Best of the 2000s Revised

Here's another list I posted last year, and the year before that - turning into a tradition. There's probably some point in it, as we near the end of the decade, and prepare for the stock taking that usually accompanies the change in the tens digit... First, something new - the overall top 25 of the 2000s:

1. Inland Empire - USA - David Lynch
2. Yi Yi - Taiwan - Edward Yang
3. Vanda's Room - Portugal - Pedro Costa
4. Kings and Queen - France - Arnaud Desplechins
5. 2046 - China - Wong Kar-wei
6. Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Romania - Christi Puiu
7. Colossal Youth - Portugal - Pedro Costa
8. L'Intrus - France - Claire Denis
9. O Brother Where Art Thou? - US - Coen Brothers
10. Los Angeles Plays Itself - USA - Thom Anderson
11. Mulholland Drive USA - Lynch
12. Secret Sunshine - South Korea - Lee Chang dong
13. Goodbye, Dragon Inn - Taiwan - Tsai Ming-liang
14. The Son - Belgium - Dardennes Brothers
15. Platform - Chain - Jia Jiang-ke
16. House of Flying Daggers - China - Zhang Yimou
17. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - South Korea - Park Chan-wook
18. Memories of Murder - South Korea - Bong Joon-ho
19. There Will Be Blood - USA - Paul Thomas Anderson
20. Ichi the Killer - Japan - Takashi Miike
21. Regular Lovers - France - Philippe Garrel
22. Syndromes and a Century - Thailand - Apichatpong Weerasethakul
23. En Construccion - Spain - Jose Luis Guerin
24. Songs from the Second Floor - Sweden - Roy Anderson
25. Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors - South Korea - Hong Sang-soo

And by Years, revised with 2007 added, and new films noted. This may not actually align with the lists above - there is a limit to my nerdishness, believe it or not. And all of it is approximate enough,a nd context sensitive enough....

2007:
1. Secret Sunshine - South Korea - Lee Chang-dong
2. There Will be Blood - US - Paul Thomas Anderson
3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days - Romania - Christian Mungiu
4. The Flight of the Red Balloon - Taiwan/France - Hou Hsiao Hsien
5. Zodiac - US - David Fincher
6. California Dreamin' (Endless) - Romania - Christian Remescu
7. No Country for Old Men - US - Coen Brothers
8. In the City of Sylvia - Spain - Jose Luis Guerin
9. Darjeeling Limited - US - Wes Anderson
10. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - US - Andrew Domenik

2006:
1. Inland Empire - US - David Lynch
2. Colossal Youth - Portugal - Pedro Costa
3. *Syndromes and a Century - Thailand - Apichatpong Weerasethakul - new add, saw it last year.
4. The Woman on the Beach - South Korea - Hong Sang-soo
5. *Still Life - China - Jia Jiang ke - another new one: saw it this year
6. *Brand Upon the Brain - Canada - Guy Maddin - another new one
7. Children of Men - UK - Alfonso Cauron
8. *I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - Taiwan - Tsai Ming-liang - and another one
9. *Triad Election - China - Johnny To - also new
10. Honor de Cavelaria - Spain - Albert Serra

2005:
1. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Romania - Christi Puiu
2. Regular Lovers - France - Philippe Garrel
3. The Squid and the Whale - USA - Noah Baumbach
4. Three Times - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
5. Grizzly Man - US - Werner Herzog
6. L'Enfant - Belgium - Luc & Jean Pierre Dardennes
7. Cache - France/Austria - Michael Haneke
8. The President's Last Bang - South Korea - Im Sang-soo
9. *Magic Mirror - Portugal - Manoel de Oliveira - just saw this this year
10. Mutual Appreciation - US - Andrew Bujalski

2004:
1. Kings and Queen - France - Arnaud Desplechins
2. 2046 - China - Wong Kar-wei
3. L'Intrus - France - Claire Denis
4. The House of Flying Daggers - China - Zhang Yimou
5. The World - China - Jia Jiang-ke
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - US - Michel Gondry
7. Nobody Knows - Japan - Kore-eda Hirokazu
8. Innocence - France - Lucille Hadzihalilovic
9. The Holy Girl - Argentina - Lucrecia Martel
10. Clean - France - Olivier Assayas

2003:
1. Los Angeles Plays Itself - USA - Thom Anderson
2. Goodbye Dragon Inn - Taiwan - Tsai Ming-liang
3. Memories of Murder - South Korea - Bong Joon-ho
4. Doppelganger - Japan - Kiyoshi Kurosawa
5. Dracula, Pages from a Virgin's Diary - Canada - Guy Maddin
6. Cafe Lumiere - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
7. Elephant - USA - Gus Van Sant
8. Gerry - USA - Gus Van Sant
9. Blind Shaft - China - Li Yang
10. Crimson Gold - Iran - Jafar Panahi

2002:
1. The Son - Belgium - Luc & Jean Pierre Dardennes
2. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - South Korea - Park Chan wook
3. Man Without a Past - Finland - Aki Kaurismaki
4. The Pianist - USA - Roman Polanski
5. *Blissfully Yours - Thailand - Apitchipong Weerasthukal - just saw this one this year
6. Unknown Pleasures - China - Jia Jiang Ke
7. Millenium Mambo - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
8. Devils on the Doorstep - China - Jiang Wen
9. Springtime in a Small Town - China - Tian Zhuang Zhuang
10. Talk to Her - Spain - Pedro Almodovar

2001:
1. Mulholland Drive - USA - David Lynch
2. Ichi the Killer - Japan - Takashi Miike
3. *En Construccion - Spain - Jose Luis Guerin - recently seen
4. Donnie Darko - USA - Richard Kelly
5. Va Savoir - France - Jacques Rivette
6. The Royal Tenenbaums - USA - Wes Anderson
7. Distance - Japan - Hirokazu Kore-eda
8. Pistol Opera - Japan - Seijun Suzuki
9. Waking Life - USA - Richard Linklater
10. Pulse - Japan - Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2000:
1. Yi Yi - Taiwan - Edward Yang
2. *Vanda's Room - Portugal - Pedro Costa - a great one, saw it last fall
3. O Brother Where Art Thou - USA - Joel and Ethan Coen - this film has been rising pretty steadily ever since I saw it. Last year, heard Stanley Cavell give a talk about it, complete with questions and answers... it seems light, but it contains multitudes.
4. Platform - China - Jia Jiang Ke
5. Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors - South Korea - Hong Sang-soo
6. Songs from the Second Floor - Sweden - Roy Andersson
7. *Peppermint Candy - South Korea - Lee Chang Dong - just saw it last weekend: very impressive
8. The Circle - Iran - Jafar Panahi
9. Eureka - Japan - Shinji Aoyama
10. In the Mood for Love - China - Wong Kar-wei

And there it is. If I get ambitious, I might try this for the 90s next.

Decades - Revised

I posted this last year: this is revision. No huge changes, but plenty of tweaks here and there - including some plain cheating in the 50s and 60s so it's not just the Godard and Imamura greatest hits...

2000s:
1. Inland Empire - USA - David Lynch
2. Yi Yi - Taiwan - Edward Yang
3. Vanda's Room - Portugal - Pedro Costa
4. Kings and Queen - France - Arnaud Desplechins
5. 2046 - China - Wong Kar-wei
6. Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Romania - Christi Puiu
7. Colossal Youth - Portugal - Pedro Costa
8. L'Intrus - France - Claire Denis
9. O Brother Where Art Thou? - US - Coen Brothers
10. Los Angeles Plays Itself - USA - Thom Anderson

1990s: [nothing new - reflection of what I've seen this year, I guess]
1. Rushmore - USA - Wes Anderson
2. Breaking the Waves - Denmark/UK - Lars Van Trier
3. Goodbye, South, Goodbye - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
4. Satantango - Hungary - Bela Tarr
5. Fallen Angels - Hong Kong - Wong Kar-wei
6. Flowers of Shanghai - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
7. Beijing Bastards - PRC - Zhang Yuan
8. Through the Olive Trees - Iran - Abbas Kiarostami
9. Happy Together - Hong Kong - Wong Kar-wei
10. White - France/Poland - Krysztof Kieslowski

1980s:
1. City of Sadness - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
2. Blue Velvet - USA - David Lynch
3. Fitzcarraldo - Germany - Werner Herzog
4. The Elephant Man - USA - David Lynch
5. Do the Right Thing - USA - Spike Lee
6. Peking Opera Blues - Hong Kong - Tsui Hark
7. Brazil - UK/USA - Terry Gilliam
8. Blind Chance - Poland - Krysztof Kieslowski
9. Full Metal Jacket - USA - Stanley Kubrick
10. Blade Runner- USA - Ridley Scott [yet another rerelease, and it's back up here again]

1970s: [no real changes: a strong decade, of films I've seen many times...]
1.McCabe and Mrs Miller - USA - Robert Altman
2. Aguirre Wrath of God - Germany - Werner Herzog
3. A Woman Under the Influence - USA - John Cassavetes
4. Nashville - USA - Altman
5. Celine and Julie Go Boating - France - Jacques Rivette
6. Mystery of Kasper Hauser (Every Man for Himself and God Against All) - Germany - Werner Herzog
7. Killer of Sheep - USA - Charles Burnett
8. Killing of a Chinese Bookie - USA - John Cassavetes
9. The Long Goodbye - USA - Altman
10. Camera Buff - Poland - Krysztof Kieslowski

1960s: [the 50s and 60s are impossible to rank fairly. And Godard and Imamura especially hog the spots on these lists. So they get one each, though I'll list all the films that would make it on their own, roughly inthe order or preference.]
1. Vivre Sa Vie/Pierrot Le Fou/Alphaville/Breathless/Two or Three Things I Know About Her/etc. - France - Jean Luc Godard
2. The Pornographers/Insect Woman/Pigs and Battleships/A Man Vanishes/Intentions of Murder - Japan - Shohei Imamura
3. Gospel According to Matthew - Italy - Pier Paolo Pasolini
4. High and Low - Japan - Akira Kurosawa
5. Playtime - France - Jacques Tati
6. The Sun's Burial - Japan - Nagisa Oshima
7. Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - US - Stanley Kubrick
8. Mouchette- France - Robert Breson
9. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - Japan - Michio Naruse
10. A Touch of Zen - Hong Kong - King Hu

1950s: [Same story here: one per director again, with possible multiples noted.]
1. Early Summer/Tokyo Story - Japan - Yasujiro Ozu
2. Vertigo/Rear Window - USA - Alfred Hitchcock
3. Seven Samurai - Japan - Akira Kurosawa
4. Ugetsu Monogatari/Life of Oharu/Sansho the Bailiff - Japan - Kenji Mizoguchi
5. Touch of Evil - USA - Orson Welles
6. Pather Panchali - India - Satyajit Ray
7. The Searchers - USA - John Ford
8. Late Chrysanthemums - Japan - Mikio Naruse
9. Rebel Without a Cause - US - Nicholas Ray
10. Imitation of Life - US - Douglas Sirk

1940s:
1. It's a Wonderful Life - USA - Frank Capra
2. The Maltese Falcon - USA - John Huston
3. Late Spring - Japan - Yasujiro Ozu
4. His Girl Friday - USA - Howard Hawks
5. Ivan the Terrible - USSR - Sergei Eisenstein
6. The Big Sleep - USA - Howard Hawks
7. Fort Apache - USA - John Ford
8. Citizen Kane - USA - Orson Welles
9. Germany Year Zero - Italy - Roberto Rosselini
10. Stray Dog - Japan - Akira Kurosawa

1930s: [Again with the one per director]
1. M - Germany - Fritz Lang
2. Rules of the Game/Crimes of M. Lange - France - Jean Renoir
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - USA - Frank Capra
4. Duck Soup - USA - Leo McCarey
5. I Was Born But.../Passing Fancy/Inn in Tokyo - Japan - Yasujiro Ozu
6. Bride of Frankenstein/Frankenstein - USA - James Whale
7. Osaka Elegy - Japan - Kenji Mizoguchi
8. Love Me Tonight - USA - Reuben Mamoulian
9. Wife! Be Like a Rose! - Japan - Michio Naruse
10. Blue Angel - Germany - Joseph von Sternberg

1920s: [nothing new - haven't seen that many real old films since last year. Bunch of Douglas Fairbanks, mostly, all excellent but not top 10 quite.]
1. The General - USA - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
2. Nosferatu - Germany - FW Murnau
3.The Gold Rush - USA - Charles Chaplin
4. Our Hospitality - USA - Buster Keaton and John G Blystone
5. Man With the Movie Camera - USSR - Dziga Vertov
6. Earth - USSR - Aleksander Dovzhenko
7. Battleship Potemkin - USSR - Sergei Eisenstein
8. Sherlock Jr. - USA - Buster Keaton
9. October - USSR - Eisenstein
10. Greed - USA - Erich Von Stroheim

Pre-1920s:
1. Birth of a Nation - USA - DW Griffith
2. Les Vampires - Louis Feuillade
3. Broken Blossoms - USA - Griffith
4. The Tramp - USA - Charlie Chaplin
5. Intolerance - USA - Griffith
6. Regeneration - USA - Raoul Walsh
7. True Heart Susie - USA - Griffith
8. South - UK - Frank Hurley [this is the footage shot on the Shackleton expedition]
9. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - Germany - Robert Weine
10. The Champion - USA - Chaplin

Best of 2007 - Better Represented

Like last year, I am going to revisit the previous year's best of list, now that a better sample of the world's films have made it to town. (Though there are plenty more to come: I notice that the 2006 film I singled out last year - Jia Jiang-ke's Still Life - only made it here in the last couple months, this year...) The list I made in January (here) has been significantly augmented... I don't obsess over lists and ranks like I used to - but it's fun and to go back, think about what I thought about films, think about what's held up and so on; see which filmmakers have risen in my estimation, who's built on promise, etc.... Like last year, I may take also rework some older lists in the next week or so. List-o-phobes may need to look away....

But here it is - best of 2007, from 1/3 of the way into 2008.

1. Secret Sunshine - South Korea - Lee Chang-dong
2. There Will be Blood - US - Paul Thomas Anderson
3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days - Romania - Christian Mungiu
4. The Flight of the Red Balloon - Taiwan/France - Hou Hsiao Hsien
5. Zodiac - US - David Fincher
6. California Dreamin' (Endless) - Romania - Christian Remescu
7. No Country for Old Men - US - Coen Brothers
8. In the City of Sylvia - Spain - Jose Luis Guerin
9. Darjeeling Limited - US - Wes Anderson
10. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - US - Andrew Domenik
11. Some Photos from the City of Sylvia - Spain - Guerin
12. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - France - Julian Schnabel
13. Don't Touch the Axe - France - Jacques Rivette
14. Paranoid Park - US - Gus Van Sant
15. Persepolis - France - Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Parronaud
16. Away From Her - Canada - Sarah Polley
17. Married Life - US - Ira Sachs
18. Michael Clayton - US - Tony Gilroy
19. Grindhouse - US - Quinten Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez
20. Eastern Promises - Canada - David Cronenberg
21. Taxi to the Dark Side - USA - Alex Gibney
22. Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street - US - Tim Burton
23. Vanaja - India - Rajnesh Domalpalli
24. Witnesses - France - Andre Techine
25. Bourne Ultimatum - US - Paul Greengrass

(Quick reference: my January 1 top 10:

1. California Dreamin' (Endless)
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Zodiac
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
5. Darjeeling Limited
6. Eastern Promises
7. Away From Her
8. Grindhouse
9. Margot at the Wedding
10. Vanaja

Blogathons, Lists and Coming Attractions

A couple quick blogathonic notes, and some links this Sunday night:

Ferdy on Film's Invitation to the Dance blogathon is underway. I suppose this is an excuse to post a link to my Busby Berkeley notes from a couple years ago, though I hope I can come up with some more. This should certainly bring some fine reading...

And coming up later this month, Jeremy Bushnell will host a Production Design blogathon, which looks like a very interesting project. A chance to post more Princess Raccoon screen captures anyway.

Also:

Don't forget the Film of the Month Club - Pacze Moj posts links to access May's movie, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. I confess to having one of Netflix's copies at this moment, but will return it as soon as possible...

And the Self-Styled Siren takes on Joseph Breen, via Thomas Doherty's biography.

And so on. Hopefully this week I will manage to write up some more reactions to Secret Sunshine, and Lee Chang-dong's films; I'm thinking as well it might be time for a more definitive version of my Best of 2007 list. 1/3 of the way through the new year - a reasonable number of last year's films have made it to Boston, so the list is something closer to fair. We'll see.

3 Short Reviews

Another week without anything deep to add - a couple good movies, though, which is all we can ask.

The Flight of the Red Balloon gives us Hou Hsiao Hsien in Paris, watching Juliette Binoche as a somewhat harried mother and voice actor/puppeteer, with a new Chinese nanny (a filmmaker in her own right) for her clever son, and a dead beat tenant living downstairs... No, there isn't much plot to it - a series of incidents - Song, the nanny, reporting for duty, then learning her way around the household; the kid taking piano lessons and talking about his sister; Binoche coping with the tenant; some excerpts from puppet shows; Song taking Simon around the city, shooting bits of the city for her own film about The Red Balloon... Much of it is shot in the front room of their apartment - a cramped little room with a table between the door and the kitchen where everyone seems to spend most of their time, with stairs just to the left going up to a Mezzanine... A space that seems as much a character as the people - its utterly realistic clutter (books and puppets and papers and boxes), that everyone lives around. Later in the film, Hou finally turns the camera around for a couple shots - pointing back from the table - so first we see the space where the camera had been: couch and chairs, a TV with video games - and later, the space beyond that - a conventional looking living room that no one ever seems to go into. (We might see it in the flashbacks to Simon and Louis: though it's not identified as this room, and those scenes aren't exactly fixed in time - flashbacks, flashforwards, fiction - it's not certain.) Just this, Hou's leisurely tour of the apartment's rooms, is enough to remind me again what an astonishing filmmaker he is. Getting the way people live in their spaces; making subtle associations between the spaces and their lives - the way he slowly, casually reveals both the fuller layout of the apartment and the fuller history of the characters. What the film lacks in plot, in drama, it supplies, not just in the detail of their lives as they live them, but the quiet consideration of their lives so far (and to come: we are given to imagine where Fang Song will go, as we watch her working on her film throughout this film.) Another reminder - along with Godard and Rivette - this is the world's greatest living filmmaker...

My Blueberry Nights - meanwhile, Wong Kar-wei also strayed far from home for this film - Norah Jones mopes, at first in Jude Law's cafe in NYC, then in Memphis and Nevada. In Memphis, David Straithairn steals the picture playing an alcoholic stalker; in Nevada, Nathalie Portman amuses as a gambler. Then there's a happy ending! It livens up once Jones leaves NY, but still ends up playing like a parody of Wong's 90s films: rehashing all his old tricks... actually, arodying them directly - having Law play with a surveillance camera during a fight scene... All told though - it's pretty disposable. Nothing wrong with it, but...

The Visitor - Tom McCarthy's follow up to the Station Agent. Richard Jenkins stars as a college professor, going through the motions, pretending to write, pretending to teach, pretending to learn piano. He is sent to NYC to present a paper he cosigned, and when he arrives finds a couple living in his apartment in the city. He lets them stay the night - and within a day or so, he's struck up a friendship with the man - a Syrian musician. Who unfortunately does not have a green card - this goes where you fear it will. But it does so with grace and dignity. McCarthy has a nice way of withholding information, not to build false suspense, but to bring you into the story - to make you engage with it: like Jenkins coming to his apartment in NY - or later,when we see why he keeps trying to play piano... Things emerge naturally and in their own time... It is a lot like the Station Agent - the story of a lonely, depressed man, brought out of his shell by an outgoing stranger, brought into a new community where he finds himself at home... little sadder - the story poisoned by politics... A good, solid, film, the kind that justifies the existence of the American Indie film as a type...

Links and Miscellany

While I can't bring any original content today, I want to drop in for a word or two, a link, maybe a photograph, marking a terrible trauma. This terrifying beast -



- nearly crippled me. Visiting Ye Olde Homestead, one of my nephews showed me where he and his pals had found a goose egg over the winter - while we were examining the old nest, all of a sudden, this bird came at us, beak out and honking - we lit for the territories! alas - trying to run on a bed of pine needles wearing a pair of slip on "comfort mocs" is a recipe for disaster, with or without a pissed off Canada Goose on your heels, though I got away with nothing but a bad charlie horse. Thankfully the brute was more interested in defending the (long gone) nest than exacting vengeance, so he just stood there and honked...

Anyway: that's a poor introduction to a slate of pretty intriguing links:

Girish asks: Why do you blog?

Kristin Thompson discusses Fair Use of film frame reproductions.

Damn near everybody talks about Armond White whining about the internets. And critics. And whatever else he can think of. I'll forgive him because he's one of the few critics to take Darjeeling Limited as seriously as it deserves.

Oh yeah - Cannes! Lineup, courtesy of Anne Thompson.

And finally - to prove I have not been completely idle: pop over to Film & Discussion to take part in a poll - where does Woody Allen belong on the Sarris scale of film directors? Nor should you forget Film at 11's blogathon - harness the hive mind to create a guide to post 1968 auteurs! Join the hive mind, etc.!

Return of Random Friday Music!

Finding myself again with nothing ready to post - let's reach for an old stand by, the Random Ten... with some bonus record reviews! Though not very good record reviews since I've only listened to one or two of these CDs as a whole, the rest just popping up on the iPod now and again... what can you do. Lately I've cut back on my CD purchases: but mostly that means, no old CDs - I still buy a fair number of new ones... old favorites, the occasional experiment... It seems to me that I should comment on these records more, even if it's just a list of what I've bought... So - what do we have?

- Earth - The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull - is a fine piece, with Bill Frisell guesting on a couple numbers... I have been looking forward to this for a while, and it delivers...
- Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath - I have barely listened to this: oops.
- Stephen Malkmus - Real Emotional Trash - this either. And I meant to. Hmm.
- The Duke Spirit - Neptune - I downloaded a song somewhere, at someone's recommendation - (Where the Stress Falls) - I liked it enough to make an investment, though if you've read the last 2 notes, you can guess what the next line would be....
- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig! - I m not sure if there is enough information on this blog for readers to guess which of these CDs I would have been absolutely certain to listen to: if there is, no one will be surprised this is it (and the Earth, of course.) I become more or a Nick Cave song every year. This one continues the direction of Grinderman - noisy, rockier, etc - nicely done...
- REM - Accelerate - buying records by old favorites is a risk, especially if they've faded from view a bit: sometimes you get something like the recent Mission of Burma CDs - great stuff, standing perfectly well on its own; sometimes you get something that makes you wish your heroes had taken their own advice and died before they got old.. Usually you get something with one or two good ideas and a bunch of competently executed mediocrity. I might be missing something, but so far this is #3. They seem to be working hard, but I've no incentive not to hit the forward button.
- Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely - Jack White seems to put put 6 records a year under 5 different names and fills them all with tunes and words and playing. I'll buy anything he does, at this point, and expect to be entertained...
The Kills - Midnight Boom - I haven't listened tot his all the way through yet, but have tried to sample it enough - it remains to be seen, I suppose, if it's as good s it gets or just really good.

And now - Commence Randomization!

1. Sleater Kinney - Little Babies ***** - that's a good start
2. Butthole Surfers - Waiting for Jimmy to Kick - one of those weird little oddities from Rembrandt Pussyhorse...
3. Hank Williams - Lost Highway - doesn't get much better than Hank
4. Son Volt - Underground Dream
5. CCR - Long as I can See the Light - that's a nice pairing, Jay Farrar and John Fogerty...
6. David Bowie - Always Crashing in the Same Car
7. Bill Frisell - Have a Little Faith in Me **** - this is hard to beat too - one of y favorite records of the 90s...
8. Red Krayola - The Red Krayola on Forty-five - Red Krayola/Mayo Thompson (and Frederick Barthelme!) - one of the best kept secrets in rock...
9. Sufjan Stevens - The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us
10. Faust - The Sad Skinhead

And for video? Well - here's some Red Krayola:



And - some vintage Sleater Knney:

Movie Quickies

Trying to keep a hand in here, and get back to something resembling a regular blogging habit... Not a lot of films, but some interesting ones.

Contempt - back on the big screen, in glorious technicolor - glorious indeed. It's an odd film - Godard at his most conventional, I suppose, with the Moravia plot (wife despises husband after he lets her ride in an American's car, I guess), and a fairly realistic and representational style. It looks magnificent of course - beautiful places and things, that Godard exploits, moving his actors around and through like sour tourists (which they all are, in a way). An interesting cast: Bardot pouts, beautifully and effectively; Palance is great - outsized, ridiculous, funny; watching Michel Piccoli and Fritz Lang together is strange - I realized that most of the Piccoli films I have seen are from the 90s and 00s - Rivettes and Oliveiras - and that Lang, in quite a few of the scenes, looks and acts like Piccoli in some of those films. That wry, implacable personality - wise and sly and impossibly cool. Anyway, the film - is, I say, Godard at his most conventional, though it has its moments: the film in a film stuff is definitely something - those inserts aren't treated in a realistic way: they signify the film in a film, they don't show it, I think... But the conventional parts - the breakup scene at the couple's apartment, say - are magnificent. The way Godard develops the situation, while showing the couple in an utterly routine way, going about their mundane business, with all that (unspoken, or half-spoken) emotional business underneath - it is brilliant. Economical while seeming to be digressive...

All for Free - this one has a story. Yesterday, I planned to see Contempt again. I got there late Saturday, and ended up sitting directly behind a tall man with very good posture who did not slouch in any way during the film, so I had to try to guess what was on the right hand side of the screen.... But then, Sunday morning at the grocery store, I bought a pot roast for supper - and when I got home realized that a pot roast would take 2-3 hours to cook: and the Godard film would get me home about 6, making for a very late night. What to do? find another film - nothing else looked worth it, so I picked this, which I knew nothing about. What is it? A Yugoslavian co-production (though set in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I believe), distributed as part of the Global Lens Film Series (at the Coolidge. What else is it? A slow moving comedy, that starts with four friends hanging around a miserable small town, doing nothing, drinking, cuckolding each other, which leads to blood. The survivor, conveniently aged 3, sells all he has and buys a truck/diner and drives through the land giving away drinks. He stays one day in every town - he is greeted with suspicion at first, but eventually, people warm to him (it's all free, after all), but then he meets a cafe owner protecting his turf and a beautiful girl... It's a decent film, over all - often quite funny, sometimes more serious, sometimes maudlin, but generally effective; it makes a few political points, though without pounding them home. It's an interesting twist on the christ archtype, a kind of savior who's mostly saving himself.

And finally - more Douglas Fairbanks! this time, Mark of Zorro and Don Q Son of Zorro (together on one DVD). A neat pair of films - Mark of Zorro was where Douglas Fairbanks became Douglas Fairbanks - and might well be the best of the lot. He gets a lot of comic business, especially as Don Diego Vega, fop, slouching around doing magic tricks and laughing up his sleeve at everyone else - and even more derring do as Zorro, masked avenger. There is achase, worthy of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd - Fairbanks lets out all the stops: jumping over a mule, running up walls, swinging around, diving through wndows, jumping off roofs, everything. It's good stuff, and clocks in at about 100 minutes, a good sign - as the 20s went on his films tended to get longer and longer, less and less focussed. That's what happens in Don Q - oddly, though, there the second half goes off the rails. The first half shows Cesar, son of Zorro, living it up in Spain - he annoys one Don Sebastian (played by Donald Crisp) and impresses the Archduke Paul of Austria (Charlie Chan - I mean, Warner Oland), so of course the three of them are stuck together. Ah, but there's a girl (Mary Astor), and Cesar wins her out from under the nose of Don Sebastian... And then there's a toady, and a grand ball, and Paul mocks and insults Sebastian while Cesar wins the girl - it's all too much for someone!

Actually, it's a pretty interesting setup. Don Sebastian, though a prig and a snob and willing to screw over his rivals, is not the usual unadulterated cad - the real SOB is Archduke Paul, who mocks him, and blocks his efforts to pitch woo at the girl,and then makes fun of him for being bested in love... it's hard to feel much sympathy for him. Unfortunately, after the terrible event occurs, the film goes flat - Don Q runs for the hills, the villains twirl their mustaches and glower and cast sinister glances around, the girl laments, then everyone - including Zorro - converges on the ancestral pile for a brawl... it's a bit of a let down after the first half... But plenty of fun.

Anyway: here's Doug (or someone) in mid air: probably was Fairbanks - he was the Jackie Chan of his day. (And watching these films it's very clear: Jackie Chan is the Douglas Fairbanks of our day - he stole more of his act from Fairbanks than from Chaplin and Keaton combined...)

American Cinema Blogathon

Today is the 40th anniversary of the publication of one of the towering classics of film criticism - Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema. This is being commemorated with a blogathon, hosted by Film at 11 - write about American filmmakers since 1968 using Sarris' categories and general schemes. (I imagine as well there will be posts about Sarris himself and the place of his book in film history - and many film lovers' personal histories.)

There should be plenty more to come from this one - it's a more open ended blogathon, starting today, and going forward. And - though Adam's focus is on discussing post-68 fimmakers within Sarris' framework, the topic itself (auteurism, Sarris himself, etc.) remans a vital one - as anyone clicking over to that big argument at Girish's can see. So I look forward to what can come from this.

Blog Neglect Addressed

I have been neglecting this blog to argue about auteurism at Girish's blog. The conversation has taken some odd turns. I might have to bring some of it here - points are raised, examples cited, that I want to pursue, but would turn a long and probably deadly dull (to everyone but me and the 2-3 other people left in the thing) comment thread into a, um, longer and deadlier duller.... Anyway - you can read it over there: if I do bring some of it here, I will try to work out a coherent position, and maybe chase some of the specifics noted but not pursued - like Michael Curtiz' contributions to The Adventures of Robin Hood (which I cited as a great, non-auteurist films - though Curtiz in fact does great work, I think). Or something about the interplay between Fred Astaire (and Hermes Pan) and Mark Sandrich in their films together...

But that will have to wait. Right now? some quick film hits - a habit I should get back into...

Married Life: a rather nice pastiche of Hitchcock and Sirk from Ira Sachs, with Chris Coper and Patrcia Clarkson, and Pierce Brosnan, who keeps getting better and better... It's a nice little story, pitched somewhere between a breezy dark comedy, bitter tragedy and a sex farce, which may not seem like the most obvious place to pitch a film, but it works.

Leatherheads: George Clooney tries to make a Coen Brothers film about pro football, ca. 1925 - he plays an aging footballer who lures a college kid into the pros, while a hard-bitten reporter (Renee Zellweger playing Jennifer Jason Leigh playing Jean Arthur) tries to expose the kid's war career as a fraud... it has witty moments, and everyone seems to be having fun, but it's pretty flat. The story is about as fresh as one of those 20s uniforms might be if they had been left, unwashed in a suitcase for 80 years.... the most astonishing thing about it is that Zellweger does not ruin it - she almost pulls off the dame reporter bit. You can imagine her with better material not sucking. It's like the last 10 years have been erased.

Monkey Warfare: Canadian film starring Don McKellar and Tracy Wright as a pair of ex-radicals living off the grid picking garbage to sell on ebay... They meet Nadia Litz as a young pot dealer who before long is drawing them into her radical politics, blowing up SUVs. Secrets are revealed... it's funny, clever, with some okay Godardian moments, and a first rate cast. I haven't seen a Canadian film in ages apparently - Don McKellar used to be ubiquitous. I miss him.

The Bank Job: a slow weekend last weekend, so I caught up with this, mostly because a guy I talked to at one of the Oliveira films said it was pretty good. He's right, basically. A bank heist film - British intelligence (MI 5 or 6 - no one can remember which) sets up a small time hood to rob a bank to steal dirty pictures of Princess Margaret... he rounds up a bunch of losers and robs the bank, with the spooks trying to shield them from the cops, which goes about as well as expected. Gangsters, good and bad cops, MI 5 or 6, all come after them, but the randy princess trumps all.... It works for what it is - it has an odd tone, not as comic as Big Deal on Madonna Street, or as noir as Riffiffi or Asphalt Jungle, nor as dark as Sexy Beast, kind of sliding around among them - but it works.

And finally, more Errol Flynn - The Sea Hawk: more rollicking Warner Brothers action - Flynn as a privateer harassing the Spanish, with Queen Elizabeth playing for and against him, and Henry Daniell providing the blueprint for Christopher Guest's Count Rugen. Quite nice, as usual with that combination of talents.

Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston has died. Many links and tributes can be found through Greencine. He was every bit the movie star.

I will commemorate him with some clips from the best film he was ever in. His performance isn't always given its due - he's stiff and strange and about as Mexican as I am, but I still think he came pretty close to nailing it. He gets across a mix of heroism and high rectitude that defines the character perfectly. Watching that last confrontation, tailing Quinlan and Pete under a bridge, then facing Quinlan alone in the garbage - it might be Welles' finest hour, but it's hard to imagine it working as well without Heston. He plays off Welles' tragic decay, emotionally, Vargas all business, cutting through Quinlan's excuses and guilt and defeat, and physically, with his sleek athleticism, and almost complete control. Welles gives him just enough to do, physically, to make the point. It's good stuff.



Maybe I should leave Heston's politics out of it - but looking at a Touch of Evil, can I? The end of his life, devoting his authority and reputation to dubious ideas (at least, dubious extensions of ambiguous ideas), has a bit more in common with Hank Quinlan than it should. We shouldn't let it obscure what he did on screen.

Especially when he had a director who knew how to put pictures together....



Also posted at Film & Discussion.

Week in the Making

I've been lazy here lately - weird: three posts in three days last week, then... I've not been totally idle - poking around on another blog I started up with some of my old AOL cronies... setting up an RSS reader - as usual, years after everyone else started using them for all. It's an interesting way of reading blogs - I've been getting used to it. Thinking about how to make something of it: I like Harry Tuttle's Google shared page: maybe I should try something like that - here's a cut at it. I may experiment with that...

Somewhat more substantively, I have been following the discussion of auteurism at Girish's place. Reading along, composing replies and arguments, though I've only posted one so far. It's a vexed subject, as one of my english teachers used to say. It keeps coming up in film discussions, and when it does, I can never decide how much to dive in. There's a lot to be said about it - though most of it has been said somewhere already, and if I'm going to add my 2¢ I should do some due diligence and read up on the theorizing, and that fills me with dread... So, for now, I've stuck to offering generalities - Film is a Composite Art! Auteurism is best seen as a form of genre theory! I have not yet made the claim that auteurs don't make films, films make auteurs, but I might. While the auteur theory seems first to have been promoted to claim some of the prestige of literary authors for directors, I think it also served to undermine the idea of authorship - it made it more figurative; it conceived of authorship as something that emerges from the "text" as much as it precedes it. So - you might find a route from Truffaut to Barthes if you look for it....

Meanwhile, typing this, I'm listening to the recordings Charlie Parker made with the Dave Lambert singers: strange, strange stuff. Bird was certainly on top of his game, but the singing is almost surreal. Given the talent involved - Gil Evans arranging - boy... A quick google, though, comes up with this two part interview with Hal McKusick, a musician on the session.

And finally - I have seen films. Don't Touch the Axe - for some reason, renamed "The Duchess of Langeais" in English (probably to fool Americans into thinking it's a respectable literary adaptation and not a Jacques Rivette film.) Which is quite marvelous, if not up to the best Rivettes. It would have fit pretty well in the Oliveira series I've been attending - it is certainly a tale of doomed love. Though Rivette is a different kind of director than Oliveira: funnier, more knowing - the characters are older, and get into things willingly and consciously. Rivette certainly takes a different approach with his actors, giving Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu a good deal of freedom to fill the screen - they do, especially Balibar, who is perfectly magical on screen. Though Rivette is certainly capable of being as strange as Oliveira when he wants to be. Though usually hilarious at the same time - a scene of two drunken fops turning over 19th century cliches - "stunning" - "it's a drama" - is perfectly priceless....

Rivette, meanwhile, having reached the age of 80 without discernibly slowing his filmmaking output, is stalking Olveira from that angle too. I also saw Abraham's Valley last week, another Oliveira, from 15 years ago, when he was a fairly young 85. This is another literary adaptation, the life of a woman, married young to an older doctor, and who lives, too beautiful, too smart, too alive for her world (provincial Portugal, latter half of the 20th century) - shades of Madame Bovary, though perhaps not controlling. It's less a tale of doomed love than a melodrama of an unknown woman - though one who manages to insist on and get a fair amount of her own way, however limited this might be. Beautiful film, though somewhat domecticated compared to the 70s films - muc more naturalistic, though there is some direct address to the camera, and an impertinent cat.

Meanwhile, stcking with octogenarian directors, on DVD, I finally got around to watching Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon. A fairy tale of doomed lovers and magic and evil christians (the Virgen Hag!) enacted in eye popping color on every imaginable variety of set... Here's a picture, far more informative than anything I could write:



And finally - another screenshot, from another wonderful DVD I watched - Douglas Fairbanks (auteur!) in the Black Pirate. Here he is in all his much-imitated glory:

Manoel de Oliveira Retrospective

The Harvard Film Archive has been on a particularly interesting run lately. I suppose they always have great programming - but last year and this, they seem to have had a lot of things and people I knew a little bit about, but not enough - it's been a chance to discover several filmmakers in some depth. Rivette and Tarr and Pedro Costa last year; this year, Jose Luis Guerin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and now Manoel de Oliveira. 

I've seen some Oliveira in the past, 3-4 films - Party, I'm Going Home, Belle Toujours, etc. They were, I thought, handsome, well made art films, with some surrealist or theatrical twists, but that's about all. I knew he had a reputation for greatness, but thought it was mostly a result of his longevity - a 70 year career of fine work... This series has been a revelation. In fact, he is a fascinating, challenging, almost unique director - the films I had seen are his most conventional: he has made some far stranger works through the years. 

This is just a quick set of notes about the films I have seen: there is a lot to be said about them, but for now, things will have to stay fairly sketchy. There are a few more films in the series - I have more to look forward to.

Magic Mirror: 2005 film, about a young man who gets out of prison and starts working for a rich woman who is obsessed with religion, and longs to be visited by the virgin Mary; the ex-con hooks up with a forger turned piano tuner, and they hatch a scheme to fake the miracle... but what happens then.... actually, the whole film works, narratively, by promising a plot - a trip to the Holy Land? a backstory about a woman named Camille? an affair between the driver and the rich woman? the plot to fake the appearance of the Virgin? - which never quite materializes. Or is elided in the film, like the tour - which happens offscreen, then appears onscreen, as something from the past... It's a strange, stylized film, that starts slow and stiff, but slowly teaches you how to watch it, and gains in power throughout - this was the first film I saw during this program, and it was an excellent introduction to the odder side of Oliveira's career.

Aniki Bobo: His first feature film, from 1942 - a very charming film about kids in Oporto, centering on the romantic rivalry between Eduardo, athletic and boastful, and Carlitos, soulful and a bit put upon, for the love of little Teresinha. When Eduardo gets the upper hand, Carlitos steals a doll for the girl. He is haunted by guilt, though that doesn't stop him from giving it to her. Things take a turn the next day - the shop owner sees them and follows, they run, fight, and watch a train - oh no! a fall! (Not giving anything away - that's the first shot of the film, one of the boys falling toward the train tracks...) Anyway - it's been called a precursor to neo-realism, which is a fair comment. Even more than that, though, it looks like the missing link between Zero for Conduct and some of Ozu's kid films and Little Fugitive - the tone isn't quite as dire as those post-war Italian films... But the style and the method, shooting in the street with kids, basically, is definitely where that stuff is going. I don't know what actual connections there were among these films - but the style is very similar for all of them, as well as the interest in kids and their world. Very few adults figure here - the shop keeper, who is alternately indulgent and stern, and a ridiculous schoolteacher, basically. It's all kids. Anyway - it's very nicely done; there are some great shots - a kid climbing a crane and diving into the water; another kid running around on roof tops, not all the shots faked... very neat stuff.

Francisca: Massive slow art film about doomed love, one of many (4?) such films from Oliveira in the 70s. This one follows two men - one a writer (Camilo Castello Blanco, one of Portugal's great novelists), the other a romantic, a Byronist. The latter falls for the daughter of an Englishman - Francisca/Fanny. They elope, suffer; he's bored from the start, and a bit of a prick, and the writer also loves her, and interferes. There are letters - incriminating? he is suspicious of her, but he marries her anyway (by proxy - one of the many slyly funny moments in these films), but - we can guess where this is leading. She sickens and dies, he rants, then goes to confront her brother about her mystery. The brother offers nothing, and the lover dies, offscreen, so his friends can gossip about him over cognac. A very strange film: beautiful and lush, though the lushness is often (obviously) fake - painted backdrops, usually seen through doors and windows. (The most startling example of this is a shot of the sea: first we see the actual ocean through a window; then we cut back, and see the same window and scene, but now the seascape is a painting: Oliveira makes no effort to pretend otherwise, he emphasizes the artifice.) Actors pose and talk, often directly to the camera, sometimes as inner monologues, but sometimes when they should be talking to each other. Actors strike poses and remain still in some scenes - people dance or walk through scenes in odd disruptive ways. Whole scenes are repeated, shot from different angles. The speech is flat and uninflected, without emotion, with things conveyed conventionally - putting your head on your arm to indicate crying, etc. Stagy, though well beyond stagy. As abstract as Greenaway or Gertrud or Straub/Huillet, and like those films quite powerful, building in force throughout. And - like most of Oliveira's films - surprisingly funny, in a dark, understated way.

Doomed Love: good as Francisca is, Doomed Love is a masterpiece. It's a simple story - the unruly son of a provincial magistrate falls for the neighbor's daughter - but their fathers are enemies and forbid the match. When her father tries to marry her to a cousin, she rebels, and when he (her father) tries to force the issue, Simao (the boy) turns up and blood starts to flow. When he finally gets around to killing someone important, he is arrested (again - I'm not giving anything away - the film opens with the story of his arrest and transportation to India), and he and Teresa suffer in their separate confinements, until the title is fulfilled. Meanwhile, Simao is comforted by the daughter of a blacksmith his father once saved from the gallows: she is an angel, and suffers her fate with no hope of anything - her love is pure and selfless and doomed. Very long - almost 5 hours - in the same, strange style as Francisca - voiceover narration, non-emotive acting, flat line readings (like reading), occasional breaks in the representations - actors freezing in place, etc., more of the panted backgrounds, stylized sets and so on.... And gorgeous - gorgeous compositions and lighting, and some dazzling sequences: Teresa refusing to marry her cousin (she's shot reflected in a mirror while her father is in the shot directly - when she leaves the room, the camera retreats to keep her reflection in the shot, but never reveal her...); Teresa's introduction to the convent; the murder; and the ending, which definitely gives the title its due.... 

These films remind me of other films - Straub/Huillet, Greenaway sometimes, Rivette, late Dryer - but there really isn't a lot like them. Their mix of high melodrama and very high modernism... their aggressive anti-representationalism - all that inexpressive acting, the artificial sets and backgrounds, mixed, of course, with genuine natural vistas, deep, rich,colorful sets and costumes... their love of ritual and formalized movement: crimes and duels staged as tableaux; dances, dinners, etc., all formalized - like one scene in Doomed Love where the servants, preparing for a dance, come into a room to make it ready, going through it lighting candles, rolling up a carpet in formation - prefiguring the ritualized and formal dance that follows. Brilliant films.

Roundup of Recent Films

I have to get better at this; I have to get better at writing about films, and other things, more quickly. I have been very bad this year. Things are dragging out longer and longer. I have to stop that. If nothing else, I will get back to this - sketching up a draft of notes about some recent films. This post stretches the idea of recent a bit beyond its usual online meaning: a couple months worth of new films, seen in theaters. That period has also included a good number of older films seen in theaters: Jose Luis Guerin and Manoel de Oliveira, particularly. There is always hope something may come of that. Anyway: a few notes on a couple months of films:

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days: The Romanian abortion film, set in the days of Ceausescu's dictatorship. Made in a naturalistic style, handheld camera, something close to real time, following a girl trying to arrange an abortion for her friend. For all the political implications of it, it's really more like a Val Lewton film. A series of threats that don't, in fact, exactly materialize - lots of dead ends, hints and threats, but none come about - and most of the threat is suggested, but stated. The girl walking throught he dark city at night, looking to get rid of the fetus - complete with a Lewton bus - a dog jumping out from behind a dumpster she considers... which I suppose conveys the dread and paranoia, the routine horror, of the period as well as anything could.

Michael Clayton: Mistaken in some circles for a legal drama or a message picture, but in fact, a clean and well made neo-noir. George Clooney as Clayton, fixer at a law firm, broke, in debt to the wrong people, with a history of gambling and other bad behavior, and two brothers, one a drunk, one a cop: it's a classic set up. Clooney sets off to rescue a colleague who goes off his meds at a depo in the middle of a long horrible case - the man eludes him, and trying to get him back reveals all to our hero... I put off seeing it, fearing a Hollywood image picture, but in fact it is another fine genre piece, like so many of last year's films. Not among the very best - second tier - better than Before the Devil knows you're Dead, not as good as No Country for Old Men or The Assassination of Jess James (etc.). Clooney, of course, is wonderful - Tom Wilkinson is called on to ham and does. Tilda Swinton has a thankless role that she somehow pulls to near life (close enough for the Oscar, I se.) Sidney Pollack plays the same guy he played in Eyes Wide Shut, explaining it all to the hero...

Diary of the Dead: another zombie picture, this one presented as a shot on the fly documentary. A student film crew and their drunken teacher drive across Pennsylvania, fighting off zombies, sometimes with the help of people they meet along the way... It's okay - reasonably good zombie film, with silly pretentious blather about technology. Shawn of the Dead was better across the board, and it's hard to come up with more after that...

Witnesses: Latest Andre Techine film, set in 1984-85: a young man turns up in Paris, living with his sister in a hotel, which is really a brothel. He is gay, and soon he meets a nice older guy while cruising - before long the older man is squiring him around town, though without sex. The older man is friends with a couple, Emmanuelle Beart and her husband, an Algerian cop: it isn't long before the cop and the kid are having a wild affair. Then the kid gets AIDS, and things unravel. And go on. Techine does a nice job with this situation - especially after the boy gets AIDS, the other characters take turns accusing one another of things - selfishness, martyrdom. He handles it well - they attack one another, but Techine shows us enough to know that what they say isn't fair - but is a bit fair: none of them know the others as we do; but all of them miss things about themselves. Overall, a solid, well acted ensemble piece.

Be Kind Rewind: I certainly wanted to like this. I liked the last two Gondry films (even if one is a Kaufman film) - this one sounded fun. But in fact - it's lame. It's - what is it? It's strange - a big budget Hollywood extravaganza dedicated to the joys of low-tech filmmaking, low tech art. Though that's just where the ironies start: take the fact that contemporary technology, DV and computers and YouTube, make this kind of low tech filmmaking easy - making a film, any kind of film, on videotape? holy cow - that was work. That's harder than making a film on film!

The Band's Visit: one of the many foreign films jobbed out of a chance to win an Oscar, in this case because it was mostly in English (the common language of its Israeli and Egyptian characters). Not quite the tragedy that excluding 4 Months... or Persepolis or whatever was.  Not a bad film by any means, but basically sentimentalized Kaurismaki, in the desert... Complete with a band, funny clothes... Chet Baker?

Taxi to the Dark Side: Nothing special in the filmmaking, but then again, the subject does not allow it. Almost pure talking heads - but the story it tells is devastating. The story of torture in America, under the Bush administration, taking as its departure point the story of a taxi driver names Dilewar, arrested in Afghanistan and basically beaten to death in custody. From there it moves on to the rest of the sordid mess - Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc. And the Bush administration's continued campaign to get torture accepted. In Afghanistan and Iraq the administration behaved as perfect swine: they push for harsher interrogation methods, more intelligence (without much interest in whether the intelligence is any good), while insulating themselves from responsibility. They create the systems and the implication that harsher methods are allowed, without clarifying the rules - so when soldiers on the ground do something like at Abu Ghraib, or what happened to Dilewar, the soldiers take the fall. The administration creates pressures that lead to the soldiers abusing people, but in a way that they are never, officially, taking orders. At this point, noting the essential cowardice of the Bush administration is nothing new, but here it is again.

Still Life: Jia Zhang-ke's film set in the three gorges area of China. The film is split in two - a man and a woman come to town each looking for a lost spouse: he stays and works, she searches around, delivers her message and leaves. I can't really do justice to Jia Jiang ke in 3-4 sentences so I won't bother trying.

Paranoid Park: Latest fro Gus Van Sant - a skateboard kid goes to paranoid park, a skateboard park - bad things happen. What? Van Sant circles the story, around and around, as the kid writes about what happened, thinks about it - nicely done, almost a fugue state, really... Van Sant leaves us with the kid in suspension - what will he do what will happen? Probably not quite a match for Van Sant's other 00's films, but a fine work anyway.

CJ7 - latest Stephen Chow film - he plays a poor man who sends his kid to a good school, though the kid is bullied and not too well suited for it. Then he brings him a toy from the dump which turns out to be an alien from the planet Cute. The film is also very cute, and intermittently charming and funny,but not up to Chow's best. It has a couple moments, yes - Chow is at his best when he's most unhinged, and this one stays pretty securely fastened, but there is a fine dream sequence, as the kid and his alien space dog take vengeance on the brats at school... Otherwise the sentiment tends to overpower the wit, though it is still reasonably entertaining. 

Baseball Picks

We are getting close to the happiest day of the year - Tuesday, 6 in the morning - opening day! Nihon de! Time for some picks - I did this last year: got most of the AL right, botched the NL completely, but so did everyone, and you could have probably picked teams with a week to go and got none of them right. Given how completely the Mets and Padres choked... so here goes again...

American League:
East:
1) Boston - I have to pick them again. They brought back most of the team; they are reasonably young, so not likely to get hurt by injuries - they're going to be tough for a while. Though as usual, an injury or two to the wrong people and they're out of the playoffs. Losing Zumaya and the Gambler, probably, kept the Tigers on the sidelines last October, and that could happen here... But all things being equal, Boston's going to be near the top.
2) Yankees - pains me to say it, but I suspect they will hang around. See below for more reasons.
3) Toronto - I'd like to see them beat the Yanks - and they could, except they seem to have the worst luck, and unlike the Red Sox (and Yankees, somewhat) they don't have the depth to survive any injuries to key players. That's brought them down the last couple years. I think they have a better team than the Yankees though, and could even break better than the Red Sox, but they need everyone to be healthy and play well.
4) Tampa Bay - one of these years they are going to be halfway decent. Shields and Kazmir might get them started on the road, though they've almost had decent pitchers before. They have a solid array of nice young hitters, but have for awhile: until they start getting people out, they'll continue to stink.
5) Baltimore - can only dream of respectability.

Central:
1) Detroit - a murderer's row lineup, a couple prime pitchers - though behind the top of the rotation, things turn sour quickly, and there's not much waiting in the wings. So odds are they win the division, but it's hardly a sure thing...
2) Cleveland - there's no reason they can't maintain last year's success, even get better - they have decent hitters and all, and they are way deep in the pen, with 5-6 effective relievers - though oddly, the least of them get to pitch the 9th... this should be a good race in any case,between them and the Tigers, and I suspect this is where the wild card will come from this year.
3) KC - every year you have to pick someone to make a jump up or down - why not the royals? They were not bad last year - Greinke seems to be back on track; Brian Bannister emerged as a solid pitcher; Gil Meche brought stability... they have some good relievers - and some very interesting young players. If Butler and Gordon build on last year, they might get into hailing distance of being a decent team.
4) Chicago - still a complete wild card. Is Ozzie Guillen crazy? will they figure out who plays and who doesn't? will they have enough pitchers? I don't have a clue. I don't think they can win it this year, but otherwise, I have no idea what to expect. Somewhere between 65-85 wins, I guess.
5) Minnesota - everything must go! I hope Joe Nathan keeps his bags packed. It looks like another trip to the wilderness for the Twinkies, though like most of their disintegrations, this one probably won't last all that long. They still have nice core in Morneau, Mauer (if he can stay on the field), Young, Liriano (if he's healthy) - when a couple more of their young pitchers develop, they could be back in the hunt. Though probably not in time for Nathan or Morneau to benefit, not in Minnesota...

West:
1) California Angels - it's not a sure thing, but they do look strong: deep rotation, solid pen, Vlad, plus Figgins, Hunter, Anderson, and some promising youngsters - they should hang on to first.
2) Seattle - though the Mariners could get there too. Bedard ad King Felix is a nice way to start a rotation; Putz a nice way to end games; Ichiro is Ichiban, and they have decent talent around him, though nothing overwhelming. I think their chances depend more on something going wrong for the Angels, but they could be in the middle of things.
3) Texas - they might have rebuilt quicker and better than I thought - they have a lot of young talent - Kinsler, Hamilton, Saltamacchia [I'm not looking up how thats spelled] - though as usual it's all offensive talent. Odds are probably pretty good that more than one of those guys will, after blossoming in Arlington, will seek their fortunes elsewhere in a year or two, like Soriano, Texeira, etc.
4) Oakland - out with the old in with the new! maybe. Until the new is ready, the A's can look up to the rest of the division. Unless Texas pulls its usual disappearance.

NL:
East:
1) NY Mets - Santana helps. They had the best team last year, but ran out of pitching - same as the year before (though they did it in the playoffs in 06). Santana ands Maine though should stay on the field, and that might be enough to win.
2) Atlanta - they have some pitching depth, they have some nice hitters, they have Bobby Cox - they should be all right. They are more likely to vulture someone else's collapse though..
3) Philly - they can hit, but they are in trouble on the hill. They have gone 7 years winning in the 80s - tied for the longest stretch of that brand of mediocrity ever. I think this year they take the record.
4) Washington - actually look like they might have the start of a decent team. "Decent" is a relative term, of course.
5) Florida - they have the best player in the national league.

Central:
1) Milwaukee - why not? they were close last year - this year, why not? they have a very god core of young hitters, who could improve this year - Hall was off, Hardy collapsed - why not? if their pitching holds up, they should win.
2) Chicago - about the same as last year, aren't they? there is plenty of room for either improvement or collapse - of more of the same.
3) Cincinnati - another possibly up and coming squad: they need some pitchers to develop,and better innings from Arroyo, they need Cordero to be effective and others to emerge behind him, they need the young hitters to play well. If those things happen, they could content - it's still a weak enough division that if a bunch of them happen, they could win it.
4) Houston - their rotation is hideous. Their lineup though might save them. At least keep them around .500, and from there, who knows.
5) St. Louis - they've been coming apart for the last couple years,though they had 2 good weeks in 2006 and won it all. I don't think they will be in any position to do that again.
6) Pittsburgh - the what - 10th? - team so far that, if their young pitching develops this year, could take a major leap forward. Well - something forward: they don't have much in the way of a team on the field.

West:
1) Arizona - they added pitching over the winter, though their biggest problem last year was hitting - but they have a team of young hitters, who were inconsistent last year - seems to me the odds are good that Drew and Reynolds and Young will all get better - and they should get something out of Upton: so they might be about to start a run of championships.
2) San Diego - still have a great, deep pitching staff - though old; old and mediocre offense, though some of those guys - Kouzmanoff, or however he spells it, say - could step up. They'll take the division if other teams stumble.
3) Colorado - pitching remains a question, but they can hit, catch the ball, and they do have some nice young pitching talent. Might be asking a bit too much to expect them to have full seasons. Odds are they won't be able to play .500 for 145 games and still get to the world series though.
4) LA - can Joe Torre integrate his kids into the rest of the lineup? I'm not sure. I don't know how things will go out there. Could be a contender, could disappear. I'll be boring and split the difference - 85 wins in a strong division.
5) Sa Francisco - they too have some nice pitching. But Benji Molina is their cleanup hitter.

And so: playoff teams?
Boston - Detroit - Anaheim + Cleveland: Boston wins through.
New York - Milwaukee - Arizona + Atlanta: Mets, what the hell. It's a rematch of 1986! Revenge!!!

Awards?
MVP: I suppose it's A Rod's to lose in the AL. If that happy event occurs - who knows - Manny? Ortiz? Victor Martinez? Ordonez? Granderson? Miguel Cabrera? There's a lot of talent to choose among.
NL: I'll say this year is David Wright's year - the odd thing is that the best NL players are way more interesting than the best AL players - Wright, Ramirez, Utley and Rollins, Reyes, Fielder and Howard, Holliday, Tulowitsky,Braun - the AL has been beating theNL up for a while, but those days may be coming to an end.

Cy Young: AL - Josh Beckett, dammit! NL - hey: the best two pitches in baseball are out there - Santana and Peavy. Santana wins this year.

Rookie of the Year: Jacoby Ellsbury! vs. Justin Upton? I don't know - we'll see.

Is this why they're the RED Sox?

It's sometimes very satisfying being a Red Sox fan. The team has just voted to boycott their trip to Japan if their coaches and staff are not paid. It's easy to snipe at players for the money they get, but it's a bit different when they do it for others - coaches, staffers in this case. MLB can't make the players do much of anything - players have the power to get their money and perks. The rest of the staff is not so lucky - unless the players take their side and push for it. $40,000 may be chicken feed for David Ortiz or Mike Lowell, or even Francona, but it's gotta be a significant chunk of change for the rest of the staff. It's nice to see the players using their leverage for the people around them.

UPDATE: And, nice to see a happy resolution... Still - an odd situation, and gratifying to see the players using their clout to get something for someone else.

Iraq Invasion Anniversary

5 years ago now the United States invaded Iraq. In a month or so we can celebrate the end of major combat operations in Iraq. After that, 5 years of disaster. Trillions of dollars wasted. God knows how many dead. Only 4000 Americans dead! Most of them after "major combat operations" ended of course. None of the excuses for the war proved true - no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to Al Qaeda; none of the promised benefits have come about - the middle east is as unstable as ever, we lost a lot of leverage in dealing with other countries, Iraq itself remains a disaster, repressive, dangerous, not likely to improve on our watch. The US is weaker than it was before the invasion, we've undermined our economy fighting this useless and evil war, we've undermined (to the point of breaking) the constitution, we've debased the discourse beyond the awfulness of the 90s. It's been a bad stretch.

It stands as a testament to George W. Bush - the worst president this country has had, surrounded by incompetent villains, who take pleasure in their villainy (look at clips of Dick Cheney talking about going to the "dark side" to fight terrorism: his smug supervillain act) - but can't do anything right. They brag about their villainy, but it never gets them anywhere, they try to keep it secret but it all comes out, they fail fail fail at everything they touch. Except staying out of jail, most of the time. And finding ways to make money. They posture and preen as if all this badness makes them tough - but attacking Iraq was a pointless and cowardly act of bullying - almost certainly undertaken because they knew that Iraq had no WMD or anything else that could harm us. I don't know if they even care what a disaster it has been since - after all that trillion plus dollars in government money is going somewhere... Ah, what socialists capitalists have become!

Anyway: it's a rotten decade to be an American. Just hope things like that don't last, and get as many republicans as far from power as possible...

Uncanny Games

I have to admit up front - I'm not sure if I am going to see the American version of Funny Games or not. I'm sure it will be controversial - Jim Emerson has a bunch of posts up over the last couple days, (starting here and scrolling up), generally focusing on the reactions. Most of the reviews, and the conversation at his blog, talk about the film's take on violence and entertainment - comparing it to torture porn (either for reveling in violence and degradation, or for withholding violence degradation, nudity), sticking with Haneke's claims that the film is about violence and our reaction to violence.

This is strange, to me. I admit, all that is in the film, and it's what Haneke himself harps on (and harped on back in 1997) - but it's not what I saw in the film, when I saw the original. What I saw then was one of the most effective classical horror films I have ever seen. It gave me nightmares: convincing and genuinely disturbing ones - I am not usually unnerved by films, I was by this one. It worked.

But that aside - the story, the structure of the film, was, I thought, an almost paradigmatic horror film, a classical monster picture like Frankenstein or Dracula. Those great monster pictures, and horror more generally, are driven - maybe even defined - by the idea that our fears, whether of isolation, sex, growing up, death, etc., can be given a form and let loose on the world to torment us in real time. Maybe even more precise than that: that what we fear inside ourselves can take form outside ourselves and come to get us. And this is almost always acted out in the home and the family: something inside the home is incorporated as an alien being that invades the home. It's usually acted out literally, like here - the monster invades the home, the house itself; as well as symbolically - the monster disrupts the family. And - again - almost always through monster that is both a Double and Other: both part of us, like us, our mirror image, an image of a child, parent, etc. - and something alien, other, completely stripped of its normal human form.

It's a structure present in most of the great horror films: Frankenstein (a surrogate and monstrous child, who complicates a marriage, invading a home on the wedding night, etc. [that detail may be in the book, not the film - though the monster certainly invades the home in both the whale Frankensteins] ); Dracula (who replaces Harker, who certainly represents sexuality, desire and so on, who has to be invited in, but when he gets in makes the most of it - violating the integrity of our bodies and minds, another dominant theme in these films); it's there in many of the Val Lewton films - Cat People (the fear of sex releasing a monster); I Walked With a Zombie (the whole plot - the afflicted household, the relationship with the voodoo outside,the way the voodoo is brought in to the house, etc.); even in later films like Isle of the Dead - which does not have a literal family, but it does have a literal house - it posits the threat as something inside: the disease or the vorvolaka - who is, significantly, linked to Karloff's dead wife; plenty of angst about bodily integrity, losing control of our selves as well, in that one); Bava's horror films tend to work this way - Karloff's Wurdalak is paradigmatic - something from the home that becomes it's own double, and returns, becoming, simultaneously, part of the home and an invader of the home.) Eraserhead is another paradigmatic film (the child, the formation of the home, which immediately proves monstrous and destructive.) Rosemary's Baby. There aren't many that don't fit. It persists down to the present, though other kinds of horror have appeared as well: zombie films are not so easy to assimilate to this scheme: but Audition, Doppelganger, The Tale of Two Sisters all fit well enough. So, for that matter do Benny's Video, Cache, as well as Funny Games.

Because Funny Games fits the pattern almost perfectly. Its monsters, Peter and Paul, are unheimlich, as the Austrians might say. They come from inside the home, they are incarnated outside the home, as Others - as embodiments of fears, and then they invade the home, to violate its security, and the bodies and minds of the family. They are, socially, part of the same milieu as the family - same social class, same way of acting: this might have been even more obvious in the original version, with Arno Frisch and Ulrich Muhe playing criminal and father, as they did in Benny's Video. (Though I hadn't seen the earlier film at the time, and Funny Games was plenty effective.) But aside from that - they are also, quite clearly, products of that central fact of the modern home - the television.

That's worth a comment - the role technology plays in contemporary versions of these films. Children, sex, aging, death, the classic sources of the horror, have been augmented by technology, ubiquitous, domestic technology - televisions, telephones (Bava again, in Black Sunday!), computers, as well as things like toys, etc. Familiar technology, that turns against us. Which we get here. Its not the first time horror film monsters stepped out of the television - Cronenberg is fond of the idea; Poltergeist played with the idea; The Ring (and it's 8 million variations), of course. But it's quite rigorous here, and it's not like Haneke is subtle about it - the remote control scene is the most famous scene in the film.

I will, I think, let it got for now. Like I said - I don't know if I am going to see it or not. The first one was quite enough, thank you. But I do think the conversation about it, at least what I have seen has been ignoring the ways this film is an almost perfectly classical horror film. Comparisons to Saw and Hostel are evasions. And questions about whether people will see it as exploitation or critique of exploitation are evasions. I admit that Haneke has pumped up these aspects of the film - I'm not sure why: maybe to emphasize its disruptiveness, rather than its classicism. Maybe just to distinguish it from the rest of his career, because these themes - the disruption of the family, often from within; the specific role of technology as a kind of disease that destroys the home - are pervasive in his work. This one too - what's different is its treatment of violence... Maybe. Either way - it seems to me that Funny Games is less about violence as such than about the monsters that emerge from within our homes to destroy our homes...

Robin Hood

Somehow, I got this far in life without ever seeing The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn movie. How did I do that? It's one of those films that is so often cited, shown on TV, at least clips, talked about, it feels like I'd seen it. And I'd seen enough clips and shots from it for it to be very familiar - but I hadn't seen it. Boy - what a treat. I have been on an old adventure film kick - this, Captain Blood, a bunch of Douglas Fairbanks films, got quite a few more Flynn/Fairbanks etc. films in the queue... They are all quite fine - but this really is a cut above. It looks great, that eye-popping color; it swoops along - it starts quick and nothing gets in the way of the action; it's funny, clever, it mostly makes sense; it's acted with panache all the way up and down the cast - Flynn is superb, as is De Havilland; Claude Rains is oily and dangerous as Prince John, and Basil Rathbone - oh: would make Alan Rickman proud!



Its the template for every action movie to follow - wisecracks and action, secondary plots (love! family! what have you) alongside the action... It's much more effective than some of the earlier takes on the genre. Captain Blood and Fairbank's Robin Hood, especially, take forever to get going: both of them are half set up - it's well over an hour in before Fairbanks even starts being Robin Hood, and even then, most of the Robin Hood stuff is offscreen. Captain Blood is almost as bad, taking forever to get Flynn out to sea. None of that here - this one dives in, wastes no time giving us Robin Hood - and giving him to us in all his glory, swinging down on a vine, crashing Prince John's party with a dead deer... And building to a series of magnificent set pieces: the big party scene; the ambush in the trees; the archery contest, with its famous arrow splitting business; Robin's escape; the big brawl at the end - and that magnificent duel between Flynn and Rathbone. That alone is worth the price of admission - that one shot in the middle: long crane shot starting with the men fighting, they go out of frame and we see their shadows on a huge pillar in the middle of the screen, they come fighting back into the shot on the other side - sweet Jesus, that's a beautiful shot.



I can't get enough of it. I had to buy it.

Don't I Get a Saving Throw?

It's been a week for obituaries here - today, Gary Gygax, co-inventor of D&D. The blogosphere pays tribute, revealing some of their inner nerd - me too, I guess, me too. Is that saving throw gag too obvious? So what if it is? it's long since entered the vernacular, at least among certain classes of people - including a good many of my friends.

The truth is, I've never played all that much D&D. I started in college, and my brothers simultaneously discovered the game in middle school. I played at school, but I wasn't an enthusiast about it - even as a gamer, I was more into Diplomacy and Squad Leader. I was a history nerd, not a scifi nerd. I played a lot more with my brothers - though our games were a different kind of thing. The Making Light link mentions the mashup style of D&D - that was us. It was always a mix of war game and Hardy Boys, Bonanza & Gunsmoke, Get Smart, LOTR - in later days, this got out of hand, and we played characters based on William S. Burroughs, Zippy the Pinhead, ran dungeons derived from Borges or Eco, always working in jokes about contemporary politics, our friends, etc. Of course most of these things never quite got past the conception, and maybe writing up character sheets, and heading out to fight monsters but instead getting into a long conversation with a strange old man on the trail... once the dice started rolling, everyone got bored and went to the other room to watch the Braves.

Anyway: I don't talk about that kind of stuff here, but maybe I should. I've never really set down what this blog is supposed to be for - but the template adornments ought to be a hint - it really is a three headed monster composed of Captain Beefheart, Shohei Imamura and the Hardy Boys. The boys tend to get short shrift, I'm afraid. I manage to get around to talking about music often enough; and movies most often (when I get any posting done) - but the Hardy Boys, not so much. The Hardy Boys represent, well - not quite pop culture not quite trash culture - but maybe, nerd culture - or the odd corners of pop culture - or, maybe most of all - a kind of mashup culture, cartoons and paraliterature and YouTube and primitive cinema and Ed Wood and D&D and so on - not just disreputable things, but things that invite you to make of them what you want to. A Madvillain aesthetic. And that was something that D&D did very neatly: provided a means of chewing up and spitting out whatever caught your eye. It was, at its best, improvisational mashups - injokes and incongruous references the point of the exercise.

I don't think we were unique in that approach: I think it was built into the game, especially in the days when Gygax was writing it. "Lamentable Belaborment" spells - or the spell that made you tap and shuffle, heel to toe and shuffle off to Buffalo... made me happy.

Friday Top Ten

I've already made a couple music posts this week (and that reminds me - Tucker's got a couple posts about Larry Norman and christian rock - including a very cool Glass Harp clip), but let's try another one: the iPod was generous, walking home in the cold today.... here are some of the songs I heard.

1 Undertones - She can Only Say No
2 REM - Wake Up Bomb - from New Adventures in Hi Fi, which I have almost never listened to in all the years I've had it
3 James Brown - I Don't Mind - live at the Apollo
4 Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Hey, Hey, My My (From Weld)
5 Nick Cave - Oh My Lord - one of those wild epics of his, and a fine song
6 The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Fucker - I wonder what Anton's worked up about? some fucking bitch tried to drag him down, if I got the lyrics right - gee...
7 New Pornographers - Use It
8 Come - Brand New Vein - how did Hole become a big hit, and Come just a minor underground act? couldn't be Courtney Love starfucking, could it?
9 Eric Dolphy - Bird's Mother - Eric Dolphy is so good
10 Boogie DOwn Productions - You Must Learn - hey! BDP! nice stuff....

Let's see - what can we find for video? Can't find the song above, but here's the Undertones, doing Teenaged Kicks - can't beat that!

Another Guitarist Down

Goodness - two musical obituaries in two days - this one perhaps even more obscure than the last, but a good deal more central to my particular musical life. I see on Alicublog that Pere Ubu's Jim Jones has died. I doubt that the true depths of my devotion to Pere Ubu has come through on this blog: but they are, and have been, one of my favorites, since I first discovered them in the mid-80s. Jones was part of the Cleveland scene in the 70s, turning up on a great many records, and he joined Pere Ubu proper when David Thomas put them back together in the late 80s, and stayed throughout the 90s, until his health forced him to retire. Of all the Pere Ubu guitarists through the years, he's probably the least distinctive - of course Laughner and Herman and Thompson were about as distinctive as punk (and post and pre punk) guitarists got.... But Jones' stay was a pretty impressive run for the band. Not up to their first pass through (but what is? who was better in the late 70s?), but they still produced - what, three? great records (Tenement Year, Worlds in Collision, Raygun Suitcase), and 2 other excellent records, plus a great live record (Apocalypse Now) - they're on the shortlist of the best bands of the 90s, as well as the 70s... Jones' virtues are probably summed up in the solo on Memphis I mentioned a couple weeks ago - a basic, uncluttered, snarling riff that makes the song. He did that consistently, playing just what made the songs... I don't know how much of their less experimental and abrasive sound from that period was his doing, but it's good music, sometimes great, and he served it well.

Larry Norman

I see on Slacktivist that Larry Norman has died. That may not be an obituary anyone would expect to see here - I don't make much of my upbringing, but I have spent my time among the evangelicals. Saner evangelicals than what we usually hear about, but still... Oh, I remember the periodic paroxysms of the evils of rock and roll that went through my circles - the terrible, shocking revelations that the Rolling Stones used drugs! that "Queen" was slang for "transvestite"! and other wonders... This often translated into pressures to only listen to christian rock in some circles - it never had much affect on me (I was in the throes of Bruce Springsteen worship at the time), but around some people... Then, as now (from what I know of it), christian rock was a wretched and lifeless genre. There were three bright spots I remember: Phil Keaggy, who had the decency to shut up and play guitar (and was the first "real" concert I ever attended, featuring lots of soaring guitar solos - bless him); Keith Green - a strange, jagged, piano driven singer songwriter, whose songs hold up on their own to this day - I have quite a few of them on the iPod, highly ranked... And Norman - whose music did sometimes fall into a bland 70s soft rock vibe, but was still quite listenable - and topped with genuinely sharp, funny, smart lyrics. No wonder Black Francis name dropped him. Anyway - an hour on youtube later...

Acoustic version of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good music - a reminder of how funny he was:



And Electric:



And proof that it's not just me - here's Frank Black covering Six Sixty-six: