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.