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August 26, 2011

CIFF 2011 – Twenty Two Most Wanted!

By michaelgloversmith

With the start of the Chicago International Film Festival only six weeks away, it’s time for my annual wish list of films I’d most like to see turn up there. This is a combination of movies that have generated buzz at other festivals throughout the year, movies by favorite directors whose production status I’ve been following in the press, recommendations from friends and even a title or two that may be nothing more than rumor. In alphabetical order:

Arirang (Kim, S. Korea)

South Korea’s Kim Ki-duk directed an astonishing 12 feature films between 2000 and 2008. The last of these, Breath, belatedly received its U.S. premiere at Facets Multimedia earlier this year and suggested that Kim’s wellspring of creativity had run dry, an impression seemingly verified by the 3 year silence that’s followed it. Arirang, Kim’s latest, is apparently a one man show/pseudo-documentary in which Kim himself examines this impasse a la 8 1/2. This premiered at Cannes where its supposed “navel gazing” quality drove many viewers up the wall. I say bring it on!

The Assassin (Hou, Taiwan)

When I put this on my wish list of films I hoped would turn up at CIFF last year it was nothing more than a pipe dream. Since then, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s long rumored martial arts film actually did quietly begin production. Tadanobu Asano and Takeshi Kaneshiro have apparently joined a formidable cast that has long had Hou regulars Shu Qi and Chang Chen attached.

Bernie (Linklater, USA)

Richard Linklater has intriguingly described this as his version of Fargo – a quirky true crime tale set in his beloved native Texas. Jack Black (reuniting with Linklater for the first time since the excellent School of Rock), Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey star.

Carnage (Polanski, France/Germany)

Roman Polanski follows up his estimable The Ghost Writer with an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony award winning play about a long night of drinking and fighting between two married couples brought together after a playground fight between their children. Polanski’s talent for shooting in confined spaces and the sterling cast (Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet and John C. Reilly) make this a mouth-watering prospect.

A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg, Germany/Canada)

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play about the birth of psychoanalysis, which is depicted as stemming from an imagined rivalry between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). As someone who thinks Cronenberg’s recent Mortensen collaborations (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) are his very best work, my expectations for this could not be higher.

The Day He Arrives (Hong, S. Korea)

Another character-driven Hong Sang-soo comedy/drama that premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar where it was universally admired, begging the question of why it didn’t land in Official Competition. This one apparently deals with the relationship between a film professor and a film critic. Expect the usual witty merry-go-round of booze, sex and self-deceit.

The Devil’s Church (de Oliveira, Brazil/Portugal)

A year after working with CGI for the first time, the great Portugese director Manoel de Oliveira continues to stretch himself by travelling to Brazil to shoot his first film outside of Europe (and his 57th overall). The Devil’s Church is based on a Faustian-themed short story by Machado de Assis, widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer. Ricardo Trepa, Oliveira’s grandson and favorite leading man of late, stars. CIFF’s fondness for Oliveira makes this a good bet.

Faust (Sokurov, Germany/Russia)

Speaking of Faust . . . I’m on the fence about Russian miserabilist Aleksandr Sokurov whose films frequently astonish on a technical level but fail to stir the soul in the manner of his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky. But this Russian/German co-production looks promising – a new version of Faust with Fassbinder’s muse Hannah Schygulla in the Marguerite role.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher, USA/Sweden)

English language remakes of recent foreign language films are almost always a bad idea but since the Hollywood version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is directed by David Fincher, we can assume it will be an exception. At the very least, Fincher, whose best work has featured dark, twisty narratives involving serial killings, expert use of CGI and Boolean logic that seemingly puts this project in his wheelhouse, can be counted on to push the material in an interesting direction.

Goodbye (Rasoulof, Iran)

According to reports out of Cannes Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof made this film under “semi-clandestine conditions” while awaiting sentencing following his highly publicized arrest and trial for “anti-regime propaganda” in 2010. Goodbye uses the story of the disbarment of a female lawyer to allegedly tackle the repression of Ahmadinejad’s Iran head-on.

The Grandmasters (Wong, Hong Kong)

This made my wish list last year and, knowing Wong Kar-Wai’s glacial pace of shooting and editing (and re-shooting and re-editing), it could also make the list again next year. A film about the early years of Ip Man, best known as Bruce Lee’s kung-fu teacher, “built around one of the most exciting sets and fighting sequences that I have ever seen” according to Fortissimo Films chairman Michael Werner who came on board as associate producer earlier this year.

Hara Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Miike, Japan)

Takashi Miike continues his recent trend of remaking chambara classics, this time in 3D, by taking a stab at Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri from 1962. But with Miike, you can always expect the unexpected, and this project boasts surprising collaborators like veteran art house producer Jeremy Thomas and A-list actor Koji Yakusho (the favorite leading man of Miike’s mentor Shohei Imamura and the star of Miike’s superb 13 Assassins).

Le Havre (Kaurismaki, Finland/France)

I’ve never really warmed to the deadpan humor of Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismaki whose “minimalist” films have always struck me as less than meets the eye. His latest, a supposedly sentimental tale of immigration politics centered on a French shoeshiner and an African refugee, was by far the most critically admired film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Color me interested.

Hugo (Scorsese, USA/France)

Martin Scorsese throws his hat into the 3D ring with this Johnny Depp/Jude Law-starring children’s film about a little boy who lives inside the walls of a Paris metro station in the 1930s. This will obviously receive a super-wide release; if it does turn up at CIFF it will be as a sneak preview “Gala Presentation” (hopefully with cast and/or crew present).

In the Qing Dynasty (Jia, China)

Another improbable but intriguing-sounding concoction is the latest from Jia Zhangke, the important, formidably arty chronicler of China’s tumultuous recent history, who appears to be making his first big budget film with this historical epic. Produced by none other than Hong Kong gangster movie specialist Johnnie To.

J. Edgar (Eastwood, USA)

Clint Eastwood’s critical stock is at the lowest its been in some time following his poorly received (but in my humble opinion misunderstood) melodramas Invictus and Hereafter. Stakes are therefore even higher than they otherwise would be for this J. Edgar Hoover biopic scripted by Dustin Lance Black and starring Leonardo di Caprio and Armie Hammer. As with Hugo Cabret, this will only make it in as a Gala Presentation (not out of the question since this happened with Hereafter last year). Sure to make my CIFF wish list next year is the prolific Eastwood’s next film – a remake of A Star is Born starring . . . Beyonce?

Life Without Principle (To, Hong Kong)

This began life as a project titled Death of a Hostage when it started shooting (without a script) in 2008. Three years later, it’s finally complete and it sounds like Johnnie To’s most exciting in some time: a bank heist thriller starring the charismatic, enormously talented Lau Ching-Wan; the last collaboration between these two, 2007′s ingenious Mad Detective, was one of my favorite films of the last decade. Will Life Without Principle stack up? Is the title a reference to Thoreau? Is the above movie poster the coolest ever?

Night Fishing (Park/Park, S. Korea)

Park Chan-wook, the reigning innovator of the South Korean New Wave, caused a stir on the festival circuit earlier this year with this 30 minute horror short shot entirely on an iphone. This alone would justify the purchase of a ticket to one of CIFF’s notoriously erratic “Shorts Programs.”

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan, Turkey)

Still photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan made one of the great directorial debuts of the last decade with Distant, a deliberately paced, minimalist comedy about the growing estrangement between a professional photographer in Istanbul and his visiting country bumpkin cousin. If Ceylan’s subsequent films haven’t quite lived up to the promise of his debut, this film about a night in the life of a doctor living in the harsh title region (the gateway between Europe and Asia) should still be worth a look. Won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

A Separation (Farhadi, Iran)

Asghar Farhadi (Fireworks Wednesday, About Elly) is a CIFF veteran so one can only hope that this universally admired marital drama, which won three prizes in Berlin (including the Golden Bear), will turn up here – preferably as an in competition entry with multiple screenings.

This is Not a Film (Panahi/Mirtahmasb, Iran)

Like Mohammad Rasoulof, Jafar Panahi essentially made his latest film as a political prisoner in Iran. Co-directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, this documentary-style “diary” about the great director’s inability to work was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick buried inside of a cake. The more attention that’s brought to the tragic plight of Rasoulof and Panahi the better.

The Turin Horse (Tarr/Hranitzky, Hungary)

Hungary’s Bela Tarr took home the Best Director award in Berlin for this, his acclaimed final film. The premise is a fictionalized account of what happened to the horse Friedrich Nietzsche saw being whipped in Turin a month before the philosopher was diagnosed with the mental illness that left him bedridden for the rest of his life. Tarr himself has described this as his “most radical” work, a daunting claim from the uncompromising, austere maestro responsible for the seven and a half hour Satantango. I was fortunate to see Bela Tarr bring The Werckmeister Harmonies to CIFF in person in 2000. One can only hope he’ll see fit to do so again with this swan song.

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February 28, 2011

Last (Grouchy) Thoughts on Oscar

By michaelgloversmith

Even though I voted against it in my Oscar pool, I kept secretly hoping all night that The Social Network might somehow win Best Picture, especially after Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored an upset win for their excellent original score. But as soon as Tom Hooper’s name was called for Best Director, the game was over and I realized why “the Facebook movie” never really had a chance – its main rival, The King’s Speech, was a middlebrow entertainment that plays like a virtual checklist of Oscar’s favorite qualities: true story, period piece (set against the beginning of the second World War no less), a cast of British acting royalty and a main character who overcomes a physical handicap (especially since Colin Firth didn’t, as my friend David Hanley points out, go “full retard”).

Lovers of The Social Network can take solace knowing that the list of movies that have never won Best Picture Academy Awards is more illustrious than the list of those that have. Like many great American films before it, David Fincher’s zeitgeist movie was too edgy, too hip, too relevant. Or as Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker might say: “Winning Best Picture isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Losing Best Picture.” Fans of David Fincher who don’t agree shouldn’t worry though. The man will win an Oscar someday, probably fifteen years from now for a film that isn’t as brilliant or innovative as Zodiac or The Social Network.

P.S. – A big thank you to Judi Marcin for throwing the best Oscar party ever. You deserve a little gold statue.

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December 30, 2010

Top Ten Films of 2010

By michaelgloversmith

It may not have been as strong of a calendar year as 2007, which I’m convinced will go down as one of the all-time great movie years alongside of 1939 and 1960 (but that’s a subject for another post); 2010 was still a good year for the movies. I would go so far as to say it offered an embarrassment of riches for Chicago-area cinephiles – provided, that is, one knew where to look. The only films I really wanted to see but missed were Tuesday, After Christmas, the latest buzzed about film of the Romanian New Wave, which received a scant few Chicago International Film Festival screenings, and the full five and a half hour cut of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, which turned up for a few Music Box screenings before being supplanted by the much shorter, and ostensibly more audience friendly, theatrical cut. But with so much good cinema fare playing only in limited runs or at “alternative” venues, a few things are bound to slip through the cracks. Having said all that, I’d like to give a special shout out to The Chicago International Film Festival for having a more impressive line-up than usual and the enterprising programmers at the Music Box, the Siskel Center and Facets, who continued to go above and beyond the call of duty in bringing the best of contemporary world cinema to the Second City.

Below is a list of my ten favorite new films to first play Chicago in 2010 (even though some debuted elsewhere last year), as well as fifteen runners-up.

The Top Ten (in preferential order):

10. Around a Small Mountain (Rivette, France, 2009) – Siskel Center. Rating: 8.0

aroundasmallmountain

Jacques Rivette’s supposed swan song, which some allege was completed by his longtime screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer, is a charming, wise, deceptively simple film that clocks in at a very atypically brief 84 minutes. The story concerns an Italian businessman (Sergio Castellitto) who becomes involved with a low-rent traveling circus, presided over by a mysterious Englishwoman (Jane Birkin). But plot is really only an excuse for Rivette and Bonitzer to explore the nature of performance and how art and life are inextricably bound. Delightful scenes of jugglers, acrobats and clowns performing are intercut with the main story until it becomes unclear where the performance ends and life begins. If it is Rivette’s last movie, it is a fitting farewell indeed. Full review here.

9. White Material (Denis, France/Cameroon) – The Music Box. Rating: 8.1

The peerless Isabelle Huppert combines sinewy physical strength with psychological complexity as Maria, the French owner of a coffee plantation in a nameless civil war-torn African country. As violence escalates, Maria presses on running her business, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that the world around her is descending into chaos. No characters are spared the harsh eye of director Claire Denis in this disturbing drama – not Maria’s fractured family, the government troops, nor the rebel soldiers (including a fair number of child soldiers) led by Isaach de Bankole. This isn’t a masterpiece on the order of her earlier Beau Travail but no one else except Denis, who spent her childhood in Africa and has now made three films there, seems willing to perform the necessary task of providing a moral reckoning of France’s colonial past.

8. Carlos (Assayas, France/Germany) Music Box. Rating: 8.2

French writer/director Olivier Assayas posits the international terrorist as rock star in this electrifying biopic of Ilich “Carlos the Jackal” Ramirez Sanchez. Multilingual, made-for-television and shot in many different countries, this insanely ambitious epic is a perfect reflection of the “global” character of cinema in the 21st century – even as it sticks closely to the “rise and fall” formula of a Warner Brothers gangster film of the 1930s. The highlight is an hour long scene depicting Sanchez’s takeover of OPEC headquarters in 1975, a set piece that puts most contemporary Hollywood action movies to shame. If the film’s inevitable downward spiral denouement can’t sustain as much interest, no matter. This is still essential stuff.

7. Everyone Else (Ade, Germany/Italy) – Gene Siskel Film Center. Rating: 8.4

Everyone Else announces the arrival of a major new directorial talent in Maren Ade, the film’s young female writer/director. In only her second feature film, the chronicle of the end of a love affair between a young German couple vacationing in Sardinia, Ade shows she knows a thing or two about human nature and the mysterious machinations of a relationship in irreversible decline. Reportedly inspired by Ingmar Bergman, whose relationship dramas traverse similar psychological terrain, I found this more devastating and more cinematic than Ade’s ostensible models. I can’t wait to see what she does next. Full review here.

6. The Ghost Writer (Polanski, UK/Germany/France) – Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. Rating: 8.8

With this, his 19th feature film, Roman Polanski earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first director to supervise post-production of a major motion picture from jail. Unfortunately, the brouhaha surrounding l’affaire Polanski overshadowed this superb return to form, a meticulously crafted political thriller. Comparisons between The Ghost Writer and Shutter Island are instructive, as both are influenced by Alfred Hitchcock but in radically different ways; Martin Scorsese is the modernist, Polanski the classicist. In Scorsese’s film, every aspect of the movie is aggressively stylized as a way for the filmmaker to comment on the subject matter (expressive camera movements, bold color schemes, intentionally fake-looking digital backdrops, crazy editing rhythms). In Polanski’s film, the visual components are just as aesthetically developed but are less self-conscious and more pressed to the service of . . . not really the story per se, but more what I would like to call Polanski’s theme; this is most obvious in Polanski’s rigorous color scheme (in particular the suppression of red) and the set design of Pierce Brosnan’s beach-front home, which is perhaps best described as a modern art nightmare. Both movies finally aren’t about “story” at all; Shutter Island centers on the question of whether violence is inherent to human nature. The Ghost Writer is a query into the dark heart of our new global society and how the major players on that stage use, betray, victimize and discard one another.

5. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, Thailand) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 8.9

“Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.” So begins the latest film by Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, one of the world’s most exciting young directors. Fully deserving of its Cannes Palm d’Or, Uncle Boonmee is a masterful tone poem that expands on the spiritual themes of Joe’s earlier work to encompass a graceful, feature-length meditation on dying and death. Shot entirely in the jungles of rural Thailand, the cinematography is appropriately lush and the dense sound mix creates an impressively immersive experience. I suspect the experimental aspects of this film may drive some viewers up the wall but I could have watched it go on forever; I emerged from the theater as relaxed and refreshed as I typically feel after watching a film by Yasujiro Ozu. More here.

4. Wild Grass (Resnais, France) – The Music Box. Rating: 9.2

Alain Resnais’ alternately sublime and ridiculous study of fantasy and obsession represents a return to the “wildness” of his early films and, for my money, is also his best film in decades. I really admire the way Resnais takes the premise of a generic romantic comedy (a typical meet-cute involving his regular players André Dussollier and Sabine Azema) and continually undercuts the audience’s desire to “identify” with these characters. Is Dussollier a stalker? Did he actually kill a man in the past? Why does Azema express interest in him as soon as he loses interest in her? The most obvious example of the film’s surrealist/satirical bent is its first false ending, complete with Sweeping Romantic Gesture and Twentieth Century Fox theme music. This is followed by the “real” ending, a cosmic punchline so bat-shit crazy that it nearly caused me to fall out of my chair from laughing so hard. I also loved the candy box colors and near-constant use of crane shots. Now what the hell’s wrong with Sony Pictures Classics that they won’t release a blu-ray, hmmmm?

3. Shutter Island (Scorsese, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 9.7

The closest Martin Scorsese has come to making a straight horror film is also the best thing he’s done since Goodfellas in 1990. Forget about the narrative twists and turns, which aren’t any more implausible or predictable than what you’ll find in Hitchcock’s best movies. Shutter Island is a great film because of the raw, ferocious emotions at its core, in particular the palpable guilt, fear and paranoia of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels. These emotions all coalesce in the film’s ingenious finale, which critic Glenn Kenny has aptly compared to Vertigo and referred to as a “perfect note of empathetic despair.” Once the mystery plot has given up its surface secrets, Shutter Island still repays multiple viewings as a brilliant character study. And the unusually baroque visuals, which clearly show the influence of Scorsese’s idol Michael Powell, are never less than a treat.

2. The Social Network (Fincher, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 9.8

Another groundbreaking, digitally shot time capsule from David Fincher’s astonishing post-Panic Room mature period. Every aspect of this movie works – from the terrific rapid-fire dialogue of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay (which recalls the heyday of Hollywood screwball comedy) to the sterling ensemble cast (notably Jesse Eisenberg as motor-mouthed Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake as the Mephistophelean Sean Parker, and Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, the man they both screw over and the movie’s true emotional core). But it’s Fincher’s mise-en-scene, which for many reasons could have only been achieved in the 21st century, that turns The Social Network into an exhilarating roller coaster ride. A film that defines our time? Who cares? It’s a film for all time. Full review here.

1. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, Iran/France/Italy) – Chicago International Film Festival. Rating: 10

I’ve heard Abbas Kiarostami’s latest masterpiece described as both a comedy and a metaphysical horror film. Certified Copy, which seems to be both a curve ball and a true-to-form puzzle film from the master, is great enough and slippery enough to accommodate both descriptions simultaneously. I still don’t know if this is a story about the characters played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel engaging in some extreme form of play-acting or if the film instead posits a kind of mutable reality in which their identities are constantly morphing in accordance with the demands of a mischievous narrative. And that’s how I like it. Binoche continues to look more radiant with each passing year and Shimell (a professional opera singer but amateur thespian) is pitch-perfect as her foil. More here.

The Fifteen Runners Up (in alphabetical order):

35 Shots of Rum (Denis, France) – The Music Box. Rating: 7.7

Black Swan (Aronofsky, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 7.6

The Chaser (Na, S. Korea) – Facets Cinematheque. Rating: 7.3

Chicago Heights (Nearing, USA) – Gene Siskel Film Center. More here. Rating: 6.1

Heartbeats (Dolan, Canada) – Chicago International Film Festival. More here. Rating: 7.6

Hereafter (Eastwood, USA/France/UK) – Wide Release. Rating: 7.4

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Stern/Sundberg, USA) – Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. Rating: 7.5

Lebanon (Maoz, Israel/Lebanon) – The Music Box. Full review here. Rating: 7.7

Life During Wartime (Solondz, USA) – The Musix Box. Rating: 7.0

On Tour (Amalric, France) – Chicago International Film Festival. More here. Rating: 6.6

A Prophet (Audiard, France) – Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. Rating: 7.1

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright, USA/Canada) – Wide Release. Rating: 7.0

The Town (Affleck, USA) – Wide Release. Full review here. Rating: 7.1

True Grit (Coens, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 7.4

Winter’s Bone (Granik, USA) – Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. Rating: 7.1

Anyone reading this should feel free to post their own favorites in the comments section below.

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October 3, 2010

Now Playing: The Town and The Social Network

By michaelgloversmith

The Town
dir. Ben Affleck, 2010, USA
Rating: 7.1

The Social Network
dir. David Fincher, 2010, USA
Rating: 9.8

The bottom line: Hollywood done good.

Now playing in theaters everywhere is The Town, a love story/crime movie hybrid that confirms the filmmaking promise Ben Affleck showed with Gone, Baby, Gone, his auspicious directorial début from 2007. Also now playing everywhere is The Social Network, David Fincher’s second major masterpiece in the past four years (along with Zodiac in 2007), confirming the director as a uniquely American visionary in the midst of an astonishing mature period. Each film is crucial viewing for lovers of American cinema, as they both illustrate what Hollywood still knows how to do right, albeit in very different ways and to different degrees.

Ben Affleck is an interesting case – a talented actor who nearly self-sabotaged his career by starring in a long string of crappy action movies around the turn of the millenium. Then, in 2006, he poignantly played George Reeves, television’s original Superman, in the massively underrated Hollywoodland. It must have hit awfully close to home for the former Daredevil star to play Reeves as a washed-up has-been in tights begging to be taken seriously by the industry. Whatever the case, the delightful performance, a supporting role by any measure, earned Affleck the Best Actor award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival and set the stage for the actor’s reinvention. This notion was confirmed the following year with the release of Gone, Baby, Gone, a dark, brooding crime film indebted to the recent work of Clint Eastwood, which Affleck co-wrote and directed but did not star in. Gone, Baby, Gone had its share of plot contrivances but the narrative twists and turns led to a very welcome and satisfying finale; after returning a young kidnapping victim to her rightful but drug-addicted mother, Casey Affleck’s private detective character realizes the kid is in an even worse place than before. For me, the unexpected gravitas of this ironic “happy ending” and the moral questions it raised lingered long after the closing titles.

If there’s nothing in The Town quite as good as that, no matter. Affleck takes a serviceable Chuck Hogan cops and robbers plot and injects it with enough genuine human emotion, juicy performances and authentic sense of place to put most recent Hollywood fare to shame. Affleck directs himself this time as Doug MacRay, a Boston-bred career criminal who pulls off a bank job in the film’s opening scene, one that requires him to take as hostage the bank’s manager, Claire Keesey (the always reliable Rebecca Hall). Because MacRay and his cohorts are wearing masks, Claire doesn’t recognize him when she and Macray meet cute in a laundromat several days later. The budding relationship between the two, which provides MacRay with a glimpse into a way out of “the life,” gives the movie its heart. Unlike the cardboard cutouts populating most contemporary Hollywood action movies, here at last are two people we can care about.

As an actor, Affleck has never been better as MacRay, a blue-collar hood whose tough exterior masks a sensitive soul, but even he’s upstaged by Jeremy Renner as violent sidekick Jim Coughlin. Renner, so memorable as the cocky, adrenaline-junky Sergeant in The Hurt Locker, carves out a different but equally impressive character here. Coughlin unpredictably vacillates between quietly charismatic and live wire manic; with his heavy eyelids and thuggish charm, Renner resembles no one so much as Jimmy Cagney in his prime. The rest of the ensemble cast, including Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper, Jon Hamm and Blake Lively, is fine too; Affleck as director gets a lot of mileage out of these actors in the film’s quieter moments, especially in shots where they simply listen and react to each other, moments that a lot of other narrative filmmakers couldn’t be bothered with.

Less successful is the mechanical way the plot grinds to a One Last Job climax, preceded by several scenes in which MacRay finds that his criminal brothers want to Keep Pulling Him Back In. But even these aspects seem to reflect the influence of Eastwood, an old hand at balancing human drama with the demands of commercial genre filmmaking. Towards the end of the film, Jon Hamm delivers the jokey throwaway line “It’s for you,” a direct crib from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but the film’s most important antecedents would appear to be minor Eastwoods like The Gauntlet and Blood Work, crime thrillers with more invested in their unlikely love stories than in any action set pieces. In the end, The Town is intelligent, modest, well-acted, emotionally moving and all around well-crafted. These are virtues that used to be a dime a dozen in Hollywood genre films of the 1940s and 1950s. Today, they’re so rare that to see them combined in one movie is almost enough to make you weep with gratitude.

When was the last time you saw a 21st century American film that felt like it could have only been made in the here and now? As much as I love The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mulholland Drive, There Will Be Blood, The Hurt Locker, Before Sunset and even David Fincher’s own Zodiac, I’m not sure if any of those films couldn’t have been made elsewhere or in a previous era. The Social Network, by contrast, is so new and so prescient, it feels almost like a bulletin from the future. It tells the by-now familiar story of Mark Zuckerberg, the teenage wunderkind who founded Facebook from his Harvard dorm room and became the youngest billionaire in history. The fact that Zuckerberg’s life has been dramatized in a movie when the subject is still only 26 years old, is also, for better or for worse, emblematic of the times.

The Social Network uses dark, lush digital images (the kind that only Fincher seems able to capture), wall-to-wall dialogue, hyperkinetic editing and a discordant techno score to paint a portrait of America in the internet age that’s as frightening as it is beautiful. Like Zodiac, it confronts the viewer with an endless, raging sea of information, which by design cannot possibly be processed in a single viewing. Much of this information comes verbatim from legal depositions given as Facebook skyrocketed in popularity and lawsuits were filed against Zuckerberg by former friends claiming he had either stolen the idea from them or swindled them out of stock shares.

The deposition scenes take place in the present and serve as catalysts for a series of flashbacks that may represent objective reality or may be scenes colored by subjective memory. The film’s greatness lies largely in its ambivalence towards Zuckerberg; we can never be entirely sure to what extent he might be a visionary genius and to what extent he may have opportunistically screwed over his friends. Or does the truth lie somewhere in between? The only thing we know for sure is that Zuckerberg’s grandiose ambitions were fueled mainly by his own social insecurity, a point driven home in the film’s final chilling scene.

The screenplay for The Social Network was written by the esteemed Aaron Sorkin and serves up delicious machine-gun paced dialogue for the film’s entire 2 hour running time. It helps that Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg. (Since playing the precocious teenage lead in The Squid and the Whale, Eisenberg has graduated to specializing in playing neurotic, motor-mouthed adults.) The film’s best scenes involve rapidly edited battles of meticulously phrased, rat-a-tat line delivery, especially the ones involving Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker. Timberlake, a terrible musician, is absolutely riveting as the Satanically charming Parker, so much so that you may find yourself hoping he returns every time a scene involving him ends. According to the movie, Parker was broke financially in the wake of Napster lawsuits and yet somehow finagled his way into becoming a substantial Facebook stockholder after intellectually seducing and “informally advising” Zuckerberg. The movie’s key scene between the two of them is one for the ages: set in a garishly lit nightclub, Parker comes on like Mephistopheles while Dennis De Laat’s “Sound of Violence” reaches pulse-pounding levels on the soundtrack. The question arises: are these character portrayals accurate? My answer is who cares? If you want non-fiction, watch a documentary. Historical authenticity is not inherently valuable. What Sorkin and Fincher capture are larger truths about the world we live in, such as the disturbing fact that privacy, as Parker happily admits, is the relic of a bygone era.

Some critics have compared the film to Citizen Kane. This is due partly to the film’s multiple narrator/flashback structure and partly to the suggestion that Zuckerberg never got over a break-up with an early girlfriend – his very own Rosebud. Also, like Welles, Fincher is a true Hollywood maverick; his use of CGI is as impressive here as it was in Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The fact that the same actor, Armie Hammer, plays twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, is absolutely astonishing given how much screen time the brothers share and how seamless their interactions with each other are. And given how unnoticeable Fincher’s use of effects tends to be, we’ll have to wait until the supplemental material on the blu-ray release before understanding the full extent of how they’ve been employed here. I think the Kane comparisons are valid but I think comparisons to the German films of Fritz Lang might be even more fruitful. Like Lang’s relentlessly “third-person” point-of-view in Metropolis and M, what Fincher provides us with here is nothing less than an impressively detailed, panoramic view of society, one that we can understand from top to bottom – only the society in The Social Network exists partly in real space and partly in cyberspace. And then there’s the matter of that techno version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

5 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Film Reviews

August 25, 2010

In Defense of Benjamin Button

By michaelgloversmith

The first official review of David Fincher’s hotly anticipated The Social Network, a film about the founding of Facebook, has appeared online and it’s a doozy: Scott Foundas, respected critic and New York Film Festival selection committee member, has given it an unequivocal rave at the Film Comment website. He calls the film “splendid entertainment from a master storyteller” and compares it to The Great Gatsby both in terms of plot and as a kind of cultural bellwether. Unfortunately, he also uses the occasion to take a swipe at Fincher’s previous film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, as mawkish and insincere.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the only David Fincher movie to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and the only one to be released in a deluxe edition on home video by the prestigious Criterion Collection. Its pioneering use of digital special effects is undeniable and, impressively, the service to which those effects are put is the form of a crowd pleasing melodrama (albeit one haunted by the specter of death); rare among Fincher’s films, Benjamin Button was a big commercial success on a global scale. And yet, as Foundas’ comments testify, from a certain critical perspective it has also always been an unfashionable movie to love. It has been the subject of articles dubious of its anointment as an “instant classic” at the hands of Criterion and it even made one journalist’s list of 10 films that Hollwyood never should have greenlit. But the biggest bone of contention for most critics has been the film’s similarities to Forrest Gump, with which it shares a screenwriter in the person of Eric Roth. So much critical ink has been spilled over the superficial similarities between Button and Gump in terms of story, with the harshest critics claiming that the two are essentially the same movie, that I won’t bother to rehash the comparisons here. Instead, I’d like to point out how the films are crucially different in the far more significant areas of ideology and aesthetics.

Forrest Gump is reactionary in that it martyrs a man for not questioning authority and always doing what he’s told. Forrest is a simpleton who puts all his faith in what God, Mama and Uncle Sam tell him, fights in Vietnam and is rewarded with wealth and fame. A parallel plot involving his girlfriend, Jenny, sees her do the opposite (she joins the counter-culture, protests the war and experiments with free love and drugs) and then punishes her with AIDS and death. There is a sense that the success of Forrest Gump, including an actual win for Best Picture, is the result of its function as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for viewers who would like to triumph over history without doing any hard work. On the other hand, Benjamin Button is the tragedy of a man who lives through history, making tough decisions and taking responsibility for his actions at every turn. Just think of the heartbreaking scene where Benjamin decides to leave Daisy so that she can raise their daughter without him.

In contrast to the high-key lighting and Disneyland-vision-of-the-South art direction employed by Robert Zemeckis in Forrest Gump, The dark, brooding beauty of Fincher’s digital mise-en-scene in Button perfectly complements the film’s melancholy obsession with the passing of time. This is most obvious in the astonishing sequence near the beginning where scratchy, old-movie-like footage of World War I is run backwards, an expressionist device corresponding to the desires of Elias Koteas’ clockmaker character. More importantly, where Forrest Gump always calls attention to itself in its use of digital special effects (“Hey look, it’s Tom Hanks interacting with real documentary footage of some famous historical figure!”), the use of CGI in Button is always subservient to the story, just as it was in Zodiac. (Whenever I point out to students that there are over 200 CGI shots in Zodiac, the most common reply is, “I didn’t notice any.” Exactly.) And although audiences are well aware that computer technology is what allows Brad Pitt in Button to age in reverse, I’ll bet you it’s the last thing on all but the most jaded minds of the viewers who are actually watching the movie.

Finally, where Forrest Gump offers naïve optimism, Benjamin Button is a profoundly moving, and, on occasion, a courageously “feel-bad,” study of aging and death. The concept of showing someone age in reverse is a completely novel way to constantly remind the audience of those themes in a way that could not have been done by showing the character age normally. After all when you see a senior citizen, you don’t automatically think of that person as having only X-amount of time left to live. But when you see Benjamin Button at the age of six, you certainly do.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

August 11, 2010

CIFF – Twenty Two Most Wanted!

By michaelgloversmith

Here is a wish list of the 22 films I’d most like to see turn up at the Chicago International Film Festival in October. The titles are a combination of films that played at Cannes in May, films that have been slated to play at the Venice or Toronto fests in the coming months and some serious wishful thinking.

22. The Housemaid (Im, S. Korea)
An erotic thriller in which a married man’s affair with the family maid brings tragic consequences. I would normally be skeptical of this, a remake of one of the best S. Korean movies of all time (Kim Ki-Young’s mind-blowing Hanyo from 1960), but this was made by Im Sang-Soo, director of the formidable The President’s Last Bang.

21. The Town (Affleck, USA)
Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone, Baby, Gone, was one of the great surprises of 2007: an effective genre piece boasting a terrific ensemble cast and some interesting sociological insights to boot. This sophomore effort is another crime thriller, starring Affleck and The Hurt Locker ‘s Jeremy Renner.

20. 13 Assassins (Miike, Japan)
A reunion between Audition director Takashi Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan that promises to melt more brains – in the audience if not onscreen.

19. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog, France/USA)
A 3-D documentary about the earliest known hand-drawn images. Werner Herzog, whose best films in recent years have tended to be documentaries (see Grizzly Man), will almost certainly do something interesting with the 3-D format.

18. Secret Reunion (Jang, S. Korea)
I know nothing about this except that it stars the enormously talented Song Kang-Ho, veteran of many great S. Korean New Wave movies. Recommended by my film fest savvy friend David Hanley.

17. Another Year (Leigh, UK)
I always like to see what Mike Leigh is up to. If nothing else, you know the performances will be very good.

16. Accident (Cheang, Hong Kong)
A new crime drama from producer (and possible ghost-director) Johnnie To, arguably the best genre filmmaker in the world.

15. Black Swan (Aronofsky, USA)
I found The Wrestler to be Darren Aronofsky’s best film by a wide margin so I’m eager to see what he does in this follow-up, a dark thriller about rival ballet dancers starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.

14. Poetry (Lee, S. Korea)
An elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease takes a poetry course in this highly praised drama from S. Korean director Lee Chang-Dong. Won Best Screenplay at Cannes.

13. Film Socialisme (Godard, France/Switzerland)
A Mediterranean cruise is the jumping off point for the latest edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s global newspaper. This outraged many at Cannes (and predictably found passionate admirers among the Godard faithful) where it was shown with “Navajo English” subtitles.

12. Hereafter (Eastwood, USA)
After Invictus, director Clint Eastwood re-teams with Matt Damon for a European-shot supernatural thriller.

11. On Tour (Amalric, France)
Mathieu Amalric, a distinctive actor who specializes in comically unhinged characters, directs and stars as the manager of a traveling burlesque show. This has been compared to the work of John Cassavetes and indeed it sounds a lot like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. A surprise Best Director winner at Cannes.

10. Hahaha (Hong, South Korea)
School of the Art Institute grad Hong Sang-Soo is one of the most prominent writer-directors of the S. Korean New Wave. His latest comedy won the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar and had critics grumbling that it belonged in the main competition.

9. Road to Nowhere (Hellman, USA)
Described as a “romantic noir,” this new film from Monte Hellman (director of the great Two-Lane Blacktop) is also apparently a movie-within-a-movie that he shot digitally with a newfangled still-camera. Hellman, returning after a too-long absence, has compared it to Last Year at Marienbad.

8. The Strange Case of Angelica (de Oliveira, Portugal)
This turning up is almost a certainty as the CIFF has shown 101 year old(!) Portugese master Manoel de Oliveira a lot of love in recent years, regularly screening his films since the late nineties. The Strange Case of Angelica premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes where it found many admirers. Adding to the interest is the fact that it’s Oliveira’s first time working with CGI.

7. Tree of Life (Malick, USA)
Brad Pitt and Sean Penn play father and son (though probably don’t share screen time) in a drama set in both the 1950s and the present day. If the last couple films by the reclusive, secretive Terrence Malick are anything to go by, this will probably open in New York and L.A. on Christmas Day, then have its Chicago premiere in early 2011.

6. Carlos (Assayas, France)
A five and a half hour epic period piece about the true exploits of left-wing celebrity/terrorist “Carlos the Jackal,” this would seem to be an abrupt about-face from Olivier Assayas’ last film, the sublime family drama Summer Hours. Originally made for French television, Carlos screened out of competition at Cannes where some critics claimed it was the electrifying highlight of the entire festival. Could conceivably play CIFF in one, two or three parts.

5. The Grandmasters (Wong, Hong Kong)
Wong Kar-Wai’s return to filmmaking in Hong Kong after taking a stab at an American indie (2007′s minor My Blueberry Nights) is a biopic of Bruce Lee’s kung-fu teacher, Ip Man. The all-star cast is headed by Wong’s favorite leading man, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who has said this will be a “real kung-fu film” with “many action scenes.” This is an intriguing prospect from the most romantic filmmaker in the world.

4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong, Thailand)
The latest from another SAIC alumnus, Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, who specializes in experimental/narrative hybrids. Joe made an auspicious debut with Mysterious Obect at Noon in 2000 and has only gone from strength to strength with each subsequent feature. Uncle Boonmee, a work of magical realism about the deathbed visions of the titular character, wowed ‘em at Cannes where it converted previous skeptics and walked off with the Palm d’Or.

3. The Social Network (Fincher, USA)
Or “Facebook: The Movie.” If anyone can make a great film about the founding of a website, it’s David Fincher whose pioneering work with digital cinema in Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button established him as a Hollywood innovator and maverick in the tradition of F.W. Murnau, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick.

2. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, France/Italy)
More often than not, when a beloved auteur leaves his native country to make a film in International Co-production-land, the results are muddled and unsatisfying. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the shot-in-Italy, Juliette Binoche-starring Certified Copy, which has been hailed as a return to form of sorts for Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami. (He’s working in 35mm again after having spent most of the past decade experimenting with digital video.) This nabbed Binoche a Best Actress award at Cannes and was favorably compared in some quarters to Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece Viaggio in Italia.

1. The Assassin (Hou, Taiwan)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s long rumored martial arts film starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen. This is probably a pipe dream as news of the project was first announced years ago but reports of the film actually going into production have never materialized. Still, one must dream.

6 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Film Festivals, Other Lists

July 24, 2010

Top 100 Films of the Decade (2000-2009)

By michaelgloversmith

This list represents the culmination of a decade’s worth of avid movie watching – and at least a full year of watching and re-watching hundreds of movies specifically for the purpose of making this list. (Hey, I can only do it once every ten years!) In compiling the list, I purposely sought out films from countries whose cinematic output I was unfamiliar with (Hello Romania and Turkey!) and I tried to make the final list as diverse as possible in terms of the directors and genres represented. However, in the end, personal taste prevailed over any sense of including anything merely because I felt obligated to put it there; I know a lot of intelligent people who think highly of recent films by the Coen Brothers, Lars Von Trier, Wes Anderson, Michael Haneke, etc. but ultimately I had to be honest about only including movies I personally love.

The next time you’re stumped at the video store, perhaps this folly will come in handy.

Countdown of the Top 25 (Preferential Order):

25. Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinema (Godard, Switzerland/France, 2004)

Jean-Luc Godard’s hour and a half distillation of his marathon video opus Histoire(s) du cinema, where the history of cinema and 20th century world history collide. Whatever Godard goes on to accomplish, this will likely remain his final testament.

24. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Scorsese, USA, 2005)

My favorite Martin Scorsese picture of the decade wasn’t a theatrical release but this engrossing made-for-T.V. documentary about Bob Dylan’s early career. As one might expect, this is bolstered by terrific concert footage but also contextualized by the myriad social and historical changes undergone by America from the end of WWII to the beginning of the Vietnam war. An epic achievement.

23. Moolaade (Sembene, Senegal, 2004)

An improbably warm, colorful and very humane comedy about a horrific subject: female genital mutilation in West Africa. I was lucky enough to see this at the Chicago International Film Festival with the director, the late, great Ousmane Sembene, present.

22. Failan (Song, S. Korea, 2001)

Judge Smith pronounces this Korean melodrama guilty! Guilty of making a grown man cry all three times he saw it, that is. Career best performances by actors Choi Min-sik and Cecilia Cheung in a unique love story about lovers who never actually meet.

21. Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro, Spain, 2006)

Guillermo del Toro’s magical-realist film about a girl’s attempt to deal with the unfathomable horrors of war by creating an elaborate fairy tale mythology. The great Mexican director’s departure from The Hobbit is cause for bitter regret.

20. There Will Be Blood (Anderson, USA, 2007)

Sly, enigmatic fable about religion vs. big business in an America still young and wild. Brilliant, innovative orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood, and Daniel Day-Lewis, as megalomaniacal, misanthropic oilman Daniel Plainview, gives one of the great screen performances of modern times.

19. Time Out (Cantet, France, 2001)

A French businessman is fired from his job. Rather than tell his family, he continues to leave home every morning as if going to work and eventually drifts into a life of crime. A scary, heartbreaking drama and a vital movie for our time.

18. A History of Violence (Cronenberg, USA/Canada, 2005)

David Cronenberg posits violence as a kind of latent virus in this art film masquerading as a thriller. Or is it a thriller masquerading as an art film? In any case, that’s how I like ‘em.

17. Black Book (Verhoeven , Holland/Germany, 2006)

Paul Verhoeven’s masterful return to filmmaking in his native Holland mimics the form of an old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama in order to pose complex, troubling moral questions about WWII and the Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation. In other words, the antithesis of Schindler’s List.

16. Mad Detective (To, Hong Kong, 2007)

A mentally unstable ex-cop with the supernatural ability to see people’s “inner personalities” comes out of retirement to solve a missing persons case in this sad, funny, bat-shit crazy neo-noir from Johnnie To, the world’s greatest living genre filmmaker. This deserves to be much more well-known in the West.

15. Avalon (Oshii, Poland/Japan, 2001)

Mind-blowing, philosophical sci-fi about a futuristic Poland where everyone is addicted to a virtual reality video game. My rating here refers only to the original version of this film (available as a region-free DVD or Blu-Ray import), and not the official North American Miramax release, which is ruined by Neil Gaiman’s wildly inaccurate “dub-titles.”

14. Offside (Panahi, Iran, 2006)

Jafar Panahi’s timely comedy follows the misadventures of several young women who disguise themselves as men and attempt to sneak into Tehran’s Azadi stadium to see Iran’s national soccer team play a World Cup qualifying match (women have been prohibited from attending men’s sporting events since the Islamic revolution). Major portions of the film were shot “live,” documentary-style as the match was being played, which audaciously leaves elements of the film’s plot (such as the outcome of the match) up to chance. When the girls are arrested and corralled into a holding area outside of the stadium walls, the central location ultimately becomes a microcosm of both Iran and the entire world. A film overflowing with compassion yet ruthlessly unsentimental, this is political filmmaking at its finest.

13. The Intruder (Denis, France, 2004)

A retiree in need of a heart transplant (Michel Subor) takes emotional stock of his life and attempts to reconnect with his estranged son (Gregoire Colin) in this mysterious, elliptical drama. It is unclear how many of the scenes are occurring in reality and how many take place only in the protagonist’s mind. These narrative shards are served up by director Claire Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard as tactile, painterly images and accompanied by a terrific, minimalist electric guitar score. The end result is an unforgettably sensual experience.

12. Letters from Iwo Jima (Eastwood, USA/Japan, 2006)

The peak of Clint Eastwood’s best decade as a film director is the second part of his Battle of Iwo Jima diptych. Like all true anti-war movies, this spare, haunting, elegiac film is told from the “losing” side.

11. Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2006)

A fascinating experimental/narrative hybrid in which the story of two doctors meeting and falling in love is told twice, each time in a different location. My favorite digression (among many) in this sweet, gentle, humane film is a conversation between an ex-DJ turned Buddhist monk and a dentist who moonlights as a pop singer.

10. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, USA/Canada, 2007)

A visionary re-imagining of the last year of the famous outlaw’s life, this funny, strange, beautiful and sad film boasts cinematography as masterful as you’ll find anywhere and many incredible performances by a large ensemble cast. Remains enthralling for its near 3 hour running time even after many viewings.

9. In Vanda’s Room (Costa, Portugal, 2000)

A documentary/narrative hybrid about junkies living in the slums of Lisbon that vaulted director Pedro Costa to the front ranks of the world’s greatest contemporary filmmakers. Epic long takes of real-life sisters Vanda and Zita Duarte smoking heroin, coughing and talking about nothing are juxtaposed with shots of their neighborhood being systematically demolished. Costa knows that, in filmmaking terms, adding up a bunch of shots of “nothing” frequently equals “something” – in this case a powerful statement about the disenfranchisement of an entire class of people.

8. Memories of Murder (Bong, S. Korea, 2003)

A gripping, superior police procedural about the investigation into S. Korea’s first known serial murders. Director Bong Joon-ho, shining light of the South Korean New Wave, also nicely sketches the 1980s small-town milieu as a portrait of life under military dictatorship.

7. The Headless Woman (Martel, Argentina, 2008)

Shades of Hitchcock and Antonioni abound as a woman becomes increasingly disassociated from reality after participating in what may or may not have been a hit and run accident. I can’t recall the last time I saw a film in which every composition, cut and sound effect seemed so precisely and exquisitely calibrated to impart psychological meaning.

6. Before Sunset (Linklater, USA/France, 2004)

Richard Linklater’s exquisite talk fest, a gentle real-time comedy reuniting Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy from his earlier Before Sunrise, proves that sometimes the sequel can be better than the original. “Baby, you are going to miss that plane.”

5. Yi Yi (Yang, Taiwan, 2000)

Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral, this riveting family comedy/drama set in contemporary Taipei is simultaneously as epic and as intimate as the best 19th century Russian novels. The last film by the great writer/director Edward Yang.

4. Mulholland Drive (Lynch, USA, 2001)

David Lynch’s masterpiece, an endlessly watchable, open-ended narrative puzzle about an aspiring Hollywood actress trying to help an amnesiac unlock the mystery of her identity. This is one of the great “let’s theorize endlessly about what it all means over coffee” movies.

3. In the Mood for Love (Wong, Hong Kong, 2000)

Next-door neighbors in a tiny apartment building, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung are drawn ever closer together after suspecting their frequently absent spouses may be having an affair. Wong Kar-Wai’s fondness for patterns of repetition and variation pays dividends in this subtle, restrained, impeccably designed film. A Brief Encounter for our time and a film so beautiful it hurts!

2. Zodiac (Fincher, USA, 2007)

A brooding obsession with the passage of time and the nature of obsession itself are the hallmarks of this bold foray into the realm of digital cinema, a masterful, epic film about a newspaper cartoonist’s personal investigation of a series of unsolved murders. Deserves to be ranked alongside Sunrise, Citizen Kane, Vertigo and The Searchers as one of the all-time great American films.

1. Three Times (Hou, Taiwan, 2005)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s profound meditation on love, cinema and twentieth century Taiwanese history with Shu Qi and Chang Chen playing lovers in three different stories set in three different eras. Lyrical, beautiful and all-around perfect.

First Runners-Up (Alphabetical by Director’s Family Name):

Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2002)

Vincere (Marco Bellochio, Italy, 2009)

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, USA/Jordan, 2008)

Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2002)

Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, S. Korea, 2007)

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2006)

I’m Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, France/Portugal, 2001)

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008)

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2008)

Lady Chatterley (Extended European Edition) (Pascale Ferran, France, 2006)

Mary (Abel Ferrara, Italy/USA, 2005)

Two Lovers (Gray, USA, 2008)

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, S. Korea, 2006)

The Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsiao-Hsien Hou, France/Taiwan, 2007)

Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2002)

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2008)

INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, USA, 2006)

The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2004)

Ichi the Killer (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2001)

Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, S. Korea, 2003)

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Poromboiu, Romania, 2009)

Wild Grass (Resnais, France, 2009)

Everlasting Moments (Troell, Sweden, 2008)

Goodbye Dragon Inn (Ming-Liang Tsai, Taiwan, 2003)

2046 (Kar-Wai Wong, Hong Kong, 2004)

2nd Runners-Up (Alphabetical by Director’s Family Name):

Everyone Else (Maren Ade, Germany/Italy, 2009)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008)

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 2002)

Bright Star (Jane Campion, UK/Australia, 2009)

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada, 2007)

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, UK/USA, 2006)

The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, Australia, 2002)

Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2004)

The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2003)

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA, 2002)

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, USA, 2005)

Save the Green Planet (Joon-hwan Jang, S. Korea, 2003)

Be With Me (Eric Khoo, Singapore, 2005)

Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2008)

School of Rock (Richard Linklater, USA, 2003)

This is England (Shane Meadows, England, 2006)

Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem, Spain, 2001)

The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, Iran, 2001)

The Circle (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2000)

JSA: Joint Security Area (Chan-wook Park, S. Korea, 2000)

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, Poland/France, 2002)

Last Life in the Universe (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Thailand, 2003)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, USA/Germany, 2009)

Quitting (Yang Zhang, China, 2001)

The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2003)

3rd Runners-Up Group (Alphabetical by Director’s Family Name):

20 Fingers (Mania Akbari, Iran, 2004)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, USA/Spain, 2005)

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, USA, 2003)

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France, 2008)

Once (John Carney, Ireland, 2007)

Durian Durian (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong, 2000)

Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, Iran/Iraq, 2004)

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA, 2002)

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany, 2006)

The Proposition (John Hillcoat, Australia, 2005)

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany, 2004)

Chunhyang (Kwon-taek Im, S. Korea, 2000)

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (Shohei Imamura, Japan, 2001)

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, New Zealand/USA, 2001-2003)

The World (Zhangke Jia, China, 2004)

Three Iron (Ki-Duk Kim, S. Korea, 2004)

Happy Go Lucky (Mike Leigh, England, 2008)

The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2003)

Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran/Afghanistan, 2001)

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mali, 2006)

Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2002)

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, USA, 2008)

Werckmeister Hamonies (Bela Tarr, Hungary, 2000)

The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, France, 2000)

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, England, 2004)

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in All Best of Lists, Best Films of the 2000s, Film Reviews

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