The Gleaners and I (2000)

Last year, quite by accident, I had a chance to write about legendary director Orson Welles inventing the video essay in 1973. This summer, I’ve given myself a similar opportunity by choosing to watch 2000’s The Gleaners and I, in which legendary director Agnès Varda invents the vlog. Armed with a digital camera, septuagenarian Varda went all over France talking to to people on the fringes of society. What she found were chefs, artists, and families that quietly challenged global consumer culture. And she found out about herself too, a person with wrinkled hands and gray hair who may have more in common with these gleaners than she thought.

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Cure (1997)

One of my favorite video essayists, KaptainKristian, released a video last January called, “The Melancholic Comfort of Late 90s Horror” and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (although not strictly horror) reminded me of this video. There was a “vibe” that was unique to late 90s horror. As KaptainKristian points out, we were nearing the end of the Millenium and there was an underlying sense of dread. A somberness to films like; Ringu, The Sixth Sense, and The Blair Witch Project. A mournful age for the lonely with seemingly no… cure.

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Fallen Angels (1995)

Let me try to assemble the house of cards that led to Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels. In the Sixties and Seventies, King Hu brought new technical and artistic heights to the wuxia genre with his films Come Drink with Me, Dragon Inn, and A Touch of Zen. Around the same time, Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon brought martial arts films to the global stage. This created an opportunity in the mid-Nineties for an up-and-coming filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai, to take his own shot at the genre. He wrote a prequel to the novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes for his first wuxia film, Ashes of Time.

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Barcelona (1994)

I originally planned on skipping Barcelona in my perusal of Criterion’s Whit Stillman trilogy, going directly from Metropolitan to The Last Days of Disco (if you call a three year gap “direct”). But it’s another year later and and I felt guilty ignoring the middle child. Plus, on paper, you gotta admit it sounds like Stillman made all the right moves in conceptualizing his sophomore effort. He teamed up with a studio, doubled down on stars Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman, and branched out into a more exotic locale that still drew from his personal experiences. Sounds great, right? Yeah, I mean, pretty much. I had a good time.

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Naked (1993)

Sometimes you end up picking a movie for Criterion Month that makes you question why you chose it in the first place, or even why someone would want to tell this particular story. I asked both these questions while watching Naked, although the first question was easy to answer, as I’ve seen a number of Mike Leigh movies and liked every one of them that I’ve seen. So even though I watched half of Naked in college and found it pretty offputting, I still felt compelled to finally watch all of it, since it’s often regarded as one of Leigh’s best films. Also, I just figured my younger self was too dumb to comprehend it. Well, over a decade later, I still have a hard time wrestling with this one, since it has to be among the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen. And yet because Leigh is a director with such specifically-designed characters, you still can’t take your eyes off of Johnny, even if he is at the end of the day, a miserable twat. Continue reading →