Top Ten – 2013

At one point, I thought I would use this year’s list to highlight the unconventional approaches to moviemaking that gave me so much enjoyment. The Great Beauty and Blue Is the Warmest Color both benefited from my seeing them while I was rereading Proust. Neither had a traditional story arc; one was a portrait of a love affair, the other an essay on art and memory – both Proustian subjects, neither for someone in a hurry. Post Tenebras Lux was the most innovative of all, a movie version of the magic realism we’ve seen in Latin American writing by Garcia Marquez and others. It was shown, fittingly, at the Walker Art Center and left behind a trail of stunning images. Caesar Must Die transported Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to an Italian prison, bringing to new life a centuries-old play, much like Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus did last year.The Place Beyond the Pines jerked me to attention when one movie seemed to end and another began; instead of seamlessly blending together, the two halves left the viewer to make the connections. Of course, for sheer bravura filmmaking, there was Gravity, but its refusal to care much about a plot and its absurd ending left it off my list.

But that plan for a top ten innovative films didn’t count on Captain Phillips, featuring the most traditional of movie stars, Tom Hanks. It wasn’t Hanks, though, that got me – quite the contrary. It was the movie’s daring presentation of Somali pirates as sympathetic characters and the U.S. as bullies who don’t keep their word. The movie was constantly thought-provoking and beautifully filmed. Enough Said and Mud were two more traditional American films, one a romantic comedy, the other a dramatic adventure. Both had some of my favorite acting of the year: James Gandolfini, ably abetted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was the most real lover, with the most real heartbreak, I saw this year; while the kid in Mud, abetted by his sidekick, was my favorite character for all of 2013. 12 Years A Slave stands as a cinematic landmark: it was hard watching, but it will define slavery for everyone who saw it. It illuminated history, unlike Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which shamelessly exploited it.

That only leaves Barbara, to which I have somewhat tentatively assigned the top spot on my list. It is not powerful, or surprising or innovative. But when I left the theater I felt I had seen an almost perfect movie. The bleak East German setting brought us face-to-face with the everyday moral decisions faced by real people, reminiscent of the similarly located The Lives of Others (2009). It was as thought-provoking as Captain Phillips, as historically acute as 12 Years A Slave, as personally emotional as Enough Said, and, finally, as dramatic as Mud or The Place Beyond the Pines. It was just a fine movie.
There were other fine movies in 2013, and the following make up my roster of Honorable Mention: Nebraska, Out of the Furnace, Don Jon, A Touch of Sin, World War Z, Fruitvale Station, and maybe American Hustle.

Making my selection of a top ten easier is the decision to have a separate category for Documentaries. Here there was a tie between The Gatekeepers, a politically amazing series of interviews of Shin Bet leaders, interspersed with archival footage; and Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, a remarkable translation of an artist’s work to the screen.

And finally, I acknowledge The Impossible, the story of the Thailand tsunami with Naomi Watts that I didn’t see in time to include on my 2012 Top Ten, where it surely belongs.

Top Ten 2012

1. A Separation and Amour. Every year, it seems, there is a critical favorite that avoids the smaller cities until the deadline for my list has passed. Last year it was A Separation, which opened in 2011 but was far and away the best film I saw in 2012. This year it is Amour, which topped numerous lists but which I have yet to see. I am, nevertheless, getting it out of the way so it won’t be out of place on next year’s Top Ten. As for the Iranian film, it had acting so good you didn’t think it was acting and posed moral dilemmas that echoed and echo still. There are no bad people in the story, but almost all do bad things, chiefly lying for what seem to be good reasons. How would each of us respond if put in their situations? I don’t know, but I see examples in the news literally every day.

2. Django Unchained. The year’s most enjoyable film, it captured the aura of an old-time Western, was simultaneously funny and violent as only a Tarantino work can be, yet presented the serious subtext of slavery’s evil inescapably and unrelentingly. The performances of Christoph Waltz and Samuel Jackson were supporting-Oscar-worthy, and it is only my antipathy toward the miscast Leonardo DiCaprio that tempers my praise.

3. Argo. A rare mainstream movie that hit on all cylinders. It was fair, I thought, to the Iranians without lessening our fear for the hostages. It balanced the humor and absurdity of Hollywood with the grime and terror of Tehran. Ben Affleck led the ensemble cast without needing to raise himself above it. The airport chase at the end cost the movie credibility points and was unnecessary; the historical postscript was heartwarming enough.

4. Well-Digger’s Daughter. Were we back in the ‘60s or the ‘40s for this sweet, innocent adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol story? Daniel Auteuil is the father (and movie director) who struggles to reconcile his love for his wonderful but knocked-up daughter with the need to protect the honor of his family. Scenes of the French countryside and a simpler time left all irony behind and let us know a happy ending would come along.

5. Ted. At the spectrum’s other end we find this gagfest starring an animated bear that has more personality, and better lines, than any of the live humans around him. I laughed till I cried, then I cried some more at the heartwarming story. In any anthology of Boston movies, this will have to be included.

6. Queen of Versailles. A documentarian’s dream: to have a story you’re already filming become bigger, more interesting and, ultimately, more important, as it reflects America’s financial meltdown. Another plus is a lead character who is easy on the eyes, remarkably open and equally worthy of sympathy and scorn.

7. Farewell, My Queen. A highly original costume drama, behind the scenes at Versailles as the Bastille falls, made us feel “you are there.” By telling the tale through the eyes of Marie Antoinette’s personal reader, we saw the court as a collection of people, not historical figures, although the quotient of pulchritude and fashion remained high.

8. Where Do We Go Now? This hit my sweet spot from Peace Corps days: a true-to-life but very comic depiction of village life in the Arab world. The movie smartly looks at eternal, universal themes like man v. woman, love v. hate, life v. death and offers an optimistic ending that is refreshing, if not so realistic.

9. Last Ride. A doomed father running from the law raising his son with tough love to prepare him for the world was the entire story in this projectile of a film. Hugo Weaving was the father and the Australian outback was the co-star.

10. Coriolanus. This was an eloquent answer to my general scorn for updated Shakespeare. Ralph Fiennes seamlessly mixed modern with historical to make the point that the play’s plot is timeless: the politics of Rome resemble nothing so much as the politics of Washington or Athens or Jerusalem.

Honorable Mention: Silver Linings Playbook, 7 Psychopaths, Five-Year Engagement, Bullhead, Rust and Bone, Dark Knight Rises, Elena, Skyfall, Darling Companion, Pelotero.

Biggest Disappointments: Intouchables, Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Cabin in the Woods, Moonrise Kingdom.

Oscar Choices (from official nominees):

Best Picture: Django Unchained

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence

Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz

Supporting Actress: Amy Adams

That said, I won’t be upset if awards go, instead, to Argo, Joaquin Phoenix, Tommy Lee Jones or Anne Hathaway

Top Ten 2011

Top Ten 2011

2011 was, at best, a middling year, with no standout like No Country for Old Men, and among the Oscar favorites, all of which we saw, no favorite like Hurt Locker. I do count 15 very good movies that, in the ultimate test, I had no trouble recommending to others. Rather than rate them individually, which would involve too many close calls, I can stick to tradition by listing a Top Ten and will then add five runners-up. (I am not copying the NY Times critics, although astute observers will note that this was their m.o. this year, as well.)
The Double Hour. My top discovery from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, this Italian mystery-thriller did play in Edina for a week later in the year, and I would’ve liked to have seen it again, not only to judge the plot twist that flips the mirror at the end but to spend more time in the company of the two stars, who were both attractive and real in the manner of anonymous-to-me European actors.
Margin Call. The anonymous stars here stood for you and me, the regular people working under Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey. How would we fare in the crucible of a collapsing business? While the story was purportedly inspired by the demise of Lehman Brothers, it echoed in news stories for weeks to come. Together with Michael Lewis’s The Big Short , this film explained the implosion of the American economy – and the character of Wall Street – better than anything else that came my way.
Just Go With It. Frothy yes, but everything one could want in light entertainment: romance, humor, cute kids, hysterical secondary actors and the best and prettiest comic actress going, Jennifer Anniston. Adam Sandler infused the story with a kindspirited tone that allowed me to relax and laugh out loud, which I did at scene after scene, especially the one with the goat.
Of Gods and Men. At the opposite spectrum end from Adam Sandler, what could be more serious than a movie about monks in a foreign land, evaluating their vows in the face of rebel fanatics intent on their destruction. The cinematography, music, costumes and characters’ faces all matched the beautiful severity of the largely true story.
The Mill and the Cross. Answering my own rhetorical question is this reenactment of a Breugel painting. Making better use of silence than The Artist, the movie explains little while it wraps you into the world, and the horror, of daily existence in the year 1570. I could’ve done without Michael York and Charlotte Rampling, but the peasants captivated me as the movie confounded life and art, just as Breugel confounded 1st century Palestine with 16th-century Belgium.
Drive. A taut, tingling, stylish and supercool action thriller, with background drumbeat and technomusic that push suspense and violence that is shocking. Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan (the “It” actors of the moment) are brilliant, and generate their own electric charge without saying a word. The ending rather resembles Hamlet, surely no coincidence from a Danish director.
The Help. Along with Bridesmaids, the best female ensemble cast of the year, only this movie has a legitimate pedigree, a serious subject, an identifiable locale and a hard-won feel-good ending. To those who found it corny, I’m happy to show my softer side, and I trust some of these actors, if not the film itself, will be around come Oscar-time.
Incendies. The bridge between the West and the Muslim world is, today, one of the hardest and most necessary to cross, and this film vividly showed how hard that can be. It personalized the sectarian strife that tore apart Lebanon, making us imagine how different life in that world is from ours, while at the same time neatly reminding us that we do inhabit the same planet, if barely.
Bobby Fischer Against the World. A mesmerizing subject, told with appropriate drama and objectivity. The talking heads were uniformly insightful and the historic clips were fascinating, reminding us of a bygone era when the two most famous athletes in the world were the heavyweight champion and a chess player.
Super 8. E.T. updated for the video-game age, five youngsters making their own movie get caught up, a la Blow-Up, in bigger game. The kids were wonderful actors, except in their own movie, and the adolescent romance was the hottest love affair I saw all year. This movie was as full of cinema clichés as Hugo, The Artist and War Horse, but without taking itself seriously. What fun!
Honorable Mention:
My Week with Marilyn. No King’s Speech this year, but this came closest.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Next to Bobby Fischer, the best doc of the year.
Cedar Rapids. A feel-good farce, bested only by Just Go With It.
Jane Eyre. A perfect period piece, if less original than The Mill and the Cross.
Hanna. Second only to Drive for intense, non-stop action and stylishness.

Top Ten – 2010

This year for the first time I am offering three Top Ten movie lists, and the first, for reasons of pre-Oscar urgency, will merely be my capitulation of the ten nominees for best film. For detailed explanation of why I prefer one to another, go to the Alphabetical Listings for 2010 and click on the relevant movie title. In order, my choices are:
1. Winter’s Bone. The most authentic, least Hollywood of the bunch, with acting that didn’t seem like acting (compare Jennifer Lawrence to Hailee Steinfeld) and a gripping, unpredictable story.
2. Black Swan. Even more intense than Winter’s Bone, the sheen of Hollywood and melodrama is all that made its horror bearable (if not always watchable). Wonderfully psychological and ambiguous.
3. The King’s Speech. Wonderful acting but small story.
4. The Fighter. Wonderful acting but cliched story.
5. Social Network. Fascinating character study, but for a “true story” a lot rang false.
6. True Grit. (Dropoff starts here) Formulaic story enlivened by precociously formal young heroine, but that was not enough to carry the film.
7. 127 Hours. Not much suspense or point, a how-to for something you don’t want to do, or see.
8. The Kids Are All Right. The relationship between Annette and Julianne left me cold.
9. Inception. Bold moviemaking, but it could have been just as groundbreaking with a more comprehensible plot and better casting.
10. Toy Story 3. Good pre-adult animated film, but it remained a pre-adult animated film.

Being critical of so many of the Academy’s choice, I must next offer my own list of 2010 movies, which I admit to being more idiosyncratic, if not offbeat.
1. Cell 211. A good, suspenseful and original story, which was rare, and powerful acting by some scary Romanians.
2. Winter’s Bone. See above.
3. Black Swan. Ditto.
4. Women Without Men. An artwork by Shirin Neshat that grabbed the emotions as well as the eyes.
5. Bluebeard. A feminist fable that brought a myth to life.
6. Get Him to the Greek. Raunchy good fun, a smile-a-minute, with music to boot.
7. Buried. One person in a coffin but oh-so-connected to the world.
8. Love and Other Drugs. My favorite romance of the year.
9. Fair Game. Politics, Sean Penn and a story I cared about.
10. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. An adaptation that did justice to the book.
Runners-Up: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; The King’s Speech; The Fighter; The Social Network.
Finally, for reasons of completeness, I add a third Top Ten, based on movies I saw in 2010. Several were released in 2009 but didn’t make that list because I had not yet viewed them when the list was published. There are, obviously, overlaps.
1. Cell 211.
2. The White Ribbon. So much for German culture.
3. Black Swan.
4. The Secret in Their Eyes. Spanish passion, good storytelling.
5. Winter’s Bone.
6. Women Without Men.
7. A Serious Man. Coen Brothers at their best.
8. Bluebeard.
9. Still Walking. Japanese family saga.
10. Buried.
If I can add one comment that perhaps makes some sense of my choices. What I rewarded this year was edgy or unusual film, works that used the cinema form in a novel way: Bluebeard, Buried, Women Without Men, even Black Swan. Cell 211 and Winter’s Bone, coincidentally my top two picks, are the only films that tell a straightforward story building to a suspenseful climax. Maybe next year there will be more, but for 2010 it was a more experimental cinema that caught my attention.

Top Ten Movies 2009

“Gritty” is the word that comes to mind when I think of the movies that made the greatest impact on 2009 for me. I can still feel the Iraqi sand coating my body when I think of The Hurt Locker, the only film in my top 5 that is also garnering critics’ awards, but then again it is the only American film in this group. Gomorrah, from Italy, was even rawer, and South Africa’s District 9 gave us a science-fiction future ten times more realistic, and therefore more brutal, than Avatar. The Class, from France, was, in its own way, even more visceral, because it was easier to imagine oneself in that situation, and the acting, if it was even acting, was so unvarnished. Yngve, from Norway, would seem the odd-film-out, with its story of love and music; but unlike a Hollywood film there was no happy ending here. Not gritty, perhaps, but serious, and lasting.

            Most years I fear the list is incomplete because of all the major films that get released around Christmas. This year I’m still waiting on one or two – White Ribbon and Crazy Heart, in particular – but the year-end crop was unusually light, and I found better films in February at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

1. The Man Who Loved Yngve. A Norwegian coming-of-age story, a study, much like Juno, of that age when teenage rebellion and angst run up against real-world consequences. There was the dorky friend, the sexy girlfriend, the divorced parents, the loner bandmate, and in the middle Carlje, trying to live with the conflicting emotions that were tearing him up inside. Good rock music and the slightly different culture contributed to my most enjoyable movie experience of the year.

2. The Hurt Locker. I saw this, like Avatar, as an indictment of the U.S. presence in Iraq, while recognizing that one of this film’s strengths was its apolitical nature. Dismantling bombs is a job, someone’s got to do it, and this guy (played remarkably by Jeremy Renner) is just crazy enough to be good at it. Powerful and suspenseful, beautifully directed and acted, this film kept you on edge while making you ponder: Who is the enemy– the man with the cell phone in the butcher shop? The boy who is hawking bootleg DVDs? How can anyone tell? And when will the next bomb go off?

3. Gomorrah. Not for the fainthearted, but remarkable moviemaking. At first I dismissed this as a Sicilian version of The Sopranos without plot, humor, recognizable characters or professional camerawork. By the end, though, the stories had coalesced into a bleak, violent and scary world of Italian crime. We started with a young boy delivering groceries, watched how he was inexorably drawn into the gang, and ended with the world of the bosses, which made the child’s play along the way seem just that. This was fiction that told an ugly truth.

4. The Class. Provocative, haunting and utterly realistic, this movie was a Gomorrah of the classroom. I walked away not rating the movie so much as judging the individual students, the teachers, the French school system, education in general and even our contemporary society. The teacher appeared a saint, but time and again his pedagogic techniques caused me to squirm. The student who caused the most damage appeared a good sort. Nothing was black and white in this mess of a world. As I said, it was more life than cinema.

5. District 9. Who are the bad guys here? Is it the “prawns” from outer space? The Nigerian hoodlums?  The profit-driven corporate chieftains at MNU? Or the trigger-happy South African Defense Force?  This film is brilliant in its moral ambiguity, its documentary style is oh-so-clever, and its pacing is perfect. And despite the inclusion of a million creatures from a space ship, I found the movie quite realistic, perhaps because Johannesburg was itself an alien backdrop.

6. Whatever Works.  With Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona and now this, Woody Allen has returned as my favorite American director, especially with the recent three of four flat efforts from Clint Eastwood. The first half hour and the exchanges between Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood were the comedic high point of the year. The warm and fuzzy ending is a letdown from the welcome view of cynical New Yorkers at the start, but we don’t love Woody for his heft.

7. Julie and Julia. A totally charmant film. I had tears of pleasure streaming down my face from the first TV impersonation of Julia Child by Meryl Streep until the end. Contrary to most reviewers, I thought Amy Adams held her own, and both husbands were admirable anchors for their flighty spouses. How often do you see a film in which everyone is nice, everyone achieves their goal, and the audience just has fun all along the way?

8. In the Loop. Hysterically funny, at least the half I was able to catch. The performances were uniformly over-the-top, but the whole fit seamlessly together, like fingers in a glove. An especially deft and novel leitmotif was the role of 20-somethings, pulling and being hit by levers in the power corridors of Washington and London. The story of how British “intel” facilitated America’s rush into a nameless war might have seemed absurd had not every event in the movie echoed reality as we now know it.

9. Il Divo. The flip side of Gomorrah, equally daring as moviemaking and equally depressing as a picture of Italy.  All those marbled floors, high ceilings and columned terrazzos, heavily made-up women and men with deep tans and coiffed hair, who would kiss you and murder you equally without expression. There was no hint of what P.M. Andreotti’s public appeal must have been – it surely wasn’t the turned-down ears – but I take his affectless character to be a symbol of sorts that one must be Italian to decipher.

10. Adventureland. The oft-told love tale of the geeky guy and the gorgeous girl, this time set, amusingly, in an amusement park run by Bill Hader and a bunch of slacker employees. Kristen Stewart portrays the heartthrob, perfect on the outside, troubled and insecure on the inside, while Ryan Reynolds and Jesse Eisenberg are just as good as the men in her life. A great rock music soundtrack from 1987 provides an overglow of nostalgia, through which we recognize the sincerity and authenticity of the film.

Also Worth Noting: A Single Man; (500) Days of Summer; Easy Virtue; Departures; No One Said It Would Be Easy; It’s Complicated; Sin Nombre; Food, Inc.; Damn United; Three Monkeys

Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker)

Best Actress: Kristen Stewart (Adventureland); Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia); Carey Mulligan (An Education)

Best Actor: Jeremy Renner (Hurt Locker); Colin Firth (A Single Man)

Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Supporting Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart); Zoe Saldana (Avatar); Anna Kendrick (Up In the Air)

Biggest Disappointments: Whip It, Grand Torino, Valentino, Seraphine, Inglourious Basterds, Duplicity