Two Lists From Film Comment

Picked up the new issue of Film Comment yesterday, and they have two lists I thought might spur discussion. First is the Readers’ Poll of Best Films of 2011. I’ve starred those films that did not appear on the critics’ list. Understandably, the readers were more welcoming of mainstream fare:

1. The Tree of Life
2. Melancholia
3. Drive*
4. Hugo
5. Midnight in Paris
6. The Artist*
7. Certified Copy
8. The Descendants
9. Meek’s Cutoff
10. A Separation
11. A Dangerous Method
12. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*
13. Shame
14. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
15. Take Shelter
16. Moneyball*
17. Le Havre
18. Martha Marcy May Marlene*
19. The Skin I Live In
20. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo*

I’ve seen 15 of these (not seen: Certified Copy, Uncle Boonmee, Shame, Le Havre, The Skin I Live In).

Secondly, and more controversially, is their list of the “Worst Winners of Best Picture Oscars”

1. Crash
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. Chicago
4. Forrest Gump
5. A Beautiful Mind
6. Gladiator
7. American Beauty
8. Shakespeare in Love
9. Braveheart
10. Titanic
11. Driving Miss Daisy
12. Dances With Wolves
13. The Greatest Show on Earth
14. The King’s Speech
15. The English Patient
16. Amadeus
17. Around the World in 80 Days
18. Chariots of Fire
19. Gandhi
20. Mrs. Miniver

I have seen all but one of the Best Picture Oscar winners (except for Tom Jones). I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the compiler(s) of this list have not. The top 12 are all post-1990, and 17(!) of the 20 are post-1980, which means of the past 31 winners, more than half are on the top of the suckitude scale.

The section this list appears in is “Film Comment’s Trivial Top 20,” so I suspect there’s some kind of joke going on here (as with them leaving off Schindler’s List from the 20 Best Black and White films since 1970). That, plus snobbishness, as these are films that beat out the precious films that they thought deserved to win. To anyone who has seen all of the films, to suggest that Cimarron, Cavalcade, Broadway Melody, and The Great Ziegfeld are better than any of the 20 films above (except for The Greatest Show on Earth, which is indeed the worst) is ludicrous.

This is a case where the most recent has shoved out the old. It happens all the time in lists of great sporting events where the recent take precedence over the old, if only because those voting weren’t alive to witness the old ones. (Gabby Hartnett’s 1938  “Homer in the Gloamin’” never gets the respect it deserves).

When I finally catch up with Tom Jones, I’ll compile my own list of Best Picture winners.

The Worst Films of 2011

We’ve discussed the best of 2011, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about the opposite end of the spectrum. I haven’t seen as many 2011 releases as others here have but I’ve seen enough duds and disappointments to come up with the following list:

Most Overrated film (1) – The Descendants. Being a huge fan of Alexander Payne’s work, this film above all else was the film I was most looking forward to in 2011. But, despite all the critical praise it received, I found this to be a huge disappointment and easily his weakest film. The trend I sense in Payne’s work is that he’s moved away from the acute social satire and analysis that he was so good at and more blander Oscar bait type films. On that basis he’s been successful with two consecutive screenwriting Oscars but it’s made him a far less interesting filmmaker.

Most Overrated (2) & Boring Film – Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I don’t think I was out of step with critical and public opinion more in 2011 than this film. Lauded as being a blockbuster finally done with skill and intelligence, I saw virtually nothing in it that I liked. Having about 0.0001% of the intellectual interest of the original POTA, I found this perfunctory and uninteresting from the word go, with an incredibly dull ‘romantic’ angle. It’s far from the worst film I’ve seen at the cinema, but would be close to the most boring.

Most Overrated (3) – The Trip. This film had plenty of admirers. And I can’t deny that bits of this film are very funny and when Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s segment when they’re doing duelling Michael Caine impersonations is great. But as a whole film I found it rather hard to take. That’s perhaps in part because it wasn’t really a film, but just an edited down version of a TV series. It’s almost an anti-film in many ways, with no real plot to speak of and Brydon and Coogan playing themselves, but not really. More palatable if you watch the funny bits (like the Caine impersonations) on YouTube.

Most Overrated (4) – Bridesmaids. This one ticked off all the negative boxes of the modern mainstream Hollywood comedy – relies on ‘outrageous’ behaviour instead of wit for laughs, raucous elements cover up how conventional it all is, has no sense of comic timing, overlong by 20-25 minutes, has a lame ending, etc… It did have some laughs early, although the biggest laugh of all was that it got a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination.

Worst ending – Crazy, Stupid, Love. While the first half of this film was fairly entertaining, there was always a feeling of telegraphed phoniness about this film. But it really went downhill towards the end with increasingly hard-to-take sentiment and plot contrivances piling on top of each other. But it really fell apart with the school hall finale which managed to be implausiable, cringeworthy, sitcomish, sappy and unfunny all at once.

Worst Film – I Don’t Know How She Does It. Basically a slogan (aren’t corporate working mothers great!) that somehow became a movie. Virtually no narrative or plot to speak of with the only entertainment being wondering how such a good cast managed to be attached to this non-event. Earns extra demerits for employing the irritating device of having segments where characters talk to the camera in a pseudo-documentary style.

The Best Films of 2011

The unusually weak awards season and disappointing Oscar slate overshadow the fact that it was really a pretty good year overall. The big prestige year-end films were almost all disappointing, but there was a period earlier in the fall when it seemed like there were great films being released every week. The top 7 all got 10/10 ratings from me, with the 8th being really really close, and I actually had to leave several 9/10-rated films off the list.

As usual, some of these are technically 2010 films, having premiered in festivals or overseas. But as far as I can tell, they were all commercially released in the US for the first time in 2011.

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
Iranian director Kiarostami makes his first European film, set in Tuscany and starring William Shimell and Juliette Binoche as a writer and one of his fans, respectively. The movie seemed to get a reputation as a stuffy art film over the summer, but what struck me the most was how playful it is, with an unsolvable mystery at its core. The relationship between the two leads gets more elusive and unsettling as the film progresses, but I rather enjoyed Kiarostami’s gamesmanship and the thoughtfully oblique way that he approaches the film’s themes. Plus, it’s beautifully shot and wonderfully acted.

2. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
It’s interesting that my two favorite films this year were both by Iranian directors, although A Separation is actually set in Iran. It’s about an affluent middle-class couple in the process of divorce when the husband finds himself in legal trouble. This is an impeccably written and acted film, and I especially admired how the alliances between the characters in the film are constantly in flux as new facts and dimensions of the case are revealed. This challenges the audience, preventing their sympathies from settling too easily and allowing us to see the case in a much more complex way than we probably would in a more conventional film. It very deservedly won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, probably the highlight of this year’s ceremony as far as I was concerned.

3. The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski)
Probably the most visually unique film I saw this year. Polish director Lech Majewski uses digital effects to bring Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Procession to Calvary to life. Rutger Hauer plays Bruegel, who discusses his design of the painting, while the film imagines the lives of some of the people in the film. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie quite like this, and I found it brilliantly imaginative, both in an artistic and humanistic sense.

4. Bellflower (Evan Glodell)
Evan Glodell’s Bellflower is one of the most fully-realized American debut films in years, set in a modern Los Angeles that’s been given a stifling, post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Glodell and Tyler Dawson star as two twentysomethings mostly preoccupied with building their own flamethrower, so that their gang can dominate after the apocalypse. Glodell is a rare first-time director who has full control of tone, especially impressive because the film ranges from a sweet, slightly dopey romance to full-on doom and violence. What also struck me is how well Glodell knows his characters and sees their narcissistic self-loathing. It’ll be interesting to see where Glodell’s career goes from here, since there’s a definite Richard Kelly vibe being given off here and the risk of getting stuck repeating himself seems very real. But this is a masterpiece, right out of the gate.

5. 3 (Tom Tykwer)
Tykwer is a director that I’ve always admired, but I’ve also often found myself frustrated at his lack of narrative development and cohesion. Here he adopts a different strategy than I’ve seen from him, in this story about a fortyish couple who are both having an affair with the same man. I deeply appreciated how Tykver disregards the usual melodramatic hysterics of the situation, sparing us the jealous arguments and childish recriminations that would be typical of a story like this. I also especially admired the performance by Sophie Ross, although all three lead actors are very good. Most interestingly, Tykwer turns the movie’s narrative into a sort of stream-of-consciousness musing on any number of subjects, including disease, genetics, medical ethics, art, and even current world events and politics. It’s actually a very radical film, not just in its adult approach to relationships and infidelity, but in the way it integrates profound political and cultural debates into everyday life.

6. Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
I’ve been touting Michael Shannon for years, and he’s phenomenal here as Curtis, a man experiencing terrifying apocalyptic dreams. One of the more thoughful aspects of the film is that Curtis is only too aware of his family’s history of mental illness, so he knows that whether the dreams are actual prophecies or not, they’re harbingers of ill fortune for him one way or the other. Writer-director Nichols is able to integrate the dreams into the narrative in a clever and sensitive way; it’s easy to imagine a lesser film where the dreams are played for exploitation purposes, but here they’re a useful window into Curtis’s mental anguish, as he worries about his friends and family abandoning him in the face of his illness. Nichols also made a terrific film several years ago called Shotgun Stories, also starring Shannon, and with this film he solidifies his status as one of America’s best new filmmakers.

7. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
Like Take Shelter, this film is built around a dominating lead performance, this time by Elizabeth Olsen as Martha, a young woman just escaped from a secretive cult. And like Bellflower, it’s an extremely impressive debut film. Writer-director Durkin structures the film as a series of flashbacks between Martha’s time with the cult and her current stay with her sister and the sister’s fiance. He ingeniously linkes the stimuli at the sister’s house with Martha’s memories with the cult, producing a disorienting effect that emphasizes her confusion as she readjusts to societal norms and her struggle to maintain her identify after years of it being systematically stripped away. This is a terrific psychological thriller and character study.

8. Incendies (Denis Villaneuve)
When their mother dies, two siblings learn to their surprise that not only is their father still alive, they have a brother that they never knew about. That’s the premise of this family drama and political thriller from Canada, which received an Oscar nomination in 2010 for Best Foreign Film. Their journey takes them to the Middle East, where they learn about their mother’s ordeals during a civil war decades ago. This is a genuinely unpredictable film, and structured so that the audience sometimes knows more than the characters do and at other times are in the dark as much as they are. My only complaint is that director Villaneuve occasionally loses sight of his characters in favor of the action, short-changing one minor character especially in a way that I found peculiarly thoughtless. Overall, though, this is a very gripping story and profound statement on the nature of civil war.

9. Beginners (Mike Mills) (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
I admit that this movie looked like potential trouble from its trailer, which showed two emotionally withdrawn characters engaging in a tentative romance and a dog with subtitled thoughts. It ended up being a wonderful surprise, though, and won Christopher Plummer an expected but deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The film nicely balances two story threads, the first being the aforementioned emotionally tentative romance between Ewan McGregor and Mélanie Laurent, and the second being Plummer’s revealing himself as gay after living his whole life in the closet. Without calling much attention to itself, the movie is an incisive critique of the way that society’s stigma against gays fractures families and inflicts emotional scars on children that last even into adulthood. At the same time, though, Plummer’s character is able to find happiness and is able to provide an example of a positive relationship for his son late in life. It’s not a didactic film, but it is a quietly and righteously angry one.

10. Another Earth (Mike Cahill)
The third debut feature film on this list, this film also marks the breakout performance by Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the film. It’s about a high-school senior who drinks too much at a graduation party and causes a deadly car wreck; on the same night, a new planet, later discovered to be a parallel version of Earth, appears in the sky. This is primarily a drama about loss, guilt and redemption, given a very poignant and delicate touch by Marling’s sensitive portrayal of Rhoda and William Mapother’s fine performance as the victim of her drunken driving. The shots of the second Earth in the sky appear throughout and are quite striking, and they invite the viewer to wonder along with Rhoda about what’s going on up there and if people are any happier than down here. Despite its sci-fi minimalism, this is a very ambitious film, and one that I felt was unfortunately ill-served by its mid-summer release.

Review: The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Back in late 2009 the English newspaper The Times announced its best 100 films of the decade. In response, Melbourne-based comedian and film buff Tony Martin wrote a column arguing that the list wasn’t a celebration of the strength of modern cinema, but a demonstration of its dismal decline.

The first film he provided as an example was the 2006 film directed by David Frankel ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ (coming in at No. 100). As the critical response had generally been very positive on its release and it got plenty of award nominations (mainly for Meryl Streep, including yet another Oscar nomination), when I got around to seeing it recently at the back of my mind I was wondering which perspective was the correct one.

The plot centres around young wannabe journalist Andy (Anne Hathaway). Struggling to find work after having moved to New York, she settles on a job as a personal assistant to the notoriously ruthless editor of fashion magazine ‘Runway’, Miranda Priestly (Streep). Initially Andy is way out of her depth in the fashion culture and is belittled by her boss and colleagues. But she adapts (including changing her own fashion style) and begins to make a success of her career there… but at the expense of her values, friends and relationship with her boyfriend.

While there are some pleasures to be had, overall TDWP is a major letdown; in almost every aspect it’s obvious with no hint of texture of subtlety. If you read the plot outline above and guessed how it would turn out based on the most predictable outcome you would probably be 100% accurate.

But it isn’t so much the predictably of the narrative that kills it, it’s the detail. For example, to demonstrate how much of a fish-out-of-water Andy is in the fashion culture early on we get clunky scenes of people belittling her, with plenty of eye-rolling on display. And to convey how much she’s struggling at the demands of her job, we see drearily lazy montages of her rushing around the city doing Miranda’s errands ranging from the inevitable rushing around with cups of  instant coffee (and of course spilling them) to the even more inevitable being dragged aroundand barely able to keep her feet while walking several dogs at once.

It’s a similarly cliché-filled zone for Andy’s personal life. We get the stock scene at the beginning (before she’s employed by ‘Runway’) where she’s out to dinner with her best friends and boyfriend to illustrate how well her personal life is going, culminating in them clinking their champagne glasses together (the sort of thing you often see in trailers). And then when her professional life begins to take precedence over her personal one, we get telegraphed scenes like where a friend has a confrontation with her at a public event about how she’s changed. And of course, it culminates in a work event taking precedence over an important personal event (missing her boyfriend’s birthday celebration), which is tediously conventional, right down to Andy bringing home a tokenistic birthday cupcake.

As well, the comments the film wants to make on the fashion industry are so obvious they venture into the banal territory. According to the filmmakers, the industry is full of backstabbing and bitchiness and people with self-absorbed, superficial attitudes. What a shock!

Only one scene – where Miranda points out to Andy that there is a genuine connection between the top-level fashion she deals with and the cheap clothes Andy’s wearing had something beyond the stereotypes and conventions to say about the fashion industry.

As has been so often the case during her career, Streep’s performance is a highlight of the film. As critics noted at the time, she doesn’t resort to conventional anger and shouting to convey the influence her character has; indeed, she never raises her voice at all during the movie. It’s the fact that she doesn’t have to show visible anger that demonstrates her self-assuredness and power. The obvious thought put into her performance stands out like a sore thumb compared with the rest of the film.

In contrast, Anne Hathaway gives a disappointing performance, especially in the context of her generally impressive career to date. Whereas Streep rises above the mediocrity of the material, Hathaway sinks down to its level. Her performance is a superficial one as despite the major changes that occur to her  character personally and professionally during the film, we get no sense of change or transition. Indeed, the lack of change that occurs to Andy when she ‘loses her way’ makes her more sympathetic than the film intends. In her jittery, bumbling but well-meaning performance she almost seems to be channelling her character from ‘The Princess Diaries’, which worked well there but is ill-suited here.

There are minor compensations in that the film remains watchable and is slickly made and pleasing to look at (as one would expect considering the subject matter) but that counts for little with such a dull script (which got a BAFTA nomination!) and a dramatically limited film.

As it turns out Tony Martin was on the right track. If TDWP is one of the top 100 films made in the 2000s, the film industry is in serious trouble.

Rating: C-

*A 2009 post discussing The Times best 100 films of the decade on this blog can be accessed here

Best of 2010, So Far

Overall, I think it’s been a fine year so far, although once again the major studios seemed to have mostly abandoned efforts to make good movies. But I can’t really complain, because like last year, the rest of the world is picking up a lot of the slack.

Of course, I’ve only considered the movies that were released in the US before July 1, of which I’ve seen 48. And some of these are technically 2009 films, but were not released theatrically in the US before this year.

Anyway, on to the movies.

1. The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve)
This is a French film about a movie producer whose professional struggles overwhelm his life, and it’s the most down-to-earth portrayal of the movie business that I’ve ever seen. Hansen-Løve emphasizes quiet observation over melodrama in her film, especially during the second half, after a tragic event occurs that dramatically changes the course of the film. The result is a heartbreaking study of family dynamics, with Hansen-Løve capturing the effects of said tragedy in a way that felt new and profound to me. The film has a terrific ensemble cast, led by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, with his real-life daughter Alice de Lencquesaing also giving a standout supporting performance as his quiet and sensitive daughter.

2. The Girl on the Train (André Téchiné)
Another French film, this one inspired by a true-life incident that occurred in Paris in 2004, when a young woman claimed to have been jumped by thugs on a train because they thought she was Jewish. After a few days of national outrage over the attack, she admitted that she had fabricated her story. The film is a fictional version of those events, observing Jeanne (played by Émilie Dequenne) during the weeks leading up to the “attack” and the days immediately proceeding it. Director and co-writer André Téchiné avoids trying to theorize why Jeanne does what she does, instead choosing to introduce the people in her life and then patiently wait for events to take their course. I’m baffled that it hasn’t gotten better reviews here in the US (they’ve been respectful but unenthusiastic), because I think it’s a fantastic film. Elusive but potent in its themes, it delivers an impact along both political and personal lines.

3. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
I’m not too sure I’ve seen anything quite like this before. It’s a Greek film about three teenagers (two girls and a boy) who are kept in isolation from the rest of the world on their remote rural estate; they’re taught all sorts of absurd things by their sadistic parents, from incorrect definitions of everyday words to the mortal danger posed by cats. It’s a very disturbing setup, and I can’t really say I understood what it all meant, although it bears a superficial thematic resemblance with Haneke’s The White Ribbon in its portrayal of a social unit (in this case, a family) undergoing a breakdown of authority, with a particular emphasis on the way children are affected. Unlike that film, though, it’s definitely a satire – of what exactly it’s hard to say – and is perversely funny and even at times playful.

4. I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino)
Sometimes a movie announces right away that it’s going to be good, and the opening credits of this film is a good example of that. It’s a gorgeous sequence against a backdrop of snow-covered Milanese villas, and it perfectly establishes the affluent Italian world that the characters of the film live in. It’s about a Russian immigrant to Italy (Tilda Swinton) who has married into a wealthy Italian family of textile merchants, whose life is comfortable despite her her limited role in the family’s affairs. When she meets a friend of her son’s, though, great stirring of erotic unrest are unleashed. This movie is somewhat the opposite of The Father of My Children, in that it bathes in melodrama, and the movie has the feel of a period epic although it’s set in the present day. It’s also one of the performances of Tilda Swinton’s career, which is saying something.

5. Youth in Revolt (Miguel Arteta)
Michael Cera’s screen personality is, at this point, very familiar. He’s the sardonic, slightly nerdy, low-energy but extremely sensitive guy, and none of his onscreen roles (e.g., Superbad, Juno) have strayed from this particular formula. The ads for Youth in Revolt promised more of the same, but as it turns out the film does twist his personality type around. He plays a sardonic, slightly nerdy, low-energy but extremely sensitive high school guy who falls for a like-minded girl (Portia Doubleday). When circumstances force them apart, Cera’s character is forced to adopt a second, rebellious personality. The result is a surprisingly hilarious movie, with Cera alternating between his sweet nerdy self and his sociopathic (but, it must be said, equally nerdy) alter-ego. Throw in a long list of funny supporting performances (Ray Liotta, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Long, Steve Buscemi, to name a few) and you end up with a terrific, but overlooked, comedy.

6. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)
Several great things about this one. The first is Jennifer Lawrence’s lead performance as a 17-year-old girl who tries to track down her father when he disappears while out on bail, having signed over their home for the bond. It’s a breakout performance of a desperate but also stubborn and thoughtful character, clearly announcing Lawrence as a major talent. The second is director Granik’s use of southwestern Missouri locations and her navigation of local customs, which feels authentic where most films would exploit. This is a very fine drama, with an uncommonly well-developed script that consistently refuses to take the usual way out.

7. The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella)
Argentinian film that won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this past year, about a dormant murder case that a retired detective is investigating for a novel. The film mixes all kinds of plot elements, blending melodrama with police procedural with austere romance with subtle political overtones. I think the romance angle works best, with the attraction between the detective (played by Ricardo Darín) and his supervisor (Soledad Villamil) spanning a quarter century of repressed and unexpressed feeling. It’s a strong film all around, though whether that’s despite or because of the mix of tones and genres is hard to say.

8. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich); Gone Elsewhere review by Jackrabbit Slim
The first twenty minutes or so are terribly clunky, and I was worried that the movie was headed for disaster, but it rights itself well enough to become a terrific adventure. If it’s not as terrific as the first two Toy Story films, and if the new characters don’t seem to add a whole lot, I suppose that’s simply an occupational hazard when it comes to being the third film of a series.

9. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
Billed on the poster as “the world’s first street-art disaster film”, this is a documentary about how an LA man set out to make a film about street-artist Banksy and ended up a star of the art world. I’m only slightly more interested in street art than I am decorative dentistry, but it’s actually well worth seeing, given the highly amusing twists that the story takes. I should note that the film’s veracity has been questioned, although it seems believable enough to me. Either way, though, it’s pretty insightful film about the nature of art and celebrity, with a few sour grapes thrown in for good measure.

10. Green Zone (Paul Greengrass)
Director Paul Greengrass, who made the latter two Bourne films, brings his usual no-nonsense urgency to this film about Army WMD hunting in Iraq. While others have complained about his use of “shaky-cam,” I continue to find Greengrass’s directorial work outstanding. Not since Oliver Stone’s run in the 1990s has there been a director who could make dialogue and exposition more viscerally exciting than the big action sequences. In fact, the big action sequences during the third act are the least interesting sections of the film, as a carefully constructed story of high-level political intrigue devolves into a chase through the streets of Baghdad. By this point, we’ve learned what’s going on and why, and there’s little riding on the ultimate outcome. The film is very effective in getting there, however, and the work of Greengrass and Matt Damon in the lead role is exceptional.

A Decade in Film – 2000 to 2009

After having threads devoted to each year of the previous decade, now seems a good time to look back at the overall decade and see what was the best (and the worst).

I’ve got to admit that overall I found the previous decade of films less than inspiring. Sure, there were plenty of good, solid, enjoyable films but there were surprisingly few imo that were truly exceptional pieces of cinema. I don’t think there’s a single film I’ve seen that I would regard as a classic.

As a result, I’ve defined my ‘best of’ list as those I considered to be A-Grade films which I’d define as very high-quality films. But I don’t consider any of them to be flawless, 5 out of 5 films imo (although ‘Good Night… and Good Luck’ probably is closest to that)

A-Grade films (in no particular order) – Good Night and Good Luck (probably the best made film of the decade imo), Michael Clayton, The Queen, The Lives of Others,  Brokeback Mountain, Kinsey, About Schmidt, About a Boy, Auto Focus, Gosford Park, Ghost World, High Fidelity, A Single Man, Children of Men

Worst  – Righteous Kill, The Oh in Ohio, What Planet Are You from?, Scary Movie (it was a particularly dismal decade for comedy), Mission Impossible 2 (couldn’t watch it all the way through), Thir13en Ghosts 

Most Overrated – An Inconvenient Truth, Superbad, Kill Bill, Wonder Boys, Meet The Parents, Spiderman 2

Most Overlooked/Underrated – Auto Focus, The Assasination of Richard Nixon

Year by year threads:

2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

An interesting (but early) best of decade list

As has already been mentioned in this month’s Random thread, best of decade lists are already coming out (even though the award contenders of 2009 haven’t been released as yet). One early one interesting enough to be worthy of discussion is a list of 100 produced by The Times newspaper in England.

Their article can be accessed here, but I’ve provided the list below with comments on the films that I have seen and whether they’re worthy imo of being put on such a list. I’ve only seen a mere quarter of the list (I have a lot of catching up to do!) but hopefully those on here who’ve been a far larger proportion of these films can give a better analysis of it:

Worst of the Decade

Worst of the Worst (courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes)

I know James has his “Decade In Film” series running, but after seeing this on Rotten Tomatoes I just had to make a post. I’m usually a little ashamed that I haven’t seen the balance of AFI’s (or critics or whoever’s) top 100 list. However, I can say that I am fully proud that I have only seen 7 of these worst 100 movies (and even then only 1 in the “top” 40 – Kickin’ It Old Skool). Thoughts?

Best of 2009, So Far

Thankfully, 2009 has so far been a much better year than 2008 was. Out of 39 new releases that I’ve seen through the first six months of the year, I’m actually comfortable with listing 10 of them here, with a few of them being genuinely great movies.

As always, I’ve linked to the Gone Elsewhere reviews where they exist, and as always, I’m grateful to Jackrabbit Slim for writing the vast majority of them (all reviews are his unless otherwise noted). I seem to have stopped writing reviews almost altogether, which is kind of sad but unlikely to change in the short term. Also, only movies released before July 1 are eligible.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the ten best films of the first half of 2009.

1. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
I could tell this was a great film from the opening shot, a hypnotic extended take of a sunrise over a Mennonite community in rural Mexico. This is a slow-moving tale of a man torn between his love for two women in a conservative religious community, but it’s riveting all the same because it never unfolds the way you would expect. It’s a shame it didn’t get a wider theatrical release, because although it is a foreign film and does move slowly, I think it’s an accessible film that could have found a strong arthouse audience. Unfortunately, Tartan Palisades didn’t see it that way, and despite strong critical backing it was buried, and there’s not even a DVD release scheduled here in the States until September. All the same, add it to your Netflix lists now; it’s a strong contender for the top film of the year, regardless of how the next six months pan out.

2. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
A film that has a lot to say about a lot of subjects, including art, culture, family, the global economy, the passing of generations, the nature of one’s ties to home and country, and the way that all of these things interact. Like Silent Light, it uses plotlines that may seem routine in other movies, such as a dispute between adult siblings over their inheritance, and lets them unfold in ways that are unexpected.

3. The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh)
The prolific Soderbergh turns in his best film in years. It’s a document of a time and place – specifically, New York City in fall 2008 – when it became clear that the empire was crumbling, so to speak. While outwardly a movie about a call girl, I see it more as a movie about how the relentless pursuit of status among American elites leads to the exploitation of the lower classes. Ironically (or perhaps not), it’s more of a revolutionary-minded film than Soderbergh’s Che.

4. Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola)
I wasn’t expecting much from Coppola’s latest given lukewarm reviews and my own ambivalent reaction to Youth Without Youth, but I pretty much loved every minute. It’s a story about two brothers reuniting in Buenos Aires and facing the legacy of their famous father. It’s funny and poignant, and features terrific performances, especially by Vincent Gallo and Maribel Verdú. And, as an added bonus, the black-and-white photography is unbelievably beautiful.

5. Sugar (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck)
To start with, it’s rare for a sports movie to get simple sports things right, so I was impressed when Miguel “Sugar” Santos makes his pro baseball debut and walks the first batter on four pitches. A lesser movie would have had him a little nervous but triumphing, but this movie’s scenario is far more believable. In this movie, the coaches talk like coaches, the players struggle from day to day and even inning to inning, and the actors actually look like they play the sport they’re playing. In short, it’s a thoughtful movie about a sport I love, and I appreciated the way the filmmakers allowed all of their characters, including those that would be villians in lesser movies, have their dignity.

6. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)
Perhaps the strangest and most original movie I’ve seen this year. As a reaction to being dumped, filmmaker Nina Paley has animated the Indian legend of Ramayana and set it to the songs of Annette Henshaw, and the result is both very funny and curiously sad. Unfortunately, the songs she uses are copyrighted and unlicensed, meaning it’s unlikely you’ll be able to rent a DVD any time soon. On the bright side, though, the entire film is available to download from the film’s website. If you’re so inclined, and don’t happen to be in Chicago tomorrow, I encourage you to check it out (if you are in Chicago, it’s playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center).

7. Up (Pete Docter)
Unfortunately, not one of the best Pixars in my opinion, but still a plenty fun way to spend a couple hours. I still laugh when I think of Dug, the talking dog. If dogs really could talk, I’m guessing that the vast majority would sound just like him.

8. The Merry Gentleman (Michael Keaton)
Keaton’s directorial debut mostly came and went without notice, but it has one of the year’s best performaces, by Kelly MacDonald. She plays a woman who seems to find herself in awkward relationships with men, including a hitman played by Keaton himself. At first, it seems like the movie is going to succumb to the tired old cliche in which the hitman is actually the nice guy, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. It’s an unusual film in that it’s made by a man, but sees its male characters as predatory and sinister, and sympathizes with the everyday difficulties of simply being a woman having to deal with these creeps.

9. Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell); review by Nick
Swedish film that follows a familiar template of immigrants dealing with being strangers in a strange land … only it’s not actually about immigrants. It’s about the way dramatic social change can make people feel alienated even in their own homes. Perhaps it views its characters through an overly sentimental lens – the ending felt somewhat flat to me – but it is, as Nick says, “a gripping portrait of the times.”

10. Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera); review by filmman
There are, to be sure, things not to like about the film. The story’s a little uneven, the ending is bad, and the budget for the special effects looks like it was less than it would have cost to simply buy a new Mac. But while I was skeptical when our own filmman announced it to be on the cutting edge of science fiction, after seeing the film I had to agree. This is a thoughtful and provacative look at the casual militarization of American culture, with a premise that is absolutely ingenious.

Best Films of 2008

After one of the best years for movies I can remember in 2007, 2008 was one of the worst, at least in terms of the top films. While I sincerely believe the 11 films on this list are deserving of the recognition, I also feel compelled to say that none of them would have made my top ten from last year. These things move in cycles, I suppose, but 2008 was even lower than 2004, the last notably weak year. It may have beat 2001, although I probably didn’t see enough that year to know for sure.

The links in the titles are for the official Gone Elsewhere reviews, where applicable.

1. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme); review by Jackrabbit Slim
Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet accomplish one of the hardest things to do in movies, making it believable that family members in a film have a long and complicated history together outside of the events in the movie. The film also features two outstanding performances: one by Anne Hathaway, who was justly nominated for an Oscar, and one by Rosemarie DeWitt, who was unjustly not.

2. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman)
Ari Folman’s animated documentary about his experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War is one of the few films this year to feature both cutting-edge filmmaking with a solid emotional core. By the end of the movie, the psychological weight is truly tough to bear.

3. Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols)
Independent film about two sets of half-brothers engaged in an ever escalating rivalry, starring Michael Shannon, intense as usual. Jeff Nichols’ first feature film is a fascinating look at hatred that never dies and the culture of revenge in the American South.

4. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton); review by Jackrabbit Slim
The second half is just a little weak, but the first half is as incredible as anything I’ve seen in years. Pixar’s consistent high level of creativity and quality – and in a genre that typically brings out the worst in studio instincts – can only qualify as miraculous at this point.

5. Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes); review by Jeanine
I had some issues with the ending of the film, but it’s still a lightning bolt in a lot of ways. For one thing, future generations will laugh at the Academy for ignoring both the work of both Leonardo Dicaprio and (especially) Kate Winslet, who does the best work of her distinguished career in this film. But it’s also a very timely film, arriving just at a time when American suburban life appears to be starting to undergo radical changes.

6. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
Quiet film starring Michelle Williams as Wendy, a girl stranded in an Oregon town with her dog, Lucy, while en route to Alaska for mostly unexplained reasons. Reichardt’s film gives us very little of Wendy’s background, choosing instead to focus on her interactions with the people she meets. I took it as a counterpoint to Reichardt’s previous film, Old Joy. That film focused on a brief retreat from everyday life; this film is about people who can’t escape it.

7. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan); also reviewed by filmman
Oh boy. Nolan’s Batman opus was the year’s (and the decade’s) domestic box office champion, and has inspired something of a backlash. I watched it again last week, and I remain impressed despite a couple of obvious flaws. The Nolans put the Batman mythology to the test, even going so far as to question if Gotham City may be better off without the Caped Crusader. And the Heath Ledger’s Joker was the most terrifying villian of the year, a character that is the living embodiment not of insanity, but of fear.

8. Burn After Reading (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen); review by Jackrabbit Slim
The Coens’ follow-up to No Country for Old Men poses as a slight (if nihilistic) comedy, but several months later it’s stuck with me. It’s very funny, with Brad Pitt’s Chad Feldheimer leading a cast of goofballs, but I think it also carries an undercurrent of deeply felt rage. It’s hard to imagine the Coens making an overtly political film, but especially on the heels of the passive and defeatist No Country, it’s easy for me to see the film as a reaction to the bungling by the US intelligence community during recent years.

9. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
In a year when Twilight (which I didn’t see) made teen vampires all the rage, this Swedish film explored the friendship between a 12-year-old outcast and his very strange next door neighbor of the same age. The two child actors both find just the right notes for their performance, and despite some story weaknesses this is one of the most convincing films about the awkwardness that children feel among their peers in a long while.

10. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman); review by Jackrabbit Slim
Kaufman is well known for his screenplays of Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, and his directorial debut is even more mind-twisting than those two films. Using the story of a playwright working on his masterpiece to contemplate the hopelessness of ageing and the fleeting nature of human relationships, Kaufman’s work here is unquestionably original, and occasionally brushes up against the profound. Only an off-key performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the lead holds it back.

11. Funny Games (Michael Haneke)
Haneke remakes his 1997 German-language film, changing the actors and virtually nothing else. I’m not sure there’s much of a reason to do this, but taken on its own terms, the film is a powerful examination of the effects of onscreen violence. A film that invites – and even encourages – misreadings, it was on the receiving end of much critical hand-wringing upon its March release, and was a box-office dud, but I think it points out the moral callousness of other films more than it demonstrates it on its own.

Honorable Mentions, in very rough order of preference:
The Wrestler, Transsiberian, Milk (review by Jackrabbit Slim), The Class, Trouble the Water, My Winnipeg, The Visitor (review by Jackrabbit Slim), The Fall, Chop Shop, Alexandra, Reprise

This year, I want to start a new category for movies that are daring, challenging, or otherwise innovative, and which have my full respect for being more interesting than a lot of other, better movies, even though I found them ultimately unsuccessful. I’ll call it the “Honorable Intent” category, and this year there were three movies that deserve the designation:
Che (review by Jackrabbit Slim), Blindness, Speed Racer

Sad I Missed It:
The Edge of Heaven

In Review: First Half of 2008

I was going to do a Top Ten for the year so far, but a funny thing happened when I tried to do this. While I was reviewing the eligible 2008 releases (43 so far), I couldn’t come up with even five movies that I felt deserving, much less ten. It has not been a very good year so far in terms of new releases. So instead, I want to touch on the highs and lows of the year so far, along with a mention of other titles that were noteworthy, if not necessarily deserving of Best Of status.

The best new release I’ve seen thus far is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. The film stars Michael Shannon as the oldest of three adult brothers whose father abandoned them years ago and began a new family, with four sons. The two sets of half-brothers grew up as bitter rivals, and emotions come to a head after the father dies. Shannon may be the most creepily intense actor in movies today; see William Friedkin’s Bug if you don’t believe me. Among the more interesting insights the film has to offer is that most of the characters seem to know full well that their actions are irrational and unproductive, but their hatred is self-sustaining and out of their control.

Incidentally, Shotgun Stories was released yesterday on DVD.

Another overlooked independent film is The Fall, directed by Tarsem. Already a film of legend before it opened, Tarsem spent years in production while filming all over the world, and relying on his own money for funding. The result is a spectacularly imaginitive film about a little girl who befriends a suicidal man in a hospital. He tells her stories about a mysterious masked bandit and his fight against an evil tyrant, and we see the stories come alive in her imagination.

If you’ve seen The Cell, also by Tarsem, you know he is an unparalleled visual artist. The Fall matches and perhaps exceeds the visuals in the earlier film, while thankfully stepping up the storytelling as well. It doesn’t have the depth of the somewhat similar Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s a pleasure to watch and a good yarn in the best sense of the term.

The best major studio release so far has been, without question, Pixar’s WALL·E. Jackrabbit Slim wrote a review for this site, and my comments can be found in that thread. It’s not a perfect film, but Pixar’s consistent high level of creativity and quality - and in a genre that typically brings out the worst in studio instincts - can only qualify as miraculous at this point. 

Speaking of studios, a trend I’ve noticed this year is that the big summer releases are being drastically overrated. ‘Good’ is being turned into ‘great,’ and completely average films are being enthusiastically greeted. As examples, I offer up Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (review by Jackrabbit Slim), which earned a 79 Metacritic rating, and Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk (review by Jackrabbit Slim), which earned a 61 Metacritic rating. Both were serviceable entertainments, but little more than that, and the high volume of praise for both (near-unanimous in the case of Iron Man) puzzles me. I certainly allow that other people just feel differently than I do, and I also allow that both represent a big step up from the Roland Emmerich debacles of summers past. But I can’t help but believe that if these had been released several years ago, before terrible summer movies became a given, those ratings would be lower than they are now. I guess what I’m saying is that it feels like the world is grading on a curve.

On the other hand, maybe the world is just crazy, because the worst film I’ve seen this year is Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which scored a mind-numbing 65 on the Metacritic site. I reviewed the film for this site, and I think history is already on the way to vindicating me on this point, but the intial enthusiasm for this one reminded me of the initial response to The Phantom Menace. If anything, it’s even more unfounded in this case.

Another one I hated, but in a different way, was David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels. The film tracks two loosely intersecting stories, the first of a marriage on the rocks (featuring Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell), and the second of a high school romance (Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby). The storyline concerning the high schoolers didn’t bother me too much, but the Beckinsale-Rockwell storyline disgusted me with Green’s relentless insistence on stacking the deck against the Beckinsale character. In the course of the film, she has to deal with a cheap affair with a friend’s husband, the Rockwell character’s obvious mental illness, and the dramatically pointless death of her young daughter. That’s a lot to ask of an audience, and I felt that Green approaches all of this with a very heavy and manipulative hand. And it all leads to a Tragic Ending, which is one of the most cruel – to the characters and the audience – in recent memory.

Speaking of movies that are cruel to the audience, no year-in-review piece can be complete without a mention of the most polarizing film of the first six months, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (my review here). The film caused a minor earthquake upon its release in March (at least critically, if not in terms of box office) due to its relentless violence and seeming nihilism. I found value in it, though, and if nothing else it helps to illustrate the moral callousness of a film like Snow Angels, by emphasizing the inherent manipulativeness of onscreen violence.

Finally, a few honorable mentions, as it were – I didn’t like them enough to warrant a formal Best Of list, but they’re good films to seek out on DVD if you missed them. In no particular order:

Redbelt, David Mamet (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
Reprise, Joachim Trier
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Nicholas Stoller (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
The Visitor, Thomas McCarthy (review by Jackrabbit Slim)
Summer Palace, Lou Ye
Chop Shop, Ramin Bahrani
The Bank Job, Roger Donaldson
Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant
In Bruges, Martin McDonagh (review by Jackrabbit Slim)

Least Favorites of 2007

This is a little late, but it’s time to close out the year for good.

I don’t feel comfortable doing a “Worst Of” list – and this serves as a big-time disclaimer for this post – because I simply skip most of the movies that I feel I’m likely to hate.  So that’s why there’s no Because I Said So on the list – why would I subject myself to that? Although I guess it might really be the best movie of the year, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t watch the filthy motherfucker.

As a corollary to that disclaimer, I’m not here to pick on movies that were merely bad.  For example, I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Transformers (read Joe’s (positive) review) were mighty crappy, but both in a very mundane kind of way.  What this post is about is my least favorite of the year – maybe not the worst, but the ones that left the worst taste in my mouth.  Metaphorically speaking.

One of the top candidates, and certainly the winner of the Most Disappointing title, was The Simpsons Movie (my review). I wasn’t expecting something as good as the best years of the TV show, but what I got was a movie that was singularly unfunny.  I honestly don’t remember even one good laugh-out-loud moment, and the vast majority of it was simply lame.

As bad as it was, though, it was lacking the one quality that could make it a Least Favorite finalist – the ability to not just bore me, but also to make me really hate it. Lajos Koltai’s Evening (review) is a good example.  This is a maddeningly shallow, empty-hearted film, with poor performances all around and a storyline that revolves around a group of self-obsessed fools.  Koltai made the much more compelling Fateless a couple years ago, and it’s surprising that he’d choose material like this for his follow-up.  Such a waste of talent.

I also hated Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up (review). This one actually started out OK, with an amusing first action scene, but only took a few minutes to descend into desperate hackery.  I have no idea why actors like Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti would have done this movie, unless they were suckered in by a five-minute demo reel or something.  Upon seeing the finished film, though, I think it’s clear that Davis clearly does not have the skills to pull this off at this stage of his career.  It does earn the title for Most Pathetic Moment, however, for repeating the carrot joke from the first scene later in the movie.

But the title for Least Favorite ends up going to George Ratliff’s Joshua (review).  As I wrote in my original review, the premise – some kind of creepy devil child – is not a great starting point, but Ratliff and his writer, David Gilbert, manage to go downhill from there.   They refuse to draw out characterizations beyond the most simple traits (Vera Farmiga’s character has pyschological problems … and that’s all there is to her).  Storylines are introduced and dropped.  And most of all, people act like Martians or Neptunians or something.  Certainly not humans from Earth.  The acting is terrible, even from the normally dependable Vera Farmiga and Sam Rockweel.

It seems like there’s one of these every year – a movie that comes along that separates itself in terms of the pure, visceral hatred that I feel for it.  In 2006, it was Ryan Murphy’s Running with Scissors.  Year before that, it was Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Sequestro Express.  Joshua is a very worthy addition to this tradition.  I try to avoid stuff like this, but it seems I can never completely escape.  Oh well.
 

Best Posters of 2007

The IMP has picked their best of 2007 over here. I’m not sure I agree with their choices, but I can’t remember any others that stuck out this past year. (Alvin and the Chipmunks notwithstanding)

Best Films of 2007

I suppose, all things considered, that 2007 turned out to be a pretty great year. As always, I didn’t limit myself to a top ten list, but instead I’ve included all the films that I thought attained a certain level of quality. With that said, if I were to limit myself to a top ten list, the top ten below might be the strongest group, 1 through 10, that I can remember. I might end up buying all ten of them on DVD at some point.

I’ve included links to the Gone Elsewhere reviews where applicable. So without further ado, I present the Best Films of 2007:

1. Into the Wild (Sean Penn); review by Jackrabbit Slim
Penn’s masterpiece was unfortunately snubbed by Oscar voters, with the film failing to get a nomination in any major category other than Best Supporting Actor (for Hal Holbrooke’s performance). But I thought it was an incredible film, capturing multiple perspectives of McCandless’s ill-fated journey and culminating in one of the most haunting conclusions in recent years. Excluding Penn and actor Emile Hirsch from the Oscar noms seems especially egregious.

2. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel); review by Jeanine
This film actually gave me a new perspective of the world, that of a victim of “locked-in syndrome.” Schnabel shoots much of the film from the point of view of a man who is completely paralyzed, except for the use of one eyelid. While this sounds like a strategy that would punish an audience, it is actually curiously involving.

3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson); review by Jackrabbit Slim
Blood features the second (along with Hirsch) of two performances that tower above anything else the year had to offer. Daniel Day-Lewis confirms his status as one of the very best, and Anderson provides the most assured direction of his career.

4. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach); review by Nick
The Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in 2006 was given a US release in early 2007, qualifying it for this list. Loach crafts a story that shows us the Irish conflict against the British eventually turning in on itself. Parallels have perhaps been drawn to the US occupation of Iraq, but I thought the film had less to say about any specific conflict that it did about the nature of extremism leading to horrific bloodshed. Another standout performance, this time by Cillian Murphy.

5. Ratatouille (Brad Bird)
Pixar continues to shine, providing the most amazing animation they’ve yet produced, and an engaging, funny story to boot. The character of Remy is a true original, a rat who is also a master chef. While the scenes featuring rats in the kitchen (and they were numerous) was a turnoff to some, the filmmakers have fun with it, never forgetting how revolting the sight is to people and getting great comic mileage out of it.

6. Control (Anton Corbijn)
Control stood out for being a completely unconventional biopic. It profiles the rise to fame of Joy Division and their singer, Ian Curtis, who ended up committing suicide just as the band attained fame. Corbijn’s experience in the business shows in his treatment of Curtis, which portrays on Curtis as a regular person who happens to be in a band instead of a larger-than-life icon. Samantha Morton’s performance as Curtis’s wife deserves special mention.

7. No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen); review by Jackrabbit Slim
The Coens recover from their recent slump to deliver a film, also featuring a controversial ending, that in some ways feels like a counterpoint to their own Fargo. Both films feature a law enforcement officer at their heart, Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson is a resourceful and effective detective, where No Country‘s Ed Tom Bell offers little resistance to the horrors in his midst. Tonally, the two films are about as different as those characters would suggest.

8. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson); review by Jackrabbit Slim
This movie manages to take three actors who could not possibly be related on the planet we actually live on, cast them as brothers, and create a believable family dynamic between them. Adrien Brody makes his first appearance in Andersonville, and performs admirably, giving the film an emotional center that keeps it from flying off in a million different directions.

9. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy); review by Jackrabbit Slim
In a year that was decidedly short on well executed genre films, Michael Clayton stands out as a fantastically written, intelligent, and efficient corporate thriller. George Clooney does the best work of his career, and writer-director Gilroy develops his characters beyond their obvious plot-driven roles, even creating a villian (played by Tilda Swinton) that approaches sympathetic. Great fun.

10. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)
As I wrote in my original review, “the movie gives a good name to long and slow movies everywhere.” Casey Affleck earns my theoretical Oscar vote for his portrayal of the title coward, and Roger Deakins’s cinematography is truly beautiful.

11. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson)
12. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
13. Once (John Carney); review by Jackrabbit Slim
14. Sicko (Michael Moore)

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order):
Persepolis (review by Jackrabbit Slim), Golden Door, Offside, Rescue Dawn, Vanaja (review by Jeanine), The Great Debaters, Juno (review by Jackrabbit Slim), In the Shadow of the Moon, Eastern Promises (review by Jackrabbit Slim), Superbad, Manufactured Landscapes, Knocked Up (review by Jackrabbit Slim), Bug, Away from Her (review by Jackrabbit Slim), Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037

Decade by Decade

When I mentioned yesterday that Pulp Fiction was my favorite film of the nineties, that got me to thinking, what are my favorite films in each decade? This is off the top of my head (and I’ve given two answers for each). I am sticking to the sound era, as I’m not up to snuff on silent films.

 193os: City Lights, Duck Soup
1940s: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon
1950s: On the Waterfront, The Seventh Seal
1960s: The Graduate, A Hard Day’s Night
1970s: Annie Hall, The Godfather
1980s: Hannah and Her Sisters, Ragtime
1990s: Pulp Fiction, Fargo
2000s: (So far) Adaptation, The Royal Tenenbaums

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