Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982)

There are some films you just love to watch because they are so pleasurable in a way only you can relate to. This is what I felt about Diner, anyway. It’s a film that takes us back to those much simpler times of America, the late 50s, where everyone has a groovy car, the youth culture of the 60s still seem millions of years away, and the sweet tunes of Frank Sinatra filled the airwaves. I love this time period on film, and it was particularly well portrayed in American Graffiti. Diner also has this, although somewhat more tunes down. But what else does it have, besides a bit of classic Americana? There are actually quite interesting characters in this film, and it is a wonderful collaboration of some talented actors and fine directing.

This is the kind of films that Hollywood should make, although sadly they don’t anymore. It is a fairly low-key piece, but with some wonderful characterizations and performances, as well as entertaining scenes of the guys just hanging out. Most of the cast weren’t that famous when this film was made, but have gone on to become big names, such as Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mikey Rourke (Jesus Christ, he looks absolutely nothing like he does in The Wrestler, talk about aging badly) and Kevin Bacon. The cast does a wonderful job as the film jumps between their different stories and problems. In a way it’s a coming of age story, or a “get off your ass and come of age” story. All the characters are on the edge of being youngsters and adulthood, one is married and one is getting married. They all love to relax at the local diner, where they more often than not spend their time, just chatting and wasting their time. Despite its set up, the film manages really well to avoid melodramatics and emotionalism. One good example is the Eddie character who is getting married. Although he likes his fiancé, he will only marry her on the condition that she passes a quiz on sports that he has devised, and it’s quite a grueling one as well. The characters are trapper between the infantile and adulthood, and the film captures this quite wonderfully. Another example is the character Shrevie, who goes mental when he finds out his wife has somewhat mixed up his tightly organized collection of records, to the point that she starts crying and contemplates cheating on him. At the end the character’s don’t really achieve any sort of conclusion, so the film is more like a slice of life film, but wonderfully convoluted in its own right.

The film does really well in dramatizing and characterizing the characters, so by the end you truly feel like you know these people. The most interesting character for me was Bacon’s character, Fenwick, who is quite possibly mad, but also some sort of quiz genius. He is the most “lost” of all the characters, and his story arc is left the most open, there doesn’t really seem to be much to hope for in his character. Yet all these characters live through their life with the support of each other, but as I said, the film wonderfully avoids sentimentalism. There isn’t any hugging or “I love ya man”, but a strong fundamental male bond between these characters, and it’s one of the things that really gives the film its quality. The film is also really well paced, exploring each of the characters stories in its own time, dwelling on their problems and issues. It takes a sit back, and just explores the lives of the characters. In this fast paced modern world of hyper block buster films, I found it incredibly refreshing. But all the emotional scenes are handled extremely classy, and the observations are captured with a sense of joy and discovery, and it really does make the films world come alive vividly. The time period is captured really well, although I would say that American Graffiti captured it even better. But Diner is an important film, it’s a film where you can kick back and enjoy, but it’s just not a popcorn film, but has more depth to it. The end, while not overall positive, leaves you with a warm feeling. There might be uncertainty in the future, but there’s always the brightness of friendship and closeness.

I thoroughly enjoyed Diner. It’s a fine film and a character piece, exploring the lives of five young men in crisis. It has great moments and dialogue, and most importantly, when it is over you will truly know its characters, and feel like you’ve been close to them. It’s a positive film, overall, but the ending and message is more complex than that. It could be compared to American Graffiti, but I would characterize Diner as American Graffiti’s older and somewhat more sophisticated cousin. However, both are great movies.

My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

My Dinner with Andre is famous for being a film just about two guys sitting and talking in a restaurant. And this is true, for about 100 minutes it’s just conversation at the table, nothing else. It’s an interesting concept, and of course Louis Malle is an excellent director, but does it work? Does the film manage to create a meaning and story even though it has such limited range? Or is it just a pretentious experiment that doesn’t really hold any value in cinema?

The set up is simple enough; a failing playwright is invited to dinner by his estranged friend Andre, who used to be a very successful theatre director. The two primary cast members are Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both playing fictionalized versions of themselves. At first it’s a though movie to take, the camera is fixed on Andre as he talks about his recent exploits. However, after 20 or 30 minutes it really starts to drag you in, almost in a hypnotic way. In the beginning I was watching the timer, but at the end it felt as if it was over in no time. The audience becomes very much a part of the conversation; we share the perspective of Wallace, who does most of the listening, although towards the end he has a couple of things to say for himself. The film touches upon issues of how society works and the masks we wear. Do we really live our lives in a real way? The film forces the audience to confront these issues, although Andre can sound a bit high and mighty at times. Wallace very much grounds us down, emphasizing the little things in life that have value.

Both cast members do a good job, although there isn’t really that much dramatic material to deal with. The conflict works on a very intellectual level, but there’s definitely some conflict there between the two, although it’s all quite polite. Louis Malle was the director and I can see the challenge in the project that might have drawn him to it. However, he does a fine job, keeping it simple and slick. The atmosphere in the restaurant, although subdued in the background, adds a decent layer to the film and the issues that are being talked about. By the end it feels like time has stopped and is suddenly started again, when the characters realize that the once full restaurant is now empty. The film leaves you with a taste, a pondering. This is where I find the major strength of the film lies. You leave the film feeling richer or perhaps poorer and despairing, depending on your point of view. It’s an intimate conversation about deep human emotions, and we’re allowed to see it all. It’s not just a question of audiences listening, but we also have to participate, giving our own mental notes and discerning what really is behind the character of Andre. It might drag in the beginning, but at the end it works marvelously well.

Whether or not someone likes My Dinner with Andre is purely a matter of taste. There is certainly something to be had here, and many will find it a wonderful movie, but if you decide to turn it off in the first 20 minutes and never pay the film any mind ever again, I would certainly not hold it against you.

Top 100 Films

Quite simple, my 100 favorite films. It's probably not complete, and some of the arrangment could change, but here it is:

1. La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)
2. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)
3. Akahige (Kurosawa, 1965)
4. The Apartment (Wilder, 1960)
5. The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger, 1948)
6. Smultronstället (Bergman, 1957)
7. Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)
8. Zerkalo (Tarkovsky, 1975)
9. Charulata (Ray, 1964)
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
11. Die Büchse der Pandora (Pabst, 1929)
12. L'année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
13. Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962)
14. Viskningar och Rop (Bergman, 1972)
15. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
16. Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)
17. La Notti di Cabiria (Fellini, 1957)
18. La Ronde (Ophuls, 1950)
19. Mimi wo sumaseba (Kondo, 1995)
20. Au Hasard Balthazar(Bresson, 1966)


21. Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)
22. Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, 1987)
23. Manhattan (Allen, 1979)
24. Ossessione (Visconti, 1943)
25. Körkarlen (Sjöström, 1921)
26. La Strada (Fellini, 1954)
27. Persona (Bergman, 1966)
28. Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, 1959)
29. Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951)
30. Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)
31. Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
32. L'armée des ombres (Melville, 1969)
33. À bout de souffle (Godard, 1960)
34. L’Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962)
35. Sátántangó (Tarr, 1993)
36. Les quatre cents coups (Truffaut, 1959)
37. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
38. Der Letzte Mann (Murnau, 1924)
39. Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955)
40. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante, 1990)


41. Mahanagar (Ray, 1963)
42. Nattvardsgästerna (Bergman, 1963)
43. L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
44. Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
45. It’s A Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946)
46. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg, 1976)
47. No Country for Old Men (Coen, 2007)
48. Kapurush (Ray, 1965)
49. There Wil Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)
50. Alien (Scott, 1979)
51. All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955)
52. Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
53. Annie Hall (Allen, 1977)
54. The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
55. Il conformista (Bertolucci, 1970)
56. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen, 1989)
57. Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa, 1975)
58. Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975)
59. Fargo (Coen, 1996)
60. Fanny och Alexander (Bergman, 1982)


61. Le mépris (Godard, 1963)
62. Le Samuraï (Melville, 1967)
63. Rififi (Dassin, 1955)
64. Odd Man Out (Reed, 1947)
65. North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)
66. Sanshô dayû (Mizoguchi, 1954)
67. Sommarnattens leende (Bergman, 1955)
68. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
69. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols, 1966)
70. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (Bresson, 1956)
71. Faces (Cassavetes, 1968)
72. Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932)
73. A Woman under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974)
74. Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
75. Såsom i en spegel (Bergman, 1961)
76. Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959)
77. Faust - Eine deutsche Volkssage (Murnau, 1926)
78. Salinui chueok (Bong, 2003)
79. Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971)
80. Boksuneun naui geot (Park, 2002)


81. Bakushû (Ozu, 1951)
82. Forbidden Planet (Wilcox, 1956)
83. Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi, 1953)
84. The Player (Altman, 1992)
85. Onibaba (Shindô, 1964)
86. The Getaway (Peckinpah, 1972)
87. All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950)
88. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
89. The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925)
90. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Nimoy, 1986)
91. Mononoke-hime (Miyazaki, 1997)
92. Suna no onna (Teshigahara, 1964)
93. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998)
94. The Thing (Carpenter, 1982)
95. Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973)
96. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Herzog, 1972)
97. Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
98. Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)
99. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Murnau, 1922)
100. Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet, 1975)

Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)

My feelings towards films that rely too much on their dialogue is somewhat ambiguous. I love films that can create meaning and story through their visuals, and don’t rely on dialogue to hammer in to the audience what it is about. Glengarry Glen Ross was based on a play written by David Mamet, and he himself wrote the film adaptation. It does come across that the film has its roots in theatre. There are only two major locations throughout most of the film, its dialogue heavy, and has a particular kind of dialogue. Still, the film works pretty well, and stands out as a somewhat underrated classic.

The premise is simple: A questionable real estate office isn’t doing as well as they would like to, and so the boss comes up with a contest to motivate his four salesmen. Earn the most, and you get a new car. Finish second and you get a neat bonus. Finish third and fourth and you get fired. The film takes place over just one night and one morning, so the tension is laid thick. There is a genuine sense of desperation and hopelessness which captures the spirit of the 90s. But what really makes this film stand out is the casting. Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris and Alec Baldwin. It’s a great cast, and everyone does their outmost to make their characters vivid. The stand out performance is Jack Lemmon. His character is pathetic, but has genuine concerns, still living on the memory of better days, and in his worst moment fooling himself into believing that he made a good sale. His character screams of both desperation and poignancy. Alec Baldwin has only one scene, but remains in the back of the audiences heads as he is the one that describes the contest, in a very intimidating scene. Spacey is also great, as the coldhearted manager who has little sympathy for his crew, but he also has some underlying issues of his own. Al Pacino steals every scene he is in with his mesmerizing intensity. It’s not just about the casting though, the script is excellent, and every character has several layers. The film slowly peels away at the characters and in the end everyone is left naked and exposed.

One of the reasons I don’t like “talky” films is that they have a tendency to spell out what the characters are thinking and what’s going on. Glengarry Glen Ross elegantly avoids this; every character has something to hide. The film is smart in quickly telling us what’s at stake, so that the characters and their underlying issues and concerns can be revealed effortlessly. The film also keeps the audience guessing until the end. Most of the film is shown in real time, but there is a clever jump between night and day. During these hours where we, the audience, have not been present there have been some significant story developments, but we were not able to see them. This creates a great moment where we can guess and speculate what happened and who did what, where everything is not what it seems. Although there is a lot of dialogue in the film, everything that the characters say is significant and the film doesn’t seem bloated with dialogue. Indeed, the director managed to create some significance through the visuals, and the cinematography is beautiful, expertly using colors and angles to create meaning. So while the film has a lot of dialogue, it doesn’t always rely on it to tell the story, and thus becomes more interesting. I think this is one of the more successful transitions from theatre to cinema.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Glengarry Glen Ross, but I was captivated throughout the film, with the interesting characters and the fascinating setting. The film builds up well and towards the end is intense, although it is still low-key. Many will talk about the excellent cast, but it’s all about the brilliant script, which they really do justice to. It’s quite incredible how the script gets so much out of so little, and stands as a fine example of intricate screenwriting and filmmaking.

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Inception is the latest film by Christopher Nolan, the director of the functional and entertaining, though massively overhyped, Dark Knight. And guess what? The hype for Inception almost deafened the initial hype for Dark Knight. Somewhat begrudgingly, I decided that this time I wasn’t going to concern myself as much as I did with Dark Knight, and just try to enjoy the film for what it is. By now we know what kind of films Nolan makes; entertainment films that masquerade themselves as something more important, with a hint of “it’s serious and dark” pretentiousness. The big concern is of course that the average audience doesn’t see through the masquerade, but let’s discuss that later.

So the film is about Leonardo DiCaprio looking moody and serious, which he has been in most of his recent films. Actually, Inception reminded me a lot about Scorsese’s recent Shutter Island, this is the second film in which we are trapped within the mind of DiCaprio, God help us. So DiCaprio makes a living by infiltrating the minds of important people, going into their dreams. But to do this the most effectively he has to go within a dream of the dream, so he has to make the person dreaming within the dream, dream. Enough of that awkwardness. DiCaprio has a dark past, his wife is dead but still haunting him through his dreams, or other people’s dreams, just go with it. He also has two children who he wants to be together with again, but he can’t because he is an outlaw in the US. Then, a rich Asian business man has one final job for DiCaprio and his crew, and as a reward will get rid of all the charges against him in the US (How does the rich Asian business man have so much power over US legislature? I don’t know, he’s rich, so that’s probably a good an explanation as any). However, DiCaprio needs an “architect” who can create dreams, so he hires the girl from Juno, we’ll call her the “Juno Girl” from now on. Him, her, and the A-Team now start to prepare for their final mission, where they have to infiltrate the mind of a rich business owner and implant ideas into his mind about what kind of business model he should use, because this in some way benefits the rich Asian business man. But to do this, they have to go into a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. Simple enough.

A lot of people have said that this is a very complex film that you have to see at least twice to “get it”. However I don’t agree with this. Each level of the dreams has a very specific look, and there is never any doubt where we are at each time. There are no confusing elements. Everything is set up pretty well for us to understand what is going on and where we are. This might be attributed to the fact that the first hour of the film is exposition, describing the rules of the film universe. The whole long opening is truly boring and tedious, going through the motions of explaining to the audience what is going to happen and how. I would have preferred it if they just handed out pamphlets at the beginning of the film and that could be read as an option. I feel that if you need to go through this much trouble to explain something, then it isn’t worth explaining. The story itself is complicated, and hard to explain, but the film isn’t. Of course it isn’t, because the first hour is spent on exposition. There are also a couple of things that are a bit to quaint. In the mind of the business man they are infiltrating there has been set up a defense against intrusion. This comes in the variety of blank faced machine gun wielding goons, so we get a good opportunity to have loads of shooting scenes. It becomes almost banal at some point. Visually the film does look quite interesting and it opens up for a lot of nice scenes and set pieces, but I still feel that the film missed out somewhat, I never felt like the film was like a dream. When you talk about going into dreams you think of irrationality and crazy things happening, but they don’t in this film, so its representation of dreams is actually quite boring.

One major problem though is that the film is quite funny, most often when it’s not supposed to be. There’s one moment that had me laughing out loud in the cinema, where DiCaprio leans close to the camera and mutters something incomprehensible with the music droning on in the background. What he was saying sounded quite ridiculous, but the film took it so seriously. That’s another thing; this film takes itself way to seriously. But the whole concept is quite silly when one actually thinks about it, and it makes me think that Nolan is something of a manchild. So it’s very funny when the characters talk with the utmost seriousness about what’s going on, when it’s all just very silly. It doesn’t help that the music is ultra serious as well. Apparently, Nolan liked the music from The Dark Knight so much that he just had the composer remix that track, because it is pretty much the same as it was in that film. You might have noticed how I refer to the characters, that’s because they are so blank and empty that they don’t deserve any more. The film lacks any serious characterization, and most of the characters are boring. The only one I found interesting was the business man who they are trying to infiltrate, he’s played by the same guy as Scarecrow from Batman Begins. Otherwise, the characters are just puppets that make things happen on the screen. DiCaprio does an ok job, but it’s just too similar to the roles he has been playing of late, and while his character has issues that might be taken seriously, they are just too cliché. Oh, and of course, at the end Nolan couldn’t resist playing with the idea for the audience whether or not the whole thing was just a dream or if it was real. But at this point I had stopped caring. My problem with Inception, and this goes for The Dark Knight too, is that it’s a standard summer blockbuster film, but it pretends it’s something more. Yes, it’s somewhat smarter and complex than the average blockbuster, and its well made, but at the end of the day it’s just another action film.

I didn’t like Inception. The only remarkable thing about it is how much it’s stuck up its own ass. The film takes itself way to seriously, the emotions within the film are too flat, and overall I found it quite boring. The first hour is mind numbingly boring with all its exposition, and although it picks up after this, I just think “why bother caring anymore?” But the endless drones of faceless goons aren’t that interesting, and sometimes it makes you think that the whole concept for the film was just an excuse to have loads of gunfights. And before anyone says that I’m biased or something because of my expectations, this film let me down. The opening scene was beautifully shot and well paced, it was mysterious and interesting. I thought, “Wow, this might actually be really good”. However after the initial ten minutes the film started letting me down, and in the end I almost forgot about the good opening scene.