This is the second part of my list of films I watched for the first time in 2012. Read an explanation and the first 25 choices here.
25. Duck, You
Sucker!, Directed by Sergio Leone (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; June 19th)
An explosive film that lives up to the amount of dynamite it delivers, Duck, You Sucker! seen completely cold. But since you’re hear reading this capsule, just know that it’s both Leone’s most fun film (the closest to a screwball comedy he ever made) and his most political. The fact the film “accidentally” switches genres and stakes forty-five minutes into the film is a complete Coup d'état of Leone, leading to the brilliant sequence where Rod Stieger leads a daring heist but instead becomes a revolutionary leader. It’s a bitter film to swallow, suggesting the lack of agency of any individual in a political battle, but it’s also pure visual pleasure, and now my favorite Leone.
An explosive film that lives up to the amount of dynamite it delivers, Duck, You Sucker! seen completely cold. But since you’re hear reading this capsule, just know that it’s both Leone’s most fun film (the closest to a screwball comedy he ever made) and his most political. The fact the film “accidentally” switches genres and stakes forty-five minutes into the film is a complete Coup d'état of Leone, leading to the brilliant sequence where Rod Stieger leads a daring heist but instead becomes a revolutionary leader. It’s a bitter film to swallow, suggesting the lack of agency of any individual in a political battle, but it’s also pure visual pleasure, and now my favorite Leone.
24. Show People, Directed by King Vidor (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 23rd)
The good people at Film Forum could not have chosen a better time to show this great silent comedy than the height of last year’s Oscar season, as Show People is essentially The Artist made by the people The Artist was portraying. It’s also 1000 times better (fact). Instead of the divide between sound and silents, Vidor’s film shows the movements of a young Marion Davies from slapstick comedian to serious drama actor, while her love interest William Haines remains at the bottom. Vidor captures with authenticity the difference between stars and actors with a jibing sensibility, and peppers his film with plenty of cameos that make for a number of gags that rival the best of the screwballs. Vidor’s work with actors makes this a timeless classic about the importance of termite art.
23. Greed, Directed
by Erich Von Strohiem (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 2nd.
Rewatched on Digital Transfer of VHS; December 24th)
The original film maudit?
Irrelevant if it is or not, Greed is
a staggering and towering work. While Frank Norris’s McTeague is certainly an interesting novel, it’s Von Storheim’s
expressionism that turns this into a stunning depiction of humanity at its
worst. But unlike the somewhat condescending tone of the novel, Von Storheim
finds an odd sympathy with his characters, even as they descend into madness.
As I wrote about over on Letterboxd, the two hour version is where to start,
but the 4-hour attempt to re-create Von Stroheim’s original vision is a
necessary addition that expands on so many elements and turns this from a class
melodrama into so much more. Whichever version you watch, you’ll be treated to
epic vistas, haunting images of decrepit hands, and ZaSu Pitt’s brilliant
performance. It’s American capitalism at its more grotesque.
22. Daises, Directed by Věra Chytilová (Seen on 35mm at BAMcinematek; July 10th)
The extremely astute film blogger Andreas Stoehr described this as a filmic adaptation of Amos Vogel’s “Film As Subversive Art,” and that’s pretty much not far off for the hilariously surreal comedy about two women out to cause a ruckus. Narrative is thrown out the door, and yet there is something of an odd emotional journey for these two besties as they make amok of high society. There’s certainly something more political and most likely feminist in Chytilová’s opus that are worth deconstructing and critiquing, but that almost plays secondary to how damn fun the flick is, and it’s great to know the film can be appreciated either way.
21. My Night at Maud’s, Directed by Eric Rohmer (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; December 17th)
My Night at Maud’s has five of my favorite things ever: math, philosophy, deconstruction of Catholicism, mysterious women, and pure cinema. My first Rohmer (my hope is to see a dozen more in 2013—hint, hint programmers), My Night at Maud’s features a solemn Jean-Louis Trintignant using his exterior and highly religious shell as a way to hide from his more carnal impulses. Beginning with an odd riff on Vertigo, then sprawling into an epic discussion of Pascal, the film becomes truly pure during a 45-minute epic battle of wits and sexuality between Trintignant and the titular Maud, played by the devilishly beautiful Françoise Fabian. They debate everything except the fact that their conversation is so sexually charged, but they needn’t talk about it—the camera says it all, as every shot brings them closer and closer together.
20. The Gang’s All
Here, Directed by Busby Berkeley (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; April 23rd)
Bananas! You can see why the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s loved Berkeley in his only color feature. The narrative here is almost a complete joke (its final plot point is hardly the climax of the film), as Berkeley stages some of the most eclectic, surreal images ever thrown on to the screen. Each number is more dazzling than the next, as the camera twists and turns through impossible crevasses, revealing something more ridiculous. Cinema at its purest, Berkeley’s film is a delightful romp that should be a midnight movie classic, especially given Carmen Miranda’s electrifying performance. By the time the giant head of Eugene Pallette pops onto the screen, you have to surrender to this film’s elemental pleasures.
19. They All Laughed, Directed by Peter Bogdanavich (Seen on 35mm at 92Y Tribeca; September 21st)
Stuck at a crossroads between the past and the present, They All Laughed is a timeless comedy of love and loss. The central romance between New Hollywood icon Ben Gazarra and Classic Hollywood’s Audrey Hepburn says it all—there’s always a lost potential, an unfulfilled romance that simply cannot cross the boundaries (the temporal is made into the physical here by the ocean of the Atlantic). But this is also perhaps one of the funniest films put to screen, and each performance is funnier than the next: John Ritter’s awkward stalker, Blaine Novak’s mustachio’d detective, Patti Hansen’s cool and collected taxi driver, Sean Ferrer’s odd foreign prince charming, the hilarious boss-secretary duo of George Morfogen and Linda MacEwan, and most notably, Colleen Camp as the fast-talkin’ country singer whose a woman on a mission. Sentimental without feeling schmaltzy, it’s a film of pure comic nostalgia, ending with a wince of pain, but one that reminds you that not everything can be perfect, but hopefully close to it.
18. The Last Run, Directed by Richard Fleischer (Seen on 35mm at Anthology Film Archives; June 17th)
The Last Run got a more than hostile reception in 1971 because John Huston infamously left the picture, leaving it in the hands in the often forgotten Richard Fleischer. But The Last Run is one hell of a picture, and one of my favorite types: it’s a last hurrah of old Hollywood, as a former getaway driver (George C. Scott) is corralled into bringing an escaped convict across to border of Portugal and into France. Things go wrong, and there’s a stunning car chase between a Jaguar and a BMW that is perhaps one of the best put to screen. But this is one of those great genre pictures about the movement of Old Hollywood to the European Art House, as exemplified by its three major characters. You know where it’s ending, but it doesn’t make it anymore beautiful as well as tragic.
17. Celine and Julie
Go Boating, Directed by Jacques Rivette (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; May 6th)
In a way a great companion piece to Daisies, Jacques Rivette’s three and a half hour comic masterpiece is a surreal journey into the medium of storytelling. Beginning with a chase sequence that could have easily been directed by Chuck Jones, this is a story of female friendship at its center, and how far these friends will go to support and even become each other. None of it makes complete sense—how could it? Why should it?—but Rivette finds magic in both the characters as well as the cinematic space. The last 90 minutes, as the duo re-create and dismantle a murder mystery, throws anything close to classical narrative out the doors that, in the words of its stars, is simply clover.
16. I Was Born, But…, Directed by Yasujiro Ozu (Seen on 35mm at Anthology Film Archives; January 6th)
Ozu is perhaps the master of cinematic space. Does anyone even come close to his construction of how to create a poetic cinema? Is there even any director who has successfully aped his style? Not even Kiarostami and Jarmusch, who directly cite him, look like Ozu. But I’ve always been a little more ambivalent on his narratives, mainly because perhaps I’m too young to feel the tragedy, or perhaps my cultural background has always held me at a distance (I have similar “problems” with films by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Hou Hsio-Hsien). But I Was Born, But… was the one that finally got me. Beginning as a minor but truly clever comedy about two children afraid of the bullies in their new school Ozu slowly expands his narrative to a story about the pains of class differences, but in a way that is surprising without feeling overt. He’s not pulling out the rug—he’s gently pulling so you step off with him, turning a comedy into a melancholy lament for those that try to bring as much joy into the lives of children as possible. And add to that Ozu’s stunning cinematic technique, and the word masterpiece easily applies.
15. Thief, Directed by Michael Mann (Seen on 35mm at BAMcinemtek; June 3rd)
I recently got into a small debate in one of my graduate classes with Film Comment contributor Larry Gross (who is also an excellent professor, if I may brown nose) on what films really represent neo-noir—not just aping the style and semantics, but truly contended with the political, aesthetic, and urban aspirations of the much-debated style. I threw out Michael Mann, though he contended that Mann’s films are somewhat slight in their narrative. He’s completely right, but that doesn’t mean that Thief isn’t one of the great films, perhaps because its narrative ambitions are not its primary concern. Instead, it’s a film that’s built on pure visual abstraction. It’s one of those films where every single frame deserves to be posted on your wall. It’s like Picasso and Edward Hopper had a child. Thief wants to be a genre movie, and never hides it. But unlike a certain beloved film that so impishly apes it (coughRefncough), it has no business deconstructing either. Instead it’s purely a character study within an abstract visual palette that stuns at every moment. But the film never lacks in character, which is why James Caan centers this narrative. His monologue to Tuesday Weld shows the dreams he’ll always have but never achieve. But to his credit, he lives in a world filled with artistry.
14. Damnation, Directed by Béla Tarr (Seen on 35mm at Film Society of Lincoln Center; Feburary 3rd)
Sátántangó may be the Tarr’s most monumental film, but there is something about his first collaboration with László Krasznahorkai that makes Damnation a more gut-punching film. Finally turning from a more neo-realist style of filmmaking (though his 1984 film Almanac of Fall began to show the first signs), Tarr moves along a community in what they didn’t know would be the last days of a Soviet government. The film traces a few characters as they make a number of morally gray decisions, while everyone else around them drowns in alcohol. The film comes close to a brilliant climax as the entire town wastes the night away on beer and plum brandy during an epic rainfall. The title Damnation probably needs a Self- before it; these men and women reduce themselves to animals, so much as the film ends with a protagonist dropping to his knees and barking at a fellow dog. Damnation is more plot-driven and as little less formally daring as Tarr’s later works, but the nihilistic ambition has never had as hard as an edge as it does here.
13. Distant Voices,
Still Lives, Directed by Terrence Davies (Seen on 35mm at BAMCinematek; March
23rd)
How do we remember our childhoods? As Mad Men’s Don Draper told us, nostalgia isn’t just a reminder of warm feelings, but pain as well. No one captures that better than in Davies’s autobiographical feature debut about growing up in a small Liverpool apartment. It’s a lyrical narrative but never surreal, giving us the delights of young love, the pains of a brutal father trying to do his best (Pete Postlethwaite, never better), and the communities that bind us together. Is there another filmmaker who has made you want to simply live in a pub and sing old tunes all night long? Davies’s long takes and use of both classical and pop music give an authentic view of a working class sensibility, but what is most remarkable about Distant Voices, Still Lives is that it never seems to be about anything, yet always feels essential. This is a man wrestling with his own teenage demons, and our witness to them leave us both with gruesome and beautiful intimate details, but always a feeling that perhaps there are things we cannot know. Whichever it is, we can still enjoy our trip into this world.
12. Pickpocket, Directed by Robert Bresson (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 14th)
If I had to choose just one film by Bresson, it would without a doubt be Pickpocket. Paul Schrader famously said his script for Taxi Driver was modeled off this impeccable work of art, which follows a man that attempts to transcend his poor circumstances by becoming an expert in the titular craft. Bresson’s visual style—his emphasis on body parts in quietly staged framing—is essential to making the pickpocketting scenes tensely thrilling. But beyond that is a narrative of redemption, as Martin LaSalle’s Michel slowly corrodes his soul, he is crying out for pain as he drives others away. Many question the film’s redemptive ending, but how redemptive is it? Like Crime and Punishment, it certainly is marking the “conversion narrative,” but the film has a sense of ambiguity of what this man awaits him. Like the Dardennes, Bresson suggests an inescapable life that no man can rise above. The escapees of A Man Escaped might be physically free, but their entire journey was a spiritual one. Michel is a part of the world; his spiritual conversion leaves us with another Michel, but another practice of daily rituals like his pickpocketting. The only escape can be one of the mind.
11. The Sugarland Express, Directed by Steven Spielberg (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; July 18th)
If you read any critic on the canon of Steven Spielberg, The Sugarland Express usually gets placed near the bottom. It was his first theatrical feature after all. Well, hell to those critics, because this early feature not only shows many of the themes that would become so essential to his later career, but spikes them with a hit of arsenic that is often forgotten in his career (or often hidden so slyly in his filmmaking). Following lovers on the run that hijack of police car to go find their son, Spielberg takes a classic genre of the late 60s and 70s and makes it very much his own. It’s at times a dumb comedy, but its brilliance is in the cleverness of its dumb comedy—the numerous police cars that chase the duo are like mechanical stooges, crashing into each other with earnestness and little intelligence. But it’s the ending of this film that knocks a punch, as we see how little faith Spielberg trusts in people to do the right thing. He makes these characters all too human for us, and by the final shot (one that was notably copied in an episode of Breaking Bad this season), he makes us realize that a reliance to see the human in others is an ideal often only held by a few. The political side to Spielberg, whether in the anonymous enemy of Duel, the capitalist-driven government of Jaws, or the anonymous agents of E.T., is often forgotten. But The Sugarland Express brings this to the forefront in an emotional way that is enlivened with truly crafted filmmaking.
I don’t think I would love Khrustalyov, My Car! if I understood it. Let me rephrase that: I don’t think I would love this film as much if its cultural differences that are so coded in the film were more apparent and easy for an outsider to understand. Aleksi German’s perhaps now final feature is an epic odyssey into the literal heart of the Soviet Union. General Klensky heads deep into the long night, drinking tea (vodka) at every moment, using authoritative power to unleash cruel treatment, and parading around his small town like a dictator. But this man is about to get his comeuppance, as the second half of the film shows society and authority slowly turn on him. Power is only something desired by those who wield it. A madcap comedy that’s closer to Looney Tunes than any American style, shot is gorgeous black and white with some of the most epic, free-flowing long takes put to screen, and finally building to some of the most strange, haunting, and disturbing images I saw all year, to say German is one of the great Russian filmmakers of our time is an understatement. His will to film is his own, bowing to no such possible even hints of a commercial or even cultural hindrance. This film is truly a one of a kind.
Max Ophüls became famous for making enclosed melodramas about the rich and weightless, fighting over the smallest and silliest of problems, even if they were hugely important to them. That never mattered how slight they were - he treated his characters with reverence, which is all a filmmaker must do, and thus made great stories. But then there’s his infamous film maudit, famously championed by the great Andrew Sarris for many years, Lola Montès. It’s a film about the spectacle of melodrama, simultaneously indulging in the grand spectacle of watching this young woman inspire and break the hearts of men all through Europe, while staging it cleverly as a circus show. Her stories can be vividly thrilling to watch, especially given the wondrously wide frames of CinemaScope and epically luscious colors of Technicolor that make it a thrill to view. However, it is the framing device that exposes our need and desire to watch such melodrama—we need to believe that there’s no net, and its all real. And if we do, we’ll throw our money at her in the end.
In the late 1950s, film noir began to reach its peak: it became too twisted, too explosive, too violent for even those that wanted to see the morays and decays of urban life it so brilliantly depicted. But before we get to the fin de film noir, we have one stop to make in Fuller-ville: an angry and scathing world of sexy women who get abused, little old ladies just trying to find a decent place to die, and ambiguous heroes who never stick their neck out for no one. From its sexually charged opening to its ambiguous and ambivalent view of its political villains, Pickup on South Street never let’s you go. Part a social realist film that beautifully captures the hardships of New York life in a way only a practitioner of De Sica and Rossellini could, and part expressionist view of a city that is clearly indebted to Fritz Lang, Fuller takes the best stands of noir and creates a film that clearly should stand as the definition of the “crackerjack thriller.” And even if the film posits a hopeful future to its beaten and imperfect couple, the lasting image will always be poor Thelma Ritter, a soulful outcast of society that might be a little twisted, but defines what it means to be a decent human being.
What is cinema? It can be many things, but it is foremost a moving image. The goal of the film should be to use every magic trick inherent to the medium to tell the story it wants to tell (if it has one, which is not necessary). The oft-too forgotten other master of French comic cinema during the 1950s-1960s, Pierre Étaix, uses every trick in the book for his wondrously clever narrative in Le Grand Amour. You know the story already: a man and woman are getting married, but soon the man has a young, new, and supremely sexy secretary right under his nose. Will he give into his vices? Étaix doesn’t give a damn about psychological realism—his film indulges in the most epic flights of fancy, visually expressing every thought he has with wit and charm (most notably an epic dream where beds becoming moving cars). With very simple tricks of the camera, each joke almost tops the next in its unending cleverness that had me rolling in my seat throughout. And yet, Le Grand Amour ends on a bitter note about the frustrations that will always plague lovers until the end of time. Our loves might be grand, but they often end in pitiful and bitter moments.
Easily the most egregious “blind spot” to make this list, The Rules of the Game is a masterpiece full stop. It’s humanity at its highest and lowest points; in its most epic of comedy and most disheartening of tragedy; in its most wondrous moments of romance and its most frightening sights of jealously; in its exposure of the over-indulgent upper class to its most slyly knocking of those that work below; in its astutely composed deep focus cinematography to its visual beauty of its production design; to its humorously over-emphasized caricatures to its honest and brutal authenticity in its performances, most notably by Renoir himself. It’s a masterpiece. Go see it.
Or better titled: How the West Was Won While America Lost. At this first American screening of the entire 229-minute cut in over 30 years, Cimino explained that all you needed to see in the film was the eyes of Kris Kristofferson in the final shot to see the pains of the entire Vietnam era. He was right, but the 228 minutes leading up to that are some of the most grandiose and luscious filmmaking ever put to screen. People who take issue with Heaven’s Gate treat it as if it should have some sort of a propulsive narrative that keeps them moving at every moment. But how do you cut the opening that sets the tone for so many American men, educated by the elite but always reduced to their most vulgar and boy-ish tendencies? How do you cut the moments that show both the best and worst of immigrant culture, giving the film a necessary ambivalence? How do you cut the romantic scenes between Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and Isabelle Huppert, which will make the ending so much more devastating? And how do you cut any of the most epic visual beauty put to screen? I never found Heaven’s Gate overlong—I was surprised how quick I found it. Instead, I found myself entranced by every shot, the camera’s wondrous movements in and out of the action, captured both at the most epic scale of devastation, and the most intimate moments of tenderness. Its dismissal in 1980 now seems foolhardy at best.
The camera can’t keep up with Rosetta in the opening frames of the Dardenne’s greatest cinematic achievement, as she lunges forward with fierce and bitter conviction to fight for her humanity by keeping her job. A woman on the edge of society and the edge of her humanity, Rosetta desperately fights for her own humanity by becoming society. She detests are alcoholic mother that sells herself for sex, but must live in the trailer park that gives her a home. She fights furiously for a job at a local waffle house, but by morally questionable tactics. An opportunity presents itself to secure her future, but at making a ghastly decision. Its intimate close-ups speak volumes about a character who so desperately wants to feel. She has to teach herself to believe in her humanity: “You’re name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta…. You have a normal life. I have a normal life,” as if simply stating it once would not create such conviction. Tormented by the temptations to cheat her way into a society that would treat her better, she instead turns toward sacrifice, and yet the film emphasizes the cruel and bitter irony toward a woman who desires the transcendent life. In what might be my favorite performance I saw in these 320 films, Émilie Dequenne’s face captures the pain of life in its utmost and elemental vision. The final shot, as she sees that her most spited enemy is also the one that could save her, chilled me to my bones.
Mikey and Nicky is a comedy, but it’s a very bitter one at that. Balance is restored by the end of the film—all the wrongs are righted—but our perception is simply in an unexpected place. In Elaine May’s unclassifiable master work, we watch two best friends (John Cassavetes and Peter Falk) take a long day’s journey into the night that becomes the ultimate test of friendship. Between Mikey’s parental-like resentment and Nicky’s trouble-making showmanship, these two best friends slowly realize what their friendship is based on. Not stories of nostalgia and joyous comradery, but on a dominant competition to prove the other less a man. Through physical, mental, and sexual challenges, these two friends use and abuse the environment around them to show each other who is the boss of this town. Its tragic ending is only inevitable. But Mikey and Nicky is a comedy, its laughs are simply the moment where you also scream. Back during their Broadway show May and Mike Nichols would do a sketch called “Pirandello,” where the moment between uproarious comedy and actual, bitter shouting, would be such a thin line it would often be crossed. The same is true of Mikey and Nicky—at the same time you think one of them will murder each other, you begin laughing at the hilarious when something purely unexpected pops into existence. May shot more footage for this small-time gangster film than Coppola did on Apocalypse Now, but the version now available today never feels loose and unstructured; it’s a tightly wound time bomb, waiting to go off at every moment.
Kiss Me Deadly is
my one cheat on this list—I saw it originally in 2011, where I found it fun,
but structurally incoherent, a bit overplayed by its performances, and a little
too loose for my tasts. Calling me a moron would be an understatement. Kiss Me Deadly is the purest noir—the
one that turns almost every element of the now completely self-aware genre into
its extremes that it almost feels like parody. The violent, mechanical male has
never been more violent and less aware of what he is searching for. The femme
fatales are twisted and fractured into five different women, none of them able
to use their sexuality for anything close to good (even Velda is only sent out
for sex as an errand). And the truth behind this all, the secret everyone
searches for —“the great whatzit”—cannot be represented on screen. It’s a
blinding white light that defies the screen, destroying all cinematic life
along with it. Where could film noir go after Kiss Me Deadly? Even those which often get classified near the end
of the genre (Sweet Smell of Success,
Touch of Evil) are working on a
different set of operations that are no longer purely noir. None comes close to
the strange, seductive beauty of a film built on pure violence, which literally
collides high and low art, destroying any such boundaries. It’s the film with
noir became mythology, but only by equating them with the great arts, and by
destroying itself in the process.
22. Daises, Directed by Věra Chytilová (Seen on 35mm at BAMcinematek; July 10th)
The extremely astute film blogger Andreas Stoehr described this as a filmic adaptation of Amos Vogel’s “Film As Subversive Art,” and that’s pretty much not far off for the hilariously surreal comedy about two women out to cause a ruckus. Narrative is thrown out the door, and yet there is something of an odd emotional journey for these two besties as they make amok of high society. There’s certainly something more political and most likely feminist in Chytilová’s opus that are worth deconstructing and critiquing, but that almost plays secondary to how damn fun the flick is, and it’s great to know the film can be appreciated either way.
21. My Night at Maud’s, Directed by Eric Rohmer (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; December 17th)
My Night at Maud’s has five of my favorite things ever: math, philosophy, deconstruction of Catholicism, mysterious women, and pure cinema. My first Rohmer (my hope is to see a dozen more in 2013—hint, hint programmers), My Night at Maud’s features a solemn Jean-Louis Trintignant using his exterior and highly religious shell as a way to hide from his more carnal impulses. Beginning with an odd riff on Vertigo, then sprawling into an epic discussion of Pascal, the film becomes truly pure during a 45-minute epic battle of wits and sexuality between Trintignant and the titular Maud, played by the devilishly beautiful Françoise Fabian. They debate everything except the fact that their conversation is so sexually charged, but they needn’t talk about it—the camera says it all, as every shot brings them closer and closer together.
Bananas! You can see why the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s loved Berkeley in his only color feature. The narrative here is almost a complete joke (its final plot point is hardly the climax of the film), as Berkeley stages some of the most eclectic, surreal images ever thrown on to the screen. Each number is more dazzling than the next, as the camera twists and turns through impossible crevasses, revealing something more ridiculous. Cinema at its purest, Berkeley’s film is a delightful romp that should be a midnight movie classic, especially given Carmen Miranda’s electrifying performance. By the time the giant head of Eugene Pallette pops onto the screen, you have to surrender to this film’s elemental pleasures.
19. They All Laughed, Directed by Peter Bogdanavich (Seen on 35mm at 92Y Tribeca; September 21st)
Stuck at a crossroads between the past and the present, They All Laughed is a timeless comedy of love and loss. The central romance between New Hollywood icon Ben Gazarra and Classic Hollywood’s Audrey Hepburn says it all—there’s always a lost potential, an unfulfilled romance that simply cannot cross the boundaries (the temporal is made into the physical here by the ocean of the Atlantic). But this is also perhaps one of the funniest films put to screen, and each performance is funnier than the next: John Ritter’s awkward stalker, Blaine Novak’s mustachio’d detective, Patti Hansen’s cool and collected taxi driver, Sean Ferrer’s odd foreign prince charming, the hilarious boss-secretary duo of George Morfogen and Linda MacEwan, and most notably, Colleen Camp as the fast-talkin’ country singer whose a woman on a mission. Sentimental without feeling schmaltzy, it’s a film of pure comic nostalgia, ending with a wince of pain, but one that reminds you that not everything can be perfect, but hopefully close to it.
18. The Last Run, Directed by Richard Fleischer (Seen on 35mm at Anthology Film Archives; June 17th)
The Last Run got a more than hostile reception in 1971 because John Huston infamously left the picture, leaving it in the hands in the often forgotten Richard Fleischer. But The Last Run is one hell of a picture, and one of my favorite types: it’s a last hurrah of old Hollywood, as a former getaway driver (George C. Scott) is corralled into bringing an escaped convict across to border of Portugal and into France. Things go wrong, and there’s a stunning car chase between a Jaguar and a BMW that is perhaps one of the best put to screen. But this is one of those great genre pictures about the movement of Old Hollywood to the European Art House, as exemplified by its three major characters. You know where it’s ending, but it doesn’t make it anymore beautiful as well as tragic.
In a way a great companion piece to Daisies, Jacques Rivette’s three and a half hour comic masterpiece is a surreal journey into the medium of storytelling. Beginning with a chase sequence that could have easily been directed by Chuck Jones, this is a story of female friendship at its center, and how far these friends will go to support and even become each other. None of it makes complete sense—how could it? Why should it?—but Rivette finds magic in both the characters as well as the cinematic space. The last 90 minutes, as the duo re-create and dismantle a murder mystery, throws anything close to classical narrative out the doors that, in the words of its stars, is simply clover.
16. I Was Born, But…, Directed by Yasujiro Ozu (Seen on 35mm at Anthology Film Archives; January 6th)
Ozu is perhaps the master of cinematic space. Does anyone even come close to his construction of how to create a poetic cinema? Is there even any director who has successfully aped his style? Not even Kiarostami and Jarmusch, who directly cite him, look like Ozu. But I’ve always been a little more ambivalent on his narratives, mainly because perhaps I’m too young to feel the tragedy, or perhaps my cultural background has always held me at a distance (I have similar “problems” with films by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Hou Hsio-Hsien). But I Was Born, But… was the one that finally got me. Beginning as a minor but truly clever comedy about two children afraid of the bullies in their new school Ozu slowly expands his narrative to a story about the pains of class differences, but in a way that is surprising without feeling overt. He’s not pulling out the rug—he’s gently pulling so you step off with him, turning a comedy into a melancholy lament for those that try to bring as much joy into the lives of children as possible. And add to that Ozu’s stunning cinematic technique, and the word masterpiece easily applies.
15. Thief, Directed by Michael Mann (Seen on 35mm at BAMcinemtek; June 3rd)
I recently got into a small debate in one of my graduate classes with Film Comment contributor Larry Gross (who is also an excellent professor, if I may brown nose) on what films really represent neo-noir—not just aping the style and semantics, but truly contended with the political, aesthetic, and urban aspirations of the much-debated style. I threw out Michael Mann, though he contended that Mann’s films are somewhat slight in their narrative. He’s completely right, but that doesn’t mean that Thief isn’t one of the great films, perhaps because its narrative ambitions are not its primary concern. Instead, it’s a film that’s built on pure visual abstraction. It’s one of those films where every single frame deserves to be posted on your wall. It’s like Picasso and Edward Hopper had a child. Thief wants to be a genre movie, and never hides it. But unlike a certain beloved film that so impishly apes it (coughRefncough), it has no business deconstructing either. Instead it’s purely a character study within an abstract visual palette that stuns at every moment. But the film never lacks in character, which is why James Caan centers this narrative. His monologue to Tuesday Weld shows the dreams he’ll always have but never achieve. But to his credit, he lives in a world filled with artistry.
14. Damnation, Directed by Béla Tarr (Seen on 35mm at Film Society of Lincoln Center; Feburary 3rd)
Sátántangó may be the Tarr’s most monumental film, but there is something about his first collaboration with László Krasznahorkai that makes Damnation a more gut-punching film. Finally turning from a more neo-realist style of filmmaking (though his 1984 film Almanac of Fall began to show the first signs), Tarr moves along a community in what they didn’t know would be the last days of a Soviet government. The film traces a few characters as they make a number of morally gray decisions, while everyone else around them drowns in alcohol. The film comes close to a brilliant climax as the entire town wastes the night away on beer and plum brandy during an epic rainfall. The title Damnation probably needs a Self- before it; these men and women reduce themselves to animals, so much as the film ends with a protagonist dropping to his knees and barking at a fellow dog. Damnation is more plot-driven and as little less formally daring as Tarr’s later works, but the nihilistic ambition has never had as hard as an edge as it does here.
How do we remember our childhoods? As Mad Men’s Don Draper told us, nostalgia isn’t just a reminder of warm feelings, but pain as well. No one captures that better than in Davies’s autobiographical feature debut about growing up in a small Liverpool apartment. It’s a lyrical narrative but never surreal, giving us the delights of young love, the pains of a brutal father trying to do his best (Pete Postlethwaite, never better), and the communities that bind us together. Is there another filmmaker who has made you want to simply live in a pub and sing old tunes all night long? Davies’s long takes and use of both classical and pop music give an authentic view of a working class sensibility, but what is most remarkable about Distant Voices, Still Lives is that it never seems to be about anything, yet always feels essential. This is a man wrestling with his own teenage demons, and our witness to them leave us both with gruesome and beautiful intimate details, but always a feeling that perhaps there are things we cannot know. Whichever it is, we can still enjoy our trip into this world.
12. Pickpocket, Directed by Robert Bresson (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 14th)
If I had to choose just one film by Bresson, it would without a doubt be Pickpocket. Paul Schrader famously said his script for Taxi Driver was modeled off this impeccable work of art, which follows a man that attempts to transcend his poor circumstances by becoming an expert in the titular craft. Bresson’s visual style—his emphasis on body parts in quietly staged framing—is essential to making the pickpocketting scenes tensely thrilling. But beyond that is a narrative of redemption, as Martin LaSalle’s Michel slowly corrodes his soul, he is crying out for pain as he drives others away. Many question the film’s redemptive ending, but how redemptive is it? Like Crime and Punishment, it certainly is marking the “conversion narrative,” but the film has a sense of ambiguity of what this man awaits him. Like the Dardennes, Bresson suggests an inescapable life that no man can rise above. The escapees of A Man Escaped might be physically free, but their entire journey was a spiritual one. Michel is a part of the world; his spiritual conversion leaves us with another Michel, but another practice of daily rituals like his pickpocketting. The only escape can be one of the mind.
11. The Sugarland Express, Directed by Steven Spielberg (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; July 18th)
If you read any critic on the canon of Steven Spielberg, The Sugarland Express usually gets placed near the bottom. It was his first theatrical feature after all. Well, hell to those critics, because this early feature not only shows many of the themes that would become so essential to his later career, but spikes them with a hit of arsenic that is often forgotten in his career (or often hidden so slyly in his filmmaking). Following lovers on the run that hijack of police car to go find their son, Spielberg takes a classic genre of the late 60s and 70s and makes it very much his own. It’s at times a dumb comedy, but its brilliance is in the cleverness of its dumb comedy—the numerous police cars that chase the duo are like mechanical stooges, crashing into each other with earnestness and little intelligence. But it’s the ending of this film that knocks a punch, as we see how little faith Spielberg trusts in people to do the right thing. He makes these characters all too human for us, and by the final shot (one that was notably copied in an episode of Breaking Bad this season), he makes us realize that a reliance to see the human in others is an ideal often only held by a few. The political side to Spielberg, whether in the anonymous enemy of Duel, the capitalist-driven government of Jaws, or the anonymous agents of E.T., is often forgotten. But The Sugarland Express brings this to the forefront in an emotional way that is enlivened with truly crafted filmmaking.
10. Khrustalyov, My
Car!, Directed by Aleksi German
(Seen on 35mm at Film Society of Lincoln
Center; March 14th)
I don’t think I would love Khrustalyov, My Car! if I understood it. Let me rephrase that: I don’t think I would love this film as much if its cultural differences that are so coded in the film were more apparent and easy for an outsider to understand. Aleksi German’s perhaps now final feature is an epic odyssey into the literal heart of the Soviet Union. General Klensky heads deep into the long night, drinking tea (vodka) at every moment, using authoritative power to unleash cruel treatment, and parading around his small town like a dictator. But this man is about to get his comeuppance, as the second half of the film shows society and authority slowly turn on him. Power is only something desired by those who wield it. A madcap comedy that’s closer to Looney Tunes than any American style, shot is gorgeous black and white with some of the most epic, free-flowing long takes put to screen, and finally building to some of the most strange, haunting, and disturbing images I saw all year, to say German is one of the great Russian filmmakers of our time is an understatement. His will to film is his own, bowing to no such possible even hints of a commercial or even cultural hindrance. This film is truly a one of a kind.
9. Lola Montès,
Directed by Max Ophüls
(Seen on 35mm CinemaScope Projection at Film Forum; August 24th)
(Seen on 35mm CinemaScope Projection at Film Forum; August 24th)
Max Ophüls became famous for making enclosed melodramas about the rich and weightless, fighting over the smallest and silliest of problems, even if they were hugely important to them. That never mattered how slight they were - he treated his characters with reverence, which is all a filmmaker must do, and thus made great stories. But then there’s his infamous film maudit, famously championed by the great Andrew Sarris for many years, Lola Montès. It’s a film about the spectacle of melodrama, simultaneously indulging in the grand spectacle of watching this young woman inspire and break the hearts of men all through Europe, while staging it cleverly as a circus show. Her stories can be vividly thrilling to watch, especially given the wondrously wide frames of CinemaScope and epically luscious colors of Technicolor that make it a thrill to view. However, it is the framing device that exposes our need and desire to watch such melodrama—we need to believe that there’s no net, and its all real. And if we do, we’ll throw our money at her in the end.
8. Pickup on South
Street, Directed by Sam Fuller
(Seen on DVD; October 24th)
In the late 1950s, film noir began to reach its peak: it became too twisted, too explosive, too violent for even those that wanted to see the morays and decays of urban life it so brilliantly depicted. But before we get to the fin de film noir, we have one stop to make in Fuller-ville: an angry and scathing world of sexy women who get abused, little old ladies just trying to find a decent place to die, and ambiguous heroes who never stick their neck out for no one. From its sexually charged opening to its ambiguous and ambivalent view of its political villains, Pickup on South Street never let’s you go. Part a social realist film that beautifully captures the hardships of New York life in a way only a practitioner of De Sica and Rossellini could, and part expressionist view of a city that is clearly indebted to Fritz Lang, Fuller takes the best stands of noir and creates a film that clearly should stand as the definition of the “crackerjack thriller.” And even if the film posits a hopeful future to its beaten and imperfect couple, the lasting image will always be poor Thelma Ritter, a soulful outcast of society that might be a little twisted, but defines what it means to be a decent human being.
7. Le Grand Amour,
Directed by Pierre Étaix
(Seen
on 35mm at Film Forum; October 25th)
What is cinema? It can be many things, but it is foremost a moving image. The goal of the film should be to use every magic trick inherent to the medium to tell the story it wants to tell (if it has one, which is not necessary). The oft-too forgotten other master of French comic cinema during the 1950s-1960s, Pierre Étaix, uses every trick in the book for his wondrously clever narrative in Le Grand Amour. You know the story already: a man and woman are getting married, but soon the man has a young, new, and supremely sexy secretary right under his nose. Will he give into his vices? Étaix doesn’t give a damn about psychological realism—his film indulges in the most epic flights of fancy, visually expressing every thought he has with wit and charm (most notably an epic dream where beds becoming moving cars). With very simple tricks of the camera, each joke almost tops the next in its unending cleverness that had me rolling in my seat throughout. And yet, Le Grand Amour ends on a bitter note about the frustrations that will always plague lovers until the end of time. Our loves might be grand, but they often end in pitiful and bitter moments.
6. The Rules of the
Game, Directed by Jean Renoir
(Seen on 35mm at Anthology Film Archives; January
2nd)
Easily the most egregious “blind spot” to make this list, The Rules of the Game is a masterpiece full stop. It’s humanity at its highest and lowest points; in its most epic of comedy and most disheartening of tragedy; in its most wondrous moments of romance and its most frightening sights of jealously; in its exposure of the over-indulgent upper class to its most slyly knocking of those that work below; in its astutely composed deep focus cinematography to its visual beauty of its production design; to its humorously over-emphasized caricatures to its honest and brutal authenticity in its performances, most notably by Renoir himself. It’s a masterpiece. Go see it.
5. Heaven’s Gate,
Directed by Michael Cimino
(Seen on Digital 4K Projection at Film Society of
Lincoln Center; October 5th)
Or better titled: How the West Was Won While America Lost. At this first American screening of the entire 229-minute cut in over 30 years, Cimino explained that all you needed to see in the film was the eyes of Kris Kristofferson in the final shot to see the pains of the entire Vietnam era. He was right, but the 228 minutes leading up to that are some of the most grandiose and luscious filmmaking ever put to screen. People who take issue with Heaven’s Gate treat it as if it should have some sort of a propulsive narrative that keeps them moving at every moment. But how do you cut the opening that sets the tone for so many American men, educated by the elite but always reduced to their most vulgar and boy-ish tendencies? How do you cut the moments that show both the best and worst of immigrant culture, giving the film a necessary ambivalence? How do you cut the romantic scenes between Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and Isabelle Huppert, which will make the ending so much more devastating? And how do you cut any of the most epic visual beauty put to screen? I never found Heaven’s Gate overlong—I was surprised how quick I found it. Instead, I found myself entranced by every shot, the camera’s wondrous movements in and out of the action, captured both at the most epic scale of devastation, and the most intimate moments of tenderness. Its dismissal in 1980 now seems foolhardy at best.
4. Rosetta, Directed
by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
(Seen on 35mm at the IFC Center; January 28th)
The camera can’t keep up with Rosetta in the opening frames of the Dardenne’s greatest cinematic achievement, as she lunges forward with fierce and bitter conviction to fight for her humanity by keeping her job. A woman on the edge of society and the edge of her humanity, Rosetta desperately fights for her own humanity by becoming society. She detests are alcoholic mother that sells herself for sex, but must live in the trailer park that gives her a home. She fights furiously for a job at a local waffle house, but by morally questionable tactics. An opportunity presents itself to secure her future, but at making a ghastly decision. Its intimate close-ups speak volumes about a character who so desperately wants to feel. She has to teach herself to believe in her humanity: “You’re name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta…. You have a normal life. I have a normal life,” as if simply stating it once would not create such conviction. Tormented by the temptations to cheat her way into a society that would treat her better, she instead turns toward sacrifice, and yet the film emphasizes the cruel and bitter irony toward a woman who desires the transcendent life. In what might be my favorite performance I saw in these 320 films, Émilie Dequenne’s face captures the pain of life in its utmost and elemental vision. The final shot, as she sees that her most spited enemy is also the one that could save her, chilled me to my bones.
3. Mikey and Nicky, Directed
by Elaine May
(Seen on 35mm at the Museum of Modern Art; August 8th)
Mikey and Nicky is a comedy, but it’s a very bitter one at that. Balance is restored by the end of the film—all the wrongs are righted—but our perception is simply in an unexpected place. In Elaine May’s unclassifiable master work, we watch two best friends (John Cassavetes and Peter Falk) take a long day’s journey into the night that becomes the ultimate test of friendship. Between Mikey’s parental-like resentment and Nicky’s trouble-making showmanship, these two best friends slowly realize what their friendship is based on. Not stories of nostalgia and joyous comradery, but on a dominant competition to prove the other less a man. Through physical, mental, and sexual challenges, these two friends use and abuse the environment around them to show each other who is the boss of this town. Its tragic ending is only inevitable. But Mikey and Nicky is a comedy, its laughs are simply the moment where you also scream. Back during their Broadway show May and Mike Nichols would do a sketch called “Pirandello,” where the moment between uproarious comedy and actual, bitter shouting, would be such a thin line it would often be crossed. The same is true of Mikey and Nicky—at the same time you think one of them will murder each other, you begin laughing at the hilarious when something purely unexpected pops into existence. May shot more footage for this small-time gangster film than Coppola did on Apocalypse Now, but the version now available today never feels loose and unstructured; it’s a tightly wound time bomb, waiting to go off at every moment.
2. Kiss Me Deadly,
Directed by Robert Aldrich
(Seen on DVD; October 31st. Originally
Viewed on 35mm at BAMCinematek; March 28th, 2011)
(Seen on 35mm at the Museum of Modern Art; April 5th)
Great movies have two steps to them. The first is to create
a system of signs that tell you how to understand and read the world of the
film. Once that is set up, you can begin to manipulate those signs in order to
create tension. Jeanne Dielman takes
90 minutes to set up its world, as it takes us through the first day and a half
in the life of a mother taking care of her house, as well as performing a
little additional service to pay the bills. None of it seems necessary, but
what people miss about Chantal Akerman’s stunning first feature is that it’s a
horror film where things begin to go slowly wrong is the smallest of details.
First, a top to a piece of china isn’t put back on. Then a cleaned spoon is
dropped on the floor. Potatoes are overboiled. In a moment that my heart
literally jumped, she almost knocks
over a glass of milk. The amount of literature explaining and deconstructing
Akerman’s feminist perceptions in Jeanne
Dielman are endless, but this is a film that should be appreciated at its
most elemental first. It slowly lulls you into a world of complacency, only to
take what seems like the smallest of gestures and turn them into moments of
pure tension. By the time Jeanne makes a fateful decision at the end of the
film, it is almost not a shock after the small tragic horrors that have
corrupted her routine. This woman needs escape, and she takes it in the only
way she can.
Honorable Mentions, Presented in No Order: Citizen Ruth (Payne, 1996), Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966), The Prefab People (Tarr, 1983), Yellow Sky (Wellman, 1948), L'Argent (Bresson, 1983), You Can Count On Me (Lonergan, 2000), Charade (Donen, 1963), The Truth About Charlie (Demme, 2003), Trial on the Road (German, 1971), The Iron Curtain (Wellman, 1948), Colonel Redl (Szabo, 1985), Bird (Eastwood, 1988), Police Story (Chan, 1985), Frenzy (Hitchcock, 1972), Mouchette (Bresson, 1967), Dry Summer (Erksan, 1964), Elegy (Güney, 1971), The Connection (Clarke, 1961), The Indian Epic (Lang, 1959), Boy Meets Girls (Carax, 1984), The Price of Power (Valeri, 1968), The Steel Helmet (Fuller, 1951), Ulzana's Raid (Aldrich, 1972), The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi, 1952), In Praise of Love (Godard, 2001), One from the Heart (Coppola, 1982), Phantom Lady (Siodmack, 1944), Lonesome (Fejos, 1928), Toni (Renoir, 1935), Hollywood or Bust (Tashlin, 1956), Max et Les Ferraillues (Sautet, 1971), Cooley High (Schultz, 1975), Port of Shadows (Carne, 1939), Downpour (Beyaz’i, 1972), Ishtar (May, 1987), Hellzapoppin' (Potter, 1941), Easy Street (Chaplin, 1917), The Tell-Tale Heart (Parmelee, 1953), The Mad Magician (Brahm, 1954), Abraham Lincoln (Griffith, 1930), The Black Cat (Ulmer, 1934), Twilight's Last Gleaming (Aldrich, 1977), Saint Jack (Bogdanavich, 1979), In Again, Out Again (Emerson, 1917), Purple Noon (Clément, 1960), The Naked Dawn (Ulmer, 1954), Three Strangers (Negulesco, 1946), Girlfriends (Weill, 1978), Westward the Women (Wellman, 1951), and Night Nurse (Wellman, 1931)
2 comments:
Great stuff as per usual, Peter. Just wanted to point out that the Davies film is actually set in his home town of Liverpool, not Manchester.
Updated. Thanks for the correction.
Post a Comment