Happy New Year!

15 Favorite 2009 Films as of the End of 2009

15. Lourdes (Hausner)
14. Face (Tsai)
13. Irene (Cavalier)
12. Soul Kitchen (Akin)
11. A Hard Name (Zweig)
10. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson)
9. The White Ribbon (Haneke)
8. Les Derniers jours du monde (Larrieu)
7. Ruhr (Benning)
6. Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)
5. Dogtooth (Lanthimos)
4. Hadewijch (Dumont)
3. To Die Like a Man (Rodrigues)
2. In Comparison (Farocki)
1. Les Herbes folles (Resnais)

10 Least Favorite 2009 Films as of the End of 2009

10. I Am Not Your Friend (Palfi)
9. Star Trek (Abrams)
8. Trash Humpers (Korine)
7. Greetings From the Woods (Karlsson)
6. Tetro (Coppola)
5. Moloch Tropical (Peck)
4. Mammoth (Moodysson)
3. Art & Copy (Pray)
2. Bruno (Charles)
1. Clubland (Geringas)

10 Best 2009 Films I Haven’t Seen As of the End of 2009

10. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Herzog)
9. Plein sud (Lifshitz)
8. Unmade Beds (Dos Santos)
7. Enter the Void (Noe)
6. Around a Small Mountain (Rivette)
5. A Serious Man (Coens)
4. Katalin Varga (Strickland)
3. Canary (Adams)
2. Ne change rien (Costa)
1. Everyone Else (Ade)

Now that my graduate classes are wrapped up for winter break (ok, my year-end critique is this coming Monday, but I’m done enough), I’ve already begun looking forward to the new semester, year, decade in art and film.  I really have no idea what lies ahead in 2011 and beyond, so I’ll stick to the coming year, 2010, in highlighting what’s on tap.

Michael Snow

If you live in or near Toronto, and have any interest in experimental cinema and video art, the 1st quarter of 2010 is going to snack you upside the head. The Power Plant on the Harbourfront will, on December 10, open an exhibition of the last 10 years of Snow’s video work, called Recent Snow: Projected Works by Michael Snow.  The exhibition will run until the Spring.  Corresponding with the exhibition, their will be screenings in the early Winter months of Wavelength and La Region Centrale, on film!, at the Drake Hotel and TIFF Cinematheque, respectively.

Also in Toronto, the Bell Lightbox will open in the summer, greeted equally in skepticism and absurd promise and excitement.  It is just as likely to further tarnish an already unstable Toronto International Film Festival, or it could help propel the festival to the forefront of all festival experiences, providing a hub that rivals the Croisette.

Speaking of:

Cannes and Beyond

It’s looking likely that I’ll get to make it out to Cannes this year (hopefully, there will be some coverage here).  As a bonus, there are some damn fine-looking films on tap for this year.  Here are my most anticipated for the festival, and for the year in general:

Top 3

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul) – my most anticipated film of 2009 returns to take the top spot of ’10.  Anyone who has seen Phantoms of Nabua will understand this sentiment, and anyone who has also seen Letters to Uncle Boonmee knows that I’d be crazy to have this film any lower.

Certified Copy (Kiarostami) – A return to narrative filmmaking after nearly a decade of (quality) experimental projects, starring one of my favorites: Juliette Binoche.  I don’t care how much this project may sound like an arthouse cliche, there is zero reason to believe that this film will be anything other than perfect.

Tree of Life (Malick) – another holdover from last year’s anticipated list (did anyone actually think, though, that Malick would spend less than 18 months editing it?).  Shameless prediction: these first 3 films will be in my Top 20 of the Oh-Tens.

The Rest

The Turin Horse – (Bela Tarr): I’m realizing that I’m not really that huge a fan of Tarr (yet I still haven’t seen Satantango, so whatever), but there are always 2 or 3 extended sequences in his films that trick me into thinking that I love him wholeheartedly. Hopefully this (last?) film of his will have more like 4 or 5 of those.

L’Illusioniste – (Sylvain Chomet): Briefly showed up in the 2009 program for the Toronto festival, only to be removed almost instantly without mention from anyone. Stills are gradually leaking out every couple of months, looking sexy, and it’s bound to show up this year. Likely the last new material we’ll ever see with Jacques Tati’s creative input involved.

Meek’s Cutoff – (Kelly Reichardt): One of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, this 19th century western has to be one of the most interesting out-of-left-field projects of the year.

The Strange Case of Angelica – (Manoel de Oliveira): Somehow I have few concerns that de Oliveira will make ten films this coming decade. I don’t think his current output is as challenging as it was in the 70s and 80s, but I’m Going Home and Eccentricities are gems without question.

Rabbit Hole – (John Cameron Mitchell): not much to say about this one that isn’t said in the filmmaker’s and the lead actress’s names and a rave review of the stage play on Variety.  Mitchell is hit more often than miss (and the hits are solid hits), and Kidman is due for a comeback.  That still frame above makes me think of Solondz a bit.

The Age of Tattoo – (Jia Zhang-ke): I don’t even know if this is actually what Jia is currently working on, but I want to see another building shoot into space.

Poetry – (Lee Chang-dong): director.

True Grit – (Joel & Ethan Coen): directors.

Aurora – (Cristi Puiu): The 2010 Romanian film of choice for sure. Realism.

Untitled Dracula Project – (Albert Serra): Serra tackles the oldest myths and fables around, yet when I hear something like ‘Serra to helm Three Wise Men/Dracula project,’ it sounds like the most original idea in the biz. Can’t wait to see some lost, aimless, hungry vampires.

Jekyll and Hyde – (Abel Ferrara): It will star Forest Whitaker. And 50 Cent.

Hopefuls (Doubtfuls) for 2010

Untitled Master Project– (Paul Thomas Anderson): Just read about this today actually. Sounds like There Will Be MORE Blood, but who cares, to the top of the Unlikely For 2010 list it goes.

Untitled Sci-Fi Project – (Lucrecia Martel): I think Martel is off of the El Eternauta project, which I think is good based on the blockbuster-ish descriptions I’ve heard of the intended production. Good news is that she still intends to dabble in some fantasy. Bad news is I don’t think she’s finished writing it yet. Either way, there will be a new Martel film on the big screen in two years, three years max, which, as I’ve learned from a recent retrospective of her work at the TIFF Cinematheque, is Awesome news.

Abel Cain/King Shot – (Alejandro Jodorowsky): Another filmmaker who I want to like much more than I do. I find that his films are way too consciously cult-y, and this sounds like the ultimate ‘what kind of film does my cult following hope that I would make if I were to make one right now’ free-for-all. Lynch’s involvement has me hanging on.

I think that’s it.

the results:

1. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand) – 53 votes
2. Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Kong, China/China/Japan/France) – 49 votes
3. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China) – 48 votes
4. Beau travail (Claire Denis, France) – 46 votes
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, China) – 43 votes
6. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, France/Thailand/Germany/Italy) – 38 votes
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania) – 35 votes
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary) – 35 votes
8. Éloge de l’amour (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland/ France) – 34 votes
9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania) – 33 votes
10. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands) – 32 votes
11. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/Germany) – 31 votes
12. The New World (Terrence Malick, USA) – 30 votes
13. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, France/Thailand) – 29 votes
14. Le Fils (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France) – 27 votes
15. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Switzerland) – 25 votes
16. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda, France) – 24 votes
In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, Portugal/Germany/Italy/Switzerland) – 24 votes
Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Denmark/Norway) – 24 votes
17. Caché (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy) – 23 votes
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, USA) – 23 votes
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, France/USA) – 23 votes
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan) – 23 votes
18. Rois et reine (Arnaud Desplechin, France) – 21 votes
19. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, USA) – 20 votes
20. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain) – 19 votes
21. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France)– 18 votes
YI YI (A One and a Two) (Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan) – 18 votes
22. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Spain) – 17 votes
23. L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France) – 16 votes
The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin, Canada) – 16 votes
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France/Austria) – 16 votes
Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs, USA) – 16 votes
24. The World (Jia Zhang-ke, China/Japan/France) – 14 votes
25. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan) – 13 votes
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Spain/France/Italy) – 13 votes
L’Intrus (Claire Denis, France) – 13 votes
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France) – 13 votes
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada) – 13 votes
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden) – 13 votes
Spirited Away (Hiyao Miyazaki, Japan) – 13 votes
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, USA) – 13 votes
26. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, USA) – 12 votes
27. Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey) – 11 votes
Dogville (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/UK/France/Germany) – 11 votes
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, USA) – 11 votes
28. Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/France) – 9 votes
demonlover (Olivier Assayas, France) – 9 votes
29. Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, Canada) – 8 votes
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan) – 8 votes
30. Longing (Valeska Grisebach, Germany) – 7 votes
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea) – 7 votes
Vai e Vem (João César Monteiro, Portugal) – 7 votes
Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA/France) – 7 votes

Here are their 90’s results:

1. Dream Of Light (Erice)
2. And Life Goes On (Kiarostami)
3. Through The Olive Trees (Kiarostami)
4. Drifting Clouds (Kaurismaki)
5. Close-Up (Kiarostami)
6. Breaking The Waves (von Trier)
7. Sátántangó (Tarr)
8. Flowers Of Shanghai (Hou)
9. Taste Of Cherry (Kiarostami)
10. Chungking Express (Wong); Hana-Bi (Kitano)
11. The Thin Red Line (Malick)
12. Histoire(s) Du Cinema (Godard)
13. A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
14. A Moment Of Innocence (Makhmalbaf)
15. Goodfellas (Scorsese)
16. L’Eau Froide (Assayas)
17. Mother And Son (Sokurov)
18. Vive L’Amour (Tsai)
19. Nouvelle Vague (Godard)
20. Abraham’s Valley (Oliveira)
21. Safe (Haynes)
22. Dead Man (Jarmusch)
23. The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan)
24. Unforgiven (Eastwood)
25. Exotica (Egoyan)
26. Sonatine (Kitano)
27. Maborosi (Kore-eda)
28. Naked (Leigh)
29. La Vie De Jésus (Dumont)
30. Fargo (Coens)
31. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino)
32. La Belle Noiseuse (Rivette)
33. Van Gogh (Pialat)
34. Three Colours: Red (Kieslowski)
35. The Last Bolshevik (Marker)
36. Dear Diary (Moretti)
37. Crumb (Zwigoff)
38. The Puppetmaster (Hou)
39. Goodbye South Goodbye (Hou)
40. Sicilia! (Straub/Huillet)

I hadn’t seen Dogville in six years until last night.  It worked much better for me now, mostly because I’m not restricting myself to analyzing it as a comment on America.  As such, I found it to be a formally innovative exercise in more-of-the-same.  But, removed from that mitigating context, it’s quite an incendiary bit of judicial therapy, not unlike the revenge therapy that is the focus of Tarantino’s films.  I only wish that I could machine gun my problems like poor Grace has the opportunity to do at the end of this film!  Mike D’Angelo and his Skandies clique just cumulatively voted this the best film of the 00’s (aughts, et al), which it isn’t, but it was a gesture that motivated me to revisit it, and, thus, like it much more than I did. So thanks to those guys.

Over at criterionforum.org, the guys are conveniently in the 00’s episode of their Lists Project, up to 28 pages of light, but thought-provoking insight into some truly hidden gems from the last ten years.  It’s one of the best ongoing best-of-the-decade discussions on the web right now, so I’d encourage anyone who reads this to check it out (*you have to be a member of the forum to see it, but this is one of many reasons to register over there).

I’m currently trying (failing) to see my share of 00’s movies that I’ve missed, which I’m logging in my 2009 film log in the tabs up top.  October was a great month for pretty good, ungreat films.

And, yes, Les herbes folles will be making any decade list that I may or may not make; can’t stop swooning over that one.

Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri…, what I imagine to be mumblecore because I’ve never seen any of this mumblecore, and the Apatow-ish ‘what now?’ limbo between college and mid-life crisis: Humpday embraces its influences, and sputters while it sets up its contrived conceit before coasting on awkward, yet real, emotions.  An old college friend shows up after a long hiatus to spend some time with his more stable, and married, bud (just like Reichardt’s set-up, basically).  But where Old Joy focuses on the impossibility of undoing the ‘growing-apart’ that people inevitably face when they spend time away from each other, Shelton pushes that aside and says ‘let’s make them fuck”.  After a rocky effort to set up this scenario (which I forgive because I usually suspend my disbelief for a film’s first third), the film becomes focused on some interesting facets of male sexual politics, stereotypes, and breaking down the idiotic institution that is marriage.

Ben, the married guy, is more open-minded than Andrew, the drifter, thinks he is; Andrew, inevitably, is more closed-minded than his hippie facade suggests.  The subject of the film is the pending fornication that Ben and Andrew will partake in, but the meat of it is how this effects Ben’s relationship with his wife, Anna, with which he is currently trying, and struggling, to get pregnant. The strength of the film, from this point, is in the tension created by the social politics that the film is attempting to question: How should Anna feel that her straight man wants to sleep with another man? Does it matter that Andrew is obnoxious and flaky? Is the knowledge that Ben and Andrew were friends before Anna was in the picture a factor in the insecurities?  If Ben and Anna were still in college, unmarried, would this dare be more acceptable to each of them? If so, why should marriage, a make-believe union that is used to mask insecurities of infidelity and the prevention of dying alone, change what they do, and how they interact, with other people? When Ben goes to that social gathering with Andrew, the night that the initial ‘deal’ was made, he sees a social setting that he hasn’t experienced in several years, a glimpse of what people his age are still capable of when free from invisible bonds of manners and ‘morality’.  Sleeping with Andrew isn’t so much about confronting sexuality as it is about proving that his marriage wasn’t the end of living life the way he wants to.

Anna, the reserved, borderline-bitch wife, eventually becomes the not-so-sheltered wife with her own history of marital excursions: she got drunk and made out with someone in a bathroom.  Ben’s reaction to this, obviously hurt and expressing the urge to guilt-trip her, is one of the film’s strongest moments, because it shows that he feels exactly the emotions that he is trying to get away from: the anti-experimental monogamy of a committed relationship.  Humpday argues that this seemingly cultural taboo of polygamy is either so hardwired in us that we cannot break it without some serious self-reconstruction, or that it is, worse, innate.  Though Anna theoretically cheated on Ben (at a time when he was, and intended to always be, faithful to her), it did not free her of anything.  She had her fun, but came running back to the safety of her picket-fenced union with Ben, more happy than ever.  The completion of this circle, then, relies on how Ben is affected by his own excursion (sleeping with Andrew).  This is where allowing Ben and Andrew to not have sex, a resistance to portray how Ben reacts to marital deviancy, fails so massively.  It closes off the male half of the debate, and makes the film’s entire argument incomplete (and, probably, pointless).  At the same time, it shows the film’s homophobia, which twice interrupted a scene of homosexuality because of heterosexual reservations; the first instance belonging to Andrew, the second belonging to the filmmaker.

I Am Love (Guadagnino)

Films that just miss the mark can be excruciating to reflect on, and none of the films that I saw this year were as painfully close yet oh-so-far from a masterpiece as Luca Guadagnino’s beautifully monumental misfire, I Am Love.  The film looks at an aristocratic Italian family that is transitioning into a new era in pretty much every way: globalizing business, unconventional sexuality, and many others that reside in spoiler territory.  Holding it all on her shoulders is the elegant matriarch played expertly by Tilda Swinton, who is just as good here as she was in Julia.  She is caught in a struggle between the sense to conserve what her family is founded on, and the call to adapt to all of the natural changes and developments that are surfacing.  Much of the film’s strength, besides its technical bravura both in its lensing and its music, is in this pulsating tension and uncertainty that creates such an unbearable iciness in everyone.  Something is building, for sure, and it promises greatness.

Then, the development that the film was obviously structured around is revealed, and all of the steam that trapped under the lid simmers away, yielding what feels like a a poorly-made Adrian Lyne film.  Everything from the half-point on suffers from a big feeling of ‘ok whatever.’  It’s not that what is occurring is implausible, nor is it deviating from the film’s primary themes, but it’s just all so ordinary compared to the extra-ordinary set-up.  And it only gets worse from this point, introducing a last-minute, contrived downer-of-an-event that took my breath away only in its ability to shock me that this project could have sunk so low.  I convinced myself after the film that this bit at the end could potentially make sense, but again, it is done in such a cheap, thoughtless way that I wished I had stopped watching an hour earlier.  There is a final sequence that re-captures the swift energy that the film’s best moments master, leaving the family in a true disarray, as well as an eerie coda that plays in the middle of the closing credits, leaving a pleasant taste in my mouth that I decided to roll with.

First of all, I hated the experience of watching Harmony Korine’s new film Trash Humpers.  I only caught the film because I swapped it at the last minute to replace Hong Sang-soo’s new film Like You Know It All, which I did for three reasons:

1. Hong’s film is being released on English-subtitled within the next week in Japan, and
2. It wouldn’t have ended until after midnight, which would have been both nearly impossible to sit through (considering that I woke up that day at 6am), and (considering that I would have to do the same the next morning) would have made it nearly impossible for me to get to bed on time. And
3. All word coming out on Trash Humpers, both from published reviews and bystanders at the festival, was that it had very little chance of being distributed outside of the festival circuit.

Trash Humpers is seemingly designed to be an unlikable film, and certainly unlovable, yet it has defied these characteristics to become both liked and loved by a significant number of established critics and cineastes, precisely because it accomplishes so well its aspirations of achieving ultimate detestability.  I agree with the opinion that the only useless art is mediocre art, a belief that holds up by how I am reacting to Trash Humpers, because the hatred I had built for it is inspiring thoughts which are consistently manifesting themselves in my consciousness to an extent that is only rivaled by those of the three or four films that I saw in the festival that I believed to be at least minor masterpieces.  But these lingering ruminations happen to not be about the content of Trash Humpers, but of the politics and manipulation that are necessary for one to consider this film to be of quality.  This is because the content of the film is Boring.

At 78 minutes, the content of Trash Humpers overstays its welcome by at least 68 minutes.  After the 10-minute mark it is only repeating what it has already done: trash-humping, appliance-destroying, life-hating.  These first 10 minutes could have potentially been a very interesting short film, in the same way that a strange and absorbing viral video on youtube can be considered to be a quality work if it was created intentionally.  There are several moments here where I chuckled at the absurdity of what I was seeing, both the absurdity of human beings behaving the way the ones on the screen are behaving, and the absurdity that I and 200 other film fans are actually watching this in one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals (not to mention, for this particular screening, in the Cinematheque located in the AGO, Toronto’s largest and most celebrated art institution).

However, once the film becomes repetitive, and, thus, quite boring, it is no longer the juvenilia of the film’s content, nor its sub-youtube quality VHS presentation, that makes the film of low quality.  I think that there actually could have been a version of this film that I would have supported and enjoyed quite a bit, because I didn’t mind the childish humor that much, nor the intentionally cruddy look.  But, for over 80% of a film to be boring is inexcusable, especially when the length is shorter that 80 minutes.  Boredom is the cardinal sin of a feature film, because once the viewers’ attentions drift beyond the content of the film or anything relating to it, there can’t be a completely informed discussion of its content.  Boredom is subjective, yes, but I can almost objectively say that a film in which its content does not develop or progress after the 10-minute mark to a level that is in any way different from what has come before it, will not produce enough interesting ideas to satisfy a 78-minute running time.  If it does for a particular viewer, then that viewer has a specialized attachment to the material, a bias to its humor, or perhaps the filmmaker, that ignores the quality: no version of the film could have disappointed them.

I checked twitter about half an hour after the film ended, searching for “Trash Humpers tiff09,” and of the 4 or 5 tweets that came up from people who just came out of my screening, none of them were anywhere near negative.  Sure, I’m aware that there is a very specific demographic that uses twitter, and even more so that tweets the moment a film ends or during the film; but, for those tweets claiming that the film was ‘hilarious’ or that it ‘rocked,’ I can only say that these people are lying.  I was in the cinema.  After the first 15 minutes, the people in that theatre, a fairly small theatre, was almost dead silent (save for the girl sitting behind me, who every twenty minutes let out a belly laugh when one of the humpers started humping another trash can).  No laughter, no giggles after 15 minutes, yet it was hilarious.  These tweeters and fans of the film, as mentioned in the review by Mike D’Angelo on notcoming.com, decided before the film that they were going to like it, and that they were going to laugh when a humper humped some trash, and are probably already planning private screenings of the DVD (or VHS) with a generous supply of marijuana to go around so that they can all giggle and guffaw at the awesomeness.

I was fully prepared for my reaction to Trash Humpers to be a negative one, and given a particular kind of distaste for it, I could have conceivably viewed it as a successfully terrible film.  But the manner in which it achieves its low quality is not acceptable, and its greatest accomplishment and discussion point, now, is that it has convinced anyone that it is worth discussing: a tired post-modern idea that has barely any interest anymore.  When the film ended, I was ready to never discuss this film again, to let it die as a blemish on my otherwise well-curated schedule; yet, here I am approaching 1000 words discussing it, falling brilliantly or idiotically into its trap.