Happy Birthday Watson!  You’ve been a great movie watching buddy.  Nobody holds up a couch like you and your Daddy!

“This is the End”…or is it?

            My favorite film (and thus my favorite lister) begins with these words sung by Jim Morrison of The Doors.  I’m trying to think now if Apocalypse Now (1978) was my favorite movie when I bought the 1001 text seven years ago.  I certainly loved it, but at that point my favorite film was probably Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity (2000; not on the 1001 list).  That film has only been surpassed by one or two others in that time, so I think it is safe to say that I am fairly adverse to changing my own lists of all-time favorite anythings.  That being said, it’s important to remember that one takes on a challenge like the 1001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die for the reason of expanding their taste and taking in the gamut of culture that the cinematic art form can offer.  I’ve certainly done that, and in doing so I’ve been forced to look beyond the list as well.  I’m currently also trying to see the entire Criterion Collection DVD/Blu-ray series, many of which I was initially prompted to by this list.  I figured it might be a good idea to see everything that they had to offer (even though I’ve been putting off the Stan Brakhage anthologies after seeing and loathing Dog Star Man), and without having to blog them I should be able to get done with the Collection (with a few hard-to-find exceptions) by the close of this summer. 

            Does that mean that I’m done writing for this webpage?  Heck no!  Obviously my output has slowed significantly in the last year because the titles got so hard to come by.  In fact, without the help of my friend and research assistant Matt Sands, I’d never have been able to make it this far. (I owe you big time brother)  But with his help and the support and encouragement of many others I’ve done it!  Just under two and a half years ago I sat down at my dinner table and typed out the initial post for this blog.  Now I’m sitting at that same table, and hour and a half away from the deadline of my 27^th birthday, and I’ve gotten to the top of the mountain.  This was a hard journey, but as I said, I had invaluable support and help along the way.  I doubt that I’ll be able to get out of the habit of posting film reviews and opinions, but I don’t know that I’ll be taking on any other significant long-term blogging projects in the near future.  Along the way, I’ve been quietly viewing the supplemental films to the list, and I have only three of the most recent crop left to tackle.  So I’d expect to see reviews of Shame, A Separation, and La Harve here sometime in the near future, as well as those of any other film I feel like spewing my two cents on.   

            The 1001 text suggests that it is unlikely that most people who pick up the tome will have already seen all of the entries.  This is, of course, true, because without this book many of the films would be even more obscure than they are with it, and even fewer people would have motivation to see them (Flaming Creatures I am coughing and looking in your general direction).  I can’t tell you the number of times I viewed a title and began to research it more by heading to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), only to find that the single note in the “Did You Know?” section of the film’s page read, “Included in the book 1001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die.”  But that’s what this book is about; guiding those of us who can’t get drunk enough on the sweet nectar of cinema toward those titles that even the people of that endless information superhighway haven’t yet seen on their radar.  My copy of the book, seven years removed from purchase, now sits tattered and torn on my bedside table.  It has been a constant companion and a treasure trove of knowledge.  Yes, my wife has threatened to hit me over the head with it, but weaponized uses aside, it has guided me through this journey.  So now without further ado, here are my top and bottom ten titles from these final 200 movies.  

The Best of the Best (have or will purchase on DVD/Blu-ray)

1.      Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

2.      A Matter of Life and Death

3.      Seconds

4.      The Last Battle

5.      Report

6.      Shanghai Express

7.      Zero for Conduct

8.      High School

9.      The Cool World*

10.  Winter Light

*Not available (Come on Wiseman!)

The Worst of the Worst (there, but for the requirements of the list, go you)

1.      The Color of Pomegranates (worst; even worse on recollection than initial ranking)

2.      Touch of Zen

3.      Heaven and Earth Magic

4.      Blonde Cobra

5.      The Asthenic Syndrome

6.      Come Drink with Me

7.      Black God, White Devil

8.      Caravaggio

9.      Celine and Julie Go Boating

10.  Flaming Creatures

The Final 50 Films in Review

            Well I’ve done it!  I’ve tackled the beast.  I’ve climbed the mountain.  I’ve slain the dragon.  I’ve gone round the bend with metaphorical references in writing about these 200 movies.  I’m exhausted and exhilarated.  These last fifty took me over a year to find, see, and blog, and now looking back on the whole thing I’m thanking God that it’s over.  Does that mean that I now hate movies and never want to see another one again?  By no means.  Does it mean that I’m now in the mood to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (also on the 1001 list)? Yes.  But it’s important to see this thing through and do a recap of these last fifty titles.  I noticed as I was looking over my reviews that I’ve been more generous on these last fifty.  I gave 21 of these films a rating of 3 Hats Off or higher, and only 10 movies a rating of 1.5 Hats Off or lower.  Does this mean that these were better films? Maybe, but I’m inclined to believe that my being near to completing the list gave me a generosity of spirit, and that the effort I (or my friends) put into finding these films made them all the more worth watching.  Anyway, here are my lists.  

The Best

1.      The Last Battle

2.      Report

3.      The Cool World

4.      The Baker’s Wife

5.      The Unbelievable Truth

The Worst

1.      The Asthenic Syndrome (worst)

2.      Black God, White Devil

3.      The Spider Strategem

4.      Too Early, Too Late

5.      The Puppetmaster

1: Loulou

            I’ve never quite been able to buy Gérard Depardieu as a sex symbol.  He’s a fine actor, no doubt, but his goofiness (just look at his IMDb headshot) always strikes me as something that would detract from his appeal to female audiences and characters.  Then again, I’m not French.  In Maurice Pialat’s Loulou (1980) he lays that foolish quality against the more underplayed, even cool sexuality of Isabelle Huppert (a more legitimate sex symbol) and it somehow works.  He’s playing to type as the ex-con and social loafer, Loulou, who somehow is able to win the interest of Huppert’s Nelly, a bourgeoisie woman whose in the process of leaving her husband, André (Guy Marchand).

            Those are the basics of the plot, and for the most part they’re all that we get from the movie as far as motivation goes for each character.  Loulou should get a job if he wants to keep Nelly, but because he initially believes that she is only interested in him for sex, he doesn’t really see the point in putting effort into their relationship.  Nelly meanwhile can’t quite decide if she is done with André, and upon an agreement with Loulou, she returns to work for him to allow him time to come to terms with their breakup.  Films rarely, if ever, come with a disclaimer that their relationship patterns are not meant to be taken as sound romantic advice, and Loulou is no exception.

            This is not a film about great love or about the choices we make in relationships and where they lead, but more an effective declaration that perhaps we have no real reasons for making those choices at all.  This is a film in which characters feel emotions and desires and then act on them, rarely considering what the consequences will be.  Consider this conversation between Nelly and André after they’ve made love during one of their work sessions.

           

Nelly: I’m pregnant with Loulou.  I’m going to keep the child.

            André: How far along are you?

            Nelly: About two months.

            André: What does Loulou think?

            Nelly: He’s very excited

            André: And you?

            Nelly: I’m very happy.

            André: Are you in bed with me to tell me that?

            Nelly: No, I just wanted you.  I don’t know why.

Nelly speaks her words with calm detachment, as if she’d had no inclination to sleep with André again prior to that moment, and expecting that it will change nothing about her situation with Loulou.  Perhaps this is because very little does change. 

The couple move into a nicer apartment – with the rent always paid by Nelly – and they go about their life together.  Loulou talks about getting work once the child comes, but he has no sense of urgency.  He warns his friends about being tied down by marriage, but refers to Nelly as his fiancée.  He meets her family and is as charming as he can be, but Pialat’s subtle direction always makes it clear that these two characters don’t belong in each others’ worlds.  She denies it, but Nelly still needs André for intellectual stimulation, and though she says almost nothing, she’s appalled when she joins Loulou and a fellow hood as they steal stereo equipment from a loading dock.   

Where this story goes is interesting, but it ultimately isn’t the point of the film.  The third act contains a point of ambiguity that depending on perception might alter an audience’s view of these characters, but by that time we’ve been with them for over an hour and a half, and we’ve seen them at their worst and their best.  Depardieu and Huppert turn in performances here that make these characters worth our investment simply in that these actors are brave enough to show us this gamut of their experiences.  Guy Marchand’s performance is impressive as well, as he’s able to be despicable, pathetic, sympathetic, and then forgettable all at the right moments.

From a technical standpoint Loulou is lacking in the lighting category, as night exteriors are often imperceptible.  But when the actors’ faces and bodies are visible they hold the screen magnificently.  Consider that so many scenes feel both dangerous and improvised.  Pialat challenges his actors here with difficult situations and emotions and is brave enough himself to let their craft speak for itself.  He doesn’t employ directorial flourish because he knows that his screenplay (written with Arlette Langmann) gives his characters all the motion (and emotion) they need.  He isn’t interested in their innermost desires.  He wants the blood, the sweat, and the tears that pour out of them.

Language: Franch

Runtime: 101 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off

2: The Baker’s Wife (a.k.a. La Femme Du Boulanger – Original French title)

            Marcel Pagnol’s The Baker’s Wife (1938) is yet another title that screams out for the Criterion treatment, and, indeed, upon watching it I was shocked that it had not already been christened into that other great canon of titles.  My only speculation about the holdup of such a release: the audio on the version of the film that was sent to me through a private link is hampered by a significant motor hum, which I presume may be near impossible to remove.  No matter, Criterion should give it their all, as The Baker’s wife is a gem.  My only fear in recommending this film is that I didn’t have the benefit of subtitles to pick up on the details of the comic exchanges.  I don’t speak ten words of French, and I didn’t need to in order to appreciate the humor.  The timing and the rhythm were there, and any comedian will tell you that that’s 80% of any good joke.  A criterion print transfer with subtitles would be the oh-so-justified icing on the cake. 

            The reason this film flies so high is the performance of Raimu in the role of the cuckolded baker, Aimable Castanier.  The humor and humanity he conveys is miraculous from the movie’s opening.  The middle-aged man has moved with his young wife (Ginette Leclerc) to a provincial village in southern France to open his bakery.  He produces magnificent loaves of bread, but he’s no sooner finished his first run out of the oven then his wife is struck smitten with a handsome local shepherd.  She leaves in the night after the young man serenades her by moonlight.  Awakened the next morning by the excess smoking of the ovens, Aimable finds her bed stuffed with pillows. 

After a frantic search of the village, it becomes clear to where, and to whom, the wife has gone.  Incensed but still composed, Aimable is, at first, tempted to explain her absence and carry on, not knowing that the villagers have already begun to mock him behind his back.  Their laughter turns soon though to desperation, when after a sermon from the pulpit on the virtues of marriage – which is clearly aimed squarely at the baker – drives him to drink and to swear off lighting the ovens again until his wife returns.

Hunger begins to drive the villagers toward the cause of the cuckold, and even old squabbles between the village’s opposing moral and political factions are set aside to assuage the desperation and aid in the return of the wayward wife.  Arguments are had about the best plan of action, enemies forge friendships in support of the cause, and Aimable is driven slowly mad by the thoughts of his lost love in the arms of another man.

The ease with which Raimu seems able to move in and out of anger and despair, into blind rage and then energetic reason is the true magic of this film.  The actor, large in stature and personality, is kept small in the confines of the screen by DP Georges Benoit, and this ironic approach brings to his performance both profundity and basic decency.  He is not unaware of the power of love to make us do crazy things, but he is dismayed at the audacity of love to perform its cruel tricks on him.  Part Chaplin, part Oliver Hardy, and with a touch of his contemporary Michael Simon, Raimu creates here a character that feels somehow both ubiquitous and unique; comfortable and yet constantly surprising.

Simon is of course remembered so well for his work with Jean Renoir, and retrospect has placed that director’s work among the greatest films being made anywhere in the world during the 1930s.  While Renoir’s masterpieces The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) aren’t likely to be usurped in their placement as some of the finest movies ever made, I believe that this comic work by Pagnol far exceeds Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), and that Raimu’s work here has a leg up on the Simon performance in that film.  A Criterion double feature of the two pictures would likely convey that point better than any words that I could commit to type, but it appears we will have to wait for such a an opportunity.

Language: French (NST)

Runtime: 133 Minutes

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

3: Last Chants for a Slow Dance

            There is an unmistakable sense when watching Jon Jost’s Last Chants for a slow Dance (1977) that you are watching something being born and something dying.  One way of life, and of filmmaking, draws its last breath while a new America and a new American cinematic movement are emerging from the second great period of U.S. filmmaking.  The irony is, of course, that Last Chants was released in the same year as Star Wars (1977), the film that effectively ended – with its product tie-ins and lines around the block – the Hollywood interest in personal filmmaking, splitting the industry into the blockbuster driven studios and what we now call the independent American cinema. 

Last Chants is at the forefront of the latter movement, and indeed much of what was to come from independently financed movies over the next two decades owes its look and feel to this film.  The obvious comparison is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), but I was struck by how much Last Chants’ antihero Tom Bates (Tom Blair) was resembled in the River Phoenix character in Gus Van Sant’s My own Private Idaho.  Those sunglasses, that hair, the denim, the sense of wandering; they’re all there in Van Sant’s film.  

Last Chants for a Slow Dance doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a central figure.  Bates (I wonder why Jost chose that name…) is a drifter.  He has a wife, Darlene (Jessicas St. John), and two boys, Billy and Bobby, but he’s only at home with them for a brief segment of the film.  He and Darlene argue about the things that he’s told another drifter that they argue about, and he’s on his way again, ostensibly looking for work, but really looking for a way out.  He sits in bars and diners, talking to other customers, always trying to get laid, but he never betrays any sense of real motivation.  He wants to be free to sit in bars and diners it seems, and to try to get laid.  He’s got no money for anything other than smokes, drinks, and gas, and while he seems bitter about the state of things, he’s resigned to find comfort in the fact that “you can’t get ahead.”

Country music, mostly ballads, play on the radio as he drives across Montana.  He calls Darlene from the apartment of a woman he’s just had a one night stand with and their conversation sounds like it’s the same one they’ve had a hundred times before.  He hangs up and tells the woman that he was talking to his boss, then realizes that he doesn’t really care if she knows now that he’s married. 

There isn’t much more to Tom than what meets the eye.  He’s almost all Id and libido, with any elements of concealment only lasting long enough to convince a woman into bed.  Jost finds a way to develop his shallow character economically, using very few shots and sparse cutaways that are effective if not overbearing.  The slaughter of a rabbit in close-up effectively stands in for other acts of violence, while conveying the desperation of Tom to break free from a life that is in actuality not so terribly restrictive.  He’s a rebel without a cause and as such, he seems so desperate to simplify life to animalistic urges.  As a portrait of 1970s America he is thus effective, conveying a need to dismiss traditional values and norms while denying the need to establish a newly sufficient median. 

Made for only $12,000, and comprised of fewer than one hundred 16mm shots, Last Chants for a Slow Dance is, in the eyes of many, the prototype for the latter 20^th century independent film.  Jost is hinting at so much by saying so little here, and though Last Chants is a difficult and vexing movie, it’s an interesting contrast to other 1970s statement pictures.  It’s infinitely more interesting that Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and, as the 1001 text points out, refreshingly less muddled than Nashville (1975).

Language: English*

Runtime: 90 Minutes

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off

*I’d hoped to make this my final film, thinking that it would be unique to finish off with a movie in both English and color, but I’ll settle for knowing that three of my final five meet those specs.  I wonder if any other list enthusiast can claim that odd (in light of the fact that these final pictures are the films that are the most difficult to see) combination.