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. 

Oh the mountain of must-see movies and my humble attempts to scale it...

Progress will be compiled at the end of each month with films listed in order of preference.

Singin in the Rain

Stanley Donen (1952)

Gene Kelly plays a silent cinema star moving into the sound era in Stanley Donen’s soaring, dreamlike musical. Set in a Hollywood studio, Donen’s film acknowledges - almost pokes fun at- the falseness of the dream factory before giving us perhaps the most beautiful example of what that falseness can do. I smiled from start to finish. And for a good while later. In a word: Perfect.

The American Friend

Wim Wenders (1977)

We’re in Hamburg, and a bit in Paris. Bruno Ganz plays an artist with a fatal blood disease. He meets a shady international art dealer played by Dennis Hopper and the two form a bond. Hopper’s boss hears of Ganz’ troubles and so offers him a late pay day if he’s willing to ‘take out’ some of his buddies in return. He has a wife and kid and so, agrees. Ganz is terrific here; despite his character’s fantastical circumstances, his tender, low-key performance somehow keeps the whole thing grounded. It reads like a thriller but Wenders seems more interested in the unlikely friendship between his two stars; reserved Ganz and wild Hopper. Almost a decade before he unleashed Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet- a character which would define the later part of his career- the Hollywood cowboy  bubbles with that same intensity. The antithesis to Ganz’ gentle craftsman, he’s Stetson-clad and wild, but still… he’s a mate.

A Moment of Innocence

Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1996)

Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a leader of Iran’s Cultural Revolution and more recently one of the state’s fiercest dissidents. At 17 years old under the Shah’s regime, he was imprisoned and tortured for stabbing a policeman. In 1996 the policeman visits Makhmalbaf. He’s big and awkward and an actor too. He’s also a bit of a gent. He asks Makhmalbaf for a role in one of his films so the director decides that the two men will cast their younger selves and re-enact the fated event. Playing with fiction and reality like a kid with a ball, Makhmalbaf gives a delicate, funny and ultimately astonishing portrayal of how we remember things or, perhaps, how we choose to.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Tobe Hooper (1974)

A group of teens get terrorized by a chainsaw wielding maniac and his family of cannibals while visiting their grandparent’s old home. You might think you know the drill but Hooper’s film feels so much stranger than what’s come since. Its bogeyman, Leatherface, is more a simpleton with a certain love for arts and crafts than a demonic monster. Halloween was celebrated for its low budget stylish aesthetics and yet this film, made for a quarter of the price, looks even better. The ghastly set design is remarkable and it’s DP, Daniel Pearl on his first movie, does an incredible job. The dinner table scene could have been lifted from a Stanley Kubrick nightmare.

The Wicker Man

Robin Hardy (1973)

Christopher Lee plays the Lord of a pagan Island in this legendary folk horror. A straight edge Presbyterian policeman comes to the Island to investigate a case of a missing girl but stumbles upon something far weirder. The place is rife with sex, songs, hedonism and perhaps much more. It seems were following the copper, but the locals- despite all the madness- have a lot more charm. Endlessly bizarre, the film looks in good health as it hits 40 years of age.

The Fog

John Carpenter (1980)

Carpenter followed up his slasher smash Halloween with this spooky seaside tale. A small town are celebrating their centenary when a strange fog rolls in and starts causing havoc. It's great in parts but dreadful in others; on one hand Carpenter points a finger at the genocide of the Native Americans while on the other only offers us the most ridiculous of ghouls.  Still, it’s very well shot by Dean Cundey, who would go on to shoot Jurassic Park, and Carpenter himself provides another memorable score.

All I desire

Douglas Sirk (1953)

One of Sirk’s earliest melodramas at Universal concerns a mother, played by Barbra Stanwyk, who -having left years before to become an actress- returns to suburbia to see her daughter’s play. In 1953 it seems Sirk was yet to sharpen the knives but this story of a broken family still flickers with subversion. Stanwyk is, as ever, electric.

Un Femme est Un Femme

Jean-Luc Godard (1961)

Anna Karina stars in the French New Wave’s answer to the Hollywood screwball comedy. Following this film, Karina would go on to become the director’s muse and while both the film and performances are full of colour and youth, Godard seems to indulge Karina a touch too much. But then, who wouldn’t.

Oh the mountain of must see movies and my humble attempts to scale it...

Progress will be compiled at the end of each month with the films listed in order of preference.

At five In the Afternoon

Samira Makhmalbaf (2003)

Samira Makhmalbaf gives a beautiful, honest portrayal of the hopes and hardships of a young woman in the ruins of Kabul. The woman is thrilled with the idea of a female Afghan president and so enters her class election before her optimism is chipped away. Shot with tremendous balance, Makhmalbaf treats her subjects with absolute dignity no matter how tough their lives become. It might sound grim but there is an incredibly human beauty to Makhmalbaf’s film; the imagery is patient and composed and the natural performances flow with vitality as the women’s pale blue head scarves soak up the gentle light of the Afghan sun.

They Live…

John Carpenter (1988)

This iconic late 80s Sci-fi concerns a blue collar worker played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper who happens upon a pair of special sunnies which reveal the world as it really is. Piper taps his WWF background for some ludicrous brawls but it’s in the film’s remarkable imagery- as seen above- that we get the most thrills. Imagery so powerful it inspired Shepard Fairey to plaster it onto the streets of LA. He later tweaked his work to make the defining image of Barrack Obama’s inaugural campaign. The work was sincere- and it certainly did the job- but what wonderful irony.

Youth of the Beast

Seijun Sazuki (1963)

An explosive lone gun with a connection to some sort of knitting club infiltrates the Tokyo yakuza and starts to play two bosses against each other. The film swaggers to its own slick, nihilistic tune with Sazuki’s eye for colour and composition providing a wonderful counterpoint to all the rat-a-tat action and loud mouth jabbering. Its renegade director, at 90, is still with us today.

Spellbound

Alfred Hitchcock (1945)

Hitchcock was already a sensation stateside and well into the studio groove by the time he released this dreamy effort. Gregory Peck plays a doctor who’s convinced he’s committed murder. The lovely Ingred Bergman plays a Freudian psychologist. She falls for Peck and so uses some fairly broad psychoanalysis to get to the bottom of things. The themes haven’t aged well but a wonderful Dali dream sequence and a couple of great shocks late on keep this amongst the director’s better works.

Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock (1946)

One year older and one year wiser, Hitchcock looked less concerned with cheap thrills and more with dream factory longing when he made this story of love and espionage. Bergman once again stars, this time as the daughter of a Nazi spy whose given the chance to make amends by infiltrating some friends of her Dad who’ve exiled to Rio. Cary Grant plays the agent in charge. You can see where this is going.