The 1996 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1996

VOTE THROUGH AUGUST 31

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[yoshimori]

Looks like Zulawski's Szamanka [She-Shaman] is not on the list.

And I'm recommending every who hasn't seen it watch Morita's (haru), a movie with maybe 50% "screens", shot at a time before the launch of Internet Explorer. For my money, even better than my other 1996 favorites "Trouble in the Image" and Fargo.

[domino harvey]

Can you please add Welcome to Planet Earth (AKA Alien Avengers) and Pedale douce?

[John Cope]

Please add Yannis Smaragdis's Kavafis (Cavafy) and Everett Lewis's Skin & Bone.

[swo17]

All added, thanks!

[The Narrator Returns]

Could you add Girl 6, Jim McKay's Girls Town, and (it can't help but bother me a little that this breaks the name pattern) Greta Snider's Portland?

[swo17]

Done

[TMDaines]

Watched Piavoli’s Voci nel tempo (1996). Excellent dialogue-free, montage film showing the human lifecycle throughout all the seasons and trials and tribulations of a small Italian village. If you like many of Marker’s films or Le quattro volte, you will love this. I previously watched Piavoli’s Nostos and found it quite undecipherable, but this was right up my street with much broader appeal, whilst remaining truly poetic.

[knives]

Could you add this pair of shorts to the list.

The Solomon/ Brakhage collab Concrescence is a relatively new discovery of mine, but instantly flew to the top of my optical printer films list. I’ve seen it three or four times since and would recommend everyone else to do the same.

Alternatively, How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels is an old favorite. It’s incredibly Borowyczk influenced with this sense of a metaphor you can’t entirely place.

[swo17]

Added

[knives]

Drifting Clouds is far from Kaurismaki’s funniest work, but it’s also one of his gentlest as he lets spirit be enough to get relief from the toils of life regularly throughout. In a lot of ways this plays the opposite of The Match Factory Girl. A little more action is filled in and the story just has a ton more beats to it. This, I suppose, is a Kaurismaki action film then as in it is full of incident that is expressed through actual action and movement. The point of it all seems to be a way of engaging with reality bound fantasy. This poor woman is put through the wringer of a nasty culture yet gets reprieve after reprieve in a way that doesn’t even feel the need for added relief.

A bit more obscure, and missing from the Masterlist, was a fun little television movie by Ted Kotcheff, A Strange Affair a.k.a. A Husband, a Wife, and a Lover.

Before I get to the movie itself I just want to express how I really think the reputation of American television movies as a black hole of quality is really exaggerated. In the last few years I’ve been going through them and there are a lot of gems which make up in budget with daring often presenting things in ways you’d never get away with in the theatrical sphere. This one for example while it fits the woman trapped in matrimony genre to a tee manages to go to places far weirder than I would have expected from its Sirkian logline. The movie keeps Judith Light, who is far better here than I could have expected, physically stuck and frees her at least by degree through the event which permanently damns her. It’s a kind of wish fulfillment via payback which never comes to full pleasure. What’s inspiring in all this is how she manages to buck convention while the film affords everyone happiness. It’s as if the boundaries of expectation are the only villain akin to Theorem.

I do think a negative is how passive Light is. She has one great active moment before she’s chained to her husband. From there each step to her freedom is pushed by her lover or her husband. She’s not ever afforded to create her own freedom. Yet I can’t help but think that perhaps this is a deliberate choice. After all how many women at the time could mandate their own freedom.

[swo17]

I added the Kotcheff

[Yakushima]

Swo, could you please add Supermarket Woman by Juzo Itami? Thanks.

[swo17]

Done

[the preacher]

To be added, if you please:
Celluloide (Carlo Lizzani)
Phenomenon (Jon Turteltaub)
The Spitfire Grill (Lee David Zlotoff)
Daylight (Rob Cohen)
Jägarna (Kjell Sundvall)
Moebius (Gustavo Mosquera R.)
Sol de otoño (Eduardo Mignogna)

[domino harvey]

The Spitfire Grill (Lee David Zlotoff)

I never saw this, but I recall this being one of the first (perhaps even the first?) pricy Sundance acquisition flops— is it any good?

[swo17]

I've added all of those

[the preacher]

The Spitfire Grill (Lee David Zlotoff)

I never saw this, but I recall this being one of the first (perhaps even the first?) pricy Sundance acquisition flops— is it any good?

Well, I guess a melodramatic tearjerker with good storytelling is not an easy recommendation nowadays.

Elmer Bernstein’s main track from the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird is heard at the beginning of the movie, as a hint of what was attempted...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBISMUzU0Xo

[knives]

Could you add Ivan Maximov’s Strings? It’s really fun seeing Maximov’s still not fully formed. Especially with the use of color this reminds me of some of the weirder background stuff reminds me of Masaaki Yuasa.

[swo17]

Added

[knives]

I really hope everyone is running to Super(market) Woman which continues to prove Juzo Itami as one of the best filmmakers ever. It’s another classically styled cartoon of comedy this time reminding me of Bogdanovich and not just for the bonkers ending. This time around around there’s this fablistic tale of a simple hero saving the honest people from demonic deception. This of course is told through puns that don’t translate into English at all (the title is the one I get playing off the name of a supermarket in Japanese which is just super). Fortunately each minute has fifty other types of jokes to cover for that as Itami presents a sincere vision of serving an audience while dealing with artistic integrity.

It really is fascinating that the main theme of the film is artisans working where money is convenient and the responsibility to adapt to that condition. It reminded me a lot of Alan Clarke, the person not his films, as he tried balancing artistic integrity and a desire to work in the most popular of mediums. The film acknowledges a supermarket as not the best place for high styled food prep and gives two models in reaction to that: the villainous meat carver who won’t budge acting as if he were working in a fancy restaurant and the good fish master who is working toward his own independent shop as he trains journeymen who are comfortable with a less artistic output. It’s a brilliant metaphor that gets at something I have never seen thought through so thoroughly.

[Lowry_Sam]

I really hope everyone is running to Super(market) Woman which continues to prove Juzo Itami as one of the best filmmakers.

I think I was the only person to vote for his The Gentle Art Of Japanese Extortion for the 1992 list, which was a new discovery for me from doing this project & landing in my top 10 for that year. I was quite surprised not to see it chart at all because I found it to be his most entertaining and thought-provoking of those that I've seen from him. I will put this toward the top of my watch list.

I am usually one to find larger-than-life/broad brush stroke type comedy (especially with slapstick) to be off-putting and wear thin after a while, particularly if a film goes past the 90 minute mark. I initially thought that was going to be the case for Extortion, however when the underlying social critique started to emerge I was able to get past the overstated comedic elements, so I will expect the same here.

[Yakushima]

I really hope everyone is running to Super(market) Woman which continues to prove Juzo Itami as one of the best filmmakers.

I think I was the only person to vote for his The Gentle Art Of Japanese Extortion for the 1992 list.

Lowry_Sam, I would definitely second your vote for it, had I discovered these list projects earlier!

[andyli]

I really hope everyone is running to Super(market) Woman which continues to prove Juzo Itami as one of the best filmmakers ever. It’s another classically styled cartoon of comedy this time reminding me of Bogdanovich and not just for the bonkers ending. This time around around there’s this fablistic tale of a simple hero saving the honest people from demonic deception. This of course is told through puns that don’t translate into English at all (the title is the one I get playing off the name of a supermarket in Japanese which is just super). Fortunately each minute has fifty other types of jokes to cover for that as Itami presents a sincere vision of serving an audience while dealing with artistic integrity.

It really is fascinating that the main theme of the film is artisans working where money is convenient and the responsibility to adapt to that condition. It reminded me a lot of Alan Clarke, the person not his films, as he tried balancing artistic integrity and a desire to work in the most popular of mediums. The film acknowledges a supermarket as not the best place for high styled food prep and gives two models in reaction to that: the villainous meat carver who won’t budge acting as if he were working in a fancy restaurant and the good fish master who is working toward his own independent shop as he trains journeymen who are comfortable with a less artistic output. It’s a brilliant metaphor that gets at something I have never seen thought through so thoroughly.

You can count on a second vote for this from me. Saw it in a big theater and the whole audience loved it.

[scotty2]

Could you please add Sokurov's Vostochnaya elegiya Oriental Elegy? Thanks.