Never Too Late

In Amir Bar-Lev’s excellent documentary Happy Valley, someone posits that the crowd at Penn State Games (and by extension, I’ll say rabid sports fans in general) are a crowd in search of something to rally behind. When Joe Paterno turned out to be less than the heroic figure they’d believed him to be, they quickly found another coach to deify. The words “anoint a new king” are used, which is telling. Americans are the loudest people in the world whose lives are completed by blind faith in figureheads. Conservative voters scream the loudest for the worst candidates. Watch the way that one man with a sign that says “Joe Paterno protected pedophiles” ignites so much hatred and violence in perfect strangers passing by. People used to make pilgrimages to a statue of Paterno to take pictures next to him. Then it was revealed that he’d helped cover up assistant coach Jerry Sandusky’s raping football players for years. And yet people still came to the statue. They’re understanding of him as a guy who’d helped football teams win overpowered whatever shred of moral obligation they felt to the dozens of young men whose lives had been ruined thanks to Saint Joe. Football came first.

Maybe cinephiles should thank the French (or just Andrew Sarris) for introducing the primacy of theory over the personalities behind movies to us. Critics will be quick to tell you that, for instance, Woody Allen’s movies are more important than anything Woody Allen has done in his personal life because we're not psychologists or ethics professors. Our job is to study the films and watching Manhattan is not equal to supporting what he did to his daughters. In the same way we don’t support Ted Hughes driving Sylvia Plath to suicide everytime we buy one of his poetry books. We also are up front about how fucking terrible our heroes can be as human beings. That's almost a given with geniuses of the arts. However, compare that to the general tone of most commenters under negative reviews of Marvel Comics movies or Quentin Tarantino films. Critics have the theory and can separate the people from the art they make. Criticize a Christopher Nolan movie that fans have not even seen yet, and you’ll see something akin to those pilgrims pushing and swearing at the lone man with the “Joe Paterno protected pedophiles” sign. “How dare you infer that the man who made The Dark Knight doesn’t know what he’s doing. The Dark Knight is the best movie ever and so, then, must Interstellar be kept from intellectuals who don’t understand what kind of movie he’s making this time out. You don’t get it.”

Something I know I’ve struggled with for the last few years is figuring out if the loyalty I feel towards the artists I love is the same way I love cousins I don’t see that often, or if I seriously believe they’re still good directors. Right around the time that The Counselor came out…or maybe it was just before Exodus, I don’t remember, I said that I believed Ridley Scott was one of the greatest filmmakers alive. Today, even after having seen what may wind up being his last good movie (not that I want it to be, but he’s getting on, ya know?) I may not be ready to stand by this claim. What changed? The things I prioritize in film. Pre-Prometheus he was my guy. Then I realized that just having an eye for visuals and an iron clad sense of dramatic pay offs wasn’t quite enough to make him special to me. Ridley gave me a lot of things, including my first memory of movies. He made me grow to love middle brow action films (and by turning Harrison Ford into a detective before anybody else could, he also accidentally invented them - The Fugitive, Patriot Games, The Devil’s Own) and, along with Terry Gilliam, he established the visual standard for mainstream western cinema. Combine the two and you get Alejandro González Iñárritu, David Fincher, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Bong Joon-Ho, Tom Tykwer, The Wachowskis, and, yes, Chris Nolan. And I grew up worshipping at his altar. Alien, Blade Runner, Legend, Someone To Watch Over Me, Thelma & Louise, 1492, G.I. Jane, Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, American Gangster, Kingdom of Heaven... I stand by these movies (well except Gladiator). But I’ve come to see his that like any director he’s not infallible. He fucks up. He’s an old British man with old British prejudices. Occasionally he produces and directs like it’s 1965. Exodus, in particular, reminded me just how human he is. Which had a peculiar effect. Yes, it showed me he can cock up a movie just like anyone, but it kind of made reinvest in him. He’s made it this far, and if his daffy biblical epic (which I believe may have been a perfectly reasonable response to his brother’s suicide, but I’m doing that thing again. Protecting artists I don’t know personally because I have a personal attachment to their achievement) didn’t turn me off of him, than nothing can. Exodus can’t make Alien worse. Nothing can. These are facts, physical, tangible truths, and only our opinions can change. 

So it was with palpable excitement I sat down for The Martian. Everybody seemed to love it, there was Oscar talk for Christ’s sake, and even agnostics seemed to concede it wasn’t the worst thing they’d ever seen. And they’re all right. It’s a good movie. It’s fun. Ridley engages in playfulness, something he didn’t even try in his misbegotten, joyless romcom A Good Year. He has his most sombre astronaut, the Norwegian one, spinning and blowing kisses to his family in zero gravity, a beautiful few seconds in the middle of a montage set to a David Bowie song. Doesn’t that sound like a director rejuvenated to you? Or at least someone finally allowing themselves to have fun. To be different. It’s the fun he’s having that makes me forgive how fucking cute the script can be. Some of that dialogue is…not good. The nerd who wrote the book may have a great grip on the way nerds think, but he can’t write dialogue normal people would say to each other. It’s a long way from the shit-shooting and piss-taking of Alien’s wonderfully accurate blue-collar speak. Ridley has traded one for the other it seems. The believability is in his images and the survival of his lead, not the dialogue between earthlings, who I don’t think he has much interest in understanding anyway. 

What’s funny is that a rejuvenated Ridley looks like an awful lot like a young man who’s just seen Alien and Brazil. The Harry Gregson-Williams music apes Jerry Goldsmith's jittery trumpets early on as we get a god's eye view of the red planet and There’s a lot of Gilliam in Dariusz Wolski’s camera, the way it flies around corners to keep up with its hero’s progress. Ridley and Pietro Scalia burn through the dude’s year and a half in space, because psychological survival itself has never interested him (there's a great press conference where NASA head Jeff Daniels answers questions with blunt disinterest which sounds a lot like he's answering for the racial politics of Exodus and its subsequent box office failure). He likes it when people get fucked up real bad then get up and keep going. He likes his heroics in broad strokes. So we don’t check in on Matt Damon’s Mark Watney as he falls to pieces a la Into The Wild. That’s never been Ridley’s MO. So this is a film that is both right in his wheelhouse and a little more about exceptionalism as a positive force, instead of the thing that keeps you out of the frying pan just long enough to return to dust. He was a colonial critic for a lotta years, but he seems to have let that slide off him a little bit as he’s gotten older. Maybe realised the inherent contradiction in a British millionaire telling everyone about the evils of capitalism and empire building. But The Martian is the kindest he’s been to tourists since A Good Year. Mars doesn’t beat Watney or the governments he represents. It just lets everyone know they’ll have to do better to earn their place there. Doesn’t sound like the guy who gave up Jerusalem or punished soldiers for setting foot in Somalia, no matter how resilient they turned out to be. 

So if this is the way Ridley has to be in order to keep making movies with elephantine payoffs, that’s fine with me, because he couldn’t have kept making films the way he used to. Just look at Robin Hood. His old method had run its course. But it’s still not what it might have been. There’s no way around that. And Ridley Scott isn’t our greatest living filmmaker, even if he’s made some of my favourite films and may do so again. But I couldn’t help thinking about how much even something as rock solid as The Martian had nothing on one of my favourite dead filmmakers, given the same premise. A person marooned in a hostile environment, and the efforts of a few people coming to the rescue. A few weeks ago I went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw Orson Welles’ long-thought-lost (by me, anyway) The Deep. It’s only a work print, so most of the sound is bad temp ADR or indecipherable wild sound, the colour comes in and out and looks faded at best, and some scenes are made up of every take Welles captured on set. But it’s still probably the most thrilling movie I saw this year.

If you’ve seen Philip Noyce’s Dead Calm (a fine, if totally nutso movie, halfway between polite Noyce and Blind Fury Noyce) you know the story, kinda. Charles Williams’ novel has a few more snags than Noyce and George Miller’s adaptation. When the married couple (Oja Kodar and Michael Bryant) are separated by the lunatic seaman (Laurence Harvey, never more obviously a gay man playing straight) Bryant has company on the sinking ship on which he’s abandoned. Welles (a beach ball with arms) and Jeanne Moreau were left for dead when Harvey went off the deep end. Harvey, in his paranoid fugue, thought wife Moreau was fooling around with captain Welles. The absurdity of that to everyone but Welles does wonders for the audience gauging the progress of Harvey’s deteriorating cranium. Harvey plays his character like a cowboy without a horse, all sharpened good ol' boy mannerisms. He sounds like he miiiight have been trying to play it Tennessee Williams, but it's truly the strangest thing, especially because with no background noise, his purring "nah nah Mizzez Ingrim" speech patterns nearly deafen you. It's his worst performance, but it feels kind of at home in this treacherous blotchy world of Welles. Harvey likely didn't have time to clean it up because he was busy making Night Gallery and Night Watch, shooting his proper directorial debut Welcome to Arrow Beach, and dying. Welles wouldn't bother returning to the film after Harvey departed. And though it's truly insane misjudged work, you don't ever feel that Welles didn't trust Harvey and wouldn't have made it work if things had worked out.

The cramped location - two boats on the high seas - ignites Welles’ imagination. He never has trouble deciding the best way to utilize every inch of the vessels. His framing is marvelous, bidding us imagine the dimensions of his set to be larger than they are simply through withholding certain corners. The patchy print MoMA screened takes about twenty minutes to settle into, then you stop noticing the problems, and, if you’ve seen enough Welles, you fill in the blanks with what you know he would have done. Stefan Droessler from the Munich Filmmuseum presented the film, and would talk us through missing pieces or silent patches. He sounded like Werner Herzog, which made the whole thing much feel like a hybrid of church and cinema with its premiere sage offering us guidance in the darkness. Even deprived final cut Welles was the best. I was riveted waiting for the final confrontation between Harvey, Bryant and Welles, which I knew was going to be ugly. There’s a sequence, probably the longest in the film, where Bryant has Welles and Moreau help him set the boat ablaze to get Kodar’s attention across the the horizon. They run out of flammable liquid real fast and resort to paint. So for ten minutes we watch the three of them gleefully splashing different coats of paint all over the deck. Which would have looked great if the colour of the film had been preserved, but its bizarre installation loop feeling paints it for us. I thought for a brief second maybe Welles hadn’t filmed an ending and we’d just watch them throw buckets of paint until the house lights came up. And I wouldn’t have minded. As it stands the shot where the film’s villain is meant to be dispatched was missing, so he’s just gently edited out of the movie, a tragically fitting end to the final semi-completed work of America’s greatest director. If they never finish The Other Side of the Wind, then this will be the closest we get to Welles’ last finished film. Ridley is older now than Welles was when he died, and it’s nice to know he can still try new things, but it’s funny to think how innately cinematic Welles’ imagination stayed even as he kept having his projects forcefully aborted. Ridley has the luxury (not to mention the money, which eluded Welles for most of his working life) to keep experimenting. Orson wasn’t so lucky. But both are proof that you should never give up on artists just yet, even if they appear to reject your easy narratives. I’m rooting for the art of both of these men to continue to be discovered and funded because no matter who they were as people, their work has been with me all my life. 

In A Lonely Place

"You're thinking like you're back there." says a character whose name I can't even remember in Michael Mann's Blackhat. I know she's played by Wei Tang from the terrific and underrated Lust, Caution. I know this because like Public Enemies, Michael Mann's last film, Lust, Caution was the last film before a director threw up his hands and said "What do you want?" to an audience he no longer knew how to please. The further into discovering digital he's gone - the medium someone else found for him, that he knew would be the future, for better or worse - the further away from audiences he's gotten and the more he's burrowed into a select few critics' hearts. Having worked in a record store that specializes in trade-ins, few directors have their whole catalog traded in with the regularity of Mann, a director I've loved since I was old enough to know what a director is. People don't have the time for him they evidently once did - you can't return a film you didn't buy. And just as Lust, Caution sent Ang Lee racing toward middlebrow, NPR-friendly fare after a fearlessly intimate decade-plus to himself, and Ridley Scott retreated into Gladiator style pablum after the formally abstruse The Counselor was called the worst film of his already polarizing career, the indifference that greeted Public Enemies seems to have broken Mann's stride. Public Enemies was an experiment in a time, place and language that were altogether unfamiliar to him - I know I'm not the only one who thinks that film redefined the possible in digital grammar. I wouldn't change a frame of Public Enemies. It's perfect in its deliberate imperfections; one of the defining films of the 21st century. And when people shrug at your masterpiece it might just hurt your feelings. 

I don't pretend to know what Michael Mann went through in 2009, but a few things seem clear enough - Blackhat's attitude is one of defeat, a movie defined by grief for a world that has changed and will continue changing. Progress means nothing anymore. Mann was likely equally devastated when he returned to Los Angeles - his true home despite that beautiful Chicago accent - and discovered they'd changed the lights on him. The sick yellow glow of the Halogen street lamps he used to play his greys, blacks and blues against has vanished. Replaced by white/blue flourescents. The resulting vacancy in the air was caught expertly by Robert Elswitt in Nightcrawler - the town finally looks like a set in a tv studio. It's anathema to Mann's version of reality; he has a formula for background stylistics being inversely proportional to the stylishness of the action. Chicago looks like a cool neon nightmare in Thief, but the action itself is all purposely grounded. Tough, but real. He met in the middle for Heat. A new LA just won't do. So, like a thwarted moth, he sought a new source of light. There are the neon orgies on the streets of Hong Kong, the dull sizzle of computer monitors blurring and muting flesh, always presented in contrast to the earthy reality of the skin of those watching, and finally the unearthly glow of the banks and towers of harddrives. Mann's recreation of the inhuman space of data traveling through circuitry is all the virtue (and none of the boneheaded mythology) of Tron and Tron: Legacy in one bravura little sequence. And it hints that a resigned Michael Mann isn't someone concerned with people anymore. His hero is a Chicagoan, like Mann himself, and he's only interested in getting every single task taken care of as quickly and efficiently as possible, because the motivation to do them splendidly isn't there anymore. 

Chris Hemsworth's Nicholas Hathaway is a man who forgets what it meant to do things because there is joy in them. He does them because on the other side is the possibility of remembering how to love them. He emerges from prison after the same number of years since the last time Mann has made a film. He hasn't made a film set in the modern world in almost ten years. That's a long break from depicting our world as we know it. Hathaway is shown first listening to headphones, his hearing muffled. The world is now a little too big, a little too fast. Maybe that's why the mouths speaking Mandarin dialogue seem to lag a little behind their voices. Why Hemsworth needs a long second to himself before boarding a plane to LA. The world is bright now, and both perversely bigger and smaller than it's ever been, to paraphrase Transcendence. We're all in the same room, but no one's on the same wavelength. Hathaway/Mann's way of doing things just don't work anymore. The bad reviews that have greeted Blackhat confirm as much. There are hints of the old Mann in here (The action sequences still glue you to your chair, Viola Davis channels Pacino in Heat very effectively, the frenetic camera work of that film returns briefly, though in truth it resembles a hungover pantomime of the precision ambling of The Color of Money), but we're looking at a director looking for new pleasures. He's found only a few. 

I don't think the Chinese setting was arrived upon idly, as the influence of its vanguard is strongly in evidence. Wong Kar-Wai used to juxtapose the deadly serious (cops, traffickers, hitmen) with the lighthearted (clingy ex-lovers and OCD lovers-to-be) and Mann's fused them without too much fluctuation in tone. The discussion about whether an ex-con should be dating a cop's sister crops up right before a police raid, a stray thread that will eventually be woven into the quilt once the focus has narrowed toward the end. There's a scene in a Korean restaurant that has the languid awkwardness in its choreography that calls to mind the delicate dance of space in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times. It's clumsier, but Mann has a heavier footfall. The lightest he's ever been was in Public Enemies. Those days are a distant blip in the rearview. Everything here weighs a ton. It starts with how he chooses to fill a frame. He builds himself a considerable team; Davis, Hong Kong police including Hemsworth's love interest, Hemsworth himself, his minder (played with little fuss and credible workmanlike anonymity by the ever-dependable Holt McCallany, still showing the beauty he wore forever and a day ago as a rapist in Alien³) and whoever else happens to be within arm's reach. Mann arranges them in chaotic patterns and erratic formations, hinting that they aren't united by a purpose, merely by incidental geography. Then he makes this giant crew sprint through the X and Z axis as frequently as he can find a reason to. The running is labored and ugly. It looks strange. Perfunctory. "What'd she say?" "Move fast." They run because they're being compelled. Different from the usual desperation with which Mann imbues his action sequences. They don't live for this. It's a task, like anything else.  When asked what he'll do once he's been freed Hemsworth lamely suggests that he'll fix TVs. The world doesn't need Mann's version of a hero. The world is quiet and his characters have fallen quiet with it. Mann searches the faces of the dead for meaning and finds nothing as sad as Hemsworth, framed alone in worlds moving at an alien pace. Blackhat is a very lonely film.

There is, however, a dignity in the silence, and here is where Blackhat works best. The villain's philosophy, that which is not in front of him does not matter, is what Mann has discovered he's up against. Audience attention span, audience willingness to indulge fetishization, audience's sympathy for an idea that takes a whole film to bloom. That which does not stimulate continuously is not worth considering. That scheme - or is it a fear? - informs the film in every imaginable way. There's the dialogue, recorded haphazardly, fading in and out seemingly at random, forcing audiences to think about whether the content of a conversation matters in a film that's meant to be all momentum. There's the way the team slowly disbands, leaving Hemsworth and his love interest alone. Soon their influence fades and the film begins to reshape into a movie that seemed to be about them all along. Did they have any impact on each other or on Hathaway? It's a film ruled by a tide it can't seem to control, like the Apocalypse Now style festival and its current of bodies that keep Hathaway from his target in the final shootout. The action comes in, forcefully washing away the quiet. The action washes away and the quiet returns. In the quiet, gestures and symbols register. A sleeping man's hand lies on the floor. Hemsworth and his love interest lie together on their sides, facing each other in bed, waiting for a phone call. Three people walk through a bustling marketplace to a secret rendezvous, colours and sounds flaring up all around them, no point beyond seeing them navigate the crowds. Hemsworth's perfect face staring holes  into data-filled screens and the night sky, feeling disproportionately connected to them, mournful synthesizer telling us what he can't ever come out and say. Conversations have no punctuation. When Tang is told by her brother that she's the only one he can trust, she looks away from him and into space we can't see for a small eternity and then turns back briefly to say "when do we leave?" in heavily accented English. Hathaway wants to let suspects walk around and lead them to the next man on the ladder. "I say we let 'em ride" he says to Davis. She sits with the idea for a long, long moment and simply offers a soft "yeah." Nothing clever, nothing memorable, except that the film had led us to believe that something greater was coming. Nothing great comes. Just violence that is all the more destructive for interrupting human contact founded on shared silences and knowing when not to talk anymore. Nothing more spectacular than death awaits them. There is time to stop, talk, and look into each other's eyes. Watching Blackhat is realizing that we can't possibly protect what we imagine to be our future. No government can plan for malevolence with no motive, a lesson some still refuse to learn. The indifference is here to stay. 

The Simple Art of Codependency - Hannibal Season 2

The finale of this season of Hannibal isn’t titled “Imago” because it wouldn't have fit the season’s theme of Japanese food preparation. However, about halfway through the season’s final episode, two characters let us know why it would have made a perfect alternate title. For those who don’t already know it’s the final form of an insect’s transformation from larva to adult and bringing it up anywhere in the second season would have been appropriate. The fact that the Bryan Fuller and his team of writers decided to keep this conversation close to the chest until the finale was a great idea though. It packed far more of a wallop when it arrived because Hannibal allowed itself to change this season. It stopped being a series that followed a case of the week formula (albeit a more gruesome take on the recipe than any on record) and only allowed itself a thin overarching season plot. I can’t stand television like this but Hannibal did it so well that it became a tolerable formula. From week to week the show presented its viewers with a ballet of blood that turned murder into a legitimate art form in every way that shows like Dexter, which frankly can go fuck itself, managed to fail at. But by changing the formula that the series' fans had come to know and love, season 2 of Hannibal knocked our expectations of the show on their ear. The show slowed waaaaaay down. No more was it merely a killer of the week kind of show. Hannibal tried for a new kind of horror. It took Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) who we’d all begun to rely on as an infallible source of true justice and has him switch sides with Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). The pair begin taking pages out of each other’s books and the result is a season that shows us what can happen when two men who are each incredibly dangerous in their own way begin to allow the boundaries between them to blur. 

Hannibal got itself famous (at least with critics) for being one of the most beautifully shot and beautifully violent (again, just with critics) series to ever grace the small screen. The fact that it lives on NBC is a mystery to rival the Tunguska event. I watched the series after having seen all but the latest Hannibal film (Hannibal Rising) and enjoying all of them despite Brett Ratner’s horrific track record as a filmmaker - Red Dragon is by far his best film - and the pure awfulness of the series’ final chronological installment, 2001's Hannibal, which is up there with Ridley Scott’s worst films. It got me wondering why none of the films, with the exception of Hannibal, ever attempted anything as inventive as the visual style that the TV series has made its bread and butter. Director of Photography John Mathieson uses the already gorgeous palette provided by Florence, Italy to help Scott's Hannibal take on new life as a thing of visual beauty. Hannibal’s series cinematographer James Hawkinson seems to have taken brief inspiration from Mathieson before going off on a wild quest to create a show that would rival even Game of Thones in how painfully beautiful it was to look at.  

That visual style really ends up being the only thing about Hannibal’s second season that resembles its first. The plotlines this time around have felt more like Lecter himself was listening to music and painting to the tempo. It began at a fairly rapid clip with familiar faces dropping like flies but as it carried on it began to slow down and spend a lot of its time meditating on Will and Hannibal’s relationship. Hannibal tries as hard as he can to drag Will down (or up?) to his level and become a killer while Will resists. We, of course, begin to see cracks, sometimes big ones, in Will’s defense and we begin to genuinely fear for him in a way we never had to in season one. We now have to fear for his very soul.

This season also manages to invert the previous season’ structure by making Will a reliable narrator once again. When we first met Will in season one he was a good but troubled cop who was beginning to unravel by the end of the pilot. We had to watch over the subsequent twelve episodes as Will came completely apart at the seams due to his time in therapy with Hannibal Lecter. But after last season’s left field (though not unwelcome) finale, we got to watch Will rebuild himself back into someone who’s both sane and very dangerous to those who continue to walk the earth doing evil. He becomes the only person with enough mental capacity to outsmart Hannibal but because the writers never make it easy on him we really never know how it’s going to go down. This matching of wits may actually be why the writers decided to make Hannibal and Will some kind of genius sadistic team in the season’s latter half and pit (sorry for the incoming pun) them against Mason Verger (Michael Pitt) whose appearance represents both a wonderful callback to Gary Oldman’s stellar performance but also a unique source of total fear. Mason is a dangerous foe and even though lovers of the film series know his fate we still aren’t quite sure if the tv version is going to take the same road to get there so all our favorite characters are suddenly in harm's way.

Watching the season back in a rapid fire fashion results in some very thrilling television. Apart from a court room drama episode (the season’s low point for sure) the first half of the season moves incredibly quickly and the framing device presented in the premiere’s opening minutes keeps you aching to get back to it at the end of the season. Hannibal plays a much larger role this season than he did before. He gets his hands far more dirty and doesn’t just come off as some kind of god that the law abiding characters of the series waste their efforts trying to stop. Instead we see Hannibal as a fallen angel who's so enamored with humanity that he allows others to see a very human side of him and even though he rarely makes a mistake, he’s a much more sympathetic monster than we got in the first season and it makes it that much more interesting when Will finally goes toe-to-toe with him. The odds are finally evened up. Fuller and his writing staff have established that they like their creative liberties, which means the stakes are quite high.

Hannibal’s second season allowed itself a lot of creative license and I applaud them for doing so. The show pulled back on its gruesome nature but it traded a gimmick for far better long form storytelling. Not to beat a dead horse but I can’t believe this show ran on NBC. It’s astounding when you think about the kinds of themes this season focused on and how many times it made its viewers stare into the heart of human darkness and didn’t let them look away when it opened its eyes and stared back. The second season is the series’ imago; its final transformation. I have no fear for the third season but it became clear while watching the finale that the writers were prepared to throw in the towel. The series was renewed but extremely late in this season’s run and the finale’s final moments are certainly geared toward the idea that they could have been the shows last. I await it excitedly but I think Hannibal will be forced to reinvent itself again in order to keep becoming the best thing it can be.

The Rosenbaum Test: The Greatest Living Narrative Filmmakers

A little while ago Jonathan Rosenbaum, in whose direction myself and most other critics genuflect, reposted an article of his on the master director Michelangelo Antonioni he wrote in the early 90s. The interesting thing is that he starts his article with a quick list of who he thinks might be the 12 greatest living narrative filmmakers, and of course the director of Red Desert and The Passenger made the cut. He'd have made mine too at the time. This got me and many others thinking about how to answer that question today. Kevin B. Lee got a discussion going and Richard Brody posted his own list with a complete set of guidelines. I cribbed a bit from those guidelines and tried to make my own list, which proved sensationally difficult. I love a lot of directors, but are they "the greatest"? Can their work never be equaled? Could anyone else even pretend to their style? It took some incredible concentration to get it down just to 16. Never one to suffer alone, I asked everyone else to throw their two cents in and here's what we came up with.


Scout Tafoya

1. Marco Bellocchio
2. Terence Davies
3. Claire Denis
4. Philippe Grandrieux
5. Terrence Malick
6. Chantal Akerman
7. Tsai Ming-Liang
8. Agnès Varda
9. Wes Anderson
10. Alain Resnais
11. Francis Ford Coppola
12. PT Anderson

Honorable Mentions: Manoel De Oliveira (who'd be in my top 12 but I don't want to jinx him - I want him to live forever), Léos Carax, Tomas Alfredson, Catherine Breillat, Dan Sallitt, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino, Takashi Miike, Richard Lester, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Terry Gilliam, Volker Schlöndorff, William Klein, Roman Polanski, Sofia Coppola, & Gene Wilder.

Noah Lyons 

1. David Lynch
2. Jean-Luc Godard
3. Lars von Trier
4. Michel Haneke
5. Woody Allen
6. Werner Herzog
7. Roman Polanski
8. Alejandro Jodorowsky
9. PT Anderson
10. Steven Soderbergh
11. Yorgos Lanthimos


Dan Khan

1. Steven Soderbergh
2. P.T. Anderson
3. Lars Von Trier
4. Agnès Varda
5. Jim Jarmusch
6. Mike Leigh
7. Wong Kar-Wai
8. Terrence Mallick
9. Jean-Luc Godard
10. David Cronenberg
11. Michael Mann
12. Alejandro Jodorowsky


Gifford Elliott

1. Lars Von Trier
2. Wong Kar-Wai
3. PT Anderson
4. Jean Luc-Godard
5. Werner Herzog
6. Woody Allen
7. Roman Polanski
8. Martin Scorsese
9. Jane Campion
10. The Coen Brothers
11. Wes Anderson
12. Alfonso Cuarón

Honorable Mentions: Mel Brooks, Sofia Coppola, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki, David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola & Agnès Varda.


Tim Earle

1. Pedro Almodóvar
2. Park Chan Wook
3. Hayao Miyazaki
4. Steven Soderberg
5. Wes Anderson
6. Terence Malick
7. Joel and Ethan Coen
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Martin Scorsese
10. Terry Gilliam
11. Edgar Wright
12. Tomas Alfredson


Fox Johnson

1. David Fincher
2. PT Anderson
3. Joel & Ethan Coen
4. David Cronenberg
5. Ridley Scott
6. Martin Scorsese
7. Michael Mann
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Terrence Malick
10. Wes Anderson
11. Roman Polanski
12. Steven Soderbergh

Favourite Genre Directors

In my effort to trump Andrew Sarris (Bazin rest him) as this country's preeminent list queen, I present my favourite directors of genre films. One needn't have worked exclusively in horror or westerns, but they need to have proved themselves capable of turning B-movie mill-grist into something at once personal and indelible. No one else performed the same magic when given a heist movie, an anti-western, a horror film or a revenge thriller. No one else had their eye for composition, their ear for dialogue, their nose for trouble. For better or worse, you know who's behind the camera. The list will probably evolve over time; this is a snapshot.

Barbara Peeters
Nicholas Ray
André De Toth
Byron Haskin
Stephanie Rothman
Jules Dassin
Sergio Martino
John Hough
Roy Ward Baker
Jacques Tourneur
Sam Fuller
Budd Boetticher
Fritz Lang
Michael Reeves
Michael Mann
John Carpenter
Walter Hill
Charles B. Pierce
William Friedkin
Robert Aldrich
Rian Johnson
Don Siegel
Monte Hellman
J.J. Abrams
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Jacques Becker
Joe Dante
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Joseph H. Lewis
Juan López Moctezuma
Teruo Ishii
Joe D'Amato
Robert Siodmak
Matt Cimber
Clint Eastwood
Ridley Scott
Takashi Miike
Jean-Pierre Melville
John Hillcoat
Seijun Suzuki
Kihachi Okamoto
Tobe Hooper
Joseph Losey
John Brahm
John Flynn
David Cronenberg
Jorge Grau
Sam Peckinpah
Dario Argento
Neil Marshall
Giulio Questi
Takeshi Kitano
Greg McLean
Nic Winding Refn
Kathryn Bigelow
Ti West
Jack Hill
E. Elias Merhige
Tomas Alfredson
Park Chan-Wook
Andrew Dominik
Ben Wheatley
John Dahl
Brian Trenchard-Smith
Oswaldo de Oliveira
Arch Nicholson
Ida Lupino


Aside: John Ford, John Huston, Guillermo Del Toro and Stanley Kubrick, all capable hands at genre films, seem somehow wrong on this list, despite being far above average in the game. So here they are as an appendix. This, I suppose, is a topic for further discussion.

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."