Three films a day

On the docket for June

Assuming I am able to resume the feverish pace I had until very recently (and assuming I don’t do another of my infamous queue reshufflings), I might get to see my current top fourteen Netflix queue movies in June. This year has been all about balance. I want to fill in a number of gaps, where I’ve somehow not seen things which everyone assumes I must have. (Some of the movies I haven’t seen are so shamefully shocking to reveal I wonder if I’ll even bother admitting when I finally do see them.) All the same, I don’t want to turn this into remedial class, so I’m peppering those films in between more recent (and older but relatively obscure) stuff.

Here are my current top fourteen. There are some shocking enough never-seens on that queue, aren’t there? I can’t even begin to imagine what some of you might think of me when I get to #15 (my only defense is, well, I saw his second film first and never went back to his debut). [The image is a thumbnail, so just click on it to see this list. I know, I’m being lazy.]

#86, 5/30 – The Station Agent (2003) (dvd)

So after a weekend of movies that battered my poor senses (and occasionally challenged me to stay awake), this little gem was a welcome change of pace. This will surprise no one, but I’m very much a fan of films about a small set of lonely or isolated characters who find themselves together and better off because of it. It’s quiet and  lovely and something about it made me miss someone.

Plus, it had Patricia Clarkson. As some of you may remember I realized last year that I have this weird affinity for her. I can’t explain it. I’m not even sure I would if I could. I just know that when I watch a movie with her in it (be it All the Real Girls, Falling Like This, Pieces of April, or Far From Heaven—all of which I watched in a very short span of time last year), when she’s on the screen, I pay attention. And that was true even before I knew her name. Only in High Art, where she played a mostly inanimate character and shared time with Radha Mitchell, did I really not take too much notice of Clarkson when she was on the screen. I just love it whenever she shows up.  The only other living actress I can think of who has this effect on me is Tilda Swinton.  Yeah, Tilda Swinton.

#85, 5/30 – The Trojan Women (1971) (dvd)

My brief tour of Cacoyannis films ends with this, his English language adaptation of the Euripides play (as translated by Edith Hamilton), starring Kate Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave as Hecuba and Andromache, respectively. It didn’t do much for me. There’s a lot of wailing and moaning and emoting and maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it, but I was very happy when it was over. 

That said, Genevieve Bujold, ever a favorite of mine, shines as Cassandra.  I actually got chills as she said, essentially, "O, Mother, ain’t no thing about what’s gonna happen to me. Wait til you get a load of what’s gonna go down in Agamemnon’s house! For real, ma!"

Tell it like it is, Cass. Tell it like it is. (Or, more accurately: Tell it like it will be. Sadly, no one will ever believe you.)

#84, 5/29 – Esther Kahn (2000) (dvd)

Please, the next time I decide to watch five hours of film in one day, beat me if I’ve only seen less than three whole movies for my efforts. Watching two two-and-a-half-hour movies in the same day is just dumb. But it’s what I’ve done. Hot on the heels of the jackrabbit-paced Tarkovsky I’ve submitted myself to…. this.  It was not easy to sit through, but I did it and no one can take that away from me.

And, fortunately, I liked the end result. The word on Desplechin is that he feels for his characters, and I think that’s exactly right. He tries to show them in all their complexity, neither saints nor villains. I found Esther largely fascinating as a character despite her being almost entirely emotionally dead. She has no real connection to "the commons" of human experience, if you will. (I know people like this, which is perhaps what made this movie both fascinating and painful.)  As any 2.5 hour movie with an emotionally dead subject is prone to do, the movie drags a bit, but there are scenes which bubble with loveliness all the same.  In fact, one of the best scenes I’ve experienced this year came when Nathan (Ian Holm) instructs Esther (Summer Phoenix) on how to cross the stage.  And the "Hedda Gabler"  scenes at the end reminded me, I suppose unsurprisingly, of the play scenes at the end of Cassavetes’ Opening Night (another movie that runs close to 2.5 hours, kids).

So, much like Stalker, while I would never recommend this movie to anyone, I got something from it all the same.

#83, 5/29 – Stalker (1979) (dvd)

I go through periods where I find it difficult to watch movies. I’m not sure why it happens, but I seem to go through a stretch like that every year (in 2002, from roughly May to November, I watched maybe half a dozen movies) and I’ve just come to accept it. I may be in such a period again, or maybe my rental habits just aren’t jiving with my needs at the moment. I mean, do I really have the energy right now to watch these ponderous foreign films? I’m not sure I even have the time, and I barely have the motivation.

If it sounds like I’m going to pan Stalker, what with its 163 Tarkovsky-paced minutes and heavy philosophizing, well, you’d be close to right. I wasn’t in the mood for it, but I fought all the way through it, because I believed I’d get something out of it. And I did. Stalker is one of those movies which, frankly, isn’t that much of a joy to watch, but it’s interesting to think about afterwards. The last, hmm, I think it was 20 minutes, but it could easily have been 35, or 10 (Tarkovsky pacing. Everything is slow. It throws my sense of timing off completely), had amazing moments. Once our characters’ journey nears the end, it gets good. No, it gets fantastic. But you have to put up with a lot to get there. A whole lot.

It’s almost baffling to look at all the elements in this film which turn out to be purely incidental (for instance, there’s a mutant in it—no, really, a mutant—but almost no issue is made of it). I wonder if those things received more attention in the original story.

Stalker reminds me of a short story I rather liked, but I’m too lazy to look it up. (Hmmm. No, I’m not. I’m sitting here in front of Google and I’m a decent searcher.) Oh, right: Michael Swanwick’s "Edge of the World" (I understated earlier. I don’t "rather like" it; it’s one of my favorite stories ever) from the second Full Spectrum book. It’s kind of funny: There’s nowhere new to go with wish-fulfillment stories, and yet they’re often amazingly fascinating to me.

#82, 5/15 – Elektra (1962) (dvd)

I’ve been so busy (and tired) films have been one of the little pleasures I’ve mostly forsaken this weekend. Still, this morning I found time to catch this adaptation of Euripides’ play about the unfortunate family of Agamemnon (who, despite what David Benioff and Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy may tell you, actually made it back to Greece alive). It’s both theatrical and cinematic, and the combination works very well.

Crash:
Edelstein’s review of Crash is pretty much dead on. Especially as he notes:

A universe in which we’re all racist puppets is finally just as
simpleminded and predictable as one in which we’re all smiling
multicolored zombies in a rainbow coalition. It’s strange, but I came
out of Crash feeling better about race relations—not because
of anything in the screenplay, but because of the spectacle of all
those terrific actors (of all those races) working together and giving
such potentially laughable material their best shot.

A weak film. A very, very weak film.

Hero:
If you haven’t seen Hero and you plan to, stop reading. Spoilers are a-comin’

It turns out that some of my misgivings about the message of Hero (the first film I wrote about in this space, incidentally) may be down to the translation and not the filmmaker. I probably should have considered that, especially since I notice fairly benign differences between the little pieces of spoken French I understand in a film and what the subtitles say. It makes sense that a translator’s choices might alter meaning.  From Cineaste’s fantastic piece about the movie:

The film’s ambiguous and flawed ending has allowed for a multiplicity of interpretations both in China and the United States…. Seeing an expression of support for the Communist regime in the film’s sympathetic account of a tyrannical ruler’s sacrifice of individuals for the greater good, some American critics have compared the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda pieces [note: Not me. I was thinking more of Frank Capra’s. -n], while Chinese critics have derided Zhang’s "servility" to the government. More specifically, the film has been read as either justifying the Communist government’s massacre of its own citizens at Tiananmen in 1989, or as supporting the mainland’s goal of eventually "unifying" Taiwan as well as Hong Kong and Tibet.

To be honest, I read it more as simply justifying tyranny if the ruler thinks he’s doing "the right thing". I didn’t go so far as to dredge up specific Chinese or Nazi examples, ‘cos my country has got plenty of them on display, too.  But here’s comes the curveball.

In the United States at least, such interpretations are to some degree justified by the film’s subtitles, which give the film a more nationalistic slant than in is present in the original Chinese. In the most misleading example, when Broken Sword writes two characters in the sand to persuade Nameless not to kill the King, they are rendered in subtitles as "Our Land". The characters, however, are tianxia, which might more literally be translated as "All Under Heaven" or "Mankind". Broken Sword is not arguing for some grandiose concept of nationhood, but simply that endless fighting creates hardship for the people.

Oh.

Kind of a lot different.

#81, 5/8 – Stella (1955) (dvd)

I’m not entirely sure this is my first ever Greek film, but it’s certainly among my first. It’s certainly my first Michael Cacoyannis film, and I have two or three others sitting high in my queue.  I’m sort of ashamed to admit I didn’t see the parallels between this and Carmen until just now. Heh. I liked this one quite a lot, and I’m a sucker for films about people trying to keep themselves in tact, regardless the cost, so this worked quite well for me.

#80, 5/8 – Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994) (dvd)

I’ve respected Lin since my first and only experience with the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (the only thing of hers I’ve seen up close) in my early teens. Regardless of what each individual brings to that piece, there’s the sheer, jaw-dropping power of seeing this recognition of 57,000 people’s lives. (I can’t help but think of the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians killed or badly injured as a direct or indirect result of our involvement, but that’s beyond the scope of this film or my impression of it).

It covers the first ten years in Lin’s career and it did a decent job, though I wasn’t entirely satisfied for some reason. I’m not sure what it lacked, or what I expected from it and didn’t get. I guess it’s that it didn’t give me anything I didn’t already know. No insights from Lin I wasn’t already aware of, no small moments working on a piece that showed me something I didn’t expect. It lacked surprised. And while that’s fine for me with some movies, it was disappointing in this case.

#79, 5/7 – 3 Iron (2004) (tofw)

Kim Ki-duk has won my respect for one reason: his movies don’t seem to have many words.  As I mentioned not to long ago, his The Isle left me thoroughly disturbed. It was not a great movie, but his use of silence (and of sound) was impressive. I can say exactly the same about this one, a movie in which the two lead characters almost never speak on camera. I’m impressed with filmmakers who can express important things without dialog and this director is certainly one of the more gifted.

I was one of only two people in the theater for this one. I guess mostly-silent South Korean fare has gotten a bit dime-a-dozen recently.

[@Century CinéArts 6, ~2:40pm]

#78, 5/7 – Crash (2004) (tofw)

I didn’t care for this movie.

Sure, it had some brilliantly cinematic moments and every now and again a situation would pulse with an interesting bit of tension. But I must respectfully disagree with the IMDB commenter who labeled this "a realistic, gritty, no-nonsense look at the way life is for so many….". I could call Crash a number of things. Realistic is not one of them. This was like sitting through Altman’s dreadful Short Cuts all over again. Just worse. This was Short Cuts but with this overflowing pot of racially prejudiced characters. And, of course, all the prejudices were wrong, which is the mark of a weak filmmaker.

I kept hoping the movie would stop making a point and start dealing with the honest-to-goodness humanity involved. I kept wondering if the movie would take a second to ask some questions instead of answering things so quickly and forcefully. It never did, on either count.

[@Century 12 Evanston, 11:00am]

#77, 5/7 – The Pawnbroker (1964) (dvd)

Some of you have heard me go off on 8mm, a film I utterly detest, since I consider it exploitative, stupid, and, worst of all, boring. An absolutely horrible movie, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. And it was in the final scene that I realized part of what bugged me so much about it. Schumacher had the nerve to make this irredeemable trash when he was sitting on a far more interesting film: what happens after you experience something like this? How do you go through the day-to-day now, having seen what you have? Is the world the same? Can the world be the same? Can you relate to other people like you used to? Schumacher and company were sitting on a doozy of a movie idea and instead they gave us the unnecessary prologue and left us to wonder about the part that really mattered.  Of course, since Nick Cage hasn’t been in a remotely interesting movie since Moonstruck (look! another opportunity for me to talk shit about Charlie Kaufman! I won’t let you down, either: every last copy of Adaptation should be shot into the sun), he would have brought the whole thing crashing down anyway.

Anyway, I’ve gotta commend Sidney Lumet (who is, as I’ve said before, my favorite living Hollywood director) for trying this film. Released the same year as his under-rated Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker examines a few days in the life of a man who survived one of the most horrifying experiences of the 20th century. And it asks those questions which need to be asked: How do you go through the day-to-day now?

Sol Nazerman’s day-to-day is not pretty. He’s no longer alive, really, and he—having been dehumanized in systematic, barely imaginable ways—has no empathy at all for those who come into his shop. A prostitute. A junkie. A woman who needs money to presumably "do something" about her illegitimate pregnancy. These people have themselves  been dehumanized by our society (and by Nazerman himself), but he has no connection with them. He can’t seem to connect with anyone. Some people try to reach across the gulf of experience, but he’s just too far away. Sol wants only one thing, and no one’s willing to give it to him.

Despite the script’s heavy-handedness, I’m happy they tried this.

#76, 5/2 – American Splendor (2003) (dvd)

Brilliant filmmaking. Not just in terms of form (interspersing the real people with the representations was inspired), but also because it’s a movie which doesn’t ever try to laugh at the people (or the representations) from the sidelines.

I could say more, but if I did I’d be late for work.

#75, 5/1 – Master of the Flying Guillotine (1975) (gitn)

A one-armed man versus a blind man. Yeah, we must be talking about a martial arts movie. (Though the opening to The Fugitive notes that Richard Kimble was "an innocent victim of blind justice". So, in his case I guess he was working against a blind woman and a one-armed man)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie both more deserving of a good MiSTing (oh, how I miss MST3K sometimes) and yet somehow worthy of praise. Odd. It’s just thoroughly entertaining, even if it’s kind of silly.

I got it because of all the badly-dubbed martial arts movies I watched on Saturday afternoons roughly twenty-five years ago, the only specific Hong Kong movie I can remember involved the flying guillotine. I’m a bit tired and therefore not thinking clearly, but I’m pretty sure the flying guillotine is the sickest, most absurd movie weapon I’ve ever seen.  Anyway, this wasn’t the movie I saw as a kid (I think I saw Flying Guillotine, or perhaps its sequel), but the weapon was the same.  And it’s the weapon I came to see. Why else would I watch a movie featuring a swastika wearing blind man with a vendetta against one-armed people?

Oh, right. Plenty of reasons, actually. The yoga master who could elongate his arms at will, for instance. You know how useful that could be in everyday life? If my yoga-practicing friends can do that shit and they didn’t tell me, I’m gonna be pissed.

#74, 5/1 – The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000) (dvd)

"One should live where one’s soul is in harmony,
where it is in accord with its surroundings."

This is a quiet, nuanced, gorgeously-realized film about a month in the life of three sisters and the people connected to them. I honestly don’t remember if I’ve seen The Scent of Green Papaya (I know it was on my must-watch list back then, but so was The Piano, and look how long it took me to get to that), or if this was my first experience with the director, but regardless, this one got me in the right place and time.

There’s a lot to like about this film, or maybe I’m just a sucker for small-scale Asian films, given my adoration for things like Take Care of My Cat and Suzhou River. It was a good way to start the day. And later today I plan to watch a supposed Hong Kong classic. Again, you envy me. You gotta stop doing that.