Alphabetical listing of movies

A

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
L'Age D'Or
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
All That Jazz
Alphaville
The American Astronaut
At the Circus
L'Avventura

B

Bad Company
The Battle of Algiers
Being There
Bring Me the Head
.......of Alfredo Garcia
Bringing Up Baby

C

Capote
Carnal Knowledge
Cat People
The Celebration
C.H.U.D.
Cold Comfort Farm
The Comedians of Comedy
Corpse Bride
The Crush

D

Danger: Diabolik
Dark Habits
Day for Night
Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine
Dracula
Dressed to Kill

E

The Endurance
Eureka

F

Fanny & Alexander
Female Trouble
First Blood
Fitzcarraldo
The Frighteners

G

Gappa
Gates of Heaven
Gerry
Go West

H

Hiroshima Mon Amour
A History of Violence
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Hotel Rwanda

I

Inside Deep Throat

J

Jabberwocky
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

K

King Kong
King Kong (1976)
King Kong (2005)
King of New York

L

The Lawnmower Man
Lenny
The Leopard
Little Otik
Lost in La Mancha

M

March of the Penguins
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party
Munich
Murder, My Sweet
My Dinner with Andre

N

The Nesting
The Nightmare Before Christmas

P

Parents
Paris, Texas
Passion Fish
The Passion of the Christ
The Phantom of Liberty

Q

Q: The Winged Serpent

R

Rasputin: the Mad Monk
A Real Young Girl
Reflections of Evil
Robocop 2
Rumor Has It…

S

Seven Up!
7 Plus Seven
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
Shadows
Shopgirl
Short Cuts
Sleuth
The Stendhal Syndrome
Syriana

T

Tess
The Time of the Wolf
True Stories
Two Mules for Sister Sara

W

Walkabout
Wallace & Gromit: the Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Weekend
Who's That Girl?
Who's That Knocking at My Door
The Wicker Man

Z

Zardoz
Zombi 3

So it ends.

My new blog can be found here: Electric Shadows. It has no purpose, no goal, nothing... just the unedited ramblings of me.

One Movie a Day is over and this post is really just a squeezing out of the afterbirth. I am delighted that I was able to no-foolin' meet a goal I set down for myself and I'm pretty happy that the blog was at least noticed by some people. I didn't expect that to happen, though I did want it. The process of watching one movie a day was so much more mundane than I expected. Though it was tiring, frustrating, and overwhelming at times, after a while, my life gained a certain rhythm that was ultimately very boring as I'd do nothing but work, write, eat, watch, write, work, eat, etc. Moments when I was able to find the time to read from a book were heavenly.

One unexpected effect this whole experiment had on me was to get me excited about writing again. I've been writing for a long time, but this really got my juices flowing since I kind-of forgot how hard it is to actually write decent stuff. Another thing I found via blogging here was just how much I love the first Robocop movie. Quite a bit.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to clean this site up a little, create an alphabetical list of the movies I've watched, and probably do some more detailed reflection posts. Right now, I'm going to celebrate by having some toast.

Day 93: Reflections of Evil

This is the final film for One Movie a Day.  This film was viewed on a VHS tape a friend of mine sent me some years ago.  I note that a DVD for this film has been released, but have no idea if this is the same version.

Like channel flipping through time while taking a methamphetamine-inspired jump into a nest of cobras, Reflections of Evil is a media-saturated pastiche, the plot focusing on an obese street vendor in Los Angeles.  His sister disappeared sometime ago on the Universal Studios tour (not unlike the famous story about a young Steven Spielberg who is lampooned without mercy in the film) and she figures into the film in oblique, sometimes terrifying ways.  Reflections of Evil is a kitchen sink style production with crazy and inspired choices in overdubbing, editing, and shooting.  When it works, it's touching, scary, and exciting - suffused with the life and vigor of undiluted artistic integrity.  It's far too long, though, and the valleys in the film are very, very low with a final sequence that falls to the level of a home video prank and makes too coherent a plotline that previously meandered at its own whim.

The film's audacity is almost enough to carry it off, though.  The film opens with an intro by Tony Curtis, who introduces what would seem to be a completely different movie, but he's overdubbed at times to say the correct title (and "he" reveals that the director was sued by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg). We're then treated to an old Serta commercial and some old ABC promotional material.  More materials like this are cut in and out of the movie, and there's even a clip of John Ashcroft talking about the war on terror from FOX News at one point.  There are also clips from other films like 2001 and The Omega Man that play counterpoint to the narrative.  The soundtrack of the film also contains many "sampled" elements including music and sound FX (I heard the bird noises from The Birds at one point).  These alternate media sources float in and out of the film like radio interference at times.  They often work well as jokes or distortions of mainstream culture, but they're as often digressive.

A better idea of what this movie is like:  We first meet our main character as he stumbles around a neighborhood shouting obscenities, gets drunk on candy liquers, shouts at dogs, and vomits a great deal of some disgusting substance.  Then, the film flashes back several months to when he's selling watches on the streets of L.A.  When he's got free time, he eats giant sugar-filled snacks with great delight, though his sound effect laden gorges will put anyone off food for some time.  The citizens of L.A. and, indeed, the city itself are presented as blatantly hostile to the main character and he responds in kind with grandiose threats of pent-up rage.  Much later in the film, there is a sequence in which the main character is attacked by dogs that rivals the traffic jam sequence in Weekend for its length, intensity, brilliance, and insufferablity.

This is a good movie, made good by brilliant passages and kept from brilliance by overindulgence.  It's a feverish experience: dirty, random, and smoking with temple-vein bursting vitriol.  However, even as the film beat me down, I was terrified, excited, and overjoyed for much of the movie because I had no idea, whatsoever, what would happen next.  And that, it seems to me, is as good a place as any to stop.  

Day 92: The Lawnmower Man

What strange fate dropped this movie into my lap, the penultimate film on my movie-a-day viewing. What an odd, odd world it is to have this bizarre mashup of The Fly, Tron, and a vast array of other Frankenstein stories be second-to-last, gleaming with 1992 computer graphics and watered down Stephen King plot stylings. I am aware of the whole "Stephen King" deal with this film, the fact that his short story had so little to do with this film that his name was removed from all materials after a lawsuit. And yet, though his name isn't on it, the way the film is made and the way the plot progresses isn't unlike some of the awful adaptations made from King's work.

The movie draws its inspiration from the now laughable notion that virtual reality (as it was known in 1992) could change the world, creating alternate states of consciousness, brand new weaponry, and new educational possibilities. Pierce Brosnan is a lead scientist on the technology, working for a company more interested in the military implications of his work than the possibility for human advancement. When a chimp goes NUTS due to the experimentation he's undergone, Brosnan decides to take matters into his own hands and ply his trade on the local retarded lawnmower man.

This movie is fun-bad and the seriously dated computer effects are refreshing to these 21st century eyes. They're not trying to replicate any degree of reality, rather to create a new emotional landscape and I wish more effects work in films was that honest. The film opens with a sequence in which a chimp goes ape! on some military guys while wearing a virtual reality suit, so that's pretty fun too. The rest of the film trods on well-worn soil and the only deviations from this path are the nifty computer FX.

The film's conceptual use of virtual reality is somewhat prescient considering the hubbub that followed The Matrix and, in this way, earns some points. But, really, it's just a drag. Still, for bad movie lovers... this is a great one, oozing early 90s sensibilities, trapped by them, and unaware of this fact. If it were twenty minutes shorter, I'd call it a future camp classic.

Day 91: Munich

Munich, Steven Spielberg's potboiler-that-would-be-prestige-picture, is ostensibly about an incidient involving Israel's revenge campaign against Palestinian terrorists following the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, but, as its final shot coyly states, it can also be seen as a film examining America's reaction to September 11th. That it's effective at being both of these things at once is its greatest asset; this effectiveness is born of an admirable restraint for about the first half of the film. It's a wonderful companion piece to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, another film that took a tangential, though far from subtle, route to examine, explore, and exploit (I use that word in the kindest way) post-9/11 American fear of the other. However, as laudable as it is to make mainstream films that seem like a conscious attempt to deal with national trauma using familiar genres to synthesize the zeitgeist floating around in the ether, both films are severely flawed, probably by the same calculation I praised above.

Munich, for instance, is far too watery-eyed and guilt-ridden from the get-go to function as a film about the consequences of revenge. The sequences featuring a group of agents executing those unfortunate enough to be on a list of names are invariably staged with the technical and emotional competence one expects from Spielberg. Each has its own rhythms, its own visual identity, and its own set of suprising moments that serve to ratchet up the suspense as the killer Israelis attempt to kill their targets while leaving civilians unharmed. All of this stuff is pretty great, reminiscent of the comraderie and fellowship in killing found in (of all things) DePalma's The Untouchables at times. And yet, continuing with this comparison, Munich's characters (and overreaching tone) are too often like Kevin Costner's Elliot Ness: moralistic and strangely unprepared for the potential ramifications of their actions.

Which isn't to say that all maudlin moments in the film come off this way. The moment when the bomb-maker of the group has to bow out because he's unprepared for what the group is about to do is a great moment that skirts the edge of treacle and comes out genuine. The conversation that occurs between the lead Israeli agent and a terrorist about the Israeli/Palestinan conflict is also effective and thoughtful, if only for the way it raises questions and answers them according to the point of view of those involved with the conversation and then leaves it alone until the two meet again. Additionally, I liked the montage of television reports and the people watching these reports about the kidnapping of Israeli athletes so much that I wanted it to be the entire film.

But after the group kills a female assassin in a fit of cold-blooded retribution, the film wiggles about, looking for its groove and never finding anything. And later, Eric Bana, as the lead agent, begins freaking out in paranoia as abruptly as Jack Nicholson went crazy in The Shining. This is not Bana's fault at all, he's interesting in the role, but the film's. It has done very, very little to set up this character change. The film finds itself again in its closing scenes, making clear that the film is also about the abandonment of the father figure, but prior to this is a vast stretch of time and one of the more ridiculous sex scenes ever committed to celluloid (poor, poor Kate Capshaw).

Munich would have been better served to take its perspective on revenge from the Daniel Craig character's perspective. He's the group's hothead. Wants to kill the enemies, has no compunction about doing it, and, yet, he's got very little to do in the movie. Bana's character is so angst-ridden in the opening, it cheapens his double angst later. How about a movie about a man who thinks with his gut slowly learning that his gut is very often stupid and wrong? About someone who does not care about the consequences of his actions being forced to deal with them? I think that's your zeitgeist, Sr. Spielbergo. Have at it.

Three posts to go.

I've hit 90 movies and have only three more posts to this blog before it ends. Sometime on Januray 2nd, I will post a summary of the entire experience and a link to my new, more pointless blog, currently being constructed.

I don't know what the last three movies will be. I have absolutely no idea. With apologies to John, I don't think Reflections of Evil will make the list.

Day 90: March of the Penguins

This week's entry in Anthropomorphism Theatre, March of the Penguins, has such sensuous and rich wildlife cinematography that I suspected CHEATING BY COMPUTERS more than once (and I dunno, did they?). The quality and depth of the image was so involving and affecting to me that I often tuned out Morgan Freeman's narration, preferring the thick solid ground of the penguin imagery. The narration's not bad, often providing just enough context for the narrative of the film to come through and it's certainly lighter on the arty poeticisms of the narration in many similiarly anthropomorphic IMAX films. But my feeling with this film, as it is with many films of this type, is that movies like this should provide a simple contextual narration at the beginning, telling us what we will be seeing, and then let the images and the animals tell their own damn story. But I'm quibbling. This is, really, a nice, simple film that works well due to the imagery found within.

I like animals, I like evolution, and I'm tickled beyond belief that this film was touted as supporting "intelligent design" by some Christian folk. Check out this quote, pulled from this article.

"To think that natural selection or even the penguins themselves could come up with the idea to migrate miles and miles multiple times each year without their partner or their offspring is a bit insulting to my intellect. How great is our God!"

I'm not interested in setting up a Creationist strawman here with my layman's knowledge of religion, evolution, and/or science, but this CRACKS ME UP! It's a weird understanding of evolution, positing that evolution would somehow give the penguins the intellectual property rights on their wasteful, trecherous, and idiotic reproductive needs. Further, the idea that there's a guiding hand behind the numerous deaths of penguins, as they scramble their young eggs (God, the abortion doctor!), freeze to death, or starve, featured in this film doesn't say much for this guiding hand's intelligence. Unless, I guess, the Penguins who die deserved it for some reason (they probably ate the sacred krill). It's absolute nonsense. But whatever.

But two can play at this game. Watch: The real story here is quite the opposite from the attempt of the religious right to co-opt these penguins. What's really important here is the way this film depicts quite plainly the lack of any specifically defined gender roles in God's creatures. Sure, we all know that seahorse males carry the eggs before they hatch, but emperor penguins? The most masculine of aquatic, flightless birds? Are stuck starving themselves taking care of a stupid egg while their women go off in search of food to bring home for the hungry brood? And not only that, but once the women actually get back (and some of them don't... never send a girl to do a man's job, are you with me fellas?) then they get to take care of the baby for its youth, even after the baby penguin has sucked out the last of the male's food reserves after hatching. That's some gratitutde, huh? Who knew that penguins could be so genderbending? The actions of these penguins prove that the established gender roles humans have built up over centuries are completely bogus, naturally speaking. There's some sound reasoning for ya. Blugh.

The only problem I have with this movie is that it seems a bit too packaged (and particularly for the "super-mom" set) with, at times, a very human narrative forced onto non human creatures. Nevertheless, it seems to be, at least, basically accurate with a minimal amount of cheap editing tricks to make the animals conform to the structure the film wants to have. A bonus for me: I love Antarctic imagery and this movie's got some of the best I've seen.

Day 89: Syriana

Intelligent, thoughtful, and involving multi-faceted drama about the wheelings and dealings of oil industry executives, the U.S. governement, Arabian governments, and the disaffected populations who turn martyr, Syriana is not altogether successful at weaving an interrelated tapestry of characters and events that culminate in blood for oil, but it is always interesting. It's impressive that it's able to take such multinational and culturally diversive topics and make each one of them a personal story for each of the many characters that populate the film. But the film is not quite up to its ambitions on a first viewing, due primarily to the fact that a lot of narrative energy is spent on an overabundance of characters and the confusing, poorly explicated legal ramifications that surround international oil law. Still, I left the theater feeling great about the film, mostly because, while the details of the plot were vague to me, I never felt lost about what was going on between the people in the film. And the intercutting of emotional beats is spot on.

I felt the same way after watching Heat, a movie I'm now quite fond of. Both Heat and Syriana lost me amidst all the names and side-characters (and in Heat's case, some of Al Pacino's performance) but I always felt in good hands, guided along by levels of pure filmmaking the way one might be if they were watching a procedural film in a foreign language with no translation. Having seen Heat on video, I was able to more fully understand the details of the plot and so warmed up to the film quite a bit more. I'm sure the same will happen for Syriana since I will definitely rewatch it, if only to reexperience several very striking moments at the end of the film.

Having said this, there are some points in Syriana where the cross-cutting between characters was off. At one moment, the film cut back to George Clooney's character and it had been so long since I'd seen him, I'd forgotten where his plot strand had left off. This happened to me several times during the movie, and it seemed as if the problem was that the film had too much to say in too little time, so it threw a ton of information at the viewer at a very fast pace. Surely this is a movie that will only improve upon a second or third viewing and as it stands on my first viewing, it's one of (hopefully) many films that will be made about the state of oil dependence in the world today.

Day 88: The Frighteners

Another gift, and in this case, I hadn't expected to dip into this particular movie until well after this blog had run its course. I've already ruminated on Peter Jackson as a director of well-written genre pieces in my King Kong post and, so, it's a bit abhorrent to me to revist this same man's work so soon afterwards. Particularly since I've seen The Frighteners a couple of times already, though it's probably been at least eight years since I've seen the film. Unfortunately, I've gotten a bit sick and needed a day of much rest and relaxation to recuperate. The only other option was another Val Lewton piece and that's even more abhorrent to me.

As it is, I'm glad I watched this film. When I first saw The Frighteners in its theatrical run, I was already aware of Peter Jackson having watched Dead Alive (its true title is Braindead, but I can't think of it by that name) zillions of times. When I left The Frighteners I liked the movie well enough, though I felt the comraderie between the ghosts that helped out Michael J. Fox was a bit labored and underdeveloped and some of the plot machinations strained credibility. I revisted it when it came out on video and found that the film was full of riches on a second viewing, with wonderful connections between side characters that I missed on my first viewing. This began to clue me in on the sound structures Jackson and Fran Walsh build into their scripts, though it would be some time before I had that final a-ha! moment when I was able to articulate this aspect of these films.

Years later, I began to hear about a longer cut of the film (and the accompanying behind the scenes documentaries) available on laserdisc and I was curious to see it. This is what I watched today and it is a remarkably better film than the theatrical cut, with little snippets of character development that improved the viewing experience enormously. From what I could tell, most of the added material involved the ghost friends of Michael J. Fox and the establishment of the "rules" of ghostiness the film deals with. These developments turn the film from a pretty-good genre movie with some effective creepy moments and a show-stealing turn by Jeffery Combs, into an intrincately wound automated toy of a film, with surprising deviations and delightful contrivances. Of course, this may also be a result of having seen the film before, but it seemed that with one or two exceptions, the added material made everything in the film much more believable, understandable, and enjoyable.

It remains a loud, shrill, and hyperactive experience. And the plot's convolutions are a bit too much. And I really, really wish that there could have been something in the script to justify the presence of the FBI agent in the climax or that the heaven at the end of the movie wasn't such a cheap plot device (though it's still fucking earned) or that the movie could have sorted out whether son of Busey was a mythical creature or a literalistic boogedy boo back from the grave, particularly since the "soul-collector" character is totally scary and it's a bit of a let-down to see it unmasked as a serial killer. But it is so god-damned delightful when Michael J. Fox uses the afterlife mythology of the movie in order to defeat the villains, and Jeffery Combs's deranged FBI agent goes so far off the deep end, and the movie's so internally consistent while it constantly threatens to jump off the tracks, that I was overdelighted while watching it. I haven't felt the joy found in cinematic exuberance in some time, but I remember it now. It's here in The Frighteners, a messy, rough masterpiece of genre fusion.

Day 87: Cat People

This was my first viewing of a Val Lewton project. I received the Val Lewton Horror Collection as a gift, and Cat People was a nice drink to follow the awful Rumor Has It.... Fun, kinda sexy, and genuinely creepy (the creepy/sexy aspects are surprising to me, given the age of the film and, most importantly, how jaded I am), Cat People is about a woman who fears that if she kisses a man, she will turn into a Cat Person and destroy them. This becomes a problem when she marries a well-meaning but dopey man. The film is like a werewolf tale with an interesting wrinkle of overt sexuality rather than subtextual, and notable that the "monster" is never seen.

Indeed, all the pyrotechnics and horrific monster images are gone from this film, instead it boils down the horrific aspects of its premise to the primal social aspects and exploits these to good effect; the film is primarily made up of scenes in which people talk to one another. There are absolutely fantastic suspense sequences, the standouts being a woman walking down the street, being pursued by a Cat Person and the same woman in a swimming pool in a dark room, as a large cat-thing stalks outside. The "monster," when it's seen, is clouded or shadowy, and, as a result, the creepiness quotient goes up. The solid writing doesn't hurt as all of the monsterishness could almost be seen as resultant from the characters' incompatible psyches.

I'm too tired to dig into the depths of this film. Let it be known that I enjoyed Cat People tremendously. Also let it be known that five more days of a movie a day make me happy.

Day 86: Rumor Has It...

Hate to spoil the fun for anyone, but this is just awful. The premise of this film is that the characters featured in The Graduate were based on real life people and Jennifer Aniston is the daughter of the Elaine character. Kevin Costner is the Dustin Hoffman surrogate, and Shirley MacLaine is Mrs. Robinson.

This is not a bad premise by any means; it's ripe for some fun pop culture riffing, finding how The Graduate has affected Aniston's generation, and possibly exploring the differences in how personal insecurity and uncertainty about the future express themselves in each generation. What do we get? The soulless, dead gaze of Jennifer Anniston, an earnest, but misplaced Kevin Costner, and Shirley MacLaine as one of those profanity spouting, oversexed old ladies that screams out, "LAUGH AT THIS MOVIE!" Really, only Mark Ruffalo as Anniston's well-meaning fiancee is worth seeing, and even then, he's got nothing to do except shout a speech about how much he's been hurt.

This is pablum. Flat, sitcom-like lighting and blocking, more jokes that fall flat than hit, and good God almighty, this is a film that actually has the audacity in late 2005 to use the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as a joke. HA HA HA! That joke's so old! HA HA HA! I've seen that so many times before. OH MY SIDES! There's an older lady mad at Kevin Costner and they're playing music that usually plays when tough people have a showdown! HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHEEHEEHEEHOHOHH.

The Graduate remains a dangerous movie about the flaunting of all societal conventions and an accurate depiction of how the passions of youth entrap younger generations into repeating their parents' mistakes. It's funny and it's poignant. It's a perfect comedy, and one of my favorite films, ever, ever, ever. This film plays with the themes at play in The Graduate, but is so coy and shy about the sexual matters, it might as well be talking about spoons. Even if we throw out the inevitable comparisons to The Graduate, the film is an unfunny muddle, a sterile and bland piece of dough with cheap, easy psychological revelations. If you were to throw this all together and bake it, it would turn into a flavorless mush. And, what's worse, it's only half baked.

Day 85: The Nightmare Before Christmas

It's become tradition for Tara and I to watch this every year on the 23rd of December. I've seen this movie many, many times and listened to the soundtrack even more often. When I saw this film, I was a sophomore in high school and it had a profound effect on me. Immediately after seeing it, I began making ill-fated stop-motion projects of my own on a VHS camcorder with no one-frame advance. I'd press record, listen to the mechanism within, and if I managed to press pause at just the right time, I could get record a reasonably short amount of time on the tape. It was painstaking, terrible animation, but the most rewarding thing I'd ever done with my life. This eventually led to some horrible high-schoollish live-action films and then, I guess I can say, an undergraduate degree in filmmaking and the semi-lucrative job I now have.

It's no exaggeration then, to say that this is one of the more important films of my life. In recent years, because I'd gone so absolutely bonkers over this movie when I was in high school, I began to distance myself from it. It's probably partially the "goth" association with the film, or the fact that you can buy Nightmare Before Christmas swag at Hot Topic now. And, while the film still had some pull, for the first time, I was able to see some notable flaws in the thing that my enthusiasm had previously blinded me to.

So, figure for the past five years, I've been slowly distancing myself from The Nightmare Before Christmas despite having both the score and the songs embedded in my memory for the rest of my life. I watched it last night and I went absolutely nuts in love with it all over again. Despite the many times I've seen the movie, I'm still finding new stuff tucked away in the background, noticing details I've missed in the set direction. And when Jack Skellington tears off his Santa costume to reveal his "proper" outfit underneath, crying, "I AM THE PUMPKIN KING!" I was impressed at how effective this very simple gesture (the tearing off of a self-imposed costume to reveal the true character underneath) works every time.

This film made me an Elfman fan for life, as well, not that he had much work to do after Edward Scissorhands and the Batman music. I think that this may be the high point of Danny Elfman's career, and it was certainly the peak of the first wave of his film composing (he's moved on to less melodic, more textural work in recent years), bringing to bear every musical trick he'd used prior to this film.

I don't like Christmas, not really. But I like the feelings associated with Christmas: the excess of kindness, the gluttony, the bright colors and gaudy displays. The sheer exuberance of it all. It doesn't "fit" me well, or at least, I've never felt it did. But this movie does. And always will. Despite any of its flaws... because of its flaws. It's a messy film, but a beautiful one and one about which I cannot write anything but a sloppy personal essay. I'm smiling just thinking about it.

Day 84: Two Mules for Sister Sara

It's, apparently, time for a Shirley MacLaine double feature. She was the wife of a dying businessman in Being There and here she plays the titular Sister Sara. She's in Mexico, a nun on the run from the French army sometime in the cowboy days. Clint Eastwood, playing his rough, laconic loner cowboy character, shows up and saves her from some would-be rapist banditos, and thus begins the classic "I hate you while I become attracted to you" relationship story. They do the usual Amazon Queen-style sniping at one another as they head toward Mexican revolutionary headquarters. He's upset that she requires so much care. She's mad that he's so uncaring.

So, off they go into the familiar looking deserts, on horses and mules. And it's swift and paced well, with a growing uncertainty over Sister Sara's true identity that has a nice payoff. And a scene in which Eastwood, drunk, has to shoot some dynamite to blow up a bridge is funny and exciting. Plus, the ending of the film is smart in the way it doesn't labor over the ultimate fate of a stormed fort. This is a movie about two people and it cuts to the moment most important to them while a Mexican army does its thing. The movie's also nice in the way it examines Eastwood's standard character from the vantage point of him being alcoholic.

But, really, my interest in this film? Ennio Morricone scored it. Here he adds donkey sounds made by clever instrumentation to his collection of Western musical sounds, which previously included whistling, musical watches, coyote howls, and screaming. A few years ago, I thought it would be interesting to try and watch every movie that features a Morricone score. I don't take this goal seriously since the man's scored like 8,000,000 movies, but I was grateful that this movie, chosen at random from what was playing on cable television, allowed me to cross one more Morricone scored off the vast list. I was also grateful that it was so funny, well-paced, and exciting. It also features a machete to the face and a man set on fire!

Day 83: Being There

Ah, Hal Ashby. Somehow you found the soul of disaffected American romances with Harold and Maude, pushing the lovers united against the world, Bonnie and Clyde-esque, "even if no one in the world agrees with us, we'll love each other no matter what!" genre into a corner, prodded it, and came out with one of the most loveably sweet, endearing movies of all time. And here's another sweet, endearing, and poignant film about an unlikely hero who's got everything to lose, but pushes on and finds happiness. God damn you, Hal Ashby, for getting it so right... for including in your film, the fact that Chance, the gardner, could not have done all he does here if he were black... for complicating the myth of the sweet retard who makes everyone else's life better with his unassuming. selfless ways by insinuating that he's Jesus!

Hal Ashby... if I could reanimate you, I would: to pat you on the back for knowing how not to tip your hand while doing an entire movie in deadpan. For understanding that Television is not the problem, so much as the fact that we're all as dumb as the shows on TV and so self-aggrandizing, we think our lives are worth being on TV. For being prescient enough to know that all a man has to do to be elected president, is get his face on TV, spout a few simplistic, yet smart-sounding analogies, refuse to talk about his past (or better still, insist that he has none), and have the right corporate connections. For giving Peter Sellers this role near the end of his life, the character somehow a fitting tribute to how he made us all feel.

Being There is a beautiful, sad little film with much wit. The premise is labored from the get-go (dumb guy wanders around, affects people with homespun gardening parables or a lifetime of television-inspired platitudes) and yet, the acting is too good, the writing too funny, and the way it's all captured too assured to do anything but fall for the damn thing. Though there were times that I thought the territory the movie was steering me into might get far too schmaltzy and Gumpish, it never, ever went there and every emotional beat was fairly earned. Good show, this one. I like to watch it.

Day 82: The Crush

I caught this on HBO in a hotel room in the middle of Kansas last night. About a 14 year old girl played by Alicia Silverstone who has a "crush" (in quotes because anytime someone says the word "crush" in this movie, they say it as if it is the most significant word in the English language, and I want to honor this choice) on 28 year old Cary Elwes, The Crush is a watchable, though middling, piece of tawdry fluff. When Elwes rejects Silverstone's advances, she goes a bit crazy and starts destroying his life to gain his affections. The proceedings feel alternately arbitrary, convenient, or preordained, so much so, that I thought that the movie might first have sprung to life as a trailer and extra material was then shot to pad it out to feature length. The movie also commits a cinematic crime, paying homage, I guess, to the peeping tom closet scene in Blue Velvet by ripping it off.

At the end of the movie, society's order is regained by Silverstone being committed to a looney (or, if you will, a "crushing") bin and the movie indicates that she's now replaced Elwes with a young male doctor as the object of her homicidal affections. A closeup of Silverstone smirking tells us that things are not changing. She's going to "crush" on this guy and the cycle will begin anew. I thought about how many horror movies end this way and I suddenly realized that one probable reason many teenagers get into horror movies is this aspect of them: worlds where things are fixed and permanent. An external reflection of their notion that things won't, can't, and shouldn't change, no matter how bad they may be. I'm sure that this was present during my own horror fixation as a teenager (lately I've found the genre's good/evil conflicts too based in religious ideas for my liking [seriously, can someone please do something about how frightening the prospect of NO God, NO pure good or evil is?]).

Extrapolating pedestrian and amateur insights into my teenage psche to a larger population aside, this is a movie about a 28 year old man who can't outwit a smarter-than-average 14 year old girl. Elwes's character makes so many bumbling, idiotic choices in dealing with the girl who's "crushing" on him, that I was as far from sympathetic with his character as I'm capable of being. Yeah, I mean, I get that people make dumb choices in life, but rarely do they make choices that result in such a neat and tidy narrative. The plot's leanness is one of the movie's most redeeming features, but that's a backhanded compliment. I liked that the movie went from rote plot point to rote plot point in such a clean and efficient manner, since it clearly had no insights, no new observations, no scares, nor, really, anything to say.

I kind-of forgot that movies like this one existed...

Day 81: Hiroshima Mon Amour

I've got to stop watching such great old films. It's really impossible to enter into any dialogue about them that feels fresh, vibrant, or, even honest without the ghosts of critics past haunting my keystrokes. Generally, when I sit down to write about a movie like Hiroshima Mon Amour, I try to dig deep, to find what it means to me, try to ignore everything that's been said about it, and find the aspect of the film that hit me the hardest as an entry point.

For Hiroshima Mon Amour, there's no doubt that the documentary footage of survivors of the atomic blast is this entry point. The film juxtaposes the smooth bodies of two entwined lovers with the burnt, crispy flesh of the survivors while the lovers whisper enigmatic things to one another about Hiroshima. The couple is comprised of a French actress, in Hiroshima to make a film about peace, and a Japanese architect. They've only just met and both are married, but they connect so quickly, so easily that the affair threatens to overtake their lives. As the film progresses, they constantly break apart and then come back together, compelled, perhaps, by the desire to understand the enormity of the violence that took place in Hiroshima and how it affected both of them.

We learn that the Japanese man was off fighting in the war when the bomb dropped, but his family was living in Hiroshima. We learn that the French woman had an affair with a Nazi when she was 18 and was publicly shamed for this fact. Both lovers cling to one another in order to exorcise their painful memories, but their desire to hold on to the pain of the past separates them, isolates them, and dooms their relationship. The Japanese man is the more ready to let the past drift away of the two, but the film never resolves his disturbance that the French people celebrated when the bomb was dropped. The actress cannot let go of the memory of the dead Nazi, telling herself that she's cheated on him by revealing their story to another.

The pall and guilt of war crimes pervades a well-captured and realistic romance. The relationship is a sweaty, passionate, yet shameful affair, and this is never more apparent than when the two make one another happy. Their smiles are tinged with regret and their laughter short and terse. The characters often refer to past events in the present tense and this conflates the past and the present of the film. This is particularly saddening, as it gives the sweet relationship an air of inevitable doom.

The film is beautiful in the way it takes world events and makes them personally relevant to realistically drawn characters. This is something that I never fail to go nuts about. With beautiful black and white photography and a delightful musical score, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a poignant history of the emotions of people post World War II and, yet, much like the way the characters speak of the past in the present tense, it exists above time.

Home stretch

A double meaning. On the one hand, I'm down to watching the last ten or so movies for this blog. In addition, I'm going to Kansas City for the holidays to be with family.

But there will not be any days off. Not even with a 10 hour car trip. I've gone so long with no break, I'm committed to not skipping a single day even with my bullshit declaration of principles allowing for it. No. Movies will be watched. And things will be written about them. Even on Jesus's birthday. Especially on Jesus's birthday. This is what he wants me to do. I can feel it deep down.

What's even more exciting is I'll be away from home base, forced to find films and fit them in as I can, even with busy holiday activities. Forced to find stray internet capable computers and type on them before their rightful owners find out. Blogging by the seat of my pants. It's going to be fun.

Things like this are only worth doing if the amount of respect you'll lose for yourself upon failing is enough to make you commit yourself totally. And, you know, even if no one was watching, I'd still feel this way.

Day 80: Eureka

Not a bad movie, exactly, hobbled by critical flaws, to be sure, but certainly interesting, Eureka is about a gold prospector, Jack McAnn, who strikes it super-rich thanks, in part, to a magical rock.  After he finds his fortune (alas, very little dancing around and screaming GOOOOLD!), the film jumps forward in time to show a man marred by his wealth.  He's married, owns an entire island, and lives in a state of paranoia, greed, and jealousy.  There are echoes of Citizen Kane in the way the character uses his money to craft a world of his own making and becomes angry when other people won't play along according to his plan.  His daughter, for instance, is in love with Rutger Hauer, something any dutiful parent would object to, I think, and McAnn goes to great effort to destroy their relationship.

This is a Zardoz-y trainwreck.  The film bounces around in time and space for a while, a technique that captures the McAnn character as a hardened loner against the rough landscape of the American West in mythic, grandiose terms.  It's not entirely convincing, though, and the histrionics surrounding his character in the first sequence of the film are so overblown, albeit in a pleasing Legend-era Ridley Scott sort-of way, that it's hard to get a handle on what's happening in the film.  Once we join his cranky future self, things settle down (to both the movie's benefit and its loss) and the plot that follows the elder McAnn is well-wrought (the film finds its footing through a particularly focused and engaging Gene Hackman).  But, suddenly, he's gone from the story and Eureka turns into an unconvincing, improbable, and ridiculous court drama.

The courtroom shenanigans don't work and the straight-forward Kane meets The Godfather plot digressions are lacking any real narrative thrust as well.  What's captured nicely, though, is a triangle of conflicting emotions between McAnn, his daughter, and Rutger Hauer.  After exercising restraint with the other straight plots in the film, director Nicholas Roeg turns on his faucet of editing gimmicks when this conflict is at the forefront of the movie, and they're used to good effect.  One sequence featuring Hauer at a Bacchanalian voodoo ceremony, cross-cut with Hackman and the daughter is especially effective as the rhythms of the music and the actions of the people at the ceremony seem to dictate what will happen in the narrative.  Then, we're back to the straight stuff as Hackman refuses to sign some papers for some land over to Joe Pesci, and it feels like a betrayal of the fantastic scene that's come before.

This is representative of the whole.  There's a fantastical element to the plot found in Hackman's magic rock that works surprisingly well, foreshadowing events to come and affecting Hackman's life in a subtle, uneasy way.  The film is very, very good at this and excels whenever something "odd" is happening onscreen (including an intense and grisly murder scene that defies all the cinematic decorum that's preceded it [and come to think of it, also the decorum that follows]).  But the more traditional narrative strands are done in such a conventional fashion that they feel lacking in comparison.

  

Day 79: The Phantom of Liberty

Luis Buñuel, I feel comfortable saying now, is one of my favorite filmmakers.  The Phantom of Liberty is the third Buñuel film I've seen and watching it, I felt as if it was taking place inside my brain, transforming half-formed ideas from my feeble mind into fully fledged cinematic reality.  The movie had me, quite literally, screaming with laughter as the multitude of random, bizarre plotlines played out before me and, in addition, touched my thinking bone as well.  It's a brilliant film.

A constant lesson in dramaticus interruptus, a phrase I've just coined, the movie follows a plotline or a character until things get interesting and then shifts to focus on a different character or plotline.  It plays out like a particularly warped (and deadpan) episode of Monty Python or Mr. Show, with inspired, hilarious vignettes or sketches of an altered reality.  The moments of transition from one vignette to the next are linked by an emotional stream-of-consciousness that never once lets the viewer down, unless, that is, the viewer happens to desire any degree of dramatic closure for these fundamentally banal storylines.  And the movie plays everything absolutely straight, positing as reality alternative worlds where, for instance, a couple denounces photographs of landmarks around the world as obscene while being turned on by them at the same time.

What's more, all of these satirical worlds have a thesis to them that makes sense, if only in the subconscious.  The Phantom of Liberty is the perfect antidote to Godard's strident, didactic voice.  Utilizing an eloquent, purposeful (and masterful) sense of absurdity, it says everything about the society watching the film and the society that made the film that Weekend said, only with more wit and guile than Godard used.  Perfection in every way.

Day 78: Weekend

This is the movie equivalent of Cain, that preacher from the last two Poltergeist movies.  On the surface, it's relatively unthreatening, though the creaky old voice is a bit alarming, but when it grabs you, it stares at you with burning, ghoulish eyes and sings "God is in his holy temple," over and over and over, refusing to let go until JoBeth Williams comes to save you.  Weekend has one upped the demonic preacher in that it posits there aren't any JoBeth Williamses to save you, and as it turns out, it's right.  The question becomes, how many times will the preacher sing the same tune over and over?  The answer: A lot.

While that's the feeling I take away from Godard's Weekend (I described the experience of watching Alphaville as feeling like I was being poked with a stick… I think creepy ghost preacher is a step up), I cannot deny that the movie's laden with fantastic stuff, sequences that will live on in my memory for ages to come.  As such, I'm glad I've seen it and I'd like to see it again in twenty years.  Rather than clutter up the internet with random attempts to pin down Godard or the people who unabashedly love him, I thought I'd just ramble about what I liked.  (Because I just finished watching the thing and I'm very tired.)

The traffic jam in the movie is superb and, so I hear, famous.  It features a camera tracking down an interminable stretch of traffic and an ever-increasing cacophony of blaring car horns.  The length of the sequence and the pace of the camera movement, in addition to the aural displeasure of so many car horns honking, creates a disgusting, amusing suspense.  Every time a break appears between cars, a sense of hope that this brilliant sequence might soon be over pops into one's head.  And then it continues to its hilarious conclusion: bodies strewn everywhere from a nasty wreck.  The characters (and we) are so glad to be out of the traffic, we don't care at all about the dead.

I don't really care to get into the plot as I'm still not sure what was going on in many parts of the film.  Suffice to say: The movie follows an unhappy and somewhat wealthy couple as they attempt to go somewhere.  As they travel, the decaying bodies of dead or dying are cars scattered everywhere, smashed-up, flaming wrecks covered in the blood of their drivers.  The imagery is creepy and apocalyptic; it's also a dynamic way of foreshadowing the end of civilization, a subject the movie eventually reaches.

I enjoyed the bourgeoisie couple and the pointed attacks against them, and, I enjoyed the literary digressions Godard makes here and the characters referencing the movie they're in (what an awful movie, the man complains, all we meet are crazy people), and there's a poetic statement at the end of the film set to drums that had me both tapping my feet and wanting to shake my fist in triumph when it ended.  I also liked the way the movie seemed to subtly shift from being about the awfulness of the bourgeoisie to the awfulness of revolutionaries.

I'm not sure I'll ever fully enjoy a Godard film, but, then, after seeing this, I’m pretty sure they're not made to be enjoyed or even talked about.  I think they're made to be experienced as the deadening, soul-crushing, acerbic and funny little things that they are.  And I think they're supposed to make me as mad and ashamed as I feel now that I can cross another one off the list.  But time and technology have played a joke on Godard:  I purposefully ate fast food while watching this movie.