Favorite Films
randomly selected films that I like, roughly organised by chronology
Footlight Parade. Sound cinema is just 4 years old. Busby Berkeley makes the imaginative leap to choreograph the camera as much as the actors and mise-en-scene. It also amply shows that James Cagney is not just a tough-guy actor. A new paradigm of musical cinema is birthed that is hardly topped until the brilliance of Gene Kelly in ...
Singing the Rain. Brilliant, a homage to the silent screen and the Busby Berkeley musical and simply the most 'pure cinema' experience you can get until ...
2001: A Space Odessey. Kubrick is a genius, basically, and this one is high mighty 'pure cinema' experience - don't even begin to think that DVDs and wide screen TV can match against a movie screen until you've seen this on 70mm like it's meant to be viewed -- 20 metres tall. Then there's his narrative cinema masterpiece ...
The Shining. You-tube promo reedits aside, the only other American director that matches Stanley directed the following ...
Raging Bull. Forget Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. This one is the real Scorcese/DeNiro deal. I saw it at the Cinema when I were a young lad and it seriously punched my brains out and showed me the real possibilities of Cinema. Glorious Black and White.
Honorable mentions:
Golddiggers of 33. Another Busby Berkeley number. We're in the money, the skies are sunny, we've got a lot of what it takes to get along ... in the middle of the depression.
Citizen Kane. Yeah Orson's radio work was the highlight of his artistically brilliant career, but not far behind was this much praised film. Despite this possibly being the most over-hyped film ever made, nonetheless it deserves its accolades. It did not win the Oscar. "How Green Was My Valley" did. As if.
Doctor Strangelove: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Savage satire by Kubrick and Peter Sellars at the height of the Cold War.
Bedazzled. No not the version with Liz Hurley. The original with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. "You give me Inertia"...
Alphaville. "Breathless" and "Weekend" are bearable, but really this is Godard's only good film, and it's a SF pulp fiction number. Occupie. Libre. Occupie. And into the dustbin of history with you my French new waver.
Juliette Of The Spirits. Beautiful, Surreal, Fellini. No more need be said.
The French Connection. No, it's not a supposedly witty mispelling of 'fuck' by a vacuous fashion label, rather it's a great Hollywood film of the early 1970s starring Gene Hackmann. A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, before the spectacular blockbuster phenonemon was launched with "Jaws" (not Star Wars), Hollywood was not at all afraid of "slow" films - even in a crime drama with a top-notch chase scene.
American Graffitti. The only good film that George Lucas ever made ("THX1138" is only half-decent), starring Ron Howard as one of a small group of boys nearly ready to become men in 1960s small-town America. It can be said that "Happy Days" was a spin-off from this film. After this brilliant film, with its startling soundtrack edited by Walter Murch, Lucas went quickly downhill.
The Conversation. Gene Hackman plays surveillence wunderkind Harry Caul as he spies on a very youthful Harrison Ford all directed by Francis Ford Coppola. More Walter Murch sound editing.
Breaker Morant. This brilliantly acted ensemble film tells the story of Australian Folk hero, Kitchener's scapegoat, and possible war criminal Harry 'Breaker' Morant. A poet, bon vivant and raconteur, who followed "Rule 303" through to the end while fighting the Boers on the Bushveldt of South Africa and who was sacrificed by the British Army to greater political ends. Starring Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown, and Jack Thompson, directed by Bruce Beresford. "Shoot straight you bastards, don't make a mess of it.".
Bladerunner. The director's cut vastly improves the original by ditching the narration. Beautiful melding of the film noir detective and science-fiction genres. Revolutionary, a pity that its many modern imitators are nowhere near as good. Welcome to the off-world colonies.
Gallipoli. The creepy political overtones later layered onto this film (and the event itself) in the late 1990s cannot detract from the fact that this film is basically Peter Weir's masterpiece.
Repo Man. Punks, suburban alienation, car stealing, reposession agents, aliens. What's not to like about this film? "Blammo! Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead". Ask me for the Electro remix someday. "You hear the most outrageous lies about it."
Withnail and I. A cynical and witty take on the 1960s starring Richard E. Grant and the camberwell carrot.
Apocalypse Now. A fantastic adaptation of Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness", and a quote-mining gold rush.
At this point I'll desist. There are heaps more modern movies I'd love to go through. Just to list a few: Dark City; Donnie Darko; The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind; Lost In Translation ... I could go on and on but I'm afraid my eyes will melt!
Little Boy (mp3)
Little Boy & The Fat Man
After a couple of months break with the new music, it's back to the Sunday afternoon quickie specials, this one being a quick little throwaway track I did this afternoon in an accessible house/electro style. It's titled "Little Boy". It was recorded in Ableton Live 5.0, using the Impulse drum sampler for the beats, the synthesisers are all from my Clavia Nord Modular. The vocals are by Mary Quantum and Victor Xray.
Download Little Boy by Victor Xray.
TO DOWNLOAD: As usual, click the "attachment" link(s) in this entry if you are viewing the HTML web page - or use a podcasting client RSS feed of the blog to get automated downloads of any new music placed on The Horse, He Sick. If you can't see a download link anywhere go to the original page url - usually linked from the title.
The Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara
Academy award winning documentary by Errol Morris
Robert Strange McNamara was United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. He is popularly blamed for leading a reluctant Lydon B. Johnson into the Vietnam War. This beautiful and powerful documentary by Errol Morris explores Robert S. McNamara's life experience as a scholar, an army officer reponsible for the analysis of statistical and operational data related to world war 2 USAAF B-29 bombing operations in the Pacific theatre under General Curtis LeMay, as a senior executive at the Ford Motor Company, and as the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban missile crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam conflict.
The 11 lessons
- Empathize with your enemy.
- Rationality will not save us.
- There's something beyond one's self.
- Maximize efficiency.
- Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
- Get the data.
- Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
- Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
- In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
- Never say never.
- You can't change human nature.
The documentary addresses the imbalances of the popular perception of McNamara, who actually recommended withdrawal to Kennedy, a position that later Johnson describes as wrong. Taped archives of telephone conversations and cabinet meetings show that in effect Johnson orders McNamara to escalate the war; later public statements by McNamara in support of the war appear to be the statements of a cabinet member in support of the executive descision of his President. But the documentary is more than an attempted rehabilitation of McNamara. It is an attempt to draw, through the film documentary form, a modern-day philosophy of the conduct of conflict.
Filmed in a powerful self-reflexive and meditative style, the documentary doesn't attempt to engage in an argumentative discourse, and at the same time it exposes its structure and filmic conventions while allowing the viewer to create their own judgements of the actions of McNamara and those he served both for, and with. One of the most powerful sections of the film are not the parts dealing with the Vietnam conflict, but rather his service in the Army under the command of General Curtis LeMay. McNamara was part of the military command which conducted the large-scale destruction of Japan with the B-29 bomber, in the final years of the Pacific War.
Robert McNamara: I was on the island of Guam in [General Curtis LeMay's] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.
Errol Morris: Were you aware this was going to happen?
Robert McNamara: Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it.
...
Robert McNamara: LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He - and I'd say I - were behaving as war criminals.
...
Robert McNamara: LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
This remarkable admission is startling; earlier McNamara, during the exploration of the first lesson, had explained that while both he and Kennedy had wanted to avoid a war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the top American military personnel, including Curtis LeMay, had wanted to bomb the crap out of Cuba, thereby most likely providing the spark that would ignite nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
To produce this simultaenously beautiful work of art and history, Errol Morris employs a stunning trick: his invention, the 'Interrortron'. In essence a modified teleprompter, it allows the interview subject to directly address the viewer's line of sight, as opposed to the off-camera line-of-sight typically used in traditional documentaries. Added to the eerie effect of Robert S. McNamara directly talking to you, the audience, Morris also employs a beautifully selected and edited set of wartime and post-war documentary film footage of the type highly familar to those of us who lived through the Cold War. American scientific, military and television pictures aptly illustrate each of the eleven lessons in the film. The music of Philip Glass wonderfully to the emotional and intellectual traces of the film. Morris has described the music of Philip Glass as one eminently suitable for his documentary;
If the central theme of this movie is the inexorability of history versus the question of whether one man can make a difference, can change the course of historical events, there is something about Philip's music ( ... ) that mirrors this, that mixes chance with a kind of inevitability. I may not be explaining it very well, but it provides a powerful metaphor, a musical metaphor, for the rest of the movie. [Senses Of Cinema, Making History: Errol Morris, Robert McNamara and The Fog of War. Interview by Tom Ryan.]
There is no 'voice of god' narrator in this documentary telling you what to think. Unlike some of his documentary-making collegues, Errol Morris doesn't use the medium to expound from a pre-figured ideological position on the topic at hand. It is as if Morris's opinions become more complex, more ambiguous and highlighted with doubts and qualifications the more he goes into the process of making the film. The film itself is a exploratory investigation into the topic, an exposition of the data which does not hasten to draw conclusions, but rather, illustrate an important historical, and much mis-understood, figure, his reasons and his actions at the centre of one of the most pivotal periods in modern history (certainly in the 20th Century).
In the end, I was left moved and humbled by the experience of viewing this film. McNamara is not the cartoonish war-monger of 1960s propaganda. He is a complex man, a scholar of warfare as well as a practitioner of it, loyal to his Commander-In-Chief. As a child of the Cold War, as part of that generation who had grown up with the omnipresent threat of instant nuclear annihilation, and later as one of its many youthful soldiers, the questions it raises about the lessons we have and have not learned from that vast and terrifying enterprise are very disturbing indeed. Although it never set out to do so in the first place, this film raises many uneasy thoughts about the informed nature of the American Presidency and its allies during its recently headlong rush into the modern day quagmire of war in Iraq. Are our modern leaders aware of these questions? Have they studied, and even are they up to studying, the Eleven Lessons that Errol Morris illustrates from the life of Robert Strange McNamara, Harvard Scholar, Lt Colonel in the US Army Air Force, President of the Ford Motor Company, President of the World Bank, and United States Secretary of Defence?
Links.