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.