TRAVELOGUE, POOT STYLE: ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Photo by Henry Kaiser.

There’s no two ways about it: Werner Herzog has become an old poot. A Wagnerian, Nietzschian old poot, but an old poot nonetheless. Werner rails—old poot-like—against ‘tree-huggers and whale huggers’ and describes as ‘an abomination’ the fact that workers living in the no nighttime summer of the McMurdo Center in Anarctica practice yoga and aerobics. He sounds like Grandpa on The Simpsons.

Herzog finds boring New Age bullshitters among the McMurdo workers, lets them start talking and cuts them right off, voiceovering his disdain for their dull, self-serving stories. In parallel cuts, he lets almost equally boring but more self-consciously Wagnerianly philosophical bullshitters spout their horsehit proverbs or insights into science fiction. From the non-old poot viewpoint, it’s tough to tell them apart.

Encounters at the End of the World is, simply, a travelogue in the old poot style. Garsh darn, lookit this place—ain’t it somethin’? Basic ugly shots of amazing sights accompanied by the most obvious voice-over, juxtaposed with luminescent shots of even more amazing sights accompanied by the most obvious music. This is not the travelogue we’ve come to expect from ol’ Werner. Fata Morgana, a dreamlike series of disconnected images of African mysteries, had not a syllable of voiceover, never mind the aggressive old pooty pronouncements Herzog has come to prefer. Lessons of Darkness needed voice-over, but Herzog remained silent, trusting to the considerable poetry of his images to keep us enthralled.

His position seems to have been: look beneath the surface of what I show, and find the universal metaphor I’ve unearthed for you there. Herzog now seems to have left the metaphor business. It’s as if his pending mortality has him so freaked that he cannot believe the world exists without his commentary.

Silence would become the old poot. Here, jabbering away as he descends into literalism, Herzog’s insights into McMurdo and Anarctica are just not that insightful. They are, for anyone with a passing knowledge of the place, cliches of the lowest, most obvious order. That Werner states them with his classically incontrovertible Herzogian didacticism only makes him seem more past it, more pootish.

And while he voices deep displeasure at the New Age—whatever the hell that might mean today—he’s deeply vested in New Age tropes. Someone Herzog dubs a philosopher tells us all about the universal consciousness, while another postulates on how awful life must be for a parasitc worm that lives in a sea urchin’s anus. “A terrible way to spend your life,” this philosopher declaims, pootishly. Pardon me, but how does he know?

Maybe a sea urchin’s anus is the Carlyle Hotel of sea-creature anuses; maybe parasitic worms have struggled on the evolutionary ladder for eons working up to the sea urchin’s anus. Maybe the worms’ daddies are as proud as Pontius Pilate…such assertions would seem a random, silly bit of anthropomorphic nonsense if Herzog didn’t provoke similar hypotheses from everyone he interviews.

Sitting high above an endless penguin rookery, and finally getting to talk to Dr. Penguin himself, the foremost expert in the world and everything—a guy Herzog desribes as ‘taciturn’ and unreachable—Herzog asks: are there gay penguins? Mr. Taciturn gives Herzog far more reasonable answers than he deserves. Later, Herzog captures the astonishing sight of an unstoppable penguin determined to march away from the sea, toward the impenetrable 10,000 foot peaks of the interior. As the penguin waddles off at high speed, Herzog feels the need to tell us the bird is heading for ‘certain doom.’

Happily, things turn hypnotic when the camera descends below the Antarctic ice. The world underneath– enormous billowing jellyfish, bizarre translucent, eyeless creatures, clams squirting themselves across a dark brown ocean floor, unearthly light filtering through the ice—makes the picture. He tells us the divers call this “going into the cathedral.” In case we miss the point, celestial music of all forms—orchestral, didgeridoos, massed voice chorales—leaves little room for interpretation. Likewise, when snowmobiles race across the ice we get fast-picking banjo and guitar. When the wind howls ominously, the soundtrack is all deep slide blues. It’s totally Ken Burns.

The book to read on McMurdo is Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson and Erik Sønneland. They describe McMurdo as Herzog finds it: a brutally industrial, purely functional urban sprawl in the midst of exquisite, killing emptiness populated by seasonal loonies trapped in an unyielding hierarchy of task. The laborers are beneath the skilled workers who are beneath management who are beneath the scientists and everybody has to obey the bureaucrats back in Denver. Nothing matters more than not running out of ice cream substitute. In Big Dead Place, the authors know how to translate the claustrophobia of living in an artificial world into a metaphor for any urban landscape. For Herzog, the inhabitants are a moiling hive of idiosyncratic personalities, some of whom occasionally appear to know what they’re talking about. Some play excruciating guitar solos atop house trailers while others drop down into the cathedral.

But when they do, it’s not Herzog who films them. One of several disquieting aspects of Encounters is that the raison d’etre for the film seems to lie in another of Herzog’s devil’s bargains. Most of the material for Grizzly Man lay under the legal control of the dead protagonist’s girlfriend. Herzog gave her more screen time and apparent approval than she warranted. There was also a clear sense that he tailored his portrait of the Grizzly Man to suit her specs so he could use the once-in-a-lifetime footage the dead guy amassed. Here, Herzog states that his friend Henry Kaiser shot the underwater sequences. Kaiser is also listed as one of the film’s producers. The slapdash nature of the film suggests a hasty trip south by Herzog to find something with which to bookend what Kaiser provided. It’s shocking how prosaic Herzog’s imagery can be—what a banal film it is, given the beauty of the place.

The travelogue goes like this, as many do: Grandpa came to town, found what amused and repelled him and looked no further. Maybe the angry old pootish tone of his narration derives from being trapped in the editing room and realizing that—maybe for the first time—he could no longer work his old magic.

THEY'LL GET BETTER AT IT AS THEY GO ALONG: THE BEST FILMS OF 2009

Someone gave me a hard time the other day, demanding to know why I don’t write more about movies everyone has seen—and this was another Rail film reviewer! The answer’s obvious, ain’t it? As much as the mainstream can blow, it blew with particular force in 2009. Meanwhile, as every outlet kept telling us, the heyday of indie film is over. Distributors are dying, venues are shuttered, Netflix and cable obviate the need for theatrical release. Yet the best films this year gave the lie to that thesis; all are international, indie or straight-up arthouse. Even District 9, a blockbuster if there ever was one, felt under the radar, subversive somehow, as if no film with such big box office should be so witty and complex. 2009 gave us few masterpieces and almost as few immersive escapes.
This year, we had to search out the gems.

Beware, beware, beware of the naked man: Baader Meinhoff Complex
1) Baader Meinhof Complex

How could you top this story? Murderous, brilliant, shockingly effective cast-offs of the German bourgeoisie invent modern urban terrorism, merge European and Middle Eastern guerrilla outfits, take psychic control of an entire nation, make a farce of its judicial system and then die/get murdered in prison. The film walks a moral and dramatic tightrope that perfectly captures the psychosis, ambition, rock star sex appeal, and unintentional, homicidal self-parody of Germany’s foremost terrorists of the Vietnam era. Told with a dynamic camera and absolutely no explanation, Complex, like the best films of 2009, leaves you to draw your own conclusions. The overriding conclusion, as with all the best films, is that you have been shown every side of the argument, with no melodrama to ease your way through the complexities.

2) 24 City (Er shi si cheng ji)

Jia Zhang-ke, the best director in the world, here reverts to the grand tableau-like tracking shots of his 2006 masterpiece, Still Life. As Rail film critic Lu Chen observed, these shots parallel the Chinese tradition of narrative pictorial scrolls, with their infinitely unrolling, slowly revealed visions. In 24 City, Zheng’s barely moving camera celebrates and undermines China’s aggressive modernism and the denial—of freedom, of community, of history, of truth—that accompanies it. Or, in certain cases, fuels it. The most beautiful film of the year, 24 City proves the most purely cinematic. In merging documentary interviews, actors pretending to be documentary subjects, portraits, unstoppable upthrusting cityscapes and clanging factories immolating themselves in an orgy of self-demolition, Zheng gives us—as the actual 24 City gives itself—a new form, a way of seeing that digests, even as it ignores, all the forms that came before.

3) Police, Adjective  (Politist, adj.)

Yes, all you whining complainers, by the standards of Transformers or even French Connection, in this policier very little happens. There are no shoot-outs, car chases, or even tracking shots. It’s Romania; no one can afford them. The tension and poetry reside in the understated, telling observation of the clash between duty and conscience in the day-to-day whether at work or in love. Scenes start small and either stay that way or escalate into verbal pyrotechnics that hit harder than any CGI explosion. No one raises their voice, but lives are changed, hearts revived, corruption ensconced. And how many films would dare to base their climax around a dictionary being read aloud? By my count, only this one, ever.

4) District 9An orgy of self-demolition: 24 City

Get some!*

But…some of what?

*( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI)

There went the neighborhood: District 95) Adventureland/ZombieLand

Leading manchild Jessie Eisenberg establishes the brand in two witty, satisfying, not all that dissimilar movies in which amusement parks figure prominently. One offers the bloodsport of late teen romance, the other ditto killing zombies. Eisenberg’s the same guy in both: too smart/sensitive for the room, but capable of a ruthlessness that makes his incisive nebbish routine more than bearable. Both films revel in self-consciously meta-aware dialogue, aware of the character’s own self-consciousness and of each film’s self-conscious determination to warp genre to its own ambitious ends. Both get cute and suffer genre predictability in the third act, but what can you do? On this level of expenditure, it’s a revelation that they get away with as much brainy anarchy as they do. As for Woody Harrelson’s career, clearly he’s in a post self-consciousness, post self-parody space. A space Bill Murray will never occupy, because after inventing it, he long since transcended. Quote of the year: “I know it’s a pretentious affectation, but it relaxes me.”

6) Exodus (Cheut ai kup gei)

Naked frog-men cops beat a crawling man with hammers under a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth as opera blares. With that introduction, you might expect another surreal Hong Kong male-bonding police procedural. While vesting deeply in the color-saturated, overly designed visuals of Hong Kong bros-before-hos master Johnny To, Exodus explores the driving question of film noir reduced to its most basic component: are women trying to kill men? And if they are, can love forestall the murder(s)? In this Hong Kong, it’s not To’s lingering glances between he-men cops that hold the passion. In this world, men and women actually make an effort to understand each other. That effort comes to naught, but they really do try. Really.

7) Surveillance

Bill Paxton and Julia Ormond play a couple who understand one another perfectly. Federal agents whose love and lust burn undimmed, they elicit great jealousy and furious anger from the rural dimwit coppers who need help with a rash of grisly serial killings. Director Jennifer Lynch nabbed Off Broadway’s and indie’s best actors to give depth to a modern updating of the kind of idea that built Roger Corman’s American International Pictures. In Lynch’s worldview, true love should and does triumph, even when it’s knee-deep in blood. Inexplicably ignored upon release, this nasty little tale’s sophisticated perfomances and fiendish back-story sneak up on you, and seem more nourishing after the movie than during. Another great line sums up serial killers and couples dealing with their own passion: “They’ll get better at it as they go along, or maybe they just don’t give a shit.”

8) The Missing Person

Michael Shannon shows up again, in almost every shot of this neglected indie noir. With his toreup face and thousand-mile stare, he so belongs in neglected indie noirs it makes you fear he’ll never become a big-movie leading man like he deserves. A drunken defeated private eye who channels both Raymond Chandler and Elliott Gould’s fractured remaking of Marlowe (in Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye) has to travel on a job. Of course he meets colorful characters (some a bit too damn colorful, as if they didn’t fully understand the phrase “supporting player”), falls inappropriately in love, and ultimately refuses to do what he got paid for. The style, like the story, revels in throwback, and suffers from how poorly its digital imaging conveys the chiaroscuro that noir requires. But Shannon holds it together, and the quiet dignity of his self-degradation might be the performance of the year.

9) In the Loop

Yes, I am an obnoxious wanker!: In The Loop
A relentless, hilarious exercise in Brit-style, Swiftian political truth, wherein everyone—especially those holding the fate of the free world in their hands—proudly acts precisely as venal and short-sighted as they really are. Although it’s simplified so American audiences can understand it (subtitles might have helped, too) and depicted as farce, the incessant narcissistic rage seems a more accurate portrayal of our governing processes than any documentary.

10) The Escapist

One method of escaping: The Escapist
Brian Cox, as everybody knows by now, was so far and away the better Hannibal Lecter it ain’t even funny. Missing the boat on the bigger film featuring that character seemed to hamstring his career, and he’s spent all his time since playing smaller parts. With his orotund voice and brave embrace of his baggy body and poxy face, Cox carries a heavy load of melancholy. His intensity, and the perfect scaling of his emotion to every moment, makes him among the most satisfying actors on the planet. Here he gets to lead, both a film and a prison break. Such films—the good ones—move along predictable lines and still generate suspense. Escapist transcends on the strength of its superb cast (doing their best work to avoid getting blown off the screen by Cox) and—for this kind of exercise—a remarkable, restrained intelligence.

11) Medicine for Melancholy

I know our audience is around here someplace: Medicine For Melancholy
Made for practically nothing, Melancholy manages the trifecta of a singular visual style, story material that you’ve seen nowhere else, and a willingness to poke gentle fun at its own characters. Melancholy makes a virtue of its low budget necessities: street locations, easy naturalist actors, and the smartest parsing of the hipster dilemma ever.

Honorable Mention: Bleeder

BAM presented the work of Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn, the auteur behind the Pusher series. Bleeder is Refn’s never-seen masterpiece, his first picture after 1996’s Pusher 1. Bleeder’s like a Kevin Smith movie—about video store clerks, their girlfriends, and the maniacs who sell them weed—only made by someone smart. Refn grasps what the dead-end Kevin Smith life would really do to its characters, and the violence they might resort to from sheer frustration. Their slacker, supposed solutions are writ in blood or abandoned, leaving someone either dead, maimed, or perpetually stewing. Refn’s rigorous, taut style shows his characters no mercy, and each is shocked in his or her turn when they discover their own true nature. And Bleeder’s still not available on DVD in America.

DEPTH IN A DECADE OF DISTRACTION: THE TWENTY BEST FILMS OF THE OUGHTSS

The best films of the last ten years resisted the distraction or distractedness which seems to be the decade’s signature. Remarkably, directors created and audiences found films that required and rewarded concentration. Everybody knows so much now, so much of form, technique, method and intention. Film fanatics curate their own private museum of DVDs or downloads, and seeing a favorite or intriguing film five times is no big deal. As a result, we’ve become connoisseurs of fragments. We YouTube sex scenes, punch lines, iconic speeches (“Say hello to my little fren’!”), car chases, classic moments. We accept that most films don’t succeed in their entirety, but might have a moment here or there worth remembering. But moments are not drama.

Films that function as complete aesthetic and dramatic entities are rarities. Anybody who watches only the car chases in Deathproof or the seduction scenes inMulholland Drive might subsequently defend both movies without recognizing the level of their own detachment. In the light of Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy proclaiming the death of the epic novel, and the ever-increasing brain-reduction we all suffer under the unrelenting barrage of schlockbusters (which, like, totally have their virtues!) it’s a relief to see understated, resonant, layered films find distribution and audiences. And inspiring to see films of moral, narrative or technical complexity thrive in the mainstream.

The best films of the decade revealed truth in the first viewing, and grew not only richer, but more entertaining with repeat visits. While their highlights offer plenty of kicks, if that’s what you’re after, the narrative method remains cinematic—story-telling modes that cannot be replicated in fiction or theatre, and were made to be observed in a big dark room in the company of strangers. The best films of the 2000s dealt in archetypal themes, and harkened to the community campfire that no amount of Netflix On Demand can replace.

I fucking hope.

Number 20 is a catch-all, a decade’s worth of Bruno Dumont (Twentynine Palms ’03; Flandres ’06; Hadewijch ’09) and Michael Haneke (La Pianist ’01; The Time of the Wolf ’03; Caché ’05, Funny Games {US re-make} ’07; The White Ribbon’09). Neither director can escape his signature concerns enough to make a film that escapes the constraints those concerns impose. Their excessive mannerism draws you in, but keeps you from immersing. It’s an academic standoff—admirable, but frustrating.

Dumont and Haneke strive to be so damn adult, with their furrowed brows and tortured psyches, but Number 19, Madagascar (USA—2005—Eric Darnell/Tom McGrath) revels in being juvenile. It’s just amped up enough, reliant on wit rather than gags, gave adults their portion with hidden Twilight Zone references and never turned oppressive with messages or lessons learned.

Number 18, Morvern Callar (UK - 2002—Lynne Ramsay) features a heroine determined to learn no lessons of any kind. Incarnating a new British youth, she stumbles from one sensation—one New Drug—to the next, morals-free and lucky as hell. With its air of aimlessness without longing—a shocking rejection of the key teen movie trope—and a rotting body in the living room, Movern seemed less somehow on first viewing, but its mood, its atmosphere—poisonous, recognizable and true—linger and grow in the mind.

Number 17, Spirited Away / Sen to Chihiro no kamikakush ( Japan- 2001—Hayao Miyazaki) provides (along with all of Miyazaki’s ouvre), the poetic mysteries we crave; the suggestion that all perceptible phenomena exists only as the signs and wonders of a hidden world. Miyazaki’s Michael Powell-like use of color to express emotion and the odd inevitability of his pacing, grants his animation a profundity, an emotional pull, in the form of the unspoken yearning that his young protagonists never manage to fulfill and his adult audience recognizes only too clearly.

While Miyazaki employs the most spare dialogue, director Rian Johnson joyously immerses US teenagers in the linguistic convolutions, the relentless iambic pentameter, of the hysterical period of film noir and, of course, Shakespeare (orDeadwood). In Number 16, Brick (USA- 2005) Johnson creates a singular noir milieu, comprised of lethal terror and the high-school social melee. This accurately presents the high school social melee for what it is: deadly, nuanced, ridiculous, and inescapable.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa had a productive and worthy decade (Bright Future ’03; Ghost Cop ’04; Loft ’05; Shriek ’06; Tokyo Sonata ’08) to say the least and Number 15Pulse/Kairo (Japan—2001), best showcases his gifs: quotidian locations made beautiful by Godard-like composition, an eerily matter-of-fact presentation of the greatest horror, hypnotic pacing, absolutely unexplained allegories and solution-free resolutions: endings guaranteeing that everything that has gone wrong will, in the future, only go worse.

"Can daddy please have the heroin?" Pusher II

Number 14 Red Riding: 1974 ( UK—Julian Jarrold—2009) / 1980 (UK—James Marsh—2009) are British made for TV movies released theatrically stateside, thus raising of the question: how many films this decade were better than The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men or The Shield?Answer: damn few as far as character development, distinctive dialogue style or ensemble casting. The best of the Red Riding trilogy is almost Pusher (see below) lite: brutal, spare, unexplained, and colloquial. But Red Riding ventures further into melodrama, so it’s only the second best killer/thriller film series of the last ten years. Only.

Number 13, Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) (France—Cédric Klapisch—2002) brings us to the trend of the decade, which I’m required by statute to discover. In the 00s, an underground railroad of (mostly) foreign thrillers, noirs and genre pictures developed, offering a complex, insightful presentation of the human dilemma usually associated with more self-consciously arty and less commercial fare. Like Ni pour, these thrillers mix showcased plotting with cynical characterizations, class/race consciousness, Jean-Pierre Melville-ian locations and wicked idiomatic dialogue. Ni pour goes even further by doing the impossible: it creates an entirely new idea of the femme fatale, and how she got to be one. In that, it’s the most feminist film on this list.

A new world—ours—in which every act or aspect of life is measured only in its worth as barter, as currency, is depicted in Number 12, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days/ 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (Romania—Cristian Mungiu—2007). This purely transactional appraisal applies to abortion, sex, hotel rooms, cars, clothes, a handshake, a rape or a passport. The nightmare of negotiating unending government beauracracy and personal betrayal is shot in a fluid, agile, style. Mungui eschews cuts—he employs lengthy single-shot scenes that underscore how all the characters are in the same mess together, be they supposed supportive life-long allies or mutually antagonistic one-deal-only partners. His unsparing eye and tough-ass compassion mark Mungui one of the most promising new directors.

There ain’t no new Tarkovsky, and there ain’t gonna be. But the emerging filmmakers of China—some whose films are shown in their homeland, some whose never will be and some who go to jail because they are—share Tarkovsky’s preference for endless slow shots that reveal so much reality they render it fantastic, for allowing mise-en-scene to provide all the context or explanation we’re going to get and for moments that combine heartbreaking bittersweet awareness of life with the promise that, while life will remain bleak, a fleeting instant of connection gives it meaning. Number 11, Still Life/Sanxia haoren (China—Zhang Ke Jia—2006) Still Life brings rigorous beauty, documentary-like presentation of concerns that exist only in the 21st Century and—again that word—clear-eyed compassion.

If Number 10, The New World (USA—2005—Terrence Malick) suffers, it’s only in comparison to Malick’s incomparable Thin Red Line. When the spell of Malick’s sublime tableaux weakens, his processes become suddenly visible, and we fall out of the story. That happens no more than twice, and no other director can employ cinema to replicate the dream-state with the poetry of Malick. In his role as the American Ozu, Malick captures the ungraspable essence of the natural world; dude loves himself some wildlife. Plus, he makes Christian Bale seem not only not sinister, but kind-hearted. And only a genius could accomplish that.

The most credible adult love story of the decade, and Ben Kingsley as the most enjoyable, unforgettable villain, make Number 9, Sexy Beast (UK—Jonathan Glazer—2000) rise so far above genre it invents a new one. Referencing 1970sPerformance without once evoking it, Beast showcases rich self-dramatizing characters, nasty brutal humor and Ian McShane being all McShanian ’n’ terrifying. Charming, blood-soaked, deeply perverse and self-consciously proud,Beast kicked off a newfound malevolent exuberance in British gangsterdom.

Number 8, Triplets of Bellville/Les triplettes de Belleville (France—Sylvain Chomet—2003) conceals so much heartache, class commentary, mother love, innovative visual genius and Tati-like gags under it’s comfy blanket of astonishing charm and likeability. Featuring pretty much the most accurately rendered dog—and the best dog-dreams—in movie history.

“It all ends in tears; these arrangements usually do,” the villain tells our hero, a post-mod, post-noir coke wholesaler who, like every sensible noir protagonist, views the world with deep-seated but never acknowledged dread. Daniel Craig gives Number 7 Layer cake (UK—Matthew Vaughn—2004) its glamorous focus, but it’s the note-perfect character actors and laconic self-mocking dialogue that provide the depth. The visual and narrative rigor, the lack of decoration or of plot explanation (or of subtitles for them Limey accents) raise this would-be entertainment to the level of all great noir: the tragic certainty that each Faustian bargain ends in tears.

            "Close the fucking curtains!" Let The Right One In

As we sink beneath a tidal wave of cheesy vampire-derived nonsense determined to leach any mystery, romance or tragedy from that arena,Number 6 Let the Right One In/Låt den rätte komma in (Sweden—Tomas Alfredson—2008) reminds how compelling an archetype—and what sort of identity and moral questions—the mythology can still raise. Instead of wallowing in soft-core, Right One asks the tough questions about the forming of sexuality, the limits of friendship and loyalty, the exploitative nature of love and how character may or may not determine fate. A delicate, evolved love story, awash in blood, told with grace and a fiendish sense of consequences.

Dane Nicholas Winding Refn wrote and directed Pusher, a neo-realist street thriller, a masterpiece of concision. He never thought he’d make another. Then poor fiscal planning, two more underappreciated pictures (including Bleeder, which, if it came out in this decade, would sure as hell be on this list), forced him to the edge of bankruptcy. To save himself, Refn made two sequels to his original thriller, one right after another. And so Number 5, Pusher 2: “With Blood on My Hands” (2004) / Pusher 3: “I’m the Angel of Death” (Denmark – 2005) showcases what tight visual grammar, propulsive narrative momentum, an ear for the street and a realpolitik awareness of the new immigrant realities in Europe can produce. Unlike the desperate men in his pitiless urban dope-dealing, whore-mongering, business partner-disemboweling universe, Refn did his best work in the most dire circumstances.

Less dire, more familiar circumstances lend Number 4, Linda Linda Linda(Japan—Nobuhiro Yamashita—2005) its unlikely heartfelt emotion.; Four girls in a Japanese high school have to learn the immortal Blue Hearts Japanese punk anthem “Linda Linda Linda” and play it at their school’s talent show. In this quiet little masterpiece, a New Yorker short story kind of tale, the drama derives from the nuance. And, not so much like a New Yorker story, from a kick-ass rock and roll finale.

Help Me Eros/Bang bang wo ai shen (Taiwan—Kang-sheng Lee—2007),Number 3 creates a seemingly new visual language, a modern narrative echoing the crushingly modern, homicidally indifferent city of its setting. Told in simply framed, hallucinatory one-shot tableaux rich in color, modern street scenes, and repressed emotion, Lee presents a vision of our distractedness, a study in technologically induced alienation and failed groping after love, or any human connection. Immersed in all this banal reality, Lee finds the only possible narrative solution: magic.

"I laugh sometimes myself."

Number 2, No Country For Old Men (USA—Joel & Ethan Coen—2007) remains watchable, rewarding, irritating, funny, compelling and tragic. Is it a capitalist critique (as my eighth or ninth viewing suggests), a Beckettian riot of English as only Americans can mangle it and/or the end of the West(ern)? The Coen’s obsession with American idiosyncrasy as expressed in regional mannerism here serves rather than mocks their characters, and that makes this the most adult of their films. That and the unbeatable source material.

"It's your decade, Bill."

Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003)/ Kill Bill Vol. 2(USA—Quentin Tarantino—2004), the undisputed Number 1, as deranged and fragmented as our age, a cartoon for adults, the most daring and original style-piece of the decade, with all that bloodshed just to make us smile. Tarantino’s ability to synthesize Asian cinema tropes and render them American predicts the cinema to come. His deep distractedness, and that ability to synthesize, makes him—like it or not—the very model of a contemporary filmmaker. That, and that QT has inexhaustible ideas and not a millimeter of depth. Yet nobody matches his technique, not with actors, the camera, sound design, soundtracks, multi-media formats or editing. Thomas Keller, the chef behind the famously sublime restaurants French Laundry and Per Se, reportedly believes that our palate stops tasting after three bites. So his meals are made of millions of tiny portions, each discrete, but all adding up to a complex and orchestrated whole. That’s Tarantino’s method, relying on his jittery sensibility and connoisseur’s knowledge to reject any realist tendencies in narrative: he is—and allows us to be—the ultimate escapists.

Best Retrospectives & Re-Releases
Thank you Film Forum, BAM, MoMA, 
Anthology Film Archives and the Japan Center:

Sailor Suit & Machine Gun/ Sêrâ-fuku to kikanjû (Japan—1981—Shinji Somai)
Chelsea Girls  (USA—1966—Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her/ 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’el (France—1967—Jean-luc Godard)
Shohei Imamura Retrospective 
In A Lonely Place (USA—1950—Nicholas Ray)
Fallen Idol (UK—1948—Carol Reed)
Human Condition/ Ningen no jôken (Japan—1959/’61—Masaki Kobayashi)
Celine & Julie Go Boating/ Céline et Julie vont en bateau(France—1974—Jacques Rivette)
The Red Shoes (UK -1948—Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger)
Brighton Rock (UK—1947—John Boulting)

HEAVIOSITY VS. FUN: THE 2009 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

"Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda..."

2009 New York Film Festival, September 25–October 11

The 2009 Festival took a lot of flak for succumbing to “festivalism.” This affliction supposedly drove the Festival to choose films of a certain rigor, films lacking in fun, films that would edify us all with their high-end film-iness. A.O. Scott in the Times practically begged the programmers to lighten up by offering more Hollywood crap. (He must not have been in Walter Reade the year the Festival opened withStrange Days.)

No matter how much Scott worried that the mainstream was underserved, a festival with an Almodovar picture and three first-rate police procedurals cannot be accused of lacking fun. True, there was a certain take-your-medicine-it’s-good-for-you grimness in the programming, traceable to the selectors feeling all film-school Euro-canonical. Believe me, if Jean-Pierre Melville were alive, he’d have had a picture in here. Bergman ditto. Some exalted grinding retreads spoiled the mix, Claire Denis foremost. But there were transcendent, uh, visions, some pure cinema (a three-hour Chinese documentary) and some pure blood ’n’ guts (The Red Riding Trilogy). I logged at least two days of over eight hours of viewing, and the ass ache was worth every minute.

ANTICHRIST, dir. Lars von Trier

As Robert Christgau said of Tom Waits, Lars Trier is so full of shit they should name a Porto-San after him. Of the many cheesy épater le bourgeois affectations in this porno kitsch (dead babies, stiff dicks, lady masturbation, fetishistic mutilation, unkind creatures of the forest), none are as galling as Trier’s effrontery in dedicating his hogwash to Andrei Tarkovsky. Suffice to say that Antichristepitomizes anti-Tarkovsky in every frame. Who does this guy think he’s fooling? The NYFF selection committee, for starters.

GHOST TOWN, dir. Zhao Dayong

With Errol Morris relatively fallow, domestic documentaries have devolved into moral melodrama or such avid preaching to the choir that no actual content is required (cf. Fuel). As for addressing the documentary form itself, has anyone done that since Sherman’s March? Yet Zhao Dayong’s intimate, gorgeous, restrained, unexplained three-hour presentation of the abandoned peasants–members of the reviled Christian Lisu and Nu ethnic minorities—who took over the abandoned concrete Zhiziluo Village in the absolute boondocks of the mountains of western China offers a new, rich take on traditional form.

Made possible by digital video, Ghost Town is the most cinematic and painterly digi-video yet made. And Dayong did it all himself, living in barren fire-heated rooms for two seasons and filming every aspect of his subject’s comfortless, pre-industrial lives. Had he dared submit his work to the Chinese authorities it would have been, in his words, “asking to be raped.” What might enrage the censors is Zhao Dayong’s poetic capturing of a brutally Hobbesian, purely rural, predominantly 19th century existence—an existence likely shared by more Chinese than those in the glittering cities Westerners think of as today’s China. Beautifully shot, unsentimental, and perceptive, Ghost Town is the jewel of the Festival.

Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu (ROOM AND A HALF), dir. Andrey Khrzhanovskiy

If the title seems endless, that’s nothing compared to sitting through the film, an ecstatically, maddeningly back-patting meditation on the life and work of the Russian exiled poet Joseph Brodsky. Remember those endless essays about himselfThe New Yorker used to run, in which we learned of every bottle of milk Brodsky ever pulled sweating from a groaning Communist refrigerator? Room attempts to be more light-hearted, but it’s every bit as completist. No Russian cliché is left unpresented: Brodsky’s tearful, dominant, full-featured mama, his ineffectual hand-wringing daddy, the exquisitely pointy-faced Russian lit-babes that resentfully threw themselves at him in succession, the stone-faced pre-Perestroika apparatchiks terrified of his unquenchable genius. After I don’t know how many hours, I silently screamed at the screen: “I get it, already! I get it!” Then I got up and left.

THE ART OF THE STEAL, dir. Don Argott

Speaking of the documentary as moral melodrama, here’s the clumsily told but still compelling saga of the powers-that-be in the Philadelphia art world inexorably wresting control of the priceless Barnes Foundation collection from its under-moneyed, less sophisticated executors. Quite late in the film we learn that the director uses the staunchest advocates of one side of the struggle to tell what we mistook for the whole story. When these advocates leave their recliners to grapple with the real world, they stand revealed as the pathetic losers they are, thus eradicating whatever moral authority Argott hoped they might represent. There’s no denying the greed and malfeasance on display, but Argott’s inept manipulation, his insistence on heroes and villains, makes him seem not worldly enough to grasp the subtleties of the story. Especially irritating is his flipping between excitedly telling us how many billions the Barnes collection is worth and his puppets declaiming over and over that art should never be about money.

LEBANON, dir. Samuel Moaz

"Dude, war is intense!"

An exercise in bravura technique that for once gives more than it takes away. Moaz shot his memory of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon entirely from inside the tank in which he served the Israeli army. We see the roads, the fighting, the civilians, the dead dogs, the shattered lives through the driver’s cross-haired viewfinder and hear through a cacophony of motorized sound. The effect is claustrophobic and terrifying. Moaz pulls it off, faltering only with a too-long soliloquy about the bafflement of average kids hurled into war. As with Waltz With Bashir, the moral disconnect between the confusion inside the tank and the consequences it wreaks outside cannot cleanse the warriors of culpability, no matter how much Moaz yearns that it might.

36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN), dir. Jacques Rivette

                     The dull clowns of Around A Small Mountain.

I’ve never liked circus movies. They always seem too schematic; clowns are dull, etc., etc. But even if I loved them, the tiny absurdist conceits in this almost romance are too opaque to entertain. Rivette seems mighty obsessed by them, but to what end? Clearly, this film was chosen because the old master made it. He’s part of the Euro-canon, so he has to be included.

HADEWIJCH, dir. Bruno Dumont

Opacity for opacity’s sake plagues Dumont’s latest, a great disappointment after the physical and emotional savagery ofTwentynine Palms. In Palms, the characters were opaque to one another, but their halting, closed-off intimacy exposed them to us. They’ve remained vital and real to me in the six years (!) since Palms’ release. I think about their dilemma, and Dumont’s solution to it, often. In his new effort, Dumont attempts to channel Bresson by following a lost Parisian soul who, rejected by the nunnery where she hoped to serve, falls in with Arabs who turn out to be terrorists (oh, really?) and then apparently blows herself up near the Arc de Triomphe. Only wait, she doesn’t…and the film meanders through three different endings, each more forced-seeming and more groping-after-meaning than the last. No matter how obscure, all of Bresson’s plots, the narratives, make sense; all track as story. Dumont mistakes impenetrability for Bresson’s greatest gift: mystery.

Das wieße band (WHITE RIBBON), dir. Michael Haneke

  "Yes, I will grow up to be a Nazi!"

Hey, guess what? German High Protestantism in the early 20th century, with its vicious repression and ornate far-reaching concepts of sin, manifested in insular rural villages in perverse destructive ways, and thus created a German mindset ripe for National Socialism. Capish? Good—now you can skip the film, with all its overly plotted episodes and egregious sign-posting. It looks great, in sharp black and white modeled after Fassbinder’s Effi Briest in framing, pace, era and costumes. But here, for the first time, Haneke preaches, and it’s wearying.Caché demonstrated the nuance he’s capable of capturing, for all his love of violence. White Ribbon plays like a tedious sermon, a long pointless Protestant downer. And again, it seems, chosen for the director’s brand, not for the quality of the work.

THE RED RIDING TRILOGY: 1974, dir. Julian Jarrold; 1980, dir. James Marsh; 1983, dir. Anand Tucker

The wreck of a Gypsy camp in Red Riding.

This year’s Festival saw good and great directors alike founder when they attempted to achieve heavyosity by head-on depiction of “great” ideas. It’s a commentary, and not necessarily a sad one, that recently the most profound films have been genre pictures. By remaining rigorously true to genre, they evoke the very themes upon which more tedious, high-art pictures come to grief. The Red Riding Trilogy, based on the pitiless novels by David Peace, concern the Yorkshire Ripper, a murderer of young girls who terrorized England’s North in the mid-1970s. Ripples spread wide from his atrocities, producing corruption in every institution, which in turn corrupts almost every heart. The three films were made by England’s Channel 4, and each stands on its own while illuminating the next. 1974 is the most matter-of-factly hopeless; it features a monster of a man shrugging his shoulders and saying calmly, “We all have private pleasures.” 1980suggests that what goes around comes around, even in the North, where, according to the crooked cops: “We do what we like.” 1983 attempts redemption and proves the weakest of the three. 1973 and 1980 are astonishing in their spare, propulsive narratives, reminiscent of The Pusher trilogy: simple shots, fast cutting, abbreviated dialogue, no lingering for the protagonist or for us; there’s too much moral squalor to track. They also feature the performance of the year by Sean Harris (Ian Curtis of Joy Division in 24 Hour Party People). Even a roomful of deeply scary men fear Harris, and for damn good reason. A host of stellar UK character actors, with Paddy Considine leading the pack, and the no-frills profundity of the story-telling, evoke the parallel best of American television, The Wire. Is there any higher praise?

Da Vinci, Sedaris, Middlesex, Deleuze: The Da Vinci Code

Heretofore suppressed transcripts of the Sermon on the Mount have been discovered, in which Jesus apparently said:

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