1927 Ten Best Movies

Last week I saw two 1927 films projected in theaters with live music accompaniment (Sunday was Underworld at the Rose Theatre in Port Townsend, Monday was Seventh Heaven at Seattle’s Paramount). Surely this is a cue for this week’s list? Or at least an excuse.

1927 was the year sound permanently changed cinema, but another way of putting it is that the art of silent film had reached a very high point in 1927. To say that the #1 movie defines “very high point” is rather understating it: Sunrise is deservedly on the short list of greatest movies ever made. F.W. Murnau (himself a #1, on the list of directors who died too young), given a free hand to make his first American film, achieved something so rich and supple that Hollywood directors immediately began imitating it like crazy. Subtitled A Song of Two Humans, Sunrise is musical in the way that it seems to breathe on its own, the way its immensely sophisticated technical devices are rendered invisible and almost liquid.

The ten best of 1927:

1. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau)

2. Metropolis (Fritz Lang)

3. Napoleon (Abel Gance)

4. Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage)

5. Underworld (Josef von Sternberg)

6. Berlin – Symphony of a City (Walter Rutter)

7. Wings (William Wellman)

8. The Love of Jeanne Ney (G.W. Pabst)

9. The Unknown (Tod Browning)

10. The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde)

Harold Lloyd nips into the final slot ahead of Buster Keaton, because Keaton’s 1927 film, College, isn’t quite up to the glorious level of his other silent work. As they keep finding more and more pieces of Metropolis, that mad classic just keeps getting greater; and speaking of movies with changing running times, I am basing Napoleon on the Coppola cut that came out in the early 80s, which was convincing enough for me. But really, every film on this list is gorgeous in its own way, the crest of silence, the beginning of the era’s end.

Next week: 2004.

Movie Diary 7/4/2009

Management (Stephen Belber, 2009). Unhappy corporate art salesperson Jennifer Aniston meets childlike motel clerk Steve Zahn, and all roads lead to…Aberdeen, Washington? This movie doesn’t quite know how to do the thing it’s doing, but it has some nice stuff in it. (full review 7/10)

Whatever, Ice Moon Enemies (Weekly Links)

Movies I reviewed for the Herald this week.

Public Enemies. “Whatever strikes Mann’s fancy.”

Whatever Works. “Tighter and funnier than Woody’s been lately.”

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. “Diminishing returns.”

Moon. “Inquiring about the nature of being human.”

Captain Abu Raed. “It almost doesn’t matter if the story is old.”

On KUOW-FM, Mark Rahner and I talk about zombies and Rotten with “Weekday” host Steve Scher: here.

Movie Diary 7/1/2009

Objectified (Gary Hustwit, 2009). The Helvetica filmmaker takes on a larger idea, design in general. Hard to beat the focus on a single font, but some intriguing concepts about a design world are suggested. (full review 7/10)

The Earth Dies Screaming (Terence Fisher, 1964). A very Village of the Damned item that features both robots and their zombie slaves. Brit horror clocking in at an hour and two minutes, featuring obligatory Yank actor Willard Parker (looking like the poor man’s Ken Tobey) and Dennis Price. Hard to dislike.

Movie Diary 6/30/2009

Captain Abu Raed (Amin Matalqa, 2007). Accessible arthouse number with a mainstream soul, agreeably assembled by Jordanian-American Matalqa. Main character is an airport janitor, mistaken by children for a much-adventured airline pilot; he’s pulled into a protective situation, Slingblade-style. (full review 7/3)

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009). Sam Rockwell tour-de-forces his way through this slight but sturdy variation on an old sci-fi situation: he’s an astronaut stationed alone on the moon, who begins to notice some extremely odd things about his mission. (full review 7/3)

Movie Diary 6/29/2009

Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, 1927). Known for its influence on later gangster pictures, this film is alive in many different ways. The production design carries the Sternberg stamp, but so does the precise sense of gesture and facial expression, especially in Clive Brook’s performance. This screening at Port Townsend’s Rose Theatre featured live-music accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, who came through with a splendidly moody score.

Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927). Luminous performances by Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor in Borzage’s stirring love story, one of those films in which each moment seems thought-through and totally committed. 1927 was a pretty awesome year – and then sound had to come in.

Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1937). This one wears well, so clear and light you barely notice the skill that oozes out of it. One of Hitch’s most “acted” cameos, too.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Carlos Saldanha, Mike Thurmeier, 2009). Number Three rarely improves the series, but Scrat is here. (full review 7/1)

1961 Ten Best Movies

The granddaddy of modern-day puzzle films, an influence on Kubrick, Greenaway, and Roger Corman, and famous cause celebre in its time: Last Year at Marienbad has gotten around. And while the movie was once a great conversation piece, and at some point began looking dated, it has now slipped into a realm of timelessness. At this point along the way you can worry less about What It All Means and instead see it as a rich many-corridored experience. The conventional satisfactions of story will never be delivered anyway, and without that, we may be left with only our own reflections in one of the film’s countless mirrors.

Close upon the heels of Marienbad is Luis Bunuel’s mighty return to European filmmaking, a very different kind of movie but an even more direct personal statement. The best of 1961:

1. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais)

2. Viridiana (Luis Bunuel)

3. Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)

4. Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller)

5. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni)

6. Lola (Jacques Demy)

7. A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard)

8. Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)

9. The Misfits (John Huston)

10. The Hustler (Robert Rossen)

Just missing: Accattone, Pasolini’s feature debut, Satyajit Ray’s Two Daughters, et aussi The Ladies Man, un film de Jerry Lewis. Also have strong feelings for Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, and the dance numbers in West Side Story.

Last week I said I’d do 1962 this week. Oops.

Transformers Adoration (Weekly Links)

Movies I reviewed for the Herald this week.

Is that a giant robot in the distance, or the inexorable tread of time?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. “From one stupefying situation to the next.”

Cheri. “A lurking empathy for their foolishness.”

Adoration. “Somewhat airless spaces.”

Tulpan. “A wry, funny intelligence guiding us.”

Treeless Mountain. “The emotional effect is sneaky. But strong.”

Plus a Rotten link: Mark Rahner and I interviewed by KPTK’s Jacques Pugh about the comic book: here. Our bit starts about halfway through.

Movie Diary 6/25/2009

Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009). A true Dantean circle of hell — not the movie, the preview screening. Dear god in heaven, there must be a different way to distribute movie passes. (At the very least, instead of giving away free T-shirts at these things, they might supply some bath soap.) The movie? That Michael Mann sure knows surfaces. (full review 7/1)

Life is Hot in Cracktown (Buddy Giovinazzi, 2009). Watched the DVD for Amazon. Urban brutality, with junkies and hookers and thugs. I’m not sure it’s forgivable to cast Kerry Washington as a character who was once supposed to have been a man.

Movie Diary 6/24/2009

It Might Get Loud (Davis Guggenheim, 2009). Interesting idea – put three generations of rock guitarists in a room for a summit meeting – although we spend less time in the room than we do tracking some conventional how-they-got-here background material. The three are Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White; the most human of the bunch is The Edge.

Whatever Works (Woody Allen, 2009). It sounds like the same old thing: aging kvetch (this time played by Larry David), worried about germs and death, irresistible to very young women. Right? But Allen’s timing is back, and if this were a movie by a young unknown filmmaker I think it would look pretty good. (full review 7/3)

Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, 2008). From the first minute you can see that a crafty filmmaker is at work; not content to lean on the spectacularly empty Kazakh steppes, Dvortsevoy shows a talent for deadpan humor and a touch with actors. (full review 6/26)