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)

GENRE TRIUMPHANT: THE 11 BEST FILMS OF 2008

The best films this year were genre pictures: vampire, policier, art film, gangster, war movie…all using genre conventions to keep us anchored as they shattered every genre convention we know. The sensation of being on familiar ground and utterly unmoored made the usual fare seem even more schematic, yesterday’s news. Especially yesterday’s news was, for instance, the supposed cautionary tale ofWall-E; its metaphors of overconsumption proved unintentionally amusing in the face of the new economic reality. By the time Wall-E’s future arrives, we’ll all be fighting him on the slag heaps for those scraps of resonant refuse—Rubik’s Cubes, hubcaps, any sign of green life…

So many films this year seem equally time-warped, as if they didn’t realize their narrative methods just weren’t that effective. But the best of 2008 found ground-breaking story-telling modes (some are forty years old) and ways of conveying drama that rely on our inescapable visual sophistication. The best this year made nothing explicit and the implicit—wherein the emotional, thematic, and even dramatic material was held—was almost too much to bear. There was little arty self-consciousness in the Tarantino, Baumbach or Anderson mode. Why? Because there are only three American films on the list, and it’s only Americans who feel compelled to be self-conscious when they’re artful.

1) Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)

Love hurts. Love scars. It wounds and mars. Love will also get your arms torn right out of your shoulders if you fuck with someone a vampire loves. And loving a vampire might force you to spend the rest of your mortal days hanging innocents upside down from trees so you can drain their blood. The passive, aging Swedish hippies huddled in their Danish Modern state housing provide the perfect 21st-century equivalent to the terrified villagers who refuse to open their shutters when Count Dracula’s about, no matter how blood-curdling the screams. Despite the astonishingly original treatment of an old story, what lingers are the rigorous, gorgeous visuals, the twining of love and doom, the rescues that ensure only more brutality, the mysteriously disquieting presentation of what comprises gender, and an even more disquieting notion of soulmates.

     "No more sheep head!?!" © Blueeyes Productions.

2) Jar City (Mýrin)

2) Jar City

Contemporary artist Luke Murphy created a big pop-art graph that traces the relationship between Depression and Hidden Information. Director Baltasar Kormákur provides the real-life dynamic: an Iceland of the repressed, where seldom is heard an encouraging word and the skies are apparently cloudy all year. Toughness is admired (vegetarians get a hard time), toughness destroys (our protagonist cop’s junkie daughter comes to him only for money). The cop seeks not justice, really, or truth, but a moral cause, some proof that his corruption within is not wholly mirrored by corruption without. In that quest, as in all others, he will be disappointed. Jar City understands that the only the tiniest triumphs endure.

3) Help Me Eros (Bang bang wo ai shen)

A masterpiece of mise-en-scène and deploying color to convey emotion. At once lucid, apparent, and cloaked in mystery, joyous, transcendent, and heartbreaking. Taiwan’s loneliest man befriends a cigarette girl in a chaos dreamscape of urban pastels. He grows the best bud in town, and sells his priceless modern furniture in crap pawn shops to buy bread. He incarnates the artist’s dilemma manifest in the universe of the post-collapse of global markets. Deadpan Kang-sheng Lee directs and stars in a slow-moving poem of disconnection, alienation, and sex that achieves transcendence through a seemingly new cinematic language.

"When do we get our heads blown off?" © IFC Films.

4) Gomorrah (Gomorra)

Naples is one tough town. The mob stacks barrel upon barrel of industrial waste just down the street, murders moms who won’t give up their apartments, and functions with a mind-set that ensures its members and business partners the life expectancy of East Texas bikers, if that. Matteo Garrone, a thoughtful intellectual, chose a visual style that’s equal parts documentary and The Valachi Papers—half deadpan gaze, half lurid exploitation. As with all this year’s best, he explains nothing. We are hurled into the story as the locals are hurled into this milieu, and sink or swim with them. It’s strenuous, captivating, and it raises the bar for every gangster movie to come.

5) Waltz With Bashir

Guilt, confusion, the fog of war, political purpose, reluctance to bad-mouth one’s homeland, the determination to dehumanize one’s enemies, and an in-the-bone aversion to taking responsibility for atrocities committed on the periphery of one’s actions: these are the ingredients of national denial, as every American knows all too well. It took Ari Folman twenty years to come to grips with the terrors he lived through, the terrors he unknowingly enabled, and the terrors of slowly remembering who he was and what he did. He turned to animation in pursuit of realism, a genius move, and as counterintuitive as his methods of recovery, moral accusation and the refusal to forgive himself or his nation.

  "Why aren't we on DVD yet?" ©Image Entertainment

6)Human Condition (Ningen no joken 1959—’61)

Give it up for the Film Forum: 10 hours of Japanese Tolstoyan, Dostoevskian hopelessness, the unblinking depiction of Japan selling its soul, citizen by citizen, while building to the war; of the dying during the war and the crushing poverty of the land after. Never seen (never on video) and, once seen, never forgotten, not as story nor as one of the more significant visual influences on a number of masters—Bergman, Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa among them. Let’s hope that one day soon Criterion will give this film the treatment it deserves.

Lonely are the bullied; Let The Right One In © EFTI.

7) Celine And Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau—1974)

Give it up for BAM: 193 minutes of Jacques Rivette fucking around as only he could. Light-hearted Rivette proved a rare and lovely thing, and as I wondered when is he going to stop fucking around, he did. The contrast between the cat’s-paw decadence of the first 192 minutes and the door-slamming, party’s-over-oops-out-of-time of the final 60 seconds sear the film in memory. Like Human Condition, it’s set in a quite specific time and place that remains universal and constantly true.

  Three men who have not yet heard the terrible news. ©Blueprint Pictures.

8) In Bruges

Playwright, screenwriter, and director Martin McDonagh’s entire oeuvreseeks to prove the truth of Bertolt Brecht’s immortal line: “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.” The poles of laughs versus terrible news form the yin and yang of McDonaghville, and the urge to escape remains as potent as the need to keep watching through fingers clamped over my eyes. He generates restlessness, and concern over whether to laugh. He makes us ask: is that too much? Has he gone too far? Has he responsibly connected all this gore and pain to something more? And the answer is: nope, and he ain’t gonna. Like Beckett, McDonagh omits what he regards as unnecessary. And like Beckett, that would be everything save ghastly humor and death. Those omissions resonate through his work and may grant a witty gangster farce more profundity than it warrants, but there’s no denying the laughs or the terrible news.

9) Shotgun Stories

As evidenced by …Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Revolutionary Road, Michael Shannon might be the best, not-so-unknown-anymore actor in America. He carries Shotgun Stories, the least embellished, most compassionate and accurate cultural and moral depiction of southern rednecks ever made. This is no small feat. Set in a succession of endless 1980s days in rural po’bucker nowhere, Jeff Nichols’s low-budget Neorealist approach captures the vanity, obsession, small-mindedness, and earned occasional nobility of white, hardscrabble, dead-end American life. As ever, violence and revenge offer the only possible transcendence.

 "I'm going to blast my fuckin' legacy right outta the water!"© WarnerBros.

10) Gran Torino

In the best Charles Bronson movie Charles Bronson never made, Clint proves more patient and more sentimental than Charles ever was. Having begun the cycle of revisionist Westerns by being (in Clint’s words) “the first hero to ever fire first,” Clint here repudiates forty-four years of on-screen bloodletting by refusing to fire at all. For both character and director the finale demonstrates true moral courage. Clint’s unregenerate misanthropy and his genuine wit—a late-career development—more than compensate for clanking exposition and underwritten characters. Much is lost by Clint’s insistence on singing over the closing credits, but it’s his epitaph, so what can you do?

11) Valkyrie

Every year the chickenshit sheep of American movie critics and irony outlets gang up on one picture before it comes out, label it ridiculous, and smirk as it fails. This year, they tried to lay that shit on Valkyrie, but audiences found it anyway. Cruise’s big vehicle is not his vehicle at all, but instead a perfectly solid, well-executed, dumb World War II movie, and I love dumb WWII movies. Is Cruise playing a good Nazi any more absurd or morally bereft than Michael Caine or Robert Duvall playing theirs (The Eagle Has Landed)? Director Singer assembled a Who’s Who of dignified British thesps—Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Terrence Stamp for god’s sake!—to embody the Third Reich as he sought to make a John Sturges picture and he came damn close. It’s our era’s Where Eagles Dare, and there is no higher praise.

And, not while sitting in the theatre during Rachel Getting Married, but afterward and since, Jonathan Demme’s Gus Van Zant Lite sent my bullshit detector off the charts. I expect in a couple years we’re all going to be awfully embarrassed at being taken in. Ditto for Wendy and Lucy.