(Via Indiewire.)
Labeling 2004 the “Year of the Passion,” as some have done, does film culture a dual disservice: it not only validates and ennobles the project of an obviously lunatic mind, but it also occludes that fact that, all-told, 2004 was a pretty great year for movies, if you were looking in the right places. For our annual Reverse Shot writers’ poll we asked our staff for their 10 best films of the year, and through an arcane tabulation system arrived at the master list of films below. Topped by a sequel none of us expected anything at all from, this list reflects, through various means, just how completely events in the United States this year absorbed world imagination. Look for longer, definitive takes on these films and the rest of 2004’s cinematic landscape in our Year End issue at www.reverseshot.com, forthcoming in early 2005.
1. Before Sunset
Even those of us who recognized Linklater as a major figure in American filmmaking, those of who listened closely to his yammering dreamers amidst the cacophony of Nineties Indie banality, those of us who had to defend “Tape” and “Waking Life” as dramatically vibrant ways of interpreting new media, were still astonished at the breathtaking artistic coalescence of “Before Sunset.” Much like Lynch‘s “Mulholland Drive” or Almodóvar‘s “Talk to Her,” this film was not just the apotheosis of a career marked by humbling detours but a refining and whittling down of all that seemed to matter to this most unassuming of auteurs. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke don’t just reprise their roles from “Before Sunrise,” they have simply never left them. And for those of our generation who have never let go of Celine and Jesse, even after nine years, this miraculous meditation on time and mortality in the guise of a romantic comedy was a reaffirmation of everything we hoped these characters could almost, perhaps, try to become. For all the political, psychosexual, and philosophical (pseudo or otherwise) banter, what resonates most are the moments that only Bazin’s God’s-time cinema can capture: the aged crease in Hawke’s furrowed brow, the pangs of doubt that flash across Delpy’s beautifully aging face like lightning-bolt transmissions direct from the heart. For myself, and at least ten other people I know, the film’s casually abrupt, Nina Simone-enhanced fade-out elicited literal gasps of exhilaration, of awe at the wondrous fragility and resilience of the human soul, and the capabilities of cinema to capture what we’re all feeling, somewhere, deep down inside. – Michael Koresky
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
If you ever suspected, in the middle of an awful breakup, that the beautiful and carefree were metaphorically dancing atop your bed of misery, the scene where Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo‘s characters literally do that to Jim Carrey‘s unhappy Joel will fuel your paranoia for years to come. Born of a conceit — that memories of those who’ve wounded us could be medically wiped — “Eternal Sunshine”‘s landscape of memory is one that can only be told in the form of cinema. And it is seldom that a film reanimates the magical properties of the medium — the logic of dreams dominates a cathartic indoor rainstorm or a quickly vanishing room as Joel clings to images seeking the goodbye he never got. Charlie Kaufman‘s movies are always beautiful playthings, but their typical sense of manipulation is absent here. The seeming whimsy is soon left behind, and beauty and simplicity remain. Clementine (Kate Winslet, vivid beyond her hair) and Joel are left to decide if any relationship is worth a probability of failure; the flicker of memory is gut-wrenching. – Marianna Martin
3. Dogville
Branding Lars von Trier a misogynist has become the cinematic equivalent of calling George W. Bush stupid — in both cases the labels gloss over far more complex and sinister realities that are more comfortably left ignored. With “Dogville” von Trier begins a trilogy of films explicitly dealing with the United States, and places his tale within the boundaries of a radical formal project that simultaneously acknowledges his inability to travel the country in question and recognizes that doing so would only limit the scope of his investigation. A new beginning, but for the bulk of “Dogville” you’d be forgiven for imagining yourself planted firmly in the queasy moral landscape of his “Golden Hearts” films. But then, near the end of his lengthy fable, he deviates from the expected path. Instead of painful self-sacrifice, our familiar, long-suffering, beatifically innocent female protagonist is offered an opportunity to step out of her shackles, assess her oppressors and pass judgment. Tables turned, von Trier provides the fire and brimstone finale of the year. Imagine if Bess from “Breaking the Waves” had gone back to the sailors who violated her, not to offer her body again, but armed for retribution. In “Dogville,” von Trier truly finds the American grain he sought in “Dancer in the Dark.” His heroine Grace is pristine, gorgeous, naÔve, yet cunning and savage all the same. And the fateful locale of her degradation is completely anonymous but always familiar — Dogville isn’t just any town in America, according to von Trier, it’s every town. He might just be right. – Jeff Reichert
4. Kill Bill Vol. 2
Once upon a time, in Hollywood, some believe in the year two double-aught four, Quentin Tarantino exceeded the auteurist expectations that had proved more of a hindrance than a standard since 1994’s “Pulp Fiction.” And, not unlike kung fu master Pai Mei, whose slightest of nods to a passing monk goes unreturned “once upon a time in China,” the second installment of Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” was met with little fanfare, critics having seemingly cooled on Tarantino’s innovative pop culture patchwork. But, beyond the loving appropriation, there’s real human sweat to be found on the symbolic brow of “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” a sequel comprised of contextual weight that runs a veritable emotional gamut while seamlessly balancing tone and theme as though on the point of a Hanzo samurai sword. So, it’s fitting that the most “retro” moment in Tarantino’s accused retro career is to show The Bride’s “cruel tutelage” under Pai Mei’s killer hands in such raw, grueling detail. Training montages, themselves the most worn of filmic tropes, have rarely been so brutal, or irony-free, as they are here. In a downloaded “I know kung fu” age, Tarantino has made classical struggle and Shakespearean revenge cool again, and while “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” might lack the frenetic energy of the first, it does lend it retrospective weight. And that permutation of “retro,” sorely lacking in contemporary film, let alone contemporary film sequels, is something that certainly deserves more than a mere nod of acquiescence. – Suzanne Scott
5. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
“Goodbye Dragon Inn” could be called the “Mulholland Drive” of 2004: a sumptuous, self-reflexive, haunting eulogy to cinema’s powers to cast spells through dreams and deceive through illusions. But while Lynch subverts the tropes of film noir and melodrama to create a hallucinatory nightmare of showbiz corruption, Tsai Ming-liang works within contemporary Asian cinema’s penchant for patient rhythms and slowly-unfolding anti-narratives (see also Weerasethakul‘s “Blissfully Yours” and Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s “Café Lumiére”). The result is something less frightful and a little more melancholic, a nostalgic work of mourning for the once proud giants of a national cinema, as well as a fare-thee-well to the fading cultural traditions such giants stood for. Tsai places King Hu’s martial arts classic “Dragon Inn” at the center of his somnambulant characters’ night journey through a gorgeous, crumbling movie palace of yesteryear — a simple, yet effective metaphor for film’s lost past and murky future. In a year that saw the passing of Brando, the final film of Bergman’s career, and Godard’s latest treatise on The End of Cinema, “Goodbye Dragon Inn” provided the most striking image of vanishing cinephilia: the house lights go up and the theater is empty. We are looking into a mirror: the audience has been comprised of phantoms. – Michael Joshua Rowin
6. The Village
Perhaps the most unjustly maligned studio release of 2004, M. Night Shyamalan‘s precisely executed fable is both a thoughtful allegory of current world events and a fantastically artful horror film. Striking an effective balance between subtlety and over-the-top theatrics, Shyamalan, a director whose trade in gimmickry has earned him both praise and critical dismissal, winds up with a film that’s timely, lush and suspenseful. A tale of an isolated 19th century village terrorized by monsters who roam the surrounding woods, “The Village” sees Shyamalan further mastering his directorial art; where “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” seemed mere vehicles for the twists at the end, “The Village” is entirely captivating even before the trademark reveal. Quiet, emotive performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard perfectly compliment the tension Shyamalan puts into his slow pans, rolling mists, and ominous shots of black forest. A movie this sure of itself and of its message is bound to have its critics — the Hobermans will find it hokey and the Shalits will find it too subtle. It’s neither. “The Village” is Shyamalan’s best film, and one of the most relevant, simple statements made about America in a year full of political hot air. – Neal Block
7. Crimson Gold
Abbas Kiarostami may well be his country’s Roberto Rossellini. Since “Crimson Gold”‘s disillusioned protagonist Hussein’s job as pizza delivery man allows him to traverse the social strata of Iran, the film has in common with Italian Neorealist classics the unflinching, raw ability to analyze existing conditions while documenting them. What comes through in the script Kiarostami wrote for Jafar Panahi are the contradictions and hypocrisies of a theocracy venturing into capitalist territory — a police crackdown on upper class revelers, young people forced into law enforcement, palatial mansions unappreciated by the spoiled children of Westernized millionaires. Despite Godard’s bitching about Kiarostami’s inability to “make films with a camera,” “Crimson Gold” was the humanist-materialist film of the past year, tracing the use of violence back to its roots in social inequality and desperation. The fact that Panahi and Kiarostami never condescend or preach makes this film a marvel of quiet outrage. – Michael Joshua Rowin
8. Notre musique
If 2001’s “In Praise of Love” glimmered with hope of a second coming, this year’s “Notre musique” was The Light. A welcome confirmation of Godard‘s artistic resurrection after years entrenched in confounding esoterica, “Notre musique” also may be among the most inspiring and important films of this young century. Silencing his once-innumerable detractors, Jean-Luc returns to the pulpit with a pointed sermon on Heaven, Hell, and the art of Cinema; it’s a divine and clearly conceived triptych with the power to save any lax cinephile’s soul, straight from the heart of the medium’s holiest father. And to think: some of us thought he was the one lost. At a seminar amidst the ruins of Sarajevo, Godard grumbles on the subject of le text et l’image, truth and beauty, revolution. His young female protagonists, a journalist and a film student, survey “Purgatory” between antithetical bookends. “Musique” begins with the piecemealed avalanche of destruction on film known as “Hell,” and ends at “Heaven,” an unsettling yet halcyon tableau. That he can still command the camera with such nuanced vitality at age 74 is not just a reminder of his relevance but of why Godard remains the filmmaker most worthy of a single-name sobriquet, the first three letters of which lend a deserved resonance. – Matthew Plouffe
9. Time of the Wolf
While Lars von Trier continues to retreat (albeit brilliantly) into mere provocation, Michael Haneke has asserted himself as the European art cinema’s foremost stone-in-the-shoe humanist. The odd indifference that greeted “Time of the Wolf” at Cannes 2003 might have had something to do with its screening out of competition, or the fact that between “Elephant,” “Dogville,” “The Brown Bunny,” and “Twentynine Palms,” there was an unprecedented glut of formally austere, thematically challenging auteur projects. Anyway, this muted gaze at a secular apocalypse beats ’em all: as in “Code Unknown,” the rigorous minimalism of Haneke’s approach works to generate maximum emotional impact. There is a narrative trajectory in the aftermath of a vaguely defined social/environmental tragedy (nuclear holocaust is one possibility) a mother and her two children helplessly wander the abandoned French countryside until running into a group of survivors huddling in a train shelter. Haneke could have used the hoary, pseudo-sci fi scenario to mock genre conventions a la “Funny Games,” or to indulge in portentous, cautionary-tale hysterics, but restraint, not to mention the director’s genius for imbuing small details of human interaction with catch-in-the-throat significance, carries the day. One indelible moment (of many): a man presents his aged father with a tiny container of milk, procured with great difficulty and not likely to ever be replaced. The older man gives the precious gift to his own terminally sick wife. She feverishly drinks the entire thing down, in front of her equally thirsty and doomed husband, and wordlessly resumes waiting to die. That sound is your heart breaking. – Adam Nayman
10. Twentynine Palms
When’s the last time you were truly scared by a movie? No, this isn’t the tagline for the latest Dimension release or a marketer’s tactic to get you to see some low-budget indie horror phenom that “breaks all the rules.” The sort of fear that French philosopher (and sometimes filmmaker) Bruno Dumont dredges up in “Twentynine Palms” is the kind so difficult to classify that most decided to ignore it altogether. Like denying the id, refusing to acknowledge the primordial sensations Dumont means to coax is like walking through this world blindfolded. A wholly unpleasant couple, barely communicating due to a barely tested language barrier, drive out into the desert from Los Angeles, stay at a series of motels, fuck loudly, fight violently, and drive, drive, drive in their increasingly anthropomorphized Hummer. The camera watches and waits. When Dumont finally, in thirty terrible seconds, slices through the mundanity of it all, the primal scream is deafening. Goofy, absurd treatise on American foreign policy? Stupefyingly literal-minded burrowing to the heart of complacent misogyny? Exercise in meta God’s-eye POV trickery? Adam and Eve redux? To even attempt to so strictly define it seems sheer folly: like shoving your hand into a gaping wound and poking around. You’re sure to emerge with something you weren’t quite ready for. – Michael Koresky
Closer
New Year’s Resolution for Mike Nichols: He must film an epilogue for “Closer” revealing that the entire film took place on the planet Ogatu. And thus is one of the most head-scratchingly remote, implausible, and alienating films ever made about (ostensibly) human relationships revealed to be an incisive sociological study of the exotic Ogatans, impeccably groomed creatures from a distant world who speak in the stilted cadence of high school drama majors, lace their conversations with epithets to shock an unseen (and urbanely shockable) “audience” whom they believe are watching their domestic squabbles with rapt attention, and whose strip clubs are not only designed by professional art directors, but also employ DJs whose musical choices are thematically appropriate to any drama playing out within its confines. Eat your heart out, M. Night. – Adam Nayman
The Passion of Christ
Jesus invented the modern chair — just one of the many things Mel Gibson taught me. I also learned that Judas was tormented by Jewish children morphing into demons, Satan was (and is) a bald androgyne, and that the Gospels are best represented at about 48 frames per second. But for all of Gibson’s laughable directorial decisions (his fruit-fly attention span, his Bruckheimer-esque emotional subtlety), the lesson that ultimately emerged from the disturbing success of “The Passion” is that numbing violence is the new realism. Moved viewers could only contrast Gibson’s fetishistic, graphic portrayals of male martyrdom to the stylized action pap Hollywood has been inuring audiences to for years. As a simulacra of art — the detailed beatings, the faux-renaissance lighting, and, in a “brave” move, not being in English — “The Passion”‘s “realism” cunningly peddles its self-righteous, hateful twisting of Christian teachings. After passing off manipulative exploitation as art and rousing America’s religious right to culture war, Gibson might offer Jews, as well as anyone — Christian and non-Christian alike — who cares about cinema, a slap in the face: a film about the Hanukkah story. As my father said when I told him of Gibson’s plans, “Can’t he leave us alone?” –
Michael Joshua Rowin
Darkness
When I traveled to Spain a few years ago, I visited Madrid, Sevilla, and the Costa del Sol. Despite regional dissimilarities in population, cuisine, and architecture, there was one major unifier that seems important to mention — everyone spoke Spanish. Not so in Jaume Balagueró‘s “Darkness,” a horror film set in a Spain in which everyone speaks English, the newspapers are printed in English, dead Spanish children whisper ominous threats in English, signs are in English, long-buried record albums unearthed from crawl-spaces and played on old gramophones spin out American music, and nary a Spanish word is uttered throughout. A shame, too, since the luxury of having to read subtitles would have distracted from Anna Paquin‘s overacting, from the way events unfold with neither foreshadowing nor follow-up, and especially from Giancarlo Giannini‘s embarrassing turn as a snake-wielding occultist (if the snake could speak, it would hiss, most assuredly, in English). And yet even if “Darkness” had been set in Kansas, and the characters spoke the appropriate language, and Giannini was traded in for Christopher Walken, it still wouldn’t make the shamefully wretched screenplay any more watchable. Back into the darkness from which you emerged, Jaume Balagueró! – Neal Block
The Dreamers
It was forgotten as quickly as it was (mildly) celebrated, but brickbats must be saved for Bernardo Bertolucci‘s reductionist vision of movies, history, politics, and sex in “The Dreamers.” Addressing themes charged with passion and controversy, Bertolucci brings it all down to a Euro-luxe tour through cinematic and erotic touchstones shorn of context, perfect for faux-sophisticates slumming it to the theaters on a Friday night and lazy critics for whom a mention of Godard, a glimpse of Mao’s Little Red Book, a couple of limp dicks (literal and figurative), and a pair of truly impressive milky-white breasts constitutes a vivid and challenging recreation of May ’68. Bertolucci’s insults to art — particularly in a sequence where his vapid lead and bearer of the aforementioned impressive pair (Eva Green) attempts suicide accompanied by clips from the shattering ending of Bresson‘s “Mouchette” — have nothing on his insults to reality. The likes of May ’68, in all its promise, disappointment, and foreboding, may never come again, but to reduce it to the backdrop of this anodyne sex triangle is to deny a half-century of thrillingly messy history. Keep the dream, Berty — the waking life’s a whole lot more interesting. – Andrew Tracy
Tarnation
Don’t believe A.O. Scott’s recent New York Times broadside: Alexander Payne’s “Sideways” isn’t really the most overrated film of the year. Sure, it’s walking off with all the critics’ awards, but in terms of completely unquestioning rapturous reception, this year’s clear winner was Jonathan Caouette‘s “Tarnation.” Where “Sideways” takes grossly hackneyed buddy-movie material and elevates it at almost every turn, “Tarnation” takes a “real life” with the weight of epic tragedy, reframes it through some moderately complex video trickery and ends up squarely in its own navel at every turn. If Caouette intended “Tarnation” to be some sort of commentary on mental health, the media, performance, or the intersection of the three, his film only completes this work by default — Chris Marker he ain’t. Some might find this complete lack of self-awareness fascinating, but naiveté and irresponsibility don’t earn points anywhere else in the world, so why should we laud this, especially given the movie that could have been? To call Caouette’s formal tactics “groundbreaking,” “original,” etc. is to ignore 30 years of video artists more successfully plying similar avenues in obscure galleries and biennials across the globe. I suppose a $200 movie making its way to festivals and theatres is a great development for independent cinema, but that doesn’t mean we should break out the free pass especially when the film leading the charge stands completely oblivious in the nexus of a host of contemporary cinematic debates. Upon exiting, my companion immediately proclaimed “Tarnation” “the worst film ever.” Though I won’t go nearly that far, if this represents the future of cinema, I’ll stay home and watch Oprah. – Jeff Reichert
Birth
If there could ever be such a thing as unbridled portent, Jonathan Glazer‘s silly experiment in metaphysical dead-ends luxuriates in it. Apparently, all of us pathetically hermetic, socially inept cinephiles surely love a good ambiguous airless art-fuck as much as a good roll in the hay, so why bother taking this ludicrous, half-conceived forehead-slapper beyond the single-sentence pitch? Woman believes her dead husband is reincarnated in the flesh of a 10-year-old boy. Yes, and…? Must we viewers really be made to feel insufficient for not projecting our own notions of “faith,” “love,” and “spirituality” onto a script so completely bereft of context, subtext, intertext, or, hell, even text of any kind? Even more stultifying is all the mindless Kubrick corpse-exhuming going on here: Nicole Kidman‘s “Eyes Wide Shut”-pilfering cadences are barely a blip on the radar compared to the 2001-esque opening shot following a jogger through Central Park (courtesy of DP Harris Savides, a.k.a Gus Van Sant‘s brain), the sight of the always unwelcome Danny Huston bouncing a rubber ball off the walls of his isolated apartment à la Jack Torrance, and lordy lord, the beyond-“Barry Lyndon” rough-and-tumble domestic squabble in the austere parlor during a violin concerto. Next to all this, the old “in-out, in-out” that perhaps took place between Kidman and her prepubescent paramour seems but a drop in the dried-up well. – Michael Koresky
Open Water
No one can accuse “Open Water” writer/director/cinematographer/editor/craft service provider Chris Kentis of not being a hard worker. One would have to be, to somehow manage to suck all the tension out of a situation tailor-made to invoke horror. Desensitized yuppies stranded at sea, the fear of the unknown that resides in us all, a coy commentary on our growing discomfort with anything we construe as “primitive” — it would seem a conceit impervious to cinematic failure. And yet, Kentis (cowering behind Dogme influence as some sort of thin excuse for shoddy storytelling and filmmaking skills) somehow succeeds only in being wholly unsuccessful on every count. Ricocheting between misplaced humor and poorly acted melodrama, all punctuated (that’s too kind a word — “sledgehammered” would be more appropriate) by perhaps the most grating and tonally schizophrenic film score in recent memory, one can’t help but wish the sharks would just get vivisecting already. Haunting? Absolutely, for all the wrong reasons. – Suzanne Scott
Alfie
The 1966 original with Michael Caine remains a provocative document of its London era, Charles Shyer‘s remake with Jude Law is a clumsy anachronism stranded in NYC with no return ticket. Law works hard and maintains likeability in spite of the awful dialogue, but the movie is a grotesque pastiche of mod London pasted onto contemporary New York as seen through the lens of fashonistas, all cooing over the style without understanding an ounce of the substance. Indeed, Shyer seems to have watched the original with the sound off, slavishly recreating visuals and entire shots that no longer have resonance in this newly maudlin context. The original Alfie wasn’t actively looking for redemption, but Alfie for the 21st century won’t shut up about it, and the whiny tone grates. It’s a movie about about midlife crisis seemingly scripted by teenagers. – Marianne Martin
King Arthur
An easy target, but “King Arthur” stands out as the recipient of my most honest movie laughter of the year. About 20 minutes in, a fellow Reverse Shot editor turned to me and whispered: “I have no idea what’s happening.” I paused for a second, realized that no shot in the film to that point seemed to bear any relationship to the one preceding or following it, and that I also had no idea what was happening, then laughed my way through the next several minutes. I’d almost like to call Antoine Fuqua‘s fragmentation of space, time, and history avant-garde just to be contrary, but that might encourage someone to actually see it. – Jeff Reichert
The Clearing
Further proof that today’s hyped “indie” hits are yesterday’s middling studio weepies. What was once middle-of-the-road bathos now passes for “classy.” Billboards proclaim, “Finally, a movie for adults!” Witness also Marc Forster‘s ossified “Finding Neverland,” Zach Braff‘s super-fun psychotherapy rib-tickler “Garden State,” and Tod Williams‘ erratic and muddled John Irving thing “The Door in the Floor,” which all apparently mistake “adult” for “brain-dead” and “apathetic.” And when big stars like Robert Redford stoop to appear in lower-budgeted fare, the perceived gap between studio and independent becomes even hazier. This excruciatingly dull, carelessly plotted fossil of a film, concerning the kidnapping of a wealthy business executive and, of course, the falseness of the American dream, may not be the worst offender of its type, but it’s certainly the most pointless. Also responsible for financing the similarly watered-down, absurdly machine-tooled and de-politicized Che Guevara-goes-a-picnicking romp “The Motorcycle Diaries,” Redford needs to create more of a wedge between art and finance for the dream of Sundance to ever flourish again, certainly considering last year’s hopeful one-two punch of “Primer” and “Maria Full of Grace.” Let’s cross our fingers for 2005. – Michael Koresky
The Manchurian Candidate
Maybe not the most repulsive film of the year (hello, “Man on Fire”!) but likely the most superfluous. Not only was Jonathan Demme‘s misguided remake devoid of any contemporary political relevance (which tends to happen when you set your film in the “real” world but conspicuously avoid any partisan signifiers), its construction as a thriller was so tortured as to border on the positively avant-garde. Discussing its shortcomings with regard to its source material would be both cruel and obvious: it’s more than bad enough on its own terms, from Denzel Washington‘s “John Q”-redux performance to the most clumsily staged kayak-related killing in cinema history. – Adam Nayman
Random theater-hop more often:
I paid for “Closer” and regretted it even before the previews. Snuck into “Spanglish” afterwards and left 1 for 2 on the afternoon. A ticket for Toback‘s overlooked curio “When Will I Be Loved?” carried me through the politically suspect “Hero” and the soporific “Silver City.” Only 1 for 3 that day. “The Village,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” and “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” back-to-back-a solid 2 for 3. From this small selection of a year’s worth of viewing, I spent around $30 and saw four good movies and four bad for serious savings and a better average than most probably get following the advice of their daily papers. – Jeff Reichert
Encourage Wes Anderson to Get Out More:
After leaving “The Royal Tenenbaums” quite moved, I said to myself: “Pretty good, but I’m not going to let him get away with that again.” Then “The Life Aquatic” pulled out all the same tricks and still won me over, but it needed an animated fish and Icelandic space-rock to get the job done. This time I really mean it. Wes, it’s obvious from the films that you all are having a big old blast, but you’ve got to shake things up a bit. Dump the regulars, try a little genre slumming — maybe noir? Now that would be something. Maybe not necessarily a good something, but at least something else. – Jeff Reichert
Learn to Stop Worrying and Criticize Pixar:
Show any dissent about the most sacred cow of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking and risk being run out of town on a rail. Impeccably crafted? Check. Stunning digital backdrops? Check. Clever. Witty. Wholesome. Wonderful for kids and adults. Yes, yes, yes, I know already. Sadly, “The Incredibles”‘ PG rating merely reflected a newfound intensity in its pummeling action sequences rather than any sort of truly subversive ingredients. I’m sorry, but a modern-day parable about the lack of superheroes in our increasingly violent, desperate world that still manages to retreat into hip retro early Sixties kitschy cool? Even for a kid’s film, it’s just too reticent to rock the boat. And there’s something about that pristine sheen that’s becoming slightly off-putting: people are quick to call it art, but since when was art the product of assembly-line standards, no matter how high the quality? – Michael Koresky
Try to Forget that No One Really Goes to the Movies Expecting Politics:
With all the buzz around the slew of political docs that didn’t quite push Kerry over the edge, everyone forgot that mythmaking and storytelling come more loaded with the stuff of solid real word decision-making than any documentary. How else to explain the accolades showered on Zhang Yimou‘s “Hero” or the lack of attention paid to the disturbing undercurrents of Brad Bird‘s “The Incredibles”? Maybe I’m just quibbling, but when “Hero” undercuts 80 minutes of visual poetry and lush romanticism by expounding the virtues of safety through tyranny and critics applaud and write things like, “it’s actually a mythic illustration of charisma and treachery’s central role in leadership” shouldn’t we pause for a second? (I’ll vote for honesty, transparency, and humility in my leadership, thank you.) Or what of the “everyone is special so no one is” rhetoric that peeks through the cracks of “The Incredibles”‘ airtight fantasyland? Sounds to me less like a message of learning one’s strengths than a late night C-Span diatribe from the early Nineties directed at PC-liberalism. Everyone, right or left, knew what came with their ticket to “Fahrenheit 9/11.” That’s why it’s ever more important for critics to shine a light on those politics that get absorbed with minimal questioning every time a film is screened anywhere. – Jeff Reichert
Start Preparing for Christmas ’05… NOW!
I may be Jewish, but living in Hollywood’s America, I better jump on the Christ-loving bandwagon pronto, buy my ornaments on sale, put my pine tree on layaway before it’s even a sapling, and barricade myself off behind ten tons of holly wreaths and mistletoe. I saw what happened to those poor Kranks — and they’re not even of “that” persuasion! But Robert Zemeckis‘ frightfest “The Polar Express,” starring a cast of plasticine, expressionless zombie kids with the voices of deep-throated adults carted off on a berserk train ride to the North Pole to meet some guy named Klaus and to re-educate them in the ways of Christmas cheer, has really terrified me into submission. I believe, I believe! And if I go to midnight mass this year, Mel Gibson, do you promise that Terminator Christ won’t knock on my door with a Hail Mary and a cat-o-nine tails? I swear I’ll stop watching Adam Sandler‘s truly singular Hanukkah gem “Eight Crazy Nights” in an endless loop every December 25th….I swear! – Michael Koresky
A grab bag of 2004 festival faves just getting “wider” releases. Misunderstood studio experiments. Inventive indie charmers. It becomes increasingly ridiculous to try and separate one year’s best-of list from the next in any sort of edifying ideological, spiritual, or political manner, as the disparity of visions and points of view from around the globe just happen to be reflected in a handful of films lucky enough to see the light of a projector. So, at Reverse Shot, as always, our notion of a panoply of critical voices never seems more appropriate than when compiling a top ten. As with last year’s poll, each staff writer voted for ten films, with the first-place ranked film receiving ten points, the second-place getting nine points, and so on. Of the resulting films, each is assigned to a writer who has a special place in his or her heart for that particular title. We wish we had the space to herald more than just this arbitrary amount, for there was much passion for our very close runners-up (Lucrecia Martel’s “The Holy Girl,” Jia Zhangke’s “The World,” Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and “War of the Worlds,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows,” Rob Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects,” Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days“). Apologies to RS readers, but blame the slow distribution process for the umpteenth appearances of some of these titles, which have been in heavy rotation since Cannes ’04. And in ’06, keep an eye out for repeated appraisals of our festival picks from ’05… sure to be seen right here come January ’07. Stay tuned though, cause we’ll do everything we can to keep things fresh.
1. Kings and Queen
The most sprawling, scrawling accomplishment of a year in cinema was — like its protagonists — a compelling, melodramatic mess. “Kings and Queen” found space for the best and worst of movie moments: an astringent, posthumous father-to-daughter hate letter that hisses like a blotch of acid, burning into every scene around it; a “endearingly quirky,” cutesy break-dancing interlude that brings the movie to a screeching, pile-up halt behind it. Perhaps it’s much too unfocused, lumpy with bafflingly protruding scenes and awkward shifts, to comfortably shoulder the burden of Masterpiece-dom, but who needs great, banefully consistent movies when you can have a grab bag that’s this crazily overstuffed? Throughout, each cast member is ready with an ambiguous smile to flash on at the oddest of times — some lovely bit of guidance is obviously behind them. For all the crazy contortions of Desplechin’s movie, no one outside of Philippe Garrel (whose father, Maurice, plays the aforementioned letter’s author) has shown as much intent interest in something as simple and essential as the hidden stories of a human face. – Nick Pinkerton
2. Caché
The year’s biggest head trip, the year’s most prescient film, a thriller without release, an expansive perspective lacking identity, a purveyor of clear truths hidden in plain view — Michael Haneke‘s “Cache” challenges the way we look at the world by destabilizing the very act of looking. From an opening establishing shot paused and rewound to a concluding one that refuses to validate and follow the action, Haneke’s film demands nothing less than a reawakening, a rehabilitation of the viewer’s lazy eye. For as his film so thickly demonstrates, any reckoning with how things really are–or simply might be — requires kicking out the crutch of appearance. Maintain biases and expectations (be they visual or social) at your own risk: the risk of missing everything. If Haneke were merely out to bait, baste, and bake the bourgeoisie — as some critics have asserted — he’d have spent more time goosing his characters in a Bunuelian manner rather than allowing them reasonable human responses to their mounting discomfort. If Haneke’s self-described bobos were easy to mock, if their fears were overplayed, then why is “Cache” so terrifying? Seeing things, be they right before our eyes or conveniently buried in the past, can be devastating. But the consequences of ignorance–proven this fall by post-“Cache” Paris’s burning — can be much worse. – Eric Hynes
3. A History of Violence
If 2005 saw the absolute nadir of big-screen graphic novel adaptations with Robert Rodriguez’s “Sin City,” then I suppose we could offer the beleaguered form an olive branch by arguing that David Cronenberg‘s “A History of Violence” stakes out a more positive claim on its viability. But why should we reduce the complexity of this fully-formed, intricately assembled film to the mere two dimensions and limited palette afforded a comic book? It’s hard to believe that anything in the original text could compare to the subtle unease of Cronenberg’s coolly modulated compositions or those moments of discomfort wrought out by its internal dissonance — what’s instantly cinematically recognizable here clashes with its filmmaker’s burning philosophical agenda. This latest work by a director more known for taking his audiences to surreal locales presents a small-town Indiana simultaneously so utterly familiar and so completely disorienting that by the end, the odd countenances and performances of his actors (if Viggo Mortenson and his family all look and act as though they might have stepped from another planet, then William Hurt’s goateed and Philly-fied turn stems from another universe entirely) combine with a narrative that always takes the most interesting wrong turn to create the year’s most plausibly implausible masterwork. – Jeff Reichert
4. 2046
Cinematic lyricist Wong Kar-wai‘s “2046” elicited what felt like a collective sigh of enraptured relief upon its long-awaited theatrical release earlier this year as it proved to be that rarest of achievements–worth every second of the clamorous anticipation. Like last year’s emotional stunner of a sequel “Before Sunset,” Wong’s film is not a retread of its predecessor “In the Mood for Love” so much as an exploratory continuation and voluptuous development of character. Its heady stylistic evocation of lost love and longing makes it another movie-to-swoon-to in the way of vintage Wong, but “2046” remains far more hauntingly elusive and, for this reason, powerful, leaving in its wake an expanding impression of mood and colors and slowness rather than a straight recollection of narrative details–almost as soon as you behold it, it slips out of your grasp. This enticing opacity owes something to the delicate connective tissue holding together its mysterious movements between past and future but also has to do with an enthralling probing of the secretive possessiveness of memory itself. And perhaps this is the best you can say for any visual endeavor–that it nearly escapes words. – Kristi Mitsuda
5. L'Intrus
During an interview in 2004, Claire Denis told me that she was “horrified” by suggestions that “The Intruder” was in any way “obscure.” It wasn’t until I revisited it a few weeks ago that I was inclined to agree. What initially scans as impenetrable (but fascinating) reveals itself, upon a second viewing, as visionary and wholly unpretentious. In adapting Jean-Louis Nancy‘s autobiographical text about the alienating effects of his own heart transplant, Denis has crafted a film of crystalline beauty and startling ambition. It’s a story about an aged soldier of fortune (Michel Subor) journeying from Jura to Pusan to Tahiti in an elaborate, potentially misbegotten gesture of reconciliation towards his estranged son. Now here’s the startling part: His voyage is related to us as a waking dream in which binary distinctions between literal and figurative representation have been casually obliterated. Internal conflicts are represented externally: a group of marauders threatening Louis’s cabin along the French-Swiss border may also be harbingers of his own failing cardiovascular system. Clear themes do emerge–as always, Denis is fascinated by rituals of cultural exchange and finds time for two or three characteristically temperature-raising seductions–but decode the film at your peril. Denis comes by her ellipticism honestly, and her magnificent film is a force to be reckoned with. – Adam Nayman
6. Tropical Malady
2005’s most radical break from narrative occurred as a literal break in celluloid: Halfway through “Tropical Malady,” the greatest experiment yet by the world’s latest-greatest experimental narrative filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the screen zaps out. What was formerly a completely disarming naturalist romance suddenly, through some wondrous cinematic alchemy, becomes a supernatural mythological treatise on the nature of love itself. But no mere diptych is this–the minimalist folk legend functions as the mirror image of the realist love story that provides accessible entryway into Apichatpong’s philosophies. Relentlessly confounding as the film may be to some, its charms are in its simplicity: When was the last time a contemporary romance ended in Buddhist enlightenment? With its shimmering twilight jungles and cricket-chirping soundtrack, “Tropical Malady”‘s unnervingly becalmed artwork enveloped me in its rhythms more than any other film this year–so pure and primal it’s like watching love reinvented before your eyes. – Michael Koresky
7. The Squid and the Whale
Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale” is a drama that hits the ear like a farce: characters talk past one another in dialogue at once succinct and realistic, a series of flares fired into the air that effectively communicate nothing but crisis. Words fail two accomplished writers (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) as they dissolve their union, leaving melodramatic Pink Floyd lyrics and an inarticulate tennis- playing philistine to speak most clearly for two boys lost in lonely tailspins of anxious adolescent self-definition. The entropy of divorce sends the boys bouncing between action and regret before they retreat to mirrors and monuments in moments that capture all the helpless, directionless frustration required to come of age. Sexual discovery is often undignified, and here the boys’ simultaneous confrontation with their parents’ sexuality rips loose the moorings of their world. The effect is as comic as it is tragic–demanding tears for the inherent pathos of adolescence and laughter for the familiarly absurd–in this peerless incarnation of a timelessly unhappy family. – Lauren Kaminsky
8. The New World
“The New World”‘s opening and closing credits roll over images of maps being drawn, which is appropriate enough: Cartography, after all, is a lot like history –it starts with the real (land masses, mountains, seas) and provides an imaginary order (names, borders) born of the arbitrary authority of human interpretation. History, too, offers an intelligibility that is largely imaginary; the telling of history turns real places into settings, real people into characters, reducing them all to the logic of narrative. “The New World” resists narrative, though, instead plunging headfirst into the experience of history, not as Event but as Emotion, as Image, as Aspiration, as Loss. Terrence Malick doesn’t offer answers, just as he never invokes the authority to call Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher, in an exquisite debut) by her name. He’s more interested in posing questions–about the narratives we tell, the coherences we map, the names we give, none more piercing or inadequate than the “Rebecca” hurled by white civilization at his Pocahontas, achingly human despite her symbolic import. Some critics have taken Malick’s refusal to aspire to historical fact (if such a thing exists) as evidence that he isn’t concerned with history at all, that his “tone poem” is preoccupied exclusively with allegory. History, though, is the heart of the matter. “The New World” is defiantly anti-commercial and utterly unapproachable with the conventional tools of film criticism (which may be why many reviews of it seem so glib and dismissive). It isn’t perfect; still less is it coherent. Those are among its chief virtues. Intellectually rigorous, aesthetically challenging, and breathtakingly beautiful, “The New World” doesn’t belong to our disposable film culture of opening weekends, awards-blogging, and capsule reviews. – Chris Wisniewski
9. Grizzly Man
In a year of strange beauties, Werner Herzog presented one of its most compelling protagonists: Timothy Treadwell, defender of the wild, emblem of a culture of narcissism. A withering counterpoint to the season’s bigger nature hit, “March of the Penguins,” “Grizzly Man” is essentially a conversation between the starry-eyed Treadwell and the pessimistic Herzog. Guess who wins. Where Morgan Freeman’s voiceover for “Penguins” was a breath of warm air over the Antarctic landscape (not to mention worth several million dollars at the box office), Herzog’s imperious narration chills the New Age nirvana of Treadwell’s Alaskan summers. Part tribute, part rebuke, Grizzly Man critiques the hubris that masquerades as humility in mindless eco-worship. (It’s as much about human nature as nature itself.) Herzog’s disagreement with Treadwell the idealist, however, is leavened by his kinship with Treadwell the artist. By piecing together a scrapbook of a life, Herzog has constructed a breathtaking mosaic of an untouched world — we can see how Treadwell was seduced. The poetry — in the images, in the ironies, in Treadwell’s tragic end — can be touching, but it is, as Herzog reminds us, the product of chaos, not design. – Elbert Ventura
10. Junebug
That “Junebug” manages to circumvent the precociousness and self-conscious whimsy of so many forthrightly indigenous Amerindies is somewhat of a miracle–especially considering that on paper, this delicate portrait of empty spaces and blind spots, both in landscape and in the family unit, sounds little more than rote culture-clash. Phil Morrison‘s utter surprise of a movie has been both praised and misread for its blue state-meets-red state fish-out-of-water narrative, and its depiction of North Carolina locals and eccentrics has been seen as both condescendingly specific and transcendently universal — yet what Carolina native Morrison really achieves, along with a nuanced screenplay by Angus MacLachlan that refuses to promise easy resolutions for festering conflicts, is something far more profound than geographic specificity: a state of almost holy unity, a home-and-hearth portrait at once concrete and somehow liminal. The glowing, glorious Embeth Davidtz, in a more difficult and rewarding role than her more ballyhooed costar, Amy Adams, is our surrogate, a sophisticated Chicago art dealer joining her new husband (Alessandro Nivola) in a trip down South, both to meet his family but also to court a possibly autistic “outsider” artist. Morrison’s film is lovingly humane, emotionally multifaceted, and even above all that, aesthetically daring. The filmmaking is so “on” in “Junebug” that just about every scene reveals something new and wonderful, among people and the environments they inhabit. More memorable than any exchange of dialogue (of which there is nary a wasted moment between any two characters) are the spaces (empty rooms, quiet nighttime forests) that Morrison leaves open for contemplation. From erstwhile choirboy Nivola’s spirit-shaking impromptu hymn to the epiphanic, cathedral-like silence that falls upon the family’s modest abode when the cast has walked out of frame, “Junebug” says the most when the words simply won’t come. – Michael Koresky
