The Church of the Cultured Mind: The Cinematheque's The Best of the Decade List

“I have had enough serious interest in the products of the ‘higher’ arts to be very sharply aware that the impulse which leads me to a Humphrey Bogart movie has little in common with the impulse which leads me to the novels of Henry James or the poetry of T.S. Eliot…To define that connection seems to me one of the tasks of film criticism, and the definition must be first of all a personal one. A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he’s that man.”

--Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, 1955.

We seemed to have come a slippery distance from the time when critic Robert Warshow eagerly expressed curiosity about an impulse, or a justification to make a connection between what is often deemed “high culture” and “low culture.” One look at the TIFF Cinematheque Best of the Decade list tells you that there is no desire, or curiosity, to connect with anything but their own church of refined taste. This is why it is really immaterial to discuss what’s on their list of the best films of the past decade. In examining their choices, I’m sure that we can all find things we love (The Gleaners and I, Yi Yi), things we dislike (Syndromes and a Century, Caché), even things we didn’t see – and perhaps might want to (Songs from the Second Floor). What is more important, as the previous writers on this site attested, is to discuss what isn’t on it – and why.

Where is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy on the 'Best of the Decade' lists?

Since I stepped away from regular criticism more than 20 years ago, I freely admit that my ability to see more 'challenging' films has declined (made more difficult by the fact I live outside of Toronto now and these films never make it to either my local cinema or DVD shop). So it would be unfair and dishonest to address the shortcomings (or strengths) of TIFF Cinematheque's Best of the Decade List since I've only seen a small handful of the pictures. Besides, my cohort Shlomo has already done a fine job eviscerating it, so what's the point of repeating?

I'll only make one comment before I get to the point of my piece: a major work of art that is missing from the List. Critics or curators who make lists that refuse to even acknowledge commercial cinema are as ridiculous and narrow-minded as people who only go to the movies so they can 'check their brains at the door' and think flicks like Transformer 2: Revenge of the Fallen, or The Dark Knight, are The. Best. Movies. Ever. There is no difference. On one hand, the James Quandts of the world will turn up their noses at anything that might be considered 'commercial,' while the others would run screaming from the theatre at the first sign of a subtitle. Me? I can get just as jonesed by a cinematic essay by Chris Marker, such as Sans Soleil or La Jetée, as I can by zombie flicks like Shaun of the Dead or 28 Weeks Later.

Buyer Beware! TIFF Cinematheque's so – called Best of the Decade

The Best Films of the Decade list recently unveiled by TIFF Cinematheque (formerly Cinematheque Ontario), is problematic in many ways, not just in terms of what was picked (and not picked) as the finest of the past decade but more significantly, for what it says about the stagnant view of movies held by those who chose the 54 films on the list. (See http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca/newsrelease_detail.aspx?Id=678 for all the titles, not all of which will be shown in Toronto).

That film list, which begins showing today, is put together solely by curators and programmers (and not film critics), as TIFF Cinematheque Senior Programmer James Quandt, who shepherded the list to fruition, is quick to point out. The collection is chock full of many films that would try the patience of most film-goers, movies that often have words like rigor attached to them in the film notes. (Rigor mortis would be more accurate.) They deliberately go out of their way, it seems, to eschew any cinematic energy or zip. Resembling museum pieces rather than entertaining works of art, they remind me of that old joke about movies being called moving pictures, which many of the films on this list decidedly do not.

Love As An Open Argument: Remembering Kate McGarrigle

When I heard the news yesterday about the death of Kate McGarrigle from cancer, it really cut to the quick. “It’s like getting kicked in the gut, you know,” Sylvia Tyson remarked upon hearing the news. I know what she meant. Over the years, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the folk singing siblings from Quebec, had written and performed a distinct body of beautiful songs that had the capacity to share wounds and open sores that their soaring voices could quickly heal. Their temperaments were radically different – Anna the hopeful romantic; Kate the skeptic – but the blending of their differences often created a harmony unique to popular song. Calling the McGarrigle sisters’ material “tart and tuneful,” J.D. Considine in Rolling Stone said their work married “the resonance of folk to the emotional immediacy of everyday life.” What Kate and Anna McGarrigle did was give the genre a different lease on everyday life. They wrote personal songs without resorting to solipsism. They wrote romantic songs without bending to sentimentality. They could be funny and sarcastic without being smug.

A Consideration of The Lovely Bones

I grew up in Parry Sound in the 1960s. I was part of a big pack of kids who would play outside until after dark throughout the summer, completely unconcerned about our safety, not oblivious to it, just unconcerned. However, we also all knew to 'stay away from Johnnie'. Johnnie was probably a pedophile. He was a man in his forties who lived alone in a big house up the street from our home. We would always see him walking quickly through our neighbourhood, a hand always in his pocket, watching the kids as we played. We nicknamed him Johnnie Walker (no offense to the fine scotch producers). We just all knew to stay away from him. Creepy and weird, he certainly was, yet our parents were seemingly oblivious to him and what he might be, but we weren't. Yet we sure as hell never told our parents about him. We wanted to be able to play unfettered. Granted, he didn't, that we know of, ever actually act on his obvious compulsions, so the light of adult suspicion was never cast upon him. These reflections came to mind as I watched Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, because there is a major character in the film that reminded me of Johnnie.

Ad Men & Women

The characters on Mad Men tend to lack integrity in both their personal and professional lives. AMC’s perceptive and award-winning series, set in the early 1960s, broadcasts consistent proof of that pitiful human condition into my living room. This miasma of mendacity, which most often comes during breaks for commercials and TV promos, reflects the output of contemporary Don Drapers, Peggy Olsons and Pete Campbells.

The tasteless deception is so pervasive that undiscriminating viewers can no longer differentiate between genuine information and the cesspool of artful lies. In enumerating some of the many atrocities, let’s not preface these peeves with the word pet because that would be offensive to my two lovely cats:

Rohmer Passes

The recent death of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, at age 89, reminds us not just what a significant director he was but how the French revere their artists, from allowing Rohmer to work into his late eighties, something which rarely happens in America, to the moving eulogy given him by French President Nicolas Sarkozy when word arrived of his passing. Sarkozy’s comments, calling him a "great auteur who will continue to speak to us and inspire us for years to come” is more than apt but it might prompt those who are suspicious of the praise meted out to any celebrity who dies, to think Sarkozy is exaggerating. He’s not. Rohmer really was one of the greats.

His films, the best known of which were unveiled in his series’ Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons, spanning the 60s to the 90s, usually featured young people, women more often than men, talking about, seeking and finding love, with an emphasis on the romance behind most hookups. But Rohmer never simplified his characters' search for love and his affection for the people at the center of his films was such that they achieved a humanity and generosity that is still a rare commodity in the cinema. They also influenced everyone from American filmmakers Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset) and Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona) to his fellow countryman Oliver Assayas, whose Summer Hours (L'heure d'été), owes much of its tone and structure to Rohmer’s way of seeing. For me, his films were often the highlights of the Toronto International Film Festival, movies I eagerly looked forward to seeing, especially because I knew it was likely my only chance to see them as they often wouldn’t open commercially in Toronto. And I rarely felt short changed by any of them, right through to the end of his career and his final 2007 film, the sweet Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrée and Céladon.).

Living in a Song: Crazy Heart

Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Besides gospel, there is probably no other musical genre in American culture that is so devoted to the quest for roots, or the deep desire for personal transformation, than country music. So when the boozy, destitute country-and-western singer Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) in Crazy Heart sings “I used to be somebody, but now I’m somebody else,” he carries in his voice those ghosts on the lost highway that carried singers like Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt. (Speaking of gospel, Blake may also be carrying the ghost of Thomas A. Dorsey who wrote “Peace in the Valley,” a song about transcendence that drew the interest of both Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley where, in the song, the singer hopes to “be changed from this creature that I am.”)

Produced and Abandoned: Last Orders

From time to time, I will pull down a DVD from my shelf, watch it again and see if it still deserves a place in my permanent collection. I'm starting, ironically, with a DVD that I've owned for two years or more, but have actually never seen, so I have no idea if I even like it. Picked up for next to nothing on the recommendation of my Critics At Large cohort, Kevin Courrier, I just never got around to watching it. So, it is with Last Orders that I begin. Short answer to the most obvious question is yes, it does deserve a place in my permanent collection. You should be able to find it at better DVD rental shops... run don't walk.

The Power of Big Love (Part Two)

Big Love differs from other cable series in its unpredictable casting. The Sopranos, True Blood, Mad Men and Six Feet Under, for example, generally have cast unfamiliar, even unknown actors, in the leads, so as to avoid viewer preconceptions. (I was barely aware of who Edie Falco (Carmelo Soprano) and James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) were when The Sopranos began and didn’t know most of the casts of the other shows.) Big Love has taken the opposite tack by signing on better known actors and setting them down in unlikely roles. I would never have imagined casting American indie actress Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry, American Psycho), as the repressed, sexually and otherwise, Nicki, Roman Grant’s daughter, whom Bill married for political reasons, in an attempt to being some rapport between him and his father-in-law, and who finds herself caught between conflicting loyalties to her husband and father. She’s a revelation in that role. Similarly, I never realized how good Jeanne Tripplehorn could be when she had a part worthy of her talent. The actress, who was previously best known for her ordinary roles in bad movies like Basic Instinct and Waterworld, is superb as Bill’s only legally recognized wife, who was never born to the polygamous faith and who has thus never quite reconciled herself to it. (The reasons she agreed to it are revealed at the outset of the show but I won’t spoil that for you.)The same could be said for Bill Paxton (Twister, Apollo 13), who as Bill Henrickson, plumbs the depths of ordinariness, even banality, to get at a multilayered persona beneath, someone who is more like Roman than he can admit. That’s a tour de force performance Paxton never got to give in his competent but one dimensional movie roles.

The Power of Big Love (Part One)

It’s just begun its fourth season but HBO’s Big Love, the best show on television, is also the most undeservedly unheralded show currently on the air. I’m not sure why the series, which deals in an entertainingly unique fashion with a polygamist family in Utah, is being virtually ignored by all most TV critics, except that they seem to run in packs, as in pack journalism, expending much ink on The Sopranos, Dexter, Mad Men and True Blood and comparatively, virtually ignoring Six Feet Under, Rescue Me, United States of Tara and Big Love. In other words, it’s nothing to do with quality but simply copy cats copying what everyone else is writing about. I’d be worried that this terrific show wasn’t garnering enough viewers, because they don’t know it’s even on (airing on The Movie Network in Canada), except that HBO, though not driven by ratings as much as network television, wouldn’t be keeping it on the air if someone wasn’t watching it, unless someone at the cable channel has a soft spot for it and is making sure it keeps on running. It helps, of course, that actor Tom Hanks is one of show’s executive producers but that alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the show on the air, I suspect, if the ratings for Big Love were really low.

Joel Silver's Sherlock Holmes

Guy Richie may be listed as director of Sherlock Holmes, but the most important credit is probably 'Producer: Joel Silver'. Silver - producer of Lethal Weapon (and its sequels), Predator (and its sequel), The Matrix (and its sequels) and Die Hard (and its...you get the idea) - has a reputation for having writers 'design' action sequences for his movies and then, when the script doesn't work and the movie isn't made, stripping those sequences out and using them in ones that end up being produced.

Those thoughts went through my head in the days following my viewing of Sherlock Holmes. This isn't a movie I hated, because the whole cast (except Mark Strong, as the dullish villain) are uniformly ... well, excellent isn't the word. Entertaining, fits better. It's just that after I saw it, I found myself thinking, 'yeah, that was okay', but I just couldn't put my finger on why I wasn't particularly taken with it.

The Pure Grain of the Voice: Blind Willie Johnson

Walt Whitman once wrote that “a perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do any thing, that man or woman or the natural powers can do.” But I’ve also heard singers who can achieve that same kind of alchemy. They take you past style, technique, even past the song itself, so that you become moved by the pure grain of the voice.

When I was writing about Don Van Vliet (i.e. Captain Beefheart) in my book Trout Mask Replica, which was about his strange and incomparable 1969 album, I was trying to get inside what made his voice, a lascivious growl straight out of the blues, so pure, so compelling. Some people said they heard Howlin’ Wolf, a singer whose power Robyn Hitchcock once compared to a DC3. There were others who insisted that he was possessed by the raucous spirit of Richard Berry (not the Berry of “Louie Louie,” but the sly narrator of the Robins’ hit “Riot on Cell Block #9”). Others detected a little Muddy Waters, maybe a pinch of the attitude of Charley Patton, possibly the jagged rhythms of Robert Pete Williams. Not bad company and not entirely wrong. But, for me, Beefheart’s voice didn’t bring to mind influences as it did of a man inhabited by a spirit. “I was never influenced,” he once said. “Possessed, but never influenced.” Which is why when I was listening to Trout Mask Replica, I heard the soul of the Texas-born gospel/blues singer Blind Willie Johnson haunting the record. Johnson’s voice, possessed of an unearthly power, holds an unfathomable mystery in its texture, as does Beefheart’s singing on Trout Mask.

Better SF: Battlestar Galactica - The Plan

If there was ever a film made 'strictly for the fans', Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is it, because if you have never watched the show, this otherwise fine direct-to-DVD film will make almost no sense.

With the wrap-up this past spring of the revered 2003-2009 series, many of us who became addicted to this thoughtful show were seemingly out of frakking luck. This was compounded by the horrible news that the hack, Glen Larson -- the man who created the 1970s cheeseball version -- was being permitted to do a feature film for Universal that had nothing to do with the new series (with supposedly Bryan Singer directing!). It was a downer on top of the news the show was finished.

The only saving grace is that, if the film actually ever gets made, it can be safely ignored without damaging our memories of the series. We now have one more piece to add to our treasure chest of 'good' Battlestar Galactica. Directed by the show's lead actor, Edward James Olmos, BSG: The Plan rewinds the story to the period just prior to the Cylon's annihilation of humanity (and ending about 290 days later) to tell us the story from the Cylon's point of view.

The Trouble With Avatar (Part Two)

When I write about Hollywood not getting science fiction right, I should point out that I am mainly referring to the movies, which by necessity have to compress portraits of complex futures / societies into roughly two hour movies, though Avatar was longer than that. By comparison, successful SF series, i.e.: Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Star Trek, etc., have the scope to delve into depictions of the future in more depth. That doesn’t mean that movies can’t do so, as well, but generally the people behind most SF films today aren’t making that attempt to deliver complexity and depth to the scenarios they offer us on screen.

The Trouble With Avatar (Part One)

Can Hollywood ever get science fiction right? I ask this because I am baffled by the praise emanating from most critics towards James Cameron’s wretched 3D extravaganza Avatar. The story in this lengthy (2 hours, 40 minutes long) science fiction tale is simplicity (or simple mindedness) itself. A cabal of scientists, mercenaries and corporate types are occupying the planet of Pandora and planning to get their hands on a precious mineral that they say Earth needs desperately. Our hero, Jake (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine, is chosen to link up with one of the humanoid species, the Na’vi, who live on the planet, in order to get into its brain and attempt to communicate mankind’s 'peaceful' wishes to get the mineral even though it is found beneath the Na’vi’s holiest site. Needless to say, the Na’vi neither wants to move off the land nor allow the humans to drill for the mineral. But Jake, who can inhabit the virtual body of a Na’vi, and thus walk and run, begins to sympathize with the gentle humanoid species and slowly starts to turn against his military masters.

In the Beginning...

In the fall of 2009, Kevin Courrier, Shlomo Schwartzberg and David Churchill met to discuss the possibility of setting up a website for film and popular culture critics who had once worked professionally in the media, but were now making their living doing other work. By the way, they didn’t eagerly choose to leave the profession. In the case of Kevin and Shlomo, a combination of unethical practices by their recent publications and the desire in their editors (or producers) for more “consumer-friendly” movie reviewers, left them seeking other alternative routes. David Churchill, on the other hand, saw the writing on the wall years earlier and - unhappy at what he saw coming – abandoned the profession in 1989.