Screening Notes #5

Cold Weather (2010): Aaron Katz completes the process of breaking off from the tired label of mumblecore with this low-key caper set in Katz's very own solemn and gray Portland, Oregon. The film casually drifts into its deadpan central mystery about the presumed disappearance of main character Doug's (Cris Lankenau) ex-girlfriend, but the presence of a solid and genre-specific plot isn't what gives Katz's third feature its legs; rather, it's the loose, comfortable chemistry of its cast. Katz excels at making films about subjects that are never quite clear until the film is over, never really recognized as the meat. Here, it's the touching sibling relationship of Doug and his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), a Karina look-alike who Katz makes a Godardian joke out of during the brief and indifferent climax. Cold Weather is a giant leap forward for this decidedly simple entertainer who remains among an elite handful of filmmakers who know exactly how to end a movie every time...

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974): ...Which brings me to a filmmaker who doesn't know how to end a movie. Why Joseph Sargent decided to conclude this one on a close-up of Walter Matthau's goofy puckered mug in one of the laziest anti-climaxes I've ever seen is beyond me, but otherwise I can see what attracted Tony Scott to this dynamic and propulsive material. This kind of narrative cross-cutting - in this case between the hijacked subway train underground and the police department above ground - has scarcely been done with more skill and assurance even as it has proliferated in genre cinema, and the biting critique of a somnambulistic task force as well as the intimate feel for New York City is spot-on. Although the third act feels strenuously rushed, I certainly can't complain about the film overstaying its welcome. It's a briskly paced, often hilarious romp that never loses sight of the very dangerous civilian situation at its core.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011): The worst movie yet in the worst franchise in Hollywood, the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean is a bulky, lumbering mass culture trifle filled to the brim with idiotic subplots, cheap attempts at humanity amidst all the caricatures, and lousy, dim images of ugly pirates. It's no wonder Rob Marshall directed it, seeing as he's the King of making lavishly produced epics feel like junior high class plays. So canned are its intolerable butt jokes and sexual innuendos and so flimsy are its action sequences that the whole affair feels like some weird social experiment that so much of the audience isn't in on, an attempt to keep stealing from America's wallets even as it sticks transparently to the same formula over and over and over again. Bright and shining proof of Hollywood's uselessly self-perpetuating industry, an ouroboric process of using money and making money for no societal gain. And does anyone even like Johnny Depp anymore?

Tung (1966): An amorphous blue haze, refracted against the edges of the frame as if seen through a globe, washes over from the screen from right to left throughout Bruce Baillie's Tung, a hypnotic and mysterious 5-minute visual experiment. As the film continues, the haze is gradually disrupted by spurts of other colors, filmic blemishes, and fragmentary images of life: a woman (in negative black and white), summer, grass. With the exception of the girl, most of these glimpses are too brief and abstracted to really get a handle on what they are, yet the sensations of warmth and joyousness are unmistakable. The final feeling is as if waking up in the morning to find a woman you love playing around in the grass outside, and as far as I know, that's not a bad feeling to have.

Apricot, Some Static Started (2009, 2010): The past is a malleable presence in these two short films by Australian visual artist Ben Briand, something that must be talked through and actively mulled over before it can become remotely tangible, and even then it feels dreamy and incomplete. But that's exactly where the strengths of these works lie, in the probing and the reaching, in the wispy images of recollection. Apricot is a maudlin and predictable love story that somehow winds up being adequately moving by virtue of its own conviction, and Some Static Started is a brooding, Lynchian, and indeed incomplete scenario involving two bloodied guys in a motel room communicating about a seemingly tangentially related episode in the same space with a girl. With its gorgeous sun-bleached and unfocused images of youthful love and turbulent narrative, the former is definitely the more satisfying of the two, but both share unique commonalities: the clipped, enigmatic line deliveries, the fragmented and subjective compositions, the ambient soundtracks. These are very admirable short films that could pave the way for a strong feature from this visually adept Aussie.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) A Film by Niels Arden Oplev

What to film and what not to film: when faced with a novel of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's size and narrative complication, director Niels Arden Oplev can't quite navigate this fundamental question. What he does do is find himself in some confusing middle zone between fully fleshed-out and pared down, in which he picks from a hat one narrative thread to zero in on but doesn't quite neglect all the others, instead keeping them there as thin, sensationalized window dressing. As oddly sluggish and convoluted as modern mystery cinema gets, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an icky movie seemingly about corporate corruption and the irresolvable determinacy of history, but it's so sloppily arranged that neither of these themes, or their many implications, are ever really tangibly felt. The story, or at least the one kernel of heaping plot that is emphasized most, is of a left-wing journalist named Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) who, after being accused of slander by a corporate tycoon, is hired by a suspicious member of the secretive Vangar family to investigate the enigmatic disappearance of lovely Harriet Vangar (Ewa Fröling) forty years earlier. His accomplice is the super-serious goth chick Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a nifty computer hacker who was only recently digging up information about Blomkvist himself. It turns out that the same corporate head he blew the whistle at is linked to the grisly and immoral Vangar family, which tosses him and Salander into a spiral of violence and intrigue, as they say.

The problem is that the mystery being investigated, almost silly in its endless overload of facts, photos, and long-lost data, is never nearly as interesting as the sexually charged and emotionally tacit relationship of Blomkvist and Salander. It's an example of destructive exposition, spawned by a story whose many divergent subplots and unwieldy build-up of names and faces becomes a liability, a violation to the actual human drama that's being disguised by all the narrative playmaking. (It's no surprise that it presumably works better on the page, in words, than it does in a visual medium.) Underneath it all, there's Blomkvist and Salander, two potentially complex characters dropped into a situation that requires both professional and emotional intimacy. He's a lonely and vulnerable man spotlighted by a media landscape starved for a sensational story - which, ironically, is what Blomkvist makes a shallow living on - and she's a closed-off, vengeful drifter pining for human contact beyond abuse and rape. When they finally do touch, it's a wordless, visceral sexual encounter that ends with an awkward "yep, ok", and it's one of the film's most successful scenes because it simultaneously establishes the inexpressible desire between them and cements the tension they cannot defeat. Remove the obligatory shot of Salander's back-spanning dragon tattoo, which I can only assume is an offhand treat for readers of the book but actually has zero significance in the film, and Oplev has shot one modest scene of interaction between two people that is not bogged down by external narrative forces.



Bear in mind this is a very short scene during a middle part of the film when Blomkvist and Salander are sharing a small house in solitude to work on the case; cushioning it are the overlong episodes that are required simply to set up their meeting. For reasons never made explicit in the film, Salander must have a mandatory guardian passed down from the government, presumably to keep her violent and antisocial impulses at bay. When her longtime guardian has a stroke, she is assigned to a sadistic, scheming new one who takes advantage of her vulnerability, knowing that if she causes any "trouble" he can report her to a psychiatric hospital. Salander, clever and forward-thinking as she is, brings a camera with her to one of their meetings to secretively record his brutal chaining and raping of her, a piece of blackmail that she reveals to him later in her equally horrific act of revenge. Meanwhile, Blomkvist is shown meeting with a cordial Martin Vanger (Peter Haber) to have drinks and discuss his knowledge of Harriet. Martin, whom Oplev seems to think he has developed enough merely by placing him in this one scene of friendly interaction, returns later in the film to showcase a much darker side, kidnapping Blomkvist to torture, taunt, and lecture him about his shady father who honed him as a killer and rapist. Coincidentally, the film also ties up the loose strands of Salander's pathology by linking it via Ron Howard-like flashbacks and a flimsy scene with her hospitalized mother to paternal abuse and a childhood trauma involving gasoline, a match, and a car. What the film is trying to say about all this crushing patriarchal horror and masculine oppression - other than the fact that they permanently stain the victim - is anyone's guess, so they're reduced to unforgivably cheap thrills.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isn't faithful enough to any of these subplots in terms of screen time or conviction to muster up any tension out of the shifting power dynamics. At their worst, they feel like lazy opportunities to add some muscle to the primarily talky and systematic central drama, which is, admittedly, not even a very compelling subject to fashion a film around, especially since Oplev is not willing to give all the research adequate patience and attention. A quarter of the way through the film, Oplev has already established the small handful of recurring images that define and shape the investigation and indeed continue to throughout its duration: a black-and-white portrait of a smiling Harriet, a shot of her with a group of schoolchildren, and the perspective angle of a man across the yard in a blue sweater who instills fear in Harriet. As the characters struggle to extract the meaning behind the grainy photos, Oplev is happy to just keep showing them, not in the determined, purposeful manner with which Antonioni repeated the same photographs in Blow-Up, just out of a lack of anything else to show. Elsewhere, the guy doesn't seem to mind showing too much: the visual design of the production must have been to get coverage of every scene from every angle and then piece the shots together at random in the final edit. Rather than open up space, this approach paradoxically closes off and disorients it. Like much of the film, it's a decision that overcomplicates the core meaning, making it not quite the propulsive thriller it's intended to be and more of a drawn-out headache.

Shadows of Forgotten Film

It's the one-year anniversary over at Cinelogue, and the occasion has prompted a feature called "Shadows of Forgotten Film". Each writer has chosen 10 obscure films that are deemed essential or underrated based on the criteria that it must be at least 10 years old and have fewer than 5,000 votes on IMDB. My list, which I won't be posting here, is live now at Cinelogue. Also check out my reappraisal of Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos, which is also part of the feature.

The Thin Red Line (1998) A Film by Terrence Malick

The Thin Red Line is the most thoughtful war film ever made because it aims not to make any simplistic anti-war political statements but rather views war from a more cosmic perspective, questioning the epistemology of it and lamenting its effect on nature. Of course, this being a Terrence Malick film, nature has several different manifestations here: the landscape, the internal mind, the collective - in a word, everything. The film's effectiveness becomes clear when its finest segments are not when battles are taking place but rather when they cease. It is there that Malick discovers the endless philosophical weight in the downtime, in the moments of calm contemplation for the banged-up and horrified gang of American soldiers fighting in the remote island of Guadalcanal in World War II. In this surreal landscape of beauty and destruction, bloodied soldiers Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) and Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel) debate secularism vs. spiritualism, Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) longs for his wife (Miranda Otto) back home, Captain James Starros (Elias Koteas) struggles maintaining a commitment to combat while also preserving the lives of his brethren, Lt. Col. Gordon Tall (Nick Nolte) loudly asserts his authority over others, and Private Doll (Dash Mihok) desperately tries to conceal his staggering fear. Malick simultaneously shines a light on all of these characters' stories while also democratically treating them as no more important than the landscape they inhabit and indeed part of it.

All of these characters - a richly evocative ensemble that is a testament to Malick's unmistakable and rarely praised skill with actors - have an inner softness to complement their hardened exteriors, just as nature possesses an element of wonder (the trees, the rivers, the dirt, all nurtured by Malick's camera) and an abysmally dark side (the war itself). For a film with such a vast number of A-listers (George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Adrien Brody, John Travolta, Tim Blake Nelson, and John C. Reilly all join the fray with small cameos), it is totally absent of a main character, a natural progression for Malick who was already rhyming his many characters' patterns with those of nature in his first two films Badlands and Days of Heaven. It's more apt to say that the entire group of soldiers is a character, and their many passions and grievances cumulatively form one consciousness, an idea that is actualized in the large array of characteristic Malick narrations, the voices of which are never instantly attributable to any specific character. As if acknowledging this very ambiguity, he includes one voice that bookends the film with no actual character equivalent in the film. It's a soft, whispery Southern drawl, full of awe and naivete, and it could be justified broadly as the "voice of the soldier".

The soldiers find their foil in the tribe of Melanesian natives who are seen early on in the film attempting to live peacefully beside the clamor of warfare around them. Pvt. Witt is spending his short leave of absence with them as the film begins, and it is here that Malick explores their sublime group dynamic, at once exposing both the features that make them a singular entity and those that align them more closely with the soldiers. Rather than indulging in any sort of simplistic "we-are-all-the-same" allegory though, Malick's just plainly interested in people and the social functions that cultivate within a group. There is no imposition of directorial control over these scenes; natural encounters simply play out (Witt talks calmly to a radiant mother about the weather, young children do dizzy bat races in the sand, the natives wade around and swim in the ocean) and the symmetries connecting diverse types of people are discovered organically. As in The New World, there are numerous images of people underwater and emerging at the surface as if from the liquids of creation, a repeated motif that underscores Malick's metaphysical concept that as individuals we are always being "born", even in the terrible context of war, where new situations and conflicts force people to redefine their sense of self.



As much as The Thin Red Line gathers an enormous power from the sustained episodes of non-violence that rest on the outer edges of the warfare, Malick proves an adept choreographer of large-scale battle. The primary fight that takes up a great majority of the film’s running time is a spectacularly intimate-feeling American siege up a tall hill. At its crest is a long line of Japanese bunkers, and for quite some time Malick does not reveal any Japanese soldiers, keeping the onslaught of gunfire and bombs abstracted and depersonalized to better reflect the faceless savagery of war. The soldiers ultimately see the enemy merely as the “enemy” rather than as people, and as such the prolonged sequence becomes a Sisyphean struggle, with various members of the infantry (different workings of one mind) dying in their ineffectual bravery. Malick is attentive to the mini-stories of all his characters, watching as Capt. Starros humbly declines the gruff Col. Tall’s orders to launch a full-blown attack up the hill, an adolescent soldier (Nick Stahl) writhes in pain before death, and one overanxious lieutenant (Jared Leto) observes in shock from within a trough of tall grass as his partners sprint up the hill only to be shot down. The entire sequence alternates between short bursts of loud, visceral battle – which feel longer than they actually are given Malick’s unique method of cutting right on the explosions - and quiet interludes of strategizing. War, the film suggests, is a dance between these two extremes, an absolute overload of sharp emotions and high-stakes decision-making.

Despite the acknowledgment of the soldiers’ initial blindness to the similar plight of the Japanese, the film’s not making (at least not aggressively or primarily) any predictable condemnation of militaristic ignorance and blind patriotism. Malick’s heightened compassion holds greater sway, and when the Americans inevitably do reach the top of the hill and attack the Japanese, he’s quick to share the same sympathy for the supposed enemy, lingering on long, documentary-like close-ups of the suffering soldiers. At first glance, this is a rather familiar, even manipulative, “anti-war” strategy: connect the audience to the one side only to suddenly reveal the true humanity on the opposite side, forcefully tugging the sympathies around (this effect was famously employed in Full Metal Jacket and has since been used in Letters to Iwo Jima, among others). But even if perhaps it would have been more in line with Malick’s moral democracy to intercut earlier on between the Americans and the Japanese, the film doesn’t hammer the idea home, letting the succinct emotional reactions of the Americans speak for themselves. What’s most important is that during the subsequent scenes, particularly the masterful attack on the Japanese fort in which the diegetic audio is muted and a series of frantic steadicam shots capture the crushing brutality and then the devastating sadness in one fell swoop, Malick’s distribution of compassion is completely equal.



After fighting ceases for a while, fighting begins again. Such is the nature of war. This time around, Pvt. Witt finds himself courageously walking into a trap of Japanese soldiers and dying. If there’s one character that could be said to be more of a main character than the others, it’s Witt, if only because he most overtly shares Malick’s spiritual, environmentally optimistic worldview. As a result, his scenes often achieve unmatched effectiveness, with the camera peering gently into those bright blue eyes, the kind of eyes that makes Colin Farrell such a piercing enigma in Malick’s next film. When Witt dies, it’s a similarly hypnotizing moment; the soldiers attack, but before we get a chance to have any grasp on the violence, there is an elegant stream of flashback images. Witt’s swimming, he’s smiling, the trees and the Earth are smiling. Somehow Malick makes even death an instance of profound rejuvenation, only to subsequently cut to an absolutely wrenching moment with Penn kneeling over his gravestone, murmuring beneath tears a simple question: “where’s the light now?”

These are the kinds of unanswerables so often muttered by The Thin Red Line’s cast of characters. In quiet internal voices, they plead questions about the origins of war, the two-sided coin that is nature, and the consuming hatred and stubbornness that overwhelm love, often times in the span of one long philosophical tirade. The desire is not to answer these questions, nor even to suggest that they are truly being asked in the vocal sense. They are merely the fundamental crises that rest within the consciousness, unable to really be justified by words. Sure, the film’s resolutely anti-war, but it’s less about discouraging American warfare or lamenting the existence of World War II in global history per se than it is about asking a deeper and more unsettling question about the instigation of violence and conflict in human nature in the first place. And sure, the film disagrees with a great majority of the behavior going on within it but the intention is not to single out individual shortcomings, only to place these shortcomings within the context of the larger rhythm of nature and to wonder why that’s the way it is.

Of course, skepticism about the darkness of nature is also complemented by an enormously reverent and ecstatic vision of nature courtesy of Malick and cinematographer John Toll. The images in The Thin Red Line are not just beautiful; they send a jolt to your system, a realization of the stunning pictorial majesty already inherent in the world. A shot of a leaf, torn-up and gleaming with sunlight and the thick smoke of battle, manages to evocatively telegraph everything Malick is trying to get across about the dichotomous and often collaborative forces of nature, and there’s not just one but countless similar shots throughout the film. This sense of pre-existing wonder, simply “captured” by the camera, underscores the idea that the physical world is a gift, a miracle even, which should not be taken advantage of or destroyed. In such an epic yet intimate and detailed work, it’s amazing how unmistakable this undercurrent is, so much so that it makes the experiences of the characters look almost petty in comparison. But Malick, obviously, is not concerned with dwarfing anything. He wants to see the light in everything, to ask the most vital questions about everything, and that’s what he does in The Thin Red Line.

Bardo

About four months ago in the introduction to my new "Screening Notes" series, I hinted towards a film I was working on that was getting in the way of watching movies. The good news is that that film is now finished and I'll have more time to focus on writing. Seriously, seeing other films while attempting to dive into your own project can result in some serious cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, because it was such an all-encompassing project that consumed my attention for the better part of five or six months, I'd like to share it here. It's called Bardo, and it's about a composer (the titular character) who is struggling with tinnitus while attempting to finish his final masterpiece. The story is inspired in equal parts by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, the former of which faced harsh ringing before finally going deaf and the latter of which had a troubling and tense social life. I worked as cinematographer on the film, but it was really a deeply collaborative effort between myself and three other talented friends and colleagues. The film was shot on 16mm, making it the first time in my life I have actually shot a full project on film. We're all very proud of the finished product and would love to hear anyone's thoughts on it!

Bardo can be found here.

Meek's Cutoff (2010) A Film by Kelly Reichardt

As the first title card ("Directed by Kelly Reichardt") graced the screen at the end of Meek's Cutoff, the predominantly old crowd at my screening started to unleash a wide range of juvenile sounds from snickers to outright laughter. Around me, dissent hissed: "we've been punked!", "someone forgot to finish the screenplay", and "well, I guess there's no resolution there..." were among the common remarks amidst all the angry hysteria following Reichardt's modest fade to black at the conclusion of her film. It was all a tad, well, childish, especially coming from a crowd made up of people who have presumably seen, you know, a few movies in their lifetime. I couldn't help but feel the kind of strong defensiveness boiling up in my gut that any cinephile might feel after a great piece of art is wrongfully accused. My overriding sentiments (bear in mind this is a twenty-year-old reacting to people anywhere from their 40's to their 80's) were: "what more do you want?", "haven't you ever seen, or heard of, arthouse cinema?", and "aren't you aware that films can and often do consciously end in ways that do not resolve lingering tensions?"

It was all considerably aggravating, not only because it spoiled the bleak, spine-tingling mood of those final moments, but also because from the very beginning of the film - hell, from the beginning of her career! - Reichardt, as tough and unladylike a director as there is in America, and coincidentally one of the best, had made it damn clear that she was not about to provide any easy resolutions for the audience. The dour, self-defeating, and expansive propulsiveness of Meek's Cutoff is signaled right in Reichardt's detached left-to-right pan watching a group of settlers crossing the one and only body of fresh water they experience throughout the whole film. A lifetime of media consumption has taught us, implicitly, that right-to-left movement is indicative of progress, of some sort of positive momentum - see, for instance, old-fashioned video games where a character (say Mario) must traverse a plethora of obstacles and the further the character moves, the better along the player is (a simple concept that was ingeniously paid tribute to cinematically in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003)). Therefore, it's logical to deduce that left-to-right movement must imply degeneration or stagnation, a retreat away from the end goal.

That's exactly what is happening to the haggard and downtrodden heroes of Meek's Cutoff, a tight-knit pack fixing to follow the path of a mysterious, bearded guide named Steven Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who proves less and less trustworthy as the pursuit of water and settlement grows longer and more physically demanding. The particulars of the end goal for the settlers - Soloman and Emily Tetherow (Will Patton and Michelle Williams), Thomas and Millie Gately (Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan), and William, Glory, and little Jimmy White (Neal Huff, Shirley Henderson, Tommy Nelson) - are kept under wraps for the entirety of this ultra-simplistic narrative, lending it charged mythical undertones. It might as well be Eden that they're searching for, or the holy grail, because the desperation and care with which they slowly forge a sense of distrust toward Mr. Meek is so profound that it sends a ripple of tension through the whole group. Reichardt, who has now refined her sympathies towards the plights of the underprivileged across three films, is excellent at locating this tension early on and letting it casually grow.



Wisely, Meek's Cutoff saves any true "release" of this tension until the last fifteen minutes, the better to watch it simmer in the ritualistic non-communication of the day's work. To a somewhat lesser extent than Gus Van Sant with his hypnotic Gerry, Reichardt is fixated here on the trance-like, nearly somnambulant rhythms of desert survivalism. The endless creek of the rusty wheels on the settlers' carriages, the plodding crunch of feet against arid ground, and the various sounds of hard labor are all given democratic weight in the film's soundtrack, so much so that they tend to overshadow the soft murmurs of scheming, questioning, and mundane dialogue filling out the background of the mix. It offers a palpable experience of the settlers' increasingly serious troubles in the vast expanse of a very severe and windswept Oregonian landscape. Jeff Grace's stripped-down ambient score, also, is a fitting reflection of the growing unease in these characters, never swelling up but remaining an insistent presence regardless, like the equivalent of a soft and relentless wind.

Typical of Reichardt's cinema is her empowerment of female characters (or perhaps it's more appropriate to simply say her empowerment of Michelle Williams), but it's not so much in any sort of predictable feminist fashion as it is an organic preoccupation with the underrepresented details of women. Reichardt vividly establishes the pre-existing gender hierarchy in the group - the women wake early in the morning when it's still dark to commence chores and remain focused on them throughout the day while the men do the heavy lifting of decision-making and independent exploration just out of earshot - only to undermine it later as the basis for firm decisions crumbles in on itself and Emily must carve her own solution. Her strong will receives its greatest test when the men reel in an enigmatic Native American (whose Apache language is effectively unsubtitled) and are forced to decide what to do with him. Meek, a rampant racist and xenophobe, loudly voices the idea to kill him, while the others, compassionate but nonetheless wary (and certainly xenophobic themselves), suggest they keep him as a more knowledgeable guide to water. Emily is the only member of the group who is willing to fearlessly approach the unnamed Indian (Rod Rondeaux), offering him water, food, and eventually re-stitching his moccasin so that, as she says, he will "owe her something". Williams is silently evocative in the role, her no-nonsense facial expressions cutting fiercely through the shadows cast on her dirty face by her oversized bonnet. In Reichardt's modest decision to single her behaviors out of the crowd, an offhand suggestion of the importance of women in the navigating of the West is unmistakable.



Also unmistakable, albeit nuanced and unfussy, are the political implications in this imposed division of leadership. The settlers, clearly the lower-class surrogates here, have little authority in the actual navigation of the landscape given their naked unfamiliarity with it, but they are nonetheless required to make a judgment about who best to follow: Meek, the equivalent of an unruly politician with his essential understanding of human nature as the manifestation of chaos and destruction, or the Indian, a tried-and-true native of the land with unknowable intentions. This ambiguity propels the drama forward, and the absence of any excess subplots really allows this conflict to be magnified. But Reichardt thankfully doesn't infringe any deterministic message either way, only gestures towards the potential advantages and disadvantages of both options. In a knockout scene towards the end, William collapses from dehydration and exhaustion, and in a presumed attempt to heal him, the Indian begins a native chant. The settlers look on with a mix of confusion, skepticism, and awe, but despite the seeming good-nature of his actions, Reichardt is not merely exposing the privileged ignorance of the settlers. There's also a lingering sense that the Indian is reacting only to mystical instinct and nothing more, or perhaps that he's sustaining a pretend acceptance so that his bloodlust towards the inhumane white-folk remains, for an indeterminate amount of time, unrecognized.

These questions reach their pinnacle in the final scene, and as expected, Reichardt chooses not to answer them, preferring to let the internal strife of the settlers extend to the audience. It's a certainly a bold and "unsatisfying" move that she makes to not resolve the conflicts that dominate her film, but it feels adequately suited to the reality of the situation, which involves a group of settlers wandering aimlessly through the unforgiving clutches of nature. Furthermore, it reinforces the concept Reichardt had been successfully establishing visually throughout: that the landscape is a never-ending vacuum of disorientation and ambivalence. A surrealistic dissolve early on does the trick wonderfully. As the settlers wander off frame in a static wide shot, suddenly a cowboy on a horse seems to step out into the sky from atop the hill in the background. Only slowly do we realize the film is performing an elaborately slow-paced shot-to-shot fade, and any sense of firm perspective is immediately shattered for the rest of the film. In Meek's Cutoff, the Oregon desert is a shifty, claustrophobic space, as much a natural phenomenon as it is a reflection of the torn psyches of the characters.

A Life in Movies

A meme initiated by Fandango Groover called "A Life in Movies" has been going around and the task is to choose a favorite film from every year since you were born. It's an interesting experiment because I have never thought about films in such a way. Of course I've thought about my favorite films from various years, but never specifically within the timeline of my own life. The only parameter I set for myself was that I couldn't choose more than two films by the same director (or else I could fill this thing up with a small handful of directors). So that's it. Here's my picks:



1991: Slacker (Richard Linklater)
The year I was born was, fittingly, also the year of the film that awakened both my critical interest in film as well as my desire to make films myself. Richard Linklater's Slacker, just barely edging out Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique for the mere sake of personal significance, proved to me that something extraordinary and original could be fashioned from a small budget and nonprofessional actors, not to mention something plotless and semi-autobiographical. This is still one of the most enjoyable movies I know to watch, simply in the name of snappy philosophical dialogue and elegant tracking shots, and it's an indelible example of a filmmaker so effortlessly establishing a firm sense of time and place.



1992: Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann)
One of Michael Mann's simplest and most poetic films, and in a genre (historical epic) not familiar to his oeuvre, Last of the Mohicans is a fascinating and timeless fairy tale about love, violence, and nature. It's The New World before The New World, with nearly equal levels of woodsy rapture and an added injection of testosterone philosophizing. Every one of the film's action set pieces manages to simultaneously make the violence thrilling and revolting, with Mann's visceral, impressionistic filmmaking at its finest. There's probably some more complex films from this year - Kiarostami's Close-Up would certainly qualify as such - but none are quite as much of a euphoric adrenaline boost, and absolutely none boast the winning feature of intense mid-battle Daniel Day-Lewis expressions.



1993: Naked (Mike Leigh)
David Thewlis' showstopping portrayal of foul-mouthed drifter Johnny is still the most memorable in Mike Leigh's long line of larger-than-life anti-heroes, and it makes most contemporary stabs at a similar kind of brutish figure look tame in comparison. His spit-fire dialogue dominates nearly every scene so that the moments when he stops talking are loaded with immense contemplative power, which Leigh has a way of drawing attention to in his compassionate, probing close-ups.



1994: Satantango (Bela Tarr)
How does one do justice to such an ineffably moving film that is not two or three long hours but in fact seven, and whose every hour is so immaculately constructed that not a minute comes across as uneven? Well, one way to try is to do a series of posts on it attempting to grapple with its imposing beauty, but even then it seems beyond the scope of analysis. This is without question one of the finest works of art of the nineties, and it fully deserves your willingness to cover the windows (as the drunkard doctor does in the finale of the film) and watch it for a whole day.



1995: Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater)
The latter half of this rich and intelligent duo of films (Before Sunset) might be the wiser, more complex of the two, but Before Sunrise is a burst of old-fashioned romantic energy that feels fully genuine and never devolves into fake sentimentality (plus, I have a hard time not lumping them together as one film, a kind of Resnaisian experiment in the fracturing, distancing effect of time on love and kinship). I've never witnessed a more honest and open testament to spontaneous romance, one that is able to capture both the ecstatic energy and the crushing melancholy of it simultaneously.

1996: Nothing
I don't know if it's just the paltry output of films this year or simply my lack of exposure to a whole gamut of foreign releases (Kiarostami, Panahi, Hsiao-Hsien, Godard, Rivette, Von Trier, and Ming-Liang all released work this year), but I have nothing amazing to say about it. Fargo, widely considered the strongest American film of the year, is in my estimation the Coens' weakest film. Maybe Mars Attacks!?



1997: Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami)
Between Lost Highway, Ossos, The River, and The Ice Storm, 1997 was a fantastic year for cinema, but Taste of Cherry, as a rigorous meditation on mortality (and, like any good film about death, it's also inevitably about life), is absolutely devastating. I find the "epilogue" - its aesthetic "statement" aside - just a tad too much of a mood-killer to really be useful, but the film proper builds with quiet, sublime intensity, and Kiarostami knows exactly when to stay nondescript with his visuals and when to release something vast and metaphorically suggestive. The shot of Mr. Badii's shadow obscured by falling dirt at a desert construction site is perfection.



1998: The Celebration (Thomas Vinterburg)
Thomas Vinterburg's Dogme creation The Celebration is the epitome of what the short-lived "movement" strived for: a lean, gripping, no-frills production gaining all of its momentum from the rigor of its performances. The tale of an unveiling of secrets at a countryside reunion and the ultimate dissolution of the family in question, Vinterburg ratchets up the tension in grimy, humid interior sequences that give a mansion the feel of a claustrophobic tool-shed.



1999: Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)
Kubrick's final film, much to the feverish skepticism of some critics, is as mesmerizing and tactful as any of his great landmarks and it is attached to a concept that is uncharacteristically humanistic and intimate. The vision of New York City as a neon holiday fever dream is unmatched and Tom Cruise brings to the table one of his finest performances, an accumulation of subtle tensions and grievances that culminates in the notorious and haunting orgy sequence.



2000: Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)
Quite simply one of my favorite movies - not to mention the inspiration for this blog - Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies somehow manages to one-up even the director's colossal Satantango with its bleakly gorgeous imagery and spare, apocalyptic narrative. It's a welcoming invitation to allegorical reverie, one of the most tantalizing films to dissect even as it maintains a blunt experiential force that belies intellectual detachment. Tarr creates an entire world that is separate from ours yet is figuratively relevant, and that is special.



2001: Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
Lynch's best movie encapsulates every one of his favorite themes - identity, desire, Hollywood, dreams - in a spellbinding yarn that is superficially convoluted but really rather simple and universal. In an attempt to cope with our perceived and often real inferiority, we duck into the idyllic luxuries of our desires, usually in a feverish flight from reality. Naomi Watts makes that transformation palpable and powerful, and Lynch's nightmarish imagery and brooding sound design completely alter one's perceptual basis for processing the world.



2002: City of God (Fernando Meirelles)
The only worthwhile film Fernando Meirelles has made is City of God, a tense and gritty work about the trials and tribulations of violent gangs in Rio de Janeiro that is sandwiched in between a handful of hyperbolic, manipulative, and overwrought globetrotting dramas. What's so poignant about the film is the way that it handles its vast scope - the story spans decades and covers a multitude of touchy subjects - with such intimacy, never drowning under the weight of its many stories and characters.



2003: Elephant (Gus Van Sant)
Nowadays, I tend to fluctuate between Elephant and Gerry as my favorite Gus Van Sant film, but I figured that the former should get the billing because of the sheer impact of my first encounter with it. Gerry took a while to really hit home for me; Elephant wrecked me right away many years ago and was probably one of the most aesthetically striking films I'd seen up to that point. Van Sant's rigorous day-in-the-life-of structure is the perfect marriage for this harrowing build-up to high-school tragedy, an aggregation of details so precise and beautiful that when they are extinguished suddenly in the final outburst of violence, it's enormously devastating.



2004: The New World (Terrence Malick)
Having just seen The Thin Red Line (which I'll write about soon), I can say with conviction that The New World remains Malick's crowning achievement (although of course I can't speak for The Tree of Life, which I await like a giddy schoolboy). This is because Malick seems to grow as an artist with each picture, not simply exploring a new theme each time but adding more expansive inquiries to his ever-evolving rotation of concerns, and as such The New World is naturally his most jam-packed yet. It's a film that will speak eloquently to me every time I revisit and it seems that its tale of discovery and renewal is the ideal counterpoint for Malick's polyrythmic stylistic approach.



2005: Cache (Michael Haneke)
A comfortable bourgeois family. A mysterious tape. Violence and voyeurism. These are primal ingredients for a great thriller and they are the ones that are built into the fabric of Cache. But Michael Haneke, a filmmaker of evolving intelligence and subtlety, does not assemble them in quite the way the viewer would expect. The mystery is broadened and made metaphysical rather than concrete, turning the narrative away from sensationalism to psychology and politics. It's an extremely slight and organic maneuver that Haneke manages, but it ultimately allows Cache to be the thought-provoking meditation that it is as opposed to the taut and agreeable thriller it could have been.



2006: INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch)
Heavy anticipation and ultimately heated debate surrounded the release of David Lynch's fascinating digital experiment INLAND EMPIRE in 2006, much of the discourse dealing with whether Lynch's employment of shoddy prosumer cameras was a valuable artistic progression from the warmth of 35mm. It's tough to say, yet, if in the long run the answer will be yes, but certainly for INLAND EMPIRE the decision was extraordinary and unique, allowing Lynch to better adapt to the grimy illogic of his abstract narrative collage. To this date, it still strikes me as the most alarmingly effective use of the digital medium, a strategy that aims not to recreate filmic slickness but to embrace the ugly murkiness of bad pixellization.



2007: There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
There Will Be Blood is undoubtedly a new American classic, its immense cultural influence as a Kubrickian, postmodern western already rubbing off on a plethora of diverse films from The Road to Meek's Cutoff, not to mention spawning an irritating slew of parodies. But Anderson's actual film remains, obviously, the finest of all the spiritual antecedents and imitations, an epic vision of the open West as a corrupted arena of consumerism, a place where the powers of industry - of both oil and religion, which are treated as two sides of the same coin - have sculpted and degraded the pure majesty of the landscape.



2008: Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Most installation artist-to-director transformations lead to stylistically innovative films loaded with so many ideas that they fall apart somewhat as satisfying full-lengths (think Julien Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is periodically beautiful but cumulatively insignificant). Steve McQueen's Hunger is a different story: an unflinching visual poem chronicling the IRA Hunger Strike in British prisons in the 1980's, the film is so assured and complete as a narrative, thematic, and aesthetic statement that it stood up winningly against most conventional "director films" in 2008 (of course, this being a fruitful year with films like Summer Hours, 35 Shots of Rum, Revanche, The Wrestler, and Still Walking). Hunger is gorgeous, revolting, and mesmerizing all at once.



2009: Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso)
The strongest effort to date from Argentinian minimalist Lisandro Alonso, Liverpool is a moving contemplative chronicle of one enigmatic, seemingly shattered individual that generously allows the eye to wander around the tactile, nondescript compositions. Alonso slips you into an unremarkable world and asks you to take it or leave it. I took it, and the rewards were immeasurable.



2010: Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)
Frammartino's magical yet plainly down-to-earth and unsophisticated cycle of life essay met my eager eyes at the beginning of this year to knock Martin Scorsese's ecstatically enjoyable career comeback Shutter Island out of its top spot for 2010. Any regret or skepticism now a few weeks away? No, not really. This is an utterly delightful film that has a cosmic sense of humor and acceptance, and its eye-opening command of non-human performers suggests that there must have been something supernatural going on during the production. Perhaps they were slipping church dust into their water?

Be sure to check out Jake's list over at Not Just Movies too!