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'.