Rants and Ruminations

NYT’s The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century (part 1)

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Photo caption: Song Kang-Ho in PARASITE, justifiably on the NYT’s Best Movies of the Century.

Naturally, The Movie Gourmet has thoughts about the New York Times’ recently published The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century. First of all, I’m glad that the NYT did it – it demonstrates that one of our most credible institutions thinks that cinema is important to the culture and that people should take it seriously. Movies matter.

And, it’s a pretty good list. I can weigh in because I’ve seen all 100 except for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (#38), Let the Right One In (#70) and Interstellar (#89), and I’ve written about most of them. There’s solid representation of animated films and international cinema, with a few comedies and only one comic book movie (The Dark Knight). Parasite is a worthy choice for #1 on the NYT list, although I would place it at #2 behind Boyhood (#23 on the NYT list).

ACCOLADES

I am absolutely delighted to see some deserving films on the list that aren’t often included in the Great Movies conversation: In the Mood for Love (#4), Children of Men (#13), Memories of Murder (#99), Spirited Away (#9), A Serious Man (#36), Y Tu Mama Tambien (#18), Anatomy of a Fall (#26), Her (#24), A Prophet (#35), Aftersun (#78), The Act of Killing (#82) and Grizzly Man (#98). Lately, In the Mood for Love has been getting more buzz from cinephiles.

Identifying good filmmaking is one thing, but personal taste is pivotal in ranking films. I rank the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (#36) higher than their There Will Be Blood (#3), Jordan Peele’s Nope higher than his Get Out (#8), Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…(#44) than his Inglorious Basterds (#13), Denis Villaneuve’s Incendies higher than his Arrival (#29), Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces higher than his Volver (#80), Greta Gerwig’s Barbie higher than her Lady Bird (#39). I can’t imagine how the NYT panel overlooked Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Don’t Look Up in favor of his Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (#85).

SOME QUIBBLES

A few movies should have been ranked much higher: Before Sunset (#49), Best in Show (#57), Oppenheimer (#65), Minority Report (#94).

There are only two lousy movies on the whole list: The Tree of Life (#79) and The Favourite (#52). And the panel generally resisted including Eat Your Broccoli Movies, except for Yi Yi (#40) and The Gleaners & I (#88). I just don’t like The Royal Tenenbaums (#21), Frances Ha (#90), Inside Llewyn Davis (#83), Melancholia (#84) and City of God (#15).

With only three documentaries (The Act of Killing, Grizzly Man, The Gleaners & I), the list is pretty light on docs. On any list of 100 films, I would have added An Inconvenient Truth, They Shall Not Grow Old, Stories We Tell, and the three films in the Seven Up series (49 Up, 56 Up and 63 Up).

BIG MISSES

The NYT panel whiffed on six movies that should be in the century’s top 30, let alone 100, films: 25th Hour, Million Dollar Baby, Nomadland, The Power of the Dog, Shoplifters and Sideways. What were they thinking?

And there’s not a single film from Clint Eastwood (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima), Spike Lee (25th Hour), Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska), Debra Gralnik (Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace), Sarah Polley (Away from Her, Take this Waltz, Stories We Tell), Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy) the Dardennes brothers (The Son, The Kid with the Bike), Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters, Broker), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Chloe Zhao (The Rider, Nomadland), or Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, The Bikeriders). Given the inclusion of work from Yorgos Lanthimos, Lars Von Trier and the way overrated Wes Anderson, that’s pretty shocking.

THE CONVERSATION BEGINS

Thanks, NYT. Now it’s our turn. I’m working on my own list (much shorter than 100) of the century’s best. Watch this space.

Edward Norton in Spike Lee’s 25TH HOUR – regrettably not on the NYT list..

Why I’m skipping THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

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Photo caption: Benedict Cumberbatch in THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME. Courtesy of Focus Features.

You’re gonna have to look elsewhere for a review of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, because I’ m gonna skip it. As I wrote about Anderson’s Asteroid City, he keeps making remarkably clever movies without an emotional core.

Anderson is undeniably an auteur, whose films are highly imaginative. The finest film actors love working with him, and studios will finance his films. Yet, I have very strongly ambivalent feelings about his work. I’ve loved his Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom and pretty much scorned his other movies. After The Grand Budapest Hotel, I refused to even see The French Dispatch, and I only saw Asteroid City because it was extremely convenient for me.

I have friends who enjoy Wes Anderson movies, and I can understand why.  His films are breezy and a relief from all that is stupid in the culture. His backgrounds are filled with Easter Egg witticisms which are fun to scan for, and it’s fun to count off the movie stars (hey, that’s Matt Dillon!). He takes the viewer into worlds that only he can imagine.

The Phoenician Scheme is especially tempting because it’s filled with many of my favorite actors: Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Alex Jennings and Michael Cera, whom the trailer indicates is stealing the movie. Another of my favorite actors, Benedict Cumberbatch, gets to wear a gloriously silly beard that makes Emperor Maximilian’s look like five o’clock shadow. Benicio del Toro, Bryan Cranston, Steve Park, Rupert Friend and Mathieu Amalric round out the crazy impressive cast.

But I’ve come to realize that Anderson often makes very clever movies whose characters don’t engage me. I really, really cared about Max Fischer in Rushmore and and Sam in Moonrise Kingdom. I never cared what happened to Steve Zissou or any of the fucking Tenenbaums. All wit and no heart doesn’t do it for me.

Comments on the Oscars, along with The Movie Gourmet’s 2025 Oscar Dinner

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Photo caption: The Movie Gourmet’s 2025 Oscar Dinner.

The Dinner

Every year, The Wife and I watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. Usually, there’s one dish or beverage from each of the nominated movies; here are the 2024 Oscar Dinner and the 2023 Oscar Dinner as examples.

But we just couldn’t contrive an elaborate meal from this year’s nominees. There just weren’t memorable food scenes in A Complete Unknown, Wicked or Conclave. The fancy dinner parties in The Brutalist were pivotal scenes, but it’s not clear what they were serving, nor was it memorable what Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley were taking out of their fridge in The Substance. We had already echoed the giant sandworms of an earlier Dune movie (wih gummy worms on a bed of rice) and didn’t care to duplicate that. The one great 2024 food scene was in Anora, when Annie (Mikey Madison) scarfed the burger in the diner with the Russian/Armenian goons; that is the best Gal-Devours-Burger scene since Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy.

So this year, we’re just celebrating the movies with movie food. We’ve got the fountain drinks, popcorn and movie candy, and we’re getting our protein from nachos and hot dogs. The very idea of multiplex hot dogs would make me gag, but I remember that the sadly departed Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco, served Nathan’s All-Beef hot dogs, and that’s what we’re going with here.

The Academy Awards

And how about the Oscars themselves? The lead story is that the nominations were pretty solid. For the second straight year, there weren’t any gross miscarriages of justice in snubs or undeserved recognition. Either Anora or The Brutalist would deserve Best Picture and ither Timothy Chalamet or Adrien Brody would deserve Best Actor. Kieran Culkin was always a lock for the Best Supporting Actor, but the others guys all deserved to be nominated. It was fun to have such a wide-open race for Best Actress, without a clear frontrunner and this clearly being the only chance at an Oscar for Demi Moore, Karla Sofia Gascon and Fernanda Torres.

I had been thinking about the Best Actor award, where Adrien Brody had been the frontrunner for months, as the star in this year’s most ambitious, epic, intentionally arty movie – An Important Movie. Brody gave a wonderful performance as a guy who came into the story drained of his resilience; Brody played a guy weathering big lows and big highs, without ever controlling his destiny. To my mind, Timothy Chalamet had the tougher assignment – to play a character so odd, so prickly, so witty and so ambitious. Yeah, Dylan was a genius at age 20, but he was so obsessed about songwriting, so reverential about Woody Guthrie and yet so self-confident when there wasn’t any objective evidence to support him until people like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez heard his work. Chalamet captures all of of Dylan’s complications and gives us a believable impersonation of an icon, too. IMO Chalamet had the best performance. But Brody was excellent, and he gave a heartfelt acceptance speech.

FWIW I’ve had Anora as the #1 film on my running list of the Best Movies of 2024 since the week it released in October.

The Show

The best moments of the telecast were:

  • The opening We Love LA segment followed by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo and their beautiful renditions of home-themed songs. Sentimental? Sure, but very fitting as an acknowledgement of the fire disasters on the industry and the community.
  • Conan O’Brien’s claim to interrupt overlong acceptance speeches, not with music, but with John Lithgow looking disappointed. Very funny.

The Oscar producers actually improved two areas that have been pet peeves of mine. First, they condensed the presentation of the Best Song nominees, and excised the tiresome full performances of the five songs. Finally!

Second, recent changes to the In Memoriam segment (always my favorite part of the show) had been sucking out the emotional impact. This year, it helped to show examples of the decedents’ work in the background of their portraits.

But there’s no reason for this show to drag to three hours and 46 minutes, and it would generate more viewer engagement if an hour shorter. Examples of time wasting abounded tonight: the silly Adam Sandler gag, O’Briens’s “time waste“ musical number, professional firefighters delivering jokes from the writers room, and the inexplicable medley of James Bond songs. I think it’s time to move the animated, live action and documentary shorts off the live telecast, too.

Still, I’m a sucker for the Oscars. I’ll be watching next year, too.

NOIR CITY is here – don’t miss these three femmes fatale

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Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN
Photo caption: Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN

Tomorrow, the Noir City film fest opens at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland and runs through February 2. This year’s program showcases the women of film noir – which femme is the most fatale?

Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and hard-to-find movies. You know Eddie Muller from TCM’s Noir Alley, and he hosts Noir City in person, this year with his TCM colleague Alicia Malone.

Evelyn Keyes and John Payne in 99 RIVER STREET
Evelyn Keyes and John Payne in 99 RIVER STREET

It’s a great program of 24 movies over ten days, jam packed with unforgettable female performances that span from the iconic (Jane Greer in Out of the Past) to the seductive (Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet) to the, well, savage (Ann Savage in Detour). Here are three of my personal favorites that you should not miss:

  • The Narrow Margin, Noir City’s opening night film with Marie Windsor. In this taut 71 minutes of tension, growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target. McGraw might be film noir’s toughest Tough Guy, but Windsor gives him all the tough he can handle, and matches him snarl for snarl. “Relax, Percy, I wouldn’t want any of that nobility to rub off on me”.
  • 99 River Street with Evelyn Keyes and Peggy Castle. Film noir tends to be about guys with bad luck, but nobody would trade their luck with Ernie Driscoll (John Payne). Ernie has lost his boxing career to a fluke cut and his abusive and slutty wife (a suitably insufferable Castle) to a mobster, and, now, he’s been framed for a murder. His only hope is to track down the Real Killer while driving around with the murdered corpse in his cab. Evelyn Keyes plays a Good Girl would-be actress who goes along for the ride; problem is, Ernie can’t tell when she’s acting. Nobody can keep ’em guessing like Evelyn Keyes.
  • Cry Danger with Rhonda Fleming. Rocky (Dick Powell) has been released from prison; he knows he didn’t commit the crime, but he knows that his alibi is phony, too. Trying to figure out who framed and unframed him, he seeks out an old flame, his partner’s wife Nancy (Rhonda Fleming).  The exquisitely beautiful Nancy is as wholesome as anyone can be with a hubbie in the hoosegow.  We know that. if she turns out to be a femme fatale, it’s going to be a major punch in the gut for Rocky. Bonus: Rocky’s wing man is the perjuring alibi witness (an indelible Richard Erdman): “Occasionally I always drink too much.” It’s hard to top a frame, a drunk, a dame, hidden loot and an LA trailer park. This is not available to stream, so see it at Noir City.
Dick Powell and Rhonda Fleming in CRY DANGER

Read my festival preview, NOIR CITY returns – with the spotlight on femmes fatale, which lists the twelve films from this year’s Noir City program that are NOT available to stream. Noir City is your best chance to see them.

I’ve written about The Narrow Margin, 99 River Street, Raw Deal, Caged, Cry Danger, The Prowler and Murder, My Sweet in my Overlooked Noir feature. Check them out, along with my Overlooked Neo-noir.

Don’t miss Noir City. Review the program and buy tickets at Noir City. Of the nine film festivals that I cover each year, I always insist on attending Noir City in person. To steal from Eddie Muller, see you in the shadows.

NOIR CITY returns – with the spotlight on femmes fatale

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Evelyn Keyes and John Payne in 99 RIVER STREET
Photo caption: Evelyn Keyes and John Payne in 99 RIVER STREET

The Noir City film fest, always one of the best Bay Area cinema experiences, returns January 24 and runs through February 2 at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. This year’s program showcases the women of film noir – which femme is the most fatale?

Come to think about it, noir is the only movie genre that practically REQUIRES a pivotal female character. You can make a western, a comedy, a sci fi, a war movie or even, these days, a romance without any women on the screen. But not a noir.

Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and hard-to-find movies. You know Eddie Muller from TCM’s Noir Alley, and he hosts Noir City in person, this year with his TCM colleague Alicia Malone.

Recent Noir City fests have introduced us to film noir from other countries and have sampled neo-noir. This year’s Noir City program goes back to the basics of American movies from the classic film noir period of the 1940s and 1950s. The program spans the genre, highlighting essential female performances, both famous and overlooked:

  • Out of the Past with Jane Greer manipulating Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas in her most celebrated Good Girl/Bad Girl role.
  • The Narrow Margin: Charles McGraw might be film noir’s toughest Tough Guy, but Marie Windsor gives him all the tough he can handle, and matches him snarl for snarl.
  • Murder, My Sweet, featuring the Queen of Noir, Claire Trevor.
  • Raw Deal, where Trevor and the underused Marcia Hunt form a ménage a noir with poor Dennis O’Keefe. Two for the price of one.
  • 99 River Street: Nobody could keep the guys guessing more than the alluring Evelyn Keyes.
  • Tension with Audrey Totter as the most dismissive, humiliating, cuckolding wife in film noir.
  • Cry Danger and the ultra rare Inferno, with Rhonda Fleming, arguably the most beautiful American movie star of all time. When Rhonda goes bad, it’s a real gut punch for the sap.
  • Caged, the prototype for Orange Is the New Black. Eleanor Parker was the one nominated for an Oscar, but Hope Emerson, in an obviously LGBTQ role, steals the movie.
  • Detour: Ann Savage as perhaps the most rapaciously predatory and unhinged of femme fatales. One of the few Hollywood films where the leading lady was intentionally de-glamorized with oily, stringy hair.

Thirteen films on the program will be projected in 35mm.

Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor and Dennis O'Keefe in RAW DEAL
Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor and Dennis O’Keefe in RAW DEAL

These titles from this year’s Noir City program are NOT available to stream, so Noir City is your best chance to see them: 

  • Hell’s Half Acre
  • The Sleeping City
  • Tension
  • Alias Nick Beale
  • The Long Wait
  • Raw Deal
  • Mary Ryan, Detective
  • My True Story
  • The Reckless Moment
  • Tomorrow Is Another Day
  • Cry Danger
  • Inferno

Next week, just as Noir City opens, I’ll be back to feature three Must See movies in the program. I’ve previously written about The Narrow Margin, 99 River Street, Raw Deal, Caged, Cry Danger, The Prowler and Murder, My Sweet in my Overlooked Noir feature. Check them out, along with my Overlooked Neo-noir.

Make your plans now. Review the program and buy tickets at Noir City. I’ll be there.

Best Movies of 2024

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Photo caption: Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in ANORA. Courtesy of NEON.

Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year.  By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2023 and  Best Movies of 2022 lists. To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.

When I wrote my year’s end post last December 31, I had already seen the best two films, Oppenheimer and Anatomy of a Fall. Today, I still haven’t seen many of the films I expect to contend for this list, including The Room Next Door, The Brutalist, Hard Truths, All We Imagine as Light and Hard Truths. Pretty sure most of those will end up high on my list when I finalize it in a couple months. Sean Baker’s Anora is brilliant film, but I expect it to be surpassed on my list by one or some of the upcoming releases.

I HAVE seen 126 2024 films so far. BTW that 126 total for 2024 doesn’t include the 105 festival submissions that I’ve screened (those will be 2025 films) nor the 104 movies from earlier years that I watched this year.

Monica Barbaro and Timothee Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Here’s the entire list of the best of 2024:

  • Anora: human spirit vs the oligarchs. In theaters.
  • A Complete Unknown: a genius and his time. In theaters.
  • The Bikeriders: they ride, drink and fight, and yet we care. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • Hit Man: who knew self-invention could be so fun? Netflix.
  • Challengers: three people and their desire. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • La Chimera: six genres for the price of one.  Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • In the Summers: they mature, he evolves. Amazon.
  • The Substance: the thinking woman’s Faust, if you can take the body horror. MUBI (free), Amazon, AppleTV.
  • Ghostlight: a family saves itself, in iambic pentameter. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango (included).
  • The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed: is she going to be a loser? Amazon, AppleTV, Hulu.
  • Sweetheart Deal: a triumph of cinéma vérité. In arthouse theaters.
  • Love Lies Bleeding: obsessions and impulses collide. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • I Saw the TV Glow: brimming with originality. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
Jodie Comer and Austin Butler in THE BIKERIDERS. Courtesy of Focus Features.
Bill Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

Happy Anniversary to The Wife!

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Photo caption: Donna Reed in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE – the second best wife ever

Happy 24th Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa, The Love of My Life!

We started out the year by binge-watching The Crown (season 6) and Shetland (season 6), and ended, as is our beloved Holiday tradition, watching It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen

I really enjoyed introducing her to Anatomy of a Fall in January. Together, we discovered Ghostlight and The Bikeriders in July and Conclave, A Real Pain, A Complete Unknown and Queer to close out the year.

After a year-long streak of stinkers, she revived her own movie-picking credibility with Wicked Little Letters and Kneecap.

Once again, she tolerated my spending huge chunks of time covering Noir City and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in person and Cinequest, Slamdance, Frameline, San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), Nashville Film Festival and San Francisco Jewish Film Festival virtually. She was also OK with my helping out Cinequest by screening over 100 film submissions. I’m getting ready now to cover Noir City in person and Slamdance virtually again in January.

She joined me on my bucket list pilgrimage to the 105-year-old Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank Grill. We sat at the bar where William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett imbibed (and where Hammett wrote). We dined at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s regular booth and passed by Charlie Chaplin’s regular table by the front window. Unforgettable.

She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog DURING ALL OF ITS FOURTEEN YEARS, and I appreciate her and love her. Happy Anniversary, Honey!

JIMMY CARTER – “What people say they want”

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In PBS’ American Experience documentary Jimmy Carter, The New Yorker writer and former Carter speechwriter Henrik Hertzberg says:

Jimmy Carter was what the American people always SAY they want – above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn’t lie, a modest man, not someone with a lot of imperial pretenses.  That’s what people say they want.  And that’s what they got with Jimmy Carter.

And herein lies the rub. 

In 1976, Americans were reacting to Watergate and wanted a President the LEAST like Richard Nixon. We got him, in the form of Jimmy Carter; it turned out that Carter could deliver non-Nixonian decency, but not the leadership that the era required.

In Jimmy Carter, we hear from those who know Carter best – including his wife Rosalynn Carter, his vice-president Walter Mondale, and right-from-the-start Carter insiders Jody Powell, Pat Caddell and Bert Lance. How the times made this man, then propelled him to such improbable electoral success and then finally doomed his Administration, is a great and cautionary story.

Jimmy Carter is in two parts, which combine for two hours and 39 minutes. It’s available to stream from Amazon and AppleTV (I can find it on my app, but not on the website).

Best (and Worst) Movie-going Experiences of 2024

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Photo caption: Craig Wasson and Jodi Thelen in FOUR FRIENDS

I see over 300 movies each year, and every time, I am hoping for an especially rewarding experience. Here are my favorite movie-going experiences of 2024.

  • A special screening of Four Friends at the Cambria Film Festival with stars Craig Wasson, Reed Birney and Jim Metzler. Critics loved this 1981 Arthur Penn film, and I loved it, and almost nobody else saw it. A film about an aspirational blue-collar young man in the turbulent Vietnam Era (like me), this film deeply resonated with me in 1981 and continues to do so. Grievously underrated, Four Friends isn’t available to stream and is very hard to find. It was wonderful to see it agaon, this time with an audience and the filmmakers.
  • Noir City: In recent years, Eddie Muller and team have been introducing me to international film noir. This year, they came through with the French Symphony for a Massacre and the British Across the Bridge. I attended Noir City in-person in Oakland, and I’ll be returning in January 2025.
  • Slamdance: This blog loves directorial debuts and world premieres – and that’s what Slamdance is all about. This year, the best two films were Italian: The Complex Forms and The Accident.
  • Cinequest: The film festival that launched this blog was once again rich with world premieres. The best were The Invisibles, Pain and Peace, and The Island Between the Tides, and the North American premiere of Human Resources. presented the remarkable In the Summers.
  • Nashville Film Festival: NashFilm has become one of my favorite film fests, and this year introduced me to In the Summers, which made my year-end top ten.
  • SFFILM: This time, SFFILM delivered two surprises of surrealism and absurdism: Mother Couch and The Practice.
  • San Luis Obispo International Film Festival: This year, the SLO Film Fest soared with its unique and very deep surf/skate program, and two indie charmers, Tokyo Cowboy and Chasing, Chasing Amy.
  • Frameline: San Francisco’s major LGBTQ fest brought us Gondola, another charming, dialogue-free comedy from German writer-director Veit Helmer, this one set in Georgia.
  • San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: The SFJFF is a major Jewish cultural event held against the backdrop of current events in Israel and Gaza, and the SFJFF leaned right into what would otherwise be the elephant in the room. I’ve been covering the SFJFF since 2016, I’m not Jewish and I can attest that this attitude is nothing new. I’ve seen SFJFF films with Palestinian voices, by Palestinian and Israeli Arab filmmakers, and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  • Not for the first time: I re-experienced Man on a Train, The Day of the Jackal, The Valley of Elah and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.
  • Palm Theater: My hometown arthouse delivered The Taste of Things, La Chimera, Wicked Little Letters, Ghostlight, How to Come Alive, Didi, The Outrun, Anora, A Real Pain, Queer and A Complete Unknown.
  • Sweetheart Deal: I’ve reviewed fifteen documentaries this year and screened another 80 while helping to program a film festival. Sweetheart Deal is the best documentary I’ve seen this year.
  • The Bikeriders: Jeff Nichols has written and directed six films, and I have loved all five that I have seen, including this latest one with Jodie Comer’s fine performance.
  • Netflix: I expected Richard Linklater’s Hit Man to be good (and it was), but I was totally surprised by The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

TO TOP EVERYTHING ELSE

This is not technically movie-GOING, but it topped my movie-RELATED experiences of 2024. The Wife and I were joined by our friends Keith, Cynthia and Nisan on a bucket list pilgrimage to the 105-year-old Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank Grill. The Wife and I sat at the bar where William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett imbibed (and where Hammett wrote). We dined at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s regular booth and passed by Charlie Chaplin’s regular table by the front window. (The old-school martini and the sweetbreads were the best I’ve had.)

THE WORST

I usually don’t have a “ten worst movie” list because I only choose to watch movies that I hope will be exceptionally good. After all, I don’t have an editor assigning me to review soulless franchise movies, predictable rom coms and cheesy horror flicks. And, I generally just choose NOT to write about a bad indie – indie filmmakers have invested years of their lives in their films, and they just don’t need snark from somebody like me. But EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, some film crosses the line.

This year, that film was a world premiere at Slamdance, the Japanese high school coming of age film House of Se, where one of the main characters is a menstruophile who swipes all the used sanitary napkins in the school. Anyone who makes a film this transgressive really must deliver a movie with some minimal production values and a coherent story, which House of Se fails to do. Of the 300+ movies that I watched in 2024, House of Se is unquestionably the very worst.

I did despise Kinds of Kindness and The Dead Don’t Hurt, but at least they were competently made.

2024 FAREWELLS: behind the camera

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Roger Corman

The prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman has died at 98, leaving behind a legacy far greater than the 491 titles that he produced. Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers.  Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.  Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman. And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend. And movie star Jack Nicholson In the 70s, Corman combined making lowbrow American movies with distributing highbrow foreign films, including  Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Fellini’s Amarcord, Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzawa and Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum.  In one decade, he distributed more Best Foreign Film Oscar winners than all the Hollywood studios combined.

Robert Towne is best known, justifiably, for his Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown, one of my Greatest Movies of All Time; but director Roman Polanski perfected the script by changing the ending over Towne’s objections.  However, Chinatown was only one of a string of brilliant screenplays penned by Towne between 1973 and 1982 – The Last Detail, The Yakuza, Shampoo and Personal Best. Starting in 1967, Towne was also the uncredited script doctor who polished Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Godfather and Heaven Can Wait.

Casting director and producer Fred Roos enhanced the films of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas by advocating for then unknown actors like Al Pacino, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Lowe, Cindy Williams, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon and Mackenzie Phillips.

In his second act, Marshall Brickman co-wrote Woody Allen’s two masterpieces: Annie Hall and Manhattan. Brickman had success before (creating Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent and co-writing The Muppets) and after (creating the Broadway shows Jersey Boys and The Addams Family).

Documentarian Morgan Spurlock broke through with his McDonalds exposé Super Size Me.

Eleanor Coppola was the wife of director Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of director Sophia Coppola. Eleanor Coppola herself directed perhaps the best ever documentary film about the making of a movie, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.