the LAST FILM YOU'VE SEEN thread

[wpqx]

Well 2002 I found an extremely strong year. Any year where there are more than 10 films I'd rate at 5 stars is one to note. I believe the total is 12 or 13 for 2002, which makes it high, but it is the particular films. I thought the Two Towers was the best of the LOTR series, Talk to Her is my favorite Almodovar film, The Pianist was my film of the year, Spirited Away I thought was the best Miyazaki, Bowling for Columbine I found far better than Fahrenheit or Roger and Me, I enjoyed both of Spielberg's movies that year, thought Adaptaion was one of the most original and intriguing films of the year, and there were just several other damn good movies. Among those I'd recently add to the great list would be Gerry and All or Nothing.

[Chris Knipp]

Have you contributed your best lists for 2005 on the Top Ten thread yet?

[arsaib4]

I agree that 2002 was a great year in film. I haven't actually posted an official list yet for that year, but I know that you're missing Sokurov's Russian Ark, Cantet's Time Out, Oliveira's I'm Going Home, Koshashvili Late Marriage, Tsai's What Time is it There?, among others. A great year, indeed.

[Chris Knipp]

Blood Simple. Coen brothers. 1984. rental dvd.

It looks a lot different after these years and all the other Coen movies. I'm afraid I don't like it as much as I did then, when it seemed so cool and fresh. Now I see the condescension toward rustic, rural types and the cold nihilism that you get in some of the later movies, without the depth of character development found in Great Lebowski, Barton Fink, and others. There are edgy, tongue-in-cheek thrills, and I like the Highsmith-esque clumsy burial, but it seems pointless now, though cinematic and obviously full of talent.

[arsaib4]

Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent (now available on DVD in the U.S.)

Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005)

[arsaib4]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
The story fizzles away... but it's told with such tact and style that one walks out curiously satisfied.

If the subject matter is a bit thin, the style is such a delight that it doesn't matter, and the themes of loneliness, dress, possession, and money (relevant to our last century and to Japan's postwar history and perhaps to all human experience) are thought-provoking enough to make the minimalist content expand in the mind. A quiet, subtle, delightful film.

That's about right, althought I'm not sure what exactly prompted you to use the word "delightful." The film is spare and dreamy, and it is also decidedly mournful, perhaps overly so. You're right about the style -- very elegant, indeed. The story "fizzles away," and after reading Haruki Murakami's short story, I wonder if the film would've been better off as a short (about 30-40 mins. instead of 75).

[Chris Knipp]

Well if it's spare and elegant that can be a delight, that's all. But it is slight and I didn't remember it at the end-of-the-year list-making time.

[Chris Knipp]

Patrice Chereau's Intimacy (2001)

A lot can be said about this, which must have been shown in San Francisco very briefly so I missed it though I saw a newspaper review that was good and very admiring. It's fun to mull over watching this at home stopping and starting it and doing other things in between. The photography, which evokes Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at times, is beautiiful, and the loud sound track with sound effects and music is interesting. The blending of French sexual frankness with seemingly improvisatory dialogue and Mike Leigh situations (and Leigh regular, the always strong Timothy Spall, not to mention the Globe theater director Mark Rydell in the main role; imagine the irony of the latter refusing to give an opinon to Spall of his wife's performance in The Glass Menagerie saying, "I don't know; I'm not into the theater at all") -- the mixture does and doesn't work. The film demands to be taken seriously, but doesn't resolve structurally or have anything definite to say about its situations and people, which are based on a couple of Hanif Kuraishi stories. The explicit sex scenes which the disapproving David Walsh of the World Socialist Web Site says are a "third" of the movie (it may have see4med that way to him, but surely it's less than a tenth of actual screen time) made people alternatively think this was terribly serious and profound, or dismiss it as pure crap. I'd say they just add to the rich mix, but a mix so rich that it never quite all comes together. I keep coming back to some of the images though, which as an artist I find deeply satisfying in themselves, and on my good dvd playder (now working again) and sound system the sound track is arresting and fresh. A divorced man in London with a couple small children who once was a musician and now works in a small Soho pub has quick sex one Wednesday at the spare flat where he now lives with a middle aged woman. She keeps coming back on subsequent Wednesdays and eventually he meets her cabbie husband and finds out about her life as a mediocre actress. He follows her and then the anonymous sex relationship begins to unravel, because things get too complicated. Definitely worth watching, and another interesting addition to the complex Patrice Chéreau oeuvre.

[Chris Knipp]

Matthieu Kassovitz: Métisse (AKA Cafe au lait), 1993

A Jewish bike messenger (Kassovitz) competes with a rich African diplomat's son (Hubert Koundé) for the affections of a beautiful mulatto girl (Julie Mauduech) who has gotten pregnant -- by one of the two, she won't say which -- while they take care of her and squabble with each other in a menage a trois in which race and other issues are frankly but amusingly dealt with. This light French knockoff of SHe's Gotta Have It is Kassovit's first feature directorial effort and he also co-stars in it as the Spike Lee character. It's full of fun -- no use going into much depth about it. The q uestion is, how did Kassovitz get from this to La Haine/Hate in just a couple of years? And to Les rivieres pourpres five years later, and to Gothika in 11 years, and has he maintained his promise as a director, or just become a serviceable actor, as he is seen to be -- still rellatively the comic lightweight -- as the 'toy maker' in Spielberg's Munich?

[Chris Knipp]

The Crook/Le voyou (1970) by Claude Lelouch starring Jean-Louis Tritignant, Danièle Delorme

On the loose again after escaping from prison, Tritignant, known as “the Swiss” for his precision and his habit of working alone (?) is a suave criminal who avoids capture and carries out a successful kidnapping (in which he does not at all work alone but has three or four accomplices). The film has a bright look and a pleasing sense of watching a smooth, gentlemanly crook at work, though there is never any sense of danger, and comparisons with Tarantino seem very wide of the mark. The action has momentum and charm, but things become a bit confusing due to oddly placed flashbacks. There is a focus on the role of publicity and media involvement in kidnappings, which allows the “crook” to successfully blackmail a bank for a million dollars, and features a gullible couple who give up their small boy becuse they think they've won a Simca car. We're suckered by ads, Lelouch is saying, and look what it can come to. Charles Denner of Elevator to the Scaffold and Life Inside Out/La vie à l’envers is effective and strange, if not real, as a minor bank official. A typical Lelouch touch is bookending the film with a musical film-within-the-film called “The Crook”[Le voyou] and it is all very amusing and light, but somehow it leaves you flat, and the main event, the kidnapping, cheats the audience: we aren’t told the setup.

[wpqx]

Mother (1952) - Mikio Naruse

Being unable to catch any of the Naruse retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center, I was relegated to checking him out on prehistoric VHS. Only three of his films were ever released in the US, and this is the earliest (and only one at the video store). The comparisons to Ozu are completely warranted. The suburban atmosphere is eerily similar. In fact it seems as though this film was shot on the same sets as Ozu films, particularly Ohayu. The film is simple in it's family story, and recalls a little of the American I Remember Mama, although not quite as nostalgic. This film focuses much more strongly on the direct and indirect impact that the war had on the average Japanese citizen. In it's own way commenting on the post war situation as so many more bleak Italian films did.

[wpqx]

The Cloud Capped Star (1960) - Ritwik Ghatak

Well my first non-Ray Indian film, this one seems much in the same style. Which is to say it isn't a four hour Bollywood musical. That said it isn't anywhere near as good as a Ray film might have been. Again it's story is about country folk trying to get by, but something about the film seems tired, as if we've already seen it a hundred times, and we have. The style of the film is admirable, lots of great deep focus compositions, but generally speaking it's been done before, and done better. Overly pessimistic and depressing, but not in a compelling way.

[Chris Knipp]

Alexandra Leclère: Soeurs fâchées, Les (2004) [DVD bought in Paris.]

Comedy about reunion of "angry sisters" (the title calls them) with a good cast headed by Catherine Frot and Isabelle Huppert as the sisters and François Berléand as Huppert's husband. Another humorous study of French bourgeois spoiledness and grumpiness. Louise ( Frot, who is good at playing sympathetic but ditzy ladies) is the country sister; Marthe (Huppert) is the elegant Parisian one. Louise comes to visit and see a publisher about a novel that's been accepted and her behavior (to Marthe) seens to be nothing but a string of gushy faux pas. But it's Marthe who turns out to be shrill and annoying. Louise is the one who's happy and successful, and the outwardly sophisticated, elegant Marthe is miserable and doesn't like who she is. This homely paradox is saved from seeming corny because of the wry way bourgeois pretensions are observed. In this regard Leclère's film can be compared with Bacri and Jaoui's acerbic comedies, because it deals with some of the same kinds of people amd peels away some of the same façades. Frot (who was in Un air de famille, which Bacri/Jaoui wrote) emerges as a complex character, and the devastating Huppert as usual doesn't mind playing someone you're impressed by, but really can't possibly like. Both of these actresses are in top form here.

There seems no reason why this wouldn't play well in the US but it may be getting late for a US release. Anyway, according to DVD Times (UK), which has an excellent discussion, it is out there (where it was also inexplicably not released) in a Region Two DVD, and in a great looking print (which the French one also is, and it also has both French and English subtitles available on the latter).

[wpqx]

The Matador

I'll keep my comments to the thread appropriate.

[Chris Knipp]

Manoel de Oliveira, I'm Going Home/Je rentre à la maison (2001). (Netflix) Touching, low keyed study of an aging actor (played by Michel Piccoli) whose life is seen as a series of small humiliations following a major bereavement. Strong elements in the film: Piccoli's measured assurance; a reliance on concrete, real-time incident, including lengthy passages from Ionesco and Shakespeare. A little too dry and detached for my taste, though I'll have to admit the director Oliveira's being 93 adds creditibility to the portrait of a valitudinarian.

Morgan Jon Fox, Blue Citrus Hearts (2003). DVD from Blockbuster store. Small indie gay coming-of-age movie focused on two high schoolers, not a success.

Lucretia Martel, The Holy Girl/La Niña Santa (2005). DVD from Blockbuster. Amazing, subtle and distinctive. I loved the elliptical, crabwise style of both storytelling and camera placement -- and some of the images are very beautiful, and the young girls are so real you can almost smell them. Helena, the mother, is also very attractive. Had I seen seen this in time I might well have put in in my best list. Howard Schumann has a good review of this elsewhere; it may be on this site too but I couldn't find it.

I'm catching up on the ones that got away last year. Next on my 2005 "Wish I'd Seen List" lined up for viewing: Tropical Malady. Coming up soon on my Netflix queue: Cafe Lumière, My Summer of Love, The World. I'll see Jones's Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada when it's on DVD.