Happiness

While looking up a single three minute clip of Singin' in the Rain (1952) the other night I got sucked into the whole movie, and then watched it again this evening for the second time in a row. I am not obligated to make a single defense for that either, because there are scarcely few better ways to spend your time in front of the screen. So while I get together a couple of posts on new film that I have seen recently, here are a few highlights that I hope send you beaming.

I do not think there is another single sequence in all of cinema that gives me as much happiness as this, the "Good Morning" sequence. (The clip below has an added bonus for anyone studying Spanish, as the highest quality clip I was able to find on YouTube happens to be subtitled this way.):



It makes me weep!

I imagine if I were a 16 year-old girl in 1952 I would want to be Debbie Reynolds. What am I talking about? I am nearly 30 in the new millennium and I want to be Debbie Reynolds. To be a flapper girl and have Gene Kelly smile longingly over you:



It can't get much better, except maybe to be the devilish vamp in green satin snake skin, like Cyd Charisse. Those legs keep going and going and...



What's astounding in this sequence are the little things--like the two thugs at the end flipping their coins in time--and the big spectacles alike. Have you ever wondered how Kelly gets the height of a figure skater in those leaps at the front of the sequence? What a gorgeous freak of nature.

Obama's Inauguration Speech

Our new President, Barack Obama, was sworn into office about two and a half hours ago. To watch this incredibly significant and historical event, just click below. (Huzzah!)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Jay Hufford Does Funny

Fantastic video on Funny or Die here, with special Director of Photography, Jay Hufford. Laugh hard, my friends.

HADER, PETSOS, and WIIG in The Key Fits by Kristen Wiig

Milk (2008)

A few quick notes on Gus Van Sant's Milk, which I will scratch off the 2008 to-see list as of this evening and recommend as one of Hollywood's better biopics. The big risk of a biopic, as I see it, is their crippling tendency to become so blindly enamored by their subject that the subject is eulogized too sweetly, too sentimentally, with an emphasis only on the starkly black or white areas of that person's life. This kind of over-simplification keeps it confined to your basic formula, the three acts, strict and sewn-up Robert McKee-style. To say that all simply, biopics are usually boring.

What was refreshing about Van Sant's Milk was his emphasis on performance and some particularly surreal staging of mundane settings. To cover what is still a provocative and controversial topic, gay rights, via the political life of the late Harvey Milk, the film was bound to certain biopic conventions to relay points of narrative and historical importance easily. One such outstanding scene, was Milk's final legislative victory, wherein he realizes the anti-gay Proposition 6 failed to pass in the state of California; there is a swell of music and extended close-ups of Milk and his supporters rejoicing. Where an unseasoned filmmaker would have had this scene cut up into numerous shots with coverage from other angles, then overlaid each subsequent shot with something like a dissolve effect, for example, Van Sant held Milk in one extended close-up that, though shaky and jarred by the eruption of the moment, let us see his character react uncut. The freedom of this longer take let us experience Milk's emotion without cheapening the sentiment with unnecessary editing.

With an actor like Sean Penn--no matter how overtly lacking he is in humor in real life--a shot like the one above showcases his outstanding talent to, well, act. Letting the actor act. Now there's a new concept. It's one that Van Sant seems to have a good handle on in both of his 2008 releases, Milk, and the year's earlier release, Paranoid Park. In the latter, there is a magnificent scene with the young actor Taylor Momsen (primarily known for her regular role in TV's Gossip Girl) as Jennifer, getting dumped by her boyfriend; as they continue to bicker back and forth the shot holds steady on her, her boyfriend's back is to the camera, and as the sound of their dialogue cuts out we watch her in full response to him, again uncut. In run-of-the-mill moments like these--breakups, victories--that are easy to take for granted in a narrative, Van Sant maintains the tension through a longer take and fewer (if any) post-production effects.

When you have a cast of pros like Penn, James Franco and Emile Hirsch, this is one of the better qualities a filmmaker can possess. The performances from these actors are a tremendous asset to the film, but Josh Brolin's less publicized rendering of Milk's political opponent Dan White is something more to savor. His stumbling scene of inebriation immediately following Milk's legislative victory is breathtaking, scary, and a moment to see how a good actor plays "drunk." It seems to me this is one of the actor's tougher chores, as so many cliches can be built into it. Though the camera kept him there steady, then held the tension of the moment with a few extra seconds of screen time; this is a fantastic symbiosis of Brolin's abilities and Van Sant's natural eye and calm behind the camera.

If I caught this before the posting of my recent Top Ten list, that final order may have looked a little different. So let's just suffice it to say this will fall somewhere in that "honorable mention" slot. But truly, what a beautiful film.

Bride Wars: The White Wedding. Concentrated.

While I have not yet seen this latest piece of nuptially themed fluff, I wanted to point folks toward a brilliantly scathing piece in the New York Times, written by the great Manohla Dargis, about the upcoming Bride Wars, starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway. In her review, Dargis touches upon the alarming rate at which fantastical films surrounding the idea of the virginal white wedding (i.e. Enchanted, 27 Dresses, Mamma Mia!) are quickly turning into an industry of their own.

Chick flicks, as we discussed last year in our "Women Aren't Funny" series, have always traditionally stuck to the safest (read: LAMEST) material imaginable. And it seems that as the Apatow boys' camp of geek-chic, nerdcore, and freak comedy continues to ascend to new levels of hilarity, the comic material available to women, about women, and for women within the film industry is splitting off and reeling even more violently away from anything that could be considered "edgy," "daring," or least of all "funny." Bride Wars, it appears, is only the latest harbinger of doom to female-driven comedy, focusing its attention towards the escapist nature of designer label consumerism, "petty and cutesy" pathologism, and revelry in the joys of tulle, butter cream frosting, and thousand-dollar flower arrangements.

Sigh. Was Juno just a fluke? How many movie stars does Sarah Silverman have to f*ck anyway, just to be taken more seriously as a comic genius? Julie Delpy, WHEN will your next directorial piece come out? And, somebody, give that lady over there a mic!

2008's Guilt of the Unseen

December came and went and what is usually a month of movie cramming before the final Top Ten List was released on The Crew's circle of sister sites ended up being uncharacteristically quiet. There was more travel than usual and then the readjustment and catch up period of work thereafter, and this consumed most of the month for me.


But no matter, really. I am content and at relative peace with how the month panned out in terms of quality of the films that were seen, and both are list toppers. Mm-hm, I saw only two movies in December. I know, nothing to brag about. In 2008 there was a lot of beating oneself up over how little film one has seen, and by "oneself" I mean "myself," and that "one" really means "me" as you have surmised as well. If you page back through the archives of my other site you'll see almost everything posted is laced with this weird anxiety to make note of everything I saw very quickly. The cherry on top was the preface of how "good" or "bad" I had been that month noting with a heavy sense of guilt the vast amount of film that still remained unseen. What madness! What silliness!

As the Top Ten season approached for Termite Art, Tativille, Scarlett Cinema, Spinster Aunt and Tits and Gore, an issue arose in which the deadline for list submissions be pushed back to make time for more screenings. I wonder often how anyone--no matter how devoted and reclusive the critic--has the time to see everything. Because of course it is impossible to see everything, even given a whole lifetime. Some people see an incredible amount. Mike Anderson at Tativille (and now Ten Best Films) I think has seen more movies than anyone I know, longtime critics included; and Anderson is not even a "critic" in the usual sense, rather he is a film scholar. Matt Singer at Termite Art, and more visibly at IFC's site, saw in the upwards of 400 movies this year alone, which is a hell of a lot. On the other hand, I have no idea how many movies the other Crew compatriots saw, though I assume it was many more than the average film-goer for each of them, and I trust that if they have contemplated and composed a top ten list at all it must be quite a few.

Though whatever that exact number is, alone it has little intrinsic meaning. We could have pushed the deadline back (which nearly all of us missed by one week) a whole year and still not have seen every 2008 release. What's a critic to do? More importantly, what's a blogger with a day job to do? Push through some late nights and even earlier mornings to make time for extra viewings is a good place to start, but I am not a machine, I have got limits, for just as important as watching is reading about the films and the film history I have experienced, and that often consumes whole days and nights. Equally important are everyday pursuits and past times that are unrelated to cinema (we need a context for all these pictures after all). In these terms, my viewing habits come in fits and starts. Aren't these a set of strange habits, particularly when regular folks--coworkers, acquaintances and the like--will ask curiously, "you can get a degree in film criticism?" Oh, I know, pointing out that query is old hat nowadays. It is worn of shock and I now have a very rehearsed stock answer with which to reply to it (it goes like this: "Yes."); still the reaction that question stirs in me is a refreshed urgency to see more. See more movies, read more about them, have a faster answer with more astounding facts and observations on this pop medium for the questioner! It's all just another way to make myself stand out, I suppose. A track to reaching somewhere in the multiple hundreds of movies per year.

That is at least a version of the ideal critic. After all, a critic has got to see a lot to make sound judgments. There is a serious period of disillusionment about the course and nature of criticism in the age of bankrupt print media, and I suppose there will continue to be as long as critics are being systematically laid off (one highlight of 2008 was a Cineaste symposium piece that helped assuage this issue). Though I think there is a light at the end of the tunnel, which began, for me, when Chris Lee at the Los Angeles Times cleared the air with this piece on critic Ben Lyons, the new co-host of At The Movies receiving "many thumbs down." Lee's report was as productive as it could be without being hateful, occasioning his argument on the anecdote that Lyons named I Am Legend (2007) as "one of the greatest movies ever made," meaning to Lyons' dissenting critics that he probably has not seen more than 50 movies ever in his lifetime to make such an audacious judgment. So seeing a lot and at the most consistent rate possible is part and parcel of the critic's job and it is easy to spot a fake. Maybe that's why we beat ourselves up so much to keep on watching. The Self-Styled Siren has created a movie resolution list for the new year that captures this sentiment with as much urgency and hardly any self-deprecation; for her it is to focus on more silent and foreign films (one per month and week, respectively), and I think this is an easily digestible way to go about it.

I am never one for resolutions. This year I made one up bluntly at the office when I caught myself yawning while I was talking: Resolved: In 2009 there will be no more yawning while speaking aloud. It throws your inflection way off. It can't make for very convincing arguments either. I think I can keep this one.

Anyway, I propose something similar for myself as The Siren has done, "Cinephile Resolutions." Just perfect. Resolved: In 2009 I will see at least one new movie in theaters per week. Truly, I don't get to the theater enough. On some weeks I'll be there five or more times; on others, not at all and it wears on my mood. This resolution keeps both my "seen it!" count higher and my spirits too. Those are win-win odds. As for home viewings, let's aim for a consistent three per week: more Asian cinema and French New Wave classics, two areas in which I am admittedly weak. Resolved: In 2009 I will see at least three movies on DVD per week (with an emphasis on Asian and French New Wave cinema). With these resolutions in place at the very minimum I should reach a total of 208 movies seen by December 31, 2009. This sets up a nice caveat in advance that I will not see everything available to me; it is an advance assurance that as a critic-hopeful (who has not seen and never will see it all) that the final ten slotted numerically next December will be made while poised. More importantly, I can dump that cross I've been bearing about all the movies I have missed. Join me in my new secularism, people.

Above image: a still from the next movie I will watch, The Red Shoes (1948).

Top Ten Tablulations and More

Now that the year 2008 is five days past expiry (almost) all of Scarlett's sister sites have posted their official Top Ten Films of 2008. Here is everyone who has participated thus far:

• Andrea Janes at Spinster Aunt
• Lisa K. Broad at Tativille
• Michael Anderson at Tativille
• Robster Sweeney at Termite Art (and at indiewire.com)
• Matt-O Singer at Termite Art (also at indiewire.com)

And of course Karen and I here at Scarlett Cinema. The best part of The Crew's list making this year comes in the form of a blog devoted entirely to the art of Top Tenning, that is Michael Anderson's new bundle of joy "Ten Best Films." Here, he has tabulated the winners of 2008 from all of this year's participants in a mini-poll. It is fantastic and I am glad for someone with the drive and superior math skills to crunch the numbers and announce the official '08 winner in the first place. In the second place, it looks like my personal choice for best film made the number one slot, Arnaud Desplechin's Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël). It all adds up!

When the old bugger at Hamblogger gets off his keister to post his top ten I will be sure to make mention of it here. The same goes for the Italian Stallion who usually posts his list at Termite Art. Can't wait to hear from you, fellas.

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In other news, the year 2008 is still wrapping in other circles of the WWW and my favorite at the moment is The Movie Club that was posted today on Slate, a fine encouragement of "an all-girl Movie Club in 2009." That has a definite ring to it.


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UPDATE:
Ah, ha! And the Italian Stallion has posted! Enjoy his list of the Top Ten Films of 2008 here at Termite Art.

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UPDATE, 1/8:
Lyon's list has arrived! Find the fantastic (and usually hilarious) Mike Lyon's list of the Top Ten Films of 2008 here at Tits and Gore.

Top 10 Films of 2008

A still from the animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir.

Hello, dear Cinephiles.

Now, with the insanity of the holidays over, I am finally able to share with you my top ten films of 2008! 'Twas indeed a very full year of memorable cinema, and thus the ranking process was especially difficult this time 'round. Looking at the list of films I managed to catch, either at festivals or during theatrical runs, I narrowed down the choices based on the following criteria (in no particular order): originality of vision; composition and artistic design; achievement in production; entertainment value; story; and social significance.

Really, when it comes down to it, we all know that these kinds of lists are purely subjective. For my own purposes, each film that made the list had to have either moved me emotionally, inspired me as an artist, or compelled me to think critically about a specific topic. Whatever its singular effect, each film has long stayed with me after the credits rolled, lingering in the recesses of my mind, fading into whispers that continue to change and inform the way I see the world.

1. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman)

2. Man On Wire (James Marsh)
3. L'Huere d'ete (Summer Hours, Olivier Assayas)
4. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
5. Entre les murs (The Class, Laurent Cantet)
6. Milk (Gus Van Sant)
7. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
8. Boy A (John Crowley)
9. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
10. Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)

It also happens that I saw more than just ten films that I believe deserve mention here. For those of you who care to read on, please find below the other fifteen films that made my top twenty-five!

11. Un conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin)
12. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
13. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh)
14. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton)
15. Marina of the Zabbaleen (Engi Wassef)
16. Somers Town (Shane Meadows)
17. Cztery noce z Anna (Four Nights with Anna, Jerzy Skolimowski)
18. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky)
19. Lat den ratte komma in (Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson)
20. Fire Under the Snow (Makoto Sasa)
21. Tulpan (Sergei Dvortsevoy)
21. Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard)
22. Mi vida adentro (My Life Inside, Lucia Gaja)
23. Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Gini Reticker)
24. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher)
25. Idiots and Angels (Bill Plympton)

Films which I am still waiting to see: Le voyage du balloon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon); Gran Torino; The Reader; Revolutionary Road; Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Chop Shop; Medicine for Melancholy; The Secret of the Grain; Doubt; Ballast; Frozen River; Take Out; In Search of a Midnight Kiss; Afterschool; Hunger; Taxi to the Dark Side; Changeling.

And a few discerning cineastes may be annoyed or even outraged that the following films, which I did see, didn't even make it onto my list: Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman); Burn After Reading (Ethan and Joel Cohen); Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green); En la cuidad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia, Jose Luis Guerin); Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris); Parlez-moi de la pluie (Let It Rain, Agnes Jaoui); La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel); A Corte do Norte (The Northern Land, Joao Botelho); Mi guo (Lost Indulgence, Yibai Zhang); and Strangers (Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor).

To those people, I say: "Meh." While I am not dismissing any of them as films that shouldn't be considered essential viewing, none of them truly hit me in the gut, heart, or head. To each her own.

The Top Ten Films of 2008

There she is! The star of my Top Ten Films of 2008 list, Catherine Deneuve, in the sweet-funny-stylish family drama from director Arnaud Desplechin, Un conte de Noël (Christmas Tale). I like Ms. Deneuve because she smokes and drinks and does not apologize for it. I loved watching her smoke, and I loved watching her speak, shop, read, and argue with her family. She speaks without pretention or silly one-upmanship; she debates and tells you flatly what she thinks. Deneuve, as the terminally ill matriarch of a large dysfunctional family, is the frazzled clan's center of gravity that behaves with the utmost cool. How refreshing to watch her simply be onscreen, a model for all, with her directness, her wisdom and calm, and must it be stated? Naturally, her beauty. Deneuve sealed 2008 with a kiss and I suppose you know, then, which film is my number one? Here are the rest, in order from top to bottom:

1. Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël, Arnaud Desplechin)
2. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
3. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke )
4. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
5. Girl Cut in Two (La Fille coupée en deux, Claude Chabrol)
6. Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood)
7. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
8. Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani)
9. Step Brothers (Adam McKay)
10. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton)

Great Runners-Up: 24 City, Ballast, The Band's Visit, Elegy, Happy-Go-Lucky, Man On Wire, Medicine for Melancholy.

List Influencing, But Still Unseen: Che, Changeling, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, In The City of Sylvia, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, Sparrow, Synecdoche, New York, The Reader, Redbelt, Tokyo Sonata, Wendy and Lucy, The Wrestler.

But 2008 was funny for me because the biggest winners to my mind are the slew of retrospective screenings I caught up with. Some were formal theatrical screenings at festivals and at the Gene Siskel Film Center and The Music Box here in Chicago, but many more were DVD showings at home. One of the brightest was a movie I saw at Roger Ebert's film festival last April, Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), a movie I've seen a number of times before and remains on my list of the top 5 films of all-time; but seeing it this time on a tremendous screen with musical accompaniment made it fresher, more vibrant, almost as if I were seeing it for the first time. At that same festival I experienced Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), an astonishing structuring of a book adapted to film that places its characters on surreal, color-bursting sets with a haunting Philip Glass score.

I saw the threesome of John Ford, George Marshall and Henry Hathaway's How The West Was Won (1962), albeit on a sad 19" television that does zero justice to its Cinemascope format; Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) and Coming Home (1978), Lucino Visconti's Sandra (1965) and The Damned (1969), and Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), Taste of Cherry (1997) and Ten (2002). I also caught up on a lot of Johnny To action flicks, Running Out of Time (1999), Fulltime Killer (2001) and Throwdown (2004), each one great, the latter of the three impossibly so. And upon the recommendation of Dave K. (who has a pretty damn great list over here) I saw 1983's Risky Business--a spooky stomp through the city of Chicago and the awkwardness of adolescence, ironically starring Tom Cruise sans hair product and Armani shirt. Anthony Mann naturally made an appearance with The Last Frontier (1955); and then there was Julien Duvivier's Au Bonhuer de Dames (1930), for me, the biggest retrospective spectacle of the whole year.

So that is that. It was a productive year indeed, but mama is still hungry for more movies. Feed me, 2009!