Celebration

This week is a time for celebration.  I’m an uncle for the second time, and at long last I’m done with Chemistry.  I know it was only an 8 week course but it felt like a full time job and was absolute torture.  This means one thing in particular, more time for movies.  I’ve seen the amount of movies pile up in my to watch bin without any sign of me catching up.  I aim to change that over the next couple of weeks, at least until the inevitable next classes begin, but let’s not look that far into the future. 

Still from Cosmic Ray (1962)

I haven’t been completely without cinema in this time.  I have been making an effort to tackle a more diverse group of films, in other words more experimental and documentary films, and starting very soon quite a few films from South America.  Of the better films I’ve been watching are the films of Bruce Conner.  For those who don’t know who Bruce Conner is go ahead and google that.  In particular I got to watch A Movie (1958) and Cosmic Ray (1962) which are two of the best experimental films I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey

Less impressive was the Andy Warhol film projects I watched.  First up was Blow Job, which despite its awesome title is simple a shot of a guys face while he’s presumably receiving fellatio.  The fact that the camera never pans down and that’s all we see, it’s just the title and a sort of suggestive idea.  Not a bad concept, a bit of a tease, but horribly executed.  All silent and unnecessarily long 35 minutes it gets old quick.  This is nothing compared to his even longer and more pointless films like Sleep and Empire which are static shots of a person sleeping and the Empire State Building for hours.  He might be considered a genius in the art world, but the man was not much of a filmmaker.  He abandoned directing to Paul Morrissey later on, and they made something of a trilogy with the films Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Heat (1972). 

I’ve just recently watched both Flesh and Trash and well they aren’t terrible by some standards.  After all the rather frank depiction of sex and the odd characters make them an interesting if not a horribly chaotic experience.  Trash is in many ways a much, much better film than Flesh.  Don’t think I’m calling it a masterpiece but it achieves something that Flesh doesn’t come close to, which is to say it accomplishes something.  Flesh is a mess of a would be hustler trying to get money for a friends abortion and well it’s a bit boring, and very uneven.  Trash might not have a more coherent plot structure in any traditional sense but the films depiction of drugs is incredible.  Who would think that the greatest endorsement not to do drugs would come from an Andy Warhol film?  Rather than preach about drugs and dramatize horrible consequences instead Warhol/Morrissey allow the film to play out matter of factly.  Joe finds himself unable to get an erection despite the never ending amount of people who want to have sex with him.  He lives with a tranny named Holly (yes the same one from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”) who spends his/her time digging through trash bins and collecting various discarded pieces of furniture. 

Opening scene from Trash (1970)

Joe spends his days trying to get more dope and his days are centered around such.  He meets some strange, and at times horribly annoying females who are looking more for sex but Joe simply shoots up and passes out.  He even gets caught trying to rob an apartment in a very feeble attempt to get money for more drugs.  He’s cleaned up and even still can’t perform after given some heroin to shoot.  There is a fascination that many of the outside people he runs into have for his drug problem.  These people, many of whom are from more affluent backgrounds look at him with curiosity, wondering what it’s like to see someone shoot up, only to be naturally horrified by the experience and openly condemning the man they just watched plunge deeper into addiction.  The film ends with a hilarious exchange with Holly, Joe, and a welfare case worker that needs to be seen to be believed.  I can easily say though this film would do more to discourage people from using heroin than any after school special I’ve ever seen.

The Dark Knight Rises

Ok, of course you knew I saw this, how could I wait more than 24 hours after it came out to check out the most anticipated film of the year, or the last four years really.  Unfortunately some jack ass in Colorado decided to violate everything we hold dear about the cinema and I sincerely, honestly hope that someone mutilates his genitals, peels his flesh off, and makes him eat his own dick.  Unfortunately the Bill of Rights has a thing against “cruel and unusual punishment” so I guess I just have to hope for an angry mob to bust him out, but that won’t happen so whatever I’ll stop talking about it now, because it will only make me more upset.

The film itself was excellent.  I won’t say anything about the plot because what rock have you been living under that you either A:  Haven’t already seen the film or; B:  Haven’t already read enough reviews/commentary online?  Perhaps the only complaint is that Bane was about as hard to understand as I thought he'd be, gonna need subtitles next time. 

MMMMM Anne Hathaway

Now at first I have to sigh because I know this is the end of an era.  Not only will this be the last Batman movie directed by Christopher Nolan, it might very well be the last great super hero movie period.  As the genre keeps expanding the desire to make more crowd pleasing special effects laden films is going to keep anyone from trying to make the dark, philosophical films that Nolan and company were trying here.  DC and Warner Bros are attempting to make their own Justice League movie that they very foolishly believe can compete with the Avengers franchise, so don’t be surprised if Batman is back on the big screen very, very soon in a much sillier environment.  There’s no place for Nolan’s Batman in the DC Universe.  You can’t put this Batman in the same world as Superman or Green Lantern because that would ruin damn near everything great about these films.  Batman is great because he’s a man, an extraordinary one, but still a man, and to add him to that universe can work for comics because it’s always been like that, but it’s going to fail miserably in film.  So expect the next Batman movie to be more like Joel Schumacher than Nolan.

There are some bright spots however.  Another X-Men movie should be coming out at some point.  Mathew Vaughn’s X-Men First Class showed that Marvel can make great super hero movies with plenty of subtext.  I anticipate the next film should be damn good, I hope at least.  First Class was instantly better than all three of the previous X-Men films plus the Wolverine movie combined.  I just hope they don’t fuck it up. 

We can also look forward to Christopher Nolan’s next film.  Inception was damn fantastic, and Nolan has proven that he can not only create original works of art, but actually make a fortune in the process for any studio that wants to back him.  So he’ll probably have James Cameron like control and budgets the next time around and I can’t wait to see what he does (provided it’s nothing at all like Avatar). 

Anyways expect more blogage in the coming weeks, just wanted to post a bit here. 

Film Journal 2012 - June

Well another month down and we are halfway to 2013, are you excited yet?  Didn’t think so, anyways I’ll refrain from making another lame excuse but as evidence from the list of films below this was hardly a productive month for movie watching.  You will notice at least one trend particularly by the end of the month so oh boy stay tuned.  Since I don’t seem to be able to get too many blogs in per month, the journal is becoming my one stop shop for all things film.

Not much at all seen this month in general.  Towards the end sure plenty of horror films, a couple sporadic Rosenbaum films and a handful of films that I had no real rhyme or reason to why I watched them.  Sadly my only trip to the movie theater in the past month was to see Moonrise Kingdom.  Now it’s not bad that I saw this film so don’t misunderstand, it’s just that happens to be the only film I saw in the theater.  Not to say I didn’t attempt to see Prometheus in theaters, but was told my free movie pass wouldn’t be accepted even after two weeks of the movie being out, so to hell with Regal, might as well just throw out your Regal Crown Club card because they will tell you when and where you can actually use the free movies you spent a shitload of money to earn, but that’s another story.

I began and ended the month with an A-List selection.  We began things with The Bank Dick and finished everything off with The Godfather II.  So to carry on my policy of writing about each of the NSFC films we watch, I’ll just start there and do away with the formalities.

The Bank Dick (1940)

W. C. Fields has long since been one of those “critics darlings” if such a term can apply to someone like Fields.  As low brow and vaudeville as he is I’ve scarcely encountered any critic, at least any older critic who doesn’t love Fields and wouldn’t rank several of his films amongst their very favorites.  The Bank Dick for many is the de-facto best film Fields ever made.  Like many of his films Fields wrote the screenplay under the ridiculously silly alias of Mahatma Kane Jeeves.  Also like many of his other films he gives his own character a rather silly name, here Egbert Souse, which he constantly reminds anyone in earshot how to pronounce it.  His family of course hates him and he’s berated by an evil little daughter that proves that violence towards children can be hilarious, as well as a wife and mother in law who are clearly in league with the devil.  His one saving grace is a teenage daughter who actually gives him a break and whose fiance works at the bank that hires Fields to be security after he accidentally apprehends some bank robbers.  The gags are funny and the plot rather silly, but as far as Fields’ vehicles this is easily the most well balanced.  Most of the gags work, and the laughs are still quite good, so along with It’s a Gift this is definitely the place to start for those of you born after 1970 who have no idea who the hell W. C. Fields is. 

The Godfather Part 2 (1974)

The summer before I “discovered” great cinema the American Film Institute unveiled their 100 greatest American film list on TV.  A local video store known as Thumbs Up Video (RIP) had a section dedicated to the films on the list.  After spending nearly every day that summer watching countless horror films, we decided maybe we could check out one or two of these films, and among those were the three Godfather films.  Ironically I don’t think I’ve seen Part 3 since that summer of 1998.  Many people would understand why I feel that way.  From day one though I thought that the first Godfather film was easily the best.  As much as I loved the sequel over time I never thought there was any competition as to which was the better film.  I’ve probably seen the first twice as many times as Part 2, so I’m also far more familiar with it.  However as you may surmise that the more times you see these films the more things will start to clarify.  I highly doubt anyone can watch the first two Godfather films once and retain all the information as to the families and how everyone’s connected, keeping track of who tried to kill who, and so on.  It took maybe 3-4 viewings of the first film to really get things straightened out and well since this was about the 4th time seeing the sequel it makes sense that now it’s all into focus.  Now perhaps it’s the fact that I noticed a few “flaws” the last time I watched the first film, but this erased all of them, and inexplicably I may now consider this the better film, although that’s still up for debate.  Although we’ll get into that later, there’s a reason why this is the greatest sequel ever made.

Dare I say the best sequel ever made?

Oh the horror, the horror

Time Out London put together a list of the 100 Best Horror Films recently and well it got me thinking.  Well to be more accurate it got my brother thinking and he decided fuck it we know a lot of horror films why not do our own top 100 horror films list?  Well I’m always down for a list but this one will present some problems, such as:

1.  How do you define a horror film?  It’s easy to make a list of the 100 funniest films ever and simply put comedies in based on how they make you laugh.  Sure there are the unintentionally funny films that aren’t exactly comedies but may still count, but essentially if its funny its comedy.  Then there’s a Western which for the most part takes place out west, features some cowboys, six shooters, maybe some Indians, horses, and so on.  Horror gets way more complicated.  For starters we can’t simply make a list of the 100 “scariest” movies because well I have a penis so the list of movies that scare me consists of Paranormal Activity, and two films that traumatized me as a kid, The Shining and It.  So it’d be damn hard to come up with another 97 films for this list.  So well what is a horror film?

I have always found that studying a genre or trying to group films into specific genres is something for rather bad introductory film courses and quickly gets dismissed the more you know about film in general.  This is the reason why I’ve never offered any definitive list of any genre in the past.  However reading this list makes me think I should give it a shot.  So monster movies, ghost stories, and a few slashers certainly count as horror films.  What about say science fiction movies or films about serial killers.  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is nowhere near a slasher in the sense that Halloween is.  Psycho to many people is the definitive slasher film but I’ve always had a hard time even calling it a horror film.  Alien was in the top five on the Time Out list but it’s a science fiction film, are you starting to see the conundrum? 

Point is horror likes to mix and match with a few genres, which I guess is true of most genres.  So when is something a thriller and when is it horror?  When does a film edge more towards horror than science fiction?  Is Invasion of the Body Snatchers horror or is it pure sci-fi?  Are films like Silence of the Lambs and Se7en horor or just thrillers/mystery films?  If those serial killer films do count as horror, what about films about the search for serial killers like Memories of Murder or Zodiac?  You get where the grey area comes in.  How about an unclassifiable mindfuck like Lost Highway?  There are moments in the film that are absolutely terrifying and super creepy but is it a horror film, and if it isn’t just what the hell is it?  Eraserhead made Time Out’s list but several people have wondered if it is a horror film at all.  Ask my girlfriend and she’ll tell you it’s terrifying and freaked her out like few films ever have, so maybe it is horror after all.  For some reason Elem Klimov’s Come and See made their list at #100.  This is one of the best war movies ever made but never have I considered it a horror film.  Likewise this is not the first time Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf has been listed as a horror film, but I never got that vibe from it the first time I saw it.

So we’re left with a few options.  The easiest is to say if it counts for the Time Out list it’ll count for ours.  This takes the blame off of us, and if anyone thinks “that’s not a horror film” then we can point to this officially sanctioned ranking as our evidence.  The other is to simply go on IMDB (I don’t ever recommend visiting this site mind you), and looking at what tags the film has.  If it has a horror tag, then bam horror it is.  For example Se7en has a crime, thriller and mystery tag, but no horror.  Eraserhead has a horror, sci-fi and fantasy tag, but Lost Highway doesn’t.  I actually kind of prefer the outside party definition so as to remove the degree of ambiguity.  Anyways more research needs to be done, so look forward to this list in the next month or two.

…And the Big One

It may seem odd that a listoholic like myself last made a 100 Greatest Movie list back in 2003.  You might even search this blog and wonder if I hadn’t already made that list (that was a purely objective essential list that you were thinking of).  So I was thinking, it’s been damn near a decade why not update the big one? 

This idea isn’t anything new mind you.  I tried putting together a master list of films that would make my list, along with some titles that I wanted to revisit back in about 2007, so clearly this has taken me awhile to put together.  More recently I thought about putting this list together after doing all that individual research for my decade lists.  However I decided against it for a few reasons.  For starters those lists took over a year to put together and that was just too damn much research.  I was burnt out on list making.  Also I was under the impression that my readers would be burnt out on it too.  It’s one thing to see several lists but to see the same person make several lists featuring the same films in different rankings would be overkill.  The other main reason why I didn’t want to make the list then is I realized that I would need to do more research, particularly for the 1920s-40s.

So why now of all times?  Well maybe it’s the fact that Sight and Sound is putting out there top 10 this year, or maybe it’s the fact that I realized I’m rapidly approaching a decade anniversary of my own.  Knowing my own long winded research periods for this, if I start now perhaps by the end of the year I’ll be satisfied enough to make my list.  I realize that it really doesn’t matter and there is no reason at all to obsess as much as I do.

This time around I’ve decided to change the rules a bit.  Even if I made a list with “No rules whatsoever” I’d still need some parameters, it’s impossible not to.  Now there will be no restrictions like one film per director, or a minimum of 10 films per decade, etc.  However there are some other things to get straightened out.  Much of it is formulaic and carried over from previous lists, but there’s at least one modification worth mentioning.  For starters this list is going to be of feature length films, but without a length requirement.  So that if say a film is completely self contained in 50 minutes or so that counts, 30 or so not so much.  This is going to be predominantly a fiction film list, but those quasi-fictional films are going to count.  That is to say like always The Man With a Movie Camera will probably be on my list, and this time might be joined by Sans Soleil, or hell maybe even Hour of the Furnaces, or the Battle of Chile.

I should also point out a separate requirement exclusive to this list.  Years ago I decided that in order for a film to make my top ten I needed to see it at least twice.  Well in the 9 years+ since that list was done I figured I’ve revisited most of my favorites, and covered a lot more with the previous by-decade lists so why not apply the twice minimum rule to every film on the list?  This will help make sure that all my favorites have held up and that I’ve at least given them a second shot to see how they hold up.  For this reason there are a couple of films I still need to revisit but really not that much, and even some films I’ve seen three or more times I still feel like I need to revisit. 

Now on the subject of film series/sequels/trilogies/etc I’ve had a slight change of heart.  If you ask me it is downright silly to rank Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi separately, to me they are one collective super long film that rules beyond belief.  Likewise talking about The Godfather earlier I certainly intend on “cheating” and putting the first two together, which gets me to another point.  Just because a film series has x number of titles doesn’t mean x number of titles have to be on this list.  For example there’s a third Godfather film so what?  I don’t have to put that film on my list.  There are also three Star Wars films that will never under any circumstances ever come anywhere near making this list, complete saga my ass.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Now this can get interesting.  What if say I put Rocky and Rocky IV on my list and ignored the other four?  Sure why not I have the right.  Since I don’t like Rambo III nearly as much as the other three films I could leave this out.  The Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes are by far the two best films of that series, so why not those two and leave out Beneath, Escape, and Battle (we’re not getting into the two newer installments)?  Ok by my own convoluted system of grouping this could be acceptable, now the question is are any of those movies good enough to make my list? 

One group that I previously allowed that I no longer will is “thematic trilogies”.  Ever buy a boxed set of a trilogy and realize that the films although thematically linked actually have no linking narrative?  Hell even a few trilogies really stretch the “linking narrative concept” like say Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy.  Now this applies to two film series in particular, and they were both ranked pretty high some time ago.  For starters is Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name Trilogy.  Sure they’re all Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as a character without a name who wanders around, kills some people who are even bigger lowlifes than himself has a ridiculously awesome gun battle at the end, and so on.  However the character from Fistful of Dollars is not the same as the one in For a Few Dollars More or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  So I decided that this isn’t a real trilogy, at least not in the sense that Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings are.  The other is Andrzej Wajda’s WWII trilogy.  Now these actually take place at different times chronologically during WWII, but the characters don’t exactly transfer over into one continuous narrative, similar to Roberto Rossellini’s WWII trilogy.  So basically in the case of both of these would be trilogies I’ll simply have to put the separate films on or pick the best of the bunch to represent the lot of ’em. 

I should also point out that there won’t be any requirements about when a film was made.  If I say the 100 greatest films of all time all came out in the last ten years so be it, I’m not giving a five year span for films to “stand the test of time” or any such nonsense.  In this regard Tree of Life might be really, really high.  I also plan on waiting awhile before putting this list together because who knows just how damn good the new Dark Knight movie will be?   

6/4
The Bank Dick (1940) 9/10

6/7
You Are Not I (1981) 8/10

6/8
La fin du monde (The End of the World) (1930) 8/10
Home of the Brave (1949) 6/10

6/9
Repast - Meshi (1951) 8/10

6/10
Moonrise Kingdom (2012) 9/10

6/17
Her Man (1930) 6/10
The Window (1949) 7/10

6/19
Uzumaki (2000) 5/10

6/20
A Wife Confesses (1961) 9/10

6/22
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980) 7/10
Lazybones (1925) 6/10
Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir (1931) 6/10

6/23
Aventurera (1950) 8/10
The Omen (1976) 6/10

6/24
Re-Animator (1985) 6/10
An American Werewolf in London (1981) 7/10

6/26
Cloverfield (2007) 8/10

6/27
Season of the Witch (1972) 6/10

6/30
Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) 8/10
Possession (1981) 10/10
The Godfather Part 2 (1974) 10/10

Best Film of the Month - The Godfather Part 2
Worst Film of the Month - Uzumaki (not terrible but something had to take this dishonor)
New Discovery of the Month - Possession

Possession (1981) - Good Times in a subway station

Film Journal 2012 - May

Well the merry month of May has ended with 50 degree weather and cold rain, go figure after a record hot Memorial Day, gotta love living in Chicago.  Anyways a lot has transpired this month, sort of.  The Avengers has completely dominated the box office, and on a personal note this month is a bit of a swan song for me.  I’m not going anywhere per se, but starting next Monday I’ll be taking a chemistry course that promises to consume 4 hours a day, 4 days a week for 8 total weeks.  In other words that’s 16 hours a week that could be spent watching movies that will be conducting wonderful chemistry experiments and needless to say with a condensed schedule the still remaining free time will likely be consumed with studying and what not.  Anyways consider that an early warning if my next post is skimpy, sorry in advance.

A few of the usual trends continued this month.  Pretty much every movie watched with Kate was from the A-list yet again (we did go to see Avengers which she hated mainly because she hadn’t seen any of the other films and knew nothing of the original comic books, go figure).  I did knock a few random films off of Mr. Rosenbaum’s list, which is always a plus. 

More of 2012

One of the other goals this month was to slowly get my self acquainted with 2012’s releases.  I don’t want to be making the mad dash towards 50 in December so any progress I can make on that front now, all the better.  Some of the individual films I posted about in the last blog, some of the others well maybe I just didn’t think were as interesting.   I just noticed now that I forgot to write down when I saw Kill List, and up to this moment I was still debating how to rate it.  If everything goes to plan I may just watch it again tomorrow so maybe by next month my rating will change. 

Some of the newer films I’ve seen seemed a bit formulaic for their directors.  Werner Herzog seems intent to make nothing but documentaries these days which sometimes is interesting but I lament the fact that the man who directed Aguirre the Wrath of God seems to be largely done with fiction.  Into the Abyss was ok for what it was, but a documentary about someone on death row is never exactly an uplifting subject for a film. 

Speaking of formulaic, Hong Sang-Soo’s The Day He Arrives is the latest in his never ending series of identical films.  They seem to always involve a director who uses a little bullshit to sleep with a few women and then move on.  For some people he’s a genius for others quite repetitive.  I haven’t quite figured which side of the fence I’m on.  Many directors have made reputations for making essentially the same film over and over again (Ozu, Kaurismaki for sure) and well they’re prone to masterpieces.  By that standard though The Day He Arrives is neither better or worse than any of his other films. 

Hirokazu Kore-eda who reminds me every couple of years that he is Japan’s best filmmaker working today, is also prone to make a film or two that misses the extremely high mark he set for himself over a decade ago with Maborosi and After Life.  Kiseki, or I Wish as it’s been released as in some parts of the world returns to a focus primarily on kids (as Nobody Knows did), but it seems to lose that overarching specter of doom that hovered around that previous film.  In other words there doesn’t really seem to be any drama here which makes it recall some of Ozu’s films with children.  Somehow the lack of drama made the film seem to be just “ok”.

Aleksandr Sokurov completed his Quadrilogy (if that’s the word) with Faust.  It’s an interesting adaptation that makes the Mephistopheles character a money lender who never becomes an outright devil.  Considering the enormous amount of adaptations of this fable (some dating over 100 years ago) it’s hard to add much new to the fable.  Jan Svankmajer did an admirable job by adding his trademark stop motion animation to his 1994 adaptation, but here the film seems a bit of a mess.  Sokurov seems to largely abandon his complicated long takes to employ far more in-scene editing that I’m used to seeing in his films.  It still has that same bizarre visual look that only his films seem to have (well maybe Tarkovsky) but I felt it was missing that sort of surrealistic hypnotic pace of his other films. 

Speaking of true to form, Frederick Wiseman’s recent offering Crazy Horse is well same Wiseman different subject.  One of the strengths Wiseman has always had was picking interesting subjects.  Since his style of documentary has always been as observer, fly-on-the-wall, or what the French called cinema verite you need an interesting subject on screen.  So what did he pick, a strip club in France that makes the claim to be the best exotic club in the world.  Based on the amount of preparation and agonizing over seemingly insignificant choreography choices it seems the reputation is well earned.  For those simply meandering into this to see what the director of Titicut Follies, High School, Hospital, and Public Housing is up to you’d be surprised to find that there is a whole ton of nudity in it, much as I was surprised. 

One film that will be showing up on a LOT of critic’s top ten lists by the end of the year is Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film.  Co-directed by Mojtaba Mirtahasebi it’s a very interesting film.  For those unfamiliar Jafar Panahi has been one of Iran’s best directors of the last twenty years or so.  Like many great Iranian directors he has a knack for offending authority in his country.  After his last film, Offside came out the Iranian government decided that he would be banned from directing movies or writing screenplays for 30 years, and possibly serve a prison sentence as well as not be allowed to leave the country.  It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening in civilized society and considering how many Americans love to bitch about their freedoms being taken away this really puts it in perspective. 

Jafar Panahi attempting to create a set for the film he'll never make

This would explain the ironic title of the film.  Essentially Panahi films himself in his house on New Years and invites his director friend Mojtaba over.  He has an idea for a film that was stopped in mid-production following his ban and he wants to discuss the film.  He reads scenes from the script, tries to set up the action, but the majority of the film is simply him at home, passing the time, talking on the phone (about his upcoming trial among other things) and visibly displaying his frustration for his situation.  It’s a profound film based on the real life nature of the story, but I’m not sure it exactly makes it a great film.  Certainly an important one and well worth checking out if you ever get the chance.

The Problem With Al Jolson

You’ll also notice randomly that I watched Mammy, the fourth talking picture Al Jolson made.  This got me thinking ,and it led to a rather interesting debate on Mubi.com about a star’s image.  I made the point that I don’t think any star’s image has aged worse than Jolson.  This is for numerous reasons.  For starters his singing style which he was greatly known for is kind of atrocious.  Whenever we hear singers of the 20s and 30s with that nasally wine to their voice it instantly comes off as terribly hokey and sometimes just plain terrible.  This is the reason why Louis Armstrong created such a revolution by actually singing with feeling and rhythm.  The next mystery to his stardom is the fact that by the time he made it to the cinema he was kind of an ugly dude with thinning hair.  Not quite the matinee idol you would expect in your movie stars.  Although the biggest reason his films are looked at with dropped jawed awe is the fact that he is the best remembered relic of the long forgotten Minstrel Show. 

Can't resist the black face in the corner can they?

One of the great pop culture fads of the 19th and early 20th century was the Minstrel Show.  Performers (many of whom were actually black) performed in blackface, acted an ignorant fool and performed what were affectionately titled “coon songs”, seriously that was a genre of music, look it up.  The fact that Jolson was in The Jazz Singer which forever will be linked with the talking picture revolution, and the fact that he appeared in blackface in that film, and that well that was his trademark makes his legacy severely tarnished.  By all accounts a standup citizen, and The Jazz Singer was far more about being Jewish than offending black people, but like The Birth of a Nation some images just stick with you longer than others.  Mammy features Jolson in an all white minstrel show (in other words all white people in black face) and the plot bares a striking resemblance to that same year’s Rain or Shine (which if you’ll remember was named the worst film of the month for April). 

Now from most of the biographical evidence on Jolson he was a standup guy.  He was an early supporter of civil rights, and was known to go above and beyond to help black performers whenever he had the chance.  Perhaps you can call it white guilt, but he genuinely seemed to go out of his way to prove he wasn’t racist and quite the opposite.  Things like that get to be forgotten when viewing his films out of context.  Mammy was unique in regards to the fact that it featured a color sequence, which used Technicolor’s very problematic and awful looking two-strip process before they were able to make three-strip Technicolor films in 1935, but well feel free to look up the specifics of that on your own.  Warner was trying to bank on perhaps using the same star that helped launch talking pictures into launching color films, but the fad didn’t really catch on because of the enormous cost and the fact that it looked terrible.  Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp is generally regarded as the first proper color feature, and it’s not a bad film at that, but I’ve always been extremely fond of Miriam Hopkins, but that’s for another blog sometime.

A few people had some interesting rebuttals for the topic of whose image has aged worse.  Some people mentioned Mel Gibson, I heard Lindsay Lohan, I suggested Pauly Shore, someone mentioned Eddy Cantor, etc.  I didn’t really hear anyone that outright topped Jolson for the simple reason that at the end of the day, Mel Gibson might be a anti-Semite lunatic but 50 years from now Road Warrior, Lethal Weapon, Gallipoli, and Braveheart will still be pretty bad ass movies.  Plus it’s not like Gibson runs around in those movies purposely chasing down orthodox Jews (his Passion movie is another issue though).  The other “stars” well never were as popular as Jolson so by sheer magnitude of how baffling it might be that Pauly Shore was an a-list actor for several years he’ll be lucky to be remembered about as well as Franky Avalon. 

Speaking of The A-List

Well continuing my previous trend I’d like to discuss each of the films from that book that were viewed this month, starting with:

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

With the possible exception of Star Wars there is no film on this list that I’ve seen more than Bride.  As a kid it was my favorite Universal film simply because the main character was the monster, rather than Dr. Frankenstein as in the first film.  Over the years I’ve grown to love the little details of the film.  The bizarre canted angles, the over the top camp of some of the performances.  Admittedly Una O’Connor who plays Minnie used to make me want to stab my ears with rusty screwdrivers but I’ve since learned to comically chuckle at her screeching hysterics.  Ernest Thesiger is so blatantly queer that I gotta feel his performance style was a knowing wink at the audience by director James Whale (who was gay, they made a whole movie about it called Gods and Monsters check it out sometime).  Sure they changed the hell out of the novel, just like in the first film but so what, this is still the best damn monster movie there is.  Sad that following this film Universal would start to significantly limit the budgets of their horror movie franchises so in many ways this was the last real A-list horror film for decades.

Modern Times (1936)

I’m not going to lie I wanted to make an entire blog about this film.  As you can tell however life got in the way and before too long I figured this little paragraph would have to suffice.  Chaplin’s last “silent” film has been regarded over the years as one of his all time best.  It was one of the first three of his films that I saw and the one selected by the NSFC.  I hadn’t seen it for quite some time so I wondered how it would hold up.  After all I had actually seen it twice before but again since the last viewing was over a decade ago tastes do change.  I found this time around that the film I felt didn’t have enough social commentary was littered with it.  Earlier I felt his jokes went on too long and he milked all his gags longer than necessary, here I felt the pacing was perfect and the timing excellent.  A few moments I noticeably had to laugh out loud.  For instance when he goes to the docks and is looking for a wedge and proceeds to accidentally send an incomplete boat into the ocean to sink.  There is also the great scene where he becomes the oblivious leader of a communist rally, and the similar scene during the factory strike where he accidentally starts a riot by stepping on a board which launches a brick at a cop. 

Chaplin was right not to have the Tramp speak.  When it seems we may finally at last hear his voice it turns out to be a song in Italian sounding gibberish.  Everyone who speaks in the film is filtered through some electronic device, whether a monitor or a phonograph.  I didn’t notice until the third time I saw the film that the sheep in the beginning features one black sheep.  I started to think, were these all lambs being led to the slaughter, or was this pointing out that Chaplin was the one who didn’t fit into the herd, the outcast.  Were these sheep mindlessly being herded into society, as the cutaway of pedestrians pouring out of a subway terminal indicates, or is there some slightly more specific relation to the Tramp, who here is listed in the credits as A Factory Worker?  What seems at first glance like a blatantly bush league use of symbolism turns slightly ambiguous, or maybe I’m thinking too much about it.

Amongst the reviews and commentary on the film someone made the point that this is sort of a pre-quel to the film The Tramp which was the first appearance of cinema’s most recognizable character.  For the first and only time Chaplin allows himself to walk off in the sunset with someone else, the Gamine played by Paulette Goddard who many figured to be the only leading lady he ever had that was his equal.  I like looking of the film in the light of it as an origin story for the Tramp.  After all we never know how he got to be in his situation even in that first film.  Here he isn’t a tramp but the Factory Worker, and after a series of mishaps and comical failures to fit into society he hit’s the road holding his chin up with that trademark sense of optimism.  A fitting end to film’s most legendary character.

A fitting end for the tramp

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

One of the few times Steven Spielberg decided to write a screenplay resulted in this film, which was a monstrous hit, even by his standards.  Considered one of the few films to feature friendly aliens the tall thin alien figures with their odd shaped heads and huge black eyes turned out to be for many the universal standard of extra-terrestrials.  Spielberg recognizes his own limits as a writer and his extraordinary strengths as a visual storyteller by making the last half hour or so of the film almost completely wordless just focusing on visuals and sound.  It’s a spellbinding scene that does a lot to capture the wonder of the moment that goes by tremendously fast despite how much screen time it takes.  I don’t think this quite hits the mark of masterpiece like several of his other films.  Some of the scenes, particularly early on are a little on the boring side.  He gets a little personal dealing with his own broken home issues earlier.  He does a nice little homage to Howard Hawks and Robert Altman by constantly having the kids talk over everyone’s conversation much in the way kids really would interrupt everything.  I’ll give him credit, few films are so synonymous with mashed potatoes as this.

Metropolis (1927)

You knew eventually I’d finally get to see the most recent restoration.  I was amazed mainly because Kate stayed awake for the whole film, as she did with The Piano, trust me this is rare, but all kidding aside I didn’t get the feeling that the film was particularly different.  I was told that the majority of the science-fiction element was downplayed with this new cut, but it really seemed like the same old film to me.  Perhaps I don’t recall the other incarnations well enough to have noticed the specific differences.  The film is still pretty damn fantastic and although the acting still fits that laughably over the top style prevalent in so many silent films, particularly the German ones, this film does blend quite a few elements of the French school of Impressionism.  The attention to detail is incredible and there’s good reason why this is considered by many to be the most important science fiction film ever made.  The garden sequence early in the film has me wonder if this wasn’t a rather large influence on Adulous Huxley’s Brave New World, which has published about 5 years later. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Speaking of science fiction, now we’re talking.  Instantly one of my favorites and to me the high water mark of the respective alien invasion movies and the communist paranoia films that so aptly describe America’s pop culture in the Cold War.  What makes the film interesting is that in a lot of ways the aliens aren’t bad.  They simply take over their human host and everything is perfect.  Of course the element of love weakens the deal, but they make the argument that a world without emotion might be better after all.  It’s an obvious shot at communism, because of course true communists had no time for weak things like emotions (at least according to Americans in the 50s).  Don Siegel who would go on to direct Dirty Harry does a damn fine job and takes a page or two out of Robert Aldrich’s book with a wide array of disorienting tactics and plenty of interesting camera angles.  The story is rather simple but as it progresses it reveals more and more layers like the great movies usually do, easily one of my favorites ever.

The Piano (1993)

Thus we get to our last film of the month, or the last of the A-list.  Jane Campion’s film was that rare breed of art house box office success that earned several jokes on The Critic (how I miss Jay Sherman), as well as a few Oscars.  Odd to say but Anna Pacquin’s career has been all downhill ever since, because well how do you top an Oscar?  Holly Hunter impressed the shit out of people for her gimmick role and the fact that she not only did sign language but actually played piano in the film.  The film’s inclusion in the book is clearly the result of it’s director who along with Dorothy Arzner (Dance Girl Dance) is the only female filmmaker given a spot.  That said I was never a huge fan of The Piano, but after 12 years or so clearly I was due for another look.  Well I only found the film slightly better than the last time and it still seems to be a painfully self conscious attempt to beg for Academy recognition.  These are the types of films that come out every single year, sometimes they’re nauseating other times deserving, this falls somewhere in the middle.  I can make the argument that Sweetie and Angel at My Table were better films, but this was the one that really took off so I guess it’s status as an essential does more to say how mind bogglingly under-represented women are as directors. 

And there you have it, oh by the way, yes I watched a shit load of Buster Keaton shorts thanks to Kino’s newly put together 3-disc set.  As before I would have to give the edge to The Playhouse (which actually features Keaton in blackface as well as in every other role in the film) as his best short.  The Keaton-Chaplin debate however is still not entirely resolved.

5/1
Into the Abyss (2011) 7/10

5/7
The Day He Arrives (2011) 8/10
Glissements progressifs du plasir (1974) 8/10

5/8
The Visitors (1972) 6/10

5/9
From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) 8/10
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 10/10

5/10
Mammy (1930) 6/10
The Avengers (2012) 9/10

5/13
This is Not a Film (2011) 9/10
Faust (2011) 8/10

5/15
Modern Times (1936) 10/10

5/16
Routine Pleasures (1986) 7/10
Monsieur Lazhar (2011) 8/10
Kill List (2011) 9/10

5/17
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 9/10

5/18
Kiseki (2011) 8/10
Training Day (2001) 9/10
Machete (2009) 8/10

5/19
Metropolis (1927) 10/10

5/21
Two Arabian Knights (1927) 6/10

5/22
Crazy Horse (2011) 9/10

5/23
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) 10/10

5/25
The “High Sign” (1920) 8/10
One Week (1920) 8/10
Convict 13 (1920) 9/10
The Scarecrow (1920) 6/10
Neighbors (1921) 7/10
The Haunted House (1921) 8/10
Hard Luck (1921) 8/10

5/27
The Goat (1921) 8/10
The Play House (1921) 10/10
The Boat (1921) 6/10
The Paleface (1922) 8/10
Cops (1922) 9/10
My Wife’s Relations (1922) 7/10

5/28
The Blacksmith (1922) 8/10
The Frozen North (1922) 6/10
Day Dreams (1922) 8/10
The Electric House (1922) 8/10
The Balloonatic (1923) 8/10
The Love Nest (1923) 7/10
Hard to Handle (1933) 9/10

5/30
Narita:  Heta Village (1973) 8/10
The True Story of Jesse James (1957) 7/10
The Piano (1993) 8/10

5/31
Comedy of Innocence (2000) 7/10

Best Film of the Month - Bride of Frankenstein
Worst Film of the Month - None (tempted to give the nod to Mammy but it’s technical innovations are enough to let me be generous and give props to all)
Best New Discovery - Kill List

Seriously why haven't you seen Kill List yet?

The State of Cinema 2012 - Starring The Avengers

It’s mid-May and I’m sure by now you all are aware of this film called The Avengers.  Knowing my particular fondness for the nerdier side of life and in particular this group of super heroes you might be wondering if I was going to blog about the film, well I am, so get ready.

Marvel is a well built universe of comic characters.  Most of them reside in real locations, New York in particular, and throughout the history of the company characters have constantly appeared in each other’s respective stories.  Now I know DC has had plenty of Superman/Wonder Woman/Batman interactions and the Justice League has been around for damn near ever, but well DC has never been as cool as Marvel.  I’ve been waiting for an Avengers movie for the better part of my life, and when my particular favorite Iron Man came out in 2008 I was given the first little tease that the dream of an Avengers movie was soon to be a reality.

Now over the course of the last four years since Iron Man proved to be a hit there were a lot of things that could have happened to make this Avengers movie either never happen or be a disaster.  Not all Marvel movies are created equal (Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider which all seem to have gotten uncalled for sequels), but this new batch was sticking to the comic format of interacting.  It was clear that this was a long term plan and I’d have to anxiously wait for everyone to get their proper introduction before the big show.  It’s not really like the X-Men who were always a group and grew as superheroes and learned their powers as part of a group.  The Avengers were formed by a group of already established super heroes who when necessary would band together to tackle major problems. 

Some people might wonder why the Hulk would be part of this group.  After all he’s by far the least social member of the group and his power is generally a sign of severe chaos, but well way back in 1963 he was a charter member of the group.  Granted he quit almost immediately (by issue #2 to be accurate) but yes Hulk was an original Avenger.  So was Hank Pym (aka Ant Man, Giant Man, Yellowjacket, etc) and his wife The Wasp but well not too surprised they didn’t make the cut. 

The films although acceptable to a mass audience seem particularly geared with the nerd at heart.  We got a glimpse of Hawkeye in Thor as he grabbed a bow and arrow, Terrence Howard looked at the suit of iron and said “Next time”, here patience was the key.  My point is that not only do these films benefit from prior knowledge of the comics (the Leader origin in the last Hulk film, the Mandarin teaser in the first Iron Man), they also benefit from having seen all the previous films.  In the same way Star Wars helped build on what came before and how the pre-quels were supposed to serve as the backstory of things mentioned in the good films.  Walking into one of the random films might be fine, but it would be better if you saw what came before.  The fact that there virtually is no origin for the Avengers, simply the assembling (pardon the pun) of the group from previously established characters.  It helps allow the film to dig into the action more or less because by now we should know all about S.H.I.E.L.D and Nick Fury, we’ve seen Loki in action, and we know all about the cosmic cube (or whatever they decided to change the name to here), the fact that Captain America was thawed out, Hulk and his knowledge of gamma radiation, Iron Man and his self sustaining energy source, etc.  Likewise without knowledge of these things, a few times you might be inclined to scratch your head.

This is in direct contrast to last year’s X-Men:  First Class which went back to establish the group and how the mutants fit on each side.  Which made it infinitely better than the first X-Men film made in 2000 which seemed to skip right past a lot of those little details that made the last film so fantastic.  So perhaps because I'm measuring the film on a different level that I hesitate to say it is a masterpiece.  For once though I do feel like Hulk in CGI form just might work, although I still would prefer some juiced up body builder to play him.

Now I’ll admit the time I started writing this and the time I’m posting it has turned out to be quite a difference so if I’m re-treading on familiar ground my apologies.  As we hit Memorial Day, The Avengers has finally been toppled at the box office by a rather unwarranted Men In Black sequel, but whatever, does anyone outside of a movie studio give a shit about box office these days?  The thing I was reading in a recent Tribune article mentioned that The Avengers was crippling the competition as films like The Dictator, Dark Shadows and Battleship in particular opened to disappointing returns.  Well I wanted to mention this and say that it is hardly the fact that The Avengers is just this all powerful beast that’s keeping those films from finding their audience, the fact is no one really seems to give a crap about those films.

For starters The Avengers was an idea as a film that’s been brewing for a good four years, meaning in that time you’ve gotten little teasers and slowly building to a monumental release.  Not to mention even without the prior film’s tying in I’d still be stoked as shit for an Avengers movie simply because I’ve been an avid comic fan for the majority of my life.  So let’s look at these other three films and why they aren’t living up to expectations:

The Dictator - I’ll be honest I actually do want to see this.  For starters I didn’t even know when it was released.  Avengers I had my calendar marked for months waiting for it, and well I’ll be certainly on top of the next Batman film when that comes out.  Now this isn’t anything new with Mr. Cohen’s films.  Borat I saw probably two months after it was released, and was one of only two people in the theater.  Bruno I likewise saw several weeks after release so you might say for various reasons I’ve never made a point of catching his films opening weekend, despite the fact that I am a fan.  Other people I know have mentioned that the film looked rather terrible in previews and the fact that the character is an entirely new one (as opposed to his other three characters that came from Da Ali G Show) it doesn’t have a built in fan base or familiarity with it.  Instead of seeing Bruno or Borat because of the skits with those characters on the show, here you’d be seeing it largely because you liked what he did before, completely separate of this character.  Truthfully the film seems to be making steady money, so if anyone thought this would be some $300 million juggernaut they were probably kidding themselves.

Dark Shadows - Where do I begin?  Ok there are plenty of people of the older generation, or at least my parents and anyone in their late 50s-early 60s that remember the soap opera with vampires from it’s original run.  Perhaps you have a fondness for it, or even remember the prime time reboot of the show in the early 90s.  Ok but that’s where the familiarity ends, I can’t imagine too many people thinking that would be a fantastic thing to drag up for another reboot on the big screen.  Then we have the “please make them stop” combo of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.  Ok, Edward Scissorhands was great and so was Ed Wood but can you honestly say another one of their collaborations was spectacular?  The Corpse Bride was the only remotely original idea these two have made in the past decade, and Tim Burton’s best film of the last 15 years is not surprisingly the only one made without Mr. Depp (Big Fish, go see it if you haven’t).  This is simply another reminder that once upon a time Tim Burton used to have a great vision and was a clever inventive filmmaker.  Now he simply rehashes someone else’s idea, casts his wife and Mr. Depp and proceeds to put him in pale creepy makeup and act eccentric.  Considering how boring and downright bad Sweeney Todd and Alice in Wonderland were, I’m giving up on Mr. Burton for now.  I mean how many times can you be burned with the same lackluster duo.  I mean Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have been churning out gold for the past decade, but even they decided to take a break while Scorsese made Hugo, but well comparing any director to Scorsese isn’t exactly fair.  This film bombing is simply inevitable.  Up next for Tim Burton, another remake, this time of his own film Frankenweenie.  I mean really how long before he decides to remake Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure with a 56 year old Johnny Depp?  I’m shuddering because I could totally see him doing it.

Battleship - Ok in the long line of movie based on board games we pretty much have Clue and  . . . . Ok so maybe the sub-genre of board games turned into movies is about as remarkable as video games turned into movies, so this one is really a head scratcher.  Let’s make a movie about the game battleship but let’s put aliens in it, wtf?  Who comes up with this shit and who decides it’s a good idea.  It’s like someone did some market research and realized their studio somehow bought out Milton Bradley at some point and wondered if those games could make good movies, then they got a focus group together and decided that aliens are cool, and people seem to really like this Rihanna singer, so let’s throw it all together and make a big pile of putrid filth and charge people $12 a pop to torture themselves.  Well apparently overseas the movie is going considerably better, so much for the rest of the world having better taste than Americans.  I admit I only saw one preview for the film but I really, really wanted to wash my eyes out with bleach after those five minutes of agony.  I’m not sure I’ve seen a film look worse since Jack and Jill. 

So how could the Avengers bury all this “competition” well I’m amazed these films made any money.  Now who knows if Rock of Ages can clean up?

Is there hope?

Well around the mid-point of the year I find it necessary to offer some insight as to the best films I’ve seen thus far.  Typically I expect to find a couple of decent pictures by this point but well pickens are slim this time around.  In fact the few good films that can be considered 2012 releases I actually saw last year.  So I’ll offer a few recommendations of films that good or great are at least worth watching.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia - Ok I’ll come right out and say it, I didn’t get it.  This film can try your patience as not a lot happens in any dramatic sense.  Incredibly long shots and scenes of real time boring police procedural work, it does start to slowly build to something and if you have the patience to get through it you will be rewarded, but it’s a film I somewhat hesitate to recommend because well it’s not for everyone.  If you saw Distant or Climates and enjoyed them, this would be worth checking out if you’ve never heard of those films, rent them first then decide if you want to proceed to this.

The Kid with a Bike - Belgium’s Dardenne brothers have been making neo-realist dramas for quite awhile now.  Maybe you saw La Promesse, Rosetta, L’enfant, The Son, or Lorna’s Silence but either way they’ve done some damn good work.  I was particularly fond of Lorna’s Silence and it just missed my top 10 in 2009.  This film damn near made my top ten from 2011 until I realized that technically it’s a 2012 release, but sometimes foreign DVDs make their way here before an American distributor decides to release a film.  Opinion on this film is somewhat divided, but I consider it one of their strongest efforts.

The Turin House - Well if you know who Bela Tarr is I don’t need to say anything else about this film.  If you don’t well you may or may not find this to be a groundbreaking masterpiece.  Again Tarr loves his infinitely long takes, and in 1987 he pretty much decided he was never going to shoot a film in color again.  So if you’re partial to slow paced black and white Eastern European films with extraordinary cinematography he might just turn out to be your favorite director.  I’ve seen his 7 ½ hour Satantango twice so that might tell you how much I enjoy even his longest work.  I found this film to fit in with his canon quite well, some thinking it’s his finest film in ages, and most agreeing it was an improvement over The Man From London.  Either way I’d watch this 25 times before I sit through even the trailer for Battleship again.

Kill List - This film has me in a bind.  I can’t recall the last time I saw a film where I really, really, really wanted to discuss it with every living soul I could find, but this is that film.  Unfortunately I don’t personally know anyone else who has seen the film.  This puts me in a bind.  I’m not sure if it’s a masterpiece, and despite the brief description I read of the film before watching it, I wasn’t entirely convinced it was a horror film.  When something new, original, and ambiguous hits the horror movie circuit people generally seem to lose their minds over it.  After all no genre is more starved for anything worthwhile quite like horror.  This is why some people may go overboard with praise of an original idea (I admit I was perhaps guilty of this with Paranormal Activity).  I won’t say a damn other thing about the film, except, see it now, immediately and then we shall discuss.

And that’s all for now, I’ll have the month of May’s film journal up in the next couple of days so stay tuned. 

Film Journal 2012 - April

We are now in the merry month of May.  Before too long Memorial Day will signal the un-official beginning of summer and cold weather will be a thing of the past (or so we all hope).  April was the month where baseball begins, and the NHL and NBA playoffs kick off.  I know you may think this is my preface to saying “here’s why I didn’t watch as many movies this month”, but hell I haven’t watched that much sports either.

Progress on the Rosenbaum front has been a little slow this month.  Only a handful of films I was able to cross off, so it’ll be some time before I polish that one off.  Of the films I watched however, I was quite impressed with Alex Cox’s Highway Patrolman and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue.  The Hopper film was certainly a downer but it makes me wonder just why he was kept from directing movies for so long.  An interesting time capsule that still seems surprisingly in touch.  Granted Hopper’s character might easily win worst parent of the year awards (the mother coming in a close second) but as a film of troubled youth it’s very solid.

The Cox film has that slightly surreal dark comedy vibe that makes several of his films worthwhile.  I wouldn’t necessarily call it a masterpiece, but as a tale of how simple corruption can be it gets comical without ever really being a “laugh-out-loud” type of film.  For fans of Walker and Repo Men this would be right up your alley.  Too bad it doesn’t seem nearly as easy to find as those others.


I'm also trying to appreciate Manoel de Oliveira but that's for another blog.

Now the new project I’m unofficially working on will help explain why I’ve been watching what I’ve been watching.  I’ve blogged before about The National Society of Film Critics A-List, going so far as to offer my own alternative group of 100.  Now perhaps I’m discrediting my own selection but after looking over the original book I realized that me and my girlfriend have watched a whole hell of a lot of them.  So I started thinking, wouldn’t it be something if we watched ALL of them?  We’re a long way away, and it frankly doesn’t help that she likes to fall asleep during every single movie, but we are making progress.

Considering I first found the book in late 2001-early 2002, it’s been nearly a decade or more since I’ve seen some of these films.  Many of the films I only remember segments of, forgetting large chunks of plot and in some cases it feels like a whole new movie to me.  Just this past month we watched L’atalante, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Nosferatu, Chinatown, The Seventh Seal, The Thief of Bagdad, Unforgiven, Written on the Wind, 42nd Street, The Passion of Joan of Arc, La Strada, Ugetsu, and Pandora’s Box.  I’ll post on each of these now:

L’atalante (1934)

I finally get it!  Wow after a decade and three viewings I finally seem to understand just why every damn critic whoever lived loves Jean Vigo and this film in particular.  I was also amazed that Kate happened to enjoy the film, but I think the absurd abundance of cats had a whole hell of a lot to do with that.  There is a just slightly off kilter almost surreal quality to everything in the film.  Nothing seems to be grounded in reality, from the random clutter Jules has in his cabin, to the cats that have overrun the ship, to the famous “love scene”, everything has a dream like edge to it.  There is also a humorous undertone to everything, again not a comedy in any direct sense, but nothing should be taken too seriously here.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978)

The A-Lists’s lone Australian film was the bane of my existence for years.  This was the last film on the list I was able to see, and it wasn’t until I found it had been released on DVD that I purchased it and finally crossed off my final film.  Well after a couple years I felt it wouldn’t be a bad film to sit through again.  The film is sort of an Australian version of the Nat Turner story, especially considering most of the victims are women and children.  Obviously slavery is different than Jimmie’s brand of discrimination.  There’s something that seems downright rewarding when awful people get what’s coming to them, but rather than make this film be about Jimmie’s retribution it paints him as a rather complicated character that isn’t entirely sympathetic throughout.  We can understand the initial outburst but things quickly go off the dark end where even his closest friend can’t stand by him.  Still a landmark in Australia’s “new wave” and thankfully it is no longer the hardest film on earth to find.

Nosferatu (1922)

You know what?  I don’t think this is quite a masterpiece.  Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel is incredibly slow paced and through no fault of Murnau Kino’s DVD has two horrible musical scores to choose from.  We had to laugh when the villagers warn of the werewolf and there’s a cutaway to what looks like a cross between a dog and a fox with a fluffy tale, and anything but a menacing werewolf.  I do think the film is fantastic and there are some wonderful touches that I love, I can’t help but be a total dork for silent movie special effects, but I think from start to finish this just lacks that little something extra.

Chinatown (1974)

The last time I watched Chinatown I proceeded to talk through the first hour of it and realized that although I knew what was going on, my friend probably didn’t.  This time I kept my mouth shut, but well Kate was none too impressed, and actually went so far as to say “nothing happened”, to which I nearly pulled out my hair wondering if we spent the last two hours watching the same film.  Some people love mysteries where a little detail leads to another clue, which unravels another mystery, and so on, and other people well just don’t seem to have the attention span to keep all those little details together and stick with the unraveling process.  As a neo-noir mystery Chinatown is probably the greatest of all time, it is Roman Polanski’s masterpiece, and that’s saying something considering how many excellent films he’s directed.  This is probably the fourth or fifth time seeing it, and well it never ceases to amaze me even if I was the only one impressed this time.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Well clearly the time to introduce Kate to Ingmar Bergman was now.  This is actually the first Bergman film I ever saw and well considering how much I love his work, I’d say it was a good first impression.  After being unimpressed with Chinatown, I admit I was a little suspicious to try this film, where it is anything but “action packed”.  However Bergman is a little better at getting your mind working, and with questions of faith to go along with a plague, a game of chess, and even a troupe of actors who are always the same any time or place gives the viewer more than enough to contemplate.  I may lean towards Persona as his greatest film, but I’ll never turn down a chance to watch this again.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

A few years back I decided to watch a bunch of Douglas Fairbanks films.  The first one I had ever seen was this gem.  So it had been a good decade since, and it was interesting returning to it with a knowledge not just of Fairbanks other epics, but of his early comedies as well.  The film is great because as I mentioned before I’m a total nerd for silent movie special effects and this was loaded with them.  For the NSFC it also doubled as a representation for Raoul Walsh, although calling this a Walsh film seems something of misrepresentation.  Not because the film is soft whereas Walsh’s other films were known for being masculine, no this is a misrepresentation because it is Fairbanks film.  He wrote (under his real name Elton Thomas) and produced the film and is making a point of chewing as much scenery as allowed.  It is his show start to finish, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Unforgiven (1992)

Almost forgot about this one.  I’ve seen a lot of Clint Eastwood films.  As a director though, I would say this is still his best.  Granted it’s been awhile since I last watched Million Dollar Baby, but well even after 3-4 viewings Unforgiven still ranks as one of the all time greats.  It serves the distinction of being one of the most recent films on the list and a rare film that also happened to win best picture.  To be honest the list is fairly Western heavy (we still have to watch High Noon, Winchester ‘73, and the Wild Bunch), but I wonder if any film has ever shown the difference between the legend of the West and the “real” West better than this.  What’s interesting really is that Eastwood’s William Munny is a horrible person, and he’s the first to admit it, yet somehow we can’t help but feel like he’s in the right.  I can’t think of any film that breaks down the real life guilt associated with killing someone however justified.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Douglas Sirk was the master of melodrama.  Written on the Wind was one of the first times I was introduced to his work.  Like All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life I found this film to be too melodramatic for my tastes, but I recognized that it might be the best of the bunch.  Well a decade later and several other Sirk films seen, I guess my frame of reference was expanded.  Watching it again perhaps I felt that some of the problems were more relatable.  Sure Robert Stack’s character’s alcohol abuse is the type of thing that you’d find only in melodrama, but the never ending string of triangles keep things interesting, and well did any director in the 50s have as much style as Sirk?

42nd Street (1933)

I always loved this film.  Hell when posting about 1933 I just mentioned how much I loved it, but also threw in that I hadn’t seen it for a long time.  Watching it again I was still enamored with is primitive charm.  Sure this is more advanced than say The Broadway Melody, but in terms of plot this is as formulaic as it gets.  Over the next three musicals featuring similar cast members and Busby Berkley choreography things would get more complex, particularly the dance numbers but here things seem just as simple as can be.  Basically a show is put on, people are worked like dogs, a temperamental star breaks her ankle, and a newcomer has to step in and become a star over night.  Well throw this out and you have a story about a lecherous and incredibly creepy sugar daddy, a tyrannical boss willing to sacrifice his own health because he lost all his money in the stock market crash, a chorus girl who only said no once, and she didn’t hear the question, and well those dance numbers still are fantastic even if they could never take place on a real stage.  Doesn’t hurt that the trio of songs in the Pretty Lady musical are still memorable numbers, particularly the title track.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Few films in the history of cinema are as blatantly brilliant as Dreyer’s ultimate masterpiece.  Hailed upon it’s premiere as possibly the greatest film ever made, and considered by many to still rank among the all time greats, I wonder if anyone alive thinks this film isn’t a masterpiece.  So much has been said about the shot selection, the framing, the claustrophobic feel of it, but well at the end of the day it is just a powerful film.  I like the fact that Dreyer cast the ugliest people imaginable for his would be executioners, and the only person that doesn’t seem to be cartoonishly monstrous is the one sympathetic character who seems to genuinely feel for Joan’s plight.  I also watched Otto Preminger’s much maligned Saint Joan this month and I wondered why?  Why have so many directors good and bad taken a stab at telling the tale of Joan of Arc?  I mean all of these directors know of Dreyer’s version, and I wonder how anyone can have the audacity to think they could possibly do a better job?

La Strada (1954)

Ever since I saw a Fellini film he’s been one of my favorite directors.  Now I may say that 8 ½ should have been on this list rather than La Strada/Nights of Cabiria, but well would I have revisited it this month?  Probably not.  I liked La Strada when I first saw it, but I didn’t think it was a masterpiece.  I much preferred Nights of Cabiria, and still thought his later more surreal films were better.  Now after seeing this again I was blown away.  There’s a reason many regard this as Fellini’s first masterpiece.  It was the first of two films in a row to win a best foreign language film Oscar, which I know isn’t that wonderful, but it still says something.  It’s not a very likeable film, but neither is Nights of Cabiria.  The film is great, if not heartbreaking, its characters are sympathetic and yet Zampano is still a monster, but there’s a slight bit of redemption somewhere in the end.  Nearly everyone is pathetic in some way, but well there’s that wonderful beauty in suffering that characterizes Fellini’s early films.

Ugetsu (1953)

Last month I revisited Sansho the Bailiff so why not give Ugetsu a third try?  Now I’ve always loved this film and well depending on what day it is I may say it’s Mizoguchi’s best.  Thanks in part to this book it was the first film I had ever seen from Mizoguchi.  His style and ever roaming camera were somewhat lost on me the first time around.  After all his sense of style is so subtle that you hardly notice it the first or even second time around.  The more you know of his work the better all his films seem to be by comparison.  Ugetsu is heartbreaking but there is a redemptive quality about it.  Sansho seems more like a film of loss and suffering, and well let’s not even mention Life of Oharu, but here the women do suffer as a result of their husband’s ambition but at least one is reconciled and well things seem like they just might be alright again.  Interesting how supernatural the film is, considering Mizoguchi removed all supernatural elements from the Sansho Dayu legend.

Pandora’s Box (1928)

G. W. Pabst is a personal favorite of mine.  This was the first film of his I had seen and although I liked it I wasn’t sure it was a masterpiece.  Even after watching several other films I wondered if this really was his best.  Well as you’ve noticed there is a trend with many of these films, they were early first impressions and revisited years later with a greater frame of reference.  This gets at the heart of what the A-List was all about.  It is meant to be a starting point where you can venture from there.  Louise Brooks performance is one of the wonder’s of silent cinema.  Her range from childish brat to long suffering self-sacrificing is remarkable.  Even towards the end she maintains that lovely smile and you get the sense that through it all she really was an innocent that just happened to ruin the lives of nearly all the men she came in contact with.  This film is even better than I remembered it and so is Brooks, too bad I can’t say the same for Diary of a Lost Girl which I found severely disappointing.

Well enough about that, here’s the rundown of what I watched:

4/1
The Exile (1947) 6/10
L’atalante (1934) 10/10

4/2
Porgy and Bess (1959) 6/10
Komedie om Geld (1936) 6/10
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) 10/10

4/3
Divine (1935) 8/10
Rain or Shine (1930) 4/10
Romeo und Julia im Schnee (1920) 6/10

4/4
Nosferatu (1922) 9/10
A Great Day in Harlem (1994) 8/10

4/5
Out of the Blue (1980) 9/10

4/6
Major League (1989) 10/10

4/8
Chinatown (1974) 10/10
The Seventh Seal (1957) 10/10

4/11
The Famine Within (1990) 6/10

4/12
The Anderson Platoon (1967) 7/10
Towards the Light (1919) 6/10

4/13
Pennies From Heaven (1981) 9/10
Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) 6/10
Saint Joan (1957) 5/10

4/15
Big Trouble in Little China (1986) 10/10

4/16
Highway Patrolman (1993) 9/10

4/17
Thief of Bagdad (1924) 10/10

4/18
Obsession (1976) 7/10

4/19
Unforgiven (1992) 10/10

4/22
Written on the Wind (1956) 10/10

4/23
A Walk in the Sun (1945) 6/10

4/24
42nd Street (1933) 10/10

4/25
The Strange Case of Angelica (2011) 7/10
Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) 8/10
Bonjour Tristesse (1958) 6/10

4/26
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) 10/10

4/28
Party (1996) 5/10
Inquietude (1998) 7/10
La Strada (1954) 10/10

4/29
Ugetsu (1953) 10/10

4/30
Pandora’s Box (1928) 10/10








Best Film of the Month - The Passion of Joan of Arc
Worst Film of the Month - Rain or Shine

Film Journal 2012 - March

Well some big changes are upon us as we enter the month of April. For starters Calvin got a job, and by Calvin I mean me, so regardless of the hours I work, that means far less movies viewed, oh well I'd certainly rather have money to live.

Also baseball is starting this week, and although I probably won't watch as many games as I've been known to, for at least a little while I'll be quite obsessed with it. So expect the numbers to be slightly less impressive going forward. In case you didn't hear, I wasn't one of those people that won the $640 million Mega Millions so the life of luxury will have to be put on hold for a bit longer.

So you may notice a few things about this month's films. For instance there are a whole mess of films with no ratings next to them, and there are also a whole mess of films listed. This is because I watched one disc of Flicker Alley's Saved From the Flames set, and both volumes of Kino's Gaumont Treasures set. The individual films I've listed as well as the year they were made, but with extremely few exceptions I have not bothered rating them, because well they aren't the easiest films to rate. I've enjoyed the sets tremendously and hope a volume three comes out before too long. Hell I didn't even know there was a second volume but alas. I have periodic obsessions with silent films where sets chock full of them are just the thing I need. Rarely do I go through two of them virtually back to back, but well I had one week to watch all of them and I didn't waste time.

A few things I can add to my list of great discoveries. More than one film I've been mulling over since watching it, and wondering if I was either too generous with my rating, or too harsh. A couple of films I revisited for the first time in a long time. Some were damn excellent the second (or 10th or 20th) time around, others failed to really blow me over. I realize that They Live By Night was no fluke, it really is damn near the best film of the 40s, or at least in the top 10.

Revisiting Touch of Evil I was instantly reminded that Orson Welles belongs on the short list of greatest directors of all time, and next to Kane this would be his masterpiece.

As mentioned in the previous blog I've been watching quite a few Japanese films of late, and you can see just which ones below. You'll also notice I ended the month with Enter the Dragon, and have since become obsessed (again) with Bruce Lee which is starting to pour into my lifestyle as well, who knows if this will lead to getting ripped and having the ability to knock people out with my one inch punch but I figure it should be good for something, but that's another blog.

Ah Jerry Lewis . . . Well I watched Cracking Up which is alternately known as Smorgasbord. Turns out I saw the film when I was a kid and remembered bits and pieces of it. Along with The Bellboy I think this is his best film. The plot is thin to say the least, but it instead plays out like one long live action Looney Tunes cartoon, which is a good thing from my perspective. However just as I was figuring maybe Lewis really is a comedic genius, I watched Hardly Working which was closer to terrible than tolerable. This repeats a common hit or miss pattern for Lewis' films, and sometimes I can't even explain why I like the ones I do and hate the others, but well I think the man is very polarizing, and that can even be amongst his fans.

I'd also like to remember Estella Parsons for Bonnie and Clyde and remind everyone that she might very well be the most irritating screen character of all time. The fact that she won an Oscar more than blows my mind. So along with Dennis Weaver, I'd say she might take the cake, at least in Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie hated her, whereas in Welles film no one seemed to notice what an irritating imbecile Weaver was.

I would also like to take a moment to mention Sans Lendemain/There’s No Tomorrow (1940). This was cited as one of Max Ophuls final films made in France before his American exile. Like many of his films from this period it's largely forgotten and rarely seen. However this is damn near his best film, possibly ever. Ophuls is one of my favorite directors, and I recently watched The Exile (1947) as well which was certainly not among his best. He was a master of style and any self respecting Kubrick fan will appreciate his love of tracking shots. This film begins with a bang, and has honest to goodness female nudity, I know this still blows my mind when I see it in a film from the 30s or 40s, hell even the 50s for that matter. Aside from that the plot seems like it would be unbelievable melodrama but Ophuls plays it for all its worth and slowly lets us in on the details to unfold what is really a remarkable picture, and well the ending was something you just have to see. This is easily his most neglected film and one I hope can join some others in the mystical land of DVD/Blu-Ray.


So here's the list, forgive me if I forget anything:

3/1
Ruby in Paradise (1993) 4/10
Sleepwalk (1986) 7/10
Mr. Hoover and I (1989) 9/10
Le cochon (1970) 4/10

3/2
Cuadecuc, Vampir (1970) 8/10
Ice (1970) 7/10
The Deadman (1989) 9/10

3/3
Exiting the Factory (1896)
Arrival of a Train (1897)
Card Party (1896)
Kobelkoff (1900)
Danse Serpentine (In a Lion’s Cage) (1900)
Cyranno de Bergerac (1900)
Le Marsillaise (1907)
Excelsior! - Prince of Magicians (1901)
The Talion Punishment (1906)
Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats (1907)
An Excursion to the Moon (1908)
The Automatic Moving Company (1911) 10/10
The Seine Flood (1910)
Over the Top (A Battle with the Elements) (1915)
Le Mobilier Fidele (1910)
A Visit to Lost Angeles (1916)
Montmartre’s Kids (1916)
The Dirigible Los Angeles (1924)
In the Land of Giants and Pygmies (1925)
Caddyshack (1980) 10/10

3/4
Bhowani Junction (1956) 8/10

3/5
Technicolor Fashion Parade (1927)
Charles A. Lindbergh, Hero of the Air (1927)
The Fireman of the Follies-Bergere (1928) 8/10
Meet Me Down at Coney Isle (1932)
The Gold Diggers (1983) 6/10
La Dolce Vita (1960) 10/10
Touch of Evil (1958) 10/10

3/6
Enemies. A Love Story (1989) 5/10
Cracking Up (1983) 10/10
The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954) 3/10
The Argyle Secrets (1948) 6/10
Rope Cosmetology (1978) 6/10

3/7
Mr. Thank You (1936) 7/10
Les Diaboliques (1955) 10/10
D’Est (1993) 5/10

3/8
Marriage of the Blessed (1989) 10/10
The Last Bolshevik (1994) 9/10
The Masseurs and a Woman (1938) 6/10

3/9
Hardly Working (1981) 4/10
The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me (1950) 9/10
Kisses (1957) 9/10
The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) 7/10

3/10
In Darkness (2011) 5/10
Coming to America (1988) 10/10
Total Recall (1990) 9/10

3/11
The Grand Illusion (1937) 10/10

3/12
Fish Tank (2009) 4/10
Standard Operating Procedure (2008) 10/10
Stagecoach (1939) 9/10
Dark Passage (1947) 7/10

3/13
Let’s Make Love (1960) 6/10
Million Dollar Legs (1932) 6/10
To Have and Have Not (1944) 10/10

3/14
The Great Consoler (1933) 6/10
The Devil Doll (1936) 7/10
The Three Caballeros (1944) 5/10
Man’s Castle (1933) 10/10

3/15
The Fisherman at the Stream (1897)
Bathing in a Stream (1897)
Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter (1897)
The Turn-of-the-Century Blind Man (1898)
At the Hypnotist's (1898)
The Burglars (1898)
Disappearing Act (1898)
Surprise Attack on a House at Daybreak (1898)
At the Club (1899)
Wonderful Absinthe (1899)
Avenue de l’Opéra (1900)
Automated Hat-Maker and Sausage-Grinder (1900)
At the Photographer's (1900)
Dance of the Seasons: Winter, Snow Dance (1900)
The Landlady (1900)
Turn-of-the-Century Surgery (1900)
Pierrette’s Escapades* (1900)
At the Floral Ball* (1900)
The Cabbage-Patch Fairy (1900)
Serpentine Dance by Lina Esbrard (1902)
Midwife to the Upper Class (1902)
An Untimely Intrusion (1902)
Miss Dundee and Her Performing Dogs (1902)
How Monsieur Takes a Bath (1903)
Faust and Mephistopheles (1903)
The O’Mers in “The Bricklayers” (1905)
The Statue (1905)
The Magician’s Alms (1905)
Clown, Dog and Balloon (1905)
Spain (1905)
The Tango (1905)
The Malagueña and the Bullfighter (1905)
Cook & Rilly’s Trained Rooster (1905)
Cake Walk, Performed by Nouveau Cirque (1905)
Alice Guy Films a “Phonoscène” (1905)
Saharet Performs the Bolero (1905)
Polin Performs “The Anatomy of a Draftee” (1905)
Dranem Performs “The True Jiu-Jitsu” (1905)
Dranem Performs “Five O’Clock Tea” (1905)
Félix Mayol Performs “Indiscreet Questions” (1905)
Félix Mayol Performs “The Trottins’ Polka” (1905)
Félix Mayol Performs “White Lilacs” (1905)
The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906)
An Obstacle Course (1906)
Madame’s Cravings (1906)
A Sticky Woman (1906)
The Hierarchies of Love (1906)
The Cruel Mother (1906)
A Story Well Spun (1906)
The Drunken Mattress (1906)
The Parish Priest’s Christmas (1906)
The Truth Behind the Ape-Man (1906)
The Consequences of Feminism (1906)
Ocean Studies (1906)
The Game-Keeper’s Son (1906)
The Race for the Sausage (1907)
The Glue (1907)
The Fur Hat (1907)
The Cleaning Man (1907)
A Four-Year-Old Hero (1907)
The Rolling Bed (1907)
The Irresistible Piano (1907)
On the Barricade (1907)
The Dirigible “Homeland” (1907)
The Colonel’s Account (1907)
A Very Fine Lady (1908)
Spring (1909)
The Fairy of the Surf (1909)
Custody of the Child (1909)
The Defect (1911)
The Roman Orgy (1911)
The Trust: Or the Battles for Money (1911) 10/10
The Heart and the Money (1912)
The Obsession (1912)

3/16
Tragic Error (1913)
Bout de Zan Steals and Elephant (1913)
The Agony of Byzance (1913)
The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador (1912) 6/10
The Child of Paris (1913) 7/10

3/17
They Live By Night (1948) 10/10

3/18
Fantasmagoria (1908)
The Puppet's Nightmare (1908)
Drama at the Puppets' House (1908)
The Magic Hoop (1908)
The Little Soldier Who Became a God (1908)
The Boutdebois Brothers (1908)
Transfigurations (1909)
Let’s Be Sporty (1909)
Japanese Fantasy (1909)
The Happy Microbes (1909)
Modern Education (1909)
The Living Fan (1909)
Spanish Clair de Lune (1909)
The Next Door Neighbors (1909)
Crowns (1909)
Delicate Porcelains (1909)
Monsieur Clown Among the Lilliputians (1909)
Comic Mutations (1909)
Matrimonial Shoes (1909)
The Enchanted Spectacles (1909)
Affairs of the Heart (1909)
Floral Frameworks (1910)
The Smile-o-Scope (1910)
Childish Dreams (1910)
En Route (1910)
The Mind of the Café Waiter (1910)
Master of the Fashionable Game (1910)
Petit Chantecler (1910)
The Twelve Labors of Hercules (1910)
Petit Faust (1910)
The Neo-Impressionist Painter (1910)
The Four Little Tailors (1910)
Art's Infancy (1910)
The Mysterious Fine Arts (1910)
The Persistent Salesman (1910)
A History of Hats (1910)
Nothing is Impossible for Man (1910)
Mr. Crack (1910)
Bebe’s Masterpiece (1910)
Musicmania (1910)

3/19
Calino’s Baptism (1911)
Calino Wants to be a Cowboy (1911)
Zigoto and the Affair of the Necklace (1911)
Calino the Love Tamer (1912)
Zigoto’s Outing With Friends (1912)
Oxford vs. Martiques (1912)
Onésime Goes to Hell (1912)
Calino, Station Master (1912)
Onésime, Clockmaker (1912)
Onésime vs. Onésime (1912)
The Railway of Death (1912)
Zigoto Drives a Locomotive (1912)
Burning Heart: An Indian Tale (1912)
Under the Claw (1912)
Onésime Gets Maried... So Does Calino (1913)
Onésime: Calino's Inheritance (1913)
Onésime Loves Animals (1913)
Onésime, Tamer of Men and Horses (1913)
Onésime and the Heart of a Gypsy (1913)
Onésime, You'll Get Married...or Else! (1913)
Onésime's Theatrical Debut (1913)
Onésime's Family Drama (1914)

3/20
Heads and Women Who Use Them (1916)
Friendly Advice (1916)
Biscot on the Wrong Floor (1916)
The Long Arm of the Law (1909)
The Barges (1911)
La Marseilles (1912)
A Factory Drama (1912)
The Pavements of Paris (1912)
A Drama of the Air (1913)
Child’s Play (1913)
Feet and Hands (1915)
Sansho the Bailiff (1954) 10/10
Side Street (1950) 8/10

3/21
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933) 7/10
Sans Lendemain/There’s No Tomorrow (1940) 10/10
The Trio’s Engagements (1937) 6/10
Pumping Iron II (1985) 6/10
Stand Tall (1997) 7/10
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 10/10

3/22
Flunky, Work Hard (1931) 8/10
Petites notes à propos du film 'Je vous salue, Marie' (1983) 5/10
Not Blood Relations (1932) 6/10
A Man Vanishes (1967) 8/10

3/23
The Scoundrel (1935) 6/10
Jiraiya the Hero (1921) 5/10
A Simple Story (1959) 5/10

3/25
Red Angel (1966) 10/10

3/26
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 10/10
The Shining (1980) 10/10

3/27
The Exorcist (1973) 10/10

3/28
The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (1944) 9/10
Night of the Living Dead (1968) 10/10

3/29
Enter the Dragon (1973) 10/10

Best Film of the Month - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Worst Film of the Month - The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954)
Best New Discovery - Sans Lendemain/There’s No Tomorrow (1940)