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25 Non-English Language Films

Sunday, September 2, 2007

sevsamsnip.jpgEdward Copeland has undertaken an ambitious project on his blog: trying to assemble a Top 25 list of non-English language films. Interestingly, he’s running it in two rounds: in the first, an invited group of people submitted their lists, which were whittled down to 123 films. Voting on those 123 films is now open to the public (until September 16, so get those lists in!).

One side-effect of doing it this way is that the list has the feeling of ranking the existing canon of Generally Acknowledged Foreign Masterpieces (yes, that’s the required capitalization), because only films that already had some kind of consensus behind them made it to the second round. This is probably unavoidable, but it does have the effect of pruning idiosyncratic, controversial and/or obscure choices. As much as I may love Even Dwarfs Started Small, there’s not much hope of it making it onto a list like this: it’s an idiosyncratic, controversial and fairly obscure choice. The comments on Edward’s blog have been full of people’s personal top choices of films that didn’t make the list, a lot of which look more interesting to me than all the Bergman, Godard and Fellini films that made it on.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my own (very half-assedly ranked) Top 25 from the 74 films on the list that I’ve seen:

  1. The Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa
  2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God directed by Werner Herzog
  3. Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa
  4. Ran directed by Akira Kurosawa
  5. Spirited Away directed by Hayao Miyazaki
  6. Yi Yi: A One and a Two directed by Edward Yang
  7. Nosferatu the Vampyre directed by Werner Herzog
  8. Wings of Desire directed by Wim Wenders
  9. Chungking Express directed by Wong Kar-Wai
  10. M directed by Fritz Lang
  11. Yojimbo directed by Akira Kurosawa
  12. The Wages of Fear directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
  13. High and Low directed by Akira Kurosawa
  14. Amelie directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
  15. Throne of Blood directed by Akira Kurosawa
  16. Das Boot directed by Wolfgang Petersen
  17. Run Lola Run directed by Tom Tykwer
  18. Le Samourai directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
  19. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser directed by Werner Herzog
  20. Andrei Rublev directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
  21. Children of Paradise directed by Marcel Carne
  22. City of God directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund
  23. Three Colors: Blue directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
  24. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by Ang Lee
  25. The Blue Angel directed by Josef von Sternberg

Of course, it’s very likely that if and when I see the rest (many of which are on my to-see list), this list would change. The ones I haven’t seen are: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar); Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville); Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda); Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette); The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci); Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard); The Cranes Are Flying (Mikheil Kalatozishvili); Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer); Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa); The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski); The Earrings of Madame De… (Max Ophuls); Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel); Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju); Forbidden Games (René Clément); The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini); The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci); I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini); La Strada (Federico Fellini); Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais); Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu); L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni); The Leopard (Luchino Visconti); Lola Montes (Max Ophuls); The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); Masculin-Feminin (Jean-Luc Godard); My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer); Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer); Orpheus (Jean Cocteau); Pickpocket (Robert Bresson); Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard); Playtime (Jacques Tati); The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni); Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti); Satantango (Béla Tarr); Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman); Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller); Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut); Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman); Stolen Kisses (Francois Truffaut); Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi); Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar); The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff); Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu); Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi); Umberto D (Vittorio de Sica); Viridiana (Luis Bunuel); Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara.

And for the record, some movies that would be in my own Top 25 if they had been on the lost of nominees: Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog); Hard Boiled (John Woo); Legend of Drunken Master (Chia-Liang Liu); Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky); El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky); The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky); The Killer (John Woo) and Spring Summer Fall Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-Duk).

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10 movies I still want to see this year

Thursday, August 30, 2007

assassination-of-jesse-jame.jpgSeptember to January is traditionally when the low-brow summer movies are put aside and the more-interesting flicks start to show up. Of course, it’s also when the middle-brow Oscar-bait starts to appear, but those are usually easy to avoid: just look for trailers with middle-aged UK actors, cellos on the soundtrack, and the words “from critically-acclaimed director Paul Haggis”.

To be totally honest, I don’t even go to the theatre all that much these days (God bless DVDs), but these are ten movies I will probably go see this fall.

3:10 to Yuma. Sept 7. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in a chatty western drama remake of an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel? Sign me up!
Eastern Promises. Sept 14. Cronenberg. It looks like it might be awesome.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Sept 21. Sounds promising, looks beautiful. Shot in Manitoba. I’m there.
The Darjeeling Limited. Sept 29/Oct 5. Dude, it’s Wes Anderson.
Funny Games. Oct 26. Michael Haneke remakes his own, extremely brutal and shocking home-invasion thriller. I have no idea what to think of this, but the original made me feel sick and angry. In a good way.
No Country for Old Men. Nov 9. Hopefully, I don’t have to explain why the new Coen brothers western crime movie is on this list.
Be Kind Rewind. Dec 21. Michel Gondry! And Jack Black!
There Will Be Blood. Dec 26. P T Anderson-directed movie about early 20th-century oil barons.
Synecdoche, New York. TBA. Charlie Kaufman’s directoral debut.
Paranoid Park. TBA. Gus Van Sant is pretty hit-and-miss, but this movie about a group of skateboarders who may or may not be involved in the death of a security guard has been getting some good buzz.

And some others I’ll be keeping my eye on:

The Brave One. Sept 14.
Into the Wild. Sept 21.
Lust, Caution. Sept 28.
My Kid Could Paint That. Oct 5.
Margot at the Wedding. Oct 19.
30 Days of Night. Oct 19.
American Gangster. Nov 2.
Southland Tales. Nov 9.
The Kite Runner. Dec 2.
Sweeney Todd. Dec 21.
Persepolis. Dec 25.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Dec.

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Be Kind Rewind trailer

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Remember a couple weeks back when I said that The Darjeeling Limited and No Country for Old Men are my two most-anticipated upcoming films? Sure, we all do. This is number three, Michel Gondry’s upcoming movie about a video store clerk (Jack Black) who accidentally erases the store’s inventory with his magnetic head and has to remake classic movies like Ghostbusters and Robocop.

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on Bergman and Antonioni

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

So both Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni have passed away. As is so often the case, The AV Club expresses my own feelings (and even experiences this time) better than I ever could.

When I was an 18-year-old Film student, I tried to force myself to appreciate the works of Antonioni and Bergman because they were clearly Great Works of Art. Their ponderousness and inscrutability was surely evidence of that, wasn’t it? Around the time I dropped out a couple of years later, though, I started to read Pauline Kael, and it was a revelation to find somebody vastly smarter, funnier, and more sophisticated than me… and who didn’t care for them either.

More recently I re-watched Smiles Of A Summer Night and Winter Light, and found a lot to admire, even though they still aren’t great favourites of mine. Maybe one day I’ll even understand why The Seventh Seal is regarded so highly.

Antonioni, though, I still think was a pretentious phony.

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“Mr Shoop’s Surfin’ Summer School Midterm”

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Mr Shoop’s Surfin’ Summer School MidtermI’ve praised Dennis Cozzalio’s Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule before, but probably my favourite part is his semi-regular film geek quizzes. I’ve never managed to actually find the time to fill one out before, though (hey, I have important Battlestar Galactica and The Wire to watch!). But this time, finally, I did. I’m so proud!

Anyway, here are my answers. And if you’re in any way reading this because you’re a film nerd, go take the quiz (and then let me know: I always like evidence I’m not shouting into the great interweb void). Or you can just read other people’s responses: always interesting and enlightening. I avoided reading any of the responses until I wrote my own, so I’m gonna go read them right now and envy all the people who came up with cooler answers than I could think of.

purchase stromectol online 1) Favorite quote from a filmmaker

“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.” — Werner Herzog

runner-up:

“Filmmaking is not about the tiny details. It’s about the big picture.” — Ed Wood

http://woosterglass.com/seoreich/462.html 2) A good movie from a bad director

Kevin Smith is pretty much a wash as a director, but I still like Chasing Amy a whole lot. (I like Clerks and Clerks II a lot, too, but I’m not sure I’d say they’re good movies.)

3) Favorite Laurence Olivier performance

I’ve seen maybe four or five Olivier movies in my life, but I don’t remember his performances in any of them well enough to compare.

4) Describe a famous location from a movie that you have visited (Bodega Bay, California, where the action in The Birds took place, for example). Was it anything like the way it was in the film? Why or why not?

My first trip to New York was a eye-opener. I couldn’t get over how “New York” it all looked. In retrospect I should have maybe expected that.

5) Carlo Ponti or Dino De Laurentiis (Producer)?

Dino. He not only produced Conan, Barbarella, Death Wish and Army of Darkness, but he had the brains not to get involved with Zabriski Point or the overrated Blowup.

6) Best movie about baseball

Mr Baseball.

7) Favorite Barbara Stanwyck performance

Double Indemnity, of course. Bad wig, bad make-up, and she looks downright feral in some scenes, but I still believe Fred MacMurray would kill a man to tap that.

8.) Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Dazed and Confused?

Dazed and Confused. I have no nostalgic attachment to Fast Times, Though Phoebe Cates in that bikini is pretty memorable.

9) What was the last movie you saw, and why? (We’ve used this one before, but your answer is presumably always going to be different, so…)

Sholay. I’ve been getting into Bollywood movies lately, and it’s a classic “curry western”.

10) Whether or not you have actually procreated or not, is there a movie you can think of that seriously affected the way you think about having kids of your own?

While it wasn’t part of my own childhood (which was essentially movie-free), various friends and relatives let their kids watch the same children’s movie over and over again. Being in such a house seems a special kind of hell to me.

On the other hand, there are all kinds of really great films I look forward to watching with my own kids: Iron Giant, Star Wars, The Princess Bride, and, of course, a pre-adolescent Jaws and The Exorcist double-bill. I often think about how different my life might have been if I’d first seen Jaws at age 12 instead of 26.

Maybe I shouldn’t reproduce.

11) Favorite Katharine Hepburn performance

Bringing up Baby. Back when she was still young and cute and trying to play a character rather than “the immortal Katherine Hepburn as…”.

12) A bad movie from a good director

Gangs of New York. Sometimes great artists follow their dreams where nobody can really be expected to follow.

13) Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom– yes or no?

I still have not brought myself to watch it, and having recently read Matthew Dessem’s review on The Criterion Contraption (“This film literally made me vomit.”), it’s not high on my list. But I suspect I will watch it one day. So, yes.

14) Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder (Screenwriter)?

Ben Hecht probably has more funny lines, but Billy Wilder’s characters are much more fully-realized. Advantage: Wilder.

15) Name the film festival you’d most want to attend, or your favorite festival that you actually have attended

I attended the Toronto film festival every year when I lived there and always saw a few movies that blew me away. I can’t say that about other festivals I’ve attended.

16) Head or 200 Motels?

I’ve only seen Head, but I suspect I might like 200 Motels more.

17) Favorite cameo appearance

Bill Murray in Wild Things. To quote Roger Ebert: “Bill Murray lands in the middle of this pie like a plum from heaven.”

18) Favorite Rosalind Russell performance

I’d have to go with His Girl Friday. It’s the only one of her films I’ve seen, but I liked her a whole lot.

19) What movie, either currently available on DVD or not, has never received the splashy collector’s edition treatment you think it deserves? What would such an edition include?

Is Kill Bill too obvious? Even if it is: Kill Bill. It would include the two-film version and the original one-film cut, and a long doc showing scenes from Kill Bill alongside the ones that inspired them. Plus, a commentary by a random Tarantino-hating film geek bragging about how he was into Lady Snowblood way before QT. Just to get the full experience.

20) Name a performance that everyone needs to be reminded of, for whatever reason

Bill Murray (again) in Groundhog Day. Even now, I don’t think Murray gets enough respect as an actor, and he sure didn’t then because he’s “funny”. In Groundhog Day, he goes through pretty much every emotion one can have but still stays identifiable as the same character.

21) Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn (Studio Head)?

Gonna have to pass.

22) Favorite John Wayne performance

His portrayal of Genghis Khan in The Conqueror is endlessly entertaining. “Dance for me, Tartar woman!”

23) Naked Lunch or Barton Fink?

Naked Lunch is less successful, but more ambitious and therefore more interesting. Advantage: Cronenberg.

24) Your Ray Harryhausen movie of choice

Is this a trick question? Jason and the Argonauts, of course! The skeleton scene is one of the greatest things ever committed to celluloid.

25) Is there a movie you can think of that you feel like the world would be better off without, one that should have never been made?

Leaving aside political films like Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will, I could cite The Jazz Singer and Heaven’s Gate for helping to kill off really pretty awesome periods of cinema. Though you could easily argue that if they hadn’t, another would have. So maybe I’ll just go with Matrix Reloaded, which was not only awful, but destroyed my ability to enjoy the original Matrix movie.

24) Favorite Dub Taylor performance

Given that I had to look on IMDB to even learn who the guy was, I’m gonna have to pass on this one, too.

25) If you had the choice of seeing three final movies, to go with your three last meals, before shuffling off this mortal coil, what would they be?

An Adam Sandler marathon would doubtless put me in the right frame of mind to welcome death.

26) And what movie theater would you choose to see them in?

One full of screaming babies.

EXTRA CREDIT!!!

Your proposed entry in the Atheist Film Festival

Microcosmos

What advice on day-to-day living have you learned from the movies?

Beautiful, vivacious, quirky women are irresistibly attracted to moody, scruffy, brainy introverts. This knowledge is sure to pay off any day now.

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