Originally posted January 30, 2007
Lately we're enamored of simple documentaries that tell the personal stories of random folks. There was Michael Apted's "49 Up" in October and "Hand of God" in December.
Now comes one that tops them both, the heartbreaking "51 Birch Street," which is essentially the stark tale of a postwar marriage. That's pretty much it. But it might be the most compelling documentary of the Ordinary People genre that I have ever seen.
Filmmaker Doug Block goes back to his childhood home in Port Washington, N.Y., to study his mom, whom he's close to, and his dad, the stereotypical World War II veteran who has always been a mystery to his children.
But as Block peels off the layers from his parents' past, it's his mom, Mina, who provides the revelations. It's no secret from the start of the film that Mina and Mike had an unfulfilling marriage. He threw himself into his work and she repressed her desires in order to raise three good kids in a clean house. The way her own son presents the yearning of a '60s housewife is both tender and shocking. Making this film took guts.
The nagging questions throughout the movie slowly build: Do Block and his sisters want to know what their parents really were like? Do these middle age people want to know exactly what their parents were thinking and feeling when they were the same age? Will the secrets of '60s suburbia force the offspring to shed their own hang-ups and see their parents as true flesh and id?
I won't reveal much about the "plot" of the film, because one of the great accomplishments here is the way Block gradually unlocks secrets, and revealing the key device in his film (it involves some memoirs) would ruin much of that for you.
Like a good dramatist, Block patiently lets his story unfold and his characters evolve. Toward the end, he gains insight into (and intimacy with) his father (ostensibly the original mission of the film), and Mike gives us a glimpse behind the facade of the World War II Male. Turns out, this emotionally distant provider might not want to dredge up the past -- especially the negative stuff -- but he's clearly been paying attention all these years.
When, toward the end, the father turns the camera around and directs a question to his son, you get the feeling that Block has his own walls around him. You almost want a sequel that would peel back the layers of the son.
I saw this movie at the Loft Cinema in Tucson, and the local weekly wondered aloud whether such a home movie has much appeal beyond the Block family. It does, because it tells a universal story and asks a compelling question: Why do we take the path in life that we do? And another: Are we happy?
One of Mina's friends, Natasha, while discussing the '60s mind-set and the joys of psychotherapy, explains (perhaps unwittingly) why the rest of us might care about the family that lived at 51 Birch Street during the second half of the century. "What a relief," she says, "for someone to really know us."
In a recent post, about Daniel Burnam's "Family Law," I admitted that no film had made me miss my father like that one did. Today, Doug Block's documentary made me want to get to know my dad.
16 September 2008
31 July 2008
Pixies and "Old Joy"
Originally posted November 2006
These movies come and go at the Guild Cinema, and I'm beginning to think that my top-10 list for the year could come just from the local art house's '06 slate, starting with "The World" back in January.
In the past few weeks, the films "Old Joy" and "Loud Quiet Loud: A Film About the Pixies" have hit close to home, even though they are two of the most laconic, uneventful movies you'll ever see. In the manner of the recent "49 Up," they are about people my age, or nearly so, who are settling into their skin, realizing that, for better or worse, this is your life.
As I watched the Pixies movie about their 2004 reunion tour, I was reminded of the Beatles. Running hot for six years; four people outgrowing each other; creative tension between the two songwriters. And the music is that good. Few bands nailed just about every song straight on for six years like the Pixies and Beatles did.
The mini-review of "Loud Quiet Loud" we ran recently (from the band's hometown Boston Globe) faulted the film for being tedious and uneventful. But it was the movie's quietest moments that were some of the most powerful. The four of them sitting in a room without speaking. Kim Deal (or was it twin sister Kelley?) doing needlepoint on the porch of their home in Dayton, Ohio.
We see Deal struggle mightily a year into sobriety (chain-smoking and slamming nonalcoholic beers day and night). Black Francis and Joey Santiago adapt to sudden fatherhood and the separation from their new families. Drummer David Lovering deals with his ailing father. One of the four is clearly having a nervous breakdown.
The Pixies were the poster children for the explosion of diverse popular music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time I call the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, before the co-opting of "alternative" music. I saw the Pixies live once, in 1991 at the Riviera Theater in Chicago. It was a jet ride of a show. Greg Kot, the great rock music critic of the Chicago Tribune, said the band members played as if their cars were double-parked outside. He meant that in a good way. It was a frantic show.
Apparently, though, these four people who reach sublime heights onstage don't have much in common and are all missing the communication gene. At the beginning of the film, during their first rehearsal in a dozen years, they can't remember how to start the song "Hey." Finally, Deal fetches an iPod to play the original version. Late in the movie, toward the end of the triumphant reunion tour, the band is sailing through "Hey," and the filmmakers flash back to old footage of the band as young 20-somethings. It's done in the melancholy style usually reserved for the now-dead. The boys have flowing hair. (One scene from the reunion tour shows the men shaving their heads; they all go shaved now to mask receding hairlines.) In the flashback, Deal doesn't have lines on her face — or any worries, it seems. (She and her sister, after years of substance abuse and weight gain, could easily pass for 55 now.) The old footage is poignant.
Then we return to the stage for the climax of the wildly popular tour. Black Francis hugs his bandmates as they leave the stage, but it seems like less of an emotional moment and more of a pat on the back for making their business venture a success (they all needed the money). They survived. They are flattered at the reaction from the fans. Maybe they know that that's all they should expect.
The members of the band still haven't learned how to talk to each other. Black Francis tells an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine that he has demos ready for a Pixies album and that he's waiting for one of his bandmates to ask about booking studio time. But the passive-aggressive frontman is obviously incapable of just walking up to Joey or David or Kim and telling one of them directly.
That's just the way he is, apparently.
We find ourselves in our late 30s or early 40s and we realize we are hard-wired a certain way. This is who we are. This is who we are sharing our lives with; either mates or bandmates, songs or babies. We worship our youth and marvel at our energy and our accomplishments. We occasionally try to recapture moments, but it's easier if we just admire them from afar and write new songs.
The bleak drama "Old Joy" leaves us wondering which direction two estranged friends will head. One of them shares a memorable line: "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy."
And worn-out joy is joy just the same. It comes with implied hope. And it's what we pass among the people in our lives, often unspoken and unwritten.
These movies come and go at the Guild Cinema, and I'm beginning to think that my top-10 list for the year could come just from the local art house's '06 slate, starting with "The World" back in January.
In the past few weeks, the films "Old Joy" and "Loud Quiet Loud: A Film About the Pixies" have hit close to home, even though they are two of the most laconic, uneventful movies you'll ever see. In the manner of the recent "49 Up," they are about people my age, or nearly so, who are settling into their skin, realizing that, for better or worse, this is your life.
As I watched the Pixies movie about their 2004 reunion tour, I was reminded of the Beatles. Running hot for six years; four people outgrowing each other; creative tension between the two songwriters. And the music is that good. Few bands nailed just about every song straight on for six years like the Pixies and Beatles did.
The mini-review of "Loud Quiet Loud" we ran recently (from the band's hometown Boston Globe) faulted the film for being tedious and uneventful. But it was the movie's quietest moments that were some of the most powerful. The four of them sitting in a room without speaking. Kim Deal (or was it twin sister Kelley?) doing needlepoint on the porch of their home in Dayton, Ohio.
We see Deal struggle mightily a year into sobriety (chain-smoking and slamming nonalcoholic beers day and night). Black Francis and Joey Santiago adapt to sudden fatherhood and the separation from their new families. Drummer David Lovering deals with his ailing father. One of the four is clearly having a nervous breakdown.
The Pixies were the poster children for the explosion of diverse popular music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time I call the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, before the co-opting of "alternative" music. I saw the Pixies live once, in 1991 at the Riviera Theater in Chicago. It was a jet ride of a show. Greg Kot, the great rock music critic of the Chicago Tribune, said the band members played as if their cars were double-parked outside. He meant that in a good way. It was a frantic show.
Apparently, though, these four people who reach sublime heights onstage don't have much in common and are all missing the communication gene. At the beginning of the film, during their first rehearsal in a dozen years, they can't remember how to start the song "Hey." Finally, Deal fetches an iPod to play the original version. Late in the movie, toward the end of the triumphant reunion tour, the band is sailing through "Hey," and the filmmakers flash back to old footage of the band as young 20-somethings. It's done in the melancholy style usually reserved for the now-dead. The boys have flowing hair. (One scene from the reunion tour shows the men shaving their heads; they all go shaved now to mask receding hairlines.) In the flashback, Deal doesn't have lines on her face — or any worries, it seems. (She and her sister, after years of substance abuse and weight gain, could easily pass for 55 now.) The old footage is poignant.
Then we return to the stage for the climax of the wildly popular tour. Black Francis hugs his bandmates as they leave the stage, but it seems like less of an emotional moment and more of a pat on the back for making their business venture a success (they all needed the money). They survived. They are flattered at the reaction from the fans. Maybe they know that that's all they should expect.
The members of the band still haven't learned how to talk to each other. Black Francis tells an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine that he has demos ready for a Pixies album and that he's waiting for one of his bandmates to ask about booking studio time. But the passive-aggressive frontman is obviously incapable of just walking up to Joey or David or Kim and telling one of them directly.
That's just the way he is, apparently.
We find ourselves in our late 30s or early 40s and we realize we are hard-wired a certain way. This is who we are. This is who we are sharing our lives with; either mates or bandmates, songs or babies. We worship our youth and marvel at our energy and our accomplishments. We occasionally try to recapture moments, but it's easier if we just admire them from afar and write new songs.
The bleak drama "Old Joy" leaves us wondering which direction two estranged friends will head. One of them shares a memorable line: "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy."
And worn-out joy is joy just the same. It comes with implied hope. And it's what we pass among the people in our lives, often unspoken and unwritten.
15 July 2008
"No Country for Old Men"
Originally posted Nov. 16, 2007
As I get older, I reap the benefits of getting to figure a few things out. But one of the insights I've had lately is that the more meaning-of-life epiphanies I have, the less it seems to matter.
Or the less I matter.
This past week my film world was mired in the era of my childhood, from Kennedy to Reagan eve. In Peter Bogdanovich's luscious 1968 period piece "Targets," Boris Karloff plays an autobiographical character, an actor who realizes suddenly that Hollywood and the world have passed him by.
Earlier in the day I saw the Todd Haynes film "I'm Not There," a pseudo-biopic of Vietnam-era Bob Dylan that suggests life begins and ends the moment you stake your claim to fame, and after that — well, you could just as well be a character from the old West as a rock star. I'll sort that one out next week.
And then there are the Coen Brothers and their deeply moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," a paean to the old world order.
The film is framed, both literally and figuratively, by Ed Tom Bell, the aging Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. This is 1980, and like Boris Karloff in "Targets," Sheriff Ed Tom's world just isn't the same — we're on the brink of an upheaval — and he's ready to hand things over to the type of people who just don't appreciate a "sir" or "ma'am" anymore.
And so be it.
"No Country for Old Men" is, ostensibly, about a welder named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on the aftermath of a botched drug deal in the desert, finds a bag with $2 million in it and subsequently is hunted by the devil in flesh, air-gun-wielding Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who wants that money back, with a few quarts of blood as interest.
That's the plot, but it's not what the movie is about.
Instead, Joel and Ethan Coen — shedding the froth of "Fargo" and returning to their darker roots of "Blood Simple" — have crafted a quietly apocalyptic morality play about disillusionment.
Yes, Ed Tom is old and cranky and losing his touch. But this is more than nostalgia or the churn of the generations.
He's perfectly ready to step aside, to admit that, as the title suggests, it's a young man's world and always will be. Jones captures the duality that we all slowly comprehend: On the surface, life is fleeting and shallow (a coin flip, as Chigurh demonstrates to a few of his victims), but that doesn't mean each loss we witness along the way doesn't tear us up on the inside, little by little. Those lines in Jones' face got there somehow.
And if we manage to elude the bad guys (or are too timid to take the risk that provokes them in the first place), our consolation is a slow march toward death, a dull wade through inconsequence.
The Coens don't turn their camera away from death. In fact, they linger on the bloody bodies. Death is brutal but natural. In their random universe, dogs die with as much dignity as humans do.
At a crucial point in the film — just when a traditional director would show us a clamorous climax to the underworld chase — the Coen brothers pull the rug out from under us. The death of a key character is skipped over, as if a scene is missing, and instead we see it all in a quick reaction shot, a facial expression.
It's those faces that help tell the real story here. Often the Coen brothers use reflections, another reminder of our lives receding in that rearview mirror. Two characters stare into the same blank TV screen — it's a '70s-era click-channel model — and we see them float in it like ghosts. And perhaps we wink along, conjuring up modern, 3-D plasma images of this all playing out on a reality show in 2007.
After their anticlimax, the directors take a detour. Ed Tom goes to visit Ellis (Barry Corbin), a destitute old coot who survives on stale coffee and not a little bitterness.
Suddenly this potboiler of a movie rambles to an ending — as if scenes were set to iPod shuffle. The Coen brothers put us in the boots of those old men, and we wander aimlessly, confused.
"You can't stop what's coming," Ellis tells Ed Tom at one point, and you can almost hear an "Amen" from Jones the actor.
"It ain't waiting on you," Ellis says coldly. "That's vanity."
As I get older, I reap the benefits of getting to figure a few things out. But one of the insights I've had lately is that the more meaning-of-life epiphanies I have, the less it seems to matter.
Or the less I matter.
This past week my film world was mired in the era of my childhood, from Kennedy to Reagan eve. In Peter Bogdanovich's luscious 1968 period piece "Targets," Boris Karloff plays an autobiographical character, an actor who realizes suddenly that Hollywood and the world have passed him by.
Earlier in the day I saw the Todd Haynes film "I'm Not There," a pseudo-biopic of Vietnam-era Bob Dylan that suggests life begins and ends the moment you stake your claim to fame, and after that — well, you could just as well be a character from the old West as a rock star. I'll sort that one out next week.
And then there are the Coen Brothers and their deeply moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," a paean to the old world order.
The film is framed, both literally and figuratively, by Ed Tom Bell, the aging Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. This is 1980, and like Boris Karloff in "Targets," Sheriff Ed Tom's world just isn't the same — we're on the brink of an upheaval — and he's ready to hand things over to the type of people who just don't appreciate a "sir" or "ma'am" anymore.
And so be it.
"No Country for Old Men" is, ostensibly, about a welder named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on the aftermath of a botched drug deal in the desert, finds a bag with $2 million in it and subsequently is hunted by the devil in flesh, air-gun-wielding Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who wants that money back, with a few quarts of blood as interest.
That's the plot, but it's not what the movie is about.
Instead, Joel and Ethan Coen — shedding the froth of "Fargo" and returning to their darker roots of "Blood Simple" — have crafted a quietly apocalyptic morality play about disillusionment.
Yes, Ed Tom is old and cranky and losing his touch. But this is more than nostalgia or the churn of the generations.
He's perfectly ready to step aside, to admit that, as the title suggests, it's a young man's world and always will be. Jones captures the duality that we all slowly comprehend: On the surface, life is fleeting and shallow (a coin flip, as Chigurh demonstrates to a few of his victims), but that doesn't mean each loss we witness along the way doesn't tear us up on the inside, little by little. Those lines in Jones' face got there somehow.
And if we manage to elude the bad guys (or are too timid to take the risk that provokes them in the first place), our consolation is a slow march toward death, a dull wade through inconsequence.
The Coens don't turn their camera away from death. In fact, they linger on the bloody bodies. Death is brutal but natural. In their random universe, dogs die with as much dignity as humans do.
At a crucial point in the film — just when a traditional director would show us a clamorous climax to the underworld chase — the Coen brothers pull the rug out from under us. The death of a key character is skipped over, as if a scene is missing, and instead we see it all in a quick reaction shot, a facial expression.
It's those faces that help tell the real story here. Often the Coen brothers use reflections, another reminder of our lives receding in that rearview mirror. Two characters stare into the same blank TV screen — it's a '70s-era click-channel model — and we see them float in it like ghosts. And perhaps we wink along, conjuring up modern, 3-D plasma images of this all playing out on a reality show in 2007.
After their anticlimax, the directors take a detour. Ed Tom goes to visit Ellis (Barry Corbin), a destitute old coot who survives on stale coffee and not a little bitterness.
Suddenly this potboiler of a movie rambles to an ending — as if scenes were set to iPod shuffle. The Coen brothers put us in the boots of those old men, and we wander aimlessly, confused.
"You can't stop what's coming," Ellis tells Ed Tom at one point, and you can almost hear an "Amen" from Jones the actor.
"It ain't waiting on you," Ellis says coldly. "That's vanity."
02 May 2008
Best of 2007: At the movies, having the time of your life
Originally posted December 28, 2007:
Top 10
1. "No Country for Old Men"
2. "I'm Not There"
3. "A Mighty Heart"
4. "Killer of Sheep"
5. "This Is England"
6. "51 Birch Street"
7. "Once"
8. "Away From Her"
9. "The Astronaut Farmer"
10. "Talk to Me"
It would be so easy for me to blame the "Idiocracy."
Mike Judge's frustrating look at our bleak future was sneaked into a few theaters in fall 2006 (where it earned less than $500,000) and then dumped off to DVD release this past January. While Albuquerque's homegrown idiot savant didn't match the manic brilliance of 1999's "Office Space," the futuristic slapstick of "Idiocracy" had just enough nuggets of truth about a world bled of dignity and culture that the easy laughs belie an unsettling message.
That's how I started my movie year, and as you might have heard, this annus horribilis is ending with an execution - a shot from an air-powered cattle gun straight to the cerebral cortex of a newspaper, an industry, a career. They did warn us "There Will Be Blood."
If the future, rendered in cartoon form in "Idiocracy," is a depressing world to visit, then maybe I can be forgiven if most of the movies on my top-10 list tossed me back into the past. I like to think of it not as a retreat (that would be defeatist) but rather a re-examination (more therapeutic, like on an HBO series).
On back-to-back days I saw the equally brilliant "I'm Not There" and "No Country for Old Men," which bookended my childhood experience, respectively, from the mid-1960s to the dawn of Reagan.
"I'm Not There" is less about Bob Dylan than it is about the rest of us and how we (journalists, especially) like to pigeonhole; how we build people up just to knock them down; how we insist they fit our formula. The movie begins and ends with that steady, rambling freight train leading us both forward in time and back. It takes a Midwest boy on a journey, to the big city out east as well as to the Old West, into the future and through the past.
"I'm Not There" is Todd Haynes' most fully realized film, reminding me of the equally offbeat "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," in which Wes Anderson perfected his vision and was a maestro in the zone. (Anderson's offering this year, "The Darjeeling Limited," deserves another viewing, and I might wish a few months hence that I'd put it in my top 10.)
"No Country for Old Men," the best film Joel and Ethan Coen have made, took us back to 1980 and to the brink of a new era. Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff ached with the realization that the world he came of age in no longer needed him around and that our ultimate fate is obsolescence. Those meandering final 20 minutes magically capture the onset of such aimlessness.
For me, adrift in my analog world, I watched a neighborhood video store succumb to the times, and I gave in to Netflix. But I refuse to shrink with the times.
Odds are movie theaters, if not newspapers, will last as long as I do. And it was often in sparsely attended matinee screenings that I did my time travel this year:
I was moved to tears by Don Cheadle as a DJ at the unraveling in the 1960s ("Talk to Me") and by -- it's excruciating to admit it -- Adam Sandler having a meltdown after losing his family in the 9/11 attacks ("Reign Over Me").
The other 9/11 film, "A Mighty Heart," made me glad I had skipped the Daniel Pearl headlines five years ago and instead waited for Michael Winterbottom to devastate me with the story.
"This Is England" also slugged me in the chest with its stark depiction of brutal boys bonding in Maggie Thatcher's England. (It's often no country for young men, either.)
"The Hoax" was a hoot as it celebrated the '70s, and "Charlie Wilson's War" had a similar dark revelry, sharpened by Aaron Sorkin's ebullient script.
"51 Birch Street," a near-perfect documentary about a postwar couple yearning to be themselves, captured the evolution of a culture and a mind-set.
The sweet films "Once" and "The Astronaut Farmer," while set in the present day, were clearly throwbacks to another era, with the talented Polish brothers paying homage to Frank Capra in the latter.
"Fido," the most unexpected joy of the year, was a sly spoof of Eisenhower-era boy-and-his-dog sappiness that made me glad I didn't come along until after the '50s.
And then there was a film literally made 30 years ago: "Killer of Sheep." Charles Burnett's minimalist masterpiece defies description (Cassavetes meets "Good Times"?) and could fill a semester's film class. To watch a man and his wife slow-dance to Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth" is to witness time standing still, with molecules fizzing into the ether like soda-pop bubbles.
My descent into the past extended to the small screen, as I got lost in the world of "Mad Men," the series about Madison Avenue brutes at the dawn of the 1960s. In fact, this year I found some of the most powerful drama on cable TV, of all places.
It felt like my year didn't truly begin until the final season of "The Sopranos" did in the spring, and 2007 didn't feel complete until last week when I finally watched the last episode of another HBO show, "Tell Me You Love Me."
When asked to name my favorite movie of all time I say "The Decalogue" by Krzysztof Kieslowski. That 10-part gem was made for Polish TV in 1989 and 1990 before making it to U.S. theaters.
"Tell Me You Love Me," which was dismissed early on because of its explicit sex, offered 10 chapters that often did for romantic relationships what "The Decalogue" did for human interaction and spirituality. The examination of four couples was a tour de force from Cynthia Mort, whose previous claim to fame was being a writer and producer on "Roseanne," one of my occasional guilty pleasures from the 1990s.
"Tell Me You Love Me" was short for a TV series, but, of course, like "The Decalogue," you can savor it like an epic film. With its slow, European pacing and long takes, it offered something too often missing from the movies this year: real life in real time.
I can't tell you how many times I nodded my head uneasily and felt like Mort had tapped my phone lines to come up with dialogue or simply was reading my mind. Once everything clicked on Episode 4, I felt like I was ensconced in expert French cinema.
It was a mixed-up year like that, in which foreign films barely registered. I loved "12:08 East of Bucharest" and caught up with last year's indie favorite, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" - both from Romania. And I wish I'd made it up to Santa Fe in time to see Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," which is likely to cap its yearlong awards run with a foreign-language Oscar, probably around the time it opens in Albuquerque.
The most foreign of films to nearly crack my top 10 was as American as the French could be: "2 Days in Paris," Julie Delpy's sharp examination of (what else?) a relationship being torn apart by mistrust and denial.
Then again, I found Julian Schnabel's elegiac "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" to be too French - beautiful women will continue to dote on a jerk and fight over him even when he's immobilized.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" struck me as insufferably American. It's a panoramic travelogue (mawkishly so) that somehow hammers most of the humanity out of a fundamentally human story. (Of course, it's a period piece, too, taking place in the early '90s.)
"Into the Wild" is about a college grad who shuns the modern world, abandons his family and returns to the earth - literally, as he outsmarts himself and starves to death in the Alaska wilderness, alone and yearning for the embrace of his parents.
As romantic and gloriously organic such a road trip might seem to a newsman losing his job, my itinerary this year was destined to be confined to time travel. Life itself is a journey (or maybe, in the end, just a Journey song, as "The Sopranos" suggested), and it's that fourth dimension that opens up exponential avenues and possibilities.
Time goes both ways, forward and back, like a pendulum.
"Age will flatten a man," Tommy Lee Jones laments in "No Country for Old Men."
Like a dutiful journalist, I wrote that line down in my notebook.
Age, though, also gives a man perspective. It reminds him where he's been. It gives him insight into what will come after him.
It puts him in his place.
***
Honorable mention: "The Darjeeling Limited," "You Kill Me," "Inland Empire," "The Italian," "The Hoax," "Reign Over Me," "Czech Dream," "The Black Book," "Year of the Dog," "Waitress," "2 Days in Paris," "Red Road," "Fido," "Police Beat," "Charlie Wilson's War"
Wish I'd seen: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," "Into Great Silence," "Lars and the Real Girl," "Sunshine"
Best director: Michael Winterbottom, "A Mighty Heart"
Best actress: Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"
Best actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Charlie Wilson's War" (and probably "The Savages," too)
Top 10
1. "No Country for Old Men"
2. "I'm Not There"
3. "A Mighty Heart"
4. "Killer of Sheep"
5. "This Is England"
6. "51 Birch Street"
7. "Once"
8. "Away From Her"
9. "The Astronaut Farmer"
10. "Talk to Me"
It would be so easy for me to blame the "Idiocracy."
Mike Judge's frustrating look at our bleak future was sneaked into a few theaters in fall 2006 (where it earned less than $500,000) and then dumped off to DVD release this past January. While Albuquerque's homegrown idiot savant didn't match the manic brilliance of 1999's "Office Space," the futuristic slapstick of "Idiocracy" had just enough nuggets of truth about a world bled of dignity and culture that the easy laughs belie an unsettling message.
That's how I started my movie year, and as you might have heard, this annus horribilis is ending with an execution - a shot from an air-powered cattle gun straight to the cerebral cortex of a newspaper, an industry, a career. They did warn us "There Will Be Blood."
If the future, rendered in cartoon form in "Idiocracy," is a depressing world to visit, then maybe I can be forgiven if most of the movies on my top-10 list tossed me back into the past. I like to think of it not as a retreat (that would be defeatist) but rather a re-examination (more therapeutic, like on an HBO series).
On back-to-back days I saw the equally brilliant "I'm Not There" and "No Country for Old Men," which bookended my childhood experience, respectively, from the mid-1960s to the dawn of Reagan.
"I'm Not There" is less about Bob Dylan than it is about the rest of us and how we (journalists, especially) like to pigeonhole; how we build people up just to knock them down; how we insist they fit our formula. The movie begins and ends with that steady, rambling freight train leading us both forward in time and back. It takes a Midwest boy on a journey, to the big city out east as well as to the Old West, into the future and through the past.
"I'm Not There" is Todd Haynes' most fully realized film, reminding me of the equally offbeat "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," in which Wes Anderson perfected his vision and was a maestro in the zone. (Anderson's offering this year, "The Darjeeling Limited," deserves another viewing, and I might wish a few months hence that I'd put it in my top 10.)
"No Country for Old Men," the best film Joel and Ethan Coen have made, took us back to 1980 and to the brink of a new era. Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff ached with the realization that the world he came of age in no longer needed him around and that our ultimate fate is obsolescence. Those meandering final 20 minutes magically capture the onset of such aimlessness.
For me, adrift in my analog world, I watched a neighborhood video store succumb to the times, and I gave in to Netflix. But I refuse to shrink with the times.
Odds are movie theaters, if not newspapers, will last as long as I do. And it was often in sparsely attended matinee screenings that I did my time travel this year:
I was moved to tears by Don Cheadle as a DJ at the unraveling in the 1960s ("Talk to Me") and by -- it's excruciating to admit it -- Adam Sandler having a meltdown after losing his family in the 9/11 attacks ("Reign Over Me").
The other 9/11 film, "A Mighty Heart," made me glad I had skipped the Daniel Pearl headlines five years ago and instead waited for Michael Winterbottom to devastate me with the story.
"This Is England" also slugged me in the chest with its stark depiction of brutal boys bonding in Maggie Thatcher's England. (It's often no country for young men, either.)
"The Hoax" was a hoot as it celebrated the '70s, and "Charlie Wilson's War" had a similar dark revelry, sharpened by Aaron Sorkin's ebullient script.
"51 Birch Street," a near-perfect documentary about a postwar couple yearning to be themselves, captured the evolution of a culture and a mind-set.
The sweet films "Once" and "The Astronaut Farmer," while set in the present day, were clearly throwbacks to another era, with the talented Polish brothers paying homage to Frank Capra in the latter.
"Fido," the most unexpected joy of the year, was a sly spoof of Eisenhower-era boy-and-his-dog sappiness that made me glad I didn't come along until after the '50s.
And then there was a film literally made 30 years ago: "Killer of Sheep." Charles Burnett's minimalist masterpiece defies description (Cassavetes meets "Good Times"?) and could fill a semester's film class. To watch a man and his wife slow-dance to Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth" is to witness time standing still, with molecules fizzing into the ether like soda-pop bubbles.
My descent into the past extended to the small screen, as I got lost in the world of "Mad Men," the series about Madison Avenue brutes at the dawn of the 1960s. In fact, this year I found some of the most powerful drama on cable TV, of all places.
It felt like my year didn't truly begin until the final season of "The Sopranos" did in the spring, and 2007 didn't feel complete until last week when I finally watched the last episode of another HBO show, "Tell Me You Love Me."
When asked to name my favorite movie of all time I say "The Decalogue" by Krzysztof Kieslowski. That 10-part gem was made for Polish TV in 1989 and 1990 before making it to U.S. theaters.
"Tell Me You Love Me," which was dismissed early on because of its explicit sex, offered 10 chapters that often did for romantic relationships what "The Decalogue" did for human interaction and spirituality. The examination of four couples was a tour de force from Cynthia Mort, whose previous claim to fame was being a writer and producer on "Roseanne," one of my occasional guilty pleasures from the 1990s.
"Tell Me You Love Me" was short for a TV series, but, of course, like "The Decalogue," you can savor it like an epic film. With its slow, European pacing and long takes, it offered something too often missing from the movies this year: real life in real time.
I can't tell you how many times I nodded my head uneasily and felt like Mort had tapped my phone lines to come up with dialogue or simply was reading my mind. Once everything clicked on Episode 4, I felt like I was ensconced in expert French cinema.
It was a mixed-up year like that, in which foreign films barely registered. I loved "12:08 East of Bucharest" and caught up with last year's indie favorite, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" - both from Romania. And I wish I'd made it up to Santa Fe in time to see Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," which is likely to cap its yearlong awards run with a foreign-language Oscar, probably around the time it opens in Albuquerque.
The most foreign of films to nearly crack my top 10 was as American as the French could be: "2 Days in Paris," Julie Delpy's sharp examination of (what else?) a relationship being torn apart by mistrust and denial.
Then again, I found Julian Schnabel's elegiac "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" to be too French - beautiful women will continue to dote on a jerk and fight over him even when he's immobilized.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" struck me as insufferably American. It's a panoramic travelogue (mawkishly so) that somehow hammers most of the humanity out of a fundamentally human story. (Of course, it's a period piece, too, taking place in the early '90s.)
"Into the Wild" is about a college grad who shuns the modern world, abandons his family and returns to the earth - literally, as he outsmarts himself and starves to death in the Alaska wilderness, alone and yearning for the embrace of his parents.
As romantic and gloriously organic such a road trip might seem to a newsman losing his job, my itinerary this year was destined to be confined to time travel. Life itself is a journey (or maybe, in the end, just a Journey song, as "The Sopranos" suggested), and it's that fourth dimension that opens up exponential avenues and possibilities.
Time goes both ways, forward and back, like a pendulum.
"Age will flatten a man," Tommy Lee Jones laments in "No Country for Old Men."
Like a dutiful journalist, I wrote that line down in my notebook.
Age, though, also gives a man perspective. It reminds him where he's been. It gives him insight into what will come after him.
It puts him in his place.
***
Honorable mention: "The Darjeeling Limited," "You Kill Me," "Inland Empire," "The Italian," "The Hoax," "Reign Over Me," "Czech Dream," "The Black Book," "Year of the Dog," "Waitress," "2 Days in Paris," "Red Road," "Fido," "Police Beat," "Charlie Wilson's War"
Wish I'd seen: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," "Into Great Silence," "Lars and the Real Girl," "Sunshine"
Best director: Michael Winterbottom, "A Mighty Heart"
Best actress: Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"
Best actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Charlie Wilson's War" (and probably "The Savages," too)
01 May 2008
Best of 2006: My world and welcome to it
Originally posted December 29, 2006:
TOP TEN
1. "The World" / 6. "Half Nelson"
2. "Tristram Shandy" / 7. "Changing Times"
3. "Innocence" / 8. "The Proposition"
4. "The War Tapes" / 9. "United 93"
5. "The Sisters" / 10. "The Queen"
The film year for me began in earnest at an amusement park on the outskirts of Beijing and ended, for our purposes here, on a balcony with a sweeping view of the Tokyo skyline.
That might seem like classic cinematic escapism. But those two movies -- the Chinese film "The World" and the cross-continental epic "Babel" -- tell human stories so real and universal that you feel them in your neighborhood, and maybe in your bones.
It's the opposite of escapism; it's searching for a connection, whether reaching out across the globe to another culture or merely across the armrest in a dark theater for the hand of the person next to you.
In a year devoid of a true blockbuster A-plus standout (or a year in which the '06 A-listers won't arrive in Albuquerque until next month), it was all about the tactile. (Epitomized in the sensually resplendent love story "The Fountain.")
In a year in which most documentaries were relegated to my list of honorable mentions, it was true-life dramas that provided that human connection this year.
Among those that hit close to home:
The French takes on middle-age relationships: "Changing Times" (with the heartbreaking Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu) and "Heading South" (with the hardened Charlotte Rampling).
The ballads of 30-something women: "Friends With Money" and "The Sisters."
The bleak loneliness of young adults: "Somersault" out of Australia and "Lower City" from Brazil.
The brutal realities of childhood: the shocking, stark French films "Innocence" and "L'Enfant (The Child)."
The rough urban-America fables: "Half Nelson" and "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints."
The intractability of the Middle East: "Syrian Bride" and "Paradise Now."
The films that cleverly used gimmicks to entertain the hell out of me: "Brick" and "13 (Tzameti)."
And the charming dry humor of the whimsical "Duck Season" and the melancholy "Lonesome Jim."
Of course, real life did show up in documentaries. Films don't get any more raw or honest than "The War Tapes," which features footage shot on the ground by Army National Guard troops in Iraq but also tells the deeply personal stories of the men and their families. Or "Darwin's Nightmare," perhaps the bleakest explanation of globalization and human nature you'll ever find.
With "49 Up," filmmaker Michael Apted proved that you can make anyone's life story interesting if you just let it unfold. And I was moved to tears by the music and the humanity of both "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" and "The Devil and Daniel Johnston."
They weren't documentaries, but Paul Greengrass' high-tension "United 93" and Stephen Frears' pristine "The Queen" might as well have been.
And, of course, Michael Winterbottom, who made the best comedy of the year ("Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), literally mixed fact and fiction to get to the darkest side of our nature: our willingness to torture each other in the name of God or country ("The Road to Guantanamo").
I saw exactly half of the movies on my top 10 at the Guild Cinema. You just can't get the big picture without regular visits to the single-screen art house in Nob Hill.
It was at the Guild where, in the middle of the year, I traveled not by distance but in time and saw two brilliant movies that would have easily made my list - if only they hadn't been released nearly 40 years ago.
Go to Alphaville or Netflix and find "Spring Night, Summer Night" and "David Holzman's Diary."
"Spring Night, Summer Night" (also known by the less articulate title "Miss Jessica Is Pregnant") is a rarely screened gem about Appalachian life in the 1960s. It is probably the most beautifully shot movie I've ever seen. It also happens to be the only movie made by J.L. Anderson. And it's a masterpiece.
That same retro weekend brought the recently revived "David Holzman's Diary" to town. It's perhaps the first-ever mockumentary, about a guy dealing with a breakup. It was shot in summer 1967 in New York, and 98 percent of it is legit -- the sounds and the images of the city are not made up.
The film is a jarring immersion in that place and time. More real than real, it seems.
My movie year wrapped up on that high-rise balcony in "Babel," the story of interconnected lives (and fragile ones at that) spanning Morocco, the U.S.-Mexico border and Japan. Its director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, as well as any filmmaker around today, captures the hum of human existence.
"Babel" isn't a great movie. It invites you to pick it apart, to take issue, to question its fairness, to complain about Brad Pitt again, if you must.
But if ever a filmmaker should get credit for merely attempting to create a masterpiece, it is Gonzalez Inarritu, who also tried with "Amores Perros" and who failed much more so with "21 Grams" two years ago. (We're not cutting Sofia Coppola and "Marie Antoinette" that same slack this year.) With "Babel," Gonzales Inarritu exposes some of the basic truths of our role on this planet, and he is surehanded with his depiction of the randomness of our actions and their consequences.
"Babel" is not for everyone. And it could have been, like a lot of films this year, shorter and just a little less tidy at the end. But there was no denying its magnificence - in its cinematic sweep across continents and in the mature way it understands the way we misunderstand each other, whether it's a language barrier, a handicap, a generation gap or a gender divide.
Back at the Guild, it was there, in January, that I saw "The World," the story of aimless, star-crossed young adults working at an amusement park outside Beijing. The attractions include the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and other architectural wonders.
The characters have the world at their fingertips. Their escape comes via their imaginations. They use their cell phones to share their feelings. Through giddy animation they fly through the air on magic carpets.
But their escapist fantasies can't hide the fact that it's not the manmade wonders of the world that bridge the divide; it's the look in another person's eyes, the touch of skin.
It was in the Guild, around twilight in January, that I had "The World" at my fingertips. It was the moment I realized that the person sitting next to me in the dark was both a fascinating mystery and, potentially, the one who could lead me to a place where we both might unlock the secrets.
After spending most of the year estranged, at arm's length, struggling to trust each other, we finally connected. We went to see "Babel." We held hands and watched the world unfold before us and unravel.
*****
Here's the rest of my list:
Honorable mention: "Shortbus," "L'Enfant (The Child)," "Duck Season," "Lonesome Jim," "Darwin's Nightmare," "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," "Paradise Now," "Road to Guantanamo," "Sir! No Sir," "Syrian Bride," "Brick," "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," "Heading South"
Best director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, "Babel"
Best actor: Jack Nicholson, "The Departed"
Best actress: Julia Jentsch, "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days"
Biggest disappointment: "Marie Antoinette"
Wish I'd seen: "Infamous," "Running With Scissors"
TOP TEN
1. "The World" / 6. "Half Nelson"
2. "Tristram Shandy" / 7. "Changing Times"
3. "Innocence" / 8. "The Proposition"
4. "The War Tapes" / 9. "United 93"
5. "The Sisters" / 10. "The Queen"
The film year for me began in earnest at an amusement park on the outskirts of Beijing and ended, for our purposes here, on a balcony with a sweeping view of the Tokyo skyline.
That might seem like classic cinematic escapism. But those two movies -- the Chinese film "The World" and the cross-continental epic "Babel" -- tell human stories so real and universal that you feel them in your neighborhood, and maybe in your bones.
It's the opposite of escapism; it's searching for a connection, whether reaching out across the globe to another culture or merely across the armrest in a dark theater for the hand of the person next to you.
In a year devoid of a true blockbuster A-plus standout (or a year in which the '06 A-listers won't arrive in Albuquerque until next month), it was all about the tactile. (Epitomized in the sensually resplendent love story "The Fountain.")
In a year in which most documentaries were relegated to my list of honorable mentions, it was true-life dramas that provided that human connection this year.
Among those that hit close to home:
The French takes on middle-age relationships: "Changing Times" (with the heartbreaking Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu) and "Heading South" (with the hardened Charlotte Rampling).
The ballads of 30-something women: "Friends With Money" and "The Sisters."
The bleak loneliness of young adults: "Somersault" out of Australia and "Lower City" from Brazil.
The brutal realities of childhood: the shocking, stark French films "Innocence" and "L'Enfant (The Child)."
The rough urban-America fables: "Half Nelson" and "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints."
The intractability of the Middle East: "Syrian Bride" and "Paradise Now."
The films that cleverly used gimmicks to entertain the hell out of me: "Brick" and "13 (Tzameti)."
And the charming dry humor of the whimsical "Duck Season" and the melancholy "Lonesome Jim."
Of course, real life did show up in documentaries. Films don't get any more raw or honest than "The War Tapes," which features footage shot on the ground by Army National Guard troops in Iraq but also tells the deeply personal stories of the men and their families. Or "Darwin's Nightmare," perhaps the bleakest explanation of globalization and human nature you'll ever find.
With "49 Up," filmmaker Michael Apted proved that you can make anyone's life story interesting if you just let it unfold. And I was moved to tears by the music and the humanity of both "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" and "The Devil and Daniel Johnston."
They weren't documentaries, but Paul Greengrass' high-tension "United 93" and Stephen Frears' pristine "The Queen" might as well have been.
And, of course, Michael Winterbottom, who made the best comedy of the year ("Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), literally mixed fact and fiction to get to the darkest side of our nature: our willingness to torture each other in the name of God or country ("The Road to Guantanamo").
I saw exactly half of the movies on my top 10 at the Guild Cinema. You just can't get the big picture without regular visits to the single-screen art house in Nob Hill.
It was at the Guild where, in the middle of the year, I traveled not by distance but in time and saw two brilliant movies that would have easily made my list - if only they hadn't been released nearly 40 years ago.
Go to Alphaville or Netflix and find "Spring Night, Summer Night" and "David Holzman's Diary."
"Spring Night, Summer Night" (also known by the less articulate title "Miss Jessica Is Pregnant") is a rarely screened gem about Appalachian life in the 1960s. It is probably the most beautifully shot movie I've ever seen. It also happens to be the only movie made by J.L. Anderson. And it's a masterpiece.
That same retro weekend brought the recently revived "David Holzman's Diary" to town. It's perhaps the first-ever mockumentary, about a guy dealing with a breakup. It was shot in summer 1967 in New York, and 98 percent of it is legit -- the sounds and the images of the city are not made up.
The film is a jarring immersion in that place and time. More real than real, it seems.
My movie year wrapped up on that high-rise balcony in "Babel," the story of interconnected lives (and fragile ones at that) spanning Morocco, the U.S.-Mexico border and Japan. Its director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, as well as any filmmaker around today, captures the hum of human existence.
"Babel" isn't a great movie. It invites you to pick it apart, to take issue, to question its fairness, to complain about Brad Pitt again, if you must.
But if ever a filmmaker should get credit for merely attempting to create a masterpiece, it is Gonzalez Inarritu, who also tried with "Amores Perros" and who failed much more so with "21 Grams" two years ago. (We're not cutting Sofia Coppola and "Marie Antoinette" that same slack this year.) With "Babel," Gonzales Inarritu exposes some of the basic truths of our role on this planet, and he is surehanded with his depiction of the randomness of our actions and their consequences.
"Babel" is not for everyone. And it could have been, like a lot of films this year, shorter and just a little less tidy at the end. But there was no denying its magnificence - in its cinematic sweep across continents and in the mature way it understands the way we misunderstand each other, whether it's a language barrier, a handicap, a generation gap or a gender divide.
Back at the Guild, it was there, in January, that I saw "The World," the story of aimless, star-crossed young adults working at an amusement park outside Beijing. The attractions include the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and other architectural wonders.
The characters have the world at their fingertips. Their escape comes via their imaginations. They use their cell phones to share their feelings. Through giddy animation they fly through the air on magic carpets.
But their escapist fantasies can't hide the fact that it's not the manmade wonders of the world that bridge the divide; it's the look in another person's eyes, the touch of skin.
It was in the Guild, around twilight in January, that I had "The World" at my fingertips. It was the moment I realized that the person sitting next to me in the dark was both a fascinating mystery and, potentially, the one who could lead me to a place where we both might unlock the secrets.
After spending most of the year estranged, at arm's length, struggling to trust each other, we finally connected. We went to see "Babel." We held hands and watched the world unfold before us and unravel.
*****
Here's the rest of my list:
Honorable mention: "Shortbus," "L'Enfant (The Child)," "Duck Season," "Lonesome Jim," "Darwin's Nightmare," "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," "Paradise Now," "Road to Guantanamo," "Sir! No Sir," "Syrian Bride," "Brick," "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," "Heading South"
Best director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, "Babel"
Best actor: Jack Nicholson, "The Departed"
Best actress: Julia Jentsch, "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days"
Biggest disappointment: "Marie Antoinette"
Wish I'd seen: "Infamous," "Running With Scissors"
Best of 2005
Originally posted December 29, 2005:
Top Five of 2005
1. "The Squid and the Whale" - The way we were. Like "The Virgin Suicides," it re-created the texture of a decade.
2. "Look at Me (Comme un Image)" - The most honest and direct film of the year.
3. "The Aristocrats" / "Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic" - Fundamentally funny.
4. "Broken Flowers" - Jim Jarmusch and me, we got this thing.
5. "The Dying Gaul" - A punishing story brought alive by three amazing actors: Peter Sarsgaard, Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott. And I bought the ending.
The Runners-up
"Capote" - Instantly transported me to a very real time and place.
"Junebug" - Maybe the smartest film of the year.
"Happy Endings" - I was mesmerized by the way Don Roos captured Lisa Kudrow in close-up, in their wonderful follow-up to "The Opposite of Sex."
"Kontroll" - Made me ache to be a part of the world created amid the Hungarian ticket inspectors in the subway.
"Thumbsucker" - I keep thinking about the three male role models in the film: Keanu Reeves, Vince Vaughn and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Honorable Mention
"Keane," "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Memory of a Killer," "2046," "Me and You and Everyone We Know," "Touch the Sound," "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus," "We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
Worst of 2005
"Sin City" - What was I thinking?
("Crash" also left a bad taste in my mouth, but I wouldn't call it a bad movie.)
Best Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote"
Best Actresses - Joan Allen in "The Upside of Anger" and Amy Adams in "Junebug"
Best of the Santa Fe Film Festival:
"The Sisters" - One of the best screenplays ever.
"Syrian Bride" - A moving story, maturely presented and beautifully filmed.
"In Memory of My Father" - Wish I'd written this; the acting, which includes a lot of improv, is impressive across the board. And very funny.
"Cowboy del Amor" - This documentary about a cowboy fetching Mexican brides is a total hoot.
"Stay Until Tomorrow" - Another film with a texture you can feel; a deft examination of living in the moment.
"Favela Rising" - A moving tribute to the slums of Brazil.
"Four Lane Highway" - Another smart film about real people. Reg Rogers is a revelation.
"A Driver for Vera" and "The Thief" - Pavel Chukhrai makes beautiful films and captures male-female relationships like few others have.
Top Five of 2005
1. "The Squid and the Whale" - The way we were. Like "The Virgin Suicides," it re-created the texture of a decade.
2. "Look at Me (Comme un Image)" - The most honest and direct film of the year.
3. "The Aristocrats" / "Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic" - Fundamentally funny.
4. "Broken Flowers" - Jim Jarmusch and me, we got this thing.
5. "The Dying Gaul" - A punishing story brought alive by three amazing actors: Peter Sarsgaard, Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott. And I bought the ending.
The Runners-up
"Capote" - Instantly transported me to a very real time and place.
"Junebug" - Maybe the smartest film of the year.
"Happy Endings" - I was mesmerized by the way Don Roos captured Lisa Kudrow in close-up, in their wonderful follow-up to "The Opposite of Sex."
"Kontroll" - Made me ache to be a part of the world created amid the Hungarian ticket inspectors in the subway.
"Thumbsucker" - I keep thinking about the three male role models in the film: Keanu Reeves, Vince Vaughn and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Honorable Mention
"Keane," "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "Memory of a Killer," "2046," "Me and You and Everyone We Know," "Touch the Sound," "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus," "We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
Worst of 2005
"Sin City" - What was I thinking?
("Crash" also left a bad taste in my mouth, but I wouldn't call it a bad movie.)
Best Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote"
Best Actresses - Joan Allen in "The Upside of Anger" and Amy Adams in "Junebug"
Best of the Santa Fe Film Festival:
"The Sisters" - One of the best screenplays ever.
"Syrian Bride" - A moving story, maturely presented and beautifully filmed.
"In Memory of My Father" - Wish I'd written this; the acting, which includes a lot of improv, is impressive across the board. And very funny.
"Cowboy del Amor" - This documentary about a cowboy fetching Mexican brides is a total hoot.
"Stay Until Tomorrow" - Another film with a texture you can feel; a deft examination of living in the moment.
"Favela Rising" - A moving tribute to the slums of Brazil.
"Four Lane Highway" - Another smart film about real people. Reg Rogers is a revelation.
"A Driver for Vera" and "The Thief" - Pavel Chukhrai makes beautiful films and captures male-female relationships like few others have.
29 April 2008
"Werckmeister Harmonies"
I couldn't stop re-watching scenes from Bela Tarr's epic milepost of cinema, 2000's "Werckmeister Harmonies." On the original viewing, which I spread over two nights, I actually fast-forwarded through some scenes (there's a lot of walking and walking and walking), but despite rushing through it the first time I found myself going back the next day and studying a bunch of scenes (there are only 39 shots, some as long as 11 minutes, in the 140-minute film).
When the camerawork, the music and the heartbreaking message all come together, the experience can be transcendent. Here's one such scene:
Jonas views the whale.
And here's the end of a monologue that states the movie's theme as good as any, arguing that we have to undo the technical advances made by the 17th century musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister because they toyed with nature:
"Carefully, we have to correct Werckmeister's mistake. We have to concern ourselves with these seven notes of the scale, but not as of the octave, but seven distinct and independent qualities, like seven fraternal stars in the heavens. What we have to do, then, if we are aware, is that this natural tuning has its limits, and it is a somewhat worrisome limit that definitely excludes the use of certain higher signatures."
When the camerawork, the music and the heartbreaking message all come together, the experience can be transcendent. Here's one such scene:
Jonas views the whale.
And here's the end of a monologue that states the movie's theme as good as any, arguing that we have to undo the technical advances made by the 17th century musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister because they toyed with nature:
"Carefully, we have to correct Werckmeister's mistake. We have to concern ourselves with these seven notes of the scale, but not as of the octave, but seven distinct and independent qualities, like seven fraternal stars in the heavens. What we have to do, then, if we are aware, is that this natural tuning has its limits, and it is a somewhat worrisome limit that definitely excludes the use of certain higher signatures."
19 March 2008
Sun Comes Up, 2.0
This is a space-holding site for future random blogging about film, music and culture. It will also be a place to house the archives of the ABQ AV Club film blog that ran on the Albuquerque Tribune's website from 2006-08.
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