The fight for beauty, vitality, family, pleasure, and humanity when the system is designed to keep you poor and hammer your soul into the ground because of the color of your skin. One of the all-time great performances from Kaycee Moore. Written by one of my favorite filmmakers, Charles Burnett, and a worthy companion to his own Killer of Sheep.
I don't know how Rohmer made so many great movies about minor relationship problems in the lives of (mostly) young people who are generally likable but also a bit superficial and silly. This is another one, and it's incredible. I don't know how to tell you why. Rohmer was a genre unto himself. (He also made several delightfully oddball historical period piece films that are quite different from but just as good as his contemporary relationship movies.)
I was out of town when A Christmas Tale briefly rolled through Austin in 2008, and I'm so glad I got the chance to finally see it in all its big-screen glory. Along with Kings and Queen, this is Desplechin's peak (so far), wild and messy and ambitious (but not a mess) and creating its own form and structure as it goes. This has the density of a novel in its story of a large, complicated family, but the tale is told in a way that only movies can. Scratch that. In a way that only this movie can.
I'm pretty sure the late-night screening I attended discombobulated me permanently. Rivette's films set in the present (distinct from his period pieces) have a peculiarly seductive magick unlike anything but other Rivette movies. This one is not in the league of his undeniable (unless you're a stone-cold chump) masterpiece Celine and Julie Go Boating, but it catches wild sparks in the same general direction. Like I'll say about a different film in my next post (in slightly different wording), this one throws you in the pool and forces you to teach yourself to swim. But when your swim teachers are Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier, why complain even if you drown?
Perverse, hilarious, terrifying. Every character is a horrible person, but you want to spend time with them anyway (from a distance) because you've got some darkness in you, too. The most nihilistic film noir ever? Probably. KABLAMMO!!!!
A horror classic from a great director we sadly lost in 2017. Also the story of a smart, resilient black man beset on all sides by incompetent, stupid, violent, hysterical, selfish white people, some of whom are flesh-eating zombies.
Rene Clement's Patricia Highsmith adaptation uses Alain Delon's face to great expressive effect, finding the mixture of blankness, seductive charisma, and malevolence needed for the character of Ripley. This is a fascinating collision of Clement's classical, old-fashioned craftsmanship with a not-quite-New-Wave energy and sensibility, and a great crime film that skillfully manipulates the audience into rooting for a sociopath.
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that this film is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century.
Unlike my feelings about our current government, I never wanted this nightmare to end. Why can't Suspiria last forever? Argento's creative peak and maybe the most beautiful horror film ever. Dreamy as all get out.
Panahi continues to thwart his 20-year filmmaking ban by the Iranian government by shooting on digital cameras and phones, and Taxi follows the director playing a fictional version of himself as he drives around Tehran picking up fares in his cab. The movie is deceptively simple and has a lot to say about contemporary Iran, Panahi's political situation, the human condition in general in its shades of comedy and tragedy, and how all movies are a blend of fiction and documentary.
Polish madman Zulawski proves he can make any movie super fucking intense and super fucking weird, even a melodrama about a love triangle that has no psychically-manifested-from-grief sex monsters or Christ-figure astronauts crucified by moon cults, to pick just a few examples from his filmography. The three sides of the triangle are Romy Schneider, Jacques Dutronc, and Fabio Testi, and if that's not enough, you also get Klaus Kinski performing Shakespeare, clowns, suicides, bar fights, shady underworld types financing porn films and gambling, maudlin painters, cats, an incredible apartment swallowed almost whole by bookshelves, and an operatic pummeling of your expectations of what movies are supposed to do.
John Carpenter could take no more of Reagan's America and used the dynamic duo of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and Keith David to lay cathartic waste to the aliens disguised as humans responsible for exploiting the worst in us and widening the gap between rich and poor. It really felt good to see this again in 2017, but it also felt bad because when the fuck are things going to change? When we're all dead?
Mexican director Ripstein's first film is a death-haunted western with a screenplay by Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The camera movements are stately, graceful, and elegant when the film is outdoors and hand-held and jittery when moving inside the characters' living spaces, revealing their private anxieties and fears.
This film is impossibly beautiful. How could human beings make this? I know we're all mad at Catherine Deneuve online this week, but what a career. One of the great musicals. What's with those people who hate musicals? That's like hating freshly baked bread.
Experiences I didn't enjoy as much but were worth having anyway
On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski, 1988)
The bulk of this three-hour science fiction epic was filmed in the '70s, but the Polish government shut down the production for "subversion" before it could be finished. In '88, an exiled Zulawski snuck back into Poland, got his hands on the surviving footage, completed the final third of the movie with Polish street scenes accompanied by narration explaining what he would have filmed in the '70s, and snuck it back out of the country. I'm glad I saw it because it has that patented Zulawski strangeness and visual invention, but all three hours are pitched at a level of hysterical intensity that is exhausting. Fortunately, when it comes to the consumption of art, I'm a masochist with a lot of patience.
Stranded (Juleen Compton, 1965)
I was excited to see this ultra-rare independent film from the '60s, but I had a hard time reconciling my love of Compton's stunning shot compositions with my dislike of her obnoxious, childish characters. Compton clearly had great affection for these characters who were based on her and her friends, but I found them mostly unbearable. This created an unpleasant disconnect I was never quite able to get past. I did get to see a stoned Gary Collins talk about how much he loves Jello, so it was probably worth it.
Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969)
An awkward transitional film that's stuck between the bloated, old-fashioned studio spectacles of mid-'60s Hollywood and the new wave of American filmmaking ushered in by Bonnie & Clyde, Sweet Charity is a mess, but it's a mess with a charming Shirley MacLaine performance and two great scenes, the greatest being the "Big Spender" number, which has the energy, style, humor, and darkness of Fosse at his best.
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