The Sun Reviewed at Gone Cinema Poaching

I first saw Sokurov's melancholy biopic on Hirohito waaaaay back at the 2005 New York Film Festival.  Good thing too, as it would not be until just this past week that the film would see an American release.  Since making The Sun, the Russian auteur has made and released Alexandria.  It debuted in the US in 2008 - less than a year after making its international debut.  All the while The Sun sat upon the shelf - at least as far as the US market went.  It has seen a run in theaters in Greece, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Japan and Brazil.  But never here in the good ole USofA.  That is until now.  November 18, 2009 to be exact.  Opening at Film Forum in NYC, The Sun is finally among us.  My review of said film can be read over at Gone Cinema Poaching.  It is my third review for Chazz Lyons wonderful website.  I will soon be contributing to GCP's Best of the Decade project - so keep an eye out for that as well. 

Read my review of The Sun at Gone Cinema Poaching.

Best of the Decade: Year 2000

This is the first of a series of posts that will commemorate the decade that was (or will soon be was!?).  Each few days I will name my choices for the best films of each particular year in the aforementioned decade that will soon be a was.  This will culminate just after the new year with my list of the 50 greatest films of the decade.  So without further ado I give you the year 2000. 

1. In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai) - Wong's tragic romance about two married neighbors who find out their spouses are having an affair and the bittersweet lengths they will go to in order to understand this betrayal, is simply put, one of the most sumptuous movies ever made. 

2. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr) - Stark and harrowing, yet lyrical and transcendent, the Hungarian auteur's self-proclaimed "world of shit" plays out here as some sort of black & white poetic homage to both Tarkovsky and Dostoyevsky. 

3. American Psycho (Mary Harron) - Having put off seeing this film until just a few days before compiling this list, I wanted to kick myself for waiting so damn long.  This film, and Christian Bale's star-making performance in it, is a delightfully disturbing treatise on the excesses of the eighties and one of the best truly black comedies I can remember seeing. 

4. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier) - What is not to love about a von Trier directed, dogme-esque musical featuring Bjork as a mother so obsessed with her child's well-being that she is willing to go to the gallows to save him?  Add Catherine Deneuve and one of the most insidiously shocking final notes ever put on screen, and you have this delectably heartbreaking cinematic opus.  

5. Memento (Christopher Nolan) - Many called it mere gimmick when it first appeared, but Nolan's backward-sailing neo-noir is a confusingly hip head trip that acts as cinematic bridge between classic Hollywood and post-millennial chutzpah. 

6. Amores perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) - The film most attributed with beginning the Mexican New Wave, Inarritu's delirious cross-cutting urban symphony can also be seen as an audacious revelation in modern filmmaking. 

7. The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin) - It may be just six minutes long but that doesn't stop Guy Maddin's Russian silent cinema influenced bon mot from being the most well crafted short film released in recent memory - and it can stand alongside the nine feature films on this list as well. 

8. Yi Yi (Edward Yang) - Obviously highly influenced by Ozu, this is a quiet supine film that waves back and forth between giddy childlike innocence and a lachrymose adult anguish.  

9. Requiem For A Dream (Darren Aronofsky) - The follow-up to his radically designed pi, this sophomore work from Aronofsky is a gloriously fucked-up composition on society and the underbelly of addiction. 

10. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel & Ethan Coen) - O so loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, the Coen Brothers' eighth film is probably their most downright fun film to watch.  It is also the film (along with From Dusk Til Dawn a few years earlier) where George Clooney proves how downright funny he can be.  And what a great soundtrack.

Now to add a pair of films as runners-up (and to extend this to a top 12 list): 

11. Our Lady of the Assassins (Barbet Schroeder) - Schroeder - a filmmaker I had always been rather indifferent to in the past - creates here a strange and tragic little film set in Colombia and revolving around an older man's love and desire for a young assassin boy.  

12. The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola) - The debut feature from the young legacy that would soon become - in this critic's opinion - one of the finest and most highly calibrated filmmaker's working today.

Hon. Mentions (in no particular order):

Traffic (Soderbergh), Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin), Code Unknown (Haneke), The House of Mirth (Terence Davies), The Widow of St. Pierre (LeConte), Time Code (Mike Figges), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee), Melena (Tornatore), Nine Queens (Bielinsky), The Circle (Panahi), Murderous Maids (Denis), Little Otik (Svankmajer), Dr. T and the Women (Altman), Bamboozled (Spike Lee), Uzamaki (Higuchinsky), The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini), Under The Sand + Water Drops on Burning Rocks (both Francois Ozon), Brother (Kitano), The King is Alive (Levring), Suzhou River (Lou Ye), Jesus' Son (MacLean), Best in Show (Guest) and Wonder Boys (Hanson).

Well, that's about it for Year 2000 (a slightly alternate list - written a few months back, prior to my finally seeing American Psycho - can be found over at Counting Down the Zeroes).  Join me in a few days for, you guessed it, Year 2001.

Pepe le Moko (Julian Duvivier, 1937)

Pepe le Moko is #555 on My Quest to watch The 1000 Greatest Films 

Screened 11/09/09 on DVD from GreenCine

Ranked #519 on TSPDT

 

Though it has been remade several times (both loosely and straightforwardly so) and was highly influential on Michael Curtiz when he made his Academy Award winning classic Casablanca just a few years later, and (of course) was referenced by Jean Luc Godard (via Jean Paul Belmondo) in Pierrot le fou, once the Nouvelle Vague and Cahiers du Cinema brought such forgotten films and filmmakers back into vogue, possibly Pepe le Moko's most enduring (and widest spread) legacy can be seen in the namesake rapscallious and somewhat odoriferous classic Looney Tunes Character of Pepe le Pew.

That particular extracurricular cartoonish anomaly aside, Julian Duvivier's pre-noir noirish film about a French thief and all about roue, running around the Casbah, evading the police and the informants but not the ladies, though perhaps seen as a bit racist in hindsight when it comes to the portrayal of the Casbah and its residents, is a classic of poetic realism (which was after all a stylistic precursor to film noir) that was in itself a precursor to a whole slice of film history.  This may seem a bit on the overdramatic side but nonetheless, in this critic's eyes, it is a true statement.  And a fellow critic may very well agree with me.  In his essay for the Criterion release of Pepe le Moke, Michael Atkinson wrote thus:

"Without its iconic precedent there would have been no Humphrey Bogart, no John Garfield, no Robert Mitchum, no Randolph Scott, no Jean-Paul Belmondo (or Breathless or Pierrot le fou), no Jean-Pierre Melville or Alain Delon, no Steve McQueen, no Chinatown, no Bruce Willis, no movie-star heritage of weathered cool, vulnerable nihilism, bruised masculinity-as-cultural syndrome."

I couldn't have said it better myself.  I was actually trying to verbalize this very point when I came across the Atkinson essay and he did it for me.  Pepe le Moko is, at the very least, one of the catalysts for all the aforementioned film history that was to follow.  Along with films such as early Hollywood Fritz Lang and von Sternberg, Duvivier's exotic thriller is what made noir possible, and in turn everything which has spawned from noir's own dark underbelly.  In fact, the novel on which Pepe is based was in turn inspired by Howard Hawks' Scarface.  Perhaps film history is all one viscous circle - much like the winding alleyways of the Casbah itself.  How's that for a segue?  

This spectacular spiraling camera of Duvivier is like a whirling dervish breaking free of the poetic realism it finds itself mired - for good or for bad - inside of, yet it is Pepe himself, the wonderful and quite prolific actor Jean Gabin, that makes this visually attractive film blossom into the full fledged sexy beast that it is.  To quote Michael Atkinson again (from the same Criterion written essay as above) in describing Gabin, he says he is "almost Garbo-like in his ability to anchor our attention without moving a muscle."  It is Gabin's stoic realism, twinged with an almost anti-sentimental sentimentalism (that makes sense, right?) that is the heart, the core, of Duvivier's film.  Incidentally, Gabin would go on to roles in Grand Illusion, Port of Shadows, Daybreak and Moontide but his career would slow down with the advent of WWII, where he would work with the Resistance. The rest, I suppose, is history.

Pirate Radio Reviewed at The Cinematheque

It was called The Boat That Rocked when it first opened in the UK.  Now its name has been changed (I personally liked the UK title much better) and nearly twenty minutes have been excised from the running time (mostly the parts that fleshed out characters and gave a certain amount of depth to the rather light-hearted story).  Welcome to America Pirate Radio.  Still though, truncated or not (I certainly prefer the UK version, now out on DVD across the pond) the film still manages to elicit a boatload of fun.  And yes, that very bad pun is used by one character in the movie.  And what a killer diller soundtrack.  Rock & Roll people, Rock & Roll indeed.

Read my review of Pirate Radio at The Cinematheque.

35 Shots of Rum Reviewed at Gone Cinema Poaching

My second review written specifically for the website Gone Cinema Poaching is for the film 35 Shots of Rum, directed by French provocatress Claire Denis.  I caught the film at Film Forum waaaay back in late September (a side trip from the NYFF screenings) and am only now writing the review.  Rather late, but hey, here it is now so get over it.  Anyway, as I said, this is my second review for GCP and there will be more to come.  I am excited to have another outlet to write for - new readers and all that jazz.  I will be doing a review for the most recent Aleksandr Sokurov movie to be released stateside, The Sun.  Talk about me being late with reviews, the Sokurov film debuted at the NYFF waaaaaaaay back in 2005 and is just now being released in the US.  The Russian has made several films since The Sun, including 2007's Alexandria which opened in the US nearly two years prior to this film.  So never call me late again dammit.  After The Sun (prob. posting on GCP sometime this week-end or early next week) I will be writing a piece on Almadovar's latest, Broken Embraces and (hopefully) Richard Linklater's new film, Me and Orson Welles (if anyone could get me a screener that would be fantastically appreciated).  I am also going to be taking part in GCP's Best of the Decade Project, counting down til the new year.  I will be doing pieces on Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette and Robert Altman's The Company as well as possibly a piece on Brian De Palma and his four films from the past decade.  So with all that said (and I suppose I did ramble a bit) I am going to go now and get to work on much of what I just rambled on about.   

Read my Review of 35 Shots of Rum at Gone Cinema Poaching.

A Look Back at the Decade That Was

Beginning next week I will launch my look back at the cinematic decade that was.  Beginning with the year 2000 (sorry all you 2001 decade purists - I am beginning with 2000) and moving on through the aughts, I will talk about the best films of each particular year.  This will all lead up to the revelation of my list of the best of 2009, sometime in the first week of 2010 (since I missed out on the NYFF screening, I am holding off until I am able to see Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon - a likely addition to the list).  After this I will reveal my Best of the Decade list (January 12ish).

The main thing about doing such a project is fitting the correct films into the correct years.  My annual Best of lists go by US release but with this I will revert all films back into their proper original release date.  With that said, obviously some of these upcoming yearly looks back will not exactly coincide with some of my past Best of lists.  Some films may change in rank from these said Best of lists as well, due to a reevaluation of some of them.  I know several films (De Palma's Black Dahlia and Bertolucci's The Dreamers to name the most severe cases) have risen much higher in my esteem than they first did.  Anyway, I suppose this is neither here nor there - everything is an anomaly anyway, so why fight it.  These lists will be what these lists are - no more, no less. 

Year 2000 will be coming on November 24th, and if you were thinking the below picture is a hint to what the number one of the decade is...very close, but not quite.

A Serious Man Reviewed at The Cinematheque

After building the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (in my capacity as manager and projectionist of our local arthouse Midtown Cinema) I sat down and watched the brothers' fourteenth film all by my lonesome.  At first glance I wasn't sure what to make of this strangely curious little film.  Yes, the Coens' are usually purveyors of strangely curious little films, but this one was strangely curious in a completely different way.  Don't ask how, just go with me here.  Anyway, after contemplating it for a while, by the time I went to bed that night (about 2 hours after finishing the film) I was won over by this strangely curious little film.  Perhaps not their best (Fargo and No Country For Old Men hold those spots) but pretty darn close.  In that Coenesque second tier realm of Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski.  A strangely curious little film indeed.

Read my review of A Serious Man at The Cinematheque.