OT: Edgar Wright's Fave 1000 films
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swanstep — 9 years ago(September 27, 2016 09:50 PM)
561 Breathless Jim McBride, 1983
An interesting film that I'll need to see again (and meanwhile rewatch Godard's original) before I can reach a final verdict I'd been looking forward to seeing this for a while since I vaguely remember the film getting poorly reviewed in 1983 and yet I've been aware since the '90s that it has its high-profile fans, most notably QT and Mark Kermode. I guess my way into the film (given that it has little of the timeless, ineffable cool of Godard's original) has therefore been to see it as trying to be a mixture of True Romance and Pulp Fiction before its time. (with a bit of Kill Bill 2 anticipation for good measure). True Romance rewrites and sexes up Badands much the way Breathless (1983) does Breathless (1960), and True Romances's way of using both music and pop-cultural references are both strongly in evidence in Breathless (1983). The use of multi-cultural 'Southlands' LA locations feels like Pulp Fiction (although the bits of PF it feels like most are, unfortunately, the Butch and Fabienne bits! The female lead in Breathless (1983) is Fabienne stretched out to 80 minutes!). First Time Through then I couldn't really say if I liked B (1983) or not; it's something to be ahead of your time but it doesn't necessarily make you good! Anyhow, it's a good sign that something makes you want to see it again, and Breathless definitely does that.
886 The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters Seth Gordon, 2007
Terrifically entertaining if insubstantial doc. about the world of the world champions of Donkey Kong and other arcade games. Well-edited and doesn't overstay its welcome.
Glad to have seen both of these. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 05, 2016 04:49 AM)
957 The Counselor Ridley Scott, 2013
Ha, I remember this one getting slammed by the critics when it came out enough so that I never even considered seeing it (Scott's been a pretty erratic director since the mid-'80s). Well, The Counselor turns out to be very watchable even somewhat fascinating (even though at least on first viewing the mechanics of the main caper and the double- and triple-crosses are still pretty obscure to me, to the point where I wasn't completely sure who was doing most of the killing at the end of the film). I'll certainly watch it again sometime soon.
The Counselor wr. by Cormac McCarthy is kind working the same beat as McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and also things like Traffic and Sicario, but with a Double Indemnity/Body Heat layer over the top of the (by now) usual border-land spectacular violence. If that sounds like your kind of thing then this film probably will be. Interesting dialogues throughout are the principal compensation for not completely understanding in real-time the plot/caper mechanics. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 08, 2016 02:25 AM)
954 Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch, 2013
A languid vampire tale of no particular distinction in my view. Swinton and Hiddleston are both amazing physical and acting specimens, some of the production design is fun to eyeball, and there's some interesting music, but with little story to speak of and only a few repetitive ideas, OLLA feels like a 30-40 minute exercise needlessly stretched out over two hours.
I'm intrigued by the fact that OLLA made Wright's list but the somewhat similar A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) - the b/w indie Iranian vampire flick shot in L.A.! - did not. The latter had a few problems, but it still struck me as having most of the virtues of OLLA while being rather more fun, and getting through its paces in about 25 mins less. Hmmm. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 15, 2016 04:57 AM)
906 Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea, 2009
A fascinating hybrid of documentary and lost-film-reconstruction. In 1964, Clouzot sets out to make his master statement that'll top Vertigo and Marienbad and 81/2. Inferno/Hell/L'Enfer. He gets unprecedented support from an American studio (officially budget is unlimited), and afters month of camera tests and make-up experimentation with the actors, Clouzot heads to his big location with no less than three complete ace film-crews..and things fall apart. Clouzot has become so intrigued with all his new research and exploration that he's barely able to complete scenes. Actors are forced through hundreds of takes and eventually start walking off set, famous DPs do the same, and eventually Clouzot has a big heart attack which closes down production. Clouzot survives but he'll never be the same after the hugely expensive L'Enfer disaster. This doc. reconstructs as much as possible from the 175 reels that were shot (that includes the months of test footage).and most of it looks amazing. (A good source of frame-grabs for image-avatars! Hence my own recent change in this department.) If Clouzot had been able to complete the film it doubtless would have at least been one of the most visually sensational films of the '60s.
The main problems I have with the doc. are that it leaves out a few big chunks of the story as far as I'm concerned. The big subject of L'Enfer is jealousy and its mind-bending-ness. I find it weird that the film never mentions that the great scandalous avant-garde, death-of-the-author French novel of the late '50s was Robbe-Grillet's (writer of Marienbad) Jealousy/La jalousie which plunges you into a twisted-by-jealousy mind in a then new way. That has to have been a big background inspiration for Clouzot, yet it's never mentioned in the film.
Something else the film never mentions: in 1994 Chabrol made (with Clouzot's wife's permission) his own film, L'Enfer, from Clouzot's script.and it's excellent. More normal than/less far out/psychedelic than what Clouzot was trying for.it's still a dynamite film.and it is the whole original script so it's really useful to see it before seeing the kind of half-reconstruction of Clouzot's intended L'Enfer here.
Anyhow, H-G Clouzot's Inferno (2009) is fascinating if you're into Clouzot and '60s film and/or tales of Directors losing their minds and their films. It wouldn't make my top 1000 list but it's still my sort of thing.
Update: The doc. is currently available in full on youtube (you have to click in the right button to get the english subtitles):
Someone has also put up (with a techno soundtrack) about 10 minutes of some of the greatest hits from Clouzot's test footage here:
955 Prisoners Denis Villeneuve, 2013
Pretty solid, long police procedural welded to a kind of commentary on the use of torture in the Global War on Terror. Not sure, first time through what it was actually saying about all that, especially given that the film elided the consequences for all but the main torturer. Villeneuve has pretty much been given the keys to Hollywood after this and Sicario: he's got the new sci-fi Arrival coming out shortly and he's current filming
Blade Runner 2049
. He's definitely proficient but maybe doesn't have quite the eye and editing chops of a Ridley Scott or a Fincher. Put another way, he's more a Fleisher than a Hitchcock. But, hell, these days we'll take a Fleisher! Villeneuve is one of the few people getting to make relatively big-budget non-superhero, original script films period, and we have to salute the guy for having achieved that status. Still wouldn't put Prisoners on any major lists myself but it's worth seeing. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 19, 2016 04:11 AM)
842 Ong-Bak Prachya Pinkaew, 2003
A Thai Martial Arts/Parkour/Boxing action-film. the sort of film that insists on replaying any especially sensational kick or blow from 5 or 6 different angles. Not my sort of thing and not in the same league I'd say as The Raid: Redemption (2011) (also on Wright's list), a martial arts epic that does a much better job at characterization, story, themes, you name it.
Ong-Bak is fun enough, and doubtless Thailand deserved to have its Jackie Chan or Jet Li, but this is not a film I'll watch again, nor will I track down Ong-Bak 2,3,4
Thinking back to 2003 and looking at what did not make Wright's list from that year including Pirates of The Carribean 1, Dogville, Capturing the Friedmans, Fog of War, Bad Santa, Mystic River, maybe even The Station Agent and ThirteenI think I'd take any/all of those ahead of Ong-Bak.
In general tho' there's quite a bit of martial arts stuff on Wright's list (QT has the same weakness I believe). I may have to face that, with only very rare exceptions (like The Raid as I mentioned above), that whole genre is a bit of blind-spot for me the way musicals are for some other people. I don't think I'm going to be able to follow through my notional plan to watch everything previously unseen on Wright's list; henceforth I'll mostly pass over anything that's obviously martial artsy. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 22, 2016 04:06 AM)
970 Love & Mercy Bill Pohlad, 2014
A better-than-average but not truly-superior biopic of Brian Wilson. The films cuts between Wilson in the '60s (played by Paul Dano) as he becomes a studio genius putting together Pet Sounds, Good Vibrations and Surf's Up, and Wilson in the '80s (played by John Cusack) as he finds the love of a good woman (nicely played by Elizabeth Banks, who's growing on me) and breaks free of a wretched psychologist who'd become his ultra-controlling legal guardian. The best things in the film are the studio-whiz recreations with Dano (who's the spitting image of Wilson) and Banks, but of course they can never meet since they're in different halves of the film which is frustrating. For a large chunk of the movie you feel like you've stuck in one of those Julia & Julia movies - a movie of two very unbalanced halves. Ultimately my taste on this front is just more orthodoxly high-brow than Wright's: for me it's insane to have Love and Mercy on a top 1000 list ahead of things like Amadeus and Topsy Turvy and Bound for Glory and I'm Not There, or even Walk The Line and Saving Mr Banks.
626 Lethal Weapon Richard Donner, 1987
It was good to finally catch up with LW. Lots of elements from it - the Xmas setting, people falling from great heights onto cars, the heavy quipping, blonde super-soldier nemesis bad-guy, etc. - turn up but done much better with Die Hard the following year, and various other elements including surprise exploding houses (just as our heroes walk up to them) became de rigeur after this so I guess I have to give LW and Shane Black some credit for a kind of cornerstone '80s and '90s action film, for getting these elements all together and out there first.
Still, for me, the film drags, neither half of the central buddy duo really works for me, the mainly sax and guitar score is obnoxious and obtrusive, the inciting incident of the plot (i.e., the model/hooker jumping to her death) doesn't work at all when you think about it (once the bad-guys are revealed it's clear they would have killed the girl themselves and not used a convoluted scheme of hiring another hooker to poison her), and, e.g., the first guy (who ends up dying in the pool) who shoots at Murtagh and Riggs is just the dead girl's pimp/porno-producer as far as we know, not one of the main bad-guys whose only connection to the dead girl is that she's daughter of one of their own, so his action simply doesn't make sense (if that's directly from Shane Black's s/play then I say that that s/play isn't very good at plot basics). And visually LW isn't in the same class as things like The Untouchables or Robocop or even Predator or The Lost Boys from the same year. In other words, LW strikes me as kind of a paradigmatic, OK-for-Friday-Night, 3-stars-if-we're-being-very-generous movie. It wouldn't be anywhere near any top-anything list o' mine. -
ecarle — 9 years ago(October 22, 2016 09:06 AM)
626 Lethal Weapon Richard Donner, 1987
It was good to finally catch up with LW. Lots of elements from it - the Xmas setting, people falling from great heights onto cars, the heavy quipping, blonde super-soldier nemesis bad-guy, etc. - turn up but done much better with Die Hard the following year
Though I too think that Die Hard is a much better thriller and movie than Lethal Weapon, they are bonded together via several elements: the musical composer(Michael Kamen, I believe) had such a distinctive style, particularly during the action scenes, that Die Hard seems a CONTINUATION of Lethal Weapon, and the producer, Joel Silver, made his mark in the nineties by throwing all sorts of big budget money, directors, and cinematographers at these projects. When Clint Eastwood's cheapjack and minimal "The Dead Pool"(Dirty Harry 5) came out in 1988, it was anhilated at the box office by "Die Hard," which showed that: big budgets were now going to be a part of the action movie, too.
I find myself so often nostalgically drawn to the movies of 1958-1962 well before my time as an adult movie goer. I find myself more cynically drawn to the movies of the late eighties. They are just as distinctive in their own way, but really, by the late 80's, TV-series style narrative(COP TV series narrative, ala "Starsky and Hutch") had just been gussied up with big budgets, sleek looks, and a kind of "Star Wars"-infused special effects and bullets emphasis.
Lethal Weapon of 1987 was a late-breaking "creative sequel" to the movie that I REALLY think started it all: "48 HRS" of 1982 with Nick Nolte (a favorite of mine at that time; hulking, gravel-voiced but boyish) and Eddie Murphy(exploding as the biggest star SNL ever gave us, yet separate from all the rest of them.) I think Joel Silver produced that , too. But it took the late 80's and Michael Kamen to really set the mold. Cop movies were all the rage for awhile: Tango and Cash(Stallone and Kurt Russell), Red Heat(Schwarzenegger and JAMES Belushi), Stakeout (a comebacking Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez) and ALL the Lethal Weapons, which edged us into the nineties with The Last Boy Scout(from Shane Black again; Bruce Willis and Damon Waynons) and Rush Hour(Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.) And then buddy cops burned out and comic book heroes came in.
All that history is perhaps why "The Nice Guys" was a disproportionately nostalgic and emotional experience for me, this year. (Though Crowe and Gosling aren't cops.)
and various other elements including surprise exploding houses (just as our heroes walk up to them) became de rigeur after this so I guess I have to give LW and Shane Black some credit for a kind of cornerstone '80s and '90s action film, for getting these elements all together and out there first.
They really did. 48 HRS wasn't really done the same way; it took Lethal Weapon to "set the template" for quite some time.
"Die Hard" to its credit really went in another direction and became a DIFFERENT template: the hero versus terrorists(usually criminals, not political.) The joke became: "Die Hard on a BLANK." Die Hard on a bus(Speed); Die Hard at the hockey game(Sudden Death); Die Hard on a mountain(Cliffhanger); Die Hard on a ship(Speed 2.)
Still, for me, the film drags, neither half of the central buddy duo really works for me, the mainly sax and guitar score is obnoxious and obtrusive, the inciting incident of the plot (i.e., the model/hooker jumping to her death) doesn't work at all when you think about it (once the bad-guys are revealed it's clear they would have killed the girl themselves and not used a convoluted scheme of hiring another hooker to poison her), and, e.g., the first guy (who ends up dying in the pool) who shoots at Murtagh and Riggs is just the dead girl's pimp/porno-producer as far as we know, not one of the main bad-guys whose only connection to the dead girl is that she's daughter of one of their own, so his action simply doesn't make sense (if that's directly from Shane Black's s/play then I say that that s/play isn't very good at plot basics).
"Lethal Weapon" was released in March of 1987; "Die Hard" in the summer of 1988. That one film was selected as a big summer blockbuster and the other as a "spring low-level event" tells you: the studio felt "Lethal Weapon" was flawed in some way. And it was. The script. Famous as Shane Black was for making so much money as a screenwriter so young, his plotting was for crap. A lot of "Lethal Weapon" is literally incoherent, and the whole thing boils down to a WAY too long martial arts/wrestling fight between Mel Gibson and Gary Busey(impressively slimmed down as the albino-haired villain.)
The black/white pairing of Gibson and Danny Glover was probably good box office. And giving Glover the happy family to Gibson's suicidal loner made the movie "Dirty Harry Meets The Cosby Show"(in the words of one critic.)
And visually LW isn't in the same class as things like The Untouchables or Robocop o -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 22, 2016 02:47 PM)
Lethal Weapon of 1987 was a late-breaking "creative sequel" to the movie that I REALLY think started it all: "48 HRS" of 1982 with Nick Nolte (a favorite of mine at that time; hulking, gravel-voiced but boyish) and Eddie Murphy(exploding as the biggest star SNL ever gave us, yet separate from all the rest of them.) I think Joel Silver produced that , too. But it took the late 80's and Michael Kamen to really set the mold. Cop movies were all the rage for awhile: Tango and Cash(Stallone and Kurt Russell), Red Heat(Schwarzenegger and JAMES Belushi), Stakeout (a comebacking Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez) and ALL the Lethal Weapons, which edged us into the nineties with The Last Boy Scout(from Shane Black again; Bruce Willis and Damon Waynons) and Rush Hour(Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.) And then buddy cops burned out and comic book heroes came in.
Thanks for all this background ecarle. I didn't see (and still haven't seen) any, and it surely is against this background that LW's importance emerges.
All that history is perhaps why "The Nice Guys" was a disproportionately nostalgic and emotional experience for me, this year. (Though Crowe and Gosling aren't cops.)
I thought of The Nice Guys after watching LW and much prefer it.
On Mel Gibson and Lethal Weapon: quite a career break and he almost didn't take it. He was offered two leads at the same time: The Untouchables(Elliott Ness) and Lethal Weapon. Gibson chose Lethal Weapon and got a franchise part; The Untouchables went to Kevin Costner and made HIM a star. In fact, if you tie in Bruce Willis("a TV star") getting Die Hard after Arnold, Sly, Clint andAl Pacino! andRichard Gere! turned it down, you can see that 1987-1988 minted three new male movie stars: Gibson, Costner, and Willis. All via cop action roles.
Interesting.
But Mel Gibson had been around a long time. "Mad Max" in 1979 launched him a little bit(it was a foreign indie) and "Mad Max The Road Warrior" in 1982 made him a star but..Gibson then floundered for five years in "prestige" movies like The Year of Living Dangerously, Mrs. Stoffel, The Bounty, and The River that did nothing for his box office profile. His simple choice of "Lethal Weapon" finally did it for Mel Gibson. Perhaps he chafed at that. All those prestige movies and a cop action film made him a superstar.
Much as I don't think that highly of LW, it does almost eeriely get elements of plot and character and feel to snap into place for the first time that were then picked up by others. And Gibson suddenly snapping into focus as a star with the Martin Riggs character is a really great example of this: I don't think Gibson had ever played 'crazy' before this, ditto I don't think he'd ever been tortured on screen before this (or, hang on, did that happen in the third Mad Max 'Beyond Thunderdome'?). well after LW this 'crazy quippy Mel who kinda digs being strung-up and tortured' was his star persona and what he mainly played on-screen. and haunted him as a director and off-screen too at least until he ended up flaming out at the end of the '00s from which he's finally come back much older and presumably wiser and calmed down recently.
It's all so fateful around LW isn't it? I really think Gibson would have been downright bad and miscast as Elliot Ness, and if Gibson doesn't do LW then he probably never really transcends his original stoic Aussie/Mad Max semi-stardom. Gibson was Martin Riggs, the audience knew it, and handsomely rewarded him for it. But as with Perkins as Norman there were costs for Gibson from revealing so much the role was a Faustian bargain for Gibson that I'm sure he's probably thought long and hard about in the last decade or so.
BTW, the AVClub has continued its review of the history of action movies. They're up to 1987 where they of course chose LW:
http://tinyurl.com/jexc96v -
ecarle — 9 years ago(October 23, 2016 06:31 PM)
Lethal Weapon of 1987 was a late-breaking "creative sequel" to the movie that I REALLY think started it all: "48 HRS" of 1982 with Nick Nolte (a favorite of mine at that time; hulking, gravel-voiced but boyish) and Eddie Murphy(exploding as the biggest star SNL ever gave us, yet separate from all the rest of them.) I think Joel Silver produced that , too. But it took the late 80's and Michael Kamen to really set the mold. Cop movies were all the rage for awhile: Tango and Cash(Stallone and Kurt Russell), Red Heat(Schwarzenegger and JAMES Belushi), Stakeout (a comebacking Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez) and ALL the Lethal Weapons, which edged us into the nineties with The Last Boy Scout(from Shane Black again; Bruce Willis and Damon Waynons) and Rush Hour(Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.) And then buddy cops burned out and comic book heroes came in.
Thanks for all this background ecarle. I didn't see (and still haven't seen) any, and it surely is against this background that LW's importance emerges.
I saw 'em all. Even as back then, I at least TRIED to keep up better with art films and Oscar bait, too. But to me, those movies were like "eating peanuts." I had a tough office workload back then, and I just enjoyed go seeing the shoot -em ups and the bad guys losing.
They were all "genre" but varations within a theme: for instance, "Stakeout" believably positioned Richard Dreyfuss as a tempermental, wiry "little man" kind of action cop who believably beat the hell out of the bad guys. I was really surprised. BUT Dreyfuss used his Best Actor "sensitivity chops" to romance the endangered female lead believably, too. Emilio Estevez was much more charming than his brother Charlie as the younger buddy.
"Stakeout" also used gorgeous Seattle/Northwest locales and climaxed amidst all the dangerous crushing-logs and dismembering sawmills of the lumber industry.
Tango and Cash worked for giving the ladies two extremely gorgeous male specimens in Stallone and Russell, when both men looked their best and both men had a charisma that far exceeded the material.
Red Heat posited Arnold as Russian cop paired in the US with an American cop and..well, not so good. But by the director of 48 HRS. In fact, in plot if not characters, it is kind of a remake of 48 HRS.
One I forgot was "Shoot to Kill" which brought Sidney Poitier out of semi-retirement to buddy up as an FBI agent paired with outdoorsman Tom Beringer. The plot was scary/nifty, set in the mountains of the Northwest again. Beringer's mountain guide girlfriend has taken five men on a mountain climb one of them is a psycho killer criminal mastermind. But which one? While Poitier and Beringer (the city boy and the country boy) try to catch up with the hikers, we get a pretty scary scene in which the killer among the five reveals himself by killing all of the other four in one fell swoop, except for the female guide. Its one of those scenes you just REMEMBER. No hiking climbs with strangers for me.
These movies poured out with EXACTLY the same rapidity that we are getting the comic book movies today, but I fear the comic book trend is immortal.
All that history is perhaps why "The Nice Guys" was a disproportionately nostalgic and emotional experience for me, this year. (Though Crowe and Gosling aren't cops.)
I thought of The Nice Guys after watching LW and much prefer it.
Well , same screenwriter, with two maybe three more Shane Blacks in between that are even more like The Nice Guys.
ONE: The Last Boy Scout: Willis and Waymans in LA. Great opening scene: a halfback being chased down an NFL field by the defense elects to get his touchdown by pulling a handgun and SHOOTING his pursuers. Then he shoots himself. THAT's a way to start a mystery.
TWO: The Long Kiss Goodnight: the novelty is a woman(Geena Davis) paired with a black private eye (Samuel L. Jackson, hilarious.) Oh, the woman is a happy housewife who slowly remembers that she's a top CIA martials arts expert and assassin.
THREE: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer(as a gay private eye) in LA. This one is the most LIKE The Nice Guys: offbeat, funny, a bit self-mocking.
These movies dragged on into the nineties, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was rather an "attempted Shane Black comeback" in the 00's. It didn't take.
And The Nice Guys just wasn't a big enough hit to bring it all back. I remain nonplussed that The Nice Guys was set in the SEVENTIES. You'd think Black would have set it in The Big Eighties to hook up with his prime era.
On Mel Gibson and Lethal Weapon: quite a career break and he almost didn't take it. He was offered two leads at the same time: The Untouchables(Elliott Ness) and Lethal Weapon. Gibson chose Lethal Weapon and got a franchise part; The Untouchables went to Kevin Costner and made HIM a star. In fact, if you tie in Bruce Willis("a TV star") getting Die Hard after Arnold, Sly, Clint andAl Pacino! andRichard Gere! turned it down, you can see that 1987-1988 mi -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 25, 2016 05:32 AM)
932 Compliance Craig Zobel, 2012
Well-acted, -scored and -shot beyond-belief true crime story. Hard to discuss the content without spoilers, so I won't, but the fact that these events really happened (and were part of a large wave of similar crimes) is little short of staggering. The film probably wisely decides not to overstay its welcome (it's under 90 mins), and in its small way is an important film that needed to be made, and will always be worth watching.
Compliance is, however, not ultimately as interesting as it starts off threatening to be. After 30 minutes I was thinking it was in Lumet and Mike Leigh territory for tense drama rooted in some bit of the real world one normally takes for granted - here it's the world of fast food production and the folks on minimum wages who do those jobs. Somehow that analytical drive gets lost in the second half of the film as it works to wrap up its true-crime plot. Lumet or Leigh would have figured out a way to keep the analysis alive to the end.
633 The Hidden Jack Sholder, 1987
I know that this film has its fans but I thought it was pretty bad. It looks like a made-for-TV, SyFy channel movie. The plotting's inconsistent, the action's very unexciting, all the basics really are fluffed. A Cameron or Carpenter or Michael Mann or McTiernan or Friedkin or Verhoeven would have knocked this 'body-snatcher, serial-killer alien on the loose in LA' script into shape and then committed to specific casting and shooting ideas that would have brought the film to life. As it stands The Hidden feels like an empty vessel, as though every single creative decision on it has been exercised in the most lifeless way possible. In sum, The Hidden (1987) is one of the worst '80s movies I've ever seen.
Note that The Hidden is one of 20 films from 1987 that are on Wright's list. I really do find it hard to believe that he chooses it ahead of Predator in particular (same basic genre, vastly superior). And it's just weird to have so much stuff from 1987 and yet to have no room for any of Broadcast News, Dirty Dancing, Radio Days, Wings of Desire, Au Revoir Les Enfants, The Dead, etc.. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(October 28, 2016 05:19 AM)
975 The Guest Adam Wingard, 2014
Complete garbage that's nonetheless quite enjoyable. The Guest entertainingly fuses the renegade vet. movie (First Blood) with the slasher (Halloween) with the Psycho-Inside movie (Internal Affairs, Fatal Attraction, Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Single White Female, etc.), and the whole thing's presented with a bit of a wink and the ending/final gag in particular gets a big laugh.
Not a movie I think anyone would need to see more than once (and there's lots of wrong with it technically - e.g., a lot of the action is flat-out unintelligible and much of the dialogue audio is buried by the blaring retro-techno score - some of which is used diegetically in party scenes that it's almost impossible to believe would be soundtracked by such stuff in the real world). Low-brow pop-corn movies for groups of teens have their place, but not on a top #### list in my view.
Update: One point I shoudl have made: the lead/villain is played by Dan Stevens, whom I previously only knew a little for playing a relatively effete character on Downton Abbey. He obviously really went for it in this film - he was magnetic, completely convincing as an American and as a buff special forces guys. He does look quite a lot like Paul Walker so I think there may be a real gap for him right on Hollywood just on pure looks alone too. In sum, this was a star-making performance: every Hollywood producer will have seen this film and seen $$. All the jobs he got off the back of this performace/film should be showing up about now. I'll be keeping an eye out for him. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(November 10, 2016 03:49 PM)
887 Timecrimes Nacho Vigalondo, 2007
Sweet Spanish Time-travel thriller (certain to be pointlessly remade in English I'd guess). Less convoluted than high-quality genre-peers like Primer (2004) and Predestination (2014) [neither of which makes Wright's list], Timecrimes may pack more of an emotional punch, be more satisfying than those films for most viewers I think. Ultimately Timecrimes feels a little more like Being John Malk and Eternal Sunshine than its time-travel peer-films do, which is probably a good thing for most people.
Since I see essentially all time-travel-themed films that come out, I was maybe a little ahead of the film watching it more than most people would be, which is not ideal. I was expecting a little more convolutedness than I got, so when
a central crime isn't undone or revealed as having been staged
I was surprised. Pleasantly as it happens, but not all genre-experts will feel the same way.
Anyhow, good film, and an impressive directorial debut for writer/director Vigalondo. He's got a very-Charlie-Kaufman-ish-sounding film starring Anne Hathaway coming out early next year called
Colossal
that should be his ticket to Nolan-, Cuaron-style studio-auteur status if it hits big. I'll be checking it out for sure (it got good, though bemused reviews at the Toronto Film Fest). -
swanstep — 9 years ago(November 11, 2016 04:59 AM)
821 The Devil's Backbone Guillermo del Toro, 2001
A stately (first hour a little slow for many viewers I suspect) ghost story set at the end of the Spanish Civil War (in the late '30s) in an Orphanage/School up on Spain's High Plains, TDB is a very nice, controlled piece of work by Del Toro. It suffers a little by comparison with other great Spanish Cvil War-inflected pieces, esp. De Toro's own later Pan's Labyrinth (for which TDB feels like a dry run) and Spirit of the Beehive, both of which are also on Wright's list. Those films strike me as a just a little more interesting than TDB overall - both richer and clearer and better paced from their beginnings and yet more mystery-preserving/inexhaustible/rewatchable by their ends. [Indeed, one slight problem I had with TDB is its final shot, which I initially misinterpreted - I won't explain the problem here because that would involve spoiling the shot of anyone here, but when I rewatched the shot to check, it did strike me that the confusion could and should have been forestalled by the director.]
My preferences here may be just a matter of taste I suppose, and maybe if I'd seen TDB first I wouldn't feel the way I do. At any rate, TDB is still a very good film, with a nice score, some of the best deep-focus color photography this side of VistaVision, some good monologues, and first-rate performances across the board. Certainly, if one is looking for a follow-up watch to Pan's Lab. this is the De Toro film to go for: none of his films in English (Pacific Rim, Mimic, Crimson Peak, Hellboy, Blade 2) are up to the standards of his Spanish-lang films.
240 Daisies Vera Chytilova, 1966
Experimental, surreal, highly episodic Czech film that's both exhausting and exhilirating to watch. Roughly half of the episodes involving our two doll-like leads are pretty memorable for both their content and technicals while the other half are experimental misfires that don't stick in the mind. Put another way, Daisies feels like a real 'film school' film - a film everyone probably should see at some point (esp. if they;re going to be making films themselves) regardless of whether it's strictly enjoyable to do so. Daisies has almost certainly been a good sources of idea for MTV promos and videos back in the day, and doubtless there rare advertising campaigns and fashions shoots as well as other films that have stolen bits and pieces (There's a famous/infamous Rivette film, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) that I'm pretty sure references and emulates Daisies directly but I'd need to rewatch it to be sure.). Thus, I'm glad to have seen Daises even though it's not really my sort of thing and a tiring watch: no real plot, lots of hyperspeed montage, lots of different film-stocks used, lots of mixing of color with b/w and lots of tinting changes between shots.
Fair enough, then, that Daisies is on Wright's list. Interesting, however, that from 1966, Wright finds no room for Virginia Woolf, Au Hasard Balthazar, Alfie, all films I regard as essential viewing from that year. Film needs its experiments but VW, AHB and A are absolutely thrilling must-sees and as good as films get really. Wright's list is so weird when you get right down to it! -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 11, 2016 11:31 PM)
834 Good Bye Lenin! Wolfgang Becker, 2003
German Oscar bait? Warm sentimental tale about a young East German guy whose mother has a heart attack and goes into a coma for about a year starting mid-1989, thereby missing the collapse of the East German State to which she'd devoted her life. When she awakens from the coma still in a very fragile state, the son decides to perpetuate the illusion for her sake that nothing's changed. Hijinks ensue as the illusion gets harder and harder to maintain as the mother recovers enough (at least temporarily) to move around a bit.
I had a continuous feeling of deja vu while watching this film - something else I've seen before shares its type of premise but, frustratingly, I can't think of what I'm being reminded of.
Anyhow, aside from one very amusing, well-shot, well-set-up plot point in the final third of the film, for me Good Bye Lenin never rises above the merely adequate. But I accept that this is the sort of feel-good middle-brow movie (think Forrest Gump, As Good as It Gets, Intouchables, etc.) that's just not my sort of thing. I'm actually surprised that it's Wright's! I'm also bemused really that The Lives of Others (2006), Tin Drum (1979), Das Boot (1981), Wings of Desire (1987), Seventh Continent (1989), Kaspar Hausar (1975), Maria Braun (1972), and many other celebrated German-Language films didn't make Wright's list and this did.
Good Bye Lenin! was the breakthrough of Daniel Bruhl who has gone on to be a reliable presence in Hollywood movies starting with Inglourious Basterds (He's the Nazi sniper who kills Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) and continuing with the lead in Rush, the villain Zemo in Cap Amercia: Civil Wars. Bruhl is good as the slightly crazily dutiful son in GBL. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 13, 2016 01:45 AM)
835 High Tension Alexandre Aja, 2003
The weakest example I've come across of what's often called 'New French Extreme Horror'. The film starts relatively well with some good ominous sound design and nifty shot-making. Once the film's main harrowing, relentless, slasher/home invasion tale gets going it's fine but undistinguished. Then 10 minutes from the end we get a big twist that's Psycho by way of Fight Club and The Sixth Sense. While the opening scenes of the movie did foreshadow the twist it's one of those twists that makes a nonsense of everything we've seen go on before. Whole settings - e.g., a van where a lot of the action takes place including the revelation of the twist itself - can't exist/ have to all be in the villain's imagination if the twist is accepted. And this is to say that High Tension spontaneously combusts before our eyes.
Update: Thinking a little more, the twist can be made to work (so that the place where the twist is revealed stays real), you just have to throw out the whole set-up of the movie where two girls are together driving out to one's family in the country (that never happened!) not just everything that happens when the killing starts. Are twists that require you to throw away essentially everything up to the twist (so that there's literally nothing left for the twist itself to potentially conflict with) any good? Not on the evidence of this stupid stupid movie.
Director and co-writer Aja leapt from High Tension to a very undistinguished career in Hollywood including a The Hills Have Eyes remake and Piranha 3D. Having finally seen his name-making-film High Tension, I can confirm that it's not going-to-Hollywood that's made Aja bad, rather he's always been terrible. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 21, 2016 06:35 AM)
896 The Ruins Carter Smith, 2008
A bunch of US college kids on (I think) Spring Break in Mexico trek to an off-the-tourist-trail Mayan pyramid/ruin, where all hell breaks loose. Will any of them make it out alive?
The Ruins, while following a standard, simple horror formula (and there are probably at least half a dozen movies with this same formula on Wright's list), is above average production-wise especially for a novice director. Somehow the director, Carter Smith, who hasn't done much since, not only managed to wangle a descent budget, he also was able to get some ace help, e.g., Se7en's DP and The Lord of the Rings' Production Designer. And the kids in the horrific situation basically behave logically and the stresses that develop are believable. The two girls in the horrific situation stand out as better actors than the boys. Particularly good is Laura Ramsey (right before she played Don Draper's young and yummy Cali-babe, Joy, in Season 2 of Mad Men) whose character suffers an especially horrific fate (but maybe only second worst now I think about it - one character gets an ultra-gory operation en route to. musn't spoil!).
So, The Ruins is pretty good still, nothing quite makes it exceptional; it doesn't really leave you with anything much to think about (no subtexts) and no performances blow you away. (The Descent (2005) is an example of the same sort of premise but perfected; arguably Green Room (2015) is too.) And I'd rank it well below things like Martyrs, Two Lovers, In Bruges, Wall-E from 2008, none of which Wright mentions. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(January 03, 2017 06:20 AM)
881 Hot Rod Akiva Schaffer, 2007
Good grief, what a stinker. The Lonely Island's first movie doesn't have any Lonely Island songs in it which means that it's nothing special. (Reading around a bit about this movie it was written for Will Ferrell, and Andy Samberg and co. were only subbed in quite late in the piece, hence the lack of original songs.)
Hot Rod's not as funny as Will Ferrell's best stuff (Zoolander, Old School, Anchorman, Elf, Lego Movie), and I can see why he ended up passing on it. And Hot Rod's not nearly as good as this year's properly music-driven Lonely Island film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Not that any of these comparison cases (except possibly the Lego Movie) would get anywhere near most people's best-of-anything list!
Wright was too modest to pick any of his own movies for his list. Well, in my view, Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007) is vastly superior not just to Hot Rod (2007) but to anything Will Ferrell or Lonely Island has done or probably ever will do. While trend-surfing on things like Jack-ass that were big at the time, Hot Rod seems mainly driven by a desire to parody a certain sort of numbskull feel-good '80s film (esp. Karate Kid). Team America (2004) did the latter much better (and with fab songs - 'It's gonna take a montage!'). Hot Rod feels late. Compare with Hot Fuzz's razor sharp, surprising, even ingenious parodies of Michael Bay editing styles etc. as well as Midsommer Murder-type English mystery series (where small villages end up having Beirut-level death-rates if you keep track!). Hot Fuzz feels sharp and on-time.
In sum, Hot Rod is probably not worth watching unless you're prepared to get completely blasted and just wallow in its silliness while in that state. Yarp! -
swanstep — 9 years ago(January 09, 2017 05:18 AM)
947 Blue Ruin Jeremy Saulnier, 2013
Well-made, but by-the-numbers revenge drama/thriller that didn't have anything really new to say. The ending didn't quite work for me especially the lame-o final shot (the film seemed to pass up a better ending 60 seconds earlier). Of course, it's hard to have anything new to say about revenge when it (and how it tears both the avenger and the wider community apart) has been a key theme of drama since at least the Ancient Greeks but famously the South Koreans have consistently found new angles over the last decade+ so Blue Ruin can only be a second-tier achievement to me at best. Still director Saulnier definitely showed some chops with this film, and his recent Green Room is more proficient still. So he's definitely one to keep an eye on right now.
Wright picked a lot of good films for 2013 but still found no room for 3 of my faves that year: 12 Years A Slave, The Act Of Killing, Frances Ha. All of them are at least a class above Blue Ruin in my view. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(January 17, 2017 07:05 PM)
944 The Imposter Bart Layton, 2012
One of those mind-bending documentaries in which you continually learn new information but that new info always raises more questions than it answers so that after an hour and a half you're more confused and uncertain, further away from the truth than ever. I can't go into the story at all without spoiling a twistso let me just say that the case is genuinely interesting and that the doc. is worth seeing. Presumably another shoe will drop at some point in the future settling some of the outstanding questions in the underlying case. An Imposter 2 seems like a good bet for the 2020s at the latest.
I'd rate a bunch of 2012 things that Wright didn't find room for (Amour, The Master, Beasts of The Southern Wild, Frances Ha, Beyond the Hills) ahead of The Imposter, and Capturing The Friedmans which kind of invented this mind-frazzling sub-genre of doc. didn't make it onto Wright's list for 2003, which seems bizarre. Still, The Imposter (2012) is good and gripping alright.