Movies are two dimensional artifacts (yes, even the 3D ones). Our brains fill in the missing dimension and no one complains. But movies are also obsessed with the fourth dimension – compressing it, tracking it obsessively, and commenting on it. Film can’t get enough of time. Presented in chronological order (but not the chronological order you think), here are the top ten movies so interested in time that they’re all about times of day.
10. Before Sunrise (1995)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rN6D3PcYB4[/youtube]
After the wandering camera of Slacker and the stoned Texas teenage vibe of Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater did a creative turnabout and made a film centered on just two characters as they drift through a night in Vienna, talking, eating, bumping into strangers and parting again in the morning. The brief relationship between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) is a romantic fantasy for the twenty-ish crowd, a Gen X fable with a Lemonheads soundtrack, and a film about the days when our lives could change in one night.
9. Sunrise (1927)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YiTQwqRufs&feature=related[/youtube]
Silent films are an acquired taste. Most people experience them as a painful afternoon or two in film class, usually coupled with a lecture on Soviet Montage or early film technology. But the truth is that silent film can be beautiful to watch. Without sound, filmmakers relied on well-constructed images to tell the story, and sometimes they had to go to extraordinary lengths to get the best possible shots. Imagine what good bicycle riders we’d all be if the earliest bikes had no handles.
Sunrise is one of the last great silent films (in fact, it opened just a few days before The Jazz Singer), a fable about love and betrayal and not drowning your spouse in the lake after all. The story is broad and melodramatic, but it’s worth repeated viewings.
8. Red Dawn (1984)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_I4WgBfETc[/youtube]
WOLVERINES!!! Just like the Ewoks and their deadly anti-stormtrooper rocks and logs, the Colorado teens of Red Dawn know how to take down evil. John Milius’ nutso piece of right-wing jingoism tells the story of a Communist invasion of America. It turns out that red-blooded American teens are more than a match for these evil Soviets, who may be competent enough to invade a gigantic overseas industrial and military behemoth, but not competent enough to withstand a band of teenagers in the hills. The movie also presents us with the strange spectacle of American teens as insurgents, looking more and more like a U.S. version of mujaheddin as the film grinds on.
7. High Noon (1952)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkNu4-sSglY[/youtube]
High Noon ranks up on my list of all-time favourites. On Sheriff Will Kane’s (Gary Cooper) wedding day, he finds out that gangster Frank Miller is coming to town on the high noon train to exact some revenge and generally perpetrate lawlessness. Instead of leaving town with his new Quaker bride (Grace Kelly), Kane decides to stay and rally the townsfolk and form a Miller-catching posse. He expects that everyone else will follow his moral compass, but discovers a vast well of apathy and resentment. High Noon is one of the few movies that takes place in real time, with every second counting down to the moment when the train pulls into the station and evil comes to town.
6. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF1rtd8_pxA[/youtube]
Heist movies don’t get much stranger than this. Al Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, a man who holds up a bank in Flatbush in order to get enough money for his male lover’s sex change operation. The heist devolves into a hostage situation, then a media event, as camera crews and crowds of rubberneckers arrive. The weirdest thing? It’s based on actual events. Sidney Lumet could have extracted a cheap comedy from this situation, but instead we get a surprisingly touching and funny film about desperate and deluded people.
5. Before Sunset (2004)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvFosXeqmDg[/youtube]
“Baby, you are going to miss that plane”. “I know”. Ten years after the Viennese night of Before Sunrise, Jesse and Celine bump into each other in Paris and spend an afternoon together, talking incessantly and running each other through the emotional mill. Before Sunrise was an enjoyable romance that mixed promise with the germ of nostalgia; Before Sunset is full of missed opportunities and the first reflections of maturity. One of the best films of the decade, and far better than the trailer would suggest.
4. Twilight (2008)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2T7d8j6I5I[/youtube]
Yikes. No one could accuse this movie of being particularly good, but when your source material is basically tween mash notes to an imaginary sparkly boyfriend, there’s really nowhere to go but up. Catherine Hardwicke had the good sense to include the climactic action scene that the book omitted, and we can credit her for casting Kristen Stewart as the dead-inside Bella. Rarely has a casting choice proved so apt.
3. Night of the Living Dead (1969)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gUKvmOEGCU[/youtube]
Monsters! They’re what’s for dinner. Or rather, we’re what’s for dinner. George Romero’s film defined the modern zombie: a shambling, rotting creature that just wants to eat you alive. Romero’s achievement was to create an actual character drama out of the most unlikely materials, as a group of random survivors hole up in a house and spend the night fending off waves of the dead. The ending ranks as one of the best shock moments in movie history.
2. ‘Round Midnight (1986)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxRQ1iFmGvY[/youtube]
Are you still sitting here? Go watch this film. Set in 1959, ‘Round Midnight is the story of Dale Turner, an alcoholic jazz saxophonist at the end of his rope. He moves to Paris but finds all his Stateside problems just waiting for him, tied up in a bow and poured into a tumbler over ice. One day a young man buys him a beer, and an unlikely friendship develops. Turner is played by the actual jazz musician Dexter Gordon, who isn’t really an actor, but it’s safe to say that no one else could have pulled off the role in the same way.
1. Night of the Hunter (1955)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5AKK_om1VU[/youtube]
Charles Laughton had a long and renowned turn as an actor, but his directorial career was cut short after he made Night of the Hunter, a phantasmagorical tale of religion, evil, innocence and god knows what else. The studio hated it, audiences didn’t know what to make of it, and Laughton never got another chance behind the camera.
What a shame. Even now, with its countless pale imitators, Night of the Hunter is unique. There’s no villain quite like Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell, a psychopathic preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles and an unorthodox relationship with the Lord. Laughton’s vision is so inexhaustible that Night seems to contain the seeds of countless movies, with images and sequences echoed by directors like Terence Malick, David Lynch and Lars von Trier.
As always, this list is incomplete. What are your time-of-day movies?
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