fleshgordon

 As an excuse to revive my little LJ, and a way to distract myself a little from studying for my chemistry exam,  I decided to post 5 of the reviews for my 00s-Top 10 Films, which I have written since the start of the year. This leaves me with 5 more to decide on as I try to rewatch all of those titles I would want to include. I've changed my preliminary list a little, but these first 5 I'd comfortably place amongst my favorite films from this decade. So, yay!

In my opinion, this is the most epic and resonant film of the decade, by one of the most gifted filmmakers currently working. While it handles the historical weight of the story’s background with an uncommonly elliptical approach, the narrative never loses its remarkable grasp on the dramatic developments in the characters’ lives and attitudes. The themes include the search for community and cultural identity, which Jia underscores with an extraordinary flair for depicting communal settings and an inspired eye for filming landscapes. From an early scene, in which a mother skeptically makes adjustments to her son’s newly acquired bellbottom-jeans, to a later one in which two young dancers are confronted with the brutal indifference of their employer in the face of humiliation, the film is always sensitive towards a period of shifting values within society and family. The densely featured natural soundtrack seems to give every shot its own historical bearing and veracity, revealing most awesome effect during the numerous impressive long takes, which merge place and character seamlessly.

 
Lost in Translation Sofia Coppola, 2003

Even after the fourth or fifth time, this film doesn’t loose its beauty for me. Coppola’s lucid vision of restlessness and catharsis secluded in the giant metropole recalls Edward Yang’s magisterial Yi Yi, both in the gorgeous cinematography and the lack of narrative urgency in favor of conceiving an episodic and richly atmospheric collage. The film shows very accurately, I think, how easily a sense of freedom can shift to abandon and loneliness, especially when you’re traveling. The warmth of the protagonists’ friendship always feels genuine, and the many truly hilarious scenes work beautifully contrapuntal to the overlying melancholia of the story.

 
 I’m going home Manoel de Oliveira, 2001

Among this film’s virtues is its showcase of what remarkable actors can do with duration. Not only does it feature a mercurial lead performance by the great Michel Piccoli, but also an expert sketch of comic desperation coming from John Malkovich (his is my favorite supporting role of the decade, next to William Hurt’s in A History of Violence). The film’s masterly application of ellipses and visual patterning allows the story to be experienced with a veritable sense of daily life and of time passing. The ending is impossibly touching and startlingly simple, all the more powerful as it seems to implicate many of the unsaid things haunting the last years of Gilbert’s life.

 
 Into The Wild Sean Penn, 2007

Sure, I may very well have had my gripes with several awkward and regrettably pedestrian stylistic choices made on this film (including the schmalzy voice-over by the sister) – though in the end I still feel that “Into The Wild” is simply one of the most soulful and moving American film I’ve seen from this decade. It is clearly a labor of love and as a road movie of sorts, full of vivid characters and epiphanies. The casting of Emile Hirsch could not have been more perfect, and it is a great credit to Penn’s sensitivity as an actor and director, that he saw in Hirsch the right actor to so sincerely evoke this story along with its myriad landscapes and lives touched upon.

 
 Syndromes and a Century Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006

Originally I wanted to include Tropical Malady on this list, though a chance to attend screenings of the wonderful features – including Blissfully Yours – by this extraordinary director made this latest one, a spellbinding and subtle experimental comedy, my favorite in retrospect. Following through on his penchant for narrative diptychs, Syndromes sets up a clear distinction between its first half, set at a rural hospital and its vicinities, and its latter half, in some ways a parody of modern TV medical-dramas. Though the film draws many amusing comparisons between its two halves, it really thrives on a diffuse sense of wonder for the minutiae of its settings and characters, and stuns with an exquisite artistry of tonal transitions, most notably perhaps in its mesmerizing musical interlude and coda. 

Benjamin reminded me a lot of Prince Myshkin, because just like the character in Dostoevsky’s novel, his presence, as a centrally observant protagonist, throws all the story’s notable characters into stark relief. Brad Pitt strikes an incredible balance between restraint and vibrancy, and much of the remarkable tonal inflections throughout the film owe it to his intuitive finesse and the seamless achievements in make-up and digital modeling. I wouldn’t hesitate to place the technical craft, and more importantly the incalculable creative consequences it impresses on the story and its impact, attained in this picture, on the level of such masterworks by Kubrick or Welles. One of the movie’s most beautiful and moving accomplishments, is its exquisitely dovetailed build-up to the most blissful period in Benjamin and Daisy’s relationship, when the two of them are close to same-age and essentially catching-up with their “adolescent” affection for one another. In the apt words of Kent Jones from his excellent cinema scope article on the film, “[Fincher] understands that fleetness of pace aids in the establishment of verisimilitude”, and this is particularly true for the above-mentioned segment of the film, a kaleidoscopic stream of meticulously conceived episodes and images, radiant with the unity of the two protagonists who are literally heading for diametrically opposite directions in their lives – it is the central and beautifully wrought irony of the film, and the richness Fincher draws from this and the fantasy of the F. Scott Fitzgerald story is often startling.

That leads me to the major problem I had with Benjamin Button, its hackneyed and unconvincing framing device, which consists in the reading of Benjamin’s diary, by his daughter in the present, and the so established narrative motor by which the audience is lead through the story. I don’t even know whether Blanchett acted herself in the role of dying Daisy in the hospital, but something about that performance seemed really sketchy and just not authentic at all – I think the film could actually have done without that mother-daughter subplot in the present, because it really didn’t provide an effective anchor to the fantastical force of the main tale, which was so satisfying and fully realized that I doubt it needed much additional contrast in the first place.

I also want to say that Tilda Swinton was amazing in her comparatively minor role – almost everything in this film displays an impressive collaboration by all creative minds involved, and a particularly memorable example occurs fairly early in the plot: an oasis of intimacy and a sense of fleeting human yearning, rarely seen in Hollywood blockbusters nowadays, tucked away in a small kitchen and a musty dining room behind the lobby of an old Russian hotel, at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. 

Winners



clearly, they were the awesomest people of the Games.