Monday, December 28, 2009

Cinema of the New Millennium

by Bob Clark

49) Sunshine (Boyle) 2007

Whenever you’re in a sci-fi movie set out in space and you pick up a distress-signal that would take you off course, it’s best to keep in mind Chef’s words after facing a jungle tiger from Apocalypse Now-- “Never get off the boat.” The crew of the Nostromo from Ridley Scott’s Alien learned that lesson the hard way, after discovering the most peculiar and lethal of stowaways aboard their vessel after touching down on LV-246, and it’s a lesson the crew of the Icarus II are forced to come to terms with in this film, as well, after they come in contact with an S.O.S. from the Icarus I, a ship that disappeared from contact years ago and failed on the same mission they now find themselves on. That mission is to steer their massive craft on a direct path into the sun, hoping to kick-start the dying star with a massive nuclear bomb and thus save the Earth from the slow death of eternal winter. Scripted by his 28 Days Later collaborator and The Beach author Alex Garland, Danny Boyle creates a unique sci-fi vision of the future that is at once plausible-looking enough to feel somewhat real and distinct enough to impress on its own aesthetic terms. Their various solutions for very real scientific-problems are both practical and eloquent-- the big, reflective-golden suits the astronauts wear for spacewalks so near to the sun; the “oxygen garden” of hundreds of homegrown plants to supply breathable air during the long-term trip; even the distinctive look of the Icarus-craft with its mushroom-shaped solar-sails. Though towards the end the film gets a little stir-crazy with a man gone mad by an outer-space variant of cabin-fever, Boyle and Garland’s vision of the future is one that is both impressive and emotionally resonant.

48) When the Levees Broke (Lee) 2006

Following 1991’s Malcolm X, Spike Lee enjoyed a string of highly visible successes with audiences throughout the 90’s, but none that truly duplicated the critical sensations of his earlier work in the 80’s like the indie hit She’s Gotta Have It or the confrontational big-statement triumph Do the Right Thing. A little better off was his broadening of subject-matters around and during the next decade, with The 25th Hour and Inside Man striking all the right chords of urban-strife and movie-showmanship without being locked into racial-politics the same way that Jungle Fever and Clockers were. But during the past two decades, another side of Spike Lee has slowly emerged and just may be taking its space as the definitive side of this maverick director, with his efforts not as a dramatist, but instead as a documentarian. With 4 Little Girls, he offered one of the most straightforward and haunting looks at what might justifiably be called the most shocking and heinous act of violence committed during the struggle for civil rights, and did so with the same in-your-face visual panache that fuels his best films. But his greatest moment, not just as a documentarian but as a filmmaker in general, might be this 4-hour look at New Orleans and the unspeakable toll of damage done to the city’s lives, infrastructure and spirit by Hurricane Katrina and the federal government’s shamefully negligent response. Interviewing countless individuals who survived, covered and helped to counter the effects of the storm, Lee films in the same matter-of-fact style that can be found in the straight-to-the-camera testimonials throughout his filmography, revealing that perhaps documentaries suit him so well because that’s what he’d been doing more or less the whole time-- first-person cinema of the highest order.

47) Stille Liebe (Schaub) 2001

Christopher Schaub’s simple, affecting look at a deaf Nun who finds kinship and love with a small-time thief who shares her affliction is one that remains little seen and little talked about in the years since its release, but it’s one of those gems that those who have enjoyed the rare privilege of seeing it can appreciate as pure cinematic luck. What’s perhaps most effective about this movie is the restraint with which Schaub shoots this feature-- he doesn’t go for the anti-clerical jugular when presenting how a woman of God breaks her vows and embarks upon a life of personal pleasures, nor does he fall prey to turning his tale into one of mere eroticism as she discovers a sensual world beyond the confines of her convent. Instead, he shoots with a straightforward, hushed clarity that depends largely upon a natural-lighting scheme that is at once painterly and naturalistic, presenting us a world that impresses us with its beauty while remaining down-to-earth enough to be bought on a one-to-one, personal level. A great film about the deaf that doesn’t star Mary Matlin.

46) Redbelt (Mamet) 2008

At long last, playwright, screenwriter and director David Mamet has finally created something that escaped him for the whole of his two-decades long cinematic career-- an actual, honest to God movie. Bear in mind, none of the films he’s personally helmed can ever exactly be called boring, or even bad-- with deftly scripted mysteries like House of Games, Homicide and The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet has time and again demonstrated himself an expert hand with first-rate dialogue and genuinely twisty and surprising plots, not to mention a master at coaxing level-headed, authentic deliveries from actors of all types of career paths and experiences. However, the visual element of cinematic craft always seemed to evade him, and though he kept getting closer with the more ambitious scales and scopes of the Gene Hackman-caper movie Heist or Val Kilmer’s variation on The Searchers in Spartan, it wasn’t until Redbelt that he had finally created a motion picture that actually depended more upon the strengths of its motion and pictorial content than the written word. It helps that in telling the story of a martial-arts instructor who fights to stay true to his personal moral code of Samurai-like honor, we are given a narrative that is vastly simplified from the Byzantine plots of cons far too long to contain themselves by image alone. It also helps that with Chiwetel Ejiofor, he has a protagonist who can speak volumes with the strength of his force, as with the tenor of his simple, straightforward words. Most importantly, Mamet finds a visual voice that matches his plainspoken eloquence working alongside veteran cinematographer Robert Elswit (who enjoyed a very productive decade, displaying expert versatility with films like Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana and Michael Clayton besides his collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson). Unlike the writer’s other enterprises, there’s less of a need for his famous verbal showmanship here, because perhaps for once in his creative life, the director has crafted a film that truly speaks for itself.

45) 300 (Snyder) 2007

Make no mistake, this movie is complete nonsense, utter tripe and histrionic propaganda in every way, more likely to damage the impressionable minds of today’s youth with testosterone-soaked odes to hollow machismo and savage violence than open up perspectives to the true way of the world at one of its most violent and threatening ages. But at the same time, it may be one of the most important movies made during the entire decade, and one that certainly has much more to say about the political fabric of the time it was conceived in than perhaps even the filmmakers themselves are fully aware of. Tackling Frank Miller’s 1998 graphic-novel with the same reverence that fueled Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (though without crediting the seminal comic-book talent as a director, which he may deserve just as much here as before), Zack Snyder puts to film a savage, epic picture of the Battle of Thermopylae so conflated with mythic revisionism it practically resembles a fantasy-film in the same realm of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. The surprise, of course, is that it works-- by framing all the cinematic hyperbole of over-the-top action and hyperstylized presentation in the same campfire storytelling that Miller did in his original comics, Snyder retains a sense of the oral tradition throughout the picture, allowing for it to indulge in the same highly inaccurate portrayals of historical events as can be found in the poetry The Iliad or Song of Roland. As such, it is a film that reveals much about the intents such storytelling has over populations during wartime, and how propaganda, whether it be in the form of moving pictures or moving words, depends upon a depiction of events that has more to do with fairy-tale logic than would like to be believed. It bears almost no resemblance to the reality of King Leonidas and his Spartan warriors, but it’s likely how they would have liked to have seen themselves, and it’s probably close to the way warriors of Western civilization have propped themselves up. It might just be the most culturally revealing movie since John Rambo walked the Earth.

44) Black Hawk Down (Scott) 2001

Timing is everything. Had Ridley Scott’s depiction of the chaos that ensued in the midst of downed helicopters during U.S. Army operations in Mogadishu been released any sooner than the fall of 2001, his frenetic picture of modern warfare might have very well been dismissed as a waste of his noted “world building” talents, and a return to the hollow military fetishism that turned G.I. Jane into a guilty-pleasure at best, and an outright joke at worst. But after the harrowing attacks of 9/11 and the rise of nationalism in America, Black Hawk Down thrived as a movie showcasing the kind of dedicated war-waging that audiences wanted to see in retribution of fallen civilians, even as it depicted the very same failings of military and political foresight that led to Al Qaeda’s bloody stratagems in the first place. As an exercise in storytelling, it must be admitted that Scott’s film is only very barely successful, as in the midst of his ground-zero depiction of battle’s storm, it is usually impossible to tell any of the soldiers apart, even when they come with the faces of famous actors or are developed in the half-hour or so before the fighting starts. However, even as the drama hinges upon men who are put in danger and fall victim to it, distinguishing one soldier from another is more or less irrelevant to main weight of the picture. Scott throws us into battle and asks us to make sense of all the madness, but whether or not we actually are able to follow any of the explosive bloodshed with any more clarity than an ashen-faced survivor reduced to the ear-ringing awe of shell-shocked silence, we may trust in the knowledge that we have seen the tools of cinema put to their best use in the articulation of warfare as a visceral experience of the senses than just about anything since. Only the director’s insistence to place a series of politically motivated codas, and his reduction of the Somali to masses of angry black men with guns mobbing up against lone, almost exclusively white soldiers, keep the film from completely working, and risk turning the whole film into something that approaches a particularly ugly brand of xenophobic propaganda, but in the end the movie’s best portions stand on their own as exhilarating, exhausting and worthwhile viewing.

43) Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino) 2009

Finally, Tarantino begins to grow up a little. As one of those long-in-the-making prospects of the director’s, whose shape seems to have changed several times over the years, this bizarro-World War Two epic wound up becoming a definitive picture of the artistic maturation of a filmmaker whose creative voice remains a work in progress. As far as its script goes, Inglourious Basterds may be an even more self-indulgent collage of pastiches than even Kill Bill, as Tarantino stitches together variations on just about every 30’s and 40’s era cinematic convention he can think of-- Christoph Waltz’s near-superhuman level of charm and intellect as a civilized Nazi who might as well have stepped right out of a Fritz Lang film; former SNL comic and Austin Powers-progenitor Michael Myers as a freckled, map-pointing British commander familiar to countless Dam Buster-style war pictures; Diane Kruger as a Dietrich-esque German movie-star turned Allied spy and Melanie Laurent as a French refugee hiding out in a Paris movie-theater plotting revenge for the extermination of her family. And all of this, of course, is excluding the Brad Pitt and his titular Dirty Dozen-style swaggering band of cutthroat Jewish commandoes out to scalp and batter Nazis into meaty, rotten pulps and destroy the German High Command by and all any means necessary, and it doesn’t even take into account the soundtrack largely cribbed from Ennio Morricone’s best needle-drops, turning the whole bloody affair into a perverse spaghetti western. What keeps Tarantino’s ecstatic enthusiasm for the material from tearing it apart at the seams is a newly honed sense of visual and cinematic restraint from him, no doubt earned by his experience of acting as his own cinematographer on the not-quite worthless Death Proof chapter of the mostly pointless Grindhouse, thus making his working relationship with the capable Robert Richardson here much more cohesive and convincing than the bug-eyed cartoon of Kill Bill. Only time will tell if it has the staying power of Pulp Fiction, but at long last Tarantino has shown some real growth as a filmmaker. Now let’s see him go somewhere with it.

42) Gangs of New York (Scorsese) 2002

As with many of the historical epics to come out in the past decade, Martin Scorsese’s fabled-project Gangs of New York doesn’t always remain as adhesive to exact historical accuracy as one would imagine. Picking and choosing historical figures and composing variants based upon them to mix and match throughout different periods of New York’s history, largely settling to focus on the years of Tammany Hall, the Civil War and the Draft Riots, the director spins an operatic tale of Irish immigrants fighting for acceptance in their new home against the native-born mobs represented here by Daniel Day Lewis’ bloodthirsty, knife wielding Bill the Butcher. As a portrait of American xenophobia and old-world violence, Lewis’ portrayal is easily one of the best performances of this or any other decade, both viciously grotesque and surprisingly, subtly sensitive as he inhabits the role of a man who would, and often does, kill for the sake and pride of both his country, and his position in it. Unfortunately, Scorsese chooses to focus most of his time on catch-of-the-day actors Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio, and while in the latter the director has found a fruitful creative partnership not seen since his prolific pairings with Robert De Niro, one wishes that he given us more time with his villain, rather than his rather rotely-written revenge-seeking orphan of a hero. Then again, as the film is widely rumored to have been drastically cut-down by overseer-producer Harvey Weinstein, perhaps there might just be a longer, more substantial edit of the film out there to be discovered. But as sporadic as its quality is, at times, Scorsese’s vision of his beloved city’s forgotten, blood-spattered past is daring and distinct enough in its current form to provide a nearly unparalleled experience of cinematic time-travel.

41) Traffic (Soderbergh) 2000

If there is one American director who over the course of the past decade has enjoyed greater creative success or freedom than Steven Soderbergh, I’d like somebody to point them out for me. From 2000’s Erin Brockovich to 2008’s Che, he has consistently found ways to direct films of all kinds, covering genres as disparate as WWII melodrama, hard science-fiction, fly-on-the-wall political docu-drama and star-stuttered heist-capers. But perhaps the film which best represents his twin instincts for mainstream and idiosyncratic fare is this adaptation of British Channel 4’s series on international drug trafficking with an eye for drama both at home and abroad. Reconfiguring much of the series’ substance to fit the particulars of American narcotics by telling sets of stories occurring in Mexico, California, Virginia and Washington D.C., Soderbergh utilizes a careful aesthetic of color-coding to help audiences keep track of which narrative strand they’re watching at any given moment, allowing the movie to be experienced in broad strokes as a kind of impressionistic tone-poem on the subject matter, even while diving head-first into extensively researched and detailed depictions of both the criminal and law-enforcement sides of the divide. Shooting most of the material himself as both cinematographer and camera-operator while also marshalling the large cast of well-known faces and talented character-actors, Soderbergh proves himself an expert cinematic multitasker and one of the most formidable talents of the decade.

40) No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen) 2007

The Coens get their groove back. After fumbling through most of the decade with varying degrees of success-- O Brother Where Art Thou, a middling movie outshined by its brilliantly compiled bluegrass soundtrack; The Man Who Wasn’t There, a beautifully shot but aimlessly scripted black-and-white noir; Intolerable Cruelty, a pedestrian comedy which should have remained in the hands of the lesser director it was scripted for; The Ladykillers, a wrong-headed remake with Alec Guinness’ shoes barely filled by Tom Hanks’ Col. Sanders impersonation-- the brothers came back strong with an ambitiously shot and staged adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of a Texan border cat-and-mouse game between a resourceful average man who stumbles across drug money and the supernaturally persistent assassin out to collect it, deciding fates and lives along the way by the flip of a coin. With a cast headlined by Josh Brolin as the hunted, Javier Bardem as the huner, and Tommy Lee Jones as a wise old sheriff out to track them both down, the Coens are careful to stage as much of the film as possible without dialogue, relying instead on impressively staged and perhaps even more impressively paced action, and investing what few words there are to be spoken with an anxious kind of humor that seems as though it’s always bound to precipitate some form of bloodshed. The culmination of a lifetime’s worth of playing out genre variations of all shapes, sizes and styles, in this film the brothers are able to apply their expert craft upon material that meets the mileage of their talents and carve out a work that realizes the fullest potential of both.

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