Last 10/10s you saw?

Victoria
Vivre Sa Vie

Black Orpheus & Europe '51.

you're mom

Breathe
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Miami Vice
Heat (promoted after re-watch)

In terms of most recent viewing, I rewatched There Will Be Blood yesterday.

In terms of release date, Tower.

There Will Be Blood
City Lights

either Once (2007) or Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

That was over a year ago though

I'm very liberal with my 10/10 ratings. I don't like basing my ratings on some predetermined scale where a 10 means literal perfection on all fronts, because there are no perfect films, only films that are perfectly themselves. I base my 10 ratings on one, totally emotional and therefore undefinable question: did I absolutely love this movie? So these are my 10s for movies released in the last five years:

2017
Okja
Logan

2016
Moonlight
Embrace Of The Serpent
The Witch

2015
Carol
Mad Max: Fury Road

2014
Birdman
The Babadook
Under The Skin

2013
Gravity
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Inside Llewyn Davis
Before Midnight

2012
Django Unchained
Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Hm... how shall I explain?

So I was just restoring my external harddrive over night and then by the morning when I was still not finished Mildred Pierce comes on TV and I watch it and it starts out really good, nice atmosphere, top class noir, great atmosphere, we're directly in a shadowy parrallel-universe. Then the film slowly packs out and I start to realize how badly I hate Micheal Curtiz for this. It just keeps getting more and more and there's barely any use explaining it all because it's all on the goddamn screen anyway and I feel cheap just frown watching it. There is no central dichotomy, there are 10, 20, 100, I don't know. As it seems Curtiz just decided to go full dialectics on this and YES, it is genius, there you have it! But Curtiz is still such a dick for doing it. The film isn't a historical epic, yet on those metrics it outclasses most actual historical epics (god, why?), it is a little shady noir but it packs in the not even 2h runtime the entire cosmos of American life, so as to touch every American. Every American is in it and every not American. It is the tale of capitalism, the capitalisation of self. Curtiz is Mildred Pierce (just read up on what kind of person he was) and he's proud of it and also just as proud of telling you a tale about Mildred's terrible failure and how she is kept in an eternal cycle of downfall, which looks like an ascension. The ending looks just like the 2 parents entering the gates of heaven with both childs being lost, one to death, the other to a nameless world. And it is all written in that goddamn dialectics. The children die, the parents go to heaven, to eternity. They share a strange kind of bond, it is not love, it is not friendship, rather shared fate, the brokenness after having walked through it all, the destruction of the will (the inner market maybe you could playfully dub it in American). It starts with an attempted, unexplained suicide, ends with a seeming ascend to heaven (at least that damn wallpaper glooms just as strongly as to suggest that). The frame story is veiled in the darkness of crime, the actual story is a story of the disintegration of a middleclass family. The (dark) Crime story is brighter, happier than the bright surface of the frame story. Mildred has 2 names, one is bourgeosie, the other is middle class, none of them is real (Pierce is the name of her 1st husband, no maiden name is ever mentioned). She is uprooted from the start (as people are when they are old enough to comprehend this film). 3 Men are after her, one wants her as a mother, one wants her as a sex object, the last one wants her as a bank. Mildred only wants her daughter (actually she wants herself, she just doesn't know it, she is appaled by her daughter but almost like a cramp that prevents her from considering herself she is dragged towards her daughter because she knows otherwise she can only lose everything) and she only goes through the men to get to her daughter (first through birth with her husband, then by aquirering wealth through Wally and then lastly to aquire class through Beragon).  Then there are the bars, the alcohol, the determination of work, the characters which mirror each other (to a pretty insane extend, George Lucas would be proud, "it's like poetry, it rhymes", no?), the poor mother that gets rich and determined, the rich kid that gets spoiled and poor, a murder at the start and at the finish and a death in the middle, first waves screaming for suicide, then later waves in a scene of seeming passion, the beachhouse as the scene of said passion and also the murder (it only appears in those 2 scenes), etc, etc, etc. And it all works such an incredibly thin line between parody and determined stortelling and it hits the marks all the time. When the father leaves, everyone is just like "meh, whatever", the kid dies and afterwards Mildred be like "hopefully my caffee is a big success" (there is litterally a direct transition between this) and all Mildred's plans just work out way too well but we believe them because she still fails desparately at the same time. It is cringingly deadpan but always with a point and told with such a straight face and with such conviction, that one just never stops. On top of that the visual excecution frightens me. If Kubrick is a robot, Curtiz must have been the surpreme overlord of the entire robot race because this is so, so much closer to brutally flawless than I dare admit. The lighting, the blocking, the camera, it all falls into one another. And it is very simple actually. Always a set-up and then there is a pay off. But obviously often with various inbetweens, walking towards mirrors, a symetrical set-up around the table that is set-up during the scene, a dramatic highpoint counterbalanced with a completely static shot with almost no motion. You could analyze every single scene, I don't think Curtiz misses the pay-off once and this is inspite of keeping the overall ark completely dynamic and the pacing flowing, and even with some mini points within scenes (like subtly showing the suburbs while the kids come home or the way Wally lights a cigarete or the knee-shots of pierce - which are again doubled).

I liked Curtiz better when he was doing Robin Hood, that was harmless and fun, this is like a punch in the stomach. You can't even sympathize with Curtiz but still it is all up there on the screen, all the conflict of eternity. In the end it is really about death, about (the atempt at) conquering death in life, an impossible task. You couldn't prove Curtiz wrong and that hurts, yet he probably want a world full of Mildred's (god what an awful name!). If I'd ever crossed his path, I'd have slapped him right in the face and I don't even dislike him (hate maybe but not dislike), it's just so necesarry.

Here is a quote from Curtiz which sums up it all: "You think you know fuck everything and I know fuck nothing. Well, let me tell you, I know fuck all!!"

Sad part about it is: He might have actually known a lot.