The 1985 Mini-List

[therewillbeblus]

And my recommendation for 1985: If you liked the likes of like Je vous salue, Marie or A Zed and Two Noughts or Mishima, try Morita's Sorekara [And Then ...] if you haven't already seen it.

I liked this, but it didn't feel as connected to those aforementioned works as I expected. I'd love to hear more about why you chose them as points of comparison (which may help me appreciate this film more than I did)

[yoshimori]

Ah. Sorry about that. Didn't mean to suggest that these works somehow particularly resonate with each other. It's just that they're all 1985 films I quite like. If you like those others, I hoped to imply, you might also like this one.

In any case, glad you did like it. I'd write more, but I'm about to get on a plane. I'll try to organize some sentences about it when I get settled back in, but maybe the best way to gain greater appreciation for it is to watch more Morita films. I'd recommend, especially, whichever of Family Game, [haru], Keiho, and Mohouhan [Copycat Killers] you haven't already seen.

[knives]

I rather liked Mephisto, but it in no way prepared me for how good Colonel Redl would be. Brandauer plays a completely different sort of character. Here is is so intelligent and aware of his surroundings as to kind of self immolate in slow motion just to fit in. He’s always thinking of how he isn’t to the extent he probably never could be.

[yoshimori]

Brandauer ... is so intelligent and aware of his surroundings as to kind of self immolate in slow motion just to fit in.

Ha! Yes.

And Armin Mueller-Stahl's half-whistling the Strauss waltz is unforgettable. [For those who know it.]

[yoshimori]

OK. I'm not sure this kind of thing leads to appreciation, but here are a couple notes on two Morita films: Tokimeki ni shisu (Death in the Throes of Ecstasy) – one of my orphans on our 1984 list – and 1985’s Sorekara.

- Tokimeki ni shisu – an “adaptation” of an Akutagawa Prize-winning thriller about a hitman preparing to assassinate a cult leader. Instead of Day of the Jackal-like scenes of the mechanics of preparation Morita shoots playboy bunnies watching monks play pinball and the day trips the assassin-protagonist and his officious butler take to the beach.

- Instead of orthodox characters struggling through an ambivalence about the morality of killing or whose socio-economic background or ideology somehow justifies their actions, Morita populates his film with the socially awkward, comic eccentrics he developed in Family Game and mocks the thriller’s attempts at “explanatory backstory”. No matter how directly the assassin’s butler-handler tries to wrest psychologically germane information from him – “I want to know all about your childhood” and “Do you have a motive?” – the hitman remains a cipher whose idiosyncratic dietary, sex, and other habits prove ultimately irrelevant.

- Morita drains the long-awaited denouement, the assassination attempt, of any typical narrative pleasure. His hitman simply approaches his target, waves his gun a bit, then is immediately tackled and whisked into the backseat of a police car before he can fire it.

- Sorekara is also an adaptation ... of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel. But rather than meticulously recreate turn-of-the-century Japan, Morita overlays his distinctly postmodern, comic sensibility onto the Meiji period.

- The movie explicitly raises the epistemological questions that shaped Tokimeki, and will later, with minor variation, drive the plots of Keiho and Copycat Killers. When his brother-in-law comments on his apparent tranquility, for example, the sphinx-like protagonist, Daisuke (Matsuda Yusaku, who played the tutor in Family Game), corrects him: “Appearances are deceiving.” When his translator friend asks him why he was born, Daisuke’s hilariously brusque response – “None of your business!” – suggests any answer would be futile.

- Daisuke himself seems oblivious to his beloved’s intentions – she borrows money on the pretense of paying a debt, spends it on clothes, claims it was used for “moving expenses”, then asks for more. Unambiguous character motivations, Morita implies, are for the weak!

- In the end, Daisuke, determined to follow a path that spells financial and social ruin, is expelled from the family estate because, as his father (an iconic Ryu Chisu) complains, “No one is more dangerous than someone we can’t understand!”

All this - Morita's critique of mainstream cinema's development of "characters" and its narrative conventions - along with his unparalleled visual and editorial technique and his control of his cast's idiosyncratic performances, strikes me as super-delightful.

[knives]

Thanks so much both of you for the impassioned discussion of the Morita. I wouldn’t have searched it out otherwise.

I liked it a fair bit. It weirdly reminded me of Merchant-Ivory or perhaps a more hard edged Yoji Yamada. There’s something compelling for me in these quiet scenes of battle determined by a look or the smallest movement. The film feels dense in its use of simplicity.

[yoshimori]

There’s something compelling for me in these quiet scenes of battle determined by a look or the smallest movement. The film feels dense in its use of simplicity.

Part of Morita's genius is his ability to present the sentimental thing and undermine it in the same film. Those aesthetics of "quiet" and "the smallest movement" are pushed to the extreme here, in the "love story" part of the plot:

- Michiyo visit Daisuke to ask for a financial favor in a 270 second shot which ends, after over two minutes in a seated medium profile two-shot, with Michiyo's standing, then moving slowly foreground (camera tracking back with her) into a light which artificially overexposes her face.

- An hour later in the film, Michiyo serves Daisuke a soft drink and asks why he doesn't marry in a continuous 320 second take in which Daisuke never budges from his spot on the floor and the camera, aside from a minor pan to pick-up Michiyo in the middle of the shot, pushes only imperceptibly in.

- In an all-but-static 465 second tight profile two-shot, Daisuke and Michiyo, seated either side of a vase of lilies, profess, obliquely, their love.

- The most bizarre of the protracted, motionless moments is probably the one in which Michiyo explains that her husband's scarf has been made from their dead baby's unused wardrobe. [!] Morita's three-shot exudes a tension derived not only from the compositional triangle with three distinct image sizes – Daisuke's face in the foreground left, Hiraoka's upper torso in the middleground right, and Michiyo's whole body in the background middle – but also from the juxtaposition of his character's three distinct performances. Michiyo, eyes down, stereotypically deferential, earnest, slow, tenderly exhibits the cloth. Hiraoka, stiff but active, wriggling out of his macabre scarf, barks at his wife. Daisuke sits through the family squabble with a characteristic dopey smile plastered on his face, spouts non-sequiturs, pretends everything is fine. As if three different movies are happening simultaneously in a single long take.

- The strategy evidenced in these moments is "crystallized" in several cheesily poignant faux-freeze frames - Daisuke shelters Michiyo under his umbrella on a rain-drenched overpass; four shots in Ueno Park are utterly motionless, like snapshots, the only indication of movement a reflection of light on a garment or the slight displacement of hair. The players are frozen in pregnant poses. Dramatic stasis.

It weirdly reminded me of Merchant-Ivory or perhaps a more hard edged Yoji Yamada.

I can see that, but it seems to me to underestimate his fashionableness and pomo irony. If he's a Yamada, he's a very very very hard-edged one. For me, Morita's more like a precursor to the Coen Brothers. His Sorekara is a kinda muted Japanese Miller's Crossing (minus, of course, the whole gangster plot thing).

Interestingly, I think, there's a directorial reference to Scorsese's King of Comedy in Sorekara. In a café scene during an extended single-shot conversation in which the journalist asks Daisuke for a loan, another diner in the foreground mimics the journalist's every move - nervously twirling chopsticks, hurriedly shoveling noodles, anxiously leaning in towards his potential benefactor – in a significantly more pronounced, and absurd, manner than his model does. The King of Comedy uses the same tactics to ridicule Robert De Niro's Rupert Pupkin - a diner in the booth behind Pupkin mocks the hapless protagonist's gestures over his shoulder. But Morita's scene spirals further out of control than Scorsese's when its journalist unexpectedly starts lecturing in Russian. This momentarily stymies the bewildered copycat.

[knives]

Wow, I didn’t pick up on many of those things. Thanks for the additional examinations.

[yoshimori]

I didn’t pick up on many of those things.

Ha! You probably haven't seen the movie a dozen times over the past 30 years.

I've owned the unsubbed Japanese VHS, truly hideous HK VCD and DVDs, an unsubbed Japanese Laserdisc, and now, finally, the big Japanese Morita blu-ray box. Most films in the box are untranslated, but there are readily available linkable sub files for all but three of them.

[knives]

Boorman’s The Emerald Forest is a pretty fun one. I went in assuming it was going to be a parody of Indiana Jones and it turns out to be a philosophically inclined Blue Lagoon minus the sex. Boorman’s interest in the father differentiates this from most other narratives of its kind (though that makes it basically a left wing The Searchers if such a thing can be considered) even as it eventually surrenders to a a proto-type of Dances with Wolves. I guess that makes this a bit of a transitional film which is where a lot of the interest comes from even as it’s also where a great deal of the lack of success comes from as this kind of narrative on the whole has been passed over.

It’s also nice to see Boorman back from the edge a bit. Even Excalibur was fairly strange so to see him segment his aesthetic concerns into something mostly traditional was a surprise, but I think it does the film well.

[knives]

Here’s another one to add to the list, please and thanks swo, Goaha’s sensitive killer tale Tracked. This is a clear relative of Vengeance is Mine with Gosha rolling back some of his most stylish preoccupations to really build a character study of a man completely changed by his misdeeds. Ogata gives a very different performance from when he worked with Imamura. The result is someone who first reads as sympathetic despite his deeds before being enveloped with enough danger to make all of his positive interactions terrifying. It’s a nesting doll of audience relationship.

[swo17]

Added, thanks!

[knives]

Just submitted my list and despite seeing a decent number of films I considered voting for less then 25. The top end of my list has some all time favorites like the beautifully bonkers Broken Down Film, but it began to trail off hard after about 15 films.

[therewillbeblus]

It’s a little late to make a plug, but for all of you who’ve been sleeping on Yvonne Rainer for these projects, The Man Who Envied Women is one of her better and most accessible films, as well as the most Godardian of her works. That’s a bit of a paradox, but it’s still true

[swo17]

Broken Down Film

Thanks for recommending this!

Some other lesser known titles worth a look:

The Black Cannon Incident (Huang Jianxin)

A more down-to-earth (but still darkly comic) version of the scenario from Brazil, with a bureaucratic mix-up producing exaggerated consequences

Le Soulier de satin (Manoel De Oliveira)

7 hours of carefully arranged actors performing the source play in lengthy static shots that will drive you mad, possibly in the good way

Fire Festival (Mitsuo Yanagimachi)

In the tradition of those Imamura films where the lives of some secluded villagers are regularly disrupted by those pesky next-door neighbors in the sky, the angry gods

Régime sans pain (Raúl Ruiz)

The visual inventiveness you'd expect, with the welcome addition of a cheesy '80s music video aesthetic

Everywhere at Once (Alan Berliner) (on Kino's DVD for Nobody's Business)

Effective marriage of seemingly random juxtapositions of found sound and video footage to achieve the titular effect without even once resorting to hot dog fingers

Grim (Takashi Itō) (on the Takashi Itō Film Anthology DVD)

Another extremely cool exercise in using camera tricks to make a simple space appear to be inhabited by the supernatural. There's at least one trick that I can intuit how it was done (time lapse performed while the camera tracks backward at a glacial pace) but it's no less invigorating to watch

Braddock Food Bank (Tony Buba) (on Kino's Collected Shorts of Tony Buba)
Comically low budget but for philanthropic reasons

And finally, some great music videos:

Fetus Productions: Flicker (Alex Proyas)
Yello: Oh Yeah (Dieter Meier)
'Weird Al' Yankovic: Like a Surgeon (Jay Levey & Robert K. Weiss)
Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm (Jean-Paul Goude)
Bernard Wright: Who Do You Love (Zbigniew Rybczyński)

[thirtyframesasecond]

Zbigniew Rybczyński also directed a great music video for Propaganda (P Machinery) the same year.

[swo17]

Yes, I limited myself to one (and picked something pretty obscure) but he actually has 10 videos eligible for this year. A lot of good stuff there!

[geoffcowgill]

Is Altman's Fool for Love not 1985 eligible?

[swo17]

Sorry, that hadn't been on my radar. I've now added it

[geoffcowgill]

Thanks!

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1985

VOTE THROUGH JULY 31

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

Last day to vote, if anyone needs a reminder. Or if you've already voted but want to change anything and can't see your ballot, PM me and I can send you a link to it

[swo17]

The 1985 List



##. Film (Director) points/votes(top 5 placements, aka likely votes in decade list)/highest ranking

01. Иди и смотри [Idi i smotri] [Come and See] (Elem Klimov) 228/12(6)/1(x2)
02. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen) 196/10(4)/1
03. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader) 194/10(4)/1(x2)
04. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis) 171/9(4)/2
(tie) After Hours (Martin Scorsese) 171/10(3)/1
06. Brazil (Terry Gilliam) 168/9(3)/1
07. 乱 [Ran] (Akira Kurosawa) 154/8(3)/2
(tie) Sans toit ni loi [Vagabond] (Agnès Varda) 154/9(3)/1
09. Lost in America (Albert Brooks) 146/8(4)/3
10. タンポポ [Tanpopo] (Jūzō Itami) 122/6(3)/1
11. 青梅竹馬 [Qing mei zhu ma] [Taipei Story] (Edward Yang) 111/6(4)/2
12. The Breakfast Club (John Hughes) 95/7(2)/4
13. שואה [Shoah] (Claude Lanzmann) 83/5(1)/2
14. O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman) 82/5(3)/1
15. Pee-wee's Big Adventure (Tim Burton) 81/5(1)/1
16. Witness (Peter Weir) 75/6(1)/2
17. Smooth Talk (Joyce Chopra) 71/6/8
18. Je vous salue, Marie [Hail Mary] (Jean-Luc Godard) 70/3(3)/1
(tie) To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin) 70/4(2)/3
20. Oberst Redl [Redl ezredes] [Colonel Redl] (István Szabó) 62/4/8(x2)
21. Détective (Jean-Luc Godard) 61/4/7(x2)
22. 警察故事 [Ging chaat goo si] [Police Story] (Jackie Chan) 60/3(1)/2
23. Mitt liv som hund [My Life as a Dog] (Lasse Hallström) 59/3(2)/3
24. Sherman's March (Ross McElwee) 55/4(2)/4
25. ამბავი სურამის ციხისა [Ambavi suramis tsikhisa] [The Legend of Suram Fortress] (Sergei Parajanov) 52/4/6
26. A Zed & Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway) 51/4(1)/4
27. O-bi, o-ba, koniec cywilizacji [The End of Civilization] (Piotr Szulkin) 50/4(1)/4
(tie) Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph) 50/4/8
29. Into the Night (John Landis) 48/3/6
30. The Goonies (Richard Donner) 46/2(2)/2
(tie) 火まつり [Himatsuri] [Fire Festival] (Mitsuo Yanagimachi) 46/3/6
32. Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky) 44/2(2)/4(x2)
33. The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg) 43/3/10
34. 童年往事 [Tong nian wang shi] [A Time to Live, a Time to Die] (Hou Hsiao-hsien) 40/2(1)/3
35. Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood) 38/2(1)/1
36. Отац на службеном [Otac na službenom putu] [When Father Was Away on Business] (Emir Kusturica) 34/3(1)/1
(tie) Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg) 34/2/7
38. Fletch (Michael Ritchie) 33/3/13
39. 台風クラブ [Taifū kurabu] [Typhoon Club] (Shinji Sōmai) 32/3/6
(tie) Real Genius (Martha Coolidge) 32/3/10
41. Tokyo-ga (Wim Wenders) 31/2/10
42. Lifeforce (Tobe Hooper) 29/2/11
43. Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman) 27/3/13
44. Plenty (Fred Schepisi) 25/2/7
(tie) The Man Who Envied Women (Yvonne Rainer) 25/2/10
(tie) 食卓のない家 [Shokutaku no nai ie] [The Empty Table] (Masaki Kobayashi) 25/2/12
(tie) Prizzi's Honor (John Huston) 25/3/13
48. Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse, or This Unnameable Little Broom, Being a Largely Disguised Reduction of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tableau II (Stephen & Timothy Quay) 22/2/15(x2)
49. Mask (Peter Bogdanovich) 20/2/8
(tie) Weird Science (John Hughes) 20/2/15
(tie) Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon) 20/3/16


ALSO-RANS

殭屍先生 [Geung see sin sang] [Mr. Vampire] (Ricky Lau) 18/3/16
Fright Night (Tom Holland) 16/2/15
The Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon) 14/2/19(x2)
Ladyhawke (Richard Donner) 13/2/16
Vesničko má středisková [My Sweet Little Village] (Jiří Menzel) 13/2/18
The Falcon and the Snowman (John Schlesinger) 11/2/18
The Coca-Cola Kid (Dušan Makavejev) 11/2/20
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller & George Ogilvie) 6/2/22
Poulet au vinaigre [Cop au Vin] (Claude Chabrol) 3/2/24

ORPHANS

Film (Director) highest ranking

7 p., cuis., s. de b.... (à saisir) (Agnès Varda) 6
Bittere Ernte [Angry Harvest] (Agnieszka Holland) 3
Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (Alan Clarke) 7
Esperando la carroza [Waiting for the Hearse] (Alejandro Doria) 17
Fetus Productions: Flicker (Alex Proyas) 14
Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit [The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time] (Alexander Kluge) 9
Pet Shop Boys: West End Girls (Andy Morahan & Eric Watson) 15
Le Livre de Marie [The Book of Mary] (Anne-Marie Miéville) 6
秋天里的春天 [Qiu tian li de chun tian] [Spring in Autumn] (Bai Chen) 9
A.K. (Chris Marker) 22
L'Effrontée [An Impudent Girl] (Claude Miller) 12
皇家師姐 [Wong ka si jie] [Yes, Madam!] (Corey Yuen) 19
A szél [The Wind] (Csaba Varga) 16
聖誕奇遇結良緣 [Sing daan kei yue git leung yuen] [It's a Drink! It's a Bomb!] (David Chung) 6
Kate Bush: Running Up That Hill (David Garfath) 25
The Angelic Conversation (Derek Jarman) 12
ผีเสื้อและดอกไม้ [Peesua lae dokmai] [Butterfly and Flowers] (Euthana Mukdasanit) 2
La ciudad y los perros [The City and the Dogs] (Francisco José Lombardi) 8
Padre nuestro [Our Father] (Francisco Regueiro) 12
Racetrack (Frederick Wiseman) 25
Höhenfeuer [Alpine Fire] (Fredi M. Murer) 22
The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy) 23
78 Tours (Georges Schwizgebel) 13
ചിദംബരം [Chidambaram] (Govindan Aravindan) 19
Mala noche (Gus Van Sant) 18
O Beijo da Mulher Aranha [Kiss of the Spider Woman] (Héctor Babenco) 3
薄化粧 [Usugeshō] [Tracked] (Hideo Gosha) 18
黑砲事件 [Hei pao shi jian] [The Black Cannon Incident] (Huang Jianxin) 24
'Weird Al' Yankovic: Like a Surgeon (Jay Levey & Robert K. Weiss) 25
Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm (Jean-Paul Goude) 22
The Journey of Natty Gann (Jeremy Paul Kagan) 16
The Lightship (Jerzy Skolimowski) 14
The Emerald Forest (John Boorman) 24
Clue (Jonathan Lynn) 25
Бал на води [Bal na vodi] [Hey Babu Riba] (Jovan Aćin) 6
Kate Bush: Cloudbusting (Julian Doyle) 23
Anne of Green Gables (Kevin Sullivan) 21
Bez końca [No End] (Krzysztof Kieślowski) 17
霹靂十傑 [Pi li shi jie] [Disciples of the 36th Chamber] (Lau Kar-leung) 25
Silverado (Lawrence Kasdan) 5
La vaquilla [The Heifer] (Luis García Berlanga) 13
La historia oficial [The Official Story] (Luis Puenzo) 17
天使のたまご [Tenshi no tamago] [Angel's Egg] (Mamoru Oshii) 19
Le Soulier de satin [The Satin Slipper] (Manoel de Oliveira) 9
Commando (Mark L. Lester) 23
Police (Maurice Pialat) 15
U2: The Unforgettable Fire (Meiert Avis) 16
Year of the Dragon (Michael Cimino) 9
Restless Natives (Michael Hoffman) 14
The Peanut Butter Solution (Michael Rubbo) 25
The Amazing Bone (Michael Sporn) 20
Péril en la demeure [Death in a French Garden] (Michel Deville) 9
Sting: Fortress Around Your Heart (Mick Haggerty) 24
La messa è finita [The Mass Is Over] (Nanni Moretti) 15
Tears for Fears: Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Nigel Dick) 17
Tears for Fears: Head Over Heels (Nigel Dick) 18
Tears for Fears: Shout (Nigel Dick) 19
おんぼろフィルム [Onborofirumu] [Broken Down Film] (Osamu Tezuka) 1
Scorpio Nights (Peque Gallaga) 20
Depeche Mode: Shake the Disease (Peter Care) 24
Régime sans pain [Diet Without Bread] (Raúl Ruiz) 13
Pete Townshend: Secondhand Love (Richard Lowenstein) 25
INXS: What You Need (Richard Lowenstein & Lynn-Maree Milburn) 20
Fool for Love (Robert Altman) 18
Transylvania 6-5000 (Rudy De Luca) 20
My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears) 10
Dire Straits: Walk of Life (Stephen R. Johnson) 21
A-Ha: Take on Me (Steve Barron) 14
Grim (Takashi Itō) 7
Louie Bluie (Terry Zwigoff) 5
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Just Like Honey (Tim Broad) 23
The Cure: In Between Days (Tim Pope) 22
Braddock Food Bank (Tony Buba) 23
それから [Sorekara] [And Then] (Yoshimitsu Morita) 2
Bernard Wright: Who Do You Love (Zbigniew Rybczyński) 19
青春祭 [Qing chun ji] [Sacrifice of Youth] (Zhang Nuanxin) 10

15 lists submitted

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks swo! Much love to my fellow pranksters who ranked O.C. & Stiggs so highly, and to Fran for releasing it on blu-ray to make this possible.

Edit: Also, who else voted for Yvonne Rainer, allowing one of her films to make the main list? What a treat!

1. O.C. and Stiggs
2. Je vous salue, Marie
3. To Live and Die in L.A.
4. The Goonies
5. Back to the Future
6. It’s a Drink! It’s a Bomb!
7. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
8. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
9. The Purple Rose of Cairo
10. The Man Who Envied Women

[knives]

Thanks so much Swo and to also to whomever also voted for the Kobayashi. Makes my posting feel like they made a difference.

[swo17]

That was me, and yes, it wasn't on my radar until you posted about it