Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 51

We Interrupt This List Already in Progress to Bring You Another List Already in Progress.

After I posted about watching the AFI Top 100, a former student asked me about recommendations from the Criterion Collection (Hello Lydia! Hope all is well! Hope you find something you like here!). I’ve seen a small percentage of the Collection, and as a film obsessive choosing one to watch can be mentally crippling, much less trying to rank them. Luckily, despite what these lists may seem to indicate, I like a well-rounded film diet, one that includes Neil Breen and Street Trash (1987) as well as Maya Deren and Agnes Varda, so I’ve watched only a portion of what the collection offers.

I made a few rules. I did a top five from each decade, with the occasional short film as a bonus. I also didn’t include any film that appears on my AFI list. Also, like I told my student, I skew towards horror and surrealism, so, again, I don’t mean this as a “best of” but a list of favorites.

 

Quick Reference:

My Top Ten Through the Decades

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

The Orphic Trilogy (The Blood of a Poet/Orpheus/Testament of Orpheus)

Black Narcissus (1947)

Ikiru (1952)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Dekalog (1988)

Dreams (1990)

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

 

The Full List

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

Häxan (1922)

Safety Last! (1923)

Body and Soul (1925)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

The Orphic Trilogy (The Blood of a Poet/Orpheus/Testament of Orpheus)

M (1931)

Vampyr (1932)

I Was Born, But ….(1932)

It Happened One Night (1934)

The Great Dictator (1940)

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Cat People (1942)

Black Narcissus (1947)

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Ikiru (1952)

The Wages of Fear (1953)

Tokyo Story (1953)

Godzilla (1954)

Diabolique (1955)

Bonus short: “The Red Balloon” (1956)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

8 1/2 (1963)

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Red Desert (1964)

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Bonus Short: “La jetée” (1963)

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Grey Gardens (1976)

Eraserhead (1977)

House (1977)

(Yeah, that 5 equals 6, but I couldn’t remove any of those films.)

Videodrome (1983)

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

Mala Noche (1985)

Dekalog (1988)

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Dreams (1990)

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Crumb (1995)

Breaking the Waves (1996)

George Washington (2000)

Y tu mamá también (2001)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

I didn’t include the 2010s because I’ve only seen two in the collection.

There Are Things Swimming In Us That We Love. The AFI Top 100, Part II.

Here are the next five in chronological order. You can read the original post here.

Five More of My Favorite 20 of AFI’s Top 100+

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Stagecoach (1939)

Though there are moments of visual sublimity in The Searchers (1956), I’ll have to go with Stagecoach here as a personal favorite. I’ve never been much of a western fan, though I do enjoy the Italian vision of the Untamed West a great deal. I had no expectations going in, and I just remember being immersed in this film and enjoying it. It’s one I need to see again.

 

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The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I’ve had a special edition of the music to this since I was in college. When I was a kid, my fondest memories of watching this were at my grandparents with my aunt. She was like a sister to me because she was six months younger. Long story. It seems like this only came on once, maybe twice, a year. My aunt unabashedly loved the movie. I remember I would try to act too old to really like it, but make excuses to walk back in the room, especially to see the flying monkeys that scared the hell out of me.

Years after that I could at least admit how much I loved the music and I feel like I enjoy the movie more every year, and I feel like I interpret the symbolism in more refined ways. Hopefully I’ll get a few more years of watching this with the kids before they’re too cool to watch it with me. We’re also going to read the novels together soon.

 

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Fantasia (1940)

When I had a VCR, this was the movie that I watched every Christmas and sometimes a few other times throughout the year. Now that I think about it, considering how uneven, if not downright bad, most anthology films are, this is one of the best. And while there’s plenty of sweetness and light, Fantasia has some fantastic imagery of darkness and the monstrous. Of course, one of the greatest film scores, but they stacked the deck on that one, using masterpieces. I would love to see this in the theater. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), also on AFI’s list, is one of my favorite theater experiences.

 

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Double Indemnity (1944)

Considered the template for many a film noir and features a cheat and a dame in a bid to nefariously gain some insurance money. Smoking guns and lots of smoking. Claustrophobic fun. The lighting is one of the stars and much of the lighting design here became popular for film noir in general.

 

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Sunset Blvd. (1950)

A couple of films after Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder made this dream noir about Hollywood. David Lynch screened the film for everyone working on Eraserhead (1977). In an interview when asked why he screened it, he states, “Sunset Boulevard is in my top five movies, for sure. But there wasn’t anything in particular about it that related to Eraserhead. It was just a black and white experience of a certain mood.” In another interview (both available in the book Lynch on Lynch), when asked if he had thought about Sunset Boulevard while he wrote and directed Mulholland Dr. (2001), he says, “No. I’m sure there are things swimming in us that we love. We might love them because our machine is a certain way to begin with and so it’s hard to say which comes first.”

You could do worse than a Friday night double feature of Sunset Blvd. and Mulholland Dr. It might be nice to screen Kenneth Anger’s short film “Rabbit’s Moon” (the 1972 version) between them.

Below is the list so far. I’ll add five more soon.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

City Lights (1931)

Frankenstein (1931)

King Kong (1933)

Stagecoach (1939)

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Fantasia (1940)

Double Indemnity (1944)

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

My Heart Will Go On and On (And On and On): Some Thoughts on Watching the AFI Top 100 and a List

My three-year-old’s versions of Titanic (1997) are more enjoyable for me than the actual movie. Her versions are like the clips of Drunk History I’ve seen. Deep down I knew this wasn’t a movie made for me and there’s nothing wrong with that. Hence the twenty years it’s taken me to sit down and watch the thing. My kids really got into it, especially any dancing. kissing, running, or mixture of these. Though the three-year-old is also at the stage of asking a question every fifteen seconds, sometimes the same question for a solid five minutes, I do enjoy watching movies with them, which has also given me a love for computer animated movies that I have always avoided.

No matter how good some of those cartoons are, it was nice to watch a “real” movie (with some mild age-appropriate editing) with the kids. The other reason I watched Titanic was because it was the last film that I hadn’t seen on the American Film Institute (AFI) Top 100 films of cinema’s first 100 years. They have updated the list once, so I watched both. It’s not like completing the set haunted me. I’ve been down to Titanic alone for almost two years.

What I thought I would do, since I used both versions of the list, is a top twenty of my favorites, not necessarily what I think are the best, but films that I go back to regularly, several of which I have been watching for over three decades. Honestly, the list had very few films, if any, that I thought were total garbage, not even Titanic, though I have no plans for a revisit. Having never been a fan of Bill Paxton, and I’m sure I’ve missed some good performances, but he will always be Chet to me, I even got a little misty-eyed seeing his big ol’ mug. The real difficulty wasn’t finally getting through the film, but narrowing down my favorites from the list(s).

But here goes–in chronological order.

My Favorite 20 of AFI’s Top 100+

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Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Murnau is more famous for Nosferatu (1922), but Sunrise has just as many visual delights. A love triangle story with hints of murder, and one that A Place in the Sun (1951) echoes, a film also on the list and worth watching. If you remove the frame story and stick with the melodrama among the lovers, Titanic isn’t all that different from Sunrise, either. But I love silent film and what Murnau conjures on screen and could watch this anytime. Nosferatu is one of the movies that made me love the medium. It’s hard to believe Murnau was dead by forty-two.

 

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All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Just as Sunrise could be a modern melodrama, All Quiet feels like many a modern war film. Down to the last breath we will likely be telling stories of love and war. It’s not that I don’t like war movies, it’s just that I haven’t seen many or closely watched many for that matter. I tend to read about war. All Quiet does give a window into the nightmare of trench warfare in World War I, which make up some of the film’s greatest scenes. Barbed wire. Machine guns. Gas. Death.

 

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City Lights (1931)

As a huge fan of the Clown Princes (The Other Three Stooges?) of Silent Cinema (Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin), it is impossible for me to really pick a favorite film by any one of them. Luckily, AFI makes it a little easier since Lloyd doesn’t appear at all (if memory serves) and Keaton appears once on only one version of the list for The General (1926). With the exception of giant monster movies, I tried not to repeat directors or genres as much as possible, but all of Chaplin’s films ranked by the AFI made it to my initial list, but I chose this beautiful romantic comedy worth multiple viewings.

 

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Frankenstein (1931)

One of the rare instances where I am as much a fan of the source material and the film that butchers said source. I love this movie and this monster. Karloff makes the creature come alive in a way that’s scary and tragic. I guess that’s obvious considering how iconic this version of the creature is. We may have been lucky that Lugosi, famous after his role of Dracula, turned down the role of the Creature.

 

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King Kong (1933)

I like stop-motion animation. I like monsters. I really like stop-motion animation monsters. I remember seeing this somewhere around kindergarten and I always felt sad pangs for the big guy at the end. The only update besides King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) I’ve seen is the disaster of a 1976 remake. It felt like a disaster when I watched it as a child, and I haven’t revisited it and don’t remember it well at all. There are some rough spots in the film, but it gets the monsters right and if it was good enough for Harryhausen, it’s good enough for me. I wish I could get to the theater more, but it just isn’t always possible. In fact, the last non-documentary film I saw in the theater was Godzilla (2014). Maybe my return will be Godzilla vs. Kong (2020).

And, Adam, good luck!

 

As always, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Tell me your favorites. I’ll post my next five soon.

Mid-Year Viewing

Over the last few years, I’ve posted mega-lists of works I’m either just starting to chew on or digesting. I’ve tried to write about this more frequently this year. I decided I’d also do a set of mid-year lists of favorites so far. Titles in bold are ones I particularly liked.

Animated

Interplanetary Revolution (1924)

Fire and Ice (1983)

Finding Dory (2016)

Documentary

Art / Literature

Ways of Seeing (1972)

Being and Becoming: Chua Ek Kay (2012)

Author: The JT Leroy Story (2016)

John Berger: The Art of Looking (2016)

Film

Raging Boll (2010)

Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Sante Sangre (2011)

The Definitive Document of the Dead (2012)

Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four (2015)

Music

Every Everything: The Music, Life and Times of Grant Hart (2013)

Salad Days (2015)

Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents (2015)

Art House

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

At Land (1944)

Witch’s Cradle (1944)

A Study in Choreography for a Camera (1946)

GUTAI: Japanese Performance Art, 1956-1970

8 ½ (1963)

The Alphabet (1968)

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

Fata Morgana (1971)

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008-2011)

Horror / Sci-fi / VHS Weirdness

The Haunted Castle (1896)

A Nightmare (1896)

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1912)

Killers from Space (1954)

Curse of the Faceless Man (1958)

Alice Sweet Alice (1976)

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Mystics in Bali (1981)

Chopping Mall (1986)

Heavy Metal Massacre (1989)

Cat in the Brain (1990)

The Dark Half (1993)

REC (2007)

Let the Right One In (2008)

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

The Midnight Meat Train (2009)

I Saw the Devil (2010)

The Reef (2010)

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

The Witch (2015)

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Under the Shadow (2016)

Everything Else

Body and Soul (1926)

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Accattone (1961)

Signs Of Life (1968)

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

The ‘Burbs (1989)

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

Big Fan (2009)

Macbeth (2010)

Inherent Vice (2014)

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Doctor Strange (2016)

Swiss Army Man (2016)

Television

Tales from the Darkside: Season One (1983-1984)

Trollhunters (2016–)

Mid-Year Reading

Over the last few years, I’ve posted mega-lists of works I’m either just starting to chew on or digesting. I’ve tried to write about this more frequently this year. I decided I’d also do a set of mid-year lists of favorites so far.

General Favorites 2017–So Far

Books that left traces.

Fiction

Einstein’s Dreams : Alan Lightman

Hamlet : William Shakespeare

Labyrinths : Jorge Luis Borges

Marigold : Troy James Weaver

The Marriage Plot : Jeffrey Eugenides

My Antonia : Willa Cather

Oliver Twist : Charles Dickens

One Hundred Years of Solitude : Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Pickwick Papers : Charles Dickens

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories : Bruno Schulz

Too Loud a Solitude : Bohumil Hrabal

The Underground Railroad : Colson Whitehead

Visions: Troy James Weaver

Witchita Stories : Troy James Weaver

 

Nonfiction

Auto/Biography

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man : James Weldon Johnson

Jim Henson: The Biography : Brian Jay Jones

Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America : Natalie Goldberg

Psychology/Philosophy/Education

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business : Neil Postman

Beyond Freedom and Dignity : BF Skinner

Embedded Formative Assessment: Dylan Wiliam

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays : Albert Camus

Practicing Peace in Times of War : Pema Chödrön

The Story of Philosophy : Will Durant

The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults : Frances E. Jensen

A Whole New Mind : Dan Pink

Essays/Criticism

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Essays, 1979-1985 : Adrienne Rich

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays: Zadie Smith

Film

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film : Michael Ondaatje

Halloween (Devil’s Advocates): Murray J.D. Leeder

Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film : Carol J. Clover

 

Art/Comics

The Best American Comics 2014

The Cage: Martin Vaughn-James

Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic: Alison Bechdel

Paper Girls, Vol 1 : Brian K. Vaughn, Cliff Chiang, Matthew Wilson

Paul in the Country : Michel Rabagliati

Set to Sea: Drew Weing

The Worst Breakfast: China Miéville and Zak Smith

 

Poetry

All the Poems : Muriel Spark

Dark City : Charles Bernstein

Magic City Gospel : Ashley M. Jones

Off Message : Joel Brouwer

Selected Poems, 1954-1986 : Tomas Tranströmer

Short Talks: Brick Books Classics I : Anne Carson

The White Stones : J. H. Prynne

A Woman of Property : Robyn Schiff

It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice /or/ Kiw da wabbit

Needing to read and release pressure from the finals cooker I selected my Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H. G. Wells and decided to start with some Island of Dr. Moreau. I’ve always liked the cover art to this one and it has nostalgic properties since my late grandmother gave it to me for Christmas when I was 11 or 12. I always liked Wells’s stories, but I haven’t read them in a long time.

So far Dr. Moreau is just what I wanted:

From pages 90-91:

“The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe–I have thought since–I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea- breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.”

And one more, though be warned of rabbit gore–page 92:

“I was startled by a great patch of vivid scarlet on the ground, and going up to it found it to be a peculiar fungus branched and corrugated like a foliaceous lichen, but deliquescing into slime at the touch. And then in the shadow of some luxuriant ferns I came upon an unpleasant thing, the dead body of a rabbit, covered with shining flies but still warm, and with its head torn off. I stopped aghast at the sight of the scattered blood. Here at last was one visitor to the island disposed of!”

Overall, I’m enjoying the novel even more than when I read it decades ago. Maybe it’s just reading the right thing at the right time.

If Wells interests you, or Richard Stanley, (or if you liked Jodorowsky’s Dune) I highly recommend Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.

Fascinating and bizarre!

A Project That Could: Erick Forsyth and The Three Graces Studio

Erick Forsyth still is or has been a boxer, bartender, organizer, writer, blacksmith, photographer, and soul disc jockey. He’s probably had a whole range of curious employments I don’t know about. Currently, he’s running The Three Graces Studio, which specializes in blacksmithing and ironwork, wet plate photography, and writing.

His ironwork is impressive and photography is fabulous, but what may be the most exciting aspect of Erick’s work is how he’s constructing a life for himself out of the work that he finds interesting and fulfilling. He installed plumbing among other amenities into his studio largely by himself, sometimes with the help of a few friends. Among his many accomplishments so far, the third grace, writing, has been elusive.

Not any longer.

Erick just got an acceptance to present his book-in-progress, Of Flesh and Word, at the Summer Institute in American Philosophy at the University of Oregon this year. He attended one of the Institutes and decided to apply himself. I was skeptical. Neither of us have traditional credentials for something like this. The day we met to talk about the submission abstract, Erick was also completing a lamp project for Auburn University, a commission that came through due to the recent death of a blacksmithing friend. I think we were both surprised that he was able to get such disparate and detailed work done in the same few days.

Here’s his general description of the book:

From its beginning the US South has been known for violence. Its rates of murder, capital punishment, and incarceration are the highest, and with the exception of incarceration, this has always been so. While the phenomenon is multifaceted and lends itself to many forms of analysis, largely ignored has been the objects of violence at their most fundamental construction, metaphor. Using both American and Continental Schools of philosophy as well as Southern Literature, History, and Historiography this work takes on the practice of legal and extra-legal violence in the South by placing it in the context of its beginnings as an honor culture with a racially based slave economy through the current era of mass incarceration. The work focuses on three metaphoric constructions– “Honor, Race, Criminal”– and follows their genealogy as sites of justified violence in both common and legal domains.

Late last year, Erick contacted me to look over a manuscript he had been working on for several years. He was interested if I would help him adapt pieces of it into screenplay format. I like working in that genre and I had liked the bits of Erick’s work I had seen. None of it had been finished that I could remember, but what was there, was always interesting.

This was no different.

Since then I’ve been a kind of first reader/editor/collaborator on the project. To be clear, the project is total Erick. I’m just nursing it along. I’ll update its progress when I can.

Also, thanks to Dr. Litaker for help in getting us through the abstract process!

 

Might as well….

A few friends of mine have worked through the “Favorite Films for Every Year I’ve Been Alive” and it looked like fun. Zine-Queen Delaine Derry Green posted hers on Facebook and digital slayer and general maker-of-things Trey Lane made a rad Storify version of his.

My Favorite Film for Every Year I’ve Been Alive

1977: Eraserhead

1978: Dawn of the Dead

1979: The Muppet Movie

1980: The Shining

1981: An American Werewolf in London

1982: The Thing

1983: A Christmas Story / Videodrome

1984: Stop Making Sense

1985: A Zed & Two Noughts

1986: Blue Velvet / “Street of Crocodiles”

1987: Predator

1988: Die Hard

1989: Dekalog

1990: Dreams

1991: Prospero’s Books

1992: Unforgiven

1993: The Piano

1994: Crumb

1995: The City of Lost Children

1996: I Shot Andy Warhol / Kissed

1997: The Sweet Hereafter

1998: Pi

1999: Audition / Twin Falls Idaho

2000: Requiem for a Dream

2001: Y Tu Mamá También

2002: Frida

2003: “Harvie Krumpet” / The Triplets of Belleville

2004: Primer

2005: Double Down

2006: Pan’s Labyrinth

2007: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008: Let the Right One In / Rambo

2009: Antichrist

2010: The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

2011: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

2012: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

2013: Nebraska

2014: Guardians of the Galaxy

2015: Creed

2016: One of the few releases I’ve seen is Pass Thru.

2017: Looking forward to Get Out.

Recently Read: February

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Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead

2016

I liked this book, but I didn’t love it like most friends have. I’m not trying to be contrarian and say I’m above the hubbub it’s received. A few things go into this. One is that I genuinely like Whitehead’s writing. His philosophical zombie novel Zone One was a blast  and had me reaching for the dictionary on more than one occasion–in a zombie novel! Most readers I know were turned off by that vocabulary and voice. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to rereading that particular book. I’ve done so already in sections.

Another reason for my response is that I was expecting something stranger with his take on a slave narrative. I heard one review that mentioned a kind of magical realism and I was expecting something like a retelling of Huck’s adventures, but weirder and scarier. This is not the book’s failing, but my own. I had certain expectations based on a previous novel and a half-heard radio book review. I was talking to a friend and he said he, too, thought that it had a “sci-fi” element to it based on reviews.

My main complaint would be more that the book is in line with much of the fiction and nonfiction about slavery and race that I’ve read. Beloved, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frederick Douglass, Equiano, Pudd’nhead Wilson, etc. I don’t mean that these are all the same stories, or that there is a single slave narrative, but there are similarities. Most people I’ve talked to haven’t read many of these other titles. It was a particular area of interest of mine for a few years while I was studying the crossover of Gothic and horror elements in slave narratives.

Readers I know love the book, and like I said, I enjoyed it. I need to read it again without the expectations of magical realism being built into it–or at least more than an underground locomotive. That being said, there are some fantastic details and masterful touches. One of my favorites is that one of the major plantation owners owns a cane that sounds similar to Larry Talbot’s from The Wolf Man (1941), an emblem of classic horror interesting for many reasons. It “marks” Cora, the main character, and the duplicitous nature of the gentleman/slaveholder. Whitehead’s symbolic use of the “one-drop rule” is fantastic. He writes a mass shooting event that for any reader should be a clue about historical resonance, that we can learn reading backwards and forwards in time. Cora’s mother’s story is perfectly told as a fable, a mystery at the center of the book, that couldn’t be resolved in any other way than how Whitehead does here.

for that single moment we love them ever after

I’m rereading a collection of Bruno Schulz’s writing. It’s dense, lyrical, strange. I had to type up this section below about the reading experience. This reminds me of certain experiences as a young reader, or being an older listener to music of my youth, music that had seemed vital, but only feels frail and false now.

From Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass:

Leaning over that Book, my face glowing like a rainbow, I burned in quiet ecstasy. Engrossed in my reading, I forgot my mealtimes. My intuition was right: this was the authentic Book, the holy original, however degraded and humiliated at present. And when late in the evening, smiling blissfully, I put the script away in the bottom of a drawer and hid it under a pile of other books, I felt as if I were putting to sleep the dawn that emits a self-igniting purple flame.

How dull all my other books seemed!

For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone-dead messages like wooden rosary beads.