One thing about John Sayles: calling his films didactic or preachy seems like stating the obvious at this point, because that’s just kind of the way Sayles’ films are. From Matewan (1987) — a great film, but see it if only for the young Will Oldham — to Casa de Los Babys (2003), Sayles’ films may be complex and cross-sectional, but the big lessons at their cores are not. I realize I’m being willfully reductionist if I reduce a film’s moral to “We’re all connected” or “The world isn’t as black and white as you think,” but viewers of Lone Star (1996) or Eight Men Out (1988) — two very fine films — may agree with my assessment.
I think that’s just how Sayles rolls, and that’s fine with me; best get that out of the way. Amigo may be Sayles’ least commercial film in quite a while, probably as much as my favorite film of his, Men with Guns (1997), and I take that fact (along with the clearly shoestring budget) as proof of Amigo being a labor of love. (Do a Google search for “Sayles” and “uncompromising” and you’ll see what I mean.)
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Popularity: 12%
No one blows shit up quite like Michael Bay. Roland Emmerich may flatten entire cities with tsunamis, and turn the earth’s crust into strips of taffy, but only Michael Bay has the gleeful abandon of a boy crashing his Matchboxes together.
For a movie about robots who transform into different objects, each moving part inseparable from the whole, Bay loves blasting things apart in an orgy of destruction, the separate components rendered in exquisite CGI detail: steel girders twisted, wood splintered, oil spilled, scaffolding, plaster, wheels, metal, glass, concrete, the building blocks of capital since the Industrial Revolution.
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Popularity: 7%
In the very first fight sequence in Wilson Yip’s Ip Man (2008), the titular hero (played perfectly by Donnie Yen) faces off against a rival. Making the most minimal of gestures, the Wing Chun master Ip Man stands perfectly straight, his spine stiff and unbending, even during the spectacular drubbing he gives his opponent.
In the Ip Man series, Donnie Yen embodies (dare I say it?) Oriental discipline, and I use that term with all the East Asian cultural baggage it implies. He’s the very picture of studied equanimity, and with his hair cropped closely to his skull, and his somber black robes, he’s actually far more reminiscent of a monk — not a Shaolin monk, but you know, the other kind.
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Popularity: 17%
So my self-imposed challenge of the month of September was to write one blog entry a day – short little squibs, at the very least, then stretched if the movie, good or bad, warranted the extra space. So far, so good; except for a couple days here and there, I was able to muster the writing discipline to crank something out every day.
However, I can’t think of a better illustration of the garbage-in-garbage-out principle than what I’ve done in the last thirty days, but the truth is that I was stuck in a bit of a writing bind. The more depth there potentially was to a film, the more difficult it would be to meet my daily deadline, since I wouldn’t be content with writing only 150 words on, say, Mesrine. So soldier on I did, gamely watching the summer movie franchises and telling myself I’d be popping them into the DVD player anyway at some point, and stepping up to the daily routine of writing. A mostly rewarding experience, as you can imagine.
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Popularity: 13%
Ti West’s formal exercise in the babysitter-in-distress genre is, alas, little more than that, but it’s fascinatingly watchable in a kind of academic way. All the elements are in place: an oblivious college student (played by Levi’s model Jocelin Donahue), a one-time babysitting gig, a creaky mansion in the middle of nowhere, the house’s creepy residents (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov – what a cast! — performing mannered line readings), and an unprecedented lunar eclipse – well, the kind that Satanists of all stripes apparently find irresistible, anyway.
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Popularity: 14%
Grace seems, at times, to be a cruel little film, but it’s probably one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in quite some time, its abysmal 4.5 rating on IMDB notwithstanding. The blurb (from USA Today, certainly more trustworthy than myself) compares Paul Solet’s film to “a Stephen King tale,” in contrast to a “splatter-fest horror flick,” but that’s accurate only to the extent that King has long flirted with, and succumbed to, the idea of placing children in mortal danger. In Grace, the aforementioned peril also involves the child’s pregnant mother, Madeline Matheson (played by a good Jordan Ladd), who is determined to deliver her baby through natural childbirth. I don’t really want to reveal too many details about the movie, except to write that things go very wrong, and the grieving mother makes what seems like an indefensible decision, but the screenplay is finely engineered enough so that her choice, and a subsequent miraculous plot twist, are, by horror-movie logic, utterly believable. Yes, you more or less see where the film is going after the first half hour is over, but that’s the joy of it. There’s nothing like anticipation to make you squirm.
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Popularity: 11%
Since we’re experiencing a relative heatwave in the Bay Area, I thought I’d write about something vaguely appropriate. Bill Viola’s video is set in a 5,000-square kilometer salt lake in the Sahara Desert that receives 100 millimeters of rain a year, according to Wikipedia. (Chott el-Djerid is also famous for something entirely cinematically different: it stands in for the planet of Tatooine in the Star Wars saga.)
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Popularity: 25%
As you folks can probably tell, I’m working my way through the summer movie franchises — for it certainly feels like summer in the Bay Area right now — and Blade nicely satisfies my jones for action-fantasy, especially if gouts of blood are involved. (You could do worse, like with Resident Evil, or with any of the Scorpion King installments.) All the inadvertent phallic campiness aside — and an unnecessary semi-incestuous subplot — it’s a fun, bloody romp.
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Popularity: 12%
Oh to live in a world populated by endless Kylies, in all their pink and light blue splendor, blonde curls forever tossed by the wind, a bombshell calmly oblivious to the chaos blooming around her, duplicate upon duplicate, doubling and redoubling into infinity. Or it may be some sort of cursed recursion, a tangled loop where Kylie after Kylie after Kylie proliferate uncontrollably, a world into which you may not want to come: Kylie, eleison. In his feature films Gondry has shown an interest in repetition (the joy of repetition really is in him, as Hot Chip once sang), about the possibility of eternal return, but it’s in this video – shot in fifteen takes, a disappointingly finite number – where the idea sees its clever visual fruition. (It’s also my favorite Gondry work so far.) Or perhaps it’s a sly comment on the world of celebrity: the steady accretion of public personas amidst the media swirl, as omnipresent cameras stalk her in the streets as she performs the ordinary act of picking up her own dry cleaning, until she and we lose track of the real Kylie amidst the multitudes of Kylies, Kylie ceaselessly imploring you to lift her up, up, high upon your love, condemned to strut forever on an infinitely scrolling catwalk.
Popularity: 23%
I could go on and on about how beautiful the Polish brothers’ Northfork looks – the way light shines through feathers, the stark gray beauty of the Montana landscape, the loneliness of weather-beaten farmhouses and the vastness of the sky swallowing them up, the visual humor of six men in black suits and hats filling up the foreground, all thanks to M. David Mullen’s gorgeous cinematography – but then I’d exhaust the good things about the film. Replete (or overstuffed) with religious symbolism, the film, set in 1955, mostly follows the mysterious Movers, assigned to persuade the last stubborn residents of Northfork to move before a new dam is opened and floodwaters consume the village. The film slips through different realities: one is from the dream-perspective of a boy abandoned by his adoptive parents, but I write that as if it’s clear which is which. Slowly both universes seep into each other: one suffused with a deadpan surrealism, the other with willful eccentricities, and both unfortunately begin to overshadow the narrative’s overall tone of mourning. Not to mention how this mood of impending loss is often shattered by egregious puns (one character actually says, “What are you talking about, Willis?”). Quite an acting cast, though: Nick Nolte, James Woods, Anthony Edwards and Daryl Hannah are here, but their formidability can’t save the film from collapsing under its own pretensions.
Popularity: 10%
This second half of Jean-Francois Richert’s gangster epic is slightly more disjointed, but its arguments make for a richer film. Removed from the more straightforward narrative arc of Mesrine’s early career and his marriages (his first is skipped in the former film), Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 echoes the peripatetic nature of this thief’s occupation. The film feels like a string of narrow escapes and increasingly brazen (and, from the perspective of 2010, pretty damn insane) robberies. Practically every scene is conducted in broad daylight, almost as if they were deliberate provocations designed for maximum publicity. (It also helps that the police are also remarkably incompetent.)
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Popularity: 10%
With his cheekbones, scarily gaunt features, and what seems like a perpetual sneer, Vincent Cassel has a face made for gangster movies. But there’s no denying his low-key charm as well (though I think my women friends would disagree with “low-key”) — witness the twinkle in his eye when, like a shark, he encircles his female prey — and in that sense he’s wonderfully suited to play Jacques Mesrine, notorious robber of banks and jewelry stores and wanted in probably just as many countries. A smooth criminal indeed.
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Popularity: 16%
I’ve come to realize that Will Ferrell’s secret comic weapon is the dullness of his eyes. No, really, bear with me here: he’s mastered the art of the blank stare, a look that seems to suggest that something you said just isn’t quite sinking in. (Which is why his Saturday Night Live impressions of George W. Bush were painfully on target.) It only serves to heighten the effect of his buffoonery; in the excellent Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Ferrell employs that slow-witted stare along with a clueless arrogance and precise comic timing, often a few significant seconds off. That stare — plus his total lack of shame about removing his shirt and showing off that worryingly hirsute barrel chest — is what makes this Ferrell’s movie.
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Popularity: 12%
In my completely voluntary trawl through Paul W. S. Anderson’s oeuvre — and I write “voluntary” to emphasize the fact that I wasn’t threatened with sharp implements to watch this — his 2004 goo-fest with the unwieldy and literal-minded title, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, actually stands as something of an achievement. Sure, it’s icky to look at, it comes with a backstory that’s patent nonsense, but nonetheless provides excitement in an efficiently dumb way.
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Popularity: 12%
Pointless, except for the one at the tip of the hatchet. Adam Green’s Hatchet — lauded, apparently, by Harry Knowles and MTV and genre film fests worldwide — was billed as “Old School American Horror,” which sounds a bit like a Chevy truck recall: “It’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel, and it’s not based on a Japanese one.” Fine, but what do you have then? Certainly not originality. Its presumed antecedents are Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), two films that provided the template for the slasher film. Hatchet is neither gruesome enough for jaded gorehounds, or witty enough for audiences who expect a little directorial spin on the proceedings. All Hatchet is is form — the masked killer, an origin story, annoying victims with various levels of intelligence — and not much more. (Hatchet features a swamp, a deformed maniac and clueless tourists.) While Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) employed those same formal elements, it was also about them; Hatchet merely lumbers along, like the maniac Victor Crowley. Also stars Parry Shen from Better Luck Tomorrow, who, because he puts on three different accents, looks like he’s the only one having fun in the film.
Popularity: 9%
