During the slow summer of 2016, everything I published was either completed in the spring or a commitment/tribute to someone else (or both). Finally in the fall I resumed a busy pace, in this case exclusively focused on concluding my Favorites series by the fourth anniversary of its debut. Every day I published a new entry following the order I'd established a half-decade earlier; obviously preferences and perceptions shift with time, especially given my drift from intense cinephilia, but that was part of the pleasure in writing these fifty-eight reviews (almost all from memory rather than re-viewings).
Subjects, outside of the Favorites series yet in tune with its subjects and mission, include teasers for a Citizen Kane video series that would remain just a tease years later, an experimental switcheroo between Au Hasard Balthazar and Pyaasa, two podcasts each on my two favorites series/film combos, written interviews with Twin Peaks and Prisoner fans, and a sad farewell to Wonders in the Dark guru Allan Fish, the cinephile extraordinaire.
My highlight for this period is, appropriately enough, The Favorites - Masculin Feminin (#1), a longer-than-usual entry on a favorite that felt newly relevant with its portrait of a growing but frustrated youthful left against the backdrop of a national election.
MAY
Just in time for the film's seventy-fifth anniversary, a teaser for my Mirrors of Kane video series (one chapter would follow, but the rest were put on the backburner for the near future...)
Kicking off the Kane series with a look at how people approach the film - and why it matters
JUNE
The creator of Wrapped in Plastic joins me for another conversation, this time to discuss his new book
JULY
Reaching the season 2 finale on this podcast after a yearlong journey
Swapping two very different soundscapes in an experimental video essay
Multiple guests take turns with various aspects of Fire Walk With Me for the Unwrapped podcast
Why "The Girl Who Was Death" is a great episode (and many other matters) - a great conversation with a big Prisoner fan
AUGUST
Bringing our discussion from print to audio, I join Bob's podcast to take a sweeping overview of the whole Evangelion series
Switching places, I guest-host the podcast for an episode
Talking to the director of a documentary about the Twin Peaks Festival (and finding how how he ranks Twin Peaks episodes)
Paying tribute to the great Allan Fish, whose work - and the community that sprung up around it - dominated so much of my online activity
SEPTEMBER
Comedy as imaginative as it is funny (and the Marshall McLuhan cameo anticipates Twitter celebrity tag-ins by several decades)
Thirty, forty, even fifty years after release, the film's zeitgeist still seemed within reach - but does it still?
Celebrating that eternally stirring climax with a 2016 review of a 1992 adaptation of a 1936 film based on an 1826 novel about a 1757 war
This casual epic conveys a magic embedded in the every day, waiting to be discovered (in my case, on a Sunday morning at an obscure festival)
A masterpiece (in its way, an anthology of loosely-linked sci-fi stories) whose very existence is as iconic and improbable as the monolith itself
If L'Avventura is haunted by a recent yet irretrievable past and La Notte captures the anxiety of a very present ennui, L'Eclisse - my favorite of Michelangelo Antonioni's trilogy - conveys the possibility of an open future
Part crime genre, part art film; part Cassavetes, part Bertolucci; defined by both handheld grittiness and camera dollies, Martin Scorsese's very personal film is drawn from many cinematic traditions
Geppeto's village, the intricate array of clocks and whirligigs in his shop (a tightly woven web of Silly Symphonies), the "Dark Disneyland" design of Pleasure Island...all depict Disney's talent for world-creation
Peter Greenaway's work is a dizzying tug of war between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and this is a film that I could enjoy on mute OR with my eyes closed
Perfect evocation of noir's je ne sais quoi - thick with fog, wet streets, chiaroscuro, tightly packed deep frames, harsh lights hitting the lens, and a femme fatale embracing a detective as smoke curls in the air
Forget the Bomb, *this* is Slim Pickens' finest moment
The tragedy of a schoolgirl investigating her own trauma, considered in isolation from the larger mythology that spawned this film
Hilarious and brilliantly constructed, what initially seemed like a minor film in the Coens' vast oeuvre has possibly become their most beloved
Reeling the viewer into its murky waters through sheer narrative grace and clear-eyed formal discipline
Is Out 1 a coded message concealing a fascinating secret? Or a puzzle that purposefully doesn't add up?
An American genre film glazed in the avant-garde
While the characters tumble around their little corner of the universe, the film mournfully suggests a larger, more transcendent reality just passed by, like a cloud drifting lazily but irrevocably toward the horizon
Weaving the line between cold, weary apathy toward life and painful exposure to its strongest emotional eddies
Not content to cut between frames, the film cuts within them, creating dazzling collages in perpetual motion
A music video shot on a single roll of film, with each layer of imagery exposed over the same frames
The blimp that proclaims "The World is Yours!" turns out to be the Hindenburg
OCTOBER
Packs a hell of a punch at seven minutes and seven seconds - one for each dwarf
Though City Lights and Modern Times provide close competition, this may be Charlie Chaplin's most beloved film
"Dziga Vertov's 1929 film is the single work in the new [Sight & Sound] top ten that seems to understand that nervy mixture of interruption and unexpected association [of the online era]" - David Thomson in 2012
"He wondered if the world is becoming a dream, or if the dream is becoming the world"
Relocates the urban warfare of Prohibition thugs to the wilderness of the American West and shifts the sensibility from post-World War I fury to post-World War II introspection
Snapshot of a zeitgeist seemingly at its peak but in retrospect already beginning to slide
Winking at the silliness of the whole charade while wrapping us up inside an examples of how effective that charade can be
Tex Avery is so in tune with the pace of cinematic perception that he knows we can understand the most ludicrous conceit in a matter of seconds if presented the right way
Probably the earliest film on my list that I can remember being released in theaters although I was way too young to see it at the time - Home Alone was my Joe Pesci flick that year
Up in the villa overlooking the valley, as in an enchanted castle in a child's fable, an alienated young man decides to see what happens when he shakes the foundations of his frozen family's world
Embodying and subverting classical western forms, The Searchers draws on genre conventions that John Ford and John Wayne helped create while pointing toward the revisionist decades to come
A film project tracks a group of Brits from childhood to old age; each time I watch the series I can identify with a different chapter since I match up roughly with one of the installments every seven years
As in an earlier entry on this list, the standout scene involves slow death, overpowering music, and an achingly, even ominously still landscape
Caught between the common folk and the local elite, the family he's defending and the community opposing them, his own idealistic appeals to higher principles and his shrewd ability to employ emotional manipulation
In addition to the cleverness of its overall shape and its fearlessness in articulating its concerns, this wintry classic is very much an exercise in atmosphere
The film has plenty of empathy (which is not to say sympathy) to go around but its power is anchored in the subjectivity of the victim of violence, rather than identifying solely with her avenger
In many ways a small, focused film, whose looming presence in Hollywood history is owed to two factors - one positive, one definitely not
Seemingly patterned along the lines of L.A. ensemble pieces like Short Cuts and Grand Canyon, David Lynch's most celebrated work owes its sprawling structure to another source - and goes in a very different direction
A work whose massive impact eventually shifted away from cinema (once #1, it's no longer even in the top 500 hits of all time) and toward cable drama
Naive expectations raised only to be crushed by the disillusioning indifference or hostility of those - individuals, institutions, and social forces - more powerful or deceitful than our heroine
Star Wars fuses the spirit of backyard play with careful craftsmanship and the result is unlike anything before or since, despite many imitations
The intriguing, unsettling sensation of getting lost in your own home
Very British in sensibility and attitude, as crisp and curt as Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene could manage, but the two most important characters are American and this may be the greatest noir (a very American form)
The outsider who finds his own path to confident power by deciding his role is to defend society from other outsiders
Experimental to its core, mixing documentary, found footage, home movie, fictional re-enactment, autobiographical narration, and pure painting-in-motion visual setpiece
A snapshot and a painting at the same time - and of course, the music is fantastic
Within moments of our grandiose introduction to this larger-than-life character, a rapid-fire newsreel exalts, mocks, glosses, and punctures Kane from all angles
Bedford Falls is a fantastically impressive microcosm, a self-contained universe worthy of a decade-spanning soap opera, yet somehow contained within a single two-hour film - all as set-up for the famous final act
Not to ignore the film's searing, if implicit, critique of capitalism, imperialism, and representative government, but the heart of this Godfather is still more psychological than sociological
Something about Carl Theodor Dreyer's work connects on an electric level - however carefully the film was planned, it must have grown out of a core understanding rather than a cold-blooded blueprint
This documentary about the Rolling Stones' catastrophic Altamont concert offers the distinct sensation, almost unparalleled in American film history, of capturing a particular period in the exact moment of its apex, collapse, and transition
NOVEMBER
There's an intense precision to these hallucinatory stop-motion nightmares, as nonsensical as they seem, creating the impression that what we see is incredibly significant...even if we can't quite determine why
Soon after its release, The House is Black became a memorial not just for the leper colony documented onscreen but for the woman whose imagination and intelligence illuminate the film - it is twenty-two minutes, her only movie, and a masterpiece
Perpetually unsettling us with its combination of dollies and pans, startling us with its harsh, vivid sound design, and wrapping us in a carefully-realized world of sin, dread, and suffocating custom
I distinctly remember, on first view, dreading that the film would end when its primary narrative seemed to conclude despite the lingering mystery. And then...it kept going.
Lawrence of Arabia's greatness, cleverly constructed in the first part, is most fully realized in the uncertain, sprawling second part
Not a present-day documentary, and these "children of Marx and Coca-Cola" are not millennials, but this zeitgeist felt very relevant as I wrapped my Favorites series with #1 in autumn 2016
(I covered this period on Episode 24 of my Patreon podcast)
Next: Awaiting the Good and Bad (November 2016 - January 2017)
(in which I catch up with unreleased work in the wake of the election)
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Previous: Paris, Portmeirion, and Other Planets (December 2015 - April 2016)
(in which I catch up with unreleased work in the wake of the election)
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Previous: Paris, Portmeirion, and Other Planets (December 2015 - April 2016)
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