by Allan Fish

(Italy/Switzerland 2010 88m) DVD1/2

Dust to dust

p  Philippe Bober, Elda Guidinetti, Marta Donzelli, Gabriella Manfré, Susanne Marian, Andres Pfäffli, Gregorio Paenessa  d/w  Michelangelo Frammartino  ph  Andrea Locatelli  ed  Benni Atria, Maurizio Grilli  m  Paolo Benvenuti  art  Matthew Broussard

Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano,

Of all films of the 21^st century I have had cause to write about, there is none that has filled me with more trepidation than Michelangelo Frammartino’s truly extraordinary Le Quattro Volte.  After all, my role is one of converter in chief, of trying to make the reader want to seek out the film, a minority film at best, and yet any description of what takes place cannot help but send the reader into a mild coma. 

            We’re in a remote Calabrian village perched high on a citadel, and in essence we follow the last days of an old goatherd.  We see that he’s frail; he’s coughing repeatedly and is seen taking something in his water before he goes off to sleep in his truly Spartan bedroom.  On his rounds, we see him go to the local church where an old woman tears half a page out of a magazine and folds up some dirt from the church floor into it.  It transpires that he’s using this to put into his water as a sort of immersion.  Needless to say it does no good, and he’s found dead one morning and is taken away for burial. 

            What perhaps surprises here is that the old man dies barely half way through and from this point there is no human protagonist at all.  One of his goats gives birth, the kid literally plopping out of its mother and seen trying to take its first steps and take its first feed.  We see it getting used to being around other kids while their parents are taken to graze on the mountains, until it finally is allowed out with them.  On its first day out the goat gets itself positioned in a sort of trench which, while it could extricate itself quite easily, it cries out to its mother and the mother doesn’t hear or doesn’t return.  We last see the kid huddling up against a tree on the mountainside as the camera fades to black.          Even now this isn’t the end, there’s another act to come, and in many ways this plays like a nature play.  Man is seen as no more important, indeed less important, than the animals around him.  The camera largely stays still and allows its characters to move within the frame, but for one or two exceptions.  The biggest of these takes place in a sequence that becomes one of the funniest scenes you will see in modern cinema but which on the page would not raise so much as a smirk.  A camera is perched high above a goat pen and we see a truck pull up.  Out of the truck three Roman soldiers emerge looking like they have returned from the world’s longest ever stag do, closely followed by a woman dressed up like she’s an extra in Pasolini or Rossellini’s Christ film, and it becomes clear that a sort of passion play is taking place, in which villagers enact the roles of the Romans, Christ and the thieves, and they are taken to a nearby hill to be nailed up in the accepted manner.  The man playing Christ – assuming he is playing him and that he’s not really going to be nailed up – literally drags his own cross as the long procession is followed by the camera.  The camera then turns back to its position above the pen to see a dog – that of the old man – pestering a latecomer to the parade, but as he runs off to catch up we see the dog pull out the rock that is holding the truck in place, which proceeds to run back and crash into the goat pen, leaving the goats to merrily make their way out onto the street and up into the village.  It’s in following these goats into the village we first become aware of the old man’s passing. 

            It’s details like this that help to contribute to what becomes like a requiem for innocence lost, for a mankind that has, by and large, long since lost its connection to nature.  In doing so, humour alternates with inherent sadness and a sense of poetic beauty all the rarer in modern times.  That Frammartino does this purely through visuals and noises, without a single word of dialogue, only adds to the cumulative effect.  It’s little wonder it’s been seen as a religious experience by some critics; even an agnostic would have to concede that it’s one of the most spiritual films of recent times. 

One of the top 20 movies from the list

by Jaime Grijalba.

Well, here we are, it’s time to be outraged, whine and scream as I mention my 20 favorite movies of 2011, the year that just went about three weeks ago. I usually do my list around this time of year, because it gives me time to catch up with the late releases, when supposedly the good stuff comes out, as well as a personal task to come up with a list after the Oscar nominees are announced (as this past tuesday showed us how surprising they can be, for better or worse). Why after the nominations? Well, the thing is that where I live, Chile, there are certain festivals at the start of the year (first two weeks of january), and they show a lot of films that haven’t had their premiere in Chile as of date. As years have gone by, these festivals have diminished in their overall quality, and they have become more and more expensive, which is a bitch for a film student as myself, who barely can finance his own short film. So, yeah, out of a whim, I used to do this even before I started to comment in this amazing house of bloggers/writers, I did it when my blog was the number one stop of my friends when they needed a film recommendation, and now is just a barren wasteland, filled with new content, but voided of comments, the thing I love the most about having a blog: the conversation. So now I have the opportunity, at a bigger venue, a wider audience, a better time and more universally understandable language: english. Now I’m just making a mess of myself, so why don’t we just go ahead and move along, onto the movies?

Well, I think it’s time for me to say how good or bad was 2011 for movies in general, before going into the list in particular… it wasn’t good for me. I mean, there are some great movies, but even if I thought movies weren’t that good in 2010 (and in that year I had four ***** movies), this one is even worse, with just one movie getting the highest mark from my end of the spectrum. How sad is that? I mean, I’ve seen 108 movies from 2011, I’ve seen most of the most rewarded and critically acclaimed films from the year (and with that I mean, the pure year, actual releases from 2011, no commercial releases after festival runs in 2010, or foreign films that never got distribution but now have, which seems to be the way of American critics, and I can’t blame them– except for that one last thing I said… I mean, really? A Yang film?) and still I found myself not moved by most of them. It must be one of the most boring years in what I think is what I like in movies, and what I think movies should do with people: make them feel something. And in that regard, the 2011 movies I saw left me cold, except a few ones, these I’m going to mention here, but besides that, even these 20 are stretching the term of giving me an emotional response (and I don’t mean crying, when I cry for the first time in a movie, I’ll call it the best movie ever made, but that hasn’t happened yet). So, do my eyes deceive me or I’m just turning a new leaf? These 20 movies, I’d say, are the most impressive of the year, and I could live in a world where the rest of the 88 films I saw didn’t exist (not that I actually want that, but it’s pretty narrow the margin of good movies coming out these days, specially since 2010, weirdly). Nevertheless there were certain films that I had an interest in that either weren’t available or just didn’t have the time to see them properly: ‘Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol’, ‘The Adventures of Tintin’, Hugo’, ‘Mientras Duermes’, ‘Kotoko’, ‘Killer Joe’, ‘Ichimei’ and while I just came back from the avant premiere of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, the film was seen out of time given by myself to see these films. Now, prepare yourself, because I’ve been told many times that my list contains ‘shit’ and that is ‘weird’. I don’t really care, I can tell for sure this thing: from the oscar nominees for best picture, only one of the 9 is in my top 20. Which one is it? Take a look for you to see…

20. ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ (George Nolfi)

Here we have the debut in the directing chair of the action screenwriter George Nolfi, and this time drinking from the waters of the science fiction master that is Phillip K. Dick, and even reteaming with the actor of his earlier screenwriting credit ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ (2007), the star and great actor Matt Damon, that with every year that passes demonstrates once more that he is much more than a pretty face and young girls appeal, even if it is that what makes his movies a success at the box office. And in this movie, they work perfectly together, telling us a story that goes to the source of one of the most important questions in the human existence: fate. Does fate exist? Is it something that is predetermined or something that changes along with you? Who manipulates fate? Is there a God? Even if the movie ends up giving you the answers to all these questions, I felt completely attracted to the premise itself as well as the mythology and the figures and the whole visual work that was displayed in the film itself. This film tells the story of a young politician played by Matt Damon who runs for the senate, but ends up loosing due to the circumstances of the race. It is in that fateful night that she meets what may be the love of his life, a girl called Elise (Emily Blunt) who gives him a kiss. It is four years later that she meets her again, when he’s gearing up for a new campaign for the senate… but he wasn’t supposed to meet her again. Here comes the bureau, a group of non-humans, that look exactly like humans from the 50′s, who take care of the fate of all the people from the world, fixing heads and even changing the rules of the game, just as the chairman (the g-word present) seems convenient. The movie becomes action-thriller-romance and even a sci-fi film, but not just another sci-fi movie, but one that is lo-sci-fi, one with little yet important elements (in this case, the fate books are incredible dispositives that seem like they come from the future), and some of my favorite movies are lo-sci-fi, so there you go.

19. ‘Thor’ (Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon)

The best of the Marvel movies to come out leading out to the big event that will be ‘The Avengers’ (2012) in the next year, directed by the talented and geek-favorite Joss Whedon, famous for writing comics and creating two of the most fan-loved series of all time, ‘Buffy’ and ‘Firefly’. Yes, I think it’s better than ‘Iron Man’ (2008), which seems to be the standard and ground for many comic book movies, specially those of the Marvel universe, but I never quite liked Tony Stark as a character nor Robert Downey Jr. as an actor in a role that would glorify the conduct he (supposedly) stopped having when he took this and other roles, as if it were some kind of comeback from the rehab. It’s good to see that Downey Jr. has left the shadow of Downey Sr., but I don’t think that makes him a great actor, just a good one. Anyway, let’s talk about this one, which is actually good (not that ‘Iron Man’ (2008) is bad, but…), not because of the action scenes, not because of the memorable characters that we always wanted to see reincarnated in the screen (as well as ‘Green Lantern’ (2011), no one really cared about seeing a movie on the subject of the norse god/superhero Thor), but because it’s a definitive and great mixture of the holy and the prophane, the art and the pop, a visual treat for those who are really looking, and not just dismissing it as pure popcorn entertainment. Kenneth Branagh was the needed addition to the world of Marvel, as he inflicted his own shakespearian ways into the plot and the acting of the characters, as well as the whole solemnity and the importance of the family tribulations in a royal group, but filled with characters with silly costumes. Then comes the whole way the film looks: bright, yellowy, specially the scenes in the plane of the gods… it is quite beautiful, even if its computer generated, but still there’s some beauty in it, and an akin eye to match those scenes with the murky and really not as good-looking planeth earth. A real document for art as commerce.

18. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)

This is the only movie nominated for best picture that has a feature spot on this personal top 10 list. It doesn’t usually happen like this, I mean, last year I had four of the ten nominees in the top 20 (and 3 of them in the top 10), so I don’t know what has happened this year to me, or to the movies the Academy seemed to like this year. Anyway, I’m not an Oscar nut, I’ve hardly been on the same ground with them in the last few years (the last time was when ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (2008) won best picture, and yes, I loved the film). But this film, as if it were some kind of miracle, clicked with me, and it’s quite surprising to me that it worked on a gut level, filling me with joy and even with content as I saw it develop before my eyes. It’s a great real story, and I usually hate those films… it was a sport film, not with much sport, but all the talk was about baseball, and I don’t like either sport movies (box seems to be the exception) nor baseball (hell, I’m not even sure how baseball even works, so that’s that)… it had Jonah Hill, an actor I’ve never cared about, but suddenly he made the most worthwhile performance in his career, and the best of the film after the turn of Brad Pitt in this spectacular fest. Now, I knew I was in for something good when I saw that Bennett Miller was the director, after all, he directed ‘Capote’ (2005), one of my favorite films about the process of writing and what it actually means to investigate and suffer for the things you write, as well as a great performance from the best living working actor: Phillip Seymour Hoffman (I usually change that with Paul Giammatti, but then I remember he made ‘Sideways’ (2004) and I get so angry that I want to punch him), who also acts in this movie in a small role as the coach of the baseball team. The film itself is great because it mixes a simple enough story about the fall and rise of a baseball team that failed to maintain its best players, and how with the aid of the inventive, statistics and just sheer luck (at some points) made them the best team of the year, winning 20 consecutive games, a record at that year. The editing and the score are perfect, this one is the movie I root for at the Oscars… too bad it won’t win a thing.

17. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)

You either love or hate this movie, and I can easily think why I would love or hate this, but I ended up in neither of those spectres, but that doesn’t leave me in the middle of it, but leaning more to the positive, but not being completely blinded by its genius. This is the ocassion where the film itself connects with me in a professional way, and I mean that I don’t see every movie with the critical eye of the process of filmmaking, because I really find that seeing movies with a scalpel and mask is boring, it takes the fun out of the joy that is to me watch films. After all, my approach to the art of the film buff is that the film itself must be ‘entertaining’, but not in the sense of funny or thrilling or anything like that, I find myself entertained in various ways, and whenever I think that a film is eliciting an emotion in me, or having me inmmersed into the plot, I feel entertained in the way that I don’t think about what my present situation is, not as in a way of escapism, but that the film can take me to another reality, real or not, but if you manage to make me believe that what I’m seeing is possible inside the rules of its own world, I feel entertained and so I aproove of your film. While I found this film thrilling and tense, it was also entertaining for me, but it also was possible for me to see it technically, and I’m talking about what has been the beef of many when they oppose this great movie: it’s ‘style over substance’ method. I’d like to think that when people say ‘style over substance’ are wrong, as this movie is more like ‘style is substance, substance is style’, as every shot of the film is filled with imagery that combines with what is happening plot-wise, expanding and even showing you the metaphors explicitly in a way that could only be akin to what I was doing at the moment: I was filming a (failed) short film, and in every shot I was trying to do the same thing, telling the story visually as well as through the dialogue. Now, of course, THAT didn’t work, but this movie does, and deliciously.

16. La Piel que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar)

The Skin I Live In is one of the most shocking and director friendly movies of the year, meaning that it is here that we can find that the auteur (Almodóvar) can surpass a story that it’s completely different from what we are used to see from his continuos spanish output. Here we have a story that is more akin to the world of horror and the science fiction (lo-sci-fi again) more than the usual melodramas that he makes, even if they are filled with mystery or comedy, they are all after a while, melodramas. And even if this film is a genre exercise (genre in more than one sense), Almodóvar shows up in the whole extension of the film in different ways, even more than you would think: always talking about the issue of gender, the figure of the woman as a genre, the body itself as a way of communication (personal) to the other, homosexuality, and at the end of it all: family and melodrama, it all comes down to that issue with the films he makes, and he has made a name of himself out of the tragic issues of the human people, elevated to the highest of the emotions the human being can express, and even in this film, a clear genre excercise, you can see how his true spirit dominates the themes present in all the plot points of the film. The movie has been made important due to one twist that seems obvious starting the middle of the film, but I’ve seen it twice, and even if I knew the twist, the film itself becomes another thing completely different: a tale of obsession and love, of looking for things past, of the importance of the family and the fact of ‘being at home’ as the ultimate goal for everything, that can be seen in the detail that Almodóvar and his collaborators go to humanize the dehumanized ambients in which the characters move, giving each place that seems cold or forgettable, and that, in the world of medicine, it is hard to find the warmth of the maternal womb that the house that you can call yours has.

15. The Umbrella Man (Errol Morris)

Errol Morris knows how to direct documentaries, but I guess it was my first time seeing him tackling the short form and make still one of the best and most worthwhile documentaries of the year. Initially released at the New York Times website, this 7 minute short film goes to one of the most important sources regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Josiah ‘Tink’ Thompson, author of the book ’6 Seconds in Dallas’, regarding the same subject, and talking about one thing: the umbrella man, one of the most famous conspiracies and theories regarding that still mysterious death, one that has been the subject of many takes, including fiction, and that’s besides the three books per year that go out trying to solve the problem, involving, as time goes by, even more and more absurd implications. The short film is a summarization on one short film of a 6-hour conversation using the always incredible Errol Morris approach to documentary, essentially conversation/interview based. The short film makes many claims and states the fact that sorround the presence of the man with the umbrella. Josiah is a joy to watch and hear, as well as the whole morale of the story: a cautionary tale of a day where all was alright in the neighbourhood. You can see the short film if you click the name of this short, right beside its number placing. Errol Morris still has the touch and he still makes great documentaries. Be prepared, this is a test reel for a documentary on JFK’s assasination, and if this kind of stories we are going to have, we may have a masterpiece in our hands.

14. Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes)

Now, you know that I put many things in my list, as you can see, I put a short film only available online just before this, and now I put a TV miniseries… a great TV miniseries I’d have to add. This one is a great piece of period drama that advances into time and with a great art direction, great acting, great editing, great direction from Todd Haynes and just a classic story. The film is about how Mildred Pierce, an almost modern woman becomes a modern woman, her growth and her raise (as well as her fall) as an owner of one of the most delicious and succesful restaurants. When she knows that his husband is cheating on her, he abandons her and leaves her with her two childs, having to find herself a job as a waitress, where she starts becoming famous for her bakings and becomes known with the usual clients at the diner, so she can come up with funding for the start of her restaurant and family dining place. In the meanwhile, her daughter Veda becomes evil, as she despises the work that her mother does, just because she is working and he shouldn’t (let’s remind ourselves this is, I think, before the economic crash of 1929 or during that, so women in such an elevated figure as businessman, as we see her later in her career, was rare), and then she dissapears, just to be found as an impressive singer of opera. The miniseries takes its time, after all, it is 5 episodes long and a total runtime of 363 minutes, and makes its revelations slowly, and not rushing anything that will come back, because in this TV effort everything comes back to what it was in the past, and that is the fact that this miniseries tries to put across, there are certain moments, certain characters and situations, even dialogues, that communicate with each other as reiterations across time, and that is what makes the seeing of this effort important. To see and remember, as weeks went by on HBO, that everything that was will more likely come alive again than be forgotten, and that even what we want to see dissapear, is always there, looking at us, and that feeling is not creepy, but more heartwarming, as you will never, ever be alone with the forgetfulness of the man (or woman in this case) that feels that has lost everything.

13. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)

Paul Giammatti is in this film and it’s maybe the only thing I can say to proove why I liked it. Well, there’s also the thing that the film is beautifully shot, incredibly well directed (no performance is a waste here, and all the young kids act wonderfully, each one of them is a discovery for the art) and of course, the most important of all, the script is a marvel in itself, which shouldn’t be a surprise for those who follow the career of screenwriter turned director Thomas McCarthy. Even if this film was incredibly well received when it opened early last year (after a great Sundance run), it was mostly forgotten in all the lists I can think of, and that I find dissapointing. Bob Clark, last week, mentioned how people tend to forget the movies released early and just consider the screeners they get when the prizes are getting near and at hand, and it is true, this little marvel was universally ignored, even by Sam, one of the people that championed the films for the same reasons I’m giving, and yet it was missing from his list, and I don’t remember seeing it in his also-rans. Now, I’m not questioning the practice of making lists, as people usually tend to forget what they say and what they think, or even forget if they saw this or that film, but what I’m trying to say is that the ‘considered best movies’ shouldn’t be released all at once at the end of the year, it makes one confused and just anxious to see everything, and in that craze you just forget that little gem you saw at the start of the year and that was completely put away because you just saw a bunch of ‘good’ films at the end… Oscars aren’t good to that, and that’s because some movies that had Oscar chance and were released at the end, got the shit end of the stick and where ignored, just because they had one-week qualifying runs and just nobody knew they existed and just wanted to be there, oscarbaiting. Anyway, I spent way too much time talking about other stuff that is not the film itself, because… well, I’m forgetful and I remember most of the film, but not details to really get into it. I remember that the newcomer is a great actor, and the fighting scenes where worthwhile. The whole mix of the strangeness of the characters, the exhasperated situation in which the Giammatti character is at the moment, make this one film to treasure just because of the characters it sports and how good it looks: that will keep it in your memory.

12. Le gamin au vélo (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)

The Dardenne Brothers take a naturalistic approach to filmmaking, trying to be as close to human life as possible, following the sight and attention of the people they portray, and making films about the common people, the people who work, the people that don’t have an easy life, people who struggle every day to have something to live for, and in that they have become the common man’s champion, and with that comes The Kid with a Bike, where they not only continue with their stupendous portrayals of the (let’s say it) poor and less fortunate people, but give us the best male performance of the year as well. Thomas Doret plays Cyril Catoul, a kid that desesperately, at the start of the film, wants his bike, but people from all around try to prevent him from entering the building where he thinks it is, and that’s because his father has left him and hasn’t come back, and has left an empty apartment and sold everything he had. The kid now lives at a orphanage, which he hates, and just wants to be free and have his bike again. In one of his escaping travellings to find his bike, he comes across Samantha, a woman who helps him and fosters him during the weekends, in a tale of love of the most pure kind, where the characters feel an inmediate attraction for the other, but they don’t treat each other equally, as he is more interested in the liberty that he has to leave the place that he hates more than that he wants to be with her, but that’s just assumed. The film itself is perfect in its filmmaking inclinations, it is a Dardenne film, which gives natural inclinations to the movement of the camera, giving us the perfect Image-Time, even if it seems more akin with Image-Movement, that we are looking for in modern and even post-modern cinema. Nevertheless, the Dardennes are starting to free themselves from the usual restraints that they usually put in their films, as it is their first co-directed movie where scored music comes in, in certain spots where we see the face of Cyril, we hear a piece of classical music, and that, even if it breaks the famous name they’ve made for themselves, it is quite perfect for the moments they chose. An achievement that, if continues, will give us more room to breath and a change of pace for these amazing directing brothers.

11. Rango (Gore Verbinski)

This animated movie was at the top of my list for more than three months, making it clear how much I liked this film. Here we have the first experience of the animated kind in which instead motion-capture, the technique that many 3D films (animated or not) are using right now to capture performances from famous actors and cover them with a different skin or just making them something not human, there was the use of emotion-capture. Every actor that was on the film, instead of being called alone to record their lines in a booth, they were called all together, to film the movie in a green screen with some props and a lot of recording devices, so to capture every sound and movement they make, and transport them to the animated film. The result? Maybe the most important time in which actual stars have done the voice of an animated character, as their acting and personality is actually there for you to see, even if you don’t actually “see” the actor behind all the animation. Of course I’m talking specifically about the protagonist of the film, Rango, an iguana voiced by Johnny Depp (coming with his fourth collaboration with Verbinski after the three Pirate of the Caribbean films), where you can practically see the attitude and the usual quirks that make every Depp character memorable for us, and the film itself is great, with a pastiche on the western genre, with self-aware references to the movies of the most classic canon, and a dream sequence to be remembered as one of the best in film history. The film is just a joy to watch, and it’s not even close to being just another kids film, it is quite extraordinary in the way it plays around with the usual tropes, and at the same time gets a whole trippy atmosphere to it, due to the state of the main character and the whole aspect of the dessert in the middle of the day. It is a fun rise and my pick for the best animated film of the year.

Now here where I trick you (again), so you can visit my site. If you want to know the top 10 of the year, you need to follow the link here. So, that’s all here, thanks for having me and reading me, and comment accordingly in both places, if you want to.

by Jamie
Rereading one of my favorite books about rock music recently (‘Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock’ by John Harris) I was struck by a wonderfully perceptive quote from Jarvis Cocker that gets to the heart of the matter just four sentences. It almost seems like it could be a thesis to this entire Series as well:

“When British pop is great, it’s great because of the personality in the music. The sense of the romantic in the everyday. Ray Davies finding the poetic in the sun going down over Waterloo Station. You don’t get that much in American rock.”

So with that today, I offer what I consider to be the greatest Pop band Britain has ever produced: the Ray Davis led Kinks.

Saying this one then realizes how difficult, and perhaps arbitrary it is to nominate a single album from their catalog today. It would just barely speak on the albums brilliance and more about my personal preference. But, as I said last week all great bands have a stretch in their career of about 3 to 5 years where nothing is released but supreme masterpieces, and the Kinks run, from roughly 1966 to 1971 is second to none. Just consider the albums in order: Face to Face, Something Else by the Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, Pt. 1, and finally their most underrated album Muswell Hillbillies (there is also untold riches in the singles from this era as well). From there there would be a smattering of high points (sometimes it’s just a single track like ‘Celluloid Heroes’, and sometimes it’s a complete album, like Misfits from 1978) but never did they reach that point consistently again. And, this is more then understandable and perfectly fine, that run is perhaps the greatest ever (and you could even go a little earlier if you wanted to as something like Kinks Kontroversy from 1965 is great too). The fact that this era also coincided with a late 1965 ban by the US Government that stipulated the band not be allowed to enter the country that wasn’t lifted until late 1969 meant that they were deprived of the largest market in the world and their most brilliant period would never be given its full due. In an era of such social and musical change a voice as articulate and perceptive as Davies’ would have surely been welcomed. Instead, the Kinks are always viewed as slightly lesser then the other titans of the form, always viewed primary by a rabid cult for what they really were.

Today, I’ll be picking for discussion their 1969 concept record Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), but I’d like to make special comment that I could just as easily be talking about Muswell Hillbillies had the coin toss came out oppositely as they are neck and neck as my favorite from the band.

Arthur opens  with the bluesy strum shuffle of ‘Victoria’, which points that while Arthur may be similar to their earlier effort (that many probably thought there’d be no way of topping) Village Green in concept, it was an altogether more rocking affair. ‘Yes Sir, No Sir’ opens with a military cadence and expounds the sometime lack of self worth so found in the working class. It becomes apparent here that this is a chief concern of Davies throughout this record, a class struggle is further articulated into a struggle within the individual, an individual that’s been shown nothing but ill will his entire life and how he (or she) can rise above this for real change. Will he continue to ask permission for such simple acts as breathing from his ‘superiors’ or will he take some semblance of control. Davies gives it the added historical relevance of an entire Imperialist culture for added measure.

The context grows into ‘Some Mother’s Son’, which is easily one of Rock’s defining anti-war statements. A generation later Paul Weller would see the same story for his similar ‘Little Boy Soldiers’ (Setting Sons) but here is the original in all its melancholy timeless beauty. Its vivid imagery makes no connections to any specific conflict thus making it about all modern armed conflicts. ‘Drivin” then seemingly lessens the mood, but therein is the brilliance, as the ‘troubled world around us’ is the specific reason the charms of turning to an open road and just motoring with a loved one is such a desired idea. Dave, the Kinks great guitarist, and Ray’s brother, offers one of his many exciting and instantly recognizable guitar breaks.

‘Brainwashed’ and ‘Australia’ work in tandem to point towards what a more nailed down concept would have sounded and been concerned with (Arthur was originally set to be a TV piece as well). Both songs feature the Kinks sounding like they did a few years prior— a band that executed the greatest examples of British sloppy drumming and garage sound around.

‘Shangri-La’ comes next, and for my money is one of the Kinks truly great tracks, if not my all-time favorite. It turns the album from masterpiece status to status as one of Rock’s true landmark records. It’s achingly bittersweet and poignant, the most beautiful punch in the gut you’ve ever heard. It begins in a stark sarcastic tone, about a retired man who has been spit out from a hard life spent doling towards a twilight where he figured he’d have at least something meager to look forward too. Davies understandably cuts all this down, and around 2:50 the rest of the band joins in to thoroughly trash this culturally respected idea down to nothing but a sedate roll on the old rocking chair. It’s such a powerful track that one doesn’t know to cry tears of sadness or have their eye’s squeeze out tears in the name of righteous anger.

‘Mr. Churchill Says’ continues the song cycle away from Australia and more towards Britain looking eastward upon Australia, and the role the mother country must play going forward. ‘She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina’ continues the Anglocentric portion of the record, and indulges with several new musical textures.

‘Young and Innocent Days’ makes a great argument as the best straightforward pop song on the record. Midtempo ballads had by now been almost been a market cornered by the Kinks (what else can one say when you think about it, this is the band that had offered ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Well Respected Man’, ‘This Time Tomorrow’, ‘Dandy’, ‘Village Green’, ‘Animal Farm’, ‘Big Sky etc in the previous few years), and ‘Days’ does nothing to disappoint. Again, a sad longing hangs over much of the affair, but it’s an epic beauty as well making countless plays virtually impossible to resist.

It’s then no wonder that ‘Nothing to Say’ is arranged as it is, uptempo and quite bubbly. The entire band seems in great spirits, there is a rolling piano, Davies offers several vocal ideas and cadences, and the drums remain at their bar room beat best. ‘Arthur’ furthers the upturn in musicality as the album comes to a close. Lyrically it’s wonderfully concise and full of summarization. It’s essentially the entire albums story retold as an epilogue on clarity. Arthur was a swell fellow, and in this frank matter of factness one can either feel happy and joyful or incredibly sad. It’s quite up to you how you take life no?

“Arthur was born just a plain simple man
In a plain simple working class position
Though the world was hard and its ways were set
He was young and he had so much ambition.”

It can crush or it can come and go. As Ray says, “Someone loves you, and wants to help you / Don’t you know it?” In an episode of the old UK show called ‘My Generation’, a show where each episode was devoted to a classic English musical act that some great soul has uploaded a good number of episodes into youtube, Ray Davies himself closes the Kink’s episode with such a perfect and melancholy tribute: “I’ve always been wary of doing interviews, because my work is better then I am. I just don’t live up to it. I’d love to be as good as ‘Waterloo Sunset’.”

(it’s also worth mentioning as long as this album is the subject, is that the deluxe remaster added additional tracks and B-sides from the albums sessions and one is really foolish to not be aware of something like say, ‘This Man He Weeps Tonight’ or the weirdo beautiful melody contained within ‘Mr. Shoemaker’s Daughter’. Bands kill for tracks like these while the great ones stick them on B sides or in vaults unreleased for decades)

Happy listening, see you next week.

By Peter Lenihan

Finding Ford is a biweekly series in which I examine the films of John Ford.

There are, it seems, at least two ways of framing Rio Grande, one of the three Ford features of 1950 (Wagon Master and When Willie Comes Marching Home are the other two). The first (and far more common) way to discuss it is as the final entry in the cavalry trilogy, a series of films starring John Wayne and many members of the Ford stock company that revolved (some would say obsessively) around notions of duty and justice and the (im)possibility of reconciliation. Despite these films’ rejection of classical storytelling technique and traditional methods of audience identification, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache are, at least among Fordians and western aficionados, very kindly looked upon, and have been embraced in a way that Rio Grande, a film no one seems to know what to do with, hasn’t.

It’s not all that hard to see why. Next to Fort Apache, whose tonal complexities and simultaneous celebration and repudiation of the U.S. military is among the most contradictory in the director’s filmography, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which features some of the most poetic color cinematography in the history of cinema, Rio Grande can seem a little, well, slight, and its undeniably low-budget feel only contributes to the sense that the director might be on auto-pilot here. History suggests Ford made it for Republic to help get The Quiet Man off the ground, and the digressive, ramshackle nature of the “plot,” and the familiarity of the characters’ names (protagonists named York, Quinncannon, Sandy and Tyree had all appeared in earlier Ford films) has helped encourage the view that it is something minor.

It’s an understandable position, though one I’m not particularly sympathetic to, partially because Ford at his slightest is often Ford at his most interesting. Take, for example, his employment of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara here. As a director, Ford was never above building films around his stars, and in The Quiet Man and The Wings of Eagles he came close to doing just that, wrapping the disparate narrative strands around their (frayed) relationships in a way that is a lot more familiar, though no less affecting. Here, however, neither actor gets significantly more screen time than Victor McLaglen or Ben Johnson, and its focus on the ensemble, on a social world outside of the “leads,” occasionally makes it seem like those involved are coasting. (Nothing, it must be mentioned, could be farther from the truth, and Wayne gave few performances this tender, or in which he seemed to be so aware of the frustrated pain his face was capable of expressing.) This brings us, I suppose, to the second way we can frame Rio Grande, and the way I think we should—not as the third cavalry picture, but as Wagon Master, Part 2. Released only six months apart, they share Bert Glennon, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., the Sons of the Pioneers and what appears to these eyes to be many of the same Moab locations. From the font of the opening titles to the beautiful, modest cinematography—and it’s worth noting that few of the films Glennon worked on (and he shot everything from The Last Command to Crime Wave) look like this—all this seems to be of a piece, and if the two films hadn’t been made for two different studios one might suspect they were shot concurrently. Given the director’s fondness for Wagon Master (he frequently listed it, along with The Sun Shines Bright and The Fugitive, as the favorite of his own films), it’s not unreasonable to think that Rio Grande may have been an attempt to remake it, to recapture the very specific magic of that film. And even if it isn’t quite its equal, it remains a striking achievement, and one that deserves to be discussed more seriously than it generally has been.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, despite its preoccupation with the ghost of Wayne’s dead wife, opened with the witty repartee of McLaglen and Wayne; Fort Apache, a comedy in which almost everyone dies, openly and humorously mocked the stiffness of Fonda in its first minutes; Wagon Master, a comedy in which almost no one dies, begins with some jokes about Solomon’s wives and the horns hiding under Ward Bond’s hat—Rio Grande doesn’t. Instead, things proceed solemnly—it opens with a battle unseen and all we glimpse is the tired aftermath, the soldier and officers and Native Americans returning exhausted and disappointed, incapable of crossing the Rio Grande, incapable of fighting the fight they believe they should be. In the face of death (and Ford is always thinking of death) all conflict is pointless, but Wayne & co. aren’t even able to recognize that pointlessness, to wage combat of any kind, and the weariness of being able only to face the possibility of pointlessness shows on their faces. No jokes, then, or at least not until McLaglen (who was English, if you can believe it) shows. Instead, movement for the sake of movement, talk for the sake of talk, ritual for the sake of ritual, and already the deep melancholy that pervades so much of the film sets in. Boys, faced to see their fifteen year absent fathers as commanding officers and nothing more, and men, American and Mexican alike knowing what they should do and knowing they can’t—these things are the body of the film, and while for any twenty-first century filmmaker they would be ironies of history, for Ford they’re goddamn tragedies, athough you’d never hear him admit it.

Eventually the jokes come. Most of these revolve around McLaglen and O’Hara—she keeps calling him an arsonist, and he doesn’t know what the word means. Shenandoah, a place first referenced in that opening conversation and resurfacing throughout, is Rio Grande’s ghost (there’s always one in a Ford film), now a farce in long shot but no doubt a tragedy in close-up were we permitted to see it. Wayne, a Northerner and West Point officer, seems to have been ordered to burn down his Southern wife’s plantation, and O’Hara never forgave him, leaving him and raising their son on her own. McLaglen, we later learn, was one of Wayne’s men, and she doesn’t seem to have forgotten that either. And of course his son is transferred to the regiment he commands, and of course his wife shows up—as plot points these are obvious, but Ford needs excuses to get these people and ideas into the same room, and they go down easier on-screen than they do on paper. Nevertheless, the construction is clumsy even for Ford, and the half-assed approach to the film’s plot will no doubt be off-putting for those that go to the movies to see a story well-told.

(A quick aside here: how many great movies are actually great stories? I’d argue there aren’t many, and, even more importantly, that most great stories make for really bad movies. The fact that the directors (Ford, Hawks) who most frequently claimed they were just telling tales, and that were most often cited as embodying a rich tradition of narrative classicism, were such lousy storytellers, and so consistently made movies defined by their lengthy, dramatically unjustifiable digressions, only supports this I think. “Storytelling” is the arena of a Zinnemann, not a Ford.)

And it’s not that this is a significantly more lackadaisical or stubbornly anachronistic film than She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Wagon Master are—but everything here is a bit more transparent, and while Ford would quicken or revise a scene he wasn’t interested in to reshape the trajectory and rhythms of a film, here he doesn’t even bother to finish the scenes he’s bored by, and the radically oscillating tones are almost without parallel among his mature works. There’s a let’sjustshootthisscene spontaneity to it, and when a wagon train is raided out of nowhere by a band of Native Americans, ruthlessly interrupting the subtle, developing sense of social interaction among these frightened people, it’s hard to shake the feeling that in this moment, in this film, right now, anything can happen. Is it inelegant? Of course, but it’s very hard for me (an avowed Fordian, admittedly) to fault a director for making a film that privileges all his bizarre, wildly lyrical idiosyncrasies over the (potentially banal) let’s-get-them-Indians narrative.

And so it goes; incidents happen, many of which I could comment on, many of which I couldn’t. Two moments linger above all others, however, and neither of them have anything to do with tracking shots, gunfights or running horses. The first is a simple shot of Wayne, looking in on his wife helping her son, badly beaten in a fight the night before. Many Ford movies exist through their windows, and having a character look through one at a world that is no longer their own is hardly new. Neither is pointing it out. But there is something embodied in this shot, something Ford and Wayne were able to put into it, that’s unshakeable. Perhaps it’s this–Ford’s movies are filled with outsiders who long to be part of a community, despite their awareness (or ours) that the group itself is a humiliating beast, and that if they were a part of it they’d either hate themselves or be bored. Nevertheless, because Wayne is looking in not on a social order but a family that abandoned him (or, perhaps more accurately, he abandoned), it generates a striking, deeply emotional pitch that cuts through, and states without stating that he ain’t living like he should.

The other moment, and one I cannot really remark on, is this. The Sons of the Pioneers (corny to some, but not to me) sing an unbelieveably beautiful song called “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” “I will take you back Kathleen to where your heart will feel no pain,” the man sings. Ford cuts to Wayne and O’Hara. And they both seem to have died.

by Sam Juliano

     Yeah the Oscars are a sham and many of the voters are wankers.  Artistry escapes them, and politics and commercialism rear their ugly heads definitely.  When Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in 2005, many tuned off for life, unwillingly to even engage in the fun.

     Allan Fish, Maurizio Roca and Jamie Uhler are classic Oscar bashers as well as they should be.  I choose to engage in all the guilty pleasures it afford, and have hosted a party with an Oscar pool since 1978 at my home.  it’s fun to discuss the omissions and the dire rules each and every year and to make predictions.  It’s also fun to acknowledge that rare unexpected time when the voters by luck or a rare moment of inspiration make some right choices.  While the masterful The Artist will be taking home the Best Picture prize on February 26th (it received 10 nominations to Hugo’s 11) the naming of The Tree of Life in the nominations for Best Picture, and Terrence Malick for Best Director is surely one of those great moments that are reached even as Allan Fish states, ‘they have to get it right sometimes.’  War Horse also got into the Big Show in the main category.  Here are the nine films that are in for Best Picture:

The Artist

The Descendants

Midnight in Paris

The Tree of Life

Moneyball

The Help

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Hugo

War Horse

For best director:

Hazanavicius (Artist)

Payne (Descendants)

Malick (The Tree of Life)

Scorsese (Hugo)

Allen (Midnight in Paris)

Anyone have anything to say about these nominations and/or the acting noms, or all or any of the others?

by Allan Fish

(UK 2010 166m) DVD1/2

Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose

p  James Gay-Reese, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner  d  Asif Kapadia  w  Manish Pandey  ph  Jake Polonsky  ed  Chris King, Gregers Sall  m  Antonio Pinto

In the introduction I recall mentioning how up until a certain age movies didn’t mean much to me.  As a youngster, sitting down to watch anything for over two hours meant it was either a football match, a Saturday afternoon’s racing or a Formula One Grand Prix.  I’d grown up with it.  I even used to do my own commentaries, amusing myself for hours using bits of card with the drivers’ names on.  Invariably, one driver always won…Alain Prost.  He had the same name as me, after all, and he was called The Professor. 

            There were two camps, of course; you were either for Senna or for Prost.  At the time I was for Prost.  Prost had retired in 1993.  By that time, I was beginning to move away from watching Formula One.  Schumacher was emerging on the scene, Mansell had retired.  Yet if someone were to ask me what turned me away from Formula One to the point where I no longer watch it at all and haven’t done or a decade, it’d be the events of 1^st May 1994.  I don’t really remember where I was when Prost won any of his four World Titles, but I remember where I was when the news of Senna being declared dead was announced; at my grandmother’s an hour or two later. 

The death of Ayrton Senna, at the peak of his powers, at the age of 34, and the outpouring of grief displayed during his Sao Paolo funeral, which was like Eva Peron’s on a more spontaneous level, affected us all.  It’s difficult to put into words, but even if Don Bradman had been taken from Australia in the 1930s the grief would still have paled into insignificance.  This wasn’t adulation but worship, and his death seemed to do what the death of the equally seemingly invincible Jim Clark had done a generation earlier.  Everyone began to think ‘if Ayrton Senna could be killed, we all could be.’ 

            Kapadia’s film, which improves markedly in this hour longer version, follows Senna from his beginnings karting in the late 1970s as a teenager to his death and virtual deification in his homeland.  It takes in the miraculous early drives for Toleman and the then dwindling Lotus, the glory and infamy years at McLaren and the final dance of death with Williams in a car with all the stability of Bambi on ice.  The interview footage with Prost, Ron Dennis and other who knew him was priceless enough, but the real fascination goes into seeing behind the scenes, the sense of camaraderie that was felt among the drivers, the nerves and tension and the almost guesswork that went into experimenting with the car often in the racing environment.  We get insights into Senna from both sides, and while both he and Prost possessed inflated egos and the politics of the sport were as draconian as ever, one can find oneself changing loyalties from incident to incident.  The final fatal chapter isn’t gone into in any real detail, and rightly so, for this is not a post mortem but a celebration of a man and his time. 

            Back in the late eighties and early nineties, the final glory days of Formula One (which now sees drivers not so much driving the cars as sit in them), of the Turbo-engined beasts, the sport quite literally transcended barriers.  The rivalry between the two greatest drivers of their generation, the yin to the other’s yang, was unprecedented in sport.  Just as McEnroe was nothing without Borg and Connors, as Coe needed Ovett, Senna and Prost and their fierce fights, on and off the track, and their reconciliation just before Ayrton’s death, symbolised the end of an era.  There has, touch wood, been no fatality in Formula One since, and in some ways with it went the romance and the ghosts of not only Clark and Graham Hill, but Jochen Rindt and Gilles Villeneuve, went into the night bearing Senna with them like Doug Fairbanks at the end of The Iron Mask.  The most telling remark perhaps comes from Ron Dennis, who observes that even if he’d known and had a premonition of his death, Senna would still have gone out and embraced it as he had life.  Kapadia, his editors and composer Antonio Pinto have made the film worthy of the subject. 

The Choral Art Society of New Jersey outside of Westfield church

by Sam Juliano

Felix Mendelssohn’s Paulus, first performed in 1836, is the first of the composer’s two oratorios, and the more popular during his lifetime.  The later work Elijah has since eclipsed Paulus in popularity by some distance, but Paulus remains a major intrigue for choral groups and conductors looking to further scrutinize the work of one of music’s greatest melodists.  Indeed, musicologists periodically make a spirited case for it, arguing that it was central to the revival of the German oratorio tradition in the early 19th century.  There can be little doubt that Paulus is a kind of outgrowth of the composer’s celebrated 1829 revival of J.S. Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in Berlin.  The opening of the oratorio is modeled on Bach with a preponderance of chorales, fugues, and inflamed crowd scenes.  Mendelssohn’s indebtedness and reverence for Bach (and for Handel) manifests itself in the recitatives and in the contrapuntal rigor of some of the choruses. The first half, comprising 22 sections and dealing with Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity is the more dramatic -it has been suggested that Mendelssohn’s decision to employ a four-part women’s choir to voice the words of Jesus was controversial – but it is still highly effective.  The second half deals mainly with Paul’s ministry in a general sense, opting to leave out the more dramatic narratives from the book of Acts that could have transformed the work into something far more compelling.

Still, if “Paulus” is never as inspiring and consistent as “Elijah” it is still genuinely powerful and moving at junctures.  The Choral Art Society of New Jersey, a distinguished ensemble entering their fiftieth year of operation, have followed up their own staging and orchestration of “Elijah” from a few years ago with a performance of “Paulus” at the beautiful Presbyterian Church in Westfield on a blustery Saturday evening, January 21st, under the baton of CAS musical director James S. Little, who is serving his fourteenth and final year in that capacity.

In a performance that ravished the large throng in the long cathedral-like structure with a three-quarters balcony and not a bad seat in the house, both the reliable CAS orchestra and chorus completed a quartet of impressive soloists, led by the electrifying Andrew Martens, the bass baritone, whose Wagnerian manipulations of dynamics and line shape lent the portraying of St. Paul as vocally arresting as anything else in the performance.  Martens, who sung in a Summerscape Festival production of Shostokovich’s The Nose, sung the role of Ramphis in Verdi’s Aida at Carnegie Hall, has enjoyed a long association with the Hudson Opera Theatre, singing major roles in works by Puccini, Donizetti and Tchaikovsky among others.  David Kellett, a distinguished lyric tenor, has sung at the Charles Ives Center for the Arts with the Long Island Jewish Festival, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and at Lincoln Center during the ‘Joseph Papp Shakespeare Festival’ delivered a performance of expressive verisimilitude, doing his finest work in the section on St. Stephen in the work’s first stanzas.  The Soprano Ellen Goff Entriken, who has sung at Lincoln Center and Avery Fisher Hall, was warm and supple, yet dark in the passages that demanded it (she made a lovely show out of the celebrated “Jerusalem” aria) and the alto mezzo-soprano Angelika Nair infused her role with aching beauty and a mesmerizing focus, leaving the audience wishing that Mendelssohn had given her more to do.  As always the veteran conductor James S. Little brings polish in his blending of the choral and orchestral elements, bringing a pleasing accentuation to Mendelssohn’s impressive writing for the strings, and allowing for the brass flourishes that were perhaps the most dominant musical sounds on Saturday night by way of resonance.

The child prodigy Mendelssohn, who at the young age of 27 knew how to stir his audience with choral writing largely patterned in dramatic style to the baroque masters, did his own spectacular rendition of “Wachet Auf” (“Sleepers Awake”) and “O welch eine Tiefe” (“O Great Is the Depth”) has often been praised for the compelling dramatic arc that is evident in “Paulus” and in the later masterpiece “Elijah.”  But what really distinguishes his oratorios is the melting melodies he incorporates into his musically austere proceedings.  It’s what ultimately sets the composer (and “Paulus”) apart as a listening experience of exceeding beauty, and what makes Mendelssohn’s hybrid such an original and ravishing listening experience.  The Choral Art Society of New Jersey have done “Paulus” full justice, asking listeners to conducted their own re-evaluations.

Note:  Lucille and I attended the performance of ‘Paulus’ by the Choral Art Society of New Jersey at 8:00 P.M. on a blustery cold Saturday night at the Prysbeterian Church in Westfield.  There was a single intermission, and we later convened with some of the singers (a few are friends) at a Charlie Brown’s in nearby Scotch Plains.

Re-viewings of 'The Artist' have elevated it to the #2 position, from #8, where it was previously placed in Top Ten of the Year presentation from two weeks ago

by Sam Juliano

The NYC area was blanketed with several inches of snow early Saturday morning, but rising temperatures that purportedly will hit around 51 today will surely melt the ramnants of the first appearance of the white stuff since that freak and destructive Halloween storm.  Anyway, the same snow path dropped even more on our friends in and around the Windy City.

As I write this ‘Diary’ lead-in the Giants and 49ers game is still almost five hours away.  Lucille and I were invited to a friend’s home up in Montvale, New Jersey to watch the game, so I will revise thios post accordingly late tonight before publihing it with a parenthesis.  (Flash!!!!  Giants win!!!  Giants win!!!  Giants win!!!  They beat the 49ers 20-17 in overtime to land a spot in the Super Bowl!!!)  Best Wishes to our dear friend Dee Dee, who may well be headed west in the upcing days for the annual ‘Noir Festival’ at the Castro in San Francisco.  Allan Fish’s year-by-year voting countdown continued yesterday with the ‘best of 1922.’  Everyone is encouraged to participate if they have a decent knowledge of this period.

Perhaps the biggest problem with presenting a ‘finalized’ annual list of the ‘best’ films is that there is really never any finality to it at all.  I noted in my own introduction that numereical listings are subject to change of hearts in days or even hours of a ‘final’ proclamation, and re-viewings and further pondering can often have one regretting a published listing that has been usurped by re-evaluation.  Such is the case with the list I published two weeks.  One film, The Artist, which I have seen several times running now (and continue to be ravished by the soundtrack CD every day now) deserves in fact to be in a much higher placement than the #8 it was listed as in the original publishing.  I could have just let things be, and saved myself the probable grief I will now face from some who believe a change of heart for whatever reason undermines the original presentation, but I have honestly fallen head over heels over The Artist, and need to be honest with myself and my list, even if the entire idea of a Top Ten flies in the face of sanity in the first place.  Thinking about the film more and more, seeing Jim Clark’s extraordinary review, engaging in spirited e mail discussions and hearing Ludovic Bource’s score rergularly have all collaborated to make me realize that I love this film as much as I do any other this year, and though numbers within the Top 10 can be interchanged at any time, I still want to make a symbolic statement here with the change.  I was questioned by some friends about the possibility of some thinking I might want to be seen as wanting to ‘stand with the critics’ who championed this film in droves this year.  My resounding answer is that over the last five years, I have only embraced a single film of the five top critics’ film of each year, and that was a #9 placement for There Will Be Blood.  This has nothing to do with critics, it has to do with my increasing passionate fervor for this film.   I added another film to the Top 10 as well to make for a #10 tie (my regular way of doing the lists until this year) so that the wonderful Poetry can now be part of the Top 10, as it should be.  I will make the proper changes on the original post over the course of the next fews days. I also added We Need To Know About Kevin to the ‘Runners-Up’ list.  Anyway, here is the new (and yes final on pain of torture) Top Ten for 2011:

1.  The Tree of Life (Malick; USA)

2.  The Artist (Hazanavicius; France)

3.  Mysteries of Lisbon  (Ruiz; Portugal)

4.  Bal ‘Honey’  (Kaplanoglu; Turkey)

5.  Of Gods and Men  (Beauvais; France)

6.  War Horse  (Spielberg; USA)

7.  A Separation (Iran; Farhadi)

8.  Melancholia  (Von Trier; Denmark)

9.  Hugo  (Scorsese; USA)

10. Jane Eyre  (Fukanaga; UK)   and   Poetry (Chang-Dong; South Korea)

Lucille and I (and the kids in part) had another very productive week with a celebrated classical oratorio by Felix Mendelssohn on a snowy Saturday night in central New Jersey a sure highlight, and the conclusion of the Bresson Festival (except for the one-week run of A Man Escaped that began on Friday) with Thursday evening’s screenings of Four Nights of The Dreamer.  I hope to say a lot more about the Bresson Festival in a later post.  It was also a special treat to see Tornatore masterpiece director’s cut of Cinema Paradiso on the 70 foot screen of the Loews Jersey City movie palace, and another superlative presentation in the Monday Silent Festival at the Film Forum with the Browning/Chaney vehicle The Unknown.  In a rare occurance, for all the activity, we didn’t see a single new release.

I saw the first two one-hour installments of the celebrated television series BOARDWALK EMPIRE, which I was quite impressed with.  Scorsese’s pilot was a fitting launch.  But I know I have so much further to go on this front.

I published a full review of Mendelssohn’s Paulus as performed by The Choral Art Society of New Jersey at the Presbyterian Church in Westfield.  This is the esteemed ensemble’s 50th Anniversary season.

The completed movie itinerary is as follows:

The Unknown (1927)   **** 1/2    (Monday night)   Film Forum

Une Femme Douce       ****          (Tuesday Night)  Bresson at Film Forum

The Devil, Probably      *** 1/2     (Tuesday night)  Bresson at Film Forum

L’Argent       *****                (Wednesday night)    Bresson at Film Forum

Four Nights of a Dreamer  *** 1/2  (Thursday night)  Bresson at Film Forum

Cinema Paradiso -director’s cut-  *****  (Friday night) Jersey City Loews

Pat Perry has posted a stupendous Top Ten of 2011 list over at Doodad Kind of Town:                                            http://doodadkindoftown.blogspot.com/2012/01/last-word-on-2011-best-and-brightest.html

Anu at The Confidential Report has checked in with a fabulous Ten Best list that fully warrants everyone’s attention: http://theconfidentialreport.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/top-ten-of-2011/

Tony d’Ambra is leading up at FilmsNoir.net with a brilliant post on ‘Film Noir and Living in the Past’ that makes some persuasive conclusions:                            http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/film-noir-and-living-in-the-past-if-a-mans-life-can-be-lived-so-long-and-come-out-this-way.html

Marilyn Ferdinand has penned a terrific review of Mikio Naruse’s Japanese masterpiece “Floating Clouds” at Ferdy-on-Films: http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/?p=12923

Laurie Buchanan talks about the ‘Differences That Make the World Go Round at Speaking From the Heart: http://holessence.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/difference-makes-the-world-go-round/

Judy Geater at Movie Classics is leading up with a splendid comparative piece on “My Week With Marilyn” and “The Prince and the Showgirl”:  http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/my-week-with-marilynthe-prince-and-the-showgirl/

Just Another Film Buff (Srikanth) has posted a spectacular Top 10 at The Seventh Art that raises the bar in every sense:         http://theseventhart.info/2012/01/01/favorite-films-of-2011/

John Greco has authored a trenchant piece on James Toback’s “Fingers” over at Twenty Four Frames:                               http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2012/01/miss-robin-crusoe-1954.html

Samuel Wilson has penned a spectacular work of originality on Godard’s “Film Socialism” at Mondo 70:                            http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2012/01/film-socialisme-socialisme-2010-homage.html

Jason Marshall has penned an excellent takedown of Spielberg’s “War Horse” at Movies Over Matter:                              http://moviesovermatter.com/2012/01/10/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-war-spielbergs-war-horse/

Pat Perry recaps the past year at Doodad Kind of Town with an engaging  look behind and forward:

R.D. Finch at The Movie Projector has penned a masterpiece about a masterpiece in his “Vertigo” review at The Movie Projector:                                                              http://themovieprojector.blogspot.com/2012/01/deadly-obsession-alfred-hitchcocks.html#comment-form

Roderick Heath at This Island Rod is an incomparable horror film writer and his review on 1986′s “The Hitcher” is wholly masterful: http://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2012/01/hitcher-1986.html

Jaime Grijalba has unveiled his towering Top 10 list over at Exodus: 8:2:   http://exodus8-2.blogspot.com/2012/01/las-mejores-peliculas-del-2011-chilean.html

Joel Bocko offers up “Highlights For the Holidays” at The Dancing Image, which showcases some of the great posts from the past year: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2011/12/highlights-for-holidays.html

Dee Dee has posted a wonderfully informative and engaging piece on the origin of lobby cards at Darkness Into Light: http://noirishcity.blogspot.com/2011/11/holding-auctiontaking-look-at-eleven.html

Jon Warner at Films Worth Watching has penned a terrifically insightful review of Visconti’s “Senso”:                              http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2012/01/senso-1954-directed-by-luchino-visconti.html

Kaleem Hasan’s Satyamshot blog offers a New Year’s greeting to all readers: http://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/happy-new-year-folks/

At Roderick Heath’s solo movie blog “This Island Rod” the great writer offers up a classic takedown of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”: http://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2011/12/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-2011.html

At Heath’s literature blog, English-One-O-Worst, the great writer takes on the Bard’s “King Lear” and the result is a scholarly masterpiece: http://englishoneoworst.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-he-rightly-is-king-lear-as-king.html

Craig Kennedy’s always engaging Watercooler post is leading the way at Living in Cinema:                                                                 http://livingincinema.com/2012/01/15/movie-vacation-all-i-ever-wanted/

Ed Howard at Only the Cinema is presently leading up with a marvelous review of the multi-taled “Paris je t’aime”:                                                                                        http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2012/01/paris-je-taime.html

Murderous Ink, in Tokyo examines ‘Nuclear Noir’ in a brilliant new post at Vermillion and One Nights: http://vermillionandonenights.blogspot.com/2011/12/nuclear-noir.html

At Patricia’s Wisdom, our friend and proctor of the same name has authored a tremendous review of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”: http://patriciaswisdom.com/2011/12/the-tree-of-life/

At Scribbles and Ramblings Sachin Gandhi has penned a brilliant piece on ‘Three Films by Mohammad Al-Daradji”:                http://likhna.blogspot.com/2011/12/three-films-by-mohamed-al-daradji.html

At the always-spectacular Creativepotager’s blog, artist Terrill Welch offers up a new post for the new year that will ravish the senses in an ocean of blue: http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/mayne-island-dawn-of-2012/

At The Long Voyage Home, Peter Lenihan offers up an incredible list of “key films” that screams out “essential” in every sense: http://thelongvoyagehome.blogspot.com/

The gifted and always brilliant Jason Bellamy takes a fascinating and perceptive look at “J Edgar” that in some measure differs from the majority stand. It’s at The Cooler: http://coolercinema.blogspot.com/2011/11/solid-weight-j-edgar.html

Filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman at The Late Lullaby has posted a stupendous round-up of the best cinematic experiences he’s enjoyed in 2011: http://cahierspositif.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-top-10-or-so-films-for-2011.html

Again Stephen Russell-Gebbett offers an original piece on the artistic worth of the “remake” at Checking on my Sausages:          http://checkingonmysausages.blogspot.com/2012/01/remakes-why-not.html                                             

At The Schleicher Spin our very good friend David frames expectations for 2012.  take a look:                                                            http://theschleicherspin.com/2012/01/01/are-you-ready-for-dun-dun-dun-2012/

At Cinemascope Shubajit Laheri has penned a fantastic capsule on Bresson’s “Mouchette”:                                                                                                                      http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2012/01/mouchette-1967.html

Adam Zanzie at Icebox Movies has authored a marvelous essay on “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”:                                      http://www.iceboxmovies.blogspot.com/2012/01/on-torture-and-revenge-in-girl-with.html

Michael Harford, the erstwhile ‘Coffee Messiah’ offers up an engaging video about the beverage’s worldwide popularity: http://coffeemessiah.blogspot.com/2011/11/coffee-break.html

Troy Olson announces plans to commence with his Robert Bresson project at Elusive as Robert Denby: http://troyolson.blogspot.com/2011/11/argh.html

At Radiator Heaven J.D. has penned a superlative piece on 2005′s “Mirrormask”: http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2011/12/mirrormask.html

At Petrified Fountain of Thought Stephen Morton has penned a masterful takedown of “Melancholia” http://www.petrifiedfountainofthought.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-melancholia.html

Drew McIntosh is a real scholar and good skate, as he just gave away a blu-ray of Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” at The Blew Vial: http://thebluevial.blogspot.com/2012/01/take-two-tarkovsky-blu-ray-giveaway.html

Kevin Olson offers up a postscript to his recent Horror Blogothon at Hugo Stigliz Makes Movies:                                                                                                    http://kolson-kevinsblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/italian-horror-blogathon-postscript.html

Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder offers up an interview with the Self-Styled Siren:                                                     http://www.cinemaviewfinder.com/2011/11/gone-to-earth-conversation-with-self.html

At The Man From Porlock Craig takes down both “War Horse” and “Melancholia” with his usual impressive analytical prose: http://themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/2011/12/tears-for-fears-war-horse-and.html

Hokahey has penned a terrific review of “War Horse” at Little Worlds:                                                                                                                  http://hokahey-littleworlds.blogspot.com/2011/12/spielbergs-war-horse.html

Dave Van Poppel is gearing for some updates at Visions of Non Fiction, but presently is still leading up with his very fine review of “Project Nim”: http://visionsofnonfiction.blogspot.com/2011/08/project-nim.html

At The Reluctant Bloger Jeff Stroud has offered up some stunning beautiful images in a post titled “Autumn Leaves”: http://jeffstroud.wordpress.com/

by Allan Fish

Again, ladies and germs, straight to the poll results for 1922.  Pretty much landslides all round.

Best Picture Nosferatu, Germany (11 votes)

Best Director Friedrich W.Murnau, Nosferatu (8 votes)

Best Short Cops, Buster Keaton (5 votes)

Best Actor Max Schreck, Nosferatu (11 votes)

Best Actress Mae Busch, Foolish Wives (11 votes)

My own choices for 1922 were exactly the same as those voted for, so may I congratulate you all on your taste.

Best Picture Nosferatu, Germany

Best Director Friedrich W.Murnau, Nosferatu

Best Short Cops, Buster Keaton

Best Actor Max Schreck, Nosferatu

Best Actress Mae Busch, Foolish Wives 

And on to the nominations for 1923

Best Picture/Director
La Belle Nivernaise (France…Jean Epstein)

Coeur Fidèle (France…Jean Epstein)

Comin’ Through the Rye (UK…Cecil M.Hepworth)

The Covered Wagon (US…James Cruze)

The Finances of the Grand Duke (Germany…Friedrich W.Murnau)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (US…Wallace Worsley)

Little Red Devils (USSR…Ivan Perestiani)

The Merry-Go-Round (US…Erich Von Stroheim, Rupert Julian)

Our Hospitality (US…Buster Keaton, Ernest G.Blystone)

The Pilgrim (US…Charles Chaplin)

Raskolnikov (Germany…Robert Wiene)

La Roué (France…Abel Gance)

Safety Last (US…Sam Taylor, Fred Newmeyer)

Salome (US…Charles Bryant)

The Smiling Madame Beudet (France…Germaine Dulac)

The Street (Germany…Karl Grüne)

The Ten Commandments (US…Cecil B.de Mille)

Three Ages (US…Buster Keaton)

Warning Shadows (Germany…Arthur Robison)

The White Rose (US…D.W.Griffith)

Why Worry? (US…Sam Taylor, Fred Newmeyer)

A Woman of Paris (US…Charles Chaplin)

Young Medardus (Austria…Michael Curtiz)

Best Short
The Balloonatic (US…Buster Keaton)

Fait-Divers (France…Claude Autant-Lara)

Felix in Hollywood (US…Pat Sullivan)

Opus 1 (Germany…Walter Ruttmann)

Paris qui Dort (France…René Clair)

Le Retour à la Raison (France…Man Ray)

Rhythmus 23 (Germany…Hans Richter)

Best Actor
Lon Chaney The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Buster Keaton Our Hospitality

Harold Lloyd Safety Last

Adolphe Menjou A Woman of Paris

Theodore Roberts The Ten Commandments

Séverin-Mars La Roué

Best Actress

Mady Christians The Finances of the Grand Duke

Ivy Close La Roue

Germaine Dermoz The Smiling Madame Beudet

Gina Manès Coeur Fidèle

Patsy Ruth Miller The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Mabel Normand The Extra Girl

Edna Purviance A Woman of Paris

As before, any suggestions or requests for nominations for 1924 to be emailed to me directly acf171072@sky.com – they will then be added to the list for next Sunday if not already there. 

Last week I offered up my choices for the best late releases of 2011– this week, the best films that were actually released for the first time during the full scope of last year. Or at least, the films I’d pick as my favorite releases, because that’s all any “best of” list can ever really be called, if we’re to be honest with ourselves. Forget about the choices people make to project the right image for publications or to stay in with certain crowds of popularity– on a certain level you have to just plain like a movie enough to endorse it at the end of any given 12 month cycle. Even if you just wind up regurgitating the same old countdown of autumnal art-house and award-bait releases that every major published critic tends to drum up somewhere in the span between December and January, suffering from all the same long-term memory problems that tend to hit commentators when the time comes to remember films other than the ones you’ve gotten screeners for in the past couple of weeks for your proverbial consideration, it all comes down to the question of actual enjoyment. If a film was fun enough (and we all have our own kinds of fun) for you to recommend it to a whole host of readers, up it goes, or ought to. So that’s what this is, in all honesty, and if you take a careful look at the image up above then you probably know what you’re getting yourself into before you even gander at the rest of this piece (if you hadn’t already figured it out before). There won’t be any surprises here, folks.

10– Tree of Life, Terrence Malick

Okay, maybe just one or two. Yes, this year I actually managed to find a Terrence Malick movie that I liked. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, and it found me. Regardless, I’ve long been skeptical of the director’s work and the hyperbolic praise that’s usually directed towards it. Badlands and Days of Heaven don’t strike me as bad films, per se, but I can’t say they’re anywhere near as memorable as they are for everyone else. Gentle little artsy dramas and not much more, treating human beings with the same lyrical graces as Carrol Ballard’s various animal fables– probably great research material if you’re an alien on an anthropological expedition, but nothing more than an acquired taste if you’re of more terrestrial ilk. The fact that his reputation lasted for the better part of decades on those two alone was mind-boggling enough, much less that it managed to survive the pretentious mess that is The Thin Red Line, which among other things reveals that just about every doughboy U.S. soldier who fought in the Pacific theater during WWII was some kind of philosophy major, whispering Thoreau-esque musings in between being blasted at by Japanese artillery. The New World brought me back to the same kind of status-quo with the director, able to appreciate in passing the visual qualities of this latter-day Pocahontas retelling, if never able to really grasp the more fundamental question of why.

Maybe I’m just not attuned to his gospel of the sanctity of nature and the perverse qualities of civilization (being allergic to everything in the former poses something of a problem) to really dig all his innocents frolicking about in the pastures of Eden, but then maybe that helped me better get into his more personal and cosmic visions in Tree of Life. For the first time, all those voice-over soliloquies don’t feel quite so out-of-character to my ears, perhaps because we’re grounded for the first time both in a more recognizably human backdrop of an autobiographical American upbringing, rather than the various allegorical whatnots of movies past. It also helps that when he does go for the allegory, it arrives with the transcendent visuals of old-school effects marvel Douglas Trumbull, putting to the screens visions of the cosmos that would rival the work he did on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and snapshots of a prehistoric Earth that play like the most esoteric episode of Walking With Dinosaurs ever filmed. Granted, a lot of the movie is filled with so many of the same-old cliches of family feuding dynamics, outdated Americana and religious waffling, but for some reason it all works for me, this time. Or at least most of it does. I can’t say that it’s enough to make me want to revisit the rest of his filmography any time soon, but it’s nice to know that going in with an open mind can reap rewards every once in a while.

9– Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder

Okay, back to business. Zack Snyder’s made a name for himself in the past ten years by playing the remake/adaptation game better than most in the pop-culture free for all that modern Hollywood has become. His work hasn’t been original by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s been interesting at the very least, especially in ways that seem to slip beneath the consciousness of even the filmmakers themselves. His update of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was a bang-up debut in an utterly commercial sense– it pared the original film of most of the cynicism and satire that made its “zombies in a mall” concept purposefully laughable back in the day, and instead focused on delivering a hard-nosed survival-action thriller with just enough self-awareness of its place in cinematic and post-disaster history to coast by with a winning kind of undead gallows humor. His shot-for-shot adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 helped reveal the graphic-novel as a canny work of modern-day Crusader-mentality storytelling and burst open the propagandic nature of old-school mythologizing and modern-day fairy tales alike, something that comes off looking smarter and smarter the further we get from the war-elephants and monstrous peoples of the East from Lord of the Rings. Even his Watchmen managed to do good at producing an exactingly faithful, if somewhat hollow version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ acclaimed comics masterpiece to the big screen, introducing new audiences to the characters and stories on terms that long-time fans of the graphic novel, like myself, could respect.

And then, we have this movie. Well, we also have that CGI animated movie he did about owls, but let’s ignore that for the moment. After all, enough people already ignored Sucker Punch, dismissing it as just another one of Snyder’s rote exercises in music-video style directing and rote pop-cultural pastiche mining, weaving his first original screenplay in the form of a series of worn hand-me-down narrative and character conventions from seemingly all of cinema– the psych-ward melodrama with pretty little matchstick girls abused by bad ol’ medical professionals, the backstage musical with even prettier little matchstick girls all dolled up to strut the stage for leering boors, and the dream-within-a-dream puzzle-film mentality that connects the two. On one level, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, and especially in the past decade or so– Lynch took us through the rabbit hole with Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, De Palma at least tried to with Femme Fatale. Even Christopher Nolan’s latest movies and the better part of the Matrix films have done a good job of taking that sort of thing mainstream, but what makes Snyder’s take on it interesting is how he turns all of the borrowed psycho-sexual fugues into both a j’accuse and a mea culpa all at once for the whole of the male dominated pop-cultural canon. While Baby Doll and her cohorts try to escape one level of sexual subjugation or another, they escape into fantasy action set-pieces that see them liberated as heroines while at the same time exploited all over again as scantily clad bimbos. In an age where Buffy can be seen as a feminist icon and comic conventions are filled to the brim with booth-babes hawking sexist wares, it’s nice to know that the people who dream up this stuff can be self-conscious enough about their fetishes to let them come out on screen like this, or at the very least that their unconscious can find this kind of big-budget gestalt.

8– The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodovar

On paper, this should be exactly the same kind of psycho-sexual victory that Sucker Punch is by subtle virtues. Almodovar tackling a progressive science-fiction story of plastic surgery, gender roles and all the obsession that plays into both sounds like the most engaging take on the same sets of themes that made movies like Seconds, The Face of Another and especially Eyes Without a Face such thought-provoking body-horror masterpieces for their time. In an age where the best we can get of imaginative works of this type are one zombie scarefest after another, there’s something suave and cool about seeing a pop-sensationalist like Almodovar stretch his creative wings a bit and get inside the heads of a brilliant surgeon who appears to be keeping a woman prisoner in his high-tech mansion, and the victim of his experiments herself. Especially when you factor in a potent cast that includes Antonio Banderas and the gorgeous Elena Anaya as the twin poles of this mad-science turned follie a deux, you have the makings for a potent bit of B-movie archetypes being spun by a master of melodrama.

And to be sure, it’s an interesting mix, but one that doesn’t quite congeal in all the ways one imagines it might. Part of this is due to the lackadaisical pacing and structure in the first half of the film, where Almodovar’s merely treading water with a lot of the same old campy tricks and theatrics as a means to bide time until the big reveal of the film’s midpoint. Part of it is also due to a sort of seeming reticence on the director’s part to fully commit to the kind of gothic neo-noir guignol that the various intersections of sub-genres almost cry out for in the filmmaker’s hands– early on, he feels reluctant to give into the sci-fi atmosphere that Frankenheimer, Teshigahara and Franju made magic with, and instead relies on a lot of the same old stock soap-opera formulas he’s used time and again until the story begins to deliver its thrills on its own. It may not be among Almodovar’s better films, but it’s still one of the more impressive psycho-sexual genre efforts of the past couple of years. At the risk of offering art-house anathema, however, I might believe that the story could be better served by an English-language remake (at the very least, I’d like to see the sexual panic it would put M. Night Shyamalan through).

7– Urbanized, Gary Hustwit

For the past few years, publisher turned producer turned documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit has turned out a series of highly acclaimed features examining the design mentality of the modern world in ways that both engage and enrage me, as a viewer. Helvetica, at first, seemed something of a cute, documentary joke, examining the roots and omnipresence of the famous sans-serif font with all the thorough research and imaginative details of any modern expose. Who knew there was this much attention paid to the intricacies and controversies of the different schools of print design and their prevailing philosophies in the modern world? Who cared? Though Hustwit’s footage of the font’s presence on seemingly every square acreage throughout metropolitan sectors around the world was no doubt beautiful and evocative, as though he were channeling the same spirit that fueled Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her with more an eye for typographical decline than urban decay (or the intersection between the two, at least). Objectified only made things even worse for me as a viewer– yes, it’s fascinating to see the amount of attention people devote to the design of all manner of household appliances, furniture and the like, and to listen to people expound upon what it all means in terms of modernism and post-modernism, but it also strikes me as a kind of nascent yuppie navel-gazing. This is the same kind of mentality that makes people fawn in devotion over the minimalist beauty and form/function synthesis of their Apple products, but only at the expense of neglecting to devote any thought to the real-world cost of the toll all those wasted resources take on the environment or the kind of third-world slave labor it takes to build those geek-chic products so cheaply in the first place.

Save for an afterthought of the need for green-design late in the game in Objectified, this is a problem that Hustwit seems to have completely ignored in his films at the expense of all those gleaming, pretty, Steve Jobs-friendly designs. Urbanized makes an attempt to probe the human question of modern design in a much more thorough in meaningful way, however, by looking at the modern innovators of city-planning on large and small scales alike throughout the world. Granted, it doesn’t offer any grand solutions, probe too deeply into the issues of third-world slums or even take that hard a look at the dehumanizing urban landscapes of first-world population centers, but at least it’s taking a far more forthright and direct look at the impact that modern civilization has on the planet, and more importantly its inhabitants, than either of his previous bourgeois infomercials, and without sacrificing any of the aesthetic pleasures that made those two films so hypnotic to begin with. It’s may still be a pretty shallow, wealthy take on the subject, but it’s interesting, to say the least. Hopefully Hustwit can follow up on this more humanist line of thought in the future with more economically mindful examinations– say, a hard-hitting expose about the price of tea in China.

6– Contagion, Steven Soderbergh

Of all the filmmakers to be creatively opened by the advances of digital production, Steven Soderbergh may seem lower on the totem-pole of impact in comparison to directors with higher visibility in terms of technological pioneering. Plenty of filmmakers have pursued video and digital tools over the past ten years or more– Lucas, Cameron and Jackson being the most obvious, but also guys like Mann, Rodriguez and Linklater, for whom the new cameras and computer-driven editing environments offer not only greater technical draws in what they can do, but also greater creative freedom in what they can get away with and put on screen below certain kinds of mainstream budgets. Of all of them, Soderbergh has probably benefited the most from the digital revolution, especially where it concerns the newfound creative freedom offered by the RED camera series. At least since Schizopolis he’s been striving to turn himself into a one-man army as a filmmaker, acting as his own cinematographer and cameraman wherever possible, and though he came off with great works on celluloid like Traffic and even the studio-bound Ocean’s 11 series, there was always a weight to the old technologies you could see slowing his system down, restraining him in key ways. You can’t really imagine him getting away with the epic scope of the Che films on 35mm, or the subversive sexual forays of The Girlfriend Experience without the borderless paradigm of video, with its more immediate feel and coverage. At the very least, you can’t imagine him being able to afford these movies without sacrificing much of their indie souls, which is perhaps the best part of the video revolution, in small and big-budgeted terms– it allows filmmakers to live and breathe on their own terms.

In Soderbergh’s case, that means as much genre cross-migration and experimentation as possible. Just as he could seamlessly blend his instincts into a hard-nosed docu-drama on one of the world’s most notorious guerrilla revolutionaries at a scale that would make most Hollywood epics blush, he can navigate his way into this speculative big of real-world sci-fi, taking a realist’s look at what might happen in a worst-case scenario kind of pandemic spreading across the world. On one level, it plays off like an old-fashioned star-filled disaster epic of yore, and even not too disimilar from the ensemble-driven narrative of Traffic, spreading its focus around the world in following both high-ranking officials and ordinary everymen as they try to stop the disease, or at the very least find a way to survive or even capitalize upon it. On another level, however, the strict realist’s gaze that Soderbergh employs at all of the unimaginable yet all-too-real possibilities helps turn much of the experience into an almost lyrical kind of tone poem. As society breaks down in the face of epidemic strains and strict government control, a kind of transcendent quality reminiscent of Oshii’s best animes floats across the screen. The more he threatens to retire nowadays, the less convinced I am that he’ll actually make good on it. But even if he does, digital filmmaking has made Soderbergh prolific enough to produce enough quality in the next few years to rival what most make up for over a lifetime.

5– The Sunset Limited, Tommy Lee Jones

I’ve never been too enamored of the literary output of Cormac McCarthy, another of those lionized American writers of that staunch masculine territory of the modern old-west, but to be sure, his work has made for some pretty standout cinematic adaptations over the years. All the Pretty Horses mostly floundered under the weight of its cast and aspirations, but the Coen Brothers’ job of No Country For Old Men produced a modern classic and bang-up piece of entertainment that both encapsulates the writer’s taciturn perspective of the timeless archetypes of violence and the famed filmmakers’ cynical appropriation of genre aesthetics. The Road made for a surprising read as a near hopelessly bleak bit of post-apocalypticism, miles away from the wish-fulfillment fantasies of Mad Max or even the quaint civic aspirations of David Brin’s The Postman (or Kevin Costner’s amiably clueless film thereof), and though its Viggo Mortensen-starring film didn’t match the power it had on the page, it at least managed to be true to its grimy, chalk-mouthed vision.

And yet, of all the writer’s works that were filmed before cameras in the past decade and change, I might say that my favorite is this HBO film of McCarthy’s little-known play, directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones alongside lone co-star Samuel L. Jackson. Pitting an affluent, but suicidal professor against an altruistic, but hard-lived super who saves his life (against his will) after a botched attempt to throw himself in front of a subway train, the film becomes an expertly conceived set of sociological and philosophical conflicts boiled down to two men debating in a crowded apartment building. McCarthy’s script from his own stage play expertly zeroes in on the various drives and disagreements fueling both mens’ passions to their various ends, while the actors bring those conflicts to life– Jackson’s to save a lost soul, Jones’ to lose it for good and all. In the end, McCarthy may stack the deck a little in favor of absolute bleakness and existential despair (I’ll never understand how so much success, in this world, can engender so much pessimism in writers), but Jones’ craftsmanship before and behind the camera bring a somewhat more level playing field to the intellectual tennis-match on the screen. All in all, it’s a worthy hour and a half to watch at any given moment, though I’ll admit, sometimes my mind wanders and begins to conceive a production of the play where Spalding Gray fought off depression long enough to star himself– with any luck, he’s getting standing ovations in heaven’s theaters, instead.

4– A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg

I know I’ve said this before, but hot damn, is it good to see Cronenberg back where he belongs. After winning mainstream success but painting himself into a corner with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, the no-nonsense dramatics of A Dangerous Method come as something of a breath of fresh air to fans of the director’s past work. He hasn’t done anything this heady or provocative (both intellectually and sexually) since the likes of Ballard’s Crash. In tackling the rivalry between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and the latter doctor’s complicated relationship with a comely young patient turned psychotherapist in her own right, the director finds a real-world subject matter every bit as engaging and imaginative as any of his sci-fi body horror spectacles. In a sense, it’s most thrilling of all to see Cronenberg go deep into the heart of psychotherapy’s roots if for no other reason than to show just how much it has influenced his entire career as a filmmaker– a film like this stands as going back to the human and historical source that fueled so much of films like Videodrome or Dead Ringers, works that resonate with all the power of a dreamer’s active-imagination with the running commentary of a trained, clinical physician.

However, that’s not to say that the film stands as a perfect return to form for the director. Though well acted on most fronts (Keira Knightley is pretty, but little more than a sweaty, gesticulating overbite masquerading as a performance much the time), the script tends to leave out much of the best substance concerning the differing philosophies of Freud and Jung, in place of focusing on the speculative romantic entanglements and ensuing scandal as a means of driving them apart. Mostly there’s just lipservice paid to Freud’s fascination with the sexual side of psychotherapy, above all, and Jung’s increasingly esoteric interest with the occult and the supernatural, both of which would have added volumes of substance to what is, as it stands, a very nice period romance and drama, but nowhere near as provocative as it could be. For anyone who knows more than a Wikipedia article’s worth on either of these pioneering minds, one can’t help but feel left somewhat adrift at the end, like Jung sitting on the shore of his own mind’s eye, about to lose himself in the prophetic madness that resulted in the Red Book. I’d have loved to have seen a fuller take on these individuals (Cronenberg himself said there was enough material to create a mini-series instead of a mere feature film), but I’ll settle for seeing the director get back into subjects that are really worthy of his talents. I can only wait for his take on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis with bated breath.

3– Buddha: The Great Departure, Kozo Morishita

Lately there’s been a fair amount of talk in anime circles of the decline of the big-budgeted likes of feature film efforts like Akira in the past few and coming years. Digital piracy and dwindling theatrical circulation of anime films in America has helped curb the profits that once fueled the industry to the heights it enjoyed in the 90′s, to the point that we’re now seeing standout companies like Bandai announce that they’ll no longer be distributing new works in the United States, cutting themselves off from a market that for the most part has already shrunk down to a mere niche and found alternative avenues to satisfy themselves. It’s quite a shame, because amidst all the stolen torrents, fan-subs and fan-dubs out there, the past few years have been among the more prodigious in terms of promising new anime releases, especially at significant cost and scale. Yeah, the backbone of the industry is still pretty much old warhorse series like Evangelion being brought back to theaters with no expense spared, and one of the most promising new voices, Satoshi Kon, was lost just as the mainstream was beginning to get a handle on him, but every once in a while we see new works of bold vision being given the latitudes they deserve in ways that we haven’t seen for years. Madhouse’s longspanning Redline project was one of them, and Toei Animation’s adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha manga, was another.

Condensing the first two volumes of the master mangaka’s epic narrative into a tight feature-length experience, director Kozo Morishita delivers one of the most beautiful animated efforts of the past several years, as well as one of the most harrowing ones as well. Absolutely no punches are pulled in transcribing Tezuka’s uncompromising vision of the depths and depravity of human suffering that spurs the young prince Siddhartha’s quest for enlightenment and compassion, especially where it concerns the parallel, wartorn journey of a young boy born into the lowest of the unjust caste system and seeks to rise up by whatever means he can. As adventurous and epic in its scope as it is intimate and heartbreaking, the film succeeds at bringing to life the opening salvos in the major narrative of one of the world’s biggest religions– one only hopes that the rest of this story can be brought to the screen in the same manner that it deserves.

2– X-Men: First Class, Matthew Vaughn

In the past year, we’ve seen Michael Fassbender assume some of the most challenging and thought provoking roles any actor of his generation has been asked to shoulder– as Rochester in Jane Eyre, he took on one of the most iconic romantic leads of English literature, and a perennial favorite of period devotees everywhere; as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method, he portrayed one of the finest minds of the 20th century, both as an intellectual rival for the legendary Sigmund Freud, and as a man combating his own deep-seated inhibitions in the pursuit of what may have been the love of his life; as Brandon Sullivan in Shame, he tackled what may be the most demanding role of the bunch, eliciting both shock and sympathy in his portrait of a successful young man brought low by his own sexual addictions, covering a whole spectrum of complicated emotions and social boundaries in his various professiona, personal and all-too personal relationships.

But never mind that shit– he was Magneto! Without a doubt, X-Men: First Class was by far the most fun I had at the movies this year when it comes to new releases, and Fassbender’s turn as Erik Lenscher was easily one of the highlights of an already outstanding exercise in blockbuster entertainment. As directed by Layer Cake and Kick-Ass filmmaker Matthew Vaughn (who nearly took on X-Men III, and even fully cast and storyboarded the damn thing before handing it off to Bret Ratner), the movie runs at a brisk and confident clip as it portrays the backstory to both the Master of Magnetism’s war on humanity and his friendship with a young Professor Charles Xavier, as they seek to band together mutantkind in the face of a looming threat to world peace at the height of the Cold War. Ivory pedestal art, it is not, but who gives a damn about that as long as you’re getting some of the finest comic-book and spy-caper thrills delivered in an adventurous little package as tight and punchy as this? Fassbender’s turn as Magneto in his early years especially is righteously cool as a riff on Connery-era Bond and Bond-villains alike– trotting ’round the globe and torturing incognito Nazis with his superpowers in one language after another without tripping over his tongue once, one almost wishes there were still a few 60′s-era radical terrorists in the same ilk as Carlos for him to add to his repertoire.

But beyond his performance, nearly every facet of this film from the casting and scripting to the visualization impressed me, even if only on a snappy surface level,  brimming with cinematic confidence that overcame its occasional hamstrings in onscreen imagination (aside from a couple of gangbuster set-pieces, much of the action is just a little bit rote when compared to Bryan Singers’ revelatory take in his X-features) and narrative impatience (they’re a little too eager to put Professor X into that damn wheelchair of his, like Star Wars fanboys who dream of a revisionist Prequel Trilogy where Darth Vader’s pushed into lava in the first reel and spends 6 or 7 hours butchering Jedi in the intergalactic equivalent of a slasher flick). But no matter what minor hiccups it crosses paths with as it gallops towards one of the finest superhero-climaxes in recent movies, First Class easily stands as the best of all the Marvel comic-book films (even if it doesn’t get to join that Avengers club-house that I’m already thinking about skipping after being somewhat bored by Thor and Captain America), and a first-rate experience, especially in the theater. More than all the special effects or winning performances, what impressed me most of all was just how well the movie connected with audiences who dug the film on more than just the old rote comic-book geek references, everyone riding the same emotional wavelength of these troubled kids trying to find their place in a world as volatile and dangerous as their own unstable genetic formulas. Of all the films on my list, here’s the one I’m most ready to see a sequel for on opening day. Mutant and proud.

1– Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below, Makoto Shinkai

Over the past year, I’ve found myself more and more aware of the importance of the theatrical experience in all its forms, and gone to greater lengths to see films in their natural habitat instead of merely settling for viewing them on the diminished format of television. This has been especially true of my efforts to watch feature-length anime works, which have driven me to disparate corners of Manhattan in order to see these films the way they were meant to– hunting down a hole-in-the-wall theater within walking distance from Central Park and Bloomingdales that normally shows Bollywood epics to see the Rebuild of Evangelion features; attending matinee showings of Welcome to the Space Show and Time of Eve during the New York International Children’s festival while surrounded by countless screaming kids; enjoying Buddha: The Great Departure just mere blocks away from Grand Central and the best udon joint in the city at the Japan Society center; catching a sketchy digital screening of Chocolate Underground at the Soho Mini-Con (everything’s sketchy in Soho); enjoying retrospective showings of Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky and Spirited Away, among many others, at Lincoln Center and the IFC Center. I missed, to my chagrin, a screening of Satoshi Kon’s dreamy masterpiece Paprika at the Gotham festival, which makes my fourth or fifth failure to see the film on the silver screen when I had the chance, but that’s primarily because I was spending that time obsessed with seeing another anime on the big screen, and this time a film that was actually screened in Japan during the same damn year. And for that movie, Makoto Shinkai’s epic Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below, I would have to mount the biggest challenge I’ve ever had to face in order to see a film theatrically– Comic-Con.

Now, you may be thinking that for someone whose interests in the sci-fi/fantasy end of pop-culture and cinema border on the obsessional like myself that such an event would be paradise, or at the very least a walk in the park. I mean, here I am, a die-hard Star Wars fan who actually likes the Star Wars films instead of going into hissy-fits over which pixels George Lucas has rearranged, and enough of an anime fan to spend the better part of a year writing about it every Saturday. If you were to see me in person, you’d no doubt see me wearing a Darth Maul dog-tag around my neck, along with a sporty little NERV pendent beside it in matching red and black. I’m almost surprised myself that it took me until last year to attend my first Comic-Con, but after spending just one measly hour there, I was just about ready to call it quits. Maybe there’s better, more sociable and amiable conventions out there where sci-fi fans and otaku alike can meet and connect with one another on an intellectually stimulating basis, but dear God in heaven, you won’t find it at the Javits Center. A sheer hell for the crowds of poorly dressed and apparently unbathed cosplayers alone, I can ill-imagine a more disreputable collection of rude and ignorant enthusiasts than the ones I found myself pushed and prodded by in line after line throughout the whole of the weekend, most of them seeming to enjoy about the same intellectual depth as a shallow puddle of beer, and all emotional maturity of a stale condom wrapper, incapable of starting any conversation without it ending in a sweaty argument that would bring shame even to the most flameworthy internet troll. To put it succinctly, it’s like walking into a living Chan board, and if you have no idea what on earth that means, then I can only envy you.

It would take a Herculean effort for any movie to make this prolonged experiment in trying patience a worthwhile way to spend your time, but in Makoto Shinkai’s second feature-length work of theatrical animation, you have something that at the very least takes the sting out of it all. A sweet and imaginatively adventurous fable of life and death in the same vein of the classic myth of Orpheus and Euridice, Shinkai’s film makes obvious and reverent connections to the canon of Studios Ghibli and Gainax alike, mixing the family-friendly fantasy of one with the darker and more mature (or at the very least adolescently angsty) stakes of the other. What’s thrilling is how the director is able to mix elements of Miyazaki and Anno alike into a concoction of his very own, with copious nods to his own customary obsessions, like visions of the sky in all its forms to rival Lucas and all his setting suns. Moreover, Shinkai mixes his various celestial and terrestrial landscapes into concrete action set-pieces throughout, following his youthful protagonists as they chase the sun while chased by ravenous shadow-monsters themselves, proving his talent lies in more than just basic stylistic portrayals of stock anime cliches. In the end it may not stand as quite the same kind of unique and imaginative work as the works of the masters who came before him, but at the very least it shows him worthy of all the recognition and attention that he earned from his solo-animation gambit Voices of a Distant Star in ways that all his works afterwards merely seemed to be building up to. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next, but whatever it is, it’ll certainly be worth braving another Comic-Con to attend (maybe not quite as worthwhile as the next Evangelion or even the next movie by Mamoru Hosada, but enough for one day’s unpleasantness, at least).