TOP
TEN FILMS SEEN IN THE YEAR 2007
(Films
not released or shown in Chicago until 2007)
1.) INLAND EMPIRE A 95
USA France
Poland (179
mi) 2006
d: David Lynch
A
woman in trouble
Vintage Lynch, a return to the eerie experimentation of ERASERHEAD
(1977), complete with remarkable industrial sounds and Hitchcock-like
orchestrations accompanying the grainy video visualization of lone characters
walking up dark, winding staircases, through a neverending
labyrinth of long hallways and doors, into a Donnie Darko-like
TV set piece with characters wearing bunny suits and long ears, including an
obnoxious laugh track, where we see a constant stream of distorted faces
enlarged, stretched or pulled, also an obsession with various forms of light,
from total darkness, to barely lit rooms, dim lamps, candles, cigarette
lighters, to brightly lit streams of light which reveal an awesome power of
their own, ending with one of the most brilliant end credit sequences ever
filmed. One noticeable effect was a
fidgety audience, where people constantly got up and down from their seats,
making endless trips back and forth, in and out of the theater. Lynch’s first venture with digital video
film, which by the way is not shot in ‘Scope, is largely plotless, but follows
the synchronicity of dreams, many of which veer into nightmares, disturbing
images that return to familiar surroundings with horrific results. Initially, the audience is privy to a series
of images that are startling by the sheer design of the frame, by the washed
out colors, and by an audacious oddness the defines the formal structure of the
initial conversations, some of them absurdly funny, as if we are being told
what’s about to happen by a strange Gypsy fortune teller (Grace Zabriskie)
speaking in a thick accent as she unexpectedly visits her supposed neighbor,
Laura Dern, in one of her multiple roles, making apocalyptic pronouncements
about yesterday, today, and tomorrow, suggesting that by tomorrow things will
not be the same.
Even earlier, in black and white images, we see a prostitute (Karolina Gruszka) with a client in a hotel room with their faces
digitally blurred. Nothing of
consequence happens, yet the girl becomes a central character of the film
despite never leaving her room, as in tears, she proceeds to watch a television
show of the Rabbits, which has a decidedly slower sense of time. The room of the set is similar to Dean Stockwell’s plainly designed room in BLUE VELVET (1986),
where a bunny with a pink apron irons in the back, while two other bunnies sit
on a sofa where the prevailing tone is oddness.
This sequence was pulled from Lynch’s 2002 short film RABBITS and is
fully integrated into the film. Much
like the ear in BLUE VELVET, there seems to be multiple portals to other
dimensions, creating a layered effect of overlapping realities, one of which is
Gruszka, known only as the Lost Girl, apparently
stuck in a waiting room.
Recalling a similar mood of the future co-mingling with the past, where
time leaves a mark of scarred psychological isolation and exaggerated decay
from Norma Desmond’s mansion in SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), here our vantage point
is from the opulence of another estate, where Dern, as has-been actress Nikki
Grace, receives news that she’s been offered the lead role as Susan Blue in a
hot-boiled romance film, On High In Blue
Tomorrows, starring opposite Justin Theroux, a reputed womanizer, who is
warned by Grace’s husband (Peter J. Lucas) to keep his distance from his
vulnerable co-star, which, of course, falls on deaf ears. Almost immediately we learn the movie has a
cursed history, as the initial film was scrapped after the leads were
mysteriously murdered. The venerable
Harry Dean Stanton, no less, provides comic relief on the set, and in the
middle of an initial reading, the drama is so fierce that it supplants existing
reality when Stanton hears a strange noise from the adjoining room, suggesting
a shadowy presence lurking nearby that is then seen from multiple realities,
one that is real, another that takes on the life of the movie, which is also
viewed by the Lost Girl on television, who may in fact have morphed into the
film she is watching. Grace becomes so
wrapped up inside her character, we’re never again able to distinguish which
altered state we are witnessing, as the imagined and the real merge into one,
but we follow her throughout the film on her journey through this labyrynth of fragmented identity and lost souls, which
includes a trip to the snowy streets of Poland and the interruption of a
backyard barbeque by a strange concoction of Eastern European men who seem like
they just walked off the set of a Béla Tarr movie, who then become interspersed throughout the
film.
The initial humor gives way to an underworld of grim disconnection and
fear, where Dern continues to find herself a stranger to the person she is
playing, almost as if she is outside herself, continually trying to find a way
back in, similar to the Lost Girl, whose fate seems to be linked to an
unrealized outcome on the television screen. There are moments that repeat themselves, like
the television Rabbits sequence, an alley behind a grocery store, an
interrogation sequence with a brutalized Dern, which supposedly was the initial
sequence written by Lynch for the film, and we often find ourselves in similar
rooms, as if the subconscious is striving to push itself to the surface. Three of the most perfect realizations in the
film are cued to musical sequences. The
first involves several girls working as prostitutes who are seen in a moment of
reprieve dancing to the music of Little Eva’s “Loco-Motion,” a joyous moment
that provides a temporary uplift of spirit.
The second is a hurried walk down Hollywood Boulevard by Dern to the
enlivened rhythms of Beck’s “Black Tambourine,” moving through a maze of
streetwalkers who may as well be the ghoulish silhouettes of dead or forgotten
souls that Hollywood has discarded and left behind, as she fears for her life,
certain that someone is out to kill her.
The final is set to Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man,” a jazzy rendition that
pulsates with a soulful sensuality as it plays over the end credits to the
wondrous vibrancy of a jubilant group of dancers, which bookends a similarly
dazzling opening credits dance sequence from MULHOLLAND DR. (2001).
Among her recognized roles, Dern plays a has-been Hollywood actress
under pressure to revive her career, also an ordinary wife of a blue-collar
Polish worker, and a Hollywood prostitute. One of the most beautiful
aspects of the end, when she finally enters the room of the Polish
prostitute who's been sitting in tears watching television since the beginning,
who seems to have her life connected in some way to what Dern does, and in the
end the two embrace, is that Dern has somehow released that woman from her fate,
perhaps by killing her murderer, choosing a reality that does NOT include the
victimization of prostitution, allowing her to return to her family at the end,
and for Dern to return to the picture of innocence. Prostitution is
certainly one fate that awaits fallen actresses that never make it in the
business. The amusing breast sequence among prostitutes only accentuates
artificial beauty, even artificially enhanced beauty, which contrasts mightily
with the "sweetness" of Nina Simone over the end credits, and
the discovery of real love.
Lacking the luscious beauty of MULHOLLAND DR, it would be hard to say
one enjoys this as much, but it’s certainly a film that blows everything else
out of the water in terms of its defiance of convention and its ambitious
scope, a hypnotic free form stream-of-conscious statement that is at times
relentlessly aggravating, strange, uncompromising, dazzlingly inventive, lurid,
sexist, creepy, sadistic, baffling, mind-altering, brilliantly unsettling,
mystifying, indifferent, languid, ambiguous, horrifying, and not like anything
else except other Lynch films. There are
obvious moments of brilliance, while at other times, we keep being pulled into
a wearying darkness that saps our energy reserves with unending references to brutality
and abuse. This film feels like a walk
down memory lane, though it is never anything less than inventive, filled with
superb Lynch imagery that may remind us of his other films, but it also paves a
path for the implementation of experimental technique in a feature film, where
plot and narrative are secondary to the overall artistic stylization, which
always includes superb performances to match the power of the director’s
vision. By plumbing the depths of Lynch’s
own fertile imagination, which reimagines and reinvents with such ease, he is
constantly challenging the audience’s ability to reawaken their own sense of
consciousness.
2.) 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS A 95
Romania (113 mi) 2007
‘Scope d: Cristain Mungiu
A reflection of life in Romania under the Ceaucescu
era, set in 1987, this is the story of a young girl’s attempts to obtain a
cheap abortion on the black market, where every aspect of society is layered in
corruption and lies, revealing a society where truth has little value, where
learning to operate through the lies is like making your way through a
minefield, where some lucky ones may get through, but only by accident. Meanwhile, many people’s lives are routinely
trampled over by the societal indifference to other people’s problems. While it has a similar scenario as THE DEATH
OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005), shot with a fluid in-your-face, hand-held camera,
intensely following the lives of a few people over the course of a few hours,
this actually has a greater dramatic impact and could easily be called one day
in the life of a decent person in an indecent society. Many who watch this film will wonder what all
the fuss is about, why it was awarded the Palme D’Or at Cannes as the Festival
winner this year, believing it is a “good” but not a great film, as it can be
pretty slow going for awhile, actually plodding along
at times, where the final effect accumulates much of its power through
misdirection, by “not” being what we expect.
The girl who gets pregnant, Găbiţa
(Laura Vasiliu) and her college dorm roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), are
two fairly ordinary girls who go about their business thinking this is like any
other day. Only through the accumulation
of detail, and one brilliant performance from the best friend do we come to
appreciate just how many different levels this film is operating on, not the
least of which is the abortion itself, which is captured in its entirety, seen
as a despicable act that becomes a catalyst of something that takes on a life
of its own in this film.
Personally, I was not won over by the drab, bleached out colors, or by
the use of ‘Scope, which wasn’t used to any particular effect except perhaps in
a dinner sequence, squeezing many people all into one shot, where we could
follow several people’s gestures and body language all at the same time,
actually becoming one of the turning points of the film, but other than that,
the garbage and litter that seemed etched into every street scene was simply
expanded to more of it. Most of the film
takes place inside cramped rooms, occasionally opening to the world outside,
but only briefly. What is actually
probed is not any external condition that a camera could beautify, but the
internalized feelings of one remarkable character, allowing the camera to
linger and gaze, giving the audience the full impact of the moment, which
happens repeatedly throughout the film.
Oftentimes the other character isn’t even seen at all, only heard, but
there are some extraordinary conversations in this film, all written by the
director. Two in particular that stand
out are what follows the hushed silence moments right after the abortionist
exits and also the previously mentioned dinner sequence which was simply a
phenomenal sequence, perfectly balancing both the interior and exterior worlds,
rivaling some of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
signature shots in several of his films (the opening of FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI [1998]comes to mind).
Without using a musical soundtrack, but presented through a grim,
realist style, this is proported to be the first in a
collection of Mungiu’s stories of life under
Communism called “Tales from the Golden Age,” which may take us back to
Kieslowski’s gritty, down to earth world of moral anxiety, where individual
choices were forced up against the wall of authoritarian inflexibility, where
all choices were impossible.
This film has a throbbing sense of dramatic urgency, where abortion is
seen as not only emblematic of an entire ineffectual system where
individualized needs are viewed as outlawed, subject to serious criminal
penalties, where women are forced to expose and humiliate themselves to
underhanded black market profiteers, but it becomes a full-fledged feminist
treatise on the gulf that separates the sexes, dramatically revealing in
excruciatingly real terms just how systematically entrenched in backwards
thinking men (and many women) remain, still blindly incapable and perhaps
unwilling to understand their own culpability in creating and maintaining
insufferable conditions for humans to endure, where suppressing the rights of
others is typically a product of historically ingrained masculine ideology.
3.) THE LIVES OF OTHERS A 95
Germany (137 mi) 2006
d: Florian Henckel
von Donnersmarck
A brilliantly realized depiction of the East German Stasi secret police,
set in the mid 1980’s when they were in full swing, casting their net of
surveillance over the entire nation, sadistically turning neighbor against
neighbor, all under the thumb of an information hungry police state, where all
choices were impossible, where for an entire nation there was no option, as
failure to cooperate with the authorities usually meant dire consequences. This is a revival of Kieslowski’s behind the
iron curtain cinema of moral anxiety, and in many ways parallels his 1988 film,
A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), as in this case, instead of an ordinary citizen
spying on his attractive neighbor, it is one of the highest Stasi agents
bugging the home apartment of one of the country’s leading playwrights, a man
who flaunts western attire, interests, books and other periodicals, also a
demure leading actress, so the police can only conclude he’s up to no
good. In both cases, the voyeur becomes
intoxicated with the subject, so much so that they act in a way that might
otherwise be considered insane, as it’s beyond logic or reason, and might even
be considered an act of love.
Ulrich Mühe, a man who was in real life
married to a Stasi informer, who understands all too well what it feels like to
live under constant police surveillance, plays Captain Gerd
Wiesler, an Alec Guinness look-alike from DR. ZHIVAGO
(1965), an unassuming man of quiet intelligence, a Party advocate who rarely
speaks, but continually jots down what he sees in a small pocket notebook, the
eyes and ears of the State. At each
level above him are more despicable men, men enthralled with and corrupted by
their own power, men who hold themselves above the laws of the nation, who
would rather intimidate the entire population into blind obedience. Their systematic infiltration of the
population is legendary, their interrogations ruthless, operating with 100,000
full-time employees, 200,000 informers, forcing each citizen to capitulate to
the police one interrogation at a time.
In the opening sequence, Wiesler demonstrates
how he wears down his subjects, offering them no sleep, coldly and
calculatingly waiting them out until their resistance is broken, then
threatening their family or loved ones with arrest until they confess. Sebastian Koch is the East German playwright
Georg Dreyman, “the only non-subversive playwright we
have,” while Martina Gedeck is exquisite in the role
of his girl friend, the nation’s leading actress,
Christa-Maria Sieland, “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R,” who unfortunately
has an addiction to popping illegal pills.
The head of the Stasi is forcing Christa to submit to weekly sessions of
sex in exchange for allowing her to work, an artistic practice that is
completely controlled by the State. It
is their apartment that Wiesler bugs, sitting and
listening and typing his reports on everything he hears.
Dreyman is connected to a community of other
artists, many of whom have already defected to the West, which is the
government’s greatest fear, which is why they keep such close tabs on
them. Many have already been
interrogated and imprisoned, leaving them with a bitter taste in their mouths,
while others have been blacklisted and out of work for as long as a decade. The Stasi’s method is to imprison them
indefinitely, but long enough so that they voluntarily never again contribute
anything else in their chosen field.
What Wiesler discovers, however, is that these
artists are hiding nothing, exhibiting a rare openness in a society that
thrives on secrets and covering up, discovering instead that it is his own
superiors who have the suspect motives, which puts him in the same impossible
position as the people he is spying on.
This turns into a series of calculated risks, where each side realizes
they’re being watched, but they have to decide how to act. When a blacklisted director who hasn’t worked
in ten years finally hangs himself, Dreyman and Wiesler simultaneously commit to more drastic actions,
beautifully rendered in a musical sequence where Dreyman
plays a piece of piano music given to him by the director called “Sonata for a
Good Man,” a piece written by the film’s musical composer, Gabriel Yared, which has a significant impact on Wiesler, who begins to identify with “the lives of others,”
omitting significant details in his reports, as it’s hard for him to believe
his government didn’t drive that man to the breaking point. Dreyman at one
point is heard asking how anyone who has listened to this music, really
listened to it, could ever think of it as anything bad. On several occasions Wiesler
nearly blows his cover, one is a beautifully designed sequence in a bar which
is one of the turning points in the film, as without ever coming out and
actually saying so, he subtly persuades Christa to re-examine her weekly sessions
with the Stasi superior, where she inquires into his
motives, as he seems to know so much about her, questioning if he is a “good
man?”
Beautifully written, mixing meticulous detail with intelligence and
humor, where the tone and pacing of the film are perfectly matched, where the
music does not overreach, yet is genuinely in synch with the mood of the film,
where the ensemble cast is flawless, and where the urgency of the story starts
to feel overwhelmingly personal after awhile. There’s another scene nearer the end where
Christa is arrested and subject to interrogation, a scene of indescribable
conflict and tension, where she identifies her interrogator as a friend from an
earlier moment in the film, yet cannot reveal anything, where the interrogator
himself is under observation, so both are placed in an impossible dilemma. This poignantly describes living under the
thumb of relentless totalitarian psychological pressure, eloquently described
in his book as The Captive Mind by Polish Nobel prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and the film never for a minute wavers in
this regard, filled with small moments that are as revealing as the larger
ones, which include a not so incidental reference to Communist Party Premiere
Gorbachev, a man who simply walked away from a position of unlimited power, and
a man who incidentally changed the entire culture of living under an
authoritarian police state, and in doing so, changed the course of
possibilities for others. It’s a
powerful work for a first time filmmaker who also wrote the film, whose
recollections include his mother being searched by the secret police as a young
boy, which may help explain the dramatic impact this film reaches by the end,
stunningly understated, yet precisely to the point.
4.) THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY A- 94
Ireland Great Britain Germany
Italy Spain (124 mi)
d: Ken Loach
A film that’s bound to draw attention to itself, as it’s a film of ideas
wrapped in the blood of brothers-in-arms and history, as well as a lump in your
throat story by Paul Laverty that grabs the audience from the haunting opening
moments and relentlessly never lets go.
Following on the trail of John Ford’s THE INFORMER (1935) and Italian neorealists like Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1945) or de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEF (1948), Loach is so superb at painting
compassionate portraits of progressive realism, a wrenching view of ordinary
people caught up in the turmoil of the times, using a fictionalized recreation
of a moment in history that has profound implications on the world we live in
today, creating a style of film that defines intensity. Set in Ireland in 1920, we see the armed to
the teeth British Black and Tan soldiers not only harassing Irish youth, which
might have been tolerated, but the mainstream professional class as well,
bloodying a few noses, using a bullying style of thuggery that eventually leads
to murder. At a local farmhouse that
becomes a focal point of the film, Damien, Cillian
Murphy, witnesses the murder of one of his friends for saying his name in
Gaelic instead of English, and after watching the Black and Tans knock a train
conductor senseless for refusing to allow soldiers to bring their weapons on
the trains, he changes his plans from attending medical school in London and
joins up with the Irish Republican Army where his brother Teddy, Padraic Delaney, is already active as a soldier. The story follows Damien’s path as he and his
brother undergo the painful transition from civilian to soldier, where violence
becomes their trademark, which leaves more than a scar in their anguished
souls.
Much like Melville’s portrait of the French resistance in ARMY OF
SHADOWS (1969), these Republicans face an impossible dilemma, as they’re being
rounded up, tortured and killed, all graphically realized in a few short
moments of the film, they’re left with a huge burden on their shoulders, where
the freedom of the country lies in the hands of a bunch of poor, working class
kids, an underfunded rag tag few, or they can face the humiliating alternative
of living the rest of their lives under the brutal dictates of a British
occupation. Loach has already shown us
what the British can do, so what alternative do they have? In one of the more wrenching scenes of the
film, they have to decide what to do when they discover the identity of an
informer, a young kid they’ve known all their lives, as well as his family,
whose real sin is he couldn’t endure the kind of torture the IRA was used
to. What to do? Through a series of raids and ambushes,
Damien develops the friendship of Dan, Liam Cunningham, and Sinead, Orla
Fitzgerald, whose brother was killed earlier at her grandmother’s farmhouse,
which comes into play again in another unforgettable scene when it is burned
down by the Black and Tans, leaving Sinead beaten and bloodied. As we’re being drawn into this life or death
intensity of an unstoppable mayhem and neverending
revenge, a truce is declared. The Treaty
of 1921 is signed by both the Irish and British, which leads to the withdrawal
of the Black and Tan troops, a police force in the hands of the Irish, but the
country will remain under the power of the British – the terms of peace.
Suddenly the film changes from the fight for freedom set in the vast
green landscapes of the cloudy outdoors, beautifully captured by
cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, to the cramped back
rooms of a dingy building where a progressive political discussion ensues, the
heart and soul of the picture, guys in caps and vests arguing vehemently with
one another over the terms of the agreement, exploring questions of history and
political experiences of the working class as if their lives depended on it, as
some feel they are so close to driving the British out that they’d never
forgive themselves if they stopped now, while others, overwhelmed by the rising
body count, welcome the prospects of peace, believing there are no
circumstances under which the British would ever actually leave, so withdrawing
their troops is a good compromise.
Damien and Teddy end up on opposite sides of the argument and both end
up pursuing their goals in their own way, which only leads to disastrous
results. The final shot at that same
farmhouse, the setting where so much of the action occurs and a fitting
metaphor for Ireland itself, is an extraordinary picture of hurt and sorrow, as
one wonders how much more anguish that farmhouse can endure? The language of the film is in a thick Irish
brogue, a good third of which is incomprehensible, and unlike a few other
working class British films, there are no subtitles, which makes for a
frustrating viewing, as what we can decipher is bold, brash, and at times
poetic, so it might have helped, but this is one of Loach’s most powerful
films, where the initial intensity never lags due to such a strong undercurrent
of staggering realism.
5.) FAY GRIM A- 94
USA Germany (118 mi)
2006 d: Hal Hartley
Another one of those inexplicably chosen Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban
productions, men with questionable artistic resumés
financing legendary American indie-film director Hal Hartley in this
deliriously upbeat film about, like INLAND EMPIRE’s tagline, a woman in
trouble. Shot in New York, Paris,
Berlin, and Istanbul, this film gives you no idea where it’s heading, even as
it begins in the familiar neighborhood of Queens and extends outward to greater
distances, eventually ending in the remote mindset of the entangled web of
intrigue that resembles America’s current obsession with the murky underworld
of terrorism. What Hartley does do,
besides write his own film music which blends perfectly with the changeable
mood of his films, is write some of the best dialogue in films today, and
through the skills of Parker Posey, see THE HOUSE OF YES (1997), who provides a
startlingly complex and risqué performance, he has crafted a wonderful balance
of savage Team America-style subversive hilarity with the dramatic breadth of
Posey’s ever changing persona where “she is not what she seems.” Everyone underestimates Parker Posey, critics
and audiences alike, as do all the men in this film, with the possible
exception of her own family, led by the cynical CIA foil Jeff Goldblum, who
fast and furiously spurts out the latest Agency plans which continually turn on
a dime based on a series of their own catastrophes. A comment on our modern day governmental
quagmire you think? Possibly, but think
again, as this film invariably spoofs spy thriller films, including the
exaggerated use of giant titles cutting into the action reminding us just where
we are in place and time, in case we forgot, while poking a little fun at
Hartley’s own 1997 film HENRY FOOL, which he uses in the musical prelude and
fugue variation, starting with a restatement of the theme, combining updated
elements from that theme, and then breaking into a jazz riff that all but
obliterates any resemblance to the original except Parker, who always works
within the framework of that film, while everything around her changes. Lest we forget, Parker had a tiny role in
HENRY FOOL, but made so much of her brief appearance that here it has expanded
infinitely.
In a role resembling Gena Rowlands in GLORIA
(1980), Parker makes a fashion statement as an ultra
sophisticated woman dressed all in black whose composure is tested on
every level, especially in a scene where she hides a cell phone set on vibrate
in her pants. Opening at home, Fay
(Posey) is called to school to meet with authorities after her 14-year old son (Liam
Aiken) is caught with a small hand-cranked moviola
that reveals pornographic material, a device that he recently received
anonymously in the mail, a gift that keeps on giving as it’s mined for more
comedic material throughout the film.
“”It’s an orgy,” he matter-of-factly tells his mom when she peers into
it. But all is set right in the world as
he’s eventually expelled from school for getting a blowjob from two classmates,
but not until this knowledge has been perfectly set up by a single shot of two
short skirted girls silently staring down the school staircase at him, like
hawks about to swoop down on their prey.
But that’s the least of her problems, as waiting for her at home are a
couple of CIA operatives led by motor-mouthed Goldblum who pesters her with
questions about the supposed disappearance of her long lost husband, missing in
action for the past seven years, the notorious conman Henry Fool (Thomas Jay
Ryan), who they suggest may have dabbled in previous secret espionage missions
involving governmental overthrows in Nicaragua and Chile, also rumored to have
been seen in Israel, Iraq, China, and even the Vatican where the Pope threw a
chair at him before disappearing into the friendly confines of the Middle
East. Of course, this all feels
ridiculous to Fay, but her son confirms his own 5-year old memories of his
dad’s bedtime stories which he still vividly recalls were a whirlwind of
political intrigue. All this leads to
their report that her husband is dead, and there is a serious need to collect
his previous series of notebooks, previously viewed as a series of deluded
rantings, but now thought to be a secret code filled with potentially
embarrassing international intelligence secrets. As his widow, they want to send her on a
mission to Paris to collect some of the known missing material, a mission that
should she choose to accept, she makes contingent upon their releasing her
imprisoned brother, Nobel Prize poet laureate Simon Grim, the ever dour James Urbaniak who was found guilty of conspiring to falsify
documents which led to Henry’s escape from the country. Fay’s overriding concern here is that her son
needs a good home schoolteacher now that he’s been expelled from school and
Simon is certainly up to the task.
This sends Fay unwittingly into the frenetically paced, cryptic world of
international espionage, cover ups, false identities, wrong turns, double
crosses, forged identities, and assassination attempts, as things don’t go
precisely as planned, all set in motion by clues found in the moviola and the suddenly unraveling mysterious secret life
of her missing husband, where bodies start piling up, but so does her
collection of his missing notebooks. As
she gets deeper involved in the Casablanca-like political charade, she
discovers her husband may still be alive and meets a partner in crime, Elina Löwensohn, a Chechen punk
rocker refugee on the run, “I’m not a spy! I’m a stewardess – sometimes a
topless dancer!” who may have love connections to her husband, where the
flashbacks of their hotel lovemaking reminds us of what an insidiously amoral
creature Henry is, later describing himself to the Osama bin Laden-like
terrorist and former friend who has been quietly keeping him under wraps: “It’s just the way I am, I gravitate to the
lowest common denominator on principle.”
But it’s Parker Posey, who begins the film as a distraught,
deer-in-the-headlights mother, a clueless American abroad who sets the tone of
the film by adapting to every situation presented to her, becoming ever more
ballsy in her leggy slit skirt and high heeled boots, devising incredibly
well-thought-out, on-the-spot strategies, planning harrowing escapes, making an
eloquent plea for her husband’s life, adding real emotional weight to what
might otherwise be seen as a GET SMART-style sideslapper
comedy. And while this may be the
funniest film seen all year, it’s also one of the smartest and best written,
filled with highly sustained deadpan, yet always intelligent dialogue that
audiences are simply not used to, shot through oblique angles by Sarah Cawley Cabiya that straighten out
at the end, changing its tone in the final reel, giving the film a novel
inventiveness, utilizing the continuing presence of quirky characters and what
is easily the performance of the year from Posey as well, a criminally
underused American indie-film icon who is simply phenomenal in the extension of
her dramatic range, who couldn’t be more perfect in this film, whose bewildered
poignancy in the final shot is nothing less than sublime.
6.) AFTER THE WEDDING A- 94
Denmark Sweden (120 mi) 2006
d: Susanne Biers
An intimate, wonderfully complex and compelling film style that from the
outset paints a dazzling portrait of the rhythms of life in India, accentuated
by hand held cinéma vérité
camera techniques, immersing the viewer inside the noisy claustrophobic
quarters of a slum orphanage greeted by eager, wide-eyed children whose
circumstances define poverty and overpopulation, yet this vibrant colorful
world is expressed with a sense of openness, where the rapidity of the cuts and
the ever shifting camera movements help generate a natural sense of
immediacy. Mads Mikkelsen
plays Jacob, the quiet Western aide worker/teacher
with a sympathetic yet expressionless face, who calmly provides a paternalistic
influence over boys that were rescued from living on the street as child
prostitutes, one of whom is an 8-year old he has been raising as his own. Ordered by his superiors to meet with a
wealthy donor in Denmark who insists on making face to face contact with him,
as the orphanage is on the verge of financial collapse, Jacob grudgingly
returns to the land of his self-imposed exile for the past 20 years, and the
contrast is amusingly evident in the sudden change in music, facial expressions
of new European characters, the luxurious wealth on display and an endless
amount of space that can be seen for miles.
Bier’s restrained style draws us into the heart of a man that straddles
both worlds through an extension of the Strindberg/Bergman dramatic school,
where plumbing the depths of emotional turmoil is key, using highly skilled
ensemble acting performances in a situation reminiscent of THE CELEBRATION
(1996), where a large family gathering is rife for exposing carefully kept
family secrets.
Jacob’s arrival in Denmark is something of a shock, feeling brutally
wasteful after experiencing such a total immersion into third world conditions,
where the tour of his hotel room reveals an outrageously luxurious penthouse
suite, with modern electronic gadgets all run by remotes, and an accompanying
balcony that on clear days offers a view of Sweden, perhaps a humorous
reference to the criminally exiled, binocular-wielding Swedish neurosurgeon
(“Danish scum!”) who fondly views his homeland off in the distance from von
Trier’s THE KINGDOM (1994). This obscene
offering of corporate extravagance is provided by Jørgen
(Rolf Lassgård), a brazenly successful and
domineering millionaire, a Shakespearean physically imposing Lear-like presence
whose rags-to-riches story defines him as a veritable modern day king, a
corporate CEO who is used to controlling the levers of power. He interrupts Jacob’s presentation to say
he’s heard enough, sarcastically calling him an “angry young man,” though
apparently impressed, but has overriding time concerns as his daughter is
getting married over the weekend and invites Jacob. His arrival to the wedding sets the scene for
the remainder of the film, all captured in a series of carefully choreographed
furtive glances, highlighted by close ups of eyes much like Bresson
uses brief images of feet, as Jacob can’t take his eyes off Jørgen’s
wife Helena (Sidse Babett
Knudson), a younger, sensually beautiful woman who is caught staring back both
at the church wedding and at the family gala as she mills through the
crowd. Revelations ensue like shots of
adrenaline, where Jacob soon discovers Helena is his old girl
friend that he ran away from years ago causing him to live in the
relative obscurity of India and he may actually be the father of the bride,
their daughter Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen).
After carefully constructing Jørgen’s world,
represented by the lavish festivities conducted around the huge dimensions of
his immense country estate, where he is seen as a Godfather-like presence who
loves to play with and spoil his children, Bier then proceeds to dismantle it
piece by piece before our eyes, exposing the family secrets behind the veneer
of wealth and success, unraveling the intricate world of the patriarch, his
wife, his daughter, a man who is connected to them both, revealed in a series
of quick emotional revelations and outbursts that are quite simply devastating,
using a highly personalized, almost portraiture camera style that allows each
to reflect on the sudden shift of their rapidly changing fates and the ensuing
psychological discomfort that leaves an almost elegiac tone of anguish. A brilliantly executed walk through a
theatrical minefield of elaborately concealed emotional time bombs just waiting
to be set off, this turns out to be one of the more enjoyable films of the
year. Coming out of the Danish ultra realist Dogma school of filmmaking, Bier has refined
her earlier style to allow the occasional use of lighting or music to grace the
screen, which adds a degree of complexity to the film by greatly expanding the
breadth of the interior landscape.
Written by Bier and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen, there’s an inventive
command of the medium that’s reflective in the highly original look of the
film, featuring precise film composition, a wonderful crisp pace in the
beguiling manner in which information is disseminated, and in the searing
dramatic tone that is essential throughout.
This is a thoughtful always engaging film that challenges the viewer,
beautifully underscored by a warm poetic musical elegance from Johan Söderqvist.
7.) ONCE A- 94
Ireland (86 mi) 2006
d: John Carney
Probably the best double feature I’ve seen in years, seeing ONCE
immediately following Hal Hartley’s deliriously upbeat FAY GRIM, shot in two
weeks for under $150,000, this is one of those small films that works,
generating such superlative reviews that by the time you get into the theater,
you half expect it to fall apart at some point, while the other half, of
course, hopes it’s everything it’s cracked up to be. Fortunately, this film doesn’t need to grab
you by the throat to pull you in, it does so instantly with the emotional
sincerity of the music, which always sounds so heartening, even as it’s
describing hearts that are breaking, beautifully shot by Tim Fleming who
consistently captures the immediacy of the moment and the freewheeling swagger
of the two wonderfully refreshing lead characters, making this one of the more
unique twists on an age old love story.
Known only as the Guy and the Girl, he’s a thirtyish street singer that
repairs Hoover vacuum cleaners at home with his dad, Glen Hansard from the
Irish rock group The Frames and from THE COMMITMENTS (1991), a guy whose songs
bear a strange similarity to the optimism and melodic simplicity of Cat Stevens
when he was Cat Stevens, while she, Markéta Irglová, is a younger Czech émigré who sells magazines and
flowers on the street, living with her mother and small daughter, a girl with
classical piano training who bears a strange resemblance to the recently
deceased British actress Katrin Cartlidge, as she
combines intelligence and a very forward curiosity with an eloquent stage
presence, and at only age 17 during the filming, she reminds us of just how
glorious it is to be young. Written and
directed by John Carney, who was a bass player in both The Frames and THE
COMMITMENTS, this film makes no attempt to overreach, but does an excellent job
of living within its small means by creating two well-defined characters living
on the fringe of working class Dublin, both with the love of music in common,
and with the same loss of an affectionate “other.” The Guy realizes early in the film his
mistake at coming on to the Girl, and his face tells all, as he knows he
screwed up the instant he violated this fragile trust these two developed on
the street when after hearing him sing she was amazed at the profound
seriousness of one of his songs, knowing he loved someone, as she could sense
an intimate outpouring of personal confession, which he found exasperatingly
obtrusive, finding it incredible and somewhat off-putting that this young
stranger could see right through to his soul.
Much like the poetic realism of Jacques Demy, who compiled a string of
musicals in the decade of the 1960’s that remain at the pinnacle of the art
form, this film has more than a passing similarity to THE UMBRELLAS OF
CHERBOURG (1964), immersing itself in the energetic spontaneity of the streets
from which these characters spring, where their first sparks of love make the
audience sense they are made for each other, soul mates, inseparable, perhaps
projecting this chemistry onto the troubled relationships of the unseen
“others” in their lives, even as they go their separate ways, much like the
audience senses the misdirected love in CHERBOURG. But establishing realism within the world
they live in is essential, as from within this carefully defined lack of
pretentiousness comes the sincerity of the music, which leads us ever further
into the lives of these two young lovers, who mesh together so well in one of
the opening scenes in the back of a music store where they basically put a song
together for the very first time which is nothing less than revelatory, it’s
simply movie magic. Her soft piano and
vocal harmony are so understated, yet so pure, it’s simply heartbreaking
hearing the song “Falling Slowly” developing onscreen for the very first
time: “I don’t know you/but I want
you/all the more for that,” as is her response to his request for lyrics to one
of his melodies, where she scampers out into the night in her slippers and
pajamas to the local music store where she can play his CD of the recorded
music, returning later humming this song under her breath, completely oblivious
to the outside world, allowing the audience to share in her joy at hearing her
lyrics for the very first time accompanied by her pitch perfect harmonies. It would be so easy for scenes like this to
disintegrate into artificial grandstanding, but they are charmingly contained
entirely within the musical structure.
By this time, it’s hard not to sense that we’re experiencing a different
kind of film, a tone poem of young love that relishes intricate harmonies and
the adrenal rush of waiting for the next chorus.
Much of this film was born as well in Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA
(1999), reflective of the exquisite montage use in that film of the Aimee Mann
song “Save Me,” spread throughout several characters which adds a
hyper-realistic quality to the emotional content of the song. In ONCE, this mesmerizing quality extends
throughout the entire film. Here the
guy’s reborn love is expressed in flashback images from a projected video of
his distant love in London, who is actually in real life the girl friend of the director, but it’s a beautiful collage
of mixed emotions, where he longs for the love that he’s actually experiencing
again, rekindled by the crazy directness of the girl, who kindly defers all
matters of love, as she has a husband of her own living abroad who hasn’t been
particularly helpful. Instead, she’s
visited each day by three burly guys next door who promptly sit on the sofa and
watch her TV, the only one in the building, known in the credits as the men
watching TV. Before the guy leaves for
London, he decides to cut a record with the girl and a few other street
musicians, which is basically the end third of the film, watching them pique
the interest of the sound engineer who comes to realize he is witnessing a
unique recording session filled with undiscovered talent. The strength of the session is the blending
of textures and tones, the unabashed joy and genuine passion that comes from
Hansard’s vocals, and the gorgeous melodic refrains, always underscored by the
girl’s talent for harmony. The
personalized intimacy of the characters is perfectly realized in their joining
forces and coming together musically. After immersing themselves in the cramped
quarters of a recording session all weekend, there’s a wonderfully sweet
release that is simplicity itself, where the music continues over the end
credits, but where we know the real story is only getting started, this was
just the beginning, a brief moment, once.
8.) BAMAKO A- 94
aka: The Court
France Mali USA
(115 mi) 2006 d: Abderrahane Sissako
A continuation of themes hinted at and explored in the hauntingly poetic
WAITING FOR HAPPINESS (2002), yet enunciated loudly and clearly in this film
for anyone who still has doubts about the effects of globalization in
Africa. Much like Kiarostami’s
THE TASTE OF CHERRY (1997) without the optimistic epilogue, there seems to be a
predominate theme of death that infiltrates the mood of this film, a scourge
that is ravaging the continent, beginning with a local photographer’s admission
that death is the only reality, the only truth worth paying attention to. And indeed, this film divides the world into the
haves and the have nots, those that have the luxury to choose how to live their
lives, and those that have no choices whatsoever offered to them from birth due
to the overwhelming poverty that afflicts every aspect of their lives, where
death is a constant. Sissako has a
wonderful eye for poetic detail, and for offering visual metaphors that border
on the surreal, examining the rhythm and motions of life taking place in
impoverished societies. This film is set
in the capital city of Bamako, Mali, one of the poorest nations on earth, where
a small, fictionalized public war crimes tribunal is taking place in an open
outdoor courtyard where the continent of Africa is providing a series of
witnesses charging the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund, and the G8 nations that historically stole what
they could from African nations through colonialist exploitation, replaced
today by another system that remains even more deeply entrenched through the
huge debts these impoverished nations supposedly owe to these international
institutions, ranging from 40 to 60% of the nation’s total income. Not only is this an impossible burden to
meet, but due to the overwhelming drain to the already fragile economies,
nations are unable to provide basic human services, like education or health
care needs, which have become privatized under the crippling reform demands of
the International Monetary Fund, thus preventing the local population from
utilizing these services. The
consequence of this so-called global modernization is a declining standard of
living and an illiterate society, as no one can afford to attend school in the
poorest nations, and zero health care, as without money, patients aren’t being
treated, so the poorest patients are left to die, many in huge numbers due to
potentially lethal sanitary conditions that are causing Middle Age style
epidemics across the continent.
What’s different about this film, somewhat reminiscent of Ousmane Sembene’s revealing 2004
film MOOLAADÉ, featuring one of the same strong, outspoken actresses, Maimouna Hélène Diarra, is the neverending trial dialogue, which is broadcast on the radio
throughout the town, which even the population turns off, as it all begins to
sound the same after awhile. Unfortunately, this film is more didactic and
may spend too much time and focus on the words, much of which are incendiary
and purposeful, as this is a blistering indictment of capitalism not seen since
Raoul Peck’s 2002 Haitian film PROFIT AND NOTHING BUT! OR IMPOLITE THOUGHTS ON
THE CLASS STRUGGLE, a Dostoevskian “Notes from the
Underground” rant that is filled with contempt, claiming capitalism has already
won, making he and his third world brethren invisible, out of sight, out of
mind, where the wretched conditions of others are no longer a concern to people
from wealthy nations, or Herbert Sauper’s 2004 film
DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE, a film that reveals in horribly graphic detail the
consequences left behind by capitalism, how the unscathed haves take the food supply
from the region, in this case huge Tanzanian perch, all of which is exported to
Europe and Russia, priced out of the affordable range of local villagers, the
have nots who have to fight for the rotting scraps left behind in garbage heaps
to stay alive. While those last two are
documentary examinations, this is a fictionalized film rendered with a poetic
as well as politicized purpose. There is
an amusing allegorical film within the film, a fill-in for a botched Malian TV
broadcast, as we see small children adoring an American Sergio Leone-style
western movie called DEATH IN TIMBUKTU featuring Danny Glover, Palestinian
filmmaker Elia Suleiman, and the director himself as one of the cowboys, where
a small African village falls under a torrent of bullets from disinterested
outsiders. How entrenched are we in our
own complacency?
Like WAITING FOR HAPPINESS, there are beautifully rendered life
portraits that are interspersed throughout the film that represent various
forms of life in the region. Even as the
trial is taking place, where one by one witnesses come forward to speak, a
writer, a professor, a farmer, a refugee, or we hear the arguments of the
lawyers on each side, 30 or 40 people are seated in folding chairs while people
around them who live nearby quietly go about their business gathering water,
doing the laundry, but also keeping an eye on the proceedings, occasionally
interjecting, as goats and chickens roam the premises. One particularly attractive woman (Aïssa Maïga) is a singer, opening
and closing the film in a live performance that has a powerful impact, again
untranslated, but she has to travel to distant towns to make a living, leaving
her husband behind to care for their young daughter, a role reversal that
devastates his sense of manhood. The
women are always working, even the young girls are caring for the young babies,
giving them a bath while the older women carry water or die fabrics which they
hang on a line to dry, sometimes creating brilliant fashion designs, while the
unemployed men sit around in two’s or threes doing nothing, perhaps playing
dominoes, much like Arthur Miller’s recollection in his play A View from the Bridge of penniless
Sicilian men after the war in the late 40’s and early 50’s standing around the
public square with no hope of a future, leading many to crime or illegal
immigration to America. One witness
recounts his survival story of an incredibly dangerous journey traveling
through the endless Saharan landscape with a group in search of a friendly
border, most of whom are left behind to die alone in the overpowering natural
elements, now ghosts in his memory that will forever haunt him.
Despite a reliance on dialogue, it is fitting that the wordless or
untranslated sequences hold the most power.
Initially a former teacher introduces himself at the podium, but then
stands silently, offering no testimony at all other than a reverential
silence. The proceedings are interrupted
on another occasion by a wedding procession that passes by, where the jubilant
voices are heard singing, rising above the dire mood of the trial, a noticeable
contrast from the subject at hand. One
haunting image that may as well be a metaphor for the film itself is the
stunning anguish and simplicity of Aïssa Maïga fighting through the tears in her performance,
weeping not just for herself it seems, but for the entire African
continent. And despite the compelling
arguments, where the final verbal arguments are particularly effective, it is
the strong African voice of a griot or storyteller who has the most mesmerizing
effect, as his untranslated chant is a picture of words and great passion, as
his African essence, a whole history of everything that came before, is at
stake, and he boldly and defiantly leaves his imprint on the entire process,
completely capturing the attention of everyone in the village, which comes to a
complete stop in respect for his offerings.
It’s a stunning moment. Some in
the audience were complaining that there were no subtitles, but that was the
point. In a largely illiterate society,
it’s not just the words that matter, it’s the emphasis on what’s expressed that
says it all, which may as well be a stand-in for the filmmaker himself who has
crafted an eloquently stylized poetic vision giving voice to those that are
largely ignored or forgotten by the rest of the world.
9.) TALK TO ME A- 94
USA (118 mi) 2007
‘Scope d: Kasi Lemmons
One of the more hilarious and entertaining films of the year, a film
DREAMGIRLS (2006) tried to be, but couldn’t pull off despite two award winning
performances by Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy, as the showcased musical
numbers smothered the lame attempts at social commentary. In this film, it’s one of the better films
out there on authentically capturing the times with Don Cheadle in a 60’s afro
recreating the “Keep it real” ghetto persona of DC radio legend Petey Greene and his off-the-charts fly girl doing her own
exaggerated Foxey Brown imitation, Taraji P. Henson
(from HUSTLE AND FLOW [2005]) strutting her funky sexual stuff following him
stride for stride, who open the film with a memorable conjugal prison visit,
preceded by Greene as a raucous yet highly observant prison deejay playing
James Brown’s “This is a Man’s World,” accompanied by his “Wake up, Goddamn it!”
(decades before 1989 when Spike Lee stole a similar riff for the opening of DO
THE RIGHT THING) profane prison take on events inside and what it takes to
scratch “another day off the wall.”
While this is another one of those Hollywood trips down memory lane
where they love to bring people back to life onscreen, usually with award
winning success, think Idi Amin, Queen Elizabeth, June Carter Cash, Truman
Capote, Ray Charles, Aileen Wuornos, all best
actor/actress winners in recent years, but Kasi Lemmons has more in mind, as she uses Cheadle’s brilliant
“voice of the streets” performance to illuminate the period of the late 60’s, a
time when people actually had something to say, an era of lost heroes, JFK,
Bobby, Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, all shot down for speaking their
minds. This film highlights a lesser
known personality who had a significant impact in the DC area, not only as an
ex-con who became a legendary radio personality, but as a social activist and a
Lenny Bruce-style advocate of telling the truth through free speech.
This could also be seen as another one of those buddy films, as it
follows the interrelation of two men over the span of their lives, Petey Greene and Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a radio
executive at WOA-AM, the man who hired Greene, one a loud, spontaneous,
free-wheeling ex-con while the other is a quieter, more carefully composed
speaker who has the look of a corporate lawyer, who on the surface couldn’t be
more different, yet both made their mark in radio history. The story was actually written in part by
Hughes’s son, Michael Genet, who along with fellow screenwriter Rick Famuyiwa, took their time to get this story right,
accentuated throughout by the perfect musical choices of the day from Terence
Blanchard, who has also scored about a dozen Spike Lee films. Several key scenes come to mind, none funnier
than Greene’s jaw dropping entrance to the WOA studio in search of a job, who
along with his girl, Vernell, simply blow everyone’s
mind with their outlandish display of verve and theatrical funk on parade,
another at Greene’s favorite pool hall, where he and Hughes compete in a
colorful high stakes game of 9-ball in his attempt to land a job at the studio,
but it’s more a defining lesson on blackness.
But easily the turning point of the film is the seminal moment in 1968
when Martin Luther King was assassinated, when street rage was at its angriest,
as cities across America burned in a fury of unspoken agony, where street
credibility was needed to help calm the quelling storm outside, easily Greene’s
finest moment, where fellow coworkers in the studio actually applauded the
depths of sincerity elicited in his radio performance relating the ethical
thoughts of King’s protests against the unethical turbulent violence exploding
on the streets, an extended sequence that culminates with Sam Cooke’s “A Change
Is Gonna Come,” a superior moment in the film as the
song has a personal history with both men, but it’s given even greater
significance cast against the almost dreamlike Armageddon that captures the
utter chaos of the moment. Anyone who’s
ever lived through that moment realizes the delicate hand that is taking us
back through that monumental precipice in history.
Hughes has such faith in Greene that he becomes his manager, where he
does his own impassioned, profanity-laced stand up
comedy act as well as hosting his own TV show, mimicking the infamous image of
Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton sitting in that high-backed
wicker chair, humorously talking about life from the black perspective, which
ultimately leads to a shot on Johnny Carson, the pinnacle of success for a
rising young comic, which leads to another one of those riveting, stand out
scenes. But the two strong willed men
clash over what constitutes success, as Greene is out of the Sweet Sweetback school of blackness, never trusting the Man,
never wanting to become so successful that you become the Man, while Hughes
wants to win over all of America, and following in Greene’s footsteps, becomes
a successful deejay to do it, ultimately buying the radio station himself, the
first of many successful business ventures.
There’s a poignant scene from Vernell who
comes to visit Hughes late in the film, this time without any of the flamboyant
outfits, playing it completely straight, letting him know that Greene is
seriously ill. It’s a touching moment in
an unconventional film that takes seriously its role of representing the times,
where music played a much more culturally defining role commenting on the
social fabric of the Civil Rights and Vietnam era with all the color and the
activism that brought people together.
There was a time when all that mattered in our lives, when it was
significant to hear a guy on the radio telling people to just “Be yourself”
when the right leaning serve and protect laws of the land seemed to suggest
otherwise.
10.) SILENT LIGHT A- 94
Mexico France Netherlands
(144 mi) 2007 ‘Scope
d: Carlos Reygadas
Another challenging film that requires a great deal of patience, an
artistic leap for this director, who has previously been unhesitant to show
graphic sexual detail, to the extreme in some instances, but tones it down here
to reflect the subject matter. Shot in
‘Scope, there’s a Bruno Dumont sense of detail and severity on people’s faces,
which is shown with complete detachment.
Without any backstory to describe where we are, opening in the cosmos
before settling down to a time-lapsed sunrise, using long static shots with
plenty of sounds of cows, we follow the minimalist rhythms of what appears to
be a well run farm, with automatic milking machines
for the cows where an older couple can easily complete their rounds within a
few minutes of real time, and we are introduced to roads cutting through a vast
flat landscape of dried up corn fields and various people, most always
surrounded by large numbers of well behaved
children. A clue is the prayerful
introduction to breakfast, as the parents as well as their family of six
children sit silently in their own meditations for what feels like several
minutes before the father concludes the silence with an Amen. With such abject politeness, the women
wearing scarves over their heads, and everyone speaking in the same Germanic
sounding dialect, we are as far removed from the bleak Sátántangó
farm collective as we could possibly be, as everything here appears to be in
proper order.
It turns out we are in a Mennonite community near Chihuahua in northern
Mexico, where the family father Johan comes to visit his own father (a farmer
and preacher), explaining that he has found a new love, but needs his father’s
help to know what to do. But when the
father (a preacher) starts preaching about the work of the devil, Johan cuts
him off, “Talk to me like a father, not a preacher.” Words are exchanged, but certainly no
recommendations or judgments, just simple words of kindness. Johan has been upfront with his wife about
this all along, but he fears if he doesn’t make the right decision, he may lose
them both, believing he alone is responsible for what has happened. Both appear to be kind-hearted men, strong
and resolute, who are not used to having to face this kind of dilemma. This kind of thing just isn’t in their creed. The family goes about their business, as before,
where the near angelic nature of the children is simply flabbergasting, as it
would be near impossible to have to explain immoral conduct to those cherubic
faces. But in a discussion between the
husband and the wife, when Johan can’t give up this other woman, the reaction
of his wife turns sour, believing she may be the one who will be excluded from
her own children, which couldn’t be a worse fate. Explaining peace may be more important than
love, thoughts must run through her head like all the hard work, all that she’s
endured, everything she’s ever lived or sacrificed for, despite her morally
appropriate conduct, if God’s fate is that she loses her own children, it feels
like a mortal blow in her eyes. Shortly
afterwards, she is pronounced dead.
The black dresses and bonnets return as the community makes ready for
the funeral, where young and old sit on benches sipping drinks in the room
outside where the body is being prepared for viewing. Again, the innocence of children provides an
extraordinary power to these situations, almost as if they are the eyes and
ears of God himself. They bear witness
to the lives that their families lead.
Johan is a wreck and can barely contain his grief, while his children
are still curious about the afterlife, whether or not their mother is at
peace. From the outside of the house,
the camera peers into the window as men move the body inside, where a
reflection of the cornfields behind them is seen, as if the body is already
being returned to earth simply by this double-sided reflection. In an interior static shot of the deceased,
shot in a glowing white light, candles on each side, nothing more, an image of simplicity
itself, enhanced by the spartan use of space, where
there is nothing in the frame that is without purpose or that doesn’t need to
be there, and where there couldn’t be a more devout image of holiness.
This image replicates that of a certain Danish master, Carl Dreyer, who
explored similar territory in ORDET (1955).
Dreyer believed human nature has a factor which has yet to be located,
that notices activity outside our natural world. Our accepted habits unconsciously prevent us
from seeing. Our sensibility has been so
atrophied that we can’t see outside our own system – like religion – where people
believe in their idea of faith only as an idea, while the meaning has been
lost, and must be demonstrated through their actions. Only when we suspend the laws of nature do we
accept or recognize something outside our experience. One of the factors inspiring Dreyer was
Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Einstein could not scientifically explain actions which he had no
knowledge how to explain. For Dreyer,
there are forces outside our sphere of knowledge that have an influence over
us. With this film, Reygadas,
like Dreyer before him, explores those unfathomable forces utilizing a similar
austere style and has actually found a unique modern day community that views
faith much like it was originally intended.
The results are astonishing as the final time-lapsed sunset image
returns the film back into the cosmos.
Honorable
Mention
11.) ACROSS THE UNIVERSE A- 94
USA (131 mi) 2007
‘Scope d: Julie Taymor
Following months of viewing different versions of what were arguably the
best trailers of the year, this is a glowing, sumptuous experience of
exhilaration and sheer inventiveness, dazzling from the opening shot,
beautifully extending the boundaries of cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel and the use of ‘Scope, Taymor’s
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE Beatlefest is easily her best
film effort so far, as the anything goes, imaginary world of a musical only
enhances her ability to shine. For the
first half of this film, it’s probably the best film seen all year, but by the
time Bono makes his Kesey connection, “You’re either
on the bus or off the bus,” and Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite takes us through his
loopy surrealistic world of chaotic disorder, the entrance of which looks like
something out of the COLOSSUS OF RHODES (1961), the emotional bottom falls out
of the experience as people’s lives start falling apart. In its place are overly simplistic renditions
of the times, perhaps top heavy with typical imagery of police confrontations
with Vietnam war demonstrators, never really getting under the surface of any
of the leading players, nothing that can pull the audience into their world,
which the first half does so well for at least a half dozen characters.
Opening dramatically in song, John Lennon’s highly personalized, almost
hushed lyrics from “Girl,” where the singing is done by the actor’s themselves,
the film distinguishes itself by adhering to character references from Beatles
songs and allowing the lyrics to tell the story of a jubilant and sad encounter
between a boy and a girl from opposite ends of the globe, Jim Sturgess as Jude, a somewhat cherubic, baby-faced kid who’s
had to work in the shipping yards to make ends meet for his single mom, and
Evan Rachel Wood as Lucy, the pampered, free spirited suburban girl who’s had
everything handed to her, who has her life in front of her but hasn’t a clue
what to do with it. When her high school
boy friend is drafted, they vow, as lovers do, to write and wait for one
another, while on the other side of the world Jude is promising his girl friend the same thing, using the same lyrics from
“Hold Me Tight” to project similar worlds, despite the differing social
status.
Jude is off to America in search of his missing father, an American GI
who was stationed in Liverpool during the war, a guy who never knew he existed
and is none too pleased at meeting him, while Lucy has to contend with the
bizarre and crazy antics of her brother, Joe Anderson as Max, a wild-eyed kid
who drops out of school with no real ambition other than a Quixote-like quest
for discovery. Max runs into Jude and
invites him home for a rancorous Thanksgiving dinner with the folks in
suburbia, becoming best friends forever, and this before he realizes Lucy is
his sister, who immediately captures his heart.
Before you can blink, Max and Jude run off to Greenwich Village to
discover the world, renting a room from “Sexy Sadie,” played by Dana Fuchs
looking ever so much like Drea de Matteo, a hard
drinking singer who slinks her way into the sultry world of Janis Joplin, a
rock icon whose career was anything but sultry.
But easily the most outstanding early sequence features an unnamed Asian
high school cheerleader (TV Carpio as Prudence, we
later learn) who is out practicing on the football field at the same time as
the players, who starts singing this incredibly sad and mournful, startlingly
off-kilter rendition of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which expresses her
alienation to the in-crowd, as cheerleaders and football players flirt and
carry on while football players fling one another across the screen with great
abandon while we assume she’s got a thing for one of the players. Next thing you know, she’s out on the road
hitching a ride to who knows where, amusingly re-entering the other storyline
by the spoken phrase from Jude, “She came in through the bathroom window.” Her lesbian intentions only become clear
later when Prudence literally needs to be coaxed out of the closet, where they
all gather outside her locked door and urge her gently and sweetly in song:
“Dear Prudence, won’t you come out and play.”
Very inventive.
This kind of lyrical context is beautifully interwoven throughout the
entire film, some hilarious, others heartbreaking, like when a little black kid
from Detroit breaks into "Let It Be" while riots in the street are
breaking out all around, a sequence that continues with the boisterous support
of an Aretha Franklin-like all-black choir that takes the song into magical
heights, but ending with a funeral scene of that same little boy in a coffin as
"he" continues singing the song (in spirit) alone. Taymor, as usual,
receives highly incendiary negative criticism, some even calling this the worst
film of the year (Village Voice
critic Robert Wilonsky, the stand in for Ebert on
Ebert & Roeper), but this is really not due to
her skills as a filmmaker, but her degree of purpose, as she uses a
take-no-prisoners approach. She refuses
to downplay or compromise her vision, trusting her artistic impulses, creating
some of the more vividly imaginative sequences shown onscreen this year. The early build up
of innocence and hope is simply unsurpassed, but there is a subsequent letdown
exploring the darkness of the Vietnam era, taking a great big dive into 60's
demonstration overkill, where unfortunately it at times veers into laughable stereotypical
territory. The two leads and the entire cast are terrific, and there's
some brilliant cameo appearances, one by Joe Cocker in multiple roles, another
by Selma Hayek whose multiple images as a army
hospital nurse with a syringe in her hand reappear like the actor Deep Roy in
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005) to the tune of “Happiness Is a Warm
Gun,” yet another by Bono as Ken Kesey who
swaggeringly sings “I Am a Walrus,” which looked like a laugh riot to play,
each role drawing a smile. All that was missing were appearances by Paul
and Yoko Ono making up.
Lucy receives a jolt of reality when her guy gets killed in Vietnam and
decides to join her brother and Jude in New York for awhile,
adding to this mix Martin Luther McCoy, a Jimi Hendrix-like guitar phenom named Jo-Jo whose younger brother died in the
Detroit riots earlier in the film, who also arrives in New York and answers an
ad for Sadie’s lead guitarist to the intoxicating sounds of “Come Together,”
all moving in under the same roof of what feels like spirited bohemian
underachievers. But just as things start
to jell for everyone, with Lucy and Jude entangled in a myriad of surreal love
fantasies, perhaps expressed best when she sings to herself a hauntingly quiet
rendition of “If I Fell” before their first kiss, the same goes for Sadie and
Jo-Jo with their boisterous Ike and Tina onstage chemistry with “Why Don’t We
Do It In the Road,” while brother Max receives his draft induction notice, and
next thing you know, posters on the wall of the draft board literally come
alive pointing their finger at Max exclaiming “I Want You, I Want You So Bad,”
and he’s off to Vietnam (“She’s So Heavy”) in one of the wilder choreographed
numbers mixed with a highly stylized surrealistic flourish that expresses how
the world is tilted on edge.
Jude becomes a very talented artist but remains noncommittal on politics
(“Nothing’s gonna change my world”), while Lucy
desperately joins the anti-war movement creating a rift that becomes the film’s
biggest contrivance, as she is never once convincing as a so-called radical
turned “revolutionary” (so Jude can snidely sing the song “Revolution”) and
crudely dismisses Jude’s obvious talents as nothing more than doodles and
cartoons just as the screen comes alive with his blazing red images of bleeding
strawberries, more war imagery, to the massive sounds of “Strawberry Fields
Forever.” The two become separated, as
does Prudence, as does Sadie and her guitar man, while newsreel war reports
saturate the television screens to the divisive and horribly screeching sounds
of “Helter Skelter” sung by Sadie to a raucous crowd
of war resisters getting their heads bashed in as they are arrested in mass
numbers. Turbulence defines the times
that are a-changin’.
There’s a wonderfully quiet moment of reflection afterwards with Lucy
alone on a dock singing “Blackbird,” which reintroduces the key that holds this
universe together. Perhaps there’s a few
too many police in riot gear, which gives the impression kids were under siege,
which of course they were, but that introduces a highly divisive political
ingredient to this film that remains a contentious issue even after all these
years and obviously influences how an audience views and/or accepts this
manufactured landscape, an unending psychedelic phantasmagoria of color
saturated, magnificently designed moving set pieces that illustrate what
amounts to a simple 60’s love story, which is also a metaphor about kids
yearning to be free and a country that still barely recognizes the voices of
its own children.
12.) COLOSSAL YOUTH (Juventude em Marcha) A- 94
Portugal France Switzerland
(155 mi) 2006 d:
Pedro Costa
An intensely challenging film with very little action, or even movement,
most of it shot in near darkness with just the briefest glimpse of light, so
that half of a face or just a portion of the screen is in the light, the rest
remains engulfed in shadow or darkness, using a slow, funereal pace,
beautifully shot by the filmmaker himself as well as cinematographer Leonardo Simões. Set in the
dilapidated slums of a condemned Kieslowski-esque Fontaínhas housing project just outside Lisbon, we follow a
group of people originally from the Cape Verde islands, now seemingly isolated,
poor, and alone. Even their language is
a mix that is not really Portuguese or a Cape Verdian
dialect, but seems of a different world, which perfectly captures the essence
of the people we see, who appear shadowy, ghost-like, as if they are
apparitions outside the human realm.
People here appear to be already dead and move at the pace of the
undead, zombie-like, as if they’re barely alive. There’s an artificialized style throughout,
where each frame is carefully composed maximizing the artistic, photogenic
impact of every shot, usually starting with still figures, a man sitting
outside a housing complex in a red chair, eventually rising to go inside, or a
pitch black room with a small square of light, where a man instinctively moves
toward the light, or opening in the golden hues of a dark stairway, where we
hear voices from people’s lives offscreen, where a
shadowy figure emerges from a silhouette in the darkness.
Ventura is the lead character, a former construction worker who
describes the past in much the same manner as the present, making them
indistinguishable, where he is seen from time to time wearing a head bandage
from a scaffold injury that occurred sometime in the unknowable past, now a
retired, severe looking, sixtyish black man dressed in a black suit wearing a
white shirt throughout the film, who complains that his wife (or someone who
resembled her, he’s really not sure) has left him after cutting him in a fight
and destroying all his belongings (which are seen flung out a window in the
opening scene), so he spends his time making the rounds of all the people he
knows, calling many of them his “children,” a vague label that is vociferously
denied by one but routinely accepted by others.
Ventura’s visits include conversations that may at times be hauntingly
poetic, but always remain overwhelmingly detached, people who have lost touch
with the world, where Ventura resembles, though in a completely non-religious
context, the role of a traveling priest listening to the various confessions of
a hard to reach underclass who offer extended monologues, creating familiar
scenes of stylized tableaux, revisiting the same people in the exact same rooms
throughout the film, elevating their sense of dignity and worth by allowing
intimate moments to be shared, giving voice to the voiceless though utilization
of repetition and pace that leaves one drained and exhausted after awhile, reminiscent of the scene in Tarkovsky’s
NOSTALGHIA (1983) where a man tries to walk the length of a dry swimming pool
with a lit candle, returning to the beginning each time it goes out, starting
all over again numerous times, where the length of the scene keeps getting
extended and seems to drag on forever in one of the more exasperating sequences
ever created. There is a recurring theme
of a letter he has composed and memorized in an attempt to get his wife back,
where the verses of the letter are repeated several times, each with a slightly
varying ending and tone, always suggestive of yearning for and an absence of
love. The film is so dreamlike that it barely
resembles reality, instead it has a highly choreographed, stagy feel to it, yet
the carefully constructed darkened images appear designed to capture the last
flicker of light before being completely extinguished.
One of the themes is relocation, destruction of the old, construction of
the new, as Ventura reluctantly makes the transition to leave his dilapidated
slum world for a brand new “white room,” inventing the number of people in his
family to increase the size of the room, thinking all his family can live
there, much like a church constructs a building hoping to fill it with
parishioners, yet Ventura’s white room remains strangely empty. There’s a beautiful moment midway through the
film when Ventura plays a record, where all of a sudden there’s this vibrant
energy in the air that wasn’t there before, where we are reminded just for a
moment of something enjoyably familiar, before that too disappears, leaving us
to rediscover life in the vacuum left in its wake. Purging the familiar, the recognizable from
the film creates an eerie film where life as we know it has been stripped away,
depriving the audience of any comfort factor other than the continually
interesting film composition, which resembles the darkness in David Lynch’s
ERASERHEAD, yet this is filmed in color, where most of the color has been
drained or bleached out of the frame.
Even if much of the film is exasperating, Costa has found an original
method to imprint his vision into our subconscious, literally keeping the mood
of his images in our heads long after the film is over. Add to that the somber reality of the people
who inhabit this human purgatory, where much of what we remember, particularly
enhanced by the music that plays over the end credits, feels like an elegy or a
requiem, providing an almost classical sense to this highly individualized and
in many ways unpleasant journey.
13.) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN A- 94
USA (122 mi) 2007
‘Scope d: Joel and Ethan Coen
Not as much fun as BLOOD SIMPLE (1984), which was far more amusing, but
this is tense, brilliantly paced and has the same spare tone with a sense of
age weariness, people who are tired of it all, set in motion by an introductory
monologue from Tommie Lee Jones who describes himself as coming from a
generation of lawmen, many of whom never used to wear a gun, finding its use
more of a bother than useful. Lawmen use
their keen wits, their knowledge of the arid landscape of West Texas, and their
ability to size up a situation and the people who tend to get themselves in
trouble. He recalls a young 14-year old
boy who murdered his girlfriend, not for any motive really other than to kill
her, claiming he always knew this would happen sooner or later, offering not an
ounce of remorse. This opens up the
floodgates for the modern portrait of the cold hearted men who inhabit the
landscape today. Adapting the even
bleaker Cormac McCarthy novel, the Coens veer into
rural Texas much like they did Minnesota in FARGO (1996), and while it hasn’t
the profound wit or charm of Frances McDormand’s
brilliant pregnant detective, it does have the same love for detail, the
dialect and phrases that just roll off the tongue, the sage loners that live in
abject poverty in order to maintain their independence, or kind hearted
strangers or store clerks who maintain a sense of decency in their everyday
lives even as the world around them seems to have moments when it just goes to
hell. This film is about the arrival of
just that kind of hell and the impact it has on a few people’s lives that are
unfortunate enough to feel its presence.
The story is simple enough, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a hunter
stalking antelope in the isolation of the desert who stumbles across the
remains of a shootout, with dead bodies and even attack dogs strewn across the
landscape, many still holding their weapons guarding a stash of heroin, where
following the traces of blood he’s able to track a lone man sitting under a
shade tree with a briefcase full of money (supposedly $2 million), which he
retrieves from a bloody, lifeless corpse.
This sets into motion a series of events all spelling more trouble,
renegade Mexicans who wish to steal the drugs, Javier Bardem
as Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer who’s sent to
recover the money, a man whose weapon of choice is lugging around tanks of
compressed air normally used to instantly slaughter livestock, Woody Harrelson
as a cocky hired gun who’s needed to reel in the out of control killer, and
Tommie Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell, a man who knows Llewellyn Moss and his wife
Carla (Kelly Macdonald), whose job it seems is to assess the damage littered
all over the western parts of Texas. For
some reason, Moss seems to think he can get away with stealing the loot,
despite the rising body count that suggests otherwise, as his life and his
family are swarmed upon from all directions.
There’s some light-hearted dialogue that connects all this together, the
best coming from the Tommie Lee Jones, one of the best scene stealers in the
business, especially on his own home turf of Texas, but mostly we dread the
inevitable, as the awesome destruction of the killer is like a cyclone laying
waste to everything it touches for miles.
Yet unlike other psychopaths, this man is not stewing in his own venom,
filled with anxious, profanity-laden episodes that reveal some hidden childhood
character flaw, this man never raises his voice or shows any sense of
urgency. He always threatens by tracking
his prey with such measured and calm proficiency that he enjoys watching the
other guy sweat, continually applying more heat to the already sweltering
southwestern landscape.
While the film is an excellent character study, interweaving the
perspective of various points of view, it’s also a concise, well written
thriller that thrives in wordless tension, always leading with a sense of
foreboding where the law remains two steps behind, and where prevailing wisdom
comes during the pauses in the action, sometimes over a cup of coffee while
reading the morning paper, or two sheriffs having a meal together finding just
the right tone , where it’s hard to define when this overriding sense of apathy
began to take hold of us, where the horrors even in our own midst are
disregarded as easily as spitting out our morning toothpaste. As the body count rises, so does our
declining interest to even witness the fatalities, as we already know what to
expect, and a killer with this degree of precision does not disappoint. This growing weariness with death is not conducive
to the typical Coen brother’s wise-cracking amusement with genre mixing, even
when laced with clever dialogue, making this profusely uncomfortable, just as
it must have been for the lawmen whose job it was to clean up this kind of
sordid mess. The point being: it’s never cleaned up. We just don’t have to look at it when someone
else does the dirty work for us. This
kind of killing is all too antiseptic, out of sight out of mind, like wars
fought overseas that leave a bitter aftertaste only when it affects someone
inside your own family, but it’s peculiar when other families next door or
across the street remain entirely unscathed.
How are people to address one another in those circumstances? How does one show respect or try to put it
all behind us? Instead, there seems to
be no escape, where the prevailing sense of apathy only increases the horror of
the events, as if disregarding the dead is to our own detriment, a parallel to
what we know about history and the current slaughter of innocents abroad, which
we as a nation continue to ignore at our own peril.
14.) MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES A- 93
Canada (90 mi) 2006
d: Jennifer Baichwal
From the outset, this is a film that made me more inquisitive about both
artists featured in the making of this film.
Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal has set a
high standard for the manner in which she chooses to document artists,
developing a personal relationship with Moroccan recluse Paul Bowles ahead of
time so that a writer with a reputation for stubborn reticence becomes a
fascinating interview in LET IT COME DOWN:
THE LIFE OF PAUL BOWLES (1998), or painstakingly allowing both critics
and admirers to chime in on her exploration of poverty through the works of
Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams in THE TRUE MEANING OF PICTURES: SHELBY LEE ADAM’S APPALACHIA (2002), so that
in both films Baichwal’s goal has been defined by a
near scientific objectivity, a straightforward presentation of the material, allowing
the audience a chance to make their own judgments. Similarly, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has taken a fascination with the world’s
industrial dumping grounds, capturing startling images by framing the subject
in such a way that it fills the entire picture, maximizing its impact as it
seemingly extends into the infinite [web site]. Earlier
in his life, Burtynsky worked in gold mines and auto
assembly plants and reportedly took a wrong turn on a rural Pennsylvania road,
discovering a huge coal pit that left such a mesmerizing yet horrible
impression on him that he was inspired to make his life’s work photographing
similar panoramic vistas, making ugliness look stunningly beautiful, raising
questions about the aesthetics of debris, known as “the industrial sublime.”
Something of a follow up to Michael Glawogger’s
WORKING MAN’S DEATH (2005), even sharing a similar location, a Bangladesh
shipyard that more accurately resembles a shipping graveyard, a place that survives
on scrap metal with workers stripping old oil tankers piece by piece, which is
contrasted against another immense Chinese shipyard that is constructing as
many as 100 ships, or Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s
OUR DAILY BREAD (2005), a wordless yet stark examination of depersonalization
through degrading and monotonous work that someone necessarily endures for the
sake of the food we eat. In this film, Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler
follow photographer Edward Burtynsky to China and
Bangladesh, adding real life context to what he so eloquently captures in still
shots, recording a heightened imbalance of nature, showing how modern
technology is so rapidly reconfiguring the shape of our landscape, both
internally and externally. It’s an
interesting project, as a photographer’s eye is initially struck by specific
subjects, such as rock quarries, strip mines, waste dumping grounds, recycled
tires, computers, or ship parts, the mass employment of factory workers, the
displacement of humans by gigantic technological projects that are considered
vital to modern advancement, then the filmmaker follows up on that idea,
extending the boundaries of the photographs, showing how people are dwarfed when
placed alongside these massive projects which reduce humans to just a speck on
the landscape.
Resembling the enormity of the final image from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
(1981), we get an eyeful from the opening seven or eight minute shot, a slow
tracking shot down a side aisle of a huge Chinese iron assembly plant that
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, finally settling on a single worker who is fast asleep. This indoor shot is immediately followed by
another similarly choreographed outdoor shot, where the entire work force of
yellow-clad workers is lined up in perfectly organized columns directly outside
the yellow colored factory buildings, where the road is lined with yellow
flags, creating a surrealist glimpse of human progress. We see other factories with workers uniformly
wearing pink, with all the women in identical blue headscarves. Burtynsky himself,
in extracts from his Chinese lectures, tells us that China recycles 50% of the
world’s computer parts, a task that is illegal in the West due to the toxic
effects of what’s called E-waste, that a recognizable odor permeates for miles
before entering a town that performs this task, where the workers wear no
protective gear as they hammer apart computers and heat circuit boards in order
to separate the chemical compounds, a process that may have the effect of
poisoning the workers as well as the neighboring water supplies, routinely
throwing the waste into nearby streams.
Though it’s been illegal to import electronic waste into China since
2000, Baichwal’s camera captures tons of debris being
unloaded at local shipping ports in giant containers mostly from Europe, Japan,
and the United States, which are then trucked to the nearby recycling
centers.
Sometimes a single photo or a slow wordless pan will introduce a
segment, perhaps the voice of a worker describing their task, but the film is
notable for its hauntingly beautiful original music from Dan Driscoll and an
extraordinary industrial sound design from David Rose and Roland Schlimme (who doubles as the film editor), providing an
ethereal calm to the already provocative subject matter. Some of the more devastating footage is
showing the impact of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric
engineering project on the Yangtze River, more than 50 % bigger than any other
dam in the world, where some of the most fertile farmlands in the country had
to be destroyed and where over a million people have been displaced to make
room for this mammoth construction project, seen here being paid by the
government to remove their homes brick by brick so that they could rebuild
their new homes elsewhere using the same materials.
Much of the film was shot in China, home to over a billion people, as
it’s a country undergoing a colossal shift in priorities. Under Mao, the country was 90% agricultural
and 10% urban, while today it is 30% agricultural and 70% urban, changing the
landscape with unprecedented speed.
Nothing reflects that change any more than the modernization of Shanghai
which has nearly completely demolished its old city, making way for a skyline
of new high rises in the name of progress.
Baichwal finds one old woman who refused to be
moved, despite the threats of broken bones, whose lone one room shanty remains
standing, as the modern building complexes were forced to build around
her. In a scene reminiscent of
Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963), there is an opulent estate next to this woman’s
home with giant glass windows revealing sweeping panoramic vistas of modern
Shanghai, a scene that couldn’t possibly provide more contrast between an old
woman’s humble origins and an extreme flaunting of wealth. The woman residing in the modernized
apartment is the epitome of China’s new woman, who bears a striking movie star
resemblance to Gong Li (who was credited with thanks at the end of the film),
welcoming the camera into her home, graciously offering her Jackie Kennedy-like
tour, proudly showing us her library of classical Chinese books, where any one
room is bigger than the old woman’s entire house. By the end of the film, after seeing the
damaging environmental impact of industrial waste on such a large scale, one
couldn’t be sure if this one person’s arrogant display of opulence in Shanghai
wasn’t even more egregiously horrifying, as her wealth, and others like her, is
likely acquired by selfishly turning a blind eye to the community of
others. Isn’t that the same arrogance
that demolishes old cities, destroys natural farmlands, displaces ordinary
people, and leaves behind a trail of toxic debris for others to clean up after
them?
15.) MARGOT AT THE WEDDING A- 93
USA (92 mi) 2007
d: Noah Baumbach
While SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005) featured a repugnant father (Jeff
Daniels), this film features one of the more revolting mothers in Nicole
Kidman’s neurotically smug Margot, who perhaps best represents what years of
therapy gone wrong can do. Honest to the
point of being compulsive, where she can’t help herself from making snide,
overly critical remarks, she’s willing to destroy all those around her in the
name of truth and honesty, used like a bulldozer to clear the landscape around
her, where her primary purpose appears to be to deflect personal criticism away
from herself, completely oblivious to the ramifications of her actions. She’s brazenly horrible, where her overly grumpy
nature around others, exacerbated by the everpresent
glasses of wine, lead to despicable family betrayals which she reveals like
open sores through her successful short stories. Of primary interest, due to her literary
acclaim, she is actually considered the breadwinner and the voice of reason and
success in the family, even though she hasn’t spoken to her sister Pauline
(Jennifer Jason Leigh) in years. They
are burying the hatchet, however, as Pauline announces she’s about to be
married to the mildly artistic but perennially unemployed Malcolm (Jack Black),
who Margot immediately detests and undermines.
More friction ensues. Shot in underlit
darkened exteriors by Harris Savides, this is a
savagely dark comedy with only brief traces of humor, which is instead
dominated by a foul odor that expresses itself in strange ways, the unwanted
string of personal critiques coming from Margot, her son Claude’s (Zane Pais) entrance into puberty and the first emergence of body
odor, the strange and cruel neighbors next door who want them to chop down an
immense tree that borders their property, claiming the roots are rotting,
poisoning their plants, and the disappearance of a well
liked family dog.
The film opens with Margot and Claude taking a train from New York to
the Hamptons, which may as well be a journey back to her childhood, as Pauline
inherited their mother’s summer home, so it brings back a flood of memories and
stored up resentments which come to a head almost immediately, where Margot
assumes her domineering role as the older sister, showing her true colors when
she instantly reveals information told to her in confidence that Pauline is
pregnant and intentionally hadn’t told anyone else, as she didn’t want people
to believe that’s why she was marrying Malcolm.
Pauline’s daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross) immediately becomes concerned
wondering why her mother didn’t tell her, as well as Malcolm who’s somewhat
ambivalent about becoming a father, believing this may be the stage in life
where he’s not the most important person in the world anymore. This story reflects a growing unease that
people have with each another, revealing how people unhesitatingly poison the
waters of the world around them, like opening the floodgates of the obnoxious
behavior displayed on opinion-oriented talk radio, disparaging everyone around
them while at the same time they somehow attempt to balance a sense of trust
and personal honesty with their friends and family, and in this case an all but
doomed impending marriage. Somehow, the
more they try to make it work, the worse it gets.
While this film has a feeling of incompleteness with so much background
information left out of the film, a bit like entering in midair and having to
figure out how to fly, but what it does show in sharply defined characters is
revealed in intimate detail, sparing nothing, in a scathing portrait of a
dysfunctional family behaving like they’ve always done, which is tear each
other to shreds. This is a no holds
barred indictment of suburban hypocrisy, people who use honesty as a weapon to
hold others at bay, which gives them a phony sense of superiority. What’s unique here is that such self-absorbed
adults are behaving so wretchedly inappropriately in front of their own
children. Claude especially is a quietly
sensitive kid, played with a beautiful sense of authenticity by Pais, but he’s subject to constant critiques from his
mother even over the smallest things, where every detail of his life comes
under neverending scrutiny, yet he’s attached to her
and loves her, even if she doesn’t know how to love him back, telling him that
when he was a baby, she wouldn’t allow anyone else to hold him. “I think that was a mistake.” Despite the horrid things Margot says and does,
Pauline is basically a forgiving soul and her maternal instincts are more on
the mark. When the inevitable dust up
with Margot reaches volatile proportions, the audience is surprised with how
quickly Pauline’s anger subsides and her more easy going personality takes
center stage. Jennifer Jason Leigh is
luminous in this role, yet her character has a surprising passivity, where her
low key nature allows her sister (and others) to trample all over her again,
yet she’s stunningly appealing displaying such an open vulnerability. A unique and refreshingly daring work, always
smart and articulate, all the performances feel pitch perfect in this small
incendiary chamber drama, like an off-stage Broadway production made on a
miniscule budget, offering a great deal more freedom of expression, more bang
for your buck, where we may remain haunted afterwards by the wrenchingly
expressed unpleasantness of these troubled souls.
BEST
ACTOR
Viggo Mortensen – Eastern Promises
Casey Affleck – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
Ford (1) + Gone Baby Gone (2)
*Javier Bardem – No Country for Old Men
Sam Riley – Control
Phillip Seymour Hoffman – Before the Devil Knows You’re
Dead (1) + The Savages (2) + (supporting actor) Charlie Wilson’s War (3)
Kurt Russell – Grindhouse
Chris Cooper – Breach
Michael Shannon – Bug
BEST
ACTRESS
Parker Posey – Fay Grim (1) + Broken English (2)
*Anamaria Marinca – 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2
Days
Isabelle Carré – Anna M.
Nicole Kidman – Margot at the Wedding
Ellen Page – Juno
Laura Dern – INLAND EMPIRE
Julie Christie – Away from Her
Tang Wei – Lust, Caution
BEST
SUPP ACTOR
Ben Foster – Alpha Dog (1) + 3:10 to Yuma (2)
*John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac (1) + Things We Lost in the Fire (2)
Hal Holbrook – Into the Wild
Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
– Love Songs
Rolf Lassgård – After the Wedding
Martin Huba – I Served the King of England
Robert Downey Jr. – Zodiac
Max von Sydow – The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly
BEST
SUPP ACTRESS
*Amy Ryan – Gone Baby Gone (1) + Before the
Devil Knows You’re Dead (2)
Eugenia Yuan – Choking Man
Cate Blanchett – I’m Not There
Taraji P. Henson – Talk to Me
Tilda Swinton – Michael Clayton
Lili Taylor – Starting Out in the Evening
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Margot at the Wedding
Kristen Thomson – Away from Her
BEST
DIRECTOR
David Cronenberg Canada
Eastern Promises
David Lynch USA INLAND
EMPIRE
*Cristian Mungiu Romania 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days
Joel and Ethan Coen USA No Country for Old Men
Ken Loach Ireland Great Britain The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Susanne Bier Denmark After the Wedding
Sidney Lumet USA Before the Devil Knows You’re
Dead
Carlos Reygadas Mexico Silent Light
Hal Hartley USA Fay Grim
BEST
SCREENPLAY
*Diablo Cody – Juno
Joel and Ethan Coen, adapted from Cormac McCarthy – No Country for Old
Men
Hal Hartley – Fay Grim
Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen – After the Wedding
Noah Baumbach – Margot at the Wedding
Matt Greenhalgh, adapted from Deborah Curtis –
Control
Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman – I’m Not There
BEST
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins – The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford (1) + No Country for Old Men (2)
Bruno Delbonnel – Across the Universe
Martin Ruhe – Control
*Alexis Zabe – Silent Light
Frederick Elmes – The Namesake
John Christian Rosenlund – The Bothersome Man
Sean Kirby – Zoo
Rodrigo Prieto – Lust, Caution
BEST
ENSEMBLE ACTING
*No Country for Old Men
Eastern Promises
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
After the Wedding
Fay Grim
Margot at the Wedding
BEST
ART DIRECTION
*Across the Universe
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Aerial
Lust, Caution
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Into the Wild
The Bothersome Man
We Own the Night
BEST
EDITING
No Country for Old Men
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
After the Wedding
Fay Grim
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
*Yella
BEST
COSTUMES
*Lust, Caution
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Talk to Me
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of
Fleet Street
Across the Universe
The Namesake
Grindhouse
BEST
ORIGINAL MUSIC
*Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
– Once
Koichi Shimizu and Hualampong Riddim – Ploy
DJ Nitin Sawhney – The Namesake
Johan Söderqvist – After the Wedding
Carter Burwell – Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
(1) + No Country for Old Men (2)
Alexandre Desplat – Lust, Caution
Arvo Pärt and Andrei Dergachyov – The Banishment
Constance Lee Camille – Flight of the Red Balloon
BEST
DOCUMENTARY
*Manufactured Landscapes
Bergman Complete
The Cats of Mirikitani
The Forest for the Trees
Into Great Silence
The Trials of Darryl Hunt