35 rhums (2008)

Claire Denis's Ozu Checklist

1. Widower facing loneliness
2. Daughter codependent or independent?
3. Will she get married?
4. Bars as safe place to express emotion
5. Busybody lady neighbor
6. Casual narrative ellipses
7. Cycles of work and home
8. Farting

Rating: 6 out 10
Recommended also: Take your pick

The Informer (1935)

Cinematography changes, editing changes, technologies change, fashions go in and out, genres rise and fall, ideologies and topics follow the day:  I (for the most part) can accept them in their context.  I can hang with silent Ku Klux Klan heroes or Mel Gibson as a feminist.  I will grant the author their subject and the time its style.

Two notable exceptions:
Early 80s cinematography is flat out ugly.
English speakers overacting, but especially the 30s and early 40s.

Victor McLagen won best actor and The Informer was the first film and only film to win the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Picture by a unanimous vote on the first ballot.  Just not my style.

Rating: 3 out of 10
Recommended instead:  How Green Was My Valley

Avatar (2009)

Most feel Avatar has a happy ending.  Or it is some sort of leftist plot.  I take it as reflecting the nadir of civil debate in America.  Think about it:  is diplomacy or talking or negotiation even in this universe?  Both sides assume the other is incapable of compromise or a change of heart or change of mind.  The false dilemma of "kill or be killed" is forced down our throats.  Nonviolent resistance isn't CGIable, I guess.

Then again, maybe Avatar just faces the fact that big bully capitalism will never change until it gets its ass kicked so hard that it can't sit for a century.  Speaking for myself, I never changed my ways from any inner virtue.  I had to suffer the consequences of my bad behavior.

Rating: 5 out of 10
Recommended instead: The New World

Near Dark (1987)

If Kathryn Bigelow wins Best Director, I'll be happy that more women might get a chance to direct.  The studio that cultivates female directorial talent will enjoy a competitive advantage akin to the National League in the 1950s.

That doesn't mean she deserves it. 

Rating: 2 out of 10
Recommended instead:  Any Suzanne Bier film.

Man Hunt (1941)

I admit it:  I took some classes at VCU for easy A's.  Looking back, some of them were the best courses I ever took.  So there.  One was ARTH 271 History of Motion Picture II with Mike Jones.  So much learned, so many memories, dare I say a "defining life experience" or two.  I was walking home on a post-rainstorm gloomday.  Staring at my feet most of the way, looking at my sneakers hitting the sidewalk cracks, I was in what I would now call a dissociative state.  The trauma was Rashomon.   

I have worn out the assigned text, A History of Narrative Film, aka "The Cook Book."  It is now falling apart and is still one of my top reference books.  At any rate, I wish I had read this sentence on pg 365 much more carefully:

"[Fritz] Lang directed another twenty-one films in the United States for a variety of studios between 1938 and 1956, but only him film noir masterpiece, The Big Heat (1953, Columbia), achieved the quality and depth of his greatest work."

With my age 20 brain, I internalized that as:  Later Lang sucked. 

Until I fell into They Shoot Pictures, Don't They's thrall, which puts 16 Lang in their Top 1000, half of them post-38, that was still pretty operative in my noggin.  Now Scarlet Street stands at #50 overall on my personal list.  It has the most brutal dismantling of a noir patsy I have seen to date and barrels through the Production Code's stop signs in virtue of the sheer force of its hatred of all of the characters.

Man Hunt is pretty good too.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Recommended also:  Hangmen Also Die, Rancho Notorious, Human Desire.

The first sentence on VCU's cinema department homepage is "Do you love films your friends really hate?"  LOL.  I'm lucky I always had cool friends.

Nowhere (1997)

OffScreen finally got their Spring 2010 schedule online, and I am pleased to see three films that were already in my Netflix queue: 35 Shots of Rum, Bronson and 24 City.  A few years ago they screened another Gregg Araki film, Mysterious Skin, which I missed then but might see in the future.  Hopefully all of these will be more enjoyable than Nowhere, which was insufferably repulsive.

Rating: 1 out of 10 (made it about 40 minutes)
Recommended instead:  Fast Times at Ridgemont High is at Xer speed, I guess.  Those Nowhere kids were just too scary.  Stop texting and GET OUT OF MY YARD YOU ROTTEN KIDS!

LOL (2006)

Watched the movie.  Watched it with the technical commentary track.  Watched it with the acting commentary track.  LOL, Funny Ha Ha, Hannah Takes the Stairs, The Puffy Chair, My Effortless Brilliance & Humpday makes it six for six thumbs up from me.  This mumblecore group's aesthetic sweetspot has such perfect timeliness that it may guarantee their untimelessness.  I want to be here now so I can tell people later that you had to be there.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Recommended also: More now before the moment has passed.

Deep End (1970)

I think I first heard Kevin Kellam use the term "rope a dope" to describe The Lower Depths.  Start out slow, almost too slow, bide your time, then WHAM!  Did you doubt me as a director?  HA!  I AM THE GREATEST!

The risk that goes with that strategy is that you have to win by knockout.  Otherwise, as is the case with Deep End, you just end up falling too far behind on the scorecards.

Rating: 4 out of 10
Recommended instead:  When We Were Kings

Tsotsi

Tsotsi somehow crosses Cidade de Deus with a Lifetime movie.  Breastfeeding at gunpoint is novel, to say the least.  Overall it has half the plot with a quarter of the style and none of the musical bravado of the Brazilian original.  Still, a crazy plot in an interesting locale will carry the day any day.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Recommended also: City of God, of course.

Sweetie

On Craig O'Brien's dream blog, he labels all dreams not only with the themes and motifs within them, but also with what he ate for dinner that night.  Dickens famously made this connection when Scrooge dismisses Marley's ghost as "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

It pays to be sensitive to how we are feeling or what we've been eating.  I use HALT all the time.  If I am feeling hopeless, I ask myself "am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired?:  If so, I just deal with that issue first, by eating, breathing, talking or sleeping, and more often than not the supposed doom goes away as well.

At any rate, I bring this up because whenever I drop the 1-bomb on a well regarded film, I need to be open to the possibility that I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to enjoy it that day.

Rating: 1 out of 10
Recommended instead: The Piano

Dracula (1931)

I don't have photographic memory of the Monster Manual anymore, but I think they left a few special abilities out.  First, vampires should be immune to Web.  At about the 10 minute mark, Bela Lugosi walks right through a spider's web without disturbing it.  Also, vampires should have Knock at will, as all doors open automatically ahead of Dracula without his touch.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Recommended also: Nosferatu was one of the first, and is maybe the best of them all.  In the public domain in the US, so it's free to watch.

The Scarlet Empress

Josef von Sternberg, if he were born decades later, would not have needed Hollywood.  The Scarlet Empress shows a man yearning for the freedom from plot of music videos or commercials.  Lady Gaga and von Sternberg would have made a fine pair.  I would have preferred to enjoy this crazy production design accompanied by a commentary track, because the film, as is, just didn't hold my interest.

Rating: 4 out of 10
Recommended instead: Doctor Zhivago

Nightmare Alley

Some screenplays just feel like novels.  The protagonist has a life with ups and downs, personality changes and long strange trips it's beens.  These are lives that take hundreds of pages to live.  I suspect that the most "full lives" on screen are biopics based on real life or drawn from novels.

Stan Carlisle in Nightmare Alley is one of those "full lives."  Not surprising its author had a crazy ride as well. 

Rating: 8 out of 10
Recommended also: OK, lemme do the research and go straight down my favorites list for films dominated by the twists and many turns of a protagonist's life, taking the first ten:

Citizen Kane = based on real life
Amadeus = based on real life (stretch?)
Boogie Nights = original work
Days of Wine and Roses =  original work
A Clockwork Orange = novel
Lawrence of Arabia = based on real life
The Color Purple = novel
Persepolis = based on real life
Field of Dreams = novel
The Man Who Fell to Earth = novel

Congratulations to Paul Thomas Anderson and JP Miller for creating the exceptions.

Reversal of Fortune

It takes two to do the codependency tango.  Dershowitz went on to be on OJ Simpson's "dream team" so some of his more crusading moments in the film now sound tinny to the ear. 

Rating: 5 out of 10
Recommended instead: Until I see the 1940 version, I'll have to go with Gaslight from '44.

Still assembling my thoughts on Antichrist.  In process of rewatching Andrei Rublev and guessing that the upcoming snowstorm will provide the proper atmosphere to type a bit more than usual.

Mark Bastable pointed out offline that I tend to be a hard grader. That is true.  I rebel against the IMDB inflation/compression of the 10 point scale.  Here is what my numbers mean.

10: Masterpiece
9:   Excellent
8:   Very good
7:   Thumbs up
6:   Recommended, barely
5:   Usually means "decent time-waster on TV" or "see it if you want, or not," but in special cases means "equal parts brilliant and infuriating so it all cancels out"
4:   "Oh, if only it could have been just a little better...."
3:   Thumbs down
2:   "Well, at least it had that (one thing) going for it..."
1:   Can mean either "irredeemable trash" or any film that, no matter what merits it may have had, I cannot or will not watch until the very end.  I consider it a fundamental aesthetic principle that if a director cannot "close the deal," then the work is a failure.