1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941): I still don’t think that it is the Greatest Movie Ever Made, but I do think it was pretty amazing that a movie like this got made in Hollywood in 1941.
  2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957): It’s totally “movies I have seen a hundred times already” week! It’s seldom a year doesn’t go by without me seeing this movie for one reason or another. It’s kind of amazing that this got made in Hollywood in 1957. It’s just so unrelentingly depressing, what with the death, and the madness, and the creepy makeover sequence that I always wince when I watch, and “I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all,” possibly the single saddest line in the history of everything, followed by Scottie’s totally wrong assertion that “there’s an answer for everything.” But it’s also stunningly, amazingly beautiful. Every frame is like a painting; you totally drink in all the colour and the diffuse light and the glowing and it somehow makes the whole thing really appealing. Frame from Vertigo
  3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007): I’m still not totally sure how I feel about this whole thing, there were definitely some weird sexual politics, but Cronenberg’s been doing uncomfortable sex and violence since before it was cool, so I think he might get to be “examining” stuff like the cryto-gay villain who has the “crypto-” more or less subtracted it’s so obvious what’s going on and the woman who works with babies but is totally sad because she doesn’t have one (I don’t want to be too spoilery, but look at Naomi Watts’ costumes throughout the movie and then look at how she is dressed and shot at the end and you will know what I’m talking about). I didn’t love it as much as History of Violence, but I think Cronenberg does a really good job with this kind of genre movie: it’s amazingly well-cast (Vincent Cassel was great, but Armin Mueller-Stahl, who I’ve always liked, blew my mind), and he hits all the right notes, but he takes all the sex and violence just far enough that it’s noticeable, plus you get a brief passing glimpse of Viggo Mortensen’s junk. The much-talked-about bathhouse knifing scene is totally the centrepiece of the movie — it’s made more powerful because you basically just see him in suits up until this scene (with one big exception). There’s something ideologically slippery about Cronenberg that makes him really interesting; he’s not really trying to be ideological, he’s doing something else. Maybe he’s just pushing genres a little more to their logical conclusions, which pushes audiences to question their pleasure in said genres?

I also watched the last half of The Fountainhead this week: it was written by Ayn Rand and ends with a guy being applauded for blowing up some public housing. Objectivists suck. I wasn’t much of a fan of Gossip Girl either.