In the dark, I get such a thrill

Not to be a spoilsport [ah, who'm I kidding?], but what about the movies? You know, the stories we watch alone in the dark, rather than in a well-lit room while sprawled on the sofa?

Liz and I agreed early on that there should be no shame in not having seen a particular film--no one pays us to do this, after all. And I'm not much of one for top 10 lists. But in the spirit of shameless full disclosure, here are 10 of the movies I didn't see in 2004.

1. Spiderman 2
2. Shrek 2
3. Ocean's Twelve
4. Open Water
5. The Brown Bunny
6. Maria Full of Grace
7. Collateral
8. The Village
9. Fahrenheit 9/11
10. The Passion of the Christ

[crickets]

I also found it interesting how many of the Globes' acting nominees had two performances [at least] hit the big screen this year: Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, Jamie Foxx, Kate Winslet, Gael Garcia Bernal, Zhang Ziyi, Don Cheadle [v. busy!], Laura Linney, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, and Jim Carrey. Why, it's like the studio system, all this productivity! Better still, none of the nominations this year seem to be of the "my bad for not recognizing your earlier performance" ilk, a la Whoopi Goldberg getting the nod for Ghost rather than The Color Purple. Of course, there is that axis of "bad mother"/"bad girl" performances to mull over. What was it Parker said about running the gamut from A to B?

As for television, I only got cable, and basic at that, in October 2004. And even with it, I managed to happily squander my limited TV time watching Survivor, America's Next Top Model, Arrested Development, and Veronica Mars. But before you people give up on me completely, one of the most moving documentaries I saw this year was on PBS: Love and Diane. And one of the most entertaining was the five-night hip-hop history And You Don't Stop on VH1.

Let the pile-on begin.

Comments

[Aaron]

dvd: Sorry. So many comments. Too many words. Not paying close enough attention. Late hour. The only thing I would say is that I was never trying to say there was nothing there. I agree with you that there is a wonderful revenge saga layered underneath all the flash and dash of QT's style. And I think the storytelling itself is actually effective as well. I don't think the various fights, homages and stylistic elements are irrelevant. I think they do serve the story he's telling. But there's a line where it becomes excess and QT often crosses it. That in itself may actually be OK -- excess is part of his style -- but at a certain point, excess turns into overkill, and that's where I think one finds the flaws in Kill Bill.

[Matt]

re: Russian Ark -- past, present and future all being part of the same living reality -- Bazin's ontology of the photographic image -- there's a near moral necessity for the shot to be unbroken -- so many various snatches of Russian history, existing together, under one roof, in one shot, at the same time. The form was the content.

re: Memento -- he didn't experience life forwards in black and white and backwards in colour -- he didn't know how it was going to end -- he wasn't working backwards towards a one-line payoff ["Now, where was I?"] -- that was all there was. The form was a gimmick.

[Luke]

Russian Ark: I always thought that Bazin was a little rough on editing. I'm a mise-en-scene kidna guy myself, but I won't deny the power of the Odessa Steps. It seems to me you're making a sweeping statement that the technique of incredibly long shots was the content: if so, is something like Hitchcock's Rope a masterpiece for the same reason alone?

I understand how form can be content (Godard's Breathless and Contempt, for example), but I refuse to accept that a movie a masterpiece simply because it was done in a single shot.

Memento: I think I found things here beyond a gimmick, and you found things limited to a gimmick; the relativity of a film experience is apparent.

[Eddy Faust]

Not everyone who loved Kill Bill(s) was a Momento fan...I'm usually not big on gimmick-reliant films. And if the Kill Bill films were simply about the homages, then I probably wouldn't enjoy them so much. But you also had kinetic direction, memorable dialogue (mainly in vo.2), interesting characters and great acting. It also helps that I'm a big fan of Robert Richardson’s cinematography. To me he's only second to Christopher Doyle. Maybe that's why I relish every blood-splattered frame of The Bride's attack.

[Matt]

Well, Luke, I think there is more to Russian Ark than the sinlgle take -- what I was saying is that, in Memento, the gimmick isn't half as motivated, that's all. And I stand by that.

Great dialogue, Eddy?! It was by far Tarantino's weakest writing thus far. I remember on the Pulp Fiction DVD, in the deleted scenes, he explains that he one scene because it sounded like someone trying to write like him. I thought the dialogue in Kill Bill felt forced and sounded like someone other than Tarantino trying to write like Tarantino.

[James Russell]

because the extreme violence was front-loaded, the end of the movie gave me time to recover

I'll concede there's some truth in this, but for me the front-loading of the violence also meant the second half of the film was quite boring, which the first half, loathsome as it may have been, never was at any point. The final/first revelation struck me as merely trite.

[James Russell]

It was by far Tarantino's weakest writing thus far.

YES. Which goes some considerable way towards explaining my dissatisfaction with Kill Bill.

[Filmbrain]

It was by far Tarantino's weakest writing thus far.

Not only was the writing weak, there was no flow. In his past films, the lengthy, clever monologues would appear at just the right moment, and flowed beautifully both within the scene and as in the film as a whole. In KB2, the speeches come out of nowhere, and the films stops dead in its tracks.

Plus, with the exception of the goldfish speech, I thought they were beyond sub-par. Like Matt said -- somebody trying to do Tarantino.

[Eddy Faust]

"This tall glass of cocksucker is still alive."

"If you come across God, God will be cut."

"Wakey wakey, eggs and bacey."

"Bitch, you have no future."

"You're not a bad person. You're my favorite person."

Just a sample of some memorable lines from KB, that you won't find in your typical Michael Bay action flick. And let's remember, unlike Pulp Fiction, the Kill Bill films are action films and as such, the dialogue is more visceral. Hemmingway was praised for using "short declarative sentences"...why shouldn't QT? Many of the lines were fun and I could recite them after existing the theater.

[Filmbrain]

Fair enough, but a fistful of one liners does not a screnplay make.

Think of Dennis Hopper's monologue in True Romance. The way it builds, slowly, to the payoff. Now compare it to any of them in KB. They begin, they go on for a while, and then they simply fizzle out. Not just once - this happens multiple times.

[Aaron]

First of all, Eddy -- trying to say that lines in just about any movie are better than something you'd find in a Michael Bay film isn't exactly praise because that's just a given. The moment I compare anything Tarantino does (even if I dislike it) to Bay is the moment he really needs to stop directing.

And Filmbrain, just FYI, I still think to this day True Romance is QT's best script. (His Natural Born Killers was pretty incredible too; but I liked the screenplay itself better than the resulting Oliver Stone movie.) Interestingly enough, that may go to the very point we were all making earlier elsewhere about a film benefiting from its writer not also directing. I think QT is probably a more talented and visionary filmmaker than Tony Scott, and I'll take Pulp Fiction over True Romance as a more complete film, but that True Romance script is a brilliant fucking piece of writing.

[Eddy Faust]

Although True Romance had some great moments, I think it's callow writing in comparison to QT's later scripts. It definitely lacked the structural complexity of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill...not that every thing needs to be complex, however if complexity can be pulled off, it’s a bonus. TR had a far more conventional outcome then either PF or KB (that may have been Tony Scott's doing though...I never read the original script). We're really getting into subjective waters now, but I thought David Carradine's "Super Man" monologue had just as much pay-off as Dennis Hopper's "egg-plant" monologue...just in a more subtle way. The latter lead to a character's death, but the other lead to a deeper understanding of the film's protagonist and what the entire conflict between Bill and The Bride came down to. The thing that I liked about Kill Bill’s script was that it saved all of the elongated “talky” dialogue for Carradine at the end of the film. I know this is a problem many have with the script. QT could have scattered lengthy monologues throughout the film, but then we’d just have Pulp Fiction again. This was something different; QT was being to a degree mischievous (which I’m all for). He kept the dialogue terse and visceral for the majority of the film(s), leading viewers to think this is going to be but a stylish, bombastic action-film. Then he threw a curve ball at the end. Bill wasn’t some villainy cliché, but a guy with a lot to say to the woman who broke his heart. After all the bloodshed, after all the bravado, it’s just a man and a woman talking. That’s what is so refreshingly subversive about the script and it’s quite thought out. By having the dialogue be sparse and cheeky throughout most of the film(s), the talkative and confessional nature of the last chapter is greatly emphasized.

[Filmbrain]

Here's when KB2 fell apart for me, and when I realized how lazy Quentin had become.

Bill begins telling the story of the five-fingered exploding heart death thingy (whatever it was called). The camera cuts to Uma. At that moment, I thought to myself..PLEASE don't have her say "And what, pray tell, is the five-fingered..." -- and that's exactly what she did. One of the most awful, tired lines that can be written. Lazy, lazy writing. The Quentin of years past would not have had written such a blatantly stupid line.

What's next? Will his war film contain "Let's get the hell out of here!" or "I'm getting too old for this shit!"?

[David Hudson]

Way, way, way up there, Luke wrote, "it'd be interesting to know who our 'Conversation' members see as their film criticism progenitors, if any," and I always meant to get back to that.

Progeneration completely aside, since it's loaded with sort of icky connotations, I definitely wanted to second the cinetrix's mention of Geoffrey O'Brien. It's not that he's the most insightful film critic, but, besides the prose yearning to break into poetry, he has a profound way of meshing films with the world they play in.

Along that line, but in a very different camp are, for me, Rosenbaum and Hoberman, who never, ever fail to recognize the political and social milieu of any film they're watching - they understand that not only form and content are inextricable from each other, but that both can't be considered outside of context, either.

In the same vein, Stuart Klawans. John Powers. Ella Taylor. Susan Gerhard.

I've followed Manohla Dargis on and off since her days at the Voice. I was a little weirded out when she went from the LA Weekly to the LA Times, but, like many, was pleased to see that the LAT recognized that, though her reviews are vivacious, what a cracking good read she is when cut loose from the format. I hope the NYT can find something along the same line as those "Ask Manohla" columns for her as well.

There are a few German favorites as well, but you know, since I'm bringing it up, Wenders and Schlöndorff have both written quite a bit for German papers, both about a wide range of subjects ranging widely beyond film, and each in his own way is a fine stylist.

Otherwise, Phillip Lopate has some very fine pieces. All in all, a part of me would like to be spending more time reading more histories, more biographies than today's reviews, but another part of me can't stand not knowing what's going on right now.

[Luke]

David, I'll infer that you agree with Rosenbaum & Hoberman that form and content can't be considered outside of context. Naturally, I agree, but I've always been intrigued as to whether or not that consideration of context extrapolates to a consideration of the moral context of the picture. For example, had Elephant (2003) glorified its violence and its villains, and thusly opened itself to a flood of complaints that it would encourage more school violence, would that make Elephant a bad movie?

Does the racism of The Birth of a Nation trump its innovation and technical importance, making it a bad movie instead of a great one? If a critic disagrees with the morality of a picture, should he claim that it is a bad film? I don't read enough critics to know if this approach is common or not, but apparently you (David) do.

Thanks, David and others, for providing so many critics' names I've never heard before (unfortunately, some of them are less Google-able than others).

[Wiley Wiggins]

Wow, this is just an overwhelming torrent of moviewords.
Trying to figure out a way to keep track of all this? RSS feeds with comments?

[Matt]

Wiley, you're not alone. If only this had taken one week earlier -- you know, before I came back to university...

[Luke]

I suspect I'm exhausting everybody with so many questions and so few answers. As if David (and others, I'm sure) wasn't writing enough already.

I'll cast my vote, too, for comments RSS, if possible.

And, I hope the CONVERSATION will very quickly move to more interesting things than the Golden Globes, as I'm sure it will. BTW, how long do you guys plan to keep this up?

[David Hudson]

Well, Luke, by now you may have seen that we're wrapping up the CONVERSATION proper today and this evening, but the comments will remain open for a few days longer.

About your other questions, you got me thinking! And I've posted some thoughts on them at towards the end of all this (good grief, I do go on sometimes).

I thought of another name I should've mentioned, by the way: Fred Camper, whose insights on Brakhage and Warhol in particular have been invaluable to me.

And my book of the year: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70.

Still haven't caught up with Down and Dirty Pictures, by the way, but I don't doubt that, even taken with a pound of salt, it'll be a blast.

[Matt]

Fred Camper is quite something, to be sure; Portrait of the Artist at Seventy is a fantastic book; re: Down and Dirty Pictures [and Biskind in general]: you'd better make that two-and-a-half pounds of salt, David...