How 'Bout a Top 100 List?

My Top 100 Best Movies of All Time that I Can Remember. These are only films I have seen and remember—thus many qualified candidates are probably out. I think the most important shared quality of films on this list is JOY (in the filmmaking, not the narrative, which will quickly become clear).

#1 Contempt
#2 The Godfather Epic
#3 The Thin Red Line
#4 The Philadelphia Story
#5 La Jetée
#6 Out of the Past
#7 The Rules of the Game
#8 2046
#9 Raging Bull
#10 L’Avventura
#11 Vertigo
#12 Breathless
#13 Persona
#14 Leaving Las Vegas
#15 The Night of the Hunter
#16 His Girl Friday
#17 Battle of Algiers
#18 Funny Games (Original)
#19 Casablanca
#20 Chinatown
#21 Five Easy Pieces
#22 The Passion of Joan of Arc
#23 The Conversation
#24 Talk to Her
#25 La Notte

FOREIGN

8½
The Bicycle Thieves
Bob le Flambeur
Cache
Chungking Express
Cries and Whispers
Dancer in the Dark
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Elevator to the Gallows
Hiroshima Mon Amour
In the Mood for Love
Irreversible
L’Eclisse
Le Samourai
Oldboy
The Piano Teacher
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Pierrot le Fou
Rashomon
A Special Day
Time Out
That Obscure Object of Desire
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Wages of Fear
Y Tu Mamá También

DOMESTIC

The Age of Innocence
All that Heaven Allows
All the Real Girls
Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now Redux
Badlands
Bonnie and Clyde
Brick
Bringing Up Baby
Casino
Clueless
Citizen Kane
Days of Heaven
The Deer Hunter
Do the Right Thing
Double Indemnity
Far from Heaven
Fargo
Glengarry Glen Ross
Hannah and Her Sisters
Heat
High Noon
Hoop Dreams
The Ice Storm
In the Bedroom
The King
L.A. Confidential
Lost in Translation
Malcolm X
Mulholland Dr.
Nashville
No Country for Old Men
North by Northwest
Notorious
Out of Sight
The Passenger
Rear Window
Red River
The Royal Tenenbaums
Rushmore
Stagecoach
Sunset Blvd.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
To Have and Have Not
Traffic
Usual Suspects
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Wild Bunch
You Can Count of Me

&

Miami Vice (fuck the haters!)

*

Not quites:

All About Eve, All the Pretty Horses (my personally imagined 4 hour cut), The Anniversary Party, As Good as It Gets, Best of Youth, Best in Show, Best Years of Our Lives, Big Night, The Big Sleep, Boogie Nights, Breaking Away, Brief Encounter, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Conformist, Crossfire, The Country Girl, Day for Night, Devil in a Blue Dress, Eat Drink Man Woman, Election, The English Patient, The Fountain, From Here to Eternity, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, George Washington, The Getaway, Gladiator, Ghost World, Goldfinger, Gone with the Wind, The Great Escape, Grey Gardens, Grizzly Man, Groundhog Day, House of Games, The Hustler, Indiscreet, Klute, The Kid Stays in the Picture, The King of New York, Knocked Up, Lamerica, Le Cercle Rouge, Léon: the Professional, The Limey, M, Ma Mère, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Manhattan, My Best Friend’s Wedding, My Life to Live, The New World, Once, Ossessione, Patton, Pickpocket, Point Blank, Primer, The Proposition, Rebecca, Requiem for a Dream, Rififi, A River Runs through It, Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, Rocco and His Brothers, Roman Holiday, Rosemary’s Baby, Run Lola Run, Sexy Beast, Shakespeare in Love, Shane, She’s the One, Shoot the Piano Player, Some Like It Hot, Spellbound, The Squid and the Whale, Straw Dogs, Suddenly, Last Summer, Suspicion, Swingers, Three Women, To Be and To Have, To Catch a Thief, Trainspotting, Truman Show, Umberto D, The Virgin Suicides, Wonder Boys.

*

Don’t cut it: Tarantino. P.T. Anderson. Most of Buñuel. Truffaut (though Shoot the Piano Player and Day for Night sniffed the top 100). Clint Eastwood. Stanley Kubrick. John Cassavetes. The films of James Dean (How long does the guy have to be dead before we can admit his movies blow? Why oh why can’t he just be canonically replaced by Montgomery Clift?).

Haven’t seen enough: Tarkovsky (I’m 0-2 on staying awake for the duration of his films). Eisenstein. Bergman (despite two films on the list). Japanese directors not named Kurosawa (I'm 0-1 on staying awake through Ozu). All the silent film masters.

Admitted blind eye: Musicals. Children’s films (Disney, Star Wars/Star Trek, Tim Burton). Amateur films (Steven Spielberg, Michael Moore).

Scarlett or ScoJo?

There were no breasts whatsoever in the last post and I imagine everyone felt the loss. To rectify this I went to the movies. I saw in print that Scarlett Johansson might now be termed ScoJo and, fascinated by the distinction between the names, I had to investigate. There are two types of film I generally must see in theaters, those with (probable) overwhelming artistic value and those with Scarlett Johansson. As I stepped up to the box office for The Other Boleyn Girl, I should have just said, “I’ll take one for Scarlett Johansson in a shaky English accent please.”


It’s Natalie who’s the Other One, just so we’re clear. And no, idiot film reviewer for Seattle's The Stranger, Natalie (Anne Boleyn) and Scarlett (Mary Boleyn) do not look particularly like sisters. We should round up all these film sibling truthers, ship them to an island (not The Island) and make them watch the three generations of Douglases in It Runs in the Family. Just so they can talk about how “correct” they look together onscreen. Many reviewers are justified, though, in their assertions that the film is quite modern—the title font is Futura, there are lens flares on the camera and there are even a couple of wavering handheld moments. The scene where Anne and Mary go for a walk in their pajamas followed by a line of geese is so lushly saturated that it looked like CGI for a moment. Not to mention Anne’s small pearls that resembled my young cousin’s puka shell necklace, and the gold script “B” pendant that combines the charms of a middle school Brianna wearing her name around her neck and rappers repping brass knuckles on their chains. The loveliest moments for me were the shots of horses and banners running up through the warped glass of the Boleyn estate. And Scarlett wears an absolutely fabulous black, white and red patterned ensemble to her sister’s public execution. But by then the film had grown less vital, colder with each of King Henry’s progressively more obscene doublets. There was sex, but no one had a sexy time (the only garment ripped was not a bodice). But that’s what happens when you make a Henry VIII film without Geneviève Bujold.


The larger question for me is this: has my beloved Scarlett become ScoJo? To state the obvious, this potential nickname puts me in the mind of J.Lo (a titan of my younger and more vulnerable years gone sadly astray). Jennifer Lopez had an arc between ’96 and ’98 that included extremely well filled out polyester in Selena, sweaty high desert adventures in U-Turn, and electric chemistry with George Clooney in Out of Sight. She was great and going to be great. I need not list the last 8 years worth of films and CDs to show how that greatness is fleeting. There is, however, always this:


So just seeing the word ScoJo filled me with the alarming connotations (the Tom Waits album!). I mean, five years from now Scarlett (or ScoJo) better not be having any twins by an unattractive dude who can’t sing—unless they’re my babies, obviously. As I (loudly) lamented the lack of Oscar Night Scarlett recently, a female coworker termed her “plump to the point of bursting” and said she had “already had her moment” (as a 17-year-old in Lost in Translation, I presume). Thoughts rushed through my head. Is Scarlett already at Dolly Parton status? Has she become just the red carpet red dress “chest that launched a thousand GIFs”?


But but but. Her assurance in Ghost World and Lost in Translation is permanent, undeniable. In the latter film she is the ideal Millennial woman: gorgeous, educated, drifting. As she wears a pink wing and sings The Pretenders in Tokyo, she defines contemporary America. But what’s happened to that 17-year-old Yale graduate who knew that Evelyn Waugh was a man?


Whither the old country, light-eyebrowed woman I adored in The Girl with a Pearl Earring? As Henry VIII found out in The Other Boleyn Girl, there is usually more powerful energy without sex—I had a shatter-the-glass-in-the-palm-of-your-hand moment when Vermeer told Griet to lick her lips and she put her lower lip inside her mouth to accomplish the task.

Aside from her reasonable work in the English Period Woody Allen I have already discussed on WHITE TANK TOP, Scarlett has had her best ever hair color for In Good Company, provided nice scenery in The Prestige, looked sexy as fuck doing android shots in the shockingly watchable The Island and been nicely pantsed in The Nanny Diaries. But otherwise she’s gone terrible places—part of the horrifying A Good Woman (note for mainstream film critics: Helen Hunt did not look like her mother) and the uber-horrifying Black Dahlia, luckily not onscreen much with Josh Harnett, as he pushed hard for the worst acting performance of the 00’s award (there’s still more Travolta and Willis films to be made but Hartnett is your leader in the clubhouse).

But it’s okay. I’m okay! Perfectly comfortable putting my entire life’s happiness on the line for the forthcoming Vicky Christina Barcelona lesbian sex scene. Gratuitously:

Blinds

I am late to the wake for Alain Robbe-Grillet but some thoughts in any case. I’ve read three of the four early novels that made his noveau roman name and wanted to speak to Jealousy (as The Erasers and In the Labyrinth seem less successful iterations of the same idea—Labyrinth in particular seems just a less inventive version of Jealousy).


Obsession dictates form in Jealousy. Robbe-Grillet total reliance on surface detail showed me how little emotional background is required to brilliantly portray a depth in characters. The protagonist is a husband that never identifies himself in the course of the novel but gives mathematically exact description of his wife’s actions with Franck, a neighbor from the next banana plantation. The narrator’s unspoken suspicion is that Franck is having an affair with “A…,” his wife. The simple statement, “He [Franck] has probably been delayed, as is not infrequently the case, by some incident occurring on his plantation, since he would not have put off this lunch [with A...] for any possible ailment of his wife or child,” becomes an accusation, both dark and hilarious. The precise circumstances of the affair are opaque; the narrator runs through the facts he knows elliptically, jerking back in forth in time. About a recurring supper he states “the table is set for one,” and then, a paragraph later, says, “the table is set for three.” After piecing together a timeline it is clear that the narrator is referring to two separate days, while remaining constantly in the present tense, as his particular fixation overtakes every thought. While the narrator describes no human violence directly, he refers to an many-legged insect Franck squashes approximately 30 times (we see the question mark of its mangled body from every angle) and in the last few pages he describes a “dark liquid” spreading across the flag stones of the house.

The repetitious detail in Jealousy is more captivating even than that in Duras’ Blue Eyes, Black Hair (and I’m a big fan of that book) because Robbe-Grillet changes the angle in his lens constantly, which demands my total focus. Even the infamous sequence where the narrator counts the rows banana trees for several pages is interesting because the author has the confidence to put such an unexpected section near the beginning of an already dense book. Vision is obviously the most vital sense for Robbe-Grillet; in the instances where the narrator uses his ears instead of his eyes he gets confused. The narrator is eavesdropping on Franck and says, “His sentence ends in ‘take apart’ or ‘take a part’ or ‘break apart,’ ‘break a heart,’ ‘heart of darkness,’ or something of the kind.” Here the mind is allowed to free-float into the similarly oppressive Heart of Darkness—a book famous for, among other things, Conrad’s complicated circular layerings. But it’s as if Jealousy is written by taking the grooved plate-shape of Darkness, smashing it, then recomposing the whole piece as a mosaic. Reading the book made me believe that Robbe-Grillet really was writing a new novel.

In an undergrad workshop one day we had to write as Robbe-Grillet would: just on the surface of things, no metaphor, no inherent narrative. We made a pile of belongings on a table in the center on the room and began to sketch away. I remember hating my piece, feeling others were successful only in short bursts. But just try trying to describe each snowflake as a storm floats by. I seem to have less time for these things than Robbe-Grillet. The final part of my fantasy is that young French students are forced to read Jealousy and that they fall into the same ditches of imitation that young American writers do with Hemingway. Just look at this dashing white beard:


As with many things on WHITE TANK TOP, part of my Robbe-Grillet affection comes from his location somewhere “just obscure enough that only in-the-know people have read and enjoyed him.” I once sent a conservative teacher, whose name cannot ever be mentioned in blogs, a copy of Jealousy in the French. I did not hear back from him. Ever.

Another old fool, John Updike, said Robbe-Grillet’s prose “is not so much written as scripted,” with its “splicing, blurring, stop-action, enlargement, panning, and fade-out.” Wait, is that supposed to be a bad thing, those filmic movements? Because I think they are awesome. Let me close with Barthes, who knows things: “Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space.” The novelist was trying to destroy, “the adjective itself,” he adds. “The realm of qualification, for him, can be only spatial or situational.” Boom.