Most of the comment traffic that I've received so far on this project has been off-forum, and a lot of that has been to suggest movies that haven't yet (and now, of course, probably won't) make the list. So I'd like to take this opportunity to invite anyone interested to submit to me a write-up of their favorite film or films.
If you think you'd like to do one or more reviews for this project, I would suggest that you e-mail them to me with the subject line "MOVIE REVIEW," and the review typed directly into the body of the e-mail (for obvious reasons I will demur on opening any attachments). Don't worry about hypertext linking to the trailer, I'll take care of that part -- as well as reserving the right to exercise some editorial oversight for content, tone, length, and readability. ...Which is to say, you might look forward to having a seven-sentence paragraph turned into a one-sentence paragraph with thirty-eight commas in it? I'll try to control myself.
Submissions should run between three and ten short paragraphs, opening with a few general words about what made the film so important to you, followed by a middle section reserved for plot synposis (easy on the spoilers, if you please), and concluding with some discussion of the larger creative choices -- cinematography, set design, directorial oversight, soundtrack -- that had to work in order for the film to work. Sign the bottom of the e-mail with the exact by-line that you would like to appear here, regardless of whether that is also your name, also your blogger-ID, etc., and be sure to indicate if you've cross-posted the review to your own blog, so that I can link to it.
I don't know if anyone will take me up on it, and I don't promise to run every review submitted by every person who does, but it's fun to imagine this becomming a far more interactive discussion than it has been so far, along our way to the Key Grip's choices of the ten greatest movies he's yet seen. At the very least, maybe other peoples' discussions of their favorite movies will introduce me to some new titles to try for myself.
I'll be watchin' for 'em.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Monday, June 8, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
The 100 Greatest Movies (Part Eleven: Films 11-15)
As mentioned at the conclusion of the last installment, we've entered special territory with these last remaining spaces, in that no film to be discussed from now until the project's conclusion will have escaped at least momentary status as a candidate for my number-one favorite film of all -- a realization made especially poignant for this particular installment, seeing as how the five films described below will find themselves on the wrong side of the "top ten" cutoff. Of course the whole rush of excitement -- and whatever gleeful controversy might yet be kindled -- from an exercise like this one, comes from the messy and ultimately impossible business of sorting these precious jewels into something not unlike an absolute hierarchy. We can't all be first. And so, numbered as usual, here are The Key Grip's choices of the eleventh- through fifteenth finest of his first 2,000 critically watched films.
15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). I was planning to start this entry by saying something sympathetic about how unusually challenging it would've been for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to pick the Best Picture of 2000, what with all the astonishingly superlative movies that came out in that single, charmed year. ...And then I remembered that the film they did pick was Gladiator, and suddenly I didn't feel so sorry for them anymore. Meanwhile, Ang Lee's only film to make our list at all finds itself nursing a fourteen-spaces-from-the-top nosebleed, and all is well with at least this tiny little corner of the film-evaluative universe.
Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh are Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, lifelong colleagues near the end of their useful careers as sword-wielding protectors of Governor Yu, administrator to one of the Qing Dynasty's largest and western-most districts, and himself the proud keeper of the "Green Destiny," a sword of unusual prowess and almost mythical cache in the eyes of his subjects. When the sword is stolen and Li Mu Bai's kung fu master is killed by minions of the infamous Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei), Li and Yu Shu Lien must strike out into the breathtaking west-China landscape to avenge the murder and recover the sword.
Explained that way, this could be just about any martial arts picture of the past thirty-five years -- let's say, for the sake of argument, oh, half of Quentin Tarrantino's beta-tape collection, altogther. But the thrillingly remarkable thing about Crouching Tiger is that these tried-and-true elements of Asian martial arts cinema form the mere jumping-off point (literally?) for a plot so much richer in both complexity and empathy as to leave the unsuspecting viewer feeling all but intentionally misdirected.
The beating heart of the film (and of the book from which it was adapted) is the cleverly inventive conflict faced by Yu Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai in their dealings with the young and impetuous would-be courtesan, Jen Yu -- a comely young femme who at various turns should be their protege, their sweetly adored proto-daughter, their quarry in a high-stakes pursuit for truth and justice, their mortal enemy, and their only real vessel for confessing the honesty of their own feelings for each other, and who yet eludes any, and all, of these nice neat boxes into which they repeatedly try to fit her and her exasperating exploits. Jen Yu, it happens, may or may not actually have stolen the sword, herself, and may or may not be intending its possession as her calling-card to throw off the oppressively malevolent tutelage of Jade Fox, under whom she's been secretly and semi-willingly a pupil ever since her forced separation from a mongol lover who'd stolen her heart after taking her hostage as a teenager when the Governor's court was crossing the high desert.
Over the next two hours the three kung fu warriors, Yu Shu Lien, Li Mu Bai, and Jen Yu, will pause between sessions of the breathtaking swordsmanship and (physically impossible but somehow instantly credible nonetheless) aerial martial arts displays, to ruminate over a galaxy of complex moral and existential dilemmas, from the consequences of admitting a forbidden love, to the perils of choosing the wrong mentor, to the very nature and point of close, unconditional friendship--ultimately disarming even the most cynically dis-believing martial arts rejectionist among us, in favor of the simple immersion in the universally enthralling characters and their could-happen-to-anybody problems.
Ang Lee's direction is typically conscious of tone and composition, inspiring his actors to explore the depths of their own capacities for subtle turns of attitude, over a more clamped-down, this-happened-then-this-happened interpretation of the somewhat different-feeling book by Du Lu Wang (adapted for the screen by Hui Ling Wang). The cinematography is lush and epic without seeming turgid, the high-China triptych is worth the price of the rental alone, the wire-work is instantly (if unexpectedly) believable, and the mostly cello-led score, composed by Tan Dun and played with just the sort of arresting virtuosity one might expect from Yo Yo Ma, fills every spare corner of its own space in the picture without once intruding on anyone else's.
It's been said that there are really only a very small handful of "stories" in the world: The getting-home story (Das Boot, O Brother Where Art Thou, Apollo-13, Saving Private Ryan), the learn-to-love-before-you-miss-it story (Good Will Hunting, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Amelie, Punch Drunk Love), the proving-one's-self-to-one's-self story (Rocky, The Verdict, Scent of a Woman, gosh, even Silence of the Lambs), but frankly I know of no other single picture that dares to tackle this at-once ubiquitous and yet so prickly question of what, exactly, one does when one's affection for a young and roguish colleague is placed in direct conflict with one's duty to serve the larger good. Many of us have been there, our unflinching desire to see the younger colleague prosper as we have before them -- an impulse perhaps reflective of a certain measure of ego-tainted superiority on our own parts but sincere and well-intentioned nonetheless -- brought into stark and hand-wrung relief by that young colleague's impetuous insistence on his or her own set of rules and principals. But to set out to write a book, or make a movie, about this idea is little short of unique as far as I know. And this is to say nothing of the exquisitely delicate and understated portrait of Li Mu Bai's and Yu Shu Lien's exquisitely delicate and understated love, for each other.
That all of this dense and fallow material can be crafted to fit into a two-hour container, together with the classic martial arts storyline of a stolen sword and the vengeance with which it must be sought out and returned, is the sort of accomplishment that few other filmmakers have ever seriously dared, and no one else has pulled off, ever. The kung fu, the sword wielding, and the impeccably choreographed many-against-one set pieces are, of course, vastly superior both in ambition and polish to anything that's ever been attempted in a martial arts picture before, and it does the movie no disservice to comment on these elements for the peerless standard-bearers that they are. But the shame of the thing is the expectation that so many of my friends have brought to the picture: that all they'll be watching is a bunch of people in flowing white robes, floating impossibly amid the thin ends of building-sized bamboo chutes and kicking each other. For this reason it's been another of those tough sells, to get friends and family to sit still for this one. The loss is theirs. Indeed I've been imagining many feedback scenarios once this entire project is complete, but the very first one I heard inside my head, before I uploaded the first installment, was of someone logging-in to say, "How could you put Crouching Tiger anywhere other than number one?" Tough question to answer, in the end: It may well be the single greatest motion picture ever made.
14. Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993). When last we paid a call on the "three colors trilogy" of Krzysztof Kieslowski, it was to discuss Rouge -- the film whose theme was to be that of "fraternite," or brotherhood. At the time I hinted that Kieslowski's take on each of the three themes of the French tricolor would be importantly askance, but it is only here, with Bleu ("liberte"), that we may appreciate the full effect of his genius eccentricity with respect to interpreting the mottoes associated with each color.
Juliette Binoche is Julie Vignon, the young and jet-set-gorgeous wife of a symphonic composer who has been commissioned to write a work commemorating the unification of Europe, to be played in fourteen simultaneous locations, in fourteen countries, on the occasion of the ratification of the Maastrict Treaty. But before Julie's husband can conduct a single note of the performance he and their daughter are killed in -- and Julie herself barely survives -- an unusually empty and pointless car crash, leaving Julie independently wealthy and without any particular desire to move forward with her own life. "And what is it that you will do?" an apartment agent asks her in his office, when she presents herself in search of a quiet flat somewhere in Montpelier. "Nothing," she replies, simply. Then there is an understandably pregnant and awkward pause, before the agent adds, "Absolutely nothing?" "Absolutely nothing," replies Julie, just as simply as before.
In a premise that might remind readers of the story of Fin McBride in The Station Agent, Julie's attempts to seclude herself behind a wall of inactivity are met with higher-than-expected levels of pushback from the social fabric that surrounds her. By turns she finds herself confronted by a tabloid journalist who accuses her of having secretly written all of her husband's works, a former colleague of her husband's who confesses his own long-standing sexual obsession with her, a downstairs neighbor whom the tenant association wishes to throw out on grounds of rampant promiscuity, a mother in the late stages of dementia, a secret lover of her late husband, even a family of mice living in the closet.
Naturally Julie's dismay at all of these uninvited intrusions into her would-be hermit existence is nothing short of palpable, but the unforced brilliance of the film is that she also stands rock-like against every unexpected turn, dispatching each item on this improbable checklist with a dexterity born of equal measures' cold pragmatism and devil-may-care denial -- just as we might expect of a smart young woman who had a bright and drippingly self-confident future, and who'd suddenly lost it all, in real life. She makes significant gifts to improbable recipients, dismisses other peoples' concerns for her and her state-of-mind, and, throughout, speaks in the staccato bluntness of someone who's not likely to be worrying about cultural propriety any time soon.
Of course life may not leave her up there in that fifth-floor apartment to stew in her own solitude, either -- even as she pulls-out ever larger and larger stops to try to ensure her privacy -- but herein lies what surely must be the point of our director's otherwise inexplicably down-beat choices in characterizing what we all think of the virtuous ideal of liberty:
To make a movie about freedom, it would seem, Kieslowski endeavored to define exactly what that would mean, down to the specifics (in my mind's eye this might even been done with pen and paper), beginning quite obviously with a protagonist who would never have to worry about money, and to that extent there would be no reason not to envy her. But when Kieslowski looked down and saw how much blank space would be left on the page below that simple fact, the question must quickly have gotten a lot messier.
To be truly free, of course, a person must be free from concern -- free from family to worry over, free from anxiety about the future, free from the consequences of, well, really anything whatsoever. And the only way to be that free, of course, is to have none of the comforts we associate with a happy, well-adjusted adult life. "You want freedom?" our maestro director seems to be saying. "Well, then, here: Slow down, there’s no traffic behind you; take a good, hard look."
13. Gerry (2002). Our second minimalist picture in a row is the final entry for director Gus Van Sant, and without question one of the most controversial movies to make this list, anywhere on it from top to bottom. Make no mistake, this is a movie that is ruthlessly, nay venomously despised by whole ranks of mostly considered movie aficionados, and not without their own type of justification -- for during no less than eighty percent of this feature-length picture there is, to a first approximation, nothing happening on the screen whatsoever.
Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (the two of whom co-wrote the screenplay with Gus Van Sant) play two lifelong friends, both named "Gerry." Almost from the very outset we are let in on the fact that they use the name as an affectionate verb for having just messed something up in an avoidable, usually painfully absent-minded way. "I thought you'd Gerry'd the rendezvous," one of them might say to the other, or "I was going to bring you that, but it turned into a total Gerry."
The brilliance of this deft little piece of characterization cannot be overstated, for it is with this one implied inside-joke that we in the audience understand a universe worth of backstory -- all double-ordered deliveries of pizza, empty-handed party arrivals, and forlorn waiting in airport gate lobbies for the friend who's waiting equally dolefully at the rental-car counter. At the film's outset we see them driving a battered old Mercedes (unquestionably Van Sant's favorite mode of transportation; there are no fewer than six of them in the three movies discussed in this list), to a scenic nature trail somewhere in the dry and sagey intermountain west, perhaps the Wasatch.
They park the car and get out, strolling amiably along the trail and talking about such walked-in-on-the-middle fare as one Gerry's astonishment at the inability of a Wheel of Fortune contestant to solve the puzzle, and the other's recent performance in a role-playing computer game. This amiable but rudderless banter continues for several long (and semi-famously improvised) minutes -- at one point Damon even stops to have a pee against a fallen log, with no directive from the script: he just had to go -- after which the two decide that the best thing for a pair of well-established mistake makers to do, in a wilderness preserve in the middle of the high desert, is to get off the path and take a short-cut. After which... well... after which either nothing happens, or everything happens, depending on whom you ask.
Van Sant has said on many occasions that he drew his inspiration for this and many of his other contemporary works (including Elephant) at least in part from the high guru of post-modern minimalist cinema, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr (Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People), and it certainly shows. Never one to have fashioned pictures whose narratives hurried us along, Van Sant in his later years has evolved into a sort of mainstream-Hollywood equivalent of the European avant-garde movement, with achingly long takes, a total absence of foley sound, and virtually no plot-points with which to crutch the holding of our interest.
The gasp-inducingly gorgeous landscape is framed to maestro perfection by cinematographer Harris Savides, reaching deep within the highest play-it-as-it-lies traditions of his craft, the fickle light and weather serving as a droning reminder that these two young men -- boys, really -- are into this matter far deeper over their heads than they are capable or willing to admit. Meanwhile Arvo Part sweetens the broth just that little bit with a hauntingly beautiful and appropriately reductive score, both in its complexity and its playing-time. Indeed most of the film consists entirely of uncircumscribed production sound, with no musical accompaniment and, more to the point, nary a line of spoken dialogue.
This is what we notice most palpably, at least after having found ourselves already deeply frustrated by compounded errors in decision-making (some of them obvious to us even before-the-fact): It's not bad enough that these things have happened, now we must endure the force-multiplying agony of the two Gerrys' collective unwillingness to rationally de-construct or for that matter even really acknowledge their predicament. It is not true that Gerry and Gerry do not speak during their long and increasingly harrowing trek across the wilderness; they just don't talk about -- at least in anything like a macro-constructive fashion -- the only thing they should.
Most people will not have the resolve or the desire to sit still for the lengths of time necessary for, or be willing to feel so un-entertained by, the taking of what is supposed to be a work of entertainment, and in consequence very few among us may connect on anything like a profound level with this mysteriously intoxicating and eerily terrifying film. Indeed most people will give up on it long before its startling (and yet thoroughly genuine and un-gimmicky) conclusion. But that's too bad, for it is somewhere in all the deep rough of all that internet piffle about whether Van Sant, Damon and Affleck were playing some sort of elaborate joke on the motion picture industry (they weren't), where the flawless diamond that is this picture truly lies. There is no magic punch-line to the question of what this movie is about; there is no "about." There never is, at least in the real world. Things happen. Old friends go to wilderness-preserves to hike trails together, stop to have a pee, and opt for short-cuts.
As any of my friends will surely tell you, I’ve never been one to pass at the opportunity for self-inflating pomposity about much of anything. “You talk around the house as if you were constantly being interviewed for a PBS documentary,” is how one former girlfriend put it, in words that have yet to be improved upon. But in this one matter I’ll have to insist, snickering eye-rolls be damned: Anyone who watches this movie with me will be asked to commit in advance to doing so in total, goose-bumped silence. Thanks to the peerless efforts of all involved, we’re out there with Damon and Afleck as they pull their Total Gerry—and the only way the experience can be appreciated, is to give one’s self to it totally: To. Be. Out. There. With. Them.
12. City of God (2002). The first time I looked up the running-time on this picture on IMDB and found it listed there as two hours and ten minutes, I didn't believe that it could possibly have been that short—but that's a compliment to this sprawling multi-narrative about the desperate lives of a group of young men growing up in the deepest slums of Rio. Indeed I can think of no higher compliment to pay this epic-of-the-first-order film, adapted by Braulio Mantovani from the novel of the same name by Paulo Lins and directed by Fernando Mierelles. How Mierelles could have managed to immerse his audience in the tales of so many disparate characters, so completely and so sympathetically, and not rush anything or leave any threads twisting in the credits, all in just a few heartbeats over two hours, struck me the first time I watched it as such an unfathomable triumph that I had to put the disc back in the tray and fast-forward through the last scene to check the counter for myself.
Alexandre Rodrigues is "Rocket," the undeniable early-teen protagonist in this dozen-character effort (all of whom are played, as is Mierelles’ custom, by people cast directly from the streets of Rio). Indeed it is Rocket’s abiding dream of becoming a newspaper photographer that makes the picture, serving as it does as a saccharine-free substitute for his allegoric (if obvious) wider dream of escaping the ‘hood to a grown-up life that is clean and well-adjusted and happily middle-class. As we follow Rocket through a childhood fraught with third-person violence, petty crime, desperate choices, unrequited love, and eventually a terror-stricken gambit to flee, our journey crosses paths all but incidentally—just as it would in the crowded barrio of the title—with a host of far shadier and far more comfortably underground figures, some as young as Rocket; some, disturbingly, much younger.
By far the most shamelessly menacing and by that measure charismatic of Rocket's multitude of antagonists and would-be friends is Li’l Ze, a childhood companion whose preferred coping mechanism for the stranded choices before them at that younger age was to commit a stunningly pointless set of crimes—even by grown-up standards—thus setting himself on the path of becoming the barrio’s most hardened and cheerfully homicidal drug dealer, and the self-proclaimed boss of all the nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. Then there is Carrot, Li’l Ze’s counterpart, who wears his good-guy-of-the-neighborhood boss routine for as long as Li’l Ze will let him keep up the artifice by holding his own malevolence in check to avert a war.
Keeping the two of them separated is the assumed task of Benny, an improbably gawky redhead who walks and talks and dresses like a bourgeois kid from the suburbs, but who manages just enough pot-smoked edge, at just the right moments and in just the right places, to steal Rocket’s girl as an incidental trophy along the path of asserting himself as a trusted confidant and peacemaker between the bosses. As long as Benny is alive, Carrot and his rival manage to coexist in an uneasy truce out of shared respect for their common friend—with Rocket, still visibly smarting at Benny’s assertion of his primal entitlement to the object of Rocket’s love, swallowing his resentments and lobbying Benny for the chance to catch the competing gangs in action for a scoop photograph that could garner some professional notice for him at the city’s biggest daily newspaper (where he works, during this time, as a mere delivery boy).
There is also Knockout Ned, who earned his moniker with a small-time boxing career, but who when we meet him for the first time is a ticket-taker on a bus line. After Benny is accidentally killed and the gloves come off between Li’l Ze and Carrot, Li’l Ze takes a shine to Knockout Ned’s fiancée and humiliates Ned in front of her, then comes back to commit even more ghastly wrongs against Ned and his family, after which Ned transforms himself before our very eyes from a straight-laced voice of reason, into the self-appointed consigliare of Carrot’s suddenly and brutally violent gang.
And yet with all of this going crash all around us, our point-of-view keeps stubbornly returning to the tale of unprepossessing little Rocket, snapping photographs with his battered, second-hand camera, and ducking around corners to escape the line of sight of his erstwhile friend and now cold-blooded enemy Li’l Ze. In a lesson for all of us, Rocket checks his ego at the door of the newspaper in order to patiently, methodically cultivate relationships with the people he most wishes to emulate—fulfilling arrestingly mundane errands for them, right there on screen, while Carrot and Li’l Ze and Knockout Ned and the rest of the neighborhood rabble are cheerfully trying every trick they can think of to see each other brutally murdered.
But Mierelles isn’t satisfied with the Herculean parameters of the tone-poem he has thus far set for himself; quite the contrary—all that has gone before is merely the substrate upon which he plans to grow his most affecting social comment of all. For, it transpires, Rocket’s big break at the paper comes in the form of a single, stolen snapshot of Li’l Ze and his gang in the red-handed act of committing the singularly most brutal of all their myriad crimes, and thence paying-off the police to keep from answering for it.
The warning-shot being fired across our bows could not be harder to miss if it were painted on a bed sheet and hung out a neighborhood window: People don’t make it out of the barrios of Rio, we are intended to worry to ourselves right along with the palpably distressed Rocket, who realizes what he's done only after his snapshot turns up above the fold of the newspaper’s front page. No, we think to ourselves, people almost make it out of the barrios of Rio. And then, at that precise moment, they must be taken down by those who wish such happier endings for no one.
That the fourth and most complex act of this enormous film may- or may not fulfill our deepest sinking sensations about poor Rocket’s innocent dream of escaping his unhappy surroundings, and that we don’t know which it is to be until the movie’s final, stunningly unexpected moments, is the sort of takeaway after which it will be very difficult for new arrivals to this picture to suspend disbelief enough for clearing the flaws of any other film, from any genre, for quite a good long while, afterward.
11. Cast Away (2000). "Please tell me that your number-one favorite movie of all time isn't going to be something starring Tom Hanks," a friend of mine recently pleaded. To which I say, okay, I won't: My number-eleven favorite movie of all time will do nicely.
Pardon my redundancy, but it really does surprise and puzzle me that people manage to bring so much bile to their opinions of Mr. Hanks and his work. There is no one as versatile, no one as instantly sympathetic, no one who can act as well without acting at all, anywhere in Hollywood, as Tom Hanks. “How did you do the near-brawl scene in the space capsule for Apollo-13?” a young interviewer once asked him, to which he replied, “What do you mean? The line was, ‘We’re not going to go bouncing off the walls for ten minutes because we’ll just end up right back here with the same problems,’ so that’s what I said.” Except, of course, that if you and I had read the line, it would’ve sounded like someone reading a line, and when he said it, he was at that moment Jim Lovell, desperately tying to hold-together his warring crew, telegraphing to us the unmistakable reality that their descent into squabble would signal the end of the emergency’s survivability, right then and there.
This time Hanks capitalizes on his thicker-than-water friendship with Robert Zemeckis to pursue what ends up having been a personal fascination of his and a promise to himself of very long standing. “Bob,” he asked Zemeckis in an out-of-the-blue telephone call in the late 1990s, “what would it really be like to be stranded, completely alone, on a deserted island? I mean, what would it really be like?” “That’s a good question,” Zemeckis replied, “let’s find out, and make a movie about it.”
Hanks is Chuck Noland, a relentlessly type-A business go-getter who lives and eats and breathes his job as a systems’ integration manager for Federal Express. Tasked with the (believably specific) job of turning around any of FedEx’s foreign transit hubs, whenever and wherever they start to slip, Noland spends his life six weeks at a time, in places as different from each other and as far from his home in Memphis as Rio, Moscow, and Kuala Lumpur. He’s blunt, he’s curt, he’s obsessed with making things easier and more profitable for his employer, and at the film’s outset he’s forty pounds overweight. Not a fiber is out of place, in other words, in this instant backstory of an IBM-meets-Genghis-Khan corporate swashbuckler—despite the fact that Hanks is playing against both type and inherent personality to an extent that most other leading actors would scarcely consider trying.
Meanwhile Helen Hunt is Noland’s love interest Kelly Frears (her last name chosen as a conscious hat-tip to admiring well-wisher Stephen Frears, who at one point even offered to put some of his own money into the making of the picture). Kelly, it transpires, is a nearly finished Ph.D. student at the University of Memphis, staring at a future that seems at a crossroads and, in consequence, finding herself gun-shy about committing to a man who has given so much to the obviously primary love of his life, FedEx. When Noland asks Frears to marry him, she responds, simply and poignantly, “I’m terrified.” Fair enough, thinks Noland, who tells her to keep the un-opened ring box until he can return to her for New Year’s Eve. “I’ll be right back,” he calls over his shoulder, as if in afterthought, on his way to the plane.
And even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know what happens next: The FedEx plane aboard which Noland is hitching his ride to Malaysia ditches in the tractless mid-Pacific, hundreds of miles off-course after having deviated around a thunderstorm (and no, by the way, I won’t make any references to current events here, out of respect). The next morning Noland awakens, still in an escape raft, to discover that he has washed up on an island with no visible neighbors, no signs of human life, no fresh water and no obvious food source. All he has, at least at first, are his wits and his unflappable determination to work all of this out.
Escape proves impossible, thanks to a surf-boiling reef that encircles the island, whereby the risk of further injury at the hands of an impulsive mistake is communicated to the audience in a single scene at once imminently predictable and edge-of-the-arm-rest terrifying, at the same time. Everything—from the unseeing ship that passes along the horizon, to the mud-choked puddle from which he must drink at one especially low moment, everything about the situation—seems to be a conscious head-thump by the Gods Of The Fully Appreciated Present. Indeed, as if there wasn’t already enough pathos surrounding this karmically gotcha’ed middle manager, it turns out that he also has an abscessed tooth--its own nasty infection quietly festering into a soon-to-be-unbearable knot on the side of his jaw, perhaps the size of a gumball.
In due course, Noland surmounts the myriad challenges he faces—recurring and otherwise—to forge for himself something not unlike a routine, though it is of course a routine born of the precise opposite of all that has governed his existence to this point: a world without clocks, paychecks, beepers or bosses. A world, in other words, without any of the manufactured (and ultimately hollow) forms of validation with which Noland has been comfortably avoiding his relationships up to now.
I won’t tell you how long he spends out there on that island, but suffice it to say that it is not a short while; indeed it is long enough that, after a brilliantly handled transition, we see the “after” picture of him, bearded and sun-browned and, we notice with an involuntary startle, shockingly under-weight. The filmmakers, it transpires, shot the first half of the film with Hanks having intentionally put on a significant spare tire, then adjourned from the project for eighteen months (during which Zemeckis was making What Lies Beneath), while Hanks went on what must have been a life-shorteningly dangerous crash diet—the second of his career in service of a film role, after Philadelphia. And to think: there are still people who will roll their eyes if you try to say something good about the guy.
Quite aside from the masterful dispensation of any number of fascinating logistical considerations (How does one store fresh water, even when it rains? Where’s the food coming from? What of dentistry?), Noland’s gradual descent into deeper and deeper levels of acceptance of his situation is the brilliantly painted and easily missed thrust of the middle hour of the film—a transition emphasized by his insistence, at the beginning of his ordeal, on “sorting” the few FedEx parcels that have washed up on the island with him, to a self-steeled, bit-lip determination to open them and make some use of their contents, later on.
As for the packages themselves, it happens that the filmmakers sat around a table and brainstormed a list of the most self-evidently useless things a person could possibly find inside them, forwarding the resulting inventory to a survivalist training firm in Colorado—which in turn managed to cobble together the very uses for them that we in the audience then witness Noland gradually figuring out for himself. Every item in every package was written into something useful on the counsel of the survivalists after having been chosen for its uselessness. With one notable exception, that is.
The most famous package-content is, of course, the volleyball Noland inadvertently paints in his own blood and, finding the image of a face in the resulting stain, befriends as his surrogate for a conversation partner—the ubiquitous “Wilson” of all those countless parodies that have been made since nearly the literal moment of the film's release. This was not the junior-writers’ idea, but rather what just might be the happiest and most consequential accident of serendipity in Hollywood history: The head writer for the project, William Broyles Jr., was actually enrolled in a survival school on the Mexican beach for five days, for the purposes of getting the true feel of the thing--eventually finding himself befriending and talking to a discarded volleyball that had washed up on the beach near his improvised shelter.
Had this not happened, Cast Away might yet have turned out to be a supurlative film—might even have made the list of the top-100--but surely would not have announced itself as the almost indescribably letter-perfect accomplishment it turned into, since it is this budding relationship (never mind the quote-marks; it really is a relationship) between Noland and Wilson, that propels the back half of his terrible imprisonment on that island, culminating with a climactic moment on the high seas that will leave even the most macho and pathos-wary filmgoer a blubbering gob of jelly. You don’t have my permission to cry, at that particular moment in this particular film: You have my solemn imperative to do so.
Zemeckis, too, is the right man in the right place and time to make this picture work—knowing without having to be told (by his long-time friend with the original idea) that this is a picture in which the lighter the directorial hand, the more believable the moment. “Camera’s gonna be on sticks,” Hanks once parodied Zemeckis for having said, meaning that there would be no cutesy hand-held bullshit or clever split-screens or any other devices that work so well in pictures for which an otherwise unbelievable situation needs them in order to be believed. Instead everything that exists in this film is in service of making this situation so matter-of-fact believable that we cannot help but believe it: The cinematography captures both the arresting beauty and inescapably imprisoning vibe of that nondescript little island (it’s actually part of an island in Fiji, with the rest having been CG’d away), and the clean lines of Chuck’s situation there on the beach are, even at the time, a palpable juxtapose with the messy entanglements to which he is trying against all reasonable hope, to return. Even the score doesn’t come in until the picture is over half finished.
Still, I am obliged to mention one other thing that needed to happen the way it did for this film to surmount so many other worthy projects and claim such a high slot: The company for whom Chuck Noland had unknowingly given away so much of his life had to be the real-life FedEx, with its real-life planes, its real-life color scheme, its real-life job titles, its real-life hub in Memphis. The premise would still have worked if Chuck had been employed by First Amalgamated Global Shipping (except perhaps for the logo on the airplane tails?), but at all events it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well. …And what, exactly, did FedEx require, in return for total use of the company images and logos and unconditional access to its Tennessee headquarters? Nothing. No creative control, no financial commitment, no product-placement. Absolutely nothing. “I’m sure you’ll take good care of us,” real-life CEO Fred Smith told Zemeckis, even before he was informed that space was being reserved for him for a brief (and appropriately wooden) speaking part in the film.
I am pleased to own exactly one article of movie memorabilia (this seems just the right amount for an avid lover of movies who wishes not to bury himself and his net worth under a litter-pile of Hollywood flotsam) and I am even more pleased that this one, single article of film memorabilia happens to be a copy of the shooting script for Cast Away, autographed by both Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt. Does that mean that this particular choice of potential number-one film, should have been assigned the status of number one? Perhaps. But something tells me that Hanks and Hunt and Zemeckis will forgive me, on account of the sheer weight of my enjoyment of, and fascination with this picture. Ten other movies will score higher slots, but no movie in my entire collection has been watched more often, or shown to a wider assortment of friends.
Oh, and by the way: BEST. TRAILER. EVER. PERIOD.
And so to the top ten movies in my film portfolio. It's a bittersweet moment—considerably more so than I'd expected it would be—since from this moment forward, none of the other films we've discussed, including these five, will own such unqualified status. Forgive me if that sounds overwrought, but it won't be as easy as you might think for me to publish a next entry in this column that says, in effect, "The Lives of Others is not one of the top-ten movies of all time." Because it is, of course: They all are. That's what makes this whole exercise so difficult and so stimulating.
Stay tuned…
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15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). I was planning to start this entry by saying something sympathetic about how unusually challenging it would've been for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to pick the Best Picture of 2000, what with all the astonishingly superlative movies that came out in that single, charmed year. ...And then I remembered that the film they did pick was Gladiator, and suddenly I didn't feel so sorry for them anymore. Meanwhile, Ang Lee's only film to make our list at all finds itself nursing a fourteen-spaces-from-the-top nosebleed, and all is well with at least this tiny little corner of the film-evaluative universe.
Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh are Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, lifelong colleagues near the end of their useful careers as sword-wielding protectors of Governor Yu, administrator to one of the Qing Dynasty's largest and western-most districts, and himself the proud keeper of the "Green Destiny," a sword of unusual prowess and almost mythical cache in the eyes of his subjects. When the sword is stolen and Li Mu Bai's kung fu master is killed by minions of the infamous Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei), Li and Yu Shu Lien must strike out into the breathtaking west-China landscape to avenge the murder and recover the sword.
Explained that way, this could be just about any martial arts picture of the past thirty-five years -- let's say, for the sake of argument, oh, half of Quentin Tarrantino's beta-tape collection, altogther. But the thrillingly remarkable thing about Crouching Tiger is that these tried-and-true elements of Asian martial arts cinema form the mere jumping-off point (literally?) for a plot so much richer in both complexity and empathy as to leave the unsuspecting viewer feeling all but intentionally misdirected.
The beating heart of the film (and of the book from which it was adapted) is the cleverly inventive conflict faced by Yu Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai in their dealings with the young and impetuous would-be courtesan, Jen Yu -- a comely young femme who at various turns should be their protege, their sweetly adored proto-daughter, their quarry in a high-stakes pursuit for truth and justice, their mortal enemy, and their only real vessel for confessing the honesty of their own feelings for each other, and who yet eludes any, and all, of these nice neat boxes into which they repeatedly try to fit her and her exasperating exploits. Jen Yu, it happens, may or may not actually have stolen the sword, herself, and may or may not be intending its possession as her calling-card to throw off the oppressively malevolent tutelage of Jade Fox, under whom she's been secretly and semi-willingly a pupil ever since her forced separation from a mongol lover who'd stolen her heart after taking her hostage as a teenager when the Governor's court was crossing the high desert.
Over the next two hours the three kung fu warriors, Yu Shu Lien, Li Mu Bai, and Jen Yu, will pause between sessions of the breathtaking swordsmanship and (physically impossible but somehow instantly credible nonetheless) aerial martial arts displays, to ruminate over a galaxy of complex moral and existential dilemmas, from the consequences of admitting a forbidden love, to the perils of choosing the wrong mentor, to the very nature and point of close, unconditional friendship--ultimately disarming even the most cynically dis-believing martial arts rejectionist among us, in favor of the simple immersion in the universally enthralling characters and their could-happen-to-anybody problems.
Ang Lee's direction is typically conscious of tone and composition, inspiring his actors to explore the depths of their own capacities for subtle turns of attitude, over a more clamped-down, this-happened-then-this-happened interpretation of the somewhat different-feeling book by Du Lu Wang (adapted for the screen by Hui Ling Wang). The cinematography is lush and epic without seeming turgid, the high-China triptych is worth the price of the rental alone, the wire-work is instantly (if unexpectedly) believable, and the mostly cello-led score, composed by Tan Dun and played with just the sort of arresting virtuosity one might expect from Yo Yo Ma, fills every spare corner of its own space in the picture without once intruding on anyone else's.
It's been said that there are really only a very small handful of "stories" in the world: The getting-home story (Das Boot, O Brother Where Art Thou, Apollo-13, Saving Private Ryan), the learn-to-love-before-you-miss-it story (Good Will Hunting, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Amelie, Punch Drunk Love), the proving-one's-self-to-one's-self story (Rocky, The Verdict, Scent of a Woman, gosh, even Silence of the Lambs), but frankly I know of no other single picture that dares to tackle this at-once ubiquitous and yet so prickly question of what, exactly, one does when one's affection for a young and roguish colleague is placed in direct conflict with one's duty to serve the larger good. Many of us have been there, our unflinching desire to see the younger colleague prosper as we have before them -- an impulse perhaps reflective of a certain measure of ego-tainted superiority on our own parts but sincere and well-intentioned nonetheless -- brought into stark and hand-wrung relief by that young colleague's impetuous insistence on his or her own set of rules and principals. But to set out to write a book, or make a movie, about this idea is little short of unique as far as I know. And this is to say nothing of the exquisitely delicate and understated portrait of Li Mu Bai's and Yu Shu Lien's exquisitely delicate and understated love, for each other.
That all of this dense and fallow material can be crafted to fit into a two-hour container, together with the classic martial arts storyline of a stolen sword and the vengeance with which it must be sought out and returned, is the sort of accomplishment that few other filmmakers have ever seriously dared, and no one else has pulled off, ever. The kung fu, the sword wielding, and the impeccably choreographed many-against-one set pieces are, of course, vastly superior both in ambition and polish to anything that's ever been attempted in a martial arts picture before, and it does the movie no disservice to comment on these elements for the peerless standard-bearers that they are. But the shame of the thing is the expectation that so many of my friends have brought to the picture: that all they'll be watching is a bunch of people in flowing white robes, floating impossibly amid the thin ends of building-sized bamboo chutes and kicking each other. For this reason it's been another of those tough sells, to get friends and family to sit still for this one. The loss is theirs. Indeed I've been imagining many feedback scenarios once this entire project is complete, but the very first one I heard inside my head, before I uploaded the first installment, was of someone logging-in to say, "How could you put Crouching Tiger anywhere other than number one?" Tough question to answer, in the end: It may well be the single greatest motion picture ever made.
14. Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993). When last we paid a call on the "three colors trilogy" of Krzysztof Kieslowski, it was to discuss Rouge -- the film whose theme was to be that of "fraternite," or brotherhood. At the time I hinted that Kieslowski's take on each of the three themes of the French tricolor would be importantly askance, but it is only here, with Bleu ("liberte"), that we may appreciate the full effect of his genius eccentricity with respect to interpreting the mottoes associated with each color.
Juliette Binoche is Julie Vignon, the young and jet-set-gorgeous wife of a symphonic composer who has been commissioned to write a work commemorating the unification of Europe, to be played in fourteen simultaneous locations, in fourteen countries, on the occasion of the ratification of the Maastrict Treaty. But before Julie's husband can conduct a single note of the performance he and their daughter are killed in -- and Julie herself barely survives -- an unusually empty and pointless car crash, leaving Julie independently wealthy and without any particular desire to move forward with her own life. "And what is it that you will do?" an apartment agent asks her in his office, when she presents herself in search of a quiet flat somewhere in Montpelier. "Nothing," she replies, simply. Then there is an understandably pregnant and awkward pause, before the agent adds, "Absolutely nothing?" "Absolutely nothing," replies Julie, just as simply as before.
In a premise that might remind readers of the story of Fin McBride in The Station Agent, Julie's attempts to seclude herself behind a wall of inactivity are met with higher-than-expected levels of pushback from the social fabric that surrounds her. By turns she finds herself confronted by a tabloid journalist who accuses her of having secretly written all of her husband's works, a former colleague of her husband's who confesses his own long-standing sexual obsession with her, a downstairs neighbor whom the tenant association wishes to throw out on grounds of rampant promiscuity, a mother in the late stages of dementia, a secret lover of her late husband, even a family of mice living in the closet.
Naturally Julie's dismay at all of these uninvited intrusions into her would-be hermit existence is nothing short of palpable, but the unforced brilliance of the film is that she also stands rock-like against every unexpected turn, dispatching each item on this improbable checklist with a dexterity born of equal measures' cold pragmatism and devil-may-care denial -- just as we might expect of a smart young woman who had a bright and drippingly self-confident future, and who'd suddenly lost it all, in real life. She makes significant gifts to improbable recipients, dismisses other peoples' concerns for her and her state-of-mind, and, throughout, speaks in the staccato bluntness of someone who's not likely to be worrying about cultural propriety any time soon.
Of course life may not leave her up there in that fifth-floor apartment to stew in her own solitude, either -- even as she pulls-out ever larger and larger stops to try to ensure her privacy -- but herein lies what surely must be the point of our director's otherwise inexplicably down-beat choices in characterizing what we all think of the virtuous ideal of liberty:
To make a movie about freedom, it would seem, Kieslowski endeavored to define exactly what that would mean, down to the specifics (in my mind's eye this might even been done with pen and paper), beginning quite obviously with a protagonist who would never have to worry about money, and to that extent there would be no reason not to envy her. But when Kieslowski looked down and saw how much blank space would be left on the page below that simple fact, the question must quickly have gotten a lot messier.
To be truly free, of course, a person must be free from concern -- free from family to worry over, free from anxiety about the future, free from the consequences of, well, really anything whatsoever. And the only way to be that free, of course, is to have none of the comforts we associate with a happy, well-adjusted adult life. "You want freedom?" our maestro director seems to be saying. "Well, then, here: Slow down, there’s no traffic behind you; take a good, hard look."
13. Gerry (2002). Our second minimalist picture in a row is the final entry for director Gus Van Sant, and without question one of the most controversial movies to make this list, anywhere on it from top to bottom. Make no mistake, this is a movie that is ruthlessly, nay venomously despised by whole ranks of mostly considered movie aficionados, and not without their own type of justification -- for during no less than eighty percent of this feature-length picture there is, to a first approximation, nothing happening on the screen whatsoever.
Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (the two of whom co-wrote the screenplay with Gus Van Sant) play two lifelong friends, both named "Gerry." Almost from the very outset we are let in on the fact that they use the name as an affectionate verb for having just messed something up in an avoidable, usually painfully absent-minded way. "I thought you'd Gerry'd the rendezvous," one of them might say to the other, or "I was going to bring you that, but it turned into a total Gerry."
The brilliance of this deft little piece of characterization cannot be overstated, for it is with this one implied inside-joke that we in the audience understand a universe worth of backstory -- all double-ordered deliveries of pizza, empty-handed party arrivals, and forlorn waiting in airport gate lobbies for the friend who's waiting equally dolefully at the rental-car counter. At the film's outset we see them driving a battered old Mercedes (unquestionably Van Sant's favorite mode of transportation; there are no fewer than six of them in the three movies discussed in this list), to a scenic nature trail somewhere in the dry and sagey intermountain west, perhaps the Wasatch.
They park the car and get out, strolling amiably along the trail and talking about such walked-in-on-the-middle fare as one Gerry's astonishment at the inability of a Wheel of Fortune contestant to solve the puzzle, and the other's recent performance in a role-playing computer game. This amiable but rudderless banter continues for several long (and semi-famously improvised) minutes -- at one point Damon even stops to have a pee against a fallen log, with no directive from the script: he just had to go -- after which the two decide that the best thing for a pair of well-established mistake makers to do, in a wilderness preserve in the middle of the high desert, is to get off the path and take a short-cut. After which... well... after which either nothing happens, or everything happens, depending on whom you ask.
Van Sant has said on many occasions that he drew his inspiration for this and many of his other contemporary works (including Elephant) at least in part from the high guru of post-modern minimalist cinema, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr (Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People), and it certainly shows. Never one to have fashioned pictures whose narratives hurried us along, Van Sant in his later years has evolved into a sort of mainstream-Hollywood equivalent of the European avant-garde movement, with achingly long takes, a total absence of foley sound, and virtually no plot-points with which to crutch the holding of our interest.
The gasp-inducingly gorgeous landscape is framed to maestro perfection by cinematographer Harris Savides, reaching deep within the highest play-it-as-it-lies traditions of his craft, the fickle light and weather serving as a droning reminder that these two young men -- boys, really -- are into this matter far deeper over their heads than they are capable or willing to admit. Meanwhile Arvo Part sweetens the broth just that little bit with a hauntingly beautiful and appropriately reductive score, both in its complexity and its playing-time. Indeed most of the film consists entirely of uncircumscribed production sound, with no musical accompaniment and, more to the point, nary a line of spoken dialogue.
This is what we notice most palpably, at least after having found ourselves already deeply frustrated by compounded errors in decision-making (some of them obvious to us even before-the-fact): It's not bad enough that these things have happened, now we must endure the force-multiplying agony of the two Gerrys' collective unwillingness to rationally de-construct or for that matter even really acknowledge their predicament. It is not true that Gerry and Gerry do not speak during their long and increasingly harrowing trek across the wilderness; they just don't talk about -- at least in anything like a macro-constructive fashion -- the only thing they should.
Most people will not have the resolve or the desire to sit still for the lengths of time necessary for, or be willing to feel so un-entertained by, the taking of what is supposed to be a work of entertainment, and in consequence very few among us may connect on anything like a profound level with this mysteriously intoxicating and eerily terrifying film. Indeed most people will give up on it long before its startling (and yet thoroughly genuine and un-gimmicky) conclusion. But that's too bad, for it is somewhere in all the deep rough of all that internet piffle about whether Van Sant, Damon and Affleck were playing some sort of elaborate joke on the motion picture industry (they weren't), where the flawless diamond that is this picture truly lies. There is no magic punch-line to the question of what this movie is about; there is no "about." There never is, at least in the real world. Things happen. Old friends go to wilderness-preserves to hike trails together, stop to have a pee, and opt for short-cuts.
As any of my friends will surely tell you, I’ve never been one to pass at the opportunity for self-inflating pomposity about much of anything. “You talk around the house as if you were constantly being interviewed for a PBS documentary,” is how one former girlfriend put it, in words that have yet to be improved upon. But in this one matter I’ll have to insist, snickering eye-rolls be damned: Anyone who watches this movie with me will be asked to commit in advance to doing so in total, goose-bumped silence. Thanks to the peerless efforts of all involved, we’re out there with Damon and Afleck as they pull their Total Gerry—and the only way the experience can be appreciated, is to give one’s self to it totally: To. Be. Out. There. With. Them.
12. City of God (2002). The first time I looked up the running-time on this picture on IMDB and found it listed there as two hours and ten minutes, I didn't believe that it could possibly have been that short—but that's a compliment to this sprawling multi-narrative about the desperate lives of a group of young men growing up in the deepest slums of Rio. Indeed I can think of no higher compliment to pay this epic-of-the-first-order film, adapted by Braulio Mantovani from the novel of the same name by Paulo Lins and directed by Fernando Mierelles. How Mierelles could have managed to immerse his audience in the tales of so many disparate characters, so completely and so sympathetically, and not rush anything or leave any threads twisting in the credits, all in just a few heartbeats over two hours, struck me the first time I watched it as such an unfathomable triumph that I had to put the disc back in the tray and fast-forward through the last scene to check the counter for myself.
Alexandre Rodrigues is "Rocket," the undeniable early-teen protagonist in this dozen-character effort (all of whom are played, as is Mierelles’ custom, by people cast directly from the streets of Rio). Indeed it is Rocket’s abiding dream of becoming a newspaper photographer that makes the picture, serving as it does as a saccharine-free substitute for his allegoric (if obvious) wider dream of escaping the ‘hood to a grown-up life that is clean and well-adjusted and happily middle-class. As we follow Rocket through a childhood fraught with third-person violence, petty crime, desperate choices, unrequited love, and eventually a terror-stricken gambit to flee, our journey crosses paths all but incidentally—just as it would in the crowded barrio of the title—with a host of far shadier and far more comfortably underground figures, some as young as Rocket; some, disturbingly, much younger.
By far the most shamelessly menacing and by that measure charismatic of Rocket's multitude of antagonists and would-be friends is Li’l Ze, a childhood companion whose preferred coping mechanism for the stranded choices before them at that younger age was to commit a stunningly pointless set of crimes—even by grown-up standards—thus setting himself on the path of becoming the barrio’s most hardened and cheerfully homicidal drug dealer, and the self-proclaimed boss of all the nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. Then there is Carrot, Li’l Ze’s counterpart, who wears his good-guy-of-the-neighborhood boss routine for as long as Li’l Ze will let him keep up the artifice by holding his own malevolence in check to avert a war.
Keeping the two of them separated is the assumed task of Benny, an improbably gawky redhead who walks and talks and dresses like a bourgeois kid from the suburbs, but who manages just enough pot-smoked edge, at just the right moments and in just the right places, to steal Rocket’s girl as an incidental trophy along the path of asserting himself as a trusted confidant and peacemaker between the bosses. As long as Benny is alive, Carrot and his rival manage to coexist in an uneasy truce out of shared respect for their common friend—with Rocket, still visibly smarting at Benny’s assertion of his primal entitlement to the object of Rocket’s love, swallowing his resentments and lobbying Benny for the chance to catch the competing gangs in action for a scoop photograph that could garner some professional notice for him at the city’s biggest daily newspaper (where he works, during this time, as a mere delivery boy).
There is also Knockout Ned, who earned his moniker with a small-time boxing career, but who when we meet him for the first time is a ticket-taker on a bus line. After Benny is accidentally killed and the gloves come off between Li’l Ze and Carrot, Li’l Ze takes a shine to Knockout Ned’s fiancée and humiliates Ned in front of her, then comes back to commit even more ghastly wrongs against Ned and his family, after which Ned transforms himself before our very eyes from a straight-laced voice of reason, into the self-appointed consigliare of Carrot’s suddenly and brutally violent gang.
And yet with all of this going crash all around us, our point-of-view keeps stubbornly returning to the tale of unprepossessing little Rocket, snapping photographs with his battered, second-hand camera, and ducking around corners to escape the line of sight of his erstwhile friend and now cold-blooded enemy Li’l Ze. In a lesson for all of us, Rocket checks his ego at the door of the newspaper in order to patiently, methodically cultivate relationships with the people he most wishes to emulate—fulfilling arrestingly mundane errands for them, right there on screen, while Carrot and Li’l Ze and Knockout Ned and the rest of the neighborhood rabble are cheerfully trying every trick they can think of to see each other brutally murdered.
But Mierelles isn’t satisfied with the Herculean parameters of the tone-poem he has thus far set for himself; quite the contrary—all that has gone before is merely the substrate upon which he plans to grow his most affecting social comment of all. For, it transpires, Rocket’s big break at the paper comes in the form of a single, stolen snapshot of Li’l Ze and his gang in the red-handed act of committing the singularly most brutal of all their myriad crimes, and thence paying-off the police to keep from answering for it.
The warning-shot being fired across our bows could not be harder to miss if it were painted on a bed sheet and hung out a neighborhood window: People don’t make it out of the barrios of Rio, we are intended to worry to ourselves right along with the palpably distressed Rocket, who realizes what he's done only after his snapshot turns up above the fold of the newspaper’s front page. No, we think to ourselves, people almost make it out of the barrios of Rio. And then, at that precise moment, they must be taken down by those who wish such happier endings for no one.
That the fourth and most complex act of this enormous film may- or may not fulfill our deepest sinking sensations about poor Rocket’s innocent dream of escaping his unhappy surroundings, and that we don’t know which it is to be until the movie’s final, stunningly unexpected moments, is the sort of takeaway after which it will be very difficult for new arrivals to this picture to suspend disbelief enough for clearing the flaws of any other film, from any genre, for quite a good long while, afterward.
11. Cast Away (2000). "Please tell me that your number-one favorite movie of all time isn't going to be something starring Tom Hanks," a friend of mine recently pleaded. To which I say, okay, I won't: My number-eleven favorite movie of all time will do nicely.
Pardon my redundancy, but it really does surprise and puzzle me that people manage to bring so much bile to their opinions of Mr. Hanks and his work. There is no one as versatile, no one as instantly sympathetic, no one who can act as well without acting at all, anywhere in Hollywood, as Tom Hanks. “How did you do the near-brawl scene in the space capsule for Apollo-13?” a young interviewer once asked him, to which he replied, “What do you mean? The line was, ‘We’re not going to go bouncing off the walls for ten minutes because we’ll just end up right back here with the same problems,’ so that’s what I said.” Except, of course, that if you and I had read the line, it would’ve sounded like someone reading a line, and when he said it, he was at that moment Jim Lovell, desperately tying to hold-together his warring crew, telegraphing to us the unmistakable reality that their descent into squabble would signal the end of the emergency’s survivability, right then and there.
This time Hanks capitalizes on his thicker-than-water friendship with Robert Zemeckis to pursue what ends up having been a personal fascination of his and a promise to himself of very long standing. “Bob,” he asked Zemeckis in an out-of-the-blue telephone call in the late 1990s, “what would it really be like to be stranded, completely alone, on a deserted island? I mean, what would it really be like?” “That’s a good question,” Zemeckis replied, “let’s find out, and make a movie about it.”
Hanks is Chuck Noland, a relentlessly type-A business go-getter who lives and eats and breathes his job as a systems’ integration manager for Federal Express. Tasked with the (believably specific) job of turning around any of FedEx’s foreign transit hubs, whenever and wherever they start to slip, Noland spends his life six weeks at a time, in places as different from each other and as far from his home in Memphis as Rio, Moscow, and Kuala Lumpur. He’s blunt, he’s curt, he’s obsessed with making things easier and more profitable for his employer, and at the film’s outset he’s forty pounds overweight. Not a fiber is out of place, in other words, in this instant backstory of an IBM-meets-Genghis-Khan corporate swashbuckler—despite the fact that Hanks is playing against both type and inherent personality to an extent that most other leading actors would scarcely consider trying.
Meanwhile Helen Hunt is Noland’s love interest Kelly Frears (her last name chosen as a conscious hat-tip to admiring well-wisher Stephen Frears, who at one point even offered to put some of his own money into the making of the picture). Kelly, it transpires, is a nearly finished Ph.D. student at the University of Memphis, staring at a future that seems at a crossroads and, in consequence, finding herself gun-shy about committing to a man who has given so much to the obviously primary love of his life, FedEx. When Noland asks Frears to marry him, she responds, simply and poignantly, “I’m terrified.” Fair enough, thinks Noland, who tells her to keep the un-opened ring box until he can return to her for New Year’s Eve. “I’ll be right back,” he calls over his shoulder, as if in afterthought, on his way to the plane.
And even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know what happens next: The FedEx plane aboard which Noland is hitching his ride to Malaysia ditches in the tractless mid-Pacific, hundreds of miles off-course after having deviated around a thunderstorm (and no, by the way, I won’t make any references to current events here, out of respect). The next morning Noland awakens, still in an escape raft, to discover that he has washed up on an island with no visible neighbors, no signs of human life, no fresh water and no obvious food source. All he has, at least at first, are his wits and his unflappable determination to work all of this out.
Escape proves impossible, thanks to a surf-boiling reef that encircles the island, whereby the risk of further injury at the hands of an impulsive mistake is communicated to the audience in a single scene at once imminently predictable and edge-of-the-arm-rest terrifying, at the same time. Everything—from the unseeing ship that passes along the horizon, to the mud-choked puddle from which he must drink at one especially low moment, everything about the situation—seems to be a conscious head-thump by the Gods Of The Fully Appreciated Present. Indeed, as if there wasn’t already enough pathos surrounding this karmically gotcha’ed middle manager, it turns out that he also has an abscessed tooth--its own nasty infection quietly festering into a soon-to-be-unbearable knot on the side of his jaw, perhaps the size of a gumball.
In due course, Noland surmounts the myriad challenges he faces—recurring and otherwise—to forge for himself something not unlike a routine, though it is of course a routine born of the precise opposite of all that has governed his existence to this point: a world without clocks, paychecks, beepers or bosses. A world, in other words, without any of the manufactured (and ultimately hollow) forms of validation with which Noland has been comfortably avoiding his relationships up to now.
I won’t tell you how long he spends out there on that island, but suffice it to say that it is not a short while; indeed it is long enough that, after a brilliantly handled transition, we see the “after” picture of him, bearded and sun-browned and, we notice with an involuntary startle, shockingly under-weight. The filmmakers, it transpires, shot the first half of the film with Hanks having intentionally put on a significant spare tire, then adjourned from the project for eighteen months (during which Zemeckis was making What Lies Beneath), while Hanks went on what must have been a life-shorteningly dangerous crash diet—the second of his career in service of a film role, after Philadelphia. And to think: there are still people who will roll their eyes if you try to say something good about the guy.
Quite aside from the masterful dispensation of any number of fascinating logistical considerations (How does one store fresh water, even when it rains? Where’s the food coming from? What of dentistry?), Noland’s gradual descent into deeper and deeper levels of acceptance of his situation is the brilliantly painted and easily missed thrust of the middle hour of the film—a transition emphasized by his insistence, at the beginning of his ordeal, on “sorting” the few FedEx parcels that have washed up on the island with him, to a self-steeled, bit-lip determination to open them and make some use of their contents, later on.
As for the packages themselves, it happens that the filmmakers sat around a table and brainstormed a list of the most self-evidently useless things a person could possibly find inside them, forwarding the resulting inventory to a survivalist training firm in Colorado—which in turn managed to cobble together the very uses for them that we in the audience then witness Noland gradually figuring out for himself. Every item in every package was written into something useful on the counsel of the survivalists after having been chosen for its uselessness. With one notable exception, that is.
The most famous package-content is, of course, the volleyball Noland inadvertently paints in his own blood and, finding the image of a face in the resulting stain, befriends as his surrogate for a conversation partner—the ubiquitous “Wilson” of all those countless parodies that have been made since nearly the literal moment of the film's release. This was not the junior-writers’ idea, but rather what just might be the happiest and most consequential accident of serendipity in Hollywood history: The head writer for the project, William Broyles Jr., was actually enrolled in a survival school on the Mexican beach for five days, for the purposes of getting the true feel of the thing--eventually finding himself befriending and talking to a discarded volleyball that had washed up on the beach near his improvised shelter.
Had this not happened, Cast Away might yet have turned out to be a supurlative film—might even have made the list of the top-100--but surely would not have announced itself as the almost indescribably letter-perfect accomplishment it turned into, since it is this budding relationship (never mind the quote-marks; it really is a relationship) between Noland and Wilson, that propels the back half of his terrible imprisonment on that island, culminating with a climactic moment on the high seas that will leave even the most macho and pathos-wary filmgoer a blubbering gob of jelly. You don’t have my permission to cry, at that particular moment in this particular film: You have my solemn imperative to do so.
Zemeckis, too, is the right man in the right place and time to make this picture work—knowing without having to be told (by his long-time friend with the original idea) that this is a picture in which the lighter the directorial hand, the more believable the moment. “Camera’s gonna be on sticks,” Hanks once parodied Zemeckis for having said, meaning that there would be no cutesy hand-held bullshit or clever split-screens or any other devices that work so well in pictures for which an otherwise unbelievable situation needs them in order to be believed. Instead everything that exists in this film is in service of making this situation so matter-of-fact believable that we cannot help but believe it: The cinematography captures both the arresting beauty and inescapably imprisoning vibe of that nondescript little island (it’s actually part of an island in Fiji, with the rest having been CG’d away), and the clean lines of Chuck’s situation there on the beach are, even at the time, a palpable juxtapose with the messy entanglements to which he is trying against all reasonable hope, to return. Even the score doesn’t come in until the picture is over half finished.
Still, I am obliged to mention one other thing that needed to happen the way it did for this film to surmount so many other worthy projects and claim such a high slot: The company for whom Chuck Noland had unknowingly given away so much of his life had to be the real-life FedEx, with its real-life planes, its real-life color scheme, its real-life job titles, its real-life hub in Memphis. The premise would still have worked if Chuck had been employed by First Amalgamated Global Shipping (except perhaps for the logo on the airplane tails?), but at all events it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well. …And what, exactly, did FedEx require, in return for total use of the company images and logos and unconditional access to its Tennessee headquarters? Nothing. No creative control, no financial commitment, no product-placement. Absolutely nothing. “I’m sure you’ll take good care of us,” real-life CEO Fred Smith told Zemeckis, even before he was informed that space was being reserved for him for a brief (and appropriately wooden) speaking part in the film.
I am pleased to own exactly one article of movie memorabilia (this seems just the right amount for an avid lover of movies who wishes not to bury himself and his net worth under a litter-pile of Hollywood flotsam) and I am even more pleased that this one, single article of film memorabilia happens to be a copy of the shooting script for Cast Away, autographed by both Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt. Does that mean that this particular choice of potential number-one film, should have been assigned the status of number one? Perhaps. But something tells me that Hanks and Hunt and Zemeckis will forgive me, on account of the sheer weight of my enjoyment of, and fascination with this picture. Ten other movies will score higher slots, but no movie in my entire collection has been watched more often, or shown to a wider assortment of friends.
Oh, and by the way: BEST. TRAILER. EVER. PERIOD.
And so to the top ten movies in my film portfolio. It's a bittersweet moment—considerably more so than I'd expected it would be—since from this moment forward, none of the other films we've discussed, including these five, will own such unqualified status. Forgive me if that sounds overwrought, but it won't be as easy as you might think for me to publish a next entry in this column that says, in effect, "The Lives of Others is not one of the top-ten movies of all time." Because it is, of course: They all are. That's what makes this whole exercise so difficult and so stimulating.
Stay tuned…
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Monday, June 1, 2009
The 100 Greatest Movies (Part Ten: Films 16-20)
Our job eighty-percent complete, the “fun part” stands before us now, with the chronicling of The Key Grip’s twenty favorite movies. Let’s not waste any more time getting started.
20. Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), (1964). Movies that contain a single iconic image or monologue have an unfair burden in the competition for new audiences, in that many people who haven’t seen the movie have seen the image or the monologue and filled their own movie in around it, complete with their own expectations about what the rest of the film is going to be like. This is bad enough when the iconic image is so consistent with the rest of the picture that people feel they don’t “have” to see it anymore (which see, Alien), but the real trouble begins—people really start short-changing themselves—when the durable takeaway from the film is wholly non-representative of the rest of the picture.
Such is the case with Slim Pickens’ unforgettable, unintentional, un-regretted, but entirely out-of-context ride aboard a recently-dropped nuclear bomb near the conclusion Dr. Strangelove—a vignette parodied so many times that, upon recently showing the original to an erstwhile girlfriend of mine, she suggested that the filmmakers were copying someone else. And friends, neighbors, well-wishers, if you hear me say nothing else in these pages, hear me say this: The rest of this movie is nothing like that image, whatsoever.
Adapter-director Stanley Kubrick (yet another supreme talent whose achievements will be scandalously under-represented in this list, if only by a factor of one other movie for which there just wasn’t quite enough room) channels the best inspirations of some of the finest directors to precede him for this hilarious social commentary on the absurdity of the Cold War. From Fritz Lang to Truffaut, Kubrick salts appropriately obscure nods to some of the best choices for characterization and framing at his disposal, borrowing mad scientist Rotwang from Lang’s Metropolis, and the notion of the unseen, through-the-window gunfire from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player--together with countless other examples that have established this picture as a favored re-watch among students of the medium and avid amateur film-buffs alike. “There was a period of three months where I heard Dr. Strangelove dialogue form the moment I woke up until I went to bed at night,” commented Vera Anderson, first wife of the late Z-Channel programmer Jerry Harvey, during her interview discussing Harvey for Xan Cassavetes’ documentary about the station.
Ultimately a character-piece (despite all superficial appearances to the contrary), Dr. Strangelove tells the unnervingly credible story of an Air Force base at which the Colonel in charge, Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has slipped quietly into madness and, in consequence, ordered a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by his almost-too-late-to-recall bombers, led by Maj. T.J. “King” Kong (Pickens). When word of the rogue makes its way to the darkest basement lair of Washington (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!”), the job of breaking the news falls to Joint Chiefs representative Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). ...But for the small problem, that is, that Turgidson is finding himself distressingly torn about whether or not the government should bother trying to recall the bombers, anyway.
In just one of the astounding statements that he made over his tragically shortened career, Peter Sellers grabs this movie by the throat and bashes it against every wall in the room with his coolly resolute fulfillment of three completely separate parts—with performances so distinct in character, mood and accent that the same former girlfriend of mine refused to believe that they were all the same actor until I proved it to her on IMDB.
We meet him for the first time in the personage of Ripper’s NATO observer Lionel Mandrake, desperately trying to coax the recall codes from his nutty C.O., while army soldiers outside the building are trying with equal desperation to kill the both of them and take the base. Not long after, when Turgidson can finally hang up from the incessant phone calls of his bored and lonely secretary for long enough to sort-out his briefing, the President to whom he delivers it, Presdient Merkin Muffly, turns out to be Sellers again—this time finding himself haplessly mired in an impossible telephone conversation of his own with the Soviet Premiere, who is drunk on the other end and oscillating wildly between not comprehending or believing what he’s being told, and accusing Muffly of having been discourteous with him.
When Kong and his crew are nearly shot-down by a Soviet air defense missile and their recall radio is shorted-out in the process, the grim reality of the situation prompts those in attendance in the War Room to begin marshaling their resources to prepare for the worst. It is then that we encounter Sellers in his last and greatest role—the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist of the title, a man whose fixation on the subsequent breeding behavior of those few humans who might survive the conflagration serves as a fitting red ribbon on the arabesque appetites and unfathomable character defects of these people in whom all of our lives have been (and remain, incidentally) continually entrusted.
This is, in the end, the simple genius of Kubrick’s adaptation of Peter George’s book (called Red Alert). To make the film’s message digestible for a fatalistically desensitized, post-Cuban-missile-crisis audience, he had to sneak up on them with the gravity of the situation—and to sneak up on them, he chose consciously to mold the very straight original text into an absurdist comedy in which people behaved in ways so wacky and incomprehensible that the grim horror of what just might happen could hide from our cynicism in plain view. Oh and one more thing: As comedies go, it's very difficult to conjure as successful an example of its genre--in that on top of everything else, it's actually funny.
19. Yi Yi (A One and a Two), (2000). Director Edward Yang returns to familiar subject matter in a far more accessible and linear style than his earlier, cult favorite A Brighter Summer Day, this time following three generations of an extended family living in Taipei—from a nearly undermined wedding at the movie’s outset, through the lives and times of a galaxy of delicately interrelated characters with quiet crises all their own. This is a long and contentedly patient work, with characters’ inner conflicts not so much on display as peeking out from around window-curtains, ranging over issues as familiar as infidelity and the nature of love, at one extreme, to those as unfamiliar as whether a shadowy and self-made businessman should be trusted to rescue one’s faltering dreams of commercial success, at the other. And despite the fact that Yang will indulge in nearly three hours’ worth of exposed film canisters along the way, at the conclusion of the experience there doesn’t seem to have been a single gratuitous or disposable moment.
Choosing non-professional acting talent as is his custom, Yang inspires writer-director in his own right Wu Nien to crackle with the credibility of untrained inspiration as N.J., the conscience-conflicted third partner in a struggling computer company that hopes to tie its fortunes to a wealthy and unscrupulous Japanese computer-game tycoon. While sorting his mixed emotions about the impending deal in Tokyo, N.J. takes up a brief re-initiation of a relationship he had (and unilaterally dissolved for no obvious reason), thirty years earlier. Meanwhile the woman to whom N.J. has been married this whole time, herself emotionally damaged and unsettlingly needy, is in his absence barely holding-down an extended household consisting of N.J.’s perpetually hazed son, sexually adventurous and self-despising daughter, loan-shark-indebted brother-in-law, comatose mother, and piano-playing and possibly abused next-door-neighbor.
The quiet with which the desperation of all these many figures plays out is only part of Yang’s genius; the other part is his playful and yet somehow seamless shifts in narrative point-of-view, from long vignettes of N.J.’s son becoming increasingly obsessed with photographing (and, to that extent, living inside) the world that others can’t see at the backs of their own heads, to long vignettes of N.J. strolling arm-in-arm with his erstwhile lover on an appropriately boulder-strewn and alien-looking “beach” near Tokyo, and back to the slow-dawning realization on the part of his daughter, that her own newfound appetites may be clouding her capacity to judge character in ways that have important and possibly even lasting consequences.
To call this movie anything other than a “family portrait” would be importantly dishonest, for this is indeed the heart of Yang’s matter with these people: They are, in the end, come Hell, high-water, or both, a family. On the other hand, the maudlin self-mythology that so-called “family portraits” often evokes is evaded deftly by a director with a keen sense of the precise moment when his principals are beginning to sound unduly sanctimonious or victimized, and we could all do with a little break to splash around in some slightly pulpier fare. The fact that there are Yakuza and semi-enslaved hostess girls and random acts of property damage and gripping existential questions on the nature and quality of life, serves not as striking contrast to the far more identifying dilemmas faced by N.J. and his family, but rather as the license through which those more routine dilemmas may be legitimized.
Neither does Yang settle for a “family portrait” level of professionalism when it comes to craft: From the carefully composed shots—some of them lasting only an instant or two, others lasting whole minutes—to the sparing use of soundtrack, Yi Yi is in the end that most delicate fabric of the quietly beautiful and sweeping motion pictures of the highest Asian filmmaking traditions. Woven from what might in lesser hands be mostly banal and predictable subject matter, Yang strikes a perfect balance between the deeply personal dramas of a large and semi-typically challenged family, on the one hand, and the more cinematic plot-points against which those personal family dramas ultimately derive all of their special gravitas in this picture, on the other.
Comparisons are often made between Yang and Bertolucci—in particular between this picture and 1900—but I for one feel that a closer parallel is deserved of the finer works of Antonioni, particularly La Notte, despite the completely different sense of scope. Whereas 1900 is a character-piece set against the backdrop of fascism’s rise in southern Europe, La Notte and Yi Yi are both character-pieces set against a backdrop of nothing. And in no small way this is the film’s point: There is no lumbering movement with ominous pan-social consequences lurking just over the next hill; there is only us—there is only this. There is only now.
18. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). (Author’s note: The following is a re-print of my herein previously published review of this film, dated November 30, 2008.)
Like many of the best foreign Directors, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami apparently doesn't lose much sleep at night over the question of whether his films have too little plot. Far from the roar of pyro crews and the all-nighter hothouses of CG post-production that are modern Hollywood, Kiarostami is free to explore the question, not of how much eventfulness an audience may tolerate in a two hour sit-down in a darkened theater, but rather how little.
Without exception Kiarostami’s films are explorations into the subtlety of characterization—questions of morals and morale, decision vs. destiny--often hinging on a single event buried deep within the fourth reel and, in case we hadn't yet caught the premeditation in such choices, delivered off-camera anyway. Though perhaps an acquired taste for Western palettes, Kiarostami's introspective character pieces are always provocative, always moving, and in the end, always a treat to the senses to which few other filmmakers may aspire, and The Wind Will Carry Us is the apogee of his portfolio. It is a film so adroitly timed, so pitch-perfect in every tiniest detail, that its completion would surely have stranded a lesser individual with the crippling sensation that he would never be able to make another film again.
The film opens with a long take of the (unexpectedly?) beautiful Iranian countryside, in wide-shot--a tiny-looking International Scout making its way down a winding road only barely noticeable in an unremarkable corner of the scene, while the vehicle's four occupants, recorded in production sound instead of ADR, can be heard quietly bickering about whether or not they've misunderstood their driving directions. Even at this early juncture two things are inescapably apparent about the experience that this film will represent: First, our director sees no reason to explain himself--you know as much about who these people are and where they're going as anyone else, and no more than you're supposed to--and second, if you'll pardon the pun, this film is hardly in a hurry to get anywhere. Through a series of long takes shot at different angles along the route, this anti-scene of four guys gently squabbling about the proper turnoff continues for over five and a half minutes, long after the opening titles would have been over and done with, had there even been any.
Eventually the quartet finds their intended destination--a small village carved into a steep hillside and notable to our eyes as the sort of un-even-roofed hodgepodge that we'd be less surprised to find in desert Africa. Indeed after finding a young guide on the outskirts of town, our presumptive lead character (and the only one of the four whom we will ever see on camera throughout the film) makes his way literally across the tops of the earthen dwellings that will encompass his universe for the duration of the picture, hopping first up two feet to transit the next interval, and then down again.
Kiarostami devotes this opening reel of the film to establishing not just its tempo, but also its principal source of mystery--that these four obviously urban Tehranians have checked themselves into the closest local semblance of a guesthouse, apparently for the purposes of monitoring the health of an infirmed and elderly local, convalescing at the opposite end of the village. Throughout his long walk across the rooftops with the boy who will be his foil, our lead character--"The Engineer"--inquires repeatedly and with implied familiarity about the old woman's health, the boy's side-mouthed answers revealing either discretion or ignorance; we aren't supposed to know which.
I can think of no higher tribute to Kiarostami's achievement with this picture than that, by the time we actually discover what these four men are doing here and why they've taken so much interest in the health of an old woman, it no longer really matters to us anymore: Like the characters themselves, we've become immersed in the day-to-day rhythm of this at once surreally alien and improbably familiar little community. Its cranky restaurant matron, her semi-estranged and possibly philandering husband, the arrestingly pregnant and then arrestingly “un-pregnant” innkeeper, the hauntingly beautiful young woman who milks a cow in darkness so that their collective guests might enjoy just one more locally tricky little comfort from home.
The film is described by assorted critics as a mystery, and to that extent they're right: We are meant to wonder, of course, who these people are and how they came to find themselves in such a far-flung place with such a seemingly insignificant agenda (indeed at one point in the film the Engineer's three accomplices become so bored that they literally disappear, never to be seen again). But to describe the film with this single identifier is to entirely miss Kiarostami's point. There is mystery in life, of course, but it isn't the glamorous, maybe-they're-spies kind of mystery that we so often find ourselves escaping into at the movies; it is rather the mystery of mundanity--the strange shooting-script by which all of us on this homey little planet of ours seem to play out the same micro-dramas, the same rivalries, the same petty squabbles. The mystery in life is that it could contain so little real mystery, and yet seem so mysterious--so wondrous. So beautiful.
17. Layer Cake (2005). “You’re a smart boy. But you keep very bad company.”
If it seems superficially implausible that British East-ender Matthew Vaughn would be given something not unlike a blank check by Sony Pictures to try his hand at directing, then one must consider his previous two assignments—as producer and script supervisor for Guy Ritchie’s incomparable Snatch, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. That kind of greatness doesn’t strike where it pleases, either, folks, and it is to the betterment of us all that the suits at Sony knew a bird-in-the-hand when they saw one, since their semi-bold vestment of Vaughn resulted in the creation of one of the most delicately balanced and down-to-the-second flawless of all the fractured-narrative gangster movies that have ever been attempted.
Daniel Craig plays the part of a smart, upper-crusty and nameless young cocaine broker—the sort of guy Burt Reynolds’ Hooper was thinking of when he said, of stunt-men, “these days they all wear pleated pants and carry little pocket calculators.” At the film’s open Craig’s character (often referred to as “XXXX” for convenience’s sake) explains the modern English drug trade, and his role in it, with a marvelously understated voiceover that could easily have come across as unsubtle and manipulative in the hands of lesser filmmakers. XXXX, it transpires, is trying to hold his tidy little arrangement together for one last week before he can extricate his ill-gotten finances from the bank, and disappear. Only problem is, his benefactor and skin-crawlingly taciturn supplier Jimmie Price (Kenneth Cranham) has two important assignments for his favored protégé, neither of them without messy and possibly even life-threatening entanglements: To move a way-too-big shipment of ecstasy, on the one hand, and to locate the runaway daughter of an even better-connected colleague, on the other.
In due course the ecstasy turns out to have been stolen from a band of grimly homicidal Serbian militia who dispatch their top man to hunt down whoever is trying to move the shipment and return with both it, and him. Meanwhile the hunt for the missing daughter turns out not to have been the well-connected-colleague’s idea at all, thus putting XXXX in the delicate position of trying to explain why he’s been stalking and attempting to bundle-off the target, to an unhappy father with no qualms about venting his frustrations in a most creatively permanent way. This is not even to mention that the loud-mouthed nobodies who stole the ecstasy in the first place are splashing XXXX’s name and reputation all over the place, to both cop and criminal alike, that XXXX’s new love interest turns out to be the long-time lover of the nephew of the principal thief, or that XXXX’s hired muscle Morty (George Harris) must disappear from his side at the critical moment as a result of some unfinished business left over from his days running with the counterpart for Jimmy Price, Gene (Colm Meany).
Just as the tangle of overlapping storylines risks indigestibility, XXXX presents himself at Gene’s flat for what I would argue is the centerpiece moment of the film: Two colleagues at the highest reaches of the London drug trade, coolly friendly but first and foremost mutually respectful, sucking-down single malt scotch and splitting what just might be the most memorable order of Chinese takeaway in film history, all while Gene fills XXXX in on the dealings that render this whole web vastly more complicated and self-telescoping than either he or us had previously understood. Clearly it will take every last shred of XXXX’s guile, every last contact, every last favor, and no small allotment of blind good luck, if he is to escape all of this intrigue in one piece—let alone retire at the end of a single further week to a life of princely anonymity somewhere else. “Let’s go back to his place and see if what he says is true,” a certain character says over the momentarily crumpled figure of XXXX, at a point roughly halfway through the film, “and if it’s not, we’ll both kill him.” --And what of the fact that the two characters having this conversation are, even on the basis of this short read, the last two people you’d expect? Par for the course in this how-much-trouble-can-we-expect-him-to-get-out-of cavalcade of sinking fortunes, intrigue, dishonesty and greed.
I’ve been a sucker for movies of this style for a long time, now: Not so much for the violence or the grim subject matter but for the tendency in pictures of this genre to weave such sparklingly multi-faceted plot lines, often with the paths of characters crossing at moments neither opportune nor expected but just perfectly placed to ensure maximum leverage over everything that happens after. And with this picture Matthew Vaughn stakes his claim to status as one of the great, fractured-narrative gangster movie directors of all time. His is a film that works positively flawlessly, regardless of which ending you watch—and if that last comment doesn’t quite make sense, you’ll have to rent the DVD and give all three of them a try for yourself.
16. Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulin de Montmartre (2001). Not every director is principally concerned about narrative, and with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (for short), placed back-to-back with Layer Cake, placed back-to-back with The Wind Will Carry Us, our list could not do a better job of highlighting the latitudes with which filmmakers may choose to prioritize or de-prioritize the significance of the events they’re showing, as opposed to the characters or the scenes or the suffused emotional resonances sought as overarching takeaways from the finished product. Whereas everything in Layer Cake, the settings, the soundtrack, the set decorations—even the exquisitely painted characters—exists in service of the plot, the plot of Amelie exists strictly in service of the feelings we in the audience are supposed to experience at the taking of each scene.
Audrey Tautou is the title character, a young woman whose over-protective father deprived her of a properly interactive childhood out of fear that she suffered from a fragile heart muscle and could die if she received too much external stimuli. As an adult working at the (real-life) Café Deux Moulins in Montmartre, her life is bounded by a an ensemble cast of equally flawed and sympathetic creatures, from the surly and distrusting Joseph (Dominique Pinon), to his hypochondriac girlfriend and Amelie’s fellow waitress Georgette (Isabelle Nanty) to the Renoir-obsessed copyist Raymond (Serge Merlin) who lives down the hall and tries against all better expectations to impart an appreciation for Renoir’s subtle majesty to a simple-minded stock boy who works downstairs.
Upon learning of the tragic death of Princess Diana, Amelie drops the lid to her perfume bottle, which rolls haphazardly across the bathroom floor, eventually dislodging a loose plate of tile behind which Amelie discovers the childhood treasure-box of a previous tenant from many years earlier. Succumbing to the vagaries of fate, she decides to take it upon herself to see that the treasure-box is (anonymously) returned—thus setting in motion her addiction to carefully orchestrated, carefully un-credited acts of kindness toward the people around her.
In due course she repairs the relationship between Joseph and Georgette, enlists the help of an Air Hostess to persuade her father to travel by having one of his garden gnomes photographed in exotic locales, chastens the abusive boss of the store-clerk downstairs by fiddling with the wiring in his apartment, and, in what is to be her piece de la resistance, plots to return the lost photo album of attractive stranger “Nino” (Matthieu Kassovitz) who himself seems preoccupied with collecting the discarded photo strips of a half-seen figure at a coin-operated picture booth at Gare de L’est.
Only thing is, her childhood of involuntary estrangement from healthy human contact is preventing her—and her alone—from realizing that she is, in fact, romantically intrigued by this dashing young man, and not just bent on returning his photo album in the most playful and exotically deferred manner possible. It then falls to her unconditionally loving friends to straighten her out in time (if they can) as to the true source of her desire to do these anonymous good works, and set her on the path to healthy intimacy with the kindly photo collector.
Each of Jeunet’s four principal works are nothing if not visually and aurally arresting, from City of Lost Children with its dreamy rust-brown cityscapes and toothpaste-green water, to Delicatessen with its inimitable sonic repetitions to emphasize the rhythmic mundanity of life inside that terrifically striking little apartment building, to the piano-black claustrophobia of Alien Resurrection, and Amelie is his statement-piece in each regard. The sets are more conscientiously decorated than in any other picture I’ve yet seen, with the richly over-saturated reds of Amelie’s apartment carefully “popped” through foreground placement of a brilliantly ice-blue lampshade, and the warmly suffused ambers of the café abutted in sharp cutaway with the dingy olives of the shopkeeper’s dangerously re-wired bedroom.
The ear, too, is treated like an old friend in this one—with a satisfyingly ham-delivered voiceover (about essentially nothing) setting the not-too-serious tone with far more aplomb than any actor could convey, telegraphing unmistakeably our requirement to send our hang-ups about conflict and narrative tension outside to play in traffic for awhile.
“On September 3rd 1973, at 6:28pm and 32 seconds,” the stern-and-stentorian narrator intones at the film’s opening, “a bluebottle fly capable of 14,670 wing-beats per minute landed on Rue St Vincent, in Montmartre. At the same moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat, 28 Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugène Colère erased his name from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphaël Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amélie Poulain was born.”
...You know, a word or two of caution may be in order—perhaps inspired by having just re-read that last line of voiceover: Though the vibe of this film is inescapably “feel-good,” the picture itself is also inescapably French, and by that measure decidedly not for children.
And so we’ve arrived at last. With this installment, the Key Grip’s list of the hundred greatest movies enters the short subset of films that started with offsetting number-one rankings. I won’t tell you how many of these, from this five, were afforded that honor—but from here on in, every movie we discuss received at least one initial nod as my number-one favorite film, ever. Perhaps that means we can look forward to more frequent installments from now to the end of our journey.
…Perhaps just the opposite.
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20. Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), (1964). Movies that contain a single iconic image or monologue have an unfair burden in the competition for new audiences, in that many people who haven’t seen the movie have seen the image or the monologue and filled their own movie in around it, complete with their own expectations about what the rest of the film is going to be like. This is bad enough when the iconic image is so consistent with the rest of the picture that people feel they don’t “have” to see it anymore (which see, Alien), but the real trouble begins—people really start short-changing themselves—when the durable takeaway from the film is wholly non-representative of the rest of the picture.
Such is the case with Slim Pickens’ unforgettable, unintentional, un-regretted, but entirely out-of-context ride aboard a recently-dropped nuclear bomb near the conclusion Dr. Strangelove—a vignette parodied so many times that, upon recently showing the original to an erstwhile girlfriend of mine, she suggested that the filmmakers were copying someone else. And friends, neighbors, well-wishers, if you hear me say nothing else in these pages, hear me say this: The rest of this movie is nothing like that image, whatsoever.
Adapter-director Stanley Kubrick (yet another supreme talent whose achievements will be scandalously under-represented in this list, if only by a factor of one other movie for which there just wasn’t quite enough room) channels the best inspirations of some of the finest directors to precede him for this hilarious social commentary on the absurdity of the Cold War. From Fritz Lang to Truffaut, Kubrick salts appropriately obscure nods to some of the best choices for characterization and framing at his disposal, borrowing mad scientist Rotwang from Lang’s Metropolis, and the notion of the unseen, through-the-window gunfire from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player--together with countless other examples that have established this picture as a favored re-watch among students of the medium and avid amateur film-buffs alike. “There was a period of three months where I heard Dr. Strangelove dialogue form the moment I woke up until I went to bed at night,” commented Vera Anderson, first wife of the late Z-Channel programmer Jerry Harvey, during her interview discussing Harvey for Xan Cassavetes’ documentary about the station.
Ultimately a character-piece (despite all superficial appearances to the contrary), Dr. Strangelove tells the unnervingly credible story of an Air Force base at which the Colonel in charge, Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has slipped quietly into madness and, in consequence, ordered a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by his almost-too-late-to-recall bombers, led by Maj. T.J. “King” Kong (Pickens). When word of the rogue makes its way to the darkest basement lair of Washington (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!”), the job of breaking the news falls to Joint Chiefs representative Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). ...But for the small problem, that is, that Turgidson is finding himself distressingly torn about whether or not the government should bother trying to recall the bombers, anyway.
In just one of the astounding statements that he made over his tragically shortened career, Peter Sellers grabs this movie by the throat and bashes it against every wall in the room with his coolly resolute fulfillment of three completely separate parts—with performances so distinct in character, mood and accent that the same former girlfriend of mine refused to believe that they were all the same actor until I proved it to her on IMDB.
We meet him for the first time in the personage of Ripper’s NATO observer Lionel Mandrake, desperately trying to coax the recall codes from his nutty C.O., while army soldiers outside the building are trying with equal desperation to kill the both of them and take the base. Not long after, when Turgidson can finally hang up from the incessant phone calls of his bored and lonely secretary for long enough to sort-out his briefing, the President to whom he delivers it, Presdient Merkin Muffly, turns out to be Sellers again—this time finding himself haplessly mired in an impossible telephone conversation of his own with the Soviet Premiere, who is drunk on the other end and oscillating wildly between not comprehending or believing what he’s being told, and accusing Muffly of having been discourteous with him.
When Kong and his crew are nearly shot-down by a Soviet air defense missile and their recall radio is shorted-out in the process, the grim reality of the situation prompts those in attendance in the War Room to begin marshaling their resources to prepare for the worst. It is then that we encounter Sellers in his last and greatest role—the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist of the title, a man whose fixation on the subsequent breeding behavior of those few humans who might survive the conflagration serves as a fitting red ribbon on the arabesque appetites and unfathomable character defects of these people in whom all of our lives have been (and remain, incidentally) continually entrusted.
This is, in the end, the simple genius of Kubrick’s adaptation of Peter George’s book (called Red Alert). To make the film’s message digestible for a fatalistically desensitized, post-Cuban-missile-crisis audience, he had to sneak up on them with the gravity of the situation—and to sneak up on them, he chose consciously to mold the very straight original text into an absurdist comedy in which people behaved in ways so wacky and incomprehensible that the grim horror of what just might happen could hide from our cynicism in plain view. Oh and one more thing: As comedies go, it's very difficult to conjure as successful an example of its genre--in that on top of everything else, it's actually funny.
19. Yi Yi (A One and a Two), (2000). Director Edward Yang returns to familiar subject matter in a far more accessible and linear style than his earlier, cult favorite A Brighter Summer Day, this time following three generations of an extended family living in Taipei—from a nearly undermined wedding at the movie’s outset, through the lives and times of a galaxy of delicately interrelated characters with quiet crises all their own. This is a long and contentedly patient work, with characters’ inner conflicts not so much on display as peeking out from around window-curtains, ranging over issues as familiar as infidelity and the nature of love, at one extreme, to those as unfamiliar as whether a shadowy and self-made businessman should be trusted to rescue one’s faltering dreams of commercial success, at the other. And despite the fact that Yang will indulge in nearly three hours’ worth of exposed film canisters along the way, at the conclusion of the experience there doesn’t seem to have been a single gratuitous or disposable moment.
Choosing non-professional acting talent as is his custom, Yang inspires writer-director in his own right Wu Nien to crackle with the credibility of untrained inspiration as N.J., the conscience-conflicted third partner in a struggling computer company that hopes to tie its fortunes to a wealthy and unscrupulous Japanese computer-game tycoon. While sorting his mixed emotions about the impending deal in Tokyo, N.J. takes up a brief re-initiation of a relationship he had (and unilaterally dissolved for no obvious reason), thirty years earlier. Meanwhile the woman to whom N.J. has been married this whole time, herself emotionally damaged and unsettlingly needy, is in his absence barely holding-down an extended household consisting of N.J.’s perpetually hazed son, sexually adventurous and self-despising daughter, loan-shark-indebted brother-in-law, comatose mother, and piano-playing and possibly abused next-door-neighbor.
The quiet with which the desperation of all these many figures plays out is only part of Yang’s genius; the other part is his playful and yet somehow seamless shifts in narrative point-of-view, from long vignettes of N.J.’s son becoming increasingly obsessed with photographing (and, to that extent, living inside) the world that others can’t see at the backs of their own heads, to long vignettes of N.J. strolling arm-in-arm with his erstwhile lover on an appropriately boulder-strewn and alien-looking “beach” near Tokyo, and back to the slow-dawning realization on the part of his daughter, that her own newfound appetites may be clouding her capacity to judge character in ways that have important and possibly even lasting consequences.
To call this movie anything other than a “family portrait” would be importantly dishonest, for this is indeed the heart of Yang’s matter with these people: They are, in the end, come Hell, high-water, or both, a family. On the other hand, the maudlin self-mythology that so-called “family portraits” often evokes is evaded deftly by a director with a keen sense of the precise moment when his principals are beginning to sound unduly sanctimonious or victimized, and we could all do with a little break to splash around in some slightly pulpier fare. The fact that there are Yakuza and semi-enslaved hostess girls and random acts of property damage and gripping existential questions on the nature and quality of life, serves not as striking contrast to the far more identifying dilemmas faced by N.J. and his family, but rather as the license through which those more routine dilemmas may be legitimized.
Neither does Yang settle for a “family portrait” level of professionalism when it comes to craft: From the carefully composed shots—some of them lasting only an instant or two, others lasting whole minutes—to the sparing use of soundtrack, Yi Yi is in the end that most delicate fabric of the quietly beautiful and sweeping motion pictures of the highest Asian filmmaking traditions. Woven from what might in lesser hands be mostly banal and predictable subject matter, Yang strikes a perfect balance between the deeply personal dramas of a large and semi-typically challenged family, on the one hand, and the more cinematic plot-points against which those personal family dramas ultimately derive all of their special gravitas in this picture, on the other.
Comparisons are often made between Yang and Bertolucci—in particular between this picture and 1900—but I for one feel that a closer parallel is deserved of the finer works of Antonioni, particularly La Notte, despite the completely different sense of scope. Whereas 1900 is a character-piece set against the backdrop of fascism’s rise in southern Europe, La Notte and Yi Yi are both character-pieces set against a backdrop of nothing. And in no small way this is the film’s point: There is no lumbering movement with ominous pan-social consequences lurking just over the next hill; there is only us—there is only this. There is only now.
18. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). (Author’s note: The following is a re-print of my herein previously published review of this film, dated November 30, 2008.)
Like many of the best foreign Directors, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami apparently doesn't lose much sleep at night over the question of whether his films have too little plot. Far from the roar of pyro crews and the all-nighter hothouses of CG post-production that are modern Hollywood, Kiarostami is free to explore the question, not of how much eventfulness an audience may tolerate in a two hour sit-down in a darkened theater, but rather how little.
Without exception Kiarostami’s films are explorations into the subtlety of characterization—questions of morals and morale, decision vs. destiny--often hinging on a single event buried deep within the fourth reel and, in case we hadn't yet caught the premeditation in such choices, delivered off-camera anyway. Though perhaps an acquired taste for Western palettes, Kiarostami's introspective character pieces are always provocative, always moving, and in the end, always a treat to the senses to which few other filmmakers may aspire, and The Wind Will Carry Us is the apogee of his portfolio. It is a film so adroitly timed, so pitch-perfect in every tiniest detail, that its completion would surely have stranded a lesser individual with the crippling sensation that he would never be able to make another film again.
The film opens with a long take of the (unexpectedly?) beautiful Iranian countryside, in wide-shot--a tiny-looking International Scout making its way down a winding road only barely noticeable in an unremarkable corner of the scene, while the vehicle's four occupants, recorded in production sound instead of ADR, can be heard quietly bickering about whether or not they've misunderstood their driving directions. Even at this early juncture two things are inescapably apparent about the experience that this film will represent: First, our director sees no reason to explain himself--you know as much about who these people are and where they're going as anyone else, and no more than you're supposed to--and second, if you'll pardon the pun, this film is hardly in a hurry to get anywhere. Through a series of long takes shot at different angles along the route, this anti-scene of four guys gently squabbling about the proper turnoff continues for over five and a half minutes, long after the opening titles would have been over and done with, had there even been any.
Eventually the quartet finds their intended destination--a small village carved into a steep hillside and notable to our eyes as the sort of un-even-roofed hodgepodge that we'd be less surprised to find in desert Africa. Indeed after finding a young guide on the outskirts of town, our presumptive lead character (and the only one of the four whom we will ever see on camera throughout the film) makes his way literally across the tops of the earthen dwellings that will encompass his universe for the duration of the picture, hopping first up two feet to transit the next interval, and then down again.
Kiarostami devotes this opening reel of the film to establishing not just its tempo, but also its principal source of mystery--that these four obviously urban Tehranians have checked themselves into the closest local semblance of a guesthouse, apparently for the purposes of monitoring the health of an infirmed and elderly local, convalescing at the opposite end of the village. Throughout his long walk across the rooftops with the boy who will be his foil, our lead character--"The Engineer"--inquires repeatedly and with implied familiarity about the old woman's health, the boy's side-mouthed answers revealing either discretion or ignorance; we aren't supposed to know which.
I can think of no higher tribute to Kiarostami's achievement with this picture than that, by the time we actually discover what these four men are doing here and why they've taken so much interest in the health of an old woman, it no longer really matters to us anymore: Like the characters themselves, we've become immersed in the day-to-day rhythm of this at once surreally alien and improbably familiar little community. Its cranky restaurant matron, her semi-estranged and possibly philandering husband, the arrestingly pregnant and then arrestingly “un-pregnant” innkeeper, the hauntingly beautiful young woman who milks a cow in darkness so that their collective guests might enjoy just one more locally tricky little comfort from home.
The film is described by assorted critics as a mystery, and to that extent they're right: We are meant to wonder, of course, who these people are and how they came to find themselves in such a far-flung place with such a seemingly insignificant agenda (indeed at one point in the film the Engineer's three accomplices become so bored that they literally disappear, never to be seen again). But to describe the film with this single identifier is to entirely miss Kiarostami's point. There is mystery in life, of course, but it isn't the glamorous, maybe-they're-spies kind of mystery that we so often find ourselves escaping into at the movies; it is rather the mystery of mundanity--the strange shooting-script by which all of us on this homey little planet of ours seem to play out the same micro-dramas, the same rivalries, the same petty squabbles. The mystery in life is that it could contain so little real mystery, and yet seem so mysterious--so wondrous. So beautiful.
17. Layer Cake (2005). “You’re a smart boy. But you keep very bad company.”
If it seems superficially implausible that British East-ender Matthew Vaughn would be given something not unlike a blank check by Sony Pictures to try his hand at directing, then one must consider his previous two assignments—as producer and script supervisor for Guy Ritchie’s incomparable Snatch, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. That kind of greatness doesn’t strike where it pleases, either, folks, and it is to the betterment of us all that the suits at Sony knew a bird-in-the-hand when they saw one, since their semi-bold vestment of Vaughn resulted in the creation of one of the most delicately balanced and down-to-the-second flawless of all the fractured-narrative gangster movies that have ever been attempted.
Daniel Craig plays the part of a smart, upper-crusty and nameless young cocaine broker—the sort of guy Burt Reynolds’ Hooper was thinking of when he said, of stunt-men, “these days they all wear pleated pants and carry little pocket calculators.” At the film’s open Craig’s character (often referred to as “XXXX” for convenience’s sake) explains the modern English drug trade, and his role in it, with a marvelously understated voiceover that could easily have come across as unsubtle and manipulative in the hands of lesser filmmakers. XXXX, it transpires, is trying to hold his tidy little arrangement together for one last week before he can extricate his ill-gotten finances from the bank, and disappear. Only problem is, his benefactor and skin-crawlingly taciturn supplier Jimmie Price (Kenneth Cranham) has two important assignments for his favored protégé, neither of them without messy and possibly even life-threatening entanglements: To move a way-too-big shipment of ecstasy, on the one hand, and to locate the runaway daughter of an even better-connected colleague, on the other.
In due course the ecstasy turns out to have been stolen from a band of grimly homicidal Serbian militia who dispatch their top man to hunt down whoever is trying to move the shipment and return with both it, and him. Meanwhile the hunt for the missing daughter turns out not to have been the well-connected-colleague’s idea at all, thus putting XXXX in the delicate position of trying to explain why he’s been stalking and attempting to bundle-off the target, to an unhappy father with no qualms about venting his frustrations in a most creatively permanent way. This is not even to mention that the loud-mouthed nobodies who stole the ecstasy in the first place are splashing XXXX’s name and reputation all over the place, to both cop and criminal alike, that XXXX’s new love interest turns out to be the long-time lover of the nephew of the principal thief, or that XXXX’s hired muscle Morty (George Harris) must disappear from his side at the critical moment as a result of some unfinished business left over from his days running with the counterpart for Jimmy Price, Gene (Colm Meany).
Just as the tangle of overlapping storylines risks indigestibility, XXXX presents himself at Gene’s flat for what I would argue is the centerpiece moment of the film: Two colleagues at the highest reaches of the London drug trade, coolly friendly but first and foremost mutually respectful, sucking-down single malt scotch and splitting what just might be the most memorable order of Chinese takeaway in film history, all while Gene fills XXXX in on the dealings that render this whole web vastly more complicated and self-telescoping than either he or us had previously understood. Clearly it will take every last shred of XXXX’s guile, every last contact, every last favor, and no small allotment of blind good luck, if he is to escape all of this intrigue in one piece—let alone retire at the end of a single further week to a life of princely anonymity somewhere else. “Let’s go back to his place and see if what he says is true,” a certain character says over the momentarily crumpled figure of XXXX, at a point roughly halfway through the film, “and if it’s not, we’ll both kill him.” --And what of the fact that the two characters having this conversation are, even on the basis of this short read, the last two people you’d expect? Par for the course in this how-much-trouble-can-we-expect-him-to-get-out-of cavalcade of sinking fortunes, intrigue, dishonesty and greed.
I’ve been a sucker for movies of this style for a long time, now: Not so much for the violence or the grim subject matter but for the tendency in pictures of this genre to weave such sparklingly multi-faceted plot lines, often with the paths of characters crossing at moments neither opportune nor expected but just perfectly placed to ensure maximum leverage over everything that happens after. And with this picture Matthew Vaughn stakes his claim to status as one of the great, fractured-narrative gangster movie directors of all time. His is a film that works positively flawlessly, regardless of which ending you watch—and if that last comment doesn’t quite make sense, you’ll have to rent the DVD and give all three of them a try for yourself.
16. Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulin de Montmartre (2001). Not every director is principally concerned about narrative, and with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (for short), placed back-to-back with Layer Cake, placed back-to-back with The Wind Will Carry Us, our list could not do a better job of highlighting the latitudes with which filmmakers may choose to prioritize or de-prioritize the significance of the events they’re showing, as opposed to the characters or the scenes or the suffused emotional resonances sought as overarching takeaways from the finished product. Whereas everything in Layer Cake, the settings, the soundtrack, the set decorations—even the exquisitely painted characters—exists in service of the plot, the plot of Amelie exists strictly in service of the feelings we in the audience are supposed to experience at the taking of each scene.
Audrey Tautou is the title character, a young woman whose over-protective father deprived her of a properly interactive childhood out of fear that she suffered from a fragile heart muscle and could die if she received too much external stimuli. As an adult working at the (real-life) Café Deux Moulins in Montmartre, her life is bounded by a an ensemble cast of equally flawed and sympathetic creatures, from the surly and distrusting Joseph (Dominique Pinon), to his hypochondriac girlfriend and Amelie’s fellow waitress Georgette (Isabelle Nanty) to the Renoir-obsessed copyist Raymond (Serge Merlin) who lives down the hall and tries against all better expectations to impart an appreciation for Renoir’s subtle majesty to a simple-minded stock boy who works downstairs.
Upon learning of the tragic death of Princess Diana, Amelie drops the lid to her perfume bottle, which rolls haphazardly across the bathroom floor, eventually dislodging a loose plate of tile behind which Amelie discovers the childhood treasure-box of a previous tenant from many years earlier. Succumbing to the vagaries of fate, she decides to take it upon herself to see that the treasure-box is (anonymously) returned—thus setting in motion her addiction to carefully orchestrated, carefully un-credited acts of kindness toward the people around her.
In due course she repairs the relationship between Joseph and Georgette, enlists the help of an Air Hostess to persuade her father to travel by having one of his garden gnomes photographed in exotic locales, chastens the abusive boss of the store-clerk downstairs by fiddling with the wiring in his apartment, and, in what is to be her piece de la resistance, plots to return the lost photo album of attractive stranger “Nino” (Matthieu Kassovitz) who himself seems preoccupied with collecting the discarded photo strips of a half-seen figure at a coin-operated picture booth at Gare de L’est.
Only thing is, her childhood of involuntary estrangement from healthy human contact is preventing her—and her alone—from realizing that she is, in fact, romantically intrigued by this dashing young man, and not just bent on returning his photo album in the most playful and exotically deferred manner possible. It then falls to her unconditionally loving friends to straighten her out in time (if they can) as to the true source of her desire to do these anonymous good works, and set her on the path to healthy intimacy with the kindly photo collector.
Each of Jeunet’s four principal works are nothing if not visually and aurally arresting, from City of Lost Children with its dreamy rust-brown cityscapes and toothpaste-green water, to Delicatessen with its inimitable sonic repetitions to emphasize the rhythmic mundanity of life inside that terrifically striking little apartment building, to the piano-black claustrophobia of Alien Resurrection, and Amelie is his statement-piece in each regard. The sets are more conscientiously decorated than in any other picture I’ve yet seen, with the richly over-saturated reds of Amelie’s apartment carefully “popped” through foreground placement of a brilliantly ice-blue lampshade, and the warmly suffused ambers of the café abutted in sharp cutaway with the dingy olives of the shopkeeper’s dangerously re-wired bedroom.
The ear, too, is treated like an old friend in this one—with a satisfyingly ham-delivered voiceover (about essentially nothing) setting the not-too-serious tone with far more aplomb than any actor could convey, telegraphing unmistakeably our requirement to send our hang-ups about conflict and narrative tension outside to play in traffic for awhile.
“On September 3rd 1973, at 6:28pm and 32 seconds,” the stern-and-stentorian narrator intones at the film’s opening, “a bluebottle fly capable of 14,670 wing-beats per minute landed on Rue St Vincent, in Montmartre. At the same moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat, 28 Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugène Colère erased his name from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphaël Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amélie Poulain was born.”
...You know, a word or two of caution may be in order—perhaps inspired by having just re-read that last line of voiceover: Though the vibe of this film is inescapably “feel-good,” the picture itself is also inescapably French, and by that measure decidedly not for children.
And so we’ve arrived at last. With this installment, the Key Grip’s list of the hundred greatest movies enters the short subset of films that started with offsetting number-one rankings. I won’t tell you how many of these, from this five, were afforded that honor—but from here on in, every movie we discuss received at least one initial nod as my number-one favorite film, ever. Perhaps that means we can look forward to more frequent installments from now to the end of our journey.
…Perhaps just the opposite.
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The 100 Greatest Movies (Part Nine)
It would've been hard to miss that the frequency of updates to this list has been dropping precipitously at the precise moment that we've entered truly high ground on it. That's no coincidence, of course: The best movies are also the hardest to write about, precisely because they had so much more powerful -- and so much more personal -- impact. It's one thing to say "the set decorations are perfectly, nay eerily believable" about Hunt for Red October, or that the "palpable sense of unease is all around us like incense" about Punch Drunk Love. And then, when the movies that made not just any impact, but an impact so significant and so lasting that they were assigned #1 rankings come along, how does one enhance those same statements without splashing empty adjectives all over the place?
I'm not asking rhetorically, you understand: if you figure this out, I want to be the second person to know. In the meantime, here are movies 21-25 on The Key Grip's list of the 100 greatest movies.
25. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001). In what just may be the strangest road movie premise in the history of the genre, Julio and Tenoch (Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna) are two prep-school friends in Mexico City—vaguely shiftless guys with girlfriends away for the summer—who encounter a comely, slightly older woman named Ana (Ana Lopez Mercado), at a wedding. They spin her lavish tales of a secluded beach on the Pacific coast, a couple of days' drive away and—to their surprise as much as anyone's—she accepts their invitations to come along and see it for herself. What follows could in a pinch be described as “Bottle Rocket With Subtitles,” at least insofar as we in the audience find ourselves charmed by these two impish boys, staring voyeuristically as they come of age before our very eyes, despite our best efforts not to fall for their inimitable charms.
Along the way, Ana, Julio and Tenoch encounter the Mexican countryside in a way that immediately conveys to us director Alfonso Cuaron’s quiet brilliance, insofar as the country through which these three characters will pass is an allegory for them, and they for it: beautiful, possessing of a future bright with promise and yet at the same time fraught with the potential for semi-self-inflicted hardship and disappointment. Make no mistake, a straightforward, coming-of-age-cum-road-movie this is most assuredly not.
Yes, Julio and Tenoch find their friendship tested by their impish rivalry for Ana’s affections; yes, the trip they take is peppered with variously harrowing, disarming, and hilarious anecdotes; yes, the strain of carrying the fiction of this mythical beach for two days and two nights on the road serves as an obvious device for shading the personalities of the two male leads. All is as we would expect to find it, here. But to this ample foundation Cuaron adds a carefully chosen assortment of backdrops that, by their very context, will spike the punch of this otherwise easygoing picture with recurring statements on poverty, global capitalism, the meaning of loyalty, the failings of bourgeois social conventions. All are woven artfully into the narrative, all without heavy-handed manipulation or maudlin, tinkling-piano soundtrack.
As added element of allegoric tension, the boys themselves happen to hail from strikingly different classes--their own likely futures standing just behind the unfolding storyline like a muggy summer afternoon that could turn glorious or ugly at a moment’s notice—as is, of course, also the case for Mexico and her people, careening from a path that might lead to first-world splendor, to one fraught with poverty and misfortune, and back, without ever having to move farther than a two-day drive from urban to rural landscapes, and onward to the beach.
Mexican cinema has been turning out some real gems for several years now, the most famous of which is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s flawed but inescapably affecting triplet, Amores Perros (literally, “love’s a bitch”). But between the unflinching and steamy sexuality, the variously breathtaking and heart-rending triptick, and the carefully multi-layered narrative, Cuaron’s improbable coming-of-age road movie (complete with a ‘gotcha’ that we should see coming even before we've placed the DVD in the tray, and yet somehow don’t), holds pride of place over the field, and indeed stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great coming-of-age pictures from any nation, of any era, in any theme or genre.
24. Kitchen Stories (2003). Our second bizarre premise in a row makes the first one look restrained and formulaic. It is 1950, and the Swedish government has undertaken the decision to fund the development of a new, hyper-ergonomic kitchen layout with which happy Swedish housewives might toil even more happily to please their bread-winning husbands. So far, so good (well... kind of). Only somehow -- we’re never quite let in on how, exactly -- the supplemental decision is undertaken to cross the international border into Norway, thence to study the kitchen behavior not of housewives but of the aging and legendarily cranky bachelors farming the Norwegian countryside.
To do this unobtrusively, the institute carrying out the research has devised an apparatus resembling nothing so much as an overambitious high-chair, intended for placement in the corner of the bachelor farmer’s kitchen and, once the farmer has acceded to all of this nonsense, the semi-permanent repository of the researcher who will chronicle his subject’s use of an existing, perfectly serviceable kitchen, day and night. And if that sounds like a premise straight out of someone’s gone-off plate of mackerel, well, that’s the idea. Writer-director Brent Hamer, resisting the temptation to reduce the picture to an assortment of hilarious anecdotes (the way a certain other highly acclaimed director did, recently), envisions not so much the preposterousness of the arrangement, as its obvious prelude to the formation of a quirky, temporarily-arms-length friendship between observer and subject.
Thomas Norstrom is "Folke," the reluctant, indeed at first openly belligerent farmer of our scene--a man who has lived alone for a very long time, and grown quite accustomed to same, thank you very much. Meanwhile Joachim Calmeyer ("Isak") convinces us with the lightest of hamless brushstrokes of his lack of conviction in the project, struggling to be at once unobtrusive, there in his high chair, and still a fully-functioning, sensing, feeling human being, endeavoring not to go crazy in the near-total absence of appropriate human contact. Along the way there is room for an envious neighbor (Bjorn Floberg), a bumbling supervisor (Reine Brynolfsson), an aging and infirmed horse, unrequited love, homesickness, intrigue, even reckless endangerment. But unlike other Scandinavian filmmakers, including others on this list, Hamer never lets the inevitability of the onrushing winter ruin his vibe.
The soundtrack, the color scheme, even the camera movement is playful--with cutaways to scenes suggested by the previous one in just that special way that always gets us chuckling at how we, and the characters, might have done a better job of seeing this coming. There is sadness in this film, yes, but it is a sadness that embraces the moment and celebrates it, instead of submerging into the overwrought self-victimization with which the Scandinavians tend so often to look at the inevitable sadnesses we all face every day. Instead of mashing our heartstrings to a pulp, Kitchen Stories plucks them one-by-one, reminding us of the simple joys, the simple tragedies, the simple pleasures, and, ultimately, the simple beauty of our quietly banal little stories, out there on that snow-covered Norwegian countryside we call life. One of the half-dozen pictures on this list that, if pressed for a recommendation, I would need know nothing about the person asking me before suggesting. And that’s not something that may be said about even the highest-placing films to follow, either: This one is, quite literally and in its own, unprepossessing way, for every one. Every. One.
23. Forrest Gump (1994). Robert Zemeckis clocks-in with the first of two superlative pictures on our list with this luminescent and stirring travelogue through thirty years of American pop-culture history, as seen through the eyes of the sweetly impaired title character--played of course by Tom Hanks. By turns a love story, a statement-piece on the desperate times of the late twentieth century, and a harrowing tale of near-certain death, improbable redemption, and unwavering commitments to lifelong friends, little doubt is left from the opening credits of the picture that this one will leave us feeling good—but to call this a “feel-good picture” is to slight its delicate balance of palpable sympathy for its main character, on the one hand, and you-are-there immersion into the iconic events of the most tumultuous epoch in American history, on the other.
The relationship between Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis goes back a long way, and with this film (as with another collaboration that will score even higher on our list), they exploit their implicit trust of one-another to the maximal benefit of we the audience. Hanks, unselfconscious and comfortable enough with Zemeckis’ oversight to spare himself the need to ham; Zemeckis, always conscious of cinematic construction before all other considerations (he began his professional life as a cinematographer), for once free from the need to marshal his principal acting talent, thence to concentrate on the tricky composition of an endearing but undeniably small figure, moving through some of the biggest things that have ever happened.
Only a director who began life as a cinematographer, who trusted his talent enough not to feel the need to direct it very much, could've pulled it off. From Gump’s childhood infatuation with Jenny, to his accidental tryout for the Alabama Crimson Tide football team, to his search for the missing Jenny, to his reflexively heroic conduct in Vietnam, to his failed reunion with Jenny, to his emergence as an international celebrity ping-pong player, and on in such fashion through shrimp-boat captaincy, lawn-mowing, three Presidential receptions at the White House, and a three-times-over run from coast to coast, everything, somehow, works.
The supporting cast contributes to the formula in a not insubstantial fashion, too: From Sally Field’s headstrong and unconditionally loving portrayal of Forrest's mother, to Gary Sinise as Forrest’s sternly cranky and yet ineffably lovable Lieutenant in Vietnam, to Robin Wright Penn’s bang-on-the-nose rendition of Forrest’s abiding, would-be, should-be, might-yet-be love interest, all the necessary contributors to the personal storyline are so instantly believable and sympathetic, precisely because the jobs they play are relieved of the burden of carrying anything heavier than themselves.
In consequence, what should be a film in which the characters serve only as the substrate on which to grow the cultural travelogue, and who therefore recede into comic-book levels of dimensionality and significance, becomes instead a film about these individuals, and these alone -- with Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Vietnam and The Moratorium and Watergate and détente with China the seemingly insignificant; only so much set-dressing, just as they would’ve seemed for these individuals, had they really lived through it all.
This was the second-in-a-row academy award for Hanks as best actor (the previous one for his performance as an AIDS-infected and wrongly dismissed attorney in Philadelphia), and Zemeckis’ first ascension to the ranks of best director- and best picture winners. Let there be no complaint from anyone. Say what you will about the former’s sometimes-saccharine appeal to middle America, say what you will about the latter’s past tendencies to gravitate to less artistically important work, the collaboration they pull off with Forrest Gump is a letter-perfect film in which not the tiniest detail escapes the critical assessment and honing influence of a closely bound team, flying in the tightest of possible formations. When you’ve seen as many movies as I have, you can tell when the talent and the crew are getting along, and when they aren’t. Thank the gods of filmmaking that these folks did, and that they chose to do it for this, permanently affecting film.
22. Catch Me if You Can (2002). Tom Hanks scores with two pictures in a row on our list, Leonardo DiCaprio silences his critics, and Steven Spielberg pays us one last visit along our path to the best movie, with the true-life story of Frank William Abagnale Jr. (DiCaprio)—the grown-up-looking high school kid who processes the news of his parents’ divorce by bolting from a custody hearing--thence to embark on a life of making ends meet by passing himself off as people he isn’t, to improve his chances of forging checks.
Taking the sort of glee from his crimes that older, more hardened thieves can only dream of (does he even fully realize that they are indeed crimes?), Abagnale assumes an impressively rich assortment of identities, from an airline pilot to a trial attorney to a chief of emergency physicians, all the while doggedly pursued by humorless and semi-hapless FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Hanks). Naturally, the deeper into this web of deceit the young Abagnale sinks, the more estranged from normal life he becomes—but the genius of Spielberg’s and scriptwriter Jeff Nathanson’s adaptation of the autobiography is in its gentle depiction of Frank's slow but inescapable descent into abject loneliness, the distrusting and self-alienated isolation that any truly successful identity thief must surely consider his stock-and-trade.
When for the first time in years he encounters his big-talking, tax-cheating father, Frank Sr. (played with unsurprising mastery by Christopher Walken, in a role that seems to have been waiting for him in someone’s desk drawer for years), Frank soon realizes that neither he nor his dad truly know each other anymore, indeed can’t truly know each other anymore, for all the risks inherent in the knowing. When he calls his nemesis Carl on the telephone, we are not to understand—at least at first—that he is reaching out for the only form of social contact that he knows he can have without endangering the other party or further endangering himself. When he falls in love, genuinely and touchingly, with a young lady who would be miles beneath his station if he were any of the people he claims to be, he knows even as he senses the swoon that it will probably cost him his freedom.
Every member of the supporting cast is an irreplaceable contributor to the special chemistry of this three-parts-comedy, two-parts-social-comment, one-part-lost-puppy-in-the-rain symphony of talent, from Frank’s mother Paula (Nathalie Baye), to Hanratty’s boss Jack (James Brolin), to poster pin-up girl-turned-high-priced hooker Cheryl Ann (Jennifer Garner), to Frank’s girlfriend Brenda (Amy Adams), who had the inspired impulse to leave her retainer in for her screen-test, and got the part for it.
But special recognition is surely deserved of Martin Sheen, who climbed down from the highest perches of Hollywood aristocracy to play, with jaw-dropping believability, Brenda’s vaguely uneasy and semi-trusting father Roger—raising goose-bumps on the arms of even the most hardened movie cynic with his authoritative (and foolhardy) acceptance of the lying Frank, despite having, perhaps, three-dozen speaking lines in the whole picture.
The irrepressible and ready-at-a-moments'-notice score was carefully plotted by Spielberg and composer John Williams, not to make this a timeless story but rather the very opposite. “We were striving for a conscious recollection of the great caper-movies of the sixties,” said Williams, in an interview for the featurette. “From the opening title sequence, we wanted those who were old enough to have seen some of those films to know exactly the time and place and type of movie we were putting them in.” Williams has composed many film scores, of course--he may be the most prolifically superlative of all motion picture music-writers--and I will make no new friends with such a bold statement as this one, but friends, it is with this rollicking little picture that he makes his statement for all time.
Fascinating anecdote about the making of this film: During principal photography DiCaprio, as is his custom, would ask for one extra take of each scene, after everyone involved was sure that they had at least one keeper in the can (he called it, perhaps somewhat unfortunately, “one more for the Gipper”), the idea being that he would then be free to try something interestingly off-script, just to see what happened. This worked fine for as long as it took the other cast-members to get used to it, and then things really took off—in the form of Walken’s sudden and completely improvised choke-up during the scene (beginning at 1:45 of the linked clip) in which he describes, one last time, how he met and wooed Frank’s mother Paula.
It’s a completely unexpected moment, of course, and DiCaprio’s real-life momentary unease, followed abruptly by his total immersion in the improv, rings truer than any other single moment in the movie. “Are you sure you don’t want to do it again?” Walken said to Spielberg, even as he was still wiping tears from his cheekbone. To which Spielberg, visibly shaken, stood stock-still for a half a dozen beats, and then said, finally, “Chris, are you kidding?”
21. Broken Flowers (2005). Fans of director Jim Jarmusch would burn me in effigy (if there were anyone left still reading) for picking this as my only selection from his list of fine and arresting pictures -- not least because it is without question the most linear and accessible (dare I say, cinematic?) of all his efforts. But here's the thing: it is also his best, and by a margin far larger than seventy-nine spaces on some random bald guy's list of good movies.
Bill Murray is Don Johnston, a self-alienated and possibly early-retired computer entrepreneur whose long line of gorgeous former girlfriends may or may not include someone claiming that twenty years earlier she gave birth to his son. In an unsigned letter that has been curiously typed in red ink on pink stationary, complete with matching envelope and illegible postmark, the mysterious claimant suggests that the son in question, after years of hounding her with probing questions about his father, has finally grown exasperated with her demurrals and set off to find the truth.
Don shows this letter to his next-door neighbor, a working-class and instantly likable mysteryphile named Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who plans an itinerary in which Don will fly to the cities of all possible candidates for the mother in question (in an undeniably Jarmuschian wrinkle, there turn out to be either four or five -- depending on how one counts), whereupon Johnston will visit each of them unannounced, in search of clues. "What if this son shows up here while I'm not here?" Johnston asks his neighbor, as if anticipating the audience's difficulty with the whole premise--to which Winston replies, "Ah, no problem: I'll be monitoring your house the whole time!"
At length Johnston agrees to all of this (with just the sort of aggrieved, heavy-sighing way that a person would agree to something as absurd as this, as a way of getting the other person off his back), and in no time he finds himself realizing, way too late, that he is completely unprepared even to lay eyes on any of these women again, much less to say anything that doesn't sound bizarrely affected and possibly deranged to them, when they ask in turn what it is he thinks he's doing in their lives again like this after twenty years.
The actresses cast to play Johnston's past loves are as comfortable inside their assorted reactions to his sudden reappearance as we in the audience are uncomfortable with them – from Laura (Sharon Stone), at one end of the plausible spectrum of coping responses, through Dora (Frances Conry) and Carmen (Jessica Lange), to Penny (Tilda Swinton) at the other, with plenty of room in-between for oafishly over-accepting new husbands, mean dogs, invitations to dinner, hostile receptionists, even the odd, naked teenaged daughter thrown in on a larf. Never afraid of long takes or quiet premises, Jarmusch thoroughly outdoes himself with his conveyance of just how permanently changed Don Johnston’s life is likely to be, if and when he gets home -- the subtlety with which it dawns on us that Johnston’s history is not something he relishes, or even necessarily wishes to continue, but instead represents all of those many things about ourselves that we’d change if we could.
It’s no accident that the film opens (more or less) with Johnston’s most-recently estranged girlfriend Cheri (Julie Delpy) leaving him (“It’s like I’m your mistress, Don, except that you aren’t even married”), or that, having finally surrendered to Winston’s peculiar plan, Johnston passes on the opportunity to hit on a comely businesswoman waiting with him in the gate-lobby of his first flight. Should it surprise us that Don can’t remember – indeed has no idea – who the mother of this child might be? Of course. And in the end, that is the quietly brilliant point of the film: It should surprise us. It should surprise anyone. It should surprise him. And it does. But not quite enough.
And so we reach the conclusion of the first eighty of the hundred greatest movies. When next we visit this project we'll be delving into the truly, black-tie-required territory of the Key Grip's top twenty selections among his first 2,000 critically viewed films. And while the air is certainly thin up here and getting thinner all the time, let's not forget that every motion picture to make this list -- indeed many that almost did but just barely didn't -- are treasures; little chocolate bonbons for the soul. It isn't true that life would be unbearable without them. But it sure would be a lot less fun.
Stay tuned....
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I'm not asking rhetorically, you understand: if you figure this out, I want to be the second person to know. In the meantime, here are movies 21-25 on The Key Grip's list of the 100 greatest movies.
25. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001). In what just may be the strangest road movie premise in the history of the genre, Julio and Tenoch (Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna) are two prep-school friends in Mexico City—vaguely shiftless guys with girlfriends away for the summer—who encounter a comely, slightly older woman named Ana (Ana Lopez Mercado), at a wedding. They spin her lavish tales of a secluded beach on the Pacific coast, a couple of days' drive away and—to their surprise as much as anyone's—she accepts their invitations to come along and see it for herself. What follows could in a pinch be described as “Bottle Rocket With Subtitles,” at least insofar as we in the audience find ourselves charmed by these two impish boys, staring voyeuristically as they come of age before our very eyes, despite our best efforts not to fall for their inimitable charms.
Along the way, Ana, Julio and Tenoch encounter the Mexican countryside in a way that immediately conveys to us director Alfonso Cuaron’s quiet brilliance, insofar as the country through which these three characters will pass is an allegory for them, and they for it: beautiful, possessing of a future bright with promise and yet at the same time fraught with the potential for semi-self-inflicted hardship and disappointment. Make no mistake, a straightforward, coming-of-age-cum-road-movie this is most assuredly not.
Yes, Julio and Tenoch find their friendship tested by their impish rivalry for Ana’s affections; yes, the trip they take is peppered with variously harrowing, disarming, and hilarious anecdotes; yes, the strain of carrying the fiction of this mythical beach for two days and two nights on the road serves as an obvious device for shading the personalities of the two male leads. All is as we would expect to find it, here. But to this ample foundation Cuaron adds a carefully chosen assortment of backdrops that, by their very context, will spike the punch of this otherwise easygoing picture with recurring statements on poverty, global capitalism, the meaning of loyalty, the failings of bourgeois social conventions. All are woven artfully into the narrative, all without heavy-handed manipulation or maudlin, tinkling-piano soundtrack.
As added element of allegoric tension, the boys themselves happen to hail from strikingly different classes--their own likely futures standing just behind the unfolding storyline like a muggy summer afternoon that could turn glorious or ugly at a moment’s notice—as is, of course, also the case for Mexico and her people, careening from a path that might lead to first-world splendor, to one fraught with poverty and misfortune, and back, without ever having to move farther than a two-day drive from urban to rural landscapes, and onward to the beach.
Mexican cinema has been turning out some real gems for several years now, the most famous of which is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s flawed but inescapably affecting triplet, Amores Perros (literally, “love’s a bitch”). But between the unflinching and steamy sexuality, the variously breathtaking and heart-rending triptick, and the carefully multi-layered narrative, Cuaron’s improbable coming-of-age road movie (complete with a ‘gotcha’ that we should see coming even before we've placed the DVD in the tray, and yet somehow don’t), holds pride of place over the field, and indeed stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great coming-of-age pictures from any nation, of any era, in any theme or genre.
24. Kitchen Stories (2003). Our second bizarre premise in a row makes the first one look restrained and formulaic. It is 1950, and the Swedish government has undertaken the decision to fund the development of a new, hyper-ergonomic kitchen layout with which happy Swedish housewives might toil even more happily to please their bread-winning husbands. So far, so good (well... kind of). Only somehow -- we’re never quite let in on how, exactly -- the supplemental decision is undertaken to cross the international border into Norway, thence to study the kitchen behavior not of housewives but of the aging and legendarily cranky bachelors farming the Norwegian countryside.
To do this unobtrusively, the institute carrying out the research has devised an apparatus resembling nothing so much as an overambitious high-chair, intended for placement in the corner of the bachelor farmer’s kitchen and, once the farmer has acceded to all of this nonsense, the semi-permanent repository of the researcher who will chronicle his subject’s use of an existing, perfectly serviceable kitchen, day and night. And if that sounds like a premise straight out of someone’s gone-off plate of mackerel, well, that’s the idea. Writer-director Brent Hamer, resisting the temptation to reduce the picture to an assortment of hilarious anecdotes (the way a certain other highly acclaimed director did, recently), envisions not so much the preposterousness of the arrangement, as its obvious prelude to the formation of a quirky, temporarily-arms-length friendship between observer and subject.
Thomas Norstrom is "Folke," the reluctant, indeed at first openly belligerent farmer of our scene--a man who has lived alone for a very long time, and grown quite accustomed to same, thank you very much. Meanwhile Joachim Calmeyer ("Isak") convinces us with the lightest of hamless brushstrokes of his lack of conviction in the project, struggling to be at once unobtrusive, there in his high chair, and still a fully-functioning, sensing, feeling human being, endeavoring not to go crazy in the near-total absence of appropriate human contact. Along the way there is room for an envious neighbor (Bjorn Floberg), a bumbling supervisor (Reine Brynolfsson), an aging and infirmed horse, unrequited love, homesickness, intrigue, even reckless endangerment. But unlike other Scandinavian filmmakers, including others on this list, Hamer never lets the inevitability of the onrushing winter ruin his vibe.
The soundtrack, the color scheme, even the camera movement is playful--with cutaways to scenes suggested by the previous one in just that special way that always gets us chuckling at how we, and the characters, might have done a better job of seeing this coming. There is sadness in this film, yes, but it is a sadness that embraces the moment and celebrates it, instead of submerging into the overwrought self-victimization with which the Scandinavians tend so often to look at the inevitable sadnesses we all face every day. Instead of mashing our heartstrings to a pulp, Kitchen Stories plucks them one-by-one, reminding us of the simple joys, the simple tragedies, the simple pleasures, and, ultimately, the simple beauty of our quietly banal little stories, out there on that snow-covered Norwegian countryside we call life. One of the half-dozen pictures on this list that, if pressed for a recommendation, I would need know nothing about the person asking me before suggesting. And that’s not something that may be said about even the highest-placing films to follow, either: This one is, quite literally and in its own, unprepossessing way, for every one. Every. One.
23. Forrest Gump (1994). Robert Zemeckis clocks-in with the first of two superlative pictures on our list with this luminescent and stirring travelogue through thirty years of American pop-culture history, as seen through the eyes of the sweetly impaired title character--played of course by Tom Hanks. By turns a love story, a statement-piece on the desperate times of the late twentieth century, and a harrowing tale of near-certain death, improbable redemption, and unwavering commitments to lifelong friends, little doubt is left from the opening credits of the picture that this one will leave us feeling good—but to call this a “feel-good picture” is to slight its delicate balance of palpable sympathy for its main character, on the one hand, and you-are-there immersion into the iconic events of the most tumultuous epoch in American history, on the other.
The relationship between Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis goes back a long way, and with this film (as with another collaboration that will score even higher on our list), they exploit their implicit trust of one-another to the maximal benefit of we the audience. Hanks, unselfconscious and comfortable enough with Zemeckis’ oversight to spare himself the need to ham; Zemeckis, always conscious of cinematic construction before all other considerations (he began his professional life as a cinematographer), for once free from the need to marshal his principal acting talent, thence to concentrate on the tricky composition of an endearing but undeniably small figure, moving through some of the biggest things that have ever happened.
Only a director who began life as a cinematographer, who trusted his talent enough not to feel the need to direct it very much, could've pulled it off. From Gump’s childhood infatuation with Jenny, to his accidental tryout for the Alabama Crimson Tide football team, to his search for the missing Jenny, to his reflexively heroic conduct in Vietnam, to his failed reunion with Jenny, to his emergence as an international celebrity ping-pong player, and on in such fashion through shrimp-boat captaincy, lawn-mowing, three Presidential receptions at the White House, and a three-times-over run from coast to coast, everything, somehow, works.
The supporting cast contributes to the formula in a not insubstantial fashion, too: From Sally Field’s headstrong and unconditionally loving portrayal of Forrest's mother, to Gary Sinise as Forrest’s sternly cranky and yet ineffably lovable Lieutenant in Vietnam, to Robin Wright Penn’s bang-on-the-nose rendition of Forrest’s abiding, would-be, should-be, might-yet-be love interest, all the necessary contributors to the personal storyline are so instantly believable and sympathetic, precisely because the jobs they play are relieved of the burden of carrying anything heavier than themselves.
In consequence, what should be a film in which the characters serve only as the substrate on which to grow the cultural travelogue, and who therefore recede into comic-book levels of dimensionality and significance, becomes instead a film about these individuals, and these alone -- with Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Vietnam and The Moratorium and Watergate and détente with China the seemingly insignificant; only so much set-dressing, just as they would’ve seemed for these individuals, had they really lived through it all.
This was the second-in-a-row academy award for Hanks as best actor (the previous one for his performance as an AIDS-infected and wrongly dismissed attorney in Philadelphia), and Zemeckis’ first ascension to the ranks of best director- and best picture winners. Let there be no complaint from anyone. Say what you will about the former’s sometimes-saccharine appeal to middle America, say what you will about the latter’s past tendencies to gravitate to less artistically important work, the collaboration they pull off with Forrest Gump is a letter-perfect film in which not the tiniest detail escapes the critical assessment and honing influence of a closely bound team, flying in the tightest of possible formations. When you’ve seen as many movies as I have, you can tell when the talent and the crew are getting along, and when they aren’t. Thank the gods of filmmaking that these folks did, and that they chose to do it for this, permanently affecting film.
22. Catch Me if You Can (2002). Tom Hanks scores with two pictures in a row on our list, Leonardo DiCaprio silences his critics, and Steven Spielberg pays us one last visit along our path to the best movie, with the true-life story of Frank William Abagnale Jr. (DiCaprio)—the grown-up-looking high school kid who processes the news of his parents’ divorce by bolting from a custody hearing--thence to embark on a life of making ends meet by passing himself off as people he isn’t, to improve his chances of forging checks.
Taking the sort of glee from his crimes that older, more hardened thieves can only dream of (does he even fully realize that they are indeed crimes?), Abagnale assumes an impressively rich assortment of identities, from an airline pilot to a trial attorney to a chief of emergency physicians, all the while doggedly pursued by humorless and semi-hapless FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Hanks). Naturally, the deeper into this web of deceit the young Abagnale sinks, the more estranged from normal life he becomes—but the genius of Spielberg’s and scriptwriter Jeff Nathanson’s adaptation of the autobiography is in its gentle depiction of Frank's slow but inescapable descent into abject loneliness, the distrusting and self-alienated isolation that any truly successful identity thief must surely consider his stock-and-trade.
When for the first time in years he encounters his big-talking, tax-cheating father, Frank Sr. (played with unsurprising mastery by Christopher Walken, in a role that seems to have been waiting for him in someone’s desk drawer for years), Frank soon realizes that neither he nor his dad truly know each other anymore, indeed can’t truly know each other anymore, for all the risks inherent in the knowing. When he calls his nemesis Carl on the telephone, we are not to understand—at least at first—that he is reaching out for the only form of social contact that he knows he can have without endangering the other party or further endangering himself. When he falls in love, genuinely and touchingly, with a young lady who would be miles beneath his station if he were any of the people he claims to be, he knows even as he senses the swoon that it will probably cost him his freedom.
Every member of the supporting cast is an irreplaceable contributor to the special chemistry of this three-parts-comedy, two-parts-social-comment, one-part-lost-puppy-in-the-rain symphony of talent, from Frank’s mother Paula (Nathalie Baye), to Hanratty’s boss Jack (James Brolin), to poster pin-up girl-turned-high-priced hooker Cheryl Ann (Jennifer Garner), to Frank’s girlfriend Brenda (Amy Adams), who had the inspired impulse to leave her retainer in for her screen-test, and got the part for it.
But special recognition is surely deserved of Martin Sheen, who climbed down from the highest perches of Hollywood aristocracy to play, with jaw-dropping believability, Brenda’s vaguely uneasy and semi-trusting father Roger—raising goose-bumps on the arms of even the most hardened movie cynic with his authoritative (and foolhardy) acceptance of the lying Frank, despite having, perhaps, three-dozen speaking lines in the whole picture.
The irrepressible and ready-at-a-moments'-notice score was carefully plotted by Spielberg and composer John Williams, not to make this a timeless story but rather the very opposite. “We were striving for a conscious recollection of the great caper-movies of the sixties,” said Williams, in an interview for the featurette. “From the opening title sequence, we wanted those who were old enough to have seen some of those films to know exactly the time and place and type of movie we were putting them in.” Williams has composed many film scores, of course--he may be the most prolifically superlative of all motion picture music-writers--and I will make no new friends with such a bold statement as this one, but friends, it is with this rollicking little picture that he makes his statement for all time.
Fascinating anecdote about the making of this film: During principal photography DiCaprio, as is his custom, would ask for one extra take of each scene, after everyone involved was sure that they had at least one keeper in the can (he called it, perhaps somewhat unfortunately, “one more for the Gipper”), the idea being that he would then be free to try something interestingly off-script, just to see what happened. This worked fine for as long as it took the other cast-members to get used to it, and then things really took off—in the form of Walken’s sudden and completely improvised choke-up during the scene (beginning at 1:45 of the linked clip) in which he describes, one last time, how he met and wooed Frank’s mother Paula.
It’s a completely unexpected moment, of course, and DiCaprio’s real-life momentary unease, followed abruptly by his total immersion in the improv, rings truer than any other single moment in the movie. “Are you sure you don’t want to do it again?” Walken said to Spielberg, even as he was still wiping tears from his cheekbone. To which Spielberg, visibly shaken, stood stock-still for a half a dozen beats, and then said, finally, “Chris, are you kidding?”
21. Broken Flowers (2005). Fans of director Jim Jarmusch would burn me in effigy (if there were anyone left still reading) for picking this as my only selection from his list of fine and arresting pictures -- not least because it is without question the most linear and accessible (dare I say, cinematic?) of all his efforts. But here's the thing: it is also his best, and by a margin far larger than seventy-nine spaces on some random bald guy's list of good movies.
Bill Murray is Don Johnston, a self-alienated and possibly early-retired computer entrepreneur whose long line of gorgeous former girlfriends may or may not include someone claiming that twenty years earlier she gave birth to his son. In an unsigned letter that has been curiously typed in red ink on pink stationary, complete with matching envelope and illegible postmark, the mysterious claimant suggests that the son in question, after years of hounding her with probing questions about his father, has finally grown exasperated with her demurrals and set off to find the truth.
Don shows this letter to his next-door neighbor, a working-class and instantly likable mysteryphile named Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who plans an itinerary in which Don will fly to the cities of all possible candidates for the mother in question (in an undeniably Jarmuschian wrinkle, there turn out to be either four or five -- depending on how one counts), whereupon Johnston will visit each of them unannounced, in search of clues. "What if this son shows up here while I'm not here?" Johnston asks his neighbor, as if anticipating the audience's difficulty with the whole premise--to which Winston replies, "Ah, no problem: I'll be monitoring your house the whole time!"
At length Johnston agrees to all of this (with just the sort of aggrieved, heavy-sighing way that a person would agree to something as absurd as this, as a way of getting the other person off his back), and in no time he finds himself realizing, way too late, that he is completely unprepared even to lay eyes on any of these women again, much less to say anything that doesn't sound bizarrely affected and possibly deranged to them, when they ask in turn what it is he thinks he's doing in their lives again like this after twenty years.
The actresses cast to play Johnston's past loves are as comfortable inside their assorted reactions to his sudden reappearance as we in the audience are uncomfortable with them – from Laura (Sharon Stone), at one end of the plausible spectrum of coping responses, through Dora (Frances Conry) and Carmen (Jessica Lange), to Penny (Tilda Swinton) at the other, with plenty of room in-between for oafishly over-accepting new husbands, mean dogs, invitations to dinner, hostile receptionists, even the odd, naked teenaged daughter thrown in on a larf. Never afraid of long takes or quiet premises, Jarmusch thoroughly outdoes himself with his conveyance of just how permanently changed Don Johnston’s life is likely to be, if and when he gets home -- the subtlety with which it dawns on us that Johnston’s history is not something he relishes, or even necessarily wishes to continue, but instead represents all of those many things about ourselves that we’d change if we could.
It’s no accident that the film opens (more or less) with Johnston’s most-recently estranged girlfriend Cheri (Julie Delpy) leaving him (“It’s like I’m your mistress, Don, except that you aren’t even married”), or that, having finally surrendered to Winston’s peculiar plan, Johnston passes on the opportunity to hit on a comely businesswoman waiting with him in the gate-lobby of his first flight. Should it surprise us that Don can’t remember – indeed has no idea – who the mother of this child might be? Of course. And in the end, that is the quietly brilliant point of the film: It should surprise us. It should surprise anyone. It should surprise him. And it does. But not quite enough.
And so we reach the conclusion of the first eighty of the hundred greatest movies. When next we visit this project we'll be delving into the truly, black-tie-required territory of the Key Grip's top twenty selections among his first 2,000 critically viewed films. And while the air is certainly thin up here and getting thinner all the time, let's not forget that every motion picture to make this list -- indeed many that almost did but just barely didn't -- are treasures; little chocolate bonbons for the soul. It isn't true that life would be unbearable without them. But it sure would be a lot less fun.
Stay tuned....
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Sunday, May 17, 2009
The 100 Greatest Movies (part eight)
Our job now seventy-percent complete, it's time for us to tread into some genuinely high altitudes with movies 30-26. But before we continue, I've received one or two off-column queries about how exactly I've gone about all of this, so I thought I'd take a moment to explain.
Basically -- and I know this is going to sound prosaic, but it's the absolute truth -- the key to the whole exercise was to reduce it into smaller bites. I took from my own collection all the films that I'd afforded "five bald head" ratings, and supplemented those with favorite films I'd seen but hadn't yet collected for myself. This gave me a total of about 125 pictures, which I'd naively thought could be ranked from 1 to 125 in a single step. Of course the immediate difficulty one faces with a ranking task of such magnitude is what economists call a "transitivity problem": It was possible, I quickly found, to believe that I liked The Sweet Hereafter better than Rocky, and Rocky better than The Station Agent, and The Station Agent better than The Sweet Hereafter.
The solution came to be entirely by chance. Figuring that, at least, the top- and bottom- overall choices would be straightforward decisions, I went down the entire list looking for those two movies, and assigned a "#1" to the first, "greatest" film I encountered. But because I still needed a "#125," I had to keep reading down the list, whereupon I found that I wanted to assign a number of other movies the "#1" slot, too -- eventually about a dozen or so.
Instead of letting this bother me, I decided to run with it, ultimately filtering the pool into sub-classes based on which movies were positively, arrestingly superlative (#1), which movies were outstanding but not quite as good (#10), and so on, after which the job of ranking the entire list became a simple question of ranking the films in each individual sub-class within it -- usually about ten movies at a time. The chances of a transitivity problem went away almost entirely, and the thinking about how to place a movie at the top of its class became a question of picking the best out of ten-or-so, instead of the best out of two thousand. The highest and lowest-ranking films from any one class were then compared with their counterparts from the adjoining classes, and only once did a minor problem of circularity emerged, which was settled (thrillingly) by re-watching the three films in question.
Without further ado, then, here are The Key Grip's choices of the twenty-sixth through thirtieth greatest of all movies.
30. The Lives of Others (2006). To say that this is a film about a power-intoxicated love triangle behind the iron curtain of the mid-1980s barely hints at the subtle complexity of this enthralling tale of the men of the dreaded "Stazzi," the East German secret police, and the 'lives' of all those 'others' they were tasked with monitoring.
It is East Berlin in 1984 and, as the opening placard explains, "Glasnosdt is nowhere in sight." Deep in the shadowy clockwork of the Stazzi lurks rising-star Gerd Weisler (Ulrich Muehe), cool-headed interrogator extraordinaire (the two opening scenes are intercut between his chilling interrogation of a suspect, and his explanation of proper technique to a classroom full of college students). At the conclusion of the class, Weisler's friend and superior Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) invites him to see the work of "the republic's only non-subversive artist," Georg Dryeman (Sebastian Koch), in the form of a play to be premiered that very evening and likely to be attended by Grubitz' own superior, Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme).
At the play Grubitz takes turns congratulating himself to Weisler for his good judgment about Dryeman's self-evident loyalty, and panning back down to the VIP seats to watch Hempf, who seems restless and figety during the performance -- except when the stage is held by the leading actress, Dreyman's girlfriend Christa-Maria Seiland (Martina Gedeck). Grubitz, meanwhile, is content to stare-down Dreyman himself, sitting in a wing, for even the slightest hint of odd behavior. "I'd have him monitored," Grubitz says to Gruber in an affectless monotone as the play is ending.
Of course he has no idea what he's letting himself in for, or how the granting of his wish to install a listening station in the attic above Dreyman's apartment will change the lives of all the aforementioned parties, forever. By the time it's all over, this improbably complex and subtle brush-stroke narrative will manage to shift our sympathies for the main characters not once but several times, even without the benefit of knowing, until very near the end, exactly what's been going on.
The skill with which this film patiently assembles its intricately woven characters, the subtle changes in perspective and allegiances, the quiet desperation, the blind alleys of possible narrative twist that must come to nothing if we are to find the eventual resolution genuinely surprising, are unto themselves a thorough justification for top-thirty placement. But beyond the "simple" fact of the tight formation in which all these disparate plot elements must fly, there is the added consideration that each of the other ingredients under director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck's control are surmounted with equal aplomb -- from the subtle use of color schemes to convey different characters' visions of their situation and its terrifyingly fluid nature, to the equisite use of Gabriel Yared's versatile and haunting soundtrack, to the literal accuracy of the listening equipment with which Weisler is shown, up in that attic, finding out more than he bargained for about the people on whom he has volunteered to spy.
29. The Conversation (1974). I know there isn't a reader left who's going to believe this, but as God is my witness it was a pure (and indeed previously unnoticed) coincidence, that the two films about recorded conversations to make this entire list, would occupy consecutive slots on it. Gene Hackman is Harry Call, the best freelance electronic surveillance expert on the west coast, but for the small problem that he is so paranoid that he can't have a healthy relationship of any kind, from that of an employer to that of a lover to that of a friend to that of a tenant in a friendly-run apartment house.
As the A-story (in which Call and his associates are hired to record and then clarify a conversation in San Francisco's Union Square) unfolds inexorably -- seeming almost to taunt Harry with the inevitability of its own, looming denouement -- the man himself senses that he is pushing everyone else away and can do nothing to stop himself. He offends his most faithful sidekick Stan (John Cazale) to the point that the latter ultimately quits to take all he has learned and imbue it to a mostly friendly rival Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield), who himself reveals at a convention after-party that Call's earlier freelance work resulted in the murder of an east-coast union boss. Shortly afterward Call throws Bernie, Stan, and the giggly women of the party, lock, stock, and barrel, out of his building and slams the door behind them.
The next morning, as Call works off his frustrations alone in his lab, a fragment of previously un-intelligible dialogue in Union Square comes through the headphones: He'd kill us if he got the chance. And, just like that, Harry Call must confront the fact that he is a sensing, feeling human being who just might repeat his own ghastly history if he delivers the tapes of this conversation to his client.
Director Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed the exquisite narrative, in which the A- and B-stories are only separate until the very moment in which they are not, after which their confluence -- which would've felt contrived at the hands of mere mortal filmmakers -- seems as natural as the grim inner conflict with which Call is so self-evidently devouring himself over the prospect of more responsibility for loss of human life. The Conversation would've been a positively fantastic film, a run-don't-walk-to-the-video-store film, if Coppola had settled for pulling off only this much complexity, with such precision.
But the ending, which I will not spoil even though other internet-based reviews are happy to do so, utterly closes the deal and, I would argue, places this film among the top suspense pictures ever made. No contrived "gotcha" that, once we know it, seems hardly worth the trouble of having come all this way, this time. Oh, no: This one will set you back six inches in your chair.
28. Saving Private Ryan (1998). Steven Spielberg's second film of three to make our list is, without a doubt, the single greatest picture about World War Two, period. The grim reality of those early days of the western front is palpable to the point of being, at times, unbearable; the surreal intimacy with which eight individual GI's experience the chaos and devastation is confronted at freckles-on-the-eyelids range; the set-piece battles are mesmerizing to the point of motion sickness, and the sweeping John Williams soundtrack is grand and imperious without glorifying the blood-soaked horror of it all, or shamelessly trolling for a cheap audience response, either one.
As Captain John Miller, 2nd Rangers, leads his company into near-certain death on Omaha Beach, all of the three brothers of a certain Private James Francis Ryan of the 101st Airborne are having their lives taken from them at the hands of the enemy. None of the principles know any of this yet, of course, but make no mistake: it is this juxtaposition, the struggling shore party and the unknowing soldier somewhere behind the lines, that will pull the thread of tension that sustains us, almost unwittingly, as the story unfolds: He. Doesn't. Know. Yet.
Somehow Miller (Tom Hanks) and his motley rabble survive the beach-landing and the taking of a hardened gunner's nest at the opposite side, only to discover in the battle's aftermath that they have drawn the assignment of locating Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon) for evacuation to his grieving family in Iowa. With no choice but to follow orders, no matter how improbable or seemingly impossible, the squad departs Omaha Beach and walks, literally walks, straight to and through the front line, in a near-futile effort to locate, inform, and remove this single fighting soldier, somewhere in Normandy.
Not a hair is out of place in this gripping, tragic, heartwarming, and self-hallowing portrayal of those first, ugly hours when the fate of the entire planet hung precariously in the balance. From the nearly twenty-six minute beach sequence ("What's the rallying point?!?!" "ANYWHERE BUT HERE!!!"), to the coolly aware and melancholy scene in which Gen. Marshall (Havre Presnell) learns of Ryan's situation and orders him removed from the theater, to Miller and his company's ensuing search ("like looking for a needle in a stack of needles"), Spielberg brings the full weight of his oft-disrespected virtuosity to bear in scene after letter-perfect scene.
None of it would work, of course, without the peculiar cocktail of arm's-length-disintimacy at the prospect of death, and involuntarily deep comradeship, that exists among the exquisitely played soldiers under Miller's command. These include Tom Sizemore as Miller's trusty Seargant Mike Horvath, Edward Burns as the loud-mouthed and confrontational but nonetheless endearing Pvt. Reiben, Barry Pepper as the can't-miss-sharpshooter Pvt. Daniel Jackson, Giovanni Ribisi as the rashly altruistic medic T-5 Irwin Wade, and last, and certainly not least, Jeremy Davies as hapless map-translator Pvt. Timothy Upham. The tone of the post-invasion movie is indeed set by Upham, who realizes even as he is reassigned to Miller that he is hopelessly out of his depths. "Sir," he says to Miller, in one of the movie's countless unforgettable scenes, "it's just that I haven't held a weapon since basic training." To which Miller, visibly unimpressed, replies, calmly, "Did you fire the weapon in basic training?" "Yes sir," says Upham, looking at his shoes. "Well, then, get your gear," says Miller.
Cameo space is reserved for just the sort of no-expense-spared talent that massive war epics cannot work without, including Ted Danson as a surprisingly sympathetic fellow-captain ("I've got a brother of my own; find him"), Paul Giamatti as a fumbling Sergeant entrusted to help Miller's squad find the first of several candidates for the Pvt. Ryan they're looking for, Dennis Farina as the Lt. Col. who breaks Miller the bad news of his low-percentage mission ("It was a tough assignment, John; that's why you got it."), and Nathan Fillion as a James Frederick Ryan who, having just survived an all-but-unsurvivable battle to take a nondescript Normandy village in a driving rainstorm, finds himself being told that all of his brothers are dead -- and then, abruptly, that they aren't.
When Miller and his team finally find the Ryan they've been sent for, neither they nor he are in any fit state to carry out their orders, and everyone knows it. And what follows is, without a doubt, the second-greatest single battle scene in the entire archive of World War Two movies -- bested only by the beach-landing at Normandy that happens at the opposite end of the same, peerless film.
27. Scenes From a Marriage (1973). No one can claim to love quiet, subtle pictures with long takes and almost imperceptible turns of narrative, as I do, without his thoughts rushing back to Bergman each time the topic is brought up. Indeed Bergman might be the most talented director on the planet when it comes to cool subject matter, and certainly Scenes From a Marriage is the pinnacle of a storied lifetime of achievement as a writer-director of this very sort of picture.
Liv Ullman plays Marianne and Erland Josephson is Johan, the two principles of the marriage in question. Through boredom, mid-life crisis, and assorted dalliances and indiscretions, Marianne and Johan squabble in the ways that couples squabble -- the veiled cut-downs, the wondrously self-indulgent mythologies, the half-spoken references to a past that it helps no one to keep bringing up -- with an apparent inability to leave each other once and for all, or cut out the bickering and get over themselves, either one.
As we watch, palpably uncomfortable and yet inescapably transfixed, their saga spins out over years of trial separations, engagements with other people, and perhaps ultimately even divorce, but it seems no matter what obstacles they throw in the path of continuing to torture each other with their own bad company, the forces larger-than-ourselves (you know, the same ones that keep the rest of us continually slugging away at these things, too), always intervene at just the right moment: a heartwarming shared-intimacy over some minor drama being experienced by one of their children, a stolen memory of happier times, an unexpected confluence of appetites.
In all Bergman has written/directed over fifty feature-length pictures for distribution in his native Sweden, but it is this film and two others -- Autumn Sonata and Fanny & Alexander -- that cemented his reputation as a filmmaker whose entire raison d'etre was to portray the tense and balletic rituals of the self-alienated bourgeois; to expose their petty grievances and shallow pleasures without flinching even once. To show us who we really are, when we think that no one's looking.
26. Michael Clayton (2007). Tony Gilroy directs and George Clooney plays the title role in this unrelenting back-of-the-house drama of a law firm at which only the resident "fixer" can keep the top-flight clients from bolting to another firm, taking all their more reputable business dealings with them. ("Never underestimate a motivated stripper, Henry.") Executive producer Steven Soderbergh affixes his creative thumb-print all over this one, a film that might in a pinch be described as "Traffic Takes Manhattan," with all the same one-beat-out-of-rhythm unease, the same flaws in the characters' logic (and in their character), and the same sense that, if people don't get busy recognizing themselves for who they are pretty doggone soon, they're really going to regret it.
The film opens with the booming voice of one Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson -- another of those elusive "underrated actors"), speaking in what sound like affectionate, you-won't-believe-what-just-happened tones, to someone named Michael. As he monologues unseen, the camera reveals a series of cutaways in an empty and darkened law firm in the middle of the night (though, on re-watch, our eyes are perhaps drawn to the shot of a ten-line office phone, on which eight of the lines are in use and the other two are on hold). "Okay," we think to ourselves, if only momentarily, "I get it: he's leaving someone a voice-mail."
Except for one small problem: The longer Edens speaks, the more obvious it becomes that something is terribly amiss, here. ("...I realized I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life. The stench of it and the stain of it would in all likelihood take the rest of my life to undo. And you know what I did? I took a deep cleansing breath and I set that notion aside; I tabled it; I said to myself as clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe that I have witnessed today, it must wait....")
Edens, it transpires, is the renowned and ruthless senior litigator for Kenner, Bach, and LaDeen, a Manhattan law firm run by Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack, in his last cinematic role), himself one of the few people who knows that Edens suffers from a manic depression so enthralling that he occasionally misses its effects badly enough to skip his pills. For ten years Edens has been schilling the defense of an agribusiness conglomerate with a weed killer that has the unfortunate habit of killing the people who live on the farms to which it is applied, presumably at no extra charge. After ten years of this being all the life he has, Edens needs just the sort of holiday he knows he'll get by leaving the lids on his medicine bottles for a while -- prompting him eventually to strip naked in front of one of the plaintiffs at her own deposition. And when this happens, who else can the firm trust to rein-in their star attorney and soothe the rattled client, than Michael Clayton?
This may be Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, but his teeth were cut on some pretty amazing pictures in their own right (screenwriter for all three of the Bourne Identity movies, writer-producer of the pace-quickening albeit flawed movie about a South American kidnapping, "Proof of Life"). Through the combination of Soderbergh and Clooney's executive oversight, with Gilroy's perfect-pitch on the subject of how to pace a suspense picture, stringing it tighter and tighter without snapping its plausibility in his hands, Michael Clayton emerges as a best-of-three-worlds collaboration: At once uneasy and irresolute like Soderbergh, instantly sympathetic in that special way peculiar to Clooney, and absolutely gripping from the opening monologue all the way up to -- and through -- the end-titles, the device for which is at once the most simple and straightforward, and perhaps the most difficult to pull-off, of any I've yet seen.
On the insistence of Clooney, Pollack and Soderbergh, Gilroy was given final-cut on this picture (something even he himself is on-record knowing well enough not to expect ever again), and his choices in the editing process reveal a sense of self, and a sense of medium, that even most of the great names in directing needed a lifetime to grow comfortable with. James Newton Howard's soundtrack outdoes even the best of his previous work, with haunting swells and fades juxtaposed against just enough low-rumble percussion to keep us planted squarely on the hook (the opening monologue is periodically stung with the muffled sound of someone striking the lowest half-dozen strings on a piano, through the opening between the lid and the case, instead of using the keys), and the set decorations are chosen with the kind of maestro care with which we can immerse ourselves totally into the competing worlds of a big and bustling midtown law firm, and a dingy basement poker match, without once feeling tugged around by movie-makers.
In a particularly interesting wrinkle that also works -- flawlessly -- one of the very first scenes in the picture, and certainly the most tense and suspenseful in the first reel, is also one of the last scenes in the picture, meaning that at the end of the film we spend a thrilling car-ride sitting next to George Clooney, worried for him and all that he stands for in the movie, despite knowing exactly what's about to happen.
All of the actors hit their marks impeccably -- thanks in no small measure to Casting Director Ellen Chenoweth: conservative and true-to-type where that will suit the movie (David Lansbury as Michael's alcoholic and no-account brother Timmy), but bold in precisely the right doses as to leave us, in the audience, feeling that extra undercurrent of tension that comes with a fine acting talent playing just a bit outside themselves. Most notable in this respect is the choice of Tilda Swinton, the always virtuoso actress (Vanilla Sky, Adaptation) who must somehow figure out how to play the in-house council for the client company, in such a way as to come across equally cold-blooded and obviously in over her head, and who pulls it off with skin-crawling deadpan. Clooney and Wilkinson are as outstanding in their own performances as we've all come to expect them to be, but mark this down: Tilda Swinton steals this movie.
It's been more than a few days off for this project, and for this I apologize. Between a number of professional commitments and an un-invited flame war on Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, your intrepid author has been a little busier than usual, to say the least. Thanks to all who've commented off-forum about this project, and about the blog in general, and, as always, stay tuned: our next installment gets us into the top twenty-five pictures -- the sort of movies that I'd not be satisfied to live on a Thai island, without. I don't know about you, but personally I can't wait to get crackin' on 'em.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida)
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Basically -- and I know this is going to sound prosaic, but it's the absolute truth -- the key to the whole exercise was to reduce it into smaller bites. I took from my own collection all the films that I'd afforded "five bald head" ratings, and supplemented those with favorite films I'd seen but hadn't yet collected for myself. This gave me a total of about 125 pictures, which I'd naively thought could be ranked from 1 to 125 in a single step. Of course the immediate difficulty one faces with a ranking task of such magnitude is what economists call a "transitivity problem": It was possible, I quickly found, to believe that I liked The Sweet Hereafter better than Rocky, and Rocky better than The Station Agent, and The Station Agent better than The Sweet Hereafter.
The solution came to be entirely by chance. Figuring that, at least, the top- and bottom- overall choices would be straightforward decisions, I went down the entire list looking for those two movies, and assigned a "#1" to the first, "greatest" film I encountered. But because I still needed a "#125," I had to keep reading down the list, whereupon I found that I wanted to assign a number of other movies the "#1" slot, too -- eventually about a dozen or so.
Instead of letting this bother me, I decided to run with it, ultimately filtering the pool into sub-classes based on which movies were positively, arrestingly superlative (#1), which movies were outstanding but not quite as good (#10), and so on, after which the job of ranking the entire list became a simple question of ranking the films in each individual sub-class within it -- usually about ten movies at a time. The chances of a transitivity problem went away almost entirely, and the thinking about how to place a movie at the top of its class became a question of picking the best out of ten-or-so, instead of the best out of two thousand. The highest and lowest-ranking films from any one class were then compared with their counterparts from the adjoining classes, and only once did a minor problem of circularity emerged, which was settled (thrillingly) by re-watching the three films in question.
Without further ado, then, here are The Key Grip's choices of the twenty-sixth through thirtieth greatest of all movies.
30. The Lives of Others (2006). To say that this is a film about a power-intoxicated love triangle behind the iron curtain of the mid-1980s barely hints at the subtle complexity of this enthralling tale of the men of the dreaded "Stazzi," the East German secret police, and the 'lives' of all those 'others' they were tasked with monitoring.
It is East Berlin in 1984 and, as the opening placard explains, "Glasnosdt is nowhere in sight." Deep in the shadowy clockwork of the Stazzi lurks rising-star Gerd Weisler (Ulrich Muehe), cool-headed interrogator extraordinaire (the two opening scenes are intercut between his chilling interrogation of a suspect, and his explanation of proper technique to a classroom full of college students). At the conclusion of the class, Weisler's friend and superior Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) invites him to see the work of "the republic's only non-subversive artist," Georg Dryeman (Sebastian Koch), in the form of a play to be premiered that very evening and likely to be attended by Grubitz' own superior, Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme).
At the play Grubitz takes turns congratulating himself to Weisler for his good judgment about Dryeman's self-evident loyalty, and panning back down to the VIP seats to watch Hempf, who seems restless and figety during the performance -- except when the stage is held by the leading actress, Dreyman's girlfriend Christa-Maria Seiland (Martina Gedeck). Grubitz, meanwhile, is content to stare-down Dreyman himself, sitting in a wing, for even the slightest hint of odd behavior. "I'd have him monitored," Grubitz says to Gruber in an affectless monotone as the play is ending.
Of course he has no idea what he's letting himself in for, or how the granting of his wish to install a listening station in the attic above Dreyman's apartment will change the lives of all the aforementioned parties, forever. By the time it's all over, this improbably complex and subtle brush-stroke narrative will manage to shift our sympathies for the main characters not once but several times, even without the benefit of knowing, until very near the end, exactly what's been going on.
The skill with which this film patiently assembles its intricately woven characters, the subtle changes in perspective and allegiances, the quiet desperation, the blind alleys of possible narrative twist that must come to nothing if we are to find the eventual resolution genuinely surprising, are unto themselves a thorough justification for top-thirty placement. But beyond the "simple" fact of the tight formation in which all these disparate plot elements must fly, there is the added consideration that each of the other ingredients under director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck's control are surmounted with equal aplomb -- from the subtle use of color schemes to convey different characters' visions of their situation and its terrifyingly fluid nature, to the equisite use of Gabriel Yared's versatile and haunting soundtrack, to the literal accuracy of the listening equipment with which Weisler is shown, up in that attic, finding out more than he bargained for about the people on whom he has volunteered to spy.
29. The Conversation (1974). I know there isn't a reader left who's going to believe this, but as God is my witness it was a pure (and indeed previously unnoticed) coincidence, that the two films about recorded conversations to make this entire list, would occupy consecutive slots on it. Gene Hackman is Harry Call, the best freelance electronic surveillance expert on the west coast, but for the small problem that he is so paranoid that he can't have a healthy relationship of any kind, from that of an employer to that of a lover to that of a friend to that of a tenant in a friendly-run apartment house.
As the A-story (in which Call and his associates are hired to record and then clarify a conversation in San Francisco's Union Square) unfolds inexorably -- seeming almost to taunt Harry with the inevitability of its own, looming denouement -- the man himself senses that he is pushing everyone else away and can do nothing to stop himself. He offends his most faithful sidekick Stan (John Cazale) to the point that the latter ultimately quits to take all he has learned and imbue it to a mostly friendly rival Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield), who himself reveals at a convention after-party that Call's earlier freelance work resulted in the murder of an east-coast union boss. Shortly afterward Call throws Bernie, Stan, and the giggly women of the party, lock, stock, and barrel, out of his building and slams the door behind them.
The next morning, as Call works off his frustrations alone in his lab, a fragment of previously un-intelligible dialogue in Union Square comes through the headphones: He'd kill us if he got the chance. And, just like that, Harry Call must confront the fact that he is a sensing, feeling human being who just might repeat his own ghastly history if he delivers the tapes of this conversation to his client.
Director Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed the exquisite narrative, in which the A- and B-stories are only separate until the very moment in which they are not, after which their confluence -- which would've felt contrived at the hands of mere mortal filmmakers -- seems as natural as the grim inner conflict with which Call is so self-evidently devouring himself over the prospect of more responsibility for loss of human life. The Conversation would've been a positively fantastic film, a run-don't-walk-to-the-video-store film, if Coppola had settled for pulling off only this much complexity, with such precision.
But the ending, which I will not spoil even though other internet-based reviews are happy to do so, utterly closes the deal and, I would argue, places this film among the top suspense pictures ever made. No contrived "gotcha" that, once we know it, seems hardly worth the trouble of having come all this way, this time. Oh, no: This one will set you back six inches in your chair.
28. Saving Private Ryan (1998). Steven Spielberg's second film of three to make our list is, without a doubt, the single greatest picture about World War Two, period. The grim reality of those early days of the western front is palpable to the point of being, at times, unbearable; the surreal intimacy with which eight individual GI's experience the chaos and devastation is confronted at freckles-on-the-eyelids range; the set-piece battles are mesmerizing to the point of motion sickness, and the sweeping John Williams soundtrack is grand and imperious without glorifying the blood-soaked horror of it all, or shamelessly trolling for a cheap audience response, either one.
As Captain John Miller, 2nd Rangers, leads his company into near-certain death on Omaha Beach, all of the three brothers of a certain Private James Francis Ryan of the 101st Airborne are having their lives taken from them at the hands of the enemy. None of the principles know any of this yet, of course, but make no mistake: it is this juxtaposition, the struggling shore party and the unknowing soldier somewhere behind the lines, that will pull the thread of tension that sustains us, almost unwittingly, as the story unfolds: He. Doesn't. Know. Yet.
Somehow Miller (Tom Hanks) and his motley rabble survive the beach-landing and the taking of a hardened gunner's nest at the opposite side, only to discover in the battle's aftermath that they have drawn the assignment of locating Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon) for evacuation to his grieving family in Iowa. With no choice but to follow orders, no matter how improbable or seemingly impossible, the squad departs Omaha Beach and walks, literally walks, straight to and through the front line, in a near-futile effort to locate, inform, and remove this single fighting soldier, somewhere in Normandy.
Not a hair is out of place in this gripping, tragic, heartwarming, and self-hallowing portrayal of those first, ugly hours when the fate of the entire planet hung precariously in the balance. From the nearly twenty-six minute beach sequence ("What's the rallying point?!?!" "ANYWHERE BUT HERE!!!"), to the coolly aware and melancholy scene in which Gen. Marshall (Havre Presnell) learns of Ryan's situation and orders him removed from the theater, to Miller and his company's ensuing search ("like looking for a needle in a stack of needles"), Spielberg brings the full weight of his oft-disrespected virtuosity to bear in scene after letter-perfect scene.
None of it would work, of course, without the peculiar cocktail of arm's-length-disintimacy at the prospect of death, and involuntarily deep comradeship, that exists among the exquisitely played soldiers under Miller's command. These include Tom Sizemore as Miller's trusty Seargant Mike Horvath, Edward Burns as the loud-mouthed and confrontational but nonetheless endearing Pvt. Reiben, Barry Pepper as the can't-miss-sharpshooter Pvt. Daniel Jackson, Giovanni Ribisi as the rashly altruistic medic T-5 Irwin Wade, and last, and certainly not least, Jeremy Davies as hapless map-translator Pvt. Timothy Upham. The tone of the post-invasion movie is indeed set by Upham, who realizes even as he is reassigned to Miller that he is hopelessly out of his depths. "Sir," he says to Miller, in one of the movie's countless unforgettable scenes, "it's just that I haven't held a weapon since basic training." To which Miller, visibly unimpressed, replies, calmly, "Did you fire the weapon in basic training?" "Yes sir," says Upham, looking at his shoes. "Well, then, get your gear," says Miller.
Cameo space is reserved for just the sort of no-expense-spared talent that massive war epics cannot work without, including Ted Danson as a surprisingly sympathetic fellow-captain ("I've got a brother of my own; find him"), Paul Giamatti as a fumbling Sergeant entrusted to help Miller's squad find the first of several candidates for the Pvt. Ryan they're looking for, Dennis Farina as the Lt. Col. who breaks Miller the bad news of his low-percentage mission ("It was a tough assignment, John; that's why you got it."), and Nathan Fillion as a James Frederick Ryan who, having just survived an all-but-unsurvivable battle to take a nondescript Normandy village in a driving rainstorm, finds himself being told that all of his brothers are dead -- and then, abruptly, that they aren't.
When Miller and his team finally find the Ryan they've been sent for, neither they nor he are in any fit state to carry out their orders, and everyone knows it. And what follows is, without a doubt, the second-greatest single battle scene in the entire archive of World War Two movies -- bested only by the beach-landing at Normandy that happens at the opposite end of the same, peerless film.
27. Scenes From a Marriage (1973). No one can claim to love quiet, subtle pictures with long takes and almost imperceptible turns of narrative, as I do, without his thoughts rushing back to Bergman each time the topic is brought up. Indeed Bergman might be the most talented director on the planet when it comes to cool subject matter, and certainly Scenes From a Marriage is the pinnacle of a storied lifetime of achievement as a writer-director of this very sort of picture.
Liv Ullman plays Marianne and Erland Josephson is Johan, the two principles of the marriage in question. Through boredom, mid-life crisis, and assorted dalliances and indiscretions, Marianne and Johan squabble in the ways that couples squabble -- the veiled cut-downs, the wondrously self-indulgent mythologies, the half-spoken references to a past that it helps no one to keep bringing up -- with an apparent inability to leave each other once and for all, or cut out the bickering and get over themselves, either one.
As we watch, palpably uncomfortable and yet inescapably transfixed, their saga spins out over years of trial separations, engagements with other people, and perhaps ultimately even divorce, but it seems no matter what obstacles they throw in the path of continuing to torture each other with their own bad company, the forces larger-than-ourselves (you know, the same ones that keep the rest of us continually slugging away at these things, too), always intervene at just the right moment: a heartwarming shared-intimacy over some minor drama being experienced by one of their children, a stolen memory of happier times, an unexpected confluence of appetites.
In all Bergman has written/directed over fifty feature-length pictures for distribution in his native Sweden, but it is this film and two others -- Autumn Sonata and Fanny & Alexander -- that cemented his reputation as a filmmaker whose entire raison d'etre was to portray the tense and balletic rituals of the self-alienated bourgeois; to expose their petty grievances and shallow pleasures without flinching even once. To show us who we really are, when we think that no one's looking.
26. Michael Clayton (2007). Tony Gilroy directs and George Clooney plays the title role in this unrelenting back-of-the-house drama of a law firm at which only the resident "fixer" can keep the top-flight clients from bolting to another firm, taking all their more reputable business dealings with them. ("Never underestimate a motivated stripper, Henry.") Executive producer Steven Soderbergh affixes his creative thumb-print all over this one, a film that might in a pinch be described as "Traffic Takes Manhattan," with all the same one-beat-out-of-rhythm unease, the same flaws in the characters' logic (and in their character), and the same sense that, if people don't get busy recognizing themselves for who they are pretty doggone soon, they're really going to regret it.
The film opens with the booming voice of one Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson -- another of those elusive "underrated actors"), speaking in what sound like affectionate, you-won't-believe-what-just-happened tones, to someone named Michael. As he monologues unseen, the camera reveals a series of cutaways in an empty and darkened law firm in the middle of the night (though, on re-watch, our eyes are perhaps drawn to the shot of a ten-line office phone, on which eight of the lines are in use and the other two are on hold). "Okay," we think to ourselves, if only momentarily, "I get it: he's leaving someone a voice-mail."
Except for one small problem: The longer Edens speaks, the more obvious it becomes that something is terribly amiss, here. ("...I realized I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life. The stench of it and the stain of it would in all likelihood take the rest of my life to undo. And you know what I did? I took a deep cleansing breath and I set that notion aside; I tabled it; I said to myself as clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe that I have witnessed today, it must wait....")
Edens, it transpires, is the renowned and ruthless senior litigator for Kenner, Bach, and LaDeen, a Manhattan law firm run by Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack, in his last cinematic role), himself one of the few people who knows that Edens suffers from a manic depression so enthralling that he occasionally misses its effects badly enough to skip his pills. For ten years Edens has been schilling the defense of an agribusiness conglomerate with a weed killer that has the unfortunate habit of killing the people who live on the farms to which it is applied, presumably at no extra charge. After ten years of this being all the life he has, Edens needs just the sort of holiday he knows he'll get by leaving the lids on his medicine bottles for a while -- prompting him eventually to strip naked in front of one of the plaintiffs at her own deposition. And when this happens, who else can the firm trust to rein-in their star attorney and soothe the rattled client, than Michael Clayton?
This may be Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, but his teeth were cut on some pretty amazing pictures in their own right (screenwriter for all three of the Bourne Identity movies, writer-producer of the pace-quickening albeit flawed movie about a South American kidnapping, "Proof of Life"). Through the combination of Soderbergh and Clooney's executive oversight, with Gilroy's perfect-pitch on the subject of how to pace a suspense picture, stringing it tighter and tighter without snapping its plausibility in his hands, Michael Clayton emerges as a best-of-three-worlds collaboration: At once uneasy and irresolute like Soderbergh, instantly sympathetic in that special way peculiar to Clooney, and absolutely gripping from the opening monologue all the way up to -- and through -- the end-titles, the device for which is at once the most simple and straightforward, and perhaps the most difficult to pull-off, of any I've yet seen.
On the insistence of Clooney, Pollack and Soderbergh, Gilroy was given final-cut on this picture (something even he himself is on-record knowing well enough not to expect ever again), and his choices in the editing process reveal a sense of self, and a sense of medium, that even most of the great names in directing needed a lifetime to grow comfortable with. James Newton Howard's soundtrack outdoes even the best of his previous work, with haunting swells and fades juxtaposed against just enough low-rumble percussion to keep us planted squarely on the hook (the opening monologue is periodically stung with the muffled sound of someone striking the lowest half-dozen strings on a piano, through the opening between the lid and the case, instead of using the keys), and the set decorations are chosen with the kind of maestro care with which we can immerse ourselves totally into the competing worlds of a big and bustling midtown law firm, and a dingy basement poker match, without once feeling tugged around by movie-makers.
In a particularly interesting wrinkle that also works -- flawlessly -- one of the very first scenes in the picture, and certainly the most tense and suspenseful in the first reel, is also one of the last scenes in the picture, meaning that at the end of the film we spend a thrilling car-ride sitting next to George Clooney, worried for him and all that he stands for in the movie, despite knowing exactly what's about to happen.
All of the actors hit their marks impeccably -- thanks in no small measure to Casting Director Ellen Chenoweth: conservative and true-to-type where that will suit the movie (David Lansbury as Michael's alcoholic and no-account brother Timmy), but bold in precisely the right doses as to leave us, in the audience, feeling that extra undercurrent of tension that comes with a fine acting talent playing just a bit outside themselves. Most notable in this respect is the choice of Tilda Swinton, the always virtuoso actress (Vanilla Sky, Adaptation) who must somehow figure out how to play the in-house council for the client company, in such a way as to come across equally cold-blooded and obviously in over her head, and who pulls it off with skin-crawling deadpan. Clooney and Wilkinson are as outstanding in their own performances as we've all come to expect them to be, but mark this down: Tilda Swinton steals this movie.
It's been more than a few days off for this project, and for this I apologize. Between a number of professional commitments and an un-invited flame war on Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, your intrepid author has been a little busier than usual, to say the least. Thanks to all who've commented off-forum about this project, and about the blog in general, and, as always, stay tuned: our next installment gets us into the top twenty-five pictures -- the sort of movies that I'd not be satisfied to live on a Thai island, without. I don't know about you, but personally I can't wait to get crackin' on 'em.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida)
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