100 Greatest Films Beyond the Canon
Filed under: Lists
Earlier this year I participated in a poll of film critics, enthusiasts and experts to find the 50 greatest films of all time. The results were worthy, of course, and anyone should be proud to have seen or own such a collection of 50 films. But the results were also fairly predictable, and were just about the same as every other film poll, complete with Citizen Kane topping the list. So the listmaster, Iain Stott, came up with a better idea. He invited everyone to participate in another poll, a "Beyond the canon" poll. This time he gave us a list of 300 films that were considered the "canon" films, or the accepted classics. Our job was to vote for up to 100 great or favorite films that did not appear on this list. The final list of 100 posted this week, and it's a great deal more interesting.400 Screens, 400 Blows - Doc Flock
Filed under: Documentary, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Lately I have been looking at some of my year-end awards screeners, mainly the documentaries. My critics' group votes for the year's best documentary; we each vote for our top five and then vote again from the top five finalists. It's not easy to figure out this year's front-runner as of yet, and most of the contenders have been huge yawners. For several years in a row, the big award-winners have always been about war in some form, either WWII or the more recent wars in the Middle East. But this year I have detected grumblings of ennui from the other critics, an ennui that i started developing years ago. This year the favorites appear to be a bit more lighthearted in tone, as well as more local in theme. Rowdy movies like Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Capitalism: A Love Story (52 screens) and Food, Inc. (5 screens) for example have captured the hearts of my colleagues.
The Academy threw a monkey wrench in the works when they announced their shortlist of 15 films that they would be considering for Oscar nominations. Following their bizarre rules, it was an odd list; it included many titles that no one has seen, and it eliminated many of the favorites, including Tyson (prompting an interesting response from director James Toback), Good Hair (38 screens), The September Issue (13 screens), It Might Get Loud (11 screens), Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (10 screens) and More Than a Game (46 screens). The list also eliminated a couple of my favorites, both lively and spirited: Kirby Dick's Outrage and Not Quite Hollywood, about the history of Australian exploitation cinema.
Directors We Love: Jim Jarmusch
Last week Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control came out on DVD. I loved it, and was completely baffled by the weird, negative response to it. Baffled, and a little depressed. Has Jarmusch really changed so much that his existential road trips don't work anymore? Or is it that we have grown far too lazy to enjoy them? Twenty-five years ago, Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise -- another existential road trip -- opened, and it caused quite a stir in the fledgling "indie" world. It gained a small and passionate following, and its funky, deadpan humor tapped into something. Hardly anything happens in the film. A girl from Hungary comes to visit her cousin in New York. They spend a few aimless days together and she leaves. Later, the cousin and his friend travel to Cleveland to see her again, and the three of them decide to drive to Florida.
Even when something happens in this film, such as a mysterious bagman botching a dropoff, it happens without any kind of setup or payoff. It just sort of drops into the frame and then out again. Even the road trip itself is uneventful and passes quickly. The travelers don't meet any quirky characters or get into chases. They just drive and arrive at their destination. Really, there's not much difference between that film and The Limits of Control, which tells the story of a hitman preparing to do a job. He travels from place to place and collects several peculiar clues before finally arriving at his destination. His actual mission is completed in much the same matter-of-fact way, without much fanfare. The films feature the same kind of deadpan dialogue and gorgeous cinematography, highlighting spare backgrounds.
Discuss: Performer of the Decade?
Like many critics I'm working on my list of the best films of the decade. I have been doing lots of shuffling around, swapping some of the films in the top 20 with films in the top ten, just to see how they look. But something occurred to me. A lot of the films had one thing in common: Scarlett Johansson. What does that mean? Does it mean that she's the greatest actor of the decade? Or is she just lucky? I'm not sure what to make of it. I have never interviewed her (I was once all set for a phone interview for Girl with a Pearl Earring that was canceled) so I can't claim to know what she's like in real life. Frankly, she's not the greatest actor in the world; in bad movies she can seem awkward, fumbling with troublesome dialogue. But there's definitely something about her, and it goes beyond her blonde-haired, full-lipped, smoky-voiced, voluptuous beauty. I might make an argument for her as "performer" of the decade.
Let's look at her first great film of the decade, Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (2001). She plays Rebecca, the best friend of Enid (Thora Birch). They have just graduated high school, and face a long, boring summer. They have long-standing plans to get jobs and rent an apartment together. Rebecca holds to her end of the bargain, but Enid becomes sidetracked with a summer class and a friendship with a nerdy record collector (Steve Buscemi). When they are together, Rebecca and Enid have a funny, dark, cynical rapport. Rebecca is good at keeping up with her friend, but there's the tiniest hint that she's getting tired of it, that she wants to move on. Johansson was only 16 here, and two years younger than Birch, but she seems much older and perhaps wearier.
Their Best Role: Meryl Streep
Welcome to a new series here on Cinematical where we select an actor or actress and the role we think is their all time best.
Last August, "Meryl Streep" wrote an op-ed piece for The Onion called "Name One Masterpiece Of Cinema That I've Starred In." It was really written by the Onion staff, of course, but they (and Streep) made a good point. For a woman who is very possibly the finest living actor of any sex, she has made very few truly unforgettable films. Her resume doesn't contain anything quite like Rear Window, The Godfather, Chinatown or Pulp Fiction. Case in point: the article brings up Kramer vs. Kramer. "Streep" says "I'd watch it if it were on," but it isn't really a masterpiece. Also, it's more Dustin Hoffman's movie than Streep's movie, and if you look at it that way, it ranks pretty far down on Hoffman's list of classics.
Streep's two best bona-fide classics are without a doubt Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) and Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), but she has only tiny roles in both. Despite Streep's excellence, films like The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Sophie's Choice (1982), Silkwood (1983), Out of Africa (1985), Plenty (1985), Ironweed (1987), A Cry in the Dark (1988), Marvin's Room (1996), One True Thing (1998), Music of the Heart (1999) or The Hours (2002) aren't exactly compulsively watchable, nor do they turn up on very many lists of favorite films. You could also eliminate her comedies like She-Devil (1989), Postcards from the Edge (1990) and Death Becomes Her (1992), and her recent string of lightweight hits like The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and Mamma Mia! (2008).
400 Screens, 400 Blows - What's Up with Whip It?
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Drew Barrymore's Whip It (260 screens) opened seven weeks ago and still hasn't broken even on its initial cost. What's going on? When I walked out of the press screening, the critics were all buzzing about how much fun they'd had. The reviews were stellar: it has an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. But somehow this critical enthusiasm just didn't translate for viewers. Something about tough chicks beating each other up during roller derby games just didn't appeal to the masses. Maybe it's because the movie is supposed to be set in Texas and was actually shot in Michigan. Maybe it's because our hero Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) was supposed to fall in love with a cute boy (Landon Pigg) who really wasn't very interesting, and you actually root for them to break up.
Free Flick of the Day: Mr. Arkadin
Filed under: Drama
One of the great fallacies of film history is that Orson Welles made his directorial debut at age 25 and then burned out and never made anything else of note. And it's true that he spent a lot of time doing acting jobs for money and starting projects that he never finished. But in reality, he directed, completed and released thirteen films between 1941 and 1976 -- including that debut, Citizen Kane -- and every single one of them is notable. Some are masterpieces, some are ahead of their time, and some, like Mr. Arkadin (1955), require a little work. Mr. Arkadin was only one of two original screenplays in Welles filmography (along with Citizen Kane), and they have many things in common: a flashback structure and a secondary character snooping around in the life of the title character. (A book was published with Orson Welles listed as the author, but Welles insisted that he wrote the screenplay himself and the book was ghost-written by someone else after the fact.)
Should Herzog Have Made 'Bad Lieutenant'?
Filed under: Remakes and Sequels
Werner Herzog's new film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has raised all kinds of hackles, mainly over the "remake" issue. Some movie buffs are crying foul over the remaking of Abel Ferrara's classic Bad Lieutenant (1992), including Ferrara himself, who launched some famously acid comments in the press. This fuss has caused most critics to address the issue of how closely the two films resemble one another. In most cases, critics have concluded that the two films are entirely different with totally different feels and approaches.
Frankly, I'm fascinated by the two films, given that both directors are crazy mavericks, both indulging in their looniest personal whims, no matter what the cost or the outcome. This is not a remake in which anyone is concerned with "staying true to the material" or anything boring like that. Ferrara went nuts on his original film, and Herzog has gone nuts on the new film. Herzog has claimed that he never even saw Ferrara's film, and indeed, it more closely resembles his own earlier films with Klaus Kinski, with Nicolas Cage playing the part of the unhinged, psychopathic terror onscreen. (Most people I have spoken to have compared Cage's performance with some of his earlier, more extreme work, such as Vampire's Kiss).
Free Flick of the Day: Black Sabbath
Filed under: Horror
Anthologies are common in the horror genre, whether two or more directors band together on a project, or whether one director takes on several short stories alone. Usually the result is that at least one of the entries is pretty weak, but the strongest entry makes the film worthwhile. Once in a while, however, you get something like Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, which has three strong entries. Bava's secret is that he was never very strong on plot or story or character; he could direct the hell out of any old script with his astonishing use of colors, mood and atmosphere. The best thing about Black Sabbath -- which the distributor American International Pictures re-titled to cash in on the success of Bava's Black Sunday -- is that it actually does have some good stories. In the first one, "The Telephone," a woman gets a phone call and learns that a dangerous man from her past has been released from jail; the entire story is set in her apartment, and Bava makes you jump each time the phone rings.
Free Flick of the Day: Night of the Living Dead
If there were any justice, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) would be counted as one of the great movie debuts of all time. (Yes, up there next to Citizen Kane.) In some quarters it is, but the fact that it's a horror film and the fact that it has languished for decades in the public domain (and many, many cheap, sub-par VHS tapes and DVDs) counts against it. Not to mention that younger zombie fans that come to the movie for the first time will most likely be surprised -- and probably disappointed -- as to how slow and thoughtful it really is. But if you consider things besides gore and terror to be important in your horror movies, then Night of the Living Dead endures, not just as one of the great genre movies of all time, but one of the greatest movies ever made, period. (It's currently ranked at #260 on the list of the 1000 greatest movies of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.)
Night of the Living Dead achieved several notable things during its time. Firstly, it established an artistic tone and a directorial signature that Romero would carry through the rest of his career, up to the present day. Secondly, it was an independent film (produced, of all places, in Pittsburgh) long before "independent film" came to be a marketing term. It was made by a cast and crew of people who genuinely wanted to make it, and -- somehow -- it was actually distributed and shown in theaters. Thirdly, by casting an African-American (the late Duane Jones) in its lead role, by introducing the "basement versus the ground floor" conflict, and by featuring gun-toting rednecks as the clean-up crew, it managed to subtly suggest a few ideas about America at the time, and indeed, it still suggests a few things about America in 2009.
Watch Night of the Living Dead on SlashControl!
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