Title
|
Director, Country, Year
|
Date Seen
|
Comments
|
|
Ace in the Hole / The Big Carnival |
Billy Wilder, USA, 1951 |
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The Crowd |
King Vidor, USA, 1928 |
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Crumb |
Terry Zwigoff, USA, 1994 |
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Drylongso |
Cauleen Smith, USA, 1998 |
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F for Fake
 |
Orson Welles, USA, 1974 |
Jun. 19
|
Orson Welles' winking treatise about forgery and illusionism is an enjoyable lark, and
there's no gainsaying the friskiness of its formal mélange, combining new footage, archival and newsreel material, inserts
from famous films, cast-offs from Orson's own abandoned projects, and a teasing, climactic tête-à-tête between
Orson and his co-writer Oja Kadar. Devotés of the personal mythologies of Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and the notorious
forger Elmyr de Hory will be especially gratified. Then again, call me a killjoy, but the implicit point about the ubiquity of trickery—especially
in the arts and even more especially in the hands of inveterate formalists like Welles—doesn't lead us anywhere deeper than
we've already assessed less than halfway through. Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil,
The Third Man...all of them were just as illuminating about the borderzones between truth and falsity, but they contextualized
these notions rather than holding out postmodern axioms in a vacuum, as though it were all (or, indeed, any of it) breaking news. A fine divertissement,
but it's a puzzle-box of ideas about art rather than a fully satisfying film. B
|
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Fast Company |
David Cronenberg, Canada, 1979 |
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I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang |
Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1932 |
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Jubilee |
Derek Jarman, UK, 1978 |
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The Killing of a Chinese Bookie |
John Cassavetes, USA, 1976 |
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The Killing of Sister George |
Robert Aldrich, USA, 1968 |
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Lost Highway |
David Lynch, USA, 1997 |
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Monsieur Verdoux |
Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1947 |
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The More the Merrier
 |
George Stevens, USA, 1943 |
Jun. 15
|
Sometime after World War II, maybe after They started putting fluoride in the water, our
teeth got better but our comedies got worse. The More the Merrier gloriously reminds us how light-footed, randy, and
specific Hollywood comedies used to be: suffused with wit rather than clotted with punchlines, and wedding the absurdities of
a well-defined situation to the cheerful fractals of love and attraction. Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea are delicious here as
attracting opposites (though not that opposite) thrown together by the wartime housing shortage in Washington, DC.
Oscar winner Charles Coburn burns slowly but brightly as the mischief-maker who draws them together. The picture sputters
toward the end, abandoning Arthur in particular to a bunch of needless weeping (it feels, sounds, and looks like a joke, but
it doesn't really seem to be one). Still, the whole thing's a peach, and laugh-out-loud funny. A–
|
Mrs. Miniver
 |
William Wyler, USA, 1942 |
May 10
|
The Academy, box-office, and zeitgeist champion of 1942 is neither as good nor as bad
as you might think. Wyler, as ever, is attentive to his actors, and Garson, Pidgeon, and their surrounding brood of children
and neighbors are an agreeable, believable lot without turning into jellybeans. The MGM production unit clearly took care
with the project, but as often with Wyler in his most prestige-minded projects, his camera stultifies more often than you wish
it would. Sermons abound, more patriotic than churchy. Garson's good, but she was better in her other big hit of 1942,
Random Harvest, where she smarted from the pangs of love but didn't have to shoulder the Meaning of War. B–
|
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Out of the Past |
Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1947 |
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Parting Glances |
Bill Sherwood, USA, 1986 |
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Performance |
Roeg & Cammell, UK, 1970 |
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Salesman
 |
Albert & David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, USA, 1969 |
Mar. 26
|
I've now made three goes of the Maysles Brothers' canon, and while Salesman, to my mind,
makes a better case for itself than the lurid irrelevancies of Grey Gardens, I still have a hard time balancing the
officious immediacy of the Maysles' photography with the evident manipulations of their editing. At least in Salesman, they
are the willing beneficiaries of some artful, O'Neill-style verbal riffs from their subjects—especially Paul Brennan, notwithstanding the
fact that he works almost as hard as the filmmakers do to make himself the rather pyrrhic linchpin of the story. The glimpses
of these Bible salesman footing their way on the retail trail is almost implicitly fascinating, but the intrusiveness of
even a small camera crew shouldn't be forgotten, and the movie's elegism, however rough-hewn and distinguished for its era
(or even for our era, with its proudly sensational "documentaries"), feels too consciously cultivated to mean all that much.
B
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7 Women |
John Ford, USA, 1966 |
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The Steel Helmet |
Samuel Fuller, USA, 1951 |
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The Tarnished Angels |
Douglas Sirk, USA, 1958 |
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Thieves Like Us |
Robert Altman, USA, 1974 |
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32 Short Films about Glenn Gould |
François Girard, Canada, 1993 |
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To Each His Own |
Mitchell Leisen, USA, 1946 |
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Title
|
Director, Country, Year
|
Date Seen
|
Comments
|
L'Âge d'or
 |
Luis Buñuel, France, 1930 |
Feb. 25
|
Predicting the textures, images, and counter-ideologies of longer, more narrative films he wouldn't make for 30 or 40 more
years, Buñuel here achieves the peak of his early career: a surrealist vision that is outrageous in both the heretical
and humorous senses, and a more coherent collage of associative imagery than the infamous Un Chien andalou.
The repeated images of ecstatic smothering—in mud, in feathers, in something that looks like lava, or shit—ironically
pose the abject as the prefered alternative to the dogmatic, and though Viridiana in particular would take this tension
to more deliriously memorable places, the jokey effrontery already has an impressively sharp point. A–
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Alexandria...Why? |
Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1978 |
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Bandit Queen |
Shekhar Kapur, India, 1994 |
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Céline and Julie Go Boating |
Jacques Rivette, France, 1974 |
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Code Unknown
 |
Michael Haneke, France, 2000 |
Mar. 14
|
More expansive than Funny Games or Caché, but not finally as provocative as The Piano Teacher or
Time of the Wolf, this polyglot Parisian drama once again demonstrates writer-director Haneke's formal and tonal gifts.
The best scenes, including Binoche's humiliation on a subway car and a Malian cab driver's tenderly tense interview with his
young son, are quite impressive on their own terms but also resonate in the broader contexts, unveiling Haneke's well-hidden
emotional core. Still, Code often feels like a mosaic of social theses, familiar despite their urgency, and the effect
was slightly more sublime in Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep. B+
|
|
Dakan |
Mohamed Camara, Guinea, 1997 |
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Faat Kiné |
Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 2000 |
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Gertrud |
Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1964 |
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Ivan the Terrible |
Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1944/46 |
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Knife in the Water |
Roman Polanski, Poland, 1962 |
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Landscape in the Mist |
Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, 1988 |
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The Leopard |
Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1963 |
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The Marriage of Maria Braun |
R.W. Fassbinder, W. Germany, 1979 |
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Matador
 |
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 1986 |
Sep. 24
|
Almodóvar inscribes the opening credits of Matador over a montage of grisly demises from low-budget, exploitative
horror movies, the colors in these clips so deeply saturated and the gestures of violence so ardent and brisk that the
atmosphere they foster is one of camp psychosis. That's not a bad term for the register that Matador will thereafter
inhabit. An early sequence in which the formidably coiffed María (Assumpta Serna) impales a naked, virile lover with a
hairpin follows a runic, obsessive inroad into the codes and fetishes of S/M violence; later, when Angel (Antonio Banderas)
attempts to rape the fluorescently dressed Eva (Eva Cobo), Almodóvar courts absurdism more bravely, and perhaps more
tastelessly. Some of the acting is good, particularly from Julieta Serrano and Nacho Martínez, despite the film's priority
on visage and affect more than intricacy of characters. Also, for a 1980s Almodóvar, the camera does a good job tracking texture and depth instead of just color and surface. As
pervy as Bad Education, the structure and pace of Matador are similarly susceptible to lapses. It's unmistakably
an early work, but it's a bracing one, and the bodies, however colorfully conceptual, also bleed real blood. B+
|
|
Open City |
Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945 |
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Orpheus |
Jean Cocteau, France, 1950 |
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Pandora's Box |
G.W. Pabst, Germany, 1928 |
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Raise the Red Lantern |
Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong, 1991 |
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La Ronde |
Max Ophüls, France, 1950 |
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|
Sanshô the Bailiff
 |
Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1954 |
Nov. 26
|
A breathtaking masterwork, and a formidable corroboration of those readers who have
chided me for not spending more time with Japanese cinema. The poor quality of many DVD and VHS transfers have kept me shy
of the Mizoguchi canon, but I jumped on Sanshô when the restored 35mm print passed through Chicago, and it's hard
to say what moved me most: the meticulously arranged shots, which somehow preserved their beautiful, articulate lines and
tensions even as the camera tracked and panned; the evocative use of sound, both in strident moments of crisis and as
subliminal reinforcement; the depth of irony and moral complexity, avoiding simplistic judgments and keeping perfectly
in tune with the wide, unprescriptive camera angles and the sober, low-contrast photography; or the sheer amount of plot and the series of tragic reversals
that Mizoguchi manages within two hours, elaborating a fable with personal, national, and spiritual dimensions while
maintaining a primary, luminous allegiance to the art of film itself. A future candidate for the Top 100 list, no question,
and probably the best movie I have seen all year. A
|
|
Scenes from a Marriage |
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1973 |
|
|
The Spirit of the Beehive
 |
Victor Erice, Spain, 1973 |
Apr. 18
|
The Spirit of the Beehive is a Spanish movie that looks almost Scandinavian;
specifically, the ochres and umbers of the interiors, the harrowed chill of the sky and the fields, and the darker, ruddier colors around
town kept reminding me of Sven Nykvist. So, too, the eye for contrasts and the precision of the camera movements, interspersed among painstaking and
often arresting tableaus. However, unlike Bergman's Fanny and Alexander,
another film where two watchful, mischievous children skirt around all kinds of tight-lipped adult dramas, all the while
embarking on their own furtive trips to the rim of something unknown, The Spirit of the Beehive strikes me as a little
too self-regarding in its cultivation of mood. Yes, Erice's pace and his co-authored script are subtly evocative, and wonderfully
accessible for such a reticent, occasionally haunting film. Five-year-old Ana Torrent is a sensational find, and her face rewards more close-ups than many older actors can stand. Sill, at least for my taste, the
film grows too replete with visual portents (the beehives, the Frankenstein monster, the abandoned shelter, the shattered
crockery), themselves too suggestive of broader thematic reads—political, generational, and self-reflexively cinematic—that
somehow feel too gossamer and, at the same time, a mite forced. Give me Dream
of Light any day. B
|
|
That Obscure Object of Desire |
Luis Buñuel, France/Spain, 1977 |
|
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Three Days |
Sharunas Bartas, Lithuania, 1991 |
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