OK, stop bugging me. I did it. But it wasn’t easy.
There were at least 20 films this year that really stood out to me as markers of great storytelling, great filmmaking, and simply enjoyable experiences. To trim the list down to 10 was just too difficult so I’m presenting you with a Top 12. Falling on the wayside were Ratatouille, A Mighty Heart, Stephanie Daley, The Bourne Ultimatum, Zodiac, No End in Sight, The Namesake, and others. But congratulations, Josh Brolin; three of your films appear on my list. Like I’ve said before, I feel this was an incredibly strong year for film; I saw several very good films this year, and everything below qualifies. However, I saw very few films this year that “punched me in the gut” so to speak. In the last few years, I’ve walked out of many a theater reeling at what I just saw. Not as much this year. Not that I’m really complaining—when your roster’s as good as this, how can you?
Also, there were a number of notable films that entered and disappeared theaters faster than I could hit “publish blog post.” Unfortunately, this list comes arrives without having seen such buzzed-about films as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I’m Not There, Sweeney Todd, Across the Universe, and Norbit. Oh wait, nevermind…I saw part of Norbit (an Oscar nominee…seriously!) on HBO.
And, of course, feel free to leave comments! I want to hear what I forgot or what I got right. Because I'm narcissistic and needing your validation.
Petey Greene would not have allowed a movie chronicling his life to pass through the public's consciousness with nary a whimper and that's a cruel injustice. But tackling injustice was Petey's game and, after securing a radio deejay spot in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, he did it with flamboyant style, spitting his brand of street truth into the microphone every morning. The talking leads to activism and Don Cheadle gives Greene an underlying sensitivity from which all of his battles originate, but it's the relationship between Petey and station executive Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) that grounds the film and stops it from becoming just another life story. Petey's confidence disintegrates the more he's put on a pedestal (and, surprise, driven to the bottle) and the filmmakers don't let him off the hook, but it's also a beautiful testament to how one person, when the timing is right, can yell everything on his mind and sound like the most sensible of leaders.
Walking in cold, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a mockumentary, a Christopher Guest protégé’s stab at a hilarious battle that would appeal to his own nostalgic generation. There’s no mock to this doc, however, which chronicles and recounts, of all things, a high-stakes competition for the top score ever in the Nintendo game Donkey Kong. Good and evil quickly emerge—how perfect is it that the mustachioed “bad guy” sells blazing hot BBQ sauce?—and the viewer is assaulted with several laugh-out-loud scenes and characters. It’s also, more than anything, captures the essence of a large portion of Generation X males. They grew up in a time where it was great to be a boy—especially one good at video games—and then, years later, they have to reconcile their boyhood dreams with their adult goals.
In a year where violent, sprawling, male-driven epics flourished on the screen and at the box office, no protagonist stood out quite like Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis—based on the Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel and mimicking its black and white, soft geometric style—chronicles her childhood in Iran during the revolution, her flee to Europe, and her eventual return. Oh, and everything in between. Satrapi's battle is one for identity, but it's also a classic, cut-to-the-bone coming of age story with touches that make her incredibly specific journey instantly relatable. While the film sputters to its end a bit, it never sacrifices its raw realism…or its fanciful charm. Looking for the most complex female character of the year? Look no further than the second dimension.
You know what did really well this year? Not talking. There’s the beginning of There Will Be Blood and the end of Michael Clayton, but no movie made better use of the contrast between silence and golden nuggets of dialogue like the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Llewelyn Moss (an underrated Josh Brolin) races from one dingy pit stop to the next, fleeing the bullets and pressurized air of the men hunting him and the sack of money upon which he stumbled. For Moss and Chigurh (a terrifying Javier Bardem), words are spoken only when necessary; rather, they chase and scram by the codes they never question and the dreams they never quite formulate. It’s Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell who supplies the bursts of Coen-brand witticisms. His poignant reflections on the cycle of violence are not unlike those of Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Like that film, No Country will rest high atop the Coen canon.
Once might make Aristotle spin in his grave given its way of eschewing storytelling's golden rules: the characters rarely encounter struggles they can't fix in a few minutes, people are nice and supportive of each other pretty much the whole time, and the love story is platonic. (Actually, its mere existence probably made Robert McKee's head explode.) But somehow, this kitchen-sink musical, which operates on the correct assumption that its magnetic, musically-gifted leads (Glen Hasnard and Marketa Irglova) have enough charisma to fill a film, succeeds with every note. The quality of the songwriting, too, is a make-or-break factor and, thankfully, songs like "When Your Mind's Made Up" and "Falling Slowly" are so pure and thoughtful, it's probably fair to assume they don't have an ironic bone in their bodies. Once is sincere in a way you didn't think movies could be anymore.
While lovers of horror—or scares in general—were probably not titillated by the idea of deadly (or is it?) water vapor invading a New England community, I can't think of the last time my hands shot over my mouth more than while watching The Mist. When the mist ominously rolls in and warning makes it way to the local supermarket, a motley crew of shoppers lock themselves in to wait it out. The water vapor in question contains numerous CGI creatures of varying inventiveness, but the horrors arrive via the human relationships. Marcia Gay Harden's bone-chilling doomsday preacher converts one wary soul after another and the battle becomes more ideological than anything else. And the final twenty minutes seem nearly impossible, a great risk in storytelling that left me shaken and disturbed.
Ed Asner once said to Mary Tyler Moore: "You've got spunk. I hate spunk." And, initially, Juno's spunk—her clunky wordplay about spouts and pork swords—is self-righteous cleverness in the form of cultured slang. But that hesitation all melts away and quickly, too, when Juno makes her decision to have the baby. The film is already in love with its characters and that contagion activates when the game cast is allowed interplay. Ellen Page pulls off a character that was no doubt a riddle on paper; her heroine is both lost and confident, a suitable blend for a teenager living in the age of endless, meaningless praise and vague direction. The story plays out in moments of tender hope and frustration and even when stylized, it never feels dishonest. The $85 million and counting haul is a testament to how appealing that hope is. Pass the tissues, Ed Asner.
The experience of watching Grindhouse is not unlike going to a wine tasting. Except the bottles contain aged, trashy, sticky-floor flicks and Tarantino and Rodriguez are your overeager sommeliers. Without the guidance of their cobbled-together plots, one could get lost in the grimy beauty of the non-stop pastiche. In Rodriguez' opener, Planet Terror, a band of outsiders fight off a zombie invasion. Never has violence been so sexualized and sexuality seemed so violent while neither come off as the least bit threatening. And once Tarantino's Death Proof kicks into fifth gear—when we meet the second set of girls—road rage and car chase mayhem become a visceral kick. It's the joy of film on film and, like any good wine, it's got great legs.
Maybe I’m too far deep into the cult of Haggis, but I thought that—while not necessarily electric—Elah has been the most mature film to come from the writer so far. (I do believe that had his name not been attached to this, it might have gotten a fairer shake from the critical community. But I digress…) The plot is a small town murder mystery—who killed a freshly-back-from-Iraq soldier?—with some nice twists and turns. The way it forces the characters to stand back, away from themselves, though, is what’s so harrowing. Tommy Lee Jones, gravity seeming to pull at the flesh on his face in each shot, is heartbreaking as he re-examines the state of the American soldier and, yes, the state of the nation. But he also goes back and looks at his life as a father and if the choices he never questioned were the wrong answers for his sons. “What have we done to our boys?” he asks, acting as a mouthpiece for a frustrated country. It’s also his personal, regretful plea, heavy on his heart.
In Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, George Clooney plays a "fixer," a man who can fix any situation unless, of course, it pertains to his own problems. But Hitch this is not. Michael Clayton builds edge-of-your-seat tension by simply letting great actors (Clooney, Swinton, and Wilkinson are all in top form) talk at each other; every moment the power shifts or a discovery is made, it's electrifying. Gilroy's directorial execution of his brilliant script is notable for how little it panders. Those electric moments are almost never accompanied by shocking quick cuts, a cluing-you-in score, or sepia-colored flashbacks. Rather, the story is told with a surprisingly straightforward precision and as Clayton decides what his life means—and what justice is and isn't worth—I couldn't help but watch in awe as corruption is flipped inside out and then…a bang of silence.
One part Coppola’s The Conversation and two parts poetry, The Lives of Others invites you to watch the art of spying on artists. In East Germany, Hauptmann Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe, who sadly died last year) is one of the government’s best “listeners”—he wire-taps and bugs homes of citizens—and he receives the assignment of spying on a playwright and his actress lover whose work suggests anti-Communist political beliefs. Like Wiesler, it’s impossible to not become engrossed in these passionate, complex characters; at one point, he breaks the golden rule and speaks to the actress in a restaurant because his personal transformation, his surprising devotion to their plight, grows every time he puts on his headphones. There are monologues in The Lives of Others that are so gorgeously written, they should go down among not only film’s finest, but democracy’s finest. But it’s the fragile human relationships that change the character’s hearts and may very well break your own.
The title alone deserves prizes, but the way it breaks down in this wonderfully epic and wholly personal story is something unexpected. There Will Be: never before—not that I can think of—has a filmmaker used the future tense to such advantage as Anderson has. There Will Be Blood maintains a constant sense of foreboding, of inescapable forward movement, the world turning. Johnny Greenwood's ominous score punctuates the actions of malicious oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) with percussive notes that seem to whisper, “There. Will. Be. There. Will. Be.” And the editing is something marvelous; it seems, at first, as revolutionary as Eisenstein. Every shot propels you into the next. The present never seems like anything more than the set-up for the future.
And then: Blood. There's shockingly little of the red stuff onscreen—it pops up occasionally in all the right places—but it's always flowing in the background. Plainview's salvation, acting under the assumption he has a soul that can be saved, is in the oil, the black blood beneath his feet. And for Eli Sunday, the charismatic and overconfident young hillside preacher, the blood of Christ is his ticket. It brings him the attention and subservience that give his life value. And then there will be fathers and sons and even brothers and the blood that runs between them, poison that can be passed between generation.
While Plainview exists outside archetype for the most part, I couldn't help but be reminded of Tony Soprano who, had they shared a birth year, probably would have been his spiteful rival. They are American men of the highest regard, admired for their ambition and psychoanalyzed for their eternal discontentment. Tony struggles to make sense of the family he’s been given, though, whereas Daniel tries to force sense out of the family he creates for himself and almost succeeds in doing so.
When the elements are taken together, Anderson has drafted a clear portrait of how the past shall haunt the future as economic greed and corrupt religious fervor continue a tenuous partnership. When one is destroyed, the other is “finished.” Anderson, once on the cusp of doing something revolutionary, has more than fulfilled his early promises with a picture of bloody brilliance.
