Ghost World (2001)

Jaded cinephiles and rent-a-movie whores looking back to the classics of the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa, or (God be with us) Tarantino's grindhouse influences, may miss a few gems of the more recent past, none more so than Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, which on first viewing is as close to masterpiece as you can get for a film from this century.

Let's call it "arthouse comedy": be funny, smart, or interesting in some trivial but outlandish way, then be sad or generally dramatic in a twisty middle act, then conclude on some horseshit that either makes everyone feel better about themselves or else offer a falsely (read: dishonestly) ambiguous conclusion that "confuses" the slow kids -- art as a device of egoism to artist and consumer, a self gratifying lie dreamed by the former instructing the latter to agree, and feel clever doing so. In other words, pander to the neurotic complexes of your audience but be artsy about it - be a hipster. Superficially, Ghost World does all of these. In spirit, it does none of these, even if at times it's this close to being hypocritical in its critique of hipsterdom. It's hiply unhip, it's meta, it's art, even. It's brilliant.

When a couple of outsider teens (Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson) graduate from high school, they have to be "different" and not go to college like the other dorks, jocks, losers. What then? Well, lots, mostly jokes and pranks adding up to zilch, but we're young, so fuck it. One of the poor bastards (Steve Buscemi) at the other end of the stick turns out to be not as creepy as first thought (well, he does, but you can't help but like the idiot), leading to the central plot point: impossible and dumb love. If it sounds trite, it really isn't, and give Ghost World credit for handling it with aplomb. Even better, repeatedly, little plot threads meet, sometimes ingeniously, symbiotically, the best being a) the treatment of art as misrepresented in academia therefore high school and b) hidden racism in contemporary culture instructed by America's racist history, with the synergy of a + b causing controversy of the best kind.

Ghost World is masterfully executed, especially thematically. Shot for shot even. Playing out the existential crisis of teenage life in a time where everyone is clueless ("fuck everybody"), it dips in and out of well earned, Honest to Gods Transcendence. When it becomes clear our protagonist should stop pointing the finger and look at herself for a clue, the film draws from a well of the intangible but real wisdom of an artistic consciousness to make out of a lone wolf a humble heroine. It would be flippant to fault it for relying on the holy fool, as he knows best after all: be patient with your dumb ideas, wait for that ticket away from drama, then grab the bus en route to creation anew.

Une femme est un femme (1962)

Award winning Une Femme Est Une Femme has Godard in top form, playing with the novel in the Nouvelle Vague he helped create, by 1962 in its adolescent phase. The film self-proclaims masterpiece status in a jest of untouchable confidence springing from the well of youthful exploration of a new style of cinema, and five(!) decades later, it's hard to argue how different it is from any film you're likely to see. What separates it from the youtubers and MTVers is discipline to a medium that allows for artistic coherence and an intellectual attention span. Yet for all its cleverness, you question its ability to make any serious statement beyond "bitches be crazy."

Inception (2010)

Leo DiCaprio finally gets the Keanu Reeves role that has him save the world through the seven heavens/hells of dreams, nightmares, and demons of the subconscious of the bloated melodrama that is Inception, Christopher Nolan's most complex piece of cinema, which paved the way for that big-budget joke The Dark Knight Rises. These "extractors" use a musical cue to signal an oncoming return from one dream level to the previous, and upon hearing it, they either get a "kick" that disturbs their cranial equilibrium in order for them to awake, or they get killed. And then they fall like dominoes back to reality, the dream of God, you know. When the tediously repeated chords of the kitsch denouement melted to images of TV series catharsis, I was looking for the nearest object to suicide with and hopefully myself awake from this tiresome nightmare.

I'm so bored

It's about extracting information from the subconscious of people by accessing their dreams, and using this method in a massively convoluted plot for the implausible but possible Inception, planting an idea in someone's head and making them think it's their own, the dystopian ruler's mind control wet dream. On top of that, Cobb (Di Caprio) wants to return home to his muppet children but to get there he has to carry out an inception on a powerful man with daddy issues and convince him he wants to split his dad's empire into two, because, we're led on, corporate monopolies are evil. So "the best [extractor] in the business" and his crew of cardboard action heroes cook up a plan to suggest as much to the guy's subconscious in an intricate series of dreams within dreams where the chaos of the human mind is so shaky they can pretty much pull off anything because, like, it's metaphysical territory. The most curious inclusion in the team is Ariadne (Ellen Page), dreamscape architect if you like, yet her role as a character is to keep reminding Cobb what a bastard he is for trying to keep dead people alive in his vaginal dungeon of a subconscious ready to trap everyone in dream limbo.

Can't touch this

Why (or how) did Nolan follow the fairly good Dark Knight (2008) with this unashamed cheese? It's not like the emotional centre of the film is intrinsically bound to the twisty maze of a plot a la Memento. Rather, the plot demonstrates the complexity of physical dreaming, and the emotions are there on the sidelines, strung out like bad dialogue in a messy student film. The dreams within dreams is a superfluous device that builds a platform for revealing clever plot twists. And then what? The greatest potential metonymy -- mania in losing track of reality through dreaming -- is lost to psychiatry room metaphysical vivisection of personal pain. Inception is poverty art, devoid of the extratemporal abstractions it speaks of, planting in the viewer its inception of dinner-movie platitudes for you to identify with passively as you're distracted by the giant nothing of a plot, an afterschool mathematics puzzle set, afterall.

Where did daddy hide the car keys?

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Up there with Bunuel's The Milky Way as one of the greatest of all time, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is an ode to immortality, a true filmic equivalent of religious reverence for origins and destinies, even if some details are based on the modernist revisionism traditionalists eventually fall out of favour with, i.e. evolution. In other words, in the context of this film, it doesn't matter, as inherent substance is eternal, and whether we have evolved or not, we return to the source of all life, gaining all the power that comes with such a gigantic step, if we have the courage to step into the unknown.

Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972)

 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' is a mad and ambitious thaumaturgy. Arrogant madness thwarted by uncompromising Nature, a "frenzy" dreamt by mad genius Werner Herzog and played out and embodied by his egomaniac of an accomplice, Klaus Kinski. Shot on a shoestring budget with a crew of eight on location in the unforgiving Amazon, part of its greatness lies in the defiant achievement of its bold ambition in spite, and because, of the tumultuous conditions of its creation. Add to this the absurdist realism balanced by a haunting romanticism and beauty and you have a true work of art, a quintessence - perhaps even an archetype - of film that flies in the face of Pauline Kael's infamous indictment of the medium as "corrupt art".

Loosely based on historical events, the story follows a Spanish expedition to El Dorado, the lost city of gold of Incan legend. When reason and better judgement would have the expedition abandoned, power hungry Aguirre mutinies and takes forced command. As he leads the troupe into what becomes clear as certain doom, his madness blossoms, culminating in his self proclaimed divinity. A plot summary however cannot do justice to the genius created here by Herzog. It beggars description and belief.

Minimalist method and overtly surreal tone lay the platform for Herzog's penchant for the absurd, most evident in the title character's evolution of madness and only helped by Kinski's circus act gesticulations (the resulting performance, however, masterfully wrought). Bubbling beneath all this like the rapids of the Amazon basin is a worship of the sublime in Nature, myth and ambition itself, be it explicit in depiction or implicit in subtext.

Through these surrealist and romanticist means 'Aguirre' achieves its own sublime state of meditation: man's foolish ambition to achieve the unachievable, unchecked, becomes the blind will to conquer all, and is hence devoured by the "vile obscenity" of its own nature, much like Aguirre's mad quest for fabled gold is swallowed by the Amazon. Its ultimate transcendence however lies in its impermeability to explicit interpretation, the inadequacy of the written word to fully describe its meaning. In plain terms, it is a masterpiece. To call it one of the greatest films of all time is no folly.

How to lose friends and alienate people (2008)

they took my goddamned teeth

The shallowness of the big time leaves you kneeling in humility (the ignominious kind) begging for more 'cause it's all you have after you've been left disillusioned by chasing obvious (duh!) plastic things in the name of the good life. That La Dolce Vita is the central shrine of homage is a quaint touch complimented by a cute shuffle from Kirsten Dunst (who is otherwise forgettable, as usual), but nothing more.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Knavish big budget foolery that's nonetheless breathtaking in that sci-fi nerd kind of way, Planet of the Apes achieves if nothing else the questioning of prejudice. If often times it all seems a bit dumb, by the end you feel a bit hoaxed. It's a sucker punch, especially to the critic who mulls each detail, looking for weak points to expose the myth, to call out the prophet as a charlatan. Meanwhile, running with the thesis, it should have been obvious all along, and we were gullible enough to be strung along.

A group of astronauts are sent on a deep space expedition, the apparent objective of which is as much to prove the theory of time condensation at near-light speed as it is to explore and conquer outer space, expanding "our" (American) empire. Shit happens and they crash on an unknown or unplanned planet; the female trooper dies along the way, her corpse a prescient ape-like effigy. Soon they discover life, and a species of mute hominids, but are then captured by talking, riding, weapon yielding apes, the kings of the food chain on this "upside down" planet. When the apes in charge of the plainly dumb, backwards religious orthodoxy discover that Taylor (Charlton Heston) is smarter than they are, they persecute him out of fear.

The spine of the narrative is a tired diatribe of a kind of Victorian renunciation of scientific heresies, the stupidity of which is only eclipsed by its sheer audacity as a red herring. The entire thing is in fact a marvellous deception, yet, there's the thing. It makes sense, but only in hindsight, and thus doesn't evoke transcendence, because pulling a trick from up your sleeve - as opposed to directly relating sublime experience - never will.

And then there's the diegetic speeches and monologues, smug at times, used as short cuts to grand ideas, typical of director Schaffner, who is as annoying as ever. While taken as a whole, this thing is a bit of a mainstream farce, the great consolation is that it manages to be auto-critical, what with its ending on a cloud of doubt on the merits of scientific knowledge. Credit it also for at least pledging its nihilism early on, and after much silliness in between, ultimately sticking to it.

Wendigo (2001)

Wendigo - misty spirit of the land

Wendigo is as much an ode to the mythic imagination of ancient times as it is a simple but effective horror flick. Boring as hell for just under an hour, when the shit hits the fan, it sticks, and we're forced to look inward for eternal truths now lost (forgotten) in modern times. Top notch as far as early 2000s indie horror goes, back in the days before the youtube generation exploded onto that scene and turned it into an excuse for masturbating in public.

Suspiria (1977)

As made by seminal giallo maestro Dario Argento, Suspiria will perhaps best be remembered for its unnerving, heart stoppingly gruesome opening sequences, including one of the most logistically stunning set pieces in film history. But throughout, it's a cinematic marvel of thematic aural and visual entanglement, defined de facto by the neon reds, blues and greens of its nightmare probe into the occult.

The naively curious Susie Banyon (Jessica Harper, pedestrian but not terrible) is the overgrown American, clueless ingenue fumbling her way through a series of mysterious events.

The power of suggestion and subconscious projection of fear drives the psychological, subtextual roadmap for the visual narrative of murderous demons, murmuring spectres, and conspiring witches. Apart from a campy, anti-climactic ending, the payoff is always in bucketloads of blood and squeamishness. Cult.

Danger is always off-screen, metaphorically encapsulated, or otherwise obscured from view, creating a consistent negative space which maintains a creepiness that subtly increases tension and apprehension.

The only let down is the self-nullifying resolution out of apathy, and though there is a recognition of absurdity, it's not nearly as terrifying as the buildup would suggest, giving us riddle instead of conflict. Yet even so, Suspiria is a masterpiece of the genre not to be overlooked.

Easy Rider (1969)

Easily misconstrued as merely a sarcastic look at the plight of the counterculture and its ill defined ideas of simple minded freedom, Easy Rider is rather an astounding psychedelic fever dream of hypnotic, intoxicated meditation. Dennis Hopper's one big directorial hit and an inspiration for a generation, it starts as a simple search for freedom, but by the end finds the promised land a waste land of desolation, a paradise lost. It is in fact an anthropomorphic American reverie of another lost generation in mourning for what could have been.

Two chilled, distilled bikers, Wyatt (Peter Fonda's Captain America) and Billy (Hopper), deal drugs with Mexicans and new money brats to fund a cool trip to Mardi Gras (free fracas down South). Along the way they meet a series of morons, sideshows, and sex, culminating in an LSD bad trip, one of the most memorably haunting, _naked_, yet still humorous sequences of dementia and torment in film history.

Initially, their effervescent cool carries them through in a manner only hippies of the era could fashion, but gradually, subtly, it fizzles out. The fun never lasts too long, the highs are repeatedly cut short, muted, and distanced from positive audience indulgence. Instead, the growing disillusion is, perhaps despite itself, painted thick with a remarkable visual flare that somehow captures the subconscious of a people busying themselves with a series of short term thrills as a means of ignoring the decay. What makes this flick great is that these effects serve the overarching tropes of an extra-textual legacy: America -- like an aimless hippie looking for the right things in the wrong places -- as a self destructing organism.

"We blew it."
- Wyatt

We blew it, man, and nothing can make up for the time however wasted, in other words. That it was indeed wasted is generously hinted at with those lingering words. The general idea, granted, is that we (America/The West) fucked up big time somewhere along the line.

While seemingly knocking easy targets of the America of governmental oppression, capitalism, and backwards hicks, the film reaches a point of nihilistic abandon so as to ignore the political and social memes and lose itself in the ride to free oblivion, gazing long enough to see the abyss stare back at the chaos and ruin inside itself, until what's left is a cold shrug at freedom in flames.

A Parable

I like the chaotic nature of life, it keeps me going.

A man likes chaos, or the appearance thereof.

What do you mean appearance.

Chaos only seems so before a man understands its cause.

And once you understand...

You can struggle with it, and ask a man for guidance.

But why _choose_ to struggle?

Without struggle a man loses respect for life.

But sometimes the struggle is too great, and you despair.

Then a man has learnt a lesson, and must choose again.

And so it goes on and on... seems pointless.

At some point a man begins to choose wisely.

I'm not that stupid. Victory is always uncertain, even for the wise.

A man leaves victory for the vain, victory is impermanent.

But then what's the point if not victory? You want your life to mean something.

A man learns, then passes his knowledge on to others.

But what if you never learn?

Then a man does not trust Whatever gave him life.

But you can trust in God and still make mistakes, still be wrong.

A man must not be afraid of making mistakes, else he will never learn.

A man is going in circles.

Then already he learns to read time, but he must learn patience.

Time is a repetition of cycles, you mean?

A man has said.

But each cycle is a lesson?

A man is learning.

There is always doubt though, gnawing at you like a cancer.

Then a man fails to choose.

But sometimes the choice is ghastly, or the effects of the choice appear so to others.

Then a man must trust his judgement.

No matter what?

If that is a man's choice.

But I don't want to be vicious and I also don't want to be weak.

A man can be both or neither.

Enough riddles. How can I be strong when the laws of men force you to be weak?

One cannot force a man to be anything.

You know what I mean, you're forced to follow.

A man wants freedom, but does not want to leave.

There's nowhere to go. Man owns all habitable land. I'm not some hippie shitstain to die in a pointless hole.

Then a man must stay and be content.

I refuse to be content with laws protecting the cowardly, the stupid, the weak.

A man judges others and not himself?

I know my flaws, I work dilligently to fix them.

A man is wiser than he looks.

Thanks, but it's just so frustrating sometimes that people are so stupid.

A man must accept stupidity as an eagle accepts the wind.

That doesn't even make sense, an eagle welcomes a good wind.

A man welcomes a good idiot.

Whatever. If you're so wise, then you or your god can tell me concretely, what is the best way of life?

Life is its own optimum, a man learns.

So just learning then, is that all?

A man does not tell others how to live. A man lives.

More riddles. Talk straight.

A man wants to know, but does not want to learn.

Okay, my brain is tired. So, you have to live to learn, and learn to live?

A man learns.

Okay.

A man is not content.

But I feel more focused somehow.

A man knows what he must do.

A man must live.