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In Focus |
Monday, December 28, 2009Cinema of the New Millennium by Bob Clark
19) In Praise of Love (Godard) 2001
After a long, dark journey through the wilderness of increasingly didactic features and expressly abstract video-experimentation for the better part of several decades, the first great master of the French New Wave makes his return to mainstream art-house cinema with this simple, unpretentious little love story. Yeah, right. Whatever the world expected from Jean-Luc Godard when he made his way back into the front line of filmmaking with this disjointed look at a tentative love affair observed amidst the slow, obscure progress of one creative project (a film or play of some kind-- we never really figure out what) and the slow, painful breakdown of another several months back in time, nobody should’ve dreamed that the old reactionary guard would make anything other than this. In mixing razor-sharp black and white celluloid with garishly colored digital-video stock for sustained acts taking place in the present and past respectively, Godard plays with cinematic conventions just as much as he toys with the new visual elements, finding new reaches of expressive images with some of the most low-fi tools at his disposal. In telling a politically charged story of a couple almost but not-quite coming together while Hollywood executives look to exploit the romantic life-story of a pair of French resistance fighters, he levels harsh accusatory tones against figures representing the ignorance of contemporary cinema, represented by The Matrix and Steven Spielberg (his accusations, not mine). Finally, in breaking up a story into near-incomprehensible bits and pieces made even more abstract by the radical visual stylizations he adopts, Godard offers up one of his most poignant narrative collages yet. After years of mopping up his emotional ruin after losing Anna Karina and hooking up with communist-dogma and collaborator Anne-Marie Mieville alike, the director of classics like Breathless and Alphaville has seemingly found a voice to follow him into the new era, less restrained by narrative convention and freer to explore political and aesthetic experimentation as he sees fit. With the upcoming Socialisme on the horizon, one can only hope for a late-period as fruitful as the blossoms of his creative youth.
18) Naqoyqatsi (Reggio) 2002
Quite possibly the single-most most difficult entry on my list, at least when it comes to viewing-experience. After their one-of-a-kind couplet of pure-cinema features Koyanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, former monk-turned-filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and collaborating composer Phillip Glass had to wait over a decade for filmmaking technology to advance to the point where they could comfortably finish the final piece of their trilogy of life out of balance, in transformation, and finally at war with itself in Naqoyqatsi. While their two preceding films both earned rapturous acclaim from devotees of art-house fare and gained fervent support from occasional experimental filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, their third feature failed to capture the hearts and minds of audiences and critics alike, leaving it to fall into an obscurity even deeper than either of the other Qatsi films suffered while they languished in copyright ambiguities. The reason for this is plain to see throughout the picture, as Naqoyqatsi lacks the impressive and evocative environmental and urban photography from celebrated cinematographer Ron Fricke that made Koyanisqatsi such a hit, instead eschewing for an aesthetic almost wholly composed of digitally manipulated stock-footage culled from hours of familiar film and video clips, with only a handful of real-life moments and occasional computer-animations to add some variety. As such, the film denies itself the sheer sensual pleasures of its predecessors, but finds a kind of abstract purity in its stead. Here, Reggio finds a sense of liberation as he moves past the painterly images of Fricke’s design and creates a more direct mode of cinematic communication. While it’s by no means as superficially enjoyable as either of its predecessors, Naqoyqatsi might actually be a much more important film in the long run, a chilling expression of contemporary globalization and a triumph of art that can move past even the confines of its own aesthetic pleasures. And hey, if you want another Koyanisqatsi, you can always go watch Baraka.
17) The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson) 2007
If there is one thing I have learned from the films of this decade, it is this: Never fall in love with Natalie Portman. Nothing good can come of it. Since growing up from the vengeful little moppet who lured Jean Reno into an explosive paternal sacrifice in Luc Besson’s Leon into increasingly more mature roles over the years, Portman seems to have continually taken up roles that put her into the role of a kind of continual omen of doom for her paramours. In films like Closer, Goya’s Ghosts and the upcoming Brothers, she always appears to have a knack for leaving men in much worse states than she found them. Hell, she even managed to tempt Hayden Christensen over to the dark-side of infanticide and third-degree burns in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, proving herself a cinematic siren of truly mythic proportions. As such, her brief appearance at the prologue of this film, which was released separately as the short Hotel Chevalier, helps to underline the emotional turmoil she’s put Jason Shwartzman in, and while her explicit nudity certainly has a welcome quality to it, it hardly seems necessary to sharpen a sting that already goes unspoken by her appearance alone. After all, the young man spends most of the movie looking like the spitting image of a Sgt. Pepper-era George Harrison-- how much more evidence do you need of a desperate, heartbroken cry for help? It’s just one delicate element of the emotionally restrained film that Anderson concocts here, exercising his usual Salinger-lite storytelling and New Wave-plus filmmaking in an Indian setting that proves just unfamiliar enough to provide a rich new territory for his lonely lost boys. Here, his sometimes suffocating diorama-instincts take root in a new way, presenting American outsiders left to make sense of a foreign land and their own fragile emotional states. It shows that Anderson’s cinema is perhaps best conducted with a spirit of adventure, exploring new frontiers wherever he can find them, instead of running back to settle down home somewhere, which for his characters might just be the most alienating concept of all.
16) Collateral (Mann) 2004
One of the great cinematic developments of this decade has been the advent of digital-video as a legitimate tool of filmmaking technology, and watching as director after director have found ways to integrate it into their personal work philosophy is an interesting phenomenon if for no other reason than the wildly divergent courses many of these artists take. Some, like Lucas and Cameron, embrace the digital for the new opportunities it presents them as digital imagineers, and strive to give their work the same crystal-clear polish seen in the best of celluloid-captured efforts. Others, like Lynch or Godard, wholeheartedly embrace the homemade aesthetic of consumer-grade technology and find a new expressive freedom in it, never bothering to dress up their video as anything but what it is. The most impressive blends of old-director and new-technology, might be Michael Mann in his first wholly digital-feature, a nocturnal thriller about a taxi-driver stuck delivering a stone-cold assassin from hit to hit across the nighttime cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, which survives in leaps and bounds beyond the pedestrian qualities of its script and becomes the strongest work the procedurally-minded director has helmed since Heat. Again employing his exhaustive familiarity with the geography of his adopted city and exercising the same virtuoso instincts at building impressive and authentic action set-pieces and stylish drama from start to finish, Mann’s work finds a new life breathed into it by DV, injecting a much appreciated sense of reality into his gun-battles and moments of macho self-inspection. It helps that Tom Cruise is there to deliver the most impressive performance of his career, and helps turn the project into what might very easily be the most serendipitous pairing of director and actor in years. After all, who better defines the style-over-substance craftsmanship of 80’s cinema than Cruise and Michael Mann, and who better to collaborate on a film like this, which both embraces and analyzes all the same Reagan-era instincts of vapid self-interest and cool facades? Cruise has been on auto-pilot ever since this flick, but Mann’s still developing as an artist, and in time there’s little doubt he may create a masterpiece to top even Heat in the coming years, thanks to the creative lessons learned here.
15) Moon (Jones) 2009
Science-fiction cinema at its hardest and absolute best. Duncan Jones’ throwback to films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running is a marvel of a lot of things, particularly the continued efficacy of old-fashioned special effects by physical models and miniatures, a rarity in this age where almost everything finds itself conjured on computers instead of before cameras. In the simple story of a man living out a corporate contract to perform mining operations on the moon, seemingly alone but growing more and more paranoid of his circumstances as time wears on, Jones uses a spare, restrained style of camerawork that favors long-shots and slow pans over too many close-ups, even at the most vulnerable emotional moments. Sam Rockwell does some of his best work yet as the lunar-worker who comes to realize that he isn’t quite as alone as he thinks he is, while Kevin Spacey provides a game foil by voicing the HAL-like robot assistant whose uncertain loyalties are put to the test. I’ve seen very few genre works that encapsulate the experience of dreary workaday life or loneliness better than this, with the THX 1138-style white-on-white aesthetic doing more than merely providing posh minimalist décor or smug anti-corporate sentiment. Instead, beyond all the usual company-man politics that sci-fi features have been addicted to since the Weyland-Yutani crooks of the Alien franchise, Jones’ lunar base arrives with decidedly personal existential dilemmas, as Sam Rockwell’s worker is forced to confront a whole slew of conflicts appearing as all manner of man vs. nature, man and self archetypes, frequently two at a time. A first-rate film by a first-time director, Moon is a breath of fresh air in more ways than one, and a hopefully a solid indicator of things to come, cinematically speaking.
14) Steamboy (Otomo) 2004
Since his groundbreaking anime Akira, the film world hasn’t seen a whole lot of Katsuhiro Otomo. Partly it’s due to the fact that he still had to take a couple of years to finish the epic-length manga he’d just adapted into a feature film, providing a satisfying conclusion to a work that has become as visionary in one medium of comics as it was in that of cinema. Following that, the director’s efforts could be seen here and there in a handful of animated projects—penning the tales for the Robot Carnival-esque story collection of Memories, directing the visionary satire Cannon Fodder himself, and writing the Tezuka/Lang inspired screenplay for Rintaro’s Metropolis—but it wasn’t until 2004 that he finally returned with a feature-length follow up in the form of Steamboy. A tale of a family of brilliant inventors who find themselves fighting one another amidst various international corporate factions in turn-of-the-19th-century London, Otomo conjures up a futuristic vision of the past just as thrilling as Neo-Tokyo, but far friendlier to a wider audience of filmgoers than that bloody post-apocalyptic madness was. As an example of the nascent steampunk genre, the film cleverly mixes past and present conventions to create an alternate history as thought provoking and entertaining as Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine, allowing Otomo the opportunity to work through just as many hard science-fiction and political concepts through cliffhanger drama as much as Akira did, before. While it didn’t nearly receive as much attention as his earlier animated blockbuster, Steamboy is a solid mix of satire and adventure that deserves more than to be seen, but to be seen over and over again.
13) Dogville (Von Trier) 2003
To the untrained eye, there have been two major periods in the career of Danish provocateur Las Von Trier—before Dogme and after. If one truly means to trace the roots of the director’s changing course, there’s probably more evidence that during Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark he was taking a larger page from the lessons he’d learned on the production of his celebrated television works like the Dreyer-scripted Medea or the popular Riget series, where adopting the smaller-scale of video production was the necessary component of directing for the smaller-screen. In the latter case, a miniseries chronicling the comings and goings of a haunted hospital in Copenhagen, Von Trier took inspiration from Barry Levinson’s series Homicide: Life on the Streets for his on-the-fly camerawork and jump-cut editing, and when the time came for him to shoot Dogville television again provided a serendipitous inspiration in a broadcast production of a Dickensian play. There, he found black-box aesthetic that matched the Brechtian tale unfolding in his head, a “Pirate Jenny”-like story of an abused young woman in hiding (Nicole Kidman) who at long length takes utter vengeance upon the town that wronged her, and articulated that theatrical look into a cinematic language all of his own. Eschewing sets in favor of an empty soundstage and chalk-outlines indicating the blue-print map of the town on the floor, Von Trier offers up a playful recreation of a small township not unlike the similarly minimalist scope of the seminal Our Town, but with a series of events far more bleak and punishing than Thornton Wilder’s classic Americana. Perhaps most affecting is the sequence where Kidman’s Grace is violently, but silently raped inside one of the homes while the rest of the town goes about its business, oblivious to the ugly truth right that is literally played out before their eyes. With an epic-length running time and a star-stuttered cast (including Lauren Bacall, of all people), Von Trier delivered his least accessible, yet most powerful act of cinematic melodrama yet with Dogville. One can only hope that he’ll complete the trilogy someday with Wasington.
12) There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson) 2007
I must be honest—until this film, I never had any use for the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, whatsoever. Boogie Nights struck me as an example of excellent craft and even more-excellent acting wasted on a uselessly juvenile look at 1970’s porno-production in a thinly-veiled version of the life-story of John Holmes that somehow found its way to the screen a second time in the form of the Val Kilmer-starring Wonderland. Why did we need a movie about an ignorant young douche with a prick even bigger than his burgeoning ego? Still, that was nothing compared to my reaction to the experience of watching Magnolia, which to this day strikes me as the single biggest waste of studio-dime and creative effort in the wake of the indie-renaissance of the 90’s, pouring far too much money into the production of a screenplay so thinly and pretentiously constructed that it would barely survive an undergrad-level writing seminar intact. I never would have imagined that the same director who wasted so much of his time on disco-era priapism and modern-day second plagues would have a movie of this caliber in him, but there it is. In adapting Upton Sinclair’s didactic novel Oil! for the big screen, Anderson manages to restrain nearly every single one of the self-indulgent strains of his creative instinct that maddened me so much in the past, and re-channel the remaining ones in a manner that perfectly fits the deservedly epic tone of this story of one man’s boundless greed and ambition while hunting for black gold in the early 1900’s. It helps that with Daniel Day Lewis, Anderson finally has a leading-man whose mountainous performance allows him to stray away from the Altman-esque ensemble casts that helped turn his previous films into such shallow exercises in barely developed characterization. Most of all, however, the director shows the common sense to reign himself in and rely upon the strictest and most visual sense of cinematic storytelling possible, resulting in long wordless stretches and grandly photographed spectacles that reach back to the scale and scope of silent-era filmmaking. Thanks to this one picture, I have come to rethink my position on Anderson’s career, and can confidently look forward to his next film. I only hope I don’t come to regret it.
11) The Science of Sleep (Gondry) 2006
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