My moviegoing: 2003

from Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind (2003)

First movie/last movie: Vittorio De Sica

Maddalena, Zero for Conduct (1940)
The Voyage (1974)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974)

My moviegoing: 2003

from Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946)
Austin Film Society's European Directors in Hollywood series

First movie/last movie: Basil Dearden

The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942)
The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)

American movies, 1970-1979

from John Cassavetes' A Woman under the Influence (1974)

The decade

I've been looking at a lot of film sites' best-of-the-decade lists, and I wondered what my own would look like. (This is the cue for the humorless nerds to speak up with this complaint: "Umm, actually, the new decade begins next year. The millennium actually started in 2001, not 2000, umm." Well, none of us were alive in the year 1, and nobody gives a shit, so shut the fuck up, nerds. We couldn't call the 1980s "the 1980s" if the decade left out 1980 and included 1990, so I'm content to continue our modern decade-defining system. That still leaves a small problem. What do we call this decade? The people who have been calling it "the noughties" make me a little queasy. I think I'll call it the double-donuts, because I like donuts.) Anyway, I went through my various collected sources and compiled two lists of my favorite movies of 2000-2009, one for movies seen on the big screen and another for those only seen on video. I think this was a strong decade for movies. Except for mainstream Hollywood, which probably had its worst decade ever.
My lists contain a lot of films, even though I narrowed them down considerably. I could have whittled them down to 10 each, or even 5 each, but I love movies, and I wanted to include all worthy titles. The criteria: These are my personal and idiosyncratic favorites, not a self-professed "best" list. These are the movies from the past 10 years that remained in my memory on a regular basis, had a strong visual reason to exist, and gave me a lot of pleasure or pleasurable frustration. Some of them are deeply flawed but still contain a lot of what I love about the art of film. I'm not interested in films that think they are literature acted out, or films that try to teach us a lesson, or films that try to uplift the human spirit. I am interested in movement, light and shadow, performance, character, people, life, shot composition, and humor. I prefer slippery messes to lumbering behemoths of perfection. I'm really impressed when a film can be slippery as hell without being a mess. Some films I didn't think much of while I watched them have never left my mind since. Other films seemed amazing but walked out of my brain forever. Other times other things happened. Sometimes I ate cheeseburgers. Here are my lists, in vaguely chronological order:

My favorite movies of 2000-2009, as seen on the big screen


















The Circle (Jafar Panahi)
Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier)
George Washington (David Gordon Green)
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay)
Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes)
Gerry (Gus Van Sant)
All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green)
The Man without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki)
Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2 (Quentin Tarantino)
Elephant (Gus Van Sant)
Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff)
The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo)
Dogville (Lars Von Trier)
Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano)
Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson)
Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)
The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin)
Before Sunset (Richard Linklater)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen)
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)
Palindromes (Todd Solondz)
Last Days (Gus Van Sant)
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
2046 (Wong Kar-Wai)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
Junebug (Phil Morrison)
Keane (Lodge Kerrigan)
The World (Jia Zhang Ke)
Bubble (Steven Soderbergh)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones)
Cache (Michael Haneke)
Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Jonathan Demme)
A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)
Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)
The Host (Bong Joon-Ho)
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Inland Empire (David Lynch)
Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino)
Offside (Jafar Panahi)
Lights in the Dusk (Aki Kaurismaki)
The Boss of It All (Lars Von Trier)
Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)
The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson)
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes)
Romance and Cigarettes (John Turturro)
Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
The Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Lorna’s Silence (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier)
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)


My favorite movies of 2000-2009, as seen on video




























In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson)
Yi Yi (Edward Yang)
Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin)
The House of Mirth (Terence Davies)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)
The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg)
Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Y tu mama tambien (Alfonso Cuaron)
I’m Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira)
All or Nothing (Mike Leigh)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami)
Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton)
The Son (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang Ke)
Decasia (Bill Morrison)
Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin)
Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin)
The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas)
Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
Terror’s Advocate (Barbet Schroeder)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010

To paraphrase a line from Robert Altman's last film, A Prairie Home Companion, the death of an old man is not a tragedy, especially when he leaves behind so many great movies.

(from the top)
My Night at Maud's (1969)
Perceval (1978)
The Aviator's Wife (1981)
A Good Marriage (1982)
Summer (1986)
Autumn Tale (1998)
The Lady and the Duke (2001)

My moviegoing: 2003

from Fritz Lang's You and Me (1938), with songs by Kurt Weill
Austin Film Society's European Directors in Hollywood series

First movie/last movie: Jules Dassin

Nazi Agent (1942)
Circle of Two (1980)

American movies, 1970-1979

from John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974)

2009

Last year, I decided to write about every movie I saw on the big screen. It took four months. This year, I say fuck that. Pronouncements about what this year in film meant culturally? Not interested. I really liked almost everything I saw this year on the big screen and pretty much liked everything, but I don't think I saw any flat-out masterpieces (not counting the old stuff I saw at film society and revival screenings). That doesn't mean anything. I'm not paid to do this, so I avoid anything I think I will hate and see almost everything I think I will like. Here's what I saw this year, broken down into three categories: Top Shelf, Almost Top Shelf, and Decent, followed by my favorite film society and revival screenings of the year.

Top Shelf (in no particular order - this applies to the other three lists, too)

























Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)

The Class (Laurent Cantet)
This is the only accurate movie I've seen about teaching high school, which means nothing in terms of its success as a piece of filmed art. It's pretty good on those terms, too.

Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
The critics who called this movie misguided revisionist history and unintentional anti-Semitism were curiously silent when Schindler's List came out and culturally replaced the actual Holocaust, as well as its strongest film record, Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah. Besides that, they failed to recognize the exploitation, drive-in tradition Tarantino marries to classic, mainstream cinema. This movie-mad revisionist WWII fantasy is about the Nazi as classic movie villain and about other WWII movies, as well as spaghetti westerns and men-on-a-mission films. Tarantino's visual imagination continues to expand, and I love that he created an American box-office hit out of a movie that is mostly in subtitled German and French, contains 10 or 11 long scenes instead of a headache-inducing barrage of quick cutting, and references several German and American films from the silent era to the 1940s. And a David Bowie musical montage.

Lorna's Silence (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)

Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski)
I might be overrating this one a little because I was an extra in it, and I got to see my name in the credits on a big screen in one of my favorite theaters, but I was actually cut out of the frame and didn't end up in the final product. Unlike the other practitioners of the media-created "mumblecore" gang, Bujalski shoots on film and has a sophisticated approach to structure and visual space lacking in his peers' work (Duplass Brothers, the almost completely worthless Joe Swanberg, et al.). This time, his characters are stronger, richer, and more likable, and the mystery of how he creates such watchable films out of such mundane, ultra-realist material continues to deepen.

A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen)
These guys are on a roll again.

Antichrist (Lars Von Trier)
When will people stop seeing him as a misanthropic carnival barker charlatan and start seeing him as one of the most innovative formalists of the last thirty years? The critics hated Led Zeppelin when they were a going concern, too.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
Takes the prize for both the most fun I had in a theater this year and the most unwieldy title since Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. For only the second time in a forty-year career, Herzog is working from someone else's script. He creates a weird combination of reliable genre action/thriller and crazy fucking Herzog movie. Nicholas Cage is fun again. It all somehow flows. I thought it was going to be an interesting trainwreck, but it's way better than that.

Almost Top Shelf
























The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky)
I hated Aronofsky's first two movies and didn't see his third, but the actors and subject matter made me take a chance. I'm glad I did. The cliched premise doesn't even play like a cliche.

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood)

Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, & Bong Joon-Ho)
The Carax segment by itself is Top Shelf.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
I'm guessing that most people I know will be bored out of their minds by this movie. I'm sorry about that, because it's not boring.

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)

Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze)
This was probably the best-looking movie I saw this year. Those sunsets. That fur. Those mouths and noses. That tree house.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater)

Decent

























Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
The moment when TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe sings Neil Young's "Unknown Legend" a capella is Top Shelf.

Chelsea on the Rocks (Abel Ferrara)
His last two movies haven't been released in the U.S., but this minor documentary got a limited release. Boo for the Sid & Nancy and Janis Joplin dramatic recreations and for any part where that smug idiot Ethan Hawke talks and/or plays his "music." Yay for everything else.

The Road (John Hillcoat)
Viggo Mortensen is awesome. (I think I have a heterosexual man-crush on him. I don't know what you do with those. Befriend him somehow? The man has charisma.) The rest is a competent cross between Mad Max and a Hallmark card. The book is essential reading. The movie is a fine way to kill an afternoon.

Favorite revival and film society screenings
(Watching these will cure all your ills.)























Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma)

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra)

The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich)

Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin)

The Landlord (Hal Ashby)

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer)

Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox)

Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey)

Avanti! (Billy Wilder)

Dan O'Bannon RIP

Screenwriter, special effects man, and occasional director Dan O'Bannon died of Crohn's disease shortly before Christmas. He brought a sharp intelligence and sense of humor to many excellent horror and science fiction films. He didn't always work regularly, but the projects he was involved in are pretty impressive. Here's a selected filmography with some notes:























A college buddy of John Carpenter's, O'Bannon collaborated with Carpenter on the screenplay of Carpenter's first film as director, Dark Star. O'Bannon also did the special effects, edited the movie, created the production design, and played the role of Sgt. Pinback.
He created the computer animation and worked in the miniature effects unit on Star Wars. He wrote the screenplays for Alien, Dead & Buried, Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars, and Total Recall.
He wrote and directed Return of the Living Dead.
I will be writing about two other O'Bannon films on my horror movie blog, Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath, in the coming months.

My moviegoing: 2003

from Peter Hall's The Homecoming (1973), screenplay by Harold Pinter based on his own play
Paramount Theatre special screening of American Film Theatre productions

Val Avery, 1924-2009

Recommended roles
The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)
Too Late Blues (John Cassavetes, 1961)
Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1962) (sentimental junk, but he's good)
Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963)
Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)
Minnie and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, 1971)
Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)
Up in Smoke (Lou Adler, 1978)
The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979) (total crap, but he's good)
Gloria (John Cassavetes, 1980)
Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997)

First movie/last movie: Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925)
This Is Cinerama (1952)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Robert Altman's California Split (1974)

My moviegoing: 2003

from David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls (2003)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973)

First movie/last movie: Jean Cocteau

The Blood of a Poet (1930)
The Testament of Orpheus (1960)