Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

Academy voters had essentially two choices for best picture of 2014, not that there weren't six other nominees, two of them, The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) and Whiplash (Damien Chazelle), quite worthy of the honor. But Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu) and Boyhood were the front-runners, in large part because they took great risks. In addition to an often surreal approach to its subject matter, Birdman was filmed to give the illusion that most of it was one continuous take -- even though the narrative was not necessarily continuous. And Boyhood was filmed over the course of 12 years, as its protagonist, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), went from the age of 6 to 18 years old. Faced with two such groundbreaking but inimitable films, the Academy chose poorly: It went for the flashy technique of Birdman instead of the profoundly revealing story of the pressures a child faces in the process of growing up. But it's not just Mason's story, it's also that of his mother (Patricia Arquette), his sister (Lorelei Linklater), and his father (Ethan Hawke). Arquette deservedly won a supporting actress Oscar, but Hawke (who was nominated) also demonstrated the remarkable ability to adapt his persona over the extended filming time. The divorced parents face pressures, too: the mother the more immediate one of becoming a single parent and then making disastrously wrong choices as she remarries, the father the long-term one of remaining a presence in the lives of his children. He seems to have it easier than his ex-wife does, but every time Hawke re-appears in the film, he beautifully communicates the sense of having lost something precious. Like his son, he grows, shedding his fecklessness and irresponsibility, just as Mason learns to sift through the continuous barrage of advice from adults and find the wisdom to become his own person. I don't know of any film that so tenderly presents what the quotidian is like, without resorting to melodramatic crisis at its turning points. The only other films I can even compare it to are François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (1956), which take place in much harsher milieus than the Texas towns and cities in which Linklater sets Boyhood. But even though that world is milder and more familiar than the places in France and India where Truffaut and Ray set their films, Boyhood reveals how the world shapes us -- or as Linklater puts it at the end of his film, "the moment seizes us" -- as well as those films do. I think it's a treasure that belongs in their august company.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is beginning to show its age, as any 41-year-old movie must. It no longer exhibits the freshness that won it acclaim as a masterpiece and raked in the five "major" Academy Awards: picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay -- only the second picture in history to do that: The first was It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), and only one other picture, The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), has subsequently accomplished that feat. Today, however, One Flew has the look of a skillfully directed but somewhat predictable melodrama; its tragic edge has been blunted by familiarity. In treating the material, director Forman goes for straightforward storytelling, without showing us something new or personal as an auteur. And as time has passed, some of the elements of the source, Ken Kesey's novel, that screenwriters Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman took pains to mitigate -- namely the countercultural glibness and antifeminism -- have begun to show through. It's harder today to wholeheartedly cheer on the raw, anarchic antiauthoritarianism of McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) or to accept as a given the unmitigated villainy of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). We want our protagonists and antagonists to be a little more complicated than the film allows them to be. There are still many who think it a great film, but if it is, I think it's largely because it's the perfect showcase for a great talent -- Nicholson's -- supported by an extraordinary ensemble that includes a shockingly young-looking Danny DeVito, Scatman Crothers, Sidney Lassick, Christopher Lloyd, Will Sampson, and a touchingly vulnerable Brad Dourif.

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction

Pumpkin: Tim Roth
Honey Bunny: Amanda Plummer
Vincent Vega: John Travolta
Jules Winnfield: Samuel L. Jackson
Butch Coolidge: Bruce Willis
Marsellus Wallace: Ving Rhames
Mia Wallace: Uma Thurman
Capt. Koons: Christopher Walken
Fabienne: Maria de Medeiros
Winston Wolfe: Harvey Keitel
Brett: Frank Whaley
Jody: Rosanna Arquette
Lance: Eric Stoltz

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Cinematography: Andrzej Sekula
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Sally Menke

Watching Pulp Fiction again -- I don't know how many times I've seen it but it feels like a lot -- I'm struck by how much the film is about language. In a way that's appropriate, given that it was nominated for seven Oscars but won only for the screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary. And certainly language comes to the fore in the way the film tramples on taboos like the f-word and the n-word, which are repeated so often that you're numbed to the expected shock. And then there's the great biblical tirade by Jules, extrapolated from a passage in Ezekiel and repeated three times to make sure we get the point that Jules is some kind of prophet. And of course there's the familiar pronouncement by Vincent that the French call a quarter-pounder with cheese a Royale with cheese. But throughout the film characters encounter semantic problems, as when Jules asks Brett what country he's from. The puzzled Brett asks, "What?" thereby provoking Jules's response, "'What' ain't no country I've ever heard of. They speak English in What?" Or when Esmeralda (Angela Jones) asks Butch what his name means, and Butch replies, "I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit." Or when Pumpkin calls out, "Garçon! Coffee!" and the waitress (Laura Lovelace) corrects him: "'Garçon' means boy." Pumpkin and Honey Bunny have even decided to give up robbing liquor stores because they're owned by "too many foreigners [who] don't speak fucking English."  For Pulp Fiction's characters language is a means of establishing dominance, as when Winston Wolfe refuses Vincent's request to say "please" when he's giving orders. It's also a way of establishing intimacy: When Vincent brings Mia home after she has overdosed, she finally tells him the silly joke -- a pun on catch up/ketchup -- that she refused to tell him earlier. So maybe Pulp Fiction isn't exactly about language -- it's also about violence and God and a lot of other things -- but I don't know of many other recent films that are so memorable because of it.

The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

The Civil War had been over for 60 years when The General was made, and from the tone of it you might think the South had won. That was, however, the usual attitude in Hollywood, and would remain so for perhaps another 40 years. The reason usually given for Hollywood's avoidance of treating the Southern states as what they really were -- i.e., racist traitors -- is a fear of losing the considerable market that the former states of the Confederacy constituted. So The General seems biased toward treating the Confederacy as a genteel homeland full of honorable, self-sacrificing heroes. There's no shying away from waving the Confederate battle flag as there would be today, and the strains of "Dixie" are used to stirring effect even in the score composed for the restored version seen on TCM -- as they would have been in any theatrical showing in the year of its release. If all this sounds like a curious quibble about one of the great silent comedies, now regarded as Buster Keaton's masterpiece (or at least one of them), so be it. But I was born a Southerner and raised to take such sentimentality about the region's past as a matter of course, in large part because Hollywood encouraged it. Now that I know better, I don't think it hurts to quibble about such things, especially when the political air is currently filled with legislated tolerance of discrimination, much (but not all) of it emanating from the states of the Old South. But let's lighten up: The General is a great film despite its wrongheaded view of history, and Keaton is one of the masters of the medium. Every time I watch it I see something new: This time, for example, I was taken with the sequence near the start of the film when Johnnie Gray (Keaton) arrives home with the first of his two loves (his engine, the General) and goes to see the other love, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). He is trailed to her house by two small boys, following in single file, and unknown to them Annabelle joins the little procession. Arriving at her door, he knocks, only to notice with a double-take that she's right behind him. They enter her living room, with the two boys following and seating themselves on the couch to observe. Johnnie sees them, pretends that he's leaving, goes to the door, ushers them out first, and then closes the door behind them. It's a simple gag routine of no importance to the plot (we never see the boys again), but it's executed with such straight-faced precision, as if it were being performed to a metronomic beat, that it becomes a small delight. Henri Bergson's theory of comedy is as unreadable as most theories of comedy are, but he makes a point that some things are funny because they show human beings behaving mechanically. Human beings are elastic and unpredictable, and when they turn inelastic and predictable, they can become funny. Almost everything in The General is done with this straight-faced precision, so that we laugh even when Keaton departs from it. Marion Mack proves herself a game performer here, subjected to all sorts of torments from being caught in a bear trap to being tied in a sack and flung into a boxcar to being drenched with water. Throughout it all she remains a ditz, and we often want to throttle her because of it. So when Keaton gives in to the exasperation we are all feeling with her, he does start to throttle her -- and then, endearingly, changes his mind and kisses her.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

So, on a repeat viewing, does Birdman hold up as the triumph of style, technique, and performance that won it a best picture Oscar, or is it seriously undermined by pretentiousness and banality? That it is undermined I can't deny, just as I can't deny that the style of Kevin Thompson's production design and Antonio Sanchez's drum score are fresh and powerful, that the technical wizardry of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and the film editing of Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione provide a seamless flow that appears to be one long tracking shot through most of the film, and that Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone give career-landmark performances. But I also have to say that I don't think the movie adds up to enough. As Richard Brody observed in his New Yorker review, Iñárritu even courts comparison to Jean-Luc Godard in the opening titles of his film -- a disastrous comparison to my mind, because whatever his faults, Godard was always going against the grain of conservative politics and social attitudes. Iñárritu is attempting a satire on the power of popular culture and celebrity to foul up even the best-intentioned attempts at doing something different. The problem is that his protagonist, Riggan Thomson (Keaton), is doing little more than trying to change his public image. He's known as a pop-culture hero from his hit Birdman movies, but like every clown who wants to play Hamlet, he's trying to make a Broadway debut in a deadly serious play he has crafted from a Raymond Carver short story. Naturally, he is plagued with insecurity, and nothing that his family, his crew, his fellow actors, or the busily buzzing entertainment media can break him free of it. There is a good human story here, but Iñárritu and his fellow screenwriters, Nicolás Giacabone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo, can't be content to just tell it. Instead, it has to be tarted up with touches of magic realism (the first time we see Riggan he is in his underpants, levitating in his dressing room), and by the unstated fact that Iñárritu has cast as the former Birdman a former Batman. We are in the realm of that tiresome trope, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the screenwriters can't help hammering on the point. Riggan has a sign on his dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said about that thing." And Mike insists that he has to drink real gin during the rehearsals because Raymond Carver was a drunk and everything else on the set is fake. He even tells Riggan's daughter (Stone) that the only time he is real is when he's onstage. The satire tends toward banality when the film takes as its target the omnipotent critic for the New York Times, who is determined, even before she sees the play, to destroy it because she resents a movie star like Riggan invading the sacred temple of the theater. So does the technical finesse of the film make up for these flaws? Only if you're willing to shut off some key parts of your intellect, which is something Godard would never ask you to do.

Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987)

Woody Allen's warmest and maybe most irresistible film has none of the neurotic obsession gags or existentialist angst shtick that are so often associated with his work. It's a simple piece about the nostalgia that old songs evoke in us -- in Allen's case, reminiscences of the days when radio was the dominant, almost ubiquitous medium in people's lives, before television held people captive in their living rooms or the internet addicted them to the little screens of their cell phones or tablets. Specifically, it's Allen's childhood as seen through the eyes of young Joe (Seth Green) and his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker) and extended family. It's also, secondarily, a tribute to many of the actors who have enlivened Allen's films, with smaller roles and cameos filled by Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, Danny Aiello, Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, Diane Keaton, and many others. Production designer Santo Loquasto deservedly received an Oscar nomination for his re-creation of Queens and Manhattan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but honors should go to the luminous cinematography of Carlo Di Palma, too. The soundtrack, supervised by Dick Hyman, ranges from such true classics as Kurt Weill's "September Song" and Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train" to novelty pop of the period like "Mairzy Doats" and "Pistol Packin' Mama." As one born B.T. (Before Television), I can really dig it.

High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

High and Low begins surprisingly, considering that Kurosawa is known as a master director of action, with a long static sequence that takes place in one set: the living room of the home of Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), an executive with a company called National Shoe. The sequence, almost like a filmed play, depicts Gondo's meeting with the other executives of the company, who are trying to take it over, believing that the "Old Man" who runs it is out of touch with the shoe market. Gondo, however, thinks the company should focus on well-made, stylish shoes rather than the flimsy but fashionable ones the others are promoting. After the others have gone, we see that Gondo has his own plan to take over the company with a leveraged buyout -- he has mortgaged everything he has, included the opulent modern house in which the scene takes place. But suddenly he receives word that his son has been kidnapped and the ransom will take every cent that he has. Naturally, he plans to give in to the kidnappers' demands -- until he learns that they have mistakenly kidnapped the wrong child: the son of his chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada). Should he go through with his plans to ransom the boy, even though it will wipe him out? Enter the police, under the leadership of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), and the scene becomes a complicated moral dilemma. Thus far, Kurosawa has kept things stagey, posing the group of detectives, Gondo, his wife (Kyoko Kagawa), his secretary (Tatsuya Mihashi), and the chauffeur in various permutations and combinations on the Tohoscope widescreen. But once a decision is reached -- to pay the ransom and pursue the kidnappers -- Kurosawa breaks free from the confinement of Gondo's house and gives us a thrilling manhunt, the more thrilling because of the claustrophobic opening segment. The original title in Japanese can mean "heaven and hell" as well as "high and low," and once we move away from Gondo's living room we see that his house sits high on a hill overlooking the slums where the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki) lives, and from which he can peer into Gondo's house through binoculars. We return to the police procedural world of Stray Dog (Kurosawa, 1949), where sweaty detectives track the kidnapper through busy nightclubs and the haunts of drug addicts, and Kurosawa's cameras -- under the direction of Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito -- give us every sordid glimpse. It's a skillful thriller, based on one of Evan Hunter's novels written under the "Ed McBain" pseudonym, done with a masterly hand. And while it's not one of Kurosawa's greater films, it has unexpected moral depth, enhanced by fine performances, including a restrained one by Mifune -- this time, the freakout scene goes to Yamazaki's kidnapper.

Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, who starred in Seven Samurai, appeared together five years earlier in this noir detective story. In a crowded bus on a sweltering day, Murakami (Mifune), a rookie homicide detective, has his gun stolen by a pickpocket. He gives chase but loses the thief, and shamefacedly has to report it to headquarters. To make matters worse, he soon discovers that the gun has been used in a robbery, wounding the victim. He begins a dogged search for the gun. In an extended sequence Kurosawa's depiction of police work takes us into the lower depths of post-war Tokyo as Murakami follows a lead that suggests the gun may have been sold on the underground gun market. Murakami's guilt becomes more intense after ballistics work reveals that his gun had been used in a robbery homicide and he witnesses the grief of the victim's husband. But he's teamed up with a veteran detective, Sato (Shimura), who persuades Murakami not to quit the force and accompanies him in an effort to retrieve the weapon. It's not only a well-made thriller but also a complex portrait of the lingering effects of the war on the Japanese populace, peering into sleazy nightclubs and cobbled-together hovels. Mifune and Shimura are a fine team, with the former far more restrained than he was in Seven Samurai and the latter adding a deeper note of warmth to the quiet integrity he demonstrated as the leader of the samurai band. Keiko Awaji plays the nightclub dancer who knows the hangouts of the gunman (Isao Kimura, who played the naive young samurai Katsushiro in the later film) but is reluctant to give him up. A vivid supporting cast and Asakazu Nakai's atmospheric cinematography make this more than just a skillful reworking of an American genre movie.    

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa,1954)

It's a truism -- one that I've often echoed -- that silent movies and talkies constitute two distinct artistic media, and to judge the one by the standards of the other is an error. But it's almost impossible to watch films made by older directors, especially those who came of age when silent films were being made, without noticing the efforts they make to tell their stories without speech. It's true of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks, even though they, especially Hawks, became masters of dialogue in their films. And it's true of Kurosawa, who although he didn't begin his career in films until 1936 and directed his first one in 1943, was born in 1910 and grew up with silent movies. I think it helped him learn the universals of storytelling that are independent of language, so that he became the most popular of all Japanese filmmakers. Others rank the work of Ozu or Mizoguchi more highly, but Kurosawa's films manage to transcend the limitations of subtitles more easily. Of none of his films is this more true than Seven Samurai, which is also generally regarded, even by those with reservations about Kurosawa's work, as his masterpiece. That's not a word I use lightly, but having sat enthralled through the uncut version, three hours and 27 minutes long, last night, I'm willing to endorse it. It's an exhilarating film, with none of the longueurs that epics -- I'm thinking of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) -- so easily fall into. I don't know of any action film with as many vividly drawn characters, and that's largely because Kurosawa takes the time to delineate each one. It's also a film about its milieu, 16th-century Japan, although as its American imitation, The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), shows, there's a universality about the antagonism between fighters and farmers. Kurosawa captures this particularly well in the character of Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), the would-be samurai who reveals in mid-film that he was raised as a farmer and carried both a kind of self-hate for his class along with a hatred for the arrogant treatment of farmers by samurai. Mifune's show-off performance is terrific, but the film really belongs to Takashi Shimura, who radiates stillness and wisdom as Kambei Shimada, the leader of the seven. There are clichés to be found, such as the fated romance of the young samurai trainee Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) and the farmer's daughter Shino (Keiko Tsushima), but like the best clichés, they ring true. Seven Samurai earned two Oscar nominations, for So Matsuyama's art direction and Kohei Ezaki's costumes, but won neither. Overlooking Kurosawa's direction, Shimura's performance, and Asakazu Nakai's cinematography is unforgivable, if exactly what one expects from the Academy.

No Regrets for Our Youth (Akira Kurosawa, 1946)

Setsuko Hara in No Regrets for Our Youth

No Regrets for Our Youth seems like an ironic title for a film made in a country that in 1946 had much to regret. It is, in fact, a kind of apologia for the students and intellectuals who resisted the rise of militaristic fascism in Japan, a fictionalized treatment of the "Takigawa incident" of 1933 -- an event that perhaps few in the West, except students of Japanese history, know about today. After a professor at the law school of Kyoto University was removed by the Japanese Ministry of Education for statements that the education minister regarded as "Marxist," other faculty members resigned and students went on strike. Kurosawa's film focuses on a professor (Denjiro Okochi), his daughter Yukie (Setsuko Hara), and two of his students, Itokawa (Akitake Kono) and Ryukichi Noge (Susumu Fujita), and spans the years from the incident at the university to the end of the war. It's unusual among Kurosawa's films in that the protagonist is a woman, Yukie, whose relationships with her scholarly father, the accommodating Itokawa, and the rebellious Noge are examined in detail. She chooses to join Noge in his revolt against the Japanese government, which leads to their imprisonment and his death, after which she seeks out his parents, peasants in a remote village. They have been shunned by the other villagers as "spies" and "traitors," but she defies them and helps Noge's parents survive, doing the backbreaking work of clearing land and planting rice. Setsuko Hara, who did some of her most memorable work for Yasujiro Ozu but also appeared in Kurosawa's 1951 film Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, is nothing short of phenomenal as Yukie, ranging from the young and flirtatious girl to the worn but determined survivor. Kurosawa, as usual, is a skilled storyteller -- he edited as well as directed the film. The cinematography is by Asakazu Nakai.