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Thanks, I'll have to check that out! I couldn't find the exact piece I'm referencing, so it's probably a misquote.domino harvey wrote:Mann gave us a psychologically twisted Stewart at least five years earlier with the Naked Spur, though!
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. No one can completely trust their memory of every candidate of theirs for the list as some films will always have been seen more recently or more often than others. It sounds like you're more than qualified to submit a list. There's no guarantee this list will happen again, though the format does encourage participation in the next round of decade lists, and I hope there will be an all-time list in some form again.Rayon Vert wrote:I can't quit my job but, inspired (or driven insane) by doing the Hitchcock rewatches, I'm actually doing something like this right now for those kinds of reasons, with the top 400 or so films on my personal list-of-every-film-I-watch-ranked (started about 10 years ago when I got into films again and seriously developed cinephilia). Unfortunately this means I won't participate in this list because I can't trust my current ranking as it stands. I'll try to part in it when this project comes around again in X amount of years!
Yeah, I just went through and chose every film that's a particular favourite of mine. Really, the hard part is winnowing that list of 81 films down to 50.domino harvey wrote:I agree that people should still submit if there's fifty films they've seen from the 585 they feel strongly enough about to vote for
Absolutely.domino harvey wrote:I agree that people should still submit if there's fifty films they've seen from the 585 they feel strongly enough about to vote for
I know there's a lot of dross on this list (and what those titles are varies on who is looking at it), but I don't believe for a second that anyone who posts here could not find a worthy top fifty from the titles profferedTommaso wrote:I feel strongly enough about some films to vote for them if they were only on the list
I'd love an extension. House move at the start of the period, followed by a month or two getting my projector and home cinema set up (plus three holidays!) meant that I haven't hit the ground running and my keyvip is large.swo17 wrote:I wouldn't be opposed to an extension if people were going to make good use of it...
Thanks for the advice, noir. You're right. I'll assemble a list from a mixture of what I've been able to start re-evaluating in the past months and guesses as to what would still best hold up for me. And any extension (any amount would be welcomed) would just make this more easy!Noiradelic wrote:Rayon Vert wrote:Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I would dearly love an added month. Ideally 2, but I'd take whatever everyone's OK with. Planning to just rewatch films from the master list, at least one a night.swo17 wrote:How much more time would people like?
Great review. I had a very surreal experience last night; I came across this exact review on Letterboxd, liked it and followed the author, and then went to CriterionForum where the first post I saw was... yours. (I assume you posted it there as well, unless we have a plagiarist on our hands!)Superswede11 wrote:I can't believe my only long write-up is for this, but here goes.
Body Double (Brian De Palma 1984)
"There's a man following you"
"I know."
"No, uh...it's not me."
Somebody said the cruelest sleight-of-hand Hitchcock ever pulled on the American public was turning a beloved movie star like Jimmy Stewart into a damaged, domineering wretch like Scottie Ferguson. The cruelest (and funniest) prank De Palma ever pulled was recasting the role of Scottie Ferguson with Craig Wasson. Wasson is to Stewart what Body Double is to Vertigo, and what Los Angeles is to San Francisco.
There are other De Palma movies that recontextualize other people's work, both brilliantly (Carrie as a gender swapped Psycho about the horrors of growing up) and not-so-brilliantly (Dressed to Kill as a brainless Psycho with regressive gender politics), but Body Double is where he takes the idea to its (il)logical conclusion. Which, in this case, is a synthesis of Rear Window & Vertigo, 80s genre movies, pornography, and MTV (life imitates art). In this post-modern soup, De Palma ridicules the influence of MTV and pornography on Hollywood's aesthetics, connecting porn to the excessive phallic imagery of horror movies and the visceral satisfaction of both shoddily made music videos and expertly crafted genre movies. He goes further, comparing easy-to-please film critics to unthinking porn viewers. De Palma also realizes that in an age of ubiquitous pornography, including voyeur porn, his audience is no longer alienated by one Peeping Tom. So there's scenes of Scully watching someone watch someone, and scenes of other people watching him watch someone. The whole movie works on a similar principle, taking everything that it's remixing one step further, even the already overdone, but it's for a reason not just for laughs (though there are plenty of those too).
Even the old trick of making Hitchcock's subtext text has real purpose here: by removing any beauty, romance, or mystery from Scottie's obsession in Vertigo, Scully's stalking is driven solely by adolescent lust, becoming more and more pathetic and creepy. Accordingly, there's a recreation of Vertigo's famous mirror shot and spinning camera kiss on a porno set, and the latter is crosscut with a scene from earlier in the film that is itself a porn-y recreation of another originally romantic moment. One of the most painful and emotional scenes in cinema is ironically transformed into juvenile male wish fulfillment. Another aspect of the movie's hilarious takedown of the trope of "nice guy" protagonists is Scully justifying himself by claiming that he's trying to stop a creepier guy from doing exactly what he's doing. And that ridiculous villain is in reality a malicious racial stereotype scapegoated by a rich white man for profit, and is exploited in other ways by Scully as an overblown opposition to make his sleaziness seem excusable by comparison, with De Palma's critique broadly extending to genre conventions that regularly do the same.
If any of these descriptions make Body Double sound didactic, comfortable, or clear-headed, let me say that it's anything but. The movie reflexively implicates itself and its audience at every turn. Watching it is like receiving a neverending stream of fuck yous, a sophomoric variation of Godard's style of complete audience alienation that is a perfect fit for the material. But for all of its post-modern pranksterism, the movie is also deliriously fun. I mean, just look at the slicked-back hair and all-leather outfit Wasson is stuck in for the entire second half of the movie. As one of the many with an intense personal connection to Vertigo, this movie really upset me the first time I saw it, so I can't blame anyone else for having a similar response. But on rewatch, I admired its brazen parody ("Scully" and "Scottie" sound similar, the actors physically resemble each other, and there are scenes where I'm pretty sure Wasson is literally doing a Jimmy Stewart impersonation) and found its commentary on Vertigo and beyond provocative. Many viewings later, it has become one of my favorite movies, never failing to elicit from me something like Kael's "tiny hedgehog squeaks and raptures" for The Fury. Body Double is De Palma at his most engaging, somehow simultaneously generous and cruel, delightful and troubling, ludicrous and lucid, academic and moronic. In terms of movies I love that make me hate movies, this is, ironically, second only to Vertigo.
If I do some remarkable catch-up and am able to submit a list, this would be somewhere in the top half.
Yeah, that was me! I agree that some of De Palma's best movies are the ones he takes seriously, but for me, this is not one of them. I find it entirely nasty and detached.It's a pretty ludicrous film on its face, but De Palma really takes the emotional core seriously, and it all ends up being far more than just another PoMo joke-y exercise in past master-pastiche. Sure, it's still silly, but it's surprisingly poignant.