Or: “I’m the Marcia FUCKING Brady of the Upper East Side and sometimes I want to kill myself. So there’s your psychoanalysis, Dr. Freud.” It was a long, good movie week.

  1. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977): Holy shit. It’s like a collage of life in a working class LA neighbourhood. It’s all slice of life vignettes, interwoven with children playing horribly dangerous games, and scored with all manner of African-American music. It’s definitely in the neorealist vein, but it doesn’t have the self-seriousness or the detachment that the Italian neorealists have — the whole thing is warm without being sentimental, and it’s pretty unflinching, but still beautiful. I can’t really articulate how amazing the experience of seeing this was; it is seriously one of the best movies I have ever seen. I love movies, but I haven’t had that “wow” moment in a long time, where you’re conscious that you have never seen anything quite like this before, and your heart is breaking for the characters, and also because of the total stylistic genius. I seriously was just sitting there with my mouth open, in amazement.
  2. Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999): This is such a good bad movie. I saw this when it came out, which is before I turned 16, and I remember thinking Sarah Michelle Gellar was really trying too hard. My new conclusion is that she thought this movie was supposed be funny, but no one else besides Selma Blair got the message. It’s like Reese and Ryan were in a whole other (boring) movie. I also resent that they really took all the flaws (and really, agency) away from Sebastian. Also, why were they all teenagers? And why did they make the two leads step-siblings?
  3. Valmont (Milos Forman, 1989): So this — a more era-faithful adaptation of the same book — was on TV the next day, and it had Colin Firth, so I decided to watch it. I loved what Forman did with the story — instead of making Valmont all schmoopy and lame, he makes him interesting, funny, charming, and really emphasizes how totally scared he is of Mme. de Tourvel’s love. Also, it is much more clear that this is supposed to have social commentary. It’s very much about marriage and pleasure and how women’s hands are tied much more than men’s. It’s awesome to hear Merteuil say that the reason she didn’t get married again was because she didn’t want any man to have a claim over her. I kind of assumed (mostly based on the style and the film quality) that this would be a sort of BBC-ish adaptation, but I wound up thinking it was a really great movie. Young Colin Firth was fantastic — he was so lanky and funny — and Annette Bening was really great. My favourite scene is still when Cecile is finally alone with her music teacher, who’s been writing her love letters, and the first thing they do is hand each other letters and then start to read them. It is funny and Zizek would have a field day.
  4. Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969): I had seen this a couple of times before, but Alex hadn’t, so we caught it at the Cinematheque. I noticed lots of little details I hadn’t before, like the little visual joke when Robert Forster’s lighting his cigarette in front of his giant Jean-Paul Belmondo poster. Medium Cool is mostly famous for the scenes that Wexler shot at the riots around the 1968 Chicago DNC — he actually filmed his actors at the actual event, and at one point you can hear someone call out “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” (which Imdb says was dubbed in after the fact, which is even more amazing if you’re thinking about this movie in terms of authenticity and media manipulation, which I do) — but there’s a lot more there. The way Wexler mixes documentary-style stuff with more “constructed” seeming bits — I’m thinking of the transition when he’s interviewing the Kennedy supporter kids and then the camera latches on to Harold on the train and they have a whole sequence of him and the pigeons, all overlaid with really loud, obtrusive music, or how ridiculously bucolic the flashbacks to West Virginia were, or even the way he plays wacky music over the roller derby footage and then cuts it, so you just hear the actual roller derby sounds, which kind of emphasizes the brutality of the whole thing — is really, really interesting. Anyway, I can’t imagine most of the politically engaged cinema of the 1970s without this movie.
  5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, 2007): Oh, so funny. I think a lot of the “80s stuff = instant comedy” that’s been going around lately is really tiresome, but Andy Samberg seems to have the right amount of sincerity vs. irony. I don’t think this kind of thing markets really well though. It obviously wasn’t, like, a triumph of filmmaking or anything, but I think silliness counts for something.
  6. 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002): This was, weirdly, on TV the day after the sad death of the real Tony Wilson — coincidence or tribute? — either way, great. I really loved Tristram Shandy, which broke the fourth wall in different ways from this (and is probably a better movie) but I love how smart Winterbottom is about the “authenticity” question. Instead of just making a biopic, he has his main character address the camera frequently, like, pointing out the cameos of the various “real people” in the movie and noting at least one instance where an event was totally fictional. And he mixed in archival footage, most notably of a seminal Sex Pistols show! So part of it was really real. Basically, I think Winterbottom is really savvy about drawing attention to the artificiality of the project and the nature of the medium, but in a still-entertaining way. The CG stuff in the pigeon scene has not aged well though.

In other news, Karl Rove is resigning (!). I think this is a good thing for the world. Also, I am pretty sure I watched another movie this week that I forgot, but I honestly can’t figure out when I would have watched it, so I may have just counted wrong when I was tallying things up.