Movie Enthusiast Issue 39: Afghanistan’s Lost Films, Revisiting My Top 100, Don’t Tell Me About mother!
I am planning on seeing Darren Aronofsky’s mother! this week. Somehow, I have managed to avoid all trailers and plot descriptions of this movie. All I know is that it stars Jennifer Lawrence, people seem to either hate it or be oddly amused by it, and that it reminded one viewer on Twitter too much of the time they dated a poet in college. Please do not tell me anything about this movie; I am quite proud of my accomplishment.
A few weeks ago I was in the mood to catalogue and decided to revisit my list of my personal best movies of all time. I hadn’t given any thought to it for about two years, so I decided to do away with trying to rank them and to make an alphabetical list of my top 100 movies of all time instead. That way instead of comparing apples and oranges (in what sense is Apocalypse Now better than Singin in the Rain, anyway?) I had more freedom in choosing from across genres. No need to worry about “importance” if it comes down to a movie that I just think is an excellently-made example of its kind.
How did I decide what made the list and what didn’t? A lot of it was intuition. For some reason it just felt right to include four Studio Ghibli movies and no Pixar movies as I was running down the list of every movie I’ve ever logged (I guess Wall-e would have come closest to making the cut, except don’t I actually prefer Finding Nemo among Pixar movies? and yet I didn’t have to think twice about putting Only Yesterday or Howl’s Moving Castle on the list). Because somebody already asked: Mad Max: Fury Road was floating on the edges of this list but I ultimately left it off because I already had 3 movies from 2015 represented and wouldn’t that just be overkill? (Now you see how illogical my process is.)
I also realize that my list exposes a lot of my blind spots: musicals, 1980s Hollywood, Westerns, German cinema, Czech cinema, Russian/Soviet cinema, documentaries, horror, avant-garde experimental, anything by Michael Mann/David Cronenberg/Brian De Palma; somehow I’ve never seen a Luchino Visconti movie either and now I’m rather ashamed to realize it. I’d like to think I did a pretty good job choosing movies that are both (1) movies I actually like and didn’t just feel obliged to include and (2) representative of my capacity for putting aside personal preference and be surprised by a really good movie in a genre that wouldn’t normally be to my liking. And then I somehow ended up choosing 4 Ozu movies, all of which are more or less indistinguishable from one another (except for Floating Weeds, which is in color). I’m nothing if not dependable, I guess!
Now have at it and tell me what I got wrong, what you’re impressed I included, what I still need to see.
Here’s the best film-related news story I’ve heard all month, which will also be the best film-related news story you hear all month: over 7,000 movies from Afghanistan’s national cinema are seeing the light of day after they had been hidden from the Taliban for nearly 30 years. There’s much more to the story than just that attention-grabbing headline, so please go read all of it!
My latest published movie review is also one of my favorite things I’ve written all year. It’s about Good Time, a real shot in the arm of a New York movie and an excellent chance for me to put my Classics degree to good use outside of the academy. So far as I have seen, I’m the only critic who’s made any connection between Robert Pattinson’s character’s Greek lineage to the Homeric precedent for his character and the miniature odyssey he goes on. Or at least I’m the only critic who has done so without belaboring the point.
I realize Good Time is mostly no longer in theaters anymore, so add that to your respective watchlists for when it comes around to streaming services. And after reading my review, check out this great profile of the directors to get more of a sense of where the manic energy from their film comes from. Hint: it’s all in the casting.