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you don’t understand, i’m obsessed

House of Sand and Fog directed by Vadim Perelman

Some movies of the early '00s, good, bad, and indifferent:

THE SWEETEST THING (2002): Enthusiastically raunchy but extremely dumb romcom starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair as three 20something friends supporting each other through various sexual and romantic misadventures. Not without charm, but too sloppily written to really land except in fits and starts, and the weak plot, which focuses on the Diaz character's disastrous pursuit of a hunky real estate agent (Thomas Jane), sidelines both Applegate and Blair so completely that they might just as well have been condensed into a single character. However, it is occasionally very funny, with the highlight being a hilarious musical number entitled "Your Penis Is…" CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not even as a concept. VERDICT: Your life will be no poorer if you tune out after the musical number, but don't miss that.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (2003): Slow-moving, moody, downbeat drama about the battle of wills between depressed white divorcée Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), whose house has been wrongfully seized and auctioned off by the county, and the buyer, exiled Iranian military officer Massoud Behrani (Ben Kingsley), who moves in with his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and teenage son (Jonathan Ahdout) and refuses to sell the house back to the county for less than four times what he paid for it. (With the skyrocketing cost of real estate since the film's release, hearing those amounts may cause physical pain.) Now broke and homeless, Kathy falls into a relationship with a married local sheriff's deputy (Ron Eldard), whose attempts to "help" by bullying and terrorizing Behrani into cooperating lead to tragedy. A strange story that spends a lot of time alternately cultivating and then deliberately puncturing viewer sympathy for the characters, and which seems unusually determined to avoid examining the larger social and structural forces that are actually driving the plot. Connelly and Kingsley are effective; Aghashloo is boxed in by her thankless, rather condescending supporting part as Behrani's timid wife Nadi, who barely speaks English and lives in mortal terror of being sent back to Iran — a far cry from her later role as cunning, sharp-tongued politician Chrisjen Avasarala on THE EXPANSE. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not at all. VERDICT: Well-made, but very heavy going, and the last half hour (which is a real downer) is troubling on several levels.

BOARDING GATE (2007): Customarily oblique Olivier Assayas crime drama, in some ways reminiscent of a William Gibson story (though it's not based on one), about a sleazy businessman (Michael Madsen) confronting his soon-to-be-former mistress Sandra (Asia Argento), whose sexual favors he has previously exploited to gather intelligence on business partners and rivals, and who now wants to break things off for good. That meeting is just one strand in a more complex web of betrayal and vengeance involving Sandra and her new employers (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), who each have their own agendas. The terse, gritty, sometimes lurid story can be tricky to follow at points because Assayas deliberately avoids ever pulling back to present a larger picture of what's going on or revealing much about the actual nature of the characters' business, and the jittery, desaturated cinematography seems calculated to keep viewers disoriented. The problem is that the film also holds the characters at arm's length, making it hard to care what happens to them, and the ending succumbs to Gibsonian anticlimax, leaving it unclear what the point was supposed to be. That it works at all is due mostly to Argento, whose smoldering performance is the main thing holding the film together. CONTAINS LESBIANS? By implication only. (Sandra describes a reluctant past encounter with a woman who doesn't actually appear in the story.) VERDICT: The story's self-imposed limitations tend to smother its virtues, although in stretches, the movie feels more like a William Gibson story than most actual William Gibson adaptations.

THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS (2004/2006): Sordid, thoroughly unappetizing drama based on the 2001 short-story collection by "JT LeRoy," adapted by Asia Argento and Alessandro Magania and directed by and starring Argento herself, her second feature directing effort. (The movie debuted at Cannes about two years before "LeRoy" was revealed to be a fiction created by Laura Albert, although that revelation limited the film's eventual theatrical release in 2006.) The film is an episodic chronicle of several nightmarish years in the life of a boy named Jeremiah (played at different points by Jimmy Bennett, Dylan Sprouse, and Cole Sprouse), who after spending his early life in foster care ends up back in the custody of his erratic, self-absorbed, wildly irresponsible mother Sarah (Argento). After Jeremiah is sexually assaulted by one of his mother's awful boyfriends (Jeremy Renner), he's ineffectually counseled by a useless social worker (Wynonna Ryder, appearing unbilled) and placed in the custody of his Jesus-freak grandparents (Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti), who are no less cruel or abusive in their own ways. Sarah later "rescues" Jeremiah, encourages him to cross-dress to pose as her younger sister — leading to his being assaulted by another of Sarah's terrible boyfriends (Marilyn Manson) — and then moves them in a run-down house with a meth lab in the basement. The public interest in this very unpleasant material, which is a veritable anthology of child abuse and frequently difficult to watch, was ostensibly driven by the notion that it was based on real events of "LeRoy's" life. With that pretense revealed as a fraud, what's left is a distasteful appetite for the self-consciously lurid, to which Argento's main contribution is the gusto with which she embraces an especially unsympathetic maternal role. Even that was rendered all the more unpalatable by the subsequent allegations of Jimmy Bennett, who reported in 2018 that when he was 17 (about 10 years after this film was made), Argento sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room. Argento's DARVO response squandered all of her remaining goodwill and permanently consigned this already hard-to-stomach movie to the "Morbid Curiosities" file. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No, and aside from the point. VERDICT: Unpleasant content, fraudulent premise, too many creeps. Very strong CW for CSA and other forms of child abuse.

35. House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman, 2003)

Genuinely impressive how consistently this movie is able to make narrative choices in the worst possible taste. Aghdashloo innocent, of course. Rating: 2.8/10

Honorable Mentions by Year

In this second of four installments, 2003 had the most entries with 20. 2004 and 2005 had 17 each. Looking back, the years 1936 and 1993 also had 20 honorable mentions.

Looking ahead, the third installment will be the years 2009-20, which will be followed by the most recent entries to the best 1001 movies and the most recent honorable mentions.

A very happy birthday to Don Logan himself, Sir Ben Kingsley!

Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.

– Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

Best of 2022 - Movies

Including morbid social criticism, soon-to-be cult thrillers, and unconventional fairy tales.

01. Triangle of Sadness - Dir: Ruben Ostlund - 2022 - Watched it twice so far but I’ll watch it again soon, that’s for sure. It’s just genius. He is a genius director. So far all of his films are my favorites. 

02. Everything Everywhere all at Once - Dir: Dan Kwan - 2022

03. Parrallel Mothers - Dir: Pedro Almodovar - 2022 - I never cry in the cinema almost ever, but I did when I watched this. 

04. Riders of Justice - Dir: Anders Thomas Jensen - 2020 - Laughed so much and so loud, everyone were looking at me on a plane and they couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with me. 

05. The Lost Daughter - Dir: Maggie Gyllenhaal - 2021

06. The Father - Dir: Florian Zeller - 2020

07. Good Luck To You, Leo Grande - Dir: Sophie Hyde - 2022

08. House of Sand and Fog - Dir: Vadim Perelman - 2003

09. Spencer - Dir: Pablo Larrain - 2021

10. Help - Dir: Marc Munden - 2021

11. Licorice Pizza - Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson - 2021

12. Knife + Heart - Dir: Yann Gonzales - 2018 - Gay porn and murder in ‘70s Paris with Vanessa Paradies? Sold. Also dildo knives are scary as fuck!!!

13. Great Freedom - Dir: Sebastian Meise - 2021

14. After Love - Dir: Aleem Khan - 2020

15. Rainbow - Dir: Paco Leon - 2022 -  Paco Leon, delivers a new fresh concept of Dorothy. Dora (maybe like Marco) is looking for her mother whom she has never met. Definitely not for everyone’s taste. Some people call it “pure art” others “wasted time”. Which one are you? 

16. The Mitchells vs The Machines - Dir: Michael Rianda - 2021

17. Another Round - Dir: Thomas Vinterberg - 2020

18. The Nest - Dir: Sean Durkin - 2020

19. Catherine Called Birdy - Dir: Lena Dunham - 2022

20. The Worst Person in The World - Dir: Joachim Trier - 2021

21. The Wonder - Dir: Sebastian Lelio - 2022

22. I’m Your Man - Dir: Maria Schader - 2021

23. As Far as I Know - Dir: Lorincz Nandor & Nagy Balint - 2020

24. 15 Years - Dir: Yuval Habadi - 2019

25. By The Grace of God - Dir: Francois Ozon - 2018

26. Rams - Dir: Grimur Hakonarson - 2015

27. All My Friends Hate Me - Dir: Andrew Gaynord - 2021 - You sometimes sympathise with Pete, you sometimes hate him. But you're always thinking about what is going on!

28. All The Old Knives - Dir: Janus Metz - 2022

29. Swan Song - Dir: Todd Stephens - 2021

30. The High Note - Dir: Nisha Ganatra - 2020 - Loved it. It's not rocket science but it's thoroughly enjoyable. Easy to watch, some great one-liners, excellent performances... Haters gonna hate no matter what. 

You know those bleak movies that really screw with your very soul? House of Sand and Fog is one of those.

Blu-ray review: “House of Sand and Fog” (2003)

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@giftober 2023 | Day 25: Teary

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This is a cinematography and filmmaking breakdown video essay on how Roger Deakins shoots horror and thrillers.