Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Cinema of the New Millennium: Top 10

by Bob Clark

10) Mongol (Bodrov) 2007

With the advent of digital production and distribution, the past decade has seen the world grow a hell of a lot flatter when it comes to the viewing audience of international cinema. That’s allowed many more sophisticated efforts from around the world reach American shores, but occasionally overlooked are the more mainstream exercises of blockbuster style entertainment from abroad, not quite fitting into either the art-house or multiplex niches necessary to find true life in the States. One such film was Sergei Bodrov’s telling of the rise of the legendary Ghengis Khan, a movie that offers a throwback to old-fashioned David Lean-sized epics that are rarely found invoked outside of sci-fi or fantasy cinema nowadays. Bodrov’s filmmaking instincts are sharp, strong and focused—while only composing the early years of young Temujin’s life, from the arrangement of his marriage as a child to the bloody lengths he’s forced to undertake over the years to win her back from conflict after conflict of old family feuds and tribal division, there’s a fantastic terrific sweep from start to finish that manages not only to do an excellent job of regailing martial conquests and genuine romance, but also in condensing the causes and motivations of the warrior’s drive to take power and unite a whole continent of peoples under one rule. With terrific action and magnificent camerawork throughout, both during battle scenes staged at a scale that even Oliver Stone couldn’t manage well in Alexander and during intimate scenes of love, friendship and betrayal, Bodrov’s film is one that deserves to rise to its own position as a classic piece of historical drama. I cannot wait for the sequels.

9) Waking Life (Linklater) 2001

For many, this exercise in digitally-enhanced rotoscope-animation is a weak entry in Linklater’s filmography, a self-admitted “kitchen sink” movie which collects a lot of bits and pieces he’d written over the years, all shoehorned into the seemingly thin frame-tale of a wandering dreamer (Wiley Wiggins) who just can’t seem to wake up. But both in terms of the visual power of its technical craft and the thematic effect of its drifting narrative, Waking Life is, in my opinion, the most powerful film Linklater has been responsible for since Slacker and a great piece of cinematic lyricism in its own right. The comparison with his famed 1990 film is an apt one, as at times this film almost seems to be a kind of animated sequel-in-spirit to the previous effort—both find themselves concerned with Austin’s countercultural scene of various pontificating miscreants, telling what might best be described as a collection of short-stories. The crucial difference, in the end, is not the splendid work that Bob Sabiston and his team of animators do with Linklater’s video footage, giving each sequence a unique style of its own while still finding ways to blend them together rather seamlessly. Instead, it is the presence of Wiggins’ central character, who moves from place to place and person to person, seldom involving himself any more than a passive observer as he bears witness to philosophical discussions, political rants and casual acts of self-destruction. Thanks to Sabiston’s work, the film glides with a genuinely dreamlike quality from episode to episode, and even manages to impart some interesting tidbits about the nature of dreams, imagination and reality along the way. By far his most experimental effort of the decade, Waking Life is my favorite of all Linklater’s films, a work I find as inspirational as Slacker while at times nearly as seductive and heartwarming as Before Sunrise.

8) Inland Empire (Lynch) 2006

To be quite honest, I still don’t really know exactly how I feel about this movie. To say that I remain ambivalent about Inland Empire is to speak a massive understatement. Divorced from many of the qualities that have kept his particular brand of cinematic surrealism alive since the midnight-movie classic Eraserhead, David Lynch at times appears to be floundering in the excess of his own creative instincts, broken free of all kinds of narrative and aesthetic entanglements by the newfound artistic liberty of digital-video production. Gone is the strong disciplined storytelling that made works like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive accessible to mainstream audiences without sacrificing his artistic principles; now all we have is a string of loosely connected scenes and events largely written, shot and performed in an improvisatory manner, one incident leading to another in a kind of cinematic stream-of-consciousness. Also gone is the attention to conventional aesthetic sensibilities that helped ground his most unusual films even at their most bizarre; in retreating from the more traditional and expensive celluloid, Lynch indulges in a far more unrestrained mis-en-scene that removes nearly all traces of sure, stable footing any audience has before the rug is pulled out from under them. As such, one might expect such a sustained experience of truly experimental filmmaking might fail to hit its mark, and oftentimes that’s exactly how I feel about it. But no matter how much I decry the failings of this picture, it has become the Lynch film that I’ve watched more times than any other, and nearly every occasion that I watch it I find something new to be impressed by. Laura Dern deserves boat-loads of credit for delivering a career-high of a performance that manages to carry the film even at its most unchained moments. And even as I look back on the beautifully photographed films of his past, I can’t help but admit that in working with video, Lynch has delivered some of the most singularly disturbing images I’ve ever seen put to any definition of film. A nightmarish portrait of dreams in decay, Inland Empire is perhaps the most essential thing its director has made since Agent Cooper first stepped into the Red Room, even if it isn’t necessarily the most enjoyable.

7) Angels in America (Nichols) 2003

Considered by many to be the most important theatrical event of the latter half of the 20th century, Tony Kushner’s epic two-part Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes didn’t exactly seem to be the most cinematic of plays, but that didn’t stop filmmakers from trying to adapt it anyway. With a running time of over six-hours altogether and with a little over half a dozen cast members playing well over a dozen roles and composed of many scenes that ran simultaneously with one another, it stood as challenging fare for any director to mount even before one considered the themes of AIDS, politics, gay life and religious fervor in Reagan-era New York City. Robert Altman almost went ahead with a version in the mid-90’s that would’ve shortened the play’s content to three-hours and kept an eye for the director’s usual assortment of ensemble-repertoire. Thankfully, that didn’t go through, and instead it was given Mike Nichols, a man experienced with theater just as much as he is with cinema, and decided to invest his HBO production of Kushner’s play with equal attention for what works best in both mediums. Kept intact is the conceit that cast-members play multiple roles—Meryl Streep in particular plays an elderly Rabbi, a strict Mormon mother and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Modified is the simultaneity of certain scenes, replaced with both discrete intercutting and a special-effects enhanced camera that rush us from the Plaza Hotel to the Brambles in under ten-seconds. Cinematically it’s Nichols’ most impressive feat since the iconic shots and poses of The Graduate, and while occasionally he leans a little heavily on homages to Cocteau and Fassbinder, his visualization of the divine is one of the most naturalistic and strangely rational ones put on film since Wings of Desire, and thanks to Kushner’s deft script, a much funnier one at that. While it’s still probably better experienced on-stage, Angels in America works incredibly well as a piece of cinema, and without a doubt contains Al Pacino’s best performance ever since he fell into his yelling-phase.

6) Paprika (Kon) 2006

Over the past few years, Satoshi Kon has developed as one of the most important new voices in anime. As a screenwriter on the Magnetic Rose portion of Memories, he proved a capable collaborator with overseer Katsuhiro Otomo and segment director Koji Morimoto. Following that stint, he blossomed as a director of inventive animated fare with Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, drawing comparisons to David Lynch and Phillip K. Dick for his reality-bending stories and visuals. After the John Ford-inspired Tokyo Grandfathers, he returned to that same dream-oriented storytelling with the series Paranoia Agent, and more significantly, with the feature-film Paprika, which represents his strongest and most accessible efforts at anime-experimentation to date. Following a psychologist whose double-life as a detective of the mind begins to blur as she investigates the mystery of a stolen device which allows people to inhabit other peoples’ dreams, Kon indulges in some of the most freewheeling visual spectacles ever put to screen, mixing genres, iconography and metaphors as though in a lucid dream-state. Part of the reason he’s able to get away with such abundant image-overload is the way in which every handdrawn moment is kept crisp and detailed enough to impress themselves upon the eye, yet just distanced enough from resemblance to reality for it to get away with moments’-notice transformations. While it’s nowhere near as accessible with mainstream Western audiences as the work of Miyazaki or other masters of the medium, Paprika and Kon’s body of work as a whole is an essential addition to the anime experience, and one that all serious followers of film should keep an open mind to.

5) Casino Royale (Campbell) 2006

The miracle of the decade. After Martin Campbell brought the Bond series up do date in the post-Cold War climate of the 90’s, he went off by himself to pursue a career of directing escapist entertainment apart from the venerable franchise with results both high (the modern Zorro films) and low (Vertical Limit). Meanwhile, EON Productions let the Bond series languish in a series of directors who either didn’t match Campbell’s dramatic range (Tomorrow Never Dies’ Roger Spotiswode) or nuance with adventure filmmaking (The World Is Not Enough’s Michael Apted). Even when they had finally found a director whose track-record demonstrated an experienced, inventive hand with both character development and action set-pieces in Lee Tamahouri, they were unable to pair him with anything even remotely resembling an intelligent script for Die Another Day. Thus, the reign of Pierce Brosnan as 007 closed with less than spectacular results, which was especially sad seeing how talented he was in the role when his gifts were being put to good use—besides GoldenEye, the best roles the actor had in the 90’s were in The Thomas Crown Affair and Tailor of Panama, far away from the reach of the Broccoli estate. However, there was a bit of splendid serendipity following Brosnan’s departure from the role, as EON Productions finally gained the rights to adapt Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, the first novel to feature James Bond, and in their new film, the British agent’s first adventure after gaining Double-O status. Besides rebooting the franchise, a high-minded rewrite of the script from Paul Haggis helped bring a much needed dose of intelligence to the mix, as did a solid cast headlined by Daniel Craig, bringing a Steve McQueen-style mix of casual cool and heedless brutality back to the “blunt instrument” of Bond. But best of all, Martin Campbell’s return to the director’s chair with virtuoso set-pieces of high-wire action and slow-burning suspense allowed this entry to become not just a great entry of the Bond franchise, but a modern classic of the cinema in general. Just how good is it? It’s better than Goldfinger, and that’s saying something.

4) Che (Soderbergh) 2008

Back when actor Benicio del Toro and producer Laura Bickford first considered collaborating on a bio-pic of communist revolutionary Che Guevara, director Terrence Malick was originally in line to pen a screenplay and helm the feature himself. Thank God he didn’t, because in his stead, Steven Soderbergh delivered a monumental double-feature that boldly condenses the essential episodes from Guevara’s career as guerilla soldier into cinematic vocabulary that is at once steadfastly traditional and defiantly experimental. From the jungle-warfare of the revolution, to the diplomatic drama of the United Nations, and finally to the Bolivian campaign where his life would come to an end, Guevara’s story is told with a passionate attention to detail, yet still retains an objective stance that resists the easy option of either glorifying him as a heroic rebel or demonizing him as a murderous thug. Del Toro’s performance is captivating, as are the supporting turns from the various members of the cast throughout, but at the end of the day the film remains Soderbergh’s throughout, especially as he indulges in some of the biggest cinematic risk-taking of his career. Besides his defiantly on-the-fence portrayal of one of the world’s most controversial figures, his aesthetic choices are at once provocative and often highly original. Throughout the first half of the picture, Soderbergh films everything in an expansive 2.35:1, capturing every detail of the Cuban jungle and city battlefields with an eye for dramatic composition that would feel at home in a David Lean epic. Everything changes, however, in the second part, where he shrinks the screen down to a more intimate, and thoroughly less visually impressive 1.85:1, as he seeks to better express the doomed enterprise of Che’s Bolivian excursion with a less romantic aspect-ratio than the adventurous stretch of CinemaScope. While this and other such gambits don’t always pay off, they exhibit Soderbergh’s firm grip on both the ambitious subject-matter and attention to craft, a combination at once masterful yet not yet set in its ways. One of the most impressive uses of digital-video filmmaking with the RED camera, Che is an experience that all students of cinema and history owe themselves to sit through.

3) Waltz with Bashir (Folman) 2008

I don’t even know where to begin in attempting to describe how much I admire this movie. Ari Folman’s blistering look at Israel’s role in the invasion of Lebanon and a slaughter of Muslim civilians by Christian extremists is a lot of things—a hybrid autobiography and pseudo-documentary in the vein of Morretti’s comedic Caro Diario; an examination of the military mentality of a country born from the ashes of one of the worst war crimes ever committed; a psychological travelogue of a mental landscape which probes the unreliability of memory, the import of dreams and the effect that any great trauma can have on the mind; and perhaps most tellingly, a cartoon. In filtering his meta-cinematic fiction through the Flash-assisted lens of Waking Life-style animation, Folman provides the perfect aesthetic with which to express his hazy, disturbing and highly personalized recollections of his service in the Israeli army, eschewing the implicit reality of staged live-action recreations with the obvious fiction of drawn imagery which barely even appears to be based too heavily on rotoscoped footage. Countless features of this decade have mixed reality with the digital, inventing the landscapes and populations of entire planets wholly out of pixels on a computer-screen, but Folman and his team of artists are able to do something even more impressive, and concoct a simulacra of historical events and intimate memories which represent the truth without ever attempting to assert themselves as pureblooded fact. It is a highly subjective, first-person account of events which benefits from the visual distance supplied by the stylish, but down-to-earth animated imagery, and one which provides many enlightening moments as to the nature of the mind’s instincts to retract within itself at times of dangers and the uncomfortable realities of warfare. With an unflinching ending that drops all its veils in an absolutely chilling way, Waltz With Bashir is easily the most effective and important animated film of the past ten years.

2) Revenge of the Sith (Lucas) 2005

Part of me doesn’t even want to say anything about this particular film, and simply wait until I have an opportunity to better express my feelings about it at length in essay format as I have for its predecessors. Suffice to say, however, that in this missing link of the Star Wars cycle, George Lucas provided not only one of the great works of cinematic escapism but also one of the most effective demonstrations of such entertainment as an instrument of powerful social and political commentary. This is the film where audiences and critics finally got the message of dire warning against dictatorial-powers within capitalist corruption and democratic institutions that he’d been trying to say since The Phantom Menace, and only clumsily expressed in Attack of the Clones. Perhaps being both filmed and received in a post-9/11 world in which the Patriot Act granted President Bush the kinds of emergency executive powers talked about in the films helped Lucas’ articulation of his Nixon-era story of rebel Jedi and intergalactic imperialism focus and solidify into his most potent exercise in cinematic storytelling yet, or at least it provided filmgoers with the correct context to finally understand what the story had been about all along. For once in his career seemingly all former weaknesses which have plagued his creative sensibilities seem to lift slightly, and no matter how small the improvement in certain areas (the script still feels a little tight, even with Tom Stoppard’s supposed involvement), it manages to make all the difference in lifting the tonal quality of the film to a vantage from which all can appreciate it. Performances around the board range from solidly professional to out-of-the-park career highs—Ian McDiarmid especially earns praise for his juicy turn as Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine, one of the few to realize from the start that the only way to act in a Star Wars film is to sink your teeth into whatever scenery avails itself to you on the bluescreen-set and take a bite. Most of all, however, Lucas both finds ways to thrill and move his audience with his imagery, offering up some of the most imaginative and meaningful sequences of his career, fully utilizing scope, choreography and editing in ways that best take advantage of his storied characters and worlds. To say it is the greatest work of epic mythmaking this decade had to offer is as big an understatement as it is a compliment, considering the blockbuster competition from the likes of Peter Jackson and James Cameron. With Revenge of the Sith, Lucas puts detractors to shame with something only the best sci-fi fantasists truly have —a sense of imagination that truly makes a difference.

1) American Psycho (Harron) 2000

The great novel of one decade, written at the start of the next, and finally put to screen at the dawn of ours, now in its own waning days, American Psycho represents at least three-decades’ worth of development, and stands as one of the great unsung literary and cinematic statements about the dog-eat-dog nature of the world to which yesterday, today and tomorrow belong. In adapting Bret Easton Ellis’ seminal look at the Reagan-era coke-and-dagger lifestyle of one Patrick Bateman, stock-trader by day and serial-killer by night, Mary Harron creates one of the most bewitchingly intelligent and hysterically funny pieces of sensationalist genre filmmaking and epic cinematic satire since the days of Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick. Polish can be found both on and beneath every surface on display throughout the film, both visually and thematically—Tarantino’s early cinematographer Andrzej Sekula ably articulates the Harron’s cold-gaze affect throughout the film with a cinematic effect that both objectively observes and subjectively glorifies the savage acts of bloody violence and absurdist sexual games throughout the picture. Harron and co-writer Guinivere Turner cut down and pare as much of book’s graphic vision as is necessary in bringing the story and its most essential components to the screen, transforming Ellis’ mostly disturbing, obsessively detailed accounts of crimes against humanity and fashion alike into a cleanly neatened and streamlined progression of darkly comic encounters, exchanges and alibis that draw as much laughter as they do edge-of-your-seat suspense and freshly curdled blood. Finally, Christian Bale shines in his star-making turn as Bateman himself, whose delivery of Ellis’ words brings a delightful sense of ironic glee to every deadpan pop-cultural ode and split-second turn into misanthropic introspection. Whether or not his murderous rampages are indeed figments of his tragically repressed imagination or merely the casually excused pastime of a white-collar blue-blood at the top of the economic food-chain, Bale’s performance of Bateman is easily the best of a career that’s seen fit to launch itself into one heroic caper after another, and Harron’s distillation of his and every other creative department’s contributions to the film marks one of the most impressive feats any director has managed to assemble for such a controversial work. A personal favorite of the highest order, American Psycho is one of the funniest, smartest and most exciting cinematic efforts I’ve ever had the pleasure to see up on the big screen, and the sooner it gains the recognition it deserves as an unqualified modern classic, the better.