Because no self-respecting auteur is without a few Criterion favourites, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive, revealed his top 10 Criterion. And what do you know, he's a fan of Seijun Suzuki!
#2 The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo) "I was twenty-four years old when I made my first film, Pusher (about the Danish drug underworld), and for it I stole everything I could, both visually and technically, from this film and Cannibal Holocaust."
#3 Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer) "Vampyr has always reminded me of a mysterious dream I once had when I was very little. The film has always stayed with me. I watch it before I make every film, and yet it still remains a mystery to me."
#4 The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton) "The Night of the Hunter is a perfect example of the strength of cinema, in which an image can say a thousand words, whereas in literature a word cannot show a thousand images."
#8 My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström) "I saw this film with my mother when I was very young. It’s the only movie aside from It’s a Wonderful Life during which I’ve cried because I was happy."
What happened to the last two?! Are they fillers? Branded to kill is such a Drive film. Or, rather, Drive is such a descendent of that killer-cool Suzuki film, no?
Take Shelter, Drive, and The Artist started with a bang! Let's see if the European Awards would make any dent at the Oscars. Regardless, yay for The Kid with a bike winning something.
Best Feature 50/50 Beginners Drive Take Shelter The Artist The Descendants
Best Director Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist Mike Mills - Beginners Jeff Nichols - Take Shelter Alexander Payne - The Descendants Nicolas Winding Refn - Drive
Best Screenplay Joseph Cedar - Footnote Michel Hazanavicius - The Artist Tom McCarthy - Win Win Mike Mills - Beginners Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash - The Descendants
Best First Feature Another Earth - Director: Mike Cahill In the Family - Director: Patrick Wang Margin Call - Director: J.C. Chandor Martha Marcy May Marlene - Director: Sean Durkin Natural Selection - Director: Robbie Pickering
Best First Screenplay Mike Cahill, Brit Marling - Another Earth J.C. Chandor - Margin Call Patrick deWitt - Terri Phil Johnston - Cedar Rapids Will Reiser - 50/50
John Cassavetes Award Bellflower - Writer/Director: Evan Glodell, Producers: Evan Glodell, Vincent Grashaw Circumstance - Writer/Director: Maryam Keshavarz, Producers: Karin Chien, Maryam Keshavarz, Melissa M. Lee Hello Lonesome - Writer/Director/Producer: Adam Reid Pariah - Writer/Director: Dee Rees The Dynamiter - Writer: Brad Inglesby, Director: Matthew Gordon
Best Female Lead Lauren Ambrose - Think of Me Rachael Harris - Natural Selection Adepero Oduye - Pariah Elizabeth Olsen - Martha Marcy May Marlene Michelle Williams - My Week with Marilyn
Best Male Lead Demián Bichir - A Better Life Jean Dujardin - The Artist Ryan Gosling - Drive Woody Harrelson - Rampart Michael Shannon - Take Shelter
Best Supporting Female Jessica Chastain - Take Shelter Anjelica Huston - 50/50 Janet McTeer - Albert Nobbs Harmony Santana - Gun Hill Road Shailene Woodley - The Descendants
Best Supporting Male Albert Brooks - Drive John Hawkes - Martha Marcy May Marlene Christopher Plummer - Beginners John C. Reilly - Cedar Rapids Corey Stoll - Midnight in Paris
Best Cinematography Joel Hodge - Bellflower Benjamin Kasulke - The Off Hours Darius Khondji - Midnight in Paris Guillaume Schiffman - The Artist Jeffrey Waldron - The Dynamiter
Best Documentary An African Election - Director/Producer: Jarreth Merz Bill Cunningham New York - Director: Richard Press The Interrupters - Director/Producer: Steve James The Redemption of General Butt Naked - Director/Producers: Eric Strauss, Daniele Anastasion We Were Here - Director/Producer: David Weissman
Best International Film A Separation (Iran) - Director: Asghar Farhadi Melancholia (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany) - Director: Lars von Trier Shame (UK) - Director: Steve McQueen The Kid With a Bike (Belgium/France/Italy) - Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne Tyrannosaur (UK) - Director: Paddy Considine
Piaget Producers Award Chad Burris - Mosquita y Mari Sophia Lin - Take Shelter Josh Mond - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Someone to Watch Award Simon Arthur - Silver Tongues Mark Jackson - Without Nicholas Ozeki - Mamitas
Best Actress Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Best Adapted Screenplay Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash
Best Animated Feature Rango
Best Director Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Best Documentary Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Best Ensemble The Help
Best Film Hugo
Best Foreign Language Film A Separation
Best Original Screenplay Will Reiser, 50/50
Best Supporting Actor Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best Supporting Actress Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Breakthrough Performance Felicity Jones, Like Crazy
Breakthrough Performance Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Debut Director J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
NBR Freedom of Expression Crime After Crime
NBR Freedom of Expression Pariah
Special Achievement in Filmmaking The Harry Potter Franchise - A Distinguished Translation from Book to Film
Spotlight Award Michael Fassbender (A Dangerous Method, Jane Eyre, Shame, X-Men: First Class)
Top 10 Independent Films (in alphabetical order) 50/50, Another Earth, Beginners, A Better Life, Cedar Rapids, Margin Call, Shame, Take Shelter, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Win Win
Top 5 Documentaries (in alphabetical order) Born to be Wild, Buck, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Project Nim, Senna
Top 5 Foreign Language Films (in alphabetical order) 13 Assassins, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, Footnote, Le Havre, Point Blank
Top Films (in alphabetical order) The Artist, The Descendants, Drive, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Ides of March, J. Edgar, The Tree of Life, War Horse
Star Wars, the movielore that keeps on producing. I'm kind of SW-fatigued at the moment actually (shouldn't we look at some more cat pictures?), but this is some kind of awesome.
Slate published a review of Richard Rhodes’ new book, Hedy’s Folly, which illuminated a creative side to the actress most widely known for her beauty. Of all things, she was apparently something of an inventor.
Lamarr envisioned airplanes controlling torpedoes remotely, flying high above them and adjusting their direction with radio pulses. This setup had some precedent in Nazi Germany, and Rhodes suspects that Hedy overheard the idea from Mandl. But torpedoes could receive radio instructions only on one predetermined radio frequency. If the enemy figured out that frequency, he could jam transmission, flooding the signal with noise and sending the torpedo off-course. Lamarr had an idea of how to circumvent this threat. Both plane and torpedo would jump in tandem to different frequencies over and over, much like turning a radio dial every few seconds. So even if the enemy jammed one frequency, it wouldn’t matter, since both sender and receiver would soon switch to another.
I'm just gonna go work on my Middle East Peace Treaty right ... now.
Title: Hugo Director: Martin Scorsese Language: English Year: 2011 Critical Reception:Metacritic score 85 Psych Index: Family relations, Self-identity In Brief: Hugo, an orphaned boy living inside the walls of a French train station, tried to fix an automaton left to him by his father. On his journey to retrieve what he believed was a message from his father through the working automaton, he discovered a cinematic dream long lost in the deep of a toy shop owner's trove. Hugo is neither an adult nor a child's film; it is Scorsese's awkwardly sentimental love letter to cinema that perhaps only the very dedicated film enthusiasts might appreciate. **1/2
Comment (SPOILERS ALERT): As 3D films become more common place, for better or worse, the time is probably ripe for a look into past major cinematic transitions. Hugo is the latest film I'd seen in recent months that devoted its screen love to the early-times cinema, and unfortunately - given its acclaimed director at the helm - was the least successful of all.
The film has its charms, for certain. There was an off kilter feel to the pacing that succeeded at times in transporting the film to a different time. Sasha Baron Cohen delivered one of the most pitch perfect performances of the year as the train station inspector, lighting up the down-trodden film whenever he was on screen (even though at times a little of Borat peeked through). The train station set fantasized a simpler time in cinema when people were transparent in their intentions and would automatically draw their eyes to each other just because the film demanded them to. Most notably, the 3D effect was properly utilized and made a strong argument for its place in cinema's history moving forward.
As impressive as the Eiffel Tower looked glowing at the end of a run-through of the train station clocks' internal working, however, the wonder worn off after the nth time the audience was forced to "discover" the set. Despite some well-placed 3D moments, fascinating footage of early cinema, and a beautiful, dreamy set in the old, out-of-time train station, the picture is a clunky, repetitive, uninspired piece of sentimental film making. For a film that celebrates the magic of films, there's a disappointing lack of wonder on screen, even as it tries to make some plot lines "magically" disappear (whatever happened to the notebook inquiry?).
Films move forward by the momentum of words or visuals (and at times, both). John Logan, Scorsese's screen writer for Hugo, produced a listless script, seemingly with the hope that either the actors or the director would fill it out and give it life. While Cohen succeeded in infusing the picture with his oddly fitting comedic timing, the rest of the acting cast tried hard but their strained effort failed to give much substance to the thin storybook. They were not helped by the director, as Scorsese seemed lost in the maze of his clocks. Since Hugo acted as a silent film for the most part, the directing was crucial in connecting its story to the audience. Yet, the film was languid in too many places where either words or visuals could have imbued it with some much needed kinetic energy.
It may have been the case that Scorsese attempted to make a picture in a more sentimental Spielbergian vein (Hugo featured both Jude Law and a robot-like automaton, a nod to Spielberg's A.I.?). As we've discovered in the case of Super 8 (Abrams, 2011) earlier this year, being good at Spielbergian is no easy feat. Whereas Super 8 got help by a very charming cast of natural-acting children and Abrams' intentional direction, Scorsese seemed unsure what picture he wanted to make. At times, the tone of the picture shifted dramatically from Spielbergian lost-boy family feel-good drama to horror to quirky comedy to documentary-like story about the movies. The visuals were surprisingly bland, outside of periodic flashes of 3D pop. The use of Hugo as our access to Georges Méliès, a film pioneer in many important ways, may have been a miscalculated move. Removed from Méliès' perspective, it was difficult to feel the crushing effect of burying a life's dream. Perhaps it could've been rescued by more effective directing, but as it was, the climax did not carry the emotional heft it should have.
Méliès was a technical wizard, but there was no wizardry in this homage to him. If you wanted to get your fill of meta cinema love, you'd be better off seeing Le Havre or The Arist. Both are superior films doing what Scorsese should have done with Hugo. While his love for cinema was obvious to Scorsese, the film did not make it clear why we should care to preserve the past. Just because Hugo was a love letter to cinema, and thereby the people who love the art of films like us, it doesn't make it any better than other films we examine. Méliès' work was much more interesting than the film itself. The connecting story has to matter, fundamentally, to our human experience somehow. Hugo just didn't seem to matter, and that's a shame for Méliès, a VIP of who's who in cinema.
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Because no self-respecting auteur is without a few Criterion favourites, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive, revealed his top 10 Criterion. And what do you know, he's a fan of Seijun Suzuki! 
