Best of 1953

1. Ugetsu                                                                                    Kenji Mizoguchi
2. Angel Face                                                                             Otto Preminger
3. The Big Heat                                                                          Fritz Lang
4. Pickup on South Street                                                        Sam Fuller
5. Mogambo                                                                              John Ford
6. Take Me to Town                                                                   Douglas Sirk
7. The Naked Spur                                                                    Anthony Mann
8. The Earrings of Madame De...                                             Max Ophuls
9. All I Desire                                                                             Douglas Sirk    
10. The Bad and the Beautiful                                                   Vincente Minnelli     

          Honorable Mention

          A Lion is in the Streets -- Walsh, El Bruto -- Bunuel,

          The Blue Gardenia -- Fritz Lang, I Vitelloni -- Fellini,

          The Band Wagon -- Minnelli, Gate of Hell -- Kinugasa

        Films I Enjoyed

       Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I Confess,

       The Wages of Fear, Beat the Devil,

       Summer with Monika, 99 River St.,

       Stalag 17, Shane, 

       The Actress, Niagara,

       The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, Arrowhead,

       Kiss Me Kate, Roman Holiday,

       The Captain's Paradise, I Love Melvin,

       The Wild One,

       From Here to Eternity, Julius Caesar,

       Peter Pan, Hondo

       Below the Mendoza Line

       Blowing Wild, Houdini

       House of Wax, Calamity Jane,

       The Moon is Blue ("The Moon's a Balloon" is better),

       Titanic, How to Marry a Millionaire,

       Fear and Desire,

       The Long, Long Trailer, Bright Road, 

       The Robe

The Dig

                                              

Moping about the Suffolk countryside: The Dig

Too innocuous to dislike, yet not willing to break eggs in order to make an omelet, Simon Stone's The Dig tells the truish story of an unlikely archaeological excavator who uncovers a major find in 1939 England.. Ralph Fiennes is outstanding as the blue collar excavator, Basil Brown. He says more with stillness and quiet than any number of antic thespians. Carey Mulligan doesn't have much to do as the widow whose estate grounds contain ancient burial mounds. She and Fiennes spend most of the film moping about the Suffolk countryside.

Moira Buffini's screenplay, based on the novel by John Preston, nicely develops the dig itself, but the secondary plot points are less engrossing. The direction is haphazard, but there are enough good performances and a plethora of pleasant scenery to compensate.

Cut Throat City

 

Le plan americain in Cut Throat City

Somewhat neglected, RZA's Cut Throat City packs more of a cinematic punch than such putative Oscar bait as Mank and Da 5 Bloods. The film is a New Orleans based crime drama with an ensemble cast of veterans and rookies eager to work for the talented director and musician. The RZA handles his cast with aplomb and shows a range to his work heretofore unevidenced; though the genre dictates of The Man with The Iron Fists and Love Beats Rhymes may have had something to do with it. The screenplay by P. G. Cuschieri is chaotic and full of lines that thud ( "A storm is coming..." intones Kat Graham as we cut to Hurricane Katrina), but it tries to present a multi-layered portrait of a community. Perhaps I am tired of buppies in peril, but I responded to the attempt to portray a black working class milieu as a petri dish of crime. Worth a gander because RZA believes in rising above through art. 

Possessor

 

Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor is a promising first feature that fail to coalesce into a memorable work. Andrea Riseborough portrays an assassin who works for a company which has the technology to enable her to inhabit other peoples' bodies. Thus, the crimes are enacted by innocent hosts and the guilty are able to escape without a trace. For much of the film, we don't see Ms. Riseborough per se, but Christopher Abbott as a patsy controlled remotely by Riseborough. It is a difficult movie to follow, particularly because Cronenberg uses an oblique method of storytelling that obfuscates the proceedings. When Ms. Riseborough and Mr. Abbott battle for control of his body in some Interzone netherworld (or something), the visual presentation is too cheesy, with melting faces, and indistinct to support the barely fathomable narrative.

It is impossible to write about this film without mentioning Cronenberg's father, David. Brandon Cronenberg's original screenplay is replete with allusions to his father's films: penetrations of humans with a number of inanimate objects, evil corporations, man messing with mother nature, characters who cannot communicate, Jennifer Jason Leigh. It is almost as if Cronenberg the younger was a Renaissance painter taking over his father's studio. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but a master filmmaker's shadow is always hard to escape. Brian De Palma has made many fine films, but sometimes his work seem to be that of a Hitchcockian manqué. Another comparison that comes to mind is that of Andrew V. McLaglen to John Ford. McLaglen's films seem like pleasant, but bland facsimiles of Ford's work. John Wayne and remnants of the Ford stock company are present, but little of Ford's visual distinction or thematic irony.

Possessor is a more flashy, post-modern work than that of Cronenberg pere. David Cronenberg, despite the exploding heads and undulating viscera, is  very restrained as a director. He frames his tales (usually adaptations) in a straightforward narrative style, without busy editing or camera movement, that allows the viewer to relate to his beleaguered characters. Possessor upends our relationship to reality so severely that it is impossible to relate to its characters. It succeeds as an alienating and disorienting experience, but it is too jumbled as a narrative to linger in the mind.

Balloon

Michael Bully Herbig's  Balloon chronicles a family of four fleeing East Germany in 1979 using said conveyance. The prologue was so ham-fisted, a man gunned down attempting to vault the border wall is cross cut with children singing a paean to socialism, it had me rooting for the commies. Things did not improve. An overbearingly boring film and I write this as one fascinated by its subject. The production design and costumes are nice, but only Thomas Kretschmann as a Stasi agent emanates a life force. 

Best of 1954

         

1. Sansho the Bailiff                                                                       Kenji Mizoguchi
2. Rear Window                                                                               Alfred Hitchcock
3. Voyage to Italy                                                                            Roberto Rossellini
4. Senso                                                                                           Luchino Visconti
5. The Sun Shines Bright                                                              John Ford
6. A Story from Chikamatsu                                                          Kenji Mizoguchi
7. Robinson Crusoe                                                                       Luis Bunuel
8. The Seven Samurai                                                                    Akira Kurosawa
9. Johnny Guitar                                                                            Nicholas Ray
10. Touchez Pas au Grisbi                                                              Jacques Becker

          Honorable Mention

          Black Tuesday -- Fregonese, Anatahan -- Sternberg, 

          The Barefoot Contessa -- Mankiewicz, On the Waterfront -- Kazan

          Films I Enjoyed

          Riot in Cell Block 11, The Raid, 

          Dial M for Murder,

          20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, It Should Happen to You,

          Mr. Hulot's Holiday, The Naked Jungle,

          Apache, The Far Country, Vera Cruz,

          Magnificent Obsession, A Star is Born,

          Silver Lode, Private Hell 36, 

          Brigadoon, River of No Return,

          Sabrina, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers   

         Below the Mendoza Line

         La Strada, Carmen Jones,

         Ulysses, Taza, Son of Cochise,

         Executive Suite, The Last Time I Saw Paris,

         Desiree, There's No Business Like Show Business,

         The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Glenn Miller Story,

         Animal Farm, The High and the Mighty,

        The Caine Mutiny, Godzilla,

        Three Coins in the Fountain,

        The Country Girl           

Brewster McCloud

I rewatched Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud for the first time in 45 or so years and the baffled bemusement with which I initially watched it chopped up on TV remains. This is pure Altman for both good and ill and a more realized distillation of his vision than his previous film MASH, which would prove to be his greatest commercial success. That success afforded Altman the indulgence to film a very curious script by the now obscure Doran William Cannon whose scant credits include Skidoo and Knots Landing. Cannon was peeved enough about the changes wrought by Altman and the improvisations of his ensemble to write about it in the New York Times. Altman turned the story of a boy who lives inside the Houston Astrodome into a carnivalesque celebration/denunciation of the USA; much like Nashville and Buffalo Bill... I prefer Brewster McCloud to either film. Altman's sour tone does not lend itself to affection for any sort of American mythos, be it that of Country music or the Pioneer West. Yet, the sweetness of Bud Cort's Brewster provides a fitting contrast to Altman's gallery of grotesques in this acidic portrait of Nixonian America.

The puerility of Brewster McCloud stuck in the craw of some contemporary critics, but I find it consistent with Altman's affection for childlike outsiders. Amidst the polyphonic cacophony of Altman's mature canvases there are often childish men whose irresponsibility stands as an affront to traditional values: Hawkeye and Trapper John, McCabe, Philip Marlowe, Popeye, OC and Stiggs in a too little seen film which is Brewster McCloud's twin in the Altman canon. The bird shit that rains on the various villains in Brewster McCloud is a juvenile gesture, but is also an appropriate one given the disgust Altman feels towards America. The guano sprays down upon an symbolic array of American ills: environmental ravagement, misogyny, sexism, racism and an occupant of the White House. Brewster McCloud is a purposefully childish film which stands as a rejection of the garish monstrosities of American life, epitomized here by the Astrodome.

The Michael Murphy subplot is a specific satire of the Steve McQueen hit, Bullitt, and a more general critique of American individualism as mindlessly macho. In contrast to this, as always in Altman's films, is a celebration of the collective and the feminine. From MASH on, Altman's work stands as a "life is a carnival" tribute his his players. In Brewster McCloud, a trio of actresses emanate a life force that stands in contrast to the sterile culture that surrounds them. Jennifer Salt had a number of choice roles in the early 70s, most particularly in De Palma's Sisters, before she became a successful writer and producer. She is winning here as is Sally Kellerman who is given a chance to exude warmth as Brewster's mom before she became typecast as a kook. Shelley Duvall makes her film debut here and that alone would make Brewster McCloud significant. Her quirky charm both uplifts and grounds this strange film. (11/17/18)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

 

Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology film with separate vignettes set in a fanciful American West. The film has drawn the usual brickbats that critics toss at the Coens: threadbare material, an overly cartoonish tone, an over indulgence of schtick. All this is somewhat true, yet this film sings to me both literally and figuratively.

The film is a pointedly ersatz one. The framing device of a leather bound book points to the allusive nature of the work. This is a film that draws upon the mythology of the West rather than attempt a realistic narrative: more Cat Ballou than True Grit. Indeed, allusions to other movies, songs, legends, myths and even critical texts abound. One example is Zoe Kazan's bullet to the head which draws upon Shelley Winters' two different reactions to similar gambits in Winchester '73 and The Scalphunters as cited by the late Philip French in his superior tome, Westerns (pg. 88). There is plenty more to mine here for future Coen scholars and that explains critical resistance to their work. They are smart alecks, anathema to high toned reviewers since the days of the Cohens' antecedents, Wilder and Kubrick.

I would further compare this duo to Preston Sturges in that their scripts are usually superior to their visual style. Still, Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography lends a lustrous dimension here whether supposedly lensing Monument Valley or the Rockies. The film's chief distinction is the highfalutin dialogue memorably enacted by Ms. Kazan, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Tyne Daly, Henry Melling and, especially, Bill Heck. The music by Carter Burwell is very good, the song renditions even better. It was to be expected that the Coens would be able to exploit Tom Waits' foghorn on "Mother Machree" and Nelson's comic baritone, but the most memorable song is Brendan Gleeson's take on "The Unfortunate Lad", also known as "The Unfortunate Rake". This is foreshadowed in the opening by the use of the same tune most of us know as "The Streets of Laredo". The whole film is a foreshadowing, each vignette fading to black, a comic meditation on morality.

So what, some will carp. The satire is often on an SNL, Mad Magazine level, but at least provides amusement. Not many comedies do even that. The Coens' corpus falls just short of the Pantheon, but they have reached the far side of paradise with their finest work. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is middling fair from the brothers. "The Girl Who Got Rattled" ranks with their most memorable moments, the rest ranges from marvelous to mediocre. All in all. the film has enough behavioral, musical and pictorial beauties to commend it. (11/18/18)

Best of 1955

1. Lola Montes                                                                               Max Ophuls
2. Smiles of a Summer Night                                                        Ingmar Bergman 
3. Kiss Me Deadly                                                                          Robert Aldrich
4. Princess Yang Kwei-Fei                                                            Kenji Mizoguchi
5. Othello                                                                                        Orson Welles
6. French Can Can                                                                        Jean Renoir
7. Ordet                                                                                          Carl Theodor Dreyer 
8. Pather Panchali                                                                         Satyajit Ray
9. To Catch A Thief                                                                       Alfred Hitchcock
10. The Long Grey Line                                                                 John Ford

         Honorable Mention

         Moonfleet -- Lang,

         The Night of the Hunter -- Laughton, Rebel Without A Cause -- Ray,

         The Big Knife --Aldrich, Le Amiche -- Antonioni,

         East of Eden -- Kazan, The Big Combo -- Joseph H. Lewis

         Films I Enjoyed

         The Man From Laramie, The Trouble with Harry,

         House of Bamboo, The Indian Fighter, 

         The Naked Dawn, 

         Land of the Pharaohs, The Cobweb,

         The Phenix City Story, Violent Saturday,

         The Purple Plain, Sawdust and Tinsel,

         Dementia, 

         Diabolique, Captain Lightfoot,

         Lady and the Tramp, Summertime,

         Rififi, The Man with the Golden Arm

         Below the Mendoza Line

         Mister Roberts, Pete Kelly's Blues,

         5 Against the House, Pearl of the South Pacific, 

         Kismet, The Blackboard Jungle,

         Wichita, My Sister Eileen, 

         The Rose Tattoo, The Seven Little Foys,

         The Seven Year Itch, Strategic Air Command,

         Oklahoma!, The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing,

         Daddy Long Legs, Love is a Many Splendored Thing,

         Bad Day at Black Rock, I'll Cry Tomorrow,

         The Desperate Hours, The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell,

         The End of the Affair, Marty,

         The Private War of Major Benson, We're No Angels

    

          

                                                                   

Tomasso

 

Abel Ferrara's Tommaso borders on self-parody and solipsism. Willem Dafoe plays Tomaso, a version of the director, while Ferrara's wife and child play "themselves". The film is from Tommaso's point of view with frequent onscreen fantasies involving sex and death. Dafoe's character is an artist in love with the flame of his own desire, He leads an actor's studio, frolics with his family and attends AA meetings. These vignettes are theatrical to the point that Tommaso's AA rants are the equivalent of stage monologues.

All for the best because Dafoe is wonderful. It is a very giving performance and Dafoe is even willing to poke fun at his previous attempt to play Jesus. Ferrara frames the film as an expatriate's immersion into Roman life. The film is surprisingly vibrant at evoking everyday life on the street in a modern city. Even Tommaso's interaction with a homeless man seems grounded and believable. 

Ferrara's career has not only had many peaks and valleys, but also blind alleys and Shanghai tunnels. Typed as an aficionado of scuzz, his career seems tangential to the commercial cinema. Tommaso is his most distinctive and focused film in some time. 

The Gentlemen

Typecasting in The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen is his most interesting and personal work in some time, but still is only a dim facsimile of better films. It is nice to watch and listen to a Ritchie penned flick instead of the Hollywood drivel he has churned out the last two decades. However, Ritchie increasingly looks like a one trick pony. He has a facility for comically roughhewn dialogue and ornate plotting. Good actors flock to work with him and Colin Farrell, Charlie Hunnam and Henry Golding are all effective here. Michelle Dockery is fine, but Ritchie has yet to write a fully developed role for a female. The ensemble playing gives the film a cheeky flavor that is Ritchie's best attribute. 

The role of the marijuana tycoon seems almost too tailor made for Matthew McConaughey and he delivers his dullest performance since Sahara. Hugh Grant flails as a scuzzy tabloid reporter. One sympathizes with his desire to sink his teeth into this role, but he is really only suited to play flippant toffs and cannot convincingly play a lower class grifter. Ritchie showed promise early in his career with his ability to craft genre material. However, his script for The Gentlemen is too self-conscious and derivative. Among British directors, he is more akin to Michael Winner than Mike Hodges. The Miramax logo at the start of the film gave me a chill.   

Best of 1956

1. The Searchers                                                                              John Ford
2. The Killing                                                                                    Stanley Kubrick
3. All That Heaven Allows                                                               Douglas Sirk
4. The Man Who Knew Too Much                                                   Alfred Hitchcock
5. A Man Escaped                                                                            Robert Bresson
6. Bigger Than Life                                                                          Nicholas Ray
7. Invasion of the Body Snatchers                                                 Don Siegel
8. Attack!                                                                                          Robert Aldrich
9. Richard the 3rd                                                                            Laurence Olivier
10. The Girl Can't Help It                                                                   Frank Tashlin

         Honorable Mention

         The Wrong Man -- Hitchcock, Seven Men From Now -- Boetticher,

         There's Always Tomorrow -- Sirk, The Ten Commandments -- De Mille,

         The Brass Legend -- Oswald

         Films I Enjoyed

         Bhowani Junction, A Kiss Before Dying,

         The Last Hunt, Aparajito, 

         Death in the Garden, Gervaise,

         While the City Sleeps, Baby Doll,

         War and Peace, The Red Balloon,

         Forbidden Planet, Giant

         Lust for Life, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt,

         High Society, The Ladykillers,

         The Mystery of Picasso, The Killer is Loose

         Below the Mendoza Line

         Hot Blood, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,

         Tea and Sympathy, Moby Dick,

         Picnic, The King and I, 

         Carousel, The Man Who Never Was, 

         The Harder They Fall, Helen of Troy,

         The Bad Seed, The Court Jester,

         Trapeze, The Eddy Duchin Story,

         Somebody Up There Likes Me,

         Anastasia, Friendly Persuasion,

        Alexander the Great, Trapeze,

        Around The World in Eighty Days,

        The Rainmaker, The Catered Affair,

        The Wild Party, 

        The Mountain, The Conqueror

Shirley

Elizabeth Moss looking dissipated as Shirley

Josephine Decker's Shirley fills me with so many contradictory impulses that I am not sure I have come to grips with the film, but that is a good thing. Sarah Grubbins' screenplay, based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, is ostensibly about writer Shirley Jackson, picturing her as a troubled, drunken and isolated genius living with her husband, Bennington Professor Stanley Hyman in the 1950s. Hyman is portrayed as a comic satyr whose love and respect for Jackson coexists with his feckless womanizing. A callow TA , Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife, Rose (Odessa Young), arrive on campus and are roped by Stanley into sharing a house, primarily so Rose can clean up after and watch the erratic Shirley. Shirley and Rose bond, particularly over the disappearance of a coed which provides fuel for Shirley's writing. Their bond becomes erotically charged, but Shirley's demons drive them apart.

Shirley is not a biopic. Murky in its plotting and photography, the film defies rational analysis because it represents an attempt to portray Jackson's life as if it were a Shirley Jackson story: a nightmare vision that seems to spring from the unconscious. The action is mostly limited to the dingy shared house linking the work to the sick abode genre of horror found in Poe, King and many others. A primordial ooze of Dionysian abandon overwhelms any sense of Apollonian architecture. Shirley purposefully gurgles red wine over the couch of a rival. Stanley is introduced as Dionysus himself. his bald pate garlanded by ivy. The campus coeds are portrayed as sinisterly knowing maenads. 

The film has a chthonic pull. Tarot cards, fertility offerings, black cats, murder ballads and mushrooms all appear to signal the preternatural. The fungus is secretly shared by Shirley and Rose in a daft sex magick rite. Jackson describes herself as a witch (she did write a book about the Salem witches) and is shown having Cassandra like visions. She transmits this hidden wisdom to her acolyte Rose, but also channels Rose's youthful vigor for her own ends. This is the ambivalent result of experience. At film's end, Rose is even mimicking Shirley's sardonic pose and hauteur while vowing never again to be a submissive little "wifey". Another disaffected sistah raging against the patriarchy.

This is but one aspect of the script that somewhat diminishes the power and reach of Jackson's prose. Jackson is a feminist writer, but that is not all she is. Like a number of other 20th century writers (Kafka, Faulkner, O'Connor, Beckett, Camus, etc., etc.), Jackson was addressing the plight of a mankind seemingly abandoned by God. A world with no moral order and no hope of divine intervention underpins "The Lottery", We Have Always Lived in the Castle and most of her corpus. Misogyny is merely one of the torments humans inflict upon each other. The screenplay, at times, simplifies the agony of Jackson's world. When Shirley urges Rose not to fling herself off a cliff, the result is a too literal summation of Jackson's work as a skirting of the abyss. 

A clunky opening sequence, in which Rose's reading of "The Lottery" inspires her to seduce her husband in an incredibly oversized railcar washroom, begs incredulity. "The Lottery" is designed to elicit a response, but lust seems an odd one. A lot doesn't add up in Shirley, but, as in Madeline's Madeline, Ms. Decker is able to powerfully portray the give and take of symbiotic relationships. Only Logan Lerman, of the four principle actors, is not up to the demands of his role. He doesn't even have the chops to portray a shallow character. Odessa Young, as Rose, suffers when she is in proximity to Mr. Lerman, but when interacting with Michael Stuhlbarg and Elizabeth Moss she shows she can do the heavy lifting. 

Stuhlbarg has, with his casting here and in A Serious Man, nailed down the role of the Jewish academic in our lifetime. Stanley's joie de vivre allows Stuhlbarg to show a little more range than he did in the Coen brothers feature. I have yet to see him deliver a subpar performance and particularly value his Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire. Moss is nonpareil. She succeeds in making Jackson both dislikeable and fascinating. Shirley has its faults, but it gave me much to chew on. I look forward to seeing what more Ms. Decker has to offer us. 

Muriel

Despite an ugly wig, Delphine Seyrig triumphs in Muriel

 

A jigsaw puzzle of jump cuts and collective amnesia, Alain Resnais' Muriel, from 1963, is a heartfelt response to the trauma of the Algerian fight for independence. Delphine Seyrig plays a widow in Boulogne whose personal life and antique business are both in a state of disrepair. A mysterious figure from her past returns and further muddles her various ménages. Sacha Vierny's striking color photography expertly frames Resnais's theatrical mise-en-scene. Only Hans Werner Henze's overwrought operatic score seems a misjudgment. Surely one of Resnais' finest films, Muriel affords an opportunity for Ms. Seyrig to give a performance that ranks with her turn in Jeanne Dielman as one of her greatest contributions to the cinema. 

Best of 1957

1. The Seventh Seal                                                           Ingmar Bergman
2. The Rising of the Moon                                                 John Ford
3. Written on the Wind                                                       Douglas Sirk
4. White Nights                                                                   Luchino Visconti
5. Forty Guns                                                                      Sam Fuller
6. The Wings of Eagles                                                      John Ford
7. Men at War                                                                      Anthony Mann
8. Elena et Les Hommes                                                    Jean Renoir
9. Paths of Glory                                                                 Stanley Kubrick
10. Run of the Arrow                                                            Sam Fuller

        

         Films I Enjoyed

   

         Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, Band of Angels,

         Nymphlight/ Angel, China Gate, 

         Sweet Smell of Success, Time Without Pity,

         Nights of Cabiria, The Cranes Are Flying, 

         Wild Strawberries, 3:10 to Yuma, 

         Hell Drivers, Throne of Blood,

         The Halliday Brand,

         Saint Joan, Jet Pilot,

         Crime of Passion, The Tall T

         A Face in the Crowd, Valerie

         The Brothers Rico, The Incredible Shrinking Man,

         An Affair to Remember, Old Yeller

        Below the Mendoza Line

        Witness for the Prosecution, Funny Face,

        The Tin Star, Love in the Afternoon, 

        The True Story of Jesse James, Desk Set,

        Fear Strikes Out, The Bridge on the River Kwai,

        Boy on a Dolphin, Sayonara,

        Heaven Knows Mr. Allison,

        The Prince and the Showgirl,

        Twelve Angry Men, Peyton Place,

        The Sun Also Rises, Pal Joey,

        A Farewell to Arms, Beau James

        The Pied Piper of Hamelin

         Cave Videntium

         The Pride and the Passion

How can a movie with these two be this bad?