Capsule reviews: MYSTERIES OF LISBON, THE TREE OF LIFE, MELANCHOLIA, DRIVE, and HUGO

On MYSTERIES OF LISBON

No 2011 film has impressed me quite as deeply as Raul Ruiz's MYSTERIES OF LISBON, an immense period epic concerned with memory, identity, and narrative. Story begets story in a four hour-long chain of incident, largely revolving around sexual sin and its fallout. While the story itself is quite old-fashioned, the filmmaking is nevertheless decidedly contemporary, continually exploring the effect point of view has on story. MYSTERIES ends in the only possible way it can, refusing definite resolution, but instead offering a last look into the past. The moment suggests that even with all its entanglements, secrets, and tragedies, the chain of events of human interaction creates a space where love--in this case, the love of and for a mother--can come into being.



On THE TREE OF LIFE

THE TREE OF LIFE is not so unlike MYSTERIES OF LISBON; the two films share similar concerns and have some similar motifs (particularly in the way the films conclude with images of mothers), as well as a decidedly strong Christian influence. THE TREE OF LIFE achieves its most transcendent moments when it centers on childhood, adolescence, and adult disillusionment, investing all these common moments with a rich, vital spirituality (in no small part thanks to the contributions of cinematographer Emanuel Luzbecki). But Malick too often strains towards more obvious displays of cosmic significance, trafficking in overblown visual metaphors, and the broader narrative of cosmic redemption is too vaguely sketched to challenge or inspire.



On MELANCHOLIA

Of all the films I've seen this year, none seem more unjustly praised than MELANCHOLIA, a tedious wallow in misery. Von Trier has an undeniable talent for striking imagery, as the glossy opening sequence demonstrates, but little worthy thought. A more tangible sense of the characters might have invested the film with some powerful emotion, but Von Trier's handling of his story is both too scattershot and too removed to effectively register the characters' despair. His nihilism is less deeply-felt than it is purely cynical.



On DRIVE

DRIVE is all swagger and adrenaline, powered by Nicolas Winding Refn's sense that anger is a kind of inexplicable, cosmic force (kudos for Michael Leary pointing out that element of Winding Refn's filmography over at Arts&Faith). That counts for something, as does Refn's Michael Mann-esque grasp of alienation and loneliness in Los Angeles. But the story's simplicity keeps DRIVE from being anything more than a slick exercise in genre conventions. In interviews, Refn suggested he wanted to treat the story as a fairytale, but he apparently forgot that the best fairytales are only deceptively simple, distilling tremendous insight into a single, striking episode.



On HUGO

No filmmaker working today is quite as enjoyable to listen to as Martin Scorsese, who is so contagiously jovial and passionate in all his discussions about film. It comes as little surprise, then, that the strongest moments of HUGO occur when the film leaves the forced attempts at childlike wonder and whimsy behind and gives itself over to displays of unadulterated cinephilia. As with the rest of Scorsese's work this decade, HUGO is terribly inconsistent, but nevertheless offers enough intriguing moments to be worthwhile.

Another pointless list

One year, one film:

2000-2010
2010: MYSTERIES OF LISBON
2009: A SERIOUS MAN
2008: BURN AFTER READING
2007: THERE WILL BE BLOOD
2006: PAN'S LABYRINTH
2005: THE SUN
2004: 2046
2003: OLDBOY
2002: FEMME FATALE
2001: A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
2000: EUREKA

1990-1999
1999: TITUS
1998: THE BIG LEBOWSKI
1997: HAPPY TOGETHER
1996: SECRETS & LIES
1995: NIXON
1994: CHUNGKING EXPRESS
1993: THREE COLORS: BLUE
1992: BARAKA
1991: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE
1990: METROPOLITAN

1980-1989
1989: THE DECALOGUE
1988: DEAD RINGERS
1987: THE DEAD
1986: BLUE VELVET
1985: RAN
1984: ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA
1983: THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR
1982: THE THING
1981: BLOW OUT
1980: KAGEMUSHA

1970-1979
1979: STALKER
1978: AUTUMN SONATA
1977: THE LAST WAVE
1976: THE TENANT
1975: BARRY LYNDON
1974: F FOR FAKE
1973: DON’T LOOK NOW
1972: AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD
1971: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
1970: THE CONFORMIST

1960-1969
1969: ANDREI RUBLEV
1968: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
1967: POINT BLANK
1966: WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
1965: CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
1964: THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
1963: CONTEMPT
1962: THE TRIAL
1961: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
1960: PEEPING TOM

1950-1959
1959: HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR
1958: VERTIGO
1957: NIGHTS OF CABIRIA
1956: BIGGER THAN LIFE
1955: ORDET
1954: SENSO
1953: TOKYO STORY
1952: OTHELLO
1951: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
1950: SUNSET BOULEVARD

1940-1949
1949: THE THIRD MAN
1948: THE RED SHOES
1947: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
1946: GREAT EXPECTATIONS
1945: BRIEF ENCOUNTER
1944: IVAN THE TERRIBLE
1943: DAY OF WRATH
1942: CASABLANCA
1941: CITIZEN KANE
1940: FANTASIA

1930-1939
1939: THE RULES OF THE GAME
1938: ALEXANDER NEVSKY
1937: MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW
1936: MODERN TIMES
1935: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
1934: THE BLACK CAT
1933: TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE
1932: VAMPYR
1931: THE THREEPENNY OPERA
1930: THE BLUE ANGEL

1920-1929
1929: PANDORA’S BOX
1928: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
1927: NAPOLEON
1926: FAUST
1925: BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
1924: GREED
1923: LA ROUE
1922: NOSFERATU
1921: DESTINY
1920: THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI

Book Sale Purchases of October 16, 2011

A few more for today:

THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. Le Guin
THE MACHINERIES OF JOY by Ray Bradbury
THE ROCK GARDEN by Nikos Kazantzakis
SEVEN GOTHIC TALES by Isak Dinesen
THE STAND by Steven King (original 1978 version)
ZORBA THE GREEK by Nikos Kazantzakis

Book Sale Purchases of October 15, 2011

THE ALIENIST by Caleb Carr
AMERIKA by Franz Kafka
BAUDELINO by Umberto Eco
CARTE BLANCHE by Jeffrey Deaver
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson
THE LEOPARD by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE by Graham Greene
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E. M. Forster
SKELETON CREW by Stephen King

Not a bad haul, really. I'm especially excited to dig into Kafka's AMERIKA.

Walker Percy on the contemporary novelist

"Something, it appears, has gone wrong with the Western world, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which enraged Dickens. It did not take a diagnostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways people see and understand themselves. What is called into question in novels now is the very enterprise of human life itself. Instead of writing about this or that social evil from a posture of consensus from which we agree to deplore social evils, it is now the consensus itself and the posture which are called into question. This state of affairs creates problems for the novelist. For in order to create a literature, whether of celebration or dissent, a certain shared universe of discourse is required. It is now these very shared assumptions which are called into question. Forty years ago Steinbeck had an easy job writing about the Okies and the dust bowl. It is a different matter now when the novelist confronts third-generation Okies in California who have won, who seem to have everything they want--and yet who seem ready any moment to slide physically and spiritually into the Pacific Ocean.

So the novelist today is less like the Tolstoy or Fielding or Jane Austen who set forth and celebrated a still intact society, than he is like a somewhat bemused psychiatrist gazing at a patient who in one sense lives in the best of all possible worlds and yet is suffering from a depression and anxiety which he doesn’t understand."

~ Walker Percy, 1977.

CONTAGION (2011, dir. Steven Soderbergh)

With Soderbergh on the verge of a possibly permanent hiatus, these last few films we're getting from him seem a little more precious. CONTAGION, a thriller about a deadly virus sweeping through the world population, is a pretty slick bit of work, generally well-written, acted, and photographed, but, while this bit of respectable entertainment achieves a decent level of suspense, it's also fairly forgettable, lacking standout moments or ideas to elevate it beyond being a decent time at the movies. CONTAGION does what it says on the tin, so to speak, but nothing more.

As a Soderbergh fan, I'm looking forward to his next effort a bit more: the unabashedly trashy action thriller, HAYWIRE.

Twilight of the Gods

We knew it had to happen sometime. Maybe it's premature to declare the US of A dead in the water, but with our current mess and no foreseeable bright future, it doesn't make a great deal of sense for me to be an optimist. So, in this time of national decay and global disorder as nations reap the reward of their hubris and folly, I naturally turn toward The End that all minor tremors of entropy foreshadow.

The End never received such a stellar representation (in opera, anyway, though likely in any narrative art) as in Wagner's Götterdämmerung:



I'm hoping I can make it to the Met's new production, though tickets are admittedly scarce.

This year, we also have two apocalyptic films; Malick's The Tree of Life and Von Trier's Melancholia. I've yet to see the latter, but I'm interested to see how they measure against each other (as they have often been compared and contrasted since their Cannes debut this year). Malick's Tree of Life offers an optimistic, it-all-turns-out-good-in-the-end, pseudo-Christian vision of cosmic history, and Von Trier's Melancholia, as far as I understand it, serves up a bleak, welcome-to-the-abyss, nihilistic finale (incidentally, Melancholia uses Wagner as the score to its depictions of The End). Both films, though, posit annihilation through natural forces; Malick gives us the gradual demise of the stars, and Von Trier gives us a collision of planets.

We can also turn to bleak finales of Cold War films such as Dr. Strangelove or Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which envision total annihilation by nuclear war. My favorite variation on this is the terrifying meltdown at the end of Kiss Me Deadly, which plays out such nuclear destruction on a smaller scale, but retains the apocalyptic overtones:



But the "Lacrimosa" from Mozart's Requiem stays with me the most. Though only the first nine bars were actually authored by Mozart, and it was completed after his death by other individuals, it is nevertheless a breathtakingly beautiful piece.

Two Highly Anticipated 2011 Releases

THE GRANDMASTERS (dir. Kar-Wai Wong)



TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY (dir. Tomas Alfredson)

Twenty Favorite Films: Because I Like Lists

In lieu of posting any actual content, which would take serious thought and work, here's a top twenty films list I've compiled for myself that I think holds up pretty well:

A. I. : ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
APOCALYPSE NOW
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
2046
BARRY LYNDON
THE BIG LEBOWSKI
BLOW OUT
F FOR FAKE
KISS ME DEADLY
THE LAST WAVE
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
POINT BLANK
THE RED SHOES
RAN
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
TOUCH OF EVIL
THE TRIAL
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
VERTIGO
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

Yeah, that seems to work out alright.

Seriously, though, I have been tinkering on a review of Nicolas Roeg's INSIGNIFICANCE which I may or may not eventually publish here (in short, the new Criterion release is splendid; the film isn't quite splendid, but it is interesting).

Discussing THE TREE OF LIFE

I'm not among those lucky folks who have seen THE TREE OF LIFE and are able to discuss its intricacies. But, for various reasons, I suspect when I have, I'll have much to echo or respond to in Robert Koehler's review, a large portion of which I've excerpted below:

Most critical in a 2001 comparison is how this “Dawn of Life” film-within-a-film climaxes, and how it points to the film’s central philosophical defects. A long-necked dinosaur, first observed at its beach hangout, lopes into a forest where it encounters a smaller, wounded dino prey, looking for all intents and purposes like dinner as it presses a claw like a death-grip on the little guy’s head. But, in a truly Spielbergian moment (and even Spielberg couldn’t conceive of such dino-to-dino kindness in Jurassic Park), big dino takes apparent compassion upon little dino, releasing its grip and consoling it with a gentle stroke. This, we can only conclude, is the birth of love, or, at least, pity. (Compare, if you will, this image of big dino’s gentle claw with Monica Vitti’s white hand on the forehead of Gabriele Ferzetti at the end of L’Avventura for a useful contrasting expression of genuine pity.) This is pure anthropomorphism, and precisely the opposite of Kubrick’s apes-into-men. Such a depiction of dinosaur love is little more than human wish fulfillment, a fantasy–even a romance–of altruism amongst animals, and this after having just been told in blunt terms on the film’s whispered soundtrack that “nature” is bad. Kubrick’s apes, having accidentally stumbled upon the usefulness of bones as weapons, deploy their invention to kill members of a competing band of apes, confirming that man’s innately violent nature is certain to make tools into implements of violence. These, not love, are some of the elements of evolution.

A clearer difference in philosophies, between Malick’s essentially naive romanticism–which proves to gird much of what follows in The Tree of Life–and Kubrick’s Darwinian view of natural selection, is hard to imagine. Yet this probably wont stop the upcoming flow of commentary likening The Tree of Life to 2001, encouraged by the participation of Kubrick’s important special effects collaborator, Douglas Trumbull, with Malick, as well as a spate of classical music selections (John Tavener, Holst) which directly acknowledge the influence of 2001. While Malick’s early films, including Badlands and Days of Heaven, combined an awareness of class conflict and the inevitable clashes of human desire with a fascination with nature that bordered on Pantheism, The Tree of Life dives headlong into a world view that can be summed up in the Beatles lyric, “All you need is love.” Mrs. O’Brien, in one of her few whispered voice-overs as the family moves out of their old Waco house, states that without love, life goes by in a flash. Love is seen to finally bridge the growing barrier between Jack and his father. An increasing lack of love between Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien can be seen to fuel his angry outbursts when he’s confronted with his boys’ disobedience.

At the same time, Malick is either uninterested, unwilling or unable to convey emotions on screen, except through the crutch of all those whispered voiceovers allowing us to eavesdrop on characters’ inner thoughts. The annoying mannerism of the whispering aside (and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the spectacular misjudgment of the flagrant overuse of this device, to say nothing of its pseudo-poetic language, the on-the-nose obviousness and the particularly vexing issue that about 75% of what’s whispered is inaudible, even when seen in the Directors Guild’s superb big cinema), the emotional undercurrents are crowded off screen for the picturesque. The actual human dimension is replaced by bits of bullet-point dialogue; when Jack faces his father and says, “You’d like to kill me,” it doesn’t shock or resound, because there’s nothing backing it up, since there’s nothing in the father’s behavior that’s remotely homicidal, only aggressive. Malick wants to convey love’s force, and, as he deems it, “grace,” but he can’t find cinematic correlatives for it. His narrative contains all the aspects of a primal father-son conflict, but he drains it away and replaces it with New Age quotations. “The glory” is a term heard often, in a throwback to its use in The Thin Red Line to far more powerful effect, since it was tied to actual human endeavors and historical events. (The New Age effect also flows to the soundtrack: Tavener is a favorite composer with the New Age crowd, as well as the progressive Anglo-Saxon Christian crowd, with whom New Agers have much in common. This is also true of Henryk Gorecki, whose music is also periodically cued.) Even Mr. O’Brien’s real-world work at a giant oil refinery and his efforts to cash in on his various patents comes across as abstract and vacuous, materialist engagements framed in purely spiritualist terms; the refinery resembles nothing so much as a cathedral of industrial pipes, while the Texas state capitol building where O’Brien tramps around aimlessly and to no real purpose is filmed as if it were St. Peter’s in Rome.

The Tree of Life begins with a quotation from the Book of Job (Chapter 38, verses 4 and 7, in which God puts Job in his place), and references Job’s trials with God later during a pastor’s sermon. Nods to God and Job and references and quotations do not, however, by themselves earn meaning. Nor does a train of images early on of the family grieving over news of the son’s death conjure up a Job-like struggle. A detectable pattern emerges: Ideas are stated, and then not explored in cinematic terms. Worse: the ideas contradict one another. Take the matter of grace vs. nature, which Malick clearly intends as his central dialectic. The ways in which these two states of mind/existence are defined by Malick has little to do with any recognizable view of either. Grace is typically associated with either the comforting power of a supreme being, or in Malick’s Pantheistic view, an equilibrium between humans and nature. As for Nature, philosophers have clashed for centuries over it’s essential meaning, ranging from the kind of anthropomorphism dramatized by Malick with his dinos or poets’ use of “the pathetic fallacy” to a more scientific view that sees Nature as an amoral process of birth, life, death, decay and regeneration–the view, if you will, of “2001.” But Malick has wholly confused his terms. Two direct literary influences on The Tree of Life are William Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence; Faulkner for his fracturing of narrative into a stream-of-consciousness, better to convey the unstructured momentum of inner thought and emotions, and for his fascination with the eternal battle between fathers and sons; Lawrence for his concern with the conflict between what he viewed as ”nature” and “will.” Mr. O’Brien is a purely Lawrencian character, which Malick proceeds to utterly misread. Rather than representing nature (that would actually be Mrs. O’Brien, who’s constantly depicted outdoors, under the trees, walking barefoot in the grass, dipping her toes in water), Mr. O’Brien is pure will, and he states it as such in a few lines of dialogue while advising his sons on the cruel ways of the world. His entire character can be viewed as a man trying to exert his will on his sons to follow in his path; the middle son’s interest in music draws him closer to the father, who regrets aborting his own music studies (now channeled into some organ playing of Bach and record-spinning of Brahms and other composers at home), and which seems to spur Jack’s jealousy. This is not nature, but it’s opposite, the human forces impinging themselves upon nature, exactly as Lawrence viewed it.

Ultimately, Malick discards these matters for something far more amorphous: Adult Jack’s quest for meaning, conveyed in a manner that can only be described as graduate film school surrealism. In the early reels, Malick inserts strange footage of Sean Penn in his business suit traipsing through what may be a desert in California or Utah; trippy and maybe a bit silly, but quickly forgotten what with the dinosaurs and Jack v. dad tale that consumes much of the film. But then, in the final reel, it all comes back, with Penn’s Jack still traipsing, climbing over rocks, walking through a door standing alone in the wilderness (I’m not kidding), then the roofless family house (or a small section of it replicated by Malick’s longtime production designer Jack Fisk in the desert) and finally reaching a long, flat beach with lots of folks blankly wandering around. They include, in a true stroke of Kitsch, Jack’s family as they were when he was a kid; these are, it seems, the living dead, or ghosts of Jack’s past, or perhaps something else, since almost nobody in this gaggle of beachside wanderers outside of the family is recognizable from the rest of the film. Nothing much happens; Penn and Pitt walk silently together in the film’s only superstar moment, the kids receive a few hugs, the water laps ashore, and then it’s over.

And to what end? It might reasonably be expected that this sequence should be adult Jack’s final cathartic release of emotional memory, an expunging of familial toxins, a recognition of impending mortality as well as a reconciliation with the past. Whether this was Malick’s intention can only be guessed at, since none of this happens, and nothing else either, expect a bunch of images of various people walking on the beach. Literally, and nothing more, pictures. This is important, since endings are important, this is where he ends the film, accented by such postcard Kitsch as a shot of a field of sunflowers. Nothing more clearly points to a film run aground by undeveloped ideas in contradiction than this.

The tragedy of The Tree of Life is the film itself, a project of such profound importance to the filmmaker that he worked on concepts and images for it ever since he’s been a filmmaker–nearly 38 years. He clearly based the family story on his own memories growing up in Texas as a boy in the late 1940s and 1950s, and this is best preserved on film in the many wonderful, Wyeth-like moments of rambunctious boys playing indoors and out, having fun for the sake of it. (The sole moments of anything like lightness in a film utterly devoid of humor, irony or inference.) He sweated out several 200-page drafts, and when producer Bill Pohlad told him a decade ago that his script contained two films that weren’t joined into one, he worked on it some more, making The New World in the interim. It’s now clear that Pohlad’s criticism was precisely on point; what hardly makes any sense is why the film was subsequently funded and produced when the very problem Pohlad defined was never resolved. Like the New Age itself, The Tree of Life is an aspirational quest that can’t come full circle, since it never determines what it is in the first place, and concludes as a cinema con.

The Awfulness of Beauty

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The Future Cinema

Though the future cinematic landscape seems to be over-populated reboots and sequels, there are nevertheless some interesting, ambitious projects up ahead:

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, dir. Guillermo Del Toro
Del Toro's MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS plans to be an epic, pulse-pounding action horror romp the likes of which hasn't been seen, well, ever. While Del Toro seems more interested in mining Lovecraft's novel for excitement than for existential terror, which is a little disappointing to me, there's no denying that this film will likely be unmissable.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, dir. Werner Herzog
Herzog's documentary about the Chauvet caves in the south of France has dazzled critics. Some of Herzog's recent films have left me cold (RESCUE DAWN and BAD LIEUTENANT), but as a documentary filmmaker, he's one of the best around.

CONTAGION, dir. Steven Soderbergh
Soderbergh is planning on retiring after CONTAGION and a few other films. Let's hope he makes this one count; it's a kind of cinema verite thriller with a sprawling storyline about an out-of-control virus. The cast is crammed with high-profile names, including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, and Sanaa Lathan.

DALI, dir. Philippe Mora
A highly unusual, non-linear biopic of artist Salvador Dali, bring his artwork to life in startling 3-D (a format for which Dali supposedly had a great affinity). Philippe Mora has an odd filmography, but there's good reason to believe this film will be worth a look.

FAUST, dir. Alexander Sokurov
I was waiting for this one to come out this year. Alas, no luck. Sokurov, the Russian visionary behind RUSSIAN ARK and THE SUN, gives us his take on the Faust narrative.

GOD OF CARNAGE, dir. Roman Polanski
Polanski follows THE GHOST WRITER with a blackly comic, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?-esque tooth-and-nail battle between two couples after their children get into a conflict. Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, and Kate Winslet star.

THE GRANDMASTERS, dir. Kar-Wai Wong
For my money, there is no contemporary filmmaker greater than Wong. His last film, which was six or so years ago, was a knock-out. For this film, he returns to the martial arts, ground he explored before in ASHES OF TIME. Beautiful visuals and sorrowful romance are expected.

INHERENT VICE, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Thomas Pynchon supposedly has given his seal of approval to Anderson's screenplay adaptation of Pynchon's novel, set in the California of the early 1970s, is a kind of psychedelic Raymond Chandler story, breezy and fun. Should be an interesting return to the realms of Anderson's earlier outings, HARD EIGHT and BOOGIE NIGHTS.

THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET, dir. Martin Scorsese
Scorsese gives us a 3-D kids film. Word is that the film's budget has ballooned to epic size as Scorsese has struggled to get a handle on the technology. Good or bad, I want to see the end result.

THE MASTER, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
The other Anderson film in the pipeline, THE MASTER is a film about a cult known as the Cause (a thinly-veiled representation of Scientology) and a ne'er do well who gets caught up in its rise to success.

THE MILL AND THE CROSS, dir. Lech Majewski
What a film this appears to be. THE MILL AND THE CROSS brings to life the art of Brueghel the Elder, using all kinds of digital trickery. The trailer alone is a visual feast, even if the film itself might turn out to be a bit slight.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, dir. Orson Welles
It's hard to predict whether or not this film will ever see the light of day. But recent reports suggest that Welles' final work may finally be completed (most likely at the hands of director Peter Bogdanovich, a friend of Welles and a star of the film in question). I hope so.

THE TREE OF LIFE, dir. Terrence Malick
I kinda hate the sentimental trailer for this film, but there's enough ambition and visual fire-power on display to keep me intrigued. It juxtaposes the story of the cosmos--its birth and death--against the life of a young boy growing up in the 1950s, struggling with the realities of death and suffering.

UBIK, dir. Michel Gondry
This one, just announced, will hopefully come to pass, and soon. UBIK, arguably the greatest of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick's novels, is a maddening, fractured tale about states of mind and time and consumerism. The thought of making a two-hour film out of it boggles the mind, but I'll be interested to see what kind of twisted, mind-bending experience Gondry can conjure up.

The Arts & Faith Top 100 Films (and Top 25 Horror Films)

Film lists are everywhere these days, and now we have another one. IMAGE, a journal of literature and the arts, has a sister community of film lovers that goes by the name ARTS & FAITH. This community, around since 1999, has dedicated itself to exploring the intersection of, well, arts and faith. Every once in a while, they release a Top 100 films list, the outgrowth of much conversation and struggle within the community about the place of mystery and meaning in the cinematic medium.

As a member the community, I've had the pleasure of voting for the Top 100, and I think it's probably the strongest Top 100 we've yet produced, marvelously diverse and very accomplished. You can check it out here.

In addition to the Top 100, the ARTS & FAITH community has produced a Top 25 Horror Films list, which is similarly quite strong, and will hopefully be one of many themed lists in the future. That one is right here.

Great Scenes: THE LION IN WINTER (1968, dir. Anthony Harvey)

Great Scenes: TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, dir. Orson Welles)

Great Scenes: LOLITA (1962, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Arnold Böcklin: Prometheus (1882)

Visions of the Future

 

Talking about Darren Aronofksy

The House Next Door has been housing some discussion about Darren Aronofsky and BLACK SWAN. In the first part of the conversation, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard walk through his first four feature films: PI, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE FOUNTAIN, and THE WRESTLER. In the second part, they tackle BLACK SWAN. I'll be surprised if you can find a better examination of Darren Aronofsky's body of work.

Salvador Dali's DESTINO