Because my top ten of '04 is pretty much the same as that from the Auckland International Film Festival (with Before Sunset, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Elephant all thrown in the mix), I've decided to pull something different this time round when I'll just mention ten great classics caught up with on DVD this year, that in a perfect world would have gotten some form of communal orgiastic celebration they all so richly deserve. By MUBARAK ALI.
The Color of Pomegranates
Paradjanov, the gay Armenian artist and outcast filmmaker used to make films that force us to leave our universe and enter his, where we are assaulted with his highly eccentric cinema of abstract imagery, otherworldly folk music, and a wild, restless camera. In what is perhaps his most accessible work (of the five I've seen), he traces the life of Armenian poet, Sayat Nova, with his distinctive aesthetic embellishments (i.e., stripped of any discernible plot, dialogue or character development, and the presence of a skewed perspective – ostensibly reflecting the constantly drifting state of mind of its subject). We are left with impressions (such as what possibly inspires his art or that of his discovery of sexuality as a child, or spirituality as an adult) rather than concrete incidences as the film navigates its fragmented narrative of highly abstruse episodes that sketch the outline of a life that culminates in tragedy. One of the key films of sixties avant-garde cinema, this is a small universe away from realist/cinema verite films. (Sergei Paradjanov/1970)
The Falls
Greenaway's three-hour faux-documentary-slash-absurdist fantasy sets the highly idiosyncratic tone of much of his later work. Its subjects are the 92 people who have survived the mysterious Violent Unknown Event, only to end up with bizarre mutations, create new languages of their own and harbour a fanatical infatuation with birds and flying. The 'screenplay' has to be one of the most ingenious (or preposterous, depending on what your view on Greenaway is) conceptions ever: theories and mini-biographies are created around each of the available victims of the incident (some of them have been removed from the catalogue for various reasons, you see), one of whom hilariously cites the VUE as being an Alfred Hitchcock creation in an attempt to contend with the unexplained ending of The Birds! Recurring Greenaway motifs such as ornithology, numerology, demented humour, and a self-aware and artful obsession with symmetry and pattern are all astonishingly evident here, his first feature-length film, through which he's already (re)defining the role of the spectator. (Peter Greenaway/1980)
The Holy Mountain
Jodorowsky's follow-up to his classic acid-Western El Topo is a lot more esoteric, but it holds rich rewards for those willing to submit to the mystical experience. It bears elements of a plot, which involves the wanderings of a Christ-like figure across a bizarre, apocalyptic landscape of unrest and chaos. He ascends a mysterious portal where he meets The Alchemist (significantly played by Jodorowsky) who has assembled eight other people from different backgrounds – it turns out that he's planning to kill and supersede the nine immortal masters atop the Holy Mountain in order to achieve eternal life, and the film thereafter follows their path to the Mountain. (If all this sounds very anticipatory of Monty Python-esque daftness, it kinda is. Except, the humour here being seethed with acid and reformed from its own excrement – you'll see what I mean.) Because this is a Jodorowsky film, the intense surreal imagery of the film is best left undescribed, but it is utterly (and somewhat dangerously) disorienting, and is barely balanced by the absurdist humour that surfaces sporadically. The final self-reflexive scene recalls that of Persona or The Patsy, but here the inaccessibility of nirvana is likened to the illusion of Cinema. (Alejandro Jodorowsky/1973)
Man With A Movie Camera
This is probably the ultimate 'director' film – no other film fetishises or mythologises the camera (and unavoidably, it's product) as much as this experimental Soviet silent does. The exhilarating score by Michael Nyman elevates the frenetically juxtaposed montage – capturing an ordinary day in Russia – almost to the level of performance art (although the film is, I'm told, a formalist documentary). (Dziga Vertov/1929)
The Servant
While Performance remains the best male version of Persona ever made, this nasty little bugger bears some of the revered Swedish film's characteristics too, preceding it by three long years of European cinematic innovations. Disguised as a rejection of the British class system in its situation of role reversal between master (James Fox, who was also the victim of a dynamic power shift in Performance) and servant (devilishly played by Dirk Bogarde), there's always something more sinister lurking beneath the surface that has more to do with distorted gender and repressed sexuality (I'm not reading too much into it – there's a convex mirror in the living room fer God's sake, plus it stars Dirk Bogarde!). Nice b/w photography (the interior shots are especially disorienting), cool jazz score, neurotic women, swinging sixties-style orgies: this is easily the best of the three collaborations between Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter. (Joseph Losey/1963)
Diary of a Country Priest
Another Bresson film I like, which has led me to reconsider my initial position on the French master; I've always been mixed on Bresson, not least because of the near-Brechtian distance at which his later films have always held me. An austerity is certainly evident in Diary, but not to such an extent that it becomes forbidding. Indeed, such a distancing mechanism is relevant in this case when the unwell priest who arrives in a hostile village, becomes increasingly isolated from those around him and is confronting his own demons, so to speak. In this manner he is similar to A Man Escaped's Fontaine, whose isolation in a jail cell culminates in an escape, and indeed to the brutalised animal, Balthazar, from the director's quintessential film. The priest eventually finds escape too, and it is a moving and humbling moment of spiritual release. (Robert Bresson/1951)
Pickup on South Street
Or Honour Among Thieves, Fuller-style, is all loopy about a top-secret microfilm that our pickpocket hero unknowingly obtains while pulling a 'job' on the film's unlikely femme fatale. Fuller's rough and distinctively frugal filmmaking is evident in this classy crime-drama-noir – which shares the stratosphere of fifties noir cinema with Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat – and you can almost taste the sleaze as it threatens to bubble to the surface (though not in the absolute uninhibited glory as in some of his later works). And the kiss that passes between Widmark and Peters is electrifying, as is Thelma Ritter's gritty, Oscar-nominated performance. (Samuel Fuller/1953)
The Ladies' Man
Jerry Lewis' is a universe that is forever embracing the artificiality of the medium (in this case generously showing us the edges of the huge doll-house set), a universe outlaying the illusory nature, hypocrisy and necessity of the Hollywood system, a universe that taps into his own dysfunctional psyche to express hidden fears and obsessions through Lewis-the-performer. The Ladies' Man is also a brilliant statement on the domestication of man by woman and contains some of the funniest sequences you'll ever see ('funny' being an entirely relative word in Lewis' dictionary). Lewis stars as Herbert Heebert, who, upon discovering that his sweetheart cheated on him on his graduation day, regresses into the I-hate-girls phase of pre-teen years. Next thing you know, he gets a job as a caretaker-cum-houseboy in the enormous boarding house (the aforementioned 'doll-house') occupied by dozens of young and beautiful aspiring actresses. The film's acute sense of gynophobia expresses itself in almost every subsequent encounter Herbert has with the ladies, but Lewis-the-director allows two important excursions that are brazenly male-centric: the famous hat scene (which not only underscores challenged masculinity, but also has to be one the funniest scenes, like, ever) and the highly complex sequence where the film's sense of space gives way to an endless chamber of male sexual frustrations (when Herbert enters the one room he's forbidden to). (Jerry Lewis/1961)
Andy Warhol's Trash
Along with the prior Flesh and the subsequent Heat (forming a loose trilogy that attempts to capture the sixties' perversions from the point of view of societal pariahs), Trash understandably constitutes an iconic film trilogy of American underground cinema, this side of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Gregory Markopoulos. Joe Dallesandro stars as the impotent heroin-addict, suspended in a state of asexual bliss and perpetual disconnection, and the film thinly – and mostly hilariously – follows the attempts of many women (and men) to seduce him, and those of his live-in girlfriend to salvage him/them-as-a-couple (a great, celebrated performance by transvestite actress, Holly Woodlawn). If at-times-banal-but-mostly-beguiling longeurs of nothingness, improvisation, graphic full-frontal male and female nudity and near-exploitative/frank sexual encounters sound off-putting, then potential viewers should remain off-put. However, those brave enough to venture into the film will be rewarded with an unyielding canvas of transitory but chilling emotional truths. At the end, it's up to the viewer whether to take it seriously or not, but either way, it's essential viewing. (Also worth watching by Paul Morrissey is the flawed but highly enjoyable, Blood For Dracula, which is probably as poetic as B-movies get). (Paul Morrissey/1970)
Germany, Year Zero
While it was thrilling to witness the birth of an entire film movement in the first film of Rossellini's 'trilogy of war', it wasn't until here, the final film, when this new cinematic language took on a meaning – that of a constant state of wandering – that defines much of neorealism. The subject of the post-Nazi influence on a young German boy leading him to kill his ailing father, and then himself, may have been shocking then (it's still affecting now), but the one surprising element that haunts the film is its cold persistence in searching for meaning where it lamentably doesn't exist: the raison d'être of war. (Roberto Rossellini/1948)
–Mubarak Ali
DAVID'S TEN
Top five moments that Rocked My World (in no particular order):
Tropical Malady – Fisting: on a scene-by-scene basis, its first half reigns as one of the most arresting pieces of cinema this year, a heady fusion of Thailand's morphing (pop)cultural landscape with a burgeoning gay romance. But if I had to pick just one, it would be the point at which Tong begins licking Keng's fist, turning day into night, like into love, and the film's universe into something so much more.
Kill Bill, Vol. 2 – Bride in a Coffin: makes for one of the most nimble negotiations of sound/space in recent memory.
Twentynine Palms – Knife to the Chest: first time round, made me want to put my foot through the floor. Second time round, what had appeared to be whiny Euro-malaise suddenly became like an existential noose to the neck.
Before Sunset – Nina Simone: where the eighty-minute battle fought between an entrenched past and untenable present comes not so much to as a standstill as it seems to evaporate entirely.
Napoleon Dynamite – "I see you're drinking 1%. Is that 'cause you think you're fat? 'Cause you're not. You could be drinking whole if you wanted to."
Top five films that will never see the light (or is that dark?) of day in New Zealand outside of a festival context:
2. Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat)
3. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)
4. Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho)
5. Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin)
Well, 8 ½, unorthodox tele things*, writes TIM WONG – who quite frankly, has had enough of movies for one year.
1. Gilmore Girls
A show supposedly aimed at mothers and their daughters, its ammunition of machine gun, Zeitgeist-piercing dialogue should dispel that gender myth alone. The series, of which I've only ventured into partially via Sunday screenings and midday repeats, similarly heeds no respect for the promiscuity of midriff and teen spirit – if anything reversing the roles, so the mom is the hot brunette, and her kid is the cute, buttoned-down bookworm who actually looks her age (see: The O.C). Although crawling with quaint, self-mocking small townisms and TV world idealisms, it's loaded with enough pop, humour and growing pains to have more in common with Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman than Sex & the City ever will (so really, it is a girl's show after all). (TV2, returning in 2005)
2. The Late Show With David Letterman
Making fun of George W. Bush is a little passé, and frankly, way too easy. And when you've reduced yourself to comparing his face to a row of monkey headshots, you know the joke is wearing thin. Stubbornly, David Letterman will grind a joke down its bone if he has too, having made an entire career out of mocking people, often for years (Clinton, still). And yet, when the current President bears the brunt, it comes so effortlessly, usually under compact self-titled headings like "Genius" and "Electrifying the Nation's Youth". Ridicule is then matched by self-deprecation; he even once admitted upon the eve of the US election, that if Bush lost, he'd be stumped for comedy. Oprah – 2004's queen of material excess – is Letterman's other pet hate, and following a failed olive branch toward Ms. Winfrey (a "Superbowl of Love" between Dave, Oprah, and Dr. Phil), he promptly reverted back to lambasting her car giveaway, book club and other monstrous creations. This is personified by none other than Pat & Kenny: the greatest deadpan comedy skit in living memory, involving two droll, middle-aged men reciting Oprah transcripts in grouch-like monosyllables. Gold. (Prime, 10:30pm+ weeknights)
3. Northern Exposure
Twin Peaks without the mystery. As much as I love a good David Lynch mindfuck, there's something to be said about small towns that aren't forever warding off evil; where being weird or eccentric is endearing in a completely innocent, how-could-you-even-think-that? kind of way. Exposure's non-hellish charm comes via cataloging an indelible club sandwich of characters, some of whom aren't too far off their own Wrapped in Plastic brand of cult status. And unlike Lynch's ephemeral bunch, the residents of Cicely, Alaska got to breath, roam and mature over six whole seasons. TV1 repeated the entire series earlier this year, and for someone who works mostly from home, it made for the perfect lunch break – a hopelessly romantic hymn to the backwater existence, where size never mattered, where logs were just logs, and where David Chase test drove his hyper-lucid dream sequences before Tony Soprano came along. (TV1, repeats)
4. The Apprentice
You could accuse me of channeling my inner-capitalist here. And to be honest, I am, but only because I came to a realisation earlier this year that there are two types of productive people in this world: those who work for somebody, and those who work for themselves. I tend to fit more into the latter category, and what ever glamorous self-label that registers under, the truth is that it's the more cutthroat, ball-breaking route of the two. In my attempt to negotiate the steep learning curve, textbooks and search engines have proven helpful, but it's the stuff those things can't teach you – aggression, confidence, the nerve to wear a pink tie – that The Apprentice has some unique leverage over. Sure enough, it's laden with the same old Reality TV bullshit, but can at least boast women in power suits – a very corporate substitute for the two-piece bikini, indeed. (TV2, 8:30pm Tuesdays)
5. The Price is Right
An ode to consumerism and American Express, this alarming game show requires that contestants needn't possess a high IQ or good general knowledge, but that they simply function as a human receipt. Despite not boding well for the future of modern society, The Price is Right maintains a brief sense of noble vocation as a true people's contest; lucky audience members get to "come on down", and will range anywhere from a mother-of-three, to an indebt student, to a senior citizen, to an international netballer. It's said that they pump the studio with Nitrous Oxide, because everyone's jolly crazy, with plastered Joker smiles, and enough hugs and kisses to feed the world. The host, Larry Emdur, even flirts continually with sexual harassment, exploiting each opportunity to peck, hold hands, brush up against, and rub the small of every female contestant's back. (Prime, 6pm weeknights)
6. The O.C
Why I even watched this, I'm not entirely sure. Part of me knows it's marinated in the grease of affluent materialism and periodic trend setting (Chuck Taylor's, iPods, suit jackets over pastel Lacoste polo shits) that's 40% responsible for baiting its core demographic of impressionable tweens. The remaining 60% is bolstered by that great American axis of evil: a cast of Clearasil-approved boys and girls appearing as pubescent high school students, who look like they're in their 20's, are, and will disintegrate like Tori Spelling, Luke Perry and every other 90210 discard by the show's end. It's a pure white bred, Californian handjob of a series, fetishising a world of Catilian, big yachts, swank charity fundraisers, and rich people helping the needy. Or hell on earth. (TV2, returning in 2005)
7. Late Night Movies
After-hours television is partial to a number of things: infomercials, evangelism, adult advertising. All the best movies live here too; not because they should, but because they're usually too violent, profane, or the slightest bit askew to rate even a channel flick. Of course, with four years of nocturnal festering and a lifetime of deadlines under my belt, this suited me just fine. No longer a student in 2004, bad habits still died hard, but at least I got to share those late, late nights with Henry Fool and his literary knack; Mark Borchardt and the elusive American Movie; Chris Knox and a vault of Hollywood gold; Laura Palmer and her killer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (just about the scariest film ever made). Even Mean Streets – a film you don't see all that often – turned up, seemingly content on teaching a whole new generation (or the few who were awake that night) the definition of a mook. (TV1/2/3, 11pm+)
8.5. The Office + The Christmas Specials
In theory, 20 years from now, The Office won't have aged a bit. And it's a testament to that Greatest of corporate innovations – or blights – towards a more progressive, shitbrained society. The uniform hasn't changed, the maze of cubicles remain, and the human interaction, if ever, reeks of the same wall-to-wall claustrophobia that hits you the moment you step from the lift. Actually, I'm sure it's a perfectly decent way to make a living, and as life dictates, it's often the people, not the environment, that ruin it for everybody. David Brent, in particular, seems to have monopolized the entire category of Most Annoying Work Colleague Ever. His omnipresence means the comedy – and it is a comedy – tends to cower occasionally under its own weight of hole-in-the-ground unpleasantness, cocked and ready at arms' length to drill home the awful truth that there will always be guys like these. Which is where The Christmas Specials sleigh on in, dusting David, Gareth, Tim and Dawn with a miracle each we thought would never come. While it's almost maudlin in its festive intoxication, never has a happy ending felt so deserved. (TV1, repeats)
*in no particular order
–Tim Wong
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