1999: The Insider (Michael Mann)

1999: The Insider (Michael Mann) 
Starting with The Insider, Michael Mann, already a masterful stylist by this point in his career, began going in a new direction.  His films became more abstract, less rooted in cinematic realism as we've come to know it and more concerned with forging something completely modern, and perhaps even without precedent.  Mann has always been interested in filmic vocabulary, but with this next stage he put his experimentation fearlessly at the fore of his work.  And although I still struggle with this later chapter in his career, I can't deny my love for this film. 

Not only is The Insider one of the most formally bold and interesting works for me of this entire period, it merges form and content in a way that makes me want to pack my bags and go pursue something else.  I can't think of many films that, at times, are this avant-garde in their formal approach yet remain completely compelling in a narrative and emotional sense.  Mann has always straddled classical/modern, genre/personal, and real/surreal. And whereas Heat feels like the most classically balanced of all his work, The Insider seems the most balanced on the more modern side of his tendencies.

Other things of note, the casting.  It's incredible, and as meticulous in its ensemble casting as any movie I can remember.  Crowe is awesomely vulnerable.  I completely connect with Pacino in this one.  And of the ensemble, I can't think of people more perfectly cast than Christopher Plummer, Michael Gambon, Bruce McGill, and Colm Feore.  

I know there are people that don't love this one near as much I do.  But I've always marveled at it and consider it one of the greatest accomplishments of the nineties.  

Other contenders for 1999:  From this year I still have some titles to see.  These include: Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, Suwa Nobuhiro's M/Other, Julio Medem's The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, and Frederick Wiseman's Public Housing.  At some point, I need to revisit Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta as I struggled with both the one time I saw them. From this year though, I really like Alexander Payne's Election, Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, Sam Mendes' American Beauty, Andy and Larry Wachowski's The Matrix, David O. Russell's Three Kings, and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey.  I love Bruno Dumont's L'humanite, Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro, and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.  And my closest runner-up is Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us.

7/8/12 I watched Martin Scorsese's My Voyage to Italy.  A wonderful, incredibly thorough look at Neorealism and the Italian cinema that has so profoundly influenced Scorsese.  Special focus is on Rossellini, but De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni also receive insightful commentary.  A great introduction to anyone just beginning to look into this, one of the cinema's greatest moments.

6/7/14 I watched Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: An Odyssey: New American Independents & The Digital Revolution.  Again another fairly interesting episode where I gravitated in particular to those segments with Gus Van Sant and Jane Campion.  

11/4/17 I watched Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend.  I definitely got some new insight into Herzog and Kinski but I wouldn't call it all that great of a doc.  

4/16/20 I watched Nobuhiro Suwa's M/Other.  The first film I have seen from Suwa delves deeply into a male-female relationship that starts to be challenged and threatens to unravel when the male's son from another woman comes to live with them for a month.  It all feels uncommonly true to life.  The relationship is working one day, struggling the next, and then is back on track before starting to seem vulnerable again.  Suwa's style, in a similar way, is very natural.  A couple of times it even takes on some of the characteristics of an old home movie, flickering shots on a a less robust film stock.     

9/6/20 I watched Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's Sicily!  Although the French husband-wife directing team has a major reputation among a number of people I admire, this is only the second film of theirs I have ever seen.  Clearly they are masters of the medium, as they are able to deconstruct it and find puctuation that is different from anything I have ever seen before.  I am thinking of the shots that linger on someone long after they have finished speaking or the sudden shift to silence as the train continues to move through the landscape.  But, it never came together for me.  I enjoyed watching it but when it was all said and done, I was unsure what to make of what I had just seen. 

11/18/21 I watched Kelly Reichardt's Ode.  I watched a very poor print but I feel confident in saying it contains some of Reichardt's skill for capturing the feel of the American landscape and her soft lyricism.  It does not have the weight of some of her greatest work but it signals a bit of the talent to come. 

2/13/22 I watched Jean-Claude Biette's Trois ponts sur la riviere.  I know more about French film than I know about almost anything else.  And though I was aware of some of Biette's work, particularly Loin de Manhattan and Le champignon des Carpathes, this is the first of his movies I have seen.

Biette has a great feel for capturing spaces in a precisely realistic way, like a college student's apartment in Paris or a bookstore in Porto, Portugal.  Similarly, his dialogue and the way he lets his actors move around and express themselves, reinforces a directorial desire to adhere closely to the way these types of moments unfold in real life.  In fact, it seems that Biette's quest to remain accurate and truthful give the film one of its most unique qualities, its willingness to show certain glances or moments without the need to explain them.  I am thinking, for instance, of the way Claire stares from her hotel window at the Brazilian guest, the brief scene suggesting it is normal for attraction to occur without ever being acted upon.  

I can only guess at the reasons for it but like Rivette's Out 1, Le Pont du Nord or even La bande des quatre, Biette includes, with the character of Frank, a subplot of noirish overtones.  Like in the abovementioned Rivette works, the subplot feels more artificial and more difficult to believe than one typically experiences in regular genre films while the foregrounded story, that of Arthur and Claire, feels far more real than most movies.

2/26/22 I watched Frederick Wiseman's Belfast, Maine.  Wiseman is as pure and true to form as always.  But I found this particular cast of characters slightly less interesting than those featured in my favorite Wiseman films.