Friday, January 27, 2006

And if you see me down at the liquor store, please don't tell my dad. And if you see my dad down at the liquor store, don't tell me anything at all.

A couple of things I wanted to share...

I watched Junebug again tonight, really strong flick. The direction, the performances, and the script are all fantastic. Movies like this have become a joke, newly christened spouses introduced to a backwards-ass family, they've been done to death. This one is so careful with its observations and so natural in its tone that it feels quite outlandish at times. You forget that not every family has a sex crazed barbara streisand as its matriarch. Anyway, I wish I could have put it in my top ten cause it really was one of the best films to come out last year, and a great source of comfort knowing its director was a first-timer. Also if amy adams doesn't get an oscar nomination for either supporting or lead (I'm not sure which she qualifies as) then I will add to list of 999,000 reasons why the oscars should be done away with. Her breakdown scene at the hospital is reason enough to see this movie and it's one of the best performed scenes of the year by any actor.

"God loves you just the way you are but he loves too much to let you stay that way."

Also, I am becoming obsessed with that Antony and the Johnsons CD, I am a bird now. There is something about that guy's voice, it's like nina simone combined with a transexual ghost. Haunting doesn't even begin to describe it. Particularly the first song, Hope There's Someone, but I'll get to that later. The writing is spot-on and the instrumental back up is every bit up to snuff, especially Fistful of Love which begins with a Lou Reed poem of some kind. Also Rufus Wainwright shows up for the song, What Can I Do? Rufus is righteous. Anyway, back to Antony, there's something so hearbreaking about this album because you get the sense that it's about someone wishing to do away with whatever life he or she has now and start over with a completely different one. They're trapped and this is their only solace, I know that makes it sound corny but just listen to the record or sample it whatever you want to do. I think it's one of those things that if you're into it and it gets you then it does, if not, no biggie, it's cool.

Anyway, please watch this This is the first song off of the Antony and the Johnsons record and it's one of those songs you need to listen to over and over again. Especially right before you go to sleep. It will make you feel better, I think. That's all, good night everybody....

Hope there's someone
Who'll take care of me
When I die, will I go

Hope there's someone
Who'll set my heart free
Nice to hold when I'm tired

There's a ghost on the horizon
When I go to bed
How can I fall asleep at night
How will I rest my head

Oh I'm scared of the middle place
Between light and nowhere
I don't want to be the one
Left in there, left in there

There's a man on the horizon
Wish that I'd go to bed
If I fall to his feet tonight
Will allow rest my head

So here's hoping I will not drown
Or paralyze in light
And godsend I don't want to go
To the seal's watershed

Hope there's someone
Who'll take care of me
When I die, Will I go

Hope there's someone
Who'll set my heart free
Nice to hold when I'm tired

Sunday, January 01, 2006

You ain't even in my top ten!

Okay, okay here I go again hitchin a ride on the blog bandwagon, shoving another top ten list down the throats of my dear readers. Then again, this blog was never built on anything resembling an original thought, idea, or concept. Plus, I used to do these for my highschool newspaper and they were always my favorite things to write at the end of the year. Actually, I always wrote them mid january due to the fact that in delaware, we had to wait several weeks before the limited engagements (whatever the hell that means) releases made their way down to our humble abode. All that aside, here are my top ten films of 2005, actually my ten best films of the year in alphabetical order. They are equal in the eyes of the anti-fanboy.

The Ten Best Films of 2005 (in alphabetical order)

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee's intimately epic western achieves a kind of power that stays with you long after the end credits. Lee has a compassionate gift for understanding a tormented psyche, and his amazing cast pulls off a beautiful and heartbreaking love story. With its mountain vistas stretching on forever into the horizon and its painterly cloud splotched sky lines, Brokeback Mountain reminds us that behind any face there be could be untold reservoirs of sorrow, longing, and regret. Some movies just know how to hit you where it hurts, the is one of them, and it will not be forgotten.

Capote
Phillip Seymour Hoffman has been consistently remarkable for so long that I forgot he has never had a staring role for himself. My memory is now surely intact after his astounding portrayal in this stunning film. It's the best biopic we've had in the past couple of years, because it uses the life of an artist to illuminate a character study of one man's decent into his own personal hell. First time director Bennett Miller also captures the stark, lonely nature of the mid-west, the shockwaves that result from a brutal act if violence, and how the two sometimes go hand in hand. Look out for Clifton Collins shattering confessional to Hoffman in his death row cell. Make sure you remember to breathe.

Good Night, and Good Luck
The passion for this project permeates through every frame and every carefully measured performance. Some accused Clooney and Co. of hero worship, nuts to that. Clooney is making a statement about people who acted heroically during a time when such feats were in short supply. Too bad nothing has changed. No need to despair, Good Night's sure handed intelligence and gracefully entertaining execution is a testament to the power an artists yields to enact change. This movie got people thinking, and we should all be grateful.

Last Days
The caper in Gus Van Sant's fantastically daring "death trilogy" is the best of the bunch. A biopic in the loosest sense of the word, Last Days accounts for the final lonely hours of a Kurt Cobain-like rock star. Never before has this kind of despair been so perfectly captured on film. Always questioning, but still containing a clarity of vision that places the viewer under a hypnotic spell. Van Sant's wandering eye puts us in the place of a disembodied spirit looking for a looking for a body, one that may never be found. It's a testament to Van Sant's talents that he can pull off this kind of spiritual aplomb within the confines of Michael Pitt's solitary march to death.

Millions
Finally, a film for children that lives up to the vivid imagination of a child. Finally, a film for children that doesn't peddle a bunch of easy answers and morals. Finally, a film for children so tender and moving, only the hardest of hearts need not apply. Danny Boyle's vibrant and colorful look at a child hood in transition does what all great children's stories do: sings us to sleep without coddling. Alex Etel gives the best performance by a child actor in many a moon. Watching him in this film, it's easy to remember that there is goodness in this world.

Munich
Screw the box office success! Ever since Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg has hit an artistic stride the likes of which we've never seen. He seems to be getting better and more challenging to himself and his audience with every film. Munich thoughtfully explores a complex subject and Spielberg uses his masterful command of the filmmaking craft to take the Hollywood blockbuster to bold new levels. Spielberg's cast is equally game with Eric Bana's gut wrenchingly subtle performances leading the way. Munich is a globe-trotting thriller suffused with a compelling anti blockbuster brain. The film pleads for peace, not politics and the devastating final shot reminds us just how much is at stake.

The New World
Terrence Malick's historical epic is the most beautiful film of the year. In fact, it is the most beautiful film to grace our screens since Malick's last outing: The Thin Red Line. Malick's films bleed through the confines of cinema: the cuts, the frames, and the words are almost rendered arbitrary. Watching one of his films is a completely immersive experience and no other director in the history of film operates on the same level. The New World reminds us that there is still some pure and untouched wonder in this world waiting to be discovered. Whether or not those places actually exist is up to us. Malick's quest is a masterpiece of one of most important directors in history, passing up the opportunity to see this one on the big screen is insane.

The Squid and The Whale
Noah Baumbach's achingly funny family memoir adds another gem to my favorite genre: the melancholy comedy. Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and the rest of the cast give career defining performances in a film that never takes a wrong step. Baumbach's screenplay (the best original of the year) allows his characters to embarrass the hell out of us and each other. His fearless representation of an incredibly flawed group of people is reason to cheer. Baumbach is an unflinchingly honest director, and this is personal filmmaking at its best. It reads like great fiction but feels like real life.

Syriana
Stephen Gaghan's head spinning examination of the toxic tentacles of corruption that have infested oil, politics, and business startles us with its wealth of information and rattles us with its passion to fight back. The film gives no easy answers, but its intentions are nowhere near defeatist. The very nature of the film itself immediately begs for further examination, and maybe a greater grasp on what is wrong. Gaghan's script and direction are a marvel of multi-narrative story telling. Each scene ending with the finality of the perfect last line, only to leave us begging for more. The cast is uniformly excellent with Clooney giving the best performance of his career. What's more, the film gets better on repeat viewings.

Winter Solstice
Here is a movie that was unfairly ignored during its initial release and has been pretty much forgotten since then. This movie is a quiet force, one that, if allowed, will rattle you wit its realistic emotional core. The cast here is doing something extraordinary, they are acting to not act. This sounds like a cliche, but this film feels like a carefully observed real life, right down to the most minute details. Josh Sternfeld's assured and understated direction only gets richer with each viewing. It's a thrill to see drama moving like a memory and not like a something out of a screenwriting manual. Perhaps the greatest feat of all that this film accomplishes is that it looks so effortless.

Now that I've gotten the top ten out of the way, here is a list of some other films that I really liked but for the sake of title purposes, could not be crammed into my top ten.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Bad News Bears
Breakfast on Pluto
Broken Flowers
The Constant Gardner
Corpse Bride
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Grizzly Man
A History of Violence
Happy Endings
Jarhead
Junebug
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Pride & Prejudice
Sin City
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Transamerica
War of the Worlds

Here's something I saw the onion do and I though it would be a fun idea...

MOST OVERRATED MOVIE OF 2005

Crash
This is without a doubt, hands down, the easiest decision to make for this particular subject. Yet for some reason, I see this film popping up on all kinds of top ten lists of critics who I used to think owned brains. How could anybody fall for this nonsense? A film without any kind of resemblance to real life is being touted as a monumental dissection of modern racism. What bugs me the most is that this is a film that says absolutely nothing at all, but it just so happens to do it very loudly. Director Paul Haggis (who was also responsible for one of last years most overrated films, Million Dollar Baby) needs to understand that just because you can exploit melodrama for the sake of manipulating an audience, doesn't mean you should.

MOST UNDERRATED MOVIE OF 2005

Elizabethtown
You might as well put this on my honorable mention list. Cynic critics didn't vibe with Cameron Crowe's optimism as an act of revolution mindset and all I can say to them is that they missed out on the fun. This isn't so much a film as it is an essay set to that perfect soundtrack that only Cameron Crowe seems to know how to assemble. Crowe has the confidence to let his film wander but never meander, like the Dunst character says, every day has a purpose and every scene has one too. Cameron Crowe movies inspire a specific kind of wonder inside of me, perhaps that's way I'm susceptible to them. He loves the characters he writes about, and he loves the places they visit. I walked out of this movie invigorated, hopefully he was too.

And finally...

THE SPECIAL JURY PRIZE OF 2005

Star Wars Episode III-Revenge of the Sith
I knew you all were wondering where I was going to put this one on my list. I can see you sweating frantically, worrying that I had given up on the one film that was the purpose for creating this freakin blog. Don't worry, dear friends, I just figured that it wasn't fair to put this film in the top ten because it belongs in an even higher echelon of best film categorization. This film was a summation of everything I love about movies and it was one of the single greatest experiences I have ever had in a theatre. Can anything else really compare to it? No, and it doesn't have to. Star Wars has always been in a category unto itself for me ever since I first layed eyes on the opening crawl. I usually tell people right away whenever they ask me for my favorite films (and that happens almost every hour) that my favorite filmed story of all time is the Star Wars Saga and then I go off from there. Revenge of the Sith was like a childhood memory I experienced at 21, it was the only movie I ever clapped for at its completion and it is the only movie that I could spend nine hours of my ass on the concrete sidewalk waiting for without a single regret. This was the movie of my dreams and it's quite an exhilarating feeling, watching a movie live up to that. Even if this is the last of the series (and I hope it is), I never want to let go of that desire to let a movie simply envelop you to the point where you just surrender all your senses and just say wow. I never want to let go of Star Wars.

There you go, it was a good year but good movies always come out and people will continue to see them. Don't listen to this nonsense about the death of the box office or the death of good cinema (even though I could be accused to doing that sometimes). The movies are out there, and it's a simple matter of getting off your ass and checking them out. I guess that's all I got to say right now.

Oh wait, one more thing...

"One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad's stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter, who only had just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine and I thought where would I be this very moment, if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody… this very moment... if my mom had never met my dad… if she had never died. And what's the man I'll marry gonna look like? What's he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn't know me? Does it show on his face? For days afterwards I lived in dread. Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, and this never happened."