Movies Of The Year: 1965

I put this off for awhile because I hoped to watch Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard first, after having owned the very nice Criterion DVD of it for several years. But it doesn't look like I'm going to get around to it anytime soon, and I can always add it to The Big List when I do finally watch it.

15. That Darn Cat! - One of the greatest movie titles of all time is this live-action Disney film about a crime-solving cat. The cast is remarkable: Disney stalwarts Haley Mills and Dean Jones star along with Elsa Lanchester, William Demarest, Frank Gorshin, Ed Wynn and Roddy McDowell.

14. The Sound Of Music - Julie Andrews stars as a singing nun who abandons God for Christopher Plummer and his obnoxious children. In turn, God sends Nazis after them. Directed by Robert Wise, who edited Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, directed The Set-Up, The Day The Earth Stood Still, West Side Story and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. According to imdb, Christopher Plummer "likened working with Julie Andrews to 'being hit over the head with a big Valentine's Day card, every day.'" Sounds about right.

13. The Sons Of Katie Elder - Remade last year by John Singleton as Four Brothers, starring Marky Mark. John Wayne and Dean Martin reunite 6 years after Rio Bravo in this mediocre Western about some brothers avenging their parents. Also stars Dennis Hopper and George Kennedy. Directed by Henry Hathaway, who made true Grit, Niagara and a series of films noirs in the 40s (Kiss Of Death, Call Northside 777, The House On 92nd Street) that I haven't seen.

12. Repulsion - One of the most horrific experiences I've ever had watching a movie. Roman Polanski's film stars Catherine Deneuve as a disturbed young room left alone in her sister's apartment for a weekend who becomes increasingly deranged and terrified as she's overcome by possible hallucinations of murder and rape. It's a brilliantly done film, if what Polanski was going for was a cinematic kick to the groin. Ranks this low because I personally don't like to be kicked there or anywhere else.

11. Dr. Zhivago - For a beautiful woman, Julie Christie does look pretty terrible in a whole lot of movies. This is a prime example. Mostly I blame the lipstick. David Lean's bloated, dull, painfully melodramatic epic about poetry and infidelity in the time of the Russian Revolution has a tremendous cast and, like you expect from Lean, is a big, beautiful film. But I can't say I liked any of it. Lawrence of Arabia I can watch over and over again, Zhivago was like a visit to the Cinemascope dentist. I think I may have slept through the middle hour, but I'm not sure. Stars Christie, Omar Sharif, Alec Guiness, Tom Courtney, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Ralph Richardson and, believe it or not, Klaus Kinski.

10. For A Few Dollars More - The ubiquitous Kinski also co-stars in this, the second of Sergio Leone's so-called Man With No Name trilogy. It's a transitional film between the Kurosawa ripoff that was A Fistfull of Dollars and the truly epic style that Leone would master in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (#2, 1966), Once Upon A Time In The West (#3, 1968) and once Upon A Time In America (#7, 1984). Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef play a pair of bounty hunters on the trail of Gian Maria Volantè.

9. Shenendoah - I reviewed this back in August here on TINAB (which you can read here). It's an anti-war pseudo-Western starring James Stewart as the head of family that doesn't want to, but inevitably must get involved in the Civil War. katharine Ross is the only high point among a pretty dreadful supporting cast. Director Andrew V. McLagen had a long career highlighted by generic John Wayne mediocrities and "sequels" to good films (The Dirty Dozen: The Second Mission, Return From The Riv er Kwai).

8. Thunderball - One of the better James Bond films, rather pathetically remade in the 80s as Never Say Never Again ( #22, 1983). SPECTRE steals a bomber loaded with a couple for nuclear weapons and holds the world ransom for 100 million dollars (say it like Dr. Evil). Fortunately, Sean Connery's around to track them down and save the day, but not before stealing the bad guy's girlfriend Domino, naturally. Claudine Auger plays Domino (it was the terrible Kim Basinger in the '83 film), Adolfo Celi plays the villainous Emilio Largo and Luciana Paluzzi plays the wonderfully named Fiona Volpe.

7. A Charlie Brown Christmas - The best remembered of the Peanuts specials, and not just because Robert Schmigel seems to love it (he does the cartoons on Saturday Night Live that have been the best part of the show for the last decade or so). It's success lies in the fact that while it's critique of the commercialization of Christmas (and by extension, the secularization of modern life) is unsubtle and simplistic, it's told with complete honest such that the viewer never feels manipulated. Which is, of course, the best way to manipulate someone. It's telling that the climactic speech Linus gives at the pageant is not about any of the great Christian values (charity, mercy, compassion, forgiveness) but rather an assertion of that Christmas is merely the celebration of the birth of a God-figure (Jesus, if you didn't know). Certainly an odd message, if you ask me, that Christmas isn't about values at all but about the birth of one particular religious group's deity. The film then is about how good Christians are being corrupted by the technological and capitalistic advances of secular society (pink aluminum Christmas trees, for example). I propose that for next years battle in the Liberal War On Christmas, we expose this piece of non-inclusive propaganda for what it is: a radical combination of Marxist and Fundamentalist Christian critiques of modern American society. Just be sure to ignore the fact that Peanuts is the most successfully merchandised and commercialized comic in history. But the dancing's real cool.

6. The Cincinnati Kid - This definitive poker movie stars the always cool Steve McQueen as the title gambler who hopes to unseat Edward G. Robinson as the best of the best. It's a simple plot device that works for any genre film from The Hustler to Enter The Dragon. This being a gambling film, our hero must resist the temptation of gangsters who want to cheat and a overcome a dealer who has been compromised. Not surprisingly, he must also juggle the attentions of two women (a madonna and a whore, of course) played by Tuesday Weld and Ann-Margaret (poor bastard). Karl Malden, Joan Blondell, Jack Weston, Cab Calloway and Rip Torn also star. Norman Jewison directed, Hal Ashby edited and Ring Lardner Jr (Laura, MASH) and Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Barabarella) adapted the screenplay.

5. Alphaville - Jean-Luc Godard making a ultra-low budget sci-fi film starring Anna Karina? Sign me up. Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, an American private eye who travels to a futuristic, Orwellian city run by a computer that doesn't like emotion or self-expression or poetry and all that. Karina's the daughter of the evil scientist who built the computer, Dr. Von Braun, who Lemmy's supposed to kill or something. A crazy, mystifying Godardian soup of sci-fi, film noir, in-jokes, puns, overthetop pretentiousness and Akim Tamiroff. This was the second Godard film I saw, after Breathless and it confused the hell out of me a decade ago. I haven't watched it since, but not because I don't love it. I've a cheap used video copy of it, but I hear the Criterion version is pretty bare bones, it's on the list of movies to buy.

4. Samurai Spy - Masahiro Shinoda directed this beautiful film about warring gangs of spies in the early days of Tokogawa Japan. The only film I've seen that successfully mingles samurai and ninja, two of the coolest things ever. One of the ninjas, a leper, is clearly the influence for the look of Snake Eyes's arch-enemy, Storm Shadow. The plot's ridiculously complex, with a Sanada clan spy caught in-between a spy war among the Tokogawa and Toyotomi clans, trying to hunt down a spy named Nojiri, Seven Samurai's master swordsman Seiji Miyaguchi showing somewhere along with a group of persecuted Christians. It's a beautiful black and white film, filled with dramatic, thematically appropriate shadows. A perfect example of samurai noir.

3. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold - One of those movies that I love and that no one else seems to have seen, let alone really like. In this John Le Carré adaptation, Richard Burton plays burned-out spy Alec Leamas who leaves his agency after his last agent is killed, becomes a librarian, romances Marxist bookworm Claire Bloom all in an elaborate scheme to frame his East German rival, Hans-Dieter Mundt. Burton is brilliant, as always, Peter Van Eyck is very good as the menacing Mundt and Oskar Werner is exceptional as the German agent who interrogates Leamas. Director Martin Ritt brings a seedy noir style to the film that matches perfectly Le Carré's deglamourized, anti-Bond spy world. One of those rare movies that's actually better than the book, though I did enjoy the book very much.

2. Chimes At Midnight - Orson Welles took all the parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV parts 1 & 2, Henry V and Richard II that involved the character Sir John Falstaff and reedited them into one film about him and his relationship with Prince Hal, later Henry V. Falstaff is one of the more remarkable characters in the history of literature: fat, obnoxious, drunk, boastful, and melancholy. Flastaff is a bit of a joke, we laugh at him and we laugh with him. He's Hal's friend when he's slumming among the common people, and he gets abandoned when Hal has to grow up and become the King. You might recognize the plotline from Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (#12, 1991), in which Keanu Reeves plays the Prince Hal role, abandoning his homeless and gay prostitute friends when he takes his role in society as the son of the mayor of Portland. Anyway, Welles's film is, like you'd expect, beautiful, with a tremendous performance by Welles and great work from John Gielgud as Henry IV and Jeanne Moreau around somewhere. It's criminally unavailable in a decent DVD version, there is a crappy Spanish version of it out there. Hopefully Criterion or someone will get around to releasing it. I saw it on video 8 years ago, it was one of the first movies I rented the first day I moved to the big city a couple blocks away from "the best video store in the world".

1. Pierrot Le Fou - After a party where everyone speaks in advertising slogans except for Samuel Fuller, Jean-Paul Belmondo escapes with the babysitter, Anna Karina, who's fleeing a group of Algerian gangsters. The two lovers run to the Mediterranean, where they live a life filled with romance, music, poetry, art, movie references, bizarre dialogue and Godardian absurdity until the hit-men catch up with them, Karina leaves with them and Belmondo blows himself up. Like any Godard film, the plot is both impossible to summarize and the least interesting thing about the movie. It's another beautiful Godard film, with typically great performances from the two leads. This is the peak of a remarkable run for Godard from 1960-68, where he was putting out two or three films a year, most of them masterpieces: Breathless, A Woman Is A Woman, My Life To Live, Le Petit Soldat, Les Carabiniers, Contempt, Band Of Outsiders, A Married Woman, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, Masculin-Femenin, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Made In USA, La Chinoise, and Week-End. An artistic peak rivaled only by The Beatles from 1965-70 or Bob Dylan 1963-1966.


Red Beard leads the list of Unseen from this year, but there's some other interesting stuff as well:

Flight Of The Phoenix
Help!
Cat Ballou
What's New, Pussycat
Battle Of The Bulge
Red Beard
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Juliet Of The Spirits
The Greatest Story Ever Told
The Shop On Main Street
The Agony And The Ecstasy
Darling
The Loves Of A Blonde
Simon Of The Desert
Lord Jim
The Saragossa Manuscript

Movie Roundup - Last Life In The Universe, Murder My Sweet, Gilda

Last Life In The Universe - A possibly suicidal Japanese librarian (he keeps failing to kill himself) hangs out with a Thai girl after his brother and her sister are killed. He's an obsessive compulsive neatfreak while she's a pot-smoking slob. He spends a couple days cleaning up her house (right by the beach), they fall in love and are separated and learn a lot about life and love and all that. Neither one speaks the other's language, so they spend most of their time communicating in English, and eventually each of them spends some time transformed into their deceased sibling, both of whom are cultural stereotypes (Japanese yakuza and Thai prostitute). It's Harold & Maude with the gap the lovers overcome being culture instead of age. It's a beautiful movie, some of Christopher Doyle's finest cinematography, though it's totally different than his work with Wong Kar-wai. It looks more like Danny Boyle circa Trainspotting. It's the only film I've seen by director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, though his film 6ixtynin9 has gone right into the queue. The #2 film of 2003.

Murder, My Sweet - Edward Dmytryk's adaptation of raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely stars Dick Powell as the detective Philip Marlowe. It's an odd choice for a hard-boiled film noir, as Powell was mostly known for his work in light musical comedies, and he doesn't entirely pull off Marlowe, at least not as I imagine him (that'd be Humphrey Bogart in the Big Sleep) but he's not bad. Marlowe's hired by a bulky thug to find his missing girlfriend and manages to get himself mixed up with a wealthy family that's being blackmailed. He gets beat up, a lot, which leads to one of the more unfortunate parts of the film, a cheesy pool of blackness that fills the screen every time Marlowe gets knocked unconscious (this many concussions in such a short period of time can be extremely dangerous, by the way, even if you're a hockey player) that was apparently greeted with guffaws when the film eventually played in Paris. More successful is a hallucination sequence when Marlowe's forcibly injected with heroin for some inexplicable reason. But really, the main attraction here is the Chandler dialogue. A nice, summarizing example: "'Okay Marlowe,' I said to myself. 'You're a tough guy. You've been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you're crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let's see you do something really tough - like putting your pants on.'"

Gilda - Another mediocre film noir, this one featuring a superstar-making performance by Rita Hayworth as the title object of desire. Much like in Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight (#8, 1996), a young gambler is adopted by an older man and shown how to survive. This time it's Glenn Ford who's taken in by George Macready's Buenos Aires casino owner and would-be tungsten magnate. Things fall apart, as they must, when a woman gets involved, Hayworth in this case, Macready's new bride and Ford's ex-girlfriend. There's more than just a hint of a homosexual relationship between Ford and Macready that isn't exactly minimize by the hostility with which Ford treats Hayworth throughout the entire run of the film. Even after Macready fakes his death and he and Hayworth get married, he proceeds to lock her up in an apartment to punish her for her mistreatment of his "friend". Of course, they all live heterosexually ever after, but we know what's really going on. Hayworth, by the way, is as advertised, especially in her famous striptease in which all she manages to remove is a single glove. But I think she looked better in The Lady From Shanghai.

Movie Roundup- After Life, The Producers, Limelight, Gertrud

After Life - In the tradition of Stairway To Heaven and Defending Your Life, Kore-eda Hirokazu's film has an odd take on what happens when you die. Instead of angels or demons, you get civil servants, who live in a big mansion and make you pick one memory from your life to take with you. After three days of memory picking, the staff makes the memory into a movie. Once you watch the movie, you go off to spend eternity with your favorite memory. It's a quirky little film, with a light humanistic touch and obvious affection for its characters. It isn't an especially profound movie: there are hints at a Rashomon-like idea that people can't tell the truth, even to themselves, as a few characters can't help but embellish or misremember their own lives, but it doesn't really go anywhere. There's also a vaguely translated theme about choosing a single memory from your life as a way to "take responsibility" for that life, but I don't think I know what that's supposed to mean, so maybe it's me that isn't all that profound. . . . Anyway, despite it's slow pace and low-key style, the movie never fails to be both interesting and entertaining. The #9 film of 1998.

The Producers - Between the musical, the movie of the musical and the whole season of Curb Your Enthusiasm devoted to it, it was pretty much impossible for me to get anything new out of finally getting around to watching this movie. basically, watching it for the first time was like watching it for the 12th time, I knew all the jokes and the whole plot, so I can't even say if it was funny or not. I imagine it is though. I enjoyed the hysterical performance by Gene Wilder and the ridiculous cuteness of Lee Meredith and was disturbed by the similarity of Dick Shawn's performance as the Hitler-playing hippie to Robin Williams, especially in his stand-up. The #9 film of 1968.



Limelight - Charlie Chaplin plays an aging drunk vaudevillian who can't get work anymore who saves Claire Bloom, a neighboring ballet dancer, from killing herself. Her nurses her back to health, teaches her that life's worth living, and helps make her a huge star. In turn, she thinks she falls in love with him and tries to revive his career. It all ends with a gala vaudeville show, complete with Chaplin and Buster Keaton combining for a very funny performance. I've always been a little put-off by Chaplin's sentimentality, Modern Times is my favorite of his silent films over City Lights and The Gold Rush for that reason, and I've always preferred Keaton (it's like an Elvis/Beatles thing I guess). But Chaplin is always so honest about his sentimentality that it's really hard to criticize him for it. He may be a big ball of cheese, but he never tries to hide it, and you've got to respect that.

Gertrud - I've seen two movies by Carl Theodor Dreyer, and they couldn't be more different. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is a silent, highly stylized, visually exciting movie highlighted by a brilliant performance by Maria Falconetti in the lead role. Gertrud, on the other hand, is all talk, fairly static and dull visually (though the camera does move, its movements aren't exactly exciting, and there is some interesting stuff in the mise-en-scene, specifically a rococo mirror and a dream turned into a tapestry) with some very odd acting by all of the actors. The film seems to consist of long scenes of the actors making monotone speeches while not looking at each other. Gertrud leaves her husband, a successful politician, for a young composer. The next day at a party, her old boyfriend tells her the composer was bragging about sleeping with her the night before at another party at the home of a courtesan. So, she leaves all three men and goes off to Paris to hang out with a gang of psychiatrists. It's an emotionally intense film, made in such an alienating way that it'd be really easy to make fun of. The style is extreme to that point that it's almost a parody of the European art movie of the 60s, which is, I assume, the reason it wasn't particularly well-received when it first came out.

Movie Roundup - King Kong, United 93, Centre Stage

King Kong - Finally got around to watching this as Netflix decided it had been out long enough for a frequent movie watcher like me to be allowed to see it. The special effects are as advertised, it's a beautiful film, more so than any of the Lord Of The Rings movies in fact. Naomi Watts is terrific and Jack Black's not too bad either. However, instead of thinking the movie was too long, as most commentators seem to, I think it was actually too short. I dug all the set-up in Act One, especially the idea that this trip to skull island to make this movie is fate, totally out of their control. The little subplots on the boat didn't work for me at all: the kid and the first mate, the Captain not wanting to got to the island, blah. Once they get on the island, everything's great again: spooky natives, cool effects, a lot of fun action (though does anyone else wonder why these people never get lost on that island?). It's Act Three that I have a problem with. None of the interesting themes for Act One are revived or concluded, it all becomes subservient to the (admittedly spectacular) action and the pseudo-love story. The final scenes at the top of the Empire State Building even managed to trigger my fear of heights, which kind of ruined the romance, I guess. A summary of some plot holes: there's no explanation of why Watts and Adrian Brody are separated at the beginning of Act Three, after he spent the previous hour and a half fighting dangerous computer beasts to rescue her from the giant ape; there's no explanation for why the cowardly actor came to deus ex machina them back on the island (and where's his moustache?); there's no further elaboration, or even mention of the destiny theme. Maybe in a year Peter jackson will release the 5 hour director's cut and I'll be satisfied. As is, the movie has everything in common with Titanic but the massive box office gross: it's big, pretty and simple. The #18 film of 2005.

United 93 - Is this movie any good? The better question is is it possible for this movie to be good? What would a good movie about 9/11 look like? Paul Greengrass seems to think that a verité-style approach is appropriate. We get fly on the wall views of the events on the plane, intercut with scenes in various air traffic and military control centers. This style, and various comments about the film in advertising and some reviews, and the total lack of outside context in the film (no resolution, no mention of anything that happens after the plane goes down) seem to indicate a desire to take no political position on the events in order to avoid offending anyone, to not be seen as exploiting a tragedy for political purposes. However, I don't think it's even possible to make a film (certainly not a film like this) without being political, and Greengrass does seem to drive home the unpreparedness and inefficiency of our disaster-response system ("Where is the President?"). The idea that a film should be made of events like this at all is questionable: reducing a very real and very human tragedy to an anecdote, a simple narrative or even worse, and action movie is intrinsically distasteful. But at least when it's made with a political purpose, such a narrative has some kind of larger purpose. Without that, the narrative is just an action story, the real human tragedy is reduced to, well, a movie. It's similar to the Schindler's List argument: the quality of the film as a film necessarily trivializes the real experience of 9/11 or the Holocaust. At least if the narrative has some kind of context or political agenda, the skill in telling it can be seen as a means to education and the prevention of further tragedies. As is, this film, by doing everything it can to be non-political (and necessarily failing) does nothing to further or deepen our understanding of 9/11 and what it means. The best we can take out of it is sympathy and admiration for the collective hero of the airplane's passengers. But did we really need a movie to show us how heroic those people were? If so, doesn't that say something horrible about us and the way we deal with reality? Is it not really real until we've seen the movie (and wasn't 9/11 cinematic enough the first time)? Anyway, I don't think we've had a great film about 9/11 yet, but when we do I'm certain it'll look a lot more than Fahrenheit 911 than United 93.

Centre Stage - A funky biopic about Chinese silent film star Ruan Ling-yu played by Maggie Cheung and directed by Stanley Kwan. Ruan killed herself at age 25 after only a few years of making movies, most of which no longer exist. After reading Jonathan Rosenbaum rave about it in his Essential Cinema book (where it's called Actress, a much better title), I snagged it from Netflix. Problem is the Region 1 copy of the movie sucks. The subtitles are bad and absent at inconvenient times, the transfer is really bad and apparently 20 minutes have been cut out of the film. As is, there's enough to see what Rosenbaum dug about the film: Kwan mixes archival footage of the silent films with Cheung reenacting those same film scenes and interviews with actors in the film and some of the people they're portraying mixed with dramatic recreations of scenes from Ruan's life. Incoherence is a necessary part of the film because there are so many gaps in what we know of Ruan's life, but the cuts take it to far (not too mention that a key newspaper headline remains untranslated, not being able to read Chinese, I have no idea what the tabloids were attacking her about right before she killed herself. Seems like whoever subtitled this film would have thought that might be important. . . . Recognizing that it's incomplete, I'll rate it the #21 film of 1992.

Movie Roundup - Brick, Young Mr. Lincoln, As Tears Go By, Days Of Being Wild

I had a version of this mostly finished the other day when I accidentally closed Safari and deleted it all. That's always awesome. Anyway, catching up with some movies I've seen recently, in-between baseball games. More to come in a couple of days, as it's late and I want to watch a movie.

Brick - Is it a film noir set in a high school, or a high school movie set in a film noir? Either way, I don't think there's much here beside an interesting conceit and a competent exercise in stylized dialogue. Writer-director Rian Johnson has a clever mastery of the type of hard-boiled dialogue you hear in a noir, but the film lacks any of the feel or visual style of true noir. Pre-dawn grayness just doesn't work as a substitute for chiaroscuro, at least not in creating a sense of existential fear or dread. Instead, the dullness of palette and general lack of visual flourish creates only a feeling of boredom and disconnection. Perhaps this is intentional, going along with the idea of only being able to viewing high school through the mediation of old movies, the bland real world contrasted with the vividness of artificial, borrowed, dialogue. . .a reflection of post-modernity or something like that. This being Johnson's first film, it's too early to say. I rate it the #23 film of 2005.

Young Mr. Lincoln - I didn't expect to like this movie as much as I did, considering how disappointed I've been by so many biopics I've seen recently. But there's simply no comparison between this kind of mythmaking and such mediocrities as Walk the Line or Ray. To start with, Henry Fonda was better than I expected, amazing how much a little bit of make up can change a man's appearance (he also seems taller and lankier than in any other Fonda movie, which might just be my imagination). I was most surprised by how beautiful the movie is, it may be John Ford's best in that sense, and that's saying something. The many shots framing Lincoln against his environment, especially the river, are my favorites, but the shot of him blocking the jail door from the enraged lynch mob is amazing as well. For a 1930s Hollywood biopic, this film is remarkably strange and poetic. The ending is an obvious example of this, as Lincoln walks up a hill in the face of an oncoming storm, but even better is the scene at the dance, when Mary Todd drags Lincoln to the porch and he just stands there staring off at the river in the distance.

Best movies I've seen from 1939:

1. The Rules Of The Game
2. Stagecoach
3. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
4. Young Mr. Lincoln
5. The Wizard Of Oz
6. Gunga Din
7. Destry Rides Again
8. Goodbye Mr. Chips
9. The Four Feathers
10. The Roaring Twenties
11. Gone With The Wind

As Tears Go By - Wong Kar-wai's first film is essentially a remake of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (#1, 1973), with a little bit of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (#4, 1984) to start things up and a dash of Tony Scott's Top Gun (#6, 1986) just to keep you on your toes (you'll know it when you hear it). Andy Lau (House Of Flying Daggers) stars as an experienced, slightly disillusioned triad who has to juggle his burgeoning romance with his cousin (the adorable Maggie Cheung, in one of her first non-girl-in-kung-fu-peril roles) and the increasingly dangerous antics of his irresponsible and incompetent "little brother" played by Jacky Cheung. Visually speaking, all the basic elements of Wong's style are here for all you who think Christopher Doyle made Wong Kar-wai, you surely see this. By taking Scorsese's plot but leaving behind all his Catholic guilt and madonna-whore complexes, Wong makes an entertaining genre film that lacks any of the depth or resonance of Scorsese's masterpiece. Which isn't so terrible considering one of the three movies Wong wrote this same year was Haunted Cop Shop Of Horrors 2. As a first directorial effort, this certainly isn't bad, but it's still the worst film Wong's made so far. I rate it the #8 film of 1988.

Days Of Being Wild - The first part of a trilogy set in 1960s Hong Kong by Wong Kar-wai that simply gets better as it goes along, though all three (including In The Mood For Love, #4, 2000 and 2046, #2, 2004) are classics. The movie starts with Maggie Cheung's Su Lizhen (the same name as her character from ITMFL, who is also incarnated twice in 2046, though it's unclear if any of these four characters are the same woman) who works at a snack counter (think Chungking Express) is picked up by Luddy (the name is translated differently on imdb and my DVD), played by Leslie Cheung (Happy Together). The two have a relationship that ends when she asks to move in with him. He dumps her and starts dating Mimi (Carina Lau, the longtime girlfriend of Tony Leung in real life), a character who turns up on the train in 2046. Su, unable to deal with the breakup, begins hanging around outside Luddy's apartment where she meets a cop (Andy Lau). Su and the cop spend a long night walking the streets and talking, he tells her about his wish to become a sailor so he can leave Hong Kong and travel (think Faye Wong in Chungking Express). Eventually, Luddy and the cop end up on a train in The Phillipines, Luddy's sidekick (Jacky Cheung) falls in love with Mimi and Su goes on to break Tony Leung's heart. Speaking of Leung, his name is prominently displayed on the poster I have from the revival of the film last year, and as he's one of my favorite current actors, I was waiting all movie for him to show up. Eventually he does, at the end, in one little dialogueless scene that Steven Spielberg may have ripped of a year later for the beginning of Schindler's List. The movie's a big step up from As Tears Go By, though it's not as visually ravishing or as abstract as his more recent films. Quentin Tarantino, in his unintentionally hilarious comments on the Chungking Express DVD compares this to American Graffiti, which I guess makes a kind of sense. Though it's set in the same time period as Lucas's film, it has much more in common with the early 90s cycle of mid-to-highbrow coming-of-age movies like Dazed And Confused, Singles, Metropolitan and Kicking And Screaming. I rate it the #6 film of 1991.

Movies Of The Year: 1966

The further we move back in time, the more stratified the movies I've seen become. Generally there will be a bunch of great, classic films at the top of the lists, and a few mediocre at best movies at the bottom that I watched as a kid (thanks Disney Channel, ugh.) That isn't the case this year, when pretty much all of the movies are pretty good.

14. Winne The Pooh And The Honey Tree - The first Disney Pooh film, it's much the same as the others, only a little worse. I believe this film was instrumental in the development of my intense fear of bees. Did I mention The Tao Of Pooh is a great book?

13. A Man For All Seasons - Paul Scofield is one of my favorite actors, I especially like his performance in Quiz Show (#3, 1994). He won the Best Actor Oscar playing Thomas More in this film, and while he's very good, it wasn't enough for me to really like the film. There's a real overblown 1960s Hollywood vibe to the film that I found very off-putting, and when I saw it, on VHS, it looked to be a pretty ugly, all the bad things about Technicolor, kind of film. I probably need to watch it again, there are too many people I like involved in it for me not to like it. Orson Welles, John Hurt and Robert Shaw star and Fred Zinneman directs Robert Bolt's screenplay.

12. Hunger - My favorite discovery in my Scandinavian Film class (yeah, it was as dull as it sounds) was this film and novel. Both the film and the book are about a struggling writer who wanders the streets of Christiania being, well, hungry, largely by choice. It's a very weird movie of a very weird book. The film was directed by Henning Carlsen, who doesn't appear to have done anything else I've ever heard of. Knut Hamsun wrote the novel, he was recently the subject of a long New Yorker profile.

11. Fahrenheit 451 - Another film I watched in class, this time in a crappy Communications 101 course. François Truffaut's adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel stars Oscar Werner and Julie Christie. The plot should be familiar: at some point in the future, books are banned and firefighters run around rounding them up and burning them. Werner plays a fireman who has some doubts about whether or not this is a good idea. Another movie I should see again, but I'm wrong about this not being a great film.

10. Persona - The movie that turned me off Bergman, whether that his fault or mine I will leave as an open question. Bibi Andersson plays a nurse taking care of a mute actress (Liv Ullman) in some remote place in the country. Gradually, the two women begin to merge into the same person. This is the movie people who hate of foreign art movies are thinking of when they make fun of them. Since it was over a decade ago that I watched this, I intend to give it, and especially Bergman another try. This seems to be a theme with the bottom half of this list. With so many movies to see once, how will I ever find time for all the ones to see twice?

9. How The Grinch Stole Christmas - Hayao Miyazaki may be the trendy pick, but I've no doubt that Chuck Jones is the greatest animation director of all-time. This is his most famous non-Looney Tunes film, an adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book. If you haven't seen it, I congratulate you on waking from your 40 year coma. Welcome to the world of the mobile! I am honored you choose this blog as your initial foray into the modern world. Now, go watch this movie.

8. It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown - It's a tough call on which is the best Peanuts film, but it's either this one or the Christmas one. I'd say Christmas is the better film, while this one is my personal favorite. Let's just say I can relate a lot more to the idea of faith expressed by Linus in the pumpkin patch than I can by his speech for the Christmas play. Plus it's got one of the greatest and most resonant lines in all of film history: "I got a rock."

7. Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - This film of Edward Albee's play is perhaps the meanest movie I've ever seen. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are at their best as a vicious old married couple who torture each other and their young dinner guests over the course of one awful evening. George Segal and Sandy Dennis play the clueless young couple, Mike Nichols directs (it was his first film) and Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay. Lehman has a bizarre list of credits: North By Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound Of Music, Sabrina, The King And I, Black Sunday, Sabrina, Family Plot, Hello Dolly! and The Sweet Smell Of Success.

6. Masculin Féminin - Young, pretty, disillusioned French kids awash in consumerism, Americanism and the stirrings of the 60s cultural revolutions in pre-1968 Paris. It's Jean-Luc Godard midway between his more politically explicit films of the 70s and his early chaotic, fun and romantic films. Jean-Pierre Leaud (from the 400 Blows and other Truffaut films) and Chantal Goya (who was a pop star in France at the time) are the lead actors, but as always in his films, Godard is the star.

5. What's Up, Tiger Lilly? - Back in the dark ages before Woody Allen invented the modern romantic comedy, before he began dissecting and satirizing the New York upper class much to their delight, before he became the most improbable sex symbol in film history, he took a cheap Japanese James Bond rip-off called "International Secret Police: Key of Keys" and redubbed all the dialogue to create a comic masterpiece, a defining post-modernist film and what is perhaps the funniest movie in his long career. The star, Tatsuya Mihashi was also in The Bad Sleep Well and Inagaki's version of the 47 Ronin, Chushnigura.

4. The Battle Of Algiers - Strikingly realistic seeming film about the war between, for want of a better word, terrorists and the military in French-occupied Algiers in the 1950s. Storywise, it's essentially an epic police procedural, and like all great procedurals, it's fascinating in it's depth and detail, both in describing the tactics of the army and the terrorists. The films sympathy pretty squarely lies with the anti-colonial side, though it stops short of actually condoning their tactics. It's a more nuanced and interesting examination of the political relationship between the West and Islam than would seemingly ever be made nowadays, unfortunately.

3. The Sword Of Doom - An amazing movie, one of the darkest action movies I've ever seen, and the best non-Kurosawa samurai film. Tatsuya Nakadai plays a truly evil swordsman, walking the earth in search of more evil to do. The first thing he does in the film is cut an old man in half for no particular reason, and he only gets worse from there. Toshiro Mifune has a small role as a fencing instructor and he also gets one great action sequence. This is one of the all-time great film endings, wholly by accident, I guess, as this was supposed to be only the first part of a trilogy. A beautiful black and white film, directed by Kihachi Okamoto, who also directed Nakadai in the Sanjuro remake Kill! (#6, 1968).

2. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly - The third part of Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy is perhaps the greatest action movie ever made. It's certainly one of the prettiest. It doesn't have the same resonance as his Once Upon A Time films (In The West, #3, 1968; In America, #7, 1984), but it's still an ambitious, epic film. The story couldn't be simpler: three outlaws each know one third of the secret of where some buried treasure is located. All three hate and mistrust each other, but no one can get the treasure without the other three (sounds like some game theory scenario). But, this being a Sergio Leone film, the joy is not in the plot, but in the slow, grand, sweeping unraveling of that story, building tension past all reasonable expectations until the final paroxysm of violence. The three leads have become iconic: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach.

1. Au Hasard Balthazar - The simple story of a girl and her donkey, Robert Bresson's masterpiece may be a trendy film geek favorite, but I love it nonetheless. It's basically a biopic about a donkey, we follow Balthazar from his birth and idyllic childhood on a farm, his separation from the girl he loves, the varying degrees of mistreatment he receives as he passes from one owner to another (somehow always finding his way back to the girl). Paralleling Balthazar's story is that of the girl, a fairly stupid, self-destructive kid who constantly makes the wrong choices. Also along for the ride are the girl's father, an absurdly stubborn man who loses everything in a near-unbelievable attack of stubborn pride, and a young hoodlum who owns Balthazar for awhile and dates the stupid girl. Most people will claim the film is an allegory for something or other, usually whatever religion or philosophy they already happen to have. That's what makes the film so unique: it can mean literally anything and everything. The simplicity of the story, the blankness of the acting (a Bresson trademark), the near invisibility of the visual style and score (though both are beautiful) create a blank slate of a film which the viewer must then give some kind of larger meaning (much like life? nah).


Some interesting Unseen films from this year: classics from Swinging London, pseudo-New Wave French films, Howard Hawks's remake of his own Rio Bravo, and Tokyo Drifter, by Seijun Suzuki, none of whose films I've seen, but I plan to in the near future.

Manos: The Hands Of Fate
Blowup
Torn Curtain
El Dorado
Fantastic Voyage
Alfie
How To Steal A Million
Seconds
Our Man Flint
Closely Watched Trains
One Million Years B.C.
Django
Born Free
Tokyo Drifter
Is Paris Burning?
La Guerre Est Finie
Fighting Elegy
The Fortune Cookie
Un Homme Est Une Femme

Movie Roundup

Well, between the start of baseball season and a lot of movie buying and watching and a lot of working, it's been awhile since I've done any blogging. So, here's some reviews of the movies I've seen lately, and I'll get around to putting up the 1966 list hopefully in the next couple of days.

A Woman Is A Woman - Jean-Luc Godard's idea of a musical instantly becomes one of my favorite Godard films (and, thanks to the sale at DeepDiscountDVD.com, the only Godard I own on DVD). Anna Karina is at her best as a part-time stripper who, on a whim, decides she wants to have a baby. Her boyfriend, jean-Claude Brialy doesn't want to, and mockingly suggests she enlist the help of their friend, Jean-Paul Belmondo, who happens to be in love with Karina. The story is overthetop melodramatic, but the great thing about the movie is Michel Legrand's score: the music constantly wants to turn the film into a musical, but never quite gets going. It's the broken, demented, yet still romantic cousin of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Like Brialy says, "I don't know if it's a comedy or a tragedy, but it's a masterpiece."

V For Vendetta - A very good action film with a surprisingly good script. Hugo Weaving's great as V, he's got one of the best voices in film today. Natalie Portman's accent comes and goes. I like the joke of having John Hurt play the Big Brother dictator (he was the lead in the movie of 1984). I have a few minor quibbles with parts of the film (the backstory, the last action sequence, an unexplored and unresolved theme which might involve predestination vs. freedom) and the more I think about the movie, the more of them I come up with. But it was still very entertaining. The number 15 film of 2005.

Night Watch - This movie gets an incomplete, first because its only the first part part of a trilogy but more importantly because of the loud Russian teenagers in the theatre who totally ruined the mood by whispering, laughing randomly and playing with their cell phones. At least they stopped having actual conversations (in Russian, naturally) after I yelled at them. Anyway, it was a cool looking movie and may end up being a pretty good trilogy. I'm rating it # 20 for 2004.

The Squid & The Whale - A nice little film, though I didn't like it as much as Kicking And Screaming (#4, 1995). A different look to the film than Baumbach's first two, what with the hand-held camera and a hint of arty, almost jump-cutty editing. I don't know why Laura Linney got any Oscar buzz for this, not that she was bad or anything, she was just unremarkable. Thankfully, she did not get a nomination. Jeff Daniels was very good though. Very evocative of its time and place and culture and I liked that it stayed within the kids' point of view instead of explaining the parents' side as well. I've ranked it the #9 film of 2005.

DOA - Mediocre psuedo-noir. Edmund O'Brien gives a fun, semi-hysterical lead performance, and the story's interesting enough. But there isn't really much all that new here aside from the clever set-up:

"I'm here to report a murder."

"Who's the victim?"

"I am."

There's some good misdirection in the plot, a compelling score by Dmitri Tiomkin (including a great hallucinatory scene in a night club), but it lacks the visual style of the really great films noir though the movie has an exciting pace and energy. The supporting actors, though, are really pretty bad.

My Life To Live - It's a great movie and all, but I like Godard better when he's having fun. Still, Anna Karina is amazing, this is the best performance I've seen from her yet., though it's my least favorite of her movies. Some of the "tableaux" are great, I particularly enjoyed the old professor, the scene in the record store, the dance sequence, the documentary-style montage as Nana's being taught how to be a professional, and especially, the whole last chapter. My Godard list, keeping in mind that they are all great:

1. Pierrot Le Fou
2. A Woman Is A Woman
3. Weekend
4. Band Of Outsiders
5. Alphaville
6. Breathless
7. Contempt
8. Masculin-Femenin
9. My Life To Live

Inside Man- An above average thriller/heist movie from Spike Lee, though I have this weird feeling that there's something more profound going on in the film that I can't quite put my finger on. . . . Something about racism and terrorism and the banality of evil and the emptiness of threats and public fears. . . I don't know. All the actors are very good, and Lee's direction was stylish and effective. The last act does kind of drag, but I think that's intentional. Weird performance by Jodie Foster, but I liked it.

Sword Of Doom - Wow. Reading about this film, I see it was supposed to be but Part One of a trilogy, and it's a damn shame it never got finished. I like the ending a lot as is, but some of the duller stretches of subplot would be more excusable if they'd ever gotten resolved. Still, a beautiful film, a fine performance from Toshiro Mifune and a brilliant intense, physical one from Tatsuya Nakadai. This film was clearly a big influence on George Lucas (Nakadai would have made an amazing Vader, instead we got a whiny Hayden Christiansen; Yoda's death scene in Return of the Jedi is almost wholly ripped off from a scene here) and Tarantino for Kill Bill Vol. 1 (that should be real obvious). My favorite non-Kurosawa Samurai film.



They Live By Night - Noirish young-lovers-on-the-run movie that's nearly totally ruined by Farley Granger. He was merely a bad actor playing a preppie in a pair of Hitchcock films (Rope and Strangers On A Train), but playing a young ex-con/former circus performer? Ugh. Nicholas Ray's direction is slick and stylish, and Cathy O'Donnell is quite cute (and acts circles around Granger), but that just isn't enough to make me like this movie.

F For Fake - Everything you could possibly want from an Orson Welles movie: a brilliant visual style (though created by editing here instead his usual techniques), a multilayered, profound yet entertaining story, a great lead performance from Welles himself, and one good-looking Hungarian woman. I've rated it the #2 film of 1974). This was my first DVD blind buy, but it was a pretty safe bet that I'd love it, as I have loved every one of Welles's films that I've seen:

1. Touch Of Evil
2. Citizen Kane
3. Chimes At Midnight
4. Lady from Shanghai
5. F For Fake
6. Mr. Arkadin
7. Macbeth
8. Othello
9. Magnificent Ambersons
10. The Trial
11. The Stranger

Orson Welles: One Man Band - Bonus film on the Criterion F For Fake DVD. As a documentary, it's not much. It's not, as it apparently wants to be, an essay film along the lines of F For Fake. And it doesn't really work as a traditional documentary either: too unfocused; doesn't follow any apparent order, chronological or otherwise; isn't particularly informative about much of the footage it does show; and it only covers the work that Welles left unfinished during the last 20 years of his life, while glossing over the unfinished work from the first 25 years of his career (like Don Quixote). Anyway, it's worth seeing just for all the footage of Welles, fragmented and disorganized though it might be.

King Of Kings - The Nicholas Ray version from 1961, it was pretty interesting. Maybe it's just because I watched the end of Do The Right Thing earlier that day, but I thought the film seemed to be paralleling the MLK/Malcolm X argument from the civil rights movement in the early 60s: violence or non-violence. Jeffery Hunter's Jesus is a uncomplicated symbol of peaceful non-violence, and he's contrasted with Barrabas and Judas (played by an unrecognizable Rip Torn), who are violent revolutionaries. Of course, this means some parts of the Jesus story have to be left out: no talk of swords for him, and certainly no attacking of moneychangers. The production is what you'd expect from a Hollywood bible epic from the time, and the direction and the performances are quite good. Some of the voices are a little weird, and the dubbing has some flaws, but it isn't terrible. Orson Welles's narration is, of course, excellent.

49th Parallel - British-Canadian propaganda film from the early days of World War 2 by Powell and Pressburger. The basic idea is to get Canadians involved in the war effort by showing them how wonderful they are and that the Nazis can get them too. A U-Boat crew gets stranded in Canada and makes its way across the country, encountering various Canadian stereotypes along the way. Laurence Olivier is hilarious as a French-Canadian trapper with an outrageous accent. Anton Walbrook is great as the leader of an Amish-type sect of German émigrés, he and the leader of the Nazis (Eric Portman) have a great scene of dueling speeches. Leslie Howard plays an effete intellectual who learns to bravely confront the Nazis and Raymond Massey plays a seemingly honorary American: loud and lazy but who becomes mobilized to join the fight in the end. Very entertaining and effective propaganda.

Winchester '73 - The first Jimmy Stewart-Anthony Mann Western, it wasn't as dark or noirish as I expected it to be. The story's quite good, with Stewart's revenge quest (and his concurrent gun search) providing an effective frame for what is essentially a tour of the West, descending into lower and lower levels of civilization (it starts with Dodge City, peaceful and ably run by famous lawmen, then is a battle between Indians and Cavalry, finally the chaotic violence of psychotic bandits). There's even a nice twist at the end, not in the same class with a movie like, say, Oldboy (#8, 2003), but it did elicit a minor exclamtion of "that's fucked up!" from me.

Friends With Money - Interesting attempt at discovering what happens if you make an ensemble character study without any interesting characters. Also, it teaches the profound truth that money cannot, in fact, buy happiness. Many great actresses are wasted in this mediocrity.

Movies Of The Year: 1967

I've been a bit busy lately, with a trip to Spokane, a birthday and lots of work. But I've finally gotten around to finishing this that I started almost two weeks ago.

Well, I certainly didn't expect this. You have to go all the year forward until 1981 to find a year from which I've seen so many movies. And there's quality too: the top 8 or 9 are all great, and every movie on the list is pretty good.

19. The Jungle Book
18. Barefoot In The Park
17. In The Heat Of The Night
16. Who's That Knocking At My Door?

15. You Only Live Twice - One of my earliest film memories is going to see a James Bond quadruple feature at the local drive-in. Goldfinger was the first movie, and I stayed awake through that. I think I fell asleep during this one, which was the second film. I did manage to stay awake long enough to think that the evil redheaded girl was hot. Anyway, this is one of the very best Bond films, as he teams up with ninjas to save outer space, or something. The screenplay was by Roald Dahl, of all people.

14. Casino Royale - Speaking of Bond movies, this all-star parody film is bizarrely prescient as the plot hinges on their being a number of different actors playing James Bonds (including Woody Allen). A mess of a film, behind the camera as much as one it. IMDB lists the following with uncredited writing on the film: Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Billy Wilder and Peter Sellers. The cats includes: Allen, Sellers, Orson Welles, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Deborah Kerr, Jaqueline Bisset, Ursula Andress, David Niven, John Huston, Charles Boyer, George Raft, William Holden, David Prowse, Peter O'Toole and Anjelica huston's hands. The newest Bond movie is also Casino Royale, but they're playing it seriously this time.

13. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner - Social problem film in which Upper middle class white people are shocked when their daughter brings home a black fiance. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play the old couple, Hepburn's neeice Katharine Houghton and Sidney Poitier play the young couple. It's the kind of film that doesn't age very well, but the brilliance of the performers still stands up.

12. Cool Hand Luke - Nobody can eat 50 eggs. Paul Newman created his definitive antihero character, the type he'd been playing for almost a decade in this movie about a non-conformist on a chain gang. It's a lot like One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest, come to think of it, but with a more quotable screenplay. Frank pierson cowrote the screenplay. he also wrote Cat Ballou, Dog Day Afternoon and Presumed Innocent.

11. The Fearless Vampire Killers - Very strange little horror-comedy by Roman Polanski. He also co-stars as the assistant to a vampire-hunting professor. A weird and funny movie made poignant by the fact that Polanski's love interest in the film is played by his wife, Sharon Tate, just a couple years before she was murdered by the Manson Family.

10. Samurai Rebellion - Toshiro Mifune stars as a aging samurai who's first commanded to have his son marry his lord's mistress, and then give her back after the two have fallen in love. He, predictably (thanks title!) refuses to do so, with lots of bloody samurai fun to result. Tatsuya Nakadai also stars. Directed by Masaki Kobayashi, who also did Harakiri, Kwaidan and The Human Condition Trilogy, none of which have I seen.

9. The Dirty Dozen - All-star World War II action movie about a group of criminally insane misfits who get assigned a suicide mission to kill a bunch of Nazis. We follow them from their selection, through their training at the hands of the great Lee Marvin and finally their attack on a house full of German generals. The cast is ridiculously good: Marvin, John Cassavettes, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, George Kennedy and Ralph meeker. Director Robert Aldrich also did The Longest Yard, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, The Big Knife, Vera Cruz and one of my all-time favorite films noir, Kiss Me Deadly.

8. Belle De Jour - Luis Buñuel's satire of bourgeois repression is also a loving tribute to perversion. Catherine Deneuve plays a bored housewife who decides to become a prostitute in her spare time. One of her clients, of course, falls in love with her, but that's not the point. The film is full of little jokes. It's not as weird as some of Buñuel's other work, but there are a few surrealist touches here and there.

7. Le Samouraï - Jean-Pierre Melville made a whole series of films noir in the 60s, and this is the only one I've seen. Alain Delon plays a very cool hitman in this very cool movie about very cool people double crossing each other and such. Did I mention this movie was cool? Parts of this film were a big influence on John Woo, especially for The Killer (#6, 1989), just as American noir was an influence on Melville. Delon's hitman is named Jeff, just like Chow Yun-fat's in The Killer and Robert Mitchum's in Out Of The Past.

6. Point Blank - John Boorman directed this stylish neo-noir revenge tale in which Lee Marvin comes back from being betrayed and left for dead by his friend and his cuckholding wife. Also stars Angie Dickenson, Keenan Wynn and Carroll O'Connor. It's a dark, violent film told in a flashy New Wave style, with lots of weird cuts and flashes forward and backward in time. Marvin, as always, is terrific in the lead role. It was remade by Mel Gibson as Payback, a dreadful film, I rated it dead last, the #54 film of 1999.

5. The Graduate - Mike Nichols's classic film about a disaffected young man and his affairs with a rich housewife and her daughter. If you haven't seen it, you've probably been in some kind of tragic coma for the past 40 years, but I'm glad to see you've come out of it and have your priorities straight by reading this before doing anything else. It hasn't really dated at all, despite what I've heard multiple times in the last month or so, instead it really only works if you're close to the same age as Dustin Hoffman's character. You have to be young for the aimlessness and angst to really make sense.

4. Don't Look Back - One of the best and most influential documentaries ever is this DA Pennebaker film about Bob Dylan. It chronicles Dylan's 1965 tour of England, the one right before he went electric and freaked out the lunatic folkies. It's one of the pioneering cinema verité documentaries, where the filmmaker appears to leave his opinion out of the film, giving the impression that the audience is just a fly on the wall. Dylan's hilarious, young, cocky, mean, sarcastic and brilliant. The are several extended sequences of him just toying with other people: reporters, annoying fans, Donovan. It also starts with a proto-musical video, for Subterranean Homesick Blues. A must see whether you're a Dylan fan or not (and of course, you should be.)

3. Bonnie And Clyde - One of the more influential films in history, this film marks the end of the studio system and the rise of the independent-minded, personal studio films of the early 70s. Both Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were both slated to direct it at one time, but eventually producer/star Warren Beatty settled on Arthur Penn to direct. Penn also directed Little Big Man (#7, 1970), The Chase, Alice's Restaurant and the great Paul Newman/Billy The Kid movie The Left-Handed Gun. The cast was largely unknown at the time, including Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Gene Wilder and Michael J. Pollard, with Morgan Fairchild, of all people, as Dunaway's double. The screenplay was by David Newman and Robert Benton who both also wrote Oh Calcutta, What's Up, Doc? and Superman: The Movie. Newman went on to write Superman II and III, along with Santa Claus: The Movie, while Benton became a successful writer/director with Kramer vs. Kramer and Nobody's Fool.

2. Week End - Jean-Luc Godard's fractured road movie about a bourgeois couple lost in an apocalyptic rural highway system. Along the way to try to kill one of their parents to inherit some money, they meet singers, cannibals, revolutionaries, poets, actors and more lunatic rich people. The long tracking shot of the traffic jam is one of the greatest scenes in all of film. It's not a perfect film, but even the episodes that seem dull (a long justification for terrorism against capitalism) or silly (the revolutionary cannibals at the end) can't overcome the sheer audacity and brilliance of the film. The movie ends with Godard's famous proclamation of The End of Cinema, which I can't wait to open someday.

1. Playtime - Jacques Tati hated his famous character M. Hulot, but audiences just wouldn't accept him as anything else. So, with this film, instead of Tati alone as Hulot, everyone becomes Hulot: a regular guy, maybe a bit clumsy, a bit oblivious, trapped in a modern world that, chaotic as it is, as much as it appears that he doesn't fit in, in fact is perfectly interconnected, seamless and maybe even purposeful. The effect of the film is difficult to describe. . . . if it was possible to combine the best parts of the silent comedies of Chaplin and Keaton with the grace and musicality of an Astaire and Rogers film. Tati creates a symphony of movement without any actual music, just the sounds of an office, a roundabout, or a crowded restaurant. If you've ever wondered what that cliché about the 'poetry of motion' is all about, this film is the purest expression of it I've ever seen. The movie's currently unavailable on DVD, and I've only seen it one time on video, but Criterion's rereleasing it later this year, and I'll be buying it as soon as possible. One of my all-time favorite movies.


Some good stuff I haven't seen this year, including a Jacques Demy musical, a couple Godard films, a Bresson , a Hepburn and George Lucas's first movie.

Wait Until Dark
In Cold Blood
To Sir With Love
Bedazzled
Camelot
Hombre
Doctor Doolittle
In Like Flint
Magical Mystery Tour
Branded To Kill
The Young Girls Of Rochefort
Mouchette
THX 1138
Two Or Three Things I Know About Her
I Am Curious (Yellow)
Hour Of The Gun
La Chinoise
The Collector
The Shooting

Movies Of The Year: 1968

Now this is a great year. Four indisputable classics, along with plenty of other pretty good movies. It's also got the most moves I've seen since 1972.

12. Romeo And Juliet - This gauzy adaptation is far inferior to the lively Baz Luhrman film that ranked 11th in 1996. It's directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who also directed the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet (#8, 1990), which too is much better than this film. Both the leads are very pretty.

11. The Love Bug - The best movie about a sentient car ever made. Director Robert Stevenson did almost all the truly great live-action Disney films: Mary Poppins, Darby O'Gill And The Little People, Old Yeller, The Absent-Minded Professor, The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones, and so on.

10. The Odd Couple - The movie version of the play that turned into a TV series. Neil Simon wrote the screenplay and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau start the legendary onscreen collaboration that would ultimately lead to the genius of Grumpier Old Men (#75, 1995).

9. Planet Of The Apes - One of the greatest of all camp classics. It lead to a second career peak for star Charlton Heston. The man who played Moses and Ben-Hur soon become the greatest of all crappy SF movie actors in films like this, The Omega Man and Soylent Green. Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter co-star. You remember Hunter as the Stella that Brando was yelling about in A Streetcar Named Desire. She won and Oscar for that, but not for this.

8. Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day - The second of three animated Disney Pooh movies. This is the one that introduces Piglet and Tigger. I read the Tao Of Pooh in high school and it's a great book. I never got around to reading The Te Of Piglet though, so I don't know what that's about.

7. Bullitt - The ultra-cool Steve McQueen stars in this otherwise unremarkable cop movie. It's got one of the all-time great car chases, right up there with The French Connection (#8, 1971) and Ronin (#15, 1998). And it co-stars Jaqueline Bisset, Norman Fell, Robert Vaughn and Robert Duvall.

6. Night Of The Living Dead - A transitional film between the old b-movie horror films of the 50s and 60s and the splatter films of the late 70s and 80s. George Romero's first Zombie movie is also the best. It's ultra low-budget, more taught and suspenseful than the latter three films (Dawn Of The Dead, #7, 1978; Day Of Thee Dead, #24, 1985; and Land Of The Dead, #30, 2005) which are more about social satire and action than anything else. First a hysterical woman, then a heroic black men, then a lunatic family hide from the zombies in a farmhouse and are surrounded. The scenes are intercut with the coverage of the zombie attacks on TV, in a kind of homage to 50s sci-fi films. It's a perfect example of it's genre, as scary as any horror film ever.

5. Barbarella - The movie that gave Duran Duran their name. Jane Fonda plays a secret agent (in space!) who must track down a missing and evil scientist who wants to destroy the universe, or something. Along the way, she often finds herself in various states of undress, falls in love with a pretty blind angel and must confront the dangers of the evil scientist's Excessive Machine. The best movie about sex ever made.

4. Rosemary's Baby - The other side of the sex coin is this film, wherein Mia Farrow becomes impregnated with Satan's baby. Farrow's terrific, as is John Cassavetes as her husband. Ruth Gordon won an Oscar for playing the annoying neighbor, but I really just find her annoying. Maybe director Roman Polanski's best film, though most would claim Chinatown is better. Certainly one of the creepiest movies I've ever seen.

3. Once Upon A Time In The West - Sergio Leone's masterpiece is this summation of everything the Western genre represents. It's the story of how civilization came to be imposed upon chaos. All Westerns are about that conflict, some more explicitly than others. In this sense, this film is the purest expression of the genre. Henry Fonda famously plays against type as the villain, in one of the better performances of his career. In his character, the twin evils of murderous outlawry and rampant capitalism are united. Opposed to him are Jason Robards, as the honorable thief type perfected by Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and Charles Bronson, also playing somewhat against type as the nameless harmonica-playing, revenge-seeking hero. Claudia Cardinale plays the widow of a visionary man who wanted to build a town in the middle of a desert, which, like I said, is what it's all about. If Unforgiven (#1, 1992) represents the thematic end of the Western, then this represents its pinnacle.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Speaking of genres, I once wrote a paper about 2001 in which I argued that science-fiction is not a genre, but rather a mode or a setting. It makes sense really: what does films like Star Wars, Alien, Solaris, Blade Runner and 2001 have in common but being set in the future with as yet undeveloped technology? It'd be like calling Gone With The Wind, Ben-Hur, All Quiet On The Western Front, Caligula and The Life Of Brian all part of the same genre simply because they all take place in the past.



Anyway, 2001's a great movie, on of the few pre-Star Wars films whose special effects still hold up over time. It's split in thirds: the first section, about the monkeys, is my favorite; the second, about the computer, is the most accessible, it's often remarked how Hal is the most human character in the movie; the third, about, well, that depends. It's weird and trippy and it is what you make of it. I think it's supposed to be about the evolution of humankind into a purer consciousness, unbound by physical limitations (which is why you can't see the aliens). But it's not really clear.

1. The Lion In Winter - An idiosyncratic pick for the top spot to be sure. I can't objectively argue that this is a better film than the previous two, but there's no doubt which among them is my favorite. Being essentially a filmed play, the movie doesn't have any of the stylistic elements you look for in a great film, but it does have a plethora of fantastic performances and one of my favorite scripts of all-time. At Christmastime 1183, the royal family of England gathers to figure out who's going to be the new heir to the throne. King Henry wants troglodyte John to succeed him, Queen Eleanor (of Aquitaine) wants Richard (the Lion-Heart), and nobody likes Geoffrey. Joining the party are Henry's girlfriend Alys and her brother Philip, the King Of France. Whoever marries Alys gets to be King. The dialogue is a retro-screwball-comedy dialogue, which makes a nice anachronistic contrast with the period-specific grimy sets and props. The actors are uniformly outstanding. Katherine Hepburn won her third Oscar as the Queen, Peter O'Toole was robbed, again, for playing the King. Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton make their film debuts as Richard and Philip and Nigel Terry plays John (he was Arthur in Excalibur (#7, 1981). It was written by James Goldman (William's brother) and based on his play. One of my all-time favorite films.


Some pretty good Unseen movies this year, most notably the ones by Truffaut, Brooks, and Cassavettes. though I hear the Russian version of War And Peace is really good. It can't be worse than the Hollywood one with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda playing Russians.

The Producers
Where Eagles Dare
The Party
Oliver!
Hang 'Em High
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
The Green Berets
The Thomas Crown Affair
If . . . .
Funny Girl
Ice Station Zebra
Stolen Kisses
Faces
The Bride Wore Black
Finian's Rainbow
War And Peace
Monterey Pop
Rachel, Rachel