The forthcoming "Grindhouse" notwithstanding, the motion picture double bill is a nearly dead art. Marquees have always been plugged with twosomes that just happened to be from the same distributor (it's the same kind of logic that gives us a "The Robert Altman Collection" on DVD, consisting of "M*A*S*H," "A Perfect Couple," "Quintet" and "A Wedding" -- simply because they were all released by 20th Century Fox). On a slightly more creative level (sometimes), today's few remaining revival houses might connect two films by language, genre, director or star.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with a fairly straightforward double bill of, say, Scorsese/De Niro pictures ("Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver") -- or David Lynch LA nightmares ("Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive") or Michael Haneke puzzles ("Code Unknown" and "Cache" ) -- all of which are illuminating pairings. As I like to remind myself, you invariably view movies through the prism of the movies you've already seen -- particularly those you've seen recently, and never more so than when you see two of 'em back to back. You can't help but make associations, and a well-considered double bill can help you see both movies from new angles -- emphasizing some aspects over others, and creating a kind of conversation between the two films.
When I was in college, at the University of Washington, I got to program hundreds of movies in the student film series -- a different double bill every Friday and Saturday night (and sometimes Wednesdays and Sundays, too!) over a couple of years -- and I had a blast doing it. My favorite strategy was to put an older or less well-known (and cheaper to rent!) film with a more recent or recognizable title in hopes of pulling in an audience (and maybe blowing people's minds!).
Put "Citizen Kane" with "All the President's Men" and all kinds of things start happening: They're both detective stories, journalistic stories, overshadowed by famously flawed and powerful public/private men who remain essentially unknowable to the end... Or put Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" with Michel Deville's "Dossier 51," and you have two accounts of psychological meltdowns under the glare of intense surveillance -- one by the watcher and one by the watched -- but both from the perspective of the voyeur. Or how about Peckinpah's "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" with Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"? Eric Rohmer's "Perceval" with Robert Bresson's "Lancelot du Lac"? I would love to have paired Brian DePalma's "Hi Mom!" with Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" -- for perverse structural and audience-freaking reasons. On the other hand, I don't recall exactly what I was going for when I put Bunuel's "L'Age d'Or" with Godard's "Weekend," except that I knew they were both shocking and transgressive... and, most of all, I really wanted to see them. Anyway, you can set up all kinds of thematic, historical and stylistic clashes and consonances reverberating between films....
So, that's what I've decided to do with some of my favorite movies of 2006. Rather than a traditional "ten best list" (which I've already contributed to MSN Movies), here are my suggestions for fruitful ways of viewing some of the year's best movies, alongside some of the best of past years. Make an evening of it -- in theaters and/or on DVD!
1) Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and Bernard Rose's "Paperhouse" (1988). Disobedient little girls enter frightful fantasy worlds (rendered with awesome eerieness) to grapple with internal and external demons. (Alternative fever-dream fairy tale: Neil Jordan's undervalued 1984 "The Company of Wolves.")
2) Tom Tykwer's "Perfume" and Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" (1960). Voyeurism and possession, via smell and sight. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter: The killing is incidental. What does he seek? (Alternate: Jonathan Demme's 1991 "The Silence of the Lambs," of course!)
3) Ramin Bahrani's "Man Push Cart" and Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket" (1959). Stylistic minimalism and lost, lonely men surviving on the street. (Alternates: Vittorio De Sica's 1948 Neo-Realist "Bicycle Thieves" or Bresson's 1984 "L'Argent.")
4) Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" and Altman's "Nashville" (1975). Altman set up this conversation across the decades himself, concerning living and dying, onstage and off, through music, politics and commerce.
5) Neil Marshall's "The Descent" and Philip Noyce's "Dead Calm" (1989). Tales of maternal grief and demons unleashed -- one in the claustrophobic underground darkness, the other on the bright, wide-open sea. (Alternates: James Cameron's 1986 "Aliens," Peter Weir's 1975 "Picnic at Hanging Rock," Neil Marshall's 2002 "Dog Soldiers." Each juxtaposition is going to give you a different experience.)
6) Eric Steel's "The Bridge" and Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958). Mysteries of suicide, identity and madness -- and the plunge into the chilly waters beneath the majestic (romantic, tragic) monument of the Golden Gate Bridge. (Alternate: Stanley Nelson's 2006 "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple" -- another documentary about a suicidal landmark that looms as large in San Francisco's history and collective psyche as the Bridge.)
7) Doug Block's "51 Birch Street" and Andrew Jarecki's "Capturing the Friedmans" (2003). If those suburban walls could talk: Family portraits that test the limits of what we can know about the members of our own families -- one meditative, the other melodramatic, but both deeply enigmatic. (Alternates: As I said in my review of "51 Birch Street," it should be shown after every Hollywood romantic comedy that ends with a wedding clinch -- any happy plot that ends with a marriage knot...)
8) Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson" and Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy." I'll just quote from the comments in my earlier list: "Two tales of struggle with personal and political idealism as Americans (in the urban Northeast and the bucolic Pacific Northwest, respectively) age into their 30s and 40s, worried about what they've lost, who they've become and who they're going to become."
9) Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima" Too obvious? They're meant to be seen as two parts of a single film. They make their own bloody gravy. (Alternate: John Ford's 1945 "They Were Expendable.")
10) Larry Charles' (and, of course, Sasha Baron Cohen's) "Borat" and the Marx Bros.' "Animal Crackers" (1930). Lessons in comedy and socially disruptive anarchy. And, yes, making fun of all kinds of people. Including those that Harry Dean Stanton so memorably described in the great "Repo Man": "Ordinary f---kin' people. I hate 'em." That's funny. (Alternate: W.C. Fields' 1934 "It's A Gift" -- particularly because of the scene with the blind man destroying Fields' shop. And because it's one of the funniest movies ever made.)
11) Rian Johnson's "Brick" and the Coen Bros.' "Miller's Crossing" (1992). Both have common roots in Dashiell Hammet's "Red Harvest" -- and revel in mangled motives and tongue-tangling slang. (Alternate: Howard Hawks' 1948 "The Big Sleep" -- and most especially Season One of "Veronica Mars.")
I could go on. I'd like to see Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German" on a double-bill with (no, not "The Third Man," not "Casablanca") Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun" or Billy Wilder's "Foreign Affair." Or "The Break-Up" with "The Awful Truth" (mainly for the contrast -- "The Break-Up" is not a romantic comedy!).
Do some programming of your own. And let us know what you come up with...
I'll probably get into trouble for comparing (or even bringing up) these two, er, 'films'. But... back in 1986, when I was still at community college and had bits and pieces of money burning in my pocket, I went to a summer Sunday double bill--at a UA theatre in Cerritos Mall, no less, talk about an unlikely venue-- of Stand by Me and Jumpin' Jack Flash.
I could blab away all Jim's bandwidth describing all my recollections about these two movies, but I'll try to keep this post to at least a tolerable length by just saying it was a great lesson in learning to be your own best, most trusted critic. Stand By Me, the movie I really wanted to see, was (as I recall it) a cynical, bitter, messy letdown. And the supposedly oh-so-hip, urbanish JJF, complete with Whoopi Goldberg livin' the low-end life down in good ol' grimy NYC, was (gasp) funny, uplifting, a nice Bond spoof, and even... omigod... Patriotic! (Even with all the subtle jabs at Reagan.)
Anyhoo, maybe I'm just posting this to be egotistical ("ooo, I can't wait to see what Emerson has to say about this!"). And I certainly don't consider either of these movies that memorable. But--cue the heartwarming sitcom music--I learned several great lessons that day about movies, perceptions, and the limitations of the critics. And it was all brought to me by a double feature.
STEVE
Lakewood, California
("Ebert fan and Medved defender"... just to jog your memory of me, Jim.)
I'm working on an essay for The House about The New World and Mirror: both skeptically patriotic dreams.
Actually, the double bill is my new favorite game. At the NWFF Satantango weekend we kept coming up with cross programming choices. My favorite that I came up with was Crank. Sean's best was Office Space.
Thank you for this! Top 10 lists used to serve as an inspiration for things to see; but I've become jaded and cynical of these repetitive formulations - this idea helps me find some new material... as a contemporary film fan you can bet that i've already planned on seeing many of your current items, but these unique pairings have me eager to go to the catalog titles, given this new frame of reference. (First stop for me, off you list, will be "Old Joy" because it's paired with what *is* the best movie of the year in spite of your erroneous placement of it at #8 :)
I just broke my hand, pardon the brevity.
"The Science of Sleep" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", or "Bad Timing" by Nic Roeg for a darker edge to romantic obsession and dissolution.
"The Prestige" and "Dead Ringers" - twins, psychological dichotomies, mad scientists, success-driven males.
"An Inconvenient Truth" hand "The Chitna Sydrome" fior environmental terrowr at its best, with excellent social commentary which actually raised public awareness. Activism in film!
great idea for a list... actually i did go to a double billing of perceval and lancelot du lac at uni and they were great, especially since my knowledge of french is pitiful... therefore it was visual stimuli non-stop and it was awesome...
if i had to do my own list i woul do the following:
badlands and bonnie & clyde/rebel without a cause;
king kong (1933) and king kong (2005);
bram stoker's dracula and wuthering heights (1992);
throne of blood and the wild bunch...
I'd love a double feature of Miami Vice and Punch-Drunk Love.
Or Three Times and The Rules Of The Game.
Or Princess Raccoon and The Band Wagon (or The Pirate).
Or The Departed and The Bad Sleep Well.
This could go on indefinitely. . . .
The most memorable double bill I ever saw was when I was still a poor graduate student in Miami in the 90s. I wanted to see Disney's Beauty and the Beast one last time in a theater, so my partner and I went to North Miami to a rundown $1 cinema, and when we got there we saw saw on the marquee that it was paired with Basic Instinct.
Was this a case of two movies being shown simply because they came from the same distributor, or was it actually thought out in advance? As Freud said, there are no accidents.
I love it, and I'm totally going to steal this idea. But which of these is "the first double feature you’d program for opening night of your own revival theater"?
I have to think this way a lot in teaching different units in my high school film class -- the only difference is that the double feature takes about two full weeks of class to pull off. A few that I like (some are kind of obvious, but hey, this IS high school):
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946) and Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 1968) -- it's worth it just for the way Leone transforms Henry Fonda's persona that we see in My DC, but it's also interesting to see the evolution in the cowboy hero and the female roles, as well as looking at the attitudes toward the arrival of civilization in the Old West.
Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) -- nothing that most people probably haven't thought of before, but both involve male protagonists who are physically and/or emotionally handicapped and try to "make over" the female love interest in some way; and both films are about voyeurism and obsession, a theme that is helped by the fact much of the story is told through the subjective point of view and without dialogue.
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) and Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989) -- The first uses documentary style, the second uses a much more expressionistic style, but each of these political films paints fair, balanced portrayals of explosive topics (terrorism and torture in the former, racism in the latter) whose relevance has not diminished with time.
This is a marvellous idea for a list and certainly something I'd like to see exercised by the proprietors of the only non-corporate-owned theatre in my area (The Vogue, nestled near Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, Canada). Here are some pairings I'd like to suggest for 2006 releases with films from the same year or our past:
- Lights In The Dusk (Kaurismäki, 2006) with Man Push Cart (Bahrani, 2006) or City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
Pivotal for me here is the pairing with City Lights. Kaurismäki's film seems to operate as an anti-Chaplin story, taking the pissing out of 'City' and its romanticization of homelessness and poverty. Paired with Man Push Cart, though, I draw comparisons between both protagonists that are elucidating considering each respectively infuriated me with their inexplicably poor choices. Both men seem helpless to rescue themselves from bad situations they've each in part contributed to.
- Children Of Men (Cuaron, 2006) with The Handmaid's Tale (Schlöndorff, 1990)
Two movies I didn't care for a great deal; maybe seeing them again afresh, back-to-back, might help tease out aspects of one another I might be better able to appreciate.
- Talladega Nights (McKay, 2006) with Trailer Park Boys: The Movie (Clattenburg, 2006)
Two grand hurrahs for the so-called redneck underclass (to an extent; each was about much more than that). Both were very affectionate, but Nights relied more on absurdity and surrealim to garner laughs while Trailer Park Boys instead opted for hand-held camera docu-realism. I loved both movies dearly.
The Journals Of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk and Cohn, 2006) with Nanook Of The North (Flaherty, 1922)
Journals is set around the same time as Flaherty's documentary was really filmed. Both are differently fascinating glimpses into Inuit culture and society.
Hana yori mo naho (Koreeda, 2006) with Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1962)
Like Lights In The Dusk and Chaplin, Koreeda appears to be using his latest, Hana yori mo naho, to deconstruct and reimagine the past. Here it's the legacy of samurai honour, which was previously questioned to great and profound effect in Kobayashi's gut-wrenching (literally; who can forget the ritual performed with the wooden blade?) Harakiri.
I'd keep going but I'd rather not take up too much space here before others have a chance to post!
To this day, the most memorable double feature I've ever seen was a paranoia bill of The Conversation plus The President's Analyst at NYC's Elgin Theatre in 1974. Both excellent, the differences in style and approach made the films compliment one another.
You missed a fairly obvious doublebill of two movies that came out this year: The Black Dahlia and Hollywoodland -- two neo-noirs set in post-war Hollywood.
Steve: I'm pretty sure I saw "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; I may even have reviewed "Jumpin' Jack Flash." But I have absolutely no memory of "Jumpin' Jack Flash."
Andy: I'm workin' on Prof. Jennings' quiz, and will finish it as soon as I get off deadline!
Flickhead: I LOVE "The President's Analyst"!!! It should be seen with "The Good Shepherd" -- or, better yet, INSTEAD of "The Good Shepherd."
Sean: Nice pairing -- and I did enjoy "Hollywoodland." But "The Black Dahlia" was a deflating disappointment for me, so I wouldn't put it on my "best" list.
This is an exercise I do in my head all the time, though real double bills are few and far between in my neck of the woods. I mentioned a couple with my 2006 best list: rather obviously "Akeelah and the Bee" with "Half Nelson" and, maybe less so, "Borat" with "The Queen"--all those uncomfortable clashes of manners vs. brutal honesty. Using your new criteria, how about "Prairie Home Companion" with "All That Jazz"--music, show biz, death, etc. and if Virginia Madsen's character wasn't at least partially inspired by Jessica Lange's than there's something really weird going on. Or "Inside Man" with "Clockers", an even better Spike Lee sort-of-mainstream-movie which should have been a hit (and as Richard Price adaptations go, much better than "Freedomland").
I agree that watching David Lynch's "Lost Highway" feels at times like being inside a nightmare you can't wake up or look away from.
But to call "Mulholland Drive" a nightmare is doing it a major disservice. It's a beautiful, tragic love story in the most classic sense of the word. I've seen it probably fifty times. "Mulholland Drive" sends my imagination, reality and heart into a million different places. No film I've seen has had that kind of effect on me. "Mulholland Drive" is many things but certainly no nightmare.
The oddest double feature I've seen was on New Year's Eve 1987: "The Running Man" with a sneak preview of "For Keeps." Wonder who thought a game show of death would complement teen pregnancy. Maybe they were from the same studio?
Thinking about illuminating double bills reminded me of the oddest double bill I ever saw. I went with a friend to see Dead Ringers at a theater in Seattle after it had been in town for a week or two. When we got up to the box office for the 8ish show we wanted to see, we were told there was a sneak preview. We decided not to go out for beers before seeing Dead Ringers, and so were treated to a double bill of Mystic Pizza followed by Dead Ringers.
I don't remember a lot about Mystic Pizza, but I do remember after Lily Taylor's teary breakdown when fisherman Vincent DiNofrio delays (cancels?) their wedding, that I told my friend I didn't think she would ever act in a movie again. How's that for predictive skill?
just out of curiosity, why did you choose the underrated "animal crackers" instead of what would seem the more obvious, both in terms of fame and politics, "duck soup"? it's good to see the more ignored marx brothers' pictures which get an unnecessarily bad rap sometimes get some mention. for sheer anarchy i was always fond of "a day at the races" and have a soft spot for "cocoanuts". good choices overall, too.
The one I'd love to program is Peter Jackson's King Kong and Mulholland Dr.: the biggest, bestest, beautifulest Naomi Watts lovefest one could hope for...
Sort of an obvious one, but The Fountain and 2001: A Space Odyssey, or for a less obvious choice Being There. All about death in the end, The Fountain most fervently. I'd show 2001 first, but I'd show Being There second. I can't explain why, but it seems right to me.
Monster House and Small Change. Very independent kids, growing up, and both are scary in different ways.
Another obvious pairing Marie Antoinette and Barry Lyndon, or as an alternate L'Avventura. The Lyndon connection should be evident, but the Antonioni connects to the feelings of lonliness while being surrounded by so much, suddenly losing everything, gaining a large mass of things and people, but losing in a way any sense your self. I think in the begining of the film Marie is Claudia, and by the end she'd prefer to be Anna, dissapearing without a trace. Marie first in both cases.
Ooh! Stephen Holden made the connection for me, but I think Pan's Labyrinth and Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete would be perfect together. I may actually carry that one out. (Pan first.)
Double-worst of the year:
APOCALYPTO and PASSION OF THE CHRIST.
Happy holidays to all!
Another double-worst:
THE FOUNTAIN and SOLARIS.
This isn't meant to reflect my final top ten yet, but rather a selection of my favorites of the year for which I was able to think of good matches...
Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive: two labyrinthine mind trips through Hollywood, one a failed actress, one successful, both incredible mind experiences.
Miami Vice and The New World: Same meditative attunement to internalized personas and characters' relationship to their surroundings, different time periods, different genres, both ravashing.
Army of Shadows and The Battle of Algiers: Two of the finest films ever made about revolution, the two offering two polar outcomes that highlight the cost of doing the right thing.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Stop Making Sense OR Year of the Horse: Take your pick - two brilliant concert films, or a Neil Young double header.
Marie Antoinette and Barry Lyndon: 'Nuff said. ^_^
A Prairie Home Companion and Nashville: Just because.
Three Times and Before Sunset: Love pursued, lost, forgotten, and fulfilled.
The Fountain and Breaking the Waves: Two vastly different takes on the theme of the overriding power of love (and a lot of other stuff).
Happy Feet and Dumbo: They've been making political animated films for a looong time. Try reading the latter as a gay allegory; either way, I dare you to not weep your eyes out when Dumbo's mother coddles him through the prison bars.
Iron Island and Turtles Can Fly: Two intriguing perspectives into oppressed life abroad, on the other end of the American foreign policy.
The Proposition and The Wild Bunch: Two gritty, violent, and sweaty westerns, although I think they work better together for their moral examinations than their mere genre similarities.
The Science of Sleep and Office Space: Both protagonists hate their 9 to 5; two semi-different approaches to similar themes. Something between the two seems to be jiving in my mind.
Infamous and Capote: There's more in common between assembly line fodder like The Guardian and Coach Carter than these two films; I wish more books would be adapted multiple times in this manner. Even if you don't like both films, they're wonderful contrasting peices.
Since you mention Altman and Lynch, why not a pairing of Mulholland Dr. with 3 Women?
Fairly obvious, but still I'd have to go with "Casablanca" and "The Third Man." I can't think of a better contrast between pre-WWII romantic optimism and post-WWII selfish cynicism. I've always percieved them as complementary movies anyway.
YES rob, that's exactly what I was thinking when I saw Miami Vice last summer. During the last third, starting with the shots of the "go fast" boats at night, I thought "this is a great companion piece to The New World." The connection definately goes beyond the lead actor too, as you said.
One of the strangest double-features I've given myself is David Fincher's bleak masterpiece "Se7en" followed by Peter Weir's equally great "Picnic at Hanging Rock". Both films work as great "anti-mysteries". With "Se7en" there is never any myster as to who the killer is, and the film becomes a meditation on why humankind is led to atrocities, and whether or not an atrocity, or even morality itself, can be justified. "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a film about our human need to find the answer to a mystery, and how the lack of an answer is the most devastating of all. Needless to say, I was not able to sleep easily after my experience.
Grizzly Man w/Peter Jackson's King Kong is the most amusing double bill that pops instantly to mind. Although, I did once attend an Oh Brother Where Art Thou?/Dude, Where's My Car? double feature, which was also extremely amusing.
Children of Men & Idiocracy. Two very different dystopias.... Yet both logical extensions of the current world situation...
A recent accidental pairing that worked brilliantly for me: my husband and I happened to rent two old favorites, “The Player� and “Network,� and watched them a few nights apart. Both blacker-than-black comedies exploring the underside of entertainment, made with great originality, style and bravura use of film techniques. Both commenting on the use of media to manipulate viewers while cleverly manipulating us all the while. Intense enough watched within a couple days of each other – a true double feature would really be a heavy-duty festival of cynicism!
Looking at Dave Kehr's Top Ten List on his blog, I'm thinking a double feature of Borat and Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World would be mighty interesting.
Just thought of another one...Ken Loach's Wind That Shakes the Barley and Peter Watkin's Culloden would pretty much sour most anyone (present US administration excluded) on the idea of imperialism, and could probably ruin the day of a staunch anglophile. And of course there's always the danger of inciting a riot with two very angry films like these...
I love reading about all the odd pairings people have seen, usually at discount or second-run theaters. When I was at school in New York, I went to a cheap theater near Times Square (back before it was Disneyfied) and saw a pairing of Boyz in the Hood and Hot Shots. Also in NY, at a second-run theater I saw the slightly more logical pairing of Star Wars and 2001. However, the latter made the former look rather ridiculous.
As for films this year, Rob already stole my rather obvious choice of The Proposition and The Wild Bunch.
How'bout Le Petit Lieutenant paired with the final Prime Suspect.
Casino Royale and Layer Cake.
The Illusionist and Bergman's The Magician.
Half Nelson and Fresh.
Hollywoodland and Auto Focus.
The Banquet with Bride with White Hair. The Wow-Choten Hotel with Noises Off. (reviews on my site ;) )
for some synergy between films:
Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" and David Lynch's "Blue Velvet"
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Third Wave" and Koji Wakamatsu's "Ecstasy of the Angels"
John Boorman's "Point Blank" and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Eyes of the Spider"
Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" and Kazuo Hara's "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On"
Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samurai" and Walter Hill's "The Driver"
putney
I'm not one to always view one film through another, though I recognize the merits, especially when the filmmaker is attempting to bring to life another era or style of film making, or a similar theme is being dealt with, and the movie completely sucks in it's attempt or makes such an obvious attempt that it's hard not to compare to something else - or as you say two director's films, etcetcetc. For instance "The Good Shepard" falls to pieces when compared with it's 70's predecessors (pick one out of a hat!) Or a John Ford and Kurosawa film (ahem, pick two out of a hat.) It can also be fun to compare a series of films that have been created over a great length of time, such as the Bond films, or the famous Japanese series Zatoichi, where, in a matter of 3 or 4 films you can see the the influence of Western film making take hold - from static shooting to the (over)usage of tracking and dolly shots, then into the era of color and violence. It's really quite an amazing experience to watch a character grow through the history of film itself.
I will add that the idea of viewing films through the lens of other films narrows a much larger idea. I think that people view films based on their experiences, which would include their experiences in the make believe world of film, but also things that happen to them in the "world of the real" -- as it's so uncleverly put in "The Matrix".
Happy New Year, all!
Tarkovsy's Solaris with Sodebergh's Soraris. I am not exactly raking my brain to come up with this one but I really think that this is the proper way to view the underated Soderbergh film. Since Tarkovsky's film really emphasized the science and barely touched the love story, Soderbergh wisely does the opposite. In that sense it's not a remake but a true complement to the first version. Neither film quite captures the Lem novel but between the two of them they come pretty close. Tarkovsky matches the tone but for me Soderbergh is the one that really delivers the meaning of the story. In fact, It moved me to tears. For this reason, it is my favorite of the three version (the original novel and the two films).
The double bill I remember most is the pairing of Ken Russell's "The Devils" with Peter Brook's "Marat/Sade".
It was a date. I never saw her again.
I just saw "Perfume" at the show and absolutely loved it! I was completely shocked to see A.O. Scott, a critic I greatly admire, say that he hated it when he was a guest critic on "Ebert & Roeper." It's my personal pick for best of the year, followed by "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Tristram Shandy." (I've yet to see "Pan's Labyrinth," though.) But to the point...
I would suggest pairing "Perfume" with "Five Easy Pieces," one of my favorite movies. One thing I really liked about "Perfume" was how the whole thing felt like a giant myth of a tragic character whose story seemed essential to cinema history. I think, in this sense, it really mirrors "Five Easy Pieces."
Eric, They did "Casablanca" and "The Third Man" in LA just before the Holiday.
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Perhaps "Apocalypto" with Peter Brook's black and white "Lord of the Flies" -- that would be awesome!
Does anyone know what film "Five Easy Pieces" is based on? There's an almost exact replica, except the lead doesn't play piano - he practices another form of art or musical instrument -- and for the life of me I can't remember what it is!?!?! Maybe it was based on "Five". But that would be a good pairing. Though I never really liked "Five Easy Pieces".
"The Virgin Spring" and "Last House on the Left" -- shame on you Wes Craven for turning something brilliant into schlock!
This may be a bit late for it's use, but if there were ever two films similar in mood they would hav to be Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock." They two can be seen as obviously similar (with young and seemingly fragile girls as their focus, innocence, and a sense of foreboding as the more apparent themes), but I immediately thought of "Picnic" after seeing "The Virgin Suicides" and it all has to do with the ethereal and almost haunting tone of each. They both leave you "hanging" at the end, though only when viewed with a more modern, conclusionary take on what a movie is and needs to deliver. But taken for what it each should be, they are beautiful and cryptic and scary in their own way, and the tone would flow perfectly from one into the other.