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.