My newest film:

The rest of my movies: Vimeo

My blog: This Ought to be a Crime

Movies I’ve seen starting with January:

Violence at Noon; Nagisa Oshima (1/2/12)
On the Town; Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly (1/3/12)
Human Tornado; Cliff Roquemore (1/4/12)
Wings; Larisa Shepitko (1/6/12)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; David Fincher (1/4/12)
On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate; Hong Sang-soo (1/7/12)
The Day He Arrives; Hong Sang-soo (1/7/12)
The Massuers and a Woman; Hiroshi Shimizu (1/9/12)
What About Bob?; Frank Oz (1/9/12)*
Bubble; Steven Soderbergh (1/11/12)
Uncle Kent; Joe Swanberg (1/15/12)
Notorious; Alfred Hitchcock (1/18/12)
Night and Day; Hong Sang-soo (1/21/12)
Lost in the Mountains; Hong Sang-soo (1/21/12)
Phantom of the Paradise; Brian De Palma (1/23/12)
The Graduate; Mike Nichols (1/25/12)*
Body Double; Brian De Palma (1/27/12)
607; Liu Jiayin (1/27/12)
Distance; Hirokazu Kore-eda (1/27/12)
Akira; Katsuhiro Otomo (1/27/12)
Fantastic Planet; Rene Laloux (1/27/12)
Marriage material; Joe Swanberg (1/29/12)
The Godfather; Francis Ford Coppola (2/1/12)*
Bowling for Columbine; Michael Moore (2/3/12)
Goodfellas; Martin Scorsese (2/8/12)*
Pan Tadeusz; Andrzej Wajda (2/9/12)

asterisk denotes repeat viewing

What is a Film?

This is one hell of a question; to this, I usually respond that a film is images moving on a screen – nothing more, nothing less, and I do believe that this is the case. When the awards season comes around, and films get nominated for Best Picture, and the like, it seems that no one takes into account that there are plenty of other films out there that are just as good, in their own right, as the films that are nominated for such awards. Basically, the majority of awards center around narrative films, ones that tell a story in some way or another.

This does indeed bother me. When Christopher Columbus’ film version of Rent came out, I was quite shocked to note that Roger Ebert, my all-time favorite critic and film-lover, said that no one could make a worse film then the one the character Mark had made (which plays as the movie itself ends). Now, I think this is quite unfair, because the form of film that Mark was making was not that of a story, or if it was, it was telling the story of the city and the people, even while not being explicit about it. His little short film was capturing life, friends, the world as a whole, and, with that, I think he did a good job. I do not understand how one can call a film of that nature bad, simply because it goes against the grain of how most films are made.

Personally, I will not sit here and write that I absolutely adore avant garde cinema, or at least anymore than I do narrative films, because I don’t. What I will say, though, is that a film needs to be looked at almost objectively, as it’s own being. One cannot rate a film against another, because of the vast number of differences between the two films, such as the reason for the film’s existence, or any possible variables that make a film different from another. When I rate a film on The Auteurs, I do so not against other films by the same filmmaker, or of the same genre, but as the film itself should be rated (in my opinion). When looking at a film, to determine whether it is, in one’s mind, good or bad, one must come to realize what the filmmaker was attempting to do with the film, and ask himself whether the vision was accomplished or not.

So, to answer my title question, all I can say is that a film is exactly what the maker intends it to be, whether it is full of ideas, whether it is full of action, whether it is deranged, whether it is heartfelt, whether it is brainless, or whether its outer shell shows no resemblance of reason at all. A film can capture life, a film can capture death, a film can capture truth or lies, a film can capture knowledge and wonderment, a film can capture anything that a filmmaker wants to get across. Whether it is good or not is a completely different matter.

Note: While I do think that a film should not be rated against another, I tend to find it difficult not to make lists praising one film over another. In this sense, I do not believe that I am really saying that one film is better than another, but that I think one film accomplished itself better than another.

Savvy