MC Yearly Consensus - 1964

[soitgoes...]

Originally Posted by Spinal

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

I don't know why I haven't watched this yet.

[dreamdead]

Originally Posted by Spinal

#10 (tie)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Excellent. This one was a wonder to watch last week, letting its rhythms unfold and letting the quiet rapture of the film take hold. Even ignoring the lovely central artifice of the music and lyrics, those last twenty minutes make the film so purposeful, shifting beyond youthful romance into something simultaneously starker and more mature. Also love how the film utilized the seasons as a backdrop to suggest a passage into new realizations, though I do question Watashi's assertion that Catherine Deneuve's character ends up cold and heartless....

[Spinal]

#8 (tie)



Scorpio Rising

Director: Kenneth Anger

Country: USA

An army of gay/nazi bikers make their engines roar and ride their way to pain/pleasure as sexual and sadistic symbols are intercut into the chaos and rhythm.

Filmed in Brooklyn with young motorcycle buffs whom Anger had met at Coney Island while he was staying at a friend's house on a visit from France. The film was censored for indecency, and the case went to the Supreme Court, where it was decided in Anger's favor.

"Rather than building character through action or dialogue, it constructs a world as a set of symbols, and characters as the confluence of those symbols ... The camera lingers on the donning of leather attire, casting the event as a momentous transmutation: the creation of Self as symbol." - Melville

[Spinal]

#8 (tie)



Marnie

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Country: USA

The beautiful Marnie is a first-class bookkeeper. She happens also to be a compulsive thief who has taken her last employer to the cleaners before disappearing into thin air. But eventually, she attempts robbery once too often. Her target forces her to marry him, and out of love for her uncovers the mysteries of her past.

Bernard Herrmann's last score for a Hitchcock film. When Hitchcock's discussion with Grace Kelly (to appear as the title character) became public, the residents of Monaco expressed their disapproval, and Kelly withdrew. Bruce Dern can be seen briefly as the sailor in Marnie's flashback.

"Viewed from the safe distance of four decades after its release, Marnie, perhaps even more than The Birds, emerges as the director's definitive late-period masterpiece." - Fernando F. Croce

[Spinal]

#7



A Hard Day's Night

Director: Richard Lester

Country: UK

Harassed by their manager and Paul's grandpa, the Beatles embark from Liverpool by train for a London TV show. Showing a typical day in the life of the band at the height of Beatlemania, the Beatles are depicted as prisoners of their own fame.

Earned two Academy Award nominations including Best Original Screenplay. The word 'Beatles' is never mention in the movie. A young Phil Collins can be seen in the audience at the television theater. He's wearing glasses. While all four Beatles attended the movie's premiere, reportedly none stayed for the whole thing.

"Made on the fly to capitalize on The Beatles' meteoric rise, Richard Lester's joyous and innovative pseudo-documentary is also transparently promotional, a shrewdly calculated exercise in star manufacture. Yet even as it strings together the obligatory hit parade of singles and performance sequences, the film conveys an intensely liberated spirit, with fun interludes and digressions that make bubblegum out of the French New Wave." - Scott Tobias

[Spinal]

#6


Fail-Safe

Director: Sidney Lumet

Country: USA

A technical malfunction causes an erroneous order to be sent to a squadron on a routine training mission instructing the bombers to fly beyond their fail safe distance. The flight crew are trained to cease communications and prepare to fulfill their objective by bombing Moscow. As the planes near their target, together the Americans and Soviets decide on a final, desperate solution.

Columbia Pictures produced both this and Dr. Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick insisted his movie be released first, and it was, in January 1964. When Fail-Safe was released in October, it garnered excellent reviews, but audiences found it unintentionally funny. Henry Fonda later said he would never have made the movie if he had seen Strangelove first, because he would have laughed too. Look for a couple of brief shots of a very young Dom DeLuise in his first film.

"Lumet sensibly avoids pyrotechnics in favour of tightening the psychological screws, as Larry Hagman (the president's translator - nice looking kid) does nervy trade-offs on the hot-line, and everyone, from President Fonda down, starts drowning in a sea of cold sweat." - Time Out Film Guide

[Spinal]

#5



Onibaba

Director: Kaneto Shindô

Country: Japan

As feudal war rages in 14th-century Japan, the wife and the mother of a soldier make their meager living by preying upon hapless samurai who come their way. When a friend of the soldier returns to the women's hut, tensions build as the younger woman gives in to her loneliness, and the older woman feels jealousy and plots revenge.

The demon mask used in the movie inspired William Friedkin to use a similar design for the makeup in subliminal shots of a white-faced demon in The Exorcist. Initially refused a certificate in England by the BBFC in 1965, but resubmitted in 1968 where it was approved with an X classification albeit with some cuts.

"Cued to Hikaru Hayashi's radical score, which combines frenzied percussion with sharp avant-garde trumpet bursts, Onibaba sustains a high level of emotional intensity, particularly in sex scenes far removed from polite, soft-focus choreography ... Many of the actions in the film are horrifying and despicable, but few are beyond comprehension, because Shindô registers his characters' needs so clearly and urgently." - Scott Tobias

[Spinal]

#4



I Am Cuba

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Country: Soviet Union/Cuba

Four vignettes in Batista's Cuba dramatize the need for revolution.

Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards. The now famous long take that begins at the top of the hotel, then winds around and down into the swimming pool, originally come out of the water and continued. The camera was hand held, passed from crew member to crew member, to make its way down the side of the hotel into the pool. Much to the disappointment of the camera crew, Kalatozov cut the end of the take.

"I Am Cuba is a cinephile's wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn't so humane." - Ed Gonzalez

[Spinal]

#3



Woman in the Dunes

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara

Country: Japan

An amateur entomologist searching for insects by the sea is trapped by local villagers into living with a mysterious woman who spends almost all her time preventing her home from being swallowed up by advancing sand dunes.

Nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1965. Nominated for the Best Director Oscar in 1966. Won the Jury Special Prize at Cannes. Based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, who also wrote the film's screenplay.

"More than almost any other film I can think of, Woman in the Dunes uses visuals to create a tangible texture--of sand, of skin, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature. It is not so much that the woman is seductive as that you sense, as you look at her, exactly how it would feel to touch her skin." - Roger Ebert

[Spinal]

#2



Band of Outsiders (Bande à part)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Country: France

Franz has met Odile in an English class. She lives with wealthy benefactors and has mentioned that Mr. Stolz keeps a pile of 10,000 franc notes unlocked in his room. Franz tells his friend Arthur, whose shady uncle is pressing him for money. Arthur and Franz case Odile's house and pressure her to assist them with a burglary.

The principle actors rehearsed for the famous dance sequence in nightclubs and bars in Paris' Latin District. The story Franz refers to in the café scene, about something being best hidden in the most obvious place, is The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allen Poe.

"It's as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines ... This lyrical tragicomedy is perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film." - Pauline Kael

[soitgoes...]

Sweet, but it makes me wonder... what could possibly be number 1??

[Spinal]

Originally Posted by soitgoes...

Sweet, but it makes me wonder... what could possibly be number 1??

Prepare to be shocked!!!!!

[Spinal]

#1



Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Country: UK

U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper goes completely mad and sends his bomber wing to destroy the U.S.S.R. The U.S. president meets with his advisors, where the Soviet ambassador tells him that if the U.S.S.R. is hit by nuclear weapons, it will trigger a "Doomsday Machine" which will destroy all plant and animal life on Earth.

Nomiated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Peter Sellers) and Best Adapted Screenplay. Won Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle. The film's first test screening was due to take place on November 22, 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The film was just weeks away from its scheduled premiere, but, after the assassination, this was pushed back to late January 1964, as it was felt that the public would not be in a mood for a black comedy so soon after such a traumatic event.

"Stanley Kubrick's new film ... is beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across. And I say that with full recollection of some of the grim ones I've heard from Mort Sahl, some of the cartoons I've seen by Charles Addams and some of the stuff I've read in Mad Magazine." - Bosley Crowther (1964)

[soitgoes...]

[Spinal]

1. Dr. Strangelove (98)
2. Band of Outsiders (47)
3. Woman in the Dunes (43.5)
4. I Am Cuba (35.5)
5. Onibaba (30)
6. Fail-Safe (26)
7. A Hard Day’s Night (23.5)
8t. Scorpio Rising (19)
8t. Marnie (19)
10t. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (18)
10t. Shadows Of Our Forgotten Ancestors (18)

Not quite:
Charulata (17.5)
A Fistful of Dollars (14)
Goldfinger (13.5)

[Spinal]

Originally Posted by soitgoes...

(Kub)rickrolled!

[soitgoes...]

Originally Posted by Spinal

(Kub)rickrolled!

Nice.

[Grouchy]

Lots on this list I still need to see. Specially curious about Woman in the Dunes, Onibaba and even Scorpio Rising since I saw Scorsese raving about it on some DVD interview.

[dreamdead]

Definitely need to get around to Shindô and Teshigahara's filmography soon, but that response is tempered by M-C's lackluster response to Satyajit Ray here.

[Spinal]

Originally Posted by dreamdead

Definitely need to get around to Shindô and Teshigahara's filmography soon, but that response is tempered by M-C's lackluster response to Satyajit Ray here.

I thought Charulata did pretty well for a film that probably hasn't been widely seen.

[Yxklyx]

Originally Posted by Spinal

I thought Charulata did pretty well for a film that probably hasn't been widely seen.

Charulata was OK. I liked Mahanagar (The Big City) and Jalsaghar (The Music Room) quite a bit more. People should watch the former in preparation for the 1963 consensus (though the DVD gets really crappy towards the end when the subtitles get out of sync - at least on the copy I rented).