Wednesday, December 16, 2009

2006: Sexy Time

1. Children of Men

I've written plenty about how great Children of Men is, and I would have just put this one up here without comment if it weren't for a stunningly wrong-headed article Mike D'Angelo wrote for the Onion AV Club a few weeks ago. In it, D'Angelo condemns the scenes that Children of Men is best known for, the car ambush and refugee camp sequences that famously utilize long, uncut tracking shots. His central complaint is that the scenes are too "show-offy," and he can't watch them without thinking about the herculean acts of camera trickery required to pull them off. This is some straight-up bullshit. D'Angelo even admits that a non-film expert would probably not notice the lack of editing unless he pointed it out to them, so he's admitting that it's really his own issue. I like to think I know something about movies, and the first time I watched the car ambush scene, I only realized that the camera hadn't cut away until the very end of the scene. If Mike D'Angelo can't stop thinking about the technical aspects of filmmaking, that's his own hipster-ass problem. D'Angelo also challenges people who claim that the scenes are "realistic" by claiming that editing doesn't lessen realism because the human brain edits together images all the time. I don't know who's claiming that the tracking shots are realistic, but as far as I'm concerned, the lack of cuts doesn't contribute to greater verisimilitude, but to heighten the sense of tension. In an action sequence, every edit is a minuscule reprieve, a chance for the audience to catch it's collective breath and choose a point on which to focus their eyes. By using an unblinking camera eye, director Alfonso Curon doesn't give the audience any time to reorient themselves, thrashing their nerves raw by the time the camera finally turns away.

2. United 93

How the hell do you make a narrative film about the 9/11 attacks that isn't exploitative, mawkish or jingoistic? Hire Paul motherfucking Greengrass to direct it.

3. The Descent

Best horror film of the aughts.

4. The Prestige

This movie left me somewhat cold the first time I saw it, but over the years, I've come to appreciate the performances, the typically Nolan-esque puzzlebox structure and, most of all, the brilliant marriage of theme, subject matter and setting. It ends up making some interesting and ingeniously-presented points about film, performance and the impact of scientific progress on our collective imagination.

5. The Departed

This is sort of the anti-Prestige, in that I loved it when I first saw it, but once the sugar rush faded, some of the film's flaws became more glaring over time. But I still love the super-long opening sequence and most of the performances, especially Jack Nicholson, whose over-the-top shenanigans are a perfect compliment to his character's place in the world, rather than an exercise in failed hammery. OF COURSE he's ridiculously theatrical! He has to be! A mob boss has no legitimacy beyond the appearance of legitimacy, and he generates it be behaving like a swinging dick who deserves to be in charge.

Worst superhero film not produced by Roger Corman: Superman Returns. This pile of turgid mopery makes Ang Lee's Hulk look like Iron Man.

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Pan's Labyrinth. It was pretty good. Let's just not go nuts.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: The Last King of Scotland. Bugnuts Forest Whitaker or not, this movie is one of the most egregious "Africa-through-the-eyes-of-white-people-because-they're-the-only-ones-who-count" ever. Hotel Rwanda might not have been great, but at least it didn't require a love-struck Caucasian to make the Rwandan genocide meaningful.

Best "gearshift" moment in an action movie: the bizarre, extended child molester scene in Running Scared. This movie is mostly notable for being a particularly grimy example of the undercover cop genre, but halfway through, it achieves a certain left-field audacious brilliance. A runaway kid gets abducted by a creepily wholesome-seeming husband/wife pedophile team. He spends some time in their child-proof, escape-proof house, and, realizing that they're some bad folks, he tries to hide out in the bathroom to stall for time. While in the bathroom, a shadow creeps across the wall behind him that looks eerily like some kind of spider-legged monster. He doesn't notice it, and when he leaves the bathroom, it's never mentioned again. Random weirdness like that is a rare and beautiful thing.

Best awful Nicholas Cage performance: Given the fact that Nick Cage has exclusively trafficked in awful performances ever since winning an Oscar (with the aforementioned exception of Adaptation) , there's a fuck-ton of competition for this award. And yet, The Wicker Man is the hands-down winner here. He actually yells "No! Not the bees! Not the bees!" when he's not punching women in the face. The movie is actually pretty dull until the last twenty minutes...but oh, what a twenty minutes!

Best performance by a otherwise boring old British lady: Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal.

Genuinely effective Clint Eastwood-directed sequence: the grenade suicide scene, Letters from Iwo Jima. As I've written before, Eastwood is usually so overly-fussy and somber in his composition that it's impossible to evoke genuine emotion. But when the scared Japanese soldiers reluctantly (very goddamn reluctantly) kill themselves in their cave in Letters from Iwo Jima, the tight focus on the character's eyes tells a tragic and complex story that second-hand WWII legends about Japanese soldiers who refused to be taken prisoner could never convey.

Line of the Year: "I'ma scissor kick you in the back of the head, Chip! I'm all hoped up on Mountain Dew!" --Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

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