2007

01. Death Proof - Quentin Tarantino

Rip-roaring exhiliration! I have an almost romantic love for Tarantino's double-punch of road mayhem. Nihlistic without boundary - and hilariously profane without apology - Death Proof approximates the object of its homage even more succintly and carefully than Jackie Brown or Kill Bill, breathing almost palpable life into Q's favorite bargain basement, nailed-coffin film genre: 70s exploitation cinema. Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike, whose terrifically schizophrenic adventures  include preying on two nests of hotties (without, as he so astutely points out, the use of CGI). I found myself practically intimidated by all of its lead actresses which is, I think, apiece to the recreation.

[Just as I suspected I would, I've already been chastised for the inclusion of this film as its own entity, but despite the fact that in the U.S. this version's premiere was on DVD, I still contest that its inclusion is as a version of a certain film, not as a straight-to-DVD release (Sort of like a Studio re-edit of a foreign film - only a good thing).]

02. No Country For Old Men - Joel and Ethan Coen

Poised with a spareness of mood to harmonize with the spryness of its storytelling, Joel and Ethan Coen's existential nightmare seems epic and small all at the same time. Carrying far less weight, dolling out information only as it must, the hyper-colloquial fetish that seems so rich and funny in most of their canon hides
on the borders, allowing a tight yet formless tale - mano-a-mano across Texas over $2M with the aging sheriff on their trail - of no particular spice, to play out like a
John Ford western as directed by Terence Malick. There's no wanting for great, towering performances - all three principles are exceptional - but it is, without question, Anton Chiguurh - the psychotic, oxygen-tank brandishing bagman - who seems to linger in memory: He is at once as terrifying a presence as the unstoppable Michael Myers in Halloween and as calmly menacing as Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter.

03. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Andrew Dominik

Dominik's fascination with romanticized villainy whiles itself away in a magical place, kowtailing to our every squint of the softest cinemascope beauty; It's one breathtaking set-up after another. Pitt and Affleck breath their opposing ambitions with fire, the former squirmingly ominous and the latter deviant, childlike and finally, bitter with self-pity. Over its sharp-yet-dreamy visage, Assassination sounds terrific, too, culling dialogue both hyper-colloquial and snappy, dolled out by an impeccable supporting cast (most notably, the indelible Paul Schneider) over a haunting Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score. It's the sort of film you know is special without adding things up.

04. There Will Be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson

Daniel Day-Lewis is, yet again, the eerily compelling villian at the center of a variety of turf wars; He embodies the sly grizzle of charming wrongheadedness, a man of strong codes (none of them including honesty) and a man tortured by the duality of familial connection. Probing unselfconsciously, Anderson's confidence is so key to this coming off, and he tells the story without an ounce of hurry. The scope of the thing is monumental, with no call to soften or mythologize Little Boston's Frontier fumes. "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking" is not merely Daniel's drunken campfire "confessional", but the attitude of the film, which allegorizes (by close) the most blunt revelations on Religion's inseparable relationship/eternal struggle with Capitalism.

05. Zodiac - David Fincher

Or, how it would look if James Ellroy had written Family Plot. Fincher has this way of prolonging an icky feeling until only an eerie sense of normalcy permeates everything; A normal so normal it becomes weird of its own. Zodiac not only breathes this chilling status quo, it's a procedural on steroids. For being a sprawling eight reels, the momentum trumps all: You're never out of its grasp long enough to realize it. I was so used to the slow rhythm of unfolding facts, falsehoods and dead leads, it just kept going in my head long after the film ended.

06. Once - John Carney

I loved that it descends, thrillingly, from its love story haunches to reveal, instead, that indescribable bond between collaborating artists. Glen Hansard is immensely likable, Markéta Irglová is a childlike hyper-enthusiast and there is so much pleasure in the film's romantic entanglement of musical sensibilities. The joy of their pursuit, the chase - not the payoff - makes for an unwavering, sacred bit of charm, which I refused to cloud with my cynicism.

07. Rescue Dawn - Werner Herzog

Bale captures Dengler to a T - that arrogant, supersmart, excited kid in a grown-up's flight suit - but Werner Herzog is, as ever, the main character. He looms in every frame, observing human nature at face value, as he always does, leaving everything to depend entirely on casual circumstances and genuine luck. Like most films about long-playing survival treks, the deafening quiet of a half-starved existence gives the film that long-shadow muteness, as if the world were bracing itself for the long cry that never comes.

08. I'm Not There - Todd Haynes

Its the very best kind of sensory overload: A soft mush of a kaleidoscope that comes at us from all sides, breathing into us the spirit of a life's rebellion.  It would be cliche, at this point, to even imply that the text encapsulates Dylan's many-faced persona, but it does, and with such imagination and energy, approximating his many masks with absurdist casting (14 year old, African American Marcus Carl Franklin as The Woody Guthrie Moment), adaptations of songs alive and kicking before our eyes, fragments staged like deleted scenes from Don't Look Back (with Cate Blanchett doing a killer impersonation) and bio notes what still got the stinger in 'em. If only Haynes had the benefit of such confidence/clarity of thought when he made Velvet Goldmine.

09. Eastern Promises - David Cronenberg

Eastern Promises is rock solid and, like most Cronenberg films, does a whopper on you in your mind after you finish viewing it. Viggo Mortensen, in impentrable hardass mode, sporting a flawless Russian accent, is very much The Big Show at hand; We never stop examining his steely demeanor. Otherwise, the film leans closer, and much earlier on the picture, to a traditional genre film than A History of Violence did. It's like that film, stripped down to whatever's below marrow in a bone.

10. The Host - Bong Joon-ho

Precisely the type of film to fit Bong's penchant for using jagged mood shifts to combine and conquer a slew of genres within one film: There's slowly creeping J-horror hues, there is that unflappably off-kilter Katakuris-comedy element (when they're all rolling on the floor crying - and its hilarious), and there's even that disconnected, meditative connection (Kore-eda?) as old and young characters intertwine. And then, tossed in without care or worry, there's Giant Monster CGI-worship intermingling with environmental alarm. Bong is a director we should never import. I could have watched this madness for days on end.

Five more

the first 11 Minutes of 28 Weeks Later

Tightest, scariest foot race I've seen in accessible memory - and a close one, too.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

The distillation of singular thought from this bevy or ideas is the real success here, never more evident than in the manifestation of chaos and confusion; Loach renders Ireland's early struggle for freedom from England (and, later, from itself) as a tug-o-war so complicit, its participants so uncertain of its exact terms, that they find themselves passionately fighting for a cause - any cause - even as they're being pulled into the mud pit of ambiguity that stands between the two hypothetical teams of tuggers. As the only one left clutching his ideals when it all goes to shit, the unflappable Cillian Murphy is a benevolent firestorm of a stubborn patriotism. 

Ghosts of Cité Soleil

Never clearly supporting, decrying, sympathizing or finger wagging, Asger Leth and Milos Loncarevic are clearly caught up in the 2004 saga of brothers Billy and
2Pac, inexperienced gang leaders at the head of The Chimeras, who were armed and payrolled by former President Aristide to suppress the growing dissent in Cité Soleil, a shanty town located on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince (or, as the UN calls it, "the most dangerous place on earth"). Fashioned more like a documentary posing as a docudrama (they don't just bait the camera, it's to the point where they're appropriating moviespeak), Ghosts of Cité Soleil has threads that make it seem like a portrait of the faceless baddies in films like Black Hawk Down (here's how the screaming cot-addicts chucking ginormous bags of rice out of the back of a truck feel) or, a non-fiction riff on City of God. But it works more passionately as a sort of beaming message, spotlighting the existence of places like this in the very world we inhabit.

The Boss Of It All

Von Trier bookends the film as pretentiously as the actor in the center ring of it all, by telling us that we are not to read into the ensuing "comedy" in the typically intellectual terms we'd nearly trip over ourselves to apply to one of his films. No, in point of fact, he's arrested his own control by using Automavision, a process that allows a computer to select camera angles and movements at random and apply them (as in his Dogme films, he's freeing art from its oversimulated shackles). The result is an aggressively obtuse visage that's nothing if not a rider, tacked on to the butt of the joke. It's a stunt designed to take the piss out of both convention and its defiance, leaving only those of us who get a kick out of Von Trier's constant play to up the ante and refresh the medium. A point, to be sure, that he'd revel in taking offense to.

No End in Sight

A superb and disturbing chronicle of All Things Iraqi Freedom, which I found particularly valuable, given that I formed an opinion at the beginning of the war and
generally tuned out of its day-to-day events (Theo Panayides is right: "Raise the rating...if you haven't been following the News much over the past five years"). No End In Sight isn't just a fine film because it fills you in - it also examines the war as if it were something winnable and deconstructs the seemingly nonstop flood of failures by elected officials to gain control. There seem to be one of these great documentaries about Terror-related injustices per year, which is pretty disturbing.

Planet Terror

Essentially the cinematic equivalent of a Ween album, Planet Terror simultaneously parodies and paints in the colors of 70s splatter flicks of the lowest grade. It never needs to keep a logical base (scenes go unfinished and inconsequential backstories are unspooled), which helps to encapsulate its charm: Unabashed nonsense squares the focus on the aesthetic, which is constantly teetering between out-and-out hilarity and gooey horror homage.

Five Worst

Sicko

Repeating himself like a mantra in context-less snatches of heartache and insurance company betrayal, Moore is milking it big time, jettisoning any remaining shreds of his audacious entertainment in favor of ill-conceived trips to Cuba and invasive, downright bad filmmaking. No drawbacks to socialized medicine are given the nod (Tony Wilson's death anyone?), nor are there suggestions for how to replace our current healthcare system or what a good or likely plan might look like.

Spider-Man 3

Precisely the derivative, growth-hormone induced swill the first film was the antidote to. I'm not penning another word on this thing.

Transformers

More time to fill all the product placement requirements was required, so the film swelled to two and a half tedious hours. There are concepts that work best in cartoons - and Transformers (Spielberg blessing or no Spielberg blessing) is one of them. Live-action only underscores the silliness that exists in the space between the viewer and his robot-worship.

3:10 to Yuma

Dull, more than anything. Also, when Dallas Roberts' ever hurried, ever blunt banker upstages both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, something's amiss.

My Best Friend

Leconte can give even the most ham fisted of premises a classy, almost-repaired lining, camouflaging the bluntest of social commentaries and the most outrageous of
contrivances. Except here, where he doesn't.
 

Prior Years

Regular Lovers - Philippe Garrel, 2005

To pinpoint a universal scope through an exhaustive absorption of youthful indifference would have been easy; Garrel, however, is in it for all the marbles, feverishly watching with sadness and joy as, one by one, these characters find themselves forced into betrayal of their ideals. Sympathetic to these ideals, he treats each one as disposable, leaving the main character to finally accept his position as the last man standing and see finality only in his subconscious, as a dream overtakes him.  (And, of course, there's that earth-shattering scene where they all dance to The Kinks' "This Time Tommorrow".)

49th Parallel - Michael Powell, 1941.

The bold choice to make the doomed nazis the main characters gives the film something of a melodramatic, badge-on-your-sleeve rah-rah, as they're forced out of
safehouse after safehouse. And it should. It was originally conceived as straight up propoganda meant to incite U.S. involvement in WWII. Beyond its political means, 49th Parallel is also a great work of entertainment, skipping along at a snap-quick pace, wearing both the adventure hat and the war hat but, also, staging some fine ironies.

Jackass: The Movie - Jeff Tremaine, 2002

Breaking down the confines of the collective male psyche and the upending of The Establishment are hardly the deep concepts I'm proud to say I glean from both
the TV show and the film. But here we are.

The Clash: Westway to the World - Don Letts, 2000

I loved the way it seemed to simply be framed around a sort of detached roundtable discussion wherein the band just rattled off, candidly, their memories and
wisdom and the documentarian was only around to toss in photos and old footage from time to time.

Ace in the Hole - Billy Wilder, 1951

As dark and razory as Sweet Smell of Success, but on a grander, more openly satirical scale. Watching Douglas in this mode is a particular thrill. Billy Wilder takes a potshot, sure, but who better to make the most respectable fish-in-a-barrel cautionary maybe ever?

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - Mikio Naruse, 1960

Navigating with ease through the harsh realities of the postwar Ginza Strip life, Naruse weighs the price of each - both morally and emotionally - through the
genuinely remarkable main character (the "a" in the title hints at the film's omnipotent perception). Credit Hideko Takamine, whose performance as Mama (equal
parts winning perserverance and unwavering bad luck) puts us deep into her dilemna: Consider a marriage of convenience to be a way out into a mediocre life or
continue with a measure of independence constantly diminished by exploitation. Full confession: I found myself actively rooting for her to find a third solution.

The Philadelphia Story - George Cukor, 1940

Its peppy, but the key thing is the way Hepburn seems to exorcise her philosophies on both people and marriage, coming to the conclusion that, while lovable Jimmy
Stewart is the most exciting match, Cary Grant's character more correctly fits her in a philosophy coined by Andre Wescott: "We break up, get back together,
break up, get back together - sooner or later you realize we're the only ones who love to hate each other". Nearly all of it is delightful, particularly when its simply
absurd.

Killer of Sheep - Charles Burnett, 1977

Edited with a passive flow, as if observing just the right, random specks of existence necessary to summate human nature. It's a safe bet that David Gordon Green has seen this film: It not only features a boy that wears a grotesque animal mask for most of his screen time, but the film also seems to coast on fumes of hazy tone poem organization, moody music wafting in and out, bursts of achingly natural dialogue on which whose every audible word we hang, and impeccably sumptuous photography. I would've watched it for hours and hours.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House - H.C. Potter, 1948

Pace is in line with nothing I could describe - from slapstick setups to long, intricatee satire; Cinematography is pure candy. The intricate tracking shot through the Blandings' cramped apartment as they arise is a marvel. Clever bits like Myrna Loy's insanely detailed color specs on a walk-thru with the decorater benefit from the lob-it-up-and-hit-it fact that the film is in black and white. Later, it portrays the family as shooting into a stratosphere of wealth due, mostly, to their servant's marketing catchphrase ("If you ain't eatin' WHAM, you ain't eatin' HAM!"). Then, it breaks the fourth wall, with both Grant and Douglas welcoming the viewer to "drop in" on their elegance. They whole thing feels so subversive for its age, so aware of itself, so un-1948.

Hairspray - John Waters, 1988

That teenagers would be so passionate about dancing, so unspoiled by their own self-consciousness gives 1962 Baltimore an almost unheard of sense of fantasy; This is one of the best musicals in modern years, impeccably staged and terrifically entertaining. Easily John Waters' best film.