Doormouse Etc.

Best Films Of 2011

2012-01-05T16:58:00.000-08:00

This year in film in images; short reviews forth coming, but if pictures are worth a thousand words than here's roughly 30,000 words on why movies are still worth seeking out.

From The Top: The Tree Of Life, Drive, Melancholia, The Future, Shame, The Skin I Live In, The Mill And The Cross, Another Earth, Beyond The Black Rainbow, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Target(Mishen), Hugo, Attack The Block, Play, X-Men: First Class, The End(Al Nihaya), The Day He Arrives, Faust, Coriolanus, The Gaurd, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, Contagion, A Dangerous Method, The Turin Horse, Scream 4, Sucker Punch, Hanna, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Adventures Of Tintin, Too Big Too Fail, The Innkeepers, Bridesmaids, The Immortals.

Full 2011 list: http://mubi.com/lists/2011--184

My 2011 Reading Log

2011-10-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

In order of least(top)to favorite(bottom). comics then novels. 2011 so far...

Comics:

Novels:

The Weight Of The World

2011-10-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

Melancholia(2011)
Directed By Lars Von Trier

Melancholia is the latest film from Lars Von Trier, tagged as an “emotional disaster movie” about two sisters Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsboug, facing internal and external catastrophes. In the first half of the film we watch Dunst sabotage her own idealic wedding as a sudden gloom descends on her like light piercing between clouds, in patches at first until she’s immersed, and the weddings called off. The second half follows the other sister Gainsbourg as a hidden planet is on a crash course with Earth, and her denial, begging, and panic in it’s wake. “If you think I’m afraid of the planet, your too stupid.”, says Dunst in the second half, to a crumbling Gainsbourg. The first half of the film is like “Rachel Getting Married” a lavish wedding party with emotional dead lights slipping through cracks in the opulence. “We have a deal!...The deal is that you be happy.”, says Kiefer Sutherland, as Gainsbourg’s wealthy husband, bitterly footing the bill for in-laws he distrusts and resents. Dunst’s parents are divorced and vocal about it, her mother’s cruel comments to the wedding party contrast against her otherwise hippie free spirit attire. She is against this marriage, and marriage in general, her affable doormat husband is content to smile quietly as she berates him. We get the impression this fight has been going on for years, boiling over anytime the two come into contact with each other. Likewise we come to understand that Dunst’s angst is nothing new, her mother’s speech only serves as a catalyst. “Let’s not have any episodes today?” warns Gainsbourg to Dunst early on. Everyone at the wedding seems to be walking on eggshells, except for her mother who is claimed by her own misery early on, and refuses to leave her room or speak to her daughter. Like the planet Melancholia lurking all along behind a hidden star her soul sapping depression is waiting behind the forced smile Kiefer believes he has paid for with generosity. This relationship plays out another way between Dunst and her boss. Some have suggested Melancholia is a kind of companion piece to “Antichrist”, but that film had at least a promise of comeuppance for Willem Defoe’s smug psycho-therapy, while in "Melancholia" there is no justice, only calamity and “evil”. Dunst claims as much as the final act approaches, “the world is evil…and we're all be better off”.Like Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” "Melancholia" opens with a dreamlike tableau of images obliquely representing events and images we will later observe, and also involves two women whose personalities slowly merge and their roles of authority and patient reverse. In “Anti-Christ” Gainsbourg lashes out at Defoe and herself, but in "Melancholia" with all encompassing destruction and extinction on it’s way even bitterness wears itself out. Dunst comes alive, so to speak, only as the end is closest and only when her sister and nephew are coming apart. Her, dare I say in a Lars Von Trier film review, compassion for her nephew and sister, comes from their entrance into the world of desperation and despair that Dunst has been occupying for most of the film. She could easily abandon them, but she decides (:SPOILERALERT:) to build a shelter that she has told the boy is magic. To me the construction of the shelter and the final moments are cinematically sublime, with all doom that’s come before, and the very literal death from above crashing down on them, and with Dunst's explicit refusal to sit on the porch with a bottle of wine as Gainsbourg suggest, for Dunst to play along with her nephew in one final illusion is what makes the film truly tragic, and not just fucked up and weird. The image we are left with is a frail shelter of twigs, with human beings holding hands in the center while the world bears down on them, unprotected by the magical belief and faith in the symbol they’ve erected around themselves. But still Dunst goes through with creating the symbol, even in a world where it’s empirically meaningless. I don’t mean to say the film supports the old “no atheists in foxholes” adage, or that the magic cave is just a satirical example of denial of death, Dunst choice to build the cave, is as much for her family whom she like life, loves (her nephew) and hates (her sister) regardless of it’s value as good or evil, because its all that’s still exists. All that’s left is hope, doubt, and innocence holding hands in the end, but it’s Dunt’s hope she’s done one true thing in the cave, the boy’s doubt that the cave will work or mean anything, and the innocence of Gainsbourg’s sobbing, jibbering, terror, if you watch the impact carefully you’ll notice Gainsbourg is the first to let go of the other two. As a rule, the endings of Lars Von Trier films, the final scenes, are usually the most important parts of the film. They radically challenge our views of everything that’s come before, most notably in “Breaking The Waves” and “Dogville”, and "Melancholia" continues with this tradition. Why was the fairy tale wedding ultimately a sham, but the real sham fairy tale enacted in the end scene more real than anything that’s come before? Is shared suffering necessary as a pre-requisite to connecting with other human beings? Think of those characters who hide from each other from the mother in her bedroom, to the father reduced to a goodbye note, to Sutherland’s abrupt exit, to Udo Kier as the wedding planner who won’t look Dunst in the face because “she ruined my wedding”, all of these are connected, twigs along the magic cave to keep Melancholia away.

Is When?

2011-09-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

The Future(2011)
Directed By Miranda July

Miranda July has a very singular cinematic style that most people dismiss away as twee or cloying, which to me is a very superficial dismissal, because it gets no deeper than her characters softly eccentric clothing and homemade art projects, and ignores the complex webs of relationships she created in "Me, And You, And Everyone We Know" which continues in her latest film "The Future", but now includes characters that aren't human, and events impossible. The Future is about a couple in their mid-thirties, Sophie (Miranda July) is a children's dance instructor, while Jason (Hamish Linklater) has a job in tech-support that he can do from home on the couch. The two live happily, if uneventfully, in their own world of private jokes, musings, and intimate tangents, the kind that all couples have but that like excessive public displays of affection are rarely observed by those in the outside world. They have decided to adopt a kitten, but a sick one that is scheduled to die in six months, so that it will be not so much a commitment as a few months of charity, and maybe also maybe a dry run to having children. The "c" word never comes up directly, but its visible in nervous glances they exchange when they discover the cat could live another four years. "We'll be forty by then". The kitten in question, named Paw Paw, also serves as a narrator, but one whose perspective is completely limited to his cage, and his imaginings of what life will be like once he is adopted by July and Linklater. Paw Paw is unfailing, undying hope for the future incarnate. He's always been an outside cat, the world of inside sounds like a paradise. So too, do July and Linklater proceed from their cage like apartment to map out their own futures. July convinces Linklater, they are getting older and must seize the day! Seizing the day requires them to quite their jobs, vow to be "sincere" with everyone and in all things, to limit Internet access to one hour a day, and follow their dreams. But what are their dreams? What one of July's points here seems to be is that people often decide to follow their dreams, before they even know what their dreams are. No one is allowed to exist in the present, unless it is in service to the future. Maybe it's better to just sleep soundly next to your loved one than bother with dreams. "It's a widely known fact that dreams are just your brains way of taking a dump at the end of the day."-Stella, "Kaboom" One great scene finds July watching two of her friends, whose lives seem to pass by in seconds, until she's standing in front of their grandchildren. Notice all the trophies on one side in the screen-shot below from said scene.
Linklater isn't sure what his dreams are, he wants to "help the world" but doesn't know how or where to begin. He takes a job with a "non-profit" going door to door trying to get people to buy trees to be planted throughout the city. July tries to do a video-project for YouTube called "30 days, 30 dances", inspired by videos of younger girls dancing in their bedrooms imitating girls from rap videos. Her dances are not as overtly sexual, but slinky, jerky performance art that never seems to get itself started. Linklater's sincerity or guilt for not feeling "more" leads him to buy a drawing on sale at the animal shelter. July's renewed sense of destiny and the significance of everything leads her in a moment of self-doubt, to impulsively to get into contact with the artist, a man named Marshall.
This "yes to everything" attitude, quickly leads to an affair. He puts his hand on her leg, she humps his furniture. Marshall is an older suburban single dad and owner of his own company. Though we never learn too much of his perspective its obvious she is a shot life to him, while he is her chance to be a "kept woman", free of having to decide anything more about the future. Finally a chance, to just "be" and let someone else foot the bill for once. No more worries about rent, career, talent, beauty, or the entropy of such things. "I wish I was prettier. I'm on the verge of being attractive, but I still have to make my case to everyone who looks at me.", July says of herself early on. "Your free now" Marshall tells her during a "Welcome" barbeque as he gestures her in the direction of his daughter.
Meanwhile when Linklater discovers the affair, before he can ask any questions, he manifests an ability to freeze time by placing his hands on July's head. Here the narrative splits in two parallel stories, one of July's new life in the suburbs, and the other of Linklater's in the apartment where time stands still. Linklater begins talking to the moon, which speaks back to him in the voice of an old man that he meet earlier; a man he believed was a sign of he and July's future of growing old together. July's new suburban life is just as dull as her old life, but with no chance of failure or responsibility hanging over her. An old t-shirt of Linklater's seems to be edging its way across town of its own accord, like a creeping memory of the world she left behind. At the same time Marshall's daughter begins to ominously dig a a hole in the backyard, but she wont say for what or why?This all sounds complicated, but when all is said and done, the plot makes sense on an emotional level that never gets buried under the allure of its fantasy elements. "The Future" finds Miranda July stepping into interstitial territory previously synonymous with Woody Allen and Charlie Kaufman; combing personal details ("30 Dances, 30 Days" is a more amateurish version of July's Blond Redhead music video), with a satirical eye for conventional relationships equally open to turns of the dramatic, the neurotic, the deadpan, and the poetic. Quitting your job in the worst recession in decades because your a month away from getting a sick kitten that has made you suddenly aware of your impending adulthood/responsibility/death is just as possible as freezing time with your thoughts, talking to the moon, or stepping out of your life and into your fantasy kept suburban wifedom, because in "The Future" all things are possible. Cats are dreaming of life in your house, but the future is less fresh tuna and flying cars as much recordings of bedroom rump-shaking and trees pining over places to be planted. Maybe its the looming of the future itself, its shadow across the surface of what responsible lives are supposed to resemble that drives these characters from their simple "twee" world of uni-sex haircuts, security blankets and sleepy, snuggly, afternoons, and into ruin, bitterness, and isolation. "When your just starting out...you'll do terrible things to each other"-the old man. But ignoring the future, is no better than blindly saying "yes" to all it, because all decisions have consequences and time can't stand still forever. What begins with all the makings of a typical rom-com story of slackers finding purpose, sidewinds into magic realist study of fears of parenthood/adulthood like "Eraserhead" if he had to work at a build-a-bear in the mall. For all its strangeness, "The Future" has the most realistic endings of any film Ive seen this year. Bitter-sweet is beauty without sentiment, true acceptance of how cosmically wonderous all the minutia of daily life is while never forgetting most of it will be forgotten tomorrow. "The Future" is bittersweet. Your kittens is wounded and waiting.

Shopping Is Feeling

2011-09-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

True Stories(1986)Directed By David Byrne

"I used to like dinosaurs, I think allot of kids did"-David Byrne David Byrne of the Talking Heads, has made one of the oddest films I have ever seen. It feels like he came up with an idea, and then had to put allot of Talking Heads musical moments into it, to justify it's existence. The songs are plentiful (not the band's best, and a few of their worst), and the routines surrounding them are whimsical and absurd, and at times just terrible (there's a fashion show in the mall, that's pretty great though, recalling Fellini's Roma, a movie I hated, but which this makes more than a few nods). The film is set in a place called Virgil in Texas, a small town having its annual celebration of "Specialness", and follows Byrne(who also stars) as our guide to the town and its eccentric folk. While making the film Byrne collected all the oddest "true stories" he could from newspapers, like Spalding Grey as a man who has not spoken to his wife directly for 15 years, to a woman who has retired early and only wants to stay in bed and watch TV, to John Goodman, who if Byrne is narrator, than he is the closest we come to a main character. Goodman is trying to find a wife, by putting out televised commercials of himself; "I'm 6'3", and maintain a very consistent panda bear shape." It's dated, but very unique and a bit inspired. Rumor has it there are 50 sets of twins in this movie, I tried counting but lost track. It's just one of many strange, deadpan features of this movie, like David Byrne's cowboy hat and voice which never rises above monotone. "What time is it? No time to look back!" Allot of it feels out of place, well actually all of it feels out place, but it would be silly to act like it's oddness was only a detriment, it's also the driving point of interest. Like the fake static backgrounds of Texas landscape during Byrne's driving sequences.
It's a beautifully made film, the cinematographer was a vet, and it's full of musings like "I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is." In the end, it's amusing and idiosyncratic portrait of Americana, the weird tale, tall tales, and Byrne's stylings both "Talking Heads" and poetic. Later David Lynch's short film "The Cowboy And The Frenchmen" would seek out similar territory, if not quite same surrealism of a big mouth bass on the wall next to a portrait of dogs playing poker and voodoo alters in the backs of pawn shops, the type on display in the town of Virgil. This is a movie I like to hum along to. "Shopping is feeling"

Man, Machine, And Melody

2011-09-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

Drive(2011)
Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn

"Drive" is car-chase film with so much excessive style that the fact that there are very few car chases or scenes involving driving at all for that matter is excusable. From Nicolas Winding Refn, "Drive" is the first American film for the Danish director whose last films "Valhalla Rising" and "Bronson", were both examples of apex genre film making. This time around Ryan Gosling stars as the unnamed driver, part time mechanic and part time Hollywood stunt-man, and moonlighting as getaway driver, whose credo is that he is only involved in any crime as long as he is driving and not a second more. This kind of motto is only of interest, because the detachment Gosling shows to his fellow criminals is the same face he shows to everyone he interacts with. “I’m yours in that window and not a second after”. This changes when Gosling meets a neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her son, a neighborly ride after some car trouble leads, to a slowly and quietly blooming fondness between the two, until it’s revealed her husband is going to be released from prison in a week. This sets off a chain of events involving ex-Hollywood producers of “eighties action movies” turned mobsters, a suitcase full of cash, a heist gone wrong, etc. What makes “Drive” worth seeing? Why not just watch any of "The Transporter" or "The Fast And The Furious" franchises? “Drive” has style, like all of Refn’s films not style over substance, but style as substance. The music, the costumes (Gosling’s jacket a gaudier homage, among many, to Kenneth Anger’s “Lucifer Rising”), the Los Angeles setting, and the cars themselves take on real weight in the film. The music above all, makes the film though. According to Gosling the music “…is this dark disco sound: hyper-romantic dance music that has a menacing undertone.”, and Refn “If this movie was a piece of music it would be Kraftwerk because Driver is half man, half machine. Kraftwerk was about taking technology and make it melodic, so that was the right approach. We wanted electronic but not retro.”. Bubbly synths and soft female vocals, act as the perfect compliment to the driver’s sun bleached and neon streaked drives down L.A.s “100,000” streets. It’s important to remember though that Gosling’s character is not playing the songs that form the films soundtrack (it seems as if he prefers silence actually). The film itself produces the music, which though sounding great, doesn’t make emotional sense to the film until later on, when we finally get glimpses of the driver’s naivete. “I don’t eat I don’t sleep I do nothing but think of you”, croons “Desire” on the track “Under Your Spell”, as Gosling and the neighbor think each other. Like Tsai-Ming Liang’s musical-hybrids the pop songs subtitle what the love-lorn characters wish they could say to each other. By the time the credits role to a song called (with its title sung in refrain during the fade to black) “A Real Hero”, there is little doubt, that the sugary music is the very sound of the driver’s heartbeat beneath the roar of engines and tire screech. Man, machine, and melody. The Driver himself is a largely silent character, bashful and childlike to some “I thought you could take the money and go away, and that….I could uh come with you and…protect you?”, but prone to outbursts of violence, as if they were always lurking beneath the surface waiting to emerge. One scene finding him masked Michael Myers style on a beach, seems to confirm than for all his strong silent type charm, there is something not right quite right about him. Gosling deserves top marks for playing being able to play innocent puppy-dog and blood soaked terror with such command. All of the performances in “Drive” are good though, Ron Pearlman seems right at home as a mob boss, Bryan Cranston does well in his bit as the washed up mentor, but Christina Hendricks is under-used. Still it’s rather telling about the seriousness of “Drive” that it would rather use a bomb-shell like Hendricks to keep us on our toes, rather than introduce us to her bending over a motorcycle Michael Bay style or something equally exploitative. Though I wouldn't have minded a little exploitation here to be honest...alas... Albert Brooks is also surprising here as our hero’s main nemeses, an ex producer of “shitty 80’s action movies” of the type that “Drive” is signifying or as Refn says, " “Drive” also belongs to the genre of L.A. noir and to this niche genre, which is called neon noir and a lot of those films are from around 1979 to 1984.” Though the film did remind me of Los Angeles thriller’s like “To Live And Die In LA” (which also features an electronic pop soundtrack from Wang Chung) and “Vice Squad” where the mask/beach scene in “Drive” is as strange as the funeral fetish scene of the later. Never did the film feel derivative of anything it was compared too, especially the likes of “Bullit” and “Vanishing Point”. “Drive” is less like “Point Blank” and more like “The Limey”, “Point Blank’s” younger modern nephew wearing it's Uncle's vintage clothes.In “Drive” the driving is more of a symbol for Gosling’s character’s shark-like loneliness which is only alleviated when he has passengers, someone to share the ride with. The L.A. river scene recalling the out-of -idiom joy rides from "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid", and the warmth there in. The golden scorpion on the back of Gosling’s jacket cannot be ignored though, “you heard the story of the scorpion right? Well your friend didn’t make it across the river”. Just as it is not the scorpion’s nature to abide fellow travelers, so to is the driver fated to destroy anything that gets close to him, regardless of intentions. “Drive” may not be as bizarre or existential as something supposedly dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky might lead you to believe, but it’s a compelling thriller that will make you jump when a gun does go off, rather that turn automatic fire into white noise as more standard fare might this past summer has. I don’t think I’ve ever felt embarrassed for a hero the way I did when Gosling says “…I could protect you”, staring at his feet like a ten year old caught red-handed. That kind of vulnerability is rare in an action film, even rarer in a "super-hero" film as this has been referred to, by it's cast. I also don’t think there’s been a better closing scene/song match-up since “The Breakfast Club” or “Dogville”. Like so many wounded heroes in westerns riding off into the sunset, it’s easy to imagine Gosling’s driver, mouthing the words “real human being” to himself while his guts are literally spilling out all over the upholstery, until he becomes just another set of tail and headlights amongst 100,000 neon streets streaking their way across the blacktop into eternity.

Nostalgia's Revenge

2011-08-22T17:07:00.000-07:00

Super 8(2011)
Directed By J. J. Abrams

The zombie film the kids were making before the train blew up had more going for it than anything that actually happens in "Super 8". "Mars Attacks" is retro sci-fi at full throttle, this film is a nostalgia trip for fans of classic Steven Spielberg films. "You've gotta put that scene in, so that later on the audience cares who get's eaten" a young director says to his crew, a lame brained excuse for the useless funeral prologue, melancholy lead and his forced star-crossed puppy wuv. When we finally see what all the fuss is about it's a beast with a tediously predictable origin (like something a unimaginative ten year old would come up with) and even worse it looks exactly like the beast from Cloverfield, just smaller and less intimidating. No effort seems to have gone into designing an original looking monster at all, which if there is a bare minimum I want out of a monster movie its just that.I enjoyed most of "Lost", "Fringe", and liked "Cloverfield", but "Star Trek" was awful and this even worse. The kids were lame except for the little pyro, the camaraderie and chemistry of kid team-ups like "Monster Squad", "The Goonies", and to a lesser extent Robert Rodriguez's wonky but still unique, "Spy Kids" series, is absent here, and the dead parent drama that is supposed to connect all the dramatic plots together, rings hollow and cloying like the even flatter and blander "Monsters".The train sequence is the only portion of the film that approaches genuine spectacle, the rest is just non-threatening and often barely palpable suspense. If you've forgotten what a good monster movie for the whole family can be re-watch "The Host".
Not to mention the great giant-fighting mockumentaries "Troll Hunter" and "Big Man Japan". The hype machine behind "Cloverfield" when all was said and done seemed appropriate, while in "Super 8" the mystery is a let down, because it's basically "Cloverfield" with some hallmark card and completely unearned "E.T." sentimentality, that doesn't promote the humanism (of the film's it apes) so much as justify the cynicism that leads audiences to "Rampage" and "The Human Centipede" to get their thrills.
"X-Men: First Class" and especially the surprising "Attack The Block" were retro, youthful, relevant, dramatic, had unique action set pieces, and didn't need to explain to us why we are supposed to be care about a character, it made us feel it. Compare the openings sequences of these three films, and its easy to see why Super 8 goes so wrong. Its restrained tone of domestic does not sharpen or highlight the domestic drama its just hopelessly anchored by it. I was hoping the jolly fat kid would have been the lead, his crush on the lead actress could have been cute and offered opportunities for much needed lightness. Instead with the mop topped sad kid she gets to emote about dark secrets and second hand guilt. What an adventure. I never thought I would say this but Micheal Bay would have made this a film worth seeing, it might not be good, but it would at least be worth seeing.
"Super 8" is not worth seeing.

War Horse

2011-08-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

13 Assassins(2010)
Directed By Takashi Miike

Takashi Miike is back in rare form. I was mildly amused by his Zebraman series and Yatterman and laughed out loud more than a few times during Detective Story, but Miike had been overdue for something truly grand, Sukiyaki Western Django's notwithstanding. He seems to have found a measure of cross-over success in that most quintesentially Japanese of genre's the Samurai film, relatively fresh territory for the workaholic auteur who cut his teeth on Yazuki and bleakly humored trangressive freakouts like Miike has. The film retains some of his usual genre distortions and deconstructions (like a gleefully nihilistic Robert Altman), specifically in the perverse Lord the assassins are retained to eliminate and his disdain for the samurai who serve him and their blind eyed obedience. He is a typical Miike character an aristocratic rapist, with a childlike fascination with violence, who asks in awe of the carnage around him "The age of war...was it always like this?" Paul Veerhoven's anti-military inter-galactic space war "Starship Troopers" is Miike's favorite film, and its influence shows in 13 Assasins as much as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which have been mentioned repeatedly in multiple reviews. The final hour or so of this film is one continuous battle/fight/chase scene and it's a thing of cinematic joy to behold and really the main reason to see this film. And then to see it again, and again. There is no choppy CGI on display here just old fashioned martial arts mayhem and daring stuntcraft, explosive as the arterial spray of a kitana to the jugular vein. When it comes to action films they rarely get better than this.

Art Or Something Like It LIVE AUGUST 6TH!!!

2011-07-27T17:14:00.001-07:00

For those of you in the Southern California area interested in seeing my work up close and for free. I will be having a solo gallery of my works on display August 6th in Long Beach. This is the first show I’ve had this year, and so far the only one scheduled so if you can be there. BE THERE. Message me if you need any additional information. Tell your friends.

http://www.experiencela.com/calendar/event/39827

Are You There God, Its Me Terrance?

2011-06-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Tree Of Life(2011)Directed By Terrence Malick

"The Tree Of Life" is the latest poetry reading and montage from Terrence Malick, a filmmaker known for his reclusiveness, large gaps of time between films, and love of interior monologue voice over narration. "The Tree Of Life" is Malick’s most experimental and lyrical film, hovering around the subjective POV of a young boy named Jack from birth to adolescence in suburban Waco, Texas (the director's hometown) in the 50’s, and into his dissatisfied life as a grown up Sean Penn living in the modern day big city, with a brief history of life from the big bang through cell division in the primordial oceans to the rise and fall of dinosaurs, interspersed throughout the film for good measure. There are also portions which take place entirely within an interstitial space between thought and spirit, a bedroom underwater, a red desert, and a beach all of characters find themselves in like the end of Fellini’s 8 ½.

In my opinion Malick had worked himself into a creative corner with his last film “A New World” which added the “twist” of shifting to Pocahontas’s perspective half-way through but otherwise used the same formula that Malick had used in his three previous films of voice over and carefully choreographed nature photography. “The Tree Of Life” also shares these characteristics but makes them more central than ever before. For the first thirty to forty minutes of the film (its hard to keep track of time in a film as dense as this) it’s easy to wonder if a conventional dialogue driven drama will ever begin to emerge.

Once our main character Jack reaches around ten the film becomes a slightly more lucid coming of age story. The conflicts are still largely internal though, the boy wrestling with “the way of nature and the way of grace” epitomized by his relationship with his terrifying/awe inspiring father and loving/naïve mother. Much of the beauty and majesty of the opening minutes which expertly combine a Herzogian eye for nature at its most surreal and Kubrick at his most bombastic and operatic, are held in sharp contrast with the limited world of the boy’s physical life largely consisting of a house, some surrounding woods and fields, and the all consuming tension created by the presence of his father.

This oedipal conflict (son love mommy/pleasure but resents daddy for placing limitations on these and behavior or typical for the time good cop bad cop parenting structure) sandwiched between kaleidoscopic imagery, constantly moving (panning, dollying, craning, but not shaky hand-held) camera work, and some of the most kinetic editing, reminded me instantly of Gaspar Noe’s much maligned and personally beloved “Enter The Void” which is for better or worse kissing cousins with “The Tree Of Life”. If “The Tree Of Life” is a prayer to all of creation, then “Enter the Void” is a hedonistic joy ride to oblivion, at opposite poles of experience the films are remarkably similar. The recent equally mystical, equally impressive, and equally under-understood (though much more subdued), “Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives” falling somewhere between the two, and forming a spiritual trinity, much like the symbolic characters of “Tree Of Life”. It may be helpful to think of the characters are concepts rather than people, "The Tree Of Life" or Sephirot (not that the film adheres to this in anything other than name only, like "Enter The Voids" appropriation of a Tibetan moniker) after all, are the varieties of emanations of God in the physical and immaterial planes in Kaballah, not a literal tree.

The symbolic trinity of the film is not mother, father, son and nor is it the three sons themselves, but mother, father, brother. Though were told the fate of one of the brothers in the film, it’s not simply his end that makes him significant, it’s that his mere existence acted as a reminder for Jack that besides the mother and father “wrestling within me, always wailing...” there are also other people in the world, people that he could in turn be a source of cruelty or kindness. Brother in the genial sense I think we can take to mean as Brother in the universal or spiritual sense, meaning all people (agape). The voice over narrations of both the mother and father are directed at Jack, but it’s important to note that the Jack's reflections seem almost always directed to God."You let a boy drown today. You’ll let anything happen.” to “Please kill him [the father]. Make him go away” to “Before I knew who you were, I believed in you. I recognized you in the streams, the trees, etc”. The beach scene one might be tempted to see as an afterlife, and I flirted with that idea for a moment, but dismissed the thought because :SPOILER:: the brother is the same age he was when Jack moved out of the house, not the age he was when he died at 19. The youngest of the three brothers is also there frozen in time as a child. If this is an afterlife shot, then it’s of a completely subjective afterlife where loved ones appear only in forms which are most emotionally relevant to those observing them and not as they would see themselves. “You’re my child and you’ll always be my child”, taken to an extreme. That’s not Heaven folks, that’s “Solaris”. “We don’t want other worlds, we only want a mirror”. ::SPOILEROVER::

Regardless of where Malick draws his metaphysical lines, the resounding spiritual cry of the film is obvious. Alain Resnais’ "Mon Oncle D’amerique” examined the lives of three people from birth into adulthood through the eyes of evolutionary behaviorist and philosopher Henri Laborit. In that film like “Tree Of Life” we observe human life cycles next to animal and geological ones in a free flowing montage.
Indeed that film also features extensive voice-over narration. The ideas in “Tree Of Life” are not new, in fact they are almost ancient in their simplicity.
The question is of nature vs. nurture, and the almost impossible task of disentangling one from the other, or trying to sort out or remember a particular moment, through a web of ephemeral memories and emotions are lifetime long (and maybe longer) of one being greater than the other.

"The Tree Of Life" is as ambitious as films get in its cinematography, editing, structure, and content. The performances are good, but the editing never really settles down long enough for us to “get to know” the characters or too much of their personalities, and if you are among those for whom drama is the foundation stone of cinema (which is to my ears as arbitrary as saying costume design is the foundation stone of cinema) than “The Tree Of Life” will probably seem like a dull dream of dinosaurs and baby boomer malaise. For me precisely because the film does not lean to heavily on the domestic and inter-personal drama it opens itself up to doing the real business of cinema, which is visually eradicating those boundaries between internal and external perceptions, ideas, and emotions. If anything negative could fairly be said of “The Tree Of Life”, one could make a case for it being, underneath the visual and auditory chutzpah, all too simple in its Oedipal, Biblical, or New Age expressions. The Father only seems to share his fears and the Mother only her hopes, and we spend our longest time with the son as he contemplates the effects of “sin” (ei the possibility that his parents may be wrong, and if “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted”). Malick goes to lengths to make us feel as small in the greater structures of the universe as the son feels as an infant looking at the titanic legs of his parents. Eventually this awe at the world, becomes, at least, in Malick's Americana inner conflict and anxiety, which either we transcend at the point of death (discussed above) or we never stop reflecting on. The last image in the film is a bridge rising out of a morning mist. Does a bridge represent travel itself or an eventual destination on the other side?

"The Tree Of Life" is the most ambitious and accomplished American film I’ve seen since David Lunch’s “Inland Empire” and PT Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”. This is the type of cinema that will endure and will provoke argument for years to come. It deserves, begs, and screams from the fibers of its celluloid to be seen in a theater on a big screen. If you’re going spend you’re hard earned money on seeing on film this year, then see "Tree Of Life", it is genuine cinema, everything else so far this year, has just been big screen DVD.

Cloudy Judgement

2011-05-03T12:33:00.000-07:00

Thor(2011) Directed By Kenneth Branagh

"Thor" is a film based on a Marvel superhero comic book, based loosely on Norse mythology, about the "God of thunder" cast down from Asgard to our human world of the present. Too much time is invested in this flimsy plot of political intrigues between Asgardians and Frost Giants, and the even more tiresome flash-romance of Thor and Natalie Portman (playing an astro-physicist studying "weather anomalies" and "Einstein-Rosen bridges".) Portman is awful by the way, her shocked utterance "oh-my-god" in this film I imagine will become a popular Internet soundbite or gif, akin to Keanu Reeve's "I know Kung-fu". All this talking leaves precious little time for "Thor" in full super-hero regalia to be on-screen. What makes most super-hero films a drag is that they take up too much time trying to find the drama and the realism in the characters at the expense of what made these types stories compelling. The drama is flat, and the action is spread too thin to become kinetic or hypnotic, or whatever it would need to be to justify sitting through the non-special effects portions of the movie. The costume and creature designs are especially bland, and look even worse against a desert small town background. The frost giants look like blue versions of the evil Djin in Wes Craven's "Wishmaster", and the other monster Thor faces is like a walking suit of armor that shoots fire from its eyes, basically yet another giant robot, but plainer and stiffer than usual. And please, Dear Hollywood, stop changing the ethnicity's of classic characters for your adaptations, by which I am referring to the certain Asian and black Norse gods who appear in this feature. If you really want to have non-white characters in sf/fantasy either invent some new ones (PLEASE!) or make use of those who already exist. Simply re-imagining minor or supporting white characters as non-white, only reaffirms that the racial place of non-whites is in minor and supporting roles. The "Council of Conservative Citizens"( a white nationalist group) attempted to organize a boycott of the film, outraged precisely because a black man was now a playing a Scandinavian and Germanic God. Considering the "racial" sub-plot involving Loki's (our ethnically confused villain's) illegitimacy, there is some unintentional irony in introducing non-whites to the very Pantheon which is responsible for our conception of God as a white, bearded, old man (more so than Zeus), but the film makes no substantial use of the fact. Comic book films do not have to be historically accurate, but there is fine line between multi-cultural sensitivity and multi-cultural pandering and these Marvel comics based films specifically have been treading into boarder line "The Last Airbender" territory, though as of yet, still not that bad. Okay then, good I can drop the soap box until my next update on lame brained affirmative action in fantasy land. And were moving on. "Thor" is a film meant to introduce us to the character, so he can later be brought into "The Avengers" film series, set to come out in a few years, and not a film meant to stand on its own, and it doesn't. The film is a less articulate and stylized version of "Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes",http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8VSicDdeA , forcing us to slough through information a child could breeze through in ten minutes. To be fair Thor was never particularly exciting as a comic book character, and had it not been for his membership in the Avengers (he's best in small doses) its likely his title would have been discontinued.Kenneth Branagh's "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" had given me some hope "Thor" might have something interesting or unusual about it, but lightning clearly has not struck twice. More effort went into deciding to end this review with that awful pun, than went into anything having to do with this film.

Slash From The Past

2011-04-20T14:58:00.001-07:00

Scream 4(2011)Directed By Wes Craven

"Scream 4" is Wes Craven's best film since the original "Scream" 15 years ago. The film begins with a fantastic opening of movies-within-movies trying it's best to get past the years and layers of expectations that have grown up around the original films and especially the even more numerous "Scary Movie" series. Rather than try to spin off yet another adventure of poor Sydney (Nev Campbell) being chased around by "Ghostface" and his trademark telephone calls in a new location (college and then a Hollywood studio the last times) "Scream 4" goes back to the sites and sets of the original murders in the town of Woodsborrow. In "Scream 4", "The Stab" series, films within the Scream-universe inspired by the original murders, have been churned out continuously, and after the seventh Sydney returns to Woodsborrow to do a book signing for her new auto-bio "Out Of Darkness", with which she hopes to reinvent herself. Reinventing yourself is a theme and phrase repeated throughout the film, by Sydney with her book, Gale (Courtney Cox) who is trying to adjust to the pace of small-town life, the "film geeks" who believe the killer is trying to do a "remake" (not a sequel) of the original killings for the modern age, and finally the killer itself. "Scream" in all its "meta" ("I don't know what it means I heard one of the kids say it") glory was made for an audience who had seen it all when it came to slasher-horror, but "Scream 4" is the audience whose seen Everything, and then the spin-offs, prequels, sequels, parodies, and failed TV versions of Everything as well. Too bad despite all this prior knowledge, and everyone from the hottest ingenue to the lowliest nerd able to rattle off laundry lists of horror film titles, no one attempts even the most basic survival techniques (like arming themselves) until the films end. In a town full of murder, people still stay at home alone, open front doors, get out of their cars, throw parties, and all but paint targets on their chest. "Name-dropping" is just that; easy list making, if any substantial information or ideas behind any of those names, goes unremembered and unapplied. If no one learns anything from previous films or from events earlier in the film, then the post-modern playfulness becomes empty posturing. Though innovative and entertaining in its own right, the style of the film has more a brain than its characters. To really re-invent the slasher genre you would have to after the "deconstruction" (which "Scream" accomplished amply) you would then take out the parts that don't work and re-construct into something better, not just continue along the same path while commenting and becoming ever more aware of its flaws and limits. "Scream 4" as many times as I laughed or found myself surprised by a bit of witty dialog or particularly effect scare, is still "deconstructing" cliches and tropes while then stumbling right into them (the lack of weapons, opening doors, being alone in desolate areas etc). The film is a wormhole for those looking to examine self-reflexivity nearly to the point of exhaustion, but it doesn't practice enough of what it preaches. Unable to create genuine scares, it makes up for it with jokes, in-jokes, peek-a-boo surprises and peppy dialogue with no lag time or wasted sub-plots. The killers motives haven't advanced much over the series childhood scars and a need for fame come up again and again, but in "Scream4" they come across more bitterly with less faith in the "future". The sequels will not save us. In fifty years as the killer reminds us the slasher film has come no further than "Peeping Tom", in its obsessions with voyeurism and violence, regardless of how non-invasive our modern cameras have become (one character wears a camera attached to his head). But by the end of the movie, truth be told, I was more than satisfied. I enjoyed "Scream 4". Coming out of a three film slump with (in order of awful in decreasing order) "Red Eye", "My Soul To Take", and "Cursed" Wes Craven has finally returned with something lively and stylish. His latest film is not one of his most original but like "Vampire In Brooklyn" and "New Nightmare" proves to be one of his more clever pastiches, and if nothing else confirms Craven's position as a master of his medium.

Hotwire My Heart

2011-04-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

Repo Chick(2009)

Directed By Alex Cox

Alex Cox's "Repo Man" is remembered if remembered at all as the Emilio Estevez movie with the punk soundtrack.

Vague memories of downtown Los Angeles and neon green glowing car trunks might stumble toward your memory as well.

Over a decade later, and still far under the radar Cox returns with an update for the 2000's with "Repo Chick".

Repo Chick is the story of a disgustingly wealthy heiress named Pixxie who lives her life according to her parents in and out of clubs, police cars, and sandwiched between backup dancers.

Her family has finally decided to disinherit her if she cannot find a job.

Her only explanation is that "they be lying at my probation hearing".

Her car is repossessed and when she goes to retrieve it, discovers that one of the members of her entourage is related to one of the repo men.

Small world.

Pixxie decides to claim her fortune by staying on as a "repo chick".

Naturally her entourage is also trying to make a reality show about Pixxie's new life.

Here the wafer thin rationality of the film ends and cartoon logic and the extremes of political parody take over.

I should mention for instance that the film takes place in a future America where "the banks caused a housing crisis by selling homes to people who couldn't afford them", the country has collapsed to the point where the only remaining industries are the military and repossessions. Mounds of garbage litter the landscape like Mike Judge's "Idiocracy".

The special effects amateurish and stylized; ultra-flat cartoon style backdrops filling out the scenery.

Likely a reaction against the all encompassing 3d sheik that drives the multiplexes.

How Pixxie goes about her repossessions is gloriously reduced to only reaction shots of people fleeing in terror.

She repossesses football stadiums, malls, houses, beds from under sleeping children etc., or so we are told by Miguel Sandoval her guide to the world of repossessions.

Sandoval is often a bit actor in other films, but Cox here as in his nativity farce "Three Businessmen" finds ways of using of his odd charms.

The only real "action" in the film takes place aboard a train carrying several powerful authority figures (a senator, a media mogul, a religious leader, etc) which Pixxie tries to repossess (while the train is moving) only to become embroiled in a left-wing terror plot involving veganism and golf.

The pleasures to be had from watching Repo Chick are in its unpredictability, the plot begins unhinged and proceeds into tatters from there.

Pixxie's life as a model/actress/clothing designer/fragrance maker/and general purveyor of meaningless things make her an ironic choice for repossessions, now reclaiming the crap that she previously slathered her face onto.

"This film is based on true events only the dimensions have been changed.", those dimensions of political satire, between the terrorists, the rich, the military, and the working stiffs waiting to repossess it all, have all been flattened to comic book dimensions both visually and comically.

Repo Chick is trashy, clever satire aimed a culture that idolizes slick animation and soulless glamour, and that its attacks rarely get specific is also apart of its embrace of the modern flippant "psh whatever" ethos that empowers youth markets everywhere.

The characters in Repo Chick handle there self-awareness with some wit, and in the final scene especially, a measure of grace.

The humor wont work for everyone at times it failed to gather anything greater than bemusement, but the jokes that fail are forgotten, and the ones that endure are like junkyard treasures that instantly possess you to run out and show to all your friends.

Repo-Chick is trash in rare form.

Joe's One Stop Dream Shop

2011-03-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

Dreams That Money Can Buy(1947)

Directed By Hans Ricther

Painter and film theorist Hans Richter and some of his friends in the old time surreal avant-garde gang; Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Max Ernst, decide to get together and direct a surprisingly accessible (for these guys this is "Oceans 11"), film about a man who sets up a business selling dreams to people, who cant have any of their own.

After all, as our narrator Joe informs us, "If you can look inside yourself, other people shouldn't be any problem".

Assorted characters come into the Dream shop, a gangster, a repressed banker, an overzealous pamphleteer, a blind man, a bored housewife, etc, and all are given dreams, each one directed by a different surrealist; Ernst, Duchamp, Ray, etc.

Which alternately, delight, offend, disturb, and annoy there patrons.

In that respect it's a little like an anthology film, with each dream, a story in the story, the best of which is a satire of conventional 1940's relationships, staring two mannequins who fall in love and get married.

It's a surprisingly charming and funny little feminist music video (I want the song from this sequence!).

Though the rest of the music is handled by experimental composer John Cage, who gives the film both a traditional comedic tone and one of ambiguous minimal drones and squeaks.

The narrative of the framing tale, that is the story of Joe, owner and dream weaver of the business, is also distinct in that, none of the characters mouths move, and when dialog does take place on screen it comes as voice over, usually with one characters monologues followed by the others.

Most of these are spoken in a kind of Beat style rhyming (this is also a decade before any of the big Beat writers Keroac, Ginsberg, etc, start publishing.).

Though this rhyming can take a minute to adjust to, it gives the film a much needed sense of rhythm and continuity, as a good framing story should.

If you like early avant-garde films or the artists involved, this is an absolute must see, but if your also just interested in early comic fantasy, stories about dreams, poetry, or just watching something visually different, that doesn't just dismiss narrative as a nuisance, it's worth the price of admission.

Few films see the relationship of dream, cinema, and audience this clearly or eerily, but don't take my word for it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=303G8-8dVWg

They Lost Their Lives In Backyards

2011-03-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

Dogtooth(2010)

Directed By Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth is a film about a family who has never let their children of out of the house.

I say “children” but by the time we see them they are well into their 20’s, the eldest perhaps even her early thirties.

So that they do not become confused when reading one of the very limited, and in all probability, heavily redacted books, in their home the parents have taken the time to replace certain unknown words with more tangible ones.

The “sea” they are told is the word for the armchair in the living room, a “zombie” is a small yellow flower, and a “pussy” is a large bright lamp. “For example “If you turn out the ‘pussy’ the room will plunge into darkness”, the mother tells her inquisitive daughter.

I am perhaps giving you too much information up front, the film is largely silent in passages, preferring to tell its story visually and subtly.

It’s not until a substantial way into the film that are we are told what “Dogtooth” means. What we do see and quite early on is that the father brings a blindfolded woman to his home regularly to have sex with the son, who has become increasingly aggressive toward the fence which separates him from the outside world.

Lacking any understanding about why he hates the fence he can only taunt it and hurl objects at it, while suggesting that he can do a better job of cleaning the carpet than it ever could.

A haze of cognitive dissonance pervades everything.

This is all deeply disturbing, and things only get worse as they continue on. Some of you who have seen the 1968 horror film “Spider Baby” also about three adults living and functioning as children and living out a macabre combination of extreme innocence and violence, may experience a sense of deja vu.

“Dogtooth” like “Spider Baby” is also full of pitch black and bleak comedy, but in Dogtooth the comedy is more brutal, surreal, incisive, and believable.

When I first really started this blog a few summers ago, I remember a story that was big on the local news, around the time of the election riots in Iran, about a man in California who had kidnapped a girl, and kept her in his basement for years.

He fathered several children with her, and eventually (with his wife who was aware of all this) moved this second family into the backyard, where they had small shacks concealed from view with a tarp.

There is the Fritzl case, years before that where an Austrian man imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in a basement and abused her, resulting in several children.

I remember then thinking (ignoring for the moment the horrors of the kidnap, perpetual rape, and other likely tortures) about what it would be like to be raised completely cut off from the world. Not just Amish-style culturally cut off, but with no real concept of the outside at all.

The three children of "Dogtooth" having grown up with all things equal begin to become aggressive as the new visitor (the woman brought to have sex with the son) becomes something they cannot share, and begins herself to exert her new found celebrity over other members of the house.

We don’t get any background as to how this family began or why. We can’t understand the parents motives any more than the children could. When silent the family resembles a scene of domestic perfection (the children clad in white), but when the parents speak they sound mysterious and absolute as Gods on a distant mountain.

If you were or have ever met someone who was had a prolonged and sheltered upbringing you might note a familiar childishness in the small gestures of the actors. It’s not just that they are pretending to be children, they are intelligent enough to realize something is wrong with the world, but lack any background knowledge that would tell them what it is.

In a scene which recalls Luis Buneul’s "The Exterminating Angel" (about a party where the guests find themselves unable to leave for reasons that never get explained) the children watch their father leave for work at the edge of the open gate, peering out, but not daring to cross the threshold, like an invisible forcefield had been thrown up at the edge of the driveway. They are told the only possible way to leave the house is in the car. The floor is hot lava.

“Dogtooth” is a satire, of the perfection of the nuclear family, the idea that children can be raised without being contaminated by the rest of the world, but its execution is so ruthless and comical that its easy to forget that its about anything else than a family living in their own private universe. What does freedom mean when the word for freedom might translate to “wood shed”?

From this train of thought, outside of the obvious hypocrisies of the parents and the deeply uncomfortable sexual episodes (akin to the thematically similar “Splice”), we can see a variety of questions emerge about the role language plays in shaping reality (never have Orwell’s notions of a limited language creating limited human beings been better expressed), and the reactionary feelings many people have to modern technology (which revolves for better and worse around communication).

We don’t know exactly why the parents have done this terrible thing to their children but we almost understand their need to create their own perfect world, as instinctively as the son understands that the fence is his natural enemy.

Dogtooth is a very cerebral horror film and if you have dark sense of humor, also an exceptional domestic comedy. It’s rare that I am shocked in a movie, but there were many moments in “Dogtooth” were my jaw was on the floor, or my hands defensively covering my face to keep the images away.

Everyone may see something different in “Dogtooth” “it’s about the homogenizing effects of capitalism”, “the horrors of traditional patriarchy”, “a critique of modern Greek politics”, and they may all be right, when a movie has an ending as devastating and tension filled as the ending here, such considerations take a back seat.

“Dogtooth” takes us into this world of inverted logic, wicked parents, and disastrous siblings rivalries, a place where you might sit on the sea under the gentle light of the pussy with a zombie in your hair and reflect on all that you’ve seen and done and then on the much larger region of all that you don’t know, haven't done, and can only vaguely imagine if at all.

Guy Maddin: Ranked

2011-03-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Guy Maddin In Order Of Personal Opinion

My Winnipeg(2007)

Careful(1992)

The Saddest Music In The World(2003)

Twilight Of The Ice Nymphs(1997)

Tales from the Gimli Hospital(1988)

Brand Upon the Brain!(2006)

Cowards Bend The Knee(2003)

Archangel (1990)

Dracula, Pages From A Virgins Diary(2002)

Mel Brooks: Ranked

2011-03-14T00:39:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Mel Brooks In Order Of Personal Opinion

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Life Stinks(1991)

Young Frankenstein (1974)

History of the World, Part I (1981)

Spaceballs (1987)

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

The Producers (1968)

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

The Twelve Chairs (1970)

High Anxiety (1977)

Silent Movie (1976)

Darren Aranofsky: Ranked

2011-03-14T00:24:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Darren Aranofsky In Order Of Personal Opinion

The Fountain(2006)

Pi(1998)

Requiem For A Dream(2000)Black Swan(2010)The Wrestler(2008)

Stanley Kubrick: Ranked

2011-03-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Stanley Kubrick In Order Of Personal Opinion

2001: A Space Odyssey(1968)

Eyes Wide Shut(1999)

Barry Lyndon(1975)

The Shining(1980)

A Clockwork Orange(1971)

Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb(1964)

Spartacus(1960)

Paths Of Glory(1957)

Full Metal Jacket(1987)

Lolita(1962)

The Killing(1956)

Fear And Desire(1953)

Killers Kiss(1955)

David Fincher: Ranked

2011-03-13T23:27:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of David Fincher In Order Of Personal Opinion

Fight Club(1999)

Seven(1995)

The Game(1997)

The Social Network(2010)

Zodiac(2007)

Alien 3(1992)

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button(2008)

Panic Room(2002)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Ranked

2011-03-13T23:08:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Jean-Pierre Jeunet In Order Of Personal Opinion

Amelie(2001)

Delicatessen(1991)

The City Of Lost Children(1995)

A Very Long Engagement(2004)

Alien Resurrection(1997)

Micmacs(2009)

Ranked: Gaspar Noe

2011-03-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Gaspar Noe In Order Of Personal Opinion

Enter The Void(2009)

Irreversible(2002)

I Stand Alone(1998)

Paul Thomas Anderson: Ranked

2011-03-13T22:38:00.000-07:00

The Feature Filmography Of Paul Thomas Anderson In Order Of Personal Opinion

Punch-Drunk Love(2002)

There Will Be Blood(2007)

Magnolia(1999)

Boogie Nights(1997)

Hard Eight(1996)