Month 41 Status Report

May was something of a disappointment in that I only reviewed 22 List films. It's not terrible, but I always shoot for 25. Ah, well.

However, June is going to be massive! With tonight's review of Serpico, I have put up 993 reviews of List films. That means sometime in the next 10 days, I will write and post my 1,000th review of a List film. That's a milestone that I wasn't sure I'd ever really hit. But I'm almost there, and will be very soon.

Shortly after I post my 1,000th review, I'll reach 1003, which means 100 films remaining. This is a more minor milestone, but still one I'm excited about. Once I get there, it's just bottles of beer on the wall and a few months to finishing.

The third milestone I'll hit in June is my 1,000th post. This is my 979th post on this blog, so sometime around the end of June, I'll hit four digits, another milestone I wasn't sure I'd achieve.

For now, though, my allergies are kicking in severely. I'm going to take a blisteringly hot shower and tuck myself into bed for the next day. See you in June.

Good Cop/Bad Cops

Film: Serpico
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

Serpico is a film that is right in line with a lot of American sensibilities, I think. It may also be in line with the sensibilities of other nations; since I’m not as aware of what the typical Norwegian or Spaniard or Sri Lankan have to say about particular character types, I’m not willing to suggest that Serpico is a universal story. It may well be, though. It has the familiar feel of 12 Angry Men, a lone character standing alone against a group who wish him ill. That the lone man stands for truth and justice and honesty is only natural. That in this case it is based on a true story makes it something exceptional.

The film opens with Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) being rushed to the hospital after being shot in the face on a drug bust. We’re unaware in the moment of what might happen to him or if he will survive the car ride, let alone once he gets to somewhere he can be treated. A few frantic phone calls suggest that Serpico’s wound might well have been inflicted by another officer. From here we flash back to Frank Serpico’s graduation from the police academy.

Toppling Dominoes

Film: Russkiy Kovcheg (Russian Ark)
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I very much feel like I should have a lot to say about Russkiy Kovcheg (Russian Ark), and I very much feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. That’s the problem with demanding longer reviews from myself—when I get into a position like writing up a film like this, I struggle for something to say. At its most pure essence, Russkiy Kovcheg is a 99-minute experiment and little more. We walk through an art gallery and encounter various periods of Russian history preserved, as it were, like the art itself.

Russkiy Kovcheg is notable not for its plot (it has none) but for its astonishing technical achievement. The entire film consists of a single take, one long, uninterrupted shot. This wouldn’t be notable if it were nothing more than a static camera, but the camera here is almost never still. As the narrator and audience point of view (voiced by director Alexander Sokurov) wanders through this living museum, he speaks with another ghost out of time known as either the Stranger or the European (Sergei Dreiden). At times, the Stranger interacts with the people they see; at other times, the two wanderers appear to be unobserved observers.

Die Liebe eines Sohnes

Film: Good Bye, Lenin!
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

One of the great things about the movies is that they are a tremendous opportunity to play make believe. With a good premise you can get away with almost anything. Good Bye, Lenin! is that sort of a film, one that banks on an unbeatable idea for a story and then plays it out by sticking to it as closely as it possibly can. I love it when a film buys into its premise so completely.

In the late 1970s, the father of a family in East Berlin vanishes to the West on the day that the first German launches into space. His wife, Christiane (Katrin Sass), throws herself into becoming the very best citizen of East Germany that she can. In 1990, as the times are changing, she witnesses her son involved in a protest. As her boy Alex (Daniel Bruhl) is tossed into a police van, she collapses. This near-fatal heart attack leaves her in a coma for months.

Trying to Find Chinatown

Film: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

There’s something about film noir that I find attractive and compelling. I can’t get enough of it. Technically, film noir is a style, not a genre but I don’t really care that much about the specific definition of such things. I dig film noir, and when it’s done well, I like neo-noir just as much. Anything that touches on these sensibilities I find interesting, at least when it’s done well. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is done relatively well. It just doesn't quite feel as realistic as it should.

Cosmo Vittelli (Ben Gazzara) is the owner of a strip club. As the story begins, he has just finished paying off a debt to a loan shark (Al Ruban). With his debt paid off, he decides to celebrate. He takes three of his dancers out for a night out. Cosmo ends up at a poker table where he is extended a very large line of credit by the people who run the game, who turn out to be the Mafia. Cosmo’s luck doesn’t change, and he runs up another massive debt. In the whole to the Mob for $23,000, Cosmo finds himself in a difficult situation—he’s at the mercy of a group of very difficult, impatient men who don’t take no for an answer and who don’t care about which side of the law they are on.

Gnarly!

Film: Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I wonder when watching a film like Fast Times at Ridgemont High if an actor like Sean Penn looks back at it, does he do so with fondness? I imagine he probably does. For what is otherwise a funny but ultimately throw-away teen comedy from the early 1980s, Fast Times has a huge number of people in it who went on to do a hell of a lot more, like Penn. This has to be one of the reasons it was selected for The List. In addition to Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Judge Reinhold (an icon in and of the ‘80s), we get appearances from Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and Nicolas Cage before he changed his name from Coppola. It’s also the debut screenplay from Cameron Crowe. For what most people think of as a teen sex comedy, it’s got a pretty good pedigree.

The other, were I to venture a guess, is that it’s one of the rare teen films that blends the sort of raucous sex-and-drugs comedy that most of its key demographic are looking for with some actual drama. If it’s been awhile since you’ve seen this, you may forget that there’s more than just Sean Penn getting stoned with Eric Stoltz and Anthony Edwards and Phoebe Cates taking off the top of her swimsuit here.

Gangland

Film: The Cool World
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

When I started this blog three and a half years ago or so, I made the commitment that I’d write full and complete reviews of every film. While I’m certain there are a couple of films that have gotten short shrift, in general I put up 750 words or more on every film (sometimes a lot more). This causes problems when I come across a film like Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World. When I looked for pictures of this, most of what I found were shots of Dizzy Gillespie. For the life of me, I thought this was going to be an underground documentary on jazz. Now that I’ve seen The Cool World, I’d have rather watched jazz.

For this being an independent film, it’s actually pretty straightforward. A young kid in Harlem named Duke (Rony Clanton) wants nothing more than to get a gun from a man named Priest (Carl Lee). With this gun he hopes to take a leadership position in his gang, the Royal Pythons. His goal with the Pythons is to get them to start rumbling again.