My Top 100 Films (61-80)

[The following is the latest entry in my Top 100 films. Click the links to see picks 1-20, 21-40 and 41-60.]

61. Once Upon a Time in the West (1969/Italy, USA/Sergio Leone)

Leone's homage/revisionist take on the Western reaches its pinnacle in this perfectly directed, almost Brechtian deconstruction. From the long, unbearably tense beginning (hands down the best film opening ever) to Henry Fonda's everyman image being perverted to suggest that violence and sadism is a cornerstone of the "average American." Leone helped create a Western icon in Eastwood's Man With No Name, but here he tears the whole damn place to the ground. Even so, he does it with such lush formalism it's nearly impossible to see him battering at the foundations until it all collapses.

My Top 100 FIlms (41-60)

[The following is a continuation of my top 100 films. Click on the link for picks 1-20 and 21-40.]

41. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [director's cut] (1978/USA/John Cassavetes)

I still have so much to learn from John Cassavetes. I need to rewatch A Woman Under the Influence and to see for the first time Opening Night, a film several writers I deeply admire love so fervently that most cannot even talk about it. But this director's cut of Cassavetes' ostensible gangster picture—actually shorter than the theatrical version—still resonates. Ben Gazzara's tragic, greasy loser, a man who celebrates the paying off of a debt by getting a whole new stack of it, is haunting. His Cosmo continuously retreats into physical and emotional safety back in the haven of his disgusting nightclub. Compared to the world around him, however, this cum-stained den is as close to comfort as Cosmo can hope for. Cassavetes doesn't use any flashy camerawork, but at no point does his camera fail to suggest the character's inner thoughts and moods. At every turn, Chinese Bookie feels like it might devolve into Oscar-baiting actor moments, only to be cruelly cut short by an uncaring world.

My Top 100 Films (21-40)

[This is the second part of my top 100 films. See also picks 1-20.]

21. Close-Up (1990/Iran/Abbas Kiarostami)

Kiarostami's masterpiece tops Herzog's blending of fact and fiction, not merely recounting the true story of a man who posed as Iranian director Mohsen Mahkmalbaf but replicating it. Kiarostami gets all the actual parties involved, having the man and the family he conned play themselves. The director even gets to film the man's trial, possibly influencing its outcome in the man's favor. But in the playful collision of documentary, recreation and fiction, Kiarostami offers a beautiful meditation on art and the love and power of it. The final shot, frozen on the man's bashful face as he apologizes to the family he hoodwinked, is one of the greatest image in all of cinema, art bringing people together even through manipulation and lies.

My Top 100 FIlms (1-20)

I've done my best to resist the rush to list-making spurred by the critical census-taking of the Sight & Sound poll, that decennial feature that shows off the dearest loves of critics and filmmakers the world over before being averaged out to remind everyone that Citizen Kane is still the best movie ever. I've seen so many top 10 lists pop up over the last few weeks that I started to feel as if I were the only blogger actually happy to not have to agonize over something so meaningless and yet so crucial as a list of 10 movies among the thousands a cinephile has seen that somehow stand out among the rest. I can't even keep a year-end list limited to that many entries; to sum up all of cinema into so few choices is an infuriating prospect. Besides, at 22, the idea of me setting down my favorite movies is laughable. There's so much I haven't seen, so much I haven't re-seen, that I wouldn't dare claim to have any grasp on what I truly love yet.

Then, I thought about the fun of doing such a list not as a declaration of taste but as a time capsule, a snapshot of my mindset at this stage of my life to be revisited later after my picks have undoubtedly changed. I admit that gives these selections a self-satisfying, esoteric bent, but that's true of all lists. Still, I love lists, and I love to spread my affection for my favorite movies. I tried to stick to that old one-film-per-director rule to maximize the variety, though I quickly violated that with a few filmmakers. (Howard Hawks even appears three times in my top 100, but then one could make a credible top 10 of all time with nothing but Hawks films, so I'm convinced this constitutes restraint on my part.) My tastes do skew a bit more recent, a reflection both of my lateness in coming to film and my passion for a type of reflexive, (post-)modern cinema that will become apparent as I explain my choices. I have presented these in alphabetical order, having had such a hard time narrowing the list down to 100 as it is without worrying about placement. I will, though, mark the films I would likely include in a top 10 I would submit to Sight & Sound if I were asked today. Or perhaps I should say were I asked right this second, as my picks at any given moment could be different. So, for the time being, here are the first 20 of my 100 favorite films of all time:

Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

[This is my May post for Blind Spots.]

Irma Vep is the third Olivier Assayas film I've seen, the other two being Summer Hours and Carlos. This 1996 feature contains the roots of both, the former's elegant respect for French art history and the latter's deconstructive, post-New Wave wit. A film about a film production starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Irma Vep instantly recalls Day for Night, but as Assayas voices and visualizes a sense of dissatisfaction with French cinema, the film becomes something else. Eric Gautier's gritty, 16mm cinematography and sophisticated camera movements combine New Wave spontaneity (the film was shot in three weeks) with formal know-how to be both behind-the-scenes docudrama and rich cinematic fantasy.

That the  production in question is an adaptation of Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires only complicates Assayas' thematic intent. The characters working on this French film set all talk of American films, some disapprovingly, others with an eagerness to see their own national cinema reflect Hollywood's crowd-pleasing scale. Assayas "remakes" Feuillade's film to remind everyone that France invented the action epic, and that they didn't need insane budgets and special effects to do so. Yet the fact that someone would remake it speaks to a lack of original ideas for contemporary French directors, and that's leaving out how little of France seems to make its way into this production.

Eros + Massacre (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1969)

[The following was originally written for Cinelogue. I've edited and changed a few things, but otherwise this is the same article.]

Why has revolution not swept the West in recent years as it did in the ’60s? We’re engaged in two wars (now potentially three) to the sole conflict in Vietnam, civil rights remain an issue, and the world economy is vastly worse than the prosperity of the mid-‘60s. Maybe that’s the reason: people don’t have enough money to go play Maoist and instead have to fight just to keep a crap apartment or a house someone assured them they could afford.

Perhaps our relative sexual freedom is the issue. One of the major demands of practically every national youth movement in the sixties was the demand for coeducation, a call for the end of repressive gender segregation. Student riots in America, Japan, France and elsewhere began on such terms and soon exploded into larger sociopolitical stances against the status quo. While Godard and Marke pieced together the remains of these leftist uprisings in their direct and indirect treatises on May ’68, Japanese New Wave director Yoshishige Yoshida traced the revolution back to its unlikely source, and in the process he revealed how the personal and political overlapped.

Criminally Underrated: The Limits of Control

I loved Jim Jarmusch's divisive (to say the least) post-modern noir when it came out in 2009, and finally watching one of its biggest inspirations, The Lady from Shanghai, inspired me to revisit the film. If anything, I love it even more, so I had to write about it for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. This new piece incorporates some of the views I expressed at the time, but I tried to refine the more scattered thoughts. Not that any succinct summary could ever capture the intoxicating beauty of what Jarmusch and Christopher Doyle shot.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.