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.