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Showing posts with label Lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lists. Show all posts
Thursday, January 3
The Best Criterions of 2012
Up at Movie Mezzanine, I've put up a list of my 10 favorite Criterion releases from the past year. It was a bit of an off year for the company, but it still put out some of my favorite movies and introduced me to some stunning new discoveries. So head on over and check out my article.
Monday, December 31
The Best FIlms of 2012
This new decade continues to offer up dozens of films that directly refute the seemingly endless cottage industry of “thinkpieces” devoted to cinema’s death. Directors who proudly stick with film until it is ripped from their hands are joined by inventive users of digital, be they up-and-comers or adaptive old masters, people forging new possibilities of visual language with a new format. And for the film viewer, access has never been so open, closed as it may still sometimes seem. Like last year, 2012 offered up an embarrassment of riches, so much so that narrowing down selections proved even more arduous than in 2011. Not only were the movies themselves great, many contained parallels with each other. As such, I arranged my picks for the best the year had to offer as a series of double (and one triple) features that link up thematically, stylistically, or both.
Life Without Principle/ Haywire
“The motive is always money.” That is the justification Ewan McGregor’s defense contractor offers for putting out a hit on his ex-lover in Haywire, and the ethos that drives both Steven Soderbergh’s and Johnnie To’s jazzy anti-thrillers. To stays on the ground level of the financial collapse, sitting in with the bank employees driven to sell sell sell no matter the consequences until the monster they wrought but cannot even see for being so low on the ladder consumes everything. Even criminals get caught up in the matters, dispelling the notion that they live in their own world when their assets suffer as much as the average punter’s. Haywire does not feel the pinch so much because its characters exist in one of the few utterly safe zones, the ever-funded military industrial complex. But it too eats its own, and the petty personal issues that put Gina Carano’s Mallory at risk look even more abhorrent when carried out with the support and means of government and commerce.
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning/Resident Evil: Retribution
John Hyams’ and Paul W.S. Anderson’s respective breakthroughs deconstruct the video game aesthetics that have crept into action filmmaking by probing the medium’s moral, metaphysical and existential implications. Anderson, with his love of vast but contained spaces, crafts a series of game levels where the foes get exponentially stronger and players respawn to be fed back into the grinder. Hyams, on the other hand, sets those players free, only to find that a character programmed to be a conduit for death can only plod on with mindless violence. And yet, neither film lets its fount of ideas get in the way of thrilling genre filmmaking. Anderson’s slo-mo and clever 3D usage let every moment linger, stressing the beauty of the composition and the cheeky critiques embedded within them, while the long-take carnage that caps Universal Soldier is the most thrilling (and, ultimately, horrific) of its kind since the famed long take in John Woo’s Hard Boiled that rose to and fell from a jolting moment of friendly fire.
Consuming Spirits/It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Chris Sullivan’s long-gestating labor of love is an outsider art vision of loneliness and proof that ennui and restlessness affect those out in the sticks as much as they do the upper-middle-class of the world’s cities. Sullivan’s mixture of animation styles allows him to cross lines of memory and deceit (of others and self) as the full extent of his characters’ abuse, regrets and longing are revealed. Of course, memory is denied to Bill, the protagonist of Don Hertzfeldt’s final volume of a trilogy of existential short films (also edited together into a feature-length film of the same title), and Hertzfeldt’s animation often plays out in isolated, ragged bubbles set against a black void. Sense-overloading bursts of avant-garde techniques visualize Bill’s mental illness with shocking clarity, and the fourth-wall breaking reversal of fortunes that concludes the film takes The Last Laugh’s fate-altering coda to new heights and beyond, until the happy ending becomes darker than its original, logical conclusion.
Anna Karenina/Magic Mike
A film about a dying aristocracy trapped in constantly changing but still singular sphere and one about the dissolution of the myth of meritocracy, still wrapped in its plastic to up the resell value. One is a freewheeling adaptation of one of the most revered works of literature, and the other is a movie about male strippers. Both films operate musically, Wright’s with the elegant, classical movement of ostentatious balls, Soderbergh’s with the stuttering, unmasked sexuality of club music. And both, in their own ways, point out the double standards of gender in society. Wright formalizes the female objectification Tolstoy exposed, not only using stylistic flourishes to isolate Anna in the frame but treating Keira Knightley herself as part of the mise-en-scène to be ordered. The double-standard is deepened with Magic Mike, which Joe Manganiello, one of the film’s stars, has rightly said proves that men cannot be objectified.
Barbara/The Deep Blue Sea
Terence Davies' humid melodrama might be more obviously paired with Anna Karenina, as in many ways it is the more faithful adaptation of the same narrative and thematic arcs than Joe Wright’s free-for-all. Yet the mood of its tortured love triangle, where furtive glances and an attempt to batten down swirling emotions, vaguely links with the surveillance-heavy paranoia of Christian Petzold’s more austere East German moral thriller, Barbara. Barbara’s own feelings for the mostly off-screen, wealthy West German lover who beckons her through danger to his arms and the warm but ideologically loyal East German doctor for whom she works fit with Hester’s relationship to the passionate but unstable lover and loving but unphysical husband. Neither women finds all the answers in either, and they face, respectively, political and social repercussions for whatever choice they make. It is interesting which of those proves most unbearable for the chooser.
Killer Joe/Twixt
Two masters at work on genre fare. The difference, of course, is that William Friedkin is well-versed in the exploitation cinema he hones to its sharpest point in his Coen-esque Killer Joe, while the bombastic prestige of Francis Ford Coppola seems so oddly matched for his low-key, oddball Gothic romance. Yet both men make some of their finest films in years, paying homage to old-school grindhouse and horror filmmaking while updating it by either taking the genre to new levels of frankness or by propelling it forward with new technology. Friedkin’s chicken-fried chamber horror is so well-acted it almost achieves a veneer of class, while Coppola effaces himself (and the frame’s image, which he slyly links to his own fall) to get at his own demons. And in their final, deftest strokes, both films reveal themselves to be superb comedies.
Bernie/Girl Walk//All Day
One of the forefathers of modern American independent film joined with a movie that crystallizes the possibilities of new revenue streams for the next wave of independent filmmaking.The latter is the latest city symphony for America’s greatest metropolis (and one that at times recalls the freewheeling, anything goes energy of one of its first, Paul Fejos’ recently revived Lonesome. This New York must slowly warm to the individualistic outburst of Anne Marsen’s spastic, ecstatic dancing, and so much of the film’s joy comes from its disruption of how millions of people simply get on in the same space. The opposite is true of Bernie’s view of small-town Texas, where the real community thrives so vitally on the scruples of individuals they well know that they intrude upon a dramatized recreation to tell their gossip. There is also an inverse of expectations, where the big, cynical city produces a genuinely guileless burst of energy like Marsen and Carthage conjures up a false shade of that same innocence revealed to be a sinister huckster. Inexplicably, Linklater nevertheless shows as much affection for his milieu as Krupnick does for his.
Moonrise Kingdom/Tabu
The new creative peaks for established American aesthete Wes Anderson and upstart Portuguese young master Miguel Gomes both employ, in part or whole, 16mm film stock in their journeys through the wild. The grainy stock helps Anderson dismantle and critique his solipsist dollhouse worlds by following its dissatisfied characters outside the normal bounds of bourgeois comfort as they find ways to bend the wild to that comfort. Gomes goes one step further, using the 16mm, silent second half of Tabu to trace modern Western ennui to its wistful nostalgia for imperial superiority and colonial exoticism. The white privilege of Tabu’s first half and Moonrise’s whole is both perpetuated by characters and undone by the promised chaos of labor unrest in the former and the turbulence and restlessness of youth in the latter.
The Color Wheel/The Comedy
The year’s two funniest films are also two of the most wrenching. Rick Alverson’s The Comedy depicts a man hollowed out by irony, working menial jobs just because he need not worry about money and deliberately provoking others just to see what a genuine reaction to something looks like. But underneath Tim Heidecker’s dead, shark eyes (and the cheap-chic sunglasses that frequently obscure them) is a person screaming for release, making connections the only way he knows how, which is by driving people away. Then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s feature, in which the vicious bickering of two siblings is gradually revealed to be nothing more than sparring matches that prepare both to face even harsher verbal treatment from the outside world. A loneliness links the two films, though The Color Wheel proves both more optimistic and more perverse for staging its emotional breakthrough as its most twisted punchline and, wildly, its most touching moment.
Holy Motors/This Is Not a Film
I’ve seen both of these films twice, and good thing too. The surreal vignettes of Leos Carax’s return to feature-length filmmaking and the political dissidence of Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s un-film could very well have been one-off pleasures, an intense and singular experience that waned once the surprise vanished. Yet both stand proudly as complex, probing films on the nature of art and, more importantly, how art can inform life. Denis Lavant’s tour of personae each has has something to say about the way we get along in the world, from the faces we wear in public to the way life can shift so abruptly. Panahi, under house arrest and filmming a sketch of what he will never be allowed to film properly, winds up with something that strongly resembles the thematic content, even the narrative arcs, of his fictive work that he occasionally shows on his TV. Both filmmakers lament the death of artistic freedom, be it for capitalistic or political reasons, yet both films revitalize cinema for its own sake and in relation to the world outside theater doors.
Romancing in Thin Air/The Day He Arrives
Johnnie To’s undistributed melodrama (one of the best films of this young decade, and handily available as a Region-A import Blu-Ray from Hong Kong) links with Hong Sang-soo’s film in a myriad of ways. Both concern filmmakers who flee their craft, only to find that the more they attempt to retreat from their work, the more life around them begins to resemble a movie. The director within Hong’s film rails against film's promotion of falsity, yet his pining for a waitress who looks like an ex and the temporal confusion of his repetitious arc (which could take place over several days, just one, or a dream) are purely cinematic. The repeated movements and crucial variations that calmly propel Hong’s film are reflected in To’s, in which a jilted, alcoholic actor is revived by a woman harboring a secret obsession with him now compounded by the indirect but overwhelming connection the man has to her and her late husband. The world turns to cinema and cinema takes on the world and reworks it for a better outcome.
4:44 The Last Day on Earth/The Turin Horse /Cosmopolis
The apocalypse has been in for a few years now, but this trio of films each finds new paths to explore how the world falls apart. Abel Ferrara, auteur of a canon of autocritical exploitation, turns in a surprisingly sweet chamber drama, one that suggests that people may rediscover their humanity when money loses all value. David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s book, on the other hand, sees the loss of monetary value as precisely the catalyst for the end of days. The technology that brings people together in the former reminds humans of their obsolescence in the latter, and one is left wondering whether mankind can evolve with its creations to survive a cataclysm of our own making. Béla Tarr’s purported film is, apropos of its Nietzschean inspiration, beyond such trivialities altogether. Space and time slowly reverse over its arduously long shots, morality having been sucked away well before the first of them. All that is left is to have a few last, measly meals and take one last swig of bad brandy before the void swallows the last dregs of existence.
Honorable Mentions: Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Detention (Joseph Kahn), End of Watch (David Ayer), Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos), Sleepless Night (Frédéric Jardin)
Films I've yet to see: The Grey, Amour, Neighboring Sounds, Life of Pi
Ordered top 25:
Life Without Principle/ Haywire
“The motive is always money.” That is the justification Ewan McGregor’s defense contractor offers for putting out a hit on his ex-lover in Haywire, and the ethos that drives both Steven Soderbergh’s and Johnnie To’s jazzy anti-thrillers. To stays on the ground level of the financial collapse, sitting in with the bank employees driven to sell sell sell no matter the consequences until the monster they wrought but cannot even see for being so low on the ladder consumes everything. Even criminals get caught up in the matters, dispelling the notion that they live in their own world when their assets suffer as much as the average punter’s. Haywire does not feel the pinch so much because its characters exist in one of the few utterly safe zones, the ever-funded military industrial complex. But it too eats its own, and the petty personal issues that put Gina Carano’s Mallory at risk look even more abhorrent when carried out with the support and means of government and commerce.
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning/Resident Evil: Retribution
John Hyams’ and Paul W.S. Anderson’s respective breakthroughs deconstruct the video game aesthetics that have crept into action filmmaking by probing the medium’s moral, metaphysical and existential implications. Anderson, with his love of vast but contained spaces, crafts a series of game levels where the foes get exponentially stronger and players respawn to be fed back into the grinder. Hyams, on the other hand, sets those players free, only to find that a character programmed to be a conduit for death can only plod on with mindless violence. And yet, neither film lets its fount of ideas get in the way of thrilling genre filmmaking. Anderson’s slo-mo and clever 3D usage let every moment linger, stressing the beauty of the composition and the cheeky critiques embedded within them, while the long-take carnage that caps Universal Soldier is the most thrilling (and, ultimately, horrific) of its kind since the famed long take in John Woo’s Hard Boiled that rose to and fell from a jolting moment of friendly fire.
Consuming Spirits/It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Chris Sullivan’s long-gestating labor of love is an outsider art vision of loneliness and proof that ennui and restlessness affect those out in the sticks as much as they do the upper-middle-class of the world’s cities. Sullivan’s mixture of animation styles allows him to cross lines of memory and deceit (of others and self) as the full extent of his characters’ abuse, regrets and longing are revealed. Of course, memory is denied to Bill, the protagonist of Don Hertzfeldt’s final volume of a trilogy of existential short films (also edited together into a feature-length film of the same title), and Hertzfeldt’s animation often plays out in isolated, ragged bubbles set against a black void. Sense-overloading bursts of avant-garde techniques visualize Bill’s mental illness with shocking clarity, and the fourth-wall breaking reversal of fortunes that concludes the film takes The Last Laugh’s fate-altering coda to new heights and beyond, until the happy ending becomes darker than its original, logical conclusion.
Anna Karenina/Magic Mike
A film about a dying aristocracy trapped in constantly changing but still singular sphere and one about the dissolution of the myth of meritocracy, still wrapped in its plastic to up the resell value. One is a freewheeling adaptation of one of the most revered works of literature, and the other is a movie about male strippers. Both films operate musically, Wright’s with the elegant, classical movement of ostentatious balls, Soderbergh’s with the stuttering, unmasked sexuality of club music. And both, in their own ways, point out the double standards of gender in society. Wright formalizes the female objectification Tolstoy exposed, not only using stylistic flourishes to isolate Anna in the frame but treating Keira Knightley herself as part of the mise-en-scène to be ordered. The double-standard is deepened with Magic Mike, which Joe Manganiello, one of the film’s stars, has rightly said proves that men cannot be objectified.
Barbara/The Deep Blue Sea
Terence Davies' humid melodrama might be more obviously paired with Anna Karenina, as in many ways it is the more faithful adaptation of the same narrative and thematic arcs than Joe Wright’s free-for-all. Yet the mood of its tortured love triangle, where furtive glances and an attempt to batten down swirling emotions, vaguely links with the surveillance-heavy paranoia of Christian Petzold’s more austere East German moral thriller, Barbara. Barbara’s own feelings for the mostly off-screen, wealthy West German lover who beckons her through danger to his arms and the warm but ideologically loyal East German doctor for whom she works fit with Hester’s relationship to the passionate but unstable lover and loving but unphysical husband. Neither women finds all the answers in either, and they face, respectively, political and social repercussions for whatever choice they make. It is interesting which of those proves most unbearable for the chooser.
Killer Joe/Twixt
Two masters at work on genre fare. The difference, of course, is that William Friedkin is well-versed in the exploitation cinema he hones to its sharpest point in his Coen-esque Killer Joe, while the bombastic prestige of Francis Ford Coppola seems so oddly matched for his low-key, oddball Gothic romance. Yet both men make some of their finest films in years, paying homage to old-school grindhouse and horror filmmaking while updating it by either taking the genre to new levels of frankness or by propelling it forward with new technology. Friedkin’s chicken-fried chamber horror is so well-acted it almost achieves a veneer of class, while Coppola effaces himself (and the frame’s image, which he slyly links to his own fall) to get at his own demons. And in their final, deftest strokes, both films reveal themselves to be superb comedies.
Bernie/Girl Walk//All Day
One of the forefathers of modern American independent film joined with a movie that crystallizes the possibilities of new revenue streams for the next wave of independent filmmaking.The latter is the latest city symphony for America’s greatest metropolis (and one that at times recalls the freewheeling, anything goes energy of one of its first, Paul Fejos’ recently revived Lonesome. This New York must slowly warm to the individualistic outburst of Anne Marsen’s spastic, ecstatic dancing, and so much of the film’s joy comes from its disruption of how millions of people simply get on in the same space. The opposite is true of Bernie’s view of small-town Texas, where the real community thrives so vitally on the scruples of individuals they well know that they intrude upon a dramatized recreation to tell their gossip. There is also an inverse of expectations, where the big, cynical city produces a genuinely guileless burst of energy like Marsen and Carthage conjures up a false shade of that same innocence revealed to be a sinister huckster. Inexplicably, Linklater nevertheless shows as much affection for his milieu as Krupnick does for his.
Moonrise Kingdom/Tabu
The new creative peaks for established American aesthete Wes Anderson and upstart Portuguese young master Miguel Gomes both employ, in part or whole, 16mm film stock in their journeys through the wild. The grainy stock helps Anderson dismantle and critique his solipsist dollhouse worlds by following its dissatisfied characters outside the normal bounds of bourgeois comfort as they find ways to bend the wild to that comfort. Gomes goes one step further, using the 16mm, silent second half of Tabu to trace modern Western ennui to its wistful nostalgia for imperial superiority and colonial exoticism. The white privilege of Tabu’s first half and Moonrise’s whole is both perpetuated by characters and undone by the promised chaos of labor unrest in the former and the turbulence and restlessness of youth in the latter.
The Color Wheel/The Comedy
The year’s two funniest films are also two of the most wrenching. Rick Alverson’s The Comedy depicts a man hollowed out by irony, working menial jobs just because he need not worry about money and deliberately provoking others just to see what a genuine reaction to something looks like. But underneath Tim Heidecker’s dead, shark eyes (and the cheap-chic sunglasses that frequently obscure them) is a person screaming for release, making connections the only way he knows how, which is by driving people away. Then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s feature, in which the vicious bickering of two siblings is gradually revealed to be nothing more than sparring matches that prepare both to face even harsher verbal treatment from the outside world. A loneliness links the two films, though The Color Wheel proves both more optimistic and more perverse for staging its emotional breakthrough as its most twisted punchline and, wildly, its most touching moment.
Holy Motors/This Is Not a Film
I’ve seen both of these films twice, and good thing too. The surreal vignettes of Leos Carax’s return to feature-length filmmaking and the political dissidence of Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s un-film could very well have been one-off pleasures, an intense and singular experience that waned once the surprise vanished. Yet both stand proudly as complex, probing films on the nature of art and, more importantly, how art can inform life. Denis Lavant’s tour of personae each has has something to say about the way we get along in the world, from the faces we wear in public to the way life can shift so abruptly. Panahi, under house arrest and filmming a sketch of what he will never be allowed to film properly, winds up with something that strongly resembles the thematic content, even the narrative arcs, of his fictive work that he occasionally shows on his TV. Both filmmakers lament the death of artistic freedom, be it for capitalistic or political reasons, yet both films revitalize cinema for its own sake and in relation to the world outside theater doors.
Romancing in Thin Air/The Day He Arrives
Johnnie To’s undistributed melodrama (one of the best films of this young decade, and handily available as a Region-A import Blu-Ray from Hong Kong) links with Hong Sang-soo’s film in a myriad of ways. Both concern filmmakers who flee their craft, only to find that the more they attempt to retreat from their work, the more life around them begins to resemble a movie. The director within Hong’s film rails against film's promotion of falsity, yet his pining for a waitress who looks like an ex and the temporal confusion of his repetitious arc (which could take place over several days, just one, or a dream) are purely cinematic. The repeated movements and crucial variations that calmly propel Hong’s film are reflected in To’s, in which a jilted, alcoholic actor is revived by a woman harboring a secret obsession with him now compounded by the indirect but overwhelming connection the man has to her and her late husband. The world turns to cinema and cinema takes on the world and reworks it for a better outcome.
4:44 The Last Day on Earth/The Turin Horse /Cosmopolis
The apocalypse has been in for a few years now, but this trio of films each finds new paths to explore how the world falls apart. Abel Ferrara, auteur of a canon of autocritical exploitation, turns in a surprisingly sweet chamber drama, one that suggests that people may rediscover their humanity when money loses all value. David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s book, on the other hand, sees the loss of monetary value as precisely the catalyst for the end of days. The technology that brings people together in the former reminds humans of their obsolescence in the latter, and one is left wondering whether mankind can evolve with its creations to survive a cataclysm of our own making. Béla Tarr’s purported film is, apropos of its Nietzschean inspiration, beyond such trivialities altogether. Space and time slowly reverse over its arduously long shots, morality having been sucked away well before the first of them. All that is left is to have a few last, measly meals and take one last swig of bad brandy before the void swallows the last dregs of existence.
Honorable Mentions: Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Detention (Joseph Kahn), End of Watch (David Ayer), Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos), Sleepless Night (Frédéric Jardin)
Films I've yet to see: The Grey, Amour, Neighboring Sounds, Life of Pi
Ordered top 25:
- Romancing in Thin Air
- This Is Not a Film
- The Color Wheel
- Cosmopolis
- It’s Such a Beautiful Day
- Moonrise Kingdom
- Holy Motors
- The Turin Horse
- Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
- Bernie
- The Day He Arrives
- The Comedy
- Tabu
- Magic Mike
- Resident Evil: Retribution
- Twixt
- Killer Joe
- Anna Karenina
- Haywire
- Girl Walk // All Day
- 4:44: The Last Day on Earth
- The Deep Blue Sea
- Barbara
- Consuming Spirits
- Life Without Principle
Sunday, December 30
The Top 10 Michael Powell (And Emeric Presburger) Films
I do not know if any director has had as formative an influence on the films I love than Michael Powell and his creative partner, Emeric Pressburger. The film that sits in the number-one slot on the list that follows radically altered what I look for in movies, and it remains my favorite of all time. On his own, Michael Powell was an extraordinarily gifted director, an innate visual genius and a conservative in the Fordian mode, reflected in films that looked fondly on a traditional Britain but also displayed an ambivalence, even borderline acceptance of the nation’s fading importance in the 20th century. (His breakthrough, The Edge of the World, recalls Ford’s How Green Was My Valley in its wistful but clear-headed appraisal of a secluded hamlet eroding to modernity for ill and good.)
With Pressburger, though, Powell crafted not only some of the most sumptuously beautiful films of all time, but some of the most resonant as well. Their propaganda films are anything but, and their postwar work celebrates the preservation of their beloved country even as it offers firm, and sometimes critical, assessments of what needs to be done to maintain Britain’s spirit. Even at their most troubling, however, the filmmakers communicate such vivaciousness of life through some of the greatest Technicolor work in history that an optimism blazes to the surface on their aesthetic mastery. The films below are not merely some of the best ever made, they are also some of the most endlessly, exuberantly entertaining.
Honorable Mention: The Thief of Bagdad
Left off the list proper only because its laundry list of credited and uncredited directorial credits makes attribution to any one filmmaker unwise. But the auteurial quagmire makes no difference on the film itself, one of the most rousing adventures ever put to the screen. Mounted on a vast scale and an extravaganza for pioneered special effects, The Thief of Bagdad also makes great use of its leads, especially Sabu as a plucky, whip-smart thief and Conrad Veidt as the manipulative grand vizier. This film announces to the audience that it intends to go wild from its first shots of a ship painted in surreal, vivid colors, and it only gets more vibrant and astonishing from there. Show this to children, not Disney’s racist, attention-deficit ripoff Aladdin.
10. The Tales of Hoffmann
It may feel like something of a rehash of the Archers’ superior dance movie, but The Tales of Hoffmann may stand as the Archers’ most brazenly stylish work. Bouncing between the vignettes of its adapted opera, Powell and Pressburger wildly vary sets, mood and movement (of dancers and camera) in a fit of orgiastic style. The whole may not equal the sum of its parts, but the film’s pleasures are so overwhelming in its isolated moments that it still manages to awe almost as much as their more cohesive displays of perfectly ordered excess.
9. A Canterbury Tale
It seems so fitting that the first major work of literature in the English vernacular is a foundational text in British humor, and somehow it makes sense that Powell and Pressburger would take look to it for their own view of England. In updating and reworking the material, the Archers offer an amusing look at the ways people are divided by a common language, and how they come together and remain apart in certain areas. The local man who goes about gluing ladies’ hairs to remind them of their fealty to their British boyfriends, the frequently alienated Oregonian sergeant suddenly finding a common tongue with fellow woodworkers as other Brits look on cluelessly. All of these glimpses of country life, and more, shade in a subtle celebration of British spirit, self-effacing, even a bit resigned at times, but proud and noble. Powell and Pressburger always approached propaganda from an odd angle, but never one so delightful as this.
8. The Small Back Room
Mixing the harrowing portrait of alcoholism of The Lost Weekend with a thriller narrative, The Small Back Room trades the Archers’ visual bombast for a confined view of a self-medicating alcoholic who must help defuse a new, booby-trapped German bomb being dropped on the island. But no bottle can stay corked around a sot for too long, and the expressionistic camerawork common to the filmmakers’ other movies soon rears its head in the form of withdrawal hallucinations and the mounting stress of its climax. One of the pair’s most straightforward works, The Small Back Room is nevertheless a good a showcase for their effortless perfectionism as any.
7. 49th Parallel
49th Parallel points to the remarkably subversive and un-propagandic propaganda films the Archers would make during the war. Much as the film depicts the Nazis stranded by the destruction of their U-boat a degenerate killers, it also bothers to dig into the beliefs of the Germans as they struggle toward the border into then-neutral United States. Nearly all in the group openly express dissent with the ideals they are forced to accept or are visibly hollowed out in order to make space for that horrid code. Here is a propaganda movie that remains with the enemy, that stays with them long enough to erode their ideology until only the unbending, grotesque rock is left. Like any truly British propaganda film, its chief weapon is dark, subtle irony: when one of the remaining Germans hesitates over selling an executed comrade’s field glasses for food, another replies, “They belong to the Fatherland. It wouldn’t let us starve, would it?” Even the ending, a hilariously rousing fade-out from a certain ass-whooping, only counts for so much nationalistic cheer in the face of its human contention with the other side.
6. I Know Where I’m Going!
Not many idyllic, romantic traipses around the Scottish countryside begin with a social climber’s dream of eroticized industrial imagery to show her equation of sex and capital. But then, not much about this film fits the mold: its technical exercises prevent the film from lapsing into pre-neorealism, while it makes an early pushback against the coming postwar influx of capitalism by favoring the quiet, emotional aspects of British life over the promise of a powerful and strategic union (hint hint). The Archers may have done their share to make sure Americans were welcomed by British soldiers, but this romance marks a subtle but firm push to keep Great Britain’s spirit.
5. Peeping Tom
Released just before Psycho, Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom is in some ways the more disturbing film. Its conceit of a serial killer driven to murder through his recorded voyeurism is one of the first explicit critiques of the exploitative properties of filmmaking, and the shots of the camera inching toward the victim make the audience shockingly complicit for a film released in 1959. It still gets under the skin, too, and it only ever becomes more disturbing the more one delves into Powell’s other work, so rich in the humanism that has been conditioned out of this film.
4. Black Narcissus
If Powell/Pressburger’s postwar films communicated their fervent wish for Britain to live up to its incredible sacrifice, Black Narcissus is their darkest and most unsettling instruction, turning outward from emotional repair and strengthening bonds with allies to the question of the nation’s now-openly hypocritical imperialism. The conceit is brilliant—nuns sent to civilize the wilds of India find themselves driven to despair and madness by a land they do not understand—but the execution more so. One of the handful of films that could lay credible claim to the greatest use of color, Black Narcissus brims with such expressive force that something as small as the application of lipstick nearly resembles a Grand Guignol flourish.
3. A Matter of Life and Death
Who has watched The Wizard of Oz and not wondered why Dorothy would ever want to return to the dreary monochrome of real life after living in lush Technicolor? A Matter of Life and Death inverts its color schemes, portraying the real world in joyous color while heaven, for all its splendor and glory comes across in stiff compositions and black-and-white. With the world still wallowing in death, the film does not glorify the afterlife but this plane of existence, where wrenching but euphoric things like love mean even more now that so many could not enjoy them ever again. Set during the dying days of the war, A Matter of Life and Death sets its sights on new causes worth fighting for, not national conflicts worth dying for but human achievements that give us a reason to live.
2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
The blustering, reactionary face of an aged Colonel Blimp that opens this film reflects the satire of the comic strip it adapts. Then, the Archers move deeper, probing the life of extraordinary social, political and national upheavals that made that pompous old man who he is. The result is the greatest tribute to, and gentlest critique of, the British Empire, embodied by a man who lives equally by brashness and honor, who epitomizes nationalistic fervor but forms his closest friendship with an “enemy” who seems so unlike the faceless Other conjured by propaganda and xenophobia when met as a person. So many of Powell’s films, with and without Pressburger, display a capacity for multitudes, but never was the Archers’ ability to be shamelessly sentimental and brutally, unflatteringly honest more pronounced.
1. The Red Shoes
The best of the Archers’ work is pure cinema, and they don’t come any purer than The Red Shoes. It is a cinema of elegant but ebullient subjectivity, carefully ordered and formal but dizzying in its impact. An impresario fears life may interfere with art, and the artist under his thumb sacrifices her own for her art. Dance, a communication beyond words and sound, perfectly fits Powell’s visual gifts. Indeed, though there have been many more superior dance sequences in other films, no other film has filmed dance so cinematically, with key edits, daring effects work, and subjective superimpositions. It is the ultimate celebration of artistry, and the ultimate testament to the despair it can create.
With Pressburger, though, Powell crafted not only some of the most sumptuously beautiful films of all time, but some of the most resonant as well. Their propaganda films are anything but, and their postwar work celebrates the preservation of their beloved country even as it offers firm, and sometimes critical, assessments of what needs to be done to maintain Britain’s spirit. Even at their most troubling, however, the filmmakers communicate such vivaciousness of life through some of the greatest Technicolor work in history that an optimism blazes to the surface on their aesthetic mastery. The films below are not merely some of the best ever made, they are also some of the most endlessly, exuberantly entertaining.
Honorable Mention: The Thief of Bagdad
Left off the list proper only because its laundry list of credited and uncredited directorial credits makes attribution to any one filmmaker unwise. But the auteurial quagmire makes no difference on the film itself, one of the most rousing adventures ever put to the screen. Mounted on a vast scale and an extravaganza for pioneered special effects, The Thief of Bagdad also makes great use of its leads, especially Sabu as a plucky, whip-smart thief and Conrad Veidt as the manipulative grand vizier. This film announces to the audience that it intends to go wild from its first shots of a ship painted in surreal, vivid colors, and it only gets more vibrant and astonishing from there. Show this to children, not Disney’s racist, attention-deficit ripoff Aladdin.
10. The Tales of Hoffmann
It may feel like something of a rehash of the Archers’ superior dance movie, but The Tales of Hoffmann may stand as the Archers’ most brazenly stylish work. Bouncing between the vignettes of its adapted opera, Powell and Pressburger wildly vary sets, mood and movement (of dancers and camera) in a fit of orgiastic style. The whole may not equal the sum of its parts, but the film’s pleasures are so overwhelming in its isolated moments that it still manages to awe almost as much as their more cohesive displays of perfectly ordered excess.
9. A Canterbury Tale
It seems so fitting that the first major work of literature in the English vernacular is a foundational text in British humor, and somehow it makes sense that Powell and Pressburger would take look to it for their own view of England. In updating and reworking the material, the Archers offer an amusing look at the ways people are divided by a common language, and how they come together and remain apart in certain areas. The local man who goes about gluing ladies’ hairs to remind them of their fealty to their British boyfriends, the frequently alienated Oregonian sergeant suddenly finding a common tongue with fellow woodworkers as other Brits look on cluelessly. All of these glimpses of country life, and more, shade in a subtle celebration of British spirit, self-effacing, even a bit resigned at times, but proud and noble. Powell and Pressburger always approached propaganda from an odd angle, but never one so delightful as this.
8. The Small Back Room
Mixing the harrowing portrait of alcoholism of The Lost Weekend with a thriller narrative, The Small Back Room trades the Archers’ visual bombast for a confined view of a self-medicating alcoholic who must help defuse a new, booby-trapped German bomb being dropped on the island. But no bottle can stay corked around a sot for too long, and the expressionistic camerawork common to the filmmakers’ other movies soon rears its head in the form of withdrawal hallucinations and the mounting stress of its climax. One of the pair’s most straightforward works, The Small Back Room is nevertheless a good a showcase for their effortless perfectionism as any.
7. 49th Parallel
49th Parallel points to the remarkably subversive and un-propagandic propaganda films the Archers would make during the war. Much as the film depicts the Nazis stranded by the destruction of their U-boat a degenerate killers, it also bothers to dig into the beliefs of the Germans as they struggle toward the border into then-neutral United States. Nearly all in the group openly express dissent with the ideals they are forced to accept or are visibly hollowed out in order to make space for that horrid code. Here is a propaganda movie that remains with the enemy, that stays with them long enough to erode their ideology until only the unbending, grotesque rock is left. Like any truly British propaganda film, its chief weapon is dark, subtle irony: when one of the remaining Germans hesitates over selling an executed comrade’s field glasses for food, another replies, “They belong to the Fatherland. It wouldn’t let us starve, would it?” Even the ending, a hilariously rousing fade-out from a certain ass-whooping, only counts for so much nationalistic cheer in the face of its human contention with the other side.
6. I Know Where I’m Going!
Not many idyllic, romantic traipses around the Scottish countryside begin with a social climber’s dream of eroticized industrial imagery to show her equation of sex and capital. But then, not much about this film fits the mold: its technical exercises prevent the film from lapsing into pre-neorealism, while it makes an early pushback against the coming postwar influx of capitalism by favoring the quiet, emotional aspects of British life over the promise of a powerful and strategic union (hint hint). The Archers may have done their share to make sure Americans were welcomed by British soldiers, but this romance marks a subtle but firm push to keep Great Britain’s spirit.
5. Peeping Tom
Released just before Psycho, Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom is in some ways the more disturbing film. Its conceit of a serial killer driven to murder through his recorded voyeurism is one of the first explicit critiques of the exploitative properties of filmmaking, and the shots of the camera inching toward the victim make the audience shockingly complicit for a film released in 1959. It still gets under the skin, too, and it only ever becomes more disturbing the more one delves into Powell’s other work, so rich in the humanism that has been conditioned out of this film.
4. Black Narcissus
If Powell/Pressburger’s postwar films communicated their fervent wish for Britain to live up to its incredible sacrifice, Black Narcissus is their darkest and most unsettling instruction, turning outward from emotional repair and strengthening bonds with allies to the question of the nation’s now-openly hypocritical imperialism. The conceit is brilliant—nuns sent to civilize the wilds of India find themselves driven to despair and madness by a land they do not understand—but the execution more so. One of the handful of films that could lay credible claim to the greatest use of color, Black Narcissus brims with such expressive force that something as small as the application of lipstick nearly resembles a Grand Guignol flourish.
3. A Matter of Life and Death
Who has watched The Wizard of Oz and not wondered why Dorothy would ever want to return to the dreary monochrome of real life after living in lush Technicolor? A Matter of Life and Death inverts its color schemes, portraying the real world in joyous color while heaven, for all its splendor and glory comes across in stiff compositions and black-and-white. With the world still wallowing in death, the film does not glorify the afterlife but this plane of existence, where wrenching but euphoric things like love mean even more now that so many could not enjoy them ever again. Set during the dying days of the war, A Matter of Life and Death sets its sights on new causes worth fighting for, not national conflicts worth dying for but human achievements that give us a reason to live.
2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
The blustering, reactionary face of an aged Colonel Blimp that opens this film reflects the satire of the comic strip it adapts. Then, the Archers move deeper, probing the life of extraordinary social, political and national upheavals that made that pompous old man who he is. The result is the greatest tribute to, and gentlest critique of, the British Empire, embodied by a man who lives equally by brashness and honor, who epitomizes nationalistic fervor but forms his closest friendship with an “enemy” who seems so unlike the faceless Other conjured by propaganda and xenophobia when met as a person. So many of Powell’s films, with and without Pressburger, display a capacity for multitudes, but never was the Archers’ ability to be shamelessly sentimental and brutally, unflatteringly honest more pronounced.
1. The Red Shoes
The best of the Archers’ work is pure cinema, and they don’t come any purer than The Red Shoes. It is a cinema of elegant but ebullient subjectivity, carefully ordered and formal but dizzying in its impact. An impresario fears life may interfere with art, and the artist under his thumb sacrifices her own for her art. Dance, a communication beyond words and sound, perfectly fits Powell’s visual gifts. Indeed, though there have been many more superior dance sequences in other films, no other film has filmed dance so cinematically, with key edits, daring effects work, and subjective superimpositions. It is the ultimate celebration of artistry, and the ultimate testament to the despair it can create.
Saturday, November 17
The Top 10 Martin Scorsese Films
With Martin Scorsese celebrating his 70th birthday today, what better time than to count down 10 of the greatest achievements of one of America's greatest directors? Unlike his contemporaries, Scorsese has enjoyed a typically stable level of quality over the course of his entire career, not flaming out like a Cimino or Coppola nor exploding beyond his initial, intimate scale the way Spielberg and Lucas did. A consummate craftsman, Scorsese continues to employ technical mastery on a level that up-and-comers can only imitate, and often through contradictorily old-fashioned means. Think the tangible recreations of Gangs of New York, or the lush Technicolor throwbacks of The Aviator or Shutter Island. And when presented with new technology, as with digital and 3D, the director looks not merely to replicate the feel of film but to explore how these technical aspects can influence new directions in storytelling.
Not content merely to provide the world with his own string of great and memorable films, Scorsese has devoted much of his life to the preservation of the movies that inspired him, keeping them alive to motivate the next generation of movie brats. It can be difficult to whittle down his impressive filmography, filled not only with features but documentaries, concert films, shorts, even music videos and advertisements. These 10, however, distill the best of my all-time favorite director.
10. Mean Streets
Both De Niro and Scorsese had made films before Mean Streets (De Niro had even appeared in a masterpiece in the form of Hi, Mom!), but that slo-mo scene of De Niro bouncing onto screen to the strains of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" feels like an announcement of arrival for both. Swathed in the Catholic guilt that would become one of Scorsese's trademark tics, Mean Streets refines the raw, Cassevetes-inspired work that preceded this third feature and funnels it toward an exciting, developed voice. The director would continue to develop his skills over the years, but the immediacy of this breakthrough still offers one of the best insights into the director's canon of self-destructive characters pursuing hollow, often dangerous dreams and paying dearly for them.
9. Shutter Island
As Roberto Rossellini once said of Chaplin's A King in New York, Shutter Island is the work of a free man. Having finally gotten his Oscar for an enjoyable but wan self-parody, Scorsese threw himself into some good pulp and produced this elegantly colorized, paranoiacally unsettled thriller. Sure, the twist can be seen from the boat pulling into the prison island's harbor, but it's the journey that counts, and Scorsese spins out a masterful yarn that plys his Im- and Ex-pressionist tendencies to their fullest use since Bringing Out the Dead. And after The Departed basically used a "Best Songs from Scorsese Films" playlist for its soundtrack, Shutter Island sources canonical and contemporary classical music and ambient noise to further trap its plunging crimsons and multiple image sources (several kinds of film stock and digital are used) in a time all its own. It even manages to revisit the irritatingly expository dénouement of Hitchcock's Psycho with a more devastatingly personal twist.
8. Raging Bull
Leave out Robert De Niro's overhyped weight fluctuations and Raging Bull still contains one of the all-time great performances for its complete understanding of character. Whether lean and mean or fat and broken, De Niro gives Jake La Motta the braggadocio, intensity and insecurity a boxer who came from nothing would feel, making it big and falling pray to all the impulses no longer restrained by income level. Scorsese more than matches his muse: the boxing scenes are a tour de force, aping the great ballet scene of The Red Shoes by occurring in the subjective experience of the protagonist, who gets in the ring not for the crowd around him but to pummel the poor son of a bitch in front of him. The fights take place against a black void of white noise, which makes the matches as disturbing as the astonishing prosthetic and makeup work that shifts features with every sick punch.
7. Goodfellas
So many position Goodfellas as the recipient of The Godfather's baton, but in nearly every way it is the opposite of Coppola's operatic saga. The Corleone family comprise a host of Greek tragic figures, perversely successful immigrants and wholesome American heroes turned fratricidal monsters. The characters of Scorsese's gangster masterpiece, however, are nasty, brutish and stupid, in the game solely to satisfy their id and dying suddenly when they make one wrong step. To put it another way, The Godfather sticks with the masterminds; Goodfellas stays with those the masterminds plot to whack when they get out of line. For sheer bravura filmmaking, the coke-soaked sequence of the FBI closing in on Ray Liotta's burned-out hood has rarely been matched by anyone, even Scorsese himself.
6. Gangs of New York
Unfortunately compromised with a tacked-on love story and a bit too unwieldy even without the influence of studio notes, Gangs of New York nevertheless serves as Scorsese's messiest valentine to his hometown and the legacy of blood that built it. Released in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Gangs demonstrates that xenophobia and carnage are inherent in New York's story, but so too is the desire to make a better life. The film suggests that some battles are worth fighting while others are merely worthless, and the opinion of the mob may not always see which is which. And though the film technically concerns Leonardo DiCaprio's avenging son of an immigrant, it hinges on Daniel Day-Lewis, an Irishman playing an anti-Irish gang leader whose extradiegetic contradictions manifest in the character. A brute whose preference of open conflict over democratic gentility anthropomorphize the Civil War that only intrudes upon the myopic street wars depicted here at the feature's end, Bill is equally capable of honor and dignity for those he carves so ruthlessly. One of Scorsese's messiest films, to be sure, but also one of his purest.
5. Life Lessons
Scorsese's segment in New York Stories (the only worthy one of the trio) returns to the Dostoevsky well that served him so well with his Palme D'Or winner, this time loosely adapting The Gambler rather than Notes from Underground. "Life Lessons" uses a painter's block and his strained relationship with an assistant who wants to break away with him in order to craft a vision of art as expansive and intimate as the vast canvas Nolte's character throws paint upon in brief, tightly shot fits of creativity. Deafening music, blinding stylistic flourishes and more turn the protracted hell of Dobie's emotionally wrought creative process into a larger portrait of how art inspires, torments and releases. In 45 minutes, Scorsese says as much about why he lives to create as much as his lengthy documentaries on the films that inspire him.
4. The Last Temptation of Christ
When I found it online shortly after watching the movie, the Siskel & Ebert review of The Last Temptation of Christ struck me as much as the film itself. In it, Gene Siskel noted that Willem Dafoe’s Jesus “knows it is harder to be a good man than a god.” That single line captured the whole film for me, an atheist who always felt awful watching Jesus walk to his death with the supposed foreknowledge of what he would endure. Scorsese uses that prescience as perhaps the greatest agony Christ faced, filling Him with Catholic guilt before the Church could even grow out of His sacrifice. By showing Jesus as a man (emphasis on man, not Son of God), Scorsese actually lends greater credence to the power of His words because Jesus wrestles with every teaching, every temptation. Sympathy, too, is spared for Judas, who knows the role he must play and is torn up by the awful responsibility placed upon him. The titular final temptation, in which Christ gets to live out a peaceful, happy life as he bleeds out on the cross, is Scorsese's greatest moment to date.
3. Bringing Out the Dead
Every so often, Scorsese cleanses his palate with a pure exercise in style. After Hours, Casino, Shutter Island and the like let off creative steam when the director gets too overheated. Bringing Out the Dead, however, mixes this glorious excess with a genuinely great script, messing with Taxi Driver’s components until that movie somehow morphs into a touching romance between two broken individuals and between a shattered Christ figure and his even-worse-off flock. Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances, wild but wounded, capable of playing to the sensory overload of the frame but centered enough to ground it. So many of Scorsese’s films are hallucinations. None is more pained than this.
2. Taxi Driver
So ensconced in the pop culture lexicon that it almost suffers for being put on a pedestal, Taxi Driver remains a singular achievement, as intimate as it is vast and so wrapped up in its protagonist that the man is, to this die, cited as both an anti-hero and a total villain. Scorsese's hell-vision of New York is repugnantly realized, Bickle's hatred transferred through the subjective lens onto the entire city. It no longer even resembles a metropolis but a state of mind, hissing steam, dripping grime and grinding innocence into pulp between molars. The only thing worse than staring at this world through Travis' eyes is the moment when Scorsese, unable to bear it any longer, briefly tracks away from the psychopath and the vacant hallway upon which he settles disturbs more than the sight of Travis' worst carnage.
1. The King of Comedy
The King of Comedy feels so unlike a Scorsese film, endothermic where his work usually burns will spare energy and static instead of vivid. Rupert Pupkin even erects a dream world around himself of unmoving cardboard cutouts, celebrities and a two-dimensional wall of an adoring crowd frozen in love for whomever stands in front of them. Bickle simmered until he exploded, but even Pupkin’s most drastic actions reveal an insularity as the anxious, fame-hungry loser collapses into his paper-thin fantasy. Among the film’s many ingenious, brutal reflections on celebrity, the best may be the anticlimax and denouement, almost entirely shown through the filter of a TV screen, reflecting how Pupkin’s triumph would be transmitted but also weakening the impact with soft video images. For Scorsese, the master aesthete, the inferior image quality clearly connotes the negative aspect of fame for fame’s sake, but as celebrities famous simply for being famous have exploded in recent years, The King of Comedy looks enduringly fresh in its analog conclusion.
Not content merely to provide the world with his own string of great and memorable films, Scorsese has devoted much of his life to the preservation of the movies that inspired him, keeping them alive to motivate the next generation of movie brats. It can be difficult to whittle down his impressive filmography, filled not only with features but documentaries, concert films, shorts, even music videos and advertisements. These 10, however, distill the best of my all-time favorite director.
10. Mean Streets
Both De Niro and Scorsese had made films before Mean Streets (De Niro had even appeared in a masterpiece in the form of Hi, Mom!), but that slo-mo scene of De Niro bouncing onto screen to the strains of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" feels like an announcement of arrival for both. Swathed in the Catholic guilt that would become one of Scorsese's trademark tics, Mean Streets refines the raw, Cassevetes-inspired work that preceded this third feature and funnels it toward an exciting, developed voice. The director would continue to develop his skills over the years, but the immediacy of this breakthrough still offers one of the best insights into the director's canon of self-destructive characters pursuing hollow, often dangerous dreams and paying dearly for them.
9. Shutter Island
As Roberto Rossellini once said of Chaplin's A King in New York, Shutter Island is the work of a free man. Having finally gotten his Oscar for an enjoyable but wan self-parody, Scorsese threw himself into some good pulp and produced this elegantly colorized, paranoiacally unsettled thriller. Sure, the twist can be seen from the boat pulling into the prison island's harbor, but it's the journey that counts, and Scorsese spins out a masterful yarn that plys his Im- and Ex-pressionist tendencies to their fullest use since Bringing Out the Dead. And after The Departed basically used a "Best Songs from Scorsese Films" playlist for its soundtrack, Shutter Island sources canonical and contemporary classical music and ambient noise to further trap its plunging crimsons and multiple image sources (several kinds of film stock and digital are used) in a time all its own. It even manages to revisit the irritatingly expository dénouement of Hitchcock's Psycho with a more devastatingly personal twist.
8. Raging Bull
Leave out Robert De Niro's overhyped weight fluctuations and Raging Bull still contains one of the all-time great performances for its complete understanding of character. Whether lean and mean or fat and broken, De Niro gives Jake La Motta the braggadocio, intensity and insecurity a boxer who came from nothing would feel, making it big and falling pray to all the impulses no longer restrained by income level. Scorsese more than matches his muse: the boxing scenes are a tour de force, aping the great ballet scene of The Red Shoes by occurring in the subjective experience of the protagonist, who gets in the ring not for the crowd around him but to pummel the poor son of a bitch in front of him. The fights take place against a black void of white noise, which makes the matches as disturbing as the astonishing prosthetic and makeup work that shifts features with every sick punch.
7. Goodfellas
So many position Goodfellas as the recipient of The Godfather's baton, but in nearly every way it is the opposite of Coppola's operatic saga. The Corleone family comprise a host of Greek tragic figures, perversely successful immigrants and wholesome American heroes turned fratricidal monsters. The characters of Scorsese's gangster masterpiece, however, are nasty, brutish and stupid, in the game solely to satisfy their id and dying suddenly when they make one wrong step. To put it another way, The Godfather sticks with the masterminds; Goodfellas stays with those the masterminds plot to whack when they get out of line. For sheer bravura filmmaking, the coke-soaked sequence of the FBI closing in on Ray Liotta's burned-out hood has rarely been matched by anyone, even Scorsese himself.
6. Gangs of New York
Unfortunately compromised with a tacked-on love story and a bit too unwieldy even without the influence of studio notes, Gangs of New York nevertheless serves as Scorsese's messiest valentine to his hometown and the legacy of blood that built it. Released in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Gangs demonstrates that xenophobia and carnage are inherent in New York's story, but so too is the desire to make a better life. The film suggests that some battles are worth fighting while others are merely worthless, and the opinion of the mob may not always see which is which. And though the film technically concerns Leonardo DiCaprio's avenging son of an immigrant, it hinges on Daniel Day-Lewis, an Irishman playing an anti-Irish gang leader whose extradiegetic contradictions manifest in the character. A brute whose preference of open conflict over democratic gentility anthropomorphize the Civil War that only intrudes upon the myopic street wars depicted here at the feature's end, Bill is equally capable of honor and dignity for those he carves so ruthlessly. One of Scorsese's messiest films, to be sure, but also one of his purest.
5. Life Lessons
Scorsese's segment in New York Stories (the only worthy one of the trio) returns to the Dostoevsky well that served him so well with his Palme D'Or winner, this time loosely adapting The Gambler rather than Notes from Underground. "Life Lessons" uses a painter's block and his strained relationship with an assistant who wants to break away with him in order to craft a vision of art as expansive and intimate as the vast canvas Nolte's character throws paint upon in brief, tightly shot fits of creativity. Deafening music, blinding stylistic flourishes and more turn the protracted hell of Dobie's emotionally wrought creative process into a larger portrait of how art inspires, torments and releases. In 45 minutes, Scorsese says as much about why he lives to create as much as his lengthy documentaries on the films that inspire him.
4. The Last Temptation of Christ
When I found it online shortly after watching the movie, the Siskel & Ebert review of The Last Temptation of Christ struck me as much as the film itself. In it, Gene Siskel noted that Willem Dafoe’s Jesus “knows it is harder to be a good man than a god.” That single line captured the whole film for me, an atheist who always felt awful watching Jesus walk to his death with the supposed foreknowledge of what he would endure. Scorsese uses that prescience as perhaps the greatest agony Christ faced, filling Him with Catholic guilt before the Church could even grow out of His sacrifice. By showing Jesus as a man (emphasis on man, not Son of God), Scorsese actually lends greater credence to the power of His words because Jesus wrestles with every teaching, every temptation. Sympathy, too, is spared for Judas, who knows the role he must play and is torn up by the awful responsibility placed upon him. The titular final temptation, in which Christ gets to live out a peaceful, happy life as he bleeds out on the cross, is Scorsese's greatest moment to date.
3. Bringing Out the Dead
Every so often, Scorsese cleanses his palate with a pure exercise in style. After Hours, Casino, Shutter Island and the like let off creative steam when the director gets too overheated. Bringing Out the Dead, however, mixes this glorious excess with a genuinely great script, messing with Taxi Driver’s components until that movie somehow morphs into a touching romance between two broken individuals and between a shattered Christ figure and his even-worse-off flock. Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances, wild but wounded, capable of playing to the sensory overload of the frame but centered enough to ground it. So many of Scorsese’s films are hallucinations. None is more pained than this.
2. Taxi Driver
So ensconced in the pop culture lexicon that it almost suffers for being put on a pedestal, Taxi Driver remains a singular achievement, as intimate as it is vast and so wrapped up in its protagonist that the man is, to this die, cited as both an anti-hero and a total villain. Scorsese's hell-vision of New York is repugnantly realized, Bickle's hatred transferred through the subjective lens onto the entire city. It no longer even resembles a metropolis but a state of mind, hissing steam, dripping grime and grinding innocence into pulp between molars. The only thing worse than staring at this world through Travis' eyes is the moment when Scorsese, unable to bear it any longer, briefly tracks away from the psychopath and the vacant hallway upon which he settles disturbs more than the sight of Travis' worst carnage.
1. The King of Comedy
The King of Comedy feels so unlike a Scorsese film, endothermic where his work usually burns will spare energy and static instead of vivid. Rupert Pupkin even erects a dream world around himself of unmoving cardboard cutouts, celebrities and a two-dimensional wall of an adoring crowd frozen in love for whomever stands in front of them. Bickle simmered until he exploded, but even Pupkin’s most drastic actions reveal an insularity as the anxious, fame-hungry loser collapses into his paper-thin fantasy. Among the film’s many ingenious, brutal reflections on celebrity, the best may be the anticlimax and denouement, almost entirely shown through the filter of a TV screen, reflecting how Pupkin’s triumph would be transmitted but also weakening the impact with soft video images. For Scorsese, the master aesthete, the inferior image quality clearly connotes the negative aspect of fame for fame’s sake, but as celebrities famous simply for being famous have exploded in recent years, The King of Comedy looks enduringly fresh in its analog conclusion.
Wednesday, October 31
The Top 10 Roman Polanski Films
Paranoia runs deep under Roman Polanski's work, an obvious feature of a man who has lived under the pressure of social scrutiny since childhood. The main reason he attracts that scrutiny today serves as the elephant in the room for any discussion of Polanski's work, not least because of how often the paranoia of his films manifests itself through rape and sexual violation. His grotesque ties to that subject matter make his considerable empathy almost disturbing: what does is say about the general state of commercial filmmaking that a convicted rapist is one of the great directors of women?
As a stylist, Polanski is almost without peer, with lighting, blocking and camera placement always timed for maximum impact. Perhaps the most famous example of this can be found in Rosemary's Baby, in which he had cinematographer William Fraker frame Ruth Gordon partially behind a door frame, causing audiences at the time to crane their necks as if it might help them look around the block and see all of her. This exacting formal perfectionism turns skewed genre fare into enduring works of pure cinema, which gives even his slightest work an aesthetic and thematic rigor. It also makes ranking his films a hell of a task, and by limiting this list to 10 films I leave out several unjustly underrated features like the excellent Ninth Gate, the muscular Frantic, the neorealist and brutal take on Macbeth, even the deeply personal The Pianist. But the 10 that remain showcase the immense skills of one of the great filmmakers of the modern era, and one who can still shock longer after he broke nearly every taboo you can name.
10. Death and the Maiden
In some ways, Polanski's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's play about the scars left by South American dictatorships is a deeper exorcism of his Holocaust demons than The Pianist. By parsing out its revelations throughout the film, Polanski shows us revenge isolated from its motive, which makes it only violence, then asks how we feel about it when the full extent of Paulina's (Sigourney Weaver) trauma is made clear. Her thirst for justice is further complicated by the doubt cast over whether her captive (Ben Kingsley, in a beautifully, and literally, restrained performance) is really the person she believes he is. But then, the need for revenge can override such trivialities as fairness. In the film's most striking exchange, Paulina's husband impotently protests, "What if he's innocent?" to which she replies, "If he's innocent, then's he's really fucked." Has there ever been such a succinct, blackly comic summary of the grotesque hypocrisy of reprisals against dictatorial crime?
9. Knife in the Water
I cannot think of a more appropriate feature debut for Roman Polanski. It is not a landmark, seismic event like, say, Citizen Kane or Breathless, yet the perfectly composed, contained psychosexual thriller shows how innately Polanski understood how to hook a crowd and how to casually display technical mastery. With only three characters (and only two of them named), Polanski crafts a rich triangle of sexual competition, sociopolitical commentary (the unnamed, virile outsider is a working class schlub alternately enervating and energizing the bourgeois couple) and repressed violence. The deep focus shots give a greater sense of claustrophobia than even shallow focus would have allowed, giving the yacht-confined characters nowhere to hide even within the frame, much less the lake. Watching this, there could be no doubt that Polanski would become one of the great Hitchcock disciples, and one of the few to add anything of his own to the master's legacy.
8. Cul-de-Sac
A little bit of everything about Polanski is in this film. Transgressive sexual terror, an isolated setting, a smattering of noir parody, and much more filter in and out of this loopy, indescribable funhouse of a movie. Time seems to freeze on the tide-surrounded home where Donald Pleasance's cross-dressing, submissive husband and his wife (played by Catherine Deneuve's sister, Françoise Dorléac) find themselves held captive by a stranded, bleeding out gangster (Lionel Stander, voice made of pure gravel) as his partner slowly dies. Gradually, however, the tables turn, and that which was already odd becomes full-on madness. Even by the director's standards, this is loopy, yet its character tics, location types and extreme sexual comedy would reverberate through Polanski's entire career.
7. The Ghost Writer
A music box of a film, a throwaway trifle that, upon closer inspection, reveals the intricacy of great craftsmanship that makes its simple pleasures possible. Hell, with Alexandre Desplat's glockenspiel-heavy score (his quirkiest work to date), it even sounds like a music box. Polanski takes to the political content of Robert Harris' book with relish, stressing every hypocrisy of international crime the United States commits (and its lack of recognition of the ICC) with just a hint of self-justifying scorn for the country that turned on him so massively. But these wisps of self-martyrdom cannot overpower the peevishness with with Polanski approaches the War on Terror, brilliantly casting Pierce Brosnan not only as a stand-in for Tony Blair but a vague extension of his post-Cold War Bond, ostensibly liberal but still spoiling for a fight somewhere, anywhere. With the former prime minister's war crimes widely publicized, Ewan McGregor's titular writer finds himself caught up in an even more sinister cover-up, and Polanski's stately but uncomfortable compositions never fail to give the impression that McGregor is powerless, constantly watched and one too-bold move away from meeting the same fate of his predecessor. Among the director's most delicate gems.
6. Tess
Tess’ stately frames lack the darkness aggressively eating away at Polanski's filmography to this point, but the tranquil foliage that delicately frame subjects of interest also have the effect of surrounding the characters, imprisoning them and blocking off the light of day. Polanski keys into the vicious satire of a poor man who finds he has old, irrelevant ties to an ended line of nobility and instantly puts on airs, even sending his daughter try and marry into another branch of the line. Instead, she is raped and left to uncaring judgment of the world, finding it even in the arms of her next lover, whose sense of honor is so ironically misogynistic that he can only look his beloved in the eye when she murders the man who used her. And through it all, Tess is cursed with the ability to see this system for what it is. “Once victim, always victim. That’s the law,” she says. And as the brutally removed dénouement reveals, she was all too right.
5. Rosemary’s Baby
As a horror film of a woman bearing the child of Satan. Rosemary’s Baby is a shiver-inducing work of icy formal precision, in which even inanimate objects loom over Mia Farrow’s titular character in judgment and domination. But the movie becomes even more terrifying, and terrifyingly relevant even today, as an allegory for the manner in which society forces victims to carry their rapists’ babies to term. Rosemary’s husband is named Guy, his name making him a stand-in for men in general. As played by John Cassavetes, Guy savages the actor’s macho tics: following the film’s straightforward depiction of Guy as an actor who literally sells his wife’s soul to gain fame, we can see the man as someone who still holds the view of spouses as property and objects to be used for their own gain. But when Guy casually takes credit for the scrapes on his wife’s body when she awakens from her “dream” of being raped by Satan, he suggests a dark alternate reading of Guy himself being the demon figure that takes his wife, and the doctors, neighbors and friends who won’t listen to Rosemary become an entire system of misogynistic thought that punishes women well after their humiliation. Nothing churns the stomach like Rosemary being goaded into caring for the demon spawn at the end. “You’re trying to make me be his mother,” she exclaims in disgust. “Aren’t you his mother?” the man replies, sealing the poor woman’s fate.
4. The Tenant
It is so easy to read the personal in Polanski's work that the final film of his Apartment Trilogy, starring Polanski himself as the psychologically assaulted tenant, almost seems a reaction against the media firestorm around his rape even though the film came out a year before his crime. Macabre humor pervades the trilogy, but The Tenant is the funniest of the series, its circular, nonsensical story played for uncomfortable laughs. Yet of the three films, this has the closest connection to reality, its tension based not in the constant threat of sexual invasion nor the careful monitoring of equally violating satanists but instead the relatable (if comically exaggerated) irritations of asshole neighbors. Slowly, the banality of their demands drives him insane. A scene in The Pianist of a woman spotting Adrien Brody's character in a complex and screaming "Jew!" may hold the key to this movie, a lavishly absurd analogy for the fear Polanski might have felt every day as a child that the normal pettiness of people sharing the same space might at any moment get him killed. The director loves to laugh in the face of his hardships, and The Tenant laughs hardest to beat back the memories.
3. Chinatown
Only Polanski could take the bleakness of noir and create a revisionist work that painted the genre as too soft in comparison. Most L.A. movies establish the town's seediness through Hollywood via ironic self-flagellation, but Polanski and Robert Towne dig into the city as innately corrupt, created out of a perversion of the natural order by bringing water to the desert and immediately spawning greed and manipulation. The film features one of Jack Nicholson's most controlled, nuanced performances, as if the sheer, awesome madness of the microcosm around the actor managed to cow his own showy instincts in meek fear. Jake's arrogance is a smokescreen that quickly evaporates as he sinks into a morass of murder and incest that leaves him rattled and as catatonic as Nicholson would be after a lobotomy in perhaps his most famous role. Subversive casting choices occasionally pepper Polanski's work, few better than the casting of John Huston, maker of the "first" noir, as the gruff and deceptive kingpin of this fever dream. Many of the director's films build in claustrophobic intensity as they approach their climaxes, but Chinatown impressively does this against the backdrop of one of the nation's largest cities, shrinking the whole place until it is small enough to fit into the palm of its true owner, who promptly crushes it like a bug.
2. Bitter Moon
Chamber horror is Roman Polanski's speciality, with his Apartment Trilogy setting the high-water mark for claustrophobic terror. Bitter Moon isn't confined to one location, though its story visually springs from a tale told in a confined ship cabin to a man held captive by propriety and his own morbid curiosity. The twisted sexual nightmare that Polanski paints takes his sexual dynamics to their extreme, with lust and heartbreak turned from inward pains to outward torture. The noose ever tightens around the smattering of characters, one couple grotesquely joined but divided by their perversion uniting for one last hurrah, the corruption of a stiff, bourgeois couple who individually find themselves lured into the couple's sick openness until they get in too deep. How does one even describe this film's protracted, abhorrent joke, strung along by Polanski at his stylistic peak to make everything as unwittingly irresistible as Oscar's sad saga? A shagging dog story?
1. Repulsion
Polanski entered the English-speaking world with a shockingly confrontational thriller that paid no never mind to any sense of propriety. In fact, {Repulsion} is all about the ways that social conditioning and an obsession with maintaining good reputations do not overcome the evils of the world but mask them and allow them to move more freely. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol as a woman who has fallen prey to these evils and is thus broken from the society that shrouds them. She can therefore see those forces moving freely even within the supposed "castle" of one's home, and the total lack of any secure, safe ground gives the film its primary drive. This gives maximum impact to its demented sexual hysteria, with its nightmare visions of hands always groping, figures always intruding, fissures always forming, and time literally rotting away as the protagonist withdraws ever more in a futile attempt to hide.
As a stylist, Polanski is almost without peer, with lighting, blocking and camera placement always timed for maximum impact. Perhaps the most famous example of this can be found in Rosemary's Baby, in which he had cinematographer William Fraker frame Ruth Gordon partially behind a door frame, causing audiences at the time to crane their necks as if it might help them look around the block and see all of her. This exacting formal perfectionism turns skewed genre fare into enduring works of pure cinema, which gives even his slightest work an aesthetic and thematic rigor. It also makes ranking his films a hell of a task, and by limiting this list to 10 films I leave out several unjustly underrated features like the excellent Ninth Gate, the muscular Frantic, the neorealist and brutal take on Macbeth, even the deeply personal The Pianist. But the 10 that remain showcase the immense skills of one of the great filmmakers of the modern era, and one who can still shock longer after he broke nearly every taboo you can name.
10. Death and the Maiden
In some ways, Polanski's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's play about the scars left by South American dictatorships is a deeper exorcism of his Holocaust demons than The Pianist. By parsing out its revelations throughout the film, Polanski shows us revenge isolated from its motive, which makes it only violence, then asks how we feel about it when the full extent of Paulina's (Sigourney Weaver) trauma is made clear. Her thirst for justice is further complicated by the doubt cast over whether her captive (Ben Kingsley, in a beautifully, and literally, restrained performance) is really the person she believes he is. But then, the need for revenge can override such trivialities as fairness. In the film's most striking exchange, Paulina's husband impotently protests, "What if he's innocent?" to which she replies, "If he's innocent, then's he's really fucked." Has there ever been such a succinct, blackly comic summary of the grotesque hypocrisy of reprisals against dictatorial crime?
9. Knife in the Water
I cannot think of a more appropriate feature debut for Roman Polanski. It is not a landmark, seismic event like, say, Citizen Kane or Breathless, yet the perfectly composed, contained psychosexual thriller shows how innately Polanski understood how to hook a crowd and how to casually display technical mastery. With only three characters (and only two of them named), Polanski crafts a rich triangle of sexual competition, sociopolitical commentary (the unnamed, virile outsider is a working class schlub alternately enervating and energizing the bourgeois couple) and repressed violence. The deep focus shots give a greater sense of claustrophobia than even shallow focus would have allowed, giving the yacht-confined characters nowhere to hide even within the frame, much less the lake. Watching this, there could be no doubt that Polanski would become one of the great Hitchcock disciples, and one of the few to add anything of his own to the master's legacy.
8. Cul-de-Sac
A little bit of everything about Polanski is in this film. Transgressive sexual terror, an isolated setting, a smattering of noir parody, and much more filter in and out of this loopy, indescribable funhouse of a movie. Time seems to freeze on the tide-surrounded home where Donald Pleasance's cross-dressing, submissive husband and his wife (played by Catherine Deneuve's sister, Françoise Dorléac) find themselves held captive by a stranded, bleeding out gangster (Lionel Stander, voice made of pure gravel) as his partner slowly dies. Gradually, however, the tables turn, and that which was already odd becomes full-on madness. Even by the director's standards, this is loopy, yet its character tics, location types and extreme sexual comedy would reverberate through Polanski's entire career.
7. The Ghost Writer
A music box of a film, a throwaway trifle that, upon closer inspection, reveals the intricacy of great craftsmanship that makes its simple pleasures possible. Hell, with Alexandre Desplat's glockenspiel-heavy score (his quirkiest work to date), it even sounds like a music box. Polanski takes to the political content of Robert Harris' book with relish, stressing every hypocrisy of international crime the United States commits (and its lack of recognition of the ICC) with just a hint of self-justifying scorn for the country that turned on him so massively. But these wisps of self-martyrdom cannot overpower the peevishness with with Polanski approaches the War on Terror, brilliantly casting Pierce Brosnan not only as a stand-in for Tony Blair but a vague extension of his post-Cold War Bond, ostensibly liberal but still spoiling for a fight somewhere, anywhere. With the former prime minister's war crimes widely publicized, Ewan McGregor's titular writer finds himself caught up in an even more sinister cover-up, and Polanski's stately but uncomfortable compositions never fail to give the impression that McGregor is powerless, constantly watched and one too-bold move away from meeting the same fate of his predecessor. Among the director's most delicate gems.
6. Tess
Tess’ stately frames lack the darkness aggressively eating away at Polanski's filmography to this point, but the tranquil foliage that delicately frame subjects of interest also have the effect of surrounding the characters, imprisoning them and blocking off the light of day. Polanski keys into the vicious satire of a poor man who finds he has old, irrelevant ties to an ended line of nobility and instantly puts on airs, even sending his daughter try and marry into another branch of the line. Instead, she is raped and left to uncaring judgment of the world, finding it even in the arms of her next lover, whose sense of honor is so ironically misogynistic that he can only look his beloved in the eye when she murders the man who used her. And through it all, Tess is cursed with the ability to see this system for what it is. “Once victim, always victim. That’s the law,” she says. And as the brutally removed dénouement reveals, she was all too right.
5. Rosemary’s Baby
As a horror film of a woman bearing the child of Satan. Rosemary’s Baby is a shiver-inducing work of icy formal precision, in which even inanimate objects loom over Mia Farrow’s titular character in judgment and domination. But the movie becomes even more terrifying, and terrifyingly relevant even today, as an allegory for the manner in which society forces victims to carry their rapists’ babies to term. Rosemary’s husband is named Guy, his name making him a stand-in for men in general. As played by John Cassavetes, Guy savages the actor’s macho tics: following the film’s straightforward depiction of Guy as an actor who literally sells his wife’s soul to gain fame, we can see the man as someone who still holds the view of spouses as property and objects to be used for their own gain. But when Guy casually takes credit for the scrapes on his wife’s body when she awakens from her “dream” of being raped by Satan, he suggests a dark alternate reading of Guy himself being the demon figure that takes his wife, and the doctors, neighbors and friends who won’t listen to Rosemary become an entire system of misogynistic thought that punishes women well after their humiliation. Nothing churns the stomach like Rosemary being goaded into caring for the demon spawn at the end. “You’re trying to make me be his mother,” she exclaims in disgust. “Aren’t you his mother?” the man replies, sealing the poor woman’s fate.
4. The Tenant
It is so easy to read the personal in Polanski's work that the final film of his Apartment Trilogy, starring Polanski himself as the psychologically assaulted tenant, almost seems a reaction against the media firestorm around his rape even though the film came out a year before his crime. Macabre humor pervades the trilogy, but The Tenant is the funniest of the series, its circular, nonsensical story played for uncomfortable laughs. Yet of the three films, this has the closest connection to reality, its tension based not in the constant threat of sexual invasion nor the careful monitoring of equally violating satanists but instead the relatable (if comically exaggerated) irritations of asshole neighbors. Slowly, the banality of their demands drives him insane. A scene in The Pianist of a woman spotting Adrien Brody's character in a complex and screaming "Jew!" may hold the key to this movie, a lavishly absurd analogy for the fear Polanski might have felt every day as a child that the normal pettiness of people sharing the same space might at any moment get him killed. The director loves to laugh in the face of his hardships, and The Tenant laughs hardest to beat back the memories.
3. Chinatown
Only Polanski could take the bleakness of noir and create a revisionist work that painted the genre as too soft in comparison. Most L.A. movies establish the town's seediness through Hollywood via ironic self-flagellation, but Polanski and Robert Towne dig into the city as innately corrupt, created out of a perversion of the natural order by bringing water to the desert and immediately spawning greed and manipulation. The film features one of Jack Nicholson's most controlled, nuanced performances, as if the sheer, awesome madness of the microcosm around the actor managed to cow his own showy instincts in meek fear. Jake's arrogance is a smokescreen that quickly evaporates as he sinks into a morass of murder and incest that leaves him rattled and as catatonic as Nicholson would be after a lobotomy in perhaps his most famous role. Subversive casting choices occasionally pepper Polanski's work, few better than the casting of John Huston, maker of the "first" noir, as the gruff and deceptive kingpin of this fever dream. Many of the director's films build in claustrophobic intensity as they approach their climaxes, but Chinatown impressively does this against the backdrop of one of the nation's largest cities, shrinking the whole place until it is small enough to fit into the palm of its true owner, who promptly crushes it like a bug.
2. Bitter Moon
Chamber horror is Roman Polanski's speciality, with his Apartment Trilogy setting the high-water mark for claustrophobic terror. Bitter Moon isn't confined to one location, though its story visually springs from a tale told in a confined ship cabin to a man held captive by propriety and his own morbid curiosity. The twisted sexual nightmare that Polanski paints takes his sexual dynamics to their extreme, with lust and heartbreak turned from inward pains to outward torture. The noose ever tightens around the smattering of characters, one couple grotesquely joined but divided by their perversion uniting for one last hurrah, the corruption of a stiff, bourgeois couple who individually find themselves lured into the couple's sick openness until they get in too deep. How does one even describe this film's protracted, abhorrent joke, strung along by Polanski at his stylistic peak to make everything as unwittingly irresistible as Oscar's sad saga? A shagging dog story?
1. Repulsion
Polanski entered the English-speaking world with a shockingly confrontational thriller that paid no never mind to any sense of propriety. In fact, {Repulsion} is all about the ways that social conditioning and an obsession with maintaining good reputations do not overcome the evils of the world but mask them and allow them to move more freely. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol as a woman who has fallen prey to these evils and is thus broken from the society that shrouds them. She can therefore see those forces moving freely even within the supposed "castle" of one's home, and the total lack of any secure, safe ground gives the film its primary drive. This gives maximum impact to its demented sexual hysteria, with its nightmare visions of hands always groping, figures always intruding, fissures always forming, and time literally rotting away as the protagonist withdraws ever more in a futile attempt to hide.
Tuesday, October 9
David Lynch's features, ranked
For October's favorite director ranking, I thought I would choose one of my two favorite directors of horror films that are not exactly horror films. (The other is Roman Polanski, whom I bumped last month to cover Tony Scott and who will receive his spotlight later this month.) Lynch's work digs under the image of postwar American society—parenthood, bourgeois suburbia, the glamor of Old Hollywood—to find the terror beneath, which is itself usually rooted in grotesque exaggerations of classic pulp. Lynch exists always in the past and on the forefront, sublimating noir and melodrama of the '40s and '50s into an ambitious, massively influential television program and an exploratory use of the capabilities of DV. Nearly all of his 10 features are great, and despite the occasional characterization of his work as weird for its own sake, they reward multiple viewings rather than suffer from them. A year ago, it would not have occurred to me to rank Lynch among my favorite filmmakers, but after viewing and revisiting the gems below, he now sits near the top of my list.
10. Dune
You know you're in for a mess when the director credit not only lists "Alan Smithee" but reads "A Alan Smithee Film" rather than "An Alan Smithee Film." Dune, in theory, might have been perfect for Lynch to explode the scope of his weirdness on blockbuster scale. Instead, it is a work of profound soullessness, weighed down at every turn by impersonal sets and a dreary slog of expositional dialogue. To mention that the film has expositional dialogue, though, is to suggest it ever has dialogue of any other kind. Indeed not, and the endless tedium (not to mention bewilderment) of listening to every single character explaining every single thing in excruciating, unnecessary detail offers no respite from the big emptiness of the sub-Star Wars production design. The best that can be said of the whole affair is that Lynch himself clearly must have endeared himself with some of the actors, as performers like Kyle MacLachlan and Dean Stockwell would return for later, better films.
9. The Elephant Man
Had Dune been a commercial success and a fulfilling project for Lynch, would the rest of his career departed from this smash sophomore effort rather than the magnificent mulligan that was Blue Velvet? If works in the mawkish, stilted vein of The Elephant Man might have been the true groundwork for a commercially successful Lynch, it is hard not to be glad the director soon moved far away from this brand of filmmaking. Buoyed by two strong performances by Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, The Elephant Man nevertheless suffers for its oppressively static construction, suffocating in a way that could be intentional but does not matter either way because it saps the film of any impact. Occasionally, Lynch cuts away to the roaring underbelly of the hospital where Hopkins makes Hurt a glorified prisoner, and these jarring blasts of noise and symbolic imagery, like the jolts in Haydn’s “Surprise,” are the cleverest, most engaging bits of the whole work.
8. The Straight Story
Moving past the aforementioned two stinkers, ranking Lynch’s filmography becomes nearly impossible, as the remaining eight features are all of exceptional quality and striking vision. That is true even of this stylistic departure, a movie so pared down from Lynch’s usual weirdness that practically everyone sees the title more as an admission on the director’s part than a description of the subject. Yet the most remarkable aspect of The Straight Story is not the absence of Lynch’s weirdness but its application toward a positive, even wholesome narrative. Try not to fall in love with Alvin Straight, the old, broken man forced to take the oddest transportation imaginable to see his even more decrepit brother. Filled with an assortment of endearing characters but powered by Richard Farnsworth’s quiet, real performance, The Straight Story is not an outlier in Lynch’s canon so much as the uncovered heart that pumps blood through even his most despairing work.
7. Blue Velvet
One of the greatest films of the 1980s, Blue Velvet got Lynch back on track after two disappointing Hollywood features threatened to kill his early promise. Refining Eraserhead’s psychological surrealism into a broader social portrait of weirdness, Blue Velvet peeked out from the freakish individuals that dotted earlier work to suggest that society itself was twisted. In light of what came after this, Lynch’s first feature-length immersion into the underworld of Rockwellian suburbia seems relatively conventional, gas-huffing psychopath Hopper and icy, Golden Oldies voguer Stockwell included. This may be Lynch’s most satiric work: MacLachlan and Dern blatantly look too old to be in high school (probably intentional, as Dern looks younger in Wild at Heart, made four years later). Meanwhile, Hopper’s sadistic relationship with Isabella Rosselini’s tormented torch singer, however frightening, is absurdist farce, Frank regressing to infancy as he bites her blue robe and slides his hand up her (Freudian) slip. A gaudy, and gauzy, counterpoint to visions of middle class Shangri-La in Reagan’s America.
6. Eraserhead
For some, Lynch never topped this 1977 feature debut, made with the AFI's assistance and surely the greatest student film ever made. With an impressive grasp of film technique, young Lynch set about breaking all the rules he understood so innately. The sound design and carefully ordered but...off mise-en-scène establish Lynch’s stylistic foundations and his penchant for drawing almost unbearable tension from ordinary objects. In fact, take out all the grotesque people and effects Lynch inserts into the film and you still get one of the most chillingly effective horror films of all time. No wonder Stanley Kubrick studied it so judiciously when making The Shining, another movie in which interiors are the true villain.
5. Lost Highway
Noirish elements creep into many of Lynch’s films, but none dives into the genre’s black soul like Lost Highway, which seems to take the POV of film noir itself. Of particular note to Lynch, who has often given the most weight and nonjudgmental affection for his women characters, is the misogyny subtly put on parade in the movie’s shape-shifting narrative. The extended middle section, filled with all the seedy details that riddle Lynch’s sub-suburban nightmares, is the self-justifying projection of Bill Pullman’s character, who murders his frigid wife in paranoid delusion and attempts to run away from himself for the rest of the film and the cycle it promises to restart at the end. Plenty of filmmakers have had fun with the femme fatale archetype, but Lynch suggests that it is a fabrication by men to justify their own sexism, so that even the woman who refuses to be a victim is made a victim of male thought control. Through it all, Lost Highway makes the case for David Lynch coming the closest of perhaps any filmmaker to even partially replicating the effect of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another work about sexual guilt that it always morphing and yet fundamentally cyclical.
4. Mulholland Dr.
Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks won Lynch legions of fans he spent the ‘90s gradually bleeding out, their interest in his trippy surrealism hitting the wall when they saw in his first three ‘90s movies how far Lynch could go with that style. The Straight Story won back some acclaim but seemed a departure more than a comeback. Then came Mulholland Dr. Collecting all the aspects of his ‘90s movies that appeared in such raw form, Mulholland Dr. distills all the weirdness into easily the director’s most focused work. Lynch repurposes the obliterating guilt of Lost Highway; into a cloud of denial over unrequited love and, perhaps worse, the realization of one’s lack of talent. As such, this poisoned love letter to Hollywood may be Lynch’s most tongue-in-cheek film, but as filtered through Naomi Watts’ performance and the lush formalism that meshes with its hazy dreamscape, it is also one of his most gripping and affecting.
3. Wild at Heart
I figured out Wild at Heart when Nic Cage’s character upstaged a show by speed metal band Powermad and led the group in a sudden cover of Elvis Presley. Up to that point, Wild at Heart is a mad jumble of freaks cranked up to 11 to show all Lynch’s post-Blue Velvet admirers what they were in for. It is still all of that after this moment, of course, but this scene acts as a skeleton key that reveals the film as a swirling collage of 20th century pop culture, where Elvis and Wild One-era Brando flow in and out of thrash metal and gaudy snakeskin. It also revamps The Wizard of Oz and reworks it to make dull, repressive home life the evil force it always should have been in that story and the thought of permanently escaping it the greatest wish one could ask from a ruler who could grant anything. Nic Cage has never been more attuned to the subject matter of one of his movies, and Lynch has never so casually touched metal to a raw nerve.
2. INLAND EMPIRE
The Joycean aspects of David Lynch’s filmmaking reach their pinnacle with INLAND EMPIRE, in which the temporal simultaneity of Wild at Heart and Möbius-strip cycles of Lost Highway are laid together, joined by mortar made from the ground-up shards of Lynch’s entire filmography. Lynch’s other films contain tendencies of Finnegans Wake, but this is the full thing: a basic plot rendered insensible and inexplicable through a stacking of time, space, even dimensions of reality into one simultaneously, flowing moment. Trading Irish national guilt for American pulp and a sense of complicity in the misogynistic exploitation he abhors, Lynch delivers perhaps his ultimate statement on the bonds of abuse that ground our loftiest fantasies, and how he perpetuates that as much as anyone. Laura Dern handles the constant slip between realities and places better than anyone could be reasonably expected to do, and Lynch finds in DV the smeary grime he wanted film to have all along. Indeed, INLAND EMPIRE, with its raw lighting and expansiveness of visual scope, is perhaps the quintessential visualization of digital as a different method of image capture than film, not merely in the ease of shooting but how that image is programmed and saved.
1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
If one views Fire Walk With Me solely as a narrative link to Twin Peaks, it will seem an unnecessary (and unnecessarily obtuse) rehash of a story we all know. Laura Palmer’s inevitable death, and the sufficient piecing together of her life’s horrors on the series proper, admittedly saps the tension of the piece. As an emotional landscape, however, the film displays Lynch at his best. Featuring an early, half-formed bifurcated structure that Lynch would later refine, Fire Walk With Me opens with the director’s most abstract, surreal, alienating humor before switching gears to plunge into the heart of the depravity and despair that lurks beneath the surface of all Lynch’s films. As the director ignores the wishes of fans and throws out narrative closure for the sake of honing in on a detail they already know, he provides a more resonant sense of emotional clarity to the show for those paying attention. No other Lynch film so plainly makes the case that the director’s schtick isn’t just easy, cynical irony. He really cares about his characters, even—especially—when he puts them through the worst hell.
10. Dune
You know you're in for a mess when the director credit not only lists "Alan Smithee" but reads "A Alan Smithee Film" rather than "An Alan Smithee Film." Dune, in theory, might have been perfect for Lynch to explode the scope of his weirdness on blockbuster scale. Instead, it is a work of profound soullessness, weighed down at every turn by impersonal sets and a dreary slog of expositional dialogue. To mention that the film has expositional dialogue, though, is to suggest it ever has dialogue of any other kind. Indeed not, and the endless tedium (not to mention bewilderment) of listening to every single character explaining every single thing in excruciating, unnecessary detail offers no respite from the big emptiness of the sub-Star Wars production design. The best that can be said of the whole affair is that Lynch himself clearly must have endeared himself with some of the actors, as performers like Kyle MacLachlan and Dean Stockwell would return for later, better films.
9. The Elephant Man
Had Dune been a commercial success and a fulfilling project for Lynch, would the rest of his career departed from this smash sophomore effort rather than the magnificent mulligan that was Blue Velvet? If works in the mawkish, stilted vein of The Elephant Man might have been the true groundwork for a commercially successful Lynch, it is hard not to be glad the director soon moved far away from this brand of filmmaking. Buoyed by two strong performances by Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, The Elephant Man nevertheless suffers for its oppressively static construction, suffocating in a way that could be intentional but does not matter either way because it saps the film of any impact. Occasionally, Lynch cuts away to the roaring underbelly of the hospital where Hopkins makes Hurt a glorified prisoner, and these jarring blasts of noise and symbolic imagery, like the jolts in Haydn’s “Surprise,” are the cleverest, most engaging bits of the whole work.
8. The Straight Story
Moving past the aforementioned two stinkers, ranking Lynch’s filmography becomes nearly impossible, as the remaining eight features are all of exceptional quality and striking vision. That is true even of this stylistic departure, a movie so pared down from Lynch’s usual weirdness that practically everyone sees the title more as an admission on the director’s part than a description of the subject. Yet the most remarkable aspect of The Straight Story is not the absence of Lynch’s weirdness but its application toward a positive, even wholesome narrative. Try not to fall in love with Alvin Straight, the old, broken man forced to take the oddest transportation imaginable to see his even more decrepit brother. Filled with an assortment of endearing characters but powered by Richard Farnsworth’s quiet, real performance, The Straight Story is not an outlier in Lynch’s canon so much as the uncovered heart that pumps blood through even his most despairing work.
7. Blue Velvet
One of the greatest films of the 1980s, Blue Velvet got Lynch back on track after two disappointing Hollywood features threatened to kill his early promise. Refining Eraserhead’s psychological surrealism into a broader social portrait of weirdness, Blue Velvet peeked out from the freakish individuals that dotted earlier work to suggest that society itself was twisted. In light of what came after this, Lynch’s first feature-length immersion into the underworld of Rockwellian suburbia seems relatively conventional, gas-huffing psychopath Hopper and icy, Golden Oldies voguer Stockwell included. This may be Lynch’s most satiric work: MacLachlan and Dern blatantly look too old to be in high school (probably intentional, as Dern looks younger in Wild at Heart, made four years later). Meanwhile, Hopper’s sadistic relationship with Isabella Rosselini’s tormented torch singer, however frightening, is absurdist farce, Frank regressing to infancy as he bites her blue robe and slides his hand up her (Freudian) slip. A gaudy, and gauzy, counterpoint to visions of middle class Shangri-La in Reagan’s America.
6. Eraserhead
For some, Lynch never topped this 1977 feature debut, made with the AFI's assistance and surely the greatest student film ever made. With an impressive grasp of film technique, young Lynch set about breaking all the rules he understood so innately. The sound design and carefully ordered but...off mise-en-scène establish Lynch’s stylistic foundations and his penchant for drawing almost unbearable tension from ordinary objects. In fact, take out all the grotesque people and effects Lynch inserts into the film and you still get one of the most chillingly effective horror films of all time. No wonder Stanley Kubrick studied it so judiciously when making The Shining, another movie in which interiors are the true villain.
5. Lost Highway
Noirish elements creep into many of Lynch’s films, but none dives into the genre’s black soul like Lost Highway, which seems to take the POV of film noir itself. Of particular note to Lynch, who has often given the most weight and nonjudgmental affection for his women characters, is the misogyny subtly put on parade in the movie’s shape-shifting narrative. The extended middle section, filled with all the seedy details that riddle Lynch’s sub-suburban nightmares, is the self-justifying projection of Bill Pullman’s character, who murders his frigid wife in paranoid delusion and attempts to run away from himself for the rest of the film and the cycle it promises to restart at the end. Plenty of filmmakers have had fun with the femme fatale archetype, but Lynch suggests that it is a fabrication by men to justify their own sexism, so that even the woman who refuses to be a victim is made a victim of male thought control. Through it all, Lost Highway makes the case for David Lynch coming the closest of perhaps any filmmaker to even partially replicating the effect of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another work about sexual guilt that it always morphing and yet fundamentally cyclical.
4. Mulholland Dr.
Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks won Lynch legions of fans he spent the ‘90s gradually bleeding out, their interest in his trippy surrealism hitting the wall when they saw in his first three ‘90s movies how far Lynch could go with that style. The Straight Story won back some acclaim but seemed a departure more than a comeback. Then came Mulholland Dr. Collecting all the aspects of his ‘90s movies that appeared in such raw form, Mulholland Dr. distills all the weirdness into easily the director’s most focused work. Lynch repurposes the obliterating guilt of Lost Highway; into a cloud of denial over unrequited love and, perhaps worse, the realization of one’s lack of talent. As such, this poisoned love letter to Hollywood may be Lynch’s most tongue-in-cheek film, but as filtered through Naomi Watts’ performance and the lush formalism that meshes with its hazy dreamscape, it is also one of his most gripping and affecting.
3. Wild at Heart
I figured out Wild at Heart when Nic Cage’s character upstaged a show by speed metal band Powermad and led the group in a sudden cover of Elvis Presley. Up to that point, Wild at Heart is a mad jumble of freaks cranked up to 11 to show all Lynch’s post-Blue Velvet admirers what they were in for. It is still all of that after this moment, of course, but this scene acts as a skeleton key that reveals the film as a swirling collage of 20th century pop culture, where Elvis and Wild One-era Brando flow in and out of thrash metal and gaudy snakeskin. It also revamps The Wizard of Oz and reworks it to make dull, repressive home life the evil force it always should have been in that story and the thought of permanently escaping it the greatest wish one could ask from a ruler who could grant anything. Nic Cage has never been more attuned to the subject matter of one of his movies, and Lynch has never so casually touched metal to a raw nerve.
2. INLAND EMPIRE
The Joycean aspects of David Lynch’s filmmaking reach their pinnacle with INLAND EMPIRE, in which the temporal simultaneity of Wild at Heart and Möbius-strip cycles of Lost Highway are laid together, joined by mortar made from the ground-up shards of Lynch’s entire filmography. Lynch’s other films contain tendencies of Finnegans Wake, but this is the full thing: a basic plot rendered insensible and inexplicable through a stacking of time, space, even dimensions of reality into one simultaneously, flowing moment. Trading Irish national guilt for American pulp and a sense of complicity in the misogynistic exploitation he abhors, Lynch delivers perhaps his ultimate statement on the bonds of abuse that ground our loftiest fantasies, and how he perpetuates that as much as anyone. Laura Dern handles the constant slip between realities and places better than anyone could be reasonably expected to do, and Lynch finds in DV the smeary grime he wanted film to have all along. Indeed, INLAND EMPIRE, with its raw lighting and expansiveness of visual scope, is perhaps the quintessential visualization of digital as a different method of image capture than film, not merely in the ease of shooting but how that image is programmed and saved.
1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
If one views Fire Walk With Me solely as a narrative link to Twin Peaks, it will seem an unnecessary (and unnecessarily obtuse) rehash of a story we all know. Laura Palmer’s inevitable death, and the sufficient piecing together of her life’s horrors on the series proper, admittedly saps the tension of the piece. As an emotional landscape, however, the film displays Lynch at his best. Featuring an early, half-formed bifurcated structure that Lynch would later refine, Fire Walk With Me opens with the director’s most abstract, surreal, alienating humor before switching gears to plunge into the heart of the depravity and despair that lurks beneath the surface of all Lynch’s films. As the director ignores the wishes of fans and throws out narrative closure for the sake of honing in on a detail they already know, he provides a more resonant sense of emotional clarity to the show for those paying attention. No other Lynch film so plainly makes the case that the director’s schtick isn’t just easy, cynical irony. He really cares about his characters, even—especially—when he puts them through the worst hell.
