I'm sitting in the Castro Theatre, about to see a 35-mm print of Buster Keaton's "Our Hospitality" for the first time. It was the first Keaton film I ever saw, leading to my current obsession. With this and F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" both part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Winter Event, how could anyone not be here?
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The National Review = Movie Geniuses
Film Criticism has reached its pinnacle in the form of The National Review's "Best Conservative Movies of the last 25 Years." Batman isn't Bruce Wayne, but George W. Bush. The White Witch in "The Chronicles of Narnia" is "a cross between Burgermeister Meisterburger and Kim Jong Il." I can't wait to hear what they say about Slimer!
The National Review wants you to buy a digital subscription to see all the write-ups right now, as they gradually unveil the list on this blog.
There are quite a few gems in what they've published so far. "Gattaca" demonstrates the "progressive fantasy" of eugenics, a concept most popularly promoted by Theodore Roosevelt and Hitler, "the road to which is paved by the abortion of Down babies, research into human cloning, and 'transhumanist' dreams of fabricating a 'post-human species.'"
Terry Gilliam's nightmare of bureaucratic fascism, "Brazil," came it at number 22. I'm not making this up. Here's a sample of the description ofthe last eight years the movie: "Terrorist bombings, national-security scares, universal police surveillance, bureaucratic arrogance, a callous elite, perversion of science, and government use of torture evoke the worst aspects of the modern megastate." As Salon noted, Gilliam has already pointed out the obvious: "Have people forgotten I made Brazil? George W. [Bush], [Dick] Cheney, and company haven't. I'm thinking of suing them for the illegal and unauthorized remake of Brazil." I think the real reason it made the list, however, is for its early recognition of the series of tubes that is the Internet.
Most offensive, however, is the National Review's attempt to claim "United 93" as a conservative movie because—get ready for it—they made the terrorist the bad guys! Fuck you, Andrew Coffin and National Review. Paul Greengrass didn't make a liberal film or a conservative film. He made a film about the shock and horror of an American tragedy.
Here's the full list:
1. The Lives of Others (2007) - I guess it's anti-communist, but is really about the culture of surveillance. I mean, really? The number one conservative movie is about artists trying to liberate themselves from an oppressive regime, all the while the government monitors their actions?
2. The Incredibles (2004) - What?
3. Metropolitan (1990) - Never seen it.
4. Forrest Gump (1994) - I can see this one.
5. 300 (2007) - Definitely conservative—homophobic homoeroticism, with bad writing and shitty filmmaking to cap it off!
6. Groundhog Day (1993) - Really? This is a political film?
7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - OK, I guess it's about a guy who works hard, and all libruls are lazy deadbeats. But what about leeching off that homeless shelter?
8. Juno (2007) - Because only conservatives choose not to have an abortion. By all means, take it!
9. Blast from the Past (1999) - One of the greatest films of any kind from the last 25 years.
10. Ghostbusters (1984) Seriously, what the fuck? Is Ramis one of the great conservative filmmakers now?
11. Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003) - You knew they were going to go for this one, gay wizard and all.
12. The Dark Knight (2008) - Batman IS George W. Bush.
13. Braveheart (1995) - A terrorist insurgency in an invaded country!
14. A Simple Plan (1998) - If it's a morality tale, it must be conservative!
15. Red Dawn (1984) - Clearly a masterpiece.
16. Master and Commander (2003) - Definitely portrays a British conservative ideal, but not really a political movie.
17. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005) - I still think this is a mediocre bore, however you paint it.
18. The Edge (1997) - Hrm.
19. We Were Soldiers (2002) - They love Mel Gibson here.
20. Gattaca (1997) - Those crazy liberals won't stop until they create a master race!
21. Heartbreak Ridge (1986) - Never seen it, but sounds like a conservative masterpiece.
22. Brazil (1985) - C'mon! This should be number one! It so elegantly distills conservative ideology.
23. United 93 (2006) - Kindly go fuck yourselves, NR.
24. Team American: World Police (2004) - I can see it—too bad it's not very funny.
25. Gran Torino (2008) - I've said it before and I'll say it again: Huh?
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
The National Review wants you to buy a digital subscription to see all the write-ups right now, as they gradually unveil the list on this blog.
There are quite a few gems in what they've published so far. "Gattaca" demonstrates the "progressive fantasy" of eugenics, a concept most popularly promoted by Theodore Roosevelt and Hitler, "the road to which is paved by the abortion of Down babies, research into human cloning, and 'transhumanist' dreams of fabricating a 'post-human species.'"
Terry Gilliam's nightmare of bureaucratic fascism, "Brazil," came it at number 22. I'm not making this up. Here's a sample of the description of
Most offensive, however, is the National Review's attempt to claim "United 93" as a conservative movie because—get ready for it—they made the terrorist the bad guys! Fuck you, Andrew Coffin and National Review. Paul Greengrass didn't make a liberal film or a conservative film. He made a film about the shock and horror of an American tragedy.
Here's the full list:
1. The Lives of Others (2007) - I guess it's anti-communist, but is really about the culture of surveillance. I mean, really? The number one conservative movie is about artists trying to liberate themselves from an oppressive regime, all the while the government monitors their actions?
2. The Incredibles (2004) - What?
3. Metropolitan (1990) - Never seen it.
4. Forrest Gump (1994) - I can see this one.
5. 300 (2007) - Definitely conservative—homophobic homoeroticism, with bad writing and shitty filmmaking to cap it off!
6. Groundhog Day (1993) - Really? This is a political film?
7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - OK, I guess it's about a guy who works hard, and all libruls are lazy deadbeats. But what about leeching off that homeless shelter?
8. Juno (2007) - Because only conservatives choose not to have an abortion. By all means, take it!
9. Blast from the Past (1999) - One of the greatest films of any kind from the last 25 years.
10. Ghostbusters (1984) Seriously, what the fuck? Is Ramis one of the great conservative filmmakers now?
11. Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003) - You knew they were going to go for this one, gay wizard and all.
12. The Dark Knight (2008) - Batman IS George W. Bush.
13. Braveheart (1995) - A terrorist insurgency in an invaded country!
14. A Simple Plan (1998) - If it's a morality tale, it must be conservative!
15. Red Dawn (1984) - Clearly a masterpiece.
16. Master and Commander (2003) - Definitely portrays a British conservative ideal, but not really a political movie.
17. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005) - I still think this is a mediocre bore, however you paint it.
18. The Edge (1997) - Hrm.
19. We Were Soldiers (2002) - They love Mel Gibson here.
20. Gattaca (1997) - Those crazy liberals won't stop until they create a master race!
21. Heartbreak Ridge (1986) - Never seen it, but sounds like a conservative masterpiece.
22. Brazil (1985) - C'mon! This should be number one! It so elegantly distills conservative ideology.
23. United 93 (2006) - Kindly go fuck yourselves, NR.
24. Team American: World Police (2004) - I can see it—too bad it's not very funny.
25. Gran Torino (2008) - I've said it before and I'll say it again: Huh?
Chris Bellamy’s Top 10 Films of 2008…One Month Late
At long last, Chris gives us his top 10 list—Can you handle this much Bellamy?
Blame the Holocaust. It’s the logical move. This year, there was something in the neighborhood of 800 movies concerning the Holocaust, Nazis, concentration camps, or any fun combination of all three.
The result, as it turned out, was that 2008 wasn’t the greatest year for movies, by and large. Who has time for creative, personal works of art or interesting ideas when so many variants of this Very Important Lesson are at our hands?
Studios from around the world plundered the greatest tragedy in human history for every last vestige of a dramatic slant with which to attack heartstrings everywhere. If one doesn’t do the trick, Hollywood brought reinforcements from all angles. By God, they will get that lower lip to quiver if it’s the last thing they do. What exploitation? These are Serious Dramas!
Amazingly, none of the Important Holocaust Dramas from 2008 were particularly good, ranging from the banal (“The Counterfeiters”) to the excessively mediocre (“The Reader”) to the downright absurd (“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”). While that certainly didn’t stop the Academy from having its way and, dammit, just nominating whatever the hell Holocaust movie sounded the funnest, it did make it a bit easier to narrow down the year’s elite films.
But OK, if the Holocaust defense is too un-P.C. for you, blame the writers’ strike for pushing back so many projects. Or, you can blame “LOST” for overwhelming just about everything else that came out, in any medium, making even the biggest pictures look…well, small. Or blame Bush. (After all, he has inspired countless humdrum indie documentaries during the last eight years.) Blame whatever you want, but there was more than enough mediocrity to go around this year. That doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of excellent choices – there were. Just not as many as a few other years I could mention. Whittling 12 months down to 10 movies wasn’t as difficult as usual – and when it comes right down to it, 2008 will be known for one movie – and for good reason.
1. The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan
The best movie of the year was, for once, the biggest as well. What a novelty, to construct a superhero template and take to task the very idea of heroism. Christopher Nolan’s noirish masterpiece scopes out a world of grey in which neither good nor evil is a solo act, as Heath Ledger’s incomparable Joker uses a microcosmic Gotham as a battleground for the two.
What’s most remarkable about "The Dark Knight" is the breadth of detail with which it explores its struggle, while remaining massively entertaining. From the Batman impostors who “fight crime” in his name, to the dual (and dueling) identities of Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent ( both who they are and who they wish to be…which is, essentially, each other), to the experiments the Joker sets up to prove his theories on humanity, to the stunning and ballsy symbolic gesture that closes the film, Nolan’s vision persists.
"The Dark Knight" is crime drama and tragedy wrapped inside a pop-art exterior – and it took its genre to new heights. That it will be the most-remembered film of 2008 from a pop-culture standpoint is beside the point; the film stands as a testament to epic filmmaking.
Academy-Sanctioned Holocaust Version (ASHV): We open on a flashback of a young Alfred Pennyworth watching his family get slaughtered at the hands of the S.S., then slowly dissolve into the principled, ever-loyal butler for the hardest-working man in crime-fighting. The Joker turns out to be none other than the son of Joseph Mengele, continuing in the spirit of his father’s experiments in modern-day Gotham, including the infamous test of his dueling “concentration boats.”
2. Reprise
Directed by Joachim Trier
Joachim Trier’s "Reprise" captures something almost completely intangible and does it in a purely cinematic way. A film about two writers in their 20s, Erik and Philip, whose paths start at the exact same point and expectedly diverge in unexpected ways, it celebrates and toys with all the peculiarities and trappings of youth – the joyful exuberance, the naivete and confusion – amid the insulated environment of Oslo, their hometown.
As the film opens, Erik and Philip drop their respective manuscripts in the mail and we’re treated to a romanticized fantasy of what their lives will be like – they will be like a French New Wave movie, a freestyle montage of existential struggle, social unrest, torrid romance and expository narration, all captured in black and white with George Delerue’s “Contempt” score. It’s a beautiful touch by Trier and it establishes the film’s tone from the outset. The rest of the film, in all its vibrance, humor and insight, exists in the same spirit.
ASHV: Erik and Philip write Very Important Novels about the horrors of puberty by way of the Holocaust as seen through a Godardian lens.
3. Man on Wire
Directed by James Marsh
The greatest discovery of last year’s Sundance Film Fesival was James Marsh’s "Man on Wire," a documentary about Philippe Petit’s high-wire act between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Far from merely reminiscing about the event, Marsh combines the traditional elements of old footage and talking-head segments with a dramatization that plays like a high-stakes heist movie. By doing so, the movie gets us into the mindset of those involved to experience the heightened importance of this grand event.
The sense of danger is so palpable that we forget just how innocent the entire endeavor is. But we are reminded when, after an absurdly funny and sensationalized series of events, we witness an astonishing moment in time – the walk itself – that then and now can only seem surreal. And breathtaking.
ASHV: The twin towers aren’t in Manhattan; they’re just a metaphor, and Philippe is in a race against time to run across the wire from one tower (death!) to the other (freedom!). Without falling off and into the deadly swamp of Nazi alligators awaiting him more than 100 stories below.
4. WALL-E
Directed by Andrew Stanton
“WALL-E” is a movie that trounces established filmmaking styles – and established directors – at their own game. It is action, romance, science fiction, slapstick comedy, social commentary and absurdist satire, and it comes in the form of a Pixar animated film. Director Andrew Stanton has come a long way from his previous film, “Finding Nemo,” a wonderful-looking but slight effort compared to this one. The 15-minute opening sequence is a brilliant introduction to the character and tone of the film and it rarely, if ever, steps wrong. Unless, of course, it’s on purpose, to piss off M-O.
ASHV: The film’s villainous auto-captain, “Auto,” doesn’t visually reference the HAL-9000 from “2001" with is glowing red iris; instead, its eye takes the shape of a swastika and speaks in an angry German dialect. Fortunately, nobody on the ship can understand German, and there are no subtitles – a good thing, as this is a kids’ movie, and some of Auto’s words are VERY naughty.
5. Paranoid Park
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Of the two Gus Van Sant films that came out this year (along with “Milk”), “Paranoid Park” was the more personal, the more unique and the one that most demands to be seen and experienced again. “Experience” is the key for me in this one – any movie can depict a person dealing with a tragic event, but damned if I’ve seen anything that does so in such an exquisitely internal way. The movie is not about discovering the “truth” about the incident or getting/not getting caught – it’s about one teenage kid’s mindset about something he isn’t quite ready to deal with yet. “Paranoid Park” is a collage of images, fragmented memories and feelings that reflect something intangible and, in an oblique way, truthful.
ASHV: The narration sequences – deliberately broken in the current version to replicate the detached recitation of, say, a book report – are now the result of our hero’s finally having learned to read after committing an historic monstrosity.
6. Synecdoche, New York
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
Of all movies from 2008, this one demanded the most of its audience. The great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, here making his directorial debut, stares into his own brain and finds an endless chasm of neuroses, hopes, fears, inaccuracies, embellishments, tragedies and regrets. He brilliantly filters this all through one theatre director with the goal of creating an all-encompassing theatre piece—designed to speak to the very essence of the human experience. The piece becomes an albatross that carries him to his dying moment. The film is a messy concoction of absurdist and surrealist impulses, and it culminates in a stunning, funny, bleak apocalyptic sequence that includes the best closing line of the year. “Synecdoche, New York” has too many inspired scenes and ideas to name, but the burning house is, yes, burned in my memory forever.
ASHV: Theatre director and refugee Caden Cotard creates an all-encompassing theatre piece about the Holocaust, using his fellow captives as actors to play all the parts. Hilarity ensues, as the prisoners so immerse themselves in their newfound thespian talents that for a few fleeting moments they forget about the horrors that surround them and see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The film’s final line, however, remains the same.
7. Rachel Getting Married
Directed by Jonathan Demme
There has been a theme emerging among my picks for the year’s best films—“Rachel Getting Married” is the fourth one so far, along with “Reprise,” “Man on Wire” and “Paranoid Park,” that is specifically focused on creating an experience in which a story takes place, rather than the other way around. Such films capture something intensely individual, something sensory that we have to feel rather than just hear about. We’re inside something. Many films present everything and everyone from a distance simply to tell Us a story.
A movie like “Rachel Getting Married” isn’t afraid to indulge in its characters’ lives and craft a film out of ambience as much as anything else. We’re inside this house that becomes a breathing organism with all the guests, workers, musicians, family members and every conflict that comes up (or has been simmering) between them. Jonathan Demme’s restrained, handheld style perfectly projects Jenny Lumet’s script into something personal and beautiful. This movie charms and this movie hurts – and it hurts in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we saw everything from a distance.
ASHV: The loving family in Connecticut is now a bunch of Nazis. The inspired, loading-the-dishwasher sequence is now about a competition to cram as many refugees into the ghetto as possible—rather than those trivial “dishes” into that non-historically important “dishwasher.”
8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Directed by David Fincher
A movie both praised and reviled for what it isn’t, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is an astonishing marriage of the old-fashioned Hollywood epic and modern sensibilities and technical capabilities. Together the two elements – the old and the new (or, if you insist, the young) – speak to the very heart of the film. The whole of Benjamin Button is the co-existence of elements that in nearly all other contexts are mutually exclusive. Life and death, young and old, hope and regret – all of those things, among many, exist at once, allowing us to examine life’s best and worst elements in all their inevitability.
The film is about death, of course, but its version of death is something of a catharsis. It is an oft-stunning scrapbook of experiences, during which time Benjamin observes—and is observed, harshly at times—amid an ever-changing set of circumstances as he grows younger/older. He begins and always remains an isolated character, a curious anomaly, and to me that lent a certain poignance to every new emotion and new experience he went through. Like the film, Benjamin himself inspires both awe and consternation, and in both cases it’s understandable. “Benjamin Button” has sharply divided people. What I see is a deeply felt exploration of the expectations and inevitabilities within life. That it takes the time to inspect an entire life spent within a sort of peculiar isolation is a testament to director David Fincher.
ASHV: Technically, this doesn’t really apply, as “Benjamin Button” was nominated for a thousand Oscars already. But for the sake of consistency ...let’s just say Benjamin creates a rapid-backward-aging serum, which the Allies give to the Nazis, who all take it and turn into babies. Then the Allies kill the babies.
9. The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky makes a significant stylistic transition with “The Wrestler” and deftly pulls it off. He strips down his visual palette to explore the life of a stripped-down pro wrestler, once famous, but who now has to scrounge for rent money. Aronofsky slowly, deliberately introduces us to the different angles of Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s psyche, ultimately coming to the sad conclusion that, at least in Randy’s mind, his frailty is too much to overcome. The brutal wear-and-tear he takes in the ring is his own form of flagellation—punishment for the mistakes he’s made for which he cannot forgive himself. Mickey Rourke’s performance is worth every bit of the hype, ripping into the broken, emotional core beneath his self-created mass of flashy masculinity. “The Wrestler” is a film that refuses to go for the easy out and insists on following this character’s struggle through its natural progression.
ASHV: Randy assuages some of his crushing guilt through a symbolic renaissance, as he returns to the circuit and goes on to defeat a series of Nazi-themed opponents such as The Final Solutionist, The Bergen-Belsenator and the tag-team known as Führer Furor.
10. Happy-Go-Lucky
Directed by Mike Leigh
A rant about the Academy’s inexplicable snub of Sally Hawkins for Best Actress would be well worth it, but instead let’s just celebrate the movie she starred in, “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Once again, Mike Leigh proves that he’s one of the best, if not the best, at creating real human characters – natural, three-dimensional, strange, flawed, absurd, tragic and everything in between. There is an intimacy in his films that I can only compare to Kieslowski and Bergman.
There is a knock-you-flat-on-your-ass sequence in which Poppy (Hawkins)—a typically bubbly, optimistic, caring person with too much energy for her own good—happens upon a mentally unstable homeless man, speaking in complete jibberish, and approaches him. She sits there and listens, she looks into his eyes – “yeah…I know…I know…”—and lingers for minutes on end. Without saying anything at all, the scene expresses so much and hits so hard, I can’t imagine any vocalization of any of the things being felt or understood being any more powerful.
And, of course, every interaction between Poppy and her driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) is brilliant. Enough said.
ASHV: Poppy breaks into a concentration camp to be with a friend she’s just met – not so happy-go-lucky now, huh?
HONORABLE MENTION
It gave me great pain to leave off one of my cinematic heroes, Woody Allen, who just missed the list with his “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”—yes, another “relationship dramedy” from the master himself, but one that finds new insights about our own desires and expectations as the characters discover surprises about themselves—not just in what they want, but in what they don’t want.
A film well deserving of its (surprising) awards-season attention is Martin McDonagh’s “In Bruges,” a hilarious but surprisingly poignant story of two displaced hitmen. Tarsem finally discovered how to combine actual storytelling with his incredible flair for visuals in his excellent “The Fall”—a huge step up from 2000’s “The Cell.”
Yang Li’s “Blind Mountain” – which received only a very limited release—features the most brilliant ending of the year, and is a powerful and angry film in its own right. Michael Haneke remade one of his own films with “Funny Games,” a Brechtian experiment in audience participation and expectation.
Guillermo del Toro returned for another go-round with Hellboy and outdid himself with “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” which featured some of the most stunning visual setpieces I’ve seen in years. Del Toro may have a kindred spirit in Tomas Alfredson, whose “Let the Right One In” is an expressive and beautiful examination of childhood isolation through the specter of a vampire story.
There were two excellent choices from David Gordon Green this year – the sensationally funny “Pineapple Express,” which begins as a stoner comedy and becomes an absurdist deconstruction of the Action Movie; and the much more somber, poetic “Snow Angels,” which featured my favorite opening scene of the year.
Hsiao-hsien Hou follows up his stunning “Three Times”—the fourth-best film of 2006 – with the ethereal “Flight of the Red Balloon.” Christopher Bell’s documentary “Bigger Stronger Faster*” offered new perspectives into the steroid issue that has gone from sports-world nuisance to mainstream political issue. Ramin Bahrani’s “Chop Shop” takes us to a neorealist setting in Queens through the eyes of a resourceful young orphan and his relationship with his sister.
Gus Van Sant kicks Hollywood’s biopic-loving ass with “Milk,” which finds the essence of a hugely sympathetic character in victory, in defeat, in ecstasy and in death. Stephen Chow, meanwhile, found the essence of irony and comic juxtaposition—once again—with his underrated “CJ7.”
And the great Errol Morris examines the Abu Ghraib scandal in different contexts in “Standard Operating Procedure,” which explores the relationship between a moment caught on film and the truth that such a moment represents.
ALSO WORTH SEEING:
“My Brother is an Only Child,” “Iron Man,” “Speed Racer,” “Transsiberian,” “Horton Hears a Who!,” “Changeling,” “Cloverfield,” “Shine a Light,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” "Ghost Town," “Role Models,” “Burn After Reading,” “Wendy and Lucy,” “Blindness,” “Leatherheads,” “Gran Torino,” “The Strangers,” “Doomsday.”
AND THE WORST:
1. 10,000 B.C. (directed by Roland Emmerich)
2. Love Songs (directed by Christophe Honore)
3. Vantage Point (directed by Pete Travis)
4. Hounddog (directed by Deborah Kampmeier)
5. Revolutionary Road (directed by Sam Mendes)
6. Righteous Kill (directed by Jon Avnet)
7. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (directed by Dave Filoni)
8. Boarding Gate (directed by Olivier Assayas)
9. Prom Night (directed by Nelson McCormick)
10. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (directed by Mark Herman)
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
Blame the Holocaust. It’s the logical move. This year, there was something in the neighborhood of 800 movies concerning the Holocaust, Nazis, concentration camps, or any fun combination of all three.
The result, as it turned out, was that 2008 wasn’t the greatest year for movies, by and large. Who has time for creative, personal works of art or interesting ideas when so many variants of this Very Important Lesson are at our hands?
Studios from around the world plundered the greatest tragedy in human history for every last vestige of a dramatic slant with which to attack heartstrings everywhere. If one doesn’t do the trick, Hollywood brought reinforcements from all angles. By God, they will get that lower lip to quiver if it’s the last thing they do. What exploitation? These are Serious Dramas!
Amazingly, none of the Important Holocaust Dramas from 2008 were particularly good, ranging from the banal (“The Counterfeiters”) to the excessively mediocre (“The Reader”) to the downright absurd (“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”). While that certainly didn’t stop the Academy from having its way and, dammit, just nominating whatever the hell Holocaust movie sounded the funnest, it did make it a bit easier to narrow down the year’s elite films.
But OK, if the Holocaust defense is too un-P.C. for you, blame the writers’ strike for pushing back so many projects. Or, you can blame “LOST” for overwhelming just about everything else that came out, in any medium, making even the biggest pictures look…well, small. Or blame Bush. (After all, he has inspired countless humdrum indie documentaries during the last eight years.) Blame whatever you want, but there was more than enough mediocrity to go around this year. That doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of excellent choices – there were. Just not as many as a few other years I could mention. Whittling 12 months down to 10 movies wasn’t as difficult as usual – and when it comes right down to it, 2008 will be known for one movie – and for good reason.
1. The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan
The best movie of the year was, for once, the biggest as well. What a novelty, to construct a superhero template and take to task the very idea of heroism. Christopher Nolan’s noirish masterpiece scopes out a world of grey in which neither good nor evil is a solo act, as Heath Ledger’s incomparable Joker uses a microcosmic Gotham as a battleground for the two.
What’s most remarkable about "The Dark Knight" is the breadth of detail with which it explores its struggle, while remaining massively entertaining. From the Batman impostors who “fight crime” in his name, to the dual (and dueling) identities of Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent ( both who they are and who they wish to be…which is, essentially, each other), to the experiments the Joker sets up to prove his theories on humanity, to the stunning and ballsy symbolic gesture that closes the film, Nolan’s vision persists.
"The Dark Knight" is crime drama and tragedy wrapped inside a pop-art exterior – and it took its genre to new heights. That it will be the most-remembered film of 2008 from a pop-culture standpoint is beside the point; the film stands as a testament to epic filmmaking.
Academy-Sanctioned Holocaust Version (ASHV): We open on a flashback of a young Alfred Pennyworth watching his family get slaughtered at the hands of the S.S., then slowly dissolve into the principled, ever-loyal butler for the hardest-working man in crime-fighting. The Joker turns out to be none other than the son of Joseph Mengele, continuing in the spirit of his father’s experiments in modern-day Gotham, including the infamous test of his dueling “concentration boats.”
2. Reprise
Directed by Joachim Trier
Joachim Trier’s "Reprise" captures something almost completely intangible and does it in a purely cinematic way. A film about two writers in their 20s, Erik and Philip, whose paths start at the exact same point and expectedly diverge in unexpected ways, it celebrates and toys with all the peculiarities and trappings of youth – the joyful exuberance, the naivete and confusion – amid the insulated environment of Oslo, their hometown.
As the film opens, Erik and Philip drop their respective manuscripts in the mail and we’re treated to a romanticized fantasy of what their lives will be like – they will be like a French New Wave movie, a freestyle montage of existential struggle, social unrest, torrid romance and expository narration, all captured in black and white with George Delerue’s “Contempt” score. It’s a beautiful touch by Trier and it establishes the film’s tone from the outset. The rest of the film, in all its vibrance, humor and insight, exists in the same spirit.
ASHV: Erik and Philip write Very Important Novels about the horrors of puberty by way of the Holocaust as seen through a Godardian lens.
3. Man on Wire
Directed by James Marsh
The greatest discovery of last year’s Sundance Film Fesival was James Marsh’s "Man on Wire," a documentary about Philippe Petit’s high-wire act between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Far from merely reminiscing about the event, Marsh combines the traditional elements of old footage and talking-head segments with a dramatization that plays like a high-stakes heist movie. By doing so, the movie gets us into the mindset of those involved to experience the heightened importance of this grand event.
The sense of danger is so palpable that we forget just how innocent the entire endeavor is. But we are reminded when, after an absurdly funny and sensationalized series of events, we witness an astonishing moment in time – the walk itself – that then and now can only seem surreal. And breathtaking.
ASHV: The twin towers aren’t in Manhattan; they’re just a metaphor, and Philippe is in a race against time to run across the wire from one tower (death!) to the other (freedom!). Without falling off and into the deadly swamp of Nazi alligators awaiting him more than 100 stories below.
4. WALL-E
Directed by Andrew Stanton
“WALL-E” is a movie that trounces established filmmaking styles – and established directors – at their own game. It is action, romance, science fiction, slapstick comedy, social commentary and absurdist satire, and it comes in the form of a Pixar animated film. Director Andrew Stanton has come a long way from his previous film, “Finding Nemo,” a wonderful-looking but slight effort compared to this one. The 15-minute opening sequence is a brilliant introduction to the character and tone of the film and it rarely, if ever, steps wrong. Unless, of course, it’s on purpose, to piss off M-O.
ASHV: The film’s villainous auto-captain, “Auto,” doesn’t visually reference the HAL-9000 from “2001" with is glowing red iris; instead, its eye takes the shape of a swastika and speaks in an angry German dialect. Fortunately, nobody on the ship can understand German, and there are no subtitles – a good thing, as this is a kids’ movie, and some of Auto’s words are VERY naughty.
5. Paranoid Park
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Of the two Gus Van Sant films that came out this year (along with “Milk”), “Paranoid Park” was the more personal, the more unique and the one that most demands to be seen and experienced again. “Experience” is the key for me in this one – any movie can depict a person dealing with a tragic event, but damned if I’ve seen anything that does so in such an exquisitely internal way. The movie is not about discovering the “truth” about the incident or getting/not getting caught – it’s about one teenage kid’s mindset about something he isn’t quite ready to deal with yet. “Paranoid Park” is a collage of images, fragmented memories and feelings that reflect something intangible and, in an oblique way, truthful.
ASHV: The narration sequences – deliberately broken in the current version to replicate the detached recitation of, say, a book report – are now the result of our hero’s finally having learned to read after committing an historic monstrosity.
6. Synecdoche, New York
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
Of all movies from 2008, this one demanded the most of its audience. The great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, here making his directorial debut, stares into his own brain and finds an endless chasm of neuroses, hopes, fears, inaccuracies, embellishments, tragedies and regrets. He brilliantly filters this all through one theatre director with the goal of creating an all-encompassing theatre piece—designed to speak to the very essence of the human experience. The piece becomes an albatross that carries him to his dying moment. The film is a messy concoction of absurdist and surrealist impulses, and it culminates in a stunning, funny, bleak apocalyptic sequence that includes the best closing line of the year. “Synecdoche, New York” has too many inspired scenes and ideas to name, but the burning house is, yes, burned in my memory forever.
ASHV: Theatre director and refugee Caden Cotard creates an all-encompassing theatre piece about the Holocaust, using his fellow captives as actors to play all the parts. Hilarity ensues, as the prisoners so immerse themselves in their newfound thespian talents that for a few fleeting moments they forget about the horrors that surround them and see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The film’s final line, however, remains the same.
7. Rachel Getting Married
Directed by Jonathan Demme
There has been a theme emerging among my picks for the year’s best films—“Rachel Getting Married” is the fourth one so far, along with “Reprise,” “Man on Wire” and “Paranoid Park,” that is specifically focused on creating an experience in which a story takes place, rather than the other way around. Such films capture something intensely individual, something sensory that we have to feel rather than just hear about. We’re inside something. Many films present everything and everyone from a distance simply to tell Us a story.
A movie like “Rachel Getting Married” isn’t afraid to indulge in its characters’ lives and craft a film out of ambience as much as anything else. We’re inside this house that becomes a breathing organism with all the guests, workers, musicians, family members and every conflict that comes up (or has been simmering) between them. Jonathan Demme’s restrained, handheld style perfectly projects Jenny Lumet’s script into something personal and beautiful. This movie charms and this movie hurts – and it hurts in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we saw everything from a distance.
ASHV: The loving family in Connecticut is now a bunch of Nazis. The inspired, loading-the-dishwasher sequence is now about a competition to cram as many refugees into the ghetto as possible—rather than those trivial “dishes” into that non-historically important “dishwasher.”
8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Directed by David Fincher
A movie both praised and reviled for what it isn’t, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is an astonishing marriage of the old-fashioned Hollywood epic and modern sensibilities and technical capabilities. Together the two elements – the old and the new (or, if you insist, the young) – speak to the very heart of the film. The whole of Benjamin Button is the co-existence of elements that in nearly all other contexts are mutually exclusive. Life and death, young and old, hope and regret – all of those things, among many, exist at once, allowing us to examine life’s best and worst elements in all their inevitability.
The film is about death, of course, but its version of death is something of a catharsis. It is an oft-stunning scrapbook of experiences, during which time Benjamin observes—and is observed, harshly at times—amid an ever-changing set of circumstances as he grows younger/older. He begins and always remains an isolated character, a curious anomaly, and to me that lent a certain poignance to every new emotion and new experience he went through. Like the film, Benjamin himself inspires both awe and consternation, and in both cases it’s understandable. “Benjamin Button” has sharply divided people. What I see is a deeply felt exploration of the expectations and inevitabilities within life. That it takes the time to inspect an entire life spent within a sort of peculiar isolation is a testament to director David Fincher.
ASHV: Technically, this doesn’t really apply, as “Benjamin Button” was nominated for a thousand Oscars already. But for the sake of consistency ...let’s just say Benjamin creates a rapid-backward-aging serum, which the Allies give to the Nazis, who all take it and turn into babies. Then the Allies kill the babies.
9. The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky makes a significant stylistic transition with “The Wrestler” and deftly pulls it off. He strips down his visual palette to explore the life of a stripped-down pro wrestler, once famous, but who now has to scrounge for rent money. Aronofsky slowly, deliberately introduces us to the different angles of Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s psyche, ultimately coming to the sad conclusion that, at least in Randy’s mind, his frailty is too much to overcome. The brutal wear-and-tear he takes in the ring is his own form of flagellation—punishment for the mistakes he’s made for which he cannot forgive himself. Mickey Rourke’s performance is worth every bit of the hype, ripping into the broken, emotional core beneath his self-created mass of flashy masculinity. “The Wrestler” is a film that refuses to go for the easy out and insists on following this character’s struggle through its natural progression.
ASHV: Randy assuages some of his crushing guilt through a symbolic renaissance, as he returns to the circuit and goes on to defeat a series of Nazi-themed opponents such as The Final Solutionist, The Bergen-Belsenator and the tag-team known as Führer Furor.
10. Happy-Go-Lucky
Directed by Mike Leigh
A rant about the Academy’s inexplicable snub of Sally Hawkins for Best Actress would be well worth it, but instead let’s just celebrate the movie she starred in, “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Once again, Mike Leigh proves that he’s one of the best, if not the best, at creating real human characters – natural, three-dimensional, strange, flawed, absurd, tragic and everything in between. There is an intimacy in his films that I can only compare to Kieslowski and Bergman.
There is a knock-you-flat-on-your-ass sequence in which Poppy (Hawkins)—a typically bubbly, optimistic, caring person with too much energy for her own good—happens upon a mentally unstable homeless man, speaking in complete jibberish, and approaches him. She sits there and listens, she looks into his eyes – “yeah…I know…I know…”—and lingers for minutes on end. Without saying anything at all, the scene expresses so much and hits so hard, I can’t imagine any vocalization of any of the things being felt or understood being any more powerful.
And, of course, every interaction between Poppy and her driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) is brilliant. Enough said.
ASHV: Poppy breaks into a concentration camp to be with a friend she’s just met – not so happy-go-lucky now, huh?
HONORABLE MENTION
It gave me great pain to leave off one of my cinematic heroes, Woody Allen, who just missed the list with his “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”—yes, another “relationship dramedy” from the master himself, but one that finds new insights about our own desires and expectations as the characters discover surprises about themselves—not just in what they want, but in what they don’t want.
A film well deserving of its (surprising) awards-season attention is Martin McDonagh’s “In Bruges,” a hilarious but surprisingly poignant story of two displaced hitmen. Tarsem finally discovered how to combine actual storytelling with his incredible flair for visuals in his excellent “The Fall”—a huge step up from 2000’s “The Cell.”
Yang Li’s “Blind Mountain” – which received only a very limited release—features the most brilliant ending of the year, and is a powerful and angry film in its own right. Michael Haneke remade one of his own films with “Funny Games,” a Brechtian experiment in audience participation and expectation.
Guillermo del Toro returned for another go-round with Hellboy and outdid himself with “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” which featured some of the most stunning visual setpieces I’ve seen in years. Del Toro may have a kindred spirit in Tomas Alfredson, whose “Let the Right One In” is an expressive and beautiful examination of childhood isolation through the specter of a vampire story.
There were two excellent choices from David Gordon Green this year – the sensationally funny “Pineapple Express,” which begins as a stoner comedy and becomes an absurdist deconstruction of the Action Movie; and the much more somber, poetic “Snow Angels,” which featured my favorite opening scene of the year.
Hsiao-hsien Hou follows up his stunning “Three Times”—the fourth-best film of 2006 – with the ethereal “Flight of the Red Balloon.” Christopher Bell’s documentary “Bigger Stronger Faster*” offered new perspectives into the steroid issue that has gone from sports-world nuisance to mainstream political issue. Ramin Bahrani’s “Chop Shop” takes us to a neorealist setting in Queens through the eyes of a resourceful young orphan and his relationship with his sister.
Gus Van Sant kicks Hollywood’s biopic-loving ass with “Milk,” which finds the essence of a hugely sympathetic character in victory, in defeat, in ecstasy and in death. Stephen Chow, meanwhile, found the essence of irony and comic juxtaposition—once again—with his underrated “CJ7.”
And the great Errol Morris examines the Abu Ghraib scandal in different contexts in “Standard Operating Procedure,” which explores the relationship between a moment caught on film and the truth that such a moment represents.
ALSO WORTH SEEING:
“My Brother is an Only Child,” “Iron Man,” “Speed Racer,” “Transsiberian,” “Horton Hears a Who!,” “Changeling,” “Cloverfield,” “Shine a Light,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” "Ghost Town," “Role Models,” “Burn After Reading,” “Wendy and Lucy,” “Blindness,” “Leatherheads,” “Gran Torino,” “The Strangers,” “Doomsday.”
AND THE WORST:
1. 10,000 B.C. (directed by Roland Emmerich)
2. Love Songs (directed by Christophe Honore)
3. Vantage Point (directed by Pete Travis)
4. Hounddog (directed by Deborah Kampmeier)
5. Revolutionary Road (directed by Sam Mendes)
6. Righteous Kill (directed by Jon Avnet)
7. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (directed by Dave Filoni)
8. Boarding Gate (directed by Olivier Assayas)
9. Prom Night (directed by Nelson McCormick)
10. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (directed by Mark Herman)
Friday, January 30, 2009
Sundance 2009: The Dramatic Competition: Based on the Blog by Jeremy
I will be recapping Sundance over the next week by taking a detailed, epic look at each of the festival's program selections. First up is the festival's best-known—if not always best—category.
If the 2009 Sundance Film Festival was an above-average affair, one must acknowledge its flagship category, the US Dramatic Competition, for—if nothing else—approaching something in the ballpark of uniform quality. While it didn't exactly house a game-changing, ah-ha piece of cinema, it only had a couple films that made me want to blow my brains out rather than view them to their conclusion.
I saw all but one of the selection's films ("Peter and Vandy"), and none of them were incompetent. Regular Sundancers will recognize this as a rare feat on the part of the festival programmers. There were still a few boring and/or ridiculous titles, but the turds were generally shiny.
While the Documentary Competition routinely outshines it on the total-films-worth-watching scale, the Dramatic Competition usually plays home to the festival's best discoveries. "Blood Simple," "Sex, Lies and Videotape," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Primer," "American Splendor," and many more turned up here. But so have a lot of films that no one cares to remember, or even acknowledge.
Festival-goers often speculate about the programming process, and from the rumors and hearsay emerges a narrative of a bunch of feuding programmers, each with a pet film they're determined to force through. One programmer even introduced the World Documentary entry "Big River Man" by enthusiastically proclaiming that there was no fighting over its inclusion. Huzzah!
If the competition was stronger than usual in 2009, the jury, always unpredictable (except when they agree with me), was considerably more stoned when it selected the competition's winners.
The two top prizes, the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, both went to the same film: "Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire." Now, I suppose a film with that subtitle could be worthy of an award, providing that money men forced it upon its makers so it wouldn't be confused with an upcoming release starring Dakota Fanning. But the title is merely where the problems start.
At times, the film contains very moving performances—hence the Audience Award. (Sundance audiences love that kind of stuff.) But I'm surprised the jury fell so hard for the over-loaded and generic weepy inspirational melodrama.
"Push" could have been a film about a morbidly obese teenage girl who doesn't know how to read, and ends up in an alternative school where she learns to love herself. Or it could have been about a girl who is pregnant with her second child…her second child conceived of her father's incestuous rape, that is. And either of these plots could use a crazy, abusive, violent mother as a sideshow. But "Push"—sorry, "Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire"— saddles its main character, Precious (Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe), with all these problems and more.
The resulting film rushes its character arcs while also falling into monotonous traps. Mo'Nique received a Special Jury Prize for her turn as Precious's mother, but I think this award was based mainly on her closing monologue. For the rest of the movie, all her scenes presumably consisted of this direction: "Act crazy and throw shit!" I don't doubt the filmmakers' or the jury's intentions, but this bloated movie doesn't represent the best the competition had to offer.
The jury made an even more perplexing decision when it presented the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award to "Paper Heart," a boring, repetitive, annoying mess that very obviously had no screenplay.
If they wanted to give a writing award to an improvised movie, they should have honored Lynn Shelton's "Humpday." A funnier, better-structured work, the movie stars Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore as a couple whose insecurities come to the forefront when Duplass's old friend, played by Joshua Leonard, arrives for an unexpected visit. Stoned and drunk at a party, the two friends conceive of a porn film featuring two heterosexual male friends having sex—starring themselves.
Shooting in the same spirit of the films by Duplass and his brother Jay, Shelton creates an authentic examination of the second thoughts and regrets that plague suburban professionals. More importantly, however, the film is funny as hell. At least "Humpday" received of the three awards given to deserving films: a Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence.
The other two prizes, including Best Director, went to Cary Fukunaga's "Sin Nombre," an entertaining and heartfelt drama of gang culture and redemption in Mexico. The film follows a young man who can't escape gang life, and gets himself into deeper trouble when the frustration reaches its tipping point. He soon finds himself on the run, traveling with a young immigrant woman on her way to the U.S. border. Adriano Goldman's award for Cinematography was well-deserved, as he captures the hot, endless days, and a sweaty, tense train ride of would-be U.S. immigrants traveling from the Guatemalan border. Focus Features will release the film in the United States soon.
The best film of the competition went home with no awards. Cruz Angeles's "Don't Let Me Drown" is a touching teenage love story that weaves through the lives of two Latino families in Brooklyn during the months after the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks. Lalo's (E.J. Bonilla) father, a Mexican immigrant, was a janitor in the towers, and now cleans up the site, inhaling dust and asbestos all day. Stefanie's (Gleendilys Inoa) sister died in the attack, leaving her father angry and overly protective. The two find that their connection with one another may be the only thing to carry them through troubling times.
The film's characters are so well written and acted that we develop a deep affection for them. The humorous and emotional moments work so well because they grow naturally out of the interaction. In particular, the rapport between the high school students feels just right. These are good kids who are still trying to come to terms with their emotions, but also want to enjoy their youth. Nothing at the festival was funnier than Lalo's uncle's attempt to give the boy "the talk." And nothing was more poignant than the simple, elegant conclusion to which the film leads us.
Writer/director Cherien Dabis offered a a third, distinct, look at the immigrant experience with "Amreeka," the story of a Palestinian mother and son who emigrate to the United States to live with her sister's family in suburban Illinois. Full of well-written characters in roles big and small, "Amreeka" recognizes the loss of dignity inherent in starting a life in a new country. LIke "Don't Let Me Drown," it offers a balance of comedy to offset a largely sad story. Muna, portrayed delicately by Nisreen Faour, was a banker in Palestine, but now can only find a job at a White Castle. While at times overly cringe-inducing, the film is a testament to challenge of maintaining your self respect.
Max Mayer's "Adam" found a memorable love story the relationship between two characters who, no matter how hard they try, can never fully understand one another. Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne star as two New Yorkers who meet in their apartment building, but fail at the traditional courtship routine because he suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. Beth really likes Adam, but his behavior is often awkward and perplexing. He can never quite recognize how she feels, and she can never get through to the man behind the scientific wizardry and clumsy social skills.
In a festival with more science-themed films than usual, "Adam" won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The prize is awarded by a separate jury that, I've always suspected, spends most of its time desperately looking through all the Sundance categories for science-themed films that might be eligible for the award. Several of this year's strongest film's were science-fiction or otherwise science related, making this a much more competetive prize than usual.
Speaking of science, people will no doubt recall another film when hearing about Sophie Barthes's "Cold Souls." The film stars a well-respected actor as himself to create a surreal, existential science-fiction experience. Yes, the "Being John Malkovich" comparisons are inevitable, but the film has its own set of rules and ideas apart from Kaufman and Jonze. Paul Giamatti plays himself as a tortured actor who decides to extract his soul and put it in storage because it is too much of a burden for him to carry. Of course, moving through life with no soul also proves difficult. While Giamatti's motivations and the film's internal logic don't always work, Barthes generates some fascinating philosophy and humor, most notably in the wonderfully droll scenes between Giamatti and David Strathairn as the facility's dodgy doctor and manager.
Robert Seigel, who wrote the screenplay for Daren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," one of the best films of 2008, made his directorial debut with "Big Fan". The great standup comedian Patton Oswalt stars as a parking garage attendant who lives with his mother and spends his free time obsessing over the New York Giants football team. While overly repetitive and tonally uneven, the film nevertheless offers a fascinating look at a man who equates much of his life's value with the performance of a team over which he has no control.
Ross Katz's "Taking Chance" stopped at Sundance on the way to its premiere on HBO next month. Based on the memoir by Lt. Col. Michael R. Strobl, it stars Kevin Bacon as Strobl, a Marine with a desk job who decides to escort a fallen young Marine's remains home for his funeral. The tear-jerking journey that follows emphasizes the affect of war on a community, and the tragedy of dying young.
John Krasinski showed some directorial flare and daring in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," his adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story collection, but failed in his attempt to create a cohesive story with which to frame the material.
Emily Abt's "Toe to Toe" unevenly and sometimes lopsidedly attempts to study the racial and class divide through the lives of two students on a high school ladies lacrosse team, one black and one white, each in a different economic and social strata. While each character is at times intriguing, the story of two sad girls lacks the interaction of a great character drama.
Despite one very interesting character, Adam Salky's sulky teenage drama "Dare" loses much of the impact of its lurid teenage love triangle by favoring bacchanalian excess over over coherency.
While Shana Feste's "The Greatest," starring Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon as greiving parents, was part of Sundance's coming out party for the bright, young and charming Carey Mulligan, it suffers from a remarkably idiotic screenplay. But at least it had its moments, which I can't say for John Hindman's insulting "Arlen Faber."
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
If the 2009 Sundance Film Festival was an above-average affair, one must acknowledge its flagship category, the US Dramatic Competition, for—if nothing else—approaching something in the ballpark of uniform quality. While it didn't exactly house a game-changing, ah-ha piece of cinema, it only had a couple films that made me want to blow my brains out rather than view them to their conclusion.
I saw all but one of the selection's films ("Peter and Vandy"), and none of them were incompetent. Regular Sundancers will recognize this as a rare feat on the part of the festival programmers. There were still a few boring and/or ridiculous titles, but the turds were generally shiny.
While the Documentary Competition routinely outshines it on the total-films-worth-watching scale, the Dramatic Competition usually plays home to the festival's best discoveries. "Blood Simple," "Sex, Lies and Videotape," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Primer," "American Splendor," and many more turned up here. But so have a lot of films that no one cares to remember, or even acknowledge.
Festival-goers often speculate about the programming process, and from the rumors and hearsay emerges a narrative of a bunch of feuding programmers, each with a pet film they're determined to force through. One programmer even introduced the World Documentary entry "Big River Man" by enthusiastically proclaiming that there was no fighting over its inclusion. Huzzah!
If the competition was stronger than usual in 2009, the jury, always unpredictable (except when they agree with me), was considerably more stoned when it selected the competition's winners.
The two top prizes, the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, both went to the same film: "Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire." Now, I suppose a film with that subtitle could be worthy of an award, providing that money men forced it upon its makers so it wouldn't be confused with an upcoming release starring Dakota Fanning. But the title is merely where the problems start.
At times, the film contains very moving performances—hence the Audience Award. (Sundance audiences love that kind of stuff.) But I'm surprised the jury fell so hard for the over-loaded and generic weepy inspirational melodrama.
"Push" could have been a film about a morbidly obese teenage girl who doesn't know how to read, and ends up in an alternative school where she learns to love herself. Or it could have been about a girl who is pregnant with her second child…her second child conceived of her father's incestuous rape, that is. And either of these plots could use a crazy, abusive, violent mother as a sideshow. But "Push"—sorry, "Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire"— saddles its main character, Precious (Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe), with all these problems and more.
The resulting film rushes its character arcs while also falling into monotonous traps. Mo'Nique received a Special Jury Prize for her turn as Precious's mother, but I think this award was based mainly on her closing monologue. For the rest of the movie, all her scenes presumably consisted of this direction: "Act crazy and throw shit!" I don't doubt the filmmakers' or the jury's intentions, but this bloated movie doesn't represent the best the competition had to offer.
The jury made an even more perplexing decision when it presented the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award to "Paper Heart," a boring, repetitive, annoying mess that very obviously had no screenplay.
If they wanted to give a writing award to an improvised movie, they should have honored Lynn Shelton's "Humpday." A funnier, better-structured work, the movie stars Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore as a couple whose insecurities come to the forefront when Duplass's old friend, played by Joshua Leonard, arrives for an unexpected visit. Stoned and drunk at a party, the two friends conceive of a porn film featuring two heterosexual male friends having sex—starring themselves.
Shooting in the same spirit of the films by Duplass and his brother Jay, Shelton creates an authentic examination of the second thoughts and regrets that plague suburban professionals. More importantly, however, the film is funny as hell. At least "Humpday" received of the three awards given to deserving films: a Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence.
The other two prizes, including Best Director, went to Cary Fukunaga's "Sin Nombre," an entertaining and heartfelt drama of gang culture and redemption in Mexico. The film follows a young man who can't escape gang life, and gets himself into deeper trouble when the frustration reaches its tipping point. He soon finds himself on the run, traveling with a young immigrant woman on her way to the U.S. border. Adriano Goldman's award for Cinematography was well-deserved, as he captures the hot, endless days, and a sweaty, tense train ride of would-be U.S. immigrants traveling from the Guatemalan border. Focus Features will release the film in the United States soon.
The best film of the competition went home with no awards. Cruz Angeles's "Don't Let Me Drown" is a touching teenage love story that weaves through the lives of two Latino families in Brooklyn during the months after the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks. Lalo's (E.J. Bonilla) father, a Mexican immigrant, was a janitor in the towers, and now cleans up the site, inhaling dust and asbestos all day. Stefanie's (Gleendilys Inoa) sister died in the attack, leaving her father angry and overly protective. The two find that their connection with one another may be the only thing to carry them through troubling times.
The film's characters are so well written and acted that we develop a deep affection for them. The humorous and emotional moments work so well because they grow naturally out of the interaction. In particular, the rapport between the high school students feels just right. These are good kids who are still trying to come to terms with their emotions, but also want to enjoy their youth. Nothing at the festival was funnier than Lalo's uncle's attempt to give the boy "the talk." And nothing was more poignant than the simple, elegant conclusion to which the film leads us.
Writer/director Cherien Dabis offered a a third, distinct, look at the immigrant experience with "Amreeka," the story of a Palestinian mother and son who emigrate to the United States to live with her sister's family in suburban Illinois. Full of well-written characters in roles big and small, "Amreeka" recognizes the loss of dignity inherent in starting a life in a new country. LIke "Don't Let Me Drown," it offers a balance of comedy to offset a largely sad story. Muna, portrayed delicately by Nisreen Faour, was a banker in Palestine, but now can only find a job at a White Castle. While at times overly cringe-inducing, the film is a testament to challenge of maintaining your self respect.
Max Mayer's "Adam" found a memorable love story the relationship between two characters who, no matter how hard they try, can never fully understand one another. Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne star as two New Yorkers who meet in their apartment building, but fail at the traditional courtship routine because he suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. Beth really likes Adam, but his behavior is often awkward and perplexing. He can never quite recognize how she feels, and she can never get through to the man behind the scientific wizardry and clumsy social skills.
In a festival with more science-themed films than usual, "Adam" won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The prize is awarded by a separate jury that, I've always suspected, spends most of its time desperately looking through all the Sundance categories for science-themed films that might be eligible for the award. Several of this year's strongest film's were science-fiction or otherwise science related, making this a much more competetive prize than usual.
Speaking of science, people will no doubt recall another film when hearing about Sophie Barthes's "Cold Souls." The film stars a well-respected actor as himself to create a surreal, existential science-fiction experience. Yes, the "Being John Malkovich" comparisons are inevitable, but the film has its own set of rules and ideas apart from Kaufman and Jonze. Paul Giamatti plays himself as a tortured actor who decides to extract his soul and put it in storage because it is too much of a burden for him to carry. Of course, moving through life with no soul also proves difficult. While Giamatti's motivations and the film's internal logic don't always work, Barthes generates some fascinating philosophy and humor, most notably in the wonderfully droll scenes between Giamatti and David Strathairn as the facility's dodgy doctor and manager.
Robert Seigel, who wrote the screenplay for Daren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," one of the best films of 2008, made his directorial debut with "Big Fan". The great standup comedian Patton Oswalt stars as a parking garage attendant who lives with his mother and spends his free time obsessing over the New York Giants football team. While overly repetitive and tonally uneven, the film nevertheless offers a fascinating look at a man who equates much of his life's value with the performance of a team over which he has no control.
Ross Katz's "Taking Chance" stopped at Sundance on the way to its premiere on HBO next month. Based on the memoir by Lt. Col. Michael R. Strobl, it stars Kevin Bacon as Strobl, a Marine with a desk job who decides to escort a fallen young Marine's remains home for his funeral. The tear-jerking journey that follows emphasizes the affect of war on a community, and the tragedy of dying young.
John Krasinski showed some directorial flare and daring in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," his adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story collection, but failed in his attempt to create a cohesive story with which to frame the material.
Emily Abt's "Toe to Toe" unevenly and sometimes lopsidedly attempts to study the racial and class divide through the lives of two students on a high school ladies lacrosse team, one black and one white, each in a different economic and social strata. While each character is at times intriguing, the story of two sad girls lacks the interaction of a great character drama.
Despite one very interesting character, Adam Salky's sulky teenage drama "Dare" loses much of the impact of its lurid teenage love triangle by favoring bacchanalian excess over over coherency.
While Shana Feste's "The Greatest," starring Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon as greiving parents, was part of Sundance's coming out party for the bright, young and charming Carey Mulligan, it suffers from a remarkably idiotic screenplay. But at least it had its moments, which I can't say for John Hindman's insulting "Arlen Faber."
Brief Flirtations with Adapting DFW
Sundance 2009 Review: "Brief Conversations with Hideous Men"
Dramatic Competition
You can't say that John Krasinski isn't ballsy. For his debut as a writer and director, the actor best known as Jim on NBC's "The Office" could have played it safe and made a nice indie comedy—something akin to Sundance's last filmmaking debut from a sitcom star, Zach Braff's "Garden State." Instead, he tackled the daunting task of adapting a dark short story collection by the late David Foster Wallace that isn't inherently likable and (by design) has no story structure outside of thematic connections.
The result, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," fails to create a compelling narrative, but succeeds in several of its vignettes, which work as marriages of Wallace's text and cinematic form. Think of the film as an audiobook with visual aid. Krasinski displays a passionate loyalty to the source material, transferring much of Wallace's writing directly into monologues and narrated set-pieces that swirl around the skeletal main story-line.
Taking his cue from European art films, Krasinski charges into the material with jump cuts and editing trickery, maneuvering his actors' conversations through time and space. Sometimes the style is overly self-conscious and he tries too hard to keep the visuals exciting. Other times, the techniques fit perfectly with the story.
Adding to the uneven quality, some actors do a better job nailing the mannerisms in the dialogue than others. Clarke Peters swiftly delivers commentary on the different types of men who don't know how to please women, particularly those who think they know all the tricks. Josh Charles admits guilt while projecting it onto others in a cruel, oft-repeated breakup speech. Frankie Faison and Malcolm Goodwin offer alternating perspectives as a son remembers his father's career as a high-class restroom attendant. Unfortunately, Krasinski's own acting chops don't quite meet the material's demands in a long monologue that aims to bring closure to the entire mosaic.
To provide perspective on the sausage buffet, Krasinski casts Julianne Nicholson as a grad student conducting interviews with these men for her study. She records the men in a dismal, concrete room, but also files her discussions with students (Dominic Cooper) and her professor (Timothy Hutton), as well as other overheard conversations around campus. Visually, Krasinski initially keeps her out of the interview scenes, then shows only the back of her head, until she gradually becomes a much more involved party. Krasinski plays her ex-boyfriend, seen intermittently in flashbacks, but doesn't do much other than look at her and smile until the film's closing moments.
Watching "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," you get the feeling that Krasinski was much more sure of himself while adapting Wallace's words than while creating his own. But the source left many blanks to be filled in if the goal is a narrative. "Brief Interviews" works best when the main story is forgotten, and Wallace's words dance in the foreground.
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
Dramatic Competition
You can't say that John Krasinski isn't ballsy. For his debut as a writer and director, the actor best known as Jim on NBC's "The Office" could have played it safe and made a nice indie comedy—something akin to Sundance's last filmmaking debut from a sitcom star, Zach Braff's "Garden State." Instead, he tackled the daunting task of adapting a dark short story collection by the late David Foster Wallace that isn't inherently likable and (by design) has no story structure outside of thematic connections.
The result, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," fails to create a compelling narrative, but succeeds in several of its vignettes, which work as marriages of Wallace's text and cinematic form. Think of the film as an audiobook with visual aid. Krasinski displays a passionate loyalty to the source material, transferring much of Wallace's writing directly into monologues and narrated set-pieces that swirl around the skeletal main story-line.
Taking his cue from European art films, Krasinski charges into the material with jump cuts and editing trickery, maneuvering his actors' conversations through time and space. Sometimes the style is overly self-conscious and he tries too hard to keep the visuals exciting. Other times, the techniques fit perfectly with the story.
Adding to the uneven quality, some actors do a better job nailing the mannerisms in the dialogue than others. Clarke Peters swiftly delivers commentary on the different types of men who don't know how to please women, particularly those who think they know all the tricks. Josh Charles admits guilt while projecting it onto others in a cruel, oft-repeated breakup speech. Frankie Faison and Malcolm Goodwin offer alternating perspectives as a son remembers his father's career as a high-class restroom attendant. Unfortunately, Krasinski's own acting chops don't quite meet the material's demands in a long monologue that aims to bring closure to the entire mosaic.
To provide perspective on the sausage buffet, Krasinski casts Julianne Nicholson as a grad student conducting interviews with these men for her study. She records the men in a dismal, concrete room, but also files her discussions with students (Dominic Cooper) and her professor (Timothy Hutton), as well as other overheard conversations around campus. Visually, Krasinski initially keeps her out of the interview scenes, then shows only the back of her head, until she gradually becomes a much more involved party. Krasinski plays her ex-boyfriend, seen intermittently in flashbacks, but doesn't do much other than look at her and smile until the film's closing moments.
Watching "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," you get the feeling that Krasinski was much more sure of himself while adapting Wallace's words than while creating his own. But the source left many blanks to be filled in if the goal is a narrative. "Brief Interviews" works best when the main story is forgotten, and Wallace's words dance in the foreground.
Monday, January 26, 2009
My CW Sundance Blogs
The Sundance Film Festival takes place in some sort of temporal anomaly. (Perhaps Park City is the island from "LOST?") You feel that time raced by because, well, there's so much to see and do that it's impossible to accomplish everything before the awards are handed out and the theaters dismantled. At the same time, when you think back to your first day, 70 films earlier, you feel that it couldn't really only be 10 days ago, could it? I'm looking through the blog entries I wrote for the City Weekly, noting distant memories and stories that I still need to tell.
"Don't Let Me Drown was the best films of the Dramatic Competition. But as always, there were several duds, including "Arlen Faber" and "The Greatest."
There was the anti-climactic, unannounced premiere of Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience." Other premieres included Carlos Cuaron's "Rudo y Cursi" and opening night film "Mary and Max."
A lot of intriguing, philosophical sci-fi came out of the festival, including the wonderful "Moon, which I'll write about later, and "The Clone Returns Home" and "Cold Souls."
The Spectrum category brought the uneven but intriguing "The Missing Person."
Several of the documentaries were excellent, and I'll have more on them soon. Be sure not to miss the exciting documentary "The Cove," which feels like a heist film as much as a political documentary. It went on to win the Documentary Audience Award. I also commented on "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe" and the rise of documentarians making films about family members.
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
"Don't Let Me Drown was the best films of the Dramatic Competition. But as always, there were several duds, including "Arlen Faber" and "The Greatest."
There was the anti-climactic, unannounced premiere of Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience." Other premieres included Carlos Cuaron's "Rudo y Cursi" and opening night film "Mary and Max."
A lot of intriguing, philosophical sci-fi came out of the festival, including the wonderful "Moon, which I'll write about later, and "The Clone Returns Home" and "Cold Souls."
The Spectrum category brought the uneven but intriguing "The Missing Person."
Several of the documentaries were excellent, and I'll have more on them soon. Be sure not to miss the exciting documentary "The Cove," which feels like a heist film as much as a political documentary. It went on to win the Documentary Audience Award. I also commented on "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe" and the rise of documentarians making films about family members.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Paper-Thin
Sundance 2009 Review: "Paper Heart"
US Dramatic Competition
Gene Siskel liked to pose this question in his reviews: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" "Paper Hearts" pretends to be a documentary about its actors, and even includes lunch scene. If its depiction is even remotely close to the real life scene, I'll order in.
Nicholas Jasenovec's film stars Charlyne Yi as herself, as she and Jasenovec, played not by himself, but by Jake M. Johnson, travel the country to make a documentary about her quest to discover love. Poor Charlyne doesn't believe in love, but Nick hopes to change her mind. They interview people in six different cities and towns about their relationships, but these vignettes have no relation to the film's main story, about Yi's attempted romance with Michael Cera.
You'd think that Yi, who co-wrote the movie, would want to make herself a more interesting character, seeing as she's depicting her own personality. While funny in small doses in film's like "Knocked Up," her cutesy goofiness can't sustain a feature. She spends half her screen time repeating the meaningless mantra that she still doesn't believe in love. I don't know why the supposed documentary would need her. She doesn't inject the interviews with any good questions or a compelling personality. A better film could have been made about any of the interviewees.
Jasenovec makes the film itself a major plot point, as Charlyne tries to build a relationship with Michael while a film crew follows them. Jasenovec succeeds in upholding the film's conceit, but fails to create any genuine emotional resonance with his characters. The gimmick is yet another layer of distraction in a film that never gets to know its characters.
The filmmakers layout the entire plot with some very clumsy foreshadowing, rendering the film's resolution completely inevitable. Perhaps if the story had more to it than a series of drones about the meaning of love, the foreshadowing would have felt more organic, or at least less obnoxious. But the dialogue only has any aim when it telegraphs what will happen next. And when there aren't any characters, it's hard to care.
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
US Dramatic Competition
Gene Siskel liked to pose this question in his reviews: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" "Paper Hearts" pretends to be a documentary about its actors, and even includes lunch scene. If its depiction is even remotely close to the real life scene, I'll order in.
Nicholas Jasenovec's film stars Charlyne Yi as herself, as she and Jasenovec, played not by himself, but by Jake M. Johnson, travel the country to make a documentary about her quest to discover love. Poor Charlyne doesn't believe in love, but Nick hopes to change her mind. They interview people in six different cities and towns about their relationships, but these vignettes have no relation to the film's main story, about Yi's attempted romance with Michael Cera.
You'd think that Yi, who co-wrote the movie, would want to make herself a more interesting character, seeing as she's depicting her own personality. While funny in small doses in film's like "Knocked Up," her cutesy goofiness can't sustain a feature. She spends half her screen time repeating the meaningless mantra that she still doesn't believe in love. I don't know why the supposed documentary would need her. She doesn't inject the interviews with any good questions or a compelling personality. A better film could have been made about any of the interviewees.
Jasenovec makes the film itself a major plot point, as Charlyne tries to build a relationship with Michael while a film crew follows them. Jasenovec succeeds in upholding the film's conceit, but fails to create any genuine emotional resonance with his characters. The gimmick is yet another layer of distraction in a film that never gets to know its characters.
The filmmakers layout the entire plot with some very clumsy foreshadowing, rendering the film's resolution completely inevitable. Perhaps if the story had more to it than a series of drones about the meaning of love, the foreshadowing would have felt more organic, or at least less obnoxious. But the dialogue only has any aim when it telegraphs what will happen next. And when there aren't any characters, it's hard to care.
Sundance Journal: Friday, Jan. 16
Almost all of my Friday Sundance experience is a bit of a haze. If it weren't for some memorable films, the whole day would be a blur.
After I discovered that I planned my day based on an erroneous press schedule printout that placed every film one time slot earlier, I had to wing it. Sleep-deprived from a long night of prep, I waited in vain for a shuttle. It didn't show, so I walked, then ran, to my first screening, only to find out that there was in fact no screening. It wasn't that something else was screening. No screening existed at the theater.
Thinking fast, I scrambled into the only screening that I could possibly make on time, the Animation Spotlight (which I'd planned to see later on). This year's collection of animated shorts was stronger than last year's, and featured new comers as well as veterans of indie animation. Pes offered an inspired, colorful bit of pixilation called "Western Spaghetti," which depicts the preparation of an everyday meal with a twist: the food is made entirely from inedible household materials. A hand runs a spool of yarn across a cheese grater, and little pieces come out. Bill Plympton's "Hot Dog" found his lovable dog character trying to earn a job with the fire department.
And Don Hertzfeldt debuted "I'm So Proud of You," the second chapter in what Hertzfeldt now describes as a three-part series. It contains much of the same experimentation with multiple passes and different animated forms as the first chapter, "Everything Will Be OK," which also played at Sundance. It's been a while since I've seen "Everything Will Be OK," but I'm interested to see how well the films build on one another.
I then saw Lynn Shelton's "Humpday," a very funny comedy starring Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard. An improvised, handheld endeavor in the same vein as the films Duplass has made with his brother, it is observant, but more important, fucking hilarious. I'll have more on it later.
I then caught Spike Lee's musical theater concert film, "Passing Strange," and the atmospheric noir throwback "The Missing Person" (Read the City Weekly blog).
I ended the night with Carlos Cuarón's "Rudo y Cursi," which I again covered for the City Weekly blog.
And I wrote more on opening night film "Mary and Max".
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
After I discovered that I planned my day based on an erroneous press schedule printout that placed every film one time slot earlier, I had to wing it. Sleep-deprived from a long night of prep, I waited in vain for a shuttle. It didn't show, so I walked, then ran, to my first screening, only to find out that there was in fact no screening. It wasn't that something else was screening. No screening existed at the theater.
Thinking fast, I scrambled into the only screening that I could possibly make on time, the Animation Spotlight (which I'd planned to see later on). This year's collection of animated shorts was stronger than last year's, and featured new comers as well as veterans of indie animation. Pes offered an inspired, colorful bit of pixilation called "Western Spaghetti," which depicts the preparation of an everyday meal with a twist: the food is made entirely from inedible household materials. A hand runs a spool of yarn across a cheese grater, and little pieces come out. Bill Plympton's "Hot Dog" found his lovable dog character trying to earn a job with the fire department.
And Don Hertzfeldt debuted "I'm So Proud of You," the second chapter in what Hertzfeldt now describes as a three-part series. It contains much of the same experimentation with multiple passes and different animated forms as the first chapter, "Everything Will Be OK," which also played at Sundance. It's been a while since I've seen "Everything Will Be OK," but I'm interested to see how well the films build on one another.
I then saw Lynn Shelton's "Humpday," a very funny comedy starring Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard. An improvised, handheld endeavor in the same vein as the films Duplass has made with his brother, it is observant, but more important, fucking hilarious. I'll have more on it later.
I then caught Spike Lee's musical theater concert film, "Passing Strange," and the atmospheric noir throwback "The Missing Person" (Read the City Weekly blog).
I ended the night with Carlos Cuarón's "Rudo y Cursi," which I again covered for the City Weekly blog.
And I wrote more on opening night film "Mary and Max".
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Sundance starts…NOW!
I just finished watching the opening film of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, "Mary and Max," and the festival is now officially underway. The charming film marks the feature debut of Adam Elliot, who won an Oscar for his 2003 short "Harvie Krumpet." It tells the story of two unlikely friends, she a grade-schooler in suburban Melbourne, Australia and he an anxious middle-aged man in New York City, who forge a deep bond as pen pals. Elliot infuses his story with whimsy, playful design and dry, morbid humor. It's a film for adults who still like to look at the world through the eyes of children.
It's also worth noting that Sundance has opened two consecutive festivals with very good films, last year's being "In Bruges." I am concerned that the programmers have permanently tarnished their reputation of opening with movies that are either agonizingly bad or completely forgettable.
I'll have lots of Sundance coverage here and elsewhere in the following 10 days. For starters, be sure to check out City Weekly's "5x5=25" retrospective, written by Scott Renshaw and myself. (WARNING: DISTURBING STILLS FROM "NAPOLEON DYNAMITE" APPEAR. Seriously. The picture is even bigger in print. And on the cover. You just can't hide from it.) I'll try to keep the links coming here, but you will find me blogging at City Weekly too. I also hope to help my friends at Film Threat out with some reviews.
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
It's also worth noting that Sundance has opened two consecutive festivals with very good films, last year's being "In Bruges." I am concerned that the programmers have permanently tarnished their reputation of opening with movies that are either agonizingly bad or completely forgettable.
I'll have lots of Sundance coverage here and elsewhere in the following 10 days. For starters, be sure to check out City Weekly's "5x5=25" retrospective, written by Scott Renshaw and myself. (WARNING: DISTURBING STILLS FROM "NAPOLEON DYNAMITE" APPEAR. Seriously. The picture is even bigger in print. And on the cover. You just can't hide from it.) I'll try to keep the links coming here, but you will find me blogging at City Weekly too. I also hope to help my friends at Film Threat out with some reviews.
Jeremy's Top 10 Films of 2008
1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
With an unflinching eye on the truth, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" unforgettably depicts the story of an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania. With steadfast reservedness, Mungiu examines a society in which the disadvantaged and unfortunate are either ignored or exploited. Without contrivance, the film takes a gripping journey to the dark side.
Under the scrutiny of long, merciless takes, the film's performances are true accomplishments. Anamaria Marinca's protagonist exceeds the bonds of friendship with bravery but increasingly weariness. And Vlad Ivanov perfectly captures evil as an abortionist with deliberate and manipulative bargaining skills.
2. Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky" studies the challenges, joys and perils of maintaining a positive attitude. Sally Hawkins stars as the personable Poppy, who insists on being friendly and outgoing to people, even if they'd rather be left alone. Leigh's screenplay is smart and observant, hopeful and honest, and his direction is down-to-earth and engaging. The scenes between Hawkins and Eddie Marsan as Poppy's driving instructor exemplify the film's straddling of humor and poignance, danger and bravery and danger.
3. Wendy and Lucy
A lovingly acted, quiet tragedy that unfolds without a false note, "Wendy and Lucy" offers a crushing look into the life of an unemployed drifter and her dog after their journey stalls in a small town in Oregon. "Old Joy" director Kelly Reichardt deftly portrays Wendy's (Michelle Williams) humanity, and that of those around her. No character acts for the convenience of the plot—everyone is a real person and they all have their reasons.
4. The Wrestler
Much of the praise for Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" has centered around Mickey Rourke's transformative performance, but the film deserves accolades on all accounts. Aronofsky crafts a delicate character portrait of a fragile man who never quite figured out how to give and receive love. A professional wrestler now a couple decades past his prime, he still longs for the gratification that he could only get in the ring. Maryse Alberti's up-close 16-mm photography and Aronofsy's endlessly creative direction propel the film—along with Rourke and cast-mates Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood—to greatness.
5. Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant made two excellent film's this year, and his poetic meditation on youth and tragedy was even better than his Hollywood biopic. "Paranoid Park" journeys through a maze of unsteady memories, spiraling closer and closer to a place that its young protagonist (Gabe Nevins) doesn't want to go. In a flury of skateboarding, sex and personal connections, the truth slowly unveils itself. Van Sant displays his great control of cinematic form, gloriously melding his images with a variety of musical genres from Elliot Smith to opera to invoke a troubled, introverted psyche.
6. Pineapple Express
A buddy action movie about two guys who aren't equipped to be action stars or buddies, "Pineapple Express" is the most sublime of all pot comedies. David Gordon Green took a dramatic turn from his poetic meditations on southern life and proved his passion and understanding of the action genre. The film is entertaining both as an action film and as an hysterical deconstruction of the genre. And I haven't even mentioned James Franco and Seth Rogan. Too bad playing stoned doesn't have the same Oscar clout as playing a mentally disabled person.
7. Wall-E
The opening 30 minutes of "Wall-E" feature some of the most transfixing cinematic storytelling of the year. With almost no dialogue, they depict the film's plucky title robot as it travels through a deserted metropolis of waste that was earth, finding meaning in the trash that the planet's former inhabitants left behind. It's simple and hypnotic. With nods to science-fiction past and plenty of his own creativity, Andrew Stanton constructed a bleak vision of a future Earth overrun with garbage and evacuated by humans who would rather sit around and watch TV than solve their own problems. The robots whom they expect to serve them for them reveal some of the best character design and animation I've ever seen.
8. Man on Wire
James Marsh's documentary on Philippe Petit' rogue attempt to string and walk a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers is at once a heist movie, a tale of friendship and an inspirational testament to the importance of following your dreams. With a mix of intimate recollections and carefree recreations, Marsh captures the glory of youth and the joy of mad dreams.
9. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" takes in the beauty of Spain while studying the different forms in which love can emerge. Writer/director Woody Allen finds himself in excellent form as he follows the intertwined stories of two friends (Rebecca Hall and Scarlet Johnansson) who spend a revealing summer in Spain. The quality of the writing and acting really shines in the scenes between Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who play on-and-off lovers and artists. Note the ways they shift between English and Spanish, and how it relates to their comfort zones.
10. Rachel Getting Married
Like most everything in life, familial love is rarely as ideal or as easy as we'd like it to be. The simple act of enjoying a celebration together can be a great struggle, and Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married" pulls together all the nagging regrets and hang-ups as well as any film of its kind. This wedding party is so compelling partly because of the performances (including Anne Hathaway as the emotionally destructive sister), and partly because Demme's handheld-style exudes authenticity. The family's house constantly feels alive—like a living, breathing, organic component of the movie. You get the feeling that the handheld camera could do a 180-degree turn, head up or down the stairs or go outside and find other characters busily preparing for the big event.
Tied for 11th:
The Dark Knight
In Bruges
Milk
Still Life
Snow Angels
Honorable Mention
My Brother is an Only Child
Boy A
Encounters at the End of the World
The Fall
Funny Games
Ghost Town
Let the Right One In
My Winnipeg
Role Models
Standard Operating Procedure
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
With an unflinching eye on the truth, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" unforgettably depicts the story of an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania. With steadfast reservedness, Mungiu examines a society in which the disadvantaged and unfortunate are either ignored or exploited. Without contrivance, the film takes a gripping journey to the dark side.
Under the scrutiny of long, merciless takes, the film's performances are true accomplishments. Anamaria Marinca's protagonist exceeds the bonds of friendship with bravery but increasingly weariness. And Vlad Ivanov perfectly captures evil as an abortionist with deliberate and manipulative bargaining skills.
2. Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky" studies the challenges, joys and perils of maintaining a positive attitude. Sally Hawkins stars as the personable Poppy, who insists on being friendly and outgoing to people, even if they'd rather be left alone. Leigh's screenplay is smart and observant, hopeful and honest, and his direction is down-to-earth and engaging. The scenes between Hawkins and Eddie Marsan as Poppy's driving instructor exemplify the film's straddling of humor and poignance, danger and bravery and danger.
3. Wendy and Lucy
A lovingly acted, quiet tragedy that unfolds without a false note, "Wendy and Lucy" offers a crushing look into the life of an unemployed drifter and her dog after their journey stalls in a small town in Oregon. "Old Joy" director Kelly Reichardt deftly portrays Wendy's (Michelle Williams) humanity, and that of those around her. No character acts for the convenience of the plot—everyone is a real person and they all have their reasons.
4. The Wrestler
Much of the praise for Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" has centered around Mickey Rourke's transformative performance, but the film deserves accolades on all accounts. Aronofsky crafts a delicate character portrait of a fragile man who never quite figured out how to give and receive love. A professional wrestler now a couple decades past his prime, he still longs for the gratification that he could only get in the ring. Maryse Alberti's up-close 16-mm photography and Aronofsy's endlessly creative direction propel the film—along with Rourke and cast-mates Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood—to greatness.
5. Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant made two excellent film's this year, and his poetic meditation on youth and tragedy was even better than his Hollywood biopic. "Paranoid Park" journeys through a maze of unsteady memories, spiraling closer and closer to a place that its young protagonist (Gabe Nevins) doesn't want to go. In a flury of skateboarding, sex and personal connections, the truth slowly unveils itself. Van Sant displays his great control of cinematic form, gloriously melding his images with a variety of musical genres from Elliot Smith to opera to invoke a troubled, introverted psyche.
6. Pineapple Express
A buddy action movie about two guys who aren't equipped to be action stars or buddies, "Pineapple Express" is the most sublime of all pot comedies. David Gordon Green took a dramatic turn from his poetic meditations on southern life and proved his passion and understanding of the action genre. The film is entertaining both as an action film and as an hysterical deconstruction of the genre. And I haven't even mentioned James Franco and Seth Rogan. Too bad playing stoned doesn't have the same Oscar clout as playing a mentally disabled person.
7. Wall-E
The opening 30 minutes of "Wall-E" feature some of the most transfixing cinematic storytelling of the year. With almost no dialogue, they depict the film's plucky title robot as it travels through a deserted metropolis of waste that was earth, finding meaning in the trash that the planet's former inhabitants left behind. It's simple and hypnotic. With nods to science-fiction past and plenty of his own creativity, Andrew Stanton constructed a bleak vision of a future Earth overrun with garbage and evacuated by humans who would rather sit around and watch TV than solve their own problems. The robots whom they expect to serve them for them reveal some of the best character design and animation I've ever seen.
8. Man on Wire
James Marsh's documentary on Philippe Petit' rogue attempt to string and walk a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers is at once a heist movie, a tale of friendship and an inspirational testament to the importance of following your dreams. With a mix of intimate recollections and carefree recreations, Marsh captures the glory of youth and the joy of mad dreams.
9. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" takes in the beauty of Spain while studying the different forms in which love can emerge. Writer/director Woody Allen finds himself in excellent form as he follows the intertwined stories of two friends (Rebecca Hall and Scarlet Johnansson) who spend a revealing summer in Spain. The quality of the writing and acting really shines in the scenes between Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who play on-and-off lovers and artists. Note the ways they shift between English and Spanish, and how it relates to their comfort zones.
10. Rachel Getting Married
Like most everything in life, familial love is rarely as ideal or as easy as we'd like it to be. The simple act of enjoying a celebration together can be a great struggle, and Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married" pulls together all the nagging regrets and hang-ups as well as any film of its kind. This wedding party is so compelling partly because of the performances (including Anne Hathaway as the emotionally destructive sister), and partly because Demme's handheld-style exudes authenticity. The family's house constantly feels alive—like a living, breathing, organic component of the movie. You get the feeling that the handheld camera could do a 180-degree turn, head up or down the stairs or go outside and find other characters busily preparing for the big event.
Tied for 11th:
The Dark Knight
In Bruges
Milk
Still Life
Snow Angels
Honorable Mention
My Brother is an Only Child
Boy A
Encounters at the End of the World
The Fall
Funny Games
Ghost Town
Let the Right One In
My Winnipeg
Role Models
Standard Operating Procedure
Monday, January 12, 2009
Microsoft Creates Most Awesome Software Ever
Remember when someone re-dubbed the voice-over of the promotional video for Microsoft's Surface? Well, this video above is the 100-percent-original Microsoft ad. "Microsoft, huh? So it's pretty easy to use?"
If that doesn't make you a believer, listen to Songsmith in action, paired with America's favorite douchebag, David Lee Roth. I can't believe I spent all that time recording music when I could have waited for Songsmith to do it for me.
(via Gruber.)
Thursday, January 1, 2009
You Can't Stop Progress
What the hell snarky comment am I supposed to add to this?
From what I can tell, it's not a joke. I guess we can only hope that this is the start of new, 3-D versions of many a classic film. We can call the process "vomitization."
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
San Diego -- Dec 23, 2008 -- Night of the Living Dead is getting a unique dimensional twist that promises to pull viewers closer to the undead action. The team of Legend Films and PassmoreLab is bringing new life to the undead by converting the previously colorized genre-defining zombie film into jaw-dropping 3D. The enhanced 1968 George Romero cult classic is slated for release on April 1, 2009.
From what I can tell, it's not a joke. I guess we can only hope that this is the start of new, 3-D versions of many a classic film. We can call the process "vomitization."
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Woah…What?
Man, even I wouldn't shoot someone for talking during a movie on Christmas.
And why does everyone keep guns in their sweatpants?
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
And why does everyone keep guns in their sweatpants?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Frenchies Name Top 100 Films, Piss Off Brits and Confuse All
In an effort to make money by selling fancy books, the venerable Cahiers du Cinéma surveyed 76 French film experts to determine which 100 films most deserved to be featured in a fancy book. Setting aside certain reliables, the results are surprising in good ways, bad ways and most often perplexing ways.
"Citizen Kane" takes its predictable and hard-to-argue-against spot at number one, but the vote totals revealed that it did so by only one measly vote. Yes, had any single voter decided to bump Welles's masterpiece off his or her ballot to make a point about how "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" doesn't get enough respect, "Kane" would have split first place with Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game."
While a few nice surprises placed in the top 10, things only really get weird in the lower rankings, where many directors' best-known works were overlooked in favor of other efforts. Surrealist mischief-maker Luis Buñuel, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, only makes one appearance on the list with "El," the 1953 tale of jealousy and obsession from his Mexican period. The film, which tallied the minimum number needed to make the list, is certainly a worthy inclusion, but one wonders what happened to "The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie," "The Exterminating Angel" or—well, it's Buñuel, so I could go on listing films for quite a while. That Buñuel received the eighth most votes of any director and only had one film on the list testifies to the extreme quality of his remarkable body of work.
I certainly didn't expect to see my favorite Ernst Lubitsch film, "To Be or Not To Be," all the way up at number 12, with the better known "Trouble in Paradise" at 58. But that was the least of the oddities. Elia Kazan narrowly made the list, but not with his canonized "On the Waterfront" or even "A Street Car Named Desire." He did it with "America, America." Joseph L. Mankiewicz didn't make the list with "All About Eve," but "The Barefoot Contessa" (a good film with some inspired moments, but not one I expected to see on a top 100 list). And instead of recognizing Martin Scorsese for "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas" or "Mean Streets" or "After Hours" or "The Last Temptation of Christ," uh… Oh. Hrm. Scorsese didn't make the list at all. And Leo McCarey placed with "An Affair to Remember" rather than "The Aw—
Wait a minute. "An Affair to Remember" made the list, yet no Scorsese film did? The fuck?
Italian Neo-Realism suffered a setback at the hands of the Frenchies, who relegated "Bicycle Theives," "Rome, Open City" and "Senso" to the lower tiers while ignoring "Rocco and His Brothers" entirely. But that's nothing compared to what happened to the entire country of Great Britain. No Powell and Pressburger, no David Lean, no Mike Leigh, no Carol Reed—yes, including "The Third Man!"
"An Affair to Remember" made the list but "The Third Man" didn't? Neither did anything by Kieslowski, Herzog, Malick or Fassbinder? Or "Last Year at Marienbad?" The fuck?
Fortunately, silents were well represented on the list, including "The Crowd," "Greed," "The Wind," "Intolerance" and three films by the great F.W. Murnau, including "Sunrise" at number 4. The French voters were apparently too busy trying to list every Charlot film they could think of to surprise us with an unexpected Keaton, and so only voted on "The General." How 1960s of them. It's time to wake up and realize that Keaton made quite a few other masterpieces, folks. Remember the one where the house falls on him or when he walks into the movie screen? Oh, mais regard!: Charlot habillé comme Hitler et joue avec le monde!
Anyway, here's the list. It's not bad, as far as lists like this go, but it is a bit confounding with its combination of obvious picks and out-of-nowhere inclusions. The Cahiers page is kind of confusing and other sites decided to just assign each film a numerical ranking, using the alphabetical ordering of the French title as the tie-breaker. I've formatted it with the intent to reflect the list's many ties (especially towards the bottom of the list), yet still make clear where each film ranks.
Rank 1 (48 Votes)
Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
Rank 2 (47 Votes)
The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) - Jean Renoir
Rank 4 (46 Votes)
Sunrise - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Rank 5 (43 Votes)
L’Atalante - Jean Vigo
Rank 6 (40 Votes)
M - Fritz Lang
Rank 7 (39 Votes)
Singin’ in the Rain - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Rank 8 (35 Votes)
Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
Rank 9 (34 Votes)
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) - Marcel Carné
The Searchers - John Ford
Greed - Erich von Stroheim
Rank 12 (33 Votes)
Rio Bravo - Howard Hawkes
To Be or Not to Be - Ernst Lubitsch
Rank 14 (29 Votes)
Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
Rank 15 (28 Votes)
Contempt (Le Mépris) - Jean-Luc Godard
Rank 16 (27 Votes)
Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) - Kenji Mizoguchi
City Lights - Charlie Chaplin
The General - Buster Keaton
Nosferatu the Vampire - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Music Room - Satyajit Ray
Rank 21 (26 Votes)
Freaks - Tod Browning
Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) - Jean Eustache
Rank 24 (25 Votes)
The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin
The Leopard (Le Guépard) - Luchino Visconti
Hiroshima, My Love - Alain Resnais
Pandora's Box (Loulou) - Georg Wilhelm Pabst
North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
Pickpocket - Robert Bresson
Rank 30 (24 Votes)
Golden Helmet (Casque d’or) - Jacques Becker
The Barefoot Contessa - Joseph Mankiewitz
Moonfleet - Fritz Lang
The Earrings of Madame de… - Max Ophüls
Pleasure - Max Ophüls
The Deer Hunter - Michael Cimino
Rank 36 (23 Votes)
L'Avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni
Battleship Potemkin - Sergei M. Eisenstein
Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock
Ivan the Terrible - Sergei M. Eisenstein
The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola
Touch of Evil - Orson Welles
The Wind - Victor Sjöström
Rank 43 (22 Votes)
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman
Rank 45 (21 Votes)
The Crowd - King Vidor
8 1/2 - Federico Fellini
La Jetée - Chris Marker
Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard
Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d’un tricheur) - Sacha Guitry
Rank 50 (20 Votes)
Amarcord - Federico Fellini
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) - Jean Cocteau
Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder
Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli
Gertrud - Carl Theodor Dreyer
King Kong - Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
Laura - Otto Preminger
The Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa
Rank 58 (19 Votes)
The 400 Blows - François Truffaut
La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini
The Dead - John Huston
Trouble in Paradise - Ernst Lubitsch
It’s a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
Monsieur Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer
Rank 65 (18 Votes)
À bout de souffle (Breathless) - Jean-Luc Godard
Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick
La Grande Illusion - Jean Renoir
Intolerance - David Wark Griffith
A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) - Jean Renoir
Playtime - Jacques Tati
Rome, Open City - Roberto Rossellini
Livia (Senso) - Luchino Visconti
Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin
Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat
Rank 76 (17 Votes)
An Affair to Remember - Leo McCarey
Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Scarlet Empress - Joseph von Sternberg
Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi
Talk to Her - Pedro Almodóvar
The Party - Blake Edwards
Tabu - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Bandwagon - Vincente Minnelli
A Star Is Born - George Cukor
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday - Jacques Tati
Rank 86 (16 Votes)
America, America - Elia Kazan
El - Luis Buñuel
Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich
Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone
Daybreak (Le Jour se lève) - Marcel Carné
Letter from an Unknown Woman - Max Ophüls
Lola - Jacques Demy
Manhattan - Woody Allen
Mulholland Dr. - David Lynch
My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud) - Eric Rohmer
Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) - Alain Resnais
The Gold Rush - Charlie Chaplin
Scarface - Howard Hawks
Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio de Sica
Napoléon - Abel Gance
Top Directors
Charles Laughton only directed one film in his career, but with the votes for that film he managed to beat out Preminger, McCarey, Cukor and Tati in the rankings for most votes. Well done, Chuck. (One wonders if Laughton would have split his vote had gone on to direct 10 more projects. But we'll never know.)
Jean Renoir 155
Alfred Hitchcock 146
Fritz Lang 143
Charles Chaplin 128
John Ford 124
Orson Welles 114
Ingmar Bergman 113
Luis Buñuel 110
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau 108
Howard Hawks 105
Jean-Luc Godard 99
Federico Fellini 99
Ernst Lubitsch 98
Luchino Visconti 90
Robert Bresson 90
Kenji Mizoguchi 87
Akira Kurosawa 86
Max Ophuls 83
Alain Resnais 82
Carl Theodor Dreyer 76
François Truffaut 75
Stanley Kubrick 75
Vincente Minnelli 73
Joseph Mankiewicz 73
Roberto Rosselini 73
Josef von Sternberg 69
Michelangelo Antonioni 67
S. M. Eisenstein 65
Marcel Carné 64
Billy Wilder 61
Buster Keaton 61
Yasujiro Ozu 60
Eric von Stroheim 60
John Huston 59
Elia Kazan 55
King Vidor 53
David Wark Griffith 53
Maurice Pialat 52
Jean Vigo 51
Nicholas Ray 49
Jacques Becker 48
Woody Allen 48
Francis Ford Coppola 47
Jacques Demy 47
Charles Laughton 47
Jacques Tati 46
Otto Preminger 45
Leo McCarey 45
George Cukor 44
Raoul Walsh 44
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
"Citizen Kane" takes its predictable and hard-to-argue-against spot at number one, but the vote totals revealed that it did so by only one measly vote. Yes, had any single voter decided to bump Welles's masterpiece off his or her ballot to make a point about how "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" doesn't get enough respect, "Kane" would have split first place with Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game."
While a few nice surprises placed in the top 10, things only really get weird in the lower rankings, where many directors' best-known works were overlooked in favor of other efforts. Surrealist mischief-maker Luis Buñuel, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, only makes one appearance on the list with "El," the 1953 tale of jealousy and obsession from his Mexican period. The film, which tallied the minimum number needed to make the list, is certainly a worthy inclusion, but one wonders what happened to "The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie," "The Exterminating Angel" or—well, it's Buñuel, so I could go on listing films for quite a while. That Buñuel received the eighth most votes of any director and only had one film on the list testifies to the extreme quality of his remarkable body of work.
I certainly didn't expect to see my favorite Ernst Lubitsch film, "To Be or Not To Be," all the way up at number 12, with the better known "Trouble in Paradise" at 58. But that was the least of the oddities. Elia Kazan narrowly made the list, but not with his canonized "On the Waterfront" or even "A Street Car Named Desire." He did it with "America, America." Joseph L. Mankiewicz didn't make the list with "All About Eve," but "The Barefoot Contessa" (a good film with some inspired moments, but not one I expected to see on a top 100 list). And instead of recognizing Martin Scorsese for "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas" or "Mean Streets" or "After Hours" or "The Last Temptation of Christ," uh… Oh. Hrm. Scorsese didn't make the list at all. And Leo McCarey placed with "An Affair to Remember" rather than "The Aw—
Wait a minute. "An Affair to Remember" made the list, yet no Scorsese film did? The fuck?
Italian Neo-Realism suffered a setback at the hands of the Frenchies, who relegated "Bicycle Theives," "Rome, Open City" and "Senso" to the lower tiers while ignoring "Rocco and His Brothers" entirely. But that's nothing compared to what happened to the entire country of Great Britain. No Powell and Pressburger, no David Lean, no Mike Leigh, no Carol Reed—yes, including "The Third Man!"
"An Affair to Remember" made the list but "The Third Man" didn't? Neither did anything by Kieslowski, Herzog, Malick or Fassbinder? Or "Last Year at Marienbad?" The fuck?
Fortunately, silents were well represented on the list, including "The Crowd," "Greed," "The Wind," "Intolerance" and three films by the great F.W. Murnau, including "Sunrise" at number 4. The French voters were apparently too busy trying to list every Charlot film they could think of to surprise us with an unexpected Keaton, and so only voted on "The General." How 1960s of them. It's time to wake up and realize that Keaton made quite a few other masterpieces, folks. Remember the one where the house falls on him or when he walks into the movie screen? Oh, mais regard!: Charlot habillé comme Hitler et joue avec le monde!
Anyway, here's the list. It's not bad, as far as lists like this go, but it is a bit confounding with its combination of obvious picks and out-of-nowhere inclusions. The Cahiers page is kind of confusing and other sites decided to just assign each film a numerical ranking, using the alphabetical ordering of the French title as the tie-breaker. I've formatted it with the intent to reflect the list's many ties (especially towards the bottom of the list), yet still make clear where each film ranks.
Rank 1 (48 Votes)
Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
Rank 2 (47 Votes)
The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) - Jean Renoir
Rank 4 (46 Votes)
Sunrise - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Rank 5 (43 Votes)
L’Atalante - Jean Vigo
Rank 6 (40 Votes)
M - Fritz Lang
Rank 7 (39 Votes)
Singin’ in the Rain - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Rank 8 (35 Votes)
Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
Rank 9 (34 Votes)
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) - Marcel Carné
The Searchers - John Ford
Greed - Erich von Stroheim
Rank 12 (33 Votes)
Rio Bravo - Howard Hawkes
To Be or Not to Be - Ernst Lubitsch
Rank 14 (29 Votes)
Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
Rank 15 (28 Votes)
Contempt (Le Mépris) - Jean-Luc Godard
Rank 16 (27 Votes)
Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) - Kenji Mizoguchi
City Lights - Charlie Chaplin
The General - Buster Keaton
Nosferatu the Vampire - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Music Room - Satyajit Ray
Rank 21 (26 Votes)
Freaks - Tod Browning
Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) - Jean Eustache
Rank 24 (25 Votes)
The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin
The Leopard (Le Guépard) - Luchino Visconti
Hiroshima, My Love - Alain Resnais
Pandora's Box (Loulou) - Georg Wilhelm Pabst
North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
Pickpocket - Robert Bresson
Rank 30 (24 Votes)
Golden Helmet (Casque d’or) - Jacques Becker
The Barefoot Contessa - Joseph Mankiewitz
Moonfleet - Fritz Lang
The Earrings of Madame de… - Max Ophüls
Pleasure - Max Ophüls
The Deer Hunter - Michael Cimino
Rank 36 (23 Votes)
L'Avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni
Battleship Potemkin - Sergei M. Eisenstein
Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock
Ivan the Terrible - Sergei M. Eisenstein
The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola
Touch of Evil - Orson Welles
The Wind - Victor Sjöström
Rank 43 (22 Votes)
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman
Rank 45 (21 Votes)
The Crowd - King Vidor
8 1/2 - Federico Fellini
La Jetée - Chris Marker
Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard
Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d’un tricheur) - Sacha Guitry
Rank 50 (20 Votes)
Amarcord - Federico Fellini
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) - Jean Cocteau
Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder
Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli
Gertrud - Carl Theodor Dreyer
King Kong - Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
Laura - Otto Preminger
The Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa
Rank 58 (19 Votes)
The 400 Blows - François Truffaut
La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini
The Dead - John Huston
Trouble in Paradise - Ernst Lubitsch
It’s a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
Monsieur Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer
Rank 65 (18 Votes)
À bout de souffle (Breathless) - Jean-Luc Godard
Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick
La Grande Illusion - Jean Renoir
Intolerance - David Wark Griffith
A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) - Jean Renoir
Playtime - Jacques Tati
Rome, Open City - Roberto Rossellini
Livia (Senso) - Luchino Visconti
Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin
Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat
Rank 76 (17 Votes)
An Affair to Remember - Leo McCarey
Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Scarlet Empress - Joseph von Sternberg
Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi
Talk to Her - Pedro Almodóvar
The Party - Blake Edwards
Tabu - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Bandwagon - Vincente Minnelli
A Star Is Born - George Cukor
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday - Jacques Tati
Rank 86 (16 Votes)
America, America - Elia Kazan
El - Luis Buñuel
Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich
Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone
Daybreak (Le Jour se lève) - Marcel Carné
Letter from an Unknown Woman - Max Ophüls
Lola - Jacques Demy
Manhattan - Woody Allen
Mulholland Dr. - David Lynch
My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud) - Eric Rohmer
Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) - Alain Resnais
The Gold Rush - Charlie Chaplin
Scarface - Howard Hawks
Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio de Sica
Napoléon - Abel Gance
Top Directors
Charles Laughton only directed one film in his career, but with the votes for that film he managed to beat out Preminger, McCarey, Cukor and Tati in the rankings for most votes. Well done, Chuck. (One wonders if Laughton would have split his vote had gone on to direct 10 more projects. But we'll never know.)
Jean Renoir 155
Alfred Hitchcock 146
Fritz Lang 143
Charles Chaplin 128
John Ford 124
Orson Welles 114
Ingmar Bergman 113
Luis Buñuel 110
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau 108
Howard Hawks 105
Jean-Luc Godard 99
Federico Fellini 99
Ernst Lubitsch 98
Luchino Visconti 90
Robert Bresson 90
Kenji Mizoguchi 87
Akira Kurosawa 86
Max Ophuls 83
Alain Resnais 82
Carl Theodor Dreyer 76
François Truffaut 75
Stanley Kubrick 75
Vincente Minnelli 73
Joseph Mankiewicz 73
Roberto Rosselini 73
Josef von Sternberg 69
Michelangelo Antonioni 67
S. M. Eisenstein 65
Marcel Carné 64
Billy Wilder 61
Buster Keaton 61
Yasujiro Ozu 60
Eric von Stroheim 60
John Huston 59
Elia Kazan 55
King Vidor 53
David Wark Griffith 53
Maurice Pialat 52
Jean Vigo 51
Nicholas Ray 49
Jacques Becker 48
Woody Allen 48
Francis Ford Coppola 47
Jacques Demy 47
Charles Laughton 47
Jacques Tati 46
Otto Preminger 45
Leo McCarey 45
George Cukor 44
Raoul Walsh 44
Saturday, November 29, 2008
The Rick Roll to End All Rick Rolls?
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
'The General' vs. 'The General'
Update: A few special features were left out of the "only on MK2" section. They're all there now.
I sit in on DVDTalk's Silent DVD column this week with a review of Kino's new edition of Buster Keaton's "The General." This edition aims to become the quintessential release, with a new HD transfer from the original camera negative and three different accompaniment tracks including a new 5.1 version of the beloved Carl Davis score from Keven Brownlow's Thames Silents TV broadcast.
Being the parade-rainer I am, I was compelled to point out that the French company MK2 also did an HD transfer of the film back in 2004, and spent more time on frame-by-frame cleanup, whereas the Kino edition shows the (relatively light) wear and decay of the source material. Now, some silent film aficionados believe that transfers shouldn't be overly repaired, but simply capture the surviving documents. I'm of the opinion that, for a home presentation like this, if you can make the film look as close to how it looked when Keaton premiered it, then that's the way to go. Anyway, read the review, which has a lot more on the film beyond PQ nitpicking. And if you're thinking about going PAL region 2 for the MK2 (I recommend the UK Cinema Club release), here's a comparison of the two editions.
Transfers
KINO: Color-tinted HD transfer — Some of Keaton's compositions are particularly gorgeous in sepia tone, but I'm still partial to black-and-white, mainly when it comes to the blue nighttime scenes. Great detail and crisp image.
MK2: Black-and-white HD transfer — Brilliant image, free of the scratches and decay on most silent prints. Would be extremely difficult to top.
BOTH EDITIONS feature high-definition transfers, but neither companies will give us the film on a damn HD format. At least put it on iTunes, for crying out loud!
Scores
KINO: Carl Davis score performed by Thames Silent Orchestra (5.1 and stereo), Organ score by Lee Irwin — Davis's score is involving, exciting, and sounds great. Irwin's score is a nice bonus.
MK2: Joe Hisaishi score performed by Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra (5.1) — Hisaishi's beautiful score features some inspired moments, although at certain times is a bit detached from the film.
BOTH EDITIONS: The Robert Israel score that's on, like, every edition of "The General" ever (not really, but this one's been around for a while, and is featured on Kino's previous edition).
Special Features
BOTH EDITIONS:
Filmed introduction by Orson Welles — The great Welles offers an introduction that's at times insightful and astute, and always comedically Wellesian. Clips from "Coney Island" and "Cops" illustrate Keaton's development. (The Kino version maintains the old TV titles and credits for "The Silent Years: From the Collection of Paul Killiam," while the MK2 version doesn't.) (12:00)
Behind-the-scenes home movie footage (called "Filming the General" on MK2) — an interesting minute's worth of behind-the-scenes footage. Neither company makes an effort to add context via editing or voiceover.
(1:00)
MK2 Only:
"The Railroader" (actually "The Railrodder") — This 25-minute Canadian promotional short from 1965 is known as one of Keaton's most Keatonesque works from his later life. It and the documentary of its making (see below) give the MK2 release the upper hand, unless you already own them.
"Buster Keaton Rides Again" An excellent chronicle of the making of "The Railrodder." The film offers rare insight into Keaton's creative process, as well as a somewhat inaccurate history of his career. A great look at the man behind the stone face. (55:00)
Introduction by David Robinson — Robinson provides a nice overview of the film and its history, illustrated by clips and stills.
(5:00)
Featurette on movie restoration — The usual shots of original physical prints, the side-by-side comparisons, etc. (2:00)
Featurette on recording the 2004 score — This one is not subtitled in English, and features mainly footage of the recording process before some chanteuse shows up to sing a song about Johnny Gray to one of Hisaishi's themes.
(8:00)
Footage from the tinted version — In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, footage from the old transfer. (7:00)
Keaton filmography — Stills and clips from Keaton's Silent features. (11:00)
"The Return of The General" — 1962 publicity film documentary by the Louisville & Tennessee Railroad showcases the restored engine, which is featured in the present day on the Kino edition.
(11:00)
The trailer for "The Great Locomotive Chase" — Disney brought the same story that inspired "The General to the screen in 1956
"The Iron Mule" — This 1925 Al St. John silent two-reeler features the replica of the small, absurd train The Rocket that Keaton used in "Our Hospitality." The film (and its title) reference John Ford's "The Iron Horse" from the previous year. Keaton also appears, uncredited, as an Indian. (13:00)
"Alice's Tin Pony" — From Walt Disney's "Alice in Cartoonland" series, which combined animation with live-action photography, this 1925 short was also inspired by "The Iron Horse." (6:00)
Cinema Club distributed MK2's edition in the UK and includes a nice 24-page booklet with details on the film and the features, including the text of David Robinson's introduction. I understand that the French edition includes nice literature too—si tu parles français, naturellement!
KINO ONLY:
If you already own "The Railrodder" and "Buster Keaton Rides Again," Kino might have the edge.
Filmed introduction by Gloria Swanson — This clip from TV's "Silents Please" is amusing in a campy sort of way. (2:13)
A video tour of the authentic General, presented in association with the Southern Museum — See the General, learn its history and how it operates. (18:00)
A tour of the filming locations, presented by John Bengston, author of Silent Echoes — Bengston's detective work is always impressive. (4:30)
"The Buster Express" — Kino describes this as "A brisk montage of train gags from throughout Keaton's career," and that about sums it up. It's a fun, free-association montage, but certainly not essential. (5:45)
Finally, the disc features a gallery of promotional photos, lobby cards from various countries and production stills, including some from a sequence deleted from the film.
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
I sit in on DVDTalk's Silent DVD column this week with a review of Kino's new edition of Buster Keaton's "The General." This edition aims to become the quintessential release, with a new HD transfer from the original camera negative and three different accompaniment tracks including a new 5.1 version of the beloved Carl Davis score from Keven Brownlow's Thames Silents TV broadcast.
Being the parade-rainer I am, I was compelled to point out that the French company MK2 also did an HD transfer of the film back in 2004, and spent more time on frame-by-frame cleanup, whereas the Kino edition shows the (relatively light) wear and decay of the source material. Now, some silent film aficionados believe that transfers shouldn't be overly repaired, but simply capture the surviving documents. I'm of the opinion that, for a home presentation like this, if you can make the film look as close to how it looked when Keaton premiered it, then that's the way to go. Anyway, read the review, which has a lot more on the film beyond PQ nitpicking. And if you're thinking about going PAL region 2 for the MK2 (I recommend the UK Cinema Club release), here's a comparison of the two editions.
Transfers
KINO: Color-tinted HD transfer — Some of Keaton's compositions are particularly gorgeous in sepia tone, but I'm still partial to black-and-white, mainly when it comes to the blue nighttime scenes. Great detail and crisp image.
MK2: Black-and-white HD transfer — Brilliant image, free of the scratches and decay on most silent prints. Would be extremely difficult to top.
BOTH EDITIONS feature high-definition transfers, but neither companies will give us the film on a damn HD format. At least put it on iTunes, for crying out loud!
Scores
KINO: Carl Davis score performed by Thames Silent Orchestra (5.1 and stereo), Organ score by Lee Irwin — Davis's score is involving, exciting, and sounds great. Irwin's score is a nice bonus.
MK2: Joe Hisaishi score performed by Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra (5.1) — Hisaishi's beautiful score features some inspired moments, although at certain times is a bit detached from the film.
BOTH EDITIONS: The Robert Israel score that's on, like, every edition of "The General" ever (not really, but this one's been around for a while, and is featured on Kino's previous edition).
Special Features
BOTH EDITIONS:
Filmed introduction by Orson Welles — The great Welles offers an introduction that's at times insightful and astute, and always comedically Wellesian. Clips from "Coney Island" and "Cops" illustrate Keaton's development. (The Kino version maintains the old TV titles and credits for "The Silent Years: From the Collection of Paul Killiam," while the MK2 version doesn't.) (12:00)
Behind-the-scenes home movie footage (called "Filming the General" on MK2) — an interesting minute's worth of behind-the-scenes footage. Neither company makes an effort to add context via editing or voiceover.
(1:00)
MK2 Only:
"The Railroader" (actually "The Railrodder") — This 25-minute Canadian promotional short from 1965 is known as one of Keaton's most Keatonesque works from his later life. It and the documentary of its making (see below) give the MK2 release the upper hand, unless you already own them.
"Buster Keaton Rides Again" An excellent chronicle of the making of "The Railrodder." The film offers rare insight into Keaton's creative process, as well as a somewhat inaccurate history of his career. A great look at the man behind the stone face. (55:00)
Introduction by David Robinson — Robinson provides a nice overview of the film and its history, illustrated by clips and stills.
(5:00)
Featurette on movie restoration — The usual shots of original physical prints, the side-by-side comparisons, etc. (2:00)
Featurette on recording the 2004 score — This one is not subtitled in English, and features mainly footage of the recording process before some chanteuse shows up to sing a song about Johnny Gray to one of Hisaishi's themes.
(8:00)
Footage from the tinted version — In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, footage from the old transfer. (7:00)
Keaton filmography — Stills and clips from Keaton's Silent features. (11:00)
"The Return of The General" — 1962 publicity film documentary by the Louisville & Tennessee Railroad showcases the restored engine, which is featured in the present day on the Kino edition.
(11:00)
The trailer for "The Great Locomotive Chase" — Disney brought the same story that inspired "The General to the screen in 1956
"The Iron Mule" — This 1925 Al St. John silent two-reeler features the replica of the small, absurd train The Rocket that Keaton used in "Our Hospitality." The film (and its title) reference John Ford's "The Iron Horse" from the previous year. Keaton also appears, uncredited, as an Indian. (13:00)
"Alice's Tin Pony" — From Walt Disney's "Alice in Cartoonland" series, which combined animation with live-action photography, this 1925 short was also inspired by "The Iron Horse." (6:00)
Cinema Club distributed MK2's edition in the UK and includes a nice 24-page booklet with details on the film and the features, including the text of David Robinson's introduction. I understand that the French edition includes nice literature too—si tu parles français, naturellement!
KINO ONLY:
If you already own "The Railrodder" and "Buster Keaton Rides Again," Kino might have the edge.
Filmed introduction by Gloria Swanson — This clip from TV's "Silents Please" is amusing in a campy sort of way. (2:13)
A video tour of the authentic General, presented in association with the Southern Museum — See the General, learn its history and how it operates. (18:00)
A tour of the filming locations, presented by John Bengston, author of Silent Echoes — Bengston's detective work is always impressive. (4:30)
"The Buster Express" — Kino describes this as "A brisk montage of train gags from throughout Keaton's career," and that about sums it up. It's a fun, free-association montage, but certainly not essential. (5:45)
Finally, the disc features a gallery of promotional photos, lobby cards from various countries and production stills, including some from a sequence deleted from the film.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Insert Sad Joke About 'Pushing Daisies' Possibly Pushing Up Daisies
Remember "Pushing Daisies," the best new show on TV last year? It seems that the writer's strike, coupled with ABC's dumbass decision not to bring it back for some spring episodes after the strike ended, halted the show's momentum. It hasn't been doing so hot in the ratings department, despite some very good episodes and intriguing plot developments.
The show stars Lee Pace as a pie maker who can bring the dead back to life—with a few catches—and has one of the most unique, eye-popping visual schemes on television.
Production just wrapped on the first 13 episodes of season 2 (season 1 only had nine), and ABC doesn't seem likely to order more.
An ABC spokesperson said no decision has been made, and series creator Bryan Fuller said he has not heard a verdict.
"Our ABC exec was on the set last night saying they are still swinging in the fight to keep 'Daisies' on the air," Fuller said. "Spirits are high and hopeful and everyone here is very proud of our work and this show."
…
Fuller previously expressed interest in returning to the writing staff of NBC's "Heroes" if "Daisies" departs. He also has indicated that he would finish this season's story lines in comic book form.
Sadly, it sounds like the show either needs a ratings boost, fast, or it'll need it's own pie maker to bring it back to life. (Sorry! But how could I resist?)
Friday, November 14, 2008
A Tale of Two Marriages
Since the passing of California's Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage, the discussion in Utah (and the rest of the country) has grown louder than ever. It's a dialogue that we should have engaged in so ferociously prior to the election.
Utah has been particularly hopping. The state is home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose leadership encouraged its members across the country to donate more than $20 million to the Yes on Prop 8 cause. During the many conversations I've had over the past couple weeks, two marriages keep popping up in my head, and I wonder which one most people would prefer to exist in their neighborhood.
Next door, two people love each other dearly and decide to get married and spend their lives together in a caring relationship. There will be good times and bad times, and the couple hopes that they will make it through the tough parts and live a happy life together. Because this couple happens to consist of two men or two women, many consider this marriage an abomination and lobby to legally erase it from existence.
A few houses down the street, another relationship, this time heterosexual, plays out, but it veils a deep secret. The man is so ashamed of his homosexuality and so pressured by the bigotry facing homosexuals that he stays in the closet. To prove something to himself and others, he marries a woman whom he doubtlessly cares about, but the sexual desire isn't there, no matter how much he wants it to be. The woman does her best to ignore the signs that everything isn't right, and hides her unhappiness. They have some children and love them, but a nagging feeling haunts both husband and wife, because something is missing.
Unwilling to abandon his wife and unable to form a meaningful homosexual relationship, the man instead finds himself seeking meaningless, anonymous sex in public restrooms and highway rest stops. This goes on for some time, until one day an undercover police officer apprehends him in the act. Now his family is shattered, his children confused and ridiculed, his wife heartbroken, his career possibly ruined.
If he happens to be a public figure, like a church leader or a politician, then the embarrassment plays out in public. His traumatized and humiliated wife must stand beside him as he delivers a speech for a media circus press conferences.
And here's where I get a bit confused: Which of these scenarios is supposed to damage the sanctity of marriage?
The crux of anti-gay-marriage rhetoric is based on falsehoods. Some people who belong to faiths that oppose marriage equality tell us that if the government acknowledges gay marriage, that their religion must perform marriages that they don't believe in. The people who make these claims are at best misinformed and at worst spreading fear-mongering that they know to be lies.
I have a hard time believing that the people who engineer this messaging actually believe it. But it's stunning how successfully they distort the issue of religious rights to the opposite of the truth. No church would be forced to conduct weddings that it doesn't believe in. Hell, your religion could consider marriage to be the union of the two sides of an Oreo cookie, bonded by cream. No one forced the LDS church to allow blacks into the priesthood before the leadership decided to do so in 1978. That's what freedom of religion means. However, anti-gay legislation invalidates the practices of the many religions that do believe in marriage equality. I doubt Mormons would like it if California said, "You can get married in the temple, but don't expect us to acknowledge it!"
Prop 8 and other anti-gay legislation bring religion into secular law—exactly where it shouldn't be. No one can stop a religion from disliking a minority population's way of life—or the majority's way of life—even if that way of life in no way affects the religion or its members. But Prop 8 does strip homosexuals of their rights. And no matter how you feel about the homosexual lifestyle, it's something to consider before taking a stance on any law that deprives others of their rights.
bxAv110
bxAv110
bxAv110
Utah has been particularly hopping. The state is home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose leadership encouraged its members across the country to donate more than $20 million to the Yes on Prop 8 cause. During the many conversations I've had over the past couple weeks, two marriages keep popping up in my head, and I wonder which one most people would prefer to exist in their neighborhood.
Next door, two people love each other dearly and decide to get married and spend their lives together in a caring relationship. There will be good times and bad times, and the couple hopes that they will make it through the tough parts and live a happy life together. Because this couple happens to consist of two men or two women, many consider this marriage an abomination and lobby to legally erase it from existence.
A few houses down the street, another relationship, this time heterosexual, plays out, but it veils a deep secret. The man is so ashamed of his homosexuality and so pressured by the bigotry facing homosexuals that he stays in the closet. To prove something to himself and others, he marries a woman whom he doubtlessly cares about, but the sexual desire isn't there, no matter how much he wants it to be. The woman does her best to ignore the signs that everything isn't right, and hides her unhappiness. They have some children and love them, but a nagging feeling haunts both husband and wife, because something is missing.
Unwilling to abandon his wife and unable to form a meaningful homosexual relationship, the man instead finds himself seeking meaningless, anonymous sex in public restrooms and highway rest stops. This goes on for some time, until one day an undercover police officer apprehends him in the act. Now his family is shattered, his children confused and ridiculed, his wife heartbroken, his career possibly ruined.
If he happens to be a public figure, like a church leader or a politician, then the embarrassment plays out in public. His traumatized and humiliated wife must stand beside him as he delivers a speech for a media circus press conferences.
And here's where I get a bit confused: Which of these scenarios is supposed to damage the sanctity of marriage?
The crux of anti-gay-marriage rhetoric is based on falsehoods. Some people who belong to faiths that oppose marriage equality tell us that if the government acknowledges gay marriage, that their religion must perform marriages that they don't believe in. The people who make these claims are at best misinformed and at worst spreading fear-mongering that they know to be lies.
I have a hard time believing that the people who engineer this messaging actually believe it. But it's stunning how successfully they distort the issue of religious rights to the opposite of the truth. No church would be forced to conduct weddings that it doesn't believe in. Hell, your religion could consider marriage to be the union of the two sides of an Oreo cookie, bonded by cream. No one forced the LDS church to allow blacks into the priesthood before the leadership decided to do so in 1978. That's what freedom of religion means. However, anti-gay legislation invalidates the practices of the many religions that do believe in marriage equality. I doubt Mormons would like it if California said, "You can get married in the temple, but don't expect us to acknowledge it!"
Prop 8 and other anti-gay legislation bring religion into secular law—exactly where it shouldn't be. No one can stop a religion from disliking a minority population's way of life—or the majority's way of life—even if that way of life in no way affects the religion or its members. But Prop 8 does strip homosexuals of their rights. And no matter how you feel about the homosexual lifestyle, it's something to consider before taking a stance on any law that deprives others of their rights.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
