Monthly Top Five

PG Cooper only watched French films all month, none with subtitles, because that crap ruins the cinematography. He couldn't understand why all those men were fucking each other, but it looked great.

top 5 new movies for the month? That's what we're doing? Let me check my records...

Good Boys is great.

I will not apologize for being cultured.

Agreed about Kubo. I really liked it at first but as it went along I thought it lost a lot of steam.

And I was actually going to watch First Cow this weekend but I read reviews that I thought flew in the face of the 93% or whatever’s on RT. Sounds like it’ll get a pass from me, too much good stuff on the Criterion Channel that I want to check out.

5. Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002)

Hideo Nakata's Ringu famously launched the J-horror wave of the late 90s/early 2000s and while that film is clearly significant, I think I actually prefer Dark Water. That might seem strange given the film is repeating a lot of what made Ringu a success (drowned black-haired ghost girls haunting divorced moms) and generally lacks the urban legend flavor, but I ultimately connected with the characters a lot more in this. I really rooted for Yoshimi and her daughter to be happy and the fact that the film draws on a divorced mother's anxieties that she is providing enough for her child adds a psychological weight to the horror. Dark Water also really won me over with its ending. The climactic set-piece is a great piece of horror filmmaking with emotional resonance and the story's epilogue is scary, sad, and oddly touching all at once. Dark Water had a much less profound impact, especially in North America, than Nakata's breakthrough, but it's well worth a look.


4. The Young Master (Jackie Chan, 1980)

Another big step up for Jackie Chan. A large part of what makes The Young Master so effective is actually the story. Where the earlier films in Criterion's "Early Jackie Chan" playlist either had poor narrative structure or were just overburdened with weirdness, The Young Master tells a straightforward story about one orphaned martial artist (Jackie) seeking his brother who has been disgraced by their school. That's a very clear premise and the way the story evolves to Jackie evading police and eventually hunting an outlaw feel like a natural progression of events rather than a bunch of random shit to justify Jackie doing cool Kung Fu stuff. Granted, "cool Kung Fu" stuff is definitely the main appeal here and on that level, The Young Master rules. We get a ton of fun fight and chase scenes which introduce weapons, and some particularly ingenious work with a bench. The final fight is also this absurdly drawn out epic duel which leads to a really funny ending.

3. Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

The film is a sci-fi-noir about a spy who infiltrates the dystopic city of Alphaville, his overriding mission to destroy the city. Stylistically, the film is a very cool blending of two different genres. The noir roots are probably most clear with the trench-coat detective and dark rooms, but Godard also creates a futuristic setting in what is essentially just modern Paris. There's nothing overtly fantastical, but through lighting and smart shot selection, Alphaville still feels an alienating and dystopic space. The distorted electronic voice of the evil super computer Alpha 60 also helped a lot. Narration in Godard's films is often this sort of gentle whisper, but here, it's more a mechanical growl. I really loved just spending time in this world.

The actual story of Alphaville is a pretty standard sci-fi yarn about an oppressive state that controls emotion and personal expression, but more important than the plot is the way the film blends the thematic strands of its two genres. Specifically, Alphaville emphasizes the powerlessness of the individual in a corrupt world which is inherit to both film-noir and science-fiction. There's a bleakness to the worldview here, with the protagonist eventually pushed into incredible violence in order to accomplish anything. But, maybe there's hope too, as the film does suggest a break from oppressive systems, even if this optimism feels less believable than the more world-weary darkness that defines most of the story.


2. Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi, 1967)

Samurai Rebellion is a slow movie, but with good reason. The film concerns itself with an aging samurai (the man himself, Toshiro Mifune), slowly standing up to the unjust Aizu clan for forcing his daughter-in-law to care for the clan's heir. Masaki Kobayashi spends a great deal of time setting up the events leading to this rebellion. How Yogoro and Ichi are intially forced into marriage but don't really love each other, the Aizu clan summoning Ichi back, Isaburo (Mifune) touched by the young lovers and coming to help them and the slow lead up to violence. The film doesn't need to spend this much time setting up these details from a strictly narrative perspective, but one result of this long build-up is gets you itching for some bloodshed. This is a movie called Samurai Rebellion afterall. And one the action finally comes in the third act, the initial exhilaration is soon deflated by a growing sense of fatalism as things quickly fall apart and it becomes clear things can't end well.

This third act is really amazing and pays off the build-up beautifully. The story here is also intriguing as it's about rebellion in a time of relative peace. On the surface, things seem okay, however closer inspection reveals an unjust hierarchy that overtime our hero cannot abide. It's a more complex portrait of rebellion and Mifune plays the growing discontent beautifully. Placing the film in the context of Masaki Kobayashi's other works, I don't think Samurai Rebellion is as perfect as Harakiri or as visually creative as Kwaidan, but it is an intriguing portrait of Edo-era Japan. And man that ending rules.


1. Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)



Different though these movies may be, I do think they need to be taken in tandem to really feel the weight of the story. At its simplest, Soderbergh's epic portrait of Che Guevara is a rise and fall narrative. A tale of how a revolutionary successfully led a campaign against an oppressive regime and how that same revolutionary failed to do the same elsewhere. It's that contrast that makes the two movies so powerful. While both deal in somewhat muted emotions, there is a certain understated excitement to Part One was we slowly watch Che in the rebels triumph. Conversely, Part Two is stricken by the haunting inevitability as we watch Che slowly march towards his death.

I certainly don't think either movie is perfect. We never get much of a sense for Che Guevara outside of his role as a rebel and neither film delves particularly deeply into political ideology. Nonetheless, the man's deep sense of conviction to a cause and intelligence come though in spades. I've always admired how subtle an actor Benicio del Toro can be and his work here is among his best. We leave the film feeling like we know Che a great deal despite how limited the film's perspective is and that's precisely because of how powerful an impression del Toro leaves. And really, any film dealing with the many complexities of this point of history is going to have its gaps. What Soderbergh and his team create with Che is nonetheless a deeply compelling and unique piece of cinema. I'd rank it among Soderbergh's best.

Whaaat?

&

Yeah, it really worked for everyone.

Eight days late.  Whatever.

5. Burn! (1969)
Gillo Pontecorvo is a director who had a pretty weird career all told. He scraped by making mostly documentaries for most of the 50s and 60s, had a huge international breakthrough with his masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, made the movie Burn!... and then basically retired. He did make one more movie about a decade later and had a couple documentary projects, but in many ways Burn! seemed to be the end of the line and I’m not sure why because this is hardly a movie to be ashamed of. The film is set sometime in the 19th Century in a fictional Caribbean island under the colonial control of the Portuguese and Marlon Brando stars as a British agent sent to forment a slave rebellion on the island, not out of any humanitarian concern but to advance British interests in taking control of the island themselves. It’s a bigger budget work than The Battle For Algiers for better or worse and doesn’t have quite the same documentary-like intensity that that film had and the interactions between Brando and some of the less experienced actors in the film can be a touch stiff. However, the political content at the center of the film are palpable. I’m pretty sure Pontecorvo’s aim was to compare the 19th century colonial freebooting seen in the film with the Cold War driven proxy wars and foreign interference that was going on in the world when the film was made. It’s not quite the unimpeachable innovative classic that its predecessor was but it’s worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five

4. The Red Turtle (2016)
This film was sort of hard to classify when it came out in 2016; Studio Ghibli had worked on it but it wasn’t truly one of their movies but was instead a French co-production directed by a Dutch guy named Michaël Dudok de Wit that Ghibli was contracted to work on or something. You can kind of see their style coming through in the film but also that it’s being combined with other ideas and it also doesn’t really use their usual storytelling style. The film actually doesn’t have any spoken dialogue at all and instead tells this odd little fable of a story about a guy who washes ashore on an island (presumably because of a shipwreck) and ends up hooking up with a turtle that turns into a lady… that last part makes more sense in context. It’s not the easiest movie to analyze because the story is very pared down and simple, there’s not a whole lot to dig into, but it sets a pretty good tone, has good visuals, and is pretty effective at telling its story through those visuals. It’s a pretty good piece of animation, but not necessarily a game changing classic or anything.
***1/2 out of Five
 
3. The Last Seduction (1994)
The Last Seduction is a film that is somewhat known for its production history as director John Dahl got the film made by selling it to his producers as a more shamelessly lascivious kind of “erotic thriller” of the skinemax variety and while they weren’t looking he turned the film into a more respectable neo-noir in the vein of Blood Simple or Body Heat. Linda Fiorentino stars as a particularly “fatale” femme Fatale who manipulates men into murdering for her (and occasionally does her own murdering). Her performance is the obvious standout in the film and the film’s story has some of that fatalism we’ve come to expect from the genre. The film’s budgetary limitations and occasional dives into salaciousness do reveal its origins and the film generally makes more sense as an entity once you know that backstory, it’s also a movie that generally exudes 90s-ness and you have to kind of be willing to go along with that aesthetic and find it interesting to enjoy the movie.
***1/2 out of Five

2. Palm Springs (2020)
Normally reserve these kind of rankings for non-2020 movies but... I kind of spent a lot of time watching Jet Li movies this month, so pickings were slim. Review in the review thread.
**** out of Five

1. The Americanization of Emily (1964)
I’ve long been fascinated by the title of this movie. Didn’t even know what it was or what it was about, but the title was striking. Striking to the point where I’ve been planning to use a variation on it as the title for a project I’ve been working on so… I figured it was about time I saw the actual movie. As it turns out this is something of a satire set during World War II, not a million miles removed from Catch-22. The film was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Arthur Hiller but that Chayefsky screenplay is clearly front and is set in England shortly before the D-Day invasion and focuses on a naval officer whose job is to act as an assistant for admiral, and he’s happy to have a job that keeps him out of combat and has this sort of philosophy about why he’s fine with this “cowardice.” The Emily in the title is a local British woman who starts dating this attaché and sort of challenges him on his shit. The “Americanization” refers to the struggle she has to maintain her own principles rather than get tempted by all the comfortable shit that the Americans are bringing over like Hershey bars. That the movie isn’t straightforwardly patriotic in its depiction of the U.S. military and the war feels subversive, certainly different from the depiction of military life we saw from movies made closer to when the actual war was. The movie ultimately isn’t quite sure how it wants to end and is perhaps more witty than it is insightful, but definitely an underseen gem.
**** out of Five

Are we not allowed to post 2020 movies?

You bastard.

I know PG Cooper has Nazi fans, but didn’t expect him to turn into one. My next list will only be 2020 movies.