A number of our bloggingfriends have picked up the Alphabetical Favorites meme. The idea is that you list 26 favorite movies, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some people are adding comments, but I think it’s more interesting to just toss the titles out there, to see how they fit together within a single list and how they match up to other lists. Also, it’s been a hell of a week and I’m exhausted. I will say this: after not being able to think of a single movie beginning with the letter “J” that I enjoy more than Joe Versus the Volcano, I noticed that several commenters at the House Next Door had slotted the same film in the same face. So much for Todd McCarthy’s contention in his Doubt review that John Patrick Shanley’s first directorial effort was “misguided.”
The above montage of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, set to two songs by Nina Simone, was posted on Vinyl is Heavy by Stephen Boone. I’ll let him explain:
The idea is that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is two films. The first is about two lovers dealing with the terrible, disapproving world. The second is about the two lovers, having conquered the world, dealing with what poison it has left in each other’s system. Nina sings a song for each “film.”
I’m generally a big fan of the YouTube musical montage/tribute’s ability to condense an entire film experience into a concentrated crack hit of pop-scored pure emotion. The second half of this clip especially nails the devastating strangeness of the film’s final moments.
By all accounts, Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas rocked Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s world when he first saw them in the early 70s. In “Imitation of Life: On The Films of Douglas Sirk,” a 1971 essay on Sirk included in the Criterion edition of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder presages his own late-career turn towards films centered around female protagonists by marveling at Sirk’s unique way with women. “In Douglas Sirk movies the women think,” Fassbinder writes, as if this plain realization has knocked the wind out of him. “I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any.” He also marvels at the Hollywood director’s ability to subvert dominant society via low art, sneaking radical critique into “films that people in Germany with his level of education would have smirked at.”
What Fassbinder must have seen that those academic stiffs would have missed, was that Sirk needed the smirk in order to mask what he was “really” up to. When Fassbinder reworked Heaven’s basic plot and ideas into his own Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 18 years later, he dispensed with the beard. Refusing to allow the audience the option of wallowing in redemptive fantasy and ignoring the subtext, he brought the tragedy up to the surface where it couldn’t be missed.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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A number of our 
