Addictive series full of distinct characters getting into overblown soap-opera situations. It concerns changing social structure in the early 1900’s – specifically, bookended by the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 and the start of WWI (for Britain) in August 1914 – then season two takes us to the end of the war. An extremely busy series with excellent writing and acting and no wasted time.

Upstairs:

The Earl Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville, star of Asylum) is in charge of the “abbey” (mansion? I see no monks).

His American wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern of Once Upon a Time in America and The House of Mirth) provided all the family’s monetary wealth, has scary eyes.

Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery, who played the murdered decoy-Cate Blanchett in Hanna) is the oldest daughter who should be married by now, but drives away all suitors except a Turkish diplomat, who dies in her bed provoking hushed scandal. She’s supposed to hook up with Matthew in order to keep the fortune in the family, but they drive each other away until the end of the post-s2 Christmas special.

Lady Sybil (Jessica Findlay) is the kinda nice middle daughter who turns political, gets excited about equal rights for women, and finally runs off to Scotland or someplace to marry the chauffeur.

Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) is the youngest daughter, defined mainly by her fights with Mary, which quickly escalate (Mary scares off her would-be-fiancee, Edith writes to the Turkish embassy explaining how their diplomat died). She also has a wartime fling with a neighboring farmer.

The Dowager Countess (the great Maggie Smith), Crawley’s mom, hangs around to provide the official old-world upper-class perspective on everything. She grudgingly agrees to some of the major changes and improprieties, thus staying a lovably wonderful character instead of an increasingly out-of-touch old sourpuss.

Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) is a distant cousin who becomes heir to Downton after a nearer cousin dies on the Titanic. He moves his law practice into town to familiarise himself with his future estate, is being set up to marry Mary, but instead gets engaged to Lavinia. He’s injured in WWI in the same blast that mortally wounds William, and will never walk again. But of course, he walks again.

Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton, Shaun of the Dead‘s mother, also in Match Point) is Matthew’s mom, a contentious nurse who takes over the house when it becomes a recovery home for wounded soldiers during the war.

Lavinia Swire (Zoe Boyle) is the beloved fiancee of Matthew, who is too perfect to ever leave him or do anything wrong, so instead she’s killed off by Spanish Influenza.

Downstairs:

Mr. Carson, head butler (Dennis Potter regular Jim Carter), is the servant equivalent of Maggie Smith – knows exactly his place, and everyone else’s.

Mrs. Hughes, head housekeeper (Phyllis Logan, star of Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) is a benevolent leader and problem-solver, like a female Carson but friendlier.

Mr. Bates, Crawley’s valet (Brendan Coyle of an upcoming, annoying-looking Poe adaptation/bio-pic) and servant during the Boer War (1900-ish), is hired and allowed to stay despite his controversial leg injury. He and Anna fall in love, but Bates is secretly married, and after his wife takes all his money and still won’t agree to a divorce, Bates possibly kills her. But we’ll see in season 3.

Ms. O’Brien, head maid (Siobhan Finneran of the Andrew Garfield starmaker Boy A) is evil and resentful, always scheming with Thomas, causes Cora’s miscarriage.

Thomas, first footman (Rob James-Collier), is possibly even more evil, also a closeted homosexual. Coincidence? He gets out of the war by arranging a hand injury, A Very Long Engagement-style, loses his fortune in a black-market scam, then achieves his long-held goal of taking Bates’s job as valet.

William, second footman (Thomas Howes), is a hapless, bullied fellow, lovestruck for Daisy.

Anna, head maid (Joanne Froggatt of an upcoming movie with description “a teenage boy’s descent into the dangerous world of the Internet”), is Bates’s sweetheart.

Gwen, maid (Rose Leslie), is learning to type so she can leave service and hold a proper job, secretly assisted by Sybil.

Ethel (Amy Nuttall) is the s2 replacement for Gwen. Even more of a free-spirited, liberated woman than her predecessor, she gets knocked up by a hospital guest and leaves the house in shame. Good, I was sick of her.

Mrs. Patmore, cook (Lesley Nicol), is losing her sight until the family sends her off for cataract surgery – spends the next ten episodes berating Daisy.

Daisy, cook’s assistant (Sophie McShera) is cute, tiny, guilted into marrying William on his death bed from war injuries.

Molesley (Kevin Doyle) is assigned to be Matthew’s servant, keeps almost getting regular plot threads but he’s not quite interesting enough so they get pushed aside.

Branson (Allen Leech) is the commie chauffeur who manages to marry into the family – but never gets invited into the house.

Crew:

Writer/producer Julian Fellowes was an actor for years, appearing in a Bond movie and bunches of miniseries, also wrote Gosford Park, Vanity Fair, The Young Victoria and a new version of Titanic with Toby Jones.

In the original Zebraman, made in 2005, family man Sho Aikawa is obsessed with an old TV series that’s set in 2010, the year the film takes place. This one jumps ahead to 2025. The only recurring character is Asano, the young student who shared Sho’s love for the Zebraman series, who now provides care for refugees from Tokyo. Sho wakes up, can’t remember the last 15 years (his family is never mentioned), so Asano fills him in.

Oh, where to begin? The Governor of Tokyo (Guadalcanal Taka of Beat Takeshi’s Boiling Point and Zatoichi) has renamed it Zebra City and instituted the “Zebra Time” policy, by which for ten minutes a day, nothing is illegal (cue amusing montage of violence), and the Zebra Police walk the streets in poor neighborhoods killing everyone they see.

Where has Zebraman been all this time? He was in a centrifuge run by the governor’s mad midget doctor. After years of spinning, they succeed in separating black from white. So he is mostly white, and his dark side became the governor’s “daughter,” the Zebra Queen (Riisa Naka), who is also incidentally a pop star.

And what of the alien infestation from the first film? Well, the only remaining alien presence is inside a ten-year-old girl – actually she’s twenty-five, but the force required to imprison the alien has kept her from growing. Eventually she’s sent to the centrifuge and the alien is released to terrorize Tokyo again – part of the Zebra Queen’s plan to displace Zebraman as the legendary hero by saving the city.

Where does Asano fit in? Asano (Masahiro Inoue, star of a series called Kamen Rider) and his buddy Ichiba (Naoki Tanaka) help out victims of Zebra Time, are accumulating an army of the injured to overthrow the governor. Ichiba is a Zebraman obsessive (not Asano, strangely) and once played the title character in a revival of the show. Also there’s a dark fellow with bad-boy bangs named Nimi (Tsuyoshi Abe of Initial D) who’s in love with the Zebra Queen.

Action! The Z Queen kills her rival in the pop charts and her “father” during successive Zebra Times, but can’t defeat the giant alien. She also sort of kills Nimi, and he finishes himself off. Zebraman isn’t sure what to do about the giant alien, but Ichiba remembers the final episode of the rebooted series, instructs Z to eat the alien – which he does before floating balloon-like into space.

Weird movie, then. More nutso fun than the first one, with all subtlety out the window. We get a couple Zebra Queen music videos, clips from fake TV episodes, and a “Stop AIDS” advertisement.

There was a forty-minute direct-to-video spin-off called Vengeful Zebra Miniskirt Police – why oh why wasn’t it included on the blu-ray?

On the way out, I commented that this should really have been a miniseries, since Gary Oldman is conducting an investigation into Tinker (Toby Jones), Tailor (Colin Firth), Soldier (Ciaran Hinds) and Poor Man (David Dencik of both Dragon Tattoo and its remake) but we know nothing about the four men, so aren’t invested in the outcome (except through the cathartic rifle-shot of tortured ex-operative Mark Strong). And Chris told me it WAS a miniseries, starring Alec Guinness. Not only that, I now see that Tinker Tailor follows The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and is followed by Smiley’s People (another miniseries), all tied into a seven-part series of novels. So this two-hour movie is hardly the whole story.

Colin Firth is hiding behind Poor Man’s head:

But as a film, it works. Alfredson (Film-grain-happy director of Let The Right One In, with the same cinematographer) has the best cast you could hope for, including Gary Oldman as the lead, John Hurt as the (late) boss of it all, and someone named Benedict Cumberbatch (TV’s latest Sherlock Holmes) as Oldman’s main man. Such a very British cast and film (plus a notable scene in Hungary), I’m surprised they hired a Swede to direct.

It’s complicated how Oldman identifies the mole in MI6’s spy ring – something to do with a Russian who’s fed information by everybody, but only true information by one of them (Firth, of course, since he’s the most respectable-looking of the crew). Side plots include Tom Hardy (who was he in Inception?) hiding out at Oldman’s place with his flashback story of a woman he failed to save, Cumberbatch’s file-snatching escapade (spying on the spies), Firth stealing Oldman’s wife, and the sad, trailer-by-the-river life of Mark Strong.

Keira Knightley (Atonement) is amazing as a perverse mental patient turned psychoanalyst. The movie is mainly focused on her (sometimes quite inappropriate) relationship with Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender of Hunger and Inglorious Basterds), but also about Jung’s relationship with Sigmund Freud (cigar-chomping Viggo Mortensen).

Doesn’t sound like Cronenberg’s usual fare, but his movies have always concerned themselves with sex and the workings of the mind, and Keira proves herself a great Cronenbergian heroine, having fits and jaw-locking facial tics when trying to discuss her past, the mind perverting the body.

Vincent Cassel returns from Eastern Promises in a small role. Sparkling sunlit photography by Cronie regular Peter Suschitzky. Closing titles tell us that Keira’s character Sabina Spielrein returned to her native Germany and was murdered by nazis. Jung has previously been played by Max von Sydow and Freud by Liev Schreiber, Bud Cort, Alec Guinness and… Max von Sydow.

Another installment of the consistently high-quality series, the best thing Tom Cruise has ever gotten himself involved with. He escapes from prison, climbs the highest building in the world with malfunctioning suction gloves (a much better use of Dubai than in Sex & The City 2), gets into so many car accidents, sneaks into the Kremlin (all you need is a fake mustache) and stops a nuclear missile from destroying San Francisco.

Jeremy Renner is a spy-turned-accountant-turned-spy with a dark past (he failed to protect Ethan’s wife from getting killed by foreign agents), Simon Pegg is the comic-relief tech spy with an awesome rear-projection screen used to fool a Kremlin guard into thinking a spy-infested hallway is empty, and Paula Patton is the sex-appeal spy who gets to kick the enemy spy (Lea Seydoux, Mysteries of Lisbon) who murdered her boyfriend (Josh Holloway) out of a 300-story window.

Ving Rhames gets a cameo at the end, and Tom Cruise’s wife is still alive if anyone gives a shit about that. Brad Bird knows how to plan an action scene and shoot it coherently, and that’s really all we wanted.

2023: Rewatched on new year’s eve. RIP Tom Wilkinson. Come back, Paula Patton.

Perfect example of a movie that works in theory, but lacks something essential. Strong performances by good comic actors (I was happily surprised by Andy Serkis), funny situations and dialogue, strong historical interest, and good energy. So why is it such an average movie? Blame Landis?

Simon “Burke” Pegg tries to buy the favor of feminist actress Isla Fisher, while Hare is content with his wife Lucky (Spaced star Jessica Hynes). The intrigue revolves around head doctors at competing medical schools – old-school Tim Curry, who gets the law on his side, and Tom Wilkinson, who resorts to hiring our heroes to provide him bodies on which to experiment (leading to the undignified death of poor Christopher Lee). Bill Bailey plays a narrating executioner and David Hayman is a gangster who wants protection money but ends up dead in the operating theater. Movie closes on a present-day shot of Burke’s skeleton, still preserved in Edinburgh – perfect ending to a historical black comedy.

I haven’t much to say, so thought I’d end by stealing a native Edinburgh perspective from Shadowplay, but damn it, they haven’t watched this one yet.

As a rule, I don’t like movies about precocious, lovestruck schoolkids. But I like Richard Ayoade and this got good reviews and Rushmore comparisons, so I checked it out. Extremely well-done – funny and atmospheric, two things that rarely go together. It’s Wes Andersonian without seeming derivative.

Oliver Tate worries that his parents (Sally Hawkins of Happy-Go-Lucky and Noah Taylor, appropriately of The Life Aquatic) aren’t getting along, pines after a classmate named Jordana, and envisions his own life in that sweetly megalomaniacal manner that teenagers do.

Drama: Oliver gets the girl, then loses her when he panics and doesn’t come to the hospital on the day of her mother’s cancer surgery. And Oliver’s mom might be cheating with the next-door neighbor (new-age spokesman Paddy Considine). For a movie starring a kid, it works out its conflicts in a refreshingly mature way.

Oliver checks up on his parents:

Paddy Considine:

Bela Tarr is back, with the same crew he’s been using since Damnation (plus DP Fred Kelemen, a relative newcomer). And he is BACK this time, with another wind-filled, nearly apocalyptic-feeling black-and-white masterpiece. It seems almost like a horror film, which seemed exciting until I remembered that Werckmeister Harmonies and Satantango could be just as bleak.

Everything in the movie seems concrete and real, pre-existing the film by decades. The characters are real too, even though I recognize the daughter. Once I realized the father has a bad arm that he never uses, I didn’t wonder why the actor or filmmakers decided to add that detail – I wondered what happened to the poor man’s arm. And yet, with its long takes and methodically roving camera, sometimes shoving the camera right in the face of a person or horse, I’m constantly thinking about the film’s structure and photography. Knowing Tarr’s love for artificial weather, at one point when the camera turned in an unexpected direction outdoors, I was actually surprised not to catch sight of a giant wind machine. I can’t figure out how Tarr manages to hold this atmosphere of complete reality with showy technique.

Having read no plot summaries, I was surprised that this turned out so similar to the second half of Melancholia, which I also watched this month. Both are about a small, isolated group who we gradually realize may be facing the end of the world. But Von Trier tells us about his apocalypse ahead of time. Tarr’s heroes don’t have access to google.

A cart driver (Janos Derzsi, a killer in The Man From London, Kraner in Satantango) lives with his daughter (Erike Bok, the lead couple’s daughter in Man From London, cat tormenter in Satantango) in a small house away from the main town. Besides a chatterbox neighbor who shows up one day to borrow some brandy and a band of gypsies who stop at the well for a few minutes, they are the only two people in the movie. After the prologue they barely leave the house, so we get to know their routines and mannerisms – but Tarr shoots repeated actions in a different way each time. For instance, at the first dinner scene it’s a tight shot on the father’s face as he peels and eats his potato in a great hurry while it’s still too hot. Next time we watch the daughter instead, from further away over her father’s arm. And the third time it’s a two-shot with the camera centered on the table.

Of course I counted shots. Might be off by one or two, but it’s definitely fewer than Werckmeister Harmonies, which was the same length. Five-minute average!

Prologue (1): After a black-screen voiceover tells us the title story, about Nietzche losing his mind after protecting a horse that was being brutally whipped. The man rides his cart home, the story in our minds as the camera watches his horse, which doesn’t seem to be suffering.

The First Day (4): The girl comes out and they put the cart and horse in the barn. She helps him change clothes. They each have a potato then go to bed, after taking turns staring out the window. “The woodworms: they’re not making any noise. I’ve heard them for 58 years, but I don’t hear them now.” A narrator unexpectedly bursts in, telling us the man’s name (Ohlsdorfer), that he’s the girl’s father (I assumed) and that it’s windy out (heh).

The Second Day (7): She gets water at the well, helps father dress. They gear up the horse, but it won’t move. After some attempts with the whip (nothing that would give Nietzche a breakdown), they give up, put the cart and horse back and give it fresh food. Dressing again. He splits wood one-handed while she does laundry. Potatoes. Then the neighbor wanting brandy. We’re not sure what to make of his rant (does it come from Nietzche?). “The wind’s blown [the town] away. It’s gone to ruin. Everything’s in ruins.” Then he gets more abstract, about how “they” have acquired and debased everything, that no god exists, nor does anything. “Extinguished and burnt out.” In five minutes he delivers more than half the dialogue in the entire 150-minute film.

The Third Day (5): Water at the well, father gets dressed, off to the barn. The horse hasn’t eaten, has no energy. They don’t even try to make it pull the cart, just retreat back indoors. A gypsy cart approaches and the man gets anxious. The daughter tries to shoo them away as they get water from the well – one grabs her, “Come with us to America!” The father chases them off with a hatchet. Back indoors, she reads the book a gypsy gave her, something about the violation of holy places, ending with the words “Morning will turn to night… night will end…” before she’s cut off by the narrator telling us more about the wind.

The Fourth Day (6): The well is dry. The horse won’t eat. He’s had enough, decides they need to move. They pack their possessions into the hand cart and head off, the horse walking behind. In a wide shot, they walk past a distant tree, over a hill beyond which the camera can’t see. In a minute they’re back on our side of the hill, returning home, wordlessly unpacking. The camera is outside in the wind as the girl stares out the window.

The Fifth Day (5): Wake up, have some brandy, give up on the horse. Dad barely eats, stares out the window. Then a blackout. No sun. They light the lamps, but a few minutes later those go out too, though they’re full of oil. “Tomorrow we’ll try again.”

The Sixth Day (1): Dim light (is it really there, or is the film cheating?). No water, no fire. He attempts to eat a raw potato while she stares into her empty dish.

J. Romney:

Composer Mihaly Vig contributes an intermittent score, leaden with organ and abrasive violin, that alludes to folk music while also invoking the repetitions of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich. The omnipresent sound of a raging gale has a quasi-musical presence of its own.

R. Koehler in Cinema Scope:

The film’s text . . . can be pegged as a tale of an oncoming apocalypse with great implications for today’s viewers. Such a reading tends to ignore the story’s essential absurdist essence, the will to go on despite all dire signs to the contrary. The Turin Horse is as much tied to Samuel Beckett as it is to Friedrich Nietzsche.

Fred Kelemen reveals that the house was outfitted with around 30 lights on dimmers – the natural-looking light completely faked. And in addition to wind machines, they sometimes used a helicopter.

Kelemen on the moving camera: “It is like the movement of thoughts, your thoughts move and you reveal something. We move in the world and by moving we discover and understand. The human being is a moving being — physically and spiritually — not a stationary one. The moving image is thus a thinking image.”

In a separate article, Koehler says it’s wrong to call the film apocalyptic, but I don’t follow his reasoning. “Tarr’s cinematic design begins with elaborate camera dances, the pure celebration of cinematic movement through space, and ends with absolute stasis and darkness.”

A few annoyances – Cousins’s lilting voice makes me laugh for a few minutes at the start of each episode (I never get used to it), and all the statements that the well-known film classics aren’t really the great films (as opposed to Rosenbaum’s distinction between acknowledged greats and personal favorites). I tried to keep my ears sharp for factual errors after reading an early account on Shadowplay, but by the five minute mark I’d completely melted, just enjoying the hell out of the clips on display, the cinematic history lesson and its clever organization. Also, I couldn’t believe he mentioned Samira Makhmalbaf in his introduction.

Part 1: 1895-1918, Thrill Becomes Story

From the earliest works through DW Griffith’s Intolerance in 1916, with spotlights on Lumiere and Melies, Billy Bitzer, Edwin Porter (his Life of an American Fireman gets the most play), Alice Guy, Victor Sjostrom and Griffith.

Part 2: 1918-1928, The Triumph of American film and the first of its rebels

About the industrialization of Hollywood, then the breakout comic stars of Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd, the beginning of documentary with Nanook of the North (with a shout out to The Five Obstructions) and realism in fiction film. More rebels: first The Crowd, then Aelita and Yevgeni Bauer, then a spotlight on Carl Dreyer and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Part 3: 1918-1932, Great Rebel Filmmakers around the world

Focuses on challenges to the dominant Hollywood romanticism in the 1920’s and 30’s. Lubitsch’s style and innuendo, French impressionism (Abel Gance), German expressionism (Caligari, Metropolis, Sunrise), experimentalists (Walter Ruttmann, Entr’acte, Alberto Cavalcanti, Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’or), Soviet montage (Potemkin and Arsenal), Ozu’s humanism and compositional innovations, Mizoguchi’s feminine miserablism and the realistic acting of Ruan Lingyu.

I see that Mark Cousins doesn’t have a better copy of A Page of Madness than I do – a shame. I hope a decent print of it exists somewhere. Five years before that one, he calls Souls on the Road the first great Japanese film.

Part 4: The 1930’s, Great American movie genres and the brilliance of European film

Sound film in hollywood and europe: Love Me Tonight as example.
The genres: horror, gangster, western, comedy, musical, cartoon
Europeans who push boundaries: Cocteau, Vigo, Carne/Prevert, Renoir
in South America: Limite (looks great)
in Poland: The Adventures of a Good Citizen (whoa, looks just like Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe)
in Germany: Leni Riefenstahl (way to go, Germany)
Back in Hollywood, reasons why Hitchcock was “the greatest image maker of the 20th century” then a run through the women of Ninotchka, Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind

Part 5: 1939-1952, The Devastation of War and a new movie language

On to neorealism, but wait – first Ford’s and Welles’s use of deep space and wide lenses – okay, back to neorealism, then film noir (Gun Crazy looks amazing). He calls the Hollywood blacklist “the single greatest trauma in american cinema.” A chat with Stanley Donen, then onto Britain for Powell and Pressburger, Humphrey Jennings and The Third Man (“a compendium of 40’s cinema”). I like how he keeps flashing-forward to Martin Scorsese films influenced by the clips he’s showing.

Part 6: 1953-1957, The Swollen Story: world cinema bursting at the seams

Another world cinema round-up: Youssef Chahine – “the founding father of creative african cinema” for Cairo Station – is the original James Dean. Indian realism in the mid-30’s to Pather Panchali to Mother India. A melodrama called Two Stage Sisters by Xie Jin. A few by Kurosawa. Rio 40 degrees by Dos Santos in Brazil. In Mexico, Dona Barbara and La Perla and the return of Bunuel with Los Olvidados. Then on to Sirk, attacking Hollywood melodrama from within, along with Kenneth Anger and Nick Ray. The rise of television, Marty, and method acting. Checking in with old friends Welles, Ford, Hawks and Hitchcock, then in Britain, David Lean vs. Lindsay Anderson. A sign of sexy things to come: Brigitte Bardot.

Lars Von Trier:

Part 7: 1957-1964, The Shock of the New: Modern Filmmaking in Western Europe

Bergman, Bresson, Tati and Fellini led the way in making European films personal – a couple examples of each. Then enter the French New Wave, beginning not with Breathless and The 400 Blows but, happily, with Cleo from 5 to 7 and Last Year at Marienbad. New waves everywhere: in Italy you’ve got Pasolini’s Accatone and The Gospel According to St. Matthew plus Visconti and Sergio Leone. Nice how he talks about each filmmaker’s specific innovations, instead of just listing them out like I’m doing. In Spain, Marco Ferreri (The Wheelchair) and the return (briefly) of Bunuel. In Sweden, I Am Curious, Yellow. And then back to France, where The Mother and the Whore knocked the wind out of the new wave.

Part 8: 1965-1969, New Waves sweep around the world

In Poland, Wajda and Polanski (again with his wardrobe short). Czech: Jiri Trnka, Milos Forman and Vera Chytilova. Hungary: Jancso. Soviet: Tarkovsky and Parajanov. Japan: Oshima, Imamura. India: Ghatak (I interrupted his Ajantrik to watch this show, and Cousins gave away the bloody ending) and Mani Kaul. Brazil: Glauber Rocha. I Am Cuba. Iran: The House Is Black. Senegal: Black Girl (by the “founding father of black african cinema” – note the extra word). Britain: Karel Reisz, Ken Loach and Richard Lester. And in the USA, a curious list of titles I would not have come up with: Primary, Shadows, Psycho, Blow Job, Medium Cool, Easy Rider and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Part 9: 1967-1979, New American Cinema

Unlike Adam Curtis, Cousins doesn’t seem to have enough footage to go around. His pillow shots of city streets in between interviews and film clips start to feel repetitive. Anyway, he divides New American Cinema into three categories. 1. Satirical Movies (Buck Henry, Frank Tashlin, Robert Altman, Milos Forman). He brings up some of the great, subversive stuff Buck Henry wrote in The Graduate and Catch-22, then in his interview Henry points out that these come straight from the source novels. Good stuff on Altman though, and always nice to see Artists & Models get some credit. 2. Dissident Movies (Charles Burnett, Dennis Hopper). Nice, but where are Robert Downey and Frank Zappa? 3. Assimilationist Movies (Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, P-Bog, Sam Peckinpah, Terence Malick, Bob Fosse, F.F. Coppola, Martin Scorsese). Shout out to Woody Allen for bringing the Jewish experience onto the screen. A bit about how Schrader’s solution to the emptiness of his protagonists was “astonishing” – he stole from Pickpocket. Then he stole the ending of Pickpocket AGAIN in another movie (the two being American Gigolo and Light Sleeper). I guess that is pretty astonishing, but I wouldn’t go bragging about it in TV interviews.

I don’t know who was responsible for this, but in a corner of the screen during the closing credits, over a picture of Paul Schrader they throw up the words PAUL SHRADER. Perhaps an unhappy Bresson fan at the studio?

Charles Burnett:

Part 10: 1969-1979, Radical Director in the 70’s make state of the nation films.

A globetrotting look at films about identity in the 70’s. I’ve only seen a few films discussed in this segment but need to watch them all – they look stupendous. In Germany: Fassbinder, Wenders (Alice in the Cities), Margarethe von Trotta and Herzog. Italy: Pasolini again (Arabian Nights) and Bertolucci. Ken Russell and Nic Roeg and Gillian Armstrong. Documentaries in Japan: Minamata, The Victims and Their World and The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On with an interview with Kazuo Hara. On to Africa with La Nouba, Xala, Kaddu Beykat, Harvest: 3000 Years and Mambety. Yilmaz Guney with Hope and Yol. The Battle of Chile and finally, The Holy Mountain.

Part 11: The 1970’s and onwards, Innovation in popular culture around the world

“Cinema of sensation rather than contemplation”

In Hong Kong with Bruce Lee, John Woo and Yuen Woo-ping, with special notice given to King Hu as innovator and Tsui Hark for producing every 80’s and 90’s movie he didn’t direct. In India with insanely popular actors Sharmila Tagore (who started in Satyajit Ray’s Devi and The World of Apu) and Amitabh Bachchan, scenes from Mughal e Azam and a long segment on Sholay, which looks like a Western. On to Arab countries with The Message and The Sparrow, and Cousins seems to have gotten Youssef Chahine incensed by calling Egypt a developing country. Then back to Hollywood for the rise of the blockbuster, more “sensation,” with Jaws, The Exorcist and Star Wars.

Part 12: The 1980’s, Moviemaking and Protest around the world

“Speaking truth to power” is the theme of the episode – he uses that phrase about thirty times. Another globetrotting decade-roundup. The Chinese “fifth generation” filmmakers like Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang (Horse Thief) and Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth) are discussed with Stanley Kwan. In Spain, “protest had a sex-change” with Almodovar, who he pits against Victor Erice. Cousins declares Come and See the greatest war film ever made, Kira Muratova one of the most underrated filmmakers, Yeelen “one of cinema’s most complex works of art,” Distant Voices, Still Lives the greatest British film of the 1980’s, and John Sayles & Maggie Renzi “America’s state-of-the-nation filmmakers.” I like how he demonstrates different filmmakers’ techniques with his own camera, training us to watch for specific techniques in the following clips.

Part 13: 1990-1998, The Last Days of Celluloid before the coming of digital

A great round-up of self-reflexive Iranian cinema starting with Samira Makhmalbaf, then her dad, then Kiarostami’s Friend’s Home trilogy. I showed this section to Katy, since she suffered through Where is the Friend’s Home with me, not understanding the fascination. Though his mantra is “the last days of celluloid,” the point in this episode isn’t film itself but the filmmakers who are still making personal art in new ways as multiplex fare gets ever more glittery and disconnected from reality. So there’s Wong Kar Wai and Irma Vep, an interview with Tsai Ming-liang who discusses Hou Hsiao-hsien. Miles away from their cinema is Shinya Tsukamoto with Tetsuo, then Ring and Audition (what, no Pulse?). Interview with Lars Von Trier, discussion of La Haine, L’Humanite, Rosetta. Claire Denis says she was greatly influenced by Touki Bouki. Crows, Wednesday and Haneke.

Part 14: The 1990’s, the first days of digital, reality losing its realness in America and Australia

Discussion of the possibilities of digital with Gladiator and Terminator 2. The opposite ends of the digital spectrum with Toy Story and Blair Witch, then asian innovation in House of Flying Daggers. Referential postmodernism in Goodfellas and the movies of Tarantino and the Coens. An interview with Gus Van Sant. “No movies in the 90’s was more complexly connected to film history” than Elephant – I wouldn’t have guessed that one. I love when Gus reveals his utter cluelessness about video games. Cousins is such an auteurist that he puts the name of Tomb Raider’s lead designer over the footage. Matthew Barney with Cremaster 3. Robocop and Starship Troopers mixed sci-fi, comedy and politics. Jane Campion talks about the unconscious and subjectivity in An Angel at My Table and The Piano, and we close on a good interview with Baz Luhrmann.

Part 15: 2000 onwards, film moves full circle and the future of movies

“The clash between reality and dreaming.” A hilarious metaphor, referring to innovation as “the gorilla.” Post-2001, documentaries got big: Fahrenheit 9/11, To Be and To Have, Zidane. Reality in fiction photography with The Assassination of Jesse James, Climates, Mr. Lazarescu, The Headless Woman, Battle in Heaven. In Korea: Oasis, Memories of Murder and Oldboy. American dream films: Mulholland Dr., Requiem for a Dream. Then the combination of reality and dreams with Songs from the Second Floor, and digitally screwing with perception with The Rules of Attraction and Avatar. The boldness of Tropical Malady (he pronounces the director’s name Vair-suh-THACK-ull). Cousins ends the series in the present, not with some hot young filmmaker who may be the voice of the future, but with sixty-year-old Aleksandr Sokurov: Mother and Son, Russian Ark (“perhaps the most inventive film ever made”). But wait, here it is, an epilogue set in the future: Inception, Eternal Sunshine and a lovely post-cinema roundup closing in Burkina Faso.

Of course, while watching The Story of Film I kept seeing clips and hearing mention of great films that I never got around to watching, and so I hereby declare The Story of Film Festival, during which I’m watching one never-seen film from each episode. Lineup below – will update as I go.

1. Intolerance
2. The Crowd
3. Nothing But Time & Entr’acte
4. Daybreak
5. Gun Crazy
6. Rio 40 Degrees or Cairo Station or Mother India
7. Curious Yellow
8. Daisies
9. The Last Picture Show
10. ?
11. A Touch of Zen, Dragon Inn or Chahine’s The Sparrow
12. The Horse Thief
13. Beau Travail
14. Gerry or An Angel at My Table
15. Mother and Son