Still More Top 10 Lists
By Brian Miller in Film
Thursday, Jan. 1 2009 @ 2:52PM
You can read our critics' alphabetical list of the 12 best films of 2008 here. Me, I'm a traditionalist, a 10 best man who prefers numbers and rankings. Happily, several of our top-line writers have complied (after the jump). First, however, is the Village Voice Media critics' poll (with my votes and 10 best list contained herein), with an introduction by the esteemed J. Hoberman. But I'll give you the list that matters first:
1. Wall-E
(Andrew Stanton, U.S.) Determined little whatsit saves Earth and rocks the vote. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
2. The Flight of the Red Balloon
(Hou Hsiao-hsien, France) Great Chinese filmmaker remakes a 50-year-old French kiddie classic. Paris has never seemed more gloriously strange--nor has puppeteer Juliette Binoche.
3. Happy-Go-Lucky
(Mike Leigh, UK) Insanely cheerful little earful teaches kindergarten kids (and the rest of us) how to work and play with others in normally dour British filmmaker's greatest crowd-pleaser.
4. Still Life
(Jia Zhangke, China) Part archaeological dig, part science fiction, this is a documentary with actors--and Jia's latest report on China burying its past and entering the future.
5. A Christmas Tale
(Arnaud Desplechin, France) Dysfunctional French family clusters around matriarch Catherine Deneuve. She's gravely ill and in need of a compatible transplant-- the real infusion is the film's superabundance of cinematic brio.
6. Waltz With Bashir
(Ari Folman, Israel) War is treated (and "treated") twice removed in Folman's animated documentary of the nightmares, memories, and fantasies suffered by Israeli soldiers a quarter century after invading Lebanon.
7. Milk
(Gus Van Sant, U.S.) Van Sant goes straight . . . for the heartstrings, that is, in this wildly affirmative biopic of the San Francisco activist Harvey Milk, played with a controlled enthusiasm by Sean Penn.
8. Wendy and Lucy
(Kelly Reichardt, U.S.) Boxcars, hobos, no money for gas--the Great Depression happening today: Stranded somewhere in Oregon, Michelle Williams is so lonesome she cannot cry.
9. Let the Right One In
(Tomas Alfredson, Sweden) Bullied 12-year-old boy falls in puppy love with the androgynous 200-year-old child vampire next door, in this gritty, wintry, bloody adaptation of Sweden's equivalent of the Twilight novels.
10. Synecdoche, New York
(Charlie Kaufman, U.S.) First-time director wrestles with the convoluted script he wrote for himself--it's self-reflexive to the max and beyond, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Kaufman's alter ego.
Oh, but you say you want even more 10 best lists? Get ready, but also with the following disclaimers. Some titles, like The Counterfeiters and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days are considered to be 2007 releases by sticklers (like me). Some played Seattle only briefly last year; some are already on DVD; some are expected here this month and in February.First, from J. Hoberman at the Village Voice:
4. Silent Light: This astoundingly beautiful, Dreyer-influenced drama of marital and spiritual crisis, set in a modern-day Mennonite community on the outskirts of Chihuahua, is the most mature work to date by Mexican cinema enfant terrible Carlos Reygadas. A must-see for anyone who cares seriously about the art of cinema.
5. The Dark Knight: A model for comic book movies to follow, Christopher Nolan's second stab at the Batman franchise is to his previous Batman Begins roughly what The Godfather Part II is to The Godfather. As the anarchic Joker, the late Heath Ledger proved to be the freakishly disturbing highlight of a very good show, while Nolan deepened and enriched the central ideas that have attended his work since Memento -- memory, obsessive desire and the dual nature of man.
6. Heartbeat Detector: In a year when you could scarcely venture into a cinema without catching sight of a swastika, the most oddly resonant Holocaust tale was director Nicolas Klotz's audacious corporate thriller, with the great Mathieu Amalric as the in-house productivity guru for a French petrochemicals firm that happens to be run -- in fact as well as spirit -- by the descendants of Nazi sympathizers.
2. Milk As one who ordinarily finds Sean Penn insufferably pompous on or off screen, I was caught short and beguiled by his ardent take on slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. Critics who balked at Gus Van Sant's conventional bio-pic filmmaking have it all wrong. The radiantly joyful Milk was a populist by temperament and conviction, so the aesthetic suits the man and his message right down to the ground on which he was finally felled. If Josh Brolin doesn't win Best Supporting Actor for his twitchy turn as the Twinkie-fortified murderer Dan White, I'll...I'll...I'll force myself to sit through the rest of my W. screener, which I abandoned in boredom after half an hour.
1. The Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
The great Chinese filmmaker goes to France. The Flight of the Red Balloon is explicitly an outsider's movie, full of odd perspectives and founded on dislocation. Typically, Hou's narrative rhythms allow for long periods in which not much happens, followed by a cascade of overlapping information. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental performances, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.
2. Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World (Ken Jacobs)
Once more into the breach, Ken Jacobs further explores the ground zero of cinematic representation. Razzle Dazzle takes its title and much of its imagery from a minute-long 1903 Edison actualité of a circular whip-like amusement-park ride. In a sense, Jacobs has created a continuous loop. The amusement park merges with the film machine as the artist ponders the infinite possibilities that photography (and re-photography) afford to reconstitute the moment.
3. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
Another sort of circle: Lyrical yet gritty, Paranoid Park cashes the check that Van Sant wrote with his first feature, Mala Noche. In telling the tale of a Portland skater kid involved in the accidental death of a railroad bull, the filmmaker comes close to inventing his own film language. Chronology is shuffled, narrative gets dealt out as a succession of subjective impressions, and the world is made to shimmer with adolescent magic.
4. Che (Steven Soderbergh)
Soderbergh's project is to search for the inner technocrat in the original revolutionary rock star. Assuming responsibility for this ambitious, risk-taking, possibly pointless project enabled the filmmaker a means to identify with his legendary subject. Thus the emphasis is on process, with Soderbergh acting as his own director of photography. Che might be described as an anti-biopic that seeks to humanize its subject with a shocking absence of human interest.
5. Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman)
History may not be personalized in Che, but it is in Ari Folman's grim phantasmagoria, swirling around the traumatic 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature--the first, incidentally, in Israeli cinema.
6. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
The world's first talking picture shot in Plautdietsch is a behavioral experiment--set in northern Mexico's Mennonite community and cast almost entirely with Mennonite non-actors. Reygadas's tale of passion, betrayal, and redemption is a unique amalgam of ethnographic documentary and 16th-century psychodrama, but the most startling thing about the filmmaker's latest stunt is its bid for greatness.
7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
The story of two college girls negotiating the treacherous currents of a drab police state in order to secure an illegal abortion is a movie one watches in a state of mounting dread. The Romanian director's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is a long premonition of disaster, discreetly--and then shockingly--graphic. It's both a visceral allegory and a virtuoso white-knuckle thriller.
8. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis GuerÃn)
Hitchcockian in another fashion (think Vertigo), GuerÃn sends a sensitive young romantic through an urban labyrinth in search of his lost soulmate. Did she ever exist? Sensuous and gently self-mocking, In the City of Sylvia is predicated on a love of cinematic process, including film theory.
9. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)
It's a technological tour de force and an aesthetic triumph. The first 40 minutes, transporting us back to the world of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, are sublime.
10. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
More modest but no less cosmic: A sad pixie stumbles and slides into America's lower depths. Wendy and Lucy is essentially a solo turn for Michelle Williams that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would be an aria of stoical misery. (And if the filmmaker weren't so unsentimentally prosaic, she might have called this prescient ballad of quotidian disaster Pictures of the Gone World.)
And here's the list from Scott Foundas at L.A. Weekly (actually about 17 titles long):
1. Still Life and Fengming: A Chinese Memoir: The latest bottled message from Jia Zhangke, China's (if not the world's) foremost forager of filmed images, Still Life used the story of two estranged spouses in search of their respective partners to commemorate the disappearing landscape of Fengjie -- a village flooded to accommodate a massive hydroelectric dam -- and with it, a few thousand years of Chinese history. It is the work of a director in total command of his craft, in which anything seems possible. At one point, a gutted building literally blasts off into the stratosphere like a rocket ship to the moon; had WALL-E put in a cameo appearance, he would hardly have seemed out of place. As Jia was bringing us to the forefront of the new China, his countryman Wang Bing took us back through the nation's tumultuous past without ever leaving the living room of He Fengming, a septuagenarian widow who recounts her stranger-than-fiction odyssey from Maoist revolutionary to political dissident to "rehabilitated" citizen in what seems like a single, uninterrupted three-hour breath.
2. Gran Torino: Leave it to the 78-year-old Clint Eastwood to come up with the year's most au courant American film. Because Gran Torino doesn't wear its sentiments -- or its themes -- on its sleeve, it has been misunderstood (and dismissed) by some as a comic spin on Eastwood's patented Dirty Harry franchise. But in Eastwood's typically subtle, stealthy way, the film has more to say about the things that really matter in this country -- race, economic disenfranchisement, the fog of war -- than any other movie in recent memory.
3. Che and Hunger: The year's most important works of filmed biography took as subjects two of the 20th century's enduring martyrs and restored to them their essential warts-and-all humanity. Neither the deification of a saint nor the denigration of an icon, Steven Soderbergh's mammoth two-part take on the life of the Argentine doctor-cum-revolutionary Ernesto Guevara plays more like a primer on how (and then how not) to stage a popular rebellion, in which Guevara himself (played brilliantly, but never ostentatiously, by Benicio Del Toro) often seems but an ensemble player in his own story. Likewise, Bobby Sands -- the imprisoned IRA leader whose 1981 hunger strike marked a turning point in the Troubles -- doesn't even show up until one-third of the way through Steve McQueen's Hunger, by which time the film has become less an invocation to martyrdom than a timely consideration of the human body's value as a political instrument.
6. Heartbeat Detector: In a year when you could scarcely venture into a cinema without catching sight of a swastika, the most oddly resonant Holocaust tale was director Nicolas Klotz's audacious corporate thriller, with the great Mathieu Amalric as the in-house productivity guru for a French petrochemicals firm that happens to be run -- in fact as well as spirit -- by the descendants of Nazi sympathizers.
7. A Christmas Tale and The Secret of the Grain: The polar extremes of French family dramas. In A Christmas Tale, the uber-bourgeois Arnaud Desplechin takes his gabby, desentimentalized approach to family crises to (literally) the cellular level as a sprawling Roubaix clan reluctantly reunites for the holidays; at the other end of the country (and the economic spectrum), in the port city of Sète, the Tunisian-born director Abdellatif Kechiche spun his own masterfully chaotic tale of a 61-year-old ex-shipyard worker trying to turn a decrepit boat into a thriving couscous restaurant -- a folie de grandeur that he hopes may bring together the disparate members of his wayward brood.
8. George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead and Let the Right One In: In the midst of the biggest overabundance of horror movies since the 1980s, a pair of superior offerings pumped surprising life into two moribund of genre staples: the zombie movie and the vampire flick. Of course, it wasn't that surprising that undead maestro George A. Romero should find yet another untapped vein for his flesh-eating Zeitgeist lightning rods, this time taking on the politics of image-making and image consumption in the YouTube/MySpace/iPhone era with typically savage wit and gory brio. Elsewhere, Sweden's Tomas Alfredson offered up the perfect riposte to the unaccountable Twilight phenomenon with his own enigmatic, darkly alluring teen bloodsucker tale -- a movie marred only by the knowledge that it is soon to be remade by J.J. Abrams (whose Cloverfield was an inferior version of Diary of the Dead).
9. Shine a Light and Synecdoche, New York: Forget Benjamin Button: a more curious case of reverse aging and arrested development could be found in Martin Scorsese's exhilarating IMAX record of the Rolling Stones' 2006 benefit concert at New York's Beacon Theatre. The world was a stage for Charlie Kaufman, too, whose magnificently overreaching directorial debut probed the slipperiness of time and the inevitability of death with all of the messy honesty that seems to have ended up on David Fincher's cutting-room floor.
10. Happy-Go-Lucky, Slumdog Millionaire, and Wall-E: Three unapologetic up-with-people celebrations that even this critic (who naturally believes we are all condemned from birth to eternal misery and suffering) couldn't resist, in part because while these generally cheerful affairs may have looked at the world through rose-colored lenses, none of them had Hollywood's usual blinders on. In all three, pain and loss -- be they personal, national or planetary -- loom at the edges of the frame, allowing the ultimate triumph to feel earned rather than dictated.
Also from L.A. Weekly, Ella Taylor has this take (also packing her list):
1. Waltz With Bashir If ever there was proof that psychic agonies are not always best represented by realism, it's Ari Folman's soulful animated documentary about the deferred torment of former Israeli soldiers, himself included, who witnessed the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in 1982. Gorgeously drawn and colored in livid yellows by a team of animators headed by Yoni Goodman, the surreal images that accompany the quietly traumatized voices captured on Folman's tape recorder, bring back the horrors and the absurdity of a war without heroes and, as it turned out, without closure.
3. Still Life and Up the Yangtze Two radically different films with but a single thought: the human cost of Chinese progress, if that's what you call the building of the Three Gorges Dam, which brings more electricity while casually displacing more than a million already impoverished citizens and a raft of traditional cultures. In both cases, the focus is tight and personal, the fallout historic. Yung Chang's documentary Up the Yangtze focuses on a young woman who leaves her family home, a shack threatened by the rising water level, to work on a luxury cruise-liner. Jia Zhangke's heartbreakingly beautiful, wistful drama follows a coal miner and a nurse with a slow-moving digital camera as they search for spouses who have disappeared into the man-made landscape. In their quiet, elegiac way, both films mark the speed and ruthlessness with which modern technology can sink a communal past in favor of a dubious future.
4. Wendy and Lucy Lyricism goes hand in hand with urgent timeliness in Kelly Reichardt's radically understated drama about a homeless young woman (Salon critic Andrew O'Hehir calls her a slacker, thereby missing the point entirely) whose fierce spirit is depleted along with her material inventory as she passes through Oregon on her way, she hopes, to a job in the Alaska canneries. Michelle Williams is revelatory, while barely moving a muscle.
5. The Class and A Christmas Tale No, not because they're both French, unless you count garrulousness as a national trait. Which it is, and a distinct asset in the case of these two, each in its artful way an ode to the power and the limits of the word. Laurent Cantet continues to take the pulse of rapid change in Western Europe with The Class, a pitched battle of wits between a gifted teacher and his mouthy, multi-culti high school students, whose ambiguous outcome underscores the fragility of a common culture in unequal societies inundated with immigrants. In the far more navel-gazing but no less nourishing A Christmas Tale, a queenly Catherine Deneuve presides over a family gathering of unruly offspring licking old wounds while waging verbal internecine warfare, leavened with a saving bout of extra-marital nookie that puts a spring in the step of the congenitally mischievous Chiara Mastroianni. if you liked writer-director Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen, you'll love this.
6. Wall-E By contrast, the year's most touching animated picture has a screenplay so minimal, the only dialogue that remained in memory was the sound of two techno-critters, the last signs of life on an eco-scorched earth, crying out for one another as follows: "Eeeeva!" "Wall-Eeeeee!" If they hadn't found one another and one tiny live sprig with which to re-green the planet and bring back love, I'd have cried myself to sleep over the little trash compactor who folds himself into a neat, lonely cube at bedtime.
7. Slumdog Millionaire Sunnier natures than mine may froth over Happy-Go-Lucky as their movie of the year. Personally I wanted to kill Poppy -- but then, so did a lot of other long-faced Brits like me who found Eddie Marsan's driving instructor more to their taste. Or at least true to their fond memories, in my case, of a driver's ed teacher in London who, after an hour spent risking his scrawny neck on the road with me, screamed that the A41 was not a scenic railway and would I please make it back to the center to the best of my limited abilities. Anyway, back to optimism: Despite the terror that befell Mumbai right around the opening of Danny Boyle's frenetic tale of a chai wallah's rise to fame and fortune on an Indian game show, Slumdog Millionaire is my upbeat movie of the year. Watching it is like reading Dickens: For the destitute life gets brutal, and worse, and funnier, and more and more bizarre characters factor in, and a few people die on you, and then everything gets dizzyingly better all at once. The director of Trainspotting charming us with a Bollywood softshoe finale -- now that's cause for hope.
8. The Counterfeiters 2008 may go down as the year of tacky made-in-America Holocaust movies. Yet out of Austria, of all countries, came a strange but more or less true tale of an ignoble Jew, masterfully played by the hatchet-faced Karl Marcovics, who parlays his money-forging skills into saving his own skin, several others' and the entire British currency system from the inside of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Stefan Ruzowitzky's filmmaking is more capable than distinguished, but alone of this year's otherwise rubbishy World War II movies, The Counterfeiters is bold enough to consider the fuzzy line between altruism and self-interest in the camps.
1. Wall-E
9. Moving Midway and The Order of Myths Two docs, by Godfrey Cheshire and Margaret Brown respectively, chisel away delicately but with resolve at the ambiguities of race past and present in the American South. Moving Midway uncovers mixed emotions about mixed race in Cheshire's own sprawling family as a cousin quite literally moves his North Carolina house. In The Order of Myths, a tradition of segregated Mardi Gras kings and queens in Alabama is tentatively, painfully brought into a more integrated future. In a year when we elected a President born of a white mother and a black father, we have earned the right, at last, to entertain such cautionary tales of hope.
10. $9.99 This has to be the first year that three animated movies make it into my top 10, but "animated" is an elastic definition that also covers the stop-go figures in Tatia Rosenthal's feature debut, which transposes short stories by po-mo Israeli writer Etgar Keret into a Sydney apartment building filled with lost souls looking for fulfillment, parental attention or just sexual bliss with a smooth-skinned man. Like Keret's stories, $9.99 hovers dangerously around whimsy, then veers into the depths of benighted souls, and bestows on them the moments of grace that may be the best we can hope for. Unless, of course, you're Poppy.
Then there's the national IndieWire critics' poll, in which I also voted. The results were:
1. The Flight of the Red Balloon
2. A Christmas Tale
3. Wall-E
4. Wendy and Lucy
5. Happy-Go-Lucky
6. Paranoid Park
7. Still Life
8. Silent Light
9. Synecdoche, New York
10. Waltz With Bashir
Last, and certainly least (since I had time to see so few movies, missed several big releases, and did almost no reviewing), my own paltry list:
1. Wall-E
2. Let the Right One In
3. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
4. Boy A
5. Up the Yangtze
6. Slumdog Millionaire
7. Trouble the Water
8. The Wrestler
9. Pineapple Express
10. Milk
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Cover Story: Critical Mass
