Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310775/]

The Gist:
Man this movie had some brilliant fucking moments. As a whole, it takes on a sort of piecemeal feel to it, only Chan-wook Park's second film so its understandable that it has some serious flaws, both aesthetically and in terms of plot. However, the visuals at times take a form of pure poetic raw power and the visceral story telling is uncompromising, often brilliant. I left the film feeling brutalized, feeling like I had watched some twisted piece of genius that wasn't fully formed or realized. It was an amazing film overall, and I would write about the plot but I don't think I should. Maybe I'll just say there's lots of people dying, it's fairly wrenching, it kind of made my soul feel dirty. Watch it if you think you can, but I would say it will probably challenge your threshold in "fucked up-ness". That's all I'll say.

Modern Times

Modern Times (1936)
IMDB #83 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027977/]

The Gist:
This is maybe the closest Charlie Chaplin ever got to an art/social commentary film. I mean I haven't watched the Great Dictator yet so maybe I'm speaking too soon, but you get the idea. It also happened to be the most insane of all its pictures, at least through the first half. Unfortunately it calms down a bit. However, when Charlie Chaplin was having a nervous breakdown in the factory and sniffing cocaine in jail and trying to get himself arrested after leaving jail the movie was shaping to be a masterpiece. Perhaps it still is, but I have some reservations. First of all, you have these little artistic decisions in the beginning of the film like the juxtaposition of the workers heading to the factory and cattle being herded (fairly reminiscent of Strike by the way), also have this weird quality in the beginning of the film where all human voices are issuing from technology but throughout the rest of the film they are traditionally silent film characters in person. There's an idea of symbolism in all this, the first example fairly obvious, the second an idea that we can only be given voice and shape through the technology that has begun to control us (vaguely reminiscent of some Vonnegut themes). However, these artistic leanings peter out as the film's insanity dies down and a more traditional love story rises from the ashes. Also, I do love the film as a whole but I wish it would have saved this whole settling down thing for its conclusion. Instead you have a sort of "pull yourself up by the boot straps" kind of resolution that just rings false to me. You know, thinking about it the film really is one of Chaplin's best though. Maybe I'm being too nitpicky.

Food, Inc.

Food, Inc.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/]

The Gist:
Well I read a review that sort of summed up my feelings on the film and I'm tempted to post it but instead I'll just talk. So basically there are two main sources that cover the material that is in this film, I've read neither of these books but I get the feeling from watching the film that I should have read the books. Is the film bad? No, god no. But it is limited, and it lacks focus, and most importantly it has this sprawling nature to it that would doesn't quite fit as well in a film medium. While watching it I just got a general feeling that all my food was fucked up except maybe some organic shit, and that chickens are genetically altered to have larger breasts because people like white meat and so the chickens are all crazy and can't stand up and also that the soy bean company is like the fucking mafia. Despite my problems with the actual filmmaking there's no doubt that the content of the film is staggering. However the editing is awkward and imprecise, it was not structured well, and it only made me read the book so I could feel like I had a better handle on the situation instead of this vague feeling that everything I eat is fucked. Documentaries should be able to take and issue and meticulously peel back the layers to its audience. Food, Inc. suffers from taking too many issues within that broad topic of food and not being able to give us a clear direction for the film.

On Another Note:
The two big books that I must now read on the subject are Fast Food Nation which you've probably heard of since they made a crappy movie out of it (don't ask me how that happened), and also In Defense of Food which I at least haven't really heard of.

Bonny and Clyde

Bonny and Clyde (1967)
IMDB #214 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061418/]

The Gist:
Bonny and Clyde are two lovely country folk that fall madly in love for each other within the course of an hour or so and go an adorable adventure where they rob banks and kill people and lob grenades at the police and write poetry and get burgers with Gene Wilder and...okay, so this movie's pretty random. It has that sort of carefree attitude toward violence that you would find in a film like Band of Outsiders, where young reckless individuals delve into crime and only come to find out the consequences of these actions too late. Beyond that though, there is something very engaging about this film and its later predecessors (Badlands comes readily to mind). I think its the idea of being lost in youth and embracing violence as a facet of freedom. It's an obviously misguided idea, but powerful nonetheless. And where some would take this concept and turn it into sensationalism, like Natural Born Killers, Bonny and Clyde and its spiritual descendant Badlands extend these actions to a greater nature of man and of nature. At its core, this is what Bonny and Clyde symbolize.

Odd list of the Month

Odd List of the Month: A Decade in Film

Instead of doing a list of the best 10 or 50 or 100 films of the decade I've decided to simply list the best ten films of each year. This of course has many limitations since the only way I've gone about remembering what played when is by going onto Metacritic and looking at the past critics top 10 lists and also looking at a couple decade lists (one 50, one 100). But whatever, so it'll be imperfect, so it goes. Also I'm not going to rank them, that just seems troubling and I'd just change my mind as soon as I did so. Maybe I'll try to avoid ranking things except for lumping them into a ten or twenty or whatever from now on. Anyway, for now I'll put them in alphabetical order. So here they are, working from the bottom up.

2000
Almost Famous
Amores Perros
Billy Elliot
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
High Fidelity
In the Mood for Love
O Brother Where Art Thou?
Requiem for a Dream
Traffic

2001
Amelie
Donnie Darko
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Memento
Moulin Rouge!
Mulholland Drive
Sexy Beast
Shaolin Soccer
The Royal Tenenbaums

2002
Adaptation
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Gangs of New York
Lord of the Rings: Two Towers
Monsoon Wedding
Punchdrunk Love
Spirited Away
Talk to Her
Y Tu Mama Tambien
25th Hour

2003
All the Real Girls
Big Fish
City of God
Dirty Pretty Things
Kill Bill Volume One
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Lost in Translation
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
The Barbarian Invasions
28 Days Later

2004
Before Sunset
Dig!
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
House of Flying Daggers
Kill Bill Volume Two
Primer
Shaun of the Dead
Super Size Me
The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
The Five Obstructions

2005
Batman Begins
Cache
Howl's Moving Castle
Kontroll
Kung Fu Hustle
Millions
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Oldboy
Wedding Crashers
2046

2006
An Inconvenient Truth
Brick
Children of Men
Half Nelson
Letters from Iwo Jima
The Departed
The Fountain
The Lives of Others
The Science of Sleep
Volver

2007
Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Eastern Promises
I'm Not There
Juno
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
No Country for Old Men
Sunshine
Sweeney Todd
The Host
There Will Be Blood

2008
A Christmas Tale
In Bruges
Let the Right One In
Reprise
Synecdoche, New York
The Class
The Dark Knight
The Fall
The Wrestler
Wall-E

2009
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Drag Me To Hell
Facing Ali
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Inglorious Basterds
Sugar
The Brothers Bloom
The Cove
The Hurt Locker
Up

That took more work to compile than one would think. Also here is a short list of films that almost made the cut:

Iron Monkey, Spellbound, District B13, Good Night and Good Luck, Hot Fuzz, V for Vendetta, Nightwatch, Persepolis, 28 Weeks Later, Mongol, Man on Wire, Redbelt, (500) Days of Summer, An Education, Sherlock Holmes

Also, here is a list of films that still need to be seen and thus could upset the tenuous balance I have just established:

In the Loop, A Serious Man, Bright Star, Antichrist, The White Ribbon, A Prophet, Girlfriend Experience, Broken Embraces, 35 Shots of Rum, Summer Hours, A Single Man, Thirst, Tyson, Precious, Imaginaruum of Dr. Parnassus, Funny People, World's Greatest Dad, Two Lovers, Treeless Mountain, Pollock, Quills, Small Time Crooks, The Contender, Before Night Falls, Beau Travail, Yi Yi: A One and a Two, In the Bedroom, Eureka, Gosford Park, The Believer, Far From Heaven, Rabbit Proof Fence, Russian Ark, 21 Grams, Irreversible, Man Without a Past, The Son, Bad Education, Code 46, Dogville, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Goodbye Lenin, Last Life in the Universe, Maria Full of Grace, Tokyo Grandfathers, Touching the Void, Time of the Wolf, The Edukators, Memories of a Murder, Murderball, Mysterious Skin, The New World, The Three Burials of Melquaides Estrada, L'Enfant, Syndromes of a Century, Notes on a Scandal, Who Killed the Electric Car, Why We Fight, 4 months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, La Vie en Rose, Lust Caution, Control, Into Great Silence, Away from Her, The Orphanage, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Che, Happy-Go-Lucky, RocknRolla, Wendy and Lucy, Waltz with Bashir, Paranoid Park, Still Life, Silent Light, My Winnipeg, I've Loved You So Long, Ballast, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, This is England, Black Book, The Limits of Control, Red Cliff

Week Sixteen

Okay, okay, I've fallen behind again. I now have two days to watch 4 films and I'm not sure if I'll actually do that but if not I'll get close. Also next month I'm going to deviate from my usual rules, but I'll get into that later. For now, the new queue:

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) - check
Modern Times (1936) - check
Food, Inc. (2009) - check
Bonny and Clyde (1967) - check

On Another Note:
Who knows if I'll actually watch Gojira and Dogville, those two have been kicking around forever. Char holds me back on Gojira and Dogville...I just haven't been in the mood.

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092593/]

The Gist:
It's kind of like 400 Blows with Nazis. I know that's a simple way of relating this film to the average viewer, but it's kind of true. It has the same minimalist tone and attention to small details that the beautiful French Wave film has, it is strongly autobiographical, it gives an honest depiction of youth in a surrounding environment that forces maturity on the protagonist too soon (and the tension that yields), and so on. There are many comparisons, but to me this is the stronger film (*gasp* a film student saying he liked this film better than the influential French New Wave classic?!). Yes, yes I think its a better film in most respects, if there is really such a thing as a "better film" in this sense. For one, you can tell how deeply personal the film is for the director who intones at the end "Forty years have passed but I will remember that day in January until I die" (note: paraphrasing). For another thing, the film has two haunting moments of stillness where all human beings cease to exist save for these two boys. These moments are filled with such palpable emptiness, such loneliness, I was...transfixed. And by the time I reached the end, there was a moment where I winced, several moments even. The film registered on a deeply emotional level to me, it was a film that seemed to try to be honest above all else, to carefully depict a moment in time in the director's life without distortion, clear and distinct, a memory committed to film stock.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049470/]

The Gist:
The Man Who Knew Too Much succeeds on the sheer presence of James Stewart (but I'm biased because he's one of my favorite actors). With the exception of his fascinating screen presence, this is not as engaging as other Hitchcock films, it doesn't really carry a strong line of suspense. There are very strong aspects to the film, the sequence in the opera where all dialogue is drowned out by the music is particularly brilliant, and the use of the "Whatever Will Be" at the end is done with verve and sorrow. However, I never felt any danger for their child, or really for anyone. That's because the film, in terms of plot, is quite conventional. It's a good premise (as are all Hitchcock films really) but in order for this particular plot to really have an impact the viewer needs a sense of threat. Instead, we see a wonderfully engaging setup that loses a little steam as it races to its conclusion. Ah well, que sera.

The Cove

The Cove (2009)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1313104/]

The Gist:
This is the best documentary I've seen all year, one of the best films I've seen all year, and one of the best documentaries/films I've seen ever. Why? Many reasons, for one it fills you with righteous indignation which is no small feat. You kind of want to get on a plane and go to Taiji, Japan and stop this whole killing 23,000 dolphins a year for no good reason thing within the week. For another thing it lets you see dolphins in a new light, for instance maybe dolphins are smarter than we are. Just saying it's possible. For another, the film, whether this was an intentional effect or not, filled me with such despair over the future of humanity that I wondered if there was any hope for us at all. The fact that we are rapidly consuming the fisheries in the ocean and now the Japanese government (and the many small South and Central American governments that the Japanese have bribed for votes) are trying to justify killing dolphins and small porpoises because they are eating too much fish and ignoring the fact that we, as human beings, are on a self-destructive path and if we don't step back and realize this, if careful measures aren't taken, then we will soon get to a desperate point of no return. Oh they're also trying to kill Whales for the same reason, they really hate that ban on whale killing, in fact that's why they started to kill dolphins. And the lucrative dolphin trainer/seaworld type trade which pays something like 125,000 dollars for a single dolphin manages to support the slaughter of all the dolphins that aren't picked and their mercury-laden meat is sold for maybe 600 dollars. It's senseless, it's frustrating, it makes you want shake your hands of civilization. And yet the movie offers concise action, to stop the practice in this one are in the world. It offers the point that if this single place in Taiji cannot be shutdown than there is no hope at all. And the film revolves around a Ocean 11-esque crew breaking into this facility and getting video footage and sound footage of the slaughter (since obviously no cameras are allowed). It's maybe the most ballsy documentary I've ever seen, akin to Morgan Sperlock's proactive approach to Super Size Me. When you exert your presence into your film, when you take inherent risks, you allow the audience to take personal stock with the struggle (instead of the more dispassionate approach which has its own merits).

On Another Note:
-The legal limit of mercury is .4 pounds per inch or ppi. Dolphins have 2000 ppi.
-There was an attempt to use this insanely dangerous mercury laden dolphin meat in school lunches (which is compulsory by the way).
-Most who eat the sold dolphin meat think that it is whale meat from South America or some such place where it is still legal to kill whales.
-Dolphins are so sensitive to sound that most died in early captivity because the filtration system was too loud. Dolphins also get ulcers from the stress of captivity. Also think if they are sensitive to sound how enervating performing for a cheering stadium in a place like seaworld must be.
-One of the dolphins that played flipper committed suicide. You balk but watch this movie, you'll see.

The Lady Vanishes

The Lady Vanishes (1938)
IMDB #234 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030341/]

The Gist:
Tell me if this plot sounds familiar. A woman is on a train with someone, she goes to sleep and wakes up and the older woman is gone and there is some conspiracy where no one claims to have seen the woman on the train in the first place, something sinister afoot. The young woman had received a bump on the head earlier, and now is trying desperately to hold on to the idea that old woman did exist, must exist. Also the old woman had written her name in the window, she sees it just when she's starting to doubt herself but of course it clears up before she can prove anything. ...If anyone has seen the mediocre movie Flightplan, that film is kind of a direct ripoff of this premise. And yet with everything that was done wrong with the premise almost seventy years afterward, Lady Vanishes manages to get everything right. It strikes a sort of theatrical tone that expertly undermines the the credibility of the plot instead of having to painstakingly establish why the conspiracy exists. Instead, Hitchcock turns the cute old lady into a badass spy and throws in a crazy fist fight with a magician and a final shootout in a train car where no one seems to need to reload their guns. If that sounds awesome to you, then you are right.

Additional Project Goal

Okay, so during that last semester with school I sort of shirked on something I had been doing up until that point that sort of resembles the spirit of this project. I'd been consciously choosing things to read (which is kind of how I got into Hemingway and Kerouac which along with Vonnegut are my favorite authors at this point) and I'd like to try and integrate that into this project. For this month I'm going to try for two books (one I'm already in the process of) and when the semester starts next month I'll have to see. If it's too hectic I'll have to go with one book a month (which is really all I could have done this last semester, if that. I was damn busy). Anyway, the book queue for December:

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (check)
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

On Another Note: I think I'll be more forgiving if my book reading goes over the deadline. Perhaps I'll just keep an update about which books I'm trying to read and change out when I get them finished. I guess we'll see.

Week Fifteen

Alright, I'm almost back on track for the month so that's good. Perhaps if I finish off my month early I'll go with some retro viewings (which is something that I'm going to have to integrate into this project eventually. There are too many movies that I consider "favorites" that I've only watched once.) New queue:

The Lady Vanishes (1938) - check
The Cove (2009) - check
Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) - check
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - check

On Another Note:
My sister is home, which means that soon we will have a glorious Gojira viewing! GOJIRA!

On Yet Another Note:
Maybe not with the Gojira, since I might have the swine flu and my family are unjustly avoiding me. Sad.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
IMBD #71 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050212/]

The Gist:
This is the first real Alec Guinness movie I've watched besides any Obi-Wan incarnation (except for Laurence of Arabia but I don't know if that counts because I can't remember who he was). In any case, he was pretty damn good in the film...had a strong presence that carried the picture (especially since I thought the guy who played Shears was just alright). In terms of pure filmmaking, it is a thoroughly well made picture, it goes on for almost three hours and appears fairly weightless. This is because the struggle they take part in is so engaging, because the whole movie is framed around consistent clashes of ideals and life philosophies. No one goes through any great change as a character, they are even bordering two dimensionality but the director guides the performances well. The result is that we have strong presences that don't change because the story's drama is not in but in the the changing perspective of the characters but in the conflict of these different personalities put into close proximity to each other. Only occasionally does this get too expositional, like the end where the doctor just repeats "madness". Apocalypse Now this is not. In fact, in terms of the technical perfection of Laurence of Arabia this film pales in comparison as well. However, it is a more enjoyable film, not a better film mind you, but one I can see myself watching more often. I guess I'm not a pure film person for that reason, but I can live with that. After all, a little imperfection makes a film unique. In terms of the visuals, throughout most of the feature it is very functional. Lean uses lots of longer shots, taking on a vastness very similar to the aesthetic in Laurence of Arabia. However, there are brief moments where he fills the frames with abstractions, moments of nature, touching upon something that Terrence Malick would hone to perfection in The Thin Red Line (unless you're one of those who think these scenes dominate too much of Malick's film). Here, however, the moments are brief but beautiful. In particular there is a scene where a grenade thrown at the enemy causes hundreds of birds to fly up from the trees in a panic, and they fill the sky throughout the dog fight and then after, still restless as the action dies down...it is a wonderful scene, breathtaking even (to use an appropriate cliche).

Family Guy: Something Something Something Dark Side

Family Guy: Something Something Something Dark Side (2009)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1329665/]

The Gist:
See, I'm still wondering if I should count this one just for the simple fact of "what the hell am I supposed to sum up here?" ...It's Family Guy crudely recreating The Empire Strikes Back and it is actually pretty damn funny. All the things that Family Guy has done well in the past they seem to do here, and most of the my personal grievances with their humor is fairly minimal. Also I'm sick with the flu and I wanted to watch something mindless and it fits my criteria for the project so fuck it. I figure my slot for recent films can be used as something of a mindless diversion if I want (see: Away We Go). Anyway, I honestly don't know what to put here other than to dissect the different comic bits (it's really all the film was, a series of bits that loosely tie together the source material) but that would be monotonous I think. I guess I'll just post this and be done with it:

Shiri

Shiri (1999)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192657/]

The Gist:
So I picked up this movie based on one of my old lectures from my world cinema class, because basically it was given credit as being the impetus of the South Korean art film movement of the last ten years (which has some amazing films under its belt like Oldboy and The Host). While I can see why it would have gotten that credit, since it was in all appearances the first big budget South Korean film really ever produced, it turns out to be a pretty poor carbon copy of a bad Hollywood thriller. I mean I liked it at first, but the twist became obvious in about the first fifteen minutes of the film and I was sitting there thinking "well of course everyone is going to know the dude's girlfriend is the killer, there's no other reason to focus on her so much and everytime the dude's around people she's trying to kill she doesn't kill him because she has grown feelings for him during her undercover whatever and so on and they're not going to play out the whole movie like we're not going to know this...are they?" To answer that question, yes, yes they did. And you know I could forgive the bad shaky cam, I can forgive the fact this bad guy should have been killed like twenty times and for whatever reason the bullets just seem to magically land errant, I can forgive the weird editing gap towards the end of the second act that completely fucks with the narrative flow and logic of the film, but having to go through the motions where the film tries to play on "who is the spy who is always one step ahead of them?" (the girlfriend) or "who is this mysterious assassin who we never show the face of" (the girlfriend) and so on is just...it's frustrating. The plot just gets more ludicrous after we "find out" the girlfriend is the assassin, but I won't bother with going into it. The point is, you've seen this movie in English and you've seen it done much better. Stay far away from this.

On Another Note:
On the off chance someone does end up seeing this, believe me if you are even a scarcely intelligent person I haven't spoiled anything. I mean it, it's that obvious.

The Propostion

The Proposition (2005)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421238/]

The Gist:
In consideration of this film I would like to bring up two very different westerns made by the end all of westerns past the glory days of John Ford et al. That is to say, Sergio Leone and his films The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. After calling up these two films, I want to further state that the Proposition tries to be both kinds of films at the same time. In GBU (abbreviated for the sake of efficiency), you have the spaghetti western at peak badass levels, where every moment in the screen is dedicated to a hyper real, stylized, tension filled epic full on with Mexican stand offs and Clint Eastwood being a serious badass. On the other hand you have Once Upon A Time In the West that makes sparse use of these moments, instead taking a pragmatic approach to the western creating a thoughtful drama that exudes a feeling of nostalgia and antiquity. Once Upon a Time is more careful, more understated, and draws out the natural conflict of men in the semi-lawless environment of the fabled west with little noticable effort. It is possible to make a film that has elements from either style and have it come off as balanced but Proposition is not that film. Instead, it becomes rather jarring when you have a hitman giving a delightfully theatrical drunken performance in one scene and then Ray Winstone sitting subdued with his wife in the next, playing out a quiet drama of the Husband not wanting to share his burdens with his wife. The two styles are at odds with each other, and the whole thing ends up feeling uneven. But man is this film pretty, cinematography on it is insane. I'll be trying to watch this again to see if it bothers me less a second time around because much of this film is truly a marvel of a modern western.

Week Fourteen

Okay, so I got done with finals recently and I'm on vacation so the project is going to suffer a little (hence why week fourteen is almost a week behind). But I don't have school all month so I feel confident that I'll catch up by month's end. New queue:

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - check
The Proposition (2005) - check
Family Guy: Something Something Something Dark Side (2009) - check
Shiri (1999) - check

Note: Okay so I know the Family Guy movie is a stretch but I did watch, I did enjoy it, it is technically a movie, as far as I can tell it does satisfy all my film karma requirements, and by this point I'm so behind on the month from finals/vacation/subsequent flu from Boston's frigidness that I say "fuck it".

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity (1944)
IMDB #56 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036775/]

The Gist:
Kind of a badass little film noir film, written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. This is an odd pairing, with Raymond Chandler coming on to write the screenplay for someone else's noir novel (Raymond Chandler is probably the most famous noir novelist there was). Anyway, the film moves well, its shot in that beautiful noir style, and the story is relatively engaging. However, the movie lives and dies by the words that the actor's speak, and by that token the film does very well. There is talking through the entire movie, either through the omnipresent voiceover that most noir parodies take up or the rapid fire dialogue that characterized the screwball comedies of the time more than most film noir, but it goes down smoothly enough. In terms of the dialogue, it toes the line between being completely badass and being an awful cliche, and surprisingly both work very well and happen consecutively without issue. I don't know how that happens but it does, and the film that we see is something imminently quotable. In fact, I don't have any large complaints of the film, it is a well-crafted genre film with very good writing, it just didn't have the same impact on me as something like The Maltese Falcon or the Big Sleep or Touch of Evil did. I don't think I cared enough about the characters in this film...maybe that's what it is. But it is still very good.

A Christmas Tale

A Christmas Tale (2008)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993789/]

The Gist:
At first glance, the film doesn't have a lot to do with Christmas other than that is when it takes place. However, when I think of Christmas I think of a bitter sweet nostalgia that comes with it, this ineffable quality of grief that comes from the thought of your childhood and your family and the beautiful sorrow of snowfall and a Christmas tree filling your living room with soft light as you go to sleep. I don't really know how to describe it and I don't know why it feels that way, I just know what it does feels like, and whoever made this film knows it too. Beyond that the film is very French, in that people act in a way that I can't fully understand, they have a completely different way of seeing the world. That both makes the film fascinating and frustrating at times, mostly the former. Also the film makes very interesting stylistic choices, using the iris shot in a way that was just...well cool, and other things like that, your typical "post new-wave but probably watched a lot of new-wave films" style. Honestly, I mostly loved the film from top to bottom, the characters were always interesting, the writing was excellent, and it felt like a very unique experience. However, I will say that there were parts in the middle that lagged a bit and it needed to be edited down a good ten minutes. Other than that, it is an amazing film.

Downfall

Downfall (2004)
IMDB #80 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/]

The Gist:
As I was watching this I had to wonder why the film was so popular, why people thought it was so good. I have come up with two reasons, one that Bruno Ganz makes for a pretty convincing Hitler, and two that there is a great fascination of Hitler's final days. Particularly with the second point, I think as an audience we want to see what the man's thought process was when he could see empire crumbling around him, what it would be like to see Hitler have doubts, to have his authoritative view of the world questioned by approaching defeat. In that sense the movie does well enough for itself, centered around a convincing performance (if not as air tight as people give it credit for). However, I do not believe this is a great movie. In fact, in terms of storytelling this is a weak film, because it continually tries to manipulate its audience into feeling something, everything is calculated to evoke what the filmmaker wants you to think instead of letting you make up your mind itself. Most of this comes from bad dialogue or overt compositional choices etc, that professes a poetry of the film too bluntly, like the secretary stating that "it all feels like a dream, blah, blah, blah". The scene has Hitler's soon to be wife leading everyone in the bunker into a dance hall and putting on music and dancing while bombs are still going off. It would already have a lurid dreamlike quality to it, all we need is the secretary's physical reaction to it we don't need it overstated in the dialogue. It just feels cheap. A lot of the film feels that way, its strangled in its good intentions.

On Another Note:
There is a small subplot in this film of a child soldier who tries to find his way back home through war torn Berlin that is good enough to be a movie itself. This might have been the only time where I thought the film truly touched upon something beautiful, a child lost in the death of the fallen city.

The Sweetest Sound

The Sweetest Sound (2001)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281249/]

The Gist:
This is a documentary that I watched the first twenty or so minutes in a film class and was interested enough to track it down and finish it off. It's about the director's obsession with names, with identity, and particularly his own name and what it says about his own identity. The director goes so far as to contact all of the "Alan Berliner's in the world" and invite them over to dinner. He gets a solid handful and he interviews them a bit but nothing really comes out of it, which the director readily admits. But that's the film's problem, despite the director's honesty about nothing really coming out of the meeting. In the beginning, when he is exploring the nuance of names (for instance how Alan sounds soft and gentle and Al sound macho and how Al Capone could never have been named Alan Capone) or when he is exploring his own weird reservations of having his name shared by so many different people in the world the film works very well. But it is sort of built around this final meeting, you can tell the director shaped the film around the idea that by setting up this meeting the film would lead itself into new and surprising areas and instead it just sat idle. In the end, the film becomes a fascinating yet anti-climatic film, lacking the dramatic heft of better documentaries.

Three Months

Today marks the third month of my project. Top five films are:

1. La Dolce Vita
2. La Notte
3. Das Boot
4. Swordsman 2
5. Paths of Glory

Honorable Mention: Tokyo!, Come Drink With Me, Samurai I: Mushashi Miyamoto

Week Thirteen

Three months under the belt! New queue:

Downfall (2004) - check
A Christmas Tale (2008) - check
Double Indemnity (1944) - check
The Sweetest Sound (2001) - check

Alright, I'm gonna wait on Gojira and Dogville I think. Waiting for the sisterhead for Gojira, it will be epic.