August 2013

Best Films

1. Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012/France-Germany-Mexico-Netherlands)

2. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969/USA)

3. This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963/UK)

4. To The Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012/USA)

5. Vidas Secas (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963/Brazil)

6. La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001/Argentina-France-Spain)

7. Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997/USA) [Rewatch]

8. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012/USA)

9. Le pont des Arts (Eugène Green, 2004/France)

10. Half A Man aka Un uomo a metà (Vittorio De Seta, 1966/France-Italy)

11. Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981/Canada)

12. Noroît (Jacques Rivette, 1976/France)

13. Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice (Akio Jissoji, 1988/Japan)

14. The Tatami Galaxy (Masaaki Yuasa, 2010/Japan)

15. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium aka. Sanatorium pod klepsydra (Wojciech Has, 1973/Poland)

16. Turkish Delight (Paul Verhoeven, 1973/Netherlands) [Rewatch]

17. *Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow, 2002/Canada)

18. Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992/France-USA) [Rewatch]

19. Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963/USA) [Rewatch]

20. Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972/USA)

Other Memorable Works From The Month

The Music Lovers (Ken Russell, 1970/UK); Maniac (Franck Khalfoun, 2012/France-USA); Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980/USA); The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970/Italy-West Germany) [Rewatch]; Passion (Brian De Palma, 2012/France-Germany); Passe Ton Bac D’Abord aka. Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1979/France); I’m So Excited! aka. Los amantes pasajeros (Pedro Almodóvar, 2013/Spain); Impaled [From Destricted (2006]] (Larry Clark); Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005/Belgium-France-Germany-Mexico-Netherlands); Flaming Star (Don Siegel, 1960/USA); Iron Monkey (Woo-ping Yuen, 1993/Hong Kong); In Search of Famine (Mrinal Sen, 1980/India); House by the Cemetery (Lucio Fulci, 1981/Italy); Something Weird (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1967/USA); Top Spot (Tracey Emin, 2004/UK); Justine’s Hot Nights (Jean-Claude Roy, 1976/France); The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (Naoko Omi, 1990/Japan); The Number 23 (Joel Schumacher, 2007/Germany-USA); Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Jeff Burr, 1990/USA)

I've decided to try something different this time to make this a lot more interesting. Why try to explain your choices through words when they are a visual medium? Generally it's been a really solid month. That I can have twenty choices above in images, and plenty more in honourable mentions including a few (un-) guilty pleasures, shows a good amount about the quality of the films I saw. It was a month of delicacies from around the world and various places that, while they may have been a little disappointing in some cases (Indonesian fantasy martial arts film The Devil's Sword (1984)), they were still memorable. Even those like Chompa Toung (1974) that I viewed without any subtitles or knowledge of the language. Many films improved on rewatches such as Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963). Some because I have developed a different attitude to art now after the gap of a few years, making the American release version of Destricted (2006), a series of short films about pornography and sex with mostly fully explicit and real sexual acts, more interesting and rewarding. Gaspar Noé's entry for it was still terrible, but Larry Clark's Impaled grew in quality immensely. That I discovered there are two versions of the project for Britain and the States, with shorts uniquely on theirs as well as many crossovers, makes for an interesting comparison when I revisit the Brit release.

Some disappointments were found. I don't understand why Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009) was seen as a good film at all; my first Manoel de Oliveira, I am still very interested in his work, but even if he was over a hundred years old when making this film, it wasn't good enough on this first viewing for any director of any age. Baadasssss! (2003), Mario Van Peeble's biographic depiction of his father creating Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), sadly turned out to be another generic biography after anticipating seeing it for years. Meek's Cutoff (2010) is an empty film when there are so many legitimately great arthouse movies that are ignored, and I saw my first Mumblecore film in Hannah Takes The Stairs (2007). Joe Swanberg's film was not a great introduction to this sub-genre at all, and I don't want this to be the new face of independent American cinema unless there are Mumblecore films which are actually good out there in existence.

August was when I decided to start actually seeing films released this year globally and in my home country. They make their mark on the Top Twenty list of the month, and while you could argue I'm a little too excited to put some ahead of other, older films on there, they are a hopeful look at this decade coming up, especially as many of the inclusions fragment narrative into moments and moods while conveying a fleshed out story. Even the anime series The Tatami Galaxy shows this as it was only produced a few years ago and does the same thing in its own way. Even if the list is full of films that do this from decades ago too, there is a potentially great future of this attitude to cinema growing to compensate for a world that has gone through and out of post-modernism, where especially American (North and South) films wrestle with reality as if though the images onscreen were generated instantly as if through memory and the subconscious. Unfortunately there have been some bad films released this year. It was sad that Small Apartments (2012) by Jonas Åkerlund became a generic dramatic comedy considering its cast. But of more grievance for me is that I've really become disconnected from the opinions of quite most if not all film critics now, finding that quite a few critically praised films are not good at all and were a waste of their existence. Chan-wook Park's Stoker (2013), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects (2013) are all bad, pretentious films which are not that clever as they thought they were, and there are B-movies with similar ideas which are a lot more rewarding than them. They were all a misery to sit through in their own way - Stoker for causing me to worry Wook's films from his native country will turn out like it on rewatches, Cloud Atlas for having to sit there for two and a half hours bored, and Side Effects as a film that desperately needed Brian De Palma to have made it - and I'm angry about them all.

I've already burnt out on catching up with films released in 2013 because of these films that get great reviews but are so insignificant when I've finally seen them. Bad dramas, genre films with pretensions to messages they don't reach at all, dull blockbusters, all overrated, enough to make me consider sticking to just films that I was excited about already when I first heard of them, and my usual wheelhouses like Japanese animation or cult films. That De Palma's own Passion and Pedro Almodóvar's I'm So Excited! (2013) have been dismissed, while these films were celebrated, is baffling when those two at least were solid and rewarding films regardless of their places in the directors' career. These dismissed films were far more rewarding and are the thing that stop me from tearing my hair out because they were good. And I am still viewing this year as great, despite this horrible realisation about how alienated my tastes are from what is usually championed, because the films I hoped for like Spring Breakers and Post Tenebras Lux were great. Because To The Wonder turned out to be incredible, regardless of the fact that it happens to be the one Terence Malick film that is dismissed as average, a baffling thing when I found the last two disinteresting and that a film like Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) is praised instead. I have to wait until I deal with September new month to continue this issue, but the same issue happened this month too.

Worst film? Technically it's The Bay of Love and Sorrows (2002), a Canadian low budget drama, that I gave up watching in ten minutes and got rid of the DVD copy of. I will probably not be able to see it now because of this, such an obscure film it was, and I feel hesitant to put it here because I didn't watch it all. In fact I feel guilty because I believe I should see a film all the way through regardless of how bad it is. But I don't want to waste time with dull drama films now. I can withstand and see through bad horror films, bad anime, bad genre films, but drama is for me the area of cinema which has the most bad films within it, far more than any other, and I find myself with no reward in sitting in them like I can in even the most abominable of the others. I found myself feeling no rewarding in sitting through The Bay of Love and Sorrows for its full length. It's cruel, but from the beginning there felt like no worth to viewing it all. The worst film I did see the whole of is the remake of Evil Dead (2013). Its everything wrong with horror cinema of today. It tries to make the characters deeper but paradoxically they're shallower than the ones in the original film. There is no tension, just obvious, abrasive jump scares, and gore scenes without purpose to them, which is made worse when you compare it to effect scenes in a film like David Cronenberg's Scanners, which I caught up to finally, which have purposes and even symbolic ones. What was said to be a feminist horror film in the promise of it was a cop-out because said female protagonist was a possessed monster for most of the film, and there was nothing of worth to the whole thing. There are other films that are actually scary, and the only reason I could sit through one like this or the similarly pointless Texas Chainsaw remake is because I'm both a masochist and can withstand the pain. It makes me glad there were so many great films for the year as I would eventually snap if I only saw films like Evil Dead when that pain resistance finally broke down.

And that it got praised, along with the others I found dull or worse, was irritating. And eventually the realisation that I find a significant distance to my opinions came about, and that it was pointless to consider one right over another including my own. And then I thought about film culture, both cult and critical ones. Frankly I've started to find that, while my love for cinema is strengthening still, it comes with the price that I absolutely hate most of the fan and critical culture around it. I'm baffled by how high strung, paranoid and argumentative film criticism gets now; even if films are life enriching, the life and death argument between individuals over them is utterly comical, the least momentous debate you can have when existence and its purpose is of more concern. I've given up on most podcasts now because they're just tedious to sit through, not contributing anything actually thoughtful or even funny. This is more so when the old, no longer existing ones like Mondo Movie or The Hollywood Saloon, from the first years of podcasting I was lucky to catch, are still far and ahead superior when you re-listen to them. Even if I disagree with the tastes of their film viewing at times, the presentation and amusement show that they weren't just a bunch of film fans yacking for an hour or more, like most podcasts now are, but people you would want to go drinking with at a bar and talk about other subjects like politics or music as individuals. As I am trying to figure out my own life so I don't waste it, I no longer want to hang out in an area, whether it's real critics or film forums, that mostly consists of contradictory, backstabbing, pretentious and bitchy drama queens I've never actually met. I want to actually be a human being. Go ride on my bicycle, eat, talk to relatives, maybe fall in love, read and get to know the outside world outside the cinema screen. It just so happens that I will still read Sight & Sound magazine, do this blog, and watch two films a day, maybe only one or none at all that day because something of more importance has come about, I want to finish writing something, or there's a book near my bed I want to finish reading. And every film on this Top Twenty for the month, even to an extent films like Scanners and Pink Flamingos, is about this desire to know about the world and learn from it, or are made by directors obsessed with reality and just happen to filter it through their idiosyncratic viewpoints. Many of the directors had obsessions that required other forms than feature films to tackle them, like Paul Verhoeven with Christianity and John Waters with camp and his own inspirations.  Even in the film about film, like Jackie Brown, it's about characters in a narrative becoming human and enjoying life even in a scenario. I need to be more than just a form sulking in a cinema seat to be myself, and even if I don't need to go as far as eat actual dog shit on screen like Divine in Pink Flamingos to establish who I am, that kind of impulsive mentality will be a lot more healthier than joining the herd that send death threats to people because they hate the films they like.

76 Works Watched In March

10 Rewatched Works

66 New Works Seen

============

Sources for images = 1. http://www.ahk.nl/uploads/pics/post_tenebras_lux_01.png / 2. http://chriscrespo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/MC.jpg / 3. http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c212/savagedudeguy/movies/This%20Sporting%20Life/1.jpg/ 4. http://www.lassothemovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/To-the-Wonder-2012-4.jpg / 5. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnu9-EsXeWmF381Za2Lj-QIkbGPNxLKRgxAGlJKUEPJXXpd2mX79LCjqUp2o2ysvj1mdhrz7zBUUW2XxRu4s72KQUyBBOfToPk9JzyMfQA0F_MNJ2iCIkRoA7FKZfmNpz5njoJ3Uo9WUE/s1600/vidas+secas.1.jpg / 6. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8VksdRfBfeyXlpLQEQJTTcM8zWjgmJCQdQwhiBuZBBjMkyA8zXatmxIMCPl870GLQAarPEDnpo4613gaUi4zWljb-kZtN_pHs6SByzFO_kIeHn62UE8EAkRiPf7jvqtstosfZ5Vk56Vc/s320/cienaga4.jpg / 7. http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/jackie-brown/w1280/jackie-brown.jpg / 8. http://style.mtv.com//wp-content/uploads/style/2013/01/spring-breakers-trailer-5.jpg / 9. http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/103/36/9319/format_page/le-pont-des-arts-natacha-regnier.jpg / 10. http://www.thecinetourist.net/uploads/7/0/9/9/7099213/104758_orig.jpg / 11. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN3hP8iAcMNKhpYorPGGmtOhZpHLy_fUtUoN3_H3E2PqVyBKyJx2ZxY8C71kc1EvCqeNyJNouKqQcUFGqTcsw2fAODcd0doWXZjiwr1urRxSUJNCO19SeJwigudltaA3FXTLoS3jCir-Nb/s400/scanners.jpg / 12. http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/noroit5.jpg / 13. http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/3331/akutoku2.jpg / 14. http://chinesecartoons.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/tatami.jpg / 15. http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4069/4612877447_cfdbf39888_o.png / 16- http://cdn-3.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/clp/271736-789-clp-720.jpg / 17- http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/images/Wfilmfest03_Corpus_Callosum.jpg / 18- http://www.dvdactive.com/images/reviews/screenshot/2011/4/basicinstinctbdcap1_original.jpg / 19- https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgftMPyFiCdMcdvb-fe5LjMhIxeTsMHQ0F-F2VENpNRPz9Y9U_7L9f9qsaPCUo4Dur2RY_9BzKhy6aV6saHtI3SietKFJ6tqyANi6_5A_wGlaH3qNlzwtoiJhXn7mRFxMLh8W-SAHnqfS8/s1600/shock1.jpg / 20 - http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llnevsnHkG1qbvv1io1_500.png