My 10 best moviewatching experiences of 2005

Since I so rarely see "new" movies, I did this last year in lieu of a "best of" list, and I thought I'd continue the tradition. Below is a list of my ten most enjoyable filmwatching experiences of the past year, regardless of format. The only condition is that they had to all be films I'd never previously seen.

1. Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carne, 1945)
   
   Yet another classic I'd never seen... Weirdo that I am, I have a tendency to put off seeing highly-regarded films such as this, just so I have something to look forward too in coming years. I was not disappointed. This is, I suppose, the French Gone With the Wind, in the sense that it's huge, grand, epic, and magnificent. There's tremendous subtlety and pathos as well.



2. Masculin, féminin: 15 faits précis (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
   
   I say this with some reserve, but this is possibly the quintessential 60s film. Godard makes a big statement here, about youth culture, consumerism, and the naivete of radical politics, but he makes it entertaining as well.



3. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
   
   Take a trite plot, make a musical of it overlay a beautiful set and possibly the best score Michel Legrand ever composed, and top it off with Catherine Deneuve.



4. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
   
   Nicholson's best ever performance, and probably the best attempt by an American to capture the style of Ingmar Bergman. This film captures America, c. 1970 better than any other I've seen.



5. Rois et Reine (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
   
   Desplechin's masterpiece. It''l rip your guts out. I've given up trying to explain how or why this film is so great, so instead I just tell everyone to see it. Now.



6. Histoire(s) du Cinema (Jean-Luc Godard, 1989-1998)
   
   Forget what I wrote above. THIS is Godard's big statement, about damn near everything - art, literature, war, fascism, sex, and yes, even film.



7. Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)
   
   Maybe the best film by an American director made so far this decade. It's a shame it never gets screened anywhere.



8. Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005)
   I'm an obsessive Whedon-phile, so this was a no-brainer. I actually saw it twice on the same day. As das put it, proof that entertainment doesn't have to be stupid. (I think that's what he said).



9. La Maison des bois (Maurice Pialat, 1971)
   
   A miniseries made for French TV, I caught it over two consecutive at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Yet more evidence that, in the hands of a great filmmaker, the miniseries format can be the most rewarding for the viewer.



10. Star Wars Episode 3: The Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)
    
    Don't get me wrong - the movie sucked ass, but I was at least content in the knowledge I'd never have to sit through another shitty Star Wars movie for the rest of my life...

Une Femme de Ménage (Claude Berri, 2002)

OK, so I'm watching this movie I recorded off Sundance a couple of weeks ago - Une Femme de Ménage, directed by Claude Berri (Jean de Florette, Manon of the Spring). I have several problems, both with the movie and also with myself.

The film is about a middle-aged man, recently divorced, who finds himself in need of someone to pick up after him. He hires a young woman named Laura as a housekeeper, and a relationship begins to develop between them. Things proceed in a fairly mundane and predictable way. To describe the plot in detail would assume you haven't already figured it out by now, with probably accurate results. So, I start to wonder to myself, why am I watching this? It's not particularly fascinating or compelling, it's obviously unoriginal and hopelessly mainstream in every way. Is it because it's in French? Am I that shallow? Then I notice that he housekeeper is played by Émilie Dequenne, who became known to me with her Cannes award winning performance as the titular Rosetta. Then I realize that she's significantly more alluring and provocatively clad in this movie than she was in Rosetta. I'd never really noticed her breasts before... Naturally I'm not the only one who notices them, and soon she has moved in with Jacques, the man for whom she cleans.

Now, I need to point out a couple of things. First, Jacques is a pretty sympathetic character. He's shown to have talent (he works as a sound engineer), taste, manners, and a decent sense of decorum. In no way does he chase Laura or attempt to seduce her. She initiates everything. We never really know why - it could be opportunism, a curious fondness for older men, whatever. Jacques motives seem clear, but even so he's remarkably clear-headed about inviting this lovely young woman into his bed. He knows she's never going to stay, and he's still too on the rebound to attempt anything serious yet. Second, the story is told in a flat, emotionless tone. Berri's technique is to withdraw himself from the film, letting the actors do the work with little interference.

It's likely the best aspect of Une Femme de Ménage is that it doesn't pretend to give us motives for the characters' actions. In many cases they're obviouis, and in the rest it just doesn't seem necessary. We can extrapolate what we need, leaving the movie open to varied interpretations. To me this is refreshing. Yet, somehow I'm not really satisfied at the end. It's possible I'm trying too hard here, but I kept expecting the it to turn into a Claude Chabrol film (nobody gets murdered), but it kept teetering into Claude Lelouch territory instead (but it never fell there completely). Eventually, I got neither. There was nothing profoundly metaphysical, like if Jacques Rivette had directed it, just a flatness, as if to imply that the incidents from the film would ultimately play a very minor role in the main characters' life stories. It was odd to watch something so unambitious.

I'd fathom that thousands of films have been made about middle-aged men sating their midlife crises' with nubile young women. That I physically (balding and paunchy) and emotionally (reticent and taciturn) resemble the male lead (although he's a dozen years older than me) didn't attract me or repel me, and, while I enjoyed looking at Dequenne wear short skirts and tank tops, that alone wouldn't have held my interest for more than a half-hour. In other words, this is a very strange example of a male wish-fulfillment fantasy. I can't even say that it works on that level at all, even though that's how it looks to be initially. So, you know how, in the beginning, I said you could guess the plot straightaway? Well, even if you do, that misses the point of the film completely. Ultimately I think that's what makes it worth watching, if not worth loving.

DoubleTake Twenty-Five, Summer 2001

A Conversation with Wim Wenders by Michael Coles

Michael Coles: You seem to evoke Edward Hopper in some of your films. How has Hopper influenced your work?

Wim Wenders: I encountered Hopper on my first trip to America, in 1972. I was in New York and spent quite some time at the Whitney Museum. And I had known Hopper a little before, but he hadn't made much of an impact on me until I actually saw the paintings. He became very popular all over the world during the 1970s, with calendars and books and postcards everywhere. But at the time I saw him in the Whitney, he wasn't yet the postcard artist of the twentieth century. The first film of mine that was influenced by Edward Hopper's paintings was The American Friend, which I shot in 1976. More than anything else I liked his sense of framing. It was very cinematic and reminded me a lot of classic American movies, of Anthony Mann or John Ford. I especially liked the city paintings and his hotel windows. Hopper's influence showed most in The Million Dollar Hotel (2000). The entire film was shot in a brownstone building that could have served as Hopper's studio. Of course, later I learned how much Hopper himself had been influenced by movies, and how often he had gone to see them whenever he suffered from "painter's block."

Here's the trailer for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, featuring, of all things, New Order's "Age of Consent":

This looks to suck, proving that Lost in Translation wasn't a fluke.

An open letter to Facets, re: Satantango

To whom it may concern:

It has come to my attention that your company is planning to release a DVD of Bela Tarr's film Satantango in 2006. I should not have to tell you how important this film is; in a poll conducted by the Cinematheque Ontario it was voted one of the ten best films of the Nineties by a panel of internationally respected film scholars and curators, and is considered something of the "holy grail" of DVD releases by nearly every film aficionado I know. Given your company's spotty (to put it kindly) record in the past when it comes to DVD quality, I feel the need to impress upon you the tremendous responsibility you have in releasing this film. It is of vital importance that you do it well. Your target audience will be among the most discriminating DVD buyers in the world - we know a lemon when we see one! If you do a good job with the DVD of Satantango you will have a group of purchasers guaranteed to spend the rather sizable amount that you will no doubt charge for this film transfer, and in addition, you will have earned the thanks of a dedicated, nay, obsessive group of DVD buyers. If you do a poor job then you will have earned the enmity of, once again, a large group of very vocal DVD buyers.

I understand there will be problems finding high quality, well-preserved film elements. There are surely scant few prints of this film extant, and the amount of time and energy that must be devoted to a project of this size is no doubt daunting. All we ask is that you treat this masterpiece with the care and respect it deserves. I hope and pray that you do so.

I got my Deep Discount DVD 20% off order today:

The World (Jia Zhang Ke, 2004)

In a serendipitous event, The Economist ran a special on China the global economy the same week that I watched Jia Zhang-Ke's The World. As a westerner and particularly as an American, I tend to think of globalization the way Thomas Friedman leads me to think, i.e., on the way it will affect my life and the lives of other middle-class westerners. Our concerns are, to put them succinctly, "will our jobs be exported overseas, to someone in Asia making a small percentage of what we make?" "How will rampant globalization continue to change the American economy?"

In contrast to my concerns, The World is an examination of the effects of globalization on the Chinese working class. The World may be a beautiful film, but the world it paints is not a pretty picture. The general impression I got was that Jia sees the global economy turning the Chinese working class into a global lumpenproletariat. Chinese society is being torn from its roots with millions of citizens being forced, through economic circumstances, to leave their provincial hometowns and relocate in megalopolises like Beijing in order to find jobs. Herein lies the principal irony in a film full of ironies. The Chinese government, possibly the most successful Marxist regime in history, is subjecting its citizens to the same market forces of which Marx was so critical in market economies. Now these days China is about as Marxist, in an economic sense, as Switzerland, but all signs point to the fact they pay lip service to the Marxist-Leninist "brand", in spite of economic reality. Given the amount of criticism it makes against this new reality, it's remarkable that Jia was able to make this film under the (presumably) ever-watchful eye of the Chinese government.

Tao (Tao Zhao) is a young woman who works at an improbable theme park in the Beijing suburbs called The Beijing World Park. That this place actually exists is bizarre enough, but to concoct such a desperate yet engaging drama within its confines is extraordinary. The Beijing World Park, which, according to a website I found, covers roughly 117 acres of land 16 kilometers from Beijing proper, contains replicas at roughly 1/3 scale, of all the world's great buildings, from the Taj Mahal and the great pyramids to Big Ben and the entire New York City skyline. In other words, an interesting visual backdrop which creates a startling juxtaposition to the humdrum, barely-scraping-by existence of Tao and her boyfriend Taisheng (Taisheng Chen), who works along side his little brother as a security guard for the park. Their lives are the stuff of melodrama - Taisheng wants sex but not necessarily commitment, while Tao is holding out for commitment before sex enters the relationship. Taisheng drifts into a sexual relationship with an older woman whose own husband emigrated to France (the Belleville section of Paris, specifically) a decade before, and, for all she knows, may have died there.

Tao's job is two-fold - by day she dresses up in the local costume of whatever "country" she's working in that day and walks around or participates in localized dance routines or ostensibly acts as a tour guide. I say 'ostensibly', since we rarely see any of the employees working; they seem to spend most of their time hanging out on the observation deck of the "Eiffel Tower". By night Tao, again dressed in costume, participates as a quasi-showgirl in a series of massive, elaborately staged, and beautifully photographed shows attended by tourists. These shows, which are staged and shot very differently from the rest of the film, form a sort of punctuation or demarcation point in the structure of the film, which itself is quite minimally plotted.

In many ways the film is about as subtle as repeated hammer blows to the head - one construction worker from the provinces, who is helping build one of the numerous high-rise apartment complexes that house the massive influx of other provincial workers, dies in a construction accident. His family comes en masse to retrieve the body, presumably their first, and for the older ones, last visit to Beijing. In another subplot, Tao befriends Anna, an Russian immigrant who gets a job in the park, only to leave for the more more lucrative life of a prostitute. The explanation for her need for money is that she wants to visit her sister, who has immigrated to Mongolia. Tao and Anna form possibly the closest relationship in the film, despite the fact neither can understand the other's native language.

One is also struck by the amount of modern technology on display in this film. Everyone has a cellphone, and instant messaging is integral to not only the look and feel of the film, but to the plot as well. Given that the GDP per capita of China is less than 15% of that of the United States, the prevalence of technology considered relatively advanced in this country implies a tremendous disparity in the spending culture between the two countries, and a uncomfortable one for the Chinese.

In the end, working on such a massive canvas almost proves too much for Jia, who, for all the wonderful set pieces and fully-realized ideas in the film, cannot by the end keep the whole thing together. The ending itself feels perfunctory, and the lazy, casual pacing of the first 90-120 minutes is replaced towards the end by a flurry of plot developments for which we are not given time to assimilate by film's end. Ultimately, I can only assume that Jia accomplished less than he set out for, but it's heartening that a director from the People's Republic has both the ambition and the support to even try to realize such lofty aims in a gritty, contemporary setting.

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

It had been many years since I'd lasst seen Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, and really all I remembered were the oil rigs, Nicholson's swagger, and the "hold the chicken between your knees" diner scene. So I was quite unprepared for the full force of what I saw last evening. As a matter of fact, the film may be the key work of the new wave of American cinema, that glorious period that began with Bonnie and Clyde and ended sometime between the summers a shark attacked and the Jedi were given a new hope.

This is, of course, the film that made a star out of Jack Nicholson, which is fitting, since no other actor, side from Dustin Hoffman, embodied the new, independent spirit of Hollywood movies of that era. Jack was not handsome. Jack was not even likable, in the way James Stewart was likable, or admirable, the way Gregory Peck was admirable. No, Jack was a funny looking, sarcastic rogue, with enough charm to appeal to men and women alike, but a far different charm than that of Cary Grant or Clark Gable. Perhaps the closest to a prototype for Nicholson's onscreen persona was that of Humphrey Bogart, but even that doesn't fit. Bogart, for all his physical shortcomings - his lisp, his height (or lack thereof) had an inner grace that Nicholson couldn't be bothered with.

In this film Nicholson plays Bobby, a man drifting through his life, running away "when things start to get bad". He was born into a family of musicians (his middle name is Eroica), and ever since he started to play the piano, at age eight, he began running from it. Currently he's working at an oil rig in Southern California, shacking up with Rayette, a waitress into Tammy Wynette, and hanging out with his pal Elton, who lives in a trailer with his wife and small child. Bobby is content enough with this life, that is, until things start to get bad, as they do when Elton tells him that Rayette is pregnant. Bobby runs into his sister, who tells him their father is dying, and this precipitates a trip to visit the family, who live on a small island in Washington state (presumably in Puget Sound). Against his better judgement Bobby brings Rayette with him.

At this point the film (a) goes from great to a masterpiece, and (b) becomes the best Ingmar Bergman film ever made by an American director (take that, Woody). Nicholson's character, which up to this point was merely fascinating and fun to watch, becomes deep and complex, and Nicholson's performance takes on a luster which, sadly, he was rarely called upon to duplicate later in his career.

In 1970 America was divided, and this film, without mentioning politics once, even in passing, demonstrates that divide as well as any film of the era. The distance travelled by Bobby from his family home, full of intellectual discourse and framed portraits of Beethoven and Schubert, to the oil rigs and bowling alleys of Southern California, and back again, is a gap that we have yet to bridge. It's a testament to the films of the early 70s that we could see that gap, and an indictment on the current American 'indie' film scene that, when they show the diversity of our society at all, they only do so to ridicule one side or the other. It's a sad thing that there hasn't been an American film made in the past 10 years that could hold a candle to Five Easy Pieces, and I don't see one on the horizon that will, either.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)



What makes Les Parapluies de Cherbourg such a great movie? It's certainly not the plot, which is as trite and formulaic as could be imagined. Two young people are in love. They decide to marry. Their families object, saying the couple are too young and don't know the meaning of love. The boy, Guy, who lives with his aging godmother and her pretty assistant Madelaine, is drafted and will be sent away for two years. Crushed, the couple spend one last night together. Inevitably, the girl, Genevieve, finds out she is pregnant with Guy's child. Concurrently, the umbrella shop owned by Genevieve's mother is not doing well, and she is forced to sell her jewelry to a successful young man named Roland Cassard, a not-so-secret admirer of Genevieve's. With Guy out of the picture and less than prodigious in his correspondence, Genevieve decides that Roland's proposal of marriage might not be such a bad idea after all, especially if he loves her enough to raise another man's child as his own. With Guy's letters held up due to combat, censorship, or just bad luck, Genevieve finally agrees to marry Roland, and soon afterward the couple leave Cherbourg for good, and having sold her shop, Genevieve's mother leaves also. Some time later Guy is discharged from the army after having suffered a minor gunshot wound. He returns to find his great love gone, and his godmother on her deathbed. He is inconsolable, and sinks into drinking, fighting, and depression. Eventually Madelaine, who we are led to believe was always rather fond of Guy, is able to bring him around. The couple marry, and with money from his inheritance Guy opens his own business, they have a child, and live happily ever after...

...Except that naturally Genevieve returns and she and Guy accidentally run into one another. In the final, heartbreaking scene, the old lovers realize what they once had and what they will never have again.

So, the plot isn't exactly earthshattering in its originality. One of the people with whom I saw this film described it along the lines of "the last gasp of 50s melodrama" and as a soap opera. Fair enough, but people still go to see The Marriage of Figaro enough times, so plot can't be everything, now can it?

Well, of course not. One of the things that seems obvious about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is that probably anyone who watches it understands that, in a sense, the film is a deconstruction of a melodrama. The plot is not to be taken seriously on its face, but is rather being used to say things about cinema, class, youth, romance, marriage, and society.

This seems to be heady stuff for a pretty, musical, soap-opera, but the great thing about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is that it is so astonishingly beautiful in every aspect (Deneuve never looked better, and the use of primary and secondary colors in the costumes and sets is exquisite), and so gloriously musical (this may be Legrand's best score, which is saying a lot), that you can enjoy the soap opera yet the next day idly find yourself marveling at the social detail of a story that asks so many questions in such an elegant way.

I suppose that the issue of marrying away from your social class is fairly worn and frazzled 40 years on, so much so that contemporary audiences may even gloss over that particular plot point. This is probably no great loss, since the film asks much more interesting questions as well. Are young people in love old enough to know what they really want? If a teenager approaches life and love like an adult would, will they deny themselves happiness once they become an adult? What does the child owe the adult they will become? Is it the opportunity to be happy when young, or is it the necessity of providing for comfort once old? Both Guy's godmother and Genevieve's mother have plenty of creature comforts, but both are also very lonely and unhappy, presumably having made poor romantic decisions earlier in life. Are Guy and Genevieve destined for such a future themselves? By the end of the film it seems quite likely, since each in their own way made the responsible and adult decision and married for comfort, rather than love.

My one problem with this line of thought is that the problem is not symmetrical; Genevieve is afforded the opportunity between being comfortable yet romantically unsatisfied, or the possibly more idealistic choice of marrying for love yet being poor. Guy has no such choice, he merely makes the choice between comfort and desparate loneliness, not much of a choice for the non-suicidal among us. The hitch here is that to resolve this problem we need to get into the head of Genevieve, a pregnant, scared, lovelorn 17-year-old girl living in a provincial French town in the late-50s. Once we in the audience have made this leap, the point is laid bare - Genevieve has no more confidence in the hope of young, romantic love than her mother. She is just as bourgeois and provincial in her outlook, and the idea that Guy hasn't written because he's unable is not her worry, since she is convinced that his love, as hers, is destined to wither and fade sooner rather than later. That she is proved wrong, that the lovers when united see everything that could have been but wasn't to be, shows the underlying tragedy in this sweet, lovable film.

Oh, one last thing: in addition to the film being as textually and visually rich as it is, it has another thing going for it. Every single word of dialogue is sung, to a magnificent, jazzy score by nouvelle vague favorite, Michel Legrand. I said at the beginning of this little essay that this may be Legrand's best score ever, well, one of the reasons for that is the fact that Legrand was given the opportunity to take over the film, to be a full collaborator. He was able to parley that responsibility into creating a masterpiece of sounds, of recurring, overlapping themes, and of a wash of musical colors as vibrant as those umbrellas adorning Genevieve's mother's shop.

Masculin-Feminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)



A continuing problem I have when talking about movies with friends and casual aquaintances is the eternal question, "What's the movie about?" I think to most people this question relates more to plot than anything else ("this movie's about a man whose niece is kidnapped by Indians and he spends the next decade looking for her"), or in lieu of that, some vague reference to the main characters and their circumstances ("This movie's about a group of people working in the film industry and what happens to them with the coming of 'talkies'"). The problem I have is that, while the above descriptions of The Searchers and Singin' in the Rain indicate I can think that way, I rarely do when contemplating an individual movie. For example, to me, Werckmeister Harmonies isn't about a group of people in a small town on the Hungarian plain, or about the circus coming to town, but rather it's about what happens to a society when reason and rule by law are replaced by superstition and the cult of personality. The people and events of the film are secondary to the core meaning of the film, which is usually some sort of philosophical argument the director is having with himself.

The philospohical argument in Masculin-Feminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966) isn't hard to suss out, given the secondary title of the film, "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola". Clearly Godard's interest in this film is in dissecting youth culture, circa-mid 60s, caught in the counteracting pulls of leftist political awareness and the attraction of (mainly American) commercialism and consumerist pop culture in general. In a sense, given its references to Vietnam, soft drinks, labor union strikes, random violence, Bob Dylan, artsy Scandanavian soft-core porn cinema, American imperialism, birth control methods, and self-aware postmodernist cinema, Masculin-Feminin could be considered the meta-film for the entire decade. That it's probably not even Godard's best film speaks volumes about his mastery of the art during that fascinating decade.

As far as the events go, the plot is so rudimentary it's almost laughable. Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a young Marxist recently discharged from national service, meets Madeline (Chantal Goya), a young aspiring pop star who works at a magazine. Paul simultaneously hits Madeline up for a job while he hits on her. He gets the job, and eventually he gets the girl. Paul moves in with Madeline and her two roomates, one of whom may have feelings for Paul herself. Paul quits his magazine job, and gets another job doing public opinion polling, a nice plot device Godard uses to full effect, as Paul is able to ask a lot of questions to various characters throughout the movie, which allows us to see what Godard thinks the youth of the time think about, well, just about everything. Eventually Madeline becomes a star, gets pregnant, and then Paul dies by falling out of a high-rise apartment window (what an emblematically "mod" way to go.) The End.

Like I said, there's not much to the plot, but that was never the point anyway. The point is that Godard is making the BIG STATEMENT, about youth culture and everything else going on around him. If in La Dolce Vita Fellini was "taking the temperature" of Roman society at a specific place and time, in this film Godard is taking the pulse of an entire planet. So dense is the mise-en-scene, full of random images of pop stars, concert posters, advertising slogans, people running in and out and moving from seat to seat in restaurants, bars, and movie theaters (a common Godard motif) that, even after letting the film digest for several hours one is still dizzy from the activity. Seeing a Godard film is one of the more exhausting activities one can do while remaining seated. In addition to the visuals, the soundscape of the film is incredibly busy, with random gunshots punctuating several scenes, and other offscreen noise obscuring part or all of several conversations. Since what's important in Masculin-Feminin isn't what's going on or even what's being said, but who's saying it and how they are saying it, these distractions help to propel the film forward, and not drag it down.

Possibly the most beautiful thing about Masculin-Feminin is the fact that its beautiful leads, Leaud and Goya, while each representing the opposite pulls of political radicalism and mass consumerism, don't come off as particularly inviting in any intellectual way. Both characters are fairly shallow, with Paul advocating some sort of revolution he possibly doesn't even understand, while Madeline is content to ride the rising tide of stardom to wherever it may take her, even if she doesn't know where and she doesn't know why. For each they are merely doing what their particular "brand" is telling them they want and need. That brand Coca-Cola won out over brand Marx doesn't mean that consumerism is any better than radical politics, but it's sure a lot more fun.

Yesterday I finished compiling the DVD Beaver film list for 2005 (only two months late!) The top 10 films:

Rank	Film	Director	Year	Points
1	2001: A Space Odyssey	Stanley Kubrick	1968	262
2	Vertigo	Alfred Hitchcock	1958	246
3	Ordet	Carl-Theodor Dryer	1955	223
4	Tokyo Story	Yasujiro Ozu	1953	187
5	In the Mood For Love	Wong Kar-Wai	2000	184
6	Sunrise	FW Murnau	1927	176
7	8 1/2	Federico Fellini	1963	159
7	Solyaris	Andrei Tarkovsky	1972	159
9	Dekalog	Krzysztov Kieslowski	1987	158
10	Stalker	Andrei Tarkovsky	1979	155

The best directors?

I ran across the website called They Shoot Pictures, Don't They which compiled this master list of the 1,000 greatest films ever. They combined all these other lists from Sight and Sound, The New York Times, YMDb, etc., fiddled with the numbers (probably a lot) and came up with a list that they continue to update as their sources get changed. Geek that I am, I imported the list into Access and generated the following rank order of directors, based on the number of films they had on the list.

• Ford, John (16)
• Godard, Jean-Luc (14)
• Hitchcock, Alfred (13)
• Kurosawa, Akira (13)
• Bergman, Ingmar (13)
• Mizoguchi, Kenji (12)
• Visconti, Luchino (12)
• Bunuel, Luis (12)
• Fellini, Federico (12)
• Renoir, Jean (11)
• Kubrick, Stanley (11)
• Hawks, Howard (10)

It's criminal that Mizoguchi has 12 films on the list, yet only one is available on DVD in R1. He's probably the most overlooked great director of all-time. Also astonishing is the fact that every film Stanley Kubrick made, after his initial two films from the early 50s, made the list. 11/13 ain't too bad.

Women and film

"Now there is no reason to prevent anybody from making a film. The technology exists, the equipment is much cheaper than it was, the post-production facilities are on a laptop computer, the entire equipment to make a film can go in a couple of cases and be carried as hand luggage on a plane. There is nothing to stop people making films."

"I could write a short thesis on why there were so many men in the film industry and I'd say it was to do with the weight of the equipment. One can understand how a hierarchy of men, a film crew, has built up. In order for us to handle 100 to 150 large men who are carrying equipment almost like an army unit, then it makes sense to put a man in charge of all of that because there are gender issues about control and authority. Just like in the armed forces. The fact is that in the modern film industry those physical conditions no longer prevail; therefore there is no crude, physical reason why it should be so male-dominated."

"Film is very important to our culture - it is the main story-telling medium. If it's not representational both of either the gender or race of the culture in which we live, it is an incomplete picture. So it's crucial that women are reflected in the statistics of how many directors there are. What do women bring to film-making? They bring a female perspective and, in a way, that's enough. To argue what a female perspective is not really my place, but I know it when I see it!"

- director Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode)

I received New Yorker's release of L'Argent yesterday. I was really tired by the time I eventually got home so I only watched about the first half hour of the film, one I've never seen before. So far it's excellent, with a good transfer that is a PAL-->NTSC conversion that has some slight ghosting, but not an extreme amount. I hope to watch the rest tonight.

28 Days Later...



"What do you mean there's no government? There's always a government, they're in a bunker or a plane somewhere!"

28 Days Later... is an interesting yet flawed film, which purports to be a horror film but instead mutates into a commentary on social values and life in contemporary Britain. A horrific plague of sorts is unleashed when animal rights activists free a group of monkeys infected with "rage" onto the public. This "rage" is contagious through blood exchanges, soon turning Britain into a wasteland. 28 days later, a young man (Jim) wakes up in a hospital room, having been unconscious since before the outbreak. He makes his way through now-deserted London, and is discovered by two other survivors, Selena and Mark. They fill him in on the particulars of what's happened to society the previous two fortnights, and then steel him to the fact that everyone is dead, and he better get over it, now. This group manages to find a pair of other survivors, and eventually attempts to travel to a military outpost north of Manchester, where a faint radio broadcast promises "salvation".

The entire plot is far too involved and convoluted to recount here, but the group (most of it, anyway), makes it to the military facility, which is run by Major Henry West (frequent Boyle star Christopher Eccleston). The group's hope for a return to something approaching normal society are rendered problematic by the fact that, in the absence of any overarching political, societal, or bureaucratic structures, the military arm will tend to revert to a more primitive notion of societal values.

The issues raised in 28 Days Later... are, needless to say, quite disturbing. At its basest level this is a film about what happens to people when societal structures collapse, a la Wiliiam Golding's The Lord of the Flies. As such, it in many ways covers the same ground as Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, but on a much larger canvas. When in a fight for survival, is it practical to form alliances with others, or can you only rely on ones self? Are colleagues' deficiencies in some areas counterbalanced by strengths in others? And most importantly, what is the nature of human society at its basest level? Are we or are we not advanced from other primates, or will we ultimately, when faced with a bitter struggle for survival, revert to more animalistic behaviors?

Needless to say, since I was led to believe that 28 Days Later... was nothing more than a zombie movie, the fact that it tried to wrestle with such issues at all was a pleasant surprise. That it was not a complete success is quite forgivable, in light of the fast-paced plot, uniformly good acting, and interesting visuals.

3/5