Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) & Fiend Without a Face (1958)

Another double feature, this time at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater. It's been several years since I last watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so this time I was interested to notice how straightforward and unaffected the movie really is - aside from the bookending scenes the narrative is clean and direct. Don Siegel was never a strongly expressive director with the camera, and only rarely resorts to odd camera angles or cinematographic tricks to create 'scary' moods, so that the movie's power truly derives from the careful rise of narrative tension and strong, direct performances. For example, this is just about the movie's creepiest shot: That's the town of Santa Mira, entirely made of pod people, coming together for a meeting, but it's only creepy because of the uncanniness inherent in the story at that moment. Another reason for this movie's success has to do with how realistic it all feels, with the vast bulk of the film apparently shot on location, or at least on sets that are better designed than most sci-fi movies from this period. It really feels like we're watching small-town people in a real small town.

Interpretations of this movie's subtext usually revert to fears of either Communism or 1950s American conformity, depending on the ideology of the critic. But the film wouldn't have the longevity it's had if it was just a simple contemporary allegory along those lines. Instead to me, it feels more like the fears this movie raises are about 20th century modernity in general, the loss of 'small-town' values to crushing, anonymous, emotionless ways of life that included both Communism and American conformism alike, which turn neighbor against neighbor, lover against lover in the blink of an eye.

People have also complained about the bookend scenes, added to blunt the impact of the original ending of the movie with Kevin McCarthy screaming into the camera 'You're next!' While it's true that the new ending prevents the movie from ending on a note of shrieking, hysterical horror, it's not a completely happy ending. The film closes on a shot of McCarthy's exhausted, devastated face, aware that everyone that he ever knew or loved is gone forever. It's a consolation for him to know that he's no longer considered to be a madman, but a small consolation nonetheless.

After that, Fiend Without a Face. There were a whole bunch of sci-fi movies in the 1950s and '60s made in Britain with an American in the lead so as to appeal to both markets, and this is one of them, set in rural Canada next to an American Air Force Base where a bunch of locals are being mysteriously killed. After a while we find out that the titular fiends are actually monsters created by a well-meaning scientist as part of his experiments in telekinesis, to 'materialize thoughts'. As so often happens in these movies, instead of helping humanity the experiments create crawling beasties who suck peoples' brains out of their skulls.
It's kind of a generic movie without the layers of emotion or artistry of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it's fun enough to watch stop-motion rubber brains crawl around and try to attack people, if you're into that kind of thing. What subtext the movie does have has to do with the fears of atomic power (risky in the hands of ambitious, if well-meaning scientists) and the resentment felt by locals over American military bases (also well-meaning but misunderstood by stubborn and superstitious locals).

One moment that I especially liked in this movie involves a local who goes out hunting for the mysterious killer (he thinks it's an American soldier gone nuts) who wanders back after being attacked but not killed. A city council meeting is happening to discuss these events when suddenly a curious moaning is heard - it rises until the victim walks in, gibbering and clearly lobotomized by the monsters. The audience at the Egyptian had to laugh at this, which is too bad, because to me it felt downright terrifying and emotionally violent. There's also a long expository scene where the kindly scientist is explaining his experiments in his secret lab, which even his secretary didn't know existed. He responds ominously, "If you knew what I was working on in there, you would never have returned to this house." Then, without missing a beat, in his most grandfatherly tone, "I'll show it to you later." Now that is funny.

Rolling Thunder (1977) & Taxi Driver (1976)

This was a double feature at the New Beverly, two films written by Paul Schrader. Taxi Driver is one of my all-time favorite films. Rolling Thunder, which I had never seen before, feels less developed thematically in its attitude towards violence and guys going crazy, but that might also be the result of rewrites by one Heywood Gould. It's also one of Quentin Tarantino's favorites and curiously not available on DVD.

Like the more well-known Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder is the story of a damaged Vietnam veteran who returns to this country and winds up lashing out in an orgy of destruction. The main difference in the movies is in the nature of their protagonists and the missions they put themselves on - justified revenge in the case of one movie, lunatic self-aggrandizement in the case of the other.

Major Charlie Rane (William Devane) is a former POW returning home to San Antonio after seven years of torture and deprivation in North Vietnam. Even though there are rallies in his honor, it's clear from his reserve that he's just going through the motions for the sake of politeness; the ceremonies marking his return are less for Rane's benefit than they are to ease the consciences of the people who stayed at home, to heal the wounds of Vietnam. But for Rane, the trauma of the war is only compounded by his family - his son doesn't remember him and his wife is in love with a local deputy, Cliff. Cliff tries to reach out to Charlie in an uncomfortable scene where he offers him a glass of whiskey - Charlie accepts it and toasts, but unobtrusively sets it down without drinking it and goes back to his can of beer. The dialogue that follows, as Cliff tells Charlie, "I don't want to think about what you went through" sums things up nicely - everyone in Charlie's life has gone on with their lives, and they'd prefer for Charlie to do the same with a minimum of fuss. This isn't their fault, as nobody really has any idea what it was like for Charlie in captivity - but nobody's too eager to figure out what's ticking behind that 200-yard stare, either.

What has been a tense domestic drama up to this point shifts gears at the half hour mark when a gang of thugs breaks into Charlie's house looking for a box of silver dollars given him as a homecoming gift. Reverting to POW mode, Charlie stubbornly refuses to capitulate to the thugs - his meaningless stubbornness (and by extension, the persistence of America's involvement in the war in general) are nicely summed up by a piece of dialogue from the bad guy played by James Best: "He's one macho motherfucker!" (I might be misquoting but that's the gist.) Things escalate until Charlie's wife and son are murdered and Charlie's in the hospital with a hook where his right hand used to be (note: the sound design in the hand-maiming sequence could have used some more imagination).

The rest of the movie has Charlie methodically tracking down the gang, dragging along a cocktail waitress who's developed a crush on him. She tries to reach out to him, to start a new life, but Charlie's mind is made up. For him, vengeance is practically something for him to jump at, a return to a way of life that he's more equipped for now than mere domesticity. There are strong links to Bob Clark's Deathdream (1974), which takes a more metaphorical route, turning its young veteran into a literal undead zombie creature who needs fresh blood in order to stay alive - Deathdream literalizes what Rolling Thunder only alludes to in dialogue and performance, that the war has turned Charlie into the walking dead, living only to kill, if he can get the chance.

Rolling Thunder ends with Charlie meeting up with a POW buddy (played by a young Tommy Lee Jones) and the two gearing up in their military uniforms for One Last Mission, killing bad guys in a Mexican whorehouse. As exciting as this is, it's also pretty simplistic. What makes Taxi Driver a superior work of art (among other things) is that the orgy of violence at its climax is a scene of horror, of mental illness brought to its inevitable conclusion. The excitement of the violence is coupled with revulsion of its ugliness and Travis Bickle's patheticness; in Rolling Thunder, it's just a kick-ass action sequence, with no thought given for the repercussions. By rolling credits on William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones exiting the whorehouse triumphantly, the movie performs an act of denial (not wanting to think about what their lives might be from this point on) similar to Cliff preferring to not have to think about what Charlie Rane had to endure after he got shot down. Oh well.
As for Taxi Driver, every time I watch this movie it dazzles me. My favorite sequences are the scenes of Travis Bickle talking to himself in his tiny apartment, pushing his television over with one foot until it reaches the tipping point and smashes on the floor, and the mental devastation that follows - how is he going to distract himself from those voices in his head now?

Watching it this time, I was more aware of the subplot involving Travis's racism - the fearsome black faces he stares at and the black kid holding up a grocery store that he murders. It's a pretty big event that the movie seems to forget about five minutes after it's happened, moving forward to different plot areas. It strikes me as something of a miscalculation to bring in something so heavy and then abandon it as a thread for the rest of the movie, and it seems to be Jonathan Rosenbaum's primary reason for labelling the movie 'racist', which I can't really agree with. Travis is racist, yes, but the movie doesn't endorse his racism, which is clearly borne of ignorance and fear. Such are the critical buttons which Rosenbaum allows to be so easily pressed. Also, this movie wins an award from me for being one of the filthiest movies ever made - usually Hollywood movies look clean because they're filmed on constructed sets; or if shot on location, in places that have been cleaned and dressed up by set decoraters. The cheap rooms and streets in this movie - especially the hotel site for the final bloodbath - look like they haven't seen a mop in decades.

I kind of wish Schrader had pulled the same trick in Rolling Thunder that he had in Taxi Driver; Travis, fixated on Cybill Shepherd's Betsy, intends to kill her idol, a vacuous Presidential candidate. Foiled and chased away by the Secret Service, Travis immediately transfers his energies to an easier, lesser target, Harvey Keitel's pimp character. I'm imagining a version of Rolling Thunder where Charlie Rane tracks down a bunch of low-lifes to a Mexican whorehouse and kills them, but not the actual murderers he's looking for - those could be tracked down by his less-bloodthirsty, less-damaged rival Cliff. Something to think about.

Open letter to some dude

If you're going to make an anonymous phone call to me at 1 am to say 'Fuck you' it doesn't really help anybody, because I have no idea who you are or what I might have done to offend you. Better luck next time.

(Added 8/25/07): if the person who called is who I think it is: IMDB is very slow with adding credits onto new pages. Yours will be listed eventually, jackass.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

As much as I enjoyed this, it's also a tiny bit of a letdown because this movie is, basically, exactly the same movie as The Bourne Supremacy - which I loved.

Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity was a pretty simple and straightforward action-adventure with an emphasis on realistic stunts, but it was also kind of pedestrian. Liman's inability to make a movie without someone stepping in to clean up his messes meant that the sequel went to a new director. Paul Greengrass brought a vastly more interesting sense of kineticism to Supremacy, and a greater degree of moral probing and clarity; Jason Bourne wasn't just a former spy on a sexy tour of Europe, he was an anguished loner on a journey of discovery to find out who he really was and what sins he may have committed. Greengrass made Supremacy an action movie with a soul.

And now...ditto. You could pretty much use the same screenplay for both movies, just swapping out Brian Cox for Albert Finney and ending on the same note of 'exposing-the-bad-guys' and drifting into the ether. So that as much as I enjoyed the bonecrunching fight scenes and the spectacular car chases, I had the nagging thought in my head that I had seen it all before, storywise. Also I felt that the emotional impact was stronger in Supremacy, ending on that scene between Bourne and his young Russian victim, simple but direct.

So let me reverse myself one more time and add that this is clearly the best action movie of the year, thus far, and that I'm in a certain amount of awe of Greengrass's ability to stage his complex action sequences and shoot and edit them for maximum impact. People complain about Greengrass's hyperkinetic shooting style and rapid-fire editing, comparing him to Michael Bay, but the difference between these two is so big it's not even funny. Where Bay is bludgeoning and crude, Greengrass is precise and dazzling. I can tell where characters are in relation to each other in a Greengrass movie, and every tiny shot contains information; his movies take place in a finely detailed, realistic world, which I can't say about Transformers or any other Bay movie.

So: I can't wait to see what Greengrass does with Imperial Life in the Emerald City, where he'll be working with material that probably excites him more than doing another studio spy movie.

Holy crap, I've been reviewed.

Well not me, but my USC film Sleep in Heavenly Peace. The review is here.

Thanks to whoever this is and whoever got the film to them!

The True West Cinema Festival

I've been recovering from this and trying to take care of all the stuff that needed to get done while I was out of town, but I absolutely need to take mention of how much fun this was. The True West Festival in Boise, Idaho, is fairly small (10 features and two shorts programs) but it's intimate and cozy and the organizers really took care of those of us who could attend as filmmakers.

I missed several of the films, but there were definitely highlights. Four Sheets to the Wind, a drama from director Sterlin Harjo, is set in Oklahoma amidst the Native American population. It's an intimate character drama, refreshingly taking a look at the issues of Natives and rural dwellers alike. The technical aspects are a little shaky at times and the story has one suicide attempt too many, but it's heartfelt and very well-acted, especially by lead actor Cody Lightning.

Tijuana Makes Me Happy is kind of an odd film, blurring the lines between fiction and documentary as it follows the lives of a Mexican kid and his friends and family south of the border living their everyday lives, hanging out at cockfights, selling empanadas door to door, freely crossing the border back and forth with a work visa. It, too lacks technical panache but it's so nice to see such a realistic slice of life that it didn't matter.

I had never seen the 1971 classic Vanishing Point before, but it was interesting to see especially in the wake of Antonioni's death, as an elliptical blending of post-1960s despair and grindhouse action - it's great to see existential ennui in the same movie as a naked girl on a motorcycle offering uppers to the protagonist. As the virtually anonymous antihero Kowalski, Barry Newman has little to do except look pissed off for most of the movie, but he does it very well.

Finally the best short of the weekend was from a fellow USC student who was also making his festival debut, Jacob Hatley's China. This is a finely nuanced character piece about an aging cowboy in modern North Carolina feeling the passage of the age as he tracks down a rogue bull for his employer, and it's equal parts Hal Needham and Howard Hawks, shot in gorgeous anamorphic black and white.

On top of all that was the city of Boise, which was very friendly and open to a wide variety of films, not too surprising as the local hub of what appears to be the beginnings of a boom in digital indie filmmaking. Very cool to see, and I hope to visit again sometime. Thanks again to the organizers for all their work and for inviting me!

Festival Update

My USC thesis film Sleep in Heavenly Peace will be screening at three festivals in the next month:

This weekend at the True West Cinema Festival in Boise, Idaho - technically this is the film's World Premiere. The film will be screening at 4:45 pm on Sunday, August 12 at The Flicks, 646 Fulton St., Boise.

Next, at the L.A. Shorts Fest, on Thursday, Sept. 6 at 3:15 pm, at the AMC Burbank 6, 770 N. 1st St., Burbank.

After that, at the Estes Park Film Festival on Sunday, Sept. 16 at 12pm, at the Park Theatre, 130 Moraine Ave., Estes Park, Colorado.

If you can make it to any of these (especially to any Los Angeles people out there) I promise you the funniest Christmas-themed farm accident movie you've ever seen.

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Along with Fanny & Alexander, I think this is the towering work of Bergman's career (at least of the relatively small number of films that I've seen). Bergman's trademark intellectualized questions about religion and mortality are dramatized and visualized into an artwork of pure emotion, with great simplicity and complexity, harshness and grace. It's one of the finest films ever made about how we react to illness and death. Bergman uses Christian iconography and concepts about sin and redemption, yet the film can just as easily be interpreted to take place in an atheistic universe where meaning can only come from human love and devotion. This is, of course, my interpretation, that Agnes's relief from her suffering (such as it is) comes only from the love and care of Anna, and not from any promises of organized religion. When the pastor says "Her faith was greater than mine" I think he is simply offering his own rationalization for her grace under pressure in the face of an intolerable vacuum of doubt and fear.

What I find most aesthetically satisfying about the film, in addition to its impeccable craft in terms of acting, cinematography, production design, and sound design, is its unflinching perspective, Bergman's ability to look unblinkingly at human misery at its most dismal and unpleasant. While the notion that some things are better left to discretion and the imagination of the audience is often valid, I also believe that often there are subjects that demand full visualization. Agnes' death is one of those cinematic moments that is literally hard to watch, yet Bergman's camera takes it all in, performing its own act of cinematic devotion.

I've noticed that my writing seems to get a little more formalized when writing about these Bergman films. Their subject matters seem to demand it.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007)

I mourn the movie that could have been if this had been made by Alexander Payne, who co-wrote a version of it with his partner Jim Taylor - it could have been a modern-day satirical masterpiece worthy of Billy Wilder. Instead, we have something fairly blockheaded and dopey.

Yet, like most of Sandler's movies, there's a core here of decency, and in its own clumsy way the movie ends up being progressive, in spite of numerous compromises. It's a temporary transvestite movie like Tootsie, and as such gives the audience an entry point into an identity they'd otherwise never experience, so that the scenes where Adam Sandler and Kevin James experience discrimination and homophobia and fight back give the movie a kick of relevance.

Unfortunately, Sandler needs to overcompensate in making his character aggressively heterosexual, by hitting on every female in the movie and ordering an absurd amount of pornography in the mail to his new address at Larry's house. Also, Jessica Biel should be embarrassed by her role in this. Talk about being complicit in your own exploitation, Biel's role in this movie is to deliver exposition and have tits. It's about five times more demeaning and exploitative than Elisha Cuthbert's role in Captivity, where she at least got to play an actual human character.

The Virgin Spring (1960) & Wild Strawberries (1957)

I saw this double feature last night at the still-open New Beverly, where cinephiles and homeless dudes rub shoulders on some of the most uncomfortable seats in Hollywood. It was fun, and both movies gained a lot for me by seeing them on a big screen with an audience.

First, Wild Strawberries, which more than anything else feels like Bergman's response to Dickens (A Christmas Carol) and Capra (It's a Wonderful Life) in illustrating the scope of a man's life through flashbacks. Unlike Scrooge or George Bailey, though, Isak Borg begins the movie as something of a blank slate, both to us and, apparently, to himself - we understand that he's a cranky old man, but he's not an obvious monster like Scrooge, and Bergman allows us to discover gradually what kind of life Borg has led; emotionally closed-off, priggish as a youth, a failure as a husband and as a father, but successful in his work as a doctor. What's especially interesting is that Bergman never places Young Isak in Old Isak's flashbacks; the dissolution of his relationships are things that take place beyond the scope of his direct activity, actions taken by others in Isak's life; Bergman's point is that Isak's sins are of omission, not commission. In A Christmas Carol, we actually see the scene of Young Scrooge choosing his work over his fiancee; in Bergman, we only see the effects of the slow dissolution of his relationships. The effect is to maintain our sympathy for Borg, but at the same time to reinforce the insidiousness of his character flaws.

If the movie has a 'bad guy' it would have to be Borg's son Evald, who is portrayed as stern, arrogant, uncaring of the feelings of those around him and generally nihilistic; Evald is the Monster to Borg's Frankenstein, and it's not clear what hope he will have in the future to move forwards, beyond the same kind of late-in-life redemption that Isak seems to receive.

If this all sounds rather roundabout, it's because the movie seems to me to orbit around its themes rather than addressing them head-on, which is probably why it's taken me three viewings to really get a handle on what seems like a fairly simple film at first glance.

Now, The Virgin Spring: My friend Matt Dessem has written that if Bergman had wanted to, he could have been one of the greatest horror directors of all time, and in certain ways he was anyway, with this movie as a prime example. And, as we all know, it inspired Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. But even though Craven's is a low-budget, gritty grindhouse horror movie and Bergman's is a finely-crafted art film with strong, subtle performances, the two movies still have a lot in common and bizarrely, I find Bergman's movie the more problematic of the two.

When I say 'problematic', I mean that I find this movie frustrating in several ways. As a narrative, it's absorbing; as a movie, it's extremely well-crafted, especially in terms of rendering what everyday life was probably like in the 14th century, and in terms of Sven Nykvist's gorgeous cinematography; however, as a statement, as something with a rhetorical argument about revenge, or faith, or the existence of God, it falls short for me. Last House on the Left is a crude movie, but it has a straight-forward, simple yet powerful statement on the nature of violence and revenge in 1970s America, by graphically illustrating the ugliness inherent in both the initiating violence (the rapes and murders of two girls) and in the revenge taken afterwards (the parents of one girl murdering the gang of rapists in cold blood). In comparison, while Bergman's movie has an equally appalling scene of rape and murder, it does not offer the same kind of reflection on the act of revenge; the murderers are a band of thugs whose psychology is not probed, and Max Von Sydow's need for revenge is taken for granted. He's clearly in anguish, and what he does is fascinating to watch, but there's not much sense of reflection in what he does. Bergman shows us the man preparing to kill the men, and then doing it, but that's all. As horrible as it all is, it feels relatively flat and undynamic to me, lacking in some greater moral or ethical dynamic, which Last House, despite its crudeness possessed.

After killing the men, Von Sydow and his peasant entourage find the body of the dead maiden and, after praying to God for forgiveness for his vengeance, they lift the corpse up from the ground and a miracle happens - the titular geyser begins to burble from the ground, and uplifting music swells from the soundtrack. I don't like this ending. To me it suggests a simplistic affirmation after all the horrors that have occurred up to this point - all's well that ends with a miracle. I would propose a darker interpretation, which is that God is signaling His existence to these believers and, by extension, His conscious will of all the violence that has taken place. But this ending doesn't match the happy music Bergman layers over the scene. So ultimately, it feels phony to me. Like I say, it's still a good movie - but it should have been a great movie, and it's not.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

The opening credits make it clear: this is 'A romantic comedy by Ingmar Bergman', with all that implies: it's a sunny farce with a third act on a country estate where the bourgeoisie flirt and fall in and out of love with each other - in between suicide attempts and monologues about the impossibility of happiness and love. So this movie is probably the root of more Woody Allen movies than any other.

Even though it has its dour patches, the movie as a whole is charming and warm and very removed from the Bergman that would bring us the likes of The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly just a few years later. It's also erotic as many Bergman films are (I must admit quite enjoying the contribution of Harriet Andersson as Petra, the maid) and it has some of that gorgeous Scandinavian light courtesy of cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who also did The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.

The Simpsons Movie (2007)

I can't say that it's much more than an extended, above-average episode of the show, but there are ways that it transcends the standard television-viewing experience. Foremost of these is the experience of watching the Simpsons with a live theatrical audience, which was super fun. Next is the movie's gorgeous widescreen animation, colorful and sharp, giving the film an epic scope it's never had before. Finally, there's the simple fact that the extra running time means that we can spend more time luxuriating with the characters and their relationships, primarily between Homer and Marge and Homer and Bart. There have been dozens of episodes where Homer does something stupid and Marge questions whether or not she should remain with him, until he manages to redeem himself; it's probably the show's most common basic storyline, but for a reason: it works. Homer's arc is one that we can all learn from: the movement away from single-minded self-interest into selflessness and broader consciousness, from passivity to action. Of course Homer needs constant refresher courses in this lesson - we all do.

Addendum 8/6/07: One week later, and this movie has all but vacated my head.

Rescue Dawn (2007)

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I can't help but think of it as something I'd seen before, and not just because it's the second time Werner Herzog has told the story of Dieter Dengler's adventures, after Little Dieter Needs to Fly. By narrowing the story down to Dengler's Laotian captivity, escape, and jungle ordeal, Herzog basically has made a fairly conventional prisoner-of-war movie. Not that it's without its personalized, subversive streak - when asked what patriotic or religious thoughts kept him going in the jungle, Christian Bale's Dieter responds that he just kept thinking of eating steak, and then a moment later with the Herzogian non sequitur, "When something is empty, fill it. When something is full, empty it. When you have an itch, scratch it."

What's best about the movie are the ensemble performances from Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, and the other men held prisoner; and Herzog's standard blending of narrative of fiction, shooting his action documentary-style right before our eyes.

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912-2007

Wow, I hope Godard and Resnais are taking it easy today. Unfortunately, I've seen even fewer Antonioni films than I have Bergman films (3 - L'Avventura, Blow-Up, and The Passenger, plus his section from Eros). Antonioni's style and subject matter is even more forbiddingly high modernist, and more of its time, when the old orders of Europe finally crumbled under the weight of the modern age. To be perfectly honest, I can't say that I 'get' L'Avventura or Blow-Up, although that might just be because Antonioni's style and message have so permeated the art-movie that they just seem like part of the landscape now. The Passenger, on the other hand, I love because it feels simultaneously more personal and more playful than the previous two, less mired in what Pauline Kael called 'come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties'. But I need to revisit as many of these movies as I can. All this viewing makes me wish I was out of work right now so that I could have more free time.

My Top Fifteen Simpsons Episodes

From the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous, my near-total enjoyment of The Simpsons Movie made me want to go back and do a little list-making, which was tough, considering there are now 400 episodes to choose from. The average Simpsons episode is smart, funny, and gently subversive; the best episodes are all of those, and warm and full of heart as well (for the most part).

In order in which they aired:

"Homer's Triple Bypass" (1992) Homer's mortality has never been played for such drama or realistic comedy as this episode, where he's saved by Dr. Nick Riviera and an assist from Lisa.

"Marge vs. the Monorail" (1993) This Conan O'Brien-inspired episode has a ludicrous premise, but it works thanks to Phil Hartman's Lyle Lanley and one of the best musical moments of the series.

"Cape Feare" (1993) This is the best Sideshow Bob episode, and one of the best movie parodies at the same time.

"Homer the Great" (1995) The Stonecutters episode, and a cutting satire of 'secret societies' as nothing more than frattish drinking clubs.

"Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part One)" (1995) The biggest Simpsons event ever was this cliffhanger with genuine drama stemming from Mr. Burns' most diabolical plot ever.

"Treehouse of Horror VI" (1995) The three episodes here - "Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores", "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" and "Homer^3" - are the best all-around package of Treehouse of Horror shorts, climaxing with a CGI Homer wandering down a normal human street.

"Mother Simpson" (1995) The sage of Mona Simpson, Homer's mother, was told as a story of love and loss with one of the show's most bittersweet endings.

"A Fish Called Selma" (1996) Troy McClure shines as a fish fetishist who romances Selma to rehabilitate his career, including the musical version of "Planet of the Apes".

"22 Short Films about Springfield" (1996) Following on the heels of Pulp Fiction and its ilk, a deconstruction with some of the best character bits from the show's supporting cast.

"You Only Move Twice" (1996) Homer sacrifices the best job he could ever have (working for supergenius Hank Scorpio) in order to bring his family happiness.

"In Marge We Trust" (1997) Two words: Mr. Sparkle.

"Homer's Enemy" (1997) A great mid-series auto-critique of the series, with the hapless Frank Grimes pointing out all of Homer's flaws.

"The Secret War of Lisa Simpson" (1997) The best depiction of the relationship between siblings Bart and Lisa, as the two kids are sent to military school.

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" (1997) The show's best Christmas episode, with the family perpetrating a fraud on the entire town of Springfield.

"Alone Again Natura-Diddily" (2000) The show kills off Maude Flanders and her husband copes.

Even though the last episode on this list is seven years old, I'm not one of those rabid haters who insists that the show has been worthless for years; it's had its ups and downs, and the death of Maude Flanders was probably the last boat-rocking that the show will ever see, but the show is still in the upper ranks of anything on television, and substantially better than shows like The Family Guy.

Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

Sad news of the death of one of the great filmmakers today. I'll always think of Bergman, along with Kurosawa and Fellini, as one of the big three of the foreign/arthouse period of cinema history - for many people, the definition of a foreign film was two people sitting in a room talking about the mysteries of existence and not looking at each other. For example, a clip: http://youtube.com/watch?v=h2f0nfrgaK4

I regret to say that I have only seen seven of his 60+ films, a shortcoming I will do my best to fix. Those seven are: Fanny and Alexander, Cries and Whispers, Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, and The Virgin Spring. In thinking about these films, the associations that come to mind are of an educated, sensitive man reckoning with the blind chaos of the universe and trying to make sense of it all; sometimes, with bitterness, sometimes with warmth, but always with passion and intelligence. Also, those performances, true down to the bone, and that cinematography, thanks to Sven Nykvist - those brilliant contrasts, light shining down to expose the soul of the individual.

I also notice that, assuming it's still open, the New Beverly is showing The Virgin Spring and Wild Strawberries this Wednesday and Thursday here in Los Angeles.

"The Littlest People" on Discovery Health

I was watching this documentary program on cable while folding laundry, it's about a particular disorder - primordial dwarfism - that results in children that are smaller and frailer than other types of dwarfs, and who typically don't live beyond the age of 30. It's interesting enough hearing stories about growing up different from other kids and how adults with the disorder work to try to boost the self-esteem of young primordial dwarf children.

Then they get to a profile of Danny, the guy in the picture above, and the interviewer talks about how he got to go to homecoming and his romantic life, and then she asks, "How long would you like to live?" And I was staggered at the insensitivity and condescension inherent in that question. How long do you want to live, interview lady? Of course, the guy answers, "Sixty or seventy" because what else is he going to say? "I hope to make it to forty but that's it, because my life is a worthless parody of normalcy"?

And this was in the final cut of the thing. Jeez.

Highest-grossing horror movies of all time - by special request

You can tell just from the name of this blog that I'm a big horror movie fan, which is why I've been trying to defend certain titles and filmmakers against mainstream disdain - even though horror is almost by definition an outsider phenomenon, beyond the pale of what a mainstream audience typically wants out of a movie. But of course there are exceptions. This is a list of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time, adjusted for inflation:

1. Jaws
2. The Exorcist
3. The Sixth Sense
4. Psycho
5. Gremlins
6. Jaws 2
7. House of Wax (1953)
8. The Amityville Horror (1979)
9. Alien
10. The Silence of the Lambs
11. Hannibal
12. What Lies Beneath
13. The Omen (1976)
14. The Blair Witch Project
15. Interview with the Vampire
16. Poltergeist
17. Scream
18. Seven
19. The Ring
20. Scream 2
(revised - 21. Halloween
22. Bram Stoker's Dracula
23. Sleepy Hollow)

These rankings are adapted from a list off of Hollywood.com, which for some reason included action/horror hybrids like The Mummy(1999) and Van Helsing, but not Gremlins or the two Hannibal Lecter movies, which I feel are a better fit. But this kind of genre slipperiness is to be expected, because in order for a horror movie to make a lot of money, it probably has to be more than just scary (half of these movies have happy endings), and so at the top of the list are dramas like The Sixth Sense and adventure movies like Jaws. I could have also included Jurassic Park or Signs or hell, Fatal Attraction, but they didn't feel right. Also, I think the Hollywood.com list is incomplete - I'm pretty sure that Psycho, adjusted for inflation, should show up here, as well as the likes of Rosemary's Baby, The Birds, or even the original Universal Dracula or Frankenstein.

I've been wanting to write up a list of what I think are the 50 best horror movies of all time and make it a running series on this blog (I need to see some more Asian horror classics before I feel right in doing that) but for now I'll say that nine of these movies would definitely be on that list - Jaws, Exorcist, Gremlins, Alien, Blair Witch, Seven, Halloween, Silence of the Lambs, and The Ring.

Stroszek (1977)

There are two basic types of Werner Herzog characters: the megalomaniacs who try to bend nature to their wills and fail (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Timothy Treadwell) and the innocents who find themselves coping with a strange and chaotic universe (Kaspar Hauser, Juliane Sturze, Dieter Dengler). Bruno Stroszek is one of the latter, as Herzog transplants Bruno S., Kaspar Hauser from Every Man for Himself and God Against All, out of the 19th century into contemporary Germany. Just as Bruno had played Kaspar as a confused innocent stuck in a bizarre world he never made, so now are the contrasts even higher: Stroszek (like Bruno S. himself) has been institutionalized for most of his life and has only rudimentary adult skills; when confronted by two thugs who force themselves into his grungy apartment, his response is total submission, like a dog.

After realizing how incapable he is of dealing with this existence, he tries, with a pair of friends - a prostitute and an old guy - to build a new life in Wisconsin. Here, the expression about not being able to get away from yourself comes firmly into play, as Eva the prostitute goes back to doing tricks for extra cash, and Stroszek has no idea how to make enough money to pay for his mobile home or color TV. All of this is played out not in clammy, decrepit West Germany, but in a land that promises a brighter future for anyone, yet is full of its own share of weirdness. After dealing with an unctuous banker and a jabberjaw auctioneer, Stroszek makes his final stand against the cold rationality of the world in an arcade, where you can make a rabbit ride a tiny firetruck or a chicken dance by plugging in a few cents.

The experience of watching a film like this is essentially heartbreaking, and illustrative of the whole scope of human life, from the unstoppable survival instincts of the tiny babies Stroszek views in the premature ward of the hospital, to the late-in-life rebelliousness of Mr. Scheitz, who holds up a barbershop with a shotgun out of disgust at the failures of the system, and is promptly arrested across the street buying groceries.

Through all of this, Bruno S. watches and tries to cope, until he can take it no longer and has one of those wonderful movie flameouts that we only really saw in the '70s. Everything that felt distanced in Herzog's Kaspar Hauser - the pastoral tone, the historical setting - is gone here, and the movie slaps you around with the essential tragedy of life.

I also notice from IMDB that this movie was apparently released on my birthday in 1977, which is funny.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Wow, who'd have thought that we'd have a summer where Len Wiseman would be showing Michael Bay how to direct an action movie?

I'm mostly surprised at how enjoyable this was because of how little interest I had in this movie to begin with - a sequel a dozen years after the last movie is a dubious place to start, and the only other Len Wiseman movie I've ever seen, Underworld, is dreary and tedious. And on top, the trailer, with fervent Michael Bay-isms like American flags unfolding in slow-motion and absurdly impossible stunts, made this look like crud.

But Wiseman stepped up and delivered the most entertaining action movie of this summer (presumably until next week, when The Bourne Ultimatum comes out). Wiseman's action sequences are clean and simple, suspenseful and exciting, as opposed to the meaningless chaos of Transformers or the overblown spectacle of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. This is how you do it, Bay and Verbinski: you don't have to assault the audience with constantly frenetic imagery. You don't have to attempt to bloat your movie with too many storylines, characters, and visual metaphors. You just need to provide a simple story, some good guys and bad guys, some stakes, some momentum, and some carefully choreographed sequences.

Of course, I don't wat to give the impression that this is some minor masterpiece of action filmmaking - it's a bigger, more expansive version of the original Die Hard with the Eastern Seaboard substituting for Nakatomi Tower and Mary Elizabeth Winstead filling in for Bonnie Bedelia, and lacking that movie's perfect screenplay, originality, and bad guy (Timothy Olyphant is no Alan Rickman). But as summer tentpoles go, you could do a lot worse.

Sunshine (2007)

I never again want to hear the line "He's insane! He's going to destroy the mission!" in a movie that intends to be taken seriously.

Danny Boyle bugs me. He makes movies about things that I generally like - greedy people killing each other (Shallow Grave), isolated survivalists (The Beach), cataclysmic zombie attacks (28 Days Later), featuring strong actors, music, and cinematography - then mucks them up with shallow thematic development, dumb plot contrivances, and dreadful third acts. Sunshine is more of the same, returning to his common theme of small groups of isolated people inevitably self-destructing. It starts well, with a crew of eight scientists and astronauts on a mission to 'reignite the sun' (whatever that means). Then they decide to check out the seemingly abandoned remains of the first ship to attempt this mission.

Of course, the movie reveals itself as boneheaded as soon as one sleepy astronaut explains to everyone that the reason alarms are going off is because when calculating their complex course correction to head to the other ship, he forgot to program in an adjustment to the ship's heat shields - and this poor, overworked dude becomes responsible for (spoilers!) pretty much everyone's deaths, in the first of many contrivances that shows that the filmmakers don't have much concept about how a real space mission would work. Brian DePalma's Mission to Mars is a dumb movie in a lot of ways, but one aspect it got right were the nuts and bolts of realistic space travel and how missions work - with intricate planning, checking, double-checking, and redundant cross-checking to make sure that something important - like the heat shields, on a misson to the Sun - are pointed the right direction.

Of course, that's a fairly minor point by the end of the movie, when it turns into the sequel to Event Horizon and a Kentucky Fried Madman is chasing the crew through the ship and stabbing everyone. There's some strong imagery and the movie is sort of entertaining, in a dumb, pulpy way, but Boyle is fooling himself if he thinks he's following in the tradition of Kubrick or Tarkovsky.

Everybody's doing it

Of course I hate to be part of a major corporation's marketing campaign, but hey...it's the Simpsons.

I just wish there was an option for a button-down shirt.

Torture movies

It's been very frustrating to me for the last few months to attempt to sustain a dialogue with various internet folk about the current torture subgenre of horror movies, primarily because critics of these films have insisted on simplistic knee-jerk reactions - if they've even seen the films under discussion.

I refuse to submit to the name 'torture porn' because it's meant to be purely derogatory; but it also points out what it is about these movies that make critics so very uncomfortable - horror and porn are audiovisual genres that deal explicitly with the human body; porn in a fantasy context, horror in a nightmare context, and representations of the human body in these extreme circumstances make people deeply uncomfortable, as they have for over thirty years now. This is a continuation of the same debate that flourished in the 1970s over Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave, and the same lazy arguments are in play which seek to sweep all torture movies into the same bag, regardless of individual merit.

My frustrations have stemmed primarily from the insistence from some that torture movies like Hostel, the Saw movies, or the new Captivity are not just bad movies, but deeply objectionable; one critic for a high-profile publication has made it clear that he deems these movies so horrendous that anyone who expresses any opinion other than total revulsion is beyond the pale of redemption and unworthy of human contact. (Of course, this same critic is also happy to needle those who disagree with constant reminders of his moral superiority and persistent gloating in a babyish, intellectually lazy and dishonest manner.) I don't give a rat's ass if you like or dislike a movie, but I demand basic respect for my opinions and analysis, and insist that a critic see a movie before repetitively slamming it and gloating over it's fate - that's basic.

While I'm a big fan of horror movies, I would never say that every movie in this subgenre is good or worthy of respect; Darren Bousman's Saw sequels have been grim wallows in explicit gore justified by juvenile attempts at moralizing; Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a standard slasher movie juiced up by all the aestheticization that a Michael Bay production could muster; and Turistas went through the motions, clearly uninterested in its own premise. However, as in every genre of movies, there are standouts, and so it is with Eli Roth's Hostel and Hostel Part II, and Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects. It's easier for critics to brush an entire class of movies into the 'torture porn' ghetto without actually evaluating each one for its own merits, just as thirty years ago good horror movies directed by David Cronenberg and John Carpenter like The Brood or Halloween were lumped together with turds like Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. While it would be nice if critics could actually apply some judgement other than knee-jerk loathing, I would settle for critics to at least watch the movies they're so quick to demonize.

The other reason I'm frustrated by the 'torture porn' appellation is that it overlooks all the other forms of cinematic exploitation that go on. I'm of the opinion that a gory action movie like Pearl Harbor, 300, or Man on Fire is inherently more problematic than a gory horror movie. Each of these movies exploits violent action for the viewing pleasure of the home audience, but in a significantly different manner than in Hostel or Saw. The violence in the horror movies is perpetrated _on_ the movie's protagonists, represented as horrible and experienced as violations, outrages: bad. the violence and torture of the Spartan warriors in 300 or Denzel Washington in Man on Fire is perpetrated _by_ the movies' protagonists and represented as appropriate, desireable, righteous: good. Audience complicity is completely different in the two genres of film, and more clearly objectionable in the action movies. This also leaves behind emotional pornography, art-porn, romance-porn, or any other way to pander to human emotions in ways other than by representing the human body.

Finally, criticism of these movies extends into a criticism of horror as a whole, and overlooks the cinematic traditions they stem from. These are not an original development in American horror, but merely a resurgence of forms that have been popular in Asian, European, and grindhouse traditions: Captivity is a giallo, from its black leather gloves to its fluid cinematography; Chan-Wook Park's movies are as brutal as anything made by Eli Roth, but he gets a pass because he works in a foreign language; and The Texas Chainsaw sequels speak for themselves. The idea that a torture movie is more problematic than other forms of horror because the gory torture scenes are foregrounded above the narrative ignores the very point of a horror film: you go to see a horror film to be scared, and the experience is inherently masochistic; the only difference between a classical horror narrative and a modern film is one of subtlety vs. directness, with tradeoffs inherent either way.

This is all to say that there's plenty of room for discussion and debate on these issues, but narrow-minded individuals who refuse to have honest discussions about them are the villains of the day. Anyone who can't find a difference between Turistas and Hostel isn't worthy of the name 'critic'.

And Joe Leydon owes me an apology.

Skidoo (1968)

I can understand why a viewer in 1968 might be offended by going to see a new movie from the director of Anatomy of a Murder and Advise & Consent and getting a movie as incoherent and painfully trendy as Otto Preminger's Skidoo, but seeing it today, we're free to enjoy it on other levels beyond mainstream entertainment: as a time capsule, as an attempt by a successful director to broaden his artistic horizons by adopting what must have seemed like the exciting new styles of such directors as Richard Lester, and as an insane movie artifact where some new piece of lunacy is lurking around every scene. Where else can you find a movie where Jackie Gleason is a retired mobster going out for one last hit on the orders of mob boss Groucho Marx, to eliminate incarcerated gangster Mickey Rooney? Where Austin Pendleton plays a technical genius and LSD enthusiast who doses an entire prison population, leading to a jaw-dropping dream ballet of dancing garbage cans set to the music of Harry Nilsson? Where Frank Gorshin speaks through his grimaced teeth (hilariously) to evade the lip-reading capabilities of the prison's surveillance cameras, and where Carol Channing, as Gleason's wife, belts out the title song ("Skidoo, Skidoo! Between a one and three there is a two!") dressed in a hippie-Napoleon getup while boarding Groucho's yacht hideaway with an army of flower children...it's that kind of movie.
Of course, it's not really very good - the comedy often falls flat, Groucho Marx is a little embarrassing to watch at the very end of his career, and nothing of any real consequence happens. But it's a must-see regardless.

Highest-grossing horror movies

These are the 20 highest-grossing horror movies of the last five years:

The Ring (2002): $129.1m
The Village (2004): $114.2m
The Grudge (2004): $110.4m
Red Dragon (2002): $92.1m
Saw II (2005): $87.0m
Freddy vs. Jason (2003): $82.6m
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003): $80.6m
Saw III (2006): $80.2m
The Ring Two (2005): $76.2m
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005): $75.1m
The Amityville Horror (2005): $65.2m
Gothika (2003): $59.7m
Dawn of the Dead (2004): $59.0m
1408 (2007): $58.8m (so far)
White Noise (2005): $56.4m
Saw (2004): $55.2m
The Omen (2006): $54.6m
Final Destination 3 (2006): $54.1m
Hide and Seek (2005): $51.1m
The Skeleton Key (2005): $47.9m

I'm not counting sci-fi terror tales like Signs or War of the Worlds or action/horror hybrids like Resident Evil or Ghost Rider. What this means is that the most popular horror movies are ghost stories (7 titles) followed by slashers (3), gore movies (3), devil/possession movies (2), and the rest (zombies, voodoo, monsters in the woods, etc.)

In other words: there is no epidemic of torture movies plaguing theaters, despite what the lazy bluenoses would have everyone think.

(Oh yeah, and I would only call six of these twenty good movies - numbers 1, 3, 6, 13, 14, and 18.)

The "Cloverfield" Trailer

I hate to be the tool of a marketing campaign, but I wanted to comment a little on this trailer, which reportedly was attached to prints of Transformers. It seems really lame to me, because even though it appears to be an attempt to make a CGI event/action movie that looks like it was shot on handheld, consumer-level DV, they get so many obvious things wrong that I'm annoyed with it from the get-go. To do a movie like this right, you have to shoot it in the proper shooting format - 4x3 or 16x9, to match what a consumer camera looks like, not widescreen 2.35:1. The explosions and FX shots look fake, the editing is conventional, and the movie apparently comes with a story arc and a handsome protagonist, both of which scream 'Hollywood formula' to me, not verite-realism. It's too bad because the idea of a ground-level movie like this is a great concept which J.J. Abrams and crew are seemingly bastardizing.

"Spielberg on Spielberg"

I saw this new TCM documentary last night. Apparently Richard Schickel has decided to make a cottage industry out of breezy interview-documentaries about every major American filmmaker, which he can then sell as DVD bonus features.

Anyway, it's an entertaining enough little documentary, but it stays very surface-level and never peers into the depths of Spielberg's work or his complexities as an artist. This is primarily because the movie is literally Spielberg telling his own story, and so he's free to rehash all his old stories and spin some new ones, from the comfort of his own perspective. Present are his stories about his youth and inexperience in the late 1960s, the agonies of making Jaws, the failure of 1941, his uncertainty over The Color Purple, and the controversy of Munich. I was happy to see Spielberg defend the present-day bookend scenes of Saving Private Ryan (essential for grounding the film in the present) and the brilliant ending of A.I. (part of Kubrick's original bitterly ironic treatment, not tacked on out of misguided sentimentality by Spielberg).

Not present are other stories, like his upbringing and background as a geeky suburban child of divorce; his Jaws-related Oscar embarrassment, and the strife with Verna Fields over her contributions to the film's success; his role as producer and the problems that plagued Twilight Zone: The Movie and Poltergeist; the problems of racism and violence in Temple of Doom; the failures of Always and Hook; and any significant mention of Last Crusade, Amistad, The Lost World, Catch Me If You Can, or The Terminal. When politics are mentioned, as in regard to Spielberg's critiques of governmental surveillance in Minority Report or bureaucracy in The Terminal, or our responses to terrorism in War of the Worlds or Munich, Schickel and Spielberg discreetly downplay the controversies as if to deny that any of those films contained anything that could even be considered controversial or problematic.

What I'd love to see is an objective documentary about the man (who I consider to be one of the three or four greatest living filmmakers, by the way) that goes into all the ups and downs of Spielberg's career, including a true critique of his artistic achievements and failures, including a look at his discomfort with portraying adult romance and sex, his influence on modern blockbusters, and so on. As one of the most compelling, successful, and influential filmmakers of our time, his work demands more than a puff-piece retrospective.

1408 (2007)

[Before I go any farther: My enjoyment of this movie was severely hampered by the marketing team at Weinstein/MGM, who made sure to stick every special effects shot into the trailer and capped it off with a stupid ending (the little girl growling like Mercedes McCambridge, "don't you love me, Daddy?") which seemed to spoil the whole movie. Curses to these marketers for their insistence on the lazy hard sell.]

Anyway, it's been a while since there's been a full-fledged Stephen King movie out there - and in particular, the purest form of Stephen King movie, in which a cynical middle-class white guy, usually a writer and usually estranged from his family, is subjected to bizarre and frightening occurrences beyond his comprehension (The Shining, Pet Sematary, The Dark Half, etc.) This time it's John Cusack as the cynical writer who explores haunted bed & breakfasts, although it's not clear what exactly his writings consist of - the movie can't seem to decide if he's a tour guide or a debunker.

Cusack travels to a big luxury hotel in New York, where Samuel L. Jackson, in a nice scene loaded with foreshadowing, tries to warn him away. Sorry, too cynical! Cusack replies, and he's off to the haunted room 1408. For most of the remainder of the movie, director Mikael Hafstrom pulls out every trick in his arsenal to freak the fuck out of Cusack and us.

While the movie is enjoyable as a summer horror-movie thrill ride, it falls a little short in its sub-Shirley Jackson efforts at serious drama, to get Cusack to come to terms with his family crises through spookery. Hafstrom's attempts at psychology are convincing, thanks to Cusack's inherent likability, but a little shallow.

What I do take away from most strongly in the movie is the idea that Cusack's Mike Enslin is being punished not for his failings as a father or husband, but rather because of his success as a professional cynic. People are attracted to the idea of ghosts and hauntings because they suggest the possibility of an afterlife, as the movie tells us; Enslin's cynicism goes punished as a symptom of his closed-mindedness. The final scene of the movie, in which Enslin shares the impossible tape-recording of his ghostly daughter with his wife, illustrates this awakening - but Cusack's face does not register enlightenment, but existential dread, the knowledge that there is something out there - and it's pissed.

The AFI list

I feel like the new version of the AFI Top 100 American movies list is an improvement over the version from ten years ago; creaky movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and The Jazz Singer were kicked out in favor of The General and Nashville and the whole thing just feels more modern. I like these lists, not merely because I like lists but also because I agree with the idea that these kinds of lists bring more attention to the existence of old movies and therefore get more people to explore movies they'd otherwise never care about. Sure, the list is kind of middle-brow and safe, but that's to be expected - I don't expect the AFI to promote Eraserhead, which they helped to produce, or Pink Flamingos on a primetime TV special.

One interesting change from the old list to the new was the swap of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance for his earlier The Birth of a Nation; a good idea, since Birth is notoriously racist. What strikes me as odd is Roger Ebert's quote on the matter, where he says that in his estimation, Birth is the "better film" of the two, because it was influential and invented cinema. No argument on those points, but influential does not 'better' make, and the film's racism, to me, disqualifies it from being a good film in any way; and this isn't just casual racism of a contemporary, 'they didn't know any better' variety; Birth of a Nation is a deeply racist movie down to its very core; promoting the Klan and bemoaning the decline of the White Race in the South are key to the film's existence. What is Ebert thinking?

(Side topic, from the same Ebert column: after trashing what Ebert calls 'dead teenager movies' in reference to the AFI list, and in the face of horror-movie defenders, Ebert claims, "I agree that Halloween is great, but disagree that it is a DTM [Dead Teenager Movie]" which he describes as "a movie that starts out with a lot of teenagers, and kills them all, except one to populate the sequel." Again, huh? This describes Halloween to a T, one of the movies that invented this subgenre. Ebert is clouding the issue to avoid having to defend his categorical declaration, which is false. Most teenage slasher movies are junk, but there are plenty that aren't.)

It seems that everyone is countering with their own Top 100 lists, so here's mine. My main criteria were to limit the list to American movies, which means that I eliminated movies that felt too British, including such AFI movies as The Third Man, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, among other British or Canadian productions. I stuck with the time frame of no movies more recent than 2005 and allowed documentary titles into the mix (why not?). 42 of my movies were on one or both AFI lists. so here we go:

(Chronologically)

THE GOLD RUSH (1925, Charlie Chaplin)
THE GENERAL (1927, Buster Keaton)
THE CROWD (1928, King Vidor)

FREAKS (1932, Tod Browning)
DUCK SOUP (1933, Leo McCarey)
KING KONG (1933, Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack)
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935, James Whale)
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935, Sam Wood)
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939, Victor Fleming)
NINOTCHKA (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)

FANTASIA (1940, Walt Disney)
HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940, Howard Hawks)
THE BANK DICK (1940, Eddie Cline)
CITIZEN KANE (1941, Orson Welles)
THE LADY EVE (1941, Preston Sturges)
CASABLANCA (1942, Michael Curtiz)
CAT PEOPLE (1942, Jacques Tourneur)
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944, Billy Wilder)
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946, Frank Capra)
THE BIG SLEEP (1946, Howard Hawks)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950, Billy Wilder)
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952, Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly)
HIGH NOON (1952, Fred Zinnemann)
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953, Howard Hawks)
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953, Byron Haskin)
ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953, William Wyler)
PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953, Samuel Fuller)
REAR WINDOW (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
KISS ME DEADLY (1955, Robert Aldrich)
THE SEARCHERS (1956, John Ford)
VERTIGO (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, Orson Welles)
IMITATION OF LIFE (1959, Douglas Sirk)
RIO BRAVO (1959, Howard Hawks)

PSYCHO (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
THE APARTMENT (1960, Billy Wilder)
WEST SIDE STORY (1961, Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins)
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962, John Frankenheimer)
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962, John Ford)
THE BIRDS (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
DR. STRANGELOVE (1964, Stanley Kubrick)
POINT BLANK (1967, John Boorman)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968, George A. Romero)
THE WILD BUNCH (1969, Sam Peckinpah)

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970, Russ Meyer)
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971, Robert Altman)
THE GODFATHER (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
PINK FLAMINGOS (1972, John Waters)
THE EXORCIST (1973, William Friedkin)
THE GODFATHER PART II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
CHINATOWN (1974, Roman Polanski)
THE CONVERSATION (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974, Tobe Hooper)
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974, Mel Brooks)
NASHVILLE (1975, Robert Altman)
DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975, Sidney Lumet)
TAXI DRIVER (1976, Martin Scorsese)
NETWORK (1976, Sidney Lumet)
CARRIE (1976, Brian DePalma)
STAR WARS (1977, George Lucas)
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977, Steven Spielberg)
ANNIE HALL (1977, Woody Allen)
MARTIN (1977, George A. Romero)
ERASERHEAD (1977, David Lynch)
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978, Terrence Malick)
DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978, George A. Romero)
HALLOWEEN (1978, John Carpenter)
GATES OF HEAVEN (1978, Errol Morris)
APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

RAGING BULL (1980, Martin Scorsese)
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980, Irvin Kershner/George Lucas)
AIRPLANE! (1980, David Zucker/Jim Abrahams/Jerry Zucker)
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981, Steven Spielberg/George Lucas)
BLOW OUT (1981, Brian DePalma)
KOYAANISQATSI (1983, Godfrey Reggio)
AMADEUS (1984, Milos Forman)
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984, Ivan Reitman)
THE TERMINATOR (1984, James Cameron)
BRAZIL (1985, Terry Gilliam)
BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985, Robert Zemeckis)
BLUE VELVET (1986, David Lynch)
RAISING ARIZONA (1987, Joel Coen/Ethan Coen)
ROGER & ME (1989, Michael Moore)

GOODFELLAS (1990, Martin Scorsese)
JFK (1991, Oliver Stone)
SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993, Steven Spielberg)
PULP FICTION (1994, Quentin Tarantino)
ED WOOD (1994, Tim Burton)
DEAD MAN (1995, Jim Jarmusch)
FARGO (1996, Joel Coen/Ethan Coen)
TITANIC (1997, James Cameron)
FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL (1997, Errol Morris)
THE THIN RED LINE (1998, Terrence Malick)
MAGNOLIA (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)
FIGHT CLUB (1999, David Fincher)
TOY STORY 2 (1999, John Lasseter/Ash Brannon/Lee Unkrich)

A.I. (2001, Steven Spielberg)
ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002, Alexander Payne)
THE NEW WORLD (2005, Terrence Malick)

This gives us four titles each from Hawks, Hitchcock, Coppola, and Spielberg; three from Wilder, Romero, Scorsese, and Malick; and two each by Welles, Ford, Kubrick, Altman, Lumet, DePalma, Cameron, the Coens, Morris, Lynch, and two Star Wars movies.

The half-year in review

Okay, so I've been meaning to actually post to this blog on a much more regular basis for a while now, and circumstances have been pushing me in that direction, so it seems like the best way to proceed is to do a quick wrap-up of the year so far in movies and TV. I'll probably write some longer pieces on more recent developments or things that I think are particularly important, but that'll have to wait.

My favorite movies so far this year (alphabetically):

Away from Her: Sarah Polley's Alzheimer's drama is a touching but mostly unsentimental love story about the oblivion of old age and the demands of a lifetime relationship.

Black Book: This was attacked for being mired in moral relativism, when it's actually a movie that peels off the layers of bullshit that accrue in a time of war, about the many compromises that result from intolerable situations. It's also massively entertaining.

Grindhouse: Speaking of which, this movie was apparently too entertaining for audiences to handle. Even though Rodriguez's Planet Terror wasn't much more than a goopy trifle, Death Proof emerges as one of the richest and more teasingly playful films of the year, and the overall packaging, complete with the fake trailers and bizarre interstitial ads and messages, were a fun return to analog movie heaven.

The Host: My favorite films are those which are able to defy audience expectations and meld different genres and tones, and this movie was smoothly adept at melding the monster movie, the family melodrama, and the political satire into something very fun, but with a mature edge.

Paprika: I'm still not sure that I've gotten my mind completely around Satoshi Kon's latest, but it's basically an anime melding of Cronenberg and Fellini, showing what the animation form is capable of but too rarely attempts.

28 Weeks Later: Like The Host, an astute melding of the scary, the politically savvy, and the dramatic into a world where the worst-case scenario is sadly inevitable. A big step up from Danny Boyle's original, which fell apart in its third act.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley: Ken Loach's heartbreaker puts its audience into the position of an eyewitness to history, both in its use of distressing violence from both sides of the Irish conflict, but in its rhetorically-oriented debates, which are still alive today.

Zodiac: I don't think Fincher quite got exactly the film he was hoping to get, and I think the claims of 'best American film in years' are exagerrated, but I loved this for its meticulous sense of period detail, while also feeling completely contemporary; the rambling, unpredictable plot; and Fincher's ability to keep us interested in a movie that's mostly about white guys talking to each other.

Worth seeing or better than expected:
Black Snake Moan
Bridge to Terabithia
Hostel Part II
Hot Fuzz
Knocked Up
Reign Over Me
Shooter
Spider-Man 3
La Vie en Rose
Zoo

Worst so far:
The Hitcher
Norbit
300

Inland Empire (2006)

Picking up again, I'll review the film I saw last night, David Lynch's newest.

This film is a sequel of sorts to Lynch's last movie, the glorious Mulholland Drive, in that both movies are about the mental breakdown of an actress and the spiritually corrupting powers of Hollywood - or as Lynch says here in Inland Empire's tagline, 'a woman in trouble'. Laura Dern stars, most often as an actress by the name of Nikki Grace, who embarks on an odyssey into a Lynchian nightworld, alongside Lynch regulars Grace Zabriskie, Harry Dean Stanton, Diane Ladd, and Justin Theroux, plus Jeremy Irons, Julia Ormond, Mary Steenburgen, and several Poles (the movie was partially shot in Lodz, Poland) most notably Karolina Gruszka.
It 1986, Roger Ebert panned Blue Velvet primarily because of his reaction to the portrayal Isabella Rossellini's character, which he considered to be misogynistic. There is a sliver of truth of Ebert's criticism in that film, but it has been supplanted by an increasing sense of empathy for the women in Lynch's films ever since; the young women of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, most notably. Here we have what could be called Lynch's City of Women, an array of actresses, housewives, and prostitutes rendered charmingly, sweetly, empathically by Lynch's probing camera. This sense finds its consummation in a cluster of scenes that serve as the emotional heart of the film, when Dern's character (or one of them), poor and beaten-up, explains the hardships of her life to a blank-faced man in a grungy little office. It's an apotheosis of White-Trash cinema, an Oprah confession turned into a scene from a Dreyer film, and Dern knocks it out of the park.
Of course, a Lynch film wouldn't be a Lynch film if it wasn't also funny and weird. The capper in this film occurs when Dern gets stabbed with a screwdriver and staggers through the streets of Hollywood until collapsing next to a chatty cluster of homeless people. The dialogue that ensues ("You dyin', girl.") is classic Lynch, the homeless people talking about bus schedules, broken only when Dern summons the strength to vomit some blood onto the sidewalk. In scenes like this, Lynch brings his nightmares to life.
The most notable break between this film and his previous work is the use of consumer-level DV instead of film. The effect is a tradeoff, losing the typically lustrous cinematography of every previous Lynch film, but gaining a sense of ugly rawness, as if watching a home video of the mind, that suits the film's purpose and its critique of Hollywood facades.