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In Focus |
Monday, December 28, 2009Cinema of the New Millennium by Bob Clark
39) Kung Fu Panda (Osbourne & Stevensen) 2008
Yes, I’m being completely serious here. Better than Pixar’s output for the decade, Kung Fu Panda has all the classic storytelling and contemporary wit of Disney’s Golden Age at its most imaginative. Casting Jack Black in his least obtrusive performance since High Fidelity as an overweight panda (in a variation of Ancient China populated by anthropomorphized animals, obviously) who is tasked with becoming training as the warrior to counter the impending threat of an imprisoned master bent on revenge, this effort from DreamWorks animation gets a lot of things right that probably go taken for granted by most audiences. In telling a martial-arts fairy-tale with the five schools of kung-fu practiced by their five representative animals (Mantis, Serpent, Crane, Monkey, Tiger), it condenses both theme and characters into a narrative bound in a parable-perfect animal fable. In expressing their story with the same epic style as modern-day wuxu epics from the likes of Zhang Yimou, the articulate their vision with clarity and respect for the culture their work is based upon. Even the choice for hero of a panda-bear is effective as an instantly recognizable symbol of China, and the decision to center on his habit of overeating as both an obstacle to overcome and impetus for martial-artist skill turns out to be a clever variation on the archetype of the drunken-master. The way in which everything comes together feels at once exciting, authentic and genuinely entertaining, an example of that rare classic which proves the worth and value of a true family film.
38) Notre Musique (Godard) 2004
One wonders what happened to the classic Godard of the 60’s, that maverick guerilla filmmaker whose works represented a much appreciated, much missed combination of intellect, wit, heart and just plain fun. If I had to pick any director whose work best captured that ineffable sense of joi de vivre, I’d easily pick Godard at the height of his New Wave discovery, before he lost his muse in Anna Karina and spiraled into a tail-spin of political misanthropy. No doubt, his increasingly abstract, more dialectic efforts from Weekend on have been no less essential contributions of quality cinema, but they lack the same spontaneous spirit of infectious good-will that was present in his early work, even at its darkest corners. At the same time, one can’t help but appreciate that it might just have been good for his development as a filmmaker, as over time it pushed him away from bourgeois narrative conventions and towards a more and more progressive, abstract form of cinema more suited to his particular blend of political agitprop. Like much of his recent work, this mid-decade work covers the subject of war in general, with specific attention paid to the cause-celebre of Palestine. Divided into three parts modeled after Dante’s Divine Comedy, Godard comes up with three strikingly different voices for each chapter-- Histoire(s) du Cinema-style video-montage of war footage and war-film clips for “Inferno”; a pseudo-documentary fiction following both a young Israeli journalist in Serbia and Godard himself, who spends most of his time giving postcard-assisted speeches that make him sound like the fascist computer from Alphaville for “Purgatorio”; and finally a brief sequence on a sparsely populated beach for “Paradiso” that seems to recall the same casual roadside performance-art that capped Weekend. Evidence that there’s still worth in Godard’s late-period, and plenty of room for him to grow, yet.
37) Elegy (Coixet) 2008
Were I a more superficial filmgoer, I imagine that I could probably fill a fairly large portion of a list like this with films starring Penelope Cruz. From her Almodovar classics to works with American filmmakers like Cameron Crowe and Woody Allen, Cruz has proven herself a versatile actress with a range as deep as her physical beauty is superlative. If there can be one note of disappointment in her works, however, there is the fact that in nearly all of her roles she finds herself playing variations on the same sex-symbol image, and no matter how skillfully written her part is or how capably she fills it out, one can’t help but feel a note of guilt at being somewhat complicit in her continual objectification over the years. Still, there have been more than enough roles that have given her ample opportunity to transcend that eroticized image, and chief among them is this breathtakingly real portrait of an elder professor’s tentative relationship with a former student, based on a novella written by Phillip Roth. Cruz shares a blissful, yet sad chemistry with partner Ben Kingsley, who seems to evade the tenderest levels of emotional intimacy with her out of the anxiety she impresses upon him by destabilizing his unsatisfying, but stable personal life. What makes the movie work so well is both the degrees to which Kingsley and Cruz respond to one another and the ways in which the script, written by Nicholas Meyer (perhaps most famous as the director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) articulates their physical relationship in dimensions that rise above petty sexuality and reach true emotional depth. Coixet’s sensitivity with the material helps make this film a love story that finds both conflict and resonance beyond the expectations of passion, and results in a studious, quietly marvelous picture.
36) Mulholland Drive (Lynch) 2001
Perhaps the best synthesis of David Lynch’s sensibilities, or at least the most accessible his surrealism will ever be for most audiences. In salvaging this former television-pilot into a feature-length film, Lynch was able to capitalize upon the various open-ended clues and mysteries he had set up with the intention of solving gradually over weeks, months and years as he had with the classic series Twin Peaks. But instead of providing solid closure for the questions posed in the main body of the film, he instead decides to spin off into an entirely different direction, using only bare remnants of continuity to suggest intertwining levels of dream and reality between one part and the next. As such, the film comes off as a fully expressed gestalt, pushing his characters into the heady Lost Highway-style psychogenic-fugue state only after they’ve been fleshed out as fully as the cast of Blue Velvet, instead of merely propping them up as barely developed, two-dimensional ciphers for audience anxieties as they often can be. Allowing us to invest actual emotional attachment onto his collection of wide-eyed starlets and amnesia striken femme-fatales makes the prospect of witnessing their agonizing journey through the wringer of his nightmare headgames all the more inviting and devastating. Naomi Watts makes a startling debut performance here, radiating the kind of effervescent excitement throughout that in a Lynch film is always a key signal of foreshadowed doom. In an age where experimental television Lost is allowed to flourish for season after season, I only wish this could have been given a full life as an ongoing serial, but as it stands it’s hard to argue with what we’ve got.
35) Panic Room (Fincher) 2002
David Fincher directed some of the most matured stories with his most assured and confident hand during this decade, but for my money his best effort might just be this early entry, with its B-movie plot and self-indulgent visual fireworks. Pitting Jodie Foster as a mother whose Manhattan brownstone is broken into by thieves, and must lock herself and her daughter into a small, security enforced closet while they wait for help to arrive, Panic Room is a movie that finds a new variation for the home-invasion scenario that made suspenseful thrillers like Terrence Young’s Wait Until Dark tick, and conjures up a fierce exercise in potboiling that would’ve made Alfred Hitchcock proud. Working from a solidly unpretentious script from David Koepp, Fincher maintains a careful balancing act between image and actors, paying strict attention to the seat-edge drama fueled by the likes of Forrest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam as the break-in thieves, while never taking his grip off the focus of his professional pictorial sense, keeping a keen eye for both the showmanship of digitally enhanced camera stuntwork and down-to-earth visual storytelling that keeps the whole enterprise grounded in a medium that members of the audience can follow letter by letter even when they aren’t paying complete attention to the words coming out of the cast’s mouths. As a kind of maternal-feminist suspense rollercoaster ride, putting mother and daughter in a locked uterine room which three dangerous men try to break in, Panic Room is a grand piece of entertainment that works on an archetypal, almost elemental scale. Proof positive that David Fincher can direct almost anything, which should prove useful to him on that goddamn Facebook movie.
34) Memento (Nolan) 2000
See, I told you that The Dark Knight wasn’t Christopher Nolan’s best film so far. In the almost ten years since the film’s release, most people seem to have forgotten the inventively conceived Memento, or at least lost trace of it. Part of it is because of how Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible partially stole its thunder a couple years later with its own, much more harrowing take on the newfound convention of backwards-storytelling, but mostly it’s thanks to how much Nolan has upped the stakes on nearly every new occasion he steps behind the camera, raising the ante to near-Wagnerian heights of physical and psychological devastation for the repeat-offender success of his Batman movies. But when it came out, this film was one of the first true breathes of fresh air that modern-day cinema had to offer, and an inspiring indicator of the talents-to-come from a new face on the scene. Nolan’s script, based on a short story by brother Jonathan, grounds the unusual reverse-order narrative of a short-term amnesiac out for revenge with a range of details that are at once practical and stunningly unique-- collecting Polaroid snapshots of people, places and things to remember them, or tattooing pertinent information upon the skin. Working with cinematographer Wally Pfister, Nolan never exceeds the limits of his own cinematic vocabulary and winds up offering the most coherent and sustainable pieces of action and camerawork of his career. With impressive turns from Guy Pierce and Matrix refugees Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano, Memento is an effective film on the unreliability of memory that, quite ironically, not that many people seem to remember themselves.
33) Krapp's Last Tape (Egoyan) 2000
No doubt about it, Samuel Beckett is one tough nut to crack. It almost seems surprising that nobody had before adapted the celebrated Irish playwright’s works for the screen before 2000’s immense Beckett on Film undertaking, tapping directors and performers both famous and little-known to tackle his singularly defining theater of the absurd. While by and large the results of the experiment ranged in varying degrees of workmanlike to unwatchable, it was easy for most spectators to agree that the strongest of the bunch was Atom Egoyan’s take on the hour-long Krapp’s Last Tape, a one-man show of an aged writer and the ruins of his memories, and perhaps the role of a lifetime by John Hurt. Confined to the single location of the old man’s darkened, messy desk and supplied with few articles of attention other than a tape-machine, a box full of unspooled recordings and vest-pockets seemingly overflowing with unpeeled bananas, Egoyan and Hurt work in harmonious synchronicity to play out Beckett’s heartbreaking portrayal of a man broken down by the disappointments of time, expressing themselves both in a language that remains at once theatrical and singularly cinematic. The kind of acting Hurt performs here is one that, thanks to the strength and caliber of his resonant voice, would no doubt prove effective on the stage, but thanks to the added degree of the camera’s intimacy his face and bodily mannerisms play a much larger, and substantially subtler role than they ever could have hoped to achieve before the distanced eyes of a live-audience. Egoyan, as well, thrives with the material, relying on set-ups that remain simplistic but deliberate, going in close enough to observe the ruins of his desk or the procedures for spooling together a tape for playback, but always retaining a sense of distance that implies a theatrical arm’s length but in cinema allows us to spend a greater deal of time observing Hurt in conjunction with his surroundings than would be allowable had the whole thing been played out in close-ups. While there will always be a fresh production of things like Waiting for Godot in the wings to be experienced in-person, Egoyan and Hurt’s work here just might be the definitive take on Krapp.
32) Antichrist (Von Trier) 2009
And here I thought Von Trier was going to go mainstream. When news broke out that the Danish provocateur was abandoning his USA trilogy one episode shy of completion, instead moving ahead on what was only tentatively described as a horror-movie starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of disappointment, even as the prospect of a return to the genre that he’d utilized so well in The Kingdom seemed to contain more than its share of promise. I don’t suppose anybody really knew what we were in for until those first reports of audiences fainting, vomiting and just-plain walking out of theaters. With word-of-mouth advertising like that, Antichrist became a kind of art-house equivalent of shlocky exploitational B-movies from the 50’s and 60’s, and it’s easy to say that the director made good on his promise to deliver one of the most harrowing experiences ever put to film and leave it at that. But Von Trier’s work on this picture is too good, too personally affecting on a raw, bone-and-sinew level to be taken for granted. From its perfume-commercial black-and-white prologue to the various entrancingly disturbing slow-motion sights throughout the main body of the film, the director and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle pull off some of their most evocative imagery yet, working with the much-heralded RED digital-video camera, a tool that has proven itself to be one of both versatility and quality over the past few years. With a story fueled by a couple’s tragic loss and the fleeting subject matter of women persecuted as witches during the middle ages, Von Trier conjures up a picture of idyllic and tranquil terror that matches anything by idols of his like Dreyer or Tarkovsky. While at times it might be difficult to tell whether or not the Great Dane wants you to be screaming in earnest or with laughter, the fact that such a film is capable of straddling the divide between the two is a remarkable feat in and of itself, projecting a kind of Lovecraftian delirium that marks the space between ridiculousness and sheer madness. Chaos reigns, indeed.
31) The Hurt Locker (Bigelow) 2009
30) Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier) 2000
The past decade has been a relatively good time for musicals, if you’re into that sort of thing. We’ve seen Bob Fosse’s Cabaret brought to the screen, even if it bears little resemblance to how Fosse himself would have directed it save for the bowler-hats and slinky dancing. We’ve seen Bollywood come to the forefront of the art-house crowd with high-visibility fare like Lagaan and Saawariya. We’ve even seen a couple of somewhat more daring, experimental takes on modern musical conventions, most popularly with Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge and, perhaps most significantly, with this stunning collaboration between Lars Von Trier and music-artist Bjork. As the final installment of Von Trier’s increasingly misanthropic “Golden Hearts” trilogy, the director’s one-of-a-kind mixture of downbeat melodrama with escapist singing-and-dancing is one that seeks to charm the audience into a lull while building up all his usual machinations of dreadful fate against a saintly-female figure. In her sole mainstream acting role to date, Bjork is stunning as a mother seeking to raise money to pay for an operation that will save her son from the blindness that is progressively taking root in her own eyes, seeking only trips to the movies and a part in a local production of The Sound of Music as ways out of her dreary existence. Capturing the same kind of fervor that Renee Falconetti embraced in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, the Icelandic singer-songwriter dazzles during spoken and sung portions of the film alike, and her contribution of music to the director’s lyrics help turn the picture into a truly magnificent collaboration. Von Trier’s dreamlike direction during the various musical sequences carries a light, airy feeling that belies their harsh, video shooting methods, and manages to convey an atmosphere of sweet tragedy as palpable as anything from his early period. It remains a triumph, but even then perhaps the best thing that can be said of the director is that even this was not the greatest work he achieved in this stretch of time.
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