The Chorus Canon • Page 6

You were 10000% Finch in high school

 

For pretty much all of high school I wore black slacks, a black band t-shirts, and a few armbands.

 

man

 

Decided to update my canon with a few I either forgot or hadn't seen, or just at the time had decided not to include to keep it at a round 450. I'll probably update my list every once in awhile but keep it at like, 10 additions at a time.

Scarface dir. Howard Hawks (1931)
The Magnificent Ambersons dir. Orson Welles (1942)
An American in Paris dir. Vincente Minnelli (1951)
Shree 420 dir. Raj Kapoor (1955)
La Jetee dir. Chris Marker (1962)
The Conversation dir. Francis Ford Coppola (1974)
Terrorizers dir. Edward Yang (1986)
Ossos dir. Pedro Costa (1997)
Solaris dir. Steven Soderbergh (2002)

Scarface, Soderbergh's Solaris, and Ossos I thought about at the time but for whatever reason kept out. The Conversation, La Jetee, and An American in Paris are obviously classics. I would have included them but for some reason just forgot or passed over them at the time. The Magnificent Ambersons, Shree 420, and Terrorizers I saw for the first time in the time between posting my list and now and feel like they're worthwhile additions.

Terrorizers is interesting because it's the first Yang film I came away from unsure of how I felt. His control of his craft is clearly evident, but I felt like A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi were masterworks immediately. Taipei Story I really, really liked, but didn't feel was at the same level of the other two. Terrorizers feels complex in ways that lasted with me differently from his masterpieces. Ultimately, it's a fascinating tapestry of stories and characters that move at their own pace and their connections become more meaningful the more you reflect on them. I have three Yang films left to see, plus his segment in In Our Time, but he's an essential filmmaker. Everything I've seen that he's done, I come away with something meaningful.

Shree 420 is a home run. It's a growth from Awaara, a grand class epic. Kapoor is the best at doing Chaplin outside of Chaplin, the movie is funny, folksy, emotional, and I feel like some of the images are monumental. It feels like it hops between genres seamlessly, all within the same story. Broad comedy, dark drama, there are even card game scenes that feel like proto-James Bond. It's only my second Raj Kapoor, but he's up there in terms of talent and impact with anyone of the first half century of cinema.

Obviously Soderbergh's Solaris isn't Tarkovsky's Solaris. I think I've heard it's closer to the book, but I haven't read it and honestly plot-wise it feels mostly similar to Tarkovsky's version, but it's streamlined into Hollywood arthouse, coming in under two hours as opposed to Tarkovsky's two hour, 49 minute runtime. I haven't seen it since my first watch, but it lingers, and one of the things that makes Soderbergh so interesting is that he always has an identifiable concept going into one of his films, there's usually a technical or experimental hook, something he's playing with. I think he's said it's not a remake of Tarkovsky's film, but you can't adapt something a titan of cinema already adapted, a film that's been canonized, and not have that in your mind while you're making it. And it works, which is kind of amazing. Potentially George Clooney's best performance, though he has a lot of contenders.

@OhTheWater watched Ossos for the first time and talked about it here, and I don't think I have a good reason for not including it when I had a Pedro Costa section. I was trying to keep my list at a round number, and the auteur section was the last one I was doing, so I did some trimming there (it's also partly why Yang's Taipei Story wasn't included in his section, it's good but the other two included at the time are in their own league). Maybe it's recency bias since I'd seen In Vanda's Room and Vitalina Varela in the last year and a friend showed me Ossos years ago, maybe before I was ready to grapple with Costa's style, so it was removed in my head from the two that I watched in 2020 and was more taken with. But yeah, everything Costa has done lasts, not just the style and the atmosphere, but images themselves are seared into my memory. I'd like to revisit Ossos because the control of lighting in Vitalina Varela is astounding: it feels like you are only seeing what Costa wants you to see, literally like he's a master crafting moving paintings, and I remember Ossos feeling more raw, maybe not feeling quite as precise, but ultimately he does lead you into these sequences where I feel like I can recall every pixel of the frame. So maybe it's more polished than I'm remembering, maybe it's just the feel.

I feel like the other films included speak for themselves, or have enough written about them that there's not a ton I can add. I've seen a few other films since making my original list that I considered including, like David Lean's Summertime. I thought Summertime was a magnificently orchestrated work of cinema with maybe an imperfect script or weirdly, a couple plot moments that don't feel natural. Since it's only my second David Lean, I think I'll wait to delve further into his work before deciding.

 

Armbands and flip flops

 

I didn't own any sandals then. I was much more concerned about fitting in to the hardcore scene at the time. I wore Converse.

 

i cannot imagine hardcore tetra

 

I want to see a top 25 album list from you

 

I probably haven't listened to an entire album since The Mars Volta broke up. Almost all the music on my phone is something I heard in a movie or show.

 

what the fuck

 

I’m consistent puzzled by how you ended up on this forum lol

 

Definitely A Woman Under the Influence. I didn't really care for Faces and found it kinda dull.

 

Is this actually everything you've seen? Or just some of it?

 

Paranoid '70s "Thrillers":

All the President's Men
The Conversation
Three Days of the Condor
The Day of the Jackal
Klute
Serpico
(The Parallax View fits here, too, but I wouldn't put it on the same level)

'70s Disaster Movies:
The Towering Inferno
The Poseidon Adventure
The High and the Mighty (from the '50s but it's the grandaddy of the genre)
Airport
(Avoid the Airport sequels, and The Swarm is awful. The Hindenburg's okay if you want another)

 

parallax view is better than a lot of those movies, what the hell

 

Disagree. It's well made, but it's about less. It does creeping dread really well but...that's the whole thing.

 

It is probably pretty close. I hope I haven't seen too much more than 2000 so far.

 

I have to say, your total amounts of 30s and 40s movies being under 15 caught me by surprise.

 

It isn't a particularly interesting period. Most of the great arthouse directors didn't come of age until the late Fifties or even Sixties, and the American films were often bland. I have seen most of the canon ones I had to see, but very little else of that era seems necessary.

 

Shots fired

 

The 1930s were always considered one of the great decades of American cinema and for awhile I always preferred the 40s and 50s, but in the last three years have come around. There is excellent stuff in the 30s. One of my favorite decades for Hollywood.

 

I was curious so I went to LB and took out the shorts. I've seen 281 feature films from the '30s.

 

I’ve seen 2

 

44 on Letterboxd, but that’s mostly just since I started logging there. I’m probably close to 100? I’d have to go over it

 

i have 5 on LB, maybe a few more off it that I haven't logged yet