40-31 The Greatest Films I've Seen

 40. Aliens

1986 USA James Cameron 

James Cameron has always played with the opposition of feminine and masculine archetypes (stereotypes?) and the line where they may meet. As with the once flighty Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, Aliens features a vivid icon of the mother / warrior dichotomy: Ripley carrying both Newt and a flamethrower. In both films it is the role of motherhood that triggers a new courage and a new aggression.

Although it's best not to fit films into genre boxes, introducing elements considered as belonging to different genres (with their unwritten rules) necessitates satisfying the audience's hunger for an appropriate pay-off. Putting a child into an environment of extravagant machismo could have been hokey and awkward.  The visceral and sustained explosion of action could easily have suffered when counterweighted with the rhythms of outright horror, which is more vulnerable to an unrelenting pace. Finally, Aliens' science fiction DNA might have been quickly diluted.

Aliens is a one-of-a-kind film that succeeds in getting the best out of these ingredients, building a ferociously terrifying whole. This is a chunky film made of real hardware, far distant from the mirages of computer software.

There is the sight of Newt dwarfed by an Alien slowly emerging from the waters. There is the nauseating flesh of a face-hugger's legs squeaking along metal floors, the beep of oncoming danger, the hiss of acid spat. There is too the fraught gallows humour of a trigger-happy troop made to fearfully tiptoe moist forbidding corridors:

“We can't have any firing in here...”

“What the hell are we supposed to use man? Harsh language?!”

Witness the climactic adulation of one of Cinema's great heroines. Ripley explodes the myth that courage and strength are masculine qualities worn like a marine uniform. They can be feminine qualities too :

“Get away from her you bitch!”

On the feminine/masculine of Aliens and Avatar. 

39. The Skywalk is Gone

2002 Taiwan Tsai Ming-Liang 

In What Time is it There? Shiang-chyi bought a watch from Hsiao-kang from his pitch on a train station's Skywalk that traverses a bustling street. Soon after she left for Paris.

In The Skywalk is Gone she has returned to Taipei, perhaps looking for Hsiao-Kang. Only the skywalk (in real life as well as in the film) has been torn down. She can't search. Nostalgia cannot be refuelled with fresh feeling nor disappointed. She walks. She stops. She asks questions. There is a gap. She stares at a giant screen advertising inanities (Cinema brought low) and, from a cafe, overlooks the area where progress has erased history and memory.

We see Hsiao-kang too. Indeed they pass each other on a staircase. He turns around but darkness and time dull recognition. 

The Skywalk is Gone (which functions as a skywalk between What Time is it There? and The Wayward Cloud) is an elegant depiction of things lost but, regardless of the story, it is a pleasure to look at, to enter into its appealingly crisp and relaxing compositions. Tsai Ming-Liang is one of the few Directors who can make you sad rather than relieved that a long take has ended. In only 22 minutes it refreshes the eyes.

38. Mulholland Drive

2001 USA David Lynch 

The thin gauze of a dream through which seeps the gangrenous wound of reality.

Whether a fantasy or a dream, Diane/Betty's alternate world buries her pain and guilt deep. So momentous are her actions and her suffering, however, that they cannot be contained.

By making Mulholland Drive such a wilfully obscure puzzle-box narrative some of this pain, this human core, is lost on a first viewing. The characters are confused. The viewer is confused. However, the menacing ambience (that Badalamenti hum) and the phenomenal central performance by Naomi Watts leave an indelible mark (or should that be scar?).


You come back to the film not to find answers to questions but to get lost again. You learn that the final tragedy and its true explanation (from which we are kept at arm's length) is less important than the frightening disorientation of Diane/Betty that we are never less than overwhelmed by.

37. Once Upon A Time in America

1984 ITA/USA Sergio Leone 

Of 'period pieces' or adaptations of well-known classics the question is asked: 'How do we bring it into the now? How do we modernise it?' For something set in the past to be 'relevant' (as if people aren't people whenever they were born) and 'alive' there is often the assumption that it must be filtered through the perspectives and realities of the 21st Century. This is nonsense. 

Once Upon A Time in America demonstrates that the past is made relevant and fresh in the same way that all (human) stories are: making every detail of time and place so vivid that it feels like it is right in front of us. In other words, by paying greater attention to the world of the original. We are the 21st Century filter.

Watching, I felt like I'd seen it before - the suitcase of money, the cream cakes, the girl who dances like a music-box ballerina. It was deja vu. So rich was it in its aromas, its pungent smoke and its noises, as if Gheorghe Zamfir's pan pipes were charming something out from far inside and far back.

The first hour is sensational. The childhood of these friends, interspersed with moments of great tension from Noodles' adulthood, thrums with life. It is elegiac. It is moving. Then slowly that sharpness dwindles as the details (bad makeup, implausible motivations) and our sympathies (we see the best in the children but find it hard to feel sorry for a rapist cast as a pitiable loner) falter.

There are still moments - the operatic baby-kidnapping especially - but it's not the same. Noodles' life ends up feeling like that of any gangster. Once Upon A Time in America ends up feeling like any other film. But the memories...

36. The Postman Always Rings Twice

1946 USA Tay Garnett 

He wanted her! She wanted him! Lana Turner has never been so ravishing! John Garfield burns up the screen as the drifter caught in Cora's headlights! 

They loved! They killed! Destiny brought them together, and fate tore them apart!

That blonde hair! That lipstick! Those legs! That scream! James M Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as you've never seen it before! Lana Turner as you've seen her a couple of times before! THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE!

In all good DVD stores now.

 35. Oxhide 

2005 CHINA Liu Jiayin 

Why would you want to watch a young woman and her parents eating dinner, measuring how tall she'd grown and arguing over discounts for leather bags? Why would you want to watch a family doing what a family normally does?

Oxhide (written and directed by Liu Jiayin; starring herself and her parents in their apartment) is a humanist and life-affirming film insofar as it shows daily interactions, that we may take for granted as banal and non-dramatic, as they are: nourishing, amusing, and comforting.  It turns the camera on us. 

It makes you smile. It's good to be invited to stay for a couple of days.


Oxhide is painstakingly scripted and rehearsed but, because the 'actors' are so obviously comfortable with each other, it has the glow of real life and of an affection and ease that cannot be faked. Maybe only by creating an artificial framework are they relaxed enough to be themselves on camera.

Jiayin's camera never moves. It is often placed at waist height and more often gives you less than the whole. Whereas Hou Hsiao Hsien's films allow you to turn your head as you sit in the corner of the room and Ozu's allow you an unobstructed view of your hosts, Jiayin's shots are somewhat more intimate (the placement of the camera adds humour too). It feels like a privilege. We are sneaking a peek at the cat hiding or of food being prepared and spiced.

It is a touching family portrait.

34. Sunrise : A Song of Two Humans

1927 USA F W Murnau 

Sunrise is so very beautiful. You bask in its rays.
 
Their love is so powerful. In fact it is rapturously affirmed in spite of the husband's mercurial desire to kill his wife (she sulks about it for a couple of minutes), This barely believable forgiveness, offered by a stereotypical angelic woman to the stereotypical dopey man, makes of this love a quasi-parodic ideal.

In Antichrist the hellish destruction by “man” and “woman” of their love grows from small seeds. Here, it is the opposite for the similarly nameless pair. Faced with the giant obstacle of her husband's affair and his (albeit short-lived) willingness to bump her off, she takes him back without qualms.

Sunrise is at times too soppy. Perhaps the dropping, in much of the literature on and distribution of Sunrise, of the mawkish “A Song of Two Humans” shows that we are wary of such brazen sentiment.

Nevertheless, most of it is luminous. It is said of some films that they look like great paintings. Sunrise is a painting. With light. 

33. Southland Tales

2006 USA Richard Kelly 

Southland Tales has been popularly dismissed as a garbled mess, a cornucopia of "undigested" influences, a "self-indulgent" folly. 

  

Southland Tales is gorgeous.  It is inventive and transporting in a way precious few films are. If worth can be judged by how hard it would be to replace something if it were lost, Southland Tales, in a cinematic world of few risks and little true insight, is priceless. It is sui generis, visually stunning, funny, moving, and only rarely less than startling. It is a carnival mirror to the fractured and melancholic mind-set of a United States reeling from terrorist attacks.

I believe Richard Kelly, in showing characters searching for truth and meaning in a troubled world, is doing as much as Andrei Tarkovsky did, in Sacrifice, Stalker  or Nostalghia, for the cinema of spiritual quest. 

Denying it a place in the top ten are flashes of quirkiness for its own sake, sketch-like fragments that don't quite work. Nevertheless, I doubt I'll see a film like Southland Tales again.

Read my essay on Southland Tales and Bad Lieutenant entitled A Wounded America

32. Sátántangó

1994 HUN Bela Tarr 

It is very hard to describe the films of Béla Tarr, for me at least. Then again, the greater a work of art the more it surpasses the unremarkable, to which we are practised in giving words.

Snail-like camera, thudding sounds, chiaroscuro eclatant and a thousand textures of grey. From Damnation to Tarr's latest, A Man from London (almost as good as Sátántangó), there is a monolithic weightiness to his work. 

The style gives the people of his films - downtrodden by circumstances humdrum (the inescapable in music repeated) and mystical - a kind of gravitas and presence tied to the land, to the houses, to the limitations of their minds and bodies. It would be remiss to suggest that the plot of Sátántangó is of little consequence but, truth be known, the sedentary and torpid grace of its images and movements overshadow the comings and goings of the village.

The girl and her cat, the owl in the darkness, the doctor hunched over his desk, the prostitutes huddling round a barn fire, the haunted eyes of helpless souls and the protracted tango that leads to rare gaiety in well-earned exhaustion. If only it were ten hours long instead of seven.

31. The Village

2004 USA M Night Shyamalan 

Grief is a retreat inwards. So, often, is fear. 

The elders of The Village want to escape all evil and protect innocence. They think that 'Us' and 'Them' can be separated. Only 'us' is 'them' and innocence will always be sullied and corrupted by wrongdoing or by suffering.

The Village is a proper story - a fabulous concept, beautifully executed. 

'Us' and 'Them' can be the US and "Them", as many have proposed. The monsters and the people in "the towns" could represent anything : terrorists, foreigners, members of other races, cultures or ways of life considered damaging. Fear creates fear. The Village, powerfully simple and splendidly constructed, is fertile ground for allegory.


A situation will always stand for and bring to mind similar situations. We needn't focus directly on those echoes, nor should we, lest we lose our intimacy with the story at hand. The Village is by turns sweet, nerve-wracking and heart-rending. These people have lost faith in others and, therefore, in themselves. They have endured the death of loved ones and they can no longer bring themselves to live.