1. High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952): I’ve seen this movie a few times before, and I remain kidn of ambivalent about it. So I will do a pro-con list. In the “pro” column: the amazingly catchy theme song; the greatness of Helen Ramirez who may well be my favourite female character from a Western ever (not hard to do, granted); the really stunning cinematography — it looks really modern and there’s even what appears to be hand-held camera work. Con: despite its fame for being an anti-blacklist movie, it’s beloved by many US presidents both (D) and (R) which I think is a good indicator of its ideological ambiguity; the fact that it lionizes a hero who basically saves a community from itself with his iron moral will hasn’t aged well and comes off almost Randian (Gary Cooper was also the lead in The Fountainhead); and the whole “education” of the Grace Kelly character was pretty condescending and the treatment of her giving up her pacifist ideals to save her husband and live in his world is more harsh than it needs to be to tell the story.
  2. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972): I genuinely liked this movie, especially the way Petra seems to try on different personalities as they please her and Fassbinder’s overly self-conscious compositions.Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant But I feel like I can’t totally pin it down; I get the camp and the costumes and the strategic use of pop music (which is what I was watching it for) which are all great, but I feel like there’s something slippery about the whole thing. I’d read a bit about it before seeing it, but I found myself kind of saying “so that’s it?” at the end. I think I expected it to be more over the top and less claustrophobic and silent than it was.
  3. Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993): So. Apparently at the time this movie was really controversial because of its “comic” rape scene, so I was kind of trepidatious about seeing it. I think that’s why all the people actually writing books on Almodóvar are so defensive about it–because Almodóvar understands women, he’s making rape funny because it’s uncomfortable–as are most of the imdb commenters who liked it. I kind of see what some of his defenders are getting at: if you want to be shocking, one way to do it is to try to make people laugh at something that really really isn’t funny and tada! Discomfort! I think that’s really what Almodóvar intended, but…it still seems kind of exploitative and I just don’t think you can ever de-fang a rape played as comic. It’s kind of a shame, because there’s some interesting play with the whole tired film-as-voyeurism trope, particularly how much more upset Kika is about seeing her rape on TV than about her actual rape, which sounds like it’s played horribly, but it kind of rings true. It’s just kind of impossible to talk about that movie without talking about “the scene.”
  4. Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004): This is one of my favourite Almodóvars. I love the way that the whole actual story is revealed through other people’s stories, and that voiceover of Enrique (the film director) partway through the film that sort of hints that the “real” parts are actually just as much a story. That and how much the hotness of Gael García Bernal is emphasized; it’s weird, because his sexiness is actually cinematically important, because of how he is this male femme fatale and there’s so much emphasis on the queered male gaze throughout the movie. We see him semi-naked a lot, but he’s always being watched.
  5. Dune (David Lynch, 1984): Man, I was prepared for how confusing this movie was plot-wise, for how utterly strange and ’80s sci-fi it was going to look, and for the constant, often redundant voiceovers (which I actually thought were pretty awesome), but I was completely not prepared for how sexist it was. The women have all this spiritual power, but it’s nothing compared to “Paul the chosen one,” who takes all these secret womanly skills farther than the women ever can. Or something? That is basically the story: this order of women have all this ancient wisdom, but then Kyle McLachlan comes along and outwisdoms them with his manliness and his riding the giant phalluses that inhabit the spice-world.Giant Phallus Alien
  6. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966): One of the things that’s always struck me about this movie is that despite all its famous Brechtianicity (new word!), it’s actually pretty tense and suspenseful and involving. I don’t really have much else to say about Persona because come on, whole books have been written, blah blah. But you know? I watched the trailer on the DVD, and how much was that movie being promoted as 1) a prestigious artsy way to feel good about yourself and superior to the rest of pop culture (”the critics of Europe“) and 2) a titillating vaguely sapphic* encounter between two blonde Swedish ladies (that line about “bare skin” while Bibi Andersson is walking over to Liv Ullmann’s bed)? Just saying.