CollisionWorks

Ten years ago, at the end of 1999, I had been living off-and-on, and by that point, mostly on, in the basement of the NADA theatre on Ludlow Street. Theatre had become my life, but even then Film, which had pretty much been a total obsession since I was a small child, still clutched at me a bit. The 90s weren't such a great time for Film in any case. 1999 had a surprising number of really remarkable films, but before that . . . ugh.

So as I concentrated more on Theatre . . . film kinda vanished for me. There were certain directors I would always follow, and films of interest, but I watched fewer and fewer movies as the decade went on -- in the last three years I saw anywhere from 1 to 3 movies in a theater. During my NYU days, I would see up to 10 movies a WEEK in theaters, plus whatever I'd watch on video.

So I'd had a low opinion of Film in the '00s, but as I look over all of these "Best of the Decade" lists, I'm a bit stunned at how many good films there were, and how many I DID see (nothing compared to previous decades in my life, but better than I thought). So, looking the lists over, I decided to make up my own -- which first involved figuring out which films I actually saw during this time. After some research, I came up with a list of 228, and I ranked them all from most favorite to pond scum. I include the full list here for it's own odd purpose.

For years and years starting in 1971, first in Movietone News and then later in Film Comment magazine, which I grew up reading whenever I could get my hands on an issue, Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy would do a year-end wrap-up on Film called "Moments Out of Time," which I always looked forward to. They focused on those perfect moments in movies, which can occur in any and every film, even truly awful ones, where everything comes together in one of those especial transcendent moments unique to the medium -- my all-time favorite was when, in the midst of mentioning

The blog Parallax View has been reprinting the older pieces, and their 2009 list is online at MSN Entertainment. I recommend looking at them, they bring back lots of memories of some of the finer moments of those great years of film.

Today I'm going through several of my favorite 20 movies of the past 10 years, watching them either in their entirety, or in just fragments, reminding myself of those very same moments that make me still love movies.

Things to be watched for today:

Fragments of Mulholland Drive . . . the color of Diane Selwyn's kitchen . . . the amazing business Justin Theroux does with his cigarette as he hears the name of the actress he's been ordered to cast . . . the laugh of the suddenly-competent hit man when he is asked what his blue key unlocks . . . "The girl is still missing" leading to the sound of a telephone ring hanging endlessly in the air as poor doomed avatar Betty Elms is brought into Diane Selwyn's dream . . . and then the cruel way Betty is dispatched from the dream, removed from the frame (and existence) by a casual camera move, never to return . . . The Cowboy saying, "There's sometimes a buggy..." . . . the actual script supervisor of Lynch's film, as the keeper of the text, appears in it to close the book on Diane's pitiful life and get the last word . . . "Silencio."

In The New World . . . the opening, pre-credit ritual from Pocahontas that calls the film itself into being . . . the looks of discovery on both sides as they spot each other . . . the amazing final four minutes (almost to the second) as Pocahontas/Rebecca leaves her life by ducking playfully out of the frame as she plays with her child (the positive flip-side of what is done to Betty Elms), only to be reborn in Nature again with the appearance of a Native American spirit in her English home . . . the final moments, where the film joins with the endings of Apocalypse Now, Contempt, and Bad Timing in pulling away from all humanity to show how small and petty we and all our concerns are in the landscape of the natural world. There will always be the ocean, rivers, rain, trees.

INLAND EMPIRE . . . "BRUTAL fucking murder!" . . . Bucky Jay attempts to adjust a stage light . . . a woman (prostitute?) in a Poland hotel cries herself into the static of her TV, falling down the rabbit hole into a fantasy of herself as a beautiful blonde Hollywood actress, but still unable to escape her real life of murder and infidelity, as neither Laura Palmer, Fred Madison, nor Diane Selwyn could in their own dreams before her . . . "AXXoN N." . . . "Look at us and tell us if you've known us before" . . . Nikki Grace shrugging off the attentions of The Woman in White-figure who always represents peace and transcendence in Lynch films, as she still has unfinished business . . . The way the music and sound goes - counterintuitively - strangely and suddenly quiet and mournful during the terrifying finale around the appearance of the horrible face . . . And then Nikki, The Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman, finally transcending into The Place Where All Stories Come From, a beautiful mansion filled with characters mentioned in this film, from past Lynch films (and maybe future ones?), and a man sawing logs, where there is always music in the air, and the women sing a pretty Nina Simone song.

Dear god . . . Speed Racer . . . an entire MOVIE that looks like molten hard candies and marbles and is the biggest, glossiest art film about movement, editing, and color I've ever seen, continuing the experiments Lucas started with THX-1138 but got sidetracked from by being convinced he needed more "emotion" in his films (I'm sure he wishes his Star Wars prequels were more like this film) . . . an exploration of how to turn the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey into a coherent storytelling system for narrative film, with car racing as metaphor for the artistic process.

Men (and a few women) doing their jobs in Zodiac -- writing, cartooning, codebreaking, investigating, fathering, editing, killing; the fascination of watching talented professionals do their jobs (compounded by the joy of watching highly skilled actors do their own perfectly modulated work) . . .

And so on . . . here's my top 20 for the decade, followed by a full ranked list of the remaining 208 films I saw these ten years:

I LOVED AND LOVE THESE MOVIES AND DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT, IF ANYTHING, MIGHT BE WRONG WITH THEM:

1. Mulholland Drive - David Lynch, U.S. 2001
2. Dogville - Lars von Trier, Denmark 2003
3. The New World - Terrence Malick, U.S. 2005
4. INLAND EMPIRE - David Lynch, U.S./France/Poland 2006
5. No Country for Old Men - Joel & Ethan Coen, U.S. 2007
6. Irreversible - Gaspar Noé, France 2002
7. Zodiac - David Fincher, U.S. 2007
8. I'm Not There - Todd Haynes, U.S./Germany 2007
9. Battle Royale - Kinji Fukasaku, Japan 2001
10. The Saddest Music in the World - Guy Maddin, Canada 2003
11. My Winnipeg - Guy Maddin, Canada 2007
12. The Royal Tenenbaums - Wes Anderson, U.S. 2001
13. There Will Be Blood - P. T. Anderson, U.S. 2007
14. Sin City - Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez, U.S. 2005
15. Full Frontal - Steven Soderbergh, U.S. 2002
16. The Fog of War - Errol Morris, U.S. 2003
17. Synecdoche, New York - Charlie Kaufman, U.S. 2008
18. The Gleaners and I - Agnès Varda, France 2000
19. In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong 2000
20. Speed Racer - The Wachowski Brothers, U.S. 2008

( The Remaining 207 Movies I saw, 2000-2009 )

We are staying in tonight, and avoiding the craziness and unpleasant travel of New Year's Eve. We've watched Dogville, INLAND EMPIRE and Speed Racer in their entirety, and Zodiac is almost over. What next? I'm Not There? The Saddest Music in the World? Synecdoche, New York is also on the pile but, uh, I'm not so sure that's appropriate for what supposed to be a more happy evening.

And a happy new year to you and yours, friends.

I've written about some favorite performers before, and there's a new meme going around the film blogs that appeals to the OCD listmaker in me.

Nathaniel R. at Film Experience Blog innocently started a meme nine days ago that, as he notes, evolved out of control - name and post pictures of your 20 All-Time Favorite Actresses (an original part of his meme seems to have also been to just put them in no particular order, and without comment, which has fallen by the wayside for most others doing this). Why? Well, as he says, "Sometimes you need to be reminded."

He tagged a few people, and they tagged a few, and then everyone just started doing it, tagged or not (ah, film geekery! the province of the OCD and/or slight Asperger's sufferers!). Now dozens of lists are up. Maybe over a hundred (Nathaniel had to stop linking to them; there wasn't time or space). I made up a list, but wasn't going to post it until I got a little bored last night and started searching for pictures of the women I'd had down. Once I got the pictures and cleaned them up, well, there was no reason not to post.

Rules in making the list for myself were: The listed actresses were to be "favorites" based on movie performances only, which not only took out all the stage actresses I work with, of course (several of whom, no joke, would be at the top of my list) but also actresses whose work I primarily love from television - so that took out Helen Mirren, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Melissa Leo. Also, to narrow it down and make it workable, they had to have more than one "key performance" which made them a Favorite - which took out most of my favorite individual performances from all of film, from Agnes Moorehead, Naomi Watts, Julia Ormond, Melanie Lynskey, Miriam Hopkins, Janet Gaynor, Marlene Dietrich, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, and Greta Garbo.

And I wound up eliminating a number of actresses who I would have thought would be here, whose work is wider and more varied than the ones below, but who haven't had - for me - those two or three moments that jump to another level and really grab me the same way: Jodie Foster, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Cate Blanchett, Gloria Grahame, Marie Windsor, Tilda Swinton, and Elizabeth Russell. There, with all the ones I've now named PRIOR to my list, you have a good alternate 21 runners-up. Throw in Anna Faris for 22, just because (yeah, I'm among those who're waiting for her to get a really good part).

So here - for this week at least (and it's changed several times in the week I've had the list sitting around) - are my 20 Favorite Movie Actresses, in alphabetical order:

Jenny Agutter - Walkabout, Logan's Run, Equus, An American Werewolf in London


Ingrid Bergman - Casablanca, Notorious, Under Capricorn, Murder on the Orient Express, Autumn Sonata


Ellen Burstyn - Pit Stop, The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, Same Time, Next Year, Resurrection, Requiem for a Dream


Kathleen Byron - A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Small Back Room


Angie Dickinson - Rio Bravo, The Killers, Point Blank, Dressed to Kill


Miss Pamela Grier - The Big Bird Cage, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sheba, Baby, Friday Foster, Fort Apache The Bronx, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Jackie Brown, Ghosts of Mars


Jessica Harper - Inserts, Phantom of the Paradise, Love and Death, Suspiria, Stardust Memories, Shock Treatment, Pennies from Heaven, My Favorite Year, Minority Report


Holly Hunter - Raising Arizona, Broadcast News, The Piano, The Firm, Crash, A Life Less Ordinary, Timecode, O Brother Where Art Thou?


Kim Hunter - The Seventh Victim, A Matter of Life and Death, A Streetcar Named Desire, Escape from the Planet of the Apes


Anna Karina - Une femme est une femme, Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux, Bande à part, Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, Pierrot le fou, Made in U.S.A.


Nicole Kidman - Dead Calm, Billy Bathgate, Malice, To Die For, The Portrait of a Lady, Eyes Wide Shut, The Others, Dogville


Sheryl Lee - Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Backbeat, Mother Night


Brigitte Lin - Police Story, Peking Opera Blues, Swordsman II, The Bride with White Hair, Chungking Express


Julianne Moore - The Fugitive, Safe, Assassins, Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, Psycho, Magnolia, Not I, The Hours, I'm Not There


Michelle Pfeiffer - Scarface, Into the Night, Sweet Liberty, Dangerous Liaisons, The Russia House, Batman Returns, The Age of Innocence


Vanessa Redgrave - Blowup, The Devils, Murder on the Orient Express, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Prick Up Your Ears, Mission: Impossible


Theresa Russell - Bad Timing, Eureka, Insignificance, Kafka, Wild Things


Sissy Spacek - Badlands, Carrie, 3 Women, Missing, The Straight Story


Liv Ullmann - Persona, Shame, Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Scenes from a Marriage


Kate Winslet - Heavenly Creatures, Jude, Holy Smoke, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Romance & Cigarettes

Now of course, I want to pick the men . . . let's see . . . Bogie . . . Clooney . . . Dourif . . . Brando . . . Marvin . . . Hoskins . . .

UPDATE

Daniel McKleinfeld correctly notes that I left off someone I should not have. I'll leave the above 20, but really, I should be replacing Jenny Agutter with:

Jennifer Jason Leigh - Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Flesh + Blood, The Hitcher, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Rush, Single White Female, Short Cuts, The Hudsucker Proxy, Georgia, Dolores Claiborne, Kansas City, eXistenZ

Earlier this year, I posted a list of my "50 Favorite Movies." As I noted then, if you were to go through all of my notebooks (as I sometimes do, all the way back to age 15 or so, looking for interesting ideas to develop I'd forgotten about), you find these lists, of varied length (10 films, 15 films, 20 films, 25 films), carefully dated, occurring here and there, months apart, sometimes years, sometimes just weeks.

No good reason to do this really, especially at first (except if you're a film buff, you get asked what your favorites are fairly often, so making lists means you usually don't forget them). Now that it's been years of doing this, I like to go back and see what's stayed or vanished or newly appeared on my lists, and what filmmakers I love but who don't even have one film on the list (most often, as below, Powell & Pressburger, Ken Russell, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, with whom their entire oeuvre means more to me than any individual film; Godard used to always be in this bunch, too).

Looking over a list of my "favorite films" on Facebook today, I felt that a few things were missing. By the time I added the missing ones, today's list was at 35. This time I didn't stop at a "5" because that's how lists normally work (last time I hit 45 and then kinda forced in another 5 to make an even 50), I just stopped when I had a list of the very VERY special films that make me feel a little more something (at least today, right now) when I think of them than any other movies do. This doesn't always mean they're "great," of course (there are movies generally regarded as "bad," and VERY understandably so, below), but they ARE my Favorites - that is, when I think of any one of these movies, I am overwhelmed with a great sense of love for and protection of them, and want to see them again IMMEDIATELY (luckily, I own video copies of some viewable kind of all but 4 of them).

The list is maybe a bit more English-language and American than last time - I think I was self-conscious about that then and forced in some non-English films to try and seem less USA-centric. Well, I am that, I guess.

Here's today's 35 Favorite Movies of mine:

Sherlock, Jr. - directed by Buster Keaton, 1924
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - directed by F.W. Murnau, 1927
Citizen Kane - directed by Orson Welles, 1941
The Seventh Victim - directed by Mark Robson, 1943
Detour - directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945
Magical Maestro - directed by Tex Avery, 1952
Duck Amuck - directed by Charles M. Jones, 1953
Glen or Glenda? - directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1953
Kiss Me Deadly - directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955
The Birds - directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1963
Contempt - directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963
Two or Three Things I Know About Her - directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1967
Wavelength - directed by Michael Snow, 1967
Point Blank - directed by John Boorman, 1967
How I Won the War - directed by Richard Lester, 1967
2001: A Space Odyssey - directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Performance - directed by Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970
THX-1138 - directed by George Lucas, 1971
The Last Picture Show - directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1971
Tout Va Bien - directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972
Mean Streets - directed by Martin Scorcese, 1973
Singing on the Treadmill - directed by Gyula Gazdag, 1974
Barry Lyndon - directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1975
Eraserhead - directed by David Lynch, 1977
The Falls - directed by Peter Greenaway, 1980
Bad Timing - directed by Nicolas Roeg, 1980
Stardust Memories - directed by Woody Allen, 1980
Videodrome - directed by David Cronenberg, 1983
Tough Guys Don't Dance - directed by Norman Mailer, 1987
Road House - directed by Rowdy Harrington, 1989
Barton Fink - directed by Joel Coen, 1991
The Age of Innocence - directed by Martin Scorcese, 1993
Heavenly Creatures - directed by Peter Jackson, 1994
Schizopolis - directed by Steven Soderbergh, 1996
Lost Highway - directed by David Lynch, 1997

Any connecting threads here? I'm a little surprised to see that most of them (at least 26, but maybe more if I thought about it) deal with problems of identity in some way, as in "Who Is This Person?" or "Who Are You?" or "Who is ANY person?" or mistaken identities, or shifting identities, or masks and hidden identities. Hmmn.

So I'm feeling better - not 100%, but well enough to go start directing today, though I should probably keep as far away from the actors as I possibly can. Berit will also be going back to work house managing the UTC#61 shows at Walkerspace after four days down.

Even such a relatively short, small-cast piece as this Penny Dreadful is giving me agita when it comes to rehearsal schedules and the like. Of course I can't get actors together who are in scenes together until performance/tech day! Of course. It'll work fine. Just wish I could see it work sooner and more often.

Back over at the meme from a few days ago, there are still six quotes left unidentified out of the 15 quotes from my 16 Top Favorite Movies (as one of the Top 15 had no "memorable quotes" on IMDb). Some of them are hard ones I didn't expect anyone to get, but some of them should have been pegged by now.

Well, here's some help. Since I had to figure out what my top 15 films were right now (an occasional chore - someday I should post the many lists of "favorite films" I have, all carefully dated as I knew the lists would change, going back over 20 years), I had to start with a bigger list and winnow it down. So I went to my IMDB page where I've rated several thousand movies (I was trying to give a rating to EVERY movie I've ever seen, but I haven't kept up with it) - you can see these ratings HERE - and grabbed the films from my highest-rated ones that just leaped out at me and made me just feel "favorite film." I wound up with a list of 45, so I've gone back and added another five.

Here's my 50 Favorite Films as of today:

The Age of Innocence (1993) by Martin Scorcese
Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Coppola
Bad Timing (1980) by Nicolas Roeg
Barry Lyndon (1975) by Stanley Kubrick
Barton Fink (1991) by Joel and Ethan Coen
Black Narcissus (1947) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles
Contempt (1963) by Jean-Luc Godard
Detour (1945) by Edgar G. Ulmer
The Devils (1971) by Ken Russell
Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder
Duck Amuck (1953) by Chuck Jones
Eraserhead (1977) by David Lynch
The Falls (1980) by Peter Greenaway
Glen or Glenda? (1953) by Edward D. Wood Jr.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) by Sergio Leone
Head (1968) by Bob Rafelson et al.
Heavenly Creatures (1994) by Peter Jackson
Hellzapoppin' (1941) by Erle C. Kenton et al.
High and Low (1963) by Akira Kurosawa
Hour of the Wolf (1968) by Ingmar Bergman
How I Won the War (1967) by Richard Lester
Jackie Brown (1997) by Quentin Tarantino
The Killers (1964) by Don Siegel
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Robert Aldrich
The Last Picture Show (1971) by Peter Bogdanovich
Lost Highway (1997) by David Lynch
Mean Streets (1973) by Martin Scorcese
Mulholland Dr. (2001) by David Lynch
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone
Peeping Tom (1960) by Michael Powell
Performance (1970) by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
Persona (1966) by Ingmar Bergman
Point Blank (1967) by John Boorman
The Red Shoes (1948) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Schizopolis (1996) by Steven Soderbergh
The Seventh Victim (1943) by Mark Robson and Val Lewton
Singing on the Treadmill (1974) by Gyula Gazdag
Sorcerer (1977) by William Friedkin
Stardust Memories (1980) by Woody Allen
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by F.W. Murnau
Targets (1968) by Peter Bogdanovich
THX-1138 (1971) by George Lucas and Walter Murch
Tout Va Bien (1972) by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
2 or 3 Things That I Know About Her (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick
Videodrome (1983) by David Cronenberg
W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism (1971) by Dusan Makavejev
Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) by Peter Greenaway

Ask me again in a few days and there could be 5-10 changes on there. But the remaining unidentified six quotes are from among these films . . .

Tyler Green, over at Modern Art Notes, has asked for his readers to assemble another list (previously, he asked for our favorite buildings - mine are HERE).

This time, in light of the fact that a Thomas Kinkade painting will be adapted for the silver screen (aw, jesus fuck a bagpipe!), we're asked for five paintings that we think actually SHOULD have a future in the motion picture medium.

Now, as a lover of both painting and film (the latter being my first love, the medium I think and feel in; the former being the perfect, pure medium I aspire to the qualities of), this is harder for me than it might seem, for my general rule for any medium is that the best work in any art form is usually that that is pure and true to that medium. Great films, novels, plays, etc. don't translate as great in media other than their own.

So, no Pollocks on my list.

My first thoughts were of Hopper and Vermeer. David Lynch once mentioned two of his favorite artists as being Bacon and Hopper, but the latter only "for film." I understand this - I don't necessarily like Hopper all that much, except he's very inspirational in a cinematic sense. There are a few painters like this, not so great on the wall, maybe, but great as static filmmakers (when I was at NYU Film School, Robert Longo was rather popular among my my fellow students - lots of 16mm black-and-white second-year films of men in suits fighting . . . most of them not bad, actually).

Hopper has also been pretty well done in film by now, too, perhaps best in Herbert Ross' film of Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven. So, no Nighthawks.

And Peter Greenaway has pretty much dealt definitely with Vermeer in a filmic context in A Zed & Two Noughts. So, after considering The Music Lesson, I decided to go elsewhere.

I also considered and discarded works by Goya, Duchamp, Rothko (one which, I discovered less than an hour after I dropped it from my list, is about to go under the gavel), and a different de Chirico from the one I settled on.

In the end, I had to leave behind some of my own feelings about the works as paintings, and just see them as worlds I'd love to fall into, or frozen stories that I want to see the "before" and "after" of.


( So here they are . . . )