Brandon's movie memory

Every year SHOCKtober comes around, and many horror movies are viewed, but they never get to participate in the year-end lists because most are so very bad. This year I thought I’d give the genre its own little party with a ten-best list. They can’t hold their own against Stagecoach or The Social Network, but each was very satisfying in its own way.

1. Collapse (2009, Chris Smith)
The single movie I thought about the most this year. Unfortunately, the vegetable garden I started in preparation for the Global Economic Collapse is not going very well. I can’t find the parsley anymore, the tomatillos died, and I’m not sure how long I could live off parley and tomatillos anyhow.

2. City of the Living Dead (1980, Lucio Fulci)
3. Kwaidan (1965, Masaki Kobayashi)

4. Trick ‘r Treat (2007, Michael Dougherty)
5. Hatchet (2006, Adam Green)
Horror movies can get such positive reviews among horror-movie fanatics then turn out to be utter crap to non-fanatics. I’m somewhat of a fanatic myself, but I found the much-loved Midnight Meat Train so disappointing that I’ve tried to avoid recent horror altogether ever since. Luckily I changed my mind long enough to watch these two gems.

6. Splice (2009, Vincenzo Natali)
7. Bucket of Blood (1959, Roger Corman)

8. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009, Rob Zombie)
One of the few movies that makes me hope for sequels.

9. [Rec] (2007, Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza)
Despite my affinity for horror, sometimes I’m the last person to see the popular ones.

10. Body Snatchers (1993, Abel Ferrara)
Yes, the 90′s remake with the people who scream funny.

Runners-up: The Box (it was horror, right?), A Tale of Two Sisters (not the remake) and Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent.

At the start of the year I read an awful lot of critics’ best-of-decade lists and built my own list of must-see titles from those lists, collecting eighty of them here. But after watching thirty (more specifically, after watching Godard’s In Praise of Love) I rebelled against the list and watched no more. These are the ones I loved – so, not my faves of the decade (those are here) but my previously-unseen faves of other people’s faves of the decade. Whatever, right?

1. Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch)
Already broke a rule, since I watched this in theaters when it came out. But have you really “seen” Inland Empire until you’ve seen it twice? Who cares – I studied it closely this time, watched all the bonus material, and thought it was tops.

2. Colossal Youth (2006, Pedro Costa)
The only movie on the list (of the year?) to which I devoted more time than Inland Empire – because I figured to appreciate what critics were calling Costa’s masterpiece, I should first watch all his previous films. Can’t say I enjoyed them all, but I appreciated Colossal Youth much more for having seen them in order.

3. Va Savoir (2001, Jacques Rivette)
I limit myself to a couple Rivette films per year so he won’t take up my entire year-end list. If I only watched one this year, it’s because I wrongly assumed I’d also be able to see his latest, Around a Small Mountain, which played festivals in late 2009.

4. Syndromes and a Century (2006, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
So fascinated was I by A.W.’s films this year, I can now spell his name without having to look up how.

5. Three Times (2005, Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Had to try watching this super-slow mood piece a few times, but it finally paid off. Completely transcendent – wish I could see it on the big screen.

6. Fat Girl (2001, Catherine Breillat)
Always assumed I’d dislike Breillat, and especially this movie, so maybe it gains extra points from being such a surprise favorite.

7. The Tracey Fragments (2007, Bruce McDonald)
McDonald’s second straight appearance on year-end lists. To think that in ’08 I’d never heard of him. Can’t wait to check out his early rock & roll road movies.

8. The Intruder (2004, Claire Denis)
It’s boring to say that I need to watch this again, since I’d love to watch all these movies again, and since the shuffled chronology and dreamlike narrative causes everyone to declare that they need to watch this again, but truly I need to watch this again. Denis is my favorite discovery of the year, even though I’d already discovered her.

9. Birth (2004, Jonathan Glazer)
Currently my favorite Nicole Kidman ghost story. She has starred in a few movies that question reality in interesting ways.

10. Frontier of Dawn (2008, Philippe Garrel)
One more ghost story to round things off. Colossal Youth is definitely one, and for all I know, Inland Empire, The Intruder and Syndromes would count too. Tracey Fragments has a haunting death, but I wouldn’t call it a ghost story.

Honorable mentions from the decade-viewing project: Kings and Queen (esp. the first half), The Bourne Trilogy (esp. part three), and Miike’s underrated Izo.

Need to catch up with these sometime.

Twelve that appeared on bunches of year-end lists:
The Ghost Writer
I Am Love
Another Year
Carlos
Winter’s Bone
A Prophet
Certified Copy
Meek’s Cutoff
Dogtooth
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Rabbit Hole
The Fighter

Twelve that just look awesome to me
L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot
The Illusionist
Monsters
Inception
True Grit
And Everything Is Going Fine
A Screaming Man
Norwegian Wood
13 Assassins
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
The Trip
The Tempest

Reverse Shot just posted their top ten, and number one is something called Alamar. I was tempted to add it until I saw the phrase “ascetic rigor” – not falling for that one again.

The plan this year was to watch all the movies listed here (final tally: 53/155), then after I cancelled that plan I instead planned to watch all the movies listed here (a miserable 9/90). I think the plan for 2011 will be not to follow any specific list. Because I have plenty of lists (see also: here and here and here) and they all seem like good ones to follow, but not for an entire year. Theme months are fun though – December was Westerns month and before that came SHOCKtober – so maybe we’ll do more of those.

From other long-term viewing quests: seen 54% of available Criterion DVDs (up 2% from last year – catching up!), 55% of movies on the “They Shoot Pictures” list (somehow down from last year – did my math wrong somewhere), and 46% of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1000 favorite films.

Popular filmmakers: I ended up watching six movies by Pedro Costa (only because the seventh is unavailable) this year, and three each by Claude Chabrol, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, Takashi Miike, Frank Borzage and John Ford.

I watched only ten features which IMDB would count as 2010 releases, and added (so far) a hundred more to my must-see list. At least I’ll never run out of movies.

At one point I was trying to watch tons of movies from 1977, the year I was born, but I didn’t manage to watch a single one of those this year – until yesterday with Close Encounters. Seems alright to fall behind on the 1977-movies goal, since they’re not making any more of them.

2010: Katy liked it, too.

I’ve taken to posting lists of movies I’d like to watch on this blog, which is unnecessary since I already keep a master list of movies I’d like to see in a database. Keeping extra lists here just means I’ve made everything less efficient. But no matter. A month or two ago I declared The Auteurist Completion Project, with aims to watch the last few remaining titles by directors I care about whose complete works I’d almost seen. Here’s the status report for that particular goal.

P. Anderson: The Dirk Diggler Story
W. Anderson: Bottle Rocket (short)
Anger: Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, Anger Sees Red, The Man We Want to Hang
Arnold: Deanimated
Bahrani: Man Push Cart, Plastic Bag
Baldwin: Spectres of the Spectrum
Bong: Memories of Murder, Barking Dogs Never Bite, Influenza
Cocteau: Eagle Has Two Heads, 8×8
Cronenberg: From the Drain, Italian Machine
Dante: Second Civil War, The Hole
Fuller: Day or Reckoning, Crimson Kimono, Verboten, The Command, The Tanks are Coming
Gilliam: Storytime, Tideland
Gondry: The Letter, Thorn in the Heart
Guest: For Your Consideration
Hartley: Fay Grim, shorts vol. 2
Haynes: Poison
Hillcoat: Ghosts of the Civil Dead, To Have and to Hold
Jarmusch: Permanent Vacation, Year of the Horse
Jodorowsky: Santa Sangre, The Rainbow Thief
Keaton: The Navigator, Battling Butler
Korine: Trash Humpers, Julien Donkey-Boy
Kubrick: Fear and Desire
Lang: Harakiri, The Wandering Image, Four Around a Woman
Leone: Duck You Sucker, My Name is Nobody
Linklater: Me and Orson Welles, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow…
Lynch: On The Air
Marker: Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer, The Last Bolshevik, Level Five
Moore: Pets or Meat, Slacker Uprising
Murnau: Haunted Castle, Burning Soil, 4 Devils
Panahi: White Balloon, The Mirror
Park: Chicken Run, Creature Comforts
Quays: Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Songs for Dead Children, Inventorium Sladow
Raimi: Within the Woods
Soderbergh: King of the Hill, The Girlfriend Experience, And Everything Is Going Fine
Svankmajer: Jabberwocky, Sileni, Surviving Life
Tarkovsky: Nostalghia, The Mirror, Steamroller and the Violin
Tarr: Macbeth, Almanac of Fall, Damnation
Tati: Jour de Fete, School for Postmen, Trafic
Taymor: Juan Darien, The Tempest
Welles: Around the World, Chimes at Midnight, Fountain of Youth, The OW Show
Wong: In the Mood DVD extras

Deleted from list because I was missing more titles than expected: Miike, De Palma, Dreyer, Tashlin, Van Sant, Varda, Demy, Bunuel, Cassavetes, Kieslowski, Kitano, Powell/Pressburger, Sally Potter, Dennis Potter, Renoir, Resnais, Rivette, Scorsese, Watkins.

If I was planning to make my annual end-of-year list of movies which I simply must watch next year (which I’m not, since I feel like having a freeform 2011), those titles would probably be on there. Though it would be more fun to tackle famed filmmakers whose works I’m largely (or in most cases, completely) unfamiliar with, so here’s a handy list of those, too.

Joseph Losey
Anthony Mann
Rainer Fassbinder
Josef von Sternberg
Cecil B. DeMille
Roberto Rossellini
Otto Preminger
William Wyler
Alexander Dovzhenko
King Vidor
Luc Moullet
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Mikio Naruse
Jean Eustache
Marcel Carné
Raoul Walsh
Derek Jarman
Elia Suleiman
Julien Duvivier
Terayama Shuji
Luchino Visconti
Aleksandr Sokurov
Fatty Arbuckle
Ritwik Ghatak
Masahiro Shinoda
Yevgeni Bauer
James Benning
Stanley Kwan
Carlos Saura
Maurice Pialat
Jacques Becker
Marguerite Duras
Theo Angelopoulos
Marcel L’Herbier
João César Monteiro
Herschell Gordon Lewis
Humphrey Jennings
Otar Iosseliani
Chantal Akerman
Lee Chang-dong
Paul Leni
Hiroshi Shimizu
Albert Brooks
Rene Clement
Whit Stillman
Jean Epstein
Bertrand Tavernier
Tran Anh Hung
Barbet Schroeder
Zhuangzhuang Tian
Andrea Arnold
Marco Bellocchio
Pere Portabella
Vera Chytilová
Anthony Asquith
Basil Dearden
Mark Rappaport
Hong Sang-soo
Takashi Ito
Jan Sverák
Youssef Chahine
Karel Zeman
Bruno Dumont
Francesco Rosi
Karel Reisz
Don Siegel
Roger Vadim
Guy Debord
Mara Mattuschka
Henry Hills
Andy Warhol

Months after the entire Internet had already posted its lists of best films of the decade, my favorite print magazines, Cinema Scope and Film Comment, added a hundred more lists to the mix. Here are about seventy more titles that should probably be on my “movies to watch in 2010” page. But they missed their chance, so they’ll have to stand alone over here instead.

13 Lakes
À Travers la forêt
Alumbramiento
Assassination of Jesse James
Batang West Side
Birdsong
La Blessure
Bluebeard
The Bridesmaid
Cafe Lumiere
La Captive
Chunhyang
Come and Go (monteiro)
Cosmetic Emergency
Crank / Crank 2
Crying Fist
Demons (mario o’hara)
Deux (werner schroeter)
Dog Days
Dor (kukunoor)
Dying at Grace
Election/Triad Election
Evolution of a Filipino Family
Faceless Things
Flame and Citron
Flying with One Wing
Footnotes to a House of Love
The Garden (wiseman)
Greendale
Gulabi Talkies
Harmful Insect
In Vanda’s Room
An Injury to One
Jimmywork
Last Days in a Lonely Place
La Libertad
The Long Holiday
Lot 63, Grave C
Manderlay
Margot at the Wedding
Medicine for Melancholy
Memories of Murder
Mid-Afternoon Barks
Phantom Limb
Phoenix Tapes
Pine Flat
The Pool (chris smith)
The Rebirth (masahiro)
Secret Sunshine
Shara
A Short Film about the Indio Nacional
Sleep Dealer
The Sky Crawlers
Space Disco One
Sweetgrass
The Taste of Tea
Textism
To Die Like a Man
Todo Todo Teros
Triple Agent
Turning Gate
Twentynine Palms
We Want Roses Too
When It Was Blue
Who Is Bozo Texino?
Wild Blue, Notes for Several Voices
Workingman’s Death

Looking over the decade list and reading up on Va Savoir, I realized I’ve seen eight of the ten top prize winners at the Cannes Film Festival from the last decade, and all in theaters, no less. I only missed The Class and The Son’s Room.

Other Cannes winners I should check out sometime:

Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos)
Rosetta (even though I didn’t love L’Enfant)
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh)
The Best Intentions (3-hour film written by Ingmar Bergman)
Pelle the Conqueror (same director as The Best Intentions)
Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat)
The Mission (follow-up to The Killing Fields)
When Father was Away on Business (Kusturica)
The Ballad of Narayama (Imamura)
Missing
Yol (from Turkey)
All That Jazz
Kagemusha
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi)
Padre Padrone
Chronicle of the Years of Fire (Algerian)
Scarecrow (Hackman/Pacino)
The Hireling
The Mattei Affair
The Working Class Goes to Heaven
The Go-Between (Losey)
Signore & Signori
A Man and a Woman (Lelouch)
The Knack… and How to Get it
Payer of Promises
The Long Absence (written by Marguerite Duras)
Friendly Persuasion
The Silent World
Marty
Gate of Hell
Two Cents Worth of Hope
Miss Julie
Miracle in Milan

Why have I only even heard of fewer than half of these?

At the turnover of every year I like to comb my must-see list (4000 titles and growing) and make a shorter goal list of movies to watch in the next year. The list is no big deal – usually I’m over-ambitious and I don’t make it to a quarter of them, forget to even check it after April. This year, though, I’ve got a Project. I’ve been reading lots of best-of-decade lists and culling titles I haven’t seen, planning to watch those in 2010. After all, if a movie makes a respected critic’s yearly top-20 list it’s worth considering, but if it makes his DECADE top-20 list I’ve just gotta see that. So here are the 155 movies I feel I’ve gotta watch in 2010 (that’s three a week, unrealistic as ever). Maybe I’ll cross ‘em off this list as we go.

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Decade list:

11’09″01
Afterschool
All About Lily Chou Chou
All The Real Girls
As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Battle In Heaven
Beau travail
Best of Youth
Birth
Blissfully Yours
Bourne trilogy 1 2 3
Bus 174
Chuck & Buck
La Cienaga
Colossal Youth
Corpus Callosum
Darwin’s Nightmare
Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Divine Intervention
Domestic Violence
Esther Kahn
Eureka
La face cachee de la lune
Failed States (henry hills)
Fat Girl
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir / West of the Tracks
Five Dedicated to Ozu
Frontier of Dawn
Gerry
The GoodTimes Kid
Good Morning, Night
Half Moon (bahman ghobadi)
Headless Woman
Head-On
House of Mirth
I’m Going Home
In Praise of Love
In the City of Sylvia
Innocence (lucile hadzihalilovic)
The Intruder
Jonestown: Life and Death of People’s Temple
Kandahar
Kings and Queen
Lady and the Duke
Late Marriage
Let Each One Go Where He May
Lilya 4-Ever
M/Other
Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
Magic Mirror
Michelangelo Eye to Eye
Morvern Callar
Night and Day
Oasis
The Other Half (ying liang)
Ou git votre sourire enfoui? / Sicilia
Platform
The Queen
Raja
RR
Secret of the Grain
Silent Light
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4pm
The Son (dardenne)
Songs from the Second Floor
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring
St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions / Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised for Parabolas (lynn marie kirby)
Star Spangled To Death
Syndromes and a Century
Tarnation
Tearoom (william e. jones)
Ten
This Is England
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Three Times
The Tracey Fragments
El Valley Centro
Waltz With Bashir
What Time Is It There?
When the Levees Broke
The White Ribbon

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Unseen movies by favorite filmmakers:

Bunuel
Illusions Travel By Streetcar
Susana
El Bruto
Criminal Life of Archibaldo del Cruz

Gilliam
Tideland
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Herzog
Strozek
Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Kurosawa
Guard from the Underground
Serpent’s Path

Marker
The Owl’s Legacy
The Last Bolshevik

Resnais
La Vie est un roman
Love Unto Death

Rivette
Le Pont du Nord
Merry-Go-Round
Va Savior

Tashlin
Rock-a-Bye Baby
It’$ Only Money

Varda
Jacquot de Nantes
La Pointe Courte
Lions Love

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Unseen DVDs:

Adventure in Sahara
Scandal Sheet
Elena and Her Men
The River
Lucky Star
They Had to See Paris
Young America
Song o’ My Heart
Liliom
Bad Girl
After Tomorrow
Four Devils
City Girl
Madame de…
Fanny & Alexander
The Navigator
Battling Butler
A King in New York
Sin of Harold Diddlebock

-
Brand new hotness

Mock Up on Mu
Mother
Nymph
Mary and Max
It Felt Like a Kiss
Film Ist: A Girl and a Gun
Liverpool
Eccentricities of a Blonde Hair Girl
Guy Maddin’s new shorts

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Old ones I’ve been excited to finally watch:

Battleship Potemkin
Queen Kelly
Make Way for Tomorrow
The Best Years of Our Lives
Brief Encounter
Johnny Guitar
The Naked Spur
The Apartment
Deanimated
Daisies
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The Wind Will Carry Us
Actress

-
…and to rewatch:

The Nun
Fire Walk With Me
The Crimson Kimono
Underworld USA
The Steel Helmet
Fixed Bayonets
Spider
Point Blank
Vagabond
Yi Yi

The reason I make lists of the top movies I’ve seen in a particular year rather than the top movies released worldwide in that year should be obvious – I don’t have access to most movies until a year or two after their release.

For example, in 2006 I watched 32 feature-length movies which the IMDB would count as original 2006 releases, but since then I’ve seen 35 more theatrically – that’s more than twice the number before even considering stuff I caught on video, which adds another 80.

So three years late, it seems right to make a best of 2006 list.

Pruning the ’05 titles from my original ’06 list and shuffling a couple others, this is how things would stand at the beginning of 2007:

1. Children of Men
2. A Scanner Darkly
3. A Prairie Home Companion
4. Slither
5. Borat!
6. The Fountain
7. Shortbus
8. Inside Man
9. The Hills Have Eyes remake
10. The Science of Sleep

Adding stuff I’ve seen since, and reassessing, I get:

1. Children of Men
2. Black Book
3. Bamako
4. Inland Empire
5. A Scanner Darkly
6. Brand Upon The Brain
7. The Host
8. Offside
9. The Screwfly Solution
10. Miami Vice
11. The War Tapes

A much better list! In the future I will be making best-of-year lists for every year at the end of every year!

I didn’t spend all of 2009 obsessively watching ’06 releases (although I considered it) so there are still plenty of unwatched acclaimed movies (Colossal Youth, Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Half Nelson, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), award-winners (Indigènes, Red Road, Flandres, The Queen, An Inconvenient Truth) less-acclaimed movies that I expect to like anyway (Tideland, Perfume, Nacho Libre, Rescue Dawn, The Last Winter) and others (The Decay of Fiction, Klimt, Three Times, Cafe Lumiere, The Boss of it All). But that’s more the subject of the next list…