January, 2009

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The Best Films of 2008 – Michael Polizzi

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

1. The Dark Knight: (Nolan)

2. Synecdoche, NY: (Kaufman) Shall I project a world? An uneven film from first time director Charlie Kaufman about creation, solipsism and empathy. Arbitrary bruises along with green poo and brown pee pee make this one of the few movies to really grab the strangeness of personal suffering. Arbitrary time signatures do the same with the loss of youth and its effect on love and obsession.

3. Mister Lonely: (Korine) I keep placing movies that premiered in 2007, but I promise I watched them in the theater in 2008. Where to start? Flying nuns doing BMX tricks or a man living as Abe LIncoln reciting the Gettysburg Address while spinning a basketball on his finger? Talking egg portraits or Buckwheat’s soliloquy about wanting a chicken with human breasts? Samantha Morton and Diego Luna both manage to deliver their lines without an ounce of agency. They talk around each other– the effect is really made my skin crawl.

4. I Served the King of England: (Jiri Menzel) Again this one came out in Czech Republic in 2007, NYC 2008. Ivan Barnev as Jan Díte made this movie. Terrific charisma and physical comedy. Worth it just to watch the Czech spa transform into a Nazi fertility clinic then into a hospital for amputees.

5. Be Kind, Rewind: (Gondry) The trailer for this had me cringing– yuck, yuck Jack Black is Robocop, yuck– but the trailer left out the strange heartfelt elegy to Paterson, NJ and Danny Glover’s franchise stalking. Mos Def and Jack Black have fantastic chemistry as life long buds. Again magnetic wee-wee= A+.

6. Water Lilies: (Seline Sciama) Technically this came out in Belgium in 2007 but I live in the US of A where girls magically move from pre-pubescent imps to ramped up sex vixens without all of the excruciating detail of having to watch themselves develop. I know, I’m a perv for even watching this movie, but cheers for having the courage and steady hand to tell the story of a girl who may or may not be a lesbian in love with synchronized swimming without leaving out all of the terrible hormones (and without Todd Solondz’s terrible dead-pan).

7. Tropic Thunder: (Stiller) “Fuck you, Hollywood,” signed Hollywood.

8. Burn After Reading: (Coens) Great assessment of the last eight years: empty, shallow, venal, cold incompetence.

9. In Bruges: (Dir. Martin McDonagh) This actually edged out the bald-headed, Daredevil era sex tape as my Colin Farrell favorite role (though he’s really good in the sex tape if you haven’t seen it– Breakfast, lunch and bloody dinner, love). Great dialogue and violence in a medieval Belgian town.

10. Iron Man: Fun.

Oh so close:
9/10ths of Milk (why do biopics piss me off so much? even ones that manage to subvert most of Hollywood’s standards and practices– everything always just seems far too convenient to the plot).
The first half of Slumdog Millionaire, even though I have the sneaking suspicion it was lifted from City of God.

Things I will rent/ see soon that will most likely make me want to redo this list:
Teeth, Chicago 10, The Visitor, My Winnipeg, Man on Wire, I Have Loved You For So Long, Cadillac Records, Frost/Nixon, Wendy and Lucy, Che, The Wrestler, Happy-Go-Lucky

Re-hashed reviewed for 2008:
1. Broadway Danny Rose: This movie caught me completely by surprise. Perhaps less universal than Manhattan and Annie Hall, but far more deft. Danny Rose’s Thanksgiving and Lou Canova’s singing face will be with me for a while.
2. The Purple Rose of Cairo: I know– where have I been? It took me this long to look at Woody Allen’s output from the 80’s. No better movie about the deranging power of the movies.
3. Lars and the Real Girl: Crushed me like a papercup. Oddly effecting story of a man/boy working through his lady issues.
4. Lifeboat: Rounding out my Hitchcock as well. The lighting for the funeral at sea and Tallulah Bankheads’ expression as she passes the camera before tearing a hole in the newspaper= A+
5. The Maltese Falcon: I shouldn’t be admitting this in public. Did anyone have any emotions left after WW II?
6. Naked: If anyone ever asks me for the filmic equivalent of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” — I will probably point them towards this. All the better for David Thewlis’s life at Hogwarts.
7. The Lives of Others: Surveillance in East Germany. Point for point a near perfect film.
8. The Marriage of Maria Braun: Fassbinder stands every last Romantic cliche from WWII on its head in this film.
9. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse: Lang made perfect movies. I don’t think a single director has ever constructed a movie that could compete shot for shot with Lang’s extraordinary composition.
10. Mr. Freedom: William Klein’s over-the-top comic book style semi-futuristic amazingness.

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The Best Films of 2008

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

First the films, then the yattering.

1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

2. Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

3. Fine, Totally Fine (Yosuke Fujita, Japan)

4. JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France)

5. Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, United States)

6. Sparrow (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)

7. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, United States)

8. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, United States)

9. Help Me Eros (Lee Kang-sheng, Taiwan)

10. Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, United States)

* * *

I’ll admit that I was wrong.

All year long, I bemoaned the lack of good films; I prattled on endlessly about how 2008 was a terrible year at the cinema. The writer’s strike seemed to have created a talentless vacuum in American cinema, and much-anticipated European and Asian offerings seemed to yield only failure after failure. I’ll admit it, though: I was watching the wrong films. As 2008 drew to a close and I felt the weight of so many distasteful movies pressing down on me, I finally got my shit together and started piling on the screenings, catching up on the pictures I had missed, some purposefully avoided, some that never made it to theaters in The Great White North.

Certainly there are still films to be seen. And there is no denying that even my top film picks seem a little more… eccentric than usual. I’m surprised by a few choices, especially the inclusion of The Dark Knight, not only because it seems in some ways hard to admit that a film that has already become such a part of the zeitgeist can actually be critically relevant, but particularly because I had considered Batman Begins to be such a failure. To boot, my inclusion of JCVD represents a vote of confidence for Jean-Claude Van Damme who, improbably enough, delivers the performance of the year, Mickey Rourke be damned.

But the most obvious surprise lurks at the very terminus of my list, if you had any trouble spotting it. Rambo is significantly more than the punchline I had envisioned it to be; more a horror film than an action film, Sly channeling Eastwood behind the camera while his granite-faced alter-ego sends a similarly terse nod to the audience. That John Rambo’s facial expressions seem at times to be a direct homage to UHF further confirms my suspicion that Stallone has not only accepted his detractors, he has begun to purposefully channel them in an attempt bring the writer of Rocky back from the dead without pretending to erase the star of Over The Top.

Should I only explain what I perceive to be my Achilles’ heels and ignore the top of the list? How transparent! Upwards!: A Christmas Tale handily took the lead. What at first appeared to be a hasty retread of both The Royal Tenenbaums and Fanny & Alexender ultimately ended up being one of the most powerful meditations on family dynamics since Tokyo Story. Print that! A swirling miasma of emotion with the potent, sexual stillness of Catherine Deneuve at its center, it struck chords in me I was not entirely aware were capable of being played.

Let The Right One In was my top choice for months, and not lightly. I am willing to prematurely declare it the greatest horror film of the oughts, an innocent-seeming twist on the vampire myth that disguises an exploration into a child’s complicity in murder and pedophilia. If that doesn’t pique your interest in this astonishing film, then all is lost. I pray that the architects of the impending American remake are suffocated alive in a vat of wolf semen. Amen.

I should note that, as always, I refuse (don’t I sound self-important?) to consider films originally released in their country of origin in a different year. There’s no shame in retroactively adding an old film to an old year’s list! This almost certainly showcases my OCD to an excessive degree, but hey – the consistency of my ridiculousness is part of my allure! This seems like an opportune time to mention that I definitely consider Help Me Eros to be a 2008 film, IMDb intel notwithstanding; a wide release in the director’s homeland is The Release, not a festival date. The essence of what I’m trying to say here today is, y’know, fuck you, IMDb.

I should mention that a wide variety of my friends, all significantly better-informed than me, have also presented their lists to the world (and in a more timely fashion, to boot). I urge you to visit them and read all about the films I can only hope to view in the months to follow!:

Andrea Janes
Michael J. Anderson
Lisa K. Broad
Pamela Kerpius
R. Emmet Sweeney
Karen Wang
Matt Singer
Alberto Zambenedetti

Peace be with you, but fuck that kid over there.

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