TM2YC's 1001 Movies (Chronological up to page 25/post 481)

[mnkykungfu]

Sex, Lies & Videotape (1989)
 It's interesting that Soderbergh chooses to feature (virtually) no sex or nudity in the film.

After I watch this, I often quipped about how Soderbergh had messed up the order of the title, since there's almost no sex, few lies, and a lot of videotape. He's definitely a true artist to me, in that he takes chances and when he misses, he misses wiiiiide of the mark. But when his work resonates with you, it really resonates.

The Quiet Earth (1985)

I somehow caught part of this on TV as a kid and spent forever trying to figure out what it was! I was thinking something like The Last Man on Earth, and there have been several films with similar titles. Nothing else touches this one though, the most fascinating and unpredictable of its type. I've been meaning to rewatch since I figured out the title last year.

 

[TM2YC]

Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Director: Godfrey Reggio
Country: United States
Length: 86 minutes
Type: Documentary, Experimental

An experimental documentary with no narrative, no voice-over, only a minimalist score from Philip Glass and an otherwise impossible-to-pronounce title written in a practically dead language (it's "coy-are-nis-cat-sea"), sounds like a pretentious proposition.  However, the themes are pretty simple to understand and the visuals are utterly captivating, so it ends up being fairly accessible.  The meaning of the Hopi language title is defined at the very end as something like "chaotic existence which calls for another way of life" but I thought the images spoke as much to the wonder and harmony of human existence, as of the chaos and alienation of modern life.  When footage of human activity is played at sufficiently high speed and observed from a great enough distance it appears organised with a rhythmic beauty.

Director Godfrey Reggio freely plays with the framerate of the camera, from super slow motion, to hyper sped up, time-lapse footage and everything in between.  Often the activity of humanity (specifically the USA) is observed with a vast "God's eye", or it could be the perspective of an alien trying to make sense of our way of life without any understanding of language and culture.  Juxtaposition is also used, such as circuit boards against city layouts.  One of the most potent examples was following a woman in a crowd smiling so broadly that I couldn't help but smile too, then we cut to a different person on the street, looking pale and desolate, surrounded by passing strangers, not knowing or caring why.  Sometimes the camera doesn't just observe, it meets the gazes of people and then follows them to see how they interact with the process of being recorded for no immediately obvious reason to them.  The most thoughtful bits for me were the montages but other sections which hold on single shots for minutes at a time, just elicited thoughts of "Why??? what do you want me to get out of this, that I didn't get a minute ago?".  Those overdone moments are few and far between though.  There is a definite precursor to 'Koyaanisqatsi' in Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent 'Man with a Movie Camera', accentuated by watching that with Michael Nyman's score.

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Tootsie (1982)
Director: Sydney Pollack
Country: United States
Length: 116 minutes
Type: Comedy

A few of the jokes have dated but mostly this is still a pin-sharp feminist satire and a charming romantic-comedy. The premise about a quarrelsome male actor learning a lesson about treating female actors with more respect (through experiencing what it's like to be one) has extra (unintended) dimensions given some of the complaints about Dustin Hoffman's past behaviour. Bill Murray has some of the best deadpan lines.

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Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Director: Werner Herzog
Country: Germany
Length: 157 minutes
Type: Drama, Adventure

Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) is an irrepressible failed dreamer, he's tried to bring ice and the railway to his remote corner of the Peruvian jungle but his biggest dream is to build an Opera house for his hero Enrico Caruso to perform in. He notices that there is an unexploited region of lucrative rubber trees beyond an impassable section of Amazon rapids. He realises that far beyond the dangerous rapids, the river bends within just a few hundred meters of another navigable river. So he hatches an insane plan to sail a steamship down it and then drag the vessel over land (which Director Werner Herzog did for real) to get at the rubber and make his fortune. It's testament to Kinski's undeniable genius as an actor that he makes the title character so endearing, moving, earnest and quietly heroic, despite his reputation as a real-life raving psychopath. The film is full of moments of poetic beauty like when Fitzcarraldo plays an opera record to counter the war drumming of unseen natives. One obvious model shot is used at the end, which I think they film could've done without and then been able to truly claim "We did ALL of this for real!".

 

[mnkykungfu]

The Deer Hunter (1978)

This film goes right up there with Birth of a Nation for me.

Hardly. Nothing else is close to that monstrosity.

It's also incredibly racist and the use of documentary footage spliced in with new scenes implies a realism that was completely fabricated. This isn't even putting contemporary values on an old film: Vietnam Vets at the time found the film so wildly inaccurate and offensive to the Vietnamese people that they protested outside the Academy Awards. The police could only maintain order after arresting 13 Vets.

I'm well aware of the much discussed controversies around 'The Deer Hunter'. For me, the most troubling one was Cimino (no stranger to insanity, dishonestly and raging ego) claiming the film was inspired by his own Green Beret service in Vietnam, when he'd done no such thing and been no such thing. But I don't see the racism accusation at all. I don't watch other fictional films like 'Apocalypse Now', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Platoon' and think they're prejudiced against Americans because they depict the US committing atrocities in Vietnam. Sadly that's what happens in war and Vietnam was arguably one of the worst, with well documented war crimes, sadism and torture on both sides. That is depicts a fictional game of Russian Roulette, happening to fictional characters, in a fictional POW camp, overseen by fictional characters is just fictional. It hardly matters if such a game really took place, it's a storytelling device and metaphor in a made up film.

I won't belabor the thread with a debate, but please allow me to provide a counterpoint review. I've given up hope that I'll ever convince anyone of anything on the internet, but at least allow me to illustrate why I find the movie so disgusting.
The Deer Hunter (1978)

What The Deer Hunter wants to be is a moving drama about how the Vietnam War chewed up good salt-of-the-earth Americans and broke them. It's not really anti-violence or anti-war specifically, but is more a view into that particular time and place. What it actually is is one man's imagined tale of how brutal it must have been to get suckered into going "over there". Writer/director/famous asshole Michael Cimino knows jack about Vietnam or war, and wasn't interested in input from those who do. He was an Italian American who grew up on Long Island, went to Yale and studied Fine Arts. But he joined a weightlifting club and did 5 months as an Army Reservist in New Jersey, so he could represent like he was a tough guy with bonafides. This all comes out in The Deer Hunter which is exactly what you imagine a guy like him would imagine the Vietnam War was like.

And if you think movies about real events have zero responsibility to represent them with any faithfulness, then maybe the buck stops there. Except that it's not a great movie anyway. Cimino's worship of a certain kind of entitled white American bro/f***boy/d-bag is apparent by the loving way he lingers on the deplorables of this film. We spend the first hour and last hour just hanging out with them, barely developing any character at all, just simmering in their d-baggery. Thankfully the funeral scene isn't 45 minutes long like the endless wedding that starts this film. But the actually gripping part of the movie is the real issue: the middle hour. Firstly, they filmed in Thailand because Cimino didn't get permits for Vietnam, and the locations don't look like Vietnam. They're in the West, where the colors are different, and they try to substitute Bangkok for Saigon, which don't really look similar. They get around this by splicing in recognizable news footage from the war clearing showing the US Embassy in Saigon or certain famous coastline. But most of the actors in the scenes with the stars don't even look Vietnamese (because they were Thai). I suppose it doesn't matter, because we're not meant to view them as anything specifically other than a threat of constant savagery. They display no redeeming human values, nothing but brutality and inhumanity. They don't speak English and are not subtitled, so we're not meant to view them as having meaningful communication. In Saigon, the only interactions are with other homicidal maniacs or prostitutes. This time, the bloodthirsty, gibbering mob are in suits, just so you know that it's not only a small group of savage soldiers who lost their humanity, no, this is a whole people. The prostitute too, has no humanity, lying her crying baby on the floor next to a dingy mattress that she demand the soldier f*** her on. She yells after him over her baby when he refuses. Only white characters in this film have any redeeming values...even the fixer who helps soldiers find "the game" (and cautions Bobby away from it) is a Frenchman. You know, the country that brutally oppressed the Vietnamese for generations. But hey, at least they're white.

Cimino is not a talentless filmmaker, and I'm sure that he thought he was being cool and edgy and was (mostly) blind to the malignant racism that runs through his work. Viewers and critics sure weren't, as his other films have also gotten exposed for broad racism, especially Year of the Dragon. His dream project which he chased for decades but never got to film, was an adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. When criticised publicly for his work or his many lies about his work (or himself), he often said people shouldn't take him so seriously, or other quotes to the effect. A familiar refrain these days from others accused of racist comments or attitudes. I'll let the critics say it best though: the legendary Pauline Kael "(he) doesn't think in terms of dramatic values: he doesn't know how to develop characters, or how to get any interaction among them. He transposes an art-school student's approach from paintings to movies, and makes visual choices... He works completely derivatively, from earlier movies, and his only idea of how to dramatize things is to churn up this surface and get it roiling." A perfect description of the central idea of this film. And finally, Peter Biskind in his review for The Deer Hunter, "we finally have our first, home-grown fascist director, our own Leni Riefenstahl."

 

[TM2YC]

I won't belabor the thread with a debate

Well yes quite but as I said earlier...

I'm well aware of the much discussed controversies around 'The Deer Hunter'.

...I just happen to disagree with the particular "racism/fascism" controversy about the film that you have an issue with.  The rest of the criticisms about Cimino I agree with.

I've given up hope that I'll ever convince anyone of anything on the internet

Not everybody is just being stubborn for stubborn sake, some people might actually have differing views to yourself, and have listened to your arguments, yet still genuinely think they are correct.

if you think movies about real events have zero responsibility to represent them with any faithfulness

I don't think a movie has a responsibility to be completely faithful to the facts (it's not possible for a start) but that's not saying it should have "zero responsibility".

Except that it's not a great movie anyway.

That's a valid opinion but you'd surely concede it is at least visually and technically stunning. As you say, the opening wedding sequence is very long (longer than some entire films ) and as I said earlier, I agreed with you that it was too long initially, then I rewatched it years later and thought it wasn't long enough!

they filmed in Thailand because Cimino didn't get permits for Vietnam

I don't think you can criticise an American film crew for not filming in a country they were at war with 3-years before. It speaks to Cimino's delusional personality that he even considered something so reckless. Filming in Thailand is at least making an attempt to be closer to the correct part of the world than a gas works in East London like in Kubrick's movie (I have no problem with that either). As you said yourself, Cimino wanted to film it in Vietnam, so you logically can't argue that him filming it a neighbouring country was any sort "what's the difference?" type of lazy attitude on his part. I'm sure Cimino would have shot it there, if sane people hadn't said he couldn't.

They don't speak English and are not subtitled

While that kind of decision may have negative connotations, it's also just good film-making. If we the intended audience could understand the antagonists, we'd be experiencing something different to what the protagonists were experiencing. Of course if a viewer happens to speak all the languages in a film like that, the effect doesn't work.

even the fixer who helps soldiers find "the game" (and cautions Bobby away from it) is a Frenchman. You know, the country that brutally oppressed the Vietnamese for generations.

Yes I think his character is supposed to be a symbolic representation of that history. He's profiting by proxy off a game of death between Vietnamese and American people that he's responsible for instigating.

Pauline Kael...

If Kael didn't like it, it must be good.

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A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Director: John Cassavetes
Country: United States
Length: 155 minutes
Type: Drama

John Cassavetes employs his usual documentary techniques to a stunningly effect and elicits searing performances from Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. However, watching a harrowing 2.5-hour domestic involving violence, cacophonous arguments, mental illness, angry shouting adults and frightened screaming children is exhausting and too damned real to be enjoyable to watch. There is some light and humour in there, the opera singing at the dinner party was beautiful and Falk's gruff construction-worker trying to shout his kids into having a good time at the beach was darkly and absurdly comic. It's a family affair, Rowlands was Cassavetes' wife and he also casts his and her mother, plus children and other relations.

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Chimes at Midnight aka Falstaff (1965)
Director: Orson Welles
Country: Spain / Switzerland
Length: 119 minutes
Type: Period, Drama

A cunning weaving together of the texts from 5 different Shakespeare plays to refocus the narrative on the drunken rogue Sir John Falstaff (and his fatherly relationship with Prince Hal). Orson Welles shoots the two worlds Hal steps between differently. His father the King (played by John Gielgud) occupies a cold, cavernous, cathedral-like stone throne room (the actors breath can be seen), shown in sedate expansive shots. The tumble-down Boar's Head Tavern where Hal cavorts with Falstaff is shot in a free, fast-panning, quick-cutting style. 'Chimes at Midnight' really needs to be seen in the recent Criterion blu-ray restoration because it looks fantastic, where as earlier presentations looked truly dreadful. Orson's deliberately mumbling, slurred delivery of Falstaff's drink-addled musings are occasionally hard to understand (especially when it's Shakespeare poetry) but the excellent Criterion subtitles sort that problem out. The sense of violent chaos conveyed in the hellish confusion of the big battle scene has been stated as an influence on films like 'Braveheart', 'Saving Private Ryan', 'Gladiator' and Kenneth Branagh's own 'Henry V'. The moment at the end when Hal rejects Falstaff is heartbreaking, as Welles' face trembles with emotion.

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Harold and Maude (1971)
Director: Hal Ashby
Country: United States
Length: 91 minutes
Type: Black Comedy

If I'd known the soundtrack to this black Comedy was wall-to-wall Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens songs I'd have watched it sooner. Harold is an introverted young man obsessed by death, Maude is an extrovert old lady obsessed by life... naturally romance blossoms. All the car stealing and fake suicides were really funny.

 

[asterixsmeagol]

Harold and Maude is one of my favourite movies of all time.

 

[mnkykungfu]

 

I've given up hope that I'll ever convince anyone of anything on the internet

Not everybody is just being stubborn for stubborn sake, some people might actually have differing views to yourself, and have listened to your arguments, yet still genuinely think they are correct.

That really was a general statement, not directed at you. And yeah, I completely agree with what you said there. I just don't think the internet works well as a medium for debate. It's rare that anyone changes their mind in that situation, whereas if you are in a face to face conversation, I think people relate to each other more.
 

 
you'd surely concede it is at least visually and technically stunning.

Yeah, as I wrote above, Cimino does get some gorgeous visuals, in this film and in general. So does Nicholas Winding Refn, for example. And yet I dislike most of their films. I often think they would've had great careers as photographers. That's where their strength lies, certainly not in developing a narrative.
 

they filmed in Thailand because Cimino didn't get permits for Vietnam

 As you said yourself, Cimino wanted to film it in Vietnam, so you logically can't argue that him filming it a neighbouring country was any sort "what's the difference?" type of lazy attitude on his part. I'm sure Cimino would have shot it there, if sane people hadn't said he couldn't.

I said he "didn't" get permits. I don't know that he tried, or even wanted to. Given the context of his other films, I absolutely do think he didn't see a big difference. And while that's not that big of a deal for the locations, it's much more problematic for the people. It smacks of the "Asian is Asian" attitude. Many Americans still don't see any difference between Korea and Taiwan, China and Japan, etc. I don't see anything to indicate that Cimino cared. He made not one effort to represent anything genuine about Vietnamese culture in a film supposedly about their own war. They clearly didn't matter to him as he was focused on how the white characters felt about their war, and what they did to the white characters.
 

They don't speak English and are not subtitled

While that kind of decision may have negative connotations, it's also just good film-making. If we the intended audience could understand the antagonists, we'd be experiencing something different to what the protagonists were experiencing. Of course if a viewer happens to speak all the languages in a film like that, the effect doesn't work.

Nah, I call BS on that defense. This isn't like The Man Who Knew Too Much, or some film where we see our hero stand by helplessly while two people have a conversation right in front of him that he can't figure out. What Cimino gives the "Vietnamese" to do is constantly jabbering at each other and talking over each other. They don't have scenes or lines which simply aren't translated. They're not treated as characters. They are a mass, a threatening, savage mass that is simply oppressive and alienating. They're not people. That applies not only to the soldiers (and the Americans notably have no allies, only enemies), but also to the normal citizens on the street they encounter.  Cimino not only neglects to humanize the Vietnamese, he actively dehumanizes them.
 

Yes I think (the Frenchman) is supposed to be a symbolic representation of that history. He's profiting by proxy off a game of death between Vietnamese and American people that he's responsible for instigating.

 And yet he gets redeeming qualities. He's humanized. He warns Bobby off the game. He helps him find his friend. He tells him to get out of the horrible country. Sure, he's a complicated character, but he's an actual character. God forbid that a Vietnamese person (who actually would've been in charge of any money-making activities) be given a role where he or she could have anything to say or do, have any depth or humanity.

Again, you like the film, fine. Each to their own. Like I said, I don't expect to change your mind. But to me, the film is an outrage. I genuinely feel obligated to publicly denounce it, otherwise it would be like seeing a Nazi on the street and just walking by and doing nothing. These ideas flourish when people think everyone is okay with them. I'm not okay with them. 
.
(And I don't mean any of this as an accusation of anything towards you personally. I have a problem with the film, that's it.) Anyways, returning to regular programming... :arrow:

 

[TM2YC]

Cimino does get some gorgeous visuals, in this film and in general. So does Nicholas Winding Refn, for example. And yet I dislike most of their films. I often think they would've had great careers as photographers. That's where their strength lies, certainly not in developing a narrative.

I hated 'Drive' on the first watch because I thought it was all hipster retro style and no real substance. Then I was forced to watch it a second time (at an unusual cinema screening where the film was voted on and my choice didn't win) and like with Deer Hunter my opinion changed. I suddenly found 'Drive' was full of delicate emotion, high stakes drama and characters I cared about, which I'd missed the first time somehow. I love 'Drive' now but his follow up 'Only God Forgives' left me so cold I haven't bothered with his other films yet.
 

He made not one effort to represent anything genuine about Vietnamese culture in a film supposedly about their own war. They clearly didn't matter to him as he was focused on how the white characters felt about their war, and what they did to the white characters.

I don't think a filmmaker has an obligation to focus on anyone, or anything larger than the characters and aspects of a story that they wish to depict. Cimino wants to focus solely on a group of white blue-collar steel workers in Vietnam, that's fine. If Spike Lee wants to focus on black soldiers in Vietnam in 'Da 5 Bloods' and in WW2 in 'Miracle at St. Anna', that's fine too. Although Lee's films explore much more of the context than Cimino's does. A particular director shouldn't have to represent all voices in their one film, instead all voices should be represented by the kind of directors working in the industry and they can all tell their own chosen stories.

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Plot SPOILER in the following review but if you haven't seen this classic before, what have you've been doing with your life?

L.A. Confidential (1997)
Director: Curtis Hanson
Country: United States
Length: 138 minutes
Type: Drama, Crime, Noir

'L.A. Confidential' feels so effortlessly brilliant that it's easy to miss some of it's genius. It's so action packed and thrilling that one might underestimate how subtle the writing of Brian Helgeland's characters is. Jerry Goldsmith's score is so gorgeously glamorous and evocative of the 1950s and the golden cinematography by Dante Spinotti is so dazzling that one might forget how morally dark, unflinchingly violent and downright nasty the film is. It's set back in a time when corruption, racism, sexism and homophobia were ubiquitous, they were considered the natural order of things but we arrive as that world is about to change. The plotting of the mystery is as convoluted as other Noirs but unlike some, it's never confusing, every clue adds up and the audience is taken along with the characters. The viewer is never behind, or ahead of the story as it unfolds. Every element of the production is perfect, every actor is perfectly cast.

The most fascinating part of the film is the central trio of cops. Russell Crowe's Bud White, Kevin Spacey's Jack Vincennes and Guy Pearce's Ed Exley. One is neck deep in the police corruption, one is happy to benefit from it and one wants to stop it. One is personally corrupted by anger, one by vanity and one by ambition. They're all flawed cops but in the end, decent, moral individuals with lines they won't cross. We see that Jack is truly horrified by the murder of a boy he had coerced, Exley is not just a political snake but is driven by a desire for true justice and the rage-filled Bud is really a vulnerable frightened boy deep down.  Everybody assumes they are the people they appear to be on the surface, shallow and entirely corruptible and the three also underestimate each other at first. It's only when the three incomplete personalities work together that they can solve the case. Of the various villains and antagonists of different shades and motivations, it seemed to me that Danny DeVito's muck-raker Sid is the worst because he believes in nothing. At least James Cromwell's Dudley honestly believes his actions are for "the greater good". It's poetry in the final scene when Bud can't talk but everything between him and Ed is still conveyed with a look. 'L.A. Confidential' made a star out of everybody involved (if they weren't that already) and they're all still A-listers a quarter of a century later (prior to any alleged criminal activity anyway).

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Don't Look Now (1973)
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Horror

Probably this takes more than one viewing to fully appreciate. It's certainly technically brilliant but the plot is a bit random in retrospect. Director Nicolas Roeg's trademark fracturing of time in the edit is particularly effective for this story of memory and premonition. There is some Giallo DNA in here.

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Walkabout (1971)
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Country: United Kingdom / Australia
Length: 100 minutes
Type: Drama

A depressed city father drives teenage schoolgirl Jenny Agutter and her 6-year old brother (played by Director Nicholas Roeg's own son) deep into the Australian outback for a picnic but shoots himself and burns the car. Facing death in the desert, the pair befriend an aboriginal teen who shows them how to survive in the brutality, beauty and poetry of nature. The sequence with Agutter swimming naked, inter-cut with the boy hunting and killing animals, soundtracked by John Barry's beautiful score is quite something.

 

[mnkykungfu]

 I love 'Drive' now but his follow up 'Only God Forgives' left me so cold I haven't bothered with his other films yet.

I love Drive as well. It's the exception that proves the rule with Refn. His other films are crap, all style and ideas, poor execution. Drive is wonderful precisely because it is so simple and focused. And probably because Gosling is practically giving a Master Class for 90 minutes.

Don't Look Now (1973)
Probably this takes more than one viewing to fully appreciate. It's certainly technically brilliant but the plot is a bit random in retrospect. Director Nicolas Roeg's trademark fracturing of time in the edit is particularly effective for this story of memory and premonition. There is some Giallo DNA in here.

I love how charitable you're being with this film... I watched it the once and hated it. Like Refn, it's style over substance. The plot is nonsensical and contrived, but there's so much giallo gorgeousity that critics trip all over themselves to laud it. I've never known a critic to praise a tight script over beautiful cinematography. Is it obvious I despise pretention? lol

 

[TM2YC]

In the Year of the Pig (1968)
Director: Emile de Antonio
Country: United States
Length: 104 minutes
Type: Documentary

The DVD is out of print, rare and expensive for this one, then suddenly it popped up for free on Amazon Prime in sharp HD. Yay!  This documentary was released roughly 3-years after US troops got overtly involved in Vietnam, with the goal to reveal the truth of what was going on, the mistakes that were being made and to try and explain the colonial history of the country to a US audience and why all that made "victory" highly improbable.  It didn't succeed in changing enough minds, since the war deepened and raged on for another 7-years until the infamous and pointless conclusion at the "fall of Saigon".  One of the most astute observations in the film was from then Republican Senator Thruston B. Morton describing Ho Chi Minh's standing with his people as "The George Washington of his country".  Neatly explaining why the idea that the US could convince the Vietnamese that Minh was their enemy, was as laughable as convincing Americans that Washington was theirs.

It could have done with some perspectives from actual Vietnamese nationals, instead of just French and American voices, not that I didn't think the chosen commentators weren't credible, candid and logical.  It's also unashamedly partisan, never giving voice to anyone trying to argue that the war was justified, or well directed.  With the benefit of hindsight, finding any serious person of that opinion in 2021 would be next to impossible but I've no doubt many policy makers and commentators were convinced of it's rightness in 1968.  The only time we hear supporters of the war, is to play news-clips of them making speeches, intercut with images undermining their words.  Having said all that, the subsequent sorry history of the conflict would make it difficult to disagree with the "stop the war" goal of the film.  If you've seen Ken Burn's authoritative 16-hour 2017 PBS documentary 'The Vietnam War', there is little information you won't have heard already but the "current events" perspective of 'In the Year of the Pig' is unique and the presentation is wonderfully dry and verbose, very different from many modern glossy docs.

One of the opening images of the film, used for many of it's posters, was later used, with a change to text as the cover for the brilliant 1985 album 'Meat is Murder' by The Smiths.  Adorning many a student bedroom, far removed from it's original context:

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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: United Kingdom / United States
Length: 142 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi

I've watched this numerous times because it's supposed to be a classic but I still don't particularly like it.  The timeless and beautiful FX and the graceful music sequences are always awe inspiring and so many moments are completely iconic but the majority is exhaustingly slow.  Much of the dialogue and activity is dated to the pre-moon landing era, when concepts like processed packaged food and video calling were "mind blowing" to behold but in 2021 they're mundane.  Even zero gravity and space travel are such familiar concepts now that they don't need explaining to a viewer, never mind stopping the plot and devoting whole sections of the movie to simply showing them.  '2001: A Space Odyssey' is a film that absolutely has to be experienced but it could use a trim in my opinion.  Hopefully one day I will finally "get it" but the it remains one my least favourite Stanley Kubrick films.

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Andrei Rublev (1969)
Director: Emile de Antonio
Country: United States
Length: 104 minutes
Type: Documentary

Although more or less released in 1969 as 'Andrei Rublev', Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Passion According to Andrei" was completed in 1966 but not allowed to be released by Soviet censors until a few years later. It's an extraordinary biographical depiction of the Russian Medieval religious icon painter, although it's structure is experimental and conforms to few of the conventions of the biopic genre. The film is structured into eight separate episodes in which Rublev features (not always in the foreground), plus a symbolic prologue and an epilogue showing Rublev's paintings in close-up. The epilogue is the only sequence in colour, the rest is in stunningly composed and lit high-contrast black & white scope. It's also the only part that really focuses on his paintings and Rublev isn't shown painting at any point in the film. The drama isn't about how he paints, it's about why he creates, what inspires his talent and what makes him turn away from it. It's about the choice to create beautiful art in and for a world of cruelty and chaos. The episodes also mirror aspects of the life of Christ, several characters are depicted being tortured or misused in cruciform poses. We are shown events that have a profound effect on Rublev, like a vision of a snowy Russian passion play, a naked pagan forest ritual, the ravaging of a town caught in a feud between Princes (who Rublev is employed by) and finally the forging of an immense bronze church bell. It's an epic sequence about the will to create against all opposition, that feels like you are really back in the mud drenched, smoke filled 15th-century. The massive crowd scenes and medieval vistas are something to see in this masterpiece.

 

[mnkykungfu]

I don't recall when I first watched 'It's a Wonderful Life' but I do remember the first time I saw it projected in 35mm, on the final night for my home town's family-run Art-Deco Cinema.

That would be cool. I've never seen this playing in any theater in the US. It got picked up cheap to play on TV in ...the 70s I believe? It had been a flop until then but suddenly caught on. By the time I came along, some TV channels played it 24/7 at Christmastime and I was so sick of it that I never bothered to actually watch the whole thing until maybe 10 years ago. What a masterpiece. 

The behind-the-scenes fact of the film for me is how it changed movie-making forever. If you didn't know, movie snow until that point was usually made from cornflakes. Even in scenes where it looked alright, you either had to cut out a path for actors to walk (and be careful of framing) or completely dub the dialogue since the crunch of cornflakes underfoot was too noisy! Capra tasked his production crew with coming up with better movie snow, and after much trial and error, they eventually came up with a concoction based on soap flakes and sugar. It degrades better, moves better, and is quiet. Despite the commercial failure of the film, the new snow was such a cost-efficient measure for the studio that Capra maintained his status as a visionary director and stayed in favor with the studio heads.

The film debuted to mixed reviews and lost money, but the studio still launched a massive awards campaign for Capra. They continued using his snow on every picture and pushed him as a technical genius. The film ended up nominated for Best Picture, Director, Editing, Sound Recording (and an Actor nod for Stewart) but the only thing it won was a Special Technical Award for the snow. Virtually every movie made today still uses some variation of that original snow recipe.

 

[TM2YC]

I had not heard that bit of trivia, thanks!  It's not what you snow, it's who you snow.

 

[TM2YC]

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Director: Irvin Kershner
Country: United States / United Kingdom
Length: 124 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Adventure

I saw this was on Disney+ in 4K HDR, so I thought "okay it's the special edition but maybe it'll look nice in 4K".  Sadly no, it looks soft, low contrast, low in detail and the colours are awful, never mind the unnecessary editorial changes.  I could only stand about 20-minutes, so I switched it off and went for the polar opposite, the "Grindhouse" 35mm fan scan.  Ahhhhh that's better.  Lots of detail, contrast and film grain, matte lines and I kinda love all the damage and colours being off from reel to reel.  It also serves to make the joins in the FX invisible, like you're watching a documentary about "a galaxy far, far away....".

'The Empire Strikes Back' is pretty much a perfect movie, so what else is there to say?  This time I noticed that the opening Hoth sequence is kinda like a mini-movie replay of some of the moments from the first movie, to get us back in the swing, without an actual "previously on Star Wars".  Luke gets attacked by a Wampa instead of the Sandpeople, leading to him meeting Ben again who sets him off another adventure to find somebody.  Luke takes down an AT-AT instead of the trench run, again with the help of Wedge.  There's another desperate battle with the Empire, to buy time for the rebellion to survive.  Han, Luke and Leia's bickering love-triangle is re-established and the Falcon makes a last minute escape from the clutches of Vader.

If I was trying to find fault... some of the plotting is lazy.  You can tell they knew Luke had to go off alone and be trained in the middle of the movie, so what to do with all the other characters? Shall we give them their own important adventure plot?  Nah, let's just say the Falcon has engine trouble so they can't go anywhere until we need them again at the end of the movie.  That'll do.  The thing is, that engine trouble section is so well written, acted, edited, scored etc that it's my favourite bit of the film.  I could almost do without Luke and just spend the whole movie with Han, Leia, Threepio and Chewie arguing and getting in and out of scrapes.  The asteroid sequence is one of the most exhilarating things put on film, much of the credit goes to John Williams' score, perfectly in tune with the visuals.  Ooh and that love theme.  The up close Yoda puppet is magical but a couple of the long shots featuring other animatronic versions do look a little janky.  I have to admit the cloud city interiors (which the SE made a half-hearted botched attempt to improve) do look underwhelming, once the gorgeous matte paintings have gone away and you're stuck in windowless white corridors.  Would it really have been so hard and/or expensive to at least have had frosted glass windows with some vague impression of architecture outside, achieved through painted backdrops, or force perspective miniatures?

That's all nitpicking though, 'The Empire Strikes Back' is one of the best things ever.  Sliced bread included.

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Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)
Director: Terry Jones
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 94 minutes
Type: Comedy

I've seen it a hundred times before but this time I was really appreciating the tight pacing, clarity of the story and consistency of the writing. It somehow hadn't occurred to me before that the title song is a pastiche of John Barry/Shirley Bassey style Bond themes ('Goldfinger' in particular). The humour isn't just constantly hilarious, some of the satirical observations are profound comments on human nature, like the bit where a crowd chant "Yes! We are all individuals!", except one guy who pipes up with "I'm not". The matte-paintings still hold up to HD scrutiny, the polystyrene statue and fake donkey less so. Another thing I could see up close was that Terry Gilliam collaborator Charles McKeown seems to be playing every other background character.

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Stalker (1979)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Country: Russia
Length: 161 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Drama

In "the distant future" (at least Wikipedia says that's where it's set because the film doesn't show or tell you that) two men seek to enter the mysterious "Zone" with the help of "The Stalker" (a sort of haunted, depressive Sherpa). It's either the site of an alien visitation, or a meteorite impact, it's not clear which, bottom line, it's a weird place and trespassing is forbidden. At the center there is supposedly a room where your deepest desire will be granted, an obvious enticement when the outside world looks like an apocalyptic wasteland. Like in 'The Wizard of Oz' the "real world" is all sepia but once our characters cross over the film switches to colour but it isn't exactly a Technicolor fantasy. Everything inside the "Zone" is overgrown, dank, muddy, decaying and bleak, pools of polluted water, rusting military hardware and hypodermic needles everywhere. They shot in abandoned chemical factories, toxic rivers, dusty industrial tunnels and crumbling power plants, which allegedly caused the early deaths of some of the cast and crew from lung cancer (including Director Andrei Tarkovsky).

Like with other Tarkovsky films, some of the sequences really stick in the mind. The room of dust piles, the telekinesis scene, the thunderous waterfall inside a collapsed building and the massive light bulb flaring up and popping. Also the world has this amazing smoke/fog that hangs in the far background, like the limited draw distance on an old videogame. This being a Soviet film, it's impossible to not think that the "Zone" is a reference to the Chernobyl exclusion zone but of course 'Stalker' prophetically preceded that disaster by 7-years. 'Stalker' sucks you into the mystery at the start and ends powerfully and enigmatically but did we really need every minute of the 2-hours in the middle where the three characters wonder around talking to each other? The Artificial Eye blu-ray, while sharp and detailed, looks like it's from a decaying print rescued from the "Zone" itself, which kinda added to the experience.

 

[mnkykungfu]

^I've heard Annihilation compared (both favorably and un) to Stalker. One thing it has going for it is that the middle part feels more connected to an overall narrative. The ending is also (to me) pretty unambiguous. The script is clearly inspired by Stalker at least.

 

[TM2YC]

^I've heard Annihilation compared (both favorably and un) to Stalker. One thing it has going for it is that the middle part feels more connected to an overall narrative. The ending is also (to me) pretty unambiguous. The script is clearly inspired by Stalker at least.

I didn't rate that one at all but it would be worth a watch after seeing Stalker.

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Forrest Gump (1994)
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Country: United States
Length: 142 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama, Romance, Epic

I've seen this a ton of times over the last quarter century (jeez it's been that long?) and it never gets old.  Robert Zemeckis plays with all your emotions like you're the orchestra and he's the conductor, I must have been on the verge of tears about every 10-minutes.  Although it's got an unbelievably rich jukebox soundtrack (featuring half the discography of The Doors) the orchestral score by Alan Silvestri is note perfect.  He's done so many great scores, particularly in the action genre, so I doubt it's my absolute favourite but it's up there.  I hadn't appreciated before that it's not just a waltz through recent American history but also through Hollywood's various portrayals of that history.  An early flashback to the Civil War is done in the style of 'Birth of a Nation', the Vietnam section looks and sounds like every 80s 'nam film, when the 60s dream is disappearing it starts to look like 'Midnight Cowboy', then 'Taxi Driver', then 'Scarface'.

The thing that gets stronger every time is the portrayal of Jenny and Robin Wright's performance of her.  It's a haunting portrait of the misdirected self-hatred and self-destruction of somebody who has been the victim of child abuse.  Jenny is born with all the gifts Forest doesn't have but he was the lucky one because he had a parent that loved him and nurtured him without reservation.  That line where she says "you don't wanna marry me" is so tragic.  Forest is too lovably dumb to be devious, avaricious, prejudiced, irrational, or jealous, he's happy to either do exactly what people ask of him, or what's the kindest thing to do.  The range of emotions and thoughts that pass across Tom Hanks' face when he learns about his son is an all-time masterpiece of acting.  I feel there's a similar innocence between Gump and Data on ST:TNG.  There's that profound scene from 'The Measure of a Man' when Data thanks Riker for acting as the prosecution against him because he was "born" without the ability to feel misplaced human resentment.  If the world was made up of Gumps and Datas, it would be a better place.  The amount of political shootings (fatal or not) mentioned by Gump in the 3-decades in which the story takes place is always shocking and he doesn't even mention several of the main ones.

Okay some of the CGI has aged and some of it never looked that convincing, mostly where they insert Forest into news footage (deepfake would certainly help these days) but a lot of it still holds up.  The digital removal of Gary Sinise's legs was groundbreaking for 1994 and I reckon it still looks better than simlar FX today.  By accident or design, the FX looks best when it needs to be good, in the serious scenes, it's mostly the fantasy/comedic moments where the FX have dated, so the issue is lessoned.  I think the bumper sticker and t-shirt gags were two too many, it's too much whimsy that late in to the narrative but I wouldn't cut much else.  I always love that for most of the runtime he's sitting telling his life story waiting on a bus bench by mistake.

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Pulp Fiction (1994)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Country: United States
Length: 154 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama, Comedy

'Pulp Fiction' is commonly classified as a violent Crime-Drama but when you sit with an audience continually laughing along with the snappy dialogue, crazy characters and explosive violence, you wonder if it's really more of a straight up comedy. This time I noticed how shallow the depth of field is for many shots, so parts of the actor's faces go out of focus when they merely turn their heads slightly. It creates a real intensity to what we are being shown in the foreground. He uses a split-diopter lens for other shots to further concentrate the viewers focus. As always, I felt the pace sagged in the middle between Butch escaping the fight and his encounter with Marsellus Wallace (basically, the cab ride and motel scenes). Maybe it's because the rest of the movie is so unrelenting with tension, activity and flavour that the slightest dip in pace becomes obvious, or maybe it's simply because it's preceded by the colourful and dramatic Mia Wallace sequence. A total modern classic.

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Schindler's List (1993)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Country: United States
Length: 195 minutes
Type: Historical, Drama

I've seen 'Schindler's List' so many times but not for ages, it might be the first time since I visited Krakow and Auschwitz. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that lasted until well after the credits had rolled. It's rare that a film can elicit such a physical and emotional reaction.  Making a Holocaust film about the depths to which humanity can sink would've been relatively simple but Steven Spielberg manages to also show us the heights to which individual people can rise too. I'd forgotten how many moments of subtle humour he works in there too. John William's score and in particular Itzhak Perlman's violin could move the stoniest of hearts. Of course the high contrast black and white photography looks incredible. Comparing Spielberg's popcorn blockbusters and 'Schindler's List' is like comparing apples and oranges but those aside, this is his best movie and one of the greatest ever made.  It's sad to think that many of the survivors and real people from the story we see processing past Schinder's grave in the epilogue are probably no longer with us.

 

[mnkykungfu]

^All fantastic. Great words. Nice to see someone standing up for Forrest Gump, as it's so fashionable for cinephiles and critics to bash it.

 

[TM2YC]

Nice to see someone standing up for Forrest Gump, as it's so fashionable for cinephiles and critics to bash it.

Then definitely check out that VVB review video.  Director Brad Watson is a huge fan of Zemeckis and the film.

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Romper Stomper (1992)
Director: Geoffrey Wright
Country: Australia
Length: 94 minutes
Type: Drama

This was my second watch of controversial indie Australian film 'Romper Stomper', which was the first starring role for a little-known 'Neighbours' soap actor called Russell Crowe.  He plays the leader of a neo-Nazi street gang who spend their time harassing and attacking Melbourne's prosperous immigrants, something that's of course rooted in their own worthlessness.  What makes the film really provocative is that writer/director Geoffrey Wright doesn't go out of his way to condemn the gang, or to moralise, he relies on the viewer to know what they are doing is horrendous and upsetting.  It's lost none of it's troubling power in 3-decades and sadly hasn't become less relevant.  There is a 'Clockwork Orange' flavour to the film but it doesn't have the relatively safe distance that that film's future setting and zany humour provided.  It's only in the second half that we learn more about the gang member's pathetic and tragic lives, touching on lack of education, poverty, fear, possibly misdirected homosexual feelings and incest.  Prominent Australian film-critic David Stratton called it "a dangerous film", refused to give it a rating on his TV show and allegedly called for copies of it to be destroyed, however his co-host Margaret Pomeranz defended it's merits.

The controversy is covered very well in this section from David Stratton's excellent 'Stories of Australian Cinema' documentary:

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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Director: James Cameron
Country: United States
Length: 137 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Action

The older I've got and the more I've watched T1 & T2, the more dissatisfied I've become with this sequel in comparison to the first film. That's not to say I don't love it, it's an action-packed thrill-ride classic but compared to the first one, the cracks show. The pacing is comparatively loose and undisciplined, the humour is slightly cringey and misjudged in parts and Brad Fiedel's score lacks the flare and aggression of his T1 work. Also this is where the franchise rot set in, with the timeline and plot details of the first film needing to be subtlety twisted to make the sequel work. You forgive it these flaws because it's so damned entertaining and the characters are so well written.

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Country: Japan
Length: 67 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Horror

The plot of 'Tetsuo' concerns the battle of wills between a "Metal Fetishist" and a "Salaryman" who are morphing into terrifying machine/man hybrids. Director Shinya Tsukamoto's use of grainy b&w 16mm and rapid editing successfully blurs the lines between flesh, metal, stop motion and disgusting makeup FX. He makes the two Davids (Lynch and Cronenberg) look like safe crowd-pleasing filmmakers. However, I was much more fascinated with 'Tetsuo' as a technical feat of artful editing, low budget ingenuity and imaginative sound-design, than I was with any thematic concerns, characters, or story. The industrial score is very cool.

 

[mnkykungfu]

^So much "yes" on everything you said. And have you seen Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer? There are interesting parallels to be made in how it departs from the original and how T2 departed from its original...

 

[TM2YC]

have you seen Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer? There are interesting parallels to be made in how it departs from the original and how T2 departed from its original...

I've not but I will at some point.  I think the compilers of the 1001 book I'm working through got the two mixed up, listing the first film as a being from the mid 90s and not 1989.

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My next film is also from 1989, so Hollywood and Japan were going in some quite different stylistic directions in that year .

Glory (1989)
Director: Edward Zwick
Country: United States
Length: 122 minutes
Type: War, Historical, Epic

Director Edward Zwick tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the Union's first African-American regiment in the Civil War.  The cast boasts Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Broderick and Cary Elwes.  For a film in the "war epic" genre, done on such a grand scale, the runtime is a pretty tight 2-hours, not that it ever feels rushed.  There are massive crowd shots and battle scenes like you don't see any more and a stirring score from James Horner.  The most powerful moment is of course the famous long held shot on Washington's face as he is being whipped, starting in burning defiance, then bitterness, then utter desolation and a single tear.  I'm sure Washington secured the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that moment alone.  The complexity of the characters and exploration of the nuanced issues is the most engrossing element.  The horrible duality that the white officers and black soldiers experience together in raising the Regiment up as free men, by simultaneously breaking them down as soldiers, is fascinating.  I thought there was a Henry V feel about the final act, I almost expected the Agincourt speech to be delivered but Kenneth Branagh had made that his own earlier in 1989.  I feared there was going to be too much focus on the two white officers to the detriment of the black soldiers (it being a Hollywood film from 30-years ago) but I thought it struck a near perfect balance between all the characters.  'Glory' really holds up.

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Nashville (1975)
Director: Robert Altman
Country: United States
Length: 160 minutes
Type: Satire, Drama

5 days and nights following 24 characters (played by an all-star cast) in Nashville during the build up to a post-Kennedy era political rally/concert. The comic, tragic and bizarre incidents of their lives are swiftly inter-cut, almost at random, interspersed with musical performances and the omnipresent drone of a politician reciting election slogans. It's all very good but 2.5-hours is a lot of random, with no real plot, sapping the momentum in the middle.

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Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
Director:     Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Country: Germany
Length: 93 minutes
Type: Drama

West-German Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of my favourites. The way he composes figures inside the 4:3 frame is so powerful, conveying their emotions through relations with negative space and environment. Emmi, a short, podgy, old, white German cleaning lady takes refuge in a bar on a rainy night and strikes up a charming love affair with Ali, a tall, muscular, much younger, black Moroccan immigrant worker. They are blissfully happy together at first but their visual mismatch and (then) controversial interracial relationship brings derision, vitriol and miserable isolation from friends, work colleagues and family. Brigitte Mira's performance is the highlight, her face drooping with misery, crumpled with nervousness, or lighting up with joy.

 

[TM2YC]

The Jungle Book (1967)
Director: Wolfgang Reitherman
Country: United States
Length: 78 minutes
Type: Animation, Musical, Comedy

I hadn't seen this since I was knee-high to grasshopper but I still remembered most of it.  Some of the songs remain classics like 'The Bare Necessities' and 'I Wan'na Be like You', sung with real gusto by Louis Prima.  The voice cast is superb but I associate them more with 1973's 'Robin Hood', which I have always preferred and for which many of them returned.  Having seen the two latest more action-oriented remakes, where Mowgli is basically teen-Tarzan, I was surprised by how passive he is in this earlier version. Having Mowgli be helpless does increase the sense that Baloo and Bagheera really need to be there to keep him safe on the journey.  Also, as glorious as George Sanders' voice is playing Shere Khan, he's significantly less threatening than the newer versions.

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Solaris (1972)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Country: Russia
Length: 166 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Drama

'Solaris' is often compared to '2001: A Space Odyssey' but it's the polar opposite, Stanley Kubrick's film is criticised for being too absorbed by the visuals and technical brilliance, with a cold inhumanity. Andrei Tarkovsky's film is only interested humanity, just paying lip service to Sci-Fi in order to setup a situation to explore existential themes. A psychologist who has lost his wife travels to investigate problems on a space station in orbit round a strange oceanic planet. The planet Solaris is capable of manifesting beings from people's memory, including his dead wife.  It's basically a haunted house movie, dressed to look like Sci-Fi.  FX shots are few and far between and are mostly incomprehensible swirling splodges, the two (or is it three?) shots that do attempt to convey something with form are laughably incompetent. I enjoyed the very 70s vision of a near-future, with it's widescreen HD b&w TVs, hand monogrammed beige pyjamas, driver-less radio-controlled cars and chaotic exposed wiring. The troubled performances are truly excellent, especially the leads Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk.

At nearly 3-hours, this really tested my patience, there is barely enough hard Sci-Fi content to pad out a lesser episode of Star Trek. There is a fantastic episode of 'Star Trek: Voyager' called 'Projections', in which the ship's holographic Doctor (who is an artificial simulation of a human) is faced with the prospect that he might actually be a real person. Something that he finds quite disturbing to his sense of self. It's looking at the telescope from the other end but it's exploring very similar ideas to 'Solaris', it just does it much better, with more wit, more narrative originality and in far less time.

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The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Country: Germany
Length: 124 minutes
Type: Drama

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapts his own stage play about an intense masochistic love/hate-triangle between three West-German women. It's set entirely within Fashion Designer Petra's bedroom but that only adds to the claustrophobia and Fassbinder shoots it from every conceivable angle, always keeping the visuals fresh. In some shots the composition and blocking is so good you don't even need words to understand the character's relationship. The story is divided into four distinct acts, in each one Petra has a different wig and clothes, reflecting her changing moods. Margit Carstensen somehow manages to make you feel total sympathy for Petra's pain, even when she acts abominably to others. I kept thinking it felt like 'Blade Runner', maybe it's just because I've been watching it a lot, or maybe it's all the mannequins and dolls being compared to people, lighting coming through blinds and the exaggerated 20s inspired clothing.

 

[asterixsmeagol]

Solaris (1972)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Country: Russia
Length: 166 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Drama

At nearly 3-hours, this really tested my patience, there is barely enough hard Sci-Fi content to pad out a lesser episode of Star Trek. There is a fantastic episode of 'Star Trek: Voyager' called 'Projections', in which the ship's holographic Doctor (who is an artificial simulation of a human) is faced with the prospect that he might actually be a real person. Something that he finds quite disturbing to his sense of self. It's looking at the telescope from the other end but it's exploring very similar ideas to 'Solaris', it just does it much better, with more wit, more narrative originality and in far less time.

It's been years since I've seen Solaris, but I remember feeling the same way. I was moderately interested in the story, but it was just so slow that I had a hard time focusing on what was going on. And that was before I had a smartphone!