10 Christmas Movies for Grown-Ups

....and no, I don't mean porn, but I'm sure you can find plenty of that on the Internet. Now that we have that clarified, here we go:

1. Die Hard (1988) - Some might not remember that the movie that launched Bruce Willis' career and poised Alan Rickman as the ultimate bad guy was set during the happiest of holidays, but Die Hard is a Christmas classic if there ever was one. Detective John McClane flies out to reconnect with his wife on Christmas Eve only to find himself trapped in an office building that has been taken over by a team of terrorists trying to steal $640 million in bonds from the company. McClane then spends the rest of the movie kicking so much ass that you almost feel your own butt tingling, but not in a gay way. Watching this movie pretty much makes you want to dropkick Santa in the face yelling "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!!!" while holding baby Jesus in your arms. If that doesn't get you pumped for Christmas, I don't know what will.
Netflix Instant Watch: Yes



2. A Christmas Tale (2008) - Not many films that get a nod for the Palm d'Or at the Cannes set their premise around the Christmas holiday (in fact, this might be the only one), and Arnaud Desplechin's modern family drama certainly deserved it. A family reunites after years of separated strain when they all discover that their mother has leukemia, and soon it becomes an embittered battle between the siblings as to who will be the savior and donate bone marrow to their mother. All of the characters are free and dynamic and never fall under the spell of over-dramatized stereotypes, thanks in combination to the excellent dialogue and acting and the quirky camerawork, which keeps even the most strenuous moments light-hearted and fun to watch. If you think you know French cinema, be sure to check this one out to see all of the little surprises it carries.
Netflix Instant Watch: Yes



3. Bad Santa (2003) - The idea of Terry Zwigoff and Billy Bob Thornton getting together to make a Christmas film is too weird to even be a fantasy, yet here we are. The result is about as crude as you would expect it to be - almost to a fault. It's probably best considered as the anti-Christmas movie: there is no 'goodwill' here, only dark humor between many bottles of rum. Despite its effort, though, it never reaches the perfect awkward atmosphere of Ghost World, which is definitely a superior film. Still, Thornton plays his part to perfection and Zwigoff throws off any cliche in his screenplay that his premise throws at him. To those who cling to seasonal joys and get upset when movies don't follow moral queues, the result might be pretty depressing and off-putting. But to everyone else, the sky is the limit, and hell you might even learn a lesson here and there.
Netflix Instant Watch: No



4. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) - It always felt strange to me that Kubrick decided to set his final, lust-filled opus during Christmas, but almost every scene is immersed in the season, and hell - why not make it a holiday classic, it's a great movie. A couple struggles over the temptation of infidelity during a fateful night, and whether the allure is real or imagined, they both have to come to terms and define what their bond means. I'm convinced that Tom Cruise took the role because he gets to be with, like, 20 naked ladies throughout the film, but that must have been some motivation because it's probably his best acting just short of Magnolia. And with Kubrick at the helm, every scene is completely absorbing (though the main piano theme might get a bit grinding after a while.) Whether or not you like it, it will certainly mess with your head.
Netflix Instant Watch: No



5. Love Actually (2003) - A well-scripted, hilarious Brit rom-com that intertwines multiple storylines sounds like a strange Christmas gift, but Richard Curtis gave us exactly that in the winter of 2003, and Love Actually is truly the best of its kind. It's chalk full of great scenes and characters and chooses to depict love as something imperfect and real rather than the usual idealized fluff. To top it off, it gives us Bill Nighy drunkenly singing a kitschy Christmas tune called "Love Is All Around," which manages to peak the charts and capture all of the dry jollity of the season. Good stuff.
Netflix Instant Watch: No




6. Brazil (1985) - Terry Gilliam's masterpiece is like a psychotic blend of 1984 and Monty Python, and the fact that it is set during Christmas is perfectly fitting. At its base level the movie is a commentary on the things that we become slaves to - bureaucracy, fear, vanity and most of all consumerism. Everyone aside from the main character, Sam Lowry, seems to be locked in their own self-congratulating space, appeased by giving into their own selfish desires in the easiest and fastest way possible. When looked at with a cynic's eye, Christmas could be little more than a statement on modern consumer culture; the only way we know to show our friends and family that we love them is by buying things for them. Happy Holidays!
Netflix Instant Watch: No



7. Tokyo Godfathers (2003) - A baby abandoned on Christmas Eve is discovered by the most unlikely of families: a homeless trio consisting of a man who has lost his family, a homosexual drag queen who has always longed to be a mother and a girl who has run away from home. As the three search for the baby's (which they nickname Kiyoko) parents, they each reflect on their own misfortunes and abandonment, determined to not let Kiyoko reach the same fate. Brought to us by the masters of mature anime, Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Paprika) and Keiko Nobumoto (Cowboy Bebop), this is a pretty tough watch for a Christmas flick but the plot flows with a spirituality filled with coincidences that can only be described as magical.
Netflix Instant Watch: No



8. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) - With all of the chaos and flare of a Guy Ritchie film and the sexy suaveness of a neo-noir mystery, this guilty pleasure of mine is all adrenaline and pops as seamlessly as a pack of firecrackers (oh, not to mention it stars Robert Downey, Jr.) The main character, Harry Lockhart is a thief turned actor turned hapless investigator, and eventually teams up with PI "Gay" Perry (Val Kilmer at his best) to solve a kidnapping case, supposedly to "get in character" for an upcoming role. The quick-witted meta narration by RDJr. really gives the film its edge and the romance subplot between him and his childhood sweetheart is actually pretty fun to watch. Oh, not to mention the whole thing takes place during Christmas. See, it does belong on this list.
Netflix Instant Watch: No



9. Christmas on Mars (2008) - Far and away the weirdest Christmas movie I've ever seen, this psychedelic freakout of a film was concocted from the mind of Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips (which is about the only thing that makes sense about it.) Not really a Christmas movie in any traditional sense, the plot is loosely based around a character named Major Syrtis organizing a pageant to celebrate the first Christmas on the newly-colonized Mars. Think of it as a weird fusion of Jodorowski and David Lynch in the backdrop of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A true holiday trip.
Netflix Instant Watch: No





10. Black Christmas (1974) - 10 years before he released the perennial A Christmas Story and before he got famous with Porky's, Bob Clark filmed this Canadian cult classic. It was also probably the first Christmas horror film, and came out right when the slasher flick was coming into stride (the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The movie focuses on killings that take place in a sorority house where the girls are tormented by mysterious phone calls that consist of muffled moans and screams. One by one the girls start disappearing as the killer, who we find out lurks in the attic, corners them while they're alone... and kills them. It's by no means a great film, and it's the 70s, so the movie handles 'controversial' issues such as sex, alcoholism and abortion with all the tact of a late-night comedian, but it's a fun ride while it lasts, and horror buffs are sure to love it.
Netflix Instant Watch: Yes


Not enough for you? Check out Edward Scissorhands, Die Hard 2, Scrooged, Millions and Joyeux Noël

A Serbian Film: A Review

RATING
What it tried to do: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
What it accomplished: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

There are those movies out there that seem to exist to whet some masochistic curiosity to stretch the limits of what you as a viewer can stand. Not surprisingly, a market has been made out of this strange desire to watch things that are simply unpleasing to sit through, and extremophiles now have a continually fresh variety of trash to sift through, some of them packaged with a nice moral kick in between the smut. After enough of these movies, I can assuredly say that curiosity is a disease. But even acknowledging that doesn't stop me from succumbing to its tantalizing allure, and that's where I find myself watching A Serbian Film.

Much like Michael Haneke's Funny Games, this movie presents itself as a criticism of the so-called “torture porn” genre that has seemed to pass itself off as “horror” - a vein that includes the Saw franchise, Eli Roth films and most of the Asian Extreme outfit. However, in order to accomplish their criticisms, both movies are defined by the very thing they are criticizing, making them innately flawed. It also makes them very hard to sit through because they constantly remind you that you aren't supposed to be enjoying what you are watching. No entertainment is to be gained from a movie that makes you feel bad for watching it.

I'm not going to sit here and deny that the film has any merits. In fact, a large portion of the movie steeps itself as a family drama, and even a somewhat enchanting one that deals with the strain of having a father and a husband who makes his living as a porn star. The scenes between Miloš, the father, and his son are particularly awkward and touching, especially in one instance when Miloš has to explain the confusion the boy feels when he accidentally stumbles upon one of pornography videos by his father. It also handles the transition from drama to thriller pretty well, with the atmospheric soundtrack and lighting becoming darker and more intense as the plot is removed from its heels. It's a very disorienting effect, but combined with the almost laughably tasteless context of the film, it ends up being completely jarring.

Speaking of tasteless, there's a scene where a newborn baby is raped. Just thought I would throw that out there. It stretches the few boundaries that are left to stretch and because of that it has been banned from quite a few film festivals, perhaps that was the point of the film. There are obvious influences taken from Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom and even a direct reference to George Bataille's Story of the Eye, classics in the realm of libertine philosophy and perversion. However, retreading this material in a modern light doesn't do anything to lift the film. When Pasolini adapted de Sade's work for Salò, he contextualized the work's brutality within the rise of Mussolini's fascism during World War II, a politically relevant platform that criticizes the sad state of affairs Italy was in during that time period. Though political corruption and abuse of power are themes that play into A Serbian Film, the movie doesn't have the context to back that up (I'm not an expert on modern Serbian politics, but I'm pretty certain that it isn't quite as bad as Mussolini's Italy.) It doesn't even stand as a relevant statement about the affairs of the pornography industry, like Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights did so well. So what is it trying to say?

The makers of this movie are basically saying “We made this movie because we can.” They have even stated that the vast majority of moviegoers will not want to see this movie. Too true – the movie will probably only hit hard to those people who are unprepared for it. As for those who do want to see it – haven't you got something better to do?

Three Wolf Moon Confusion

Fashion can be a pretty confusing thing at times. Mostly it's a matter of judging whether a person actually strove to achieve the look they are presenting or whether covering their bodies was a matter of haphazardly reaching into a drawer hungover on a Wednesday morning to throw on whatever they first come across to meet the societal standard of not walking around nude. Whatever a person's motive of dressing, there is a mechanism in our brain that has to decide whether what they're wearing is appropriate, and even that can be confusing. Our culture has Lady Gaga, and with that example I probably don't need to delve any further into that.

However, there is one ubiquitous piece of clothing where there is a culturally wide understood rubric for wearing. That, my friends, is the Three Wolf Moon shirt:


Yes. Let me break down the general interpretation our society has for a male wearing this shirt, based on age:

0-12 yrs: You have very cruel parents.
13-27: You are a hipster.
28-52: You are a virgin.
53-100: You either forgot how to do laundry or just don't give a fuck anymore.
101+: You are God.

If you are a female, the breakdown remains the same, but in addition you are a furry and you probably enjoy watching annoying anime.

My question is: what if I run across a normal looking guy/girl walking down the street, perhaps on their way to pick up prescriptions from the drug store or getting a Jamba Juice, wearing this shirt? Could it be that they don't know? Should I go up to them and tell them? Warn them of the dangers associated with wearing a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt? I know with certainty that everyone else around would be silently judging them, thinking they are a hipster virgin with parent issues. Would I be just as cruel as the silent judgers for not giving this single victim enlightenment?is

Nah, what am I talking about, I'd be laughing my ass off on the inside.

Wavering

In opposition to my last post, I did actually kinda like this:

Autotune This

The Gregory Brothers, masterminds behind the "Autotune the News" phenomenon that has swept the internetz for the past few months, released a new video today in which they use the same gag to contextualize the most recent Christine O'Donnell ad.



Clever? Funny? meh, how about predictable?

These guys have essentially been running off of the same fuel that pop culture has fed them for over a year, a movement which dates back to mid-2009 when everyone unanimously confirmed that autotune actually sucks (you know when Jay-Z titles a single "Death of Autone," that shit is dead). The joke of autotune, which The Lonely Island perfectly encapsulated last year with "I'm On a Boat," is that every song produced like this sounds exactly the same and that it takes virtually no talent to make a song melodized by autotune. This is a joke that the world apparently missed, as the "I'm On a Boat" legitimately features T-Pain (who, in the video, doesn't appear to realize it's meant to be funny) and the song was nominated for a Grammy. Yep, a Grammy - that thing that all musicians strive for. Around this same time, The Gregory Brothers started also making videos parodying autotune pop songs, this time by autotuning news anchors during reports, a typical youtube-esque farce that was sure to garner a couple hundred thousand views. However, they made their big breakthrough when they leeched the meme bandwagon and autotuned the infamous "Double Rainbow" video this summer and then proceeded to do the same thing for Antoine Dodson's "Bed Intruder Rant."

Oddly enough, these remakes of established humor videos have ended up getting more attention and views than the originals themselves (together they have almost amassed 50,000,000 views). The strange part to me is that these 'parodies' add essentially nothing to the existing humor: the relevance of the autotune jokes has already long passed and there is otherwise no insightful commentary to make them worthy parodies. So why are they still getting so much attention?? I guess there's no point in me griping about the quality of youtube - it's a world where the popularity of the absurdly annoying Fred is enough to get him his very own distributor for a full-length movie, and Justin Bieber's music video for "Baby" is the most watched video of all time. Still, these guys are well aware of what they are doing: they rob viral videos for views and attention. It's a cheap and effective strategy that has probably gotten them plenty of online sales (their autotune songs are available on iTunes, and if anything happens on the internet, there is merchandise for you to buy referencing it.) Remember, these guys are just using a technique that they have already established takes virtually no effort to employ and rehashing stolen jokes out with them. For me it's just disappointing to see a group of people who apparently boast great talent demean themselves to such cheap tricks, and watch the undiscerning world of the internet gobble it up. By saying "great talent," I mean that they are all established musicians who have a legitimate EP out, which supposedly embraces their true musical nature. Whether or not it's good will inevitably be irrelevant, though - to the internet they will always be known as the "Autotune the News" guys and nothing else. God damn the power of infectious melodies.

Unsolved Movie Mysteries

Mystery is probably one of the most popular genres of film, and also one of the oldest - the first true 'mystery' movie can be dated all the way back to 1903 with "The Great Train Robbery." Being a fairly established genre, a mystery movie follows a general set of rules, but the most imperative one of all is that something which is at first hidden or unknown must be revealed. The timing of this revelation is a matter of dramatic choice; typically it serves as the climax of the movie, the point where suspense breaks and the audience can breathe a sigh of relief. It's the thrill of discovery that makes these movies so much fun - we all want to think we're smarter than everyone else, and whether we do it consciously or not, we all like to search for covered truths, especially in film. So what do we do with the movies that don't play by the rules? Leaving a mystery unsolved or incomplete is probably considered one of the greatest narrative faux pas ever, and the idea of neglecting closure on a mystery is so out of touch with popular mindset that Hollywood has all but ruled out the idea. Still, that mindset didn't stop some renegade directors from crafting these sinister movies that boggle the mind and leave it boggling long after the credits roll. This isn't some cheap trick - in almost every instance, for what we don't learn in the story, we learn something deeper on a fundamental human level - a truth about ourselves and the limits of what can even be known as truth. Woah man. So, here we go - my 10 favorite unsolved movie mysteries:

10. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962) - Bunuel was well into middle age when he made El ángel exterminador, and by that point he had left both Spain and America because of his controversial work. Having then lived in Mexico for 18 years, this film was is first that he had complete artistic control of during that entire period and he really relishes in that freedom. The basic outline of the story is that a group of wealthy friends gather for a dinner party in a decadent house and break etiquette by overstaying their welcome. However, when they finally find that they want to leave, they find themselves unable to. There is no physical barrier preventing them from crossing, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot will themselves to leave. In this scenario, Bunuel presents a situation with no rational explanation but with significant implications - as the days go by, the civility that coats these people's standard of living wanes and the characters find themselves venturing into witchcraft and brutality in their isolation. The story is a clear-cut satire of the upper class: when stripped of the privileges that keep them superior, they resort to the most savage of beasts. Suddenly, as if nothing had happened, the curse is broken and the guests finally are able to leave with no explanation. No explanation is needed, though, as the sinister truth about the characters has already been revealed. As his final sleight, Bunuel closes his film within a cathedral, where a mass is being dismissed and the churchgoers find themselves unable to leave. As always, none are spared from Bunuel's vision.

9. L'Avventura (Michael Antonioni, 1960) - The 1960s opened up the decade with some groundbreaking films (Psycho, Peeping Tom, Breathless, La Dolce Vita), and L'Avventura is one of those that literally shook the grounds of cinema. The movie, set in Italy, begins with two friends, Anna and Claudia, going on a yacht trip to a volcanic island, with Anna's love Sandro coming along. Tension between Anna and Sandro are apparent right off the bat and references are drawn to a previous split they had. When they reach the island, the three of them take a nap together and upon waking up, Claudia and Sandro find that Anna is missing. Soon, a massive search is assembled, but she is nowhere to be found. Could she have committed suicide? Could she have been murdered by her boyfriend? Could she have just disappeared? And, as if her character had never existed, the movie moves on - a love affair forms between Claudia and Sandro. There is no time for atonement or moral development; the characters simply act for themselves. Anna is never mentioned again. There is no weight behind the actions in the film - Sandro soon betrays Claudia for a call-girl, and Claudia finds the two together. In the end scene, Sandro and Claudia are together, both staring into nothingness, each a brittle twig undergoing too much force. Thus is life.

8. Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) - David Lynch has been called many things: an absurdist, the modern American surrealist, an unmethodical fraud, a pretentious asshole. Lost Highway is an amalgamation of all those things - cryptic at best, absolute nonsense at worst and naturally it has slowly built itself up as a cult classic. Still, it's a hell of a watch that will leave you either wishing you could have your two hours of watching it back or two more hours to fully digest it. The plot (if you can call it that) begins with a saxophonist named Fred who suspects his wife, Renee, of cheating. The movie is drenched in abstract and surreal loops and turns, including an ominous message that says "Dick Laurent is dead" and an androgynous Mystery Man who stalks Fred, but all that aside, Fred soon finds himself watching a videotape of him killing his wife and soon after is arrested for murder. In jail, he begins having headaches and hallucinations, and one day when the guards come to check on him, they don't find Fred but rather a teenage mechanic named Pete. The police have no choice but to let him go. Pete begins to fall for a girl named Alice who has suspicious similarities to Renee, and Pete soon falls into lustful desires. However, later in the film, Pete undergoes a retrometamorphosis back into Fred. A full analysis would probably fill up this entire blog post, but I'll just leave it at that and say that there is something to be gained from the confusion.

7. Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) - This is a movie that has polarized critics for years, some claiming it to be one of the greatest philosophical movies ever made, while others pinpointing it as the worst. I can't say I'm a fan of the film, but if anything can be said about the movie, it's that Resnais is completely successful at what he set out to do: as a director, he completely blurs the lines between truth and fiction, reality and dream. Taking place at a château, the film revolves around one man trying to convince a woman that they met the previous year at Marienbad, while another man (we interpret to be the woman's husband) tries to resist his temptations. In fact, as a viewer, we are given the option of whether to submit to the film's nonsensical allure or to resist, saying to ourselves that it makes no sense. And it really doesn't - we see parallel conversations throughout the film, a soft-spoken narrator speaks the same phrases over and over again, the setting feels like it is constantly shifting. Time itself could be stacking on top of itself. Suffice to say, the wandering never stops and we never find out whether woman A ever met man X last year. The film is madness - hypnotic, dreamy madness.

6. Reversal of Fortune (Barbet Schroeder, 1990) - I find this movie fascinating simply because every American court room drama I have ever seen is focused on one thing and one thing only: the truth. Reversal of Fortune throws out any notion of what truth even is, and instead uses this ambiguity to turn itself on the justice system: when there is no certainty of truth, how is a system supposed to judge? In the movie, Claus von Bülow is accused of putting his wife in an irreversible coma by giving her an insulin overdose, but he makes an appeal and hires Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz for his case. Dershowitz puts together a team of pragmatic law school students to lead the appeal and review evidence. An interesting narrative twist in the movie is that the whole thing is narrated from the comatose Sunny von Bülow who gives flashbacks of the married couple to shed some light on what actually happened. The more we see, the more we realize that Sunny was actually leading her own path to self-destruction through drug use and idleness, but Claus was just as neglectful of her as she was of herself - we never discover whether it was Sunny or Claus who dealt the final blow. We also discover that the original murder case that convicted Claus was full of holes and did not hold up in the appeal. Despite this victory, Dershowitz gives Claus his final farewell: "One thing, Claus. Legally, this was an important victory. Morally - you're on your own. "

5. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) - Hitchcock may be the most iconic mystery director of all time, and for good reason - he pretty much invented the formula. What I love most about Hitchcock is the fact that he was a director who cared just as much about form and technique as he did about storytelling, and a movie is never really complete without either. The Birds is a movie that falls fairly late in his career, and it was at this point in his career that Hitchcock really started playing around with the formula that he himself created. Take Vertigo, which is more a psychoanalytical piece on obsession rather than a mystery, and Psycho, which kills off the protagonist halfway through. However, The Birds was probably his biggest narrative risk as there is no answer to the mystery: nothing can explain the deranged action of killer birds over the course of three days in any literal context. It plays as a strange and prophetic view of a temporary apocalypse and suddenly reverting back to reality at the cusp of insanity - if that's not terrifying, I don't know what is.

4. Picnic At Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) - I hate to admit it, but there really aren't that many worthwhile films from Australia, but Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those movies that everyone should watch at some point. For one, it was Weir's breakthrough movie (The Truman Show, Dead Poet's Society) and a shining achievement of the Australian New Wave cinema movement, and for another the whole movie is drenched in a magical aura that is sure to keep your head wrapped around it for days. The movie tells the story of an all-girls boarding school that takes a trip to Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day in 1900. Despite of the headmistresses' commands, four girls climb up the rock to explore it's plateau, and at the top all but one of them (Edith) fall under some sort of spell and advance into a crevice in the rock. Edith runs back to the group while another teacher heads up the rock on her own. Though a search party is assembled, no one is able to find the missing girls (similar to L'Avventura). Suffice it to say, Picnic at Hanging Rock is as much an allegory of sexual repression as it is of mystery. The movie captures an age group that is at the height of sexual exploration overrun by the towering and oppressive authorities of the boarding school - the girls' escape into the rock is an expression of sexual freedom, and the teacher who follows (whom Edith sees running without a skirt) joins in that freedom. This act of unbridled resistance to repression stirs the entire school and town - especially since the girls were never seen again.

3. Hidden (Cache) (Michael Haneke, 2005) - Few films demand as much focus and interpretation as Haneke's Cache, but almost no films offer as much reward for what you put in. The movie begins innocently enough: a long still-shot of a Parisian street showing a typical day as the credits roll out. Soon after, though, this peaceful shot is twisted into a shocking revelation of voyeurism: we find out that the shot is actually a videotape of a couples' house (Georges and Anne), and the tape was anonymously sent to them for them to see. Somebody is watching them. More tapes arrive, shot in the same format, sent to the couple. Is it a warning? A joke? Whatever it is, both Georges and Anne become shaken by the tapes, and Georges begins searching for answers. As he does so, he finds his past haunting him, revealing a secret that he has kept from everyone else. The videos reveal a lot about Georges character, but nothing about their existence. It might be the director himself tormenting his flawed character. It might be the fact that we are actually watching the movie that the characters feel unease about being watched. We will never know.

2. Blow-Up (Michael Antonioni, 1966) - Being the second entry here from Antonioni, you can probably guess that the director gets his kicks out of being elusive, but hey, at least he made some great movies along the way. Blow-Up is a movie that is divided down the middle: one half is the cool, hip protrayal of London mod culture at its finest (including a famous cameo by The Yardbirds) and the other half is a compelling murder mystery in which the main character, Thomas, a fashion photographer, ventures into voyeurism by taking pictures of a random couple in a park and upon deeper inspection of the developed photo discovers a dead body in the background. The films obvious metaphor is brilliant: with a single picture, the closer you try to look for details, the more blurry things become. Upon blowing-up the photo, we see what could be a gunman in the photo, but it could just as well be a patch of bushes. There may have never even been a murder; Thomas goes back to the same spot and finds a body, but when he returns later with a camera, the body is gone. In the famous last scene, we even see the main character, Thomas, disappear into a sea of grass. Nothing is certain and what we do know is skewed. This is a film of deep artistic edge, a thrilling conception of pop-art and Zeitgeist - unfortunately, at this point, people only know it as the film that Austin Powers is making fun of.

1. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) - There are those movies that leave such an impression on genre and film-making that it would be impossible to look at modern cinema without considering their influence; Rashomon is one of those movies, and was really the movie that introduced the world to Japanese cinema and Kurosawa. It is also probably the most elusive film ever made - supposedly during production the assistant directors came up to Kurosawa and had to say "we don't understand it at all" (a sentiment that is paralleled in the first line of the film: "I just don't understand.") Rashomon is the retelling of the murder of a samurai by four eyewitnesses to the crime: the bandit, the wife, the murdered samurai (by way of a medium) and a passing woodcutter. The majority of the film is composed of flashbacks, albeit flashbacks that don't add up to a sum. Instead, we are left with a sea of discrepancies - each storyteller bends reality to their own truths, and most confusing of all is how they all accept the blame for the murder. Even the woodcutter's story, which reveals the supposed 'truth,' covers up the fact that he stole the dagger after the murder. Rashomon is scary in what it reveals in humanity: the only thing that we care about is self-preservation, and we will go as far as to create our own realities to save ourselves from our own shame. The mystery remains unsolved but the meaning is crystal clear.

A Story

If you are ever in need of pissing off 40 people in one quick fell swoop, ask me for advice. I might be able to help.