Film Recommendations of the Week

DVD Recommendations:



La Pointe Courte (1955) by Agnes Varda - Agnes Varda's first feature film is a lovely, understated, and formalist precursor to the French New Wave. Varda fuses documentary and fiction and uses parallel editing (the film was edited by Alain Resnais) to tie the story of a small fishing town with lovers analysis their relationship. An early statement of what would later be the explosion of the French New Wave. Available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. You can find it on Netflix and Facets.




Only Angels Have Wings (1939) by Howard Hawks - One of Howard Hawks' greatest and most fully realized films. I always felt this film got pushed to the side in favor of Hawks' more famous works (Red River, Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep), but I find this to be one of his greatest achievements and a beautiful summation of the style and themes Hawks explored throughout his career. Available on DVD through Netflix and Facets.

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978) by Chantal Akerman - Akerman's follow up to Jeanne Dielman and News from Home is less formally rigid, but just as masterful. It was her most "mainstream" film to date in 1978, but is just as insightful and beautiful as anything she has done. I actually recommend watching this film before Jeanne Dielman to get a taste for Akerman, especially if you are at all put off by Jeanne Dielman's epic length and formalist reputation. Les Rendex-vous d'Anna is an excellent introduction into the films of Chantal Akerman and one of her most personal statement about herself as a filmmaker. Available on DVD through Netflix and Facets and released as part of Criterion's Eclipse series entitled Akerman in the Seventies.

I'm Gonna Explode (2008) by Gerardo Naranjo - The second feature film from Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo is a fresh, youthful, and radical take on the teenage, criminal lovers on the run genre. I have heard it described as a Pierrot le fou from the girl's point of view. I believe that Naranjo is one of the best young filmmaker's working today and one of the most interesting coming out of Mexico. Available on DVD through Netflix and Facets.

Region 2 Pick of the Week:

Le Lit de la vierge (1969) by Philippe Garrel - Another film from the Zanzibar film group, Philippe Garrel's Le lit de la vierge is a bizarre, minimalist, radical take on the story of Christ starring Pierre Clementi. Filled with long takes, anachronistic music, and revolutionary ideas, Le lit de la vierge is was one Garrel's best early films and one of the few available on DVD. It is available in France as a region 2 DVD with subtitles and can be obtained through Facets, the University of Pennsylvania library has a copy of it as well.

Free Movie of the Week:

Flaming Creatures (1963) by Jack Smith - Surely one of the most infamous films to come out of the American Underground in the 1960s, Flaming Creatures is strange, insular, insane, and beautiful. A film influenced as much by classic Hollywood cinema as by pornography and modern art. The film is difficult and strange, but it is worth checking out. You can view it on ubuweb for free.

Download of the Week:

Ticket of No Return (1979) by Ulrike Ottinger - Ottinger is a new discovery for me as well; she is a filmmaker I have been wanting to watch for a long time, but her films remains sadly unavailable in the United States. She is a colorful, kitschy, outlandish, and hilarious German filmmaker who came in at the tail end of the New German and has carved out a following among dedicated cinephiles for her bold and bizarre films. Ticket of No Return is a nice introduction to her work. You can download it on Pirates Bay. There is also an un-subtitled version of her film Freak Orlando (1981) on UbuWeb for those who know German.

As always, start threads on the Shooting Wall Message Board with your own recommendations and thoughts on these or any other of the recommended films.

INCENDIES

Incendies is a film I saw half a year ago, but it's currently playing at the place I work. If you're right by the theater and are a member and/or a student-as to get discounted tickets-then, and only then, come check it out if you have time to waste. Otherwise, save your gas money or train faire. The film, a international mystery film, adapted from Wajdi Mouward's play Scorched, is about a woman discovering she has family, not in her home of Quebec, but in her ancestral home of Lebanon. A discourse is proposed involving what the Middle East was, at one point, and still in several ways, if you look outside the Orientalist (go read Edward Said) US military hegemony on US media, a progressive and modern place. There are still the regressive elements, but we have that also in our society.

What unfolds is interesting, yet only traditional cinematically, so its not worth much merit. And my whole intellectual analysis above borrows more from my anthropology undergraduate courses than what is actually in the film, but I had to try to sound smart. The movie seems to borrow a bit from Atom Egoyan. Especially Egoyan's Ararat in terms of Incendies and it both being Middle Eastern historical and political mystery films. Yet, Ararat is a far superior film because unlike Incendies-which tricks you with glossy art house cinematography and a non-linear script-it delves much deeper into socio-political implications. Not only of what occurred in Armenia (where the main character in Ararat is trying to expose a genocide to the world), but also how the story is being portrayed. This is done via a non-linear meta-film technique that ultimately yields a much more intelligent analysis of the implications of one's history and how your history is portrayed-and spread-in terms of what history does to us phenomenologically. 

Incendies is then just a so-so film, surely better than most mystery films you'll see this year at the multiplex, but nothing that will incite cinephilia as it is overall a film that fits many of the dull Hollywood conventions art house movie theater-goers now expect after 30 years of Blockbuster saturation plaguing our understanding of what film can do. I mean, the film could of done so much more, but it just does the job and gives Western audiences a American History X-esque and.or Hollywood-ized portrayal of what occurred and is currently happening in the Middle East, which a film like Ararat was intelligent enough to avoid through more innovation. Definitely check out the director of Incendies Denis Villeneuve's better last film Polytechnique along with Egoyan's Ararat, but in the historical-political mystery market there is a whole contingency of films to check out before these like the amazing Katyn (Andrezj Wadja) or Z (Costa-Gravas). 

-KARL STARKWEATHER 

DRIVE

Nicolas Winding Refn's DRIVE is good.  Scratch that.  It's great.  Really great.  Some may have feared that Refn sold out with his pretty-boy Ryan Gosling action movie, and I'm inclined to call those people fools.  Yes, DRIVE does feels like a Hollywood film, but not like anything you've seen Hollywood put out in a long time.  Did you really think that Nicolas Winding Refn, one of the best and most interesting working directors, would submit to the evil ways of the studio system?  Refn actually benefitted from the opportunities Hollywood gave him with this film.  Utilizing his best cast yet (not that he hasn't always used great actors) and some very nice Los Angeles locales, Refn has created what I feel to be his most complete film to date.  

No, it isn't as existential as, say, BRONSON or VALHALLA RISING, but it is just as thoughtful, and even more violent, than anything he has made.  What Refn has done with DRIVE is make something that is not only accessible to a fairly wide audience, but also completely in keeping with the rest of his filmography.  Some diehards may rail against the film's familiar action movie structure or its dabbling with romanticism, but by the end it's clear that Refn is deconstructing the modern action film, rather than falling in line with it.

-ERIK WACKER 

 

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Catherine Breillat is a director we at Shooting Wall champion as one of foremost cinematically progressive directors working today. Breillat's latest is something every cinephile, if they have the opportunity in a theater or through the internet, should see. Stronger than her last film Blue Beard and on the same plane as the masterpieces The Last Mistress, Fat Girl, and Anatomy of Hell, I wonder in the coming weeks as I re-watch the film if it will come to dominate as my favorite of hers.

Sleeping Beauty's elements, the combination of the mise en scene and narrative pieces that each constitute metaphors, combine to create a layered interwoven epic. The film is non-linear: the story begins around the time the original fairytale was written and then the film leaps decades into the future. As sleeping beauty sleeps, we follow her as she is constantly displaced though various shifts in time in space. Though the film remains true to the eras which it depicts, it is dominated by a general "fairy tale" aesthetic. It is quite spectacular just to get your head around what you're being given. 

Now, there is a lot going on with this film. It is definitely using the strengths Breillat has honed with her past mytho-historical works like Blue Beard and The Last Mistress, to push her unique feminist polemics found in Anatomy Of Hell, Sex Is Comedy, Fat Girl, etc., on a grand socio-historical scale that ultimately pushes her ideas to a totalizing extreme. This film, in a simple sense, also pushes to a horrifying limit a line said earlier in the film, that "the lives of little girls are so boring." A thing meditated on through out and then heightened towards the end when the idea of abstracting oneself is seen as a nightmare.

Breillat, a filmmaker with amazing formal strengths in cinematography and art direction, utilizes her unique formal strategies to a limit with this film. Her gray muted color palettes, her surrealist gestures found in everything from sculptures adorning backgrounds to cobwebs suggesting century long immobility, long takes which slowly move closer to the character and heightened emotion impact, harsh complex lighting set-ups that highlight the muted-grayness of the highly unique characters and of the world, etc., make the narrative so much more meaningful. 

In short, this film is spectacular. With Breillat, you have to be open to what she is doing. She can be a harsh and violent filmmaker, but it is never without purpose. There is always so much going on her films. And Sleeping Beauty is one of her and cinema's crowning achievements. See it however you can. 

-KARL STARKWEATHER

Film Recommendations of the Week

This is a new feature being added to the blog. Each week, on Monday, I will offer some recommended viewing for the week. There will be a mixture of DVDs, downloads, and stuff you can watch for free and where to find it. I hope everyone will check in every week for these recommendations and check out a few of them, if they can, and maybe start a thread about the films on our message board. Happy viewing!

DVD Recommendations:

Brigitte and Brigitte (1966) by Luc Moullet. One of my goals in Shooting Wall is to expose more people to the films of Luc Moullet. He is one of the most interesting, funny, and unique filmmakers to emerge in the last fifty years and is barely known in this country. Brigitte and Brigitte is his first feature and is an excellent starting point to his highly referential, cinematic, minimalist comedies. This film is available on DVD and can be obtained through Netflix or Facets.

Daisies (1966) by Vera Chytilova. One of the more bizarre and original films to come out of the Czech New Wave, Daisies is a funny, freewheeling, and surreal feminist masterpiece from Vera Chytilova. The film is available on DVD and can be obtained through Netflix or Facets.

Shadows in Paradise (1986) by Aki Kaurismaki. The first film in Finnish director Aki Karusimaki's Proletarian triology and a good introduction to the filmmaker's wry and deadpan style. The film and the trilogy are part of the Criterion Eclipse series and are available on DVD from Netflix and Facets.

The Headless Woman (2008) by Lucrecia Martel. Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's most recent and best film to date; if you haven't seen this film, then see it now. One of the best films in years from one of the most interesting directors working today. Available in DVD on Netflix and Facets.

Region 2 Pick of the Week:

Duex Fois (1968) by Jackie Raynal. An odd, difficult, yet engrossing film from France in the late 1960s. Raynal was a member of the Zanzibar film group, which featured the likes of Philippe Garrel, Pierre Clementi, and Serge Bard. She isn't nearly as well-known as Garrel, but this 1968 film is worth checking out. It is available on Region 2 DVD with English subtitles, which can be obtained through Facets or downloaded at the Pirate Bay.

Free Movie of the Week:

Mes Petites Amoureuses (1974) by Jean Eustache. Eustache's follow-up to the mammoth The Mother and the Whore is less extreme, but just as remarkable. A film about youth, but played in a minimalist style reminiscent of Robert Bresson. Exposing more people to the films of Jean Eustache is also one of my goals with Shooting Wall. This film is rare, but a subtitled version is available to watch in 10 minute segments on You Tube. I highly recommend everyone checking this out.



Download of the Week:

L'amour fou (1969) by Jacques Rivette. Rivette's mammoth (nearly 4 1/2 hour) masterpiece about the decline of a marriage is essential viewing for fans of the director. In many ways, it is a transitional film for Rivette, it doesn't have the magical and dreamy feel of some of Rivette's more well-known works (Celine and Julie Go Boating, Duelle, etc.), but an ambitious film full of interesting visuals, acting, and an essential portrait of artists in late '60s Paris. The film is long and hard to find, but is available for download in three easy to digest parts on the Pirate Bay. The quality isn't perfect, but it is well worth it to see this rare and important film.

Check back next week for more recommendations!