by ·Comments Off on Brandon’s Favorite Movies from the 2010 Decade List

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.

by ·Comments Off on Some 2010 Movies To See

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.

by ·Comments Off on 2010: The Movie Year In Review

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.

by ·Comments Off on Remember the Night (1940, Mitchell Leisen)

Our second Barbara Stanwyck Christmas movie, and an improvement on Christmas in Connecticut. Moves along like a typical Hollywood holiday romance, but with some interesting twists from writer Preston Sturges (a few months before his directorial debut), which I’m surprised weren’t softened by rewrites. Even if the original script has actually been tamed down, you’ve still got romantic lead Barbara Stanwyck headed to prison at the end of the picture. It’s the morally upright ending, and I suppose the production code insists that she can’t get away with crime just because she’s in love.

Stanwyck is a thief, who steals because she wasn’t loved enough as a child and Fred MacMurray is the prosecuting attorney who schemes to delay her trial until after the holidays so the jury’s Christmastime sympathy doesn’t interfere with his case. But that leaves the sad, pretty girl in jail for Christmas, so Fred pays her bail for the week, but ends up with the girl in his apartment since the dirty-minded bailsman assumed that was Fred’s intent. And since she’s got no place to go, he takes her along home, getting in trouble with a rural farmer (John Wray) and getting frowned at by Stanwyck’s chilly mother (Georgia Caine, later a Sturges regular) at stops along the way. Inevitably they fall in love, then back at the trial she sees that he’s sneakily trying to get her acquitted so she pleads guilty, insisting that she serve her penance rather than turn them both into crooks.

Leisen is the filmmaker who frustrated Billy Wilder (Midnight) and Preston Sturges (Easy Living) into directing their own scripts. I still don’t have any problem with him. Maybe Sturges wanted a lighter touch or a snappier pace. Surely he could’ve done more with the comic cow-milking scene than Leisen did, but it’s a solid movie. Aha, from Wikipedia:

Director Mitchell Leisen, a rare director to come out of costume design and art direction, is reported to have shortened Sturges’ script considerably, both before and during shooting, something which generally annoyed Sturges. Leisen’s alterations to the script changed the focus of the film from MacMurray’s character to Stanwyck’s. Sturges summarized the film by saying “Love reformed her and corrupted him.”

Film Forum calls it a screwball comedy, but I don’t think you can just slap that term onto anything with Sturges’s name on it. In his 50’s, wholesome-looking MacMurray starred in three live-action Disney films, beloved to Katy but which I never watched. Must see him in The Egg and I with Claudette Colbert and There’s Always Tomorrow with Stanwyck sometime.

At Fred’s house: Sterling Holloway, a Disney voice actor, most notably as Winnie the Pooh. Not sure if that’s his voice singing the solemn “End of a Perfect Day” while Stanwyck plays piano, but it’s the most surprising moment in the movie:

MacMurray with the vaguely recognizable Beulah Bondi at left – mother in Track of the Cat, the wife’s tutor in Baron of Arizona, Stewart’s mom in It’s a Wonderful Life – and Elizabeth Patterson standing up – an aunt-type who also played aunts in Love Me Tonight, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, The Cat and the Canary and Hail the Conquering Hero.

by ·Comments Off on Joyeux Noël (2005, Christian Carion)

Such a joy, and such a well-executed feel-good multi-lingual message movie that I’m surprised it didn’t win an oscar. Guess it’s tough to beat a redemptive picture about African slum violence.

Based vaguely on a true story: on a Christmas eve during WWI, officers from the German, French and Scottish trenches meet up in dead-man’s land and negotiate a temporary truce, talking, drinking and celebrating together. The bummer ending (first poor Dany Boon is shot by a vengeful Scot, then when word gets out about the truce, their superiors are embarrassed and punish everyone involved) can’t completely spoil the mood.

I should know who Lucas Belvaux and Daniel Brühl are, but really only recognized priest-turned-medic Gary Lewis (of Gangs of New York and Yes) and Inglorious Basterds star Diane Kruger. Playing her opera-singing husband was Benno Fürmann, who has an awesome face. I hope to see it again in Speed Racer, Jerichow and Carion’s follow-up, Farewell.

by ·Comments Off on Scrooge (1951, Brian Desmond Hurst)

An improvement on the poop-joke semi-improv version of A Christmas Carol (co-starring Jesus Christ) that we’d just watched at a local theater. This is kind of a weird adaptation, in that it adds new scenes that didn’t appear in the novel, as if we wouldn’t notice. Most of them are in the Christmas Past segment: Scrooge and Marley taking over Fezziwig’s company, Marley’s death and some stuff involving Scrooge’s sister and girlfriend.

Any Christmas Carol adaptation hinges on the performance of Scrooge, and Alastair Sim (of The Ruling Class, ugh) was such a great one that I’m figuring it’s the main reason this is considered to be the best film version of the story. It wasn’t the additional scenes or any showy camerawork (except the introduction of Christmas Future – that was pretty great) or special effects. But a very satisfying movie overall.

Alastair Sim and housekeeper on Christmas morning:

Director Hurst worked on Korda’s The Lion Has Wings (but not Thief of Bagdad) and screenwriter Noel Langley had been the principal writer on The Wizard of Oz. Mervyn Johns (The Sundowners, Day of the Triffids) was solid as Bob Cratchit and Michael Hordern was unassuming as Jacob Marley in flashback, but he was howlingly flamboyant as Marley’s ghost (later, Hordern was more appropriately cast in comedies, like Yellowbeard and The Bed Sitting Room).

Michael Hordern as the ghost:

by ·Comments Off on The Furies (1950, Anthony Mann)

Walter Huston (John’s father, in his final role) is a slightly less grotesquely comic version of Egbert in Ruggles of Red Gap, a rich, eccentric cowboy. His extremely strong-willed but beloved daughter Barbara Stanwyck (soon before Clash By Night) argues with him over practically everything, finally scheming to swindle him out of his land as revenge for an argument taken too far. She has a brother (John Bromfield) who is introduced at the beginning but practically disappears from the movie, since he’s a decent, unassuming fellow and Stanwyck and Huston are commanding our attention at all times.

Complicated, exquisitely shot and acted movie, obviously based on a novel (I can’t explain – it just smells novelistic). Stanwyck and Huston have a near-incestual rivalry. She loves Juan (Gilbert Roland, who played bandit The Cisco Kid in six movies) who lives illegally on Huston’s land, and Huston marries gold digger Flo (Judith Anderson, sinister housekeeper in Rebecca). But after Stanwyck stabs her new stepmother in the face with scissors (!), Huston has Juan killed. Katy and I lost track of exactly how Stanwyck then claimed possession of her father’s land. She cozied up to rich gambler Rip (Wendell Corey, Janet Leigh’s dull boyfriend in Holiday Affair) then bought up her father’s outstanding I.O.U.s around the country and used those as payment when he sold off his animals, but then how did that prevent the bank from repossessing the land?

This is the first movie I’ve seen by Mann, who made three other movies in 1950, at least two of them considered great classics. That’s just how it used to work.

R. Wood for Criterion:

All of Mann’s westerns—unlike, for example, John Ford’s—suggest deep psychological disturbance, but those currents never again manifest themselves as blatantly and explicitly as they do in The Furies. Mann’s westerns … show little interest in history or in mythology; they are grounded in a fallen world of existential struggle in which the villains often become the heroes’ dark shadows. Typically, when he shoots down his enemy, the Mann hero experiences not triumph but exhaustion, almost prostration, as if he had forfeited a part of himself, his manhood.

by ·Comments Off on White Material (2009, Claire Denis)

More of a narrative than in 35 Shots of Rum, and more clearly defined than in The Intruder, but still with the shuffled chronology. It’s kind of an action thriller, though it undercuts the tension by showing us the fates of certain characters at the beginning. So, will Huppert make it to the village? Yes, because we’ve seen her future, days later catching a bus to the plantation. Will the boy with the spear kill her son Manuel as he floats in the pool? No, because we’ve seen his future, burning to death in a building. Not as softly sensual as some other Denis movies, the handheld motion-blur offering more eyestrain than intimacy.

The great Isabelle Huppert is Marie, who runs her aged father-in-law’s coffee plantation (he is Michel Subor, star of The Intruder) along with her relative (brother?) Christophe Lambert (who looks a lot like Christopher Lambert from Highlander and Mortal Kombat, only this guy is pretty good and speaks French) and her son Manuel – although I’m not saying Manuel helps run anything. He stays in bed all day, slowly going nuts. She’s strong and self-sufficient, works very hard for her coffee crop, but hers is the only white family for miles around their gated house with leather sofas, while the field workers live in a hot bunkhouse with a shared flashlight. So when rebels and military forces collide in town, neither is on her side. Isaach De Bankolé (Limits of Control, Casa de Lava) plays the most mysterious character, “The Boxer”, an inspiration to the rebels who is wounded from the start of the movie, arrives in secret at the coffee plantation and dies there of his wounds a day or two later.

Shot in Cameroon but set in an unnamed African country. I appreciated some of the similarities between this and other African-made films I’ve seen, such as portable radios being an important story element. Katy didn’t join me, somehow uninterested in a film featuring African children taking arms against colonialism. It’s probably my fault for spoiling her on Isabelle Huppert with Merci pour le chocolat and on Claire Denis with Friday Night, though I still don’t see why either of those should be disliked. I have a hard time finding serious foreign movies that she’ll enjoy. Nominated for the top prize at Venice, while 35 Shots of Rum, which I liked much better, wasn’t nominated for a damn thing.

Denis, asked why Huppert kills elder Subor with a machete at the end: “They’re both left, and I think she feels someone is responsible for letting everything happen. Maybe it’s weakness, or everyone’s blindness. But she needs to do something terrifying.”

Mubi: “Denis is too sexy to be considered disjunctive, but White Material is certainly her most jolting movie, since it traces the impression of a person experiencing nothing but breakdown—in bonds, in society, in people themselves—but somehow cannot see what is happening right in front of her. … Things like relationships and motivation all seem under-defined within such a clear-cut plot, but that may be because Marie’s fate is inescapable precisely because she can’t feel or see the nuance and meaning below the surface of her life. White Material keeps it on the surface precisely because that is the quintessential failure of its colonial heroine.”

by ·Comments Off on Lord of Illusions (1995, Clive Barker)

“I was born to murder the world.”

Watched for about the fifth time whilst trying to think of something to write about Johnny Guitar. It’s not a great movie, mostly because of pacing problems and dull dialogue scenes, but it’s better than most. Barker shoots plenty of shirtless men in S&M-inspired gear and he’s full of neat visual ideas, but needed about twice the budget (not likely for a Scott Bakula-starring horror) to pull it off. I still enjoyed it significantly more than Capra’s Meet John Doe, which I half-watched with Katy, the poorly-encoded soundtrack burbling out endless long speeches. Detective Scott Bakula was yet to achieve his post-American Beauty comeback, Magician Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) would play Dr. Mindbender in the G.I. Joe movie, the girl went on to play Jean Grey in the X-Men movies, and evil baddie Daniel von Bargen is best known for having a cheesy line in The Postman.