my personal canon, part VII

Some stuff that didn't readily fit into any of the other associational chains:

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). Still one of the best ensemble films ever made, one of the best representations of the complicated network of urban life ever made, one of the best films about the messiness of racial politics ever made. Spike Lee is a filmmaker of such talent that even his "bad" films are worth seeing, and this film is probably his best.

One more "outlier" I should have mentioned yesterday is Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre (1981), which consists entirely of two people having a meal and a conversation (Andre Gregory and the always-delightful Wallace Shawn, playing themselves), and yet is utterly gripping, literally shattering if you allow yourself to believe in even some of its conclusions.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), the second Hitchcock film on this list, a fine suspense story infused with a creepy dream-logic that cements Hitchcock's reputation as a master of both surface and depth psychology. Wish I had room for a more early-period Hitchcock; I'd probably go with Strangers on a Train (1951), a standard-issue thriller, but one that is absolutely perfectly made.

The grand, tragic biopic Raging Bull (1980), which, along with Goodfellas, stands as one of Martin Scorsese's high-water-mark achievements. I should note here that the power of each of them, but Raging Bull especially, lies in Thelma Schoonmaker's breathtaking (and largely underacknowledged) work as the films' editor.

James Cameron's Titanic (1997). Although there are plenty of romances on this list, I thought there was room for one more. Titanic's especially notable as a film that pulls double duty: it's a by-the-book period romance, but also a quality disaster/action film. I think this simultaneous fulfillment of genres that intially appear diametrically opposed might be one of the reasons why this remains the highest-grossing film ever made.

One thing that's been fun to watch over the past decade or so has been the emergence of a cadre of phenomenally-talented Latin American independent filmmakers, perhaps best represented by Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu Mamá También (2001) (although Fernando Meirelles' stunning City of God (2002) gives it a real run for its money).

I've been struggling with the question of which documentaries to include on this list: I've included two "fake" documentaries (This Is Spinal Tap and The Blair Witch Project) but only one "real" one (Triumph of the Will), which seems wrong somehow, especially given that the documentary tradition is as old as cinema itself.

So, OK, why not go all the way back to 1896, with the Lumiere Brothers' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, the famous one-minute head-on shot of an approaching train from which disoriented audience members allegedly fled in terror. (If you pick it up on this DVD you also get Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (1902), really the first SF film, and Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is sometimes considered to be the first film that uses editing for purposeful narrative effect. Probably both belong on a "canonical" list.)

In terms of more recent documentaries, I'm going to have to go with Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989): say what you will about whether Michael Moore is fair or even likeable, this documentary remains as potent a piece of agitprop as its ever been. Plus I have trouble thinking of another film that so clearly reveals the power of the documentary: the way bringing in a movie camera amplifies one man's complaint to the level of national corporate embarrassment. (I think I somehow allowed myself to misplace my pirated copy of Frederick Wiseman's institutional expose Titicut Follies (1967), banned for 25 years by the Massachussetts Supreme Court: I should see if I can't dig that up.)

I'll also include Godfrey Reggio's wordless, visually sumptuous cry of apocalypse Koyaanisqatsi (1982) for its impact and formal intensity.

In terms of documentary "outliers," I'll nominate Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), an eight-hour single shot of the Empire State Building in real time, in which the primary dramatic event is the moment the building's lights turn on. Good luck getting a chance to watch the whole thing, since a DVD release is obviously impractical, but I'd also give credit for watching his similarly-styled Sleep (1963), five hours of John Giorno sleeping, which screens daily at Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum.

I'd like to wind up the canon-making exercise by getting "meta" and including a few more films about filmmaking or about Hollywood. I've included a few already—The Muppet Movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Mulholland Dr. all qualify—but I'd also like to include Robert Altman's poison-pen love-letter The Player (1992), which remarks obliquely on many of the genres included on this list and explicitly on at least two of the specific films (The Graduate and Touch of Evil). (It remarks on Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), as well, which maybe should have gotten a spot when I was talking about exploitation cinema yesterday.)

I'm holding off on that one for now, and instead closing this list with Adaptation (2002), by Spike Jonze (directed from a great script by Charlie Kaufmann). If there is such a thing as a "mashup" film, this might be it: it takes up an existing book, which remediates a real-life figure ("orchid thief" John Laroche), and, via the process of remediating the book into a film, manages to tangle in the life of the author (New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean), and the screenwriter (Kaufmann himself), and then forces the entire mess into the genre confines of a bad thriller. So meta it hurts, this film so perfectly encapsulates the self-consciousness that undergirds the construction of a movie at this particular point in time that I can't think of a better way to cap off this list.

Note that this leaves us at 97 films instead of 100; I uncovered enough blind spots and films I hadn't seen but felt might work on this list that I'm going to leave a few slots open so that I can do a bit more further investigation. As always, comments are appreciated.

I'll publish the whole list in a single post, checklist-style, tomorrow. And probably soon I'll publish a list of my 100 "favorite" films—something determined solely by the dictates of my personal enjoyment, giving no importance to broader significance. I think it'll be interesting to see just how different the two lists end up.

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Friday, April 13, 2007
9:31 AM
8 comments

my personal canon, part VI

Wanted to spend some time today doing indpendents and outliers, as well as filling in a few blind spots that I missed earlier.

First up in this list is probably Luis Bunuel + Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929). It's a key document of the Surrealist movement, but really I'm including it for its notorious sliced-eyeball shot, which remains one of the most viscerally disquieting visuals in the entire history of film. The fact that it happens so early in the film—sprung upon the audience with only a few seconds of advance warning—makes it not only a key moment in the history of cinematic shock, but also makes it one of the first films to actively interrogate the relationship between filmmaker and (privileged) audience.

(Since I completely neglected Spain on my run-through of foreign-language films, I'd also like to belatedly add another Bunuel film, specifically his elegant, contemptuous The Exterminating Angel (1962). I'll also open up a slot for Pedro Almodovar, going for now with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), although it's been a while since I've seen it.)

Moving on up through the history of cinematic mavericks, we have to mention John Cassavetes, probably choosing Faces (1968) as the representative (although I'd like to eventually see all five films in the Cassavetes box set). It seems like Werner Herzog belongs here as well: not having seen Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) I'm instead going to go with Fitzcarraldo (1982), worth seeing for its embodiment of directorial hubris alone.

Also worth mentioning while on this particular streak is John Waters, who, like Cassavetes, is really one of the founders of American Independent cinema. The canonical Waters film is almost certainly the notorious Pink Flamingos (1972), although Female Trouble (1984) is equally near to my heart.

The rise of John Waters probably isn't possible without the existence of exploitation cinema, and the king of exploitation cinema has to be Russ Meyer, whose Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) really transcends its T+A origins (OK, mostly T) and becomes something far more bizarre and astonishing.

Does anyone want to argue for Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), which is notable for being the only "blacksploitation" film I can think of that's actually directed by an African-American director?

While on the topic of exploitation cinema, I should mention that I've been struggling with the notion of whether or not to include any pornographic films on here. I think ultimately I should: I've been trying to throw my net as wide as possible, trying to capture many different strands of cinematic history, of which porn indubitably is a major one. I'm going to go with Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972), not only because it basically establishes the endlessly-repeated template for feature-length hardcore film, but also because it spearheaded "porno chic," a phenomenon which perfectly defines the uneasy attraction / repulsion relationship that continues to exist between mainstream culture and porn. Also, the fact that star Linda Lovelace / Linda Boreman later said that she was forcibly coerced into participating in the film by her then-husband (notable asshole Chuck Traynor), and if a pornographic film is going to be on this list, I do feel like it should be a film that squarely exemplifies some of the queasymaking moral questions that radiate out of pornography itself.

But back to canonical weirdos and independents. This is as good a place as any to include what was allegedly Stanley Kubrick's favorite movie, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977). Five years in the making, created by a cast and crew so fervently committed to this strange vision that Lynch voluntarily splits proceeds from the DVD sales ten ways, Eraserhead pulls an entire world out of the imagination: it owes no clear debt to anything that's gone before, yet it seems fully-imagined, coherent and complete.

An extreme outlier—someone who defines the outer limits of what we can consider cinema—would be someone like Stan Brakhage, whose body of work (more than 400 films!) is largely made up of non-narrative, non-representational works, often involving hand-painting or otherwise manipulating film stock. Dog Star Man (1962-64) is neither truly non-representational or non-narrative, but it does stand as a long-term, sustained foray into a unique mode of filmmaking. All the standard elements of cinema are present here—editing, camera position and movement, use of color and focus, juxtaposition and superimposition—but in Brakhage's hands they're used as no one else has ever used them before: for every shot concentrating on ordinary autobiographical details (shots of Brakhage's wife, dog, newborn child, and self) there is a shots focusing on something unidentifable (chaotic flux, organic plasm, pulsating texture, incoherent clutter). The result is something like a home movie made by Martians. Put this one in the space capsule, I say, it's more likely to be understood than any of the more culturally-bound narratives that Hollywood is putting out.

One of the interesting developments in North American cinema over the past fifteen years or so is the transition of indie cinema from being a bunch of iconoclasts working truly "independently" to being a cottage industry of its own, sort of the honorary R+D branch of Hollywood. This transition begins with a flush of really fine independent cinema in the early 90s, of which Richard Linklater's Austin-based Slacker (1991) is a great example, beating out Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992) (although, come to think of it, Rodriguez should be on this list: I think Sin City (2005) should probably be in with the noirs. Not only does it recycle noir conventions in a hyper-accelerated way, it's also one of the first films to treat comic books as seriously as comic book fans treat them, and it's pioneering in its aggressive use of the "digital back lot," which filmmakers will likely emulate more and more in years to come).

Independents continue to draw more industry attention throughout the 90s, thanks to stuff like the earning power of a cheaply-made but inventive horror flick like Myrick + Sanchez's The Blair Witch Project (1999), and it's around that time that "quirk" begins to become an identifiable, bankable genre unto itself, perhaps best represented by the instant canonization of someone like Wes Anderson. His Rushmore (1998) is the crowning achievement of Indie Quirk: fresh without being threatening; unusual while still demonstrating enormous traditional powers; idiosyncratically styled, but in a way that seems indebted to the concept of brand identity at least as much as to personal vision.

OK. I'm going to do one more of these, and then that should wrap it up. We're currently somewhere around the 85-movie mark.

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Thursday, April 12, 2007
4:57 PM
0 comments

my personal canon, part V

I'm going to try to wrap up this canon-making adventure by Friday, which I'm sure non-cinephile readers of this blog will appreciate.

I thought that today I'd zip through a few of the big genres I hadn't touched on yet. Foremost among these would probably be the Western. John Ford's The Searchers (1956) is generally regarded as one of the best Westerns ever made: I've seen only fragments of it here and there, so this'll be another one that goes on the list solely through the strength of its reputation.

I'd also like to argue for the inclusion of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964): Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" is, to my mind, one of the perfect Western characters—violent, amoral, self-centered, and yet occasionally recklessly empathetic and sentimental.

Eastwood returns to nearly the exact same type of character in his own film Unforgiven (1992), only he returns with a fully-developed sense of the moral dimension of violence (and the glorification of violence). Unforgiven, therefore, ends up being a subtle yet effectively lethal condemnation of its own genre while at the same time going through and hitting all the expected marks. Complicated and interesting: the most important western of the last twenty years.

This will also be the place where I'll follow through on my promise to put a Mel Brooks film on this list, with the inclusion of Blazing Saddles (1974) (thanks to Angela for convincing me that this should be the case.)

Next up is the war movie. Vietnam remains the war that's been the most inventively envisioned in cinema, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) remains the most imaginative and powerful envisioning of Vietnam.

As for great movies representing other twentieth-century wars, I struggle a bit: David O. Russell's Three Kings (1999) is the only film I've seen that adequately gets at Desert Storm, and it's a little gem of a film, but it's been overlooked in a way that makes it difficult to argue for its canonical status. I don't know that I've even seen a movie dealing with either the Korean War or World War I (Renoir's Grand Illusion should probably go on my Netflix list).

There are a lot of World War II films, and I've seen my share, but most of them aren't very good. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) is justly hailed for its virtuoso combat sequences, but it's also pointlessly senitmental and overall has a whiff of contrivance. OK, possibly more than a whiff.

Maybe WWII is best represented by way of a Holocaust film, although that's also challenging: again Spielberg has muscled his way to the forefront with Schindler's List, but, ugh, I don't know. The Holocaust is an event of such magnitude that it might take a film like Claude Lanzmann's nearly ten-hour documentary Shoah (1985) to even begin to do it justice. (This argument sounds respectable coming out of my mouth, but it's undercut by the fact that I haven't actually seen the film.) For now I'm making no pick.

Although not exactly a "genre" per se, I feel like the Big Epic is enough of a cinematic tendency to warrant a few slots: specifically I'd like to nominate Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) as the Big Gladiator Epic (beating out Ben Hur (1959)) and Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) as the Big Fantasy Epic. The Two Towers (2002) has more awesome clashing armies, and Return of the King (2003) has more unbearable pomp, but neither of them quite carry the revelatory heft of the first one.

There should probably be a Big Biblical Epic on here, too, and it's tough to beat Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) for sheer brunt. Plus even though it's fifty years old now, the special effect of the Parting of the Red Sea still takes my breath away.

I'm skipping Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939), but will include his The Wizard of Oz (also 1939, wtf) as this list's third (and likely final) musical: it's also the most notable cinematic representation of the transition from black-and-white to color. I defy any single person who has seen this movie to tell me that their first view of Oz isn't stamped indelibly into their memory. (If watching The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack, this glimpse will sync perfectly with the cash-register noises that open "Money.")

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Wednesday, April 11, 2007
8:36 AM
4 comments

my personal canon, part IV

Whoops, looking at my friend Darren's own list of 100 films reminded me that when I blitzed past Germany yesterday, I somehow skipped Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987), which is totally essential. Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) is great, too, but Wings of Desire is the one for this list by a comfortable margin, pretty much the key film from re-unified Germany.

But what I really wanted to talk about today was animation. We have two anime films on the list, but no Western animation. Disney, of course, is the giant force of Western animation, and I'm going to pick Fantasia (1940, multiple directors) as the quintessential Disney film: it nicely encapsulates both the cloying, cutesy Disney (in the "Pastoral" sequence) as well as the terrifying, sadistic Disney (in the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence). Plus, Fantasia has Mickey Mouse in it (as well as some beautiful non-representational sequences, only thirty years after Kandinsky starts pioneering abstraction in painting.)

The late 80s / early 90s had a powerful run of Disney films, too, mostly (I'd argue) based on the revitalizing power of the Alan Menken / Howard Ashman musical collaboration: of their pieces together (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin), I'd pick Trousdale + Wise's Beauty and the Beast (1991), at least partially because it also represents Disney's first experimental dip into computer animation.

Speaking of, I'd have to include John Lasseter's Toy Story (1995), the first feature-length computer animation movie (of which there have been many, many, many since). Although my favorite Pixar film is Brad Bird's The Incredibles (2004), Toy Story holds up on the strength of its visual design and its smart script (both Joss Whedon and Joel Coen are credited on the screenplay).

I'd like for stop-motion to get a nod as well, but picking one is a challenge: I'm personally supremely fond of the Wallace and Gromit shorts, preferring them ultimately over the perfectly likeable Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), but I'm trying to avoid putting shorts on this list where possible. There's an arty axis to stop-motion as well: some of the films by the Brothers Quay or Jan Svankmajer are also quite awesome, but none of them feel quite "canonical" in the way I'm looking for. And I'm finding myself balking at including the overrated Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Maybe old-school is the way we need to go on this one: something where Willis O'Brien is involved—The Lost World from 1925, or King Kong from 1933. Kong is probably the one that's more culturally significant (and it makes a good counterpoint to Godzilla, already on the list), although if I do The Lost World I can also throw on Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), and we can do a little "dinosaur" axis. I'll figure this one out in a bit: cast your vote in the comments section.

Has anybody out there seen Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving feature-length animated film? (It's on the cover of the current issue of Cabinet.)

I'm also going to include Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), which not only remains a pretty amazing technical feat but also functions as a fascinating meta-commentary on both cartoons and Hollywood, while also creating a kind of alternate history of LA (Roger Rabbit is intriguingly analyzed along these lines in Thom Andersens' fascinating documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, which I wrote about here).

While dealing with childrens' theatre and animation, this would probably also be a good place to give over a slot to a puppet-oriented film, and I'd like the slot to go to another movie that functions as a Hollywood commentary, namely James Frawley's The Muppet Movie (1979). In addition to being the origin myth of some of the 20th century's most enduring characters, it's also a great example of the genres of both the musical and the road movie.

(Other road movies I'd include on this list: Terence Malick's benignly nihilistic Badlands (1973) and Ridley Scott's quasi-feminist Thelma & Louise (1991). As for other musicals... let me get back to that question.)

I can't bear for too long to see Orson Welles' only representation on this list be his brief cameo in The Muppet Movie, so let's quickly mention Citizen Kane (1941) and his fine noir Touch of Evil (1958). (I'm not wild about the representation of Mexicans in Touch of Evil, but a canon of representative films should include some examples of weird Hollywood racism, I think.)

While we're in noir territory, I'd like to include Billy Wilder's great Double Indemnity (1944), and then move along into neo-noir territory with Roman Polanski's staggering Chinatown (1974) and Ridley Scott's SF noir, Blade Runner (1982) (I resisted this one when I was doing the SF list, because it's starting to date a bit in a few respects, but there's enough good in the movie that I think it fits well here).

I'd like to close out the noir selections with David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001), which is not a noir or a neo-noir so much as it is a kind of post-noir: it has a number of noir conventions in it, but the intervening narrative has all come unhinged, so that the elements float in free suspension, and other, weirder elements begin seeping into the interstitial spaces...

(Just as a PS here, I shouldn't let the discussion of noir go by without mentioning Rian Johnson's Brick (2005), which transplants noir conventions to the setting of a Californian high school. I can't argue that it's canonical, but it's well worth your time.)

Forty left to go. A few big films still obviously missing, a few genres still left unrepresented. We'll get to some of them next time...

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
11:38 AM
2 comments

my personal canon, part III

So, OK, time to branch out and get some more non-English-language stuff on this list.

We're going to start off with a quick tour of Europe. From Italy, the director I feel is most important is the great Federico Fellini: it's hard to beat his two masterpieces La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963). I'm also quite fond of his whacked-out, near-psychedelic take on ancient Rome, Satyricon (1969), but I don't consider it to be essential in the way the other two are.

While still in Italy, I want to give Antonioni some consideration: I know at least two people who would strongly urge me to choose L'Avventura (1960) over his English-language film Blow-Up (1966). A tough call: Blow-Up is a great meditation on the power of the image, and L'Avventura is a film that I, er, haven't seen. I'll leave this one for people to argue about in the comments box for now.

I'll throw in a Sergio Leone when we get to the Western (later), and with that we leave Italy and head over to France.

We might as well start with Godard and Truffaut. it's hard to argue against Breathless (1960) as the representative Godard film, although I'm personally more fond of his terrifying apocalyptic Marxist film, Week-End (1967) and his strange parody of noir and SF, Alphaville (1965). I'm under-informed on Truffaut, sadly, I think the only one I've seen is Jules and Jim (1962), which works well enough for my canonical list. Still, I need to improve here. I could probably improve on my French cinema in general: two more giants of the field, Jean Renoir and Alain Resnais, are essentially big blind spots for me.

Germany? Sorry, Germany, but aside from Nosferatu and Metropolis, which I mentioned the other day, I'm leaving you saddled with Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi film Triumph of the Will (1935), a pretty scary piece of work, but also essential to the canon as an example of film's seductive power and potential use for evil. There are some more recent German films of interest (Run Lola Run (1998) is a noteworthy one), but I'm not sure I'd say any of them crack the canonical list.

If I had to pick just one film that nicely captures the overall "flavor" of foreign film—full of mystique and alluring cool, but also cryptic and in constant danger of pretention—I'd pick Sweden's Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966): that's about all I have to say about that.

One of the more interesting developments in more recent Euro cinema was the Dogme 95 movement: it was accused by some of being gimmicky, but with nearly 85 films now created under its principles, it must be said to have had an impact. As the first Dogme film, Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration (1998) gets the available slot, even though I hugely prefer the second one, Lars von Trier's The Idiots (also 1998). Maybe there's room for von Trier elsewhere, we'll see.

Moving further east, into Russia, we stumble upon Titan of Cinema Sergei Eisenstein. His Battleship Potemkin (1925) is rightfully considered to have invented many of modern editing's techniques, so he's on the list... and fifty years later we have Russia's other great filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, whose Solaris (1972) is an SF masterpiece of such magnitude that not one but two people wrote in to tell me I'd omitted it when I was did the SF list. For a second Tarkovsky I'm going to include Nostalghia (1983), possibly the single most mystical film I've ever seen, although The Mirror (1975) or Stalker (1975) could just as easily inhabit a second Tarkovsky slot as well: they're really all great films.

Next we'll jump over into Asia, and grapple with Akira Kurosawa's powerful body of work. I want to give Kurosawa three slots right off the bat: his King Lear adaptation, Ran (1985) is pretty much as powerful as any film ever made; this is the one I'd argue for as being Kurosawa's late-period masterpiece. Yojimbo (1961) deserves inclusion as well, though, it's a quintessential samurai film, and has an influence that ripples out into science fiction (via Lucas) and the western (via Leone). And then there's Rashomon (1950), an indispensible meditation on subjective truth (generally) and cinematic artifice (specifically). The fact that I'm leaving off a Kurosawa film as highly acclaimed as The Seven Samurai (1954) should give some sense of the sheer magnitude of his body of work.

While we're in this neck of the woods, I want to mention Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which is a fine movie in its own right but has a strange polyglot pedigree that speaks potentially to its importance as a "globalized" film, rather than a "foreign" film per se: it's a case of a Taiwanese-born but American-based director creating an ostensibly "Chinese" movie with Japanese financial backing. Furthermore, it's acutely aware of the status of "kung fu" as a cultural currency / valuable export, and it trades on this while at the same time striving for art-house status: this is 21st-century postmodern cinema in a nutshell.

Tarantino's Kill Bill is doing similarly complicated work, and will make it onto this list if I have room at the end; but I don't want to have two "meta" kung-fu films with no "traditional" kung-fu film to compare them against. But what's the best choice there? All I can think of is Robert Clouse's Enter the Dragon (1973), but that movie is a bit over-rated, I think. Kung-fu fans, illuminate me!

While on the topic of Asian cultural exports, any list that overlooks anime is suffering from myopia, and I'd include both Katsuhiro Ôtomo's Akira (1988) (for its role in fathering the genre) and Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997) (for its significance as the first anime to gain significant Western distribution (via Miramax / Disney).

There's going to be more animation on this list, but that'll have to wait for part four of this project. For those of you keeping count at home, we're up to 47 films: I'm aiming for 100.

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Monday, April 09, 2007
7:52 PM
0 comments

my personal canon, part II

So let's move on to comedies.

Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are the two obvious early giants needing acknowledgement. I'm going with Modern Times (1936) as the "canonical" Chaplin and (I'm embarrassed to say this) I haven't really seen enough Keaton to make an educated choice here. I'm picking The General (1927) (co-directed by Keaton and Clyde Bruckman) on the strength of its reputation, but I don't think I've actually seen it. Into the Netflix queue it goes!

Marx Brothers also should be on this list, with probably Leo McCarey's Duck Soup (1933) being top pick.

Jumping ahead a bit, trying to deal with the genre of the "romantic comedy." When thinking about the "quintessential" romantic comedies I always think of Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally... (1989), although I haven't seen it in years and am not sure how it holds up. I'm also prone to choose Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) (which functions as the perfect bridge between Allen's earlier, more absurdist films and his later, more character-driven ones).

Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967) isn't exactly a romantic comedy: I read it as more of an anti-romantic-comedy, which is interesting in its own right. It has some serious problems, not least of which is its blatant misogyny, but it's still pitch-perfect in its representation of a certain type of (white, male) alienation. (Plus I want Robert Altman's The Player on here (later) and you need The Graduate for some of the jokes in The Player to make sense.)

While we're still in the 1960's, I can't leave off Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which is not only Peter Sellers' greatest film but also possibly the blackest of all black comedies.

I do think the 80's-period teen comedies should get a slot: GreenApricot claims that Cameron Crowe's Say Anything... (1989) is the best of the batch, and I'm prepared to believe her. Aside from the famous sequence, I can't remember if I've seen it or not, but I'll give it a tenuous home on the list. (Including it makes me want to include both Heathers (1989) (like Scream, it's something of a genre-killer) and the wonderful post-teen film Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), but I'll leave these off for the time being.)

As a geek, I am contractually obligated to include Gilliam and Jones' Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)—1979's Life of Brian is not without its moments, but Holy Grail is the one that people I know have memorized from beginning to end.

I'd like a "mockumentary" to be on this list, and the choice, for me, is Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Some of the Christopher Guest films (particularly Best In Show (2000)) give it a run for the money, but Spinal Tap is undeniably classic.

I also think a goofy absurdist parody-type film belongs on here: although the current crop of these (Scary Movie, Epic Movie, etc) are about as dreadful as you can get, I still think Abrahams and Zucker's Airplane! (1980), the father of the genre, packs in enough laughs to justify the horrible spawn it would later birth. It may be taking the slot that rightfully belongs to something by Mel Brooks: we'll see if we have room for him later.

The 40's and 50's are pretty poorly represented in my sweep through comedy: it's a blind spot. There are a lot of critically-lauded 50's-era comedies that I haven't seen: especially Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Seven-Year Itch (1955), and Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (1940) may be an early romantic comedy that deserves inclusion. Anything else that's missing here?

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Sunday, April 08, 2007
5:56 PM
2 comments

my personal canon, part I

So recently my friend Catling posted a request for people to suggest "must-see" movies. There are a number of already-existing ways to approach this project: Jim Emerson's 102-film list, claiming to represent "the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate,'" is a good one, and if you're looking for something more "meta" you could head on over to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, the proprietors of which have averaged together hundreds of different critics' lists into one giant aggregate. Heck, you could even just start by working your way through the entire Criterion Collection, like this dude's doing. But being a movie-geek and an inveterate list-maker (one, two), I was naturally attracted to the idea of whipping up my own personal list of "canonical films" (which is a lot different from a list of my own personal "favorite films"). I thought I might work through some of my thinking process here in the blog, rather then just presenting a list of 100 as though it sprang fully-formed from my forehead.

Canons are at least partially about the later influence that certain films have had, so one place to start might be to pick a handful of movies that aren't particular favorites of mine, but which could be argued to collectively form the backbone of the modern blockbuster.

Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975)

George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) (which is more influential, self-contained, and narratively elegant than Irvin Kershner's Empire Strikes Back (1980))

Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon (1987) (the template for a million cop-buddy movies to come, plus the only movie that allegedly could not be improved upon by the guys who made the Epagogix hit-movie-predicting algorithm)

John McTiernan's Die Hard (1988) (another near-archetypal film, plus features Alan Rickman as one of the great movie villains).

Sticking with this attention to "roots," we should give attention to early genre-defining films, such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) (the science-fiction dystopia to which all others owe a debt) and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) (the first great horror film).

Let's stick with SF for a minute: it's one of my favorite genres and it's central enough to the history of cinema that it deserves a few more entries. For the time being, I'm going to add Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and James Cameron's Aliens (1986)—both are great science-fiction films, but also are interesting because of the way they raid elements from other genres (the horror movie and the war movie, respectively).

I think the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix (1999) probably belongs on there: it's the only good "cyberpunk" movie I can think of, and it's a good example of special effects and narrative working harmoniously, to the point where they can't easily be distinguished from one another.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968), of course—I think of this movie as pretty much the crowning achievement of SF cinema. A philosophical thriller framed by some of the most lyrical, enigmatic and transcendent passages found anywhere in all of film.

The 1950's are the heyday of a certain type of SF, and so they deserve some representation here: commonly this slot is given to 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still, but I'm more prone to say that Don Siegel's paranoid, Red-crazed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is the true representative of the era: the way that it's perpetually remade raises it to something of the status of American myth. And as for the effects those American myths have around the world?: let's throw in Ishirô Honda's original Godzilla (1954) (not the US release with the clumsily-integrated Raymond Burr, though!).

I'll tip my hat to the 1950's one final time (albeit indirectly) by including David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of 1958's The Fly—the original is a silly bit of hokum, but it turns to something elegiac and moving in Cronenberg's hands, one of the best meditations on illness that the cinema has ever produced.

It's disgusting, too, which moves us neatly into horror. I've long been a fan of Romero's nearly-perfect Night of the Living Dead (1968), which I'd still argue is the best zombie movie ever made.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) has earned a slot here, mostly for the strength of the justly-famous sequences in its first half: the second half always stuns me at how terribly the narrative begins to sag. There are better Hitchcock movies (some of which will be added to this list later), but this one is the true progenitor of the serial-killer movie, and thus deserves inclusion.

Then you have the second generation of serial-killer movies, that starts up about 20 years later—it needs representation on the list, but I'm just not sure which one to choose. Nightmare on Elm St. (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), and Halloween (1978) are all films that hold up surprisingly well, and they're each cut from similar cloth: the franchises spawned from these three films essentially dominate horror for a generation (depsite getting sillier and sillier). I suppose I'll go with John Carpenter's Halloween, simply because it's chronologically first, and thus can be said to owe the least to the others.

"Slasher" films as such die off in the mid-90s, in part because of a two-front assault: Scream (1996) lethally ironizes the genre, and movies like Se7en (1995) and Silence of the Lambs (1991) take the shock-value elements from horror and refit them into a more gritty and realistic police-procedural context. Of these, it's Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs that gets the canonical nod from me, mostly because of Anthony Hopkins' career-making turn as the nearly-iconic Hannibal Lecter.

That brings us around to crime movies, a genre in which Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) is still the obvious, unbeatable giant. The Godfather: Part II is often listed as another favorite, but I think the real companion piece is Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas (1990): the differences between the two are as illuminating as the similarities. I'd like to also argue for the inclusion of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) here: it's still the most economical of Tarantino's films, and its approach to its material is deeply interesting.

That gets me to nineteen—about a fifth of the way—and there's still a lot to include: there's not a single comedy on here, and my only piece of non-US cinema is Godzilla. But this seems like a good place to take a break.

Labels: filmographies, media commentary

Saturday, April 07, 2007
1:51 PM
7 comments

"the new non-narrative movies"

So the table of contents for this week's New Yorker (Mar 5 cover date) promised that the topic of David Denby's Critic at Large column would be "new non-narrative movies," which any regular reader of this blog must know is something that'll make me perk up and take interest. I was a little bit disappointed to see that the article didn't quite deliver what I expected: it is not, in fact, about "non-narrative movies," but rather about movies that have unorthodox narratives. But I still thought it might be interesting to list some of the movies discussed. As a nod to traditional narrative I've arranged them in chronological order:

• Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928)

• Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)

• Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960)

• Alain Resnais' Muriel (1963)

• Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Borgeoisie (1972)

• Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994)

• Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (2000)

• Christopher Nolan's Memento (2001)

• Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003)

• Michael Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

• Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006)

Traffic, Syriana, and Miami Vice get special mention as "clogged-sink narratives," "which are so heavily loaded with subplots and complicated information that the story can hardly seep through the surrounding material."

Denby writes appreciatively about many of the films in that list, but the main point of the article is to pan Babel. Everything else is just context, although the pan resonates strongly enough to implicate all films that utilize unusual narrative forms: Denby closes by comparing Babel unflatteringly to The Lives of Others, which derives its "shattering power" from "[s]traightforward chronology, [which] still may be the best way of leading us to the paradise of a morally complicated but flawlessly told story." Needless to say, I'm not certain I agree.

Labels: filmographies, media commentary, narrative

Sunday, March 04, 2007
10:59 AM
4 comments