After Hours (1985) A Film by Martin Scorsese

After Hours is one of Martin Scorsese's most unnerving studies of urban paranoia, but unfortunately is a film that is frequently forgotten amidst more mammoth works such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Mean Streets. Filmed in the mid-80's, it was a decidedly smaller production than most of his films, and as a result has slipped into near anonymity aside what preceded it (The King of Comedy (1982)) and what followed (The Color of Money (1986)). It does not lack the energy that such a fact would suggest however; by contrast, the film is always on the move, its camera an imaginative manifestation of its main character's shifty thoughts.

Bringing to the screen a quick-witted, savvy screenplay by Joseph Minion, Scorsese turns a night for Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a pragmatic guy working in a cubicle, into an insanely unlucky fever dream. When the night is young, Paul meets a charismatic blond lady named Marcy in a cafe through a mutual fondness for the book he's reading. They exchange numbers and soon enough he's being driven by a raucous taxi driver to her friend's Soho apartment, during which his only 20 dollar bill blows out the window. The apartment is the habitat of a classic lower Manhattan art-freak, Kiki, who works tiresomely on obscurely contorted body sculptures and exercises a life of sadomasochism and claustrophobic punk clubs. Paul gradually becomes creeped out by Marcy, tells her off, and later that night discovers her dead body. Following this, he bounces randomly from apartment to diner and back again in search of someone who will either lend him some money to ride the subway - whose prices increased at midnight - or offer him a bed to sleep in. To add to his troubles, the neighborhood's fed-up denizens are forming a clan in response to a spontaneous series of robberies, asserting the frantic Paul as the primary suspect.

Scorsese imbues this harrowing outing with a surreal, fable-like quality and a Kafkaesque sense of perpetually accumulating doom. His vivacious shooting style incorporates subtle, subconscious messages that manage to make the audience feel the same aggravated, discombobulated feelings that Paul has. Continuity will break, such as when the sound and image do not exactly match up during a scene when Paul sneaks into Marcy's pocket book and discovers a cream designed to soothe burns only to quickly slip it back in upon her return, and the camera will exaggeratedly glide towards objects that either propound Paul's terror or provide hope of salvation, on display when a phone rings in an apartment and Paul lunges towards it with rhythm-snapping immediacy. Scorsese also tracks along the seedy Soho streets in a voyeuristic manner behind or beside Paul, sliding across the ground like a snake bushwhacking through the immense amounts of incessant rain and manhole fog.

In a way, the camera embodies the very movement of mischievousness, as if it's involved in an endlessly hostile practical joke played on Paul. Each time he leaves Kiki's discomforting apartment to the sound of Howard Shore's haunting, minimalist synthesizer jingle, the camera wheels by the sculptures in a POV shot, looking as if they're pushing him away while warning him of eternal damnation. However, eternal damnation is eventually what he evades by some unlikely stroke of luck in the slick, devilishly clever finale. With this, Scorsese hyperbolizes the ourobouric flow of urban life: one can always make it back to work in the morning only to begin another seemingly menacing day in the city.

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) A Film by Tomas Alfredson (2008)

Vampire films of merit come few and far between, which is why Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In - a work that fuses horror and social realism to engrossing extent - comes as such a surprise. Moreover, in an age where horror cinema has dwindled into empty, gratuitous offerings of torture porn and shock-for-shock's sake ghost stories (no less, the lame cult phenomenon of Twilight), its intelligence should rightfully be highly praised. The film is not a vehicle to explore the spectacle of vampirism; instead, the inclusion of vampire elements helps to add a morally complex dimension to the young relationship between the film's two main characters: Oskar, an inferior, fantasizing 12-year old outcast, and Eli, the mysterious vampire Oskar falls for, unknowing - at least at first - of her bizarre background.

Eli is an enigmatic character throughout, both due to the fact that she is constantly verging on uncontrollable violence and because Alfredson implicitly hints towards her androgynous nature. She repeatedly tells Oskar she is not a girl, which at once can be taken in light of her inhumanity, but following the brief insertion of a shot of her castrated genital region, a gender context is implanted in her statement as well. As displayed in the opening scene, Oskar is a boy who channels the anger he feels from being bullied into vicarious acts - a Travis Bickle of sorts. "Squeal like a pig," he proclaims over a black screen in the beginning before we see him thrusting a knife through the air maliciously. In this light, Eli is the mirror of Oskar: violent, brave, and intimidating. She stirs up courage in Oskar, encouraging him to be proactive when dealing with the bullies at school and henceforth brings about his maturation, which is as much of a negative one as it is positive. The film culminates with Oskar traveling to freedom with Eli; in his mind he is a victim of love but is just as much a product of the seduction of a vampire, destined to become the kind of ruthless supplier of blood that Eli's father was in the film.

Let the Right One In's "love story" however, is by turns complex (as illustrated above) and banal. The two forge their first emotional connection through the ultimate outcast staple: the Rubik's cube. Oskar plays with the device in his free time but cannot solve it, but when he offers it to Eli, she has a curious ability to finish it overnight. This exchange felt familiar and somewhat grounded in the romance and coming-of-age genres, detracting from the relationship that otherwise felt like it was evolving supernaturally. Interestingly, Alfredson keeps most of the violence offscreen or at a distance so that when Eli does make an attack or her father collects the blood of a victim, it is genuinely terrifying. He refuses to romanticize the violence, reflecting how it is a necessary burden for Eli rather than a footloose pleasure.

For the most part, CGI is used tastefully, a method of adding a subtly alien quality to Eli's movements. The film is most frustrating when it is not, such as during a scene when a newly cursed survivor victim of Eli's attack is bombarded by digitized cats and subsequently engulfed in flames as a response to daylight. One of the finest achievements of the film is its pacing and visual focus. The art direction is stellar, an exacting milieu of snow and blood, whereas the camerawork reflects the slow pace of life in the Swedish village the film is set in. Rarely does a vampire film extract so much fear out of calculated ambiance instead of viscera, and it is one of the best films of 2008 as a result.

The River (He liu) A Film by Tsai Ming-Liang (1997)

A small selection of obsessive filmmakers say that they make one film in their career, simply rehashing the same themes with imperceptibly slight changes. If there is a current director to whom this idea can be most aptly attributed to, it is Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang. His third feature, The River, is his first spot-on representation of his career-long concerns: existential solitude within the modern, urban consumerist environment, difficulty of communication, meaningless, merely physical sexual consumption, objective struggles as spiritual struggles. In 1997, when the film was released, it was Tsai's deepest, most complex, and most ambitious film to date. Today, a wealth of critics still consider to be his finest work, however I have trouble applying favoritism to any particular film of his considering they do contain such a string of similarities.

Tsai has cast Lee Kang-Sheng as the lead in every one of his films, and he also resorts to several other regulars including Miao Tien, Chen Shiang-chyi, and Lu Yi-Ching (save Tien, these figures are non-professional). For the most part, Kang-Sheng plays drifters either jobless or with a minor job, and usually develops some physical or emotional ailment. The two always inevitably overlap, as in The River, when he develops a severe neck pain following his spontaneous involvement in a film shoot, appearing as a corpse floating in the polluted Tanshui River in the film's opening scenes. Just as he is the source of contrived tragedy in the film that is being shot on the water by Ann Hui (in a special appearance as herself), Tsai plants his camera nearby the film within a film, asserting Kang-Sheng's character (Xiao-Kang) as the narrative catalyst as well. There is a taste of Kiarostami in this scene, a need to make the audience aware of the fact that it is indeed a film. Although Xiao-Kang was initially against the idea of appearing in Hui's film due to the dirtiness of the water, he takes up the offer and pays for it.

Shortly thereafter, Tsai casually begins observing the lives of a man (Tien), who spends ample time bumming around Taipei's gay saunas, and a woman (Yi-Ching), a bored elevator attendant. It is not until about thirty minutes into the film that we see the two and Xiao-Kang living in the same apartment, a triumvirate of lonely souls that hearkens back to Tsai's previous film, Vive L'Amour (1994). This time however, the focus is on a family which is not so much dysfunctional as they are nonfunctional. They barely speak, and if they try to it is in vain, such as when the father calls the mother (the only time he tries to communicate with her in the film) and only receives an answering machine. Nonetheless, the parents feel obligated to do what they can to cure Xiao-Kang; they try acupuncture, medicine, an herbal doctor, folk rituals, and a faith healer, none of which show promise. Meanwhile, there is incessant rain that is leaking into the father's bedroom, an issue he attempts to fix by capturing the water with a plastic sheet and channeling it into the apartment's drain system. When he and Xiao-Kang are out of town to visit the faith healer, Master Lui, this flooding problem becomes extreme, leaving the mother alone in the apartment with little means of solution.

The only escape for these characters comes unsatisfactorily through sex; the mother maintains a silent affair with a pornographic video dealer, the father shimmies through the dark hallways of the saunas, one in a mob of shirtless zombies peering into rooms in hopes of finding another pleading male, and Xiao-Kang encounters several affairs throughout the film made useless by his uncertain sexual identity, one of which involves his father, quite uncomfortably, in the lowly lit sauna. Feelings of confusion and dehumanization run throughout the film, and it is most stirring in the aforementioned scene, which is all the more nerve wracking because the dank lighting of the sauna obscures body parts, most adversely the head.

Tsai's visual style foreshadows his late works, which have reached the extremes of modernist minimalism. In the most complex scenes, the camera will remain fixed in its objective, detached position for minutes on end, acquiring an eerie realistic quality that builds tension until it is almost unbearable to watch. The River does however also contain a surprising amount of camera movement, an element that is entirely done away with in Goodbye Dragon Inn. The symbol of uncontrollable water appears here as the link between the family's several troubling agendas, and one can't help but see that, on a broader scale, it helps Tsai flow smoothly from one film to the next, carrying the same themes and images down the river.

Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) A Film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2008)

The trailer for Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest film, Three Monkeys, left me hoping the talented Turkish auteur had not lost the restrained genius that has made him so distinctive. It includes a host of thriller trailer clichés: ominous flashes of negative, text that detaches from itself frenetically, distasteful solarization effects - in a word, it does not come close to doing justice to the subtle brooding atmosphere of Ceylan's third straight Cannes contribution.

At this point, Ceylan, hotly contagious among fans of high art, has established himself as the contemporary master of domestic tension, almost a Turkish Bergman when taking into account the amount of time he spends silently scrutinizing the emotional complexities of his alienated characters. While Three Monkeys does maintain this thematic bent, the film also introduces some elements that are new to Ceylan, for instance poetic hallucinations (the eerie sight of a deceased child in broad daylight) and cinematographic flexibility (the camera in Three Monkeys frequently spends time scanning faces in close-up or changing shots within scenes, whereas Distant's focus was on wide, prolonged static shots). Also, the film's characters are all well aware of each other's grief but refuse to vocalize their feelings, resulting in a more intense psychodrama than Distant, in which negative feelings were repressed and (just nearly) completely unexpressed.

The film's tension can be attributed to Ceylan's nifty, schematic approach; just about every scene contains only two characters reflecting on unseen wrongdoings, glancing morosely at each other, arguing severely, or lying about a day's events. We only see three people in the same frame in the film's most climactic scene, and those are the three stubborn monkeys that make up the shattered family at the film's center: Eyüp (Yavuz Bingol), the foreboding father who had done time in jail to assist his greedy politician acquaintance and receive a large sum of money in return, Hacer (Hatice Aslan), the deceitful mother caught up in an affair with the politician, and Ismail (Rifat Sungar), the suspicious son forced by the weight of the crisis into committing dreadful acts. Ceylan forges a discomforting quietude within the family, a product of his refusal to show the acts that trigger the dissolution, instead lingering for lengthy amounts of time on the nuances in expression in the solemn faces, the drawn out resonances of Hacer's adultery, Ismail's eventual violence, and Eyüp's shallowness.



Three Monkeys is at the same time a commentary on the greedy nature of politics, the placing of public regard atop the need to take blame for one's faults. This is evident in the character of Servet (Ercan Kesal), the politician whose legal issues are dumped conveniently on Eyüp with money as the saving grace. Servet does not need to worry about his problems with Eyüp available as bait, just as Eyüp does not need to worry about his son's crime when he can simply offer up the punishment to his friend Bayram (Cafer Köse). The mostly minor actors do an outstanding job of manifesting the deep ocean of gargantuan emotions - love, hate, grief, confusion - into a largely wordless spectrum of shadow-eyed facials and tense body movements.

Perhaps the finest achievement of the film however is its technical beauty and tonal singularity. The inherent menace in the script is supplemented chillingly by atmospheric sound design; rolling thunder, rustling winds, crickets, diffused barking dogs, clanking train tracks, and amplified drips create a palpable mood that far surpasses anything a score could have brought to the film. And of course there is the cinematography, which, as is expected from the highly skilled photographer/filmmaker, is absolutely immaculate. Ceylan has crafted a world of shiny, somber faces against huge black clouds, windy terraces overlooking the sea, and wet winding roads containing careless individuals, all adding up to his most riveting piece of cinema to date.

Bagdad Cafe (1987) A Film by Percy Adlon

German director Percy Adlon's American debut is a strange effort, a film that has largely been forgotten but remains adored in small alcoves of film culture. That it did indeed wisp away into the kind of nowhere that the film is set in is more of a justification of its uneven retelling of ancient myths, a subject that has been more interestingly explored in countless other arthouse films, than a testament to its flaws. While Bagdad Cafe is almost arrhythmic and awkward as a whole, it does contain some preciously offbeat characters and scenarios. Adlon does not necessarily assemble a situation in direct reference to a particular ancient tale, but rather modernizes the general notion of a hero that arrives supernaturally to bring about change.

He sets his film in the middle of the desert, somewhere vaguely in the American West, and treats it as a place that is in an anxious standstill, desperate for a change. At the Bagdad Cafe, where the frizzy-haired African American owner Brenda (CCH Pounder) scuffles uncomfortably through the premises sneering at her children and husband and the dilettante Italian chef lounges around without any incentive to reverse the broken coffeemaker situation, one can smell the unease. So from the boonies, lead by an illusory pair of lights in the sky, comes a plump, orderly German woman named Jasmin (Marianne Sägebrecht), fresh off a fight with her husband that left her stranded without a car. She sharply contrasts the disheveled look of both the employees and the regulars, a foreign Goddess in a tightly wound dress (a modern day robe) who brings with her a camouflaged distaste for American sloppiness.

Her arrival immediately sparks suspicion in Brenda and eventually, when Jasmin begins spending time with her children, jealousy. Brenda believes she is in the middle of a cat and mouse game between the two, but Jasmin's intentions are clearly all good. Brenda even prompts the arrival of the sheriff who comes to inspect Jasmin's unusually tidy habits only to find her completely harmless. She acts as a typically stubborn figure for most of the film, but finally upon discovering she may be the only one left with bad vibes towards Jasmin (Jasmin even works up a tender relationship with an ex-Hollywood set painter (Jack Palance), who roams the film as a laughably kind-hearted and nervous cowboy), she rethinks her position. One afternoon, she snaps at Jasmin while she's playing with her kids and immediately, feeling guilty of evil, returns through her motel room door and apologizes. This relationship reversal comes too abruptly, and what follows - a gradual give and take of lifestyles until an equilibrium is reached - feels rushed and unrealistic. Jasmin loosens up her clothing and Brenda allows her son to play on the piano during work hours, an activity that had previously ticked her off greatly. The Bagdad Cafe, previously a haven for sweaty drifters, turns into an entertainment escape, with Jasmin's magic tricks as the main act.

Bagdad Cafe's strengths are ironically sometimes also the source of its weaknesses; Adlon's wickedly wry humor rides a thin line between amateurishness and intended drollery. Frequently it is an uncertainty whether one is supposed to laugh or take something seriously. Adlon also seems to get a kick out of graceless edits, so that when he is establishing a visual gag, he'll cut away clumsily to a brief shot of a truck passing in the street, silence the music, and then return as if nothing happened. Much of the film is reminiscent of 2004's Napoleon Dynamite however, both in its similar setting and its modern breed of "awkward" black comedy, so the balance between humor and disguised poignancy is understandable. While Bagdad Cafe is indeed forgettable, it stands as a unique departure from most decidedly small filmmaking projects, and is sometimes enjoyable just for its clumsiness.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) A Film by Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais and novelist Marguerite Duras were discussing over tea the likelihood of there being dozens of bomber planes circling above them on one afternoon in France. A few days later, Duras listened in on the conversation between a French woman and a Japanese man. These separate events become the unlikely seeds for Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais' profound masterpiece of a debut feature. Resnais had beforehand been toiling with a documentary project on the atomic bomb, a work that would hopefully attract Japanese and French interest. After giving it some thought, he found it to be an inane act considering the number of excellent, undistributed films on the subject already. This led him to Duras, whom he hoped to work with on a more classic love story that could feature the Japanese postwar situation simply as a backdrop. Hiroshima Mon Amour however, is anything but a classic love story; in fact, it is quite the opposite. It deals with the anxieties of romance and the personal turmoil it can often bring from a symbolic viewpoint, ruminating within an uncertain environment (dreamy postwar Hiroshima) on how the vagaries of time can both increase the intensity of a relationship and ultimately render it worthless.

The film begins with one of the most incisive, obscure opening acts of French New Wave cinema. For about 10 minutes, we do not see the faces of the two main characters that we spend our time with for the rest of the film: a lovely French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a rigid Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). Resnais intercuts abstract shots of their tangled, naked bodies with newsreel footage of the horrors of the atomic bombing to coincide with the woman's narrated recollections - which may or may not be entirely factual. The woman fleshes out what she remembers from a previous trip to Hiroshima, quite literally at one point, as we see what looks like powdered rubble from the bombing sprinkling on her pale arm. Her soft utterances are continuously denied by her partner in the affair, a metaphor for the suppression of memory. Nonetheless, the woman remains steadfast throughout the sequence as she does for the rest of the film, refusing to stop emptying out her unfiltered memories in the face of the man. Appropriately for two characters that remain nameless enigmas for the film's entirety, Resnais eschews full body shots, preventing the viewer from garnering a solid impression of the characters. Following this cryptic scene - a scene that has an unknowable place in time - the romantic affair between the two feels distant and intrapersonal, a vehicle solely for self-inspection.



As the film progresses, Resnais establishes a tapestry of contrasts. The architect is devoted to getting to know the actress and convincing her to stay in Hiroshima with him rather than returning to Paris, whereas the woman stolidly denies his offer, realizing that he is damaging her. When reminiscing on a similarly brief love affair she had with a soldier in Nevers, France years back, she begins speaking with "you's" instead of "he's", personifying the architect as the lost lover of her memory. Therefore, the architect's presence unceasingly reminds her of the pain she experienced back in occupied France simply due to the fact that her situation with him is nearly congruent. This sets off a split in the actress' own personality, on display in a compelling scene where she enters the empty hotel room the two are staying in and immerses herself in sink water, her self-directed statements alternating in and out of voice-over. One side of her urges not to get involved in another passionate fling (a subconscious transmission) and the other is torn between the love she inevitably feels and the prospect of future anguish due to the loss. There is also the political context of postwar Japan. The actress heads there with the task of acting in a film that is vaguely about "peace", but on another level, her purpose is simply to ground her identity in something concrete. She hopes to find herself in Hiroshima, a place rife with the strength of humankind (rallies take place in the streets), but conversely is thwarted by her own lack of clarity.

Hiroshima Mon Amour was described by the cohorts of Cahiers du Cinema - including Godard, Rohmer, and Rivette - as perhaps "the first modern film of sound cinema". It denies classical aesthetics, warps traditional narrative dogmas, and simultaneously references a very current theme (for 1959) and embodies universality. Alain Resnais was truly constructing an inventive way of creating films; his temporally chopped-up method of voice-over, fragmentation, and flashback imagery roots itself in the theories of Eisensteinian montage but also takes them further, allowing him to tell a story that perceptibly only occurs over a few hours in the present but stretches to the dark corners of the past and ahead to the future. It is an introspective drama that utilizes subtle shifts aurally - a scene where Riva's character vents to the architect in a tea house amplifies the ambiance when her memoirs become heavy-handed and muffles them when she realizes she is getting carried away - and visually - Michio Takahashi and Sacha Vierny's pristine monochrome cinematography captures nuances of feeling in a distinct way in each scene - to expand on the psychology of its characters. The crushing final lines (the woman calling the man "Hiroshima" and the man calling the woman "Nevers"), suggest the assignment of the two as objects, the complete and utter extinguishment of a relationship that, as time passes, will inevitably be forgotten.

It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988) A Film by Richard Linklater

A twentysomething ditches a semester in college to look for something to do, taking train and car rides across the West while meeting friends and family along the way. Sometimes he spends his time in a worthwhile way (hiking to see a glacier in Montana), but for the most part his activities are meandering (sleeping on a train, watching TV, moseying around empty towns, driving and fiddling with FM radio). This is the extent of what happens in Richard Linklater's debut, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (I'll call it It's Impossible from here on out for obvious reasons), and now that I look at in writing, it sounds more eventful than it really is.

Linklater's early work is marked by its meditative attention to the humdrum, its careful observation of Generation X, and its general flavor of early 90's nostalgia (high-rise acid wash jeans, retro Nike's, tall striped socks, sleeveless shirts). It's Impossible was handled entirely by Linklater on Super-8 film, including the casting of himself as the primary drifter. He describes the project as a visual experiment and a diaristic study on the boredom of everyday life, the transience of emotions, and the mindset of travel. Here's where it gets tricky; to be sure, creating a film that evokes the "boredom of everyday life" can perhaps be the laziest way to make an "experimental film". Indeed, it could just take planting the camera lackadaisically and observing the most mundane events life can offer, most of which are, quite frankly, on display in It's Impossible. It's tough to decide at face value whether the film is the work of a pretentious hack or of a modest, zen-like observer. It could be a bit of both, but thankfully, keeping in mind the similarly attentive, undeniably tremendous work that followed from Linklater, I choose the latter.

The film unfolds entirely in long, static takes, a style he maintained with his next feature, Slacker, with the exception of the lack of camera movement. Slacker glides ceaselessly with its characters, whereas It's Impossible sits like a dead duck, reminding us bluntly of the directionless state of the inhabitants (the camera rarely breaks the barrier of ten feet from its subjects). It is a vacuous film about sad and lonely people who hide their disconnectedness with cordiality and useless, time-passing behaviors. Linklater's screen persona has no dignified purpose for his travel; rather, he is surveying the suburbs and countrysides in an attempt to discover something that will substantiate his transitory nature and lift him from his alienation. In a train lobby at one point, he brushes against connection, sitting silently beside another seemingly listless young woman and eventually drawing a picture (or is he writing a note?) for her while she sleeps. One can sense the desperate need for the protagonist to release his inner feelings, but he remains locked in the dreamy, drifting state that is most keenly evoked by the shots of him transitioning from one train cabin to the next, bumping around precariously while the camera remains static.

There's no doubting that Linklater achieved his goal - the film feels like you've entered another person's dull life and are seized by the lack of accomplishment during every fleeting moment - but the question is whether or not the film is good cinema. Technically, It's Impossible is ragged, with poor sound quality and relentless grain (although, this is something I see as raw beauty). However, the film utilizes the two most essential ingredients of cinema (image and sound) with clarity and purpose, so the entertainment value is on a whole different level. It's Impossible is at least a comfortable preamble to Linklater's later work, and the distinct mood it builds assures it's a success given its humble ambitions.