#11 - Meek's Cutoff (directed by Kelly Reichardt)
The Michelle Williams role last year that not many people are talking about is her role as Emily Tetherow in Kelly Reichardt’s feminist western, Meek’s Cutoff. This is not your grandfather’s western, but it is one of the genre’s finest examples, loosely based on an incident in 1845 when a blowhard named Stephen Meek was supposed to lead a wagon train to water, but never found it. Along the way the group captures a Native American who does not speak their language, but who promises to show them to water, and the group is swiftly divided about whether or not to trust him, with Meek leading the charge to just kill him. While not much happens in the film other than that, it still speaks volumes of contemporary relevance. A cautionary tale of blindly following without questioning, and the dangerous uncertainty of acting on xenophobia (I’ll let you ponder the modern day parallels), Reichardt makes the bold claim that in over 150 years, despite all our progress, not a thing has changed. Compositionally, the film has a square aspect ratio, which, in Reichardt’s words becomes a visual restriction for the audience approximating the visual restrictions of nineteenth century women who wore bonnets, a sentiment echoed in the many scenes from Emily’s perspective when the men of the group go off to decide what to do next and their conversation is only barely audible on the film’s soundtrack. Granted an audience wouldn’t come to that conclusion on their own, but the 1:33/1 boxed ratio is still missing nearly half the visual information of the traditional western, which is usually framed at 2:35/1, a compositional clue that there is something else going on here in place of the usual picturesque landscapes. Meek’s Cutoff takes its time throughout, with a slow pacing that allows for many static and tracking camera set-ups that just watch the wagon train move from one side of the frame to the other, and the film’s absence of a traditionally developing storyline all but announces its requirement that the audience pays attention to the details, the atmosphere Reichardt has created, a commentary on where we once were as a society, and where we are today, and as usual, the devil is in the details.
#12 - Rango (directed by Gore Verbinski)
Rango is not a film for children. With scene after scene drenched in irony, it takes the methodology of crafting an animated film for adults first and children second off the deep end, and parents should be prepared to do a lot of explaining. But it is never pretentious, Depp’s brilliant voice acting helps consistently maintain humility. He plays the titular character, a thespian-lizard who is introduced to the audience in the midst of putting on a play inside a terrarium, where his companions are a plastic palm tree, a toy fish, and a dead insect floating in his water. The car he is traveling in swerves to avoid hitting an armadillo, and he is thrown out to the ground, and left alone in the desert. A brief conversation with the armadillo about the nature of identity and the importance of finding one’s place in the world sets Rango off on his adventure, and soon he comes to a town called Dirt, desperately trapped in the grips of a water shortage, where he pretends to be a violent gunslinger and then ultimately becomes the town sheriff. He is first intrigued by finding the right character for these roles, and through the course of the film it is himself that he finds, and all this plays out with an abundance of visual style and much breaking of the third wall in various asides to himself, and his audience. Rango is like an animated actor's existential meditation on his purpose in the real world. Yeah, try explaining that to children. It’s rare to see a director of live action films so comfortable with animation, but helmer Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, might have just found his calling. Rango is literally bursting at its splices with more style and technique in one reel than what can be found in the entire Pirates trilogy, evident after the second instance of deep focus photography. Rango is a completely original, jaw-dropping, mind-bending, uproarious experience, with Johnny Depp finally finding in an animated film, the kind of self-important, hallucinogenic role he has not been able to find successfully in live action. Rango is not only the best animated film of the year, but also one of the best animated films of all time.
#13 - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) (directed by David Fincher)
David Fincher’s career renaissance after a five year hiatus from filmmaking has born three masterpieces, Zodiac, The Social Network, and now The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Fincher could teach a master class on genre filmmaking, evidenced by his taking Steve Zaillian’s very workmanlike script, which successfully navigates a bee line through Stieg Larsson’s flat, journalistic prose, and then directing the hell out of it. Visual effects are everywhere and you don’t even know it, as the foreground and background of many scenes are shot at different times to capture the best performances, and then compositely layered for maximum dramatic effect, showing how modern technology can be used to make the film better instead of just eye candy. Kinetic editing within scenes takes you back and forth through time without sacrificing forward momentum, again for maximum dramatic effect. Musical cues scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, rooted in the electronic scrapes of industrial music, intensify scenes for maximum dramatic effect, and inspire terror in what would otherwise be standard scenes of investigative journalism. The soundtrack and sound design in this film are so good, you could just listen to the film and it would still be more suspenseful than trudging through Larsson’s reporting on narrative events. Never before have scenes of trolling through archive after archive of photos been so unsettling, in fact this whole film is unsettling, as cold and detached as the ever present Scandinavian winter. And then at the center of it all there is Rooney Mara. Of her absolute transformation into titular character Lisbeth Salander, Owen Gleiberman said it best in his review for Entertainment Weekly, when he said that her very physical appearance in the film, is itself, “an act of violence against decorum.” This film doesn’t pull any punches; it is grimy, animalistic, and downright sinister at times. It is the mark of a director unafraid to take a story to its edge, and actually thrill an audience for a change. I was on the edge of my seat throughout. Apparently there is a graphic novel in the works, so audiences will be able to experience this material fresh for a fourth time. I couldn’t understand how that would work before seeing Fincher’s film. I do now, perfectly.
#14 - Drive (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)
Drive is a primer for the uninitiated to begin seeing why film is considered an art form. It takes an existential story about a nameless Hollywood stunt car driver who drives getaway cars for thieves in his spare time, which in lesser hands would have been a Jason Statham vehicle, and then completely transcends its genre trappings by adding layers of meaning through pure filmmaking prowess. To illustrate, one scene in particular comes to mind. The driver strolls into the dressing room of a strip club to find a man who double crossed him. Through editing, and camera placement, and ultimately through choreography, as the two men become framed by dancers who do not move, but stand frozen, and with no words spoken, the driver is shown in complete control, dominating his environment. Leaving him nameless allows his character to absorb all the emotions swirling around him in the film, and this scene is the culmination of the synergy between camera and content, between audience and character, beautifully echoed in the cocking of driver’s arm that holds a pipe ready to deliver a fatal blow, and perfectly resolved with the scene’s technical economy. You don’t question why the models stand their unmoving - a Jason Statham film would show them scurrying about to flee the room- instead you sit in the theatre flabbergasted, unaware of your complicity, drawn even further into the film through its painterly compositions. Like a cross between David Lynch and Michael Mann, which hopefully inspires a new breed of genre filmmaking, Drive is a combination of the artistic and the commercial, of conventional storytelling told through unconventionally immersive sound editing and an incendiary hyper-visual style. Director Nicolas Winding Refn is not content to merely tell the story, instead he digs and digs until he finds the correct visual translation. As wonderful as the sound is in this film, and the soundtrack that features lush, synthesized, retro-europop, you could turn the sound off, and not only would you still know what was going on, but the emotions would still be there as well, and that is a hallmark of great cinema.
#15 - Melancholia (directed by Lars von Trier)
Enfant terrible Lars von Trier’s most successful film to date, the title Melancholia refers to both the depression that has stricken one of its main characters, and also the name of a planet that happens to be on a collision course with Earth. If that sounds exciting, remember this is an art film. What is thrilling is how real to the bone Kirsten Dunst portrays Justine through what is essentially a two part film, the first hour focusing on the paralyzing grip her depression has on her at her wedding reception, while her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the picture of calm helping her through it, and the second hour focusing on the event of the imminent collision to which Justine is resigned but Claire is completely unhinged. Inspired by von Trier's own therapy sessions for depression, Melancholia uses its fantastic premise to explore the human condition, illuminating the utter devastation of a disease that can bring calm only in the face of annihilation, subverting expectations of a traditional disease-of-the-week film by showing the solace that can come from the warm blanket of oblivion. Stunningly gorgeous cinematography showing the destruction of planet Earth to the accompaniment of Wagner’s Tristan And Isolde (and that’s just in the first five minutes), once the film goes back in time, my Hollywood mind searched desperately throughout the film for how the narrative was going to avoid the calamity. Ultimately the resolution is a matter of perspective, and Melancholia’s true brilliance is in how it rewrites those opening scenes without changing anything that actually happens. This could only come from personal experience, as Melancholia bears the physical crushing weight of Justine’s disease. It finds the beauty in an apocalypse, and since depression robs its sufferers of finding beauty in everyday life, the film actually becomes depression, right before your eyes.
#16 - The Autobiography Of Nicolae Ceausescu (directed by Andrei Ujica)
The Autobiography Of Nicolae Ceausescu places higher than The Interrupters for the simple reason that it challenges the idea of what a documentary can achieve, opening bold and original new doors for the genre. Culled from thousands of hours of found footage, director Andrei Ujica depicts the rise and fall of communist Romanian leader Ceausescu without the help of narration or any created scenes. Through three hours of mostly chronologically edited footage, which could all be considered propaganda shot with the leader’s approval, with the exception of the interview footage that bookends the film, taken just hours before he and his wife’s execution, Ujica’s patently objective approach yields remarkably subjective results, and the question of how it could come to an execution remains ever present in the viewer’s mind. Any one of these clips, by themselves and stripped of context, is nothing more than informational newsreel footage. But through juxtaposition and montage, decidedly lingering on moments where Ceausescu is caught before and after the actual staging of public events, and including elaborate parades and celebrations that border on deification, Ujica’s selection of clips brings out the “story” of the leader, buried within the autobiography. The sky’s the limit with what this approach can do with other subject matter, and I look forward to seeing many more interpretations. The Autobiography Of Nicolae Ceausescu is one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
#17 - Mysteries Of Lisbon (directed by Raul Ruiz)
This 4 ½ hour Portugese film was adapted from a nineteenth century novella by Camilo Castelo Branco, and directed by the late Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz, becoming his final film. Separated into two parts, with an intermission between, Mysteries Of Lisbon is one of the best costume dramas ever made. Told from the perspective of a foundling in an orphanage, who loses himself inside a paper diorama, a supposed gift from his mother and his only possession, his growing friendship with a priest soon leads to the discovery that he was born from nobility. The story unfolds mostly through conversations and flashbacks, producing a wealth of complexities that ultimately shows how these characters are inextricably linked, occasionally showing the characters as paper cutouts on the child’s paper stage. If this sounds like Masterpiece Theatre it couldn’t be farther from it. The product of a great filmmaker with complete control over his craft, while Ruiz does work within a proscenium arch, the film is never two-dimensional. Relying on deep focus photography, showing the foreground and background in crystal focus, Ruiz echoes the narrative in drawing a connection visually between the characters’ pasts and presents. The camera rarely pushes forward or backward, but instead tracks left and right, sometimes through walls, like a pendulum that marks the passing of time, shifting the viewer’s attention without the need for editing which would break up the film's extremely long takes. Attention to detail is overwhelming, the film’s costume design and art direction among the best I have ever seen. For its length the film is never boring, and actually invites multiple viewings, of which I have not yet had the pleasure of doing. Until I can, I will continue to feel like I have only scratched the surface of what this film has to offer. Grand and epic without sacrificing the smallest of details and emotions, Mysteries Of Lisbon is the work of a true auteur, whose oeuvre I have now set my sights on consuming.
#18 - Bellflower (directed by Evan Glodell)
I’ve used the word “powderkeg” before to describe films, but clearly I didn’t know what I was talking about. Director Evan Glodell built his own camera to shoot Bellflower , and at times its out-of-focus framing and the way it captures the hot orange southern California Bellflower Bellflower
#19 - The Interrupters (directed by Steve James)
Criminally passed over for nomination as Best Documentary at this year’s Academy Awards, Steve James’s first rate look at urban violence in Chicago is every bit as good as his 1995 film Hoop Dreams. The film was shot over a year in the life of Ceasefire, a community organization established to curb the escalating amount of inner city violence, which garnered national attention when Derrion Albert, a Chicago
#20 - Certified Copy (directed by Abbas Kiarostami)
The last time Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami focused his lens so clearly on the blurred line between truth and fiction was his 1990 masterpiece Close-Up, about a man who pretends to be a famous filmmaker to gain access to and become part of a family. This time, for Certified Copy, it is copies versus originals, and it is a doozy. British author James Miller has come to an Italian town to discuss his new book, an argument that forgeries are no different than the originals they come from because what is important in determining their value is how they are perceived. An art dealer, played to perfection by Juliette Binoche, meets him after a book signing for a cup of coffee and they begin to argue about the points he raises. He steps out to take a phone call, and Binoche begins a conversation with the waitress, who believes them to be husband and wife, an idea Binoche does not disavow her of. From that point on, once he returns, the two of them begin to speak like husband and wife, switching language from English to French to Italian, when the very specific point was made earlier that Miller cannot speak any other language. Which is truth and which is fiction? Once they leave the coffee shop it matters not to the waitress, and ultimately what does it matter to the audience? Which do we want to be true? Kiarostami uses this couple to question the very nature of reality and perception, and does so quite remarkably, with long take tracking shots that show both of their reactions, including his trademark dashboard camera shot, with their arguments enveloped by the changing landscape in the rear window and in the vertical reflections of buildings on the windshield competing with their expressions. Yes this film requires some leap of faith, but it never ceases to amaze me how saying that is perfectly acceptable when we are watching giant robots punching each other into buildings, but induces eye-rolls when talking about a film that explores the nature of truth in reality, an essential question at the core of our very existence in an ever-changing world.
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