Good news -- MovieMaker Reboot!

Before I started this blog, I was doing weekly posts over on MovieMaker Magazine's website.  Those posts ended around November of last year. But good news: MovieMaker has asked me to reboot "my favorite film from 1926-2008" series for their site.

Starting yesterday, I have a new series at MovieMaker entitled "I Found It At The Movies" (a tribute to one of my favorite film critics Pauline Kael's first compilation I Lost It At The Movies).  This series will begin with 1926 and unfold in chronological order.  I have added one new section to each post, entitled "What moviemakers can learn".

I'm very excited to be continuing this great relationship with MovieMaker and can't thank everyone enough for your support of this series so far.  It's been a great ride.

2002: Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski)

2002: Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski) 

"It's so easy to laugh.  It's so easy to hate.  It takes strength to be gentle and kind."
- The Smiths

I first heard about Bujalski after reading a great Amy Taubin piece in Film Comment.  I soon tracked down Funny Ha Ha, and when I did, it really took me by surprise.  It was so different from anything else I'd seen coming out of the indy scene.  

Bujalski's film is natural and real but not at all in the way that someone like Harmony Korine might take on naturalism.  There's very little irony here, and the style is unabrasive, observational, and remarkably restrained.  The camera is often handheld but always in a fluid rather than in a shaky, aggressive manner.  Korine and many of his generation wanted to bring the Dogma aesthetic to the states.  Bujalski, meanwhile, seems to be channeling more Rohmer and Jean Eustache.  

Bujalski's casualness can be deceiving, sometimes creating the impression that his cinema is unambitious.  However, I think the way that his writing and direction of actors strips away most of what we think of as "actorly" is not only incredibly ambitious, but also incredibly successful.  Bujalski inspires and excites me, and this is my favorite of his films so far.

Other contenders for 2002:  From this year, I still have some titles to see.  These include: Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow, Niki Caro's Whale Rider, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, Rob Marshall's Chicago, and Hong Sang Soo's Turning Gate.  From this year, I really like Spike Lee's 25th Hour, Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir, and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's The Son.  I love Jim Sheridan's In America, Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, and Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her.  And my closest runner-up is Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale. 

4/17/11 I watched David Lynch's The Short Films of David Lynch.  This collection compiles six Lynch short films, Six Figures Getting Sick, The Alphabet, The Grandmother, The Amputee, The Cowboy and the Frenchman, and Lumiere: Premonitions Following an Evil Deed.  I was most partial to The Cowboy, which had the largest dose of Lynch's vintage humor.  But it was interesting to see the early work, and how quickly into his film career, Lynch already demonstrated a great interest and skill with sound and color. 

5/25/11 I watched Niki Caro's Whale Rider.  A bit overwrought and overly sentimental for my own tastes.  But Keisha Castle-Hughes has a great face that Caro uses to very good effect.  

7/6/11 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's Ten.  Kiarostami is one of the medium's all-time great humanists.  But the format here grows old after awhile, and keeps Kiarostami's extraordinary sensitivity and observations a bit too hemmed in. 

12/14/13 I watched Nicolas Philibert's Etre et avoir.  Less disciplined and rigorous than Wiseman, Philibert still impresses with the unique moments he is able to capture.  Watching for instance a young boy realize there are numbers beyond those he already knows feels like something the cinema has never quite captured before, the awakening of a young mind.  Overall the film is a very warm, patient look at an extremely gifted and giving teacher.  

5/1/21 I watched Spike Lee's Jim Brown: All-American.  What I would have thought would be an impassioned look at Brown seems fairly detached and disengaged.

3/9/22 I watched Frederick Wiseman's The Last Letter.  Wiseman's great strength is observing life as it is unfolding, holding up a mirror so we can hopefully see better, feel deeper and think more effectively.  There are some powerful elements in this work but heavy stylization and artifice work against the master's most special gifts and talents.

3/11/24 I watched Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen.  Although I am far from a Loach completist, I have seen several of his films through the years and long been a great admirer of his early film Kes.  Here, Loach seems to be inhabiting some of the same world of Kes while also channeling 400 Blows, a touch of Dardenne rawness and the inescapable doom of Mean Streets.  It's never entirely clear where it's all going.  Loach keeps the danger ratcheted up by keeping the story grounded and the emotions plausible.   

2001: Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

2001: Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch) 
One thing people don't discuss all that much when it comes to David Lynch is his relationship to film noir.  When I look at the majority of his career -- Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks TV show and film, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire -- as much as anything else, I see influences and traces of noir.  Sure he blends genre, and sure his films challenge us to reconsider the look, feel, and sound of noir, but so many elements of noir are present.  And I say this as a compliment.  After all, noir is the genre I know best, and probably the one that got me into all this in the first place.

I won't break down and analyze all the noir elements I see in Mulholland Dr.  But I will at least make a quick mention of them:  the theme of amnesia, a deep relationship to a specific city and locale, a serpentine plot, a non-linear narrative, a femme fatale, a fatalistic tone, obscurity in favor of clarity, elements of crime, and an emphasis on the nocturnal.    

Mulholland Dr. combines all of Lynch's talents -- mastery of noir, humor, and sexiness -- into an incredibly powerful and fresh concoction.  I love almost all of Lynch's work, but this one has some of his most memorable characters.  It is also one of his more accessible and relatively audience-friendly works.  As always with Lynch, Mulholland Dr. is both entertaining and smart, and looks and sounds amazing.

Other contenders for 2001:  From this year, I still have some things to see.  These include: Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera, Jafar Panahi's The Circle, Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, Yves Lavandier's Oui, mais..., and Pedro Costa's Ou git votre sourire enfoui?  From this year, I really like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl and Sean Penn's The Pledge.  I love Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: AI, Jacques Rivette's Va savoir, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo, and Dover Kosashvili's Late Marriage. And my closest runner-up is Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There?

8/29/10 I watched Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.  I've always struggled a little with his cinema.  He has wonderful taste in music, his cinema is quite unique and of one piece, but it leaves me a little frustrated.  I'm not sure if it's whether I find it too quirky and interested in being hip, or I struggle with something else in his work.  He's a talent.  I just have different wants and needs, I think, when it comes to the medium. 

12/10/10 I watched Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World.  Zwigoff has a little of Woody Allen's sensibility and an extraordinary sense of humor, at times.  I wish this film was a little less quirky and the visuals a little less glossy.  But it's mostly a fun, pretty original little film.  

12/11/10 I watched Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia.  Sexy, for sure.  But not really my type of film.  Complex like the Inarritu movies, with an aesthetic that I found a little on the ugly and messy side.  

12/21/10 I watched Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love.  Godard has not abandoned his path one bit.  He continues to believe that the role of an artist is to provide a mirror on his/her world, and he continues to believe in the power of thought, analysis, and information as a weapon rather than as a crutch.  His style here is more like Chris Marker's filmmaking, but he still has the ability to be lyrical, incredibly perceptive, and bold.   It's good to see him looking at Paris again.  I just wish, at times, that his style was a little more vital, and his thoughts a little easier to follow.  

1/3/11 I watched Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down.  It's amazing that Scott was able to make one battle sequence stretch almost two hours.  He finds a few moments, here and there.  But all in all, I thought it a little less than its reputation. 

9/1/14 I watched Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home.  Only the second film I have so far from the celebrated Portuguese filmmaker and again I was impressed, moved and encouraged to seek out and watch more of his work.  At times his aesthetic and sensibility remind me of Rohmer or even Rivette, something very loose and smart, and it does not hurt that this film takes place in Paris and features Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve.  The title holds several different meanings and the final image perpetuates the contemplative mood and tone that seems to be one of the hallmarks of de Oliveira.  

3/13/22 I watched Frederick Wiseman's Domestic Violence.  Another courageous, unflinching look from Wiseman.  It has some tremendous passages but I was never as involved as I sometimes get in some of my favorite Wiseman films.  

12/10/23 I watched Manoel de Oliveira's Porto of My Childhood.  Struck me as a mixture of a memory film from Godard and Marker.  Poetic and fully felt even if I could not follow it all. 

2000: Yi Yi (Edward Yang)

2000: Yi Yi (Edward Yang) 

The great art of humanism is alive and well.  Of course it is, Abbas Kiarostami is still making movies.  But this year, for once, it's not an Iranian film that I thought was the most humanist but rather this entry from the late Taiwanese director, Edward Yang.  

Yi Yi for me has the depth of character of the great Dreyer and Ozu films but a little less austerity and a little more warmth.  It's nothing flashy at all just committed, engaged cinema that wants us to look at ourselves and come away with a little more understanding.


Yang has a very natural, unobtrusive style that's rigorous without being cold.  He is neither as formal as Takeshi Kitano, Tsai Ming-liang, or Wong Kar-wai nor as demanding as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  Yi Yi is a wonderfully accessible film with unusual depth, patience, and heart.

Other contenders for 2000:  From this year, I still have some things to see.  These include:  Agnes Varda's Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep, Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, Arnaud Deplechin's Esther Kahn, Terrence Davies' The House of Mirth, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon, and Hong Sang Soo's The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors.  At some point I need to revisit Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as I struggled a little the first time I saw them.  But from this year I really like David Gordon Green's George Washington, Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away, and Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester.  I love Bahman Ghobadi's A Time for Drunken Horses and Jim McKay's Our Song.  And my closest runner-up is Francois Ozon's Under the Sand.

11/27/16 I watched Chantal Akerman's La Captive.  A terribly dysfunctional relationship is at the core of Akerman's film.  Although she conceives and executes at an extremely high level, the suffocating nature of the film's thematic might make it tough to support and digest.

11/18/19 I rewatched Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love which I haven't seen since its premiere at LACMA.  I had forgotten how remarkably beautiful it is.  Specific mention for Cheung and her dresses, very well the most stunning wardrobe in the history of the medium.  Wong's style is frustrating here but is it a choice he has made to frustrate us with repetition, with grounded beauty, to mirror the lives of the two main characters.  It is a challenging film, one that never provides the buoyancy it suggests it might offer, and one that feels like this very special recipe of Nouvelle Vague mixed with Bertolucci's The Conformist.  

12/24/19 I watched Miguel Gomes' Christmas Inventory.  Interesting to see this early film by a Portuguese filmmaker I greatly admire.  If nothing else, his sense of the relationship between sound and image is already well developed at an early stage in his career.

6/19/20 I watched Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards.  A film with lots of humanism and undercurrents of Iranian political issues that never fully grabbed me.  Although I was impressed by its actors and its symbolism.  

3/14/21 I watched Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I.  Only the fourth Varda film I have ever seen.  What impresses most is Varda's lightness of touch, her openness to life and the experiences she finds along the way.  Her films have some of the analytical weight of the great Nouvelle Vague works but she also infuses them with as much of the characteristic New Wave playfulness as any of her peers.  Along with Demy, Varda stikes me as perhaps the most humanist of all of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers.

10/30/21 I watched James Gray's The Yards.  Gray's second film has much to recommend.  But it is so measured that it rarely gets to you and lacks the visceral impact of the films of Coppola that he so clearly admires. 

12/26/22 I watched Jia Zhangke's Platform.  Only the second film I've seen from Zhangke.  So far, I can say that his cinema veers close to Hou Hsiao-hsien in its rigor and slowness.  This one felt particularly pessimistic compared to Still Life and suggested a China of very little exposure, hope or opportunity.

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.   

1998: The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)

1998: The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick) 

What an amazing, unparalleled career to examine, the filmmaking career of Terrence Malick.  Two critically-revered films and then nothing for twenty years.  I'll never forget when I first saw this one.  It was at my single favorite theater in all of Los Angeles, the Mann Village Theatre.  It was the middle of the day, I was up in the balcony, and completely mesmerized.  

I'm in a small, small camp, it seems, that considers this their favorite of all of Malick's films.  Though his style always interests me, I like the way it works best in this one.

When I think about The Thin Red Line, I think about one of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen.   John Toll's colors and Malick's unmatched relationship to nature combine to create an experience that had synapses firing for me that I never knew existed.  

Malick, like David Lynch, has such a liberated style you almost feel like you're in one of their meditation strands as their films unfold.  A brilliant return for an American original.  Malick is a real force, and I'm excited to see where he continues to go.  

Other contenders for 1998:  From this year, I still have some things to see.  These include:  Manoel de Oliveira's  Inquietude, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, Jacques Rivette's Secret defense, Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, and Patrice Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. At some point I'll need to revisit Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration as I struggled it with it the one time I saw it.  But from this year, I really like Warren Beatty's Bulworth, Olivier Assayas' Late August, Early September, Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, Tony Barbieri's One, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Flowers of Shanghai, The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.  I love Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels, Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, and Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life. And my closest runner-up is Eric Rohmer's An Autumn Tale.

9/23/11 I watched Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco.  I like Stillman and really love Metropolitan.  But here his characters and their intellectual rants grow tiresome after awhile, and the whole world begins to reek of artifice rather than as some expert, personal style.  

4/19/14 I watched Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: New Boundaries: World Cinema in Africa, Asia & Latin America.  I enjoyed seeing Kiarostami of course and highlights for me were hearing both Tsai Ming-liang and him interviewed. 

10/17/18 I watched Tamara Jenkins' Slums of Beverly Hills.  Some really impressive acting, particularly Tomei, but an indy that feels very much of its time which in this case is not a great thing.

3/21/20 I watched David Gordon Green's Physical Pinball.  Interesting to see Green without Orr.  There is a little bit of poetry here but it is nowhere near what he would achieve two years later with George Washington.  

2/8/21 I watched John Dahl's Rounders.  Every now and then I will see a reconsider film, a movie that forces me to rethink how I feel about an actor, a director or several of its cast or crew.  Although adhering closely to the path set out by The Hustler and countless other films about redemption, and certainly not seeking to be high art, Rounders made me for the first time rate Dahl and Norton, both of whom I have always felt lukewarm about.  It has to be the greatest film yet about poker.  

11/25/21 I watched Julio Medem's Lovers of the Artic Circle.  The romantic sweep hint at some of cienma's greatest stories of romance.  But Medem's style is a bit too heavyhanded to earn all of the genuine beats of the story.

7/11/22 I watched Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple.  I am still relatively unfamiliar with Makhmalbaf's films and her father's work compared to Kiarostami.  As a debut feature, it is remarkable.  It would be fair to say its approach appears neorealist - natural locations, seemingly non-professional actors, humanistic gestures, very little non-diegetic music and simple stories delivered as parables.  It is heavier on the symbolism than in Kiarostami's work or the early neorealist films from Rossellini, De Sica or Visconti.  It is also darker and engaged with more emotionally disturbing material than any work I can recall from the aforementioned filmmakers.  

9/14/23 I watched Ziad Doueiri's West Beirut.  In its best moments, it gets at the wonderful balance that neorealism struck infusing the heaviness of history's tragic moments with the richness of lives and humanity.  But it lacks neorealism's rigor and I never fully felt the characters' plight.

10/13/23 I watched Cauleen Smith's Drylongso.  Extremely small budget filmmaking that at times rises to impress and move.  But I struggled with the main actress (she just came across as too young to me compared to the others around her) and I was never fully immersed in Smith's world and emotions.

1997: Hana-bi (Takeshi Kitano)

1997: Hana-bi (Takeshi Kitano) 

I don't know if it's the Virgo in me, or where I get it, but I always prefer simple to complicated.  Particularly as our world, from these eyes, seems to become more and more complex, I want art to strip that complexity away and show me something pure, clean, and fairly uncluttered.  I want art mostly as a respite from my daily life.   

Many of my favorite filmmakers fall into this category (Bresson, Jarmusch, Rohmer, Dreyer, early Wenders, to name but a few).  They are simplifiers, always looking to distill their work into its most basic essence.  "What else can I take away?" must be one of the most important questions in their approach.

Another filmmaker I'd put into this category is Takeshi Kitano.  Like the others mentioned above, Kitano keeps things pretty spare and minimal. I also think he uses color as well, or better, than any filmmaker working right now.  He has a very specific, mannered rhythm like Jarmusch or Hartley and a way with violence that is quite his own.

I like almost everything Kitano has ever done.  But this is my favorite.  

Other contenders for 1997:  From this year, I still have some things to see.  These include: Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son, and Tsai Ming-liang's The River.  At some point I need to revisit Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential as I struggled with it the first time I saw it.  From this year, I really like Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, and Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together.  I love David Lynch's Lost Highway, Paul Schrader's Affliction, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, and Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry.  And my closest runner-up is Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter.  

9/22/11 I watched Andrew Niccol's Gattaca.  I found it to be one of the most unique, thoughtful, and moving Hollywood films I have seen in awhile.  It has to go down as one of the more striking debuts of the last twenty years with a Niccol script that is spare and poetic, all in the best of ways.  I wish visually the world was a little less flat and generic, but Nyman's score and Niccol's smooth direction lift the story well above the sterile visuals.  

9/29/11 I watched Tsai Ming-liang's The River.  I'm a big fan of Tsai's work.  And this is the most challenging of his films I've seen.  It's his most austere and most formally daring (long passages in almost complete darkness and long takes of almost no action, sound, or movement).  I admire the achievement here but respond in a more significant way to some of his other work.  

6/3/17 I watched Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  An Eastwood that I had never seen never really got to me.  It all felt like pretty typical genre fare in terms of courtroom drama and its feel for Savannah never felt that interesting or deep to me.  

8/23/17 I rewatched Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown.  It showcases Tarantino's feel for a different part of LA (Hermosa Beach, Carson, Torrance, etc), music, dialogue and love for the marginal (Forster and Grier).  It might be overly arrogant about how clever its non-linear abilities are or even its ability to play out the con.  But it is an enjoyable watch and easier to take in than Tarantino's first two features.

10/26/17 I watched Werner Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly.  It is interesting to see the doc after having seen the feature Rescue Dawn.  But as opposed to a similar example, Mann's Ali and the doc When We Were Kings, this time I much preferred the fictional account.  Perhaps it has to do with what I saw first and the element of surprise or perhaps Herzog and Bale brought Dengler's story to life in much more vivid ways than the heavy expository methods of this doc.  

3/24/18 I watched Hal Hartley's Henry Fool.  Although I have been a fan of some of Hartley's other work, I struggled with just how mannered this particular film was.  Everything felt as a piece but belonging to a world that I could never fully believe.  

6/25/20 I watched Charles Burnett's The Final Insult.  Striking in how human and sensitive it is, even if it lacks some of the poetic balance and levity of some of his work I like the best.  

12/22/21 I watched Olivier Assayas' HHH: Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien.  Not as engrossing encounter as I might have hoped between two of my favorite contemporary filmmakers.

3/7/22 I watched Frederick Wiseman's Public Housing.  Wiseman captures many sides of poverty and race in Chicago and begins to draw the characters and world that David Simon would only a few years later craft into his masterful series The Wire.  There are so many memorable scenes in this work that only further attest to the fact that Wiseman has a process and a temperament that enable him to reflect truths about certain sides of the American experience that no other filmmaker has been able to match.

3/29/22 I watched Mathieu Amalric's Mange ta soupe.  An odd medium-length film from Amalric that is silent for long passages and somewhat reminiscent of Tati's work.  

Cutting Room Floor

Here's my chat from yesterday with Casey Ryan of the Cutting Room Floor:

http://myrealbroadcast.myrealtalent.com/Cutting_Room_Floor/

We discuss The Last Lullaby and Peril.  It was a great doing this!

1996: Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen)

1996: Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Roger Deakins began his collaboration with the Coen brothers in 1991 on their film Barton Fink.  The two directors and the cameraman have since proven that they have one of the most vital, important, and powerful artistic relationships of anyone in film.  


All of their work together has great, visual interest, but of everything they have ever done, this remains my favorite of their aesthetic accomplishments.  I'm a sucker, as I've mentioned a couple of times now, for snow-covered imagery.  And this film is about as white as any ever made.  It's a gorgeously controlled work, in terms of its color palette, camerawork, and production design.  Everything seems considered, and everything feels unusually cohesive.  


The Coen brothers just so happen to have one other special collaboration and that's with their composer, Carter Burwell.  His work is always top shelf, but this particular score haunts me as much as any he's ever done.  


Wonderful writing per usual by the brothers.  Also two of their most memorable characters for William H Macy and Frances McDormand.  I usually don't champion "ironic noir", but other aspects of this one far outweigh any typical difficulties I might have.  




Other contenders for 1996: From this year, I still have some things to see.  These include: Peter Greenaway's Pillow Book, Edward Yang's Mahjong, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.  At some point, I need to revisit Catherine Breillat's Parfait Amour! and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's La Promesse as it's been too long since I've seen either of them to know where they'd place on this list.  I really like Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild, Wes Craven's Scream, and Claire Denis' Nenette et Boni.  And I love Hou Hsiao-hsien's Goodbye South, Goodbye, Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale, Arnaud Desplechin's How I Got Into an Argument... (My Sex Life), Andre Techine's Thieves, Takeshi Kitano's Kids Return, and Abel Ferrara's The Funeral.  And my closest runner-up is Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible.

9/5/10 I watched Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight.  It's an extremely confident debut, and I was particularly impressed by his work with Samuel L Jackson and Philip Baker Hall.  A little more mannered, perhaps, than my ideal kind of noir.  But I enjoyed it all the same.  

1/12/14 I watched Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's La Promesse.  All of the tight elements that have come to describe the Belgian filmmakers' style of filmmaking are already in order here - the fluid, handheld camerawork, the natural, unforced performances, and the very lived-in wardrobe and locations.  It is a flawless film in many ways, but it is neither as emotional as some of the great Neorealist work nor as transcendent.  

7/21/15 I watched Bobby and Peter Farrelly's Kingpin.  A crass but lovable comedy.  It helps that Harrelson is unusally likable and keeps things grounded even when the brothers push things too far beyond plausibility or funny gross. 

2/22/16 I rewatched Arnaud Desplechin's How I Got Into an Argument...(My Sex Life).  Desplechin's second feature comes with a certain looseness that could belie a unique cinematic intelligence and a nearly unprecedented capturing of uninhibited femaleness.  It feels more akin to a novel in its shape and its courage to let time unfold within its own disheveled set of rules.  "Tenderness is the fear of adulthood", Desplechin quotes Kundera, and this film might be as spot-on as any in the medium's history for capturing that very strange road from freedom to responsibility.   

7/3/17 I watched Adam McKay's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.  Not my thing but had a few funny moments when one is in the mood to completely shut it off and just be entertained a bit.

1995: Heat (Michael Mann)

1995: Heat (Michael Mann)
Ask me to choose my favorite post-seventies crime film, and this is it.  I think it's Mann's greatest accomplishment.  I also think it's our greatest crime epic, post-Godfather.  So why do I like it so much?        

a.  Location work

First off, I love how it treats one of my favorite aspects of the first noir cycle, a real interest in location work.  I gravitate towards realism.  And there's a profound effect that comes with the choice to shoot in actual locations that's missing for me in the more artificial and heavily art-directed neo-noirs.  After all, noir was spearheaded by jaded Europeans, who having fled their countries, arrived in Hollywood wanting to tell the truth.  Part of getting at the truth for them was taking a more realistic approach to filmmaking.  So Mann's work here, particularly his interest in shooting in actual locations, connects Heat for me back to these earlier films.

b.  Formal rigor

Often relegated to B-film status, Mann takes the crime film and gives it the most artful of all presentations.  There's a specificity in every shot, every cut, and every camera movement.  And Mann has a Kubrickian control, a conception of craft, and attention to formal detail unmatched by anyone currently working in Hollywood.  One of the more appealing aspects of the first cycle of noir films is their formal audacity and achievement.  By creating such a highly formal work with Heat, Mann once again offers a connection between his cinema and this past tradition. 

c.  Existential noir

Rather than take the more poular post-modern approach to noir, Mann steers clear of irony, narrative gymnastics, and pop-culture references to deliver a work with the goal of existential weight.  This tone feels more in line to me with the first cycle of noir films than the tone coming out of the post-modern cycle that began to appear in the seventies.

d.  Modern treatment

But Heat is certainly not a mere re-tread of the first cycle; Mann definitely updates the tradition and gives it a new feel.  His most major contribution is the way that he deals with sound/music.  Most of the films from the first cycle had symphonic scores.  Mann takes this tendency and replaces it with minimal, electronic music.  His film also relies much more on natural sounds than the early noirs.  Just listen to the way Mann makes sound the driving force during some of the key moments in the film, how he accents the big trucks in the first set piece or the guns in the famous heist scene.  By being so loyal in other areas but by making such a radical departure in his treatment of sound/music, Mann both upholds and moves the noir tradition forward with his work.    

It's a taste thing, I realize.  But for me, when it comes to updating noir, Heat is the perfect paradigm for a new direction.  I simply think it's a marvel.

Other contenders for 1995:  From this year, I still have some things to see.  These include:  Maurice Pialat's Le Garcu, Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, Jacques Rivette's Haut bas fragile, Charles Burnett's When It Rains, Arturo Ripstein's Principio y fin, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Good Men, Good Women, and Manuel Poirier's ...A la campagne.  At some point, I need to revisit Gus Van Sant's To Die For and Todd Haynes' Safe as it's been too long since I've seen either of them to know where they'd place on this list.  From this year, I really like Claude Chabrol's La ceremonie, Martin Scorsese's Casino, Noemie Lvovsky's Oublie-moi, Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine, Benoit Jacquot's A Single Girl, Larry Clark's Kids, and Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine.  I love Jean-Luc Godard's JLG/JLG. And my closest runner-up is Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

10/19/11 I watched Maurice Pialat's Le Garcu.  There's such a natural heft to Pialat's cinema.  And when it's at its best, it's grinding into terrain that is so rich, human, complex, and honest.  Pialat's final film might not be my favorite of his, but it's still a very strong work.  

12/9/12 I watched Charles Burnett's When It Rains.  At times, you might feel watching this short film that it's among the most amateurish things you've ever seen.  But Burnett straddles the line and by the end delivers the Bressonian punch he's after.  A difficult film to find but certainly worth seeking out.

5/30/15 I watched Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming.  Baumbach.  It's funny at times, familar to my own life and intermittently playful and likable.  But he can also be a little meandering, irritatingly verbose and emotionally cheap.  Glad I saw this though.  Feels like an important piece of the American indie story in the 90s. 

12/2/21 I watched Joao Cesar Monteiro's God's Comedy.  It's my first experience with the Portuguese filmmaker's work.  It reminded me of Moretti yet a little darker, a little less political and a little less funny.  I look forward to seeing more of Monteiro's work as he's clearly a cinephile who is bold and unafraid to take the medium into challenging places. 

3/11/22 I watched Frederick Wiseman's Ballet.  Not one of the more involving Wiseman films for me.  Sure it has some extraordinary passages but I never felt like I knew anyone all that well.  

7/17/22 I watched Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg.  This essay bears interest in the way it examines stardom and the splintering of an important figure in the history of film.