Top 10

While I'm not usually a fan of top ten lists, I thought I'd compile one of my own anyway. This is a list of my favourite movies, which I've given some thought, and think it should be as flawed and personalised as the compiler themselves. The main flaw is that not all my favourites will end up on this list - there is no P.T. Anderson, Coen Brothers, David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, Gaspar Noe or Richard Linklater here, nor can I bring myself to include more than one movie from the same film maker, otherwise I would've included Funny Games.

A favourite movie greatly differs from a great movie. Although the two can cross over, a favourite movie is usually flawed, niche, specialised, to your own senses. I think this is why a "top ten favourites" can not be disagreeable, because it's about me. My only problem here is to figure out what order to put them in. I'll go the Roger Ebert route and put them alphabetically:

ALPHAVILLE
DAS SCHLOSS
DEAD OR ALIVE
END OF EVANGELION
FALSTAFF - CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
HERZ AUS GLAS
IL BUONO IL BRUTTO IL CATTIVO
PRIMER
THE NEW WORLD (extended edition)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY


The main reason for doing this is that I want to get off my lazy butt one day and design alternative movie posters for all of these, kind of like what the Mondo Collection did, only nowhere near as good, and they'll just be for myself. If I get to complete all ten of these, then I'll do another ten - The Top Ten List Of Movies I Feel Gutted For Not Including In The First Top Ten List Of Favourite Movies. Synecdoche New York will be at the top.

CAGE-THON -- FRIDAY NIGHT

Pay no attention to the DVD's behind, even though they are the ones actually in focus for some reason.

I've had a tiresome week this week, and it's about time I wind down with some raw Nicholas Cage movies - the cream of his crop, so to speak.

First we begin with Vampire's Kiss, a classic vampiric tale about madness and teeth(?). Followed with The Wicker Man, a cult classic remake of a cult classic about a classic cult.

Then we step up to the blu-ray quality. In full high-def immersion, we take on Michael Bay's brilliant parody of the emptiness of Hollywood action blockbuster - The Rock, renowned for being his first foray into the hall of fame that is The Criterion Collection. Finally we round off the night with the ultimate Cage vehicle, the one and only Con-Air. Need I say more? Need I?

I haven't actually watched these movies yet, except Con-Air, back in the 90's, but I can't remember it too well. Should be a night of awe and/or intrigue. In any case, bring your own lube.

HANNA a Joe Wright film

I just came from seeing Hanna, the current better alternative to Captain America - although it came out a couple months ago in USA, when it was a better alternative to Thor - but that's all I can really say about it. The best it can achieve right now is that it's the most "underrated" movie this time of year, among a list of forgettable and mind-numbing comic book flicks.

My short definition of Hanna would be "revisionist popcorn action-thriller". I concede it was well made, at times awe-struck by its masterful technical precision. I loved its look, the gritty reality of the photography, and impressed by the lack of noticeable CGI (for I picked a couple objects with indifferent lighting, but I won't spoil the reader with untrained eyes for such things). And I can not complain for a lack of plot, which moved briskly yet casually, just the way I like it.

To summarise, this is a story about a girl raised in the snowy forests of somewhere in Europe by her father, trained to be a perfect killer and soldier. When she is ready, she flips a switch to set off a beacon for some CIA (or something) agent to find her and hunt her down. The movie kicks off from there and she travels around Europe on a great chase, discovering the truth about herself and the joys of finding independence and freedoms she was deprived of in her past.

My concern is that I did not gain anything out of it by the end, either intellectually or emotionally. Should it be a complement to say you can switch your brain off during this movie, but not required to go all the way off, but more like "standby" mode? Perhaps I have entered the dark side of film viewing, expecting a film to be about something, and if not, then be a riotous piece of camp. This was my same problem with watching The Dark Knight. Perhaps there is something if you look for it, but in my mind, I've had much more fulfilling experiences with other films. Great films.

It makes me think of another film from a while ago, Sucker Punch a Zack Snyder film. What both films have in common, besides sexy action-babe female protagonists, is the point of being cool for no sake other than being cool. The difference is that Sucker Punch fails, because it tries way too hard to impress with established "cool things", and Hanna succeeds, because Joe Wright seems to know what it means to be cool: to be oblivious of the fact that he is being cool. He has a cool story, cool characters, a cool soundtrack (by the Chemical Brothers), and instead of saying "OK let's make the coolest movie ever!" Joe Wright would settle on "whatever bro, yeah". The movie isn't about being cool, and that's what's cool about it.

But for me, cool is not enough. If it is for you, then knock yourself out, you'll love it.

Now I want to talk about style, something which stuck out for me in this movie. There are times when directors will decide to go in an unconventional direction. This is great when it serves the story, to surprise the audience, to move, to express. But then, as I noticed in Hanna, it seems to draw attention to itself. The first thing I noticed in the opening credits is when it felt the duty to mention this is "a Joe Wright film". This is a sign of a pretentious director, whether or not they are good, but it's not enough to simply give themselves directing credit. They have to establish this is their film, told in their voice, the auteur. When Hanna is running down a large tunnel, escaping from this strange facility, lost, all new to her experience, the camera spinning around and the editing cutting quickly up close and out wide, in time to the music, and spinning and spinning, seems to draw too much attention to itself, but pulls me out of the story. It does nothing to truly serve the story. Yes, she's confused, lost, panicking even, I can tell by Soairse Ronan's performance. Her performance is good enough, there is no need for the director to step in and make up for a short-coming that wasn't there. Unless there is really a point, such tomfoolery becomes superfluous.

Watch a film by Martin Scorcese, for instance, and you'll see what I mean. Scorcese makes many unconventional film-making choices, but they all serve a purpose to the story, or the point of. He really does make the best films.

So what did I really want out of Hanna? How could it have improved? I think in the end, all I really want to do is go watch a different movie, and let this one fall in the pile of obscurity where it belongs. It's an underrated, forgettable...thing. I don't think I'll be getting it on blu-ray, but I highly recommend the soundtrack, at least.

New ideas!

I'm all for new ideas. I was thinking, as inspired by my last post, instead of posting actual articles, I'll just post about what I've written up as drafts, or ideas I had for new articles, and then let the reader speculate the discussion in their own minds. It probably sounds like a lazy concept but I'll give it a try, and it may even be all the better as the articles would seem to have more of an air of myth and greatness, the less they are actually seen.

Firstly, I wrote up a quick draft for an article about James Nguyen's infamous runaway hit, Birdemic Shock and Terror. The article was to defend the movie as a great movie, a genuinely great movie with a genuine defence that relies on grounded and consistently reliable film theory - namely structuralism and semiotics. The main reference was to the Whitney character's ringtone on her mobile phone, which I remember has two occurrences in the film. If you know the story behind the ringtone, and about the structuralist theories of "the signifier" and "the signified", you'd understand how mind-blowing the whole movie is, as it's full if these little instances.

Secondly, I wrote up a lengthy draft (two drafts in fact) on the subject of the video game Mario Kart wii, which I have been playing a lot recently. I'm not entirely satisfied with the article, as most of it reads more like an instruction manual, or a FAQ, where I spend too many syllables giving exposition. Such that cannot be easily dismissed as it all plays vitally in the follow-up anecdotes, and felt that's where all the real juice was contained. The anecdotes were all a big lead up to a grand moral, and the article was really less about the video game itself and more about life, and such. By the end, the whole thing becomes a cathartic revelation, and all who read would find total enlightenment, a new outlook on life and new-found determination. It was truly a brilliant article, but a shame about the exposition parts. I also found the anecdotes would little apply after mere days as the game keeps bringing newer experiences after every play, and my growth in skill constantly increases. I'd look back and feel ashamed that I would ever consider displaying crude, unrefined technique I have long trampled out. I don't know. Maybe I'll try a third draft.

I liked the part in one of the anecdotes where I get really frustrated at the game and decide to listen to the CD, "KILL" by Cannibal Corpse, after which I lightly mention within parentheses "because, you know, the time to kill is now". Such beauty in prose - wasted.

Thirdly, something I haven't drafted yet, is an essay I call "Cinema as Invocation". I think modern mainstream cinema is lacking in the primal purpose of art - that is to invoke. I've been feeling lately that I want to make a film, even one with no budget, just some kind of story. I want to know if I'd have it in me, in my bones, to make something great - or at least interesting. I'm pretty sure I don't lack the resources, but I do seem to lack people around me, to motivate and give support. But that aside, I wanted to write this essay on how a film should be composed. Perhaps it's more like a manifesto. The original idea is that cinema is comparable to music, but I couldn't get my brain around how cinema could be like music if music can itself be included in cinema. Michael Haneke, who also advocates cinema's relation to music, gets around this by not scoring his films at all (except ironically in Funny Games). I'm not so much against score, but I'm against score that lacks invocation, or tries too hard and only becomes distracting.

I'm currently reading the poetry of Emily Brontë, who is probably my favourite Brontë, as I like the way she talks about the world she lives in, the moors, the woods, the skies, and all that. It struck me how it's in the specific way she uses language to visually invoke her world in conjunction to her feelings - and that the same actually applies to cinema. In this way, cinema is more akin to poetry. Firstly, the images of film could be compared to musical notes and chords, but when images move combined with sound and music, it's more like lyrics, where you can simultaneously read on paper and read out loud - visual and aural - and let the language dictate the rhythm and melody, all for the purpose of invocation. A film should be like a melody made up of invocations, but it shouldn't fluctuate too rapidly, or too dire. Once the melody is invented, then the story writes itself.

That's what I think anyway. I should explain that invocation could be anything, ranging from nostalgia to excitement to horror. The only thing I think should not be invoked is "you are watching a movie", or my personal peeve "cool, huh!?". This might contradict my defence for Birdemic Shock and Terror, above, as that movie fails to invoke anything but incompetence, but at least that's what it wasn't intending.

All these things left unwritten, and who's going to say anything of value was lost?

Dead

Sometimes this blog has a way of getting shot dead. I often forget why I have this blog in the first place. I know my first post is some kind of a manifesto, plus another post which is more Alice-related, but ideas have a way of evolving and I'm sure this blog has turned into some other kind of monster by now.

In my previous post I blindly praised Rango without getting into the meaty specifics and justification of its genius. This is due partly because I'm going through personal motivational issues and also partly because I can't find my notes I wrote in a frenzy at the time of planning that post, and to top that the notes are incomplete (I figured I would just improvise the unwritten parts). I also have notes lying around for a review of Sucker Punch and the general descent of Zack Snyder.

For anyone interested, the second part of the Rango review involved discussions on 4th-wall, Greek chorus, homage, cameo appearances, narrative structure, humour, symbolism and metaphor. And that was just for the story, character designs also play a strong part, and in the case of this movie, they related heavily with homage and cameos. The 'homage' aspect was going to take up the bulk of the discussion, as I was going to do a comparison review with the movie Shiki-Jitsu ("Ritual") directed by Anno Hideaki. They are two very different movies, but they share a fundamental similarity on the significant choices of actors and especially who those actors are portraying.

I guess with a bit of research one could come to their own conclusion with what I was planning to go on about. I know my friend Peter was going to do a review, as he mentioned that it's the first non-Pixar 3D animated major motion-picture that he has really enjoyed, but I guess he's busy right now.

With that out of the way, I can plan my next step in the evolution of this blog. I want to try out some creative exercises. I often think it would be fun to challenge myself - just as an exercise - in making improvements in failed ideas and stories. I've been currently reading some fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, and although they were recorded in another time, probably more spoken than written, I could imagine handing one of those to a University-level creative-writing lecturer as an assignment and getting it back with red scribbles crossing out entire sentences, if not paragraphs. Brothers Grimm stories have become popular again recently, what with the new version of Sleeping Beauty coming out this year featuring Emily "Babydoll" Browning in the lead role. I get the impression that the original texts are more like starting points, ready to be revised and expanded upon, much like what Disney has been doing time and time again, only they can't seem to bare the morbidity and the occasionally absurd bloody violence.

I would also find it interesting as an exercise to try and adapt a story from unconventional sources. Things like abstract non-story video games (Tetris, for example); a piece of instrumental music, or a song/poem with vague lyrics; a photograph or a painting; a joke or anti-joke; a piece of food; an alarm clock, maybe. I'm just trailing off here, listing things in my immediate view, but it's about thinking laterally.

I've always wanted to be a part of a blogging community (a blogosphere?) who operate as a kind of online writing-workshop for stuff like this. I could search for one, but I'm not very fond of random people who post on the Internet, who mostly end up pissing me off. I'd rather do it with a group of friends who have similar interests and who I know can construct a logical argument. But this is hard to organise, I may as well just remain the ever-persistent one-man-band.

I think the real reason for having this blog at all is because I think about things too much, and after a while without any articulation, my head begins to hurt.

RANGO.

Rango turned out to be a pretty good movie.

In this discussion I will have to address two previous posts I made.

The first post is where I made a premature speculation about this film predicting it's going to be terrible, based on my disappointed reaction after a somewhat high expectation due to two names I came across when I first discovered this movie's existence:

1. Gore Verbinski as director, who has always put extreme care and detailed thought in all of his stories.

2. Industrial Light & Magic as the studio, being the forerunners of CGI and special effects, it is exciting to hear of them creating their first completely animated feature.

To me this is a big deal. A big enough deal to say that this could be a contender to Pixar. Then I saw the trailer.

And the groaning began.

Immediately I lost faith. It was a little early to tell, but I thought Gore Verbinski may have pulled a Zack Snyder and jumped the shark in quality. I had two main gripes with the trailer that deflated my hopes:

1. Choppy/snappy non-sequiter type of humour with no context.

2. Another god damn anthropomorphic 'arena'-based animal movie.

While the latter remains true, and rightly so (I'll explain later), the former thankfully stays behind in the trailer, and all its parts have actual context within the movie itself. It's not my place to complain of marketing tactics, as I'm sure the department knows what they're doing, but I found it a shame they had to appeal to the Dreamworks/Blue Sky (etc) crowd.

The second post is where my expectations remained high, due to the Verbinski/ILM factor, I still had a duty to see this film for what it's worth, and I'm glad I did. My expectations were met and I am ashamed I ever doubted Verbinski in the first place.

From an adult perspective one might say that the story is a bit too advanced for children - the target audience - and some jokes and references will go way over their little heads. I must contradict this and say a child could easily enjoy the story on their own level. I remember when I was a child I couldn't remember a thing about the actual story of any movie, as long as there were colourful characters and exciting moments, which Rango is not without.

Here is the simple version, fun for all the family:

A nameless chameleon is thrust out into the Nevada desert and finds his way into a small town called Dirt, occupied by various desert animals and live on a currency of water. The town is currently in a water crisis and the townfolk are bullied by a group of cronies who work for the mayor, who are in turn terrorised by a large eagle. The chameleon adopts a new heroic personality, using his own acting and story-telling aspirations, and calls himself "Rango". Through sheer luck he defeats the predatory eagle and the town rejoices, sending him to the mayor who assigns him as the new sheriff. When the last of the bank's supply of water is stolen, Rango and friends set out on a new adventure to discover the mysteries and secret plots of this town, uncover the dastardly schemes of the mayor and eventually face off against his greatest nemesis - "Jake" The Snake.

It sounds typical enough, but it's a bit more complicated than that. To explain how, I'll have to get techinical, and, well, that's all for another post, another day. 'Till next time.

"My Fairy" by Lewis Carroll

This poem was written when he was 12 or 13, but still remains my favourite of all his works.

  My Fairy (1845)

I have a fairy by my side
 Which says I must not sleep,
When once in pain I loudly cried
 It said, 'You must not weep.'

If, full of mirth, I smile and grin,
 It says, 'You must not laugh';
When once I wished to drink some gin
 It said, 'You must not quaff.'

When once a meal I wished to taste
 It said, 'You must not bite';
When to the wars I went in haste
 It said, 'You must not fight.'

'What may I do?' at length I cried,
 Tired of the painful task.
The fairy quietly replied,
 And said, 'You must not ask.'

  Moral

 'You mustn't.'

New realisation for THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY

I guess this is the value of reading books on a whim, even if you don't end up finishing them.

What I noticed is that the characters are introduced in the reverse order to the title, which had always bugged me ever since I laid eyes on the film. Although the plotting shouldn't be laid out any other way - Clint Eastwood's introduction incorporates both Tuco and Angel Eyes in the same setting, after which we have been introduced to both of these characters - I always wondered why the title couldn't have been the more appropriate "The Ugly, The Bad and The Good", despite its lack of verbal elegance.

What I recently discovered is that this is a device called "hysteron-proteron", commonly employed by Homer in his epic The Odyssey, where this technique was brought to my attention. It is considered rhetorical, and therefore played for effect.

This, however, was unintentional, as the original Italian title is ordered "The Good, The Ugly and The Bad", however the rhetoric remains, and sets us up for a homeric grandiose epic all the same.