Retail Resistance

Top If Off

It took me 365 days, but I'm finally going to get something done before the deadline. Here's my top five of 2006 with a handful of asides besides. I'm not listing my present five in any particular order.

The Proposition
L'Enfant
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Brothers of the Head
Kekexixli: Mountain Patrol

I'm seriously considering The Descent. Maybe in place of Mountain Patrol. I can't believe I was actually scared for the first time in years. The problem is I watched the commentary afterwards - something I never do - and it clarified the ending. The ambiguity of the ending was one of the things I liked so much about the film and having the director explain it ruined the intellectual mystery of the movie. I'm still trying to get over the disappointment of that. I should have known better.

I also loved the new Bond, excepting the silly poker narration of Giancarlo Giannini. I'm just not sure I can put it in a best of list. Maybe best action movie? Borat was hilarious, but besides the Big Lebowski I'm not sure comedies can come close to greatness. Okay, dark comedies and satires maybe.

The best of list is always open to revision. Especially because I haven't seen all of the movies from this year, and I'm convinced I'll love Children of Men. I also haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth, History Boys, or Half Nelson. The new Chris Marker could also have made my list, but I doubt I'll ever get to see it.

The DVD Straight Up

Michael Atkinson wrote this list of best of films that haven't been in theatres. Evidently,

a legal DVD disc cannot qualify for inclusion in critics' polls and award systems, despite the fact that often the receipts are higher than those a "specialty" theatrical run would garner, and the rentable/buyable indie or import in question is far more accessible and is seen by more people.

The Mother List

The year's list of lists has arrived. The aggregate film critics best of list that used to be the in the Village Voice has migrated to indiewire.com. They always wait to the last minute to produce this list because if they didn't it would make all the other lists obsolete.

Le Chat

Chris Marker has a new movie opening in Neuva York this weekend titled "The Case of the Grinning Cat." Supposedly it's a relative of his earlier "A Grin Without a Cat." Based on the titles alone that seems logical.

During the filming of "The Case" Marker started to chronicle and include in his film the appearances of another cat named Monsieur Chat who was spreading the gift of graffiti with Mr. Chat on Paris rooftops.

We can all watch and enjoy Monsieur Chat's slideshow on Flickr, and I recommend it. Unfortunately, as enjoyable as this is, it won't get any of us outside of New York any closer to the pleasures of Marker's newest film.

MERD!

It's a Wonderful Post

I've come across this James Kunstler post in three different film blogs now. I suppose that's one of the bad things about blogs like these; they tend to have multiple variations of the same thing. I'll leave it to someone else to be a solution to that problem, because if ever there was a blog that Kunstler's reimagining of It's a Wonderful Life resonates with it is Retail Resistance. (Remember our concerns? Film, politics, small business.)

Try and tell me this doesn't belong here. It's like a alternative historical synthesis of either everything we are fighting for, or fighting against.

At a crucial point in the story, Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born. Only the town is named Pottersville now. Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) Prostitutes ply the busy sidewalks. Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place -- the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts -- a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale. Frank Capra could imagine vibrant small towns turning their vibrancy in the direction of vice -- but he couldn't imagine them forsaken and abandoned, with the shop fronts boarded up and the sidewalks empty, which was the true tragic destiny of all the Bedford Falls in our nation.

True That

This isn't just another list of great movies. It's a rallying cry for films that for a variety of reasons - fashion, perhaps, or the absence of an influential advocate, or just pure bad luck - have been unduly neglected and should be more widely available.

Thanks for that introduction person at The Guardian. I know it's Best of 2006 season, but I repeatedly find these alterna-lists more interesting. I'm sure that in keeping with my contrarian nature I'll get around to the 2006 Best Ofs once they've stopped being ubiquitous. I think also due to my contrarian nature Box Office Video has already made these films more widely available.

The Rapture is US

When it comes to the old New World, Mel G definitely subscribes to the "life is nasty, brutish, and short" philosophy. That is, it's all of those things if you haven't been saved, or saved by European civilization. But more on that later.

I've been waiting almost a year now for this movie to surface. It was New Year's day of last year that I first saw the preview. That preview was a spectacle of exotic and demented brown people with the contextualizing quotation, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." That quotation wasn't from the Iraq Study Group, but from some historian named Will Durant that conservatives are fond of quoting - I also found this quotation on the Drudge Report. I was agog at what seemed like The Blaming the Victim of European Imperialism and Racism...and I couldn't wait for more.

But something odd happened on the way to the cineplex; Gibson got drunk and blamed The Jews for all the wars in the history of the world, like the Crusades for instance. Then the movie got delayed, and limbo set in while Gibson did the round of apologizing to all the Jewish Leaders listed in the Jewish Leaders White Pages. But Hollywood can't deny a genius his due and after a while the movie resurrected. Oddly though, this time the preview was recut, the quotation excised, and what was once a statement movie looked to be turned into more of an action movie of heroic individualism.

I was frankly disappointed by this shift in tone. But after hearing how violent all the critics were saying it was I conqered my disappointment and worked my interest back up to see the film, and was delighted that the "destroyed itself from within" quotation was the movie's actual epigram. Yes! that Mel's still got it. And in spades at that. Not only is the statement of the original preview in the film, but the second preview's themes are there as well. It's like two for the price of one. (A $7 matinee price of one, by the way.)

The heroic, Homeric, portion of Apocalypto is a pean to blood and Family Values. Women are on earth to be mothers, and men are here to protect their women and make sure those women beget their ten babies. Hence, the film's two main heroic narratives. The main one, the male one, being whether the protagonist will be able to save his wife's life by saving his own. The more minor but related of the two is whether his wife will be able to save not only the son she already has, but the baby she's carrying. And let me tell you, she does better than that. Thus we are given a female whose heroism is having healthy babies, and her husband who is heroic for his ability to hunt, kill, procreate, and protect his offspring. God bless.

Of course the protagonist isn't the savage that the other Others, the institutionally heathen Mayans of the city are. The main character may be a pagan heathen, but he is no human sacrificer, unlike the other misguided savages with no concern for the value of human life, what with their slaving and beheading. This is where the "destroyed itself from within" part of the quotation surfaces. In Gibson's moral calculus the Mayan moral decay of Urban Elites was so great their empire was obviously past its imperial expiriation date.

The fact that Europeans would soon come and take South America by force was therefore only natural considering how immoral the continent had become. (Never mind the bollocks about the European's slaving and beheading. It's entirely different. And even though this seizure was violent it wasn't war, evidently because the Jews didn't cause it. Maybe that's the difference. War is bad because Jews cause war, but "humanitarian interventions" are good because they come from the barrel of a Christian gun.)

The movie comes to an end after the hero has escaped from urban Mayan Elite Dyscivilzation, fighting to return Home, while dispatching all but two of his foes in doing so. He makes it home in time to save his wife and kids, but is about to meet his very own end beneath the blade of these last two foes until the timely intercession of the miraculous. On his knees, waiting for death with the last of his two enemies standing over him, the three look up, and lo, the Europeans are coming ashore. His two would be killers relent, either under the influence of the sublime, or knowing a miracle when they see one. Thusly is our hero is Saved to return home to his newly minted family of four.

Gibson tells us in the second preview, "Apocalypto means a new beginning." The Apocalypse isn't all hellish and fiery at all; it's a new European beginning for the Saved.

Bleary Eyed Rummy

Not long ago when the length of the war in Iraq surpassed the length of American involvement in WWII Rumsfeld and others all took umbrage at the comparison. They all asserted the two weren't analogous. As if they had never made the comparisons themselves, i.e.. appeasement, Hitler, etc..

Now that Rumsfeld is on the way out he is continuing to not find the WWII/Iraq comparison intellectually honest. On a recent Fox News interview he again didn't use the comparison to talk about public support for the Iraq war, lamenting insufficient propaganda efforts on the part of Hollywood.

Furthermore, the movie industry was mobilized to support the war. They (filmmakers) wanted us to win, which was an important factor.

It's true you know. Hollywood's liberal elites want us to lose. People like Clint Eastwood are attempting to make movies that demythologize war because they hate America. If they would just make more movies on behalf of the Defense Department all of the administration's policy decisions would be winners.

Foxxy Brown Shirts

Looks like someone at The Guardian over there in England has been watching as much Fox News as I have lately.

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto thinks Happy Feet, this season's blockbuster animation, contains 'far-left' propaganda. 'I half-expected an animated Al Gore to pop up,' he said. Zoe Williams decodes the political subtext of the new film - and 10 other cartoons

I particularly like this snippet about the new film Flushed Away, "There's not much in the way of politics here, unless being anti-French counts for politics these days." Well, it definitely does count for politics at Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Found Object Lesson

I don't remember where this quotation came from or how long ago I first stumbled across it. I was cleaning some house and rediscovered it.

Michael Haneke:

But I do not want to provide answers to the questions in my films. Any film that answers the questions that it raises, people will forget immediately; it gets consumed and forgotten. Literature always does that—literature always works with an open structure, leaving the reader to create images for him- or herself. Cinema steals those images from the viewer. What I try to do with my films is to restore that kind of freedom.