Alternative Candidate

A viewing log (mostly). A listening log (occasionally). Words of wisdom thrown in at no extra charge.

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Station to Station (1976)

“[B]y the time he wrote ‘Station to Station,’ mainly in the studio, Bowie’s mind was like a swath of exposed film in a camera whose shutter was stuck open. ‘Station to Station’ inventoried his obsessions, made a mandala of loose thoughts. The lyric reads like grandiose gibberish and hits upon the sublime. ‘Station to Station’ is the culmination of Bowie’s musical life; it’s his masterpiece, for better or worse. His previous work was its prelude, his subsequent music lies in its shadow.”

Chris O’Leary, Rebel Rebel

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The Love Witch (2016)

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The Love Witch (2016)

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The Love Witch (2016)

“Anna Biller ingeniously tweaks some Hollywood conventions and clichés of the nineteen-sixties in this wild and bloody comedy about a young Wiccan named Elaine (Samantha Robinson), who uses her supernatural powers to attract the men of her choice, and, when they disappoint her, to kill them. The action parodies classic movie tropes—the drifter who returns to a small town, the flowing-haired professorial Adonis, the police officer whose investigation is compromised by divided loyalties, the burlesque bar where everyone meets and destinies play out. But the movie is less a matter of story than of style—it’s filled with ornate period costumes and furnishings (which were handmade by Biller) as well as sumptuous swaths of color and old-school optical effects. Biller’s feminist philosophy meshes with the freewheeling delight of her aestheticism. The film pulsates with furious creative energy, sparking excitement and amazement by way of its decorative twists, intellectual provocations, and astounding humor.”

Richard Brody   

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Knight of Cups (2015)

“The Malick of today may be the quintessential cult director: those who respond to his movies couldn’t be kept away from a new one, and you can’t tell anything to those who don’t. He has his devotees and his detractors—insofar as I can tell the factions are both well-populated, though this doesn’t keep commenters on either side from striking those self-dramatizing ‘lone voice in the wilderness’ poses that are the bane of any worthwhile criticism. (For my part, I will never understand those hostile responses to Malick, which seem determined to hold the line so that American narrative cinema won’t be overrun by avant-garde abstraction, as though there was a flotilla of directors making experimental films on this scale instead of literally just one guy.)”

Nick Pinkerton, Reverse Shot

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Sucker Punch (2011)

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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

“At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn’t get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move and talk. I was in love with that world and I hadn’t finished with it. But making the movie wasn’t just to hold on to it: it seemed that there was more stuff that could be done. But the parade had gone by. It was over. During the year that it took to make the film, everything changed. That’s the way it happens, sometimes. And then there’s this thing about turning on people. It’s so natural, in a way. It happens to so many people.”

David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch

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Judex (1963) 

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Judex (1963)

“Judex, in the original serial, had a carefully planted backstory explaining why he went to such extremes to wreak vengeance on the rapacious Favraux, but Franju decided to strip him of any such logical motivation and make him more a figure from a dream. That he certainly becomes in the scene that most viewers remember most vividly: his sudden entry, wearing a gigantic bird headdress and resembling a Max Ernst painting come to life, walking silently, with a seemingly dead pigeon in his outstretched hand, through a ballroom full of masqueraders, many of whom also sport bird heads. Franju cast an American magican, Channing Pollock, in the role, and although his acting range was not great, his mastery of sleight of hand is put to impressive use in this episode and later.”

Geoffrey O'Brien, Criterion Collection

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Branded to Kill (1967)

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Melancholia (2011)

“Ms. Dunst’s character shares her name with the title figure in the Marquis de Sade’s 1787 novel Justine, about a virtuous woman who endures a crucible of suffering and, after being reunited with her sister, Juliette, is fatally struck by lightning. Mr. von Trier has expressed interest in adapting the novel, and it was one of the inspirations for his 1996 feature, Breaking the Waves, in which Emily Watson plays a doomed, sexually exploited, saintlike figure. ‘In the end,’ Mr. von Trier said in a 1996 interview, ‘Justine thanks God for his goodness in letting her survive all the calamities—after which she is struck by lightning and burns to death.’”

Manohla Dargis

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Lost Highway (1997)

“It’s about a couple who feel that somewhere, just on the border of consciousness--or on the other side of that border--are bad, bad problems. But they can’t bring them into the real world and deal with them. So this bad feeling is just hovering there, and the problems abstract themselves and become other things. It just becomes like a bad dream. There are unfortunate things that happen to people, and this story is about that. It depicts an unfortunate occurrence, and gives you the feeling of a man in trouble. A thinking man in trouble.”

David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch

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“Plans for the Stones’ film, supposed to have started in April, had changes again. The film was now to be taken from a novel called Only Lovers Left Alive, by Dave Wallis, about England taken over by teenagers after a nuclear attack. Mick told Melody Maker, ‘I can’t see Ringo with a gun in his hand and being nasty in a movie and going to kill somebody. It just wouldn’t happen. But I don’t think it was very peculiar if you saw Brian do it.’”

Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones

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The Witch (2015)

“These are people who fervently believe both in the Devil and in God, and for whom witches are as real as trees; it’s no wonder that their inability to tame the New World blurs with their fears. The finale is a trip, but Mr. Eggers suggests that when crops and sanity each fail it misses the point to ask if the Devil exists. Of course he does—just read Cotton Mather or talk to the scene-stealing goat called Black Phillip.”

Manohla Dargis  

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The Witch (2015)

“The trope of innocent young women as targets for Puritan paranoia is well-worn, to say the least, and the script’s debt to The Crucible is apparent, except that Eggers isn’t simply putting repressive ideology under the microscope. The Witch manages to have it both ways, imagining a universe in which evil comes from within and without.

“This thematic balancing act would be unthinkable without Taylor-Joy’s superbly modulated lead performance, which complicates the question of Thomasin’s capital-I Innocence from the very first shot of her staring upward in devout prayer. The film’s allusions to Häxan and The Shining are nicely turned, but by the end, Eggers is doing something similar to Lars von Trier in Antichrist — describing the process by which a young woman can be radicalized by the misogyny of those around her. ”

Adam Nayman

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Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

“Hunt for the Wilderpeople takes a troika of familiar story types—the plucky kid, the crusty geezer, the nurturing bosom—and strips them of cliché. Charming and funny, it is a drama masquerading as a comedy about an unloved boy whom nobody wants until someone says, Yes, I’ll love him. Much of the humor comes from the child, who’s at once a pip and a gloriously expressive ambassador for the director Taika Waititi’s cleareyed take on human nature and movies. Mr. Waititi knows that we love to cry at sad and bad times, but he also knows that people in pain need to get on with their lives.”

Manohla Dargis    

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The Double Life of Véronique (1991)