Tuesday, December 15, 2009

2005: "You wanna know how I know you're gay?"

1. The Squid and the Whale

The most painfully accurate kid's eye view of divorce on celluloid. Also, one of the most painfully accurate views of childhood, period. There's none of the dewy-eyed nostalgia that most movies about kids display, where aging filmmakers gaze back to a simpler time in their lives. Noah Baumbach channels all of the raw nerves, confusion and shame that tend to fade in our memories over time.

2. Syriana

I don't care that nobody seems to understand the plot. I don't care that it's didactic. I don't care that "serious people" find the geopolitical analysis puerile. I love Stephen Gaghan's Syriana because it's the only American film to seriously and thoughtfully engage with the "war on terror." Every other Hollywood product either exploits the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an easy background for action scenes or to make rather banal points about the traumatic effects of war on those who fight them. Syriana, on the other hand, examines the moral implications of our oil-based economy with deftly intertwined stories of terrorists, CIA officers and sheiks. There's just enough time spent teasing out the characters to make you care about them, with the rest of the running time devoted to the dispiriting and wholly inevitable bureaucratic machinations that happen when you run your country on a rapidly diminishing resource that largely rests under the sands of one of the world's most unstable regions. No bullshit about defending freedom, or how tough it is to be a solider, or other airheaded pablum; just a serious wrangle with a bloody, amoral foreign policy and the chest-thumping pieties that accompany it.

3. Cache

Michael Haneke's tightly controlled frames, audacious subject matter and mastery of atmosphere make his movies compulsively watchable, but they're also rarely enjoyable in any traditional sense. He's too bent on punishing his audience for having the temerity to seek film entertainment in the first place. Even with the stately pacing, colonial allegory and moments of upsetting horror, Cache still stands as the closest thing Haneke has made to a crowd pleaser.

4. The Constant Gardener

This is sort of the anti-Syriana, in that it takes on global economic and political issues and filters them through an intensely personal prism. Fernando Meirelles' follow-up to City of God, based on one of John Le Carre's post-Cold war novels, Constant Gardner deals with the merciless logic of global capitalism while also telling the supremely affecting story of stuffed-shirt diplomat Ralph Fiennes, who falls in love with his activist wife only after she's murdered by a pharmaceutical company. Fiennes' grief blooms in tandem with the revelation of the company's crimes, culminating in an ending that manages to simultaneously offer a stem-winding denunciation of the exploitation the Third World and a beautiful tribute to Fiennes' failed relationship.

5. A History of Violence

A lot of people posit this movie as some kind of allegory for American foreign policy. I guess. For me, it works more as a family psychodrama, a movie about the limitations of romantic intimacy and the inherent contradictions of raising children who avoid their parents sins. David Cronenberg's direction is his usual deadpan violence, minus the surrealism (unless William Hurt's loopy turn as a gangster counts as surreal), and Viggo Mortensen has never been better as the docile cafe owner with a bloody past.

Worst theatrically released horror film I've ever seen: Boogeyman. Truly worse than Hitler.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: Crash. What the fuck was up the praise for this movie? Was it some elaborate, Borat-style prank on the public carried out by rogue Academy members and film critics.

Best zombie-scene in a non-zombie movie: the car riot scene in War of the Worlds. Spielberg's allegorical treatment of 9/11 has a lot of scenes of people in distress banding together to survive, but one memorable scene where fear drives ordinary citizens to frenzy and violence. When Tom Cruise's family drives their pilfered minivan into a crowd of fleeing refugees, the previous inhabitants of suburban New Jersey descend on them like a pack of ravenous undead. It's a sobering depiction of the chaos that sleeps below the surface of orderly society.

Insane and insanely memorable scene in otherwise forgettable action movie: Tom Waits as the stigmatic preacher in Domino. Domino is remembered, if at all, as Tony Scott's single most visually incoherent movie, but there's a sequence at the end, scripted by Donnie Darko mastermind and all around nutter Richard Kelly, that stands out for it's batshittery. Before sexy bounty hunter Domino Harvey and her motley gang head off to their doom in Las Vegas, they stop in the desert for a chat with a crazed prophet who happens to be bleeding from his palms. Of course he's played by Tom Waits, and of course he spouts a bunch of gibberish about destiny, and it almost redeems the rest of the movie, which is basically a migraine-delivery system.

Most genuinely shocking moment in a horror film: the scene in the garage, Wolf Creek. I hesitate to write too much about this scene in case people haven't watched it, because if you don't know what's coming, the moment is a gut-punch of surprise. Seriously.

Most ridiculous murder in film history: Christian Slater killed by liquid nitrogen in Mindhunters. Must be seen to be believed. He doesn't just get frozen by a tank of liquid nitrogen that's knocked over by a ludicrously complicated Rube Golberg contraption, but he falls over and smashes into a bunch of Slater-chunks.

Line of the Year: "Why in pluperfect fuck would you pee on a corpse?" --Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

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