JimBell
Posts 149
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7/27/2009 4:09 AM
posted awhile ago
Re:Member Profiles--JIMBELL
Greetings--I'm JIMBELL. When ;you read my reviews or consider asking me something, you might want to know something about my approach to movies.
My focus is on the movie and how it works. I do not have favourite actors or actresses, and I do not care if some millionaire celeb's career is going up or down. How do es he or she further the movie? At one time, I thought scripwriters might be the secret behind good movies, but very few screenwriters build up even a small series of top-knotch scripts. At one time, I also thought that directors were the key to movies I loved, but when I listed all my fav movies and their directors, almost no director's name came up more than once. (There were a tiny number of exceptions such as Christopher Nolan.) Because of the massive amounts of power behind most major pictures, the director is usually much more buffeted by pressures than, say, the solitary writer pounding out a novel.
While I pay a great deal of attention to each picture, I do not really care whether it has been released this year or not. Most of the best pictures will not be released this year. And, really, what does it mean to be obsessed with current movies --that you've seen everything worth seeing up until the present year?
My Fav Films
In the following list, the films I repeatedly rank among my favourites are in bold. I have separated out documentaries.
Films
Accidental Tourist, The
As Good as It Gets
Blood Diamond
Bourne Identity, The
Casablanca
Conspiracy Theory
Diamond Men
Iris—Richard Eyre, 2001
L. A. Confidential
Melvin and Howard—Jonathan Demme, 1980
Much Ado About Nothing—Kenneth Branaugh, 1993
Muriel’s Wedding
Nobody’s Fool—Robert Benton, 1994
Out of the Past—Jacques Tourneur, 1947
Painted Veil, The—John L. Curran, 2006
Shawshank Redemption, The
Spygame
Station Agent, The, 2003
Firm, The —Sydney Pollack, 1993
Princess Bride, The
You Can Count On Me—Kenneth Lonergan, 2000
12th Monkey
Aliens, I, II, III
Arlington Road
Black Book
China Moon
Chocolat
Conversation, The
Cool Hand Luke
Crying Game, The
Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Dirty Pretty Things
Dr. Zhivago
Enemy at the Gates
English Patient, The
Exotica
Field of Dreams
Finding Nemo
Foyle’s War (series)
Fugitive, The
Ghandhi
Good Will Hunting
Groundhog Day
Hotel Rwanda
House of Mirth
Jagged Edge--Richard Marguard
Liberty Heights
Lost in Translation
Madness of King George, The
Matchstick Men
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Memento
Midnight Cowboy
Mildred Pierce
Perfect World
Pianist, The—Roman Polonski
Pledge, The
Prestige, The—Christopher Nolan
Rob Roy
Romeo + Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Ryan’s Daughter
Scandal
Scarlet Street—Fritz Lang, 1945
Schindler’s List
Shakespeare in Love
Shine—Scott Hicks, 1997
Sixth Sense, The
Snapper, The
Strictly Ballroom
Sunshine State, The
The Commitments
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
The Girl with the Pearl Earring
The Great Escape
The Killers
The Story of the Weeping Camel
The Usual Suspects
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tootsie--Sydney Pollack
True Lies
Two Family House
Ulee’s Gold
Up Series
Unstrung Heroes
Vanishing Point
Washington Square
Year of Living Dangerously, The
Zodiac
Documentaries
51 Birch Street
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room—Alex Gibney, 2005
Hoop Dreams
MicroCosmos, 1996
Sharkwater—Rob Stewart, 2007
The Take—Avi Lewis, 2004
Thin Blue Line, The
Who Killed the Electric Car?
An Inconvenient Truth
Anytown, USA
Devil Plays Hardball, 2008
The Story of the Weeping Camel (semi-documentary)
The Weather Underground
Wordplay, 2006
I have more than one critical approach to reviewing movies. One: I acknowledge that movie watching is ultimately subjective. So sometimes I write "viewer response" criticism. The key to this type of criticism is to look at myself as much as the movie in order to explain my reaction to what I saw.
Two: Sometimes it is best to simply grant the movie makers their purpose and see how well they achieved it. Of course, I cannot know what the purpose is in some final, authoritative way. Even if someone like the director states a purpose, I cannot simply latch onto that. Rather I have to assess for myself what the purpose or purposes of the movie seem to be, and support that contention. Then I can match the movie against that standard. That said, I can also critique the standard as acceptable or not.
Three: Neo-Aristotelean criticism is an updated version of Aristotle's approach to plays 2000 years ago. Aristotle asked, 'Why do all these people get such a kick out of plays?" and he sat there and observed how they became hooked on plot, and so on. The more modern version often asks what key obstacles the film has to overcome and how well it succeeds at doing that.
Peace.
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Risselada
Posts 2068
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7/30/2009 4:13 PM
posted awhile ago
Re:Member Profiles
My name is Brian but I also go by the nickname Rizzo.
What I like in a movie:
I have tried before to try to figure out and define what exactly all of the films I enjoy have in common, but this is a difficult task. I guess it will be something that I'm always reevaluating.
I will try to describe a few things that I have a penchant for. Some of my favorite words when looking at good movies are "contrast" and "context". Everything about the context matters. Any line of dialogue or character could be great or horrible depending on the context. And for me, I like a context that provides a lot of contrast. Contrast between styles, emotions, genres, pacing, theme, just about any important component. To give an example in the world of music, I love sad sounding songs with happy lyrics, or happy sounding songs with sad lyrics. When you can get that kind of contrast in a film and it works for me, it really works well!
I like films to be subversive in a way, but not films that are shocking just for their own sake. Anything in a film that seems like it is dumbed down or attaching itself to some popular trend just to have more mass appeal and make money really bugs me. On the other hand, some movies attempt to go against the grain just to try to make their own waves, not because going the other way necessarily holds any more truth. I love movies that can achieve a kind of profundity without being pretentious. This usually occurs when things unfold in a way that seem so true and sincere that there is no sense of manipulation or trying too hard by the filmmakers. A lot of times for me, these feelings can only be achieved by a deep mix of absurd humor and sorrow. Something that seems absurd at first, but to me seems so true. Because to me laughter and weeping are the same in their purest form.
I love movies with a morality that I share. A kind of Christian morality of self sacrifice and humility and love for all people. But since the world does not usually operate that way to portray it can involve a lot of pointing out the absurdity of many situations taken for granted. When a film is able to show the world to me from a new angle that seems true to me, this is what I truely look for in a great film.
Whether a film is long or short, fiction or documentary, fast or slow paced, experimental or traditional structure, whatever genre you want to put into it, if it is able to make me feel like I'm connecting to some truth of the world that makes me feel more alive, that is a great film for me.
My reviewing style:
I hesitate to even call anything I've written about a film a review. This is because I more prefer a dialogue about film than just one person's complete assessment. I'm too lazy about trying to formulate my thoughts into one cohesive review as well. Partially this is because I'm such a perfectionist that if I held myself to that it would take me more time to write the reivew than it would to even watch the movie. Also I feel a bit pretentious even trying to do such a thing, as if I felt like that many people would even be reading it. And so my blogs are very fragmented as long or short or talking about whatever aspects of the film experience comes to mind at the time I'm writing. And I say experience because I am really writing more about my phsical individual experience of watching the film at a particular time and places as much than I am trying to assess the film as a preserved entity unto itself, even though the latter is sometimes more of my goal.
Some of my favorite films can be found at this link. I may post some on this actual page later.
My favorite directors:
I've invented for myself an algorithm that I use to personally list my favorite directors. You can read about it at this discussion: My favorite directors (by algorithm) or at this blog post: Favorite directors by algorithm
Here is my ranking as it currently stands:
1. Joel and Ethan Coen
2. Jim Jarmusch
3. Stanley Kubrick
4. Bruce Robinson
5. Hal Hartley
6. Tsai Ming-liang
7. Quentin Tarantino
8. Terry Zwigoff
9. Paul Thomas Anderson
10. Whit Stillman
11. Buster Keaton
12. Sergio Leone
13. Alejandro González Iñárritu
14. Terry Gilliam
15. Mel Brooks
16. Werner Herzog
17. Masaki Kobayashi
18. Jacques Tati
19. Keith Gordon
20. Aki Kaurismäki
This is all I feel like writing about for now. I'll probably make changes to this profile page as it were periodically.
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