The Denouement

"So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu!"

I have no idea why I'm using this lyric from The Sound of Music to start my final blog. Actually, I do. I find this movie to be overly saccharine and very nearly disastrous in nature. So why is the lyric stuck in my craw? Because even a nugget of gold can be found in a mound of shit. Even a bad movie can have something indelible contained within it, even if its only one scene. I don't see that as chance, I see it as the filmmaker got something right, if even for a moment. These moments can be found in many a mediocre film. What they represent, at least for me, is twofold:that the filmmaker should be commended and respected for at least trying to find his/her authentic voice and the filmmaker should also be reprimanded for failing to deliver on the promise, the fecundity, of that one indelible scene. As a moviegoer, I wish to see continuity of vision, not just drips and drabbles. Transcendence can only come by one's full immersion in the director's vision, an intense empathy of the tableaux of emotions and the vicissitudes of the characters' lives painted on the screen. As a moviegoer and critic, I'm doing my part. I'm stripping myself of any artifice and making myself completely emotionally and cognitively "naked"- completely receptive to the film's power through every pore of my being. It is not effortless, it demands commitment and patience and a honed critical acumen. In return for our effort, the filmmaker must reciprocate with equal commitment, equal dilligence.

This is why I started this column-to rally moviegoers out there to realize what they can invest, what they should invest, in their movie-going experiences and what they should demand from the filmmakers. As I stated again and again, cinema is an art form and should be discussed, analyzed and picked apart as such. Good cinema is not shallow and neither is good criticism. We all have the innate ability to demand transcendence and to articulate this demand in the most cogent way possible. And what better rallying cry than an extremely well-written and entertaining blog. I was pleased to find that this blog has reached a few people and has opened their eyes to the vastness, the power, of cinema. If I have opened only one person's eyes to this, then to me, the world on the whole is that much less blind, less naive.

So I urge all out there to realize their potential as critical thinkers and receptors of emotion to start voicing their opinions on films and their inherent faults and/or transcendent moments through either written or verbal exposition. Film must be seen as worthy of debate as the philosophical musings of Kant or the stylistic vagaries of Picasso. Film is the most powerful medium for expression out there and must be respected as such as well as being held accountable for its actions, for the power and influence it yields.

As I now relinquish my seat as movie blog critic, I hope a plethora of others will pick up the quill and continue the good fight to keep art alive and to make sure that it is consistently representative of the human condition, a cogent record of why we keep slogging through life, minute by minute, day by day, year by year...

"So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu!"

Fellini Follow-up

As I promised, I will go a little more in depth on my favorite filmmaker, Federico Fellini. He was born in 1920, the same year as my father. Both were Italian, both were robust characters. Fellini, however, trumped my father in talent. He was simply a genius. Even from his first film, the White Shiek, starring his wife and main actress for decades, Giulietta Masina, his talent could be discerned. Typical Fellini elements such as a jazzy, free-form, organic feel to the camera movements and scene after scene fecund with a beguiling blend of depravity and whimsy. Such was the convoluted mind of Fellini. His first masterpiece was La Strada (The Road) with , again, Masina and the late Anthony Quinn as downtrodden circus performers. His character is like Pagliacci, a whirlwind of emotions, but without the heart--pure id. Later masterpeices include La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Julietta of the Spirits, Satyricon, Roma, and Amarcord. Four of his films have gone on to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar, but he himself never won a directing trophy, although he was nominated four times. This calls into question the efficacy of the awards process in general.

I could extrapolate on these films until doomsday, but I will only focus on three. The first, La Dolce Vita (1961), is my favorite film of all time. It also contains my favorite film performance, by Marcello Mastraionni as the decadent journalist Marcello Rubini who is torn between the placidity of domestic life and the seemingly "sweet life" of the super rich and the famous. Mastraionni was Fellini's leading man in many films and he is just such an effortlessly brilliant actor. He can convey more emotions in one look than most actors can with an entire soliloquy. Next to Toshiro Mifune, he is my favorite actor. The second, 8 1/2 (1963), is his most well-known film. It reveals the trials and tribulations of a worn-out filmmaker trying to make sense of his new film project, all the while being hounded by ravenous agents, writers, stars, wifes, and mistresses. The director is played, again brilliantly, by Mastraionni. The movie was just remade last year as a musical by director Rob Marshall and it was called Nine, this time with the immortal Daniel Day-Lewis filling in for Mastraionni. The third and last film is Satyricon (1970). This is Fellini's loose adaptation of Petronious' "Satyricon" written in the time of Nero. The material is perfectly suited for Fellini for it shows in grand detail all the decadence and depravity of disintegrating Rome under the despot Nero. The film is a two hour orgy of garish images, music, and characters. The subheading on the movie poster perfectly captures the spirit of the film: "Rome. Before Christ. After Fellini." Any one of these movies is a masterpiece and deserving of your attention. Here is a filmmaker at the top of his form whose artistry will astound you in every frame.

Hello again!

You gotta love Roger Ebert. As I was perusing my links looking for a juicy article to write about, I stumbled upon the lastest entry in Roger Ebert's online journal. I ususally don't use his entries for my blog, I read them primarily for pleasure, for personal edification. He is not only a great writer,a great critic, but he is also a great conveyor of emotions. His new article entitled "See You at the Movies" discusses his probable return to the position of television movie critic. This got my heart beating erratically. You see, growing up, I was a huge fan of "At the Movies" with Ebert and his cohost, the late great Gene Siskel. As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, their repartee was witty, jocular, and sometimes cutthroat. But underlying all the rhetoric of both was a deep love for cinema, the unequivocal fecundity of it. It was infectious. When Siskel passed away from brain cancer, Ebert plodded on with a series of cohosts unil he himself succumbed to a debilitating illness- he lost his voice. He is still however, perspicaciously writing reviews every week on his Chicago Sun Times website. Even though verbal articulation is gone, the words are still soaked with emotion, intonation, and deep passion. On top of his review column, he has started a personal online journal. These are mainly for personal musings, usually of a political or nostalgic origin. It seems that his inner voice has been sharpened to compensate for the loss of the outer because all his entries have a deep poignancy, resonance, to them and finally reveal the man behind the estimable critic. And what a man, what a mind! He would be my ideal interlocutor. Not only would we talk about movies, say by Herzog or Scorsese, but we would also hold discourse on Dickens, Yeats, philosophy, etc. We are both self-confessed Anglophiles and I could just imagine hours of conversation on his past perambulations in London or the countryside of Hardy, Eliot...

Oops. I digressed again. Sorry, can't be helped. Back to his recent article. In it, he claims that since he has been relegated to writing purely on the internet, he has a new-found respect, appreciation, for what the medium has to offer. He feels the power of being able to disseminate his closest thoughts to millions of people with just a single press of a "submit" button-certainly easier than slogging through a weekly, erudite TV show (sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)ceaselessy trying to improve the ratings, competing with more inane, but audience-palatable shows. You would think that through all the vicissitudes his previous show went through,variegted hosts and different time slots and now cancellation,that he would be reticent to approach TV again. He probably would capitulate if it wasn't for his intractable hope in the average movie watcher. In the article, Ebert has analyzed the Red Box and Netflix phenomena and realized that many of the top rentals have been critically acclaimed films such as Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, Milk, and Doubt. That's a good pedigree of films. This gives Ebert hope that there alot of people out there that will welcome his show.

His show,as he states, will not just review mainstream blockbusters, but will discuss foreign films, independent films, an obscure film by Herzog, or by Bahrani. It will run the gamut, and rightfully so. He will not be one of the hosts, due to his vocal constraints. He does have software that can replicate the sound of his voice, but not at the speed of extemporanous conversation. Therefore, there he will handpick the hosts as well as personally doing more self-contained pieces, perhaps a soapbox interlude, or highlights from festivals. Ebert and his wife Chaz will be coproducers. This, I know, will ensure the artistic dignity of the show. In the article, he is very reticent ot go into details, but it seems it will be going into production in the near future. I for one am very ecstatic by this news, as should every devoted cinema addict out there. In the meantime, check out Ebert's site as suntimes.com (click on Ebert's link) as well as his adjoining online journal. It is food for the mind as well as the soul.

Changing Perspectives

I can't believe Bloodsport used to be my favorite movie. It was 1988, my nascent years of movie collecting. At that time, I owned only a handful of movies. Another was Real Genius starring a young and hilarious Val Kilmer. I even owned the poster and had it plastered on my wall next to my desk. Adjacent to my desk lay my brand new Commodore 128 computer replete with floppy disk drive and orange-colored monitor. The computer was a conundrum to me. You see, after watching Wargames with Matthew Broderick (still one of my favorite films), witnessing him break into NORAD with his sleek IMSAI computer, I thought I could emulate his actions with my little beauty. How naive I was! The most I could do with it was to type inane code in for hours-the result being a little fireworks display. Talk about an anticlimax! It was my first real awareness of the glaring disparity between fiction and reality. Next to my computer was my bed, the place for many hours of supine comtemplation and intense comic book reading. Proudly placed above my bed on the wall was my prestigious Conan art print collection by Bart Sears. Just at the foot of my bed was my raison d'etre-my comic book collection. Thousands of books by glorious writers and artists neatly ensconsed within my acid-free oblong white boxes. That was my mythology growing up, the heroes and artists were my gods. The sweat I shed feverishly reading those books were my libations to them, water shed in deep admiration for the glory of their efforts. And Stan Lee was Zeus, his soapbox Mount Olympus. He was a benign god and one fecund with creativity and wisdom. He loved his devotees; he even made sure to address them in his monthly column without fail.
Alas, he was soon to be usurped by the God of Cinema, a redoubtable foe more frightening than anything witnessed in the Titanomachy! Ah, the vagaries of youth, the wonder and simple joys of youth...

I digressed. Sorry. Back to Bloodsport. I don't know why I liked this film. Watching it now makes me squirm. What the hell was I thinking? The simple answer is: I wasn't. My critical thinking faculty at the time was still bald and morphous in shape, like a growing foetus. It hadn't fully matured yet. Movies to me then were purely escapism. Transcendence didn't come until my first viewing of Amadeus (for more on that, check my earlier entry,"The Genesis"). This evolution in my cinematic tastes reminded me of our lesson this week in Expository Writing, about changing perpsectives through time and intellectual growth. What once semed to me an engrossing piece of celluloid seems inane and lugubrious to me now. It does even rank as a guilty pleasure like John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China from 1986.

I think my connecting to films, albeit mainstream or esoteric, stems from a need to connect emotionally with universal themes and emotions. I never really was an exigent person, so I allowed the actors/charaters in the movies to be so for me. They were articulating, to a frighteningly precise degree, what I felt deep down. It justified what I thought were aberrant, socially undesired emotions inside of me. From film, I segued into painting, music, and literature. I found the arts to be the panacea for all my ills, a conduit for my repressed emotions and intellectual proclivities. For example, I am a lover of anything pastoral. But I can't really share that with the average coworker or fellow student. So, I turn to Constable, turn to Hardy and Eliot, turn to George Meredith and Wordsworth, to Theocritus and Virgil, even a film by Herzog, and my longings, my desires, are satiated. I feel that I am not alone in the world, and that my passion is shared and appreciated by others much more acutely sensitve than myself. I can only hope to aspire one day to reach their level of "heightened awareness" (a true Wordsworthian concept).

Incidentally, my new favorite film is La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, also my favorite filmmaker of all time. I'm convinced this man was born with a camera attached to him at birth, perhaps stitched into his thigh like Dionysus to Zeus. His films elate me, make me feel proud of my Italian heritage, and assure me that it is okay to rise into the ether supported only by my fantastical dreams and ecstatic visions. His camera movements feel organic, his directing is so natural, so faultless and his overall vision is crystalline. Fellini's inner world resembles that of Dali, but the main difference is that the emotions painted on Fellini's canvas are more blatant, more ecstatic, not nebulous and elusive as in Dali's aesthetic.

I will, as I previously promised, delve into Fellini (and other foreign filmmakers) more in my next column. My exhortations on that man will be estimable, I assure you.

Where do I find a great movie?

"Where does he get all those wonderful toys?" This quote from Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 stylish Batman film came amusingly to my mind as I read a comment on my blogsite. The comment was in response to a piece I wrote about some obscure, independent films such as Mulholland Drive, Elephant, and the Royal Tenenbaums. The comment's composer earnestly asked me where he/she (sorry, I don't know your gender)may obtain these and other independent/foreign film titles. Since Blockbusters are closing down ubiquitously, it will be hard to find these titles for rent. I would, however, try any Blockbuster that is open first. They have a wide array of both independent and foreign films. Another avenue might be the internet. I don't have an Ipod and am not tech-savvy like my commenter, but I believe there are libraries of films you can download to either a desktop, laptop, or Ipod (or any other I-device)from resources to be found online. I cannot give you specific sites, you will have to search for them. If you really want to be bold and just buy it blindly (and cheaply, mind you), you can go to any Movie Stop (their selection is enormous), Best Buy, or F.Y.E (in the mall, they have many used DVDs and for cheap prices). Red Box won't really help because they are predominantly new releases. Another cogent option is to try HBO on demand. They have many films, old and new and independent, for only $2.99 or less to rent. Many are even free! Their menus are easy to navigate through and they even separate films by genre.

What I can do, what I am educated enough to advise you on, is what titles to seek out. Let's start with David Lynch. This is an odd man, but what a brilliant visionary, what a skewed intellect! Start with Blue Velvet from 1986. It's brilliant, iconic opening montage of Americana is a metaphor for the Reagan era. Outwardly, its all roses, blue skies,and smiling faces, but behind that seemingly innocuous facade, was a surreptitous upwelling of anger and malfeasance from the country's malcontents (represented by the ants in the opening montage).This seedy underbelly of American society is what is brilliantly explored, albeit to an almost surreal degree, by Lynch in his acclaimed masterpiece. He creates such frightening, indelible images and draws brilliant performances from his cast, especially from Dennis Hopper.

The sweeter, more humane side of Lynch can be found in his other masterful films, the Elephant Man and the Straight Story. The former, from 1980, is a poignant, beautiful film about the real life personage of John Merrick, hideously deformed from birth, but with a soul deeper, more unfathomable, than the biggest ocean trench. John Hurt is absolutely brilliant in the role. It is not easy to convey emotions under all that makeup, yet he does it with a grace and pathos that is astonishing. There are other great performances too by Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft and the black-and-white cinematography is amazing. The latter, made in 1999, is another true story of a old man who one day decides to ride his tractor across many states to see his brother. The tractor's pace is languid, but the film's isn't. It is heartwarming and it contains another briliant lead performance by 80-plus year-old Richard Farnsworth who invests such dignity into this character. Incidentally, not too long ago, Mr. Farnsworth shot himself with his rifle, stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger, because he was dying of cancer and did not want a long, drawn out death. He had been in the movie business a long time, starting as a stuntman and then progressing into acting. He earned, as did John Hurt for the Elephant Man, a richly deserved Academy Award nomination for his work here. He was a stoic man,a modern-day John Wayne. They don't make men like him anymore, a true icon of cinema.

Next, I will discuss another giant of independent cinema, Gus Van Sant. He first came on the scene with 1989's Drugstore Cowboy featuring a magnificent Matt Dillon in the lead role. The film follws him and his cronies as they rob drug stores to feed their addictions. It is set in the 1970s and the attention to detail, the art direction, is unequivocally authentic. As usual with Van Sant, you get ubiquitous visual flourishes such as moving clouds, odd angles, and other surreal imagery. I think it is one of the best films of the 80s and Roger Ebert considers Dillon's work here one of the best screen performances ever. Other notable films by Van Sant are My Own Private Idaho from 1991 and Milk from 2008. The former contains an absolutely remarkable performance by the late River Phoenix. He was my generation's James Dean. The pathos he invests into the role of the narcoleptic street hustler (yes, that's right) Mikey is a true acting lesson for any aspiring actor. He takes an impossible and seemingly unlikeable character and makes him mesmerizing from start to finish. His sidekick in his adventures is played, in an absolutely great performance, by Keanu Reeves. These two are electric together! Van Sant's screenplay defies description. For the sake of brevity (and clarity), I will call it a road movie. But believe me, every inch of that road is paved with sorrow, regret, happiness, and a deep-rooted sense of what America should be, what is was, and the huge, heartbreaking disparity between the two. The latter Van Sant film, Milk, is easily accessible. It is the true story of the gay activist Harvey Milk. It is his life story. Sean Penn's performances defies adjectives. He is consistently the most briliant and versatile actor working in films today, alongside of Daniel Day-Lewis. He embodies Milk, he loses himself in this man's fight for equal rights for the gay community. His perspicacity and resilience in the face of adversity brilliantly shines through Penn's performance. This is Van Sant's most personal film, being a gay man and filmmaker. He makes us care so deeply about this man and his plight. This is truly an amazing film, one of the best, if not the best of that year.

I could go on endlessly about different filmmakers, but this last section will discuss foreign films. I will start with one of my favorite filmmakers, Akira Kurosawa. He is one of the masters of cinema, a guiding influence on some of the greatest and most successful filmmakers today such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas -the latter most directly. Kurosawa's 1957 film, the Hidden Fortress, directly inspired Lucas' Star Wars. All the characters are there- a princess,a knight, and two bumbling, antagonistic sidekicks, one small and fat and the other tall and thin (R2D2 AND C3P0). It is a very enjoyable film. His true masterpieces, though, are Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Rashomon, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, and Ran. Kurosawa was the most western of Asian filmmakers and was uniformly criticized for it by his contemporaries. His films are Western in conception and he was a vocal proponent of John Ford and his seminal Western films with John Wayne. And where Ford had his leading man, so did Kurosawa. His star was the incomparable Toshiro Mifune and their filmmaking partnership is the most fecund ever in the history of cinema (and routinely voted so by critics around the world). His most infuential films are Seven Samurai which was remade in America as the Magnificent Seven, Sanjuro was remade with Clint Eastwood in the "Man with no name" spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone, and Rashomon, which tells about a rape from several points of view. This latter tactic has been repeated ad nauseum in American movies, most recently with the immensely popular The Hangover. Mifune is brilliant in all these films. His versitality and talent knew no bounds. He has been routinely, and rightfully, called the Japanese Marlon Brando.

Kurosawa's most heartbraking film, and his best in my opinion, is Ikiru from 1952. It is about a dying bureaucrat whose spends his remaining days trying to get a playground built in a lugubrious district in Japan. His story is told in flashbacks and the ending shot of the film, as staged by Kurosawa, is one of the most brilliant in all of cinema-it made me cry. His later masterpieces are Kagemusha from 1980 and Ran from 1985. The former is about how a common thief, who is a doppelganger for the dead emperor, is forced to stand in for the deceased by the emperor's inner circle. It is humorous at first, but the thief starts to feel a sense of pride and admiration for the emperor's position and his countrymen that he never felt before. The ending is heartbreaking and the final image of a flag floating down a river is enormously moving and a personal statement by Kurosawa on the state of his country at the time. Ran is an ambitious retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear. This time, the emperor's kingdom is divided between his sons. Two are avaricious and have Macbeth-ish wives and lieges whose influence and lust for power over the brothers ineluctably leads to everyone's downfall. This is one of the best films ever made and is routinely voted by critics as one of the best films of the 80s. Kurosawa'a visual sense is precise and beautiful to behold and the lead performance by Tatsuya Nakadai (Mifune's successor), is one of the best I've ever seen- its like a fully realized Noh performance. This film is a perfect and rare example of how a master filmmaker can crystallize his vision onto the screen with seemingly zero effort. It is truly astounding. By the way, these few films I mentioned are readily avaliable at Movie Stop and most likely Blockbuster.

In later blogs, I will discuss other foreign filmmakers including my favorite, Federico Fellini. Perhaps I will do one a week. We'll see. But I think for now, I've given enough rental/purchase ideas for the lay film enthusiast. So enjoy my selections and please give me feedback as to your thoughts and feelings on these films.

Independent Vision

I wanted to expound on some of the films I discussed in my previous blog. Other films I discussed, such as Yi-Yi and In the Mood for Love, are foreign films and not readily accessible to renters, so I won't really delve into their merits. I'd rather discuss films that might be easier to obtain. The first is Mulholland Drive. It was conceived and directed by David Lynch, the oddball genius behind the 80s masterpiece, Blue Velvet. He also was the creator of my favorite TV series of all time, Twin Peaks. His films are very surreal in tone and sometimes difficult to decipher. Mulholland Drive is no exception. It is a brilliant melange of film noir and mysticism. Its dreamlike quality mirrors that of the city it is set in, Los Angeles. Its story is as nebulous as the highways and byways of that great metropolis and the ending will absolutely blow your mind! I recommend you see it more than once to notice all those little, surreptitious details ingeniously placed by Lynch throughout the movie. A paean to the "city of lights", Lynch has created a cinematic jigsaw puzzle, a brilliant enigma. The movie will haunt you, truly haunt you.

The second film I talked about was Gus Van Sant's Elephant. The film is like a sustained tone-poem, an elegy for the dead. Elephant tells the story of a Columbine-like shooting at a high school and the events that lead up to it. The film is only 80 minutes in length, but every second of it is mesmerizing. Van Sant's idiosynchratic shots of moving clouds, his ubiquitous use of Kubrickian tracking shots help to create a contemplative, almost emotionally placid, tone to every scene in the movie. The movie has a sort of portentous quality to it. Something frightening is going to happen and it will jar everyone, characters and audience alike, out of their self-enforced complacency. The film won the Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This is the most respected film festival in the world and the Palm is its highest honor, quite prestigious. Van Sant also won Best Director. A haunting, thought-provoking movie.

The third and last film is Wes Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums. This movie is a marvel. Anderson's directing style is so distinct, so purposeful,so hilarious. He creates these hermetically sealed worlds populated by eccentric characters in ornate surroundings. The visuals and the art direction in this film are startling. The script by Anderson and actor Owen Wilson is slyly brilliant, at turns hilarious, poignant, and deeply philosophical. The actors are all uniformly excellent. Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover,Bill Murray, and Luke Wilson all deftly portray members/friends of the dysfunctional Tenenbaum family. The patriarch, Royal, is brilliantly portrayed by Gene Hackman in one of his very best performances. The movie itself mirrors Hackman's performance- mostly humorous but with a subcurrent of profound melancholy and real pathos. The scene at the end of the movie between Stiller and Hackman is so perfectly written, so crystalline in its execution, that it made me cry. Anderson has done some marvelous films in the past such as Rushmore (with a brilliant award-winning supporting performance by Bill Murray), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (this time starring Murray), and The Darjeeling Limited (my personal favorite). If you have not seen any of these truly unique and magical films, rectify that heinous mistake immediately.

Competing Cinematic Ideologies

To be or not to be...a true film enthusiast. An article from Blog Catalog presents their top ranked films of the decade. This list, according to the website, has been culled from numerous online surveys. This ostensibly infers public opinion. Following this article is another which elaborates on Film Comment's list of the "Top 150 Films of the Decade". For those who don't know, Film Comment is a magazine which covers the gamut of cinematic tastes, from old to new, from foreign to domestic, from narrative to documentary films. It is published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and is considered the "official journal" of film society. I had a hunch that the two lists would be disparate in nature and to my absolute non-surpise, I was correct. This ineluctable disparity is the perfect example of the friction between dominant and fringe ideologies.

Let's start with Blog Catalog's list. The top THREE on their list are the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This definitely smacks of the influence of the lay filmgoer. Don't get me wrong, these are noble films, each a beguling blend of artistic and technical virtuosity. However,they are slightly saccharine in tone, purposely so to make it more palatable for the average moviegoer. Ok, let's look at the top three on Film Comment's list: Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, and Yi-Yi. Now, I know all three very well and their respective directors. They are all masters of their craft and their films are truly unique and powerful. But I bet if I asked random people from the public, let's say people from our writing class, they would certainly not have heard of any of them - an instant "deer in the headlights" look would return my query. The directors are, respectively, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, and Edward Yang. And I just know that everybody and their grandmother can name the director of the Rings trilogy, right?

As I perused both lists, I noticed a preponderance of Academy Award winning films on the "populist" (online) list and mostly independent and foreign films on Film Comment's. The former had films like the Best Picture winners Slumdog Millionaire and Million Dollar Baby. These choices are indicative of the power the multimedia/awards shows has on the lay public. Advertisements which aggrandize "Oscar-nominated" films are ubiquitous and insidiously ensconse themselves in the recesses of the lay public's psyche. As a result, we start to associate "Academy Award" with words like "grand" and "epic" and "dramatically brilliant". We then adopt the populist, or the dominant culture's, ideology that Oscar-winning films must be great. Everyone is victim to it, including me. Look at the Rings trilogy. People came out in droves to see these films because they were marketed as the "second coming".

Film Comment's list contained many independent film successes such as Elephant, Royal Tenenbaums, and Before Sunset. All these films were made for shoestring budgets compared to that of the Rings trilogy. The directors of these films, Gus Van Sant, Wes Anderson,and Richard Linklater respectively, have stayed out of the mainstream spotlight (excepting Van Sant for his film, Milk). Their films have an independent film sensibility- cerebral/ contemplative tone, stylistic directorial flourishes, and brilliantly incisive/witty dialogue. To the lay public, "independent" is a gentle euphemism for "fringe","esoteric", or "artsy-fartsy". The word frightens them, alienates them. Independent films are not big budget or formulaic in nature, actors sometimes work for scale, and they do not have wide distribution. They are on the periphery but this is what invigorates true film enthusiasts. They know that when they watch an independent film, they will see something out of the norm, maybe a little odd and eccentric, but continually fascinating. Even when an independent film fails artistically, one can still feel the passion of the filmmaker in every frame. Their earnestness, their striving for originality and deeper truths, is what usually sets them apart from more "mainstream", more marketable films such as the Rings trilogy. Let's face it, those films are spectacle. They're not probing for deeper human truths. The mantra for independent filmmakers is what the legendary director Jean-Luc-Godard coined the art of cinema: "Truth at 24 frames per second".

My rhetoric may seem elitist in tone, but it is not. All the films I mentioned in this article, from both the "populist" and critics' lists alike, I have in my collection. I don't solely watch independent film. I like mainstream films as well,as long as they are done effectively and with heart. I think Slumdog Millionaire and Million Dollar Baby are masterpieces. They both are powerful statements on the human condition and the resiliency of the human heart. The film enthusiast, like me, just yearns for a redefiniton of what a good film is in the eyes of a standard filmgoer. A good film can make you think, can be non-linear, contrapuntal, in its construction and tone. It doesn't have to be formulaic with a neatly wrapped, happy ending. Sometimes, you may have to contemplate how the characters' lives/story will unfold after the credits roll and after you have left the theatre. Great films, both mainstream and independent, don't give you all the answers. Instead, they provoke you, demand that you provide them. And they certainly don't have to win any damned Academy Awards or break box office records to earn your respect and gratitude.