Three Films Make A Post: For justice. For loyalty. For friendship.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005): I am really rather fond of the handful of films Tommy Lee Jones directed. While also centred around Jones as an actor, these films are prime examples of a quiet and collected post-New Hollywood filmmaking style, never stylistically showy, but always shot in such a way as to help keep actors and their characters at the centre. This one also recommends itself through a really peculiar sense of humour, the willingness to leave questions unanswered, as well as a what feels like a the conviction to meet characters on their own terms, and follow the lines of inquiry that leads to. Curiously enough, given how Jones is supposed to be on set, these lines tend to lead to compassion (not an uncritical one, mind you) and understanding, not the kitschy idea of these concepts, but the sort of thing that’s actual work for everyone involved.

Alone on the Pacific aka Taiheiyô hitoribotchi (1963): Kenichie (Yujiro Ishihara) makes it his young life’s goal to cross the Pacific to the USA in a one person sailboat. For much of its running time, the film cuts between our hero’s misadventures at sea and his growing up disaffected, eventually planning his trip. Director Kon Ichikawa doesn’t really lean into the adventure elements of the tale too hard – though he is perfectly willing and able to portray some of Kenichie’s troubles at sea, he is more interested in a meticulous portrayal of the state of mind a body at the borders of its endurance can reach, touching the surreal and the stylistically theatrical because these seem to be closest to the state of mind Kenichie gets into. There’s also quite a bit of social commentary towards post war Japan and the way it treats its youth, but I’m not terribly sure I’m the right audience for that part of the film.

At Close Range (1986): James Foley’s version of a true crime story is a deeply frustrating movie. The cast, with a young Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn and so on is brilliant. Foley even seems to realize this and provides them with a lot of big scenes to do big actor things in. The problem is that most of these scenes are utterly wrong-headed, never giving the actors the material to be people instead of characters in a movie built out of clichés from other movies. The script (by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan) makes the impression of being written by people who have never met one of the small town and rural poor before, portraying people, their motivations and actions in ways that never feel anything but wrong. On the direction side, Foley polishes everything to a sheen that often works against the story he is trying to tell, making poverty and the world rural noir tales are made of look like an overdirected 80s ad, making it impossible to believe in these characters and the places they are supposed to inhabit.

Three Films Make A Post: Something has put the fear of death in the living and sent the dead running for their lives

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013): It seems somewhat obvious to compare Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Tim Burton: both directors have very distinctive styles, both have aesthetics deeply rooted in the grotesque and the strange. But unlike Burton on his bad days, Jeunet seems to be easily able to find the volume knob for the grotesque and the weird and fit it to the necessities of the narrative he’s telling. T.S. Spivet is a case in point, for it shows the director mellowing the grotesque into the whimsically strange while keeping his ability to create a world not really like our own that still feels perfectly logical and following its own rules and which is rooted in recognizable human feelings. So this is not just a film that’s great to look – and sometimes to gawk excitedly – at but also an example of that mythical “heart-warming” quality, a quality Jeunet – as is his wont – reaches without ever seeming to stretch for it, and that never feels in conflict with the film’s stranger elements but rather a part of them.

Christine (2016): Antonio Campos’s 70s period piece about a reporter for a local TV station who ends her own life in front of a running camera thanks to a toxic cocktail of clinical depression, rejection, male chauvinism, her frustration at the state of the world (which always looks even worse when you’re suffering from depression), stupidity, and the tragic inability of the people who do love her to actually enable her to seek help (not that this would have been easy at this point in time). You might say it is a bit of a downer, but it is also a film that stretches to let Christine be more than just a freak we gawk at and watch die inside and outside, that attempts to understand Christine not just as that thing we know as “a depressed woman” but as a living breathing person who is/was more than just a mentally ill woman with a sensationalist exploitable end. Rebecca Hall’s central performance is highly nuanced, insightful and utterly humane.

U Turn (1997): In comparison, Oliver Stone’s neo noir is not much of a film, even though it is one of the director’s best – and certainly least annoying – ones. Stone’s direction is expectedly showy and nervous, the characters are absurd caricatures utterly divorced from actual human beings or even what we usually accept in movies as human beings, and the plot is a series of tonally wildly wavering episodes about how horrible everything and everyone is. I’d call it a nihilistic film, but for that, I’d have to take Stone’s habitual posing seriously. As it stands, I’m more reminded of The Big Lebowski’s “Autobahn”.


The thing is, I also find the combination of the overblown direction, the great actors (and Jennifer Lopez) playing cardboard cut-outs as loudly as possible, the noir clichés and the badly digested philosophy highly entertaining, running on an energy that might be Stone’s typical screeching about how awesome and deep he is (which he isn’t) or just the result of a group of people having a wild time making a really silly film.