Supporting Actress: Jan's Out, Feb's In

We've reached the end of our first month of the yearlong Supporting Actress retrospective, honoring the 365 movies that have yielded nominations in that category's first 80 years. (This year's AMPAS voters, whatever their other foibles, at least complied with my schema and furnished nominees from five separate films, which keeps my math on track.) I hope you've had fun reading along, if you have been.  You can click the image to the left and visit the Calendar for more on each nominated movie, plus a few individual performance reviews.

So, who are your five favorite nominees from this early batch? And, separate question, what are your five favorites among the films? My own all-star team of performances from this batch probably entails Judith Anderson for Rebecca, Fay Bainter for Jezebel, Jane Darwell for The Grapes of Wrath, Agnes Moorehead for The Magnificent Ambersons, and Barbara O'Neil for All This, and Heaven Too, with apologies to close runner-up Patricia Collinge for The Little Foxes. If we're talking actual movies, my cream of the crop encompasses Dead End, Dodsworth, Gone with the Wind, The Magnificent Ambersons, and The Philadelphia Story, though it stings to leave out Grapes, Rebecca, and Stage Door, especially.

What are your thoughts, dear reader? And—one more question—are there supporting performances by women from 1936-1942 that you especially wish had appeared on Oscar's ballot?

Lastly, do consider following along with the Supporting Actress films for February, already posted. The beauty of this feature is that you can already see what film will be up for review on the site and on Twitter for any given day. I'd love to hear other voices on the same movies. I know you're out there, you opinionated queens. Four of February's performances are first-time viewings for me: Paulette Goddard in So Proudly We Hail (1943), Lucile Watson in Watch on the Rhine (1943), and two winners, Ethel Barrymore in None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge (1946). Beyond my curiosity about these four, I'm especially keen to revisit The Song of Bernadette (1943), which I saw once, ages ago. I wish I remembered Crossfire (1947) more clearly. Two famous films that I didn't love the first and only times I saw them, Mildred Pierce (1945) and Key Largo (1948), are also ripe for reassessment.  And somehow, we'll all get through the mid-40s fad for nominating ethnically inappropriate performances: Aline MacMahon's "Chinese" peasant in Dragon Seed (1944), though she at least applies a soft touch; Gale Sondergaard's member of the palace in Anna and the King of Siam (1946); and, easily worst of all, Flora Robson's blackface part in Saratoga Trunk (1945, but nominated in 1946). Jesus, keep me close to the cross.

Cannes 1995: Day 12: May 28

The Quick and the Dead, USA, dir. Sam Raimi

Many people need no help appreciating Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. If you're me and can't help feeling agnostic, recuperating more admiration for Jarmusch's affected earnestness and genuine idiosyncrasy is a lot easier after seeing a revisionist Western as flat and plodding as Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead Or Sharon Stone's The Quick and the Dead (she also produced), or whoever's The Quick and the Dead. Even the mid-90s' reigning Goldilocks can't save the movie from being too much or too little at all times. The narrative disarray is total—as evidenced by a major flashback tucked into the last ten minutes, which, incidentally, unfolds a scene the audience has already worked out—but even disarray is more interesting than the utter stasis of so many shots where Stone or Russell Crowe or Gene Hackman just stares at people, or the brute momentum of the shootout scenes where the same same same thing happens as the field of contestants winnows down to an utterly foreordained foursome. Raimi's attempts to wake himself aren't any more interesting than the impressions of Raimi asleep at the wheel. But rather than keep laying on Cannes's closing night film, I'm inclined to put pressure on the oft-invoked phrase "revisionist Western," because the John Ford retrospective that unfolded throughout the festival—25 features in ten days——shows that even peak-period Westerns by figures as major as Ford were "revisionist" as often as not. Few have been as austere in their outlook, albeit frequently purple in their prose, as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  This 1962 James Stewart/John Wayne vehicle, which could not possibly be more cannily cast, challenges and complicates so many myths of the frontier, the ballot box, the law, the state, and the gun that you're hard-pressed to find any Western trope that survives intact. I wish I'd had time for more of the Ford films, but boy was I glad to have saved them up so that I didn't finish on Raimi's folly, and I could take in a rounder, wider, bitterer scale of revision than the simple notion of a girl with a gun.

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Cannes 1995: Day 10: May 26

Underground, Serbia/France/Germany, dir. Emir Kusturica

A very sad anecdote in Citizen Cannes, the memoir by longtime festival director Gilles Jacob, finds Serbian film director Emir Kusturica spotting Francis Ford Coppola in the airport after the 1996 festival, where Coppola presided over the jury.  Kusturica is over the moon to meet one of his filmmaking idols, and also to share in their very rare status as two of only three men (at that time) to have scooped two Palmes d'or. He approaches Coppola, fawns over him, attempts to establish fellow feeling. Coppola has never seen his movies, and indeed has no idea who he is. Kusturica keeps throwing him lifelines, establishing his credentials as a globally renowned cineaste, while humbly expressing his feelings of inferiority in present company. Coppola just can't get interested, and never figures out who he's talking to. Jacob offers the story as an emblem of American ignorance, retaining absolutely no idea of what cinema means or who produces it outside of Hollywood's confines. And indeed, you'd love to live in the world where a movie as ambitious, as outsized, as risky and huge as Underground endowed its maker with worldwide renown . . . to fellow luminaries in his field, at the very least. Kusturica has his complexities, to be sure, as both an artist and, from what I understand, as a person, but to Coppola he may as well have been Edward D. Wood, Jr.

At least Jeanne Moreau's jury showed greater appreciation for Underground. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a better day for a Cannes competition than this one: two emblematic works by two figures prominent enough to later lead their own juries. In virtues and even in what I'd call their flaws, Underground and Ed Wood both seem to embody every hope their eccentric auteurs could have harbored for them, and both of them function, implicitly or explicitly, as valentines to a form that keeps thriving, even amid the devastations of land and people, even amid the merry assaults of the utterly talentless ...

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Cannes 1995: Day 7: May 23

Nasty Love, Italy, dir. Mario Martone

It is on to-day, honey. The hits keep getting bigger!  Four of the Competition titles from the last 48 hours have handily eclipsed the rest of the field, but today's discoveries are invigorating in a different way than yesterday's because they were so much less heralded. Mario Martone, highly regarded in Italy but barely known outside of it—he's competed for the Golden Lion four times, and swept the Donatello awards a few years back with his prestige literary adaptation We Believed—wowed me more or less from out of nowhere with the directorial verve of Nasty Love, simultaneously steely and luscious, sexy and sad. Many of the most conspicuous directorial signatures of Cannes '95 have been high-handed or humorless; Martone figures out how to impress and entertain at once. No slight on sobriety, though, when it's done with the odd, immaculate mannerism of Terence Davies's The Neon Bible, though I'm suspicious I may have responded better to this one than at least a couple of my peers. All that, plus L'enfant noir is an uncommonly beautiful West African coming-of-age tale, and Safe is one of the definitive movies of the decade. Hard to swing a better day at a festival than this.

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A Necessary Hiatus

I have been forced away from this blog for so long that Blogger has changed its interface completely since last I used it. I feel like I've walked in the door from a long, out-of-town work assignment and come home to find all of my furniture rearranged!

 Thanks to everyone who has written to ask if everything was okay, or if anything was okay. Short version: I'm gearing up for the year-long process of having my tenure case considered at Northwestern, which means that for the past six months I've been working even harder than normal on academic writing, document preparation, manuscript revisions, conference presentations, and all the other ducks that need to be in line on my end so that multiple sets of undisclosed reviewers can consider my case and make a determination that will only become final around this time next year. A sufficient number of fellow academics are regular readers that I'm guessing a few of you know how much work this process entails; others are welcome to ask offsite, and I'll peel back the mysterious curtain of assistant-professorhood without scaring you all away. Anyway, that's the explanation for the radio silence since that pre-historical era when sentient life was still congealing in the primordial ooze, when dinosaurs were stepping on each other's heads at creekside, and when we all still thought Viola Davis might get the Oscar.

Dispatches will remain irregular through the summer, I'm sorry to say, but the glass-half-full version of that statement is that you'll start seeing some movement around here.  For example, Daniel Stamm—the director of 2010's The Last Exorcism, a spidery, effective horror film that's really stayed with me—has recently premiered his first film, A Necessary Death, on iTunes and DVD and has sent me a review copy. I had as great a teaching experience as I did a viewing experience with The Last Exorcism, so I'm eager to screen its predecessor... and since the premise of the film makes it virtually impossible to discuss without inviting spoilers, I absolutely urge you to rent it and save up your responses for a discussion in the Comments.

I have also been shipped some Blu-Rays from Warner Bros. that they have asked me to review—a range that includes some of your favorites and mine, some of your favorites that I sort of hate, and some movies movies you hated that I found sort of interesting. I won't be reporting about every disc that makes its way here (sorry, folks, but under no circumstances whatsoever), but I'm enjoying the chance to revisit films I haven't seen in a while, or wanted to say something about recently but didn't, or am hoping to find a fresh angle on... especially since the Warners folks have been absolutely wonderful to deal with and have made very clear that they don't expect me to adore everything that's coming my way. (Though sometimes adoration is the only sane response).

And yes: more actresses, more birthdays, some redesigns, and even a Top Ten list for 2011. Because until hell freezes over, there's always time. Stay tuned, and thanks for hanging in there with me!

Eyes on the Critics' Prize: Safe

During the latter half of the 1990s, when my movie habit was really entering its mainlining stage, the Boston Society of Film Critics was the most excitingly off-consensus of the major American critics' groups, which was a particular pleasure to me because Boston is where I was living at the time. I have written before about my love for this group and their invigorating choices during this period, made all the more interesting by the lists of people who almost won during those years (like Katrin Cartlidge and Tilda Swinton in 1997, running close behind Helena Bonham Carter for very offbeat projects, and way out in front of Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Julie Christie).

The first Boston citation that really made me sit up and take notice of the group, during the first year I was attending school and absorbing cinema in that city, was the Best Cinematography prize for Alex Nepomniaschy's lensing of Safe in 1995. That season, the bulk of the prizes were being posted to Shanghai Triad, a typically dazzling light-show from the Zhang Yimou factory. The Oscar eventually went to the emerald greens, flying dirtclots, and battlefield immersions of Braveheart. At a stage in my movie education where "best cinematography" still meant "prettiest pictures," the Boston crowd's recognition of Safe's intimidating symmetries, its freezing pastels, and its wide-angle hyperbolizing of banal Valley interiors was a real wake-up call. Clearly, I would need to rent the movie as soon as the VHS bowed (!), motivated not just by a plotline that sounded so nervy and elliptical but by a panel-certified promise of visual imagination.

Granted, the indelible visuals of Safe have a great deal to do with the director's labors of framing the shot and placing the camera. How much this prize ought to have been shared between Nepomniaschy and Haynes is up for debate, yet it's notable that no other Haynes film has really looked like Safe, not even in the moments of Velvet Goldmine (shot by Maryse Alberti) or of Far from Heaven, I'm Not There, or Mildred Pierce (all shot by Ed Lachman) that evoke the antiseptic domesticities or the deoxygenated atmospheres that are so crucial to the earlier film. Those tropes get a very particular and brilliantly effective workout in Safe, and all the more so since the film was made for almost nothing, inside relatives' houses and a lot of other existing, creatively marshaled locations. Beyond the 2001/Clockwork Orange-style vertical lines, flat planes, and rectilinear severity of so many shots, and beyond the Fassbinder-ish way that Nepomiaschy and Haynes frame characters within nested boxes and under flat light (such that even casual encounters feel depersonalized and stagy), look how often the air just hangs there in Safe. Julianne Moore's line readings constantly suggest that Carol is being asphyxiated, but for reasons that make sense if you've seen the film, we have to feel that Carol is definitely getting air, and that something weird might be in that air.

There's a subtly frizzy quality to the light in Safe—making sunrays and pools of color diffuse a bit even in brightly lit rooms and sharply lensed shots. This lighting casts a slight blur in the women's locker room, the hair salon, the living room with the wrong-color couch, the sitting room with its DNA-shaped staircase, and even the "restorative" ceramic igloo where Carol eventually winds up. This quality of the light, not dry but not damp, not gaseous so much as atomically dense, makes the airspace in Safe matter in an almost literal sense, holding its own against the man-made structures and objects that are made so conspicuous in Haynes's shots. Carol moves through a vacuous, plastic universe, and later proceeds to an ostensibly cleansing, fresh-air retreat, but in all of them, she is constantly and unnervingly touched by vaguely visible, vaguely palpable molecules. What are those molecules? What do they bear within them or convey between them? Is there something inside them that makes Carol sick? (All the white noise in the sound design immeasurably assists this quietly creepy dimension of the lighting schemes.)

Nepomniaschy frequently has to help us locate Carol within very long and wide-angled shots, particularly by the standard of most interior shooting. Yet at the same time, Carol White is the last person in the world who should attract a spotlight, or a key light, or a backlit halo, which would feel all wrong for this profoundly recessive woman. Nepomniaschy is really ingenious, then, at helping us pinpoint Carol without violating the invisibility and insubstantiality that are fundamental to Haynes's and Moore's conception of her, using geometries within the frame or the softest caress of color or glow to highlight her when necessary, just the littlest bit. In other scenes where the camera is closer, as when Carol attends the allergist's office, the ugly, fluorescent lighting of the space is somehow just soft enough around Carol that we feel some compassion for her, some human weight and latent loveliness in her body. In this way, lighting itself extends an invitation to empathize, counteracting the institutional chill that encases her (including, for some viewers, the chill of the script itself, though Haynes's writing doesn't register that way with me). Something impalpable in these shots provokes us to worry and hurt for Carol, not mock her as a Barbie doll, or reject her as a zombie, or think of her only as a rhetorical stand-in for ourselves. Nor do we just sit there, helplessly perplexed as we might well have been by this soft-spoken San Fernando cypher. The light warms Carol as much as possible, even as it refrigerates her. I love, by the way, how Nepomniaschy allows Moore her freckles in scenes like these, more so than a lot of D.P.'s have done, and he doesn't adopt the easy strategy of making Moore's natural pallor register melodramatically as a signal of dangerous anemia.

Equally marvelous are Safe's shots in daringly low light: the overhead sex scene between Carol and her husband, the late-night prowl in the garden, the testy marital exchange across a mile-wide bed, the final straight-to-camera shot. In these moments, little except the crest of a cheekbone, the angle of a brow, or the copper sheen of her badly permed curls stands between Carol and a kind of Stygian oblivion. That such details communicate from within such broad, wide, grayed-out canvases, and that Carol's last, indelible lines ("I love you... I love you...") resonate as both encouraging and harrowing from within this world of shadow, have a lot to do with Moore's and Haynes's genius. But again, some of the credit is due to the precise calibrations of pessimism and hopeful sympathy that the cinematography invests in Carol's anxious days and in her waning, bruise-colored nights.

Safe's micro-budget miracles and nifty visual tricks don't stop here. Maybe that disastrous baby shower gets a little too pink/orange toward the end of the sequence, but there's a nice against-the-grain kick to any LA sunset that's allowed to look like lox that's been sitting too long at the buffet. I also love how the potted palms in the corners of those baby-shower shots don't remotely suggest a cute, predictable oasis of greenery and fresh air. If anything, they look brackish and black-leafed, as though the plants have got environmental illness, too, but like so much else in Nepomniaschy's shots, the effect isn't so strong that you notice right away. In general, Nepomniaschy cooperates well with the movie's smart production design, delicately highlighting props, shapes, and other visual triggers that make a suburban kitchen look subliminally close to a therapeutic center, or that foster a rhyme between a living room and a hospital room. The images guide our eyes in these and other ways, despite an overall aesthetic and a thematic framework that absolutely require the austere dehumanization of the film. The camera can't look like it's guiding us, or gratifying us at all, or even speaking our language.

Nepomniaschy hasn't had nearly the career one would project for the guy who made Safe look like a million bucks, despite having nothing but nickels to work with. He gave Joe Carnahan's Narc a nicely enervated texture and tint, but there's not much in it you haven't seen in other policiers. He filmed Julia Stiles falling in love with a prince, Drew Barrymore with a teacher, and a multi-culti group of high-school students with Antonio Banderas's dancing. He was the second-unit photographer on Country Strong and on most of D.J. Caruso's movies. I have no idea what to make of this successful but undistinguished résumé, but clearly, the most important signs of Safe's legacy fall elsewhere than the D.P.'s own filmography. I have thought a lot about Nepomniaschy's work in Safe while noting the rise of recent indie phenom Jody Lee Lipes, whose lensing of the apartment in Tiny Furniture recalled the deadening homespaces of Safe, but just a bit more preciously. His low-lighting of Martha Marcy May Marlene is often clever or evocative, and a few times, as in the swimming/diving scene, extremely resourceful, yet his images don't "stick" with me in the same way, and his visual strategies for coaxing inchoate, internalized trouble out of Elizabeth Olsen's remarkable face seem just a shade coarser and more obvious than how Nepomniaschy's camera interacts with Moore's equally remarkable face. Even the images I think I know best in Safe continue to pay new dividends the longer I dwell on them. I'll never know why Nepomniaschy doesn't have more filmmakers begging to work with him, but I'm glad he has one critics' prize to call his own, in recognition of one of the best and best-lensed American movies of its decade.

Previously in this series: Dead Ringers ('88)

Top 100 Films, or Reasons To Be Thankful

I've been adding to my revised Top 100 Films list again, offering 100 words apiece about each of the entries. To give the list some added value, each entry also contains some suggestions about where interested readers might find a scholarly or film-critical response that's well worth your time.

The first ten listings in the new format have promised a place to leave comments, and though some early conversation began in this ribbon-cutting entry, you're welcome to revive the conversation here. If you've got feelings to share about Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Joyless Street, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Flesh, When Harry Met Sally..., In the Year of the Pig, Nostalghia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Riddles of the Sphinx, have at it!

Top 100 of All Time, Revised

I've been enjoying the heck out of Tim Brayton's gradual roll-out of what he presently considers to be the 115 best films ever made, roughly timed to the 115th anniversary of those French workers exiting a factory before the witnessing eye of the Lumière Brothers' camera, and giving birth to cinema in the process. (That's a highly laundered and hyperbolic version of events for the purposes of ceremonial prose, but it'll do.) Tim's project also reminded me that I traditionally revise my own Best Films list every other New Year's Eve. I follow fewer rules than Tim does. For instance, I'm happy to include things I've seen as recently as the preceding calendar year, or films produced over the previous decade.

I was so distracted by other events and projects this year that I didn't remember to re-jigger my rankings until a week had passed. The same events and projects will remain my priorities for the next several months, but that makes a Top 100 countdown highly apropos as a way to keep the site quasi-lively. This time, following my edict to my own students to practice concision in their reviews, I'll supply 100-word tributes to each of my 100 titles—so, for the first time, those of you wondering how The Green Ray or The Joyless Street or Flesh found its way onto this roll-call will at least be made privy to a short, admiring murmur of context.

Eight films have dropped from the December 2008 version of this Top 100. Once I've reached the highest debut on the new list, I'll fess up about those jettisoned titles. But here's a preview: one of the debuts, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has until now been included in the perpetually stalled Favorites Countdown, the point of which is to provide an alternate list of personal pets that supplements this more "objective" list without overlapping. Happily, one of the drops from the Top 100, Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine, will easily swap its way onto the upper reaches of the Favorites list, given that it's such a delirious passion of mine and a heavy-rotation title in my DVD player. Stay tuned for a long time, when we evennnntually get back to that endeavor.

For now, the first two movies I have announced for the new Top 100 are, at #100, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and, at #99, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Feel free to leave comments below; I'm not making any promises about the speed or rhythm at which successive titles will be unveiled, but this will remain the hot spot for debate, suggestions, hosannas, or other comments. Starting today, on 1/11/11—or, as you prefer, 11.1.11—my Twitter feed will serve as the venue for announcing each film as I make my way back up to #1. Happy hundred, everybody!

Thanks for the Memories, 2010

You'll be able to tell from this list that I devoted quite a bit of film-rental energy this year to Best Actress nominees and to catching up with classics from the mid-1940s, while Nathaniel and Mike and I slowly advanced through our Best Pictures from the Outside In series, for which a new installment goes live any day now. (One way to counteract the frustration with early Oscar victors as tepid as Going My Way, The Lost Weekend, and Gentleman's Agreement is to use those screenings as excuses for making dates with all the superior films that coulda and shoulda been contenders.) No time for adding explanatory text, but these were my 25 favorite viewing experiences in 2010 of non-first-run films:

1. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Elia Kazan, 1945)
2. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)
3. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
4. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
5. Borom sarret (Ousmane Sembene, 1963) - full review
6. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
7. The Emigrants (Jan Troëll, 1971)
8. Dillinger (Max Nosseck, 1945)
9. A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)
10. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
11. No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)
12. At Land (Maya Deren, 1944) - full review
13. The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)
14. Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960)
15. Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)
16. The Man I Love (Raoul Walsh, 1947)
17. Pandora's Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929) - full review
18. Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932)
19. This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)
20. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)
21. The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989) - full review
22. Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)
23. Boy! What a Girl! (Arthur C. Leonard, 1947)
24. The Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959)
25. The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960)

Monday Reviews: Borom sarret and Only When I Dance

I was disappointed not to be more impressed with Only When I Dance, a recent documentary about Brazilian teenagers aspiring for a spot in an elite ballet corps or an international academy. I have at least one friend who is partial enough to the film that I feel like a buzzkill. And contrary to what some readers might think, it's no fun to ruin a film's perfect Rotten Tomatoes record, even if, as a culture, we seriously need to get over our over-investment in that heuristic.

In any event, here's my full review of Only When I Dance, but I'm thrilled that I am able to chase it instantaneously with something else I wrote in the wee hours this weekend, in response to a real breath-catcher. If you don't know Ousmane Sembene's films, or you're feeling self-conscious at having never seen one and not knowing where to start, you could do a lot worse than his gorgeously controlled, wise, and economical short film Borom sarret. At 20 minutes, it's also perfectly sized for a break from heavy-duty manuscript work, which was also a plum recommendation for the 78-minute Only When I Dance. Both of them inspired a rush of words, but in Borom sarret's case, they're nothing but ecstatic praise. And in this case, I'm blazing a trail for a previously empty Rotten Tomatoes dossier. So, see the film, write it up, and give the Tomato-surfers more to chew on! Seriously, you have 20 minutes, and from where I'm sitting, you're unlikely to be sorry.

Films of the 00s: Spirited Away

A shame about Ponyo, which is often (surprise!) a kick to look at but is so lacking in narrative cohesion or persuasive emotion, and is so dully voiced by the dubbed cast of Anglo celebrities and, in two instances, their squealy younger siblings. Miyazaki really misses on this one, I think, even if my expectations were inevitably raised by the preceding weekend's return to Spirited Away. I have only seen Miyazaki's last three films, but isn't there a pretty general consensus that this is his masterpiece? It's not without its tiny flaws, but it's such a sumptuous work of imagination. Where you can see the demographic that he's trying to please with Ponyo, there's no way he made Spirited Away for anyone but himself, with all the weirdness and ambiguity that implies. From my new review:

"Chihiro's tasks are trickily superimposed: finding her parents and changing them back into humans, finding their way home, learning a new job, making sense of her companions and fairweather friends, assuaging the fiery Yubaba, working through a proto-attraction to the mysterious and changeable Haku. Because Miyazaki entitles each of these figures and plotlines to their own healthy measure of non-transparency, young Chihiro has an exaggerated but nonetheless a fully persuasive experience of adolescent confusion on multiple fronts. She herself is more rounded than the petulant but slightly blank and compulsory Ofelia of Pan's Labyrinth, and I appreciate that Miyazaki insists for so long and in such detail on the ornate workings of the bathhouse—has a center of relaxation ever demanded so much dizzying organization and helter-skelter commotion?—that it has a freestanding and magisterial integrity beyond its contingent role as a test of Chihiro's mettle. You have a sense that she has truly entered a perplexing, maddening, and magical world, rather than a hunch that an inventive filmmaker has devised some fancy tableaux for her to fumble through on her way to certain triumph. (keep reading...)

3 Hours and 21 Minutes of Good News

Very likely you have already noticed but the Criterion Collection has more than compensated for some recent lapses in taste with their announcement of a forthcoming deluxe edition of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. What could be more delicious or deserving? I admit some nostalgia for director Chantal Akerman's insistence for so many years that Jeanne Dielman needs to be experienced in a movie theater, where its reframing of domestic labor and quotidian time is by far the most effective; there is no question that the impact of the film will be diminished somewhat, or at least profoundly altered, by screening it in a home format. And yet! If one thinks in proportions of filmic aesthetics and ambitions vis-à-vis mainstream cultural reputation, Jeanne Dielman, for all of its canonization in academic circles, would rank near the top of my list of landmark masterpieces that rarely get their public due. Anyone who's wondered what this film is doing so high up on my all-time best list will now have a much easier time of finding out. Huzzah to Criterion!

(If you dig Jeanne, don't deny yourself the treat of that 5-film Belgian DVD package that premiered a couple years ago and has, up till now, represented the only venue for screening Jeanne Dielman or, I think?, the other constituent Akerman titles on DVD. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna is another particular favorite of mine.)

Buy the Book: Fifty Key American Films

While I collect my thoughts about the best of last year's performances by leading actresses, while I try to figure out why I was so stultified and put off by the Star Trek movie that everone seems to love, and while I subliminally urge you at all hours of the day to get thee hence toward Julia (reviewed here) and Sin Nombre, by far the grandest achievements currently showing on American movie screens, I shall less subliminally urge you to purchase a copy of Fifty Key American Films, a new book from Routledge Press that gathers together short essays by a variety of scholars on an unusual mélange of movies that proved pivotal, in one way or another, to film history in the U.S.A. The twist for these essays was that contributors were asked to sketch some of the broad strokes about what makes these films important and compelling, but also suggest some new directions that scholarship and thought about these movies might pursue.

Do I have anything personally invested in you buying and enjoying this book? How funny you should ask! I wrote the meditations on Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party, Pixar's The Incredibles, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, the last two emerging as the chronologically latest films collected in the volume. Other contributors chime in about The Birth of a Nation, Sunrise, Freaks, Modern Times, Cat People, The Searchers, The Misfits, West Side Story, Night of the Living Dead, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, Aliens, Daughters of the Dust, Short Cuts, Dead Man, and Se7en. For the full list of titles, you'll have to buy the book—which is easier to do in Britain, since Amazon.co.uk is happy to sell an actual book rather than the Kindle-only edition available on Amazon.com. If you want to buy the book stateside, even though I am all about Amazon.co.uk, you might also consider a direct purchase from the publisher.

Here are three short samples from my pieces, if they serve to drum up any extra interest:

On The Wild Party:
"The Wild Party was a sizeable hit for Arzner and for actress Clara Bow, a major star making her first appearance in a sound film. [Judith] Mayne reminds us how much the Paramount bosses must have trusted Arzner to enlist her as the shepherd for Bow’s transition into talking pictures. Yet what a frisky and peculiar picture The Wild Party is, showcasing Bow and protecting Paramount's investment without straining for "event" status. Compare The Wild Party to Sam Taylor's Coquette (1929), the bathetic and maladroit vehicle that ushered Mary Pickford into the sound era during the same year, and The Wild Party's spry energy and democratic embrace of multiple characters and subplots is all the more obvious. The film begins not with a bang or a sigh but with a giggle: Arzner's coterie of excitable co-eds titter off-screen while we behold a "Winston '30" pennant. The film immediately proposes school pride as a recognized value while simultaneously challenging such pride with generous doses of pent-up energy and jovial iconoclasm. Making excuses for her studious roommate and best friend Helen, [Bow's] Stella exclaims, "Someone’s gotta work around here—we don’t!" The Wild Party in fact keeps us guessing whether anyone else at Winston works, and whether they should, and at what."

On The Incredibles:
"Fans and critics alike invariably cited Bob's perturbed pronouncement that "they keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity." The archvillain, Syndrome, raises the stakes of this lament, weaving the recurrent Pixar anxiety about dubious commodities into his full-frontal assault on the gifted and talented: "When I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can have powers! Everyone can be super! And when everyone's 'super,' no one is!".... The trajectory of Dash, who intuits this same contradiction earlier in the film, challenges a pure-exceptionalist reading of The Incredibles. His family simultaneously cheers, micromanages, and confuses him on his way to the silver medal, and in his last line in the movie, indeed the last line spoken by any Incredible, he admits to his beaming Dad and Mom, "I didn't know what the heck you wanted me to do!" At this instant, the Underminer, the last in the movie's series of villains, crashes through the asphalt of the stadium parking lot. As the Parrs apply their superhero masks, the movie lays their images over the Underminer's stentorian threats: "I hereby declare war on peace and happiness! Soon all will tremble before me!" Does the family’s collective recommitment, then, to their extraordinary abilities entail its own kind of "war on peace and happiness," the very sort of pandemonium which prompted the outlawing of superheroes in the prologue? Is the superfamily as threatening to social order as the outcast or resurgent antagonist? In that sense, do the Underminer's endowments of evil genius and wit ("I am always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me!") invite comparison with the Incredibles' gifts for public crusading? The dizzying layers of nuance embedded across the film—right through these final, paradoxical tropes of violent eruption and reclaimed identity, ironized here as masked identity—trouble the stakes of exceptional self-realization, even as the movie appears to promote that principle."

On Brokeback Mountain:
"Brokeback Mountain is something old and something new, a threnody for outlawed ideals and felled amour, for Western grandeur and sublime loneliness, so romantic (indeed, Romantic) in its images and so elemental in its montage that D.W. Griffith could, with one momentous exception, have made it. That the eulogized lovers of this American pastoral are two male sheep-herders, Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), patently distinguishes Brokeback Mountain as a contemporary artifact. Then again, after more than a century of American cinema, the idea of homosexuality as an impossible love, an impossible life, particularly beneath the wide-brimmed hats and cerulean skies of the mythologized West, feels trans-historically familiar, a pure form of what the popular cinema has never embraced. By giving rich, spectacular life to such a romance, while maintaining the rule of a tragic trajectory—even today, few closets brim with as many skeletons as the celluloid closet does—Brokeback Mountain rehearses Platonic visions of majestic nature, of the aloof rancher and solitary rider, of the passion least likely to survive the political and thematic mandates of American movies, even as the film rejects the platonic in its small-p connotations of sexless disavowal. The film tells an old story (star-crossed lovers) in a new idiom ("gay cowboys"), or else a new story (men in loving bliss with men) in an old idiom (tombs and tears).
      "Thus this film, with its penchant for aphorism and its unexpected preoccupation with hetero marriage and bridal desires, is also something borrowed and something blue. Borrowed, yes, from the pages of Annie Proulx’s short story, softening her robust evocations of poverty and her hardscrabble spondees ("sleep-clogged," "broke-dick," "clothes-pole," "dick-clipped") with shimmering landscapes and gliding edits, but also from the long lines of antique weepies and queer doomsdays that prepare American film audiences for this otherwise sui generis drama. "Blue" not just in its resplendent vistas and sun-dappled lakes—"boneless blue" in Proulx’s words, another Big Eden in the lingo of modern gay film—but also, increasingly, in its emotional temperature and acoustic moods."

The Honor Roll

Well, I promised the full, revised listing in January, but I only needed a single-weekend extension. As any university professor can tell you, that's not too bad for the middle of Winter Quarter, especially when you're assembling bit by bit as a way to make it through the month. Thank God for inspirational objects! Not every link is working—no need to "Leave a Comment" when I haven't even written up the entries yet—but Version 3.0 of my Top 100 Films has been fully uploaded to my newly domain-transferred website, complete with luscious illustrations. To wit, my personal Top 10:





















Aren't those pretty? Let's have a look at the bottom ten, too, since sometimes those lower echelons strike a more unexpected chord than the topmost stuff:





















Lots more, 80 more to be precise, where those came from. And since I still haven't determined what kind of shindig I'll throw where you currently see "Text Here" on every individual link, feel free to toss out some suggestions. Conventional capsule reviews? Profiles of a favorite or pivotal sequence? I don't necessarily have the same personal connection to all of these titles that leads to the kind of garrulity you see in the Favorites (soon to be revived, via everyone's preferred Georgian-Israeli movie on the theme of delayed nuptials and dangerous liaisons). So, I'll have to hit the Top 100 write-ups from some different angle. Feast your eyes on these images, and then bend my ears with ideas.

Happy Birthday, Todd Haynes

Thanks for all the memories and inspirations, Todd, and for all the future projects. My very, very favorite is still Safe, a film that's all about the vulnerability—maybe the indistinguishability?—of inside and outside, and the scary porousness of borders, including psychological boundaries, and including the skin. Is Carol's cure worse than, or part of, her sickness? Nobody knows, but the dissolve from her hospital room to the deserts of Wrenwood is portentous, and totally apropos.


Safe, 1:06:12, © 1995 Sony Pictures Classics/American Playhouse/Chemical Films

Visions of Masterworks Dancing in My Head

It's the weekend before Christmas, and I'm packing suitcases and second-guessing gift purchases and feeling as bad as you are about all the phone calls and e-mails I still have to return. I'm also not positive that I'll be able to post any more of the Favorites until after my holiday trip, but to compensate, here's a sneak peak of the new year I've got planned for Nick's Flick Picks. Remember that the Favorites are meant to add personality and caprice to my adjacent Top 100 Films list, which is much more conservatively defined as yet another list of the "best" movies you absolutely have to see. I revised them both at the same time in the autumn, but I haven't decided yet what to do with the Top 100 in terms of writing. I'm having so much fun with the Favorites that I want to do something, but I'm still considering the possibilities. While I figure it out—and since Salome lived for nothing if not to teach me to unveil in stages—here is a preview of half of the revised Top 100. Five movies from each bracket of ten. Don't expect all the links to work: this is a rough draft of a work in progress, etc. But it's something fun to put in your stocking, as a loyal reader of this blog (THANK YOU!!) and in anticipation of many happy discussions in the new year.