The Top Ten Films (Maudit) of the 90s.

The 90s. The last era about which the phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to" can plausibly be used. Because, and many people will blame/thank digital replacing or at least competing with celluloid, the medium has changed storytelling. In microcosm, look at Jonathan English's film Ironclad. Here are some characters, here are their weapons, here's the king they oppose, here's a castle, they will defend it and die one at a time, one of them lives, the end. Efficiency? Maybe. It's easy to be efficient when you hire actors so good they're practically stock types and forget character development. Entertaining? Sure, yeah. I don't regret watching it, only that it made me see without doubt that the rules have changed. Ten years ago, Ironclad wouldn't have necessarily been a better film, just one that left a stronger imprint in its goodness or badness; Highlander or First Knight leave no room for meh's. They're fucking awful or you watch them with your friends in rotation next to Point Break and Lost Boys. With film there is a weight to every close-up and the best directors of the era knew it. Robert Redford may have lost his flair for suspense, but he still understands the weight of a shot and how to pace, which is why I didn't hate The Conspirator as much as everyone else did. Not a great movie, but it has the sturdiness of a man who learned the craft several generation changes ago. Gregg Araki still struggles with these very basic concepts; Larry Clark has actually gotten better because he had no idea about how to use film for anything other than image capture; digital's ease with light has made him a more discerning director of images. Gaspar Noe, whatever his faults, I think is still probably capable of weight if he'd slow his fucking camera down a minute. To combat the inherent drop in depth, Leos Carax has actually rooted his usually flight-prone steadicam to focus more on the faces of his protagonists, rather than following them as they float through space or run through the streets like wild animals; he's deliberate on digital in a way he only ever hinted at in his best moments on film. And no, it is not randomly that I use these names. For when the true effect of the close-up diminished by a thinness of the image so goes the power of film to really shock.

Take The Human Centipede, please. How can something that looks less substantial than a lot of senior thesis films have any power to shock or disgust, except by mere suggestion alone. Would I care to undergo the surgery myself? No. Is watching it worth the suggestion? No, because it fails to live up to its outlandish premise in execution and leaves you nothing to think about when the filth's been shed. The only thing I can think of with less formal value or narrative energy is a Jim Wynorski/Roger Corman made-for-syfy cheapie or possibly a straight-to-obscurity Geno Mcgahee horror film. I'd wager good money that the reason Ken Russell's The Devils and the few other films he produced that decade were so truly hated was because Russell's style had remained intact from his productions of The Music Lovers, The Boyfriend and Women In Love. Not only were audiences who wanted him to do justice to classic novels with modern implications disappointed by his move away from romance and into psychedelic torture and scalpel-sharp satire, they were tricked by his images, which had the same texture and moved in the same fleet way as his earlier crowd-pleasers. A fantastic rug-pull from a man who made rug-pulling his life's work. Ditto Carax, whose audiences wanted something with the same joyous air, and were instead rewarded with an accurate representation of what their expectations had done to his psyche. He used their expectations against them and brought them further into his mind than they would have ever asked to go. This was at once the definition of cinema, and so much more.

And now, the inspiration for this piece - The AV Club and Slant firing off dueling best of the 90s lists and Peter Labuza in Film Comment offering his take on the film maudit (for those who don't know the handshake, that means 'cursed film'), using Dennis Lim and Criterion's recent appreciations and restorations, respectively, of Heaven's Gate. I disagree with both of the lists strongly, because for the sake of doing the same that some of our most heralded auteurs do - throwing out the rule book for the sake of it - place the work of Paul Verhoeven higher than people who truly mastered the form to do something more than fuck with you for an hour and a half. I'm not saying Verhoeven isn't capable of great art (Black Book is really fantastic and his best film in my mind is the staggeringly awesome Flesh + Blood) but I resent anyone who tells me that Starship Troopers is a better film than Ed Wood. Subjectively speaking - they're wrong. Objectively speaking - give me a fucking break. Being in on a joke the filmmakers didn't fully comprehend doesn't make the film better, it just makes you on its wavelength, at best. If the director of that bullshit Red Dawn remake had come out and said "I'm a marxist and this is a joke," the movie wouldn't suddenly become a fucking masterpiece. But then, I suppose, that's what critics are here for. To exhume, to re-evaluate, to push their personal films above the accepted canon. Labuza points out that Andrew Sarris probably took greater pride in telling people how much he loved Lola Montès because of how poorly it had fared with critics upon its initial release. And time has vindicated both Sarris and Lola. It's a masterpiece in more than one set of eyes with a Criterion release to go with its new status, just like Heaven's Gate. And for the record I agree. Lola Montès is, to me, Ophuls' most beautiful and heartbreaking movie, and the man made more than a few beautiful, heartbreaking movies.

Which brings me to my real question, and it's nagged at me for months now. There are more film critics today than there ever have been (don't ask to see my research on this bullshit claim) which means that the odds that a film, no matter how wrongheaded, will be Universally panned are impossibly small. I grew up hating people like Paul W.S. Anderson, Michael Bay, Tony Scott and Dennis Dugan and largely the critical establishment had my back, but thanks to the internet, every one of these guys has a champion in 
'print'. In consulting reviews for Pola X from its turn-of-the-century release date, the overwhelming consensus is "it's a failure, but still worth watching." So, my question is, why? Why does a film that does not subscribe to narrative logic as we typically understand it (and film critics ought to have a broader understanding these days), have to be called a failure? Labuza cites Margaret as a film that was rescued from Maudit status in a matter of months. Of the six critics who saw it (which made up something like 34% of its first-run audience) four of them liked it enough to recommend it. The other two found it not terrible but too broad, which they failed to realize was the point. Soon the six became twelve, and so on and so on and now it's very nearly canonized. So, to quote Labuza, "One might wonder if there are even bad movies anymore..." The Kafka-esque truth is almost definitely no. I have a problem with tastemakers martyring Tony Scott, who made one masterpiece and a few good movies besides (not great, merely good) movies in a thirty year career, and lauding Brian De Palma who never once made a good film, while Margaret and Pola X have trouble getting their due because a handful of critics and distributors don't have faith in them. Heaven's Gate was blamed for the Iranian Hostage Crisis in its day; it still has its detractors, but at least now its viewed outside of the context of the curbstomping it received back when. In the age of the internet, as Labuza points out, distributors will have to try very hard to create circumstances where a film needs rescuing and can't get it. Thank god because I'm tired of reading decades old reviews that cost artists their faith in the seventh art. I fear for John Carter and Andrew Stanton, two men I want to succeed more than anything. So, while the obvious choice in response to both of these pieces was to ask my friends for their favourite films of the 90s, I also decided to go one step further. Below their choices, based solely on love and appreciation, are my selections of the best (whatever the fuck that means these days) Film Maudits of the 90s, the last decade capable of producing them. Whatever your thoughts about these 'failures,' they at least had the power to be hated.

First, our personal lists of favourites from the 90s:

Sean Van Deuren

Eyes Wide Shut
Bringing Out The Dead
Groundhog Day
Being John Malkovich
Rushmore
Magnolia
Schizoplis
The Thin Red Line
Sweet And Lowdown
Fargo

Noah Aust

The Celebration
Europa
City of Lost Children
12 Monkeys
Fight Club
Princess Mononoke
Night on Earth
Delicatessen
Being John Malkovitch
Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Tim Earle

Miller's crossing
Fargo
The Big Lebowski
Fight Club
Porco Rosso
Toy Story 1 and 2
LA Story
Schindler's List
Being John Malkovitch
Goodfellas

Fox Johnson

Saving Private Ryan
Pulp Fiction
Fargo / Big Lebowski
Forrest Gump
Se7en
Toy Story
Jurassic Park
The Matrix
L.A. Confidential
Fight Club

Dan Khan

Three Colors: Red
Three Kings
Boogie Nights
Before Sunrise
The Sweet Hereafter
Heat
Pulp Fiction
Goodfellas
Abre Los Ojos
Breaking the Waves

Scout

The Long Day Closes

Sleepy Hollow

The Double Life of Veronique

L.A. Confidential

Rushmore

Last of the Mohicans

Trainspotting 

Pulp Fiction

Heavenly Creatures

Topsy Turvy

And now onto the maudits!

1492
by Ridley Scott

You'd think the man who reinvented/revitalized/restarted Sci-fi in the 80s could do no wrong. But Ridley Scott loves a challenge. Blade Runner and Alien back to back is a feat almost no one in his generation can touch. So we can forgive him picking the script for Legend, if it existed in any other form than cocktail napkin scribblings, because it afforded him the chance to show off majestically. Ralph Bakshi and whoever was manning the autopilot at Disney must have very seriously contemplated faking their own deaths when Legend was released and was nearly the most dazzling and diverting piece of visual art the decade produced. Did it make sense? There was no internal continuity, but that didn't stop Lord of the fucking Rings, did it? Fantasy, horror, sci-fi? What next? The erotic thriller, of course. Not exactly bountiful visual stuff, but at least he could ground them in realism and conduct stake-outs like ballet. Then the 80s action film. Still in Legend territory as far as the script's concerned, but in anyone else's hands it would have been much, much worse. One 'women's picture' later and he's ready to dive headlong back into the big budget period film he made his reputation on. Another challenge, Maestro? Make a film about Christopher Columbus, who may actually deserves the mantle reserved for Jimmy Carter as history's greatest monster, where he's the hero. Easier said than done, according to everyone but me. Do I have a complaint? The Vangelis music. Lightning didn't strike twice on that collaboration. Beyond that, 1492 feels like it was shot in 3D, such is its visual splendor and the ebullience of the sound design. It does manage to be that rare film about hubris that suffers from it, which is its own reward. Thanks to the nightmarish color corrected visuals, the foreign (to its heroes) setting of the main conflict, the practical effects and handcrafted sets, and that truly bizarre electronic score, 1492 has the distinction of being the Sorcerer of its decade. Did the world need a remake of The Wages of Fear? No, but William Friedkin turned in his one bonafide art film when given the task. Did the world need three simultaneous films about Columbus? No, but I would never have professed to being capable of feeling sympathy for the man, either, and Scott made me. That is his genius. Existing in the shadows of major studios, executives, and great big stacks of money, Ridley Scott was the lone artist capable of coming out unscathed, turning standard issue genre fare into human interest stories-cum-films noir. Can't seem to turn down a bad script, but when he can take an idea as misguided as an adventure film about the world's most famous murderer and make you empathize with him (a trick he'd repeat in Hannibal), even feel sorry for the man when his dreams are in danger of slipping away from him, then I forgive his hubris everytime. I should always like to be led astray by something so gorgeous.

Alien³
by David Fincher

Not many people know I have an unpaid internship defending Alien³ on the internet. I get paid nothing and go around looking for people who write it off or disparage it in the vain hope of one day being able to talk to David Fincher about it. This sounds like a joke, but if I could put it in on my non-existent resume, I would. In a heartbeat. Few Hollywood disaster stories interest me as much as that of the third Alien movie. On paper the names they got make sense. Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. At one time or another these men could meld visual artistry with gut-level genre filmmaking that made audiences the world over swoon and empty their pockets in the same gesture. Of course the truth makes far less sense. Cameron has since dissolved into a harmless populist with no better an idea of how films fit together than George Lucas. Jeunet's film founders badly as he was, in a decision that uncannily echoes Anglo hiring François Truffaut over Jean-Luc Godard to direct Fahrenheit 451, picked to direct the most icky and philosophical film of the franchise over his much darker collaborator Marc Caro, who would have committed to the task more fully. Fincher was simply lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. A film student who'd charmed his way into a career directing adverts and music videos was chosen to handle a franchise of such importance, I assume because producer David Giler assumed he'd be grateful for the job and do whatever was asked of him. Not so. Fincher immediately set about claiming his first big budget film for himself. The edit would mangle his baby beyond repair, but the initiated know that the Assemble Cut of Alien³, featuring most everything they removed from the theatrical, is the prototypical work of its creator. With Se7en, The Game and Fight Club he would push his camera beneath the surface of wealthy America (like the one occupied by his Alien³ producer/tormentors) and find the grimy secrets we all keep. His knack for dressing horrific environs was so legendary that in 2003, after Panic Room's release, marking the end of the first phase of his career, Patton Oswalt could reference "a dank, David Fincher-esque kitchen" in a stand-up bit and everyone in his audience knew what he was talking about. That all starts here. Alien³ is a fantastic directorial achievement, even if the script is aimless bullshit written by executives on a deadline. The filthy set dressing is here in full force as are the spiderweb like interiors, the air of helplessness, the sense of a higher power fucking you over for the sport of it and a color scheme that comes out from underneath Ridley Scott's legacy on the Nostromo to become something unique: a gothic fever-dream of orange hue so intense it's as if the prison is lit by Hieronymus Bosch's hellfire. Playing like a big budget sequel to Ghosts...of the Civil Dead with the rough edges sanded down or a Sci-Fi take on Heaven's Gate, Alien³ follows a group of not very convincingly repentant prisoners who've turned to jesus for salvation from themselves as they fight first temptation in the form of a never-hotter Sigourney Weaver and then face her protector/lover/rapist/creator, a phallic alien that runs around on all fours, a bastardized mutant from the first film's more elegant designs. The effects weren't ready for this film and date it badly, the performances range from sublime to dire, and the edit is one of the worst on record (if the film had any more noticeably mismatched ADR, all the dialogue would all be voice over), but none of that is on Fincher. His achievements are myriad and are the reason the film has become something of an obsession for me. Take the genius scene that properly starts the assemble cut: a lone man in a coat deliberately too big for him walks alone on a beach looking tiny next to disused construction and foundry equipment, the air so thick with pollutants it could be Pompeii circa 79. These men are all alone in the universe and Fincher finds the simplest ways of hammering home their existential dilemmas, only ever crossing the leaden symbolism line in the last minute of the movie (which definitely has the feel of a studio note). These are the angry men he'd find later in basements and in police stations. Looking for Fincher in Alien³ is hard but rewarding. David Cairns brilliantly points out that between the baldness,low-angles and oppresive lighting, Fincher was trying to make a sci-fi version of the The Passion of Joan of Arc. Picture Cameron trying that for a second. It's difficult imagining what his experience was like making the film, but when you see his fingerprints in there, it becomes hard to look away. I once watched it ten times in a week, paying careful attention, as I always do, to the stunningly strange climax in the leadworks. I've never been able to adequately explain what about this sequence I find so fascinating. Something about the inevitability of death and the way it manifests itself on the faces of the convicts who've survived everything their god can throw at them, now lining up in a labyrinth to give it away. I think maybe I love it so much because it's endemic of the whole film. Here they are on a deserted planet, underground, no less, doing something that may well save all life in the universe and no one (not even the audience of the movie, thanks to the fucking editing) will ever know about it. No one was aware that the trials of this  misbegotten, ill-advised, unnecessary sequel would pave the way for the spiritual heir to Stanley Kubrick, responsible for more trends in modern cinema than you can count one hand, untold billions of dollars and dozens of Academy Award nominations. Just as the game is about to start, one prisoner casually asks another "do you believe in this heaven shit?" I could picture that line coming from any of Fincher's heroes right on through to Noomi Rapace's Lizbeth Salander. I could picture heaven for Fincher looking a lot like a man being nominated for the highest honor we have for a director in North America, for a film he'd had complete control over. He's learned a lot in the intervening years, but I think the time has come to give credit to the man for turning a nightmare into a work of art and back again.

The Rainbow Thief
by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Of his two final films, Santa Sangre is more obviously the work of its director, Chilean madman Alejandro Jodorowsky, but The Rainbow Thief, its comparatively mawkish companion piece, is a side of the master I can't resist. Back in the 70s and between pre-production phases of his failed Dune adaptation, Jodorowsky directed Tusk, a heartfelt and completely forgotten adventure film that played like Au Hazard Balthasar by way of The Jungle Book. Tt had nothing of its auteur caustic surrealism, which probably killed it. In point of fact it's downright sentimental, something only visible in a half-second's aside in El Topo when the gunslinger cheers up his dwarf lover after they're forced to make love for some gunslingers' entertainment. This movie could have played to kids if it weren't shot entirely in extreme wide angles that destroy any sense of its human characters. They're tiny figures in a huge landscape, the titular elephant the film's only real hero. Santa Sangre is brilliant, but returns to the well that Jodorowsky dug for Fando Y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, but with a different rhythm to guide it. The Rainbow Thief is an unabashed heart-string tugger, even if its filtered through abstraction (long sections pass without dialogue, the side characters never get names or jobs beyond providing bite-sized whimsy, characters' motivations are hardly worthy of the name) and the director himself has disowned it. But I give him more credit than he gives himself. As an avid El Topo and Holy Mountain fan, you can imagine my sensibilities are a little cynical and harsh, but even my heart melts for The Rainbow Thief. How can you not love a film that reunites Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif for only the second time following Lawrence of Arabia and Night of the Generals? How can you not love a film that worships the maligned and forgotten in ways that anticipate The Fisher King and doesn't make you suffer Robin Williams? How can you not love a film in which Christopher Lee plays not only a sympathetic character for once, but a lovable, billionaire whore monger? How can you not a love a film that brings a dog back from the dead? Jodorowsky might not want to own up to having a heart, but here's exhibit A and I respect the man all the more for taking a chance on showing it to us. He may never make another film and that would be tragic, but I feel blessed to have seen the last gift he's given us.


Bram Stoker's Dracula
by Francis Ford Coppola

Nothing I'll ever say will make Keanu Reeves' performance better. There is no healing that scar, forever on the face of this singular achievement. Many people wished it had been silent, that there'd been last-minute casting changes, that Francis Ford Coppola had never stooped back into the genre he'd started his career with, that the whole affair would have been deemed folly and smothered in its infancy. It would have saved them the time and attention they spent killing it later. I don't pretend the film's a misunderstood masterpiece, only that it is the most cinematic and unforgettable adaptation that Bram Stoker's novel received since its first, F.W. Murnau's illegal and bountiful Nosferatu. And as much as I love Nosferatu (by any measure one of the most important horror films in history), its style can't compete with star Max Schreck's performance; Bela Lugosi's hammy pantomime was the most energetic thing about the first film to have the word 'Dracula' spoken aloud; in seven movies, Hammer never gave Christopher Lee a vehicle worthy of his performance as the count; and the less said about the John Badham version, the fuckin' better. Coppola in essence gave the film the mechanized, expressionistic treatment it missed out on by being directed by Murnau, a naturalist, instead of showmen like Robert Wiene or Fritz Lang, as if George Melies himself shot second unit. Coppola and his son did all the effects in camera and their work is nothing short of magic, the kind of thing Scorsese would rhapsodize in Hugo (not many people connected the two films last year, but they're practically siblings). Nevermind the performances, Coppola had the modern equivalents of Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino on his hands, who gives a shit if they embarrassed themselves a little? The film was the thing and it would outlive any single element. Dracula is like one of those giant clocks that Scorsese's boy hero keeps winding. The public knows the time, but can't see the gears turning. All they know is that when they're late it's the clock's fault. So when no one bought what they were seeing, Coppola walked home with the blame. Fine, sure, yeah, but has anyone who's seen this blood red adaptation ever forgotten its more bizarre tangents? Have these moments of pointed unreality ever left your nightmares for good? I'd rather go up river with Coppola anyday than watch someone spin their wheels in a genre they don't appreciate. My time will forever be his to waste.


Dead Man
by Jim Jarmusch

With each passing year I come to see Dead Man as an essential American masterpiece, warts and all. I've also come to see that there may be no such thing as a perfect western. The closest anyone's gotten would be The Searchers, followed closely by The Wild Bunch, which is the more effecting of the two. After that we run into grey areas. Surely Boetticher's paranoid chamber dramas The Tall T and Ride Lonesome deserve credit for their painterly aesthetics and ingenuity? Monte Hellman used the western to throw darts at our psychological complacency in low budget success stories Ride The Whirlwind and The Shooting. Anthony Mann surely deserves a little credit for bringing out the darkest side of Jimmy Stewart in the westerns they made together? Or how about more recent fare? James Mangold's 3:10 To Yuma kicks the shit out of the Delmer Daves original for sheer excitement, craft and performance; it's final minutes are almost too exciting for words. Andrew Dominik seems to captured more beauty in Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford than a lifetime of watching could ever appreciate. I'd argue that if you took the best things from these movies, you might arrive at the perfect western, but who the fuck wants perfection when all these jagged edges are so mesmerizing? Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is his most successful toe-dipping into a genre (Ghost Dog is rough, even for a samurai film; The Limits of Control, however breath-taking, is barely the lone-killer film it masquerades as) and he gets far more mileage out of its inherent elements than he ever could breaking out of jail or into a gangster's mansion. Simply put, the western landscape he drags through is the perfect compliment to his style. Surrounded by dilapidated buildings or beautiful Spanish architecture, your mind could wander from the characters that these vistas dwarf. Not so here, where the land is the crux of its heroes journey. To paraphrase Mike D'Angelo on This Must Be The Place, every new scene is the reason the movie exists. Johnny Depp hops into the wrong bed to find comfort in a town he foolishly believed could hide any, and winds up gutshot for his sins. With the help of a sidekick who knows what it's like to lose the meaning in his life (and is thus almost as much a ghost as the dead man of the title), wanders through an unconventional western expanse to get to his point of departure, both physically and spiritually ready to die. Not for nothing was this the movie that Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the phrase 'Acid Western,' which then slid nicely into critical diction. It's almost too heady for its own good, but between Neil Young's haunting guitar accompaniment (I would also have accepted Nick Cave moaning softly) and Jarmusch turning the forest into the externalized depths of Depp's bruised and impacted psyche, it never gets ponderous; indeed, I was unexpectedly galvanized as Depp learns in his last moments to take up arms against the white men who stood in for the legacy of rape and genocide on which the country was founded. I find that in my memory, the film is simply a flood of images playing slowly over what I remember Young's guitar sounding like; a plaintive piano roll of images forever spinning in my brain. That is the power of the film. Anyone hoping for the jaunty adventures of earlier Jarmusch, the Freudian catharsis of John Ford or Howard Hawks, or the live painting demo quality of Sergio Leone will leave even more philosophically unbalanced and distressed than those with their expectations leveled properly.


Pola X
by Leos Carax

I have yet to encounter an undivided review of Pola X. Peter Bradshaw hated it, Scott Tobias praised its gynmastic camerawork and emotions but still used the word failure. Roger Ebert was the most emphatic in his praise, but even he couldn't come outright and say it, like he was worried what people would think of him if he gave his two digits to this mad chapter of French cinema. Their opinions now seem quaint, unnecessary, as they're the only people who've seen the movie - they were talking to themselves and Leos Carax. You could almost divorce Pola from its cinematic achievements and still this would be a crucial film, a one-of-a-kind artistic autopsy on a still-living subject. From the top, the one-two punch (the sort delivered by Jacques Tati in Soigne ton Gauche) of Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. The former was a cool slice of post-punk co-option; an Epstein-double exposure here, a Bressonian dialogue there. The plot is incidental except that it happens to Denis Lavant and registers on that pouting, once-a-generation face of his. Carax struck harder,  in color and in love with Juliette Binoche, in Mauvais Sang. Here he painted a paranoid, claustrophobic world in Black, Red and Whites for Lavant and Binoche to (literally) spread their wings; Nicholas Ray and Godard in one lithe body. They were so loved that when it came time to send Alex, Lavant and Carax's shared form, on his next adventure, no expense was spared, leading to the heartbreakingly raw, mega-satisfying and unbelievably romantic Lovers on the Bridge. But because of the runaway costs (shades of Cimino) and its refusal to adhere to narrative conventions or New Wave chicanery, it wasn't enough for his supposedly adoring public. This was the film Carax had threatened to make without any constraints and it was insufficiently loved (at least for my liking). It sent Carax into a depression; losing Binoche couldn't have helped. Pola X was what it was like in his mind, and thus while many people point to Lovers as the superior film, to me they're inextricable. The story, despite following the plot of the Melville novel it takes its name and story from fairly closely, is as pure an autobiography as it is a syringe full of pure cinema. The story starts on an estate in Normandy rendered in even more effulgent  detail than the hero's angelic bride. Nothing's happening at first, but it's intoxicating; circumstances built from assured, unforgettable images. Pierre, played by the almost unreally gorgeous Guillaume Depardieu, is due to wed Delphine Chuillot's almost virginal Lucie, until dark haired gypsy Isabelle, played by Yekaterina Golubeva, finds him and explains she might be his sister. And thus he finds the excuse he'd been looking for to shatter his moneyed, complacent existence in one alluring and sexy package. What follows is a descent into self-imposed madness unlike anything ever depicted. Pola X is exactly what was inside Carax's unconscious mind at the time of its creation, rendered in razor sharp detail. When Lovers failed to live up to the impossible expectations the public had built up for it, they all paid for Pola X, which was nothing short of artistic crisis and personal turmoil burned onto celluloid. And in the burning, some unearthly things are captured. Depardieu, who through what cannot be coincidence (Carax has taken my belief out of the very notion of coincidence), looks like the spitting image of Sharunas Bartas, Golubeva's husband, who plays the orchestrator of the commune Pierre and Isabelle hit rock bottom at, and is Pierre with no connection to the outside world, just Isabelle is Marie without money or privilege. When Pierre and Isabelle consummate their impossible, undeniable love, the world seems to cave in on itself. Who are watching? Depardieu? Bartas? Golubeva? Some anonymous body doubles? Who does the director want it to be, fumbling erotically in the near darkness. Carax made sure that if this was the last film he made before being immolated by his own unrequited love and ambition, he was taking the world with him.


Khrustalyov, My Car!
by Aleksei German

Imagining Werkmeister Harmonies directed by Ken Russell would still leave you inadequately prepared for this banquet of paranoia and black hilarity. Sure, there are shades of a dozen films, not the least of which are Zulawski's Devil,  Zbynek Brynych's ...And The Fifth Horseman is Fear and Piotr Szulkin's Ga-Ga - Glory to the Heroes, but there's something else at play here that defies precedent, even in that esteemed company. It seems to come from another era entirely, like it was shot around 1970 while the equipment was free between The Witches' Hammer and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. For all I know the film stock may have expired back when the soviets had to ration it. And in the complex history of Russian cinema, Aleksei German has had a harder time getting his films viewed than probably any of his peers, if he can be said to have any. Knowing that his movies had been banned and almost burned everytime out, he left not a single image or idea on the floor when he entered his fourth decade as a director, meaning that often some of the most brilliantly warped imagery of the 90s is simply tossed off in any given three seconds of Khrustalyov - a dog in a basket stuck to a zipline in a dining room is gone before we've quite realized what we've seen. And perfectly none of this imagery ever interferes with the story, or ever seems to bother its Soviet Superofficial hero. The surreal nature of a falling empire is lost on him, as it would have been on anyone in the inner circle of a madman, as he seeks desperately for how to avoid the fall of an empire adversely effecting his power and dignity. There hasn't been a narrative film like this in many moons (for a while, the darkly comic Nero-fiddled road-movie was almost its own genre in European cinema until digital made tracking shots, the greatest weapon in their arsenal, less impressive), perhaps because by they are by their nature, too ugly? Too honest? Too near the bone? Irrelevant? Whatever the reason, German's film fell on deaf ears and resulted in more Cannes walkouts than L'Avventura. The wounds were still fresh for German who had to make movies under a repressed and deeply ashamed regime's watchful eyes (indeed, many of the film's tangents were based on his own experiences with state surveillance), but the world had moved on. Up the alley, and out of the screening room door. Cannes, for their part, was stinging from Angelopoulos's barbed 1995 dismissal of the jury and had no interest in doing anything but repairing their relationship by awarding the Palme d'Or to one of his least substantial films simply because it was his. If only they'd waited six years, he'd have given them something worthy of the honor. But back to German. Dennis Lim wagered that Michael Cimino would still be working on Heaven's Gate if he could. The same is true of German, for whom My Car! was not just autobiography, but a statement of purpose. His life as improvised roadmap for his camera, ever roving, ever following, along for a ride that seems too impossible to be true. And yet, German planned every second of this movie, and for his sins, all the time in the world to keep making it, even if only in his head.


Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
by Terry Gilliam

There isn't much left to say about Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, which has been all but rescued from its disastrous origins, except to say that it is a case study in adaptation. Look no further than the muted response to Walter Salles' On The Road. Handsome, dependable, even occasionally great, but it never had a prayer of replacing its source material in the eyes of its fans. The reason? Salles is too much of a fan to do it any damage or let his own style (which isn't exactly blinding at the best of times) run roughshod over the prose. So what does it become? A Merchant Ivory film in beat clothing. Harmless. The opposite of what it should be. For the record I enjoyed On The Road, but it's worth mentioning that the best director can do in adapting a book is fill up the space where prose lives between words and actions and replace it with their own demons, neuroses and obsessions, filtered through a style only they can provide. Gilliam's Fear and Loathing did the unthinkable - rendered its source material irrelevant. Hunter S. Thompson's book was nothing shy of a cultural avalanche when it first arrived, apparently coughed out during a hangover in blistering, inimitable style. Now imagine a movie that actually bests it. Gilliam's stylistic hallmarks are at their most voracious here, dutch tilts eating the frame, images of such stark oddity that they deserve whole films to themselves, and the camera all the while attached like a conjoined twin to the vicious lunatic spirits (Johnny Depp giving his best and most iconic performance as the author and Benicio Del Toro, barely recognizable behind a hundred pounds of beer gut, dark glasses and the most threatening mustache of the decade) who serve for two hours as Vegas' worst tour guides. And yet it's also maybe the most faithful adaptation since The Maltese Falcon. Gilliam came to praise Hunter Thompson and the runaway decade that spawned him, not bury them. He didn't throw the book out, he opened his brain up with a hacksaw and painted over the pages with what fell out. If that sounds like something you want to put yourself through, "Get innnn!"


Crash
by David Cronenberg

I didn't get it either when I first saw it, either, so forgive those who condemned it. Joe Bob Briggs brought this film to my attention in his unmissable tome, Profoundly Disturbing (spoiler, Crash is anything but). I watched it, as I did every other film in its pages I'd yet to see, and wondered just what in god's name I'd watched. Why did no one ever raise their voice? Why did no one seem to feel anything, even in the throes of acrobatic sex? Why the pornographic lingering over car crashes? This was before I'd discovered Bresson, mind you. So, after a lot more viewing (including every other Maudit hiding in director David Cronenberg's closet), I gave it another shot. The clouds parted and the grey skies of Toronto had never looked clearer or brighter. Cronenberg had taken the emotions and the behavior of modern North Americans and inverted them. The emotional detachment he and author J.G. Ballard witnessed behind the false smiles of most people was externalized in Crash. Their affect reflected their troubled minds and unrequited libidos. They were all desire and no release - even in a world where random sex was normalzed, politeness and conservatism had forced it underground. So people move about their day at the speed of ignorance and repression. So Cronenberg halts them in their fucking tracks and watches the sparks fly. Note: puns are hard to avoid when talking about this film, but I'll try my best. Many people are going to misunderstand a film that, as Briggs put its, is a love story told through sex scenes, especially in a culture that paved the way for 50 Shades of Grey being a housewife cause celebre. They cannot deal with the subject honestly, let alone when Cronenberg presented it in such stark, cold light. He wasn't going to busy up the frame, nothing to get in the way of the confrontational nature of the discussion of sexuality, which no one can seem to own up to. What chance did a film that uses an underground cult of people turned on by car accidents stand with Newt Gingrich trying to keep women and their periods out of trenches? But more than honest Crash is a much sweeter and more romantic film than its ever given credit for (and frankly it's rarely given credit for existing outside the pages of Film Comment, Cahiers and Senses of Cinema). Is there any more tender image than James Spader licking Patricia Arquette's leg-wound in the backseat of his car? Don't answer yet. Remember that I also think the blood-soaked kiss between two 12 year olds in Let The Right One In is the most heartwarming thing I've ever seen. Crash is a film that goes into our brains to shock us back into feeling, so naturally, we forbid children from seeing it. Heaven help us if they ever realize what we've done to intimacy.


The Hudsucker Proxy
by Joel and Ethan Coen

After years of hearing about what a joyless slog Intolerable Cruelty was, imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a delicious confectionary of expertly crafted wordplay and near-explosive levels of chemistry between its two flappable leads. "How had this happened?" I wondered, while laughing my ass off, "how could a film this good by America's cinematic sweethearts have been swept under the rug like that?" Well, anyway, The Coen Brothers were at least used to that sort of disappointment. After all, they'd made The Hudsucker Proxy. Intolerable Cruelty is a delight, to be true, an homage to Howard Hawks, Leo McCary and Preston Sturges' comedies of remarriage centering appropriately enough on a divorce attorney who tastes his own bitter medicine and as well as it works just as well as tribute and stand alone comedy (George Clooney's comedic prowess never gets enough notice for my liking). Next to Hudsucker, however, Intolerable looks more like the work of Mitchell Leisen than Preston Sturges. Sturges was the genuine article in American comedy. In his best films, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail The Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours (As long as we're sticking up for the underdog here I'll just say that Unfaithfully Yours is a gem and I will hear no one besmirch it), he balanced humour so bold you wonder how it slipped past the censors, scabrous satire of values unique to wartime America and romance that shot past heartwarming into gripping. He had such a perfect hand with sentiment that he could appear to be making fun of the very notion of it, even as he freely indulged. He was one of a kind. But leave it to The Coen Brothers to make a film that pretends to his throne and earns the right to sit there. Painstakingly crafted through nostalgia-colored glasses and set in a place we recognize as our past but in no definite moment, corporate stooge Tim Robbins rockets to the top of a toy company despite having no knowledge of the job or that he's being set up for a literal and metaphorical fall by his handler, a never-sleazier Paul Newman, cashing in on his impossible-to-dislike irascibility and charm. The boardroom antics, Sturges-esque wordplay and bureaucratic chutes-and-ladders are hilarious, but once Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the story, this stops being a comedy no one laughed at and becomes a masterpiece whose failure isn't just baffling, it's a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic, the execution of the Rosenbergs or the cancellation of Pushing Daisies. Leigh's portrayal of a savvy journalist who goes undercover to scoop Robbins' rise to fame mirrors Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town but without hiding her unscrupulousness so disingenuously as Frank Capra does. It's a testament to the Coen's writing and feather-light direction (rendered on resplendent art deco production design, for my money their best, through the prism of Roger Deakins dark-matter heavy photography) that they pursue a route that out-bleaks famous Scrooges like Capra and Sturges, and still manages to seem more lighthearted than Meet John Doe or Unfaithfully Yours, which flirt with murder and suicide as aggressively as Leigh does with Robbins. Leigh's feisty journalist is a more endearing proto-feminist trouser-sporter than Cate Blanchet's Hepburn impersonation; better still, she brings a sexuality to her role that outstrips even the Claudette Colberts and Barbara Stanwycks of the golden age, and again, genuinely. Through the performance, through her palpably masked longing, through her robust personality. She maybe a shade of fast-talking-dames past, but she's a fully realized character, and if you don't want to marry her by the time the credits role, you must be a Franklin Pangborn character. Or worse, William Demarest. I still marvel at the level of detail that went into making Hudsucker Proxy such a loving, feel-good tribute to loving, feel-good comedies so dipped in sarcasm you could drown in it. And that's even without taking into account how fucking funny it is. It's that rare film that gets nearly everything right (wouldn't be on this list if it were actually perfect). When the film failed at the box office, I bet Preston Sturges took a belt for both Joel and Ethan Coen in auteur heaven. "Don't worry, boys. They didn't get me, either."

The Best Cinematographic Achievements in Film, dated 9/5/08

A while back I began noticing that I stopped viewing the natural world around me as I once did. I started looking at things, really looking at things - trees, ditches, fields, snow-covered flora - and began imagining them in different ways. Slowly my appreciation became deeper, in a twister sort of way it's no longer a simple matter of "this is nice looking", it's now "this is beautiful, it would look gorgeous on film. How might I film this?" An occupational hazard, I suppose. I'm not really a cinematographer - technically speaking of the three short films I've taken part in in the last year, I only photographed two of them, and only one of them I can say I really had a sense of what I was filming - it's more the sense I've been given since giving myself an education in cinematography slightly more in depth than the one I've been given twice in two different schools. I like my own self-imposed knowledge better because it meant watching all the movies that get roped in together as the best. I'm not saying that these estimations are incorrect, I just happen to think looking beyond the same five films in every summation is always a good idea. For example, in looking at the humbling work of master photographer Nestor Almendros, the film he gets most credit for is undoubtedly Days of Heaven. While I agree that the work is unrivaled in it's technique, I think more can be gained watching his first feature film La Collectioneusse, a film done without a single electrician or industrial light. I think the greatest feature of cinematography is that a film needn't be good to have rich photography. For example I greatly admire Roger Deakins work (on every one of his films, but especially) on The Village and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, two films greatly wanting in other areas. I will say that I have favorites, those who have honed their craft into the purest of art forms, but the other redeeming feature of the field is that a novice can do just as beautiful work as a seasoned professional. Look at Mihai Malaimare Jr., who cut his teeth on three short films in his native Romania before taking on the dubious Youth Without Youth, a film that couldn't look more beautiful if the cast were all greek nudes. I think it's probably all the more impressive when Cinematographers can make as splendid use of shadow in Black and White film as shades and hues in color film. The Third Man (nay, the whole Noir genre) would be nothing without the work of it's light and shadow men. Imagine Detour, M, The Lady From Shanghai, or Kiss Me Deadly without their notorious shadowplay. Cinematography is often responsible for a film's most striking aspects. Picture a less competent man than Frederick Elmes behind the lens of David Lynch's flooring Blue Velvet, or someone with less experience in the expressionist movement than wunderkind Fritz Arno Wagner filming the famous stair sequence in Nosferatu, or most terrifying, imagine if David Lean had hired anyone other than cinematographer Freddie Young when filming Lawrence of Arabia, someone who wouldn't have had the resources to get ahold of a 482mm lens to film Omar Sharif's awe-inspiring entrance. I shudder to think. Below are my fifty favorite instances of cinematography in feature length films and their accompanying cinematographers, or really what I think are the most technically accomplished/beautifully filmed movies of all time. I've given descriptions of the top ten, as reading descriptions of fifty films might get as repetitive as writing them. How many synonyms are there for gorgeous, anyway?

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Roger Deakins

This film has something of a mixed reputation. I personally think it a bit heavy-handed and melodramatic at times and I think it could have done without the prosaic voice over narration, but one thing is absolutely without question: the movie is stunning to watch. Right from the start when we see the James Gang knocking over a train, while Brad Pitt strides past the steam of the locomotive, while the light from the passenger cars douses the bandits in gold, while the dark wood of the cars clashes with the shining metal of firearms, while the silhouettes of every member of the gang closes in on the brightly lit train cars. It's amazing and Roger Deakins made sure to fill every frame of the film with otherworldly beauty. While director Andrew Dominik's tribute to the westerns of Anthony Mann and Samuel Fuller lingers in the past, Deakins makes a showing for the age of technology. The leads in their eccentric costumes standing like pillars of marble in the blazing scenery Deakins photographs. The blue-hued snowy landscapes, the dusky fields and farms of James' hometown, the exquisite dinner scenes we're drawn into. The film's screenplay may lack subtlety, but Deakin's photography needs none.

2. The Double Life Of Veronique – Slawomir Idziak

Anyone who's seen Amelie is in the dark if they haven't seen The Double Life Of Veronique. Bruno Delbonnel employs much the same tricks and color schemes as Slawomir Idziak did in 1991, but without the porcelain skin tones or constancy of the light quality. Idziak delivers what is probably the most colorful non-technicolor film before the advent of digital editing. The colors of this film, deep, alluring greens and almost erotic reds run throughout unexplained, but never unwanted. Idziak manages to bring to life Director Krzysztof Kieslowski's intimate compositions and manage to make slightly extraordinary things look unabashedly enchanting. He certainly succeeds in making Irene Jacob look like the most beautiful woman on earth twice in one film. Between Kieslowski's fairy tale screenplay and Idziak's super-saturated colors, this film is something of a minor miracle; the most romantic movie ever made.

3. La Collectioneusse – Nestor Almendros
Almendros will forever be immortalized as one of cinema's greatest eyes, but he'll rarely get the credit he deserves for his best work. His work with Barbet Schroeder and Eric Rohmer far outshines his work in America in almost every case. With the aforementioned exception of Days of Heaven, his best work was done in France. This film, his first, is the deceptively simple tale of one man's struggle to conquer his feelings for a promiscuous girl as she learns to settle down. I'm not the least bit ashamed to admit that I was a little too preoccupied with Almendros' camera work to pay close attention to the story (the ending's happy, if memory serves). At times Almendros had ony two pieces of equipment while working on La Collectioneusse, a 35mm camera and a particularly bright bedside light (the bulb was intentionally replaced with something industrial grade). The rest of the time he had natural light and reflective surfaces. Any given still from this movie could easily be mistaken for some lofty Renoir-esque painting. He'd may have gotten cleverer, but his work never got more flawless than it did on his first feature.

4. Children of Men – Emmanuel Lubezki
Ok, so it's no secret in the film world that this movie is brilliant. As my friend Lizzy said after her first viewing "I wasn't expecting much, but...". The movie really didn't scream "genius" when it made it's pitiful rounds of American multiplexes and so expectations were all but erased by the time it hit DVD, but it was cinephiles who had the last laugh. This movie is, and I don't mean to hyperbolize, the most technically exceptional movie ever made, where live film is concerned. Emmanuel Lubezki, hands down my favorite cinematographer, manages to revolutionize the real-time tracking shot while still doing wonders with he and director Alfonso Cuarón's trademark green hues. His active lens makes sick situations frighteningly real and all the more nauseating; his camera seems to trigger the release of endorphins, like a rollercoaster, because when the ending titles began flashing, I couldn't help but feel both mildly ill and like I needed to see it again; it was all I could talk about for days. Lubezki's greens are a favorite of mine (you'll notice his name five times more on the list) and they're subdued just enough here not to take center stage like they do in Cuarón's earlier work, but they still manage to catch the eye despite the chaos that consumes the frame. Lubezki and his crew should have been given nobel prizes for their work on this film; not just because they manage to stay on a battle for 6:18 without ever making it obvious that cuts are being snuck in, but for making the most horrific things in the world look so vivid and unforgettable. If viewers never forget what they see, they may just act accordingly later in life.

5. Autumn Sonata – Sven Nykvist

I'd seen a few of Nykvist's collaborations with Ingmar Bergman before I saw Autumn Sonata, but I had no idea just how well the two men understood each other. I don't know that there's a team that had such insight into the world of the other anywhere else in the annals of film history. I suppose Greg Tolland and Orson Welles came close, as do Cuarón and Lubezki, but the difference between any other teaming and this one, Bergman's entire life came out of Nykvist's camera. So when Bergman makes a film with an Autumnal motif, Nykvist came through beautifully. The movie looks effectively like the fall has come to life in Liv Ullmann's house. The faded pastel colors and rich outdoor scenery are truly remarkable and as someone who admires Autumn more than any other season, this is a wonderful thing.

6. The New World – Emmanuel Lubezki

If you paused any given second of The New World and squinted, you'd think you were staring at an oil painting. Lubezki outdoes himself at his better-than-reality camera work, and easily steps into Nestor Almendros' shoes as the undisputed master of natural light photography. There's one scene in particular that comes to mind when I consider Lubezki's work in this movie; it's the last one in the film. Thanks to director Terrence Malick's set-up and romantic reverence for (almost deification of thanks to the camera work) of death, what we have is a scene that easily qualifies as transcendence, if we adhere to Paul Schraeder's definition. Lubezki manages to craft a convincing picture of heaven without ever leaving the realm of the living, which I call a job well done. He and Malick understand that death is not an end, so much as it is a celebration of the middle. With a good camera man, it's not hard to do so.

7. Last Of The Mohicans – Dante Spinotti

This movie is probably responsible for my appreciation of nature. It's why while riding in trains or cars I'm constantly tempted to get out and become part of my surroundings. Michael Mann's tribute to the ways of the Native American (as some kind of bastard Native American myself, I get to relate on more than one level to this movie), namely their constant graciousness toward the kind earth they live on. All you really need to understand the genius of this movie and of Dante Spinotti's lens; Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook run through the woods chasing after a buck. Their surroundings whir past them, occasionally giving us glimpses of the deep greens, browns, and blues of the woods. Finally they settle on a good spot to take the animal down. In a clearing, with water running through a small brook, rich foliage both living and dying, the sun nearly down, providing minimal light. There they claim their prey and then they give thanks, while all around returns to it's usual stillness and the beauty of the natural world is restored. These men do not top the food chain, they are merely one rung; nor do they stand out against their background, they are merely one piece of a sensational picture.

8. Sweet Movie - Pierre Lhomme

This movie is little known in the United States outside of the ravenous cineastes who hunger for each new Criterion release. This, friends, is a damn shame. The movie, a madcap fusion of political theory and sexual politics in the extreme, is made all the more poignant because the beauty of its most puzzling and challenging images is identical to that of its most serene. Take for example that a scene of two people copulating in a vat of sugar is just as clear and breath-taking as that of a long shot of a boat made out trinkets and political artifacts with Karl Marx as the figurehead tooling down a crowded canal. The movie's incendiary nature wouldn't be half as effective without Pierre Lhomme's beautification of every dirty detail, and this movie gets pretty dirty.

9. I Fidanzati - Lamberto Caimi

Black and White photography is easy to make look good, easy to look sloppy and incoherent, and hard to make perfect. Would you believe that one of the most mesmerizing sequences in the history of black and white film was shot by a first-time cinematographer. I guess technically I Fidanzati was Lamberto Caimi's third film, but his work on his first movie, Il Posto, was essentially identical to his work here. Ermanno Olmi's films, which were Caimi's first gigs, evolved out of work-place documentaries their factory produced, which were amazingly well-realized and insightful. Even more impressive was that the photography was just as impressive as anything that showed up in any of Fellini's films of the same period. The sequence I described earlier takes place about midway through the film. The protagonist walks from a beach to a tired-looking derrick nearby. It looks like a precursor to the kind of work Robert Elswitt would do in There Will Be Blood. The textural capabilities of black and white film are as pronounced as I've ever seen them.

10. Apocalypse Now – Vittorio Storaro

I once tried to explain to someone why I loved cinematography so much, using Apocalypse Now as a sort of exhibit A (my actual wording was fairly juvenile, but it was only to get my point across). I've often thought of the film as DP Vittorio Storaro's as much as director Francis Ford Coppola's because he's half the reason this movie is so outstanding. When Martin Sheen reads over Kurtz' dossier while "Satisfaction" blares on Clean's radio, there's nothing better. The contrast between Sheen's tanned, hairy skin, and the crystal blue waters below him have long symbolized the genius of the film; light vs. dark, American men vs. the natural world. The point becomes clearer minutes later when Robert Duvall's Air Mobile unit shreds the bejesus out of VC target zone so that he can surf a six foot peak. The overwhelming violence stood out to my friend, which is of course the point of an anti-war film. Another viewing or a little more knowledge of cinematography and she'd see that the reason anti-war films of this caliber work is because, like Children of Men, the violence is shrouded in so glorious a light, because that's how it appears to the men who make war and because that is how a clear picture is crafted. How do you make someone remember your anti-war message? You give them images they'll never forget - they can be violent, they can be troubling, but they can also be beautiful.

11. A Very Long Engagement - Bruno Delbonnel
12. Master & Commander: The Far Side Of The World: Russel Boyd
13. Birth - Harris Savides
14. The Thin Red Line – John Toll
15. Maitresse – Nestor Almendros
16. Down by Law – Robby Müller
17. Au Revoir Les Enfants - Renato Berta
18. The Third Man - Robert Krasker
19. Gate Of Flesh - Shigeyoshi Mine
20. Broken Flowers – Frederick Elmes
21. The Village – Roger Deakins
22. Lawrence Of Arabia – Freddie Young
23. Y Tu Mama Tambien – Emmanuel Lubezki
24. The Straight Story – Freddie Francis
25. Manhattan - Gordon Willis
26. Days Of Heaven – Nestor Almendros
27. Great Expectations – Emmannuel Lubezki
28. The Conformist – Vittorio Storaro
29. Sleepy Hollow – Emmannuel Lubezki
30. Contempt – Raoul Coutard
31. Cries & Whispers – Sven Nykvist
32. George Washington – Tim Orr
33. Youth Without Youth - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
34. Fargo – Roger Deakins
35. Brief Encounter - Robert Krasker
36. Blowup - Carlo Di Palma
37. Pierrot Le Fou – Raoul Coutard
38. McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Vilmos Zgismond
39. Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix – Slawomir Idziak
40. A Little Princess – Emmanuel Lubezki
41. Gosford Park – Andrew Dunn
42. There Will Be Blood – Robert Elswitt
43. Interiors - Gordon Willis
44. Port of Shadows - Eugen Schüfftan
45. Ivan's Childhood - Vadim Yusov
46. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie - Francisco Sempere
47. Blood For Dracula - Luigi Kuveiller
48. 28 Days Later – Anthony Dod Mantle
49. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – Peter Pau
50. The Mission - Chris Menges

My Favourite Film Number 2

This is part of my effort to write about my 100 favorite films in two pages or less. This film is important to me for a lot of reasons, as evinced by my naming the place after it. So I only hope my words help you seek it out and uncover its mysteries. 

Apocalypse Now
by Francis Ford Coppola

“You Americans are fighting for...the biggest nothing…” That’s how artists must have felt all throughout the 1970s. A friend of mine who was around for it told me that people had been predicting a progressive era before the early 60s happened. They killed everyone…the peace movement became a joke…no one seemed to believe in love anymore. The films of the 1970s all had that feel, that joy was on it’s way out. Bertolucci, Scorsese, Coppola, Makavejev, Godard, Peckinpah, Bergman; it was a tough love the great directors gave to the world in the 70s. Film theory was being tested in a big way; the old ways of the studios was essentially abandoned, and vision was now dark, elaborate, and unfathomably long. The ways of the peaceful artiste, the harmless beatnik were gone in favor of the colorful realist. The idealist was dead; murdered like the ridiculous protagonists in Easy Rider. The centerpiece of the beautiful banquet of morbidity and lost love was Apocalypse Now.

Three hours long, darker than noir and twice as violent, and astoundingly beautiful, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now long went unseen as he intended it (and unlike more zealous epics like 1900 or The Last Emperor, it does benefit from it’s length), and so the breadth of Coppola’s disdain for America/organized humanity was long unknown. The movie is not a war film as had ever been done before. It’s a message, an elegy to peace and love, written backwards. Based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse follows Captain Benjamin Willard on a mission up the Nung River into Cambodia during the Vietnam war to kill a renegade colonel called Kurtz. He’s asked to do it by dry higher-ups in olive fatigues, and we will slowly learn the metaphor, the real nature of the mission as Coppola and co-writer John Millius envisioned it. Williard, the hero, has been sent to murder an idea, the innocence of America. Kurtz is an affront to order, standing in the way of the tidy military operation the men in green wish they were running. He is the free love that turned sour when Charles Manson started killing people (Manson’s face makes an appearance in a newspaper that the high-strung Chef reads in the mail). He is the irony of sending a pot-smoking 17-year-old African American to murder families to make his own family proud. The politics I suppose couldn’t be more clear-cut, the recurring musical theme is a Door’s song for pete’s sake. This is a movie that fed hundreds of cynical teenagers who’d missed 1968 by a few years.

“He dies when it dies”. Dennis Hopper’s photojournalist, the last jabbering follower of the dying colonel squeals when Willard finally arrives to do the deed. When Willard kills the man (an act just as inevitable as the one in I Shot Jesse James), his armed followers, his children, throw down their guns and obey the conquering soldier, just like the baby boomers threw away their ideas, put suits on, and started their own wars. Murder is literally everywhere and men are supposed to function as people, let alone as soldiers. Kurtz’ retreat into his own world would make sense to any bored basement-dweller today, and so the legacy of the late 70s lives on. Will they act when the time comes? The Iraq War continues. During the late 70s the young mavericks were getting to use old Hollywood stock players they had so long worshipped. Wim Wenders got Nicholas Ray, Roman Polanski got John Huston, Bernardo Bertolucci got Sterling Hayden and Burt Lancaster, and Coppola got Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando. Brando’s first appearance in the film is not unlike a child’s nightmare. Martin Sheen, the man we’ve been pulled into complicity with, our guide through the horror of war, is a man of average height. The photograph we’ve seen of Kurtz makes him look like a beast; sasquatch or a serial killer. He lies, bathed in shadows, his enormous head and hands looking inhuman next to Sheen’s. His face is always partially shrouded in shadow, just like the mission. Of course Brando is almost no match for Sheen who gives one of his strongest performances. He wears every second of combat on his face, and I feel no one else was quite capable of taking this journey from weary GI to bleary-eyed killer and staying in control.

And what a journey. This film is as much Coppola’s as it is Walter Murch and Vittorio Storaro’s. Murch, the chief editor and sound designer gives this movie it’s frantic, combat-like pace. All war films that followed were in his debt. The sounds, breaking from the background and raging to the foreground, is riveting. Like the characters, it moves in and out of fog, becoming warped here and crystal clear there. He went to great lengths to let us know the difference between the ending throws of Ray Manzarek’s organ and the guitar solo on the small tape player at the Do Lung bridge. Storaro, already one of the greatest working cinematographers, paints the most vivid picture of his career. The last trick the movie has up its sleeve is the change in color scheme. As Willard nears his objective, the danger heightens, the death toll rises, and the colors become lush and tropical. I’m always stricken by the difference between Martin Sheen’s sweating figure and the serene water behind him. Every set piece and symbol comes in colors; the purple flares, the blood, the pink tracer rounds fired from the jungle, the deep greens that constantly surround the boat. Smoke, haze, fog, rain, fire, layer upon layer, each ignited by the ferocity of their context. It is a brilliant, bold color scheme, one that is wonderfully dissonant with the muddled humanity on display. The movie tries repeatedly to evoke the feeling of a drug-induced state; I surmise that the vividness of the color, and the incredible soundscape were attempts at recreating both the feeling of war through the filter of an acid trip.

Part of the reason I love this film as much as I do is because of the history I’ve had with it. In the sixth grade, when my dreams were still hazy, I was eyeing my first electric guitar, my love for film already cemented, my teacher, a 30-something ex-soldier, used to talk to me freely, unlike the rest of my class. We would discuss music and film (I bought him a Grateful Dead bootleg for Christmas, and he lent me The Doors greatest hits), and he suggested I watch Apocalypse Now. The sound and the color were not given justice on the warped VHS tape I rented, and there were many Americans who had never heard the word Redux, but I knew this wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. “Do you think Kurtz was right to do that?” My teacher asked me the day after I watched it. He clearly considered doing something similar, fed up as he was with my classmates. I had no idea; I still have no idea. At the start of my senior year, after my initial foray into foreign cinema, I found it playing, heavily censored, on network television. They began running it once a week, and I made a ritual of watching it (always with guacamole chips and black bean salsa). The place where I usually tuned in was when the boat stops at a French plantation. Willard listens in a daze to the noise of an entire family (the conversation is a marvelous insight into colonial mentality, but that’s not what did it for me). After dinner Willard and Roxanne, the only member of the family not related by blood retire to the deck of the house. Her silky French tongue and the swelling synth music prepared me for something that never came; a tender love scene. Instead Roxanne takes Willard to her bedroom, gets him high like she would her deceased husband, and then undresses, a scene made more haunting in the TV edit as her naked body would become a dark blur in the lowlit room, a nightmare in the middle of a rapturous dream. The scene isn’t tender or romantic, but overpowering and urgent. Her words to him make perfect sense, more sense than anything about the Vietnam War, “All that matters is that you are alive.”