TOP
TEN FILMS SEEN IN THE YEAR 2013
(Films not released or shown in
Two documentaries in the Top Ten list this year, one more
in the Honorable Mention, as non-fiction films challenge fictional dramas for
the best of the year.
What the best fiction films of the year all have in common
is strong character development, an all but absent aspect of feature films of
late, where one appreciates what is turning into one of the lost arts of
cinema, especially American cinema.
While there are many ways to accentuate character, when it’s done right,
the films are literally unforgettable.
Nice to see such a strong showing from women directors, three
in the Top Ten, who often receive short shrift, overshadowed by men in the
movie business, mentioned every year in the male-dominated
Speaking of that, the film event of the year was the
10-film Claire Denis retrospective, each one a cinematic powerhouse.
Also the
Woody Allen wrote his darkest work ever, which translates
into one of his best films in over 30 years.
Jia Zhang-ke made one of his more gorgeously accessible films,
discovering the genre form while delivering a blistering critique of his
nation’s ills.
Rithy Panh has made a challengingly experimental masterpiece that
is one for the ages.
And welcome back Xavier Dolan, a director that continues to
take us places we’ve never been, dreamed of, or even imagined, and yet every
one of his films delves into undiscovered territory, a promised land of hidden
treasures that are uniquely expressed with a kind of electrifying kaleidoscopic
invention, always presented in an elegant cinematic bouquet.
Robert
Top
Ten Films of 2013
1.) The
Missing Picture (L'image manquante)
2.) Laurence
Anyways
3.) A
Touch of Sin (Tian zhu
ding)
4.) Tabu (2012)
7.) Blue
Jasmine
9.) Top of the
Lake – made for TV
10.) Ginger
& Rosa
Honorable
Mention
1.) THE MISSING
PICTURE (L'image manquante) The
Missing Picture (L'image manquante) A
Imagine
a society in which money has been banished. A society in
which you would be arrested if you wear eyeglasses, if you wear ties, or if you
speak a foreign language. One where it is prohibited
to wear bright colors, to have long hair, to marry for love, to even express
emotions. You are a traitor if you catch a fish, or pick a fruit. All of
these actions signify that your have an individualistic way of thinking, not a
collective one. These activities signify that you are educated, that you are
bourgeoisie, and that you are therefore an enemy. Simply for reading this
essay, you would be considered an enemy, one who needs to be eliminated. While
such a society sounds possible only in fiction, this is what happened during
the reign of the Khmer Rouge. They attempted to eliminate the middle-class, but
what happened in
—Randy Rosenthal, book review of Rithy
Panh’s The
Elimination from The Coffin Factory, Review
• The Elimination by Rithy Panh
| The Coffin Factory
For
many years, I have been looking for a missing picture: a photograph taken
between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled over
—Rithy Panh
While the film has a Chris Marker essayist tone about it,
with a pensive first-person narration beautifully expressed throughout, written
by Rithy Panh but spoken by
French-Cambodian actor Randal Douc, the film is a
somber meditation on memory and death, specifically the Cambodian Genocide that took the lives of Panh’s family during the reign of Pol
Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s.
The Maoist regime, modeled largely after China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), executed 90% of
Cambodia’s creative artists and performers, while also targeting intellectuals,
teachers, doctors, former military police members, lawyers, and religious
devotees, mostly in the very first year of rule, effectively eliminating any
form of western technology, decimating the once thriving film industry,
abolishing the middle class, while advocating a communal way of life, where
city dwellers were forced into punishing agrarian labor camps to live and work
in the rice paddies, where they were told “A spade is your pen, and the rice
paddies your paper.” Perhaps most
significantly, citizens were evaluated according to how closely they adhered to
the new ideology, where children helped eliminate their own parents. And while the stated enemy was foreign
imperialists, the fact is they murdered 1.7 million other Cambodians, where the
combined effects of executions, forced labor, starvation, and poor medical care
caused the deaths of nearly one-third of the Cambodian population. Largely inspired by his own book, The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer
Rouge Confronts his Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields, that he
co-wrote with French novelist Christophe Bataille, the film won the Un Certain Regard award at the
Cannes Film Festival, and while it’s considered a documentary, it must be
included in any discussion of the best films of the year, as it’s a potent
subject, an amazing film aesthetic, and one of the most dramatically powerful
films seen in years. Its haunting
expression feels more like a sacred religious experience, a transcendent film
that attempts to express the indescribable, as words are clearly inadequate,
and the overall tone is one of unending sorrow.
What Apichatpong Weerasethakul is to
The musical score by Marc Marder
beautifully supports the film, as the continually shifting music and sound
design, along with the flowing narration, provide a fluid sense of motion and
movement, like the wind or the lapping waves of the sea, even as the figurines
remain still. Listening to him describe
life in the camps is reminiscent of Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Night that recounts his experiences at age 16 in Auschwitz and Buchenwald at the height of the Holocaust,
where he learns “Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends, everyone
lives and dies for himself alone.” You
wouldn’t think little stick figures could convey such deep meaning, but it is
shockingly effective, where the horrifying death of his sister couldn’t be more
devastating. As he describes the
starvation in the camp and the delusional ideology that produces so much death,
equally as methodical as the guillotine or gas chambers, these lives hold no
meaning whatsoever to the regime, where the figures disappear before our eyes,
a hauntingly convincing technique.
If I
close my eyes, still today, everything comes back to me. The
dried-up rice fields. The road that runs through the
village, not far from Battambang. Men dressed
in black, outlined against the burning horizon. I’m 13 years old. I’m alone. If
I keep my eyes shut, I see the path. I know where the mass grave is, behind Mong hospital; all I have to do is stretch out my hand, and
the ditch will be in front of me. But I open my eyes in time. I won’t see that
new morning or the freshly dug earth or the yellow cloth we wrapped the bodies
in. I’ve seen enough faces. They’re rigid, grimacing. I’ve buried enough men with
swollen bellies and open mouths. People say their souls will wander all over
the earth.
In order to maintain his sanity, he reflects upon better
times in his youth, yet this also vividly describes the extent of what has been
lost, as people were friendlier and happier then, a time when food was
plentiful and music filled the air, such as this local rendition of Wilson
Pickett’s “Midnight Hour,” Clip: The
Missing Picture, "Plane Savior" (NYFF 51) (1:32).
With extraordinary grace, Panh tells the story
of his ravaged country subjected to incomprehensible horror, including 500,000
American bombs, where “the more bombs the American B-52s dropped, the more
peasants joined the revolution, and the more territory the Khmer Rouge gained,”
suggesting the Cambodian genocide was a direct result of American action,
knowledge few Americans hear about or are aware of, all the more reason to see
a film that resounds with such indescribable pain and open defiance. Often playing like a video installation,
drawing us nearer to the experience, the film resonates with such deeply felt
intimacy that its very unusualness heightens the effect. This is a world where “color vanished like
laughter, song, and dance,” where the only object anyone was allowed to own was
a spoon. “The revolution’s promise
existed only on film,” as peasants are seen happily toiling in the fields from
the regime’s own propaganda footage that absurdly mocks the pitiful stream of
deaths that comprise the abysmal reality.
The rusty film cans seen in the opening moments remind us what a fragile
thing memory is, where this brief historical moment wiped out more than twenty
years of freedom and independence, all but rewriting a nation’s history by
replacing everything that previously existed with pathetic propaganda
films. Panh’s
extraordinary film creates a visual record of what was lost, where his
first-hand experience reminds us how cinema plays such a prominent role in
shaping our view of history.
2.) LAURENCE ANYWAYS Laurence
Anyways A
Canada France (168 mi)
2012 d: Xavier Dolan Official site [Canada]
Two
pale figures
Ache in silence
Timeless
In the quiet ground
Side by side
In age and sadness
I watched
And acted wordlessly
As piece by piece
You performed your story
Moving through an unknown past
Dancing at the funeral party
Memories of childrens dreams
Lie lifeless
Fading
Lifeless
Hand in hand with fear and shadows
Crying at the funeral party
I heard a song
And turned away
As piece by piece
You performed your story
Noiselessly across the floor
Dancing at the funeral party
—The
Cure - The funeral party - YouTube (
Easily one of the movie experiences of the year, yet this
film was inexplicably chosen to bypass theaters from the entire Chicagoland region and instead played for less than a week
in the barren and isolated realm of South Barrington in a 30 theater Cineplex
that sits in the middle of an empty field, where at the time tickets were
purchased the box office clerk had never heard of this film, where a friend and
I were the only two patrons (perhaps all day, perhaps all week) to watch this
incredible movie. Only 19 and 21 when he
made his first two movies, now 23-years of age making his first film that does
not star the director, he nonetheless writes an original script, directs,
edits, subtitles, produces, and does the costume design for his third film,
something of an epic romance, a film navigating ten years in the complex and
turbulent relationship between a couple in the throes of love where at age 35
the man becomes an openly female transsexual, a gender shift that tests the
boundaries of love and tolerance. The
cinematic reach of this film is simply outstanding, where one would be hard
pressed to find a more originally conceived film all year, where the fluidity
of the slo-mo and hand-held camera movement by Yves Bélanger is balanced by perfectly composed shots, likely by
the director himself, where the look of the film is meticulously shaped. The acting throughout is superb, especially
the passionate and powerful performances of the two leads, Melvil
Poupaud (who first worked for Raúl
Ruiz at age 9 and a last-minute replacement for Louis Garrel)
from Ozon’s HIDEAWAY (2009) and TIME TO LEAVE (2005)
as the more subdued Laurence and Suzanne Clément as
the fiery Frédérique, more commonly called Fred,
where there are blown up moments of anger and melodramatic excess, but also
heartfelt moments of quiet restraint that express an intimate sincerity,
approaching a kind of honesty rarely seen in films today.
Not since Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret
(2011) has a film delivered so many sensational sequences, where the sheer
originality factor is impressive, as every scene is beautifully set up, and
Dolan’s exquisite use of music can be jaw-dropping on occasion. Some may feel cheated that the story only
tangentially explores gender identification, never approaching a sex change,
that it is far more about the tragic effects of an impossible love saga between
two strong-willed, artistically inclined characters. Both, however, are clearly defined, where at
nearly three hours in length the film is a marathon for all concerned, where
the emotional peaks and valleys are explored at length, delivering cluster
bombs of emotion, giving the film a novelesque scope,
thoroughly taking its time, often lingering far longer with characters than
other auteurs might dare, a common criticism of Cassavetes as well, giving the film a few jagged edges and
a feeling of imperfection, where this is not the shortened product as a result
of studio demands, but already feels like the extended director’s cut. Despite claims of youthful indulgence or
exaggerated overstylization that make conventional
filmmaking seem like ancient history, it remains one of the best and most
convincingly moving films seen all year due to the director’s unflappable
persistence in accentuating such a deeply felt, carefully nuanced level of
humanism.
Perhaps the scene of the film is set to Beethoven’s 5th
Symphony, a composition of manic and furious energy (“not a revolt, but a
revolution”), where after continually being denied entrance back to her
parent’s house, for fear of how this radical transformation might effect her
father, she finally returns to the front door drenched in a downpour of rain, a
truly pathetic sight, where her mother, a picture of chilly, overcontrolled perfection as played by the stately Nathalie
Baye, simply can endure no more, picking up the
television that her husband is continually planted in front of and slams it to
the ground, inviting Laurence into the doorway in full view of her father,
deciding straightaway to get a divorce, where instead of ostracizing Laurence
from her home, her life will forever include the daughter she never had. For Laurence and Fred, however, attempts to
stay together do not end so well, where we are treated to an emotional
blitzkrieg of accusations and confessional outpourings, with an incendiary
performance by Suzanne Clément (showing at least a
dozen different hairstyles) that should elevate her to the cover of fashion
magazines and star status, where she ferociously defends the man/woman she
loves, Laurence Anyways
- Restaurant Scene (English Subtitle) YouTube
(2:31), utterly confused herself by what it all means, where Dolan repeatedly
drags us through the mud of hopeless despair, rubbing our noses in the derailed
aftereffects of a broken romance, until sheer exasperation drives them
away. While they do briefly reunite
years later, expressed with a giddy Surrealist happiness in the winter snow, Laurence Anyways - Ile au Noir scene (1:48), it quickly fades again into a
distant memory, as the film is about how brutally hard it is to survive loving
someone, where Dolan’s brilliance in depicting an aura of love transcends the
transgender story of what it means to be your true self, as the film ends on a
beautiful grace note back at the beginning, with a door opening at the first
sparks of love, when “everything was strange and new.”
3.) A TOUCH OF SIN (Tian zhu ding) A
Touch of Sin (Tian zhu
ding) A
China Japan (133 mi)
2013 ‘Scope d: Jia Zhang-ke
One of the few award winning films at Cannes this year,
winning the best screenplay, which one might question, as the supreme
directorial flourish is usually what sets a Jia
Zhang-ke film apart from the rest, but as it turns
out, it’s an extremely well-written story that continues to surprise right
through to the end. Offering a rather
blistering comment on what it’s like living in China at the moment, where
citizens are in a Kafkaesque situation forced to endure unthinkable realities
where there is literally no escape from the unending comedy of horrors
inflicted upon them by the powers that be, as the government attempts to offer
an alternative to generations of totalitarian communism, but the introduction
of capitalism has produced a black market economy that resembles the Russian
mafia. How is any ordinary citizen
supposed to deal with the unlimited power and reach of those guys? The distance between the “haves” and the
“have nots” is even more unfathomable, where most
everyone continues to have nothing while a privileged few hoard it all. In Jia’s hands,
it’s a near surreal landscape, where he continually mixes in pictures of a
haunting past into the present, effectively using images of shrines, pagodas,
and classical art contrasted against the busy city streets, where the looming
presence of the past is evident everywhere.
Through the lens of cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai,
the director continues to provide films of ravishing beauty, where the poetic
visualizations are often spectacular, and this is no exception, but there is
also an intrusion of darkness, utter brutality, and ruthlessness, leaving
behind a particularly empty void of responsibility, where Chinese citizens are
continually expected to do more with less.
The picture of life in
What this film does express, unlike anything else this arthouse director has ever done, are grandiose, somewhat
spectacular, spectacle sequences of graphic violence, where it appears he even
turns to the martial arts wuxia genre form, as incredible as that sounds, while other
scenes resemble the Charles Bronson vigilante justice style movie, with irate
citizens taking matters into their own hands.
But the appalling idea of Chinese citizens resorting to guns to exact
justice or revenge has the feel of western fantasia, like some kind of
idealized dream sequence similar to Bobcat Goldthwaite’s raucous American
satire God
Bless America (2011), as China prides itself as being different than the
excessively violent images continually coming out of the gun-happy West, yet
here it is thoroughly entrenched in the grim realism of everyday Chinese life
depicted, where people are backed into a corner feeling they have no other
choice. At the Cannes Film Festival
press conference the director acknowledged the film would have to be edited to
play in China, as we see a variety in choices of weapons used, from hand axes,
meat cleavers, shovels, crowbars, hand guns, shotguns, and knives, where the neverending barrage of assaults does reflect the extreme
degree of economic and psychological damage citizens are forced to endure,
where they are pushed to the breaking point of near insanity, resorting to such
extreme means only because the options are otherwise dire or nonexistent. That said, this is a work of rare intelligence
and cold observation, where you’ll be hard pressed to find this kind of acute
criticism coming out of
While it all unravels with an element of surprise, the
director uses four different characters to carry out the existing themes that
are raised throughout the film, where characters overlap, but not the
storyline, including Dahai (Jiang
Wu), a frustrated coal miner in Shanxi province whose
outrage hits the boiling point when the corrupt capitalist owners sell off the
collective property of the mine without paying dividends to the workers,
driving brand new Maserati and Audi cars, even a
private jet, and then refuse to even discuss the matter afterwards. Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang)
is a nomadic migrant worker on a motorcycle (wearing a Chicago Bulls cap!) with
a secret inner life that is never revealed, but he apparently makes a living
off of his own inflicted road kill. Xiao
Yu, Jia’s frequent actress and real life wife, Zhao
Tao, is conflicted over a longterm affair with a married man while working as a
receptionist at a spa. Within the span
of a few hours, she is both assaulted by the man’s family at work, while also
forced to violently fend off unwanted advances from drunken businessmen who
expect sexual favors for their wads of cash.
And finally Xiao Hui (Luo
Lanshan) is a young factory worker who is blamed for
an accident at the plant, fleeing to a neighboring city where he gets a job in
an upscale hotel that provides sex services for its disgustingly wealthy
customers, one of whom is amusingly played by the director himself, catering to
their every need, where he falls for one of the attractive comfort girls (Li
Vivien), but is doomed by her relentlessly demanding subservience to the
customer’s needs. Finding another job in
yet another mindless factory, he finds himself living a hellish existence in a
ghetto styled high rise building, where the neighboring building is a mirror
image, ironically called the Oasis of Prosperity, revealing row upon row of
laundry hanging outside on the line. The
sense of confined suffocation is certainly prevalent in three of the four
characters, where the fourth resorts to criminal behavior to get out from under
it. For him (Zhou San), living at home
with his family in a dead end town is equally suffocating.
It’s a brilliantly conceived film that reveals the depths
of complexity through multiple characters experiencing their own agonizing
sense of loss and suffering, where each strand of the story reflects a certain dehumanization associated with economic
prosperity. In each, they escalate to an
outburst of violence while also showing a deeply layered societal sense of
indifference and alienation, where an overriding fatalism seems to be choking
the very life out of people. Separated
from any real meaning or connection to one another, individuals are forced to
live in tiny spaces that resemble prisons from which they have no escape. The working environment especially holds such
an oppressive and hostile look of vacuous sterility that it resembles the
meticulousness of Austrian documentaries like Nicolaus
Geyrhalter’s OUR DAILY BREAD (2005) or Michael Glawogger’s WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (2005), or more specifically
the stunning power reflected in the seemingly endless opening shot of Jennifer Baichwall’s MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (2006), seen here Stars Of The Lid - Taphead
(12:55) in the first seven and a half minutes, though the clip adds music
that is not in the film, and it quickly cuts away before the shot actually
comes to a slow stop, finally holding on a worker asleep at his station. The slow tracking shot down a side aisle of a
huge Chinese iron assembly plant of 23,000 workers reveals endless rows of
bright yellow-shirted factory workers sitting at their work stations performing
a synchronized monotony of repetitious motions, many of whom seem relieved to
stop and stare at the camera’s obvious intrusion, where the accumulation of
ever-expanding space defies all known concepts of rationality. These technological wastelands drive the
nation’s economy but leave the workers doomed to indifference and
solitude. With another outstanding
musical score by Giong Lim, formerly working with
4.) TABU (2012) Tabu (2012) A
People’s
lives are not like dreams. —Aurora
(Laura Soveral)
A bold, brilliantly written and directed film, where at
least part of the joy is in its magical film construction, mirroring the
original TABU (1931) directed by F.W. Murnau, a joint
project with heralded documentarian Robert J.
Flaherty, set in the Polynesian South Sea island of Bora Bora, inverting the two
halves which were originally called “Paradise” and “Paradise Lost,” shown here
in opposite order. The film shares
similarities to the original even in theme, as both comment
on the effects of European colonialization in an
otherwise native setting with a beguiling beauty that is so idealized that it
becomes mythical. Blending fact and
fiction, reality and fantasy, becomes so seamlessly integrated in both films
that the two halves continually comment on one another. The brilliance of the Gomes film is the
extraordinarily magical 2nd half, which is so stunningly beautiful, not to
mention amusingly told, that the audience is so captivated by the originality
of the story that there’s an instant desire to see the first half again,
curious about what might have been missed to see how it all connects. The second half of the film is all narrated
by a single character who describes the story, where the sound of his voice is
the only sound heard for the duration of the picture, unraveling like a
literary work without dialogue or sound effects, other than some carefully
chosen songs, giving the appearance of a Silent film, but the miraculous
stretching of the imagination is a thing of beauty, startlingly original, more
fabulously inventive than the tedious melodrama of the highly acclaimed,
Academy Award winning The Artist
(2011), which seems like a cheap imitation by comparison. Two magical realist literary works
immediately spring to mind, the most obvious being Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967),
all taking place in the mythical but intensely real town of Macondo,
where surrealism and the supernatural are ordinary occurrences, stretching the
boundaries of what is considered reality.
The second is Michael Ondaatje’s picturesque family portrait in his
fictionalized autobiographical memoir Running in the Family (1982), where
he returns to his native Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time of his birth), blurring
the lines between fact and fiction, recreating a scandalously colorful, highly
detailed portrayal of his eccentric family, set in an exotic landscape of
colonial decline.
Shot in gorgeous Black and White by cinematographer Rui Poças, the more realistic
first half is in 35 mm while the magical second half is blown up 16mm. Opening much like the Coen
brothers’ A SERIOUS MAN (2009), with an amusingly ominous Prologue narrated by
the director himself set in the wilds of early European exploration of
Mozambique in Africa, a Portuguese colony until 1975, with the sweaty black
hired hands using machete’s to chop a way through the brush for a hero known
only as “the intrepid explorer,” the unscathed white man all dressed up for a
safari adventure in khakis and a pith helmet, but never lifts a finger to help,
allowing others to do all the back-breaking work, sadly reaching an early
demise when he feeds himself to the crocodiles, distraught with grief over his
wife’s death, whose ghost can be seen on the shoreline warning him that he will
never escape his heart. In a unique
blending of the present with the past, a transition shot suggests what we’ve
been watching was being screened in a
Following the Cahiers
du Cinéma magazine
tradition in
5.) WAR WITCH (Rebelle) War
Witch (Rebelle) A
There are well over 9 million refugees and otherwise
displaced people from conflicts in
Kinshasa was just a small fishing village located on the
Congo River, while now it’s the third largest city in Africa (behind Cairo and
Lagos) with 9 million inhabitants, also the second largest French-speaking
urban area in the world after Paris, where French continues to be the language
of newspapers, schools, and the government, where it could exceed Paris in
population within a decade. Director Kim
Nguyen, currently living in Montreal, was born and raised in French-speaking
Quebec in Canada to a Vietnamese father who emigrated to Canada in the early
60’s and a French Canadian mother.
Perhaps as a way of getting a better understanding of his own Vietnamese
war-torn heritage, Nguyen spent 10 years interviewing many of the child
soldiers living in Kinshasa, developing a script based on the firsthand
testimony of what they endured, eventually making a film about the unspeakable
realities that exist for child soldiers.
This familiar terrain was also explored in Mahamat-Saleh
Haroun’s Chad Civil War Trilogy, ABOUNA (2002), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), and 2010
Top Ten Films of the Year: #2 A Screaming Man (Un homme
qui crie), also Jean-Stéphane
Sauvaire’s Johnny
Mad Dog (2008), where a 15-year old boy leads a band of children carrying
AK-47 assault rifles during the Sierre Leone civil
war crisis. These are all beautifully
shot films that involve the conscription of young children who are kidnapped by
heavily armed warlords looking to fortify their ranks and send them off to the
front, which is exactly how this film opens in the adrenaline-laced opening few
moments. Nguyen adopted a technique
working with child actors inherited from Andrea Arnold in FISH TANK (2009),
where she was able to achieve outstanding natural performances from
non-professionals by shooting chronologically, releasing only that part of the
script needed for each day’s shoot. The
biggest difference in Nguyen’s film is the use of a young female lead character,
Rachel Mwanza, where instead of a young male soldier
emulating older males, young girls have literally no one to look up to and are
easily victimized sexually by other male soldiers.
While the film was shot in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, using some mesmerizing beautiful locations, the country is never named
in the film, as it is a fictionalized composite of any African country in
turmoil. The actress Rachel Mwanza was in real life abandoned by her parents at 5 or 6,
lived with her grandmother for awhile but ended up living on the streets of
A richly complex and profoundly significant film that
offers an internally healing message, the entire complexion of the film changes
with a journey through the colorful village landscapes populated by ordinary
civilians, where they find the Magician’s uncle, a strong and powerful man
known as the Butcher (Ralph Prosper), who immediately welcomes them both. One of the more impactful
images of the film is a poster inside the Butcher’s home of Patrice Lumumba hanging on the wall, much like Americans have
similar pictures of JFK or Martin Luther King – all dead luminaries. It’s clear that everyone around them has lost
family members and have been harshly affected by the
war, still carrying deep-seeded wounds, but the young couple can finally relax
enough to start developing feelings for one another, where Mwanza
in particular brightens up when the Magician asks her to marry him. Refusing to budge unless he finds her a white
rooster, the mood develops a lighter tone where all the chicken coops are
searched to no avail, yet the locals are familiar with the customary marriage
ritual, continually teasing the Magician.
It’s here the lush and colorful vegetation, including the most gorgeous
driveway ever seen, mixed with a killer musical soundtrack, with selections
from the Soul of Angola Anthology 1965-1975, including the soulful ARTUR NUNES - tia - YouTube (3:45) and the
hauntingly tranquil Tanga - Eme N'gongo
Iami - YouTube (3:54)
that simply intoxicate the viewer with the exotic locale of the Congo, where
the warmth and local charm of the people rubs off on the young couple who
finally get married, with the Magician finally displaying a little flair for
magic. Despite their happiness, she is
still haunted by the ghosts of her parents who insist upon a proper burial in
their hometown. The blending of a documentary
style realism with myth, superstition, local custom, and warmth all feed into
this mesmerizing account of a surrounding nightmare of endless brutality, where
the enveloping war just continually sucks innocent people into it. One of the nicer aspects of the film is Komono’s running dialogue with her unborn child, who at
times is her only friend in the world, where she’s forced to stand up for
herself for the sake of her child, having to make impossible choices during
wartime. The film has one of the more
original birth scenes ever recorded, lovingly etched in the viewer’s memory,
where the two of them continue on in the mystifying journey to finally bury the
past, much like something seen in a Weerasethakul
film where characters are always haunted by ghosts of the past. While her experience, though harrowing, is
also a lyrical journey of survival, and probably not that different from many
of the survivors the director interviewed who likely still suffer aftereffects
of grief and remorse. It’s important to
note the battle has been raging for over 14 years in the
Addendum
Well over a year after filming ended, a United Nations
peace plan to stop the war was signed by 11 African countries in February 2013,
called the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework for the
6.) BASTARDS (Les Salauds) Bastards
(Les Salauds) A
One of the mysteries at Cannes this year was leaving this
film out of competition, where easily one of the best films of the year was
relegated to the second tier of Un Certain Regard films, especially since
Claire Denis is one of the great artists working today, where you’d think
France would want to showcase her unique talent. The director herself may have been too modest
about drawing attention to herself, which competition films tend to do, at
least for the first screening anyway where it’s like the creator is the very
center of the universe, as all eyes are on the film while enthusiasts around
the word await the critical results. For
most, it’s an enviable position, as cinema’s most prestigious festival provides
so much free publicity, but Denis shirks the limelight and retains a more
private profile, allowing each one of her films to speak for themselves. Due to the narrative ambiguities in nearly
all her films, they’re often misunderstood initially and gain more of a
critical following only much later. The
reasons for this are the inherent complexities of her films, which often take
some time to digest, and aren’t suited for one time only, knee-jerk
reactions. Nonetheless, the announcement
of a new Claire Denis film is always a major cinematic “event,” as the director
has simply never made a bad film and continues to make challenging works that
are both intelligent and adult in nature.
Loosely drawing upon William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931), Denis raises similar unspeakably dark themes of
rampant drug use, corruption, family betrayal, infidelity, incest, lurid sexual
crimes, as well as corncob rape sequences, all of which leads the viewer into a
downward spiraling cesspool of utterly despicable human behavior. As bleak and downbeat a film as you will see
all year, it continually surprises, however, with fractured narrative
ambiguity, visual mastery from cinematographer Agnès Godard, and superb leading performances from Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni.
Working for the first time with a digital camera, the
director’s usual methodical long takes, including static wide shots of
landscapes mixed with tight close ups are replaced here by the suffocating intimacy
of a handheld camera, giving the film a jagged, deeply fragmented syle, shot mostly using claustrophobic interior locations,
creating a deeply unsettling, psychologically disturbing look at French sex
trafficking and prostitution scandals involving powerful men of great
wealth. Denis indicated the film started
with an idea she had after watching several Kurosawa films from the 50’s and
60’s starring Toshirô Mifune,
which made her think of Vincent Lindon’s body, solid,
sexy, “a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on. In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this
strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end. My film started with that body.” Denis also read a news story about a young
woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster. In this film, set in the unrelenting
bleakness of a noirish nightmare, she imagines a
backdrop to her story. Opening in a
torrent of rain that obscures our view out the window, while inside a man is
seen through a doorway staring at the image in the shower, creating a sense of
intimacy and voyeurism. Then, an
intrusion, as if from another world, where a young girl (Lola Créton) in heels is seen dazed and naked wandering down an
empty Parisian street at night, stumbling out of the house where her father has
committed suicide (never explained), and her mother (Julie Bataille)
is being led away by the police, blaming everyone in sight, It happens so quickly we’re not sure of the
relationships, only that it takes place in the flicker of a murky gloom,
becoming the darkest movie Denis has ever made, where characters are literally
submerged in the incessant foul play.
Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon) is a ship captain that receives news of the suicide
while at sea, where he’s dropped off to come to the aid of his sister Sandra (Bataille) and niece Justine (Créton),
who ends up in a psychiatric hospital.
The family business of women’s shoes has gone belly up with bills it
can’t hope to pay, where his sister blames it all on the actions of wealthy
international financier Edouard Laporte
(Michel Subor) who has bankrupted her husband’s
business. Marco rents a flat in the same
building as Laporte, where he’s immediately intrigued
by his sexually attractive partner, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni). The building itself becomes a centerpiece of
the film, where the massive interiors are barely lit, suggesting an unfillable emptiness, and an insatiable desire, where Marco
and Raphaëlle, who is almost always left alone, begin
a torrid affair, with Godard illuminating the faces in close up shots that
appear like lurking shadows. While the
erotic moments become the most stable aspects of his multi-layered life, Marco
becomes the moral center of the film, symbolized as the virtuous, male
protective body, taking care of Raphaëlle’s restless
insecurities while looking after Sandra and Justine as well. Denis clearly sympathizes with the caged-like
plight of the femme fatale character of Raphaëlle,
making great efforts for the audience to identify with her complications and
moral ambiguity, where she could just as easily be the protagonist of the film,
which is why the finale is so shockingly effective. In someone else’s hands, it would never have
the unmistakable poetry, where Denis’s approach is more delicate, subtle, and
nuanced. The film is a
The Intruder (L’intrus)-like trip into the heart
of darkness, where the dysfunctional family element provides a theme of
contamination and infection reminiscent of Trouble
Every Day (2001), an immaculate noir in the classical sense, dark and
convoluted, where Denis offers empathy for her characters throughout.
The voyeuristic aspect of the film intrudes into the
audience as well, as we clearly get inside the head of characters who are both being watched and those doing the watching,
with both forces eventually brought together in an erotic embrace, where we
again project ourselves into the drama without actually leaving our seats. Of interest is the way Denis holds the
audience in rapt attention by the way she films the seduction scene. Typically in film noir the femme fatale lures
the hero into a compromising position, but here Marco is actively seducing Raphaëlle, shown with his back to the camera, where the
audience sees the effects of her sexual longing, often changing the focus and
perspective between them, continually sucking the
audience into this lurid world of sexual intrigue. But Marco hasn’t a clue what kind of world
he’s returning to, having been away at sea, avoiding all family ties and
responsibilities, where his family dysfunction, like that of Raphaëlle’s world, is clouded in a maze of secrets and
deception, the kind that only money can protect, not best intentions, where he
couldn’t possibly understand the deep-seeded ramifications of just how far his
sister and her husband would abdicate their parental responsibilities, allowing
the film to touch upon issues of sexual exploitation that open doors into
horror and terror. By the time the
audience gets wind of just how prevalent the danger is surrounding this man,
with people driven by base impulses, where particularly odious is a skin-crawling
incest subplot, with literally everyone around him synonymous with the film’s
title, we realize that he’s doomed, unable to extract himself from this sinking
quicksand that is the moral abyss he’s found himself in, which only makes the
enveloping dread and anguish more devastating.
Played out like a fever dream where love is nonexistent but delusion is everpresent, we watch the slow, poisoned, self-inflicted
destruction of two family units, one irreparably shattered, the other hanging
by a thread, where the exposure of their secrets rises like a dark shadow out
of the ashes of doom.
7.) BLUE
JASMINE Blue
Jasmine A
After an 8-year sabbatical making movies overseas, Woody
Allen finally returns to America like he’s found the promised land, writing his
most entertaining and dramatically rich screenplay since the 1980’s when he was
working with Mia Farrow, doing a constantly inventive and theatrically
invigorating variation on Tennessee Williams, in particular his 1948 Pulitzer
Prize-winning play Streetcar Named
Desire, featuring an exceptional international cast led by Australian
actress Cate Blanchett as
Jasmine, who is something of a nuclear force operating on another wavelength
from all other Allen actresses, doing a modern riff on Blanche DuBois, a younger version of the delusional, perpetually fragile
woman who has fallen from grace, but has yet to realize the staggering enormity
of the abyss she’s fallen into. Written
with Blanchett in mind, she is onscreen for nearly
every shot of the film, showing a range of emotion that hasn’t been seen in a
Woody Allen film in over thirty years, perhaps ever. While this is clearly an Allen film, it’s
also something of a departure for him writing such an intensely dramatic role,
easily one of the best in his lengthy career, where Blanchett
seems born to play the part, not seen having this much fun since NOTES ON A
SCANDAL (2006). While she’s not as
prominently featured, equally enthralling is British actress Sally Hawkins as
Ginger, last seen performing against type in Submarine
(2010), playing the sister role of Stella Kowalski, a more earthy, warmhearted
and working class woman who must contend with physical brutes for men,
brilliantly played by Brooklyn-born Andrew Dice Clay (who hasn’t been in a
movie in 12 years) as Augie, her first husband, and
later Jersey-born Bobby Cannavale as Chili, her
fiancé, two physically imposing Stanley Kowalski characters, working stiffs
whose foul mouths and quick tempers have a tendency to “lose it” from time to
time, while also seen trying to sweet talk their way back into good
standing. What’s surprising is the
effectiveness of flashback sequences, where half the film takes place in the
past when Jasmine was a wealthy Upper East Side socialite married to Hal, Alec
Baldwin, a Wall Street investor whose financially fraudulent business practices
eventually lead him to the slammer, but not before he steals every last dime
and nickel from all his investors, leaving Jasmine embarrassed and without a penny
to her name, sadly moving across the country where she hopes to make a new
start in San Francisco with her more commonplace sister.
The culture shock of living in an ordinary environment
leaves Jasmine horrified, depleted of her reason for living, which appears to
be a concept of worth based upon the accumulated reserve of unlimited funds to
spend, where she instead regularly pops Xanax as if
it were candy out of a bottle while slurping down Stoli
vodka martinis with a lemon twist, leaving her in a distorted state of mental
deterioration. Despite her dire economic
situation, Jasmine continues to pass herself off as upper class royalty, where
it’s simply inconceivable for her to alter her lavish lifestyle, continually
criticizing her sister for settling on Neanderthal brutes that only reflect
upon her low self-esteem, while the two men in Ginger’s life never let Jasmine
forget how her conniving thief of a husband stole all their money along with
everybody elses, making him the most wretchedly despicable
man on the planet. But Jasmine is not
deterred, completely incapable of sympathizing with the working class or their
real world problems, consumed instead with her own worries, wondering what has
a woman got to do to escape the doldrums of mediocrity, where she believes all
it takes is the need to think big, bigger than the vacuous trap that defines
Ginger’s life, working at a grocery store, taking care of two kids, and never
having a moment for herself (or her sister) anymore. Since Jasmine’s life has been a gluttony of
hedonism, where every waking moment has been spent indulging in life’s
pleasures, including a husband that bought her every extravagant gift and
luxury item she could ever hope for, perhaps this made it easier for her to
look the other way when her philandering husband was sleeping around with every
attractive woman he set eyes upon, where both felt it was their God-given right
to have whatever they wanted in life.
And for awhile, they were riding high among the social elite, written
about in the celebrity tabloids as an up and coming power couple, holding
extravagant parties where important people show up, as if this validates their
very existence. But now, of course,
she’s lost everything, having to accept criticism from the morons in Ginger’s
life that literally make her cringe, finding their crudeness to be revolting,
believing their lack of sophistication and refinement will only prevent Ginger
from ever wanting more out of life, as she’s settling for these hopelessly
undistinguished losers.
Jasmine’s plans for the future, of course, make little
sense, as she has no work qualifications whatsoever other than the ability to
assemble an overpriced luxury wardrobe that distinguishes her from those in more practical attire. Her sheer incompetence in learning necessary
work skills sets her apart from Ginger’s efficient reliability, someone who’s
gotten two kids to school and can still show up for work on time. Jasmine, on the other hand, is literally
overwhelmed by anything having to do with work, needing pills and yet another
cocktail to help alleviate all the tension she feels. Jasmine would have us believe that it’s not
easy being rich, where you have to cater to all the whims of eccentric
personalities in people who have never been told no, who are used to getting
what they want, where it’s impossible to please everybody, while at the same
time having to organize tiresome fundraisers for the poor, where extending a
helping hand to others is fraught with difficulties and unending
pressures. In Jasmine’s world, life is a
neverending theatrical performance, where it’s all
about style and flair, where ordinary concerns never even enter into the
picture, where the working stiffs in Ginger’s life are exactly what’s wrong
with the world, men who have no ambition or dreams, who think too small,
continually toiling in a dead-end job working for others, where they’re
constantly being told what to do, so they spend their own lives ordering others
around like the narrow-minded bigots and tyrants that they become. Allen creates an excoriating picture of the
aristocratic mindset, especially when Jasmine and Hal are flush with money and
find it so burdensome to stop thinking about themselves for a single moment and
have to put up with out of town visitors like Ginger and Augie
who are so out of place in “their world” that they may as well be from another
planet, like the world of the mundane.
What is initially such a hilarious portrait of polar opposites grows
deathly serious by the end, becoming one of the darkest works Allen has ever
written, a devastating portrait of a dream deferred, where the unbridled lust
and grandiose ambition of the great American Dream has lost its luster,
becoming a pathetic picture of lost and fragmented memories of an already
forgotten era, where the rich are portrayed as manipulating and conniving
thieves, while the poor and middle class are stuck with working off their
accumulated debt, stuck in an endless quagmire not of their own choosing where
they live the lives of indentured servants, like bought and sold commodities,
each one easily replaced by the next sap waiting in line to take their place.
8.) 20 FEET FROM
STARDOM 20
Feet from Stardom
A
Arguably the best documentary (when seen), and a candidate
for one of the best films of the year, a history lesson on the roots of racism
in the music industry, but a film that takes an altogether different tone,
where the expression of bitterness would be self-defeating, so this is a film
that exudes beauty and transcendence through music. Following the success
of
The revelation of the film is realized by the extraordinary
range of emotion not only found in the exemplary music performed by these
women, but in the stark honesty and unpretentiousness of their lives.
Having never risen to stardom, where the quality that defines a backup singer
is harmony and blending into the whole, they perform without egos. That
is not to say they don’t have them, as these women are divas in the music
industry, but they have the unique ability to set aside their own
individuality, yet they often perform the part of the song best remembered by
listeners without getting the credit. The perfect example is Lou Reed’s
1972 hit “Walk on the Wild Side” Lou
Reed - Walk On The Wild Side - Rare Video-HD - YouTube
(4:13), as the responding chorus where “the colored girls sing—doo, da-doo, da-doo,
doo doo doo
doo” is easily the part of the song that sticks with
us, offering a momentary joyful explosion in the middle of an otherwise
desperately sad and often monotonous, drug-filled journey for individual
recognition. Add to this the absolutely delightful combination of David
Byrne’s art school artistry finding a soulful groove with Lynn Mabry doing
background vocals in Talking Heads “Slippery People” Talking Heads Slippery People
- YouTube (4:06). The film cleverly shows
album covers of the era with the faces of the lead singers whited
out, suggesting it’s not about them, but that part of the song sung by others.
A chilling example comes from Darlene Love, who in 1962 sang the lead in
Phil Spector’s hit single “He’s a Rebel,” but when
she heard the song on the radio afterwards, it was still her voice, but the
group credited for the song was The Crystals The Crystals (Blossoms) -
He's A Rebel (original recording) - YouTube
(2:25). This kind of musical theft was common in the industry, especially
by white producers of black artists, where singers remained under contract, much
like movie stars during the heyday of the studio system, which literally
*owned* their rights, to do with as they pleased. Eventually, through
sheer perseverance, Love’s voice became among the most sought after backup
singers in history, as the musicians themselves recognized raw talent and
wanted to work with her. The most heartbreaking aspect of the story is
once Love finally freed herself from the contractual obligations of Phil Spector, she signed with Gamble and Huff, who immediately
sold her contract back to Spector, which has
implications of a slavery plantation system.
Another common element between these singers is the personal belief that if one remains true to one’s calling, stardom will follow, as nearly every one thought they’d have a solo career. One of the backups who came closest was Merry Clayton, who now in her mid 60’s remains a force of nature, who began as one of the Raelettes. Growing up in New Orleans listening to Mahalia Jackson, in 1964 she recorded the first version of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss),” although it was Betty Everett's version of that same year that reached the Top 10 of the music charts. She is perhaps most famous for her contribution to the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”Gimme Shelter 1969 - The Rolling Stone - YouTube
(Perhaps the most talented of the backups, at least in terms
of overall range, is Lisa Fischer, the only one who is an outright star, though
she prefers to remain behind the scenes. She backed up Tina Turner,
expanding her talent working with the meticulous vocal perfectionism of Luther Vandross, while also going on every Rolling Stones Tour
since 1989, seen live in 1995 in Amsterdam, Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter - Live _95-Lisa Fischer - YouTube
(6:00), seen again two years later in St. Louis The
Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter (Live) - OFFICIAL ...
- YouTube (6:50), but then sheds that stage
persona for an exquisite rendition of her own song, Lisa Fisher - How Can I Ease
The Pain. Live - YouTube (5:02), for which she
won a Grammy, rivaling Whitney Houston for sheer vocals extraordinaire, while
also singing a hushed but perfectly harmonious backup to Sting’s angelic
“Gabriel’s Message” Sting,
if a Winter's Night...2-Gabriel's message - YouTube
(3:27). The new kid on the block is the young Judith Hill, selected as
Michael Jackson’s duet partner for his 2009 planned comeback This Is It Tour before Jackson died
mysteriously, short-circuiting her career, but she’s been a favorite backup of Stevie Wonder for years, as he appreciates the majestic
purity of her voice, seen here singing one of her own songs, “Desperation” Judith Hill | Desperation
LIVE - YouTube (3:11). While these women
are all uniquely talented, the beauty of the film is that it allows the
filmmaker to probe the depths of their humanity, where there are literally
layers of history contained within, becoming one of the more telling comments
on the turbulent 60’s, yet showcasing it through music, perhaps the most
perfect expression of the soul. Despite the hardships they all face,
music has a way of transcending all earthly matters, where rather than recount
the political turmoils of the era, the director
explores that changing reality through the impassioned lives of these
women. Like a pinch hitter in baseball, these women were only called upon
to perform perhaps 15 or 30 seconds in someone else’s song, yet time and again
we see how they make it uniquely their own, where these are no nonsense,
literally kickass women displaying the dramatic
maturity of the greatest actresses of our time, yet remain unseen, unheralded,
and largely unrecognized, where in the case of Darlene Love, the only one in
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the industry literally placed someone else’s
name over her voice. Rather than remain angry and defiant, these women
have displayed nothing but professionalism where they continually rise above
the fray, where the film offers a triumph of the spirit, becoming one of the
most gorgeously uplifting movie experiences of the year.
The
featured backup singers
Merry Clayton (one of Ray Charles’ Raelettes,
Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter,” which resulted in a
miscarriage afterwards, Lynard Skinner’s “Sweet Home
Alabama,” Joe Cocker “Feelin’ Alright,” Carole King)
Lisa Fischer (toured with Tina Turner, Teddy Pendergrass,
Luther Vandross, Chaka Khan, Dolly Parton, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys,
Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle and Sting on “If On a Winter’s Night,” also toured on every Rolling Stones
Tour since 1989)
Judith Hill (selected as Michael Jackson’s duet partner for
This Is It Tour before Jackson died,
sang the lead on the song “Heal the World” at his memorial sevice,
released a tribute song “I Will Always Be Missing You,” back up singer with Stevie Wonder)
Dr. Mabel John (the first female signed by Berry Gordy to Motown's Tamla label,
also Ray Charles, co-writing 50 songs while becoming musical director of the Raelettes, becoming pastor and founder of the Joy in Jesus
Ministries in Los Angeles in 1986, earning a doctorate in divinity from the
Crenshaw Christian Center in 1993)
Gloria Jones (back up singers the Blossoms, also recorded
the 1964 song “Tainted Love”)
Claudia Lennear (Ike and Tina
Turner & the Ikettes, George Harrison,
inspiration for Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” resulting in August 1974 Playboy appearance, Joe Cocker’s “Mad
Dogs and Englishmen,” Beatles “Come Together” and “Let It Be,” the Rolling
Stones “Honky Tonk Woman,” and Sly & the Family
Stone “I Want to Take You Higher,” now teaches Spanish, French, English, and
remedial math at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California)
Darlene Love (lead singer on Phil Spector’s
#1 hit single “He’s a Rebel” in 1962, initially lead singer, later erased and
changed to backing vocals on The Crystal’s 1963 hit “Da
Doo Ron Ron,” also one of
the featured artists on Spector’s 1963 Christmas
album, singing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” also U2’s 1987 cover
version, and performed every year on The David Letterman Show on the last
episode before Christmas from 1986 to the present, The Blossoms, The Crystals,
Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Tom Jones, Sonny & Cher,
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame March 14, 2011)
Lynn Mabry (Sly & the Family Stone, Parliament Funkadelics, joined Talking Heads for “Stop Making Sense”)
Janice Pendarvis (David Bowie,
Sting on “The Dream of the Blue Turtles”)
Táta Vega (background
vocals for Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Rufus “Tell Me
Something Good,” performed musical voice of Shug
Avery in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film The
Color Purple)
The Waters Family (Julia, Maxine, and Oren,
worked with Donna Summer, Paul Simon, Michael Jackson on Thriller album, music for The
Lion King and James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar)
9.) TOP OF THE LAKE
– made for TV Top of the
Lake A
Australia Great
Britain (350 mi – 7 episodes) 2013
d: Jane Campion
and Garth Davis
You
can be very hard. And what I don't like is that you think it’s
strength.
—Robin’s mother Jude Griffin (Robyn Nevin)
There’s
no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body. —GJ (Holly Hunter)
There has been a gradual introduction of movies made for
television into film festivals, where the Melbourne and Telluride Film
Festivals were among the first to program the three films in the RED RIDING
TRILOGY (2009) made for British television, while the full-length, 5-hour
French version of the Olivier Assayas film CARLOS
(2010) premiered at Cannes, and the Venice Festival premiered Todd Haynes’
MILDRED PIERCE (2011), all to critical acclaim.
This year Jane Campion’s feminist noir TOP OF
THE LAKE became the first television series to ever premiere at the Sundance
Film Festival, later screening again at Berlin, a 6-hour jointly produced BBC
and Sundance Channel film TV miniseries spread out over 7 episodes, though the
pacing and burning intensity are much more effective when compressed into a
single viewing, especially without having to undergo commercials and the
repeating credit sequence. Since it had
been four years since she made a film, Campion
reveals her thoughts on finding more freedom working in television from the Hollywood Reporter, “Feature filmmaking is now quite
conservative. The lack of restraints, the longer story arc: It's a luxury not there generally in
film.” Campion’s
AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990) was originally produced as a
It’s no accident that the best episodes are directed by Campion herself, including the first, fourth, and final two
episodes, feeling almost mythical, featuring some stunning performances, where
the richly detailed pieces of information unraveling in the opening few minutes
are nothing less than intoxicating, filled with the beauty of the landscape,
local color and plenty of eccentric characters.
Echoes of David Lynch’s
What distinguishes this film is the densely plotted novelesque quality, where even comically drawn secondary
characters are significant to the overall portrayal of humans desperately in
need, where there’s an untapped ferocity of spirit seen in both Tui and Robin.
Adding to this picture of a lone voice in the wilderness is an inspired
idea to create a separatist women’s collective, a Greek chorus of damaged women
living together in trucked-in shipping containers at a lakeside retreat called
Paradise that sits on disputed land, as Matt claims they’re trespassing, a rag
tag group of exiled women led by Holly Hunter as the dispassionate GJ, a
guru-like presence in pants spouting Zen-like philosophic utterances, as if she
can read each person’s future, but possessing the deranged personality of a
social misfit herself, often seen pacing the grounds while off in the distance
a few naked women are continually seen running free. The lustful nature of the women is part of
the untold story, including the sexual promiscuity of several of the women
living on the compound, including a memorable scene from Geneviève
Lemon (the 7-minute woman) who played the lead role in SWEETIE (1989), as the
men in town are perceived as testosterone fueled adolescents, especially in the
moments Robin spends enduring endlessly abusive taunting by men in bars, yet
woman have to find their place in an existing contemporary landscape, including
Robin’s own sexual desires, seen developing for Johnno
(Thomas M. Wright), a childhood sweetheart and one of Matt’s offspring, a good
son that rejects the maniacal nature of his tyrannical crime boss father. The two are a sexual force bonded together by
her childhood trauma, where Johnno was her high
school prom date and suspiciously absent afterwards on a night she was brutally
gang raped by four drunken men. This
trauma gives her all the more reason to protect Tui,
even if the town has given up looking for her, suspecting she must be dead
after the passage of two months. There’s
an interesting thematic projection of men’s fears and limitations, expressed
through the perceived effects of hostile elements, as no one thinks she could
survive out there alone in the cold, while the repeated mention of the lethal
quality of the water is always described as so cold that “no one could survive
in that water.” Yet somehow, just when
Robin is told her mother has terminal cancer, easily one of the key moments in
the film, intimately captured with the camera holding completely onto Robin’s
face, at that exact moment when all hope is lost, there is also a chance that Tui has somehow survived.
Tui’s
absence changes the nature of the film, as her unseen presence, Robin’s own
personal trauma, and her mother’s impending death all blend together and
continually haunt Robin, who becomes the film’s dominant force, as events are
continuously seen through her eyes. The
on again and off again relationship with her boss, Al, always seems to be of
secondary importance, part of the police procedural component of the film, as
their presence together is usually mandatory.
But his exclusively male take on events offers a differing viewpoint
than her own, but Campion is careful not to make him
one-dimensional, where he’s one of the more complexly drawn characters in the
film, though never entirely likeable, especially as he’s seen to be in cahoots
with Matt’s criminal empire, usually protecting him or tipping him off about
upcoming police activities. But Robin
doesn’t know this and continually exposes a vulnerable side to him, where her
life is an open book while we know almost nothing about him. His extravagant home offers a clue, and is
the setting for one of the more controversial events in the film, as he invites
her over for dinner where she stupidly drinks too much and eventually passes
out, waking up alone in his bedroom the next morning wearing one of his
shirts. He reassures her that nothing
happened, that she vomited all over her clothes, so he was forced to wash them,
all of which sounds like a perfectly acceptable explanation. And that’s the problem with Al’s character,
as his answers are too pat, sounding overly detached and too well reasoned
ahead of time, never speaking passionately in the moment, where what comes
across is an arrogant and pompous man that’s used to getting his way and never
having to answer for it. Al typifies the
male mentality of the town, even if Matt is the Alpha male, while he sits
quietly lurking in the background collecting his cut of the overall operations,
running a secret Ecstasy and amphetamine lab underneath Matt’s home. In contrast to Robin and Al, Matt has his own
sexual experience with one of the women from the compound, Anita, Robyn
Malcolm, who simply craves male companionship.
Their hallucinogenic outdoor experience in the woods on Ecstasy is
unusual for how it sensitively portrays a ruthless crime boss at his most
vulnerable state, used much like the LSD cemetery sequence in EASY RIDER
(1969), where the dealers are seen under the influence of their own drugs,
often haunted by impending thoughts of death and mortality.
At some point, and one barely realizes when it occurs, the
focus shifts from the overly destructive and malicious behavior of the adults
to the often misunderstood and more innocent motives of kids, where a strange
young girl (Georgi Kay) dropped off at the women’s
compound is continuously seen playing an electric guitar in various natural
outdoor locations, NEW Ipswich- Georgi
Kay (live) (4:50), offering voice to a new and different force that hasn’t
been seen much or heard from, namely the next generation, Tui’s
generation. Robin interrogates a young
boy for shoplifting, Jamie (Luke Buchanon), seen
crossing the lake in a kayak, suspected of bringing food to a drop site,
significant as he’s one of Tui’s best friends,
perhaps even the father. Jamie has the
unusual habit of not speaking to adults, so Al tries to knock some sense into
this kid, using decisively forceful measures until he’s thrown out of the
interrogation room by Robin. The kid
disappears the next day, along with all the food in the refrigerator and
kitchen cabinets, leading to a kind of idyllic Lord of the Flies gathering of kids in the woods without the
presence of a bullying leader, where we discover the re-emergence of Tui along with boatloads of friends. But Matt and his gang are soon on to them,
forcing a very pregnant Tui and Jamie to escape, only
to lead to certain tragedy, which has a horrific effect, especially within the
women’s compound. The slowed pacing also
reflects a kind of impasse, a turning in the tide, where some of the women are
finally willing to stand up to these powerful men, refusing to be scared or
intimidated by them. In a memorial
sequence for one of the lost kids, Georgi
Kay - Joga (Top of the Lake - Jamies
memorial scene ... (2:40), featuring Mirrah Foulkes as the distraught mother, some may be shocked or
confused at just how unmanly the women are, as they don’t go the Eastwood
vigilante route and demand justice through the power of a gun or through brute
strength, which is what movies have trained us to expect, but this
psychological transformation has been slow in coming and continues to evolve at
an excruciatingly slow pace, yet it’s among the more unique scenes in the film,
as the women collectively express a quiet desperation without any hint of
violence, viewed as an exclusively male domain.
The finale goes even further down that road, where the
discovery of a date rape drug figures prominently into the tortured lives of
teens, many of whom in the past have ended up dead under mysteriously
unexplained circumstances. It’s all a
bit alarming, but it also figures into Robin’s own past, where it doesn’t do
her any good to dig too deeply into the heart of her own trauma, never wanting
to meet the child she gave up for adoption as she never wanted to explain to a child
that they were the product of a gang rape, thinking this revelation could
induce suicidal thoughts of zero self-worth, deciding it’s better to “Fuck the
truth,” where life is so much more complicated than we could ever imagine,
where human behavior is simply too despicable.
One theme Campion appears to be advocating is
that the more attention paid to pain, the worse things often become. The movie can be shocking at times with its
spurts of sudden violence, but in this film it’s not about women chasing after
vengeance, where the obsession for justice only creates more injustice, as it’s
so easy to lose sight of the arc of your own life, but it also shouldn’t be
some inhumane evil that we continually answer to. In the end, the film veers into an ambiguously
disturbing road movie, like a journey through an existential wasteland,
actually discussed at great length in the women’s group talkathons,
which are almost a parody of self-help groups, where GJ often berates their
whining and moaning, claiming they’re “madder than ever,” saying she needs to
“just get away from these crazy bitches,” getting as far away as she can, yet
still taking us on an interior journey more self-reflective and psychologically
complex than what we’re used to from crime dramas, like say the highly
successful THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY (2009).
Actually it’s more like the continuing arduousness of The Odyssey, a prolonged journey filled
with epic challenges, where the hero survives only by extraordinary cunning and
perseverance, where likewise the collective effect of this film is an assault
on the senses, causing a shock to the system and a rewiring of the circuitry,
finding oneself at the center of a great human tragedy, offering no societal
cure or moral answers, nothing more than the brave choice of learning how to
discover our own humanity, often the last one thing we pay any attention to as
we’re so busy navigating our way through life.
But in the end, eerily enough, someone, perhaps even Robin, is going to
be in a position to help raise a child that is the product of gang rape, as the
cycle of life continues where we’re continually forced to face our worst
fears.
10.) GINGER &
ROSA Ginger
& Rosa A
Sally Potter sees the breakdown of moral order not only as
an expected part of the human condition, but also equally problematic is the
way humans obsess over the impact. Any
film that starts with the picture of an H-bomb explosion, followed by shots of
an obliterated
While this director has a career in experimental (and
somewhat autobiographical) films, where her film YES (2004) was strangely
written in iambic pentameter, this may be her most conventional and audience
friendly effort, beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Robbie Ryan, where it’s
primarily a character study that accentuates strong performances all around,
one of the director’s strengths, in particular Elle Fanning (who was 13 when
the film was shot) as Ginger and Alice Englert (Jane Campion’s daughter) as Rosa, both born on the same day in
the same hospital seventeen years earlier.
Set in
What makes this film especially interesting is how
effortlessly it sets up the youthful idealism as an extension of 50’s
conformism, perhaps best expressed by the superbly inventive jazz music
soundtrack that perfectly expresses a liberation of the spirit, a literal
transformation in sound, beginning with Dave Brubeck’s
Take Five - The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959) (5:20), but also in short order Bird Gets The
Worm / Charlie Parker The Savoy Recordings (2:38), Sidney
Bechet - Petite fleur - JazzAndBluesExperience
(3:19), Thelonious Monk - (I Don't Stand) A Ghost Of A Chance (With
You) (4:22), and Miles
Davis - Blue In Green (HQ) - YouTube (5:33),
where this pair of friends is a perfect example of tolerance and open
mindedness in an era when the women’s movement had not yet begun, and no one
had yet heard of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They were flower children before the term was
invented and attracted to worldwide peace movements before they were in vogue
by the end of the decade. Potter then
turns the screws on their friendship, allowing reality to intervene, which is
shockingly discomforting, becoming the dramatic thrust of the film, blossoming
from their carefree youth into attractive young women vying for the attention
of the same man, becoming more intensely serious and dramatically complex,
evolving much like a stage play.
Honorable
Mention
AMOUR (Love) Amour
(Love)
A-
France Germany Austria (127 mi)
2012 d: Michael Haneke
Official site [jp]
Haneke has
made a powerfully devastating film about the horrible indignity of dying, and
watching someone you love deteriorate before your eyes, where in your mind
they’re still alive and strong, the way you remember them, except they’ve
become fragile creatures that can’t help themselves anymore. What’s
different about this approach is Haneke’s unsparing
and exhaustively banal detail in depicting all aspects leading up to death,
including the unsettling, interior psychological turmoil that plays into such a
personalized experience. Perhaps Haneke’s
crowning achievement is casting the aging couple with French New Wave cinema
royalty, writing the film for Jean-Louis Trintignant
(who’s 81) as Georges, from Claude Lelouch’s A MAN
AND A WOMAN (1966) and Eric Rohmer’s MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (1969), a superb actor
who hasn’t worked in seven years, while Emmanuelle Riva (85) is Anne, from
Alain Resnais’s HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959), the one
who has a series of medical setbacks. Both appeared in Krzysztof
Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS TRILOGY, Riva appearing in BLUE (1993) while Trintignant was the lead in RED (1994), where both
personify a cultured European dignity with an undisputed air of intelligence in
their roles, which certainly comes to play here, as both have professional
backgrounds living in an enormous Parisian apartment with an entire wall filled
with shelves of books, including a piano, where she was a revered piano
instructor, along with various drawings and paintings on the wall. This
couple is the epitome of cultural refinement, where it’s actually a joy,
initially, to watch their clever wordplay with one another.
The initial intimacy is followed by the realization that
Anne is likely having a minor stroke while sitting at the breakfast table,
where hospital efforts to restore her back to full health fail, leaving her
partially paralyzed on her right side, requiring a wheelchair, where Georges
has to help her get in and out of bed, her chair, the bathroom, and anywhere
else she goes, but we never again see her leave the apartment, creating a
highly restrictive use of ever confining space, as if the walls are caving in
on them. While they still maintain a daily routine, where the mundane
details become the surgically precise structure of the film, they simply don’t
get out anymore, so all they have is each other, music, and photograph books of
earlier memories. Their daughter Eva, Isabelle Huppert, shows obvious
concern, thinking her mother should be receiving round the clock hospital care,
but after her initial experience, Anne has no interest in ever returning to
another hospital. Eva complains to Georges, as if he’s not doing enough,
but he’s taking care of her himself, feeding her, helping her perform the daily
exercises, with nurse visits three times a week, and the doctor every other
week, but Eva is devastated when her mother has another mild stroke and loses
much of her speech, where her indistinguishable words don’t make sense and she
can’t make out what her mother’s trying to say, which only becomes more
disturbing. None of the medical setbacks are shown, but happen
incrementally, where Anne, once a fiercely stubborn force to be reckoned with,
becomes completely helpless, requiring full-time care, which Georges is happy
to provide, though it is exhausting. He is the consummate picture of a
man giving his undying devotion to the love of his life, where he is still
consumed by her presence, still filled with the incredible aura of her
life.
But no matter how well educated and culturally aware, this
never prepares anyone for watching a dying partner, where the daily grind
eventually grows frustrating, especially when all you’re looking for is just a
tiny sign that the person you’re married to is still there. Haneke has a seamless approach to unraveling his film,
where memories and dreams are mixed into the daily routines, reflecting the inner
thoughts of those onscreen, where the mosaic of mixing them all together is an
extremely accurate reflection of their existence. So too is the way
Georges starts hiding just how ill Anne is becoming, especially from Eva, who
continues to call for the latest updates, where his energy to respond without
anything hopeful to say simply disappears with each passing day, yet she
persists, which from Georges’ point of view feels like an invasion, as all this
couple has left is a few private moments. The energy it takes out of her
mother for one of Eva’s visits is something perhaps only Georges understands,
which leaves Eva even more devastated as she simply doesn’t know what else to
do. Georges, of course, knows he’s already providing all there is to do,
but he can’t change the agonizing twists of fate. The lingering finality
of the experience is hauntingly sad, as there’s nothing about it that’s easy or
refined, where the underlying theme that persists throughout the film is a
civilized and genteel couple who are cultured, who understand that beauty
stands alongside life’s tragedies, but this still leaves you weakened and
trembling at the knees, where nothing can prepare you for the inevitable
finality. Haneke doesn’t make any of this
comfortable for the viewer, but it is a daring and exquisitely elegant portrait
of what awaits us all, given a poetic and wordless farewell that has a touch of
theatricality to it, where there are no neat bows tying up loose ends, instead
there’s a sudden flood of emptiness, and the rest is silence.
If truth be told, my own personal life has had an overload
of painfully prolonged and tragic deaths very reminiscent of what is portrayed
onscreen, unfortunately witnessing too many people die in the end stages of
cancer, so there is a certain degree of traumatic discomfort when encountering
the subject once again, especially with the unaltered, unedited amount of
realism mandated by this director, which to a large extent is the dramatic
power of the film, the accumulating effects of death shown with such acute
detail. As a result, this is not a film likely to be revisited
again. The film is reminiscent of Maurice Pialat’s
THE MOUTH AGAPE (1974), another film about a woman slowly dying from cancer, a
starkly realistic portrait of death, told in segments of real time with long
takes of her lying in bed. While Haneke narrows
his focus to an aging couple very much in love, Pialat
paints a satirical portrait of the woman’s family avoiding bedroom visits or
any dealings with sickness or death as they instead find ridiculous ways to
pleasure and amuse themselves as they all wait for her to die. In
contrast, Haneke shows us the face of death through
an exacting control over the increasingly oppressive material, confining
actions within a ruthlessly restrictive space, which seems to parallel Georges’
efforts to maintain control over his beloved wife, right down to locking her
inside a room so no one else, including her daughter, can see her in such a
deteriorating state. However, once distanced from Haneke’s
film, the more one appreciates a certain simplistic perfection, though one
can't yet determine overall greatness when the subject matter alone is
something that would likely never be returned to, so as a one time only
experience, how significant can a film be? Might the same be asked
of Haneke’s own loathsome Funny
Games (1997), or Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS
OF
AT
What
I’m interested in is making movies about as many different subjects as I can,
and as many different forms of human experience.
— Frederick Wiseman
Wiseman has made a couple of shorter documentaries of late,
including BOXING GYM (2010) and Crazy
Horse (2011), which seemed all too brief, requiring shorter shots with more
edits, and while still interesting, the director feels much more comfortable
returning to his longer format of four-hours here, which allows greater
exploration. Without any identifying
commentary, and no narration whatsoever, the chosen subject here, the
University of California at Berkeley, is a sprawling campus situated on 172
acres across the bay from San Francisco, still managing several major American
laboratories, two for the Department of Energy, and perhaps the most infamous,
the Los Alamos National Laboratory
(still the largest employer in the State of New Mexico), where Berkeley
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan
Project that developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. The Berkeley
Lab has discovered 16 chemical elements, more than any other university in
the world, while also producing 72 Nobel prizes. Yet today, when people think of
The economic reality is state expenditures have undergone a
radical shift from appropriations for higher education to massive expenditures
for prisons and correction programs, where that trend isn’t likely to turn
around any time soon. Despite the budget
storm, the university has maintained their top global position (currently ranked #9) and top national
U.S. News and World public school rankings (listed as #1), the top public
university for the 16th year in a row.
What’s clear from the outset is
When the camera moves outside, there’s plenty of activity
with music groups performing before a largely disinterested throng, or various
student protests marching through the center of the campus, yelling their
slogans while other students are seen lying on the grass. Meanwhile the campus security is holding a
meeting devising a plan on how to maintain adequate security in anticipation of
a large student protest expected later in October. Working in cooperation with the city of
Berkeley mayor, police, and fire departments, three tiers of security are
agreed upon, one where the campus police provide all the necessary containment,
or a second level that may need available units from local police to assist,
while the most serious is an official request for back up, a state of emergency
that wasn’t used for over ten years, perhaps out of respect for the school’s
history, but was called upon twice in the past year. Chancellor Birgeneau is a fascinating and sympathetic figure, always
upbeat, looking for new ideas and comments, where as a former protester
himself, he supports student protests, as the university is a major player in
the existing free speech movement. He’s
also addressing the subject of tenure with his faculty team, suggesting there’s
a difference between making a case supported by evidence, and cheerleading,
liking someone and thinking they deserve tenure, something easily seen through
in a matter of minutes. Like any university,
it’s only as good as the teachers in the classroom, where despite laudatory
research projects and other commendable work, he still insists upon excellence
in the classroom. For most of the other
administrators, they appear to be doing their job, where we see them at work,
while Chancellor Birgeneau operates at a different
level, seen more as a visionary, as he oversees every aspect of the university,
always seeking ways to improve at every level, to leave it in better standing
than when he took over. Currently the
ethnic enrollment of new students in the Fall of 2012 is 24% White, 21%
Chinese, 12% International, 9% Mexican, 8% South Asian, 5% Korean, and only 3%
Black.
When the demonstration finally materializes, it’s a big
event, with speeches touting the effectiveness of protests held a year ago when
the legislature caved and rescinded some of their planned cuts, where they
recall the significance of 60’s activism, where a movement is larger than any
few individuals and has the power to change history. As they march to the student library, they
take over the building, issuing a set of demands that the Chancellor must meet
by
As always, some segments are more intriguing than others,
but Wiseman’s film absorbs the many arguments and perspectives offered and
remains accessible throughout, feeling perhaps more political than his earlier
work, but due to the all-encompassing depth of the examination, it’s an
invigorating and continually thought-provoking piece, where the viewer receives
a variety of relevant insight not likely encountered any other way other than
experiencing it yourself. Some of the
more interesting shots might be called transition shots, used much like Ozu, where Wiseman films a janitor sweeping a lengthy
staircase, or a landscaper’s leafblower clearing a
walkway, or various construction projects taking place, where we see a team
pouring cement, eventually leveling it off, or a steamroller flatten out a
layer of road asphalt, as these are projects showing the public’s tax dollars
at work. Former Cabinet Secretary of
Labor Robert Reich is seen instilling his views that all major goals of any
project need to be challenged in order to be successful, where part of a good
working team is providing that self criticism.
Working in the Clinton Administration, it nearly killed him that in
government he was surrounded by so many “yes men,” people whose idea of keeping
their jobs was simply telling the boss what they think he wants to hear,
revealing a story about being in a crowded elevator full of his handlers after
a particularly ineffective TV talk show, asking what did he do wrong? While the consensus told him he remained on
point and made effective arguments, a lone voice from the back from a nearly
inaudible woman suggested that he used his hands too much, immediately
generating daggers in the looks from superiors.
But she reiterated, when asked again, that for TV you’re more effective
without all the hand gestures. Reich
said he remembered that woman and kept her on his staff, and gave her multiple
promotions, always remembering that she was someone who would provide an honest
answer when he needed it. There’s
another classroom discussion dissecting the metaphors in John Donne’s love
poems, a humorous skit on the social pressures of Facebook,
while there’s also a staged performance of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town, where one of the hallmarks
of the play, besides depicting ordinary life in America, is deciding what time
capsules to choose that a hundred or a thousand years from now will tell the
future something about these times we’re living in. In a beautifully abstract dance piece, mixing
fantasy and a folksy American reality, what’s clear from this film is art
survives as a timeless expression.
SHORT TERM 12 Short
Term 12 A-
You
are not their friend, and you are not their therapist. You’re here to create a
safe environment, and that’s it.
—Jack (Frantz Turner)
The gut wrenching, emotional powerhouse blockbuster of the
year, this film is an offshoot of a 22-minute short by the same name that won the
Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at Sundance in 2009, and later won an Academy Nicholl Fellowship Award for screenwriting in 2010,
eventually expanded into a full-length feature film. Rejected by Sundance earlier this year, the
film was chosen to premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in
The anchor of the film is the lead supervisor Grace, Brie
Larson, who is nothing less than a revelation in this film, displaying a range
of emotion and a commitment to these kids that is nearly inhuman, as she
embraces each and every one of them like a big sister, as if they are all part
of the same family, where they all matter.
Of course, these kids have all grown up thinking they don’t matter, as
if there’s something wrong with them because they allowed someone bigger and
stronger to abuse them, like it’s somehow their fault. The anger and shame they feel couldn’t be
more pronounced, as it’s always there, lying just under the surface, where each
kid has a distinct personality which is largely expressed in nonverbal ways,
beautifully captured by the restless and constantly roving camera of Brett Pawlak that seems to get into everybody’s face, creating a
continually developing series of impressionistic portraits of human
intimacy. It hits you at some point that
this isn’t like other films. Maybe it’s
how uncomfortable you become by the dizzying camera movement, or the volcanic
eruptions of spontaneous rage, where the staff has to physically hold these
kids down to stop them from hurting someone, where they are assaulted by the
most venomous, profanity-laced stream of insults imaginable, as if a part of
Linda Blair from THE EXORCIST (1973) has somehow managed to infiltrate into the
bloodstream of these kids. And then a
short time later, when things have calmed down, they’ve only grown closer, as
they helped shelter someone from the storm, becoming comrades in arms, sharing
the most inexplicably intimate circumstances, remaining non-judgmental, and
still being there for them afterwards.
It’s not easy to understand how in one moment you are being spit upon,
hated, and your life threatened in a demonic fury, and a few moments later you
are genuinely hugging that same person. The
emotional intensity on display is not what we’re used to, as it’s not make
believe or exaggerated for effect, but is heartbreaking because it so
accurately reveals what these kids are trying to express. This is the pain they have to live with every
day.
Part of the brilliance of the film is the way it values
personal connections and balances time spent both with the kids and the staff,
slowly parceling out bits of information, interjecting humor and lighter
moments, contrasting the difficulty of helping these kids with how hard it is
maintaining trust in adult relationships, so that the overall effect is
accumulated knowledge, where we’re always gaining greater insight into these
lives. We quickly learn Grace is having
an affair with fellow staffer Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), both of whom adore
working with these kids, as it singularly defines who they are, people with a
commitment to being there for those who have been hurt the most, living with
and working with the most vulnerable among us, where she can be near saintly in
her attitudes about helping others, but often can’t utter a word about her own
feelings. Mason shows extraordinary
patience in trying to deal with her, as she blocks him out sometimes, almost
always because there’s something else on her mind that keeps her extremely
guarded, as 24/7 she’s responsible for continually protecting her charge from
huge reservoirs of darkness that always seem to be closing in on someone. Grace is an employee that doesn’t need to be
told what to do. Working on the floor,
she sees instinctively what needs to be done, and she protects these kids like
a hovering angel. The unseen force in
the room is being part of a government bureaucratic system, where there must be
other short term units just like this one, where they all have to answer to a
higher authority, like a doctor, a psychiatrist, an administrator, or a
politician who sits at a desk and reads reports but doesn’t get the overall
picture of what’s going on in the lives of these kids. When action is taken that literally shatters
the confidence of one kid, Grace will rally to their defense, often to no
avail, as she’s told “You are not their friend, and you are not their
therapist. You’re here to create a safe
environment, and that’s it…We’re not here to interpret tears.” But of course, Grace and her staff are the
ones comforting these kids during their most agonizing moments, helping them
survive their worst nightmares, where they rarely have the luxury to interpret
coherent thought, as it’s almost always communicated in tears or unimaginable
rage. One of the key moments of the film
is listening to Marcus, the oldest kid on the unit who’s just days away from
turning 18, scared shitless about becoming emancipated, bitterly battling the
demons in his head as he raps about “The pretty pictures in my fuckin’ head are faded/Look into my eyes so you know what
it’s like/ Living a life not knowing what a normal life’s like.”
LORE Lore A-
Australia
Germany Great Britain (109 mi)
2012 d: Cate Shortland Official site [au]
One of the more uniquely original and powerfully compelling
war stories to appear onscreen for awhile, this is a joint Australian-German
production, where an Australian director has essentially made a German language
film, co-adapting the screenplay along with British writer Robin Mukherjee from one of the three stories in British author Rachel
Seiffert’s 2001 novel The Dark Room. Unlike most
World War II war stories, this one contains no battle scenes and takes place
just after the war, where the focus is on the psychological aftereffects where
German people are quickly being judged and harshly condemned, little of which
is widely known or written about. Told
from the point of view of surviving Nazi children who were once part of the
indoctrinated Hitler Youth where they were led to believe Hitler was
a national hero, a leader glorifying the best of what Germany represents,
reality comes as a crushing blow, where mostly they are in complete disbelief,
as if a terrible hoax was being played upon the entire nation, not even
realizing at first that Nazi Germany has been wiped off the map, as the rumors
they are hearing about death camps are too gruesome and impossible to
believe. Suddenly ashamed of their
German heritage, they are part of a stunned and disbelieving nation that is
unable to express their grief. While the
film plots the slow journey of growing awareness, it should be pointed out that
some 12 to 14 million German people living in German occupied territories
during the war had to be transported back to Germany, becoming the largest
transfer of any population in modern European history, where most came from the
Eastern territories of Poland and the Soviet Union (7 million) and
Czechoslovakia (3 million). It was this
group, mostly women and children that were the most severely mistreated before
they were ultimately transported back to
In the spring of 1945, as the last signs of German
resistance collapse, Hitler commits suicide as invading Allied forces are
streaming into
What is exemplary here is the consistency of tone
throughout, where Lore, despite her strict upbringing of German arrogance and
staunchly anti-Semitic views, is such a sympathetic character, profoundly out
of her element, destitute and alone as she guides her family through the
countryside, but also deeply disturbed and conflicted about what she
discovers. Most of this is expressed
through wordless sequences of doubt and uncertainty, where the camera follows
her in close ups, changing speeds to slow motion, where she struggles with
every decision, unsure of herself every step of the way, yet forcing herself to
exude a quiet confidence that is continually shattered. This internal imbalance is contrasted by the
pastoral beauty of the surrounding countryside, often idyllic, beautifully
photographed by Adam Arkapaw, accentuating a simple
harmony of nature that humans continually defile, while the hauntingly poetic
musical score by Max Richter adds still more layers of depth and
complexity. As they quickly take their
place at the bottom of the food chain, they are forced to take the blame for
the hateful actions of their parents and the entire Nazi regime, as a flurry of
contempt and derision is suddenly thrust upon their shoulders, where especially
the youngest boys are utterly confused what to believe. When a strange young man begins to follow
them on the road, Thomas, Kai Malina from Haneke’s THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), Lore is doubly
overprotective, especially when she discovers he’s carrying Jewish identity
papers and bears a concentration camp tattoo, not wishing for him to touch any
of them. Her iron will slowly dissolves
into a different kind of standoffish acquiescence, however, as he loves to play
with the boys and as he’s able to find food, where the balance of power
literally shifts in his direction, reminiscent of Jenny Agutter’s
equally enthralling transformation in Nicolas Roeg’s
WALKABOUT (1971). This concession on her
part, the yielding of power to a completely unknown entity, is the mirror image
of the Third Reich, where she has little choice but to capitulate, losing the
last shred of Aryan dignity in the process, where she is literally transformed
by the abandonment and despair felt by every German citizen, as they were
ultimately lied to and betrayed by the Nazi regime. This film offers a unique perspective,
exploring the horrendous consequences of the Holocaust through the eyes of the
Nazi children who will bear the brunt of the sins of their parents, an inspired
and thoroughly provocative account that couldn’t be more poetically expressed,
where Saskia Rosendahl’s
performance is utterly captivating.
THE ANGEL’S SHARE The Angel's
Share A-
Great
Britain France Belgium
Italy (101 mi) 2012
d: Ken Loach
And I would walk
five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
—The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - YouTube (
Loach took
When this rag tag group of social misfits all meet for community
service, they are under the assured guidance of John Henshaw
as Harry, a likeable enough guy, by no means a hard ass, and someone who has
the flexibility to display a little sense of humor every now and then. Receiving a call while on duty, his job is to
officially deliver Robbie to the hospital, as his wife Leone (Siobhan Reilly)
is delivering their firstborn. But what
he witnesses first hand is a colossal beating by a trio of Leone’s uncles
warning Robbie to stay away from the baby or they’d kill him, giving him acute
insight into just what Robbie’s up against in his struggle to turn his life
around. Having no place else to stay
that’s safe, Harry allows him to spend the night, celebrating the birth of his
“wee lad” named Luke, pulling out some special aged whisky for the
occasion. While the two enjoy a snort,
what they’re more fascinated by is learning the ritual surrounding taste
contests and developing the unique ability to determine origin just by the
smell and taste. Harry becomes such an
enthusiast that he takes them on a tour of a whisky distillery in the Scottish
Highlands, where Albert sees his first Scottish castle in
What Loach finds in this film through that humorous banter and dizzying
interaction between characters is a special, indefinable quality that separates
humans from other species—personality.
Instead of feeling down and out, as if their lives don’t count, they
have a natural affinity for defiance, to literally defy the odds, reflected in
the clever kinds of small criminal acts they specialize in, where Robbie gets
the idea to utilize the group’s talents to steal an extremely rare batch of
recently discovered whisky that is about to be auctioned for over a million
pounds. While the audience knows what
they’re up to, they have no idea how they intend to pull it off, turning this
into a thrilling road movie as they’re off on yet another misadventure, this
time wearing kilts, where the mood of optimism is enhanced by the surging
energy of an upbeat theme song about whisky drinking, The Proclaimers
- I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - YouTube
(3:39), which never sounded more perfect.
Witty, hilarious, given a realistic style and a natural spontaneity in
the key roles, Loach counteracts the neverending
societal drumbeat of dehumanization of working class youth by creating such
likeable and sympathetic characters.
It’s not what happens, but the beautifully orchestrated layers of
comical complexity written into how it happens that continues to surprise
throughout in an audaciously thrilling whisky heist, where the supposed dregs
of the earth walk right into the lair of the wealthy and the snobbishly
super-elite without attracting suspicion and steal the most precious commodity
right underneath their noses. While
poking fun at the pretentiousness of the aristocracy, featuring a real-life
“Master of the Quaich,” Charlie MacLean, Loach adds a
bit of comic ingenuity by continually exposing our working class heroes to
their own special flair for fucking things up, as after all, what they all have
in common is getting caught. The
enchanting intrigue of the story never wavers and never resorts to hackneyed
stereotype, where the unique dialogue is just so head-splittingly funny
throughout, one often forgets how rare it is to experience such an
intelligently crafted film as this. What
it lacks in profundity, it makes up for in originality, youthful vibrancy, and
the utter joy of being alive, easily one of the most delightful times to be had
in a theater all year. While it is a bit
of a fantasy, something of a stretch for a known advocate of social realism, it
does feature brilliant writing, unforgettable characters, and the
scintillating, profanity-laced dialogue is simply sensational.
*Jean-Louis Trintignant – Amour
Mads Mikkelsen
– A Royal Affair (2) + The Hunt (1)
Robert Redford – All Is Lost
Jimmy Wong – Soul
Bruce Dern –
Idris Elba
– Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
*Emmanuelle Riva – Amour
Julie Delpy – Before
Suzanne Clément – Laurence
Anyways
Cate Blanchett
– Blue Jasmine
Brie Larson – Short Term 12
Sara Forestier – Suzanne
Tye Sheridan – Mud
*Peter Mullan – Top of the
Sam Rockwell – The Way, Way Back
Ben Foster – Kill Your Darlings
Devin Ratray – Blue Ruin
Yuri Bykov – The Major
Adriana Mascialino – Superclásico
Kristin Scott Thomas – Only God Forgives
Sally Hawkins – Blue Jasmine
Piroska Molnár – The Notebook
June Squibb –
*Jennifer Lawrence – American Hustle
*David O. Russell
*Jia Zhang-ke
Michael Haneke
Miguel Gomes
Emir Baigazin
Xavier Dolan
Mark Boal – Zero Dark Thirty
*Spike Jonze – Her
Paul Laverty – The Angel’s Share
François Ozon, adapted from Juan Mayorga
– In the House
Xavier Dolan – Laurence Anyways
Woody Allen – Blue Jasmine
Alexey Matveev, Gleb Stepanov,
Arthur Sibirski and Michael Tarkovsky
– Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Nicolas Bolduc – War Witch
Yves Bélanger – Laurence Anyways
Leah Striker – Wolfschildren
*Chung Mong-hong – Soul
Nelson Yu Lik-wai – A Touch of
Sin
Tabu
Mud
Top of the
Blue Jasmine
The Spectacular Now
*American Hustle
BEST ART DIRECTION
Tabu
War Witch
To the Wonder
Soul
*A Touch of Sin
Museum Hours
Amour
Tabu
In the House
Blue Jasmine
*Stranger By the
Harmony Lessons
Tabu
A Royal Affair
Behind the Candelabra
Laurence Anyways
*American Hustle
Thomas Newman – Side Effects
*Cliff Martinez – The Company You Keep (2) + Only God
Forgives (1) + Spring Breakers (3)
Skrillex and
Cliff Martinez – Spring Breakers
David Wingo – Mud (2) + Prince
Avalanche (1)
Philip Miller – Of Good Report
Giong Lim
– A Touch of Sin
BEST DOCUMENTARY
*The Missing Picture
20 Feet from Stardom
At
Short Term 12
The Act of Violence
The Gatekeepers
