150. Rosemary's Baby

Song - Mama (Genesis)

Movie: Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

- "You were on a horsey! Yeah, you are.. uhm?"

- "I am the Devil, and I am here to do the Devil's business."

- "Nah, it was dumber than that."

A reminder to not sell out your wife and kid in a Faustian bargain that will marginally improve your middling career. And if you really insist on doing it, check first if Faust isn't a low-rent grifter. What makes Rosemary's Baby so good is that both interpretations are equally plausible. Most of the dread comes from Polanski's filmmaking choices, which make ordinary objects, feelings and events feel alien and otherworldly, and Mia Farrow's great performance as a woman who slowly uncovers a conspiracy against her and her baby, but doesn't quite understand the why and the how behind it, causing her ever greater anxiety. In the previous sentence, I originally wrote 'causing her to lose her mind', but she does not. She correctly deduces what is going on and responds rationally to it. But the film works so well in part because it hides its rationality in plain sight. The conspiracy against Rosemary may well be the work of Satan, but nothing that actually happens in the film demands a supernatural explanation. 

For obvious reasons, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was on the back of my mind while watching Rosemary's Baby. Tarantino's film is heavily committed to blowing up every myth, icon and (self-)delusion it encounters, including all the grand narratives around Charles Manson and his followers. That ultimately leads to the exchange quoted on top of this post, one of my favorite bits of dialogue in any Tarantino film. It reduces the Manson cult to a bunch of harebrained shitheads, in the thrall of a fast talking carnival barker and the film never lets them become anything more than that. There are no great ideas behind their murders, nor are they some uniquely evil people working in the service of some uniquely evil causes whose grand mysteries need to be uncovered. They are just a bunch of dumbass Tarantino characters. This approach doesn't trivialise them or their misdeeds, but illuminates how easy it is to commit meaningless mindless violence and how hard it is to escape from it if you find yourself in the middle of it. 

I don't know how much Tarantino thought about Rosemary's Baby when making the film, but even if the Castevets are 'actual' conduits of Satan, their conspiracy against Rosemary would not have been possible without the help of her husband Guy (John Cassavetes), a harebrained shithead in the thrall of a fast talking carnival barker. His first line in the movie is a lie, telling the landlord that he is a doctor instead of an actor. When Rosemary jokingly calls him out, he lies again, telling that he is in 'Hamlet', when in fact he is mostly in Yamaha commercials. And upon returning from their first visit to the Castevets, Rosemary and Guy respond to them as most young just-married couples would after being invited to a dinner by their long-retired upstairs neighbours, gently laughing among themselves at how outmoded they are, while concluding that these are nice people who will obviously not become their friends. Guy knows this (Rosemary makes most of the assessments, he mostly agrees with her), but man, that Roman Castevet told such fascinating and interesting stories about his life, he must go back to him to hear more of that. By then, the film has shown us that Roman tells rather boringly about his life, giving the feeling that he is a bit of a fabulist who can't really get into much detail. But that is not needed to convince Guy that he was a Successful Man. And you can't expect Guy to not listen to a Successful Man, can you? 

I also don't know how much the Coens have thought about Rosemary's Baby during their career. They are far more obviously influenced by Polanski than Tarantino, especially in their approach to dreams and surrealism. But Guy Woodhouse also made me think of their trademark characters like William H. Macy in Fargo and Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple. He is a schmuck who is much dumber than he thinks he is, and loses control over a plot he is way over his head in. His panicked desperation when Rosemary lets him know she wants to change doctors is hilariously pathetic. Moreover, he is never presented with any proof that his scheme actually works. Polanski never shows any evidence that the 'magicians' are actually capable of magic or that Guy's career has meaningfully advanced. There are many reasons why your competitor can go suddenly blind. You believe it's the work of Satanists who want to help you, because you want to believe it. And yet despite his irrationality and stupidity - at every point in the film Rosemary proves to be far more intelligent than her husband - the conspiracy against his wife still succeeds. No need for Satan to find that frightening. 

149. Small Change

Song - Teach Your Children (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

Movie: Small Change - L'argent de poche (Francois Truffaut, 1976)

I was not a fan of The White Ribbon, its endless portents of doom, and its austere portrayal of a rotten village with rotten children who will grow op to be nazi's. I don't like hopelessly bleak films, especially not when they present their bleak hopelessness as dogma that would be accepted by the rest of us if we just didn't look away. But, damn, oftentimes I found this film, whose approach is basically the polar opposite, almost equally offputting. This is one of the most aggressively positive films I've seen and as shamelessly patriotic as any gun-toting, flag-waving American Rambo wannabe. 

Small Change is not without its pleasures. It is an almost plotless film meanderingly looking at the lives of pre-teens, and their families and teachers in the town of Thiers. Most of them live around each other, or even in the same apartment block, and pretty much all characters in the film know each other. The best parts of the film occur when they meet at various public spaces throughout the city (the school yard, the cinema, the bars on the streets), allowing us to observe how this community interacts with each other. We see who talks to who, how people behave around friends, acquaintances and people they know in passing just because their kids go to the same school, how small talk helps form and sustain friendships, and how the talk of the town becomes the talk of the town. Truffaut does film this beautifully, and it is a happy coincidence that I saw The Rules of the Game shortly before seeing this film. Truffaut was a great admirer of Jean Renoir, and you can really see (I think) the influence of 'La Colliniere" in the way he establishes the relationships and connections between the various townspeople, and in the way he follows and hops around various characters as they make their way across town. 

Unlike Renoir, Truffaut absolutely loves his characters. Nothing wrong with that, but you often get the feeling that the film insists that we not only have to love these characters equally, but also that we have to love them in the same way that Truffaut does. This is a film in which good things happen to good people and oy vey if you even think that something bad could possibly happen to them, or if you believe that some discord could maybe improve the film. Every potential conflict is resolved as painlessly and swiftly as possible, nobody is really a bad student, nobody gets ever truly uncomfortable (or isn't shown to be when the occasion arrives), annoyed or angry, everybody is adjusted to the norms and values of the community and is happy to live in this quaint little town where everybody knows your name. 

Well, there is one exception: little Julien Leclou, who lives on the outskirts of town in a shanty with his mother and grandmother and who always arrives in school with bruises on his face. He sleeps in class, steals from the other kids and is generally uninterested in socialising with the other kids and in becoming part of the town community. At the end of the film it is (not so shockingly) revealed that he has been beaten by his guardians and is transferred into another family. Julien's portrayal, in combination with the unfailingly positive attitude of the rest of the film, is really the main reason I was rather irked by Small Change. It makes it not merely a film about good things happening to good people, but a film about good things happening to good people, because they live in a good society and as good people follow the good rules of that society. People who fall outside of that society, who don't have access to it, do not get to live a good life. The film presents it as if every social space and institution in the town is ideally designed for people to to lead fulfilled lives. If you live in this town and are not happy it is your fault. After all, how can you possibly be unhappy in Thiers, France, where even a toddler falling from the third floor can survive without a scratch? At least the American Rambo wannabes are exciting. 

148. Love Is Strange

Song - Ik Heb Je Lief (Paul de Leeuw)

Movie: Love Is Strange (Ira Sachs, 2014)

Ira Sachs may well be a poor man's Spike Lee. That is not in any way intended as an insult - no shame in being a somewhat worse filmmaker than Spike Lee, while sharing similar feelings and ideas about life, films and New York. The comparison is also not intended to be a definite statement. I have only seen two films by Sachs - this one and Little Men. My favorite thing about both is that they use their basic setups as a jumping board for a broader look at city life, digressing from the main plot to introduce characters and places we come to care about despite seeing them sometimes only for a single scene. The dude moving to Mexico-City here, for example, is given a deeper inner life and more specificity and wit than some films give to their main characters. This approach helps create a wonderfully vibrant picture of New York as a community where all kinds of various characters try to live good, decent and interesting lives and where the problems, challenges and desires of each of these characters are not independent from each other. They are all shaped by the political, social and economic realities of the city. 

Spike Lee's films identify the racist roots of many of these realities and love black Americans more than your average Hollywood production. Predictably, Spike Lee has been accused of reverse racism for these reasons. Those accusations are disingenuous for many reasons, including the fact that Spike Lee also presents white people with more empathy and love than your average Hollywood production. Similarly, Ira Sachs, (who is a middle-aged gay man), presents straight teens, with more understanding and care than most contemporary American directors. He understands that teens' discovery that they are hormonal beings and that love, sex and friendship are distinctly different things that produce distinctly different feelings can be incredibly confusing. Especially because they do not last forever. Friendships end, sometimes for dumb reasons that you can't quite understand. 

Sachs is not as good at portraying marital strife and does not really use Marisa Tomei to her full potential here. He does luckily use John Lithgow and Alfred Molina to their full potential. I did not know that Lithgow had received an Oscar nomination for playing a trans woman in The World According to Garp, but I've always known him as an actor who emphasises his softness and his vulnerability. I was a fan of 3rd Rock From The Sun, and much of what made that show work was Lithgow's performance as a man who feels vulnerable and uncomfortable in his body, but tries to hide it by pretending he is a confident pater familias. This may be a somewhat offensive attempt to explain why I am not surprised to see that he feels so at ease playing a gay man. In any case, Lithgow and Molina really manage to convey their love for each other and their long complicated history. Which makes the film's ending only more frustrating. It feels cheaply manipulative and inelegant to kill off Lithgow, despite the fact that his death had been set up. 

147. And God Created Woman

Song - She (Charles Aznavour)

Movie: And God Created Woman - Et Dieu... créa la femme (Roger Vadim, 1956)

The French will give you two teen idols, and two worldviews, for the price of one. Not only is Brigitte Bardot here sexier than Marilyn Monroe, she is also a rebel without a cause. That allows the film to be both tantalizingly provocative in the way it shoots Bardot, and adopt an old-fashioned moralising attitude towards her independent rebelliousness. It shows off her body and non-conformism, while tut-tutting her for showing off her body and non-conformism. Happily it is much more committed to the former than to the latter, making it an enjoyably cheesy film that is also a good example of how cultural movements take their time to fully develop. Some of the elements which would a few years later come to define the French New Wave are already visible here, especially in the final scene.    

That final scene is also the best in the film. Bardot's character Juliete Hardy has by then spent most of the film married to Michel Tardieu (Jean-Louis Trintignant, not bad, but you wouldn't think this is one of the great French actors), while being actually in love with his brother Antoine (who also loves her, but sees himself as a responsible adult who can't be with such a debauchee). Meanwhile the third brother also desires her, and so does the businessman investing in the shipyard of the three brothers and their mother (who thinks Juliete is "a slut" who will lead Michel astray, which of course she does). You can see how one could lose one's mind in such a situation, which is what Juliete does in the basement of a notorious bar where a band of immigrants is practicing their music. Juliet starts dancing, seemingly in a trance, with the camera circling around her, occasionally closing in on her anguished face, arms and legs while the basement slowly fills with all the men in her life looking at her in wonder. As this is happening, she keeps dancing and the camera keeps following her until a gun is fired. Nobody dies, but nothing is resolved either and the film ends on an ambiguous note.

It was interesting to see this film so shortly after writing about Atlantic City. Both are films by French directors, set in a seaside town on the cusp of a generational transformation thanks to investments in casinos and hotels. And both are about young women seeking to embrace that transformation, while being held back by people who would like to keep those changes at bay for as long as possible. While this is for the most part a lighthearted comedy and Atlantic City a serious, sometimes bleak, character-driven drama, the latter film ultimately ends on a more hopeful note. Yet, in reality And God Created Woman had a much bigger impact on its city's transformation, helping turn St. Tropez into a touristic hotspot, thereby contributing to the rise of mass tourism (which I would argue is one of the most important developments of the 20th Century, deeply connected to labor rights and wealth distribution). Beyond Brigitte Bardot, some of the most interesting sights in this film are the empty untouched beaches, a nice reminder that these are nothing more then sandy areas along a body of water before being social spaces.  

146. Life Is Sweet

Song - Wonderful Tonight (Eric Clapton)

Movie: Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990)

Shortly after seeing this film, I discovered the debut album of Sophie Straat, an artist satirising the gentrification of Amsterdam through the 'Levenslied', the music genre most well known thanks to Andre Hazes, who sang songs about love and life in Amsterdam. 'Levenslied' is considered an authentic Amsterdam genre, especially because of its sincerity and its great attention to detail. Levenslied songs paint vivid pictures of even the most unknown corner of the city. Straat brings the same attention to detail and her music equally lends itself for drunk singalongs in Amsterdam bars. But her lyrics are jokey, and make use of irony and sarcasm to criticize the 'yuppy' transformation of the city. 

Sophie Straat (translating to Sophie Street) is the stage name of Sophie Schwartz, a British-American woman who appears to not be born in Amsterdam, but who has only grown up there. In her songs she often sings with an obviously exaggerated Amsterdam accent to make her appear more authentic. This turns her songs into more than just sincere and (righteous) criticisms of the widening inequalities in Amsterdam, and the way the city obfuscates these by marketing itself as a global center of (green) progressiveness. They are also parodies (she teases, because she loves) of the Levenslied, and all the connotations and memories associated with it. These connotations and memories are sometimes infused with a conservative and reactionary nostalgia to an idealised version of an old 'authentic' Amsterdam and criticisms about the gentrification, globalisation and transformation of Amsterdam are just as often rooted in this conservative nostalgia as they are in genuine progressive causes. This contradiction is quite wonderfully expressed in Straat's songs. 

Most of these ideas also feature in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, which took me by surprise a bit. I had expected it to be somewhat similar to Another Year, a gentle look at the lives of a British working class family. Instead, it's a detailed look at the misery of its characters and their inability to alter their lives, containing several scenes of visceral, sustained ugliness. At the same time it's an often very funny film which understands that you don't need to sanitise working class people to sympathise with them. It's really very good and further proof that Mike Leigh is one of the greatest contemporary British filmmakers. But the aesthetic experimentation of Straat and the way she mixes and plays around with different genres, styles and modes, highlighted why I may never fully fall for artists like Leigh. I like the artificiality and the 'constructed' subjectivity of art. I miss that in Leigh's films, though it is more visible here than in Another Year and Mr. Turner. Timothy Spall's character for example is a wonderful creation, and his introductory scene in particular is a great example of how stylistic exaggerations of reality can provide more truthful insights than sober depictions aiming for authenticity and verisimilitude.  

145. Atlantic City

Song - Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen)

Movie: Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

All around Atlantic City billboards promising the city's renaissance pop up, casino's are opening and buildings are being built, renovated or torn down. If the renaissance is not here yet, the promise of one is enough to lure many in search of a better life. Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon) from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is one of those many hopefuls. She is a croupier in training, studying French in the hope that Atlantic City will be her springboard to Monte Carlo. I don't know if any hopeful documentarians arrived around the same time as Sally, but I would imagine they left after seeing this film. In 1976 New Jersey legalsied gambling in an attempt to return Atlantic City - a Prohibition-era hotspot in decline - to its former glory. This film finds the city in the midst of that transition and records incredibly well how it hovers between hope and uncertainty. Sally is of course entirely fictional and so is the story built around her. But the spaces she and the other characters here inhabit feel so unmediated and naturalistic you feel you could almost smell the ocean and the fish markets. 

It's hard to capture the atmosphere, mood and authenticity of a place any better than Malle does here. It's quite a shame he didn't get to return to it, say in 1990, to see whether the promises of a renaissance had been fulfilled. Especially because of his skepticism. Many films have been made about how a city's expansion serves to fill the pockets of corrupt developers and politicians, often from the point of view of either these developers and politicians or from the point of view of the journalists, detectives and other moral crusaders trying to expose them. It's much rarer to get the view from the ground, as you do here, of the citizens whose lives will be affected by these plans. And it's a rather cynical view. The same forces that lured Sally to the Atlantic Ocean are also responsible for her potential homelessness in the city; her building may be demolished to make room for a casino. In the film's best scene she finds herself in a hospital to identify her killed husband (who had run away with, and impregnated, her sister), while around her the big honcho's are celebrating another casino opening, completely oblivious to her plight. They do so in a hospital wing named after, and donated by, Frank Sinatra. The revitalisation of Atlantic City is presented here as an elite prestige project, selling an illusion to the working people to make the rich richer. 

Unfortunately, the film doesn't entirely work for me. Especially in its second half, the characters' motivations and actions become quite unbelievable, which is only exacerbated by the film's authentic portrayal of the city surrounding them. Especially in its depiction of Lou the film seemed way more interested in calculating the right audience reaction than in creating a credible character. Lou is just the right amount of criminal, just the right amount of delusional and just the right amount of heroic to make him a lovable anti-hero. I can imagine that to audiences in 1980 this didn't matter and that they mostly cared that Low was just the right amount of Burt Lancaster (the only other Lancaster film I've seen is the great Sweet Smell of Success), who in one of his last major roles clearly relates to a character looking for one final chance to be who he always wanted, and pretended, to be.  

144. Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Song - The Lady In Red (Chris De Burgh)

Movie: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)

Most of the time special effects are used to visualise something supernatural or extraordinary that cannot exist in the real world, in films that take place in a world unlike ours or in a disrupted version of our world. Robert Zemeckis, in his best films, uses special effects to make our ordinary world seem weirder by bringing together recognisable elements which would otherwise not be able to exist next to each other. The scene in Back to the Future Part II, where Marty goes back to the past to see himself playing Chuck Berry at the prom (one of my favorite moments in any film) is a great example of this. So are the scenes where Forrest Gump meets Elvis and Nixon. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Zemeckis combines these two approaches to special effects. A hard-boiled 'live-action' detective in 1940's Los Angeles interacts with animated, hand-drawn, cartoons from 'Toontown'. Some of these 'toons' such as Roger Rabbit and his wife Jessica are created especially for the film, others are the familiar characters from Disney's earliest films and from The Looney Tunes. In Toontown Daffy Duck and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny interact with each other. Both the live-action and the animated elements are 'recognisable' on their own, but by combining them together the film presents a world that's completely unlike ours.

The effect is often quite spectacular. The idea here is that these animated characters are drawn to be directed by 'real' film directors. In of the first scenes we see a 'real' film set in which the camera is pointed towards an animated stage on which Roger Rabbit, one of the biggest stars of Toontown, is climbing out of a fridge that has fallen on him with little birds circling around his head. The director is mad at him, because the script called for stars to circle around his head. The animated stage and the film set (of course the scene makes sure to show both elements as much as possible together in the same frame) are so well integrated with each other that you never get the impression that these are two separate spaces or two different worlds. In a later scene, Zemeckis adds another element to the proceedings when he brings detective Valiant to a bar where he is served drinks by the penguins from Mary Poppins, while he watches Daffy and Donald have a piano duel. There he meets Betty Boop, who is drawn in black and white, while all the the other animated characters are in color and Valiant is played by the 'real' Bob Hoskins. 

What makes the achievement of Who Framed Roger Rabbit even more impressive is that it, to my knowledge, has inspired very few copycats. Space Jam would be the most obvious example, but even that made a much clearer distinction between the animated parts and the live action parts (and was far less funny). Of course, it didn't help that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was apparently the most expensive film of the 1980's and that it came out only 7 years before Pixar released Toy Story, accelerating the transition towards computer drawn animation. That is not necessarily progress. I would take almost any Looney Tunes short over almost any Pixar film. In fact, I would also take the Looney Tunes over Who Framed Roger Rabbit. 

What makes the Looney Tunes, the early Disney shorts, Tom & Jerry, etc so great is their directness and their simplicity. They are defined by Bugs Bunny nonchalantly eating a carrot, while his hunters are powerless to catch him. Or by Tom repeatedly hitting himself with a rake. Or by Road Runner humiliating the coyote only with a "Meep Meep". Most of the magic is in how slight and uncomplicated the 'stories' and drawings are. The technical virtuosity of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, no matter how impressive, is ultimately in opposition to that nonchalant, casual quality and the film never truly manages to capture the effortless cool of Bugs and co. It tries a bit too hard, best exemplified by Bob Hoskins' dance scene near the end of the film. It's also filled with many (often genuinely funny) sexual innuendos, double entendres, film references and inside jokes, trading the universal appeal of these cartoons for the love of a highly specific group of film nerds.   

143. The Doors

Song - Light My Fire (The Doors)

Movie: The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991)

In one of the film's early scenes we see Jim Morisson (Val Kilmer) screening one of his student films at UCLA. Clearly influenced by the French New Wave, it's some narrative juxtaposing the rise of Hitler with 60's California youth culture. His class mostly hates it, but Morisson is encouraged by his teacher, played in a cameo by Oliver Stone himself. In the film's final scenes the camera glides along Pere Lachaise, past the graves of the likes of Frederic Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and Moliere only to end up at Morisson's stone, presented as the grandest of them all. If you'd accidentally forgotten that you were watching an Oliver Stone film about The Doors, these scenes would remind you that you are indeed watching an Oliver Stone film about The Doors. I loved it.

It's not very fashionable these days to like Oliver Stone or The Doors. That's partly for bad reasons - we demand art be modest and are suspicious of self-indulgent artists. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that there is a bit of a douchey, chauvinist undercurrent behind their pompous pretentiousness. I am less of a 'Doors' fan than I was when I named this blog, but it's undeniable that at least Riders on the Storm and L.A. Woman are absolute bangers. As for Stone, it's rather disappointing that he is now one of the main proponents of what I've seen wonderfully described as the 'anti-imperialism of idiots'  - being pro Russian, Chinese and other non-western dictators just because they are anti-America. But his manic, no-holds-barred style of filmmaking, unafraid to occasionally descend into irrational lunacy in both form and content, is sorely missing in contemporary (American) film. He is both an extremely obvious choice to make a film about The Doors, and the last person you'd want in charge of such a project. It's easy to imagine this film becoming Scarface on steroids. In actual fact, it's an often surprisingly melancholic and warm film that fully achieves the surreal vibe of an actual Doors song.

It's also a film that fully concedes that most of The Doors' lyrics are rather meaningless gibberish. At the same time, it understands that this meaningless gibberish is what makes them work so well. Stone presents Morrison as someone who aspires to be a great poet, but who deep in his heart knows that he isn't. And that the best he can do is write provocative, mysterious rock lyrics, most of which he seems to make up as he goes along. His lyrics are just smart enough to make you curious and interested, but not intelligent enough to really constitute coherent thoughts grounded in reality. Accidentally or not, that does create a surreal, absurdist effect, especially in combination with Ray Manzarek's arcane keyboard sound. Stone most clearly shows this when during the first half of The End we see the band hallucinating in the desert, while during its second half we hear them playing the song to an entranced audience. The rambling incoherence of the song, combined with Morrison's languid delivery, is what keeps the audience on its feet. They are hearing something they can't quite place, that doesn't quite make sense. That makes the eventual sudden aggressive proclamations only more surprisin and more excitingly dangerous. They wouldn't have the same effect if Morisson was building up to them logically and coherently. 

The film mostly consists of similar large set pieces which aim to recreate this surreal offbeat absurdism  and it does so incredibly well. It often plays as if it's a biopic about a fictional band in a world that looks like ours, but is a just a little skewy in a way you can't quite define. The moon is just a bit too bright, Pam (Meg Ryan) becomes Jim's love of his life the moment she meets him when he enters her home through her window, we sometimes hear a Doors song non-diegetically while Morrison and co play another one in the film. And as always, Stone mixes film styles and stocks, overlays images upon images, edits across time and space, and accentuates every aural and visual choice he makes. He is also fortunate in casting Kyle MacLachlan as Manzarek, whose dialogue sometimes seems to come straight out of Twin Peaks.

One of the oddest scenes takes place halfway through when Morrison meets Andy Warhol at a party organised by the latter. Warhol is shown to philosophise in much the same way as Morrison does, yet the film seems to have utter contempt for the former. The difference is in the way they present themselves towards the world. Warhol uses his pretension to build himself up as a great artist, while Morrison uses it to create a connection with the audience and to have fun. Stone is probably one of the few filmmakers who would even think to include a scene to explore the various shades of pretentiousness and their morality, and the scene is probably unfair towards Warhol. But the scene's is interesting for its attitude towards Morrison's art, one that is reinforced throughout the rest of the film. The Doors is a full-throttled defense of making art for its own sake, to indulge in meaninglessness. And Stone would not be Stone if he wouldn't try to make the larger point that this freedom to make art that's about nothing but your own whims is not only what makes America great, but also a representation of America at its best. I don't know if that's really true, but it's a wonderful fantasy to have.         

142. The Rules of the Game

Song - All Along The Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix)

Movie: The Rules of the Game - La règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)

The future is about to arrive when The Rules of the Game begins. A woman journalist dressed in work clothes reports live on the radio on the imminent landing of André Jurieux, the fastest man to fly solo across the Atlantic and the French answer to Charles Lindbergh. Upon landing, a disappointed André finds that the woman for which he risked his life isn't at the airfield waiting for him. Believing that he must win 'his' Catherine back from Marquis Robert de la Cheyniest he finds a way to attend the Marquis' hunting party at his private estate 'La Colliniere'. And so begins a "comedy of manners" involving lordships, aristocrats, servants, chambermaids, lavish gowns, costumes, palace intrigue, masquerades and mechanical music instruments. It's sometimes easy to forget and hard to imagine that this world of noblemen and their traditions, rules and hierarchies overlapped with the world of live radio and airplanes. In hindsight it may be rather obvious that the latter would mean the downfall of the former, but seeing it so clearly while living in the midst of that transition is much harder than Renoir makes it look here.

The Rules of the Game is above all a great farce that doesn't involve merely the three main characters mentioned in the paragraph above, but also Christine's chambermaid Lizette, Lizette's husband Schumacher, her lover Marceau, Robert's mistress Genevieve, Christine's niece Jackie who is in love with André, Octave (played by Renoir), who is a confidant of most of these people, and who may be smarter or more tragic than he lets on, and a whole lot of other aristocrats and servants. The efficiency with which Renoir introduces them is a masterclass in itself. Look at the opening scene at the airfield for example. André is greeted there by a jolly Octave, but can't hide his disappointment to the radio journalist. Renoir then cuts to an opulent room where Lisette and Christine talk about love and life, while the former helps her 'lady' dress to go out with her husband, the Maarquis. In the establishing shot, before we even know their names, we see them from behind the radio. Their relationship to the previous scene is immediately clear, especially when Christine teases Lisette about her affairs, including the one with Octave. In less than 5 minutes Renoir has established all the different ways in which these four people relate to one another, and to the Marquis, who we haven't even seen by then. As he introduces more and more characters, and as we get to know them better, it becomes increasingly fun to discover how entangled they all are with each other, and how much more entangled they can get. 

Once at La Colliniere, everything and everyone has been set up and the real fun starts, most of all for Renoir himself. He happily moves the camera around the estate to discover unexpected people in unexpected corners, and is equally happy to let his characters move around the estate. We see differents sets of people leave a room, their paths diverging, only for them to briefly meet up again in some other space of the estate, and then follow their own paths again. At other times, characters are frantically entering rooms, where others are already, equally frantically, going on about their business. In the process, unlikely alliances are formed and broken, identities are mistaken, punches are thrown and guns are fired. And the most exciting space is the corridor between the various bedrooms, where people constantly move around, get in and out of rooms, and the frame, often not even knowing for certain why they are there or whether they really want what they think they want. Sometimes we may see within a shot three different strands of action take place, such as the moment when the Marquis and Andre leave a room fighting, only to end up in the same space where Schumacher is shooting at Marceau, while in the background we see Genevieve fainting. And while all this is going on, some of the guests at La Colliniere are watching a 'masquerade show'. In one of the acts four Jewish stereotypes sing about how they cannot control their sexual desires. It's hard to make such a funny, lighthearted movie about a dying world. It's easier when you have such contempt for that world.

141. Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Song - Saturday Night (Herman Brood)

Movie: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)

Inadvertently, a great argument for not being a team player. Most of the cast here is wonderfully in tune with each other and with the sweet and endearing vibe of the film, letting the vulnerability, insecurity and excitement of their characters seep through in their performances. It's obvious that all these young actors, at the beginning of their careers, loved the film and loved working with each other to make the best of it. The exception is Sean Penn, who gives the least chill performance of a surfer dude ever. More annoyingly, he is so committed to showing that what he is doing is so special and unique that he completely stops the film in its tracks anytime he appears on screen. It's an utterly stupid and ill-conceived performance. In hindsight, it's hard to blame him. His Jeff Spiccoli could have, and perhaps should have, retired him from acting. Instead, Spiccoli became an iconic character and Penn went on to have the most successful career out of the entire Ridgemont cast.

I am quite fond of The Pledge, Into the Wild and Milk, but Judge Reinhold should have been the biggest star on the evidence of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Though if you want to be a star you probably shouldn't appear next to 80's Eddie Murphy. Can't really blame the audience for not paying much attention to you in that situation.) He plays Brad Hamilton, a teen who realises that he is less mature than he thinks he is, but doesn't realise that this makes him more mature than he thinks he is, to utter perfection. The scenes where he debates how to break up with his girlfriend are really glorious. He wants to explore seeing other people, knows that this is a perfectly normal response for a teen, but isn't 100% sure whether this knowledge is correct. And so he tries to come up with all kinds of reasons for breaking up, knowing that all those reasons are bullshit. His reaction when his girlfriend actually breaks up with him, because she wants to see other people, is a priceless combination of relief, regret, amusement and disappointment. He gets into more awkward situations in the rest of the film, similarly responding to them with both annoyance and a knowing bemusement, aware of the fact that these are the kind of situations teens sometimes end up in, and there is not much one can do about it. 

An early scene is key to the character and to the film as a whole. Washing his car with a grin on his face, his younger sister Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), having lost her virginity the previous night, comes up to him, asking him to hide from their parents the flowers she just received. He helps her without teasing her or making her in any way uncomfortable. That dynamic will be again visible when Stacy needs an abortion, a plot point that badly fits in with the rest of the film, but does again highlight Brad's goodness and comfort in his own skin, without ever turning him into a mature adult. It's really not the kind of character you usually see in these kinds of comedies, certainly not from that period. The rest of the film is quite good too, though it lacks big laughs and a certain manic energy that the best comedies of its ilk have. It makes up of for that with a sort of quiet wisdom, understanding that teens often fear getting what they want much more than not getting what they want. And that anxiety about asking a girl out, is often about the fear that she will actually say yes.  

140. Native Son

Song - In the Ghetto (Elvis Presley)

Movie: Native Son (Jerrold Freedman, 1986)

If Beale Street Could Talk is one of the best films of this century, but even if it had been crap, I would have been grateful to it for introducing me to James Baldwin. Unfortunately, the perspectives of black American leftist thinkers have almost completely passed me by. There are some obvious reasons for this. Emphasising that many of the heroes and intellectuals of the Civil Rights Movement had radical socialist ideals would be quite inconvenient for the stories Americans like to tell (about) themselves. Native Son, an adaptation of the 1940 novel by Richard Wright, is certainly not a great film, but it's interesting for trying to address this conundrum. 

I have not read Native Son, but I have read about Richard Wright on Wikipedia, which obviously makes me an expert! Apparently, Native Son was a highly controversial novel, criticized by Baldwin for presenting negative stereotypes of black Americans, the American literature world still feels uneasy about. It has been criticized for being violent, profane and sexually graphic communist propaganda, causing libraries and high schools to think long and hard about how to present it. Freedman's film doesn't really capture that provocative spirit and is a bit safe. But it must have been hard to adapt a novel by a devoted Marxist during the height of American anti-communist jingoism. When Bigger Thomas (Victor Love) drives Mary (Elizabeth McGovern) to meet her 'red' boyfriend Jan (Matt Dillon) in their socialist set-up/bar, we don't enter the establishment with her. Instead, the camera stays outside with Bigger, showing us shadowy figures behind windows adorned with communist slogans. 

The rest of the night Bigger drives Mary and Jan around town, while they use him as a prop to justify their beliefs and to explore black Chicago. These are among the film's best and most uncomfortable scenes - I would not be surprised if they influenced Jordan Peele when making Get Out, as they evoke similar feelings and ideas. This does so more successfully, as Mary and Jan truly believe they are benevolent do-gooders who will be of benefit to Bigger. They are completely oblivious to the fact that their shenanigans clearly make Bigger uncomfortable and put him in an anxious state of mind. In doing so they set in motion a chain of events leading to Bigger accidentally killing Mary. (As an aside, losing Elizabeth McGovern early is not a good strategy for a film.) The film emphasises that Jan and Mary, and their desire to show off how good socialism is/how good they are for being socialists, are to blame for Bigger's predicament. But when the trial against Bigger starts the film also emphasises that the communists are the only (white) people to care about him, who see his humanity and who help him regain some pride and self-respect. This nuanced approach also shows this to be a rare Hollywood film that seems aware that there are substantial differences between social democracy/socialism and communism. 

Unfortunately. the film does fail considerably in other regards. Bigger placing the dead Mary in the furnace would have been an iconic image if the scenes surrounding it were stronger. You can see how a description of the events leading up to Mary's death and their aftermath, could work well on page. To make them work on film, one has to embrace metaphor and artificiality. Freedman is too damn literal, and so most of it feels completely unbelievable and ridiculous. It doesn't help that Victor Love isn't a very good actor; you simply don't buy that he can successfully convince anyone of his innocence. 

139. Fast Five

Song - Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)

Movie: Fast Five (Justin Lin, 2011)

Well, that was a surprising disappointment. The best thing you can say about Fast Five is that it set up Furious 6, maybe the most purely entertaining blockbuster of the last decade. That film took the franchise' idea that all the matters in life is family, fun, love and fast cars and turned it up all the way to 11, infusing every frame of the film with such hyperactive joy that I actually decided not to see the other movies in the series until the next film came out. Though I had seen the first film by that point, I wanted to remember the characters as they were in Furious 6, and the filmmakers as the people who had made that film. Now that I have seen 1,4,5,6 and 7, this one is by far my least favorite. 

As I remember it, Fast Five was the film that turned the critical tide in favor of the franchise, which may well be the main reason for the differences between 5 and 6. Furious 6 seems made by people who have gotten over themselves, who are so comfortable with making gloriously silly action movies that they couldn't care less about what anyone thinks of them. Fast Five feels made by people who are trying way too hard to prove themselves. It's filled with empty juiced-up posturing, overdetermined 'grittiness' and the most humorless Dwayne Johnson performance ever; he seems to have been given the task to put as much edge as possible on even the most banal command he gives. After the opening scenes we have to wait over an hour for the next car chase scene. 

For some reason the film even makes it a point to skip its street race scene; Diesel and Walker approach the Rio street racers for a bet, and then the film cuts to them returning to their base with the car they've won, without showing the race. That's again a decision that becomes even more disappointing in the context of Furious 6. There, the street race in the London night culminating in the meeting between Vin Diesel and Luke Evans, is one of the absolute highlights in the film, and the first sequence to point to if you want to convince someone of the genuine visual artistry of these films. If you want to teach film students how a director's craft evolves with experience you could do much worse than showing them Fast Five and Furious 6. In the process they might also learn something about Hollywood's Orientalism. It's not a coincidence that a car chase set in London is filmed with more clarity and visual splendor than a car chase set in Rio De Janeiro. This film is dominated by that ugly orange-greyish look American filmmakers like to give to Latin American places and of course a foot chase across the favelas is edited as if the film tries to out-Greengrass Greengrass. And yet, the sheer ridiculousness of the long final sequence almost makes up for the rest of the film. Stealing an entire bank vault by chaining it to two supercars racing across Rio creates the kind of gloriously silly imagery that more Hollywood blockbusters should strive for, and that Lin perfected in Furious 6.  

138. Precious

Song - Proud Mary (Tina Turner)

Movie: Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009)

11 years on, I still believe that Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, Adventureland and The Informant! are four of the 10 best films of this century. I also believe they are the best films of their respective directors. Perhaps that makes me a walking cliche - I was in 2009 a 20-year old who had just switched to an exciting bachelor in Media & Culture after a disappointing year as a Political Science student. I had every reason to inflate the quality of the films I saw. And these four especially seemed like fresh new works that pointed towards a real change in Hollywood. They took familiar time periods, genres, milieus and characters and put a spin on them, forcing us to look at them in a new way and in the process subverting romanticised American narratives with an offbeat sense of humor. (It's worth noting that Adventureland, among other things an honest depiction of the struggles of working-class Americans during the Reagan years, is very much not an exception here). Of course I connected all this to Obama's election the year before, which would obviously change everything for the better. 

I was obviously wrong about the final part, and about the impact these films would have had. But having seen them a couple of times long after I finished studying it's fairly obvious to me that my (continued) love for them is not just a consequence of an euphoric/nostalgic haze. And Hollywood would have, certainly artistically, been in a much better shape had it hitched its wagon to these kinds of films rather than to 2008's Iron Man. In any case, I don't think that it's a stretch to say that there was something in the water in 2009, and that it may well have been connected to the Obama election. Because how else do you explain a film like Precious? (To a lesser extent Avatar, The Messenger, Leaves of Grass, Everyone Else, 500 Days of Summer and even District 9, which I don't like at all, could alos be said to belong to this group of films).

I had not seen Precious until now; if I had seen it in 2009, I would have been even more excited (though it's not nearly as great as the 'Big Four'). I also probably would have had more patience with The Paperboy (one of my least favorite films of the decade) and The Butler. Daniels is probably quite proud of Precious and its success. But you have to wonder if he is not secretly disappointed that after 2009 half the walls in America's dorms weren't covered with Scarface-style posters of Mary (Mo'Nique) and Precious (Gabourey Sidibe). Early on in the film, there is a fight between Mary (abusive single mother on welfare) and her daughter Precious (overweight, physically and verbally abused by her mother, illiterate, bullied at school, 16 and pregnant with her second child, both times after being raped by her father, one of the kids has Down Syndrome). The fight culminates when Mary goes on a profanity-laden tirade against her daughter, creatively using the word fuck to come up with a wide variety of insults. The scene's point, unambiguously, is to illuminate how hard Precious' life is and to empathize with her. But it's also to revel in the style of Mary's monologue, her verbal poetry,  Mo'Nique's attitude as an actress, and to be jolted, surprised and somewhat excited by the intensity of the verbal and physical violence of the scene. Just when Mary is about to hit Precious we cut to black and hear the cat meow (which does indeed intend to be the joke you think it intends to be).

Lee Daniels is fully committed to this approach throughout the film, and it's been interesting to watch this right at the moment film journalists have been writing about the 30th anniversary of Goodfellas. In these days of clickbait journalism it's easy to write accusatory pieces about how Scorsese glorifies bad behavior, violence and whatnot. Most of these articles are obviously stupid, but film people can sometimes get too defensive about them. It's not that strange that some people misread these films. Scorsese's mob/violent films are so good partly because they make violence and bad behaviour seem so exciting. Making people enjoy stuff they know they should not enjoy, making people feel conflicting emotions about the characters, the story and their own feelings is one of the most important/interesting/fun things art and films can do. It also makes these films more honest. It's easy to see why you'd do crime if it gets you the best seats at the Copacabana. 

Likewise it's easy to see why Mary is a bad mother if you show how 'enjoyable' it is to be a bad mother. It makes you better understand how dire her situation is once you realise that hurling creative expletives is one of the only ways she has to truly express herself, and that insulting her daughter is perhaps the only thing that gives her (the illusion of) power. But there is also another reason why I think that what Daniels is doing here is really worthwhile. He is clearly influenced by exploitation and camp, but uses elements of those genres to make his story less exploitative. This would have been a far worse, and far more queasy, film if it had been a straightforward 'inspirational' drama with pretenses of realism. Daniels here embraces artifice and happily goes over the top, and in doing so makes clear that there is a clear distinction between this stuff happening on film and this stuff happening in real life. He shows you what is happening to Precious (and doesn't shy away from showing the horrifying), makes you care for her, and makes clear that this is not just a theoretic exercise. But he also makes clear that you as a viewer cannot pretend to have walked in Precious's shoes, that there is no point in pretending that abuse/violence suffered on film can ever be as horrifying as the abuse/violence suffered in real life. And so he has made a pulpy, often quite funny, film about incest and poverty, without ever downplaying the gravity of those topics.

It's glorious to see, and it absolutely helps that Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique are fully on Daniels' line, always willing to steer away from the kind of characterisations that usually win Oscars for this kind of stuff, and to make some surprising, unconventional choices. The same can be said for Paula Patton, who plays an alternative school teacher who refuses to moralise the mischievous hijinks of her girl pupils - long stretches of the film basically consist of disadvantaged girls wilding out in quite irresponsible ways and the film having fun with them. Daniels knows that this is not the conventional way to approach such a serious topic, knows that this will annoy some people, and likes to rub their noses in it. At one point Precious explains in voiceover that her mother doesn't want her to go to school, but that she chose to defy her and so now "I is getting an education". You can bet that the film joyously puts extra emphasis on that 'Is' in there.  

137. Educating Rita

Song - Geef Mij Je Angst (Guus Meeuwis)

Movie: Educating Rita (Lewis Gilbert, 1983)

Educating Rita shows in its opening scene a professor walking to his office. He is accompanied by classical music, emphasising the majestic grandeur and history of the university buildings and lawns, only to reveal in the next few scenes that the professor, Frank Bryant, (Michael Caine) is a drunk mediocrity giving lectures to pretentious, spoiled, students. He perks up only when he tutors hairdresser Rita (Julie Walters), a blunt woman, with an extremely pronounced working-class accent, who has decided to enroll in open university to have an education. It only gets more 'populist' from here. 

The film is based on a play that apparently only takes place in the office of the professor. Gilbert opens it up, but only literally not cinematically. We visit other places (e.g. the homes of both Rita and Frank, a bar, university halls, etc), but none of those ever really come alive. Especially during the early scenes, the film is stiff and awkward, partly because of unimaginative blocking and partly because of some odd narrative jumps in time. I have also never found Caine (with the exception of Hannah and Her Sisters) or Walters greaty compelling, and am not quite sure what they did here to deserve an Oscar nomination. My favorite performance in the film is actually given by one Malcolm Douglas. He doesn't appear to have had much of a film career, but here he plays Denny, Rita's dim incurious husband. Douglas never overplays or accentuates his narrow-mindedness, understanding that for Denny there is nothing special about that. Films, especially American ones, most of the time like to portray stupidity as comic relief, or they employ it as a metaphor. But Denny here is just an ordinary dimwit and the film's intent with his character is nothing more than to give an authentic honest portrayal of a dimwit. Douglas plays him completely sincerely without ever feeling the need to signal that he is smarter than his character. 

Denny is also involved in the one sequence of the film which is absolutely perfect. When invited by Frank for dinner with his family and friends, Rita arrives outside his home to see through the window 'cultured' people having 'cultured' conversations. Afraid to go in, she turns back to meet Denny in a bar. He is there with her parents and other friends, singing songs of/in quiet desperation. This is a simple scene that communicates more about the forgotten lives of the British poor than other films manage in their entire running time. It's also a rather damning indictment of British society, especially when the next morning Rita confesses to Frank what she did and tells him she feels like a "half-caste".   

Unfortunately, here is where the film's hypocritical and rather malicious politics come in. After identifying that Britain's enormous class differences almost make it a caste society, and after identifying that this makes the poor lead isolated, desperate lives, it goes on to justify that organisation of society, and to argue that it's good for the poor. And it uses the language of populism to do so. In the end the film's point is that the working class should get educated to see that the lives of the educated class are nothing special and should be rejected. Rita should not "rise above her station", because she is too good for that. It's utter bollocks, but also the performative populism/anti-elitism of the film is condescending and contemptuous and ultimately in service of the people it pretends to criticise. Which is also what makes it fascinating. It may not be a very good film, but it's a really great historical document. You often hear these days that Reagan and Thatcher were the true precursors of Trump and Brexit. There are some good arguments against that, mainly that their politics contributed to European integration and the dissolution of borders in Europe. But then you see something like Educating Rita, made in the midst of Thatcherism, and you wonder how anyone could not see the connection between 80's conservatism and modern populism.

136. The Company of Wolves

Song - Bright Eyes (Art Garfunkel)

Movie: The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)

I will always like a postmodern pastiche that explores how communities make sense of their lives through folklore. But this is a whole lot of fuss to retell Little Red Riding Hood. Now, I haven't thought much about Little Red Riding Hood since childhood, so I had never really considered the story as a metaphorical warning against sexual predators. In retrospect, it does seem like an obvious subtext that this film brings to the foreground. It's not uninteresting, and it's done with a considerable amount of artistry. It's also quietly transgressive without being smug. Its provocative moments, such as they are, do not exist to provoke and rile up the audience, but are in the service of the story and the broader questions on the film's mind. And it's clear that everyone, throughout the entire production, has put a lot of thought and care into the making of the film. 

Still, I couldn't help thinking that the whole thing is a bit of a fool's enterprise. The caveat here is that I would have probably thought better of it if I had seen it in 1984. I am seeing it now though, when Hollywood is swamped with 'gritty' reboots and overblown origin stories, straining to find great meaning where there is none, or bludgeoning you with THEMES, pretending to find new meaning that was already there in the original stories  In The Company of Wolves the main character (Rosaleen!), is an ordinary village girl, the only person in the village who believes, and has a real connection with, her Granny (Angela Lansbury), who tells her about the dark secrets and the magic of the forest.  She 'becomes' Red Riding Hood after her Granny knits a red cloat for her. At the end of the film she meets the big bad (were)wolf at her Granny's house, sitting in her Granny's chair after killing her, notices his big paws and big teeth, and 'defeats' him with some cunning and some magic. Red Riding Hood then disappears into the woods with the wolves, to be hunted by the village people who don't realise that she may be the only one standing between them and the blood-thirsty 'wildebeests'. 

A sequel (perhaps one involving Rapunzel and Snow White!) to this film never came, but obviously not for the lack of a good setup. In any case, this is the kind of nonsense Marvel/DC/everyone who wants to imitate them is currently in love with and that I find incredibly annoying. Todd Phillips is a hack, but I wouldn't have liked Joker even if he weren't. Neil Jordan is obviously not a hack, and this is probably as good as a film like this can be. Which is good news. Jordan is a director I've always wanted to explore more of. I have only seen this and Greta, a wonderfully stylish genre exercise that's pretty much the antithesis of the kind of Hollywood blockbuster I complain against here. 

It is worth noting that The Company of Wolves has more on its mind than just being a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. It's also an "old-wives' tale" about the "old-wives' tales a village forest community surrounded by wolves tells itself and in doing so it shows quite nicely how folklore becomes folklore. It understands that for a community shaped by its relationship with the forest and the wolves living in it, the forest and the wolves will become the frames of reference through which it tries to understand and explain the world. This seems rather straightforward, but making obvious how the stories we tell are shaped by the world around us (and vice versa) is not an easy thing to do. This film does it by creating a clever meta-narrative that is not only influenced by Red Riding Hood, but also by other traditional folk tales, werewolf lore and Christian and pagan narratives and imagery. Despite this mish-mash of references, all the stories told here share the same basic narrative, aesthetic, thematic and tonal characteristics, making it believable that they all originate from the same village. Their overarching idea is that nature is inherently grotesque, unknowable and, actually, unnatural. The entire film was filmed on a soundstudio, and Jordan is happy to highlight the fakeness of the sets whenever he deems necessary. That doesn't make the werewolf transformations any less frightening. 

135. Selma

Song - Pride (In the Name of Love) (U2)

Movie: Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

There may be no better evidence of institutional racism in Hollywood than the the fact that it took until 2014 for a major film about Martin Luther King to get made. Even taking his importance aside, his life has more obvious cinematic potential than, say, Shakespeare's or Mozart's. Marches, big speeches, tactical manouvers, large gatherings and peaceful resistance to violence are things that are much easier to dynamically visualise and dramatise than writing a book or composing. Ava DuVernay obviously understands this and is very smart to mostly focus Selma on marches, big speeches, large gatherings, tactical manouvers and peaceful resistance to violence. And so this is a superior biopic that is at its weakest when it veers away from those things, such as during the scenes between MLK (David Oyelowo) and his wife Coretta. Aside from one scene between her and Malcolm X, Coretta is mostly portrayed as the kind of suffering wife of great men under pressure we've seen in countless of films and strangely enough the rest of the women don't fare much better. Diane Nash is presented as a "female agitator", but barely does any agitating. We mostly see her in the background while others make big plans. 

To be fair, there is a good reason why Nash and other relevant interesting figures close to King don't quite stand out here. The film wants to show that the Civil Rights Movement was so successful, because it was a collective movement filled with individuals who were willing to sacrifice for the common good - Selma focuses on their attempts to end voting restrictions for black people. DuVernay goes to great lengths to emphasise that even Martin Luther King himself is not bigger than the movement, that he is not more special than the other activists and that he is a fallible human being with doubts. King is even missing in action (as he was in reality) in the most famous and (justly) celebrated scene of the film; the first march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a fantastically directed and edited action sequence, slowly ratcheting up tension and revealing the full danger of the situation until it all blows up. It's also one of the most slyly subversive sequences in the film. One of the ways in which DuVernay builds tension, is by letting a white New York Times journalist narrate the events on the bridge on the phone to his editor. He is clearly a good, decent 'liberal', on the side of the protesters, but while they put their bodies on the line, ending up lost and hurt in the chaos, he watches from far away and narrates the events as if he is an objective observer watching a stage show. It's a much more uncomfortable sight than the somewhat caricaturist portrayal of George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama.

Selma could have probably had more similarly uncomfortable moments, but it sometimes seems that DuVernay holds back and that she knows exactly how far she can go before upsetting the higher powers - this is I think even more obvious in her Netflix miniseries When They See Us. Yet, that is not to say that this film panders to a romanticized version of King and the Civil Rights Movement. For every success it shows, it emphasises how much more work needs to be done. The film starts with King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and while giving his speech the film cuts to young black girls descending the stairs in a church, when suddenly a bomb (by the KKK; the scene depicts the real bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama) goes off, killing them all. And, when at the end of the film Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, the film doesn't leave you with any illussions that racism has now ended. The act is not passed because Johnson and co had a change of heart regarding racism. There are no benevolent white saviors here and all the racist characters at the beginning of the film are equally racist at the end of the film. It's just that racism has become somewhat less profitable, because of a series of smart, tactical moves made by King and his allies. 

Finally, it's worth getting back to the point about 'agitator' Diane Nash. She is here played by Tessa Thompson. Other characters are played by Andre Holland,  Lakeith Stanfield, and Colman Domingo and Stephan James (both of them spectacularly good in If Beale Street Could Talk). While it is admirable to emphasise the collectivity of the Civil Rights Movement, there are ways to do that which would put a bigger spotlight on this unbelievable collection of great actors. 

134. The Panic in Needle Park

Song - Kronenburg Park (Frank Boeijen)

Movie: The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

There is a moment early on in The Panic in Needle Park, when I thought this was on its way to becoming one of my favorite films. Helen (Kitty Winn) has just been released from the hospital following complications from an abortion. Outside she is met by Bobby, played by Al Pacino as a youthfully naive rascal, a motor-mouthed petty thief whose tough guy pose masks his gentleness and insecurities. She knows that he lies, steals, uses drugs and doesn't have a permanent place to live, but she finds him cool, funny and interesting and falls for him. From the opening scenes with the callous guy who impregnated her, it is clear that these are the kinds of men she is attracted to. She is also presented as an independent confident woman who knows what she wants and knows how to handle such relationships and their potential consequences. And Bobby seems better than her ex. When after few days of living together, with her still recovering from het visit to the hospital, she tells him it's OK to have sex now, he looks at her, sees that she is not ready, and decides to wait. The camera stays in close-up on Pacino's face during his contemplations and it's clear that this is not a dilemma he usually has. His desire struggles with his newly found love for Helen. We get the feeling that he's been with many women before, but that this time things feel different. And so he decides to wait.

It was at that point that I fell in love with the film and thought it was going to be a great romantic drama between two youngsters who are smart, good and confident, but not as smart, good and confident as they think they are, or need to be, to survive hustling on the streets of New York. Yet, what it ends up being is a harsh drama about (heroin) addiction and how it hurts and devastates lives. In fact, Schatzberg does his best do stop the film from becoming a romantic drama. He always keeps the characters at just enough of a remove to never let you swoon over them, never turns them into sentimentalised tragic heroes. You are supposed to think of them as a bunch of drug users who ruin their lives, not as doomed lovers. The film at times plays almost like a fly-on the wall semi-documentary of the drugs scene in 70's New York, with long scenes in which we see how drug users prepare their high, close ups of needles going in arms, and a strange, almost silent, scene in which Pacino observes how cocaine is produced by the poorest of New Yorkers working in grim basements. Meanwhile, the police knows exactly what's going on, but can't produce any evidence. 

What makes this approach truly work is that while Bobby and Helen are not 'glorified' as romantic heroes, they are also not judged, The film objectively presents their irresponsible behavior and their downward spiral without blaming them (or anyone else) for it. It also doesn't preach, patronise or condescend, but instead always finds a way to highlight their humanity. Sometimes even with humor. When Helen has to turn to prostitution to buy drugs, she ends up in bed with a young kid for whom it's his first time. We only see the aftermath with the boy trying to act as an experienced lover; it's one of the funniest scenes of its kind I've seen, without it breaking the atmosphere of the film. 

It's easy to see how this film helped Al Pacino turn into a star (and btw if they ever decide to make a snooker epic they should use some of that Irishman de-aging technology to make Pacino play Ronnie O'Sullivan. Not only does he look like him here, he also shares many of his tics, gestures and temperament). What is harder to see is how it didn't turn Kitty Winn into a star. The film really belongs to her, playing the kind of character women rarely get to play. You could argue that Pacino is a 'homme fatale' here, whose charisma turns an intelligent, emancipated woman to the 'dark side'. Yet while she is clearly the victim, she is never victimised, The film gives her agency to make her own decisions, and perhaps emphasises that a bit too much, straining to make the point that a woman making a conscious independent choice to self-destruct is making a feminist choice. Through her nuanced, subtle performance, Winn both enforces and negates that idea. All of this eventually leads to a fantastic, surprising and melancholic final scene, that reminded me in spirit of the ending of Five Easy Pieces (released one year before this), despite the fact that it reaches the opposite conclusion. Finally, having seen this, The Last Thing He Wanted (a more interesting film than Rotten Tomatoes would make you believe) and the Netflix documentary on her life, I am very curious to explore more of Joan Didion's work.  

133. M

Song - Jeanny (Falco)

Movie: M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Filmmakers are like the rest of us. Whenever they get a new toy they like to play with it and show it around as much as possible. Which is why most color films from the '40's and 50's are much more colorful than most contemporary movies. M has become famous for providing the blueprint for noirs and police investigation thrillers, but it is also Fritz Lang's first sound film. I only realised that after watching the film and reading up on it. It is incredible how seamlessly sound is incorporated in the film's aesthetic and how it is always used in the service of the story. With the exception of one somewhat contrived scene - in which we see a bunch of oddly framed policeman listening to someone out of the shot telling them something - Lang never lets the sound take center stage. Aside from a couple of silent sequences, sound here is used pretty much in the same way as it is in 'modern' movies. 

While the use of sound is impressive, perhaps even more so is how Lang solves problems that do betray that M stems from the early days of cinema. A creaky long take, in which the camera glides through a beggars' establishment and then goes up the first floor, intends to give us the mood of the place and show how the mafia connects to the beggars. It achieves that, but what the shot truly illuminates is how uncomfortable it was to set up such complex shots at that time. It's not a surprise that for most of the rest of the film Lang refrains from such complexity and either keeps the camera still or lets it gently pan to the left or right. Yet he never makes the film feel static, because he constantly plays with lights and shadows, has people moving in and out of the frame, and crosscuts between two different spaces in which the action takes part. There is a wonderful short sequence in which a mafia boss has a discussion with his 'colleagues', when in the middle of his monologue Lang cuts to the police station where the police commissioner 'finishes' the mafia boss' sentence (and even his arm movement) in his own speech to the cops. 

That sequence touches on another interesting aspect of the film: Lang's cynicism. It's easy to say this in hindsight, but watching this film you don't get the feeling that Lang was terribly surprised by the Nazi's rise to power. He presents a society easily swayed by populist mobs, where there is mistrust both among and between the higher and lower classes, and where civil institutions have lost authority and competence. The film shows how in the hunt for a child murderer, the mafia is always one step ahead of the police, largely because the mafia has a better understanding of, and connection to, the life on the streets. They are eventually not only the ones who catch the murderer, but also the ones who give him a (somewhat fair!) trial. It barely seems to matter that at the end of the film the killer does find himself in a 'real' courtroom. The seats where the judges are supposed to sit are empty. Once they arrive, claiming they will preside "in the name of the people" Lang cuts to grieving mothers for whom the trial is an afterthought. "It won't bring our children back." And on that note, the film ends. 

132. Purple Rain

Song - Purple Rain (Prince)

Movie: Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984)

YouTube personalities are not necessarily obnoxious! For proof, see the twins filming themselves listening to classic songs they hear for the first time. They went viral a couple of weeks ago, after Phil Collins' unexpected drum solo in In the Air Tonight blew their mind. Since, they've come under the attention of the artists they respond to. Annie Lennox, for example, was overjoyed after seeing their delighted reaction to Sweet Dreams. They deserve their 15 minutes of fame. Unlike many other 'internet stars' they seem genuine in their enthusiasm and they have a genuine ear for music, allowing them to explain in not entirely amateurish ways why the song works for them the way it does. I would not be surprised if for some impressionable teen they turn out to be a gateway drug to music criticism. I, who most decidedly do not have a good ear for music, have always liked In the Air Tonight, but only after watching their viral video did I realise why the drum solo in that song is so special, beyond just being awesome. Similarly, I only realised after Prince' death that he was a truly towering figure in music. And while I was familiar with songs like Darling Nikki, Purple Rain and When Doves Cry, hearing them in this film, I felt like the two viral brothers did when Phil Collins did his thing.  

I used to see Prince as a bit of an attention-seeking clown who tried and failed to upstage Michael Jackson. And Purple Rain, I thought, was a fun song that was also heavily overblown kitsch. What this film makes clear is that I was not really wrong about the second part. Purple Rain is overblown kitsch, but it is overblown kitsch at its absolute best, created by a ridiculously talented and charismatic rock artist with an utterly unique sensibility, one who finds real emotion in overblown kitsch. You also gotta admire Prince' (and the film's) confidence in the power of Purple Rain. Throughout the film we are teased with the first couple of (instrumental) notes of the song. it's not only set up to be the absolute highlight of the film, it's what the entire film builds up to, the reason for its existence. It must deliver and does. The Purple Rain performance is one of the best music sequences I've seen in film, in part because Magnoli mostly stays on Prince. He just lets him perform, only occasionally cutting away to the utterly enthralled audience. The sequence works as a standalone rock performance (it is the song's official videoclip), as an expression of The Kid's (Prince' character) emotions and as a satisfying ending to the film's story and The Kid's character arc. (Not that there is much of a story or a character arc. Those things are just an excuse to string the spectacularly filmed performances together.)

And yet, as great as Purple Rain is, it may be upstaged here by Darling Nikki. It's the kind of unabashed celebration of casual meaningless sex, and of lust, that is rare in American media/art. American movies and music know that sex sells, but they also know that "Republicans buy sneakers too." And so they try to contrive situations that can justify showing sex, while also contriving that the sex they show fits within acceptable parameters. Darling Nikki, the song, doesn't care about that at all. Darling Nikki, the sequence in this film, cares even less. It's about sex for the sake of sex, simply because it's fun and enjoyable (equally so, for both men and women). And its sole intent is to get you in the mood for it, because that too is fun and enjoyable. That makes it subversive in itself, but what makes it even more so, is that the film doesn't make a big fuss about the scene. It's not given any special treatment, it's not being foreshadowed, or lingered on for much more than necessary. Nor is it (explicitly) used to pander to a progressive political sensibility, or to dunk on conservatives. It's just a scene that happens to be part of the film and helps drive the narrative and the characterisations forward, as normal as a scene in a horror film intended to scare you or a scene in a comedy intended to make you laugh.  

131. Philadelphia

Song - Streets of Philadelphia (Bruce Springsteen)

Movie: Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993)

I had not seen this film since high school. Back then I was an idiot who was on the side of Charles Wheeler. I thought Andrew was rightly fired as he didn't perform well and felt like the film's argument, that he was being fired for the wrong reason, namely him being a gay man with HIV, amounted to being a strawman. The end result was right after all. As I grew older and got to know more about gay and labor rights, I occasionally remembered with embarrassment how I felt about this film. Luckily I also got to know more about narrative and film grammar, and after seeing Philadelphia now, I can very well see where my initial reaction came from. Tom Hanks' entire character arc here basically consists of getting AIDS and dying.

Andrew is diagnosed with AIDS after about three scenes. At that point, we've hardly seen anything of his professional life, we haven't gotten to know him as a character, and know barely anything of his social or inner life. We won't get to know him much better throughout the rest of the film. It is especially odd to show Andrew at the hospital surrounded by doctors preparing to test him for HIV, and to then cut to one month later when he asks Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) to represent him in court, because he is being fired for having HIV. For some reason we are not shown Andrew's immediate reaction to his diagnosis. Nor do we see the reactions of his partner, friends and family. These should have been the key scenes in the film.

Furthermore, while the film unambiguously argues that Andrew is right and should win his case, weirdly a lot of it is presented from the point of view of Wheeler and his associates. Andrew claims to be an excellent lawyer, but we never see him do excellent law work. Andrew claims his illness didn't stop him from being a well-functioning lawyer, the Wheelers say it did and the film only shows how the illness hinders Andrew's work. Similarly, Charles says that Andrew made a mistake and we do see him make a mistake. And the early scene in which Andrew is made a senior associate, communicates exactly what Wheeler argues at the witness stand, namely that Andrew should be incredibly grateful for this promotion at this particular law firm. It is presented as a major, almost too good to be true, opportunity for him that he shouldn't squander, which is also how Hanks portrays it. Aside from all this, during its early scenes the film is almost hilariously didactic. Whole scenes play out with such unnatural dialogue, contrived to give the audience a lesson about AIDS. Finally, if you are feeling uncharitable you wouldn't be entirely wrong to argue that this is a film in which a white American teaches a black man (Denzel Washington has much more explicitly homophobic dialogue than any of the associates at the law firm being sued) about tolerance and a Latino man about dying gracefully. It is no surprise Antonio Banderas is terrible here. His only function is to be afraid and be comforted by Hanks. 

And yet, despite all this, I actually quite liked the film. This may be partly influenced by discovering Stop Making Sense during quarantine, but I'll probably never watch a Jonathan Demme film anymore without being biased in his favor. Nonetheless, his humanism, even if sometimes clumsily depicted, really does shine through. The film feels delighted and overjoyed by its own existence. You get the sense that everyone working on it felt to be in the middle of a great historical moment. The hope that things are about to get better shines through in every shot. And importantly, the film sees itself as a symbol of that hope, not as a cause of it. This is not a self-important film that believes it will make the world a better place, but one that believes its existence is possible, because the world is becoming a better place. And its opening credits are brilliant; set against Bruce Springsteen's great song, they show various neighborhoods of the city and the people working and living there. In doing so, they universalize Andrew's plight, making clear that this is not a story about some special 'gay' person, but about an ordinary Philadelphian with hopes and dreams like every other Philadelphian. They reminded me of Dog Day Afternoon's credits, set to Elton John's Amoreena. It would make sense if that was the intent. 

It is also worth noting how glorious it is to see Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks in these early roles. Though they are still great actors, they have become such household figures you sometimes forget how surprising  and charismatic they can be, and with how much ease they can play challenging parts. Hanks portrays a man dying of AIDS with more life and energy than most actors playing men at the height of their vitality. And Washington is so natural playing both the humanist and the homophobic aspects of his showoff lawyer, you realise how much of a loss it is that he is more an more being typecast in mediocre action movies, only elevated by his presence. Finally, through Washington's character the film also illuminates its most relevant insight; that racism and homophobia should not be seen separate from each other, but are intertwined. 

130. Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Song - I Want to Break Free (Queen)

Movie: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)

When Sgt. Luther Robinson leaves Hedwig, raised in East Berlin, on 9 november 1989, their one-year anniversary, she can only cheer herself up by singing 'Wig in a Box' in her trailer. It's the best song in the film, with simple, effective lyrics about imagining different identities for yourself. Halfway through the performance, 1989 Hedwig is joined by her contemporary band members, the trailer is transformed into a makeshift stage, and there is a random brief karaoke interlude inviting the audience to sing along. It's the kind of joyous magical realism, without regard for conventional narrative structures or temporal/spatial logic, that John Cameron Mitchell strives for throughout the entire film. He only truly achieves it during this sequence, and to a lesser extent during the song in which we find out what the angry inch alludes to. Nonetheless, even when Mitchell doesn't quite achieve what he wants, the film remains compelling, charming and committed to following its own whims and rules. Few directors would think of  the 'Sugar Daddy' sequence, including cinema's most erotically charged closeup of HARIBO.

Mitchell is clearly a better writer/director than he is an actor/performer. He is out of his element and uncomfortable acting, and while that, at times, fits the character he is playing, Hedwig is also supposed to be loose and charismatic, at least when she is singing. Mitchell can't convey that, and for the same reasons moments of sincerity don't quite play as they should. Consequently, Hedwig comes off as much more jokey character than intended. You do sometimes wonder whether Mitchell takes Hedwig's story truly seriously, and to what extent she is an ironic device. I actually did like this slippery aspect of the film, just like the fact that it is left ambiguous to what extent Hedwig really identifies as a woman, how she sees her gender, and how the audience is supposed to see her gender. 

A very long time ago I discussed Mitchell's Rabbit Hole on this blog. I called it a rare progressive Hollywood film because it dared to suggest that atheism is a perfectly valid way of dealing with grief, without dismissing that a believe in God can also be equally valid. Interestingly, despite its subject matter, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is much more sympathetic towards God and religion than Rabbit Hole. It is very much interested in exploring how religious stories can validate non-traditional sexual and gender identities. One of the funniest scenes in the film comes when the religiously brought up Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt) justifies having sex with Hedwig through an analysis of the story of Adama and Eve. The Origin of Love, the main song of the film, can be seen in the same vein, though that also exemplifies the biggest problem of the film. A lot of the songs, including The Origin of Love are didactic and expository. Often we are shown an aspect of Hedwig's life and then hear a song that explains to us a second time what we just saw, or how to interpret it. Still, the film is so playfully directed, and has such fun hopping between different times and introducing different characters, that you can't help but like it.

129. Cleopatra

Song - Ruthless Queen (Kayak)

Movie: Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963)

Like Apocalypse Now, Cleopatra is famous for its ridiculously troubled production history. Moreover, this too is a film that is as much meant to be an historical epic about Cleopatra, as well as a showcase for Hollywood's ability to get such epics of the ground no matter what. Unfortunately, unlike Apocalypse Now, Cleopatra is not good. Coppola may have used the Vietnam War as a vessel to highlight his own genius and importance, it was still obvious that he actually cared and thought about the war, and was genuinely interested in it. The curious thing about this film is that it is barely interested in Cleopatra, and even less in the country she ruled over. Cleopatra here is above all a vessel to explore the lives and characters of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. They are very much the main characters of the film; we see them in scenes that have nothing to do with Cleopatra. We barely see her in any scenes that have nothing to do with them.

This is not by definition an uninteresting approach and it is not by definition a sexist approach. Exploring the effects (great) people have on others around them, and on the society they live in can be much more illuminating than simply telling the story of their lives (it can also be a corrective to the forced individualism American films of its ilk like to espouse, but that's a topic for another time). But this film is also barely interested in the society its characters live in. It takes a greatest hits approach to the lives of Caesar and Antony, and with the exception of some early scenes it does not care at all to give any depth or look critically at the historic period it depicts. I already liked Titanic a lot, but this film gives me a newfound appreciation for it. Obviously the epic romance is the heart of that film and the main reason for its success, but the epic romance is very much helped by the film's genuine interest in how class differences shaped its historic period.

Richard Burton, Rex Harrison and Elizabeth Taylor don't get any such help, but they do make the most of the material they are given. Early on in the film, when it still looks like it's going to be good, there are a couple of really good dialogue scenes between Caesar and Cleopatra, where both rulers are shown as sharp minds able to outwit each other and change their strategic position with a couple of well chosen words. Harrison and Taylor are never better than in those scenes, playing confident and cautious at the same time, knowing that even losing a little bit of ground can have major consequences. Eventually they fall in love, forcing Taylor to play the supporting wife for a large period of the film, while Harrison gets to be stately. I haven't seen much of both actors, but you get the feeling they can do that in their sleep.

Taylor wakes up after Caesar's death and her romance with Mark Antony, playing Cleopatra as someone who genuinely loves Antony, but who also feels superior to him. But she's overshadowed by Richard Burton (somehow Harrison got an Oscar nomination, Burton not) who gives a genuinely impressive performance as a man who cannot get out of Caesar's shadow, who sees himself as an embarrassment and a coward, but still believes he deserves more than he gets. He feels too proud to beg Cleopatra for het love, but also feels that her loving him is his greatest achievement, the only way he can ever follow Caesar's footsteps. It's a nuanced and empathetic portrait of an utterly pathetic character.

In the end though, even these great actors drown in the film's grandeur. The Oscars have sometimes been criticized for confusing best acting or best editing, with 'most' acting/editing. This film's Oscar for Best Art-Direction can also be seen in that way. Scenes are so overstuffed with pillars, terraces, railings, walls and all kinds of other 'classically' designed constructions that they often feel completely out of place. And the film's obsessive focus on making sure that the audience is aware of these constructions sometimes leads to ridiculous cuts and camera placements. But I suppose that if you let your narrator inform us of two crucial battle scenes - without showing us any of them - you have to find other ways of showing where the money went.

128. Possession

Song - Margherita (Marco Borsato)

Movie: Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

I am not the greatest fan of this, but it is further evidence of how limp and full of shit The Shape of Water was. Zulawski, until the end, doesn't reveal what the strange creature is, what its purpose is, why Anna is so invested in it, and whether the creature is even part of the film's reality or of some surrealist dreamscape. And he never bothers to make clear how Anna actually comes in possession of the creature. Is it made out of the men she kills? Is it the direct product of her insanity? Did it just happen to live in the abandoned apartment now inhabited by Anna? None of these questions are answered, and it makes the whole film just more unsettling.

In the end, the whole doppelganger symbolism, plays a bit too much like a trite and not fully realized metaphor about divided Berlin/Germany/Europe - Mark lives next to the Berlin Wall, the film reminds us by periodically returning to an image of two guards seen from Mark's window. Still, and I don't know if this is because of hindsight, it manages to evoke an atmosphere and mood of impending change. We see graffiti asking for the wall to come down, while on the soundtrack we hear the kind of futuristic electro/techno music that has now become a marker of nostalgia for the restless spirit of 70's/80's Europe in general, and Berlin in particular.

Most of the film's mood though is shaped by the utterly manic acting of Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, playing Mark and Anna, a husband and wife (with a kid) who absolutely need to break up and absolutely cannot live without each other. Which drives them to insanity. I think at times Zulawski relies a bit too much on their intense acting; after the umpteenth time Anna returns home and has a fight with Mark, you get a little annoyed that Zulawski repeats himself and doesn't do something more or different to drive the story/characters forward or to deepen the film up a bit more. Especially, because when he does so, the film really does reach another level. A scene in which Mark watches a video recording, mysteriously delivered to his front door, of Anna pushing one of her ballet students to the breaking point is almost as distressing as the scenes involving the bizarre creature, certainly so when Anna suddenly breaks the fourth wall.

All of this doesn't mean that Zulawski is wrong to focus so much on Neill and Adjani's performances. They are ridiculously impressive and earn the film its title. They really do act as if they are possessed by demons that make them neither understand each other nor themselves. When they fight each other they do so with utter desperation and a seemingly total abandonment of their rational faculties. And their anger and despair only grow as they barely seem to understand where their emotions come from. The showstopper sequence, set in the Berlin metro, belongs to Adjani who does things with her body that seem almost impossible. The scene is basically only her in a grey tunnel, losing her mind, yet she is so utterly convincing and frightening, it genuinely makes you nauseous. And that's even before it becomes really gory and bloody. 

127. Apocalypse Now

Song - The End (The Doors)

Movie: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

It's both ridiculous and awesome that this film exists. I had not seen it until now, but was somewhat familiar with its iconic moments. Had seen the famous shot of the camo-painted head rising out of the muddy water, thought the head belonged to Marlon Brando instead of Martin Sheen. Was familiar with the Ride of the Valkyries scene (I actually saw Da 5 Bloods before Apocalypse Now), and had seen clips of it, but did not know the music was diegetic. Above all, I knew about the film's ridiculous production, about how Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack, how cast and crew ended up much, much longer in the jungle than anticipated and how Coppola feuded with Brando, and threatened suicide multiple times. And then there is the slaughtering of live animals, the napalming of the Philippine forest and the shady deals Coppola apparently made with the Marcos government.

Some of this stuff is obviously quite unethical, and unless you can provide evidence that your film has brought world peace, it's hard to rationally justify such overwrought excess. Apocalypse Now did not bring world peace, nor does it need all that firework to tell the story it tells and to make the points it makes. At least if you consider it first and foremost a Vietnam War film. You can also make a case that this is first and foremost a film about Coppola's grand ambitions and his obsession to make an epic war film. There is a famous quote by Orson Welles that a film set is "the biggest toy train set any boy ever had." Can't think of a better film to illustrate that point than Apocalypse Now, apart from probably Mad Max: Fury Road. The elaborate staging, the complex set-pieces, the visibly exhausted and overheated actors, they are all part of the show and the show is the point. Or rather, Coppola's ability to create the show, and not just from a technical and artistic point of view. The point is not just that Coppola is a great director, but also that him being a great artistic visionary director gives him privileges that other people don't have. It gives him the right to will a film into existence, by whatever means possible. It's not just a cute coincidence that Harrison Ford cameos as G. Lucas, sharing a scene with an actor playing a character named R. Corman. In this film's view, people like Lucas, Corman and Coppola are of equal importance as the Vietnam War.

This would be way more annoying and vulgar if Coppola wasn't indeed damn talented and self-aware. The film largely consists of set-pieces in which Americans perform a show of 'Americanness' on Vietnamese soil. That's most obvious in the Ride of the Valkyries scene (which is truly one of the most spectacular war scenes I've ever seen, and one that leaves no doubt about the vileness of the Americans), the playmates scene, the final confrontation between Sheen and Brando, and Robert Duvall's entire performance. But performance also plays a big role on the scenes down the river. I have always found it a bit curious that Coppola's filmography includes coming-of-age teenage dramas, made after he had already established his legendary status. But that's also what much of the scenes on the river are about. The five teenagers/twenty-somethings on the boat are just as busy building and presenting their identity as they are with transporting Willard upstream. Their desire to be visible, to be seen as someone, is often what leads them into trouble. It is actually easy to see why Spike Lee saw Coppola and Apocalypse Now as an inspiration for Da 5 Bloods. The ways in which the characters of Albert Hall and Laurence Fishburne present themselves, build their identity, and see the war differ from those of their white counterparts. At the same time Coppola puts them on equal footing as the white characters, and doesn't define Hall and Fishburne solely by their blackness.

It is also worth noting that Apocalypse Now's focus on show and performance was clearly on Lee's mind when making Da 5 Bloods. It's not a coincidence that in one of the first scenes of the movie we see his black veterans having a good time in an (apparently really exisiting) Apocalypse Now bar in Saigon. What makes Da 5 Bloods an interesting film is that it is in part about what it means for black Americans to perform 'Americanness' abroad, how that affects the way black Americans see themselves, and how the rest of the world sees black Americans. These are questions that have been rarely addressed in American film, and for which Apocalypse Now is really the perfect springboard.

To get back to Apocalypse Now, Robert Duvall's fantastic performance deserves a few more words. I've mostly known him as a more reserved actor and never expected he could play a cocky, showoff villain with such ease. Just like in the Godfather, he is better than Marlon Brando, and I wished he had a bigger role. In any case I am more and more convinced that Duvall is, despite all his plaudits, an underrated actor, who should be considered among the absolute all-time greats. On the other hand, the more I see of Brando, the more I realize I am not really a fan, though it is worth noting that his role here is not an easy one. His only function is to be symbolic and the final 20 minutes are the weakest part of the film, aside from the grating voiceover.