Brandon Recommends 31-40:

Aguirre: The Wrath of God by Werner Herzog - 1972

For some movies, transcendence comes early.  For Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the opening shot transports you to a higher plane.  Herzog thrusts us into the Andes, just above the clouds as a conquistador party snakes its way down into the river valley in search of El Dorado to the majestic score by Popol Vuh.  Herzog takes his time with the story, which for me, facilitated completely offering myself to the movie, as the opening few minutes are mostly dialogue-free shots of the Spaniards, their native translators and slaves, and two women in coaches navigating the dangerously steep terrain into the permanently overcast jungle (fitting, as the opening crawl reveals that the party is doomed, the story being told from the remnants of Brother Carvajal's diary).  Soon enough, Pizarro sends out a smaller expedition downriver to scout for signs of either the golden city or unhappy natives, and Klaus Kinski's pride-stricken Aguirre gets placed second in command of the party.  The expedition then becomes a poetic, visually stunning, intense meditation on pride as the root of all sins and man's place in the world.  Having seen pictures of Kinski in the movie before watching, I expected something a bit cartoonish--Kinski stands permanently leaned back and to the side, and his long blond hair and soulless blue eyes are hardly Spanish conquistador material--but the movie is in fact very realistic, and I expect quests for New Spain closely resembled Herzog's mise en scène.  It's easy to see why so many critics have hailed Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and it's a shame Criterion hasn't released a special edition. 

Night and the City by Jules Dassin - 1950

This London noir about Harry Fabian, a down-and-out hustler played by Richard Widmark cooking up another grand scheme is among the darkest film noirs I've seen.  I don't mean morally, either, but rather that Dassin's London is perpetually gloomy, with virtually no fill light.  All the better to explore the seedy underworld, with everyone from a madam plotting to run out on her husband and open her own business to a crooked wrestling promoter and sundry vagrants and gamblers.  This being noir, every relationship has its price, and a murky labyrinth of betrayals quickly threatens to topple Fabian's near-perfect hustle.  Meanwhile, we are given our lone beacon of ethics in Fabian's sometime girlfriend Mary, played by Laura actress Gene Tierney, and thanks to her work, her heartbreak becomes ours.  Dassin's camera breezily makes its way through London's neglected parts, and he makes exceptional use of depth, often layering characters in such a way that slyly hints at the chain of deception.  Moreover, the close shots convey Fabian's turmoil powerfully, and Widmark hurls himself into his hellish descent.  One of the truest adherents to the nature of film noir, Night and the City is a shadowy web of crime backed by an intelligent story, a certain entry in the noir pantheon.  

Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee - 1989

Spike Lee's seminal race film sadly predates Rodney King and the LA riots, but not by much.  Talk about collective unconscious.  Lee's story, about a black street in New York populated by Italian-American and Korean business owners and a whole lot of unemployed African-American and Puerto Rican folks, plays like a short story cycle, my mind flashing to Eudora Welty and The House on Mango Street throughout the movie. In fact, Do the Right Thing evokes an explosive, multiracial Cannery Row.  There's The Mayor (article included), an old drunk about to reclaim both his reputation and the affections of Ruby Dee's Mother-Sister (a Welty name if I've ever heard one), a trio of chorus members who balk at the idea of getting jobs and harp on today's youth, and young Radio Raheem, who carries around a boom box playing Public Enemy's incendiary "Fight the Power" and sporting opposing "love" and "hate" rings on his hands.  Despite its literary feel, Lee's creativity in film is constantly on display, with a memorable central sequence featuring characters addressing the camera with a string of insults until Samuel L. Jackson's disc jockey, Mr. Señor Love Daddy, tells them all to chill out.  Lee's warm filters and sweaty characters remind us of the rising heat and tensions throughout, leading to a calm-before-the-storm digression where Mookie rubs ice on the body of his baby mama, played by Rosie Perez, where Lee's creative camerawork displays only silhouettes of their faces as they say goodbye.  Of course, the temperature's rising for a reason, and the raging climax is an effective staging of the opposing philosophies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., a debate introduced in the opening by a mentally retarded boy named Smiley, who carries around a picture of the civil rights leaders, and settled in the epilogue.  After such a masterwork, Crash becomes even less worthy for the Best Picture mantle, but at least Do the Right Thing will be better remembered.

Hannah and Her Sisters by Woody Allen - 1986

The romantic comedy meets the family drama in Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Allen's clearest reflections on the work of Ingmar Bergman, master of the existential family drama.  Of course, bustling New York City is no bleak Sweden, but no matter.  Hannah and her sisters experience as much angst as Max von Sydow, who not coincidentally plays one sister's husband.  The story tracks the parallel pursuits of the family members:  Hannah, played by Mia Farrow, is the responsible one who senses a rut in her marriage to Michael Caine's Elliot, who is infatuated with her sister Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, while, the final sister Holly, played by Dianne Wiest, finds rejection around every corner, and Hannah's ex-husband, a hypochondriac played by Woody Allen, faces the grand questions about life during a cancer scare.  All the while, it's much funnier than the plot would have you believe, and Woody Allen is incredible, particularly in one of the final sequences where he sees a Marx Brothers comedy at a theater.  In fact, the entire cast is astounding, on up to the girls' mother played by Maureen O'Sullivan as the epitome of the boozy old broad.  Without question, the only Woody Allen movie I like more is Annie Hall, and of the eight others I've seen, I haven't disliked a single one. 

Insignificance by Nicolas Roeg - 1985

Based on a play, Insignificance sees icons of the '50s Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Senator McCarthy meet at the same hotel one night to discuss the nature of the universe.  It's a bit bizarre, naturally, since Roeg's directing, but somehow captivating.  As soon as Marilyn Monroe sets out to prove to Einstein that she understands the general theory of relativity using flashlights and toy trains, I fell into the film, no longer thinking about what it's saying about the '50s or free will or America, but instead utterly enraptured by what I was watching.  But what is the film saying?  I think its prevailing theme is the difference between truth and knowledge.  I know Marilyn Monroe and Einstein didn't discuss relativity on the night before Einstein's HUAC testimony, but that doesn't make the scene any less true.  Roeg's confident style features disquieting intercuts and flashbacks and hypothetical interludes that add some gravity to the proceedings--Einstein's guilt over his contribution to the atomic bomb leads to scenes of nuclear bomb victims, while DiMaggio's mind switches from beating someone to hitting a homer, perhaps to cope with his fate.  Insignificance is a bit off-kilter, certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but I found myself loving it more and more as it passed. 

Pickup on South Street by Samuel Fuller - 1953

In the heart of the '50s, in the jaws of the Red Scare, Samuel Fuller released this noir about Skip McCoy, a pickpocket played by Richard Widmark, who accidentally steals microfilm vital for the Communist movement from a woman with an FBI tail.  Add to this McCoy's city police nemeses, the men who have arrested him time and again, and double agent Moe, an underworld vagrant played by Thelma Ritter (who steals the show), a friend to both McCoy and the cops, and soon enough, the Communist woman, and the skeleton of the plot is in place.  But that's just a set-up for Fuller's confident direction, the interplay of dark and light, and the blazing violence.  Widmark plays McCoy with bravado, always keeping his guard up with a light-hearted facade, but when it comes down to it, he faces the film's dark corners with raving fury.  But I was most impressed by Fuller, whose camera draws us in and bangs us around, savoring those moments of delicious evil, forcing us to face misfortune.  You'd think there might be a bit of commentary given the historical and plot overlap, but if anything, I'd suggest Fuller was saying the purported Communist threat was toothless, and those perpetrating the Red Scare were power-hungry.  In all, it's an excellent crime noir for the Cold War.

Secret Honor by Robert Altman - 1984

Philip Baker Hall's one-man show is magical, his Nixon reduced to a slobbering, scatter-brained narcissist intent on defending himself on camera and tape recorder before, well, you know.  Hall is phenomenal, especially fun to watch as a raving madman, though just as powerful as an earnest believer that he chose secret honor and public shame for the good of the nation.  His stream of consciousness feels genuine, thanks, no doubt, to the ear of Robert Altman, especially when Hall loses track of what he was saying and after a stream of curses, cools down and tells his assistant (via the tape recorder) to edit that last part out.  But more importantly, Secret Honor, a political fable as the subtitle tells us, is a historically authentic exploration of Nixon.  Lucky for us, his office is adorned with portraits of Kennedy, whom Nixon surprisingly respects, but attacks for stealing the 1960 election, and Kissinger, who elicits a string of abuse from Nixon, blaming Kissinger for leaving him out in the cold.  Nixon never admits to a role in Watergate, but repeatedly reminds us that he was not impeached, but in the end he becomes a bit more lucid while simultaneously more slobbery, tying together the rise of China, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and his own unimpeachable (pun intended) nobility, before leaving us with his final repeated words in a dynamic ending impossible to forget. 

Metropolitan by Whit Stillman - 1990

I came across Whit Stillman though Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, which many critics feel is Metropolitan's younger brother.  After loving and living Baumbach's directorial debut, I tried valiantly to acquire Metropolitan to no avail.  Until now, and let me be the first to say the hunt made the movie all the sweeter.  Stillman's story--which received a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination--sees a group of upper class Manhattanites react to a new addition, lower middle class, redheaded Tom Townsend, who rents a tuxedo to fit in.  The kids talk--pointlessly, incessantly, pretentiously, they talk--about grand ideas, from Townsend's socialism (but not Marxism) and attempted Fournier-ism to the dying aristocracy (which they are aware they represent) to group leader Nick (played by Kicking and Screaming's Chris Eigeman) and his hatred of titled nobility.  Underneath it all is a lush jungle of budding romances, shattered illusions, non sequiturs, and other coming of age fare, and the final scenes hammer home that, for all their talk--did I mention these kids like to talk--they are, simply, kids with more knowledge than experience.  For instance, Townsend reads literary criticism because that way he gets both the author's story and a critical reaction--in other words, all knowledge and no experience.  By the end though, I wished I had never seen it so I could devour the film again, but at least now I get to hunt for a copy to buy.

Sólo con tu Pareja by Alfonso Cuarón - 1992

Perhaps our greatest sex director, Cuarón's debut opens, like his Y Tu Mamá También, with a young couple having sex on top of the sheets.  "Couple" is the wrong word, actually, for the man, Tomás Tomás, is a notorious lothario who in the first ten minutes also flirts with his boss and rekindles with an old flame at her wedding.  In that time, we quickly catch on to Cuarón's game:  in the second scene, Tomás disrobes and runs down a spiral staircase, so we know his sexual adventures will lead him on a downward spiral.  At the wedding, right as he and the bride are caught, in the middle of ecstasy, Cuarón cuts to a young boy squirting a water gun, and then to the groom opening a champagne bottle.  And that night, after the wedding is canceled, Tomás' friends tell him to change his ways, for he who lives by the sword, will die by the sword.  If you catch their meaning.  In the first ten minutes, Cuarón's layered script and careful direction tell us all we need to know, and soon enough, Tomás is told he has AIDS by a spurned lover pulling a prank.  But this is a comedy, one that hearkens to Shakespeare, and Cuarón's talented debut leads to a warm, funny conclusion all too soon. 

Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch - 1995

Neil Young's guitar blares between intermittent shots of Johnny Depp's mild-mannered William Blake on an altogether quirky train ride out west in the opening of the movie that spawned the term "acid western."  I mention this only because Neil Young's guitar is one of the many haunting delights offered up by Jim Jarmusch's western, an appropriately postmodern, yet somehow fitting score for such a mythical post-Christian allegory.  We quickly surmise that William Blake is in a Purgatory of sorts, as a forcefully bizarre train passenger confronts him about his trip to Hell out in Machine, California, the end of the line.  Blake will soon go on the run for murder accompanied by a wise native fittingly named Nobody, the odd couple tracked by a trio of bounty hunters.  One night, a bounty hunter asks another if he's heard of Cole Wilson, to which the second responds that he has, for Cole Wilson is a living legend.  "He fucked his parents," says the first, their conversation preparing us for the nature of the acid western.  So much sharper than an anti-western, it takes the legend of the Old West, and inverts it, turning it into a nightmare.  This is not merely about playing with western archetypes but systematically twisting them into something more malevolent.  In acid westerns, the landscape is Hell.  Therefore it's only proper to have such a twisted cast, from star Johnny Depp to supporting players including Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, and Lance Henriksen.  Dead Man is a gripping journey into death set against a backdrop of a twisted Old West, undoubtedly one of the most unique, compelling films I've seen.