Tag: Noah Taylor

2014 In Film.

So, yeah, this is a little late — I believe the current parlance is “dragging” — but I have gotten in quite a bit of catch-up over the past two months. (In fact, I watched two of my top 25 this past week, including the aforementioned Whiplash — Thanks OnDemand!)

The only Best Picture contenders I missed in the end were American Sniper — yeah, no thanks — and The Imitation Game, which looks frightfully Oscar-baity to me, and apparently does rather poorly by Turing, so oh well. Otherwise, and now that those Oscars have come and gone, time to fish or cut bait. So here’s last year’s Top 25 at last!

Suffice to say, 2014 was a pretty lean year in cinema — as weak as any I can remember (and even then the Academy made a hash of it) — so here’s hoping for a higher average quality of prospects over the next ten months.

Top 25 Films of 2014
[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006/2007/
2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/The Oughts]

1. Boyhood: YMMV, of course. But I thought Richard Linklater’s ambitious chronicle of an average Texas upbringing was the one real standout movie experience of 2014, and far and away the best film of the year.

While we’d seen glimmers of this sort of storytelling in the 7-Up documentaries, Linklater’s own Before series, and even the Harry Potter movies (where we watched all the Hogwarts kids grow up over the years), this remarkable coming-of-age tale felt like something entirely new. The degree of difficulty here is extraordinary, and yet Linklater and his dedicated adults — Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, whose onscreen aging makes the film that much more resonant — took what could’ve just been a gimmicky stunt or shapeless experiment-gone-wrong and imbued it with subtlety, nuance, and introspective intelligence.

In a sense, Linklater crafted with Boyhood the experience that Terence Malick clearly sweat bullets to approximate in The Tree of Life — how it’s the little things, the languid afternoons or random car trips, that stick with you as you grow up and/or grow old. But, unlike Malick’s more labored undertaking, Linklater makes the storytelling here seem effortless. Which of course, it wasn’t — this took 12 years! The magic of Boyhood is that that passage of time is woven into the fabric of the film itself. You sense it, slipping past you and the characters both, as you watch.

True, Oscar rarely gets it right — Last year was a notable exception in that regard. Still, as Dan Kois pointed out on Oscar night, snubbing Boyhood was an egregious mistake, and one that will speak poorly of the Academy’s judgment for many moons to come.

2. Only Lovers Left Alive: “There’s water here. And when the cities in the South are burning, this place will bloom.” Go long on Detroit, y’all: While the drop-off from Boyhood to the rest of the pack is a steep one, Jim Jarmusch’s wry-sexy-cool vampire saga Only Lovers Left Alive rests solid at #2. I’ve never been all that much of a Jarmusch fan — long-time readers may remember me wondering what the fuss was about over Dead Man. (And, at this late, post-Twilight date, who isn’t a little sick of cooler-than-thou, elitist vampires?) Still, Jarmusch et al nailed it here.

If Boyhood reflects how quickly the inexorable arrow of time speeds us along from four-legs to two-legs to three, Only Lovers and its bevy of bored blood drinkers suggest that timelessness can be kind of a drag after awhile also. Still, watching our heroes and heroines kick around the ruins of Detroit and Tangier is great fun and, with all due respect to whatever Joseph Gordon-Levitt is cooking up these days, it’s hard to imagine a better film made of Neil Gaiman’s Endless than what we have here. (Mia Wasikowska’s character in particular is the spitting image of Death.)

Also, while I liked her as the White Witch, I’ve generally found Tilda Swinton underwhelming in the past — See, for example, what I wrote about Michael Clayton back in the day. Here, she’s absolutely captivating. (As for Tom Hiddleston, he’s been doing the bored immortal schtick over at Marvel lately, so this isn’t too far afield for him.)

3. Edge of Tomorrow: I haven’t read the source material (Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need is Kill), but the concept of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow — later remonikered Live, Die, Repeat — seems pretty simple: It’s “Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers.” The beauty of Edge — easily the most fun and fully-realized thrill-ride of the summer — is that it milks this one basic idea for all it’s worth. The result is arguably the best video game movie we’ve yet seen, since Cruise’s character is basically playing Dark Souls here until he gets to the alien end-boss.

Speaking of which, Tom Cruise may be creepy as all hell in real life, but he continues to make excellent decisions on the action and sci-fi film front, and here’s he backed up by a very capable Emily Blunt — who hilariously promised she’d never make exactly this sort of film back in 2005 — and a number of wily, likable genre veterans: Brendan Gleeson, Noah Taylor, Bill Paxton. In a mostly forgettable summer, this is a movie that deserved to do better.

4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Is this ranked too high? Well, maybe, but The Winter Soldier was one of the most enjoyable experiences I had at the movies in 2014. Cap’s second outing is both a promising debut by the Russo Brothers, who are now apparently slated to take over the Avengers franchise after Joss Whedon, and a significant improvement over Joe Johnston’s sturdy first installment.

Perhaps the best part of The Winter Soldier — at a time when even those of us who wanted more comic movies back in the day are perhaps feeling a little buyers’ remorse — is the Alan Pakula, seventies-conspiracy-theory tone of its first two acts — heck, even Robert Redford is involved. The Winter Soldier demonstrates that Marvel is savvy enough to realize that not all their films have to feel the same (something we’ll hopefully see more of in their upcoming Netflix Daredevil series.)

As I said here, I’m not a big fan of the floating-helicarriers-again third act or the absurd death count in this film. Still, in this age of NSA overreach, CIA torture, and general 9/11 hysteria, it sure is nice to see Cap stand up for the real red, white, and blue.

5. Selma: Ava DuVernay’s powerful Selma — the best of the Oscar contenders besides Boyhood — applies the “House of Horrors” in-your-face approach of 12 Years of Slave to more recent American history, and quite rightfully portrays George Wallace and the cretinous cops of the white South as villains and thugs standing athwart freedom, progress, and basic human decency. Like Steve McQueen’s (better and more artful) film, it pointedly rubs the audiences’ face in the brutal crimes of Massive Resistance, both to evoke an emotional response and to stand as a much-needed corrective to all-too-many “white savior” movies like Mississippi Burning and Lincoln.

All that being said, I found it hard to take my history hat off during the movie, and on that end I felt like Selma had some issues. Much has been made of the treatment of LBJ — here are the briefs for the prosecution and the defense — and, while many films do worse violence to history, I still left the theater feeling like LBJ got screwed here. (His calling in a chit with J. Edgar was particularly galling.)

That aside, a bigger problem is that MLK himself seems off. As everyone knows, for copyright reasons, Selma couldn’t use any of Dr. King’s real words — which, by the way, is totally bizarre. Nonetheless, the words they came up with instead were tonally jarring — less memorable, too script-y, often (as at Jimmie Lee Jackson’s funeral) too on-the-nose. To me, they just didn’t sound like Dr. King, and didn’t capture either his poetic genius or his public persona.

However conflicted and exhausted he was in private (and this the film does well), his public voice — at least in 1965 — was more eloquent and more unshakeable in the conviction that freedom, justice, and the Beloved Community were inexorably going to win out. But, in a perfect world, the scriptwriter shouldn’t have had to reinvent the wheel — if you’re going to make a film about MLK, let the man speak his own words.

6. The Lego Movie: Everything is awesome? Well, for the two-odd hours The Lego Movie is on, it actually kinda is. What could’ve been a cheap-n-cheesy cash grab turned out to be a surprisingly fun trip to a witty meta-universe where the couches are double-decker, Lando hangs with Gandalf and Dumbledore, and Batman’s into therapeutic death metal. (“Darkness! No Parents! Super-Rich…kinda makes it better!”) And sure, the ending was a bit cloying — I’m on Team Kraggle, I guess — but I definitely didn’t expect that final reel going in.

7. Blue Ruin: I enjoy the cinema experience more than almost anyone I know, but tickets now on the north end of $12-a-pop means decisions have to be made on what to see with a crowd. So, for better or for worse, 2014 was the year that I embraced OnDemand for movie-watching.

One definite upside: the chance to catch movies like Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, a Coen-esque indie thriller about what happens when an average, loser-ish guy (Macon Blair) decides to seek revenge on the men who killed his parents, just like they do in the pictures. Ruin loses some steam as it goes along, but few movies this year so vividly conveyed that sickly, lurching “then THIS happened” feeling of watching a simple plan unravel.

8. Force Majeure: Man, Oscar had a bad year. Just as The Lego Movie was AWOL from the Best Animation category, this darkly funny Scandinavian import about a pater familias who fails in his prime directive during a family ski vacation was nowhere to be seen on the Foreign Film list. (This prompted another Majeure Man-Cry.) Force Majeure is likely not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s kinda hilarious if you vibe into it.

9.Whiplash: As Larry Mullen, Jr. once said of Achtung Baby, “I don’t think the lyrics are worth a shit to be honest, if you ask me. I think it’s all about drums!!” I actually caught this two nights ago, and to be honest, I call shenanigans on the Tiger Mom school of artistry that’s the film’s central conceit here. (As far as I know my sis never got ritualistically abused by a dance mentor, and she seemed to turn out ok.)

Nor did the stakes seem all that high to me — I guess, if I’m honest with myself, I just don’t care all that much about the world of jazz drummers. All that being said, this is a sleek, lean, well-made and very watchable audience picture with a fun performance at its core — the inimitable J.K. Simmons as the Hannibal Lecter of bandleaders. And it’s always great to see a long-time character actor get his due.

9. The Babadook: Stephen King once wrote — I think it was in Danse Macabre — that the secret to good horror is tapping into a real-life fear or anxiety. If so, I expect The Babadook would be much higher (or lower) on my list if I were a parent. For beyond all the freaky, stop-motion supernatural antics going on in this eerie Australian horror story, the real question haunting The Babadook is: “Wouldn’t your life be soooo much better if you just got rid of this %^&@%@ kid?” Well….wouldn’t it? If it’s in a word, or if it’s in a book, you can’t get rid of the Babadook…

11. CitizenFour: For all their other mistakes this year, big ups to the Academy (and HBO) for giving Laura Pointras’ CitizenFour a publicity boost. (And how weird was it to see Glenn Greenwald on the Oscar stage? Worlds collide!) I’ve written about Snowden at length here before, and nothing since then has convinced me I was wrong about him. (Sorry, but hysterical and completely 100% redacted warnings of damage, macho death threats from Pentagon dickbags, all-too-typical Hillary-running-right tsk-tsking, and outright lies by the NSA just aren’t getting the job done.)

I do wish CitizenFour had spent more time explaining exactly what Snowden revealed (it does a good job on metadata, for example) and less of him, say, futzing with his hair. Still, for humanizing Snowden and getting the other side of the story out there, this is an important and worthwhile film.

12. Locke: “Do it for the piece of sky we are stealing with our building…most of all, you do it for the fu**ing con-CRETE!” I’ll say this for Tom Hardy: Whether it’s The Dark Knight Rises, Bronson, Peaky Blinders (also by Locke‘s Steven Knight), or this film, half the fun of watching the man at work is doing impressions of him days and weeks after the fact. (Maybe it’s time to watch Star Trek: Nemesis again…lol, no, just kidding.)

All of Locke is just Hardy behind the wheel at night, muttering in a Welsh brogue about last year’s mistake and tomorrow’s “pour.” But damn if it isn’t engrossing for most of the drive.

13. The Double: Based on a Dostoyevsky novella and written and directed by British comedian Richard Ayoade, The Double resonated with me mainly, I confess, because it had the good sense to steal liberally from one of my favorite films (and this blog’s namesake), Brazil. Office satire, film noir sartorial sense, and unrequited love in a overly bureaucratic sci-fi dystopia? I’m in!

In any event, a fun two hours with very likable actors like Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, and Noah Taylor (the latter two also good in Only Lovers and Edge of Tomorrow this year respectively) And if the Eisenberg-Michael Cera Doubling dilemma even exists anymore — Eisenberg seems to have pulled away by now — I suppose this is Eisenberg’s answer to Cera’s Youth in Revolt.

14. Dear White People: A smart, well-written college satire of 21st century campus life — sort-of-a-Mean Girls meets Hollywood Shuffle — that’s both nuanced and topical about issues like being black in the Ivies and how white appropriation of hip-hop quickly devolves into egregious stereotypes. Writer-director Justin Simien is one to watch.

15. Guardians of the Galaxy: I thought the 70’s nostalgia was a little overdone, but still: With the help of some Douglas Adams sensibility and Chris Pratt’s aw-shucks amiability — still not sure if that’ll wash for Indiana Jones — James Gunn managed to tackle a complicated Marvel property and fashion a fun and broadly engaging space opera out of it, one that somehow didn’t turn off mainstream audiences despite having a talking raccoon and Wookie tree along for the ride. (Special props to Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer — he was much better than I’d anticipated.) So gratz on that, tho’ I’ll be realllly impressed if they actually manage to pull off The Inhumans. Lockjaw or go home!

16. The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies: Oh, PJ…well, 4.5 out of 6 ain’t bad. Battle of the Five Armies is a solid-enough Middle Earth fantasy battle pic, I suppose, and moderately engaging when taken on its own. I’m just no longer sure at this point what it had to do with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

There are any number of small problems here. First off, the fact that Smaug the Magnificent is taken care of before the title card suggests that maybe his final fate should’ve been sorted out in the second film. (And cut that awful Alien 3 homage at the end of Smaug too please — it makes the Great Wyrm a buffoon.) Second, having to pad out an entire movie from what’s left means a lot of filler — everything about Alfrid, the Unibrow of Laketown, was cringeworthy.

More importantly, tho’, I get why Jackson wanted to tie The Hobbit closer to Lord of the Rings thematically and aesthetically, but doing so ruins the whole point of the Battle of Five Armies. This was Tolkien in WWI mode — the battle is a ghastly and ludicrous mistake set off by greed and misunderstanding. But as portrayed here, it’s instead a prelude to the WWII, “Good Fight” of LotR against the encroaching menace of Sauron. So instead of Tolkien skirting over the battle because it’s a bunch of nonsense that Hobbits rightfully shouldn’t be caught up in, we get two hours of honor and glory and sacrifice and more martial humdrum. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for that — it’s called The Lord of the Rings.

As a result, Bilbo is very much a passive participant in the film that’s ostensibly telling his story, and that’s a shame. I wouldn’t say additions are necessarily the problem — far and away the best part of this movie is the White Council showing up at Dol Guldur. But it looks like there were probably two great films to make from this source material — not three. The Battle of the Five Armies is still a very competently made action epic, and one that’s engaging from moment to moment. But, sadly, it’s the least of PJ’s six Tolkien films. We’ll always have Fellowship.

17. Under the Skin: Definitely the better of the two super-powered Scarlett Johansson movies of 2014 (oh wait — there were three; I forgot about The Winter Soldier), I still liked Under the Skin less than many of the raves (and, for that matter, less than Jonathan Glazer’s earlier film, Sexy Beast.) Whatever hidden depths others found in those black oily waters, I found it mostly a slow, surface-feeding sci-fi/horror film that was only semi-involving. Still, it was unique, and had some indelible images on occasion, not the least the final shot of soot mingling with snow.

18. Ida: As a grad school friend well put it, this Polish import about a orphaned nun-to-be discovering her roots is “stunningly sterile.” It’s a beautifully-shot film — Ida well-deserved its Best Cinematography nod — and the film offers a memorably well-drawn character in Ida’s world-weary aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). But otherwise, there’s not much there there. Literally: This movie only clocks in at 82 minutes. This is more of a short story than anything — not a bad short story, by any means, but I much preferred Force Majeure and The Babadook as far as 2014 imports go.

19. Jodorowsky’s Dune: Of all sad words of tongue or pen… Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about a failed cuckoo-bananas version of Frank Herbert’s classic, is good fun for several reasons. First, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky remains a ebullient personality at age 86. Second, the sheer ambition that went into this film is staggering (Salvador Dali as the Emperor? Orson Welles as Harkonnen? Mick Jagger as Feyd? Whoa.) Third, it’s interesting to notice how many other movies ended up ripping off the work done for this flick, even decades later with Prometheus. All-in-all, a lively documentary about what might’ve been.

20. The Zero Theorem: Also mining the Brazil aesthetic this year was its original envisioner, Terry Gilliam. The actual story here — about a introverted computer programmer (Christoph Waltz) seeking to find meaning through either a long-awaited phone call, the attentions of a beautiful call girl (Melanie Thierry), or theorem that will explain everything/nothing — could use some work, sure.

But the main joy in Zero Theorem is in the canvas it provides for Gilliam to rethink his Brazilian dystopia for modern times. (See, for example, Waltz being chased around by a Gwendoline Christie ad.) I’ll be the first to admit the film gets lost in its second hour, but I still enjoyed this chance for Gilliam to indulge his creativity and sense of humor, be it David Thewlis in a Tigger-suit, Peter Stormare and Ben Whishaw showing up as mad doctors, or Matt Damon in zebra stripes.

21. Still Alice: In all honesty, Still Alice mostly comes across as a well-above-average Lifetime medical movie of the week — it doesn’t have anywhere near the horrible gravitas of, say, Amour. And I think the story here would be more interesting — a la the triumph over stuttering in The King’s Speech — if the person trying to overcome Alzheimer’s was of more limited means than Julianne Moore’s uber-yuppie professor and her family here.

Still, Moore is very, very good in Alice, and her recent Best Actress win is deserved for her slip-sliding away in this film as much as for her impressive body of work over the years.

22. The Grand Budapest Hotel: As I said last spring, I was down on Budapest. To me, this seemed like a fall away from the heights of 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom back to the more kitschy, solipsistic Wes Anderson of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited. Budapest almost felt like a parody of Andersonian tics — the trains, the sets, the whiteness — and, for whatever reason, I didn’t cotton to its spates of cartoon-y violence.

Plus, it may be like complaining about an Archduke Ferdinand joke at this point — and, it’s true, I hardly ever don’t find angry Hitler videos funny — but Anderson’s kitschy SS Banners fluttering about the hotel put me off. Worked for some, I know, but I personally found it a mite weird and distasteful to make a Holocaust film so precious and twee.

23. Le Weekend: Think of it as Before Morning. There’s not much to Le Weekend other than Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan kvetching to and about each other over the course of a brief Paris vacation. (Well, that’s not entirely true — there’s also a winning and well-preserved Jeff Goldblum who shows up to enliven everything in the middle going.) Still, this small film has the benefit of well-observed relationship dynamics and two great actors at work in Duncan and Broadbent. Very much in the same ballpark as Linklater’s Jesse-and-Celine series, and worthwhile in the same way.

24. Snowpiercer: Like Under the Skin and Grand Budapest, I enjoyed this dystopic comic book adaptation by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho less than a lot of the critics. Even notwithstanding the oh-so-Korean-cinema cleaver attacks in the second act, both its physics and its politics are cartoonish to the extreme. (Taking the former, all I kept thinking as they moved up the train was: shouldn’t you be walking through dozens of living quarters at some point? On the latter, sure, making Captain America(!) a dupe of the powers-that-be is funny, but you’re telling me John Hurt’s character enjoyed playing Emmanuel Goldstein so much he ripped off his own limb? C’mon.)

Still, however nonsensical, Snowpiercer had its moments, from Tilda Swinton’s Thatcher-hatchet job to the swing through Alison Pill’s kindergarten class. I’ve seen worse.

26. John Wick: As in other years, the last spot is up for grabs. This could’ve been A Most Wanted Man or Calvary or Nightcrawler or We are the Best. But, as with Dredd a few years ago, I like to reward #25 to a genre movie that knows exactly what it is and makes no qualms about it. In this case, John Wick, a balletic action/revenge movie that does The Raid-style action remarkably well. I’d checked out a little bit by the car-centric final reel, but the club sequence was a-mazing.

MOST DISAPPOINTING:


Interstellar: Hey, you know what would’ve made Gravity better? If, instead of lamenting her dead kid, Sandra Bullock went back in time for the last thirty minutes to see her again! Because there’s no way audiences are going to be interested in this outer space stuff unless we glom it on to a treacly soap-opera-level story about missing fathers and second chances!

Honestly…w…t…f. Interstellar had issues from the start — nothing about getting McConaughey into space makes much sense — but there were still some positives along the way: The wave planet is suitably nightmarish, and Matt Damon’s character is an interesting wrinkle. But then that Looney Tunes, saccharine final act came along and all goodwill I had for the movie was sucked out into the vastness of space. A weird miss by Christopher Nolan — here’s hoping for better next time.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES:

Birdman: The irony of Birdman is that the one part of the movie that may well have deserved an Oscar — Michael Keaton’s comeback performance — is the one that got short shrift. (Eddie Redmayne got the award for degree-of-difficulty instead, in the Oscar-baity and completely conventional The Theory of Everything. Because, wow, he doesn’t really have ALS!)

Anyway, with the exception of the game cast, this movie is pretentious and terrible from the word go. Everything else about it: that godawful subtitle, the interminable jazz drums, the ideas that sound smart but are awfully shallow, the high-schoolish references to Raymond Carver and Macbeth, the looking down on comic book movies which are usually better thought out than this affected drek, the delusions of artistic grandeur — is obnoxious and hollow. It’s like a two-hour adaptation of David Denby’s whiny complaint that people who saw The Matrix should read Cheever instead.

The only positive thing I can say about Birdman is that it’s better than Inarritu’s 21 Grams, a film which is terrible for almost exactly the same reasons — and even that’s not much of a positive, because I laughed harder during 21 Grams than I think I have in any movie before or since. This is just a lousy, pretentious movie — but it’s about how hard it is in Hollywood when nobody understands your integrity as an artist (#firstworldshowbusinessproblems) so like Argo and The Artist, let’s give it an Oscar.

Foxcatcher: Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher isn’t as offensively lousy as Birdman, but it is rather full of itself, not nearly as deep as it thinks it is, and deadly dull to boot.

Miller strains hard to make the tragic tale of uber-wealthy paranoid schizophrenic John Eluthere Du Pont (Steve Carell) and his fascination with Olympic wrestling (and specifically with Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum)) a metaphor for wayward father figures, the tyrannical predilections of the super-rich, and the death of the American Dream. And, yes, I’m inclined to agree that 1%’ers are generally awful, exploitative people, and success in America is all-too-often a rigged game. But tell me something I don’t know, like, I dunno, the story of why Du Pont shot Mark’s brother, Olympic coach Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo).

Instead, we get two gray and glacial hours of Tatum playing Mopey McGee, followed by a random-feeling leap to almost a decade later which briefly covers the murder. Tatum can be an engaging actor, but he’s bereft of his usual charisma here — he just grunts at things, eats sad dinners alone in his kitchen, and occasionally wrestles the pain away. (In the first five minutes, when Tatum waits in line — decline-of-America metaphor alert! — at the world’s grayest, saddest McDonalds, I figured we might be in trouble.)

For his part, Carell is solid enough as Du Pont, but he’s given an unfortunate putty nose which makes his performance seem like even more of an against-type stunt. The best part of Foxcatcher is Ruffalo, who doesn’t have much to do but is given one standout scene where he has to contemplate selling out on camera. Otherwise, this film is a portentous slog.

MOST UNFAIRLY MALIGNED:

Robocop: Like John Carter and Ender’s Game in this category in years past, Jose Padilha’s remake of Robocop isn’t an amazing film or anything, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Paul Verhoeven’s twisted, misanthropic classic.

But having watched this reboot several months after it bombed in theaters, I was surprised to discover it actually isn’t half-bad — The filmmakers had actually put some thought into how to update the story in a clever way. Like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it also features a surprisingly-not-all-that-hammy performance from Gary Oldman. And months before Birdman, the beginnings of Michael Keaton’s 2014 comeback were laid here. Again, a Saturday afternoon movie at best, but this wasn’t the remake atrocity it was made out to be.

THE REST:

Worth Netflixing: Calvary, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Fault in Our Stars, Frank, God’s Pocket, Godzilla, Gone Girl, Horns, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt. I, The Immigrant, Inherent Vice, Kill the Messenger, Life Itself, A Most Wanted Man, Neighbors, Nightcrawler, Noah, Palo Alto, The Skeleton Twins, The Theory of Everything, We Are The Best, X-Men: Days of Future Past

Don’t Bother: 300: Rise of an Empire, The Amazing Spiderman 2, Devil’s Knot, Fading Gigolo, Filth, Lucy, The Monuments Men, Nymphomaniac, Transcendence, St. Vincent, This Is Where I Leave You

Best Actor: Tom Hardy, Locke

Best Actress: Julianne Moore, Still Alice

Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash

Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood

Unseen: 3 Days to Kill, Alan Partridge, American Sniper, Annie, Begin Again, Belle, Big Eyes, Big Hero 6, Blended, Cesar Chavez, Chef, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Divergent, Dom Hemingway, Draft Day, The Drop, Dumb and Dumber To, Earth to Echo, Endless Love, The Equalizer, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Fury, The Gambler, God Help the Girl, The Giver, Heaven is For Real, The Homesman, I Frankenstein, If I Stay, The Imitation Game, Into the Storm, Into the Woods, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Jersey Boys, Joe, The Judge, Labor Day, Let’s Be Cops, Left Behind, Life After Beth, Maleficent, The Maze Runner, Million Dollar Arm, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Mommy, A Most Violent Year, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Mr. Turner, Muppets Most Wanted, Need for Speed, Nonstop, The November Man, Nurse 3D, Oculus, Pompeii, Ride Along, The Rover, Sabotage, Sex Tape, The Signal, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Starred Up, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, They Came Together, Think Like a Man Too, Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Trip, Top Five, Tusk, Two Days One Night, Unbroken, Veronica Mars, Walk of Shame, Wild, The Wind Rises, Winter’s Tale

    A Good Year For:
  • Brazil Homages (The Double, The Zero Theorem)
  • Chris Pratt (The LEGO Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy)
  • Jazz Drums (Birdland, Whiplash)
  • Marvel (Captain America: TWS, Guardians of the Galaxy)
  • Stars Driving Around the UK (Locke, Under the Skin)
  • Tilda Swinton’s Thatcher Impression (Snowpiercer, Zero Theorem)

    A Bad Year For:
  • The Family Dog (Calvary, John Wick, The Babadook)
  • Hydra (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, CitizenFour)
  • Parenting (The Babadook, Force Majeure)
  • Sony (The Amazing Spiderman 2, The Interview)

2015: Ant-Man, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Blackhat, Chappie, Cinderella, Crimson Peak, The Fantastic Four, Far from the Madding Crowd, Fifty Shades of Gray, Frankenstein, Furious 7, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt II, Inferno, The Jungle Book, Jupiter Ascending, Jurassic World, Kingsman: The Secret Service, London Has Fallen, Mad Max: Fury Road, Magic Mike XXL, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, The Martian, Midnight Special, Minion, Mission Impossible 5, Paddington, Peanuts, Penguins of Madagascar, Pitch Perfect 2, Poltergeist, San Andreas, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Seventh Son, Silence, SPECTRE, Straight Outta Compton, Taken 3, Terminator: Genisys, Tomorrowland, The Walk, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, and


“There has been an awakening…can you feel it?”

The Oughts in Film: Part V (10-1).

We come to it at last, the great battle of our age. In a perfect world, I would’ve gotten these up before 2010 hit. (Then again, in a perfect world, we’d have had a health care bill last July and I’d be going to work by eco-friendly jetpack.) In any case, here they are. No cheating! Please be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4, before perusing the…

Top 100 Films of the Decade:
Part V: 10-1

[The Rest of the List: 100-76 | 75-51 | 50-26 | 25-11 | 10-1]
[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006/2007/2008/2009]

10. The Dark Knight (2008)

From the original review: “Holy Catastrophic Wreck of a City, Batman! After two viewings, I’m happy to report Christopher Nolan’s moody, sinister The Dark Knight was well worth the wait, and bears the high expectations set for it quite impressively. In fact, at two and a half hours (which zip along, and even feel somewhat truncated at times — see below), this sprawling Gotham crime saga is almost too much movie to take in the first time around…Most importantly, if Begins, as I said in 2005, was ‘the Batman movie that fans of the Dark Knight have been waiting for,’ this is undoubtedly the Joker movie we’ve all been hoping for as its companion…Heath Ledger here is a true force of nature, embodying to a tee the malevolent, frighteningly insane jester of The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns.“

From the year-end list: “Yes, it’s the obvious fanboy pick. And, admittedly, TDK had pacing problems — it was herky-jerky at times and the third act felt rushed. Still, in a not-particularly-good year for cinema, Christopher Nolan’s operatic reimagining of the Caped Crusader and his arch-nemesis was far and away the most enjoyable experience i had at the movies in 2008. And if Candidate Obama was America’s own white knight (metaphorically speaking) this past year, Heath Ledger’s Joker was its mischievous, amoral, and misanthropic id. If and when the economic wheels continue to come off in 2009, will stoic selflessness or gleeful anarchy be the order of the day? The battle for Gotham continues, and everybody’s nervously eyeing those detonators. Let’s hope the clown doesn’t get the last laugh.“

And let’s be honest: The Joker’s had a good year in 2009 (and, at least so far, our “white knight” of 2008 has been looking a little more Two-Faced than some of us anticipated back then.) In a decade that saw more comic book movies than even comic book fans might have asked for, Christopher Nolan’s grim and relentlessly-paced crime noir was the pick of the litter. Yeah, some problems here persist — The movie is a little overstuffed in its third act, and Bale’s bat-rasp doesn’t get any less goofy. Still, even more than Batman Begins, this was a full-immersion Gotham experience.

As per Nolan’s usual m.o., The Dark Knight didn’t shy away from grappling with larger themes amid all its impressive action setpieces. For example, there’s much ado here about the compelling need to maintain convenient myths — be it that Harvey Dent is a saint, or that Rachel will come back to Bruce, or that, as the Joker puts it, when bad things do happen, “it’s all part of the plan.”

Or, to take another example, TDK dwells more substantially than most any other comic films out there on the heavy price of vigilantism. Consider the bad behavior “the Batman” engenders among gun-toting do-gooders in hockey pads. And once Gordon, Dent, and Bats bend one rule — extradition — to get the mob’s moneyman back from Hong Kong, it’s Katy bar the door, basically. Next thing you know, Bats is “burning down the jungle” to get his man, including setting up a warrantless wiretap operation over in the basement at Wayne Enterprises. After all, once you’ve decided to go outside the law — say, to fight crime in a big bat suit — where does it all stop?

Of course, in the end the most memorable aspect of TDK was Heath Ledger’s twisted, anarchic, and thoroughly menacing take on the Clown Prince of Crime. Mark Hamill’s cartoon work notwithstanding, this was the Killing Joke-type Joker I had wanted to see on-screen since before the original Burton Batman. Particularly as compared to Jack Nicholson’s indulgent performance back in the day, Ledger brought us a better class of criminal — I just wish he could’ve stuck around for more.

9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

From the year-end list: “Amazing film. Nothing bad to say about it. Go now.“

I haven’t seen Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in many years, so I can’t really vouch for how well its blend of wire-fu enhanced wuxia and ancient Middle Kingdom lore holds up in 2009. (I do know it’s better than Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Fearless, and Curse of the Golden Flower, to take several later examples of the genre.) Still, even coming as it did after The Matrix, also choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, Crouching Tiger was an absolute jaw-dropper. And unlike Quentin Tarantino in the uneven Kill Bills, Lee wisely let Yuen’s choreography provide the kinetic energy here, rather than opting for frenetic and choppy editing.

Speaking of QT, I’m sure he and countless other kung-fu aficionados out there could plausibly tell you that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nothing compared to Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Fist of Legend, or any number of other wuxia epics I haven’t seen. Point conceded. Nonetheless, I found Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a breathtaking movie experience. And, with Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi on hand, I’d put the acting (tho’ not necessarily the martial arts) talent here up against any possible contender.

8. Before Sunset (2004)

As with Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046, I first saw Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset back-to-back on DVD a few years ago. And, while Before Sunrise didn’t do much for me (I’m guessing the problem is that I should have seen it back in 1995, when I was a more idealistic 21), I thought Before Sunset was stunningly good. (For this one, I was juuust right.)

Basically told in real-time one Paris afternoon, Before Sunset brings Jesse and Celine, the lovers of the first film, back together ten years after their fateful night in Vienna. As it turns out, one of them didn’t show up for the romantic rendez-vous made at the end of Sunrise, which complicates things from the start. And, with ten years passed, both are now a little older and wiser in the ways of love. And by that, I mean they’ve become damaged, compromised, brittle, and gun-shy around each other.

Nonetheless, they shared something once upon a time in Vienna, and so they spend the next ninety minutes together — getting up-to-date, confessing recent disappointments, licking old wounds. Life didn’t turn out at all like they figured…and why is that, honestly? When and where did everything start to slip, and what might’ve happened if they had followed through on the promise made, and broken, ten years earlier?

In a way, there isn’t much “movie” here at all — It’s just two old lovers, chatting for ninety minutes as they stroll about the City of Light. Still, Before Sunset is a powerful film if you let it work on you. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are both engaging and excellent, and not a false note is struck as each, slowly and almost despite themselves, lets their guard down around the other again. Ok, the great in media res ending of Sunset may veer a bit toward wish-fulfillment mode. But, y’know, why the heck not? After all this time, they still believe. (In fact, the ending to Before Sunset is remarkably like another film coming up…soon.)

7. No Country for Old Men (2007)

From the original review: ““Seen the arrow on the doorpost, saying, ‘This land is condemned’…” Well, Bob, East Texas may seem rough, but trust me, West Texas is even worse. I’m always going to have a soft spot for Miller’s Crossing, and The Big Lebowski is its own strange and beautiful beast, but the Coen Brothers’ tense, brooding No Country for Old Men, which I caught this morning, is right up among their best work, and that is no small thing…[I]f you harbored any doubts about the Coens after their botched remake of The Ladykillers, fret not. The brothers are back in form.“

From the year-end list: “[T]he Coens’ expertly-crafted No Country works as both a visceral exercise in dread and a sobering philosophical rumination on mortality and the nature of evil. (And in his chilling portrayal of Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem has crafted a movie villain for the ages.)…No Country for Old Men seems so seamless and fully formed, so judicious and economical in its storytelling, that it reminds me of Salieri’s line in Amadeus: ‘Displace one note and there would be diminishment, displace one phrase and the structure would fall.’ A dark journey that throbs with a jagged pulse, No Country for Old Men is very close to the best film of the year, and — along with Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski — yet another masterpiece sprung from the Coens’ elegant and twisted hive-mind.“

“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘O.K., I’ll be part of this world.’” The Coens’ best film in a decade full of superior offerings, No Country for Old Men, as Matt Zoller Seitz eloquently argued in Salon last week, was a culmination of sorts for the brothers.

On its face, No Country is another sordid crime saga like Blood Simple or Fargo. But it’s also, like Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Serious Man, and much of the Coens’ oeuvre, a philosophical rumination on what propels people along the paths they choose. When Anton Chigurh flips a coin to decide Carla Jean’s fate, who, really, is doing the deciding? Chigurh or the coin? “The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.” “Well, I got here the same way the coin did.” Um, ok then. Is it Carla Jean, perhaps? After all, she could’ve picked tails. And, for that matter, Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn could never have taken the money in the first place. In fact, as soon as he does, he starts referring to himself as a dead man…So he knew the score.

But then again, as Tom Reagan asks in Miller’s Crossing, “Do you always know why you do things, Leo?” So maybe it was always out of their hands to begin with. After all, Ulysses Everett McGill’s travels through the South in O’Brother are dictated by the Fates. The Dude…The Dude abides. And Anton Chigurh himself takes a side-impact car crash like he takes anything else — It’s simply the way things are. As another character reminds us in No Country, “You can’t stop what’s comin’.” Or, to switch back to A Serious Man, that whirlwind’s getting closer, and you can’t stop it. So heed the words of the Jefferson Airplane, and find Somebody to Love…

The world of the Coens is all of a piece, and, for all its darkness, No Country is one of its purest expressions. (There’s a good bit of overlap in the world of Cormac McCarthy as well. No Country ends with Tommy Lee Jones talking about a dream he had, one in which his father carries fire into the dark. A father “carrying the fire” also figures very prominently in The Road.) In the Coens’ world, as in ours, the only predictable thing about life is that it is finite, so take things as they come and live it well. As Marge Gunderson puts it in Fargo, “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.” Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you. Abide.

6. United 93 (2006)

From the original review: “Whether or not the world really needed a film about the events that took place on United Flight 93 the morning of September 11, 2001 is, I suppose, still an open question…That being said, having run the gauntlet earlier this week, I can now happily report that United 93 is magnificent, and arguably the best possible film that could’ve been made about this story. Both harrowing and humane, it’s the movie of the year so far.“

From the year-end list: “A movie I originally had no interest in seeing, Paul Greengrass’s harrowing docudrama of the fourth flight on September 11 captured the visceral shock of that dark day without once veering into exploitation or sentimentality…While 9/11 films of the future might offer more perspective on the origins and politics of those horrible hours, it’s hard to imagine a more gripping or humane film emerging anytime soon about the day’s immediate events. A tragic triumph, United 93 is an unforgettable piece of filmmaking.“

If ever there was a counterpoint to the cosmic shrug favored by Anton Chigurh, it can be found in Paul Greengrass’ harrowing docudrama United 93. Here, as we all know, ordinary Americans refused to simply accept the dismal hand fate dealt them. Inasmuch as they could, the passengers of United 93 turned to face events square on — They rose up, fought back, and, at the cost of their lives, saved the United States Capitol that Tuesday morning in September.

As I said at the time, I wasn’t entirely sure a film should be made about United 93, particularly so soon after the events at hand. But, if a movie was ever going to be made about that flight, let it be this one. With clarity, conviction, and compassion, Paul Greengrass manages first to bring the horror and chaos of the day back to life here, in a way that is as non-exploitative as possible. (Unlike Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, which pretty much recreates the collapse from the inside, the initial impact on the towers here is shown merely as a blip on a radar screen.) And with the wave of fear and sheer confusion of that day vividly recreated — you can feel it gnawing at your gut at this point — Greengrass then lets the tale of United 93 unfold, so you really understand the dimensions of those passengers’ heroism that day, a heroism borne of survival instinct and a horrible recognition of the stakes involved.

It really is an amazing achievement how well Greengrass threaded the needle here. While being respectful of those lost that day, United 93 works as both art and history. It doesn’t go out of its way to demonize the terrorists or lionize the passengers — he just lets their respective actions that day speak for themselves. (The fateful words “Let’s roll,”, for example, are muttered almost as an aside, and are all the more powerful for it.) In short, what could’ve been a needless and even offensive film in other hands became, under Paul Greengrass, an outright classic.

5. In the Bedroom (2001)

From the year-end list: “I can’t remember another film this year that resonated so strongly. While I think last year’s award hoopla erred too far toward the histrionics of Sissy Spacek and away from the nuanced performance of Tom Wilkinson, the moral center of the film, In the Bedroom nevertheless powerfully depicts how ostensibly ‘good’ people eventually find themselves contemplating and acting out evil deeds. Plenty of complex and memorable scenes throughout, such as Wilkinson watching the distracted guests at his son’s funeral, or his pained attempt to forge a connection with Marisa Tomei, a woman he has nothing in common with except loss. A very, very good film that, if anyone has the stomach for a double dose of grief, bookends nicely with Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter.“

Ok, 2006’s Little Children was a bit of a dud. Still, In the Bedroom, based on the Andre Dubus short story “Killings,” was an extremely auspicious debut for writer-director Todd Field, previously best-known for his small role in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. With a strong sense of place — in this case, a small Maine lobster-town, probably not too far down the road from various Stephen King short stories — In the Bedroom is a powerful and morally complex study of how “good” people are, through rage, grief, and slowly curdling despair, eventually driven to dark deeds.

As I said above, Bedroom is a movie that resonates strongly in the details — say, Tom Wilkinson eyeing his son’s girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) with a combination of atta-boy pride and vague jealousy, or the nervous silence that descends around Wilkinson’s usual poker table after his son’s murder, or the way Wilkinson and Spacek tend to bury their grief — and their eventual plot — under mounds of everyday routine. More than most movies I can think of, In the Bedroom felt like a literary experience, one crafted by a filmmaker with a discerning, novelistic eye. So if any director can salvage something out of Cormac McCarthy’s heavy-handed Old West Grand Guignol, Blood Meridian, it might well be Field — It’s slated for release in 2011.

4. The New World (2005)

From the original review: “[A] masterfully crafted tale of discovery and transformation, passion and misunderstanding, intimacy and heartbreak, love and loss, and worlds Old and New. In short, it’s the best film of 2005.“

From the year-end list: “A movie which seemed to divide audiences strongly, Terence Malick’s The New World was, to my mind, a masterpiece. I found it transporting in ways films seldom are these days, and Jamestown a much richer canvas for Malick’s unique gifts than, say, Guadalcanal. As the director’s best reimagining yet of the fall of Eden, The New World marvelously captured the stark beauty and sublime strangeness of two worlds — be they empires, enemies, or lovers — colliding, before any middle ground can be established. For its languid images of Virginia woodlands as much as moments like Wes Studi awestruck by the rigid dominion over nature inherent in English gardens, The New World goes down as a much-overlooked cinematic marvel.“

The best way to sum up Terrence Malick’s achievement with The New World is to go back to the Gatsby quote I used in the original review: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.“

That’s the extraordinary sensation at the center of Malick’s film. I’m still not quite sure how he pulled it off, but The New World feels like arriving on the threshold of some strange, danger-ridden, and wondrous alien planet called…America. (Put another way, before Pandora, there was Jamestown.) The New World is a First Contact story that somehow manages to maintain the momentous portent of this historic moment, when Old and New Worlds collided. And, perhaps as impressively, it does it without taking sides. Half the time we’re as inclined to side with Pocahontas and the sensible Powhatans, who, unlike the new, scurvy-ridden English arrivals, have the sense to prepare for winter (or at least to stop panning for non-existent gold when the frost sets in.) More than The Thin Red Line, more than Badlands, more even than Days of Heaven, I would say this is Malick’s magnum opus.

3. I’m Not There (2007)

From the original review: “[T]o be honest, it’s hard to imagine how this film plays to people who aren’t all that into Dylan…But, if you do have any fondness for Bob, oh my. The short review is: I loved it. Exploding the conventional music biopic into shimmering, impressionistic fragments, Todd Haynes has captured lightning in a bottle here. The movie is clearly a labor of love by and for Dylan fans, riddled with in-jokes, winks, and nods, and I found it thoughtful, funny, touching, and wonderful. Put simply…I’m Not There is my favorite film of the year. I can’t wait to see it again.“

From the year-end list: “Admittedly, it was a wonderful confluence of my interests. Nevertheless, Todd Haynes’ postmodern celebration of Bob Dylan, brimming over with wit and vitality and as stirring, resonant, and universal as a well-picked G-C-D-Em progression, was far and away my favorite film experience of the year. It seems to have slipped in a lot of critics’ end-of-year lists…but so be it — You shouldn’t let other people get their kicks for you anyway. A heartfelt, multi-layered, six-sided puzzle about the many faces and voices of Dylan, l found I’m Not There both pleasingly cerebral and emotionally direct, and it’s a film I look forward to returning to in the years to come. Everyone knows he’s not a folk-singer.“

“I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spot some land…” Speaking of the New World, welcome to Bob Dylan’s Old, Weird America, here brought to life as the Halloweentown-like hamlet of Riddle, where Richard Gere hides out as the sixth and oldest Bob among us. Hiding, as always, right there in plain sight.

So, in retrospect, Todd Haynes’ ode to the many facets of Bob Dylan probably turned out to be more inside baseball-ish than I originally assumed. I’ve since watched the movie with various folks who couldn’t care less about the man, and they just found the whole enterprise weird, inscrutable, and mostly uninvolving. And, hey, if you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it. Still, for those of us who’ve imbibed the Dylan Kool-Aid (See also: J. Hoberman)…wow. Haynes’ movie is a lovely gift, and way more intriguing than any standard-issue biopic I can imagine.

Basically, I adore this film. Each fragment of Bob here feels perfectly cast — Marcus Carl Franklin as the impossibly talented wunderkind…and fake, Christian Bale as the take-no-prisoners true-believer with his finger-pointin’ songs, Heath Ledger as the womanizing romantic and survivor of Blood on the Tracks, Ben Whishaw as the know-it-all, Rimbaudian interviewee, Richard Gere as the John Wesley Harding, Old Weird America Bob, and, of course, Cate Blanchett as the electric Blonde on Blonde non-blonde. Not to mention Charlotte Gainsbourg as Suze/Sara, Bruce Greenwood as Mr. Jones, Julianne Moore’s riff on Joan Baez….it’s an embarrassment of riches here.

To me, I’m Not There is a fascinating, inspiring movie, one as much about Dylan’s primordial American landscape as it is about the man from Hibbing, Minnesota. In defiance of the usual staid biopic routine, Haynes managed to create an ambitious, open-ended film that does justice to both a notoriously mercurial artist and his impressive body of work, one that deserves its place on the shelf right next to Dylan’s music. So, yeah, I’m Not There may be preaching to the converted here somewhat. But as a member of the choir, I say press on, brother Haynes, press on.

2. The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

From the original review (FotR): “Post-Film Update: They did it! They pulled it off!“

From the extended edition review (FotR): “The Galadriel/Lothlorien stuff works much better now, with both Galadriel and Celeborn taking on the flavor of Tolkien’s tome. Moreover, all of the underutilized members of the Fellowship – Boromir, Gimli, Merry, Pippen, and even Samwise – are given more characterization. And it just seems to take longer to get from place to place, which might take away from the film’s dizzying pace, but definitely captures more of the feel of the book.“

From the year-end list (FotR): “ Suffice to say, it was everything I had hoped for and more. NOT for fanboys and fangirls alone – In fact, given its epic breadth and cinematographic sweep, I’d put it up as a worthy successor to the works of David Lean. Mr. Lucas, the bar has been raised.“

From the original review (TTT): “After two showings yesterday, I must say I’m delighted and (still) surprised at how wondrous this second chapter turned out…[O]verall a deliciously good second installment in the Tolkien trilogy. And, with the ends of both the Isengard and Cirith Ungol storylines to be packed in with all the multitudinous events of ROTK, I see no way the next one can clock in under 210 minutes. Should be grand!“

From the extended edition review (TTT): “All in all, as with Fellowship, the extended Two Towers DVD includes a better, richer film loaded with tons of fascinating extras. If you’re a fan, I’m sure you’re getting it anyway…but if you’re a casual Rings admirer, the TTT:EE is just as worth picking up as the FOTR:EE.“

From the year-end list (TTT): “No surprise here. Although Fellowship may have delivered a bigger emotional impact, Peter Jackson and co. handled massive expectations with aplomb and deftly translated J.R.R. Tolkien’s most unwieldy tome (Silmarillion notwithstanding) into the action-epic of the year.“

From the original review (RotK): “Return of the King is an amazing conclusion to a trilogy that’s surpassed all expectations and, I say this without hyperbole, redefined the medium — From the technical breakthrough of Gollum to the seamless intertwining of jaw-dropping FX and character-driven emotion throughout, these films have expanded our vision of the possible and set a new standard for epic filmmaking.“

From the extended edition review (RotK): “As with the FotR:EE and the TTT:EE, the Extended Edition is clearly a better film than the theatrical cut, with richer, denser characterizations, more Tolkien lore, and an improved sense of flow…All in all, RotK:EE, like its predecessors, is a wonderful gift to the fans of Tolkien and Middle Earth. And, although we have come now to the end, these three DVD sets (which look great on the shelf together) will now live on forever as a beacon of hope to fandom.“

From the year-end list (RotK): “If you didn’t see this pick coming, welcome to GitM…Even in spite of the pacing problems mandated by the TE running time, Return of the King is a marvel, the perfect ending to this epic for the ages and easily the best third-movie in a series ever. There’s so many ways these films could’ve turned out atrociously…The fact that they didn’t — that they instead shattered all expectations while staying true to Tolkien’s vision — is a miracle of inestimable value. In the post-Star Wars age, when epics have been replaced by ‘blockbusters,’ and most event movies have been hollowed-out in advance by irony, excessive hype, dumbing-down, and sheer avarice, Peter Jackson has taught us to expect more from the cinema once again. Beyond all imagining, he took the ring all the way to Mordor and destroyed that sucker. So have fun on Kong, PJ, you’ve earned it.“

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky. Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone. Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die. One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.“

If you get any goosebumps while listening to J.R.R. Tolkien read the last paragraph, then, you were probably like me at the start of this decade: looking for any news you could find about the forthcoming (live-action) movie version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson of Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners, and Bad Taste. On January 12, 2001, you probably also filed into the earliest possible performance of New Line’s (very quality) Thirteen Days to catch the highly anticipated trilogy trailer.

And when December 19, 2001 at long last rolled around, you may too have buried your Phantom Menace butterflies deep down inside, took up what fanboy or fangirl standards you possessed (I myself wore the One Ring…on a chain, of course), and filed in to Fellowship to see what Jackson had come up with. At which point we — you and I both — were confronted with…blackness.

“I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen…The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.” And just about right then and there, it was clear: Holy Sh*t! They did it!

Yes, there would be gigantic battles soon thereafter, massive CGI-enhanced affairs to rival the most vivid fever dreams of Led Zeppelin. And, of course, there would be elves, dwarves, and right twee little ‘obbits. But the decision by Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens to start their grand adventure with that sharp, Tolkienesque twinge of melancholy indicated right away that they had not been turned by the Nazgul of Hollywood, nor by the power of the effects at their disposal. Rather, they had stayed true to the sad and cautionary spirit of Tolkien’s tale.

Do I have quibbles about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings? Of course. Fellowship of the Ring is just about perfect to me, with the small-but-notable exceptions of Weathertop and the Ford at Bruinen. (Aragorn just should not be able to take out five Nazgul like that. And — weirdly, given his horror background — PJ somehow missed the real darkness of Frodo’s turning after his Morgul wound: A growing part of him wants to go with the Riders. “Come back, come back…to Mordor we will take you.“)

And, as the story moves forward into The Two Towers and Return of the King, more minor problems emerge. (The “Choices of Master Samwise,” Denethor’s lack-of-palantir and the too-bright-by-half Shelob’s lair, for example.) Plus, however anti-climactic and un-filmic, a strong argument can be made that the excised Scouring of the Shire — nobody wins a war, the thing you fought for is destroyed by the fighting for it — is half the point of Tolkien’s tale…although I can see why it got left out.

But those quibbles aside, The Lord of the Rings was so much better than any of us really had any right to expect. In fact, the trilogy has so many secret weapons that it’s hard to enumerate them all. There’s the variegated natural beauty of New Zealand standing in for Middle Earth, as photographed by cinematographer Andrew Lesnie. (I would argue that the most powerful moments in the Fellowship prologue are those accompanied by simple nature shots: “Darkness crept back into the forests of the world. Rumor grew of a Shadow in the East, whispers of a nameless fear…“)

There’s Ian McKellen’s turn as Gandalf, a performance that’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else pulling off as well. There’s the hauntingly beautiful music of Howard Shore, who was operating on another plane in these films. There was the art direction help by John Howe and Alan Lee — two artists who had spent their lives dreaming up Middle Earth. With PJ, RIchard Taylor, and the enterprising elves of WETA, they helped bring Tolkien’s words to life as never before. And, speaking of WETA, they and Andy Serkis brought us Gollum, a CGI-creation like none we had ever witnessed.

Ultimately, Lord of the Rings is the story of creatures, living long after the calamitous events that shaped their age, that now must face the End of their World. And, more than the calamity itself, the real story is about the characters’ various responses to this time of testing. PJ et al got this. More than most films of its ambition, its crafters understood that emotional scale was as important as visual grandeur — that, at its heart, the trilogy isn’t so much about wizards and warriors as it is about friendship, the nature of evil, and persevering in dark times. And because they got that right, The Lord of the Rings is an epic unmatched in fantasy cinema before or since.

A final footnote: While the tone and thematic weight of the story is quite different, one hopes the old gang — with their new Hobbit friend, Guillermo del Toro — can bring about similar magic when they tackle “the incident with the dragon” in short order. The road goes ever on…next stop, December 2011.

Speaking of which, here we are at the Crack of Doom at long last. So, to number 1 and the end of this Oughty Age…

1. The Hottie and the Nottie (2008)

A surprising heartwarming tale about body image and the perils of celebrity, The Hottie and the Nottie is…pretty obviously not on this list. To be honest, I never saw it. But I feel totally ok about presuming that it was an abomination in the eyes of the cinema Gods. Sorry, just seeing if anyone made it down this far. Ahem. #1 is in fact…

It’s coming…

It is…

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

From the original review: “I thought Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lived up to the hype and then some. One part Annie Hall, one part Sliding Doors, three parts Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine is an exceptionally strange take on the romantic comedy…(It probably helped that I tend to be a fan of almost all the folks at work here…Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah “Bad Frodo” Wood, and David Cross…Sunshine is a fun, thought-provoking look at relationships and memory.“

From the year-end list: “The one true classic of 2004, Eternal Sunshine has only grown in my estimation since its initial release in March. (David Edelstein’s take on it as one of Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell‘s remarriage comedies is well worth reading.) A heartfelt examination of love, loss, and memory, Eternal Sunshine was also a strikingly adult take on romance and relationships…With great performances from a caged Jim Carrey and an electric Kate Winslet, the film managed to be both an earnest, passionate love story and a wistful paean to those person-shaped holes we all carry in our hearts and memories…(Why even bother? We need the eggs.)“

“Happy is the blameless vestal’s lot, the world forgetting by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.” That poem by “Pope Alexander” is the epigram of, in my humble opinion, the best movie of the decade. I first saw Eternal Sunshine, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s second collaboration after 2001’s smart but very uneven Human Nature, in the stress-case period just before my orals exams, so I didn’t give the film the review it deserved. (Although I tried to rectify that oversight some with 2004’s end-of-year list.) Suffice to say, Eternal Sunshine is a masterpiece — beautiful, heartfelt, incisive, and humane.

Like the best science fiction, Eternal Sunshine uses a sci-fi premise — a friendly neighborhood clinic that can erase bad relationships for you — to capture something elusive about our human condition, in this case about memory, love, and regret. Is it better to have loved and lost, or never to have loved at all? While various techs (Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson) handle the details of the medical procedure at hand (and conduct their own affairs of the heart), that’s the question Jim Carrey’s Joel wrestles with as he remembers — one final time before the lights go off — his days and nights with Kate Winslet’s Clementine.

I’ll concede that certain dream-elements of Eternal Sunshine don’t quite work — the baby-Joel under the table and in-the-sink stuff, for example. And you could argue, and some do, that all of the techie shenanigans outside Joel’s mind are superfluous, although I enjoy them all the same (and, of course, they set up the final payoff involving the leaked tapes.) In fact, I tend to like the film’s ragged, organic, and hand-crafted feel all around.

Still, the movie’s real strength is its acute inquiry into the Ballad of Joel and Clementine (not to mention Joel-and-Clem, as a unit, and Joel’s in-head Clem to boot.) And this is where Eternal Sunshine is dead-on and so often devastating. Note the perfectly-selected bric-a-brac stuff — all the random, built-up detritus of a life together — that Joel must collect and hide away forever to get his mind wiped. Or his gloomy gus, self-lacerating inner monologue when he first meets Clem on the Montauk train. Consider the moments that signify the end is near — such as the usual jokes getting old, or that grisly conversation in the Chinese restaurant. And consider too the details Joel remembers and cherishes, like their trip to the frozen Charles, or that night they saw the elephants, or kissing under the sheets, or just Clem resting her cheek on his, one bright and lazy winter morning.

Given that the bottom eventually drops out, was it all worth it, in the end? Both Joel and Clementine have to answer that question with open eyes as Eternal Sunshine comes to a close. And this is where people tend to either find the movie dark and gloomy or legitimately romantic, in a way few movies are. I go the latter route — Joel and Clem know what’s 99.44% likely to happen this time: The same thing that happened last time. “I don’t see anything I don’t like about you.” “But you will! But you will, and I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped, because that’s what happens with me.“

And, yet, they take the plunge anyway, partly because the good times were good. Partly because love in the real world is never a meet-cute ’til the happily-ever-after anyway. It’s negotiation, conversation, laughter, and crumbling defenses, a give-and-take process of two people slowly falling together. And partly because maybe, just maybe, the bad times were not inevitable, and things will break a different way this time. Screw Anton Chigurh –There’s no fate but we make.

In all too many ways, from 9-11 to the Great Recession, the Oughts were ten years to forget. (And, on a personal level, it’s safe to say I spent much of the past decade glum about one break-up or another.) But would we be better off forgetting the Oughts completely? Surely, there were flecks of gold throughout these past ten years, however dismal and Dubyaesque the decade often turned out to be. Regardless of how things pan out at the macro level, whether for good or ill, there are always small moments to cherish, days to remember fondly, and films to treasure. In fact, I’ve put one hundred of my own here. And of those, for me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind shone the brightest.

So, we finally made it. That’s the end of the list, folks, hope y’all enjoyed it. Fare thee well, gone away, there’s nothing left to say.

Hey, wait a sec, that reminds me…

Special Award. The Wire (2002-2008)

From the series-finale review: “Pour a glass of Jamesons and give the devil (way down in the hole) his due: The Wire, a television show with a better claim than most to the title of “Best Ever” (and definitely the best show ever made about American politics), ends this evening…And you know the only thing better than having enjoyed all 60 hours of the show? Having never seen it at all. If that’s you, pick up Season 1 and start from the beginning — you’re in for a real treat.“

I’m not about to do a Best of the Decade TV retrospective here at GitM, partly because I don’t feel like I watch enough TV to really judge. (Although, looking at other lists, it seems I caught a lot of the good stuff: Deadwood, Arrested Development, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Sopranos, etc.) Besides, after this ridiculously extended movie project, I’ll be damned if I feel like going to the pop-culture-nostalgia well again just yet. Still, call it a 60-hour-movie if it helps square the circle, but The Wire must get its props.

With a journalist’s eye for detail and the gallows humor of good homicide po-lice, David Simon, Ed Burns, & co. used the rhythms of a cop show to hook us on an in-depth, comprehensive, and scathing diagnosis of life in the 21st century American body politic, as represented here by the failing city-state of Baltimore. Here, the Institutions are the new Gods, and people get crushed whenever they try to flout their dictates. In fact, people are worth less and less every day — Because, wherever you are in the game, there’s always someone else younger, hungrier, and/or less principled gunning for your spot.

That may sound heavy and edutainmentish, but it wasn’t. Week after week, The Wire was also the funniest hour-long on television. It built, slowly, gradually, inexorably — By the end of Season 1, I liked the show quite a bit but thought Deadwood probably edged it out in terms of quality. By the end of Season 3, I thought it was far and away the best show on television and was awestruck by its ambition. And we still had two more seasons to go.

David Simon and the gang eventually got so sick of being called “Dickensian” all the time that they turned it into a joke in Season 5: The Baltimore Sun is only interested in “the Dickensian aspect” of the streets, meaning simple, manageable problems that could be solved if, as per many Dickens tomes, only some highly convenient and thoroughly implausible Benefactor came out of nowhere to take the trouble.

Heh, point conceded. Still, as many others have noted, the term applies regardless. Just as Dickens brought industrial corruption and the plight of Victorian London’s social underclass to life at the close of the 19th century, The Wire is the piece of journalistic fiction generations one or two hundred years hence will look to to understand the urban landscape of the Oughts. And more likely than not, then as it is now, the game will still be the game. Always.

Top 100 Films of the Decade:
No-Frills Version

100. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.
99. SW: Revenge of the Sith.
98. Unbreakable.
97. Borat.
96. The Quiet American.
95. The Savages.
94. About a Boy.
93. The Matrix: Reloaded.
92. L’Auberge Espagnole.
91. King Kong.
90. Capote.
89. Star Trek.
88. Inside Man.
87. Munich.
86. Meet the Parents.
85. Sin City.
84. Bloody Sunday.
83. The Squid and thr Whale.
82. Primer.
81. American Psycho.
80. Brokeback Mountain.
79. Drag Me to Hell.
78. Michael Clayton.
77. The Fountain.
76. The Fog of War.
75. The Queen.
74. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
73. U2 3D.
72. Ocean’s 12.
71. In the Valley of Elah.
70. Boiler Room.
69. Jackass.
68. Secretary.
67. (500) Days of Summer.
66. Lord of War.
65 Bamboozled.
64. Master & Commander.
63. Mystic River.
62. HP IV: Goblet of Fire.
61. Iron Man.
60. Batman Begins.
59. Good Night, and Good Luck.
58. District 9.
57. Wonder Boys.
56. The Man Who Wasn’t There.
55. The Descent.
54. Ballets Russes.
53. Battle Royale/Infernal Affairs.
52. Zodiac.
51. 28 Weeks Later.
50. The Proposition.
49. The Bourne Trilogy.
48. The Prestige.
47. WALL-E.
46. The Royal Tenenbaums.
45. 24 Hour Party People/Control.
44. Coraline.
43. O Brother Where Art Thou?
42. Shaun of the Dead.
41. The Pianist.
40. Knocked Up.
39. Sideways.
38. Let the Right One In.
37. Intolerable Cruelty.
36. X-Men 2/Spiderman 2.
35. The Wrestler.
34. The Hurt Locker.
33. A Serious Man.
32. The Cooler.
31. Moon.
30. Requiem for a Dream.
29. Sexy Beast.
28. Milk.
27. Layer Cake.
26. Garden State.
25. Donnie Darko.
24. High Fidelity.
23. In the Mood for Love/2046.
22. The 25th Hour.
21. Mulholland Drive.
20. The Diving Bell & the Butterfly.
19. The Incredibles.
18. Memento.
17. In the Loop.
16. Traffic.
15. Lost in Translation.
14. Syriana.
13. Children of Men.
12. Letters from Iwo Jima.
11. The Lives of Others.
10. The Dark Knight.
9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
8. Before Sunset.
7. No Country for Old Men.
6. United 93.
5. In the Bedroom.
4. The New World.
3. I’m Not There.
2. Lord of the Rings.
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Special Award. The Wire.

Next Stop Wonderland(s).

In the trailer bin of late:

  • She’s given up, stop: Mia Wasikowska, a.k.a. Alice, takes a tumble down the rabbit hole anew in our first look at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, also with Johnny Depp (frontlined a bit much here), Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Christopher Lee, Alan Rickman, Matt Lucas, Crispin Glover, Noah Taylor, and Timothy Spall. (Looks like a good start, although clearly there is still much CGI-rendering to do.)

  • In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where naturally Gary Oldman is up to no good, a Mad Maxish Denzel Washington may be carrying the secret to something-or-other in the trailer for the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli, also with Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, Jennifer Beals, Frances de la Tour, and Michael Gambon. (It’s good to see the Hughes, of From Hell and the underrated Menace II Society, back behind the camera. But I’m betting this’ll seem a bit been-there-done-that, coming so soon after John Hillcoat’s The Road.)

  • Kate Beckinsale uncovers something deadly, dark, and dangerous in the furthest reaches of Antarctica in the straight-to-video-ish trailer for Dominic Sena’s Whiteout, also with Gabriel Macht and Tom Skerritt. (It looks like The Thing, with shower scenes. Beckinsale is probably one of my bigger movie star crushes, but lordy, the woman needs a new agent.)

    And, as Comic-Con 2009 is just kicking off:

  • Pushing Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, Peter Jackson talks The Hobbit and Tintin. (Apparently, the script for The Hobbit is three weeks away, and four or five of the 13 dwarves have been front-lined. Spielberg has finished a first cut of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, and The Lovely Bones comes out Dec. 11, with a trailer Aug. 6.)

  • Jonah Hex gets a poster that is sadly devoid of Malkovich. (For what is here, the scar looks decent enough, Megan Fox in anything gives me pause (but I guess she’s a hot ticket after the Transformers sequel made so much bank), and the lettering looks a bit futuristic for the property…unless they’re going post-Crisis Hex.

  • TRON 2.0, a.k.a. TR2N, is now called the much-more-boring TRON LEGACY. But, hey, at least they’re not abusing the colon…yet. (More TRON news, of sorts, in the post below, and, since the weekend is young, undoubtedly more Comic-Con news to come.) Update: The TR2N footage that premiered last Comic-Con is now — finally — up in glorious Quicktime.

    • Down the Rabbit Hole.

    “There is the usual Burton-esque ghoulishness (Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, whose favorite retort is ‘Off with their heads,’ has a moat filled with bobbing noggins), but Zanuck assures most kids can handle it. ‘The book itself is pretty dark,’ he notes. ‘This is for little people and people who read it when they were little 50 years ago.’“

    USA Today obtains some stills from Tim Burton’s forthcoming adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, including some unsettling shots of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway as the Mad Hatter, Red Queen, and White Queen respectively. Also in the cast: Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock, Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit, Noah Taylor as the March Hare, Matt Lucas as the Tweedle twins, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, and Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat.

    2006 (Finally) in Film.

    Well, there are still a number of flicks I haven’t yet seen — David Lynch’s Inland Empire, for example, which I hope to hit up this weekend. But as the Oscar nods were announced today, and as the few remaining forlorn Christmas trees are finally being picked up off the sidewalk, now seems the last appropriate time to crank out my much belated end-of-2006 film list (originally put off to give me time to make up for my New Zealand sojourn.) To be honest, I might’ve written this list a few weeks earlier, had it not happened that I ended up seeing the best film of 2005 in mid-January of last year, thus rendering the 2005 list almost immediately obsolescent. But, we’ll get to that — As it stands, 2006 was a decent year in movies (in fact a better year in film than it was in life, the midterms notwithstanding), with a crop of memorable genre flicks and a few surprisingly worthy comebacks. And, for what it’s worth, I thought the best film released in 2006 was…

    Top 20 Films of 2006

    [2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005]

    1. United 93: A movie I originally had no interest in seeing, Paul Greengrass’s harrowing docudrama of the fourth flight on September 11 captured the visceral shock of that dark day without once veering into exploitation or sentimentality (the latter the curse of Oliver Stone’s much inferior World Trade Center.) While 9/11 films of the future might offer more perspective on the origins and politics of those horrible hours, it’s hard to imagine a more gripping or humane film emerging anytime soon about the day’s immediate events. A tragic triumph, United 93 is an unforgettable piece of filmmaking.

    [1.] The New World (2005): A movie which seemed to divide audiences strongly, Terence Malick’s The New World was, to my mind, a masterpiece. I found it transporting in ways films seldom are these days, and Jamestown a much richer canvas for Malick’s unique gifts than, say, Guadalcanal. As the director’s best reimagining yet of the fall of Eden, The New World marvelously captured the stark beauty and sublime strangeness of two worlds — be they empires, enemies, or lovers — colliding, before any middle ground can be established. For its languid images of Virginia woodlands as much as moments like Wes Studi awestruck by the rigid dominion over nature inherent in English gardens, The New World goes down as a much-overlooked cinematic marvel, and (sorry, Syriana) the best film of 2005.

    2. Letters from Iwo Jima: Having thought less of Flags of our Fathers and the woeful Million Dollar Baby than most people, I was almost completely thrown by the dismal grandeur and relentless gloom of Eastwood’s work here. To some extent the Unforgiven of war movies, Iwo Jima is a bleakly rendered siege film that trafficks in few of the usual tropes of the genre. (Don’t worry — I suspect we’ll get those in spades in two months in 300.) Instead of glorious Alamo-style platitudes, we’re left only with the sight of young men — all avowed enemies of America, no less — swallowed up and crushed in the maelstrom of modern combat. From Ken Watanabe’s commanding performance as a captain going down with the ship to Eastwood’s melancholy score, Letters works to reveal one fundamental, haunting truth: Tyrants may be toppled, nations may be liberated, and Pvt. Ryans may be saved, but even “good wars” are ultimately Hell on earth for those expected to do the fighting.

    3. Children of Men: In the weeks since I first saw this film, my irritation with the last fifteen minutes or so has diminished, and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men has emerged for what it is — one of the most resonant “near-future” dystopias to come down the pike in a very long while, perhaps since (the still significantly better) Brazil. Crammed with excellent performances by Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor and others, Children is perhaps a loosely-connected grab bag of contemporary anxieties and afflictions (terrorism, detainment camps, pharmaceutical ads, celebrity culture). But it’s assuredly an effective one, with some of the most memorable and naturalistic combat footage seen in several years to boot. I just wished they’d called that ship something else…

    4. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: True, the frighteningly talented Sasha Baron Cohen spends a lot of time in this movie shooting fish in a barrel, and I wish he’d spent a little more time eviscerating subtler flaws in the American character than just knuckle-dragging racists and fratboy sexists. Still, the journeys of Borat Sagdiyev through the Bible Buckle and beyond made for far and away the funniest movie of the year. Verry nice.

    5. The Prestige: I originally had this in Children of Men‘s spot, as there are few films I enjoyed as much this year as Christopher Nolan’s sinister sleight-of hand. But, even after bouncing Children up for degree of difficulty, that should take nothing away from The Prestige, a seamlessly made genre film about the rivalries and perils of turn-of-the-century prestidigitation. (There seems to be a back-and-forth between fans of this film and The Illusionist, which I sorta saw on a plane in December. Without sound (which, obviously, is no way to see a movie), Illusionist seemed like an implausible love story set to a tempo of anguished Paul Giamatti reaction shots. In any case, I prefer my magic shows dark and with a twist.) Throw in extended cameos by David Bowie and Andy Serkis — both of which help to mitigate the Johansson factor — and The Prestige was the purest cinematic treat this year for the fanboy nation. Christian Bale in particular does top-notch work here, and I’m very much looking forward to he and Nolan’s run-in with Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.

    6. The Fountain: Darren Aronofsky’s elegiac ode to mortality and devotion was perhaps the most unfairly maligned movie of the year. (In a perfect world, roughly half of the extravagant praise going to Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth would have been lavished on this film.) Clearly a heartfelt and deeply personal labor of love, The Fountain — admittedly clunky in his first half hour — was a visually memorable tone poem that reminds us that all things — perhaps especially the most beautiful — are finite, so treasure them while you can.

    7. The Queen: A movie I shied away from when it first came out, The Queen is a canny look at contemporary politics anchored by Helen Mirren’s sterling performance as the fastidious, reserved, and ever-so-slightly downcast monarch in question. (Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair is no slouch either.) In fact, The Queen is the type of movie I wish we saw more often: a small, tightly focused film about a very specific moment in recent history. Indeed, between this and United 93, 2006 proved to be a good year for smart and affecting depictions of the very recent past — let’s hope the trend continues through the rest of the oughts.

    8. Inside Man: The needless Jodie Foster subplot notwithstanding, Spike Lee’s Inside Man was a fun, expertly-made crime procedural, as good in its own way as the much more heavily-touted Departed. It was also, without wearing it on its sleeve, the film Crash should have been — a savvy look at contemporary race relations that showed there are many more varied and interesting interactions between people of different ethnicities than simply “crashing” into each other. (But perhaps that’s how y’all roll over in car-culture LA.) At any rate, Inside Man is a rousing New York-centric cops-and-robbers pic in the manner of Dog Day Afternoon or The Taking of the Pelham One Two Three, and it’s definitely one of the more enjoyable movie experiences of the year.

    9. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: Speaking of enjoyable New York-centric movie experiences, Dave Chappelle and Michel Gondry’s block party last year felt like a breath of pure spring air after a long, cold, lonely winter — time to kick off the sweaters and parkas and get to groovin’ with your neighbors. With performances by some of the most innovative and inspired players in current hip-hop (Kanye, Mos Def, The Roots, The Fugees, Erykah Badu), and presided over by the impish, unsinkable Chappelle, Block Party was one of the best concert films in recent memory, and simply more fun than you can shake a stick at.

    10. Casino Royale: Bond is back! Thanks to Daniel Craig’s portrayal of 007 as a blunt, glitched-up human being rather than a Casanova Superspy, and a script that eschewed the UV laser pens and time-release exploding cufflinks of Bonds past for more hard-boiled and gritty fodder, Casino Royale felt straight from the pen of Ian Fleming, and newer and more exciting than any 007 movie in decades.

    11. The Departed: A very good movie brimming over with quality acting (notably Damon and Di Caprio) and support work — from Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Vera Farmiga, Ray Winstone, and others — Scorsese’s The Departed also felt a bit too derivative of its splendid source material, Infernal Affairs, to merit the top ten. And then there’s the Jack problem: An egregiously over-the-top Nicholson chews so much scenery here that it’s a wonder there’s any of downtown Boston left standing. But, despite these flaws, The Departed is well worth seeing, and if it finally gets Scorsese his Best Director Oscar (despite Greengrass deserving it), it won’t be too much of an outrage.

    [11.] Toto The Hero (1991): Also sidelined out of this top twenty on account of its release date, Jaco Von Dormael’s Toto the Hero — Terry Gilliam’s choice of screening for an IFC Movie Night early in October — is definitely one for the Netflix queue, particularly if you’re a fan of Gilliam’s oeuvre. It’s a bizarre coming-of-age/going-of-age tale that includes thoughts of envy, murder, incest, and despair, all the while remaining somehow whimsical and fantastical at its core. (And, trust me: As with Ary Borroso’s “Brazil“, you’ll be left humming Charles Trenet’s “Boum” to yourself long after the movie is over.)

    12. Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: I guess this is where I should be writing something brief and scintillating about Michael Winterbottom’s metanarrative version of Laurence Sterne’s famous novel, one which gives Steve Coogan — and the less well-known Rob Brydon — a superlative chance to work their unique brand of comedic mojo. But I’m growing distracted and Berk has that pleading “I-want-to-go-out, are-you-done-yet” look and Kevin’s still only on Number 12 of a list that, for all intent and purposes, is three weeks late and will be read by all of eight people anyway. (But don’t tell him that — In fact, I shouldn’t even talk about him behind his back.) So, perhaps we’ll come back to this later…it’s definitely a review worth writing (again), if I could just figure out how to start.

    13. Miami Vice: Michael Mann’s moody reimagining of the TV show that made him famous isn’t necessarily his best work, but it was one of the more unique and absorbing movies of the summer, and one that lingers in the memory long after much of the year’s fluffier and more traditional films have evaporated. Dr. Johnson (and Hunter Thompson) once wrote that “He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” I guess that’s what Crockett and Tubbs are going for with the nightclubs and needle boats.

    14. CSA: The Confederate States of America: I wish I were in the land of cotton…or have we been there all along? Kevin Wilmott’s alternate history of a victorious Confederate America is a savvy and hilarious send-up of history documentaries and a sharp-witted, sharp-elbowed piece of satire with truths to tell about the shadow of slavery in our past. With any luck, CSA will rise again on the DVD circuit.

    15. The Science of Sleep: Not as good or as universally applicable as his Eternal Sunshine (the best film of 2004), Michel Gondry’s dreamlike, unabashedly romantic The Science of Sleep is still a worthy inquiry into matters of the (broken) heart. What is it about new love that is so intoxicating? And why do the significant others in our mind continue to haunt us so, even when they bear such little relation to the people they initially represented? Science doesn’t answer these crucial questions (how can it?), but it does acutely diagnose the condition. When it comes to relationships, Sleep suggests, all we have to do — sometimes all we can do, despite ourselves — is dream.

    16. Rocky Balboa: Rocky! Rocky! Rocky! I’m as surprised as anyone that Sly’s sixth outing as Philadelphia’s prized pugilist made the top twenty. But, as formulaic as it is, Rocky Balboa delivered the goods like a Ivan Drago right cross. Ultimately not quite as enjoyable as Bond’s return to the service, Rocky Balboa still made for a commendable final round for the Italian Stallion. And, if nothing else, he went down fighting.

    17. Pan’s Labyrinth: A fantasy-horror flick occurring simultaneously within a Spanish Civil War film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth ultimately felt to me like less than the sum of its parts. But if the plaudits it’s receiving help to mainstream other genre movies in critics’ eyes in the future, I’m all for it. It’s an ok movie, no doubt, but if you’re looking for to see one quality supernatural-historical tale of twentieth-century Spain, rent del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone instead.

    18. Little Miss Sunshine: Another film which I think is being way overpraised, Little Miss Sunshine is still a moderately enjoyable evening at the movies. It felt overscripted and television-ish to me, and I wish it was as way over yonder in the minor key as it pretends to be, but Sunshine is nevertheless a cute little IFC-style family film, and one that does have a pretty funny payoff at the end.

    19. The Last King of Scotland: I just wrote on this one yesterday, so my impressions haven’t changed much. Still, Forrest Whitaker’s jovial and fearsome Idi Amin, and an almost-equally-good performance by James McAvoy as the dissolute young Scot who unwittingly becomes his minion, makes The Last King of Scotland worth seeing, if you can bear its grisly third act.

    20. Thank You for Smoking: It showed flashes of promise, and it was all there on paper, in the form of Chris Buckley’s book. But Smoking, alas, never really lives up to its potential. What Smoking needed was the misanthropic jolt and sense of purpose of 2005’s Lord of War, a much more successful muckraking satire, to my mind. But Smoking, like its protagonist, just wants to be liked, and never truly commits to its agenda. Still, pleasant enough, if you don’t consider the opportunity cost.

    Most Disappointing: All the King’s Men, X3: The Last Stand — Both, unfortunately, terrible.

    Worth a Rental: A Scanner Darkly, Brick, Cache, Cars, Curse of the Golden Flower, Glory Road, The History Boys, Marie Antoinette, Match Point (2005), V for Vendetta, Why We Fight

    Don’t Bother: Bobby, Crash (2005), The Da Vinci Code, Flags of our Fathers, The Good German, The Good Shepherd, Mission: Impossible: III, Night Watch (2004), Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Men’s Chest, Poseidon, Scoop, Superman Returns, The Wicker Man, World Trade Center

    Best Actor: Clive Owen, Children of Men; Forrest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland; Ken Watanabe, Letters from Iwo Jima
    Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen; Q’Orianka Kilcher, The New World
    Best Supporting Actor: Mark Wahlberg, The Departed; Michael Caine, Children of Men/The Prestige
    Best Supporting Actress: Pam Farris, Children of Men; Vera Farmiga, The Departed; Maribel Verdu, Pan’s Labyrinth

    Unseen: Apocalypto, Babel, Blood Diamond, Catch a Fire, Clerks II, The Descent, The Devil Wears Prada, Dreamgirls, Fast Food Nation, Hollywoodland, An Inconvenient Truth, Infamous, Inland Empire, Jackass Number Two, Jet Li’s Fearless, Lassie, Little Children, Notes from a Scandal, The Notorious Betty Page, A Prairie Home Companion, The Pursuit of Happyness, Running With Scissors, Sherrybaby, Shortbus, Stranger than Fiction, Tideland, Venus, Volver, Wordplay

    2007: The list isn’t looking all that great, to be honest. But, perhaps we’ll find some gems in here…: 300, 3:10 To Yuma, Beowulf, Black Snake Moan, The Bourne Ultimatum, FF2, The Golden Age: Elizabeth II, The Golden Compass, Grindhouse, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hot Fuzz, I Am Legend, Live Free or Die Hard, Ocean’s Thirteen, PotC3, The Simpsons Movie, Smokin’ Aces, Spiderman 3, Stardust, The Transformers, Zodiac.

    Undiscovered Country.

    “Right here is the essence of Malick’s existential outlook: the utter inconsequence of our short lives compared to the ancient landscape we inhabit and aim to conquer…The achievement of The New World is not to evoke a paradise lost, but to conjure the terrible beauty of the one we remain intent on destroying.” In another rave for an overlooked gem of 2005, Slate‘s Benjamin Strong ruminates on the “subtle greatness” of Malick’s New World.

    Another Green World.

    “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

    Well, that’s that — the 2005 round-up is out-of-date. If you’ve ever seen a Terence Malick flick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), you can guess the contours of The New World — a Fall of Eden motif, a languid, dreamlike pace, resonant images of natural splendor, conflicted characters wrapped up in voiceover self-reflection, all punctuated with the occasional underwater swimming cam and chaotic sortie of Man against Man. (At my sparsely attended afternoon show, the guy to my left fell asleep, and the woman to my right walked out.) That being said, I thought this movie was the perfect match of director and material, and one of the most transporting and beautiful films I’ve seen in years. Sure, it has some serious historical issues, and sometimes dabbles dangerously with the noble savage schtick, one of Malick’s favorite tropes. But as a work of cinema, I think it may just be a masterpiece.

    The year is 1607, and — with Capt. Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) at the helm and Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) in the brig — three English ships put to in a sun-dappled marshland, recently named after their late Virgin Queen. Short of food and enthusiasm after their exhausting Atlantic crossing, these new arrivals to the New World convey a tense hello to the “naturals,” construct a fort, plant a few token crops, and then begin frantically panning for gold and silver. When it soon becomes clear that the survival of the fledgling settlement will require both the forbearance and the trade of the nearby Powhatans, Smith is sent to visit the tribe in hopes of striking a deal. There, he is saved from a grisly death in the longhouse by the love, compassion, and curiosity of young Pocahontas (a radiant Q’Orianka Kilcher), daughter of the chief. (Lucky for Smith, and as the story goes, he gives her fever.)

    Here is where some historical purists might start checking out (if they haven’t already), as the much-written-about romance between John Smith and Pocahontas, however enthroned in our overly happy tales of early Native American contact, probably didn’t happen. (The tale of his being saved may well be true, but it was probably an elaborate but traditional tribal ritual, one in which Chief Powhatan displayed his magnanimity to a potential rival by having a family member spare his life.) Similarly, the later relationship between Pocahontas and John Rolfe, America’s first (white) tobacco entrepreneur (Christian Bale, so that‘s how Batman made his money) had less to do with the chastened love story shown here than with an attempt to keep the peace — In Rolfe’s own words, he married “for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God, for my owne salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbeleeving creature, namely Pokahuntas,” in that order.

    Some other details rankle too. I’m not a colonial historian, but I highly doubt the brief reign of Capt. Wingfield (David Thewlis) ended exactly as it’s shown here. (Speaking of Thewlis and a la Thin Red Line, there are a number of recognizable actors skulking about Jamestown, including Ben Chaplin and Noah Taylor, and one film-fan cameo presiding over the Court of King James.)

    But, really. To get too hung up on the history here is — quite literally — missing the forest for the trees. Like other Malick films, The New World is about impressions and evocations more than plot mechanics, and in that sense it’s a revelation. Through both natural sights and wondrous sound editing, the film does a stunning job of conveying the sublime strangeness of the other, and the magic and terror of an unfamiliar environment. In fact, the movie does it twice — Wes Studi has some powerfully haunting scenes in the third act, when, as an envoy of Powhatan, he is dumbfounded by the starkly manicured gardens of Europe. After the overgrown wilderness of Virginia, he — and we — might as well be on Mars. (Along those lines, I can’t remember the last time a film altered my perspective so much on the way out. After two and a half hours in this World, the Upper West Side seemed a bizarrely cluttered and unnatural realm for the rest of the evening.)

    Terence Malick’s The New World is a masterfully crafted tale of discovery and transformation, passion and misunderstanding, intimacy and heartbreak, love and loss, and worlds Old and New. In short, it’s the best film of 2005 (and well-worth seeing on a big screen.)

    Blood, sweat, and dust.

    In the trailer bin, Philip Seymour Hoffman channels In Cold Blood-era Truman Capote — I presume that’s how he actually sounded — in the preview for Capote, also with Catherine Keener and Chris Cooper. Elsewhere, 1880s Aussie Guy Pearce gets an offer he probably should refuse in The Proposition, written by Nick Cave and also starring Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Danny Houston, David Wenham, and Emily Watson. Finally, I should’ve posted this before, but only now found it: the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Dylan-doc No Direction Home, appearing on PBS Sept. 26th and 27th.

    America Begins.

    So that’s how Bruce Wayne made his money…Christian Bale shows up as John Rolfe in the new trailer for Terence Malick’s The New World, also starring Colin Farrell (as John Smith), newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher (as Pocahontas), Christopher Plummer, Wes Studi, Noah Taylor, and David Thewlis.

    Tintin meets the Tenenbaums.

    One part Herge, two parts Cousteau, and all parts Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, alas for Bill Murray’s thwarted post-Lost in Translation Oscar hopes, doesn’t really work. In fact, at times it seems like someone’s parody of a Wes Anderson movie. But, if you dig Anderson’s penchant for artfully constructed shots crufted over with kitsch so precious it’d make Belle & Sebastien blush — and, frankly, I find it mildly endearing — then you’ll probably have a decent time aboard the Belafonte. The movie’s a complete non-starter, but it is a rather pretty and innocuous non-starter, a bland pleasure cruise of a film.

    At least the cast appears to be having fun…except for Murray, who’s doing yet another amusing variation of the resigned, laconic, vaguely crestfallen wiseass that’s his signature. I never thought I’d see Willem DaFoe out-ham his turn as the Green Goblin, but by golly I think he’s done it. Cate Blanchett is luminous again, although she (and these seamen) are a world away from The Aviator. Owen Wilson doesn’t add much to the equation (and he’s a bit overexposed in my book these days anyway), but Michael Gambon, Bud Cort, and Noah Taylor are all enjoyable in brief supporting turns.

    That being said, these actors are all dressed up in authentic Team Zissou gear with no place to go. The story — ostensibly an Ahab-like quest for a carnivorous jaguar shark — never amounts to much, and we are instead treated to a series of episodic vignettes of life at sea (albeit on a boat with a spa, interns, a recording studio, and a Brazilian Davie Bowie fan). Many of these individual scenes are diverting, and I remember smiling through a lot of ’em, but, to be honest, they don’t really add up to a movie. By the time The Life Aquatic starts trying to gain some dramatic headway at the end, it feels forced and unearned. Ultimately too clever by half and probably the least engaging of Wes Anderson’s films so far, Aquatic is cute but not very resonant. All in all, it makes for a blithe but instantly forgettable two-hour tour.