The Train - 1964 - 3 Stars

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield
Director: John Frankenheimer

There's not much use for the black and white action film, I realized while watching The Train. There are some interesting sequences, but we're reminded by every frame that we're watching something old that happened to someone else. The film also runs an unwieldy 140+ minutes - an interesting exploration of war and its effect on people, yes, but Bridge On The River Kwai this is not.

One thing I found funny about The Train is that there must've been a scene out of Barton Fink regarding its casting - everyone in the film is either French or German, but they speak only English with accents. However, Burt Lancaster, our hero, is the one person who speaks the President's English, with no attempt to hide the fact that he is American (e.g. he uses American metaphors). One imagines a pained studio executive ranting to the director about how Americans want to see American pictures with American heroes, and Burt Lancaster's got to talk the way people want him too, dammit. Frankenheimer has a similar setup almost 35 years later with many accented people and one American protagonist in Ronin, but at least there people speak their native language when it's called for (and Robert Deniro is actually American in the film).

Traffic - 2000 - 3 Stars

Actors: Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro
Director: Steven Soderbergh

I mistrust films with multiple, interweaving stories - I hated Magnolia, I don't particularly like Short Cuts, I've grown to dislike Syriana, and even Pulp Fiction has some dud scenes. Traffic is an Important Film with a Message, and its insistence on melodrama seems to be an uphill battle against the difficulties that interweaving stories create - once we're really getting into a story, the director brings us somewhere else. We're like a child who wanders in during the middle of a movie...

I did like the different filters and camera styles used to denote exactly which story we're in; the directing generally was top-notch. Even though the beginning of the film's multiple references to alcohol could win a Hamhandedness Award for Not-So-Subtle Subtlety, sometimes painting with a broad brush is the best choice.

Hoop Dreams - 1994 - 4½ Stars

Director: Steve James

There are 12 men on an NBA basketball roster, and there are 30 teams. Some elementary math shows there's 360 NBA roster spots. How can a person believe themselves capable of meeting every challenge necessary to make it there? This documentary film shows two gifted young players' journey towards the NBA and towards manhood.

I wouldn't even dream of spoiling this movie because it's not a movie - its 'endings' are that of existence. At several points I would chastise myself for predicting the future - I've been honed by Hollywood and sports movies to know what's coming. What it eventually impresses upon us is that illusions are no way to run a life, but for some they're the best way; our hopes are brittle and beautiful and necessary.

Weekend - 1967 - 2 Stars/Incomplete

Actors: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

I've commented before that I should not hold older films accountable for sins of future films. But I'm about to with the hateful and plotless Weekend - for starters, Weekend breaks the fourth wall several times, and I hate fourth wall breaking, it's insanely lazy and uncreative. The fact that there's even a term for it that you and I all know says enough. It may have been radical to suggest that actors are aware they are in a film in 1967 (I doubt it, but it may have been), but now it just comes across as sloven filmmaking - the explanation of the joke to make sure we're all in on it.

Satires of the bourgoisie are also insanely easy - show them as hateful, vain, degraded, debauched, animalistic, it's a real crowd pleaser. Set them against the joy/wonders that art creates and the production of the farmer. Wouldn't it be great if we were all artist/farmers? I sure think so.

I debated whether or not to turn the film off - finally someone said something like, 'I can't take anymore!' and I realized that I couldn't either. Godard may elevate the artist in this film and he is a great one himself, but in making Weekend he forgot the first rule of art - art has to be engrossing and it has to be interesting to someone else other than the artist.

A Night At The Opera - 1935 - 3 Stars

Actors: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx
Director: Sam Wood

Would that I came from a time and place where long musical interludes in film didn't feel like a total bore, but thankfully I come from a time and place with a fast forward button.

The Graduate - 1967 - 4 Stars

Actors: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Banecroft
Director: Mike Nichols

As I said during my The Princess Bride review, it's real tough to think about a film such as this that has been endlessly parodied and referenced. The good news is that I didn't actually know the full plot of the film, which ventures into some rather dark and Freudian places for a supposedly 'classic' film. It also manages to be about the Sixties without jamming all sorts of Sixties symbols down my throat, compared to e.g. Forrest Gump. Ultimately, the characters are intentionally caricatures and the plot rather unbelievable, but there are some fabulous scenes that result regardless.

Note: Spoilers ahead

The film also happens to be one of those insane fantasies that can only exist on the page or celluloid - young, timorous lad gets seduced by his parents' friends mother, then her daughter wants to sex him. Thankfully the movie washes that away at the end by declaring their lust to be only symbolic - they're attracted to each other because they're not like their parents. I would've knocked off an entire star had Dustin Hoffman and his beloved embraced at the very end.

Also of note that the famous 'You're trying to seduce me, aren't you?' is far, far better in the film - I'd never heard it with the squeaky up note that Dustin Hoffman puts on the 'aren't you?'; I'd always figured it was a rhetorical question.

Stranger Than Paradise - 1984 - 4 Stars

Actors: Eszter Balint, John Lurie
Director: Jim Jarmusch

Note: Minor spoilers ahead

When I queue a movie, I try to find out as little about it as possible, even going so far as to avoid reading the little summary that Netflix provides. This way I have as close to zero expectations as possible. Stranger than Paradise opens with a terrible scene where we hear one side of a phone conversation; it's a classic film trope, where people don't talk at all how they actually do on the phone (i.e. they repeat the person's name every time they talk to them, repeat what they said back to them, etc.), but it provides exposition without the character just staring at the camera and telling us what's about to happen. With this scene, my expectations turned to less than zero, but the film turns out to be pretty damned good with some surprising twists along the way.

Stranger than Paradise has an 'I could have done that' feel to it; I have a dingy, spare apartment; I can hire actors; I can come up with not-very-interesting dialogue, and I can find a Morton Feldman imitator somewhere to score the film. What makes Stranger than Paradise a brilliant Cassavetes-style movie is all of things left unsaid and the way the characters' relationships change throughout the story. The film appears to be pieced together, but whether it is luck or excellent design, those pieces add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

One of the trade-offs to making a story like this is that the characters have to be pretty un self-aware and therefore appear almost buffoonish and/or bland, i.e. the 'protagonist' really doesn't know anyone or anywhere to visit besides Cleveland in the winter. Most characters in films are smarter than the average person, they're more 'in control', they can say really quick-witted things when they're being shot at, etc. - in these more independent ventures, the characters tend to have circumstances and Fate control them in ways they cannot grasp.

Top Movies of the Decade

The Onion AV Club, my go-to source for movie reviews, put out their list of the top 50 films of the 2000s today. There's a lot of huge surprises on there, and it got me to thinking about a personal list - the 2000s have had some great films, but nothing iconic; i suppose 'iconic' status is given to films well after their release date. Nonetheless, I decided I would come up with my own top ten list, as well as five others which I really liked.

10. The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson, 2001
9. City of God, Lund, 2002
8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry, 2004
7. There Will Be Blood, P. Anderson, 2007
6. The Wrestler, Aronofsky, 2008
5. Oldboy, Park, 2003
4. In Bruges, McDonagh, 2008
3. 25th Hour, Lee, 2002
--------
2. No Country For Old Men, Coen Brothers, 2007
1. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch, 2001

Notes on the above list:

I don't watch that many new films, e.g. I've still not seen Kill Bill, Batman Begins, and many others.

The line notes the two films I think are the best - there's a significant dropoff after that, and the 8 above those two are pretty much interchangeable.

Five favorites which don't belong on that list for one reason or another:

Funny People, Apatow, 2009
Big Fan, Siegel, 2009
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, McKay, 2004
Amores Perros, Inarritu, 2000
The Dark Knight, Nolan, 2008

Anyway, I'm curious what the 3 or 4 loyal readers think - what am I missing out on?

Oldboy - 2003 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Min-sik Choi, Hye-jyong Kang
Director: Chan-wook Park

Considering the ratings I've been giving out, it would be easy to say that I am a too-lenient critic. While Brazil could've easily been given 3½ stars, and Doubt likewise, don't let the rave reviews for everything fool you: this is a great film.

Three things I want to cover:

If I had to make a choice between destroying all the films in the world, or destroying all the books in the world, it'd be easy: so long The What Have You, you're now a George Eliot blog. The printed word is a much better framework to discuss ideas - with film, there's seventy things going on at once, and it's hard for me to imagine a discussion on even a particular film being focused. Film has its virtues, and one of its greatest is the ability to quickly jump between time without all sorts of explanation - more like the way our own minds operate with memory and imagination. Oldboy takes advantage of what film has to offer, making fabulous use of flashback and flash forward.

In a certain genre of film - noirs and comedies especially - the movie's pleasurable climax is often in the first third of the film. By the end, I'm just waiting for the film to play out the string so I can go do something else. Oldboy bucks this trend - the film got better and more interesting as it went along.

Last, and there's some very minor spoilers, but here is the facepalm-worthy summary of Oldboy provided by Netflix: "With no clue to how he came to be imprisoned, drugged, and tortured for 15 years, and no one to hold accountable for his suffering, a desperate businessman seeks revenge on his captors, relying on assistance from a friendly waitress." This is worse than the summary on the back of The Big Lebowski, which states that the Dude's rug really made the room 'hang together'.

Brazil - 1985 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jonathan Pryce, Robert Deniro
Director: Terry Gilliam

Dystopic movies often have a long uphill climb towards being entertaining because they first have to introduce the film's world without a lot of clunky exposition. Most dystopic films do so via long lectures (e.g. The Matrix, Logan's Run) that tend to end up, like, well, clunky exposition. Brazil refreshingly just throws the viewer right into the quagmire. This makes for a sprawling mess of a film full of half-realized tangents and oddball quirks. That's okay - the film seems to revel in its imperfectness as a way of form following function - i.e. its imperfectness can be explained away by its being created by artistic human beings who make mistakes, as opposed to the faceless bureaucrats portrayed in the film.

It seems no accident that Brazil was made in 1985, as it is an update of Orwell's 1984. Once again, it lacks 1984's clunky (yet fascinating) exposition - we are really left with no idea where in the world our characters are, how they came to be, etc. Gilliam is instead interested in the internal - the effect of this future society on a 'normal' person.

Doubt - 2008 - 4 Stars

Actors: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Director: John Patrick Shanley

Legendary director Howard Hawks once observed that the best films have two great scenes and no bad ones. He did not say what happens when a movie has three great scenes and one bad one. Doubt is such a movie - an amazingly well-constructed film that still falls short of greatness. However, one attribute of a good film is that it takes your expectations and messes with them - Doubt has this in spades.

Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman have been great actors for so long that it's barely worth noting just how good they are in anything; it is awesome that they share the same space in this film.

Scanners - 1980 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside
Director: David Cronenberg

Do you like sci-fi movies? Do you like movies with lots of people writhing in agony? Do you like movies about all-powerful corporate conglomerates? Do you feel that not enough films are shot in French Canada? Do you think the best way to make an office feel more 'homey' is to put some underwatered plants in a corner? Do you think that your life lacks monochrome computer monitors? If you said yes to all of these things, run, don't walk, to your nearest local DVD rental store, remember that it went out of business, and return home to illegally download and watch Scanners.

Scanners is a good film in a tiny and unappreciated niche of movies the 'best-seen-at-13-on-a-Friday-night-when-your-parents-have-gone-to-bed'. This niche also includes The Terminator, Blade Runner, and Total Recall. Scanners, like those three movies (perhaps not Blade Runner), is very silly in a very earnest way. The goofy sincerity in Scanners is best conveyed by the lead character, who appears to have no inner monologue and expresses himself in monosyllables like an unemotional child. This acting technique would be (and often is) ultra-cheesy in other films, but it works very well here.

The Princess Bride - 1987 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Cary Elwes, Robin Wright
Director: Rob Reiner

I know it seems very hard to believe, perhaps even inconceivable, but I've never actually seen The Princess Bride until today. Its catchphrases are of course ubiquitous - 'I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, etc.', 'Never start a land war in Asia', etc. Unfortunately, this ubiquity does ruin some of the film - 'I do not think that word means what you think it means' is an excellent joke. Nonetheless, I found it quite enjoyable, and it's easy to see why a certain set of people simply love this film.

One thing I didn't know is that the movie is a story within a story, which disappointed me. To me it signals the filmmakers felt the audience can't be trusted to 'get' this movie. By using a frame story and constantly cutting back and forth between the 'real' world and the story, we're made to understand that the elements of the story are farcical and untrustworthy. I feel this movie could've been played straight - what Reiner ends up doing is telling a story about the power of stories, which struck me as alternately heartfelt and masturbatory. (That's not to mention the Billy Crystal cameo, which was easily the worst part of the film).

Shadows - 1959 - 4 Stars

Actors: Benny Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni
Director: John Cassavetes

I have seen three John Cassavetes films within the last few months, and I can say this about him: His films are very distinctive and very hit or miss. At his best, Cassavetes' 'realistic' techniques bring out actions and emotions that other films simply cannot. At his worst, his scenes play like self-indulgent acting exercises rather than a movie. Shadows sticks mostly to the former, and its 81 minute running time means that no scene is drawn out well past its welcome.

A particularly brilliant scene in Shadows shows racial tension without the high theatrics and casual use of racial slurs of Hollywood films. Cassavetes shows that racism is often merely in a glance, in the way a thing is said; my Hollywood-trained mind kept waiting for an explosion that never quite came.

Whatever Works - 2009 - 1½ Stars

I may be recalling the scene incorrectly, but I think it's in Annie Hall where Woody Allen plays a kind of neurotic, narcissistic misanthrope obsessed with his own death - anyway, it's Annie Hall, where Alvy Singer is going to write jokes for this insanely lame comedian, and the comedian has an idea about what he thinks is marvelously entertaining and Alvy skewers him with some pointed ironic statement and walks out on him.

That is what I wanted to do to this film. If someone wanted to parody a Woody Allen film, they'd make this one - there is no indication that Allen put an original thought into it at all.

The trouble with narcissism is that calling someone a narcissist is actually a form of gratification to them - Woody Allen, when confronted with the charge, would say 'Of course I know that - how could I not know that about me?' And yet in this film we're subjected with the same tirades, the same love of classical and jazz music, of old films, of everything that's insanely familiar and tired about an Allen work. I can't understand what Woody Allen gets out of making a film such as this - but I suppose he has to, and when people reach a certain age they should just be allowed to do what they want.

Bad Lieutenant - 1992 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Harvey Keitel, Mad Dog
Director: Abel Ferrara

It's hard for me not to like a movie that opens with Chris 'Mad Dog' Russo's voice and includes references to Kal Daniels. And as it turns out, I did like it.

Note: Non-Kal Daniels related spoilers

In the famous essay Hamlet and His Problems, T.S. Eliot observes that Hamlet is a dramatic failure because the action of the play occurs mostly within Hamlet's head. Since we cannot access what's actually going on there, we cannot understand Hamlet's motivations. This was the problem I had with this film - there's a very stylized way of trying to get into Keitel's head, but we never really get a sense that Harvey Keitel's character is an actual person. Thus this is a film about good and evil - but how he is pulled by these forces he can only convey with soliloquies and grotesque whimpers. Even more unrealistic was the plot point involving the Mets being in the playoffs.

Like Darryl Strawberry in the film, Bad Lieutenant swings for the fences; sometimes connecting, sometimes missing terribly.

Le Samourai - 1967 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Alain Delon, Francois Perier
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Some film worlds are expansive - they suggest a past, present, and future of the characters inside that world. This is not so with Le Samourai, a movie concerned solely with the present. The title character, who goes by the name of Jef Costello, is an ideal of film badassery, but it's hard to imagine him outside his film context; difficult to imagine his childhood, or how he came to be how he is.

No matter, since what we get out of Le Samourai is a kind of Parisian film noir - everyone's doing a great job of looking out for Number One and looking really cool while doing it. Highly recommended, and were I between the ages of 15 and 20, this would be an easy five-star film.

Dog Day Afternoon - 1975 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Al Pacino, John Cazale
Director: Sidney Lumet

Note: Very Minor Spoilers

A friend of mine, confronted in a philosophy class about what he was trying to say about a dense political treatise, stammered out, 'Well, it's about love.' If put on the spot about Dog Day Afternoon, I'd say the same, despite many appearances to the contrary. A bank heist turns into an examination of the robbers - about what and who they value most.

Al Pacino's tendency towards over-the-top hamminess plays perfectly here, and Lumet knows exactly when to dial him down to low intensity. He also knows when to ratchet up the tension and when to ease it - only tiresome, superfluous commentary about television keeps this from being a 5-star film.

Paris, Texas - 1984 - 4 Stars

Actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski
Director: Wim Wenders

Paris, Texas's opening credits claim that the film won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1984. I don't know why a film production company would put this there except to say, "People better than you thought this was a great movie, so you better damn well like it." Watching an award-winning film reminds me of the old Homer Simpson line - 'I don't want to build it up too much, but this will be better than ten Super Bowls!'. Nothing ruins a film like Paris, Texas more than eager anticipation.

Watching this film yesterday, I felt myself beginning to doze off, and stopped it around a third of the way through. The film seemed too similar in theme to Gerry, Stroszek, Easy Rider, and the Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; it's similarly glacially paced, and I thought the characters were totally flat, the film entirely too precious - the sort of thing that people at Cannes love. I considered sending it back and putting it on my queue again in a few months - it wasn't fair that I was harshly judging it because I'd seen so many films like it recently.

Today, it won me over - great visuals, a story that's almost worth it, and dialogue that's not witty or entertaining but true. Everything in this film is kind of loose and illogical and it just sort of happens - I tend to downgrade movies like this (e.g. Stroszek, and Wenders's Wings of Desire) - but there are some wonderful touches that make this worth viewing.

Niagara - 1953 - 3 Stars

Niagara wishes to convey two pieces of information:

A: Niagara Falls is a terrifically swell place to go for your honeymoon.
B: Niagara Falls is also a great place to plan a murder.

The film seems to have only gotten permission to be about B by ensuring that precept A was also followed.

It is disappointing that with such a great locale the film turns out to be a by-the-numbers thriller and likely would've fallen off the map if not for the presence of Marilyn Monroe. Items A and B could've really combined into a great movie, a Canadian version of Touch of Evil. No such luck - I guess the idea of a Canadian Touch of Evil is pretty absurd, regardless.

Dirty Harry - 1971 - 4 Stars, 1½ Stars

I gave this film two ratings because Dirty Harry is actually two movies - one is a really cool crime drama about a cop who doesn't always play by the rules, the other is a really awful crime drama about a cop who doesn't always play by the rules. I felt it was unfair to combine the two.

Let's talk about the one I liked first, because it doesn't have any spoilers. Two things I loved about the way the good Dirty Harry was made - the use of light and dark in scenes. Sometimes it's so dark we don't quite know what we're looking at, but it's the good kind of obscurity - it's realistic. This flows into point number two: Dirty Harry does not often resort to typical film chicanery in many of its action scenes. Many action scenes create tension by pitting two forces against one another and have us constantly checking in on both those forces - the classic example is that horror film moment where people are led to scream 'Don't open that door!' at the screen because they know the murderer is behind it. In these cases, we are presented with a (literally) unrealistic view by basically being two places at once; it squarely makes us an observer of the action - we wish we could tell the characters what to do. Dirty Harry mostly puts us in the eyes (or close enough) of our protagonist, which creates tension because his uncertainty is our uncertainty - we think about what we would do, rather than what other people should do. I generally like this way better.

Note: Major Spoilers Ahead

The second movie, however, is terrible; it made me angry and bored at the same time, and I hope to do the same to you with this writeup. I do not understand what this film is trying to accomplish. If you haven't seen the movie in a while, the killer is set free on a technicality because basically Dirty Harry totally didn't follow procedure at all. He also tortured the killer so that he would release information; a torture which the film does not show us, which to me is unforgivable. If the film is going to traffic in this kind of morality where torture is acceptable, it cannot then fail to show us the brutal torture that no doubt happened. So the killer gets free, but Harry shadows him on his free time. The killer notices this, so he hires someone to beat him mercilessly (which the film does show us). He then claims Harry delivered this beating, a plot point which the film totally disregards after it happens. He strikes again, Harry is called to the mayor's office, which mayor is completely set on giving the killer exactly what he wants because he Needs To Get Re-Elected - at which point Harry is asked to be the bagman for yet another handoff to the killer (the first one failed, remember). This point is totally absurd given that Harry has already been reprimanded for tailing the killer on his off-time as well as failing to make the first handoff, but the situation does provide the necessary deus ex machina for the very cathartic ending whereby Harry finds out the killer's location so he can kill him.

My mind is now saying, 'But it's just a movie, that's just a plot point'. Maybe so. I'm not really upset at all the attacks on the Rule of Law - lord knows the film world does not need another Courtroom Scene (which scenes I generally find awful - the only thing worse than fetishizing vigilante justice is fetishizing its opposite), and this film delightfully stays out of that quagmire. The reason why it feels monstrous is because we know the ending - we know Dirty Harry is going to beat the living shit out of this guy. But first some kids have to get slapped and bus drivers beaten and lives endangered - the violence and mayhem becomes pornographic at that point, which is of course hugely ironic because Harry's whole raison d'etre seems to be fighting against those who feel that violence is fun by engaging in violence (which he may or may not find fun, but which we as an audience should). Violence IS fun - don't go ruining it with morality.

So yeah - if I had turned this movie off around 70 minutes in, I would've been pretty happy with it.

Wet Hot American Summer - 2001 - 3 Stars

The camp film parody Wet Hot American Summer can basically be summed up in one scene. The host of the climactic talent show is one of the camp counselors, dressed up as a Castkills comedian. He begins delivering his super-lame act, but for some reason, the audience absolutely loves it, and laughs wildly at all of his insanely corny jokes. This is the essence of the film: it's a mockery of mockeries, poking fun at films that were already light-hearted.

I was not one of those people who generally went to summer camp (I hate both people and summer camps, which is probably why I now have a film blog), and I've avoided the summer camp film, so the parodies in the film mostly fall flat for me. Even so, I (very) grudgingly give it three stars with the recognition that I am mostly no fun and that this movie really, really tries to be fun.

Stroszek - 1977 - 2½ Stars

It is often said that comedy doesn't translate well. What's considered humorous in one culture is not always so in another, and the language is always a barrier. Even more difficult is black humor, where tragedy and comedy mix freely - it's very hard to figure out what is miserable and what is funny. Stroszek, Werner Herzog's 1977 dark comedy about Germans in America suffers from a further problem: it's a German view of America, so what is supposed to be poignant satire, what is farcical? I understand that humor is subjective and that anything is funny, but I guess I just didn't 'get' this film. It has a definite Coen Brothers feel, but of one of their lesser films which feel more cruel than funny.

Making the film more difficult for me to interpret is the presence of Bruno S. as the lead man. Bruno S. is very clearly not a traditional actor; he kind of reminds me of Harpo Marx. He seems almost oddly blessed, despite not being very bright. His way of acting around other people is not like any other person or actor. I don't know that he's really the right actor for this film, though.

Burden Of Dreams - 1982 - 3½ Stars

I wasn't even sure if I should write this up here, because Burden of Dreams is a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. So basically this is an injunction to see Fitzcarraldo if you already haven't.

Note: Spoilers for Fitzcarraldo ahead

We've all watched a movie with someone who points out, during a particularly harried action sequence, something like 'that's a cool special effect'. I've always felt things like this are strange to say, because it is composed of two parts, both of which are kind of opposite; that A: that special effect very well replicated how real life is and B: that special effect very well replicated how life should be. These two conflicting claims get at what film itself is trying to do, but of course in doing so, it reveals that we are, of course, watching a film.

Fitzcarraldo makes a viewer confront this 'I'm watching a film' phenomenon with its incredible sequence where Fitzcarraldo and his native followers manage to lift a boat across a mountain. The question of 'How did they do this?' works both within the film and outside of it - how the hell did they do it? Burden of Dreams is unfortunately silent on this, mostly because it seems the documentary-makers themselves were forced to give up on the very project they were filming. It does, however, show that the man hired to engineer this feat walked off the set because he felt it would endanger people's lives.

What's striking about Burden of Dreams is that it reveals just how difficult it was to use natives in the film. Herzog decides to shoot the film thousands of miles from civilization 'to get performances out of his actors that he wouldn't otherwise' - but he's also employing lots of natives whose language Herzog does not speak and who have not been extras in a film. The documentary is filled with complications such as these, and we are left to wonder - how was it even possible to make this film?

Filmmaking is such a strange art - a filmmaker needs to employ dozens of other people to make his vision come to life. In Burden of Dreams, we learn how much suffering is undergone by everyone involved to make one man's mad vision exist forever.

Five Star Films

Some of you know me, some of you don't - even so, I figured I'd produce a list of films I consider 5 star movies, just so there's an idea of where I'm coming from with this.

Some films will be denoted with an asterisk - these are films I will not be defending as 5 star films in the comments section. They are movies I really liked for one reason or another, but have obvious flaws.

25th Hour* - Lee - 2002
American History X* - Kaye - 1998
Amores Perros* - Inarritu - 2000
Andrei Rublev - Tarkovsky - 1966
The Asphalt Jungle - Huston - 1950
The Big Lebowski - Coens - 1998
The Bridge On The River Kwai - Lean - 1957
Casino - Scorsese - 1995
Cool Hand Luke - Rosenberg - 1967
Das Boot - Petersen - 1981
The Decalogue - Kieslowski - 1987
Double Indemnity - Wilder - 1944
Fitzcarraldo - Herzog - 1982
The Godfather - Coppola - 1972
The Godfather II - Coppola - 1974
The Godfather III - Just making sure you are paying attention...
Goodfellas - Scorsese - 1990
Groundhog Day - Ramis - 1993
The Hustler - Rossen - 1961
In Bruges* - McDonagh - 2008
Koyaanisqatsi - Reggio - 1983
Monty Python And The Holy Grail* - Gilliam - 1975
Monty Python's Life of Brian - Jones - 1979
Mulholland Drive - Lynch - 2001
Network* - Lumet - 1976
No Country For Old Men - Coens - 2007
On The Waterfront - Kazan - 1954
Ran - Kurosawa - 1985
Rashomon - Kurosawa - 1950
Ronin* - Frankenheimer - 1998
Rope - Hitchcock - 1948
The Seventh Seal - Bergman - 1957
Sunrise - Murnau - 1927
The Third Man - Reed - 1949
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - Nichols - 1966
Yojimbo - Kurosawa - 1961

Gerry - 2002 - 3½ Stars

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt described his compositions as 'tintinnabular' - 'like bells' - slow tempo music with few notes and long silences. Despite this, his pieces Spiegel Im Spiegel and Fur Alina are incredibly moving and rich. The film Gerry is much the same way, and these two pieces by Pärt are a supremely perfect choice to comprise the bulk of the film's music. There's a tiny skeleton of a plot and character, the film moves at a snail's pace, but it is still full of life.

It is somewhat difficult to believe that Gus Van Sant directed Gerry in 2002 coming off 2000's insanely mediocre Finding Forrester (which I happened to catch a large portion of last night in a post-Yankees stupor). More amusingly, the average rating on Netflix is 2.4 stars, which suggests a lot of folks who liked Matt Damon and Gus Van Sant in Good Will Hunting did not so much appreciate their effort here. It is funny how a varied film career can sometimes work against an artist.

Gerry is kind of like if a director took the first 20 minutes of Koyaanisqatsi and gave it characters. Ian accused me of using the more obscure to explain the less obscure in a previous entry, and I may again be doing that here, but the analogy will hold to anyone who's seen both. Maybe it's more like Easy Rider updated for the 21st century. Whatever. It's certainly worth seeing if you can stomach a bit of wandering.

Hot Fuzz - 2007 - 3 Stars

Note: Oblique spoilers ahead

Since I began this blog, I have desperately tried to avoid my previous post-film ritual - running to the Internet to see what other people thought about the movie. I like to keep my own impressions fresh without watering them down with others' commentary. With Hot Fuzz, I just couldn't resist - the film turns from a cheeky country vs. city British comedy into something far more absurd, and I had to know what others thought about it.

Hot Fuzz runs into a problem that comedy films often do - to play something as big and ridiculous as possible, hoping that big laughs follow. My suspicion is that Animal House is not considered a comedy classic because of its anarchic final scene; Hot Fuzz goes for a similarly big climax and misfires.

One thing the film makes great use of is editing - a lot of jokes are created simply by the way the film is cut. It's reminiscent of Requiem for a Dream, as well as those British movies where British people shout in British accents about a lot of gangster stuff. It's rather ingenious.

The film is probably better than I am giving it credit for being, but it runs long and much of the humor derives from parody; being inundated with parody all over television and film, I may be immune to thinking that parody is at all clever. It's probably worth seeing.

Heat - 1995 - 4 Stars

Note: Minor spoilers ahead

Why or how I managed to go the last fourteen years without having seen Heat - I'm not quite sure. I think I confused it with Sly Stallone's Copland, and I'm only half-joking about this. Heat is a Hitchcock film for our time. It is not a revelation in plot, character, or really any other way; it's just a damn good all-around film.

Pacino/Deniro Scene: Deniro wins easily. Overall disappointing - unless I'm in a David Lynch film, I do not care about dreams in movies. I understand why their conversation went that way, and perhaps dreams were the best place for the chat to go.

Touch of Realism: There's always a kind of invincibility to characters on film - they tend to walk through storms of bullets, fire, etc. I like minor touches that remind us that these characters supposedly exist in the same world that we do - Heat has one such scene. Al Pacino pulls over Deniro's car on the shoulder of a major highway. Before getting out of the car, he looks over his left shoulder to ensure he won't be creamed by oncoming traffic. I don't even think this is normally worth commenting on, but it's a moment of tiny 'weakness' that films often remove. And yes, next up, I mention seatbelt usage and turn signals in Ronin.

Cool Setting: I normally dislike LA movies, since every movie that's set in no particular city is set in 'LA'. However, Heat makes use of the entire city, giving it a character that most films ignore. Coolest was the scene set at what appeared to be an abandoned drive-in movie theater.

Musical Selections: Gyorgy Ligeti's dissonant, tense music has been used to great effect in film (2001, The Shining) and has also been aped so many times (most recently in There Will Be Blood) that I was surprised to see in the credits that it was actually his piece used here. Moby's God Moving Over the Face of the Waters is a brilliant post-minimalist piece that ends the film perfectly.

Real Life - 1979 - 4 Stars

Not long after the Reality TV craze began, a lot of middlebrow folks wondered what exactly was 'real' about Reality TV. Sure, the people on these shows were usually not actors, and there was no 'story', but the situations depicted were so removed from actual living. Further adding to that is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Art (which I may have stolen from somewhere), which is that observing people, when they know they're being observed, changes them.

Albert Brooks's Real Life anticipates all of this, but its wit does not even lie in prediction. It is a genuinely funny film. Brooks plays a Hollywood director producing a movie that captures the life of a normal American family for a year. Adding an extra layer of irony to the whole thing is the fact that it is a movie about a movie about 'reality' which is being depicted by actors and has a script; as a meta-film, it doesn't really work (or goes over well-trodden ground), but as a meta-meta-film, it's quite brilliant and hilarious at points.


There's a great shot in the film that kind of captures this - Brooks is talking with the wife of the family, who would like some privacy to have a discussion with him about the 'film'. Of course he will not allow this, insisting that his cameramen, dressed in masks that are essentially cameras (as in the picture above), capture this moment. The wife and director stand in front of a storefront window, so that we can see the cameramen in the reflection. However, we cannot see the actual camera, as it is hidden by the actors' bodies at the center of the frame. Meta-meta-film, indeed.

The film tries to get across the notion that when one becomes an artist (or comedian), one's version of the world is warped in perhaps the same way that a businessman's is: a businessman might look at a mountain and see profit, a film director looks at people and sees a story. I have always wondered how actors, who so often marry one another, exist off-screen - their personal lives and fake lives so wrapped up with one another, their identities so amorphous. So too with writers who write about deeply personal things, for whom all their experiences are an opportunity to generate art. Such people excel at replicating universal elements of the human condition - but whether they ever lead real lives, I cannot say.

Kagemusha - 1980 - 4 Stars

Note: Major spoilers ahead.

I'm slowly working my way through the Kurosawa oeuvre - this is the sixth Kurosawa film I've seen. Like many of his films, this one is long and epic in scope, but unlike Ran or The Seven Samurai, it misses the mark. I give it 4 stars anyway because the visuals are unbelievably good, and the first half of the film is as good as any other Kurosawa picture.

What gets lost in this tale of feudal Japan may just be cultural. The dying lord Takeda orders that his death remain a secret; that a man who looks just like him be put in his place - why is this order carried out? It becomes obvious at once that having Takeda's double fulfill all his roles is impossible; his concubines are forbidden to touch him, he is unable to speak publicly, and so forth. Somehow this all comes off with only a few minor hitches, despite the fact that the fake Takeda is low-born and lapses into vulgar behavior any time he is away from anyone not 'in' on it. Yet accidentally it seems that the fiefdom is better off with the false Takeda. as neither he nor his advisors have any plans for war. This is in stark contrast to the other daimyos we see during the film, who are endlessly scheming.

The elements of the film don't come together right - we know that eventually his secret will be found out, and that eventually Takeda's double will die or be cast out; scene after scene unfolds with his advisors figuring out yet another way to disguise their lord's true identity.

More puzzling are the seeming allusions to Christianity throughout - from the double's impending crucifixion at the beginning of the film to the use of Christian missionairies as a physician to Tokugawa's distaste for red wine (brought to Japan by same). If I had to bet, I'd bet that the fake Takeda has 12 advisors, and that his 'son' is the Judas of the lot. What this all adds up to, I am not really sure.

By the end of the film, even Kurosawa realizes we are tired of endless carnage (or just could not stage the final scene properly). The end is tragic, but in a different fashion than traditional tragedy - Takeda's double willingly takes on the disguise in full awareness that he will either be found out or will no longer be useful. That he experiences brief joy with a grandson that is not actually his is not tragic; Kurosawa shows us that the life of a daimyo is always filled with loss.

So yeah, see this, but only after you've seen Ran, Rashomon, Yojimbo, The Seven Samurai, and Throne of Blood.

Quick Change - 1990 - 3 Stars

Quick Change is an ideal TV Comedy Movie. By TV Comedy, I mean the kind of movie one trips over on basic cable, has never heard of, sees that it has Bill Murray, and watches with low/no expectations. Under these circumstances, this can seem like a lovable, underdog, 'How come no one ever told me about this?' kind of movie. With the expectation of Bill Murray comedy, though, the movie doesn't quite make it. There's an excess of hijinks and a lack of Murray witticisms, but still a few genuine laughs.

Trivia note - there's a huge ad for Suntory whiskey in Times Square at the beginning of the film. Suntory is also the whiskey that Murray's character advertises for in Lost in Translation.

Easy Rider - 1969 - 2 Stars

It is worth noting that if I had more political clout, I'd be the mayor of Squaresville. This film may not be for me. Its depictions of drug use and sexuality had to be revolutionary at the time - now it just seems boring. This may be an unfair critique - later films should not inform the way this one goes about telling its story. However, it is not only plotless but characterless, and there is nothing for us to grab on to except beautiful Southwestern vistas, 60s counterculture sights, and an interestingly cut film. Further diluting the revolutionary nature is the soundtrack - hearing the strains of 'Born To Be Wild' over the opening credits must've been fresh in 1969, but having heard it trying to hock automobiles, credit cards, and liquor in recent television ads destroys its potency.

The French Connection - 1971 - 4 Stars

The French Connection is one of those movies I felt guilty about stumbling onto when it was on television, as I'd seen several scenes in the movie multiple times, but had never watched it all the way through. Having finally seen the entire thing, it is a brilliantly shot movie. There is a recent trend towards fragmenting action scenes with so many cuts that the viewer can no longer figure out what is going on (recent Bond films, the Bourne series are good examples). The French Connection shows that a film can still have high tension without overwhelming the viewer.

One of the things I feel is most overlooked about films is their location. The French Connection is, of course, a gloriously New York film. Too many films take place in MovieLand - an indistinct nowhere. The characters are therefore given no locale, no origin; we're set in a weightless story, where there is no past besides what is written into the film. I am aware that it is more expensive to shoot a movie in an actual place, but fantasy is far more vivid when mixed with familiar elements.

Million Dollar Baby - 2004 - 3½ Stars

Umberto Eco said of Casablanca,

"Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. [...] When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion."

I could not help but think of this quote as I watched Million Dollar Baby, a film I had not seen before today. 'Archetypes' is the perfect way to describe the characterization in this film, from the gruff, grizzled, hiding-a-secret trainer to the plucky, determined heroine fighting against everything that's ever beaten her down in her life. It got me to wondering about the nature of cliches and why sometimes we reject them and sometimes embrace them. Million Dollar Baby's plot twists are not always predictable, necessarily, but they're certainly not unexpected either, as its archetypes navigate through thick and thin. We're still left with thoroughly unpeople in this film.

Making the film more cliched was Hilary Swank's hateful, money-grubbing family, who may as well be wearing Evil hats throughout the film. I have always wondered about Hollywood's portrayal of the Midwest and South - I don't live in either of those places, nor have I ever, but it always feels tremendously condescending.

What salvaged the film for me are the acting performances, which are all great, and the story is a nice self-contained unit that gets across everything it wants to. I understand why the film won an Oscar; it is throughout a Hollywood-created fantasy, on all the fictions Hollywood makes us believe because we so badly want to.

The Brothers Solomon - 2007 - 2 Stars

I've already been fooled once. When I see, 'Directed by Bob Odenkirk', I figure that the Mr. Show alumnus is devoting himself to a project at least of equal caliber to Mr. Show, the terrific HBO sketch-comedy show that is still relevant and fresh almost fifteen years after its inception. But Odenkirk directed the mostly terrible Let's Go To Prison - this movie is better, but not by very much.

I will grant that comedy on film is really hard, and the reason why it often does so poorly is that everyone involved can no longer tell what's funny after seeing it fifteen times. There's one moment in the film where à propos of nothing, Will Arnett's character is getting into a rooftop hot tub with the girl he's obsessed with. She is disgusted by him and leaves. After she leaves, he climbs out of the tub and kisses her wet footprint left on the ground. This is mildly funny. The picture begins to fade, showing us Will Arnett in bed - he's dreaming. He wakes up with a smile on his face. This is hilarious. Then the film makes a terrible 'wet dream' pun, and it ruins the dark humor of a character who is excited by the prospect of kissing his crush's remnants (in a dream, no less).

There's the makings of a good movie here, but ultimately it succumbs to the Comedy Movie Formula™.

Harvey - 1950 - 3 Stars

Harvey is a fucking weird movie. That's about all I'll say, although I will say that it is *not* particularly odd if one thinks about it for a short time. It's yet another movie I've seen recently that tries to prove the old George Costanza saw - 'It's not a lie if you believe it.'

I guess all I want to mention here is that this movie completely does not work without Jimmy Stewart. Stewart's aw-shucks honesty in this role is perfect, there is no winking to the audience, and never any doubt in his character.

I can definitely see why Steven Spielberg is supposedly remaking this movie. I will be eager to see how he screws it up.

A Quick Note on Spoilers

I will warn of spoilers if they occur within a post, but everything's fair game in the comments section. That should be self-evident, but I get furiously angry about having movies/tv shows spoiled for me.

The Maltese Falcon - 1941 - 4 Stars

Note: Very minor spoilers

Thomas Hobbes once described life without government as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Film noir paints a picture of life that is quite similar, yet it somehow manages to create out of this Hobbesian muck a life filled with heroes, villains, quips, and dames. Why are some of us so drawn to film noir?

Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade is a private detective working with a partner. When his partner gets shot to death, there's little or no grief or panic, just naked wonder about who perpetrated the crime. That's what, to me, separates noir from other films - the nakedness of the characters' desires. The desire is usually quite simple, but the ability to achieve it quite convoluted. We get to see the characters' interests intertwine and clash, double-crosses, double-dealing, even triple-crosses (hat tip to Miller's Crossing). It's all so damned interesting.

The one failure of film noir is the ability to truly sympathize with the characters - as we find out more and more about what's really going on, our interest in the story's players wanes. Their role is to act out the part of these desires and little more. The Maltese Falcon is no exception, and while its final scene is tremendously well-written, it still strikes a false note to get to that point.

Grey Gardens - 1975 - 3½ Stars

Grey Gardens in the title of this documentary refers to the name of a mansion in the Hamptons on Long Island that has fallen into serious disrepair. The aged Edith Beale - aunt to Jackie Kennedy - still lives there with her daughter Edie. The film is basically an examination of their incredibly bizarre life.

Grey Gardens is very forthright about its documentary-ness - the two women will often talk to their interviewers, the interviewers will often talk back. It does not try to hide the pretense of being a film - i.e. we're put at a greater distance by the fact that everyone involved is very aware they are on film, and are aware of that awareness. Normally I'd be put off by such a thing - I'd think that the Beales are merely playing up who they are for the cameras. However, one thing I noticed about their home is that it lacks a television, and the Beales rarely refer to movies in their strange pastiche of bygone days, songs, and musicals that passes for their communication. Therefore, they don't seem obsessed with fame in the same way that certain 'freaks' in America are (e.g. Jerry Springer guests), and I didn't get the sense they were acting.

Like Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven, Grey Gardens is sometimes boring or repetitive, but also like Gates, certain images in the film linger long after it is over. This film is regarded as a 'camp classic', but laughter seems like the wrong response to it - it is ultimately a film about the Pyrrhic triumph of imagination and memory over the bleakest and most lifeless reality, which doesn't seem too funny, at least not to me.

A Note About My Film Selection Process

Starting this blog with reviews of these 5 films is not ideal - I'm pretty sure anyone reading this has seen at most 3 of these movies. I am not some fey, withering 'if-it's-well-known-it-can't-be-good' psuedo-auteur. It just so happens that I am a Netflix subscriber, and my selection process for films has a lot of randomization. I add films I am interested in to my queue, and I pick which one comes to me next (almost) purely at random. I try to keep a good balance of films on my queue: comedies and dramas, foreign films and English-language ones, classics and newer movies. Right now, it's been tending towards the weird or unknown films. So, if you're somehow reading this and somehow concerned that the only movies I'm watching will be precious, twee foreign films and ponderous English-language classics, you're only half-right.

Sunrise - 1927 - 5 Stars

Sunrise operates on the same principle as the very end of Lost in Translation - it is sometimes better in love stories if we don't know what the characters are saying. Sunrise's being a silent film makes this rather easy for the director.

The film opens with a simple concept - a man cheating on his wife - then becomes this bizarrely Tarantino/Lynch/Fellini film. It backs away from these ideas later on (perhaps naively so), but the end result is a beautiful movie that certainly rewards the patience needed to view a silent film.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film is the farmer's reaction to the 'big city' - having been used to television and more recent film's treatment of fish out of water, I here quote David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram: "For to the extent that TV can flatter [a viewer] about "seeing through" the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters' unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete." Movies have also played with this idea - Napoleon Dynamite seems to be confused about whether I should be laughing at Napoleon Dynamite for being such a gawky loser, or sympathizing with his plight (it leans towards the former). In Sunrise, I was confused whether I should be laughing with the rural bumpkin who seems to know not the customs of the city, or laughing at him for being a fool. I suspect the former - the film does not admit of these sorts of ironies. It has moments of lightness, darkness, humor, sadness, love, and loss - in short, everything a great film should have.

Sleeping Dogs Lie - 2006 - 2 Stars

Sleeping Dogs Lie is one of those confusing films that even though I didn't like it very much, I'd still recommend it to others. Like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, it totally defies expectations in an incredibly bizarre way. It is as 'indie' as film gets, with sparsely decorated sets, strangely-colored rooms, and a no-name cast - all these aspects kind of give writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait carte blanche to put his demented vision on to celluloid.

The giveaway for the queerness of the film should have been the soundtrack, which instead of typical Hollywood fare or even typical indie fare, is this strange Yann Tiersen-esque accordion-heavy music. I can't really give away the central premise of the movie - it has to be experienced - and the story is somewhat poorly paced, which is forgivable in a film such as this one. Still, it's an underdog film worth a viewing if you're into pitch-black comedy and explorations of the awkwardness of human interaction.

Manhattan - 1979 - 4 stars

Three things I want to cover with Manhattan, a film which I had seen before but had largely forgotten:

First, watching Manhattan now is supremely creepy, since in the first minutes of the film it becomes known that Woody Allen's character is dating a 17 year old girl. To me, it speaks to Woody's absolute honesty that his films are loaded with jokes about having sex with underage girls, etc. - he cannot help but put his entire self on the screen, even if it would eventually be discovered that he is a pervert.

But - I want to get behind that first talking scene to the narration that opens the film. Allen states, 'Chapter 1 - He still thought of Manhattan in black and white, with a Gershwin soundtrack...', then dismisses said opening, going through many others. Of course, we're being treated to black and white pictures of Manhattan with a Gershwin soundtrack, and the entire film continues this way. Allen's narrator therefore ironically undercuts his own creation - in a true love story, a film like Casablanca, such narration would be well-placed and would continue without interruption, but Allen's narrator struggles to begin this film because this is a film that really doesn't know what to do with love, or with anything - it asks more questions than it answers.

Lastly, I'm sure most critics note how much the film loves Manhattan, and filming it in black and white is a perfect choice - the haggard, washed out New York of The Taking of Pelham 123 and Koyaanisqatsi is replaced by a fairy tale world. We know we're watching a film precisely because it is in black and white. However, one thing to take away is how the film uses extras - people are always whirling in and out of scenes, and while people confess their deepest feelings, there's often other people within earshot. Such is existence in the big city - Allen nailed this, and even though the technique might be distracting, it's far more true-to-life.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada - 2½ Stars

It's very hard for me to decide whether The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a loving Don Quixote-influenced homage or a brilliantly ambitious meta-film sendup of indie movies where long journeys purport to have deep spiritual impact (e.g. The Straight Story). One thing that seems to point to the latter is the mysterious presence of television in the film. I can't quite understand why characters are shown watching television so often - at the beginning, Melquiades is enraptured by a television store that has the classic TV display in the front window. Near the middle, we come upon some hunters or ranchers or something that are huddled around a beat-up pickup truck with a tiny television attached to the car battery - they are watching a program in English despite the fact that none of them appear to know English.

This last scene gets to what the film's major theme appears to be - self-created artifice and illusion versus reality - that we require so many illusions to sustain our lives, whether it's the illusory images of television, the belief that a prostitute actually loves us, or that the last wishes of a friend must indeed be honored, regardless of what lengths we must go through to honor them. Yet this story is told where so many things happen in 'movie-land' - that special kind of non-logic that characters have to employ because damn it if they didn't there'd be no movie. As it turns out, we are watching illusions of illusions.

As a quixotically inspired film, it spends too much time being serious, and as a parody, it feels like a waste of time. More movies should be made that attempt such odd things, but I don't necessarily have to or want to watch them.

Prolegomena 2 - The Return

Two quick items:

First, obviously the blog's name comes from The Big Lebowski - Walter refers to the Dude's landlord's dance quintet (you know, his cycle) as 'the what-have-you', this dull, poorly attended, and needlessly grandiose performance. That's kind of how I think of blogging in general - a vain (in both senses of the word) attempt at self-expression.

Two, I will be rating films on a five-star scale - 1 being the lowest, 5 being the highest, with half stars.

The Best Years Of Our Lives - 4½ Stars

Note: Very mild spoilers ahead.

Bad directors tell us what to think by putting their views in the mouths of the characters. Good directors show us what to think by the way a film goes - the good get rewarded, the wicked punished, or perhaps an ironic involution of that. Great directors don't really care about any of this and leave the whole thing up to us as viewers. The Best Years Of Our Lives, William Wyler's triumphant post-WW2 film, is in category 3.

The film's plot is simple - three soldiers return home from the war to a fictional Midwestern city and attempt to resume the lives they left behind. The three soldiers - Fred, Homer, and Sam - are respectively shown to be poor, middle-class, and wealthy. Fred's family basically lives on top of a bowling alley and below another bowling alley, and he struggles to find employment. Sam, meanwhile, is offered a job better than his previous one at the local bank. While I as a viewer expected there to be some class-related conflict between the two - and there certainly is - it is dealt with so much more skillfully than most class conflicts. There is a dearth of righteous indignation, a lack of grand speeches about the nobility of the poor or the poverty of the rich. Sam is demonstrably guilty about having a job at the bank while so many soldiers struggle to find prosperity. However, he does not say, 'I'm demonstrably guilty about having a job at the bank while so many soldiers struggle to find prosperity' - director Wyler and screenwriter Robert Sherwood leave many of the conflicts unspoken, and therefore more tense. We desperately want the characters to say what they're thinking, what we're thinking, and yet they so often refuse to. The film won 7 Oscars and it's fairly easy to see why - a little long, and a little bit of Hollywood keep this from being a 'perfect' 5 star film, but it is a must-watch for classic film buffs.

Introduction

This is going to be a film blog. However, unlike other film blogs (none of which I have read so I am just assuming), I don't intend to 'review' movies in the traditional sense. I'll post a rating, but will try to avoid long plot summaries. Instead, I'm going to try to focus in on one aspect of the film, highlighting why I think it is of interest. I will try to avoid spoilers also, but that I certainly cannot promise. I will, however, warn of significant spoilers.

I am not a film student, nor have I ever been one, so I will not be talking about aesthetic movements or anything like that. That's a good thing, because I find that stuff insufferably boring.