Thank you, Kunio Kato

The major highlight of last night's 81st Oscars, certainly the most impressive acceptance speech in any case, came from Japanese filmmaker Kunio Kato, who took the award for Best Animated Short for 'La Maison en Petits Cubes.' Future winners may want to accept some coaching from this guy. With great concision and deadpan delivery the man managed to invoke the spirit of Styx at their most pop-savvy and thank an inanimate object, which in itself much surely constitute some sort of precedent. "Thank you, my pencil... Thank you, animation... Domo arigato, Mister Roboto..." So much more charming than the weirdly superior-sounding A.R. Rahman, who won in both the Song and Score categories and talked about how all his life he chose love over hate. I mean, what the hell does that mean?   

Anyway, considering the frustrating number of overt snubs and the ratio of genuine excellence to blandness that clogged the nominees this year, I unreservedly applaud this renovated approach to the acting categories that has five past winners come on stage and introduce each of the nominees personally, bestowing equal attention on all and taking undue emphasis away from the winner (the selection of which does so often feel like the result of a popularity contest even when the nominations sometimes convey a greater sense of adventure and observational powers on the part of the academy). Having the quintet of warm assessors play their parts made these individual moments feel far more intimate and less catty. They imparted (like Penelope Cruz's gorgeous 60-year-old gown and her heartfelt nod to Pedro Almodóvar's role in her career development) a deeper sense of tradition, and made more transparent the essence of what these awards are, or at least should be, really about, which is peer acknowledgment, a sense of community, and a love of the art. The results were far more moving than is normally the case. And Whoopi Goldberg was actually really funny! 

Of course we didn't get to see Werner Herzog win an Oscar, but I certainly can't complain about Man on Wire's taking Best Documentary or Philippe Petit's hugely enjoyable showing off. And even if I didn't feel that either The Reader or Slumdog Millionaire represented their best work, it was actually satisfying to see Kate Winslet and Anthony Dod Mantle get justly rewarded. All in all, it made the twenty minutes I spent fiddling with my rabbit ears more than worth the effort. 

2008: the year in movies

When you’re freelancing for publications with filmgoing cultures as distinctive as New York City and Edmonton, not to mention when you’re attending festivals where movies screen sometimes years in advance of their release proper, trying to sort out what counts as a 2008 release can be mind-boggling. In the end I decided to simply go with this rule: I live in Canada, so if it had a legitimate theatrical release somewhere in Canada during the calendar year, it could be considered. And the considering was surprisingly tough. There are indeed more than ten films listed in my below best of, but I did manage at least to contain them all in ten groupings. Thus it is with some fondness that I bid adieu to the most mesmerizing movies of 2008, all of which I hope to see again sometime soon.

There Will Be Blood
P.T. Anderson’s portrait of Daniel Day-Lewis’ oil baron, a lonely man of some ferocious, near-Satanic ambition, was so intensely focused as to feel like a one-man show. But think about what ingredients truly bring this strange masterwork to life, and Day-Lewis, however ingeniously outsized, becomes only the frontman for numerous superlative craftsmen: production designer Jack Fisk, cinematographer Robert Elswit, composer Johnny Greenwood. The crazy finale, the commentary on our Faustian contract with the earth’s resources, the emphasis on savagery and, indeed, bloodletting—it all adds up to something bizarre and haunting that should keep us arguing, reconsidering and celebrating for years.

Silent Light
Carlos Reygadas’ third feature, which concerns a love triangle in a Chihuahua Mennonite community, is at once a study in the most primal moral struggles and a gentle acceptance of the miraculous, whether it be found in love’s defiance of mortal boundaries or in something as quotidian as the sun’s ascent and departure. A touchingly non-judgmental film teeming with natural wonder and arresting human connections. And the question is begged: what will this guy do next?

My Winnipeg, Synecdoche, New York
The world as reflected through he self, and vice versa. In his first “docu-phantasia,” Guy Maddin profiles his hometown in audaciously hyperbolic flights of imagination and winds up contemplating the impossibility of truly breaking with his own past, embodied most potently in the late, indomitable Ann Savage, who plays Maddin’s mom. In his first time out as director, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman creates a surrogate version of himself, played with gravity and great humour by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who attempts to make a piece of theatre that contains the world, though the world it contains is of course only his, a vast simulacrum of unfulfilled desire and tenuous human connections. Both films are funny, moving, and at times sublimely surreal.

Encounters at the End of the World
While Maddin evoked cursed psychic traps mystically a-flowing beneath Winnipeg’s snowy crust, Werner Herzog whisked us to very the bottom of the world, the place where so many of its misfits gradually slip down toward as they try to find a place in the world. The title’s more than a pun—everyone working in Antarctica, watching ice caps melt up close and personal, seems acutely aware of the looming devastation of global warming—yet somehow we simultaneously get one of the warmest portraits of human nature Herzog’s ever made, a group portrait of a very oddly assembled family.

Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant’s beguiling portrait of bewildered youth and accidental death moves in mesmerizing circles as its teen hero starts and stops his written testament. The skateboard sequences quietly dazzle and the teen performances catch you utterly off guard in this, yet another fresh variation on the director’s death trip.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married
These are sensitive, vital and enormously entertaining stories about the more elusive aspects of personal responsibility. Sally Hawkins’ unshakably perky Poppy is forced to consider the limitations of hoisting cheerfulness upon the world—or, at least, upon grumpy Londoners—while Anne Hathaway’s Kym, freshly released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding, becomes the catalyst, or sin-eater, once again for her family’s collective neuroses. If these aren’t two of the finest female leads of 2008 then I don’t know anything about movies. And it’s equally thrilling to see both directors Mike Leigh and Jonathan Demme especially at the very top of the game.

Flight of the Red Balloon
Juliette Binoche is vivaciously batty as a single mother and voice actor living comfortably in perpetual chaos, while her son introduces his Chinese babysitter/filmmaker to Paris and to the mischievous drifting globe of the title. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first movie in French is a sublime homage to Lamorisse’s 1956 classic La Ballon Rogue and makes sweeping cinema from the most simple ingredients.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
A procedural, of sorts, in which writer/director Christian Mungiu traces the steps required by a young woman to procure an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. It’s gruesome, suspenseful, fascinating, and more stimulating for not actually being overtly polemical. Among other things, it’s a story of friendship’s end, with the truly remarkable Anamaria Marinca enduring some grueling trials for the sake of her drearily too-pregnant roommate.  

Man on Wire
James Marsh’s reconstruction of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers is ultimately an emotionally overwhelming experience. There’s something nearly ineffable in Petit’s feat, though the attempts made by his colleagues to recall the wonder of that day and its never-to-be-repeated crime of spectacle are deeply compelling. And Petit himself is such a marvelous storyteller that, even if there weren’t such terrific archival materials to pull from, a movie of just him talking probably would’ve been nearly as good.

La France, The Band’s Visit, Still Life
Why did I automatically think of these films as kindred spirits? Serge Bozon’s wonderful cross-dressing musical about French soldiers wandering far from their proscribed path in war-torn Europe exists in a world all its own. Meanwhile, Eran Kolirin’s tale of an Egyptian classical music group stuck in some Israeli backwater seems a million miles away from Jia Zhang-ke’s chronicle of people trying to tie up loose ends with estranged family members in villages becoming slowly submerged by China’s colossal Three Gorges Dam project. Yet there’s something about the landscapes and the desolation, the at times uneasy interaction between strangers and acquaintances alike, and the sense of, well, stillness, that binds such stories in their subtle comedy, admiration for small gestures of dignity and bone-deep dislocation. And there is finally a nomadic spirit at work in all of these that speaks to the communal spirit that can bring together wanderers astray on life’s unruly roads.

If only I could also fit: Before I Forget, Standard Operating Procedure, The Last Mistress.

Man on Wire: Trespassing as sublime art

On the overcast morning of August 7, 1974, New Yorkers lucky enough to have been passing below the twin towers of the World Trade Center bore witness to a genuinely singular event. Philippe Petit had ascended into the clouds for a walk, or rather a dance. The calendars of he and his accomplices were marked on that day with the word “coup.” Disguised, carrying much equipment, and having to constantly evade security, they’d snuck up to the rooftops the night before, strung their wire between the towers, and as the day began Petit, with a focus that's just unfathomable to me, inhabited the largely intangible performance space they’d created for about 45 minutes, dazzling onlookers, merrily taunting police.

They were all arrested, of course, charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. But the trespassing strikes me as essential to the nature of the feat. It needed to be unsanctioned, unexpected, a sort of vision nurtured clandestinely. Petit was sent in for psychiatric evaluation, but no mental illness could be established. The reporters asked Petit why he did it, and obviously there could be no satisfactory answer. In ‘On the High Wire,’ his essay on Petit, Paul Auster writes: “The desire is at once far-fetched and perfectly natural, and the appeal of it, finally, is its utter uselessness. No art, it seems to me, so clearly emphasizes the deep aesthetic impulse inside us all.” Indeed, the purity of the act is somehow its most potent element.

The event, the most grandiose and publicized in a life of similar feats, is the subject of James Marsh’s extraordinary Man on Wire. Marsh’s documentary—and caper movie of sorts—isn’t a point-by-point biographical profile of Petit. (March also has the grace to never make overt something best felt, the fact that recalling this event gives us back the WTC, not as a site of trauma and terror, but one of awe and inspiration.) Rather, Marsh focuses each moment of Man on Wire exclusively on the event’s painstaking preparations—which necessarily include Petit’s previous wire-walks across the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and those of Sydney Harbour Bridge—and its immediate aftermath. And Marsh had the good fortune to have chosen a subject that was well documented: Petit and his friends shot a lot of terrific footage of their work-in-progress and of the coup itself.

Perhaps even more importantly, Marsh was fortunate to have a superb storyteller in Petit himself, still elfin, animated, a strawberry-maned Petit Prince, still deeply charismatic, not to mention his cohorts, including his articulate, passionate technical mastermind Jean-Louis Blondeau, and Petit’s girlfriend at the time Annie Allix. As Allix, with great sincerity, explains how upon meeting Petit, “it was quite clear that I had to follow his [destiny],” Marsh nicely juxtaposes her spoken testimony with images of her actually shadowing Petit on the wire, a moving evocation of a young woman surrendering completely to love.

Still, for those of us who’ve never witnessed anything like it, the build-up to the event, which roughly consumes the first two-thirds of Man on Wire, though exciting, can feel sort of abstract. It’s only when we begin to see the actual images, and even more so when we see and hear the intensely emotional testimonies regarding that day, that we are all helplessly caught up in the sublimity of the act, which bypasses audacity and becomes something that penetrates a universal desire to live more rigorously. And it also becomes clear in the film’s final section that Petit’s seemingly weightless passage over Lower Manhattan, the fulfillment of an elaborate, un-repeatable dream, was also a passage into another life altogether, a moment in which, inevitably, everything changed for everyone involved. This moment unfolds as something beautiful, overwhelming, and, in all those trailing-off sentences, something very painful. We should all be so lucky as to feel something like it sometime in our lives.