film, eyeballs, brain

I didn’t get to go out and see many movies this year, but here are four excellent ones:

Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)

Andersen’s idiosyncratic love letter to Los Angeles, its ransacking by Hollywood, its architecture, and, when one least expects it, an incisive foray into social criticism, like a Mike Davis book brought to the big screen.

Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977)

I’d seen the excellent To Sleep with Anger before, but little from it prepared me for the gritty neo-Realist poetry of the deeply moving Killer of Sheep, about the existential longings of a slaughterhouse worker in South Central, circa the early ’70s. (Plus it features the best use of an Earth, Wind & Fire song in a film, period.)

Lav Diaz’s Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family) (2004)

More details here — speaking of neo-Realism (though I’m probably misusing the term), here it is stretched to the grandest possible scale. My humble wish is to see it at least one more time.

Marco Tullio Giordana’s La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth) (2003)

I’m not as thrilled with the way in which all the members of the extended family end up, supposedly coincidentally, representing the pillars of the modern state and other constitutive elements (medicine, industry, law enforcement, economics, art, the judiciary, etc.). But no matter: it’s a modern-day epic on four tumultuous decades of Italian history, both intimate and sweeping.

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