FAVORITES
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
Despite being a Tarkovsky enthusiast for years (Stalker is one of my all-timers), I had never seen his first masterpiece until this past year. It's one of those awe-inspiring epics that's almost too perfectly constructed. Sometimes the god-level classics are so free of messiness and visible seams that they can feel oddly inhuman, an uncanny valley of too much talent and skill defeating human feeling and happy accident. Andrei Rublev, however, is full of strangeness, dirt, emotion, and the elements, its ecstatic images connected to both the ground and the heavens.
The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
Huston's long career has its share of for-hire hackwork, interesting failures, and bewildering misfires, but when he's good, he's so good. The Asphalt Jungle is great dialogue and atmosphere, locations and sets that feel lived-in, sweat, desperation, bad decisions, good decisions plagued by bad luck, and one character-filled face after another, including Sterling Hayden, Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest substantial roles, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, Marc Lawrence, Helene Stanley, and Sam Jaffe. Also, Huston rebuts the penultimate scene's corny pro-cop speechifying with a fuck-the-police death poem of an outside-the-law small-time loser going out on his own terms.
Emma Mae (Jamaa Fanaka, 1976)
Jamaa Fanaka was part of the explosion of black independent filmmakers studying at USC in the '70s collectively known as the "L.A. Rebellion." Alongside peers like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima, Fanaka developed a distinctive voice that was underused in a racist industry in a racist country, but he and his fellow alums have incredible (often unfairly truncated) bodies of work worth seeking out if you love movies made by people. Emma Mae is an unusual and exciting blend of personal and crowd-pleasing impulses, merging observational, character-based neorealism with B-movie action and comedy in a story of a teenage girl from the rural South moving in with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Los Angeles. Fanaka combines genres and wildly shifts tones with energy and unified confidence. I love movies that live in the twilight space between the art film and the drive-in second feature, so Emma Mae is right up my alley.
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)
Most of Ozu's sound films (his silent films were more varied in genre and style) are endlessly fascinating variations on a theme, with a low, mostly stationary camera, long and medium shots but almost no closeups, and rarely any dissolves, fades, long takes, or quick cuts. His major subjects are the effects of time, generational differences, and gradual change on marriages and families. His settings are the interiors of homes, apartments, workplaces, bars, and restaurants, the streets outside these structures, and the seaside. We follow his characters' lives in these locations, but Ozu also pointedly includes shots of the same spaces when they are empty of people. He never focuses on a single protagonist, instead giving equal weight to each character. These films share the same basic elements but are all quite distinct. Almost every one is a masterpiece. In The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, a middle-aged woman with no children tires of her husband's reliable dullness and the routines and patterns of their lives. At the same time, her twentysomething niece rebels against her family's attempts to arrange a marriage for her. There is much bittersweet comedy and understated drama, and a rare empathy and respect for each character's experiences. (Rare for a movie, I mean, not rare for Ozu.)
Get Crazy (Allan Arkush, 1983)
Arkush takes his experience working the light show at the Fillmore East in the late '60s and early '70s and turns it into a goofball drive-in comedy that gets the energy, fun, freedom, projected fantasy, vicarious living, occasionally frightening group-think, and drug-fueled hedonism of the live music experience from the perspective of bands, crew members, promoters, and audiences alike. Like his previous musical comedy, Rock 'n' Roll High School, Get Crazy is a live-action cartoon that is kinda smart and gloriously stupid. Some of the jokes land with a dull thud (especially the racist one about Chinese food), but, like Airplane, they come so fast and furious that the ones that stick make up for the ones that don't (well, except for the racist joke). Worth seeing just for the surprisingly funny performances by Lou Reed and John Densmore. And, of course, Electric Larry.
Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
A surrealist psychedelic avant-garde erotic musical horror comedy pop-art nervous breakdown about extremely weird teenage girls on vacation at a haunted country house, with one of the great movie cats and a healthy disrespect for every rule of conventional filmmaking? Sign me up. Then sign me up again.
Jane B. par Agnes V. (Agnes Varda, 1988)
Varda's warm-hearted, experimental essay film about her close friend Jane Birkin blends fiction and documentary to complex yet entertainingly breezy effect, with a form and structure that assembles itself from the pathways and tangents taken by Varda's curiosity and Birkin's openness or guardedness (depending on the situation). Varda is interested in both surfaces and depths, in Jane Birkin the living, breathing private human being and Jane Birkin the image, persona, canvas, muse, and symbol, and in the intersections and differences between how Birkin is looked at by Varda, the audience, the camera, and Birkin herself.
The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)
A corrosively bleak, darkly funny and sad film noir, with dialogue by Jim Thompson, urgent, physical performances by Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., and Timothy Carey, and Lucien Ballard's gorgeously grimy black and white cinematography. Kubrick makes a visual poem out of horrendously bad luck and the unraveling of well-executed plans.
Minnie and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, 1971)
John Cassavetes is my favorite filmmaker, and though I've seen all his movies dozens of times, I still feel like each repeat viewing is a brand-new experience. His work shocks me back into the present, removing the numbness of routine. I was a little worried about how this film would play with a 2019 audience since Seymour Cassel's Seymour Moskowitz pretty much bullies (in the most well-intentioned but nuttiest way possible) Gena Rowlands' Minnie Moore into falling in love with him, but I was pleased to hear the other people at the screening laughing and gasping and I was excited to feel the energy in the room. Minnie and Moskowitz walks a wild line between raw realism and equally raw screwball comedic fantasy and irregularly stumbles and careens all over both sides of that line. It's exhausting, freeing, frustrating, and inspiring. Cassavetes understands that love is a kind of madness, and this madness creates the form and drives the narrative of his film. I also particularly love Katherine Cassavetes and Timothy Carey and Val Avery in this one.
Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)
When I was falling head over heels in love with Cassavetes' films in my early twenties, Opening Night was the only one that left me more confused than exhilarated. I admired it, but I didn't love it like I loved most of his other films as writer/director. I don't think I'd lived enough years to appreciate such a radically complex film about middle age and the loss of youth and the struggle to access honest emotions because they're covered up by layers of protection and numbness that weren't there when we were young. I couldn't grab on to what Cassavetes was doing here. Now that I'm 42 and close in age to most of the characters, and now that I understand the experience of no longer being able to access emotions that used to be close to the surface, I see so much more of Opening Night than I ever had before. It's also a film that makes more sense on a big screen than on a television, with most of its compositions benefiting from a theater screen's size and scale. Cassavetes gets typecast, even by some admirers, as a director of realism and improvisation and raw, shaky-cam visuals, but I've never found this characterization of his work to be entirely accurate. For all the raw, realistic character and emotion in his work, there is just as much exaggeration, strangeness, and hallucinatory dreaminess, with a sophisticated visual style that uses the frame, the camera, and the juxtaposition of images and scenes to radical effect. Opening Night is one of his strangest, dreamiest, rawest, and most ambitious films, and I feel like I finally tuned in to its frequency.
Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes, 1991)
I love this movie and have no idea what to say about it. It's strange, beautiful, familiar, unsettling, baffling, free. It's about the life of an alienated woman working as a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino (played by Menkes' sister Tinka), but it's nothing like whatever movie is playing in your head after reading that description. Menkes is an original, but her film has some tonal and emotional similarities with Barbara Loden's Wanda, Bette Gordon's early films, James Benning, and David Lynch's Eraserhead if it were presented from a woman's point of view 13 years later in Vegas with Wild at Heart dimly projected over the top. None of these comparisons are especially accurate. They're just my internal map of a few ways to start looking at the movie. Your mileage will vary. Queen of Diamonds is a film that resists comparisons.
Ruthless (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1948)
Ruthless, starring Austin's own Zachary Scott, is a psychosexual melodrama with a noir feel and one of the few American films to look unflinchingly at class. A wild, weird tale of greed's perversities, Ruthless is about the rise to wealth of a poor kid with a chip on his shoulder who only wants what he can take away from others and who only sees other human beings as obstacles, ladders, or glittery possessions. Ulmer's low-budget films made poetry from scarce resources, and Ruthless is his pawn-shop Citizen Kane.
To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990)
Burnett's third full-length feature is a warm tribute to black folklore and the oral storytelling tradition and an intricate family drama with surrealist touches. I find new things to love about it every time I see it. It's the story of an older couple from the rural South (played by Mary Alice and Paul Butler) who have long since settled in Los Angeles and raised two sons, who are now married with children of their own. An old friend from the South they haven't seen in decades turns up unexpectedly on their doorstep (played by Danny Glover). He's charismatic and charming and brings back old memories, but he's also a little sinister, and he stays ... and stays ... and stays, growing increasingly more menacing and stirring up family conflict. Burnett's film is complex but inviting, a modern classic about families, generations, and the tension between the past and the present.
HONORABLE AND/OR DISHONORABLE MENTIONS
The Naked Dawn (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1955)
Like most Ulmer films, The Naked Dawn is strange and beautiful and does a lot with a small budget. It's an offbeat, lived-in western with complex characters. It's also a bummer watching lily-white actors play Mexican people. This was standard '50s practice, but I'm weary of seeing it.
O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)
This incredibly bizarre Altman obscurity was barely released in the '80s and is packed to bursting with Altman's best and worst tendencies. Based on characters created in National Lampoon magazine by Tod Caroll and Ted Mann with a screenplay by Mann and Donald Cantrell, the film is an unfriendly cohabitation between Altman's overlapping dialogue and burbling, rambling character-driven ecosystems and the Lampoon's smarmy, smug, bad-boy, anti-PC irreverence. (The production was troubled, distribution was a disaster, and Altman and the screenwriters hated each other.) The film's sexism and homophobia leave a bitterly sour taste and are mean-spirited and ugly, and the young actors playing the teenage title characters have little charisma or screen presence. Where the film really takes off is in its comic-book-come-to-life depiction of suburban, upper-class America as a haven for insane minds warped by racism, warmongering nationalism, apple pie platitudes, consumerism, and convenience and comfort above all. Yeah, it's an obvious point, but Altman makes it at the height of Reagan-mania with humor instead of soapbox lectures. It's often funny, weird, righteously angry, and full of controlled, propulsive chaos when it's not being sour and mean, and it's got great performances from Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Ray Walston, Dennis Hopper, Cynthia Nixon, Alan Autry, and Martin Mull, and great music from King Sunny Ade, who also appears in the film with his band. At its best, it's like a blend of Nashville, Popeye, Apocalypse Now, and Animal House, but that's a particular blend that can (and sometimes does) spoil. O.C. and Stiggs gets the U.S.A.'s particular brand of lunacy but, in its sexist and homophobic moments, is infected with the same lunacy. A truly strange night at the movies.
One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968)
This is pretty minor Godard, and the interstitial scenes between the footage of the Stones are oddly clumsy. However, the parts of the film where Godard captures The Rolling Stones' recording sessions for "Sympathy for the Devil" as the song slowly transforms from an incomplete, half-hearted blues jam into a rock classic are mesmerizing. He somehow conveys the interminable tedium of recording with the interested eye of an alien observer spying on a mysterious human ritual.
X: The Unheard Music (W.T. Morgan, 1986)
A mostly great documentary about the rock band X, the four one-of-a-kind band members as separate individuals, Los Angeles in the late '70s and early '80s, and the vast wasteland of popular culture. Morgan uses live performances, interviews, fly-on-the-wall verite scenes, music videos, and collage footage of magazines, newspapers, TV channel-surfing, and old movie clips to capture a band, a place, and a time. Would've made my favorites list, but I grew a little restless and numb in the final third.
2 comments:
This reminds me that to my shame I have still not seen The Killing, despite being a huge Jim Thompson fan. So thanks for that and the rest of this interesting list.
Thanks for reading, Karen!
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