Features : Cinelogue

As of April 7th, we at Cinelogue belatedly celebrate our first year out of the womb. Painfully conceived in the minds of the brothers Mesaros, Cinelogue has striven to be a premiere truck stop on the superhighway of film analysis. We celebrate not with candy-filled paper-mache beasts and fermented drink, but with more film analysis. To mark our One-Year Anniversary a few of our writers were asked to submit 10 films of their choosing that they feel have been overlooked – films they feel very strongly should be looked over by any lover of film.

Back in January 2010 the pressure to see Avatar was so great that the few lone holdouts like myself were starting to worry James Cameron and the House Un-American Activities were going to blacklist us all and somehow deport us. Now that passions have cooled and the hype has died down a bit, I thought it a good time to catch up with the film and see what it was all about. Watching it on a tiny laptop screen probably isn’t as ideal as the fifteen-dollar IMAX experience, but if the movie was any good to begin with, it should hold up regardless of the format, right?

On that note, some find themselves entirely swayed by the aesthetic edge of the man’s work. It has been remarked that Park is some kind of Asian Quentin Tarantino. There’s an abundance of irony in that classification, not least of all considering where Tarantino finds most of his best ideas. Beyond that there’s a very different undercurrent to Park’s films- a spark of insight that reminds us that one is a philosophy graduate while the other graduated from a video store. His work is often violent, sometimes pushing boundaries that send casual viewers running for the exits, but it is also steeped in a cautious affection both for people and cinema itself. Park is always looking to unveil more, to dig deeper into both his characters and us.

For all of the themes of entitlement, sociopathy, insularity and the contrast between social and professional codes raised in The Social Network, its narrative is fundamentally framed as a creation myth, something openly referenced at the end by Rashida Jones’ recently barred lawyer. But Fincher gets at this idea far sooner, and in both subtler and more grandiose fashion, almost at the beginning.

The Academy honors popular films and personalities for their exceptional work—it couldn’t be any other way. Yes, for movie snobs like yours truly it isn’t up to snuff, but that’s only because this writer doesn’t value popularity or enduring importance so much as quality cinema, my personal definition of which may require a long dissertation that would best be left for another time or venue. Call it a self-congratulatory spectacle for industry politicos or call it entertainment—either way, the Academy Awards is here to stay. If you look the world over, there are trophy-gifting galas paneled by far more astute minds for more discriminating tastes, but they’re all celebrations with winners and losers.

That entire syntax he came up with in A Bout De Souffle, the shakycam and the jump cutting and the whiplash rhythms, it was all prescient without knowing it, virtually the cloth from which music videos would be cut. You go to it and you go to films like Bob Rafelson’s Head and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance and to little oddments like Dylan’s iconic Subterranean Homesick Blues and the Who’s Happy Jack and the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever and to the lab experiments Todd Rundgren and Devo were conducting. You go to these not just for the DNA signatures, though. You go to these for having the bright idea that you can make little movies from songs without having to pick through Hollywood musicals for surplus or training a camera on some guy and having him sing to it.

In the more than two decades since their first feature, an often tumultuous and uncertain period in American cinema, the Coens have carved their legacy in stone. They have a distinctive voice that will not be silenced nor succumb to the whims of pop culture or pressure from the studios. Whatever your opinion of the duo or their cinema, one can’t deny the tenacity of their vision. Here’s to hoping they persevere and continue to provoke and spellbind us for two decades more.

Through the analysis of the social order portrayed in Seven Samurai, the problems that contributed to Japan’s age of warring states are readily apparent. A combination of lawlessness, constant warfare and a lack of central authority are evident within the film. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s reforms served to address these problems and helped establish a general peaceful order that would last over 250 years. By establishing and freezing the social classes, disarming all but the samurai and conducting extensive surveys of Japan’s domains, Hideyoshi was able to strengthen the ruling class and weaken its subjects, thus putting an end to the strife of the Sengoku period and creating a stable social order that would serve as the backbone of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The story of Kurosawa is more than the story of a man who did this or that, more than an accumulation of successes and praises. It all started with Sugata Sanshiro, a film that effectively punctured centuries of flat Japanese composition with its unchained camera. Kurosawa began by painting in three dimensions, but the innovations wouldn’t end there. Over the course of a dozen films, his increasingly confident style of telling a story with framing and movement, a narrative complexity rare in the cinema of any country at the time, would influence countless artists both consciously and subconsciously.

At the very least we can see, and try to understand, how the other half lives. Most settings are somewhat identifiable and familiar in the general, but few of us know what’s its like to live in a 8’ by 12’ cell. In fact I would venture to guess that our perception of prison is largely shaped by film depictions of it. So this month, Cinelogue presents a series of depictions as we cast our spotlight upon some of the more arresting films of the genre.