Into the Wild is a 2007 American biographical drama survival film written and directed by Sean Penn, based on the travels of Christopher McCandless across North America and his life spent in the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s.
Depending on who you ask, Christopher McCandless was a Thoreau-like ‘back to nature!‘ hero or a simple-minded romantic.
The Double is a 2013 dark comedy written and directed by relative newcomer Richard Ayoade, starring Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Mia Wasikowska. The film is based on the novella The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is about a man driven to mental breakdown when he is usurped by a doppelgänger.
The Double is World Cinema Classic #218.
… I like paintings you can listen to, music for the deaf and drawings for the blind. I like playing with medium specificity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuMI4lMk_-s
I recently discovered High Note (1960, above), a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Chuck Jones.
In this charming film, various musical notes set up the sheet music to get ready for a performance of The Blue Danube Waltz. However, a sole note is missing. It turns out the note (a red-faced “High Note”) is drunk upon staggering out of the sheet music to “Little Brown Jug“, and the irritated conductor chases after him to put him back in his place so the waltz can continue as planned. Eventually, the rogue note is put back into place, but when the performance starts again, it has disappeared again, along with the rest of the sheet music. The composer then discovers that all the notes have gone into the “Little Brown Jug” to get drunk.
This film entered my head as visual music, although it is less so than the music visualization of Fantasia (1940), of which Oskar Fischinger‘s interpretation of J. S. Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is online here.
Big Eyes (2014), a biographical drama film by Tim Burton about American artist Margaret Keane, who specialized in portraits of kitschy doe-eyed children and waifs.
Lana Del Rey contributed the song “Big Eyes”.
See 2014 in film.
Above is the trailer to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years
The Dance of Reality (2013) is an autobiographical film by Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929).
Other films of 2013 I have enjoyed:
http://vimeo.com/105411099
Coke? The perfect commodity. Why?
In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology documentary Slavoj Žižek explains.
The documentary is now online in full. (update: the documentary was taken offline a few days after I had posted it.)
Slavoj Žižek is unique in using films to prove philosophical points, see film and philosophy.
The full text of the The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is here[1].
Near Death Experience is a 2014 French film directed, produced and written by Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern coming to local screens from September onwards.
The film stars French writer Michel Houellebecq as Paul, a burn-out man who escapes to the mountains on his racing bike with the plan to commit suicide.
Some of Houellebecq’s work has already been filmed.
Several years ago I saw the decidedly philosophical film Extension du domaine de la lutte (also known as Whatever) which is now on YouTube in its entirety.
The “our hero” of Whatever reminds me of Paul.
Houellebecq’s debut as protagonist has been acclaimed.
He is part of my canon.
Discovering Amos Vogel‘s Film as a Subversive Art (1974) was a blast and leafing through the book today still is a thrill (see for example a still I posted on my new NSFW tumblr blog). The book is a milestone in the history of subversion.
Now online is Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 (UK, 2003) , a documentary about Amos Vogel (1921 – 2012) and the film society Cinema 16.
“Smokestack Lightning” (1956) by Howlin’ Wolf (1910 – 1976) is ‘world music classic‘ #882.
“Smokestack Lightning” is on the soundtrack to The Wolf of Wall Street, a boring film about boring people who think they are interesting because they are high.
It’s astonishing how cocaine has shaped the history of the West since the 1970s.
The Wolf of Wall Street reminded me of American Psycho.
I liked American Psycho a lot better.
Other 1956 ‘world music classic’ compositions include “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, “Fever” by Little Willie John and “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrkjbmUPF0
closing credits sequence of Dogville
Yesterday, I watched Dogville (2003) on DVD with my daughter, who had to watch it for her final year in high school. Her assignment: searching for Brechtian alienation elements. That wasn’t hard: the whole film is an attack on the suspension of disbelief.
I’d previously seen the von Trier film in the cinema and that time I had missed the importance of the closing credits sequence [above] with images of poverty-stricken Americans taken from Jacob Holdt’s social documentary photography book American Pictures (1977) and accompanied by David Bowie’s song “Young Americans.”
The film is an indictment of the hypocrisy of small town morality. Its most dislikable character is Tom Edison Jr., the wannabe writer, would be philosopher and cowardly lover who abuses Grace’s trust time after time.
Von Trier’s tale reminded me both of Thomas Hardy and the misery of Jude the Obscure and of the festering perversion in the small town of Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss.
The film is a masterpiece. But bleak.
I’ve added it to my film canon: the World Cinema Classics list where it sits next to District 9 and Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde.