Appreciating 80s cinema

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Adam Kuntavanish posts and solicits (respectively) top ten lists on various cinematic topics over at Next Projection. For this week’s topic — the best male performances of the 80s — I finally took the time to assemble a list. His introductory remarks struck a chord with me, though, on a broader note:

Koyaanisqatsi ☕ d. Godfrey Reggio, 1982

There’s no proselytizing to be found in Koyaanisqatsi; what I half-expected going in was an eco-nut jeremiad about the evils of industrialized civilization.  What I experienced was something much more akin to Shklovsky’s defamiliarization effect: a sustained, artistic effort to re-align my perception of modern life, if only momentarily, in order to induce me to reflect critically on my place in it. In order to portray a “life out of balance,” filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and his collaborators needed to find a style that would shock the audience without losing it, and the result is a very tight montage of nature in continuity from what some might call “pristine” wilderness to the garbage-strewn streets of the urban metropolis.  What the film evoked for me was a sense of someone who wanted to show me something very important, something beautiful, something terrifying, but this person found he could not stand far enough back to take it all in.  Even with its flaws, the impact was sublime.

A few remarks on Ebert’s top ten films of all time

Most of us nerds make lists; few of our lists will actually have some measurable form of cultural impact.  Roger Ebert has submitted his list for the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll.  As most of you probably know, this poll is conducted every ten years.  Prestigious filmmakers and critics around the world each submit their top ten films of all time; the results are tallied, and the results are published in as close to a “definitive” generational top ten as you’re likely to get.  His blog post, in which he ruminates on listmaking and his decision process is therefore of some interest to those of us who a.) like making lists and b.) are interested in the thought processes of people who make lists that matter.

A practical guide to the critical application of group-unthink

Via More Than 95 Theses, we have yet another example of group-unthink at the expense of all those poor sods from the past who had the temerity to express opinions that went against the consensus formed by the tide of history.  In The Atlantic, Jason Bailey shines a spotlight on “12 Great Movies the Critics Got Dead Wrong.”  The pretext for this fluff/hit piece is Roger Ebert’s one-star pan of The Raid, which has generally gotten very positive notices.  Bailey writes:

“Then again, as much as we love Mr. Ebert, this isn’t the first time he got a great movie dead wrong. His one-star pan of Blue Velvet is still a head-scratcher; ditto the single star he awarded Wet Hot American Summer.”

Indeed.  Because think of the generations of future cinephiles who will be shaking their heads over the boobs who didn’t crown Wet Hot American Summer an an insta-classic back in 2001.

The Halloween roundup

Image’s Arts & Faith community released a top 25 list for horror movies just in time for Halloween. As seems to be the case with virtually every solid list made by anyone, there are a few films I haven’t seen. For the Arts & Faith list, my sins of omission include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, I Walked with a Zombie, and Curse of the Demon. Overall, there aren’t any real surprises or obscurities on the list; I’m a bit disappointed in the high ranking of Let the Right One In and its American counterpart, if only because I’m tired of the fanboy slobbering. Thankfully, Jeffrey Overstreet’s synopsis for the two films is devoid of fanboy slobbering. His apologia for the list is especially worth reading; it’s probably the best, most concise explanation I’ve yet read for the importance of horror cinema to the Christian viewer. His brief discussion of Ridley Scott’s seminal Alien cuts right to the heart of the film’s continuing power:

No Nanook, know nuthin’?

Not enough Flaherty. I'm not too proud to special plead.

Just another quickie post. Victor Morton finally updated Right Wing Film Geek this week after a long dry spell, and I wanted to draw attention to his post on “born yesterday-ism,” the phenomenon of propagating ultra-recent artifacts of pop culture as landmark achievements.  He was prompted in particular by Current TV’s list of “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.”  All of them, by the way, have been released in the past 25 years. Morton makes many insightful observations about this phenomenon, and I don’t gainsay any of them.  The one that I want to add is simply blunt, and I can’t justify it with reasoned argument. Basically, if someone makes a list of films exclusively from the last 25 and gives it a title implying that it’s the be-all-end-all, my conclusion is that this person doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

NPR’s expert listeners tell you what the best Sci-fi/Fantasy books are. Mm-hm.

One of the big problems with crowdsourcing a “best of” consensus list is the fact that you never know if the people voting actually know anything about what they’re voting for.  This is true of pretty much every voting process, of course, and while I don’t want to be all down on democracy, it nettles me when I see things like NPR’s new Top 100 SF/Fantasy list.  NPR has, with the help of readers/listeners and an “expert panel,” selected 100 titles from which every voter will pick 10, culminating in the Ultimate Top Ten, I guess.  There’s nothing wrong with listmaking.  It’s just that I wonder if everyone voting has actually read every book on the list of 100 titles.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only read 23 (more like 30, if you count the series and books of which I’ve only read a part, but not the whole thing).  That’s a very small number.  It’s pathetic.  So I’m not going to vote.  But I’m guessing that of all the people that will vote in this poll, less than half will have read most of the titles.  (By “most,” I mean something like 85 or more.)  Most people will probably have read far less.  They have a right to vote, but that doesn’t mean their votes are informed or meaningful, which means that the eventual top 10 will be neither informed nor meaningful.

Annotations to the Obligatory Top 100

More for posterity’s sake than anything, I thought it worthwhile to include a link to the list of my one hundred favorite films, which is available on MUBI as as list entitled, ironically enough, “The Obligatory Top 100.” As I noted there, my criteria were incredibly broad. So broad, in fact, so as to be arguably little else than the fact that these films bring me a great deal of joy.  I imposed some arbitrary other criteria on my winnowing process, mostly because without arbitrary restrictions, I would never be equal to the task of narrowing my favorites down to a mere one hundred.  As I explained to a friend the other day, there are probably at least four hundred films that could just as easily hold a place on my list, but since 100 is the conventional number for such a thing, it is the number by which I abide (with much grumbling, groaning, and other pouty noises).

We have liftoff!

For my first post on this blog, I thought it would be prudent to create a set of links to articles I’ve already written for Playtime on topics relating in some way to religion.  Sort of a house cleaning thing.  I’ve touched on religious topics over there already, and I expect I will again in the future.  Not all of these are even explicitly relevant to Christianity, but they provide some illumination of my continuing evolution as a critical writer, providing some context for what is to come.  Be forewarned: some of these articles make liberal use of salty language.

Hey — nobody’s perfect.  And I ain’t nobody.