Parallax View

Squeezing in just before the Oscar nominations are announced, here are a few final lists and remarks from Parallax View contributors and friends, along with those published by Seattle top critics, as a snapshot of the way we see 2009.

I’m not an adventurous filmgoer.
Meaning I’m very seldom in the house for a first-run Hollywood picture.
There’s generally a lag of a few years – during which a film acquires something of a reputation, or maybe I caught part on it on television – that I’ll check it out more fully.
And then – if [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 36 Number 1, January/February 2000, reprinted by permission]
• The middle-aged Gerald (Alain Libolt) taking out his glasses to look at a photo of a woman who may become his wife—Eric Rohmer’s golden Autumn Tale…

• One of those days it’s a minute away from snowing: the dancing [...]

[Originally published in Film Comment Volume 32 Number 1, January/February 1996, reprinted by permission]
• Oriental views of train bridges into Brooklyn, Smoke…
• Birds, insects, air: the sounds around the Roseman Bridge, The Bridges of Madison County…
• 1948 sunshine, and a rapturously integral job of period re-creation that never preens as such—Devil in [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978]
• Archetypal cinema: the opening of Star Wars. The foreword plunges us, in media res, into the serial of our moviegoing lives. Then the camera drops its field of view, a planet heaves into sight to lend scale to the universe, and a spacecraft angles [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 29 Number 1, January-February 1993, reprinted by permission]
• The wait by the tree, and how Will Munny drinks after getting the news, Unforgiven: as director and actor, Clint Eastwood in excelsis…
• “The pleasure was all ‘mine”—The Crying Game….
• The Player: The fax curling out of the dashboard [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 38, January 1975]
• The moment of the year, probably: Day for Night: Georges Delerue phones in from Paris to play one of the key themes for the film-in-progress, at the same time a package of books arrives for use as props in an upcoming scene. As the music [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 33 Number 1, January/February 1997, reprinted by permission]
• The car materializing out of the whited-out mystery of snow/land/sky—the opening of Fargo…
• The English Patient: closeup, the look of pearls against Kristin Scott Thomas’s sweat-dampened throat … rediscovering the sensuality of the camera eye…
• Nobody (Gary [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 35 Number 1, January/February 1999, reprinted by permission]
• Shrapnel hanging in the air, every shard in razor-sharp focus, as if molecules of the film itself had been startled out of the emulsion by the battle: Saving Private Ryan…
• A bird born dying in battle: The Thin [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977]
• The premiere of The Clansman, and D.W. Griffith’s stately acknowledgement of the cheers-the night we’d like to have attended, and thanks to Peter Bogdanovich for enabling us to be there: Nickelodeon….
• Ther duel in the barn: shafts of blue light, the flutter of pigeon wings, and the [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 34 Number 1, January/February 1998, reprinted by permission]
• The death of Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), L.A. Confidential: The gunshot comes as a cinematically rare and genuine shock, but this is crowned by a supreme actor’s-moment: Jack’s multivalenced chuckle—shoulda known better—as he plants the clue with [...]

[originally published in Steadycam No. 49, February 2006]
• Broken Flowers: Bill Murray fitting himself around a forkful of perfectly formed carrot slices…
• The Squid and the Whale: The father (Jeff Daniels), coming by what is no longer his own home to pick up one of his sons, points at a TV set [...]

I’m winding down my year in DVD coverage with this highly subjective survey of the box sets of 2009 that brought new titles to DVD (no collections of previously released titles in new packages here). To be clear, I didn’t see every set that came along, or even every film in those that [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 31 Number 1, January-February 1995, reprinted by permission]
• At the beginning of Pulp Fiction, Amanda Plummer laying her head on the coffeeshop table and smiling: “I’m not gonna kill anybody”….
• Just-right treatment of place, climate, community in the main-title sequence of Nobody’s Fool…
• Bunny (Bill Murray) [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 47, January 1976]
• Keith Carradine singing “I’m Easy” to one or all of four women—and also, to be sure, himself: Nashville…
• The awful pale blue oblong of Guinevere’s window, Lancelot du Lac: is it the only light in the world, or a glimpse into the void empty even [...]