The New York Times has this to say about this summer's movies: "Hollywood’s summer movies promise to be a little fresher, more original and funnier than usual. And that could be a problem for an industry that has done well lately by peddling the familiar."
This has awakened me to something I should have realized, but did not: Hollywood was pleased with last summer's movies.
I'm not going to tell you anything earth-shattering here, but Hollywood likes making money and doesn't care if the movies are good or bad. And man, is that short-sighted thinking. There were lots of movies that made a great deal of money last summer, some of them quite good. But the ones that made the big money were pretty bad. The top 4:
Spiderman 3 - $336 mil
Shrek the Third - $322 m
Transformers - $319 m
Pirates 3 - $309 m
Of these, only Transformers is pretty ok, and it's the only one that made money because it was pretty ok. Those other three made big money not because they were big event movies but because they were sequels to big event movies that were actually good.
The Times writes: "As hot as “Iron Man” is, with domestic ticket sales of about $180 million in its first week and a half, it still trails last year’s summer season kick-off movie, “Spider Man 3,” by about 25 percent in the same time."
But that's a ridiculous comparison. Iron Man is a good movie with a mid-level star that's raking in tons of money because it's good. Spider-man 3, which sucked, raked in tons of money as a sequel to two good movies. (Disclaimer: I hated all 3 Spider-Man movies, and may have preferred the 3rd because it was only conventionally bad, not just Sam Raimi vomiting his hack tendencies all over us and thinking it was brilliant)
In other words, this summer, which promises a whole host of movies which should be good (Hellboy 2, Batman Begins 2, Iron Man, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Prince Caspian, etc) will be a much better summer than last summer even if Hollywood makes less money. Because when someone pays $10 to get shat on in the form of Spider-Man 3 or Pirates 3, I guarantee they're not that excited to do it again next summer. But when they spend $11 for Iron Man and then actually enjoy that experience, they might just think about coming back for The Hulk, and they'll definitely show up for Iron Man 2. But everybody who watched Shrek the Third is going to think twice about Quadra-Shrek.
This makes Transformers triply the only movie of those four Hollywood should be happy about. First, it made Spider-Man 3 money by being pretty good, not by riding something else's coattails, unless you count a 20 year-old TV show. Secondly, it means Transformers 2 should make that kind of money as well. And finally, although Spider-Man 3's production costs are under wraps for shame reasons, it is the most expensive movie ever made. Transformers cost $150 million dollars to make. Spider-Man 3 may have cost $600 million, only made $17 million more, and made pretty much everyone who saw it unhappy. That's a bad summer. But it holds the record for biggest opening weekend ever, so I'm not sure you could convince Hollywood that.
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
What Happened to the Ladies?
Hi guys. Sorry, I haven't been around lately. I was busy and also upset at what a bad film reviewer I am. But I've decided just not to write film reviews, but still write as much as I can about my thoughts on movies. You might enjoy it more, or less, if you've read the blog before...either way, I hope I don't waste your time too badly.
Anyway, this post is me trying to think through some more gender issues, since that's been an unofficial theme of this blog. It's a response to a comment my friend Tolf made about hating an entire generation of female movie stars - the Meg Ryan/Melanie Griffith generation. Off the top of my head (confirming ages with wikipedia) I came up with two more actors and have this generational analysis:
A Bad Generation: Meg Ryan, Melanie Griffith, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, and Jamie Lee Curtis were all born between 1957 and 1967, which in my mind makes them all solidly in the same acting generation. And boy do they suck. Assuming that Academy Awards are a decent barometer of excellence, just not an iron-clad one, let's look at some numbers: Among these 5 actors, with several decades of acting experience, we have only 8 awards and 3 wins (actress and supporting actress), with Jodie winning two awards and Julia bringing in one. But among those eight nominations, at least 4 are in films that I consider complete jokes: Working Girl, Erin Brockovich, Pretty Woman, and Nell. That's right, those movies suck.
I want to compare these ladies to a previous generation. All of the following actresses were born between 1945 and 1951: Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston (I'm not including Sally Field, who was born in that age range and would bring some serious Oscars to the table, but I think sucks). So, wow. That's an amazing group, all born within six years of each other. Shall we do the Academy Test? The numbers are, for six actors: 28 nominations, 5 wins. Mostly that tells you that this generation had a hard time winning awards, but for our purposes nominations are more important. Plus, Mia Farrow was NEVER nominated for an Academy Award, despite some performances in films you might have heard of: Rosemary's Baby, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives...these are mostly Woody Allen movies, it's true, but in my mind that's just a giant plus.
What's more, I didn't include Diane Wiest, since I just don't really consider her a movie star (being a movie star: often a bad thing), but she would have brought three more nominations and two more wins.
So, where does that leave us? Pure Numbers: 5 Movie Stars, born between 1957 and 1967, that I consider representative, have won only three oscars, from 8 noms
6 Movie Stars, born between 1945 and 1951, have won 5 oscars from 25 noms - and nominations, I think, are a much better general gauge than wins.
If I'm right that noms are a good indicator and that those other four movies really suck (Special sucking award: Nell. So terrible), then the generation of movie stars that came of age in the 70s truly is a great one, and the generation that came of age in the 80s/early 90s is truly a waste of space...
Ok, that's it for now. Sometime later this week I'm going to try to think through the reasons for this discrepancy, and probably do some counter-arguments. If you have any counter-arguments or ideas, please, please post a comment or email me.. I would like to revive this blog: with your help! Our powers combined, etc.
Anyway, this post is me trying to think through some more gender issues, since that's been an unofficial theme of this blog. It's a response to a comment my friend Tolf made about hating an entire generation of female movie stars - the Meg Ryan/Melanie Griffith generation. Off the top of my head (confirming ages with wikipedia) I came up with two more actors and have this generational analysis:
A Bad Generation: Meg Ryan, Melanie Griffith, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, and Jamie Lee Curtis were all born between 1957 and 1967, which in my mind makes them all solidly in the same acting generation. And boy do they suck. Assuming that Academy Awards are a decent barometer of excellence, just not an iron-clad one, let's look at some numbers: Among these 5 actors, with several decades of acting experience, we have only 8 awards and 3 wins (actress and supporting actress), with Jodie winning two awards and Julia bringing in one. But among those eight nominations, at least 4 are in films that I consider complete jokes: Working Girl, Erin Brockovich, Pretty Woman, and Nell. That's right, those movies suck.
I want to compare these ladies to a previous generation. All of the following actresses were born between 1945 and 1951: Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston (I'm not including Sally Field, who was born in that age range and would bring some serious Oscars to the table, but I think sucks). So, wow. That's an amazing group, all born within six years of each other. Shall we do the Academy Test? The numbers are, for six actors: 28 nominations, 5 wins. Mostly that tells you that this generation had a hard time winning awards, but for our purposes nominations are more important. Plus, Mia Farrow was NEVER nominated for an Academy Award, despite some performances in films you might have heard of: Rosemary's Baby, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives...these are mostly Woody Allen movies, it's true, but in my mind that's just a giant plus.
What's more, I didn't include Diane Wiest, since I just don't really consider her a movie star (being a movie star: often a bad thing), but she would have brought three more nominations and two more wins.
So, where does that leave us? Pure Numbers: 5 Movie Stars, born between 1957 and 1967, that I consider representative, have won only three oscars, from 8 noms
6 Movie Stars, born between 1945 and 1951, have won 5 oscars from 25 noms - and nominations, I think, are a much better general gauge than wins.
If I'm right that noms are a good indicator and that those other four movies really suck (Special sucking award: Nell. So terrible), then the generation of movie stars that came of age in the 70s truly is a great one, and the generation that came of age in the 80s/early 90s is truly a waste of space...
Ok, that's it for now. Sometime later this week I'm going to try to think through the reasons for this discrepancy, and probably do some counter-arguments. If you have any counter-arguments or ideas, please, please post a comment or email me.. I would like to revive this blog: with your help! Our powers combined, etc.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
As you may know, I have two film critics that I feel particularly strongly about. I consider them two sides of the same coin, as they are both remarkably informed about film and literature, and both of them have developed a distinctive style, one that balances academic veracity and insight with a clarity and readability almost never found in academic writing. One of them takes all these skills and combines them with that most important of all critical features: taste. The other has no taste, but attempts to bring his criticism all together with an almost Michiko Kakutani-level of something else: pretension. A.O. Scott's taste is impeccable, and thus he can write both beautifully and wisely about Talledega Nights, Away from her, The Simpsons Movie, and The Lives of Others. Godfrey Cheshire has nothing but pretentiousness, and thus his taste in movies is always incomprehensible. These are my critical poles. This development has made me so very, very sad:
A.O. Scott writes about the new documentary Moving Midway:
"Some aspects of Godfrey Cheshire’s “Moving Midway” may also seem unlikely. Who, apart from Werner Herzog, would think of loading an old North Carolina plantation house onto a truck and moving it away from encroaching strip malls and sprawling developments? Mr. Cheshire’s cousin, as it happens. But the relocation of the house is only one piece of this extraordinarily rich documentary, which takes up the agonies and ironies of Southern history with remarkable wit, empathy and learning.
You bastard. I trusted you.
A.O. Scott writes about the new documentary Moving Midway:
"Some aspects of Godfrey Cheshire’s “Moving Midway” may also seem unlikely. Who, apart from Werner Herzog, would think of loading an old North Carolina plantation house onto a truck and moving it away from encroaching strip malls and sprawling developments? Mr. Cheshire’s cousin, as it happens. But the relocation of the house is only one piece of this extraordinarily rich documentary, which takes up the agonies and ironies of Southern history with remarkable wit, empathy and learning.
Mr. Cheshire, a New York film critic for many years, brings his intelligence and knowledge of the medium to bear on a primordial subject: What does it mean to think of a place as home?"
You bastard. I trusted you.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Review: The Signal
Foil Hat: A Homemade Defense against The Signal
3.5/5
It's hard to imagine a movie which is more firmly a product of the horror movie Zeitgeist than The Signal. Its central premise is straight from a J-Horror movie: a signal of unknown origin is being broadcast on every radio, TV, and cell phone, and bad shit happens. Specifically, people who listen to the signal too long get "the crazy," and start killing everyone around them for no apparent reason and, yes, often torturing them in a manner worthy of Saw, Hostel, et al. It doesn't take long for the city of Terminus, with just a few sane survivors fleeing from their murderous friends, neighbors, and family members, to resemble Dawn of the Dead's Milwaukee or 28 Days Later's London. And yes, The Signal has the same low-budget feel as Cloverfield (in this case, it actually is low-budget) and was written and directed, in three separate pieces, by three separate writer-directors, ala Grindhouse.
The main difference between The Signal and all those other films is that no one has ever heard of it, a somewhat astounding situation given its incredible nowness. Presumably the low-budget didn't include any marketing money, which is a shame because The Signal is actually quite good, especially in its first half. The first third of the film (or "Transmission" in the film's terminology) is the most effective; it introduces us to our three main players: Maya, her lover Ben, and her soon to be murderous husband Lewis. Maya leaves Ben in the first scene to return to Lewis, who's trying to watch the ballgame with some buddies. Needless to say, instead of the ballgame they get the signal, and from there Maya's apartment building deteriorates into an truly gruesome and terrifying orgy of murder. In the film's most brilliant move, even the sane people have to arm themselves and commit murder to survive, so its impossible to tell if anyone has the crazy.
The riveting first transmission gives way to the horror-comedy of the second transmission, in which Lewis ends up in the home of a couple still trying to host their New Year's Eve Party. In the first half of this section, "the crazy" is mostly played for laughs, but it degenerates into torture porn - with one sequence involving Lewis, an exterminator by trade, memorably utilizing his pesticides. The final transmission is perhaps the least satisfying filmically, but provides an effective emotional resolution to the first and second transmissions. It doesn't feature the horror of the first transmission or the humor of the second, but trumps them both for sheer visceral gore - not necessarily the best award to win.
I can only hope that The Signal, as a handcrafted grab bag of many of the best elements from contemporary horror movies, finds the life on DVD it so deserves. The acting is often slightly wooden, with only Lewis (AJ Bowen) standing out, but both David Bruckner of the first transmission and Jacob Gentry of the second offer up segments that mark them as talents to watch. The Signal is undoubtedly superior to Awake or any other terrible recent horror movie starring Jessica Alba, so check it out on DVD - unless you want to see it in theaters in the next week.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Top 20 Movies of 2007-2008
My Blog, my rules, so I'm gonna have a top 20 list of movies. Screw top 10 - I saw too many movies this year. Many critics' response to this problem (see: Godfrey Cheshire) is to have a 30-film long "honorable mentions" list, but that's a copout. I'm putting together a list of 20 films, in order of awesomeness. I'm also enclosing the number of publications that, according to metacritic, ranked each of these films the best of the year, so you can use that to decide how much my taste sucks - I'll try to find a Top 10 Tracker instead, since that'd be more representative, but I haven't found one yet. Enjoy. Soon, I'll try to add pictures and descriptions! (Try not to laugh if you stumble across this list in the year 2347, as part of your Doctoral Disseration on Film Blawgs of the early 21st century, and you find it without pictures or my comments).
Update: I'm too lazy to get pictures, and I've decided you don't necessarily need to hear from me again on these films, so I'm providing quotes for each of them from reviews by The Only Film Critic Who Matters. If he didn't review it, that film just has to sit without a quote and curse Dargis and Holden.
1.Away from Her
“I can’t remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.”
2.Knocked Up (1)
“Mr. Apatow’s critique of contemporary mores is easy to miss — it is obscured as much by geniality as by profanity — but it is nonetheless severe and directed at the young men who make up the core of this film’s likely audience.”
3.No Country for Old Men (20)
“No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.
4.The Lives of Others (2)
Georg and Captain Wiesler, though they occasionally waver and worry, remain true to their essential natures, and thus embody the film’s deepest, most challenging paradox: people don’t change, and yet the world does.
5.Rescue Dawn
6.Michael Clayton (3)
7.There Will be Blood (13)
8.Futurama: Bender's Big Score
9.Superbad
10.The Bourne Ultimatum (1)
11.Waitress (1)
Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress (still perhaps best known as Felicity, from the television coming-of-age melodrama of the same name) who plays her.
12.The Simpsons Movie
I have long been of the opinion that the entire history of American popular culture — maybe even of Western civilization — amounts to little more than a long prelude to “The Simpsons.”
13.Once (2)
But its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow “Once” with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.
14.Persepolis
“Persepolis,” austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit. Its flat, stylized depiction of the world — the streets and buildings of Tehran and Vienna in particular — turns geography into poetry.
15.3:10 to Yuma
Mr. Bale is one of the few screen actors who can convincingly shed the trappings of modernity. Dan is much more than a movie star in costume: with his gaunt, haggard face and wide, awe-struck eyes, he seems to have stepped out of a daguerreotype or a murder ballad.
16.The Lookout
17.American Gangster
18.The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (9.5)
Their common subject, however, is freedom, the self-willed liberation of a difficult, defiant individual. But Mr. Schnabel is not content simply to state or to dramatize this idea. Rather, he demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty.
19.Enchanted
20.The Host
Honorable Mentions: Hot Fuzz, because everyone seems to have forgotten about it, and it was awesome, although less awesome than both Shaun of the Dead and the preceding 20 movies. Otherwise, I don't think you need a list of other movies I saw that were good, but not as good as these.
Regrets: I didn't see (and wanted or at least felt obligated to see) Lars and the Real Girl, Great World of Sound, No End in Sight, The Savages, This is England, King of Kong, Election and Triad Election, Across the Universe, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Charlie Wilson's War, I'm Not There. I also didn't see 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but I blame the film industry/Mr. Stone for that.
Update: I'm too lazy to get pictures, and I've decided you don't necessarily need to hear from me again on these films, so I'm providing quotes for each of them from reviews by The Only Film Critic Who Matters. If he didn't review it, that film just has to sit without a quote and curse Dargis and Holden.
1.Away from Her
“I can’t remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.”
2.Knocked Up (1)
“Mr. Apatow’s critique of contemporary mores is easy to miss — it is obscured as much by geniality as by profanity — but it is nonetheless severe and directed at the young men who make up the core of this film’s likely audience.”
3.No Country for Old Men (20)
“No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.
4.The Lives of Others (2)
Georg and Captain Wiesler, though they occasionally waver and worry, remain true to their essential natures, and thus embody the film’s deepest, most challenging paradox: people don’t change, and yet the world does.
5.Rescue Dawn
6.Michael Clayton (3)
7.There Will be Blood (13)
8.Futurama: Bender's Big Score
9.Superbad
10.The Bourne Ultimatum (1)
11.Waitress (1)
Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress (still perhaps best known as Felicity, from the television coming-of-age melodrama of the same name) who plays her.
12.The Simpsons Movie
I have long been of the opinion that the entire history of American popular culture — maybe even of Western civilization — amounts to little more than a long prelude to “The Simpsons.”
13.Once (2)
But its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow “Once” with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.
14.Persepolis
“Persepolis,” austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit. Its flat, stylized depiction of the world — the streets and buildings of Tehran and Vienna in particular — turns geography into poetry.
15.3:10 to Yuma
Mr. Bale is one of the few screen actors who can convincingly shed the trappings of modernity. Dan is much more than a movie star in costume: with his gaunt, haggard face and wide, awe-struck eyes, he seems to have stepped out of a daguerreotype or a murder ballad.
16.The Lookout
17.American Gangster
18.The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (9.5)
Their common subject, however, is freedom, the self-willed liberation of a difficult, defiant individual. But Mr. Schnabel is not content simply to state or to dramatize this idea. Rather, he demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty.
19.Enchanted
20.The Host
Honorable Mentions: Hot Fuzz, because everyone seems to have forgotten about it, and it was awesome, although less awesome than both Shaun of the Dead and the preceding 20 movies. Otherwise, I don't think you need a list of other movies I saw that were good, but not as good as these.
Regrets: I didn't see (and wanted or at least felt obligated to see) Lars and the Real Girl, Great World of Sound, No End in Sight, The Savages, This is England, King of Kong, Election and Triad Election, Across the Universe, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Charlie Wilson's War, I'm Not There. I also didn't see 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but I blame the film industry/Mr. Stone for that.
Review: Diary of the Dead
Go for the brain, dumbass!1.5/5
I want to make one thing clear: Diary of the Dead emphatically does not deserve the 1.5 stars I have given it. It only gains them because it is a zombie movie and, yes, has some pretty sweet shots of zombies getting shot, getting stabbed, blowing up, eating brains, etc. The special effects are mostly CGI this time around, and they look pretty good, but they're nothing special - not as polished as 28 Days or Dawn of the Dead [2004) while lacking the charm of Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead.
Having gotten that out of the way, I want to make it clear that every single other element of Diary qualifies it for potential consideration as Worst Movie Ever. The director, zombie legend George Romeror, has gone on record saying he'll never make a zombie movie just for the fun of making a scary, gory zombie movie (ala the 2004 Dawn) but that all of his zombie movies must have a message. Shot, like the recent Cloverfield, in faux-documentary style, Diary is supposed to have some sort of a message about new media culture, the news, blogs, etc, but I'll be damned if I could tell you what that message was. Sometimes the mainstream media is to blame, sometimes its the bloggers, sometimes its regular people like you and me. Also, I don't know what any of these people would be to blame for, but it's something.
Possibly a full 3/4 of the film's dialogue (that is, all that's not something along the lines of "I don't see any of 'em here" or "go for the head!") is dedicated to this attempt at conveying a profound message. Our semi-protagonist Jason (I think that's his name. Probably.) has begun the movie as a bad horror filmmaker, who originally wanted to be a documentarian, and he sees the outbreak of zombieness as an avenue to tell the "truth" about the subject at hand. He's constantly making pseudo-profound statements like "I want everyone to know the truth about this" while the others in his band respond with crap like "the camera is changing your perspective on the events" or something. These are just examples. The actual dialogue is much worse. And remember, it's 3/4 of the dialogue.
The actors and characters are all such embarrassing types that I'm not going to bother to remember/lookup their names or even their types. The only semi-competent actor is (surprise!) the middle-aged professor supervising their project. Yes, the character is a stupid conglomeration of professor cliches (he's British, wears sweaters, loves bourbon, learned archery at Eton, etc) but the character is less cliched than the others, and the actor doesn't embarrass himself. Everyone else does.
All that being said, I would still recommend this movie, especially if you can round up a group to see it with - and have alcohol. Zombies are blown up with dynamite, melted with hydrochloric acid, fried with a defibrillator, tied to a tree branch by their hair and shot into tiny pieces with a shotgun, trapped in a swimming pool, stabbed with a scythe, etc. All of this is fairly awesome, and if you know going in that the other 9/10 of the movie is going to be so bad you can laugh at it, you can enjoy yourself. I managed to figure out the score early enough to have a good time.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Review: Persepolis
Persepolis
5/5
Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 are among my favorite works ever produced in that medium. Now they have been adapted into a film, Satrapi and Vincent Parronnaud's Persepolis, which I can safely say is one of my favorite films of this year.
First and foremost, Satrapi's illustrations practically glow on-screen. The product of the French graphic novel enclave L'Association, Satrapi embraced the pure black-and-white (no greyscale) method of illustrating championed by L'Association's founder, David B. But whereas David B's illustrations are sinuous and elaborate constructions, Satrapi adopted a simpler and more iconic approach, one with more geometric figures than snaking lines. When transferred to the big screen, what previously appeared to be simple and iconic has become lush and captivating. American film audiences seem to have little sympathy for traditional animation in the 21st century, but surely it's because we we've never seen figures so striking as this. Whether the film is showing us the violence of war or the beauty of jasmine flowers, the images are indelible, simultaneously stark and beautiful.
Like the graphic novels, Persepolis is Satrapi's memoir of growing up as a young girl during the Iranian revolution, spending someunhappy time free from the regime's oppression in Europe, and returning to Iran as a young woman. The graphic novels told this story in a series of vignettes, only loosely advancing a larger plot, and the film adopts this method, except it covers even less of the material, and thus connects the dots even more loosely. The movie thus plays out as a gentle, unstrenuous journey throughout various points of Satrapi's life. Some of the vignettes last for a good chunk of time; some of them seem less than a minute long. Combined, they paint a picture of a young girl struggling to find herself in relation to a country that has lost itself. Friends and family come and go, some of them permanently at the hand of the regime, as Marjane tries to navigate the road into a adulthood.
Persepolis is not a plot-driven film, and thus even its 95 minutes could feel long if you're looking for something driving the action. But sit back, relax, and lose yourself in each individual vignette, and you'll find it to be one of the most rewarding films of the year - and possibly the best looking.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Mini-Review:Atonement
The Hottie (left) and the Nottie
3.5/5
Atonement was widely praised by critics, garnering a metacritic score of 85 out of 100 and 7 Oscar Nominations, and strongly disliked both by The Critic (http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/movies/07aton.html)
and by several people I know who saw it. Having now seen it, it's hard for me to understand either reaction. While far inferior to Ian McEwan's original novel, Joe Wright's heritage picture follow-up to his heritage pic Pride and Prejudice succeeds in bringing McEwan's fascinating pre-WWII/WWII story and characters to life. Along the way, it introduces Scottish stud James McAvoy to an even larger audience, and, quite unbelievably, manages to not be completely ruined by the presence of Keira Knightley. There are few movies capable of not being ruined completely by Keira Knightley, so Wright deserves that much credit - even if he's to blame for her casting.
McEwan's novel is about both a romance between a lower-class intellectual and a young rich girl being interrupted by her younger sister's lie, and the difficult and complex moment of modernism and stream-of-consciousness in British literature that took place between the wars, played out in the younger sister's attempts to tell the story of that romance. That the film largely ditches the latter subject is to its credit; although it eviscerates McEwan's story, any attempt to render the novel's interiority would have been nearly impossible. Instead, Wright sticks to a fairly standard tale of star-crossed lovers, taking place in a lavishly filmed British mansion, a World War II hospital, and, in both the novel's and the film's finest sequence, captured France, as our protagonist Robbie tries to make his way to the evacuation point at Dunkirk. It does none of these things phenomenally, but it does none of them poorly, and if you're a fan of Oscar-bait heritage pictures (The English Patient, every Merchant and Ivory film, etc), than this one's for you.
Mini-Review: Starting out in the Evening
Starting out in the Evening
4/5 Stars
My initial response to the highly-acclaimed Starting out in the Evening was very similar to my initial response to the even more highly-acclaimed Juno: seriously? People liked this? But it's annoying!
Unlike Juno, which annoyed me because every character spoke in the same uber-witty manner, my annoyance for Evening was mainly directed at a single character: Heather Wolfe, the ambitious graduate student who's played by Lauren Ambrose to be simultaneously precocious, pretentious, and precious. Wolfe is doing her master's thesis (which seems to be about 200 pages long...) on Leonard Schiller, a former literary giant who has faded into obscurity. Schiller is both flattered and annoyed by Wolfe's interest, and their lively debate on whether or not his last two novels forsook the worthy theme of his first two provides some of the film's best scenes.
Besides that running debate, I otherwise found the relationship between Schiller and Wolfe to be a tedious rehash of any older man-younger woman Hollywood cliches you can think of. But Starting out in the Evening is richer than those cliches, and the director, Andrew Wagner, gradually spends less and less time focusing on Schiller's relationship with Wolfe, and more on his relationship with his daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) and her sometimes contentious relationship with her occasional boyfriend Casey (Adrien Lester). Taylor plays her character with the right blend of confidence and frustration throughout the film, and the script allows Casey to develop from the bad stereotype he appears to be into a rich and interesting character.
In short, I was not impressed with Lauren Ambrose or her character, but that fault eventually falls away as the film slowly widens its scope to include Ariel and Casey. In the end, although the grad student stuff feels phony, Starting out in the Evening seems right on difficult subjects ranging from literature to romantic love to the strains of aging on familial. It's not perfect, and Langella's performance as Schiller isn't as earth-shattering as others would have you to believe, but it ends up both true and touching, which is more than enough for me.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Love, A.O. Scott Style
Just after I weighed in on love, our Patron Saint decided to do so as well. He's a better writer than me. Enjoy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/movies/03scot.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/movies/03scot.html
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Sequel Excitement
Longtime readers of this blog know that I was quite unimpressed with all the sequels (mostly 3rds) that hit the cineplexes in 2007. So let me share with you my excitement about two upcoming sequels. Both of them are comic book adaptations starring superheroes, which I think means intelligent people are supposed to hate them. If so, intelligent people will be missing out, 'cause these are gonna be two badass movies - on back-to-back weeks. I could hardly be more excited.1. Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Coming July 11, 2008
The first Hellboy was stellar - if you didn't see it in theaters, kick yourself. The creative cred here is unbelievable - comic creator Mike Mignola is one of the best comics artists of all-time, and director Guillermo Del Toro has made some awesome blockbusters (Blade II, Hellboy) and compelling indie horror flicks (The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth). The second installment of this franchise features an original story from del Toro and Mignola, the ugliest man in Hollywood, Ron Perlman, reprising his role as the paranormal investigator, and yes, Arrested Development's unlovable patriarch Jeffrey Tambor as his grouchy boss. Don't miss it.
2.The Dark Knight. July 18th, 2007.
Like del Toro, Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan has had indie darlings (The Following, Memento) and blockbusters (Batman Begins, mostly). He's back for this round, as is most of the cast that led me to suggest that Batman Begins had the greatest cast ever (Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Liam Neeson, and Rutger Hauer! Damn). We (probably?) won't have Hauer, Wilkinson (dead?) or Neeson (dead???) for this round, but we've got the final(?) film role of Heath Ledger as consolation. Plus, super-crappy actress Katie Holmes, the first film's only casting oops, is replaced by super-awesome actress Maggie Gyllenhahl. And, there's a batcycle. What more could you want?
For one week in July, the American populace will experience sequel awesomeness. You better enjoy it now.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Zombies!
In a continuation of my zombie apprenticeship, I just watched Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. In the aftermath of that enjoyable splatterfest, I'm left with a question: can a zombie movie really be a zombie movie if it doesn't include a Zombie Apocalypse (Zombocalypse? Zombiepocalypse?)?
For me, this goes back to an essay that I've obsessed about in the past, Rick Altman's treatment of film genres. Altman has what he calls a Syntactic/Semantic approach, and he divides genre elements, like language, into those two categories. The first, broad category is semantics - the building blocks of a genre. For a Western, these building blocks are obvious: cowboys, outlaws, Indians, horses, sheriffs, open plains, six-shooters, shootouts, saloons, etc. Then comes the syntax. With some variation, all Westerns arrange their semantics into some similar patterns: good vs. evil, the good bad man, the other, the alien, the settler vs. the cowboy, man vs. his other, etc. Semantics are broad and obvious; syntax are more specific. Altman's example of the difference is Elvis movies - sure, they have musical numbers, so they seem semantically to be musicals, but they sure don't arrange those musical numbers the way other musicals do.
Filmmakers have all kinds of fun mixing semantics and syntax. Most famous is probably Star Wars - semantically a science fiction film, it contains pretty much everyone of those syntactic features I listed for the Western. Science fiction semantics + Western syntax= billions and billions of dollars.
So, back to Zombies. You see, Dead Alive doesn't feature a Zombiepocalypse, which we can probably describe as a missing semantic feature. But Dead Alive still has zombies in it, so it must be a zombie film, right? Except, when you remove the Zombiepocalypse, you remove most of the zombie movie's syntax (see: Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, etc). Zombie movies, syntactically, are all about dread, the collapse of established authority, survival, the tragedy of loved ones turned into zombies. These syntactic elements make appearances in recent movies like I am Legend and 30 Days of Night, and thus make them feel like zombie movies, even though those movies feature vampires, which typically have their own very different, quite gothic syntactic elements.
It would be foolish of me to declare that Dead Alive isn't a zombie movie - it has zombies in it! It'd be like declaring that an Elvis movie isn't a musical, or that Star Wars isn't a science fiction film*. But I do think it matters that it isn't syntactically a zombie movie. One way I think it matters is that I wouldn't put it in my top 5 or 10 zombie movies - it just doesn't feel like a zombie movies. And if I were teaching a course on zombie movies, I would be willing to include it, but it would certainly be the exception that proves the rule that removing the zombiepocalypse results in a movie that doesn't feel like the rest of its genre brethren. There. Sorry that was boring.
*Disclaimer: It kind of isn't, if science fiction is held to its original standard, which is to say that it has some interest in science. I mean, "science" is in the title of science fiction, and Star Wars has (as near as I can tell) pretty much zero science. I, following others before me, might be more inclined to call it fantasy - all those mystical elements are what really matters, and no one really cares about how or why any of that technology works.. This is what makes it so much less geeky than Star Trek - which actually contains science.
For me, this goes back to an essay that I've obsessed about in the past, Rick Altman's treatment of film genres. Altman has what he calls a Syntactic/Semantic approach, and he divides genre elements, like language, into those two categories. The first, broad category is semantics - the building blocks of a genre. For a Western, these building blocks are obvious: cowboys, outlaws, Indians, horses, sheriffs, open plains, six-shooters, shootouts, saloons, etc. Then comes the syntax. With some variation, all Westerns arrange their semantics into some similar patterns: good vs. evil, the good bad man, the other, the alien, the settler vs. the cowboy, man vs. his other, etc. Semantics are broad and obvious; syntax are more specific. Altman's example of the difference is Elvis movies - sure, they have musical numbers, so they seem semantically to be musicals, but they sure don't arrange those musical numbers the way other musicals do.
Filmmakers have all kinds of fun mixing semantics and syntax. Most famous is probably Star Wars - semantically a science fiction film, it contains pretty much everyone of those syntactic features I listed for the Western. Science fiction semantics + Western syntax= billions and billions of dollars.
So, back to Zombies. You see, Dead Alive doesn't feature a Zombiepocalypse, which we can probably describe as a missing semantic feature. But Dead Alive still has zombies in it, so it must be a zombie film, right? Except, when you remove the Zombiepocalypse, you remove most of the zombie movie's syntax (see: Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, etc). Zombie movies, syntactically, are all about dread, the collapse of established authority, survival, the tragedy of loved ones turned into zombies. These syntactic elements make appearances in recent movies like I am Legend and 30 Days of Night, and thus make them feel like zombie movies, even though those movies feature vampires, which typically have their own very different, quite gothic syntactic elements.
It would be foolish of me to declare that Dead Alive isn't a zombie movie - it has zombies in it! It'd be like declaring that an Elvis movie isn't a musical, or that Star Wars isn't a science fiction film*. But I do think it matters that it isn't syntactically a zombie movie. One way I think it matters is that I wouldn't put it in my top 5 or 10 zombie movies - it just doesn't feel like a zombie movies. And if I were teaching a course on zombie movies, I would be willing to include it, but it would certainly be the exception that proves the rule that removing the zombiepocalypse results in a movie that doesn't feel like the rest of its genre brethren. There. Sorry that was boring.
*Disclaimer: It kind of isn't, if science fiction is held to its original standard, which is to say that it has some interest in science. I mean, "science" is in the title of science fiction, and Star Wars has (as near as I can tell) pretty much zero science. I, following others before me, might be more inclined to call it fantasy - all those mystical elements are what really matters, and no one really cares about how or why any of that technology works.. This is what makes it so much less geeky than Star Trek - which actually contains science.
Mini-Review: Cloverfield
4/5
Cloverfield's premise is pretty simple: a monster has attacked New York at some point in the recent past, and, on the night of the attack, a bunch of beautiful young people were running around Manhattan, documenting said night with a video camera. The entire movie is thus a faux documentary, Blair Witch style, and features a camera that bobs, spins, weaves, twirls, falls, and scrambles away from danger as our 5 intrepid adventurers make their way through Manhattan to a damsel in distress (Spoilers: It doesn't take long for there to be less than 5 adventurers, etc).
I was unfamiliar with everyone involved in this production, with the exception of producer JJ Abrams, and I came away impressed with 3 of them. First the writer, Drew Goddard or, rather, whoever came up with this high concept setup, because it works beautifully. Secondly, none of the actors particularly distinguish themselves (the girls are generally better than the super-bland guys) except, ironically, T.J. Miller who as the cameraman Hud provides a steady stream of commentary while obtaining probably less than a minute of total screen time. Miller comes off as a low-rent version of whoever your favorite witty but fratty comedian is (Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, etc) and made the whole thing watchable. Finally, working with what must not have been a great deal of money, Phil Tippett created a pretty terrifying monster - something that can't have been easy, given our decades of not being frightened of Godzilla-style giant monsters.
Amid all of the Oscar hoopla, it was nice just to watch unknown actors run around scared while shit blew up. I do hope that they resist the urge for a sequel, because the camera gimmick has no chance of working twice, and making a conventional movie set after the initial attack will just bog down in all of the origin mystery and how-do-we-kill-it scenarios that this film so skillfully avoided. Also, I should note that zombies get to try their luck in a similar handheld camera horror picture coming soon - Diary of the Dead, directed by zombie-master George Romero.
Cloverfield's premise is pretty simple: a monster has attacked New York at some point in the recent past, and, on the night of the attack, a bunch of beautiful young people were running around Manhattan, documenting said night with a video camera. The entire movie is thus a faux documentary, Blair Witch style, and features a camera that bobs, spins, weaves, twirls, falls, and scrambles away from danger as our 5 intrepid adventurers make their way through Manhattan to a damsel in distress (Spoilers: It doesn't take long for there to be less than 5 adventurers, etc).
I was unfamiliar with everyone involved in this production, with the exception of producer JJ Abrams, and I came away impressed with 3 of them. First the writer, Drew Goddard or, rather, whoever came up with this high concept setup, because it works beautifully. Secondly, none of the actors particularly distinguish themselves (the girls are generally better than the super-bland guys) except, ironically, T.J. Miller who as the cameraman Hud provides a steady stream of commentary while obtaining probably less than a minute of total screen time. Miller comes off as a low-rent version of whoever your favorite witty but fratty comedian is (Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, etc) and made the whole thing watchable. Finally, working with what must not have been a great deal of money, Phil Tippett created a pretty terrifying monster - something that can't have been easy, given our decades of not being frightened of Godzilla-style giant monsters.
Amid all of the Oscar hoopla, it was nice just to watch unknown actors run around scared while shit blew up. I do hope that they resist the urge for a sequel, because the camera gimmick has no chance of working twice, and making a conventional movie set after the initial attack will just bog down in all of the origin mystery and how-do-we-kill-it scenarios that this film so skillfully avoided. Also, I should note that zombies get to try their luck in a similar handheld camera horror picture coming soon - Diary of the Dead, directed by zombie-master George Romero.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Love
My wife and I watched Notorious last night, which is supposed to be one of the greatest Hitchcock films. I actually wasn't that impressed (disclaimer: I'm not that big of a fan of the ole H-cock) but its inexplicable love story got me thinking about love in the movies. I'm going to try and run through all the different ways the movies show us romantic love developing (not disintegrating or strengthening or anything that implies it was always there. just how it starts) from lamest to least lame. I'd love to hear what you think about this, and if there are some you think I've missed. Use the comment button, damn it!
1.Duh. The internal logic for this one goes something like this: they're the leading man and leading lady, of course they're in love! Featured in Notorious and, most egregiously, in The Maltese Falcon. In the latter (and I don't recall the actual dialogue) Bogey has just discovered that the dame in question has double-crossed him, double-crossed her partners, and is now in desperate straits, and he should justifiably cover his ass. Instead, he gets her out of the predicament. Why? Well, he says it's because he loves her. Why does he love her? The movie provides no reasons for this. Your guess is as good as mine.
2.Oh Mr. Darcy I hate, er, love you! You know this one as well. He's insufferable! She's stuck up! That beast! That prude! (insert face-sucking here). As the lovable T-Rex has told us, this one seems to be on the rocks a bit, but it's a classic. Our lad and lady can't stand each other - then can't get enough of each other. Usually in the same scene. http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000956.html
3. I'm A Believer. He (and it's usually he) sees her, and that's it. The filmmakers usually try to let us in on the developing love; she's usually shot in a high angle shot, wearing something to accentuate her figure, the lens goes to soft-focus, and some music that's supposed to indicate desire plays. This one shows up big time in American Graffiti, even if he never gets the girl (or even speaks to her face to face).
4.Zing! Sometimes indistinguishable from #2, love here is at least the product of a conversation. Because of the Hays Production code, sex was taboo, so in screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, our participants had to do all of their thrusting verbally. And yeah, sometimes they're at each other throats, but it's a more sophisticated back and forth, often good-natured and always fun to listen to (#2 often has super annoying tantrums). And eventually, in the course of this, they open to each other, and voila. It Happened One Night pretty much invented this on film; see also The Awful Truth and (my favorite) The Lady Eve.
5.Love. Boy meets girl. They talk. They both have insecurities, histories, uncertainties, likes and dislikes. Nevertheless, they keep seeing each other, talking to each other, getting to know each other, changing and developing each other, possibly having sex, depending on whether or not the Production Code is in effect. At some point, their shared knowledge of each other develops into something more. It's called love. It's never been done better than in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wes Anderson knows something about it, as does Wong-Kar Wai, as does Woody Allen in some of his finer moments.This year, Once has it, as does Waitress. Waitress has it beautifully - Waitress does 1,2,3 and maybe even 4 before finally making it clear that those are just stages at best, and some point you've got to reach 5. And it does.
1.Duh. The internal logic for this one goes something like this: they're the leading man and leading lady, of course they're in love! Featured in Notorious and, most egregiously, in The Maltese Falcon. In the latter (and I don't recall the actual dialogue) Bogey has just discovered that the dame in question has double-crossed him, double-crossed her partners, and is now in desperate straits, and he should justifiably cover his ass. Instead, he gets her out of the predicament. Why? Well, he says it's because he loves her. Why does he love her? The movie provides no reasons for this. Your guess is as good as mine.
2.Oh Mr. Darcy I hate, er, love you! You know this one as well. He's insufferable! She's stuck up! That beast! That prude! (insert face-sucking here). As the lovable T-Rex has told us, this one seems to be on the rocks a bit, but it's a classic. Our lad and lady can't stand each other - then can't get enough of each other. Usually in the same scene. http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000956.html
3. I'm A Believer. He (and it's usually he) sees her, and that's it. The filmmakers usually try to let us in on the developing love; she's usually shot in a high angle shot, wearing something to accentuate her figure, the lens goes to soft-focus, and some music that's supposed to indicate desire plays. This one shows up big time in American Graffiti, even if he never gets the girl (or even speaks to her face to face).
4.Zing! Sometimes indistinguishable from #2, love here is at least the product of a conversation. Because of the Hays Production code, sex was taboo, so in screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, our participants had to do all of their thrusting verbally. And yeah, sometimes they're at each other throats, but it's a more sophisticated back and forth, often good-natured and always fun to listen to (#2 often has super annoying tantrums). And eventually, in the course of this, they open to each other, and voila. It Happened One Night pretty much invented this on film; see also The Awful Truth and (my favorite) The Lady Eve.
5.Love. Boy meets girl. They talk. They both have insecurities, histories, uncertainties, likes and dislikes. Nevertheless, they keep seeing each other, talking to each other, getting to know each other, changing and developing each other, possibly having sex, depending on whether or not the Production Code is in effect. At some point, their shared knowledge of each other develops into something more. It's called love. It's never been done better than in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wes Anderson knows something about it, as does Wong-Kar Wai, as does Woody Allen in some of his finer moments.This year, Once has it, as does Waitress. Waitress has it beautifully - Waitress does 1,2,3 and maybe even 4 before finally making it clear that those are just stages at best, and some point you've got to reach 5. And it does.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Heath Ledger
I haven't offended anyone yet that I know of with this blog, so I think it's about time to start. Heath Ledger died yesterday. Here are my thoughts.
1. Yes, it is sad. But, you know, not really anymore sad than anyone else dying (you didn't know Heath Ledger) unless you were deeply invested in Heath Ledger. If Owen Wilson had died, it would have meant a great deal to me. Heath Ledger, not so much. Which is not to say that Heath Ledger is less important than anyone else - but people die everyday and I don't worry about it too much. The fact that I knew of this particular man doesn't make his death anymore important to me than the death of others I was unfamiliar with, especially since, for the most part, I disliked his work.
2.Heath Ledger was not a very good actor. Yes, he was absolutely magnificent in Brokeback Mountain. I call this the Val Kilmer in Tombstone rule: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and then turns in one academy award caliber performance, it's still a duck. Just because Heath was great in one movie doesn't undo his otherwise general badness.
I will admit, I have not seen all of his movies. Here's what I have seen/not seen.
Not seen: Ned Kelly, Monster's Ball, Candy, Ned Kelly, The Order, The Brothers Grimm, Lords of Dogtown, The Four Feathers, I'm not There. I've heard good things about him in Ball, otherwise, nothing there interests me.
Seen (rating him, not the movie):
10 Things I hate About You: Bleck
The Patriot: Double-bleck
A Knight's Tale: Bleck
Casanova: Are Triple-blecks allowed?
Brokeback Mountain: nearly flawless.
So that's it. In 5 movies, a total of 4 (or 7) blecks and one really good performance.
3.The Dark Knight proviso. All word and trailers so far have pointed towards Ledger being amazing in the upcoming Batman sequel. If indeed he is excellent, I will consider amending my evaluation of him from "even a broken clock is right twice a day" to "many truly excellent actors start off crappy and hone their craft." We'll never be able to tell if he would have indeed made a Paul Newman-like development, but a great job as The Joker would at least suggest it. Stay tuned.
4.A.O. Scott missed this one. Check out this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/movies/24appr.html for "An Actor Whose Work Will Outlast the Frenzy," Scott's piece about how great Heath Ledger was, even if he didn't have time to live up to his potential. Scott does note that: "It seems inevitable that he will now be inscribed in the cult of the beautiful stars who died too young, alongside James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe." I agree with this. I haven't seen quite enough of Clift and Dean to be sure, but although those three were all beautiful, my initial thought is that none of them were actually that great at acting. Like those three, I think Ledger's critical reputation will be burnished over time by his death. We'll find out eventually
1. Yes, it is sad. But, you know, not really anymore sad than anyone else dying (you didn't know Heath Ledger) unless you were deeply invested in Heath Ledger. If Owen Wilson had died, it would have meant a great deal to me. Heath Ledger, not so much. Which is not to say that Heath Ledger is less important than anyone else - but people die everyday and I don't worry about it too much. The fact that I knew of this particular man doesn't make his death anymore important to me than the death of others I was unfamiliar with, especially since, for the most part, I disliked his work.
2.Heath Ledger was not a very good actor. Yes, he was absolutely magnificent in Brokeback Mountain. I call this the Val Kilmer in Tombstone rule: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and then turns in one academy award caliber performance, it's still a duck. Just because Heath was great in one movie doesn't undo his otherwise general badness.
I will admit, I have not seen all of his movies. Here's what I have seen/not seen.
Not seen: Ned Kelly, Monster's Ball, Candy, Ned Kelly, The Order, The Brothers Grimm, Lords of Dogtown, The Four Feathers, I'm not There. I've heard good things about him in Ball, otherwise, nothing there interests me.
Seen (rating him, not the movie):
10 Things I hate About You: Bleck
The Patriot: Double-bleck
A Knight's Tale: Bleck
Casanova: Are Triple-blecks allowed?
Brokeback Mountain: nearly flawless.
So that's it. In 5 movies, a total of 4 (or 7) blecks and one really good performance.
3.The Dark Knight proviso. All word and trailers so far have pointed towards Ledger being amazing in the upcoming Batman sequel. If indeed he is excellent, I will consider amending my evaluation of him from "even a broken clock is right twice a day" to "many truly excellent actors start off crappy and hone their craft." We'll never be able to tell if he would have indeed made a Paul Newman-like development, but a great job as The Joker would at least suggest it. Stay tuned.
4.A.O. Scott missed this one. Check out this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/movies/24appr.html for "An Actor Whose Work Will Outlast the Frenzy," Scott's piece about how great Heath Ledger was, even if he didn't have time to live up to his potential. Scott does note that: "It seems inevitable that he will now be inscribed in the cult of the beautiful stars who died too young, alongside James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe." I agree with this. I haven't seen quite enough of Clift and Dean to be sure, but although those three were all beautiful, my initial thought is that none of them were actually that great at acting. Like those three, I think Ledger's critical reputation will be burnished over time by his death. We'll find out eventually
Sunday, January 20, 2008
PT vs. Wes (vs. the Coens?)
First, I should confess that this is a bit of false advertising. It is simply not fair to compare PT or Wes to the Coen brothers. Even if you believe, as I do, that both PT and Wes have hit on every film that they have made, you can't compare them to the most successful filmmakers of the last 25 years, anymore than we can compare the Coens to, say, Hitchcock until some more results are in. But I do want to talk about PT's new film vs. the Coen's new film, and I'll get to that soon, so consider this a teaser for that post. I know you're excited.
But, for starters, the Andersons. If you haven't been paying attention, we've got some pretty serious similarities here: they're both named Anderson, they were born only 13 months apart, they each had their feature film debut in 1996, they each released their fifth film this year, and they've each brought a distinct style with a dedicated troupe of actors while working within the Hollywood system. That's pretty stunning. So, in honor of this congruence, and their dual fifth films, I want to take stock of each of them, where they've been, where they're going, and (of course) what I've decided about them.
First, my rankings: Wes: 1. The Royal Tenenbaums 2. Rushmore 3.The Darjeeling Limited 4.Bottle Rocket 5. The Life Aquatic (which I liked!)
PT: 1. Magnolia 2. There Will be Blood 3. Hard Eight 4.Punch-drunk Love 5. Boogie Nights
It's hard for me to decide which of these filmographies I admire more. I would take Royal Tenenbaums over any PT film and, yes, most any other film ever made. But I'd probably take Magnolia over any other Wes film, and, yes again, over most of the other films ever made. Integrated, my rankings would probably look like this.: 1. Tenenbaums 2. Magnolia 3.Blood 4. Rushmore 5. Hard Eight 6. Darjeeling 7. Bottle Rocket 8. Life Aquatic 9. Punch-drunk 10. Boogie Nights
So, there's more PT in the top 5, but he also owns the bottom two spots. I just have to call it a push. If you were going to make me choose (desert-island, at gun point, etc), I'd take Wes, because if I were stuck on a desert island with only one film to watch, I'd probably take Tenenbaums, but I'm in charge of this blog, so it's a tie.
This next part breaks my heart, though. I've only recently joined the PT fan club - been in it for about two weeks. I've loved Wes for about 6 years now, and I've been a true cinema lover for also roughly 6 years, so you can do that math. But I think it's PT who has the future, unless something changes. You see, Wes has this brilliant style, this gift for making things feel fantastic and realistic simultaneously, for stylizing comedy until it becomes tragedy and vice versa. He makes people who are real and fantastic, broken and nearly superheroic, and achingly hilarious and achingly tragic at the same times. For this, I admire him as much as any filmmaker. But he also keeps making the same damn movie, with not only the same themes (see Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini for filmmakers obsessed with the same themes over and over again) but with the same stylistic tricks, same color palette, same mix of samey comedy-tragedy over and over again. And he's doing it at a high level (see Darjeeling and Aquatic) but at a lower level than he once was (see Tenenbaums, Rushmore) and with no sign of breaking out of it. Ever. As far as I can tell, he's just going to keep making these brillaint but mediocre compared to Tenenbaums movies, even if the next one is going to be animated.
PT, on the other hand, is certainly less flashy with the color and the camera placement, although his cinematography is superior to Wes' (just less flashy). He's mostly a stranger to irony (generally a requirement for me) and, yes, often seems to work the same themes, especially as they relate to fathers, families, and Problems in the Past. But PT's filmography is a rollercoaster of highs and higher highs. He proved with Punch-Drunk he doesn't have to just get bigger and expand his running time; he proved with Blood that he doesn't need lots of characters to fill that running time, and that he could make a movie set anytime, any place. In other words, PT has got me excited for the future because I don't know what's coming, and I trust that, whatever he tries, it's going to work. Wes, on the other hand, is just going to keep trying the same thing, and it'll probably always work too - but never spectacularly. Looking to the past, I can't pick between them, but in the future, it's a no-brainer.
Also, has anyone noticed that PT mostly works with people with 3 names, or at least an initial? Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Daniel Day-Lewis, William H. Macy. Is this like a conspiracy or something?
But, for starters, the Andersons. If you haven't been paying attention, we've got some pretty serious similarities here: they're both named Anderson, they were born only 13 months apart, they each had their feature film debut in 1996, they each released their fifth film this year, and they've each brought a distinct style with a dedicated troupe of actors while working within the Hollywood system. That's pretty stunning. So, in honor of this congruence, and their dual fifth films, I want to take stock of each of them, where they've been, where they're going, and (of course) what I've decided about them.
First, my rankings: Wes: 1. The Royal Tenenbaums 2. Rushmore 3.The Darjeeling Limited 4.Bottle Rocket 5. The Life Aquatic (which I liked!)
PT: 1. Magnolia 2. There Will be Blood 3. Hard Eight 4.Punch-drunk Love 5. Boogie Nights
It's hard for me to decide which of these filmographies I admire more. I would take Royal Tenenbaums over any PT film and, yes, most any other film ever made. But I'd probably take Magnolia over any other Wes film, and, yes again, over most of the other films ever made. Integrated, my rankings would probably look like this.: 1. Tenenbaums 2. Magnolia 3.Blood 4. Rushmore 5. Hard Eight 6. Darjeeling 7. Bottle Rocket 8. Life Aquatic 9. Punch-drunk 10. Boogie Nights
So, there's more PT in the top 5, but he also owns the bottom two spots. I just have to call it a push. If you were going to make me choose (desert-island, at gun point, etc), I'd take Wes, because if I were stuck on a desert island with only one film to watch, I'd probably take Tenenbaums, but I'm in charge of this blog, so it's a tie.
This next part breaks my heart, though. I've only recently joined the PT fan club - been in it for about two weeks. I've loved Wes for about 6 years now, and I've been a true cinema lover for also roughly 6 years, so you can do that math. But I think it's PT who has the future, unless something changes. You see, Wes has this brilliant style, this gift for making things feel fantastic and realistic simultaneously, for stylizing comedy until it becomes tragedy and vice versa. He makes people who are real and fantastic, broken and nearly superheroic, and achingly hilarious and achingly tragic at the same times. For this, I admire him as much as any filmmaker. But he also keeps making the same damn movie, with not only the same themes (see Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini for filmmakers obsessed with the same themes over and over again) but with the same stylistic tricks, same color palette, same mix of samey comedy-tragedy over and over again. And he's doing it at a high level (see Darjeeling and Aquatic) but at a lower level than he once was (see Tenenbaums, Rushmore) and with no sign of breaking out of it. Ever. As far as I can tell, he's just going to keep making these brillaint but mediocre compared to Tenenbaums movies, even if the next one is going to be animated.
PT, on the other hand, is certainly less flashy with the color and the camera placement, although his cinematography is superior to Wes' (just less flashy). He's mostly a stranger to irony (generally a requirement for me) and, yes, often seems to work the same themes, especially as they relate to fathers, families, and Problems in the Past. But PT's filmography is a rollercoaster of highs and higher highs. He proved with Punch-Drunk he doesn't have to just get bigger and expand his running time; he proved with Blood that he doesn't need lots of characters to fill that running time, and that he could make a movie set anytime, any place. In other words, PT has got me excited for the future because I don't know what's coming, and I trust that, whatever he tries, it's going to work. Wes, on the other hand, is just going to keep trying the same thing, and it'll probably always work too - but never spectacularly. Looking to the past, I can't pick between them, but in the future, it's a no-brainer.
Also, has anyone noticed that PT mostly works with people with 3 names, or at least an initial? Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Daniel Day-Lewis, William H. Macy. Is this like a conspiracy or something?
Mini-Review: There Will be Blood
5/5
While puzzling over the nature of instincts in Principles of Psychology, William James asks the rhetorical question: "Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than hard floors?" His answer is that this question is rhetorical - there's no answer. This is just what men do: "Nothing can be said more than that these are human ways, and every creature likes its own ways."
Nothing I can say about There Will be Blood is more revelatory than this: we see its protagonist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) sleep on hard floors. He's a wealthy man, who could have any of his desires satisfied, and yes, does at times have a bed or at least a blanket, but we see him sleep on wooden floors. In other words, this is a creature who does not like the same ways as the other creatures we call humans. As Plainview would say: "these people." He's a man apart, a man with his own drives and his own (possibly inexplicable) desires, and his ways will never be clear to us, anymore than the ways of the squirrels will be clear to us. He is, at some point, simply not one of us "creatures" or "people," but something different. Something uber, perhaps? That's further than I can go right now.
Otherwise, I have little to add to the volumes that have already been written about the film. The cinematography is impressive. The dialogue is sharp, cutting, and practically tangible. The dissonant, nerve-wracking score, by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, may be the best I've ever heard (I've been trying to think of better scores. I like Hans Zimmer's for Gladiator and Vangelis' for Blade Runner. I might just like Ridley Scott). Plainview is played by Daniel Day-Lewis as a sort of oil tycoon version of Bill the Butcher, who does more of his violence to those around him emotionally, rather than physically, and yes, has probably given the best performance of anyone this year. And Paul Dano, the mute Nietzschean of Little Miss Sunshine, proves, as the preacher who Plainview takes a particular dislike to, to be a worthy foil to Day-Lewis' driven oil-driller. The movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes long, however, so you better go in prepared to spend 3 hours of your life staring at Daniel Day-Lewis, continually filthy, running roughshod over every human being around him, interspersed with stunning but bleak extra-long shots of Texas (standing in for California) wastelands and driven by an eerie, piercing score. If that doesn't sound like a good Friday night to you, I don't know what would.
While puzzling over the nature of instincts in Principles of Psychology, William James asks the rhetorical question: "Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than hard floors?" His answer is that this question is rhetorical - there's no answer. This is just what men do: "Nothing can be said more than that these are human ways, and every creature likes its own ways."
Nothing I can say about There Will be Blood is more revelatory than this: we see its protagonist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) sleep on hard floors. He's a wealthy man, who could have any of his desires satisfied, and yes, does at times have a bed or at least a blanket, but we see him sleep on wooden floors. In other words, this is a creature who does not like the same ways as the other creatures we call humans. As Plainview would say: "these people." He's a man apart, a man with his own drives and his own (possibly inexplicable) desires, and his ways will never be clear to us, anymore than the ways of the squirrels will be clear to us. He is, at some point, simply not one of us "creatures" or "people," but something different. Something uber, perhaps? That's further than I can go right now.
Otherwise, I have little to add to the volumes that have already been written about the film. The cinematography is impressive. The dialogue is sharp, cutting, and practically tangible. The dissonant, nerve-wracking score, by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, may be the best I've ever heard (I've been trying to think of better scores. I like Hans Zimmer's for Gladiator and Vangelis' for Blade Runner. I might just like Ridley Scott). Plainview is played by Daniel Day-Lewis as a sort of oil tycoon version of Bill the Butcher, who does more of his violence to those around him emotionally, rather than physically, and yes, has probably given the best performance of anyone this year. And Paul Dano, the mute Nietzschean of Little Miss Sunshine, proves, as the preacher who Plainview takes a particular dislike to, to be a worthy foil to Day-Lewis' driven oil-driller. The movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes long, however, so you better go in prepared to spend 3 hours of your life staring at Daniel Day-Lewis, continually filthy, running roughshod over every human being around him, interspersed with stunning but bleak extra-long shots of Texas (standing in for California) wastelands and driven by an eerie, piercing score. If that doesn't sound like a good Friday night to you, I don't know what would.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Dawn of the Dead [2004]
I just saw Dawn of the Dead and now I'm pondering if it's the best zombie movie I've ever seen. My zombie knowledge is sadly a little limited; I wasn't interested in them at all until I saw 28 Days Later. If the 2004 version of Dawn is in fact the best zombie movie I've ever seen, it's because it balances its high production values with the sort of excellent dialogue and acting that I haven't seen from Romero, while keeping all of the tension you'd see from 28 Days and 28 Weeks while having the coherent and fully fleshed out plot that both of those films lacked. Here's the top 5 zombie movies that I've seen.
1.Shaun of the Dead - It might be just the tiniest bit less tense and exciting than the 2004 Dawn, but has the production values and gorefest to match any zombie movie - and that stuff's just icing on top of the comedy cake.
2.Dawn of the Dead [2004] - Like I said, this one is the total package. Great acting, dialogue, plot, story, gore - some people you like die and it's sad, some people you dislike die and it's great, some people you used to dislike but now you like die and its saddest of all because you've seen their "growth."
3.28 Days Later - The first half, if it were a standalone movie, would top everything else on this list. Brendan Gleeson + Cillian Murphy= fucking awesome. And Christopher Eccleston is pretty awesome too, but the whole second half with the soldiers just doesn't quite ring right. Danny Boyle rarely makes a complete movie.
4.Dawn of the Dead [1978] - Comedy, Marxist commentary, lots of (semi-believable) gore, and one exhilarating bout of wheelbarrow based zombie shooting. The classic.
5. Night of the Living Dead - The one that started it all. Unspeakably bad acting and low production values, but still satisfying.
Not making the cut: 28 Weeks Later, I am Legend (zombie/vampire hybrids), probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. But I haven't seen that many zombie movies.
Here's the list of zombie stuff I still need to watch. Please, recommend anything not on here, and suggest which of these I should watch first, if you've got an opinion:
Day of the Dead
Land of the Dead
Dead Alive
Zombi
Fido
Cemetery Man
Re-Animator
1.Shaun of the Dead - It might be just the tiniest bit less tense and exciting than the 2004 Dawn, but has the production values and gorefest to match any zombie movie - and that stuff's just icing on top of the comedy cake.
2.Dawn of the Dead [2004] - Like I said, this one is the total package. Great acting, dialogue, plot, story, gore - some people you like die and it's sad, some people you dislike die and it's great, some people you used to dislike but now you like die and its saddest of all because you've seen their "growth."
3.28 Days Later - The first half, if it were a standalone movie, would top everything else on this list. Brendan Gleeson + Cillian Murphy= fucking awesome. And Christopher Eccleston is pretty awesome too, but the whole second half with the soldiers just doesn't quite ring right. Danny Boyle rarely makes a complete movie.
4.Dawn of the Dead [1978] - Comedy, Marxist commentary, lots of (semi-believable) gore, and one exhilarating bout of wheelbarrow based zombie shooting. The classic.
5. Night of the Living Dead - The one that started it all. Unspeakably bad acting and low production values, but still satisfying.
Not making the cut: 28 Weeks Later, I am Legend (zombie/vampire hybrids), probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. But I haven't seen that many zombie movies.
Here's the list of zombie stuff I still need to watch. Please, recommend anything not on here, and suggest which of these I should watch first, if you've got an opinion:
Day of the Dead
Land of the Dead
Dead Alive
Zombi
Fido
Cemetery Man
Re-Animator
Monday, January 14, 2008
Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
4.5/5
American director Julian Schabel's third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is an adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir of locked-in syndrome of the same name. Bauby experiences a stroke and awakens able to only blink one eye. He describes his condition as a binary - the diving bell of his body weighs him to the bottom of the ocean, the butterfly of his mind allows his imagination free reign. The composing of his memoir becomes the ultimate triumph of the butterfly over the diving bell.
Schnabel's adaptation is in many ways highly faithful. The first half of the film is more diving bell than butterfly, and takes place mostly from Bauby's perspective - a relentless series of POV shots in which Bauby's doctors, therapists, relatives, and friends flit in and out of his field of vision. In this portion, the film belongs most strongly to Bauby's innovative speech therapist, whose mixture of sympathy and excitement at the challenge of teaching Bauby to communicate are portrayed beautifully by Marie Josee-Croze. In the second half of the film, as Bauby's butterfly begins to emerge, we are finally rewarded with the blissful escape denied to "Jean-Do" - the camera begins to move about freely, and we get our first good looks at our subject. In this portion, it's Mathieu Almaric who shines as Bauby; strapped down and locked in, Almaric nevertheless conveys a full range of emotions simply by blinking one eyelid and moving one eye.
All of that said, the film, despite Janusz Kaminski's excellent cinematography and an excellent and moving soundtrack (U2, Tom Waits, the Velvet Underground), left me far less emotionally engaged than Bauby's memoir. Perhaps this is because the memoir allowed me to see Bauby's mind working in a way that, as he acknowledges, doesn't actually occur. The film, in which we see that a single sentence of the memoir can take hours to painstakingly blink out, is perhaps not in the position to convey the triumph of the butterfly without shortchanging the diving bell in a way that would have been disingenuous.
One final note: after just observing that I was less moved by the film than the book, I need to say that Max von Sydow's two-scene portrayal of Bauby's shut-in father is perhaps the most moving work of acting I have ever seen. Both of those scenes, the first a flashback when the hale son visits the ailing father, the second a one-sided speaker phone conversation in which the shut-in father calls the locked-in son, left me in tears as Sydow leaped from senile confusion to grief to tenderness, back to confusion. If for no other reason, you should go see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for the 78 year old Sydow, free from a stupid villain role in 2002's Minority Report and a stupider villain role in last year's Rush Hour 3, putting his entire being into an all too brief role.
4.5/5
American director Julian Schabel's third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is an adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir of locked-in syndrome of the same name. Bauby experiences a stroke and awakens able to only blink one eye. He describes his condition as a binary - the diving bell of his body weighs him to the bottom of the ocean, the butterfly of his mind allows his imagination free reign. The composing of his memoir becomes the ultimate triumph of the butterfly over the diving bell.
Schnabel's adaptation is in many ways highly faithful. The first half of the film is more diving bell than butterfly, and takes place mostly from Bauby's perspective - a relentless series of POV shots in which Bauby's doctors, therapists, relatives, and friends flit in and out of his field of vision. In this portion, the film belongs most strongly to Bauby's innovative speech therapist, whose mixture of sympathy and excitement at the challenge of teaching Bauby to communicate are portrayed beautifully by Marie Josee-Croze. In the second half of the film, as Bauby's butterfly begins to emerge, we are finally rewarded with the blissful escape denied to "Jean-Do" - the camera begins to move about freely, and we get our first good looks at our subject. In this portion, it's Mathieu Almaric who shines as Bauby; strapped down and locked in, Almaric nevertheless conveys a full range of emotions simply by blinking one eyelid and moving one eye.
All of that said, the film, despite Janusz Kaminski's excellent cinematography and an excellent and moving soundtrack (U2, Tom Waits, the Velvet Underground), left me far less emotionally engaged than Bauby's memoir. Perhaps this is because the memoir allowed me to see Bauby's mind working in a way that, as he acknowledges, doesn't actually occur. The film, in which we see that a single sentence of the memoir can take hours to painstakingly blink out, is perhaps not in the position to convey the triumph of the butterfly without shortchanging the diving bell in a way that would have been disingenuous.
One final note: after just observing that I was less moved by the film than the book, I need to say that Max von Sydow's two-scene portrayal of Bauby's shut-in father is perhaps the most moving work of acting I have ever seen. Both of those scenes, the first a flashback when the hale son visits the ailing father, the second a one-sided speaker phone conversation in which the shut-in father calls the locked-in son, left me in tears as Sydow leaped from senile confusion to grief to tenderness, back to confusion. If for no other reason, you should go see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for the 78 year old Sydow, free from a stupid villain role in 2002's Minority Report and a stupider villain role in last year's Rush Hour 3, putting his entire being into an all too brief role.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
My Favorite Films of All Time
Since Blade Runner is coming to the triangle next week, and I'm super-psyched about seeing one of my favorite films of all time, I'm going to take this time to just ruminate on my favorite films of all time. It used to be, when I was asked what my favorite movie was, I was never able to give a single film but had a pretty stable list of 5 or more films that I would answer consistently. Here's Graham's top 6 or so films, circa 2003, let's say:
Blade Runner
Apocalypse Now
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Wings of Desire
Reservoir Dogs
Ran
Gladiator
Ok, so, that's pretty close. A quick analysis:
Epic: 5/7 (exceptions: Wings and Dogs)
Violent: 6/7 (exception: Wings)
Long: 6/7 (exception: Dogs)
Sausagefest: 5.5/7 (exceptions: Wings and kinda Blade Runner)
Here's what I'm getting at. Besides the fact that Wings of Desire stands out, I think we've learned that, roughly five years ago, my favorite films were generally long, epic, violent, and lacking in major roles for chicks. Also, as I've said, it was a pretty consistent and pretty short list.
I guess this is it what it means to grow old. Nowadays, my favorite films span more continents, have entered the 21st century (the old list barely made it to the 90s) and gone back to the beginning of the 20th, and, yes, occasionally involve women (seriously, occasionally only). How does one construct a top 5 or 10 or even 20 list when faced with this sort of breadth and depth? Should there be a 1 or 3 or 5-year waiting period before a film can make the list? Would a waiting period apply only to films made within that time (no Departed, for example) or also to films that I've just seen recently, even if they're older (8 1/2, Magnolia, etc)? In a limited way, it makes sense to list the 10 ten films of the preceding year even if they otherwise have nothing in common with each other, but does it make any sense make some sort of giant list and stick The Philadelphia Story next to Blade Runner next to The Seventh Seal? Finally, should I just say fuck it, elevate myself to the same level as the AFI, and make a hundred film list?
I've decided to provisionally answer these questions by making a list that will be the logical extension of the 2003 list, and I'll try to represent my film geek side on it - all the stuff i've rented, hunted down, and loved, from any time except the last couple of years, over the years, even if I've just seen it. The, my various top 10 lists from the past few years can become the staging areas for the bigger list, but none of these more recent films are allowed on it right away. Also, for now, I'll try to keep it under 30 films, and I'm not going to order it. Finally, at the end, just to see what's happened, we'll get the same analysis as we got on the other list. Also, if anyone actually read this far, I'm sorry.
Graham's Favorite Films of All Time, for Now
Blade Runner
Apocalypse Now
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Wings of Desire
Reservoir Dogs
Ran
Gladiator
Brazil
Tampopo
Nights of Cabiria
Magnolia
The Seventh Seal
Modern Times
The Philadelphia Story
The Lady Eve
Oldboy
The Wild Bunch
Meet John Doe
The Big Lebowski
The Matrix
Sleeper
The Big Sleep
The Royal Tenebaums
The Third Man
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hero
Lone Star
Sunset Blvd
Breathless
Epic: 12/29
Long: 10/29
Violent: 11/29
Sausage Fest: 7.5/27
Hmm, well, that's what I thought. My tastes in film have, in the past 5 years or so, gotten much less epic, violent, long, and dudetacular (I still love Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, though). I might starting rating all films based on those 4 factors, as well. That'll be fun.
Blade Runner
Apocalypse Now
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Wings of Desire
Reservoir Dogs
Ran
Gladiator
Ok, so, that's pretty close. A quick analysis:
Epic: 5/7 (exceptions: Wings and Dogs)
Violent: 6/7 (exception: Wings)
Long: 6/7 (exception: Dogs)
Sausagefest: 5.5/7 (exceptions: Wings and kinda Blade Runner)
Here's what I'm getting at. Besides the fact that Wings of Desire stands out, I think we've learned that, roughly five years ago, my favorite films were generally long, epic, violent, and lacking in major roles for chicks. Also, as I've said, it was a pretty consistent and pretty short list.
I guess this is it what it means to grow old. Nowadays, my favorite films span more continents, have entered the 21st century (the old list barely made it to the 90s) and gone back to the beginning of the 20th, and, yes, occasionally involve women (seriously, occasionally only). How does one construct a top 5 or 10 or even 20 list when faced with this sort of breadth and depth? Should there be a 1 or 3 or 5-year waiting period before a film can make the list? Would a waiting period apply only to films made within that time (no Departed, for example) or also to films that I've just seen recently, even if they're older (8 1/2, Magnolia, etc)? In a limited way, it makes sense to list the 10 ten films of the preceding year even if they otherwise have nothing in common with each other, but does it make any sense make some sort of giant list and stick The Philadelphia Story next to Blade Runner next to The Seventh Seal? Finally, should I just say fuck it, elevate myself to the same level as the AFI, and make a hundred film list?
I've decided to provisionally answer these questions by making a list that will be the logical extension of the 2003 list, and I'll try to represent my film geek side on it - all the stuff i've rented, hunted down, and loved, from any time except the last couple of years, over the years, even if I've just seen it. The, my various top 10 lists from the past few years can become the staging areas for the bigger list, but none of these more recent films are allowed on it right away. Also, for now, I'll try to keep it under 30 films, and I'm not going to order it. Finally, at the end, just to see what's happened, we'll get the same analysis as we got on the other list. Also, if anyone actually read this far, I'm sorry.
Graham's Favorite Films of All Time, for Now
Blade Runner
Apocalypse Now
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Wings of Desire
Reservoir Dogs
Ran
Gladiator
Brazil
Tampopo
Nights of Cabiria
Magnolia
The Seventh Seal
Modern Times
The Philadelphia Story
The Lady Eve
Oldboy
The Wild Bunch
Meet John Doe
The Big Lebowski
The Matrix
Sleeper
The Big Sleep
The Royal Tenebaums
The Third Man
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hero
Lone Star
Sunset Blvd
Breathless
Epic: 12/29
Long: 10/29
Violent: 11/29
Sausage Fest: 7.5/27
Hmm, well, that's what I thought. My tastes in film have, in the past 5 years or so, gotten much less epic, violent, long, and dudetacular (I still love Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, though). I might starting rating all films based on those 4 factors, as well. That'll be fun.
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