92 Films I Like in Alphabetical Order

31 January 2012 • watchings
tags: cinema, comedy, comics, death, desire, drugs, dystopia, fantasy, fiction, killers, love, murder, sex, suicide

This afternoon I wrote this list with 92 films that I like to make a short video.

01. A History of Violence
02. A Simple Plan
03. A Zed & Two Noughts
04. After Hours
05. Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
06. Arrebato
07. Back to the Future
08. Barton Fink
09. Blow-Up
10. Body Heat
11. Bubble
12. Buffalo 66
13. Cotton Club
14. Crash
15. Crimes and Misdemeanors
16. Cry Baby
17. Charade
18. Dangerous Liaisons
19. Dead Man
20. Dersu Uzala
21. Die Hard
22. Down by Law
23. Dracula
24. Drive
25. Drowning by Numbers
26. Ed Wood
27. Everyone Says I Love You
28. Exotica
29. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
30. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
31. Fight Club
32. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
33. Godfellas
34. Half Nelson
35. Heathers
36. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
37. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
38. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
39. Kick-Ass
40. L’année dernière à Marienbad
41. L’atalante
42. La pianiste
43. Lars and the Real Girl
44. Leningrad Cowboys Go America
45. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
46. Lost Highway
47. M. Butterfly
48. Manhattan Murder Mystery
49. Match Point
50. My Beautiful Laundrette
51. My Own Private Idaho
52. Mystery Train
53. Night on Earth
54. North by Northwest
55. On connaît la chanson
56. Paris, Texas
57. Peeping Tom
58. Persona
59. Point Break
60. Raiders of the Lost Ark
61. Rashomon
62. Schizopolis
63. Secretary
64. Seven
65. Sex, Lies and Videotapes
66. Simple Men
67. Singing in the Rain
68. Some Like it Hot
69. Splendor In The Grass
70. Star Wars
71. The Adjuster
72. The Age of Innocence
73. The Belly of an Architect
74. The Brown Bunny
75. The Conversation
76. The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover
77. The Empire Strikes Back
78. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
79. The Last Seduction
80. The Living End
81. The Matrix
82. The Moderns
83. The Pillow Book
84. The Princess Bride
85. The Social Network
86. The Usual Suspects
87. Three Colors: Red
88. Underworld
89. V for Vendetta
90. Velvet Goldmine
91. Walkabout
92. Zodiac

Watchings

3 November 2011 • watchings
tags: cinema, comedy, documentaries, love, minimal, music, sound

• The Breakfast Club (1985)
John Hughes

• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1987)
John Hughes

• They Call It Acid (2009)
Gordon Mason

• Steve Reich – Phase to Face (2009)
Eric Darmon, Franck Mallet

• The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011)
Marie Losier

Watchings

8 October 2011 • watchings
tags: capitalism, cinema, comedy, documentaries, drugs, economy, humour, love, music, noise, perception, politics, sound, television, tv series, vampires

• Half Nelson (2006)
Ryan Fleck

• Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Craig Gillespie

• Sound of Noise (2010)
Ola Simonsson, Johannes Stjärne Nilsson

• The Shock Doctrine (2009)
Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom

• How I Met Your Mother, Seasons 1-6 (2005-2011)
Carter Bays, Craig Thomas

• Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Nicholas Stoller

• True Blood, Season 4 (2011)
Allan Ball

• The IT Crowd, Seasons 1-4 (2006-2010)
Graham Linehan

• Drive (2011)
Nicolas Winding Refn

Watchings

26 January 2011 • watchings
tags: anguish, apocalypse, chaos, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, electricity, fiction, humour, television, tv series, uncertainty, zombies

• Arduino The Documentary (2010) [watch]

• Dead Set (2008)
Charlie Brooker

• Misfits, Season 2 (2010)
Howard Overman

• Sherlock, Season 1 (2010)
Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat

• Dexter, Season 5 (2010)

• Breaking Bad, Seasons 1-3 (2008-2010)
Vince Gilligan

• Sons of Anarchy, Season 3 (2010)
Kurt Sutter

• How I Met Your Mother, Seasons 1-5 (2005-2010)
Carter Bays and Craig Thomas

• The Big Bang Theory, Seasons 1-3 (2007-2010)
Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady

Watchings

24 October 2010 • watchings
tags: animals, brain, cinema, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, fantasy, fiction, hallucinations, killers, love, mathematics, murder, music, nature, particles, perception, politics, science, sound, space, television, time, tv series

• Fringe, Seasons 1-2 (2008-2010)
J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci

• Человек с киноаппаратом / Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [watch]
Dziga Vertov

• Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly

• The Ghost Writer (2010)
Roman Polanski

• El Abecedario de Gilles Deleuze. A de Animal (1988) [watch]

• Some Like It Hot (1959)
Billy Wilder

• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sidney Lumet

Watchings

25 July 2010 • watchings
tags: civilization, comedy, documentaries, fiction, humour, psychogeography, space, television, tv series, video, walking

• Nip/Tuck (2003 – 2010)
Ryan Murphy

• London (1994) [watch]
Patrick Keiller

• The IT Crowd. Series 4 (2010)

Fragmentation, meta-narrative, liquidity and blood

6 May 2010 • watchings
tags: analysis, cinema, comedy, fantasy, fiction, humour, television, tv series

When I was a little girl, I was already fascinated by the moving image, but I loved films and TV series than were not exactly for kids, I don’t mean ‘adult films’, but I was more interested in Gene Kelly and Moonlighting than in the typical films for children. Some years later, I had a flatmate who one day told me that my ‘problem’ is that I’m a post-modernist. I’ve never seen myself as a post-modernist, or as anything else, but the truth is that some of my personal obsessions are very related to post-modernism: fragmentation, codes, meta-narratives, the absence of an objective truth, etc. And in a way I think that the films and TV series that fascinated me as a kid were quite post-modern.

Musical films as Singing in the Rain (1952) or Les Girls (1957) and TV series as Moonlighting (1985-89) play with concepts, gags and narratives which in the visual context of a child living in the Eighties were quite absurd and strange. Obviously, in the Eighties existed films much more ‘post-modern’ than that, but I didn’t know about its existence until years later, and we should remember that Singing in the Rain, Les Girls and Moonlighting were mainstream/commercial products, not experimental pieces. The thing is that now I realized that I liked those audiovisual products because of its fragmentation and its meta-cinematographic aura.

Nowadays, I don’t think there’s anything in the TV comparable to Moonlighting, but we have Lost, maybe the paradigm of fragmentation, or I should say better the paradigm of liquidity —if, as Zygmunt Bauman states, we live in a ‘liquid time’, I guess that we need some liquid audiovisual products. Lost could be described as a quantum soap opera: first it was the flashback, then it was the flashforward, after it was the time travelling and now we have the parallel realities. Even if in some moments the script is really mushy and touchy-feely, it’s also fragmented, ambiguous and remarkably liquid —fortunately, I think that we are getting over those classical flat narratives in which good is good, bad is bad and there’s nothing more in between; real life is much more complicated than that.

The truth is that although I don’t see Lost as a masterpiece, right now mainstream TV (is there a non-mainstream TV?) is much more interesting than mainstream cinema. A film from the Fifties like Singing in the Rain is much more ‘iconoclast’ that any of the blockbusters of the recent years, but in the television we are watching some interesting changes.

My favourite TV series right now is True Blood. I know, I know… It’s kitsch and excessive, but it’s also a surrealistic mix of everything you can imagine, name any genre! Drama, comedy, action, adventure, crime, horror, science-fiction, romance, eroticism… It can jump from the most tacky to the most gory in a second with an astounding audacity and self-confidence. Have you ever watched before a bloody Viking vampire murdering in jogging suit, flip flops and with tinfoil in the hair because he was having some highlights done? It’s quite hilarious. And even everything is extravagant and way-out, at the same time it has an astonishing natural/realistic quality. Thanks to True Blood, TV vampires (really lame until now) are not just post-mortem, are also post-modern.

Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)

21 April 2010 • watchings
tags: cinema, civilization, comedy, documentaries, fantasy, fiction, found footage, humour, imagination, mankind, nature

Adrian Brunel
Original: 35mm, black and white, silent.

Crossing the Great Sagrada is a strange film with an odd sense of humour and a slightly postmodern feeling. It’s not a masterpiece, but in a sense it’s decades ahead of its time.

“(…) this journey is portrayed in an absurd manner, drawing attention to the artificial nature of the film. (…) Titles, intended to provide narrative orientation, constantly give conflicting information, producing a confused, comic effect. (…) Crossing the Great Sagrada satirises the colonial stereotype of ‘native’ people. It also places doubt upon the authenticity of many of these travel films (…) The film’s surreal humour prefigures that of later innovative British comedy, such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

Jamie Sexton

Watchings

7 March 2010 • watchings
tags: appropriationism, brain, cinema, comedy, documentaries, dreamachine, economy, fantasy, fiction, flicker, hallucinations, humour, sex, structuralism, television

• Flicker (2008)
Nik Sheehan

• Heroes, Volume 5: Redemption (2009-2010)

• Muchachada Nui, 4ª temporada (2010) [watch]

• The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
Steven Soderbergh

• Outer Space (1999) [watch]
Peter Tscherkassky

• Arnulf Rainer (1958-1960) [watch]
Peter Kubelka