Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

Lately, it seems there are a lot of lists going around, ranking all things relating to film. Some of them aren’t too bad, some are downright awful, but hey, here are some of them…

AFI (American Film Institute) 100 Greatest American Movies - I must note that this is not “The 100 Greatest Films EVER” its limited to American (by whatever standards), and even then, its pretty much all you would expect.

Guardian 100 Greatest Cinematic Moments - *SPOILERS* proceed with caution, take note of the movies first, not the moments.

AFI 100 Funniest Movies

AFI 100 Greatest Thrillers

AFI 50 Heroes - The definition of “hero” might be confused with “protagonist” here…

AFI 50 Villains

Rotten Tomatoes 100 Best-Reviewed Sci-Fi Movies - This shocked me.

Rotten Tomatoes 94 Comic Book Movies - Some surprises here…

Okay, I promise no more lists, I was just getting it out of the way.

In my experience, this blog’s recommendations have yet to convince anyone to see any movie. And if anything is going to do it, its not going to be a huge picture of three Icelandic children. No matter…

I hearby declare for the next few months, my stock recommendation will unapologetically be Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, on DVD in the States for the first time ever this week (packaged together with another beautiful film, La Jetee). It’s got everything Bellingham’s movie viewers know and love - world travel, pretty pictures, leftist politics - and admittedly, a few things they don’t - no traditional narrative or storyline to speak of. I didn’t know what to think the first time I saw it, but now every time I think about it, it gives me big ol’ goosebumps. The movie is a big gaping black hole of wonder at the world. I daydream about it constantly.

Here is a passage from the film’s narration that I feels sums it up the best.

In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it’s a year later. He’s walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.

That’s for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That’s just it, he can’t understand. He hasn’t come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet’s past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

As a video clerk, I try and avoid falling into the pitfalls and stereotypes that come with it (Especially after my grueling experience of watching Clerks). That said, I cannot really keep my voice stifled any more…

Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi is the best of the Star Wars movies. Period.

Why? Well, I think most of us know this in our heart of hearts, but some of the many examples are: Green Lightsaber! Rancor! Space Battle! The Emperor! Revealing Darth Vader as a crusty, old white guy!

Hopefully this starts some sort of admittance from certain parties that keep it safe with Empire Strikes Back that they were wrong, and although I absolve them of their sins, the Rancor may not be as forgiving as I…

So I just watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and I have to say, it actually lived up to a lot of its promise. When I first heard the premise, a documentary crew following around a “supernatural” serial killer (in the vein of Michael Meyers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger) I thought “Well, this will either be pretty interesting, or a total waste of time.” Immediately, you can say this is “Man Bites Dog 2,” and yes, it might be trying to be original without really knowing that it isn’t, but while Man Bites Dog was based in a somewhat realistic context, and of much more sinister/graphic/real depiction, BTM at least plays off of the horror genre which is rooted in eccentrics and straight up cheese. Yes, Man Bites Dog is the much better film (and really you shouldn’t be comparing the two), but as far as slasher flicks go, this one actually tries a different approach and aims to make a mark, which I think it accomplishes.

It’s obviously a freshman effort, using digital cameras and some “straight out of college” actors, the film isn’t without its blemishes. But the heart of the film is really the script, and the approach to the genre, and just having fun. Essentially, it takes the elements of Scream (analyizing the horror genre and applying it to what is going on) but doesn’t hide us from the killer, rather keeps all the characters in the same room just to see what happens. The premise is wholly original really, as everything that is going on is out in the open.

“What’s your favorite scary movie?” is a question we get a lot, and while this is no more scary than any 80’s flick, its fun and kept me entertained, which is exactly what the genre was designed to do.

Paul Thomas Anderson is not one of my favorite directors, but I think he’s talented (or ballsy, which I guess is a kind of talent in the film business) and I enjoy his work and think he may one day make a great film or two… and it’s possible his next film, There Will Be Blood, could possess the qualities of a masterpiece. Certainly the pieces are interesting: Daniel Day-Lewis, an historical story about the early days of the oil industry in America, as well as being PTA’s first script adapted from an outside source: Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil.

Anyway, the trailer is online, and it’s pretty amazing - much more like Malick than Altman, which is a distinct change of tone for Anderson. Check it out. The film is scheduled to be released this fall.

In 1965, in Hattersley, England, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were arrested, tried for the murders of three children (burying their bodies in the moors), and later convicted and given life sentences. Brady’s sentence excluded the possibility of parole; Hindley, on the other hand, was considered “dominated” by Brady, and would be eligible for parole in 25 years.

Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford — more commonly known as Lord Longford — was a tireless campaigner for the rehabilitation of prisoners. A devout Roman Catholic, he found it absolutely reasonable to believe that even those who had committed horrible monstrosities could be rehabilitated, and could be forgiven. In particular, he fought for Hindley to be given a chance at gaining her freedom, a cause that very much ran counter to popular opinion and gained Longford the nickname of “Wrongford” by the press. (According to an obituary article, Longford “could accept the label ‘eccentric,’ [but] objected to being called a ’saintly fool.’”)

In the new made-for-British-television Longford, the title character is played by the wonderful Jim Broadbent (an Academy Award winner for his role in Iris, and recently announced to be joining the cast of Indiana Jones 4), all frizzy hair and quavering voice and huge eyes blinking behind gigantic spectacles. The movie begins with his entry into the case, some time after the convictions were handed down, and follows his deepening relationship with Hindley (played by the also-wonderful Samantha Morton), a relationship that causes friction not only with his wife (Lindsay Duncan) — who worries that her husband’s crusade could destroy his reputation — but also with Hindley’s partner-in-crime Brady (Andy Serkis, perhaps best known as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings). Brady requests a meeting with Longford to warn him that Hindley isn’t what she seems — that she was the driving force behind the murders, urging Brady on rather than the other way around. Longford, for better or worse, disregards Brady’s words.

Anyway. Both Broadbent and Morton are really good. The case itself is fascinating in a morbid sort of way, and it’s gripping to watch Longford cling to his conviction in the face of public opinion (and, some would say, common decency).

Coming out this week we have American Revolution 2. Covering the social scene in 1968 Chicago, specifically the Black Panthers and the Young Patriots and their struggle for change in their community in the events following the 1968 Democratic National Convention, this doc voices opinions and lets us watch meetings 40 years after the fact. Only 86 minutes long, I found myself abruptly pulled from a rather engaging film, but in the end finding it perfectly adequate.

By the end of the film, I could only wonder “Where are all of these guys today?” and “Were they successful (on anyone’s terms)?” In the end, I felt defeated. Here is a second-hand experience of the search for equality and justice in a corrupt America, one where social class and race is overwhelmed by human togetherness. The frustration, the anger, and the fire that these people have with the government and how things are/were/are taps into the common man, filling me with a hope that things can change. The problem though, is that we see these people gathering, meeting, and planning, but not actually acting. I don’t know what happened to these people by the end of the film (let alone by the end of their lives), and I can only think they either died in some heroic last stand (probably not), or faded into the background or were locked up away from where society could hear them.

I suppose after all is said and done I am unclear of the director’s intent. Was it to show us that talk just won’t do, that action is needed, unity and unbridled determination are the keys to change? Or was it to show that no matter how hot the fire burns, an oven is still an oven, and won’t change anything? I feel like the film is mostly critical of any movement, ending with a montage of angry yelling and explicatives, with a cruel realization that the lines between revolution and pure destruction are thin; Angry mobs is angry mobs…

If… you itch with indignation at any hint of hierarchy or imposed authority.

If… your sense of humor tends toward the sacrilegious.

If… you reimagined Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct as a modern day school shooting.

If… you like Malcolm Mcdowell - that stare, that sneer, that grin.

If… you like your militant macho politics with a strong hint of homoeroticism, including what David Ehrenstein calls “the most beautiful homoerotic scene ever filmed… better than sex.”.

Then you’ll really enjoy Lindsay Anderson’s If…, just released by the Criterion Collection on DVD this week.

If… you want to rent Zero for Conduct, we have it at FIT only on VHS, as its not on DVD in the States (criminal!), though for a VHS tape, its a pretty good print.

If… this review format is too trite for your taste, I’ve written a longer one at Lucid Screening.

John Cassavetes was not only one of most important directors of independent films in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but he was married to one of the era’s finest actresses - Gena Rowlands - who happened to give many of her best performances in several of her husband’s films. The work they created together (and it was a real collaboration, as all of his films were, allowing and encouraging the actors to improvise and contribute to the process) betrays his affection and respect for Rowlands. The characters she was given to play are inspiringly complex, exceptional examples of the female presence in cinema, entirely unlike the rote, one-dimensional roles so commonly doled out to actresses - even talented ones - in most Hollywood movies.

My favorite Cassavetes film, which includes my favorite female performance of all time (seriously), is A Woman Under The Influence. There have been a lot (too many) films about mental illness, but this is one of the best, avoiding all the usual cliches (calculatedly “quirky” characters and situations, psychosis as superpower, etc.) and emphasizing the troubling ambiguity, elusiveness and unreliability of relating and living with - and still, loving - such a person. The film is careful to include all the family members in the “illness”; husband, children, friends, etc. all contribute to the unstable atmosphere, but there are no pat causes or diagnoses, nor are there any trite solutions. It’s a complex, open-ended study of behavior, and the lack of resolution or revelation only makes the whole of the film all the more moving.

This past week (June 17, precisely) was the one-hundredth birthday of designer Charles Eames, who - with his wife and partner Ray - was responsible for many of the signature, iconic works in that field, including countless variations of the “Eames Chair” (stackable utilitarian models, efficient and comfortable lounges, etc.) as well as fabric designs, architecture and even toys and games.

The team also created dozens of films (mostly shorts) for a variety of purposes: educational, promotional and personal, experimental creations. Many of these are featured on a series of six DVDs called, appropriately enough, The Films of Charles & Ray Eames. We only have the first disc available for rental here at the store, but it contains my second favorite short film of all time: Powers of Ten. The 1977 film traverses, in its brief nine minutes, the whole length and depth of the universe, from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the largest cosmic arrays, revealing the patterns that seem to underlie all of creation. It’s a beautiful, hypnotic film.