|
SCREENING LOG
-11/15-11/21, 2004
Back to 2004 Index
Last week I finished my tenure in a 10 week filmmakers workshop,
and to blow off some steam I watched a lot of movies (not
that I wasn't watching a lot of movies during those 10 weeks).
I feel like I'm watching so many movies as if the apocalypse
were nigh. Part of it has to do with a resolution, hopefully
one that will not go the way of so many failed resolutions
of the past - to renounce my cinephilic a
ctivities (watching and discussing movies) in order to spend
more time on my own creative endeavors. In anticipation of
this sea-change, which is planned to take place in January
2005, it looks like I'm sowing my oats while I can. Part of
the sowing has involved a personal project where I am trying
to watch at least 10 films from every year of movie history.
I've filled all the years from 2004 to 1924, and am now working
my way to the origins of cinema. I expect to be finished in
January, at about the time I am supposed to stop watching
movies.
As if that weren't enough, I'm also going through my to-see
list, which over the course of this year has gone from 100
to 1000 titles. My cinephilic universe is expanding and I
can't possibly keep up -- which has prompted these thoughts
about whether all this movie watching is really getting me
anywhere. But nontheless I continue dipping my bucket into
the ocean, since I can get these films for free at the library,
a most terrible blessing.
And if this weren't enough, there's the Asian DVDs I bought
from Chinatown that I still have to watch. And the highly
rated films that are currently in release, not to mention
the special retro or museum screenings of rare gems. I guess
I feel a sense of duty, since there are so many films out
there that are available to me that I have to check them out.
This mindset needs to be refunneled into something that leads
to my own productivity. It seems that long gone are the days
when I had time to write paragraph reviews on every movie
I'd see each week, a great exercise for meditating and digesting
the films one has seen, one that I'm glad that many on this
thread continue to practice. For this week, I think the best
I can do is distill my viewings into the following summary
of what I got out of my week. Hopefully I'll never watch as
many movies in one week again...
Chaplin Vs. Keaton, round 3 : For a while I've been
more enamored of Chaplin than Keaton, since I felt his films
had more social significance whereas Keaton's films were more
formal exercises. But this past week's viewings of both artists
put me in awe of both of them, especially Keaton. A masterpiece
like THE THREE AGES showed that Keaton could meet D.W. Griffith's
INTOLERANCE at its own game, and do it with more entertainment,
humor and wit. But THE GOAT and THE PLAYHOUSE are high octane
Keaton at his most intensely inspired. The nonstop succession
of gags are totally cinematic - using tricks of staging and
choreography, Keaton keeps pulling the rug from under the
viewer's eyeballs, constantly shifting one's perception of
reality. Chaplin's SUNNYSIDE does similar wacky, pre-Marx
Brothers tricks; my viewings make the case that these two
could easily be categorized as leading Surrealist artists
of their time. But Chaplin shows his other exteme with A WOMAN
OF PARIS, his first directorial effort not starring himself,
and a really well-directed melodrama that pulls the heartstrings
while meditating on the bittersweet destiny of a "fallen"
woman -- for me it's as good as similar stories done by Mizoguchi
or Ophuls.
Johnny To : Arguably Asia's most prolific filmmaker
right now (the main competition appears to be Korea's overrated
Kim Ki-Duk), To has been the pet of HK action buffs, but lately
he's showing signs that his talents go beyond this. For one
thing, he seems incredibly receptive into trying out new things.
I finally got to see THE MISSION, which is generally his most
well-known work, but for me it's not nearly as interesting
as what he's done lately: the wacky RUNNING ON KARMA (where
a beefcake bodybuilder is able to see other's karmic predestinies),
or the steady unraveling of masterful set pieces in PTU. BREAKING
NEWS tries to deliver the same kind of showmanship (opening
with a bravado sidewalk shootout that's practically in 3-D)
while showing the manipulation of the media to sway public
opinion in a showdown between cops and gangsters -- it amounts
to a more action-oriented but less substantive version of
DOG DAY AFTERNOON. More compelling is THROW DOWN, an unpredictable
tribute to judo and Akira Kurosawa (who is identified as the
"greatest filmmaker of all" though I don't see much influence
in To's films). I'd say this is To's most touching film, where
the characters actually approach real people with real personalities,
and not formulas to be tinkered with.
2 x Asian New Wave masterpieces: GROWING UP was written
by Hou Hsiao Hsien and his longtime collaborator Zhu Tien-wen,
directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien's mentor, and is a watershed of
the '80s Taiwanese New Wave. It definitely feels like an early
Hou movie, chronicling the passing of time for a young boy
and his journey of personal development. It matches a populist
sweetness with stunning everyday visuals, nailing a real sense
of place and time and the details of a child's existence.
PEPPERMINT CANDY, directed by Lee Chang-dong (OASIS) is a
stunning blend of FORREST GUMP and IRREVERSIBLE (though much
much better than either film) -- a businessman commits suicide
at his high school classmates' 20th reunion, and we travel
back in time to chart his downward spiral in reverse, alongside
the "progress" made by Korean society over 20 years of history,
dating back to the terrible Kwanju student massacres of 1980.
Sol-Kyung Gu's lead performance kicks Tom Hanks in the ass
many times over, and possibly surpasses Robert DeNiro in RAGING
BULL as a lucid study of male torment and self-destruction.
One of the great films of this decade, from one of the superstar
countries of contemporary world cinema.
2 x '50s French crime movies: Finally caught up with
RIFIFI and TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI -- I admire them for their
iconographic significance (THE movie heist sequence; THE bad-ass
French gangster), and moreover the moments of looseness in
the staging, where the characters hang out in corners of a
room and trade sardonic French wisecracks while exhaling cigarette
smoke... but otherwise it's not something I can hold dear
to my heart -- like LOLA MONTES, possibly the best Max Ophuls
movie I've seen and certainly the most visually stunning.
New releases: For a good stretch of I HUCKABEES, I
thought I was watching one of my favorite movies in one of
my favorite years of movie watching. But as it spiraled towards
its climax and resolution I felt the point getting narrower,
not wider -- as with THREE KINGS, David O. Russell sets a
lot of things in motion to the point of narrative anarchy,
but then feels oddly compelled to have it come to a point
of meaning. Still, there's more going on in this film than
95% of American fare, and it fired plenty of synapses in my
brain. More enjoyable in retrospect was Almodovar's BAD EDUCATION,
which, though it figures an odd neo-noir love triangle involving
three men, has a full load of dangerous curves in its plotline
to go with the hot gay sex. I liked this film more than other
recent Almodovar because it seemed to be trying less to be
"important" and delighting in its sinful subject matter, while
still unearthing a dangerous idea that desire -- gay, straight
or otherwise -- has unavoidably dangerous consequences for
everyone in its path.
Museum Specials: El Museo del Barrio had a real rare
treat that no newspaper seemed to mention, except for the
New York Post (a paper not worth wiping your butt with --
it's owned by Rupert Murdoch -- but happens to have a great
staff of film reviewers). The greatest Mexican film of the
silent era, with a live narration performed by not one, not
two, but three benshis , the traditional performers who would
enact all the dialogue and sound effects of the film. The
three benshis performed in Spanish, English and Japanese (the
latter in tribute to the film culture where benshis originated).
The effect was overwhelming and disorienting -- since portions
of the film were unsubtitled and the narrators took turns
in different language, there was no way to understand all
the dialogue all the time, which gave a feeling of incompleteness,
which was not irrelevant to the film (which survives in large
fragments). Nonetheless the visuals were largely comprehensible
and the action moved briskly, much in the same way as a Louis
Feuillade crime serial. Without the benshis, the film is a
masterpiece, but their live contribution added a special quality
of reviving a lost film culture and reinvesting cinema with
the joys of live theater.
The big museum news in New York this week was the re-opening
of the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art. As part of the
celebration, the museum will give both new releases and lost
classics (such as Visconti's SANDRA, which I regrettably missed)
their first ever premiere screening in New York. I missed
Abbas Kiarostami's newest film, FIVE, but I did catch Godard's
MOMENTS CHOISIS, which is actually a 90 minute distillation
of his magnum opus of film criticism on video, HISTOIRE(S)
DU CINEMA (which I still haven't seen). It's an intensely
packed audio-visual experience, with frames from films interwoven
and overlapping each other, slowed down, reversed, replayed,
thoroughly scrubbed over like what Tom Cruise does in MINORITY
REPORT, that film by Godard's archnemesis. Godard investigates
the cinematic images he's collected over his life that haunt
him to this very day -- including archival newsreel or documentary
footage of the Nazi deathcamps, which he considers central
to the cinematic history of the 20th century, and a haunting
part of its legacy. It's an often astounding work, though
sometimes I experienced pushback at its more polemical, cranky
and despairing moments, as poignant as they may be at times.
Some of what he utters strikes me as gibberish, but through
it I see a fixation with death. It's contending with death
that seems to define cinema for him these days, because in
defining death, cinema may possibly transcend it, through
images that refuse to die in our memory.
The Three Ages (1923, Buster Keaton)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014538/
YES (#1 for 1923)
The Goat (1921, Buster Keaton)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012224/
YES (#1 for 1922)
My Wife's Relations (1922, Buster Keaton)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013422/
yes (#10 for 1922)
The Playhouse (1921, Buster Keaton)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012570/
YES (#2 for 1921 between THE GOAT and DESTINY)
Cops (1922, Buster Keaton)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013025/
yes (#8 for 1922 between ONCE UPON A TIME and THE TOLL OF
THE SEA)
A Woman of Paris (1923, Charles Chaplin)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014624/
yes (#2 for 1923 between THE THREE AGES and SAFETY LAST)
Sunnyside (1919, Charles Chaplin)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010747/
yes (#6 for 1919 between SPIDERS and BLIND HUSBANDS)
Breaking News (2004, Johnnie To)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414931/
yes
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048021/
yes
Throw Down (2004, Johnnie To)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0415380/
yes (#11 for IMDb 2004 new releases, between FAHRENHEIT 9/11
and I WAS BORN, BUT... #25 for new films seen in 2004 between
RUNNING ON KARMA and COWARDS BEND THE KNEE)
I Heart Huckabees (2004, David O. Russell)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0356721/
yes for the first 20 minutes, YES for the next twenty, YES
YES for the next twenty, no for the next twenty, mixed for
the last twenty, for an overall rating of yes
#8 for IMDb 2004 releases, between MOMENTS CHOISIS and TARNATION
#19 for new films seen in 2004 between GOODBYE LENIN and
15
The Mission (1999, Johnnie To)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220644/
yes
Le Souriante Madame Beudet / Smiling Madame Beudet (1922,
Germaine Dulac)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013626/
yes (#4 for 1922 between HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES
and NOSFERATU)
Peppermint Candy (2000, Lee Chang-Dong)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247613/
YES (#4 for 2000 between THE HEART OF THE WORLD and YOU CAN
COUNT ON ME)
The Woman Next Door (1981, Francois Truffaut)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082370/
yes (#8 for 1981 between THE GARDEN OF EARTHY DELIGHTS and
ON GOLDEN POND)
Bad Education (2004, Pedro Almodovar)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/
YES (#4 for IMDb 2004 releases, between ETERNAL SUNSHINE
OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and NOTRE MUSIQUE #11 for new films seen
in 2004 between ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and
THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS
Lola Montes (1955, Max Ophuls)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048308/
YES YES (#2 for 1955 between ORDET and NIGHT AND FOG)
Growing Up (1983, Chen Kun Ho)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085695/
YES YES (#2 for 1983 between LĠARGENT and VIDEODROME)
El Automovil gris (1919, Enrique Rosas)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009894/
YES YES (#1 for 1919)
Moments choisis (2004, Jean-Luc Godard)
Not listed on IMDb
yes (#7 for IMDb 2004 releases between TROPICAL MALADY and
I HEART HUCKABEES #17 for new films seen in 2004 between SARABAND
and GOODBYE LENIN)
Touchez pas au grisbi (1954, Jacques Becker)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046451/
yes
Back to 2004 Index
|
