My Favorite Movies

a documentary travelogue? a philosophical essay on the nature of time, memory, and images? It's both and probably the most incredible film ever made. Despite the weighty topics it covers, the film always endlessly poetic, witty, and fascinating.

"Isn't life dissappointing?"
"Yes, it is."


Tokyo Story one of the most humane stories ever told on film. Every part of it is perfect - the performances, the tatami shots, the use of 360 degrees of space, the subtleties of the characters. The story is about an old couple visiting their children in Tokyo. Upon arriving, they are treated by their them like burdens instead of beloved guests. The only person who treats them well is their daughter in law, who is a widow. However, the film doesn't simply villanize the couple's children, but portrays them as responsible adults with their own families to take care of. The story may sound mundane but there is tremendous depths to it. There might never be another filmmaker like Ozu, one that derives such powerful and profound themes from the subtleties of everyday life.

An absolutely mind-blowing film, easily the best I've seen from Alain Robbe-Grillet. Intoxicatingly erotic, the film follows a group of post 1968 Parisian hedonistic youths who act out perverse, sado-erotic fantasies in a cafe which the film is named after. The arrival of a stranger who introduces several new games to them triggers a hallucinogenic, baffling chain of events that takes them to an exotic locale in Tunisia, where the earlier role-playing skits enacted by the students take on the most dangerous forms of torture chambers where beautiful young women are chained and crucified. Where these images are hallucinations is not clear, the narrative is so abstract and rarified that it remains a unsolvable puzzle in the same sense as Grillet's first work - the equally dazzling and mind-boggling Last Year at Marienbad.

In a small village in Spain after the Spanish Civil War, a young girl sees the 1931 film Frankenstein for the first time. After beeing told by her mischevious older sister that the monster is a spirit that inhabits near their village. Her fascination with the monster's actions causes her to seek out the spirit. Since the story is told mostly from the perspective of the girl, the viewer is forced to see the world through the eyes of a child. The film is rich with oblique symbolism. It is both a study of childhood innocence and fascination with death and a subtle allegory of the devastating effects of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist fascist regime. Ana Torrent give the best performance I've ever seen by a child. It's impossible to tell that she was acting at all. There is minimal dialogue in a story told most through images. I like how one critic describes this film as more of a painting than a motion picture. They are incredibly beautiful and haunting paintings. The tiny figures of our protagonists amid the golden, empty plains make up some of the most unforgettable images in cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive is a film that haunts you long after you see it.

The greatest silent film I have ever seen. Such poetic and dreamy images, graceful camera movements, and bold montages distill the film with its archetypal characters into a purely emotional experience. 3epkano's (Zerkalo in Russian) score adds an otherworldly aura to the film. It feels classical yet modern at the same time. Hands down the most amazing movie going experience I've ever had.

A film composed almost entirely of still images? Surely not. A bold experiment that works brilliantly as a new form of storytelling. The story explores the themes of memory, fate, and obsession. It uses no dialogue but instead a voice over to tell its poetic and philosophical story. Marker has created one of the best and most influential science fiction films ever. Gilliam adapted this short into his full length film 12 Monkeys. It undoubtedly influenced films like Blade Runner, Dark City, and City of Lost Children which also deal with themes of memory and loss introduced in La Jetee. Marker pays homage to his favorite film Vertigo in one particular scene and in various elements of the story. A lot has been said about the still images, which I think precisely emulates what our memories are. We remember the past not as moving pictures, but ones that remain forever still.

La Jetee has one of the greatest moments in cinema, one that is very subtle and last only a couple of seconds. A moment that captures both the birth of cinema and the essence of love and memory.

La Jetee can be seen on youtube but is best appreciated on the big screen with English dub.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw0UIhLArTM

It's awfully hard to decide whether this film, or the Decalogue, or Red is Kieslowski's best work, but this is definitely his most mysterious and abstract film. In an otherworldly performance that earned her the Best Actress award at Cannes, Irene Jacob (who learned to speak Polish fluently just for this film) plays the dual role of a pair of doppelhangers, both of whom are gifted with beautiful voices. When one dies, the other senses it and avoids making the same mistake that led to the other's death, even though they have never known each other's existence. Kieslowski here is suggesting a mystical and spiritual connection between their souls. This is one of the most metaphysical films I've ever experienced. To say that it is a minimalistic film due to the lack of dialogue does not do the film justice. It is an unique visual and audio experience. The soul-shattering score is completely diegetic - its source is within the narrative. Likewise, the use of motifs such as reflections and strings suggests the character's duality and their connection. The Double Life of Veronique is a film that does not provide an explanination for anything, rather it's a film that make its audience ponder the mysteries of the human soul and its desire for connection.

ps. Amelie fans should will notice that Jeunet pays homage to the sequence involving Veronique and the audio cassette in Amelie, which pales in comparison to that of Veronique.

I don't know what to say, I mean, what is there to say about a classic so universally enjoyable, so perfect. I could say that Giulietta Masina's performance here is one of the greatest ever, but that's meaningless because words simply cannot do full justice to it. Oh yeah, the ending is absolutely haunting and unforgettable.

This is Krzysztof Kieslowski's magnum opus. A series of ten episodes, each loosely associated with one of the Ten Commandments, each filled with complex moral dilemmas.

The one's I've seen so far:


Decalogue I - 5/5
Decalogue II - 5/5
Decalogue III - 4/5
Decalogue IV - 4.5/5
Decalogue V - 5/5
Decalogue VI - 5/5
Decalogue VII - 3/5
Decalogue VIII - 4.5/5
Decalogue IX - 5/5
Decalogue X - 5/5

The most romantic film ever. Wong's most subtle, mature, complex, profound... I can go on and on... work. The film can be very disorientating as many of the scene plays with you expectations and assumptions. For example, subsequent shots of Leung and Cheung together in the same set seems to be parts of the same scene, until you realizes that Cheung is wearing a different dress. Even more important and interesting is the dialogue between the two cuckolded spouses as they pretend to be each other's spouse. This raises a lot of ambiguity in their words. This further raises the complex question regarding whether our own words are confined by our social environment, just like Leung and Cheung's characters are confined by theirs. Wong has perfected his eliptical narrative and introduced a new claustrophobic aesthetic that suits the film perfectly. One thing particularly was the blocking of film which gives the viewer a voyeuristic perspective of the characters. Also, the camera often stays on a character's torso or back instead of the face, and often lingers on a single character during a dialogue. Both are used so that the viewer never gets to see the cheating spouses' faces. The ending elevates the film to a level of profoundity above all of his other films. It's almost like Wong took a page out of Antonioni's book. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the film is the last intertitle of the film, which offers a new interpretation of the whole film:

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees it blurred and indistinct.

The film tells two parallel stories of two people searching for their families in the vicinity of the presently-completed Three Gorges Dam project- a massive hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River that submerged entire towns and displaced 1 million people, just another cost in the modernization of a nation. However, the loss of their people's homes serves as a background. The film charts the tolls of modernization on the family structure of the protagonists. One woman looks for her husband who she hasn't seen or talked to for 2 years because he was sent to manage the project. The film looks great, as Jia uses the grand vistas of the Three Gorges to full effect. Like his other films he uses mostly nonprofessional actors for realism. There are some curiously surreal moments which I'm not sure how they fit into the film.

Dong

The companion piece to Still Life is even more bizarre. It's a documentary that when seen with Still Life mocks the barrier between fiction and documentary. Jia's films always had a edgy documentary feel to them, and this complements those films perfectly.

Absolutely amazing. Probably my favorite of the trilogy (slightly above L'Avventura) although I haven't seen La Notte yet. Such a beautiful film, every frame is like a modern art photograph. The ending is one of most amazing and haunting ever. Monica Vitti is a goddess.

A self conscious, postmodern film on growing up during the Cultural Revolution. The story is told from the perspective of a young man too young to be sent to the distant provinces to work and as result live without the supervision of adults. It's fascinating to see the way kids live in such a unique social environment. The closest comparison I can make is The 400 Blows with the thematic sensibilities of Blade Runner. The lead performances are excellent. When I first saw this years ago I made the mistake of turning it off when the credits started to roll and missed that WTF moment at the end. For fans of Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine or Zhang Yimou's To Live, this is a unique perspective of this time period. Jiang is a like a missing link between the 5th and 6th Generation.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Pride and Prejudice


While this statement is not relevant to any leading man in the story of Late Spring, Austen's famous line does underline the irony in the beliefs of the relatives and friends of Noriko, the main character in the film. Almost past the prime age for marrying, Noriko is pressured by her relatives and friends to a traditional arranged marriage. Yet, she is perfectly content with her life with her widowed father, with who shares a close relationship unlike that of a traditional father and daughter. She argues with her father, who unselfishly wants to see her married, who will take care of him once she's living with her husband? Her father tells her that will solved by him remarrying, a concept that she opposes. Throughout the film we never see the groom, not even a photo of him. Likewise we never seen the wedding take place. Why? Because they are useless to the film. Ozu uses ellipses to skip these scenes which a typical movie would normally highlight, instead he focuses on the small, private moments of life that says the most about the characters and their emotions. Late Spring is quintessential Ozu, and his most perfect and thematically focused film. The emotional intensity it achieves will never be matched.

Jia Zhang Ke is one of the most talented young directors working today. This might be my favorite of his work, perhaps because I can relate to its characters the most. I love his gritty neorealist style that captures the lives and problems of people in a time and place that is undergoing huge social and economic changes. The story is about two teenage boys with no goals, directions, or future. They have no jobs and little money. They feed off of pop culture such as Pulp Fiction and Chinese pop songs, when their lives couldn't be farther away from these distractions. Jia's pacing and plotlessness might turn off some viewers, but his concern is realism, which he uses to capture the social-economic alienation and spiritual malaise of the one-child-per-family generation.

Jean-Pierre Melville's opus about French Resistance fighters of WWII is his most personal film. It is stylish, grim and so meticulously perfect. This is even better than Le Samourai. Melville draws on his own experiences as a Resistance fighter and combines them with his own meticulous attention to detail to give his film unparalleled authenticity. Not a single shot is wasted. The cast's performances are just as restrained as the film itself. Melville gives touches of his gangster films to this film as well as a fatalistic and existential feel to the story. There is no sentimentalism in this masterpiece, just hard hitting realism and an insightful look at heroism and patriotism.

This film has an utterly intoxicating atmosphere of 60's Hong Kong. Looking back at WKW's career, this is definitely his most important film. This is the film in which Wong Kar Wai became Wong Kar Wai. The cast is spetacular, especially the late Leslie Cheung, whose character has the magnetic charisma that emulates the likes of James Dean. The cinematography of Chris Doyle is not as mind blowing as his later collaborations with WKW, but it is more subtle. The washed out monochromatic filters, mirrors, and angled shots mixed with exotic rumba and hawaii guitar music creates a nostalgic feel of the 60's that not even its sequels - In the Mood for Love and 2046 can duplicate.

An incredible film about faith. While similar thematically to The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet offers a much broader and deeper scope than Dreyer's earlier masterpiece. In a rural and very religious town in the 1920's, the Borgens is a simple family of peasants. The proud patriarch of the family Morten Borgen lives with his three sons. The eldest son, Mikkel, is an agnostic whose wife Inger is pregnant. The 2nd son Johannes has gone mad from his relgious studies and now believes that he is Jesus. The youngest son Anders is in love with the daughter of a Christian fundamentalist who refuses to offer his daughter to Anders due to his disagreements with Morten on their approach to faith. Tragedy ensues as Inger dies from complication of giving birth, leading to an unforgettable ending. Dreyer pits the concept of religion against the concept of faith and spirituality. True faith as it turns out is in conflict with the beliefs of even the most religious people.

My second Cassavetes, it's definitely superior to Shadows. Like his first film it has a very raw, edgy feel with great performances by all the actors. John Cassavetes lends such great depths to all of them as we see how emotionally dissatisfied they are beneath their hollow laughter and content facades.

A detective retires due to his acrophobia (fear of heights), but is called to do an unusual assignment for an old friend. He wants the detective to investigate the strange behavior of his wife, who appears to be possessed.

On the surface Vertigo appears to be another intriguing Hitchcock thriller. As one peers further into the film it becomes clear that it is a psychological drama, a study of a man's obsession for lost love. Another misconception is that the film should have ended sooner after the twist is revealed. The part after the twist is just as important as part before. Stewart, who plays a much darker role than usual. and Novak, who shows excellent range, are simply amazing. Hitchcock's imagery uses the swirling pattern of many things such as the staircase to symbolize the dizzying chaos of not only that of vertigo but also that which the protagonist find himself sinking deeper into. Even Bernard Herrmann's swirling score mirrors the protagonist's vertigo. Vertigo is Hitchcock's most disturbing, sexual, haunting, and deepest film.

The quinessential Tsai Ming Liang film. An affecting portrait of modern alienation in Taipei. Three lonely people unknowingly share a luxury apartment for sale. This idea came from the fact that the real estate industry boom in the 80's left Taiwan with the highest rate of unoccupied homes in the world. The film is very Antonioni-esque but with an extra dose of minimalism and deadpan humor and without the brilliant visual compositions of L' Avventura or L'Eclisse. This being his second film, Tsai hasn't yet perfected his visual style.

Worth seeing just to see Jean Renoir in a bear suit.

Chungking Express may be the reason I love movies in the first place. WKW has taken his themes of urban disconnection, identity, and memory and infused them with the Goddardian and MTV visual style. The result is one of the most energetic, exciting, and refreshing movies ever. Even so, I still believe this film is underrated because most viewers fail to pick up the dual layers of this film. WKW constantly plays with the theme of identity. The second story can be interpreted as two characters who constantly change each other's values and personal preferences which define who they are. Much of the casual dialog carries multiple meanings as well. The performances were all excellent, but Faye Wong, who in her debut role easily steals the show. Hearing California Dreaming will never be the same again. It will always take on the personality of the elfin-like Faye.

ps. Amelie fans should notice how Jeunet took some of the elements of Amelie from CE, yet CE is by superior and more sincere by far than that pretentious Tatou vehicle.

Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical debut feature is one of the best films about the pains and anxieties of childhood. It tells the story of a neglected and misunderstood boy who lashes back in rebellion by running away, skipping school, and committing petty crimes until his parents are forced to institutionalize him. Jean-Pierre Leaud gives an unflinching performance as Truffaunt's alterego. I'd say it rank amongst the finest child performances ever. In the scene with the psychologist, Leaud's response to the psychologist's questions are said with such honesty and naturalism. The ending of the film is absolutely breathtaking. My jaws dropped at its sheer beauty and pathos.

Another great film by the master of family drama. The dissolution of the family is once again a major theme. Like in Late Spring, the great Setsuko Hara plays a single woman in her late twenties who is pressured by her family into marriage. Unlike Late Spring, Hara's character is a modern, more rebellious type of woman, or so it initially seems. Is she driven to her actions by her selfish and independent lifestyle, or are her actions driven by something else? The outcome however is the same. The motif of trains and tracks symbolizes the increasing distance between the different generations, both physical and emotional. Ozu's films are never heavily driven by plot, but by a sense of the realism of casual everyday life in order to capture those small pleasures and disappointment that life comprises of. Despite their surface simplicity, they are rich and sincere. This film can be considered the second part of the Noriko trilogy, bookended by Late Spring and Tokyo Story. It's the most lighthearted and comic one but no less poignant.

No. of camera movements: 7 (gasp! Too many for an Ozu film!)

The Godfather of Taiwanese cinema. Hou Hsiao Hsien's masterpiece documents the political and social chaos during the birth of the nation through the Lin family, ran by the old patriarch and his three surviving sons. Hou's film builds an elaborate set of relationships between almost a dozen major characters grounded in a volatile social-political environment. Hou's trademark style uses detached long takes and oblique narrative ellipses to make transitions between cuts almost unnoticeable. The repetition of shots works to slowly build up a devastating emotional impact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Hq1AAkiVI

One of the great classic love stories. Very subversive in its simple plot and filled with an erotic tension that borders on sadomasochism. It's impressive how all the scenes were shot on location for a film of this age. Not surprisingly The French New Wave was very much influenced by it. The film also features some great crosscutting between the couple as they are separated. Michel Simon is fabulous as the old garrulous sea dog. He and Dita Parlo carry this film.

"Are you living to shovel, or shoveling to live?"

An entomologist from Tokyo travels to a remote desert to study insect in hope of getting his recognized for the discovery of a new species of insect. A one night stay in a young widow's house in a deep sandpit turns out to be a trap that forces him to adopt the woman's way of life: shoveling sand out of the sandpit everyday to prevent the house from being submerged. His new life thus begins . The endless cycle of mundane everyday activities of eating, sleeping, sex, and shoveling sand out of the inescapable pit, very much like the Greek tale of Sisyphus. It serves as a bizarre allegory on the meaning of life, as the man is forced to question his own identity and purpose in life. How is his new repetitive way of life any different from his old repetitive city life? The man is a highly rational, logical kind of person who is contrasted by the irrational and earthly wisdom of the woman. Teshigahara's camera captures the shifting sands and the landscapes in sharp deep focus and superimposes images of extreme close ups with these landscapes. Tôru Takemitsu's jarring and abstract soundtrack complements the vivid images perfectly.

An incredible cinematic achievement. The realism in its depiction of urban guerrilla warfare is unsurpassed. It feels every bit like a documentary rather than a movie. The reason the film remains so powerful today is that one can draw close parallels to what's currently happening in Iraq. It offers such an informative look at the inner workings of terrorists and counter terrorist groups.

Stranger - We met a year ago.


Woman - No, we didn't.


Stranger - Yes we did.


Woman - Go Away, you're insane.


The End


On a more serious note, this may be the most bizarre yet poetic and hypnotic movie I've ever seen. Resnais takes the seamless transitions between past, present, and future he introduced in Hiroshima Mon Amour to a whole new level. In this film temporal and spacial relationships are completely shattered. There is no sense of which scenes are set in the present and which are set in another time. As a result the film feels like a dream, or rather a nightmare. This has some of the most interesting cinematography I've ever seen. There is this one shot where there are people in this garden.


The people cast shadows, but the triangular trees that align the garden have none. I have no idea how Resnais shot this. The plot is simple: A man meets a woman in a salon and claims that they had a romantic affair a year ago. The woman denies that they have ever met. The man tries to convince her that they did by recalling his memories/imagination of their encounter. I can't say I understood this film and I don't think that there is a solution to this puzzle.

One of the most powerful essay films ever created and a landmark film in the Iranian New Wave. The great Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad directed her only film as a documentary on a leper colony. She instills a dignified sense of humanity and perseverance in these people through her poetry and inventive montage editing.

"Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hiroshima. That is your name."
"Yes, that is my name. Your name is Ne-vers. Nevers in France. "

More than a decade after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a visiting French woman has an affair with a Japanese architect. It is an impossible relationship since both are married. The two form an emotional connection that causes the woman to remember a traumatic prior relationship, which helps her to eventually purge herself of this anguish, but never the memories themselves. Hiroshima Mon Amour works as a documentary on memory. It is also one of the most influential works in film history. The use of seamless and analogous transitions between past and present, memory and reality creates the sense that time itself is shattered. Films such as Ashes of Time, 2046, and Memento owe much of their impact on this innovative editing.

Happy Together is powerful film about the process of letting go of a doomed relationship as well as loniness and dislocation. The way Wong portrays the deterioriating relationship between the male leads allows their relationship to transcend all gender. This isn't a "gay movie" as people tend to label such movies dealing with such subjects often tend to, but simply a film about the relationship between two individuals who happen to be gay. This is how such subject matters should be portrayed, not like some lame coming out story or in anyway that focuses on the sexuality instead of the relationship itself. Stylistically it is close to that of CE and FA but also hints at his later films. Chris Doyle's experimental cinematography uses black and white film stock, oversaturation of color, wide angle lenses incredibly to make one of the most visually stunning pictures ever. The lighting and editing are so impressive. The eclectic soundtrack mixes music from il maestro Astor Piazzolla, Caetano Veloso, and Frank Zappa to generate such a haunting mood. Tony Leung's performance might be his best that I've seen of him, and that really says a lot about such a world class actor. When I first saw it, I liked it but felt it was not among his best works, recently I realized how honestly and sincerely it portrays a deteriorating relationship. This is Wong's most mature film, yet it is able to retain the brashness and youth of his earlier films, something that In the Mood for Love does not have.

This is easily the most misunderstood film by WKW. It works on several layers. On the surface it is a deconstruction of the wuxia genre that the Hong Kong industry thrives on. It deals with the themes of the inability of humans to forget the thing we want to forget the most. It also deals with the theme of what constitutes our identity (ourselves or other people), and what values derives from (money or something else). Overall, it is WKW's most lyrical and poetic film. A vastly underrated masterpiece.

Fallen Angels was originally intended to be the third story in Chungking Express, but WKW decided to keep them separate due to the difference in the tone of the film. Whereas CE is energetic and light, FA is dark and moody. Both share the same sets and locations and the same themes of identity, alienation, and memory. There are many references to CE in FA. However, in some ways FA is better. The lives of these lonely characters, the choices they make, and their growth all make FA more realistic and heartfelt than CE. The editing and Doyle's camera works incrediblely as he uses fisheye lens, handheld camera, and other cool techniques to capture the urban atmosphere of Hong Kong nights. WKW combines the wackiness and violence of HK cinema with the boundless energy of the films of Goddard. The scenes which the killer mows down his target is simply jaw-dropping in style and kineticism. It's like John Woo shootouts on acid and steroids. While at times the viewer might be confused at the anti-narrative, in the end you can't help but feel the loneliness and disconnection of these characters who are in essence fallen angels. WKW is not concerned with telling a coherent story as much as conveying the alienation and existential angst of his characters.