Dashiell

For much of the past few years my favorite writer on film, the one who gives me the most pleasure to read, is Chris Dashiell. I watched him getting into the movie opinion mix on the Cinema-L mailing list starting in the late '90's (remember them?) and was fortunate enough to occasionally contribute to Cinescene during his fecund period as editor.

Since those early days Chris has developed into a the in-house film critic for KXCI radio in Tucson, Arizona, where he has the FLICKS on-line and podcast review series. For a guy who lives where he does, he sees a hell of a lot of really excellent movies. He's able to see a lot of them projected as well, although the DVDs augment his diet, which goes heavy on independent, foreign, classics and forgotten classics.

Chris refers to himself as The Film Snob and while his standards are relatively rigorous, he writes in an easily communicative style, one which tends to lay enough background to educate while giving a thorough, sharply observed, eminently readable opinion.

Here's Chris' Signs and Wonders: A Film Snob's Favorites of '05, published on Cinescene where he still contributes. I've seen three of his top ten and of six the "B-sides":

1. The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel)
2. 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai)
3. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin)
4. Last Days (Gus Van Sant)
5. Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Gohbadi)
6. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)
7. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
8. Occupation: Dreamland (Garrett Scott & Ian Olds)
9. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach)
10. Born Into Brothels (Zana Briski & Ross Kauffman)

And now for the B-sides:

11. Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda)
12. Capote (Bennett Miller)
13. No Direction Home (Martin Scorsese)
14. Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard)
15. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
16. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park & Steve Box)
17. Look At Me (Agnes Jaoui)
18. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
19. Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene)
20. Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki)

There's a great archive of Chris' Cinescene Flicks series , some amazing pictures covered going back to the silents and all around the world, and it's possible to dig around the Dashiell archives there for more contemporary reviews by title and the index to his brilliant features, like his Katherine Hepburn piece, right after her death, 3,800 extremely well-chosen words covering her entire career.

But the writing that made the biggest impression on me and still does is a brilliantly researched 4-part piece on revolutionary Soviet directing genius Sergei Eisenstein's failed Que Viva Mexico. It's a great work of film history.

Eisenstein came to Hollywood in 1930, was feted by all the great filmmakers in town, couldn't make it work with the studios and eventually tried to make a movie in Mexico. Much of it was shot but not all or not enough, and he never edited it himself. In 1979 his assistant director from that time guided a "reconstruction".

Dashiell's piece interweaves scene-by-scene description of this reconstruction with the timeline of Eisenstein's history and analysis of his filmmaking practice, a very politically charged one due to the state-sponsored film system of post-revolutionary Russia. At a certain point under Joseph Stalin, Sergei was only allowed to teach filmmaking. At various points, Stalin sat next to him in the editing room.

And the final thing I like about Chris is his last name. I'm a big fan of the pioneering noir writer, Dashiell Hammett. I figure anyone with the same first name as Hammett has got to be cool.

So imagine how cool it must be to have Dashiell as your last name.