Afterlife
Hirokazu Kore-Eda (1998)
The recently deceased attend a halfway home to the afterlife
where they are given a week to choose one memory, which is then re-enacted, filmed and
kept for all eternity. There's a bang of film school off the plot but Kore-Eda finds a beautiful realism at its core as scripted scenes are blended with achingly tender true life interviews. They recall their lives, so we recall ours.
Christine
John Carpenter (1983)
A high school outcast discovers, restores, then falls for a
battered up- and quite hormonal- Plymouth Fury with a sick mind of its own in
this chromed out John Carpenter romp. Coming halfway through the director’s
prolific 80s period, Carpenter provides another original score and a profanity fuelled
script while barely breaking a sweat. Harry Dean Stanton shows up but strangely
not as a sage mechanic. Bonus points
none the less.
Meet me in St. Louis
Vincente Minnelli (1944)
The lives of 3 sisters are thrown into very mild disarray
when their father decides to uproot the family to take a job in New York.
Minnelli’s wafer thin escapist plot isn’t going to teach you much about real
life (there was a war still raging in Europe after all) but his film does give
us a chance to see America’s Suburban-utopia ideals in their infancy. Judy
Garland- who would marry Minnelli the following year- is pitch perfect in the
lead role but the standout performance comes from7 Year old Margaret O’Brien.
The young actress can’t sing or dance per say, she’s just a kid having a laugh,
but amidst all the flawless MGM gloss she makes for a remarkably vital and
human presence. As young performances went, it was something of a landmark.
The Searchers
John Ford (1956)
John Wayne stars as a confederate civil war vet who sets out
to track a group of Comanche Indians that slaughtered his family and kidnapped
his niece. There’s so much about John Wayne’s bumbling character which, unlike
many stars of that era, has not aged well but this John Ford classic still has
the ability to startle. Considered by many the best western ever made, Ford’s
incredible landscape shots of his hallowed Monument Valley have been an
influence on countless film makers, not to mention the home world of a certain
Luke Skywalker.
