If You're Sad, and Like Beer, I'm Your Film

Oddball that I am, mid-Olympics I had us not watch the NBC-tape-delayed-USfest but a six-year-old movie set 77 years ago and shot like it was made then, set in a Canada not just lost in snow but lost in the Depression, and all-too-eager to remind you that depression isn't just a word from economics. The Saddest Music in the World is a film by unclassifiable filmmaker Guy Maddin who is fittingly named like one of his film's characters, for he's one mad guy. Mad for cinema, particularly German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, but then other batty bits, a touch of noir, an arc of something arch from Astaire and Rogers. Mad for melodrama; his plots would put a soap opera scribe to shame, but he offers them so matter-of-factly--why of course that dad who believes he's responsible for his young son's death carries the boy's heart preserved in his own tears around in a jar--you want to laugh at the cliche, but it's so goddam believed, so ratcheted up to be more than cliche, you can't.* Mad for memory, not just in his magnificent mish-mash of styles, but in his characters, one amnesiac and lovely, another forlorn and begrudging, another, notably the one who passes himself off as the American, doing his best to bluster and shyster his way past his own terrible history, but we'll see what happens there (look out, America?).

To make a comparison, Maddin sits somewhere between David Lynch and Daniel Handler, a lemony surrealist, a formalist eager to drill down into the psychosexual heart of the world. How could I not love a man who writes things like, "Eschewing digital effects as grotesque artifacts of the present," or "Feeling that happiness depends on structure and hierarchy, I set my rank as director apart by donning jodhpurs and an imposing fez."

Does the contest of battling nations, hoping to prove they possess the saddest music in the world (and win the prize of, as Isabella Rossellini's character puts it, "25,000 Depression-Era dollars"), actually discover the singular song of sorrow? Or does it do something more, finding sorrow in our mini-tribes we know as the family, our pacts and treaties of love that we can't help but betray, mangle, defy, reify into some grand meaning, of a way to have the world feel, if just a tiny bit (I will play my song for my lost love, drives one character; I will repent for my great sin by repairing the one I love with something imaginable, beautiful, glittering and full of beer, thinks another).

It's telling a Jerome Kern chestnut ("The Song Is You"--what else could be more navel-gazingly dolorous, sad-sack?) played by a Canadian cellist posing as Serbian haunts the movie. Worldwide we've all shed tears in our beer, but that doesn't keep us from drinking.


*In his laudatory essay when the film came out, the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum quoted Umberto Eco: "When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion."

It Takes a Pork Pie Hat to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

83 years ago this Friday marks the release of one of the greatest films of all-time, Buster Keaton's The General. Upon release it received miserable reviews--the LA Times, and no, not a young Kenny Turan, called it "neither straight comedy nor is it altogether thrilling drama"--and it performed horribly at the box office.

Today we have Avatar.

Taste, appreciation for brilliant popular art, justice--that's the real unobtanium. (Footnote: Not only is it a clunky term, Cameron nicked it. Even his bad ideas are stolen.)

If you have never seen The General, see it at once for the beauty of Matthew Brady photos and the humor that only a daredevil like Keaton could pull off. And if you've seen it, see it again, as it endlessly rewards--try to find a screening someday with live musical accompaniment.

Here's a cool little clip that discusses Keaton's clever, risky stunt-work:

Blog Is Good for Anything That Ails You

Last week the ever-clever Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus and the Pinstriped Blog (he's a real writer trapped in a baseball writer's paycheck) added to what seems to be a sort of meme flying around the world of baseball bloggers--a list of their Top Ten favorite movie musicals. His is pretty good (certainly better than Keith Law's and Joe Posnanski's), but of course you know mine's better, cause it's mine and all. It seems the "rule" was to leave off rock docs/concert films, so mine does not include faves like Stop Making Sense, The Last Waltz, Big Time (why is this not on DVD?), perhaps even Urgh! A Music War (which I haven't seen since the '80s and it might not have aged as well as I have, very unfortunate for it). But my list also leaves off animated musicals, because, after all, you can make a cartoon sing any way you'd like (it's like auto-tune, but done with drawings and computers and probably the powder they made from Walt's head when they realized it wasn't worth keeping him on ice any longer). *

Clearly my love of the musical takes a bit more twisted and dark a turn than these fellows, who might know baseball better, but in Goldman's case, he's a Yankee fan, so the smarts has to stop a bit short of a full double feature, no? Without more overture, and with all apologies to musicals from my youth that have their horrible little songs lodged in my brain (what I'd give to excise "Truly Scrumptious" from my head) but really aren't very good--Willy Wonka (the Wilder one, no comment on Johnny Depp as Michael Jackson as Wonka), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang--and then something like Grease, which I had seen on Broadway and realized the movie was a big big sell out/mistake, even then, proto-snob that I was.

10) Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
How this film didn't make one of the three lists is a mystery to me, but then again it probably wasn't an immersion experience for everyone. At least for this suburban NJ boy, it certainly helped me to think about not dreaming it but being it. Plus the first hour, till Meatloaf gets served again, more or less doing an imitation of all of Sha Na Na at once, is pretty damn fun.

9) Pennies from Heaven (1981)
Steve Martin revealing his coarser side, music suckering the characters first, us second, Bernadette Peters' best film role, Christopher Walken years before Fatboy Slim made him dance famous, and some lovely lovely original period songs, all set to Edward Hopper recreations. Not a happy film about film as the wrong way to happiness.

8) The Wizard of Oz (1939)
It's simply undeniable. Plus Margaret Scary Hamilton.

7) It's Always Fair Weather (1955)
Way better than On the Town--it's sort of a sequel--for my money, as it's about disillusionment (I'm a sourpuss, ain't I?). But there's Cyd Charisse, ever lovely, and the trash can dance, and the -wise song, and people worried advertising was a sell out in 1955. All in CinemaScope (except no substitutes).

6) All That Jazz (1979)
When Roy Scheider passed away, it's this film, not Jaws, that lept to my mind, which says something about me, doesn't it. Very '70s, very Fosse, not in the least fussy. Go see more of what I wrote upon Scheider passing. In fact it's interesting how many of these films have made their way into the blog at least a few times before this accounting.

5) Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
How did this not make any of the three lists? Hilarious, moving, and great great songs (although, oddly, like one of its obvious models RHPS, it sort of loses steam towards the end--I guess with a mere inch it's easy to peter out?). John Cameron Mitchell is an amazing talented man. Bonus points for Emily Hubley animation (yes, Georgia of Yo La Tengo's sister).

4) Top Hat (1935)
I love Fred Astaire, would want to be Fred Astaire, all that amazing grace, how sweet the feet. All the Astaire-Rogers musicals are great, and they can seem interchangeable, but I'll give this one the nod. Plus here's a tip of the top hat to Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton.

3) Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Nostalgic about 1904 in 1944 and therefore now a double time trip. Great score. Judy Garland before she was all fucked up. One of the classic child performances of all-time by Margaret O'Brien (for the Halloween section alone). Not on one of the other guys' lists. Huge mistake by all three.

2) Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Hate the ballad. Love all the rest. Even the ever-too-beaming Kelly. (Remember, all his most famous dance bits, like the title one here, are un-partnered. Hint hint.) Still wishing there was a sequel following Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor in which the studio hires him to be her tutor
and they somehow fall in love. Probably has to do with singing.

1) The Band Wagon (1953)
Got a whole essay up about this one, so what more can I add now? Oh, Jack Buchanan cracks me up. And this is a lovely number, isn't it?




*Please tell me you don't read my parenths, as sometimes they get a bit excessive.

Play with Matches and You Might Get Learned

Moments just prior fascinate me, mostly because we can never know they are what they are till what happens happens. They are always ex post facto, receding in the rear view mirrors of our lives, open to interpretation, to the outline finding details as needs be. That's just one of the fascinations of An Education, which captures a slice of England 1961 before The Sixties--now a construct, not just a decade!--happened. More importantly for our 16-year-old heroine Jenny, the Second Wave of Feminism had just started to stir off the cultural shore, so she's left to bob in mighty calm and boring seas for the meantime, a calmed pool of stratified bourgeois striving, with hopes of going to Oxford to read English as her way out (to what, exactly, becomes the question). It's certainly not to the world about which she dreams listening to Juliette Greco records, as the film lovingly, languorously captures her in one scene, rapturously listening on her bed--where better for such a wealth of feeling she can only feel she should feel.

Till David shows up. He's thirtyish, dandyish, cleverish--so full of "ish"es any young woman should probably know enough to run the other way. But he's got charm, so much so he can even convince Jenny's parents to let him take her to a concert (with a harp!) and a post-show supper. It's here that Jenny might as well admit she has a feeling she's not in Kansas anymore (or whatever the English Kansas is), for the film practically shifts from black and white to color--they go to a posh nightclub where a chanteuse holds sway and the whole room seems slinky jazz. Carey Mulligan is wonderful in scenes like these, so suddenly awake, so stirred, she practically pops off the screen. Director Lone Scherfig completely presents this world to us, and there's no question why it's so seductive to Jenny--we damn well want to live in it too (heck, that's one reason we go to movies after all).

I don't want to give away the movie, just tell you to see it, to feel the ache of a smart girl in a time when smart girls didn't have enough to aspire to and therefore men, caddish, men. (Perhaps this is an old story.) True, it ends too quickly and neatly, but it pulls off not just a music montage but one set in Paris with aplomb (indeed, it's so perfect you realize it can't be real), but it features secondary characters you want to know more, like Cara Seymour as Jenny's mom, who knows too well her daughter's pains (watch her react when Paris plans almost include her), like Rosamund Pike as the ditsy Helen who is smarter than she seems (one reviewer's comparison to Judy Holliday is spot on). And then there's Peter Sarsgaard's David--perhaps even that he's a Yank impersonating a Brit for the film should be a hint. But never has a rogue seemed so enchanting. He plays David as a man who has even fooled himself, at least at times, and when those crinkly lines form around his eyes when he smiles, he's hard to resist.

As a postscript, here's a sidenote of 20/20 hindsight: where has Floyd Cramer been all my life? The film uses his delightful confection "On the Rebound" for its title sequence, and talk about charmingly seductive....

The Blog That Stares at the Men Who Stare at Goats

I don't think it just makes me old and crotchety to say they don't make stars like they used to, since the ones I'm thinking of--the Gary Coopers and Marlene Dietrichs and Cary Grants and Katharine Hepburns--existed or at least starred before I was even born (guess that makes me a crotchety gleam in my parents' eyes, but that assumes they enjoyed the three times they had sex to have me and my sisters). That digression is more than fitting, actually, since what I'm trying to do is write a review of The Men Who Stare at Goats, and it, like my intro sentence, has tonal problems. So I sympathize. But I also didn't ask you for nine and a quarter from your wallet and an hour and a half of your life.

You see, I think that George Clooney might be one of our possible stars. (And another digression--Harrison Ford was one, why he could pull off Indiana Jones so effortlessly, back in the day, like Grant in Gunga Din, but something happened. I'm trying not to blame Calista Flockhart.) It doesn't hurt Clooney's Gable-esque and gorgeous, but there's a certain magnanimity of character he effuses. And while he never seems too full of himself, he isn't yet a parody of himself, either, like Nicholson or DeNiro, say. All that helps us want to like him a whole bunch, and that good will carries us through much of Goats, as we keep thinking it has to be better than it is. That's a star up there, after all.

Alas, even with a story that seems ripe for much--the film proudly announces "more of this is true than you would believe"--about an actual U.S. Army project to create a group of mind warriors, as it were, Jedi (this is from the Stars Wars era) who could bust clouds or goats with one mighty psychic stare. Clooney, as Lyn Cassady, is perhaps the best man from that unit, and if he's the best, well, you can see as the movie goes on there's going to be problems. For here we are with him and Ohioan reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor, stuck playing straightman, Crosby to Clooney's Hope), trying to win his wife back by going to the Iraq War and being a man. Lots of desert hi-jinks ensue.

And suddenly intimations of Abu Ghraib. For what is often a very silly picture (c'mon, jokes about McGregor maybe being a Jedi? the person who steals Wilton's wife away has a prosthetic arm, just so we get a smidgen of Strangelove into the picture?) right down to the obligatory ass shots of the two leading men in hospital gowns that don't close (a little something for the ladies...) really wants to be about the darkside and those who want to profit from war and the torturing of prisoners. What's more, the nastiest character is played by the as usual mild-manneredly menacing Kevin Spacey. And if you bring in Keyser Soze to be your evil, you've got to mean it.

The wild tonal shifts just don't work, so what's supposed to be powerful and gut-wrenching seems shocking and misplaced and then the humor seems inappropriate. And it's not that I'm a prude--I'm more willing than most to make a sick joke at the wrong time just to let out the air of solemnity and sadness--it's just the jokes aren't that good. And the seriousness seems unearned, too.

There is plenty to enjoy, like the ever fine Stephen Root in an early cameo, and especially Jeff Bridges as Bill Django, the leader/guru of the New Earth Army, who even walks funny and has an amusingly blissed out look for most of the film. It's just that you keep hoping it might be funnier, or more powerful, and it can't pull either off. You keep wishing it could go all out satire (the Strangelove route) or suddenly pull you up with the sense of the danger and darkness in all of us (to stick with Kubrick, the Paths of Glory route, maybe?). Instead, the movie will just get your goat trying to be all things at a muddled once.

Hots for the Smarts

Here's something I wrote 18 years ago in my State College (motto: Penn State? State Pen? You Decide) days and I'm charmed and surprised to find it still on the web. I liked it then and think it still stands up as writing. Plus putting this here means that 1) if it goes away I still have it, 2) I finally will push the David Byrne player off the page and you won't get bombarded with sound (even if good sound) when you come visit INOTBB. You're welcome.

UPDATE: OK, that didn't work. Sorry.

A novel idea: Bringing intelligent films to a college town

Jeff Lewine, president and chief executive officer of Cinema World, the chain that operates all eight commercial screens in town, isn't a bad man. Jeff Lewine is a businessman.

It's as unsimple as that. At last week's press conference/public meeting that announced a truce with Orion Pictures and this coming Friday's opening of both "Dances with Wolves" and "Silence of the Lambs" (the wolves and lambs are an almost too-fitting a metaphor for the business world), Lewine himself admitted, "First of all, I'm here not to have to eat Hamburger Helper . . . I'm responsible to my shareholders or they'll change me."

It's best to turn to film itself to explain Lewine's bind. Perched atop a desk, Lewine looked like Robert De Niro in two of his most famous roles. Physically -- and even he joked about his appearance, claiming that the grueling nature of film distribution had reduced him from 6-foot-2-inch, blond hunkdom -- he resembled De Niro as the fatted-up Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull," a puffed man with his hair and tie askew.

Yet his motions, his gestures, echoed De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, the standup comic/kidnappper who decides it's better to be "king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime" in "King of Comedy." Lewine's 'aw, shucks!' shrugging, his closing plea "for another chance," seemed to come directly from the Pupkin playbook, in which Hollywood schmoozing with a cardboard cut-out of Liza Minnelli is no more fake than the "real thing."

So it's with some skepticism that I listened to his promises for new theaters, better theaters, better films. That skepticism grew when he "explained" last December's announced-yet-never-performed renovations to the existing State College theaters by talking about the difficulties of finding sites for new theaters. Finally, he said something about all construction having to be done at once -- new building, remodeling, the works. His conclusion to the question: "We have fallen desperately short."

Wise ass me wanted to say,"No kidding," but I didn't. At least I asked questions: The reporting press seemed more than willing to lap up whatever Lewine had to say as gospel, as if a press conference were a talking press release, as if everyone told, heck, as if everyone knew the truth.

It's pretty clear Lewine didn't: He challenged the audience to name films that never came to town after they were advertised in trailers or on posters (we chirped in with "Mo' Better Blues," "Eight Men Out" and others); he insisted a $100 million take for a movie wasn't a magical figure (although only five to 10 films a year reach that rich plateau); and he claimed "Dances with the Wolves," as he twice called it, didn't open with strong box office (it had passed the $100 million mark before it swept the Oscars).

But the Pupkin in him makes it possible to excuse these failings, for he is true to his reality, and that reality is Cinema World has to make money. Currently his chain is the 13th largest film circuit in the country; by next August, Lewine said the company would be in the single digits.

To keep such a monster of projectors and popcorn rolling, the company has to program smart, which often means programming dumb. When people at the meeting lamented the lack of art or foreign films in his theaters, Lewine replied, "There's a minority of the universe of customers who will go to a specialty film." Later, he explained the problem as follows: If 10,000 people want to see a James Bond film, and 300 want to see the art film, he has to give the screen to the Bond film. It's simple math, for Lewine: Eight screens means no room for specialty films.

The issue gets complicated when you try to define what a specialty film is. When I read a list of 1990 films (and remember, we are four months, that's one-quarter, into 1991) that never made it downtown (and thanks is due to the Graduate Student Association and International Film Series for all their fine programming) -- films like "Reversal of Fortune," "Longtime Companion," "Men Don't Leave," "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge," "After Dark, My Sweet," "Alice," "Avalon" -- he admitted many of these titles weren't specialty films.

They might be special to State College, though, if we ever got to see them.

And maybe we will, or at least the films of 1991 of similar caliber. For Lewine aped films again, however unwittingly, when he promised, once the new Benner Pike theaters opened, to reserve one screen for one year for specialty films.

He even had somebody in the crowd write the promise down so he could sign it, just like Charles Foster Kane publishing his signed Declaration of Principles. It was a bold stroke of theater, but drama deserves its critics, as the disillusioned Jed Leland learns in "Citizen Kane." Only time and a year's worth of good movies will tell if Lewine will keep his promise, or if he will bank on the transitory nature of college towns to let him off the hook.

As for State College, we can prove him wrong. At one point he said there wasn't an audience for intelligent films, claiming, "When you get to college, you're not more intellectually curious." What worried me was he might be right, that only a handful of us who can't separate our real lives from our reel lives care, and everyone else is happy to have their brains kicked in by Steven Seagal, have their hearts melted to mush by Julia Roberts, the Bambi for the '90s (as critic Dave Kehr would say).

Is that true? Would seeing "The Handmaid's Tale" or "The Sheltering Sky" or "Tune in Tomorrow . . ." be too much for Happy Valley minds to handle?

Well, I could go on, but the Collegian doesn't pay, and I have business to do.

His Trivia Questions Are In-Seine!

Maybe it's because all my female star obsession of late has been focused on this woman (album out today folks!), but over at Property of a Lady we're playing film trivia and I've totally stumped everyone with this one about another female star obsession. I guess if I don't think about her, no one does. So here's your chance, fine INOTBB-readership, to prove you know my obsessions! (Amy, you can't play unless no one else answers.) Your job is to name the actor based on the roles listed:

a possibly promiscuous photographer, a devout angel-faced virgin, a bank-teller/call girl

People guess Lisa Bonet and Faye Dunaway and are wrong. I hint:

That she’s a photographer isn’t a big issue in the film, and in fact her husband is the one taking more pictures in the film.

Here’s a clue: the films were released in 2007, 1987, and 1994.

Someone admits to a WAG: Susan Sarandon. Someone is wrong. I offer more clues:

The most recent film she directed herself and her real-life parents play her character’s parents in the film.

Quiz-answering crickets. So I offer another total giveaway clue (or so I thought):

This run of roles does not mention that she’s played the same character in 3 different films, one animated.

People guess Reese Witherspoon and Cristina Ricci. People are wrong. And so I offer two more clues:

She’s not American.

She’s been co-nominated for a best adapted screenplay Oscar.

I get abused and two more wrong guesses are offered: Sara Polley? Minnie Driver? Still no one's right. And it seems I've broken the round robin chain for the day even while offering one more clue:

In the bank teller movie her character is in the title. It costars an actor whose first prominent role made it hard to know what he actually looked like.

Please tell me someone out there gets this way before clue 5 at least.....

The answer, if you need to look.

The Man in Black (Pajamas)

Sure, the actual scheduling of films at a film festival isn't easy, as most try to cram in as much as possible to leave cinephiles bleary-eyed as long as possible. But this just seems perverse to me--SBIFF today screened Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison at 8:15 am. Was the theme Cash instead of coffee? If anything seems best suited for a late night slot, it's a film that has to rock. (And I know Cash is country if we want to play genre games, but one reason he endures is his rock sensibility, more than many "rockers" ever had.)

Maybe parolees get released at 8 am? Or the prison guard shift switches in perfect time for that screening?

Is There an Author in the House?

While Saturday's Writers Panel at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival might have suggested only white males wrote screenplays (at least moderator Anne Thompson from Variety was a woman), it did manage to hit 4 of the great screenwriter stereotypes. Robert Knott (Appaloosa) was the cranky, cynical drunk, Tom McCarthy (The Visitor) was the spacey artiste, Andrew Stanton (Wall-E) was the populist/humanist, and Dustin Lance Black (Milk) was the wide-eyed youngster. Add it up and it was an entertaining and informative 90 minutes, as these panels tend to be--writers are the ones good with words, after all, so coming up with a quick quip is easy compared to creating believable characters and charting story arcs we find compelling.

So there were the tidbits of filmmaking stories, like Stanton came up with the initial idea for Wall-E in 1994, before Pixar had even made Toy Story, and that Steve Jobs didn't like the title. (But, as McCarthy joked, "What does Steve Jobs know about marketing?") And that Dustin Lance Black wrote an entire sequence about the 1975 San Francisco mayoral election that Milk had to scrap for focus; Black said it would make a great movie all on its own, with characters like Dianne Feinstein, George Moscone, and Jim Jones. (McCarthy joked, "It should be an animated film.")

And there were the moments when the panel stressed how much work writing was--McCarthy talked about over 20 drafts of The Visitor; Anne Thompson said, "If you just want to write and not re-write, blog;" Stanton explained that "my motto is to be wrong as fast as you can...I assume my first five or six attempts will suck but it's like puberty, you have to go through it to get to the good stuff."

And then an audience question, as always at these events, was "How do you make it in the business?" which really meant "how do I make it in the business?" for the guy even had his screenplay in his back pocket.

There was the gooey, the obvious is said and we all appreciate how it moves us so moment, too. Stanton, discussing the themes of Wall-E, actually said, "What's the point of living but to love one another?" And people, of course, applauded. We love thinking we're so loving, after all. Ah, people are good.

As one last side comment, something really needs to be done about the pricing for these events. The base ticket cost $39, which is steep enough given that the hour and a half had a sponsor (Pacifica Institute). Such a cost probably helps make the audience demographic reflect that of this particular panel, at least. But then on top of that $39 the Lobero charges both a $4 fee and a $5 fee--that's $9, or over 20%. For a will call ticket ordered via the web. For that much money, Dave Asbell should shine my shoes personally. Or they should hire out to Ticketmaster, since everyone hates them and then our rage can be focused on a long-time enemy.

Update (5:06 pm): Alas, the economy comes a-calling and it's got its sickle in tow--Anne Thompson was one of 30 people laid off from Variety today. It's ugly and getting uglier.

More Movie Mania! The Nifty Nineties

I got mighty close to either giving up on this film meme or just going the list route, for as my years went on, my film watching did not, and I feel more and more a fraud. (Honest, I really do feel bad about having strong opinions about things I don't know enough about. Not that that usually stops me.) So. Take all of this was a mighty grain of salt. Or a chunk of grainy B&W film. I probably know the films of 1939 better than those of 1999.

On top of that, all the cool kids are doing the top albums of your life already. So I've got enough meme-ing to do to last me the summer.

1991

I could put this documentary in anywhere (well, any 7 years), but this seemed to be the edition to do it, Michael Apted's wonderful longitudinal project 35 Up. How wonderful humans are, how changeable. We actually do get acts. Who knows if we'll really get the post-life acts some hope for, but perhaps the funniest look at that is Albert Brooks' delightful Defending Your Life, if for nothing else than that it shows Meryl Streep at her most normal and angelic all at once. Plus Rip Torn cracks me up. Then there's Trust, the first of the brilliant two year run by Hal Hartley. One of the sneakiest love stories of all time, which is the way I like them, plus is there a more attractive young couple than Adrienne Shelley and Martin Donovan? Not to mention the film offers the best defense ever for television: "I had a bad day at work. I had to subvert my principles and kow-tow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible. Deadens the inner core of my being."

1992

Sticking with Hartley, there's Simple Men, a story of a crook and his straight-arrow brother on the lam, of course finding women with whom to fall in love, while hoping to track down their estranged dad, the infamous anarchist shortstop. Let's not forget the dance number set to Sonic Youth. I'm also a sucker for the spot-on cynicism of The Player.

1993
Weird year. I keep looking at the list of releases but come up with the same film over and over--Groundhog Day. If you've ever been to Puxsutawney, and fortunately I've only been through on the bus, you'd know this is comedy perched on the cusp of horror.

1994
Ever a fan of fractured narrative, and a fan of the French New Wave, I have to tip my cap to Pulp Fiction, even if it led to too many bad wannabe films and meant we had to deal with Tarantino thinking he's important for decades. I loved the flat-out great story, actually hiding some class criticism, of Quiz Show, with its fine performances. Speaking of that, there's the ultimate femme fatale turn by Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction--either she's been the worst used actress in the last 15 years or it's all she had in her. Then there's Heavenly Creatures, which makes me really really scared of teenage girls.

1995
Babe. C'mon you liked it too, admit it. It's an adorable talking pig! And two years from this that sweet farmer will be so mean in LA Confidential--people really do act! To see people seemingly not acting, there's the lovely love story Before Sunrise, only lovelier because of Julie Delpy. I know some people hate this one (one friend once wrote "I can go on my own boring dates, George, I don't need to watch them on film"), but it's lyrical to me. And ends with K. McCarty singing Daniel Johnston. I haven't seen it but once, but Jarmusch's Dead Man sure left an impression as another anti-Western Western (see earlier entries McCabe and Mrs. Wild Bunch). And, like everyone else, the narrative game that is The Usual Suspects was a blast for me, too.

1996
I find myself falling back on the Coens over and over, so I guess I like them more than I thought. Fargo is Frances McDormand's most acclaimed if not best performance, but it sure centers the film. Then there's the Faulkner does Texas Lone Star--completely engrossing and not as heavy-handed as some John Sayles, whose films I always want to like more than I end up actually liking. They're too earnest or something. Actually, Sayles v the Coens is quite a pairing, as many think they're not earnest enough. Maybe Sayles should write them a script and see what happens. Oh, and I almost forgot Irma Vep, one of those films about film, but much much more.

1997
Perhaps my favorite film of the past 15 years is The Sweet Hereafter. Totally harrowing, on some level, but the idea of community grief is fascinating, and the way it keeps almost but not quite getting to the bus accident, making you both want and not want to see it.... Great performances by everyone, but especially two people who make almost any film better, Sarah Polley and Ian Holm. No moment in film period, last 15 years or more, matches the flashback and the fierce look on the baby's face, the utter struggles we have trying to help each other in often the cruelest of ways. If you haven't seen this film, rent it at once.

1998
Confession time--I have never seen The Big Lebowski or The Thin Red Line. Hey, where did everyone go? OK, now that I have either no readership or credibility (or both), I'll ask for a 1998 mulligan. And in the meantime Rushmore gets the nod for finding (allowing?) the sadness in Bill Murray.

1999
I have to admit to a guilty pleasure here, as it's true, I'm terribly fond of Dick. It's not a great film, but as satirical romps go, it's hard to beat, no pun intended. While Kirsten Dunst makes her airhead just a bit smarter than the Nixon White House, the real joy is in all the non-impression versions of the "real" characters, from Dan Hedaya's Nixon to Woodstein being lampooned by Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch. Again, narrative games make Being John Malkovich a joy, plus who wouldn't want Catherine Keener in his head? As for some more gravitas, there's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, with Forrest Whitaker's best performance.

2000
I'm glad I kept looking at lists for this year as I almost put O Brother Where Art Thou? as the default--a fine film that proved Clooney could carry a picture and that T Bone Burnett's soundtrack could, too. But in the unrequited love sweepstakes nothing matches Kar Wai Wong's In the Mood for Love (released internationally in 2000 and the U.S. in 2001, so sure I'm cheating but it is a film about infidelity after all). As Slant Magazine says, the film is "ravishing beyond mortal words."

To see my previous flick picks hit the magic links: 1963-70, 1971-80, 1981-90.

He Fills His Head with Culture, He Gives Himself an Ulcer

Ah, the 1980s. As we continue our jaunt through the films of my life (see 1963-70 here and 1971-80 here) we enter the decade of my greatest film consumption. I saw plenty in college, but in grad school I upped that a serious notch as I was co-director of the student-run Bijou at the University of Iowa for three years. We screened approximately 60 films a semester, classics but also obscure older films, art films, some things the theater chain in town was too dumb to screen, so we made a killing (Stop Making Sense, thank you for keeping us in the black for a good year). I cannot begin to say how wonderful and important all those nights were to me. My guess is 3/4 of the films making all these lists first were enjoyed during that period.

1981

So after that big build up, we start with a weakish year, after all Chariots of Fire, which is best known now for people making fun of its slow-mo set to Vangelis, won the Best Picture Oscar. (And Raiders and Stripes are fun, but best picture of a year? Just can't do it.) Therefore I'll go and get all weird and pick Pennies from Heaven. I'm sort of a sucker for musicals, and even moreso when the musical is an anti-musical musical. But the tunes are delicious, Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Christopher Walken are great, and it's relatively depressing. Just my kind of film. As a close runner-up, let's go with Evil Dead, even if the second film is probably better. Still this gave Sam Raimi his start, and it leads with Bruce Campbell's chin. Perhaps the best cheapest-made film of all-time? (All apologies to George Romero, Robert Rodriguez, and John Sayles.)

1982

OK, the decade is building kind of slowly. I promise it's not just because I went to school in Baltimore that I still adore Diner. But think of that cast, and how none of them topped their performances here, least of all Ellen Barkin, woman among boys. But what wonderful camaraderie. I'm also going to go out on a limb and pick Night of the Shooting Stars, which I haven't seen in years but still remember fondly, a terrific tale of Italy at the end of WWII that is poetic and powerful. Whatever happened to the Taviani Brothers?

1983

And so I stay with foreign films but turn to Japan's great Shohei Imamura and his film Ballad of Narayama. Another film I haven't seen in years, and having lost both parents relatively recently, it would probably devastate me--a big part of the film is a man taking his mother on his back up a mountain where tradition has it the elderly must go to die. But there's so much more to this clear-eyed film, the kind of thing Hollywood could never pull off without over-weening piety or heavy-handed mawkishness.

1984

I like things dry, I have to admit, so Stranger than Paradise, with its failing to move camera, totally floored me in 1984. Still there's much humor--"I am da vinner," the chop-sockey film we only see by how it plays on the movie-goers faces, the way Florida looks like Cleveland, the TV dinner "this is how we eat in America" bit--and much cool, from the black and white photography to that enduring emblem of hip John Lurie. Jarmusch has made a lot of fine films, but the first is still the best. And then there's Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, which I loved even more as I first saw it at the Biograph in Chicago, John Dillinger's last theater. It's a myth of much of what the U.S. is about, and love is always in the way, and the cast full of folks who can overdo don't (DeNiro, James Woods). The rest of you can have The Godfather and II, just leave me this one. Both of these films I wrote about in my non-fiction prose MA thesis, too, so I've completely thought them into myself, as it were.

1985

Here's a year where quantity totally trumps a single knock-out quality production, and aren't we much for the better for that? Scorsese isn't necessarily known for his light touch (right Illeana Douglas?)* but he mined dark comedic gold with After Hours, a yuppie-eyed view of a cashless downtown NYC. I haven't seen it in years, but David Hare's writing and the ever-watchable Vanessa Redgrave made the small English film Wetherby a wonder. The Coca-Cola Kid, of all things, stars Eric Roberts, but also stars Great Scacchi, who in her day was as luminescent as any star ever. Plus she seemed to like doing nude scenes--her roll in bed dressed as Santa with Roberts with feathers everywhere...well, Dusan Makavejev knows sexy. Equally sexy, at times, but also silly, but also an ode to food, so how can I not love it, Tampopo is something I really need to rent again. In fact, this 1985 foursome would be a lot of fun to re-live some weekend.

1986

I'm stuck still naming films I wrote about in the thesis, but what films. Blue Velvet is a deep disturbing dream about film itself (that severed ear fell through cinematic history all the way from Dali and Bunuel), and what it means to get to see what we thought we wanted to see only to find out we're wrong. Something Wild is somewhat similar, as Jeff Daniels wants a thrill and gets way more than he bargained for with Melanie Griffith, who then gets way more than she bargained for with Ray Liotta. Plus the Feelies play the high school reunion--I'd go back to one of mine if that could happen.

1987

Raising Arizona. It's just incredibly funny, especially the first 15 minutes (before the opening credits even roll?), an ever-tightening montage of love and crime and a whacked out M. Emmet Walsh. All sorts of brilliant performances, not just by Hunter and Cage, but John Goodman, too. The Coens at their zaniest.

1988

There might not be a more beautiful first 30 minutes of a movie than that of Wings of Desire, but you have to be ready for it, awake and willing, an accomplice in the angel's work where listening has to be enough. It's easy to believe Bruno Ganz as an angel. And who better as a fallen angel than Peter Falk? There's even bonus Nick Cave. For a very different film there's The Thin Blue Line, which wins a man justice but makes us puzzle over whether truth is ever true. A formalist's dream, a hypnotic Philip Glass score. Errol Morris makes films like no one else.

1989

A trio, as each of these films is a bit short of greatness, the first from trying too hard, the second from not trying enough, the third for showing its age. Do the Right Thing is a powderkeg about a powderkeg, which isn't easy to do. Exactly what is the power getting fought if taking down Sal's Pizzeria is the "best" one can do? Drugstore Cowboy captures drugginess without getting dopey about it. Heathers has that final act problem--the more Slater becomes crazy the less interesting he is--but it's got attitude and the perfect delivery woman in Winona Ryder.

1990

I close the decade with a film far too little seen. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger has all the wonderful weirdness I like in a movie from its man-on-fire credit sequence on. Danny Glover can do a billion Lethal Weapons if that lets him act, stupendously, magnetically, cruelly, in no-budget films like this one. (Be sure to find the finally released Killer of Sheep, too, while you do your Burnett research.)

*The scene where DeNiro bites her face in Cape Fear is the most horrible thing I've ever seen on film, worse than Straw Dog's bear trap, The Foruth Man's metal rod through the eye, you name it. What was Scorsese thinking?

Movies for a Disco Decade, You Punks

I started this meme the other day, the best film for each year of my life as decided by me. No refunds or exchanges. So here we go with the 1970s....

1971

In our previous entry I worried over the split between the film that meant something to me then and what I feel now is the best film from that year. Most films didn't mean much to me in the '60s cause I was too young to know any better (although I probably should have put down The Happiest Millionaire for 1967 since I remember seeing it in Radio City Music Hall, one of my earliest memories, or maybe I just remember it as I wrote a poem about seeing it, not that my poetry was ever memorable). 1971 does suggest a now/then split, however. For I certainly vividly recall Duel, back when Spielberg couldn't be pretentious as they didn't give him the money and it was merely a TV movie. But boy it packed the thrills, and Dennis Weaver was McCloud, too. Years later I would see McCabe and Mrs. Miller, fall in love with Julie Christie, totally rethink the Western, realize Altman was teaching me a new way to watch, and listen to, a film. Wonderful use of Leonard Cohen, too.

1972

Last time I pointed out this might be the best year for film in my life--certainly the best year up to this point. Nine-year-old me missed most of it, getting "adult" seeing Poseidon Adventure as my first PG film (but I was blase as somehow they let me take out the novel from the public library, and that was even steamier). And my favorite film during that year was definitely What's Up Doc? as I had no idea something called Bringing Up Baby existed and was getting ripped off, however lovingly. That one can say Ryan O'Neal is a better Cary Grant than Streisand is a Katherine Hepburn is damning with feint chin dimples. Still, Madeline Kahn--film never did provide her the plum role she so deserved.

But '72 was the Year of the Marlon as Brando excelled in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. And I'm not just buttering him up here. For self-determined intensity, Brando might have been outdone by Klaus Kinski, whose driven performance in that allegory of imperialism Aguirre, the Wrath of God draws everything into it like whirlpools on the Amazon.

And then there's perhaps the most psychologically searing film ever, Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Forget fading to black, scenes fade to red, and the bitter vicissitudes of family never got committed to celluloid more painfully. The death watch scene, and that wheezing. The wine glass scene. Now that's a horror film.

1973

The sound you hear is thousands of piano teacher screaming. For The Sting has made Scott Joplin popular and everyone wants to learn "The Entertainer" (I think I can still pick its beginning out, myself). At 10 I wanted to be Paul Newman, not Redford, which suggests much about my young psyche. At the least I wanted to grow up and be a con man. Look what happened--now I'm in marketing. I won't vouch for the film as much today, but it certainly rides on a terrific supporting cast, from Robert Shaw to Harold Gould. And running with the con man theme, the other best film of this year is/was Paper Moon. Telling that films set in the 1930s were so popular, and that even as I kid I could get swept up in that. Or perhaps it was just my nascent love for old movies getting redirected into something possible for a pre-teen two years before even Beta tapes and 11 before AMC.

1974

Please turn up the speakers on your computer while I broadcast a very low range rumble, for this is the year of Sensurround and Earthquake. In New Jersey the perils of LA seemed quite remote, so to watch it crumble upon Charlton Heston was mostly a romp, except when Joe DePirri got surprised by one rumble and tossed his giant popcorn all over our row at his brother's birthday party. Everything was a disaster that year, as it also offered the sublimely all-star studded ridiculousness of The Towering Inferno (OJ saves the cat--good thing he wasn't married to it). But of course now I know I was watching the wrong Los Angeles film, and should have stuck with my 1930s obsession. Forget it, George, it's Chinatown. (Doubt it would have made sense when I was 11.) Remember when Nicholson didn't just do Nicholson shtick? If you don't, watch this again. And my god, nothing is more scary than John Huston as Noah Cross.

1975

Open wide and say Jaws. Damn it for starting the summer blockbuster idea that Lucas would run with (you won't see any of those films on my list, thank you very much), but what a thrill ride. I'm also completely enamored, still, with Love and Death, especially as it's sort of for me what MP and the Holy Grail is for others, a trove of lines to recite at any provocation. Maybe it's because I'm 50% Ukrainian, which at 12 I thought was Russian (of course it was all Soviet no-goodnik, lefty in training me didn't know). Maybe it's because I'm 100% silly, and the idea of scythe-wielding Death dancing to Prokofiev is too delicious. And there's this priceless exchange, which at that age was probably just getting a firm grip on my imagination:

Countess Alexandrovna: You are the greatest lover I've ever had.
Boris: Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone.



1976

I have to hail Taxi Driver, of course, but I have a soft spot for hokum that overpowers its own corniness (come to think of it, that might be the goal of my entire life), and there's absolutely nothing half-baked about Network, which was satire 32 years ago and more or less a documentary now. All those great performances--Holden, Dunaway, Beatty, Duvall, Straight, and of course Peter Finch. For some of its greatness, go here. 1977 can wait. And I do know Nashville came out this year--it's a close runner-up.

1977

The year Annie Hall broke. I actually like Manhattan more, but what a film this is. Again, my humor has to be at least 92% Woody Allen derived (5% the first year of SNL especially Steve Martin guest appearances, 2% Monty Python, 1% my parents' divorce, which I turned into a laff riot). Which means Amy better never suggest we adopt any South Koreans. (shudder)

1978

Not to get all artsy on you, but the images of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven pop into my head in the same way the lines of Woody Allen do. Of course that's the argument against the film--it's all pretty pictures--but I think it's after something basic and Biblical as envisioned by Edward Hopper. Not to mention trying to find a good still from it now on line was hard. Maybe that means people just haven't posted the good stuff. Or maybe it means it works only as a movie, and if nothing else it captures time and the seasons better than most films.

1979

Manhattan. In which NYC is even prettier than the young Mariel Hemingway. Plus NYC never got a boob job. Close second has to be All that Jazz, a film I wrote about back when Roy Scheider died.

1980

And the decade closes much more strongly in film than it did in politics. If I may I want to pick a trifecta. First there's Melvin and Howard, Jonathan Demme before he got pretentious. A true American story, capturing our flirts with success and fame and flirting. Then there's Atlantic City, a mix of a bit of everything done somehow right--old time polish from Burt Lancaster, edgy sexuality from Susan Sarandon, some old world new wave from Louis Malle, and poetry from John Guare. Plus the edge of America past the edge of decay.

Last and far from least the longest film on this entire lifetime list, I see England, I see France, I see Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz. OK, that was the silliest intro to a very un-silly film, one more or less humorless, a recipe that might seem deadly for something over 900 minutes long. But the world in the film is so real you get totally swept into it. I got to see this in 1984 or so over a weekend in Baltimore and the experience is still precious to me (one reason years later Best of Youth would also be so rewarding). Build me a world to go live in.

It Was a Very Good Film, When I Was 0-7

So there's this meme going around and I caught it cause I'm promiscuous like that, especially when the arts are involved and what's more to complete the project would be a huge time suck when the rest of my life has too many demands already. I learned about it over at Ben's place: you're supposed to name the best film for every year since you've been born. Now, since I'm older than Thomas Alva Edison (Ole Alvy, we called him), that's a lot of films, and it seems weird to pimp for my buds Auggie and Lou Lumiere.... (bet those 11 words have never shared such close space before).

Seriously, this is an odd and mostly silly project. For what does "best" film mean, anyway? And should it be the best for you then when the year actually happened, which of course makes the early years particularly difficult unless you were monstrously precocious. So here's what I came up with, and it's totally subjective, and yes, I'm a snob, and yes it's what I could do as quickly as possible while still spending entirely too much time on it. So much so I'm going to break it up into decades. Ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous 1960s....

1963

The Zapruder Film. OK, just kidding, nothing like a little assassination humor to kick things off in a merry vein. (It is an incredible documentary, though.) Charade (Stanley Donen). Sure, it's really Hitch-lite, but by 1963 Hitch needed some lightening (his film that year was The Birds, which has an eerie power, but best of the year?). Plus Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn make such a lovely couple. Plus there's the lines started by her, "You know what's wrong with you?" "No, what?" "Nothing." Plus it's great who the bad guy is. Hud gets to be runner-up, for James Wong Howe's shimmery b&w photography if nothing else, not that Paul Newman and a shimmery herself Patricia Neal are nothing else.

1964

Dr. Strangelove. If I need to explain, you haven't seen the film recently. Actually, now it seems less funny, more prescient. The other day I was re-reading through David Thomson, who I generally like if not always agree with, and he's cold to the the too-cold for him Kubrick. Even to Strangelove (as Sellers is too cold for him, too). But then I realized his real problem--in his George C. Scott blurb, he doesn't mention Buck Turgidson. For a film critic, this is like not noticing a B-52 has crossed your defense perimeter. Screw Patton, this was Scott's best performance.

1965

This is the first year I have to cheat a bit, and move up a few weeks a film actually released in mid-December 1964. Otherwise 1965 sucks, as I almost chose Mickey One out of perversity (if you've seen it, you'll know what I mean). So, instead it's The TAMI Show. TAMI stands for Teen Age Music International, and it's one of the first rock concert films, with a wildly diverse group of perfomers. Gerry and the Pacemakers, playing like they need them. Glimpses of Terri Garr as a young go-go dancer. James Brown at the height of his get-down. And a frightened Mick Jagger, as he has to go on after Brown.

1966

Maculine/Feminine. So much good Godard that still seems so much of the 1960s and so much completely timeless. Funny, bitter (feminin ends up just fin at the end), brittle, and bright. If that generation was the "Children of Marx and Coca-Cola" what are kids now? (Probably not able to enjoy a film this clever.)

1967

Bonnie and Clyde. I know, the consensus pick, but after you've seen a naked Faye Dunaway at a window saying, "Boy, what you doing with my momma's car," and that's just the first 3 minutes, you'd be hooked too. One of the films that tried its best to work out the 1960s violence the 1960s couldn't work out of, so it set it in a different decade. It also let the bad guys be the good guys. Think about this film and think that Sound of Music was just two years prior. Try not to think about which film won a best picture Oscar.

1968

You think I'm going to say 2001, but it's Kubrick gone mysto-mushy, great moments for which you need to be on drugs to connect the dots, some in invisible ink. So instead I'll default to a film that meant much to me years later, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. It's a solid enough version, but of course it's solid enough Shakespeare, too--there's a reason it's the entry drug into the world of the Bard. But Zeff (rhymes with Hef?) decided how nice it would be to cast actual teens in the starring roles. Therefore, Olivia Hussey.

I can't begin to say how shocked our high school freshman year English class teacher was when Olivia unveiled her Husseys, however briefly. Especially since our teacher was a nun. You'd think she would have known, given the film had been out for well over a decade at that point. Not that we complained.

1969
Can't be anything but The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah captured the west at its worst, codes gone screwy, and probably did make violence more cathartic than it needed to be. Still, as the credits show, for just as Holden says "If anybody moves, kill him," we get the credit Directed by Sam Peckinpah. If we want our violence, he will question how much we can withstand our desires.

1970
Since you don't count by saying, "0-1-2-3," 0 is part of what ends not what begins. I'm going to go truly artsy here and say The Conformist. I need to see it again--it's been over 2 decades--but it's the kind of complex that cinema rarely seems to even want to try to be anymore. It's got action, and politics. And Bertolucci has to be in this list some place, no? Given (preview of coming attractions) 1972 could be 5 films, we'll be sure he gets a spot here.

I'll be back tomorrow to see if we can avoid the malaise of the 1970s.

Whose Quote Is It Anyway?

Seems there's a new blog out there--Meming with Rickey. And it's fitting that the all-time steals leader has opted to steal some of my time with this: I must look up 15 of my favorite movies on IMDB, take a quote from each and post them for you, my readership, to identify. Do so in the comments, then I'll cross each one off as you get them. This game always drives me nuts, as I've seen tons of films (not Andrew Sarris tons, but still...) but somehow I never can remember quotes well. So let's hope you're better at this than I am. (I don't think I've rounded up the usual suspects, either.)

And as my readership (the S.S. Readership?) knows, I've given up tagging people, so if this game floats your readership, feel free to do it in your corner of the internets. Who am I to judge?

1) "You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn't have been that sentimental."

Clue--second quote (different character who is the one addressed in the first quote):
"Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice."
V------
Solved in Comment #21 by jqb
Vertigo
Less Coyly Solved in Comment #22 by Drew

2) "What goes good with lots of beer? More beer!"
The Band Wagon
Solved in Comment #20 by Amy

3) Character 1: An hour ago, Rudy Linnekar had this town in his pocket."
Character 2: "Now you could strain him through a sieve." (bonus points if you identify the actor playing Character 2)
Touch of Evil
Solved in Comment #1 by Tom Hilton (Tom also gets the bonus points--it is Joseph Cotten)

4) "Three men and one woman are trapped in a building! Send help at once! If you can't send help, send two more women!"
Duck Soup
Solved in Comment #5 by Hogan

5) Character 1: A friend of mine will be stopping by tomorrow to drop something off for me. He's a cop.
Character 2: A cop? That's a funny kind of a friend.
Character 1: Well, he's a funny kind of a cop.

Clue--second quote (said by an actor much more famous for another role for the same director):
"You're a no-good, nosy little tramp... you'd sell out your mother for a piece of fudge... you have a great big dollar sign where most people have a heart."
T-- K------
Sneakily Solved in Comment #21 by jqb
The Killing
Letters filled in by Mike in Comment #24

6) "Not Oklahoma City itself!"

Clue--dialog from near the film's end:
Character 1: Well, I mean, if you didn't feel that way you do, things wouldn't be the way they are, would they? I mean, things could be the same if things were different.
Character 2: But things are the way you made them.
Character 1: Oh, no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.

T-- A---- T----
Solved for those who know in Comment #21 by jqb
The Awful Truth
Letters filled in by Melville in Comment #25

7) Character 1: Was she supposed to be a virgin?
Character 2: Yeah.
Character 1: I had a virgin once. I had to fly to Guatemala for her. She was blind in one eye and had a stuffed alligator that said "Welcome to Miami Beach."
The Stunt Man
Solved in comment #15 by Hogan

8) "When you've been married to a man for forty years you know all that don't amount to a hill of beans. I've been married to Walt that long and I swear in all that time I just lie there thinkin' about my canning."
The Night of the Hunter
Solved in Comment #8 by Rickey Henderson (b/c I know he didn't mean to type Huntress)

9) Character 1: Do you know what this means - "I'll get you on the Ameche"?
Character 2: No.
Character 1: 'Course you don't. An Ameche is the telephone, on account of he invented it.
Character 2: Oh, no, he didn't.
Character 1: Like, you know, in the movies.
Character 2: Well, I see what you mean. Very interesting. Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.
Ball of Fire
Solved in Comment #2 by Tom Hilton

10) Character 1: I want adventure. I want romance.
Character 2: There is no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire.
Character 1: Trouble and desire.
Character 2: That's right. And the funny thing is, when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you're in trouble you don't desire anything at all.

Clue--Amy gave you one in comment #20.

S----- M--
Solved in Comment #21 by jqb, if you trust him

11)"On one side... Here, I'll show you. On one side, I put a picture of my wife...and on the other side, my little baby. When I open it, it says, 'Papa' and not 'Ochi Tchornya.'"
The Shop Around the Corner
Solved in comment #13 by Melville

12) "To smoke, and have coffee - and if you do it together, it's fantastic."
Wings of Desire
Solved in Comment #18 by Marty

13) "That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous."
Palm Beach Story
Solved in Comment #2 by Tom Hilton

14) "I've been thinking what to do wit' my future. I could be a mud doctor. Checkin' out the eart'. Underneat'."
Days of Heaven
Solved in comment #14 by Mike

15) "Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."
All about Eve
Solved in comment #12 by Melville

plus one extra credit: "In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention."
Laura
Solved in Comment #3 by Tom Hilton

We Live as We Dream, Alone

The noted critic (and terrific teacher) Hugh Kenner once half-joked that "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the only good poem ever written by a grad student. A parallel claim might be made about Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, which he created on less than $10 grand while a film student at UCLA. Of course, Eliot had more success with his poem than Burnett has ever had with his film, which didn't even get a proper release until this year, 30 years after he filmed it in Watts only 12 years after the riots.

Plotless and pitiless, the film is, and one directly connects with the other. For the characters it presents don't seem to have forward motion, don't seem to have hope. They just get to be, from scene to scene, and every moment of possible freedom shuts down--characters not only fail to win at the horsetrack, they never even get to the park to place a bet. After awhile you don't even think about the film being shot in black and white--the world seems that colorless and grim.


That's not to say the film is unrelenting. We see children jump from rooftop to rooftop from below, and airborne they have a brief freedom that is scary and earned. We see a young girl make her own words up to sing-along with Earth, Wind, and Fire on the radio, playing with her doll, but we also know when she gets older those simple lyrical promises might leave her like her mom, in the kitchen primping for a husband too tired to notice her when he gets home. Mom does this in the reflective lid of a pan as she makes dinner; it's her only break, her moment for hope.

Maybe not her only. One of the film's most famous scenes has the wife and her husband (the film's titular character, and the film's steady-eyed matter-of-factness extends to the abattoir scenes in which slaughter seems merely the daily business, drained of blood) sharing a slow dance to Dinah Washington's powerful "This Bitter Earth." At first they move by the numbers--you can almost hear counting it's so lugubrious. But then they edge in a bit, the wife's hands grasping more than caressing her shirtless husband, and what you get is familiarity bleeding into desperate need. They do all this in front of window that leaves them backlit, but it seems more like void than sun outside; it's light as blight not light as bright. Of course the song ends, the clutch ends, the scene ends.

So yes, this is a film about black and white in black and white, but that's just one of the distances it maps. From us to others, from sex to sex, from ourselves to our work, from ourselves to ourselves. Killer of Sheep might not build, but it accumulates, a film uniquely human, and therefore uniquely painful.

(Images courtesy Milestone Films)

Numero Trois?

First Bergman, now Antonioni...if I'm Jean-Luc Godard, I'm praying (yeah yeah as if he prays) I don't come down with the sniffles.

The Art House in Heaven is having one wonderful retrospective with surprise guests, though. And one part of the 1960s is really over, as if the late 1970s and the mega-marketing, synchronous pre-packaged delivery of film the total entertainment extravaganza--it's not just a movie, it's an action figure at Burger King!--didn't kill all that.

Shh, My List is Starting

Figured I might as well keep digging my hole of self-referentiality deeper and climb on in. With a movie projector. Here's the favorite foreign films (that means British and Canadian, too--since when Tancredo's president they'll have to get the films over the wall) list I put together in 1999. (Note, unsubtle readers--that means they're aren't any films since 1999.)

I couldn't keep quiet on this subject, now, could I? So, here is a randomly ordered, completely personal, decidedly arbitrary list. Trying to compile it shocked me, once again--there's so much I haven't seen. And then there's so much I just don't get, like Bresson and Dreyer, and my soul, I realize, is poorer for it.

But there are things I left off intentionally, even if others love them; for just three quickies which sure don't feel quick when I watch them, there's Blow-Up, Repulsion, and Cinema Paradiso. And My Life as a Dog. And anything with Gerard Depardieu (although 1900 is campy fun, especially when Donald Sutherland is about killing things). Stop me before I pan again.

• Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman, 55)
• Dead of Night (Dearden, Cavalcanti, Hamer, Crichton, 45)
• Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 61)
• Wings of Desire (Wenders, 87)
• Ikiru (Kurosawa, 52)
• all the Quay Bros. shorts--especially Street of Crocodiles (Brothers Quay, 84+)
• The Earrings of Madame de... (Ophuls, 53)
• The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 39)
• Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 80)
• L'Atalante (Vigo, 34)
• Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 72)
• Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut, 60)
• Stalker (Tarkovsky, 79)
• The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 97)
• The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, 35)
• Masculin/Feminin (Godard, 66)
• Breaking the Waves (von Trier, 96)
• Drowning by Numbers (Greenaway, 87)
• The Ladykillers (Mackendrick, 55)
• Irma Vep (Assayas, 97)
• Pandora's Box (Pabst, 29)
• Simon of the Desert (Bunuel, 65)
• Metropolis (Lang, 27)
• Grand Illusion (Renoir, 37)
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog, 72)
• The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 54)
• The Duellists (Scott, 78)
• Tokyo Story (Ozu, 53)
• Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Tanner, 76)
• Amarcord (Fellini, 73)
• Cries and Whispers (Bergman, 72)
• A Day in the Country (Renoir, 36)
• Un Coeur en Hiver (Sautet, 92)
• Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 66)
• Menilmontant (Kirsanov, 24)
• Ulysses' Gaze (Angelopoulos, 95)
• The Ballad of Narayama (Imamura, 84)
• Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 74)
• Nosferatu (Murnau, 22)
• The Company of Wolves (Jordan, 84)
• Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau, 45)
• The Road Warrior (Miller, 82)
• Great Expectations (Lean, 46)
• Potemkin (Eisenstein, 25)
• Red (Kieslowski, 94)
• Los Olvidados (Bunuel, 50)
• Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 53)
• Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Tati, 53)
• High Hopes (Leigh, 88)
• The Nasty Girl (M. Verhoeven, 90)
• M (Lang, 31)
• Diva (Beinex, 81)
• Pierrot le Fou (Godard, 65)
• The Conformist (Bertolucci, 70)
• The Story of Qiu Ju (Yimou, 92)
• Henry V (Olivier, 45)
• Bedazzled (Donen, 67)
• Stroszek (Herzog, 77)
• The Bicycle Thief (De Sica, 48)
• The Man Who Would Be King (Huston, 75)
• Tampopo (Itami, 86)
• Children of Paradise (Carne, 44)
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 66)
• Boudu Saved from Drowning (Renoir, 32)
• The Smallest Show on Earth (Dearden, 57)
• Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman, 73)
• Europa, Europa (Holland, 91)
• Providence (Resnais, 77)
• Carnival in Flanders (Feyder, 35)
• The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 38)
• Miss Julie (Sjoberg, 51)
• Seven Beauties (Wertmuller, 75)
• Les Visiteurs du Soir (Carne, 42)
• Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 61)
• The Servant (Losey, 63)
• Miracle in Milan (De Sica, 51)
• La Belle Noiseuse (Rivette, 91)
• Night of the Shooting Stars (Taviani Bros, 82)
• Smash Palace (Donaldson, 81)
• L'Age D'or (Bunuel, 30)
• 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (Girard, 93)

100 Best Things to Do in the Dark

The AFI is at it again, so I must be too. I put together a list to respond to their first dismal attempt at the top 100 American films back in 1998, and although they've made some improvements (like recognizing comedy as the true American genre, followed closely by horror, therefore horror comedies are the true American product--see, Raimi, Sam), so I thought I'd go and revise my old list, which I never posted on my blog. (It was on my website in the days before blogging was cool. Or even done.)

Therefore I post this list, knowing lists are silly, but this is my version, so it's my silly. There's a whole different list for international films and docs, because each are foreign in their own ways. And as I said last time I apologize to all films not-yet-seen or forgotten. I do not apologize if your favorites aren’t here, though--go make your own list.

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 58)
2. Touch of Evil (Welles, 58)
3. Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 55)
4. The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 41)
5. Citizen Kane (Welles, 41)
6. The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 53)
7. The Awful Truth (McCarey, 37)
8. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 54)
9. Chinatown (Polanski, 74)
10. Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, 84)
11. All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 50)
12. Manhattan (Allen, 79)
13. Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 51)
14. The Lady Eve (Sturges, 41)
15. Sherlock, Jr. (Keaton, 24)
16. Days of Heaven (Malick, 78)
17. Duck Soup (McCarey, 33)
18. Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 67)
19. Blue Velvet (Lynch, 86)
20. Casablanca (Curtiz, 42)
21. Nashville (Altman, 76)
22. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, 43)
23. The Godfather, Part II (Coppola, 74)
24. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 71)
25. Laura (Preminger, 44)
26. Top Hat (Sandrich, 35)
27. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz & Keighley, 38)
28. Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 38)
29. Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 64)
30. Singin’ in the Rain (Donen & Kelly, 52)
31. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 48)
32. Easy Living (Leisen, 37)
33. To Sleep with Anger (Burnett, 90)
34. Annie Hall (Allen, 77)
35. In a Lonely Place (Ray, 50)
36. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 69)
37. Melvin and Howard (Demme, 80)
38. Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Sturges, 44)
39. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 46)
40. North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 59)
41. The Big Sleep (Hawks, 46)
42. Paths of Glory (Kubrick, 57)
43. The Stunt Man (Rush, 80)
44. The Third Man (Reed, 49)
45. Simple Men (Hartley, 92)
46. Notorious (Hitchcock, 46)
47. Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 19)
48. It Happened One Night (Capra, 34)
49. Long Day’s Journey into Night (Lumet, 62)
50. The Searchers (Ford, 56)
51. Written on the Wind (Sirk, 56)
52. Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 32)
53. A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 51)
54. Sunrise (Murnau, 28)
55. The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 35)
56. Adam’s Rib (Cukor, 49)
57. The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, 42)
58. The General (Keaton, 27)
59. Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 44)
60. Network (Lumet, 76)
61. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 59)
62. Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges, 41)
63. Red River (Hawks, 48)
64. Lolita (Kubrick, 62)
65. A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 05)
66. The Women (Cukor, 39)
67. Double Indemnity (Wilder, 44)
68. Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 57)
69. The Godfather (Coppola, 72)
70. Trust (Hartley, 91)
71. Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 55)
72. Woman in the Window (Lang, 44)
73. Stranger than Paradise (Jarmusch, 84)
74. Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 39)
75. The King of Comedy (Scorsese, 83)
76. Zelig (Allen, 83)
77. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 48)
78. The Crimson Pirate (Siodmak, 52)
79. Something Wild (Demme, 86)
80. Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 60)
81. The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 62)
82. Stagecoach (Ford, 39)
83. My Man Godfrey (LaCava, 36)
84. Johnny Guitar (Ray, 54)
85. A Face in the Crowd (Kazan, 57)
86. Drugstore Cowboy (Van Sant, 89)
87. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 71)
88. The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 25)
89. The Naked Spur (Mann, 53)
90. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols, 66)
91. Pennies from Heaven (Ross, 81)
92. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 77)
93. Bigger than Life (Ray, 56)
94. Diner (Levinson, 82)
95. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 76)
96. The Evil Dead II (Raimi, 87)
97. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 94)
98. Nightmare Alley (Goulding, 47)
99. Dead Man (Jarmusch, 97)
100. Repo Man (Cox, 84)

Long Enough to Kill Lesser Cineastes!

Over at Something Awful (tagline: The Internet Makes You Stupid.) are a series of classic film posters re-done Grindhouse style. Go and giggle at them all (or jump to page 9 with Al Gore like you've never seen him before).

Oedipus Pecs

I haven't seen 300, not for any particular reason beyond I'm not even sure what the last film I saw in theaters was. But not seeing a film has never stopped my from writing about it, so I was mighty intrigued when the Los Angeles Times today ran dueling think pieces about the film by Carina Chocano and Patrick Goldstein. Chocano got to a point that's driven me nuts for years (I taught college students, remember), that she put about as well as I've ever seen it:

The interesting question is how "entertainment" has come to be accepted as a valid, irreducible argument against interpretation; how, in a broader sense, the act of putting things in context has come to be seen as inherently suspect. Whether it's the attorney general claiming lack of clarity on the firings of U.S. attorneys, or a Lionsgate executive admitting mistakes were made regarding the torture billboards for Captivity pasted all over town, it seems that no connection is too clear, no cause and effect too obvious for shocked denial and feigned surprise not to be a viable option.

That's not to suggest that anything involving 300 exists on the same plane of importance — it's just a good example of a trend that would be funny if it weren't so insulting.

Exactly why is it that we as Americans assume the only way to be entertained is to stop thinking? You'd think we'd like to think, given for so many of us our jobs are about not thinking (there's a reason Office Space is a cult favorite you know). Even in creative jobs we generally are stuck hewing to a format or style or boss who knows so much better than we do (note: I do not work for such a boss anymore). So why can't our entertainment push us a bit? Isn't it fun to have to figure things out, puzzle connections, fill in artfully left behind blanks?

I guess not, for the usually wise Patrick Goldstein takes the "the adults don't get it" tack in his essay. To drive his point home he does this:

Critics are largely shaped by the aesthetic of the cinematic past, which is why you often get the feeling they've been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new world they describe as coarser, more superficial and less intellectually stimulating than the golden age of their moviegoing youth.

The complaints are almost always the same. "It's an epic without a dream," said one critic. "The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps." Those words were written 30 years ago by Pauline Kael, reviewing Star Wars.

Nothing like trotting out the much reviled den mother of many critics still today--after all, her acolytes get called Paulettes--to prove how stuffy and behind the times those of us who can't just go with the flow are. (And it's taken 30 years for Kael to become a symbol of the stodgy--good things she's dead and doesn't have to hear such claptrap.) Goldstein then goes on to quote the film's director:

[Zack] Snyder has learned that film is a subliminal art, in the sense that he uses his visuals to supply the film's emotional underpinning. In 300, the sky is always dark and unsettled, as if to signal the bitter bloodshed to come. "We tried to make the sky reflect the emotion in the movie, which you can't do in a regular movie," he says. "That's what is great about this kind of green-screen filmmaking. It's not just the actors who matter. Every element in the frame supports the emotion of the moment."

First, it seems neither Goldstein nor Snyder have learned that the pathetic fallacy has been part of art way before moving pictures were a twinkle in Edison's eye. Second, are you trying to tell me no filmmaker before Zack Snyder has used every element in a frame to support the emotion of a moment? Did someone drop Andre Bazin in shoes lined with mise en scene cement into the Mariana Trench when I wasn't looking?

Or perhaps the key is the word "emotions." Snyder doesn' want you to think about 300, he wants the grunting animal brain at the top of your spine to go "WEEEEE!" And sure that "WEEEEE!" is us--to the tune of $129.2 million in just 10 days--but let's hope it's not all of us, and I don't mean that as something snooty and exclusive. I just want the rest of our brains to have something to do, too.