Friday, December 25, 2009

Cinema of the New Millennium

by Bob Clark

89) 28 Days Later (Boyle) 2002

Of all the directors to win an Academy Award in the past ten years, perhaps none have been so consistently unconventional in their filmography as Danny Boyle. Granted, when it came time for the man who brought us Trainspotting to be handed an Oscar it was for the third-world wishful-thinking of Slumdog Millionaire, marking perhaps the biggest contrast between a director’s efforts since Carol Reed took home a golden statue for Oliver. Far more indicative of his sensibilities was his 2002 zombie-themed collaboration with Alex Garland, whose novel The Beach Boyle adapted into a striking, if mostly tepid feature with Leonardo DiCaprio fresh off gaining his cult of Titanic teenyboppers. Eschewing most of the traditions of the genre which George Romero perfected in Night of the Living Dead while following closely in that picture’s nightmarish docu-verite footsteps, Boyle and Dogme ’95 cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle employ DV cameras to create a harsh, apocalyptic look for their film of an England overrun by the infected undead. A monster-movie with a keen eye for real-world drama and relevancy, 28 Days Later is as essential a part of Boyle’s career as it is in the canon of horror films.

88) Zodiac (Fincher) 2007

Back in the 90’s David Fincher mined the serial-killer genre in ways both sensationalist and thoughtful with Seven, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, but in this docu-drama following the exploits of police detectives and newspaper journalists alike haunted to obsession by the exploits of San Francisco’s so-called “Zodiac Killer”, he created something far more. Anchored by a trio of lead performances by Jake Gyllenhall, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. right before the start of his Iron Man-sparked upswing, the film covers a span of years, even decades of a city left in psychological shambles by the killer’s wake, with nothing but questionable leads and chilling doubts to bring closure to the case. Working for the first time in digital video, Fincher’s directorial eye proves equal parts restrained and resourceful. Unlike his assertive, sometimes overdeliberate visualizations in films past, here he exercises a quiet, naturalistic observational style while never neglecting to inject his own personal perspective in movements, angles and compositions that bring clarity and focus to the events unfolding without ever upstaging them. It is a film of both objective history and subjective experience, a methodology tailor-fit to the tenor of its time.

87) Manderlay (Von Trier) 2005

When Lars Von Trier began his now apparently aborted “USA Trilogy” in Dogville, focusing on the trials and tribulations of Grace, an aristocratically inclined gangster’s daughter in the slow-burn of the American landscape in the great depression, he carried a style that balanced both naturalistic action with an aggressively theatrical production, eschewing nearly all semblance of physical sets in lieu of all but empty soundstages, making suspension-of-disbelief a necessary action for audiences right from the get-go. That turned out to be a great help when the time came for his second, shorter episode, bringing back nearly all the cast members in new roles, like a small-town repertoire, save for the most widely recognized of all-- Nicole Kidman and James Caan as Grace and her criminal father. In one of the more daring acts of franchise recastings, Von Trier supplies able performers Willem Dafoe and Bryce Dallas Howard (herself the daughter of a criminal, seeing how many Oscars A Beautiful Mind stole), who each play their parts in ways almost completely opposite to their predecessors, while still delving just as deeply into the hearts of their characters. In fact, based purely on narrative and performance grounds, Manderlay may justly be called every bit the superior to Dogville-- in telling the story of Grace’s attempts to reform an outdated plantation where slavery still lives while at the same time dealing with her own almost tyrannical superiority complex, the film is bolder, leaner and a great deal funnier. But its hand-me-down aesthetic, no matter how beautiful in its minimalism and meaningful in its Brechtian agitprop, fails to develop further from the last picture, and it’s easy to imagine this as the reason why he lost interest in the series. Still, like Von Trier’s other unfinished labors in The Kingdom, it’s necessary viewing for anyone who wants more of the Great Dane’s madness; just not as essential.

86) Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Oshii) 2004

Mamoru Oshii had been working for a long time in anime before his sensational Ghost in the Shell, but it was with that 1995 adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk manga that he finally reached something approaching mainstream attention, affecting audiences and filmmakers around the world with his eyes-wide-open approach to animation. It allowed him the creative freedom to pursue the live-action Avalon, but it was only with his return both to animation and Shirow that he regained his wide acclaim in this sequel to his original effort, following 21st century detectives Batou and Togusa in their attempts to solve a mystery which involves androids, human trafficking and the final fate of their comrade Kusanagi, gone missing since the case of the Puppet Master. But that plot is largely only an excuse for Oshii to indulge in some of the most mind-bending perplexions ever seen in an otherwise straight-laced narrative-bound animated effort. As malevolent programmers and programs alike hack into the cyborg-brains of our protagonists it often becomes difficult to distinguish between reality and simulation, causing events to unfold in a manner more suited for a David Lynch or Charlie Kaufman feature than even most other such turtles-all-the-way-down cinematic trips. It’s a type of film that Oshii perhaps did better in Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, but in the hardened science-fiction context of Shirow’s manga, the director finds himself able to articulate both his freewheeling philosophical musings and CG-backed visual stream-of-conscious with far more thoughtfulness than Rumiko Takahashi’s sex-comedy. Still, one wonders what the hell is up with all the goddamn basset-hounds.

85) Children of Men (Cuaron) 2006

Alfonso Cuaron enjoyed a consistent, if intermittent stream of success throughout the decade, directing both the highly-adult drama of Y tu Mama Tambien and the family-friendly adventure of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to equal amounts acclaim and success, in their own respective pools of audiences. But it was in adapting P.D. James’ quietly post-apocalyptic fable of a world brought to its knees by pandemic infertility that he enjoyed his greatest artistic success, arguably a high-point not only for his career but also for science-fiction cinema in general. Following a perpetually shell-shocked Clive Owen as he strives to survive as best he can in a fascistically withdrawn Britain, eventually fighting to save the world’s last chance for survival in the life of a pregnant refugee girl, Cuaron employs a verite documentary style but with a great deal more logically presented pacing and event-sequencing than most of the decade’s shaky-handheld indulging features could manage. While in it leans a little heavily on films like Los Olvidados in its urban squalor and Alphaville in its contemporary-dystopian fable, it remains one of this generation’s most essential additions to the canon of cinematic vocabulary, and an exquisitely articulated cautionary tale of a biological catastrophe that remains unlikely, but all too easily imagined.

84) Saawariya (Bhansali) 2007

A beautiful film of intimate chemistry on the epic scale of movie-musical pageantry. As a Hindi retelling of Dostoyevsky’s perennially adapted White Nights, Bhansali’s tale of an “American Idol”-sounding song-and-danceman’s triangle of unrequited love isn’t exactly original. With its pop-meets-Bollywood musical numbers it represents a growing trend throughout the decade of Indian cinematic culture being steadily embraced while at the same time watered down and commoditized by Western commercialism-- indeed, at first glance the highly stylized visual production and Monty Sharma’s modern musical inflections make it more resemble Baz Lhurman’s Moulin Rouge than Lagaan. But at the same time, I’m a sucker for this flick. Ranbir Kapoor exudes an infectious, if occasionally oversaturated charisma, and a cast that includes fresh faces and veteran performers alike shines almost as brightly as Ravi Chandran’s sapphire cinematography. Altogether something special, though an acquired, exhausting taste-- as a friend of mine once put perfectly, “it’s a great film, but after it’s done you kind of never want to see the color blue again.”

83) Thirteen Days (Donaldson) 2000

Here in America, we seem to be caught in a perpetual cultural loop when it comes to John F. Kennedy. Since his historically short-lived presidency at the dawn of the 1960’s, not a decade has gone by without some kind of presentation, narrative or otherwise, of either the circumstances of his death or the events of his life. After the past decade’s obsession on the former thanks to Oliver Stone’s conspiratorially conceived JFK, it was natural that we would see a celebration of the latter in Roger Donaldson’s fly-on-the-wall look inside the White House during the real-life nail-bitten suspense of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reuniting with No Way Out star Kevin Costner (who seems to have as much of an obsession with Kennedy as he does in playing roles for which he has at best a tone-deaf ear for regional accents), Donaldson shoots in a style that employs enough restraint to avoid glamorizing Washington in the same way that Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing did on television, while at the same time refusing to resist all temptations to wax mythic of Camelot, mixing color and black-and-white with the same light-handed flexibility that he casts his key characters, with actors who sometimes resemble their parts (Steven Culp is a dead ringer for Bobby), sometimes don’t (Bruce Greenwood was really the best Jack they could find?) and sometimes fall somewhere in between (thanks to the bulldog real McCoy of The Fog of War, Dylan Baker is at very least the second-best onscreen McNamara). With behind-the-scenes intrigue that’s just widely forgotten enough to contain an element of surprise or two, it’s a film that manages to generate suspense even in events whose outcome every educated person ought to already know.

82) The Matrix Revolutions (Larry & Andy Wachowski) 2003

Here’s a lesson to all fantasy franchise-minded filmmakers of the future-- never shoot more than one film at a time. Sure, Peter Jackson made it look like a good idea when his epic Lord of the Rings adaptation was greenlit, and it saves you the trouble of having to raise money and pitch for the sequels, but at the end of the day it just creates more problems than it’s worth, especially if you didn’t shoot the first part that way. After the zeitgeist-defining success of 1999’s The Matrix, the Wachowski Brothers proceeded with an ambitious two-part follow-up that patterned itself after Robert Zemeckis’ back-to-back shoots of the second and third Back to the Future movies, unfolding a treasure trove of impressive cinematic set-pieces and philosophical articulations, but falling prey to a dozen or more inconsistencies with continuity, flow and presentation. Because it was filmed in conjunction with the lackluster-received The Matrix Reloaded, their third film sometimes comes off as a film that doesn’t quite stand too well on its own, owing too much narrative coherence to its direct predecessor without always maintaining as many similarities with the original that audiences might have liked. But for all its structural faults and tonal awkwardness, Revolutions might just be the best of the trilogy, more intimately relatable in its relationships, both human and otherwise, between all different types-- lovers, family, friends and even enemies. Building upon the world so carefully built up in the first two films, the Wachowskis delight in some of the most imaginative cinematic acts of destruction, often going above and beyond the call of mere action-packed explosiveness. A little more long-winded perhaps than is sometimes necessary, it’s a film worth appreciating as evidence that even within a creatively cloistered environment as Hollywood, an artistic vision can sometimes be allowed to find closure on its own terms.

81) The Life Aquatic, with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson) 2004

Sometimes an artist needs to allow himself the opportunity to indulge in every single possible whim and creative inflection, no matter how wasteful, in order to learn the spendthrift restraint that makes truly mature work possible in the future. Such may be the best thing that can be said of Anderson’s tale of a Cousteau-like documentarian juggling priorities as varied as a larger-than-life production of undersea exploration, a chaotic family life and a quest for revenge with a rare breed of marine creature that may not actually exist. Every kind of visual, aural and narrative fancy is given free-reign throughout the picture, making for the busiest production of the director’s career this side of that commercial he did for American Express, and turning the film into something that resembles an awful parody of virtuoso-cinematic talent run flagrantly amok. But at the same time, there’s a marvelous method to the madness on display in every moment of the film. No matter how crowded the frame becomes or how unwelcome the story’s various complications run the risk of being, there’s a peculiar calm and coherence to the helter-skelter disarray the movie often just barely avoids turning into. Like the other filmmaking Anderson’s pretentiously overloaded Magnolia, it’s one of the most orderly cinematic depictions of disorder imaginable, and a valuable stepping stone in a vital director’s creative growth.
 

80) The Cell (Singh) 2000

It’s interesting to look back and be able to identify, with near-certainty, the exact moment that a popular convention becomes mock-worthy cliché, home to almost naught but half-hearted recycling and ever-enthusiastic parodying. After directing a string of noted commercials and music videos, Tarsem Singh made a first feature out of a serial-killer story whose narrative remained at once painfully formulaic and laughably gimmicky, pitting a child-psychologist with a machine that allows her to travel into comatose-minds against the sinister machinations of a deranged murderer in a race against time to find a captured woman. And yet somehow, his singular mis-en-scene redeems the picture from being totally worthless thanks to the artful and severe expressionism allowed to him by modern-day special effects. With M.C. Escher-style landscapes alongside acts of violence and mutation which recall the works of Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney, Singh’s vision is one comparable only to the films of Julie Taymor or George Lucas in his creative distortions of body and environments in service to story, no matter how creaky. While perhaps not as accomplished as his later success with The Fall, Singh’s work on The Cell remains startling, curious and impossible to ignore, much less dismiss. Without doubt, the most interesting movie to feature Jennifer Lopez since Out of Sight.

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