Eleven Months

Holy shit, only one month left of this thing. And I only broke my rules one week (some time back before the oscars I did a week of newer films to try and catch up). Anyway, self-congratulations and retrospect forthcoming upon its completion, along with modified rules for a new year.

Top five films of the month, in no particular order:

Solaris
Control
For a Few Dollars More
Amarcord
Charade

Honorable Mention: The Adversary, Rebecca, The Fly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Secret in Their Eyes

Rebecca

Rebecca (1940)
IMDB #97 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032976/]

The Gist:
I spent a good deal of time being annoyed with this film only to find out that I hadn't any need to be. And I don't know how to explain that without giving information about the plot so in case anyone does stumble upon this (doubtful), I will reserve my comments. I will only say that this is a Hitchcock film that doesn't quite feel like his early work in England and doesn't quite feel like the better known suspense films he would be known for in the later stages of his career. I suppose it's a bit of a transitional film then, and as such it makes sense that this is the only film of his to win an oscar for best picture (after all, he was never quite their taste as it were). I don't think it's one of his best films, but it is very engrossing, especially as things came to a close. Not so much in suspense, more because of a genuine interest in the characters. I credit the book more for this though, and can't help but feel that something was lost in the translation which is mere speculation having not actually read the book. It's not that the film was bad, merely that I have some odd feeling that the book could be incredible and the film couldn't quite keep up tonally at times.

Amarcord

Amarcord (1973)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071129/]

The Gist:
Amarcord is one of the stranger Fellini films I've seen. I found it a little off-putting at first, the way the film tries to encapsulate the essence of the town instead of presenting any plot movement (by the way, there is none). This feeling persisted until about a half hour into the film when I felt the rhythm settle itself around two different anchors: 1. A small Italian family and 2. A presumably omniscient narrator character a la "Our Town". Through these two anchors we are given a portrait of Italian life moments before the ruin of World War II had set in. The film did not reference the fascist rule of Mussolini too much. In fact, one elongated sequence of the man visiting the small town was the most it ever figured prominently in the plot. Given the title's translation though (Amarcord = I Remember), you can get the sense of the nostalgia the director is attempting to harness, the carefree moments before death and subsequent financial hardship. The film lacks the primal force of the directors magnificent string of subsequent films in the late fifties and early sixties (8 1/2, La Dolce, Cabiria) but it had these astonishing moments that really blew me away. My favorite was the gorgeous sequence in the fog where the grandfather of the family mused to himself as he wandered around lost about whether this was what the afterlife was like and saying if so he didn't care for it.

The Fly

The Fly (1986)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091064/]

The Gist:
The creation of Brundle-Fly! Half scientist Seth Brundle, half house fly, all crazy manic sugar eating wall climbing body deteriorating goodness. In Cronenburg's remake of the original (something I still haven't seen), we jump rather quickly into a romance between scientist and investigative reporter that is sidetracked by a drunken night where Jeff Goldblum jumps into his teleportation device without much safety precautions verified (it had only turned an orangutan inside out a few scenes beforehand) and gets his genes spliced with a fly and spends the rest of the movie turning into a monster while making odd scientific observations about his process and getting into arm-wrestling matches at the local bar. A good time to be had by all, even though by the end the sheer wig out factor of this film is pretty high. For instance, a jaw just drops off of Brundle-Fly's face and flops on the floor like a fish. That part was pretty gross.

Solaris

Solaris (1972)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/]

The Gist:
Solaris is a film that evokes a bizarre poetry about the nature of humanity, of how we connect to other human beings, of our sense of purpose. It follows a psychologist to a space station left in ruins where a crew of 93 or so (I forget the actual number) has dwindled to just two. What has happened to the entire crew is something of a mystery, though we have two cases we know of that we can draw conclusions from (1. a recent Suicide and 2. some rescue mission to the alien planet the station orbits). To make a long story short, the alien planet has some strange consciousness that the station is studying and apparently has the ability to manifest human beings from the astronauts subconscious, thus creating a now immortal replication of the protagonists wife who keeps trying to kill herself and can't. Is this sounding awesome to you yet? Because it should. However, all the fascinating aspects of the plot aside, this film is one of the better films I've ever seen due to all the bizarre risks the director takes: switching back and forth between black and white, strange lyrical sections where the plot evaporates like when you sit and watch some cacophonous ballet of traffic for ten minutes, and so on and so forth. Most importantly, it broods on the nature of life and creation, and this duality of the mystery of our own creation when contrasted with the self-aware creations of the alien planet.

Week Forty-Four

New Queue:

Solaris (1972) - check
The Fly (1986) - check
Amarcord (1973) - check
Rebecca (1940) - check

The Adversary

The Adversary (1971)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066237/]

The Gist:
Satyajit Ray is probably the only Indian director I know by name, a man more influenced by Italian Neorealism and French New Wave and the Swedish art movement (of which I really only know Bergman but I know there's more to it than that) and so on and who doesn't resemble even a little of what Indian cinema is currently known for (ie Bollywood). The first film I saw of Ray's was The World of Apu, which was a great movie experience for me. I don't think The Adversary is as compelling, particularly because through a lot of the film the protagonist feels too passive and because the surrealist imagery feels far to transparent and on the nose (especially when compared to late phase Fellini or Bergman). I do, however, think this is a beautiful film that grows into itself nicely, and whose closing moments truly reflect the work of the master. Particularly when I saw the ending minutes of the film, I knew that Ray had a perfect ending on his hands. That along with the character's emergence into action and the spark of a love interest really validated the film's weaker moments for me.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/]

The Gist:
Ah, the campy 50s sci-fi thriller B-movie with social relevance, where some unknown alien threat is taking over the innocent people of small town, USA and replacing them with emotionless drones spurring the paranoiac escapades of Joe Doctor and his high school sweet heart and some other people that aren't important save for alien pod fodder and how it all resembles the collective of communism where everyone is "the same" and thus are debased into evil carbon copies who drive through American highways with trucks full of pods to infect other small towns like a disease and Joe Doctor can't do anything except avoid sleeping lest he or High School Betty get turned into drones themselves and so they shoot themselves up with some anonymous secret stay awake drugs and run away a lot and finally its just Joe Doctor alone screaming frantically in a police station like a mad man with his hair all fussed and uh... Well, in other words, I liked the film.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations (1946)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038574/]

The Gist:
An early David Lean film, just one year after Brief Encounter (a film I saw earlier in the project), doing a fairly classic rendition of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (as opposed to Cuaron's more modernist take...which I just found out was by Alfonso Cuaron, kind of crazy). Anyway, the film can feel a little stagnate at times but for the most part I found it very entertaining in its own sort of strict formalist sort of way. What I think helped the film, and perhaps what I think propelled it to greater heights than its imperfect 1998 counterpart, is that it has this gothic vibe that is just very suitable for Dickensian atmosphere. The dark shadows of the graveyard and the cobwebs of the mansion and the dark waters as they make the harrowing escape near the end of the film, it all gives the narrative such life. Now if only the writing didn't feel just a little stale.

Control

Control (2007)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421082/]

The Gist:
Control is a minimalist biopic about Ian Curtis, the lead singer from Joy Division. Before this film I had vaguely heard of Joy Division but I didn' t know any of their music, and I didn't know anything about Curtis' life. I liked it that way because the film was something of an intense discovery on both fronts for me. The music is bare, stripped down, very primal, strikes a good cord, and as a character study Curtis is pretty fascinating. However, with only that considered you only have the ingredients of a good biopic. The execution, the performances, and particularly the editing elevate this rather effortlessly to a truly great film. Honest, if I ever taught editing classes I would use this as an example of an extremely engaging style. It allows each moment to breath and yet makes its cuts and transitions before the natural moment (in terms of a more traditional film aesthetic), which keeps things off balance but also cuts into the heart of each scene very well. That bizarrely efficient style mixed with the minimalism, the music, the powerful performances from the three leads... It was a shame when the film was over.

Week Forty-Three

New Queue:

Control (2007) - check
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - check
Great Expectations (1946) - check
The Adversary (1971) - check

Charade

Charade (1963)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056923/]

The Gist:
Okay, let's side step the fact that Cary Grant looks really old in this film (sorry Cary), and focus on the excellent writing and odd tonality of the whole thing, particularly anchored in what is possibly the best Audrey Hepburn performance I have ever seen. The director takes the writing, takes what could be sort of zany and madcap and instead subdues all these moments creating a more stark absurdist humor. This is evident in all the performances, but none more than Hepburn who comes off a little crazy and is all the more fascinating for it. The way most would engage in the dialogue is in a carefree, nonchalant, rattle off the top of the head delivery that screwball comedies tend to go for. However, Hepburn uses the dialogue as a means to entice, to enliven, almost to attack. Her character seems moody and cynical in the opening moments of the film, which soon gives way to an obsession with a new love in Cary Grant. The love isn't logical because Hepburn's character isn't logical, and with that we are finally given a good reason for Hollywood's tendency to make characters fall in love within a few days of knowing someone. In terms of plot, the film plays out the way you think it would, with a plot twist you can see coming a mile away. But it's sort of inconsequential at that point.

For a Few Dollars More

For a Few Dollars More (1965)
IMDB #121 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059578/]

The Gist:
For a Few Dollars More is a continuation of Leone's famous Man With No Name Trilogy, which starts with the carbon copy of Kurosawa's Yojimbo and ends with the glorious holy grail of westerns that is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Between the two, For a Few Dollars More is much closer to latter. Of course, what I didn't realize until I watched this film is that the three are more of a spiritual trilogy than an explicit one. For some reason it took Van Cleef being a villain in The Good and ending up being a pretty swell guy in For a Few Dollars for me to go "wait a second, they aren't the same character, are they?" Anyway, not that Fistful of Dollars isn't excellent, but this film feels more original (because it is), more visually stunning, more tautly directed. We get badass shootouts, Mexican standoffs, people shooting a cigar from Eastwood's mouth and Eastwood calmly smoking the butt that is left (because he's a badass), and so on. One of the best Westerns ever made, and still debatably only Leone's third best. Guy is an animal.

Predator

Predator (1987)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093773/]

The Gist:
Sometimes when you watch a wide range of movies, certain standard viewings fall by the waist side. This was the case with Predator, where the film was coming out and I had to admit that I had never seen any of the other Predator movies before. So before I watched Adrien Brody do his best Batman voice as he kicked ass on an Alien world, I sat down and watched Arnold cover himself with mud and fuck up an Alien with a tree trunk and a makeshift wooden bow and arrow. The film works more as a cult movie than as anything more substantive, but the grisly deaths and the anticipation of the Predators arrival works very well here. I also like how near impossible it is to kill the damn thing, makes for good action. However, I do think that after firing thousands of bullets at this guy, it seems a little lame that he's done in by a tree trunk dropping on his ass. Just saying.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1132620/]

The Gist:
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish film based on a popular book series, and it has a lot going for it. It utilizes what works in the book very well: it's taut, it's character's are interesting, the plot is vaguely depraved in a way that is kind of fascinating. However, I will say that something is lost in translation. First of all, the film tries to tackle too much of the book and ends up with a two hour and twenty four minute running time. Now this wouldn't be so bad in and of itself if it wasn't for the slipshod way the film is editing in order to save time to fit everything in. The overall impact of the editing left me feeling like the moments in the film never had any time to breathe. This could have been solved by starting the film later in the action, letting the information about the trail come second hand through conversation. Also the the film's list of suspects just feels so much smaller than it did in the book, which is a serious problem and gives the genre piece a claustrophobic feeling. However, all the technical issues aside, the actors were perfect for their roles and the movie is still very entertaining.

Week Forty-Two

New Queue:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) - check
For a Few Dollars More (1965) - check
Predator (1987) - check
Charade (1963) - check

The Machinist

The Machinist (2004)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/]

The Gist:
Yes, that emaciated holocaust survivor looking so and so is Christian Bale and yes that's kind of fucking crazy. Bale has been hailed for his performance in this film and with good reason. I have never seen an actor sacrifice so much for the sake of a role. It kind of puts roles like De Niro in Raging Bull and Clooney in Syriana and Leto in Chapter 27 to shame, mainly because in this film Bale seriously looks close to death. In terms of the movie itself, it is disturbing in a way that I find very reminiscent to David Lynch films, particularly Eraser Head. Both films have the same quality of distilling a setting, making it feel less like a real place and more like a nightmare dreamscape. However, whereas Lynch films would spiral into chaos, this film veers into clarity as the ending approaches and the film is both better and worse for it. The quality of the nightmare dissipates, the landscape of Los Angeles becomes more recognizable, a reason for the insanity is given to wrap everything up neatly making an intriguing game of piecing things together. However, the ending doesn't share the disturbing heft of the rest of the film.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095031/]

The Gist:
I honestly haven't seen many old school Steve Martin films, which is a bit of a travesty. This film has him starring opposite Michael Caine, and the two work off each other very well. They play two con men who spend the film sparring against each other, as the film escalates to ridiculous heights like Steve Martin becoming a Navy officer paraplegic and Caine becoming a renowned German doctor who can cure Martin of his condition, and so on like that. Caine's dialogue is particularly well written as a suave swindler with a moral code, while Martin's character has a bit less depth (namely, he's a likable moron). The film isn't the best comedy I've ever seen, it has plenty of formula and everything is so ridiculous that you know these cons could never work in real life (unlike something like Brothers Bloom where I kind suspend belief a bit easier). However, the film is a piece of light fun, which we should always appreciate.

Days of Wine and Roses

Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055895/]

The Gist:
Days of Wine and Roses is a film about alcoholism and every moment it pretends to be about something else, the film falls a bit flat (with the exception of how the couple meet, which is very charming). Honestly, I didn't care much for the film until it got into the heart of its conflict which was well past an hour into the running time. As Jack Lemmon's character struggles with sobriety and the knowledge that he is an alcoholic, there are so many rich moments in the film that it makes me forgive the fact that I found it so boring up until the half-way mark. Lemmon's dilemma is two-fold, not only must he conquer his own alcoholism but he must find a way not to slip back into it as he tries to bring his wife back from the brink herself. His love for her soon becomes a great hindrance to his recovery as she proves a harder case, denying even that she is an alcoholic as she gluts herself on Gin in a dirty hotel room. The film's depiction of alcoholism is unfortunately a bit melodramatic and feels a little disingenuous, but that's something I'll live with if the conflict is good. Here, it's very good, but you have to wait for it.

The Secret in Their Eyes

The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)
IMDB #172 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1305806/]

The Gist:
Here we have the film that beat out White Ribbon for the Foreign Language Oscar, and after watching it the choice makes a lot of sense. First of all, let's get something out of the way, this film is not as good as White Ribbon. It's beautifully filmed (although White Ribbon's cinematography is phenomenal and not comparable), it runs very smoothly as a suspenseful drama, it's well acted...but with all that considered it relies quite a bit on formula. Don't get me wrong, it takes a certain number of refreshing risks and it is done very well but the film still feels like something I've seen before (something you could not accuse of White Ribbon). The Secret in Their Eyes is perhaps more of an enjoyable viewing, but the films that have to do with detectives (in this case a court official who takes up the detective role) who are obsessed with a case unsolved are innumerable and unlike a film I just recently watched that will be featured next week (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) this film brings nothing new to the idea except pitch perfect execution.

Week Forty-One

It's been a while since I've posted a queue I haven't seen all of yet. New queue:

The Secret in Their Eyes (2009) - check
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) - check
Days of Wine and Roses (1962) - check
The Machinist (2004) - check

Ten Months

Managed to get through this month without cheating (so tempting). Here's the top five in no particular order:

Stray Dog
The Day the Earth Stood Still
From Dusk Till Dawn
Barton Fink
Rules of the Game

Honorable Mention: Kind Hearts and Coronets, Man on Wire, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Evil Dead 2, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?