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

[mnkykungfu]

It's not without flaws though

Blasphemy! It is a perfect movie. <shoves fingers in ears and begins singing>
It honestly is my favorite war film of all time. While Apocalypse Now is excellent, it's all intentionally arty and occasionally pretentious, muddled in delivery and oblivious at times of its own messaging. The poetic nature of this buys it a lot of leeway, but if I'm stacking it up next to Platoon, the latter is the clear winner.
Not that there's not plenty of room for both to tower above other war films.
And to be fair, Stone himself did write sentences like that in his journals, which he later based the script on. Though I'm certain that most of the grunts were not burgeoning Oscar-winning screenwriters, so I can understand it feeling like the voiceover is atypical for them.

 

[TM2YC]

Stone himself did write sentences like that in his journals, which he later based the script on. Though I'm certain that most of the grunts were not burgeoning Oscar-winning screenwriters, so I can understand it feeling like the voiceover is atypical for them.

Yeah that's exactly what it sounds like to me, like the words of a screenwriter.

You've just reminded me of the war movie 'The Big Red One' in which the narrator is also a young infantry man but it's established from the start that he is already a published writer (one pulp novella anyway), making notes for a future novel about war, so that gives it a lot of licence. It's mentioned that Sheen's character is wealthy/middle class/college educated (IIRC) which does give some wiggle room but if they'd gone one further and made him a writer, plus had it be his journal, not a letter to his nan, it would would have worked better for me.

 

[TM2YC]

Gallipoli (1981)
Director: Peter Weir
Country: Australia
Length: 111 minutes
Type: War, Drama

The only major flaw with Peter Weir's film is that it's far too short at 111-minutes, it felt like a wannabe "Epic" to me. He writes and directs a wonderful cast of characters but I could've done with seeing more of them at war, after he had established them so well. The middle of the movie gets quite comedic, as the group of boisterous young Aussie soldiers revel in their first experience of a foreign culture. By the tragic end, you really care for the young men being sent to their deaths. Surely the Jean-Michel Jarre synthesiser running sequences are modelled after Vangelis' iconic score from 'Chariots of Fire', which came out 5-months earlier.

 

[TM2YC]

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Country: United States
Length: 89 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama

A surprisingly engaging and subtly amusing, minimalist, lo-fi early feature from Jim Jarmusch, where we basically just hang out with three odd but endearing characters in a few locations, as they hang out with each other because they don't have much else to do. In one scene they go to a frozen lake and stand on a dock staring into a blank white void. The three performances by musician-actors aren't that great but their monotone delivery kinda fits with the low-key vibe. I liked it.

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Down by Law (1986)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Country: United States
Length: 107 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama

Musician John Lurie really ups his acting game between 'Stranger Than Paradise' and 'Down by Law', he's genuinely terrific. Again, he plays one of three odd characters who don't seem to quite fit into "normal" life. Him, Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni end up as cellmates (for crimes they didn't commit), escape and journey across the Louisiana bayou. I loved the bickering but occasionally brotherly relationship that develops between the three. Benigni is a total delight as usual, appearing to make magic happen through the force of his character's joyful personality, which plays nicely against the other two curmudgeons. Jim Jarmusch's direction (with Cinematography by Robby Müller) is light years ahead of his last film, the compositions of the bayou are beautiful, often with the horizon exactly bisecting the image. I'll be watching this again.

 

[TM2YC]

Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama, Romance

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are sexy as hell, in an array of effortlessly stylish clothes that still look current more than half a century later. That look, the crime spree couple and Jean-Luc Godard's direction are a clear influence on Quentin Tarantino's brand of film cool. It's also a feel I'd associate with the familiar "Brit Pop" aesthetic of the 90s. I was already thinking some bits looked dangerous for the actors to film, well before a one-shot tableau where Belmondo sits on a train track and waits until the last moment to leap out the way of a passing train. I enjoyed some of 'Pierrot le Fou' but it goes on too long and has too many diversions. The literal "yellow face" bit addressing Vietnam is a bit toe-curling, it has not aged well, unlike the clothes.

'Pierrot le Fou' is the last Jean-Luc Godard film in the 1001 book/list, so I never have to watch another Godard film again. Yay!

 

[TM2YC]

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Country: France, Poland, Norway
Length: 98 minutes
Type: Drama

Irene Jacob plays two women, one in Poland, one in France, both called Weronika/Veronique. The story of one begins and ends, then we move on to the other, they are not intercut. Until right at the end, it isn't clear what Krzysztof Kieslowski is trying to say with this structure. Up to that point, it's like two separate Irene Jacob films have been glued together. I'm not sure the eventual poetic revelation justified the premise and I didn't even care that it made no literal sense. An unintentional laugh was had by me when the French daughter character pulls up to her family house in her Renault Clio and calls "Papa!". I wonder if this film had any influence on those incredibly popular 90s car adverts that aired in the UK soon after.

 

[TM2YC]

Oldboy (2003)
Director: Park Chan-wook
Country: South Korea
Length: 120 minutes
Type: Action, Thriller

I hadn't seen 'Oldboy' since I rented the old 2005 "Tartan Asia Extreme" DVD release, this time it was the lovely 4K remaster transfer in the Arrow Video blu-ray boxset. I'd forgotten what a huge part the music plays in the atmosphere of the film, the bit where the dance beat suddenly kicks in on the main 'Look Who's Talking' theme is amazing. The colourful, geometric set designs are a feast for the eye. I love the gangrenous green look to some of the lighting and the kind of misaligned Technicolor effect on the flashbacks is so clever. Park Chan-wook's direction is a masterclass of stylish invention and the performances are so extreme but so believable by all the cast.

An issue that is made obvious by the 4K remaster (and a large modern screen) is the ropey motion-tracking (probably animated by hand in those days) on the CGI knife during the iconic one-take corridor fight tableau. It wonders all over the place, so it's hard not to have your eyes drawn to it. Surely in 2003 it would've been better/easier to have had a real knife prop there for the whole fight and just paint it out for the first third. Or achieved the same effect with some sort of practical slight-of-hand gag. Maybe the budget didn't allow for ether of those solutions?

The other problem I have with 'Oldboy' is more significant. It's the use of hypnotism as a device to easily explain far too many contrived elements of the plot, some at the core of the story. Why did she do that? = hypnosis. Why did he go there? = hypnosis. Why did they act that way? = hypnosis... etc. The plot would've been so much more clever if some (or all) of these contrivances had been slightly rewritten. So for example, Oh Dae-su could've been subtly "conditioned" to act in certain ways by his environment over 15-years and we could've been shown that (but only later realise it's significance), instead of blunt hypnosis. Mi-do could've easily been introduced to the story in a natural way e.g. she is the chef of the dumplings he's been eating for years. Which would provide a neat and inevitable excuse for them to meet, to have a personal connection, for him to explain his ordeal and for her to feel guilt about what happened and so want to help him. This is only a problem if you're someone like me who has a brain that gets obsessed with unpicking a mystery, rather than just excepting the explanation as given and getting on with fully enjoying a great film like 'Oldboy'.

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Old Days (2016)
Maybe it was just because part of the production was in New Zealand but this 2-hour documentary about Park Chan-wook's 'Oldboy' reminded me of the brilliant 'Lord of the Rings' making-of documentaries. It gives you that same feeling of getting to know the members of the crew and of being there during production, to see the problems get solved, decisions being made, hear unusual anecdotes, see the good times, the bad times, the arguments and generally experience the spirit that existed on set. The Arrow "Vengeance Trilogy" blu-ray boxset also includes a 3.5-hour edit of behind the scenes footage called 'The Autobiography of Oldboy' but I wasn't quite ready for that. Maybe next time .

 

[mnkykungfu]

^I know exactly what you mean. Psychological stuff has been popping up in movies since the '60s at least as a movie plot convenience for something bizarre and unpredictable to happen. Before that, they basically just made up BS, and I think that might have been better than the gobbledy-gook they try to pass off now. I have a Psych degree and have done hypnosis before, and no, it doesn't make you

Reveal message: spoiler

do the incest

. Few movies ever get psychological stuff right, and I guess like anyone who watches a film that delves into their field, it's often hard for me to not find it almost insulting that audiences just roll with it (Avengers: Endgame, The Manchurian Candidate, Sybil) Or, on the other hand, that they look at realistic depictions and find them objectionable in all kinds of unrealistic ways (Joker, Fight Club, Memento).

That said, Oldboy is a classic that I very much want to enjoy, so I do my best to check my psychological knowledge at the door and just roll with it.

 

[TM2YC]

Lola (1961)
Director: Jacques Demy
Country: France
Length: 90 minutes
Type: Drama, Romance

'Lola' is Jacques Demy first film and the first I've seen by the Director. It's low-fi black & white, unlike the lavish, colourful films he's more known for. The story mainly focuses on Lola, a dancer and Roland, a young listless man but we also follow several other characters around the port of Nantes, a mother and daughter, a lonely sailor etc. They're all yearning for a purpose, or a connection, perhaps with each other but seem to keep missing their chance. 'Lola' isn't the most remarkable film but I did enjoy spending 90-minutes with these endearing characters.

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Scorpio Rising (1963)
Director: Kenneth Anger
Country: United States
Length: 28 minutes
Type: Experimental

I was first aware of Kenneth Anger's film due to Death in Vegas' 2002 album and single 'Scorpio Rising' but I hadn't seen the actual film until today. It's an experimental 16mm short featuring no dialogue (and minimal soundFX) and only a vague plot, focusing on the aesthetics of a New York gay biker sub-culture, worshipping chrome, leather, Marlon Brando and James Dean. I think it's a mix of documentary and improvised drama, built around real people from the NY scene. Instead of a normal soundmix, there is only 13 then-current rock & roll/pop songs, back to back. It's one of the best curated jukebox soundtracks I've ever heard, featuring classics like 'Blue Velvet', 'Wipe Out' and 'Hit the Road Jack'. So whatever reaction the viewer has to the images of motorcycle maintenance, bondage paraphernalia, drug sniffing, religious desecration, swastika flags and the occasional waved penis, they'll be tapping their toes to the peerless music. I hadn't realised that the scorpion that the Driver wears on his jacket in Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Drive' is nearly identical to a scorpion icon used by the bikers in 'Scorpio Rising' (surely an intentional homage).

There are multiple uploads of the full film on youtube in HD. NSFW:

 

[mnkykungfu]

So whatever reaction the viewer has to the images of motorcycle maintenance, bondage paraphernalia, drug sniffing, religious desecration, swastika flags and the occasional waved penis, they'll be tapping their toes to the peerless music.

A sentence I never thought I'd read, but can appreciate.

 

[TM2YC]

City of God (2002)
Director: Fernando Meirelles & Katia Lund
Country: Brazil
Length: 130 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama

I hadn't seen 'City of God' for ages but I remember liking it, today I loved it! It's incredible how easy it is to follow the lives of the large cast, across many years and events in the 'Cidade de Deus' favela. Some of this is down to great story telling, distinct character design and some of it a conversational 'Goodfellas' style narration. The performances are so good it's difficult to believe that they were all non-actor kids, recruited from the same slums in which the film is set and filmed. It gives 'City of God' a feeling of such authenticity and because they are genuinely teenagers (and younger) shown fighting the bloody gang wars, it's more shocking too. The direction is very stylish and energetic in a Scorsese/Tarantino way but not over-stylised. The only thing I didn't like was the over-use of shaky, close-ups and faster editing toward the later parts, no doubt intended to convey the spiralling chaos but it took me out of some scenes. I'd quite forgotten that it was set in the 1960s/1970s, rather than the 90s and that there is a neo-blaxploitation vibe to the film and Funk soundtrack.

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Happiness (1998)
Director: Todd Solondz
Country: United States
Length: 139 minutes
Type: Black-Comedy, Drama

The phrase "not for the easily offended" doesn't quite cut it with Todd Solondz's 'Happiness', "not for the hard to offend" would be more like it. Yet I personally didn't find it that offensive, or "sick", on this viewing, or when I first saw the VHS. It's tackling difficult and disturbing subjects, even daring to do it with black-humour but it doesn't feel like it's intending to shock, just to look into the painful lives, phycological problems and sexual perversions of a cast of damaged and pitiable characters. There is a sharp satirical edge to it all too, it's as if the more "normal" and "together" these people are, and the more they seem to conform to suburban mundanity, the more the deep seated their madness is. Joy and even Allen seem the most reasonable characters (compared to some of the others) despite outwardly being textbook "pathetic losers". Where as Trish for example, with her weapons-grade chipper attitude and her self-confessed "perfect life" has an undercurrent of poison to her, taking pleasure in the failures of others, perhaps without ever realising it. I believe 'Happiness' did cause a stir at the time but nearly a quarter century later, it seems inconceivable that it would get made today and if it was, it would surely be greeted with a firestorm of online hysteria. One scene in particular, the dream-sequence where Bill walks through a park placidly gunning down families, scored with idyllic music (intended merely as a first glimpse at what insanity lurks beneath the surface of a respectable member of the community) is difficult to view as intentionally absurd fantasy any more, it's far too real. 'Happiness' was made about a year before Columbine, so wasn't commenting on that event, or two decades of similar incidents but you can't see any humour in that scene now. I'd quite forgotten that R.E.M's Michael Stipe sings the brilliant pop-rock theme tune at the end, I used to listen to it a lot.

 

[TM2YC]

Ariel (1988)
Director: Aki Kaurismaki
Country: Finland
Length: 72 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama

If you like very dry, dark, deadpan humour then you’ll love ‘Ariel’. It begins with a coal mine closing and a now unemployed father giving his similarly unemployed son Taisto, some advice on life and keys to his Cadillac, then quietly goes in to the bathroom to shoot himself. It’s like a much bleaker Coen Brothers crime comedy (‘Fargo’ in particular), with taciturn Wes Anderson style characters but with none of the colourful artificiality. The main actor looks a lot like Nick Cave, so I couldn’t help but imagine it was him riding round in a shabby Cadillac. I loved the sidekick Mikkonen who looks like a meek moustachioed geek but is actually a low-key badass. The characters are so downtrodden by the world and their fellow humans, that I was cheering for them to win.

^ If you like and laugh at this 1-minute sample, you'll probably like the other 71-minutes of similarly awkward, wordless interactions.

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The Piano Teacher (2001)
Director: Michael Haneke
Country: France / Austria
Length: 131 minutes
Type: Psychological, Drama, Erotic

Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a cold but professionally respected conservatory music teacher in her late 30s, who is still trapped in a suffocating, controlling, abusive, sometimes violent, relationship with her mother. Her only escape seems to be self-mutilation and her own extreme sexual degradation. I could sympathise with the character's mental trauma theoretically but her being shown surreptitiously giving a young love rival life-changing injuries prevented me from truly feeling much real sympathy for her. The film ends with the characters still pretty much where they were at the start, so I'm not sure what the point of the intervening 131-minutes was. It's intense, riveting viewing nonetheless, simply due to it's shear psychological extremity but not my cup of tea.

 

[TM2YC]

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Director: Charles Crichton
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 108 minutes
Type: Comedy, Crime

I used to watch 'A Fish Called Wanda' endlessly when I was a kid but this Arrow 4K remastered re-reviewing was the first time in many years. Considering how much sex, violence and bad language there is, I can only put my parents letting me watch it down to either; a tape of one of those old censored-for-TV cuts; or my parents generally viewing films/TV/music made by the heroes of their 60s/70s generation as "art" and therefore, like a bit of eye-gouging in a Shakespeare play, culturally improving stuff. Two things occurred to me this time; one, 'A Fish Called Wanda' is very much an old Ealing Studios comedy crime-caper, sexed-up for the 1980s (before I read that Director Charles Crichton did a few actual Ealing classics back in the 1950s); two, John Du Prez's score reminds me of Bond, John Barry's 80s soundtracks specifically. I also noticed it was edited by Star Wars workprint editor John Jympson. A driving force in John Cleese's transatlantic script contrasts Anglophobia, against anti-Americanism, whilst also being an enchanting romance between Cleese's repressed English barrister and Jamie Lee Curtis' irrepressible American jewel thief. This, 1983's 'Trading Places' and 1994's 'True Lies' are three arguments for Curtis being one of the sexiest, most magnetic and charming women to ever grace the silver screen. Michael Palin's serial canicide and the scene where Cleese is caught prancing b*llock naked in front of an astonished family will never not be laugh-out-loud funny.

 

[TM2YC]

Breaking the Waves (1996)
Director: Lars von Trier
Country: Denmark / United Kingdom
Length: 158 minutes
Type: Drama

I'm surprised that younger me rated 'Breaking the Waves' (about a quarter century back) because it's excessively long, looks awful, sounds awful and for the most part is grim and depressing. Yet the emotional story, beautiful final act and searing performances from a couple of then relatively unknown actors called Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgard reward the viewer. Skarsgard had done lots of Swedish films before 1996 but after 'Breaking the Waves' he's been one of Hollywood's most in-demand actors. 'Breaking the Waves' is one of those films like 'The Exorcist', 'The Wickerman' and 'The Devils' that have enough sex and violence to put off a lot of Christian viewers but they'd be missing a religiously powerful tale. Apparently the brown, grainy, washed-out look of the film was achieved by shooting on 35mm, transferring that to video, then transferring back to 35mm (and now back to digital video). I think this rough documentary aesthetic is intended to make any otherworldly elements, feel worldly. The Udo Kier cameo was clever, he's only on screen briefly, with few lines but we already fear what his character is capable of because of who is playing him.

NSFW trailer:

 

[TM2YC]

Tampopo (1985)
Director: Juzo Itami
Country: Japan
Length: 115 minutes
Type: Comedy

I don't know what I was expecting from 'Tampopo' but it wasn't a 4th-wall-break introduction, followed by a monologue, a flashback, a fight-scene and then a ramen-chef training-montage, all within the first 18-minutes. I loved every one of those minutes and every second after as well. 'Tampopo' is obviously a film about the joy of good food but it's also a riff on the Western genre, with cowboy attired Goro as the mysterious hero who arrives in town, assembles his "Magnificent Seven" and fights not bandits but sub-standard ramen. Afterwards, I read this was originally marketed as a "Ramen Western" (a great pun). Like 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Seven Samurai' you fall in love with all the different characters. The main plot is frequently interspersed with absurdist comic vignettes about food and sex and food. 'Tampopo' goes right on to my personal list of the best films ever made, I only wish I'd seen it sooner.

 

[mnkykungfu]

Man, I really wish I could've liked Tampopo like you did. I found it profoundly icky. The attitudes towards women, constant misogynistic remarks, gender-role reaffirming, and pedophilia are too much on the surface for me to go along with the whimsy of it all. Kind of like Call Me By Your Name, it lost me early on and I struggled to try to keep being open to it for the entire rest of the runtime.

 

[TM2YC]

^ I think you must've accidentally watched a different movie you thought was 'Tampopo'. The one I watched didn't have any of those elements.

 

[mnkykungfu]

Well, there you go. Not seeing those elements in the film is key to enjoying it. For me, they were glaring and shocking. (Misogynistic attitudes in Japanese cooking are not only in this movie but are common, btw, similar to in Italian cooking. That this female cook can't make a successful restaurant without the men is not coincidental. It's Japanese. And not just in the '80s, today also.)

 

[TM2YC]

Well, there you go. Not seeing those elements in the film is key to enjoying it.

Or seeing those elements in the film, when they aren't there, is key to not enjoying it .

I can only assume you are 100% misinterpreting lines like "To Be honest... I never thought a woman could make a great ramen cook, but now I see how wrong I was!" which is said in the final scene by an elderly Japanese man, admitting his shame to Tampopo that he had held such old "misogynistic attitudes" and has discovered he was totally wrong. A film acknowledging that prejudice exists, isn't the same as agreeing with it, in fact in this case it's doing the opposite.

 

[mnkykungfu]

I won't debate further with you on this, as if I "win", I just end up convincing you to not love a thing you love? So, not really a win. But no, I'm not reading in. Ramen cooks in Japan are all men. Sushi chefs are men. There are deeply-entrenched sexist beliefs permeating throughout Japanese society, which is why it ranks consistently below any other developed nation on the Gender Equality Index.

If you know the culture, it's plain to see some of this stuff in the film. It's why every guy that stops by the ramen shop is so shocked that this women is trying to keep this thing going without her husband. It's why she needs to visit the male chef's shops to steal their secrets and learn from them. Just one element in the film that underlies it. But look, I'm happy for you to think I'm reading in to it and just enjoy it yourself on a superficial level. If you're getting joy out of watching it, more power to you.