DAY 10: WOMEN FILMMAKERS
MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010)
This is the first film from Kelly Reichardt I've seen. Reichardt is a wonderful observer of place and character. For Meek's Cutoff, she took on the 1845 Oregon Trail. A wagon train of families hires a mountain man named Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains.
Reichardt employs a minimalism that manages to speak volumes over films from her male counterparts.
B+
NEWS FROM HOME (1977)
A pre-cursor to Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Chantel Akerman's takes her observational aesthetic from Jeanne Dielman and applies it to an entire city. In this case New York.
Seeing America through the eyes of foreigners make us Americans be distant and intimately close at once. The only movie I could think of that pulls this off so well was Paris, Texas. Now I know of a second masterpiece.
A+
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962)
French New Wave directors are hit or miss. Can't stand Godard but I gel well with Varda. There is such a vibrant energy to this movie. To be alive and alone in a city during the summer. One day.
A
DAY 11
KING OF NEW YORK (1990)
This movie was released in the same year as GoodFellas, Miller's Crossing, State of Grace and The Godfather Part III. It was called an abomination to Abel Ferrera's face in a Q and A at the New York Film Festival. Many audience members including Ferrera's own wife walked out. King of New York is too easily swept away and forgotten among the crime classics. One can even argue Ferrera's whole career is way too underrated.
Christopher Walken leads a cast of insanely talented actors. All before they hit it big. Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, Giancarlo Esposito, Paul Calderon and Steve Buscemi. As much as I love Walken in The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone and even Batman Returns, King of New York is where I go to to get his full range. Ferrera lets him loose and it is an absolute delight to see.
A
DAY 12
THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)
Bunuel's films about the upper class always reminded me of surrealist paintings hanging in an art museum. The museum itself is controlled with security, sensors and even the pictures have elegant frames around them. Yet within those frames are paintings that depict chaos. Unpredictability. Car bombs go off. A woman is drenched with a bucket of water while trying to board a train.
Bunuel's final film is freighted with eroticism and battle of the sexes. In an interview with Bunuel on his final film he said "In addition to the theme of the impossibility of truly possessing a woman's body, the film insists upon maintaining that climate of insecurity and imminent disaster- an atmosphere we all recognize, because it is our own."
It's a beautiful swan song to one of my favorite arthouse directors.
A
UN FLIC (1972)
Of all the French directors, Melville had the biggest impact on me. Just stepping back and seeing his influence on other directors, you start seeing the big picture of how filmmakers talk to each other through film.
Un Flic moves much faster than his other films. The 20 minute heist sequence in particular shows that he still got it.
Jean Pierre Melville's farewell to cinema.
A-
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