Sight and Sound 2022 Round 4: 61-80

Gonna need to rewatch a few of these....

I must say...Céline and Julie Go Boating wore out my patience earlier this week, despite loving it several years ago and admiring Chytilová's Daisies, watched for the first time last month.

it wore me out too...not one I'm keen to revisit.

If I had to vote right now it would be La Jetée

There is a paragraph in Tony Judt's massive Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 where he goes in on how much he hates Celine and Julie, claiming it's when the New Wave began to parody itself. He was wrong, of course. He also digresses about how much he hated punk rock.

Sansho the Bailiff. The cinematography is stunning, the suicide by drowning scene makes me cry every time!

The Red Shoes, probably

I may go with the only Antonioni film I adore, the best film about white liberal racist guilt (Imitation of Life), or The Third Man.

voted for Spirited Away so that it would have at least one vote

i had the privilege of watching andrei rublev with dr morbius, at BAM in brooklyn. i didn't know what to say about it, as we were walking out afterward. i love tarkovsky, and i'm hard pressed to think of anything of his that i wouldn't eagerly watch. i love it all. why that is, i have a hard explaining, as is true with most art that i like

i have a hard TIME explaining

Did Daughters of the Dust go missing?

I've seen all of these except the two Miyazaki, and will try and see at least one of those this week, but this mostly reads to me like a list of films that I admire and other people love. I liked Céline and Julie Go Boating the single time I saw it and wasn't bored at all. I would have voted Rublev back in school but I know I can't bear to watch it again.

how many times have you seen rublev? i've only seen in the one time.

*it

goddamn, i'm sorry for my many millions of typos over the last few years, i really need to just calm down and re-read what i'm posting before hitting submit, it's not hard.

Did Daughters of the Dust go missing?

yes...shit, sorry. I will add it to the next poll!

I've seen Rublev three or four times, including the 200 min Passion of Andrei Rublev cut at least once.

Didn't realise Moonlight had this kind of stature. (I finally saw it a few months ago, and didn't dislike it, to be clear.)

I hadn't noticed these polls. Maybe this can be my cue to finally watch Goodfellas, my remaining blindspot here.

All That Heaven Allows is in the end the greatest Sirk film for me

This will be two Tarkovsky votes in a row for me, but Andrei Rublev is pretty much my favorite movie period. I love it more every time I watch it. There's so much in it. (I always feel bad about the horses tho.)

That's why I can't rewatch.

Moonlight is a beautiful film with a devoted following

A little tired of Goodfellas, will probably vote for The Third Man. Andrei Rublev and La Jetée are impressive, but I think I like The Third Man better.

I love Sunset Blvd. the most of these and am voting for it, but also L'avventura, Le Jetee, Andrei Rublev, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away are all great and deserve votes

Hmm

Sunset Blvd. is the ultimate gothic Hollywood film - a horror film, a mystery, or a love film, depending on where you are approaching it from in life

tossed a vote to a matter of life and death, it deserves one!

the red shoes is the last of these i saw that really blew me away, so that's my vote i guess.

i remember being so excited to see la jetee and being kinda disappointed, but that was many years ago.

sansho the bailiff and mizoguchi in general feel like they are top priority 'need to watch next' films that i haven't seen yet. also rossellini.

the gleaners and i is good but something about its pov struck me as a little out of touch the last time i watched it

the miyazakis absolutely deserve to be here

Only two I haven't seen this time: Journey to Italy and Goodfellas. I'll probably watch Journey at least. Hard to imagine anything beating Celine et Julie, though.

I've loved how those Rossellini films have received deserved reevaluation in the last decade, especially Journey to Italy; they presage beautiful-actress-walks-among-rocks-and-cityscapes Antonioni films by a decade.

Andrei Rublev and La Jetée are impressive, but I think I like The Third Man better.

The Third Man is the one it most hurts me not to vote for. Rewatched it recently, just a perfect film.

Really tough to pick but went with Spirited Away. A perfect movie imho

Great showing for the Brits in this batch. Voting Red Shoes as I think Third Man won't need my help.

Touki Buki is well worth seeing.

Out of the recentish movies to qualify, Moonlight is one I'm confident in thinking will hold on to its canonical status.

Chris L at 12:25 16 Feb 23

There is a paragraph in Tony Judt's massive Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 where he goes in on how much he hates Celine and Julie, claiming it's when the New Wave began to parody itself. He was wrong, of course. He also digresses about how much he hated punk rock.

Celine and Julie is one of those movies that make me love the artform. It’s like something from another planet, but familiar from my dreams.

this group has more personal favourites in it than the preceding. impossible to pick among the two P&Ps and two Miyazakis, so I voted for Touki Bouki

Calzino OTM about the astonishing beauty of the suicide scene in Sansho the Bailiff - Mizogouchi seems to bend nature itself to his mise en scene.

Voted for Celine and Julie, which I discovered through the enthusiasm of a friend who died some years ago - a film about friendship and time, for all time.

I remember somebody telling me about Tony Judt and thinking "this is somebody I should read!" but then I couldn't get through a paragraph, and then I decided I didn't like the person who recommended it either.

I recommend Postwar, actually: read it after Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes. As usual, excellent and not-so-excellent political writers know shit about music.

Agreed, have got a lot out of this and The Age of Extremes, third book I would add to the mix is Louis Menand's The Free World - would look to none of these for tips on film or music though.

The Menand book surprised me. I expected discrete New Yorker essays held in place by Menand's New Yorker-y POV, and while I cringed at times the narrative's compelling, especially when he concentrates on culture and cultural politics.

There was a lot about the architects of US government policies from the 30s to the 60s which was not what I was expecting at all, it was a little difficult to get through at times but ultimately rewarding, feel like in some ways it's a US-centred companion piece to Postwar, which is very much about Europe and only Europe (if anyone can suggest more books along these lines then please let me know)

It’s LA JETÉE or IMITATION OF LIFE

Both are basically top 5 films for me

A Matter of Life and Death

I've shown Modern Times in class three times, each time the students are in awe that a Silent Film Can Be Funny.

The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
L’avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1954)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)
Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)

^^^ gonna be one of these for me

Tough choice among several but maybe Gleaners for me.

It's Spirited Away for me, with Totoro and Andrei Rublev coming close

bunch of actual bangers in this list

The multiple narrators — and the relentless jukebox ost — are good not bad, the film never fucking shuts up in a way that feels v purposeful to me

It looks amazing too, if we’re considering them as a loose trilogy I’d say casino > Irishman > strawfellas (they are all excellent)

I prefer Casino too - merciless.

The Irishman is better than Goodfellas imo. When Scorsese goes on autopilot he's as bad as any bad director. But that definitely does not apply to Goodfellas. Yes the poll is a bit upside down, but it's still a very fine movie.

there's a meta thing at play in scorsese at his best that contains the thrilling notion that movies themselves are sinful

The multiple narrators — and the relentless jukebox ost — are good not bad, the film never fucking shuts up in a way that feels v purposeful to me

It looks amazing too, if we’re considering them as a loose trilogy I’d say casino > Irishman > strawfellas (they are all excellent)

― piedro àlamodevar (wins), Wednesday, March 1, 2023 11:59 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I like the narrators (Frank Vincent even gets in a bit!), I think it really is sort of a meta thing to an extent and also just a bit of trickery too, for the final bit when the narrator gets…interrupted…mid narration. Pesci is more than fine here I think too, def a different take on his loose cannon persona, sort of more strategically brutal vs unhinged. Probably the pen scene is a bit OTT but I appreciate its bloodiness.

And yes can’t underrate how amazing casino looks, it’s f’in gorgeous throughout.

I have a friend who I watched movies with in the past who just reveled in, and I think sincerely admired, the macho evil of the characters in gangster films. It made me repulsed by that kind of glorification of male aggression, and I couldn't see those films the same way again.

I’m not saying Goodfellas is bad since I haven’t seen in in 30+ years, but take for example The Wolf of Wall Street … that whole film seemed intent on making you identify and sympathize with a despicable evil person and his soulless coterie of rapiers, even through his downfall

i really disagree with that reading of wolf of wall street but its reception on this board confounded me generally

it's just so lauditory and self-congratulatory about fucking other people over financially for your own gain, it really celebrates that, and nothing that happens in the film negates that

maybe Scorsese intended something else, but it didn't come through

No one needs to defend Wolf of Wall Street in court. It’s very obvious what the movie thinks about these people and we’ve got 40 years of the director’s other films to back it up.

https://deadline.com/2014/01/martin-scorsese-on-wolf-of-wall-street-a-happy-moral-ending-to-scandalous-stockbroker-expose-would-have-turned-it-into-a-tv-movie-659127/amp/

It’s a movie that says most people are dumb in different ways and intelligence is figuring out ways to corral the greatest number of people in one spot to take financial advantage of them

God sometimes I feel like Scorsese makes things like Silence as a form of self-flagellation

He talks about WOWS in similar ways he talked about Vegas in casino-era interviews, and he’s always had an interest in the way in which criminals are parasites generating money thru fear, intimidation, cons, skims, etc. just bc they’re having a good time doesn’t mean it’s a celebration I mean ultimately despite being a fairly genial dude I suspect Scorsese has a lot of fury at people like these.

Wolf of Wall Street to me bears about the same relationship to Goodfellas as some terrible '80s Neil Young album does to After the Gold Rush. Artists do get worse, even if some of their preoccupations stay the same.

It’s a movie that says most people are honest and trusting in different ways and evil or psychopathic criminality is figuring out ways to corral the greatest number of people in one spot to take financial advantage of them!

Honestly I dealt with con artists targeting my late father in law, I’d be over at his place screening calls during the pandemic and he was a very good dude, very honest, 90 yrs old though and the people coming at him were these 20 to 30 somethings just savagely berating him into paying up. It was relentless. His number must’ve been out there. He never paid up, which was lucky.

That’s a different thing I guess, but their methods were similar, though a lot of it was just fake bullshit owed debt stuff, send us five grand and you’re in the clear etc.

without even thinking about the apparent moral ambivalence of WoWW I just thought it was a very LOUD and extremely annoying terrible movie

I've had no interest in watching Wolf of Wall Street but to call it as a valentine to Patrick Bateman types is absurd. Scorsese films a sequence where DiCaprio is so fucked up he has to drag his body; I'm fairly certain the audience laughing hysterically was not thinking, "Shit! I was that fucked up too!"

Yes, I have no doubt Scorsese has nothing but contempt for the characters in that film. But as with his mobster movies he needs to make it look at least a little dazzling to explain the appeal, and while I can deal with that in a movie about gangsters, when it comes to moral decrepitude people in the finance sector is where I draw the line. Also calz OTM that it's not a good film regardless of these issues - the CGI ocean, the shitty needledrops. The scene of DiCaprio trying to make it to his door while fucked up on drugs has a certain Looney Tunes energy to it tho.

I would say one aspect of both Goodfellas and Wolf Of Wall Street that IS morally questionable though is the fact that both of them were done with the collaboration of the real life monsters they're based on, who have been dining out on them ever since.

But as with his mobster movies he needs to make it look at least a little dazzling to explain the appeal, and while I can deal with that in a movie about gangsters, when it comes to moral decrepitude people in the finance sector is where I draw the line.

why?

Gangsters tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds (much of the mobster movie canon still set in an era where Italian wasn't fully counted as "white") and there's an underdog appeal to these fuckers using violence to succeed in a system that despises them, which I hasten to add doesn't mean I think their actions are defensible. White collar finance dudes don't tend to come from a place of poverty in the first place and at the same time are much less shunned by polite society, DiCaprio in Wolf is a "rebel" in the same way Boris Johnson and his Bullingdon buddies were rebels for trashing restaurants, it's impossible for me to feel any sense of the evil seductiveness of it because the stakes are very different.

I'm not expressing this opining in a prescriptivist manner, like.

The guys DiCaprio hires as he's making his climb are not white collar, they're a bunch of schlubs and misfits who come from outside of Wall Street.

Belfort's a college graduate and the son of accountants.

Yes, and after his career flames out he teaches a bunch of scrubs how to game the system and they love him for it.

WoWS might be the definitive movie of the Trump era so far (coming 2 years ahead of the curve), an era where many entertainers and artists failed to meet the moment. It takes a long look at the people who cultivate great wealth and decadence but still consider themselves outsiders, but also at the level of sycophancy that attaches to men like Elon Musk or Andrew Tate.

The movie is not about those scrubs though, we barely get a look into their lives. It is all about Belfort and frankly, as portrayed in the film, his psychology is just bog standard finance bro shit, I don't think he's anywhere as eccentric as Trump.

He's like Trump in that people feel liberated by his total lack of restraint. He's doing wrestling promos in front of the whole company, at totally unreasonable moments.

Top 250 update: Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard, 1988) has changed position from =84th to =78th. This is due to an incorrectly assigned vote being corrected

— Sight and Sound magazine (@SightSoundmag) March 2, 2023

o_0

No doubt we'll see a few more of these along the way

It took them so long to publish the results and they still managed to screw it up

BTW, that tweet thread includes links to everyone's ballots

guessing someone spelled the name slightly differently and they didn't pick it up, Morbsies was much better-organised.

Way to go, Sofia Coppola: The Heartbreak Kid and Lost in America.

Looked at Martin McDonagh's list and this was his only comment (they defaulted to G1)

"Godfather 1&2 if possible as one choice. If not, just Godfather 1."

Must have been a misprint; everyone hates GFII now.

clemenza...we're all a part of the same hypocrisy. Never think it applies to ILE.

Just wanted to say that if we still posted stuff to Excelsior threads I'd def post this:

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to make up a guy to get mad at

― piedro àlamodevar (wins), Wednesday, 1 March 2023 16:08 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, you can't smugly crow that "the films are widely available now; they're simply better, etc." and then subsequently say that games are played to shake up the canon. Those aren't the same thing.

― Chris L, Wednesday, 1 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

They...are? An old film like Jeanne Dielman would've been a fairly small release in '75. But it was vastly superior to the gangster/banker boy films you are all talking about all along, as the results of the '22 ballot show.

I live in a major metropolitan city and only got to see Jeanne Dielman in a fuzzy old print once, so there's no way it could've been voted on unless you really went to look for this. And even then!

As critics get to see a bigger range, and as these come from a variety of backgrounds it pretty much means the shaking up of the canon (via gamefication or otherwise) will go on.

xyzz, it is so weird that you take critical consensus as some sort of objective measure of quality like you've never been on ILX or something.

like imagine arguing that a writer is clearly superior because they've won a Nobel or an album is clearly great because it topped the Village Voice poll that year. that's what you sound like.

The issue ILM had with the music canon came from this being selected by rockist boomers. It often neglected music outside a narrow range.

S&S are beginning to address this by widening the number and range of voters. And again the range of things that people are able to vote on has increased. This is a very different situation.

As I've mentioned before this widened range didn't prevent The Godfather from getting to #12. So if you want to say that the results "prove" Dielmann is better than The Godfather you also have to accept they prove The Godfather is better than La Jetée. You can't have it both ways.

I am not saying this is perfect and the canon will never align (nor would I want it to) but there is enough here to suggest the effects of both more ballots and availability.

Yes but you keep using that general point, which I totally agree with, to argue these "this proves BY SCIENCE that film x is superior to film y" points about specific films and it just doesn't work like that.

Just wanted to say that if we still posted stuff to Excelsior threads I'd def post this:

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to make up a guy to get mad at

― piedro àlamodevar (wins), Wednesday, 1 March 2023 16:08 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

to argue these "this proves BY SCIENCE that film x is superior to film y" points about specific films and it just doesn't work like that.

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 3 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I am mostly trolling Clemenza, who is clearly uncomfortable by the way things are going.

I'm just fine with "the way things are going," because though I'm immensely interested in this poll, I don't attach a bit of meaning to the results, other than being the transient snapshot Daniel_Rf has described them as. Which is why statements like

But it was vastly superior to the gangster/banker boy films you are all talking about all along, as the results of the '22 ballot show

are so laughable. Because I think you really do believe that.

The Bank Dick 4ever.

Here's a Jeanne Dielman joke, you can objectively determine if it has merit.

People can't believe a 24-year-old director could make a rigorous masterpiece like Jeanne Dielman, but it also makes sense a 24-year-old would make a movie about how cooking and cleaning an apartment could drive you to kill someone.

Weirdly, I associate it with the fact that 2/3 of Tangerine Dream were teenagers when they made their largo in four movements, Zeit. Something about youthful focus. Don't know what Franke and Baumann thought of housework.

Akerman's teenage short film Saute Ma Ville takes place mostly in a kitchen, it's sort of the rebellious flipside of Jeanne Dielman's repression.

are so laughable. Because I think you really do believe that.

― clemenza, Friday, 3 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I do, no joke.