A year in flickering lights

For no reason other than film nerdery, I decided to make a list last year of the films I watched (when I remembered... I know there are a bunch I forgot) more or less in the order I saw them. If you like this sort of nerdery, here is my 2015 in cinema...

A MOST WANTED MAN - Antón Corbjin
MOTHER - Bong Joon-Ho
HARDCORE - Paul Schrader

TAI CHI MASTER - Yuen Woo Ping
POLICE STORY 3 - Stanley Tong
BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME - Hana Mahkmalbaf

13 ASSASSINS - Takashi Miike
35 SHOTS OF RUM – Claire Denis (rewatch)

NIGHTCRAWLER – Dan Gilroy (quit watching)
IN A BETTER WORLD - Susanne Bier (repeat watch)

WOMAN ON THE BEACH - Hong Sang Soo
BIRDMAN - Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu
MEMORIES OF MURDER - Bong Joon-Ho

THE LEGO MOVIE - Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
GONE GIRL - Ben Affleck
LA DOLCE VITA - Federico Fellini

RETURN OF THE JEDI - Richard Marquand (repeat watch)
TMNT - Michael Bay (quit watching)
REVANCHE - Gotz Spielman

WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY - Mel Stuart
DUMB AND DUMBER TO - Bobby and Peter Farrelly
CAFE LUMIERE - Hou Hsiao-Hsien (repeat watch)
THREE TIMES - Hou Hsiao-Hsien (repeat watch)

BONNIE AND CLYDE - Arthur Penn (repeat watch)

THE MULE – Tony Mahony &Angus Sampson

MAPS OF THE STARS - David Cronenberg

RETRATOS SALVAJES - Damián Szifron

IDA - Pawel Pawlikowski

NN - Héctor Gálvez

LEONERA - Pablo Trapero

WHIPLASH – Damian Chazelle

FORCE MAJEURE – Ruben Ostlund

ZERO DE CONDUITE – Jean Vigo

MAGNOLIA – Paul Thomas Anderson (repeat watch)

TAKEN 3 – Olivier Megaton

FOXCATCHER – Bennett Miller

THE IMITATION GAME – Morten Tyldum

HUNGER GAMES - MOCKINGJAY – Francis Lawrence

THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES – Mikkel Norgaard

THE GREAT BEAUTY – Paolo Sorrentino

2046 – Wong Kar Wai

IM A CYBORG AND THATS OK – Chan-Wook Park

KINK – James Franco

LA ESTRATEGIA DEL CARACOL – Sergio Cabrera

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR – JC Chandor

SCARFACE – Brian dePalma

MESRINE 1 & 2 – Jean Francois Richet

CITIZENFOUR – Laura Poitras

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN - Abdellatif Kechiche

TODOS ESTAN MUERTOS – Beatriz Sanchis

LEVIATHAN - Andrey Zvyagintsev

THE LEGEND IS BORN: IP MAN – Herman Yau

TYSON – James Toback

SALT OF THE EARTH – Wim Wenders

TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM – Morgan Neville

DIOR AND I – Frederic Tcheng

SELMA – Ava DuVernay

IP MAN 2 – Wilson Yip

THE ASSASSIN - Hou Hsiao-Hsien

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR - Apichatpong Weerasethakul

EVERY SECRET THING – Amy Berg (quit watching)

12 OCLOCK BOYS - Lotfy Nathan

JURASSIC WORLD 3D – Colin Trevorrow

DJANGO UNCHAINED – Quentin Tarantino

NEBRASKA – Alexander Payne

GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE – Hou Hsiao Hsien

DIRTY WARS – Rick Rowley

TABLOID – Errol Morris

OLDBOY – Chan-Wook Park (rewatch)

SALT OF THE EARTH – Wim Wenders (rewatch)

SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN – Malik Bendjelloul (rewatch)

FOCUS – Glen Ficarra & John Requa

LA PRINCESA DE FRANCIA – Matias Piñeiro

LA ISLA MINIMA – Alberto Rodriguez

THE AVENGERS AGE OF ULTRON – Joss Whedon

THE GUNMAN – Pierre Morel

UNDEFEATED – Daniel Lindsay & TJ Martin

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE – Ken Burns & Sarah Burns

THE INTERNSHIP – Shawn Levy

SE7EN – David Fincher (rewatch)

THE OTHER WOMAN – Nick Cassavetes

HOT PURSUIT – Anne Fletcher

SPARE PARTS – Sean McNamara

MAGIC MIKE XXL – Gregory Jacobs (quit watching)

PITCH PERFECT 2 – Elizabeth Banks

ENTOURAGE – Doug Ellin

SPY – Paul Feig

TRUE STORY – Rupert Goold

INSIDE OUT – Pete Doctor & Ronnie del Carmen

EX MACHINA – Alex Garland

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG – Noah Baumbach

THE ARTIST - Michel Hazanavicius

WE ARE YOUNG WE ARE STRONG – Burhan Qurbani

CARTEL LAND – Matthew Heinemann

STRAY DOGS – Tsai Ming Liang

EDEN LAKE – James Watkins

CASE 39 – Cristian Alvart

BOURNE IDENTITY – Doug Liman (rewatch)

BOURNE SUPREMACY – Paul Greengrass (rewatch)

BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Paul Greengrass (rewatch)

CALVARY – John Michael McDonagh (quit)

TRAINWRECK – Judd Apatow

ELECTION – Alexander Payne (rewatch)

ZODIAC – David Fincher

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS – Jonathon Demme

RED DRAGON – Brett Ratner

DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE - Krzysztof Kieslowski (rewatch)

MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART – Jia Zhangke

THE CHASER – Hong Jin Na

LOVE 3D – Gaspar Noe

IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN – Philippe Garrel

THE CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR - Apichatpong Weerasethakul (repeat watch)

MUSTANG - Deniz Gamze Ergüven

MARGARITA WITH A STRAW - Shonali Bose & Nilesh Maniyar

LAND AND SHADE - César Augusto Acevedo

THE PEARL BUTTON – Patricio Guzman

SICARIO – Denis Villeneuve

HORSE MONEY – Pedro Costa

COURT - Chaitanya Tamhane

MATEO – Maria Gamboa

FLAPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE - Diep Hoang Nguyen

EXOTICA, EROTICA, ETC - Evangelia Kranioti *

INHERENT VICE – Paul Thomas Anderson

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB – Jean Marc Valleé

JAMÓN JAMÓN – Bigas Luna (rewatch)

REVANCHE – Gotz Spielman (rewatch)

THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED – Joshua Safdie

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT – Joshua & Bennie Safdie

GO GET SOME ROSEMARY - Joshua & Bennie Safdie

LENNY COOKE - Joshua & Bennie Safdie

TESIS – Alejandro Amenabar

KISS THE GIRLS - Gary Fleder (rewatch)

LA COLLECTIONEUSE – Eric Rohmer

SERPICO – Sidney Lumet

THE PERVERTS GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY – Sophie Fiennes

35 SHOTS OF RUM – Claire Denis (rewatch x 2)

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Rupert Wyatt

CHARLIE'S COUNTRY – Rolf de Heer

EL AÑO BISIESTO -  Michael Rowe (rewatch)

DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE - Krzysztof Kieslowski (rewatch x2)

THE SILENCE – Baran Bo Odar

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON – F Gary Gray

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Matt Reeves

IT FOLLOWS – David Robert Mitchell

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE – Abbas Kiarostami

THE MARTIAN – Ridley Scott

THE GIFT – Joel Edgerton

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY - THE GHOST DIMENSION – Gregory Plotkin

 *Best line from a movie this year is from this doco: "Sailors are like terrorists. They arrive in ports with a bomb called love and throw it. And do you know what happens? The bomb explodes when they go away and they never come back, destroying the hearts of all the girls in the neighborhood. How strange - To love somebody who pays you..."

Consumption #1

My life is a mess. I don't have much these days... but I got books and films. So, although I've been working my ass off, writing some new shit and smashing out pages and pages on a new script for another director that should be up and happening mid year, I've been keeping the days roiling and boiling with just watching and reading a lot. Oh, and beer.

Because I'm not anything like Steven Soderbergh, I am gonna use this little confessional corner of the internet to make a list of consumption for the sake of clarity, openness and equal parts humiliation and curatorial signposting. I've been meaning to make January's list for ages but have been too busy/lazy. So, here it is. I imagine I'll post February's list sometime in May. I won't lie. It's been a pretty busy month of devouring.

Films

A MOST WANTED MAN - Antón Corbjin
MOTHER - Bong Joon-Ho
HARDCORE - Paul Schrader

TAI CHI MASTER - Yuen Woo Ping
POLICE STORY 3 - Stanley Tong
BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME - Hana Mahkmalbaf

13 ASSASSINS - Takashi Miike
NIGHTCRAWLER (quit watching)
IN A BETTER WORLD - Susanne Bier (repeat watch)

WOMAN ON THE BEACH - Hong Sang Soo
BIRDMAN - Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu
MEMORIES OF MURDER - Bong Joon-Ho

THE LEGO MOVIE - Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
GONE GIRL - Ben Affleck
LA DOLCE VITA - Federico Fellini

RETURN OF THE JEDI - Richard Marquand (repeat watch)
TMNT - Michael Bay (quit watching)
REVANCHE - Gotz Spielman

WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY - Mel Stuart
DUMB AND DUMBER TO - Bobby and Peter Farrelly
CAFE LUMIERE - Hou Hsiao-Hsien (repeat watch)
THREE TIMES - Hou Hsiao-Hsien (repeat watch)

Books

THE NIGHT GARDENER - George Pelecanos
MONSIEUR PAIN - Roberto Bolaño
SEX CRIMINALS - Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES - Flannery O'Connor
THE SHADOW GIRLS - Henning Mankel
DARK MARKET - Misha Glenny

Television

RAY DONOVAN - Ann Biderman - Season 01
BROOKLYN NINE NINE - Dan Goor and Michael Schur - Season 01

Touchstones #3

Wanderings #1

One of the blissful things in writing new scripts or disappearing into the dissection and resection of old ones are the places you end up trawling and looking for new ways of thinking. Films, records, photo collections, long lazy walks, dumb drunken nights, new sensations. It's the good stuff of writing.

I'm working on a 'financing' draft of a script that has, at it's heart, the intoxication of the senses; heat, drunkenness, desire, jealousy, grief, love. But it is also about wanderers, young characters drifting over the surface of the world as they travel from place to place. So, I've been listening to records that evoke the wandering spirit or the visceral quality of sweat and light and life, reading excerpts of journals and old classics by Barry Lopez, Kerouac, Geoff Dyer and other wanderers; and, of course, trawling through films that evoke the visceral wandering and immersion of getting lost in place - both viewed new and rewatched oldies and goldies - as diverse as Madame Satã by Karim Aïnouz, Lower City by Sergio Machado, Vertical Ray of the Sun by Tran Anh Hung, My Marlon and Brando by Huseyin Karabey, Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai, Motorcycle Diaries by Walter Salles, Y Tu Mama Tambien by Alfonso Cuaron, Badlands by Terrence Malick and Millenium Mambo by Hou Hsiao Hsien. Something about youth and idealism and loss and desire and rage and wandering keeps them all lingering inside.

I've also been looking through the well thumbed photography of Alex Webb and Raghubir Singh and David Alan Harvey, the three masters of sweat and light, and been looking and discovering new photographers. Two whose works I've been digging on in this weird time stooped over the keyboard are Colombian American photographer Juan Arredondo and Mexican photographer, Eva Villaseñor.

This work below by Juan Arredondo is from his series Barrio Triste, focusing on a small lost neighbourhood in Medellin that has not quite been dragged into the recovery much of the remaining city is experiencing. It is the same neighbourhood, as far as I understand, that a lot of the kids in the Colombian classic La Vendedora de Rosas came from... and there is a similar grinding beauty to the photographs.

Beneath, are the works of Eva Villaseñor whose images were introduced to me by another photographer film compañero Jensen Cope. Like Arredondo's work above, there is something of the lightness and way of seeing, a whimsy and sexiness, that keeps me agile when I'm dribbling over the keyboard trying to find some semblance of life in words and ideas.

Happiness #3

Apichatpong asks: "Are we drunk on something?"

Yes.

The opening shot of Millenium Mambo.

The final shot of Chop Shop.

Just about every moment of Isaki Lacuesta's La Leyenda del Tiempo.

Any and every page of Barry Lopez' Desert Notes.

The final passages of the Raymond Carver short story Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes.

The opening chords of 'U-Mass' by Pixies.

The fact that a bigrecordcompany allowed me to use the opening chords to 'U-Mass' by Pixies in one of my little flicks.

The final resound of Skull by Sebadoh.

The Tim Rogers lyrics: 'you woke me up just to check that I'm alive, we talk to each other as if we're five'.

The sound of just about any g-funk track coming from a passing car.

The thought of my old '82 Urvan - the red curtains and brown vinyl seats, the dodgy wiring and switch ignition - wherever it has ended up in the world.

The madness, humanity and audacity of Danish screenwriters.

This scene.

This movie.

This fragment of Eduardo Galeano's writing:

The Function of Art / 1
Diego had never seen the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it.
They went south.
The ocean lay beyond high sand dunes, waiting.
When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking, the ocean exploded before their eyes. And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it.
and when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: "Help me to see!"*

The mix tapes a friend of mine gives to me at my birthday, year after year.

The fact that only recently have his mix tapes become mix CDs.

The single annual email a long lost friend sends to me that arrives on the morning of my birthday every year without fail.

The handful of pubs and bars that surround my studio that are full of good folks and cheap booze.

The thought of all the unmade and unwatched films, unwritten and unread books and unrecorded and unheard records.

The memory of the mayhem that comes with shared listening sessions of The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused.

This fragment of writing from Walter Benjamin's 'One Way Street':

Ordinance
I had arrived in Riga to visit a woman friend. Her house, the town, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, nobody knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted, each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and ever streetcar came towards me like a fire-engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should have gone up like a magazine.**

This photo.

The absent-minded habit my 4 year old nephew has of running his hand across the stubble on my chin when he is talking to me.

The stretch of road from the Hume Highway through the rainforests of the Burrawang pass down to Jamberoo and on to the coast.

The view walking down Rucker's Hill at dusk.

The memory of an abandoned week long trek through the Alpujarras that came to a halt in a small village that was almost impossible to leave.

And this Buoy Archive I made when I first fell in love with T.

*From 'El Libro de Los Abrazos' - Eduardo Galeano
**From 'One Way Street' - Walter Benjamin

Faces

"Show us their faces. Tell us what they said"

Don DeLillo, 'The Names'

A couple of weekends past, as part of the Melbourne Festival, we watched Dean & Britta perform '13 Most Beautiful - Songs for Andy Warhols Screen Tests'. You might have already seen it. 13 of Andy Warhol's screen tests with, for the most part, songs composed to accompany them. At around 3 to 4 minutes in length, each screen test was given a musical shape. What was really incredible however, was just how intense a viewing experience it was. It was moving and immersive and verging on the transcendent. On the way home, I kept thinking about how the opportunity to gaze into a face for that length of time is reserved only for lovers and for the cinema. Someone told me many years ago - and I've never been able to remember who it was or find the source of their quote - that David Cronenberg said that his perfect film would be 90 minutes just following a person's face in close up. I don't know if that's true but I've never liked Cronenberg's films and I wanted to like them a whole lot more after hearing that. Other filmmakers who I do love seem to make precisely that kind of film. I'm thinking of the Dardennes Brothers 'Rosetta' or Hou Hsiao Hsien's 'Millenium Mambo' or Reygadas 'Battle in Heaven' or Zoncka's 'Little Thief' or Bresson's 'Mouchette'. The opportunity to linger on a face as it moves from emotion to emotion or from place to place is that rare privilege. If anything, I think my desire for this kind of film makes it difficult for me when it comes to writing. I seem almost happier to see a character in stasis than to propel them somewhere. I'm curious what will be revealed on the face in those moments of stillness. Just don't tell my script editor.



You can watch the trailer also at the pretty damned nice distributor site for Plexifilm and buy the DVD there. I am curious how the DVD translates. There was something very balanced and right about the projected faces flickering away high on the theatre wall and the haphazard snaking of amp leads and microphone cords on the stage below as the band performed.

We also watched this film/performance only a week before the opening of Dirtsong, which was a vast performance by the Black Arm Band with a background projection of a feature-ish film (80 mins or so of extracted goodness) assembled from fragments that T and I shot and edited for the performance. More on Dirtsong in time, but there was no doubt that seeing '13 Most Beautiful' allowed us, in the midst of a month of daily 18hr edit sessions to settle back, be inspired by this immersive kind of film portraiture and rely on simplicity and clarity and stillness.