#91: Hyenas
(Senegal, 1992; dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty; cin. Matthias Kälin)
IMDb
African cinema has always ranked down in the absolute dredges on the list of American appetites, somewhere in the vicinity of Brussels sprouts, socialism, and the learning of foreign languages. Not that I imagine that these films are lighting big fires on the European or Asian markets, either. Even last year's critical phenomenon Moolaadé, directed by the renowned Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène and centered around the outrageous and topical problem of female circumcision, couldn't penetrate the competition lineup at Cannes, which ceded valuable space to such cubic zirconia as The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and the Coen Brothers' D.O.A. remake of The Ladykillers. Almost 18 months later, its American DVD release is nowhere in sight. Maybe the issues so often addressed in African cinema—economic plights, political breakdowns, male bragging rights, women's subjugation, paralysis in "tradition," perils of "progress"—are just too discomfiting to observe from the outside, perhaps because none of us can pretend that we are truly outside the complex circuits of both complicity and victimhood. Maybe it's the tonal sophistication, so easily dismissable as tonal simplicity, that disconcerts: from what I hear, and again, I'd like to find out for myself, Moolaadé is, like so much politically charged cinema from West Africa, is really rather droll. Still, what accounts for all the cool kids rushing to, say, the spare but so often precocious Iranian cinema of the late '90s, when you still can't dragoon a halfway decent audience to an African anything? </Rant>

Djibril Diop Mambéty's funny, harrowing, colorful, and terrifically astute Hyenas is an emblematic case of a masterpiece—and a good time at the movies, to boot—that these cultural trends wholly short-change. Heroically, it did participate in the Cannes competition lineup in 1992 and in that year's New York Film Festival, it was micro-mini released in commercial venues that fall, and it's available for rent on DVD or VHS. So, hop on it, and observe how piquantly Mambéty adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, one of the twentieth century's great plays, and infuses the material with exciting, entertaining, and shrewd new meanings within the West African context. The plot concerns how Linguère Ramatou, an acerbic, broken-bodied, and vengeful old woman, returns to her small-town hamlet after decades of amassing a shadowy fortune. She now indulges the citizens with improbable luxuries and other, decadent incentives so long as they agree to execute the town's most popular citizen—in this version, an avuncular barkeep and shopowner named Draman Drameh, who long ago denied having fathered the illegitimate child that occasioned Linguère's banishment in the first place. The bankrupt village, whose town hall is impounded in a very early sequence, has a peculiarly African (but also not peculiarly African) susceptibility to superficial remedies and cults of personality, and they are sure that the woman's promised fortune shall be their redemption, even as they profess outrage at the demand for Draman Drameh's head... and even as Linguère and Draman volley back and forth between nostalgic recollections of their ancient affair and bitter disputes over her grudge and its consequences.

So, yes, we have here another plotline that seems inhospitable to the kind of witty, almost tongue-in-cheek tone that governs several scenes, even as the lurid heart of Linguère's scheme and the tragic cooptability of the town of Colobane are never far from our minds. "These people have no ideals," Draman murmurs with contempt about his neighbors, having been picked, of all people, to escort Linguère on her homecoming tour. "They will soon enough," she responds, ominously but humorously foreshadowing the blackmail plot she's yet to reveal. The mayor of Colobane, his lectern festooned with a French flag, regales his subjects with proud, ringing endorsements of both the town and its suddenly favorite daughter; she icily thanks them all for their "unselfish joy" in so receiving her. Draman's wry and thoroughly disillusioned wife hunkers behind the bar, uncertain of which side of this spat she properly belongs on. The theatrical blocking of actors testifies to the stage roots of the material, even as the flat vocal affect applies an African trademark, and the emotionally rich closeups, smart framings, and eye-flattering colors refit the story seamlessly as cinema. The trickling build-up of imported and largely useless commodities is a good joke with a terrible and rather aggressively flaunted secret; this is a universe, our universe, where the farming of brand-name clothes, the provision of Pepsi (where once there was only Coke!), can we twisted both to sanction and disguise the deepest crimes. Hyenas, in a way, is like a Gold Coast forebear to Dogville, a homology you hear even in their titles, but where Von Trier's tract is bullyish with its theses and ostentatious in its formal conceits, Hyenas crouches in laughter and quiet, marshaling its armies at every increment of the tonal spectrum before suckering you, as real life often does, with the absurdity, the dailiness, the familiar face of tragedy.


#92: Alice Adams
(USA, 1935; dir. George Stevens; cin. Robert De Grasse)
IMDb
Among Katharine Hepburn's most famous and auspicious screen collaborators—including, in my own order of preference, George Cukor, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy—director George Stevens is the least fêted member, but his achievements with Hepburn should not be undervalued. Once an established star, she never looked more radiant than she did in 1942's Woman of the Year, where Stevens' generous showcasing of her look and her performance beautifully counteracts the script's rather mean imbalance against her. (Well, maybe until that cooking scene, anyway.) Earlier than that, Stevens gamely ushered her through a spritely and underseen J.M. Barrie adaptation called Quality Street (1937), where Hepburn's comic dual-performance paves the way as none of her previous roles had done for the screwball delights of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and the aristocratic wit of Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940). But moving back still earlier, it's not clear that any of Hepburn's once and future heights would have been reached without the pretext of her first truly great performance in Alice Adams, which finds her amidst a glorious, once-in-a-lifetime metamorphosis from the queer, coltish ingénue of 1933 (Little Women, Morning Glory, Christopher Strong) into the rounded sophistication of her later work, somehow softer and more confident all at the same time. Alice Adams is the moment where Hepburn becomes a star, and also the moment where she becomes truly lovable.

Adapted from a novel by Booth Tarkington—the writer, too, of The Magnificent Ambersons—Alice Adams tells the story of a lower-middle-class girl, not far past her schooling years, who positively quivers with longing to join the coterie of her more fashionable peers and to find the kind of domestic bliss that presumably once united her parents (the excellent Fred Stone and Ann Shoemaker), whose tacit bond of affection is now sorely tested by illness, monetary need, and other trials of late middle-age. Alice Adams is the kind of girl who would adore Pride and Prejudice, even though in real life she might well have settled for Mr. Collins. One of the major ambitions of the screenplay and, I'm guessing, the novel is to keep Alice so dotingly loyal to her family even as she dreams of something bigger or other than what they have, which often compels a shame of her circumstances and a coy dishonesty about who she is and who they are. That the emblematically patrician Hepburn is so convincing within both this cast and this caste is a complete revelation, even more so in hindsight than it must have been in 1935, but her empathetic connection to this girl's gossamer aspirations couldn't be clearer. Her body and voice are much more relaxed than we're used to seeing and hearing them, and even though she takes center stage in a way she wouldn't truly do again until David Lean's Summertime in 1955, she holds the movie, as she does the character, with graceful, unpugnacious care, as though cupping her hand around the spores of a dandelion, keeping them from blowing away.

Stevens, so intuitive and judicious in realizing his best films, cuts to Hepburn at unexpected moments, lingering on her face longer than other directors would—possibly because, as in Woman of the Year, he's found the right angles and lighting concepts to make Hepburn's proudly intellectual face stay remarkably open and emotive. But more than that, his gift falls in knowing when to cut to Alice, when to understand the debates and dramatic actions surrounding her as essentially her story, rather than that of the bumptious family unit or the town at large. The two centerpiece sequences of the movie, when the guileless and ill-dressed but optimistic Alice takes her Cagneyish brother Walter to a local-society ball, and later when suitor Fred MacMurray arrives chez Adams for an uncomfortably hot and subtly humiliating evening of dinner and conversation, rank among the greatest passages of narrative filmmaking in the American cinema of that decade. The style is elegant and holistic, even as it magically embraces such different elements—MacMurray's somewhat lumpen appeal, the adroit conveyance of stifling temperature, the wholly unexpected elegance of Walter's dancing, a tart cameo from Hattie McDaniel, a romantic proclivity for fades and dissolves on Alice when her spirits flag, and the almost neo-realist shot where she kicks her wilting, homemade bouquet of hand-picked violets under a chair. There is also, of course, the justly famous and encapsulating shot of Hepburn weeping in her bedroom after the ball, filmed through the rivulets of rain running down her window. Moment by moment by moment, Alice Adams reverberates with humble but sure-handed technique and a credible reverence for modesty as a virtue. The last line of the movie is "Gee whiz!", and as dramatically precipitous as it is—the one major miscalculation in the script, I think—the sentiment is fully shared by the audience.


#93: I ♥ Huckabees
(USA, 2004; dir. David O. Russell; cin. Peter Deming)
IMDb // My Page

You got all that, right?

I know, I know, this movie came out, like, five minutes ago, but I ♥ Huckabees was the only movie of 2004 that I paid to see three times in a theater, and every time, I laughed like I was screaming. Every time, the triple-threat of Wahlberg, Hoffman, and Law proved that they deserved an Oscar category all their own for Flawless Comic Support Without Scenery-Hogging. Every time, the movie's sharp harpoons into the absurd fractiousness of the American "liberal" left hit all of their marks, even as the movie tipped all the sacred cows of big business, "Christian" hypocrisy, and star-studded realpolitik with equal aplomb. The movie is crazily deep with subtle touches, golden scenes, and brilliant sidebar performances. That dinner scene with Jean Smart and Richard Jenkins? The priceless walk-on from Talia Shire? Lily Tomlin, her desk strewn with notebooks titled "Coincidences" and "Galaxies" and "Fathers," refocusing her eyes every few seconds? Jon Brion's miraculous score, with the drunken calliope and the galloping rhythm? I ♥ed the whole thing, and I'm not seeing the love dissipating any time soon.
#94: Cemetery Man
(Italy, 1994; dir. Michele Soavi; cin. Mauro Marchetti)
IMDb // My Full Review
Talk about starting out ahead: tell me again why all movies don't begin with Rupert Everett, dripping wet with a towel around his waist, shooting a zombie in the head at point-blank range? Cemetery Man, known to its hometown Italian fans as Dellamorte Dellamore, thusly gets off on the right foot indeed, though it's a stop 'n' go affair ever after. Of all the movies on this list, I think it's the hardest for me to get a bead on, and the one that I'm the most surprised to feel such affection for. It also might be the hardest one to write about, as is further attested by my lame review, written in the preemie infancy of this website.
Maybe I love Cemetery Man because it's one of the few cult films in existence whose cult I blithely stumbled into, without even knowing it existed. Somehow, people everywhere seem to have seen this movie, which I caught on late-night Cinemax, O whorish bride of cable TV, one time when I was house-sitting. Everything that happens early in Cemetery Man happens again at least a dozen more times. Zombies, for the entertainment gods are good, can't stop rising out of the ground, seven days after their initial burial. Rupert, for every other kind of god is good, can't stop taking showers. That killer musical score, all sawing cellos and violins and deep-thrumming basses, never wears out its considerable welcome. The indecently buxom Italian sexpot who turns Rupert's eye, played by an actress called Anna Falchi, keeps dying and resurrecting herself, eventually returning in the guises of wholly different women, all with the same smutty expression. The mayor's daughter gets her head lopped off in a road accident, but when it comes back to life on its own, Rupert's porcine assistant has the politesse to perch it in the skeleton of a burned-out TV. Haven't you ever wanted to look out from the boob-tube instead of in? And did I mention this is played for laughs?

Well, laughs of a sort. Cemetery Man is like Shaun of the Dead as rewritten by Eugène Ionesco. Promiscuously genre-hopping among horror, comedy, Italian national satire, and highfalutin existentialism, Cemetery Man has the surface qualities of a spoof—including its absurdly matter-of-fact nods to Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Psycho—but none of its comfy core. Its bones are not really funny bones. There's something perversely poignant about its hero's unholy predicament: in trying to flee his thankless job as watchdog, caretaker, and tireless re-exterminator at the local graveyard, he drives out of town until he almost tips over the literal edge of the world... which means that all those zombies aren't a sign of The End at all, but are rather the tottering embodiments of a bloodless status quo. You can laugh or weep, or, like Callum Keith Rennie in Last Night, you can just get horny. Cemetery Man encourages all three, with a mad brio and a frank lack of interest in playing by any rules. I'm still not certain that the picture really works. Recent re-viewings have been distressingly joyless, but isn't that very trajectory from hilarity to nausea the plot and theme of this sucker to begin with? I think I'm gonna be sick, or maybe this is what enlightenment feels like. Either way, I'm sure I'll watch it again. Like the most indefatigable zombie in the cool, cool crust of the Earth, I just can't stop trying again.


#95: Possessed (1947)
(USA, 1947; dir. Curtis Bernhardt; cin. Joseph Valentine)
IMDb
This slot could have gone to The Bad Seed, with its delectable camp excesses and deliciously maladroit psychologizing, or to Mildred Pierce, which devotes considerable technical talent and a terrific Crawford performance to an impressively absurd premise. But, in the interest of economy as well as honesty, why not go with Possessed, the film that synthesized all of those films' bad-good qualities and added some more of its own to boot? Crawford, a recent Oscar winner for Mildred, scored a second nomination here as Louise Graham, who shuffles unsteadily into the early sequences, mumbling about someone called "David" on the sidewalks of LA before suddenly collapsing into a coma. Worse, her scrubbed and denuded face looks like ten miles of hard road in Hell. It's kind of amazing that Crawford of all people agreed to look this bad, though it's no less amazing that she agreed to say things like, "'I love you' is such an inadequate way of saying 'I love you.' It doesn't quite describe how much it hurts sometimes. Sometimes I get the sniffles and then my nose gets runny because I'm happy because I'm in love." Hard to explain, too, what Van Heflin and Raymond Massey are doing lumbering around with their impossible characters, though Heflin at least has a good time getting soused and shrinking uncomfortably from Crawford's fierce but addled affections—or is it from her fierce but addled performance, which itself is some kind of apex in the eternal almanac of Bad-Good?

There is much that is fascinating about Possessed, including the way it refuses to be written off as a crappy movie, even when the plot takes its serial nose-dives into purple implausibility, even when Franz Waxman indulges the most apoplectic arpeggios and electric-organ decrescendoes in the certifiably insane score. However ancient its notions of science—the title comes from Dr. Harvey Willard's expert opinion that Louise's schizoid persecution complex is one of many mental-health states that amounts to being "possessed by devils"—there's a feral, almost involuntary conviction to the film's interest in psychic unease that you don't really find in The Snake Pit or The Three Faces of Eve or other, comparable voyages into the classical Hollywood booby-hatch. The form of the film convulses amidst its own insensible agonies, alternating amongst elegant lakeside establishing shots, harshly expressionist chiaroscuro effects, uneasy dissolves, and at least one handheld tracking shot from the point of view of a dead woman who may or may not be haunting Louise (who, in turn, may or may not have killed this woman). It's easy to cackle and shrug at Warner Bros. potboilers like this, and Possessed repeatedly earns the cackliest cackle you can manage: it's that crazy, and that much fun. But it also feels symptomatic of...something, and harshly sincere: the sour force of spurned passion and the suffocating pressure of obsessive lovers who won't go away have rarely been given such free rein. The violence they exact on the movie's formal discipline is a major part of why you remember the picture.

Well, that and the ecstatic wrongness of Crawford's pleas that the alcoholic musician-engineer-mathematician played by Heflin (!!) stop dodging her with his lovingly traced parabolas and his attempts to interest her in the complex calculus of steel girders. "Why don't you love me like that?" she barks. "I'm much nicer than the girder, and a lot more interesting." Joan, never a truer word was said.


#96: Masked and Anonymous
(USA, 2003; dir. Larry Charles; cin. Rogier Stoffers)
IMDb // My Full Review
Everybody and his brother seems to have a Bob Dylan project in the works these days, yet nonetheless, rarely do you hear a kind word (or, indeed, any word at all) about this freewheeling, epigrammatic, and carnivalesque project that Dylan himself brought to the screen a couple of years ago. Since I have reviewed Masked and Anonymous in full, readers already have a stronger sense than usual of what I like so much about the movie. And this is probably just as good a time as any to acknowledge that, especially by comparison to my Top 100, this list of Personal Favorites skews heavily contemporary—an honest reflection of where my enthusiasms lie these days, even if it turns out that the ardor cools in the next couple of years. I'm as fickle as they come, I suppose, but then, so is Masked and Anonymous, which only fully commits to a small handful of its characters (Dylan's, Bridges', Goodman's, Lange's, and maybe Luke Wilson's) while mostly preferring to pinwheel among first impressions, quick interludes, musical bridges, and defiantly self-contained episodes that obscure as many of Dylan's creative intentions as they reveal.

It's no wonder that Masked and Anonymous—whose title proudly proclaims its refusal to be known—isn't everyone's cup of tea. For what it's worth, I personally can't get enough of the way it plays such a mean game of three-card monte with our expectations and even our recognition of what we're watching: is Dylan "playing himself" or playing some alternative jam-meditation on the theme of himself? Is it okay to take seriously the movie's ramshackle vision of a tumbledown, Third World America, even as the major characters appear to joke and smirk about it? What do we make of the way that the screenplay's wry, aphoristic dialogue and allegorical figures hail straight from the lexicon of Dylan's own songwriting, and yet, minus the reassurances of melody and reputation, these same aesthetics feel even more inscrutable than usual? And does that make it easy not to respond to the roustabout humor that is all over Masked and Anonymous, fighting a worthy duel with the heartbroken sadness and the confessions of failure that infuse so many of its scenes? Are the actors in the movie simply flailing about without a flight manual, or is the free-verse, improvisatory style of these performances—beyond the immediate pleasures in turns as witty as Lange's or as crafty as Bridges'—germane to the message the movie is trying to convey? And what is that message, or is there no message? On the largest scale, I'd stick my neck out to say that Masked and Anonymous is a bright but scathing future-vision of the United States after only a few more years of the entertainment industry's profit-mongering and empty self-congratulations, not to mention of the impotence of modern liberalism and the factionalizing effects of a hubristic, hawkish, but increasingly shaky government. (In its tacit way, it's also one of the few American movies to presage a future of the country where Latino and Hispanic cultures come to permeate all levels of society, culture, and public provenance.) On the narrowest level, Dylan offers a kind of perversely private apologia for his own lapses as an artist and a man—which, the film seems well aware, is not fundamentally distinct from the other narcissistic enterprises that are suffocating the power of art even as, in many cases, they provide its steadiest fuel. No coward from paradox, this film.

On every scale, I admit that Masked and Anonymous keeps me perpetually grasping at straws, and perpetually eager to keep on grasping. Abstruse as it can get, the movie is also hugely entertaining, engagingly shot, and, at least in its early and middle stretches, very cleverly edited. The music can't be beat. And I'd sure rather take this kind of dense, cryptic, and wholly personal missive from one of our most challenging popular artists than the kinds of anodyne and awkward biographies that any outside-observer in the book can throw together. Here in late 2005, I'm still perplexed about what I'm supposed to make of Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, J.M. Barrie, Che Guevara, Alfred Kinsey, John Kerry, and Ramón Sampedro. Even Mario Van Peebles' Baadassss!, which by all rights should have felt as radical and self-determined as this film does, has precious little of its idiosyncratic spark. If Masked and Anonymous has any close parallels among recent biographical pictures, it's probably Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, except that Dylan's back pages of shock, self-performance, and secret complicities have more complex harmonies than Caouette's, and they are also more persuasively our own.


#97: George Washington
(USA, 2000; dir. David Gordon Green; cin. Tim Orr)
IMDb // My Page
David Gordon Green's George Washington, a rather awkward synthesis of stratified social realism and the lyrical sublime, is a movie I cherish even as it frustrates me profoundly. Its erratic slides between plausibility and affectation, between gentle rumination and self-indulgence, between some things borrowed and some things new, are somehow unified by a stylistic tranquility that often misserves the movie—though it also occasions some magnificent and touching sequences, and moreover, it's a powerful enticement to repeated viewings. On none of the four occasions when I have seen George Washington has it quite congealed into the movie that I wish it were, nor, more importantly, into the movie that its own most coherent passages suggest it wants to be. But then, who knows what George Washington wants to be? Its diverse allegiances and its unformed, almost fetal quality of fragile metamorphosis wouldn't feel the same if the movie felt more consistent, more bounded. What is special about the movie is its fluctuating ratio of breakthroughs and breakdowns. It's like a stumbling, amateur athlete who compels the sort of loyalty and encouragement that champions, veterans, and perfectionists can't attain, and whose flashes of brilliance are more precious for what they imply than for what they actually unite to produce.

Perhaps the film's supreme accomplishment is one of its simplest: the faith and good sense that have directed Green and his collaborators to film characters, scenes, relationships, and locations that simply never arise in American films, even, for the most part, movies as off the beaten path as this one. The commencing scene, in which the emotionally precocious 12-year-old Nasia breaks up with her 13-year-old, bespectacled boyfriend Buddy (Curtis Cotton III) is both jarring and heartwarming in its lack of irony. Beyond the fact that George Washington affords such generous time and space to pre-teen emotions, and beyond the extreme rarity of seeing African-American characters of any age depicted so warmly and lit so well in an American movie, the film really hits its stride when the young characters start criss-crossing with their elders, when the white kids and black kids reveal cliques and alliances that are just as mundane to them as they are surprising within our gentrified and color-lined national cinema. The only attributes that George Washington's characters share in common are the rural, weedy county they inhabit and their unenviable class position, which seems to account for why workplaces and domestic spaces blur into each other so imperceptibly, and why everyone seems to know each other so well (kids and adults, even relative strangers, all address each other easily by first name).

If it weren't so melancholy in tone and incident—the latter is Green's real stumbling block as a writer—George Washington would feel like a sort of Fanfare for the Common Kid, utterly non-judgmental in its embrace of unremarkable youngsters and shrewd in the way it highlights their various drab environments as, at least in their minds, emotionally specific spaces. So what if George Richardson, the central character, still ends the movie as a sort of symbol without a referent, and if the kids' conspiratorial, paralyzed response to an accidental death is less confidently handled than the same plotline is in Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher. George Washington never quite achieves what Nasia, its narrator, promises—the prospect of seeing all the way into the characters' hearts and skeletons. Still, very much to its credit, the film's idiosyncratic surface already feels more revealing than the excavated cores of many other films, and it does train its audiences to see new people, to watch and listen in a new way.


#98: Brother's Keeper
(USA, 1992; dirs. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky; cin. Douglas Cooper and Richard Hissong)
IMDb // My Page
Counting upwards on the list, my next three entries are all American independent movies, each of them restoring some meaning and marrow to the idea of truly independent film; whatever their evident compromises or flaws, they all encourage my belief that unexpected stories can still be told about improbable people in untested and illuminating ways. The first of these films, Brother's Keeper, was made by documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who later found greater fame for their two Paradise Lost movies (1996 and 2000). Those films chronicled how three Arkansan teenagers were accused of diabolical murder and were subsequently run through a scattershot judicial system that has all three imprisoned to this day. I prefer Brother's Keeper, however, for telling the less didactically driven and altogether more peculiar tale of the Ward brothers of Munnsville, NY, ranging in age from 59 to 70, all of them reclusive to the point of ghostliness, barely literate if at all, and subject to a real whopper of a media circus when the second-oldest brother dies in his sleep. When the coroner determines that he seems to have been suffocated, big questions arise. When "youngest" brother Delbert signs a confession of murder, despite outside claims that he couldn't possibly understand what he was signing, the plot thickens. When semen is found in the stomach of the deceased, things really fly off the handle.

Brother's Keeper is not a perfect documentary by any means. Berlinger and Sinofsky, as in Paradise Lost, are perhaps artificial in streamlining their complex scenario into gothic-thriller dimensions, after which they follow the reverse instinct of playing all too obviously into the side of the case they prefer. Nonetheless, Brother's Keeper is a pretty extraordinary document, not least because the surviving Ward brothers are such craggy, enigmatic, and fascinating subjects for the cameramen, who at least have the grace not to leer at them outright. Shuffling about at the pace of Galapagos turtles, and marked by the same habit of palpably retreating into their private shells, the Wards do not quite seem to fit the visions of the prosecution, but nor do they seem well-suited to the "local hero" status they acquire from a roused local populace who smell a legal feeding frenzy and are determined to safeguard this trio of virtual hermits. An extremely strange social dynamic emerges, one that confers poetic justification on the name "Ward," though the film's intimate tracing of their existence cannot disguise the fact that nobody, filmmakers included, seems to know quite what to make of them. Too, the possibility subsists throughout that the Wards know more than they ever tell, and despite sensationalist undertows, the film never succumbs to romanticizing their silence. While watching other documentaries, not to mention while living as their regional neighbors in upstate New York, I have often thought of the Wards and their appalling poverty, their almost total privacy, and afterward their vulnerability to legal and finally artistic forms of surveillance which they must never have envisioned. Formally steadier than Capturing the Friedmans and less grandiose in the scope of what it imagines, Brother's Keeper won a slew of prizes from critics' groups when it was released, but it deserves a bigger following.


#99: The Breakfast Club
(USA, 1985; dir. John Hughes; cin. Thomas Del Ruth)
IMDb

#99: Pretty in Pink
(USA, 1986; dir. Howard Deutch; cin. Tak Fujimoto)
IMDb // My Page
Restoring a little balance of power to the universe, and knocking me right off of The Piano Teacher's high-art pedestal, here are the two films from the John Hughes factory that double-double my refreshment every time I pull them off the shelf. I find it impossible to choose between The Breakfast Club, which Hughes directed from his own script, and Pretty in Pink, helmed by the otherwise dubious Howard Deutch. I saw The Breakfast Club when you're really supposed to, i.e., when you are roughly the same age or, better, just barely younger than the characters in the movie—from which vantage Hughes' empathetic grasp of high-school anhedonia is all the more rewarding and exciting, and also nicely tempered by a fair grasp of each character's naïveté and inadequacy. Gorgeously, and infectiously, the movie finds all of its adolescent leads in a gently embellished free-zone between the mess that real people are in high school and the stabler, frankly nicer people that Andy and Claire and Bender and the rest will palpably become later in their lives, given just a little bit of breathing-room to grow up and get over themselves. That said, I sure hope that Ally Sheedy's Allison, by far my favorite character, will forever continue to make her dandruff-derived objets and her all-carbs all-the-time sandwiches. Also priceless: Anthony Michael Hall's shambling diffidence, so hard-fought but so hilariously ill-concealed, and Judd Nelson's marvleous line reading of the single word "Claire," turning the name into some sort of insolent question.

The Breakfast Club is snappily written, crisply defined, and cleverly art-directed, and in terms of pacing, it couldn't work better. Even the precipitous couplings at the end, some of them real head-scratchers, actually help the movie: we don't leave with any false sense that anything has been fixed or made permanent, and the excitement of making right and wrong choices at the same time is preserved. Pretty in Pink, a much more sober film however poppy it also is, gets a similar boost from what seem like errors. Andie's romantic trajectory just isn't what we expect, and the widely circulated reports of last-minute script changes augment the climactic sense of compromise. But Andie's compromises were always what was most interesting about her, right alongside her winning and utterly believable rapport with her kindly burned-out dad and the limpid, hugely gratifying accessibility of Molly Ringwald across her whole performance. Pretty in Pink starts and ends in imperfection—nicely if unintentionally underlined by the fact that Andie's "do it yourself" prom dress, which occasions her happy ending, is actually, let's be real, quite unflattering. The movie is poignant even when it's funny, funny even when it's angry ("WHAT about PROM, BLANE??!"), and enormously embraceable. It lacks, mercifully, any Long Duck Dong instance of mean and boring stereotype, and in the hands of D.P. Tak Fujimoto—later a godsend to The Silence of the Lambs and The Sixth Sense—the movie doesn't look bad, either. The Psychedelic Furs sound almost as techno-thrilling on the Pink soundtrack as the Simple Minds do on The Breakfast Club's. So riddle me this: why can't these movies get any respect?


#100: The Piano Teacher
(France/Austria, 2001; dir. Michael Haneke; cin. Christian Berger)
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Nothing like The Piano Teacher to get this list off to a savage start, proving that just because I love a movie enough to include it on a list of personal causes célèbres doesn't mean that it's easy to snuggle up to. I am a sucker for razor-sharp formal control, and The Piano Teacher certainly has that, freezing the camera at moments that are just as difficult and unexpected as the furious violence, emotional and otherwise, that often engulfs its three major characters. I always go in for conceptual dramas, and the way Haneke wrests a bold meditation on music and a cultural snapshot of Viennese schizophrenia out of this scalding character study is a subtle and breathtaking achievement. I am a pushover, apparently, for movies about pianos. And, just as obviously, I relish nothing more than watching any world-class actress tearing into a complicated part, and the ferocious precision of what Isabelle Huppert concocts here—vengeful, expert, supercilious, tamped-down, lonely, and volcanically perverse—is something that no other actress in years has equalled. (Most actresses could wrangle with this script for a decade and be too shallow or else too shy to forge the Erika Kohut that Huppert uncovers.)

In combination, these separate marks of the film's distinction yield images and sequences so blunt and shattering in their affective immediacy that the film is that rare thing—literally unforgettable. I do not have the greatest memory in the world, but at the level of individual scenes, The Piano Teacher finds a needle-sharp line right into the mind's cradle. Here is Erika, punishing a promising student with a grotesquely planted ambush of broken glass. Erika, abjecting herself for sexual attention on tile floors, and abandoning herself to ecstatic violence in her own apartment. Erika, her face tight and austere as a hangman's rope, withering in her estimation of her pupils' musical abilities. Erika, ducking into a viewing stall for a quick, hot dosage of the kind of pornographic voyeurism that Haneke himself keeps threatening but miraculously avoids. Penultimately, Erika, literalizing the wounds of her heart in one of the most shocking close-ups I've ever witnessed, capturing Huppert in a look of raw agony that is utterly, irreproducibly her own. And lastly, the music hall, the performance space, the indifferent scene of a death or a near-death, a massive edifice that Haneke has taught us over two hours to read as both an emblem of trained sophistication and an altar to the obscene. The Piano Teacher, so justifiably proud of its performances, is nonetheless bigger than all of them. It is a film of Artaudian cruelty, and a boundary-breaker in the cinema's exploration of its own erotic and artisanal id.


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