Summing Up 2014 in First Time Watches Part 3

From http://www.nina.gov.pl/images/nina_czolowka_archiwum1
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Best Discovery:

Winner: Walerian Borowczyk

Honourable Mentions: Guy Maddin; Jean Rollin; Fukui Shozin; Alain Robbe-Grillet; Douglas Sirk; Yuasa Masaaki

"Best Discovery" is open to many things, but in this it was all directors, some of them who I have encountered before, but I've properly introduced myself to this time this year. Every one of them have shown themselves to be ones I'll hold onto greatly. I admit a greater emphasis, and preference in the unconventionality of the creators is celebrated in this selection - Rollin's and Robbe-Grillet's forms of surrealism, Maddin's tributes to classic cinema by way of cinematic alchemy, Fukui's urban brutality - there is yet also the emotional highs of Douglas Sirk, far from an ironic director, and Yuasa, a deeply neglected director in terms of access to his work who brings high concepts and emotional depth together in anime whilst able to depict the unexpected and be humorous too.

The winner is the one I was spurred to view his films with immense interest, through the campaign of DVD company Arrow, already succeeding in a small way to boost his critical reputation, before he became obscured by time, through making me a convert.  I now look on to seeing as much of Borowczyk's filmmaking as possible thanks to their hard work and looking for short films online before their releases were even fully restored to put on physical media. With all these directors, each work, even flawed ones, still contribute to a portrait to them, but every film and short, animated or live action, I've watched of Borowczyk's have all been great, from drastically re-evaluating The Beast (1975) to seeing gems like Blanche (1971) for the first time. Even a film like Emmanuelle 5 (1987), the infamous last film he made, the one that marred his career probably more than making erotic art movies, is still better than most director's films regardless of how cheese ball it is and that most of the film was probable filmed by someone else. He was a man who was able to juggle stop motion animation, reminiscent to Jan Svankmajer's but, rather than texture, his obsession was with the form of them, with live action drama with the same level of imagination and inspiration.

The apparent success with Arrow's campaign has led to Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981), a film lost in right issues for many years, to finally be accessed within 2015, and one can only hope the older Polish short animations and the late seventies work onwards get as much care and devotion from them or other groups. After Immoral Tales (1974) and The Beast, Borowczyk would fully dive into the divisive erotic era of his career that led to his drop in critical standing, which leads to a fascinating question for a new fan of the late auteur's work to be asked - what films within this era are potential hidden gems awaiting to be rediscovered? The first feature film I saw for this year was Emmanuelle 5 anyway, and if that didn't put me off, then there's bound to be great films in his later career.

From http://www.regrettablesincerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/white3b.jpg

Best Director:

Winner: White of the Eye (Donald Cammell, 1987)

Honourable Mentions: Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962); Kemonozume (Masaaki Yuasa, 2006/Anime Series); Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992)

Like with the previous category for this post, all the following stand out for something specific, which considering the numerous choices I could've had, made this difficult to choose. To make it easier, I only choose one film per person, though for the most part, any other films or works I saw from those mentioned were just as rewarding and brought up in another section. The ability to turn a small drama into something profound through Kiarostami's skill; an emotionally rich western from John Ford; Yuasa taking a conventional, repeated and usually tedious anime series plot line and turning it into something strange, unconventional, and in the best way, effecting for a work that, for all its monsters, is more about a love story between two people who shouldn't logically be able to fall in love; and the film, while his third, that brought Guy Maddin to attention, where he was not put off having never seen an actual mountain film like those made in 1920s Germany by making his own, painted in faded postcard colours about the psychological mindsets of the people in the mountainside as much as about the danger of a landside taking place if someone utters a word louder than a whisper.

Just for the chutzpah, how unnerving and different from any other film it feels, I'm willing to put Donald Cammell even over John Ford, for the fact that White of the Eye does exist, a rift on the American serial killer film that splits into spiritual and psychological content that disturbs the clichés immensely. That Cammell was unable to make more than four films and a short over three decades is saddening seeing a film that pulsates like it, but White of the Eye is still there and, finally able to be seen, it's a startling film to exist.

Also nominated for this reward includes Douglas Sirk for All That Heaven Allows (1955); Walerian Borowczyk for Goto, Island of Love (1968), Jacques Rivette for La Belle noiseuse (1991); Ichikawa Kon for An Actor's Revenge (1963); King Vidor for The Crowd (1928); Kawase Naomi for Shara (2003), with an added note that 1) the rain soaked festival parade sequence was a highlight, and 2) anyone who films themselves giving birth for real onscreen, directing and in a role in said film, is placing themselves in front of the camera with an openness you could only see shown by directors like Stan Brakhage, and probably more so then him, that is rare; Alexander Mackendrick for the Sweet Smell of Success (1957); Theodoros Angelopoulos for Alexander The Great (1980); Michael Curtiz for Young Man With A Horn (1950); Mario Bava for Rabid Dogs (1974); Rouben Mamoulian for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); Joel and Ethan Coen for Barton Fink (1991); Jafar Panahi for Crimson Gold (2003); Paolo and Vittorio Taviani for Caesar Must Die (2012); Marco Ferreri for Dillinger Is Dead (1969); Jean-Louis van Belle for The Sadist With Red Teeth (1971); Douglas Sirk for The Tarnished Angels (1957); Derek Jarman for The Last of England (1988); F.W. Murnau for Phantom (1922); Tengiz Abuladze for Repentance (1984); Fukui Shozin for Rubber's Lover (1996); Raoul Ruiz for City of Pirates (1984); Terayama Shuji for Throw Away Your Books, Rally In The Streets (1971); Jean Renoir for French Cancan (1954); and Jurj Herz for Morgiana (1972).

From http://deviantrobot.com/images/content/10359beast.jpg

Best Re-Watched and Reappraised Film:

Winner: The Beast (Walerian Borocyzk, 1975)

Honourable Mentions: Baise-Moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh, 2000); Salome (Carmelo Bene, 1972); Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008)

Sometimes, you dismiss, even hate, a film on the first viewing, only for many years later, or a shorter period of time after, to give it another chance and discover the mistake you made, realise and understand what the director(s) were going for, or that you were blind to the original point within them. Unlike films that you'll never return to, something nags at you, an image or a moment stays in memory, suggesting that something better than in films you'd usually praise existed in one you thought you hated. Burn After Reading was once, like for many, a disappointment for me from the Coens, just for the anti-ending which I felt completely undermined the film's point in existing. But A Serious Man (2009), their film after, not only turned me to becoming a Coen brothers fan, but became an inexplicable Rosetta stone for their whole filmography, the levels of absurdity, coincidence and fate being played out of the characters' control obvious even in the straight forward genre films. A deeply funny film now, this turns that anti-ending into the most appropriate and one of the darkest in the directors' filmography, more so then No Country For Old Men (2007) and their apparent serious films. Set within Washington and made during George W. Bush's presidency, this also becomes the political satire in the Coen's career, but rather than choose cheap rhetoric for either left or right wing politics, the brothers instead offer that stupidity is writ large, pointlessness is inevitable in most circumstances, and barring the female figures, Frances McDormand's and Tilda Swinton's characters,  who for their flaws are the only intelligent people against most of the males, everyone is doomed to failure. Because of another film of the directors', it means Burn After Reading gains a new context in hindsight.

Salome was reconsidered just for how many images were stuck with me long after viewing it for a year or more so. Comparable in its grotesqueness to the more extreme, corporal flourishes of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the hyper-fantastical sets of Federico Fellini but with an artificiality of a film like Pink Narcissus (1971) and a hypractive, loud presentation that is entirely its own, my only Carmelo Bene film viewing belongs to an area of cinema, in Bene, deprived from us as film fans in easy to access forms, but if it was if Salome is to be attested to, it would open a new room in what you could do with cinema. A take on the titular story where large men affectively smear grapes and wines on themselves rather than actually eat it, rubbing their faces into nude women's forms, surrounded by Roman decoration if done by a Las Vegas casino or an proto-eighties nightclub from an American action film long before the eighties was in utero. Salome herself is both strangely beautiful, yet with her completely shaved head and giant proportioned eyes and lips, looks like an alien in her own existence, the centre of a barrage of extravagance between beauty and utter camp that takes place, from fruit bowls to jewellery being fetishised, to flesh of both genders being lusted over in Soviet montage editing. And then there's the image that burnt itself into my mind so deeply it led me to return to the film, a man crucifying himself, with a hammer and nails, with his own hands. If Bene's films were easier for me to see, he may likely take the jump up along with the Borowczyks and Fukuis as a mind searing discovery I hold highly.

Baise-Moi was once, back in college when I was eighteen, the worse film I claimed to have seen, a pretty embarrassing statement in hindsight, but the reason was because I was expected a nihilistic Thelma and Louise type of film, having still never seen Thelma & Louise (1991) mind you, but got something that was just completely misanthropic about the entirety of mankind. Revisiting it for the first time for at least over six years, with a vastly different viewpoint and preferences to cinema, it still has flaws, poor music cues being chosen the biggest, but it feels vital and a necessary purge of rage to view. It feels like, as a male viewer, the metaphorical equivalent of being castrated seeing it, which feels completely justifiable, and the film gains immediately more recognition from me, from the worst I've seen to one that I will gladly defend, and maybe hold more and more highly the more times I see it, from the decade of pretentious transgressive films from male directors that came after it, including  from France, that made the need by two female directors, with their two female leads, to make a film with hardcore sex, gruesome yet "cool" violence and a punk, raw aesthetic to blast standards of good taste from women's viewpoints. In hindsight to how issues of censorship and treatment of sexuality, and women's rights, are still sour in the new decade, a film like Baise-Moi feels like a necessary charge against perceived morality ahead of its time. The only reason it doesn't get the reward, because going from the worst film you've seen to a vital film to see is a one-of-a-time moment, is because of Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast.

Like Baise-Moi, when I viewed The Beast I was an easily offended, little twerp who would rather watch an overrated movie like The Usual Suspects (1995) than a film that was actually good. I kid a little, but it's amazing how I've managed to become more transgressive in my tastes instead of more conservative one from a teenager to an adult when it's usually the other way around. This was the year Nekromantik (1987) finally was released in the United Kingdom, a film that people were amazed was ever released, but I was not shocked by anything in it at all, and as I will write of later I am mortified that anyone would be offended to the point of banning the film in the first place regardless of whether it was a good film or not. The Beast, revisiting it, left my jaw on the seating area I was on, and is even more shocking in this era.

It also turns out to be utterly hilarious. Somehow twisting Luis Bunuel's style of satire, which is amazing to actually consider, The Beast is gleefully perverse and, in the end, what it celebrates is this perversity while mocking the apparent moral guardians with their questionable behaviour, an obvious idea but not when there is prolonged woman and beast sex in the woods that ends with both participants in orgasmic bliss. For me personally, we are still trying to deal with the transgressive films made in the seventies, because many have managed to still be shocking and more so now, like Sweet Movie (1974), and there are films like Terayama Shūji's Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971) that I am understandably hesitant to see even if it is seen as a piece of art, the boundaries these films pushed having become more restricted and troubling for many now. The irony, when a film like Nekromantik gets a release only now, is that a film we've had uncut since the early 2000s still have a greater edge because The Beast has a mindset that feels sadly lost, one potentially more progressive than our supposedly harmonious one now, a film I can get in my local HMV but whose ideals are ignored for the worst in us. And it's not a lie how hilarious this is - I had no idea how funny this was, either because I have a sick, weird sense of humour, or I rarely see a film that actually goes for the throat, not with nihilism, but with utter delight in its decadence.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vWmrbuOodWQ/UF3YZuVrLyI/
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Best Anime (TV Series/Straight-To-Video/Film etc.):

Winner: Kemonozume (Yuasa Masaaki, 2006/Anime Series)

Honourable Mentions: Kaiba (Yuasa Masaaki, 2008/Anime Series); Midori (Harada Hiroshi, 1992); The Visions of Escaflowne (Akane Kazuki, 1996/Anime Series); FLCL (Tsurumaki Kazuya, 2000)

I must thank one man from the internet, who goes as Nrh on multiple sites, as he is directly responsible for me being able to see two entries in this category. If he is reading this, thank you, which I mean with utmost sincerity. How Yuasa Masaaki's work is not more available in the West baring for the lucky anime fans in Australia is baffling, considering the cult growing him and his contribution to the popular cult animation Adventure Time. The other peculiar aspect, remarkably in this case, is how Kemonozume when from being the weakest of the three TV series I've seen of his, alongside Kaiba and The Tatami Galaxy (2010), to his best. Probably because what looks like a potentially ramshackle, weird for the sake of weird story whose plot has been found in countless other anime, it turns out to be the one that takes the bigger risks, the more idiosyncratic, from its "sketchy" animation style including some live action inserts, its willingness to be gory and erotic, its greater emotional gamble, more emotional than even Kaiba surprisingly, and the inherent weirdness, from a villain wearing Mickey Mouse ears to our hero having a training montage with a monkey as his sensei, one that doesn't even talk.

Out of all of them, the emotional depth is the brightest, the willingness to have an end where loved characters actually die, where the central Romeo and Juliet like story, but with sexual and mature adults, has a real romance rather than the stick figures anime fans usually have to put up with. Kaiba, though, was a great way to continue on, the next series he did chronologically, smart and intelligent sci-fi, which goes as far as briefly subverting gender alongside its ideas of memories and their importance, one of the only anime series where a single twenty or so minute episode both felt like a full story  for me and, in a character we only see in that particular and never see again, manages to break your heart, more so when they live on in an unexpected way. Its look and style, its music, its conclusion in just twelve episodes to work, all of it makes it beautiful and it's amazing its seen as a difficult work, one which puts people watching it or apparently for it to get a English language DVD release. The Australians should be praised for their good taste.

Midori is a true difficult anime. Never officially released in its home country, not necessarily banned, only able to be seen by its creator's request if shown at the end of an elaborate carnival. Made entirely by himself independently, and back when anime was handdrawn, with contribution in the music. The original film print likely lost. Only available officially on French DVD or online. At only forty or so minutes, it does have to rush itself and undercuts moments of importance, a foul and unsettling period story of a young girl forced to join a travelling freak show in early 1920s Japan, a unique look based on the original manga by Maruo Suehiro, with moments that will just cause mortified horror to appear on viewers' faces. But it is elegant and for all its taboos broken, it's a dark, unsettling tale where, regardless of the cruelty shown, we feel sympathy continually for the titular protagonist while the freaks, the magicians and ringleaders all clash with each otherand the world is completely unfair to Midori by pure accident. The nihilism, more than the content, is the really unsettling aspect that makes it a bitter, if magnificent achievement, to swallow.

The Visions of Escaflowne started out as a potential disappointment - a serial like structure for a fantasy, dragons and swords but with added giant robots for knights to pilot, always undercutting its drama because I knew the characters would escape it unscathed. But halfway through, it grew on me, a strong female protagonist who, even on the sidelines, is still in the centre, a potential romance triangle between her and two male heroes that becomes tangled and complicated, and side characters including villains who have something behind them all to lead them forwards, with some complexity to the relationships. It's a rare, sadly rare, thing to have storytelling too that is well written and interesting like this in a twenty six episode anime series, having sat through some tedious series that were only half that length let alone the same. Only by the ending did I realise how much of a great romp the series was, and the re-release for the UK on DVD expected for the later months of this year cannot feel like an eternity to wait for. Finally, FLCL, an erratic, difficult to follow work, but exactly like Escaflowne, it was only at the end I appreciated how well made it was, how memorable the characters were, and how openly unconventional and refreshing it felt in style. It's not a surprise it became a gateway work for new fans and got people excited, because it was utterly fun to watch whilst taking huge aesthetic risks anime doesn't do enough of. And if Kemonozume wins for best opening credit theme, FLCL, despite the tough fight with Kaiba, gets best ending credits and end credit song mini-award.

One anime unfortunately left out was Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (Hirao Takayuki, 2012). Rotting fish robot hybrids. Sharks with legs. The strangest, and unexpected, type of sex scene I've seen all year, and a type of out-there content throughout it that makes it's the closest to the straight-to-video anime of the nineties and eighties in a long time for me to see, something you don't get anymore. Most I've seen that try to recapture it, whether it would be good in large doses or not, have not had the mad energy this has, which is as much because, being from the same manga author, Ito Junji, of Uzumaki (1998-9), it was already unconventional before being animated. The notion there is a work, based on a manga, which features sharks with legs and it actually depicts it as many would hope it would be done is an achievement in itself.

From https://kultguyskeep.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/rabid-dogs-4.jpg?w=604

Best Cult Film:

Winner: Rabid Dogs (Dir. Mario Bava, 1974)

Honourable Mentions: Careful (Dir. Guy Maddin, 1992); The Swimmer (Dir. Frank Perry, 1968); Rubber’s Lover (Fukui Shozin, 1996); Gone In 60 Seconds (H.B. Halicki, 1974)

Amongst the films considered as well were Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963), a story about survivors on an island growing to hate each other that just happens to be a Toho monster movie as well involving mushroom men;  The Beast (1975) which has already been praised enough; Dreadnaught (1981), one of the most imaginative and elaborate martial arts films in existence; Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Tomb of Ligeia (1964); and two that have a lot to say about, Oriental Blue (1975) and Nekromatik (1988). Oriental Blue is the first porno film I've seen that isn't an art film. When porn is usually clips, to see a full narrative feature is something very different. It's amazing to see a film that is actually well made and has some cinematic flourish! It's amazing to see despite the scuzz and its plot it is a porn film you shouldn't be ashamed to watch even if its got 42nd Street New York grim all over it. Its amazing Peonies Jong in the lead, despite playing a Fu Manchu villain, manages to be a charismatic woman you want to cheer on despite being the villain. And it's amazing that, even while it may be a distracting concept for someone to act in a scene and have real sex on screen for a lengthy period immediately afterwards, she and everyone, male and female, is someone who you want to watch onscreen, with a hell of a lot more personality than what even softcore actors have now. The film also has the least expected, and dumbfounding, appropriation of a pre-existing score, which means I will never be able to listen to the music from Enter The Dragon (1973) the same way again.

Nekromatik's release in the UK is a wonderful thing, but having watched it and not been shocked at all, it leads me to shake my head in disbelief about the reactions it got in the first place. Yes, I understand if people find the ideas being shown, including the central one involving necrophilia, to be disgusting and offensive to them, because such ideas are not pleasant things for many to even picture or see done with DIY practical effects, but as a no-budget film its director openly admits was improvised in its creation, the idea that the film is still controversial, is banned in Iceland, and was even controversial back when it was  first released to be an utter embarrassment for the species. That obvious, if great, practical effects, artistic image distortions which disrupts the strength of the infamous sex scenes, and an arty tone was seen as moral degeneracy, it shows a lot of censorship and social outrage up as being pathetic

Especially as, for all the censorship and importations of bootleg Nekromatik videotapes that were likely destroyed by British customs, the cult that has surrounded this film in the UK, and that its survived longer than most censorship campaigns from when it was first made, its an ironic, if fitting, revenge we get the film in a lavish, celebratory home media release. Now, having found it not to be disgusting, not even disturbed by the real rabbit killing sequence, having seen abattoir footage in other films and skinned rabbits in butcher shop windows, the film is more of an unconventional romance drama, where the grim and the low budget abstract moments are the more bold and interesting aspects than the mere shock of some of the other content. It comes off as a charming, weird little film, and yes, I realise those are eyebrow raising words to say when the film is partially about necrophilia, but when you have witnessed The Beast, your Baise-Mois, your Sweet Movies, people are terrible for jumping forward to being intentionally offended, and we place offense as a higher priority rather than the point the directors were wanting to make. Nekromatik is more of a satire rather than anything intentionally disgusting, and it'll be a curious site, if we get the sequel its home country of Germany tried to have destroyed, manages to show how arbitrary and slightly sad the controversies around these films may be.

In terms of a cult movie, the ones you'll hold onto have a quality to them, that makes them good, and something at the same time you don't find in conventional films, like those already mentioned and those I choose as honourable mentions. Halicki's Gone In 60 Seconds devoted itself to car chases and feels like it does them better than most. Rubber's Lover was a viscous, energised blast to the senses, reminiscent to Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) but was radically its own creation. The Swimmer is a great drama, but as for many others, it deserves to have that cult tag instead because its decision to depict its metaphor about a man's growing regret by having him swim through people's pools on the way home, and make it a literal metaphorical journey, is something that shouldn't be damped and ignored by naming it as anything else other than a cult film. And Careful is a great film, but Guy Maddin's opus is as in its own existence in tone and presentation as you could get. For the winner, Rabid Dogs, there is the sad fact that, for whatever inexplicable reason, the original cut was not preserved, and without wanting to blame anyone, or blame Mario Bava's son Lamberto, the fact that the only surviving source for the original cut and audio is videotape is both tragic, and knowing how difficult to preserve and fragile videotape is, is going to mean that in decades time, the existence of this original cut on DVD and Blu-Ray is going to be undercut if that surviving source becomes lost itself. But for now, the fact that Rabid Dogs did get a Blu-Ray release, again by itself enough to lionise Arrow as a DVD/Blu-Ray distributor, and is available means you also get to see one of the meanest and cynical Italian genre films that may have been made in the country's hayday for the film production. A film from a man who had to keep up with the new trends in genre cinema, economic and striking in how it's made, in the actors he choose, in being tasteless, and having a sting in its tail that hurts the viewer by the end. That we have it at all is something to be thankful for.

From http://www.loud-clear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/prince_and_the_
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Best Music Album Listened To For The First Time:

Winner: Purple Rain by Prince and The Revolution (1984)

Honourable Mentions: California by Mr. Bungle (1999); Remission by Mastodon (2002); The Seer by Swans (2012); Hounds of Love by Kate Bush (1985)

It's not all about films, and everyone has other hobbies, music a more universally embraced art form. If you dig, you realise that even someone who doesn't like difficult movies can yet enjoy some of the most unconventional and difficult music possible, and the advantage of music in how it effects us when we engage with it means that, barring in mind personal preference, experimentation can be found even in Top 40 hits. Music is an area that needs even more devotion from me as much as cinema, needing to appreciate albums specifically more as, with these examples, a full album can be more rewarding than a single compilation, in contradiction of how CDs are left aside for MP3s for the most part.

I'd thought California by Mr Bungle would be the best, then I realised I never heard Purple Rain in its entirety until this year. As I've said, experimentation can be found in popular songs, and the likes of When Doves Cry is why I say this. Truly a magical experience to listen to, and I cannot hide my desire to see the 1984 film tied to it in its eighties glory. If it wasn't for Purple Rain, it's the Mr. Bungle album that's stayed with me; having now heard the three albums they've made, yet to return as Mike Patton has concentrated on other projects, California feels like the part where, if they continue(d), they'd melded their experimentation and mad genre blending into potential pop hits, songs so catchy whilst retaining their uniqueness that it's sad this album never had singles. Remission, again like Purple Rain, was an album that I never heard in its entirely, but it cements how much Mastodon are one of my favourite bands; they've become much more commercial on their latest album from 2014, but the distinctness of all the albums is in their favour in hindsight, the noisy sludge metal of Remission still able to sting after listening to songs repeatedly by their own. The Seer was my introduction to Swans, an entire dimension of sound that feels like being sucked into a vortex, and my first proper Kate Bush album heard, beautiful music that, again, was able to become popular but is completely experimental and different, especially when it gets to the second half and the Ninth Wave suite.

Also considered was Riitiir (2012) by Enslaved, the other metal album that I feel in love with, which would've gotten a high position if it wasn't against such strong competition, extreme metal that is utterly graceful and mind shearing at the same time; No More Heroes (1977) by The Stranglers, post-punk that is intelligent and is still edgy, with purpose rather than tasteless, after all these decades; The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975) by Pink Floyd, phenomenal peats of rock music, The Great Gig in the Sky for the former and the David Gilmour guitar solos for Shine On You Crazy Diamond audio bliss; Permanent Waves (1980) by Rush, fun prog rock; Heartbreaker (1973) by Free, beautiful soulful rock; Peace Sells...But Who's Buying (1986) by Megadeth, metal with a real snark and bite rather than adolescent whining; Drama (1980) and 90125 (1983) by Yes, the former great prog rock, the later an incredible surprise, a slide to a more commercial pop prog album that yet is made into real, good music; and John Zorn's 1989 Naked City album, the demented yet strangely fitting match of grindcore and abstract jazz, which somehow manages to have one of the best covers of the James Bond theme just behind the surf rock version by Japanese band Surf Champlers.

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Best Film:

Winner: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

Honourable Mentions: Goto, Island of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1969); White of the Eye (Donald Cammell, 1987); Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957); Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (Terayama Shūji', 1971)

Goto, Island of Love is my favourite film of the year, but with what is going to be talked about in the next and last award, for this penultimate one I'm going to give the spotlight to another film that truly deserves it, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a western per excellence for its emotional depth without losing the excitement of the western or the good nature humour. Made in the early sixties as well, there it is fitting that, as the late sixties would be where new innovations, new boundaries broken and new directors and movements came to be, the veterans of the older generations, like John Ford, were still able to cement incredible films like this one as their last works or so in the early sixties. Goto, Island of Love will be talked about soon, a one-two discovery I can thank Arrow DVD releases for alongside White of the Eye. Sweet Smell of Success was a film that I knew as being critically important, but finally seeing it, it is not only a film I hear is a masterpiece but I feel and agree is a masterpiece, surprised by how good they really mean it to be. And Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets was a vast, overwhelming mass of politics, stylistic flourishes, documentary against fiction material, and overriding rock music that feel vitalizing. The lack of Terayama Shūji'films available in an assessable form is irritating, but if you can find this film, it's a one-off experience.

Films also considered, and all the following are incredible films you should see, are All That Heaven Allows (1955); Caesar Must Die (2012); the experimental documentary Leviathan (2012); the experimental animation An Optical Poem (1937) by Oskar Fischinger; Upstream Color (2013); the entirety of Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Trilogy of Life - The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) - willingly to cheat including this, since I've seen The Canterbury Tales many years ago, because the entirety of the trilogy seen together, in any order, adds to all three films when placed together; La Belle noiseuse (1991);  Sanjuro (1962); Alexander The Great (1980); The Beast (1975); The Nude Vampire (1970); Young Man with a Horn (1950); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); Like Someone in Love (2012); Shara (2003); Barton Fink (1991); the important experimental short Ballet mécanique (1924); anime television series Kemonozume (2006), even if it contradicts the award's title; Rabid Dogs (1974); Medea (1969); French Cancan (1954); and The Tarnished Angels (1957).

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Best Cinema of the Abstract Film:

Winner: Goto, Island of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1969)

Honourable Mentions: White of the Eye (Donald Cammell, 1987); The Nude Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1970); Horrors of Malformed Men (Ishii Teruo, 1969); Rubber’s Lover (Fukui Shozin, 1996)

Considering the blog's name, it would be fitting to end with the films that feel the most appropriate for this blog, those that would represent the theme of the blog perfectly. Barring two honourable mentions, White of the Eye and Rubber's Lover which I have written reviews for, every one of the following are worth covering at some point. Goto, Island of Love is the perfect representative because, while not the most abstract or odd of the candidates, it's the best in terms of quality and in terms of depicting something never seen on screen before or after, a different world set in a kingdom where most of its landmass is gone, one with familiarities to the viewer's but also very different. The winner and the four honourable mentions are all films which feel radically different from convention, in mood inherently off-kilter while yet avoiding the wacky and the ironically weird in favour of being serious, even when the content is ridiculous.  From an island where everyone seems to have a first name beginning with G, where everything is run down yet elegant within this decay, the American desert town landscape of the eighties as a serial killer stalks around it, or France as envisioned through pulp literature and erotic vampires, the films create environments with their own rules of cinema that cause them to become bolder and instantly memorable. Be it the delirium of the erotic-grotesque-nonsense of Horrors of Malformed Men to the industrial cyberpunk delirium of Rubber's Lover, these films prickle and scorch with energy that, even if they are as quiet aesthetically as a mouse, radiates as you view them.

Amongst those considered as well is the metaphorical swimming pool-as-journey drama The Swimmer (1968); the esoteric sci-fi realist drama Upstream Color (2013); ID (2005), aka. Ido, the second and last film by Tetsuo, The Iron Man star and co-cinematographer Fujiwara Kei, a ramshackle mess about the id, rage, comedic Three Stooges interludes and the director herself turning into a pig humanoid monster but, like an obscure prog rock album, still layers itself with great moments amongst the erratic overall content; the perversity that is The Beast (1975); Leviathan (2012) an experimental documentary set on a fishing boat that goes as far as having the camera upside down on the front for a long amount of time amongst its other scenes; Dillinger Is Dead (1969), where gas mask producer Michel Piccoli gets bored one night, paints a gun red with polka dots, makes a lot of food and starts wondering why he's putting up with the life he has; Ballet mécanique (1924), a avant-garde quilt of shapes and moving images whose original score, which was too complicated to add until within the Millennium, is just as dense with everything from sirens to propellers. Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963), with its literal mushroom trip; Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971), a time capsule of Japan in the early seventies; City of Pirates (1984), the late Raoul Ruiz's meshing of various stories surrounding a female protagonist, from a mass murdering child to a man who has an entire family for multiple personalities, that I flat out despised and thought was a pretentious bore for the first half but through the second half became a great surrealist journey when I gave into its logic; Guy Maddin's take on a mountain movie Careful (1992), plus his melodrama Archangel (1990), about a town that still believes World War I is still being fought, and The Saddest Music In The World (2003), where Isabella Rossellini is at one point, as someone with no legs, given two glass ones filled with beer as a token of affection; Kemonozume (2006), an anime series about a human in a group meant to kill monsters who falls in love with one of these monsters and run off together; John Turturro getting desperate in front of a typewriter in Barton Fink (1991); and finally the metaphysical pulp romp that is Alain Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After (1970), although frankly all the films that were released in the Alain Robbe-Grillet DVD (orBlu-Ray) box set the British Film Institute released can all qualify together as one legion-like entity. Every one of these films together in one last reflection back on 2014, along with the entirety of this end of year project, combined into one strange, multi-coloured band of great cinema and I cannot complain I wasted a whole year when I saw such films.

Summing Up 2014 in First Time Watches Part 2

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Biggest Surprise (Cult Film)

Winner: Killing Car (Jean Rollin, 1993)

Honourable Mentions: Tomb of Ligeria (Roger Corman, 1964); Dead & Buried (Gary Sherman, 1981); Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (Honda Ishirô, 1963); Smoke & Flesh (Joseph Mangine, 1968)

An underrated Corman film that nearly becomes an Italian genre film with an unhinged Vincent Price performance; a Video Nasty that stands out as an underrated gem from the 1984 Video Recording Act controversy; a truly weird film from Godzilla and sci-fi director Honda that's a survivors on an island psychological drama that just happens to involve mushroom people; and a hippy drug movie that yet is lovable, has jaw droppingly good cinematography and one of the most erotic scenes you can find in an American exploitation movie. All of them were those little, unsung gems that, flaws and all, stood out with a level of quality that meant more with how they don't get talk about as much as they should be. The winner is probably one of the obscurest Jean Rollin films I've seen, one of the least conventional both for stepping out of his usual horror cinema into a crime drama narrative and being very unconventional by his standards of how to present it, a story of a woman seemingly killing random people with a handgun that is utterly unique.

Also considered: the low budget slasher Unhinged (1982), The Strange Saga of Hiroshi the Freeloading Sex Machine (2005); the playfully peculiar The Sadist With Red Teeth (1971); Madhouse (1981) and The Slayer (1982), two Video Nasties that for their flaws had things that stood out, the former for a surprisingly raw emotional thread in a certain plot event, the later for its dreamlike tone and unsettling ending; The Mutilator (1985), which despite its silly failures, is one of the first slasher films where I felt what excitement slasher film fans have viewing them; and Accoin Mutante (1993), which is well regarded, but its amazing to witness the madness the film contains the first time.

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Biggest Surprise (Art and Mainstream Film)

Winner: Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)

Honourable Mentions: Nightbirds (Andy Milligan, 1970); Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke, 2004)

While Like Someone In Love has had great critical acclaim, it's also been seen as a lesser Kiarostami or the one he started to lose people with, not preparing me for how good the film actually is. A simple three person drama, a tiny story, is given a elliptical style that creates a great emotional depth. Like Jean Renoir's The River (1951) what seems very simplistic hides an incredible weight under the surface in terms of the emotions the characters have and what is not shown to the viewer onscreen. Countless scenes, including the abrupt and violent ending, still stick with me, emphasising how more and more I want to hold Kiarostami in high regard.

In terms of honourable mentions, there is the quirky Mexican comedy drama Duck Soup, a film I long remembered reading of in a film magazine a decade ago as a young lad, and my introduction to the infamous Andy Milligan, discovering not only do I like his stereotypical horror work with The Body Beneath (1970), the material that people dismiss his for, but he also made a barnstormer of a misanthropic drama that is legitimately great.

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Special Mention

Winner(s): Donovan's Reef/Drums Along The Mohawk (John Ford, 1963/1939)

Honourable Mentions: Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989); The Stray Cat Rock DVD/Blu-Ray release (1970-71); The Tempest (Derek Jarman, 1979); Suzhou River (Lou Ye, 2000)

For those films that'll be neglected in other categories. The one and only film by Wendell B. Harris Jr that crammed enough talent to fill a few films. The Arrow release of an entire series that even the US doesn't have barring one of the films on Region 1 DVD - while its far from the pinki violence genre as I thought they would be, and a limited edition only which is disappointing in terms of getting people interested in it, the series was nonetheless an interesting time capsule to Japanese early seventies b-movies and manages to be fun, playful and still manage to pull out moments of real drama for all the camp. The late Derek Jarman's contribution to Shakespeare that includes one of the most openly flamboyant endings for any film, makes a story as fantastical as The Tempest still as vivid in a set that many would view as a hindrance, and emphasises how subversive Jarman was as a director as he was an artist. And a mystery/romance/crime film from China with possible supernatural touches that has stuck with me.

The winner(s) have to be the other two John Ford films I saw this year, both the kind of movies I would've dismissed as a younger guy but are great films to me now. Ford's humanity, behind the masculinity, is his greatest virtue, where the stoic men can still feel emotion even if they keep to their desired goals and stand tall. Out of both films, Donovan's Reef is the superior, though I put them as one winner, in that what is such an indulgent film, one of Ford's last, a comedy drama of men drinking and romancing and fighting, set in Hawaii with the potential for crass stereotyping, turns out to be such an empathetic movie where every character onscreen has a lot to love about them while having fun with the comedy, a deeply humanist film masquerading as a slapstick series of comedy errors and drunken fighting.

Moment of the Year

Winner: The Eleanor car chase (Gone In 60 Seconds (H.B. Halicki, 1974))

Honourable Mentions: "Imprisoned memories prowl thro' the dark. Fuck it. They scatter like rats..." (The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1988)); The phone messages in the taxi (Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)); The supermarket sequence (Tout Va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)); Dragging the rock through a crowded city street (964 Pinocchio (Fukui Shozin, 1991))

It's worth discussing other memorable moments in films I've seen this year, not necessarily the best films but those incidences, scenes or aspects that stood out, from amusement to awe, because everyone, while only one can win, were worth watching through some dire and tedious movies. Even the silliest were why I still watch films. The small details that stand out long after seeing the movies, like a camera shot from within a person's head, looking out the open mouth, in the late Raul Ruiz's City of Pirates (1984), which dumbfound you in their imagination. Those visceral jolts like the final psychic attack depicted in Rubber's Lover (1996), in an apartment where violent and the beautiful image of snow inexplicably falling indoors, in violent monochrome, which shock you. When a film that dissapoints it what it doesn't promise in the title, Werewolves On Wheels (1971), makes up for it in the brief moment you get at least one werewolf riding a motorcycle and they're on fire at the same time. The supernatural moment in Alexander the Great (1980) involving a statue head covered in blood that sent a chill down my spine, or the sudden moment in Jean Rollin's zombie film The Grapes of Death (1978) where two characters suddenly argue about the rural versus industry, a great cult film suddenly pulling out a moment that you'd never to see and hear, and is surprisingly profound for a lurid genre film. When films pay tribute to cinema, like in Once Upon A Time In China III (1993), or reference other art forms like the replication of Surrealist paintings in Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive (1983). They can come out of nowhere, like one of the most pulse racing and erotic scenes I've seen, in the exploitation drug film Smoke & Flesh (1968) with two charismatically believable people and whipped cream, they can set up how good a film is going to be, like the first murder in White of the Eye (1987), or in the case of seeing two mannequin heads starting to talk in the beginning of Herschel Gordon Lewis' The Gruesome Twosome (1967), that a director that never believed his films were more than work still has yet contributed some of the most delirious things I've witnessed onscreen and was enjoying said work immensely.

But what of the films that were actually nominated? A single line of monologue, from The Last of England, has been stuck in my head for most of the year, all the anger felt in just a few words, the bile and the regret, expressed perfectly in one choice use of a curse. The economy, in action, seen in Like Someone In Love, involving shots looking out of a taxi and phone messages, that is devastating emotionally and also fills out a character's life for the viewer in a single scene. And there's those elaborate, huge moments in films that stick out triumphantly. Tout Va Bien is a difficult film by Jean-Luc Godard's standards, from the Mao period that divides even fans of his more difficult work, but the supermarket sequence with a camera continuously moving right to left over the tills, in one single take as a riot eventually takes place, could become one of the best moments he devised, shared with Jean-Pierre Gorin in how bold and precisely put together it is. The same, in the maniac lack of precision, is seen in 964 Pinocchio, a film full of potential candidates for this award, seeing real members of the public look on, moving out of the way, on a crowded Japanese street as a man covered in white face paint, with a Mohawk, is running through them with a fake giant rock being dragged behind him on a chain an out-there, exhilarating sight to see.

But the award has to go to one of the longest, if not the longest, car chase in film history, one that has greater meaning knowing the film, one of only three he managed to make, was a passion project for director H.B. Halicki, self funded and willing to potentially sacrifice himself as he is in the car, giving first billing on the opening credits before him or any actor, through the whole series of sequences taking on the risky stunts set up for the movie. Willing to gamble in the many potentially dangerous moments as a car dodges the police, the set piece never becomes repetitive, and while it's not as high octane as modern car chases, the visceral nature of it, including the willingness to weave in images of the damage left in the car chase's wake, humour and overlapping sound, is a masterpiece to see. It still stands up, despite the many decades that have passed, knowing real people drove real cars and how the weight to even a small stunt within the chase is felt especially knowing the risks involved. Film fans, which I am as bad in, can bitch and moan about how good the old days were to the point of rambling, even when we were too young to see said good days in the flesh, but it should be a sane, hundred percent fact that when you see something real, it should be superior than most computer generated fake depictions, the idea that it could be argued for the opposite insane, and comparing a CGI car to a real car being smashed, or jumping in the air off the ramp, it's the later by a country mile that should have more impact on the viewer.

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The Artefact That Time Forgot

Winner: Ringu: Kanzen-ban (Takigawa Chisui, 1995)

Honourable Mentions: Devil Story (Bernard Launois, 1985); Call Me Tonight (Okamoto Tatsuya, 1986/OVA); Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman: The Birth of Gautaman (Suzuki Iku, 1994/Anime OVA)

The deeper you get into film viewing as a hobby, if you go to the stage of someone who dives into the obscurest waters, you'll encounter some curious oddities along the way. I feel that, to do this special post properly, I need to mention those examples as well. They're not the best films, not even good, but they stand out as the artefacts of the title that should be remembered just for what inexplicably gets creates. Two of the honourable mentions are straight-to-video anime works. One with the title Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman is going to immediately raise eyebrows, especially when it becomes the equivalent of the infamous Nagai Go character Kekko Kamen character but for the derriere  is a take on religious conflict through an evil Black Buddha cult. It really couldn't quality any higher than the bottom rung of the list though because, while it has its own IMDB page, its only the first half of a two part story and the second half seemed impossible for me to find to view, especially sore as the second half is where the anime apparently became utterly insane. If I can find that second half, I may talk about this anime a lot more later down the line. Call Me Tonight is just as peculiar but with a surprising concept - a mocking satire, within the same decade the trope only came into existence alongside straight-to-video anime releases, of tentacle and violent anime porn about a female phone sex operator who helps a man who keeps turning into a tentacle monster every time he gets aroused have a normal sex life. It's not a great work but - as I reviewed here for Videotape Swapshop - it shows how creative anime can be, willing to attack a side of it here that usually damns it to outside critics, and while its a little lurid, having its cake and eating it, its more light hearted and playful by its end with some intelligence to it. Something like Call Me Tonight is unfortunately obscure and only available to see online when it's the kind of one-off that stands out merely for existing.

The other two films are live action and just inexplicable in their existence. The highest honourable mention is a film that just doesn't make any sense, making Jean Rollin films more normal in comparison, in that there is no real connective tissue to link the content of the film, Devil Story, into something easy to digest. A farmer trying to shoot a black horse that may be connected to the evil force that is taking place, stood in a field all night with a never ending supply of shotgun shells to waste missing the equine beast. A deformed man in a Nazi jacket inexplicably killing people like it was a slasher film only the film itself to turn into a gothic horror film for the rest of its length, and even an Egyptian mummy thrown in with no rational explanation. Watched with Greek subtitles burnt into the muddy VHS print I saw, Devil Story legitimately qualifies as an strange item alongside films like Zoo zéro (1979), movies that could never exist anymore that seem alien even to their original eras.

The winner however manages to outdo even Devil Story with its place in an important, beloved pop culture franchise - many, like myself, thought the first film adaptation of Ring was the 1998 version, but there was a 1995 made for TV adaptation. It's said to be the most faithful version of the original novel, which makes how bizarre the result is baffling. Furthering this is that there are softcore sex scenes and nudity in the film, more abrupt in their placement as the "hot" version includes digital blurring for a brief and surprisingly graphic scene between two characters who have no contribution to the main plot. Instead of the growing dread of the Nakata Hideo 1998 version, that kick started a J-horror boom on both sides of the Pacific ocean, it shows that made for TV aesthetic is a universal language with flat images and loud, continuous music, a trippy interpretation of the cursed tape's content, an antagonist who is depicted as a beautiful, voluptuous woman instead of the being in the 1998 version that terrified many, including scenes of her being eroticised, and plot twists taken from the original source material that are dumb and make the significant streamlining of the 1998 version the best thing that may have happened for the source novel. Usually the kind of mishaps you see here are encountered in sequels and continuations of the original film, but for what is a poor film, this is a real oddball in the truest sense that, unlike most of those sequels and entries, was both the first and complicates the renowned franchise that came after it in its existence.

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Best Actress:

Winner: Jane Wyman (All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955))

Honourable Mentions: Maria Callas (Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)); Emmanuelle Béart (La Belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)); Dorothy Malone (The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)); Takanashi Rin (Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012))

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Best Actor(s)

Winner(s): Convicts of Rebibbia Prison (Caesar Must Die (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, 2012))

Honourable Mentions: Kirk Douglas (Young Man With A Horn (Michael Curtiz, 1950)); Burt Lancaster (Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) & The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968)); Hossain Emadeddin (Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)); Vincent Price (Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973) & The Tomb of Ligeia (Roger Corman, 1964))

As someone who admits he neglects acting in films sometimes, yet also believes a good performance is not enough to save a film, there were so many incredible examples this year in first watches, not just in dramas but even in knowingly absurd b-movies. The choices I had to go through also prove that the best performances are found in films where the content around those performances are as distinct and memorable, the actors adding to them in a whole rather than contributing the only thing of note. The huge number of performances to choose from was high to the point that my choice for Best Actress was a last minute inclusion, Jane Wyman, for a film that is said to be Douglas Sirk's best, but whose lack of inclusion in other categories is only because there were other Douglas Sirk films, let alone other films, that were just as good as it in the running. All That Heaven Allows is one of those incredibly well regarded films in an auteur's filmography I don't enjoy as much on the first viewing as an obscure and underrated one, but I can say will grow on me the more I view it. This is especially, if nothing else, for a performance vital to make a character still important to see in the modern day, for the honest fact that a fifties melodrama like it still touches upon a subject that is still an issue today, one that justifiably, seeing it, was continued in versions by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Hayes to reflect the later decades their versions were made in. Sirk, if anything, got such great performances from actresses, not to mention actors, that I am kicking myself for forgetting and neglecting his films I saw this saw for these acting categories as I write them. But Wyman's is the one that is more than enough to show this through the best example of them all.

For the Best Actor I am going to cheat because there had to be one exception to the usual rules for such a category. Even though many of them qualify as supporting actors logically, the entire group of Rebibbia Prison inmates, shown in the documentary/Shakespeare adaptation hybrid Caesar Must Die, qualify as one whole for me impossible to choose between, both because their performance of Julius Caesar for the film viewer, set within the cells and courtyards they live within every day, are tremendous, but the added meaning of their existence as prisoners, and the added meaning this gives to the play's narrative of betrayal and political strife, creates something wondrous. I am willing to cheat for this award because the whole experience of Caesar Must Die, both the underlining documentary and the quality of the adaptation that makes the film mostly a narrative work, was overwhelming, an utmost sympathy for the convicts shown that make the desired effect for the Taviani Brother's experiment work perfectly.

The one factor that connects both categories, which is emphasised by my dismissal of "Oscar worthy" performances and the notion that a performance is enough to make a film good, is that none of the performances in the honourable mentions for either actors and actresses is in a conventional drama. Especially with the actress category this was clear. The most obvious performance I considered for earnestness was Emily Watson's in Breaking The Waves (1996), not included as a honourable mention, but that was a performance in a Lars von Trier film. The entire honourable mentions section for the actress category goes completely against the perceived notion of what a drama performance should be - a period historical film by Pier Paolo Pasolini where the actress is dubbed yet still gives a compelling performance physically (Callas); a performance where the lengthy dialogue sequences and the numerous scenes where she is completely naked onscreen for prolonged amounts of time is utterly brave, not for the hypocritical idea that being naked or participating in sex acts onscreen is transgressive, even debasing, but that the position inherently means being the centre of the viewer's gaze, as a person and an figure of symbolism, for the plot and the film, one's image stripped away onscreen beyond the flesh and having to make sure she is not made a mere entity, as a character in a performance, as a result (Béart); a performance in an unconventional drama, which has been criticised by Japanese critics for flat acting which, as a non-Japanese speaker, may affect my view of it if I spoke fluent Japanese, from an actress most people will know of in the bloody Indonesian-Japanese crime thriller Killers (2014) in a small role rather than as a known actress (Takanashi); and a performance in the closest thing to a conventional drama, a Douglas Sirk film, which is yet more of a classic, earnest melodrama with a hard, ragged edge that makes the emotions more strong, where it is willing to gamble with being hyper-emotive to the point of absurdity because, rather than being sober and "profound", the drama, done as an entertainment picture, is about heightened passion within a pulpy scenario of airplane races and potential adultery (Malone).

The same is with the Best Actors honourable mentions. Kirk Douglas in an earnest, but powerful role in a noir strained jazz film that feels like it would be more watered down if made now, without said earnestness and the willingness to enjoy the jazz soaked atmosphere shown on screen. Lancaster in two roles, which I've made one nomination, that are not safe choices in current cinema to give awards if one has seen at least one recent Oscar winner, a callous entity in Sweet Smell of Success  who is morally rancid yet you feel sadness in his demonic nature by the end, and a very complex character in The Swimmer, who you sympathise with but is also the bringer of his own misery in a metaphorical journey in a very off-kilter film, both of which he is incredible in. Hossain Emadeddin, in a type of role that gets ignored because acting in non-English roles gets neglected most of the time, feels like a man off the street, a complete amateur who brings his real emotions with him, emphasised by the fact that Crimson Gold is the only acting credit he has, and Vincent Price's gift was only really taken into consideration by genre fans like myself, able to juggle sincere takes on Shakespearian soliloquy, one moment, showing how chewing the scernry is a fine art that only great actors do well, being maniacally evil that you cheer him on, or slowly going mad in a perfect ripeness that he is a sympathetic character even if the being dogging him into misery is a black cat.

Best Actress choices also considered also included: Emily Watson for Breaking the Waves (1996) as mentioned; Lauren Bacall for Written In The Wind (1956), thought I am glad to say I gave her the Best Supporting Actress award in the last part; Julie Shaw in Nightbirds (1970), thumbing my nose up at Andy Milligan detractors; Malgorzata Foremniak in Avalon (2001), a potentially divisive Oshii Mamoru live action film that is helped by someone as interesting in the centre as her, and Susan Harrison in the Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

Best Actor choices also considered include Tony Curtis for Sweet Smell of Success (1957) who would've gotten into the honourable mentions if the competition wasn't as strong as it was; Rock Hudson for both All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written On The Wind (1956); Robert Stack also for Written On The Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957); Charles Laughton for the underrated, if flawed, Jean Renoir film This Land Is Mine (1943); Michel Piccoli for both La Belle noiseuse (1991) and Dillinger Is Dead (1969),  two of the most wildly contrasting films I could've paired together; James Stewart for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); Mifune Toshiro for Sanjuro (1962); Fredric March in the Oscar winning role for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); another potentially controversial choice from Like Someone In Love (2012) with Okuno Tadashi; Jean‑Louis Trintignant for The Man Who Lies (1968); Berwick Kaler for Nightbirds (1970) and John Turturro for Barton Fink (1991). If anything, this list just proves how much acting means more to me than I originally thought.

Summing Up 2014 in First Time Watches Part 1

Looking back on this year as a casual film viewer, I have watched too many films. That's not to boast, but having decided to stick to one film a day from the mid-year on, there's been an apparent issue that many films, especially ones that are impossible to see on physical media, I have proclaimed to be great from the early months have vanished from memory completely. It could be an issue of how long a year actually is. It could be a result of too much stimuli to sort through - I am an anomaly that the idea of a film marathon or a film festival is an insane, terrible way to view the movies, seeing five or more films one after another liable to mangle your ability to gauge which was good or not. It could be, frankly, a reflection of how first opinions are hollow. Some films need a second chance, but there were films, difficult to see, that have made a lasting first impression which will be seen in the lists below, suggesting that only when the films linger are they truly the best.

I have not seen enough films to create a decent Best of 2014 list. I intend to create one, mind, catching up with the releases, but only those I want to see, and rather than throw a list out immediately without though at the end of the year, I'd rather take a while even if its when everyone else is writing their Best of 2015 lists. Instead I'll look at the first time watches, not just films, any format of viewing them, that have stood out in an award special just for the sake of my amusement. As long as they wouldn't qualify for a Best of 2014 list, anything can qualify. Since it'll be long, this'll be the first part below...

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Best DVD Label: Arrow

One disappointment is that Second Run, another great company, has been neglected by myself this year, whose tantalising releases for this year will be caught up with. But Masters of Cinema, the BFI and Arrow scored some incredible releases, many I still need to get to, Arrow by a country mile winning for that many things they've managed to do. Their project for Walerian Borowcyzk to be critically reassessed completely in Britain is enough by itself to get the award, but the categories you'll over the parts of this special will contain a lot of their hard work.

If there is one concern, as someone who has to be careful economically which how much I buy, there is a danger of physical media becoming incredible expensive and inaccessible for casual buyers to discover these films for the first time. The market will need new people to discover how wide and diverse cinema can be, and expensive releases and limited editions can be problematic, as well for myself with a small budget at hand, in preventing a wider audience from being created. You cannot merely depend on a hardcore fan base, even if it's meant the great releases we've had, so if there was a greater balance in cost and access in 2015 it would be for the best for all of us. That Arrow has decided to create an American branch of their business could be a risk but could also help in this issue, opening the floodgates for a wider selection of films to view.

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Best Production Design:

Winner: Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992)

Honourable Mentions: Youth of the Beast (Suzuki Seijun, 1963); Kaiba (Yuasa Masaaki, 2008/Anime Series); French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1954); Eden and After (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970)

As the later categories will show, I discovered, or properly introduced myself, to individuals that appeal to everything I find great in film and motion picture art. Animation, as much as live action, is capable of taking you into new worlds, as all the films and one series in this section can attest to. Its befitting to this category that I have a film from the director of the notorious Branded To Kill (1967) here, at the moment he would get to that film, the moment when he has a gang member's flat have airplanes on mass dangling from the ceiling obstructing the space of the main protagonist. Be it 1890s Paris in all its bright colours, of Tunisia, or the far reaches of space and numerous planets where memories of individuals float in their own milky ways, the possibilities of what you can do in the medium makes the obsession with realism in modern cinema baffling and even more patience inducing, more so when the best examples of production design are as capable of showing the real world beyond the cinema without needing to be puritanical in aesthetics. That all the works here have distinct colour schemes is as much a rebellion for myself from shit browns and greys you get in many films recently. The winner couldn't be beaten, a mountain community where silent is golden, taking inspiration from early cinema but transforming it into a strange, richly detailed world of oddballs and haunting locations. Guy Maddin may not have won many awards for this special, but he is the patron saint for this sight finally seeing most of his back catalogue in one giant viewing gulp this year.

Films that were also considered were Rubber's Lover (1996), the original King Kong (1933), Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) and the other Yuasa Masaaki anime series of the year Kemonozume (2006).

Music:

Winner: Wakakusa Kei (Kemonozume (Yuasa Masaaki, 2006/Anime Series))

Honourable Mentions: Yoshida Kiyoshi (Kaiba (2008)); Nagashima Hiroyuki (964 Pinocchio (Fukui Shozin, 1991)); Jon Newton (Unhinged (Don Gronquist, 1982)); Lauren Kirk (Young Man with a Horn (Michael Curtiz, 1950))

Music can be lyrical and it can also be pure noise, and importantly for this category, I'm also thinking of the additional music along with the work of the composers mentioned in being factors for these works inclusion. What matters is if it sticks out and adds to the visuals, draws you in atmospherically. The high level of Japanese entries says a lot, as it proves anime director Yuasa Masaaki has a knack for great music in his work; that's including having opening title songs that, rather than poor J-pop, have something magical in them, the utterly captivating one for Kaiba and the one for winner Kemonozume that most live action movie would kill to have. Beautiful, sweet music to the hard, life affirming jazz, to glitch electronic. And then there's the one that may feel out of place, the drones of the former Video Nasty and low budget slasher Unhinged, a film many would dismiss as a poor film, but a surprise, a great deal of why its memorable because of the eeriness of Newton's droning keyboard sounds. It may put many off, but something as simple as atonal notes can mean a lot in adding to a film.

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Best Cinematography:

Winner: James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957))

Honourable Mentions: Guy Durban (Goto, Island of Love (Walerian Borowcyzk, 1968); Michel Kelber (French Cancan (1954)); Ennio Guarnieri (The Garden of the Finzi Contini (Vittorio De Sica, 1970)); Henry Sharp (The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928))

There could only be one winner, and there were so many films, including those I removed from the short list above, that were exceptional in this category. I learnt of him viewing John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966) last year, and visiting one of the most critically acclaimed films in his filmography, James Wong Howe's work in Sweet Smell of Success is clearly that of a master, a black and white film where the textures of monochrome are fully felt and the environments feel three dimensional as you watch Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster duel with words of venom, a noir mood of threat around newspaper journalists out for blood. So many films could've been included, but keeping to five films, including the winners, for each category, it was a painful but a necessary thing to choose the best of the best. The one that has added meaning in the honourable mentions is The Crowd, one of the many publically unavailable films I saw in the earliest part of the year in mass with other films, one I dismissed as the weakest of those viewings, but is one of the only few to have survived in memory while others I praised higher have vanished from memory. Its tender, thoughtful tone, even if naive, has stayed with me, as has the cinematography, over ninety years old yet still bold and throwing a gauntlet down to films barely five years old now to do better in evoking a world onscreen. It is a fitting irony its lasted in memory, grown, when I felt it was disappointing originally, and says a lot why it's as critically acclaimed as it is.

Other films considered for Best Cinematography were Tout Va Bien (1971), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and its incredible use of first person sequences, Rubber’s Lover (1996), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Barton Fink (1991), Medea (1969), Upstream Color (2013), Assassination (1964), The Horse Thief (1986), White of the Eye (1987) and Morgiana (1972).

Best Screenplay

Winners: Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success (1957))

Honourable Mentions: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and Jacques Rivette (La Belle noiseuse (Dir. Jacques Rivette, 1991)); Kikushima Ryuzo and Tanaka Tomoyuki (Sanjuro (Kurosawa Akira, 1962)); Albert Zugsmith (The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)); The Joel and Ethan Coen (Barton Fink (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1991))

The lengthy conversations between painter and his subject that last for what feels like an hour, always compelling; the deliciously funny parody of Yojimbo (1961) and the mocking of honour codes as rebelling samurai hide in the wardrobe like baffled sheep as Mifune Toshiro strides onwards with the right ideas at the right time; the pulp romance as Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone fall in love behind her husband Robert Stack's back; and director-writers expressing writer's block through a mix of horror, the abstract and desperate comedy as an acclaim stage writer unravels trying to write a film script. But you hear a line like "I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic." and you realise whose won by a clear mile despite stiff competition. You don't ignore dialogue this nuanced in its nastiness especially when the film around it still has a sting fifty years or more later.

A film that were also considered was Dead & Buried (1981), Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon spinning a compelling little horror story that adds the grittier, nastier content of the eighties onwards.

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Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Lauren Becall (Young Man With A Horn (1950))

Honourable Mention: Shelley Duvall (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (Guy Maddin, 1997))

From http://youmayclap.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/waneandstewart.jpg

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: John Wayne (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962))

Honourable Mentions: Hijikata Tatsumi (Horrors of Malformed Men (Ishii Teruo, 1969)); John Goodman (Barton Fink (1991)); Frank Gorshin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997))

The discrepancy, in quantity, in actresses to actors in both main and supporting categories is utterly disappointed for myself. It shows I need to keep an eye on great performances by women more. But as it stands, seeing Duvall in a Maddin film was something special, especially as she and Frank Gorshin were utterly memorable in their roles, why they're in their categories, and part of why, for a film viewed as a disappointment, I've become immensely fond of Guy Maddin's Twilight of the Ice Nymphs immensely.

For Best Supporting Actress, it is saddening she passed this year, but it's fitting to say that I have fallen in love with Lauren Becall, as a talented actor and as an individual onscreen in a film like Young Man With A Horn. In all the films I've seen her in, she has never felt like she is playing a weak female character, and even if she is technically a villain in Young Man With A Horn, you sympathise with her as a deeply flawed person because of how good an actress she is. As for best supporting actor, you have John Goodman being Satan incarnate, yet strangely understandable in his psychological problems, Gorshin being a sweet, kooky eccentric, and the masterstroke of casting the creator of the avant-garde dance Butoh, Hijikata Tatsumi, in a transgressive Edogawa Rampo mindfuck, allowed to both use his dance style in his character, and transform a Doctor Moreau figure into a deranged mass of guttural proclamations and spasming twitches as he lolls around on jagged rocks on the beach of his island of artificially created "freaks", something you'd never forget after witnessing. But it has to go to one person; regardless of his politics, regardless of anything that could be said about him off camera, John Wayne is loved because he played men onscreen who are noble even if they are ruffians, and especially in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the meaning gained with what his character does for another played by James Stewart more significant because of the charisma and heart he shows in the role.

Best Supporting Actor entries considered also included Jack Albertson in Dead & Buried (1981) and Kase Ryô in Like Someone in Love (2012).

From http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/movie_wallpapers/Thor-2011-Wallpapers/images/Thor%202011%20Wallpaper%203.jpg

Worse Viewing Experience of the Year

Winner: Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011)

Honourable Mention: Tokko (Abe Masashi, 2006/Anime Series); Dracula In Istanbul (Mehmet Muhtar, 1953); Big Tits Zombie (Nakano Takao, 2010) & Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (Tomomatsu Naoyuki and Nishimura Yoshihiro, 2009); The Devil's Business (Sean Hogan, 2011).

Unfortunately for every good film you see, there are also terrible experiences, and for me the worse aren't badly made, but those that inspire nothing emotionally for me. For the final category for this part of this special, it's worth tackling what was the worse and what I can learn from it. The obvious lesson is that irony ruins films. Two Japanese entries qualify for one, both Big Tits Zombie and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl showing when you stop caring and languish in being cheap and dumb on purpose; even with their ridiculous titles and base desires, they could've been special if they weren't laughing at themselves and undercutting an earnestness they might've had. Compare them to the very low budget, but sweet and fun pinku softcore film The Strange Saga of Hiroshi the Freeloading Sex Machine (2005), which beats them to a pulp just with having the better title, and great strange films from Japan still exist, but they're being compromised by those purposely catering to the West rather than be what the director desires them to be. Irony, and when people try to be smart arsed with their film knowledge, is what also killed any good Sexy Killer (2008) might've had, which didn't get into the honourable mentions, worse because it's a film that could've been the quirky, Spanish sister to a film like May (2002), female characters on the outskirt of normalcy you get to cheer on. Instead you get another damned movie which references zombie films in dialogue and tires me. The other lesson is that, even if the promise is there, sometimes you'll be disappointed, a Turkish Dracula film that is utterly tedious to sit through when what you imagine in your head is a superior movie in every way. As for The Devil's Business, I want to see more films released by the American company Mondo Macabro, but I'm baffled why they picked up this film, a dull British horror film that shouldn't have any critical praise like it has done; even baring in mind its micro budget and the earnestness in making it, the lack of anything fresh or interesting is not acceptable whether it's a debut feature or your second.

It's neither only films either. I admit I only finished it just before Christmas, but if I'm allowed one hollow first opinion, I want to mention the 2006 anime Tokko once and kick its head in mercilessly. About demon slayers who are part demon, the first scenes after the opening credits, when it goes to quirky sex comedy, were a sobering realisation that this was going to be painful to sit through for all thirteen episodes. Along with live action cinema, I've realised that while great works are still made, from the 2000s onward to now, the quality barrier for even trash has been lost. Cheap, nasty looking digital animation, a haphazard script that is full clichés crushed down to their most lifeless forms, cramming in plot moments just before something is meant to be profound, all the bad things that you get in anime more from the Millennium onwards, and even botching its finale in a random clutter of scenes. It was an attempt to be a throwback to older, more adult anime of the nineties - gore, nudity and even the inexplicable fact that one of the female characters prefers being topless except for a biking jacket for the most part - but it feels fangless, with none of the perversity of older anime or anything that's actually good.

Yet the actual winner is something worse in terms of the morals behind it while better made technically, controversially choosing Thor, one of the Marvel Universe films, for the reason that, barring the sumptuous production design, what you have is the same clichés of a hero learning to become a better person regurgitated without meaning to it, its attempt at profundity merely a label for a visual food product. spending God knows how much money to make what is effectively a trailer for another trailer with no climatic end. By itself, and what it was meant to be a trailer for, The Avengers (2012), it's a thinly structured b-movie that Roger Corman would've wanted re-shots done for to boost up the action quota if he was its producer. This could easily come off as a snob dismissing multiplex cinema as I write this, but it comes off more from someone who wants to go to the multiplex more often but finds most blockbusters dull, done better in a pulp stories from the turn-of-the-century or an older more "reprehensible" b-flick, and looks on like Alan Moore in horror at how much money is spent on these comic book films, not just compared to how much comic books are made for in comparison, but for such little spectacle you actually get at the end for all that money. Norse mythology of Scandinavia has so much that could be shown onscreen that would, like any mythology and all religions, that you could create such incredible, and entertaining, films as a result, but few blockbusters and mainstream films, like Thor, actually use it, instead reducing it to something tedious and bland. Stories of Odin riding a eight legged horse, backstabbing and betrayals, Valkyries and Valhalla, runes and Norse symbols, bizarre incidents like Thor tricking frost giants by pretending to be a bride and dressing up as a woman to get his stolen hammer back, the strange, majestic folktales full of such details and idiosyncrasies that people have spun out over centuries, that would be fun to see onscreen, and instead you get great actors in Idris Elba and Asano Tadanobu twiddling their thumbs and merely saying exposition in silly armour instead of seeing  Ragnarok and monstrous dragons. The waste of such material and money is the real reason, above all else, that Thor was painful to watch, the fact that these Marvel Universe films are seen as high art of entertainment horrifying the more I think about it for how piss poor they are in telling a good story rather than any snobbish attitude to being entertained. I can imagine actually Vikings at a banquet throwing their tankards at Kenneth Branagh, who should've known better as an adaptor of Shakespeare plays, for telling such a dull story halfway through, had him dragged off the stage, and someone else tell one that was actually fun and had more frost giant fights instead.