialogues all sound like they were written by a fourteen-year-old boy, which may or may not be a deliberate choice by Cameron.)

The natives, however, aren't all that much like Afghans. Burqas? No, sir! Just think of the first five clichés that come to mind when I say "noble savage" and you know everything about them. They are so in touch with nature that while an animal the throat of which they've just slashed is bleeding to death, they inform it that its life-energy will be preserved. They keep a straight face, too. And their trees? They're not just trees; under the surface, all of their roots are interconnected and the memories of dead natives are stored there. (Regrettably, this is not referred to as the greenternet.) Cameron has really taken this whole Gaia idea in. And he lets it out!

But at least he has taken something in from the nonscreen world. A rare case. Almost all of the scenes seem second-hand. She at first wants to kill him and is furious when she is ordered to spend time with him. Hmmm, wonder whether they'll end up together? Like that. All of the time.

The screenplay also has structural problems, or, to put it differently, it doesn't have a single twist in it - you can predict the way the story will go after about ten minutes. Come to think of it, I thought that there would be a twist (concerning one specific character) that did not happen. On the other hand, between the two of us Heidi and I exactly predicted what would happen to the Sigourney Weaver character.

But let's not be picky about such things: Where the movie's really got to shine is the visuals. Well, I already mentioned the 3-D and the film's got some really nice shots of valleys, etc. But: The natives (and hence the avatars, which or who are designed to resemble them) look crap. So do the sort-of-horses. So do the sort-of-dinosaurs. In fact, every nonhuman animal in this film looks shite. (The plants look o.k.) What's worse: The film is basically set in two places; the military base and the forests. The military base is shot is shot in grey and blue. The forest is shot in green and blue. After half an hour I found myself longing for red, yellow and brown. And it's a long film.

I'm giving the movie 5/10 because the 3-D thing, as I may have mentioned, works really well. I strongly advise you, however, to see it in 2-D, irrespective of the size of the screen.

1961: L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)

Alain Resnais' follow-up to the magnificent Hiroshima mon amour is set in a castle now functioning as a hotel: a man is telling a woman about what they did when they met last year, while she keeps telling him she doesn't remember. Situated on the line between conventional narrative cinema and the pure surrealism of films like L'age d'or and possibly the best-photographed b/w film I've ever seen, the picture seems to be aimed not so much at being understood intellectually as at putting the audience in a trance-like state. Alternatively, you might dismiss it as pretentious artsy-fartsy crap (AFM 5!).

Is it going too far to say that in his less accessible films David Lynch did nothing but take Marienbad, add violence and put American pop culture references where Resnais' film uses European high culture? Yes, probably. (8.5)

(How to win the game in the film explained in German and French)

2007: 4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)

Otilia (major screen presence Anamaria Marinca) helps her friend Găbiţa get an abortion - which in communist Romania is illegal. Yes, it's the feelgood film of the noughties, and you can trust writer-director Christian Mungiu to milk the setup for all its dramatic potential. Truly gripping, although I think that a Metacritic score of 97 may be taking things a bit far. (8)

1931: City Lights

Despite an overreliance on "mix-up" jokes (bars of soap instead of pieces of cheese ending up on sandwitches - that kind of thing), Chaplin's last properly silent film, the one with the flower girl and the boxing ballet, manages to entertain throughout - though it is by no means laugh-out-loud funny. Clearly better than Goldrush. (7)

Why David Lynch Turned Down Return of the Jedi

1963: Charade

When Audrey Hepburn's husband dies, a lot of men think she has a quarter of a million dollars the man's left behind - and try to get it despite her assurance that she doesn't know what they're on about. - Set in Hollywood's version of Paris and also featuring Cary Grant, this was just the charming little crime comedy that I expected it to be. Not exactly The Ladykillers, but a good pick for a rainy Sunday (or cold New Year's Day). (7)

(This film is in the Public Domain. Free and legal download or streaming video at the Internet Archive.)

2003: Elephant

Do US high schools really look that good? I've never been to one, but if movies are anything to go by - and I do realize there is a selection bias - they make a helluva setting for a film. Gus Van Sant, writer-director of Elephant would probably agree, given the tenderness with which his fictionalization of the Columbine massacres looks at its setting, really taking us inside the school in a manner which is not unlike that in which The Killing of a Chinese Bookie takes us inside a night club. Put more technically, lighting, use of focus, movement of camera and use of music are all excellent.

Regrettably, Van Sant does not care much for his characters - or rather, he didn't even bother to write any characters, giving us undistilled stereotypes instead: the athlete with his pretty-in-a-boring-way girlfriend, the artsy type, the ugly female outsider, yadda yadda. (Van Sant calls them "archetypes", but that doesn't make them any more interesting.) The killers, you'll be intrigued to learn, are outsiders; they like first-person shooters and watch documentaries about the Nazis.

Yeah, the "real artists" among the filmmakers all want to be auteurs, writing their own material. But Elephant makes a strong case that Van Sant should direct other people's scripts. David Ricardo had a point, after all. (6.5)

The Best of December 2009

1. Ascenceur pour l'échafaud (1958) - 8
2. La jetée (1962) - 8
3. The General (1927) - 8
4. Sisters (1973) - 7.5
5. D.O.A. (1950) - 7.5

Films Not Finished: December 2009

The monthly list of films I didn't finish because they were not interesting enough

Amityville Horror, Casino Royale (1967), Cube, Die innere Sicherheit, Lolita (1997), Miami Vice, Scarlet Street, Tokyo monogatari, Twilight (1998)