Friday, December 25, 2009

Cinema of the New Millennium

by Bob Clark

100) Pitch Black (Twohy) 2000

A low-budget thriller of a mixed-bag spaceship’s crash landing on a darkened planet and the survivors’ efforts to band together and stay alive in the face of vicious nocturnal creatures, this was a film that began the new decade with style and craft, thanks in no small part to David Twohy, who had already made strides as the lead screenwriter of film version of The Fugitive and his own first effort as director, the effective indie sci-fi flick The Arrival. With an ensemble rogue’s gallery of characters as colorful as his alternately sunbleached and nightvision planetscapes, Twohy pulled off a strong piece of aggressive and inventive genre entertainment, bringing Vin Diesel to attention as an anti-hero convict who leads the way. Both he and Twohy managed to spoil all their good fortune with the large-scale flop of The Chronicles of Riddick, but even that space-opera sequel was worthwhile in its unapologetically pulpy, B-movie kind of way. The difference between that and Pitch Black, however, is that in the case of the former there was nothing which required an apology in the first place

99) Watchmen (Snyder) 2009

How necessary is a film adaptation of a graphic-novel, that other most inherently visual medium of creative expression, when the director is just going to go and copy every image from the source material as though it were his storyboards? After bringing Frank Miller’s 300 to life in a way that followed suit with Robert Rodriguez’s shot-for-panel recreation of Sin City, Zack Snyder turned his reenactment film-instincts to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, perhaps the most seminally celebrated comics tome and a work that directors as talented as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Peter Greengrass had sworn off as unfilmable. As Snyder’s end-results turned out somewhat stiffly performed and even more stiffly shot in its slavish, fanboy-ish dedication to the original work, it’s still open to debate just how much of those efforts paid off in fashioning a film worthy of the three-hours worth of time it runs even in its shortest edits. But no matter what its faults may be in the transition from page to screen, it at least has managed to bring Moore and Gibbons’ radical, intellectually demanding work to mass audiences without being watered down or compromised. There were plenty of better comic-book movies throughout the decade, but few had the balls of this one-- figuratively and literally.

98) Adaptation (Jonze) 2002

Following their singularly out-of-left-field success with the post-modern comedy Being John Malkovich, director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman continued their collaboration in the cinema-of-the-absurd with this twisted take on the bildungsroman. Following the screenwriter’s troubled attempt to craft a script based on Susan Orlean’s decidedly uncinematic The Orchid Thief, Jonze and Kaufman jump through several looking glasses with a cast which includes Meryl Streep as Orlean and Nicholas Cage as Kaufman and a fictional twin-brother. Gleefully pulling aside the myriad veils obscuring the formula behind screenwriting and storytelling itself as institutions, their resulting film manages to entertain and stimulate in equal amounts, even when all the twists of plot and aschewed convention don’t always tie together as neatly as they did in their previous work together.

97) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg) 2008

Let’s face it, there was no earthly reason that this film had to be made in the first place. George Lucas had finished his Star Wars saga, a decades-spanning feat of filmmaking as epic as its own mythic undertones, and Steven Spielberg had long since established himself as that rarest breed of directors who carry both popular enthusiasm and critical acclaim even in his most commercial of blockbuster enterprises. With personal projects of theirs like the long-planned Tuskegee Airmen-pic Red Tails and an almost-as-long promised Lincoln movie waiting to be begun, was there any real need to dust off the old whip and fedora, especially when stalwart star Harrison Ford was already hip-deep in his sixties? No, but if they hadn’t, we never would have seen some of the most singularly unusual high-concept filmmaking of the decade. By placing the Nazi-fighting archeologist in the literally alien scenario of investigating evidence of extra-terrestrial life while matching wits and fists with Soviet troops in the hey-days of the Red Scare, Lucas and Spielberg go out of their way to make this fourth entry in the series the most unusual of the series. With set-pieces at Area 51, a nuclear-bomb test town and a climax in the ruins of a centuries-old UFO, Crystal Skull goes to great lengths to make up for its creaky storytelling and forced sentimentalism. At the end of the day it was probably all for naught, but showmanship of this scale and imagination deserves credit, at the very least, for boldly striving to surprise audiences as much as entertaining them.

96) My Mother's Smile (Bellochio) 2002

The life-story of a saint has been a popular subject for filmmakers ever since the dawn of cinema. From Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Rosselini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis, there have been plenty of works by deeply spiritual directors seeking to celebrate both man and God by showcasing the story of how one of the former can dedicate their life to the service of the latter. But how many films ever examine the path to sainthood from the other, more political and altogether more questionable side of the equation, as figures both lay and of the cloth debate the merits of an individual after their death? Bellochio’s film, at once spare in its style and gusty in its premise, follows a contemporary Italian atheist whose mother has been nominated for sainthood, putting him at odds with family members seeking her canonization for political benefits and his own memories of childhood repression. While at times a little too subtle and understated for its ambitious narrative to really take hold, it remains a worthwhile, provocative effort.

95) Avatar (Cameron) 2009

No, it doesn’t change the game nearly as much as everyone says it does. Yes, the story does boil down to some of the most derivative work of its director’s career (and considering the hot water he got into thanks to borrowing from Harlan Ellison, that’s saying something) and at times it resembles a cross between Ridley Scott’s unicorn-laden misfire Legend and John Boorman’s sublimely ridiculous Zardoz. But at the end of the day, James Cameron’s much talked-about Avatar represents something more than just empty comparisons to Dune, Dances With Wolves and the Smurfs, and against all odds becomes one of the most daring and imaginative space-operas since Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. While the Weta-driven motion-capture technology is impressive, drawing genuinely affecting performances from Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington amidst all the touchy-feely glow-in-the-dark splendor, perhaps the biggest draw and most significant innovation of this enterprise is the realization of a truly noteworthy 3D filmmaking experience. Despite the fact that it’s not quite the total-immersion wonderland it aims to be, Cameron deserves credit for the delicate act of compositing his shots and sequence not as much through his use of the frame (which is pedestrian) but instead through the density of various layer-elements throughout the film. As a shot across the bow of old-fashioned cinema, it’s a great breath of fresh digitally enhanced air. Now all we have to do is get a real director’s director behind one of these stereoscopic cameras, and maybe we can get down to business.

94) G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Sommers) 2009

After the success of Michael Bay’s creatively bankrupt yet commercially explosive Transformers, it was only a matter of time before Hasbro signed a deal to put their other big toy-licenses up for treatments on the big-screen, and expectations couldn’t have been lower. As such, Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe comes off as the biggest surprise of the season for any number of reasons, not the least of which being its director’s track-record, newly tarnished by the box-office and critical failure of the clueless Universal monster-mash Van Helsing. But by following the lead of Vietnam vet Larry Hama’s comic-book series more than the line of action-figures or its cheesy Saturday morning cartoon, Sommers and his diverse team of actors do a fine job of creating an adventure with all the action and spectacle of a Roger Moore-era Bond flick with nowhere near as much tongue-in-cheek nonsense. It should never be mistaken for great cinematic art, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being considered among the decade’s better films, especially as it stands firm upon the groundroots of solid, coherent mis-en-scene, rather than the current fad of shaky-cam action-adventures like Peter Greengrass’ Bourne entries or J.J. Abram’s next-to-incoherent Star Trek. Plus, it has ninjas!

93) The Box (Kelly) 2009

Richard Kelly established himself as a surrealist of the same suburban melodrama-ilk of David Lynch and gained a devoted, if marginal following with his 2001 cult favorite Donnie Darko. He then proceeded to throw away nearly all his creative goodwill with the bewildering and unwelcome sci-fi pretentions of Southland Tales, an alternate-history of a totalitarian America struck even harder by global terrorism populated by spies and porn-stars. Much stronger than both, however, is his recent adaptation of Richard Matheson’s short-story Button, Button, about a 70’s era Virginia couple with ties to NASA’s Voyager project who find themselves tempted with the promise of a million-dollars if choosing to press a button and thus end a stranger’s life. Even amidst a story that far exceeds its Twilight Zone limitations and winds up nearly choking on its own allusions to Sartre, the Bible and Greek mythology, there’s something about the absurdist comedy and unsettling dream-imagery throughout the film that remains utterly striking.

92) Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky) 2000

Brooklyn-born director Darren Aronofsky has covered a great deal of creative ground in the past ten years, directing projects on such far-reaching premises as the hallucinating, tortured mathematician of Pi, the three-fold quest for love and immortality of The Fountain, and the low-scale, faded glory of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. It’s surprising, then, to see how this film of Hubert Selby Jr.’s hauntingly nihilistic novel of addiction has gotten lost in the shuffle, especially considering the lengths both filmmaker and cast go to portray the dehumanized existences of dependency on drugs, both legal and otherwise. With its hip-hop inspired editing dialectics and depictions of degrading sexuality and physical consequences to substance abuse that go beyond the word “explicit”, Aronofsky’s film is a powerful, unrestrained film that needs to be seen, even if only once, and never again.

91) The Golden Compass (Weitz) 2007

Oh, to marvel at the creative remains of what might-have-been. In the wake of completing the massive critical and financial success of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, New Line Cinema found itself hard pressed to find the next big work of fantasy literature to adapt for the big-screen, capturing the attention and money of filmgoers just as the Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter and Disney’s Chronicles of Narnia were beginning to assume center-stage. In choosing to produce a film version of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, they had easily found a work worthy of comparison to the dense imaginations of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, to say nothing of J.K. Rowling’s worlds of wizardry. Furthermore, in hiring Chris Weitz, whose previous credentials included the American Pie series and the amiable Nick Hornby adaptation of About a Boy, they very likely found the right person to adapt the author’s ambitious work to the big screen with both a spirit of adventure and intelligence. Unfortunately, New Line’s good sense seemed to disappear from there on, as the studio proceeded to impose the same kinds of creative restrictions they had avoided forcing on Jackson’s three-hour epics, cutting Weitz’s film not only to curb its length for the theaters but also to severely water down Pullman’s controversial atheistic storyline, including jettisoning the book’s original shocking cliffhanger ending. As such, it’s a miracle the film managed to survive as creatively intact as it is, full of impressive performances from stars and child-actors alike, and filled with spectacle that outshines most of the brainless fodder that counts for children’s entertainment nowadays. It’s a shame we’re likely never to see the full scope of Pullman’s trilogy completed on-screen, or even the full measure of Weitz’s original director’s cut, but what’s left remains thrilling on its own, and a powerful reminder of lengths to which studio-manhandling can sabotage quality filmmaking.

90) The Aviator (Scorsese) 2004

The Aviator was a project originally begun by Michael Mann in conjunction with writer John Logan, and it’s difficult to imagine what the picture would’ve been like had he stayed. Would he have indulged in the high-definition digital video that for the better part of this decade has spawned something of a creative renaissance in him, or in keeping with the story of early movie and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, could he have stuck with traditional celluloid? No matter how visually stylish his work is, it’s impossible to conceive that he would have thought to play with color the way the film does now, starting off in the two-tone process Hughes’ era flirted with, gradually warming into more familiar Technicolor palates as the picture moves through the years. That particular gem of cinematic invention can be credited to Martin Scorsese, whose encyclopedic knowledge for classic cinema plays off well in the story of a man who hobnobbed with the likes of Howard Hawkes and Katherine Hepburn alike. There are a myriad of reasons why the film flounders too much to make the flawless impact you hope for with such a director-- the script ignores the Hughes’ uglier side of racial prejudice and covers too much time to adequately convey his mental collapse in anything but the most cursory, barely convincing manner, and while he emotes well, Leonardo DiCaprio makes for an inappropriately babyfaced Hughes as the years go by, not to mention the fact that he’s easily upstaged by Cate Blanchet as the other aforementioned Kate-- but Scorsese’s enthusiasm for the material shines in every frame and is hard to resist.

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