216. Despair

Song - Als Het Vuur Gedoofd Is (Acda en De Munnik)

Movie: Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

I am unfamiliar with the Vladimir Nabokov novel this is adapted from, but I have read Lolita and some of his short stories. I've loved all of it, and find his cheerfully self-aware existentialism to be very much in my wheelhouse. Fassbinder evokes that really well here, vividly portraying both the personal demons and the societial disarray haunting Herman (Dirk Bogarde), without forgetting that Herman is a fictional character in a fictional story. Fassbinder, like Nabokov, knows that ultimately nothing but his own aesthetic choices will define how we perceive Herman, and fully delights in making these choices and signaling them to the audience. Dirk Bogarde is on the same page, choosing to act as arch and mannered as he possibly can at any given moment. It's a hugely entertaining performance, filled with elaborated gestures and wonderfully embellished dialogue. Bogarde often has to perform in situations that don't make sense of their own, without the stylisations of Fassbinder. He has to anticipate that a cut, a camera movement or the wonderful, often bordering on facetious, score will contextualise what's going on. He is also very often semi-obscured by, or seen through, windows and mirrors, a thematically relevant, but slightly overused, choice here. 

I had not seen a Fassbinder or Bogarde film before. It's both easy to see why they have been canonised as great artists and why Despair is usually not listed among their greatest works. Herman is the owner of a chocolate business in 1930's Berllin. He is also a Russian immigrant with Jewish roots, correctly suspecting that his wife is cheating on him with her dim cousin. As a result, Herman is experiencing dissociation and is obsessed with finding his doppelganger to take his identity. He eventually convinces himself he has found one (not even close, as Fassbinder constantly highlights) and plots the perfect murder, which of course turns out to be less than perfect. This exploration of Herman's mental state doesn't go anywhere unusual, either narratively, or psychologically, even if Fassbinder keeps things lively with ocassional asides into premonitions and potential alternate realities. 

Yet this slightness is also what makes the film quite interesting. Fassbinder (I suppose inspired by Nabokov) deliberately minimises Herman, turning him into a fairly inconsequential person. From an outsider perspective, his most momentous act (the murder of a random nobody) is so badly and uninterestingly executed, and of so little importance, it will at most raise the eyebrow of a semi-interested newspaper reader before being forgotten. Nobody in the film acts as if being a distressed Russian Jew in 1930's Berlin is of great historical or societal importance. Herman's Nazi-uniform wearing underling in the chocolate factory is presented similarly. As much as possible Fassbinder tries to see Germany in the 1930's from the perspective of someone living there at the time. He shows people debating politics and being concerned about extremist stances, but he doesn't let his characters betray any awareness of living through a grave historic moment.  

In the film's best scene, Herman is sitting in a bar outside when across the street a number of brownshirts throw bricks through the windows of a Jewish shop. Two Jews playing chess in Herman's bar look up from their game, and continue playing after the brief distraction. Passersby briefly (or not) take a look at the broken window, and go on with their daily lives. Even the store owners themselves don't make a scene, but take a broom, clean their entryway and get back into the shop. A couple scenes later (it's not always clear how much time has passed between scenes), Herman returns to the same bar. Thr chess table is now occupied by two non-Jewish Germans. 

215. Against All Odds

Song - Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now) (Phil Collins)

Movie: Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford, 1984)

The second movie in a row to kick it up a notch when it gets to Mexico! That is where Terry Brogan (Jeff Bridges) finds Jessie Wyler (Rachel Ward). Jessie's mum (Jane Greer) is the new owner of the LA Outlaws, the American football team that has just cut the injured Terry. Sleazy bookie Jake Wise (James Woods) sees this as a great opportunity to use Terry, paying him to search for his dissappeared lover Jessie. It's the kind of situation where nobody needs Terry and Jessie to fall in love, but, alas, they quickly find out they have the hots for each other. 

Against All Odds is more interested in being a Chinatown knockoff than in being a Body Heat knockoff, but it's much better at being the latter. Bridges and Ward have such great chemistry, it becomes very easy to root for them, especially once it becomes clear that Jessie is no femme fatale. She is the one that makes the first move in Mexico, and Hackford films many of the sex scenes from her perspective, highlighting the joy and pleasure she gets out of it. Usually in films like this that means that she is leading her lover on. Here she has no ulterior motive, which leads to a very convincing erotically charged love story.  

It's not just the romance that serves as eye candy. A street race between Terry and Jake is mostly about showcasing the speed and glamour of Ferrari and Porsche  A crucial scene set in a nightclub takes its time to evoke the fancy atmosphere of the place with its hypermodern design, its well dressed attendees and its glitzy stage performers. Naturally, there is also lots of driving on brightly lit streets, often to reach offices with ridiculously expensive interioir decorationg, including giant windows overlooking the city. There is not a single shot in which Los Angeles doesn't look like the prettiest place in the world. The same goes for Mexico. Of course, you can't justify a greyed out yellow sheen if you are the first movie in the world allowed to film in Chichen Itza. The film takes maximum advantage of having the mysterious Mayan ruins as a backdrup. 

I am a fan of 80's/90's visually appealing romantic thrillers, especially when they are filled with a bunch of great lead and character actors given roles perfectly tailored to them. This would have been one of the better ones if it was satisfied being that. But Against All Odds is more ambitious and also want to be a serious social commentary on the relationship between sports, politics and business. The owners of the LA Outlaws are shown to not care about American football and use the team to gain support for a construction project that would destroy a mountain. I get that the World Cup in Qatar was a long way from happening in 1984, but presenting rich and powerful folks using sports for their own personal gain, and to the detriment of athletes, as some new development was ridiculous even then.  All of this also happens in the most predicatble way possible, and is way less exciting than the increasingly knotty relationship between Jessie, Jake and Terry. While our rooting interests are clear, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which all these roles are reversed. All three of them are partly to blame for the situation they are in, and everyone's actions are mostly guided by self-interest. 

214. Born on the Fourth of July

Song - Born in the U.S.A (Bruce Springsteen)

Movie: Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989)

Born on the Fourth of July, is a (mostly) good movie, but it only truly becomes a certified 'Oliver Stone' once it reaches Mexico. Up until then, with the exception of a couple of hospital scenes, the film is easily recognisable as historic fiction. There are some scenes where Stone makes quite unconventional stylstic choices, but those all serve to illuminate the period he depicts and contextualise the characters' feelings and motivations. In Mexico, any sense of objective realism is thrown out of the window, in favor of maximalist subjective frenzy. And when it comes to that, Stone has no equal. Every shot is slightly off kilter, depicting something that could theoretically exist but feels unreal and the editing choices become more incoherent and mostly serve as a representation of (societal and individual) irrationality. As a result the film becomes fervidly disjointed, culiminating in a menacingly intense fight between the disabled and disillusioned Vietnam veterans Ron Kovic (the film is based on his autobiography, and co-written by him) and Charlie. Ron and Charlie are played by Tom Cruise and Willem Dafoe, who have not been instructed to be subtle. 

I get why people find Stone's descents into pompously irrational lunacy offputting, but I find it greatly appealing. It feels like a miracle that he successfully sustained such a maximalist approach for an entire runinng time in films like JFK, The Doors and Nixon. I haven't seen Natural Born Killers; that one always felt a little much, even for me, and it's probably for the best that he doesn't go entirely overboard in Born on the Fourth of July. With Tom Cruise as your lead actor you don't need to. I have always liked Cruise, but I never expected him to transform into a generous team player in the latest Mission Impossible and Top Gun films. He has always performed a bit as if he is outside of the reality of the other actors around him, making his own fabricated reality the center of the stage. Stone likes to do the same, and because he pushes the artificiality and subjectivity even further than Cruise, I think he is still quite valuable as a political fillmmaker. If you want to truly counter the idea that American power and American exceptionalism are objective virtues, you should not just criticise American power and exceptionalism, but also hightlight that your own criticism is not an objective truth. 

Born on the Fourth of July has a much more realistic 'objective' approach to historic fiction than Stone's subsequent films. Such an approach exposes much more Stone's own ideas and those don't always turn out to to be terribly insightful. Born on the Fourth of July makes less use of bluntly simplistic metaphors than Platoon, and is also more morally conscious, but it's also not nearly as sophisticated as it tthinks it is. Stone is clearly very proud of his recurring Fourth of July Parade sequences, and rightly so. They are wonderfully staged set-pieces, but all they communicate is that if you look beyond the pretty surface, America actually tells a lot of lies to its citizens. The film isn't really interested in any big ideas beyond that, and tries way too hard to turn this notion into an unifying theory that explains all of America. That's quite a shame, because when it focuses specifically on how the idea of patriotism affects Ron's life and relationships, it's really very good. It does have some other terribly misconceived characters, most notably Donna (Kyra Sedgwick). She is Cruise' childhood flame who is set up to spark his political awakening. Stone is just self-aware enough to realise just in time that this would be quite a hackneyed development, but that does mean that all the scenes between Donna and Ron never become anything more than uninspired filler,

213. The Crazy Stranger

Song - Laat Me (Ramses Shaffy)

Movie: The Crazy Stranger - Gadjo dilo (Tony Gatlif, 1997)

Very fitting that Romain Duris starred in L'Auberge Espagnole, an unseen by me 2002 film, about the experiences of western European Erasmus exchange students. You can easily imagine Duris and his full head of French hair be visible all around Paris in advertisements for studying at the Sorbonne, a poster child for 'civilised' Europe and its ideals of middle class mobility, progress and sophistication. As a certified fan of the European Union I happily subscribe to those ideals, but they have always been used (and not just by the Le Pens of the world) to stake out a difference between the 'good' Europeans and the uncivilised, dangerous, 'others'. Often times those others are Romani people. Tony Gatlif, the only Roma director to have won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, knows exactly what he is doing when casting Duris as Stephane, a Frenchman who goes to a Roma village comunity in Romania to track down Nora Luca, a singer he has a cherished cassette tape of. 

Stephane does not get a warm welcome. He is greeted as a crazy stranger who acts in ways that are completely alien to the way of life of the community. The village people fear him and pillar the kind Izidor who helpfully offers Stephane shelter and food, for potentially bringing unknown diseases into their midst. Once they figure out more abotu Stephane they conflate France and Belgium as interchangable exotic places that are far away from them. It's a funny and politically productive role reversal that never plays as cheap parody, because Gatlif doesn't turn it into a belabored metaphor. The cast mostly consists of amateur actors, basically real Romanian villagers probably playing something close to themselves, and the film presents their behavior and reaction to Stephane as authentic, without judging them. 

It also helps that Gatlif isn't much interested in great narrative developments. By the time we learn why Stephane has come to the vilage and why the cassette tape means so much to him, we barely care anymore. At that point, Stephanse has long become accepted into the community and The Crazy Stranger has become an energetic and fun hang out film, mostly interested in celebrating the culture of the people we see on screen. That mostly involves making music and dancing, greatly enjoyed by Stephany, partly because the young Sabine is especially interested in making music and dancing with him. The film is at its best when Stephane and Sabina go around the villages recording traditional folk songs, briefly turning this into a relaxed concert movie. Gatlf is happy to let it continue its meanderingly gentle course, until the ending scenes remind us that a sustained peaceful existence for the Roma is hard to come by. 

212. Who'll Stop the Rain

Song - Who'll Stop The Rain (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Movie: Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)

Who'll Stop the Rain combines all the characterstic elements that made American cinema fun and interesting in the 1960's, 70's and 80's into a highly entertaining thriller. From its own time period it's got Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), a troubled anti-hero who struggles to live according to his values in a, in his view, rotten society. He is a soldier in Vietnam, about to return home, when his old friend John (Michael Moriarty) asks him to smuggle some heroin into America. The heroin is somehow connected to 'Washington' and Ray's paranoia sets in the moment he sets foot on the San Francisco harbor. It soon turns out his fears are grounded in reality and when the deal goes wrong he has to flee across the West Coast, together with John's wife Marge (Tuesday Weld), an independently minded bookstore worker who is married to John in defiance of her dad, and is also addicted to pills. 

The film shares some of Ray's pessimism and it directly presents Vietnam War trauma as the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. That's a bit clumsily directed with a couple too many flashbacks to undefined battle scenes, full of death and destruction, set in slow motion, that are meant to be poetic, but come off as tackily sentimental. Little else in the film can be called sentimental, but it's not above the sort of glorious tackiness and excesses that would define so many 80's movies. Reisz luxuriates in the glossiness of the arrogantly rich parts of Los Angeles (where Ray has come to try to sell the smack) and in the fantastically gaudy behaviors of its citizens, here represented by Eddie (Charles Haid). It's hard to believe that Anthony Zerbe, playing the federal agent in trail of Ray, has even more fun than Haid, colorfuly insulting his two dim henchmen, and super schmuck John. Reisz is happy to let the actors do their own thing, enabling even those with the smallest role to have a couple of memorable moments  All of this gives the film a wonderfully impulsive energy (at certain points it almost plays like a dry run for Midnight Run) that you wish was just a bit more stylistically charged and over the top. If the scene at Eddie's house doesn't quite get there, though the playful score brings it very far, the climax with its cacophony of folk music, gun violence and bright lights, does. It reminded me a bit, and this is a compliment, of the Wonder World super weapon scene in Beverly Hills Cop 3, even if it's (mostly) not played for laughs. 

That climax takes place around mountainous terrain in New Mexico, in Ray's hiding place he built in the 1960's to serve as a sort of commune away from the civilised world. The place includes an intricately designed sound system that enabled parties to be heard across the entire valley. Now it serves as a place (you know you are near it when you reach the giant peace sign painted on a rock) of refuge for Ray and Marge, who in anticipation of their next steps, dance to old traditional folk songs, share their fears and regrets, and slowly get more and more affection for each other as they make use of natural resources and analogue craftmanship to survive. Cops, criminals and dumb yuppies eventually destroy their serenity, leading to the aforementioned climax and the bleak final moments that remind you that this is indeed a film made in 1978. A couple years later, Nolte gets in the car. Nolte, by the way, is fantastic, in particular during the scenes in New Mexico, where he has to play Ray as mellowed by his love for Marge, without letting him lose his hard edge. His greatest moment though comes before, at Eddie's house, doing some silent face acting that is as almost as great as Robert De Niro's famous eyebrow movements in Goodfellas. 

211. High Fidelity

Song - Bloedend Hart (De Dijk)

Movie: High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000)

I've been rewatching Seinfeld in the past few months, seeing it for the first time when I am around the same age as Jerry and co. It's astounding how much better it is than I remember it, and I already liked it a lot. It's of course ridiculously funny, but I didn't expect it to also be so perceptive about its characters' general way of being, and their fears, insecrurities, hopes and joys. The show is rightly famous for its great use of irony, but through its use of irony it's also a very sincere portrayal of how  dumb, exhausting and gloriously ridiculous people can be when they are in pursuit of dates, love, friendship, and all kinds of other good experiences, without knowing exactly what they want, and about the genuine pleasure and happiness they get out of their ability to pursue these things. That makes them neither assholes nor paragons of goodness, but just rather relatable people who are sometimes wonderful and sometimes insufferable. Last year on this blog, I discussed Chungking Express in similar terms, and I think that Seinfeld and Wong Kar Wai's film do share much of the same pleasures. 

Contemporary thinkpieces about Seinfeld would do well to take a look at the show from this perspective, and consider that there are elements of it that make it aspirational and hopeful. It's an improvement that these days cultural perspectives have more room to address the racial and class privileges of the Seinfeld characters. But it's absolutely not a sign of progress that they can't imagine a world in which those privileges are expanded to more people. Poor and non-white people in America/'the west' have huge barriers to overcome, and it's positive that pop culture is increasingly addressing those barriers, but instead of just reflecting the real world, pop culture can also imagine a better and more fun world. At the moment, it's miserably failing in that regard, while mistakenly deluding itself that this is progressive. It's not a coincidence I think that Seinfeld was extremely popular among many people from former Yugoslavia in the 1990's. 

All of this basically explains my current reaction to High Fidelity. Seeing it a long time ago, I really really liked it. Watching it now, coincidentally at the same age as John Cusack was when shooting it, I thought it mostly sucked. Nobody who starts a review of High Fidelity with a two-paragraph aside on an unrelated pop culture phenomenon can honestly say they find the film fully worthless, but it's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was released two years after Seinfeld ended. It feels completely derivative of it. Cusack's Rob Gordon is a Seinfeldian self-absorbed character who is largely clueless about romantic relationships, has barely got his life together, goes on and on about topics of little relevance, and gets irrationaly angry about minor details. The main difference is that Seinfeld lets you make up your own mind about what's on screen, while High Fidelity holds you by your hand and tells you exactly when you should find Rob sympathetic and when you should find him loathsome. Too much of the film is one big exposition dump that doesn't understand that breaking the fourth wall is more powerful/shocking/funny when it's done sparingly. It's for example much less interesting to present the four incidents that led to Rob's breakup with Laura (Iben Hjejle) as a story that he tells the audience directly, than as a series of interactions between the two actors. Obviously the film is largely about how Rob's subjective experience of his relationships differs considerably from the reality, but there are ways to show that without letting him drone on and on to us. 

More surprisingly, I also thought High Fidelity has a somewhat banal depiction of how pop culture affects people's lives. To continue the comparison with Seinfeld, there the characters constantly riff about the movies/shows/concerts/etc they see. They make stupid jokes about them, make references to them in ordinary conversation, act in the way their pop culture heroes do, and use them as conversation fillers with strangers. In High Fidelity, Rob constantly blurts out what his favorite books are, his top 5 records, his top 5 artists, jobs, first singles, and whatnot. But we never get an impression of why "Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash" is his favorite book, how it has influenced his life, or what he gets out of Nirvana. Most of the pop culture references are presented in a highly generic way and could easily be replaced by others. There is one scene where Rob listens to The Velvet Underground after an unhappy encounter with his ex, and it it's only time in the film that it feels like there is a specific connection between Rob's experiences and feelings and the pop culture he interacts with. If the film had been more directly about how Rob, as an individual, is a shallow manchild, this would be less annoying. But it is more interested in using Rob as a figurehead for how 'we' are affected by pop culture and romantic fantasies, trying way too hard and too self-consciously to be a generational statement. I am no fan of that, and recently also got nothing out of The Worst Person in the World, despite very much liking other films by Joachim Trier. 

I also probably just don't care for Nick Hornby's perspective. After watching this movie I saw a clip from the new High Fidelity show, with Zoe Kravitz taking on the role of John Cusack. It involved a huge debate with her record store buddies about whether they should sell a Michael Jackson record to a customer and whether Jackson is more problematic than Kanye West. The dialogue is such that it manages to smugly present the record store owners as a bunch of highly obsessive and knowledgeable music geeks with strong opinions, but refuses to see the audience on their level, belabouredly spoonfeeding us every stale and obvious argument they are making. It's the kind of boringly joyless bullshit the film is also full of. Zoe Kravitz and John Cusack may be among the top 5 most sympathetic actors of their generation. It takes some effort to make them actively annoying.

210. The Gambler

Song - The Turn Of A Friendly Card (The Alan Parsons Project)

Movie: The Gambler (Karel Reisz, 1974)

Using university lectures to provide insight into your leading character's motivations and the film's broader themes is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's especially beloved by the French and I always enjoy it, even if it can sometimes feel like blatantly cheap exposition, or is used to give the film an unearned veneer of intellectual heft. The Gambler contains two such scenes. In the first one Axel Freed (James Caan) makes a basketball analogy to explain why Dostoyevsky's assertion that "he deserves the sacred right to insist that 2+2 make 5" is a great expression of free will and embracing the possible over the rational. In the second one, he explains how a poem about George Washington makes a larger point about Americans being boringly risk-averse. In both scenes, the film errs on the side of cheap exposition, but James Caan turns them into something more. 

Caan plays Axel as a genuinely great professor of English, who is not only able to explain classic literature to his students by providing interesting and original interpretations that connect to their daily lives, but also conveys how much these works mean to him. When Caan reads from the material he teaches, you can sense the joy he gets out of luxuriating in the words and meanings of his favorite authors, and in making his students get it. Axel gets two more monologues outside of class, one in honor of the 80th birthday of his grandfather, a rich furniture magnate, the other as a joke to playfully annoy his girlfriend. Both are wonderful feats of oratory, with Caan knowing exactly where to pause, where to put an inflection, which word to emphasise, how to create momentum, to make sure his story has maximum effect. That Caan gets all this exactly right is key for the film. It shows that Axel knows what he is doing, hat he is an intelligent, well-adjusted man who could have a happy and good life if he wasn't a compuslive gambler, and that his gambling addiction is not a consequence of external factors. It's what makes The Gambler a really good character drame.

I have referred on this blog a couple of times to the famous quote about how there is no such thing as an anti-war movie. Well, in the same vein it's also really hard to make an anti-gambling movie. I always greatly enjoy the colorful characters, the stylishly written bullshitting, and the allure with wich the casino's and gambling cities are presented. Combine that with some great location work (the shadier, the better) and wonderful performances and it's hard to go wrong. The Gambler mostly doesn't go wrong, and during the first hour or so, James Caan gives an immensely compelling performance.  Unfortunately the film (knowing a little bit about him, this can probably be attributed to screenwriter James Toback) has some weird (socio-cultural) hang ups that eventually force Caan to act out some incredibly dumb situations, most notably the incident that incites his downward spiral and the ending scene. I imagine that one of the reasons for the 2014 remake is to present these scenes from a more enlightened perspective, but I am not in a rush to see it. If you want to make a modern version of this film your main actor should be Ben Affleck, not Mark Wahlberg. 

209. The Leopard

Song - Vous Permettez, Monsieur? (Adamo)

Movie: The Leopard - Il gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963)

Are you a shell of your former self wandering around in disilussionment? Do you feel like the world you thought you knew has passed you by? Are you completely alienated from your contemporaries and peers? Then you might be a protagonist in an Italian 1960's classic, perhaps Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster). His feelings aren't wrong. With Giuseppe Garibaldi gaining ground, a revolution seems imminent, which may be the beginning of the end for the Italian nobility. And so, as the film begins, Fabrizio sets out on a journey across Sicily, attempting to do some wheelings and dealings to save the wealth and position of his family and class. Most of his actions turn out to be fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and despite Italy being a unified monarchy at the end of the film all the old noblemen still hold high positions. With only their titles and colors of the uniforms changed, they still attend grand balls, while Garibaldi and his men are fighting on the ground for the middle class. 

This is very much the kind of film where much of the real excitement happens off-screen. We get a scene of Garibaldi and his redshirts engaged in an epic battle for a Sicilian city, but we spend most ofmi our time with Fabrizio, who is not capable of making much of a difference, partly because he always seems a step behind, partly because it's not clear what difference he could really make. His attempts to preserve the Italian nobility are futile, because the nobility seems to succeed just fine without much intervention being needed. A great example of how the film makes this visible is the scene where the prince and his family arrive in the city of their summer palace and are greeted like kings by the local population, Throughout this procession we see in the background a giant graffiti slogan exclaiming 'Viva Garibaldi'. As much else in the film it's an incredibly cynical reminder of how revolutionary activities can quickly turn into mere symbolism. The film's willingness to push its cynicism to the brink is also evident at the final ball, in particular during the scene where Fabrizio points to a group of young women, noting they are the sad consequence of decades of inbreeding among his class. This is followed by a static shot that frames these women slightly off-center, making their movements a little chaotic and unnatural, while much of their dialogue is drowned out by the music at the ball, making them come off as a bunch of primitves in gala dresses.

It should be clear by now that this is not a film of great narrative propulsion. It's interested in Fabrizio's inner turmoil and in using that as a (often darkly humorous) guide through 1860's Italy to showcase the decadence of its aristocracy. At the same, time it also seems to reflect Visconti's own pessimism.  There are quite a number of scenes which play like barely-veiled polemic commentaries on modern Italy. Ultimately, the film's highlight is Tancredi (Alain Delon), Fabrizio's nephew. Delon plays him as one of film's greatest slimeballs, a shameless opportunist who is both contemptous of the idealism of the Garibaldians and oof his uncle's inability to keep up with the times, but plays both sides to reach to the top and marry the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). I liked the film quite a bit, but found its grave grandeur sometimes a bit too much, making the more frivolous and lighthearted scenes between Angelica and Tancredi quite a welcome respite. The ball that ends the film is in their honor, but its main focus is on Fabriizio's realisation of the total corruption of his society. It's a rightly famous sequence filled with waltzes, opulent rooms, and impecable dresses, all in the service of highlighting the moral degeneracy of its subjects. 

208. The Broken Circle Breakdown

Song - Zeg Me Dat Het Niet Zo Is (Frank Boeijen)

Movie: The Broken Circle Breakdown (Felix van Groeningen, 2012)

The Broken Circle Breakdown is in the first place a superior melodrama. It tells the story of Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh, who wrote the play the film is based on) who fall madly for each other through their shared passion of bluegrass music, the American Dream, and the ideas of freedom and opportunity associated with all that. They get to live their dream on a Belgian farm they've built themselves, where they make passionate love to each other, grow their own deliciously fresh food, and make a modest living singing joyous bluegrass covers together with their raggedy group of string musicians. Life only becomes better when they get a daughter, but tragedy strikes when little Maybelle dies of leukemia and Didier and Elise struggle to make their love and their music survive their grief. Van Groeningen tells this story completely non-chronologically. He constantly cuts between different periods of their lives and even the storylines within each of these periods flash back and forward without much regard for linear time. Van Groeningen doesn't always manage to keep full control over this structure, and there are certain scenes and moments whose placement in the film doesn't always make sense. That's OK though, because van Groeniingen is above all interested in conveying the passionate intensity of his characters, their love for the life they are having and the hurt caused by the breakdown of that life. 

Van Groeningen achieves much of this by giving Heldenbergh and Baetens full permission to shine, getting two incredibly committed unrestrained performances without a hint of irony. The film wants to show that Elise and Didier had, and lost, the greatest possible life they could've had. It wouldn't have been able to do that if Heldenbergh and Baetens had even a hint of hesitation or disbelief in their performances. They make you believe that what seems like cowboy cosplay is Paradise for them. In doing so, they also help turn the film into something much more than a good melodrama. This is one of the best films I've ever seen about how Europeans look towards America, and American culture.

Belgium and Netherlands are small highly industrialised and urbanised countries. While Belgium has a bit more diverse landscapes, most of ordinary life still takes place in and around offices, supermarkets, commercial properties, universities, bars and clubs, modern infrastructure, new technologies, and all the other amenities we have come to associate with contemporary urban society.  Succesful/ordinary citizens are expected to be able to navigate these spaces, and most stories about life in the Benelux are implicitly or explicitly about how they do so. For these reasons, outside of the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands are probably the two countries in Europe most susceptible to romantisicm about America, its promises of escape, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom on your own individual terms, outside of a society organised by mainstream political and commercial forces. The Broken Circle Breakdown imagines how it would be for Belgians to be able to live this life without needing to escape their country. Van Groeningen fully immerses you in Didier and Elise's life in their Belgian 'outback' with great attention for detail, from the way his heroes build and design their house, to the way they produce food, and from how they make love to how they take care of their kid, make money and entertain themselves. There is even a wonderful scene where we see Heldenbergh and Baetens get married with the role of priest being performed by a bluegrass bandmate who drawls their vows in a performative Texan accent. It's not clear whether their marriage is legal for the Belgian administrative state, but what matters is that it is accepted by Didier and Elise and by their community.

In this context, Maybelle's illness is about more than just the loss of their healthy daughter, it's about the loss of independence from the Belgian mass society. Didier and Elise are visibly annoyed at having to cede control to doctors and scenes that take place in public roads, hospitals, and city squares have much less clarity in their images, are slightly quicker edited, and less sharply/warmly photographed. These become quite sterile, unnnatural places and the transitions to them always feel a little jarring, most notably when after hearing so many traditional bluegrass songs we suddenly cut to the children's ward at the hospital where the theme song of Mega Mindy (a popular show produced by the famous Studio 100, a giant media conglomerate that has had an immesaurable influence on children's/family entertainment in Belgium and The Netherlands) is blasting from the speakers. It's also notable that while Elise and DIdier have to travel a lot between town and country, we only see them when they depart or arrive, never in transit. We never see how the landscape changes or a visible connection being made between farm life and city life. They are two separate 'realms' not connected by any cultural/societal conditions, but by natural ones. The weather is what binds our heroes most to their countrymen in Antwerp and Ghent. When they talk about being Belgians, they almost always talk about it in relation to the rain and cold.

Now, if you thought being a strong character-driven melodrama with great music and an original view of national/cultural identity isn't enough, the film has another layer up its sleeve. We see George W. Bush twice give a speech on tv, the first time declaring the war on terror, the second time praising the approval of a bill that blocks further stem cell research that could help patients like Maybelle. We don't see Bush pretending to be a cowboy, or giving some anti-government speech selling individual liberty and personal responsibility, but the film knows that the promise of Didier and Elise's dream life is perhaps the central idea behind American conservatism and that this has shaped so much of country/bluegrass music/culture. This shapes much of the conflict in the final third of the film, and though sometimes it can feel it's laid on too thick, it's worth seeing the big political proclamations not as blunt didacticism, but as expressions of great personal confusion. It can be quite startling to find that what 'we' love and hate (about America) is so closely connected to each other, or, even, comes from the exact same place.

207. Raging Bull

Song - Halt Mich (Herbert Grönemeyer)

Movie: Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

As Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) walks his date, soon-to-be-wife, Vicky (Cathy Moriarty) around his house, he notes the dining table and points out "that's the dining room". He then gestures towards a birdcage, stating "that's a bird, or was a bird, it's dead now, I think." It's hard to conceive a better line that would more effectively show how completely devoid of an inner life Jake LaMotta is, and it's of course delivered perfectly by De Niro, presenting it with a complete lack of irony, passsion or interest, as if he is doing this because he knows that sex needs to be preceded by some sort of perfunctory conversation and this is his best attempt at it. It makes it a little hard to buy the film's final act when we see Jake LaMotta as a downtrodden stage actor entertaining bar patons by reciting works from Shakespeare, Budd Schulberg and Tennessee Williams. My bigger problem is that I also don't buy the final fight scene. The suggestion that LaMotta lets himself get beaten up by Sugar Ray as punishment for his sins, implies a thoughtfullness that he seems to completely lack, and feels like Scorsese projecting his own thoughts on the boxer. 

I am a big fan of Scorsese and I would agree that he is the most important living American filmmaker. I also think that one of the most controversial decisions in Oscar history, Ordinary People winning over Raging Bull, is the correct one, though it speaks for Scorsese that Raging Bull manages to be both more grandiosely tragic, and funnier. But I just can't quite get into it; there is only so much you can do when you don't accept the core idea of the film - I simply find it hard to believe that the LaMotta we see here is capable of thinking about sin and his own immorality, let alone understanding that he may have to be punished for it. Scorsese and De Niro may be too good at showcasing how far ahead a completely hollow man, unable to communicate any complicated thought or emotions, can get through sheer power and violence, and his complete lack of tools to express himself when power and violence can't get the job done anymore. They did so similarly in The Irishman, with I think more interesting results. In both films there is one classic scene (the phone call in The Irishman, the television antenna in Raging Bull) where this inabiilty to adress one's fears, feelings and demons in a productive way becomes viscerrally uncomfortable. And in both films Robert De Niro has moments that are the absolute pinnacle of film acting. 

Both films, though Raging Bull more than The Irishman, can also get a bit monotonous. The aforementioned dead bird scene is pretty much perfect and tells you everthing you need to know about LaMotta. Much of the rest of the film contains a lot of similarly well realised scenes that convey much of the same information about LaMotta and the relationships he has with his wife, his brother Joey (a thoroughly wonderful Joe Pesci) and the boxing establishment. It can get frustrating to watch a film built around such an empty void, and here again I prefer The Irishman; it takes a lot of panache to make a 3,5 hour epic about how American society is shaped by men who are completely indifferetn to their actions and lives. De Niro is great at playing such characters, and I very nuch like his portrayal of LaMotta as someone who is incapable of considering something beyond sex or violence, and even incapable of considering why he has sex or commits violence. The film shows that this gives him power, but whether he truly craves or realises that is questionable. Raging Bull is at its best when it suggests that we are pretty much seeing a full picture of LaMotta, that he is not capable of doing, or even thinking of doing, anything beyond what we see here. 

206. Hiroshima Mon Amour

Song - Question (Moody Blues)

Movie: Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

Another example of a classic 'high-art' film that's far more accessible than its reputation suggests. It is also far more instinctive and risky than I expected. The romance between Emannuelle Riva and Eiji Okada (only credited as 'Her' and 'Him') is not treated as some sort of McGuffin for a pre-conceived fully fleshed out intellectualised treatise on the relationship between love, war and memory. Rather, the romance is the core of the film, and its philosophical considerations arise (mostly) organically from, and often take a backseat to, the romantic shenanigans of its two leads and Resnais' plauful stylisation. The fun he has weaving in and out of flashbacks and in-between current-day Hiroshima and war-time Nevers is palpable and makes for a very dynamic film that's constantly moving and probing around, seeking out thought-provoking situations, considerations and characterisations. 

Late in the film, Riva and Okada go to a bar called Casablanca; a fun reference, as they are pretty much the opposite of Bogart and Bergman. For them, their love and potential obstacles in consuming it, amount to much more than a hill of beans. Resnais never lets his heroes think or consder anything that is not related to their romantic feelings, except in the stunning opening scene, when, in bed with her lover, Riva attempts to reflect on Hiroshima in the direct aftermath of the atomic bomb, while Okada keeps emphasising to her that as she wasn't there, she will never be able to understand the event or the city. During all this, close-ups of Him and Her in a naked embrace are interspersed with images of panicked, hurt, disformed and bewildered people trying and failing to make sense of their destroyed city and their lives. It is a mindblowingly provocative sequence signalling that this film is indeed going to be what its reputation suggests. But the bomb is barely mentioned afterwards and our two lovers spend the rest of their time discussling their personal feelings and romantic desires, without paying much mind to the event that has come to define Hiroshima. 

Riva plays an actress who has come to Hiroshima for a movie about peace, arguing that "they make commercials about soap, why not about peace?" That line shows well some of the intentions behind Resnais' approach. When Okada comes to visit her on set, they are filming a large protest against nuclear proliferation with a lot of Japanese people holding protest signs written in French, and carrying enlarged shocking images of the bombing aftermath. Some extras seem to have large wounds and scars, but it's unclear if these are real or the result of great make-up aritsts. Nothing we see of the nuclear disaster is presented as something that is directly viewed by any of the characters. We see it through photographs, newsreel images, museum pieces and model reconstructions. And while in Riva's film Hiroshima is filled with anti-nuclear protestors, the bomb is not mentioned off-set. As Riva and Okada romantically stroll around, we see Hiroshima as a lively city with an active night scene where life goes on in tea houses, theaters, restaurants and hotels, without it being defined by the bomb. I find it hard to believe that this isn't a somewhat too optimistic representation of Hiroshima in 1959, but that only strengthens the idea of film being an inadequate and inauthentic representation of horror. 

There is a line of thought in film criticism that argues that making films about the Holocaust is inherently immoral, whatever the intentions of these films may be. As I remember, some proponents of this idea are willing to make an exception for Resnais' documentary Night and Fog. I haven't seen it, but based on this film I understand where the thought could come from. In this context though, I can also imagine moral objections to Hiroshima Mon Amour - Wikipedia notes in fact that it was controversial and excluded from the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. The centerpiece of the film is a long semi-monologue by Riva remembering her youth in Nevers, when she fell in love with a German solider and was ostracized by her community for it. She was placed in solitary confinement only to be left out when France was liberated, just in time to see her Nazi lover being killed. For his part, Okada early on in the film mentions that he wasn't in Hiroshima when the bomb fell, because he was out fighting for his country. Neither Riva nor Okada is presented as having or supporting fascist ideas, but they can't exactly be called Nazi-resisters. They certainly have some regrets, but if these were real-life people it wouldn't be surprising to find them having some ugly thoughts when pressed. I found this ambigutiy the most surprising and striking aspect of the film. 

205. On the Waterfront

Song - The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel)

Movie: On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

I always enjoy 1950's classic Hollywood movies starring up-and-coming actors, some of them on the brink of superstardom, influenced by The Actors Studio and method acting. It's interesting to see the clash between the theatrical and expressionist filmmaking style and the naturalistic, psychologically grounded acting of the new talents. It's productive too, especially as many of these films are about the (generational) unease caused by the societal transformations taking place between the Second World War and thhe 1960's. I really liked On the Waterfront, but as one of the founders of The Actors Studio, Elia Kazan has no trouble adjusting his style to the likes of Brando and Steiger, making it a bit more of a straightforward realistic film, lacking the fascinating disbalanced energy of something like Rebel Without A Cause (a far more interesting film than I gave it credit for in a very early entry of this blog). 

Kazan is evidently very good at making straightforward realistic films though. He barely makes use of any sets and the entire film is set on the streets of Hoboken, New Jersey, and more specifically its harbor, where longshoremen struggle to get work. Each wide shot is filled with so much (background) detail, you get the idea the film knows every nook and cranny of the area, creating a sensc of immediacy and urgency. That is further developed by Kazan's unadorned and direct shooting style. Most of his shots are elegant and pretty, but barely stylised, only conveying the most relevant information. One notable exception is the moment when Father Barry (a really great Karl Malden) is lifted off a ship's hull, rising above the many admiring longshoremen on his way back to the deck.  Story-wise, the film has a lot of patience showing the work of the longshoremen and how they are affected by the corruption of their union. 

Elia Kazan was the most prominent director to testify in front of the House of Un-American Activittees committee, branding many of his colleagues (some of them even wrongly) as communists, consequently ruining their careers. In On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando, giving a great performance that currently plays like the blueprint for Jack Nicholson's entire career) is an informer, who by testifying against Lee J. Cobb's Johnny Friendly (unfortunately it seems this name was not an inspiration for Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) becomes a hero who brings down the corrupt union bossess. Understandably, because of this, the film has come to be seen  by some as Kazan's apologia/justification for his own testimony. While this was obviously on Kazan's mind, the film deserves to stand on its own. Aside from testifying and being ostracised for it, the situations Kazan and Terry find themseelves in are very different. The film is based on real cases of corruption along the docks of New Jersey and New York, and it looks at this world with great moral and journalistic clarity. Nothing here plays as a strained metaphor, or as propaganda, and any critical viewer should be able to easily make the argument that Terry's actions were justified, while Kazan's were not.

204. The Discovery of Heaven

Song - While My Guitar Gently Weeps (The Beatles)

Movie: The Discovery of Heaven (Jeroen Krabbé, 2001)

I will at some point finish reading The Discovery of Heaven. It is the 'magnum opus' of Harry Mulisch, the most celebrated Dutch novelist of the 20th century, who was said to wait by the phone on the day that the Nobel Prize winners were announced. The first half of the book is worthy of that description. Mulisch weaves all kinds of disparate threads into a wonderful blend of history, politics, sex, science and philosophy, challenging you to keep up, without bothering too much with the authenticity and accuracy of his ideas. Halfway through he kills Ada, 'births' Quinten and shifts his focus to opaque and aphoristic religious symbolism and mythic spiritualism. I have always found 'Chosen one' narratives to be a bit dull, and was disappointed that such a richly imaginative, uncategorisable novel turned into exactly that. This adaptation is fateful to the book and completely loses steam after the halfway point. A bigger problem is that Krabbé is a much worse filmmaker than Mulisch is a writer, which makes even the good parts a bit bland. 

Krabbé tries to evoke the spirit behind Mulisch writing, who constantly jumps between wildly different ideas, finds connections between people, places and historic periods where you'd least expect them, and renews plot threads you thought were resolved or forgotten. He does all that without ever losing sight of the complexity of his three main characters, Onno, Max and Ada. It's really hard to find a thoroughline in such an ambitiously labyrinthine story, and Krabbé never does. The many match cuts are a testament to his struggles, and a logical approach, but it too often feels like this is nothing more than a coillection of the highlights of Mulisch' book. Especially during the first half, many scene transitions fall completely flat and as a result everything in the film feels a bit disconnected from everything else. It also doesn't help that Krabbé's imagination of heaven is purely functional, and completely devoid of any interesting visual or narrative details. 

Onno, Max and Ada are played by Stephen Fry, Greg Wise (Emma Thompson's husband) and Flora Montgomery. They all are good and evoke well their intellectual, romantic and political passions, as well as their somewhat cocky arrogance that their pursuit and expression of these passions is more important than anything else. Fry is born to play verbose, charming and self-deprecating intellectuals, but he overdoes that last part. He is a bit too happy to outwardly express the doubts and vulnerabilities of his character, in a way that doesn't feel right for the kind of Dutch intellectual he portrays. His Onno comes off a bit as a more self-aware Jacob Rees-Mogg, with way better politics and morals, but Rees-Moggs in any form are quite alien to the Netherlands. 

203. Morvern Callar

Song - Nothing Compares 2 U (Sinéad O'Connor)

Movie: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

What if the elephant in the room would actually go away if you'd simply ignore it? When Morvern's (Samantha Morton) boyfriend commits suicide, she doesn't tell anyone and lets the body rot on the floor as a minor nuisance (leading to some morbidly funny moments) for weeks until she buries it anonymoulsy in a faraway field. With her still unprocessed grief, she then decides to take her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) on a wildly irresponsible holiday, while also passing off her boyfriend's just finished novel as her own. Every decision she makes is misguided and the consequence of her refusal to acknowledge and address the shitty situation she's found herself in. And yet, she ends the film in a far better emotional, psychological and financial state than she began it. 

The offbeat framing, sound design and lighting choices Ramsay makes, for a long time conceal the truly eccentric elements of the film, until everything finally sinks in at the end. Morvern Callar shares certain commonalities with revenge movies that use the death of a loved one as starting points for violent wish fulfilment fantasies. The fantasy here is not violent (though it could be seen as revenge on the 'killer'), but is more relatable, which perhaps also makes it more uncomfortable. Yes, we can imagine how we would feel if someone would kill a loved one, and we can imagine how satisfying it could be to go on a vengeful killing spree in response. But that's not a thing that would happen to most of us, nor would we necessarily be able and willing to respond to it like the Uma Thurmans and Charles Bronsons of the world. But we have all at some point in our lives wished to ignore, and choose the easy way out of, an uncomfortable situation, behaving in somewhat irresponsible ways in the hope that it would simply disappear. Morton's Morvern does just that and becomes cooler by the minute, ending the film sipping whyskis in a bar with an air of world-beating confidence that's hard to reconcile with the mousy detached girl we saw at the beginning. 

It's an ending that makes sense, as this is not a film primarily about Morvern's grief, but about her attittude, and the way she responds to men and music, and to her friends and her surroundings. Ramsay wants us to be aware of these surroundings, and fills the film with music, sounds, unusual lighting sources and interesting sights, all of which she tries to present from different perspectives. A great example are the flickering lights of Morvern's Christmas three in her living room; Ramsay has gone to great lengths to ensure that these lights are in some way 'present' in every shot of Morvern in her apartment, and that their effect is always slightly different depending on Morvern's location in the apartment. Also worth mentioning are the slightly surrealist touches Ramsay gives to the Spanish village procession. The sequence is given a different, hazier look from the rest of the film, and alternates between the point of view of Morvern and Lanna, who see and hear the same things, but seemingly experience them differently. It's wonderful to see how well executed and complex most of Ramsay's shots are, although that does also make it more noticeable when certain shots and scenes are just thoughtlessly stylized artistic flourishes that don't make much sense in or out of context. That is in particular true for anything involving the publishers, but is in general much less a problem here than in Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin. 

202. Soldier of Orange

Song - Zing Vecht Huil Bid Lach Werk en Bewonder (Ramses Shaffy)

Movie: Soldier of Orange - Soldaat van Oranje (Paul Verhoeven, 1977)

In 1947, the Dutch secret service thwarted an attempt to overthrow the Dutch government. The coup, which failed before it ever seriously began, aimed to block the process of recognising Indonesia as an independent state. Among the conspirators were a former Dutch prime minister and a number of World War 2 resistance heroes, including the "soldier of Orange", Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema. This was not public knowledge when this film, based on Roelfzema's memoirs, was made, but you can easily imagine its Erik Lanshof (Rutger Hauer) participating in such a scheme. His resistance against the Nazi's is driven more by instincts and a somewhat misplaced sense of adventure than by idealism and moral conviction. And though he would like to believe himself a man capable of making his own luck, Verhoeven never lets us forget that he is ultimately just a cog in the (resistance) machine, and not even an incredibly significant one. 

In addition to this thoroughly wonderful film, Roelfzema's memoirs also spawned the most succesful musical in Dutch theater history. It premiered in October 2010 and is still running. I haven't seen it, but its centerpiece song presents a conventionally heroic narrative: If we don't do anything, who else will/It's up to you and me/we are our only hope. This is pretty much a direct repudiation of what Verhoeven is doing, always portraying the individual resistance fighters as part of a greater whole. All of Lanshof's missions are placed in the context of a far broader resistance effort, without us (or him) ever getting a real sense of that broader context. The film for the most part presents everything from Lanshof's point of view, and so we are not made aware of the actions in tha past that made Lanshof resistance efforts necessary and possible, nor do we see the consequences his resistance efforts have. We are asked to have faith that other people we are not aware of have done, and will continue to do, the right thing, whatever that may be. This approach produces a film of almost ceaseless movement, both by the camera and the characters who are constantly thinking, scheming, spying, flirting, improvising, planning and adjusting their plans based on the information available. It is ridiculously entertaining and often almost equally tense. 

I am not the greatest fan of Paul Verhoeven. I think he tries too hard to be seen as clever and inflammatory, which can sometimes suck the air out of his films and make them painfully obvious. It's impossible to not enjoy Basic Instinct, but I have never warmed to Turkish Delight and Starship Troopers. A populist film like Soldier of Orange is probably the perfect match for him, as it stops him from making too strained choices, while adding flair to what could have been a more conventional bore in someone else's hands. Nobody but Verhoeven could film the scene in which Queen Wilhelmina is having a formal talk with Erik, while in the background of the frame his resistance/fraternity buddy Guus (Jeroen Krabbe) is having wild sex with the woman who should prepare their next mission. The same can be said about Erik's tango with Alex (Derek de Lint), his friend from college who went on to fight for the Germans. More subversive than the sexual innuendo is the suggestion that Alex and Erik aren't that dissimilar. They haven't thought particularly long and hard about the decision to join the side they joined and their roles could have been easily reversed. Neither of them can probably articulate exactly why they aren't. Finally, the opening scene is a technical marvel. Verhoeven meticulously recreates the style of Dutch 1940's newsreels to seamlessly integrate fictional characters in archival footage. 

201. Barcelona

Song - Holiday In Spain (Blof & Counting Crows)

Movie: Barcelona (Whit Stillman, 1994)

-You can't say Americans are not more violent than other people.

-All those people killed in shootings in America?

-Oh, shootings, yes. But that doesn't mean Americans are more violent than other people. We're just better shots.

Write lines like that, and you got me hooked! Barcelona is filled with such sharp dialogue, which is not a surprise if you've seen Stillman's Metropolitan and Love & Friendship. The film's timeliness, on the other hand, was quite unexpected. Fred's (Chris Eigeman) defense of American violence is a case of professional deformation. He is an American officer sent on a diplomatic mission to Barcelona to make the case for the arrival of an American navy fleet. The film takes place in 1987, five years after Spain became part of NATO and Fred is horrified to learn that many Spaniards are opposed to this alliance. Unfortunately, a ballpoint pen is not enough to erase graffiti demanding that "American pigs go home". 

I am one of those people who hoped that NATO would one day become obsolete, and that it was on its way to be so. Unfortunately the last few weeks have shown that it is still a necessary evil. Barcelona sees it as an unnecessary good, and is wistful about its disappearing relevance, connecting this to broader musings about Americanism at the tail end of the Cold War. This is an incredibly rare film that is both proud of American patriotism and the military/conservative values associated with it, and acceptant that it will, and maybe should, have a diminished importance in the world. It often reminds of the many 70's and 80's films nostalgically remembering the lost values of the 50's and 60's. To say it a bit pretentiously, it is an 'End of History' film, viewing this ending with sadness, from a liberal-conservative American point of view. Stillman, who has made only 5 movies in 32 years, is self-aware and fully understands why this perspective may be annoying to Americans and obnoxious to non-Americans. It makes Barcelona quite an endearing romantic comedy.

He is also an intelligent and good filmmaker, maybe best highlighted by the scene in which Ted (Taylor Nichols), drives his cousin Fred around Barcelona, showing him its highlights, including 'the cathedral', which remains unnamed. The camera mostly stays inside the car focusing on the two Americans as they travel across the city, discuss their romantic and professional prospects, and pay little attention to their surroundings. Ted is a salesman who has memorised all the great business self help books, but is still afraid to get fired. He is also a nebbish, insecure Woody Allen-like character (though Protestant instead of Jewish) who after his latest rejection vows to only date homely, plain-looking women and rediscovers the Bible (when he reads it, he covers it up by The Economist). Once the bickering cousins meet two attractive Spanish women (played by Mira Sorvino and Tushka Bergen), you'd expect the film to proceed along the usual lines, but it takes a surprisingly dark turn that Stillman handles extremely well. He takes seriously the potential implications of what's happened, without letting the romance and the comedy escape from him. 

200. Goodfellas

Song - Layla (Eric Clapton)

Movie: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Out of the many great scenes and moments in Goodfellas, my two favorites are probably the prison dinner, inculding the most appetising shot of an onion ever put on film, and the nightly visit to Scorsese's mom. They are both immensely life-affirming sequences, depicting the joy of simple communal experiences. One is about taking care and time to make a good dinner with your loved ones, and to enjoy it together afterwards. The other about finding comfort in being around old friends and guardians. Catherine Scorsese's delight at welcoming her son and his friends, and their shared enjoyment of her quirky painting are wonderful expressions of love and friendship. Of course, in both scenes, murderous acts are the reason that all these loving people have found themselves in the same space. 

The murderous acts in this film are all portrayed with great violence, and are gruesome and shocking, and all of them are done in the pursuit of the kinds of experiences described above. Those include the creation and sustenance of friendships, love and marriage, acceptance into a community, the comfort of your house, the pleasure of a good meal, and of dressing just right for the occasion. These experiences have rarely been depicted with as much vitality, humor, authenticity and affection as in this film. Scorsese films them with an infectious joy, with a sincere love for both filmmaking and the habits, quirks, and desires of the culture and milieu that shaped him. It's what makes this better than The Wolf of Wall Street; I think that might be an even more spectacular directorial tour de force, but it is also much more directly about the pursuit of opulence, money and material wealth. Goodfellas' criminals of course do get quite rich, but there are only a few scenes where we see them flaunt their wealth. The turning point of the film comes in fact when, after their greatest catch, Robert De Niro's Jimmy Conway kills a bunch of his team members for being too greedy, getting angry when they come with too expensive cars and jackets to the Christmas party where everyone is sharing in the joy of pulling of the biggest airline heist in American history. 

De Niro's anger is a good reflection of one of Henry Hill's voiceover musings from earlier in the film, explaining that it confounded the FBI that the loyalty to Paulie (Paul Sorvino) was rooted in community and protection rather than in money. That line is really key I think to what makes this such a great and provocative film. Its focus is very much on the pursuit of joyous and happy experiences that are easily recognisable as happy, joyous experiences to middle-class and working-class people. The life Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) desires is much closer to the lives we modest plebs hope to have, than whatever the hell Jordan Belfort is doing. Belfort is a villain in pursuit of things many of us can't have, and in some cases would even feel dirty about having, The good fellas want things we can realistically aspire to, and sometimes even get with a lot of hard work. No wonder some feel the film glorifies violence and gangsters.

Of course, it becomes much harder to feel that the film glorifies a life of crime once we reach Layla and 11 May, though even in this case Scorsese complicates things by making the latter sequence counterintuitively the most romantic one in the film. I am aware that Paul Thomas Anderson is hugely indebted to Scorsese, and Goodfellas in partcular, but I'd be curious to know if the Ouija board sequence in Inherent Vice was inspired by the troubles of Karen (Lorraine Bracco) and Henry here. In both of these sequences a couple engages in frantic, drug-adddled behavior hoping to salvage what's left of their hopes and dreams. Anderson slows down the tempo in comparison to what comes before, while Scorsese speeds it up; the hard cuts, the constant soundtrack changes, and the frenzied camera movements almost really manage to put you in the maniacally anxious headspace of Bracco and Liotta and to feel their shared desperation. It's also just purely fantastic filmmaking that would have been even more impressive if Scorsese hadn't managed this for an entire film with After Horus.

I had seen Goodfellas for the first time on an IPod Classic, sitting in a car on a noisy highway. That's not ideal, and while I liked it I wasn't super impressed. Upon further viewings, it's obviously wonderful, but I'd still put it below After Hours, Taxi Driver and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. That says a lot about Scorsese's greatness, but Goodfellas could have lived with a little less voiceover, less freeze frames and less slow- motioned repeats. These things undoubtedly add to the film's style, but their overuse does make it feel a bit bloated and, worse, ocasionally takes away the film's propulsive power. 

199. Leave Her to Heaven

Song - Nobody's Wife (Anouk)

Movie: Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)

We have already witnessed Ellen Harland's (Gene Tierney) cold-blooded maliciounsess by the time she steps towards the stairs, but that doesn't make the realisation of what's about to come less chilling... The film begins with a title card placed on a book cover, informing us that it is based on the eponymous novel by Ben Ames Williams, and then lets its opening credits unfold over the pages of said book. It follows that up by framng its story as a tale Richard Harland's (Cornel Wilde) lawyer is telling to a friend. I don't know the intentions behind this, but it is easy to see why someone may have felt the need to refract this story through multiple narrators. Emphasising that this is all just storytelling without much basis in reality is the only comfort this film is willing to give the audience. The exception is perhaps the ending, which is a bit too convenient and happy.

Ellen is discomfitting right from her first scene when she stares too intensively at Richard, when they meet in a train to New Mexico. He, a writer, is amused by that, as she is reading his newest book. Moreover, he is immediately attracted to her and happy to find that they are both travelling to the same holiday resort. A couple of flirty nights later she dumps her fiancee and talks Richard into marriage and before long they live together. Unfortunately, Ellen feels threatened by anyone she might have to share Richard with, including his semi-paralysed brother, her sister and her mother. Even more unfortunately, she is willing to go to great lengths to do something about that, and does so with an icy unflinching determination. That she is not particulary methodical only makes everything she does more disquieting. She doesn't have full control of the situation and most of the time has to improvise and play it by ear.  But whenever an opportunity does arise to get what she wants, she takes it without a hint of hesitation. It's amazing to see Tierney, especially after having watched her in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, be able and willing to portray Ellen for long stretches of the film without an ounce of warmth or humanity, yet without turning her into some sort of symbol of evil. She always comes off as a real person, capable of real cruelty. 

There are several scenes in this film David Fincher must watch green with envy. Its connection to Gone Girl is quite obvious, but the general evocation of dread in the face of coolly stylish expressions of inhumanity, detached from any feelings of regret or remorse, is something he has tried to go for throughout his career.  He has rarely been as succesfull as Stahl is here, maybe because he needs to find a better location scout. Leave Her to Heaven takes place in some of the most beautiful, tranquil places I have ever seen depicted in film. Most of the action takes place in three cottages in New Mexico, Georgia and Maine. They are all presented as ideals of homeliness, cozyness and warmth with fantastic, calming sights over mountains, lakes and oceans. They fit Richard extremely well; Wilde plays him as the most benevolently mellow version of Tom Hanks imaginable, a guy who enjoys nothing more than writing his book in his quiet garden, who loves his wife and brother, and who is always genuinely overjoyed to see his mother- and sister-in-law and sing corny farmland songs with them. This contrast between Ellen and her surroundings is what really makes the film special. It's much more transgressive to present such malevolence in a setting like this one, than in the perpetually rainy, miserable town of Seven.  

198. The Book of Eli

Song - Go Like Elijah (Chi Coltrane)

Movie: The Book of Eli (Albert & Allen Hughes, 2010)

This film has too many portentous shots of Denzel Washington walking through a desolated landscape in slow motion. That desolated landscape is part of a typical 2010's CGI-ed, 'gritty', grey, desaturated post-apocalyptic look, probably the least appealing aesthetic in film history. There are ways to depict a fallen world that don't make much of your movie look like a slab of concrete, but the Hughes brothers don't show a lot of interest in exploring these options. And yet, despite all this, I quite enjoyed The Book of Eli. There aren't a lot of films able to say that they are gnarly genre fiction (there are more than a few moments that really work great as good ol' nasty B-pulp) aimed at devout (black) Christians. 

Denzel Washington basically spends this film doing two things: beating people up and quoting the Bible verbatim, which leads to a delightfully ridiculous plot twist at the end of the film. Eli's (Denzel Washington) book is in fact the last existing exemplar of the King James Bible, apparently the most precious possession one can have in a post-apocayptic world. Hero or villain, every single character here believes that civilisation can only be rebuilt with the Bible as its fundament. Eli is on a quest to the West to deliver it somewhere to somebody, believing that the mysterious voices guiding him will eventually bring him to the correct place. The film takes this obvious religious parable seriously and presents the Bible as a book with genuinely valuable moral lessons, some of which play out over the course of the film. 

At the same time the Hughes brothers find plenty of room for some good ass-kicking and colorfully profane vulgarity, never presenting the film's religious and pulpy sensibilities as contradictory, or apologising for either. It's Man on Fire for God-fearing, Bible-reading churchgoers; Washington essentially plays Jesus with John Creasy's attitude and some great kung fu skills. It's impossible to dismiss that, especially if you add into this mix some kind-hearted cannibals, motorcycle gangs, shady saloons, Tom Waits as a nifty store owner, an even niftier Mila Kunis, and Gary Oldman in one of his last go-for-insanity roles before deciding that having an Oscar would be nice. I also enjoyed the idea to make Alcatraz the most peaceful place on Earth, and found the ending more thoughtful than it ever needed to be. 

197. Melancholia

Song - Dust In The Wind (Kansas)

Movie: Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

Melancholia begins with a long montage of fragments we'll see later in the film. These fragments, such as a bride floating in a lake, a woman carrying a child, a horse falling down, the planet 'Melancholia' bumping against Earth, unfold in extreme slow motion and are set to Richard Wagner's music. The images have a quite painterly (though also highly digitalised) look, which is only further emphasised when von Trier inserts actual classical paintings in his montage. It is an opening that self-consciously invites comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey and other classics of its ilk which took the time to announce their grandiosity with epic epilogues. Melancholia falls short of those films, but is a far bettter and more interesting film than I expected. 

This is only the second von Trier I've seen after The Idiots (which I remember liking quite a lot). Based on his reputation I was expecting self-flagellating misery porn expounding the virtues of suffering. It's very much not that; the end of the world as a metaphor for/representation of depression is admittedly a bit overwrought and belabored, but the film works incredibly well on a literal level. In the first part, 'Justine', as a sly comedy about the most miserable wedding ever, and in the second part 'Claire,' as a surprisingly realistic look at how we might react to a potentially apocalyptic natural phenomenon. I do have one other misgiving; I understand that the sound design fits von Trier's ideas, but the often deliberately muffled dialogue does at times work against the film. 

It's a bit of a cheap 'see me be a punk rebel' move to follow the carefully composed opening montage with a shot of the film's title, badly scribbled on an insignficant piece of paper, but it does set the right mood for the rest of the film, which never allows you to be quite sure of how serious you should take it. Especially once the title card is followed of a shot, not in slow motion, of a limousine driving at such a snail's pace on a country road that it might as well belong to the opening montage. The limousine gets stuck in all kinds of different ways, making Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alxander Skarsgard) late at their own wedding party, which mostly upsets the wedding planner. He won't have a better time the rest of the night.  

Everyone at the wedding knows that Justine is depressed, and has been for some time, but nobody knows how to help her. The hosts of the wedding,Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland), demand Justine hold it together, and are working hard to keep up appearances when she doesn't. At the same time, Justine tries to fake it, while the rest of the wedding guests also know exactly what's going on, and are equally trying to keep a straight face. And so, the wedding party becomes a slowly moving train wreck everybody knows is coming, but is powerless to stop. This results in a lot of passive-aggressiveness, fake smiles, aimless moving around, and pent up tension slowly coming to the forefront, with Kiefer Sutherland giving the most unexpected performance, channeling some of his dad's inttelectualized sardonic arrogance. Kirsten Dunst is of course great too, working together with von Trier to depict Justine with compassion, understanding, and some mischievousness. The film suffers with Justine, but also enjoys that her condition has everyone around her flailing about, being lost and confused. 

The second part is filled with more dread, and focuses on Claire who fears that the Earth's encounter with planet Melancholia won't end as well as the scientists have calculated. Her husband John is one of those scientists, and keeps comforting her that Melancholia will indeed be just a 'flyby'. But the scientists also know that if they have miscalculated something, it would be the apocalypse. The inage of Melancholia appearing at the horizon like a rising sun is spectacular and surreal; everything else is handled matter-of-factly. The appearance of Melancholia may be strange, but is seen as an event that can be explained and followed scientifically and rationally. It the world ends because of Melancholia, it won't be an inexplicable force, a mysterious act of God, or some alien being that finishes it, but something that can be understood, studied and empirically experienced by ordinary people. It's the most realistic and palpable depiction of the (potential) apocalypse I remember seeing. We don't see mass panic, no sensationalist news reports, no crazy end-of-the world parties, no prophets declaring the end of times. Just Claire going to a fake news website showing a graph explaining why the scientists expecting merely a flyby are wrong, actually.

196. The Accidental Tourist

Song - Roll Over Lay Down (Status Quo)

Movie: The Accidental Tourist (Lawrence Kasdan, 1988)

If you ever stumble upon this film halfway through, remember that Macon (William Hurt) has lost his son. Otherwise it may be a little confusing how a man who is pursued by Geena Davis and Kathleen Turner, and gets paid to travel to Paris, London and New York, can be so impervious. That imperviousness is the source of both the film's strengths and weaknesses. Macon is restrained and uninterested in great outward expressions of sorrow, and remains so until the very end. That is an unusual and welcome representation of grief, especially in an American film. Many similar stories would include a scene of triumph and catharsis of Macon unreservedly crying, signaling his 'uplifting' transformation into a more emotionally expresive, better and happier person.  And yet, it's a thin line between being reserved and being arrogantly self-centered. Kasdan doesn't always know how to toe that line, occasionally turning the film into a somewhat cloying wish fulfillment fantasy in which Macon gets to remain passively indifferent to his surroundings, while being showered with love and empathy.

Macon is a writer of business travel books outlining to their readers how they can have a comfortable, non-foreign experience in the places they go to. The books explain how to avoid encounters with strangers and where in London to find the best American food. They are good reflections of Macon's general disposition, something the ridiculous voiceover keeps underlying long after we've gotten the point. Nonetheless, Hurt plays Macon wonderfully as a man who seems to fully think through every move he makes. He makes even the act of taking a coat from a rack seem purposefully considered, similarly to the way he made opening the glove compartment of his car seem like a consciously thought out decision during the opening credits of The Big Chill (also directed by Kasdan). Hurt plays his characters in both films as people with an inability to make effortless decisions, who are always deeply aware of all the steps that are being taken in the act of doing something. It's not a surprise that his wife Sarah (Kathleen Turner), falling apart after the death of their son, can't stand living with him anymore. 

The family dog seems more shaken by these changes, forcing Macon to bring it to dog trainer Muriel (Geena Davis). The height difference between the dog and Muriel allows the film a lot of shots of Geena Davis' legs, but Muriel is more than just a pretty woman who serves to revitalise a broken man. She has wants and desires of her own, and the film makes it clear that she needs Macon as much as vice versa. Their relationship is mirrored by the one between Macon's publisher Julian (Bill Pullman) and Rose (Amy Wright), Macon's sister. Macon's siblings are a collection of oddballs who aren't fully adjusted to modern life. They get lost on streets they've known their entire lives, refuse to answer the phone, and undercook their food. Rose and Julain should be an incompatible couple, but the film lets them (and all its other characters) behave in ways that are not easily understood or neccesarily rational. I complained about The Big Chill that it never lets its characters escape the molds Kasdan has created for them. That is not a problem of this film, which can't be said of the somewhat bland direction. 

195. A Summer's Tale

Song - Here Comes The Sun (The Beatles)

Movie: A Summer's Tale - Conte d'été (Éric Rohmer, 1996)

Gene Hackman was wrong! And funnily enough, I think most modern audiences would have a far easier time with A Summer's Tale than with Night Moves. Those fearing French art cinema can rest assured that they don't need to be intimidated by this film's form and content, nor by the sexual prowess of its main protagonist. Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), a just graduated mathematician, soon to be employed as a designer, has come to the Breton coast looking for a summer girl. He finds three potential candidates (Margot, Solene, Lena), but for all his efforts never gets much further than briefly making out on a couch. 

Gaspard has arrived in Dinard, believing he is in love with Lena, without being sure if that's true, whether Lena is in love with him, whether they were ever a couple, or if Lena is even going to come to Dinard as she promised. Strolling around the beach town, he meets the kind, intelligent and pretty waitress Margot, who, when not working on her summer job, is writing her PhD in Ethnology. She has a seafaring boyfriend she barely sees, takes an interest in Gaspard and soon enough they spend every day walking along the dunes sharing their hopes, dreams and anxieties. As the summer goes on, Solene, an acquaintance of Margot, also sets her eyes on Gaspard and doesn't waste any time making her moves, just before Lena finally arrives in Dinard. 

Rohmer mainly focuses on Margot (Amanda Langlet) and Gaspard, filming their talks in long uninterrupted scenes, which become flirtier by the day. But their mouths can't say what their body language does, which is mostly his fault. Margot is afraid to make a move, fearing, not without reason, that Gaspard might see her only as a 'stopgap' and break her heart. Langlet has a brilliant brief moment of hesitation when Gaspard mentions that he appreciates Lena because of her high I.Q. It's a line that wonderfully adds to the characterisation of Gaspard as a mostly good, intelligent and self-aware dude, who is unfortunately oblivious to the many critical moments when he is not good, intelligent or self-aware. The enduring image of the film is Poupaud pensively, and somewhat subconsciusly, stroking his chin every time his ordeal changes. He is forever thinking about how to create the perfect conditions for the right move, unaware that he is always playing catch-up. As a result, his behaviour in almost every scene, especially in the film's second half, is both inauthentic and miscalculated.

Many young graduates tend to have doubts and insecurities that lead them to wrong, dumb and sometimes regrettable (in)decisions. A Summer's Tale is a wonderful and quite authentic depiction of that, with two - Solene and Lena are a bit inconsistently written and mostly serve to illuminate Gaspard - perfectly realised characters. In addition, the film also paints a loving picture of Breton culture. Whenever he gets the chance, Rohmer highlights the landscapes and horizons of the region. And in one of their first scenes Margot and Gaspard visit one of her interview subjects, an old fisherman who explains how they used to salt cod and sings the favorite sea shanty of his fellow laborers. It's the first of many songs about the sea we will hear; we will also hear characters complain that the Mediterranean coast is not a real coast, because it lacks tides, with Rohmer highlighting the wet smudgy sand sticking on the characters' feet. He also finds space to highlight many of the typical sights of middle class family tourism. The film is very much a celebration of the joys and freedoms of leisure culture, best highlighted by a wonderfully joyous scene including a boat and an accordeonist. 

194. About Last Night...

Song - If You Leave Me Now (Chicago)

Movie: About Last Night... (Edward Zwick, 1986)

What a bummer! And an unexpected one at that! I have liked, often very much, everything I've seen from David Mamet, both as a writer and as a director. But this is a completely tedious film that takes the laziest stereotypes about how men and women think about sex, love and relationships, exaggerates them to the wildest degree, presents this as authentic, and then laments the sad state of affairs. Its only highlight is the opening scene, which gives Jim Belushi a brilliant monologue he hits out of the park, He describes a one night stand to his friend Danny (Rob Lowe) with flippant cruelty, misogyny and callousness, proudly emphasising his uncaring insensibility. It's a great portrayal of a very specific kind of asshole that the film quickly shies away from, choosing to depict Belushi's Bernie as a confused oversexed idiot with women issues who deep down means well. He is contrasted with Elizabeth Perkins' Joan, a walking stereotype of a (boringly written) man-hating feminist. The film condescendingly/disingeniously doesn't hate either but pats them on their back for being their gender.

Joan and Bernie are actually the sidekicks to Danny and Debbie (Demi Moore), who fall in love, move in together and then have all kinds of contrived problems, based around their expectations of what it means to love and live together. Their fights are more believable then their courtship, as they have nothing in common except for sex. But the sex scenes feel perfunctory too, because the film wants to believe that sex is the only thing that can bring men and women together and wants to pretend it finds that disheartening. Mamet and Zwick keep building similar strawmen throughout the film, leaving Moore and Lowe understandably stranded. At certain points their performances get uncontrollably shouty, but it's unclear what else they could have done with this material, or how their characters could be anything but tiresome. 

Ultimately, even the truest scene, the New Year's Eve breakup, is ruined, because of the film's unbending commitment to keep its characters in the narrow molds it has created for them. The scene wants us to side with Debbie against Danny, and to be seen as feminist for doing so, but seems unable to imagine that Debbie could prefer to be single rather than fight for 'love' in an unhappy relationship, or that Danny could have valid reasons for being unhappy. This being the 80's, the film does at least know to make scenes of desperate people running at night on brightly lit wet streets look appealing. Similarly, a shot of a naked Moore, standing partly in the shadow, partly in the light, is more charged than any of the sex scenes. And a shot in which Debbie and Danny are walking along Lake Michigan at sunset, with the skyscrapers of Chicago in the background, makes you want to be immediately transported to the same spot. As long as you don't actually meet any of the characters. 

193. It's My Party

Song - With A Little Help From My Friends (Joe Cocker)

Movie: It's My Party (Randal Kleiser, 1996)

I was happy to learn that 'Serge' from Beverly Hills Cop had/has a quite respectable acting career, and even happier to find that he is the awesomely named Bronson Pinchot. Pinchot is the best part of It's My Party, playing Monty, one of the many gay friends of Nick Stark (Eric Roberts). Nick has late stage AIDS and is organising one final party for his friends and family, before killing himself to avoid spending his final days in a vegetative state. He doesn't want a funeral or a wake and the party is supposed to be a happy occasion where all his loved ones gather together to reminisce about past times, and end their time with Nick with some happy memories. Monty is the most exuberant of the bunch, fully indulging in dark, irreverent, outrageous humor, with Kleiser giving Pinchot full permission to chew the scenery and embrace his instincts for over the top flamboyance. It's a very fun performance. It's also not very believable that Monty would not make one single joke at the expense of mainstream culture, politics and sexualities. Nobody at the party does. 

In a flashback, Brandon (Gregory Harrison), Nick's ex, remembers how a failed suicide attempt of a friend of theirs left him in a barely conscious state of mind, forcing them to use a plastic bag to get the job done. This scene should have either been left out, or the film should have paid more respect to it. As it is, it is very hard to justify the comforting and lighthearted tone Kleiser tries to go for. The film uses the party as an excuse to explore and highlight different aspects of the gay cultural experience in the context of AIDS, but completely disregards anger and frustration. Eric Roberts spends most of the film acting like a second-rate stand-up comedian making self-deprecating, pseudo-ironic jokes and giving comfort and lfie advice to the people at his party. The film turns his final days into a mostly nice and pleasurable experience and it almost becomes funny when guest after guest comments on how good he is looking. Some films get rightfully criticized for overdoing it with the makeup when presenting sick/frail/old actors, but this one could have at least pretended that a dying man can't really look like a healthy and fit movie star. 

This film is one of the best examples of politically correct art. It's an attempt to portray a societal crisis, without creating any sort of disturbance in the society. It's farily notable that the only gay kiss we see in the film comes directly after Eric explains that, while he used to be agnostic, he now can sense that he will live on after death and be somehow present in the lives of his loved ones, expertly summarising what is by far my least favorite religious idea. I would have found this almost indifferent attitude towards death unpleasant in any context, but it obviously didn't help the film that I saw it during (what is hopefully the endstage of) the COVID pandemic. In that regard, a party in which no one at any point vents their frustration about the surrounding virus, and the measures to contain it, does not ring true either. Finally, haven't seen Gregory Harrison in any other films, but hope he has more tricks in his sleeve than looking sheepishly. 

192. Inside Llewyn Davis

Song - Walk of Life (Dire Straits)

Movie: Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

There is an idea that you can only truly appreciate Godard's Breathless (a film I haven't seen since watching it in Film History class, and not really caring for it) if you have a seen lot of films from the 1940's and 50's. Only then will you realise how radically different it was from what was usually offered to audiences and how much of a shock to the system it was. Inside Llewyn Davis serves as a 40's film for Bob Dylan. Once he appears at the end of the film, you may not become a fan of him, but you get it. The Coens let their Dylan perform the exact same song Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) played before giving way, making both his parting words "If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a folk song", and his music transparently obsolete. 

The only thing I don't like about Inside Llewyn Davis is that it is the least good looking film the Coens have ever made. But its aggresively dull brown-greenish cinematography does fit the presentation of the folk scene of Greenwich Village as something of an unremarkable grey sludge of good, but somewhat uninspired music. It's hard to deny the talent of Llewyn and the other performers, but none of these people particularly distinguish themselves or stand out. In all his performances Isaac emphasises how much effort it takes Llewyn to connect to the audience with the song. He is grimacing, hitting the guitar with purpose, outwardly expressing how much this all means to him, but it just never truly clicks. And while the film focuses mostly on his mishaps, most of the other characters we meet have similar (mis)fortunes. Some, like the bumbling soldier Troy, get an opportunity at something bigger, but that's more attributable to luck than to some discernable exceptional talent. 

I remember from when the film came out, some of the real-life characters from the Greenwich Village scene objected to its depiction, claiming that it was much more artistically accomplished and vital than the Coens made it out to be. Fair enough, but the artistic liberties the Coens have taken make for a much more interesting, moving film. It's easy to make audencies sympathise with great talents who don't make it for tragic reasons, or to inspire people with stories of underdogs who make it despite great odds. But Llewyn Davis not becoming succesfull is not a great injustice and makes a lot of sense. He lacks the skills, the talent and the character to make it, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care for him as a human being, or that he should be stuck in a never-ending loop of misery.

It's a depiction that goes directly against America's obsession with 'winners' and the ensuing idea that only the very best are deserving of happiness. and is fully in line with the Coens overarching worldview. They have never been much into mavericks and genuises, seeing the world as incomprehensible and uncontrollable. Your grand plans can always be derailed by unknown forces you haven't taken into account and you can't stop what's coming. That's a much less individualist perspective than you will usually find in American stories, and much less cynical than it is often made out to be. It's also what allows them to inject wonderful absurd humor even in their most dramatic films. Few others would even try to include something like John Goodman's Roland Turner or Please Mr. Kennedy in a film like this, let alone make it work. 

191. Dazed and Confused

Song - School's Out (Alice Cooper)

Movie: Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

With all the praise Richard Linklater has received for his intellectually curious and eloquent characters, it can sometimes be forgotten that there is also probably no better chronicler of youthful dumbassery. It's because he knows there are two ways of behaving when you don't yet know your place in the world, and aren't sure of how to find it in the first place. You can either go on philosophical tangents questioning the meaning of existence, art, love and knowledge, or you can throw a trash can out of a driving car. Dazed and Confused almost exclusively focuses on behavior of the second kind, exploring all the different reasons for teenage clowning. Some characters make a conscious decision to switch off their brain, to not miss a wild night. Others are insecure  bored, nervous about meeting their crush, simply drunk, or a combination of all of this.  It takes more than an hour until someone in the film has an actual conversation, but even that is just a minor respite in between scenes of high schoolers acting out, getting high, posturing, drinking, flirting, driving around, busting each other's balls and mostly hanging around aimlessly talking nonsense. What else should they do? School's out for summer. 

Linklater did all of this better in Everybody Wants Some!!, as far as I am concerned his absolute greatest film. But even if Dazed and Confused sometimes feels like a dry run for it, it's an absolutely wonderful and funny film worth seeing. It's for everyone too; as always Linklater lets women as much in on the action as men. It is stil though, perhaps unsurprisingly, Ben Affleck who emerges as the film's MVP. This is very much not an insult; Affleck is probably my favorite contemporary movie star and I think one of the smarter people in Hollywood. He is great playing insecure numbskulls, in part because he is unafraid to show that deep down he gets them. In Dazed and Confused he spends most of his time running with a paddle after the younger students, as it is school tradition to spank the freshmen on the last day of school. Having flunked the previous year, Affleck's O'Bannion is doing this for the second summer in a row, and his angered frustration comes through the screen. He is desperate to humiliate the unluck freshmen, while both sensing that his fellow students find his despereation a bit pathetic, and that he himself doesn't get same gratification out of it anymore. 

The most famous role in the film though belongs to Matthew McConaughey, who coined his catchphrase 'alright, alright, alright' here and in his first scene walks into a bar just when we hear Bob Dylan on the soundtrack singing "this is the story of the Hurricane". I think he is a good and fun actor, but that's an introduction he has never quite lived up to, in part because he is also a bit too self-aggrandizing. He is wonderful here though as an older city employee who tries way too hard to impress high schoolers, That hoary lines like "That's what i like about these freshmen; I keep getting older, they stay the same age" actually succeed in impressing them is one of the film's many great details. But it's one other very brief scene that may be the most wonderful example of Linklater's understanding of teens. Most of the film follows teenagers who are around 16/17 year old and is attuned to their chaotic, restless and semi-ironic attitude towards everything. But when the film cuts to the 13/14 year old freshmen innocently slow dancing under the supervision of teachers, it slows down a bit and imbues the scene with almost as much gravity as the serious faces of the boys and girls holding each other in their arms.