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LOST in TRANSLATION (Sophia Coppola, 2003): "Lost in Translation" is the kind of movie that needs a trial attorney, or at least a defensive filibuster, whenever it comes up in conversation. Its badge has grown a little worn since its release and its fanbase has waned concurrent with the rise of Scarlett Johansson's career. But in 2003, Johansson was still the "Ghost World" apple of cinephiles' eyes, and—say what you will about her ability elsewhere—she goddamn works as Charlotte, and she's eternally Charlotte to many who saw the film in 2003 and resisted the ensuing backlash with loyal repeat viewings. ('Lost' is, for some of us, the definition of a comfort movie thanks to its transformative ambience, urban eye-candy, and shadows velvety enough to blot out a bad day—to press into for relief.) And if Bill Murray has built a latter career—with the help of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch—on Bob Harris's wry kind of dial-tone, we should also forgive his own lack of range and concentrate on the movie at hand. Sofia Coppola chose a collection of one-notes to people her Tokyo love-letter—her little atelier piece with gargantuan atmosphere—but she chose them well, chose richly. It was, in fact, a masterstroke of casting. Giovanni Ribisi is suitably irksome as Charlotte's desperate-to-be-hip husband, and Catherine Lambert is suitably overbearing as a desperate-to-be-admired jazz singer. It really doesn't matter, to some of us, how any of these actors perform or comport themselves outside of this world, or whether or not Coppola herself was desperate-to-be-hip with her choice of venue and score—all terribly of the moment, at the time, as the Tokyo scenes in Assayas's "demonlover" can attest to (it's films with just such a tone that will strike our future selves as So Totally Aughts! three decades from now). These accusations are besides-the-point disingenuous (strangely resentful, even); it's worth peering past the style and reminding ourselves that there really is a film behind it all. This isn't the space for a filibuster, so there's no room here to move point by point through the script and mise-en-scene and argue why—on a technical level—this is, to date, Coppola's most substantial work. The best things about 'Lost' don't need explication, anyway, since they're felt rather than rationalized. Like Bob's enigmatic, unheard whispering at film's end, what's being said ultimately doesn't matter, so long as we—like Charlotte—experience that eye-squeezing wave of emotion as we hitch ourselves to her tether. RR
YI YI: A ONE and a TWO (Edward Yang, 2000): What a gift of a movie “Yi Yi” is. What a generous gesture, to process everything scary and new about our here and now, and still profess faith in our collective ability to adapt to it. Visions of the various ways our world is spinning out of control weren’t hard to come by this decade, especially among the master class of international auteurs. Jia, Assayas, Hou, Tsai—all vital voices, all deeply concerned about what the future holds for all of us. Yet how many of them stared down the barrel of our disconnected, displaced, techno-obsessed new millennium and managed to muster a measure of genuine hope? Edward Yang did. Released on the precipice of Y2K, his final film didn’t just encapsulate the decade’s big thematic concerns—questions of memory and modernization, the changing present and the immutable past—it anticipated them. “Things aren’t really so complicated,” says one of the director’s wounded souls, returning from a fruitless spiritual journey to find the big, existential questions less pressing than they seemed before. By Yang’s estimation, though we lose our center of balance sometimes, there’s an internal grace and logic that snaps us back into place, one not unlike the airtight structural integrity of the universe itself. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral—life and death in symmetrical simulacrum—“Yi Yi” follows an extended family over the course of one up and down year, twelve months of triumphs and follies. The jagged arcs of these restless relatives are constantly intersecting and mirroring one another, Yang achieving a kind of equilibrium in crosscutting pursuits of happiness. In a munificent act of parallel montage, a tentative courtship becomes entwined with a tender reunion, first love and rekindled romance in dichotomous dialectic. (It’s the entire emotional spectrum of “Before Sunset,” collapsed into five rapturous minutes.) By its very design, “Yi Yi” clamors to be processed as microcosm, yet the film never feels schematic—it’s populated by too many multi-faceted people, imperfect folks we might recognize at our own gatherings of kin. One of them is a little boy with a camera, a budding artist who wants to show the world what it can’t see for itself, the proverbial other side of things. He is Yang’s clearest onscreen surrogate, yet I see the filmmaker, who passed away a few short years after finishing this swan song, in the face of another. An old woman stirs from a great slumber to expend her final breaths on a comforting embrace. Yang offers all of us the same kindness—his autumnal farewell is a parting favor and a consolatory graze, a promise that life is hard but things will work out. Facing a new, even more uncertain decade, “Yi Yi” is still here for all of us, an affirmation at once timely and timeless. AAD
NO COUNTRY for OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007): “No Country for Old Men” is an elegant powerhouse that cultivates a trio of iconic southwestern male personas through quintessential storytelling. The three—a cowboy, a psycho, and a sheriff—lead each other, in that order, on a classic film noir chase where the personalities ricochet as much as the flying bullets. Llewelyn Moss is a sharp-tongued but honest everyman living on the fringes. Anton Chigurh is the incarnate of the grim reaper in a pageboy haircut and polyester pants. Our moral center, Ed Tom Bell, is a world-weary lawman whose disappointment in human nature fills a hole that was once probably filled with youthful optimism. Joel and Ethan Coen create a fountain of character through tightly controlled scripting and visual ingenuity from the simplest of tropes. Although 'No Country' is tinged with a sardonic humor that is classic Coens, the snarky superficial caricatures that often pepper their films are cast aside for more understated nuances. The Coens’ literary prowess balloons under the auspices of Cormac McCarthy, as the directors are able to nurture subtlety and craft from the pages of a stripped-down novel like few others. The result is a taught thriller conscious of a world filled with brutality and misery. In the end, Llewelyn and Chigurh were merely coin tosses in the life of Tommy Lee Jones's Ed. The escapade has reaffirmed his powerlessness despite his best intentions. His only hope for personal absolution is a compromise, poetically summed up by his brother: “All the time you spend tryin' to get back what's been took from ya', mores goin' out the door. After 'while, you just have to try and get a tourniquet on it.” Ed's tourniquet is retirement. “No Country for Old Men” ends with an old man caught between vulnerability and death—the purgatory of an examined life near its end, a moving soliloquy for a nihilistic ride. KS
DOGVILLE (Lars von Trier, 2004): When Quentin Tarantino rattled off a list of twenty favorite films made since he started directing, “Dogville” made a head-turning appearance. Tarantino said of Lars von Trier's creation that it's "one of the greatest scripts maybe ever written for film and I actually think if he'd done it on the stage, he would've won a Pulitzer prize." Maligned by many critics, heralded as a masterpiece by others, “Dogville” is undeniably the Danish writer/director/provocateur's most ambitious achievement to date. Using only a darkened soundstage marked off with the outlines of homes and streets, a scattering of props, a handful of actors, and a biting narration read by John Hurt, von Trier translates the intimate vitality of a stage play to the silver screen. “Dogville” traces the tragic tale of Grace, a woman on the run who seeks refuge in a dangerously small town in 1930s America. Nicole Kidman brings a nimble delicacy to the role of a masochistically merciful runaway adapting in disturbing ways to the demands of the townspeople around her. A self-appointed civic spokesman, Tom—potently captured with a halting blankness by Paul Bettany—is Grace's misguided advocate. The first installment in an unfinished trilogy (sister film “Manderlay” set off its own depth charges, but was a lesser work in all aspects), “Dogville” has been called an indictment of everything from Denmark's immigration laws to Christian charity and the American way. The latter charge drew ire from US critics who howled that von Trier had never even set foot on their soil. Considering the plethora of checkered calling cards America has scattered across world history, those criticisms rang hollow. Yes, von Trier should be welcome to draw his own conclusions about the US of A's M.O., but, more pointedly, the societal critique in “Dogville” has an undeniably potent universality. While some consider von Trier to be nothing more than a sadistic prankster, his work is vital in that he challenges the medium of film as gruelingly as he tests our intellect and moral fiber. Love him or loathe him, we're better off with a watchdog like him at our backs. Because wherever there is vanity in morality, Lars will be there. Wherever there is inanity in policy, Lars will be there. And wherever there is cruelty in community, Lars will be there. LE
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson, 2001): Wes Anderson built the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his thirty-first year. Over the next decade, he attempted to relocate it to the high seas, to India, and, when those failed, to a stop-motion underground habitrail. Can you blame him? Speaking as a fan of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (fine films, all), I feel it's become almost impossible to discuss the importance of “The Royal Tenenbaums” to the past decade without likening Wes himself to a wayward Tenenbaum savant. His output expanded in scope and confidence exponentially from “Bottle Rocket” to “Rushmore,” then hit critical mass with this, his third feature. It's becoming ever apparent that Anderson will spend much of his career remodeling that glorious house on Archer Avenue with various pastiches. What's so striking about 'Tenenbaums' is that it’s clearly the work of an artist struggling to reach his potential, scarcely aware that he’s surpassing, in every indelible moment, his own high water mark. Deadpan delivery had become standard boilerplate by the time Bill Murray was cast as Steve Zissou, but there’s something messier about it here, something as exhilarating as Mordachai’s flight to the strains of “Hey, Jude.” Every subsequent viewing yields a new MVP. At first, it’s impossible to turn away from Gene Hackman’s tour de force in the autumn of his career, then you fall under the emo-sway of Paltrow and Wilson’s unrequited pas-de-deux, and now I find the middle-aged courtship of Danny Glover’s Henry Sherman and Anjelica Huston’s Etheline impossibly moving. Drunk on Welles, Salinger, and B-sides, Wes Anderson has created a family unit always in stasis, always there for us to return to, riches manifold and ever baring. JS
THERE WILL BE BLOOD (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007): "There Will Be Blood" is a masterpiece by any standard. Not just by Hollywood's blinkered measure and not just by the fickle measure of a particular culture or generation. Anderson's epic is for the ages, the first to emerge from an American studio in some time. If US critics and film associations tend to look no further than their own border for their annual Best Of lists—neglecting stronger films from afar with eye-rolling predictability—"There Will Be Blood," at least, stands the test of international perspective. Daniel Day Lewis's turn as an ambitious oilman may be Oscar bait, but it's grand, fustian, goosepimpling Oscar bait, and Anderson tempers his lead's (perfectly appropriate) excesses with non-Hollywood devices, like a 15-minute opening sequence devoid of dialogue that's destined for film school syllabi (alongside the safecracking sequence from "Rififi" and the photo-developing scene from "Blowup"). Anderson's privileging of visuals over exposition announces his arrival in the cinematic canon. After overrated starts, he's finally learned what the medium of film can uniquely achieve. He may have drawn inspiration from studio-system fare like "The Searchers," but his movie looks more like the lovechild of a Malick/Kubrick union than a conventional Ford piece. "There Will Be Blood" has a Golden Age pedigree, but its blazing derrick scene is framed by a Terrence Malick sky and its bowling-alley scene is shot and styled like a Stanley Kubrick interior—warm hues, gleaming symmetry and all. The movie has a Hollywood heart and the face of an outlier; it’s what great American filmmakers with lots of cash should be producing but rarely ever do. "There Will Be Blood" is an aesthetic triumph and a keen study of American mythmaking in several forms: economic, religious, and libertarian. With an Upton Sinclair story, an indispensable cast, a haunting landscape and a mesmerizing anti-hero, the film wastes none of its parts, a perfect blend of image and narrative. Soundtrack is also key; 'Blood' is what it is partly because of Jonny Greenwood's inventive score, which avoids the maudlin cues of John Williams and his ilk. Some have credited the film for its realistic hue but that's false praise—Anderson's study is pointedly surreal (especially in the above-mentioned scenes), a not-quite-real world overlaying a landscape made familiar through history and entertainment. RR
THE ASSASSINATION of JESSE JAMES by the COWARD ROBERT FORD (Andrew Dominik, 2007): All westerns, by nature if not design, are eulogies. The bustling, idealized backlots of Ford and Huston. The widescreen wild country of Leone. The tangled moral thicket of Eastwood. What they all have in common is a kind of romantic infation of American history, a wistful looking back. Even the most down and dirty of oaters (think Peckinpah or “Deadwood”) can’t help but treat the proverbial Old West with hushed and elegiac awe. Writer/director Andrew Dominik, an Aussie with his eye on our cultural creation myths, adopts that subtext as his chief subject in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” Its very title evoking a kind of retrospective fatalism, the film exists in a strange limbo between the distant, dreamlike haze of mythmaking and the nitty-gritty of precise period detail. Master cinematographer Roger Deakins blurs the edges of the frame line, as though history were being refracted through the imperfect lens of memory and hearsay. Meanwhile, a gravelly-voiced narrator fills in the margins with novelistic exposition. ‘Jesse James’ shows its hand early as a work of deliberate artifice, and yet, simultaneously, has there ever been a western this committed to verisimilitude, to capturing the way people actually talked and dressed and behaved in the so-called Old West?
Like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Millennium Mambo,” this is a film that seems to occupy several tenses at once, both existing within and looking back upon its half-imagined, half-remembered world. That bifurcated vantage point colors the characterizations, too. Emerging from the locomotive steam like an apparition, Jesse James is a flesh-and-blood icon, man and legend rolled into one enigmatic whole. In the flat-out performance of his career, Brad Pitt plays the infamous outlaw like a paranoid rock-star of the 19th century, drunk on his own celebrity yet haunted by the dawning realization of his inescapable mortality. Pitt offers a few telling glimpses into this aging desperado’s increasingly unstable psyche, but we observe him mostly through the craven, star-struck eyes of Bob Ford (Casey Affleck, in an indelibly terrific turn), who’s drawn like a moth to the fading flame of his lifelong hero. The fates of Bob and Jesse are linked from the beginning, two gears in an infernal machine, and as the film builds slowly but surely to its inevitable conclusion, embellished hindsight gives way to the colder, sturdier gaze of hard history. Dominik conflates the slow death of Ford’s innocence—a disavowal of his hero worship, a mirror image of James’s own disillusionment—with America's gradual awakening into a new era, one more invested in tearing down idols than building them up. Equal parts tone poem, probing character study and funeral march into the post-modern future, ‘Jesse James’ implies that the true casualty of its oft-told tale is the Old West itself—its myths, its heroes, and all of its phony romantic promises. AAD
ETERNAL SUNSHINE of the SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, 2004): You work a clerk position on the 7½th floor of a nondescript building. You push aside a file cabinet and tumble into the mind’s eye of a ripe vessel. Is the world you see a lilting dream-life of benevolent mysteries, of kindred spirits awaiting celebration and the rejuvenation of the soul? Or is it a Byzantine maze of ironic hardships, a Kafkaesque drudge fraught with distance and misunderstandings, where your only respite is found in masturbation? Film is singular. Filmmaking is collaborative, a bringing of Whos and Whats to the table. I don't know much about Sven Nykvest, but there’s little doubt in my mind of the common ground between he and Bergman, a veritable Swede & Sweder of Nordic wit. There are few figures I could think less aligned for communion than Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. Love, death, dreams… I have to believe that the manner in which these two men prepare a bowl of cereal is seismically different, with Michel taking frequent breaks to color the walls with crayons while Charlie pauses mid-milk pour to cry in a corner. Kaufman wrote “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” as a cautionary fable about lovers who erase each other from their memories for decades on end, subsequently losing years of their lives. Gondry wanted a hipster “La Ronde” of love dying to be reborn. Kaufman sees abstract oblivion where Gondry sees forgiveness in the merry loop.
If the gulf between creators is as wide as that between Björk and Brecht, so too is that wedged between Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski, who epitomize the Facebook generation’s need for validation by way of amendment and erasure. The Aughts have been defined as much by mass interconnectedness as individual anonymity. Twitter, Tumbler, Facebook—peddlers of snark and innocuous minutiae all. In an age of incessant networking, do we truly connect? Ostensibly, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” takes place some time after Rain Dogs, but it reads as the love story of the decade. Joel’s sketchbook musings are not unlike status updates, while Clementine’s shifts in hair color announce a change in profile or a Google search result about who does have that plum job of naming hair dyes?
‘Eternal Sunshine’ made it cool to fall in love with a movie and in a movie again. Every few years, a film comes along that quenches some generational thirst for romantic fulfillment—think "Chasing Amy" or "When Harry Met Sally"—but they’re almost never this good. The exception may be "Annie Hall," but while Woody Allen’s epic features a protagonist too static to change with his paramour, Gondry’s film presents a world of people so plugged-in to salacious conveniences that they’re not given the chance to even remember they exist. And yet, still they meet in Montauk. Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman (and, in this most collaborative of films, Jon Brion, Ellen Kuras, Beck Hansen, and, playfully inverting personas, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) believe that the heart overwhelms the whims of the mind. In a sublimely powerful gesture, the love shared by Joel and Clementine transcends technology, allowing them to reconnect in person. And, in spite of evidence presented that they are not compatible, their shared moments suggest a rollercoaster too enticing for any of us to pass by. Message: get the hell offline! Okay? Okay. Change your heart. JS
MULHOLLAND DR. (David Lynch, 2001): David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." has been called crazy, abstract, challenging, and, by those still struggling to grasp its warped logic, deeply confusing. It's all those things, to be sure, but what makes it Lynch's most enduring film is the way the disparate pieces of its jigsaw puzzle narrative have a way of coming together into something that resembles clear logic. Maybe not on viewing number one or two or three, but by four? Hell, you're well on your way to understanding Lynch's madcap vision--to discovering why she did that, why he shot her, why that room is red and that other one is blue, and what that creepy gremlin of a greed-monster is doing behind that 50s-style café. I won't provide you with too many of those answers here, because the greatest thrill of "Mulholland Dr."—beyond its titillating lesbian sex freak-outs, its noir procedural plot, and the suspension-wracked opening of doors, curtains and boxes to see what lies on the other side—is in putting the puzzle together yourself, standing back and admiring your own triumph of deduction.
The film is a dream. I think I can say that at this point, right? It winds its way through purposefully-induced nightmare and the grim reality of waking life, as seen through the blinkered perspective of one very jealous and disturbed woman. That woman is Betty/Diane (Naomi Watts), and when we first meet her, she's a starry-eyed starlet embarking on a different kind of dream—moving to the City of Angels, where she imagines pleasant evenings of kicking back in a spacious apartment with a cup of Lynch's finest coffee, leafing through scripts and fielding acting gigs. But Betty's quaint ambitions are seriously complicated when she arrives at her new abode to find a dark-haired siren hiding in her shower. The woman calls herself Rita (Laura Herring), a name she gleans from a poster of Rita Hayworth hanging on the bathroom wall. She hasn’t the faintest clue about her real identity, and she scarcely remembers the specifics of a brutal car crash that put her in this state of amnesia just the night before. Vexed by her new roommate's distress, Betty dons the role of naive gumshoe, intent on cracking the case of Rita's origin. In doing so she drops deep down into Lynch's pitch black rabbit hole of funhouse mirrors and misleading illusions—"no hay banda," indeed.
Every scene the director orchestrates—from the Cowboy's loopy interrogation to the Club Silencio set-piece featuring a magician (Lynch's alter ego) revealing the secrets of his magic—has its place in the overall narrative's framework. Lynch's films are not mere non-sequiturs, and though they unspool with abstract rhythms and make room for idiosyncratic diversions, a rock-solid logic informs their progression. You just have to work a bit at cracking the code (or cracking the box, as it were). What makes 'Mulholland' more than the sum of your typical big-reveal movie is that the "twist" arrives—boldly—with a good forty minutes of film left to wade through. This isn't "Memento" or "The Usual Suspects," and it certainly isn't "Fight Club"—those films lose their hold over you the minute you become aware of their gimmick. There's a greater density to Lynch's vision, one that rewards repeat viewings. That disorienting confusion you felt the first time you descended into this mad world? That might pass. But I've found things stranger, more abstract and more challenging each time I've made my way through the winding maze that is "Mulholland Dr." SCM
IN the MOOD for LOVE (Wong Kar-wai, 2001): “Feelings can creep up on you,” says Mr. Chow to Mrs. Chan. “I thought I was in control.” Movies are like that, too. You spend your nights watching them and your days thinking about them. You learn the language: the effect of this cut, the function of that shot, how each technique is supposed to make you feel. You see the great works and you break them down, dissembling them piece by piece. You understand them, inside and out, and their power over you shrinks a little. Some of that mystery, that great excitement, is gone. You think you have them all figured out. And then one comes along and cuts straight to your core, humbles you, reminds you why you fell in love with them in the first place. I think “In the Mood For Love” crept up on everyone like that. What about it spoke so elementally, so universally to us film lovers? Was it the sheer sexiness of the thing? The rhythmic sway of Maggie Cheung’s hips? The smoldering, penetrating allure of Tony Leung’s stare? Wong Kar-Wai, that master lamenter of the Far East, could create magnetism between mannequins. But with these two on board? They were the stoic romantics we all wish we could be: unflappably cool, with elegant poise just barely masking the storm of emotion raging behind their eyes. Restraint might have been the great bugaboo of their false start affair, but goddamn if the two didn’t make inhabitation look good. And in an age where the art of seduction had slipped quietly into near-extinction, Wong made a prolonged case of blue balls look as erotic as that voracious sex scene in “Mulholland Drive.”
“In the Mood For Love” was made for romantics masquerading as cynics. It cuts through our defenses, wins us over, breaks our heart. It’s got moves. This is not the great romance of the decade. It’s the greatest unfulfilled romance of all time. How many love stories have each of us conjured in our mind? How many could or should have been lovers have we passed in the night? How many missed connections, how many misleads, how many ones that got away before we even had them? These numbers could approach infinity. Wong plucks just one of them out of the ether and inflates it to mythic proportions. Neighbors Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan discover that their spouses are cheating on them with each other—how’s that for a meet cute? The shared burden of betrayal and loneliness draws them together, just as they vow “not to be like them.” With drunken master Christopher Doyle in tow, Wong sets out to render palpable both the subjective heartspace and objective social sphere these would-be soul mates navigate. When Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan pass each other on the stairs, Wong shifts into hypnotic slow-mo, staging the close encounter as a monumental stirring of forces. (It’s love at first brush.) He confines them within cramped architecture and rigid frame-line, and he often shoots them through some manner of translucent screen, suggesting near-invisible barriers between the two. There’s more intoxicating 1960s décor here than in a whole season of “Mad Men,” but what do such retro-sleek trappings do but reinforce a then and there intolerant to this budding courtship? Few works in the whole history of cinema have more shrewdly and evocatively employed mise-en-scène.
Like vertical asymptotes, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan race forward in time, moving closer and closer but never converging. Their imperfect union goes unconsummated—ultimately, a rather potent metaphor for our own relationship with the cinema. "The past is something he could see but not touch," reads the penultimate line. So it goes with films, too, which command spectatorship but refuse total immersion. The great ones pull us in close, always teasing, always seducing, always pleading with us to get inside them. Like Maggie Cheung, we wanna run our hands over their surfaces, to feel their intangible textures, but that fourth wall is impenetrable. The best consolation is commiseration, and “In the Mood For Love”—a heartbreaker aimed at hearts devoted to the cinema—feels our pain in every one of its gloriously melancholic minutes. We should whisper its secrets into a hole and come back to them at the end of the next decade, when we’ll need such condolences anew. AAD
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[ Honorables .. 100-91 .. 90-81 .. 80-71 .. 70-61 .. 60-51 .. 50-41 .. 40-31 .. 30-20 .. 20-11 .. 10-1 ]
