Tag: Breathless

My Best (and Favorite) Movies of All Time

These are my 10 “Best” movies of all time, along with my 10 “Favorite” movies ever.

Any critic voting in the Sight and Sound poll that was announced yesterday (my coverage here if you care to compare lists) will tell you how impossibly difficult it is to select 10 films as the best of all time. Occurring every 10 years since 1952, this is really the only list that matters. They have to select with their minds and their hearts, and the two don’t always coincide. If you’ve seen all the masterpieces, how do you choose between all that is perfect? And how would you like to be the critic who finally displaced “Citizen Kane” as the best movie of all time?

I don’t have nearly as much pressure on my head (not yet), but it hasn’t stopped some of my friends from asking what are my all time favorites.

I tend to dodge the question (often pretentiously, I might add). “Well, how do you rank works of art anyway?” “Oh, you probably haven’t heard of them.” “I’ve just seen so much that it’s so hard to choose.” And then I’ll say something about how I’ve seen the Harry Potter movies a lot because they’re always on HBO and I have a sister with no qualms of re-watching stuff, so maybe those could be called some of my “favorites.”

Often, I don’t even like the word “favorite.” “Best” and “favorite” usually go hand in hand. If I called “Drive” the best movie of 2011, it’s because it’s the one I most want to see again AND because it’s the most important/best made/critic-y jargon bullshit.

There’s also the possibility that I just haven’t seen enough films. In fact, I know I haven’t seen enough. One day decades from now when my Excel spreadsheet of classic films to watch is completely marked up with yellow highlights, when I’ve written and read all I can about them and am looking back on my entire life of watching movies as opposed to looking forward to what’s coming out this Friday, then maybe I’ll make a decent list.

So for all those reasons and more, I’ve never officially made public what are my all time picks for best movies ever. I’ve always had titles in mind, but they’ve never been put on paper like this. It’s damned hard to do.

But I’ll concede that in this instant, “best” does not mean “favorite.” I’m not going to lie and pretend that some obscure foreign movie I’ve seen once two years ago means more to me than something I’ve seen dozens of times since I was a kid. At the same time, that movie I know by heart is probably not even in the same conversation technically or historically as that obscure foreign film.

It’s why I’ve decided to provide TWO lists. One has the movies I would call the most powerful and most significant movies ever made. The other has the titles that I could never forget. They define me as a critic and a person. Continue reading “My Best (and Favorite) Movies of All Time”

Rapid Response: The Warped Ones and The Japanese New Wave

The Warped Ones is one of the earliest examples of the Japanese New Wave, which borrows the name from the French, but is more than just a copy of their style and ideas.

How is it that every so often I can still stumble across a film I’ve never heard of, a director with a massive catalog that has escaped me and even an entire genre of film history that I was completely unaware of?

This week, that genre was the Japanese New Wave, and the film was Koreyoshi Kurahara’s “The Warped Ones” from 1960, a bizarre teenage drama about a pair of young men who are released from prison and proceed to wreck havoc in whatever way suits their fancy. They spot the man who sent them to jail walking down a boardwalk with his girlfriend, and the two kidnap the woman and rape her on the beach. After the ordeal, she tracks down our young anti-hero and confides in him that her relationship has forever been damaged until he too suffers a mental breakdown.

“The Warped Ones” is a film about identity and the animalistic impulses that we’re driven to when faced with reality, but at its core it’s an avant-garde art film about youth and rebelling against culture in the same way that the French New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are. The Japanese New Wave borrowed the title from the French, and the common criticism has been that they also borrowed the style and original ideas from France as well.

But what other critics have observed more fully is that the genre developed and emerged simultaneously with the French, and although the Japanese lacked the auteur theory to go along with the film movement, these films were drastically different from the Western influenced Kurosawa films and the more stately works by Ozu and Mizoguchi. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Warped Ones and The Japanese New Wave”