2000s: the decade in movies

top to bottom: numbers 2, 29, 28, 5, 10, 6

31 films to remember from the first decade of our 21st century. The number is arbitrary, but from such arbitrary elements we forge our lists, striving to bring some order to the recent past. If one thing is certain about the last decade in movies, it’s that no amount of industry tumult—the ungovernable internet; the vagaries of home video; the strikes; the ostensible death of cinema-going which thankfully never happened—hasn’t had the slightest effect on our capacity to make great movies. What has changed is our ability to get great movies seen. The studio juggernauts, with their advertising budgets equal to the gross national product of numerous small countries, have arguably never been worse, while the best independent and foreign releases became only more confined, not just to art houses but often only to festivals. Clearly, as we look to the future, those of us passionate about movies are placing our hopes that all these new delivery systems will somehow make great movies easier to discover, and that the digitization of theatres might make bringing small movies to big screens more economically feasible. In any event I'm voting to keep us all going out to the movies.

top to bottom: numbers 7, 9, 26, 19, 17, 22

But enough industry—let’s talk about the work. Frankly, the below list wasn’t so much finished as abandoned. Even as I build this post I keep thinking of titles that I can't believe I've forgotten. But after a while I simply couldn’t keep mulling over my hundred-strong short list any longer without going into a trance. A trail of masterpieces lies beyond these 31. I decided to allow only one movie per director, simply so as to cover more ground, which meant the decade’s best filmmakers—Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, Lucrecia Martel—could have just as easily had another title on this list. Some wound up without a movie included at all, despite the fact that the last decade of movies from Gus Van Sant (see the previous post), the Dardenne Brothers, Aleksandr Sokurov, or the deliriously prolific Steven Soderbergh was sometimes revolutionary and in every case consistently impressive—it’s this very consistency that made it so hard to pick one film that stood out.

top to bottom: numbers 4, 16, 24, 15, 13, 31

Great movies can do so many things, from entertaining to beguiling us, from enlightening to devastating us, from blowing our minds to re-awakening our senses. Some of the movies on this list—see, for example, numbers 5, 7 and 10—do many of these things at once with exhilarating verve. Some of them, we might argue—see, for example, numbers 19 and 28—do only one or two of these things but do them so gloriously as to tower above other movies that merely do countless things deftly. There are plenty of critically lauded crowd-pleasers I could have put on my list that more of you would surely have recognized, just as there are plenty of ultra-severe, verging on alienating works I could’ve listed out of sheer admiration for their audacity and perverse rigour. I hope the titles you know provoke you to reconsider, and that the ones you don’t provoke you to track them down. In the end I chose the movies I chose because they usurped the choicest real estate in my imagination and still haven’t moved away; because they continue to fascinate me even after the initial dazzle faded away; because they continue to move me long after first catching me off guard; because they thrill me shamelessly; because they make me afraid of the world while still wanting to fight for it; because they make me in love with the world even when it seems to love no one; because they allow me to keep dreaming, even when I’m wide awake.

top to bottom: 11, 21, 23, 12, 3, 25

(Incidentally the ranking of these titles, a practice I don't usually subscribe to, is also arbitrary. I did it mainly because there's too many titles here not to organize. The first five or six definitely feel like they're in the right place, and the subsequent 11, say, feel like they're grouped accordingly. But really, what the hell is difference between 22 and 28?)

number 1

1. In the Mood for Love (Wong, 00)
2. Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, 01)
3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong, 06)
4. Code Unknown (Haneke, 00)
5. The Holy Girl (Martel, 04)
6. The Intruder (Denis, 04)
7. Zodiac (Fincher, 07)
8. Summer Hours (Assayas, 08)
9. There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson, 07)
10. A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 05)
11. Silent Light (Reygadas, 07)
12. The New World (Malick, 05)
13. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 04)
14. Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 08)
15. Fat Girl (Breillat, 01)
16. No Country for Old Men (Coen, 07)
17. Volver (Almodóvar, 06)
18. Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog, 08)
19. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai, 03)
20. George Washington (Green, 00)
21. Birth (Glazer, 04)
22. The Royal Tenenbaums (W Anderson, 01)
23. Brand Upon the Brain! (Maddin, 06)
24. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Mungiu, 07)
25. Children of Men (Cuarón, 06)
26. Colossal Youth (Costa, 06)
27. I’m Not There (Haynes, 07)
28. The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 09)
29. Three Times (Hou, 05)
30. Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 00)
31. Before Sunset (Linklater, 04)

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.

North to Alaska, where CGI elk freak the shit out of oilmen, who in turn freak the shit out of us, in Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter

The Wendigo is a wintry, ashen, emaciated, blood thirsty and all-around nasty creature of Algonquin origin, a malevolent spirit said to possess human beings, especially those who practice cannibalism. Like so many mythical beasts derived from oral traditions, it cuts a figure that can be deeply terrifying when left to the imagination, and is especially potent when applied figuratively to dark stories about individuals who dare to step over the frontiers of taboo. It’s kind of a shame then that Larry Fessenden, the American character actor who’s conjured Wendigo in his previous directorial efforts, ultimately gives in to actually showing us a pretty cheesy-looking Wendigo in the final moments of his latest, slickest movie The Last Winter (2006), because this otherwise creepy, resonant and smart—if very didactic—chamber horror yarn, set in a small oil drilling base in Alaska, deserves to fully capitalize on its subtlety. It also, in any event, deserves to be seen by a larger audience, which with any luck it might find now that it’s on DVD from IFC.

Following a congressional hearing that finally opens up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, a certain corporation called North smacks their lips and is ready to get drilling—if only they could get their equipment in. Sadly, Hoffman (the always terrific James LeGros), the “greenie” geologist hired by North to flesh out their PR campaign, has turned out to be a wicked messenger, the message being that this global warming stuff is really happening and the melting permafrost makes it basically impossible to traverse the tundra. Enter project manager Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman, that line-backer version of Tom Waits, here playing a highly enjoyable blowhard). An intimidating spokesman for the bottom line, Pollack arrives on the scene to ensure that North’s trucks make it through, even in the face of unnerving mishaps like employees going bonkers and a series of gruesome deaths.

Fessenden and his writing partner Robert Leaver had The Last Winter written back in 2001. As it generally goes with independent movies, the script took several years to be brought to life and by the time it saw the light of a movie theatre—it played briefly in New York last autumn—it’s political subtext had been beat to the punch by Al Gore and the little environmentalist documentary that could, An Inconvenient Truth (06). By the time most of us see it, its commentary on the sanguine undercurrent of oil drilling will have even been overshadowed by PT Anderson’s towering There Will Be Blood (07). But The Last Winter is here to—if you’ll excuse the paraphrasing—deliver the weather, not the news. Anyone who isn’t a total idiot doesn’t need a conceptual horror movie to know about global warming and the glossed-over evils of the oil industry, but The Last Winter channels these issues into a story that’s fundamentally designed to provide chills of a more primordial nature. As one character informs us, what is oil, after all, if not dead animals and dead plants? This perspective renders the cultivation of oil into a sort of ghoulish desecration, and helps make The Last Winter into a good old-fashioned tale of things that go bump in the night.

Speaking of bumping in the night, the film has some good subplots, such as the affair unfolding between Hoffman and Abby (played with just a hint of duplicity by the lovely Connie Britton), their noisy sexual activity keeping the emotionally bruised Pollack up in the wee hours, grinding the corporate axe with Hoffman’s name on it. I really liked that Fessenden and Leaver have Pollack engaging in territorial man-talk with Hoffman even when faced with the possibility of frozen death. It’s these very human details that keep The Last Winter buoyant, even when the bleakness of both big and little picture loom large over the proceedings.

IFC’s disc features a very worthwhile audio commentary from Fessenden, who’s informative, articulate and even quite funny in a rather dry sort of way. Of the film’s use of archival footage of oil drilling he explains, “It was very important to me to show oil drilling in a movie about oil drilling with no oil drilling.” It’s fun to hear him talk about his excitement over the benefits of working with a larger budget—the many helicopter shots, the dolly set-ups just for little stuff, the birds from Harry Potter, “the real stars of the movie,” Fessenden confesses— as well as with very good actors, and with Iceland, where he actually shot most of The Last Winter. (And it’s funnier still to learn that the groans of desire we hear from LeGros during his off-screen humpy-pumpy were actually taken from a scene in which he’s helping Perlman escape from drowning.) All in all, one can’t help but appreciate what Fessenden is trying to make: a thoughtful, medium-budget movie with indie credibility in a genre overrun with crappy excess. The Last Winter isn’t entirely a triumph in this regard, but it’s close enough to light the hope that Fessenden can keep going in this racket.

There Will Be Blood: Paul Thomas Anderson's geyser of black and sticky dreams

Epic in scale and theme while intimate in cast, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, the writer/director’s fifth and finest feature, is something fiery and looming, controlled and eccentric, and fully deserving of the superlatives it continues to attract. Based, rather tenuously, on prolific muckraker Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, the film zeroes in from the start on a single, fascinating figure whom it will monitor for the entirety of its mesmerizing two-and-a-half-hours, one Daniel Plainview, a capitalist of fearsome, tireless ambition and great daring, seeking power for its own sake, setting upon a thrilling trajectory that will inevitably lead back to a hollow center.

Set at the dawn of the 20th century, the shape of the still virginal American frontier in There Will Be Blood is being dictated by pretty much the same forces that will dominate American life at the dawn on the next: oil and religion. Perhaps we should add family into the mix. Rest assured the film’s title foreshadows the spilling of blood, but the place from which it springs is a wounded psyche where genuine blood ties are sorrowfully lacking in this tale of obscurely formed and violently broken families.

The opening scenes are precariously compelling. Plainview, solitary, with everything still ahead of him, is found burrowing deep into the earth, carving the first niche in his tunnel to hell. Ostensibly mining for silver, he strikes black gold. Soon after he’s seen working his first derrick where a fatal injury to a co-labourer makes Plainview the unexpected father to an orphaned infant. Years after that, we encounter Plainview the established oilman, his little boy H.W. beside him in dark suit and parted hair, the quiet, attentive partner in his father’s estimable enterprise.

The extensive sequence that yields these developments sucks us into the tale with raw, muscular physicality, virtually no dialogue, and music provided by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, alternately drawing tension to a single unnerving point or creating an ominous insectile flurry of activity with low strings. Rarely are so many components so much of a piece, the space and texture evoked in the production design by Jack Fisk (Days of Heaven) beautifully lining Anderson’s catalogue of striking images: the exploding geyser that blasts H.W.’s hearing away, the vast puddle of crude that reflects the desert sky, which itself represents the limit of Plainview’s potential wealth. While the barren landscape on display in There Will Be Blood might seem to limit Anderson’s palate, the film never falls short on arresting spectacle.

The dramatic core takes hold with the coming of Paul Sunday, a goat farmer’s son who approaches Plainview one night to announce the discovery of oil on his father’s otherwise worthless hardscrabble. Plainview offers a trifling up front and Paul thence vanishes for the rest of the movie, only to be replaced by his far more imposing twin brother Eli once Plainview arrives on their land under false pretences. Plainview acquires the property for a song, but Eli, whose aspirations are to become a charismatic preacher and founder of The Church of the Third Revelation, has Plainview’s number. A line is drawn in the sand between these opponents, one representing business, the other religion, each eventually needing to align however uneasily with the other.

Both Paul and Eli are played by the terrifically unlikely star Paul Dano, who made a distinct impression as the nihilistic teen in Little Miss Sunshine. He has a girlish manner that props up the considerable rage he generates here as a slight, chinless youth easily underestimated. His Eli is a talented performer, shaking the arthritis from an old lady’s shriveled hands and tossing invisible Satan out on his ass before an admiring rural congregation. He works himself into impressive fits of hysteria, which will pay off intriguingly in the film’s bravura –if somewhat overcooked– finale.

But the film belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis, lording over the proceedings as the brilliant and monstrous Plainview. I can’t come up with another actor who could do quite what Day-Lewis has done here. Larger than life, yet so very tangible a presence, his Plainview has a sparkle of the dreamer in his eye, and a lovingly protected ruthlessness that only fully falls away when he no longer has anyone left to convince, when accident and destiny determine his absolute loneliness. (Among these determining circumstances is the arrival of a mysterious half-brother, marvelously played by Kevin J. O’Connor with the weathered calm of a weary chameleon.)

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Day-Lewis’ performance lies in his voice, its folksy oratorical nuances marked by an overt homage to the memorable modulations of John Huston. And like Noah Cross, Huston’s wondrously evil cameo in Chinatown, Day-Lewis’ Plainview has tethered himself like some mad proprietor to a natural resource. His hubris writ-large is a symbol of American arrogance, avarice and a sort of appalling beauty, a personality so grand and weirdly inviting, even as it festers the basest of needs. If anyone can sell our earth’s riches to us as though he invented it in his basement workshop, it’s this guy. And for the duration of There Will Be Blood, we are his stunned, happily bamboozled customers.