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YnEoS wrote:In addition to the two previously mentioned, the other 2 lists they've made have been

Top 100 HK Films of the 1990s
Top 200 HK Films Ever

So CHUNGKING EXPRESS edges it out: they're both locks for me for the respective decades Top 50s, but I'd probably give the nod to IA, overall.

Don't care for 'Shaolin Soccer', though; nor am I as gone on 'In The Mood For Love' which is not like HK's answer to Lelouch's 'A Man And A Woman' for me.
I much prefer '2046', for starters.

If anyone can find a proper AR uncut version of Ferrara's Cat Chaser I'll kiss you (or not as your preference may be). Might as well as also be the one to break the spotlight cherry. I've only got one for the decade and it is more a resuscitation than anything else. Anyways I hope to convince some people to love Amos Poe's masterwork Alphabet City.

I feel like I should go a little more in depth in history here because of a sense of generally chilly reception. I think that's based largely in a misunderstanding of goals for the film. In this case I think understanding director Amos Poe is essential to understanding what makes this exercise in pure mis-en-scene stylization work and why even beyond myself the film and director has some big name fans such as Jim Jarmusch. It's not my favorite film, but the key to this comes from Poe's earlier feature Unmade Beds where he claims as an absolute goal of method to work in reverse of the New Wave. Where they took trends of American films and exploded them into a purely French experimentation he wanted to take them, particularly Godard, into an American direction. This, for me, comes to a head with this picture and the Melville inspired The Foreigner.

The key exploration in these films isn't really a thematic one as the scripts carry little weight beyond the images they provide and it is with these images and sounds as is the case for Alphabet City that we get a series of paintings that nakedly reveal Poe's true subject: the New York he experiences. This is really where Poe becomes his own artist away from Godard, a master of editing, to me. The editing and even camera movement is almost none existent in the film bordering on de Oliveira at times (just look early on at the introduction to Spano's family). Though that is not without a handful of great roves which expand the painting beyond what is immediately in the frame (I'll get back to that in a minute)

The film then is best seen in tableaux connecting cinema back to its earliest day as a magic lantern show. One painted image highlighting the emotional intensity and nostalgia of the previous image. It's not just the structure of how bodies, or more often architecture, is aligned but also the colour in which it is dabbed with. This is a neon punk structure with pinks, greens, and all other sorts of lights being unnaturally exploited to give a sense of how alive the experience of the city is. I don't think there's another American from the decade where cinematography is used so effectively and deliberately to change the meaning of images. A subtle change from red to blue bringing forth the anxiety of the moment. It's almost surprising that this is Poe's first time working in colour.

Each image is altered from that magic lantern source in one important way: the sound. This primarily comes in from the music, but even the most basic sounds are built to effect how images looks. Things can be fairly simple like a light source being given meaning (red becomes police due to a few uses of police sirens) to something more complex like the emotional exposition a song may give to a man walking. All of this, of course, is film class 101 type stuff, but an exploration of its implications to the image is the purpose of the sound and image here. Reminds me a bit of a negative review of that Hollis Frampton set posted here where the reviewer complained that Frampton seemed to be trying to figure out how his camera work and I took that as a compliment then and do as I use it now. Poe's goal is to figure out how these assumed theories work and how changes within them change their fundamentals.

Going back to how the frame is used as part of his stylization Poe seems to go full Leone and then even break that barrier by having a death to anything that isn't literally indicated on the screen giving a Bretchian sense of interruption with many of the cuts and also spatial reasoning (which usually isn't a concern for films shot with so few edits). This also is what makes the ending visually so shocking since it doesn't follow the established rule of life and death to the mis-en-scene. This is probably why the sex scene is blacked out. For them at least all that's left is the bodies.

As an aside to this I also want to highlight two major collaborators on the film for without whom this wouldn't be anywhere as good a feature. The first is DP Oliver Wood who is the look of the '80s (though he is still doing a good show). I can't of anyone who utilizes colour in a solid way better (just take a look at Don't Go in the House for which he is owed co-auteur status) and this is probably his masterwork in that regard for reasons already outlined. He's easily best known for Miami Vice which he helped make one of the more interesting looking shows of the decade, but his interesting output is vast far beyond that even having a film in the collection with The Honeymoon Killers. Not every film he's worked on is good (hello Neon Maniacs), but his work is always great. The second guy, who others on the board could probably discuss better, is Nile Rodgers who provides one of the best '80s scores ever. It helps that Rodgers is attuned perfectly to Poe's frequency, but even beyond the movie the music featured is just plain excellent with a catchy listenability that is hard to match. You will be singing "Lady Luck" to yourself for the next week I promise that.

Cahiers du Cinema's Top 10 lists for the decade (They only restarted tallying in 1981):

1981
01 Francisca (Manoel De Oliveira)
01 The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer)
03 Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Bernardo Bertolucci)
03 Hotel Des Ameriques (Andre Techine)
05 Germany, Pale Mother (Helke Sanders)
05 The Woman Next Door (Francois Truffaut)
07 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
08 The Music Room (Satyajit Ray)
08 Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
10 Palermo (Werner Schroeter)
10 Girum Imus Nocte et Consuminur Igni (Guy Debord)
10 Gloria (John Cassavetes)
10 Les Ailes de la Colombe (Benoit Jacquot)


1982
01 A Room In Town (Jacques Demy)
02 Moonlighting (Jerzy Skolimowski)
02 Passion (Jean-Luc Godard)
02 White Dog (Sam Fuller)
04 Identification of a Woman (Michaelangelo Antonioni)
05 North Bridge (Jacques Rivette)
06 The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov)
08 Parsifal (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg)
09 Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz)
10 Le Beau Mariage (Eric Rohmer)


1983
01 L'Argent (Robert Bresson)
01 A Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat)
03 Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima)
03 Un Jeu Brutal (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
05 Pauline At The Beach (Eric Rohmer)
05 The King Of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)
07 Three Crowns Of The Sailor (Raoul Ruiz) (again)
07 Faux-Fuyants (Alain Bergala/Jean-Pierre Limosin)
07 L'Enfant Secret (Philippe Garrel)
10 Fanny And Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)
10 Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis)


1984
01 Full Moon In Paris (Eric Rohmer)
02 Class Relations (Jean-Marie Straub/Daneille Huillet)
03 Liberte La Nuit (Philippe Garrel)
03 First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard)
03 Biquefarre (Georges Rouquier)
06 Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola)
07 And The Ship Sails On (Federico Fellini)
07 The Right Stuff (Phillip Kaufman)
07 Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
10 Once Upon A Time In America (Sergio Leone)


1985
01 Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard)
02 Detective (Jean-Luc Godard)
03 Year Of The Dragon (Michael Cimino)
04 After The Rehearsal (Ingmar Bergman)
05 Love Streams (John Cassavetes)
06 The Home And The World (Satyajit Ray)
07 Les Amants Terribles (Daniele Dubroux)
08 Les Enfants (Marguerite Duras)
09 Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
10 Rendezvous (Andre Techine)
10 Favorites Of The Moon (Otar Iasselani)


1986
01 The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)
02 Legend Of Suram Fortreess (Sergei Paradjanov)
02 The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky)
04 Double Messieurs (Jean-Francois Stevenin)
05 Bad Blood (Leos Carax)
05 Maine-Ocean (Jacques Rozier)
07 Therese (Alain Cavalier)
08 Scene Of The Crime (Andre Techine)
09 Disorder (Olivier Assayas)
09 Garden De La Nuit (Jean-Pierre Limosin)
09 L'Ame-Soeur (Fredi Murer)
09 After Hours (Martin Scorsese)
09 Rise And Fall Of A Small Cinema Company (Jean-Luc Godard)


1987
01 Under The Sun Of Satan (Maurice Pialat)
02 Wings Of Desire (Wim Wenders)
02 Intervista (Federico Fellini)
02 The Death Of Empedocles (Jean-Marie Straub/Daniele Huillet)
05 The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci)
06 Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse)
06 Four Adventures Of Reinette And Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer)
06 Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick)
09 The Mass Is Over (Nanni Moretti)
10 Wedding In Galilee (Michel Khleifi)
10 Un Adieu Portugais (Joao Botelho)
10 The Color Of Money (Martin Scorsese)
10 Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
10 King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard)


1988
01 A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
02 The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (Phillip Kaufman)
03 The Dead (John Huston)
04 Urgences (Raymond Depardon)
05 Bird (Clint Eastwood)
06 Landscape In The Mist (Theo Angelopolous)
07 De Bruit Et De Fureur (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
08 The Last Temptation Of Christ (Martin Scorsese)
09 Les Innocents (Andre Techine)
10 The Story Of Women (Claude Chabrol)

1989
01 Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee)
01 Palombella Rossa (Nanni Moretti)
03 Gang Of Four (Jacques Rivette)
03 Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg)
05 Les Cannibales (Manoel De Oliveira)
05 Yaaba (Idrissa Ouedraogo)
07 Black Rain (Shohei Imamura)
07 Peaux De Vaches (Patricia Mazuy)
07 Little Vera (Vassili Pitchoul)
10 I Want To Go Home (Alain Resnais)
10 Time Of The Gypsies (Emir Kusturica)
10 The Accidental Tourist (Lawrence Kasdan)

Good to see two of my favourite Rohmers - 'The Aviator's Wife' and 'Full Moon In Paris' - topping their lists; and a Pialat topping their 1987 poll
No love for Beineix, though?

One of the great pleasures in this round of listmaking will be that it will finally give me a chance to re-visit some of the films that actually got me into film when I was an adolescent, and to check whether they've stood the test of time. Some of them certainly did for sure, like the films of Greenaway, Jarmusch, or Jarman, but I plan to rewatch Beineix for instance, and I already have my doubts. Gee, it might even be some 15+ years since I last watched "Blue Velvet", though I have little doubt about that one.

And I have even less doubts about this:

zedz wrote:Dorian Gray As Represented in the Popular Press (Ulrike Ottinger) Any attempt to try and explain the visual surprises that await you in this film will fall completely flat in comparison to seeing it for yourself, but do you really want to pass up the opportunity to see Delphine Setrig play Dr Mabuse?

Not sure how the title should be translated, I do prefer something like "Dorian Gray In the Mirror Of The Yellow Press", as this would save the word "Spiegel" (mirror) of the original title which I think is important for the many undercurrents of quotation, fashion and performance that run through it. In any case, it completely floored me when I first watched it on TV in the late 80s, and I was even more convinced when I had the chance to see it again in an Ottinger retrospective last year in the cinema, in a pristine print. The latter is probably necessary to fully appreciate this film (or basically everything else of her work), which is unfortunately not available in an official edition. And even if it might be released soon (according to an announcement on her website), the price point will most likely be forbidding, as she insists to do her releases herself at 'art collector's prices'. But this is certainly one of the most visually stunning films of the 80s, humourous, experimental, and, in the light of today's world, even visionary (okay, so was Lang in 1922), and indeed Delphine Seyrig is stunning in her role as the Dr. Mabuse media mogul (but Veruschka von Lehndorff as Dorian is equally great). I hope this time around I'll find time to do some Ottinger write-up I had already promised for the 70s list ... Meanwhile, check this out via the backchannels, even if the available versions leave much to be desired.

One of my spotlights for this round will be the Annunciation, which I posted a write-up and screencaps for here-- it too is commercially unavailable, though it's up on YouTube and That Site Which Shall Not Be Mentioned (and some company was selling a DVD-R that these copies are derived from that's available from Amazon Marketplace)

domino harvey wrote:Grease 2 (Patricia Birch 1982) And to the surprise of no one, conventional wisdom is wrong again. Somehow, despite everything I've ever heard anyone express to the contrary, Grease 2 is superior to the original film in every way but one-- and just because the first film has better songs doesn't mean the songs here are all bad, they're just not as omnipresent (or at all) in our collective cultural consciousness and often creep into early 80s pop-rock sludginess. Even so, admittedly the best song here doesn't reach the heights of a mid-range song from the original, and a couple are out-right duds. All that is secondary however since, to my great delight while watching, Grease 2 is most unlike its predecessor in that it is a film that knows how to be a musical. The numbers are imaginative and staged with visual wit and an understanding for how film musicals function. Gone are the obnoxious characters of the first film and in their place is a more pleasingly bland crew of mostly interchangeable "teens" plus Michelle Pfeiffer in the lead (the roles are gender reversed from the first film and now the girl is the rebel-- a funner choice to be sure). Even the period cameos are smarter, with Tab Hunter and Connie Stevens cast as fellow teachers, and Hunter leads one of the livelier numbers in the film, "Reproduction." Speaking of, in contrast to the first films occasional vulgarity, this film is squeaky clean on the surface (I don't believe a single swear is uttered) but then half the songs are not so thinly veiled odes to sex (post-Animal House/Porky's influence, no doubt). This is a film musical in desperate need of a reevaluation because every single human on the face of the planet is wrong about this movie-- I barely tolerated the first film, so I could hardly be accused of being predisposed or biased towards liking this movie. It just is a great post-classical musical, and there are so few of those made with the kind of intelligence and craft of this film that it's worth a bit of extra attention.

I love you Domino! As someone who grew up watching both Grease and Grease 2 almost non-stop (I honestly believe these were the first two films I ever saw), I have long been a fan of both, but over the last few years, the second film has really plunged ahead as the superior movie in my mind. There is a kind of care-free joyfulness here that is largely missing in the original, which takes itself far too seriously and is rather troubling in its depiction of Sandy, who allows herself to be used and ultimately stripped of her identity in order to win her man. That aspect is lessened here because there's no real relationship between Pfeiffer and Caulfield to begin with. Unlike Travolta, who is basically a dick in his treatment of the girl he supposedly loves but pretends not to for the sake of his reputation, Pfeiffer never leads Caulfield on in any way and willfully bucks the idea of going along with the other Pink Ladies and being "someone's chick." The fetishistic quality of her song "Cool Rider" is also a treat.

And yes, while I agree that none of the songs here reach the iconic status of the original's best, the opening "Back to School" and the already-mentioned "Reproduction" are two of my absolute favorite movie-musical numbers.

zedz wrote:Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes) - A movie that will never be released on DVD, so you might as well hunt it down in other ways. One of the defining moments of the New Queer Cinema, and as good as celebrity biopics get!

For anyone who wants this on a DVD-R, I believe it is still available as part of the Illegal Art collection, offered here. It has some other fun things on there and also benefits a good cause (the Illegal Art project and exhibits).

domino harvey wrote:One of my spotlights for this round will be the Annunciation, which I posted a write-up and screencaps for here-- it too is commercially unavailable, though it's up on YouTube and That Site Which Shall Not Be Mentioned (and some company was selling a DVD-R that these copies are derived from that's available from Amazon Marketplace)

Andras Jeles' fantastic Valentino's Kiss didn't quite make my 70s list, but his hair-raising documentary This Is How It Shall Pass eventually did. Apart from the unavailable Jansco, my big Hungarian recommendation for the decade is Ildiko's My Twentieth Century, a blind buy spurred by somebody's casual recommendation on this forum and a complete and utter feast for the eyes.

domino harvey wrote:That Site Which Shall Not Be Mentioned

So even after following this forum for two years, I still can't figure out what this refers to. Can I get a clue?

Tommaso wrote:One of the great pleasures in this round of listmaking will be that it will finally give me a chance to re-visit some of the films that actually got me into film when I was an adolescent, and to check whether they've stood the test of time. Some of them certainly did for sure, like the films of Greenaway, Jarmusch, or Jarman, but I plan to rewatch Beineix for instance, and I already have my doubts.

If you haven't yet seen 'Moon In The Gutter', I think you should give it a chance, Tommo. It's flawed - sure - but it's more 'grown-up' than 'Diva'.

I'm glad to see that Greenaway is still going strong, but I'm not sure he and me plan to meet up, anytime soon.

Zedz, I like your tastes as five of the films on your viewing log are toward the top my my queue as well! 'll try to write them up soon, but I have a few more films to view for the documentary list first.

In case anyone is interested in drowning in unwatched titles along with me, here's my "too see" lists for the decade (many of which were recommendations made on this forum):

1980: Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha), American Gigolo (Paul Schrader), Arrebato (Iván Zulueta), The Bogey-Man (Govidan Aravindan), Demon Lover Diary (Joel DeMott), The Falls (Peter Greenaway), Fertile Memory (Michel Khleifi), God's Angry Man (Werner Herzog), Health (Robert Altman), The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field), The Little Richard Story (William Klein), The Long Riders (Walter Hill), Loulou (Maurice Pialat), Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper), Paradise Not Yet Lost (Jonas Mekas), Proba de microfon (Mircea Daneliuc), Shogun Assassin (Robert Houston), Short Memory (Eduardo de Gregorio), Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (Steve Robert), Somewhere in Time (Jeannot Szwarc), The Stunt Man (Richard Rush), Voyage en Douce (Michel Deville)

1981: Assassination Attempt (Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov), The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer), Beau Pere (Bertrand Blier), Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski), Britannia Hospital (Lindsay Anderson), Charmed Particles (Andrew Noren), Circle of Deceit (Volker Schlondorff), Dead and Buried (Gary Sherman), Dialogue with A Woman Departed (Leo Hurwitz), Eijanaika (Shohei Imamura), Eye of the Needle (Richard Marquand), Four Friends (Arthur Penn), Francisca (Manoel de Oliveira), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz), Full Moon High (Larry Cohen), Gregory’s Girl (Bill Forsyth), Mandala (Im Kwon-taek), Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta), Mephisto (Istvan Szabo), Montenegro (Dusan Makavejev), Presents (Michael Snow), Reisender Krieger (Christian Schocher), Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh), Tree of Knowledge (Nils Malmros), The Vulture (Yaki Yosha), Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh)

1982: Ah Ying (Allen Fong), All Night Long (Chantal Akerman), Barbarosa (Fred Schepisi), Flight of the Eagle (Jan Troell), Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman), A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer), Himala (Ishmael Bernal), Hours for Jerome (Nathaniel Dorsky), Human Lanters (Chung Sun), Jom (Ababacar Samb-Makharam), The Killing of America (Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader), Labyrinth of Passion (Pedro Almodóvar), Liquid Sky (Slava Tsuckerman), New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci), On Top of the Whale (Raoul Ruiz), One Man’s War (Edgardo Cozarinski), Les Petites guerres (Maroun Baghdadi), Le pont du nord (Jacques Rivette), A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris), A Room in Town (Jacques Demy), The State of Things (Wim Wenders), The Territory (Raoul Ruiz), Time Stands Still (Péter Gothár), Too Early, Too Late (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub), La Traviata (Franco Zeffirelli), The Verdict (Sidney Lumet), Yol (Serif Gören and Yilmaz Güney), You are not I (Sara Driver)

1983: Ananas (Amos Gitai), Angst (Gerald Kargl), Au clair de la lune (André Forcier), Betrayal (David Hugh Jones), Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden), The Boxer’s Omen (Chih-Hung Kuei), The Boys from Fengkuai (Hou Hsiao-hsien), A Brutal Game (Jean-Claude Brisseau), Diary (David Perlov), The Eighties (Chantal Akerman), Entre Nous (Diane Kurys), Exposed (James Toback), Fellow Citizen (Abbas Kiarostami), The Fourth Man (Paul Verhoeven), Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio), News Items (Raymond Depardon), Reassemblange (T. Minh-ha Trinh), Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola), Selva. Un portrait de Parvameh Navaï (Maria Klonaris), Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood), Testament (Lynne Littman), La ville des pirates (Raúl Ruiz), Warriors of the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark)

1984: After the Rehearsal (Ingmar Bergman), Bless their Little Hearts (Billy Woodberry), Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen), Carmen (Francesco Rosi), Class Relations (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub), A Cruel Romance (Eldar Ryazanov), Diary for My Children (Márta Mészáros), Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer), The Funeral (Juzo Itami), Improper Conduct (Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal), Love on the Ground (Jacques Rivette), Love Unto Death (Alain Resnais), Meantime (Mike Leigh), My Summer at Grandpa's (Hou Hsiao-hsien), Our Nazi (Robert Kramer), Der Riese (Michael Klier), Streetwise (Martin Bell), Swing Shift (Jonathan Demy), Threads (Mick Jackson), Wundkanal (Thomas Harlan), Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige)

1985: Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii), Boycott (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), Daughters of Eve (Elwood Perez), Fletch (Michael Ritchie), Himatsuri (Mitsuo Yanagimachi), Lamentations a Monument for the Dead World (R. Bruce Elder), Lifeforce (Tobe Hooper), The Man who Envied Women (Yvonne Rainer), Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack), Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood), The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Jiri Barta), Nine 1/2 Weeks (Adrian Lyne), Runaway Train (Andrey Konchalovskiy), The Runner (Amir Naderi), The Satin Slipper (Manoel de Oliveira), Taipei Story (Edward Yang), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Tokyo-Ga (Wim Wenders), Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph), Twenty Years Later (Eduardo Coutinho)

1986: A Better Tomorrow (John Woo), Comrades (Bill Douglas), Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien), Esther (Amos Gitai), Forest of Bliss (Robert Gardner), The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer), Landscape Suicide (James Benning), Life is a Dream (Raoul Ruiz), Manhunter (Michael Mann), Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax), The Mexican Tapes (Louis Hock), My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksey German), Night of the Creeps (Fred Dekker), The Peddler (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta), The Rose King (Werner Schroeter), Secvente (Alexandru Tatos), Sleepwalk (Sara Driver), Tampopo (Juzo Itami), The Terrorizers (Edward Yang), Thérèse (Alain Cavalier)

1987: Anguish (Bigas Luna), Bad Taste (Peter Jackson), Blind (Frederick Wiseman), The Blind Owl (Raoul Ruiz), A Chinese Ghost Story (Siu-Tung Ching), Dark Eyes (Nikita Mikhalkov), Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan), Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer), From the Pole to the Equator (Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi), Good Morning, Babylon (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani), High Tide (Gillian Armstrong), Intervista (Federico Fellini), The Jester (José Álvaro Morais), Living on the Edge (Mike Grigsby), Magino Village: A Tale (Shinsuke Ogawa), Mammame (Raoul Ruiz), Masques (Claude Chabrol), Matewan (John Sayles), Missile (Frederick Wiseman), My Twentieth Century (Ildikó Enyedi), Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter), Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou), Rouge (Stanley Kwan), Stagefright: Aquarius (Michele Soavi), A Taxing Woman (Juzo Itami), White of the Eye (Donald Cammel), Winter Ade (Helke Misselwitz)

1988: Candy Mountain (Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer), Cien niños esperando un tren (Ignacio Agüero), Days of Eclipse (Aleksandr Sokurov), Dogra Magra (Toshio Matsumoto), Dreams of Hind and Camilia (Mohammed Kahn), Eight Men Out (John Sayles), Hanussen (István Szabó), Iguana (Monte Hellman), King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard), Land of Dreams (Jan Troell), Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz), Married to the Mob (Jonathan Demme), Midnight Run (Martin Brest), Om Dar-ba-Dar (Kamal Swaroop), On The Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski), Os Canibias (Manoel de Oliveira), Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe), Scorpion Thunderbolt (Godfrey Ho), Sound and Fury (Jean-Claude Brisseau), The South (Fernando Solanas), Stars in Broad Daylight (Oussama Mohammed), A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens), Talking to Strangers (Rob Tregenza), Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Charlotte Zwerin), Three Places for the 26th (Jacques Demy), The Vanishing (George Sluizer)

1989: Amanece, que no es poco (José Luis Cuerda), And There Was Light (Otar Iosseliani), The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova), Banana Paradise (Tung Wang), Cézanne (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub), City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Forevermore: A Biography of Leach Lord (Eric Saks), Freeze, Die, Come To Life (Vitali Kanevsky), The Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette), The Icicle Thief (Maurizio Nichetti), Images of the World and Inscriptions of War (Harun Farocki), Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand), Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia (Ulrike Ottinger), The Kill-Off (Maggie Greenwald), Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien), Marriage of the Blessed (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), Near Death (Frederick Wiseman), Red Lob (Nanni Moretti), Rembrandt Laughing (Jon Jost), Rikyu (Hiroshi Teshigahara), Recordações da Casa Amarela (João César Monteiro), Route One USA (Robert Kramer), Les sièges de l'Alcazar (Luc Moullet), Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Guy Maddin), Yaaba (Idrissa Ouedraogo)

zedz wrote:Horse Thief(Tian Zhuangzhuang)

Manoel and the Island of Marvels (Raul Ruiz)

The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova)

If I recall, Horse Thief got slaughtered during the last go-around, so you people need to check it out.

I was Manoel's biggest partisan last go around, but you and company have done a pretty solid job of convincing me of City of Pirates more economical merits. Nevertheless, as the former's bootlegs are much more readily available now, I do hope people try and see it.

I loved The Asthenic Syndrome, so you have a friend in me.

I must admit I still am pretty ignorant of HHH's filmography, so that's a goal.

Yojimbo wrote:If you haven't yet seen 'Moon In The Gutter', I think you should give it a chance, Tommo. It's flawed - sure - but it's more 'grown-up' than 'Diva'.

I'm actually a little embarrassed about gushing over this film the last go around, since I've cooled considerably on it. I think Beineix had something of brilliance here, but the more I see it, the more I'm convinced he wasn't able to pull it together.

Mauvais Sang, however, deserves all the votes.

For my spotlight, I'd like to recommend David Byrne's True Stories.

It's a difficult movie to describe- it's a sort of very gentle movie about an absurd small town, played in what seems as though it should be an ironic mode but with absolute and apparently genuine sincerity. It feels almost like outsider art, like something a child would make if picturing how moviemaking might work, but with a lot of complexity in the way its developed. I don't know, I think the way it's hard to describe is one of the things I love about it, but I would compare it to The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a small town, surreal silliness that takes everything as being sort of equally valid.

It's also a really, really funny movie, if you're on its wavelength, with a great early John Goodman performance, and really incredible music that isn't really available outside the context of the movie. There was some light discussion of it in the musicals list- though I can see where it doesn't come to mind immediately as a musical- but I'd love to push it on to this one, or at least keep it from being an orphan. (Though its relative obscurity did help me score a vintage theatrical poster from it for $6, so it's not all bad.)

Unfortunately, I don't know if there's any release, anywhere, in OAR for this- the extant release is at least open matte, so you're not losing a bunch of information, but it's far from ideal.

Also, swo, to get this out of the way- is The Living Planet eligible as a miniseries?

Blood Simple. An extremely watchable thriller. This is the kind of movie that Hitchcock would have made, had he been a hipster in the 80s. The film has an ingenious plot, but mostly bland characters, save for M. Emmet Walsh's detective. But the Coens would rectify this issue in their very next film. Still, this is a great piece of entertainment and an impressive debut.

Cold Bishop wrote:

zedz wrote:Horse Thief(Tian Zhuangzhuang)

If I recall, Horse Thief got slaughtered during the last go-around, so you people need to check it out.

I'll third the recommendations for Horse Thief. I was lucky enough to see a 35mm screening knowing nothing about the film going in, and was really taken with it.

Matrix, I think the R4 of True Stories is widescreen

It looks like it! Thanks, Dom, I'll pick that up.

matrixschmatrix wrote:Also, swo, to get this out of the way- is The Living Planet eligible as a miniseries?

Doing a little research on IMDb, it looks like the distinction they make between TV series and miniseries has a lot to do with whether the individual episodes are longer or shorter than an hour, which I don't necessarily consider a very meaningful measure. More to the point, this was always conceived to just run the 12 episodes, right? Assuming that's the case, I think I'm fine calling it a miniseries.

Yeah, that was my logic- as far as I can tell, all of the Attenborough Life series entries were designed as single works, broken up into however many pieces, generally entirely complete before the first episode was broadcast, which seems like a reasonable definition for a miniseries to me.

Re Greenaway, I see that I put The Falls at number one last time round. My vociferous enthusiasm has waned a little since then (although I expect he'll still have two in the top 10), but he's undoubtedly one of the titans of the decade, even if his artistry was matched by a titanic arrogance.

Recently rewatching Ruiz's L'Hypothèse du tableau volé for the 70s list, I was reminded of the suggestions of plagiarism in relation to The Draughtsman's Contract. It seems likely that Greenaway did lift the central conceit from Ruiz, in which case he should have been more forthcoming about it, but what is equally striking is how different the two films actually are. The Ruiz has a rather reserved, mock-scholarly, Borgesian approach; visually, some of the monochrome tableaux vivants put one in mind of, say, Dreyer. What humour there is is very dry, and there is no clear resolution to the mystery: this could never have been a blockbuster, even an arthouse one.

Greenaway throws the same concept into a brasher, more theatrical, visually spectacular setting. It's the combination of the elements - the costumes, the compositions, the arch dialogue, the throb of Nyman's cod-baroque score, the drawings (by the director's own hand) - that make it so distinctive. Its artifice could appeal to theatre or opera (even musical theatre) audiences. If the playwrights of the 1680s could have travelled 300 years into the future, it's the sort of film they might have appreciated, even if Greenaway was not quite as witty a writer as he probably thought himself. The real innovation was the extent of his neoclassical aestheticism.

Having said all that in its defence, I prefer A Zed & Two Noughts (and The Falls, of course, and maybe The Belly of an Architect).

matrixschmatrix wrote:For my spotlight, I'd like to recommend David Byrne's True Stories.

It's a difficult movie to describe- it's a sort of very gentle movie about an absurd small town, played in what seems as though it should be an ironic mode but with absolute and apparently genuine sincerity. It feels almost like outsider art, like something a child would make if picturing how moviemaking might work, but with a lot of complexity in the way its developed. I don't know, I think the way it's hard to describe is one of the things I love about it, but I would compare it to The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a small town, surreal silliness that takes everything as being sort of equally valid.

It's also a really, really funny movie, if you're on its wavelength, with a great early John Goodman performance, and really incredible music that isn't really available outside the context of the movie. There was some light discussion of it in the musicals list- though I can see where it doesn't come to mind immediately as a musical- but I'd love to push it on to this one, or at least keep it from being an orphan. (Though its relative obscurity did help me score a vintage theatrical poster from it for $6, so it's not all bad.)

Unfortunately, I don't know if there's any release, anywhere, in OAR for this- the extant release is at least open matte, so you're not losing a bunch of information, but it's far from ideal.

I haven't seen this since the 80s, but I liked it a lot at the time, and it always seemed to me that the stock criticism of it - that Byrne is condescending to the kind of 'regular folk' he's depicting - is absurdly off-base, since the film is such a sweet, indulgent lovefest. The other thing about the film that a lot of critics missed, even though it's there in the title, the promotional images, and even a specific scene within the film, is that the whole idea of the film is Byrne imagining a place in which the sort of ridiculous stories that feature in the Weekly World News actually happen, and then imagining that they're happening to real people that you might plausibly care about.

And regarding the film soundtrack, I agree that it's much better than the not-bad band album that accompanied it (and also the alleged OST): John Goodman does a better 'People Like Us' than Talking Heads; Pops Staples does a much better 'Papa Legba' than Talking Heads; and the full-on gospel-with-crusty-old-white-dude-lead 'Puzzlin' Evidence' leaves Talking Heads' version out in the desert, hitching a ride. You also have to love Byrne for engineering a (presumably) decent paycheck for Terry Allen.

Cold Bishop wrote:.

Yojimbo wrote:If you haven't yet seen 'Moon In The Gutter', I think you should give it a chance, Tommo. It's flawed - sure - but it's more 'grown-up' than 'Diva'.

I'm actually a little embarrassed about gushing over this film the last go around, since I've cooled considerably on it. I think Beineix had something of brilliance here, but the more I see it, the more I'm convinced he wasn't able to pull it together.

Mauvais Sang, however, deserves all the votes.

I've only watched 'Gutter' once so I can't be sure it will hold up; but whatever about gushing about it I'm sure there'll be enough there to make it deserving of cult status.

I've only seen one Carax to date - I'm not sure was it Mauvais Sang - but its fair to say that I was decidedly underwhelmed, and caused me to question the wisdom of blind buying the Carax that I have bought.
I'll give him another look before deciding whether or not he's a write-off

bamwc2 wrote: The Kill-Off (Maggie Greenwald)

I thought 'The Kill-Off' was quite possibly the best Jim Thompson adaptation by an American director - as opposed to 'Serie Noire' and 'Coup de Torchon', which were the best Thompson adaptations, period - but her follow-up, 'The Ballad of Little Jo' was a massive disappointment.

I thought Maggie Greenwald had maybe given up the ghost - or maybe was concentrating on raising a family - but it's good to see she made another film recently, even if I no longer have any great expectations of her.