Viva Riva!
Djo Munga crafted a gritty urban crime drama with energy to spare, and it benefits from strong performances and the uncommon setting of Kinshasa. The unique aspect, though, is its uncompromising honesty. The story has no apologies for its lurid subject matter, graphic violence, sex, lesbian action, and the utterly corrupt characters that make up the heart of Viva Riva. Ridiculously entertaining, while having neither sympathy nor mercy for the characters held in thrall to the relentless Congolese beat. This is in some ways an exercise in style, but it never drifts too far from the central theme of the gravitational center of money, and how it drives and destroys everything we see. Sure, the men and women kill for money, but without cash flow, like the gasoline Riva brings to the city, nothing shall move.

Tree of Life
One of the most ambitious films of this decade, or indeed any decade, Tree of Life grapples with the most basic and unanswerable of questions. Ostensibly about a father raising his children, it becomes a meditation on how we relate to the processes that created life around us; or maybe it is about how we deal with a distant deity and make sense of religion; or using vast perspective to understand where we fit in the struggle for life and how we find our way. There are as many interpretations as there were viewers of this transcendent film. I considered it through the perspective of the father; falsely confident about how the world is around him, he feels his way through the process of rearing his kids, never able to know the wisdom of his actions until long afterwards. You tell me.

Melancholia
Crippling depression isn’t so bad in the end of days – if Earth is about to collide with another planet, then having an apocalyptic view is a positive boon. While a fascinating consideration of how different personalities deal with the yawning precipice of oblivion, it allows the audience to understand and perhaps internalize the power of depression. That being said, Melancholia is uncommonly entertaining, with shockingly beautiful compositions. The end is nothing to be worried about, after all.

The Artist
A minute or so into The Artist, I had forgotten I was watching a silent film. The surprise here is the extraordinary skill Hazanavicius brings to telling a story with spare dialogue, scrupulously constructed visuals, and the faces of two of the best performances of the year. A star-making turn by Berenice Bejo is matched by a pitch-perfect Jean Dujardin (who already is a star via the OSS films). As far as bittersweet films go, this ode to the glory of old Hollywood is as bitter as it gets. But that is the central theme – the Artist, if they truly believe in their art, wish only to entertain, and that for a brief time. The crowd, adoring though it may be, will move on, never to return. ‘That is life’, as one character says. So why is one of the best films of the year in a dead medium?

Princess of Montpensier
Passion destroys all it touches in this sumptuous costume drama from a master of the craft. Against the backdrop of the pointlessly bloody yet enthusiastically fought war between Huguenots and Catholics, a similarly aimless love triangle reveals the destructive force of passion amongst shallow people who have yet to learn that life is not to be taken too seriously. At least not if it is to be understood. Populated by mostly narrow-minded characters driven by emotion to destructive ends, we get to view the awkward dance of human nature as people labor against their best interests. All in the name of love, pride, honor, and faith – all variants of foolish passion. Seldom has the cataract of human conflict been viewed with such thoughtful reserve.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams
This odd meditation on our history and how we interpret those frozen moments in time captured in ancient objects fascinates beyond reasonable comprehension. The rare experience of the Chauvet Cave becomes the centerpiece for a review of prehistoric peoples, or at least our guess as to who they were based on what was left behind. This sets up the amazing sequence of slow shots of the oldest cave paintings of the world, preserved for tens of thousands of years. Primitive, yet sophisticated in use of contrast and medium, and in the creative use of the contours of the cave; possibly the greatest works of art in human history.

The Red Chapel
A thoughtful commentary on the slippery nature of truth in documentaries, all masquerading as a sublime practical joke on North Korea. A group of comics seek to show the creepy and self-destructive culture of the world’s most isolated country using the dumbest imaginable stage comedy show. Meanwhile, a simple and goofy expose becomes something else entirely. As it turns out, propaganda goes both ways, and The Red Chapel becomes not only wickedly funny, but also ends up burying the guerilla documentary as a fundamentally dishonest genre.

Meek’s Cutoff
A small band of settlers strike west in search of a new life, and in Oregon circa 1845, they find themselves utterly lost, without water or food. Guided by one of the better-constructed unreliable narrators in cinema, their guide Meek has a shortcut in mind. As they press forward into nothingness, we are lost with them in this wilderness. Lacking in traditional narrative structure or any sense of closure, Meek’s Cutoff is a unsettlingly immersive experience as we join the characters in not knowing whether salvation or death can be found beyond the next hill. Perhaps they will make it, as it is always just a bit further. We must do without a hero or any real guide, just as they do, and have no idea who is speaking the truth. Metaphorically rich and thematically dense, one could see it as a simple treatise on the nature of risk while in the midst; the risk of trusting to fate, the gamble inherent in retaining one’s humanity at the cost of safety, and the payment demanded by ill fortune. In more concrete terms, it is a cry from a nation, once emboldened by Manifest Destiny, that has completely lost its way.

Certified Copy
There are no immutable truths in art, as in life or love – subjective in all ways especially regarding perspective. Straying across subjects about art, authenticity, and how these could apply to men and women, courting and married, now and long into the future, Certified Copy is a brilliant work that does not fit any conventional narrative mold. Part of the way into this feature, an antique dealer and a writer appear to be discussing the inherent value of copies against the original – and then the goalposts are moved in a way that shifts the subject, bringing subtext to the surface, and telescoping time in dramatic fashion. Bold and meditative, and benefits from repeat viewings as the person we are changes with time – as would one’s view of this film.

Life, Above All
A blistering indictment of South Africa’s response on the level of health ministry, government, and society, Life, Above All is a deeply intimate look at the effects of a pandemic that has crippled an entire continent. But never mind the mind-boggling statistics of HIV – this focuses on one family that is being devastated by the disease, but even more so by the malignant actions of the community around them. Belief in magic and curse rules the land, and provides a protective curtain behind which the plague spreads unchallenged. This film deftly addresses the war between fact and superstition, and the proxies that fight on their behalf. There is no other way to deal with adversity of any kind other than head-on, and it can be said that AIDS has been less damaging to Africa than the ignorance that nurtures it.

The Muppets
The visionary creation of Jim Henson is now regarded with nostalgia – but The Muppets make it clear that the show is not over yet. The consummate entertainers unite in a knowing and clever film that is a tribute to entertainment and entertainers. Equally turns touching and hilarious, The Muppets is a fitting way to reinvigorate the stage show and reestablish Kermit and Company. Welcome back, guys.

1. Agora

The finest film of the year is an unlikely drama – a barely-released consideration of the war between intellectual endeavor and superstition. Impeccably acted and scrupulously mounted, Agora takes place in 4th century A.D. Alexandria, as the upstart Christians begin to flex their extraordinary muscle in ousting the Pagans from power. Historical dramas rarely get the tone so right, and make points that will be relevant as long as humans walk the Earth. Superstition, and the religions that it spawned, will always be a dominant force the world over despite its lack of utility and destructive influence. Though intellectual pursuits have led to every important advance in history from mathematics as a way of modeling our world, physics as a way to define the mechanics of the universe down to the atoms, to medicine as a way to avoid the spoiling of disease and time; it remains demonized by the forces of religion for being such a dangerous competitor. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is a sickening orgy of ignorance, but symbolizes the potentially fleeting nature of knowledge – preserve such advances with a vengeance, or superstition will erode all that makes our world livable. Even today, those who deigned to bring enlightenment to the human race are under assault; Agora reminds us that to take such attacks lightly is to gamble with the future of our species as an intelligent form.

2. Four Lions

Consider the extraordinary impact of terrorism – permanent war, the revelation of The Constitution as a disposable document, and further coarsening of the public discourse to the point where useful conversation is impossible amidst individuals who disagree violently and are totally committed to their mindsets and worldviews. In such an environment, it is impossible to take any discussion on terrorism seriously. On that note, one of the best comedies of the year considers suicide bombers living in London with that uniquely British combination of playing the narrative straight with a sustained assault of goofy shit. A cell of extremists led by (or dragged down by) a radical and extremely loudmouthed imam plan to stick it to the West with the worst assemblage of talent ever. This film was relentlessly funny, highly quotable, and takes a taboo subject where it needs to be taken. In the end, the point is made, none too subtly, that all terrorist attacks are in vain. Not because the democracy is too strong, but because no belief system should be taken too seriously.

3. Carlos
Carlos manages the dizzying feat of dramatizing the terrorist career of Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez in an intricate story that spans decades and nations while remaining intimate and introspective. As a self-styled revolutionary fighting for Palestinian and/or socialist causes, Carlos is portrayed by Edgar Ramirez as a charismatic and vain megalomaniac. The performance is flawless and subtle while being in some ways larger than life. The pointlessness of violence in service of a philosophy, the deeply narcissistic nature of revolutionaries and extremists, and the self-loathing and self-destructive character of those who follow such demagogues are themes explored with an extraordinarily light touch. Olivier Assayas, a curiously versatile director, takes his place with masters of the craft.

4.  Point Traverse

Probably one of the best films you may never have heard of, Point Traverse had no theatrical release, seeing only a film festival or two before disappearing from the radar. The story, what little there is, follows two men in a frozen small town on the edge of wherever. One is a socially repressed kid with a steady job in a sandwich shop, the other is a more affable drifter who is occasionally employed and/or involved with any number of women. The contrast is in whether predictability is preferable to a hazardous adventure, considered for both men who are headed nowhere. The existential questions about whether one exists in any significant way clashes hard with the economic reality they both face – considering this is how most of the industrialized world gets by, it is not a superfluous question. First-time director Albert Shin crafts an uncomfortable but mesmerizing film with stunning visuals of a beautiful but lonely landscape, making a film with a budget of $10,000 that looks like a million. Point Traverse is content to allow the audience to drift to its own conclusions, as you are given a blank canvas on which to project your own fears and inadequacies; the men are in their early twenties, that unfortunate time when we come to realize that our failures are outweighing our successes, and likely always will.

For a DVD, contact the director via this website:  http://www.timelapsepictures.ca/

5.  Black Swan

A crystal vision of the price of the ideal, Black Swan demonstrates in operatic fashion what one must do to achieve perfection. Here, the subject is the lead performance in Swan Lake, but so it is with all endeavors. In order to touch greatness, you must destroy yourself along the way. Rather than clawing your way over rivals, you must claw your way over yourself; and one does not get to choose what is lost in the process. Vincent Cassel gives a command performance and Darren Aronofsky crafts a fantasy nightmare. Natalie Portman is astounding, the fearful dancer who is consumed with self-doubt and discovers Nina Sayers is not by herself good enough, and so must be dispatched.

6.  Inside Job

A briskly paced and informative documentary doubling as the most depressing horror film in recent memory, Inside Job details the anatomy of the recent credit crisis at the heart of the current recession. And it makes the strong case for why it will happen again and again as long as zombie financial philosophies like free market economics continue to rule our global exchange. By systematically dismantling regulatory bodies and the laws protecting against financial chaos, the banking industry has become powerful enough to not only threaten to collapse international commerce, but carry off billion dollar heists like the bailout with no recourse possible. This impeccable work crosses the aisle, as Clinton, Bush, and Obama equally assisted this insanity, and together kept vampires like Greenspan, Bernanke, and Summers in command of the sinking ship. And who better to right the vessel than the ones who plowed into the iceberg? Yes, actually we are that stupid. This film provides a strong reason to be well informed about the thieves who continually sing to sleep the politicians we elect.

7.  Don’t Look Back

This is one of those films that thrive upon a lack of exposition. Seeming to exist in that strange waking dream state just before consciousness is achieved in the morning, Don’t Look Back considers the nature of identity and how it blurs under the influence of others. Jeanne is a writer who wishes to explore her childhood – namely her lack of one since she has amnesia due to horrific trauma. We can never be sure what, if anything that occurs in the film is real. As the real of the present drifts into the faulty recall of memory, we do not have the luxury of being sure of anything. An uneasy experience anchored by two extraordinary and internal performances by Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci.

8. Police, Adjective

The police procedural to end all procedurals, this essentially Romanian film plays out in long takes that appear to simulate an investigation taking place in real time. That the cop is shadowing a sixteen year old kid for dealing a couple of ounces of weed only adds to the lack of urgency. This quiet and thoughtful work rises above the tedium invoked by the nonexistent story – this is police work boiled down to its essence. Part of the meaning of the wry title involves the importance of dialectics to this film’s subjects; they are to follow the letter of the law with no regard to whether it is right or just, and to interpret the law or be swayed by conscience is a profound evil. As such, law enforcement is more about looking busy, rather than determining whether your actions are for the greater good, or anyone’s good. Apart from any point about law and order, Police, Adjective is a daring exercise in existentialism, as the audience is left to watch wordless scenes in silence, and wander in more philosophical directions in regarding one’s place in the world.

9.  A Film With Me In It

Dylan Moran is only one of the hilarious parts of this meta-comedy about the difficulty of writing something with any sort of originality for the stage or screen. The more closely you follow cinema, the more entertaining it will be, but even for those with little such interest, the dry wit will more than satisfy. Any film that gets a laugh from crushing a wheelchair-bound invalid under a chandelier was going to make this list anyway, but few comedies were this ruthless or relentless at finding the humor in desperation.

10. Animal Kingdom

Cliches inherent in crime family dramas are met head-on in this remarkably styled Aussie film from first time director Michod. Plot falls victim to the deeply flawed characters within as the Cody family crumbles under pressure from the vicious Armed Robbery Squad of Melbourne. The poisonous environment of a family mired in crime becomes evident as the film progresses. And at the epicenter is Jacki Weaver as the diabolical and incestuous matriarch, surely one of the most inspired performances of the year.

And for number eleven, I am going to get a lot of shit for this, but…

11.  A Town Called Panic

I can’t get my head around this one, nor do I want to. A delightfully idiotic, cheap, ugly, and hilarious claymation film that makes defiance of expectations its stock in trade. Equally entertaining to children, stoners, cinephiles, and twats like me. That something like this even made it to a movie screen four thousand miles from where it was made boggles the mind and defies those who complain about how the cinema is going to shit.

The mandatory choice of the artsy fartsies deserves it. Bella Tarr’s films often contain scenes that seem to be drawn directly from Al Bundy’s conception of critically acclaimed foreign films, and I think they can be fairly ridiculed in such instances. It’s healthy to check yourself when your head starts to nod at really, really, long black and white takes of people from a backwater country not doing much or worse, speaking profoundly. But Tarr is still awesome. To start with, he is almost offhandedly, absurdly clever in this film. The climax features a mash up of North by Northwest and Through A Glass Darkly that seems so effortless and so much Tarr’s own that I didn’t even notice the allusions (if that’s what they were) the first time I saw it. And it culminates in this weirdly funny moment that is a lot like a Jarmusch movie, though the time lines suggest this is coincidence, rather than allusion. Regardless of how he got there, being able to manage a barely noticeable fusion of Jarmusch, Bergman and Hitchcock on their level of quality is… good. Maybe that is also a testimony to a purely great film: that you don’t sit there thinking “oh yes, an allusion to whateverthefuck” and “this is clearly a symbol for fuck” because you are directly engaged by what is happening onscreen.

Still, the alignments in the story that are suggested by the title are there. We open with our protagonist, an educated, rural paper boy–kind of an Ichabod Crane figure–explaining the phenomenon of total eclipse to a bunch of drunk rubes, funnily using them as the Nerf balls of various size in his barroom science fair diorama. Later, a traveling freak show comes to town with a whale (the sun) a midget seen only in silhouette (the moon) and the same kind of mass hysteria once caused by a total eclipse is unleashed. There’s probably some parallel to Hungarian politics as well–a satellite state separated from it’s primary and set into temporary chaos. We can skip pretending to give a shit about Hungarian politics, however. I won’t even pretend to fully grasp the film and will forgo wild theories about how the shot captured above pictures a sun in the center of a solar system, then moves to a shot of a whale’s dead eye, the dead eye of the god, in similar composition, then to the eye of man and like… whoa, dude.

It’s not that I suddenly thought it was good when I noticed these intricacies. But I’m a believer in the notion that these kinds of symmetries and layers of meaning work most importantly at a visceral level, like the composition of a painting or… harmonies. On first viewing, I found the The Prince (the circus midget) and his nihilistic rhetoric captivating on their own. And maybe it’s serendipitous if rural Hungary really is that much of a miserable shithole where people lead such meager, miserable lives, but the sparseness of Tarr’s films makes them so captivating to the outside viewer: those of us who possess the easy and luxurious lives that allow us to watch such films at all. When the story is centered around a car, in a Tarr film, there is exactly one car. And in this case, old fashioned can openers and coal burning heaters can dominate scenes in a way that is oddly cozy if you are the sort of person who wishes that matches still served some practical purpose. Whatever cleverness is afoot, his filmmaking is just beautiful in such cases. Like Goddard, Tarantino or Park, at some point you can toss all ideological objections to the side and point to the screen. If it were a commercial for adult diapers, wouldn’t there still be something great up there? Maybe some secondary award should be handed out to the intelligentsia. You might remember some time when there was this buzz about a guy making long ass movies that you couldn’t see and if you tried to download them on limewire, it would take a week of stopping up your connection before failing. It was natural to assume that the artsie fartsies were just being exclusionary assholes, and that may well have been their intention, but they were still right.

“Romcom” that almost makes up for the proliferation of the word “romcom:” Intolerable Cruelty

When I started making this list, I thought of a bunch of filmmakers whom I felt must be included. Any list without Mike Leigh would just be stupid, for example. But it quickly became evident that going this route would lead to a paint by numbers list and I might as well run off a bunch of Oscar winners. However, if there was any doubt as to who the best filmmakers of the recent past are, it seems like a best of decade list, from any perspective, that excluded the Coens would be silly, doesn’t it? Whether you were trying to be “Ain’t it Cool” mainstream, or “Captain Jonathan Rosenfinkle, lord of the shit nobody has seen yet” it would seem like you were trying to meet some sort of agenda if you didn’t touch upon the Coens. And, at risk of falling into the latter category, this doesn’t have much to do with No Country. I mean, yay for Hollywood/Oscar for randomly pulling their heads out of their shit pipes before the Coens were 30 years past their primes, but if you think that No Country is the best Coen film, you are a moron and I will fight you. Any time. Anywhere. Marquess of Queensberry rules. It was basically just a very, very well made Terminator or Halloween movie. So, for me, this boils down to two films that were Lebowski level works that did not receive the ultimate Lebowski recognition. Like Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Intolerable Cruelty were not massive hits with critics or customers upon initial release, perhaps because of their generic titles which I still sometimes struggle to remember. But unlike Lebowski, neither was ultimately recognized as a masterpiece. The Man Who Wasn’t There was perhaps the best noir of the decade, boiling catastrophe down to decisions that seemed sensible, given the time and place. But Intolerable Cruelty doubled down on that. Not only did it run with a hand off from bygone genius (The Coens’ most direct crib from Preston Sturges), it took what has become the most poisonous of genres, the “romcom” and made something great. Really, I should say they “remade” something great. Carey Grant, Sturges and many others were unqualified geniuses working in the genre. It’s only because the marketing geniuses have zeroed in on their target demographic– vacuous women and the hand bags passing as men who they drag along to the theater– that artistry has been squeezed out to make way for fantasies about illiterates with bejeweled dog food bowls outsmarting everyone at Harvard. Whether it is a disgrace or a triumph that only the Coens could make a film deserving of a place among the classics of the genre, it is a reality.

As always with the Coens (and Sturges) the dialogue and the character actors in this film near perfection. And the George Clooney= Carey Grant case has its best evidence here. Catherine Zeta Jones is the goddess of her own universe, like Brigham Young. Each is physically flawless, with rapid fire wit and refinement that couldn’t actually exist. The combination is so tantalizing that we are rendered a bunch of polymorphously perverse cups of Jello. Charles Bronson would pay to jerk off Clooney and Richard Simmons would suck on CZJ’s no fly zone until she begged for mercy. Neither can be matched, outwitted, more desired by another, or more justifiably conceited.  It’s Mayweather vs. Pacquio, but less erotic. This film took some heat for being “light” or mainstream, but the signature Coen contempt for us all is plainly there. Humanity is a busload of idiots, bouncing along in happy idiocy towards a cliff. The smartest of us are able to outwit the rest and land seats in the front of the bus. And these two, our total superiors, divinity made flesh, get to ride on special thrones strapped to the top of the bus.

Best movie that is pretty cliche, which ironically means I can’t think up some dumb ass category for it: Man on a Train

I liked Man On A Train so much the first time I saw it that I awarded it a prized slot on my year end top 2 list. I watched it again for this list and up until about a half an hour in, I still couldn’t remember why I thought it was so great. Though very well-crafted, this is a story of conflicting archetypes, in the vein of As Good As It Gets, or “Perfect Strangers.” Not that there is anything wrong with “Perfect Strangers.” But about five minutes into this one, you feel like you’ve already seen the whole movie. Rough criminal rolls into town, circumstances compel him to spend time with a fruity teacher and they connect. Even though they seem like total opposites! There are moments that are arguably too contrived, and the actors play their roles almost too well, especially given that each looks like a puppet designed for the part. The film comes on pretty strong, but I think it’s supposed to because each man represents a pole that very few actually reach, but most of us are pulled by. Milan is a bank robber, the ultimate gambler. A man who simply takes what he wants, but who is nearly certain to wind up empty handed. Monsieur Manesquier is a small town teacher with inherited money who lives in total security, but is nonetheless easily startled and intimidated. Each realizes he might be very near the end of life, and can look to the other as the path not taken, and each is a signpost for almost every fork in the road that you have faced, assuming you are part of our 103.7% male readership. At the same time, it’s clear that the decisions these characters make and have made are products of their nature. Your path in life isn’t determined by a spin of the wheel that could land on “join MS-13″ just as easily as “go to Vassar.” Other people sense your nature too and most, from the first girl you pursue to a bakery clerk you have never met, will have you pegged right away and begin boxing you in. Any program designed to transform you into an A+ student, a great negotiator, or a pick-up artist will either fail or have you constantly in a ridiculous costume. So while these men fancy walking in each others shoes a bit and face some final regrets, it’s clear enough that they could not have traded places. The two men wind up considering, and in large part regretting, who they fundamentally are, and that hits with a lot of force. Whether it’s never bringing down that bully, or breaking an honest heart to chase a succubus, we want to say “if only…” differentiating our decisions from ourselves when nothing could be more intrinsic to us. When we pretend to regret decisions, we are only fooling ourselves because we really regret who we are. A sassy waitress and an AIDS patient are not going to swoop into your life and coax forth the better person who has always been somewhere inside. We follow the same patterns till death and either continue self-delusion about “could-have-beens” that could not have been, or wish we could have been someone else entirely, which really amounts to “us” not existing at all. There’s also a flipside to this story: that accepting your nature and making the best of it can make a life well worth living, which is nothing to sneeze at. These guys don’t wish they’d never been born, they just wish they could have been more. Another bit of optimism comes from the fact that taking a small step outside of our nature can be a exhilarating joy, like a career criminal trying on house slippers. Besides, as we come to appreciate each character, including their strengths and weaknesses, it’s clear life would be as unbearable as a Helen Hunt movie if we were all the same, which is what makes our flaws and limitations so critical. Perhaps people who don’t hate themselves would even find the Man On A Train uplifting. For me the greatest solaces offered by the film are the moments when the adventurer and the petit pedant share simple pleasures, like a good meal with some cognac. Their sporadic connections are among these pleasures and the even the extreme paths of each man fortunately cover some common ground. These points of commonality don’t involve revelations or conversions and are more comforting for their authenticity and rarity.

Best recompense for those painfully unfunny “Fire Marshall Bill” sketches: Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

You know that, at the time, there was someone screaming “Homer ain’t shit! Derestrepidies is where it’s at!” And maybe he was right, but we’ll never know because Derestrepedies has long ago been erased. While it’s not precisely the same scenario, I thought about that kind of mechanism while re-watching Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine. Popular and critical wisdom both have it that Tom Hanks is the comedian who made the successful transition into dramatic roles, even though all of his dramatic roles have been in fucking stupid shit like The Da Vinci Code and Forrest Gump. Yet Carey, a comedic genius who can amuse with no more than a frantic flailing of the limbs, after initially Hanksing one in The Majestic, has played the dramatic lead in two excellent and arguably great films: this one and The Truman Show. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not those films work their way past Forrest Gump before I die, though maybe six months isn’t a fair time table. On a related note, I found myself thinking of this as the “Charlie Kaufman” slot, which embarrassed me and made me realize that I’m not really any different from the people who believe Hanks is the comedian who made the switch. Not that Kaufman isn’t great, but the fact that I think of him as the one screenwriter who must be accounted for almost certainly means that I am just an ignoramus and you should only read me with the faint hope of a good joke. Unless he is the greatest man of our time, it is certainly true that Kaufman is unique in his recognition, rather than his ability. I mean, fuck, film reviewers from Ruthless on up to the top of the nerdisphere consistently give credit for cinematography to the director, even thought there’s a guy specifically called the cinematographer. And sure enough, I couldn’t tell you who wrote most of the other films on this list, let alone who shot them.

Nonetheless, I give Kaufman much of the credit for how this film perfectly represents all of the self loathing and self-doubt with which all psychologically healthy people are consumed. Maybe this is the perfect male/female story. The only thing you despise more than yourself is her. You can’t live with you, with her or without her. Carey is the downtrodden rationalist, joyless and covetous, then satiated and joyless. Winslet, doing some of the best actressing of the decade, is irrational, desirable, a butterfly who seems impossible to capture but who could be a source of warmth in Carrey’s otherwise cold existence. She sees a man she can fix, but in a good way. She can help him to blossom, to have a life with some happiness and her as his muse. Then, once he is enticed and she is captured, and they are trapped together in his jar and both begin to suffocate. Until they realize once again how much they once wanted each other and how ordinary they’d be without each other. At which point, they re-embrace, probably making each other newly miserable, hopefully with a new (of course, temporary) understanding as to why that misery is preferable to the alternative misery of loneliness. Maybe the strength of this film, and the solution to this big problem, is the focus on memory and looking back, rather than forward. In the immediate pain of separation, the deletion of memories seems to be the cure because it erases the moments of mutual cruelty, regret and suffering. But in reality, it is those memories and idealizations that are our reward for enduring the conflict of the mating ritual. Remember how fun she was? Remember that time you bought live lobsters and they got loose because you were both too squeamish to cook them? Remember that fantastic fuck? Could we bring it all back with someone new? Probably not. “Why don’t we talk anymore?” Because the memories are the sweetest bit and won’t be equaled, especially because we don’t really recognize the best moments of a relationship ’till after the fact. Traveling back into those memories and fighting to keep them might be the best love fantasy put on film. Maybe Kaufman really is that good. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Best movie that, regardless of age or liberalism, would be a nightmare to watch with your mom: Visitor Q

Visitor Q can be erotic, like when a man pays his hot, teenage daughter to fuck on video; hilarious, when she makes fun of his premature ejaculation (“early bird!”) or depraved and revolting, as in depicting a middle aged woman with an active libido. I listed some of the more eye catching moments of the film in my original review, but the highlight is arguably when the father of this family fucks a corpse and his dick gets stuck due to the onset of rigor mortis, mid-boink. The punch line is that his wife helps free him with a shot of heroin and the corpse assists by expelling… some lubrication. Now there’s a whole discussion to be had about the “shock” cinema that peaked in this decade ranging from Irreversible and Antichrist, to all but one of Ki Duk Kim’s 800 films. My advice is to forget any overview and just enjoy the good ones and toss out the bad. That’s my advice in general. I mean some films might be categorized as ’00s “shock cinema” and some other films begin with the letter “G,” while others were released in October. Who gives a shit? Try to find the good ones, try to avoid the bad ones. Miike is a good man to support this view because he is generally entertaining and one of the funniest filmmakers working. He just happens to deal in mass murder, perversion and making you want to throw up. A lot of his stuff is thought provoking. My opening to this review wasn’t just hilarious. You could make the case that he is toying with the viewer’s sexuality. On the one hand he’s pushing the envelope on what you will admit to being turned on by. On the other, he’s tearing apart eroticism to reveal the oozing sacks of shit underneath it all. You’ll find something to think about with most of his movies if you try hard enough, but that is really just a fringe benefit. The real pleasure is in Miike’s pleasure at tearing everything apart. Not to replace it with true communism, or to dethrone the patriarchy, but just for fun. Everyone is an idiot. Everything is bullshit. Film is the ideal medium to act out these sophomoric realizations as an adult. Very often, Miike starts with a conventional premise and then grafts on developments that seem dreamed up by a teenage metalhead who isn’t getting laid, and uses these “twists” to destroy everything. To these round eyes, Visitor Q is, at least partially an “ALF” style sitcom. Instead of a wise-cracking plush alien, the novel figure who brings a fresh perspective to the family is a fucking maniac. The dysfunctional family is restored with the sudden injection of an outsider: a Japanese guy with an afro and a funny shirt who imparts healing wisdom– in this case, smashing family members in the face with rocks and milking the mother to orgasm. They kill, rape and maim everyone in their path and cohere into a death squad. Sha-na-na-na.

Put a gun to my head and force me to put one movie into a time capsule on death row on a desert island, my number one film of the 00′s: You Can Count On Me

I am a sucker for a lot of things, as is evidenced by this list. The relentless, cheap jokes in OSS 117 and Tarantino’s dazzling array of gimmicks and cleverness are only two examples. But nothing is more impressive (and, not coincidentally, list-making wise, more difficult to write about) as a simple story without a grand point, executed to perfection. It’s very difficult to say why The 400 Blows is better than Citizen Kane, or any other film ever made. It’s very difficult to say why You Can Count On Me is better than the 500 similar movies that came out over the decade, and all of the dissimilar ones too. The best insight I’ve heard comes from Kenneth Lonergan himself on the DVD commentary track. Remember when people watched movies on DVDs? Those were the days. I think he was talking about the inclusion of the first scenes, when Terry and Sammy, as children, learn about their parents’ deaths, when he says the scene was there to show that they “are just kids who grew up,” like all of us.

Sammy and Terry are so sympathetic, not in the cheese-bomb way of being wholesome and “characters you can root for”, but because of they’ve hung on to that piece of youthful authenticity. Maybe people who really and truly become adults have become substantive fabrications, day-to-day versions of the carefully patched together Rose Parade floats wheeled out for display on “Meet The Press,” always trying to make you feel serious and comprehending. Or, if we’re being a little too honest, we would compare these real adults to almost every character in almost every film, even some of the best ones, like Punisher: Warzone. For anyone who is “real”, or who has the bad habit of integrity, and who does not deny their past, the magical transformation never quite happens. Sammy becomes a church going professional to provide for her son. Terry is a drifter who runs into problems. They’ve been forced to adapt to the circumstances of adulthood, more than become masters of their domains. But they cut through each other’s bullshit as siblings can, with a simple “I remember when you…” Yes, that delinquent buffoon, that wallflower who stammered around boys or girls… whoever you used to be. That is still you. But hopefully you’ve learned to adjust and maneuver, and to balance presenting highly modified versions of yourself when the situation requires, which happens so often for Sammy, and keeping it real, like Terry does a bit too often. As Sammy’s fatherless son looks up, we see the need to present one’s self as something to be looked up to if there are children in our life. Maybe that doesn’t mean being 100% honest. There is a place for pretending to be a real adult, even when you are just a kid who grew older. But sheltering phonies are not ideal role models either, and Terry’s harsh and clumsy lessons do some good, along with the harm. Maybe there’s a big, “conservative” theme here about how kids need role models and teachers, not buddies or even some radical fascist contention that boys look up to men. If so, conservatives are right on this one. But obviously this is not a film meant for a sub-nation of dead eyed Palin or Oprah supporters who pretend to work themselves into a panic over “how to talk to their kids” about realities such as 9/11 and Janet Jackson’s partially exposed breast. And if you ever think that Amy Taubin, perhaps the worst critic of the decade, should ever be taken seriously on any subject, you need only look at her authentically moronic review of this masterpiece to correct such misconceptions.

Everything comes back to earth in perhaps my favorite scene of the decade when Terry whips out a joint and shares it with Sammy, for a guilty indulgence. This is everything right with the being human, even after adulthood has tried to ruin it. It is a meeting point between abusive irresponsibility and sweet relief from relentless responsibility. Sammy might be a roughly conservative figure but she isn’t a soulless ghoul in the Dr. Laura vein. It’s an almost forgotten, little joy brought back to life. “Remember when I…” And there is a real family values message of the film, one of intimacy and connection, not repression and conformity. It made me think of little transgressions with my rural cousins, even though we’ve now grown up and I voted for Kang and they probably voted for Kodos. It’s about a shared connection to the freedom of youth. Even with parents out of the picture, we still sneak indulgences that would make them disapprovingly shake their heads. For Sammy, smoking a d00b with her brother on the porch is only one of a few such moments left coming to her. That is what makes it so sweet. And the older you are, the more that scene will hit you because you realize the scarcity of those moments. “How many more of these will I have? Three or four? Maybe this will be the last one.” Or, in Terry’s case, “will I ever get my life together to the point where smoking a joint feels like meeting The President?”

Terry sticks the path of nonconformity and when Sammy worries about what will happen to him, he answers, probably accurately, “nothing too bad.” But probably nothing too good either. Trust me on the latter point. But, as with Man on The Train, the sweet spot is that commonality. Terry comes over to Sammy’s side and falls in love with her son. He won’t be a proper father figure, but he is already looking forward to pinch hitting again. Sammy blissfully shares Terry’s joint. Love, connection and authenticity exist together. For a brief moment, I do not hope that a meteor hits the earth tomorrow.

Arguably the Best Casey Affleck movie: Gerry

I have a tendency to compare everything to Kobe Bryant, but Gus Van Sant is like Kobe Bryant. Not only in his penchant for sodomy, but in that I feel like he’s gone out of his way to build a resume that demonstrates how great he is and the media response has kind of been like, “look, we won’t have our hand forced, and maybe this bid for greatness is too contrived, so we are going to give you slightly less recognition than you deserve.” Kobe scored 81 points in a game, he won multiple championships with two completely different teams, he took over games, he tried to step back and facilitate teammates, he wanted to meet every criteria for greatness. Yet he he has one MVP, just like Dirk Nowitzki. While I certainly don’t know his motivations, I think Van Sant’s body of work is similar. He made an excellent, feel good, box office success with Good Will Hunting. He made an artsy, true crime story with To Die For. He’s experimented with his Psycho remake, which I intend to watch and judge fairly one day, and he caps things off with his “Death trilogy” headed by Gerry, which stylistically feels like the film Von Trier was trying to make during those Dogma years because the time flies by as we watch two, simply filmed guys pretty much just walk around.

I’m certainly not alone in that the open road fascinates me, as do the vast expanses of still-unsettled territory in the American West. So I can only imagine that to foreign viewers, who all live in countries the size of New Hampshire, these themes are even more intriguing. If you’ve driven across the American expanse (next gas, 38 miles), you’ve imagined being lost in it. “My God, if my car broke down and I walked 800 feet in the wrong direction, nobody would ever hear from me again.” As with many great films, you wonder how nobody successfully acted on this scenario before. Van Sant captures the beauty of the dessert, or maybe these are plains or prairies. But that sparse, fruitless wilderness that still occupies so much space, and bears a harsh unfriendliness to modern humans, even those who know enough to build a fire. Consequently, the film is goddamned terrifying from about the ten minute mark on. Yeah, maybe it seems obvious that we mortals are confronted with physical realities that will extinguish our selves, and that there’s no way around it. Like, we are all trapped in the desert, man. We are all looking for water. We all exist in a world full of beauty that cannot sustain our consciousness for more than the blink of an eye. We are all putting off the inevitable with half baked theories and false hopes. As the process progresses, we only become crazier and more wrong. It seems blunt and obvious, but excellence often does, like Kobe drilling a three pointer in someone’s eye at the end of the game. But if it’s so simple, why is nobody else is doing it?

“Where are you going?”

“I dunno. Wanna help?”

Best evidence that French film will continue to be vital until the country is eventually taken over by Muslims: A Christmas Tale

When I made a section for our reviews of Christmas movies, Alex and I had a little “great minds think alike” moment when he offered to write a review of A Christmas Tale for the section. I’d been thinking of doing a review as well, but the movie was simply too sophisticated for me to tackle without repeat viewings, so I was happy to hand it off to him. Eventually he wrote me back to say that he was sorry, but the film was just too complex for him to shoot from the hip and it required several viewings. Now, that is not to say that the film is some impressionistic maze of symbolism. In fact, I would contrast it to Desplechin’s Kings and Queen by saying that, while Kings and Queen is just slightly too affected, A Christmas Tale is two tons of pure substance.

Speaking of national cinemas, this is an example of the virtues of doing it how you do it. Visual geniuses like Godard are anomalous and the next one might pop up in Hungary or Thailand or even The United States. So you can’t bank on that. But there is some sweet spot about Talking Frogs that can be hit again and again. The beauty of the language is one factor. Also, speakers of Romance languages tend to prattle on not only endlessly, but very directly compared to their Germanglo counterparts. As a person of Northern European heritage and tradition, even after years of exposure to less subdued cultures, I was still shocked by some of the directness in this “family” film. “Well, I’ve had similar feelings, but I thought you were supposed to hold them in for twenty years, then blurt them out when everyone was drunk, and then use the drunkeness as an excuse for pretending nothing ever happened, even though you know they know and they know that, so mission accomplished!… ?”

Have I said a word about the film itself yet? Truthfully, there is not that much to say, other than that it is masterful. Director, writers and cast execute a convoluted family drama flawlessly. By the 2:06 mark you should be hooked. It is “Dallas” with the arts and madness and these graphic titles separating each segment which are simple but extraordinaire. It is overseeing the perfection of such details that makes the greats. What else is there to add? There is a labyrinth of familial relation, founded upon a child conceived only to unsuccessfully provide a bone marrow transfer to another child. There is a black sheep deemed mad. Then there is a real black sheep, left stranded and broke. There are May/December romances headed into January. The virtuosity of the film lies not with its symbolism or allusion, but with it’s careful, tight packing of story and character. More critically, complex familial stories are drawn out by several expert hands and, though nobody will agree, I found the multi-technique and multi-perspective approach approach of the film to be Tarantinoesque. I grimaced a bit at the casual privileging of artistic and intellectual figures, particularly in France, which is the bastion of phony philosophy. But if I can look the other way for Woody and his belief in Freud, I can look the other way here. I’m regretting my failure to find a place for Mike Leigh on the list more than ever, but Desplechin is a monstrous talent as well. Even if he really thinks drawing sketches of Greek myths makes you better than everyone else.

Best cinematic equivalent to a Fifteen song, including age-inappropriate sexual implications with somewhat plausible deniability: Pan’s Labyrinth

I feel like the only one who “got” this movie, which basically means I had a heavily subjective and 100% correct interpretation of it.  I strongly object to those critics who went out of their way to deem this powerful, old school fairy tale as being too strong for kids. Maybe it’s not in step with current pablum, simplified to the demands of dim mothers who invest the entirety of their own value in the quality of the babies they made and who therefore insist upon boilerplate meant to build entitlement irrespective of virtue, but hey, it teaches Spanish, just like Dora! And it’s not like anybody blows a fucking horse in the movie. It is intense, it can be scary and it is powerful for all of the right reasons. But is there anything in this film more “inappropriate” than the death of Bambi’s mother? Only if you regard children as mylar Care Bear balloons. The protagonist is a little girl who finds herself swept, along with her mother, into the home of a literally fascist patriarch. He demands acquiescence and she denies it. The Spanish Anarchists, who are obviously doomed to fail even if you don’t know history, put up a fight against her step dad, a right wing goon captain. Our hero is a little girl who buys the fairy tales, favors picture books to hard truths and is rewarded by being stabbed to death by a sadistic monster.

It’s one of the most honest films about being on the left, or to be more neutral, on the side of principle and social justice instead of whoever has the most power. The film is Spanish, but maybe it rings most true for the American in Dick’s big decade of rape. We lost every time (and will continue to). The sadists and the cash money perverts win every time. What is the value of being in the right, instead of grabbing for the shiny things during your short life? Well, the moral of this story is that life is all about your story, or in extreme cases, fairy tale. Ofelia, obsessed with her stories, perhaps well past the point of madness, demands that her own life measures up them.

Suppose they do win in the end, as they almost invariably do. 100 years from now, you’ll be dead either way. Regardless of whether it is ever retold, what will your story be? Did you capitulate and cower for a modest remuneration while ignoring the fact that others suffered? Or did you bear down and fight and go out like a fading champion? Maybe the oddest thing of all given that this is a male filmmaker and I am me and I am writing for Ruthless is that I find this to be the rare feminist film that is actually inspirational, rather than condescending or only saved from being condescending because the source itself is so stupid that it lacks the capacity to condescend. No blithering idiotically about how fashion is high art and how half wits who discuss nothing but clothes, babies and gagging on dick represent a mere difference in tone from those of us who can name a Supreme Court justice. But we have a heroine hemmed in by ageism, sexism and rightism who refuses to capitulate. Accuse her of wanton subjectivity, but, again she listens to her heart, writes her own story and destroys her chosen target, not by overpowering him, but by resisting his will until it snaps, and this fits best with a female character, whereas when I say “toady,” “cronies” or “goon,” you first imagine men.

Best political thriller: The President’s Last Bang

Yep, another spot for South Korea. And it could easily have been a couple more. Call me a trendy fuck, but I agree with the herd that the Koreans kicked ass this decade. I wonder how these little clusters of artistic achievement happen. There’s an economic phenomenon called agglomeration. It basically means that as the an industry thrives in an area, each of the component parts of that industry feed off and facilitate each other until one day, there’s no porn like the porn from the San Fernando Valley, though I think my textbook focused on the manufacture of small airplanes in Wichita, rather than T.T. Boy plugging Jill Kelly, as was the fashion at the time. With something as subjective as filmmaking, maybe you also need a vanguard of obvious brilliance, in the case of South Korea, that would be Park. Perhaps a champion from the mainstream, like Tarrantino. Then the more subtle talents are granted a world stage and everyone enjoys the cultural nuances that make a national cinema. Eventually, every one is like, “I get it, Koreans are insane and exist on a switch that moves back and forth from from utter repression to explosive catharsis. I wonder what Pakistanis are like.” Who knows? It’s certainly interesting how these little bubbles in places like Hong Kong, Romania, South Korea and even France ebb, flow and maybe burst. Malcolm Gladwell should write a half-assed book about it that I won’t read but will enjoy getting the gist of from an NPR interview. I can tell you a couple of things for sure, though. Many, probably, most of the SK films that have been celebrated in the West deserve the acclaim they received and probably more. Whatever your tastes might be, there were at least a few SK films this decade that would be just as much sure fire home runs to you as a hanging Chan-Ho Park pitch is to any competent major league hitter. The agglomeration was swinging and you’ll find many well constructed, acted and shot movies in many genres. However, investigating some of the domestic box office hits that didn’t quite make it to the West reveals that the dumb and bad in Korean film still holds a “Sabado Gigante”/”The King Of Queens” relationship to the dumb American film. I’d rest my case on My Boss, My Hero, which is a total turd that has seventeen sequels over the course of four years.

So I think this one is a case of a film that is made and seen because of the buzz around the national cinema. Not that director, Im Sang Soo isn’t a swinging dick. Not that the movie isn’t gorgeously shot and brilliantly executed, which is a big part of why it made the list. But it’s a movie about historical events that you are, at best, vaguely aware of and you sort of have to wiki it to really know what is going on. It is about how, in 1979, the dictator-ish president of South Korea, Park Chung-hee is assassinated by a small cell within his security team, led by his friend, who is director of the KIA. The film is often touted as a “black comedy,” which is an angle I think critics generally overplay because it makes it seem like they are getting something that you are not. But, while sardonic in tone, this is much more a historical, political thriller for me than a comedy. It’s fascinating on a few levels. South Korea wasn’t exactly a banana republic at the time, (largely thanks to this President’s efforts) and it was a major cold war front, so it’s pretty wild, just as an event unto itself, to watch this little group decide to assassinate the president and then, just do it. Though the motivations have been brewing, the decision and action are almost spontaneous (the best approach, if you think about it). The crime is meticulously recreated, from every angle. We get a look inside of the heads of everyone involved. The secondaries who are surprised by the assassination order, trying to man up and carry it out. The imported floozies who suddenly find themselves in the middle of a blood bath and spend hours hiding, wondering what the fuck is going on and if they are about to be killed. The high officials of the government who must react to this shock and decide how to handle it on the fly. Based on my own extensive research, The President was roughly a Thatcher/Reagan figure, using right wing measures with the ostensible aim of national prosperity, while himself, living la vida Kennedy. This makes it even more interesting that the KIA would play a role in bumping him off. Usually, it’s the guy who wants to nationalize the copper mines who gets snuffed by the military/intelligence community, with a bit of outside encouragement. And, indeed this was a domestically driven move. Was it a blow for South Korean Democracy? Was it something more personal, in that the President’s overindulgence in women and booze, coupled with his repression of dissent simply meant that he, as an individual, was becoming more king-like and less fit to govern, regardless of his place on the political spectrum? Well, that implication led to a successful defamation suit against the producers, to the tune of $100 million. Given that 95% of the people reading this haven’t seen the film, I’d sell it this way- a top shelf director is telling you the story of one of the great crimes of the century that you probably don’t know much about. Imagine a more politically laden Zodiac, with little to no foreknowledge of the the case and, yeah, a bit more humor. Also, it starts a bit slowly. Give it fifteen minutes.

Five Parting Shots:

Since I posted the first half of my top twenty, I’ve seen several other groups and critics copy my idea of a best of decade list. I’ve noticed that these shoddy imitations often feature films that, though they may have some outstanding qualities, do not belong on any such list. If you must copy me, at least wait until I release the correct answers and copy those. Don’t embarrass yourself by claiming that any random film that was halfway OK is one of the decades best.

Can I make another point? Yes, I can. Most of you are aware of this boneheaded cliche that persists among ignorant, limited, female writers who manage to grind out a living by labeling themselves as feminists. “Why are actresses awarded for playing either whores or hurderrdurrdurrmmmmm?” “Whore,” is the chosen word of the “feminist/scholar,” mind you. So, as someone often labeled a misogynist, I would like to point out that at least four of these latest ten films alone would not have even sniffed the list without great, strongly female characters and performances. And these characters were neither prostitutes, nor women who won the gold medal in men’s heavyweight boxing. Maybe the reason that there were so many more actresses who could carry box office in years past, is that they had great roles as women. No, no, surely the path forward is to cast Rebecca Lobo as the next Batman.

The top 3 “meh”s people are trying to pass off as the best films of the decade.

Waking Life:

Why is it interesting to watch famous actors ramble on about new age bullshit and “I’ve never actually read a work of philosophy” philosophy? Linklater’s Slacker was good because we knew that the ramblings came from a collection of fools, weirdos and radicals. It was fun. Waking Life is supposed to be good because it used rotoscope animation. Seriously, I read several reviews trying to decipher the praise for the film at the time, and it came down to “lucid dreaming, trippy mayne!” and “Animationz!” The films’ reputation has grown like a mushroom in shitty dark and now it’s bandied about as one of the best of the decade. If that’s the criterion we’re going with, I think it’s only fair to agree that one of the best films of the decade is Charles Schwab Commercials. It’s been proven in study after study that top flight financial prognosticators can’t beat the dart board. Why pay for anything more than basic advice on distributing risk? The best case scenario is that you are being duped into paying for pure guesswork. The worst case is that you’ll be swindled by a Madoff. This seems more useful to me than Ethan Hawke wondering what it would be like to be a goldfish. The Schwab commercials are also in rotoscope.

Almost Famous:

Would that it were so!

May God damn the soul Cameron Crowe, the A+ student of the film world, to the unrelenting suffering of hell. Yes, he’s really good at producing uninspired, boring tripe that tells middle aged, boring people what they like to hear. I’m sure that, as an actual student, he could churn out a great paper that regurgitated the teacher’s views on Hamlet’s sanity and he’s been churning out the same shit ever since, receiving accolades for products that feel like they should ultimately be pinned to his mom’s ‘fridge. Special thanks for inflicting a decade of Kate Hudson on us, which was justified largely with her portrayal of a historically bullshit character: a cum dumpster who is really an angel… but then she is not quite an angel. How real and bittersweet! You’ve taken a character who, in real life, would have a reservoir tip on top of her head, tried to sell us on the idea that she’s actually interesting and virtuous, but then taken a “realist” turn in revealing that she’s a little bit tainted after all. I’m going to puke. On you. After ingesting poison. Hopefully, there will still be enough poison in my system to kill me.

Silent Light:

This one really pains me, because Silent Light has some of the most gorgeous scenes of the decade. I really hate hyperbole about this shit, because when I tell you that the opening ten minutes are among the most astonishing pieces of film I’ve ever seen, it sounds like I’m bullshitting. But I speak the troof. Every scene looks like a dream made of candy bars. I don’t know how or why one movie looks so great compared to the others, but let me redress one of the wrongs I attributed to reviewers, including myself, earlier in this piece. The cinematographer, whatever his name is, not the director, Carlos Reygadas, is the genius here. This film is so gorgeous that it almost deserves the top 10 spots it’s getting. But the reasons it does not deserve this acclaim are equally clear. Too much is contrived. I’d kind of like to peer into the world of Mennonites for real, but I’m not so interested in them as a trump card in the game of “look at the minorities I can tolerate!”As pretty as it was to look at, I winced at the contrived, overlong kiss between the the simple, blue-eyed farmer who looked kind of like the Pillsbury Doughman and his aquiline mistress. At some point, maybe eleven or twelve minutes into the forced kiss, The Saw Nose vs. The Soft Eyes resembled a Godzilla movie. Also, if you are a casual film enthusiast you should always be on the lookout for the “anything that is kind of like a Tarkovsky film is genius!” fad. Don’t be duped. While I’d encourage everyone to see this film, and the other two in this category are barely worth seeing at all, I feel like somebody had to say something.

1 very strangely not given it’s due: ABC Africa

ABC Africa is great. I honestly value the cinematic pseudo-intelligentsia. It’s easy enough to blast them for their stupid conformity and their attempts at academic legitimacy through embracing the exclusionary. But on the other hand, if everything were left up to the top newspapers, we would probably not know who Kiarostami is and Sea Biscuit would be on this list. One thing I like and agree with the pretend-geniuses of this decade about is their eagerness to privilege films that give us a look into unknown corners of the world, like Jai’s rural China. This pseudo tourism is the most underrated aspect of seeing foreign films. It is what ABC Africa pushes, and I am buying.

So now that too many know the name, Kiarostami’s film is dismissed as a mere home movie. It is not that, but let’s pretend it is- what is wrong with one of the world’s greatest filmmakers creating a visual travelogue? Are you curious about the rest of the world? Do you wonder what the rest of the world thinks about the rest of the world? If you answer “yes,” this film can only be regarded as a treasure. A man from an alien culture, who happens to be a great filmmaker, tools into a far less fortunate culture that is alien to him and us and he shoots the results. He plays with the of filming people, who play with being filmed. We get the feeling of a vicarious visit, and of the world through another person’s eyes. Not interested? Here, I have a ball. Perhaps you’d like to bounce it. I found it more intriguing than the “Paris” and “Tokyo” compilations and hope that those types of talents move instead, to emulate ABC Africa. I’d jump at the chance to see Breillait’s “home movies” of Saudi Arabia. I want to see my city of Los Angeles through the “home movies” of Wong Kar Wai. And the phrase “Soderbergh’s ‘home movies’ of Shanghai” makes me drool. Charitable motivations appreciated, but not required.

Number 21: Bad Santa

I’m just going to have to fall into critical cliche here. One reason Bad Santa is so good is its realism, and it’s willingness to look at the realities that the characters face. It would be easy enough to make a film about a drunkard Santa who throws up on kids and is totally out of control! In fact, that might even be a pretty fun movie. But Bad Santa and Billy Bob manage to hang on to that aspect, and balance it with the realities of depressive alcoholism. Having Billy Bob beat the shit out of a band of bullies in their early teens was one of the most fun and overdue scenes of the decade. And if he’d he’d fucked them up proper to the tune of missing teeth and broken noses, the film would have cracked the top 20 easily. That’s fun, but the movie only really clicks if you click with Billy Bob fantasizing about being dead. The writing is accurate enough, that I’d imagine whoever is responsible is dead by now. “You’re an emotional fucking cripple. Your soul is dog shit. Every single fucking thing about you is ugly.” I’m pretty sure you can only write something like that with yourself in mind. Maybe an exaggerated version of yourself, wallowing in pessimism. But that only makes it better.

‘

10: COBRA

Cobra skewers and roasts Night Slasher

At number 10, the final death in Cobra is like the Tim Duncan to the Jordans, Kobes, and Lebrons of the other elite 80s Action deaths- perhaps it’s not the most flashy or memorable scene, but when you sit down and look at the end product, everything you could ask for is there-

1) Set in a factory that somehow uses giant hooks to manufacture large quantities of sparks and molten steel. Though obviously abandoned, the factory is humming along at full capacity, which includes like 20 random small fires. I’m not sure about the business model of the facility, but the scene opens with a hook rolling ominously behind the villain in a foreshadowing that can only be called artful.

2) Excellent foreplay. The back and forth between Cobra and Night Slasher over who will penetrate whom with what and their discourse on the failings of the liberal criminal justice system is a fine prelude, as educational as it is erotic. Did you know that it’s illegal for a cop to shoot a man who is threatening to kill him while armed with a sawed-off in one hand and a giant knife that is studded with smaller knives in the other hand? Night Slasher calls Cobra a pig at least four dozen times before finally demanding “take me in. Pig.” Out come the chains–not that there’s anything gay about leather-clad men calling each other “pig” during chain play.

3) Inept women. The bad chick briefly comes to the aid of Night Slasher, postponing his death for two minutes by jumping on Stallone’s back as Sly is about to squeeze the trigger, which has helpfully been labeled “fire.” She is promptly blasted. Stallone’s chick is of even less help, cowering in hiding, rather than blindsiding Night Slasher when he seems poised to kill Stallone. In an 80s Action male encounter, the only function of women is to remind us of their uselessness.

4) Great performances. Obviously, Sly is one of the greatest people ever to live. But Kudos also go to Brian Thompson. While blessed with simian sex appeal, he’s not afraid to die shrieking like a woman. Too many of the stuntmen and karate consultants who die in 80s action go out with pride, depriving us of the satisfaction of a final display of cowardice and agony. Not Thompson who, finally stuck on Sly’s steel, wails and claws pointlessly at the point of penetration in his back as he is dragged to immolation. He even tries to protect himself against a raging blast furnace by covering his face with his arm. Small deduction for going limp when he reaches the flames, rather than emitting a final, blood curdling scream, but this remains an elite novelty death.

5) Pre-mortem one liner: This is where the law stops… and I start.

9: ROADHOUSE

Local man unable to continue living without throat

Marshall Teague’s epic demise in Roadhouse ranks right up there with the very best novelty deaths that 80s action has to offer. While the mode of death is fairly unique, it’s the gritty, sweat-drenched pre-mortem fight that makes it one of my personal favorites. Teague’s character, Jimmy, is the embodiment of what you want in an 80s action henchman- he’s cocksure, wears an earring, leaves his chest exposed, has an accomplished martial arts background, and after knocking out the token fat guy, he uses the dude’s belly to vault himself onto a stage with a pool cue. Swayze, however, is the peaceful warrior– calm, calculating, and possibly heterosexual. Yet from the moment we see the two of them on screen together we know a bloody engagement of some kind is imminent.

After blowing up the old landlord’s house, Jimmy rides off on a dirt bike, stops to look back at his handiwork, and laughs the kind of ridiculous bad guy laugh that cracks me up every time I see it. Swayze, meanwhile, is wearing nothing but tight gray sweats and a beaming coat of oil. The two square off near a small pond and it isn’t long before Jimmy takes Swayze from behind in a chokehold and says, “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” Now interpret this however you want but Jimmy is gay; it’s clear from the beginning what he’s interested in. When he realizes that he cannot have our hero, he decides that nobody will, and pulls a gun. “I’m gonna kill you the old fashioned way,” he says. What’s the new way, you ask? Right, Swayze knocks the gun into the air and promptly rips Jimmy’s throat out with his bare hands before kicking him facedown into the water. Somehow Jimmy lets out a final audible grunt despite missing a good portion of his neck.

Kelly Lynch shows up at the end of the fray to see if Jimmy is alive because she’s hot, sympathetic, and useless. Okay, she also happens to be a doctor. After discovering that there is nowhere on Jimmy’s neck to check for a pulse, she stands up and casts a disapproving scowl at Swayze, who she awkwardly fucked mere nights before, and walks away without a word. Naturally Swayze becomes enraged. He hauls the corpse into the pond and sends it adrift to be carried out by a pretty damn strong current in what amounts to little more than an Olympic-size swimming pool. While Teague’s death is only a preamble to the symphony of murder Patrick conducts at Jackie Treehorn’s mansion, it remains in 9th position for obvious reasons.

8: DEATH WISH III

Bullet proof vest < rocket launcher

Death Wish is one of the seminal films of 80s action and therefore, the Western Cannon. The innovations of the film would echo through countless depictions of inept cops, unpunished criminals and hot, steamy vigilantism. I don’t know how legendary 80s Action producers, Golan and Globus–-figures celebrated alongside the likes of Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir in their native Israel– got their hands on the franchise, but it took their genius to improve upon such a classic. With some critical examination they saw that, for all of Death Wish’s greatness, there was fat to be trimmed and replaced with lean muscle. Rather than squandering running time on a coherent story line, they could have Bronson kill a bunch more people. Instead of a compelling, emotional core, why not a bigger gun? Lesser filmmakers would have run into a dead end were they to follow this line of thought, because the conventional (and inferior) story elements (such as character development) used to build to a climax have been replaced by violence and hardware. Where do you go after ninety minutes of Bronson blasting thugs with the biggest hand gun in the world? It seems like a question with no answer.

Until you see Bronson use a rocket launcher to kill one guy. At close range. Inside a small apartment. But, given that the gloriously reverse-mohawked villain, Fraker, is wearing a bullet proof vest, it’s the only logical solution. Fraker has already been shot half a dozen times. The way bulletproof vests work is that, if you are shot, you pass out. Then you spring back to life and have the drop on everyone. Everyone, that is, who doesn’t happen to keep an anti-tank weapon by the phone, next to a pencil and paper for taking messages. Bronson blasts Fraker, turns half the apartment into a flaming hole, and Fraker’s scant, smoking remains become a spectacle for passers by on the street bellow. The scene worked so well that there was no real choice but to rehash it in the Death Wish 4 climax.

7: OUT FOR JUSTICE

Italian scum beaten almost as badly as he deserves

There is no movie in Seagal’s catalog that better demonstrates his streak of sadism than Out for Justice. Virtually every scummy, unlaundered guido in Brooklyn gets beaten to an oily pulp at some point. Nobody escapes. Hell, even a Chinaman and a crusty Irish boxer get their asses handed to them on a silver platter. But when the dust is settled and the trail of corpses carted away, none of the beatdowns come close to the hurt that Seagal puts on Richie Madano (William Forsythe). See, Richie killed Bobby Lupo, which, is, really the last thing in the world you want to find yourself doing. So Seagal appropriately saves his most severe ass-mugging for last. He pummels Richie, and I don’t mean quickly, I mean he fucking pummels him in what can only be interpreted as a degrading S&M snuff session. Somebody, somewhere, has masturbated to this clip, I’m sure of it.

Richie doesn’t land a single punch. Instead, he is clubbed and prodded with a variety of cutlery and other kitchenware including a humungous pepper-grinder. He is thrown into walls, onto tables, into cabinets, and finally, headfirst through a window. Having already confessed to liking pain, Richie understandably convinces himself that his next effort to kill Seagal will succeed. What results is a cataclysmic failure to achieve and surely one of the most bizarre and kinky novelty deaths of all time. Rather than drop his jeans and slather Richie’s chest with a broiling mound of feces, Seagal opts to conclude the humiliating rendezvous by planting a corkscrew into his forehead, thereby avenging the proud memory of our beloved Bobby Lupo. Also, this particular killing might be Steven’s most passionate as it was among the Italians. It was real greaseball shit.

6: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

Horse spunk saves the day, yet again.

The “X-factor” of this epic battle between Dolph and JCVD is a syringe which, particularly in a barnyard setting, seems to be loaded with horse semen. Now people have accused us of reading homoeroticism into these films where it doesn’t exist. But you don’t have to crack page one of Freud to raise an eyebrow at a pair of rain-soaked, musclebound studs achieving greater power through semen injections. “Hey, what’s the big deal? Popeye ate Spinach, Dolph and JCVD shoot piping hot ejaculate into… their hearts?” And no, I don’t buy that it’s just a coincidence that the substance is identical in color and consistency to the ol’ baby batter, especially since the power juice at the center of Dolph’s I Come in Peace is exactly the same. JCVD’s useless chick is seemingly dispensed with a nice preliminary killing-– she’s fleeing to safety when Dolph chucks a grenade that blows her up. Is JCVD upset about his love interest being blown into cornflakes? Sure baby! Like he’d be upset if you spilled his Fresca.

Watch on Youtube.

There’s some more horseplay before the actual death and frankly, it’s pretty dull stuff. Eventually, JCVD, powered by a fresh sperm injection, impales Dolph on the blades of a corn thresher and there’s a satisfying moment of agony. But Dolph then plays possum, drawing JCVD in for a closer look. When he gets his chance, Dolph makes a last ditch effort to pull JCVD onto the blades, but he counters with a Seagal-worthy arm snap, leaving Dolph helpless, in agony and slowly bleeding to death. That’s a good start. Finally, we get what we have been salivating over since the corn thresher first entered the frame. JCVD turns on the machine and chunks of œbermensch are sprayed across the heartland, fertilizing the fodder of continued American supremacy.

5: RAMBO III

Kourov gets hanged and banged.

Whether he’s wandering the foggy backroads of the Pacific Northwest, shoveling rocks in a military prison, or repairing wagon wheels in Thailand, history has shown us that it doesn’t take a whole lot to get John J. Rambo back in the swing of killing commies. In Rambo II we saw him duped and leg-swept into refighting Vietnam by Charles Napier and the Cobra Kai Sensei. This time around Rambo’s hand is forced into action by the capture of Colonel Trautman who, for some reason, decided to deliver American missiles to the Mujahideen with a few jeeps, an AK, and a dozen ill-equipped guides who are all stuffed with bullets in a matter of seconds. Are we to believe Trautman thought he could actually make a difference in Afghanistan? Or are we to believe he sacrificed himself knowing that Rambo is the only human being capable of defeating Russia single-handedly? Or are we to believe that Rambo merely wants to uphold the right of Afghan men to participate in their sacred game of drag-the-goat-carcass-through-the-sand without fear of Russian helicopters launching rockets at their horses because he is better at it than them and feels guilty? Have fun sifting through the mound of bodies to find your answer.

Watch on Youtube.

There are some complicated novelty deaths to consider here as the movie is basically an endless string of them. For example the Russian Spetsnaz Commander is shot, then impaled by the cannon on Rambo’s tank, then blown up, which is a death as improbable as Charles Bronson’s reanimated corpse lacing your cannolis with cyanide. For sheer hilarity, though, the novelty award goes to the Commander’s bodyguard, Kourov. We all know the mountains of Afghanistan are littered with giant holes in the ground that serve as entryways to a gargantuan subterranean netherworld of Islamic horror. So Kourov and Rambo throw down near one of these openings as Trautman creepily watches, sometimes observing through the scope on his gun. After a quick and playful tussle, Rambo wraps a nylon rope around Kourov’s neck, pulls the grenade pin attached to his vest, then kicks him into the blackened maw where he falls roughly thirty feet, snaps his neck, and erupts into a fireball that rivals the explosion of Alderaan. USA!!!!

4: ROBOCOP

Emil briefly experiences life as a goulash.

I think I’d actually like Emil M. Antonowsky if it hadn’t been for the scene where he was going to murder the gas station attendant because he went to college. Other than that, he just seems like a fun-loving degenerate who smokes while pumping gas. Plus, I like how screenwriter Edward Neumeier felt that a character with 4 minutes of screen time required a middle initial. But the way he tormented the gas nerd was just unforgivable. It revealed Emil to be a bully and an anti-intellectual so he probably deserved to be shot off of his motorcycle while trying to get away from the gas station, then to skid across the top of a car and some asphalt and land in a heap of injuries. If that’s the second worst thing to happen to you in the movie, and a very distant second, you’re making a run at 80s action immortality.

Indeed, Emil’s actual death is kind of a replay of the first accident, only with more toxic waste and fleshy liquefaction. Emil’s driving again, Robocop shoots his ride again, only this time, he’s not lucky enough to crash into a car. After plowing his truck into a huge container of toxic waste, Antonowsky comes spilling out the back of his truck, a half-melted, steaming-hot insta-mutant. He gasps for air, begs for help (although he is clearly further beyond any kind of medical help or restoration than Rocky Dennis after a chimp attack) and zombie-shuffles in front of Boddicker’s speeding car. In his slightly dissolved state, Emil explodes on impact like a balloon filled with chum, mucking up Bodicker’s windshield something awful. Be sure to appreciate how Emil’s head remains largely intact as it slides like a curling stone along the hood, windshield, and roof of Boddicker’s car.

3: COMMANDO

The Arnold transforms a simple, third world tool shed into a schoolhouse: of pain.

It might seem like there should be more Arnold on the list, but for all the great one-liners and set-ups, the actual murdering is often just a bit less than spectacular. This is not the case with the tool shed scene in Commando. Unfortunately, there is no tradition of oral history amongst 80s action goons because they all die within seconds of assuming their roles. If there were, fathers might pass down to sons the knowledge that firing hundreds of rounds into a small structure where your target is trapped can often be useless if every shot is aimed on the assumption that the target is standing erect in the center of the building. Rake the ceilings and floors to be sure, son, otherwise someone will swing down from the rafters and stab you in the heart with a pitchfork, like what happened to your uncle Miguel.

The glorious violence of this scene largely speaks for itself, but I enjoy the added irony that Arnold has turned on hired Latino help with the very tools that sustain their people. Every tool of the gardener, landscaper and handyman is used to kill a man who, barring this highly unusual case of some guy picking him up at Home Depot to guard a weirdo’s compound off the coast of Santa Barbara, relies upon those tools for his very livelihood. It would be like if Arnold killed Irish mercenaries by throwing drunken police officers at them. The violence itself is elevated to full blown slasher status for a few shining moments. I don’t remember Voorhees ever killing so many with such a variety of pointy things in so short a span. We’d not see a novelty spree killing of this magnitude again until Punisher: Warzone.

2: INVASION USA

And THAT’S why, you don’t snort coke through a metal tube.

We only have to wait about ten minutes to witness the best novelty death sequence of Invasion USA. While Chuck is busy wrangling crocodiles and hamming it up with his pet armadillo in the swamps, Rostov and his cohort of terrorists are literally invading the United States of America. Surely if waves of impoverished Cubans can take over Miami, then a batch of well armed terrorists can take over the country. Rostov’s plan is to bring America to its knees in less than 24 hours but before he does so, he decides to hit up a motel and sell some cocaine to Frank Nitti from The Untouchables. The strange part about the scene is that it has almost nothing to do with anything other than to show us that Rostov is a bad, feathery-haired motherfucker. Presumably he’s trading a couple ounces of blow for a huge cache of weapons that he already had.

Anyhow, before he and Nitti can complete the transaction, Nitti’s broad starts greedily railing lines off the desk as any befitting cokewhore should. This must’ve angered Rostov because he slams her head down, driving the metal tube deep into her nose, sending her screaming and flailing across the room. Rostov then shoots a couple of goons in the hallway before casually sliding his gun into Nitti’s pants and firing two shots at his cock. Afterward he grabs the hysterical bitch and hurls her through the window in a display of wanton violence that’s pretty extreme even by 80s action standards. Because the scene is completely irrelevant to the plot it ends up acting as a pretty effective, and clearly intentional, anti-drug advertisement. People who buy and do drugs deserve to be castrated and killed. People who specifically snort cocaine are always at risk of having their utensil irrevocably lodged into their nasal cavity. Minorities conduct drug deals. People who sell drugs also deserve to be killed but preferably at the hands of bearded American patriots. In fact, the only acceptable form of commerce is a proper and shady cash-only weapons deal.

1: MARKED FOR DEATH

Seagal kills one Jamaican at least four times.

Frankly, the Ruthless camp is divided on the matter of 80s Action’s greatest badass. But their can be no disputing Segeal’s status as master of the novelty death. He has achieved the peerless greatness attained by so few in any endeavor. One might argue about the greatest ballplayer, the greatest director or the greatest beauty. But in the field of novelty deaths, Seagal stands alone in unchallenged supremacy–-the Shakespeare of the severed spine; the Kasparov of defenestration. Half a dozen of Seagal’s kills could be in the top ten of all time, but Marked For Death is his masterpiece. One of the many turns of genius that sets Seagal apart is the corpse kill. He realized that the mere fact he had killed someone, and they were now a dead body, should not prevent him from killing them at least once more. In Under Siege, for example, one assumes that Tommy Lee Jones’ character has perished once Seagal has driven a giant knife into top of his skull, up to the handle. So? Like so many men of innovation, Seagal sees a starting line where most see the finish line. Rather than be satisfied with allowing Jones to die only once, Seagal throws him through a radar screen, issuing a corpse kill by massive electrocution. Now you might think that pushing beyond even the corpse kill would risk ridiculousness. But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. And dead wrong again. For, in Marked For Death, Seagal performs a dizzying combination that others had yet to even conceive, let alone attempt. Lesser novelty killers were still wondering how to pull off the corpse kill when Seagal surpassed it. While they strove for the 360 dunk, he went straight to the 540 off-the-glass tomahawk: the double kill, corpse kill with a twin.

Now, as every schoolchild knows, the primary villain in Marked For Death is the mysterious Skrewface who seems to have voodoo powers. When Seagal catches up with Skrewface, he quickly crunches through a couple of henchmen and finally gets his hands on the antagonist. Even with the preliminary slice to the balls, you have to initially be a bit disappointed with the quick decapitation via samurai sword after only a few seconds of pain. The only uplifting aspect of the kill seems to be that Seagal lugs Skrewface’s head around town like a newly won Stanley Cup to prove to the henchmen that their leader is not an invincible shaman, but rather a visibly mortal drug-pusher. But then, Skrewface appears alive and well. A twin! Now we are cooking!

Watch the clip on Youtube

You can look at this one of two ways. You can count this as Skrewface being killed twice (corpse kill not included), or you can roll it into one grand ball of suffering for the remaining twin. Before the first punch is thrown in the final battle, Seagal opens with, “Oh hai, here is your twin brother’s head, which I chopped off a while back. I might use it at the bowling alley later.” Using this as a starting point, Seagal proceeds to beat Skrewface shitless, slice open several wounds with the sword, then thumb the Jamaican’s eyes back into his skull. This culminates when Seagal audibly snaps Skrewface’s spinal chord in several places which, if it didn’t kill him instantly, would certainly leave him with nothing more than a few seconds of shutting down. Seagal then lifts the motionless Skrewface and hurls him down an elevator shaft to certain death. Finally, Skrewface is impaled on some machinery at the bottom of the elevator shaft, because after you have lethally destroyed a man’s spinal chord, then thrown him several stories to his death, it’s best to also impale him. No matter how you choose to divvy up this smorgasbord, the basic facts are as follows. At the beginning of the film we meet a character named Skrewface. By the end of the film we have seen him suffer four different fatalities, garnished with various beatings and mutilations.

While we’re at the whole list making thing, we’ve compiled a list of potentially offensive acts you could perform and listed them in order of the severity of the beating, torture and death that you would suffer as a consequence.

4. Take your Vespa club to the Laughlin River Run.

3. Start a chapter of D.A.R.E. in Juarez.

2. Finger paint a picture of Mohamed in the ejaculate you  release after spanking to Ayatollah Khamenei on Al Jazeera.

1. Borrow Seagal’s TV tray and then forget to return it.

THE END

Somehow I got the notion that The White Ribbon is meant as an explanation of Nazism, probably because I’m an idiot.  It isn’t that, but it does provide some food for thought about the relatively recent roots of authoritarianism and oppression. Set in the Greater Fatherland Area around the turn of the century, our thoughts naturally turn to Hitler, who the kids in the story would likely grow up to support.  With rigid totalitarianism on the brain, we notice nuances of life in German village upon which we might not otherwise immediately focus. Particularly, when authority becomes pernicious in such a setting, there isn’t really anywhere to appeal. Dad is diddling the daughter? She will just have to deal with it. The alternative is to create a modern, liberal social structure, establish a child welfare agency, invent the telephone and use it to call them. And even then, she will still have to deal with it.

At the center of the film is an unsolved mystery as the village is afflicted by several acts of naked cruelty. The mystery remains unsolved and is meshed with other acts of negligence, malice and abuse of power. For variety, there is a charming, old world love story set under the guidance of a kind and benevolent patriarch. Loving Dad, Rapist Dad: it’s all in the luck of the draw. One of Haneke’s big points is that the abusers of power and freelance sadists will almost invariably get away with it, because it is so difficult to produce a suitable response. Without going into detail, several of his films seem to involve the ease with which we can destroy someone and the near impossibility of justice, if justice is action that restores some kind of equilibrium. From the Nazis down to one sexually terrorized daughter, whether some of the perpetrators are hanged or they live to beat off to the memories of their crimes in old age, there isn’t any way to really counterbalance irreparable harm.

We can, however, fuck things up even further by reinvesting in still greater authority, hoping that the newly strengthened social hierarchy will finally protect us or at least make things right again. In this film, that means a culture based on severe Protestantism that comes with more abuse. When the kids grew up, they’d try to double down on dad yet again. The historical context is only one of multiple, conflicting sources of tension in this film that provide the quality of a complex thriller. The cinematography is so impressive that you could use it as a tiebreaker in determining this to be the best Haneke film. Maybe Haneke uses disabled children because they represent the most basic level of injustice, but some of the shots of a retarded boy in this movie just seemed like a cheap way to be unpleasant, which is my only complaint.

#1 Big River Man

Matt has been singing the praises of John Maringouin’s earlier work, Running Stumbled, since he saw it at some festival. But because of legal concerns, it’s very difficult to track down a copy by hook or by crook. I did find Big River Man, however, though I’m not sure if it was by hook or by crook. Whichever the bad one is. It’s lucky that I did so, because even though I haven’t seen all that many of 2009′s films, I can award first prize with total confidence. Willie, you can throw out the other projects.

My first inclination is to just copy down this entire move word for word and post about 150 screen caps. Like this:

Many Slovenians are drunk and drivers. We are top in Europe by statistics. And my father, Martin, is one of them.

But I’m pretty sure that is illegal, and it is certainly unethical and the last thing I want to do is provide you with an excuse for not seeing The Best Film Of The Year (keep an eye out for it on The Discovery Channel). Maybe even The Next Step In Documentaries. The film is about a Slovanian endurance swimmer, Martin Strel, and his attempt to swim the length of The Amazon. Strel has repeatedly shattered his own endurance records, including swims down the polluted Mississippi and the horribly polluted Yantze, where he was sharing the water with corpses. Given that Strel is in his 50s, quite overweight, an alcoholic, subsists largely on horse burgers and has an old country, slavic way of thinking, the entire film is basically one great quotation, abundant in the kind of hilarious idiosyncrasies that recent “independent” films have failed so badly, so frequently to simulate.

“If piranha, for example, start attacking or something like that, we would threw bucket of blood, or whatever, on the other side and the piranhas will just redirect there.”

Comparisons to Herzog are pretty obvious, as this is a doc focusing on an unusual individual, struggling against nature (Grizzly Man) and the Amazon in particular (Aguirre, etc.) and I don’t think there is any disputing His influence. Also, like Herzog, Maringouin intentionally leaves his fingerprints all over the subject and it is anyone’s guess how much of it he has orchestrated.  But this is an Anglo version of Herzog’s approach with a layer of self awareness and and playfulness of which the mirthless German mind is incapable (see The White Ribbon). Martin claims that he is largely motivated by promoting environmental awareness, which leads to one of the film’s masterstrokes. One reason for the destruction of the rain forest is the value of mahogany, often used in musical instruments. As this information is shared, Marnigouin mixes deadpan documentary technique and an ironic juxtaposition of images that could well be rooted in this very same internet, to solemnly accuse rock stars with over-sized guitars of being a major cause of deforestation.

Another stroke of genius has a deeper impact on the film. Rather than narrate the film himself or God fucking forbid, have a celebrity handle the job, Maringouin has Martin’s son, Borut, narrate, a decision that adds tremendously to the film with maximum economy. Instantly, the film also becomes a study of a father son relationship and we have a narrator with extensive, firsthand insight into the other elements of the story. We learn that Borut is the one man PR maven behind his dad’s enormous local fame, which makes him a natural for the role, explaining, for example, how Strel’s status allows him to park on sidewalks, or anywhere else he likes, while driving around hammered, practicing breathing exercises, eating and listening to instructional English tapes without fear of a ticket. Given that Borut’s English, while good for general purposes, is a cut below the normal standard for narrating a 100-minute documentary, there is a whole new level of humor and charm brought to the narration. This is like a great Simpsons episode. It’s so entertaining and it nails all of the glib elements so hard that most people will overlook the fact that this film is enormously sophisticated and that Maringouin as a grand master at this particular game of discourse.

The Fall of Tiger Woods

Never has an athlete fallen so fast, completely, and satisfyingly. Touted at once as a history-changing black man and the whitest man on the planet, he has managed to disappoint his most ardent supporters by being, well, black in their eyes. In the course of a long weekend he went from being the bright-eyed savior and living embodiment of the game of golf to a tabloid joke sending sports writers like Rick Reilly into hissy fits and hand-wringing worthy of a neurotic Jewish grandmother. Read between the lines of the commentary and you’ll find the khaki and loafer crowd dipping their heads in disappointment as the one black guy to whom they could all relate let them down by having even worse taste in whores than they do.

Andre Agassi’s Open

Most jock books follow a basic formula of airing some dirty laundry about fucking broads on the road, telling a coach to fuck off, and doing drugs in the bullpen. Rarely do they eviscerate the essential myths that hold up the construct that being a professional athlete is a dream come true. Andre Agassi’s blistering portrayal of himself is nothing less than exhilarating and refreshing and gives me reason to enjoy the sports world again. For all the bullshit and pomp we’re subjected to, sports are not simply unscripted competitions that challenge the essence of human endurance and focus, they are entertainment for the masses. Agassi’s frank admission that he not only spent an entire year on the ATP tour smoking and snorting meth while he tanked matches, but absolutely loathed the game of tennis, is an affirmation that not only is the grass not greener on the other side, but that your neighbor’s yard hides far more bodies than you would care to imagine.

LeBron James: King of the NBA

The general conceit is that professional athletes are childish dunces incapable of making any decision that does not revolve around choosing which club trollop they want to bring home each night. LeBron James is the best and brightest hope for destroying the myth that because you can play ball you cannot make moneymen do your bidding. Shortly after entering the NBA, James fired his professional handlers and agents and replaced them with friends and associates who were deemed amateurs and rubes. Now, one year away from free agency, those same rubes and supposed hoodlums have helped put James on everything from billboards to Nike commercials while helping to put him in position for the greatest free agent contract in the history of the NBA. Make no mistake; James is the greatest business talent to enter the NBA. Michael Jordan needed David Falk. James only needed himself.

18-1

Hubris is the enemy of success and the Patriots, of all teams, should have known better. Never before had a team come so far and done so much only to lose it all when it mattered most. The New England Patriots were on the doorstep of becoming the greatest team the NFL had ever seen, but they spent the lead up to their Super Bowl match up with the New York Giants inviting them to their victory party and talking about how the trip to Arizona was more like a vacation than a business trip. Whereas John Matuzsak and the Raiders spent the week before Super Bowl XV taunting the Eagles by brandishing their cocks and drinking Jack Daniels on Bourbon Street, the Patriots spent theirs granting interviews to Sports Illustrated behaving as if greatness was owed to them and speaking as if the Giants were rejects from the USFL. When they lost, Bill Belichick didn’t even have the decency to shake Tom Caughlin’s hand proving that the character of a man is displayed best when he fails, not when he is successful. Especially when he brings it upon himself.

Kobe Fucks a White Girl in the Ass

In the summer of 2003, Kobe Bryant traveled to Colorado to undergo some routine surgery on his knee. At the time, he was as big as Tiger Woods. He was doing McDonald’s commercials in Italian and was gracing Wheaties boxes, but after he fucked Katelyn Faber in the ass after she made it clear that her pussy would suffice, he was reduced to a childish dipshit who blew his slim chance to supplant Michael Jordan as the most popular basketball player of all time. Then, after the Lakers traded for Karl Malone and Gary Payton and financed the private plane rides back and forth to Colorado to deal with the courtroom drama, Kobe had the nerve to make public comments about Shaq doing the same sort of the thing but just paying the women off. In the end, Kobe got what he wanted – being the man in Los Angeles – but he lost everything he could have been.

Barry Bonds

Oh, Barry, my old friend, every time I think of you I smile. Sometimes I think back to that magical season in 1998 when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were stealing your thunder. Remember how you were the best player in the game, but two piece-of-shit hitters with huge holes in their game supplanted you in the press and dominated the headlines? Remember when you literally said, “fuck it,” in 1999 and did what every other asshole in baseball was doing and decided to go on the juice? I do. I loved every page of the leaked grand jury testimony that I read. I loved every second of the BALCO scandal. And I was in absolute rapture as you broke both the single-season and career home run marks while Bud Selig sat watching helplessly. And my heart sings every time I think of you because, without you, I never would have gotten to hear some pontificating dummy named Lance Williams from the San Francisco Chronicle tell me that it is crude to think that athletes will do whatever it takes to win no matter the legal consequences or the threat to their image or legacy. Barry, you will always be my hero.

The End of The Curse

Losing is an art, and for 85 years, no one did it with more style, class, panache, and inventiveness than the Boston Red Sox. Giving up game-winning home runs to overgrown midget shortstops, bumbling managers starting an ace on two days rest, letting Bob Stanley warm up – much less pitch – in a World Series game, selling Babe Ruth, humiliating Jackie Robinson during a tryout; yes, that was the Red Sox. However, in 2004 the greatest practitioners in the art of choking, fucking up, blowing it, and shitting the bed came all the way back from a 3-0 deficit to the Yankees in the ALCS to shock every sports fan on the planet before easily winning their first World Series since 1918. In game four, after decades of bad jokes and horrendous insults, you could actually hear the baseball gods say, “Enough is enough” and swing the momentum Boston’s way. Before anyone knew it, the Yankees were on the wrong end of the greatest comeback in the history of sports leaving their fans in the Bronx depressed and physically ill. That role reversal made for easily the most tangible proof that the world is not all evil.

Charlie Weiss: Charlatan, Con Artist, Fat

Notre Dame never knew what hit them. After being part of a coaching staff that won three Super Bowls in four years, Charlie Weis parlayed devising offensive game plans for Tom Brady into running one of the crown jewels of college football. After the Irish dumped Tyrone Willingham three years into a rebuilding project, Weis was feted as though there was a bidding war for his services even though no other team in football showed the slightest interest in hiring a guy who just had bariatric surgery and needed to be driven around in a gold cart. During his first two years, using talent procured by Willingham, Weis managed to convincingly lose two BCS bowl games and secure a 10-year multi-million-dollar extension. Over the next three years he embarked on a journey of mediocrity and failure that ended with him alleging on national radio that Pete Carroll was shacking up with 20-something-year-old grad students at the beach while he, of all people, was hounded by 60 Minutes for using foul language. There’s bitter and disappointed and then there is just plain classless, untalented and dumb, with Weis illustrating perfectly that success is not dependent on saying the right things at your first press conference. Not bad for a guy who never even played Pop Warner football.

The Oakland Raiders

Warren Sapp, sage, said it best: “Al Davis knows football. 1970’s football.” The problem with historical success is that when failure comes, you think it’s not your fault. Surrounded by pathetic enablers and yes men, Davis has provided some of the finest entertainment in sports by essentially firing Jon Gruden, re-hiring Art Shell, drafting JaMarcus Russell, and gracing us with the spectacle that is Tom Cable. Davis was once an iconoclast whose instincts and willingness to gamble brought him enormous success, but his dementia and his family’s unwillingness to put him a home has reduced the Raiders to a laughingstock on par with the Clippers. It’s sort of sad to see his corpse propped up and dressed in tacky tracksuits, but there is no better window into what the future ultimately holds for Jerry Jones.

Roger Federer is a Boring God

Not since Bjorn Borg wielded a wooden racket and wore grape smugglers has a player so dominated the game of tennis the way Roger Federer has. Though he is now on the wrong side of his prime, but still formidable, there was a five-year stretch where he was simply unbeatable. While players like John McEnroe, Borg, Andre Agassi and Jimmy Connors were painfully human and easy to root for because of their respective emotional outbursts and personal foibles, Federer has cultivated a business-like persona centered around the calm perfectionism, faux class, false modesty, and rigid professionalism that oozes from his perfectly tailored warm up suits and monogrammed socks. Winning his 15th Grand Slam title rocketed him into the stratosphere of the greatest professional athletes. His game is versatile, well-rounded, effective on all surfaces, and essentially perfect, but watching him – save for his matches against Rafael Nadal – is passionless, boring, disaffecting, and devoid of soul, making Ivan Lendl look like a rock star by comparison.

Adendum: Sports Related Youtube of The Decade

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a work of the most supreme audacity. A Western with little action, a history lesson without any heroes, and a character study that uses contemplative silence rather than the roar of gunfire, the film is everything I had hoped it to be and more; one of the few movies all year that actually got better as it went along, reducing its 160-minute running time to a mere flash of brilliance. Who could imagine that in 2007, a time when Hollywood is in such an advanced state of decay that every move seems pre-approved by focus groups and teams of cautious lawyers, we would be honored with such risk and bold artistry? After all, here’s a film concerning one of the most famous figures in history, an outlaw known by young and old alike, and rather than pander to the obvious with a romp of hard riding and gunplay, that very man is reduced to a supporting character; a symbol, yes, but not at all the driving narrative force. Thankfully, blissfully, this is not a tale of bank heists and train robberies, showdowns at high noon, or cat and mouse dramatics that reduce the untamed frontier to clever criminals and no-nonsense lawmen. Instead, this is a film about nothing less grandiose than America itself — its myths, its illusions, its raw, wounded identity — with the necessary sense of wonder to pull it off. Such ambitions are fraught with peril, of course (resentful glances and accusations of unjust pretension, to name a few), but each and every frame is a testament to the overall success, and by the final act — a coda concerning the days and nights of Robert Ford after the infamous assassination that stands as some of the finest filmmaking I’ve ever seen — we are not exhausted, or burdened, or bereft, but thankful at having lived to see it all. The decade has seen its masterpiece.

The Wrestler (2008)

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, a film that on its face doesn’t sound like much at all, is not without convention, or cliché, or even a hint of familiarity, but its brilliance is not in its ability — or desire — to revolutionize the medium. Through one simple character, the washed-up slob that is The Ram, America itself is laid bare (and where Jersey has never looked so Jersey). And who knew that when the chips were down, Mickey Rourke would come to set things right? His performance is a revelation to be sure; a realization so penetrating, wise, and achingly authentic that it deserves to sweep Oscar off its feet. It is greatness in raw, unflinching defiance, both as a physical embodiment and through sheer emotional resonance. It’s the epitome of the Method’s still unsurpassed approach to the art. Rourke never overreaches, or plays to the cheap seats, or asks us to find him appealing. His faded has-been is a bastard through and through, as well as the sort of man incapable of breadth, scope, or even a moment where he isn’t out to prove his worth through the channel of an appalling self-loathing. His is the vanity of utter stasis; where, preserved in amber like a prehistoric insect, he bathes in nostalgia to keep the world from penetrating his tomb. He lives as he did, stunted for all time, unable to grapple with the parade that long ago passed him by. He’s a muscular, scarred Norma Desmond; the ring his musty, cobwebbed estate.

United 93 (2006)

It’s the film that was never supposed to work. It simply couldn’t. Every conceivable minefield was glaringly apparent; it would function as little more than propaganda, a rallying cry, a spur for Bush’s approval ratings, or a perverse, exploitive justification for invasion and revenge. Heroes would be oversimplified, villains even more so, and the audience would be invited not to observe and recoil as we must in the face of unthinkable tragedy, but bare its teeth and believe, absurdly, that we would have acted more forcefully ourselves. No, this is not that movie, and for that alone, it deserves recognition as the most restrained account of actual events ever filmed. It would be more fitting to describe what we see, what we hear, and hell, what we feel, as just shy of cinema verite; a peeking behind the curtain of an event we think we know from top to bottom, when of course we could not possibly have any idea. It’s all terrifyingly real, for we know the grisly outcome, and the film wisely presents every moment leading up to the actual hijacking as routine, banal, and just this side of boring. It had to be. Our perspective, so viciously unfair as the worst sort of hindsight, screws the tension tighter than we can handle, and we wait it out; a death watch that damn near drives us to the brink. But again, and why this masterpiece will last beyond the raw wounds it portrays, this is above politics, and war, and terrorism itself; these are human beings, fragile and fearful, confused and astoundingly brave, doing whatever they could, which, sadly, was very little, to simply survive. Simply, when it’s everything? But fight on we do, brutes of a single-minded devotion, even when the whole damn enterprise is doomed. More so.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

It’s the sweetest example of a cinematic valedictory – Robert Altman, aging, frail, yet still teeming with wit and insight – faces the cold breath of mortality with A Prairie Home Companion, a delightful ode to endings; some happy, some not, but all unfailingly inevitable. Given that I was not at all familiar with Garrison Keillor’s radio broadcast (nor much of his career, period), I expected little from the movie, and must admit that I was moved to go only out of an obligation to Altman, one of the true giants of the art form. I figured that at best I would be distracted by a few corny jokes, a silly song or two, and that unmistakable overlapping dialogue that has been much imitated, but never equaled. Who knew that Altman (along with Keillor’s charming script) would focus so intently on the matter-of-factness of death itself; that while it will come for all of us, it need not be the only way in which to punch that final clock. In many ways, the film understands that before we’re carted off for the last time, we can release ourselves from the passions that drive us, and the noblest among us know when it’s time to give it a rest. This may in fact mean the end of life for many, but stepping aside can be as simple as a gesture; the nod of agreement that yes, my time in the sun is no more. There are others waiting for their shot. And there always will be.

Before Sunset (2004)

As the rarest of birds – an intellectual engagement between two adults without a trace of pretension or suffocating irony – the film stands as the decade’s most insightful romance, even though our couple remains physically uninvolved throughout. More than unrequited love, or a revisiting of what could have been, these are two older, and not necessarily wiser characters who have arrived at true adulthood with little but quiet resignation to bind their wounds. Jesse and Celine, perhaps the only cinematic pair that warranted a sequel, have an effortless grace together, while their hesitations and despairing glances reveal not the will of a screenwriter, but the hazards of the engaged life. It’s all talk, yes, and elevated beyond our normal unbearable exchanges, but the words rely not on the esoterica of the self-appointed elite, or the instant wit of the smirking wiseacre, but actual ideas learned not in the armchair of youth, but through experience and survival. It’s as if these two, slightly hardened by idealism’s inevitable decline, come together to spend a few hours in a cocoon slightly more tolerable than the ones they already inhabit. Marriage and family, as Jesse has discovered, are not “what adults do” per se, but are the only acceptable escapes left us in a world ever-intolerant of genuine solitude. Celine and Jesse work, such as it is, because they’ve never faced the actual scrutiny of life beyond the glow. At last, a film where one listens, one learns, and one recognizes all too well that our accidental encounters make the routine bearable.

Chop Shop – Any of Ramin Bahrani’s films would make this list, but this is his most tightly focused and genuinely moving, with one of the few child characters in the cinema that has the feel of reality. Each day is a dawn to dusk hustle, and sleep or entertainment can occur only if time allows. Alejandro Polanco turns in a punishing and raw performance as a young street hustler who persuades drivers to use his employer’s chop shop, and is willing to sell anything to build up his savings and realize his dream of owning his own food cart. It doesn’t sound like much, but for a child who has nothing, and no future prospect of anything beyond a daily grind of poverty, this dream is as vast as an empire. Bahrani deserves credit for creating a bleak film that resonates with the viewer regardless of their background, with a thin veneer of hope. This is above all about the survival instinct within us all, and the daily failures and tragedies offset by the occasional small victory that political philosophies and media soundbites fail to grasp. An involving film about those who live every day on the edge, with nobody there to catch them if they fall.

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days – Though set in Romania in 1987, this story could take place anywhere that reproductive rights are not guaranteed. Avoiding political statements was a wise move for any film about abortion. Those involved – the protagonist, her pregnant friend, and the abortionist – are risking their lives to serve this need. Regardless of your stance on the issue, there will always be women who will require termination of their unborn child, and going to back-alley specialists need not be the price for society’s lack of understanding. 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days eschews grandstanding in favor of going through those excruciating moments necessary to have an abortion in a nation that has made them illegal, pure and simple. The people present are not lionized or damned in the process. At the end, they are just people forced by circumstances to what they must.

Burma VJ / Control Room – A splendid double feature of documentaries that present a scathing indictment of modern commercial news, though neither really intend to. Burma VJ presents the work of reckless citizens who desire a free media so badly that they risk (and subsequently lose) their lives to create one in the hopelessly backward and closed nation of Burma. While spineless news readers in democratic societies collect fat paychecks for telling viewers what they already know and avoid news snippets that could upset their corporate owners, the journalists of Burma VJ truly understand what freedom means, and its cost. Control Room tells the story of the widely reviled reporters of Al-Jazeera, all of whom are a smidge baffled about the attention they have received. Former Defense Secretery Donald Rumsfeld sneered that these people were the voice of Al-Qaeda, despite that most of them were former BBC employees, and often were still British citizens. Ironically, they made just as many enemies in the Arab world for speaking truth to power on both sides of the ocean, and for utterly failing to edit out the footage that would piss people off. While journalists from the west embedded themselves in the rectum of the military and passed on whatever they were told as sterling fact, these guys brought raw video of the fighting in Iraq, and the atrocities committed by both sides. One Al-Jazeera reporter was killed by an American pilot in an event contemptuously dismissed by the Bush cabinet as ‘unavoidable’; no less hateful an act than the murder of Daniel Pearl. Celebrate these people while you can, for their days of operation outside the bounds of corporate media are numbered.

http://english.aljazeera.net/

An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore became the target of a smear campaign involving his extracurricular consulting activities and the size of his house, among other irrelevant points after this documentary became a hit. The data is there, and it has become quite clear to those who still maintain a measure of respect for information that the climate is changing to a warmer and less stable one on average. Though the Earth has had profound swings in temperature before, these changes occurred over hundreds of millions of years, enabling the flora and fauna to adapt. Humankind has created a true mess on slow boil since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and the planet is not prepared for such a change over only a couple hundred years. Even if you hate polar bears, bear in mind that nearly every major city on the planet has an ocean port, and if these are underwater, it could be disruptive to business. We take for granted that the economy will remain stable forever, but if we change the planet so it sustains a significantly smaller population, exactly why are we being so cavalier about it?

Kinsey – another period piece that remains strikingly relevant, this biopic about the revolutionary researcher who removed the veil of shame from human sexual behavior takes a close look at this flawed but essential man. It is easy to take for granted our current understanding about sex, but before Alfred Kinsey, our laws were shockingly regressive and our knowledge of sex based entirely upon the whims of the clergy. And Kinsey was no genius, nor did he unravel any impossible puzzles; he simply collected data about what people did or felt sexually, and published it. Period. Consider Alfred Kinsey our patron saint on the unassailable value of data, and how it can cause a seismic shift in how we view ourselves. So why is this still relevant? Even today, conservatives consider his work among the most dangerous ever, and would so dearly desire to bury it forever and return to those halcyon dark ages of religion-based views about sex. Before Kinsey published his masterworks Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female, people actually believed that masturbation was psychologically devastating, homosexuality was a psychiatric disease, and that there was only one sexual act that could be termed normal. He did not just add to human knowledge, he made life more tolerable.

Munich – In the age of the superpowers, between the decline of the American empire and the rise of the Chinese one, global wars are a thing of the past. Not that we are in an era of peace – our conflicts are now smoldering, dominated by geographic disputes and low-tech attacks that have left entire regions in chaos. Though economic issues drive the majority of these contentions, the self-renewing fuel that provides a steady burn is that of retribution. Regardless of your take on Israeli-Palestinian relations, if you were to find an actual reason for the most recent rocket attack or reactionary return salvo, it would rest with revenge for the last attack. Under the guise of a thriller, Spielberg has crafted an immaculate film that quickly becomes lost in the fog of reprisals. War justifies itself under such circumstances, and arguing right or wrong simply does not apply anymore. Most crucial to this masterpiece is the intuitive sense that ultimately the direction of vengeance cannot be predicted as the cycle of retribution removes itself from any party’s control.

Taxi to the Dark Side – On the surface, this is one of those hated liberal screeds against the policies of the Bush administration, but this is taking an exceedingly narrow view. Taxi To The Dark Side is about the compromise of the United States Constitution by those charged with defending it. Beginning with profiled kidnappings of suspects of terror attacks in the Middle East and moving to operations on United States territory, legality was forever shed as anyone vaguely suspected of doing… something… could be put in a hole forever and tortured until they confessed to the predetermined script placed before them. No oversight, no legal precedent, no structure to the metastasis of the power of the executive branch except that which ambition provides. And if you think about it, it did not take a great deal to spur this abandonment of law and order. Three thousand Americans dead is a blip on any graph, and pales next to the importance and uniqueness of the document that formed the cornerstone of our system. Even the ramifications of this has been lost on most Americans, who have the attitude that as long as they are not the ones in the naked pyramid, then such actions just don’t matter. 9/11 was a turning point in more ways than we have realized.

The Class – The teacher who wrote this winner of the Palm D’Or was also cast as the teacher in this essential film about the state of our education system. Though based in Paris, it could have been filmed anywhere. As the quality of education for the lower classes continues to decline as it does all over the world, and the cultural melange of the world’s largest cities becomes increasingly complex, it will be the classrooms where the fuse is allowed to continue burning. Rooms of education represent the place of greatest potential for understanding, teaching, and most of all learning about one another. But since they are really just holding pens for disaffected youth who are only learning their relative irrelevance to a system that does not want them, the classroom becomes a cauldron. Overtly, The Class deals with France’s identity crisis as immigrants from the Middle East and Africa floods the shores of Europe. The children are rude and ignorant, and the teacher utterly fails to reach them, whether due to their insolence or his inability to understand them does not matter. The Class, as with all universal films, deals in a simple way with innumerable subjects regarding discontinuities. Generational, ethnic, informational, gender-based, and economic gaps abound; in The Class you see a microcosm of our society, and the direction it is heading will not be easy to predict.

The Corporation – One of the most depressing films ever crafted, The Corporation takes an exhaustive look at the birth of the modern corporation, and the insidious way it rules every aspect of our lives. Starting with an obscure law that allows an organization to classify itself as an individual, we see how such arcane definitions allow corporations to take on an identity of their own and thus deflect responsibility from those who run the business and make the money. When executives are caught fudging numbers or breaking the law, they can always hide behind the opaque wall of the corporate structure and proclaim ignorance. The corporation itself can be to blame, and so culpability is passed on to shareholders, and from there blame is diluted until it no longer exists. This is how Union Carbide, Chevron, and Halliburton manage to continue chugging along despite being the cause of untold amounts of suffering the world over. When the Supreme Court redefined a corporation as a person, elevating property rights to the same level as human rights, the battle was over before a single shot was fired. Nobody is to blame, you see, unless you cannot afford the shield of incorporation. Then you are just an individual who goes to prison. The Corporation leaves you feeling utterly helpless by its end, detailing the creation of a system from which there is no escape.

Traffic – equal to the classic miniseries Traffik, this film concerns the drug trade and the sheer magnitude of the odds the Drug Enforcement Administration is fighting against. While agents patrol the borders, risk their lives to intercept less than 5% of the drugs imported into the United States, and send hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and weaponry to Columbia to combat drug lords, the people of this country pay handsomely to keep the supply coming. You will find few subjects better to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance between a nation’s elected officials and citizens. Equal parts entertainment and cautionary tale, Traffic dramatizes the schizophrenic approach to the drug trade and the impossibility of continuing to fight it.

IOUSA – The end of American exceptionalism is about to strike us full in the face not due to a conflict, but from the overwhelming size of the national debt. As it mushrooms, the United States approaches the point where tax revenues will be less than the interest payments on the American debt amassed since George W. Bush entered the White House. Reagan-era conservatives argued that this did not matter, and they may have been right before other nations aspired to superpower status. The policy of deficit spending while cutting taxes is a sure winner for incumbents, and poison to pragmatists who understand the danger of allowing other nations to own the debt of your country. If you are in the mood for a horror story, look no further than this adroit and straightforward documentary that will detail just how much time the United States has left before it will simply be owned outright by foreign interests.

Jesus Camp / The Education of Shelby Knox – No matter how many exposes, lost elections, or awareness of their insinuation into the political power structure, religious fanatics are here to stay in democratic society. And they have no interest in democracy, equality, or egalitarian ideals – they want an irreversible slide into theocratic institutions. There will be no bargaining, no reasoning with these people, as per the definition of ‘fanatic’. They want power, and their foot soldiers are the next generation. Easily led and indoctrinated, the children of fanatics are being born and bred to become political organizers, and best you believe they will be working overtime. The children of Jesus Camp are sad cases in victims of child abuse, taught to be deathly afraid of every waking moment in their worship of a just and loving God who hates their fucking guts. Consider it fair warning. The Education of Shelby Knox makes a interesting, though similarly heartbreaking companion piece in the extraordinary struggle of one Texas girl to bring sex education to her school. Read that sentence again, because their school actually teaches that abstinence is all there is, and sex simply isn’t an option. That her town has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation is ignored completely by the town leaders. Just a nice example of the social conservatives’ penchant for inventing whatever reality works for their insane beliefs. That Shelby Knox made it out of that town with her sanity intact is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, but woe to those children left behind, breeding copiously to provide additional fodder for the bible warriors and the army recruiters.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – No list of films about the most disposable decade ever would be complete without this cross section of conservative economic theory crossbred with American entitlement. These assholes not only perpetrated a massive scam – Ken Lay and the rest of his cronies truly believed that they had unearned wealth coming to them. Though the cries for their heads were sang around the world, don’t believe for a second that the board of directors of this fake Fortune 500 company was anything but a hero to the populace… until they got caught. Nobody gets this rich without ripping people off. From doctoring books to lend the appearance of vague but opulent success to manufacturing an energy crisis in California for profit, this is the true manifestation of the free market when unfettered by pesky regulators. Naturally, once the perpetrators were caught and prosecuted, everyone learned their lesson that when the books look too good to be true, they probably are. Well, until the next hot trend of housing subprime loans and fake financial products hit the streets.

Dirty Pretty Things – an instant classic the year it was released, Dirty Pretty Things took an unflinching look at the difficult, compromised lives of illegal immigrants living invisibly in the shadows of their adopted nation. Performing tasks that natural citizens thought beneath them, they live dangerously, having nobody to turn to if exploited. The most extreme example of what an illegal immigrant will sell to get a green card is in the field of organ donation – give up one kidney and you have your freedom (if you survive the procedure), and someone lucky enough to have been born in the right place gets a working organ. And yes, this all happens in real life. The perfect blend of suspense, drama, and social commentary, Dirty Pretty Things is a snapshot in time. Extraordinary risks are taken to remain surviving each day, and there is no safety net beneath them.

Flow – A crushing and obliviously hopeful documentary about the drive to privatize the world’s fresh water supply, Flow addresses a subject that would once be thought ridiculous. Privatize the supply of water, that which fills the rivers and has always existed as a public trust? As it turns out, if you appoint the right judges and amass enough wealth, you can claim ownership and sell or lease rights to anything you want. In Bolivia, the grip of multinational water companies was so tight that peasants in rural areas would be threatened with prison if they put a bucket out in the rain. Even in the United States, companies that sell bottled water can simply purchase publicly owned lakes and rivers and suck them dry before a single legal claim is filed. And as one state Supreme Court judge ruled, a multinational corporation is immune to prosecution for these transgressions. As the population rises and the efforts to legally take water and other public assets gains ground, people will discover just how strong the sense of entitlement of the upper classes can be.

Nanette Bernstein can go straight to hell. Instead of a probing, investigative look at the rot passing for American youth, this “documentary” filmmaker saw fit instead to celebrate the pastiche of quirkiness that has all but swallowed our civilization alive. More than that, the movie is a lie from the opening bell, as the director has clearly re-created scenes, assigned dialogue, and fashioned scenarios that would fit with her pre-conceived agenda. As such, authenticity takes a backseat to a “good story,” which might apply if the only criteria were a platform for self-obsessed monsters lusting for martyrdom. And let’s not forget Hannah Bailey, my selection as the year’s most vile creature. Among her many sins, she rails against the beautiful people, yet joins them the first chance she gets, and despite claiming to be above it all, is sidelined with depression the moment she isn’t noticed by the guy of her dreams. And oh how she dances! Yes, she’s one of those obsessively creative types who wants to act, sing, write, paint, sculpt, and build not for the inherent worth of art, but to be noticed, praised, and handsomely paid. I haven’t hated someone so completely in years, but Bernstein thinks she’s a star; a worthy young woman who should garner our sympathies and hugs. I hope for a sequel, but only if it centers on the little cunt’s funeral.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)

In many ways, the treatment of the mentally ill has made great strides over the years, resulting in scientific breakthroughs and enlightened attitudes that have genuinely improved lives. And yet, despite understanding much more than we ever have regarding the human brain, we have reversed course once again and threaten to move into a new barbarism, though one that avoids stigma, physical abuse, and grotesque warehousing. Instead, we have reached a critical new low, where in fact we so romanticize the mentally ill that they become objects of amusement, rather than desperately sick human beings in need of care. In our desire to remove the pain that comes with diagnosis, we believe that these people are no different than anyone else, and are simply in possession of “quirks” or “eccentricities” rather than deep, and often dangerous afflictions. It’s a bizarre cultural turn than once had good intentions, but now does far more harm to the patients themselves, as they are encouraged to so indulge their sickness that it becomes confused with “brilliance”. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is, in fact, one of the most vile symbols of this new course, as it takes a sad, demented individual (likely a schizophrenic, but surely a severe manic depressive) and rather than pull him aside for hospitalization, turns him into a hip rock star; a cult hero whose music and drawings reveal a genius that hasn’t been seen since Dylan’s basement tapes. Or so his former manager would have us believe.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008)

Who knew that Ben Stein, that sad-eyed, monotone little man from the silver screen, harbored a heart so black and so twisted that he – not Pat Robertson or James Dobson – would argue, without a trace of irony, that Charles Darwin was directly responsible for the Holocaust? The scene where Stein stands before a statue of the great thinker – you know, the one where the soundtrack features the exact same music as that which filled the screen during shots of Europe’s death camps – is so morally and ethically insidious that I couldn’t help but wonder why Mama and Papa Stein had been spared during the period. As expected, every possible scientific argument is twisted to serve Stein’s agenda, and interviews are selectively edited to ensure that the scientists themselves are turned into stammering clowns. Stein, though a Republican, always struck me as a man who was reasonably intelligent at the very least, but having decided that his inane Jewish heritage is suddenly more important than the whole of Western thought, he has joined with the mouth-breathers and truth assassins at last. More than a shot across evolution’s bow, this is a no-holds-barred war against the Enlightenment and all it hath wrought through the ages. Depressing, mean-spirited, and devious to its core, Expelled celebrates stupidity as the American virtue.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2004)

Think of the possibilities — filmmaker Andrew Douglas picks up a classic Chevy convertible and takes us on a journey through the deep, deep South, where the Pentecostal religion oozes out of every pore, and the music stands as a reflection of their sorrow, woe, and passion for life. What would we find on this bizarre trip? Snake-handlers? Faith-healers? Murderous fundamentalists? Yes, we found the nuts, the losers, the freaks, and the schizos, but Douglas, rather than genuinely explore their lives with critical detail (or at the very least, detached objectivity), has genuine fondness for these people, believing that they and they alone have found authenticity in the American landscape. As such, the trip becomes a loving valentine to a people; the very sort who deserve our unending scorn for failing to evolve beyond the 18th century. Admirable? Why, because they believe in a literal heaven and hell? That running water is a tool of the devil? And because Douglas is such an irritating guide, he makes it as much about him as his subjects, which leaves me with absolutely no one to care about. But here’s the kicker — we explore Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky, and at no time (and I mean AT NO TIME) do we see any black people. Not one man, woman, or child. That would be like filming a documentary about Los Angeles without finding a single Latino. Honestly, can anyone hope to understand Southern music without blacks? Are you fucking kidding me? That glaring omission pissed me off, and caused me to question the director’s motives. Conclusion? He’s a racist asshole who would rather spend time with some drunk lunatic with a hard-on for Jesus than an old bluesman.

Tarnation (2004)

Ignore the hype, disregard the bullshit regarding the film’s budget ($218 my ass), and prepare yourself for one of the most unpleasant (gay) experiences you’ll have in front of a movie screen. Do I say this because the film concerns a young (gay) man’s portrait of his nutty mother, in addition to the abuse, the foster homes, and the pain? You know me better than that. I enjoy depressing films, and am usually dissatisfied unless someone worthwhile dies violently. Jonathan Caouette’s (gay) movie stinks up the joint not because of its honesty, but rather because of its fundamental dishonesty. Far from a cathartic experience, this is (gay) narcissism in its ugliest form; an 88-minute excuse for a wannabe (gay) actor, wannabe (gay) filmmaker, and wannabe (gay) All-American star to stick his pathetic (gay) mug before the camera at every opportunity, all in the hopes that he’ll get noticed by someone at the William Morris Agency. Even the scenes of (gay) despair seem staged, as if (gay) Jonathan knew that the best way to attract attention to himself was to emote like some (gay) method actor. As the format is limited — Caouette pulled together photographs, (gay) home movies, answering machine messages, and (gay) phone calls, and slapped them together on his home computer — any (gay) meaning must be extracted from what are obviously disconnected items. But the only theme I could find was that whenever there was something to be filmed, (gay) Jonathan was there. And hey, anyone who films every last detail of their (gay) life from age 11 is clearly someone who has planned for (and expects) fame to drop in his (gay) lap at some future moment.

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While perhaps disappointing to those expecting a skillfully edited montage of bodies breaking apart on the waves while power chords drift and moan, The Bridge is much more than a voyeuristic death rattle. The images of human beings jumping from San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate Bridge are undeniably wrenching, but this is not exploitation. We watch because we must; these stories, told by friends and loved ones after the sad events have taken place, need that final act to lend credence to the words of the survivors. Their anger, sadness, and sense of betrayal deserve the big leap, for what other cruel reminder could suffice to let us know that for that brief moment, a monstrous selfishness won out over the feelings of others? One’s death is one’s own to be sure, as we’re the ones who have to experience it, but to watch these people — men and women, young and old alike — pace, pause, reflect, and finally jump, could only lock down the understanding that suicide is vanity’s last gift to the world; a final kiss of hoped-for infamy that will force civilization, even an extremely small portion of it, to never be able to forget. Why else would anyone commit suicide in this manner?

Cocaine Cowboys (2006)

Corben’s film is so damned exhilarating because of its self-conscious, hip style, but the facts of the matter are what sell this glitzy package. There is no shortage of interviews, news accounts, archival footage, and anecdotes to punch it all home, but its guiding theme — much like the nostalgia we feel for the older, better, mob-driven Vegas — transforms mere journalism into a grand sociological statement, irrefutable in its logic. Is the American dream — our dream — on par with the brutality and greed of barely literate, amoral gangsters? Not line for line, of course, but there stands that brilliant, glass-filled Miami skyline — a testament to economic power and success — and what else brought it from dirt and dust but the billions of dollars generated by drug sales? No one’s denying that cocaine country was a brutal, rigged game that enriched but a chosen few (no parallels to the “legitimate” economy, eh?), but their money (and theirs alone) bought the houses, drove the cars, paid the bills, raised the clubs, the restaurants, and the bars, and, most of all, was laundered through dozens of wildcat banks, which in turn promoted a construction boom unlike anything the area had ever seen. Throughout, cops, politicians, and all those deemed “respectable”, knowingly turned away. It’s worth noting that while the rest of the country suffered through a recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Miami maintained its time in the sun, as if walled off from reality by a haze of addiction. Snowblind, indeed.

Darwin’s Nightmare (2006)

The cinematic arts are often meant to inspire, instruct, and entertain, but on those rare occasions when the mood has but one direction, they are meant to produce a level of disgust and outrage so overwhelming that it’s all one can do to get home in one piece. Darwin’s Nightmare, Hubert Sauper’s new documentary, is so punishing in its bleakness, in fact, that it acts as a white flag for all further endeavors. The liberal humanist in me always wants to believe that mankind might improve, or that through various political actions, despair and exploitation might be tempered with a bit of justice, but after today, I can’t point to a single shred of evidence that justifies my cautious optimism. After 107 minutes of such pain, cruelty, savagery, and callousness masking itself as “the laws of business,” I’m not sure how to approach each and every hour of the coming days; where I am constantly reminded that we in the West — fat, content, and so blissfully successful that we have to invent problems in the absence of real troubles — must either check out via the blade, bullet, or pill, or else find a way to live with hypocrisy and crushing guilt. As I’ll still be here tomorrow, I know I’ve made my decision (I’m no saint), and I’m not nearly sanctimonious enough to judge others for joining me on my well-trod path. The world suffers, whereas I do not, and I’d be lying if I claimed to be doing anything real about it. That said, Darwin’s Nightmare is a perfect repudiation of the idea that anything can be done at all, absent altering man’s essential nature. With atomic weapons.

Deep Water (2006)

I’m convinced that no one returns from the sea unchanged, and more than any other form of adventure available to the ever-curious human animal, it holds the greatest risk of madness and death. The lust for exploration is built into our very DNA, and we the timid owe a great deal to those who pushed beyond their borders to better the lot of mankind. But now that the conquering spirit has been tamed by our modern age, all that remains is adventure for its own sake — contests, competitions, and collisions of ego that might hold vicarious thrills for spectators, but by and large are little more than senseless trips of vanity. So if we are to concern ourselves with these stories any longer, there must be an insight into the human experience that moves beyond mere winners and losers. Thankfully, Deep Water is just such a tale; a documentary that begins with a now-forgotten competition (a 1969 London Times-sponsored event that would bestow a cash prize upon the first man to complete a solo boat trip around the world), and winds up as an examination of man’s fragility so profound that it leaves us stunned.

Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog’s decidedly unromantic vision of the natural world and the foolish vanity of man was the year’s most thought-provoking work; a hammer blow to a curious self-absorption that pits the lust for relevance against an indifferent habitat that knows only survival. Timothy Treadwell, the poor sap in question, just might be insane, but there’s a touch of innocence in his quest to devote his life to Alaska’s bears, which is precisely what gets him killed. In this realm, after all, only cold-eyed realism will suffice. Herzog, as expected, is fascinated by this man’s obsession (he is our best chronicler of human beings at the extremes), and while he refuses to judge from a privileged position, the narration speaks to a differing point of view that makes Treadwell’s account seem hopeless by comparison. And no film better captured the unique intersection of sadness, thrill-seeking, and delusion so often found in individuals unable to find their place in an increasingly alienating world. At the end, we can safely assume that Treadwell wanted to die — on his terms — for martyrdom quickly supplants all else in the mind of a narcissist. In all, a devastating account, and it deserves to be recognized as among the finest documentaries ever made.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)

Ali vs Frazier. Bird vs Magic. Borg vs McEnroe. Wiebe vs Mitchell. Of all the great rivalries of sport, it is arguably the latter that best defines the American experience, despite being the least recognized, as well as the only one that did not actually involve head-to-head competition. But don’t be distracted by the absence of a field, rink, or stadium, or even a blood-filled trench of athletic endeavor, because these two men, far, far away from arenas packed with roaring crowds, did battle in garages, basements, and lonely arcades, where only the nerdy and nostalgic do not fear to tread. The game is Donkey Kong, the warfare is real, and by the end, we have witnessed a film with as many twists and turns as the boldest fiction, with heroes atop noble steeds and dastardly evildoers in black hats to match. Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters travels through these minefields of obsession, compulsion, arrogance, and unholy competition, but above all, takes the lives of two men — Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell — and the classic video game that has consumed each for the better part of the past quarter-century. It is a heartfelt, unflinching look at a bizarre, almost grotesque subculture, but more than that, it channels the drive to escape anonymity and mediocrity that afflicts high and low alike. And while we might recoil in horror at the utter seriousness by which these gamers live out their days, it is impossible not to end the screening in hysterics. Above all, this is a riotous, supremely entertaining work, and through style, music (Leonard Cohen has never seemed more appropriate), personality, and the complete absence of condescension, it becomes one of the best films of the year.

Overnight (2004)

As an exploration of hubris and unrestrained ego, I’ve never seen a more blistering portrait than Overnight, and I doubt I’ll ever encounter a viler monster than self-proclaimed genius Troy Duffy. A Shakespearean villain who would have both Richard III and Lady Macbeth for breakfast, Duffy was Hollywood’s new “Golden Boy” back in 1997, when his screenplay for The Boondock Saints sent movie executives scrambling for both dollars and superlatives. Given the opportunity of a lifetime (a generous contract to direct the film, as well as a record deal for his band The Brood), Troy lost it all not because of unfortunate circumstances or the cruelties of fate, but due entirely to his own bitterness, stupidity, arrogance, and unparalleled vanity. The film is both a document of a poor boy’s rise to the top (the filmmakers were initially asked to chronicle a “star in the making”), and a complete meltdown that might have been perceived as tragic had Troy had an ounce of human decency. About fifteen minutes in, we know what’s coming (Troy is a prick to everyone, especially the most powerful people in the business), but the ride down is never anything less than a laugh-filled, entertaining riot; the most glaring example of schadenfreude ever witnessed. I’d sooner trust my fate to Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao or Pol Pot than Mr. Duffy, the most putrid stain on humanity since the earth first cooled. I defy you to spend 81 more pleasurable minutes in the presence of something that isn’t naked.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003)

Everything filmmaking should be: passionate, exhilarating, dramatic, and spirited. This documentary about the attempted coup in the spring of 2002 against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected President of Venezuela, contains the pure, heart-pounding excitement of a summer action movie because we are witnessing history (and life) as it unfolds; raw and unscripted. Originally, the filmmakers (Ireland’s Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain) were in Venezuela to make a film about Chavez alone, but a military coup began as they were filming and their cameras continued to roll throughout the crisis. We are taken right into the heart of demonstrations, behind the doors of the Presidential palace, and into the minds of both the participants and those defending the Constitutional order. The film does not shy away from its sympathies for Chavez and his radical reforms, which posed a great threat to the ruling elite as well as an American government heavily dependent on Venezuela’s oil. After witnessing how little respect conservative forces in that country have for democracy and the rule of law, we can make connections to our own country — whenever an election doesn’t go their way, right-wingers seem hell-bent on reversing the “unfortunate” outcome, regardless of morality or simple legality. And based on how much American corporations had to lose from Chavez’s nationalistic and redistribution policies, it stands to reason that America strongly endorsed — if not outright aided — the coup attempt. But again, politics aside, this is filmmaking at its finest: literally edge-of-your-seat fire and anger swirl about, leaving the viewer dizzy with outrage. Easily one of the best films of the year and frankly, a masterpiece of the documentary form.

Running Stumbled (2006)

Johnny Roe, Jr. and his common-law wife Virgie Marie Pennoui, once beautiful, talented, and full of life, are now the scariest, most bizarre human beings you’re ever likely to see; two lost souls so pathetic, so riddled with addiction, abuse, and self-loathing, that not even John Cassavetes, tortured by visions of Grey Gardens and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, could have conceived of characters so demented. They are sick, vile, appalling, and unnaturally cruel; dancing around a relationship that long ago ceased to be anything other than sadomasochistic dependency, crossed with a heavy dose of murderous rage. Only they’re real — all too real — and their passion play is set before Johnny’s estranged son, rather than an indifferent director. Having not seen his birth father for over 25 years (he was taken from the home after his father deliberately crashed the car they were riding in, bringing forth charges of attempted murder), he has brought his camera to a dirty, dank home in Terrytown, Louisiana in order to exploit the living hell out of people he has never really known. And thank fuck for that, as what transpires is a hilarious, gut-busting treat; not only one of the best films of the year, but one of the most entertaining visions of hell in the history of the cinema. The truest test of its greatness lies in the fact that at 83 minutes, it’s not even remotely long enough, and I could have watched this bloody train wreck for dozens of hours, if not days. Hell, let’s cut to the chase: it’s damn near a masterpiece for our times. Seek it out immediately if you value all that is honorable and true.

The Staircase (2004)

I hadn’t experienced an emotional reversal of fortune this dramatic since discovering that the soft-featured prostitute devouring my member was, in fact, a transsexual named Robert. Like that moonlit night long ago, an orgasm is still an orgasm, but it’s forever tempered by disgust and shame. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s documentary The Staircase, then, is a cinematic wonder of technique, insight, and suspense, though after a bit of research within minutes of the film’s conclusion – I had neglected such things prior to the screening, so as to avoid ruining the surprise – I was forced to undertake an immediate reassessment tantamount to a thunderous rug-pulling. While the film played – all six hours of it, spread out over three nights – I was enthralled, stimulated, and even pushed to the brink, but now that I know the facts of the case, the film becomes a hollow exercise in manipulation, deception, and outright falsehood. I’ve been hoodwinked and bamboozled, ladies and gentlemen, and I feel like an utter fool. No, the film portrays an actual case (this is no mockumentary) with flesh and blood human beings occupying the frame, but instead of taking us through the intricacies of the event, the filmmaker instead operates from a position of contemptible bias; using his film to fulfill a sinister agenda, rather than shed light on an infamous murder trial.

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