Hey, why are there so many posts listing fairly well-received, popular films? There are so many films which were held at arm’s-length like doo-doo on a stick by critics and audiences alike (and I’m not talking about the ones which were subsequently rehabilitated, brought back into the fold of the canon, as even Heaven’s Gate was!). I’d also venture that one good index of a film’s neglect is that it’s not yet released on DVD, and better yet has never been!
Anyway, my not-even-on-DVD list is:
- Neil Jordan – The Miracle (1991), as high-romantic in the Vertigo mode as The Crying Game.
- Richard Eyre – The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), a topical Falklands-era film, plus a brilliant character study of moral bankruptcy; plus a “Medium Cool”-type candid on-location sequence at the Conservative Party conference of ‘82.
- Peter Greenaway – Prospero’s Books (1991), The Baby of Macon (1993), Greenaway enjoyed fantastic success with The Cook, the Thief… only to find critical attention and distribution channels crumble after. The Tulse Luper films are, like the character himself, only a rumor in most part of the world.
- Stephen Frears – Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) – I love Hanif Kureishi so much I’ll say screw it and even include London Kills Me (1991)
Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate—Christ almighty he sucks!
Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers – godawful – Just look at the way the man moves: he’s practicing a special, untutored brand of actorly “alienation effect”—namely, the alienation of a poor actor from his own role. (Henry Brandon as the Indian chief Scar was no prize, either!)
Grace Kelly in Rear Window – a rotten crepe-paper simulacrum of a real woman, she’s got a bit of Blanche DuBois going, no matter the context.
Tropic Thunder – 7/10, must say that I loved it. The money shot/sequence for me was the little kid, Ben Stiller’s newfound “son,” riding him piggyback and stabbing him fitfully in the neck, blood spraying—before Ben flings the boy like a ragdoll off the exploding bridge. There’s much to be said of the value of sadism in American film comedy. Too many comic actors and too many comedies – the king’s portion of them – are just ingratiating, mendaciously sly and fake-witty, aiming for a class they don’t deserve. Films like Tropic Thunder or Idiocracy retain that degrading, reductive part of film comedy that really has teeth. (And note how critics make the non-distinction between comedy and satire—so that you don’t feel that you’re missing out on something, when you fail to laugh much as you’re forced to sit though the newest Anne Hathaway/Kate Hudson/Jen Aniston opus.)
Zhang Ke Jia – I saw The World on DVD what seems like a few years ago, and the film has haunted me ever since. But somehow I never saw another of his films, though Platform has been on my damned Netflix queue for ages, now.
Regarding Coppola’s Tetro: Youth Without Youth was a staggering film—I’d put it way above the vaguely similar Benjamin Button (and I say that as a very deep admirer of Fincher); and it was so in part because of Golijov’s score & Mihai Malaimare’s work as DP, and I see that they’re both returning for this new one.
Hard to argue against Deneuve – and I don’t even think she’s sexy in a “warm” way.
Li Gong still makes me uncomfortable inside, in the mode of Rilke (first of the Duino Elegies), beauty as the start of terror. As with Deneuve, I see her skills as an actress and yet she cannot to my senses fully inhabit any specific character/role. An extreme of beauty in a dramatic context seems to me to function transcendentally, in a sprawling and brilliant way.
I only just saw They Live By Night for the first time last week; and I think that Farley Granger serves as vague and brilliant a function in that film. His “Bowie” is a vague naif who came of age in prison, and not capable of great crimes; but the news-borne terroristic rumors that kind of aggrandize him somehow fit—as if he’s formidable because he’s beautiful.
I see that someone already mentioned Forbidden Games.
Also – Klimov’s Come and See
Michael Radford’s 1984 (Winston and Julia meet again, zombies and quite indifferent to each other)
Tarkovsky – Solaris; Stalker (in both cases striking the most intimate and personal note in what one has taken as a sci-fi premise)…But The Mirror is the one that fucks me up profoundly: the elderly mother leading away her incongruously young boys by the hand, Bach on the score…(The image of elderly wife and infant husband in Benjamin Button hearkens back to this, and is also very powerful – was this conscious homage?)
What about this film is so fantastic? I personally despised City Of God for a cynical pseudo-anthropological potboiler speckled incongruously with romantic elements; and damned if Slumdog isn’t built the same way. Never mind the intentions of Boyle & Beaufoy – because none of us are able to read minds: we can only judge by what the film itself urges, and the means it uses. How many times, in how many bad direct-to-video or made-for-tee-vee movies, have we seen exactly the same gunplay, the footchases, the use of “urban” music on the score when shit is going down? How much of this movie is cadged from second-raters who were themselves bankrupt enough to steal from Taxi Driver and (Stone’s) Scarface? I don’t trust the critical/publicity environment in which Boyle’s ignored when he makes Millions or Sunshine, but lauded when he cobbles together a B-grade retread gangsta romance in a country he doesn’t really know.
I’m so glad that people have mentioned Crash—there’s another great example of a potboiler taken as a masterpiece.
And don’t be fooled by the formally comic ending (reunion of the lovers) tacked on to the film. It doesn’t magically resolve the jumble of picaresque, magic realism, realism (old skool, like Rossellini, Pasolini), gangsta romance (Boyz In the Hood, Jason’s Lyric), pseudo-anthropology of the Third World’s prototypical ghetto (City of Men – ugh), etc. It’s not sweet, and the dance number’s bullshit: false redemption from all the brutality.
I’m expecting mad and unearned love for this film, at the Oscars—but, really, Boyle’s “India” is right down there with Richard Attenborough’s “India.” (I’ll take Michael Winterbottom, instead, any day, thank you!)
@Samuryan – You mentioned Vanilla Sky, but not “Sweetness Follows”? God, man, that song works so beautifully, there…
Neil Jordan uses Wynton Marsalis’ rendition of “Stardust” to great effect, in the way-underrated The Miracle…
Isn’t it funny how much of an effect Scorcese has had on the perception of the use of popular songs in movie scores?
How about concert movies? – “Helter Skelter,” opening Rattle and Hum (down to Bono’s panting at the end)…I’d also say that Bono ripped shit up and totally stole Taymor’s Across the Universe, with the “I Am the Walrus” he recorded with Secret Machines (better than the accompanying visuals, better than the movie as a whole)
NIN over Kyle Cooper’s credits for Se7en, thematically right on the money: “You get me closer to God…” And the end credits, Bowie doing “Heart’s Filthy Lesson”…Fincher, again: Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind,” as the skyscrapers explode in Fight Club…
Bowie, again: “I’m Deranged,” opening Lost Highway…
Troy, I agree with you totally. And it’s disturbing that critics, at the very least, can’t be more analytical in looking at movies, instead of rushing to report on the subjective, visceral effect of image & sound. Quote-whores call some movies “thrill-rides,” but in fact no feature film is literally a thrill-ride, and every movie has some depth below the turbulent surface to be sounded by a viewer who takes the time to think a bit. In the case of cinematic Third World escapades – e.g. Body of Lies; Slumdog – it’s especially important to take a critical distance, and to see how simple-minded, offensive tropes are rebranded. Only compare the sexed-up Slumdog (guns, beatings, eye-gougings and $$$ are “sexy,” too, in movies) with Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay…
Old guys beloved by media conglomerates: Ron Howard – Robert Zemeckis – M. Night Shyamalan (“One more shaggy dog story – one more!”) – Tony Scott (what’s that smell?) – Michael Bay
Bill Forsyth’s Being Human – It was absolutely butchered by cuts, and, even worse, a perfectly wrong-note VO narration by…Theresa Russell! I love Forsyth’s work all the way back to Gregory’s Girl…
I don’t think that a great film is the sum of great technical contributions.
Hollywood has historically been the repository – through the “luck” of criminal manipulations, market forces, wars, etc. – of much of the greatest talent in cinema. But wouldn’t it be a naive position to take Hollywood as the summit of overall aesthetic achievement in cinema, even to this day?
Moral purpose, I think, is what makes a film great. And I don’t mean cheap morality, censoriousness, or any of that. It’s a post-Nietzschean “morality” I’m thinking of, a professional accountability on the part of the director, writer(s), and even DP and costumer and composer on a film. The question is: Why did you make that decision, to produce something in that way? How vested are you, as a professional, with the responsibility for even collateral effects of your work? The question appears to separate the wheat from the chaff: it separates, for instance, Jerry Bruckheimer & Michael Bay from Steven Spielberg (who in spite of having directed Schindler’s List and Amistad – having helped sketch out an Obama-nation, in other words – gets shit on by posters to this site way too often. Why should great Pole or Czech or Russian auteurs reap praise for anatomizing the evils of reigning socio-political systems, while Spielberg gets no love for doing the same re antisemitism and our own native history of slavery? I don’t get it! But for me his Lincoln movie will seal the deal, and will tie him, truly, to the Capra he’s so crazy about, as a paradigm of our cinema).
Truly moral criteria of critical judgment have the advantage of flying over binary distinctions between “good” and “bad.” And even comedies (thinking specifically of Woody Allen, the most moral filmmaker of our time) may leave us with a sense of the filmmaker’s moral limits.
I’d wager that the mark of any qualitatively “bad” filmmaker is that he/she and the crew involved aren’t fully vested in the thing they’ve made, by the identities they hold. And by these criteria, I’d agree that, yeah, Citizen Kane is very far up the list of “great films”—because Mankiewicz and Welles were anatomizing their subject as deeply as possible, and in a thoroughgoing moral spirit.
Ivan – Herzog is still indeed working, and he’s in fact nominated for an Oscar: see the remarkable Encounters at the End of the World.
Man On Wire is indeed a great film, also.
Bush’s War, produced for the Frontline series, is seminal and is available for viewing online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/
I’d second The Smartest Guys in the Room, and also the same director’s Taxi To the Dark Side, which is even sharper and more powerful than Errol Morris’ somewhat stylistically-overwrought Standard Operating Procedure.
>Slumdog was about something simple like loving a hot girl and winning lots of cash.
Vellaem, you’re right! —But – and it’s oh-so-important when you’re talking about American audiences – what about the violence, gangsterism, and gunplay? Lest a hyperactive viewer get a little bored with the fairy tale romance and the magic realism-like elements, he can at least enjoy people getting shot in the head. And the Blaze of Glory in the bathtub full of banknotes was mint, wasn’t it?
I only recently saw Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep for the first time; and so that film’s very fresh in memory. That film’s revered for many good reasons, and I can’t recommend it enough to people who’ve been diddled first by City of God, and now Slumdog, and feel that maybe they’ve had enough of the caricature and ghetto tourism in those films. (I’m also made by Boyle’s film to see, again, just how sincere and even romantic John Singleton’s Boyz In the Hood actually was.)
The Academy is poised to do ill by India, once again. First it was Attenborough’s self-righteous and simple-minded movie about Gandhi, which swept the Oscars in ‘83; and now – much worse – Boyle’s cynical attempt to kick-start his career will be vindicated though the Oscar “treatment.”
Did anyone mention Crimes and Misdemeanors? I’ve never seen a film which is so resolute on the point that there is no God, no all-seeing moral imperative. Of course Woody Allen has gone back to the same ground, since, but mostly to play up the role of Chance in our affairs (an idea he’s expressed in his work for decades).
Re Bunuel, I’m surprised no one mentioned The Milky Way, a Criterion release! Bunuel & Jean-Claude Carriere there engaged with and personified, put faces and bodies and dialogue to, a number of historical Christian heresies. The dialectic lies not between the Atheist and the Believer, but between the True Believer and the Heretic (no differently than in Dreyer’s Passion, though here it’s fun & clearly a lark). At no time in the film is there the silly feeling that you get, for instance, in a work like Huston’s Bible that the filmmaker is struggling to convey the great Power of God through goofy optical efx lightning or wind machines or a booming Voice (of the director, himself). And the end of The Milky Way contains, I think, one of the greatest repudiations of Jesus captured on film (and how many are there?), taken directly from Scripture, the bit from Matthew 10 about the sword (prefigured in the film by just such a sword slipping from under a priest’s robes).
@Joseph >What would an atheistic movie look like?
I think that the most thoroughgoing atheistic movie would have little need for dialectic and ratiocinations, little boosting for…whatever it is that opposes the idea of God – earth, finite being, ego, arbitrary prerogatives… Sade inevitably comes to mind—his 120 Days of Sodom leads right out of sacrilegious titillation into something absolute (the “Hell Passion”), and Pasolini captures some of that in Salo.
Or maybe an atheistic movie would propose rites having nothing to do with celebrating “God,” as such? I’m thinking of Kenneth Anger; and especially of Merhige’s Begotten.
>Why has no genuine Bollywood film ever been nominated?
A look at the history of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar shows you how absolutely stacked the deck is against most of the rest of the world’s cinema. All the rules re submission, language, nationhood (see: Palestinian cinema)…Isn’t it ridiculous and annoying that Let the Right One In isn’t nominated, this year?
>Why has no genuine Bollywood film ever been nominated?
A look at the history of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar shows you how absolutely stacked the deck is against most of the rest of the world’s cinema. All the rules re submission, language, nationhood (see: Palestinian cinema)…Isn’t it ridiculous and annoying that Let the Right One In isn’t nominated, this year?
Has anyone else gotten the distinct feeling from WALL-E that even the satire of dirt-ignorant consumerist couch-potato-ism in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy has become commodified, a family-friendly joke? How many thousands of buffoonish all-Amurrican hyper-consuming fatbodies sat in theaters across this country laughing at WALL-E? (Shades of what Thomas Frank wrote years ago in Conquest of the Cool…)
del Toro’s a bad example of this – see The Devil’s Backbone, which precedes Pan’s Labyrinth.
I’d say that Gus Van Sant qualifies handily, with Elephant and Last Days. The latter is especially uncompromising; but I love it alot.
Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: I think it’s a masterpiece, and I’d argue that it has only the barest superficial elements in common with his other films. And I think that the shock of Schindler’s List coming from Spielberg is – like the man himself – taken for granted. On rewatching it weeks ago, I was surprised to see just how forcefully the film argues that man is a mercenary beast, and that commerce is all-pervasive, where morality is certainly not.
Clint Eastwood: there is no way Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima wouldn’t fit this list.
Who in the critical world is it who’s praising The Reader so highly? This thing was so turgid, and so wracked with sentimental tidal pulls, but all to superficial effect. Through the beginning I was wishing I was instead seeing this subject matter done again by the masters of it – people like Fassbinder (most especially), Ozon, Bertolucci…even Wertmuller, Visconti…People who could make this subject matter what it would actually be: dangerous, painful, shocking, etc.
Kate (“I’m nekkid, roll sound”) Winslet kind of grimaces her way through it, and sometimes affects a dowdy, hobbled kind of walk in her housedress; but then, as a defendant, she’s mild and helpless—and, poor thing, illiterate. How exactly does a pseudo-erotic war crimes drama enter Stanley and Iris territory? I wouldn’t have thought it possible, before I saw this film. The film agonizes, proposes a number of moral dilemmas, but is still equivocal and vague. The worst of the dilemmas proposed is that of a woman whose illiteracy, as some kind of Mark of Cain, lands her passively in the corps of the SS seeing people to their deaths at Auschwitz.
Lena Olin’s character is brought on, too late, to speak some sense, to put a period to a long discourse of bullshit. The fact that a German production company shares the credit for this thing is more than a little troubling.
Only think how laughable Slumdog would be to many, if it were a period piece in the mode of Rob Marshall’s laughable Memoirs of a Geisha, rather than a contemporary story. What Samiracle said about 20/20 is spot-on: the pseudo-doc “you are there” gritty immediacy is pushed very hard, as a proxy for deep feeling and formal integrity.
- Hoop Dreams is staggering; as is Stevie, by the same director Steve James (the two comprise an anti-“American Dream” diptych).
- Marcel Ophuls Hotel Terminus (not available, I believe on DVD – should be a Criterion!), and of course The Sorrow and the Pity (the obsession of Alvie Singer).
- Speaking of which, Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues.
- Chris Landreth’s Ryan, about the ruined Canadian animator Ryan Larkin: a kind of fabulously conceived, animated doc which is nonetheless extremely poignant and personal, and has no peer.
- Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans – this is one of those docs served well on DVD release, with the extras (like Fog of War, or an Inconvenient Truth, etc.)
- And did anyone mentioned Michael Apted’s “Up” series?
Underrated Films... over 3 years ago
Hey, why are there so many posts listing fairly well-received, popular films? There are so many films which were held at arm’s-length like doo-doo on a stick by critics and audiences alike (and I’m not talking about the ones which were subsequently rehabilitated, brought back into the fold of the canon, as even Heaven’s Gate was!). I’d also venture that one good index of a film’s neglect is that it’s not yet released on DVD, and better yet has never been!
Anyway, my not-even-on-DVD list is:
- Neil Jordan – The Miracle (1991), as high-romantic in the Vertigo mode as The Crying Game.
- Richard Eyre – The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), a topical Falklands-era film, plus a brilliant character study of moral bankruptcy; plus a “Medium Cool”-type candid on-location sequence at the Conservative Party conference of ‘82.
- Peter Greenaway – Prospero’s Books (1991), The Baby of Macon (1993), Greenaway enjoyed fantastic success with The Cook, the Thief… only to find critical attention and distribution channels crumble after. The Tulse Luper films are, like the character himself, only a rumor in most part of the world.
- Stephen Frears – Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) – I love Hanif Kureishi so much I’ll say screw it and even include London Kills Me (1991)
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Performances that make you wince over 3 years ago
Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate—Christ almighty he sucks!
Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers – godawful – Just look at the way the man moves: he’s practicing a special, untutored brand of actorly “alienation effect”—namely, the alienation of a poor actor from his own role. (Henry Brandon as the Indian chief Scar was no prize, either!)
Grace Kelly in Rear Window – a rotten crepe-paper simulacrum of a real woman, she’s got a bit of Blanche DuBois going, no matter the context.
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Last movie you saw and rate it over 3 years ago
Tropic Thunder – 7/10, must say that I loved it. The money shot/sequence for me was the little kid, Ben Stiller’s newfound “son,” riding him piggyback and stabbing him fitfully in the neck, blood spraying—before Ben flings the boy like a ragdoll off the exploding bridge. There’s much to be said of the value of sadism in American film comedy. Too many comic actors and too many comedies – the king’s portion of them – are just ingratiating, mendaciously sly and fake-witty, aiming for a class they don’t deserve. Films like Tropic Thunder or Idiocracy retain that degrading, reductive part of film comedy that really has teeth. (And note how critics make the non-distinction between comedy and satire—so that you don’t feel that you’re missing out on something, when you fail to laugh much as you’re forced to sit though the newest Anne Hathaway/Kate Hudson/Jen Aniston opus.)
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DIRECTORS I NEED TO CATCH UP ON THIS YEAR over 3 years ago
Zhang Ke Jia – I saw The World on DVD what seems like a few years ago, and the film has haunted me ever since. But somehow I never saw another of his films, though Platform has been on my damned Netflix queue for ages, now.
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Coming soon... over 3 years ago
Watchmen Watchmen Watchmen!
Regarding Coppola’s Tetro: Youth Without Youth was a staggering film—I’d put it way above the vaguely similar Benjamin Button (and I say that as a very deep admirer of Fincher); and it was so in part because of Golijov’s score & Mihai Malaimare’s work as DP, and I see that they’re both returning for this new one.
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Who Was/Is The Most Beautiful Film Actor Ever? over 3 years ago
Hard to argue against Deneuve – and I don’t even think she’s sexy in a “warm” way.
Li Gong still makes me uncomfortable inside, in the mode of Rilke (first of the Duino Elegies), beauty as the start of terror. As with Deneuve, I see her skills as an actress and yet she cannot to my senses fully inhabit any specific character/role. An extreme of beauty in a dramatic context seems to me to function transcendentally, in a sprawling and brilliant way.
I only just saw They Live By Night for the first time last week; and I think that Farley Granger serves as vague and brilliant a function in that film. His “Bowie” is a vague naif who came of age in prison, and not capable of great crimes; but the news-borne terroristic rumors that kind of aggrandize him somehow fit—as if he’s formidable because he’s beautiful.
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OUTSTANDING JAZZSOULRHYTHM&BLUES COMPOSERS ON FILM over 3 years ago
I’d add to the list bassist Ron Carter’s score for Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice (1987).
Also – how about the crazy shit Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore cooked up for Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (shades of his “Skies Of America” recording)?
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Most Traumatic or Dramatic Film Endings over 3 years ago
I see that someone already mentioned Forbidden Games.
Also – Klimov’s Come and See
Michael Radford’s 1984 (Winston and Julia meet again, zombies and quite indifferent to each other)
Tarkovsky – Solaris; Stalker (in both cases striking the most intimate and personal note in what one has taken as a sci-fi premise)…But The Mirror is the one that fucks me up profoundly: the elderly mother leading away her incongruously young boys by the hand, Bach on the score…(The image of elderly wife and infant husband in Benjamin Button hearkens back to this, and is also very powerful – was this conscious homage?)
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Most Experimental Films? over 3 years ago
No one mentioned James Fotopoulos? Zero is as severe and as dedicated to its end as e.g. Schneider’s Film was…
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Why I didn't love Slumdog Millionaire. over 3 years ago
What about this film is so fantastic? I personally despised City Of God for a cynical pseudo-anthropological potboiler speckled incongruously with romantic elements; and damned if Slumdog isn’t built the same way. Never mind the intentions of Boyle & Beaufoy – because none of us are able to read minds: we can only judge by what the film itself urges, and the means it uses. How many times, in how many bad direct-to-video or made-for-tee-vee movies, have we seen exactly the same gunplay, the footchases, the use of “urban” music on the score when shit is going down? How much of this movie is cadged from second-raters who were themselves bankrupt enough to steal from Taxi Driver and (Stone’s) Scarface? I don’t trust the critical/publicity environment in which Boyle’s ignored when he makes Millions or Sunshine, but lauded when he cobbles together a B-grade retread gangsta romance in a country he doesn’t really know.
I’m so glad that people have mentioned Crash—there’s another great example of a potboiler taken as a masterpiece.
And don’t be fooled by the formally comic ending (reunion of the lovers) tacked on to the film. It doesn’t magically resolve the jumble of picaresque, magic realism, realism (old skool, like Rossellini, Pasolini), gangsta romance (Boyz In the Hood, Jason’s Lyric), pseudo-anthropology of the Third World’s prototypical ghetto (City of Men – ugh), etc. It’s not sweet, and the dance number’s bullshit: false redemption from all the brutality.
I’m expecting mad and unearned love for this film, at the Oscars—but, really, Boyle’s “India” is right down there with Richard Attenborough’s “India.” (I’ll take Michael Winterbottom, instead, any day, thank you!)
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Favorite use of a song in a film. over 3 years ago
@Samuryan – You mentioned Vanilla Sky, but not “Sweetness Follows”? God, man, that song works so beautifully, there…
Neil Jordan uses Wynton Marsalis’ rendition of “Stardust” to great effect, in the way-underrated The Miracle…
Isn’t it funny how much of an effect Scorcese has had on the perception of the use of popular songs in movie scores?
How about concert movies? – “Helter Skelter,” opening Rattle and Hum (down to Bono’s panting at the end)…I’d also say that Bono ripped shit up and totally stole Taymor’s Across the Universe, with the “I Am the Walrus” he recorded with Secret Machines (better than the accompanying visuals, better than the movie as a whole)
NIN over Kyle Cooper’s credits for Se7en, thematically right on the money: “You get me closer to God…” And the end credits, Bowie doing “Heart’s Filthy Lesson”…Fincher, again: Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind,” as the skyscrapers explode in Fight Club…
Bowie, again: “I’m Deranged,” opening Lost Highway…
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Why I didn't love Slumdog Millionaire. over 3 years ago
Troy, I agree with you totally. And it’s disturbing that critics, at the very least, can’t be more analytical in looking at movies, instead of rushing to report on the subjective, visceral effect of image & sound. Quote-whores call some movies “thrill-rides,” but in fact no feature film is literally a thrill-ride, and every movie has some depth below the turbulent surface to be sounded by a viewer who takes the time to think a bit. In the case of cinematic Third World escapades – e.g. Body of Lies; Slumdog – it’s especially important to take a critical distance, and to see how simple-minded, offensive tropes are rebranded. Only compare the sexed-up Slumdog (guns, beatings, eye-gougings and $$$ are “sexy,” too, in movies) with Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay…
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actor and Director pairs that you dislike over 3 years ago
To paraphrase Woody Allen’s character re Diane Keaton’s “Academy of the Overrated,” I love all those pairings you just mentioned…
But for disliked pairs, how about: Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman…Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwartzenegger (oy!)…Ron Howard and Clint Howard…
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If you had to pick ONE film as your favorite... over 3 years ago
Manhattan.
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
Old guys beloved by media conglomerates: Ron Howard – Robert Zemeckis – M. Night Shyamalan (“One more shaggy dog story – one more!”) – Tony Scott (what’s that smell?) – Michael Bay
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Other movies in situations similar to Brazil over 3 years ago
Bill Forsyth’s Being Human – It was absolutely butchered by cuts, and, even worse, a perfectly wrong-note VO narration by…Theresa Russell! I love Forsyth’s work all the way back to Gregory’s Girl…
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What makes a film great? over 3 years ago
I don’t think that a great film is the sum of great technical contributions.
Hollywood has historically been the repository – through the “luck” of criminal manipulations, market forces, wars, etc. – of much of the greatest talent in cinema. But wouldn’t it be a naive position to take Hollywood as the summit of overall aesthetic achievement in cinema, even to this day?
Moral purpose, I think, is what makes a film great. And I don’t mean cheap morality, censoriousness, or any of that. It’s a post-Nietzschean “morality” I’m thinking of, a professional accountability on the part of the director, writer(s), and even DP and costumer and composer on a film. The question is: Why did you make that decision, to produce something in that way? How vested are you, as a professional, with the responsibility for even collateral effects of your work? The question appears to separate the wheat from the chaff: it separates, for instance, Jerry Bruckheimer & Michael Bay from Steven Spielberg (who in spite of having directed Schindler’s List and Amistad – having helped sketch out an Obama-nation, in other words – gets shit on by posters to this site way too often. Why should great Pole or Czech or Russian auteurs reap praise for anatomizing the evils of reigning socio-political systems, while Spielberg gets no love for doing the same re antisemitism and our own native history of slavery? I don’t get it! But for me his Lincoln movie will seal the deal, and will tie him, truly, to the Capra he’s so crazy about, as a paradigm of our cinema).
Truly moral criteria of critical judgment have the advantage of flying over binary distinctions between “good” and “bad.” And even comedies (thinking specifically of Woody Allen, the most moral filmmaker of our time) may leave us with a sense of the filmmaker’s moral limits.
I’d wager that the mark of any qualitatively “bad” filmmaker is that he/she and the crew involved aren’t fully vested in the thing they’ve made, by the identities they hold. And by these criteria, I’d agree that, yeah, Citizen Kane is very far up the list of “great films”—because Mankiewicz and Welles were anatomizing their subject as deeply as possible, and in a thoroughgoing moral spirit.
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Any good documentaries out there? over 3 years ago
Ivan – Herzog is still indeed working, and he’s in fact nominated for an Oscar: see the remarkable Encounters at the End of the World.
Man On Wire is indeed a great film, also.
Bush’s War, produced for the Frontline series, is seminal and is available for viewing online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/
I’d second The Smartest Guys in the Room, and also the same director’s Taxi To the Dark Side, which is even sharper and more powerful than Errol Morris’ somewhat stylistically-overwrought Standard Operating Procedure.
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how many oscars will slumdog millionaire win? over 3 years ago
>Slumdog was about something simple like loving a hot girl and winning lots of cash.
Vellaem, you’re right! —But – and it’s oh-so-important when you’re talking about American audiences – what about the violence, gangsterism, and gunplay? Lest a hyperactive viewer get a little bored with the fairy tale romance and the magic realism-like elements, he can at least enjoy people getting shot in the head. And the Blaze of Glory in the bathtub full of banknotes was mint, wasn’t it?
I only recently saw Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep for the first time; and so that film’s very fresh in memory. That film’s revered for many good reasons, and I can’t recommend it enough to people who’ve been diddled first by City of God, and now Slumdog, and feel that maybe they’ve had enough of the caricature and ghetto tourism in those films. (I’m also made by Boyle’s film to see, again, just how sincere and even romantic John Singleton’s Boyz In the Hood actually was.)
The Academy is poised to do ill by India, once again. First it was Attenborough’s self-righteous and simple-minded movie about Gandhi, which swept the Oscars in ‘83; and now – much worse – Boyle’s cynical attempt to kick-start his career will be vindicated though the Oscar “treatment.”
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Atheist movies? over 3 years ago
Did anyone mention Crimes and Misdemeanors? I’ve never seen a film which is so resolute on the point that there is no God, no all-seeing moral imperative. Of course Woody Allen has gone back to the same ground, since, but mostly to play up the role of Chance in our affairs (an idea he’s expressed in his work for decades).
Re Bunuel, I’m surprised no one mentioned The Milky Way, a Criterion release! Bunuel & Jean-Claude Carriere there engaged with and personified, put faces and bodies and dialogue to, a number of historical Christian heresies. The dialectic lies not between the Atheist and the Believer, but between the True Believer and the Heretic (no differently than in Dreyer’s Passion, though here it’s fun & clearly a lark). At no time in the film is there the silly feeling that you get, for instance, in a work like Huston’s Bible that the filmmaker is struggling to convey the great Power of God through goofy optical efx lightning or wind machines or a booming Voice (of the director, himself). And the end of The Milky Way contains, I think, one of the greatest repudiations of Jesus captured on film (and how many are there?), taken directly from Scripture, the bit from Matthew 10 about the sword (prefigured in the film by just such a sword slipping from under a priest’s robes).
@Joseph >What would an atheistic movie look like?
I think that the most thoroughgoing atheistic movie would have little need for dialectic and ratiocinations, little boosting for…whatever it is that opposes the idea of God – earth, finite being, ego, arbitrary prerogatives… Sade inevitably comes to mind—his 120 Days of Sodom leads right out of sacrilegious titillation into something absolute (the “Hell Passion”), and Pasolini captures some of that in Salo.
Or maybe an atheistic movie would propose rites having nothing to do with celebrating “God,” as such? I’m thinking of Kenneth Anger; and especially of Merhige’s Begotten.
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how many oscars will slumdog millionaire win? over 3 years ago
>Why has no genuine Bollywood film ever been nominated?
A look at the history of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar shows you how absolutely stacked the deck is against most of the rest of the world’s cinema. All the rules re submission, language, nationhood (see: Palestinian cinema)…Isn’t it ridiculous and annoying that Let the Right One In isn’t nominated, this year?
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how many oscars will slumdog millionaire win? over 3 years ago
>Why has no genuine Bollywood film ever been nominated?
A look at the history of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar shows you how absolutely stacked the deck is against most of the rest of the world’s cinema. All the rules re submission, language, nationhood (see: Palestinian cinema)…Isn’t it ridiculous and annoying that Let the Right One In isn’t nominated, this year?
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Consumerism themes in film over 3 years ago
Has anyone else gotten the distinct feeling from WALL-E that even the satire of dirt-ignorant consumerist couch-potato-ism in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy has become commodified, a family-friendly joke? How many thousands of buffoonish all-Amurrican hyper-consuming fatbodies sat in theaters across this country laughing at WALL-E? (Shades of what Thomas Frank wrote years ago in Conquest of the Cool…)
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THE OPPOSITE OF SELLING OUT over 3 years ago
del Toro’s a bad example of this – see The Devil’s Backbone, which precedes Pan’s Labyrinth.
I’d say that Gus Van Sant qualifies handily, with Elephant and Last Days. The latter is especially uncompromising; but I love it alot.
Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: I think it’s a masterpiece, and I’d argue that it has only the barest superficial elements in common with his other films. And I think that the shock of Schindler’s List coming from Spielberg is – like the man himself – taken for granted. On rewatching it weeks ago, I was surprised to see just how forcefully the film argues that man is a mercenary beast, and that commerce is all-pervasive, where morality is certainly not.
Clint Eastwood: there is no way Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima wouldn’t fit this list.
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THE OPPOSITE OF SELLING OUT over 3 years ago
(damn double-post!)
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The Reader - SS weren't that bad! over 3 years ago
Who in the critical world is it who’s praising The Reader so highly? This thing was so turgid, and so wracked with sentimental tidal pulls, but all to superficial effect. Through the beginning I was wishing I was instead seeing this subject matter done again by the masters of it – people like Fassbinder (most especially), Ozon, Bertolucci…even Wertmuller, Visconti…People who could make this subject matter what it would actually be: dangerous, painful, shocking, etc.
Kate (“I’m nekkid, roll sound”) Winslet kind of grimaces her way through it, and sometimes affects a dowdy, hobbled kind of walk in her housedress; but then, as a defendant, she’s mild and helpless—and, poor thing, illiterate. How exactly does a pseudo-erotic war crimes drama enter Stanley and Iris territory? I wouldn’t have thought it possible, before I saw this film. The film agonizes, proposes a number of moral dilemmas, but is still equivocal and vague. The worst of the dilemmas proposed is that of a woman whose illiteracy, as some kind of Mark of Cain, lands her passively in the corps of the SS seeing people to their deaths at Auschwitz.
Lena Olin’s character is brought on, too late, to speak some sense, to put a period to a long discourse of bullshit. The fact that a German production company shares the credit for this thing is more than a little troubling.
Opinions?
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The Reader - SS weren't that bad! over 3 years ago
And the same period of late ’08 saw Defiance, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Valkyrie released to qualify as additional “Oscar bait.”
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how many oscars will slumdog millionaire win? over 3 years ago
@Kenny – it’s mindboggling, though I know it’s true, to think that Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago, and Crash won Best Picture awards!
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Why I didn't love Slumdog Millionaire. over 3 years ago
Only think how laughable Slumdog would be to many, if it were a period piece in the mode of Rob Marshall’s laughable Memoirs of a Geisha, rather than a contemporary story. What Samiracle said about 20/20 is spot-on: the pseudo-doc “you are there” gritty immediacy is pushed very hard, as a proxy for deep feeling and formal integrity.
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Documentaries over 3 years ago
- Hoop Dreams is staggering; as is Stevie, by the same director Steve James (the two comprise an anti-“American Dream” diptych).
- Marcel Ophuls Hotel Terminus (not available, I believe on DVD – should be a Criterion!), and of course The Sorrow and the Pity (the obsession of Alvie Singer).
- Speaking of which, Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues.
- Chris Landreth’s Ryan, about the ruined Canadian animator Ryan Larkin: a kind of fabulously conceived, animated doc which is nonetheless extremely poignant and personal, and has no peer.
- Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans – this is one of those docs served well on DVD release, with the extras (like Fog of War, or an Inconvenient Truth, etc.)
- And did anyone mentioned Michael Apted’s “Up” series?
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