Best Movies I Saw 2009-2011, #38-34

38:  THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978) accomplishes something that very few genre horror movies are capable of: it will, no kidding, frighten, disturb, and haunt you. Made on a tiny budget, THE TOOLBOX MURDERS is a very violent, even a shocking movie, an exploitation movie that is, at times, clearly intended to be offensive. THE TOOLBOX MURDERS is also, unlike most such movies, thoughtful and thought-provoking; it's so carefully written and directed and acted, that it is consistently absorbing cinema, despite its technical and budgetary limitations. The first twenty minutes portray a masked killer, carrying a toolbox, attacking several pretty girls, in various states of undress, in multiple apartments, in the same seedy building, one after another, in real time. It's the slasher classic equivalent of the first half-hour of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a cinematic experience so grueling I must admit it made me shut THE TOOLBOX MURDERS off, the first time I tried to watch it. But I found myself unable to shake off and forget that opening sequence, and after several months of thinking about it, I eventually realized that what had upset me into shutting the movie off, was how genuinely harrowingly effective it was. So lengthy consideration drew me back to THE TOOLBOX MURDERS, and I found, to my surprise, that following the unforgettable graphic carnage of its opening sequence, THE TOOLBOX MURDERS switches gears. The remainder of the movie is tense, character-driven drama, as well as traditional genre murder mystery; the rich complex script also explores criminal psychology extensively by way of dialogue, rather than more excessive violence, though the movie never ceases to be deeply disturbing and discomfiting. Only its first half-hour is calculated to satisfy "horror" fans, but any audience that appreciates heavy serious drama, will enjoy THE TOOLBOX MURDERS more than they would expect.

37:  EYE OF THE DEVIL (1966) is a stylish, intelligent "castle Gothic," directed by J. Lee (CAPE FEAR) Thompson, starring David Niven, Donald Pleasance, and an extraordinarily beautiful young actress by the name of Sharon Tate, whose promise is, in this movie, heartbreakingly apparent. (You can almost feel Roman Polanski falling in love, while you watch it.) In EYE OF THE DEVIL a woman who's married a scion of an ancient family, finds that some kind of mysterious cult, which holds sway over the entire village, also somehow controls her husband, and expects some horrible sacrifice of him. I don't actually know whether anyone but me ever uses the phrase Castle Gothic, but what I mean by it, is, any low-budget genre production which uses a rented European castle for its primary location. The market for Castle Gothics was entirely glutted between 1960 and 1975; the Corman Poe "cycle," and the British Hammer gothics, are only the most famous among hundreds of movies, many of which tell stories a lot like this one does; and though I can't be sure, I suspect that the main reason EYE OF THE DEVIL has been largely forgotten, is, there were so many movies made, so much like this one, that serious movies geeks had trouble remembering it as distinct from so many similar pictures, playing across the next decade. Perhaps the fact that EYE OF THE DEVIL is just old enough to lack graphic sex and violence, has something to do with it. In any case, it's been forgotten unjustly: EYE OF THE DEVIL has an intelligent script and a great cast; gorgeous widescreen black-and-white photography, and beautiful locations, are backed up by careful attention to visual detail in every department; EYE OF THE DEVIL may be severely lacking in originality, but it's an eerie, atmospheric, and technically accomplished movie, that is, if this happens to be the kind of thing you like, extremely enjoyable.

36:  THE UNSUSPECTED (1947) is an unjustly obscure murder mystery directed by Michael Curtiz, and while it’s not quite as good as his classics CASABLANCA and MILDRED PIERCE, it’s close enough to bear comparison without wilting. Like those much more famous Curtiz classics, THE UNSUSPECTED is a quietly dazzling exercise in technical perfection; if there’s anything to complain of, it is that THE UNSUSPECTED is so carefully calculated, its every bit of available narrative space is crowded so conscientiously, that there is, somehow, no room left to convince us to care much about any of its many morally ambiguous characters. THE UNSUSPECTED is a lot like LAURA, but maybe actually smarter and more complicated than LAURA, and if that sounds like maybe THE UNSUSPECTED is a little too smart and too complicated for its own good, that may be more reasons why it’s so unjustly obscure. Claude Rains plays a professionally creepy radio writer and announcer, whose hit show consists of live readings of true crime stories; the extraordinarily detailed plot, involving several murders, is driven by several ways the many characters trick one another and the audience into believing untruths, some of which trickery takes advantage of then-futuristic recording equipment kept in the antagonist’s soundproofed home office. This is as classy as studio era Hollywood murder mysteries get, and deserves wide rediscovering.

35:  TRADER HORN (1931), a semi-documentary epic about African exploration, is a timeless classic, one of the greatest jungle adventure movies ever made; it's the cinematic grandfather of all Tarzan movies, of all "mondo" movies, of Werner Herzog's jungle adventure classics, and that's just off the top of my head. But you don't have to keep reminding yourself of all this historical significance, to help you sit through TRADER HORN, because if you have any taste at all for movies this old, or for jungle adventure pictures, TRADER HORN will consistently stun and awe you, from beginning to end. TRADER HORN sure works hard to make itself unwelcome, by contemporary standards, by way of raging political incorrectness: its attitude about race is pretty rough sometimes, and there's really no excuse for some of the animal cruelty onscreen (some of it was captured on the fly in the wild, but some of it was, infamously, staged, by starving Mexican zoo animals into attacking each other). Nevertheless TRADER HORN is a staggering achievement: the production shot on location, deep in the jungle, under such stressful conditions that some of the cast and crew became seriously ill (lawsuits ensued, and the beautiful intense starlet Edwina Booth never totally recovered). (This, by the way, landed on my plate via the Oscar excavations project: it was nominated for Best Picture.)

34: NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (1975) is a very Gothic Spanish zombie movie, which I wrote about at length, about nine months ago, when I first began this three-year list thing I'm doing, here. If you back out and scroll down, you can read what I said, then. (If you notice that this movie is now ranked ahead of several other titles, when it was second-to-last on the original list, the explanation for this, is that during the last nine months, I saw several of these movies, a third time. NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is the kind of movie you like even more the third time you see it, than you did, the second time, which you probably know, if you're a serious enough movie geek to enjoy reading this blog, is extraordinarily high and rare praise, for any movie.)

The Best Movies I saw 2009-2011, Belatedly Continued

I hope my readers will accept my apologies, for disappearing from this space for almost nine months, without even bothering to drop by to post an explanation. The explanation is, of course, that I've been busy and distracted. 2011 has been an exciting year for me.

Easily the most interesting of the many distractions that have kept me away from this blog, for the better part of the year, was, spending several months preparing to do a serious piece of screen acting, in a show that started shooting in October. Words cannot express how deeply honored I am to be appearing in the new James VanBebber movie GATOR GREEN. Anyone who's talked with me about movies, any time in the last several years, knows that Jim is one of my heroes, because I can't discuss the current state of the art, without asserting my opinion that James VanBebber's second feature THE MANSON FAMILY is the best underground/regional movie ever made. I've been one of the many fans eagerly awaiting Jim's next project, and I could not be more proud of being the right man, in the right place, at the right time, to become a part of that project, as a cast member. I could not be more thankful for the opportunity to work with Jim, as an actor; Jim's writing a hell of a character for me to play, and though, as of this writing, I haven't yet seen the stuff we shot in October, I hear I did good.

I guess I should say, before abandoning the subject, that although I'm closely involved with GATOR GREEN, this blog will not become the best place to watch for news, as GATOR GREEN slouches toward completion, nor will it be the first original source for information about any other movies I may happen to take up helping to make. I'm not particularly interested in blogging about my work as a filmmaker, while I'm doing it; if I do, somehow, become more interested, I'll take that up on another blog, somewhere, one that does not yet exist. Though I may mention GATOR GREEN, or other cinematic works-in-progress, in this space, this space exists for me to play the movie critic, in it, and I cannot imagine that I'll cease to try hard to keep this space focused on that writerly "mission." There are, I'm sure, already better pages to keep an eye on, to keep track of Jim VanBebber's progress, than this one, and most likely, there always will be.

(By the way: I'm not now, nor have I ever yet been, posting images or links, on this blog, because I'm too paranoid about the shifting state of the law, pertaining to the posting of borrowed images or links to other pages, to indulge myself, at all. But if anyone reading this wants to go ahead and append relevant links, in the comments section, I think that for now, I can convince myself to pretend that I believe I'm not legally responsible for that "content.")

Because I now have something like two to four weeks, in which to close the subject of The Best Movies I Saw 2009-2011, I'm going to tighten up the (remaining) list, to 39 titles (that's 13 per year, which is how I was doing it before 2009, anyway - I chose 13 movies a year, rather than the traditional 10, because 10 seems to me to be, in this context, an arbitrary number, and 13 is another arbitrary number, pretty close by, that I happen to like better). I'm also going to try to restrain the wordage per title, to some smaller number than what I was blowing on each movie, back in February and March, but, you know, on the subject of limiting word counts, given that I'm the only editor around here, I hesitate to commit myself. I will try to remain committed to blogging at least once a week, and hope I can get through this list in time to "do" a 2012 list about when all the other movie critics do their 2012 "best of" lists. (Don't laugh. I really will try.)

Okay, so here they are, now, clearly ranked and numbered - the 39 BEST MOVIES I SAW, 2009 TO 2011:

39:  TARKA THE OTTER (1979) is a remarkably beautiful wildlife movie as narrative drama, that ought to be more widely known and seen. But TARKA THE OTTER has been almost completely forgotten, because while it carries itself, for the most part, like a "family" movie, TARKA sells its BAMBIesque anti-hunting theme, in part, by using imagery so gruesme, that most American parents would be loathe to share it with anyone's children. Hell, this material will disturb most adults: picture, if you will, if BAMBI had been a live action movie, shot like a documentary, using wild and trained animals as actors - this is, in fact, a pretty good thumbnail description of TARKA THE OTTER (which, like BAMBI, is based on a minor literary classic). Now imagine that this "live action BAMBI" includes, not just a frightening hunt sequence that ends with the title character's mother dead, but also, that the sequence includes several lingering shots of the mother's corpse, hanging by its feet, dripping blood, while dramatic music plays, and the animal "lead actor" looks on, whimpering in horror. Now you have an accurate, unexaggerated idea, of where TARKA THE OTTER dares to go. (Seriously - I'm not kidding. Go check out the IMDb users' comments on TARKA THE OTTER; you'll find that most of their authors are there, mostly to express shock and outrage over the portrayal of Tarka's mother's death.) This is not to say that this content is in what I'd say is, generally speaking, bad taste; if you appreciate animal stories, that do not refrain from portraying violence in a straightforward naturalistic fashion, I strongly recommend that you seek out TARKA THE OTTER, as it is the live action close cousin to the animated classics WATERSHIP DOWN and THE PLAGUE DOGS (with which it would make a terrific, if somewhat depressing, double feature).  Also, if you're really impressed by movies that use a clever combination of training and trickery to turn various animals into creditable "stars" for use in structured narrative storytelling, you really need to see TARKA THE OTTER; I've never seen another movie of this type, deploy more animals as cast members, counted as individuals or as species, in a narrative so formally complex. It rivals or outshines every established classic in this area, including THE BEAR, which tends to ne the acknowledged masterpiece among fans of animal "acting," (when I can find them, outside my own family, which doesn't happen often).

Okay: I intend to take up this subject, in this space, with #38, in about a week. Wish me luck...!

Best Movies I Saw 2009-2011: NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS

First, before I get into recommending the Spanish horror classic NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS:

I've realised, since last I entried this blog, that it behooves me, as a movie critic publishing without any editorial oversight or restraint, to explain how I treat and deal with "SPOILERS!" I understand that a lot of movie geeks who use the Internet to research movies, a lot of the people, that is to say, I expect to read this blog, someday, are deeply concerned with having movies' stories blown for them, by casually exposive (sic) reviews, posted or published by writers who don't know or don't care that in ignoring this issue, they're doing real harm, in however limited a way. For instance, writer/director James Gunn probably didn't think the real harm was so limited, when it was his movie SUPER, a movie that depends in part upon an unexpected plot twist for its positive effect on any audience, being spoiled by Roger Ebert, who may be the most widely read movie critic on the planet; Ebert not only spoiled that twist in his review, but did so flippantly, in the course of writing a largely negative review. There wasn't much James could do about it, except complain on his Facebook page, and that's why this SPOILERS! issue really pisses people off: once the harm is done, it's done, and there's no way to undo it; there's no way to restore a story's element of surprise to a reader and/or viewer.

So here's the deal, with me, and SPOILERS! This is the deal you'll always get from me, as a writer, in this matter.

I can be, at times, brutally careless about disclosing details of plot, but only in discussing movies I've carefully judged to have no chance of surprising anyone, by way of anything scripted; I may be careless in disclosing story points, but only when I'm discussing movies that clearly don't depend, in any way, on keeping those story points hidden, for their effect. Most movies don't set out to offer plot-related surprises, for anyone over the age of twelve; it's almost universal, in fact, that screenwriting is thin in exactly this sense, and that includes the scripts for a lot of movies worth writing about. A lot of filmmakers believe that writing should be thin on story, in this exact sense; in fact, this is one of the major ways in which big studio Hollywood, collectively, is falling way, way behind these times, and today's audiences, and their expectations... but that's a subject far beyond the scope of this blog entry.

Back to the subject of SPOILERS! and this blog. There are, of course, a lot of movies that are story driven in ways that require reviewers to exercise care, regarding what they reveal, in writing about them. Don't worry: being a studious movie geek, and having been a professional Hollywood screenwriter, myself, I have an intimate working knowledge, of what kinds of stories, in what kinds of movies, require this kind of care. I can't promise you that I won't give away story points, in discussing any specific movie; nor can I promise to let you know when I'm about to "SPOIL" something in such a way; but I do promise that I'll always show excellent judgment, about what kinds of details comprise storytelling "secrets," so that any movie I happen to discuss, remains as enjoyable as it can possibly be, for those of you who haven't seen it yet. I seriously promise to do better than Ebert; that is to say, as a movie critic, I will be respectful, and attentive, in this matter, when writing about any movies - even when I'm writing about movies that I don't like or care about at all.

Luckily, today I'm still exploring my three years' "best" list, so that last point doesn't apply, to present company. (But earlier points do apply; that is to say, NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, for all its many and various strengths, does not have what you might call an unpredictable storyline...)

Another set of preliminary observations, to get out of the way, before recommending NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS: when circumstances require me to try to explain my lifelong obsessive fascination for old fashioned, Gothic-esque, Halloween-y horror cinema, I'm more or less at a complete loss. Why do castles, spooky organ music, beautiful women in period costume and/or nude with fangs added, colorful unjustified lighting and wildly excessive machine-generated fog... etcetera, etcetera... why do these most elementary elements of generic genre horror, hold such overwhelming, enduring appeal, for me, or for anyone? Why is it that this is the cinematic stuff for which some among us, myself included, live? I could work hard to explain it, but I know from experience that if I do so, I will, most likely, mostly fail. It's easier for me to simply say, that's just how it is, with me, and folks like me, and Gothic-toned "classic" horror movies; if you're one of the many, many other movie geeks out there, who don't quite agree with me, in terms of taste, in this matter, all I can really say, is, it's a shame you don't enjoy this stuff as much as I do.

If, however, you do agree with me, on this subject; if you are, like me, unhealthily entranced by just about anything one might accurately describe as Gothic horror, or classic horror, or old fashioned horror, this next movie on my three years' "best" list is not unlikely to excite you, too. If you're not so susceptible to such cinema, not yet, anyway, maybe a good way to start yourself in that direction, if that's what you think you really want to do, is the old fashioned Gothic 1975 classic known in the States as NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS.

Spanish director Amando de Ossorio has a pretty good reputation, among those horror and Eurosleaze cinema fans serious enough to know his name at all; most of the cult followings his movies have earned, have accrued to the several titles in his "blind dead" series. No, NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is not the first of these slightly famous Spanish zombie movies, but I think it's easily the best. It certainly has the most appeal for those of you who are not among the aforementioned serious horror and Eurosleaze cinema fans; that is to say, NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, as the strangeness of its title possibly implies, is, somewhat self-consciously, an "art film," or something a lot like one. I'd encourage anyone unfamiliar with these movies, to start with NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (and if you like this one, backtrack to see the earlier series entries); and though my own personal tastes make it hard for me to say so, for sure, I suspect this movie is good enough to be a good place to start, for anyone who's enough of a neophyte, to lack all points of reference, for understanding what is meant by "nineteen seventies Eurosleaze horror cinema." (Of course, most of the best places to start, are among the better known Italian genre classics; but my best lists draw only on movies I myself saw for the first time, in any given year, and I saw most of that Italian stuff, for the first time, many, many years ago.)

There is no narrative connection among Amando de Ossorio's "blind dead" movies; they do not share characters, nor does any strand of story run through and connect them. What they do share, is their Knights Templar zombies, and even a glance at the stills available online will make it clear to you that these makeup creations may be the most frightful and memorable screen zombies in all horror cinema. These extremely slow-moving, ominously silent zombies, are dressed in Knights Templar costumes so weathered and tattered, you could almost believe their putative age; they're so thoroughly and effectively redolent of all things ancient and dead, that even those jaded horror geeks who find the "blind dead" movies too slow, quiet and restrained, all around, usually concede that their zombies, are, if nothing else, unforgettable.

NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS has an unusually tasteful script for a seventies European zombie movie; the desire on the part of the filmmakers, to give this movie a timeless, "classic" feeling, is almost palpable. A young doctor on his way to his first post, accompanied by his nervous wife, arrives in the tiny seaside fishing village that is to be their new home, to find they're not welcome and not wanted. The locals won't speak to them at all if they can help it, and won't even sell them groceries without telling them to leave town and mind their own business. The doctor being replaced flees without explaining the curse the town is under, beyond warning the new doctor that if he and his wife do stay, they must never go outside at night. Soon enough, the newcomers figure out that something strange is going on, something that causes the disappearances of young girls from the village, night after night - disappearances that are always preceded by the ominous clangor of churchbells, and the screech of weirdly nocturnal seagulls... and also, eerie slow-motion photography, of a troop of zombie cavalry, climbing from their graves, and riding out of their ruined castle, by moonlight...

The reason I mentioned the SPOILERS! business in this entry, is, of course, that this story is so thin, it's so old-fashioned, that it's hard to believe anything in it, is capable of "surprising" anyone. That being said, it's a tasteful, thoughtful script, that gives this movie all the excuse it needs, to pour on the style. The amazing locations clearly go back hundreds and hundreds of years; every shot in NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is crowded with decaying masonry of jawdropping age. The photography is astonishingly beautiful, dripping with opiated distortions, imagery often so fuzzy it's as textured as paint on canvas. Atmosphere and mood? NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is almost nothing but atmosphere and mood.

It's getting too late in the day, for me to fuss over giving this blog entry a rounded ending. I'll be blunt and brief: it's true it's a matter of peculiar personal taste, for me, with NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, and my passionate recommendation of it; for those of you who are generally disinclined to see this kind of thing, I guess I wouldn't recommend it, so highly... but if you happen to have no set opinion of such things, as yet... if you happen to be Eurosleaze horror-curious, so to speak... NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS is as good an introduction to the Spanish side of the field as you're likely to have easy access to.

The Best Movies I've Seen 2009-2011, Part 1: SHOOTER

It's true that the stated purpose of this blog is to comment upon, and recommend, movies that were nominated for Oscars, and I'd like to stick to that purpose, if not exclusively, then at least, you know, predominantly. It's also true that the last time I checked in here I began to write a lengthy, detailed reading list, to accompany the Oscar-related recommended viewing list I've already posted.

But the end of a calendar year recently rolled over and past us, and as I have no other venue in which to write about my favorite movies of the past year, I'll have to do it here. (Besides, I happen to know that that last entry I posted, enticed that reader who requested that reading list, into taking a shot at reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, so she ought to be occupied with that, for a while, and require no further recommendations, any time soon.) (Um, unless she has as much trouble getting into that book, as I did.)

I'm inordinately excited about this, because I haven't had a chance to write about my year's favorite movies, for three whole years, now, though I have been keeping lists. (I did get as far as posting lists of titles, without additional comment, on my Facebook page, at the end of 2009 and 2010; but the gravity of my medical condition, at both those times, prevented me from following up with any notes at all. While I do expect my friends to generally appreciate my taste in movies, I don't think I can rightly expect many or any of them, to go around watching titles from one of my eclectic lists, without any indications as to why they should, in any specific instance, in any particulars. I wouldn't, if I was them, or you, or anyone else.)

(What's that you say? I've already posted a long list of recommended Oscar titles, without saying a word about any of those? Um, right. Right, I need to catch up with writing some notes, here, about those movies, too...)

My year's end best lists are chosen from all the movies I personally happened to see for the first time, during that year. My health doesn't allow me to keep up with theatrical releases in such a way as to effectively cover the same "year's best" material that everyone else does, for any given year; and if I did, I'd probably name seven or eight of the same movies every other critic named, anyway. This blog is about recommending movies, in a truly useful way; so I'm recommending the best movies I happened to see between January 2009 and December 2011, regardless of when those movies happen to have been originally released. Certainly at least some of them will be "new," to you.

I, like many another serious movie geek, track a few generic "big Hollywood" directors, because I find them occasionally interesting. I was running way behind when, in 2009, I caught up with the 2007 Antoine Fuqua thriller SHOOTER. I went out of my way to see this slick and fashionable A-list Hollywood political thriller/action movie, because I track its director, Antoine Fuqua; I track Fuqua out of admiration for TRAINING DAY, a corrupt cop thriller starring Denzel Washington, that was so much better than that kind of movie usually turns out to be, it was almost an instant classic. SHOOTER wasn't a major hit of its season the way TRAINING DAY was, but it is almost as good, which means it's well worth seeing.

Adapted from Stephen Hunter's novel Point of Impact, SHOOTER tells the story of former USMC Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, played by Mark Wahlberg. A brilliant sniper, Swagger/Wahlberg gets disillusioned in the line of duty, and so becomes a bitter, paranoid recluse, living alone in a cabin in the woods, avidly tracking Internet conspiracy theories. A group of renegade Feds (led by Danny Glover, cast against type, here, as a creepy villain, with limited success) trick him into coming out of retirement to plan the assassination of a visiting African politician, for reasons and by means it would be unnecessarily spoiling to explain here in detail; Glover and his people plan to frame Wahlberg for the crime he never knew they intended to commit, and they also plan to kill him, too, immediately after the assassination, but Wahlberg, of course, turns out to be much more resourceful, dangerous, and vengeful than the people using him ever suspected. Wahlberg spends the rest of the intricately plotted movie eluding police and government agents, while figuring out who set him up and why, and then hunting them down, working his vengeful way up the crooked chain of command to the power behind Danny Glover, a sitting U.S. Senator (played with heavy accent and gruesome relish by Ned Beatty).

Leaving all its carefully crafted detail out of a description of SHOOTER, like I just did, makes it sound like cookie-cutter formula stuff; it's in those details, and in the careful attention paid them by the filmmakers, that SHOOTER really proves itself to be a movie too fiercely determined to entertain, to dismiss out of hand, out of disgust for its intermittent reliance on cliche. SHOOTER is richly scripted, heavily and artfully plotted, filled with interesting supporting characters and diverting minor incidents, given to carefully researched technical detail. Most importantly, SHOOTER, like TRAINING DAY, feels genuinely committed to its political message; in fact, it's essentially the same message, in both movies, and so it seems safe to attribute that message, and that sense of commitment, to their common director, Antoine Fuqua. What Fuqua seems to be determined to tell us, by unwieldy way of these his best big studio genre movies, is that power and money are intrisically corrupting influences, in any system that runs by or on power and/or money; and that the only hope for combating creeping corruption, be it among cops or among politicians, lies in good men of principle acting, when necessary, to exploit the decadence and weakness corruption always engenders, to destroy those who are so corrupted, even if and when that requires fighting violence with violence. Perhaps Antoine Fuqua sees himself and his work reflected in this message; that is to say, that Antoine Fuqua using his career as a big studio director, devoting his wit and skills to making shallow fun genre hits, to get this message across, is akin to the renegade heroics of his movies' protagonists.

That's pretty heavy talk, I know, for describing a pretty standard studio A-list action thriller, and that's the thing about SHOOTER; it may arrive as yesterday's news, in some respects, but even as it satisfies genre conventions on a mass market level, dealing in overly familiar storytelling terms and tropes, SHOOTER is also, undeniably, a smart and thoughtful movie, made for smart and thoughtful audiences, clearly intended to fuel meaningful conversations about politics and about society. SHOOTER is also irresistibly engaging, a fast paced, tightly controlled machine of a movie, carefully designed and engineered to entertain a large wide audience, in a serious intense way. In all of this, SHOOTER is, again, closely comparable to TRAINING DAY, and while I guess I'd recommend you see TRAINING DAY first, I enjoyed SHOOTER almost as much.

Reading List (that goes with the Watching List published above, or below)

(First of all, the autotype suggested I call this blog post "How do I get rid of a demon?" Which is, well, interesting, I must say. I can either feel creeped out about why the computer would just spontaneously make that offer; or just put it down to assuming that my wife Angie or my daughter Greta recently typed that title for a blog entry... and, you know, get creeped out about that, instead.)

(By the way, now that I've finished writing the entry that consisted mostly of typing a long list of movies, I'll revert to capitalizing all movie titles, which was standard stylebook for all the websites I wrote for, last time I was publishing anything. If anyone thinks capitalizing movie titles looks wrong for some reason, let me know.)

Another sort of parenthetical note: because I've just read over the list I typed over, I happened to notice that STARSHIP TROOPERS somehow vanished, at some point; I don't know how it disappeared - it was certainly supposed to be on the list, and I'll correct the other entry, as soon as I'm done typing and posting this one. It sure makes me nervous, knowing that every detail of any project I undertake, is entirely in the hands of one heavily medicated guy, who does things like accidentally deleting titles from his final recommended viewing list, without remembering how or when it happened... I suppose that means I ought to read over some master list of Oscar-nominated titles for every year, one more time, just to look for other slips of the typist's hand... then again, maybe I'll just set this matter of doublechecking the list of titles aside, for now, at least until I watch, I don't know, another thousand movies or so, from the rest of the list. Maybe two thousand. Maybe I'll just check when I think I'm done...

Okay, a reading list. Books the movies were based on. Here we go:

THE THIN MAN is that serendipitous rarity, a movie based on an excellent novel which faithfully translates the book to the screen, adding and embellishing only where it undeniably helps tell the story. THE THIN MAN was such a success as a movie, it spawned five (increasingly slight and silly) sequels; Dashiell Hammett never wrote a sequel to his novel, but the novel he wrote, is worth reading at least twice.

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is based on a notable book, one that's been filmed several times, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall; I haven't read this book, but it concerns true events, so maybe if the excellent 1935 movie inspires you to further reading on the subject, the Wikipedia page would be a good place to start.

I find unexpectedly that MY MAN GODFREY is actually based on a novel called 1101 Park Avenue, written by one Eric Hatch. Who knew? Not me. Mr. Hatch seems (from my present perspective - that of someone looking at his imdb page) otherwise most notable for having written the screenplay for the once-popular and sequelized romantic comedy/ghost story TOPPER, and another novel he wrote served as the basis for the Disney picture THE HORSE IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT. Again: who knew? Apparently he wrote 25 novels, but unless I'm mistaken, his work has gone way out of fashion; anyway, I've never heard of him.

Disney's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is based on a story "written" by the well-known German folklorists collectively known as The Brothers Grimm. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were central figures in the German literature of their time; the lifetime of work they put into gathering, writing, and publishing the wild, rich, and previously entirely oral folklore of their country, is only their most prominent and enduring among many notable literary contributions. Here in the United States "the Brothers Grimm" are commonly misapprehended as authors of fairy tales for children; in fact, a lot of the folk tales they gathered, are not only too frightening for small children, but also, too deeply strange, for any adult who actually reads them to misunderstand as "children's literature" of any kind. A collection of their stories edited for an adult audience - many editions of the "complete Brothers Grimm fairy tales" are available; I believe I read Signet paperbacks - belongs in rare literary company - I would go so far as to say that it constitutes one of the great semi-inexplicable works of world literature, alongside The Bible, The Thousand Nights and One Night, The Mabinogion, and the Satyricon by Petronius (which will come up at length later on in this list, when I get to the Fellini movie based on it). I can't recommend reading Wilhelm & Jacob Grimm's "fairy tales" highly enough, and comparing their "Snow White" to Disney's movie is as good a place to start as any.

GONE WITH THE WIND is based on the Margaret Mitchell novel of the same title, a novel which remains a much-loved perennial cult classic, mostly, as far as I can tell, in the "deep South," among, you know, white people. Well, white women, actually. (Let's go ahead and call a spade a spade, if you know what I mean.) I tried to read it once, and found it, well, I hate to just pass on a superficial impression of the first twenty pages of a gigantic novel, twenty years after I read them, but that superficial impression was that Gone with the Wind, the novel, is badly marred by racist sentiments, many of them, variously expressed, throughout several levels of interpretation of the text... but then, I was only twenty, twenty years ago, and if my synchronicity-obsessed friend Andras were sitting here, he'd point out that the Motown song that happened to be playing, just now, while I wrote this paragraph (I bought the Motown box set for Angie for Christmas), mentioned, seemingly significantly, that "you can't judge a book by its cover," right, you know, when I was doing pretty much just that. I'm sure I know some folks who love this novel, and I would love it if you'd append a comment here, to defend it; I'm also sure that, whether or not the book was  intended to express or project racist ideas or attitudes, it's well worth reading, anyway, even so, just to compare it with a movie adaptation that very carefully and cleverly avoids being, itself, racist (or even commenting often or directly on the race-related matters that insistently prodded the historical events that GONE WITH THE WIND uses for backdrop). It's true that the enduring popularity of the novel, Gone with the Wind, is at least in part directly due to the enduring popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, the movie, arguably the crowning acheivement of Hollywood's studio era. It's also safe to say that if this novel were simply terrible, no one would be reading it still, and it remains a reliable seller, so... so judge for yourself, I guess.


I find that my reliable problem with chronic logorrhea, has put me in the position of promising to continue this "reading list" business, next time. If anyone does take up watching these movies in tandem with reading these books, let me know; perhaps we can make a club out of it. (No - seriously.)

January 2012 Recommended Watching List

My apologies to those dedicated few, who've expressed an interest in following this blog, and have waited patiently, or impatiently, for further posts to appear. Of course, the holiday season derailed me for several weeks; hopefully I'll get this blog back on track, sooner than later. My new year's resolution to have a script for a microbudgeted genuinely independent movie, that is, one I can go produce and direct myself, finished and ready to shoot by the end of this year, won't exactly help, in my endeavor to create new blog posts on a regular basis, any more than my bad health does; but as author and screenwriter Peter Carey once advised, "bite off more than you can chew, and chew like hell." (Peter Carey was describing the process behind the making of the deeply underrated 1985 Australian movie BLISS, and I'm actually not sure he meant the striking phrase to be taken as advice, at all, by anyone, ever, but that's how I took it.) (And by the way, I cannot recommend BLISS highly enough; it's a very strange, very funny, and, as I said, very underrated movie, and it's - hold on, let me check - yes, it's available to watch "instantly" at Netflix, as I write these words.) (The BLISS I speak of, is the second movie that comes up, when you search that title at Netflix; I have not seen, and cannot vouch for, the heavy Turkish rape drama that appears first, though it does look intriguing, doesn't it?)

In this post I'll answer multiple requests from several readers who asked me to share the list I mentioned in my first post; the list I've created of "masterpieces," that is, movies acknowledged by the Oscars that I've seen at least three times, and at least once since 2008, and still look forward to enjoying again (a "mechanical" approach to defining "masterpieces," which seems to work much, much better, than simply trusting my judgment following one screening, though of course it is considerably more time consuming).

So though I still have about 2900 movies left to watch, or try to watch, before I can call this list complete, here are the titles I've confirmed as of January 1st, 2012. (I'm trying to see five movies a week, but at that rate this project will still take something like twenty years to complete; perhaps I'll plan to post the list as it currently stands, at the beginning of every year... though someone might have to remind me.)

The list is arranged in chronological order; each title follows its year of release. If multiple versions of a movie are available, I've noted which "cut" bears my stamp of approval, with a note at the end of the line in italics, like this sentence. (If a complete line, date and title, are parenthesized, like this sentence, that means it's a personal favorite I've seen many times in my life already, but have not yet managed to get around to seeing again since I began this project, so they aren't quite "confirmed," in the same sort of final way, as the rest of the list; I include them because they're movies I do truly love, and that last screening, just to make sure I still like them, is pretty close to obligatory.)

1927     Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
1934     The Thin Man
1935     Mutiny on the Bounty
1936     My Man Godfrey
1937     Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1939    The Wizard of Oz)
1939     Gone with the Wind
1940     Fantasia
1941     Citizen Kane
(1942    The Jungle Book)
1942     Casablanca
1944     Double Indemnity
1944     Hail the Conquering Hero
1944     Laura
1945     Mildred Pierce
1946     The Blue Dahlia
(1946    The Stranger)
1946     Song of the South
1949     The Third Man
1953     The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
1954     Rear Window
1954     Them!
1955     Bad Day at Black Rock
1955     Pete Kelly's Blues
1955     Rebel without a Cause
(1956    The Man Who Knew Too Much)
1960     Psycho
1961     Yojimbo
1962     Mondo Cane
1962     Lolita
1962     Lawrence of Arabia
1963     The Birds
1964     7 Faces of Dr. Lao
1964     Mary Poppins
1966     Fantastic Voyage
1968     Planet of the Apes
1968     2001: A Space Odyssey
1968     Rosemary's Baby
1969     The Wild Bunch
1969     Fellini Satyricon
1971     Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
1971     Straw Dogs
1971     A Clockwork Orange
(1972    The Ruling Class)
1972     Deliverance
1972     Sleuth
1973     Manson
1973     The Exorcist     any version is fine
1975     Nashville
1975     Jaws
(1975    The Day of the Locust)
1976     Taxi Driver
1977     Close Encounters of the Third Kind     I'm not "up" on the various cuts - yet...
1979     Alien     original theatrical release cut
1979     The Amityville Horror
1979     The Black Stallion
1979     Being There
1979     All That Jazz
1980     Heaven's Gate     the really long version - is the mangled short version even available?
1980     Altered States
1981     Excalibur
1981     Outland
1981     Dragonslayer
1981     An American Werewolf in London
1981     Pennies from Heaven
1982     Poltergeist
1982     Blade Runner     as far as I can tell, every available edit, is just as great as the rest
1982     Tron
(1983    Never Cry Wolf)
1985     Brazil     the theatrical cut, and the "director's" cut, are both great; avoid tv versions
1985     Return to Oz
1985     Legend     the original theatrical version is way, way better than the longer "European" cut
(1986    A Room with a View)
1986     Aliens     the director's cut is too slow and long; see the original theatrical version first
1986     The Fly
1986     Blue Velvet
(1986    Betty Blue)     I still need to triplecheck, but I think I prefer the short American version
1987     Matewan
1987     Full Metal Jacket
1987     Robocop
1988     Beetle Juice
1988     Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1988     Die Hard
1988     The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
1989     Do the Right Thing
1989     The Abyss     the director's cut is twice as good as the shorter theatrical version
1990     Dick Tracy
(1990    Wild at Heart)
1990     Henry and June
(1991    The Silence of the Lambs)
1991     Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1992     Unforgiven
1994     Ed Wood
1995     Seven
(1996    Twelve Monkeys)
1996     Fargo
1997     L.A. Confidential
1997     Starship Troopers
1997     Jackie Brown
1998     The Truman Show
1998     Out of Sight
1999     Being John Malkovich
1999     American Beauty
2000     Vatel
2001     Amelie
2002     Minority Report
2002     Adaptation
2005     War of the Worlds

That's where the list stands, as of now, on the cusp between 2011 and 2012. Now you tell me where I'm wrong. (Please! I value your input!)

For the convenience of those among you who intend to go see which movies you can watch right now, at Netflix, I'll make the list for you. Here are the titles from the above list that are currently available for "instant play" at Netflix, in chronological order, separated by commas: My Man Godfrey, Double Indemnity, Hail the Conquering Hero, The Stranger, The Third Man, Them!, Fellini Satyricon, A Clockwork Orange, The Ruling Class, The Exorcist, The Black Stallion, An American Werewolf in London, Blade Runner, A Room with a View, The Fly, Betty Blue, Robocop, Die Hard, Jackie Brown, Being John Malkovich. (I know, it's a paltry few, by comparison to the length of the list, but that's an accurate snapshot, of the current state of things at Netflix...)

(I've also been asked to include a "reading list," that is, a list of the books that provided source material for the  literary adaptations among these movies; that's a good idea, but right now I have to rush off to an acupuncture appointment - the reading list will be my next post.)

This Is Who I Am, and This Is What I'm Doing

I'm very torn, here: I'd like to push aside the long-term viewing and reviewing project I've undertaken, that gives this blog its title, and rush to treat this writerly real estate like a diary, to use this time and this space to tell you all about one or two of the more interesting movies I happen to have seen in the last few weeks, as of this writing, simply because, as you know, I can do that, if I want to; there are no editorial controls, here, to restrain me, to the task I supposedly have at hand, or anything else. For a writer used to constraining himself rigidly to assigned material, one way or another, the sense of freedom is breathtaking, vertiginous, even. However, I do, as I, and the title I've given my blog, have both already clearly intimated, have an intended goal in mind, and in hand, to which to constrain myself, and to do so is worth doing for its own sake, regardless of any and all writerly freedoms I may have to endure habitually, around these parts, to, you know, stick to it, at least intermittently.

About four years ago I moved to Miami to marry my amazing and wonderful wife, attorney Angie Wilt, and together we set about the grueling and expensive project of doing whatever it took to improve my health, and "put me back on my feet" as a writer, a filmmaker and a musician, if the thing is at all possible. We knew then that my health would demand of me several years yet of enforced convalesence, at best. But even during the worst parts of my now near decade of serious illness, I've been able to continue watching movies regularly; in fact, during the stretches when I was essentially bedridden, I've been able to see more movies than ever before, being unable to do anything else more active. So I began to consider the idea of using this excessive time I'd been forced to spend facing the TV screen, constructively; I began to think that my lengthy illness placed me in a unique position to undertake some vast structured movie watching project, to lay the groundwork for a blog, or a book, or maybe a blog, and then a book, to be written later, whenever I could do it.

I considered several long range long term movie viewing projects, before I thought of the Academy Awards. I could set out to watch every movie ever nominated for any Oscar. After a few months of trying to think of something that people might enjoy reading a blog about, more, and failing, I decided that Oscar was it, and so The Oscar Excavations is what this is (I couldn't resist the nod to the movie that remains my best known writerly work, even if that does happen to be misfortunate, insofar as THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS was work I was never paid for).

During the exhaustive and exhausting process of compiling a list of all the movies ever nominated for any Academy Award since the Oscars began in 1927 (thank you Wikipedia; thank you, Imdb), I worked out these ground rules and/or operating parameters: one final result, needs to be a list of definite masterpieces, organized by their original release dates, a chronological chronicle of the times the Academy "got it right," an ordered row of movies I confidently recommend as true, irreducibly timeless classics. It was important to me that in this context, I try not to make mistakes, as a critic; having been, for one hot year in Hattiesburg MS in the late nineties, a regularly publishing newspaper critic, one of the guys who covers and writes up everything the corporate cinema plays, I found out, some years later when I started seeing some of the movies I'd covered, again, that seeing a movie once, is no basis for judging how that movie will hold up over a period of years, over the course of multiple screenings. It is both maddening and humiliating, how often I found that I'd been wrong about which movies were good, and which movies weren't, when my opinions on the subject went into print.

So I decided that any movie I can personally sit through at least three times and still enjoy, including at least once since this project began, is a demonstrated masterpiece. If anyone here can come up with a better way to determine which movies really withstand the test of time, than to watch each movie three times over a period of several years and see if I still like it enough to sit through it again, at the end of that process, please let me know. (Seriously.)

Movies that clearly don't "work" anymore, as art or as entertainment, I don't feel obliged to sit through, in this pursuit, any more than I feel obliged to sit through them, as a private viewer seeking entertainment. The way things are currently, with streaming video backing up my home collection of DVDs, and Turner Classic Movies filling in the gaps, life is too short, and the possibilities for movie viewing too wildly various and enticing, for me to feel it's necessary that I require myself to sit through every last damned movie I start watching. Unless someone's paying me to sit through it, I give any unfamiliar movie a fourth of its running time, to hook me, or even to merely intrigue me; if it can't make me enjoy sitting there watching it by that far into a movie, I shut it off, and I think that's fair enough, given how experienced a viewer and critic I am, and, frankly, how much other cooler stuff I can and will watch, with those precious minutes of time I shave off the Oscar project. If you want to set out to look at every movie ever nominated for any Oscar, and you want to do better than sticking to only feature films (no short films), and you want to do better than giving each movie a fourth of its running time (about twenty-five or thirty minutes, usually) to demonstrate that it continues to be worth anyone spending the time to watch it all the way through, please, go right ahead and do better than me and supercede me. Let me know when you start, because my backup/fallback plan is "fantastic film and TV of the seventies and eighties," and that subject is looking like a lot more fun, by comparison, now that I've been keeping up with five Oscar titles a week, for more than three years.

Five Oscar titles a week: that's right. That's about half my total viewing, in any given week, give or take. I'm awfully ill; my medical condition, the pain, and the drugs I take for the condition and for the pain, all keep me from functioning very well, in most senses, during most hours of most days, but they rarely knock me down so hard I can't watch a movie. (No more often than twice a day, lately, and it passes within a few hours.) (Seriously.) (If it sounds like no small comfort to a man as ill as I am, to have a nice TV, and stuff to watch on it, you hear me accurately. Though believe me, there isn't a day on which I wouldn't trade the extra movie-watching time I get out of this chronic illness, for the promising career as musician and filmmaker I had going, ten years ago, when illness first knocked me down completely, and forced me to begin to set aside that life, for this one.)

I don't know how many movies I started with, though of course I could go figure it out, and so could you. (If you do, let me know.) (Seriously.) Because I counted them to prepare for this blog entry, I can tell you how many Oscar-nominated titles remain on my list, now:

As of this writing, I have 2901 movies left to watch (or try to watch). That includes:

21 I've seen three times, but not yet since this project began; these require one more viewing.

125 I've seen twice, and need to see again, to either confirm them as worthy of my final masterpieces list, or to find that they don't make the cut, as failing to solidly entertain me and sustain my interest, through and through, three times through the movie.

435 movies I've only seen once, and so need to see twice more, to complete this project to my own satisfaction. (Many of them I will only see once.)

The rest of the 2901 titles, belong to movies I haven't seen at all.

As of this writing, my final "masterpieces" list contains 88 movies. That's 88 movies I've seen at least three times in my life, and at least once in the last three-and-a-half years, that I still enjoy and like enough, to be looking forward to seeing them again. I guess I'll hold off on sharing that list, until I hit a hundred titles; it shouldn't take more than a few months, now.

At the moment, I'd rather write about the best things I've seen this week, than bother more with the Oscar list: I do intend to use this space to tell you about everything excellent and awesome I run across, and not just this Academy Award-nominated stuff.

What's that? This is already way long enough for one entry? I'll try to check in toward the end of every week, and next time, I'll be actually writing about movies, directly, rather than, you know, writing about writing about movies, which, frankly, gets to be a drag kind of quickly, whether or not you happen to be seriously ill, or editor-controlled, or anything else.