My review of Dan Sallitt's excellent new movie, The Unspeakable Act, in available on Roger Ebert's website (click here).
Monday, June 25, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
My "Sight & Sound" Poll Entry
I feel honored to take part in the upcoming Sight & Sound Greatest Film Poll. Here is my ballot:
1. Rear Window
(1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
Superbly
crafted allegory of watching and following that touches upon our primal
voyeuristic drives. By the end of the screening, the film seems to be looking
back at us with an amused little smirk. Hitchcock defines the movies; Rear Window defines Hitchcock.
2. The Long Day
Closes (1992, Terence Davies)
Cinema
is both a retreat and a prison in Davies’ memoir of childhood bliss slowly
turning into scary gay desire that the protagonist doesn’t know how to handle.
A love song that is also a dirge, it’s a profoundly sad work of immense beauty.
3. The Thin Red
Line (1998, Terrence Malick)
Malick’s
Whitman-by-way-of-Emerson poem of grace intertwined with death is as boundless
as it is instantly accessible (not to mention totally immersive). Edited in
accordance with the world’s hidden heartbeat that Malick seems completely
attuned to, it never fails to intoxicate me, no matter how often I see it.
4. City Lights
(1931, Charlie Chaplin)
No one
merged emotional mush with slapstick brilliance in quite this way – you can be
angry at the movie for tugging at your heart strings, but you stand no chance
of resisting its pull.
5. WR: Mysteries
of the Organism (1971, Dušan Makavejev)
The
only movie that managed to accommodate and satirize all the Cold War chasms at
once, and do so in a happy-collage way that’s as ingenious as it is brilliant.
6. Partie de
campagne (1936, Jean Renoir)
“Unfinished”
only in the most crude of senses, this is a work that overflows with emotion to
the point of drugging the viewer into an uncontrolled reverie. A masterpiece of
sensual seduction that feels both like a breeze and a barely suppressed sob of
sympathy for all human dreams and desires.
7. L’Atalante (1934,
Jean Vigo)
Cinema
as a diaphanous waft of half-dreamed desire; the most beautiful erotic dream
ever put on film.
8. Man with a
Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
In
some YouTube visual dictionary of tomorrow, a full video of this movie may as
well serve as the most comprehensive definition we have yet of „modernity”
itself.
9. Only Angels
Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks)
Unyielding
in its reproach of sentimentality, this is a work of true feeling and deep
compassion that asks for nothing and gives you everything.
10. Topsy-Turvy
(1999, Mike Leigh)
The
most Dickensian movie ever made is as rich as a finest novel and accommodates
everything from gaiety to sadness to grief to song.
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