My Winnipeg

w/d Guy Maddin

Another oddball classic from Canada's resident filmic auteur. This is one of his most accessible works, filled with tongue-in-cheek humor and a couple of flat-out lies. It purports to be autobiographical but it's anyone's guess whether or not anything here really happened.

This guy's secured a place in cinema history with Careful, and especially Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary.  His singular vision, combining silent-era technique with post-modern irony has created a category of one that is a blessing to film lovers world wide.

The segment here with the horses is one of the most unforgettable images in film history. Is it true? I don't want to know. True or not, it's genius.

8

Louise Bourgeois

documentary

This was a fascinating piece on an amazingly talented, visionary sculptor. She has an appealing manner,  helped some by a charming French accent, but is obviously tormented by demons from her childhood. 

It's been said that the greatest art has its roots in emotional turmoil, that the swirl of passion is the crucible out of which insight emerges. Who knows? It seems to be the case here.

I hope this film brings her work to a larger audience.

7

Blindsight

documentary

A feelgood film in the Big Game genre. 6 blind Tibetans are led, carefully, to the Advance Base Camp on Everest and back. 

They are ostracized by their communities because the barbaric concept of karma tells their fellows that they are blind because of misdeeds they must have committed in a "former life." So they probably deserve it. 

Who makes this stuff up? This culture is one of the cruelest on the planet (see Michael Parenti...Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth) but somehow has captured the warm huggies of the rich Hollywood elite and is looked upon here with benign paternalism.

It's impossible not to feel sympathy for these poor young people. Doubly handicapped, it's hard to see a good future for them. Their courage here was moving and inspirational. But how do you tell teenagers that their only hope for a decent life is to leave their homes and families, make their way to the West and try to start a new life? 

Life isn't fair.

5

1000 Years of Good Prayers

w/d  Wayne Wang

Nice, focused domestic melodrama. A Chinese man, educated and urbane, comes to stay with his grown daughter who has been living in Spokane, Washington. Slowly subterranean conflicts surface. Meanwhile he connects, improbably, with an Iranian woman his age. They have no language in common but their shared isolation in this strange land allows them to come together.

Nothing is really resolved here. After an emotional scene, he leaves, leaving us with the sense of having witnessed  just another incident in their two lives, albeit one with emotional residue. Cross-cultural issues are left present but understated...another plus. 

The whole thing was under-played. Good work all around.

5

Trouble the Water

documentary

This film dealt with the effect of Hurricane Katrina on some lower class residents of New Orleans. One of them buys a $20 video camera just before the storm hits and gets some before and during footage. These people later hook up with some professional filmmakers who return with them and record the aftermath  of the storm on their lives.

The main problem for me was the main character, a loud, motor-mouthed ex junkie who talked and talked and eventually drove me right out of the theater. Her filmmaking technique was very poor...constant camera movement and zoom-panning. Gave me a headache.

The storm footage was interesting but very brief. The rest of the film paled beside Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke.

3 

Pachamama

Bolivia

A very primitive film. Spectacular location work among the Andean native peoples. Minimal plot. Native players (non-actors). We follow a small group of people around who live on a salt flat, gather and dry the salt and once a year travel around trading it for whatever. 

Interesting as anthropology but not as film.

4

The Black Stallion

Mickey Rooney  d/ Carroll Ballard

A wonderful film. The first 40 minutes are as beautiful and well worked out as anything in film history. The slow bonding of horse and boy stranded on a desert island is exquisitely rendered here with many, many stunning shots. 

After the action moves to civilization the story morphs into a Big Game saga but even that is so well done that I was willing to forgive and just sink into it. It was a fairy tale with a rousing climax.

Much use of long lens throughout which gave a sense on compression, massiveness and immediacy. Also, great use of sound to enhance the total sensory experience.

One of the best movies ever made for children of all ages.

7

Tong Tana

documentary

A very beautiful, very sad film about the life and despoliation of the tropical rain forest on Borneo. We follow a nomadic group of Penan people who move around subsisting on palm gruel and bush meat. People like them have lived this way for as long as there have been humans. Their way of life is threatened by the advance of "civilization" in the person of loggers hungry for the cash centuries-old trees can bring on the world market and indifferent to the consequences for the indigenous people living there.

It's an old story and no one watching can have any doubt how it will play out. This film is distinguished by the presence of a Swiss national who has decided to chuck it all go native. He lives with these people, using all the same skills and hunting techniques they do and has been doing it for eight years. He serves as our guide and comes across as intelligent and articulate and not at all weird for the life he's chosen.

Subsequent research on the net discloses that Bruno Manser left the jungle, returned to Europe and spent several years advocating for the Penan in the halls of power. After he returned to Malaysia he disappeared, almost certainly murdered by the capitalist thieves whose financial interests he threatened. Twas ever thus.

6

The Beautiful Washing Machine

Malaysia

Wonderfully off-kilter film. A deadpan take on daydreams, pretty girls who serve as mute, uncomplaining house slaves and the complications that come from having a household appliance with a mind of its own.

It would be impossible to summarize the plot here. This was essentially a two hour journey through the looking glass with events set in what looks like our reality but really isn't. I thought it was fun but most wouldn't. For me it was fresh. I had no idea where it was going or what I would get to see on the way there.

It pleases me that something like this was made.

6

Chris and Don

documentary

This was a very lopsided film. They attempted a dual biopic of Christopher Isherwood and his longtime companion Don. But Isherwood was a major literary figure and well worth the attention this film brought. His first hand accounts of Weimar Germany have received world-wide acclaim and made the basis of several plays and films. 

Unfortunately he's dead. So the major focus of the film, necessarily, is Don who is an undistinguished, aging queen. He first hooked up with Isherwood when he was 16, essentially as his boy toy. Their relationship lasted but that fact alone doesn't make this guy interesting. He comes across as shallow and self-absorbed. The camera crew follows him around while he does his errands and I found myself why I was watching this. He does portraits which to my eye were generic, the kind of work you could find at garage sales everywhere.

Not worth it.

3

The Singing Revolution

documentary

This was a very moving account of the eventually successful effort by the people of Estonia to free themselves from the Russian tyranny which was their unwelcome legacy of WW2.  At the time-1991-the world's focus was on the collapse of soviet communism and the breakup of the Russian empire generally and this story got buried. 

Too bad...it's a great story. The movement was entirely self-generated and non-violent. These folks used the power of their common culture, native songs and their sheer moral authority to expel the foreign body from their midst. It should serve as an inspiration to all oppressed people.

7

Country Teacher

Czech

The loneliness and peril of a gay man in a rural Czech village. This was a poignant story nicely underplayed by the lead.

However, it was badly marred by the portrayal of most of the villagers as loud, drunken louts. This may actually be the case but it made the place seem more like cartoon reality than was good for the film.

A little too long.

4

Art School Confidential

w/d  Terry Zwigoff

This was just OK. He tried to do something oddball and quirky but it wasn't odd enough to be interesting or memorable. It was a coming-of-age/romcom more than anything. One problem was that the humor was coarse and vulgar without being funny. I counted one little chuckle which I have to admit was nicely handled.

The central conceit...what do you have to do to be a great artist?...wasn't anything we in the audience care about. You either are an artist and are continually driven to create or you're not. There's nothing wrong with being a dabbler but greatness usually eludes those folks.

Some good players were ill used here. Jim Broadbent in particular beshat himself in a losing cause. To my eye, Mr. Zwigoff has had two failures attempting fiction after his excellent Crumb documentary. It's still three strikes and you're out.

4

Trumbo

documentary

Loving tribute to one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. His career was derailed in the hateful madness of McCarthyism but his work, his humanism and his essential decency eventually triumphed.

6

In the Valley of Elah

Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron

A retired Army sergeant investigates the death of his son after the letter returns from Iraq. The theme here is dealing with the wreckage produced by American militarism.

Set up as a policier/thriller, it easily held me. TLJ underplayed his role which seems to be the current fashion for male actors of a certain age, but which worked well here.

Ms Theron made the film work. Her quietly determined character easily carried the story along. She was harassed, thwarted from all directions but simply ignored obstacles and kept moving forward.

The resolution strained credibility-a bit too pat-real life seldom comes together quite so neatly. But overall, this was in the plus column.

6

There's No Business Like Show Business

Ethel Merman  Donald O'Connor   d/ Walter Lang

All-out Hollywood spectacular musical from 1954. Strong cast, big production numbers,  cinemascope, all in living color. Structured around the life and times of a show business family through their decades in vaudeville. Similar in many ways to Yankee Doodle Dandy . 

This was made when Hollywood was fighting what it saw as a desperate battle for survival against the inroads of television so they tried with films like this to provide a spectacle which couldn't be done on TV. 

This was lively, colorful and fun. 

Incidentally, it also featured a supporting role by Marilyn Monroe which demonstrated for all who wished to see that she couldn't dance, act or sing. No wonder this woman was so troubled; she knew better than anyone that she didn't deserve the fantastic acclaim she received in the 50's. Her appeal was as a sex icon, an idealized image of female sexual allure, an impossible standard for anyone to meet and which to her, living on the inside of that body must have been bewildering. 

5

The Lacemaker

France  1997   Isabel Huppert

This film launched her into worldwide recognition and a decades-long career. She was brilliant here, playing a shy, repressed, simple but decent shopgirl who falls in love with an upper middle class college student. He is enthralled by her innocence and lack of guile. She falls sweetly and naturally into her role of helpmate. He increasingly sees her as a social handicap among his pseudo-intellectual friends and after a cool reception of her by his parents, dumps her.

It's a simple story but there's more in these 90 minutes than in hours and hours of mainstream American films. 

The film ends with her gazing blankly at the camera for a minute or so. Long enough for us to feel the full depth of her despair. Haunting and unforgettable.

9

I'm Not Scared

Italt  2003

Shot in the stunningly beautiful southern Italian landscape, this was a coming-of-age/thriller. A 10 year old boy discovers a child hidden in a hole at an abandoned farm.  His interactions with the captive boy develop nicely as he, and we, discover that this is an ongoing kidnapping drama in which all the adults around him are complicit, including his parents. There is a hint of social criticism in a scene where his mother asks him to promise to leave the area as soon as he can...the implication being that if he stays there there is no escape from the mafia's clutches. 

The film was taut and gripping until a clumsily conceived and executed deus ex machina resolution ended it abruptly. It seemed like they had originally planned a black ending but were persuaded to change it at the last minute, leaving us with unsatisfying schmaltz. 

Too bad. They almost had a classic.

5

The Asphalt Jungle

Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe   d/John Huston

Noir, maybe the ultimate noir, from 1950. Dark, filmed mostly at night in seedy locations around what looks like Baltimore, this story involves a jewel heist orchestrated and carried out by local low lifes. Betrayal, cowardice, double-cross all show up here. Filmed under the asinine restrictions of the Hayes code which required that all the criminals had to pay...some with their lives.

Solid film all around. Great cast, script, look, direction. Ended with Hayden's character dying in a sunlit field in Kentucky, highlighting the idea of the day's rebirth and cleansing of the night's nasty doings.

This is considered a classic...deservedly so.

6

The Misfits

Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe

It was impossible for me to watch this simply as a film. These players loom so large in movie history and the story of the making of this film is so well known that mostly what I saw was the legends interacting in front of a camera.

The strongest impression I had was that she couldn't act at all. She had a limited repertoire of schticks that she employed constantly. By this time (1961) she had completely lost her ingenue looks, was some 25 pounds overweight and was completely unable to bring believability to her character. She was more annoying than anything else. 

This was written by Arthur Miller, her estranged husband at the time.  He wrote the script around what he perceived as her persona but she was so neurotic and unstable that to my eye she badly needed help. Help no one around her was able to provide.

Gable was fine here in his last role. So was Montgomery Clift. I didn't care for Eli Wallach's performance...he seemed too intense, too wired to be credible as a westerner.  And Miller gave him some very clunky lines.

This has great historical value but as a film...not so much. Huston did a great job staging and editing the horse wrangling scenes at the end. But it was not enough to save it.

3

Slumdog Millionaire

d/ Danny Boyle

This has been characterized as a feelgood film. And so it is. 

It resides firmly in that corner of movie reality already occupied by Rocky, The Champ, Hoosiers, et al. In short, it's a BIG GAME movie. Will the hero overcome all the obstacles life or the filmmaker has placed in his path and win the big game? Are you kidding? 

This is distinctive in that it's set in the slums of Mumbai and the life of a slumdog is truly horrific but it has all the paint-by-numbers requirements of the genre: a really bad guy, morally compromised best pal, and, most importantly...TRUE LOVE (hey, it doesn't happen every day).  And, amazingly, everything turns out right in the end.  It even features a 3 minute closing dance video with hundreds of bodies gyrating in a parody/tribute to synchronized swim. Ya gotta love this life.

This kind of material has gotten so tired that even the parodies ( The Princess Bride, Movie, Movie ) have gotten old. Yet, people still respond to it.  Seems to touch something fundamental in us...maybe it's that hope springs eternal.

I don't bear any ill will toward these films. I just don't want to see another one again. Ever. 

This was very slickly done with quick cuts, thumping soundtrack, continuous time jumps...all the features of modern filmmaking. It will almost certainly boost Boyle's career.

3

Simon the Magician

d/  Ildiko Enyedi

A delightfully oddball film. 

A Czech seer is hired by the Paris police to help solve a murder. He does then spends several days frabbing around the city courting a young woman,  fending off celebrity and getting involved with another magician in a live burial contest which updates an early christian legend.

This worked because of the enigmatic lead performance. It tickled me all the way through and ended on a sweetly sentimental note.

Great fun.

7

Alexandra

w/d Alexander Sokurov

A wonderful film.

A lonely old woman travels to Chechnya to visit her grandson who is serving in the Russian occupation forces. The lead is played by Galina Vishnevskaya, who is well known in her native land as a prominent opera star.

Here she shuffles around, mumbling continuously, demanding this or that from the young men around her in the best babushka tradition. To them, she represents home, comfort, warmth, the familiar. They sneak longing peeks at her from around corners or down hallways.

She encounters a Chechen woman in the market and, effortlessly, the two women form a bond which transcends the martial world of men. 

This film was a marvelous display of humanism. Understated and quietly shot, it is a modern masterpiece and serves as a fine follow-up to his equally exquisite Mother and Son .

9

Redacted

d/ Brian De Palma

Pure anti-Iraq war propaganda. I agreed with his political position but resented having my face shoved in the atrocities being committed by our imperial troops.

De Palma made a similar heavy-handed screed against the Viet Nam, Casualties of War  which didn't work either. You can't just let your passion on an issue take over your judgement about what other people are willing to sit through.

This guy's had some real hits and about an equal number of misses.

3

Atonement

Keira Knightly

This was a beautiful, faithful treatment of an outstanding novel.

I thought they fudged the ending a little too much...the key point of the book, the kicker that stayed with me long after I read it...that there is no atonement, that sometimes people do really awful things to one another and aren't required to answer for it...wasn't in the film. It was implied but only obliquely. 

That aside, this was wonderful in every way...acting, sets, editing. Solid literary adaptation.

8