1. Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945): I love how in some movies you can actually see all the social anxieties it’s dealing with at once: you’ve got women working outside the home, you have the crumbling of the middle class, you have sex, you have women with guns. It also allows you to make a really good case that the artsy “expressionist” influences of film noir have a lot more in common with melodrama than people might think. Noir usually gets big points for being all existentialist and deep, but I really think that they are melodramas of male anxiety, and the fact that expressive mise-en-scene and cinematography have so much in common with domestic melodramas in terms of how meaning is produced is a really compelling argument in that favour.
  2. What Have I Done To Deserve This? (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984)
  3. Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006): So expect to see a lot more Almodóvar in the next six months or so, because, thesis. Actually I was really surprised how much these movies had in common and how you could see Almodóvar’s perspective shifting. He’s really using melodrama differently than he did at the beginning of his career. Which is good for me, because, thesis. I won’t subject you to my endless notes on what I think the significance of the extreme high-angle shot was in Volver or the possible thematic significance of counterfeiting in What Have I Done.

Also, Ranylt Richildis at Pajiba sticks it to the “serious” film:

It’s my shit luck that, about an hour and ten minutes in, Lions for Lambs slid irrevocably into the Crash drawer, which slammed shut with a shudder I’m certain my fellow audience members felt (they definitely heard my snicker). As over-used and -abused as that Haggis blot is around here (bear with me), still I’m grateful to Crash for succinctly codifying that particular counterfeiting to which American studio film is increasingly prone. In one convenient monosyllable I can communicate to readers a host of wretched qualities: windy, self-important, moronic, bungling, baroque, Oscar-bait. And as usual, it’s all disguised by solid performances, hot-button topics, extended dialogue, and a veneer of competence, which is guaranteed to flame the viewer’s rage when she realizes someone attempted to beguile her, once again, with The Serious.

Crash certainly wasn’t the first Hollywood picture to insult us with its Flecknoe-esque impotence — that title has just become shorthand for movies that make a whole art out of those off-putting moments found in stronger films like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and “Band of Brothers.” As a foreigner, I might risk a sound keel-hauling for suggesting as much, but somewhere along the way, I think America lost its ability to do war movies — or “important” movies of any stripe. The few exceptions that manage to come out of the U.S. can’t hold back the deluge of celebrity-larded films that purport to be significant, eternal and moral, but which are really just little cinematic canapés that feed actors’ and directors’ egos and offer nothing of substance to audiences so used to starvation, they can find a feast in a crumb. I want to lock Eastwood, Redford, Penn and current-day Scorsese into a theater along with Haggis, Hanks and Spielberg, and pump out the same fume of Starbuck’s tang and L.A. smog that wafts off their own blustering boardroom misfires, until these purveyors of what passes for Meaning suffocate on their own fetor. Where these mooncalves see weighty, I see a complete lack of cultural awareness beyond the axiomatic; I see output as clichéd and constipated as my non-revelation that Hollywood fucking sucks, and as unoriginal as a caffeine-addled Pajiba reviewer whacking a mediocre studio picture upside the head with a thesaurus. Crash is just the apotheosis of rank witlessness, and thanks to its bottled stink, films like Lions for Lambs (which replaces racism with propaganda as the social bête-noir we’d never recognize without Redford’s help) are much more easily scented.

Of course, after I pasted this long quote, I read the comments, of which many contained sentiments like “2 many big words, so pretentious” but seriously? I was nodding along vigorously the whole time I read this, and I thought she did a good job of actually addressing the film in the part that followed.