January 9, 2006|After a year, 2004, wherein we indulged in the fantasy that we could forget our recent past in favour of better tomorrows, 2005 finds us obsessed with the things we've lost (especially children), the things we deny, and the difficulty of living with ghosts. It was a reflection of our political landscape split starkly into a Yeatsian twain between the worst, with their passionate intensity, and the best, lacking all conviction–the ultra-conservatives producing more of the same old tired, divisive hate (The Island showed that even Old Scratch could be predictable and boring) and the ultra-liberals producing high-minded garbage that either studiously avoided a point-of-view (The Interpreter, The Constant Gardener, Kingdom of Heaven, Syriana) or was so clearly left-wing proselytizing that it jettisoned context and energy in favour of bland political allegory (Good Night, and Good Luck.). The reason Bush Jr. won a second term is that he ran unopposed–and after the disastrous year the Grand Old Party had under him as their fearless leader, the real tragedy is that there's still no strong message in any opposing party to fill the void. Which explains, I guess, why the most ambivalent, overtly politicized films of the year were not only ultimately mediocre, but also made by a guy who taught himself how to finally direct an almost-passable film on the trial-and-mostly-error backs of three of the most highly-anticipated films of all time (George Lucas and Revenge of the Sith) and the king of everything for everyone (Steven Spielberg and his War of the Worlds and Munich). The blatant exceptions were Christopher Nolan's genre Munich (Batman Begins) and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a film that says volumes about vengeance and the delusions of the righteous while trapped in the body of a good old American, sexy dames and guns-a-blazing, neo-noir.
So if 2004 was obsessed with repression and denial, the best of 2005 wasn't defined by highly-touted navel gazes masquerading as protest, but rather by untenable grief and unimaginable losses. There were no answers, just more questions, and all the while the liberal platform stayed on topic with their message of nuance and equivocation, taking so high a road that all contact with the grassroots was squandered utterly. So afraid were they to polarize that they only managed to condescend to and irritate. The finest films (and many not-so-great ones) of 2005 were love affairs (as they were back in 2002), but this batch ultimately fed into our growing pyre of crushing, cosmic doom. They're about searching and not finding, about isolation (the title of playwright Jack's mythologized production in King Kong), about persevering to no good end, about the fruitlessness of vengeance in the pursuit of justice, about the unsurprising revelation that the rot starts at the core, radiates out, and is, regrettably, inevitably mortal. You live with it as a third partner or else it eats you feet first. If people stayed home in 2005, I think it's because the majority of filmmakers had neither the ability nor the inclination to work in shades of hopelessness: those who tried tended to fail (Walk the Line, Brokeback Mountain), and those who didn't had only cold comfort in their capering grimaces–and I don't mean Hilary Duff's frightening new set of choppers–to offer the hopeless.–Walter Chaw
| BILL CHAMBERS' TOP 10 |
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10. Sky High (d. Mike Mitchell) |
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9. Kings and Queen (Rois et reine) (d. Arnaud Desplechin) |
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8. Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (d. Fatih Akin) |
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7. King Kong (d. Peter Jackson) |
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6. Forty Shades of Blue (d. Ira Sachs) |
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5. Broken Flowers (d. Jim Jarmusch) |
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4. Grizzly Man (d. Werner Herzog) |
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3. A History of Violence (d. David Cronenberg) |
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2. Oldboy (d. Park Chanwook) |
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1. Keane (d. Lodge Kerrigan) |
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Honourable Mentions: No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Nobody Knows, Batman Begins, Reel Paradise, Junebug, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Saraband, Tell Them Who You Are, Exils, The Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù) |
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Dishonourable Mentions: The 40 Year Old Virgin (abstinence propaganda in Porky's drag); Capote (an all-too-inspired In Cold Blood redux); High Tension (trash crucially lacking in self-awareness); Café Lumiere (this isn't filmmaking, it's dryhumping); Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (more effective than Sominex) |
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Notably Missed: The Squid and the Whale; Munich; The New World; The Intruder (L'Intrus); Caché |
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2004 Film I Wish I'd Seen In Time For Last Year's Top 10: Birth |
| TRAVIS M. HOOVER'S TOP 10 |
| 10. War of the Worlds (d. Steven Spielberg) Not a popular stand, but a sincere one: while the rest of American film groped towards (and away from) defining the mood of these shell-shocked times, Steven Spielberg nailed the definition with image after crushing image. Would have ranked higher if not for that stupid ending. |
| 9. Vento di terra (d. Vincenzo Marra) The story of a young man forced to shoulder burdens he can't possibly–and ultimately doesn't–support. Echoes of neo-realism reverberate back to these postmodern times, with the two sensibilities melded in a quiet but searing tale of economic desperation. |
| 8. 2046 (d. Wong Kar Wai) The deep-dish Wong Kar Wai movie I've been waiting for, it finally takes his erotics of making-do and blows them up to the epic scope they so richly deserve. Not sure about the digital future; very sure about the tortured past. |
| 7. Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand) (d. Bahman Ghobadi) This evocation of the impending Iraq war should have caught the headlines the way Kandahar did after 9/11–it says something about our fickleness and insularity that it didn't. Say what you like, but Anderson Cooper can't top the searing gallows humour of Bahman Ghobadi. |
| 6. Nobody Knows (d. Hirokazu Kore-eda) Another gentle response to traumatic subject matter. Hirokazu Kore-eda takes a sensational case and mines it for stasis instead of shock. Nobody Knows is sympathetic without being exploitative–and heartbreaking to boot. |
| 5. Grizzly Man (d. Werner Herzog) I've never particularly cared for the romantic brutality of the world's most obnoxious self-promoter, but there's no denying that Werner Herzog comes up trumps in defining the tragic flaws of a fellow prophet in the wilderness. |
| 4. Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (d. Fatih Akin) Of course, if you're going to be grim, you may as well do it right–and Fatih Akin's apocalyptic pas de deux does the trick quite nicely. A tear through life on the edge of German and Muslim cultures that will make you forget Fassbinder's soft-edged Ali for the rest of your life. |
| 3. The Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù) (d. Marco Tullio Giordana) In a film year of unrelenting grimness, here was a beacon of mercy: a six-hour meditation on personal responses to doing the right thing and a decision that the show must go on no matter how much it hurts. |
| 2. Los Angeles Plays Itself (d. Thom Andersen) An essay on Los Angeles film incarnations more potent than the films it discusses; I entered my neighbourhood rep house and exited in a completely different city. Technically the best film of two years ago, but it's been slow to make the rounds. |
| 1. The Intruder (L'Intrus) (d. Claire Denis) The babble about Claire Denis becoming "purely visual" isn't true–she's synthesized the visual and the political into a tactile mélange that's as inseparable as lived experience. This, her second masterpiece (first: Beau travail), manages to project her colonial subject across the globe and into himself without playing favourites–courtesy the most indelible, gorgeous images of the year. |
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Honourable Mentions: Junebug, The Holy Girl, Breakfast on Pluto, Social Genocide |
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Can't Say I Didn't Enjoy: D.E.B.S., Ferpect Crime (El Crimen ferpecto), Unleashed |
Honourable Mentions (11-30, in descending order): King Kong, The World, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, The Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù), Broken Flowers, Kings and Queen (Rois et reine), Tropical Malady, The White Diamond, The Squid and the Whale, Save the Green Planet! (Jigureul jikyeora!), Unleashed, Dark Water, Hellbent, Oldboy, Junebug, Batman Begins, The President's Last Bang, Sin City, Spider Forest (Geomi sup)
Wish I'd Seen: The Ice Harvest, Just Friends, Tony Takitani
Wish I Hadn't Seen: The Family Stone
Wish It'd Ended Ten Minutes Earlier: War of the Worlds
Wish It'd Been Better: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Wish It'd Been a Lot Better: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Wish I'd Seen It in Time for Last Year's List: Mooladé, The Five Obstructions (De Fem benspænd)
10. Forty Shades of Blue (d. Ira Sachs)
Ira Sachs's sophomore effort Forty Shades of Blue locates its template for perfect love in the delta of Memphis Blues–the junction bridging black music and white stomping that created one of the few uniquely American art forms. A legendary music producer–played in one of the year's best male performances by Rip Torn–and his Russian companion (Dina Korzun, in what is indisputably the year's best female performance) are the counterpoint to that union, and as their companionship begins to fall apart, enter the producer's son (Darren E. Burrows) to show the girl that the way to satisfaction might be in following herself, however imperfect, instead of trying to fit a template. It's a quiet, patient song of the south (like this year's excellent Junebug) that doesn't include yodeling or moonshine jugs–and an indie model that honours human foibles and the comfort we take in traps. Home to one of the most understated, most disconcerting scenes of the year, Forty Shades of Blue is the first of 2005's great broken love stories embedded in the collision of cultures: broken promises, broken hearts, and the real pain of mourning the lost potential of it all.
9. A History of Violence (d. David Cronenberg)
David Cronenberg's clinical mien serves well this tale of vengeance and skeletons in the closets of middle-Americans fed on Old Testament values and fear of the Blue States' corrupting influence. We're in the middle of this Civil War, it seems–these "culture wars," which have proven so divisive that, like McCarthy's '50s, with only a shady bogey from without, we start to devour ourselves from within. It's Deliverance told from the P.O.V. of the hill people, valorizing the idea that you defend your home against hostiles–even while adopting their tactics and values–as well as that in this age of Presidential authority authorizing illegal wiretaps of American citizens, your next-door neighbour could be a terror cell unto himself. Yet A History of Violence, for all its topicality and florid subtext, is a fierce, economical action film that handily upends Viggo Mortensen's recent turn as a mythical hero, type-casting him as an unassuming small-town guy who discovers that his real destiny is to become a righteous dealer of death. Cronenberg is deconstructing the Western myth here, and while most films of this type find some kind of stark, satisfying resolution to the bloodshed, the last shot of A History of Violence is a marvel of implication–of things left unsaid, for better or, more likely, for worse.
8. Gus Van Sant's Last Days (d. Gus Van Sant)
William Blake, that mad avatar of British Romanticism, is reincarnated in the wraith-like form of Blake (Michael Pitt), a stand-in for sainted rock martyr Kurt Cobain, who walks alongside locomotives in the forests of the Pacific Northwestern night before renewing an ad in the Yellow Pages for railroad engine parts. He does this in a black slip, sitting beneath a painting of a stag-hunt evocative of the myth of Acteon and Artemis in which Acteon is turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs–the price of accidentally coming across the virgin goddess taking a little dip in the woods. It's a picture about missed connections; I love in particular a moment at a concert in a barn where Blake, in a hooded jacket that obscures his face, can't possibly hear a monologue delivered to him by an admirer. Van Sant's film dutifully opens with Blake swimming towards us across a river–an image that, like the first words of Terrence Malick's The New World, plays as an invocation to an epic muse. The picture's the third part of a loose trilogy about the spread of corruption as it manifests itself in our collective body politic as ennui and entropy. The result in Gus Van Sant's Last Days is a film that, like so many on this list, feels as dulcet and elusive as the best poetry.
7. Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (d. Fatih Akin)
It's carnal in its sexiness. Nothing intellectual about the great Fatih Akin's kinetic, compulsive Head-On, which uses Depeche Mode's "I Feel You" and Talk Talk's "Life's What You Make It" with the kind of heedless joy the tunes are supposed to inspire–and did, once upon a lonely, adolescent time. A follow-up in essence to his indefinable and ebullient romance In July, Head-On is another Akin love story–introducing the enchanting Sibel Kekilli in a performance as a woman desperate to live her own hedonistic life free of her fundamentalist Turkish family–that is ferocious and somehow fragile at the same time. The images are indelible, the beat is catchy, and the thrum of big gestures (like driving your car into a wall) imbues the thing with a holy glow.
6. Grizzly Man (d. Werner Herzog)
Grizzly Man is a continuation of Herzog's exploration of not only nature and madness, but of the ever-thinning line separating fiction from documentary filmmaking, too. In essaying the life and times of self-taught grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, Herzog turns a purportedly sympathetic exercise into an increasingly hostile one, subbing his own well-documented thoughts about the "obscenity" of nature for Treadwell's need to believe in the prelapsarian ideal of man living as one with God's creatures. He tells us only what we need to know so that we judge Treadwell as Herzog judges him. And by the end, the designation of loosest screw is a toss-up between Treadwell, his hambone mortician, and Herzog himself. As a product of 2005, it sports the ideas of unrecoverable losses, the death of our ideals, the loss of security, and the loss of a son somewhere far away for a cause no one really understood.
5. Nobody Knows (d. Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Hirokazu Kore-eda's miracle of a film, improvised over the course of a year and structurally founded, accordingly, on the cycles of the four seasons, Nobody Knows follows a quartet of beautiful children abandoned in an apartment in the middle of a pacifically raging metropolis. Its title refers to the absurdity of their escalating plight, but Kore-eda resists making melodrama of it, relying instead on the astonishing performances of his child actors (Yuya Yagira is destined to be a superstar) and his own patience in observing the mysteries of the cult of childhood without judgment. There's substance in here about what a parent means to a child even when, or especially when, they're absent–something from which we ultimately extrapolate how adults live in a world without that guidance. In long, wordless passages, Kore-eda places a soft finger alongside the sub-aural rhythms of the cycles and beats of just existing, no matter how appalling or absurd the circumstances. His is life as a battered record, skipping along with its needle blunted by worn and invisible ruts.
4. 3-Iron (d. Kim Ki-duk)
Gradually becoming one of the few directors in the international community to consistently produce astonishing films that consistently receive distribution in the United States, South Korea's Kim Ki-duk defines, by himself, a nouvelle attitude in his willingness to reinvent genre without deconstructing it. His films are respectful, in other words, of their sources–but within those admittedly only semi-rigid structures, he gives himself the room to spin unrecognizable complexities and innovations. Though I feel like saying that Kim's films are of a sort I've never seen before, it's not necessarily true, because even as I'm feeling rejuvenated, I'm recognizing the signposts and turns. 3-Iron is a love story where the leads never speak to one another–it's a road trip that doesn't go anywhere, a social satire in its carefully observed yet breathless way. It defies description, existing in the kind of universe a child would create: rewarding ingenuity and hard work with a prize that few would treasure. And it internalizes the bittersweet ending that King Kong literalized: liebstrom, but quietly. Quietly.
3. The New World (d. Terrence Malick)
The second (after Last Days) mytho-poetic recasting of American folklore-grown-from-history, Terrence Malick's epic poem of the birth of America turned a passionate love affair born in dependence and torn apart by personal and cultural misunderstandings into a metaphor. The coming together of Smith and Pocahontas is seen through a confusion of paternalistic reactions on both sides: Smith calls the Native Americans free of violence and in perfect harmony when the evidence of their bellicosity belies the Margaret Mead read of them; and Chief Powhatan sees the English as brutal, primitive, and fanatical. Historical details, however, are left to the set design and costuming, with the rest of it smoothed over by Malick's hand until what's left is a hallucinogenic, swooning romance whose chief colours are grief and nostalgia. The revelation of The New World is that all human relationships can be described as lovers in harmony or tragically mismatched–an idea that speaks to me of the immense possibility for connection, as well as the grim fallout from calamitous, even well-intended disconnection.
2. Hidden (Caché) (d. Michael Haneke)
Caché is the purest film of its kind since Peeping Tom: an examination of how we form memories, the nature of scopophilia, and the ways in which a film, any film, is a blank screen upon which we project our greatest joys, most ardent desires, and deepest fears of discovery. You analyze Caché only by examining the extent to which the medium implicates and inspires you to engage in a deeper conversation about the self. Roundtable talk-show host Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) discover a videotape on their stoop, followed by others wrapped in children's drawings of the kind popularized by the "I see ghosts" genre of evil children, each progressively suggesting that their little cocoon of middle-class comforts is under surveillance by some entity that overtly unveils itself as neither malignant nor benign. The implication–a strong one–is that the simple act of being watched without consent (or wiretapped, as the case may be) is an act of supreme aggression. It indicts us as the central couple's ultimate Lacanian tormentors, something Haneke underscores with a virtuoso final shot. But before letting us off the hook with the kind of frigid intellectual answer attacked in part by the picture's central tension, Caché presents the spectre of Algeria in the French consciousness, transforming the film into an invitation to discuss the ways that history and race are ground into a fine, flickering grist by the magic of the movies.
1. Keane (d. Lodge Kerrigan)
From the very first frame of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, Damian Lewis announces himself as the centre of the universe. He is our perspective through this journey, the titular William Keane, who one year earlier lost his six-year-old daughter in New York's Port Authority bus station and has returned now (or maybe never left) to search for her, crumpled and faded newspaper clipping in hand. We do question whether or not the abduction ever actually happened, and when a single mother and her daughter cross into Keane's orbit, we also wonder if he will do violence to them or just try to ingratiate himself back into a groove he's been bounced out of in the narrow world of "normals" and their comfortable 9-5s. A love story threatens to blossom here, yet Kerrigan sidesteps every cliché in the telling of a mentally-disturbed man trapped in the grey amber between disability pay and destitution, working the margins of reason and dementia like a tongue after a missing tooth. While I'm resisting hyperbole because Keane steadfastly resists the hyperbolic, if this year is about confronting loss, I have to say that this film deserves and owns the spot atop this list not only for its execution, but also by the fact that Kerrigan's previous film, In God's Hands, was itself lost to horrific misadventure. Challenging, affecting, insightful, Keane is activism without pedantry and smart without self-congratulation. It's the best film of 2005.
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CONSENSUS: FILM FREAK CENTRAL'S TOP 5 OF 2005 |
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1. Grizzly Man |
