As regular readers of this blog know I think most movies made today look as though D.W. Griffith never lived. Still, I do watch current movies and do find some of them interesting.
Hell or High Water was directed by David Mackenzie in 2016 (not to be confused with Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water of 1954) and a similar film, Good Time, was directed by Benny and Josh Safdie in 2017, listed by Film Comment magazine as the best film of last year. The Safdie film is a virtual remake of the Mackenzie film but is impressive not only for its Queens locations but also for the diverse and accurate cast of the denizens of the borough. In both films two brothers rob a bank to save their house and it goes horribly wrong. The strengths of both films are their effective use of location (West Texas in the Mackezie film), their rigorous variants of genre conventions and the influence of such superb filmmakers as Raoul Walsh and Don Siegel.
I liked Terence Davies's A Quiet Passion (number two on Film Comment's best of 2017) better than his House of Mirth (2000) because it doesn't attempt dramatize Emily Dickinson's poetry the way the earlier film tried to dramatize Edith Wharton's prose. Instead it we hear Dickinson (played by Cynthia Nixon) reciting the poetry over an image of her struggling to write it. Film biographies of artists often try to find drama where there is none, since most artists spend their time creating their art, something difficult to capture on film. By focusing on the poetry itself in its original context A Quiet Passion reminds me of the austerely beautiful Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, directed by Jean-Marie Sraub and Daniele Huillet in 1968, with its emphasis on Bach's music performed on period instruments in actual locations.
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