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If Sight & Sound Asked Me the Top Ten of All Time

I am assuming that Sight & Sound’s editor (he’s Nick James, bitch) has lost my invite in the mail. So here are my picks for the Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time poll. I have seen many but still feel like I have not seen enough. Here goes.

Week End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-George Clouzot)

The Fallen Idol (1948, Carol Reed)

La Dolce Vita (1960, Federico Fellini)

Jules et Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)

Pather Panchali (1955, Sayijit Ray)

Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)

M (1931, Fritz Lang)

I think there’s an obvious thread running through all of these. No overstylized French classics here, though I love many of them. No groundbreaking Griffith films (he wrote the rules, let’s move on). No, I’m more interested in the people that broke the rules. While there are a couple of traditional narrative films on there (Withnail and Fallen Idol are here largely on the strength of their screenplays), I am most interested in films that trust the intelligence of their viewers to follow the story. Pather Panchali was made with no professional actors. Pather and Fallen Idol are about children, while M is about a child-killer. Wages of Fear is about men who put a price on their own lives. Both Week End and Jules et Jim use projected words, photographs, and other subversive narrative devices to push the limits of what to expect in a melodrama and romantic comedy, respectively. And Exit is just a bananas documentary which may or may not be real. All of the movies express a personal view of the world and the people in it. Except our hero Wall-E, of course. He’s a Chaplineque robot in a post-apocolyptic world. And a cartoon. How can you not love it?

What are some of yours?

A Remembrance of Carlos Fuentes, My First Conscience

I had to pull my car over when NPR announced the death of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. My hands were shaking and I had a tremendous sense of déjá vu since my other hero of letters, Christopher Hitchens, had only just died this past December. I immediately regretted not having read much of Fuentes since high school as one regrets not keeping in touch with a close friend after a cross-country move.

Fuentes is somehow not the household name that his contemporaries Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, or even his fellow countryman Octavio Paz are. Among the possible reasons for this may be the complexity and volume of his output. Despite being primarily celebrated as a novelist (and late starters like me can take heart that his first novel wasn’t published until he was 30), he also regularly wrote essays, short stories, plays for the theater, and screenplays on top of his vast expertise regarding Cervantes’s Don Quijote, the novel that irrevocably ignited his love affair with words. Fuentes’s writing was part literature, part history lesson, and part political polemic, not exactly the kind of work that Oprah sought for her book club. Because of his boundless intellect he was universally admired and had an access to world leaders that would make most diplomats envious. He pulled no punches in his op-ed pieces for El País and Reforma about a variety of issues essential to humanity and near to his heart. The son of a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes grew up in places like Washington, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro, which informed his belief in the interconnectedness of people. He was a true citizen of the world and the most charming professor of the Mexican diaspora.

With his breezy manner and sharp wardrobe, he was distinct from any of the Mexican revolutionaries that preceded him. While certainly vocal in his advocacy for the  indigenous peoples of Mexico (whose cruel dismantling by history is irrefutable), he was equally attuned to the new Mexico and the corroding influence of crony capitalism on her identity. He reveled in Mexico herself, a wide panoply of races, skin tones, languages, generations, and gifts to the world. Looking at the whole of Mexican society (which many people, including its politicians, do not), it’s hard to imagine a better suited messenger to herald the story of this abused, but beautiful, place born of blood and conquest, rituals and improvisations, tragedy and farce, all at once.

To my sponge-like adolescent brain, here was a man that I wanted to be. Dashing and opinionated, Fuentes could spend hours talking about French literature or U.S. interventionist policies abroad. He would use his imagination to do what is impossible in the body: travel effortlessly between past and future in order to decipher the present. He was timeless and of the moment. He was ours and universal.

Sometime in 1994 I heard him speak at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I wish I could recall more clearly what he said, but his words and books at that time were part of the reason why I eventually decided to leave Texas and never return. Fuentes launched himself into the cosmos and I wanted to follow. He never stopped cautioning the world to mind the peril of not remembering our universal origins. I doubt I will achieve anything approximating his contributions to the world, but I shall cherish him fondly and heed his advice for as long as I live. I am thankful that he shared his voice with me.

Gloom and Glasnost

It’s a rare film that draws your attention to what is not onscreen. While watching the Russian movie Cargo 200, a deadpan horror film set in the twilight of the Soviet era that looks to have been shot in a lesser developed Pittsburgh, I was captivated by the missing elements to which filmmaker Alexey Balabanov draws our attention. Humanism, morality, and personal responsibility are banished from every frame of his movie along with God, regard for the environment, and a basic belief in civil society. Da, survivors would agree. Such was life in the final rotting years of the communist experiment.  

All of your typical indicators of a collapsing system are here. We see inefficient government administration, backroom dealings, underground economies, an untenable war, and the fetishization of propaganda symbols by the younger generation. The end is clearly neigh. Like anything well-intended, what starts off as a seemingly innocent story of young people making the best of their dealt hand quickly turns into I Know What You Did Last Summer at the Dacha. From the younger generation’s underground reel-to-reel dance parties to the older folks who see a religious city on the hill, the growing immoral chasm between the haves and the have-nots is doing strange things to the Russian soul.

Cargo 200 is not only set in 1984, but designed to look like it was made in that era despite its 2007 release date. The movie further enhances its off-kilter tone by meandering between characters and subplots, each more gruesome than the last. It’s the same effect as letting your eyes wander across a Bosch painting. Balabanov, who made his name with the hard-hitting 1997 Russian prison classic Brother, doesn’t just kick a dead horse, he blows it up and urinates on the pieces. I could list the gross indignities that the characters in the film endure, but that would ruin the fun. What tempers the grand guignol is the outlandish decay that seems to inhabit every sputtering facet of the communist machine. Factory smokestacks spew pollution, bathroom walls drip with slime, and drunk grannies watch black and white variety shows on the television without caring to find out the source of the flies that have overpowered the room. And there’s the title, a euphemism for the returning cadavers of the Afghan war. If you’ve ever thought that Requiem For A Dream was a tad too uplifting, Cargo 200 may be the movie for you.