THE GREATEST FISH STORY EVER TOLD

I' faith, part of the reason I was writing these featured Best of the Decade of the Day reviews was as a means of focusing the spotlight on a movie I don't think has enough attention paid to it, or to redress what I believe to be flawed conventional wisdom regarding a misunderstood work. Certainly, neither of those apply in any way to my current subject, but it gave me a good chance to pursue my silent goal of eventually having a review of every single Pixar Animation Studios feature somewhere on this blog; that, and the alternative would be to have three consecutive days where I reviewed an auteur-driven French movie that's at least partially about twisted sexuality, and that's not really anybody's idea of a good time.

So here we are, then, with Finding Nemo: the highest-grossing of all ten Pixar films, and anecdotally, the one that seems to be the closest we come to a consensus pick for their greatest work. And why not? It's arguably the most structurally sound of all their narratives, lacking the third-act drift that to one degree or another arguably plagues Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., WALL-E, and Up; if it is not their most viscerally beautiful movie, it is second only to Cars; prior to Up, no Pixar film could seriously compete with the rich rawness of its emotional heft. I might also add, though I cannot say that this is necessarily an argument for or against it, that Finding Nemo is to my mind the first Pixar movie that is more for adults than it is for children; in fact, other than Ratatouille, I can't really think of another Pixar film that offers so little room for a young viewer to really engage with the film - or even an adolescent viewer, for that matter. Here is a film whose primary, explicit theme is the existential terror faced by a parent when his only child, the last link to a long-since destroyed family and the center of his universe, goes missing; it is about the absolute urgency of the drive to find that lost child, an urgency trumping every other consideration or fear, and it is about the ways that this father learns more about himself and his son in the process of his search. Hell, I don't even know why I can engage with this film. But that's why the folks at Pixar are platinum-clad geniuses, and I'm just a film blogger: they could take that story and tell it in such a way that it remains the most popular of their films, one that does indeed appeal to so many children in such a profound way that its tie-in marketing campaign is second only to Cars in terms of the availability and popularity of Nemo-themed toys and clothes. I personally have a Nemo shirt, and a Nemo shot glass. I also have four different WALL-Es, so I'm not actually a very good case subject.

Numerous viewings have not yet revealed to me the answer to this key question of why a movie so entirely and overwhelmingly about parental angst should be so universally accessible and beloved, but I suppose the simplest answer (which is therefore likely to be the correct one) is that the film is tremendously well-made, marshaling the techniques of live-action filmmaking better than any CGI feature up to that point ever had, for the same ends that those techniques ever serve in classic Hollywood filmmaking: to invisibly but irresistibly drive the audience to the exact emotional space that the filmmakers want us to occupy. In this we have to thank Andrew Stanton, the Pixar house director with the most seemingly intuitive & effortless understanding of how cinema works, making his leading directorial debut after co-directing A Bug's Life with John Lasseter (Lee Unkrich co-directed Nemo, for the record). His potent ability to manipulate the audience is obvious from the very first moments of the film: we open on a shot of the ocean, achieved at a level of photorealistic perfection never before achieved in animation, slowly panning from the open water to a breathtakingly lovely rendering of a coral reef. Anyone with eyes who saw this on the big screen can't help but be instantly drawn in by the unmitigated visual opulence of it, and coyly noting this fact, perhaps, the first lines of the movie, spoken by Albert Brooks (one of the all-time best examples of Pixar's noted skill for casting actors that you really didn't expect to hear in a cartoon, and having it work flawlessly) are "Wow. Wow. Wow." We see two little clown fish, barely distinguishable amongst the colorful life filling the left half of the frame, as Marlin (Brooks's character) continues, "When you said you wanted an ocean view, you didn't think you were going to get the whole ocean, did you?" No, Mr. Stanton, and thank you for rising above and beyond the call.

The scene continues, establishing in swift strokes that Marlin and his wife Coral have just moved into a new neighborhood on behalf of their unborn kids - a brief wide-shot provides a nice visual gag equating the reef to any random American suburb, while giving us a decent idea of who these characters are, all of it presented in a palette of crayon-bright colors. With admirable parsimony, the two clown fish are shown to be playfully, sweetly in love with each other, and then the tone of the film shifts in a heartbeat: the score, which has been light and delicate thus far, cut out for a moment, as we see a shot from Marlin's POV that is, for the first time in the movie, almost entirely devoid of movement. Tension thus instantly developed, we cut back to a shot of Marlin, looking to the left, that slowly zooms back to reveal Coral, looking past the audience to the right. At the exact moment we cut to a shot of a large, spiny fish in the distant, the score fades back in, in a darker, minor key; we cut back to the clown fish, stunned and scared; and then to a wide shot revealing the fish (now plainly a barracuda) to be much closer than the previous shot had made it seem (a tricky bit of movement-by-editing that Stanton has cribbed from the Kurosawa playbook, and a fine playbook that is indeed). The series of shots that follow are for a brief moment still and hushed, until Coral dives for her clutch of eggs, and then the score bursts out and we're hit with a flurry of movement expressed in several shots that are far, far shorter than anything we've yet seen in the film, and Marlin is knocked into blackness with one last roar of sound. He comes too, and the bright colors have been replaced by a field of dim blues, and the score is a hesitant wall of atonal strings. Marlin descends to find his wife and all but one of their hundreds of eggs gone.

I apologise for being so anally specific about this brief scene, but it's a magnificent example of how Stanton's control over the medium gives Finding Nemo so much of its particular emotional kick. There's the mixture of pure audience-wowing spectacle with images very clearly tied to the characters' perspectives, giving us both the scope of this world and defining the personal scale of the story which will take place within it; the combination of long and short "takes" is perfectly calibrated to first ease give us a sense of the characters' languid ease of life, then the horrid stillness of that moment of dread, and finally a shot of heart-stopping terror; and most amazing of all, the abrupt cut to black that divides the two very distinct color schemes, a moment of awful possibility in which, for just a second, we can't know what happened other than an untethered feeling of death (it is, for my money, the most truly distressing scene of a parent dying in the long, parent-unfriendly annals of American feature animation). Even if we have no particular reason to feel anything about the idea of two parents moving into the nice neighborhood to raise a family, everything about the very deliberate construction of this scene gives us one and only one possible response to every beat: Stanton plays the viewer like a fiddle, and it's a privilege to be played.

And that level of control and precision is present in every scene of the film: though some Pixar films use the particular language of the camera in far more evocative ways, I don't know if any of them would reward a shot-by-shot close reading as readily as Finding Nemo.

Of course, you need only see the film to know the rest: that it has a marvelous cast of characters brought to life by an equally marvelous stable of actors, with Ellen DeGeneres in particular deserving every bit of the praise she's received over the years for her performance. The score by Thomas Newman - the first time a Pixar film had been scored by anyone other than Randy Newman, incidentally (fun fact: more different individuals have directed Pixar features than written music for Pixar features) - is a real triumph, gliding and just slightly to the side of pure tonality, evoking the quicksilver aspect of water without necessarily feeling "wet" - because, of course, to a fish, the wetness of water is its least important quality. I think I can be safe in arguing that it is less outwardly funny than any Pixar film to precede it (it may in fact retain the title of "least funny Pixar movie", though the studio has taken decisive steps away from comedy in the last five years), but there are still gags in the film that are as excellent as anything else to come out in the decade; the "mine! mine!" seagulls, of a certainty, are one of the great comic creations of the '00s.

So, what have I done here? Nothing but to say, "this movie deserves praise - continue to praise it for the reasons we all have done since 2003". I feel curiously unguilty about doing so. When a movie is as flat-out good as Finding Nemo, there's not much else that you can say; sometimes it just feels really good to love something and share that love.

THE 100 BEST FILMS OF THE AUGHTS

A running tally, for ease of reading, and held behind a jump to avoid spoiling the countdown.

For the posts expounding on these choices:
Introduction #61-70 #71-80 #81-90 #91-100


61. Bloody Sunday (Greengrass, 2002)
62. Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
63. The Five Obstructions (von Trier and Leth, 2003)
64. A Christmas Tale (Desplechin, 2008)
65. demonlover (Assayas, 2002)
66. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Puiu, 2005)
67. Up (Docter, 2009)
68. The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000)

69. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, 2007)

70. Kill Bill, Vol. 1/Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (Tarantino, 2003-'04)
71. The Day I Became a Woman (Meshkini, 2000)
72. Blissfully Yours (Weerasethakul, 2002)
73. Monsters, Inc. (Docter, 2001)
74. Songs from the Second Floor (Andersson, 2000)
75. Burn After Reading (Coen Brothers, 2008)
76. Gerry (Van Sant, 2002)
77. The Proposition (Hillcoat, 2005)
78. Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2002)
79. Che: Part One/Che: Part Two (Soderbergh, 2008)
80. Far from Heaven Haynes, 2002)
81. A Time for Drunken Horses (Ghobadi, 2000)
82. Broken Flowers (Jarmusch, 2005)
83. Oldboy (Park, 2003)
84. Amores perros (González Iñárritu, 2000)
85. Man Push Cart (Bahrani, 2005)
86. The Edge of Heaven (Akin, 2007)
87. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Jones, 2005)
88. The Story of Marie and Julien (Rivette, 2003)
89. La ciénaga (Martel, 2001)
90. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee, 2000)
91. Summer Hours (Assayas, 2008)
92. War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005)
93. Birth (Glazer, 2004)
94. Bad Education (Almodóvar, 2004)
95. Away from Her (Polley, 2006)
96. Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005)
97. Zodiac (Fincher, 2007)
98. The Descent (Marshall, 2005)
99. Millennium Actress (Kon, 2001)
100. Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006)

THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE: #61-70

Introduction

70. Kill Bill, Vol. 1
Kill Bill, Vol. 2
(Quentin Tarantino, 2003-'04, USA)

Inglourious Basterds is probably smarter; it's certainly more complex. But dammit, it's just not anywhere near as fun as Tarantino's loving, epic-length tribute to, and parodic indictment of, the trash he grew up watching, the spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation and kung-fu pictures which must have made living near a grind house in the 1970s such a heavenly experience (DVDs are so... clean!). He uses the tools of cinema as a private toy box like never before or since in his eminently playful career, with an end result that has its cake and eats it too: mountains of delirious cartoon gore intermingle with a subtle thread of "yes, and then what?" anti-revenge commentary that even the director seems to have missed in his fanboyish enthusiasm; thankfully, Uma Thurman (in a miraculous, deceptively profound performance) seems entirely in on the joke, grounding the high-wire act all around her with real, vital humanity.


69. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
(Andrew Dominik, 2007, USA / Canada)

Another one of those damned neo-Westerns, this one perhaps the most excellently "neo" of them all: thanks to the dry narration by an offscreen Hugh Ross, Roger Deakins's distractingly stylised cinematography, and Domink's absolute refusal to spend time inside his characters' heads (even with Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck at their very best) when he can avoid it, The Assassination etc. ends up being both myth and counter-myth, rendering one of the key events of the American Western legend strictly as a narrative event, removing us from the events we see to such a degree that we can only possibly regard it as an artificial construct. This could be gruesomely academic, except that Dominik then uses this artifice as a scalpel, cutting his way into the concepts of "The Western" and "The Historic West" and revealing all the ways that American mythology isn't what we think it is. (Reviewed here)


68. The Gleaners and I
AKA Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
(Agnès Varda, 2000, France)

An effortless combination of autobiography and social commentary with a layer of pixie dust on top, courtesy of a filmmaker long prone to ignoring the rules of "how cinema works" that she doesn't like, and who's not looking to change at the start of her eighth decade on this planet. Taking a close look at a marginalised culture - gleaners, people who rescue usable material from what the rest of us would regard as waste - Varda does a yeoman's job bringing their story to life, but in the end this is less about a certain subset of French society than about being endlessly fascinated by the unexplored corners of life. Hence the attention paid to the treasures of Varda's own life of "gleaning", or even just her entranced delight at using her video camera to capture images. It's charming and maybe twee, but filled with obvious, infectious joy.


67. Up
(Pete Docter, 2009, USA)

Pixar's films are justly famous for their easy, genuine appeal to both adults and children; their delightfully unexpected protagonists; their masterful "pure cinema" use of color and shape to be just about the loveliest animated films out there right now. In all these ways, Up is just par for the course. But even given the studio's equally well-known ability to shift moods without a hitch, have any of their other movies - have any other American movies in recent memory, period - drifted so quickly from farce to sentiment to tragedy and back so quickly and so successfully? In the span of a minute, it jumps from the heartbreaking story of an old man whose reason to live died with his wife, to the hilarious yammering of a talking dog, and both of these polar opposites are equally engaging, moving and real. If that's not genius, what is? (Reviewed here)


66. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
AKA Moartea domnului Lăzărescu
(Cristi Puiu, 2005, Romania)

By this point, pointing out that the Romanian New Wave was the world's most exciting national cinematic movement in the last ten years has passed from "obvious" to "desperately trite", but let me do it anyway. And then let me add that the most characteristic of these Romanian films is Puiu's dazzling satire of the health care industry: too unremittingly grim to call it a comedy, too cosmically absurd to call it anything else. So instead of trying to stick a label on the film, let's just praise it as the singular thing that it is: a film that never gets so black that it can't find scraps of human sentiment lying around here or there, and at the same time a film that refuses to lie about the nasty truth in its beating heart: sometimes, unpleasant old people die because of bureaucracy, and the world doesn't give a shit. (Reviewed here)


65. demonlover
(Olivier Assayas, 2002, France)

Despite arguments about the nature of internet commerce that don't quite play the same way they did when the film was new, Assayas's heady attack against globalism and the soul-destroying tendencies of unchecked international capitalism remains tremendously unsettling. Arguments that mass media dull our moral faculties have existed ever since mass media has, but it's a rare work that comes along with quite this much ice-cold blood in its veins, and such a frankly mean-spirited refusal to coddle the audience in any way. The filmmaker frames his story of a trade deal to get hyper-violent Japanese porn to a world-wide market with a single-minded intensity of vision that gives the viewer no room to escape, and even at its most extreme absurdity, the scenario never goes so far afield from what every habitual internet user can recognise in the abstract that any of it ever becomes implausible. (Reviewed here)


64. A Christmas Tale
AKA Un conte de Noël
(Arnaud Desplechin, 2008, France)

The director's ecstasy in finding new ways to warp the fabric of cinema around his scenario like space-time bending around the event horizon of a black hole is contagious enough that it's easy to forgive how frequently his ideas come just shy of cohering - and easy to ignore how potentially depressing is this story of a family that starts out with everybody hating everyone else, and ends with everybody not particularly liking anybody else, but having found some way to more or less function in despite of that. So, no Hollywood concept of Christmas cheer is this; but even so, Desplechin's erratic, idiosyncratic approach to narrative and imagery ends up finding all that is beautiful and moving even in these miserable bastard people. The cast is a who's-who of essential French character actors, spearheaded by fiery performances from the great Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric. (Reviewed here)


63. The Five Obstructions
AKA De fem benspænd
(Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, Denmark / Switzerland / Belgium / France)

Alack, that even I, who has essentially no use for Danish shit-stirrer Lars von Trier whatsoever, was not able to keep him away from my Best of the Decade list. The documentary that he co-signed - it is a film that positively buggers any attempt to otherwise place authorship - deserves it, though: not only does von Trier seem delighted to play up his persona as an unmatched asshole, forcing his alleged mentor Leth to jump through a bizarre series of hoops in re-devising his 1967 short The Perfect Man, but the film that came about from that experiment asks a heady number of questions about the process of filmmaking, cinematic authorship, and the distance between an artist's intent and the actual meaning of the object he creates. More about the inquiry than the answers, this is one of the most challenging films about filmmaking ever created.


62. Spirited Away
AKA 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi)
(Miyazaki Hayao, 2001, Japan)

Whatever can I say about the film that finally forced anime into the dead center of the U.S. mainstream, 13 years after Akira, that hasn't been said better elsewhere? There's a reason why Miyazaki's name always comes up in conversations about the greatest fantasists in cinema, which is that he's one of the greatest fantasists in cinema, and this massively personal revision of the "Alice in Wonderland" scenario will likely always remain the argument in favor of his boundless imaginative genius. While the story beats are a bit arrhythmic, anyone with eyes is almost certainly too busy watching in goggle-eyed awe at the cornucopia of marvelous creatures and richly-detailed settings that make up this genial, beautiful nightmare world to care about nitpicky script notes. Very little can match it as a movie of the noblest kind: it creates a perfectly coherent world that could not possibly exist outside of cinema.


61. Bloody Sunday
(Paul Greengrass, 2002, United Kingdom / Ireland)

Perfecting the aesthetic that he'd later use more famously in United 93 (to much degraded effect, to my thinking), Greengrass's docudrama about the events of 30 January, 1972 in Derry, Ireland remains his finest work, and one of the great films yet made about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Despite a remarkably consisted, un-inflected visual grammar, which follows a number of characters from a detached perspective, the movie ends up being a full-throated, deeply passionate primal scream against the violent injustice done by the British Army against unarmed protesters; and even as it is made up of a laundry-list of particulars about that day, gleaned as much as possible from primary sources, it achieves a feeling of universality in its depiction of the chaos of the massacre itself, to become a great statement against any power which would use force indiscriminately and lazily.

PORN NATIONS

No film by the chameleon-like director Olivier Assayas met with as much brutal misunderstanding - at least, in the United States; I cannot speak to its reception in Europe - as 2002's demonlover, a stupendously intelligent assault on globalism, e-commerce, the media, corporate culture - oh, and violent pornography, although insofar as the movie has anything to say about pornography or sexuality at all, it's only as a means to the greater end of savaging life in the age of the internet (because, as much as we don't like to admit it, we all know that the internet really is for porn, and Avenue Q wasn't just making a snotty joke). To judge from most of the film's majority of negative reviews, you'd think that this porn angle was somehow enough to make demonlover some kind of half-assed erotic techno-noir thriller; but it's hard to imagine a thriller of any stripe more aggressively un-erotic than this one.

At heart, it's basically a corporate espionage mystery; not the most well-worn genre in the film industry, maybe, but familiar enough in the essentials that it's easy to hang on to what's happening. Karen (Dominique Reymond) is the chief negotiator working on behalf of a French media company, the Volf Corporation, in deals with a Japanese content provider called TokyoAnime, hentai producers just on the cusp of a bold new world in fully-rendered CGI porn cartoons. But Karen has herself some internal competition, in the form of Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen), assistant to the company's owner Henri-Pierre Volf (Jean-Baptiste Malartre); Diane endeavors to have Karen drugged and attacked, so that the older woman is forced to step away from the deal, leaving Diane with Karen's antagonistic assistant Elise (Chloë Sevigny) and business partner Hervé (Charles Berling), and best of all, her position.

The TokyoAnime papers are inked, and Diane moves to her next, and far more lucrative prospect: the American company Demonlover.com, in the form of a negotiator named Elaine Si Gibril (Gina Gershon), wants to get at TokyoAnime through Volf, as this will give them 75% of the world hentai market and drive their hated competitors Mangatronics out of business; but this deal starts to run into trouble when Volf (the man, not the company) has strong objections to Demonlover's alleged relationship to a site called the Hellfire Club, where anyone willing to pay the money can watch women tortured in real time, with a neat-o user command interface. Needless to say, the Hellfire Club is a massively illegal operation, and if Demonlover really is connected with it, Volf will have absolutely nothing to do with it: they're perfectly okay with porn, but are terrified at anything that might get them prosecuted, as we already saw with their tentative concerns about the TokyoAnime deal.

From here on - 45 minutes into the movie - I must let the plot tend to itself, for that's as far as we can go without hitting spoilers, and while the narrative of demonlover is not at all its most important element, it wouldn't be fair to give away some of the slinkiest turns and twists it makes in a second hour that is quite amazingly dense with plot curves.

Anyway, we've got more than enough to work on: what matters more than the particular details of who's betraying who is the wholly impersonal world in which all of these deals are made, a world that is very specifically and important not presented as wicked and immoral; it is far scarier and more accurately amoral, made up of people so invested in money and trade that they have seemingly forgotten any actual real-world consequence to the sordid material in which they traffic. The closest anyone ever comes to making any sort of moral judgment one way or the other comes when the French team is visiting the TokyoAnime studio, and Hervé, watching a scene of a girl being raped by eels, cracks "It looks bad for her," a gag so lame he doesn't even let the translator explain it to the Japanese representatives, as Diane smiles absently and lights a cigarette. That is the kind of person we're looking at throughout demonlover: corporate bureaucrats so withdrawn from humanity that they aren't bothered by watching girlish cartoon figures getting raped except for their concern that the French authorities might view the characters' lack of pubic hair as a signifier that they're minors, or whose response to something as plainly evil as the Hellfire Club is to idly suggest that it's "fascinating". Though the gold standard in this regard is certainly the American Elaine's admission that the Hellfire Club is a well-made, enviable site, not without a trace of envy.

It's maybe difficult to work up moral indignation against the absence of moral consciousness, but Assayas is a director always up for a hard job, and his treatment of this milieu makes clear his absolute hatred for an international climate in which this kind of filth can be discussed solely in terms of its financial value in ways that could hardly be imagined in any other medium than the cinema. There are two visual cues in particular that dominate demonlover and propel its arguments far more readily than any amount of speaking could, not that any of the characters in the film are particularly inclined towards mouthing Assayas's arguments: the first of these is an icy-blue color palette that dominates virtually every moment of the film, washing out the characters and leaving them looking rather artificial and robotic. The actors' deliberately vacant performances help with this feeling, but it mostly comes down to the director's frequent cinematographer Denis Lenoir to blend the harsh under-lighting of film noir with this steely color scheme in a way that leaves the world of the film seeming mechanical and brutal. The other cue, and the more important I'd wager, although much more difficult to explain, is the careful positioning of the camera, which usually adopts a perspective quite separate from anyone onscreen, especially in the moments when we in the audience are watching the hentai or the Hellfire Club site: we're "between" the characters and the media, as it were, closer to the screen than any real-life viewer ever would be, so close that at times it loses definition. It's almost as though the director is rubbing our noses in the stuff that his characters barely even notice. In this regard, the grand final shot is a particular corker: inn which a victim of the Hellfire Club is staring blankly at the home viewer, who isn't even watching his screen - but we, the movie viewer, are looking straight at her, and she at us, just for a second until the camera shifts away. The implications are legion, but the one I like best is that Assayas and the character are both daring us to admit our own culpability in living in a media-soaked culture like the one in the film, a culture in which the moral value of media has been so sand-blasted away by multitasking and increasing audience savviness that we can too easily forget that there are ramifications to media consumption.

It's a nasty-minded attack on the plugged-in lifestyle that Westerners - I suspect Americans especially - have come to love so much since the mid-'90s, and I expect this has much to do with the cold reception given the film, or the odd fixation on its "narrative breakdown" after the half-way mark. It's not really a breakdown at all, though it switches gears from the easily-digested "companies suck" story of the first half; now we're confronted directly with the personal effects on the characters who live and breath in the environment that the first half defines. It's an elegant and, in hindsight, absolutely inevitable track-jumping that gives demonlover most of its truly unsettling impact, and it's not at all fun to grapple with a film that takes such nasty delight in pointing out how much human-scale damage is done by the modern world, especially given the film's whole-hearted refusal to offer any solutions or answers - like the problem of "business love unfettered capitalism" has any solutions! Now, all I've said has a single, major knock against it, which is that the precise world imagined by demonlover looks somewhat little like the internet-addled world of 2010, and it's not exactly like I remember 2002 being, either (of course, the idea of literal torture porn has only gained credibility since 2002). But there are enough discomfiting overlaps between Assayas's world and ours - the only flat-out error in representation I caught was when he showed an American teenager's room with a poster for the 1998 Godzilla - that it's doesn't take much squinting to see how the two could align; and the idea that corporations run amuck are able to do incalculable damage to society and to the individuals caught up in those corporate cultures is something that sadly, is quite obvious even eight years later, even without the veil of a techno-thriller fable.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE: #71-80

Introduction

80. Far from Heaven
(Todd Haynes, 2002, USA / France)

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Haynes's tribute to the gorgeous Technicolor melodramas of master director Douglas Sirk (especially All That Heaven Allows) to play like a game of Spot the Reference; while the seemingly trite choice to expand Sirk's class-based social satire to include race and homosexuality could easily have resulted in just one more tiresome example of twitting Those Conservative Fifties. Instead, the film, and its immaculate re-creation of period filming techniques (kudos to DP Edward Lachman and editor James Lyons), proves a sublimely heartbreaking story of love, self-fulfillment, and loss, with a never-better Julianne Moore embodying far more than just one another repressed Eisenhower-era housewife. For Haynes didn't just recreate the look and the kinkiness of those magnificent old Sirk films; he succeeded as well in recreating the devastating emotional sucker punch that only a real soap opera can provide.


79. Che: Part One AKA The Argentine
Che: Part Two AKA Guerrilla
(Steven Soderbergh, 2008, France / Spain / USA)

This massive, dyadic story of the controversial Marxist revolutionary - a film that Soderbergh has since tacitly disowned, or at least downplayed its value - surely does look like it ought to be a biopic. But really, this lusty structural experiment is much more a commentary on the inherent unreliability of the biopic form, telling a fragmentary version of Che Guevara's life story in a very deliberate act of subversion. We are not given the easy thematic propositions that This man was a monster or This man was a saint; this man was a man, the films state at the end of their combined 4.5-hour running time, and his problems began at exactly the moment that he chose to forget that fact. And of course, being a Soderbergh film, it's a formalist's dream, providing what remains the best argument in favor of the RED ONE digital camera. (Reviewed here)


78. Russian Ark
AKA Русский ковчег (Russkiy kovcheg)
(Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002, Russia / Germany / Japan / Canada/ Finland / Denmark)

It's so easy to get sucked in by the obvious gimmick at the heart of Sokurov's most widely-seen film (the whole movie occurs in one uninterrupted 96-minute tracking shot) that it's equally easy to lose sight of just how valuable that gimmick - and if I'm going to keep praising it, I should quit calling it a "gimmick" - is to the film's meaning. The film is a tour of St. Petersburg's State Hermitage museum, with the camera occupying the perspective of an anonymous Russian (voiced by the director) journeying with a 19th Century European (Sergei Dontsov) through a series of staged moments representing Russian history over the last 200 years. With no distracting edits, the film's fluid, non-chronological amble through time becomes increasingly fervid and dreamlike, as Sokurov's deeply critical appreciation of his country's history insinuates itself directly into our minds, with no extraneous mediation or framing elements necessary.


77. The Proposition
(John Hillcoat, 2005, Australia / United Kingdom)

The latest in a long and noble history of Aussie Westerns was among the first films in the unexpected and entirely gratifying explosion of neo-Westerns that hit in the middle of the decade and hung on for a couple of years. It's closest in spirit to the films of Sergio Leone, using landscape and violence brought almost to the level of abstraction as counterpoints to its simple, nihilistic story of civilisation's miserable failure to secure a victory over the wilderness. It's more about creating a mood than anything else: from Benoît Delhomme's haunting imagery to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's outstanding score, to the worn-out, soulless (in a good way!) performances by just about every single member of the cast, The Proposition is shatteringly bleak, but it comes by it honestly, and it does something far more profound and unsettling with that bleakness than just indulging in lazy cynicism. (Reviewed here)


76. Gerry
(Gus Van Sant, 2002, USA)

Van Sant wears his influences a bit too much on his sleeve, but the first and best film of the achingly spare Death Trilogy is honest enough about itself and its intentions that the mere fact that it couldn't possibly play more like Tarr Lite feels like a misplaced criticism. Two men named Gerry are wandering in the desert, and... And what? That's not a question that Van Sant is ever terrible concerned with pursuing; this is neither a plot-driven film nor a character-driven one, but something much more about mood and presence. It's about the sounds and imagery and feelings of being lost; first liberation, then confusion, and finally frustration, anger and fear. With minimal metaphysical puffery, the film captures the moment of terror when "the wilderness and I" becomes just "the wilderness" with eminently pleasing simplicity, and top-notch Harris Savides cinematography.


75. Burn After Reading
(Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 2008, USA / United Kingdom / France)

Political satire would seem to be an easy fit for a pair of filmmakers noted for their fixation on human idiocy and destructive self-importance. Sure enough, when they turned their eye for farce onto America's badly defective intelligence-gathering community, the results were just as savage as you'd hope. That's not the only reason for loving their best outright comedy since the 1990s: for starters, it enjoys a terrific ensemble cast (one of the best they've ever put together), operating on exactly the right warped wavelength to make their characters just likable enough without dulling the edge of the brothers' most scabrous screenplay ever, a hilarious and angry dissection of the real-world effects of the widespread stupidity that marks all of their work; in the outstanding final scene, they even manage to indict the viewer who would dare to take the film seriously. (Reviewed here)


74. Songs from the Second Floor
AKA Sånger från andra våningen
(Roy Andersson, 2000, Sweden / France / Denmark / Norway / Germany)

Andersson's follow-up, You, the Living, managed to rob some of the thunder from his breakthrough (and his first feature in 25 years), using virtually the same aesthetic and themes to decidedly better effect. But even knowing that the later film exists, there are as many reasons to love Songs as there are sad-sack characters inhabiting its icily-perfect static frames. Mining breathtaking black comedy from the dourest of subjects - the soul-crushing loneliness of the individual, the mortal dread that comes when nothing, not work, family, religion, or even death itself can be counted on any longer - Andersson traps his subjects like bugs in a jar, watching them batter about helplessly against a world they can't control or understand. But even as we're laughing at their pathetic lives, we can't help but feel the deepest sympathy: for despite its grotesque nature, this is a mirror, and no mistake.


73. Monsters, Inc.
(Pete Docter, 2001, USA)

Even in a post-WALL-E, post-Dug world, is there any character in the Pixar corpus as utterly darling as Boo, the guileless toddler at the center of the drama in the studio's last genuine "kid's" movie? And if there was absolutely nothing else besides Boo that made the film soar, I might even still consider it for a spot on this list, but besides that, it creates one of the most absorbing, fully-realised alt-universes of any animated film in modern history, full of invisible throwaway details that combine to give Monstropolis the lived-in, flesh-out tactility of any real-life city in any live-action movie you can name. Add the playful, cartoon-logic energy of the third-act chase, some of the most charming, silly humor in any of Pixar's movies, and proof positive that Billy Crystal can give a truly good performance, and this one makes me embarrassingly happy every time I see it.


72. Blissfully Yours
AKA สุดเสน่หา (Sud sanaeha)
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002, Thailand / France)

The film that put a love-him or really-hate-him director on the international map, and it's never even been available in his native country in anything approaching the form that he intended, largely because of its explicit sexual nature. Explicit or not, nothing could be further from pornography than Weerasethakul's thoughtfully detached consideration of why people have sex, a subject often ignored in cinema. In his characteristically bifurcated story, the first 40 minutes detail a soullessly functional world that the remaining 85 minutes treat as a forgotten bad-dream, presenting his lovers in an absurdly Edenic woodland, filmed in such glacially-paced, artfully artless shots that even the second half feels more like a dream than not, and one that we know the protagonists are going to have to awake from eventually. But for a few precious moments, it's all so perfect that the title doesn't even play as irony.


71. The Day I Became a Woman
AKA روزی که زن شدم (Roozi ke zan shodam)
(Marziyeh Meshkini, 2000, Iran)

The best film by Iran's prolific Makhmalbaf family (Meshkini's husband, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, co-wrote this picture and has directed scads of others, most famously Kandahar; her daughter, Samira Makhmalbaf gave us the criminally under-seen Blackboards) is this three-part study of how "womanhood" is defined and understood in a country where being female is the next worst thing to a capital crime. Meskhini considers the three key stages in a woman's life - childhood, adulthood, old age - and prods and pokes about at the ways Iran seeks to dominate her gender at each of those stages with quiet, understated passion. Though the segments aren't equally effective (the third sequence in particular takes a symbolic and absurdist approach to its subject that doesn't sit well with the others), all in all, this is a devastating film that collides the personal and political as well as I have seen it done all decade.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE: #81-90

Introduction

90. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
AKA 臥虎藏龍 (Wòhǔ cánglóng)
(Ang Lee, 2000, Taiwan / Hong Kong / China / USA)

Despite some lingering concerns that this is an Asian movie for a U.S. audience - beginning with the alleged fact that the two leads, Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat sport laughably bad accents throughout - I still can't help but be sucked in by the visual grandeur and heaving emotional splendor of this unlikely pastiche of wuxia and soap opera. There's such a velvety richness to the whole affair, from the sumptuousness of the sets to the succulent melodrama of the love story to the ridiculously gorgeous photography used to capture all of it. Even as a number of later films of similar provenance have been given splashy international releases, none of them have matched the across-the-board quality of this one, a film in which Lee indulges all of his strengths while managing to keep away from all of his weaknesses.


89. La ciénaga
(Lucrecia Martel, 2001, Argentina / France / Spain)

Martel's oustanding debut didn't just usher in the career of one of modern cinema's most important new voices: it helped to remind the outside world that, in fact, Argentina made movies, and thus helped to drag that country into the fertile boom of New Latin American Cinema. None of which should distract from the very real achievement of this very specific film: a morbidly hilarious look at the decay of the Argentine bourgeoisie, embodied by two miserable families spending a humid summer in the country. Without apparently doing anything unusual, the director breaks most of the rules of conventional narrative to present her slice-of-life tale (based on her own family memories) with a directness that is both discomfiting and liberating; yet the movie is far too entertaining at every moment to ever seem as revolutionary as its off-kilter construction and aggressively symbolic social commentary would suggest.


88. The Story of Marie and Julien
AKA Histoire de Marie et Julien
(Jacques Rivette, 2003, France / Italy)

A deceptively simple, devastatingly effective exploration of two human beings. Rivette's very precise, very characteristic, very filmic aesthetic is far enough from almost anything else in contemporary cinema - while looking for all the world like it's not terribly unique at all - that it's not hard to imagine why an unprepared viewer would be horribly confounded by the film's intensely slow pace and refusal to submit its characters to the rules of normal behavior. But given enough space to unravel Rivette's pushy and yet completely subtle clock/time metaphor, to appreciate the paranormal elements that creep rather unexpectedly into the story, and above all, to fully soak in the sometimes erratic, inexplicable behavior of Marie (Emmanuelle Béart), Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), and their blackmail victim Madame X (Anne Brochet), the film starts to reveal itself in breathtakingly poetic ways that can only be experienced, not described.


87. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
(Tommy Lee Jones, 2005, USA / France)

Jones-the-director gave Jones-the actor the delicious lead role in the best screenplay Guillermo Arriaga has ever written, and Jones-the-actor paid him back in full with the best performance of his estimable career. But Jones's feature directorial debut isn't one of the finest actor-gone-director projects in recent memory simply because he was canny enough to know that he was a great actor. It's a brilliantly conceived neo-Western on all fronts: Arriaga's mindfuck screenplay holds together even better the more times you see it, and the legendary Chris Menges frames shots so casually that they almost seem messy until you look closely enough to see how expressive each and every image is. Jones might have had the good fortune to surround himself with gifted collaborators, but he still gets credit for a movie which nimbly exploits Western iconography as a frame to critique both American masculinity, and "the Western" as a concept. (Reviewed here)


86. The Edge of Heaven
AKA Auf der anderen Seite
(Fatih Akin, 2007, Germany / Turkey / Italy)

The hyperlink narrative style that become popular early in the decade produced a lot of arch, irritating stories that play like a parlor game, and a few legitimate masterpieces. Falling firmly in the latter camp is Akin's giddily novelistic exploration of "European" identity in the 21st Century. A tripartite story concerning six individuals in Turkey and Germany, and the threads both known and undiscovered that connect them, it would be easy for the whole thing to collapse under the weight of its own contrivance; instead, it hums with the vitality of its characters and their messiness, brought to life by a top-notch cast (including the timelessly great Hanna Schygulla). Marveling at the fragility of human life while marveling even more at how durable human beings manage to be in times of stress, it is a great human story that never tips into cloying sentimentality or shallow humanism. (Reviewed here)


85. Man Push Cart
(Ramin Bahrani, 2005, USA)

If I can be permitted to disagree with my own list: this one is too damn low. I mean, we're talking about the debut film, and still the best work, by arguably the most important independent filmmaker working in the United States today: in this unassuming 87-minute frame, he was able to pack all the observations you could ever hope to see about life on the fringes of Manhattan, the U.S., the urban world; giving voice to the voiceless without coming across as even a little bit political or polemical. With bottomless sympathy for his protagonist, a Pakistani ex-rock star who now sells coffee and bagels on the street from a cart, and with a carefully artlessly non-style that is something akin to neo-realism but rather different, Bahrani here made a truly essential work, as natural and unforced as breathing.


84. Amores perros
(Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000, Mexico)

Kickstarted the often-dubious "hyperlink narrative" trend, and got the careers of González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga off to a promising start that their subsequent collaborations did nothing to pay off. But let's not use hindsight to beat up on this film, which remains a majestically busy, complex study of Mexican society in the form of three people driven to despair over love and money. And, of course, their dogs. It's a heady, well-considered film that raises some very probing, unanswered questions about life and morality while hiding in the clothes of a routinely trendy crime flick, and its erratic, inventive form is a perfect match for its content. Bonus points for introducing the rest of the world to two of Mexico's most important cinematic exports of the decade, the lovely and talented Gael García Bernal, and the great rough-n-tumble cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. (Reviewed here)


83. Oldboy
AKA 올드보이
(Park Chan-Wook, 2003, South Korea)

If I'm being perfectly honest, I probably enjoy the first film in Park's loose "Vengeance Trilogy", Sympathy for Mr. Vengance, more than the second. But then again, there's absolutely no denying that Oldboy is by far more creative and inventive, and I don't mean in terms of how many ways the protagonist (Choi Min-Sik) finds to exact revenge on his former captors, although the film's American and Asian imitators often don't look any further than that. It's the kind of film that refuses to settle down into one style or favored manner of representing reality, instead chasing down one idea after another: center-punched close-ups with a certain kind of lighting here, a string of oddly-edited wide-shots here, and over there, a fight sequence that's framed like an early-'90s street fight arcade game. Hectic and alienating, maybe: exhilarating and endlessly surprising, without a doubt.


82. Broken Flowers
(Jim Jarmusch, 2005, USA / France)

The great American director's most accessible, commercial project ever - and only for Jarmusch would an arrhythmic, four-part story in which the central question of the drama is left unanswered and unanswerable count as "accessible" and "commercial" just because he has Billy Murray at the center of it all. That funnyman-turned-dramatist has never been better than as Don Johnston, a man confronted with a long-lost son in an anonymous letter from an ex-lover, whose actions in the film consist of variations of doing almost nothing at all, and being full of regret. Filled with great cameos by everyone from Jeffrey Wright to Sharon Stone to a blink-and-miss-her Tilda Swinton, the film is ultimately always about Don: probing his mind madly and unceasingly as he simply stands, too weary to do anything else. That this can even exist in a watchable state is testament to Jarmusch's incredible command of the medium. (Reviewed here)


81. A Time for Drunken Horses
AKA زمانی برای مستی اسب‌ها (Zamani barayé masti asbha)
(Bahman Ghobadi, 2000, Iran)

One of the strongest films to come from Iran during a period when that country's films were consistently among the most aesthetically brave in the world was Ghobadi's feature debut, the first Iranian film ever produced in Kurdish. It's a unblinking, bleak study of the life near the Iraq border, filtered through the figures of four orphaned children, the eldest of whom (Ayoub Ahmadi) is obliged to go through miseries that would have made Oliver Twist blanch in shock in order to keep his siblings alive and healthy. Eschewing even the surface-level innocence of most child-centric movies made in Iran, Ghobadi's film is serious and harsh, with a minimalist aesthetic that puts its clear-eyed lack of sentiment in all the sharper relief. An outraged story of the hell faced by the Kurds, it never gets so wrapped up in politics to lose sight of the human story at its center.

THEY CALL IT PUPPY LOVE

If Amores perros had not premiered in the summer of 2000, it would be necessary to lie and say that it had done so; offhand I cannot name another movie which has ever thus stood at the forefront of what would turn out to be a number of different trends in the decade to follow, while providing such a clear picture of the evolution from the trends of the decade that preceded, as Alejandro González Iñárritu's unnaturally accomplished debut feature. Viewed from the perspective of the year 2000, I recall seeing it as an unusually edgy, creative take-off on Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: there was a similar three-part narrative, shuffled somewhat out of chronological order, involving different sets of characters who overlapped at certain points, and it was set in a world of low-rent gangsters and daydreaming tough guys. Tarantino knock-offs, you may recall, were just about the most prominent subgenre of movies, from countries all 'round the world, in the latter half of the 1990s, just as certainly as Matrix knock-offs, in one guise or another, were the backbone of the first half of the 2000s, so in this respect Amores perros hardly seemed a film to usher in a new kind of cinema, although it was clear to all that it was a damn sight better than nearly all of the other post-Tarantino films out there.

Ten years later, it's hard not to look at that same film and notice above all to the key things it did differently from that glut of hip crime films; for it is those things that proved to be so influential in the years to come. In Guillermo Arriaga's script for Amores perros, we see one of the first pure example of what would come to be called the "hyperlink film", a narrative style in which disconnected stories are revealed to have overlap and connection that only becomes obvious as we hope about from event to event and character to character in what at first seems a random series of non-events, but slowly reveals itself to have distinct meaning and a precise rhythm all its own. Only Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia from 1999 can be rightfully said to predate Amores perros in the creation of this unique narrative form, though it was another 2000 film, Traffic, that really got things rolling as far as making that form so popular as it became throughout the decade, when it began to truly wear out its welcome and go from being a fresh, compelling way to structure narrative threads, to being a wholly irritating cliché in such films as Gonzálex Iñárritu and Arriaga's last collabartion, 2006's shallow, suffocating Babel.

Amores perros is also, if not the first significant example, then the first of which I am aware, of a trend in cinematography that has become somewhat clichéd itself, though not nearly as irritating: the high-grain, high-contrast, "looks cheap but also has a kind of raw beauty" look that is the very bread and butter of Rodrigo Prieto, one of the decade's great practitioners of that art form who made his international splash with this very film, before moving on to create similar visuals for Curtis Hanson in 8 Mile and Spike Lee in 25th Hour. Of course, Prieto is not the only practitioner of this style, just the best; at any rate, in the last ten years it has become incredibly difficult to avoid movies on the prestige circuit that subscribe to this same washed-out, grainy look (and I think here, too, Traffic may have been the film to actually kick off the imitators; but Traffic, I fear that Amores Perros beat you to the punch by all of seven months).

While it's not an aesthetic concern at all, it's also worth pointing out that Amores perros was right in the forefront of the Latin American New Wave, or the New Latin American Cinema, or whatever we want to call it. Either way, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about: the sudden explosion of Latin American films in the arthouses, and Latin American craftspeople all throughout world cinema. Some of the most famous of these are Mexican: González Iñárritu himself, along with his good buddies Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón; Prieto and Emmanel Lubezki, two of the most talented cinematographers now working; actor Gael García Bernal, who appeared in Amores perros himself. Now, I'm not trying to give credit to this one film for launching all of the Latin American New Wave; but it's something to think about. It was a big damn deal all over the world, something that hadn't been true of a Mexican movie since Luis Buñuel returned to France in the 1960s.

All this historical weight I'm piling on this one movie! And in the midst of it all, I haven't said one word about the most important part of all: when you get right down to it, Amores perros is a pretty great movie all around. Dozens of shoddy imitators have done nothing to disguise the wit of its narrative construction, which in this case isn't simply a matter of making something convoluted for the sheer sake of it (I contend that Arriaga did exactly this in the decent but weirdly overpraised 21 Grams), but serves a tremendously specific function in aiding the film's overall construction of a world gone mad. Amores perros is in all ways a singularly urgent film, telling three stories that each reveal a different facet of how urban life in Mexico is broken across class lines, and the fluidity of its chronology serves to keep the audience just disoriented enough that we can only get a handle on this society in fits and starts.

I think the film is not usually given its due as a class-based study: the three stories are, in order, about a poor young man (García Bernal) finding his way into some money and using it unwisely, a model (Goya Toledo) losing her single, mostly superficial talent as a result of accident and foolish judgment, and a homeless man (Emilio Echevarría) hired to assassinate a yuppie. It's hardly the case that Arriaga and González Iñárritu are launching any kind of Marxist polemic about class in Mexico - the film refuses to adopt that kind of certainty about its subjects - but simply noticing that these class issues exist, and that across classes, people tend to make the same sort of mistakes in regards to money and other people; that it is own kind of class statement, no? But thanks to the film's title (Love Dogs, essentially), this element of the movie is obscured by its other two overarching themes: the relationship of humans and non-human animals, dogs specifically, and the different ways that we can love, and more often, fail to love. Which are themes treated with some care, by all means; but I still persist in finding the core of the movie to be its treatment of Mexican society, thanks largely to the overwhelming madness of its narrative and its aesthetic, and the ways that reflects the madness of the society depicted.

Clearly, Prieto's unconventionally-beautiful, i.e. "ugly" cinematography, does much to further this notion; if not only because of the harsh contrast (brought about by his experiments with film stock, experiments not at all well-served by any of the film's DVD iterations), then also because of the jerky movement on display throughout. The editing team (which includes the director) helped in no small way: the cutting in this movie, especially in the first sequence, and especially especially in the very compellingly-faked dog fight scenes, is typically frantic and jarring, though in a much subtler way than has become common in the wake of the Jason Bourne movies. It's that urgency thing, like I was saying: everything about the film is very carefully pitched to keep us as edgy and confused and worked-up as possible, which makes the film's exploration of three very different but ultimately sympathetic social conditions seem that much more alive and important. Even the film's frequent eruptions of man-on-man and dog-on-dog violence add to this urgency, rather than seeming crudely exploitative (though, despite a very stentorian assurance that all the animal violence is faked, it's better that dog lovers with tender stomachs keep far away from this movie).

And that, too, is something that has become a bit more common in the '00s: using the language of violent cinema refined in the '90s (by which I mean both its depiction of violence, and the violence it does to traditional cinematic vocabulary) to give the film a vibrancy and vitality, making the movie itself almost a living, breathing thing, so that we are that much more attentive to the matter within the film. If I can't ultimately call Amores perros one of the full-stop, A+ masterpieces of the decade, it's only because the story does take to wandering a bit too much in the second and third segments, and not because the overall feeling of the movie is anything less than revelatory.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE: #91-100

Introduction

100. Old Joy
(Kelly Reichardt, 2006, USA)

Two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) drive to a secluded hot spring in the Oregon mountains, and find they've grown apart. That's all there is to Rechardt's quiet little breakthrough, a magnificent little jewel of character study that does all the things that American independent filmmaking is supposed to be good at, but so very rarely even attempts. There are no hopped-up stylistic tricks or hip references (unless the perfectly-suited Yo La Tengo soundtack counts as hip), just a hushed tone and unobtrusive, observant camera that follows with long but never stretched-out takes as these two sides of U.S. maledom - self-satisfied hedonism and reluctantly willing maturity - look for some kind of concord that might never arrive.


99. Millennium Actress
AKA 千年女優 (Sennen joyû)
(Kon Satoshi, 2001, Japan / South Korea)

A demanding, sometimes frustrating, ultimately revelatory exploration of how memories are created and corrupted by movies, mixed with a metaphorical consideration of how Japan has grown and changed in the latter half of the 20th Century, Kon's second feature - and, I'd warily suggest, his best work, period - doesn't push the limitations of animation as much as some better-known anime. It doesn't have to. The film's free-form, logic-defying blend of the "real" and the "fictional", could only work this well in a medium that already bends "realism" to the point where it almost breaks; the dream-logic inherent to animation matches perfectly with the dream-logic of the sneakily non-linear narrative. The best argument in favor of a director who deserves much broader acclaim in this country. (Reviewed here)


98. The Descent
(Neil Marshall, 2005, United Kingdom)

Nothing is easier to make than a horror movie; by my observation, nothing is harder to make than an honest-to-God scary horror movie, and for that alone we should never stop thanking Marshall. But it might even be the least of the writer-director's achievements that he was able to make the usual creepy sub-humans and off-camera invisible children seem genuinely terrifying; greater still is that the film looks for horror not in the shocking deaths of horny teens but in the imperceptibly slow unravelling of real-live adult characters, with real-live adult issues, like the searing pain of losing a child. Add in Sam McCurdy's outstanding anamorphic cinematography, which uses negative space in the form of thick swatches of black all around, making for a more claustrophobic cinematic underground than I have ever seen, and what we have here is an excessively sophisticated and well-crafted scare machine. (Reviewed here)


97. Zodiac
(David Fincher, 2007, USA)

By the time this unsmiling, brutally long serial killer procedural ends, we've long since figured out that, notwithstanding two perfectly-constructed attack scenes (one right at the start) that will give you the heebie-jeebies as much as anything in any other thriller of the decade, this isn't really a serial killer film according to any rules you've previously encountered. It's a study in the sheer unmitigated weariness of being obsessed with the unsolved and unsolvable, a worrying peek into the cracks of the American id. Anchored by three perfectly-keyed performances by Robert Downey, Jr, Jake Gyllenhaal and especially Mark Ruffalo, the film is piercing and uncomfortable; blessed by a directorial hand that finds Fincher at his most calculating and disciplined in using the visual flourishes that have peppered all his films, it could not possibly tell its story in a more wholly cinematic idiom. (Reviewed here)


96. Batman Begins
(Christopher Nolan, 2005, USA / United Kingdom)

A year and a half after the new movie smell has worn away from its fancier, more popular brother, I've come back around to the idea that this one is still the best superhero movie ever made, and Nolan's reigning triumph as a director - to say nothing of his key collaborators Wally Pfister on camera and Nathan Crowley on design, who do so much to make this film's evocation of Gotham City look like a foggy urban wastelaned out of some hideous breeding of comic books, 1940s film noir, and somebody's nightmare vision of Detroit. The idea that superhero stories are contemporary America's own mythology is altogether tired and clichéd, which is how you know that it's true: and I can think of no filmed superhero story which in both its stately narrative and its impossible, otherworldly imagery, is so successfully, self-consciously mythological as this one. (Reviewed here)


95. Away from Her
(Sarah Polley, 2006, Canada / USA)

It's almost impossible to believe that Polley - all of 27 when her directorial debut was completed - should have made such a perfect study of the sorrows of old age. But the evidence is in this tremendously moving, low-key story about an aging couple, Grant and Fiona (Gordon Pinsent and a stunning Julie Christie, giving one of the best performances of her career), who must painfully deal with her encroaching Alzheimer's; and even that's not as heartbreaking as the second half of the film, when Grant must come to terms with the knowledge that Fiona has forgotten who he is. Armed with her own excellent screenplay, trading in some measure of strict realism for emotional truth, and with the noblest and most under-used of all tools of the cinema, the close-up, Polley crafts a chamber drama of the most exquisite sensitivity and haunting sense of loss.


94. Bad Education
AKA La mala educación
(Pedro Almodóvar, 2004, Spain)

One of the finest living directors riffs on one of the finest directors of all time: it's Almodóvar Does Hitchcock, with a healthy splash of film noir just for the sake of making the darkest film by far of the director's current new wave of popularity that much darker. Like all of his films, it's a ludicrous melodrama shot through with glowing colors; but where they usually have a cheeky good nature even to their blackest moments, this all-male story about lies, sexual abuse, the cruelty of masculine sexual desire, and how hard it can be to find a good movie story is uncharacteristically nasty, even as it is more sensual and erotic than the rest of Almodóvar's recent work. As unforgettable as it is squirm-inducing, it's a genuinely unnerving thriller whose depiction of exaggerated, rotten human feeling is made enjoyable only thanks to its candy-colored surface.


93. Birth
(Jonathan Glazer, 2004, USA)

One of the best music video directors to jump to features in the last ten years, Glazer followed his immaculately profane crime thriller Sexy Beast with this confounding, magnificent picture of a woman torn by confusion, doubt and hope, and then promptly vanished. Let us pray that he returns sometime; but until then, Birth makes for a fine coda to a much-too-short career. Nicole Kidman plays Anna, a woman visited by a 10-year-old boy claiming to be her reincarnated husband; for all the squickiness promised by that concept (and the unfair pre-release buzz), the actual film is a shattering, beautiful study of Anna's response to this news. Besides Glazer's delicate handling, the film has a clutch of career-best moments: Harris Savides's gorgeous, evocative cinematography, Alexandre Desplat's indescribably haunting score, and Kidman's amazing performance, one of the greatest of the decade. The opera scene alone is cinema in its purest form.


92. War of the Worlds
(Steven Spielberg, 2005, USA)

Under-appreciated even by the faithful who refuse to allow that Spielberg's tremendous financial success and admittedly embarrassing sentimentality make him a wretch, this might be the bleakest popcorn movie of the decade: even more than Nolan's Batman films, it's a non-stop 116-minute ride of misery and visciouness. Starting with a drama about a man who, as far as we can tell, really doesn't like his children, Spielberg and the invaluable Janusz Kaminski freely quote imagery from some of the most horrible events in modern history: floods, earthquakes, the Holocaust, 9/11. Ultimately, even that isn't enough, and in its final 25 minutes, the movie presents a barren hellscape straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. A dreadful late turn towards one of the stupidest happy endings in the director's filmography doesn't change how effectively he's packaged so many nightmares into one impeccably-crafted blockbuster, laying bare Western culture's darkest fears for everyone to see.


91. Summer Hours
AKA L'heure d'été
(Olivier Assayas, 2008, France)

One of the most uncharacteristic movies from a director who's never been easy to pin down; and yet there's a refreshingly classic French-ness to this film, with its country house full of unhappy people trying to figure out why they aren't a better family. Quoting Chekhov in the plot and Renoir in the visuals, Assayas has put together one of the most sincerly moving family dramas in many a year, a judgment-free study of all the little ways that we move apart from each other. But even as it presents a chain of events leading only to dysfunction and alienation, it's as warm and ephemeral as the title makes it sound, loving all of its characters - given life by an absurdly strong ensemble cast - even as they don't know how to love each other. (Reviewed here)

THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

The reception of anime in the West has followed a torturous path: in the '60s, it was a cheap source of awful children's programming; in the '80s, it was an underground font of bent sexuality and hyper-stylised violence; in the '00s it had firmly entrenched itself as, if not a mainstream form of cinematic entertainment, certainly mainstream enough that it's no big deal when an anime picture wins Oscars, sells well on DVD, or does well at the box office. It's even managed, in some degree, to topple the longstanding "animation is for kids!" mentality that has dominated the American landscape since at least the 1950s.

Still, the modern acceptance of anime in the United States has only, thus far, produced one household name (for a given kind of household): Miyazaki Hayao, the so-called "Japanese Disney", whose elaborate, gorgeous fantasies are certainly emblematic of some of the best that animation has to offer anywhere in the world. But he's not the only genius working in Japanese animation right now; and if I but had the power to control everyone else's will, I would absolutely correct the shameful fact that for whatever reason, the work of animation director Kon Satoshi hasn't become better-known in this country outside of the expected anime-fanciers' circles. Partially, I guess, this is because Kon has a much smaller output: as of this writing, only four features and one 13-episode TV series. Partially, it's because unlike Miyazaki (whose films are designed for a pretty wide family audience, sometimes skewing a touch older, sometimes a touch younger), Kon's work is comfortably and unmistakably for adults - even when his films aren't as violent and sexual as his debut, 1998's Perfect Blue, they treat on themes and subject matter that is far more mature and complex than Americans want from the cartoons. And I suspect that it doesn't help matters any that his stories are generally psychological and non-fantastical in nature, save for his most recent film Paprika; unlike most of the extremely popular anime in this country, most of what we see in his movies could just as easily be represented in live-action (and indeed, Perfect Blue was originally going to be exactly that).

Oh well, it's everybody else's loss. Those of us lucky enough to have stumbled across him one way or another get to be treated to some of the most fascinating animated movies of the modern age; fascinating not least because they could so easily be live-action, and yet it hardly seems incidental or disposable that they're not. Something about the very artificial look of animation (and Japanese animation in particular) contrasts with the very grounded, psychology-based narratives that Kon prefers (I wouldn't be so brash as to call them "realistic"), and the whole experience is a fantastic, unnerving blend of the recognisable and the grotesque, firmly human stories coated with a gloss of impossible physicality that gives them the cryptic but intuitively accessible texture of dreaming.

All of which is a long-ass way of saying: boy, do I love Millennium Actress, Kon's 2001 movie about a former movie star whose life and roles intersected in peculiar and unlikely ways during her too-brief career in the mid-20th Century. It's also about the history and identity of Japan from 1939-2000, the reconstruction of memory using cinematic constructs, the unreliability of cinema as a means of recording historical fact, and the tendency of movie audiences to ascribe personality to famous actors based on their personae, and it is all these things while it shifts through a variety of visual styles based upon various periods of Japanese graphic art and Japanese filmmaking trends.

For an animated movie running only 87 minutes, then, Millennium Actress is shockingly difficult - or should I perhaps say, "demanding". It's actually all quite straightforward if you give the film the attention that it asks, even if some of the themes Kon spins out of his material are fairly arcane and conceptual. The plot is fairly simple to relate: a director named Tachibana Genya (voiced by Îzuka Shôzô) and his cameraman, Ida Kyoji (Onosaka Masaya) are putting together a documentary about the demolition of one of Japan's most venerable movie studios, and Genya hits upon the idea of trying to interview the studio's most famous star, Fujiwara Chiyoko (voiced by Shôji Miyoko, Orikasa Fumiko, and Koyama Mami, depending on her relative age), who has been in seclusion some 30 years, for reasons that have never come to light. Genya manages to get an interview by promising that he has a present she'll want to receive, and certainly the battered old key he gives her triggers some kind of profound emotional response. In short order, Chiyoko prepares to finally unburden herself of the story she has carried around since the days of Japan's occupation of Manchuria in the early days of World War II, when as a child she helped a dissident artist (Yamadera Kôichi) escape the police, and formed a romantic bond to him that has persisted for 60 years.

That's just the beginning of the story, not the whole of it; for Chiyoko's attempts to find her artist led directly to her decision to become an actress, and this is where Millennium Actress becomes something wholly other than the pleasant melodrama of a love that time could not kill. Chiyoko tells Genya and Kyoji her life's story, not as a simple matter of what happened to her and in what order, but in terms of how it was symbolically represented by the movies she made in that span. From the evidence we see, all of her movies followed a similar pattern: she played a woman fighting to save her lover against the machinations of a jealous older woman, always played by her jealous aging co-star Eiko (Tsuda Shouko), and frequently running up against a scarred man who looks exactly like the policeman (Tsukayama Masane) hunting the painter. It becomes clear somewhere along the line that all of these films couldn't have exactly the same stories, and that Chiyoko's memories of life and her memories of her movies are blurring; and Genya, a huge fan of her films who worked on her last set and has something of a crush on her, isn't helping; he continuously inserts himself into her memories as a hero rescuing her from danger. Poor Kyoji keeps getting dragged along to function as the audience's surrogate, wondering where exactly the films leave off and Chiyoko's memories begin.

Finding the truth in all of this haze of cinema and memories starts to become impossible, though Genya helpfully admits that he knows a lot more than he was letting on very near the end of the film; but at that point it's become sort of like learning what "Rosebud" means in Citizen Kane - that mystery has been long since overtaken by the character investigation and emotional stridency of the piece. Chiyoko's inability to differentiate between herself and her characters isn't a means of obfuscating the point, or a cynical sign of her increasing age: it is itself the point, that she was so bent on this pursuit that defined her whole life that the distinction between herself and the figures she played is no longer essential. What matters is the will to keep on fighting as long as hope holds out. Ultimately this turns out not to be as much a matter of enduring romance as we've been assuming throughout the movie, but I will leave it as an exercise to the viewer to make of the ending what they will.

Kon fills his study of cinematic memory with quite a few cinematic memories of his own: the films of Kurosawa are clearly referenced, especially Throne of Blood, there's a fun kaiju eiga moment, and Chiyoko herself is plainly based on Hara Setsuko, the brilliant actress best known for her collaborations with Ozu Yasujiro, among other more obscure references (several of which I didn't come even close to catching myself). But Millennium Actress isn't just a compendium of film in-jokes, nor a clever attempt to recreate the style of Japanese film over a 30-year period - though it is both of these things, and quite successfully. Insofar as the movie recreates Japanese film history, it's as a means of exploring history more generally: as a personal experience of moving through time, and as a national experience of rebuilding and re-discovering what it means to be "Japanese". This is both the subtlest and most important part of the movie: the way that it uses Chiyoko as a stand in for her country and re-configures the key movements in Japanese film culture as milestones for charting the country's development in the post-war 20th Century. All that and it's a investigation into the representational limitations of its own medium. Not many animated films - or films, period - can lay claim to that particular blend of ambitions.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE AUGHTS: AN INTRODUCTION

At long last, I'm cutting myself off from further tinkering, adding, finagling, second-guessing, and cursing the films that I haven't made. You make a top 100 list with the movies you've seen, not with the movies you wish you'd seen. So here we are, the introduction to the official Antagony & Ecstasy List of the Top 100 Films of the 2000s.

(Now, I know that "the decade" is really 2001-2010, which still has a certain cool look to it - but doesn't 2000-2009 look kind of cooler? Besides, if I chopped the year 2000 off, the list would have gotten dramatically worse in the blink of an eye. When all is said and done, you'll find that there are more films from 2000 on this list than any other).

The ten-year span included in this list represents an especially significant period in my own personal development. In January, 2000, I was just a high school senior with an unusual penchant for arthouse fare (and growing up an hour from Chicago, in a town where the nearest multiplex was managed by a gentleman who wanted very badly to have an art theater, I got more chances for arthouse fare than a lot of teens), but my tastes were rather devouring. Film school that fall didn't do nearly as much to teach me how to properly watch a movie as I wish it had - that took graduating, and setting myself a series of absurd challenges: watch a film every day of the month, watch a film from a new country every weekend for the summer, find something good about five movies I saw once and hated. And then, of course, this very blog started in the summer of 2005, and though I'd already shaken the last vestiges of narrative-based film criticism (a process that started in 2001, when I saw Moulin Rouge! and found that I could be head over heels for a movie with a fairly barbarous story and screenplay), it took a good 9 months of experimenting with writing my own reviews to figure out exactly what kind of movie I liked and why, and even finding that it was perfectly okay to be just as enthusiastic about Italian zombie movies as the newest Almodóvar film, and sometimes for exactly the same reasons.

So we eventually come to December, 2009: I'm a member of a honest-to-god film critics' society, just completed a Disney project the scope of which still hasn't really come home to me, and I know more about movies than I ever have. And less than I ever will again. Because that's the key takeaway I got from the last ten years: appreciating art in any form, and movies are the form I know best, isn't something that you can get "right". You can get it right for the person you are at the moment, but things you learn and new things you find will change your tastes; make you appreciate things you couldn't stand and find things you used to love a bit lacking. Which I guess is my way of saying that the list I'm about to embark on is hardly settled: by the time I finish posting it I'm sure I'll regret some of the rankings, and by this time next year I'll likely want to change so much that it would be faster to start fresh. But that's just how it goes: these lists are less of a road map and more like a signpost along the way.

So the short point is, don't go looking for any real consonance between this list and my previously published end-of-year lists (except for 2009; they were being built at the same time). There won't be any - like I said, tastes change.

The format: starting tomorrow, I'm going to post ten films per day, counting down from 100. There'll be a little paragraph explaining why I like that film, you know how it works. And I'm going to have a constantly updated post at the top of the blog with just the titles of however far along the list we are that day. Just for fun, before I post the ten in the evening, I'm going to write a full-scale review of one film from that day's batch, that I've never reviewed before.

One last thing: like I said, you have to make a list with the films you've seen, but that being said, here are 20 movies from the last 10 years that I'm particularly disappointed I wasn't able to see before finally nailing down this list.

Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2008)
Hammer's debut was spoken of in the same tones that greeted fellow American indie geniuses David Gordon Green, Kelly Reichardt, and Ramin Bahrani on their breakthroughs. The worst part is that it was playing two blocks from my house.

The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000)
Panahi's last film (and the only one of his I've seen) Offside is great, and proof of a sure and certain hand and a sharp political mind; and just about everybody seems to feel that this one is even better.

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
The deafening buzz out of New York made it seem positively essential, but it never, to my knowledge, got a release outside of that city, and the DVD is only finally coming in a couple of months from Criterion.

The Duchess of Langeais AKA Don't Touch the Axe (Jacques Rivette, 2007)
It's already inexcusable that I've seen only one film that Rivette made during my lifetime (it's on the list). But I've found every one that I've seen quite admirable, and there's no reason I can think of why I managed to ignore the uniformly strong reviews.

Eureka (Aoyama Shinji, 2000)
Few Japanese films have made any kind of impact in the rest of the world this decade, outside of the animation and horror genres; fewer met with anything like the universal acclaim of this one. But damn, 217 minutes is a lot to commit to.

Faat kine (Sembene Ousmane, 2000)
I've seen Sembene's first film, and his last; and given his last film's placement on my list, it seems likely that I should have put some energy into finding any of his other work by now.

Fat Girl AKA À ma soeur! (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
By all accounts, it's tremendously unpleasant and provocative; I don't love those things like I did a few years ago, but I can still respond to some good shit-stirring. Besides, Breillat is clearly too important a filmmaker for me to have seen just one of her movies.

The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Martel's first two films are both impeccable, masterful works (sadly, I could only find room for one of them on my list). Even if her third is, as rumored, not quite so good as those, I am certain it is still brilliant.

The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)
Besides falling head over heels for Davies a couple years back, this was the film were Gillian Anderson proved she could act. And it's a period drama! I still don't quite understand why I haven't gotten to this one yet.

In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerin, 2007)
To my knowledge, it screened in Chicago two times, in the span of five days. I had the flu that week. Won't make that mistake again.

Late Marriage (Dover Kosashvili, 2001)
Too many people I trust have said too many nice things about it, and I'm a pushover for Israeli cinema. That I know not a damn thing about the film's content is probably the reason why I haven't seen it yet, though hardly an excuse.

Lorenzo (Mike Gabriel, 2004)
One of the handful of refugee shorts from the abandoned Fantasia 2006 that was finished, and the trailer makes it look like nothing else out there. But it is damned near impossible to find, unless you caught in theaters. In front of Raising Helen.

The Man from London (Tarr Béla, 2007)
I almost saw it at the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival, and then I thought, "Christ, it's a Tarr film, of course it's going to get a real release." It must have been Opposite Day.

Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009)
I almost saw it at last year's Chicago International Film Festival, and then I thought, "naw, any film with that kind of buzz is going to get a decent national release soon." Tim Brayton, you are a goddamn idiot.

Oasis (Lee Chang-Dong, 2002 )
Given my statements here and there that I think South Korean cinema to be the most important national movement of the decade, I really ought to have seen the film that got the Korean New Wave kickstarted, yes?

The Son (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2002)
I don't like the Dardennes. Sorry. But I really probably ought to see what is probably the best-regarded work before I finalise that opinion.

To Be and To Have (Nicolas Philibert, 2002)
It was one of the best-received documentaries of the decade, but every time I came close to pulling the trigger, I caught wind of the "noble teacher" premise, and choked. Clearly, I need to get over my trust issues and assume that all of those very smart critics can't be totally wrong.

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, 2004)
In my head, I was waiting for the other two films in the trilogy to come out, and by the time I figured out this was an asinine plan, it was well too late to catch this one in theaters, and it feels like I'd be doing it a disservice to watch it on DVD.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001)
35 Shots of Rum reminded me of what a singular, fascinating talent she is, and that I really ought to see more of her work. Friday Night would have fit in here just as well; the point is, there's not enough Denis in my life.

And number 20 is a special note for director Aleksandr Sokurov; I've seen three of his films this decade, and I know to a certainty that I loved all three; but I cannot to save my immortal soul remember anything about two of them. It is a crime against my integrity as a scholar that I didn't attempt to re-watch Aleksandra and Father and Son. And I really desperately wish I'd managed to catch The Sun in its blink-and-miss-it Chicago run a month ago.

B-FEST 2010

Even in this post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 world of ours, you'll still sometimes find a person who simply doesn't understand, Why bad movies? Why on earth would a smart cinephile waste time watching a bad movie when there are so many good movies to watch? I have an answer to that question, as it turns out, which is that you can learn a great deal more about how movies function when you pick apart one that doesn't work than when you praise one that does - a point of view maybe better-suited for filmmakers than filmgoers, but that's as may be.

My greater point, though, was a concession: I have of late come around to the idea that perhaps bad movies aren't so benign as all that. See, this past weekend was B-Fest 2010 - B-Fest, long-time readers know, being an annual 24-hour bad movie marathon hosted at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois every January - and it is a direct result of that marvelous event that so often is the highlight of my year that I am currently sitting around with the worst cold I've had in so long I can hardly remember how long it's been, for reasons that will shortly become clear. Not a coincidence, maybe, that this year had, pound for pound, the worst movies of any B-Fest I've attended (I'm up to 9, now): usually, there's one or maybe two flat-out incomprehensibly terrible movies - Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Jungle Hell, Invasion of the Star Creatures, and their ilk - but this year, there were five, out of 14 total features. And some of them were a whole lot of fun, in all their curdling awfulness, but there was a lot of bad cinema pouring off the screen, and well... I'm fucking sick, that's all I know.

The 2010 B-Fest was marked by two other things, besides an unusual number of truly awful movies: A&O (the NU student group that runs the show) has finally and, one assumes, irrevocably embraced projecting DVDs, rather than digging up the increasingly rare and costly 16mm (and the odd 35mm) prints that used to be the Fest's standard. if I didn't mis-count, only two features, two shorts, and one trailer were projected from film this year. I am not terribly happy about this development, but it's not something that can be helped much at all: thus I blame no-one but the encroaching march of time.

What I can and do blame A&O for is the layout of the Fest's schedule, which seems all the more clumsy coming after last year's unusually elegant schedule. Consider: within the first three films, we'd had two martial arts pictures and two '80s movies; both of the '50s monster movies (not enough, but last year was pretty black-and-white heavy, so I'm not inclined to complain that loudly) came after lunch; the most boring film of the year came second-to-last, when we desperately need something hugely peppy and insane, like last year's penultimate Megaforce. I'd also like to know if they couldn't or just forgot to find a Godzilla movie for the last slot, but that's something of a different issue.

Anyway, enough of that. On to the films!

Friday, 29 January, 2010 - 6:23 PM
It took a long time for them to figure out how to manage this new DVD projection thingy, maybe the longest delay I can ever remember. Finally, though, they got things started with Crippled Masters, a marvelously incompetent Shaw Bros. knock-off (made either in Taiwan or Hong Kong, depending on who you trust). It tells the story of two kung fu fighters who are punished by their evil boss by mutilation: one gets his arms chopped off, the other gets his legs melted by acid; but they get their revenge by becoming better fighters than ever before, learning how to use their individual talents together.

The two leads were genuine kung fu artists with the same disabilities as their characters (though I don't think they came by them the same way), and to my knowledge, they made three films together: the third (I haven't seen the second), Fighting Life, is in my opinion even more outlandishly delightful, with its afterschool special morality and a character named, in the English dub, Landlady - an hypnotically awful caricature of screaming womanhood. But Crippled Masters sure does get the job done: from its "high schoolers with a video camera in the back yard" fight choreography to some ludicrously dis-continuous editing, and a villain whose evil plot is never even vaguely clear, this is high cheese from start to finish, and a pretty ideal way to kick off B-Fest: transparently bad, and so impossible to follow that it doesn't matter that the crowd is too noisy to pay attention to the script.

7:59 PM
And then the brakes kicked in, and we screamed to a halt, with the first of the Unholy Five: Heartbeeps. A massive bomb that I was delighted to learn premiered the same day I did, 18 December, 1981, Heartbeeps stars Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as Val and Aqua, two humanoid robots who end up in the GM robot repair shop on the same day, and for incredibly obscure reasons decided to trek off into the woods with a monumentally obnoxious Borscht Belt comedy-bot named Catskil (voiced by Jack Carter), who chomps on a robot stogie while mouthing jokes written by none other than Henny Youngman.

Nothing about this movie makes sense: not the function of robots in this tremendously ill-defined future society, nor what in hell Val and Aqua are looking for - we can assume it's some sort of hunt for humanity, but that's bringing our knowledge of other robot stories into the film, and not working off of what the film gives us. It's a romantic story, after a fashion, but neither of the protagonists ever seem to express romantic emotions; or any emotions either, thanks to a weirdly cartoonish performance by Kaufman (no! really!) and Peters just being stilted and awful. A peculiarly good John Williams score and some rather convincing Stan Winston make-up (Oscar-nominated make-up, at that!) aren't nearly enough to save this movie from being off-putting and strange and worst of all, completely boring. Do you know what it sounds like when an audience is stunned into silence by dullness? You learn how to identify it at B-Fest, and it was deafeningly quiet in that room.

A fun note: my seat-mate whispered at one point that he just knew that it was going to end with Val and Aqua having a robot baby. False! The robot baby came less than a minute after he whispered this prediction. I didn't forgive him all festival.

9:24 PM
A former B-Fest mainstay that hasn't shown up since my very first dance, 2002: Gymkata, the gorgeously silly Reagan-era tale of an Olympic-class gymnast named Jon Cabot (Kurt Thomas, an American Olympic gymnast) who is trained by some sp00k group or another in the martial arts (hence "gymkata": gymnastics + karate), so that he can win The Game, a deadly cross-country run in some central Asian country which usually has no survivors at all, but if there ever is a survivor, he gets to ask the Kahn of that country for any wish. The U.S. wants Cabot to win and ask the Kahn for the rights to put a base in his country, since it is a geographically perfect spot for a Star Wars anti-missile platform to be launched.

YES! It is a crazed martial arts action film about the Star Wars program. What screams "1985" more than that precise combination? Especially with the bodyguards dressed suspiciously like ninjas? It's not enough to make-up for the disappointing absence of either a Golan-Globus film or a Chuck Norris vehicle this year, but it is zanily enjoyable for the same reason both of those subgenres are: a plot that is both paper-thin and horribly complicated at the same instant, with stupidly big action that makes no sense. And that's before it gets to the strange third-act "now we are in an Italian horror movie" sequence, as Cabot must navigate a town of insane villagers.

This is old-hat to most of the B-Fest crowd, and we lapped it up with hoots and cheers, the way you'd greet any dismally stupid old friend.

10:54 PM
The annual raffle - and it briefly looked like this was going to be a red-letter Fest for me, since I finally won for the first time in nine tries! Ironically, the DVD I got, House on Haunted Hill, happens to be a movie I just received for Christmas in the excellent William Castle Collection. But still, it's nice to finally win something.

11:33 PM
The night's first short film. Now, the shorts are often not that "bad", nor that "B-picture"; last year's "The Concert" is a great example. And even the features are often not bad, either: a couple years ago, there was quite a to-do about King Kong screening at the Fest, as being both a masterpiece and not at all a B-film, even if it was a creature picture (it was quite expensive back in 1933). And of course, the blaxploitation films are usually pretty damn great, if you're willing to concede that such a thing as "great blaxploitation" exists, and if you're not, I can't imagine why you're reading this blog.

Still, I cannot recall any film in my experience or in the years I've read about that is so flat-out a masterpiece of the art of filmmaking to ever screen at B-Fest as Chuck Jones's 1955 "One Froggy Evening". I mean, it's great to see it, by all means, especially on film. But what the living hell was this doing at B-Fest? I still haven't even started to figure it out.

11:42 PM
"The Wizard of Speed and Time". An annual tradition, and still as magnificent as ever.

Saturday, January 30, 12:00 AM
Plan 9 from Outer Space. The other annual tradition, and I'm really, really starting to get bored with it. This year in particular, it would have been a good idea for me to follow my impulse and take a nap.

1:33 AM
The good folks at Stomp Tokyo, who every year do so much to get B-Fest together, didn't have the money to sponsor screen-printed plastic cups this year. So the A&O kids came out and gave everyone in the audience a little red solo cup that they'd written "B-Fest" on in black marker. Tremendously cute.

1:43 AM
Another short: I would swear it was called "Ego Trap", my friend would equally swear it was called "Ego Trip", and either way I can't find reference to it on the internet. It was actually a fun little cartoon about an airplane designer whose maniacal boss kept making him redesign a new model until it was totally unflyable, and looked just like the boss. The art style was much like a UPA film, but I am sure it wasn't UPA. As with most B-Fest shorts that aren't wickedly bad, the audience mostly milled about or watched silently.

1:51 AM
The second of the Five, and one of the biggest deals at B-Fest 2010: The Room, a 2003 romantic drama of literally incredible ineptitude. This one has been a cult favorite for a couple of years at least, but weirdly, B-Fest people tend not to be cult movie people in the midnight movie sense, so virtually everyone I spoke to or overheard was seeing it for the very first time. It was written, directed and produced by Tommy Wiseau, who also stars as Johnny, in one of the most indescribably dysfunctional performances ever given in the English language (though, to be fair to Wiseau, it is altogether possible that he is not a native speaker; his biography is maddeningly opaque).

There is so damnably much wrong with the movie that your brain simply refuses to acknowledge the possibility that it wasn't done on purpose. It starts with a ten-minute concept drawn out to ten times that length: Johnny's fiancée, Lisa (Juliette Danielle), no longer loves him, so she seduces his best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), who feels quite guilty about it. Add in Denny (Philip Haldiman), the teenage orphan that Johnny has taken in, who keeps saying things that can only possibly be interpreted as meaning that he likes to watch Johnny and Lisa having sex. Add dialogue that seems to have come from a computer translating out of a non-Indo-European language that lacks verb tenses. And film it using a style that indicates that the man behind the camera has never watched a movie, let alone attended film school. Again, I almost need to believe it's an elaborate joke. Certainly, Wiseau seems to be in on it (he attends midnight screenings whenever he can). Whatever the case, this is eye-popping anti-cinema at its most delirious. I can't really describe it. You need to see it, preferably with an audience.

The bad news: about three-quarters through the film, I started to get some stomach pains. "Damn, shouldn't have skimped on meat protein at dinner", thinks I, assuming it's just the gas pains that sometimes happen when I have too many carbs and not enough of anything else.

3:32 AM
For the third year running, we see the trailer for the 2000 rapsploitation drama Black and White. A&O must own it, or something - nobody at the Fest really responds to it, and other than the list of forgotten rappers in the cast, there's nothing remotely interesting about it.

3:34 AM
The first-ever B-Fest appearance by director Andy Sidaris, known for his sexy action pictures: Hard Ticket to Hawaii - and I was starting to feel pretty damn bad by this point. Bad enough that I did something I've never, ever done: I left the theater to go lie down. All I'd seen by that point was some cutely cheesy credits involving stencils on boxes, and a marvelously fake snake puppet. My seat-mate stayed for all of this film, as well as Greydon Clark's Black Shampoo, and he's promised to provide a write-up of those two films; I'll update this post when that's done. Neither of us managed to make it through The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, but we've each seen it a number of times - and frankly, it's a bit too knowingly campy for my tastes for it to be at B-Fest anyway.

So here's the deal: it turns out that my gas pains were actually a gallbladder attack. And while a small enough gallbladder attack isn't going to send you to the hospital (five hours of sleep, and I was good enough to go), it's not the kind of thing you're just able to get up and walk away from. For most of the Fest that followed, I was pretty well wiped out and often not as attentive to the films as I should have been; it didn't help that two of the remaining six features were so damn boring that I'd have been hard pressed to keep my eyes open even if I wasn't feeling weak.

Incidentally, we're not sure what caused the attack: I had a lot of greasy fat at lunch, but it was more than 14 hours later that I got sick. The last thing I'd put in my body, about 50 minutes prior, was a 5-Hour Energy; but my doctor doesn't think that could possibly have been the trigger. All I know is that I'd been fighting a cold for over a week by this point, and the lack of sleep, plus the massive amount of wear on my body, including GROSS-OUT ALERT the ten minutes I spent puking up bile END GROSS-OUT ALERT left me wobbly enough so that the damn cold virus just swept through me like a wildfire; and here I still am.

8:20 AM
I woke up from restive sleep just in time to see the third of the Five: Claudio Fragasso's legendary Troll 2, making its very first B-Fest appearance. This is, to me, one of the truly Great Bad Movies of all time; my seat-mate would disagree, violently. He'd never seen it, and didn't know what to expect; this was my third trip to this particular well, and it seemed fair on those grounds to lie down in our empty aisle and just listen to the crowd while the unspeakably idiotic proceedings unwound. Have you not seen Troll 2? Then shame on you: for there is hardly a more mesmerising cavalcade of terrible ideas, terribly executed (Fragasso is one of the all-time dreadful Italian horror directors: he was responsible for Zombi 4: After Death, and helped - without credit - on Bruno Mattei's epochally wretched Hell of the Living Dead), all of it bone-shatteringly hilarious. The audience, for the record, seemed to respond to it in the spirit it deserves: jaw-dropping incomprehension mixed with laughter.

"Nilbog! It's 'goblin' spelled backwards! This is their kingdom!"

10:13 AM
A DVD of the next feature included two trailers for British rocker pictures in the early 1960s: The Leather Boys and The Yellow Teddy Bears. I really want to see the latter of these: every new cut seemed to introduce some brand-new plotline, and I cannot conceive of how it all fits into one feature.

10:19 AM
In the tradition of last year's surprisingly intriguing time capsule Don't Knock the Rock, we now got a 1963 film about the burgeoning rock scene in England: Live It Up! My God, was it ever boring. As a history lesson, it is valuable mostly for showcasing what the state of English rock music was right before The Beatles came along and, well, were The Beatles: it turns out that The Beatles stepped into a fetid wasteland of tepid boy groups that made even the miserable interregnum in the States between Buddy Holly and 1964 look like a fountainhead of musical excellence. The plot is absolutely perfunctory, as it should be; the songs are also absolutely perfunctory, and that is what made this, to me, one of the biggest chores to sit through at this year's fest.

11:30 AM
Lunch! Or, as I called, it "40 Minutes of Nap, Because Goddamn, I Am Not Enough of a Fool to Put More Food in My Stomach Right Now".

12:10 PM
I think it safe to assume that Fiend Without a Face is the only film from the Criterion Collection ever to appear at B-Fest; and thanks to the new DVD policy, we even saw the Criterion logo! The film itself is a weird chimera: a British-produced film about what Canadians thought about the American military presence in Canada during the Cold War. For the most part, it's just a standard-issue 1950s sci-fi monster movie about some unseen killer that is killing people unseen, though three-quarters through the Fest, it was about damn time for even a standard-issue 1950s monster movie.

But oh Lord! the last 15 minutes! Made up for everything and then some with these really awesome monsters that turned out to be crawling brains with spinal cords, realised through fairly good stop-motion animation, and killed in what must have been an unthinkable level of graphic gore for 1958. I think I might have enjoyed those last 15 minutes as much as I enjoyed any other stretch of this year's B-Fest; but then, I am a right whore for 1950s B-movies, and this turned out to be a real corker. I still have no idea at all why it ended up in the Criterion Collection.

1:25 PM
The fourth of the really bad movies, 1978's Sextette: in which 85-year-old Mae West delivers several of the same naughty one-liners that she was famous for back in the pre-Code days, forty years earlier (I was going to call them double-entendres, but there is really just the one entendre).

It's not fair to West to say that the problem with the film is that she looks like a god-damned mummy spouting off sexually suggestive jokes; but life just isn't fair at times. And that is exactly the problem with Sextette, which goes from being a hectic, joyless farce to a mind-splitting Bad Movie on West's brittle, octogenarian shoulders. There's a certain nobility to the project, trying to prove that West still had that sexy oomph all those years later; and I dig that the film turns around the usual "old man with a young trophy wife" formula, by centering on West's honeymoon with Timothy Dalton. But nobility only takes you so far.

Oddly, the best thing about the film is probably that West still had the coming timing of her youth, though there's absolutely no reason not to just go and watch all her old movies where the same jokes were fresher and directed by better filmmakers. Because everything else is beyond a train-wreck: it's a damn mid-air collision of awful farce, bizarre political satire, inexcusable characters and the absolute worst musical numbers you will ever see; the ones that jump out are Dom DeLuise singing Paul McCartney's "Honey Pie" to a cardboard cut-out of West (this came out the same fucking year as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - who was watching the store at Apple Records in the 1970s?) and Dalton and West "duetting" on "Love Will Keep Us Together", which really means Dalton crooning terribly, while West just says "stop!" occasionally. The audience, meanwhile, was screaming "Stop!" as loudly as we could.

Naturally, for something so crass, and ill-conceived, Sextette enjoyed by far the most energetic riffing of anything that screened at the fest. A dead necessity for fans of kitsch.

2:56 PM
The last of the terrible five, an Italian sci-fi movie called The War of the Robots. This is often called a Star Wars rip-off, but it isn't, not so baldly as many Italian Star Wars rip-offs; once you get past the glowing light swords, the princess with funky hair, and the evil Empire, the plot is actually quite different. And that plot? Well... I'll get back to you on that one. It involved someone being kidnapped and other people rescuing them and one character who we thought was evil turning out to be good and then being evil again, and an army of robots that don't seem all that robotic.

What sets this one apart from every other outlandishly designed, insensible Italian sci-fi picture of the era is the excruciating final third, in which the heroes' ship keeps fighting off enemy fighters, wave after wave, over and over again, without stop, unceasing in its monotony, one after the other unending... I fell asleep and then woke up five or ten minutes later to find that absolutely nothing had changed. I have not been that abysmally bored at a movie in a very long time, indeed. The audience seemed harsher on this film than anything else, largely because it was so freaking monotonous, but for my money there were so many more absolutely insane films that I'd call it the least terrible of the Five.

4:39 PM
If they couldn't give us a Godzilla picture, at least the ended with a giant beast that laid wreck to models: The Giant Claw. This movie is famous for two things: it's oddly specific lack of knowledge about subatomic particles, and one of the stupidest-looking monsters in '50s moviedom, a giant space vulture that wouldn't look terribly out of place in Fraggle Rock. This is another one of those "of course you've seen this. You haven't? Well, jeeze, go out and see it, then!" movies that every B-picture lover should know; my favorite part, besides the monster, is a witty [sic] banter scene between the two romantic leads where they're talking about sex using baseball as a code that gets so complex that by the end, you're pretty sure they're actually just talking about baseball. That, and the ludicrous French Canadian homesteader. Gotta love those cartoon French Canadians.

And there it ended. A pretty good slate of films, maybe a hint too modern, but almost all worthy of B-Fest; I only regret that I had such a terrible go of the last two-thirds. Not my worst personal B-Fest of all (for Christ's sake, I found out I had a tumor in my long at B-Fest 2005), but it deserved more than I could give it.