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

[TM2YC]

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
Director: Francois Girard
Country: Canada
Length: 98 minutes
Type: Biography, Experimental

If you hate cliched movie biopics, then you're in luck because this biopic of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is pretty much the opposite of that. It's broken up into a non-linear, experimental, arguably pretentious, but above all fun presentation. Director Francois Girard employs gliding tracking shots, intricate steady cam moves, real interviews to camera and even animation (which is trippy cosmic magic). If you're not convinced of the genius of the music already, then I doubt this film will change your mind because a few of the chapters are just the pieces being performed, or awe-struck characters listening to recordings of the pieces. This might make a good double-bill with Paul Schrader's similarly unconventional biopic 'Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters'. Annoyingly the DVD I watched seemed to be designed to cater to only two groups, bi-lingual Canadians (who don't require any subtitles) and deaf people who read English (so require everything subtitled). I belong to neither group, so had to switch the subtitles on and off throughout.

 

[TM2YC]

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988)
Director: Marcel Ophuls
Country: United States
Length: 267 minutes (4.5 hours)
Type: Documentary

Having recently watched Steven Soderbergh's 'The Good German', it was interesting to see this exhaustive documentary on the factual basis which underpinned that fictional movie. 'Hotel Terminus' is good companion piece to Marcel Ophuls' earlier 'The Sorrow and the Pity' doc, covering some of the same topics of French collaboration in WW2 and the holocaust but also the USA's complicity in hiding, or even hiring former Nazis like Barbie. It's 4.5 hours of murky, ignoble "realpolitik", looked at from every angle, with hundreds of interviewees. Ophuls cleverly uses cutaways to dispute the various contradicting opinions offered by the subjects, rather than actually stating they are wrong, letting you work it out for yourself. For example, when somebody is saying Nazi Klaus Barbie couldn't have been truly evil because their dog liked him, Ophuls cuts to footage of a dog wagging it's tail for it's SS masters as they load people into death trains. The only problem I had was that Ophuls seems to have edited this as a piece of then-current 1988 journalism, which presumes that you know a lot of this stuff and recognise the people because it/they are in the papers and on TV covering Barbie's trial.

 

[TM2YC]

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985)
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Country: Taiwan
Length: 138 minutes
Type: Drama

I liked this more than 'Dust in the Wind'. It's got some powerful cinematic moments like the grandmother spontaneously juggling guavas, the kid looking round scared at his mother's unrestrained howls of grief, and the mother telling her life story to her daughter as it rains in the yard behind them but not enough of these memorable scenes to fill 138-minutes. Wu Chu-chu's wistful piano score is delightful.

 

[TM2YC]

Fantastic Planet (1973)
Director: Rene Laloux
Country: France / Czechoslovakia
Length: 71 minutes
Type: Animation, Sci-Fi

When it's not playing on a tiresome loop, the animation style in 'Fantastic Planet' is gorgeous in a Hieronymus Bosch meets Salvador Dali on a Yes LP sleeve type of way. The meaning of the sci-fi story is broad enough that you can interpret it as an allegory for war/peace, slavery, animal cruelty, or colonialism. It's in the same bracket as 'Planet of the Apes', or a good episode of 'Star Trek: The Original Series'. The opening scene twist is very cool and dark. The "mind expanding" hippy nonsense towards the too-neatly-resolved ending didn't match the quality of the rest for me. As this was animation and I felt a bit lazy, I watched with the Roger Corman dub (which was excellent) on the Eureka! blu-ray, rather than the original French soundtrack.

 

[TM2YC]

Boogie Nights (1997)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Country: United States
Length: 155 minutes
Type: Drama, Comedy

There is nothing worse than a director doing a poor imitation of Martin Scorsese but with 'Boogie Nights' Paul Thomas Anderson makes a film that feels like one of the best things Scorsese never made, while not aping any of those trademarked Scorsese gangster moves. I don't know which is a better pun to describe what this is, 'Pornfellas', or 'Woodfellas'? It's got that 'Goodfellas' decade long saga, incredible era-specific jukebox soundtrack, penchant for red lighting and Steadicam shots and a decent into a cocaine-fuelled lunatic nightmare but 'Boogie Nights' comes out the other side with such a heart-warming and wholesome ending, it brings a tear of joy to the eye. Anderson displays a compassion for his flawed characters that is perhaps colder and more distant in some of his later films. The more he shows these porn stars f**king everything up, the more you want them to win. He takes them to the heights of ludicrous laugh-out-loud comedy and the lows of tragic despair. The scene where Burt Reynolds' Jack talks to the "The Colonel" in jail is a masterpiece, richly deserving his Oscar. This is a sideways love-letter to the old-fashioned craft of film and it doesn't look down on these people for making porn, they are passionate artists in their field. When I first watched 'Boogie Nights' in the 90s I thought it was good but today I'm ranking this as one of my all-time favourites. By the way, is PTA obsessed with 'Star Wars'? I noticed he'd recreated the old Lucasfilm green titles for 'Licorice Pizza' and in this Don Cheadle is trying to sell a stereo mod called "TK-421".

A 35mm trailer scan:

 

[TM2YC]

The Wedding Banquet (1993)
Director: Ang Lee
Country: Taiwan / United States
Length: 106 minutes
Type: Romcom, Drama

Wai-Tung is an industrious Taiwanese New Yorker whose big headache is that his parents back in the old country want him to marry a respectable Chinese girl and give them a grandson, but he hasn't told them about the love of his life, Simon. Who is almost perfect, having learned Mandarin and how to cook great Chinese food but he's an American man. Marrying a Chinese female friend who just wants a green card seems like a neat solution but things soon spin out of control. I would say that I loved every second of this Ang Lee film, except that after the first wonderfully comic act, it becomes more serious and I started fearing for several of the endearing characters and the story potentially ending in tragedy. To my relief it all wraps up in surprising, touching and completely satisfying ways, with all the characters getting their moments to shine, grow and understand one another. This would make a nice double-bill with 2019's comedy 'The Farewell' thematically but it would also pair nicely with 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' for their shared sense of humour about family gatherings (which was being filmed as 'The Wedding Banquet' was being released). 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' will probably always be my favourite Lee film but this is a very close second and a perfect romcom. I demand a Criterion 4K remaster immediately!

 

[TM2YC]

A City of Sadness (1989)
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Country: Taiwan
Length: 157 minutes
Type: Drama

'A City of Sadness' follows the tragic lives of a family in a coastal village across the turbulent years between the end of Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan and the start of the Chinese Communist Party rule of mainland China. Tony Leung as a deaf-mute photographer is terrific as usual and so is Chen Sung-young as his gruff, amusingly volatile elder brother. The music is lovely and sad too but at 2.5-hours this felt long. It doesn't help that I'm sure there are layers of meaning in the differences between Taiwanese culture, Japanese culture, mainland Chinese culture and Western culture, in the way the characters dress, stand, sit, eat, sing, worship and speak, which I wasn't completely getting (not to mention the politics of the period). For example, sometimes characters are kneeling round a low Japanese style table to eat, sometimes they're sitting up to a higher table, but I don't know what that signifies about the cultural status of the characters in those scenes, much beyond the surface visual difference.

 

[mnkykungfu]

Anderson displays a compassion for his flawed characters that is perhaps colder and more distant in some of his later films.

I was a big early PTA fan but yes, THIS. I feel very much that his later films develop an almost sadistic bent (or perhaps masochistic if you think PTA sees himself in his driven, visionary leads). He seems reluctant to write too much meaning into their journeys, to give them much closure or to allow them to make decisions that are too sympathetic. His worldview tends to be about a complete lack of compromise, a bleak, cold, inhumane and esoteric journey that keeps us always at arm's length from the subjects' experience or thoughts or feelings. They never become as human and believable as in his early films like this.

 

[TM2YC]

The Idiots (1998)
Director: Lars von Trier
Country: Denmark
Length: 114 minutes
Type: Drama, Comedy

Apparently the Cannes screening of 'The Idiots' prompted noted film critic Mark Kermode to start shouting that it was "merde!" until he was ejected from the cinema. It didn't have that kind of strong reaction from me, although the frequent instances where the boom-mike is in shot, or the camera is caught in a reflection, did make me wonder where the deliberately rough lo-fi 'Dogme 95' aesthetic ends and just plain incompetent film-making begins. One moment where the unpolished style works perfectly is during a tense argument, when an aircraft flies over head and instead of calling "cut", the scene plays out the full awkward silence of them waiting until the fierce debate can begin again. There are some strong performances and interesting moral questions being posed but not enough to fill 2-hours.

 

[TM2YC]

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Country: United States
Length: 97 minutes
Type: Blaxploitation, Drama

Respect for this spearheading a whole new explosive genre of film (Blaxploitation), for taking so many risks (artistic and financial), breaking censorship taboos and serving an underserved audience with the anti-establishment action they were craving but it’s not very good. I like the idea of the film more than the actual film. Some of the actors, especially the Police Captain, are terrible, the sound is rough and the experimental throw-the-negative-in-a-wood-chipper editing made my head hurt. Although the scene where Sweetback challenges a female Hell’s Angel biker leader to a “f**k off” was amazing! The BFI DVD I watched had most of the intro censored with black screens because it’s got Director Melvin Van Peebles’ teenage son Mario doing a sex scene. Apparently Melvin got comp money from the Director’s Guild for curing the gonorrhoea he caught filming the other unsimulated sex scenes, money he used to fund the rest of the film! Thanks Melvin for creating the thrilling Blaxploitation genre and changing the face of American cinema in the 70s but I’m off to watch ‘Shaft’, ‘Coffy’ and ‘The Black Godfather’ a few more times, instead of ever watching this again.

---

I'd been waiting to get hold of a copy of Mario Van Peebles' "making of" biopic so I could watch father and sons work back-to-back...

Baadasssss! (2003)
'Baadasssss!' ranks alongside other excellent biopic/making-of combos like 'Ed Wood', 'The Disaster Artist' and 'Dolemite Is My Name', which are about other "outsider artists" making their dream film, where the rough qualities of the finished product are secondary to the positive free-spirited way in which the creatives pursue their art. Director/star/writer/producer Mario Van Peebles makes this a loving, heroic and admiring tribute to his father Melvin but he also doesn't hold back on the criticism. His portrayal of his dad shows him as a less than perfect father and doesn't skirt around the questionable things he subjected young Mario to in making 'Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song'. The in-camera mirror transition that Mario does early on is one of the single greatest moments in all of cinema. I wish I liked the actual Sweetback movie, as much as I loved this depiction of it being made. The dedication at the end to Bill Cosby doesn't work quite as well twenty years later. If you can find a copy of the BFI DVD then definitely give this one a watch.

 

[TM2YC]

The Butcher Boy (1997)
Director: Neil Jordan
Country: Ireland
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Drama, Black-Comedy, Horror

'The Butcher Boy' is not that easy to come by any more, having never been released on blu-ray and seems to be virtually out of print on DVD (I rented the DVD). Possibly this is a rights thing due to this being the last movie the Geffen company released? I first watched this disturbing, violent, black-comedy with my parents in the 90s on VHS, most probably because my mum's side of the family is Irish, so she's always up for a film set in Ireland in the past but this isn't a gentle nostalgic look at the emerald isle, which the jaunty score and a supporting cast who all seem to have appeared in the sitcom 'Father Ted' suggest. As it's main character is a child going mad, it's told from his point of view, so his belief that some people are bug eyed aliens, that the virgin Mary is really appearing to him in the guise of the late Sinéad O'Connor and terrorising and then executing a lady with a stun-gun is a perfectly reasonable course of action, which the film never contradicts. I could see some finding this whole thing deeply unpleasant and offensive, or put off by the notion that the kid is the hero of his own story, no matter what nasty things he does. It didn't offend me but I didn't enjoy it that much either.

 

[TM2YC]

No Man's Land (2001)
Director: Danis Tanovic
Country: Bosnia and Herzegovina
Length: 98 minutes
Type: War, Black-Comedy

The tone of this razor-sharp blacker-than-black comedy set during the Bosnian War is set by an early line "A pessimist thinks things can't be worse. An optimist knows they can". Two wounded opposing soldiers sit in a trench between their lines, with a third soldier who is stuck lying on a primed mine, a (literally) explosive stalemate. The two belligerent main characters are quite enough to make the situation bad but it soon escalates into farce when a squad of UN peacekeepers arrive, then journalists and finally the always wonderful Simon Callow as a cynical British UN Colonel who just wants the problem to not be his to deal with. The clear message is war is f***ing stupid, pointless and even hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.

 

[TM2YC]

The Puppetmaster (1993)
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Country: Taiwan
Length: 142 minutes
Type: Drama, Documentary, History

I enjoyed this marginally more than the three other Hou Hsiao-hsien films I've so far watched, mostly just because it's a true life story, narrated by the real subject (elderly puppeteer/actor Li Tian-Lu, star of other Hou films), which automatically injected more compelling power into Hou's low-key "at a distance" style. If nothing else, 'The Puppetmaster' (more accurately translated as "Dream Life") is another interesting window onto Taiwanese history across the 5 decades that Japan occupied the island.

 

[TM2YC]

Housekeeping (1987)
Director: Bill Forsyth
Country: United States
Length: 116 minutes
Type: Drama, Black-Comedy

'Housekeeping' is a sort of quirky hangout film, where we spend 2-hours in an isolated lake house with two young sisters and their odd aunt (after the mother suddenly commits suicide in a startling early scene). Director Bill Forsyth never gives us a definitive answer as to whether the aunt is harmlessly and enjoyably eccentric, a liberating free-spirit, or actually mentally ill and a danger to herself and her young nieces. In my job, I've got a few customers whose houses are similarly filled with hoarded newspapers and detritus covering every surface, to the point that you might wonder if they are crazy but they're otherwise perfectly normal, intelligent people, one is a medical professional. They often give an excuse like "I'm just tiding up", or "I'm saving this for somebody" but it's the same every year. So they aren't unaware that their situation is transgressing polite societal norms. I noticed while I was working that one had a roll of unopened bin bags, with a layer of dust over it. Suggesting they'd once thought about tiding up but had concluded all their empty cans and TV-guides were far too valuable to discard. I'm now wondering if they also have some elaborate and tragic family history that would seem to explain their behaviour too? The film's sideways family-history voice-over put me in mind of Wes Anderson but it's more psychologically inquisitive than that. So yeah, this made me think.

^ This upbeat vintage trailer is amusingly and completely misleading. Such promotion can't have helped this film find it's audience.

 

[mnkykungfu]

^I feel like that's the kind of thing we could laugh at and find quirky in the '80s, but now realize it's an actually diagnosable mental illness (follows the "4 D's") and have a hard time just laughing off. Ah, the '80s...ignorance was bliss.

 

[TM2YC]

Killer of Sheep (1978)
Director: Charles Burnett
Country: United States
Length: 80 minutes
Type: Drama

It's lucky it's taken me a lot of years to get around to watching this entry in the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' 2005 book because it wasn't even commercially released on DVD until 2008 and I think that's out of print now. Apparently it took Steven Soderbergh to pay for the music licencing to take 'Killer of Sheep' beyond an obscure curio seen only by film festival critics. That jukebox soundtrack is very important to the melancholy mood of the piece and is indivisible from the images in certain scenes. One bit is nothing more than the title slaughterman character and his wife slowly dancing against the light of a window, with a Dinah Washington track on the record player. It's the best scene in the film. It's interesting for the time that Director/Writer/Producer/Cinematographer/Editor Charles Burnett wasn't interested in making a commercial "Blaxploitation" film, instead creating an uncommercial oblique Italian neorealist style black & white film about Los Angeles' Watts neighbourhood. There is no defined story but all the separate scenes of family and community life feel so connected by a sense of trapped yearning. Poverty is the cause and the result of each problem we see.

 

[TM2YC]

Secrets & Lies (1996)
Director: Mike Leigh
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 142 minutes
Type: Drama

I hadn't watched this since the 90s, so I'd forgotten and underestimated how utterly perfect it is in every way. It's amazing the way you can see every hidden truth and secondary meaning in the faces of the actors. It's full of suppressed pain and full of tender forgiveness too. I enjoyed the dryly comic montages of photos Timothy Spall is taking of newly-weds (aka future divorcees). The central cast is first class but all the extras are played by top actors too, just showing up for little cameos. Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethyn are the sensational leads.

 

[mnkykungfu]

^I had a feeling when I watched that before that there were a lot of subtleties of British culture and race relations there that I was not really picking up on. The film seemed fine to me, but hardly the deeply resonant drama that it seemed to be for others. I found quite a lot of it slow, mundane, and the characters to be rather clueless and tiresome, to be honest. Maybe that's just me.

 

[TM2YC]

Close-Up (1990)
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Country: Iran
Length: 98 minutes
Type: Drama-Documentary

I think most film-maker's response to this fascinating real life story of a cinephile (Hossain Sabzian) posing as a famous Iranian Director (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) would be to do a documentary, or a dramatisation. Maybe only Abbas Kiarostami would have thought of getting all the real people involved in the case to play themselves in a documentary-style recreation of the events and then to make it non-linear too. It's the perfect circular way to explore this intriguing tale of the allure of cinema and using cinema itself as a form of closure and healing. Sabzian plays himself, playing Makhmalbaf, playing Makhmalbaf, then meets Makhmalbaf, who is playing Makhmalbaf. The scene where Sabzian's deception is uncovered is powerful and fascinating, it's like he's the one who is being genuine and giving of himself, while those he's been deceiving are being dishonest by revealing the truth. Life is truly stranger than fiction, especially when it's a fictional life.

 

[TM2YC]

Run Lola Run (1998)
Director: Tom Tykwer
Country: Germany
Length: 80 minutes
Type: Thriller

I remembered the premise and the exhilarating pace of 'Run Lola Run' but thankfully I'd forgotten the specifics of the triple timeline plot, so I could enjoy being surprised all over again. It's like Director/Writer Tom Tykwer saw the stylised running sequence from 1996's 'Trainspotting' and thought "what if that was the whole movie?". It feels as if the techno soundtrack, editing and use of phones as a trigger for switching realities, were an influence on 1999's 'The Matrix'. 'Run Lola Run' was released just as that film wrapped, so maybe The Wachowskis watched it while doing the editing phase and then fed it's vibe into their collage of pop culture references? Both films have visual homages to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'. I bet this is one of Christopher Nolan's favourite films, it's relentless narrative momentum and partly non-linear exploration of time is 100% in tune with the kind of films he strives to make.