Strong and Beautiful, Just Like Cuttlefish

This represents a full month of viewing. I feel ashamed not only at the small number of films here, but also at the level of writing, which is rather cursory. I apologize.

Films Watched August 6 - September 2

Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007) - For the first two-thirds of its running time I thought this was on its way to being one of the best science fiction films to come out in a while. Then, as Danny Boyle films sometimes do, the story derailed in the third act into something that had little to do with the rest of the plot, turning for all intents and purposes into a slasher film that doesn't even make sense contained within its own 20 minutes of attention. The rest of it was still rather enjoyable, and I liked Boyle's sometimes unusual visuals, his reoccurring "eye" theme, and his somewhat challenging use of noise music...though I'm still not sure it added up to anything in the end other than grasping at coolness.

Strit og Stumme (Jannik Hastrup, 1987; it was called Dreaming of Paradise by the American distributor) - A subtly bleak post-apocalyptic fable dressed in happy little kids-film clothing (probably pushed further in the English-language dub). There's a frankness about both sex and death you'd never find in an American children's film and I found it rather refreshing in that respect. The story is a curiosity I'm still mulling over; it's largely reliant on an old legend set up early in the film that I was expecting to be resolved symbolically, but surprisingly turned out to be completely literal; and the gun-toting, ten-gallon-hat-wearing rat President who supplies the film with its primary villain is clearly meant to be a shot at the USA, but I can't figure out if the director was trying to say something specific about us or if it was just there because Danes would find it funny. (I'm currently leaning towards the latter.) Some of these issues might have been obscured by a translator trying to make the movie more easily digestible for American children, but I can't be certain.

Away with Words (Christopher Doyle, 1999) - I don't have anything new to say about this, but when I first wrote about it almost two years ago apparently I recommended it very specifically to isogon, so I hope she enjoyed it.

The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel & James McTiegue, 2007) - If the studio had taken Children of Men out of Cuaron's hands and hired Jan de Bont to reshoot half the movie, it probably would have turned out looking a lot like The Invasion. What an awful, awful mess. As a suspense film it's rushed to the point of disbelief -- not only do things happen so fast they have no time to cause dread, they happen so fast that the timeline doesn't even make sense. (Example: the virus lands on earth in the middle of the night. The very next morning, Nicole Kidman's first patient tells her that her husband has been acting strangely and she's worried he's not the same person. The very next morning!) So all that's left is a chase film, but that gets boring very fast since there's basically no variation in the chase and not much of anything else happening aside from weird, confused performances, painfully stiff technobabble, gratuitous nipple shots, and a total absence of any chemistry in the totally useless love angle, all topped off with a bad cop-out ending.

Then there's the way the film grasps at several potentially relevant topics -- immigration/I.D. cards, poisoned food, government suppression of science -- but fails utterly to engage in any of them, and then makes a desperate attempt at squeezing some strange, stilted sort of moralizing into the stilted chaos. Rosenbaum noted this as an advantage to the film: "a bitter kind of satiric irony leaking around the edges that suggests maybe the body snatchers have a point." I don't disagree, but you could say the same thing about Carnosaur, and this movie might actually be less subtle. The Invasion even gives one of its big speeches to a nihilistic old Russian guy just to hammer the point home.

Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1965) - A girl from Dakar, Senegal follows a French couple back to France after they hire her to watch their children. There what began as a sense of liberation quickly turns into feelings of alienation and even imprisonment, and Sembene manages the extraordinary task of creating a film that works both as a very singular, personal account of a unique struggle and simultaneously as a universal message about class and imperialism with both sides of the story feeling completely at home in each other. To put a finer point on it, it's an obvious message movie, but the characters never feel as if they exist merely to serve the message. Thus, both character and message come across as equally vital and equally moving.

Borom sarret (Ousmane Sembene, 1965) - This short film is similar in tone and content to Black Girl, and if characterization is a bit more superficial it works because the film is shorter and more like a modern fable in its structure. The voice-over narration may be a bit redundant, but as the film is so short it doesn't get an opportunity to become intrusive.

Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames, 1977) - Awesome.

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) - I'm late to this party, but I enjoyed it immensely.

Apologies for my long long absence from film commentary. I'm going to try my darnedest not to have any more ridiculous lapses in my screening log.

ASIDE:
A few days ago I found this excellent article from Cinema Scope that not only talks about many of the things that make Otar Iosseliani's films so special but also lays out a fascinating theory that his latest film, Gardens in Autumn, is a commentary on the decline of French film culture. I haven't seen the new work (I'd say it's chances at American distribution are zilch) but it's an interesting read anyway. The article contains what would normally be called spoilers (concerning both Gardens and the ending of There Once Was a Singing Blackbird) but the joy of Iosseliani's work is not generally in waiting to see how the plot is going to unfold. Still, the Blackbird revelation might be too much, so if you want to see that film some time I'd recommend that you skip to the next paragraph of the article as soon as you see that title.

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Films Watched June 25 - August 5 (wow, that's awful)

Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987) - A young sorcerer who has been on the run with his mother finally decides to face his father, who has been trying to kill him all his life. It's a fantastical, entertaining, and fascinating film in every way, at least to someone like me who is entirely unacquainted with African cinema. It's otherworldly, but truly otherworldly -- not really alien, but different as if a parallel culture evolved an entirely unique cinematic language from the ground up. It seems otherworldly but totally naturalistic, exemplified especially in the portrayal of magic, which in this story is as fundamentally organic as any of our five senses.

( more magic, things that need salt )

Since I am ostensibly writing a film blog here (which hasn't been updated in -- yikes, four weeks?) it seems like I ought to comment in some way about the simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni earlier this week. I don't want to fall into the "end of an era" trap that danschank recently talked about, and I especially don't want to ask "who's left?" partly because I have a totally unreasonable superstition that such questions are jinxed, and mostly because I think there are still many great artists remaining in the world of cinema and counting off the masters as if they're some sort of royal family seems a little pointless.

Yet I don't know what to say about the deaths of two artists who I respected and admired so much, especially when one of them (Bergman) had a real, significant influence on me as I saw the right films at the right time in my life. They both lived full, long, and fruitful lives in which they both got to speak their piece many times over, so their passing doesn't seem especially tragic. I don't feel like they've been "cut off" from anything, especially as they've left behind so much work that I still haven't seen. It'd be great if they could have continued making masterpieces into eternity, but I'm comfortable with their moments of departure and I have a feeling they were, too. That's not to say I'm not sad about their deaths, just that I'd prefer to be happy about their lives.

I'll pay tribute with a couple of YouTube links. The first here is an interview with Bergman from 1970 uploaded in three parts. Here are Part 1 and Part 3, and I'm embedding Part 2 below because it seems to me the most poignant/relevant portion. If you haven't seen any Bergman films, I don't know what to recommend as a start. Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light mean the most to me, but I'd more quickly recommend Persona and Hour of the Wolf to most of my friends. The forces of cultural literacy will probably compel you to see The Seventh Seal at some point.


For Antonioni, I'm posting his last film -- not the segment he made for Eros, which is widely talked about as his last work, but the independent short film Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo, which I raved about when I first saw it at the Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival in 2005, and which I later listed as my second-favorite film of that year. It's one of those last works where it seems as if the artist knew his death was imminent and decided he had something to say about it. It works far better on a big screen in a silent, darkened theatre than it does on YouTube, of course, but I think it still stands (though the final shot that practically killed me with perfection two years ago is unfortunately rather limp in this tiny window). It's a very quiet film, so turn your speakers up. If you have access to a good home theatre system, I recommend skipping YouTube and renting the Eros DVD, on which this film is a special feature (though by all accounts it's far better than Antonioni's segment in that film, which I haven't seen). Part 1 is embedded below, and here's Part 2. Hopefully this won't get taken down right away.

Films Watched June 11 - June 24

( Men, Music, Mozart )

Films Watched May 28 - June 10

Nowhere in Africa (Caroline Link, 2001) - Jewish refugee family moves to Kenya fleeing Germany in the 1930's. The (based-on-a-true-)story is interesting enough that only an idiot could make it uninteresting, and the acting is rather excellent from the entire cast. But I found it lacked resonance and there's something that just keeps it from becoming special. I think it's mostly a structural problem: like many films based on books or true events that span such a length of time, attempting to get a quick, clean story in 2 hours results in some pretty rough and jagged leaps in time which really hinder the development of the characters and the cohesiveness of the plot. I think a more impressionistic approach to the story would have worked better, like the kind of structure (though not really the aesthetics) Theo Angelopoulous might employ.

the last five minutes of Hostel 2 (Eli Roth, 2007) - "I'm fucking Hercules!!" How do people manage to watch this sort of thing for 90 consecutive minutes?

Films Watched May 14 - May 27


Brand Upon the Brain!

( Rumania! )

My screening log finally returns! It's been a month and a half since my last log post, but as I've been busy there aren't too many films I have to talk about -- though there is an ungodly amount of Star Trek episodes to cover. Given that it's been so long since I've watched some of these, and I didn't have the energy to write more detailed posts about everything (without pushing my log's return post back even further), my analyses will be pretty light in most cases. There are several Trek episodes I didn't even write about, either because I watched them so long ago that I couldn't think of anything to say (i.e., most of the second season episodes) or because they just didn't inspire any particularly strong thought (i.e., most of the third season episodes).


Despite the stiff competition, I think the best thing I've seen since the end of March, or at least the most emotionally resonant, was the BBC's Planet Earth, which was finally broadcast on the Discovery Channel a year after its UK release, slightly expurgated and with David Attenborough's voice inexplicably swapped out for Sigourney Weaver's (not that she did a bad job). While its primary purpose was certainly to provide viewers with impossibly beautiful imagery of the natural world, with environmentalism turning into such a blood-boiler and climate change threatening to radically alter the face of the world and its inhabitants in the next 50 years Planet Earth also functions both as a rallying call for conservation and as a sort of panic-stricken encyclopedia. Not content to simply show nature lovers the same things they've been watching for the past 30 years with updated equipment, the Planet Earth producers were determined to film places, animals, and behaviors that have never been so captured before, and in some cases may never be again. Hence the clips above which show the first footage ever of a snow leopard on the hunt. Other things were harder to watch, like the gorgeous amur leopards who are only about 30 cats away from extinction, or a starving polar bear swimming ages to find land only to make a desperate attempt at fighting a walrus -- certainly a much more potent picture than that cute little animation in An Inconvenient Truth.

Then there were the stranger entries, like the parasitic Cordyceps fungus. And of course, it wasn't all about death; there was also the ridiculously cute (see Mandarin ducklings), the majestic (see this), and of course, the sexy. And just for danschank, there were also elephants playing in the Okavango Delta. Yes, if you look hard enough you can probably find the entire series on YouTube. But I highly encourage you to seek out the DVDs (which should now be available everywhere) and appreciate the meticulous detail and sweeping grandiosity that tiny, highly compressed flash videos simply can't offer you.

There was also an accompanying three-part series called Planet Earth: The Future, which was more of a talking-heads affair that examined current and pressing environmental and conservation issues. This was also quite good, first and foremost because it really framed the issue (of what to do, not so much what is happening) as a complicated debate rather than a more simplistic sort of environmental flag-waving. None of the interviewees agree entirely on how to deal with the problems at hand, even if they all agree on what the problems are and how quickly they need to be dealt with (except for the Bush administration spokesman who goes so far as to suggest that no one is actually cutting down rainforests). It also examined the human element quite admirably; i.e., not everyone interviewed was a rich white guy from Europe, and when they talk about conservation efforts in third-world countries they actually go to those countries and find out what the people there think about it. (As one guy working in South America put it, "These people can't eat ethics.")

Films Watched March 26 - May 13
( sorry I've been gone so long )

Films Watched March 12 - March 25

L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2006) - When you're broke -- even if your version of "broke" is "my parents have to buy everything for me" -- you become keenly aware of exactly how much money you're spending and exactly what it's going to cost to go on. The passage of funds becomes more immediately meaningful than the passage of time. And while I'm certainly nowhere near the situation of poverty portrayed in L'Enfant, this aspect of the film was nevertheless very concrete to me: there is a keen sense of money implicit in almost every scene. Transactions are always taking place. And yet this is not a focal point of the film, it is merely an element of its reality. It tracks the traffic of money as if money is part of the film's setting rather than part of its plot. And essentially this is accurate -- the characters exist in a world sharply divided from the one most of the audience is likely to live in, and money is exactly the line of division.

The film is about a couple of young people, Bruno and Sonia, who have a newborn child together. Neither of them works, and Bruno makes most of his money from theft, stealing any objects that might be of value and pawning them off to some regular contacts. One day, Sonia asks Bruno to take their baby out for a stroll, and he promptly sells the child. It's all chillingly mundane, which is part of the Dardennes' genius -- Bruno approaches this transaction with the same cool detachment he approaches any other sale, the child being nothing more than another (especially valuable) object to pawn off.

I'd go too far if I explained any more of the plot beyond this point, but suffice it to say that Bruno's story becomes one of actions and consequences, crime and punishment, and the possibilities of redemption. It's also a societal indictment -- the directors have a clear socialist message embedded here that suggests this is exactly what we should expect from anyone who is cut off from the system. Bruno is very much held responsible for every decision he makes, but without ever condoning his actions the Dardennes are nevertheless implying that the will to survive is very strong, and anyone who must routinely take extreme actions to survive will inevitably lose sight of moral limits.

That said, I'm afraid I must admit I felt too emotionally distant from much of the film. It's a tightrope act, as always: use too many tricks to draw in the viewer and you risk being overly manipulative, add too many levels of distance and you risk losing them. My feelings varied throughout the film and much of it was very effective, but remembering how emotionally shellshocked I felt at the end of Rosetta, I have to say I think this time the Dardennes let me off a little too easy.

And now I'm just nitpicking, but Bruno's hair really bothered me. It was always, always perfectly styled. Even after he nearly drowns in a muddy river, in the next scene his perfect hair is good as new. Every time I saw it I wondered how many products he was using to get it to stay like that, and more importantly how he managed to afford it. I know it seems inconsequential, and maybe it is, but a detail like that can be a major hindrance to anyone who notices hair, and in a case like this I think it oversteps accepted conventions (like 19th-century westerns where everyone has perfect teeth).


Late Marriage (Dover Kosashvili, 2001) - Zaza, the 31-year-old son of Georgian immigrants in Israel is a disgrace to his family for not yet being married. His parents have repeatedly tried to set him up with other girls, but he shrugs all of them off because he's in love with Judith, a 34-year-old divorcee with a daughter. The film essentially consists of only a small handful of long, deeply developed scenes with two major centerpieces. The first is an extended sex scene between Zaza and Judith, which is very different from any sex scene I've ever seen before. The sex isn't perfect or even particularly arousing, and absolutely nothing about the scene is in any way idealized -- basically, no effort is spent to make it enjoyable for the viewer. That's not the point. Instead, it's all about conveying the intimacy of the relationship. Zaza and Judith are entirely comfortable with each other's bodies and each of them appears to have intimate knowledge of exactly what'll excite the other. Instead of looking like a couple of actors performing a sex scene, they look like a couple having sex. (At least, it looks realistic to me; I don't actually have a frame of reference to draw on, except to say that it doesn't look at all like a typical sex scene.) This is an adult relationship being rightfully treated as such, and the couple's intimacy is so thoroughly embedded in the viewer's mind that the two of them seem like inseparable entities.

The other major centerpiece is a very different scene in which several members of Zaza's family follow him up to Judith's apartment and confront them together. His parents are unimaginably cruel and condescending to both of them, and it's by far one of the most emphatically painful scene I can ever recall seeing. You just sit back helpless while characters who previously just seemed like good, exasperated people, quaint but harmless, regress into an almost medieval sort of mob-like mercilessness, and in front of Judith's daughter, no less. But it's also far, far more complex a scene than a simple modern heroes vs. ancient villains scenario, and when it's through Zaza and Judith also emerge with the viewer's sympathies in question.

The embarrassing description on the DVD's back cover tries to sell Late Marriage as a wacky farce "in the tradition of My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and also includes a blurb from one critic citing "probably the most realistic sex scene ever filmed," which together seem like odd selling points. New Yorker apparently decided the target audience was people who thought Greek Wedding was okay except for the lack of graphic sex. In any case, don't be deceived: Late Marriage is nothing like the harmless, annoying little extended sitcom it was sold to cash in on. It's much more dramatic, much more realistic, and much, much better. And where the other film viewed potentially repressive culturak tradition as a quaint little absurdity wrapped up by a big, rosy ending, Late Marriage is a bold, unwavering depiction of the damage it can cause generation after generation. It does not shy away from real life, no matter how much it hurts. The film ends exactly how you know it must end, which is exactly how you want it not to end.

( Vulcan misogyny, or Robert Bloch can't write television )

My regular screening log will be posted tomorrow.

As film criticism is by no means a scientific act, I think it is ridiculous to claim any sort of objectivity in qualifying the "best" films of any given year. I used to make a distinction between what might be "best" and what I felt was my "favorite." I thought it was presumptuous to declare that I knew what films were the best films. Now I think the distinction is moot -- the real presumption comes in declaring that there is such a thing as an objectively "best" film. The invocation of that word in this context implies (or should imply) a personal perspective. So it is with that in mind that I say the following ten films are not my favorite films from 2006 -- they are the best.

Also, because different films operate on different systems of values and set out to accomplish different goals, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of ranking films. So I've ranked those that seem to have left the biggest memorial impression on me -- which turned out to be three, just like last year -- and left the other seven unranked in alphabetical order.


10 Best Films of 2006

01. Tideland (Terry Gilliam)



I can't think of any other film last year that left me feeling as dumbfounded, ruined and ravaged as this one, which paradoxically also left me feeling renewed, inspired and at least momentarily comforted. Tideland was easily Gilliam's most personal film since Brazil -- despite the fact that Gilliam has never really made an impersonal film -- and like Gilliam himself, his latest film is rebellious, warm, beautiful, often vulgar, rash but intelligent, prone to emotional outbursts, and much more at home in a child's perspective than an adult's. It's also very divisive. But whether you love it or hate it, I guarantee it'll be an entirely unique experience.

(NOTE: If anyone considers renting or especially buying this on DVD, they should read this article first. No version in any country presents the image 100% correctly, but the UK DVD is a little more correct than the US one.)


( mostly downers, but that's how it is sometimes )