Best of 2009: Film

Here’s the last of the best of lists. Just a quick note, I haven’t been able to see all the films I’d like to see, here’s some of the key gaps in my viewing: Antichrist, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orelans, A Single Man and a couple that didn’t make it over here, but will likely be part of next year’s list are Enter the Void and Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0.

10. Observe and Report - A dark slacker comedy riff on Taxi Driver, Observe and Report is a great journey into one ordinary man’s mad world. Seth Rogen does his most intense work yet, as a local flasher becomes the bane of his delusional existence. Considering the prominence of Rogen in Apatow’s work, this film is a great subversion of the lifestyle celebrated by countless slacker comedies. Not every slacker has a heart of gold, some are trapped in insanity, and this film conveys that in a really dynamic way. Plus, it’s got a great, fearless supporting performance from Anna Faris. Definitely an underrated film.

9. Up in the Air - Clooney is one of the last movie stars left in Hollywood. Like classic stars, think Gable or Grant, every character he plays exist somewhere within the spectrum of the core George Clooney persona. Up in the Air works as an examination of someone who thinks he has his life totally under control, think he has everything he wants, and realizes that maybe he doesn’t, and has to deal with that revelation. The film has some major flaws for me, notably a slightly off key tone in the Jason Bateman scenes, and overuse of voiceover, particularly at the beginning, but Clooney and Vera Farmiga are incredible together, and everything with them works great. The trip to Miami is one of the most fun sequences in any film this year, and I particularly love the way so much of what we expect is subverted by the film’s ending. This is a smart, satisfying character study, and a great exploration of one particular aspect of the Clooney character.

8. Funny People - This film carried the advance hype of being Apatow’s turn to drama, and in the end, yes, it is dramatic, but I don’t think significantly more so than Knocked Up. And like Knocked Up, this is a great story that’s topped with a lot of really funny jokes. The thing I love about this movie is the way that its lengthy running time means that it doesn’t fit neatly into a three act box. The characters’ lives sprawl across multiple stories, and though that can make the film feel disjointed, it gives it the lived in feel of a real world. It’s hard to predict things because the film doesn’t fit into a 90 minute comedy box, and that’s great. I hope Apatow doesn’t see the lukewarm reaction to this film as an incentive to dumb down. Keep telling emotionally true, funny stories.

7. The Limits of Control - The artiest film on the list, Control is my favorite Jarmusch to date. A total dedramatization of what could have been a traditional action plot, the film is a surreal journey through Spain, that has that distinctly Jarmusch slow paced dreaminess. I love the production design and Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is beautiful throughout. What really makes the film work is the confrontation with Bill Murray, and the haunting finale. The film is a hazy dream, and I think some mistook its stylishness for vapidity. There’s intelligence here, but even if there wasn’t, isn’t it nice to just get lost in this strange world for a bit?

6. Avatar - I could point to a hundred flaws in Avatar, I could point out to serious social and thematic issues, derivative plot points and cardboard characterization, but I choose to focus on what works about that film, on the dazzling visuals, the audacious and important thematic statements and most of all, the emotional rush you feel watching the film. It really does build a world and wrap you up in it in a way that few films before have. Cameron has pushed the boundaries on a technical level, and the dragons vs. helicopters closing fight scene is pure energy to watch. But, I also think there’s a strong philosophical and emotional core at the center of the story that’s impossible to ignore. I love that he has such a distinctive voice and watching a film like this reminds you just how good blockbuster cinema can be. There’s a reason that he’ll soon be the director of the two highest grossing films of all time.

5. Star Trek - While less ambitious than Avatar, Star Trek was equally spectacular and emotionally engaged. By maintaining a tight character focus, Abrams was able to craft a blockbuster that felt like a TV show, and I mean that as a good thing. He never got caught up in just showing random CG beasts, the goal was always to explore the way that events shaped the characters and to keep the crazy goings on anchored in emotional reality. That’s not to say there wasn’t great spectacle, the effects were fantastic, and the action scenes were tense and riveting. I’ll always have a soft spot for space action like this, and Star Trek ensures that the next generation will as well.



4. Where the Wild Things Are - As with many of the films on the list, WTWA has some flaws that prevent it from reaching all time greatness, but the heights that this one reaches are even higher than almost anything else this year. After the first half hour of the film, I was ready to call this Spike Jonze’s career best, the intense subjectivity and raw emotion of the real world segment is harrowing and does an incredible job of totally immersing us in Max’s view of the world. And, the first glimpse of the Wild Things is awe inspiring. The film’s issue is that it doesn’t always know where to go from there, and though the emotional issues raised at the top persist throughout, the film just isn’t as riveting as it was right out of the gate. That said, it’s good throughout, and ends on a really powerful note. It’s still a great film, just not as great as it could be.



3. Fantastic Mr. Fox - Another ostensibly kid targeted film from an acclaimed indie director, Mr. Fox feels in many ways like the most adult of any of his movies. It’s also one of the most fun. Visually, it’s like nothing I’ve seen before, with its utterly tactile animation, it’s entertaining just to watch the characters move, particularly during the interludes where they cut loose with dancing. But its not just spectacle, there’s real emotion that runs the gamut from melancholy to joy. And, as with Up in the Air, it’s an interesting exploration of the Clooney persona. His presence comes across in a way no celebrity voice in animation has before, and you get a real sense of performance. This film is a really cool world to visit with its own wacky flourishes, it’s everything I like about Anderson’s films in a snappy, exciting story.



2. Public Enemies - Michael Mann continues his work making esoteric, rambling art films within studio blockbuster structures. Returning to many of his core themes, he uses the visual language of Miami Vice to tell a story that makes the 30s feel real and vibrant, not like something out of a storybook. Depp and Cotillard have fantastic chemistry, and carry a sense of doomed abandon throughout. Dillinger knows he’ll die, but they hold on to the dream that somehow they can escape. The film’s most haunting moments are Dillinger’s death, staged like a film shoot, and ending in a flood of crowd and media, it’s the birth of law enforcement as spectacle. The emotional punch is then driven home in the devastating starkness of the final scene. Mann is turning back the clock, and acting like it’s the 70s, when intelligence and adult themes were mandatory in blockbuster cinema. Hopefully he’ll get to keep experimenting and exploring as a filmmaker. I can’t wait to see where he goes next.



1. Inglorious Basterds - All the preceding films were great, but nothing this year, or in the past five years, can come close to Inglorious Basterds. I’ve written about it extensively already, but I’ll stress just how exciting and suspenseful and virtuostic the film is. I’ve seen it three times and it’s still a rush every time. Tarantino puts on a masterclass in how to produce suspense, and skillfully pulls together several disparate plot strands into a perfect finale. I particularly love the seamless jumps between the goofy over the top violence of the Brad Pitt section and the very real emotion Shosanna experiences, and how the ending is able to meld the two modes so that the Basterds’ violence becomes our catharsis after the emotional climax of Shosanna’s story. No question, this is the best film of the year, and of the second half of the decade as a whole.

Avatar

Avatar was discussed before its release primarily in the context of it being a ‘game changer’ for 3-D and CG world construction, with very little discussion of the story itself. As I walked into the theater, I’d read some advance reviews, but wasn’t sure what to expect from the film. Leaving the theater, I knew I’d seen a film that was at times extremely powerful, but also didn’t quite work on all fronts. Let me address briefly first the technology outside of the context of the story itself, then delve into a more thorough discussion of the film as a whole.

I’ve never actually seen a regular 3-D film in the theater before this one, so I’m probably not the best to assess this film as a jump beyond what’s come before. What I will say is that the 3-D functions differently than in something like Disneyland’s Muppets 3-D, which is obviously not typical, but featured a 3-D that was largely about stuff sticking out the screen, but not really a use of 3-D as a storytelling device. In this film, the 3-D is used in a way analogous to depth of field in 2-D films, drawing your attention to certain elements within the frame by popping them out towards the audience.

For the first 15 minutes or so of the film, I was in awe of the way that the 3-D worked to subtly direct your attention to elements within the frame, and worked to build the world of the film. The spaceship environments seemed much more expansive and fully realized than anything I’ve seen before, specifically because of that use of 3-D. The subtlely of the effects work was most notable during simple shots like Jake waking up in zero gravity with several crew members floating around him.

As the film went on, you start to just accept the 3-D elements. I’m not sure if it was used less dynamically or if I just became accustomed to it, but as the film went on, the 3-D became less key to my understanding of the film. Perhaps that’s a sign that I became wrapped up in the story and stopped caring about the technical aspects, or it might be more that I started to focus on different technical aspects.

I’ve spoken recently about the idea that CG that is used to depict things that can never exist in real life is going to be inherently unbelievable because our minds aren’t awed by the impossibility, they instantly assume that it’s CG and write it off in that respect. But, at the same time, there are things that just can’t be realized by current technology, and some of the coolest aspects of this film were the fact that the Na’Vi weren’t just blue people, they were on a totally different scale than humans, and the shots where Na’Vi and humans interacted were some of the most surprising and exciting in the film.

Who’s to say that aliens are going to be 5-6 feet tall, aliens might have already landed and been so small we can’t even detect them, or an alien race could be so big, we can’t even comprehend it as a lifeform. Either way, it was very cool to see Jake wake up and find himself in a body that doesn’t just look different, but seems out of scale with the world around him. The Na’Vi are some of the most convincing alien creatures rendered via CGI yet.

But, the question is, are they convincing enough? In the best moments of the film, I got wrapped up in the story and didn’t worry that I was watching CG stuff, but I’m not sure that the CG was good enough to be timeless and enduring.

While the Na’Vi are pretty solid throughout, the environments are the real photorealistic spectacle. The planet feels fully realized and logical in a way that most constructed worlds don’t. And on a purely aesthetic level, I love the bioluminescent feel of the life on the planet.

But, what of the film in general? It’s clear from the start that this is very much a James Cameron film. Cameron is almost totally unique among major filmmakers in that he’s been able to develop a very specific set of thematic concerns and character archetypes within blockbuster big budget films, and has been consistently rewarded at the box office as well as critically for his work. Cameron is analogous to a Spielberg who never “grew out of” blockbusters, or a Lucas who continued to make new and different kinds of films.

This film has echoes of a lot of past Cameron films, and expands on the humanist warrior character types seen in Aliens and Terminator 2 in interesting ways. Both Aliens and Terminator 2 position strong mother types fighting to protect their children from an all encompassing, consuming inhuman threat. It was that disparity between the innocent spirit of the children they’re defending and the coldness of the threat that made it so emotionally affecting.

Here, Cameron flips the dynamic by making the Na’vi the most ‘human’ characters in the film, and stripping the human characters of virtually all sympathy. It creates a very binary morality, one that’s sharply critical of the military industrial complex and a populace that’s complicit in the sins of its leaders. It’s by no means a subtle critique of the Iraq war or American imperialism, but it’s effective precisely because it’s cased in such simple fairy tale terms. You could argue that the military characters are not at all subtle in their approach to the war, but was Bush nuanced in his fight to invade Iraq? Does Dick Cheney have a sympathetic side? Maybe, but it’s not in what you’d see on the job.

So, the film is essentially about a marine recognizing the failure of the military industrial complex and deciding to forsake it for a different approach to the world, to try and protect an unclaimed world from people out to exploit and destroy its paradisial environments. In that sense, it’s a very Malick film, connecting to elements from both The Thin Red Line and particularly The New World. You could argue that the entire film is Cameron’s riff on The New World, substituting the dreamy meanderings of that film for a variety of action feats, befitting Cameron’s own means of personal expression in his films. In a Cameron film, characters fight together as a means of showing their love, and it’s appropriate that Jake and Neytiri would find love as she shows him how to fight like a man.

Most Cameron females have a strange mix of mother and warrior attributes, and Neytiri is no exception. In educating Jake in the Na’vi ways, she is acting like a mother and teaching him how to walk in the world and be a man. But, there’s also the sexual component of their relationship, which is equally valid. In Cameron’s worldview, the role of nurturer and warrior are one and the same. To teach someone to fight is to teach them to live.

And yet, this film comes down decidedly against war. I suppose his idea here is that you need to be able to fight to maintain peace. Only by showing the warriors that you can beat them on their own terms can you succeed in gaining a lasting peace.

Where the film falters for me is the fact that a lot of the story beats within the tribe feel like things we’ve seen before. Cameron is great at making all the sequences pop and flow in dynamic ways, but the core story of the film contains few surprises, and is definitely something we’re all familiar with. While the world of the Na’vi is decidedly alien, the way they behave feels very typical of the way native people are depicted in films.

What I did find really interesting was the notion of the planet itself as a means of transferring information, the idea that our existence echoes in the Earth long after we’re gone. It’s not that far removed from Grant Morrison’s idea that because all life comes from the same source, it’s all connected and we’ve just forgotten that. If we could become connected in dynamic ways, we could potentially look back in time up the life tree to our ancestors, or transfer our consciousness through other life forms. And, in general I really like the religious feel the work had at times, it was a very spiritual film, and even though all those elements didn’t work, enough did to make an emotional impact.

The finale of the film was extremely effective. Thanks to the time spent within the society, the destruction of Hometree has a very real impact, and provides the emotional catalyst for our engagement in the final battle. People knock this film for drawing on classic story telling archetypes, but so many blockbusters today just pile action sequence on top of action sequence, it’s refreshing to have a buildup and impetus for emotional engagement with what’s happening.

And, the payoff was fantastic, on both a narrative and thematic level. It’s cool to see birds fighting helicopters, or to look at the giant blue guys throwing people around. Similarly, the final Jake/Neytiri vs. Quaritch fight was extremely satisfying. I also love small touches like the way that Trudy’s helicopter and face are painted with the tribal markings, giving her a Bat For Lashes look as she goes into battle.

But, the thing I loved most about the ending battle was the uncompromised nature of the fight. Rarely have I seen humans, particularly those clearly identified as analogues of Americans get killed as we cheer. Virtually every film about the Iraq war or 9/11 to date has been so neutered and apolitical that it becomes amoral. The Iraq war was a terrible violation of human rights, and this film treats it that way. It takes the remove of genre to allow someone to finally vent the rage about what our nation has become. People can say that Giovanni Ribisi’s character is a cartoon villain, but if that’s the case, why are people like him controlling the health care debate? Why are banks getting all the money they want with no regulation? The individuals may not be as obnoxious as he is, but as an analogue of the military industrial complex, he’s spot on.

It’s cathartic to see the adventuresome, greedy American military get its comeuppance, and I think there’s something very subversive about putting that message in a blockbuster film designed to target the widest audience. Kids will see this film, and the morality will help shape their perception of what’s right and wrong, and instill a spirit of defiance against the terrible things our government has done, and continues to do. This isn’t just a Bush/Cheney problem, it’s a problem that persists today as we prepare to send more troops to Afghanistan in the hopes that will make them love us and not want to attack us anymore.

This is one of the few socially responsible films that really addresses the issues of post 9/11 America. Some of the comments might have been a bit on the nose, but with issues like this, maybe it’s best to remind people that this isn’t just a movie, we’re doing this in reality. That the most expensive movie ever made is an attack on corporate largesse may be ironic, but it’s an example of what Cameron is able to do as an auteur.

It’s also interesting to consider the film in light of what Lucas did with Revenge of the Sith. Both films struggle with some basic competency issues and could have used another script pass, but I also like that they’re both Trojan Horse critiques of the Bush administration. Sith in particular is underappreciated as a film that attacked the grievous sins our government committed. With filmmakers so scared of making a film that’s ‘anti-military’ or ‘un-American,’ the sci-fi blockbuster has become a place to voice those feelings in a way that’s not as loaded as setting them in the present day.

So, ultimately one’s point of view on the film comes down to what you focus on. I could just as easily savage the film for its very real flaws and ignore what worked, or praise it unjustly for what did work. The truth of the film is somewhere in the middle, but in general I’m very positive about it. It was a great viewing experience, and though I don’t know that it’s totally cohesive or timeless, I was wowed and emotionally engaged throughout, and left with plenty to think about. That’s what a film should do.

Aliens

Yesterday I watched the movie Aliens for the first time. I saw the original a couple of years ago, and I liked it, but I wasn't a huge fan. However, this semester I'm taking a course on action films, and Aliens came up a bunch of times, so I figured I needed to see it and it was most impressive.

I'm usually not that big a fan of action movies, most of the stuff I've seen in class I've liked, but not loved. A film like Die Hard is undeniably entertaining, but it doesn't really go beyond that. However, Aliens went way beyond just being entertaining, it was one of the best action films I've ever seen.

I think there's a big difference between an action film and a film with action. Oldboy has a lot of action, but I wouldn't consider it an action movie, because the action comes out of the plot, rather than the plot coming out of the action. In Die Hard, the entire film is designed to give you action sequences, whereas Oldboy happens to have some action sequences, but the film could exist without them. Without the action sequences, Aliens would have no second half, because at about the halfway point of the film, it goes into an extended series of action sequences that last for the whole rest of the film.

The first half of the movie is good, it succinctly sets up the situation and follows up what happened in the original. It's also admirable that the film has such long buildup. There's no opening action sequence, and no real action until halfway through the movie. This allows for good setup of characters, and also creates more suspense, so that by the time they reach the planet, you really are wondering, what's up here, and when are we finally going to see some aliens. But, during the first half I was never bored, and that's what makes the film so effective. In an action film, the longer you can go without an action sequence, while still keeping the audience's attention, the better, because it will make each action sequence more rewarding.

Looking at this film, when they finally do open fire on an alien, it's so satisfying because we've been waiting for it for so long. A similar sequence would be in Return of the Jedi, where Luke, The Emperor and Darth Vader spend so much time talking, it's incredibly satisfying when Luke finally gets his lightsaber and begins to fight. If this whole movie had been them killing aliens, you wouldn't have this satisfaction, the thrill comes solely from the buildup.

That's one of the main problems I have with the Michael Bay style of editing, where everything in an action sequence is cut incredibly quick. In an action sequence, fast editing has its virtues, and Wong Kar-Wai used it to great effect in Ashes of Time, but if you want to make a film that will involve audience emotions in the action sequence, you need long shots to build things up. I would say there's a difference between spectacle driven action and emotion driven action. If you use really fast editing, you can make cool looking scenes, like in Blade II, but you're not going to involve the audience emotionally, and thus, you leave the audience to just admire the surface, and not go deeper. The quick cutting can be a spectacle in and of itself, but slower shots are absoultely essential to both involving the audience and allowing the visual to really sink in.

The whole second half of the film is one of the most engaging action sequences I've seen, and it is not just because the action stuff is so cool, but rather because of the character relationships that have been developed. Cameron does an amazing job of maintaining tension for a really long time, and even with the fact that he barely shows the aliens.

Looking at this film in the context of Cameron's ouevre, you can see clear connections with Terminator 2. If that flim was a treatment on fatherhood, this one would be about motherhood. I think this film has a deeper, more realistic parent-child relationship, largely because Sigourney Weaver is a much better actress than Arnold, and also because this film doesn't have as many comedy elements. Terminator 2 is a great movie, but it has a certain level of ridiculousness that the film is always aware of, and this film doesn't have that, which makes for a more intense, satisfying viewing experience.

A lot of the times, I view film in an analytical way, looking for layers and subtext, but in the case of this film, it's all about the emotional involvement. When Ripley goes back to look for Newt, you are willing her on, despertately hoping that she will find her. If you are looking for analytical content in the film, it would come in the discussion of motherhood, particularly the duel between Ripley and the Queen on the ship at the end. That sequence was amazing, and there's so much tension as you watch her shove the queen out into space, while Bishop is holding onto Newt. Just the images in that sequence are so great.

So, this is a film that just owns. You watch it and are completely absorbed into another world, which is what movies are all about. Is it perfect? No, but it's a top notch film experience.