End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Pt. VI: The Ones I Missed

I saw 75 new films in 2007 (a new record!) In a perfect world, I would've seen around 200 or so. Here are 21 that were essential viewing, but still slipped through my fingers. Can't see everything, after all.



Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)



The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin)



Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev)



The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel)



Dry Season (Mahamet-Saleh Haroun)



Election (Johnny To)



Triad Election (Johnny To)



Exiled (Johnny To)



Exterminating Angels (Jean-Claude Brisseau)



Flanders (Bruno Dumont)



Forever (Heddy Honigmann)



Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck)



Half Moon (Bahman Ghobadi)



Honor de Cavalleria (Albert Serra)



Into the Wild (Sean Penn)



Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran)



Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso)



Quiet City (Aaron Katz)



This is England (Shane Meadows)



West of the Tracks (Wang Bing)



The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach)



As I say, there's always next year. Thanks for takin' the journey with me. I'll see you in 2008.

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Pt. V: The 4 Best Movies of 2007, pt. C

Here it is, the final entry, the movie that I may have seen last, but left the most deep, violent impression on me: if I'm Not There and Syndromes and a Century are joy inherent, and Colossal Youth represents a completely new kind of film, then this is the most explosive piece of mainstream cinema of the year.




There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)

I’m not sure I have ever seen anything like what has been achieved with There Will Be Blood. It is a work that grows within you, festering, not letting its grip loose. It is a work of sublimated emotional and physical violence, etching each shot into the fabric like a knife blade into a block of wood.

We open in silence. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) can’t make his fortune in silver, so he moves to oil prospecting. He becomes rich. But he lusts for even bigger windfalls. He has a son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier). One day, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) come to his office and tells him that oil is in Little Boston, California. Plainview finds it, buys the land, and drains the oil from the ground. H.W. has an accident by the derrick and becomes deaf. Daniel’s mysterious half-brother, Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor), appears and becomes a new partner. H.W. is sent away to a deaf school, and all the while Daniel builds a rivalry with the other Sunday brother, Eli (also played by Dano), a young preacher who may not be all that he seems. And so, after Daniel has sold off to Union Oil, and we discover the depths and sources of both his fury and his sorrow, we see him retired, fifteen years later, disowning his son and having one final showdown with Eli. It is here that we see what these two men have quietly been all along: the corruption of the American soul, and of their own souls. Daniel lost his family to his avarice, and Eli lost his and many others’ faiths to the same vice.

Anderson has crystallized what he began with Punch-Drunk Love, namely, refocusing and concentrating the vast wealth of his talent. His tracking shots have slowed their tempo, and have thus become more penetrating and ominous. Similarly, his soundscapes are more stark, and more sparse. The score, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, is Anderson’s first without the Michael Penn-Aimee Mann-Jon Brion juggernaut, but Greenwood follows Brion’s lead from Punch-Drunk Love by creating an impressionistic, sparsely-used score that is without fail, the best film score since Brion’s 2002 opus. Anderson employs Greenwood’s percussive, dissonant strings to terrifying use, as they actively become an essential part of the film’s fabric, the tool which alludes to the hideous decay which is slowly built upon with all other elements.

And then there is the small matter of Day-Lewis and Dano. Day-Lewis only further confirms his mastery over his craft, as every nuance, every simmering ferocity, every small expression of tenderness or pain is completely under his control. Daniel Plainview is a titanic smokestack, misanthropic to the core and willing to subvert any obstacle in order to achieve his ends. He instantly recognizes in Eli the same impulse to control and manipulate, and hates the threat to his power. It is a marvel to see Day-Lewis keep this all under the surface of things, smoldering until the climactic battle between and money and faith.

As for Dano, make no mistake: he is a force to be reckoned with. Outclassed he may be, but how many 23-year-olds do you know who wouldn’t be? Eli is, similarly to Javier Bardem’s Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, a mortal demon, a clear-eyed, placid poison who hungers for wealth and power while appearing calm and pious to his parishioners. He condemns Plainview and his own father for striking a deal to drill for oil, but he is sickened more by the fact that he is not paid what he feel he is owed. A most revealing moment is his new church being built around him while he rehearses his sermon. Elmer Gantry would be proud. But Dano, as wonderfully creepy and outlandish as he lets Eli be, also shows his vulnerability, especially when Eli, now rich and famous at the movie’s climax, visits Daniel to see if he will drill for more oil for him. Eli is weak, succumbing to “sin” and greed, some semblance of true belief still within him that says he has failed to do the Lord’s will.

SPOILER ALERT: And what of the ending which many decry or laugh off? It seems like the explosion that the movie has threatened to bring, but away from which it always shies. It is the mad, tormented battle that illuminates the final straw of Daniel’s hatred, and of his madness. He finally explodes, like the oil derrick that brings about H.W.’s deafness. It is the delirious end of faith, faith destroyed by money, and the evil that lays sprawling out before us, yelling, “I’m finished ” Plainview has won and lost–for it is America that is finished.

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Pt. V: The 4 Best Movies of 2007, pt. B

All that I can really say about this is that it just came out on DVD. Drop what you're doing and rent it.




Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Perhaps the masterpiece in a small body of work that may be the best of the 21st Century, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ode to his parents is a breathtaking meditation on memory, metaphysics, and the delicate malleability of time. His trademark dialectic structure is here–the first half (the “mother half”) is set in a country medical clinic, seen from a young woman’s perspective, the second half (the “father half”) in an urban hospital seen from a young man’s point of view–but the two blend and intermingle more naturally than in Blissfully Yours or Tropical Malady, representing how memories can drift from one context to another. That the same characters appear in both sections only reinforces such a concept. Such gentle beauty breathes a majestic philosophical meditation into great poetry.

I was recently remarking to a friend how strange it was that Weerasethakul himself names many filmmakers to have had a direct influence upon him, namely the canonical American avant-gardists (Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Bruce Baillie) and the world cinema canon of the 1990s (Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas Kiarostami). But having seen both Syndromes and Tropical Malady again recently, along with a collection of short films spanning his career, it is evident that Weerasethakul is as completely self-contained an artist as can be imagined. His gifts of capturing the quotidian and making them effortlessly profound, of discovering the metaphysical grandeur of nature and how it interacts with human beings, of blending fiction and documentary, realism and folkloric myth, are without peer. He often employs non-professional actors, and commands their inherent naturalism with grace and ebullience. There is more life in his films than anyone else’s in the 21st Century.

Weerasethakul is fascinated by how stories come into existence. Indeed, from the 1995 short Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves to his four features and his most recent shorts (Wordly Desires, Anthem, Emerald), Weerasethakul presents characters who are creating narratives within the space of the film, and often magically inciting the existence of the film itself. The space where myth (the past) and reality (the present) meet is a source of great joy, suggesting a never-ending temporal flow, where distinctions of past and present are completely meaningless.

Syndromes and a Century marks the greatest realization of all of his concerns, and is his greatest technical achievement. Weerasethakul manipulates light to create an iridescent glow in all of his spaces. In the “mother” section, light constantly flows in from the country outside, seemingly giving life to the patients and doctors inside. Artificial light in the “father” section behaves in the same way. Environment and subject are merged. The way that characters echo each other in each section only further attests to this, that the country and the city, the mother and the father, are two halves of the same whole, inhabiting the same temporal space. Syndromes and a Century is the joyous habitation of memory, and the most affirmative film in a decade.

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Part V: The 4 Best Movies of the Year, pt. A

Even though I consider this film on equal footing with the other 3 mentioned in this section, I should mention that in this year's Film Comment Critics' Poll, I voted this film to be the very best of the year. Take that for what you will.




I'm Not There and The Grand Symphonic Dance of Chaos, Clocks, and Watermelons

"How long it had been, I couldn’t even say.
The day I arrived looks a lot like today.
At least, that’s how it seemed at the time."

Todd Haynes’s masterpiece, like its very subject, is everything and nothing to everyone and nobody. It is a poem, a concerto, an essay, and a doctoral dissertation. It is also only a movie. It is a rapturous celebration of the freedom of the artist and a devastating critique of the human consequences of such freedom. It is a canny exploration of the political realities of the 60s, and a philosophical reconstruction of identity. It is not really about Bob Dylan, and completely about "Bob Dylan." It is coldly academic and passionately emotional, incredibly dense, and delightfully effervescent. It is, along with There Will Be Blood, the best American film of 2007.

Some already well-reported talking points to cover about I’m Not There, but which are nonetheless important to consider when tackling the film’s many long and winding roads:

–Bob Dylan is played by six different people (Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere), each portraying Dylan in a different phase of his life.

–None of these six characters diegetically interact with each other.

–None of these six characters are played by people whose race, gender, nationality, and/or age correspond to the Dylan they are portraying.

–None of these six characters are named Bob Dylan.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can begin parsing just what the hell is going on in this whirling dervish of a film.

Bob Dylan is a cultural figure who has seemed impervious, especially in his heyday (1962-1977), to the poison of celebrity. The more controversy he courted, the more legendary he became. He has existed within and without of the temporal moment, whereas Elvis Presley and The Beatles have been practically defined by it. The more people attempt to define him, the more he seems to slip through our fingers.

Haynes manages to effortlessly capture this mobility, presenting Dylan not as one man, but four men, a boy, and a woman. While the film’s structural spine progresses from Dylan-as-Guthrie (Franklin) to Dylan-as-folk-hero (Bale) to Dylan-as-rock-god (Blanchett) to Dylan-as-recluse (Gere), these various parts dance around each other, moving back and forth across time, and eventually, space. This is not to mention how Dylan-as-Rimbaud (Whishaw) and Dylan-as-damaged-family-man (Ledger) weave their way across the whole story.

Since Dylan is not a fixed entity who can be linearly and psychologically understood, Haynes approaches him as a construction, one invented by the American public, but also by Dylan himself. His earliest avatar is an 11-year-old African-American boy named Woody Guthrie. In 1959, Woody has escaped from a child correctional facility in Minnesota and has jumped the rails, planning on making it big as a folk singer. He believes himself to be Guthrie, while inventing his biography on the spot. Then, Arthur Rimbaud appears, a 19-year-old poet being interrogated by a nameless tribunal in a nondescript government office. He proceeds to dance in and out of the film, offering mad aphorisms about nature and creativity. Back to Woody: when he is confronted about living 25 years in the past, we cut to a documentary about the troubled life of Jack Rollins, legendary folk singer of Greenwich Village who disappeared from the limelight in early 1964.

We jump back to Woody’s journeyman story, and when he is tossed into a river off of a boxcar, we move to the story of Robbie Clark, an actor who became famous for playing Rollins in a hit movie from 1964. His marriage is falling apart, and to that end, the perspective taken is predominantly not Clark’s, but his wife Claire’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg). We again double back to Woody, until he makes his final escape to visit the real Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. He vanishes from the story, only to be replaced by Jude Quinn, who literally guns down an "unappreciative" audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

The rest of the film revolves around this central figure, until we meet Billy, the aged outlaw who escaped Pat Garrett’s bullet and went into hiding in a bizarre small town in Missouri. After this introduction, all four remaining narratives slowly build their way to a firm break, until Jack finds God and becomes John (perhaps a seventh Dylan incarnation), Robbie gets divorced and drives off with his kids to go on a boat trip, Jude OD’s and then fatally crashes his motorcycle, and Billy escapes from prison and rides a boxcar out of town.

While this might feel like a thorough synopsis, it only touches on what Haynes accomplishes by a radical collection of distancing effects and identifying techniques, all at the same time. Dylan’s lyrics, verbatim excerpts from various interviews, and quotes from other films saturate the dialogue. Visual passages from 8 ½, Masculin Feminin, Eat the Document and Don’t Look Back are quoted wholesale. This is a film of cultural pastiche, which is only appropriate. If it appears to lack coherence, that is because attempting to dissect a life necessarily lends itself to incoherence, and no life could be better described as incoherent than Bob Dylan’s. These techniques—and the absence of any firm notion of story or character—provide a lens of analysis on the whole proceedings, studying Dylan like so many others have studied him. But now, we have a set of tools that reveals just how constructed previous studies have been. And no better technique is the splintering of Dylan into six people.

The way we have traditionally understood Dylan is in very concrete biographical elements, all closed off from the others. Haynes exploits this by his fractured narrative. But he goes one step further to reveal that such an understanding is ludicrous, because Dylan is only one man, and these six personalities live in him all at once, and have from the very beginning. If Woody disappears near the beginning of the film, it is because he is the first to become completely integrated into the greater whole. By 1962, Dylan had digested his influences and emerged as his own being. Casting Franklin emphasizes not only the roots of his influences, but the apprentice-like quality of Dylan at that time, ready from the beginning to be someone completely different. Haynes’s "natural Brechtianism," as J. Hoberman calls it, intrinsically understands what analytical tendencies would arise in someone seeing a young black child who calls himself Woody Guthrie, but also living under the pretext of "Bob Dylan."

Similarly, Haynes captures the strange behavioral implosions that Dylan showed the world from late 1965 to mid-1966 in Cate Blanchett’s performance as Jude Quinn. The most physically radical of all of Haynes’s Dylan avatars, Blanchett organically assumes the image of Dylan, which by the mid-60s was as familiar to the public as he was ever likely to become. But instead of Jamie Foxx-style mimicry, Blanchett becomes something totally different, a Dylan that is being invented right before our eyes. By becoming a man-woman (or is it a woman-man?), Quinn is never allowed to be fixed in our minds, constantly forcing us to reconsider what Dylan’s image at that time actually meant.

When it comes to Jack Rollins, we are given the least amount of conventional concrete evidence of a character, as the story is presented as a television documentary attempting to discover what ever happened to the legendary folk singer. But if considered through this Brechtian window, we see that Haynes once again demands that we think about this phase of Dylan’s life as that most fetishized by mainstream popular culture. Indeed, much of the documentary parodies the lost idealism of the folk generation, how they became commodities, and how Dylan himself first became a commodity. Rollins’s rigidity in not only his music and politics but also in how he violently bites the hand that feeds him is echoed in the rigid and obnoxious form of the TV documentary. Sheer comic magic comes from Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore), the Joan Baez figure full of pomp and circumstance, who also milks the phony "naturalism" of the medium for cathartic laughs.

Many people think that Robbie Clark is the most conventional and least interesting of these six narratives, but Haynes manages to subtly reveal another temporal warp in how Dylan the Family Man has been exhibited and received. It is the only story to not be told chronologically, which in itself implies that this Dylan infects all the others more deeply. And as another distancing layer, the story is told from Claire’s eyes. (Plunging down the rabbit hole even further, much of the expository information is recited in third-person voiceover by Robbie himself.) Haynes’s move is to show that when we think of Dylan in Woodstock raising a family, or succumbing to the more damning elements of fame, sympathy drifts to Suze Rotolo (Dylan’s girlfriend during the early folk years) and his first wife, Sara. The moment when love dies is when Robbie attempts to inhabit Jack Rollins. He is incapable of discovering the quality that defines Dylan’s allure, and Claire realizes that the man with whom she is in love is an apparition, a construction onto which she cannot grasp. Robbie embraces only what Rollins can superficially give him, but decays at the prospect of liberating himself from those gifts.

Billy is easily the most hated part of I’m Not There by most of its detractors, and even by some of its supporters. A good friend adamantly declared that "it just doesn’t work." Others similarly claim that it feels too out-of-place, too abstract, and too un-Dylan to fit in with the rest of the ghosts that haunt the film’s spaces. The character of Billy, however, is the key to the whole project, the avatar that unifies the other figures into a temporally malleable meditation on Dylan as a whole. Billy lives in a town called Riddle, MO, a name that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. It is crucial to note that Woody, at the beginning of this, told a couple of hobos that he had spent a great deal of time in Riddle. Billy tells his story in voiceover, about how in Riddle, he is invisible, allowed to live out his remaining years. But Pat Garrett has returned, announcing plans to demolish Riddle to allow a superhighway to run through the valley.

Time has already begun to bend, as Billy looks out over a valley to see Vietnamese villages being carpet-bombed. Garrett and company arrive in Buicks. Billy, after protesting Garrett’s actions, is taken to jail in such a vehicle. But everything else about the place suggests rural America in the late 19th Century. This would also be impossible if Billy actually is whom he says, because his age would place the action at around 1919 or so. And in the film’s final temporal kink, Billy, upon escaping prison and hopping the boxcar, discovers a beat-up old guitar in one of the bunks: it is Woody’s. These six Dylans have now been completely absorbed together, able to be viewed as connected elements in a naturally disconnected man, who can call upon any number of these elements to present himself to the rest of the world.

J. Hoberman, in one of the best pieces of criticism on I’m Not There, says that the film "is an essay that derives its intellectual force from the idea of Bob Dylan, and its emotional depth from his songs." The truth of this statement is unshakeable, and is one of the keys to realizing that Haynes’s film isn’t merely a cold, analytical, postmodern study. None of Dylan’s hits are diegetically present: there is no use of "Blowin’ in the Wind," "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall," "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," "It Ain’t Me Babe," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," "Lay Lady Lay," "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door," "Tangled Up in Blue," or "Hurricane." "The Times They Are A-Changin’" makes a brief appearance, but it’s Jack Rollins singing an excerpt on a Steve Allen-style talk show. (Jack’s singing duties ae taken up by Mason Jennings.) "All Along the Wachtower" is heard fleetingly, and is performed in the Hendrix mode by Eddie Vedder. "Like a Rolling Stone" kicks open the back doors of your mind only over the closing credits, and "Mr. Tambourine Man" is ripped apart in the last moments of the film by Dylan’s wailing harmonica solo from a 1966 live performance.

The brunt of the musical work is done by the more obscure, and perhaps more personal, songs of the Dylan catalogue. The only Dylan that ultimately matters is the one who emerges within these songs, and a dialogue between the music and the film is immediately begun. What’s more, covers find their way in as well, suggesting that even Dylan himself might not matter at all; all that’s left is the music he has allowed us to appropriate for ourselves.

A key example of Haynes’s intelligence in creating such a dialogue is the scene in which Claire announces that she is leaving Robbie. What builds to a fight quickly collapses into one last moment of sexual—and emotional—intimacy between the two. As they embrace, "Idiot Wind" fades into the soundtrack, but it’s not the version found on Blood on the Tracks. Instead, it is an earlier version he recorded when he initially laid down the songs in New York in the fall of 1974. It’s rougher, in a lower key, and achingly sparse, only Dylan’s voice and his acoustic guitar breathing the song into life. The lyrics, once a scathing indictment of a former love’s inability to stay true to herself, becomes an elegiac and mournful loss of something that, despite the singer’s best efforts to destroy, will live on as tender memory. It is a perfect echo of the last moments Robbie and Claire will share, and when it cuts to the divorce being finalized in court, the music and lyrics’ contrapuntal dance only becomes more incisive as we see Robbie losing his temper in the parking lot.

The other centerpiece is one of the greatest and least-heralded songs Dylan ever made, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." The final song from his mid-60s opus, Blonde on Blonde (an album more prevalent in I’m Not There than any other, interestingly enough), Haynes deploys it over Jude Quinn’s motorcycle crash and his final soliloquy, which he may be reciting from beyond the grave. The speech is from an acerbic interview Dylan gave to Nat Hentoff in a 1966 issue of Playboy, but from the mouth of Blanchett, along with the instrumental sections of the song playing beneath her words, it feels like a final eulogy to the transitory nature of Dylan’s life and music. Indeed, his final words, "everyone knows I’m not a folk singer," are followed by a swell in the music, a coy half-smile directly into the camera, and six gunshots firing at each Dylan’s mug shot (an echo from the beginning of the film).

I have seen I’m Not There four times, and have only begun to scratch the surface with this paltry amalgam of thoughts. It is a deep, rich, and constantly revelatory film, one which sees Dylan as one and many beings, instantly recognizable but hardly knowable. It is a call to thinking about time and identity in completely fresh and exciting ways. It is the American cousin to Syndromes and a Century in its celebration of temporal, artistic, and existential freedom. Like both Bob Dylan and, as it turns out, "Bob Dylan," it’s not there, but it is willing to see where it might go.


Like Bob Dylan, "Bob Dylan," and I'm Not There, criticism of the film is in a constant state of becoming. Here are six pieces which all helped bring this one into existence:

J. Hoberman in The Village Voice

Larry Gross in Film Comment

Kent Jones in The Nation

Jonathan Rosenbaum in The Chicago Reader

An anonymous blogger's rant about the film and Dylan's life

Jacob Rubin in The New Republic

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Part V: The 4 Best Movies of 2007

These are the ones that not only reached further than anything else this year, they also set out to reinvent the very essence of cinema itself. These 4 films will stand the test of time, and will be debated long after we've all left the game. Here's the first:




Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)

Before May 2006, I had never heard of Pedro Costa. Then, when Colossal Youth premiered that month at the Cannes Film Festival (out of which a substantial number of press and public walked), it was as if I could not escape him. He was a rock star. By August of this year, the Portugese filmmaker was the subject of a complete retrospective in New York, which then proceeded to tour the continent, and Colossal Youth was treated to a full New York premiere run. While I regrettably missed his shorts and his only "documentary" feature, I saw all five of his "narrative" features. (The quotes will make sense later in this piece, trust me.) By simple virtue of his current methods, and of the evolution of his body of work, Costa may be the greatest living filmmaker in the world. Even the world’s oldest–fellow countryman Manoel de Oliveira, who turns 100 next year and had THREE films premiere in New York in 2007–seems to think so.

There are people who 99.9% of the American public will never hear of: names like Hou Hsiao-hsien, James Benning, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas Kiarostami, Bela Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Sang-soo, etc. Costa certainly falls under this category. But to people like me, he’s massive, a star in his own right, so huge that backlash has already occurred. The irony is not lost on me. Yet, before August 2007, I didn’t have a single opportunity to see any of his first five features or any of his shorts. (Colossal Youth played twice in February as part of Film Comment Selects, after being controversially rejected from the 2006 New York Film Festival.) None of his work is on DVD in the US. I guess he’s just my kind of rock star.

Costa, by his own admission, is in love with classical American cinema. The Blood (1989) evokes Nicholas Ray and Charles Laughton. Casa de Lava (1994) reminds one of Jacques Tourneur and Fritz Lang. Bones (1997) is more Bresson than anyone American, but Costa insists that In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth are John Ford remakes (albeit highly radical ones). These connections sell his other achievements short, however.

In Colossal Youth, the Lisbon we see is one familiar to the viewers of Bones and In Vanda’s Room: the Cape Verde immigrant-populated district of Fontainhas. In Vanda, we watched the tenements being demolished. In Colossal Youth, there are new housing developments, and piles of rubble everywhere. It is another universe, a wasteland that seems born from molten lava. It is a film that looks and feels like nothing I have ever seen before in my life. (A note on its production: Costa shot 320 hours of footage, all on location in Fontainhas, on consumer digital video cameras over a 15-month period. He spent roughly a year editing that footage down to a 2 ½-hour movie. His crew rarely eclipsed the size of himself and 1-2 other people. He used only available light, with reflectors. He also only used direct sound. His cast was comprised of residents of Fontainhas, many of whom he has known for years.)

Narratively, it is a rather sparse affair. A man named Ventura, a former construction worker and witness to the Portugese revolution from decades earlier, is thrown out of his house by his wife. (Or is she his wife?) He then searches for a new home to live with his "children." It is not clear whether or not Ventura has any biological children, but he seems to be a spiritual father to various Fontainhas inhabitants, among whom is Vanda, who is now a mother and heroin-free.
Costa never presents a clean linear narrative; rather, we inhabit a picaresque dream, where time jumps back by a mere change of wardrobe. Vibrant contrasts of ethereal colors punctuate long, static takes of people telling many, many stories. All the actors are playing a version of their actual selves, but compared to In Vanda’s Room–which Thom Andersen astutely observed tore down the wall between fiction and documentary, between filmmaker and subject–Colossal Youth is an even darker, stranger work, the other side of the coin to Syndromes and a Century. Where Syndromes evokes the delicacy of memory and the breakdown of time and space in a lyrical, tender way, Colossal Youth does similar things, but by taking the very elements of reality and turning them on their heads. It surrealizes documentary in a way even Bunuel and Rouch could not have imagined, and grounds narrative into a tactile space the way Tarkovsky and Tarr used to do.

Few shots ever move. Almost all shots are done from low angles. Andersen has described Costa’s methods as creating a Hollywood epic in which the stars are the character actors. Tag Gallagher has said that the film applies mythical epic form to those of the most abject poverty, the ennobling of the poor that many others have mentioned. These all do disservice to the new universe Costa has created, however. He has given us a new way of looking at the world, a way of seeing beauty in abjection, hulking madness in a timeless universe, people being accepted entirely on their own terms without power being placed upon them by outside forces. Ventura, Vanda, Ventura’s friend Lento, and many others are creating their own community, one in order to make the outside universe cohere.

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Part IV: Nos. 11-5

For this year's best-of breakdown, four movies stood far and away above the rest, as well as from each other. These 7, on the other hand, fit rather nicely together in terms of the rapture they inspired in me. Once again, they are presented in alphabetical order.




13 Lakes (James Benning)

James Benning’s films are not for everyone. I warned my then-girlfriend what she was getting herself into if she came to see Benning’s latest with me, and though she stayed the whole time, I could’ve sworn I heard some gentle snoring coming from her direction (just kidding). Quite simply, 13 Lakes consists of thirteen 10-minute shots that never move or change perspective. Each shot is of a different lake in the U.S. Sound like background noise? Perhaps. But like the great structuralist films of the past, the nature of the cinematic experience is essential to finding the joys in the film; it forces one to really look at and listen to the image, until a whole wealth of rich variation becomes evident. Nature becomes otherworldly. (And by the way, the other part of this diptych, Ten Skies, is a Jerry Bruckheimer film by comparison.)





The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

It is common historical knowledge that Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by the man he had once called a friend, and that said "friend," Robert Ford, achieved minor celebrity for the killing. To most, including James’s family, Ford was a sniveling little coward who deserved the killing he himself received ten years later. That general information being taken care of before the movie even starts is a sign that Andrew Dominik is after something different than the standard Western-betrayal narrative. His film is a lyrical invocation of the mythological West already being constructed in James’s lifetime, and about James himself. Sensuous slow-motion, hands running through wheat, a hauntingly backlit silhouette of James (Brad Pitt) stalking railroad tracks–this is where myth and brutal fact collide. Pitt’s James is a saintly madman, in love with and mocking of his own celebrity. As Ford, Casey Affleck embodies a young obsessive who despises himself and James for that obsession. And as evidence of the first major case of American celebrity mythology, James intrinsically recognizes that he needs Ford as much as Ford needs him. The History Channel-like voiceover serves as a sharp counterpoint to the dreamy and violent imagery, literalizing factual history while Dominik paints it as glorious madness. And when James sets his guns down one April morning in order to dust a picture on his living room wall, he closes his eyes, and quietly awaits the only thing that can save him: annihilation.





Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye)

As an employee at Film Forum, one of the major art houses in New York City, I take it very personally that Tony Kaye’s latest film–which Film Forum premiered last October–played for only nine days to abysmally small crowds, when it was intended to last weeks. The film met a similar fate in major cities all over the country, and never escaped urban centers. It is a tragedy that people did not have the open mind to discover the fascinating and terrifying glories of Kaye’s years-in-the-making epic. The most astonishing thing about Lake of Fire is its sober evenhandedness, not daring to collapse into morally unambiguous ideology the way that the abortion debate so often does. Shot in luminous 35mm black-and-white, Kaye sketches out events in the history of abortion in the 1990s & 2000s, interviews major players on both sides of the issue, and refuses to give any easy answers. Eventually, after you see two abortions performed in front of your eyes, you realize that life, not only in its creation but also how it is lived after it is created (i.e. the autonomy women should have over their own bodies), is too easily destroyed by what certain men and women demand, based on the "word of God."





No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)

The thing that makes No Country for Old Men a masterpiece is the creation of an apocalyptic universe right in the middle of southwest Texas. Everything that happens–from Llewellyn Moss’s (Josh Brolin) theft of $2 million found in the desert, to the pursuit by hired killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s (Tommy Lee Jones) instinctive deduction of events–happens with a force of purpose that is hardly ever explained. We simply see incredibly specific, methodic, minute actions, always with intention behind them. We just don’t know their secrets. Instead, we see details, hear sounds, and feel reactions that create a complete universe, one where a demon physically stalks the earth. But even he isn’t born of Hell, for he is a mortal. Shifting perspectives are expertly crafted, with subjectivities kept intact. The barren wilderness is both liberating and oppressive, as is the almost complete absence of non-diegetic sound. Even the ending, with its eery anti-climaxes on all fronts, is appropriate. In this universe, nobody is satisfied, not even this mortal demon. And as Ed Tom Bell sits at his breakfast table and recounts a comforting dream of his father being a protecting force in his life, he has no choice but to wake up.





Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel)

Philippe Garrel’s love letter to his youth and his stern rebuttal to Bernardo Bertolucci’s facile The Dreamers, Regular Lovers is a haunting portrait of the aftermath of May ’68. Shot in sumptuous but also charmingly tossed-off black and white, Garrel’s chamber epic follows a young poet, Francois (Louis Garrel, the director’s son and also one of the stars of The Dreamers), as he negotiates how to exist after his and his friends’ moment of triumph evaporates. Regular Lovers is intoxicated by the quotidian, the casual atmosphere of young people unsure of where to go or what to do. It also does not demonize all figures of authority, nor does it sanctify the behavior of Francois and his friends. (The scene where some cops enter Francois and his friend’s apartment is hilarious in the way the cops admire the art on the walls.) The centerpiece, a communal dance to The Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow,” is a gorgeously rapturous and melancholy ode to trying to establish a community in a world that has rejected you.





The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang)

In a certain respect, The Wayward Cloud should be the happy ending the protagonists of What Time is it There? never received. After years of separation and spiritual longing, they are indeed reunited. Tsai’s gifts for rendering the absurdly erotic are on full display here, mostly involving a drought, random bursts into garish musical numbers, and many, many watermelons. Raw sensuality drips from every frame. And perhaps the film’s tragic, sexually violent ending proves that the two lovers’ romance was always little more than a dream, an ethereal fantasy which only proves brutal if ever made real.





Zodiac (David Fincher)

There is clearly an intelligence behind the David Fincher of Alien3, Se7en, and Fight Club, less so behind The Game and Panic Room. But, with Zodiac, Fincher has delivered his second Great Work, and his first true epic. Like great Hollywood art, the film is dense, uncompromising, and somewhat avant-garde while hewing all of these tendencies to a popular, mainstream framework. We disappear down a rabbit’s hole of facts, both hard and soft, and at the end of the day, cannot decipher what justice or knowledge are supposed to mean.

In many respects, Zodiac is the opposite side of the same coin as Fincher's breakthrough, Se7en. Both are serial killer procedurals, but whereas Se7en was all philosophical doom, Zodiac plunges into a labyrinth of quotidian details, adding up to something and nothing at the exact same time. Facts overlap, contradict each other, converge and split apart, until no matter how long you've been staring at them, they refuse to bring you any closer to unmasking the man who murdered five people between 1969 and 1970 in northern California. Police are able to generate a rough sketch of what he looks like, but in one letter, he says he wears a disguise. He seems to be psychotic, but always sounds calm. Moreover, he ceases to kill for no apparent reason--hardly the standard reaction for a psychotic murderer. Three men commit themselves so deeply to the case that it ultimately wrecks them: for Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist, his marriage disintegrates. For Robert Downey Jr.'s reporter, he crawls to the bottom of a bottle and loses his job. For Mark Ruffalo's cop, he nearly puts away a man he is convinced is guilty, but can't prove. Questions of obsession, the media, and the potentially inherent falsity of facts leaves us with nothing to grasp onto, which is exactly how Fincher wants to leave us.


Tomorrow, the beginning of the end! The 4 best movies of 2007, presented with their own individual posts, in alphabetical order.

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Part III: The Next 10

In any other year, these 10 films could have ended up on my Top 10; however, 2007 was so strong a year that I couldn't avoid the opportunity to acknowledge their achievements, as broad and far-reaching as they certainly are.




12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu)

Like Zodiac, Syndromes and a Century, and Brand Upon the Brain, the trickiness of memory is a central concern for Corneliu Porumboiu’s chamber piece, only it takes a much more darkly funny point of view about it. Three men, all of whom feel like they have something to prove about the fall of Ceauşescu, reveal something essential about the nature of politics: regimes may change, but people rarely do, ditto the beauty of the world all around us. The central sequence–a real-time television broadcast–is a delicious parody of regional public access TV and a sobering satire about how history can get lost in the shuffle of human perception.





Away from Her (Sarah Polley)

Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent) have the sort of wealthy-liberal marriage most of us could only dream about. But the fairy tale ends when Fiona is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and is placed in a treatment center. The great sadness of having to cope with such a loss informs every single frame of this beautiful, graceful film, one which neither sentimentalizes nor trivializes the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on a marriage. Grant watches as the woman he knew vanishes, as she finds it difficult to remember him, and even takes up with a fellow patient. Grant was once unfaithful, many decades ago, and perhaps this is Fiona punishing him. Or perhaps it is an inevitable byproduct of Fiona desperately attempting to find something which makes sense to her. Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” in its original version and a new, instrumental version, haunts the backdoors of the film, where Grant realizes that he and Fiona must invent new lives for themselves, and performs the ultimate sacrifice–which is also the ultimate act of love. Polley’s direction and camerawork is so understated, so quiet, so assured, that we can only marvel at the beautifully sad thing she has created, and wonder what true love ultimately means.





Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet)

Although it is the least of the six major American films released this year–The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I’m Not There, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Zodiac being the other five–Sidney Lumet’s newest gem is a propulsive thriller about the destructiveness of family. Brother allies with brother, brothers turn against mother and father, brother turns against brother, and finally, father turns against son. Philip Seymour Hoffman might have delivered his masterpiece, a role so finely etched, so human in its evil, and so seething underneath the surface that we don’t know when the man might explode. Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris, and even Amy Ryan and Michael Shannon rot away before your very eyes.





Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin)

Guy Maddin’s reimagining of his childhood might play differently were one to see it in a theater with a standard sound mix. But to see Brand Upon the Brain! with a live chamber orchestra performing the score, Isabella Rossellini reading the narration live, and with live sound effects turns it into a mesmerizing, living performative experience. Cross-dressing, young love, a mother Freud would appreciate, and a tawdry silent movie aesthetic makes the film one of the most deliciously gaudy, genuinely moving melodramas in recent years.





Golden Door (Emanuele Crialese)

A triumph of narrative economy, Emanuele Crialese’s immigration tale never lets the audience up for air, quite literally. Almost all of the film is set in the bowels of a ship or the many halls of Ellis Island. It is mercilessly unsentimental in presenting the vicious bureaucracy of the immigration process, from the false dreams in the homeland to the arranged marriages near the end of the island’s dehumanization method. When "Sinnerman" comes blasting through the speakers and Charlotte Gainsbourg is seen swimming in the milk of human kindness, it is a great, radiant release, the liberation of spirit the family may never achieve in fact.





In Between Days (So Yong Kim)

Although it is set in a Canadian metropolis, In Between Days could be set anywhere. The cold and isolating atmosphere in which the protagonist, Aimie (Ji-seon Kim) finds herself is emblematic of the isolation she isn’t even aware of within herself. Haunting pillow shots where she recites letters to her father remind us just how distant her reality is from her perception of it. She falls in love with the only person with whom she can communicate, drops out of a class in order to buy him a bracelet, and holds a typically adolescent insouciance toward the larger universe. After Tran (Taegu Andy Kang) rejects her affections, she begins to understand how alone she really is. Kim films these intimate moments in tossed off, handheld takes, using quiet, effortless dialogue. In Between Days is a delicate and sad slice of life.





Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning)

The monks of Chartreuse Monastery in northern France are the subject of this thoroughly mesmerizing documentary about the daily lives of men who only open their mouths to sing or pray–which is, more often than not, the same action. Gröning shoots in HD and Super-8mm, evoking a starkly beautiful, holy place that seems godly in its perfection. Gröning piles on one activity after another–dining, praying, singing, outings, gardening–without any context or talking heads. Eventually, we move at the pace of the subjects, pondering the sayings that break up the action. It’s entrancing, and quietly suggests the glories of God on Earth.





Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal)

Jennifer Baichwal’s brilliant documentary pulls off a hat trick: it discusses the work of another artist–photographer Edward Burtynsky–renders his body of work into a cinematic form, and then makes that form its own, thus creating an incredible dialogue between examiner and the examined. What’s more, the film is strikingly beautiful, exploring the weird aesthetic qualities of material and its origins. From its virtuoso opening tracking shot to its defamiliarization of scrapyards, Manufactured Landscapes exposes the beauty within the inhuman, perhaps the last stand in the war on globalization. Lacking in ideology but fully conscious of the horrors of globalized manufacturing, Baichwal and Burtynsky never flinch from the ghostly power of their images; it is the only way to wake us up now.





SuperBad (Greg Mottola/Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg)

SuperBad is the comedy of the year. A complete reconstruction of the raunchy teen comedy, it contains the strongest and funniest writing of the year, and delivers every single note correctly. SuperBad also reveals itself to be a rather incisive depiction of what hold the modern adolescent male in a perpetual state of infantilism: fear of the female body. The barrage of sex jokes, coupled with Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan’s (Michael Cera) total love for each other, makes the ending incredibly sad and mournful. Not only have they learned to no longer see women as Other, their looks back at each other mark the growth of their own love, which makes their parting all the more tragic. SuperBad is the greatest gay love story since Tropical Malady.





Zoo (Robinson Devor)

On the surface, Zoo is a documentary about men who like to have sex with male horses. This is like saying that War and Peace is about the Battle of Borodino. Robinson Devor has positioned his film as the successor to Errol Morris’s lyrical, meditative documentaries, juxtaposing actual interviews with dramatic reconstructions of the events described. Devor refuses to judge or exoticize the community of men in rural Washington who come together to have sex with these horses, but he does present their world as a dreamy, haunting and alien universe. It is extremely difficult for a non-zoophile to completely understand and totally identify with the lifestyle of a zoophile, but the notion of considering them any less acceptable in their sexual practices becomes essentially moot. Their world may be strange, but it contains the same quality of beauty that any other world might contain.

End of the Year Blog-a-thon, Part II: Provocative but Frustrating

A good friend of mine is always annoyed by this category; aren’t the best movies like the most tantalizing lovers, alluring but playing hard-to-get? The title may not suit my needs for what I try to do here, because these movies gave me a taste of fascination, and then quickly smothered it up with disappointment.

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley)

As a huge lover of Henry Fool, I awaited Hal Hartley’s delicious followup with bated breath. Cast off is the absurdist humor based on portentous silence and still, grand camera work. In their places, we have a bizarre espionage plot and Third Man-style tilted angles (not to mention the shift to digital video). Henry even serves as a Harry Lime-like figure, discussed but never seen until the climax, engaging in shady business with shady people but always standing aloof from them. But for all of Hartley’s efforts to turn the nature of art into yet another bizarre cavalcade of meaninglessness, the movie collapses under its own wackiness, not achieving the balance of emotion and provocation that its predecessor mastered.

Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino)

A strange project, this one. As fanboy homage, it is a delight, Rodriguez’s Planet Terror in particular. The bioterror subtext may hint at some broader political significance, but the movie really is just campy trash, which is how we should enjoy it. The trailers–by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and Edgar Wright–are the highlights, as they delight in parodying and celebrating 70's grindhouse culture. Tarantino’s Death Proof is certainly the most accomplished of all the pieces, and it leaves you with more to chew on, although not all of it is good. The dialogue is his strongest since Jackie Brown, and his exploration of femininity is his strongest since then. But the mixed emotions of the climactic act of vengeance, in which Rosario Dawson and Zoe Bell gleefully take down Kurt Russell's deranged stuntman, left me feeling strangely uncomfortable.

I am Legend (Francis Lawrence)

If we want to talk about narrative bifurcation, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has got nothing on this schizoid Hollywood horror film. Its first half is a masterful evocation of last-man-on-Earth subjectivity, highly concentrated in its quotidian pace and narrative ellipses. But as the second hour comes around, one suspension of disbelief too many causes the damn thing to collapse in on itself, resulting in a false Christian happy ending that undercuts all that came before it.

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis)

I was pretty shocked when I found myself liking something that Paul Haggis had created. But here was Haggis restrained, concentrated, and subtextual. Tommy Lee Jones’s performance is one of great precision, depicting a racist patriot who needs to find out why his soldier son was murdered. To watch the narrative unfold in its various dimensions is a marvel, and Hank Deerfield’s transformation is poignant and authentic. What destroys the entire film is a cheap, overwrought, purely Haggisian piece of symbolism in the last two minutes that makes Hank just another member of Crash’s panoply of stereotypes.

Juno (Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody)

I had very strong emotional reactions to Juno. It is the fantasy life I had always wanted for myself as a teenager: the quick wit, the warm and understanding parents, the rebellious sense of the absurd. But a fantasy it is: to my knowledge, no characters like these exist in real life, anywhere, in any form. Sure it is only a movie, but as a movie trying to position itself as an honest teen comedy, it mostly felt like a pack of lies. A lot of great one-liners and solid performances by Ellen Page, Michael Cera, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner notwithstanding, Juno–and Juno MacGuff herself, for that matter–tries too hard to stake a claim for its individuality. Of course, all of this could be invalidated due to the very subjective and personal reading I had: by the end, it was hard to think of Juno as only a movie, but rather a damning cultural artifact and a mournful autobiographical elegy.

Knocked Up (Judd Apatow)

Another unexpected pregnancy comedy that left me with a weird taste in my mouth, Judd Apatow doesn’t trust himself to go all the way with his examination of how men and women interact. Apatow is a master of writing and directing comedy; he doesn’t crudely juxtapose sweet sentimentality with scatology like the Farrelly Brothers; he instead seemlessly integrates them. He deftly handles actors who have great timing, and possesses an instinctive sense of when to hold back. Apatow also creates one of the most moving scenes from a marriage when Ben (Seth Rogen) confronts Pete (Paul Rudd) for being a "shitty husband," and thus ruining Ben’s relationship with his pregnant girlfriend, Allison (Katharine Heigl). Ben storms off, and Pete just stands there, on the verge of breaking down. But then, he puts on his best Dad face, and brings out the birthday cake to his daughter’s party. This moment is merely the exception to the rule, however; Apatow presents one difficult-to-swallow premise after another, and pities his women while empathizing with his men. There is a great sense of foreboding as Ben and Allison ride off into the sunset, but Apatow doesn’t seal the deal with this ironic conclusion, leaving us thinking that Apatow truly believes he has given us a happy ending.

Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach)

A recent holiday gathering provided me a fresh opportunity to reconsider Noah Baumbach’s scabrous portrait of family. And I suppose that Margot’s true failing is over-exaggerating the evil that people do to the ones they love. Certainly real-life analogues of Margot (Nicole Kidman), Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Claude (Zane Pais), Malcolm (Jack Black) and Jim (John Turturro) say nasty things and then begin laughing five minutes later, but has there been any woman more icily vicious as Kidman’s Margot, or a son so forgiving as Pais’s Claude? And rather than feeling hopeful at the conclusion, I felt like the cycle of abuse was going to begin afresh for Claude. Such a strange movie.

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly)

Its supporters declare Richard Kelly’s white whale to be the future of cinema, a deliberately chaotic mess of mixed-media decay, of extrafilmic allusions, of 21st Century American cultural madness, of the apocalypse itself. Its detractors think it is the worst movie in many years, a chaotic mess of half-baked symbols and metaphors, a facile, childish, self-indulgent political allegory that makes some want to turn Republican. But like so many films of its kind–Heaven’s Gate, One from the Heart, and Showgirls, just to name a few–the truth is a bit more complex. Don’t get me wrong: as a whole, Southland Tales is a bad movie. It is narratively choppy, poorly acted, far too heavily reliant on expository dialogue (along with Justin Timberlake’s voiceover), sloppy with its use of music, and is genuinely, ideologically confused. Kelly definitely has a lot to say, but has no concrete idea about how to say it. Yet, when the film stops trying to explain its madness and just succumbs to it, it is fascinating to watch. Timberlake’s Pilot Abilene is easily the most interesting character, and one wishes he were more prominently featured. Perhaps Kelly’s original cut was a more grounded film (20 minutes were cut and Timberlake’s voiceover was re-written and recorded), but it is hard to imagine anything saving this movie from itself.

The Ten (David Wain/Ken Marino)

I never thought I would say this, but it is true: Paul Rudd is one of the least funny things about The Ten. Attempting a radically absurdist deconstruction of contemporary bourgeois behavior via the ten commandments–a methodology similarly executed in his masterwork of comedic genius, Wet Hot American Summer–David Wain only comes up smelling like roses about half the time, and that includes the rose that grows out of rhino shit. Rudd is supposed to be the thread which ties it all together (the commandment "thou shalt not commit adultery" is his alone), but he is too conventional, not going for the jugular, as in his best work. Highlights include Liev Schreiber and Joe Lo Truglio as covetous neighbors, Ken Marino and Rob Corddry as amorous prison mates–which is a vehicle for the single funniest moment in the film: Michael Ian Black as a sassily kinky, Shakespeare-reciting prison guard–and A.D. Miles & Bobby Cannavale as men who like to hang out naked while their wives are at church. The more limp elements include Rudd, Adam Brody as a parachute accident cum celebrity, and Gretchen Mol as a librarian who experiences sexual awakening with Jesus in Mexico. Whereas Wet Hot made over-the-top seem effortless, The Ten often feels just over-the-top.

For other provocative yet frustrating movies in 2007, see my post on Beowulf, along with shorter posts on Black Book and Offside (found under "SC Movie Journal).