We film critics are a nostalgic bunch. Really, how could we not be? To the romantic recollectors, the cinema belongs—if each frame is a snapshot of a dead moment, then what is a movie but a photo album in motion? And it isn't just ancient artifacts that we obsess over. Even
recent cinematic history gets us all misty-eyed. Looking back over the previous twelve months, over the euphoric highs and bitter lows experienced in the dark of the cineplex, it's all too easy to chart our own tumultuous timelines against those of the movies we got lost in. For the true lovers of this medium, art doesn't so much imitate life as
intersect it, engaging it in some sort of shouting match/pillow talk dialectic.
Feelings get involved. And you have to be mindful of what you do with them. If you're not, a Year End round-up—that most narcissistic of annual film writer pastimes—can read something like a drunken e-mail to an ex-lover: all wistful remembrances (ah,
Paranoid Park at midnight), reoccurring regrets (why do I keep going back to you Woody?), and petty blame games (
you did this to us, David Gordon Green). Worse even than the fawning hyperboles of a "Best Of" list (see: my
thoughts on
WALL-E, which, naturally, I still fully stand by) is the self-righteous indignation of a "Worst Of" write up. This is where we film critics
really get human. And by human, I mean petty, cruel and vindictive. A “Worst Of” is just a thinly-veiled bitchfest, a chance to air grievances and flex our linguistic muscles at the ones that got our goad. Really, isn't the best revenge living well? Shouldn't sleeping dogs be left to lie? Aren't the truly terrible outgrowths of our coughing, wheezing film culture best simply forgotten?
Yes, naturally, of course, no shit. I remind myself of all that every year, shortly before sharpening my knives and going to work on Eli Roth's latest cine-abortion. They're cathartic, these public hatchet jobs, but are they useful, are they
valuable? Not particularly, alas. Which is why, staring down the barrel of this sparkly new year, I'm weaning myself off the ugly (if satisfying) ritual of rearview revenge. In lieu of a straight shot of snarkified listology—A.K.A. my official Worst Movies of the Year—I’m shaking things up a little bit. Here, instead, are 21 superlatives from the year that was, wrapped snugly into one way-past-its-expiration-date posting. Closure, thy name is variety. 2009, I await your pleasures.
Most Welcome Trend: Return of The Southern Gothic. Repetitive and wholly conventional, respectively, in their unremarkable narrative drives, Jeff Nichols’
Shotgun Stories and Lance Hammer’s
Ballast succeed almost entirely on the strength of their richly drawn, deep south milieus. As portraits of very specific environment—economically depressed small towns, stained with ancient bad blood, but redeemed by the bonds of shared cultural history—they feel as intrinsically American as any movies released last year. It’s enough to make you wish that David Gordon Green, whose lyrical influence can be felt in the tone poem sketchiness of these solemn mood pieces, would swagger his way back across the Mason-Dixon line. Speaking of which…
Most Disappointing Trend:Indie Auteurs Go IndieWood. Hey, I’m all for starving artists making their way up in the world. Gotta get paid, one way or the other. But are the perks of increased visibility worth the compromise of your character, of the very qualities that attracted folks to your work in the first place?
George Washington helmer
David Gordon Green made not one, but two bids for mainstream credibility in ’08: “prestige indie” bummer
Snow Angels and Apatow stoner lark
Pineapple Express. Both projects rendered the writer-director’s unique talents nearly invisible. If that wasn’t bad enough, the mini-majors then drafted
Peter Sollett, he of 2003’s endearingly scrappy
Raising Victor Vargas, to direct colorless, faux-hipster rom-com
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. What’s next, Lynne Ramsey shoots a Diablo Cody script? Lodge Kerrigan does the sequel to
Little Miss Sunshine?
Best Unreleased Film:I’ll be giving this one the front page, full-length treatment in the weeks to come (it just secured distribution through Regent) but for now let it be said that
Tokyo Sonata pushes Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s apocalyptic ennui to disarmingly poignant new heights. Not a reinvention so much as a redirection—the Master of Horror’s chilling modern dread is now informing a “real” world, not just the ghost towns of his exemplary genre pictures. Look for it in March.
Critics Say the Darndest Things, Part I: Auteur Theorists Gone Wild! For me, there’s nothing quite as amusing as watching cinephiles tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize their love of some awkward, stilted, generally awful filmic fiasco. It’s a particular gas when Sarris’ good ol’ auteur theory gets dusted off to lend a hand. Blind reverence has to be the driving force behind
Gran Torino‘s baffling success. Clint Eastwood, doing his best Archie Bunker impersonation, growls and scowls his way through a Haggisian race drama. Any other old salt behind the camera, and those across-the-board bad performances, broad-as-a-barn characterizations, and climatic Jesus Christ pose would be decried as the deficiencies that they are. But with Clint manning the boards, they’re just the price you pay for his unfettered true grit. (Dude does, like, one take. Cut him some slack.) I’m sorry, but if I want to see this living legend “interrogate” his weathered tough-guy routine, I’ll pop in
Unforgiven or
Million Dollar Baby. Here, I’m afraid, he’s just slipping into self-parody.
Grrrrrrrrrrr.
Best Double Dipper:This one’s a no-brainer.
Gus Van Sant has always played the “one for them, one for me” game, alternating between mainstream and fringe efforts, hunting good will one year and elephants the next. He’s proved adept at both vocations, but in 2008, he did us all
two better. Hypnotic passion project
Paranoid Park felt like the thrilling culmination of Van Sant’s art-house career, a demonstration of everything he’s learned in twenty years about mood and atmosphere and youth and the weight of human mortality.
Milk, on the other hand, emerged as the crowning achievement of Van Sant’s “populist” oeuvre, a deeply moving and wholly accessible ode to radical social upheaval. It was a personal best year for this constantly evolving iconoclast. If this is the quality of the output, let’s hope he keeps toeing the line between personal statement and Hollywood craft.
Worst Double Dipper:I’m tempted to direct my scorn at Clint Eastwood, everyone’s favorite aging journeyman, whose bland
Changeling and laughably awful
Gran Torino (there it is again!) essentially proved my running assertion that Old Squints is exactly as good—no better or worse—than his material. But those crimes were misdemeanors when compared to the rock-bottom double feature
Woody Allen cooked up in ‘08. First there was the awesomely incompetent
Cassandra’s Dream, which married
Match Point’s tedious, Dostoevsky-Lite moral quandaries to a completely out-of-touch portrait of British working-class desperation. Less irrelevant but
way more offensive was
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which the aging lecher finally got around to summarizing his retrograde notions RE: femininity, reducing the whole of womankind to three thin archetypes: the flake, the prude, and the feisty nutjob. They all just need a deep dicking from Javier Bardem’s unflappably cool, man’s man artiste.
This from the guy who’s built a reputation on being “good at writing women?”
Best Re-release:A vital precursor to the puzzle-box cinemas of Lynch and his ilk, Alain Resnais’
Last Year At Marienbad (1961) haunted inner city art houses last spring like some ghostly transmission from an alternate film past. Scenes pulse and churn in a dreamlike haze, repeated phrases poetically entwine with visual motifs, and a horror movie score drones on and on. This may be the closest movies have ever come to reproducing the elusive and confounding nature of human memory. A gloriously tangled nightmare,
Marienbad pretty much demands repeat viewings. If only Criterion would stop dragging ass on that DVD release…
The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised: Cannily constructing an end-of-days nightmare from the lingering specter of 9/11, Matt Reeves’ digital creature feature
Cloverfield was of dubious moral and cultural value—it evokes the look, sound, and awful feelings of that dark day just to infuse its Event Movie proceedings with vicarious aftershocks of remembered dread. Still, it was better than George Romero’s wretched
Diary of the Dead, which not only failed to drum up even the smallest ounce of suspense, but also announced its dated “message” about YouTube-era info consumption with about as much subtly as a rampaging lizard monster.
Most Underrated Movie of the Year:We all kind of know what the most overrated movie of the year is (
it is written, to coin a phrase) but what of the most underrated? I’m going to go with Adam Brooks’
Definitely, Maybe, a surprisingly smart and genuinely sweet romantic comedy left for dead by audiences
and critics about one year ago. Brooks deftly sidesteps most of the pitfalls of the modern rom-com, valuing sharp conversation over saccharine clichés. And his leading ladies—Rachel Weisz, Isla Fisher, and 2008’s hardest working actress, Elizabeth Banks—are not just strikingly gorgeous, but also reasonably well-drawn, nuanced even. I also dig the Clinton campaign through-line, which subtly suggests how political ups-and-down often dovetail with personal ones. Hell, mounds of extra points awarded for making Ryan Reynolds more than just tolerable. Here, he’s (gasp!) damn near charming. Hardly high art, but in the dark age of McConaughey, McDreamy, and Marley the Dog, this was the rarest of rare pleasures.
Stupidest Movie Confused For a Smart One:Tell No One is a French film, complete with accents and subtitles and everything. Surely that must be why everyone seems to think it’s a razor-sharp art thriller and not totally inane schlock. Of the various warning signs that the movie you’re watching may in fact be silly boilerplate, my favorite is a dramatic setpiece in an internet café (!) where director Guillaume Canet does everything short of superimposing an arrow to remind you of the leashed-up canine outside. Did I mention the whole scene is set to U2’s “With or Without You”?
Tell No One even ends with the hoariest of whodonit clichés: the killer who explains his entire scheme to both the hero and the audience. The inevitable American remake, sans any lingering traces of Frenchness, will likely get the sort of scoffing derision this one truly deserved.
Smartest Movie Confused For a Stupid One: Saddled with a trailer that basically strung together every Sam Jackson line from the movie into one smirking, cackling, context-free clip reel (“I’m the poleece, you have to do what I say!”)
Lakeview Terrace was the year’s most tragic casualty of terrible mis-marketing. What looked like a trashy thriller about a black boogieman cop and the nice, clean-cut couple he harasses turned out to be a far more complicated and probing examination of racial politics in post-Rodney King Los Angeles. In other words, rather than pulling a Haggis, writer-director Neil LaBute reclaimed some of the provocative gravity of his first feature, 1997’s
In the Company of Men. Still, I’ll grant the naysayers this: the
Training Day ending
is monumentally stupid.
Best Retrospective Screening:It’s pretty amazing that, with the proliferation of DVD, there are still filmmakers whose work is completely unavailable for public consumption. Such is the fate that befalls so many of our avant garde trailblazers. I was enormously lucky to be one of the few who attended this past summer’s
Bruce Baillie retrospective at Doc Films here in Chicago. Startlingly humane, his docu-sketches (poems more often than short-stories) both mourn and celebrate the people and the places that time has all but forgotten. Read more about this true original
here and consider buying one of his self-produced DVDs
here.
Best Line of the Year: "Why are you doing this to me?" That’s a corn rolled Mena Suvari, improbably deflecting blame onto the poor schmuck sticking out of her windshield (a hilariously incredulous Stephen Rea). She hit the guy on a drunken joyride and now he’s actually got the impertinent gall to keep living. Suvari’s harried and relentless guilt dodging is the dark comic crux of Stuart Gordon’s
Stuck, perfectly encapsulated by that naggingly selfish query. Just as funny: Rea’s wordless reaction.
Worst Line of the Year:“What the fuck have you done lately?” asks James McAvoy’s wimp-turned-badass at the blessed, thank-God-it’s-finally-over conclusion of
Wanted. The skinny heartthrob has just transformed his life by putting a bullet in someone’s head. What he wants to know is why we’re still living our boring little mundane lives, going to shitty summer movies when we could be using the world as our own personal shooting gallery. Via this summative line, the message couldn’t be more fascistically clear: it’s better to be a cold-blooded murderer than a dickless loser.
Critics Say the Darndest Things, Part 2: Masters of Disasters!Some movies are such colossal failures—so wildly ambitious in their miscalculation, so far-reaching in their wrongheadedness—that they’re veritably destined to be misunderstood
as misunderstood. Last year’s shitstorm of choice, championed by critics looking to get in early on the next
Showgirls or
Femme Fatale, was Richard Kelly’s supernova of bad ideas
Southland Tales. This year, the torch has been passed to the Wachowskis, whose
Speed Racer has already been reappraised by some as a kind of big-budget avant garde experiment. Let’s be clear now: jumping around in time, wiping the screen with moving faces, swirling a bunch of neon colors and flashy things into a seizure-inducing rave party—these do not qualify as “avant garde” signifiers. You want “experimental” cinema, check some of the stuff
this guy pimps.
Speed Racer is just a failed Hollywood blockbuster, as married to convention as any other eye-candy summer spectacle, twice as boring and three times as brain-dead as those dreadful
Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. The bizarro touches are just useless appendages of this franchise-launcher gone wrong. If this is indeed the “future of cinema,” I look forward to devoting my time and energies to the early work of Eadweard Muybridge.
Worst Documentary:G.J. Echternkamp’s
Frank & Cindy, in a walk. Not since
American Movie have I seen a documentary so shamelessly engineered to exploit its subjects. And even Chris Smith didn’t so fragrantly cop to his seedy intentions, nor was he making a mockery of his own damaged family. The moment where this cynical and opportunistic little shit loans money to his insecure mother
on camera (the noble saint!) sent shivers of disgust through me. Small consolation: the movie scarcely made a blip on the cultural radar, and G.J.’s not exactly fighting off the Hollywood suits with a stick.
Best Documentary: I saw Kurt Kuenne’s
Dear Zachary: A Letter To a Son About His Father not one week after posting my Year In Review. Had I caught it earlier, I’d have been singing its praises alongside the rest of last year’s cream of the cinematic crop. In sharp contrast to 2008’s worst documentary, its best was conceived first and foremost as a loving tribute. That it eventually evolved into so much more—harrowing true crime drama, social outrage polemic, colorful road movie—is a testament to the strange way that a documentarian can find his full story
as he’s filming it. Totally devastating from start to finish, this should be required viewing for all budding nonfiction filmmakers, especially those with little more than a wounded heart and a commercial-grade camera at their disposal.
Best Animated Mix-Modes Documentary:That’d be Brett Morgan’s
Chicago 10, which crosscuts grainy found footage of the ’68 Chicago riots with rotoscoped recreations of the subsequent farce of a trial. The anachronistic music choices—who needs flower power when you’ve got guerilla radio?—draw a straight-line parallel between 60s activism and our current era’s lack thereof. Like
Milk, this one stresses the need for a leader, a symbol and a mouthpiece for the movement. Is Obama as good as it gets or is there another Abbie Hoffman waiting in the wings? (The runner up in this category, by the way, would be Ari Folman’s troubling
Waltz With Bashir, partially by virtue of its conceits about defensively selective memory, but mostly because it’s the only other animated mixed-modes documentary that came out last year. Take
that, Andrew Sarris.)
I Still Don’t Fucking Know:Eleven years and one shot-for-shot remake later, and I still don’t fucking know whether to praise or condemn Michael Haneke’s sick puppy social experiment
Funny Games. It’s like the film’s various champions and detractors are waging war in my head. Is it a brilliant deconstruction of the way we watch violent thrillers, or a finger-wagging lecture from a cruelly sadistic hypocrite? Every time I lean towards the latter opinion I find myself recalling how handily Haneke played me on first viewing, how I responded exactly as he intended me to. That kind of masterful manipulation—not to mention the subsequent reflections it might provoke—is worthy of some kind of admiration, right? Regardless,
Funny Games is far more terrifying than the lion share’s of the thrillers it savages. How’s that for irony?
Worst Movie of the Year:So much for shaking things up. I just couldn’t close the book on ’08 without taking one last clean shot at the year’s most sick and ugly and reprehensible cultural excretion. It’d be easy enough to write
Rambo off as just exceedingly grisly and stupid action movie entertainment, a throwback to when high-adrenaline genre fare still delivered the visceral goods, were it not for the film’s dead-serious opening moments. Stallone begins his belated retread with
actual atrocity footage, quick-cuts of gruesome newsreel, an immediate reminder of the horrors happening every day all over the planet. The real-world prologue forces us to take this shit seriously, so when Sly starts piling on the
staged grotesqueries (women repeatedly raped, children bayoneted, babies tossed in raging infernos) it’s exceptionally hard to get stoked about the impending army-of-one retribution he’s cynically setting the stages for. I like hard-edged, R-rated mayhem as much as the next guy, but if folks can shrug off the notion of genocide as a damn McGuffin, maybe Joe Lieberman’s right after all: we
are desensitized.
21 Reasons to Get Back on the Horse in 09: Almodóvar, Bigelow, Breillat, Campion, the Dardennes, Denis, Egoyan, Gilliam, Herzog, Hillcoat, R. Johnson, Jonze, Lee, Linklater, Mann, McQueen, Miike, Scorsese, von Trier, those wizards at Pixar, and (maybe, hopefully, fingers crossed) Malick.
