From: Phil Dellio
Date: December 30, 2004, 12:00 AM
Aaron & Brian:
I should be the last guy initiating this--you've both undoubtedly seen much more than I have this past year--but I at least got out to see Huckabees, Sideways, and The Aviator over the holidays, so I guess I'm more or less ready to start this thing. Here's a sketchy Top 10 that can maybe serve as a starting point:
I know that a couple of these are technically 2003, but they all got their first non-festival screenings in Toronto this year. Using the Voice poll and a list of box-office returns as guides, here's what else I saw and am "qualified" to discuss: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Huckabees, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Aviator, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Manchurian Candidate, The Dreamers, Coffee and Cigarettes, The Village, Tupac: Resurrection, Superstar in a Housedress, Garden State. So, to open up, which is a better subject for hard-hitting action cinema: bowling or Scrabble?
Phil
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From: Aaron Aradillas
Date: December 30, 2004, 5:12 PM
Hey guys,
I am almost ready with my 10 Best list. It should be ready by New Year's Day. I am ready to talk about trends and Phil's list, though.
The first thing that pops out about Phil's list is the number of quality documentaries on it. Owen Gleiberman predicted last year would go down as a landmark year for docs. With the overwhelming success of such docs as Capturing the Friedmans, Winged Migration, Spellbound, and The Fog of War, it became apparent that a certain section of the moviegoing public wanted a dose of reality to balance the all-for-one fantasies of The Return of the King and Seabiscuit.
If anything, this year has been an even greater year for nonfiction filmmaking. With this being one of the most politically-charged years in modern American history, it seemed as if moviegoers were starving for information. Politics seemed to color everything. Not just in political docs like Bush's Brain, Going Upriver, and Outfoxed, but in seemingly nonpolitical docs like Super Size Me and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Could 2004 be the year where everyone gave an opinion? With the number of blogs at an all-time high--political and otherwise--and the unbelievable popularity of VH1's Best Week Ever and its ilk, 2004 looks to be the year when everyone became a pundit.
Do we have to talk about Fahrenheit 9/11? Oh, why not. Michael Moore's great poli-tainment spoke more directly to the anger, sadness and sheer numbness that has settled into America's psyche than any film since the three years following the attacks. The use of a blank screen and the sound of planes hitting the towers and voices of desperation did more to let people feel, through the safety of watching a movie, what it might have been like on that day, if only for a couple of minutes. I won't even bother talking about how certain movies became a red state-blue state phenomenon. Well, maybe for a minute. I believe all this red state-blue state labeling is bullshit and probably more divisive than any campaign ad or rallying speech.
First, being from one of the redder states on the map--Texas--I know how misleading and unfair it can be to be thought of as a red-stater. Second, in terms of movies, to believe that The Passion of the Christ could only appeal to red-staters or Fahrenheit 9/11 could only appeal to blue-staters says more about some people's prejudices than any bumbling speech given by Dubya or defensive statement given by Mel Gibson. Critics like Slate's David Edelstein and NY Daily News's Jack Mathews did nothing to further the cause of film criticism as a noble profession by reducing the movie year to a Godzilla vs. Mothra-like showdown between Jesus Christ and Michael Moore. Mathews' assertion that Fahrenheit 9/11 helped President Bush get re-elected was not only a cheap shot at Mr. Moore but plain ignorant, a poor-man's attempt at wit.
(For the record: I was moved by both movies.)
Sadly, the biggest fallout from the Year of the Doc was a rather unhealthy obsessive quest for the Truth. In an era of lines being drawn in the sand--not to mention the fetishizing of categorization--people seemed desperate to disprove their emotional response to certain docs. To expect, even demand, truth in documentaries is at once absurd and naive. Motion pictures are the wrong place to look for hard facts. (Books are a better place to look.) Jean-Luc Godard once said, "Truth is life at 24 frames per second. Every edit is a lie." The most we can expect from documentaries, or movies in general, is an emotional truth. What people need to be aware of is when their emotions are being unfairly manipulated. How do you know when this is happening? It's kind of like pornography, you know it when you see it.
Two examples: Jehane Noujaim's Control Room and Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me were two successful documentaries that demonstrated the difference between insincere outrage and muckraking integrity. Control Room was supposed to be an illuminating exposé on how America's news outlets like CNN prepackage war coverage into stories about good vs. evil, while Iraq's satellite news channel Al Aljazeera reports the "truth" of what's really happening in their country. Uh-huh. The embrace of this film by the critical community did nothing to make people stop and question if the film itself was prepackaged. Did anyone not wonder why subtitles weren't provided for when the newscasters were on screen? To suggest that Iraq's only news channel is just a Middle East version of CNN or MSNBC is not only the daydreams of soft-headed liberals, but possibly dangerous.
On the other hand, Morgan Spurlock's investigation of how we've become a mass-consumption society and our need for everything to be bigger, better and uncut, was disguised as a hilariously disturbing puckish odyssey as he fulfilled every child's fantasy of becoming a Mickey D kid. By deciding to eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days, Spurlock gained first-hand knowledge on how America is becoming outsized. Unfortunately, people only seemed to be concerned whether Spurlock really ate Big Macs for 30 days, as if he was taking a cheap shot at poor, little burgermaker McDonald's. When supposedly "independent" investigations were conducted and some people claimed to not have had any health problems by eating burgers, fries and shakes for 30 days, Mr. Spurlock's inquiries into obesity, advertising, and obsession were dismissed as the rantings of a Michael Moore clone.
The desire for truth in movies seeped into the other major trend of the year: the biopic. To take one example: Ray, the great rock 'n' roll bio of Ray Charles, was attacked in some quarters for playing fast and loose with the chronology of events and the deleting, combining, or short-changing of key characters in Charles' life. Structurally the movie is a little creaky but Jamie Foxx's towering performance wipes away any reservations about the film as Ray allows us to feel a man's life experiences like no other biopic since Malcolm X. Foxx transcends mere mimicry--Ray's swaying head movements, his infectious, southern-fried stutter--into a state of being. Try telling that to Charles biographer David Ritz, whose enlightening but ultimately pointless critical essay about the film, which appeared in Slate, seems to miss the point of what Foxx and director Taylor Hackford were attempting to accomplish.
Granted, Ritz, a terrific reporter and writer, is allowed to be a little protective of Charles' legacy, especially since he's been the keeper of it for the better part of two decades. Ritz's complaints about Ray's reducing of Charles sideman and long-time friend Fathead Newman to caricature and the deleting of one of two key mother figures in young Ray's life are interesting, but seem to be an attempt to belittle a moviegoer's experience. Mr. Edelstein's fall-in-line support of Mr. Ritz and his dismissal of the biopic genre in general did the movie no favors. Mr. Edelstein's assertion that the biopic is one of the least enjoyable film genres was a little strange. Personally, I find myself dragging my feet when having to see comic-book adaptations and remakes. To me, screen bios are the ultimate high-wire act for actors. What could be a greater achievement than making an audience forget that there is a real-life counterpart to what they are seeing on screen? The bottom line is this: Documentaries and biopics will always come under attack for "fudging" the facts. There will always be a certain section of the movie going community who will dismiss their emotional response to a film by demanding to know what really happened. Who knew 2004 would be the year where the movie going public would be blinded by the quest to know the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God?
On a slightly different note, I hope I'm not coming off as someone who is attacking Mr. Edelstein because I'm not. He's a fine critic whose more provocative statements, I feel, need to be challenged.
Anyway, how's that for an opening statement? Am I making any sense?
Cheers,
AA
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From: Phil
Date: December 31, 2004, 4:06 PM
Aaron and Brian:
I feel a little contrived having so many documentaries on my list. I want to be clear that I'm not trying to make the point that documentaries are somehow inherently superior to narrative film. Obviously I think they're generally better at this particular moment in time, but about half the new releases I saw this year were regular old moderate-to-big budget narratives, and with every one of them I went in genuinely hopeful that I'd see something really good (except with maybe The Aviator, strangely enough, where I expected, and got, the worst--I'll get to that shortly). But most of the time they fell short of whatever it was I was hoping for (and well short of whatever inflated praise they usually received), whereas most of the documentaries I'm seeing either come out of nowhere to surprise me (Theremin and Pornstar: The Legend of Ron Jeremy from previous years, A League of Ordinary Gentlemen this year) or, like Spellbound and My Architect, turn out to be even richer and more absorbing than I would have guessed from their reviews. It's actually only been relatively recently that I paid much attention to documentaries, with most of the credit going first to Terry Zwigoff's Crumb from the mid-90s, and then an extensive Frederick Wiseman series that ran at Toronto's AGO a couple of years ago. I won't go on at length about Michael Moore, who's become an easy and obvious target. I'm not a fan: he's the anti-Wiseman, P.T. Barnum through and through. I disagree strongly with Aaron's dismissal of the idea that Moore helped get Bush reelected; obviously he wasn't at the top of the list of contributing factors (introducing Emile de Antonio's Millhouse: A White Comedy at AGO recently, a local documentarian said that 9/11 was the biggest reason Bush was reelected, something that sounded good at that time and seems a lot sillier in retrospect--and he said that as a fan of Moore's film), but his aggressive self-promotion and general all-around busy-bodiness definitely get under the skin of a lot of people, and I'm pretty sure not many of them voted for Kerry. As I've said to a few friends, I honestly believe that one network screening of Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry would have been incalculably more beneficial to Kerry's chances of winning than the ongoing Fahrenheit 9/11 circus. (I should mention here that I still haven't seen some of the year's most prominent documentaries, Super Size Me and Control Room for starters.)
There aren't many instances when I'd opt for a biopic version of someone's life over a well-constructed documentary. I love Jonathan Kaplan's Heart Like a Wheel (Shirley Muldowney), like Oliver Stone's Nixon much more than a friend of mine who shares a Nixon obsession with me, and got hooked on Patsy Cline through Sweet Dreams; also, some of Malcolm X is excellent. Most of the biopics I see, though, don't begin to get anywhere near the complexity of their subjects. I'd single out A Beautiful Mind from a couple of years ago as a standard-issue biopic: we'll focus on some gimmicky and easy-to-understand representation of schizophrenia, but let's leave out that other stuff about repressed homosexuality and anti-Semitism, and especially let's keep all the complicated math to a minimum, because nobody goes to the movies to see math. Just last night I saw Bukowski: Born Into This. Not great, but it sure was a thousand times better than Barfly.
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From: Brian Abrams
Date: January 1, 2005, 6:03 PM
All apologies for the delayed response, gentlemen. I'd like to start off by giving thanks to Aaron for starting off the forum with The Passion and Fahrenheit. As much as I want to avoid ruminating on these two films so we can get to more esoteric (in other words: Phil's pending ten list) and more-movie-nerdy topics (in other words: the audacious indie slate of 2004 cinema), I realize we need to get these two media monsters out the way.
Not to get off on the wrong foot with you, Aaron, but I have a couple rebuts to your contribution. No personal attacks here. Just two rebuts, and I'll move on.
I somewhat empathize with you on the "unfair" biases and judgments that can sometimes misread an individual just from their residence in a politically overt state. (I, too, live in Texas.) However, your belief that "all this red state-blue state labeling is bullshit" and your disbelief that "The Passion of the Christ could only appeal to red-staters or Fahrenheit 9/11 could only appeal to blue-staters" smacks, in itself, of a little bullshit.
Regarding the partisanship-labeling connection to moviegoer demographics being "bullshit", I'll share a tidbit of insider hearsay. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's puppet show, Team America: World Police, to no news to any of us, was a flop. Moreover, it only flopped in Red States. On that $12.1 mil opening weekend, the majority of the tickets being torn were reportedly in Blue states; thus we can speculate that more Kerry voters went to see this film, not sycophants of The Idiot.
Now here is where I probably get a little too self-involved. (Oh well.) We can't dismiss the fact that, for many of us, siding with fiction rather than writing to our congressman is a more gratifying (and more convenient) form of self-expression. There is a very real, deeply drawn line in the sand for many, a line separating church and state, piety and truth. I'm not saying that in the movies there are minions being recruited for an all-out war between Mad Mel and The Baseball Cap.
I am saying, however, that it is undeniable, the social divorce in moviegoers--between those fish-hooked by Karl Rove and loving it, and those walking wounded on November 3. I sound like an escaped mental patient, for sure, but it is this kind of pop culture brain food (Passion, Fahrenheit) that we MTV/post-MTV generations identify with more so than, say, traditional family values. You said that the Red State-Blue State ruse was "more divisive than any campaign ad or rallying speech." I have to disagree. The hostility within the crowded and sparse theaters this past year was, in fact, very real.
Second, I cannot understand what "moved" you about watching a hippie underwear model (in other words: Jesus was not white) getting beaten to a pulp for two hours. Setting my Jewish upbringing and political views aside, how were you not flat out bored by the whole thing? If possible, on its most interesting plane, The Passion incarnates that of a gothic Renaissance tapestry before that of an actual film. The showering of ruby reds and the smudging of yellow-browns across the corners of the screen were more than eye-catching...not that that makes the movie any good.
As for a visual spectacle worth watching, how about Jonathan Glazer's Birth? (How was that for transition?) Most anyone who admittedly enjoyed the film on Nicole Kidman falling in love with a 10-year old imposter of her late husband probably has a page in the FBI records now. That said, I do not see the film as an apology for Michael Jackson. Rather it's a pretentious, earnest inversion of all the lukewarm metaphysical "parent traps" of the late '80s (Vice Versa, Like Father Like Son, throw in both Freaky Fridays). If that isn't convincing enough as to just how fucked up we are to have embraced those pederast comedies from back in the day, then spare no humility when I pull up the box office receipts for Big.
Now the visual aspect. I am a fan of Jonathan Glazer. His Sexy Beast balances chills and laughs arguably more successfully than any other noir picture of this millenium. But for Birth I cannot dish credit to Glazer as much I should his New Yorker cinematographer, Harris Savides, who I still praise for his bracing work on Gus Van Sant's homoerotic high school massacre, Elephant. (Not that I praise the film in whole.) Savides' photography for Birth advances his creation of Van Sant's dreamscape.
Watch the hallways of Kidman's New York apartment, how Savides drifts slowly, meditatively, past every square foot. His aerials of the crispy snow-coated park and his close-ups on Kidman (by the way, giving one hell of an underrated performance as the Deneuvian ice queen) send up photographic tensions we haven't seen since 1980 back at the Overlook Hotel. Add Alexandre Desplat's haunting musical score, and you have this year's finest work of art, from a purely physical aspect, being shot out of any projector.
Having said that (New Line Cinema is probably mailing me a t-shirt about now), I won't disagree that Birth's backbone is crooked to non-existent. Act one, act two, act three, we can predict the entire chamber drama better than a Siberian weatherman in December. Still, there's this culmination of weirdness with an emotional grip, and I'm not sure if it's all from aesthetics. If it is, then, I've discovered something I thought I'd never believe: that a film can arrest its audience prosperously with all icing and no cake...but that icing better be really fucking tasty.
Okay, I think I've wasted enough space talking about Birth of all movies. It's time to integrate Phil into this thing. Here goes nothing.
Phil, you've claimed to have seen so few films in comparison to Aaron or myself, but I must say--not that I have rummaged for ticket stubs in your trash--you've made some fine picks on that pending list of yours, four picks of which I share with you: Sideways, Before Sunset, Baadasssss!, and Spider-Man 2, which is perpetually fighting with two or three others for the 10 spot. For the sake of this conversation and for the sake of bringing Phil in on this, I'll admit it to the list fully. Today anyway.
While I'm at it, here's my top ten in full:
And the other 10-spot
perpetrators:
Red Lights, Crimson Gold, Birth, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.
Rather than sing and dance for Sideways, a film I'm anxious to laud and to defend, let's close with a validation for S-M2 before I get laughed off the world wide web as a grown man who still plays with action figures. (Not true, though I do watch cartoons.) I despise the original; for true I despise Superhero Cinema altogether. Like the X-Men flicks or The Hulk or Daredevil or any other self-deprecating multi-million dollar CGI travesty out there, the first Spider-Man had no cinematic muscle or distinctive mood. Only a melange of enough cut-away shots to cater to hyperactive 90-second trailers or A.D.D.-inducing commercials for Frito-Lay product placement.
Spider-Man 2, though, is another animal. Screenwriter Michael Chabon (whom I give most of the credit for the film's achievement) must have still been on that Pulitzer high from The Adventures of Kavalier & Klay to create such a non-contrived blueprint for such a ludicrous storyline (skyscraper-leaping college kid down on his luck saves city from cyborg madman with mantits).
Chabon has returned
dignity to the summer blockbuster, and it's a relief to not be so cynical about
movies that have larger budgets than most metropolis's waste management
systems.
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From: Aaron
Date: January 3, 2005, 2:12 PM
Hey guys,
First of all, to go into a movie expecting anything more than that it be competently made is a set-up for disappointment every time. One of the uglier trends to spring forth from a pop culture-obsessed society is a rather unhealthy sense of entitlement. For anyone to sit in a darkened theater with the attitude of "Show me or else," creates a mood of contempt on the part of the moviegoer, which leads to indifference, which leads to the acceptance of whatever is released into the marketplace, which finally leads to mediocrity. This is probably why I have little patience for comic-book fanboys who get on message boards and scrutinize every detail of the latest Marvel adaptation. Has anyone ever thought that maybe all this second-guessing of the casting, screenplay, and director of big-budget extravaganzas might be what's causing studios to play it safe? To fully appreciate movies you must be willing to give yourself over to them. As for the reviews: save 'em for later. This is easier said than done. Nothing does a movie a greater disservice than having preconceived notions of what a movie should be.
Second, to call Michael Moore the "anti-Wiseman" is at once obvious and beside the point. While I've appreciated the stately, objective style of Mr. Wiseman, I find documentarians like Errol Morris and Mr. Moore, whose smashing of invisible taboos in nonfiction filmmaking has re-invigorated the documentary over the last 15 years, to be better suited to our sped-up media-coverage times. In fact, it was the one-two punch of Mr. Morris' The Thin Blue Line and Mr. Moore's Roger & Me that showed me documentaries didn't have to be straightforward reporting of the "facts." Some critics, notably Pauline Kael, found the manipulations of facts and re-organizing of events to fit a narrative drive to be morally questionable, even dangerous. She may have a valid complaint. Personally, I feel that in an era of "spin," docs like Fahrenheit 9/11 contain more of the questioning-of-authority spirit that is part of a certain strain of the American population than any "fair and balanced" news outlet.
In response to Brian's "tidbit" of "insider hearsay," it saddens me to say that it is based on some faulty logic. Parker & Stone's Team America was not a blue or red state movie. Its demographic audience was anti-authority twentysomethings who appreciate the subtleties of scatological humor and too-cool-for-school posturing, which we all know crosses all political boundaries. Parker & Stone practice a form of back-of-the-classroom rebellion that is entertaining only to a point. That point is when their contempt for "The System" is exposed to be the posturing of a couple of insiders who are still under the illusion that they're still outsiders looking in. They're like a couple of Dennis Millers with better culture references.
More to the point though, I want to make it clear that I am aware that The Passion of the Christ's core audience was Christian middle America. What I'm trying to get across is that they weren't the only ones who appreciated the movie. Furthermore, to use the red state-blue state label to identify someone's political orientation is one thing, but to use it as way of categorizing entire regions of America is an insult to any independent-thinking person who chooses to live in a so-called "red state." You don't have to be a Jew to be offended by the anti-Semitism in The Passion of the Christ, nor do you have to be a Christian to be moved by the bloody spectacle of Jesus' final 12 hours on Earth. Same goes for Fahrenheit 9/11. I defy anyone not to be moved to tears by the sight of grieving mother Lila Lipscomb overwhelmed by the realization that her son is dead.
Speaking as a liberal or a centrist or a blue-stater who resides in a red zone, I just find the analyzing of issues along color lines to be both regressive and petty.
On a slightly more positive note, let's talk about the surprising number of good biopics. (The one big exception being the Spacey-does-Vegas biopic of Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea, which I'll get to in a minute.) While I agree with Phil's assertion that a well-researched documentary trumps any big-screen biopic, I also feel that a big, glossy film version of someone's life has its own special rewards. Mainly, biopics are the ultimate test for actors who dedicate themselves to disappearing into someone else's skin. What could be better for an actor than to know their performance made an audience forget there was a real-life counterpart to their character, if only for a couple of hours? Foxx does this in Ray. Liam Neeson channels the obsessive need for data as pioneering sex researching Alfred Kinsey in Bill Condon's liberating sex comedy Kinsey.
Then there's the dark side of biopics which is on display in the misguided, Beyond the Sea, a love-fest for one. Unfortunately, it's Spacey, not Darin, who's getting all the love. From its movie-within-a-movie framing device, to its scenes of older-Bobby-talking-to-young-Bobby, to the poorly staged and poorly integrated musical numbers, to the sight of Greta Scacchi being de-sexed as Sandra Dee's monster of a stage mom, to the succession of bad hair pieces, I left Beyond the Sea knowing less about Bobby Darin than when I entered the theater.
Not to come off as a total cynic, I'll leave on an up note and pose a question. Do you think it's about time for people to stop being surprised when Leonardo DiCaprio gives a great performance? His turn as the young, brash, eventually doomed Howard Hughes in The Aviator is one of the highlights of the year. Martin Scorsese takes his gliding-camera style to new heights as he turns the early years of Hughes' life into a Technicolor romantic-adventure of the highest order. Scorsese looks through his viewfinder and sees a fun-house refection of himself in Hughes' willingness to risk losing everything in order to achieve perfection. You can feel Scorsese's kinship with Hughes' determination in crafting the best, whether it's a movie, a bra, or an airplane. Hughes' obsession with seeing his lumbering Spruce Goose take flight can also be seen in Scorsese's desire to see long-gestating projects like The Last Temptation of Christ and Gangs of New York get to the big screen. Don't let these Scorsese-Hughes parallels fool you, The Aviator is indeed about the young Mr. Hughes as his time in Hollywood provides the basis for one of the best period epics ever made. You haven't seen star-studded reveries until you see the way Scorsese re-creates the Cocoanut Grove nightclub where stars gathered, hooked-up, and separated while moving to a swinging beat. The Aviator's slow decline into darkness is mesmerizing as the powers that be try to crush the spirit of this tool-bit manufacturer from Texas, which leads to the film's most haunting sequence: A slowly-going-mad Hughes locked in his screening room trying to keep the outside world from crashing in. (Read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls to find the moment in Scorsese's life that mirrors this sequence.) This scene is only topped by Hughes' triumphant, crowd-pleasing showdown against a Senate Committee that wants to destroy his reputation. The scene illustrates how much Hughes had to lose in order achieve perfection.
The great supporting cast is lead by Cate Blanchett's scarily funny performance as Katharine Hepburn. Blanchett's Hepburn matches DiCaprio's Hughes insecurity for insecurity as they create one of the most memorable screen couples in recent memory. The rest of the fine cast includes Alec Baldwin (smarmy as ever), Alan Alda (even smarmier), John C. Reilly (hilariously frazzled), Jude Law (showing more charm and sleaze in his one scene as Errol Flynn than he did in all of Alfie), and Kate Beckinsale, who is surprisingly touching in her portrayal of Ava Gardner. The Aviator is a great and moving entertainment. It is also my choice as the best film of the year.
Be back later with the rest of my list.
Cheers,
AA
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From: Phil
Date: January 4, 2005, 12:50 AM
Aaron and Brian:
I guess I'm up.
I'll leave the Mel Gibson movie to you guys. You couldn't pay me enough to see it.
I like that She Hate Me is on Brian's list, even though I haven't seen it and even though the reviews were pretty bad. (One more "even though": and even though I thought the last three Spike Lee films I saw, Summer of Sam, Get on the Bus, and 25th Hour, were all big mistakes.) I still retain a lot of admiration for just about every film of Lee's from Do the Right Thing through to He Got Game--flaws and all, of which there are many--and I think Jungle Fever, Clockers, and at least half of Malcolm X are pretty great. So I still root for him, and he seems to be kind of a forgotten figure at the moment. I hope he gets his Jackie Robinson film made one day.
My inclusion of Spider-Man 2 in my Top 10 is probably a lot more ambivalent than with Brian. I don't think there's ever a year where I wholeheartedly like 10 films--if I saw more than the 25-35 I generally get out to see, maybe there would be, but as is, I start to reach a bit at a certain point on every year's list. This year that happens somewhere between Word Wars and Baadasssss! There was a lot I didn't like about Spider-Man 2--I'd start by getting rid of every last scene between Tobey Maguire and his kindly old aunt, all of which were unbearably wholesome, and I fidgeted through almost the entirety of the love story, too, which I know provides "substance" for some of the reviewers who rhapsodized over the film. What I liked: Alfred Molina's great, just like he's great in Boogie Nights and Magnolia (he's also one of the few worthwhile things in Coffee and Cigarettes), and, what really surprised me--I can't believe I'm about to say something this trite--I thought the special effects were amazing. (Watch out, Joel Siegel, here I come.) I was just totally caught up in Maguire and Molina careening around the city, much more than I have been by anything like that since, I don't know, the big wave in The Poseidon Adventure when I was 11 years old.
Aaron...well, I don't know if we'll be co-hosting any film festivals anytime soon; we disagree about a lot. You actually set the bar at "competently made" when you go to see a film? You don't expect anything more, because you know you'd just be foolishly setting yourself up for disappointment? Wow--that's such a strange mindset to me. I basically want--maybe not expect, but sometimes that too--every film I see to be some combination of The Godfather, Sweet Smell of Success, and Nashville. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but I don't see the point of seeing something if you don't hold out some degree of hope that you're going to get a lot more than just competency. I especially don't understand your formulation that it's those moviegoers who go in with unrealistically high expectations (that would be me) who are somehow the cause of all the mediocrity that ends up in theatres, rather than assigning the blame to moviegoers who are content with competency (that would be you). The films of Rob Reiner and Ron Howard are very competent. They're also very mediocre most of the time--competency as an end in itself generally goes hand-in-hand with mediocrity, so if you're content with the competency of Rob Reiner and Ron Howard, their mediocrity is part of the package. That seems self-evident to me.
Which, more or less, is why The Aviator is so disheartening; it's an exercise in competency, and it might just as well have been directed by Ron Howard. I'm really not trying to be glib or cleverer-than-thou--to paraphrase Charlie in Mean Streets, you don't fuck around with the infinite, and you don't fuck around with Scorsese. He could take on Scary Movie 4 as his next project, and it wouldn't alter my boundless gratitude towards the man who made Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas a bit. I'll repeat what I wrote in connection to Gangs of New York last year: anyone who counts all, or some, or even one of those films among the cornerstones of his or her (yeah, I know, who am I kidding? his) moviegoing experience is doing Scorsese a disservice by fawning over tepid shadows like Gangs of New York and The Aviator, and also, I think, just deluding himself. I'd say Aaron accidentally gets at much of what's wrong with The Aviator very well when he writes of "Hughes' triumphant, crowd-pleasing showdown against a Senate Committee that wants to destroy his reputation." Yes. Triumphant, crowd-pleasing showdowns are kept to a minimum in Mean Streets.
Scorsese right now seems to me to be somewhere close to where Bob Dylan was in the late '70s and through the '80s; not necessarily in the precise quality of the work, but in the reluctance of many people to accept that it's just not the same guy who astounded them a decade or two earlier. I mean, obviously it is the same guy, but the place where those earlier films and albums came from--Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde--is as mysterious to him as it is to us, and is now permanently inaccessible in terms of ever replicating it. That's what I loved so much about the 60 Minutes interview with Dylan last month: his complete (and rare for an artist, most of whom are forever trying to sell you on the idea that they're "growing") honesty in saying that he has no idea where those earlier songs came from, and that even though he can do other things now, he can't do that again. I'm not saying that Scorsese will never make good, maybe even great films again--many people (not me) are passionate about Dylan's '90s albums. But if and when he does, I believe he'll first have to come out the other side of this fallow period, and that when you see The Aviator and Gangs of New York all over Ten-Best lists, and read that such-and-such is Scorsese's best film since GoodFellas, there's a clear echo of the way every new Dylan album after Blood on the Tracks would be widely reviewed as a return to form. Strangely enough, the next Scorsese film to appear will supposedly be his Dylan documentary--and, perhaps contradicting everything I've just said, I'm totally looking forward to it.
Calling Michael Moore the anti-Wiseman may be obvious--though I'm guessing Moore considers himself the natural heir to the Wisemans, Pennebakers, and Maysleses of the '60s, in stature if not in style--but far from being beside the point, it is the point. Frederick Wiseman's films were about high schools and hospitals and welfare agencies; Michael Moore's films are about Michael Moore, and that's why he's earned the admiration of millions and the enmity and distrust of just as many more. The question of how much he plays around with factual accuracy is not negligible, and it speaks directly to the trust issue: aware of the discrepancies Kael documented in her review of Roger & Me, and having winced over at least a couple of transparent bits of legerdemain in Bowling for Columbine, it stands to reason that I'm going to resist a lot of Moore's gee-whiz editorializing in Fahrenheit. But forget about that--Millhouse: A White Comedy, which I mentioned earlier, has a few rigged juxtapositions too. What it doesn't have, though, to its credit, is Emile de Antonio front and center, begging you to admire his courage, imploring you to appreciate his sensitivity, making sure at all times that you're fully aware of who's out there in the trenches fighting the good fight for the rest of us. That's the part of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine that makes me queasy. Columbine had that unbelievably self-serving spectacle at the K-Mart, where Moore does everything but grab a bullhorn and announce, "It's OK, everybody, I've confiscated all the guns and we can all go home now." In Fahrenheit, you've got the Lila Lipscomb sequence Aaron admires so much. Aaron, you've found someone who wasn't moved to tears; it made me squirm. Above and beyond the fact that pointing a camera at someone who's crying is a supremely unimaginative way to coax out a reaction from an audience--it's Dianne Sawyer, TV-type stuff--far worse was the way Moore nestled up to Lipscomb and provided comfort. That had nothing to do with Lipscomb, nothing to do with her son, nothing to do with anything except reminding us yet again that past all the showmanship, bravura, and wiseacre muckraking, Michael Moore is one exceptionally deep-feeling person. It reminded me of something I came across two or three times up here in Toronto, right after 9/11: people who made a point of writing how they broke down crying as they watched TV that day. Sorry, but that kind of thing creeps me out. Wiseman's Near Death spends six hours with doctors and families as they have to decide whether or not to pull the plug on a family member. It's an amazing film, in part because it's essentially the same grim scene over and over again. The thought of Wiseman stepping out from behind the camera to commiserate with one of these distraught families is inconceivable. Wiseman's an artist; Moore, at his best, is an entertaining, occasionally very funny gadfly, and at his worst he's Oprah.
-------------------
From: Aaron
Date: January 6, 2005, 6:03 PM
Phil and Brian,
I think Phil is under the impression that "competently made" movies are a dime a dozen. In fact, the multiplexes are filled with movies directed by hacks who wouldn't last one week in the Roger Corman School of Moviemaking. (Did you see the late-summer hit Without a Paddle?) Of course, I go into a movie hoping for greatness, but greatness is not something we see every day. (Even the so-called heyday of American cinema--the New Hollywood '70s--had its share of junk.) I prefer to walk into a movie cold, without any preconceived notions of what it should be, and come out surprised with what it actually is. One example: The Colin Farrell actioneer S.W.A.T., an unwanted TV-to-movie adaptation that turned out to be a well-made, late-summer good time with cool visuals, taut action sequences, and well-developed, B-movie-level characterizations. If I was to go into every movie expecting Godfather-like greatness I wouldn't last long as a movie critic.
Phil's assertion that "competently made movies" are represented by the works of Ron Howard and Rob Reiner says more about his Film Comment-like snobbery than what constitutes a good movie. The best work by Howard (Night Shift, Splash, The Paper, Apollo 13) and Reiner (This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men) have been wonderful, mass-appeal entertainments that require a light hand that more "serious" directors just don't possess. Just because their movies lack the "grandeur" of a movie by Coppola or Scorsese doesn't make them any less significant.
One more thing: knock off the Oprah bashing. Her ability to attract a name director (Jonathan Demme) to help her realize her dream of bringing a difficult, Pulitzer-winning novel about slavery to the big screen is reason enough to admire her. How many African-American women do you know whose name is more than just a name, it's a force in the culture?
Anyway, here's my list of the best films of 2004.
1. The Aviator
2. Sideways: Alexander Payne's remarkable two-buddies-hit-the-road-movie is all the more remarkable because it illuminates the lives of a couple of "ordinary" characters into something profound. Adapting Rex Pickett's novel into a marvel of loose-limbed comic riffs that build on top of each other, Payne and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor lay bare the dreams, fears, and anxieties of a generation of arrested-development men who've chosen to live lives of quiet desperation. That is, until a pair of good-spirited waitresses (Sandra Oh, Virginia Madsen) awaken--in at least one of the men--the possibilities of what life can offer. The instant-classic wine-as-self-descriptive-metaphor scene in which Miles (Paul Giamatti doing quiet desperation like no one else) tells Maya (a radiantly vulnerable Madsen) about his connection with pinot grapes will leave you a little dizzy, as these two lonely souls slowly realize that their lives might actually mean more than a hill of beans.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind/Before Sunset: Two love stories that seem to encompass all the possible configurations that love has to offer. Michel Gondry's sci-fi romance is, to paraphrase a much better critic (thanks Owen), a mind-bender heartbreaker. As Joel, the perpetual sad-sack who opts to have the memory of his darling Clementine erased, Jim Carrey taps into his tears-of-a-clown resources to give his most poignant performance to date. As Clem, Kate Winslet is a revelation as she shows how some loves can test your nerves and blow your mind. Eternal Sunshine shows us that no matter how hard we try we can never really forget the ones we love. Richard Linklater's urgent follow-up to his 1995 slackers-walk-the-streets-of-Vienna charmer, Before Sunrise, finds slacker-turned-novelist Jesse (a never-better Ethan Hawke) in a Paris bookstore where he--magically? fatefully?--is reunited with his one-night love Celine (a luminous Julie Delpy), an impassioned environmentalist, who trembles with apprehension and excitement at the thought of there being a second opportunity. The movie's closing scene is a beaut as Celine channels Nina Simone and tells Jesse, "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane." Jesse's two-word response contains all the hope, fear, and joy that love has to offer.
4. Kill Bill: Vol. 2: Quentin Tarantino's pay off to last year's best film isn't so much better as it is a fulfillment of the promises made in Volume 1. Tarantino, the original smash-up artist, tops Sergio Leone by making a Spaghetti Western with a heart. Every scene is charged with a heady mix of anticipation and dread as The Bride (Uma Thurman, displaying an awe-inspiring physicality) continues to cross off names on her death list as she tries to exact revenge--and find redemption. The movie culminates with a quietly moving domestic squabble as Bill (David Carradine in the performance of his life) expounds about the virtues of family and loyalty, all the while demonstrating how to make a perfect sandwich.
5. Kinsey: The greatest sex comedy ever made. Writer-director Bill Condon examines the life of pioneering--and still controversial--sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and pinpoints the moment when America, almost unknowingly, embraced its sexuality. Liam Neeson's superb performance shows us a man whose obsession with collecting data, whether it be from gall wasps or the "sex histories" of men and women, was blinded to the one puzzle he could not solve: Love. The conclusion of the film contains a powerful two-minute performance by Lynn Redgrave who, while giving her sex history, is startled to discover late in life that she has a sexual nature. Kinsey shows us how far we have come in talking openly about sex in this country. And how far we still need to go.
6. Open Water: Chris Kentis' no-budget, DV-shot, young-married-couple-stranded-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean thriller is like Jaws crossed with a John Cassavetes domestic drama. As Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis, who give life-like performances, fight, make up, fight again (all the while being circled by sharks), Kentis and creative partner Laura Lau tap into a child-like fear of abandonment like no other film ever made. The film's closing moments, in which fear and love are realized, accepted and transcended, has not stopped haunting me in the five months since I've seen the film.
7. Dawn of the Dead: A savage critique of our mass consumption society. It's also a kick-ass zombie action movie with pitch-black humor, arresting visuals and great ensemble acting by Ving Rhames, Sarah Polley, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer, and especially Michael Kelly as arrogant security guard, CJ, who learns what it means to be a team player. Contains the year's best opening credits sequence as a montage of the world devouring itself is set to the spooky-cool Johnny Cash tune, "The Man Comes Around." It's the end of the world and it never looked so cool.
8. Ray: One of the best rock 'n' roll bios ever made. Structurally the film is a little rickety but Jamie Foxx's towering performance wipes away all reservations as Ray makes us feel a man's life experiences like no other biopic since Malcolm X. Foxx transcends mere mimicry--Ray's swaying head movements, his infectious, southern-fried stutter--into a state of being. Foxx is Ray Charles. Directed by the vastly underrated Taylor Hackford, Ray is uncompromising as it shows how Charles didn't let his blindness from manipulating those around him. He did it his way.
9. Baadassss!: Mario Van Peebles' loving, no-bull tribute to his father, Melvin Van Peebles, and his making of the seminal blaxploitation epic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is also one of the best movies about the movies ever made. Baadasssss! shows that in order for a film to get made a director must be equal parts dictator, manipulator, hustler and father-figure. In a bit of meta-casting writer-director Mario Van Peebles casts himself in the role of his father and finally becomes a star, as he exorcises the demons of his father's neglectfulness and casual cruelty in order to achieve his vision. What lies on the other side of the younger Van Peebles' performance is love and understanding. Also, the birth of Black Cinema in America.
10. Tarnation: In what will go down as a landmark year in documentary history, Jonathan Caouette's cathartic, home-movies-turned-into-horror-show examination of himself and his mother stands head and shoulders above the rest. Disregarding hallmarks of regular documentaries like narration and chronological order, Tarnation divides the screen into a series of beautifully-timed montages, set the year's most haunting song score, as we slowly realize that we're seeing the thought process of a scarred psyche. An early-childhood sequence set to "Wichita Lineman" will make you recast your own memories as a pop symphony. The heart of the movie is Caouette's mother, whose possible real life tales of abuse may hold the key to both of their sanities. The scene of Caouette's mother's endless dance with a pumpkin is as transporting and terrifying as anything in The Wizard of Oz.
Feel free to choose any of my selections as a jumping-off point for discussion, debate, admiration, or argument.
Oh, Phil, a "triumphant" moments in Mean Streets would feel a little out of place, don't you think? Of course, I'm being sarcastic but you get the idea. I think The Aviator shows Scorsese's joy of cinema that some critics have felt has been lacking from his more recent work. Look closer, and you'll see a movie just as personal as anything from his so-called glory years.
Cheers,
AA
-------------------
From: Phil
Date: January 6, 2005, 10:19 PM
Aaron and Brian:
Do you keep a whistle around, Brian? A referee's uniform? We may need you to step in.
This is devolving into personal sniping fairly quickly, and one of the mixed blessings of my life is that I'm pretty good at that kind of thing. (An exchange in Broadcast News I've always loved: Holly Hunter's boss derisively observes of her something to the effect that "It must be wonderful to know that you're always 100% right and everybody else is 100% wrong"; "No, it's awful," she says.) So I'm going address a couple of bizarre comments of Aaron's and then, the next time you hear from me, I'll move onto some films from my list.
"Film Comment-like snobbery"?? The first thing you need to do, Aaron, is get a much better point of reference as to what constitutes snobbery. I don't keep up with Film Comment anymore, but when I looked at it regularly through the '80s, it published some of the sanest, least snobbish film criticism around. I've got one issue sitting around the house, the May/June '98 issue devoted to Scorsese's induction into Lincoln Center. There are pieces by Gavin Smith, David Thomson, and Michael Wilmington, a reprint of an old Manny Farber/Patricia Patterson analysis of Taxi Driver, a reprint of Scorsese's excellent "Guilty Pleasures" piece from 1978, and a few other things. Their "Critics Choice" overview of then-current releases located near the front of the magazine includes ratings from David Ansen, Richard Corliss, Manohla Dargis, Ebert, Molly Haskell, Richard T. Jameson, and Andrew Sarris. This is your definition of snobbery? No, it's not, I'm guessing, you just didn't choose your words very carefully.
As to my own membership in this conspiracy of snobs, which seems to hinge on my inability to recognize the wonderful mass appeal of Ron Howard and Rob Reiner films, all I can say is you've got just about the lowest threshold for snobbery that I've ever encountered. Not being a movie critic, I'm happily free of all professional obligation to see Without a Paddle; if I did have to see a lot of films like that, then yes, maybe Night Shift would suddenly seem very special. Of the eight films you mention, I've seen all but The Paper. This Is Spinal Tap is great, which I've always believed has everything to do with Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean, and very little to do with Rob Reiner, who tips his hand right at the end as to how much essential contempt he has for what the other three guys are parodying, I believe, out of affection. Splash and Misery were pretty good from what I remember, Apollo 13 was a lot of hokum (allowing Ed Harris to chew up scenery mercilessly is your idea of a "light hand"?), and the rest were somewhere in between. And so what? I don't see any reason to revise what I wrote earlier: they're both competent directors, and if I valued competence as much as you do, I'm sure I'd like them a lot more than I do. I'll also mention in passing that it doesn't matter a bit to me how autobiographical The Aviator is for Scorsese; I go to movies (and listen to music, and read books) to understand myself better, not the person who created the work. That's the old auteurist line, that I'm supposed to take notice of and derive pleasure from all these little personal touches and bits of autobiography found in some otherwise negligible Otto Preminger film. (A simplification, I know.) Francis Coppola's Tucker, the film I was most reminded of while watching The Aviator, is probably every bit as personal to Coppola as the first two Godfathers, maybe even more so. It's also one one-hundredth the film.
Doesn't it bother you to see Jonathan Demme, a guy who did such great work from Handle With Care through to Silence of the Lambs, being hired ("attract"? like she didn't throw piles of money at him?) for some vanity project by a woman who's as responsible as anyone for promoting a pervasive kind of touchy-feely silliness that is the complete opposite of genuine feeling and emotion? That's a good thing? In fairness, I should mention that I haven't seen Beloved, and in relief, I'll mention that I never will. But I'll try to go easy on Oprah the rest of the way, being the only African-American woman who's a force in the culture.
Calling on Brian.
-------------------
From: Brian
Date: January 6, 2005, 11:38 PM
OK, well I'm glad everyone's list has been deposited in the Canadian movie-nerd bank. Now I want to change mine!
A small change, actually. I'm not going to remove any of the ten aforementioned, but rather, throw in an eleventh that--because it's such an important expression that will and should be talked about for generations on--needs no numeral rank.
So, can any of you tell that I re-watched Fahrenheit this afternoon? I'm sure that's the exact feeling all of you received when walking out the theater that June/July afternoon. Except for me, this second viewing reminded me just how much up in arms I was over the war-criminal, pro-caste, filthy-liar advocates of The Idiot who run our corporations, and by proxy, our government. Obviously the same reasons bear in my adoration for Lee's She Hate Me, carrying the same--if not more direct--Philip Rothian rage toward the bald, cigar-smoking, suspender-wearing, self-righteous, white cocksuckers in corporate America.
(Not that Roth has implicated as candidly toward this corrupted sect. But indeed the author's an excellent vitriolic matchup to Lee, who--by the way--could have made Robert Benton's blase adaptation of The Human Stain explode, going the same ways of its original text.)
Bring on any common criticisms of 9/11 you want: it's too manipulative and not honest enough about the administration; it's not hard enough on Bush; it gets tedious; it's full of shit. Whatever. Like Aaron said about how the truth of the documentary isn't so much the matter as it's "feel," I'll agree for this particular case.
I know, guys: enough about Fahrenheit already! I thought about taking course into more documentaries, but I'm going to rail/laud on your ten lists instead.
Phil, the last two days I watched Mayor of the Sunset Strip and Going Upriver. Very touching choices to have on your list, whether you've seen 35 movies or 135 movies. Clearly you've an overall "good" taste in movies; as for Aaron, well, I feel like pouncing for a bit.
But first, in all fairness, Aaron, you do have some very respectable picks in your ten. Glad to hear you enjoyed Open Water. It's a shame, too, that such a thrilling and--oddly enough--cerebral film would get mismarketed and misunderstood so overtly. Elements of Blair Witch? Sure. But why Lions Gate didn't treat Kentis' shark tale with more elegance and less schlocky slasher campaigning, I'll never know. We all concur on Sideways, which is no surprise to me. How can you not fall for such an enjoyably heartfelt film that--I'm willing to defend--did not subscribe to the formulaic structure of every other piece of Oscar bait this season.
And speaking of Oscar bait, here comes the Aaron-slamming. The Aviator and Ray? I have seen neither. So should I shut my mouth? Maybe. I won't go into criticisms of the actual film; as Walter Sobcheck would say, I "have no frame of reference." However, I will say that the reason I have not seen these two films was not out of inconvenience. Rather, I'm just not interested. Same goes for Finding Neverland.
In fact, let's take all three of those films for a second and look at their theatrical posters. Depp, DiCaprio, and Foxx all look like they're posing for Revlon. Yes, yes, Aaron, I know you're still raving over the wonderful year of the biopic, but seriously, by the time Kinsey hit in September/October, weren't you already burned-out to a crisp? For myself, Vera Drake and Tarnation are all the biopic (or, in Caouette's case, autobiopic) I need until the Oscar platter '05 rolls around.
Oh, another thing. Kill Bill? Are you kidding? Aside from Garden State, I found Q.T.'s self-indulgent, masturbatory marathonic movie more offensive than Soulplane. (Passion of the Christ, for that matter.) I used to be a fanboy of the Tennessee rogue. His innovative dialogue from Pulp Fiction and True Romance and Reservoir Dogs and even Four Rooms rang in my head for years. Safe to say, "Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead" rang in all our heads until, oh, how about when The Big Lebowski hit the screen?
Now is a different era. Now, because of the fanboys who lauded (and still laud) Q.T. for his movie-nerdy-ness, I guess it's acceptable for a director to pop ecstasy like Tic-Tacs, fire up some expensive Miramax cameras in China, and squeeze in as much film trickery and obscure pop culture homages as possible. Just because Lawrence Bender referred to the two volumes as a "rock show" doesn't make them good movies. Now I'm rambling and getting off track. OK, here's my point: I don't go to the theater for Movie Reference Jeopardy: catch obscure faces and scores and locales and say, "Oh, yeah, I saw that '70s Swedish rape film!" Does nothing for me.
I could go on about the Dawn
of the Dead travesty, but instead, please, ask me why Garden State
is so insulting.
-------------------
From: Aaron
Date: January 7, 2005, 10:11 PM
Hey guys,
Put your whistle away, Brian. It's not needed.
Phil, I didn't mean any offense with my Film Comment remark, although the quality of the writing has fallen off this century. (The writings of Amy Taubin and the occasional piece by Howard Hampton being exceptions.)
I do have a couple of questions, though. Do you dislike Reiner so much that you're willing to disregard his contributions to Spinal Tap? It was his responsibility to keep Shearer, McKean, and Guest on track. (You should try to get your hands on the out-of-print Criterion edition of Spinal Tap to hear Reiner's enlightening commentary.)
Do you really think an Oscar-wining director is going to turn into a money-for-hire hack and spend a year of his life on an underbudgeted period slave epic? You should at least attempt to see the film before passing judgment.
I'm not a big fan of the auteur theory either. While there are personal "touches" throughout The Aviator this is not the main reason why I think it is the best film of the year. What is exhilarating about the film is seeing the way Scorsese applies his overcaffeinated visual style to various genres, whether it be a remake of a B movie, an urban period piece or a Hollywood romantic-adventure. Beyond all the visual gymnastics, Scorsese, along with Michael Mann, is one of the best American directors exploring the divided natures within a man's masculinity. Think of the cruelty and touching patriotism of Bill the Butcher. Or, the way Hughes' freewheeling energy seems to be at war with, and cut off from, his passions.
How 'bout we agree to disagree?
Anyone want to talk about the pros and cons of Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles? Like most critics I also feel that Raimi's sequel had more humor, heart, excitement, and all around smart-ass charm than the original. But my problem with the original still exists in the sequel and I don't think it'll be fixed anytime soon. The problem is Tobey Maguire. For all the second-guessing of DiCaprio's ability to play "mature," has anyone bother to notice that Maguire has yet to develop any distinguishing features? In early roles in The Ice Storm and the first half of Pleasantville, Maguire displayed a naughty-boy playfulness that was quite winning. Then, as if someone told him no one was taking him seriously, he let his face go blank and has yet to stop gawking. The only liveliness in his performance as Peter Parker came during the extended sequence where he decided to turn his back on his responsibilities. For a moment, he seemed almost grown.
This is why I nominate The Incredibles as the best superhero movie of the year. Brad Bird's eye-popping comic-adventure story showed how the ordinary could be extraordinary. The action scene of the year: Dash Parr's extended chase through the island forest topped any web-slinging, skyscraper-leaping chase in either Spider-Man movie. And who can forget the side-splitting creation of Edna Mode, the costume-maker-for-heroes, who delivers an impassioned speech on why capes are bad? Anyone care to debate the incredibleness of The Incredibles?
Was anyone else blown away by The Bourne Supremacy? Matt Damon's muscular performance showed, once again, that he is one of the most physically-imposing actors working today. Critics who complained about Paul Greengrass' ADD-style of editing seemed unwilling to appreciate jaggedly fluid layering of images, as if we were plugged in to Jason Bourne's fractured memory. And, it had the most kick-ass car chase in years.
Cheers,
AA
P.S. Phil, you should really think about renting The Paper. Not only does it contain Michael Keaton's best live-wire performance, but it also has Randy Quaid's best work since The Last Detail. Besides, any movie with Spalding Gray can't be all bad.
-------------------
From: Brian
Date: January 9, 2005, 2:30 PM
Okay, no more slamming on Aaron. In fact, this go round I have a compliment. (Can you believe it, Aaron?) While I've bullied on the majority of your ten best-ers, I have to say that your selections have a way more comprehensive pulse on Cinema 2004 than Phil's.
Too easy, right? Comparing a guy who's seen, what appears to be, nearly 100 of this year's movies to another who's seen, I believe Phil confessed, 30 or 35? Poppycock. Look at my list: it's full of self-indulging, critic-friendly (oxymoron), snooty titles (Mean Creek, Crimson Gold, Red Lights, you get the picture). And, no, I didn't just hit the Angelika over the past twelve months; AMC got my money too. I think I saw close to 70 or so films. Still, I ended up hailing the smaller, sneeze-and-you-miss-em-type movies.
Of course, this must say something about the year in film--in comparison to years past anyway. The holiday platter wasn't all that interesting: The Year of The Biopic is all too obvious, don't ya think? Subsequently, my list is chock-full of shoestring arthouse esoterica: a sexy and haunting $100,000 budget shark tale, a brazen $200 self-exposé, and even a movie about a movie budget. (Filmmaker Magazine reported Baadasssss! itself was shot in 19 days with a million dollar budget.) Maybe I didn't conform to the holiday movie frenzy this year because, well, it just didn't look that various...or interesting.
Case in point, 2003 had a way more expansive melange of Oscar bait. Cold Mountain, House of Sand and Fog, and Mystic River all took a B-line to the Academy, a pretty obvious campaign no less, and--lucky for us--all three were well worth their self-proclaimed merit.
Of course, there were plenty other arthouse-fancy films that year, too, that dominated my list. Not, I don't think, to the degree that 2004 Cinema has allowed. Granted, Sideways is Oscar bait, but it's not so obvious and straightforward in its campaigning as, say, a hopped-up Jamie Foxx swiveling his head back and forth in a jazz club. Instead, Alexander Payne's Napa Valley knee slapper (which I'm now thinking twice about giving my #1 spot, due to recent viewings of Fahrenheit) has such rich characters, characters we can identify with on multiple levels.
I'll speak for all of us in saying that we can understand (reluctantly) Miles' backing off from Maya's "tastes so fucking good" sexual invitation on the porch. I'll speak for myself in saying I can relate to Jack's sexaholic "plight," his very own "darkside," ignoring all common rationale in order to take Cammi (geez) to the nearest set of bedsheets. I'm sure a couch would have been fine, too. Those two small moments alone spoke to me more than any number of scenes from Kinsey or--god I wish I could just lie and say The Aviator and Ray. Alas, I'll have to break down and see the damn things already.
-------------------
From: Phil
Date: January 9, 2005, 9:21 PM
Aaron and Brian:
Good--we're back on track.
Let me comment on a few of my picks, some of which overlap with yours. I've got to start by issuing the same disclaimer I did in my year-end a couple of years ago: I've got a very faulty memory when it comes to movies, even ones I like a lot. I think some people who know me are under the complete opposite impression, based on the fact that I can rhyme off dialogue from The Godfather and Sweet Smell of Success. Not difficult with things you've seen 10 or 15 times (or more--a friend recently asked me how many times I'd seen the first two Godfathers, and the best estimate I could come up with was "some percentage of my life"). But when it comes to something I've seen once, as soon as a few days have passed, forget it--specifics start to blur into overall impressions. Even with the Lila Lipscomb scene from Fahrenheit, I had to e-mail three friends to check that my memory of Moore hugging her was correct (none of whom was 100% sure, so I hope I didn't invent that scene).
Mayor of the Sunset Strip: I really didn't know a lot about Rodney Bingenheimer before seeing this, even though he comes out of a world I know very well. I've had his Rodney on the ROQ compilation for years, which is mostly pretty useless from what I remember. (I'm looking at it right now: the Crowd, David Microwave, the Simpletones, the Vidiots, the Wigglers...who are these people?) Other than that, he's always been first and foremost the guy who the Angry Samoans vilified in their great "Get Off the Air": "Glitter rock and Bowie's cock/Are his idea of new-wave rock!" (The Samoans' Mike Saunders, an occasional contributor to Radio On, still ridicules Bingenheimer every chance he gets.) So I had Bingenheimer fixed to a specific moment in time, and was completely unaware of his rather amazing Rupert Pupkin/Zelig-like presence through three decades of pop history. I didn't like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind nearly as much as you guys or everybody else, in part because I find Charlie Kaufman's weirdness a little forced. I don't think Kaufman could ever come up with a more bizarre concept than Bingenheimer's entry-point into show business: he served as Davy Jones's double in The Monkees, which is kind of like signing on to play the shadow of a shadow. (Later on in the film, Kato Kaelin turns up--it's a movie filled with Zeligs.)
The sequence where Bingenheimer starts popping up in the background of all these iconic '60s clips, singled out by a little superimposed arrow each time, was the funniest, most inexplicably sublime thing I saw all year. I loved the music throughout, and (the trickier part) loved how director George Hickenlooper made use of the songs he chose. The last 10 minutes was somewhat pat--Bingenheimer travels to England to spread his mother's ashes--but his mom's centrality to the kind of person he was had been established earlier, so I thought the sequence was justified. I wouldn't say I came away from the film exactly liking Bingenheimer, but neither did I find him sad or creepy. I'm not sure what I think of him, which is not a bad place for a documentary to leave you.
Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry: George Butler, Going Upriver's director, was upfront about the fact that he's a longtime friend of Kerry's, so between that relationship and the timing of the film's release in the months leading up to the election, there's no getting around the fact that this is partly a 90-minute campaign commercial. But only partly, because the footage is there and speaks for itself, some of which made me wonder how any American, given a chance to see this film, could come to the conclusion that you'd feel better about your country (and therefore, I believe, about yourself to a certain extent) knowing that George Bush was installed in the White House rather than Kerry. To single out one example from many, when Kerry testifies before Congress in 1971, he achieves a level of eloquence and thoughtfulness that's almost unimaginable for guy in his 20s in that setting. You saw a little of that in the debates, enough that Bush not surprisingly looked small by comparison, but the young man of Going Upriver seemed a lot wiser and a lot more sure of himself than the presidential candidate. Another moment of no consequence whatsoever sticks out in my mind. As Kerry stands on the steps of Congress and addresses the Vietnam Vets Against the War (I saw Going Upriver with Scott and his wife Jackie), Scott and I looked over at each other simultaneously: there in the upper left-hand corner of the frame, taking pictures of the proceedings, you can clearly spot John Denver!
Sideways: I liked this so much, let me start with a few things I didn't like. Paul Giamatti's occasional hair-trigger transformations into Charles Bukowski (e.g., scampering down the hill with the wine bottle) didn't seem very convincing to me, or at least didn't fit the character; pouring the wine bucket over his head seemed especially movie-ish. I thought the transition between the night that Giamatti and Virginia Madsen almost sleep together (awkward pauses, missed signals) and the night that they do (Giamatti a picture of serene confidence) was clumsy; unless I missed something, there was no real explanation as to why he suddenly felt so much more comfortable around her. The ending, as usual, was too easy. And to get really nit-picky, I didn't think Thomas Haden Church's character would be familiar with A Confederacy of Dunces. Otherwise I loved it, related to it, and, a real rarity for me the last couple of years, actually cared how it was all going to sort itself out. I liked Giamatti, Madsen, and Sandra Oh fine, and I couldn't get enough of Haden Church; it might be a foolproof role that could be played by any number of actors, but he made me laugh almost every time he was onscreen. And I didn't think his character was just living a life of blissful oblivion; the part where he explains to Giamatti that he understands Giamatti's plight perfectly (I was going to put plight in quotation marks, but Brian beat me to it), but Giamatti doesn't appreciate his, resonated. Finally, the wine stuff was just so unexpectedly interesting, like getting a mini-documentary thrown in for free. I knew nothing about wine going into Sideways, other than that I get a bottle of Merlot from at least one parent every Christmas. I'll be sure to sneer next time.
My Architect: A Son's Journey: I remember thinking "excellent" after I saw this, but the truth is I've forgotten a lot of it almost a year later. I recall that all the old black-and-white footage of Louis Kahn--secretive, distant, imposing--reminded me, of all things, of Nicholson's stricken father in Five Easy Pieces: the scene where Nicholson tries to explain his life to the old man, who seems to will a kind of serene half-smile from somewhere deep inside his stroke, that's the effect that Kahn had on me. Kahn's son Nathaniel shapes his film as a cathartic coming-to-terms-with-the-past project, but I thought he seemed quite well-adjusted from start to finish, so I didn't necessarily accept that as a framework. (There was a big emotional scene on a yacht that seemed awkward.) But generally he keeps just the right amount of distance from a difficult subject that obviously couldn't be any closer to him, and he navigates his way through the pieces-of-a-puzzle side of his father's life very well. Strange bit of synchronicity: in both this and Bukowski: Born Into This, acute acne at an early age plays a part in shaping the course of an entire life.
End of the Century: Dee Dee is clownish but likeable, Joey's mostly absent, and Johnny is fascinating--the scene where he explains why he didn't visit Joey in the hospital, or, more specifically, why he wouldn't have wanted Joey to visit him if the situation had been reserved (which it would have been, had Joey lived), is as honest and as intelligent as Kerry's best moments in Going Upriver. Great archival clips, of course--the only footage I've ever seen of the Dolls is the same bit from Don Kirshner's Rock Concert that's always turning up, but directors Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia manage to unearth something different. I would liked to have seen a critic or two besides Legs McNeil interviewed (Bangs, if anything relevant exists; Marcus, definitely, explaining his ambivalence about the Ramones), and, by necessity, the musical side of the story undergoes simplification--Pleasant Dreams and Subterranean Jungle are good records. Truthfully, I had gotten pretty tired of the Ramones towards the end. It felt like they spent three or four years on the same ongoing farewell tour, Joey was always giving the same interview about how bad music had gotten except for whatever bands were wearing Ramones T-shirts at the time, and overall they just seemed kind of lost--prophets without honour, maybe, but lost nonetheless. I was surprised at how alive their story again seemed in End of the Century. That all three of the main participants are now dead obviously has a lot to do with that, but Fields and Gramaglia do a great job of wading through a lot of stuff and putting that story together.
A League of Ordinary Gentlemen: A perfect triangle: Walter Ray Williams, Jr., the unflappable square who does nothing of interest except win (anyone who watched the PBA in the '70s will remember Earl Anthony; that's Walter Ray); Pete Weber, the mercurial flake who doesn't seem unnerved by anything, except Walter Ray; and Wayne Webb, the sad-sack introspective who's barely hanging on. Bill James once wrote something about flaky baseball players--Joe Charboneau, Joaquin Andujar--that I won't even try to find, but essentially he said that flakes are fun for a while, and then they're gone; flakes don't end up in the Hall of Fame. Well, Weber's in the PBA Hall of Fame, with almost as many tour wins throughout his career as Williams, but when he gets the one thing he's been dying for, a shot at Walter Ray in the newly created "PBA World Championship," James's theory flashed across my mind and I felt like I knew exactly how it would all turn out. The five minutes that provided the answer was the most exciting thing I saw all year.
Before Sunset: I would have had this ranked higher soon after I saw it; it's flawless in its way, but a few months removed, its perfection seems limited. Michael Atkinson recently complained in the Voice's year-end about Sideways' conceit of pairing up Giamatti's schlub with glamorous Virginia Madsen. As I indicated above, I had problems with some of the same things, but I noticed Before Sunset on Atkinson's Top 10, which is surely a film that's one big conceit from start to finish. It's the conversation everyone dreams of (while walking around Paris, no less): no awkward pauses, no one says anything stupid or anything that isn't greeted by the other with anything less than wide-eyed interest, no jokes fall flat, and there's a perfect balance throughout between playful flirtation and deeper seriousness. Both participants are movie stars, and both of them look like it. Fine--it is what it is, and Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy pull it all off really well. But the idea that Before Sunset is a penetratingly honest film, and Sideways is just an entertaining road movie that might just as well star Hope & Crosby--an undercurrent I detect in some of the year-end stuff I've read, though maybe I'm just being protective of the film I prefer--strikes me as silly. I also think some of my feelings about Before Sunset were initially jumbled up with my feelings about the person I saw it with. (And there you have all the demonstration you need of why I liked Sideways better--43 years old, and I'm still passing notes in class.) Memorable: the song Delpy sings to Hawke (not the Nina Simone, but the one she strums on her guitar), which reminded me of Adam Sandler's breakup song in The Wedding Singer.
Word Wars: Anyone who reviewed this treated it as Spellbound for maladjusted adults, and that describes it pretty well. I'm only going to write a little here, because otherwise I'd need to write 10,000 words. It's loosely based on Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, which starts by following around a handful of circuit Scrabble players from tournament to tournament, and quickly shifts to Fatsis himself becoming enmeshed in this world, a severe addict with a borderline-expert rating. Amazing book. You'd think I would have paid heed to Fatsis's cautionary message, but soon after reading it, I stumbled onto the Internet Scrabble Club (where some of the same people who figure prominently in both book and film can be found playing), and within a matter of weeks I developed a consuming addiction of my own. And I do mean addiction in the fullest sense of the word--Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, Lou Reed in "Waiting for My Man," the whole nine yards. I'd sit in front of the computer at work till the custodians kicked me out at 11:00 p.m., then I'd stop at an internet café on the way home. After buying a computer last summer (I'd been without for a couple of years), I began the school year by playing till 4:30 in the morning, getting an hour of sleep, then heading off to work. (Ten hours later, I'd periodically drift off for a second or two driving home--scary). The hook was the rating; I got up near 1400 at one point, far from expert (1800-2000) but still good. I was able to stop when everything got so out of hand, I started embarrassing myself--berating and arguing with other players, resigning if I didn't like the way somebody played, demanding rematches over and over till I was able to beat someone who was beating me. (Losing is the best thing that can happen to you when you start to think you've got anything of a competitive nature figured out.) It was a bizarre six-month episode in my life that I still can't fully explain. Happily, I've forgotten a lot of the words that became second-nature to me during that time. "Atonies"--I seemed to lay that one every other game for 50+ points, so there's one I remember. The film...Word Wars gets at some of what I've just described, but it's too genial to go as deep as Word Freak does. Marlon Hill steals the movie; if you can reimagine Malcolm X as a world-class Scrabble player, you've got a good idea of Marlon.
Baadasssss!: I wish this had been funnier--Mario Van Peebles seemed unnecessarily grim as his father; even if accurate, I think a little more humour would have underscored what a crazy time this documents--but it held my attention the whole way, there's a pretty good feel for the period, and the recreation of scenes from Sweetback (which I've never seen), and their integration into the main body of the film, was seamless. (Hope I'm remembering correctly--the Sweetback scenes were reshot, right?) In any case, any film with Seinfeld's Uncle Leo ("Hello, Jerry!") has to be good; any film with Uncle Leo in a double-role is automatic Top 10.
Some quick commentary on three I left out.
Kill Bill was a big disappointment for me, but by round two I was resigned to more of the same. I love Reservoir Dogs, love the first third of Pulp Fiction, and thought Jackie Brown was a gratifying and unexpected step forward--everything that was great about its predecessors recast as an adult love story, with Sam Jackson going even farther than he did as Pulp Fiction's Jules (I recite his AK-47 speech all the time). After Jackie Brown, I thought Tarantino was capable of anything. Seven years later he's back at the video store, 19 years old again and rummaging through the $2.99 bin.
I Heart Huckabees (aka The Chronicles of Huckabee, aka The Life Aquatic With Huckabee Heart) I hated and admired at the same time. David O. Russell is really trying to get at something, and now and again there'd be a line or a moment where I thought, mistakenly, that he might start to pull everything together. Most of the time it's an ungodly mess. There was a certain kind of absurdist film in the late '60s and early '70s that Huckabees seems to come out of: Brewster McCloud, Head, Candy, Alex in Wonderland, Myra Breckenridge, Where's Poppa. Some I've seen, some I haven't. They were all ridiculed mercilessly in their day--it's surprising to see Huckabees get such generally good notices.
I liked Garden State--it lost the coin-toss for 10th spot on my list--but I can probably anticipate at least a couple of the things Brian hated about it. It's much too precious, which is a mood that breaks both ways for me--sometimes I respond to films that are seemingly held together by gossamer, as with Rushmore, sometimes not. Natalie Portman's chattering misfit is hard to take at first (she's basically reprising Liza Minnelli's role in The Sterile Cuckoo), but eventually she settles down. Overall, it's a film that ambles along without great distinction, but there are nice moments scattered throughout, and I'd agree with what seems to be the general consensus that Peter Sarsgaard is the best supporting player around right now.
I mentioned at the beginning that my list was provisional. You can count it as final, though I still hope to catch up with all of the following: Kinsey, We Don't Live Here Anymore, Primer, Collateral, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Shaun of the Dead, Anchorman, Star Spangled to Death, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Tarnation, and The Eternal Huckabee of Steve Zissou.
Phil
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From: Brian
Date: January 9, 2005, 11:09 PM
I wish I could have been more enthused about doing this. Lots of work and binge drinking sort of got in the way, and I'm not sure I'm proud of either of those things. Maybe next year, if invited back, it'll be a smoother ride for ol' Brian.
Okay, three things:
1) I watched Fahrenheit twice in the past couple days and I do not recall Mikey hugging Lila Lipscomb.
2) I don't think it's unusual for Jack to reference John Kennedy Toole. Yeah, he's the proverbial punch-drunk high school quarterback, but let's give him benefit of the doubt: a) He went to college, and b) Miles was his roommate. I'd like to think that--no matter how big a meathead you are--if you're rooming with such an intellectually obsessed person, I'm sure you'd pick up a few names of authors and paintings and what not.
3) Phil, if you like Garden State, you're not my friend anymore. Kidding. No, not really. You dismiss it as "precious" and that's true. But can you also say "painful" and "full of shit"? I'd believe Carradine's whole "five touch hearts explode" second grader masturbation trick before actually falling for this guy (Garden State's lead) having "problems." Pfft, I wish my problems were to cruise around aimlessly and whimsically in a nazi bike with Natalie Portman in my side car drinking coffee and beer to cool music while wearing a nifty t shirt. Makes me want to vomit more than the "Tiny Dancer" scene in Almost Famous.
Okay, now I'm rambling and I apologize. I really meant for this to be a quick little hello/goodbye email, but now I think I'm going to throw this to everyone else.
Brian
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From: Aaron
Date: January 15, 2005, 1:11 AM
Hey guys,
So, what have we--or I--learned from these e-mails?
I learned Phil has extremely high standards when it comes to competency. That Brian is a zombies-should-never-run kind of guy. And that, while audiences for movies are shrinking, the quality of movies might be increasing. Actually, there have always been good movies to go around. It's just when overpriced F/X blow-outs flop they make the loudest noise.
Reality TV is partly to blame. But so is the moviegoing audience. In the era of infotainment, every aspect of pop culture seems to be a mouse click away. No one seems to want to wait. When every little detail of the making of a movie is "leaked" to the press you almost feel as if you've already seen the movie by the time of its Friday night premiere. No wonder when a Sixth Sense, School of Rock, or a Sideways hits you can literally feel a rumble in the culture. What is missing from the movies is the element of surprise. (Good writing and directing are also missing, but that is a rant for another day.)
So, is there any hope for the movies? Yes, but the
responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the moviegoing public.
Audiences have been burned by so many crummy endings and crummier CGI
landscapes, that they've become defensive, even hostile, when entering the
dark. This is only natural since no one wants to keep getting their heart
broken by an art form they love. But I feel in order for the movies to achieve
greatness audiences must be willing to give themselves over to them. They must
engage and be willing to be challenged by ideas and emotions that don't
necessarily match up with their world views. To seek out the lesser-known movie
that doesn't open on 1200 screens on Friday night is to possibly discover a
buried treasure. The moment moviegoers let their defenses down and embrace
different kinds of movies is the moment they'll be happily surprised.
(Originally published in rockcritics.com)
