Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre > The Movie Canon according to Barbelith

These are all favorite movies of mine, but they're not all of my favorite movies, nor are they the most favorite. They're the ones that seem the most Barbelith-appropriate, I think. I tried not to be intentionally obscurantist, but that's a bit like asking a fish not to splash around so much.

Alice - Jan Svankmajer bended my head and slithered into my dreams with this extraordinarily vivid slice of dream-stuff. He tells the story of Alice in Wonderland with no dialogue (nearly no spoken words at all) and stop-motion animated puppets made from crumbling antique dolls, preserved bones, Victorian machine parts, raw meat, daguerrotype cut-outs and whatever else happened to be lying around his magic laboratory. The taxidermed White Rabbit leaks sawdust when he takes out his pocketwatch. Alice is sometimes a real little girl, and sometimes a chipped and faded porcelain doll.

Vanishing Point - This typifies the B-cinema of the 70s -- the kind of things that were being made then that can't be made now, for whatever reason. Too gritty, too "arty" for exploitation audiences, too goofily exploitative for art-house crowds. The plot: a car transporter makes a bet with his dealer (drug dealer, not car dealer) that he can get a new sportscar from Denver to San Francisco in less than 15 hours. That's it. It's a psycho road movie -- he starts getting in more and more trouble with The Man (who don't like speedin'), and gets more and more help from various elements of the underground: hippies, hitchers, Jesus people and soul DJs. Along the way, we discover bit by bit why the guy's so haunted -- and we begin to get the idea he's not going to survive this trip.

Billy Jack - Like Vanishing Point, this is a perfect example of 70s B-movie art. It's a Film With a Message, which involves, like What the Kids Are Talking About and how the Establishment Doesn't Understand the Truth.
It also has a crazy Indian who knows karate kicking corrupt businessmen in the head. And then having vision quests that involve getting intentionally bitten by rattlesnakes. I wrote plenty more about this film over here.

You Can't Take It With You - Frank Capra has this rap of being the ultimate feel-good wishy-washy director, but if you actually watch a few of his films, you start to realize how much of a dirty little subversive he really was. This is one of those movies, about an eccentric old man and his kooky family (in the 50s, they'd be beatniks, but this is the 30s, so no one knows *what* they are) who refuse to sell their property to a conniving developer.
It's incredibly relevant to life today, which is a bit unnerving. It's also got the romance, and a lot of great gags -- but really, like all Capra, it's about the value of independence and the human spirit triumphing over all the crap that society lays on us: greed, politics, conformism, all that jazz.

Night of the Living Dead - I always bring this one up. Like Billy Jack, it's on my favorite favorites list currently (and in all likelihood for some time to come). It's a grisly horror movie that freaked out audiences with its gut-wrenching gore (dead people! eating other people's intestines!) but puts the *true* horror in the context of the way people treat each other under pressure. It's a civil rights parable in horror movie rags. It knows that it's goofy, but it also knows that the goofiness doesn't stop the terror. "They're dead... they're all messed up." So are we, man.

Videodrome - It's a horror movie built around the premise of an unsteady, shifting reality. It doesn't fit any horror conventions. In some ways, I suppose it's "about" television, but it's also about the way we judge things as real or unreal. If you're unfamiliar with this film, it tells the story of a sleazy cable station manager (James Woods, as reptilian as ever) who's shopping for content -- Japanese porn, whatever -- and comes across a bizarre program, showing nothing but plotless sex and violence. He and his too-jaded girlfriend (Deborah Harry of Blondie) are slowly seduced by videotapes of the show, and he discovers the program is a carrier signal for another kind of transmission -- a signal that triggers mutations and tumors in the brain. Along the way, he finds a Cathode Ray Mission, bringing television to the needy, and the secret political machine of a rather sinister optician. By film's end, you have no idea how much of what you're seeing (or what you've seen) is actually a hallucination... which is sort of the whole point.

Being John Malkovich - I'm not sure exactly why, but something about this movie seems very Barbelith to me. I think it's that it's all built around the idea of the fictionsuit, playing games with identity and control and who am I, really? It's whimsical without being fey, and it maintains a bright sense of humor throughout. You're never quite sure what's going to happen next. It's also fun thinking of Charlie Sheen riding around inside John Malkovitch's head.

What's Up Tiger Lily - This was a typical 1960s Japanese spy film that Woody Allen bought the rights to. He wrote entirely new dialogue and re-dubbed the whole thing, making it an entirely new creation -- a hysterically funny, surreal comedy. I first saw this years before Mystery Science Theater 3000 hit the airwaves, so it might play differently to audiences who're used to wiseass commentary played over campy action movies, but still -- it's a trip.

Brazil - I'm not sure I can add anything to what's been said above. Terry Gilliam does a vivid, soaring dream-tapestry dystopia. Incredible imagery, and dark, dark humor. I especially love the way he highlights that terrifying glint that Michael Palin has in his eyes. Yes. He really is a torturer, isn't he.

Sherman's March - I've talked about this one before, I know. Ross McElwee, a mild-mannered Southerner and history buff, gets a grant to make a documentary about General Sherman's historic march to the sea, the hellish campaign that broke the back of the Confederacy. He starts out doing that, but it rapidly turns into Ross McElwee revisiting his ex-girlfriends who happen to live along Sherman's route, trying to figure out what went wrong in their relationships, and why he's been having recurrent dreams about nuclear armageddon. He's hysterically funny, self-deprecating to a fault... except he never turns off his camera. You get to hear his sister's plans for plastic surgery on her rear end, and his old teacher's plots to match him up with just the perfect girl. Michael Moore's in-your-face, this-is-me-and-I'm-making-a-documentary style was essentially cribbed from McElwee -- all he did was add politics, a pinch more obnoxiousness and a whole lot less self-examination. You gotta see this one.