A Journey Beyond Sight and Sound

Boy, am I late to the game on this one. I actually started writing this article before the S&S list came out, so I could post it to coincide with the release of said list. A full month later, it's at last ready for posting. Alas, stuff happens, and by "stuff" I mean heaps of homework, ever-present writers block, and a keyboard that  doesn't seem to understand that when I hit the "save" button, I mean it, gosh darnit! Thus, I pray you'll forgive me for this hopelessly dated (by today's standards) post. But just because it's out-of-date doesn't mean it ain't first rate. Hell, my dad still gets a kick out of Time magazines published during the Carter Administration. But I digress...

*****

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Every year, the good people at Sight and Sound magazine gather a who's who of critics and asks them all the same question; what are the ten best movies of all time? The votes are tallied, the films are ranked, and voila, there you have it--a list of the best films ever made, assembled by those who know the cinema better than anyone else. For fifty years, Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' massively accomplished pseudo-biography of William Randolph Hearst, has topped the list, the elder statesman of film, staring down at the competition from its unimpeachable perch and saying to all other motion pictures, "Go ahead. Make my day". One of them finally did.

In August of this year, movie buffs the world over spit coffee on their computers in shock as they gazed at the new list--Kane's reign had ended. Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo had taken its place, beating it out by almost forty votes.

What gives? Well, this year's poll was opened up to almost one hundred new critics, many of them quite young--and if there's anything the youngsters tend to love, it's an underdog. Vertigo's rise is also part of a broader re-appreciation of Hitchcock's work; the longer his movies are around, the more we glimpse the philosophical depths beneath their technically accomplished surfaces, and the more we regret writing him off as a workmanlike thrillmaster during his life.

Is this a good thing? Any attempt to answer that query leads to another; which movie is better? It's a question that's impossible to answer. The two films accomplish wildly different tasks in equally impressive ways. Kane uses technical innovation and a non-linear narrative to lend the saga of one man's life a staggering, mythological grandeur; Vertigo brilliantly repurposes the conventions of the mystery thriller to create a hypnotic meta-narrative, forcing the audience to think about the act of watching even as they watch. Neither film is objectively better than the other. Hell, neither of these movies are objectively greater than any of the other eight pictures chosen for the top ten. Quick, which  is better, Kane or the meditative Tokyo Story? How do you compare Vertigo to 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The simple truth is that there's no such thing as a "best of list". Then why, you ask, am I blogging about one? Because the S&S poll isn't a best of list, though it surely purports to be. It's really a time capsule, a record that, when re-examined in later eras, will tell us a lot about what we once valued and maybe even why we valued it. We can't learn much from asking what movies are on a list; we can learn a great deal by asking why they're on the list.

For example, take a look at the 1962 list, which is front-loaded with a whopping eight foreign films in celebration of the art-house boom that broke down cultural barriers and brought international cinema to our shores. Conversely, over half of the films on the 2002 list were made right here in the US of A, reflecting a desire to honor American cinema in the wake of a distinctly American tragedy. To this critic, the 2012 list indicates two things; a renewed embrace of silent film, brought on mostly by the release of The Artist and the advent of restorative projects like Criterion, and, more than anything, a deep-seated nostalgia for a more thoughtful and substantive kind of genre picture. With Vertigo in first place and the John Wayne picture The Searchers back on the list after a two-decade hiatus, it's not hard to see that the results of this poll reveal a collective longing for an era where art and commerce weren't such uneasy bedfellows. In this day and age, with the exception of the occasional Christopher Nolan grand-slam, it's hard to find Big Movies that harbor equally Big Ideas, and this is a cry of frustration in response to that sad fact.



If the Sight and Sound lists can tell us so much about what's on the collective mind of the critics at a given moment, then it follows that a personal list can also serve as a time capsule, a reminder of what motion pictures we once held most dear and why. That's why I've been hard at work over the past month assembling my own. It's been a fantastic, even revelatory experience, which is why I highly, highly recommend that any true movie lover try his or her hand at it. Write a gigantic treatise on each one or just jot down your favorites on a napkin. Then, send your lists to me, and we can compare and enable each other's nerdiness!

Anywho.

Making said list has taught me much about myself as a moviegoer. For one thing, I love movies that go to extremes, ones that are whimsically simple or dizzyingly dense, relentlessly bleak or persistently silly, madly verbose or dreamily meditative. It also reminds me of what I already know--that the motion pictures I hold most dear are all, in one way or another, celebrations. Some are deeply affecting glorifications of the human spirit, of the unique capacities for bravery and compassion that we are blessed with as a species. Others deal with the tragedy of our seemingly insurmountable flaws, but those films are exultant as well, for they reveal how the artist, armed with ingenuity and empathy, can lend beauty and meaning to the ugliest of human sufferings. There are comedies on this list, there are tragedies, and there is a film that features death by poison fish. But these movies all have one thing in common; they aim for and achieve what John Cheever once called the singular purpose of great art--"to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."

So here they are, without further ado and, due to the insane difficulty of comparing the incomparable, in no particular order...


MY FAVORITE MOVIES EVARRR (2012 Editon)

Dr. Strangelove

Like all great satires--and make no mistake, no greater satire ever hit the screen--this one never slides into antiquity, but becomes more relevant with each passing year. That this blackly comedic tightrope act worked then and endures now has a lot to do with the work of Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers, a director-actor duo that wasn't as prolific as Ford-Wayne or Scorsese-DeNiro but proved just as powerful. Playing three wildly divergent roles with equal parts sincerity and savagery, Sellers is the manic Liszt to Kubrick's mercurial Schubert, taking the material and making it sing. Shot in stark black and white and studded with screenwriter Terry Southern's acid wit ("Gentleman, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"), the result is a devilishly inventive, icily furious indictment of nationalism, of the way that the struggle for unilateral, survival-of-the-fittest dominance ultimately leaves no survivors. "Man", Kubrick wrote in one of his journals, "now views his nation as the moral center of the Universe. Who will be our Galileo?" Turns out he was referring to himself.

Duck Soup

The Marx Brothers got their start in vaudeville and, lucky for us, carried to the silver screen the characteristics that made them such runaway hits onstage; flippant disdain for the conventions of plot and genre, an infectious love of wordplay, and a knack for physical comedy so intricately choreographed and flawlessy timed that it rivals Fred and Ginger's dance breaks for mastery of coordination and rhythm. Nowhere is this truer than in Duck Soup's immortal mirror scene, where Chico, disguised as Groucho, attempts to convince the guy that he's seeing not an impersonator but his own reflection. Like so much of the picture, this scene plays like a crackpot science experiment, one where humour is unshackled from the constraints of plot or theme and simply allowed to do its crazy thing. When I saw Duck Soup at a sold-out screening this summer, I heard a sort of laughter I'd never encountered in a theater before. We tend to use our carefully cultivated public laugh at the movies, but my fellow Duck Soup fans and I were letting loose with our private laughs, the brash, distinctive, deeply unattractive and wholly infectious sort of side-splitters we reserve for our closest friends and family. The movie, God bless it, turned us all into children again, disdainful of pretense or posturing, delighted by the palpable sense of the absurd that permeates nearly everything. Almost a century after its release, Duck Soup still endures, an eternal and eternally funny jeremiad against the mortal sin of taking oneself too seriously. Hail, Hail, Fredonia!!

Fiddler on the Roof

 

No matter where I am in my ever evolving religious search, I'll always be deeply moved by Jewish story--the tale of a people on an eternal journey towards a higher purpose, suffering setback after crippling setback but unbowed through it all, warming themselves by the light of truth and tradition, singing jubilantly in the face of a seemingly relentless sorrow.  No movie captures the essence of the Jewish experience quite like Fiddler--a film of effervescent joy, weary optimism, and an aching, bone-deep anger that's as affecting as it is subdued.Adapting one of the greatest Broadway musical of all time (of all time), director Norman Jewison takes full advantage of the camera's ability to hone in on the kind of illustrative flourishes that can't be conveyed from the proscenium--the barrage of sacred symbols in "Tradition", the kindling of the candles in "Sabbath Prayer", and, most memorably, the faces of the crowd in "Sunrise, Sunset", all watching a village wedding, all lost in either yearning for the past or uncertainty about the future. It's the very essence of melancholy, and you feel as if you're experiencing it not just as a viewer, but as a member of the crowd itself. In the end, that's the simple, timeless genius of Fiddler--it reminds us that, in the end, we are all move than a little like these village people, each of us trying to scratch out a simple tune without breaking our necks.

Hannah and Her Sisters

You all knew it would be here: the Woody Allen spot. Annie Hall could go here, as could Manhattan, depending on my mood or the day of the week or the hour of the day. Yet I choose this one for three reasons; firstly, because it is certainly Allen's warmest, most emotionally generous film, and also his wisest, a picture with a keen ear, a truthful eye, and an open heart, probing the most pressing issues of life and death and daring us to laugh and learn all at once. It also serves as eternal proof that those who pan Allen as visually flat-flooted are wrong--the unforced fluidity with which he handles that opening Thanksgiving scene and the restaurant confrontation among the titular siblings are a reminder that, while he isn't a showy stylist, he is a skilled one.

Finally, this movie contains the best of Allen's famed star-power ensembles. As a lovesick accountant and a venomously self-obsessed writer, Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest picked up well deserved Oscars, and they're matched every step of way by Mia Farrow, the master of neurotic slow-burn, and the highly underrated Barbara Hershey, who makes sexual confusion and raw heartbreak both affecting and effulgent. Yet even if none of the above were true, I'd still love the film because of Allen's own character, Mickey Sacks, a religiously confused, bitingly sarcastic hypochondriac who's as close to a personal doppelganger as anyone I've ever met, onscreen or off. To watch his story is to see my own, and to witness his triumph over existential fear and self-doubt is as intensely vicarious and moving an experience as I've had watching a movie. Indeed, I’ve been moved by the picture so often and in so many ways that it’s become something of a self-disciplinary ritual for me to sit down and try not to be affected. So far, no luck.

Kill Bill Saga

In 2006, young filmmaker attempted to remake Kill Bill, Vol 1. He used Old Navy flip flops as Japanese sandals, wooden "weapons" as Hattori Hanzo swords, and his dog as David Carradine. I confess that filmmaker was me. I was trying to pay tribute to Quentin Tarantino, and I suspect he would've approved--after all, Tarantino's movies are tributes themselves, gifts of gratitude lain at the altar of the movie gods. Almost every shot of this feminist revenge fantasy pays homage to the B-movie genre flicks that shaped Tarantino's wonky worldview. Yet, as Godard reminds us, it's not what you take things from but what you take them to, and if this movie borrows liberally from kung-fu epics, blaxploitation pics, and westerns, it also has level of technical accomplishment those movies couldn't afford, a sense of self-referential humour that they probably could have probably used, and a set of endlessly complex characters that they never, ever possessed.Tarantino's specialty is exploring the strange ordinariness of killers, excavating the universally relatable thoughts and desires they exhibit when their lethal weapons are sheathed. Nowhere does he hit on this theme more entertainingly and incisively than with the Bride and Bill, who, even as they're locked in a deadly pas de deux that spans continents and costs scores of lives, come off as nothing more than a tragically dysfunctional couple. It is a mark of Tarantino's distinct brilliance and oft-overlooked moral compass that by the time we've reached the inevitable final confrontation, we aren't rooting for one of them as much as we are pitying both of them.

Atonement

Atonement is the tale of young Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan in one of the most astonishing child performances), who, putting her artistic imagination to toxic use, convinces herself that she saw her older sister's lover (James McAvoy) commit a rape. The fabrication sends him to prison and then to war, and Briony sets out on a decade-long quest to make things right, her efforts culminating  in a twist so overwhelming in its impact that it literally redefines every moment that came before, from the biggest setpiece to the smallest glance.

The more I watch this film, the more I'm convinced that it's not just the greatest movie released in the halcyon year of 2007, but one of the best movies made in my lifetime, unforgettable not just because of McAvoy and Keira Knightley's ravishing romance, because of its singular vision, for the overwhelming unity of image, word, and music in pursuit of a grand idea. This unity is most obviously evident in the picture's most famous scene, an awesomely harrowing five minute shot of the postwar wreckage at Dunkirk, but it's just as present in the film's opening hour, which captures the rhythms of a summer on the English countryside with a series of indelible images--Knightley laying out on a diving  board, dressed in immaculate white; McAvoy immersed in a cold bath, staring dazedly at the merciless sun; and Ronan watching from a window, Dario Marianelli's hypnotic score pounding away, Seamus McGarvey's immaculately fluid camera honing in on her darting green eyes, which, even as they conspire to deceive, lead us ever closer to true understanding.

8 1/2

Pauline Kael right was right when she called 8 1/2 "a structural disaster". She was wrong to use the term as an insult. The movie's refusal to follow a distinct narrative pattern is not a sign of laziness, but a distinct and effective creative choice linked directly to its overall message; though the artist can explore life through their art, they cannot truly control or contain it. They may create works that alter our perception of the world, but they cannot remake the world in their image, or force it to play by their rules. They may be visionaries, but they aren't gods.

In the film's early sequences, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni, the essence of the roguishly charming signore) is a director on the verge of a nervous breakdown, constantly on the run from reality. If he's not holed up in an exotic spa, immersed in elaborately conceived daydreams, he's prepping his new film, a half-baked sci-fi spectacle that's really a flimsily disguised attempt to work out his mounting personal problems through the lens of a camera. By film's circus-like finale--perhaps the greatest, ballsiest, most infectiously joyous visual spectacle ever conceived for the screen--he's embraced at last the ungovernable, inescapable madness of reality, and, well aware he can't direct his life as he does his movies, surrendered to the real world's glorious lunacy and surreal beauty. The journey from the opening dream to that final parade is an embarrassment of riches, a defiantly indulgent and sensually intoxicating parade of Rome's loveliest landmarks, Europe's most talented starlets (including Anouk Aimee, my favorite of all foreign beauties), and the best and strangest of director Federico Fellini's trademark fantasy sequences, which convey better than any I've seen the queer and indescribable feeling of dreaming, of being pulled gently but resolutely into a world that belongs to you and to no one all at once. Top it off with Nino Rota's score, as thematically intricate and sublimely evocative as anything Mozart wrote, and you have a movie that breaks all the rules and gets away with it, a work of art that acknowledges and then celebrates the shortcomings of art itself. You may love 8 1/2. You may hate it. But you'll never, ever forget the first time you saw it.
 

 Casablanca

What is there to say that hasn't already been said? The best of all Old Hollywood Studio Films--your argument for Gone With the Wind is invalid.  Movie adverts like to say that a picture "has it all". This one really does. There's tough-as-nails noir courtesy of Humphrey Bogart, swoony romance via the inimitable Ingrid Bergman, comic relief via a saucy (for 1942) Claude Rains, and a generous helping of political intrigue via a pair of exit visas, which sends all of these people down a path very different from what they--or, for that matter, we--could have ever anticipated. For what it's worth, it also has cinema's greatest theme song, its most immensely satisfying ending, and the gold standard of traditional screenplays, a model of narrative economy and storytelling energy.  Each time I watch Casablanca, I play devil's advocate, searching for a scene that doesn't do exactly what it aims to do, that doesn't skillfully advance the plot or touch honestly on a human emotion. I'm still looking. I suspect this will be the most enduring film of the twentieth century. After all, the fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese is, in his own way, as astute a religious philosopher as Pascal or Thomas Aquinas, though to my knowledge Aquinas's work never featured a woman flushing a mountain of cocaine down a toilet. In Taxi Driver, he's dealing with man's search for meaning. Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is so determined to find purpose in an existence that consists mainly of steering a wheel and wiping body fluids off of cab seats that he follows his darkest impulses as if they were dictates from a higher power. He grafts the will of God onto his own anger and shame. In his mind, his sexual attraction to a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd) is really about protecting her from lesser men ("They. Cannot. Touch. Her."). When she rejects him, his plan to assassinate the Senator she works for is the opening salvo of a much needed revolution. His violent dislike of a street pimp is really a part of an attempt to liberate a young prostitute (yes, that IS Jodie Foster) who isn't even sure she wants to be liberated. That last objective culminates in an operatically grisly bloodbath, one that secures Taxi Driver's place among the darkest and most deeply unsettling of films. In Bickle, Deniro fashions a truly Shakesperean character, specific and universal all at once. Through him, we come to understand the danger of religious delusion--of letting your own raging id as control you as if it were a deity unto itself. Travis may be a lonely man, but he's "God's lonely man", and for him that makes all the difference in the world.

A Star Is Born

 
If the only good thing about A Star Is Born was the "Born In A Trunk" scene, it would be good enough. That scene, a twenty-minute musical medley that culminates in Garland's indelible hat-and-cane rendition of "Swanee", is perhaps the greatest standalone  in any classic movie musical.  But this one has so much more--lush Technicolor cinematography, an instantly recognizable Gershwin score, and Moss Hart script that's honest and spry where so many are cheap and maudlin. Best of all, it has a crackingly charismatic power couple at its center--James Stewart, beautifully devastating as a fading celeb whose courtly charms mask a steadily metastasizing instinct for self-destruction, and, as the up-and-comer who falls hard for him, Garland herself, who somehow seems both aware of and urged on by her impending real-life decline, and thus lays every last ounce of her formidable focus, nuance, and sheer talent on the table, blessing us all with one last burst of her singular light before the end of the rainbow. I love me some Grace Kelly, but her triumph over Garland on Oscar night represented the biggest, most blatant snub in awards show history.

 If you've made it to the end of this staggeringly lengthy post....me love you long time. May the odds be ever in your favor. Live long and prosper.  And remember---make a list of your own!