I STILL SEE LOTS OF MOVIES

Finished my June Project with flying colors: I saw 36 films all told, 30 of them new to me. The list:

16 June: Nacho Libre (Jared Hess, 2006)
Like Jack Black? Like luchadores? No shame in either of those.

17 June: The Front (Martin Ritt, 1976)
An anti-blacklist film of the grand old "There weren't actually commie spies" sensibility. And even if history has tended to undermine the sentiment, there's still a lot of reasons to like it: Woody Allen in someone else's script, sweet revenge by actual blacklist members (the director, the writer, much of the cast), and the most effective use of the word "fuck" in cinema history.

18 June: Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
Yeah yeah, all that stuff about how what played as satire in '76 reads like a documentary today. And I'm right there with the complaints about the bloated (and dated) revoltionaries-on-TV subplot, and the fact that it starts to run out of steam around the 80-minute mark. What I'd forgotten since I last saw it some 4 years ago was how perfect the acting is, how subtly Lumet manages to show off that he's a genius, and how damn funny the whole thing is.

19 June: The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1925)
I have a stash of silent comedies on hand for emergencies, should it turn out that the day is ended I need to watch something around an hour long. In this case, one of the best films I've seen by the forgotten silent comedy genius Harold Lloyd, every bit the equal of Keaton and Chaplin. He's less acrobatic than the former and less sweet than the latter, but more relatable - and arguably smarter - than either. The football sequence at the end is one of those great scenes that absolute tools like me use in arguing that film peaked in the silent era.

20 June: Water (Deepa Mehta, 2005)
Didn't seem right to give a full-on review to a film that's been in theaters seven weeks. It's all a bit heavy-handed, both in its plot (the caste system = bad) and its water iconography (although I guess if subtlety was the goal, it would have a different title). But it's gorgeous, and the use of color - blue especially - is brilliantly controlled. I'd say that Mehta is a better director than writer, which doesn't keep me from wanting to see the first two films in her elemental trilogy.

21 June: The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti, 2006)
It's kind of thrilling to find a film in which every element of production can so equally be called "incoherent."

22 June: Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948)
The first of Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy" (I've also seen the second) is hardly his best film or the best Western I've ever seen, but it's still a great work. Of course, Ford didn't know how not to create iconic, perfect frames (the last shot of the climactic battle, John Wayne walking into a dust cloud, is one of the greatest images I have seen in a film), and the script is one of his most morally-aware: a veiled retelling of Custer at Little Bighorn, it's a pragmatic celebration of military honor and indictment of military overreach, while neither mythologizing nor demonizing the Apaches.

23 June: La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)
A brilliant film, but a disappointment; no matter how good it was in and of itself, it just didn't feel very Renoirvian, although as the film progressed I noticed more and more well-chosen tracking shots, culminating with a really great death scene. Still, it didn't "look" Renoir - I guess "poetic realism"-noir isn't really his style. Jean Gabin and Simon Simone are - unshockingly - great.

24 June: Wordplay (Patrick Creadon, 2006)
A bit too long, and too desperate for a plot hook. But there are some fantastic interviews and moments.

25 June: Little Caesar (Mervy LeRoy, 1930)
The great Edward G. Robinson's star-making turn is the only truly wonderful aspect of this film, but boy is it ever: the iconic gangster performance of all time, ending in that perfect, ever-parodied line, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" The rest is mostly interesting for showcasing the Warner style before there really was such thing, but there's no ignoring that it's an early American sound film.

26 June: Zui hao de shi guang [Three Times] (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
A perfect depiction of love, freedom and youth; a triumphantly cinematic film.

27 June: Banshun [Late Spring] (Ozu Yasujiro, 1949)
Not so rigidly controlled as Ozu's later films, but it's still hard to call it anything but a masterpiece. It was his first collaboration with actress Hara Setsuko, and maybe her best performance: a young woman who bridles at her father's (Ryu Chishu) plans for her marriage. Ozu's typically perfect compositions create an idealised home whose dissolution is undeniably tragic, even while it is necessary.
and Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006)
Occasionally mirthless and too long, but there's still fun to be had.

28 June: Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
Poking around on the internets after finally seeing Lynch's feature debut, I was surprised to see the energy devoted to figuring out the story and what it means. I took it as straight-up surrealism: there's something like a story, but the film is really about images, designed primarily to evoke a visceral, not intellectual, meaning. And in this case, the images mean, "David Lynch, he's real scared of the vagina."

29 June: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Werner Herzog, 1972)
The ultimate Herzog film. That's a good thing, if you didn't know. So much to love, even after three viewings; I can name no other film offhand that works so successfully on both the level of text (men going mad in the jungle) and meta-text (it's a film that makes no effort to disguise the fact that it's a construct). In both cases, it's probably best to credit Klaus Kinski, the most deranged man to ever hold any position on a film set.
and House of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1944)
I wanted to see something I hadn't before. And I own it (or rather, I own this). And it was short. And now I never have to see it again. The end.

30 June: Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
Johnny Depp in a revisionist Western with strong mystic overtones. I don't quite follow Jonathan Rosenbaum to the idea that it's the best American film of the 1990s, but it's up there. Jarmusch is perhaps our most European filmmaker, and this one calls to mind Bresson and Dreyer and even a healthy dollop of Antonioni. Which is to say: I am pretentious and it is pretentious and I love it so.