Movies Of The Year: 2007 (Part Two)

Been a wild year here at The End Of Cinema Headquarters. While I watched more movies total this year than in 2006, with the Metro Classics series taking up one of my precious days off for much of the year there was much less time and brain energy left for writing about those films. One advantage of this is that for the first time, my end of the year Movies Of The Year will actually have comments for the films instead of a simple ranking, as I haven't had a chance to write about most of the films I saw in 2007 yet.

Still, if this year is anything like years past, we haven't seen the best of the 2007 films yet. When I wrote the 2006 list last year, I'd yet to see a whopping 11 of my current Top 15 films of that year. With highly anticipated 2007 films by Hou Hsiao-hsein, Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhang-ke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr and other End Of Cinema favorites yet to be released in this country, as well as such well-regarded films as 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Silent Light and Persepolis by filmmakers I'm unfamiliar with, there's no reason to expect this list to be anything close to final.

But it's that time of the year, and list we must. Of course, because we here at The End take a long and broad view of history and the world, only films that have 2007 as their year of release on imdb are eligible for the 2007 list. This tends to create a comparability problem when looking at the lists of other folks, who believe that films only exist when they happen to show up wherever they live. Thus, any number of 2006 films show up on other people's lists that won't make it on to mine (at least eight of the Indiewire Critics Poll Top 20 aren't 2007 by my reckoning, for example). With this list, therefore, I'll be integrating films from 2006 or earlier that premiered in the US in 2007. For The Big List, however, only the actual 2007 films will be listed. The previous years' film titles will be italicized below.

So, with Olivier Messaien's Quartet For The End Of Time on the soundtrack (thanks to Alex Ross) and fueled by a not inconsiderable amount of Diet Coke, here are the Movies Of The Year for 2007.

41. Beowulf
40. Spiderman 3
39. Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
38. Spielberg On Spielberg
37. Transformers
36. 300
35. Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix
34. The Bourne Ultimatum
33. Bienvenue a Cannes
32. Hot Rod
31. Michael Clayton
30. Hot Fuzz
29. Superbad
28. Knocked Up
27. Lars And The Real Girl
26. Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
25. Tears Of The Black Tiger
24. Stardust
23. Eastern Promises
22. Paris, je t'aime
21. Paprika
20. Sunshine
19. The Host
18. Juno
17. Waitress
16. The Simpsons Movie

15. Lust, Caution - Ang Lee's adaptation of Eileen Chang's story was a huge hit in China, and it's not hard to see why, what with glamorous and often brilliant acting from stars Tony Leung and Tang Wei, beautiful production design and one of the year's best scores surrounding a dark WW2 spy-thriller narrative. And the sex. The very explicit sex. Like all of Lee's films, the movie is a visual feast with a surprisingly problematic story. Going into too much detail would spoil it, but I can't say I'm happy with the way the plot resolves itself. Too abruptly unfeminist for me. But still, a worthwhile film and one that, unlike most of the films below it on this list, I look forward to watching again.

14. The Darjeeling Limited - Wes Anderson's slightest film to date, the story of three brothers trying to reinvent their family and themselves on a train journey across India. It has all the good and bad elements of Anderson's style, including some of his best straight-ahead compositions (the ones with the camera facing perpendicular to a rectangular object like a wall or train while the characters either look straight ahead or move sideways as the camera tracks with them, often in slow-motion) and a vibrant use of color (including the blues and yellows he also used well in The Life Aquatic). Still, the movie doesn't seem to explore any new territory for Anderson, and it ever really reaches the poignancy or oblique emotional power of his earlier films. And the film also, embarrassingly, falls into the imperialistic (if not exactly racist) trap of having rich white men begin their spiritual awakening through the death of one of the local brown people. Still, Anderson's films I don't think are designed to be fully appreciated on first viewing. Of all his films, only Rushmore did I love immediately. There's something about the intricacy of his design, and the subtlety of his film's emotional shifts that demand repeated showings to be grasped in their entirety.

13. Zodiac - David Fincher's procedural about the unresolved hunt for the eponymous serial killer is the critical dark horse of the year, to the point that it's becoming overrated. The ensemble cast is terrific, led by Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr, and the digital cinematography by Harris Savides is a benchmark for that emerging medium. But there's something missing from the film for me. I feel like it works better in the abstract (cool! a film about the search for a killer where everyone goes nuts because they can never find him. Obsession! Madness! Woohoo!) that it does on the screen. This is, no doubt, related to the fact that for much of the film, it plays out like a conventional thriller and not the experiment it tends to get described and remembered as. I'm thinking not so much of the reenactments of the actual murders (which would be unnecessary if the point of the film was the investigators and not the killer) but of the way the film resolves itself, specifically Gyllenhaal's trip to a suspect's basement, with all its creepy killer-in-the-dark vibe that feels much more like Silence Of The Lambs than it really should.

12. The Diving Bell And The Butterfly - About as good as can be possibly be expected from a film that resides more or less solidly in the despised Disease-Of-The-Week genre. Director Julian Schnabel follows the pattern of such uplifting films as My Left Foot and Shine, but films it with so much élan that you forgive its predictability. Mathieu Amalric's performance as the Elle magazine editor who has a stroke and proceeds to write a book by blinking his left eye comes alive in his narration, continuously undercutting the well-meaning doctors, therapists, friends and priests who try to help him often to hilarious effect. Marie-Josée Croze, who, along with Amalric, was great in a supporting role in Munich, plays a speech therapist and has gotten some attention for her performance here, though it seems to me her performance almost entirely consists of looking adorable, which, I grant, she does extremely well. Schnabel's gotten a lot of recognition for the film, picking up Best Director awards at Cannes and the Golden Globes, though it seems to me the awards should be going to Januz Kaminski, whose cinematography is nothing short of brilliant and has thus far only won a technical award at Cannes and a couple critics association awards.

11. Once - The indie film sensation of the year, like Zodiac, suffers from overrated syndrome, but getting past the hype, there's a charming little romantic musical about marginal people trying and failing to connect. Shot in an only occasionally obnoxious handheld digital style, the film revels in the procedure of musical performance. Like another filmmaker on this list, Tsai Ming-liang, director John Carney allows the audience the pleasure of watching people do stuff, and there are few things that fascinate me as much as watching people play music. Glen Hansard and especially Marketa Irglová are very good at the acting part of their jobs, and while their music isn't nearly as outstanding as the thousands of people who've bought the soundtrack seem to think it is, it is perfectly fine and fits the story and these characters very well.

10. Grindhouse - Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's double feature ode to the crappy genre films of the 70s was one of my most enjoyable film experiences of the last few years, but I think the films work best in that format, back to back with fake trailers and missing scenes. Tarantino's longer cut of his half, Death Proof, which is the only one available on DVD, is significantly worse than the theatrical version: it's unnecessarily longer, doesn't play as well without Rodriguez's chaotic splatterfest preceding it and adds a helpful intertitle between sections that eliminates some narrative ambiguity and destroys my (much more interesting) theory of the time structure of the plot (making the film a generic Women kick ass! revenge film instead of making an interesting statement about violence begetting violence and turning the charismatic and terrifying villain of the first half into a simpering moron in the second). The film rates this high because of the energy and excitement of the theatrical release.

9. Rescue Dawn - Werner Herzog's remake of his own documentary about the true story of an American pilot shot down on his first mission in Vietnam who escapes from a Laotian POW camp and has to fight his way through the jungle has terrific performances from Christian Bale (with a wild accent), Steve Zahn (not being funny) and Jeremy Davies (who played my most reviled character in Saving Private Ryan, a war film much inferior to this one). The best work on the film though, continuing a trend from this year, is by cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, who manages to make the jungle as beautiful as it is terrible, visually demonstrating one of Herzog's most persistent themes. It's perhaps the most conventional of any Herzog I've seen, with a straightforward narrative, a happy ending and celebration of mainstream virtue and entirely lacking any tortured yet strangely heroic insanity, but that's OK. Not every film can have Klaus Kinski.

8. I Don't Want To Sleep Alone - Another director stepping towards conventionality is Tsai Ming-liang, with this film about a homeless man (Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng playing the character he often plays in Tsai's films) who gets involved in a love triangle with the man who nurses him back to health after a severe beating and a waitress at a local coffee shop. All the characters live on the edge of society, the waitress living with her mom in a shell of a building about to be sold out from under them and spending much of the day caring for her comatose brother (interestingly also played by Lee, don't know what to make of that yet), the man who finds Lee squats in one abandoned building while working to pump a lake of water out of another, and Lee himself, a Taiwanese main in Malaysia unable to speak the language (I don't think he says a word the entire film). Globalization is the ostensible political subject of the film, though it doesn't appear to necessarily be for or against it. More interesting, to me and, I suspect, to Tsai, is observing people in process. Much of the film is taken up with the small details of taking care of Lee Kang-sheng in each of his roles. While not as obsessed with seemingly mundane activity as Tsai's Goodbye Dragon Inn, there's still ample opportunity to get bored out of your skull if you're not in the right frame of mind. Though there are some comic moments, the film is never as funny as the intricate and unexpected What Time Is It There?. What the film does have that those lack, is a pair of sublime images revolving around water (Tsai's favorite motif). They aren't as shocking or transcendent as those in the next two films on the list, but they are as beautiful as anything in film this year.

7. Still Life - Director Jia Zhang-ke's story of two people searching for other people in the wake of the floods caused by the Three Gorges Dam is a deliberately-paced examination of the effects the dam has had in dislocating thousands (millions?) of people of the past several years. If this all seems a little dry, it is. For large stretches of the film it's as sober and realistic as Jia's previous work, calling to mind especially Platform, about a theatre troupe coming of age in the economic, political and cultural chaos of the 70s and early 80s. But, not unlike The World (but much more successfully, I think), this film contains a couple of sequences of such magic that to say anymore would be a spoiler felony. The film's not yet available on US DVD, and is supposed to get a theatrical release of some sort early this year. Don't blink and miss it.

6. Ratatouille - Director Brad Bird's best film to date, and certainly the best Pixar movie, if not the best Disney-related film since Sleeping Beauty, this story of a rat who wants to be a chef gets to the core of what it means to be an artist. Even more surprising is that in its perfect final 20 minutes or so, it gets to the core of what it means to be a critic and consumer of art. Apparently alone among mainstream American animators, Bird treats his films as films, and the camera moves as if it were actually filming actual space, gliding up down and around like the great crane shots of Orson Welles, Max Ophuls or Paul Thomas Anderson (to make some ambitious, not entirely absurd comparisons). The animation is as stunning as you expect from Pixar, being both realistic and stylized at the same time. The film's been criticized for the weakness of the main human character, the incompetent chef Linguini that the rat Remy controls like a puppet. I don't get it though. Isn't he supposed to be weak? He's having his movements controlled by a rat!

5. Climates - Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's fifth film, and the first that I've seen. Ceylan and his wife Ebru play a married couple who decide they can't stand each other and break up over the summer. In the fall, Ceylan tries to rekindle a romance with an old mistress of his (complete with a hilariously awkward attempt at rough sex), but that doesn't seem to do it for him. So, in wintertime he tries to reconcile with his wife. The Ceylan's are quite good, but the real star of the film is the weather, filmed magnificently with a digital camera by Gökhan Tiryaki. From the beads of sweat on Ebru Ceylan's body in the summer, to the massive snowflakes in winter, there are more just plain stunning shots in this film than any I've seen this year. Narratively speaking, the film is alright, there's nothing particularly new about the story, or the way Ceylan tells it. Though I did quite like the ending.

4. There Will Be Blood - The next three films are doubtless the top 3 American films of 2007, and that isn't likely to change, though the order may very well (I've only seen each of them once, for one thing). Paul Thomas Anderson's epic set in turn of the century California integrates his own obsessions with family and disastrous fathers into a grand narrative of the conflict and connections between peculiarly American versions of Wild West capitalism and evangelical Protestantism. Anderson's direction, however, is more restrained than in any film since Hard Eight. Though there are still some fine tracking shots, they aren't nearly as flashy as in Boogie Nights, and the film never attempts the fevered intercutting or musicality of Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love. Not that there isn't music: the score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood stands out as the year's best, though on first viewing it doesn't appear as vital to the film as the pop scores in Anderson's last three films (one sequence excepted). Daniel Day-Lewis channels John Huston (whose Noah Cross in Chinatown is a clear template both as a character and a voice) in a literally volcanic performance that slowly builds to an eruption in the film's closing sequences that either sends the film over the top into masterpiece territory or destroys the whole drama of the picture, depending on the viewer. I'm solidly in the masterpiece camp. There are few things more virtuous in a film than having the guts to blow the whole thing up from the inside.

3. No Country For Old Men - Speaking of blowing things up, the Coen Brothers do exactly that in the last third of this film, when the narrative shifts from a conventional cat-and-mouse film with Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss and a suitcase full of money on the run from Javier Bardem's oddly coiffed coin-flipping killer Anton Chigurh to a somber meditation on the meaning of violence, stories of violence and the ways we choose to cope with both of those things. Millions of viewers are, of course, outraged at this development, though I wonder what they were thinking all those long Tommy Lee Jones monologues that begin and punctuate the rest of the film were all about. On the other end of the critical spectrum, are the highbrow Coen haters, but I already wrote about how tired of their arguments I am. The film rates this high for me not just because of its technical skill (the ensemble acting is terrific, with Kelly Macdonald in particular doing great work in just a few scenes, and Roger Deakins's cinematography is as good as anything he's done with the Coens, and that's saying a lot) but because of its ambiguity: because the questions it raises about narrative and about society are as interesting as those raised by any other film (but one) of 2007. It's too bad that none of the debate around the film wants to try to deal with those questions, instead choosing to focus on what the film, and the Coens, are not.

2. I'm Not There - Todd Haynes's anti-biopic based on the idea of the life of Bob Dylan and starring six actors playing six different characters that are all, more or less, not Bob Dylan. It's a film about the conflicts between art and politics, between celebrity and art, between the past and the present and between men and women and even, occasionally, about Bob Dylan. Haynes steadfastly refuses to engage the question of who Bob Dylan is. Far more interesting (and knowable) is the question of what our idea of Bob Dylan is. Marcus Carl Franklin plays not-Dylan as Woody Guthrie, an anachronistic black kid who rides the trains from town to town singing old folk songs. Christian Bale plays a young protest singer who becomes disillusioned with the left and eventually becomes a born-again Christian preacher. Heath Ledger plays an actor who once played Christian Bale's character in a movie (my favorite not-Dylan: not only is he not-Dylan, he's not a not-Dylan) whose marriage to Charlotte Gainsbourg is slowly disintegrating in the 70s, the decade when the idealism of the 60s was exposed as the narcissism that lead to the Reagan 80s. Cate Blanchett plays the most Dylan-esque not-Dylan, pinned in a black and white 8 1/2 landscape, cut like Masculin, féminin and reciting lines out of Don't Look Back while arguing with a persistent critic named Mr. Jones and lip-syncing to Stephen Malkmus covering Dylan songs. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, old and retired to the country, an Old Weird America that can't help but drag him back to some kind of political stand. Finally, Ben Whishaw plays Arthur Rimbaud, an artist dragged before an inquisition and forced to justify himself before an unseen power. Haynes cuts from character to character along the path of a generic musical biopic (slow rise out of poverty, success, love, fame, drugs, crash, triumphant return), though temporally jumbled such that it's the emotional trajectory of the genre that drives the narrative, instead of any kind of A then B causality. All of the actors are quite good, though Bale at times is trying too hard (the TV interview scene is the low point in the film). Blanchett has been justly praised for her performance, and I think Whishaw is excellent as well with the least screen-time. I was always going to be a sucker for this film, huge Dylan fan that I am, so it's not really a surprise that I'd rate it this highly. There's far too much to it to take in in only one viewing, and there's no 2007 film I look forward to revisiting more again and again.

1. The Wind That Shakes The Barley - Ken Loach's masterful story of the Irish Revolution and subsequent Civil War was my #1 film of 2006 and I still think it's better than any film I've seen in 2007 as well. But that may very well change. It usually does.

In addition to the ones cited in the intro that have yet to get a US release, here's some more films I haven't seen:

Across the Universe
After The Wedding
American Gangster
The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
Atonement
Away From Her
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Black Book
Black Snake Moan
Charlie Wilson's War
Control
Gone Baby Gone
Helvetica
Into The Wild
The King Of Kong
The Lives Of Others
Margot At The Wedding
The Namesake
No End In Sight
Offside
The Savages
Sweeney Todd
3:10 To Yuma
12:08 East Of Bucharest
28 Weeks Later
La vie en rose
Walk Hard

Movies Of The Year: 2007 (Part One)

Still need to see There Will Be Blood (looks like Thursday), so the list for 2007 will have to wait until next week. But to fill the time until then, here's the return of a nice DVD Beaver listserv idea.

I saw 302 films for the first time in 2007. Of those, 259 were more than a couple years old. Here's the top 51, in alphabetical order:

A Canterbury Tale
Air Force
All That Heaven Allows
Bad Day At Black Rock
Bend Of The River
Cranes Are Flying
Early Spring
El Dorado
Flowers Of Shanghai
Goodbye South, Goodbye
Hell In The Pacific
I Know Where I'm Going!
Jour de fete
L'Eclisse
Lancelot du lac
Last Year At Marienbad
Le million
Le proces de Jeanne D'arc
Letter From An Unknown Woman
Lola Montes
Madame de. . .
Mon oncle
Monsieur Verdoux
Morocco
New Rose Hotel
On Dangerous Ground
Paisan
Platform
Police Story
Portrait Of Jennie
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . And Spring
Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums
Taste Of Cherry
The Dawn Patrol
The Decalogue
The Exterminating Angel
The Last Laugh
The Leopard
The Long Goodbye
The Loyal 47 Ronin
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Ox-Bow Incident
The Steel Helmet
The Tarnished Angels
The Thing From Another World
To Be Or Not To Be
Tokyo Twilight
Tout va bien
Tropical Malady
Unknown Pleasures
Woman In The Dunes

In other news, Metro Classics will be back in February. The bookings aren't set yet, but this should be the lineup:

Musicals with Gershwin Scores:

Shall We Dance?
An American In Paris
Funny Face

Westerns with scores by folk rock legends::

Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Dead Man

Movies about composers that aren't biopics and have colors in the title:

The Red Shoes
Three Colors: Blue
(and red + blue =) Purple Rain

Coen Fatigue

I know I promised some new content this week, so I guess I should write something. Ryland over at Vinyl Is Heavy is trying to get a bunch of folks together for a series of articles on the Coen Brothers, and I had a germ of an idea about responding to the attacks on the Brothers and No Country For Old Men from such esteemed quarters as Dave Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum and many of the folks on the "a film by" listserv. The charges basically come down to 1) an inappropriate attitude towards screen violence (ie, enjoying it too much); 2) condescension towards their characters (specifically rural, accented types portrayed as slack-jawed yokels); and 3) condescension towards their audience by failing to challenge either their beliefs about the world or film form.

But frankly, after weeks of reading and thinking about this stuff, I'm sick of the whole argument, for or against. As usually happens when I get to the end of an argument about film, I've reached the point where I think the whole thing comes down to subjective emotional responses, extraneous baggage that we all bring to the films we watch and which can't help but color our impressions of them. Yes, I believe that the violence argument is potentially valid, but I also think it's an artifact of the lefty baby-boomer self-righteous politicization that has run rampant through the universe, crushing everything in its path. (One of the dissenting voices on "a film by", unfortunately I forget who, pointed out that the polar opposite takes on the Coens and No Country, seem to be along the lines of "modernist" vs. "post-modernist" critics. I guess that puts me firmly in the "post-modernist camp, whatever that is.) The Coens choose sides in this struggle long ago with Barton Fink, an explicit attack on the kind of leftist, academic art that some many critics admire for its moral statements, but that doesn't have a damn bit of relevance to the lives of ordinary people. That the film went on to win the Palme d'or at Cannes can only have rankled these critics all the more. (Rosenbaum, in one of his less impressive critical arguments, apparently sees the film as nothing other than a personal attack on William Faulkner. A tree in a forest if ever there was one). I might find this criticism more compelling if it didn't seem to so often come from people who seem to have a personal dislike of the Coens as snot-nosed smart-aleck upstart kids who won't get off their lawn. (Swear to God: Kehr attacks the Coens for showing period-specific linoleum in No Country. Linoleum!)

The second two arguments I find, to the extent that they are intelligible, to be entirely subjective, that is, wholly dependent on the mind of the viewer, regardless of anything the Coens put on the screen. I don't know how anyone who hasn't already made up their mind can find the Coens condescending to Marge Gunderson (in Fargo) or can see anything but the affection they have for every character in The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona. As for condescending to the audience, well the Coens are populists, and I guess you can read giving people films they can enjoy as condescending. But personally, I don't see anything wrong with it. Of course, the ending of No Country has many in the mass culture outraged. It seems to be the middlebrow instead that's embracing the film.

I like the idea of the Coens as populists, reworking popular genres with their own idiosyncrasies. One of those being a fascination with rural America and specifically its speech patterns and accents. The Coens's filmography is a tour through the same world Bob Dylan explored with The Basement Tapes, what Greil Marcus called "The Old Weird America" (which may just have well been the title for O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Dylan dug through old recordings of ancient, pre-modern songs and ballads and put his own personal spin on the music of Appalachia, Delta Blues, English folk, Christian hymns, etc, adopting the speech patterns and diction of those who inspired him (something he had done from the very beginning of his career). The Coens work in the realm of both popular and formerly popular film genres (film noir, the gangster film, screwball comedy, the Western, etc) coloring those films with accents quickly vanishing from the American soundscape (Upper Midwest, West Texas, Appalachia, Irish and Italian American, Rosalind Russell) speaking ornate dialogue that is at once contemporary and oddly archaic. Not stylized to the extent of David Milch's Elizabethan Old West in "Deadwood", but instead just a little bit off.


All their films work as traditional genre pieces while bringing something new to them. There's certainly nothing in any "serial killer" film (to use Rosenbaum and others' arguable categorization of No Country) to compare to the final third of the film, where it becomes something else entirely (A meditation on the timelessness of evil? A coming to terms with how we deal with the violence and chaos in our midst? A justification for apathy in the face of injustice? You tell me).

That the Coens are skilled filmmakers no one seems to argue. No they are not Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Robert Bresson or Jean-Luc Godard, inventing languages of cinema with every new film. But neither are they soulless Brett Ratners sucking all life out of the universe. They are largely apolitical genre filmmakers. And it seems to me that there's nothing a baby-boomer auteurist hates more than a technically skilled apolitical genre filmmaker. But, that's just like, my opinion, man.

Movie Roundup: Still Not Here Edition

I'd hoped to be back in the blog game this week, but I got a nasty head cold for Christmas instead. So I'm focusing on the mammoth Ford At Fox boxset (My new #1 DVD of the year), basketball and the wife's homemade chicken soup instead. I have managed to watch a few movies over the last few weeks, and here's the contentless updates to The Big List:

Late Autumn: 6, 1960
The Darjeeling Limited: 2007
Red Dust: 7, 1932
Kameradschaft: 4, 1931
Ace In The Hole: 5, 1951
Hot Rod: 2007
Juno: 2007
Once: 9, 2006
Drums Along The Mohawk: 11, 1939
The Prisoner Of Shark Island: 8, 1936

If all goes well, I'll be back next week with the 2007 Movies Of The Year (need to see There Will Be Blood still) and a contribution to the series on the Coen Brothers over at Vinyl Is Heavy.

DVDs Of The Year

Here's my top 5 for the year thus far, only including DVDs I own:

1. Eclipse Series: Late Ozu and Early Samuel Fuller. Fine transfers of some great, previously unavailable films at a reasonable price. Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight and The Steel Helmet are as good as any new movie I've seen this year.


2. Dragon Dynasty: The Weinstein Company finally does something good for Asian Cinema, putting out outstanding versions of Hong Kong classics at pretty cheap prices: The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin, Five Fingers Of Death, One-Armed Swordsman, Police Story 1 & 2, Last Hurrah For Chivalry, The Protector and Hard-Boiled. The RZA's commentary on 36th Chamber isn't the most awesome thing in the history of the world, but it's pretty good. The Police Story discs are plagued by Brett Ratner commentaries, but they aren't as bad as you'd think.

3. Criterion: The best DVD company in the world continues to put out great products. This year, I've got: Yojimbo/Sanjuro, The Third Man, La Jetee/Sans Soleil, Stranger Than Paradise/Night On Earth, Days Of Heaven, and Breathless. Days Of Heaven's probably the best of them, the Jarmusches next. Two-Lane Blacktop doesn't arrive until next week.

4. Masters Of Cinema: Britain's counterpart to Criterion puts out editions that are even more deluxe, though they're more obscure and, unfortunately, there aren't as many of them. This year, I've got a pair of FW Murnau classics, Nosferatu and Tabu. They've also started releasing Kenji Mizoguchi DVDs, with their version of Sansho The Bailiff (paired with the previously unavailable Sisters Of Gion) tempting me to double dip.

5. The Stanley Kubrick Collection: Long-rumored and finally released. I'd been waiting over two years to buy any Kubrick DVDs in anticipation of this. With 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut (uncensored!) the only complaint is that it isn't big enough to include Barry Lyndon, Paths Of Glory, The Killing, Killer's Kiss and Spartacus.

Honorable Mention: Rio Bravo and Funny Face, the best regularly priced DVDs of the year, great films, great transfers.

Three things I think would be great, but I don't have them yet: Jean-Luc Godard's 4-disc Histoire(s) du cinéma, which I have every reason to believe is one of the most important and best things he ever did. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, whose cost is prohibitive for a 15 hour, 7-disc TV series I've never seen. Finally, the mammoth 21 disc Ford At Fox boxset, perhaps the best DVD box ever.

Movie Roundup: I'm Not Here Edition

As you can tell, I have had no time for The End lately, what with holidays and family and Metro Classics sucking up all my spare moments/brain space over the last couple months. My movie watching is way down as well, as I'm trying to reconnect with the NBA after several years away. Still, I've got quite a few new additions to The Big List, and I figured I'd just list them all here, sans capsules. If you'd like to know details of what I thought about any of these films, or why I ranked them where I did, feel free to ask in the comment section.

The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers: 12, 1946
Executive Suite: 13, 1954
Grizzly Man: 5, 2005
The Steel Helmet: 2, 1951
The Tall T: 9, 1957
Blood On The Moon: 19, 1948
Vivacious Lady: 7, 1938
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde: 11, 1941
The Charge Of The Light Brigade: 8, 1936
The Affairs Of Dobie Gillis: 11, 1953
Pat And Mike: 18, 1952
Macao: 12, 1952
The Ox-Bow Incident: 4, 1943
His Last Game: 1909
The Ball Player And The Bandit: 1912
The Bigamist: 20, 1953
À nous la liberté: 3, 1931
To Be Or Not To Be: 5, 1942
Lust, Caution: 2007
Blond Cheat: 9,1938
Maid's Night Out: 10, 1938
Passport To Suez: 14, 1943
Brigadoon: 10, 1954
Lust For Life: 15, 1956
Michael Clayton: 2007
Words And Music: 17, 1948
Mean Girls: 18, 2004
Lars And The Real Girl: 2007
No Country For Old Men: 2007
I'm Not There: 2007
The Newton Boys: 22, 1998
The Mask Of Dimitrios: 13, 1944
The Last Laugh: 2, 1924
A Midsummer Night's Dream: 7, 1935
Beowulf: 2007
Waitress: 2007
Rescue Dawn: 4, 2006

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

RIP Deborah Kerr

Metro Classics Returns

One week from today, Metro Classics will be back for the autumn, with eleven films over nine consecutive Wednesdays. We're focusing on directors this time around, with three weeks each of Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick and Howard Hawks. There will be two double features: Halloween night we're playing Herzog's Nosferatu, The Vampyre with FW Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror and Dec. 5th we'll have a pair of Howard Hawks screwball comedies with His Girl Friday and Twentieth Century. Two Classics for the price of one! Eleven Classics for the price of nine!!!

The full schedule is:

Oct. 24 - Fitzcarraldo
Oct. 31 - Nosferatu Double Feature
Nov. 7 - Aguirre, The Wrath Of God
Nov. 14 - Days Of Heaven
Nov. 21 - The New World
Nov. 28 - The Thin Red Line
Dec. 5 - His Girl Friday/Twentieth Century
Dec. 12 - The Big Sleep
Dec. 19 - Red River

All films but the Murnau and The Big Sleep are 35mm. Showtimes and tickets are available at Landmark Theatres. Hope to see you there!

Movies Of The Year: 1952

It's been over three months (one crazy summer), but we're back to the countdown. Lots of great films from this year, with no really bad ones.

19. Ivanhoe
18. The Marrying Kind
17. Clash By Night
16. Angel Face
15. The Bad And The Beautiful
14. High Noon
13. The Narrow Margin
12. Monkey Business
11. The Big Sky

10. Rancho Notorious - Fritz Lang's colorful Western starring Marlene Dietrich as the owner of the eponymous ranch, a hideout for all kinds of outlaws on the run. A man's fiancee is killed in a bank robbery, and he hunts the killers to the ranch and goes undercover to discover which of them actually did the killing. As always when Marlene Dietrich is key to the plot, love complicates things. Most of the performances are good, the Technicolors are really stunning, but the hero isn't especially interesting: Arthur Kennedy's pretty lame in the lead role. Bardot digs it, but Lang prefers M.

9. The Life Of Oharu - Another of Mizoguchi's films about how horrible it is to be a woman in medieval Japan. Oharu's the daughter of a high-ranking samurai who's love life leads her into scandal after scandal as she's repeatedly screwed by society on her way all the way down the social ladder. Like every Mizoguchi film I've seen, it's beautiful and heartbreaking, but it's also so so depressing. The piling on of every kind of anti-female evil possible in society onto the life of one character makes her a political statement instead of an actual human.

8. Europa 51 - Another woman gets screwed by society, this time it's Ingrid Bergman directed by Roberto Rossellini. After her son dies, a high society woman becomes obsessed with helping the poor and unfortunate. Her family then, quite naturally, has her committed to an insane asylum, making her some kind of martyr. The dark comedy of the premise (almost Buñuelian, see Viridiana) both tempers and makes more moving the saintliness of Bergman's performance and the religious ways Rossellini photographs her.

7. On Dangerous Ground - Nicholas Ray's terrific pseudo-noir sneaks up on you. It starts in an urban nightmare world as cop Robert Ryan works dangerously close to the edge of psychotic fascism. His superiors send him off to solve a crime in the country after he's pummeled one suspect too many, where he meets a blind girl (Ida Lupino, who may have directed some of the film while Ray was ill) who humanizes him. Turns out her brother is the #1 suspect for the murder of a young girl. Ryan and Lupino are at their best, and Ward Bond gives a fine performance as the dead girl's revenge-minded father. The photography, both of the city and the snowbound country is noir at its finest.

6. Bend Of The River - Jimmy Stewart-Anthony Mann Western about a reformed outlaw who guides a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon. They meet up with another outlaw Arthur Kennedy) along the way, who helps out until they get to Portland. As winter comes on, the gold crazy townfolk try to extort the poor settlers (selling food at jacked up prices, etc). Stewart and Kennedy steal the supplies, but on the way back Kennedy steals them again and tries to sell them to a mining camp, leaving Stewart for dead. So Stewart's got to defeat him, get the supplies to the starving farmers all while maintaining his newfound morality. Like with all their Westerns, Mann's terrific at bringing out the hard edges in Stewart: he's always convincing as a man struggling to not be violent. The scene where he finally snaps is one of the great scenes in the career of arguably the greatest actor in film history.

5. Othello - Orson Welles's terrific adaptation of the Shakspeare play, made under the adverse conditions that plagues him most of his career. The famous anecdote is that the proper costumes didn't arrive, so he moved a scene to a Turkish bath so the actors only had to wear towels. Where Olivier's Shakespeare films are formalized recitations of "great works" with little feeling, life, or cinematic style, Welles's are exactly the opposite. With a dark noir style and naturalistic acting, Welles gets the terrible emotions at the heart of all great Shakespeare. An Olivier Othello would be an unspeakable travesty. I think I prefer Welles's pitch black Macbeth, and the brilliant Chimes at Midnight over either, but this is still terrific.

4. Limelight - An aging Charlie Chaplin plays a retired vaudeville performer who everyone's forgotten. When his young neighbor (Claire Bloom) tries to kill herself, he nurses her back to health and teaches her that life's worth living. He helps her ballet career, and eventually she helps him get back on stage, where he does a reunion show with Buster Keaton. Sincere, poignant, wise and often funny, it, along with City Lights, is maybe the best example of Chaplin's unique ability to be sentimental without being maudlin. It also may be the finest performance of his career.

3. The Quiet Man - John Ford's Technicolor Valentine to the mythical Ireland of the imagination of the child of immigrants. A lightly comic romance about an American prizefighter (John Wayne) who has sworn of violence returning to his family home and courting the saucy redhead next door (Maureen O'Hara). O'Hara's brother, the bulging Victor McLaglen, is the big man around town who doesn't much like Wayne, and refuses to pay O'Hara's dowery. So Wayne stuck with a petulant money-hungry wife who won't sleep with him and a brother-in-law who wants to fight him. The film climaxes with on of film's greatest comic fight sequences, with the whole town cheering the two on. It's all very silly, stereotypical, and more than a little misogynist (one of my favorite parts is when a little old lady gives Wayne a stick with which to beat the independent O'Hara). But above all the film is beautiful shots of an idealized Ireland, bright primary greens and reds, terribly romantic and always good-humored and joyous.

2. Ikiru - Possibly the best of Akira Kurosawa's modern day films, and the one that most self-important Kurosawa-haters will say is their favorite of his (or his only good one). The great Takashi Shimura plays a mid-level beaurocrat who finds out he's dying of stomach cancer. This sends him off on a quest for some kind of meaning for his life. Family, friends, women, fun and games all prove to be dead-ends. In the end, he devotes himself to his work, spending his last days navigating the bureaucratic morass to turn an open sewer into a public park. This simple, humanist fable is told with all the power of Kurosawa's cinematic style, and is driven by Shimura's performance, an actor who never did much of anything, except when employed by Kurosawa, where he was one of the all-time greats. The iconic shot of Shimura alone in the snow at night, swinging in his park and singing to himself is one of the great moments in film history.

1. Singin' In The Rain - The consensus greatest musical of all-time, and I'm not going to disagree with that assessment. Gene Kelly plays a silent movie star who has to reinvent himself with the coming of sound. Much of the comedy comes from the actual complications this technological change caused, including his villainous costar, the hideously voiced Jean Hagen, in a brilliant comic performance. Along for the ride are Kelly's love interest, a young actress played by Debbie Reynolds and his lifelong sidekick played by Donald O'Connor. The entire history of Hollywood up to that point is encapsulated in the film, as every genre or film style is referenced or parodied at one time or another, all set by writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green to songs from the MGM vault from the late 20s - early 30s by Arthur Freed. The climactic long ballet sequence evens moves past the 30s to the films of the 40s and 50s, melding noir with a massive abstract ballet in the style of Vincente Minelli and Gene Kelly's own An American In Paris from the previous year. All of the musical sequences are terrific, but "Make "Em Laugh" by O'Connor and the title number by Kelly maybe the two greatest expressions of cinematic joy ever filmed. Without a doubt, one of my all-time favorite movies.


Some good stuff amongst the Unseen Movies this year. I've had The White Sheik on the tivo for awhile, but haven't watched it. And I love the title for the Ozu film.

Umberto D.
The Greatest Show On Earth
Forbidden Games
Viva Zapata!
Pat And Mike
Casque D'Or
The White Sheik
The Lusty Men
The Flavor Of Green Tea Over Rice
My Son John
Park Row
Son Of Paleface
Hotel des Invalides

Movie Roundup: Minimalist Capsule Edition

No time, no time. Gotta get back to the Movies Of The Year, but I want to catch up with these first. So we'll try to get through this as quickly as possible.

Henri Langlois: Phantom Of The Cinematheque - I really loved this documentary about the founder of the great Paris movie theatre who more or less invented the rep theatre, film preservation, laid the groundwork for the French New Wave and the auteur theory and caused riots in the streets of Paris when he got fired. Lots of great talking heads, and some fascinating archival footage. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in repertory cinema. The #9 film of 2004.

The Big Steal - Fun adventure noir with Robert Mitchum and jane Greer chasing money and being chased in turn in Mexico. Directed by Don Siegel, it's got an impressive car chase for the 40s, very fast. The #15 film of 1949.

Topaze - Mediocre comedy/drama about a naive teacher caught up with amoral rich folks after getting fired. John Barrymore's great, Myrna Loy;s alright, Ben Hecht wrote it, and it was directed by Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, which sounds fake but apparently isn't. The #5 film of 1933.

Bad Day At Black Rock - Well-above average for a 50s social problem film, with Spencer Tracy as a vet investigating the murder of a local Japanese farmer during WW2. The whole town's involved in the cover up, led by Robert Ryan in another fine performance. Considering the KKK was still doing this kind of thing at the time, and the film's relative lack of preachiness, it's pretty impressive. Directed by Don Siegel. The #10 film of 1955.

Tower Of London - Roger Corman and Vincent Price tell the story of Richard III without all the Shakespearean poetry. Fine as far as it goes, and Price is a good Richard. The #19 film of 1962.

Odd Man Out - Carol Reed when he was still great. Lots of blacks and shadows and noir in Dublin after IRA agent James Mason kills a guy, is wounded and has to make his way out of the city with entire British Army after him. An improvement on John Ford's similarly themed The Informer. Mason's outstanding. The #5 film of 1947.

That's Entertainment! 3 - MGM's documentary about it's own musicals. Lots of fun clips, lots of stars, fun, but I've no idea why Jonathan Rosenbaum loves it so much. The #27 film of 1994.

Pillow Talk - Maybe Doris Day needed a great director to be hot. She was great with Hitchcock and Frank Tashlin, but fairly lame here. Michael Gordon directed, he's the grandfather of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The #16 film of 1959.

Murder! - Early Hitchcock film in which a juror begins reinvestigating the titular crime after they've decided to convict. It's alright, not the greatness of The 39 Steps of The Man Who Knew Too Much, nor as revolutionary as Blackmail, but Hitchcock's always entertaining. The #5 film of 1930.

A Farewell To Arms - It's been almost a decade since I read the book, which I liked, and I think this is a decent adaptation of it. Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes star, Frank Borzage directs. Borzage's an interesting auteur who's film's aren't as available as they should be. I certainly need to see more of them. The #7 film of 1932.

Kiss Me Kate - Another Rosenbaum favorite that on the whole escapes me. There's lots of fun unpacking the various levels of adaptation, and some of the Cole Porter songs are great ("Always True To You" was stuck in my head for days), but other than Ann Miller (who really stands out) the cast is mediocre. Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel? Bleh. The #11 film of 1953.

The Tomb Of Ligeia - Corman + Price + Poe = always awesome. Robert Towne (Chinatown) wrote the screenplay. Price and his new wife are haunted by his dead wife, colorful horror ensues. The #15 film of 1964.

Duel In The Sun - Pretty colors, overthetop melodrama, casual racism coloring an anti-racist plot, Gregory Peck as the bad guy versus Joseph Cotton and Jennifer Jones. Lots of fun. The #11 film of 1946.

One Mysterious Night - Boston Blackie B movie directed by Budd Boetticher. Not a fan of this series about an expert thief, and Boetticher's not yet learned how to be awesome. A couple nice shots, but on the whole, just not very good. The #13 film of 1944.

Too Late The Hero - Pretty decent WW2 film from Robert Aldrich. Michael Caine and Cliff Robertson lead a group of soldiers chased across an island by the Japanese. Good acting, lots of suspense, some fine action and a killer premise for an ending. The #8 film of 1970.

Flying Down To Rio - The first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers only comes alive when they're together, and since their the supporting cast, that doesn't happen nearly often enough. Otherwise, it's a generic 30s musical comedy. The #9 film of 1933.

One, Two, Three - Late Billy Wilder film starring James Cagney as a Coca-Cola exec in West Germany. There's way too much setup, but once it all starts clicking for the zany conclusion, the film nears greatness. Cagney's wonderful with the hyperactive dialogue. The #12 film of 1961.

The Merry Widow - Perfectly pleasant Ernst Lubitsch adaptation of the famous operetta starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. I'm generationally disposed to despise this kind of singing, which limits the enjoyment somewhat. The #7 film of 1934.

The Marrying Kind - Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray star in this George Cukor film about a divorcing couple who flashback on the history of their relationship. It's alright, lots of drama and not as much comedy as you'd expect from Cukor and Holliday. Ray really kept freaking me out because he sounds exactly like Super Dave Osborne (who you can now see on the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm). The #18 film of 1952.

Morocco - Josef von Sternberg film which for some reason a lot of people I respect think is one of the very greatest films of all time. I must have missed something. It's really good, don't get me wrong. Gary Cooper's an officer in the French Foreign legion who hooks up with cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich. Romantic tragedy, some self-sacrifice and Adolphe Menjou clutter things up, but in the end there's a happy, apparently quite anti-feminist (?) conclusion. I like the young Cooper better than the old one, and I always like Dietrich. The #1 film of 1930.

Never So Few - generally generic and mediocre WW2 film by John Sturges, notable pretty much just for it's remarkable cast: Frank Sinatra, Paul Henreid, Steve McQueen, Dean Jones, Gina Lollabridgida, Charles Bronson, Brian Donleavy, Peter Lawford and George Takei. The #15 film of 1959.

The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer - Screwball comedy that isn't very funny, though it stars Cary Grant as a celebrity caught between two sisters: teenaged Shirley Temple and judge Myrna Loy. Irving Reis is no Howard Hawks. The #8 film of 1947.

Come And See - The only one of the Copeland poll films I hadn't heard of is this Soviet WW2 film directed by Elim Klimov. It's very striking to look at, stars real and becomes increasingly surreal until the last 45 minutes or so, which are an absolutely brutal account of the destruction and murder of a village by some subhuman Nazis. A horrific film. The #13 movie of 1985.

Letter From An Unknown Woman - Joan Fontaine stars in this Max Ophuls film about a woman's lifelong obsession with a philandering pianist who doesn't know she's alive. Beautiful, heartbreaking, and darkly tragic as we realize just how delusional the poor girl is. Ophuls masterly fluid direction is at it's best. This makes three of his films I've seen, and I know I've yet to scratch the surface of their greatness. The #4 film of 1948.

Tout va bien - The most famous of Jean-Luc Godard's Maoist films, Jane Fonda and Yves Montand star as a couple who get caught up in a strike at a sausage factory. There's lots of lecturing about horrible working conditions, but all filmed quite beautifully with long two-dimensional tracks across a cut away set (it's like the side views of the boat in Life Aquatic). Voiceovers deconstruct the filmmaking process (it's really a lot of fun) in the beginning. In the middle, the actors deconstruct their relationship. And in the end, Godard reflects on the ultimate failures of 60s radicalism. At least that's how it seemed to me. I wonder if he saw it as quite so elegiac at the time. Endless 2D tracks across a supermarket riot are really cool. One of the cooler tidbit I've learned reading Colin MacCabe's Godard biography: Fonda tried to back out of the film saying she had "evolved" and was no longer working with men. Hilarious. The #7 film of 1972.

Superbad - I'm certainly no running-time Nazi, the the Judd Apatow Group seriously needs to tighten up their films. This is getting ridiculous. A fine one night coming of age story in the tradition of American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused and Can't Hardly Wait. Some funny moments, but nothing revolutionary.

Le Jour se lève - The great Jean Gabin stars in this Marcel Carné proto-noir about a murderer surrounded by police flashing back on the romantic folly that lead him there. Turns out it's a typical love triangle intersection caused almost entirely by people refusing to act rationally and actually tell each other what's going on, the silliness of which kinda deflates the drama. It's a good premise which Carné directs well, and Gabin's pretty terrific. The #13 film of 1939.

Le Petit soldat - Jean-Luc Godard's second film, and the first with Anna Karina, it was banned for three years by the French government for its political content. A young French soldier gets captured by some Algerian rebels and is tortured in an apartment. The low-key torture sequence (matter of fact, but still pretty horrific) is paralleled by an earlier extended sequence of the soldier photographing (and romancing) Karina. Anticipates The Battle Of Algiers in style. The #10 film of 1963.

Eastern Promises - The last thing I expected from this David Cronenberg Russian Mafia in London film was a generic Hollywood thriller, and unfortunately, that's what I got. Fine acting from Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl isn't enough to overcome the cliché that is the final 30 minutes or so. Very disappointing.

Les Carabiniers - The third Godard film of 1963 is a strident anti-war film about a pair of know-nothing nobodies who get caught up in a generic war in order to commit all variety of crimes and earn about the world. At times quite funny, it's also quite serious about the stupidity of all kinds of war. Godard includes actual soldier's letters home as intertitles throughout the film. I wonder if Ken Burns has ever seen this? The #12 film of 1963.

Forbidden Planet - Seen now, after all the sci-fi it has since influenced, it's tough to watch this version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (in Space!) as anything other than a long episode of Star Trek with a shot of Lost In Space and a dash of The Black Hole. But it's a surprisingly pretty film, with decent enough performances by Leslie Nielson and Walter Pidgeon. Anne Francis is quite pretty as well. The #14 film of 1956.

The Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films

Edward Copeland has posted the results of his poll, along with some great pictures and lots of comments, none of which are by me because I never got around to writing them. But you can find comments here at The End about almost all of the films I voted for, and for most of the films that made the final list of 122 nominees.

My ballot was:

1. Seven Samurai
2. Chungking Express
3. The Rules Of The Game
4. Pierrot le fou
5. Playtime
6. The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg
7. Au hasard Balthazar
8. Ugetsu
9. Ran
10. Andrei Rublev
11. Celine And Julie Go Boating
12. Satantango
13. 8 1/2
14. Three Colors: Blue
15. Hiroshima mon amour
16. Late Spring
17. The Double Life Of Veronique
18. Nights Of Cabiria
19. L'Eclisse
20. Rashomon
21. Day Of Wrath
22. Last Year At Marienbad
23. The Battle Of Algiers
24. The Seventh Seal
25. Sansho The Bailiff

All of the ones I voted for made the top 100, but they seemed to finish a lot lower that I thought they would have. Two of my top three ended up in the top two spots, so I can't complain about that. Although the world has apparently still to realize the greatness that is Chungking Express (it finished only 63rd). Pierrot le fou, I imagine, will grow in estimation to the point that if you took this poll two years from now, after Criterion makes the film freely available on DVD, it would finish much higher (up from its current #87 to somewhere near Contempt and Breathless at numbers 20 and 21.

This raises an interesting point about the list, just how dominated it is by The Criterion Collection, Netflix and the several other fine companies that make foreign language films readily available to all of us. None of this would have been possible less than a decade ago.

I grew up in Spokane, a reasonably large town, but not by any means, a major league city. There were many fine video stores there (back in those VHS days) but none of them had any reasonable selection of foreign films. Kurosawa and Bergman were pretty much it, with a smattering of Fellini, Truffaut and a variety of other films that all seemed to star Gerard Depardieu. When I was in college, my friends and I literally went to every video store in Spokane looking for Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. We'd all heard what a great film it was, how it started the French New Wave, etc etc, but it wasn't available: not a single store in town had a VHS copy of Breathless. I didn't want to watch any other Godard film until I'd seen Breathless (since it was the first), not that that was a major issue because the only other one I remember being available was a t a Hollywood Video that had a copy of Godard's King Lear starring Woody Allen and Norman Mailer.

Anyway, years went by and eventually a little jazz store opened in downtown Spokane, and they also rented films. They had a small selection of classic foreign films for rent at some outrageous price (I think it was $6 for a two-day rental, at a time when most of the films (the Kurosawas, for example) we were renting from the chain stores were 49¢ for five days). They had a copy of Breathless, I rented it, watched it. . . . and it was good, but not really worth the wait.

The point is, things aren't like that any more. When I moved to Seattle nine years ago, I was smart enough to get an apartment a mere three blocks away from The Greatest Video Store On The Planet where I was finally able to rent all those films I'd heard and read about for years: Renoir, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Godard, Truffaut, Tati, Wong etc etc. Later DVD, Criterion, Amazon and Netflix came along and changed forever the opportunities for film fans outside all but the very largest cities. Thanks to this format and these companies, among others, if a film is on DVD anywhere in the world, it is remarkably easy for it to be playing in your home in a matter of days.



You could look at the flipside of this, and say how limited this list is by what Criterion's decided to release, how films that aren't readily available on DVD are underrated or simply missing from the group of nominees (Mizoguchi's Chrysanthemums I think is underrated, along with Pierrot and Satantango, which needs to be seen in a theatre for full effect). There are any number of films that either aren't on DVD or are only available in other countries (and thus not distributed by Netflix). Someone else would be better at creating a list of those omissions than me, but off the top of my head I'd name any number of Hou Hsiao-hsien films, especially A City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster (the only English subtitled DVD of which is horribly cropped but is available from Netflix), Chantal Ackerman's Jeanne Dielmann, and King Hu's Dragon Inn. The highest ranked film not available through Netflix is Max Ophuls great Madame de . . . at #49 (it is available in a very nice, and pretty cheap, DVD from England). Next is Celine and Julie in another instance of underrating at #66.

Regardless, everyone has to start somewhere, and this list is a great place for it. There are still 25 or so of the nominees I haven't seen, yet more films to add to the queue.

Movie Roundup: Poll Research Edition

First a quick note for those Metro Classics fans in the audience. We are going to have a fall edition of the series starting sometime in October. We're shooting for the 10th, but that may not be feasible. We've got some great stuff in mind, so stay tuned and I'll announce the full schedule here as soon as everything's finalized.

I mentioned Edward Copeland's non-English language film poll a couple weeks ago. Of the 122 nominees for that poll, there were quite a few I hadn't seen. Before submitting my ballot, due Sept. 16, I wanted to watch as many of those as I could. Here's what I've seen thus far, with a few brief comments about them. And yes, most of these had been saved on my tivo for months, if not years.

Cranes Are Flying - This Russian film from 1957, directed by Mikheil Kalatozishvili follows a girl who's boyfriend leaves her to fight Nazis at the start of World War 2. She ends up marrying his cousin and hating herself, but things more or less work out in the end. It's fairly conventional, plot wise, but wonderfully executed. From the opening sequence, with an eponymous bird's eye view of the young lovers, the film is beautiful. Quite impressive are a series of long tracking shots following the leads through massive crowds and a sequence where the girl finds the smoking remains of her bombed-out home. The #8 film of 1957.

Viridiana - Seems to me like Luis Buñuel's response to Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51 (#8, 1952). That film is about an upper class woman who's son dies and to cope, she devotes her life to helping the poor, only to be declared insane by her family and society at large. Buñuel's film is about a nun-in-training who's uncle dies after trying and failing to seduce her. She leaves the nunnery and devotes her life (and inheritance) to helping the poor. Except the poor turn out to be not much worth helping. Well-made, but essentially a one joke movie. The #9 film of 1961.

The Exterminating Angel - This Buñuel I liked a lot, and it's a real contender to make my final ballot. A bunch of swells have a dinner party and find they can't leave. For days (weeks?) they're stuck in a single room, and no one can even enter the house they're trapped in. You can fill in your own meanings from their, but the real achievement of the film is that it's more than a clever metaphor, it never fails to be an entertaining film. Sure, it's weird and profound, but it's also hilarious. The #5 film of 1962.

Ashes And Diamonds - Andrzej Wajda's influential film follows an assassin in the Polish Resistance on the last day of WW2. He's ordered to kill a communist leader, but accidentally kills the wrong man and finds himself staying at the same hotel as his intended target. Some stunning imagery (a man's jacket catching fire as he's shot in the back, the shadow of an inverted crucifix in a bombed-out church, among others), excellent performances and an overwhelmingly apocalyptic mood and sense of place make it an unforgettable, if horribly depressing film. The #9 film of 1958.

Lola Montès - The DVD Netflix sent me of this was pretty lousy, but it's still easy to tell that this is a great film. Director Max Ophuls last film (he's uncredited on a later one at imdb), it's the story of a famous 19th Century woman who traveled around Europe and had a series of romances with a few famous people, including Franz Liszt and the King Of Bavaria. She's reduced to telling her life story at a circus, while the various acts act out or interpret the events under the direction of Peter Ustinov as the ringmaster. Ophuls's famously fluid camera (long, mobile takes that seemingly dance through the film space) and the lushness of the melodrama make this a highly enjoyable film. But after one viewing on a lame DVD, I'm not ready to call it the greatest film ever made (as Andrew Sarris has done). Actually, I think I liked Madame de. . . (#3, 1955) better, but I'm not sure about that. Frankly, only one showing each of only two Ophuls films is not enough evidence for me to raw any conclusions about anything. The #6 film of 1955.

To Live - One of two Zhang Yimou films to be nominated, and I don't really know why it did. It isn't a bad film by any stretch. Like any of Zhang's films, it's stunningly beautiful, with vibrant colors, terrific period detail and Gong Li. But the story's a conventional "follow a family through several decades of historical events" plot, with boatloads of coincidence and tragic contrivance piled on top. There's some really cool shadow puppetry imagery I'd never seen before, and Zhang deserves some credit for making a film critical of Mao and the Cultural Revolution (the movie's still banned in China, as far as I know), but it's merely a very good historical melodrama, not a truly great film. The #16 movie of 1994.

Every Man For Himself And God Against All - I like that title of Werner Herzog's film oh so much better than the title under which it was nominated, "The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser", which is far too literal and totally lacking in poetry. Anyway, the film is pretty good, a Herzogian companion piece to François Truffaut's The Wild Child (#4, 1970). Both films are about people who don't join civilization until late in life, adolescence in the case of Truffaut, well into adulthood for Herzog. Truffaut's film plays with film technique to create a sense of turn of the century film and science (black and white photography, lots of irises and other antique techniques), reflecting Truffaut's own obsessive cinephilia and the way he viewed everything in terms of film. Herzog's film is much more subdued technically, fitting his own more minimalist style as a director, it's in color, there's some quite beautiful landscapes and images of nature contrasting with the horrors of civilization (a freak show, an upperclass party) and the takes are relatively long and stationary. Bruno S. is quite remarkable as Kaspar, a character who never fails to be fascinating both as an idea and as a person. It might be the most depressing Herzog film I've seen, however. The #7 film of 1974.

The Decalogue - Director Krzysztof Kieslowski's 10 hour miniseries made for Polish television is a fascinating and serious inquiry into ethics and meditation of the ten commandments and their relevance to modern life. All ten stories are centered on a housing complex in Warsaw (the nicest one, according to Kieslowski, which is a political commentary all its own) where most of the people in the films live. The films aren't divided into separate commandments each, but instead explore the decalogue as a whole, the interrelations and contradictions between and within the commandments ("Thou shall not kill" seen through a psychotic murderer and his defense attorney arguing against capital punishment, for example). The films would be a fantastic syllabus for an ethics class, with each story raising more questions than it answers. But as a film, I can;t say it was a particularly enjoyable viewing experience. The cinematography is uniformly drab, reflecting the low-budget of the series, the mediocre DVD transfer and the colorlessness of life in communist Poland, which only adds to the oppressive melancholy of the whole experience. Kieslowki's later films are a lot more fun, both in terms of color and style, and thematically, as romantic (borderline mystical) explorations of modern life. The Decalogue is a serious and quite worthy film, but it's weighed down by a depressing lack of whimsy. The #7 film of 1989.


Dersu Uzala - The only Akira Kurosawa film among the nominees I'd not yet seen, made in the Soviet Union a few years after he tried to kill himself. It's a simple and sentimental story of a turn of the century Russian explorer and the remarkable Goldi tribesman he meets and employs as a guide. It's very much in line with Kurosawa's later pessimism about humanity and it's impact on the world, which crops up even more explicitly in the worst sequences of Dreams (#3, 1990). It's essentially a magical native story, with the civilized white man being shown the true way to live in harmony with the universe by an uneducated yet quite wise Asian (typically in films this role is played by a Native American, for example, Dances With Wolves). It's a step up in the western genre from portraying natives as murderous savages, but it's condescending nonetheless. See Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (#1, 1995) for a more fully human native character. Despite all this, Kurosawa's film is quite good, one of his more pictorially beautiful films (easy to tell, despite the terrible Kino DVD Netflix sent me) with some remarkable landscapes dwarfing the puny humans. There's a remarkable sequence where Dersu and the Russian are lost on a flat plain with night and a blizzard on the way, as well as some of Kurosawa's best ever sunsets. A fine film, but probably not among Kurosawa's 10 best. The #4 film of 1975.

I plan to watch Come And See, the only nominated film I'd never heard of tonight, then get my ballot done, with comments by the deadline on Sunday.