So what have I been doing? Watching this:

I finished the third season last night. Good lord. It’s been three years since I’ve seen the series, and it never wavered in my mind as one of my favorite TV shows, but I forgot just how damn good it is. Especially the story around Lisa and her disappearance.

It’s this series that made me almost lose my load when Alan Ball showed up to a Q&A at Sundance.

Thank God for HBO.

The film is narrated by a man in old age, who is the school teacher in the story. He admits upfront that the stories he’s about to unfold may be embellished since he didn’t witness them all himself, and facts could be heresay. He tells of the events in a fictional village in Germany in the years of 1913, and 1914. A string of strange and horrible events occurs, and there isn’t even a hint of who’s behind them. Enough time is given between each incident that the village people almost forget. Children are kidnapped and beaten, only to be found hours later tied up somewhere, a thin wire is stretched between two trees to trip galloping horses.

Among these characters that Haneke creates (he also penned the screenplay), there are some seriously scary people.  There’s the scandalous doctor that treats the woman that loves him (and her retarded child) worse than any farm animal, and molests his daughter.  There’s the priest that whips his children and tells his fourteen year-old-son that if he doesn’t stop masturbating, he well go insane, and pustules will consume his body until he dies (the priest swears he witnessed this himself once).  The town steward beats his son to a bloody pulp because the boy didn’t play well with others.  The list goes on.  Don’t let these descriptions give you a false impression of the film.  Like all of Haneke’s work, most of the objectionable subject matter take place off screen (many times in that same Brechtian-style that Godard embraced), behind closed doors, or is alluded to in conversation.  The children here are either victims of a frighteningly violent village, or the source of all the troubles.  Their dulled smiles, perfect manners, and strict obedience comes off extremely chilling.  In 30 years, these young folks will be the leaders in Germany…  This seems too intentional to be a coincidence.

Saying to much would be doing any that are considering watching The White Ribbon a disservice.  Haneke has achieved a masterpiece with this film.  Shot in staggeringly beautiful black and white tones, every single frame could be in a coffee table photography book.  Surely this is thanks to cinematographer Christian Berger, who’s worked with Haneke on almost all of his projects.  Besides the pure visual aspect of the film, there’s the dialogue.  It’s precision is astonishing, almost artfully composed.  Haneke has never been concerned with using false attempts to speed up plot, or build suspense.  His talent comes from letting the story unfold at its own pace, until you’re sucked in, and it’s too late (the frog in boiling water comes to mind here), and you’re enveloped in this world of dread.

Bitchin' Stars: 4 out of 4 stars

I won’t deny that Martin Scorsese has more talent than more directors working today. He’s pretty much a genius. His full skill set is on display in Shutter Island, but that’s really all this movie has going for it.

The premise, based on the book by Dennis Lehane (and adapted for the big screen by Laeta Kalogridis) is completely obvious from the trailer.  Two federal marshals are sent to Shutter Island, where America’s most dangerously insane criminals are held (Alcatraz on meth) to investigate the disappearance of an inmate–er–patient.  But once they get there, things get spooky.

Scorsese’s ability to build tension is immediately evident, and some individual scenes are effective enough to make you squirm in your seat.  But a few good scenes does not make a movie.  I try not to read reviews before going into a movie, but I did catch a blurb by some critic that said, ‘Director Martin Scorsese channels his inner M. Night Shyamalan.’  Immediately, I thought, ‘Well, I guess Leo’s going to turn out to be crazy.  And if that’s the case, I’m going to be really pissed.’  Well, that’s exactly what I got.  Did anyone else think that this was the completely obvious turn of events that was to come?  I’m so tired of these types of ‘gotcha!’ endings I can’t even stand it.  I left the theatre really angry that Mr. Scorsese used his name to entice me to waste two and a half hours on this. Despite the filmmakers’ best efforts, and some really really slick production values, this is bait and switch, B horror movie.

Bitchin' Stars: 2.5 out of 4 stars

I thought I’d just go for as many categories as possible, as I’m quite certain I have no chance of winning based on my track record for the past few years.  The only sections I skipped are those where I haven’t seen any, or only one or two of the nominees. So, here they are, my eighteen guesses.

Best Picture
Official Guess: The Hurt Locker
Who I’d Like: The Hurt Locker

Actor in a Leading Role
Official Guess: Colin Firth (A Single Man)
Who I’d Like: Colin Firth (A Single Man)

Actor in a Supporting Role
Official Guess: Christopher Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Who I’d Like: Christopher Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Actress in a Leading Role
Official Guess: Carey Mulligan (An Education)
Who I’d Like: Carey Mulligan (An Education)

Actress in a Supporting Role
Official Guess: Mo’Nique (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire)
Who I’d Like: Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air)

Animated Feature Film
Official Guess: Up
Who I’d Like: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Art Direction
Official Guess: Avatar
Who I’d Like: Avatar

Cinematography
Official Guess: Avatar
Who I’d Like: The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band)

Costume Design
Official Guess: The Young Victoria
Who I’d Like: Bright Star

Directing
Official Guess: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Who I’d Like: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)

Documentary Feature
Official Guess: The Cove
Who I’d Like: Haven’t seen any of them…

Documentary Short
Skipping this one, too.

Film Editing
Official Guess:Inglourious Basterds
Who I’d Like: Inglourious Basterds

Foreign Language Film
Official Guess:A Prophet (Un prophete)
Who I’d Like: I’d be thrilled with A Prophet or The White Ribbon

Makeup
Official Guess: Star Trek
Who I’d Like: Anyone but Star Trek. If that movie gets an Oscar, I’m going to lose it.

Music (Original Score)
Official Guess: James Horner for Avatar
Who I’d Like: Alexandre Desplat for Fantastic Mr. Fox

Music (Original Song)
I’ll pass on this one. Haven’t seen the nominees.

Short Film (Animated)
Pass

Short Film (Live Action)
Nope

Sound Editing
Official Guess: Avatar
Who I’d Like: The Hurt Locker

Sound Mixing
Good lord, I don’t even know what that means.

Visual Effects
Official Guess: Avatar
Who I’d Like: I’m ambivalent about this one, but I did think District 9 looked pretty freaking awesome.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Official Guess: Up in the Air
Who I’d Like: Up in the Air, or District 9

Writing (Original Screenplay)
Official Guess: The Hurt Locker
Who I’d Like: The Hurt Locker, but I’d be stoked if A Serious Man got it as well

A huge thanks to Vouchercodes.co.uk for hosting this competition.  Coincidentally, they offer some really great discounts when it comes to buying and renting movies.  Check out there deals at the following links: Lovefilm Discount Codes, Amazon Promotional Codes, and SKY Offer Codes.

Casablanca was everything I’d ever heard it would be.  Believe it or not, it’s the first Humphrey Bogart film I’ve ever seen.  I suppose this was the perfect place to start.  And I can’t get enough of Ingrid Bergman.

All Quiet on the Western Front presented two of my biggest movie-watching obstacles: made before 1930, and the war genre. To say it simply overcame these problems is an understatement.  This film was totally bitchin’.  I couldn’t believe how effective it was.  The entire thing had me glued to my seat, and I got more emotionally involved in the characters than I’d like to admit.  The one problem I had was the last two minutes.  It may be the pessimist in me, but it just didn’t work.  I see how it could have in the original book, but on the screen, it seemed kitsch.

Read My Lips was as bitchin’ as well.  I wouldn’t expect anything less awesome from Jacques Audiard (The Beat My Heart Skipped is one of my all time favorite films, and A Prophet might join the ranks soon).  I couldn’t help but be reminded of Neil Labutes In the Company of Men, the plot premises are similar, but Audiard takes the idea and mixes it with love, violence, and some of the most dexterous scenes I’ve seen in a long while.

This week’s Loot:

Ivan’s Childhood was a million times more accessible than I expected it to be, and a million times better than I thought it would be.  Not that I don’t have faith in Tarkovsky, but this was, after all, his very first film.  It was so well structured, I didn’t know what to think.  Happily, this is the first film I watched for my Inaccessible Director Challenge, and I couldn’t be off to a better start.  I’d highly recommend this.  And it’s only ninety minutes long, which is a far cry from the enormous lengths of Solaris and Andrei Rublev.

This may be film blasphemy, but I’m not quite sure what makes The French Connection such a special movie.  Perhaps it was pioneering for its day, but it seemed like a run of the mill crooks vs. cops film about drugs.  The characters (save Gene Hackman’s) were poorly developed and little flat all the way around.  It may just be that this isn’t my favorite genre, but I probably wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.

I have been waiting for over a year to see Cold Souls, my lucky-ass roommate saw it at Sundance last year, I was pretty jealous.  The wait was worth it.  There was some fantastic imagery, it’s a great story, and all the acting was superb.  It was really nice to see Lauren Ambrose working on screen again.  Lauren, stop doing plays on Broadway that I will never see, and do something like Six Feet Under again.

I’ve avoided Cabaret so long because I’m not a huge fan of musicals.  If someone had told me this was a musical during the Nazi regime that deals with death and abortion, sadly, I would have seen it sooner.  This is the first time I’d seen Liza Minnelli act, I was quite impressed.  It wasn’t too campy, and I really enjoyed the story.

Ben-Hur was pretty great as well.  I’m not one for epics, but this story was great.  I got a little nervous every time Jesus was on screen in the first half, but happily, it stayed away from preaching, and lent itself to some outrageously good cinematography and story.  The chariot racing scene was ridiculously entertaining.  Glad to have this one under my belt.

The best of this loot was definitely Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, which was extremely dialogue heavy.  I love those types of films.  I was worried after the first thirty minutes that the whole thing would be lost on me since the subject matter was Catholicism-heavy, but the ideas tossed around quickly evolved into more general aspects of religion and philosophy.  I really didn’t want this one to end.

I didn’t get to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, so I rechecked it out this week.

Here’s this week’s loot:

Now, I’m probably jumping the gun a bit.  But I will be finishing up this list in the next few months and want to start making a new one.  It’s hard to explain what sort of parameters I’d like to adhere to since I’m not really sure what they are.  But I’d like your help and suggestions.  I think I’ll go with the supposed definition of the Criterion Collection which claims they only include important classic and contemporary films that represent the defining moments of cinema.

So folks, I want your suggestions as to what films are the defining moments of cinema. I’m opening the next list to any time period from the beginning of film until now. Leave a comment on this post with at least three suggestions for my next list. When you do, you’ll get an entry to a drawing for a brand spanking new copy of Inglourious Basterds! You’ll also get another entry if you haven’t subscribed to my blog before, but do now (just be sure to let me know in your comment). You can only enter once, but you can get your friends to enter for you as long as they have their own blog. I probably won’t be shipping overseas, so be sure you live in North America. Entries will be accepted until February 28th.  (Your blog doesn’t have to be a movie blog either.)

1. The Birth of a Nation (Griffith; 1915)
2. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Weine; 1920)
3. Nosferatu (Murnau; 1922)
4. Nanook of the North (Flaherty; 1922)
5. The Gold Rush (Chaplin; 1925)
6. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein; 1925)
7. The Freshman (Lloyd; 1925)
8. Metropolis (Lang; 1925)
9. The General (Keaton; 1927)
10. Sunrise (Murnau; 1927)
11. All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone; 1929)
12. L’Age d’Or (Buñuel; 1930)
13. The Blue Angel (von Sternberg; 1930)
14. Freaks (Browning; 1932)
15. 42nd Street (Bacon; 1933)
16. L’Atalante (Vigo; 1934)
17. It Happened One Night (Capra; 1934)
18. Top Hat (Sandrich; 1935)
19. The 39 Steps (Hitchcock; 1935)
20. Camille (Cukor; 1936)
21. The Rules of the Game (Renoir; 1939)
22. Stagecoach (Ford; 1939)
23. Bringing Up Baby (Hawks; 1939)
24. Olympia (Riefenstahl; 1940)
25. The Shop on Main Street (Lubitsch; 1940)
26. The Maltese Falcon (Huston; 1941)
27. Citizen Kane (Welles; 1941)
28. Casablanca (Curtiz; 1943)
29. Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli; 1944)
30. Open City (Rossellini; 1945)
31. Laura (Preminger; 1945)
32. Children of Paradise (Carné; 1945)
33. The Treasure of Sierra Madre (Huston; 1948)
34. The Heiress (Wyler; 1949)
35. Adam’s Rib (Cukor; 1949)
36. All About Eve (Mankiewicz; 1950)
37. Sunset Boulevard (Wilder; 1950)
38. A Place in the Sun (Stevens; 1951)
39. Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock; 1951)
40. A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan; 1951)
41. Singin’ in the Rain (Donen; 1952)
42. Pick-up on South Street (Fuller; 1952)
43. High Noon (Zinnemann; 1952)
44. On the Waterfront (Kazan; 1954)
45. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa; 1954)
46. Rear Window (Hitchcock; 1954)
47. Rebel Without a Cause (Ray; 1955)
48. Pather Panchali (Ray; 1955)*
49. The Searchers (Ford; 1956)
50. The Nights of Cabiria (Fellini; 1957)
51. Vertigo (Hitchcock; 1958)
52. Ben-Hur (Wyler; 1959)
53. The Seventh Seal (Bergman; 1959)
54. Breathless (Godard; 1960)
55. Psycho (Hitchcock; 1960)
56. The Hustler (Rossen; 1961)
57. Jules and Jim (Truffaut; 1962)
58. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean; 1962)
59. To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan; 1962)
60. This Sporting Life (Anderson; 1963)
61. 8-1/2 (Fellini; 1963)
62. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick; 1964)
63. Darling (Schlesinger; 1965)
64. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols; 1966)
65. Bonnie and Clyde (Penn; 1967)
66. The Graduate (Nichols; 1967)
67. In the Heat of the Night (Jewison; 1967)
68. Persona (Bergman; 1967)
69. Weekend (Godard; 1967)
70. Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski; 1968)
71. Faces (Cassavetes; 1968)
72. Night of the Living Dead (Romero; 1968)
73. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick; 1968)
74. The Producers (Brooks; 1968)
75. Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger; 1969)
76. Easy Rider (Hopper; 1969)
77. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah; 1969)
78. My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer; 1969)
79. M*A*S*H (Altman; 1970)
80. Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson; 1970)
81. Woodstock (Wadleigh; 1970)
82. The French Connection (Friedkin; 1971)
83. The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich; 1971)
84. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman; 1971)
85. Shaft (Parks; 1971)
86. Cabaret (Fosse; 1972)
87. The Godfather (Coppola; 1972)†
88. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Buñuel; 1972)
89. Cries and Whispers (Bergman; 1973)
90. Mean Streets (Scorsese; 1973)
91. The Exorcist (Friedkin; 1974)
92. The Conversation (Coppola; 1974)
93. Chinatown (Polanski; 1974)
94. Nashville (Altman; 1975)
95. Shampoo (Ashby; 1975)
96. Taxi Driver (Scorsese; 1976)
97. All the President’s Men (Pakula; 1976)
98. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg; 1977)
99. Annie Hall (Allen; 1977)
100. The Deer Hunter (Cimino; 1978)