Best Music Videos of 2008: #6 - Beyonce! Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)

Kevin B. Lee chose Beyonce's "Single Ladies" as the 6th best music video of 2008. If that's #6, I can't wait to see the rest. The video's brilliant! It's simple, stark, and mesmerizing, and the dance (though arguably plagiarized) is one of the first music video dances that I've seen that actually commits to the art of dance. It's not just something happening around some contrived circumstance - it's the centerpiece.

My only complaint: what about the SNL parody?

The original:



The SNL parody:

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Contempt

#45 in the 1000 greatest films of all time

This marks the 4th film I've seen by Jean Luc Godard. Many of my friends swear by him, but frankly I'd never understood why. I'd appreciated "Le Petit Soldat." It was filmed in a hand-held documentary style, and the piano score was appropriately minimalist. "Breathless," on the other hand, certainly didn't leave me breathless, and I could barely sit through "La Chinoise."

I picked up "Contempt" several months ago on a friend's suggestion, but it was almost immediately buried by the incessantly growing pile of acquisitions from the New York Public Library. I'd nearly forgotten about it when it unexpectedly floated to the top one evening this week. It was already too late to practice my drums, and my mind was tired from studying. It was in this dubious state that I began "Contempt."


From the opening credits, I knew that I had entered an entirely different world from that which I'd come to expect from Godard. The film begins with a long static shot of a crew filming a tracking shot of a woman slowly walking through what appears to be an abandoned film lot. Our perspective situates us at the end of the track, and while we watch the crew and actress inch towards us, a narrator speaks the opening credits (the credits never appear on the screen in print). It's a deliberate, thoughtful, and layered scene that lets us savor its novelty while contemplating its meta-film ironies.

At the end of the credits, the narrator tells us that Andre Bezin once said that "The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires." The scene then shifts to a slow tracking shot of a naked Briggit Bardot laying face down on her bed, bathed in a New Orleans red haze, sequentially asking her lover if he likes her various body parts (from the toes up). At this point, anyone attracted to the female form will hastily attempt to extrapolate the content of the film after juxtaposing the sumptuous view with Bezin's quote.


It wasn't long before I realized that this was not some magical world where all of my dreams came true. The world of "Contempt" is a hopeless and tragic world. This pessimistic philosophy, that contends that deep down we desire suffering and misery, has cropped up in a number of films since this, from Bergman's intimately epic "Scenes from a Marriage" and "Saraband" to the Wachowski brother's pop-culture phenomenon "The Matrix:"



"Contempt's" score consists of one single piece of music, replayed intermittently (and often unexpectedly) throughout the film. It's an unabashedly tragic piece, something you would expect during a sappy scene of a Hollywood romance. Its incessant repetition, however, transforms the unoriginal theme into a meditative mantra. It really drives home the film's philosophical bent.

The considered, deliberate pacing, Tarkovian cinematography, and layered narrative convinced me that behind the camera lay one of film's rare geniuses. I'll say nothing more about the plot; it's simply something you'll have to experience on your own. As for the many more beautifully composed shots in the film, I'll save them for my coming video essay.
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The Day the Earth Stood Still: Critics Roundup

Looks like my prediction was on the mark (though it's not like it takes a rocket scientist to predict that a bloated cgi-driven remake of a thoughtful sci-fi classic will suck). Check out the critics roundup below. I still intend to watch this (sci-fi is my weakness), but I imagine my review will just be another nail in the coffin. You know your film's in trouble when E! Online can't even find something good to say about it.


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Rounding out the top 100

Although at my pace it will take me a lifetime to watch the 1000 greatest films of all time, I'm actually pretty close to having seen the top 100. There were, however, some glaring omissions, and a couple I have to revisit. Here's some I've already added to my "socialist netflix" queue (i.e., the New York Public Library online service). Feel free your add your own recommendations from the list.


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Best music videos of 2008

Kevin B. Lee, film critic and fellow blogger, is counting down the ten best music videos of 2008. Yours truly helped secure the #10 spot for Scottish art student James Houston and his brilliant (and tragically belated) remix of Radiohead's "Nude":




Also, check out Kevin's reviews and video essays of the 1000 greatest films of all time (as compiled by "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They").
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The countdown to the Half-Blood Prince begins! Over the next few weeks, I'll review the first five movies in the Harry Potter series, from worst to best. First-up: the Chamber of Secrets (hopefully that came as no surprise).

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Frankly, this film is garbage. It's easily the worst of the bunch, and Chris Columbus's lazy direction nearly wrecked the whole series. "Chamber" had the potential to take a dark, serious turn; the book's plot is a clever take on the serial-killer progression first laid down in Ridley Scott's "Alien." Columbus didn't even have to be original! A formulaic reproduction of the familiar themes would have been better than this tripe!

But instead of a dark or suspenseful mystery, all we remember are the annoyingly cartoonish characters (Gilderoy Lockhart, Dobby, the eccentric car) and deflated action sequences. I felt like slapping Riddle when he sneers, "You may have blinded the basilisk, but it can still hear you!" Thanks, we couldn't have figured that one out.

Worst
5. Chamber of Secrets
4. Sorcerer's Stone
3. Goblet of Fire
2.
1.
Best

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Rebel Without A Cause

#360 in the 1000 greatest films of all time.

Now that I've started to establish some regular readership on my blog, I'm going to recklessly risk losing it all by coming clean with you: there are a few very embarrassing gaps in my film education. Some "essentials" that every responsible film-buff should experience before diving into less charted territory.

In this particular case, I worked my way backwards. Director Nicolas Ray is most famous for "Rebel Without A Cause," yet I first watched and reviewed his lesser known and hard-to-find "Johnny Guitar." Then I suffered through his debut, the archetypal "Love on the Run," after reading about its pioneering cinematography. (Some critics have played up the fact that it was the first film to shoot ground scenes from above on a helicopter. There were seriously about five seconds of helicopter footage in the entire film. I could barely stomach the trite romance that filled up the other 1 hour and 57 minutes.)

My childlike impetuosity is only partly to blame for my incomplete education. The AFI Top 100, Leonard Maltin, and other corporate tools have instilled in me a deep and abiding distrust of any widely touted (and popularly known) film.

"Rebel Without A Cause," however, deserves every last bit of credit it's received. 1950's America may have been a vacuous bore, but this is one of the real gems of cinema. The film opens with a long, unbroken closeup of a drunk James Dean lying on the street, amusing himself with a toy. This static shot lasts for the entirety of the opening credits; in fact, I imagine that the only way the studio would spare such an un-hollywood dead moment from the cutting room floor is if Ray placed the opening credits over it.

The historically caprice themes turn the 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" family image on its head. James Dean's character Jim, a hip trouble-magnet, continually berates and even assaults his father for not being a man and wishes that he would punch his mother, just once. Jim's girlfriend Judy (played by the beautiful Natalie Wood) has a strong, sexually confused attachment to her own father and a jealous hatred of her mother; in Judy's opening monologue at the police station she tearfully describes a dramatic confrontation with her father that could have been lifted from a Lifetime incest special. And in one of the inexplicably creepy moments in the film, Jim and Judy play house to an emotionally disturbed classmate. Judy even hums a lullabye to put him to sleep.



The film has a decidedly blasphemous subtext. The junior and senior classes of Jim's new high school take a field trip to a planetarium, where the ancient operator spins an existential yarn about the insignificant birth and death of the planet earth in a cold and indifferent universe. The film's tragic ending only reinforces the generally godless tone of the whole enterprise.

James Dean also deserved his reputation. We'll never know if Dean had the range of a Johnny Depp or the staying power of a Nicholson, but this film alone is enough to prove that he had a singularly magnetic presence in the history of cinema.

Certainly I had problems with the film. The score was maddeningly overwrought, and too many scenes felt like the editors were playing hot potato with the camera angles. But a film's not a masterpiece because it lives up to everyone's personal tastes; it's a masterpiece because it transcends them. An audacious script, Ray's clever direction, and above all Dean's hypnotic performance delivered onto us a minor miracle.
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Film-critics: A dying breed?

Roger Ebert just posted a thought-provoking piece on his blog about the death of serious film criticism (and respectable newspaper journalism in general) and the rise of the Celebrity Cult. One of the more disturbing manifestations of this trend: the AP recently restricted all entertainment writers to 500 words or less, whether it's an interview, film review, think piece, etc. There goes "The Sacrifice" :-)

Of course, it's ironic that the man who reduced film reviews to the orientation of his opposable digits is lamenting the death of thoughtful criticism.

Frankly, I couldn't care less what newspapers do. They're the real dying breed, and these desperate actions are their death throws. Serious film criticism, on the other hand, isn't dying. It's just that its venues have changed with the times. And I also couldn't care less about celebrity culture. In this world, there's room for both. Most people just occasionally dabble in media-driven obsessions. But if you want to spend your life neck-deep in all of the celeb-sewage oozing out of Hollywood, I won't stop you.
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