#84 Pierrot le Fou (1965)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina
Genre: Avant-Garde, Drama
IMDB

“Godard is the greatest filmmaker ever!”. “Fuck that pretentious hack!” No, that’s not two cineastes on differing sides of the Godard spectrum arguing over the controversial director’s merit, that’s me every single I time I watch Pierrot le Fou. The film begins brilliantly, Godard’s use of red and blue filters as a lens on the petty capitalism that Pierrot (“my name is Ferdinand”) feels he must escape is a fantastically realized technical element.

Yet Godard goes off the rails, he throws too much into the film. He shoves things in, rearranging important plot points to make sure he fits in all of his pretentions (the man singing to Ferdinand on the dock after Marianne leaves him is overly long and grating). The back and forth speaking between Marianne and Ferdinand is great, but overused. The use of color, while at times perfectly executed, is also overused and becomes an eyesore in some scenes (the scene in which Ferdinand drives Marianne home in the beginning). Godard builds his film as a noir, morphs it into a surreal, dream-like piece in the middle, and reverts back to the noir elements to end it. While I understand what he was doing and what he meant to say, the shift wasn’t as fluid as I would have liked and I came away with a very concious feeling of Godard’s intentions.

However, Godard redeems himself with the ending. In the final scene where Ferdinand kills himself, Godard brilliantly ties the surreal with the real, the dream with the noir. In a very surreal scene, Ferdinand paints his face blue, goes to a cliffside and envelops his head with dynamite in the most badass and insane attempt at suicide. Godard fixes his camera on Belmondo as he wraps layer after layer around his head. The second the fuse is lit, Godard smashes real with surreal. Ferdinand realizes, too late, that his time spent with Marianne was detached from reality; a flight of fancy that had no place in reality. “This is silly” he says, almost ironically. The blast of the dynamite is shattering, the smoke slowly drifting over the ocean.

#58 The Wild Bunch (1969)

Directed by: Sam Peckinpah
Starring:William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan
Genre: Western
IMDB

This short review may be the object of some controversy. As a disclaimer, all the films on this list are on it because they are great, so my reviews can’t help but compare them together a bit. A film may be great, but in the scheme of a list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time, it may be only good in comparison. So here’s the crux of this review; The Wild Bunchis a ‘great’ Western, yet it is merely a ‘good’ film. Let’s begin with the first part. Peckinpah is the man. There really is no way around it. The Wild Bunch makes you the man. Straw Dogs instills you with the ability to bed any woman on Earth. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia gives you the strength and balls to wrestle and subdue a grizzly bear… and this man made those three films within 5 years of each other (with Junior Bonner thrown in for good measure). The Wild Bunch has badass, slightly unhinged men engaging in epic gun battles, swearing like sailors and drinking like fish. The desert scenery is shot absolutely beautifully and the story moves along at a lightning pace. It is in my top 5 Westerns ever made and if it’s not in yours, there is something wrong with you. “If they move, kill em”… it doesn’t get any better than that!

But… a great film it is not; and here’s my take on why. The Wild Bunch is one of the most controversial films ever made because when it came out, it horrified moviegoers. Picture living in the U.S. in the summer of 1969. The previous week you had seen Sergio Leone’s new Western Once Upon a Time in the West. “It was great”, you think to yourself, “but the violence was a bit over-the-top”. You see a poster in the window for another Western by a director you don’t recognize. “Maybe I’ll try that one”, you say to yourself. If this was you in the summer of 1969, you walked out of The Wild Bunch within the first 2 minutes, and you weren’t alone. The slow motion deaths and realistic bullet damage were unheard of at the time. Not to mention that more people bite it in the first 5 minutes of The Wild Bunch than in the entirety of Once Upon a Time… But here’s my point, what thrilled and, yes, repulsed audiences back then seems commonplace and tame to us now. The violence no longer pulls us in as it did audiences at the time, and for us, the rest of the film becomes more vivid; and it stumbles because of it. Because we aren’t shocked by the violence, we can better see that the characters aren’t really all that fleshed out and the plot muddles in the last 45 minutes. Sure Holden and Ryan are great, but they’re no John Wayne in The Searchers. They’re certainly no Clint in Unforgiven. And that’s really the difference. The Searchers and Unforgiven are great Westerns, but they’re also great films. None of this is to disparage The Wild Bunch though. It’s a better film than probably 85% of the films ever made, but we’re dealing with the cream of the crop here and I feel I should judge the films with that in mind. Despite that, I have a great time every time I pop this in, and it remains one of my favorites.

#584 Boogie Nights (1997)

Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore
Genre: Drama
IMDB

Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino will forever be linked together as incredibly skilled directors who made their debut films in the 1990s. Both directors first two films are now modern classics, and many believe that P.T.’s one-two punch of Hard Eight and Boogie Nights out-duels Quentin’s first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. While I might argue that P.T. has had the better career up until this point, I believe that he has never made a film that rivals either Dogs or Pulp Fiction. Boogie Nights is undeniably stylish and perfectly acted, but it seems to get muddled in it’s middle 45 minutes and P.T. resorts to cliche plot devices to move towards the finale.

The cinematography in Boogie Nights is in a word, brilliant. Elswit’s camera wanders around the pitch perfect streets of 1970′s-80′s L.A., seemingly incidentally catching the action, never making conclusions about the characters, merely documenting their lives. P.T. Anderson may be the best of the young generation of directors, and Boogie Nights is the film that put him on the map (though not his best; Magnolia anyone?). I always find it amazing that P.T. was able to pull together such a stellar stable of actors for this film, but then I look back and realize that this film made many of the actors who star in it, and that is as high a praise as a film can hope to attend, and a testament to the skill of it’s director.

#17 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)

Directed by: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Starring: Maria Falconetti
Genre: Silent

What can I say about one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time? The acting by Falconetti as Jeanne d’Arc is, to be cliche, a tour-de-force. To create emotion within the confines of a silent film is a daunting task, and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc ranks as one of the most emotionally wrenching films I’ve ever seen. This alone stands as a testament to Falconetti’s performance as more than half the film is just a close-up of her face.

Having said that, I must admit that I didn’t necessarily enjoy the film. The reason may lie in the fact that I have only seen a handful of silent films in my life, and I may simply have yet to develop an appreciation for them. I felt the music to be abrasive, but understand it’s integral role within the execution of silent film as a medium. Again it may be my lack of experience with films of this nature, but I found it hard to devote my full attention to the film with its almost total absence of action. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is somewhat of an anomaly however, as even though I didn’t really enjoy it, I want to watch it again to see if I can get anything more from it. The final scene is one of the best I’ve ever seen.