Chickamauga Day 2

(Before I start - be sure to check out Robert Bateman's writing on Chickamauga at Charles Pierce's blog. An actual professional soldier and historian, who's always enlightening...)

So - today is the second day of the battle of Chickamauga. The first day had brought attacks all along the lines, most of them going in on their own, really, without much coordination. Nothing had been decided - the battle would be resumed in the morning.

But first, Bragg decided to reorganize his army overnight. He appointed Leonidas Polk commander of his right wing. He appointed James Longstreet commander of the left wing. Longstreet himself arrived on the battlefield sometime after dark on the 19th - got off a train, rode some distance to reach the battlefield, and was put in command of half the army. Bragg also had the idea that they should all attack at dawn on the 20th - whether this idea made it out of his head or not is an open question. In any case, none of his generals seemed to have any idea they were attacking at dawn, though it is hard to tell if that is because Bragg never told them to or because none of them much cared what Bragg wanted. None of them, not Bragg or anyone else, seemed to have put much effort into making sure they knew what they were supposed to do.

So the fighting started back up on the 20th, at about 9:30 or so, quite a bit after dawn. It started, again, on the Confederate right/Union left. The Yankees had used the night and morning to put up fortifications along this part of the line, with predictable results. This time, some of the Rebels did get on their flank, but only a few - most of them ran into the main lines, now behind cover, and were shot to hell. That kept up most of the morning; Longstreet, on the rebel left, was in no hurry to get going, so most of the action stayed where it started. This meant a couple things - one was that the Union was able to shore up its lines on the left and deal with the rebels who did manage to get around the flank. But another was that as Rosecrans kept moving men to their left, he started to lose track of where people were. And that had consequences.

Basically, two things happened, more or less at the same time, that brought on disaster for the Union. Both, I would have to say, had been coming.... One is - Rosecrans gave a bad order. He had a reputation for losing composure in battle, and he did it here - he had been shuffling troops around the battlefield, reacting to every threat, sometimes without quite thinking about what else was happening - and he lost track of where people were. He was also dispatching orders very quickly - he wrote some, his chief of staff, James Garfield, wrote some, and other staff officers wrote others - the orders were not always clear, and the group of them were not always checking against one another to make sure everything was accurate. The specific incident went roughly like this: there were three divisions in a row, left to right, near the center of the union line - Reynolds, Brennan and Wood. Most of the fighting was taking place on the left, and troops were being moved from the right and center to reinforce the left. In the middle of this, Brennan was ordered to move to the far left to meet the threat. Someone pointed out that if Brennan moved, it would leave a hole in the line - so Rosecrans ordered Wood to move into the space Brennan vacated, to support Reynolds. The problem was - all these orders got gummed up. Brennan didn't go anywhere until his replacements arrived; his division hadn't moved when Wood received his orders to move next to Reynolds. Now - maybe another general, another day, would have decided if the order’s conditions weren’t met, he shouldn’t follow them - or would have sent someone back to HQ to say that the division he was supposed to replace was still there. But Wood and Rosecrans had been feuding, over the giving and following of orders - Rosecrans had made a point, during these disputes, that an order was an order and Wood had better follow it - so Wood was not going to take the heat here. He had an order, in writing - he would follow it to the letter come hell or high water...

...Or Longstreet’s corps. Because that was the other thing happening - James Longstreet was preparing an attack on the center of the Union line even as Wood pulled out of the line. And when James Longstreet attacked, he attacked. He had a reputation for moving slow - for having his own ideas about battles and being stubborn about them - but when he moved, he moved hard. (He was a lot like George Thomas in that.) And here - unlike everyone else in this battle, he prepared this attack: he stacked his men 5 lines deep, planning to drive through any opposition - sent them in - right where Wood used to be. That pretty much did it. They punched straight through the middle of the union line, and proceeded to rout everyone to their south. It wasn't immediate - south of the break, the Yankees put up a fight for a while - but Longstreet's men could get around behind them, and every line broke. Before long, the right side of the Union army was all gone, heading west as fast as they could go - taking with them a fair part of the army's high command. Rosecrans, McCook and Crittenden, their much more talented division commanders like Phil Sheridan and Jeff Davis (the Indiana Jeff Davis, who had only two things in common with the Mississippi Jeff Davis - his name and the fact that he commited a hanging offense during the war but didn't hang. The Indiana Davis shot a superior officer dead in cold blood in a hotel lobby, but ended up commanding a corps. It helped to be friends with governors back then.) And, we can't forget, Charles Dana, assistant secretary of war, attached to the army to spy on Rosecrans and keep him moving.... Dana ran with the rest of them, but did more harm than most, interfering with a counterattack that might have stabilized the situation. John Wilder's infantry brigade had been equipped with Spencer repeaters - they came up in the middle of this fight, and determined to counterattack. They were a brigade strong, but they could get off seven shots at a time, which gave them the firepower of a couple divisions - they were an elite unit, and might well have tipped things. But Dana thought the day was lost and demanded an escort off the battlefield - by the time Wilder had sent him along, the chance was lost.

Things were almost as bad on the union left - Longstreet's attack cut the army in half, and his men were trying to roll up to the Union left like they did the Union right - but that didn't quite work. Thomas' men hadn't moved all day - their lines were still as solid as ever. All those reinforcements, people like Wood's men, were already on this side of the battle - quite a few of them got into line along a series of hills called Horseshoe Ridge. And - as things started to fall apart, the last of Rosecrans corps commanders, George Granger, appeared with most of his men - they came in just in time to hold Horseshoe Ridge. And then?

Over and over during the war, armies who looked like they had swept the field clear, ran into a force that stood up to them and stopped them cold. It happened at Shiloh, in the Hornet's Nest. It happened at Chancellorsville, where on May 2, Jackson caved in the union right, but on May 3, both sides faced off in a day long toe to toe slog. It happened at Stone's River, first when Sheridan's division held, later in the Round Forest. And it happened at Chickamauga, on Horseshoe Ridge. The Confederates had driven off half or more of the army - had gotten behind the half that stayed - but the Union threw up a defensive line, and the Rebels proceeded to simply throw themselves at it, over and over, without any further coordination, no more attempts to get around the Yankees, nothing. There were probably better reasons for it than for most of the troubles the Confederates had - John Hood had been in direct command of the attack, and he'd been shot down, leaving no one quite in charge. Longstreet exercised very little control over this part of the battle. Bragg, obviously, played no role. It was left to the brigade and division commanders to keep attacking, and they did, but with no plan beyond attacking what was in front of them.

It was still a close thing. The rebels kept coming. There were astonishing stands made - by the 21st Ohio, say, a regiment armed with Colt repeating rifles, who held off attack after attack, all day, before being left behind, without any ammunition. Desperate charges and counter charges, dirty tricks (at one point, a Confederate unit appeared, and were challenged by the Yankees - who are you? asked the Northerners; Jeff Davis' men, came the reply - honest, I suppose, but you do recall that [Indiana] Jeff Davis commanded a division in the Army of the Cumberland?) It all ended after dark, with more confused fighting and people being captured without knowing who got them... but the Union army got away, and hoofed back to Chattanooga, where they were quickly bottled up... but that's another battle.

So there it was. 34 or 35,000 casualties total, the second highest of the war. The Confederates lost more men shot, having spent two days attacking, and the end of it, relentless attacking, often against men dug in. The Union almost evened the numbers because of their prisoners. It was a very significant Confederate victory - they broke Rosecrans' army, chased half of it away, shot up all of it - they restored a lot of their fortunes in this battle. Though - well, we can discuss what happened next when we get to Chattanooga. The battle ruined men - Rosecrans was doomed, and was relieved once Ohio held their elections in a month or so, replaced by Thomas. McCook and Crittenden were soon gone. Others - Thomas particularly - were made by the battle. Some, like James Garfield, Rosecrans' chief of staff, saved their reputations by going back to he battle - Sheridan and Davis left, but did enough to try to get back to be spared the fate of McCook and Crittenden. On the Confederate side - well - that has to be another post. Bragg here won his biggest victory - but the army hadn't gotten to Chattanooga to besiege Rosecrans' wrecked army before the rest of the rebel generals were howling for his head. In that army, fighting the Union was a distraction from fighting with one another...

Chickamauga Day 1

150 years ago today - the second largest battle of the war began. Chickamauga was fought in the north Georgia wilderness, two days of brutal, relentless mayhem, a fight with little thought put into it, that almost turned the course of the war anyway, almost accidentally.

What happened, broadly speaking? Chickamauga came at the end of a summer of campaigning in the middle of Tennessee. This was the Union Army of the Cumberland, commanded by William Rosecrans - an army that seems kind of forgotten sometimes, compared to Grant's (and later Sherman's) Army of the Tennessee, that took Vicksburg, and later Atlanta; and the Army of the Potomac, back east getting (mostly) whacked around by Robert E. Lee. Rosecrans was in the middle, charged with taking east Tennessee, Chattanooga, and menacing Georgia. Rosecrans had been in command at Stone's River - a bloodbath, where the Rebel Army (The Army of Tennessee, under Braxton Bragg) caved in the Union right, and almost wrecked Rosecrans' army - but it managed to stabilize things, and ended up almost wrecking Bragg's army, when it kept on hammering away at those stabilized lines. (One of those things you see over and over in the war - someone scores a major partial victory - at Shiloh, Chancellorsville, here, Chickamauga - but a line forms, and the attackers end up battering themselves to pulp attacking it.) Stone's River felled about a third of both armies and left them with a lot of work to do to recover. It took Rosecrans 6 months to recover - a good deal longer than Abraham Lincoln (to name one) thought it should have taken him, and Lincoln made things hot for Risecrans for a while. But at the end of June, Rosecrans moved, and moved well - in the Tullahoma campaign he managed to outflank Bragg and drive him out of the middle of Tennessee virtually without a fight. Bragg retreated to Chattanooga - Rosecrans dallied for another month of so (once more annoying Lincoln, Stanton and company) - but he finally got going, and did it again - getting around behind Bragg and forcing him to give up Chattanooga without a fight. Except that in the doing of it, he scattered his army over quite a bit of northern Georgia, and Bragg and his army decided to take advantage. They tried to catch the separate parts of the Union army, but could never get their act together - so Rosecrans was able to bring his force together neat Chickamauga Creek - where Bragg determined to attack him.

The whole of it was a fairly interesting campaign, operationally - about as much actual sustained maneuver and positioning as you would see in the war. Feint's and quick marches and races for the crucial mountain pass, and so on... Though in the end, they all came together in one place and fought a straight up brawl. Maybe even more interesting strategically, especially from the Confederates' point of view. It is hard to see much good in the Rebel's strategy in the war. It's hard to see any strategy at all, most of the time. Once in a while - Lee had a strategy, try to win one big battle, that would destroy the Union army, or cause Washington to fall, something like that - something that would cause the north to sue for peace. (Basically the same strategy the Japanese employed at Pearl Harbor - with about the same degree of success.) (That and protect Virginia, at all costs, including the destruction of the rest of the Confederacy, to put it harshly.) Jefferson Davis? He seemed to vacillate, between trying to hold everything, and trying to get that one big win - or a big political win, like invading Kentucky and convincing them to switch sides.... In practical terms, it's hard to see much that he did. Vicksburg might be the worst example - he insisted on holding it, but did not force his generals to combine or cooperate, did not come up with anything like a plan to give them a chance to hold it, let Lee tell him what he was going to do with his army, Vicksburg be damned - and so Grant took the city and an army with it. After Vicksburg, Davis still didn't quite commit to anything - he didn't force Joe Johnston (in Mississippi) to join Bragg in Tennessee, or vice versa, didn't really commit to anything. But he did, for once, make a decision, toward the end of the summer, to send James Longstreet and most of his corps west to reinforce Bragg. Lee could usually stop that sort of thing - but after Gettysburg, it was obvious he would have to stick to the defensive, and if so, he could spare some men. So off went Longstreet and his men and they arrived just in time for the battle.

And - their arrival meant that for just about the only time in the war, in a major battle, the Confederates outnumbered the Union on the field. Not that it did them an awful lot of good. On September 19, in they went. The plan was to get around the Union left, cutting off Rosecrans's retreat to Chattanooga - that was one of the plans anyway. The battle started - the rebels never did quite get on the Union flank, and a messy, hard fight developed at that end of the line. As fight grew, Bragg ordered in the rest of his army - just attacking whatever they found, basically. Both sides fed men in piecemeal, and a confusing battle developed in the woods and fields between Chickamauga creek and the main roads to Chattanooga. The fighting went went back and forth most of the day, the Confederates driving the Yankees back, then being driven in turn - though in broad terms, the Union left got the better of it, while the center and right were closer calls. Through it all, the fighting was disjointed and uncoordinated and very very bloody.

The truth is, it is hard to get a grip on this battle. You can get a grip on Antietam or Gettysburg or even Shiloh or Stone's River - show the lines, see where the attacks developed, where the reinforcements came from, where the stands were made - and put the whole thing together into a kind of flow. That's hard to do with Chickamauga. Yes - you can trace the lines on the map, but the fact is, it seems to have been fought as a series of barely connected, uncoordinated chunks. I suspect a big part of that was the terrain - it was fought across a handful of fields and clearings, hills and ridges, surrounded by dense forest that cut up battle lines, separated units, made control of anything above brigade level completely hit or miss, and often made even brigade level control impossible. There were a few battles like that in the Civil War, but not many. Stone's River was fought in forests and across hills and ridges, though not as bad as this. Chancellorsville, and The Wilderness, in 1864, were both fought in dense woodland - the latter seems to have been mostly fought in the woods, even more than Chickamauga. At Chickamauga, most of the fighting was arranged around farms and fields - but the woods kept all these fights apart....

And - well - we're back to another of my old themes: call it the fog of war, if you want to sound high minded about it. Call it lack of battlefield control maybe... Here - I think you might want to call it incompetence and sheer bloody mindedness. There are lots of badly run battles in the Civil War, but are there any as bad as this one? It's beyond incompetence, into something like complete confusion. Rosecrans was on the verge of collapse, and screwed the whole thing up with his own carelessness and panic. Crittenden and McCook (two of the four Union corps commanders) never really did much, and disappeared when their men were routed on the second day. Meanwhile, the rebel generals were opening feuding with one another. They were a complete mess. Braxton Bragg was about as badly hated as any significant general on either side. (By everyone, from private to Lieutenant General; everyone but Jefferson Davis.) He commanded the Army of Tennessee from the summer of 1862, fought 4 major battles, Perryville, Stone's River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. Basically won, on the battlefield, the first three, though he abandoned the field after both Perryville and Stone's River, letting the Union claim the victory. After every one of those battles, his subordinates turned on him, openly - petitioning Jeff Davis to remove him, writing anonymous letters, or signed letters, organizing cabals.... somehow, he stayed in command - and maybe just as bad, most of the generals he feuded with (Polk and Hardee and Cheatham and Breckinridge etc.) stayed around as well. All that was bad enough - it was worse than that at Chickamauga (though it would get even worse at Chattanooga). Bragg had new generals on board - Longstreet and D.H. Hill. Longstreet didn't start causing trouble until after Chickamauga; Hill - well, he was a fine general, who had gotten himself exiled from Lee's army for his inability to get along with anyone. He came to Bragg from the Carolinas, and he brought along a full dose of his natural contrariness. He joined right in with the rest of the army in hating Bragg....

All that trouble really came home to roost. It started earlier - Bragg's attempts to catch parts of Rosecrans' army before they could unite failed because his generals didn't cooperate, no one trusted anyone else, some of them approaching insubordination, everyone moving on their own timetable. When they did catch Rosecrans and attack, the same thing happened - Bragg ordered attacks, but his underlings went where they wanted, when they wanted - when the attacks came, they were uncoordinated, behind schedule, out of place - and Bragg could do nothing to change anyone's behavior, and wasn't exactly brimming with ideas for how they should be fighting the battle. So what happened happened - a bunch of fights, all along the line, with little connection, and none of them very successful.

Now to be sure - there were exceptions to these failures. A good many brigade and regimental commanders, and a fair number of division commanders, acquitted themselves quite well, for both sides. Higher up, George Thomas, one of the Union's best generals, did his job and very well, holding on to the Union left, and the fourth Union corps commander, George Granger, would act decisively on the second day, saving the army. On the rebel side, James Longstreet mounted one of his patented devastating attacks, led, very effectively, by John Hood... But then, Hood got shot, Longstreet disappeared for much of the battle (maybe because he'd arrived on the battlefield straight from a train in the middle of the night before being assigned command of half the army), and in the end, the battle degenerated into another series of uncoordinated direct attacks on strong defensive positions - a bloodbath.

... But we'll come back to that. This note has gotten a bit out of a control - there are two days to this battle, so I think I'll finish it up tomorrow. The second day is a good deal more narratively compact, I will say that - you can make sense of it.... We'll see you tomorrow.

(I'll end with one more thing. One reason this post [posts] is [are] such a monster[s] is that it is very hard to find good information on this battle. I have read many many books about Gettysburg, and quite a bit about Antietam, Vicksburg, the 1864 Virginia campaigns, and so on - but this, the second bloodiest battle of the war - is a lot less well known. And that makes Peter Cozzens' book - This Terrible Sound - all the more valuable - a big, dense, detailed account of the fight, in all its confusion, horror and drama. All the ins and outs, from all perspectives, from the common private to all those generals ignoring orders and panicking and scheming one another's downfalls and so on. From national strategy to the men trying to scrounge water on the battlefield to how to keep a Colt repeating rifle from bursting if you loaded it with a larger caliber ammunition than it was designed for. Highly recommended.)

Bruuuuce!

This month's Band of the Month brings me to college. My next door neighbor, my freshman year, was a New Jersey kid and a Springsteen fan. He had most of the records, if not all of them - though he had them on LP, and, somehow, he and I and our roommates didn't have turntables. But he had also The River on cassette, and we wore it out.

I liked Bruce before I got there - that AOR station I mentioned last month played him, quite a bit actually - especially the first record, I think, because I remember hearing Blinded By the Light, Spirits in the Night and For You more than anything else. They were great songs; and songs from The River turned up on that radio station and others, and I liked them too, without quite loving it - but I was ready for it when I got to college. My first memories of Springsteen were more ambiguous - I read about him before I heard him, and what I heard was colored by the hype. There was that Time Magazine story, which I might have read; I think I remember something in one of those educational magazines they distributed in school (one of the useful ones, with stories about Thor and Jimmy Walker, and Brice Springsteen. Also, the Democratic primary contenders for 1976 - Sargent Shriver! Mo Udall! Jimmy Carter! I wish I remembered what it was.) All this prose was very giddy. When I finally heard Bruce - Born to Run, probably on America's Top 40 - I can't say I understood the fuss. Except - it was a haunting song - that strange, pulsing drone, those murmured/growled/yowled vocals - it didn't sound world changing too me, but it also didn't quite sound like anything else I had ever heard... Anyway - that was that, for a while, until Manfred Mann's Earth Band covered Blinded by the Light - a song (the cover) I dearly loved, at that young age. Again - Casey Kasem played the original, and it was strange and a bit beyond me - but you could hear the cool in it... Over the next year or so, I started hearing more Springsteen here and there - enough to start to get it, though I wasn't a fan exactly. There was a girl in high school who was a Springsteen fan - an Enthusiast. People thought that was very strange then - maybe it was, though when I got to college, well, I became one too.

It was a communal thing - bunches of us would listen to The River, sing along, play air guitar, do what guys do... or we'd listen to the records, which took some negotiation, to find a turntable - but we must have - those records, especially Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, are as familiar to me as The River or Nebraska are. (When Nebraska came out, someone got it on tape again - and I think I must have copied it, because I listened to it for years.) It was intense - and when Nebraska came out - it got more intense. That was not a communal record (though me and the kid from Jersey would listen to it together.) I listened to it alone a lot - or maybe it's just the kind of record that makes you feel alone. I don't know. I worshipped it though - it was one of my iconic records for many years...

But this infatuation with Springsteen, powerful as it was, did not last very long. It lasted roughly until the release of Born in the USA, to be honest. That was a record that came with very high expectations (as had Nebraska) - and it was very disappointing. It's hard to say why, exactly - there are good songs on there (the title track particularly) - but it felt wrong. It was so overproduced - it sounded normal, on the radio, in 1984. (Not a good time to sound normal.) Maybe more than that - it struck me as being a direct continuation of The River, with slicker production and fewer good songs - and it occurred to me that this was the first time Springsteen did not change with his new record. The first six were all different - they all sound different. There's obviously a lot of continuity - but still: the funky folk sound of the first one.... the more melodic, soulful, jazzy approach on the second... the epic rock and roll sprawl of Born to Run, piles of instruments all humming along.... then Darkness, while continuing some of that, moves toward a harder rock sound - think Adam Raised a Cain or Candy's Room... then The River's combination of much rootsier, rock & roll songs alongside the country/folk of the title track, Stolen Car, etc. - which gets stripped to the bone for Nebraska, country, rockabilly, folk.... all of them emphasizing different things, all of them revolving around slightly different musical styles - all of them telling slightly different kinds of stories, too. Moving toward narrative - songs like Blinded by the Light or Growin' Up aren't quite narrative at all; but every record is more story oriented, until you reach Nebraska, which plays like a set of short stories. And different types of stories - different locations (some of the records are very urban; some are very much New Jersey - some are clearly more rural, rural Jersey or PA, etc., and Nebraska is national) - different tones. Types of characters - the noirish songs on Born to Run morph into the serial killers, small time crooks, desperate auto workers shooting up a bar on a spree on Nebraska.... All that - he covers an amazing amount of ground in those records, covers a surprising amount of musical ground as well - and all that seems to be starting to spin its wheels on Born in the USA.

So he lost me. I bought the big live record that came out about that time - which, I thought, and still think, redeems most of the songs on Born in the USA... have I mentioned how much I dislike the production?... But after that - the next couple records were meh... and so? Other groups supplanted Springsteen in my heart... partly, I imagine, because I liked him in college, and I had no money in college, and so managed, despite loving Bruce, and listening to Bruce a ton - to never buy any Springsteen records until I got that big live thing - after I got out of college. And Tunnel of Love, I bought that... and so I didn't have the records around to keep going back to - not until a lot later when I made a point of getting Nebraska and Asbury Park. There you have it. He's tended to retreat in my mind more than even groups like U2, who I loved for a while, then started to love less - but I had those records (see, in college, I was the only U2 fan I knew, until I got my brothers to like them - so I had to buy their records if I was going to hear them. Other people liked Bruce - I could listen to their records.) So I didn't overlook them.

I shouldn't overlook Springsteen. My tastes have changed - he does not fit well with the things I have listened to for the last 25 years (that will be coming in this series - among the songwriting set, Lou Reed, David Thomas and Richard Thompson are going to loom large).... but he was so good in the 70s - the songs, when I listen to them now, still come back to me, how great they are, and how many different ways they are great. A song like Two Hearts or Factory plays now, and I feel what I felt then....

And now - top ten - a very difficult list to compile, for the reasons hinted at above - his consistency as a songwriter, the variety of styles he worked in... but here goes anyway:

1. Atlantic City
2. Blinded By the Light
3. Johnny 99
4. Growin' Up
5. The River
6. Born to Run
7. State Trooper/Open All Night [they are very close to the same song - same riff, one acoustic, quieter, the other fast and electric, thew lyrics echoing each other - one desperate, one hyperactive and joyful, both of them racing through the New Jersey night... though given the general tone of Nebraska, it's hard not to imagine the two of them running into one another out there... though - the mean one comes first; the happy one comes later - corrects it, maybe, who knows. I am counting them as one, no matter what.]
8. 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
9. Two Hearts
10. Candy's Room

Video - a liver version of Atlantic City:



And Manfred Mann - which doesn't really sound much like Bruce, but gave people a taste of his songs - and is still a pretty good bit of work....



Bruce Rocks - Candy's Room:



And a draft (sounding more like The River) - Candy's Boy:



And - I guess the iconic Springsteen song, Born to Run:

9-11 Again

Another September 11.

We have not gotten over it - we still seem incapable of undoing the damage we did to ourselves after the attacks. It's depressing - I look back at things I wrote in 2010 or 2006, and they are depressingly familiar. Very little has happened in those 12 years to move back from our initial overreactions. Looking at the rather insane overreaction to the Boston Bombing (shutting down the metro area because of a kid with a gun (maybe) and a homemade bomb (maybe)? Really? Yes; we did that), it's hard not to see a lot of hope for us. We have become very willing to turn over power to the government, police, military - not just in the first panic of the event (that's understandable, and frankly, that's what the police are there for) - but afterwards, onwards. It's hard to look at Edward Snowden's revelations, or the treatment of Snowden, or the people reporting on Snowden, or Bradley Manning, for that matter, and not despair a little. (Hopefully we can do better by Chelsea Manning at some point; I'm not optimistic.)

That's enough. I imagine I will get to do this all again next year. All I have to counter it is the thought that there are people like Manning and Snowden who are willing to act anyway; that this stuff gets aired out more than it did in the 00's; that people might start thinking about it. You never know. And, sometimes, things happen that do start to show some cracks - like the Syrian Situation. The fact that Obama put it to the vote is important - highly gratifying, too. Whatever his reasons - to avoid taking full responsibility, to buy time, to avoid the war (knowing the idiots in the house would never give him anything, even a war), or just because he's the first president in half a century or so to read the constitution - it's gratifying. And seems to have done some good in avoiding getting involved in the war.

I remarked on Facebook that everyone I knew who had expressed an opinion of the war had been against it - from the nuttiest teabagger (Obama wants to start WWIII!) to the Hippiest lefty. The polls tell the same story. So - the notion that democracy and legality might prevail (and diplomacy, internationally - though since that involves the Russians, one can't get too optimistic) is a cause for some hope. Maybe we will learn from it.

Summer Movie Capsules

I have not done this in a while, so here is a damned big post covering a couple months worth of theatrical viewings....

Much Ado About Nothing - 12/15 - Joss Whedon's modern dress version, shot quickly in one location, but coming out sleek and effortless, handsome and clever. It might be the best modern dress Shakespeare I have seen - the easiest, the least affected, with the language intact, but a straightforward performance style... This might be Shakespeare's most modern play, come to think of it - at least, it is the one that translates most readily into the modern world - those warring lovers have become the foundational myth of screwball comedy. It holds up, for sure - partly in the way it steers around the lovers - the plot concerns the juveniles, while Beatrice and Benedict carry the emotional weight, without being bogged down by the plot. It makes for a very lovely film.

Bling Ring - 9/15 - kind of an intelligent version of Spring Breakers, complete with famous starlets acting badly. About a real gang of kids who broke into stars' houses in Hollywood - particularly the cut rate kind of stars, Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan, reality stars... The whole thing, I'm afraid, plays like home movies - useless hangers on stealing from talentless TV stars, filmed by (really) rich people - some of the pecking order comes through: real Hollywood royalty (Ms. Coppola) filming a bunch of wanna be's (and a kid from a franchise trying to be a real actress) playing semi-rich nobodies stealing from minor stars... Coppola is very good, I won't deny it, but this seems very empty.

A Band Called Death - 10/15 - nice little documentary about a band called Death - 3 black kids in Detroit in the mid 70s who pick up where the MC5 left off. (They end up sounding like a mix of the MC5 and early Love - My flash on you, my little red book, 7 and 7 is...) They were good enough, apparently, to get studio time and consideration for a record contract, but it didn't happen. Maybe the name - 1976, Detroit, black kids - it's quite possible; they seem to have thought so.... In any case, the moment passed, they drifted off, though they kept playing. They landed in Vermont, made a couple christian records without making much impression, then the leader, David, went back to Detroit while the rest stayed in Burlington and got on with their lives. Still playing music - the two in Vermont formed a reggae band, that sounds pretty good, in a modest regional way. But then David, the oldest one, the songwriter, the visionary, died, but left the master recordings with his brother. And over time, as collectors found their single, as people put it on the internet, played it at parties (where the son of one of the brothers heard it), people traced them, and found the tapes - and got the record released in 2009, sent the 2 surviving brothers on the road, and a bunch of their kids on the road as well, as a cover version of Death... That's the story. The style - the film is all interviews, especially with the two surviving brothers, who are both wonderful. And it is such a cool story - the family, the way their parents let them play the music they wanted to, no matter how strange, the way that next generation forms a band of their own to play their father's music - there's not much style in the film, but it's such a neat story, the people are so much fun to watch and listen to, it doesn't mater. And as for the music? There is a lot of talk about how good they were, how innovative, for 1976 Detroit - how they were punk before punk... That's putting it a bit too strongly. They are very good - they should have made an impact in the 70s - they probably were victims of their time and place. If they'd come out after punk hit, especially after punk started developing outside NY in the states - if they'd come after the Bad Brains, or if they'd come in the middle of a scene, like the Bad Brains - they probably would have made a name for themselves. But they were early - especially with the name... But the music - isn't all that unusual in 1976 - even 1974, when they started. They fit rather well with their contemporaries - The Ramones, the Dictators, Rocket From the Tombs, The electric Eels... They were carrying on from the earlier hard garage bands - the MC5 and Blue Cheer, The Stooges, etc.... They just did it in isolation - and didn't go on to form other bands, like the guys in Rocket From the Tombs and some of those bands. Too bad; they were good.

The Lone Ranger - 7/15 - The bomb of the summer, but that probably isn't entirely fair. Big sprawling nonsense about railroads and silver and massacring Indians and so on.... Tonto tells the tale, in 1933; it is a tall tale - more Baron Munchhausen than conventional western. It is amusing, for all its bombast and flaws, and one notes that Gore Verbinski is making something of a career out of telling tall tales. He's tagging along after Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton, in more than just casting Johnny Depp in everything.

The Hunt - 12/15 - Thomas Vinterberg's quietly harrowing film about a kindergarten teacher who is accused of pedophilia. It's a quiet, understated kind of horror film - a little girl (whose teenage brother has been teasing her with pornography on his computer) tells a story about him when he reproaches her for being a bit too friendly, repeating what she heard from the teenagers. (All set up well - the kid's parents have been taking her for granted, fighting a bit - she sees Lucas as a kind of protector, I think, and is angry when he tries to distance himself...) The other teachers believe her (as maybe they need to) - but when she tries to retract, they trap her into repeating the story. And as it grows - it grows: other kids tell stories; and things go from bad to worse. He loses everything - his job, his friends, everything except his son and a lawyer... The story finally falls apart - the kids are caught clearly making up details - and so it ends. It's not an unfamiliar story - there have been several famous instances of this happening, false accusations that start to spiral into huge conspiracies - and Vinterberg does a very good job of tracing the ways it spins out of control. He does it without quite condemning, either - the teachers clearly have to take accusations seriously, they have to protect the children - but you can see where they get it wrong, where they stop listening, where they start to decide to believe the worst. A very strong film.

I'm So Excited - 10/15 - Latest Almodovar, set on an airplane, that develops difficulties with the landing gear. (It starts with a neat little vignette of Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz as part of the ground crew - she tells him she is pregnant, and in their celebration they forget to take the chocks off the wheels...) Anyway, up in the air - they can't come down - and the plane's crew (every one one of whom is gay, though a couple of them won't quite admit it) tries to deal with the passengers - a dominatrix, a hit man, a businessman, an actor with woman trouble, a middle aged virgin who has visions. Melodrama and camp follow, comedy, lip-synching. Very light weight but amusing.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet - 10/15 - Alain Resnais adaptation of a play, though it's not quite that simple. A dead playwright assembles a group of actors who have appeared in his adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice through the years - they watch a video of a new performance of the play - and they start acting it out as well. The main conceit seems to be the ages of the leads: there are three sets of actors - Sabine Azema and Pierre Arditi, Anne Consigny and Lambert Wilson, and Vamila Pons and Sylvain Dieuaide - playing Eurydice and Orpheus at different ages - their 60s, 40s, 20s.

Computer Chess - 12/15 - A rather wonderful new film from Andrew Bujalski. Presented like a video documentary from the 80s, about a computer chess tournament, though it's quickly apparent it's fiction. Gerald Peary turns up as a smarmy master of ceremonies, a chess master hosting the thing - Wiley Wiggins is in there as well, though the main story revolves around a couple other characters. One is Peter - the programmer for the Cal Tech team (Wiggins is a psychologist, and there's a professor who turns up late with a Russian wife). They won the year before, but are losing this time - their computer seems to be committing suicide in their games. They dig around the code looking for the mistakes, and the professor admits that his compiler adds code to the main code, allowing (he says) the thing to learn. The film sticks with Peter as he tries to figure out what is going on,a nd as he drifts between some of the other groups at the conference. There is another conference of new age therapy going on, complete with swingers; there are a couple fans, dealing drugs and hosting parties; there's Shelly, a lady programmer from MIT. Peter starts to think the computer wants to play people, not computers - things hint at the mystical... The other main character is a freelance programmer named Michael Papageorge, who spends the film in a strange kind of limbo - he doesn't have a room, doesn't have any money (a bit like Gerry and Cookie Fleck in Best in Show - Christopher Guest isn't a bad reference point for this film...), and ends up wandering the hallways of the hotel, looking for a place to crash. He has his own theories about chess and AI, that no one else takes very seriously, though he does well enough... Along the line, he buys drugs from the oddball fanboys, on credit, and ends in a loop at his mother's house looking for the money. All told - it's a neat little film, very witty, great looking, in that 80s video style, with the right kinds of angles and effects for the time as well. Very nice.

Crystal Fairy - 10/15 - Michael Cera is an American in Chile, who organizes a trip with three Chilean brothers to get San Pedro cactus to make mescaline. At a party, Cera invites a girl, Crystal Fairy - who turns up, to his dismay. They drive up north looking for cactus, running into trouble on the way - CF being a hippy given to walking around naked in their motel room. They steal cactus and Cera insists on brewing it up immediately - they take it - and wander around a beach, alternating between paranoia and euphoria. At the end - Cera apologizes for beign a jerk, and they all kind of sort it out. The two Americans are the most interesting characters - CF is a hippy, new agey thing, though she is really a dominatrix. She acts the part - over time, she reveals some of her normality - her name, Isabelle, her job, her past, her troubles, etc. Cera's character is a twit - uptight and weird, kind of a mix of an amateur druggy and something more. Very uptight. Cera himself is very good - playing this asshole; and Gaby Hoffman is fantastic as Crystal Fairy.

The Act of Killing - 13/15 - Documentary about the killers in the Indonesian genocide aimed at communists, chinese, intellectuals and so on in the wake of the 1965 coup. The film takes as its conceit the idea of having the killers restage their crimes any way they want. The main character in the film is a man named Anwar Congo, an aging gangster who was a leader of the death squads in the 60s. It is strange, then - for they are all unapologetic - claiming they were saving the country from the communists and such. On top of that, Congo and his friend Koto are huge film fans - they started as gangsters scapling tickets to American movies, and they seem to live the whole story in film terms. They pull on the style of hollywood, gangster films and war films and so on, to stage their stories. There are a number of main scenes: Congo on the roof demonstrating how he killed people with wires; Congo and Koto looking at the footage and talking about costumes; large paramilitary meetings, usually involving high officials; a visit to a newspaperman who boasts of orchestrating the killings; staged interrogations. About the middle, another killer joins - he and Congo dress as victims and talk; there is a scene by a river where they seem to come out of their shells a bit. The other man says the government should apologize for the killings; Congo talks about his bad dreams. After this, the other killer becomes more hardline; Congo, though, seems to be losing it. There is a scene of a village being burned; then a scene where Congo is - the other man says the government should apologize - Congo talks about his bad dreams - somehow this seems to send both fo them into their shells. Toward the end you get a village being burned; you have a man who had been cooperating with the killers who suddenly talks about how his father in law was murdered by the death squads. Finally - there is a scene where Congo plays a man being interrogated; he breaks in the scene - then we see him watching the footage, and the filmmaker confronts him about his feelings. And then - the film ends with Congo on the roof where he used to garrot people, trying to talk about it, and gagging... Meanwhile - along the way, there are dance routines, drag routines, Koto running for office - it's extraordinary, one of the most inventive and devastating films in years.

The Way Way Back - 9/15 - nice little coming of age comedy... a kid goes to the cape for the summer with his mother and her boyfriend. The place is hell, despite being on the beach. He finds a bike and rides around and finds an old water park and soon has a job. Sam Rockwell is charismatic, trying to kill the boredom and despair; Maya Rudolph plays his girl, with the film's writers along for comic relief. Steve Carrell, meanwhile, is the boyfriend, and a dick, and Toni Collette plays the mother... It's all clever enough, ending well, as these films do.

Despicable Me 2 - 9/15 - Someone steals a research station at the north pole, with a serum that makes things into monsters. Gru is kidnapped by the anti villain league, to find who did the deed - he refuses, but only for a scene or two. He and Lucy from the AVL infiltrate a mall to find the villain - Gru recognizes an old rival, El Macho, now running a Mesican restaurant - he tries to catch him but has no luck. Then they find the serum at a hair shop - so the investigation is called off - but El Macho did it of course. All this is interspersed with plot about dating - and in the end, Gru has to rescue Lucy and ends up marrying her. This last is a very annoying turn - she is a neat comic foil for him, competent and ridiculous, like he is, but in the end she is turned into a damsel in need of rescue. Annoying. Not that there is much story to it - mostly minion gags and dating jokes. All of it enjoyable enough, but fairly empty.

In A World - 9/15 - Lake Bell plays a woman who is a bit of a loser does vocal coaching - and lucks into a couple jobs for movie trailers. Her father of course is an old timer of voiceovers - who is grooming Ken Marino as his successor. There's the wisp of a plot involving the resurrection of the "in a world" line for trailers, for a Hunger Games knockoff called Amazon Games - the boys are after it - but she lucks into that as well. Meanwhile, she screws the voiceover jerk and flirts with a coworker and her sister almost has an affair with an Irishman. So it goes. It is episodic and a bit empty, but fairly entertaining. Bell has skills.

Prince Avalanche - 10/15 - solid indie film. A bit slow, a bit padded, 2 men working on a highway in Texas in 1988, a year after a big fire. Paul Rudd is dating Emile Hirsch's sister, and has got him this job - Lance (that's Hirsch) is a brat, lazy and rather useless, a player, of sorts. Rudd's Alvin is a fake philosopher, etc. The sister breaks up with him, since he is never home; Lance finds out one of his one night stands is pregnant. They drink and fight and sulk and bond. It's not bad, though nothing special - Green seems to be working to combine his early, Malick derived indie style with his Hollywood buddy picture stories, with some success.

World's End - 10/15 - another in the same vein from Pegg and Wright and company. 20 years ago, Pegg led his friends on a pub crawl, 12 pubs, 12 beers - it did not end well.... Since then, the rest fo the crew has grown up, but not Gary King - he gets them together to do it again. They go - things aren't great - one has stopped drinking, the others are tired of the act... but then he's attacked in the bathroom by robots and they are plunged into Shaun of the Dead, more or less. They keep on the pub crawl, fighting robots, a scheme to take over the world, etc. They are defiant, so it all ends. An epilogue that recycles the ending of Shaun of the Dead - robots assimilating into post-apocalyptic society, etc. Amusing, but kind of repetitive.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints - 12/15 - David Lowery film... Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara are outlaws, somewhere in the 70s - they get in a shootout with cops, and when their friend Freddy is killed, and she shoots a cop, he takes the rap and goes to prison. The lot of them were raised by Keith Carradine, as some kind of gangster, turned into something else in his old age - he supports Mara and her kid.... Well - 4 years along, Affleck breaks out of jail and comes back. Carradine is not exactly thrilled about this... And all this while, the cop who got shot has been hanging around making doe eyes at Mara. Anyway - everyone's looking for Affleck, but some hit men find him - there's a certain amount of gunplay and everyone who dies gets to do it with a nice little speech, thought he cop might get the best line - "that man needs to rest a while." All this bears the unmistakable imprint of Terrance Malick, but like most Malick imitations, is much better than anything Malick did after Badlands. (Though not as good as Badlands.) Malick is like Woody Allen - most of his career has been decidedly underwhelming - but he has inspired reams of imitators, almost all of whom are very good. (See Upstream Color, or David Gordon Green's indy films, etc.)

The Grandmaster - 9/15 - Wong Kar-wei film that is sort of about Ip Man, the martial artist. Lush and gorgeous and slow and confusing - a simple story made to seem epic. 1936 - a northern kung fu master comes to Foshan in the south, where he plans to retire - he challenges Ip Man, who impresses him with the hope of uniting the country, the martial arts. But the master has a daughter - she manages to beat Ip Man. He promises a remarch - but the Japanese come and ruin everything. Ip and she meet later, in Hong Kong, and she tells her tale - how her father's chief disciple collaborated with the Japanese, and stole her father's good name - but she fought him in the snow and beat the hell out of him, taking it back, and then has it die with her. Ip Man, meanwhile goes on to become a famous teacher... Again - all this is gorgeous and rather inert, though with some neat fighting sequences, and some interesting ideas floating around in the middle. Wong is too good not to be worth watching, but this plays a bit desperate at times.

Austenland - 9/15 - Keri Russell as Jane Hayes, an American obsessed with Jane Austen and Mr. Darcy (the Colin Firth version in particular.) This schoolgirl obsession has persisted into 30s spinsterhood, to the point where she finally decides to sink her life savings into a vacation at Austenland - an immersive regency era theme park. She goes, meeting Jennifer Coolidge on the way, playing a Jennifer Coolidge character; at the place, Jane learns that she has the copper package - which means plain frocks and a room in the servant's wing and a backstory as an orphan named Jane Erstwhile. Well - there's another rich girl on hand; there are 2 gentlemen (Colonel Andrews and Mr. Nobley, who is playing Darcy in this show.) There's also an irreverent stable boy, who takes Jane into his confidence. Jane despairs and almost goes home, but decides in the end to have fun, and with JC's help starts living it up. Another man now - a west Indian sea captain - who may be after her, though Georgia King's character wants him... etc. The plot is apparent more or less from the start - the stable boy is as much an actor as any of them and so poor Jane is let down again... But Nobley turns out to be a history teacher and nephew of the owner, slumming as one of the boys (he's almost a customer, actually, being as enamored with the past as the ladies) - he loves Jane, though she doesn't believe any of it - there is a big fight in an airport, with one of the best lines in the film - Martin is from New Zealand (it's Bret McKenzie), and Nobley makes fun of him - "couldn't get a part in the Hobbit?" And so - Jane goes home and Nobley comes for her - happy endings all around!

I will add - that Jerusha Hess seems to have picked up on Jared's themes, his obsession with artists - though I suppose this has been their themes all along, as they cowrote the other three films. They are all four, then, about artists, dreamers, people inventing themselves - so is this. Jared has been something of a low-rent Wes Anderson, low-rent both in a kind of pejorative sense (he;s nowhere near as good), and a descriptive sense - his artists tend to be trashier, wrestlers and junky writers and amateur dancers.... But like Anderson, the Hess's have stayed close to that basic theme, the idea of making yourself, through art. This film is pretty much more of the same. It is more conventional, more normal looking - Jared has cultivated a mix of Anderson's flat compositions and a kind of deliberate do-it-yourself look... Truth is, I rather like their films.

Friday Music September

Starting to cool down out there - quite pleasant, down in the 50s. This is my favorite time of year - once the humidity drops off, and those cooler, drier days you get in autumn come along. Very nice.

For music this week - I'm glad I declared the second Friday of the month as my Band of the Month day - I've been woefully lazy for the last week or so. Last weekend's weather was perfectly awful - pouring rain and hot and humid and gross, and it sapped whatever ambition I might have thought about having out... As good an excuse as any I guess. In any case - this week is just another random ten week - maybe iTunes will come up with something interesting:

1. The Decembrists - the Rake's Song
2. Shonen Knife - An Angel Has Come
3. Jeremy Enigk - Wayward Love
4. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - Flower Punk
5. Madonna - Take A Bow
6. Iron & Wine - Rabbit will Run
7. Jay Farrar - Chorine My Sheba Queen
8. Puerto Muerto - With a Little Help From My Friends
9. John Coltrane - Lazy Bird
10. Danielson - Hoseanna in the Forest

Quite a collection - definitely on the obscure side. Video? Let's try - live Madonna? Admittedly, not something I post a lot of...



Iron & Wine, live:



And - not the song in the list, but another Danielson song, with a video - why not?



Finally - can't embed it, but if you're looking for half an hour of Art - here's Frank and the Mothers live, 1970. Enjoy.

On Syria

I am not sure what I think about our (possible) impending interference in the Syrian civil war. I suppose my first and strongest reaction is to think this is a very bad idea. Terrorism (or Strategic Bombing, which is hard to distinguish from terrorism) doesn't work very often - it's hard to see what this attack would accomplish. I can see the point of punishing the use of chemical weapons - though as this post at The Edge of the American West points out, it's not clear why using chemical weapons is such a departure in the context of the violence and suffering already underway there. (Do I have an answer? maybe - something about the efficiency of non-conventional weapons; the idea that combining the callousness of widespread conventional warfare with the lethality of poison gas - or worse, nukes - opens the way to something even worse. The problem with this argument is more that the use of bombs, conventional or otherwise, is already hard to find any excuse for. Just as it's hard to express why firebombing Tokyo is more acceptable then nuking Hiroshima, it's hard to say why gassing people is worse than bombing them. I suspect, if I were to reach a philosophical conclusion from this, that one reason we condemn Hiroshima, or poison gas, or suicide bombers, etc. is to avoid confronting the morality of firebombing Tokyo - or making cruise missile strikes.)

The fact that these strikes are punitive is also worrying - it's not as if we are pretending we are there to end the war, win the war - we are making a symbolic attack... Which, again, is indistinguishable from terrorism. (Maybe it is halfway there: terrorism, properly defined, probably means - attacks on civilians, for symbolic purposes. Though honestly - I don't know if those terms are linked by "and" or "or" - I am probably inclined toward "or.") And - how often do symbolic attacks do what they are supposed to do? It is hard to escape the conclusion that bombing a country is more likely to strengthen the government of that country than hurt it - that is what usually happens. If the attacks were strictly military - they might work. But if they are punitive - if we are not committed to removing Assad, come hell or high water - I'm not sure they will gain us anything. Maybe they will discourage the use of chemical weapons (and by extension, maybe nukes) - that might well be a worthwhile goal... but it might come at the expense of even more bloodshed in Syria.

That's that. It is still better not to get too involved. Much as it feels right to do something about horrible situations like Syria's, it is also sometimes necessary to recognize that we can't solve everything. And that trying to solve everything is as likely to make it worse as better. So - be glad if we don't get pulled in....

The one good thing in this mess is the fact that Obama decided to take the issue to Congress. (Here are some of James Fallows' thoughts.) It is about time, I suppose - we have seen too much drift toward executive control of war-making. The notion that the president, as commander in chief, ought to have the power to start a war is a really shocking idea - not noticeably different from the idea that a General has the right to start a war. This is not one of the Constitution's ambiguous points: Congress declares war. Since WWII, we have found more and more disgraceful ways of weaseling around that point - but that's no excuse. Make Congress take their responsibilities.

Though this raises the rather bizarre possibility that the insane Republicans in the House might save us from this disaster yet. Not for lack of love of killing - but because they don't want Obama to be able to accomplish anything.

No - I don't believe that for a second. The House may be full of idiots and cretins, working happily to destroy the functioning government of this great land - but they are good dogs when they need to be. There are some things that will bring them into line: tax cuts - bullying women and minorities - killing people. They are authoritarians and war mongers, and I can't imagine them letting the chance to kill a bunch of Arabs go by the boards, no matter how much they hate the man in charge of it all.

Happy Labor Day!

Happy labor day, boys and girls, and here's to getting the minimum wage up where it belongs - $15 is a good starting place, I guess.

I could outsource the music to Lawyers, Guns & Money - Eric Loomis has a good one up.

But I need a video, right? How about Tennessee Ernie Ford on the subject of wage slavery:

Labor Day Weekend Friday Random 10

Ladies and gentlemen, a Friday morning, the last of the month, the day before a long weekend, in which we get to celebrate the working man, and the labor union, an organization that has contributed immensely to our well being, but has faded in the past 30 years or so, with dire effects on our well being. So - good luck, all you fast food workers - getting a decent wage and some institutional power will do everyone a world of good.

Meanwhile, sad news from the literary world - Seamus Heaney has died. He is the only Nobel Prize winner I have met - at least, the only one I knew I was meeting when I met him. So - my knowledge of poetry is too uneven for me to say much more about him - but I certainly enjoyed his work, when I read it, and the couple times I heard him give readings.

And so? Friday it is, and so - music.

1. Sigur Rus - Ara Batur
2. G.O.N.G. - The Isle of Everywhere
3. Audioslave - Set it off
4. Serge Gainsbourg - Requiem Pour Un Con [ah, oui]
5. Grateful Dead - Rosemary
6. Led Zeppelin - Carouselambra [didn't this come up a month or so ago?]
7. Half Japanese - Frankenstein Must Die
8. Of Montreal - Gronlandic Edit
9. fIREHOSE - Can't Believe
10. Meat Puppets - Station

And video? This, sadly, cannot be embedded - Serge Gainsbourg miming Requiem Pour Un Con for a film - have to settle for the music track and some pictures I guess... still makes you want to take up smoking and Jane Birkin, though...



And - life, reunited fIREHOSE:

August Director - Kenji Mizoguchi

We are getting to the end of this particular theme for the Director of the Month. I have been using it to count down my favorite Japanese directors, which since I started with Oshima, means counting down 6 to 1. (With bumps.) We are almost there - we are at Number 2.

I can't imagine there's any suspense here - anyone who's read this blog regularly ought to be able to figure out who's number one. And once I put my other obvious favorite at number 3, that pretty much leaves Mizoguchi. I can't claim any kind of originality obviously - I don't really depart much from the consensus, other than elevating Imamura over Kurosawa - I imagine Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa are the standard Big Three. So I doubt I have to make much of a defense of this choice, except maybe to myself.

I haven't written about Mizoguchi all that much here - I noticed that I don't have a Label for him yet (well, I do now, but I didn't before I hit publish.) I have labels for all the others on this list, and a few who aren't on the list (yet - if I go down from 7 to 10, say, I will surely hit Suzuki and Kiyoshi Kurosawa soon - they have labels!) Are there reasons for that? accidents of what I happen to have seen in the last 9 years? Is Mizoguchi maybe somewhat out of fashion, making his films less likely to be revived, less likely to be reissued that some of the others? There might be something to that - there aren't that many Mizoguchi DVDs available in the states, not that I've found. I don't remember any big retrospectives of his work in the past decade or so - unlike Ichikawa, Ozu, Naruse, Oshima... I don't know. I saw the bulk of the Mizoguchi's I have seen in the late 90s - it has been harder to add to what I have seen than it has to add to the others.

And some of it might be me. I took longer to warm to his films than I did to most of the directors I've written about - the first time I saw them, I liked his early, contemporary films better than his later, period films - however impressive all of them were formally. That division did not survive repeated viewings - every film I saw made me love him more, and every time I see them again, I am inclined to love them anew... (Though again, that's true of almost all my favorite directors of any sort - it's certainly as true of Ozu or Mizoguchi, or even Kurosawa, whose films are shown enough that you can become used to them, as it is of Mizoguchi.) But then again - I use the word "love" there - and I don't know if that is quite right. "Love" is the word for Ozu - it's the word for most of the Imamuras, and a few of the Kurosawas (Kurosawa or Kurosawa), and some Suzukis.... Is it the word for Mizoguchi? Or is the word more like "Awe"? When I'm watching them, I can't say that's a very meaningful distinction. But still - I've put Mizoguchi ahead of Imamura here, but that's a bit deceptive. That's not true if this is a "favorite directors" list - it might be true if this is a "best directors" list. Fortunately, the whole list concept here is just a conceit to pick an order to write these essays, so we can forget it!

And talk instead about what these films have. There's not much debating the question of beauty - there might not ever be a filmmaker more capable of taking your breath away, shot after shot, moment by moment in a film. Start with that. And then, of course, note that there aren't a lot of directors with a more distinct and powerful individual style. (And most of the directors with a more individual style are on this list; or will be in a month.) His camera work, the constant movement, the deep spaces, the sculpting of light and dark, creates a world that is incredibly complex. He expands space in his films, creates a world that is too big for the film, that seems to be waiting in the wings to destroy the characters. There are filmmakers who disorient you, who break the sense of spatial continuity in a film, who make you feel the difference between real world space and screen space - there are other filmmakers who work to create a cinematic world that feels as deep and encompassing as the real world. Mizoguchi is their master. He has good company - Murnau, Renoir, Welles, Dreyer - but he is probably the greatest of them. I remember when I was first reading about film, being confused about why the French loved Mizoguchi so much, at Kurosawa's expense - I think this is a big part of it. Mizoguchi fits in with the people Bazin and his followers valued - Renoir, Dreyer, Murnau, Welles, Rosselini - their use of long takes, deep spaces, the sense of continuity, of keeping back from the action, letting the viewer sort things out, make sense of the imagery - is all present in Mizoguchi, probably to an even greater extent. Those critics were not inclined to value what Kurosawa offered - the much more America and Russian style editing, the more direct creation of "meaningful" shots, and so on. That isn't to say Mizoguchi is not "meaningful" - in fact, it might be one of the points against him, that his films feel very self-enclosed (for all their expansiveness) - their style builds to a complete and inescapable world, in ways that, certainly, Imamura's films don't. Or Ozu - whose style seems much more disorienting, constructed, never letting you forget this is a thing that has been made.

And so. I admit that I will keep harping on these formal qualities in the notes below - I suppose that is part of what makes Mizoguchi sometimes a bit hard to place - he is so formally astonishing, so beautiful, that sometimes, the story might seem to become secondary. (There are many ironies there: I find Ozu much more formally disruptive - but I find his work much more emotionally cohesive. I'm not sure how that works.) But that's really just an impression - the simpler fact is that I find Mizoguchi's films to be incredibly beautiful, brilliantly composed and staged, always featuring strong stories, with a consistent and complex point of view, and - notwithstanding what I was just saying - very humanistic. He is a master in every sense.

1. Ugetsu Monogatari - Ghost story. A potter leaves his wife to pursue a mysterious woman, who proves to be a ghost; another man leaves HIS family to pursue military glory thus plunging his wife into prostitution. Features one or two of the single most magnificent shots in the history of cinema. There is probably not much need to explain why this is such a masterpiece - an utterly gorgeous film on Mizoguchi's usual subject, how women suffer to make men worth their suffering. For good measure, he works in anti-militarism (the samurai are all scum, cowards, fools - the foot soldiers are bullies, rapists, murderers, thieves) and a tract on the evils of greed as well. It is one of the high points of filmmaking - its mix of dynamicism and lyricism - the way people move in and out of the frame, the camera movement, the perfect compositions, the effects, even the use of sound.

The scenes with lady Wasaka make a particularly dazzling high point. From the beginning - Genjuro comes in, passing through the ruins; the sequence starts in ruins, but as he moves into the castle, things become more animated - lights, other ghosts and so on appear - until he is brought to Lady Wasaka herself. It is all very theatrical, especially the moment of truth - references to traditional Japanese theater in particular. The lone pine on the stage, for instance... Then Lady Wakasa dances - again, theater, the way she moves, the staging - and as she sings we hear another kind of music start, then hear her father's ghost singing... That might be a first - a ghost appearing inside a ghost story... The voices blend and Mizoguchi moves the camera to the empty armor.... I lose it every time I see that; who wouldn't?

The film as a whole becomes more moving every time I see it, as do most of these films. There is the emotional punch of the ending, but also the ending for Lady Wakasa, who Genjuro betrays as surely as he betrays his wife. She is almost as sympathetic as Miyagi. And all through there is so much to be in awe of - take the shot of Miyagi's death - a long crane shot, three starving men fighting, one stabs her, she dies in long shot and the others die in very long shot... devastating.

2. Osaka Elegy - Story of a woman who becomes her boss's mistress to pay off her useless father and brother's debts. Murky in every print I have seen, but beautifully composed and shot. Notice the use of light - the dark foregrounds, the bright backgrounds, the frequent high contrast lighting that picks objects out in the background, bright shining objects. These great Japanese directors found their styles fairly early - this is 1936, but Mizoguchi is in command of the style completely - the perfectly composed shots, the long, elaborate tracks, the cranes, the long takes, the sophisticated mise en scene. Shooting through screens - literal screens, also people, windows, shelves, laundry. Like Sternberg - also like Sirk. It is a very strong lineage, that is probably real - certainly Sternberg influenced Mizoguchi, and probably Sirk (who was making his own expressionistic masterpieces in Germany about this time). Sculpting and shaping the world in light and dark, composition, set decoration, all three of them, at a level not really matched by anyone else. (Except maybe Murnau, who helped beget the lot of them...) For Mizoguchi, especially, space is the key - he shapes it, shapes the story out of what is seen and not seen. He is a master of what we don't see as much as we see - using offscreen sounds along with the camera and actor movements, the light and dark, entrances and exits, to establish a sense of continuous space, a whole world around what we see. You feel as if every shot could go on forever, in time or space - that the world extends infinitely in all directions. And what you see, the flow of things you see, and how you see them, creates the narrative and reveals the emotional story. These things are constant in Mizoguchi's work, and they are all here, in 1936, in 71 minutes...

3. Sansho the Bailiff - Story in medieval Japan, of a boy and girl, children of a ruined noble, enslaved by Sansho, who forces their mother into prostitution. The girl sacrifices herself to let the boy escape, and he does, and gets vengeance, though he gives it up to find his mother. Another rather unbelievably beautiful film, though as usual with Mizoguchi, thematically complex as well. Here, the two fathers, good and bad - the ways the sons, Taro and Zushio - betray and redeem their fathers, and so on. And of course, the way Mizoguchi develops themes and tells stories through the formal elements of the film - the play of space, of light and dark, of movement through landscapes, the circles, the routes traced by Zushio (and his mother and sister), the sounds and images, and the ravishing shots... Images that develop themes - consider the way the characters move, where they go - men, whatever happens to them, can move; women cannot. Women sacrifice themselves because that is all they have, in these worlds - men can be stars or heroes or artists; women are lucky not to get their tendons cut.

4. Sisters of the Gion - Another mid-30s film, tracing 2 sisters who are Geisha's - one remains loyal to her lover, even when he is ruined and moves in with her; the other schemes and connives several men, but is almost killed in the end by one of them... while the loyal, good geisha, loses her man when his wife gets him a job. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, though I suppose they are all better off rid of the bastards. As such, for all it's misery, it plays a bit closer to Naruse than some of the other Mizoguchi's - the women are abandoned and suffer, but for no one's sake but their own.

5. 47 Ronin - Classic piece of Japanese drama about 46 ronin who avenge the death of their lord, and are allowed to kill themselves. This was made in 1941, and shows some propaganda elements, but great lord, what a stunning looking film. Maybe the government's interest in the film meant that Mizoguchi had all the resources he could possibly ask - this is far more extravagant looking than his other early films that I have seen. Long elaborate crane shots - overhead angles moving into low angles, all smooth and magisterial. Mizoguchi here moves the camera to get between shots - what might be a conventional shot/reverse shot, he achieves by moving the camera - moving from long to medium shots and so on... Slow going - 4 hours of it, much of it samurai sitting around pretending to vacillate - but it has such weight in the pictures that it feels full, constantly engaging. Amazing film.

6. Chikamatsu Monogatari (The Crucified Lovers) - Another theatrical adaptation, this from Chikamatsu, one of Japan's great dramatists. A complicated story of a printer's wife, whose useless brother needs money that she can't borrow from her husband. So she mentions it to Mohei, her husband's best employee - he agrees to help, but is caught in the act of trying to sneak some money away - when he tries to confess and apologize, the husband turns on him. Why? Well - the old rake had been trying to molest a maid, so the maid said she was engaged to Mohei. Well - as everyone tries to explain everything to everyone else - Mohei and the wife are caught together in the maid's room... Uh oh! They run away, and as they travel together, they fall genuinely in love - to the point that when they are caught, they go together to the gallows, hand in hand, happier than they have ever been.

The tragedy is familiar enough, but beyond that, it is a very dense, complex film - gorgeous and bitter. Money is everywhere - Ishun, the printer, has made a fortune from the great nobles, who all owe him money, and are itching for a chance to break him. He has a rival aiming to get the position back; faithless employees, stealing under his nose. The wife's brother is a useless playboy, taking singing lessons and letting his mother and sister suffer in his place. The class issues - between the printer and the court nobles in his debt, between the poor samurai like the wife's family and the printer, between the printer, his wife, and his employees - are ubiquitous as well. And sexual power - the husband causes a lot of the trouble by seducing a maid; no one (except his wife, and maybe Mohei) pauses for a second to think about the hypocrisy of it - but she does, and Mohei does, and they are ruined for it. All this is lovely as usual, dense and beautiful. Bitter, funny, cruel, tragic, as complicated and modern as Shakespeare (might be more modern that Shakespeare, though only a half century later than Shakespeare) - great film, geat story, everything.



7. Story of the Last Chrysanthemum - Late 30s Mizoguchi, about an actor in the 1880s who runs off with a servant. He had been a hack actor - she makes him a star and an artist, but only after she sacrifices herself for his good. Quintessential version of the Mizoguchi theme, probably - and as always, a masterful piece of work.

8. Life of Oharu - Another gorgeous film, this one about a samurai's daughter who is ruined by loving a servant, and then descends through the ranks of society as misfortune dogs her every step. There might be just a tad too much of it here - the parade of woe starts to seem almost comical, though that is hardly fair. As always with Mizoguchi, the style is impeccable, and this has a fantastic performance by Kinuyo Tanaka as well.

9. Loves of Sumiko the Actress - Film about the the theatrical world of late 19th century Japan - starts with a man trying to put on new, European plays - he wants to stage A Doll's House, and needs an actress - he meets and casts Sumiko, who has left her husband to act - she is a hit. It isn't long before they are lovers, and runs off with him - they become famous, revolutionizing drama in Japan, but they work themselves to death doing it. A fine film, though perhaps a bit flat, and the storytelling merely adequate - but Kinuyo Tanaka's performance carries it. She is radiant - maybe never so radiant as she is here. Radiant and spiky at once - a masterful performance.

10. A Geisha - An older geisha adopts a 16 year old girl, puts her through training, they go to work--the girl has an admirer, and so does the older woman--they go to Tokyo where the two swains try their hands with them--the girl bites her man, the other woman just turns hers down. They are blacklisted. As it happens, of course, the older woman's lover is the problem--he controls some business deal. Everyone--the other man, the teahouse owner, the geishas of course owe everyone else--and when they refuse to cooperate they are blackballed. This lasts a while--then Miyohara goes with the man. Miyoe is unhappy, but that's how it ends. Gorgeous photography as usual.

Weekend Tunes

I am still amazed at how lazy I have been this month. The weather has been superb (though this week got warm again - but a much more pleasant kind of hot than we had in July), I have plenty of things I could be doing - and what have I done? Well - actually, read two honking big books on the Civil War - Peter Cozzens' accounts of Chickamauga and Chattanooga. Gotta be ready for those anniversaries this fall!

Anyway - it's music day, and today we are just plain random:

1. Rocket From the Tombs - Life Stinks
2. The Kinks - (Wish I could Fly Like) Superman
3. David Sylvain - Snow White in Appalachia
4. Jane's Addiction - True Nature
5. John Lee Hooker - Leavin' Chicago
6. John Cale - Amsterdam
7. Pavement - Perfume-V (live)
8. Big Bill Broonzy - Key to the Highway [we got the blues today...]
9. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - EAsy Money
10. Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers - When Will I Be Loved

THat's some nice stuff - what can we find on YouTube? How about John Lee Hooker - not the same song, but live - So Cold in Chicago...



And - Ben Affleck might be the next Batman, but Ray Davies will always be Superman:

Friday Music for the Dog Days

After the weird weather of a couple months there - rain and cold to the end of June, then HOT for a month, August so far has been a peach. High 70s, clear, no humidity - "nice with sunshine" the weather sites put it. And so? I'm amazed how lazy I have been this month - with the weather better, it should be easier to get things done (like those big Imamura and Zep posts), but it hasn't happened yet. Oh well. Not going to complain...

So today? music? I said I was lazy, right? so - here are 10 songs, plucked at random by iTunes from my music library... Only one of which would probably land among my 10 favorite songs of all time. 2 in the top 50, though, possibly.

1. Damon and Naomi - (Scene Change)
2. Leo Kottke - Tell Mary
3. Replacements - Answering Machine
4. Rocket from the Tombs - Never Gonna Kill Myself Again
5. Sonic Youth - Cotton Crown
6. Death - Politicians in my Eyes
7. Pavement - Fin
8. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Spell
9. Loren Connor - Airs No. 2
10. The Who - A Quick One While He's Away (BBC version)

Video? I am reminded that I have been very remiss - I have been meaning to link to Joseph B's list of the five best uses of pre-recorded music in a film - and maybe take a stab at the exercise myself. Reminded because this might be #1.



(Somehow the Italian dialogue seems just right...)

And Westerberg:



And, finally - still at it, all these years later - Crocus and Cheetah and Craig Bell, live...

1990s WITD Poll Votes

At Wonders in the Dark, the yearly polls are currently on summer vacation, as Sam Juliano and family are in England, visiting Allan Fish - they are up to 2003... and here are my votes for the 90s.

The 1990s is when I stepped up my movie watching - from almost night at the beginning of the year to over 400 films a year the last 4-5 years... obviously, a lot of that was catching up on the past - taking advantage of the Brattle and the Harvard Film Archive to see everything I could... But I finally saw enough contemporary films to make these kinds of lists... I remember it fondly - and looking back, it was an underrated decade. Great decade to be a fan of Chinese films, great decade for Iran, etc. - good stuff. Anyway - my votes, and my favorites for the decade are below...

Decade:

PICTURE: Rushmore
DIRECTOR (single): Wes Anderson, Rushmore
(decade): Wong Kar-wei
LEAD ACTOR (single): David Thewlis, Naked
(decade): Leslie Cheung
LEAD ACTRESS (single): Brigitte Lin, Swordsman II
(decade): Maggie Cheung
SUPPORTING ACTOR: John Goodman, Big Lebowski
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Catherine Keener, Being John Malkovich
SHORT: David Lynch in Lumiere and Company
SCORE: Neil Young, Dead Man [wait - I didn't vote for it in the year it was released? I may be confused here, though I don't know where.]
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christopher Doyle, Fallen Angels

Plus bonus picks::
Script: Groundhog Day - best to miss the cut below...
1. Groundhog Day
2. Rushmore
3. Pulp Fiction
4. The Big Lebowski
5. Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould
Music: Rushmore - one of the most perfect uses of pre-recorded music ever
Sound: Viva L'Amour
Musical: Beijing Bastards
Martial Arts: Once upon a Time in China
Documentary: Close Up, Kiarostami
Animated: Nightmare Before Christmas
Musical: there are a surprising number of films that might qualify - more than one of which (Beijing Bastards, 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, Nightmare BEfore Christmas) have already turned up here... Well - the top five?
1. Beijing Bastards
2. 32 Short Films...
3. Haut/Bas/Fragile
4. Nightmare Before Christmas
5. Topsy Turvy

Top 20:

1. Rushmore
2. Brighter Summer Day
3. Satantango
4. Fallen Angels
5. Breaking the Waves
6. Goodbye South, Goodbye
7. Happy Together
8. White
9. Through the Olive Trees
10. Beijing Bastards
11. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
12. Once Upon a Time in China
13. Flowers of Shanghai
14. The Sweet Hereafter
15. Pulp Fiction
16. A Moment of Innocence
17. The River
18. Naked
19. Dead Man
20. To Sleep With Anger

And now by years:

1999:

PICTURE: Charisma
DIRECTOR: Dardennes Brothers, Rosetta
LEAD ACTOR: Russell Crowe, The Insider
LEAD ACTRESS: Emilie Dequenne, Rosetta
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Tom Cruise, Magnolia
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Catherine Keener, Being John Malkovich
SHORT:
SCORE: Angelo Badalamenti, The Straight Story
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Freddie Francis, The Straight Story

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Office Space
Music/Sound: Ghost Dog
Documentary: a good year for these - the best is probably American Movie
Action/Martial Arts: Hong Kong is starting to run down, though you still have some decent films, like Bullets Over Summer. In terms of Asian genre pictures, I should start a Best Miike category: that would be Audition, in 1999...

1. Charisma
2. Sons
3. Rosetta
4. L'Humanite
5. The Straight Story
6. Lies
7. American Movie
8. Peppermint Candy
9. The Little Girl WHo SOld the Sun
10. Audition

1998:

Another solid year, very strong at the very top, and fairly deep. Lots of great performances, especially by men; three or four films that contend for the best script of the decade; some magnificent looking films. With, in the end, the best film of the decade, in Rushmore.

PICTURE: Rushmore
DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson
LEAD ACTOR: Jeff Bridges, Big Lebowski
LEAD ACTRESS: Marie Riviere, Conte d’Automne
SUPPORTING ACTOR: John Goodman, Big Lebowski
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Erika Oda, After Life
SHORT:
SCORE: Mark Mothersbaugh, Rushmore
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lee Ping Bin, Flowers of Shanghai

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Rushmore
Music/Sound: Rushmore (one of the best uses of pre-recorded music there is)
Martial Arts: we're past real martial arts films, but still need to mark some Hong Kong films - this year - Expect the Unexpected, which deserves the name.

1. Rushmore
2. Flowers of Shanghai
3. The Big Lebowski
4. Babe: Pig in the City
5. After Life
6. Forty-two Up
7. The Silence (Makhmalbaf)
8. Secret Defense
9. Book of Life
10. Expect the Unexpected

1997:

This is a very good year, but also maybe the most unbalanced year - there are some great European films, and some very good American films, but the top of the list is completely dominated by Asian films. 6 of the top 7, by my lights.

PICTURE: Happy Together
DIRECTOR: Wong Kar-wei
LEAD ACTOR: Thomas Jay Ryan, Henry Fool
LEAD ACTRESS: Pam Grier, Jackie Brown
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Robert Forster, Jackie Brown
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Julianne Moore, Boogie Nights
SHORT: Alone, Erick Zonca
SCORE: Angelo Badalamenti, Lost Highway
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christopher Doyle

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Henry Fool
Music: Happy Together - the music selections, which are perfect
Sound: Taste of Cherry - but this is one of the best sounding films ever; Kiarostami films are so detailed, so rich, you want to watch them with your eyes closed, at least once.
Documentary: a fight to the finish between Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Fast Cheap and Out of COntrol, though I think the Herzog wins.
Martial Arts: nothing quite fits, but as Hong Kong goes over to China, you get quite a burst of creativity - Happy Together, running off to Argentina - and at home, Too Many Ways to be No. 1 has to get a mention of some kinds. For the upside down fight, if nothing else. (And the fact that those two films share a significant, extended upside down camera sequence - seems very likely to be related to the politics of the day. Both films, of course, being quite plainly about the handover, and what you are supposed to do now.)

1. Happy Together
2. The Sweet Hereafter
3. The River
4. Xiao Wu
5. Cure
6. Taste of Cherry
7. Too Many Ways to be No. 1
8. Henry Fool
9. Kingdom II
10. Funny Games

1996:

Beyond the top ten, beyond the top 20 - this year has a lot of films I find that I just really like, or remember fondly, all these years along. The Frighteners or Beavis and Butthead Do America or what have you...

PICTURE: Breaking the Waves
DIRECTOR: Lars Von Trier
LEAD ACTOR: Owen Wilson, Bottle Rocket
LEAD ACTRESS: Emily Watson (This is a very difficult choice: Kidman and McFarland, are hard to pass over, or Maggie Cheung for that matter.)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: William H. Macy, Fargo
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Nathalie Richard, Irma Vep
SHORT:
SCORE: Goodbye, South, Goodbye, Lim Giong
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Breaking the Waves, Robby Muller

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Fargo
Music/Sound: I think
Martial Arts: things are running out around here - this might be God of Cookery, typically entertaining Stephen Chiao nonsense. There are some nice action films in the next few years from Hong Kong, but fewer and fewer martial arts films.

1. Breaking the Waves
2. Goodbye. South, Goodbye
3. A Moment of Innocence
4. Portrait of a Lady
5. My Sex Life, or How I Got in an Argument
6. Fargo
7. The Delta
8. Without Memory
9. Drifting Clouds
10. Mahjong

1995:

Not a bad year at all, really. Looks a bit thin compared to some of the years around it, since that seems to have been a pretty nice stretch in the mid-90s, but still. Having a few certifiably great films helps... Anyway:

PICTURE: Fallen Angels
DIRECTOR: Wong Kar-wei
LEAD ACTOR: Takashi Kinoshiro, Fallen Angels
LEAD ACTRESS: Julianne Moore, Safe
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jackie Cheung, High Risk (or Meltdown, or whatever it's called in English - Die Hard ripoff, with Cheung sending up Jackie Chan)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Charley Young, Fallen Angels
SHORT: David Lynch's bit in Lumiere and Company, which I see is called "Premonition Following an Evil Deed"
SCORE: Eleni Karaindrou, Ulysses Gaze
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christopher Doyle, Fallen Angels

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Dead Man
Music/Sound: Fallen Angels
Martial Arts: The Blade
Documentary: Gate of Heavenly Peace - though I wish I could say Forgotten Silver - the best fake documentary at any rate.
Best English Title for a Foreign Film: Tough Beauty and the Sloppy Slop - silly Supercop ripoff with Yuen Biao and Cynthia Khan, but the title - man, you want to see that, right?

1. Fallen Angels
2. Dead Man
3. Good Men, Good Women
4. Gate of Heavenly Peace
5. Hau/Bas/Fragile
6. Forgotten Silver
7. Safe
8. Red Cherry
9. Sharaku
10. Gonin

1994:

93 rivals this year at the very top, but for the volume of great films, this is a truly magnificent year. They just keep on going... doing any sort of justice to the range of great films this year is impossible.

PICTURE: Satantango
DIRECTOR: Abbas Kiarostami, Through the Olive Trees
LEAD ACTOR: Johnny Depp, Ed Wood
LEAD ACTRESS: Sandrine Bonnaire, Jeanne la Pucelle: Parts I & II
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Samuel L.Jackson, Pulp Fiction (I suppose this is a supporting role, though it's a big one; if he were up for the lead I could vote for Paul Newman in the Hudsucker Proxy...)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Faye Wong, Chungking Express
SHORT: I think this will be The Smell of Burning Ants, from Jay Rosenblatt.
SCORE: Zbigniew Preisner, Three Colours: Red
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Gábor Medvigy, Sátántángó

Plus bonus picks:
Script: who can deny Pulp Fiction?
Music: I have to split this from sound this year - the competition is for the best use of pre-recorded music is very steep - Chungking Express, Cold Water, Pulp Fiction - I have to give it to Chungking Express, though.
Sound: It's also a year full of magnificent sounding films, films making dense, brilliant use of sound - Satantango and Through the Olive Trees and Jeanne le Poucelle - but the one that stands out is Viva L'Amour.
Martial Arts: we're getting toward the end of Hong Kong's awe-inspiring run, but there are still some nice films coming out - so, though it has a strange reputation I guess - Ashes of Time is a pretty good action film. That might not be it's main appeal, in the end - but it's still remarkable, and well done. The way the fight scenes are atomized - blurs of motion & whooshing sound effects, sudden closeups, changing speeds - but still maintaining a kind of heft - not much flying, a kind of grounded physicality, which is, after all, a trademark of Samo's choreography. It has a relentless earthiness (along with recurring images of the four elements) that makes it memorable.

1. Satantango
2. White
3. Through the Olive Trees
4. Pulp Fiction
5. Viva L'Amour
6. Jeanne La Poucelle
7. Cold Water
8. A Borrowed Life
9. The Kingdom
10. A COnfucian Confusion

1993:

This is a tough year, as good a top 5 as we've seen in a while...

PICTURE: Beijing Bastards
DIRECTOR: Hou Hsiao Hsien, The Puppetmaster
LEAD ACTOR: David Thewlis, Naked
LEAD ACTRESS: Brigitte Lin, East is Red
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Ralph Fiennes
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Katrin Cartlidge, Naked
SHORT: The Wrong Trousers
SCORE: Zbigniew Preisner, Three Colours: Blue
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Gu Changwei, Farewell, My Concubine

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Groundhog Day
Music/Sound: Thirty-Two Short Films about Glen Gould - which is a close second for best film and script... Beijing Bastards is a strong contender here, Cui Jian is quite good, but this is Glen Gould - and it's a magnificent piece of sound work as well as music.
Martial Arts: Fong Sai Yuk - Jet Li and Josephine Siao putting on a great comic action show.

1. Beijing Bastards
2. Thirty-Two Short Films About Glen Gould
3. Naked
4. Groundhog Day
5. The Puppetmaster
6. The Blue Kite
7. Short Cuts
8. The East is Red
9. Nightmare Before Christmas
10. Sonatine

1992:

I'll take Brigitte Lin's eyes and Jet Li's drunken swordfighting and Rosamund Kwan with a whip over more or less anything you can offer more or less any time. Though putting it like that isn't quite right - because as entertaining a bit of pop film-making as it is, it's also packed tot he eyeballs with the Strange, and rather more clever in its apocalyptic gender-bending politics (sort of a Tsui Hark trademark, usually given an extra level of insanity when Ching Siu-tung gets involved) than most anything else on offer.

PICTURE: Swordsman II
DIRECTOR: Tsai Ming-liang, Rebels of a Neon God
LEAD ACTOR: Denzel Washington, Malcolm X
LEAD ACTRESS: I wish I could vote for Maggie Cheung in Actress, for she is truly great, but who am I kidding? I can't not vote for Brigitte Lin in Swordsman II - why pretend? She's one of the most marvelous things ever put on screen in that film. (And the next one; you can guess my '93 best actress vote, I assume.)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Steve Buscemi, Reservoir Dogs
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Hey hey! a chance! I can vote for Maggie Cheung in Dragon Inn!
SHORT: Stille Nacht III (Though Frog Baseball is the important one...)
SCORE: Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Poon Hang-Sang, Actress

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Reservoir Dogs
Music/Sound: And Life Goes On - Kiarostami is always an absolute master of the use of sound. Though one of his strongest competitors had a film out that year too - Tsai Ming-liang...
Martial Arts: Swordsman II, of course. Though it's a loaded year, with the Dragon Inn remake and Supercop and the second Once Upon a Time in China film, covering a neat range of styles...
Documentary: Lessons of Darkness

1. Swordsman II
2. One False Move
3. Rebels of a Neon God
4. Careful
5. Actress
6. Lessons of Darkness
7. Reservoir Dogs
8. And Life Goes On
9. Glengarry Glen Ross
10. Autumn Moon

1991:

A good year, though not the best of the decade quite. One of the best films of the decade though...

PICTURE: Brighter Summer Day
DIRECTOR: Edward Yang
LEAD ACTOR: Jet Li, Once Upon a Time in China
LEAD ACTRESS: Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs
SUPPORTING ACTOR: John Goodman, Barton Fink
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Judy Davis
SHORT: Short of Breath?
SCORE: Zbigniew Preisner, The Double Life of Veronique
CINEMATOGRAPHY: William Lubtchansky, La Belle Noiseuse

Plus bonus picks:
Script: Brighter Summer Day
Music/Sound: Brighter Summer Day, named after a song after all...
Martial Arts: Once Upon a Time in China, a contender for the best martial arts film ever made.

1. Brighter Summer Day
2. Once Upon a Time in China
3. La Belle Noiseuse
4. Jacuot de Nantes
5. Rebels of a Neon God
6. Slacker
7. Thirty-Five Up
8. J'Etend Plus le Guitar
9. Life of the Dead
10. Sink or Swim

1990:

An okay year for films, but a killer for performances - trying to pick them brings back how many there are, and how indelible they are. Probably come in high on the list of years for memorable moments - Annette Bening jumping on the bed. "I'm funny?" Jane Horrocks' trouble with chocolate. Beat Takeshi and a baseball bat. Etc.

PICTURE: To Sleep With Anger
DIRECTOR: Kiarostami, Close Up
LEAD ACTOR: Leslie Cheung, Days of Being Wild - really? Over Glover?
LEAD ACTRESS: I have too many choices: I'll say - Laura Dern, Wild at Heart - not the best Lynch, but it's not her fault. (Though this is where Kati Outinen belongs for Match Factory Girl, outside this poll)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: this is even tougher, right? it's a good year for over the top - Joe Pesci; Chris Eigeman - is there such a thing as over the top deadpan? or Timothy Spall in Life is Sweet. I want to vote for Eigeman, but I think I have to join the crowd and vote for Pesci.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: this is tough too - but - Annette Bening, The Grifters, gets the vote.
SHORT:
SCORE: Carter Burwell, Miller’s Crossing
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christopher Doyle, Days of Being Wild

Plus bonus picks:
Script: To Sleep With Anger
Music/Sound: Close Up - this is for the sound, not music.
Martial Arts: it's mild mannered and same compared to the sequels, but Swordsman is first rate Wu Xia in its own right.

1. To Sleep With Anger
2. Days of Being Wild
3. Close Up
4. Goodfellas
5. The Match Factory Girl
6. Life is Sweet
7. Miller's Crossing
8. Europa Europa
9. Swordsman
10. Metropolitan