Warning: spoiler-y territory ahead. Well, why haven’t you seen this yet? It’s your own fault for being too busy for movies.

Also yes, I know there’s more than 10 Crazy Jumbled Thoughts about Inception here. I lied, in order to gain your confidence, so I can deeper infiltrate your thoughts while you dream.

WHAT IFS
1. What if Charlie Kaufman wrote this movie? Would it be funnier, warmer? Messier? What if Inception had a baby with Synchedoche, New York? Wow, that made my head hurt.

1B. What if Michel Gondry directed it? (Answer: It would be waaaay more twee.)

1C. …and what if Christopher Nolan made a James Bond film? (Oooh.)

DON’T DO DRUGS AND SEE THIS MOVIE?
2. The BF feels there’s a relation between the slipperiness of film’s core concepts and the things you think/dream up while on hallucinogenics. I think the film is too workman-like, runs too much like a clock, to be terribly related to the wild worlds one encounters on psychedelics… although it paradoxically manages to be both surreal AND real.

SNOBBY REFERENCES
3. There is an insane amount of art and architecture references rippling through this film. A few minutes into this movie they make a Francis Bacon reference? What!? This is a summer blockbuster! Crazy!

M.C. Escher certainly makes an appearance. Los Angeles’ DWP building (pictured above) is quoted. Cobb & Ariadne walk across Paris’ Bir-Hakeim bridge. Cobb’s home looks and feels like a classic Greene & Greene California bungalow. Huge portions of the film’s surface are covered in those most modern of materials, glass, cold steel, and lots of mirrors.

OTHER FILMMAKERS
4. (Slightly spoiler-y) There’s something downright Citizen Kane-esque about Cillian Murphy’s big cathartic moment. This film’s Rosebud is again a simple object from childhood that grows grandiose in stature, fully imbued with serious emotional meaning.

4B. The Pont de Bir-Hakeim bridge sequence feels like another Welles’ reference, when Ariadne locks herself and Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) in a Lady from Shanghai-esque hall of mirrors.

4C. Kubrick’s ghost also slips through the film – everything that waits for Fischer behind the safe’s door is a big visual reference to 2001. Whenever Kubrick’s influence pops up in a movie, it gives me the chills (imagine my fan girl glee sitting through There Will Be Blood).

THE LITTLE SPARROW
5. There’s a double dose of Piaf in this puppy – Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” echoes throughout the film, and Cotillard herself won her Oscar for bringing Piaf to life. Cotillard’s character Mal manages to be even more hysterical and frightening than the often volatile and larger than life Piaf herself. Mal is pure femme fatale, actually – her manipulative neediness has plenty in common with the spider women of film noir past. (And yes, I know that Malmeans bad in French. We get it, Christopher Nolan! She’s a bad lady!)

YES, VIDEO GAMES
6. Come on, you can’t tell me that 3rd level in the dream state (”the snow level”) wasn’t like something out of the Call of Duty video game franchise? Hell, the whole idea that there are “levels” to progress through, layered one on top of another, is a big reference to video game architecture itself. They could make a video game out of this movie, it would be a lot like Heavy Rain with action sequences. Although, it would be really frustrating to get stuck in one of those repeating stair-loops. (Press B! I *AM* pressing B. Keep pressing B, I guess.)

SALACIOUS THOUGHTS ABOUT BOYS
7. Oh I like that Tom Hardy fellow. I have a very woozy weakness for British action heroes. I hope I get a chance to see him shoot a gun again. I’ll have to check out his appearance as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights in the meantime. Oh, that sounds just lovely.

7B. Nobody will ever remember that Fred Astaire walked on the ceiling first, now that Joseph Gordon Levitt has done it. The next time someone does ANYTHING on the ceiling, people will shout “poseur!” until their throats are sore.

7C. This is the first time I think I’ve taken DiCaprio seriously as a man-MAN. I know he’s considered quite the sex symbol, but for example, in the Aviator, I just didn’t think he felt old/experienced enough to play a character like Howard Hughes. I thought he still felt a bit baby-faced even in The Departed, or perhaps Matt Damon just made him seem younger in that film. But in Inception, I fully bought it that he was a man old enough to be haunted by his past.

MAYBE IT’S JUST ME, BUT –
8. I don’t like Hans Zimmer! The score was the most distracting part of this movie for me. The score was doing it’s Zimmer-y thing of going, HEY, don’t forget ABOUT ME back HERE with all these DRAMATIC! BOOMING! MOMENTS! It’s too much. Something more subtle could have worked just as well, but that’s just my taste preference.

MY FRIEND DAVE LEWIS WILL WANT ME TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT ELLEN PAGE
9. Dave loves Ellen Page. When confronted with the choice, Cotillard or Page, DL doesn’t think it’s an easy question to answer. Page’s character in the movie was not as fleshed out as the others, so it’s not entirely her fault that I don’t find her appearance in this film extremely memorable. Still, she does manage to hold her own against the veterans and…um, her complexion is quite dewy in places. There, Dave, are you happy now?

WHO TAKES A KID TO INCEPTION?
10. After our screening, we watched a 10 year old little girl emerge from the theater with her father and brother. Right in front of us, with an anguished look on her face, she asked “WHAT HAPPENED?!” I feel like this movie could give a kid nightmares.

“Mommy…are we real?”

If you have crazy jumbled thoughts about Inception too, hit the Comments box.

How many female filmmakers can you name off the top of your head?

Well, here’s my answer in no particular order:

Ida Lupino, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Lina Wurtmuller, Sofia Coppola, Catherine Breillat, Julie Dash, Penny Marshall, Claire Denis, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Deepa Mehta, Barbra Streisand, Mira Nair, Allison Anders — and now the only Best Director Oscar winner, Kathryn Bigelow.

We now officially live in a world where our little girls can aspire to grow up to win statues shaped like naked men!  But in all seriousness, Bigelow is now a stellar role model to a horde the next generation of female filmmakers who can now learn that being married to someone (and then not married) is not your sole definition, that you can indeed grow older and still be a powerful, beautiful woman that inspires crushes in your fellow directors, making potent works of art.

Happy International Women’s Day Everybody!

Saw this in Munky King on Melrose and HAD to have it.  We walked over after a show at the Groundlings because there was a little group congregated to see an exhibition by Martin Hsu and Andrew Brandou, riffing on the theme of the Year of the Tiger.  I re-watched Reservoir Dogs recently and it still stands up, every moment of it, from Quentin’s ponderous Madonna analysis, to every sashay in Michael Madsen’s ear-slicing dance routine.

Wanna see something else ludicrous I own relating to Reservoir Dogs?

Look at the size of that cabeza. And yes, it is sitting in my garage, near a faded reproduction poster of a Street Car Named Desire, a croquet set, and my fondue pot.  And yeah, we do have a food dehydrator, and no we haven’t used it recently.  What’s funny is people ran off with the lovely visages of Steve Buschemi and Harvey Keitel.  Nobody wanted dear old Q so now he live in my garage.  The Qee, however, lives inside with my other vinyl toys.

My friend Brian and I once toiled together behind the counters of Laser Blazer in the very very late 90s and into the aughts.  Both of us found working at the video store a badge of honor, being appreciators of strange, awesome, or terrible cinema.   Brian is easily one of the greatest cinephiles I have the pleasure to know and to be invited into his home for karaoke and video games is a personal delight.  And look what the hell he’s done, he’s picked his 100 favorite films of the fricken century (modeled after this guy’s post).  Not one to turn down a challenge, I’ll give it a shot too.

Personal Criteria:
- Unforgettable after one viewing
- Re-watchable and/or quotable, often belongs in my personal cinema vault
- Changed my perception of what cinema can be/do/say/convey
- In the case of some titles, told compelling, unique and inspiring “chick-centric” stories

1920s
1 — Cops (Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline, 1922) (pictured)
2 — Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923)
3 — Bronenosets Potyomkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
4 — Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
5 — Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel, 1929)

1930s
6 — Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
7 — Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
8 — Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
9 — The Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy/Busby Berkeley, 1933) (pictured)
10 — It’s a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934)
11 — My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936)
12 — La grande illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

1940s
13– The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
14 — Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
15 — The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
16 – The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
17 — Sullivan’s Travels (Preson Sturges, 1942)
18 — Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
19 — Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincent Minnelli, 1944)
20 — Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
21 — The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
22 — Ladri di Bicicletti (Vittorio De Sica, 1947)
23 — Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) (pictured)
24 — Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)

1950s
25 –  Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)
26 — Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
27 — Tôkyô monogatari (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) (pictured)
28 — Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
29 — Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
30 — Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
31 — Auntie Mame (Morton DaCosta, 1958)
32 — Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
33 — Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
34 — Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
35 — Les quatre cents coups (Francois Truffaut, 1959)
36 — Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
37 — North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

1960s
38 — À bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
39 — L’eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
40 — Otto y Mezzo (Federico Fellini, 1963)
41 — Il gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
42 — A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964)
43 — Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965) (pictured)
44 — Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
45 — Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Sergio Leone, 1966)
46 — Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
47 — Belle du Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)
48 — Koroshi no rakuin (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)
49 — La mariée était en noir (Francois Truffaut, 1968)
50– Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

1970s
51 — Kes (Ken Loach, 1970)
52 — Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
53 — Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)
54 — Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Werner Herzog, 1972)
55 — Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972)
56 — Play It As It Lays (Frank Perry, 1972) (pictured)
57 — Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
58 — The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
59 — Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)
60 — California Split (Robert Altman, 1974)
61 — The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
62 — Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)
63 — Female Trouble (John Waters, 1975)
64 — Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
65 — Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975)
66 – Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Bruno Barreto, 1976)
67 — 3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
68 — Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
69 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)

1980s
70 — Coal Miner’s Daughter (Michael Apted, 1980)
71 — The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
72 — Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)
73 — Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984)
74 — Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
75 — The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
76 — Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
77 — Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
78 — A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1986)
79 — Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
80 — Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
81 — Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Pedro Almodovar, 1988) (pictured)
82 — Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten, 1989)
83 — Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
84 — Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

1990s
85 – Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
86 — Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990)
87 — Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)
88 — Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Yimou Zhang, 1991)
89 — Howards End (James Ivory, 1992)
90 — The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992)
91 — Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)
92 — Trois couleurs: Bleu — (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)
93 — Chung Hing sam lam (Kar Wai Wong, 1994)
94 — Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
95 –Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
96 — Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
97 — The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
98 –Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
99 — Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
100 — Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen, 1999)

Quirky Stats
Directors most represented – Luis Bunuel: 3, Orson Welles: 3, Woody Allen: 3, Robert Altman: 4
B & W to color ratio -  39: 100
Most represented actress: Sissy Spacek – 3 (Badlands, 3 Women, Coal Miner’s Daughter)
Number of films secretly added to this list just to anger/confound you: 3

If you take the 100 personal movies  of the last dang century challenge, please let me know!

Inappropriate:
I like the hot Terminator guy.  Easy on the eyes, but the movies, they are not so good!  In that way, he reminds me of my other favorite, the Stath.

Appropriate:
This fantasy epic packs the emotional & political simplicity of a Disney cartoon for children coupled with magical blacklight-glowing million dollar egotistical-director-guy visuals. Sure, it’s downright beautiful, Cameron’s writing and dialogue are often chortle-worthy in their simplicity. The bad guys are really bad. The good guys are really good. And blue. And the blue guys are living a peaceful existence on top of a ridiculously-named element called ‘Unobtanium’ desired by “the sky people”, namely us – depicted here as imperialistic, blood-thirsty corporate killers (hmm!). Despite the “big budget writing” (read: pretty silly writing) and the Mel  Gibson-y battle monologues, it’s easy to fall for the charms of Avatar, as it takes you soaring through an imaginary iridescent world teeming with life – and the 3D makes it feel even more immersive.

Still, it’s hard for me to say I disliked it, but just as hard to tell you to go see it.  How about this. It’s like a perfect bacon-wrapped filet mignon…stuffed with nacho cheese.  Some people will really wish they could eat that, THIS SECOND, and other people know they would never go there.

At work, we sit around geeking out about movies. It’s our job. Sometimes I wish you could be there, because it gets downright silly and amazing.  This is a list of titles culled from many people, I do not claim total credit. But I DO claim credit for typing it up, you basterds.

3 Men and a Little Lady (ew, you guys)
8 1/2
8 Women
Anaconda
Balls of Fury
Big
Big Daddy
Bigger, Faster, Stronger
The Black Hole
Black Snake Moan
Blow
Bones
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Brute Force
The Cable Guy
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Dark Passage
Deep Impact
Deep Rising
Dick
Die Hard
Dirty Harry
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (a great foreign hidden gem of a chick flick, btw)
Double Impact
Driving Miss Daisy (mentioned by multiple perv-nerds)
Earth Girls are Easy
Easy Rider
Freddy Got Fingered
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Giant
Gigantic
Good Dick
Good Boy!
Good Times (Yes, TV inclusion. Apologies to Florida as well.)
Grease
Guys and Dolls
Hard Eight
Hard Lessons
Hard Target
Hard Times (ew, the non-Dickens version stars the never-sexy Charles Bronson)
Head
Holes
Home Alone
Hot Fuzz
Hot Rod
Hot Shots!
The Harder They Come
The Hustler
In the Heat of the Night
Indecent Proposal
Jack
Juice
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Kiss Me, Kate
Magnum Force
Malcolm in the Middle (TV yes, I know, but also, clearly needs to be on the list)
Midnight Meat Train
The Naked Civil Servant
The Naked Gun
The Naked Jungle
The Naked Kiss (highly recommended lurid Sam Fuller flick)
The Naked Prey
Nuts
Pecker
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Ride the Pink Horse
The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming
Scent of a Woman
Shaft
Snatch
Some Like It Hot
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
Stroker Ace (EWW Burt Reynolds makes my skin crawl)
Swing Time
The Tender Trap
The Third Man
Twins
Two-Fisted Gentleman
Up!
Valley of the Dolls
What’s New, Pussycat?
What’s Up, Doc?
What’s Up, Tigerlily?
The Women

A Tom Cruise 5 pack:
Top Gun
The Firm
Days of Thunder
A Few Good Men
Risky Business

A Pedro Almodovar 3-fer
The Flower of My Secret
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down
Live Flesh

A Woody Allen 3-fer!
Bananas
Hannah and Her Sisters
Melinda and Melinda

A Hitchcock 5-fer!
Frenzy
Rear Window
Rope (for you bondage fans out there)
Young and Innocent
Easy Virtue

And I’m sure the ghost of John Wayne is gonna come for me, but check out how many of HIS titles sound porny:
Ride Him, Cowboy
The Cowboys
His Private Secretary
The Star Packer
Westward Ho
Tall in the Saddle
Angel and the Badman
Big Jim McClain
Cast a Giant Shadow
Chisum (yeah, I’m being that immature right now)
Big Jake

Most pretentious:
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover — God I hate Peter Greenaway.

What happens when you need Viagra? You have A Brief Encounter.
And what happens when you boink the wrong people? You get The Seven Year Itch.

Credits: Netflixians Jon, Lucia & Benji
Non-Netflixians via Twitter: @seepoe @junclecee @frumpy @cowineco @dagamant @strangling @fillup @danellej02 @iomegadrive @xina @damienragsdale

For no reason whatsoever, here’s a picture of Sean Connery in Zardoz:

“There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries and Inner Growth.”

Ha, Werner is such a mega bad ass. Seriously. He hates so much of our modern world and it’s that maverick outsider viewpoint that informs all his work.  Instead of classes on editing and cinematography, you’ll take a unit in ”the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully.”

Werner Herzog opens Rogue Film School

Inglourious Basterds is certainly the ultimate revenge fantasy for every Jewish person on the planet, but Tarantino also gives all of us a “much better” ending to WWII, involving righteous beat downs, scalpings, Mexican stand-offs, and most improbably and most wonderfully, an UFA movie premiere, crammed to the gills with every evil Nazi asshole you can name from your high school history class.

In a strange way, this is clearly Tarantino’s most Spielberg-y movie, but unlike Spielberg, who plays his history fiddle as seriously as possible with great significance and studio system grandeur, Tarantino taps in to our most deepest of longings – to see the Nazis really get what they deserve.  Schindler’s List was about a good German standing up for his victims and is ultimately *mostly* a story of his redemption.  Here, in Tarantino’s world, the victims don’t need a good German. They only need a rambling pack of violence fans (aka, the Basterds, lead by a hilariously-super-American Brad Pitt), who bludgeon and scalp Nazi footsoldiers.

The other hero in Tarantino’s world is Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escaped the slaughter of her family by the “Jew Hunter” Colonel Landa (the excellent Christoph Waltz, who should be nominated for an Oscar post haste).  Just like in Tarantino’s beloved spaghetti westerns, she waits for years to enact her revenge and gets her chance to strike back when Goebbels himself wants to premiere his newest film in her Paris movie theater.  Her tart relationship with a smitten Nazi war hero (Daniel Bruhl) turned Nazi movie star feels like something ripped out of Leone. Every single one of their conversations is full of an anxious push pull.  Substitute Laurent for Eastwood and Bruhl for Van Cleef and voila! You’ll see the roots of Tarantino’s inspiration.

(I also can’t help but feel like Tarantino saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and was like, “I can do that too!  I can be historical, and feature great monologues for actors, and cut from a scene of intense violence to a scene of intense calm and somberness?” )

Did I mention that Winston Churchill is in there?  And even Mike Myers as an aristocratic high-ranking British officer? How about a beautiful German actress double agent (Diane Kruger aka Bridget Von Hammersmark)?  And horror director Eli Roth, nicknamed the “Jew Bear” whose speciality is thwomping Nazi skulls with a baseball bat? Maybe Brad Pitt’s accent and mugging as Aldo Raine might bother you at some point, but when you see him in a suave white tuxedo attempting to speak Italian at a Nazi mixer, you’ll see the inherent absurdity in such a character.

It’s an orgy of violence interspersed with a lot of loving shout-outs to cinema – UFA, G.W. Pabst, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford’s The Searchers, a little smidgen of Wong Kar Wai/Christopher Doyle, and every Sergio Leone movie ever made. I’m only surprised that Leni Riefenstahl herself didn’t make a surprise appearance.

But basically, yeah, dude.  It’s Tarantino.

PS Yes, there is a woman’s foot in it. You know Q loves women’s feet.  Women are barefoot in nearly all his movies except Reservoir Dogs…

There’s only one place where I find copious name-dropping acceptable, and it’s in the pages of a book. I love reading a book to also find out it’s also going to give me lists of people/other books/artworks/films/recipes to dive into and research. PLUS books are g great lo-fi entertainment – wow, the words are so 1D! It’s the bookish little grad student in me, yearning for some kind of curriculum years after school has passed. (Editor’s note: I ain’t ever going back to school. But yes, I am this nerdy.)

I recently finished reading volume 1 of Susan Sontag’s personal journals (1947-1963) and discovered that her daily diary was full of lists of philosophers, books and best yet – MOVIES. So I decided to do the nerdiest thing possible and list them all out here. So here it is, every film mentioned by Susan Sontag in a 16 year span…


Ironically enough, the first two films mentioned in her journals were peep-show kind of flicks she noticed were playing in Chicago when she visited:
Love in a Nudist Colony
The Naked Truth – Uncut

Le Diable Au Corps (1947, Claude Autant-Lara)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene)

The Last Laugh (1924, F.W. Murnau)

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1942, Sam Wood)

Penny Serenade (1941, George Stevens)

Wuthering Heights (1939, William Wyler)

Blossoms in the Dust (1941, Mervyn LeRoy)

Stella Dallas — (1937, King Vidor) Sontag gets Joan Crawford mixed up with Barbara Stanwyck in her notes on this film

An Affair to Remember (1957, Leo McCarey) (she called it awful!)

A Kid for 2 Farthings (1955, Carol Reed) (liked this one more)

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, Terrence Fisher)

Three Forbidden Stories (1952, Augusto Genina)

The River’s Edge (1957, Allan Dwan)

Les Maitres Fous (1955, Jean Rouch)La Nuit de forains AKA Det regnar på vår kärlek (1946, Ingmar Bergman)

Battleship Potempkin (1925, Eisenstein)

Les enfants du paradis (1945, Marcel Carne)

Monkey Business (1931, Norman McLeod)

L’Alibi (1937, Pierre Chenal)

Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin)

Grand Hotel (1932, Edmund Goulding)

Witness for the Prosecution (1957, Billy Wilder)

Foolish Wives (1922, Erich Von Stroheim)

Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda)

Summer with Monika (1952, Ingmar Bergman)

Notti Bianchi (1957, Luchino Visconti)

Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)

Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)

Sept peches capitaux et l’ecriture sainte (1910, Louis Feuillade)

West of the Law (1926, Ben Wilson)

Cradle of Courage (1920, Lambert Hillyer)

Hands Up! (1926, Clarence C. Badger)

The Misfits (1961, John Huston)

Morocco (1930, Josef von Sternberg)

The Public Enemy (1931, William Wellman)

Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ingmar Bergman)

The Last Ten Days (1955, Georg Pabst)

Riders of the Purple Sage (1926, Lynn Reynolds)

The Grand Maneuver (1956, Rene Clair)

The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)

Casque d’or (1952, Jacques Becker)

Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Crazy for Love (1952, Jean Boyer, stars Brigitte Bardot)

Wild Love (1955, Mauro Bolognini)

Fragment of an Empire (1929, Fridrikh Ermler)

Henry V (1944, Laurence Olivier)

The Ghost Goes West (1935, Rene Clair)

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, Mervyn Le Roy)

The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston)

Broadway Express

(Michael Blackwood short -18 mins)Black and White Burlesque (1960, Richard Preston short – 3 min)

Ask Me, Don’t Tell Me (1960, David Myers short – 22 min)

End of the Line (1959, Terrence Macartney-Filgate – 30 min)

The End of Summer (?, Hirshorn – 12 minutes) – Can’t find any info for this one!

Die 3 Groschen-Oper (1931, Georg Pabst)

Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges)

Storm Over Asia (1928, Vsevolod Pudovkin)

L’avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959, Roger Vadim)

Mere Jeanne Des Anges (1961, Jerzy Kawalerowicz)

The Life of Oharu (1952, Kenji Mizoguchi)

This was my very first thought when I stumbled upon the trailer for the new Jim Jarmusch film, The Limits of Control – “I go where Jim goes.”

Who else makes movies about downbeat criminals, black zen samurais, and Jack and Meg White and a Tesla?  Who else tells the world he loves Yasujiro Ozu, and goes fishing with John Lurie?  And holy savior, Christopher Doyle was the cinematographer on this?  He of the many many MANY beautiful Wong Kar Wai films?  What’s next, will Pedro Almodovar make a movie with Roger Deakins?  Oooh, that sounds good.

For no reason, here is Jim with Tom.

Jarmusch loves to make non-thriller thrillers – this one is about a hitman (Isaach De Bankolé) trying to finish a job surrounded by enigmatic characters – a stellar lot composed of Gael Garcia Bernal, Tilda Swinton (in a white wig!), John Hurt and (yes!) Bill Murray. My boss at Netfrax thinks it looks like “the best Hal Hartley movie Hal Hartley could never make!”  Smeh to Hal Hartley.  I GO WHERE JIM GOES.

Limited release date, 5/22/2009.  While the rest of the world is in a Star Trek stupor, I will soothe my art house sensibilities with Jarmuschian splendor.

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE