The General

Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL is one of the most ingenious films I have ever seen. It tells in a nutshell of a railroad engineer who, after being rejected by the army in the civil war, and thus his girl for seeming to have not enlisted, is engaged in a locomotive chase into enemy lines all to rescue his train: The General. In the film, Keaton's serious man who is here named Johnnie Gray is always determined and, for lack of a better term, hard working. We are told he loves two things in life: his girl, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) and his train: the General. As the film opens of Johnnie going to his girls house, a wonderfully simple, but calculated joke is being played on him as a few boys closely mirror his movements and walk right behind him. They are joined by Annabelle Lee, the very person whose house Johnnie is going to (but he has no idea that they are all behind him). When he reaches the house, knocks on the door and finds the boys and Annabelle behind him, he merely straightens up and doesn't allow luck to bash him down. This is the central force behind THE GENERAL and its comedy: luck. Johnnie Gray in his locomotive chase is quite unlucky for it to have been the very train he loves to be taken away, and in many turns of fate, he is unlucky. Especially in one scene where he finds a cannon, we see and exclaim how strange, but lucky it is that he would find it. But things balance out, and the cannon, after being loaded, is tipped downward and threatens to kill Gray. There is a balance of luck within THE GENERAL that allows for everything that occurs within it to never seem persuasive in one way or another. Also, Keaton's character is a southerner, and in the chase, everyone is rooting for him to defeat the evil northerners. I saw this film at Santa Fe's Lensic with the Alloy Orchestra. It is the only time I will ever hear Santa Fe liberals rooting for the South in the Civil War. This, again, is a tribute to Keaton's genius. Only 60 years after the Civil War, he makes his character on the wrong side of the war. I see this as a statement to the universal nature of comedy, nothing more or less. Keaton's film is also deceptively called THE GENERAL, which provokes one to think it will be a war film, and then in the opening scene we see that the general is merely a train, but then Keaton takes us back to a war film. Apart from being wonderful to look at, THE GENERAL is a feat of moviemaking in its spectacle. There are no special effects in 1926, and thus everything that occurs in the film is real. That is courageous of a filmmaker. There's an advanced comedy, nobility, and self-awareness to THE GENERAL. It speaks through time and doesn't age.
The General: ★★★★

The Exterminating Angel

Luis Buñuel is a surrealist filmmaker. This is hard to accomplish within the realm of film, for many gestures can be taken as wanton or purposeful ones. But when Buñuel tells his story in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, things fall into place seamlessly. He begins with a party. The servants are strangely leaving, they all have different reasons, none of which are very convincing. All they know is that they must leave. The guest arrive. They actually arrive twice, once from a low angle shot, the second time from a high angle shot. Nevertheless, despite these strange beginnings, the party goes well, and far into the night. A woman plays the piano, people gossip, and by the time its around 5am, everyone just stays the night. However, when the morning comes, small groups of people begin to discuss why no one has made any attempt to leave the room. As this realization becomes apparent within the group as a whole, they panic. There is no explanation for why no one can leave. And no one can get inside the house as well. "We sent soldiers in around 6PM and now they're back at home enjoying a drink". "They never really tried to get in." Buñuel handles the material well, his actors are intense and focused, plotting and complex. But despite their schemes, the simple answer to their predicament would be to just walk out the front door. They are not able. I do not know what Buñuel's statement here is. It is clear that he believes that in confined, claustrophobic spaces, people become savage. But why can the guests not leave? Why are they stuck? My theory is that this is a statement on complacency or perhaps even on laziness. Are they not convicted enough? Do they think they will be saved, and thus wait? Either way, Buñuel's surreal film is wonderfully crafted, and a joy to be puzzled with.
The Exterminating Angel: ★★★★

True Heart Susie

TRUE HEART SUSIE begins with a feminist titlecard, warning us of the few rights we give to women. The film was made in 1919, when such issues were pertinent, and yet the human story of D.W. Griffith's silent film: TRUE HEART SUSIE seems just as real. Susie is in love with William, and under Griffith's ease with the camera in brilliant yellow and blue tones, we revel in their love. William looks kind of goofy, and Susie (Lillian Gish) is described as merely a "plain girl". Susie won't marry an uneducated man, and William is too poor to pay for college. Susie thus makes a sacrifice unbeknownst to William, and sells her best friend, a cow for money. Susie and her mother look sadly upon the departing cow, and the true of heart Susie begs the man to consider her "part of the family." William goes to college, and when he returns, he appears manly: with his hair back and a dashing mustache. Susie discovers that by sending William to college, that she herself is now beneath him. William is an educated minister now, and she is just a plain girl. William marries Bettina, a party-girl, and Susie is devastated in real scenes that show her screwed up face or her stoic stare. I love TRUE HEART SUSIE. It was a great film experience in its intelligence and ease. I think the film is more than a feminist statement, and undeserving of the term "you have to see this" when its delivered to a feminist. You have to see this, because it is about people and how they act. It's political, romantic, beautiful, transcendent, creative.
True Heart Susie: ★★★★

Strangers on a Train

The 1951 film, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is quite the accomplishment. It features great acting, and Hitchcock's recognizably pleasing direction. It was co-written by Raymond Chandler, and is about two strangers, one a lazy psychopath, the other a tennis player, who meet on a train and plot to kill each other's annoyances. Robert Walker (the psychopath) and Farley Granger (the tennis player) are the two men, who talk of this prospect. It would be perfect. No one would suspect, and neither could be implicated in the other's crime. But when Granger leaves the train for his hometown, the idea leaves his head, as he was never actually serious about it. But the completely serious Walker goes through with the plot, and kills Granger's troublesome wife. This shocks Granger, and now Walker expects Granger to kill his father. Walker plays such a great character, fiddling around with Granger's lighter which could implicate him in the crime, going to tennis matches, and in the midst of the people looking back and forth stares straight ahead. Hitchcock uses his trademark obsession of items, showing us Walker while the camera sits beside the lighter, and obsessing over a certain style of glasses. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is a damn good Hitchcock film.
Strangers on a Train: ★★★1/2

The Searchers

The Searchers was one of the most life-changing films I have ever seen. It deals with a mysticism created by John Wayne (the quintessential cowboy) who enters into a journey for a lost girl to indian tribes and brutally searches for her under the worst of landscapes, but the most beautiful from afar and from the camera's lens. Directed by one of the greatest of American directors, John Ford, the film seeps with realism rather than sappiness. There is a hardness and grit to Wayne's character that evokes a languor and an unmatched sadness with a quick hand for a gun. This is a man who is hateful because he has been injured. When Wayne mutilates the body of a dead indian to ensure his block towards the holy land, we see that he does it because of a hatred that has been implanted into his character. Wayne's cowboy lives on the plains outside of politics and rhetoric, and on those plains it is a singular gun that ensures safety or death. The complexities raised by Ford's film seeps into the American landscape of film, it shows a man who literally rides in on a horse to save a community from a dubious problem. It is the beauty of the cowboy western to have the scene where he gives a last, stoic look towards those who needed help, and then rides off, leaving the town desolate and solitary to fight for itself. Perhaps the purpose of Wayne's cowboy is to serve as an example for a community, but to show the imperfection of a figure who is supposedly immersed in goodness. A great film, and more elegiac than the most "serious" of films.

After Dark, My Sweet

After Dark, My Sweet is a film directed by James Foley. The man has a forgettable name, and that's too bad, for his talent is under-appreciated: as seen in this film and in Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps the hidden genius within his films allow for him to go unnoticed. For, in After Dark, My Sweet there are scenes and cuts that you only fully realize later. The film is languorous--steamy under Californian skies and ambivalent. Many of the things that actually happen in the film happen because the characters were bored. They are so empty and lazy, that they allow for insanity to seep into their lives. Consider the main character: Collie (Jason Patric). He is strange and too amicable among those who should not be given a second look. He seems to do things out of a shrug. "What else was I gonna do?". One day at a bar, Collie meets Fay (Rachel Ward) after a scuffle with the barman. She drunkenly takes him home and offers him work, but after Collie meets the odd Uncle Bud, he flees. He eventually returns after fleeing from a doctor who suspects he is insane. Now that he's accepted this odd menagerie of people, he allows the insanity of Uncle Bud to pervade his life. The trio decide to kidnap a young boy, and all goes to hell. This is a noir film, and that was probably inevitable. There is so much anti-life in After Dark, My Sweet that it becomes sort of fascinating. The movie is no easy watch, for it is constantly challenging and languorous. And then at the end, we get to see everything that we have already seen in a new light. After Dark, My Sweet is so odd and contemplative, that it becomes sort of great.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11 quite ideally fits the definition of an essential movie. For, it is a movie that regards a certain time in American history that is of great importance. Fahrenheit also succeeds in the regard of a documentary. For, whatever your views, the way that it places out things and events make them sort of undebatable. There really isn't much arguing to be had against many of the things director Michael Moore offers up in his documentary. If anything, there might be some quibbles to make about his technique, and how it is almost steaming with emotion. However, these emotional moments make sense in the context of the film, and I had no problems with it. Of all of Moore's films, Fahrenheit is his most smooth, his most solid. Not only is it a great documentary in its multiple exposures, but it is a great record of a time. I do not wish to discuss the politics of the film, for that job resides within the film. Rather, it should be discussed how well the film was made by Moore (for that is overshadowed by the message). For, Fahrenheit 9/11 has been made in a very clever way. It tells a story. A story most of us already know, but in the film it dismantles the story and analyzes it. There's humor, there's silliness, there's seriousness, and there's atrocity. The film could not be constantly a downer, and so humor exists. The film could not constantly be serious or preachy, so there are numerous interviews and clips that add to the experience. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a great film, and essential due to its subject matter.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a good a film as Woody Allen has ever made. He's a director who tends to use his films to work out his own problems, and sometimes it doesn't come off well either because it wasn't a pressing problem, or because he really needed to get a grip (as in Whatever Works). With Crimes and Misdemeanors we really have two separate films, that, in the end, converge beautifully. The first story centers around an older man named Judah (Martin Landau). He's a successful ophthalmologist, but his love life is complicated. He's married to Miriam (Claire Boom) a woman he goes through the motions with. He's having an affair with Dolores (Anjelica Huston). The affair has been going on for two years and Dolores is beginning to get hasty and emotional. She wants Judah to leave his wife, but it's clear that he doesn't intend to. So, she plans to give up their secret to Miriam. Judah gets frightened, and has Dolores killed. He experiences terrible guilt, and feels his past loom up behind him. The second story centers around the Woody Allen character: Cliff. He's a documentary filmmaker who is making a film (just for the money) about a man he hates: Lester (a successful and arrogant man played by Alan Alda). But Cliff is afraid, he's married to a woman he knows will leave him soon, and he spends his days going to 40's films with his niece. Most of the comedy in the film resides in this portion of the film, but tragedy emerges as Cliff's fears emerge: he's terribly frightened that the woman he loves (played by Mia Farrow) will choose Lester over himself. Now, Crimes and Misdemeanors would be a good film if it had just been left to the witty comments and amusing neuroticism. Actually, if it had just been that, it would've ended up being just another entry into Woody Allen's body of work. However, the film has a Sound and the Fury tone to it, where all of the tragedy and evil that befalls the characters just makes them more interesting to consider. To regard. It is the most mature of all of Allen's works, and probably the least repetitive. It's probably his greatest film.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

To start off, it should be mentioned that the actual construction of this film is done masterfully. From the use of repetition to suspense to absolute vastness of material and the appropriate and tasteful conjoining of that material, Dear Zachary is an excellent documentary. We begin with the murder of the father (mentioned in the title). His suspected killer is now pregnant with his son: Zachary. The film chronicles the attempt to put his killer in jail and keep Zachary safe. The intent of the film (at first) is to show the mass of people that cared for the murdered man. The filmmaker wishes to then present the film as a sort of gift to Zachary (who would never know his father). Plans go astray, for during the making of the film, some horrendous things happen. The greatness of Dear Zachary is in its construction, what occurs within it is awful, except for the love of the relatives and the perseverance of the murdered man's parents. Dear Zachary is a great documentary.
Dear Zachary: ✰✰✰✰

Magnolia

Magnolia is over three hours long, and yet, I never even for a moment found my mind wandering. Rather, I was completely captivated from the opening documentary scenes to the inexplicably strange and absolute end. The opening documentary I refer to is completely separate to the events in the story. Instead, it offers some explanation for life. It covers three strange events. The first: A man from Greenberryhill is killed by three men: Mr. Green, Mr. Berry, and Mr. Hill. The second: A man is lifted from the water while he scuba-dives by a fire control plane picking up water. The man conducting the plane got into a scuffle with the scuba-diver days earlier. He kills himself in confusion and depression after the scuba-diver's death. The third and most interesting: A man jumps from a building and on his descent is shot with a shotgun. The shotgun was shot by his mother. He loaded the shotgun days earlier hoping that she would kill his father. In his attempted suicide, he would have failed if not for the shotgun, for nets had been installed for window workers the previous day. The mother is arrested for homicide, and the deceased is named as an accomplice in his own death. After this, we are immediately thrust into the story, and a series of vignettes connect a group of around seven or eight people. There are a lot of great actors in the film: Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy to name a brief few. They act the film with such emotion, such poignancy. The entire film covers subjects from death to depression. The stories include a man who is dying of cancer, two women addicted to drugs, a whizz kid forced to compete on game shows, a middle aged man who thinks he needs braces, a cop, a sex motivational speaker. They all convene in themes of depression or some other form of connectedness. What occurs in the film is intriguing, but more intriguing is why what's happening to them is happening to them. In the last scene of the film, something extraordinary and unexpected happens. It surprises these characters and shatters their world. Magnolia is a complicated allegory for life. It exhibits the strangeness of life, and the importance of surprises. Great.
Magnolia: ★★★★

The Shawshank Redemption

Shawshank is a film that most everyone likes. It manages to be endearing and constantly amiable, even when it's sad or cruel. Perhaps it's because Shawshank has a happy ending. But it's popularity doesn't dwindle the greatness of Shawshank. It's a great story, penned originally by Stephen King in novella form. It tells of Andy Dufrense (Tim Robbins) who is sent to jail after being convicted of murder--the murder of his wife. However, Andy is innocent. In prison he meets Red (Morgan Freeman) and over the span of about thirty years, they become best friends. We see a lot of intriguing stuff in Shawshank. We see a man who's been in prison so long he doesn't know how to act in the real world when he's finally released. We see cruel prison guards, manipulative wardens. And yet, Andy is invigorated by Red to keep alive within prison. At first he drifts into depression, and yet Red gives him the drive to keep working. Andy works in the library at the prison, he does the tax returns for all of the guards, he gains the confidence of the warden. This might all seem like small achievements, but in the context of prison, these show the need to be important even within the heart of hell. There's so much injustice, so much love in Shawshank that it becomes more than just a prison movie. Rather, it becomes the story of a life. The story of most lives. The Shawshank Redemption is a great film.

My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin is a man who is not concerned with making a film with a linear story or even a story. My Winnipeg isn't really even a narrative film. It's mostly a dream. Maddin attempts to show us his town: Winnipeg, through his own eyes, what it means to him. Through beautiful, soothing, and eloquent poetry, we are taken through the history of the film. I have never seen a stranger scene than this: It's the dead of winter and something comes into the stables of Winnipeg one morning. Perhaps it was a mouse or some other rodent, but it spooked the horses. They all ran away and into the Winnipeg river, where they were frozen to death. For months afterwards, the people of Winnipeg would have picnics around the frozen heads of the horses. There isn't really much more to say about My Winnipeg. There's a lot of scenes like the previous one I described. We don't know what's real and we don't really care. We are completely given over to the hands of Guy Maddin, and the journey he takes us on is dreamy and intriguing.
My Winnipeg: ★★★★

The Big Lebowski

It's kind of against the movie to write a review for it, but here agoes: The Big Lebowski is purely a Coen Brother picture. It's not concerned with story (although there's a lot of it) but concerned with conveying a certain mood. With Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, that mood is pretty well conveyed. The Dude is a lazy-ass, he walks around in shorts, sandals, pajamas and a bathrobe. He steals milk and loves to bowl. His life is how it is and he likes it. The laziness of The Dude is perfectly done by Jeff Bridges, it's a great character. Everyone else in the movie is great too: the uptight essential-nurse (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the sexual and probably retarded mexican guy named Jesus (John Turturro), the trophy wife (Tara Reid), the Vietnam vet who tears people's ears off (John Goodman), and "shut the fuck up" Donnie (Steve Buscemi). Everyone here has their own specific lifestyle, and no convoluted noir-like plot is going to fuck that up. To talk any more than I have would be an insult to the movie's lazi-
The Big Lebowski (so yeah, it's fucking hilarious): ★★★★

Laura

Laura is a film noir directed by the great Otto Preminger. It's filled with dodgy imagery, impending doom, and illusions. We open, and a tragedy has already occurred. Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is dead. A detective (one of those fast talking and blunt kind of detective replete in film noir and played by Dana Andrews) is on the case. He interviews Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a popular mogul who is infatuated with Laura. He interviews her fiancé (Vincent Price) who was also deeply attracted to her. As the case moves on and new things come to light, the detective himself becomes entranced by a painting of Laura. We get a lot of backstory then, about the relationships the fiancé and Lydecker had with Laura. The suspense here is pretty great, Laura is dead, but who the murderer is, is executed better than most films. It's elevated by the good acting and the clever direction as well. Tricks with shadows and characters who seem so constantly frightened makes it great.

Persona

Ingmar Bergman was the prolific and influential Swedish filmmaker for decades, who made films in order to fix whatever inner problems he was dealing with. From the absence of God in his life to pure evil, Bergman's films are mature, if not sometimes overwhelmingly muddled. Persona is his best film. It deals with the soul. We open with a series of images: an erect penis, a boy waking from sleep and putting his hand up to the superimposed face of a woman, snow, stairs. We then meet Elisabet (Liv Ullman). She was a stage actress until all the pain in the world became too much and she fell permanently silent--mute. At the hospital, the doctors decide to send Elisabet to the shore with Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson). Who are these women? They look so much alike, Elisabet so strange, Alma so strange. We learn of Alma's sexual encounter on a beach in one of the best sequences in all of film. We first watch the scene from Alma's point of view, and then from Elisabet's. It's about a ten minute sequence--it's wonderful. Alma and Elisabet co-exist in the world, they see the same things, they've lived similar lives. The way the film ends, the revelations that Bergman gives us are so great, so interesting, that it all makes Persona one of the best films of all time.

Elephant

Elephant is a twisted movie. It is the scariest and most harrowing film I have ever seen. I have never been so absolutely disgusted and felt as sick to my stomach than the last twenty minutes of Gus Van Sant's masterpiece. We open and are introduced to around three or four high school kids. One's father is a drunk, the other is ugly--thus an outcast, and another is a zealous photographer who goes through the motions of developing film with as languid a pace as the film itself. I could eat a meal while watching the first hour. It's so sweet and gorgeously filmed, the characters are so authentic and effuse auras of high schoolers. And yet, the first hour is creepy. The color palette is uncomfortably pallid, the tension and problems as familiar as the real high school hallways I walk. And then...disaster. In recent days, we got a terrible spree killer, a lunatic, across the headlines of the news. We try to rationalize it. We try to place the blame on specific mediums like the television or some idiot head banger. Elephant gorgeously suggests otherwise. Perhaps crazy just wells up out of life, out of tension, out of the world. In the last twenty minutes of Elephant as sadistic killers roam the halls, we understand that there is no rationalizing evil.

2001: A Space Odyssey

The great Stanley Kubrick worked in secret on 2001, his most poetic and impenetrable film. The film opens with a long sequence of music, the pounding and urgent score to: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. The acting is 2001 isn't very good, it's essentially filler, the characters use small talk when they do talk, and the real personality is in the computer HAL-9000. HAL is the main operating device of the spaceship that hurdles through space (we've just seen a precursor of the evolution of man prompted by a monolith) and man is now in great danger as HAL gains a consciousness and reasoning. HAL realizes that he doesn't really need man anymore, he's so perfect and man is so fallible, that man is practically holding HAL back from his next step (his evolution). So HAL goes haywire, and man has to fight for his life. This is not the main point of 2001, but merely the story. It is rather the realistic spectacle and thought process and confusion of 2001 which makes it such an interesting film. Many people take from it different things. I'm not positive about this, but during its first screening, there wasn't a single theory that overlapped into someone else's about the film. This is what makes a movie great: that it effects you even after it's over, and that it might change what you think.

Dracula

I'm afraid (haha) that Dracula is the kind of film I trenchantly admire and few else do. It seems quite long, the beginning especially, the audio blows, and the visuals and killings are done with such phantasmagoria that they can be seen as foolish and not scary. But I believe Dracula to be the most admirable of the old horror films, as well as one of the first films that took an effect upon me. Prior to films like this one, I thought of film as purely a matter of spectacle: Show me something cool and I'll buy the tickets. But Dracula is such a visual experience that that is why it took such an effect upon me. It's so damn atmospheric and creepy that I was totally immersed in the film. I believed in a world. I believed in the culture that existed here, where women are the sex toys to men like Count Dracula. The fear and mounting tension, the catacombic aura, and the stoic face of the great Bela Lugosi affected me in a way that made me love films.

Notorious

A while back I gave Hitchcock a bad review for Rope. It sucked, but the point is that I tried to redeem myself by reviewing The Lady Vanishes. That's a great film, but I still felt as if I was selling Hitchcock short. Thus, I present one of the top ten greatest films ever made: Notorious. This film seeps with life, it's sexy, it's thrilling, it's moving, it's funny, it's sad, it's gorgeous. Roger Ebert calls it "the best expression of the master's visual style". Well, it is. There's no more beautiful a Hitchcock film than this (although North by Northwest comes awful close). But in Notorious we get close up's of a finger that is the only part of the body not in character, we get keys hidden in hands that have no business being there as we go from a shot of an entire body to that scintillating key. And then the story, as good as any Hitchcock ever concocted: Alice Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is the daughter of a well renowned Nazi. She herself is loyal to the Allies. The government seeks her out after the death of her father, and a man named Devlin (Cary Grant) drives the drunken girl home after a party. He convinces her to help the Allies, and she is sent off to Rio de Janeiro to infiltrate a group of Nazi's headed by the evil man who used to be in love with her: Alex Sebastian (Claude Raines). But Devlin and Huberman fall in love, Devlin is furious in his shell of a body as he must give her up for the sake of the Allies to a Nazi. This pain is so apparent and gorgeously done it's inexplicable. More so, the pain and dirt Huberman is dragged through is more affecting. She must, at one point, deliver Sebastian to hell. He will either be killed by his Nazi friends, or she will fail at her task and be killed herself. Notorious is so well-done a film that it will stand as one of the best of all time. It was made in 1946. It features a stellar cast, and it is directed with a masterful hand. It's probably the best film Hitchcock ever made.

The Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter is one of those films that is shockingly great. It is not only one of my personal favorite films of all time, but I think, one of the actual best shot ever. Technically, German Expressionism is apparent throughout Night of the Hunter, lines and angles feel like they shouldn't be stopping at the screen, they appear crude and gorgeous. It's one of the best looking pictures ever made. It's also a fantasy, and at a level higher than that which fantasy usually offers. We get shots of the dead underneath the fishing-poles of children, animals who resemble the people in the film in their deviousness, and a seeping fear throughout. The tale is of a preacher (Robert Mitchum) who marries into the decent American family, and shatters them from the inside out. On his left knuckles, he has written: Hate. On his right: Love. The film is about how things can go awry in a nightmarish sense, and then how classically good values can fight that evil. This is apparent within the film with Lillian Gish playing a kindly but stern matron figure. There is never any outstanding violence in the film, but the sense that that violence is about to come out, or that it has happened without anyone noticing. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is a superior film.