Some Came Running

My Best of 2009: Special "I haven't seen 'Up In The Air' yet" Edition

UPDATED.

Because I might as well, right? I will write about Air whenever I get around to seeing it (which might not be until I'm at the in-laws' for the holidays), and while several colleagues I hold in quite high esteem are crazy about it...well, it doesn't look to me like something I'd be crazy about even if I really liked it, if you know what I'm saying. 

And if I am crazy about it, I can just add it to this list of 16, which is an unorthodox number that will displease further the commenter who thought that a 70-film best-of-the-decade list was a kind of critical copout and could he have just the list of ten, please, by tomorrow morning. Nevertheless, I have decided to impose a discipline of sorts on this list...by actually ranking it. Yes, the order is of preference. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, I guess. While the actual production dates of the films vary, they all had their first official U.S. theatrical runs in 2009. 

Here goes.

UPDATE: It's official; I am dumb. A clerical error owing to a busted brain synapse forgot all about a particularly distinguished film's blink-and-you-missed it U.S. theatrical run this year. The official count of the list is now 17, and the missing film is...well, look at comments, and look below, and you'll figure it out.

1) Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas) See, already you think I'm crazy. Only I'm not. Considered here. Like they say, you gotta watch out for the quiet ones.

2) A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen) Reviewed here.

3) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) Reviewed here, further considered here.

4) Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson) Reviewed here.

5) Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson) Reviewed here.

6) The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch) Reviewed here.

7) Adventureland (Greg Mottola) Considered here.

8) The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel; pictured) Reviewed here.

 9) Tokyo Sonata (Kiroshi Kurosawa) Reviewed here.

10) Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo) Reviewed here.

11) Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) Considered here. And here.

12) The Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel) Considered here. Possibly the only thing in the world that myself, Kent Jones and Karina Longworth are in complete agreement on. 

13) Two Lovers (James Gray) Considered here.

14) Avatar (James Cameron) Reviewed here. Quite the technical achievement. 

15) The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh) "It's terrific!"

16) Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi) Reviewed here.

17) Invictus (Clint Eastwood) Considered here. Good movie. 

Okay, go nuts.

FURTHER UPDATE: Certain omissions have been questioned. Jane Campion's Bright Star and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker are among the most prominent. What can I tell you? I enjoyed both, found them both worthy, but in the final analysis both achieved "close, but no cigar" status for me. Also, in the case of Locker, I want to bait Jeff Wells. (Kidding.) As for Claire Denis' 35 Shots..., my secret shame is that I haven't seen it. Which is bad, and will be corrected, but sometimes you've got to go to your year-end lists with the movies you have...

Possible sins of omission

Well. I suppose that I could always say, "How about one-hundred-and-twenty-five, then?" or some such thing, but at a certain point the list-making has got to stop. And so now to answer the commenters asking "But what about...?"

Terrence Malick's The New World. I ought to have known it would come up. It was not omitted out of forgetfulness, and on the other hand I could have made life easy for myself and listed it and made my case based on what I admire about it. But I don't want to be evasive, or coy, or cute about it; I am very ambivalent about the picture. I am not ambivalent about it because I'm overly bothered by the non-linear editing. Nor am I bugged by the shot durations. I don't feel it often devolves into an unrelated series of pretty pictures. And I think the use of Wagner in the picture is not merely apt but moving. In fact, I think the way the Rheingold music helps complete the circle the film's ending makes with its beginning is sheer bloody genius, and that the way the film's ending links to its beginning would be sheer bloody genius even without the music. 

No, my objection to The New World is that it introduces a heretofore unknown quantity into the Malickean universe: that of sentimentality. Too often what is strange and striking and, yes, new about this vision is undercut by a seepage of pious treacle. As in, to name one for-instance, the bit in the section titled "A Proposal" in which Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas communes with a tree. "Other people direct movie. Terrence Malick builds cathedrals," pronounced one of this film's most passionate champions, Matt Zoller Seitz. Too often in this film Malick seems to be announcing that he's building a cathedral, and there's a concomitant sogginess of thought in that which skews the detachment that makes the beauty of his prior films so bracing and unusual. I prefer cinematic poetry with a somewhat stiffer spine, finally. 

Because 100 is a nice, round number...

...and because my best-of-the-decade list of 70 slighted (inevitably, I insist) at least two dozen other worthy works, if not more, I hereby consider my readers' suggestions, and my own memory lapses, and give you thirty more outstanding motion pictures of the last decade.

Many of you might have intuited that, secreted somewhere within this list and the last, is my 10 best of 2009. You would be correct, but I will be posting that separately anyway. 

Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009) Finally, an American coming-of-age comedy that wasn't rote, smug, or evasive but rather finely detailed and artful. Reviewed here.

All The Real Girls (David Gordon Green, 2003) I've come to love this film for many reasons, not the least of which being that it appears to have scared the living shit out of Anthony Lane. 

The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007) A visionary immersion.

Autofocus (Paul Schrader, 2002) A beautifully detached perspective on deeply repellent behavior indulged by desperate characters who can never quite understand how emotionally underdeveloped they are. Funsy!

Children of Men (Alfonso Caurón, 2006) A convincingly imagined dystopia and filmmaking that's both staggeringly virtuosic and emotionally involving. All this and early King Crimson on the soundtrack. 

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) For its scale, its action, its convincing grafting of a noir (rather than a pop-surreal) sensibility onto a superhero picture. Best experienced in IMAX, I have to say.

The Death of Mr. Lazerescu (Critsti Puiu, 2005) My favorite of the new Romanian films, mordant and hilarious and then more mordant.

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005) Pretty much a perfectly calibrated scare-a-thon, something not to be deplored  in this day and age.

Flags Of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006) My preferred film in Eastwood's ambitious World War II diptych.

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007) Boy, were my expectations low for this. As a result, the film's lyrical brilliance, coming in from an entirely unexpected angle, blew me away.

George Washington (David Gordon Green, 2000, pictured) Just beautiful. And troubling, and heartbreaking. But mostly beautiful—visionary widescreen imagery right outta the box, very impressive.

 

Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008) This ultimate deglamorization of Mob rule gets stronger with every viewing. 

Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) No, it doesn't hold together in quite the same way as Mulholland does, but it's incredibly vivid and disquieting and—there's no other way of putting this—fucked up. Maybe his most despair-filled picture since Eraserhead.

Kill Bill 1 &2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004) Cheating, I know. Won't be the last time.

My Seventy Greatest Films Of The Decade

So, you don't wanna talk about Spencer Tracy or James Brown? Okay, fine, be that way. I see now that the crew over at Time Out New York has posted its Top 50 Movies of the Aughts, so now's the time, as Charlie Parker would put it, when I might as well counter with my own list, and create what some call "added value" by citing 20 more than 50, because why the hell not. 

I will try to be more aphoristic and less portentous than the TONY crew in my film assessment. I don't mean that as a slam against the TONY crew's summings-up. Believe me, I know what a drag it can be to write those 50-to-120 word capsules, particularly if you're trying to get across why the films "mattered" or were "important." It was, quite frankly, really tiresome to have to strike those poses back in the Premiere days. Now that I'm my own boss, my own capsules will be...well, whatever they will be. Another liberty I take is  in not ranking—who am I tallying up ballots against, anyway?—but rather listing the films in possibly imperfect alphabetical order. Shine sweet freedom, etc...

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001): A heartbreakingly fractured fairy tale. If you think its final 20 minutes constitute a happy ending, watch, and think, again.

Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002): The Charlie Kaufman-scripted upending of Hollywood convention isn't quite the coup-de-grace it's meant to be, but it still delivers a potent viral load of satirical venom.

The Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004): The maestro's sweeping Hughes biography is a much-misunderstood study in obsession, and how failure never stops haunting success. The color manipulation is brilliant too.

Burn After Reading (The Coen Brothers, 2008): A really superb live-action cartoon. Reviewed here.

Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008): Pace, Steven, this was not a mistake. Not at all. Some thoughts on it here.

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008, pictured): A superbly multi-faceted film that genuinely suggests where cinema can, and should, go in the next century. 

 

The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000): Women's oppression in Iran. A beautiful new manifestation of the neo-realist ethos. 

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006): It took me a while to come around to this extraordinary film...and I'm glad I did. I walked out on it first...now I feel I could watch it three times a year, at least. The first key to appreciating it is to stop seeing Costa as some sort of, shall we say, "liberal." It's deeper, way deeper, than that...

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007): Well, yes, it is about the plaints of white people who are visiting India. And your point is? My initial thoughts here.

Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002, pictured): A perhaps alarmist portrait of capital in the cyber age. But a swift, effective kick in the balls in any event.

 

Éloge de l’amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001): Profoundly problematic Godard, yes. And no less great for that. 

A (weak) defense of Entertainment Weekly's "The New Classics" lists (Updated)

Rivette's Histoire de Marie et Julien: not even nominated, most likely.

Let's begin with a fundamental fact: lists are bullshit. Lists are such blatant bullshit that any magazine person will admit to you that they're bullshit. Some might need to have had a couple of drinks first, others might be more effectively cajoled by having you complain for the millionth time in the course of a conversation about how your own favorite cultural artifact was left off some list or another, but they'll admit it. Furthermore, even lists purportedly based on data and research and objective standards are, at some level, bullshit. That U.S. News and World Report annual list of America's best colleges? Guess what.

Another thing: the bigger and more putatively comprehensive the list, the greater the intensity of bullshit. I should compare this to decibel measurement, wherein each individual decibel represents ten times worth of increase. This is worth remembering when considering that Entertainment Weekly's June 27/July 4 double issue, "The New Classics," purports to present "The 1000 best movies, TV shows, albums, books and more of the last 25 years."

But let's not get ahead of ourselves quite yet. "Glenn," I hear you asking, "if lists are such bullshit, why do magazines and websites do them almost all the frickin' time?"

Well, because lists are putatively "fun." People notice them, argue about them. They take them fairly seriously, pretty much regardless of what their sources are...oddly enough. For a magazine in particular, a list is a potential goldmine of publicity. It gets your product noticed. TV news, radio outlets, they LOVE lists.