I like it a whole lot; it's got lovely camera work, and I admire it for being a literary adaptation which works by its own aesthetic, more than a remake of Tarkovsky's film, to which it actually bears little resemblance. I've seen it once, and I remember it being a very cool, detached film, which could have explored its themes a lot more, with a lengthier duration.
As for my list...
I made my thoughts on
Irréversible pretty clear recently: I think it's one of the best films ever made. I recommended it to a friend of my dad, and he watched it and said it was brilliant, but he would be careful who he told about it, fearing they'd think he was genuinely depraved. I disagree with that; though I understood where he was coming from - society tends to reject things when they confront it head on - I have no hesitation in saying I
love it.
I want to revisit Van Sant's last three films very soon, but for now I consider
Gerry his best film. The lack of narrative gives him much visual freedom, and there are some images which simply must be seen to be appreciated: the camera circling Affleck three-sixty degrees, very slowly, with nothing but desert behind him; the shot of two guys walking at dawn, with the sun slowly coming up; and the "rock-marooned" scene, in which Affleck gets caught on a high rock and Damon tries to help him down. It's an ordinary image, but the length it's on gives it a surreal abstraction; the longer you look at it the less it looks like what it is - this is something I tried doing in
Gwent Jykmel with a close-up of my mouth and a succession of incoherent sounds, which, given long enough to register on the mind, looks out-of-sync.
I held reservations for
Spider the first time I saw it. But even then I did note that it was "the kind of film one is disappointed in, and then rediscovers as a masterpiece years later." It took me about six months, after seeing some other Cronenberg. It's a fantastically structured film, so claustrophobic so as to almost impode upon itself. A multi-layered character study of interweaving fictions and Cronenberg's most visually impressive work; a slow, carefully constructed film with a sparse, grim
mise-en-scene, and an intimate, introverted psychology - the title character, acted superbly by Ralph Fiennes, through whom we see all of the events, has nowhere to go, and so the narrative is a kind of strained web of present horror, with no future, and an imagined past.
I think I'm the only one on the board who's seen
Uzak, a Turkish film whose director is compared to Tarkovsky by many. I see what they're getting at: a slow, methodic pace allows character and psychology to develop onto levels a lot of filmmakers struggle to achieve. It's also recommended to fans of Bergman.
Rabbits is one of those films that sounds terrible when you describe it - always a sign of a good film, I think, if you can't do it justice with words. It's eight mini-episodes told from one point-of-view, in the form of a sitcom, but the characters are all dressed in rabbit suits, and never interact with each other... well they do, but it's never coherent. Canned laughter, at the most mundane points of conversation, and an always-present, forever-haunting score, give it a tone which only Lynch can create.
The next time I see it, I have a feeling I won't like
City of God as much as I remember. For now though, let me praise it as a highly energetic, very colourful film which captures the dangerousness of its environment to great effect. I often measure films by how well they create and sustain a believable environment by illusion. By this notion, I can say films like
The Lord of the Rings or
The Fly, for instance, are totally believable. If
City of God offers little new (the comparisons upon its release to
GoodFellas were both unfavourable and unjust), it is totally engrossing.
For a completely change in pace, though, watch the delightful
Être et avoir, one of the simplest, finest and most direct documentaries made. Covering a year in the life of a rural French primary school, it's very funny and very revealing.
I don't know whether I will be disappointed or blown away by my next, and long overdue, viewing of
The Pianist. It's one of those films you really can't judge until you watch it. Its premise is very ordinary, I think; a Jew lives through and survives the Warsaw ghetto. It's the treatment, though, which works wonders: again, too, I admire the creation of its world and how it places its protagonist as, at first, one of many people suffering the same thing, and, as the narrative progresses, he becomes more and more central, to the point where, as Don Lope said in his proview of it, it's almost a silent film, without words. And remains utterly absorbing.
I'm a fan of Peter Jackson, especially his last four films.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy was magnicifent, and if
The Two Towers was a weak link between the first and third, it was still excellent, and made perfect sense. The narrative is more segmented than the first, and a mammoth battle substitutes for the smaller set-pieces, but the directing is sweeping, and the editing is energetic enough to sustain the perception of a world in peril. Essentially, a meaty, effective set-up for the conclusion.
Salaryman 6, which you can watch
here, covers similar themes to Resnais, and I think you'll like it. It's shot and edited to evoke the sense of repetition and monotony in office work: full of greys, visual repetitions (some of the shots look like abstract patterns of straight lines) and a narrative which, because of the state its main character finds himself in, goes over itself numerous times.