Robin Wood

The Scarlet Empress, one of Robin Wood's and my favorite films

The death this past weekend of Robin Wood, one of the greatest and most influential film critics, is being mourned by cinephiles all over the internet. Some of the best tributes come from David Bordwell, Girish Shambu, Dave Kehr and Glenn Kenny. I posted a couple feeble comments of my own at Dave Kehr's blog, in the company of such esteemed critics and friends of Wood as Adrian Martin, Kent Jones, Joseph McBride and Tony Williams. His first book, Hitchcock's Films, probably the first serious book of film criticism I read as a budding cinephile back in 1970, was enormously influential to me and countless others. I no longer have that mass-market version of the book shown above, but I'm beginning to reread my copy of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, a major expansion of the original 1965 book which he published in the late 80s.

I had already been reading and admiring Robin Wood's numerous books (on Hawks, Bergman, Chabrol, Antonioni and the Apu trilogy) and articles for several years in the 70s when I came across his famous 1977 article in Film Comment, Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic. It was a revelation to me, still closeted at the time, that one could be openly gay and also a serious film critic who shared so many of my tastes in film. The next year I attended a memorable screening of Brian de Palma's SISTERS at which Wood discussed the film, part of a series on horror films called "The American Nightmare."

Wood's always elegant, lucid prose style and his passionate defense of his favorite films are what make his work so eminently rereadable. He was a brilliant mind who, from all accounts, was also a truly decent, generous and caring man.

UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of Robin Wood's Final Top Ten, illustrated with some gorgeous stills, is a fitting tribute.

Best of 2009 (New and Revivals)

24 City

Frontier of Dawn

The Beaches of Agnès

Following up on my posts about the best films of the decade and best queer films of the decade, here is my tentative list of the best films I saw theatrically in 2009 (subject to last-minute revisions). The list is divided into Best New Releases, Best Films I Saw at the New York Film Festival, and Best Revivals.

Best New Releases
1. 35 Shots of Rum
2. 24 City
3. The Beaches of Agnes (Varda's appearance at the Walter Reade is the Q&A of the year)
4. The Headless Woman
5. The Limits of Control
6. Bright Star
7. Tokyo Sonata
8. Summer Hours
9. Lorna’s Silence
10. Two Lovers
11. Liverpool
12. Fantastic Mr. Fox
13. A Serious Man
14. The Frontier of Dawn
15. Still Walking
16. Me and Orson Welles
17. Precious
18. Night and Day
19. The Hurt Locker
20. Inglourious Basterds

SPECIAL MENTION: Invictus; The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus; Lake Tahoe; Beeswax; Up in the Air; Gomorrah; Goodbye, Solo; Of Time and the City (Terence Davies's beautiful, very personal documentary, first seen in 2008); Julia (for Tilda Swinton's fearless, breathtaking performance); (500) Days of Summer (for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance)

Best of the New York Film Festival
1. Wild Grass
2. To Die Like a Man
3. Mother
4. Everyone Else
5. Ne Change Rien
6. Ghost Town
7. Police, Adjective
8. Independencia

Best Revivals (grouped by venue, not ranked)
The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, Walter Reade)
Satyajit Ray Retrospective (Walter Reade)
Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, Walter Reade)

Shoeshine (Vittorio de Sica, Walter Reade)
Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, Walter Reade/NYFF)
La Rabbia di Pasolini (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Walter Reade/NYFF)
The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Walter Reade)
La Promesse/The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Walter Reade)
The Red and the White (Miklos Jancso, Walter Reade)
Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, Film Forum)
Holiday (George Cukor, Film Forum)
Wild River (Elia Kazan, Film Forum)
By Candlelight (James Whale, Film Forum)
In a Lonely Place/Bigger than Life/Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray, Film Forum)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, Anthology)
You and Me (Fritz Lang, Anthology)
Screen Test #2 (Andy Warhol, Anthology)
Blue (Krzystof Kieslowski, BAM) (Juliette Binoche in person)
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, BAM)
King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, BAM)
The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, BAM)
The President/Love One Another/The Bride of Glomdal (Carl Th. Dreyer, BAM)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, MoMA)
Terence Davies Trilogy (MoMA)
The Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young, MoMA)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, MoMA)
Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, MoMA)
L'Argent (Marcel L'Herbier, MoMA)
Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, Museum of the Moving Image)
Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, Asia Society) (Tsai and Lee Kang-Sheng in person)

Best Queer Films of the Decade

There were a number of great and near-great queer films in the past decade, so in this season of best-of lists I thought I'd try to compile a list of the best queer films released in the last ten years. I'll be updating it as I look back and think of more entries. Some of these, such as those of Tsai Ming-Liang, have only marginal queer content but certainly deserve to be recognized. After the first entry, which stands out for me as the best, they're presented in chronological order.

1. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

The Rest:

O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000)
Our Lady of the Assassins (Barbet Schroeder, 2000)
Come Undone (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2000)
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (François Ozon, 2000)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2001)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)
Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
His Secret Life (Ferzan Ozpetek, 2001)
Lost and Delirious (Léa Pool, 2001)
Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
The Embalmer (Matteo Garrone, 2002)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)
Son Frere (Patrice Chéreau, 2003)
Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003)
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003)
Changing Times (André Téchiné, 2004)
Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)
Night Watch (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 2004)
Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke, 2004)
Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2005)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005)
Fuseboy (Guy Maddin, 2005)
Broken Sky (Julián Hernández, 2006)
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2006) (above bottom)
The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2006)
Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)
Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, 2006)
No Regret (Hee-Il Leesong, 2006)
Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007)
La León (Santiago Otheguy, 2007)
The Witnesses (André Téchiné, 2007)
Chris & Don: A Love Story (Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, 2007)
The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007)
Serbis (Brillante Mendoza, 2008)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Julián Hernández, 2009) (above top)
Fig Leaves (John Greyson, 2009)

Best of the Decade

I realize that I haven't posted anything in quite a while, in fact I missed the entire month of November, so it's about time I write something new. There has been an avalanche of Best of the Decade lists recently (the 00s, the Aughts, or whatever it's being called), and David Hudson has done a great job of linking to them at the Auteurs Daily. My favorite list so far is the one compiled by the Toronto Cinematheque (TIFF List) from the ballots of a number of film historians, archivists and programmers, and their number one film is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century. I watched the film again for the fourth time to see if it lived up to such a designation and I can't think of another film this decade that gives me such pleasure on so many levels. (Mulholland Drive and In the Mood for Love would be close runners-up, along with Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady (#6) and Blissfully Yours (#13). My cinephile friend Juan doesn't think Joe deserves to have three films in the top fifteen, but we'll agree to disagree about that.) Syndromes is a film that is hard to analyze or appreciate on a strictly narrative level, but it does have real flesh-and-blood characters and things do happen. It's just that the rhythm of the camera movements, the flashbacks, music, and dual narrative structure are so absorbing, and Joe's attitude toward his characters (including representations of his doctor parents) is so loving, compassionate, humorous and sensual, that I find myself transported every time I see it.

Glenn Kenny lists his top 70, and Film Comment has a great list of the top 150 films of the decade.