Best of 2014: Cinema

Few years in recent memory have felt as lousy as 2014. I fear that I might make such a claim every year, but in looking back, it's been a while since I've struggled to put together ten films from a given year that I could call "the ten best films of the year" or even "my top 10," if I'm trying to keep things more subjective. While cinema seemed to stand still, I saw far more impressive work on television this year, as TV continues to "up its game" on nearly all fronts (well, maybe not CBS). HBO's The Comeback and Olive Kitteridge, Comedy Central's Broad City, and Amazon Prime's Transparent all stood taller than any of the new films I saw this past year—a claim my snobby, cinema purist 21-year-old self would scoffed at if he heard me say it.

This year, I noticed critics and audiences grabbing hold of a bunch of films whose flaws (or lack of charisma) tended to outweigh the strengths. From impressive feats like Boyhood to above-average sci-fi actioners like Snowpiercer to avant-garde critical darlings like Under the Skin to standard, moderately spooky horror yarns like The Babadook, so few films managed to shake me in the ways my top 5 of 2013 did—Stranger by the Lake, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Top of the Lake (which I would have disqualified from the list if I had known it would be returning for a second series), Bastards, and Spring Breakers. For at least those five, I had zero reservations singing my praise about them.

With each of the 2014 films I've chosen (some of which are festival leftovers from 2013 that had a U.S. theatrical run during this calendar year), there's a hesitation I feel in each one. I was impressed on different levels by them all, or I wouldn't have made this list, but something's still missing. In an attempt to focus on the strengths of the films I've listed over the weaknesses, I've decided to leave the #1 slot blank—possibly to be filled at a later date, or perhaps to remain as a reminder of how lackluster of a year 2014 was for film. I'll be posting a couple runners-up and a music list at a later date. So, at last for 2014, here are my 9 favorite films, an honorable mention, 9 runners-up, and the 2 films I truly hated. Click here to read the posts in descending order. NOTE: The "Runners-Up" section is for the best of the year, not the worst. Just to clarify.


1.
2. Force majeure (Turist). Ruben Östlund. Sweden/France/Norway.
3. Ida. Paweł Pawlikowski. Poland/Denmark/France/UK.
4. Xenia. Panos H. Koutras. Greece/France/Belgium.
5. Misunderstood (Incompresa). Asia Argento. Italy/France.
6. Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse). Catherine Breillat. France/Germany/Belgium.
7. Maps to the Stars. David Cronenberg. Canada/Germany/USA/France.
8. Child's Pose (Poziția copilului). Călin Peter Netzer. Romania.
9. Obvious Child. Gillian Robespierre. USA.
10. Only Lovers Left Alive. Jim Jarmusch. UK/Germany/France/Greece/Cyprus.

Honorable Mention:

• Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier. Denmark/Germany/France/Belgium.

The Worst of 2014:

• Whiplash. Damien Chazelle. USA.
• The Normal Heart. Ryan Murphy. USA.

Runners-Up:

• Young & Beautiful (Jeune et jolie). François Ozon. France.
• Something Must Break (Nånting måste gå sönder). Ester Martin Bergsmark. Sweden.
• Under the Skin. Jonathan Glazer. UK.
• Gerontophilia. Bruce LaBruce. Canada.
• You and the Night (Les rencontres d'après minuit). Yann Gonzalez. France.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past. Bryan Singer. USA/UK.
• Boyhood. Richard Linklater. USA.
• Gloria. Sebastián Lelio. Chile/Spain.
• Little Gay Boy. Antony Hickling. France.

Best of 2014: Honorable Mention, Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier)

Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier. Denmark/Germany/France/Belgium.

I don't even know what to really say about Lars von Trier's films any more. With each new one, they tend to feel less and less like films and more like events. Hyped to death around the world and across the Internet, the sensations I get leading up to seeing these films feel more like those that I get before long-planned trips or eagerly awaited parties. My subsequent reactions don't feel like responses to the films themselves but to the particular experiences. Those reactions also never feel weighted by my own criticism or opinion. If you asked me whether I liked Nymphomaniac or not, I don't really have an answer.

I find my own experience with Nymphomaniac to be hindered by a number of factors: I watched both volumes alone On Demand from start-to-finish after the theatrical screening was pushed back two weeks; I settled on watching the "theatrical cuts" (which von Trier had nothing to do with) since I couldn't find any information regarding the releases of his versions (which clock in around an hour-and-a-half longer than the studio edits); I eventually watched the director's cuts, at home, both volumes back-to-back and simply found myself comparing the strengths and weaknesses of both versions. I still cannot even say that I like or dislike Nymphomaniac. What I will say critically, however, is that Nymphomaniac (Vol. I, to be specific) contains both the single greatest performance and the single greatest scene in any film this past year.

As Mrs. H, a mother of three whose husband has left her to be with our protagonist Joe (here played by Stacy Martin, whose lack of presence runs the risk of fading her into the wallpaper of every scene; later played by a much more captivating Charlotte Gainsbourg), Uma Thurman enters Joe's apartment (and the film itself) like a hurricane, clutching her three mute boys as she shuffles through Joe's apartment. She refers to her sons always as a collective entity ("the children") and even refuses to use her husband's name ("the children's father" suffices) and asks Joe, "would it be alright if we showed the children the whoring bed?" She escorts the sad angel-faced children into the bedroom as if they were walking into a museum exhibit, showing the children "the whoring bed," or their Daddy's new favorite place. My descriptions of the scene and Uma's performance can't do either the justice they deserve, but "shattering" is a word that comes to mind. Nothing that follows comes anywhere near the fever pitch of this chapter. Neither Thurman nor von Trier have ever shined brighter than they did in those 10-to-15 minutes, and even if I can't really tell you that I liked (or even disliked) Nymphomaniac, I can assure you that Uma made the experience totally worthwhile.

With: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBoeuf, Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe, Uma Thurman, Mia Goth, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Connie Nielsen, Michael Pas, Jamie Bell, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, Jens Albinus, Jesper Christensen, Nicolas Bro, Hugo Speer, Christian Gade Bjerrum, Jonas Baeck, Christoph Schechinger, Jesse Inman, David Halina, Anders Hove, Simon Boer, Cyron Melville, Saskia Reeves

...Two Months (and a few days) Later

Inspired by a recent conversation with my oldest friend Dan, I’ve been positively motivated to write what I wanted to but couldn’t, for several reasons, put together for the posting of my list of The Decade List of 100. Tying ideas together successfully has always been the weakest facet of my writing, so the prospect of sifting through ten years of cinema, especially from the perspective of someone who entered those years at the age of 15, felt like an insurmountable task. It still, to some extent, seems outside the realm of possibility, but at least now I can attempt to explain or defend some of what was going through my head while arranging the list at hand.

Before I had a chance to come up with a better name for it, “The Decade List” stuck, serendipitously masking any questionable adjective one might have used to modify “Films of the ‘00s.” Neither “best” nor “favorite” felt like the correct modifier, as I tried to objectively assess the films I chose without completely abandoning some of the personal attachments I’ve developed with them over the years (or, in some cases, over much smaller of a time frame). That 43 of the films were at least partially financed by the French film industry certainly points to one of the personal biases I didn’t try to look past. That only 3 were documentaries shows another, one I’m not exactly proud of. The double (and triple and quadruple) appearances of 17 directors might suggest I didn’t put that auteur inclination aside either, but it isn’t exactly true, as omitting Clean, The Boss of It All, Time of the Wolf, Anatomy of Hell and Last Days was a lot easier than eliminating films whose directors only made a single appearance on the final list.

Though I never properly introduced the project (as I didn’t have a clear idea of where it was headed upon conception), I did establish a single rule for inclusion: the film had to make its international premiere after December 31, 1999 and before January 1, 2010. Considering the nature of the project, that rule might have sounded redundant, but it needed to be clearly stated, as it cancelled out films such as Claire Denis’ Beau travail, Nagisa Oshima’s Taboo, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources, all of which officially premiered in ’99 but hit the U.S. within the acceptable window.

It’s hard to decide which of the two grave sins of omission (not defending the list as a whole or not defending the film I chose as my #1) is worse, but I like to think the reason I had nothing to write about Dogville was the best vindication for its placement. No other film I watched for the sake of making this list screamed out, “this is it,” the way Dogville did. The sensation isn’t something I can successfully articulate nor defend in any intellectual manner. That I happened to chose a film that was appearing with some frequency on top of others’ similar lists made the task even more difficult. Do I really have anything new to say about a film that’s been written about as extensively as Dogville, and even if I did make a check-list of all the things it does right, would that come close to defining that seemingly inexplicable feeling I got while watching it?

What I will say, however, was that no other film made me re-examine and eventually adjust my once rigidly negative feelings toward its filmmaker the way Dogville did. Whether a harsh reaction to the emotions von Trier conjured inside of me with Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves and The Idiots or the inability to determine why he was doing so, my hatred for the director vanished midway through watching Dogville for the first time, and by the time the saxophone comes in on “Young Americans,” I was singing a much different song about von Trier. While I still think his motives in Dancer in the Dark are tough to define, Dogville and its world of invisible physical boundaries revealed the man behind the curtain and provided me with a special kind of elation (the sort that comes best from misanthropy).

With regard to Michael Haneke, a filmmaker who seems to be falling out of favor with a lot of people I know (or read), I feel no qualms about having him as the most featured filmmaker on the 100. While I do generally like Time of the Wolf, I think Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché and The White Ribbon represent the upper tier of his work over the past decade. However, Dan asked me if The Piano Teacher really is better than Caché, and likely, it isn’t, especially when considering Haneke’s oeuvre as a whole and his cinematic obsessions. While I acknowledge that, in terms of Haneke’s career, Caché will likely stand out as his “masterpiece,” The Piano Teacher marked my first experience with Haneke on the big screen and still remains one of my finer theatrical experiences, even though it was still fantastic to see Caché on opening night with an even larger audience. This particular bias is probably more common with albums than films as I can’t think of any other films on the list that would fall under this distinction.

The “well, it was my first time” bias wasn’t the only that was at work when organizing the films. For the majority of the year, I spent more time bestowing praise upon Sébastien Lifshitz, the one filmmaker I knew most people weren’t familiar with, than most of the other directors represented. So on some level, I think I felt it my duty to include either Wild Side or Come Undone in my top 10 instead of judging either of the films against all the rest. A close friend of mine, who also shared my enthusiasm for Lifshitz, sent me an e-mail recently saying he’d rewatched Wild Side and been surprised to have found it to be more ornamental than he’d remembered. As I read that, I knew exactly what he meant and perhaps even thought something along those lines when watching it again in December. In looking at the ten films that follow Wild Side on the list, I recognize now that all ten are better films. Had I not spent so much time absorbing as much cinema as I could over the past decade, I would have preferred naming just the ten best films of the Aughts: ten years, ten films and (likely) ten filmmakers. With that in mind, spot number 10 becomes nearly as important as spot number 1, signifying not the tenth best film you saw so much as the one film you wanted to be sure you didn’t leave off the list. So when dealing with a list of 100, both spots 10 and 100 fall prey to that idea.

If I thought really hard about it, I could probably come up with predilections for about half, in addition to factors working against about a fourth of them. As I don’t care to do so, I’ll simply point out the ones that came to mind first. Time certainly didn’t work in the favor of In the Mood for Love, allowing its director to commit a giant fuck up with My Blueberry Nights, which wouldn’t have been as damning if it didn’t share the thematic and stylistic traits that defined the rest of his works. And while the same could be said for Michael Haneke and his Funny Games remake, he at least had the chance to redeem himself (in my eyes) with The White Ribbon. Time didn’t seem to work in the favor of Mulholland Drive in the ranking either, as it had nine years to lose some of its luster from being analyzed/decrypted to death and failing to retain the magic of seeing it for the first time in its subsequent viewings. Time did work in the favor of There Will Be Blood, however, and the fact that I only watched it twice with my opinion of it growing exponentially the more I thought about it.

A couple of people seemed surprised to see not only how high I’d ranked Sex Is Comedy but that I’d placed it above the rest of Catherine Breillat’s other films. For reasons I’m not exactly sure, several films got knocked down in the rankings for containing scenes or moments I couldn’t defend intellectually or artistically. For Fat Girl, I couldn’t justify Breillat’s need to violently murder two of her characters. For Inside, I couldn’t see the explanation of why Béatrice Dalle was terrorizing Allyson Paradis as anything but a lame cop-out. For Mysterious Skin, I kept hearing that awful line Joseph Gordon-Levitt screams in the middle of the film. For Trouble Every Day, I’m still not even sure. None of Breillat’s other films really came to life the way Sex Is Comedy did on repeat viewings. Of course, I had always regarded Sex Is Comedy as a lesser film in Breillat’s canon, so finding out that I was wrong placed it in favor of discovering that I wasn’t truly satisfied with one of Fat Girl’s consequential elements.

In reviewing the annual Best Of lists I’ve written for this blog, I’ve called some truly worthless films (like The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down—Christ, drugs must have been involved) the best of their given year, as well as films that ultimately weren’t anything special (like Pan’s Labyrinth and 2046). With that said, I’ll probably recognize at least one or two of these films as being shitty after some time passes, even though I spent a lot more time on this than any of annual run-downs.

I suppose the sort of defense for my ’00 list that would make the most sense (much more so than overanalyzing my own prejudices and miscalculations) would be one where I explored the commonalities between the films I ranked highest or what I looked for when ordering them (I won’t pretend to make some sort of hyperbolic umbrella statement about the decade in cinema). Malheureusement, I can only come up with some really facile descriptors like “bold” and “obstinate” to connect the films, and those will do about as much justice to the films as forcing some loose, interlocking theme would. I made the list because I thought I would enjoy doing so, and I did… some of the time. Ultimately though the whole thing was simply a way for me to hopefully introduce films and/or filmmakers to others—the exact reason I started a blog, only in project form. If I happened to succeed on that level, then the self-inflicted exhaustion and frustration was (probably) worth it.

Things That Happen When You're Away

For the past two months or so, I've taken myself off the radar, cinema-wise, focusing on... well, nothing in particular. This week I've been trying to catch up on all the film/media news I've been missing/ignoring, and Christ, a lot has happened. Here are some of the highlights. Thanks to Jordany, Jason H, Blake and all the sources I culled the material from.

1. New Yorker Films comes back to life after closing its doors a year ago. Does that mean Céline and Julie will hit DVD this year?

2. Michael Haneke scraps the "old age" project he was set to shoot with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

3. Though rumors had been circulating for a while, I guess the untimely death of you-know-who has shifted Amy Heckerling's focus from a Clueless sequel onto a vampire film (hmm), which will reteam her with Alicia Silverstone.

4. Carlos Reygadas announced his next film, something of an auto-biopic, entitled Post Tenebras Lux. I also overlooked the omnibus film he took part in, Revolución, which commemorated the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Revolución screened at Berlin last week; the other directors who took part in the film are Mariana Chenillo (Cinco días sin Nora), Fernando Eimbcke (Lake Tahoe), Amat Escalante (Los bastardos), Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo García (Mother and Child), Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo (Voy a explotar), Rodrigo Plá (La zona) and Patricia Riggen (La misma luna).

5. Penélope Cruz was tipped as starring in Lars von Trier's upcoming Melancholia, but the rumor was later denied. Too bad she's opting for the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

6. Speaking of Lars von Trier and rumors, there was a lot of hoopla over von Trier making a Five Obsctructions-esque dare to Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro to remake Taxi Driver. But that apparently wasn't exactly true either.

7. Mariah Carey wore this outfit.

8. Beautiful, weird mystery and intrigue surround the release of these video teasers, by apparently a well-known pop star. "Christina Aguilera? Kylie Minogue? Little Boots? Röyskopp?" I was asked. "Goldfrapp? Sally Shapiro?" I replied. More speculation here.

9. Three truly exceptional albums hit record stores (or, really, iTunes and the like). And one I'm still confounded about (listen to it here).

10. Lucrecia Martel saw all three of her films on Cinema Tropical's list of the 10 best Latin American films of the decade. I can't say I'm surprised.

In DVD news, Tony Palmer and Frank Zappa's 200 Motels will make its overdue debut on DVD via Palmer through MVD. The release date? April 20, naturally. I was browsing Breaking Glass Pictures' Facebook page and was more than pleased to see that they've picked up the DVD rights to Gabriel Fleming's The Lost Coast, a haunting, outstanding film about four friends over Halloween night in San Francisco. The Lost Coast was previously available as a DVD-R on Amazon; it's still available to watch on Hulu (with commercial breaks) as well as streaming on Netflix (sans commercials). Breaking Glass will release it on 4 May, and it comes highly recommended.

I should also be attending the 7th annual True False Film Festival (which also slipped my mind). It begins on Thursday, and as I live two hours away I figure I may as well. Let me know if I should pay specific attention to anything screening there, as I haven't given the line-up a close examination yet. Another great documentary festival, Big Sky, announced their awards the other day, which you can find here. My good friend Stewart Copeland's new film Let Your Feet Do the Talkin' made its world premiere at Big Sky as well.

The Decade List: 50 (More) Honorable Mentions

I don't plan on offering realtime stats of the process of elimination I'm going to be going through, but I've officially axed 50 titles from the list that's now sitting at around 165. In previous months' updates, I'd included other honorable mentions that were certainly not going to make the 100, some annotates, some not. You can find them for 2000, 2001, 2002 and an assorted one including films from 2002-2004. These are not what one might assume to be 101-150, as I still have close to 70 more that I need to eliminate before finalizing the 100, but are of some merit nonetheless. Listed alphabetically.

20 Centimeters [20 centímetros], 2005, d. Ramón Salazar, Spain/France
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007, d. Andrew Dominik, USA/Canada
Away from Her, 2006, d. Sarah Polley, Canada
Bad Education [La mala educación], 2004, d. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
Beeswax, 2009, d. Andrew Bujalski, USA
Before I Forget [Avant que j'oublie], 2007, d. Jacques Nolot, France
The Boss of It All [Direktøren for det hele], 2006, d. Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/Iceland/Italy/France/Norway/Finland/Germany
The Bridge, 2006, d. Eric Steel, USA/UK
Captain Ahab [Capitaine Achab], 2007, d. Philippe Ramos, France/Sweden
The Cats of Mirikitani, 2006, d. Linda Hattendorf, USA

City of God [Cidade de Deus], 2002, d. Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund, Brazil/France
Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul [Istanbul hatirasi - Köprüyü geçmek], 2005, d. Fatih Akin, Turkey/Germany
Dave Chappelle's Block Party, 2005, d. Michel Gondry, USA
Enduring Love, 2004, d. Roger Michell, UK
The Exterminating Angels [Les anges exterminateurs], 2006, d. Jean-Claude Brisseau, France
Far from Heaven, 2002, d. Todd Haynes, USA/France
Fast Food Nation, 2006, d. Richard Linklater, USA/UK
The Girlfriend Experience, 2009, d. Steven Soderbergh, USA
Great World of Sound, 2007, d. Craig Zobel, USA
Home, 2008, d. Ursula Meier, Switzerland/France/Belgium

In the Loop, 2009, d. Armando Iannucci, UK
The Incredibles, 2004, d. Brad Bird, USA
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, 2006, d. Mary Jordan, USA
Jackass Number Two, 2006, d. Jeff Tremaine, USA
The King, 2005, d. James Marsh, UK/USA
Last Life in the Universe, 2003, d. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Thailand/Japan
Man Push Cart, 2005, d. Ramin Bahrani, USA
Manderlay, 2005, d. Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/UK/France/Netherlands/Germany
Milk, 2008, d. Gus Van Sant, USA
Next Door [Naboer], 2005, d. Pål Sletaune, Norway/Sweden/Denmark

Punch-Drunk Love, 2002, d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA
Quiet City, 2007, d. Aaron Katz, USA
Read My Lips [Sur mes lèvres], 2001, d. Jacques Audiard, France
Rejected, 2000, d. Don Hertzfeldt, USA
Requiem, 2006, d. Hans-Christian Schmid, Germany
Rubber Johnny, 2005, d. Chris Cunningham, UK
Silent Light [Stellet licht], 2007, d. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany
Solaris, 2002, d. Steven Soderbergh, USA
Somersault, 2004, d. Cate Shortland, Australia
Son frère, 2003, d. Patrice Chéreau, France

Starting Out in the Evening, 2007, d. Andrew Wagner, USA
Tetro, 2009, d. Francis Ford Coppola, USA/Italy/Spain/Argentina
Time of the Wolf [Le temps du loup], 2003, d. Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany
Times and Winds [Beş vakit], 2006, d. Reha Erdem, Turkey
Vinyan, 2008, d. Fabrice Du Welz, France/Belgium/UK/Australia
Wendy and Lucy, 2008, d. Kelly Reichardt, USA
X2, 2003, d. Bryan Singer, USA/Canada
XXY, 2007, d. Lucía Puenzo, Argentina/France/Spain
Yeast, 2008, d. Mary Bronstein, USA
Yella, 2007, d. Christian Petzold, Germany

All My Friends: Millennium Mambo, Take 1: Jason Huettner

Jason and I established a cyberspace amity based on two great mutual obsessions: PJ Harvey and queer cinema. He's my go-to man when it comes to PJ news and rumors, a job of no small importance for someone like me. He currently resides in New York City. I'm happy to have Jason as the first entry in this series. Neither of his lists are in preferential order.

On Music: "I hate lists that are aimed at developing some kind of consensus about art. Here are ten albums, in no particular order, released in the 00's that are essential to my 00's experience. This list isn't definitive at all (plenty of other 00's albums that I love).. but all are quality and have sentimental value. The music speaks for itself."

Life Without Buildings - Any Other City (DCBaltimore2012, 2001)
Diamanda Galás - Guilty, Guilty, Guilty (Mute, 2008)
Various Artists - Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted - Baghdad, 1925-1929 (Honest Jon's, 2008)
Scott Walker - The Drift (4AD, 2006)
Mayyors - Deads 12" (self-released, 2009)
A Frames - "1" (S-S Records, 2002)
Quasimoto - The Unseen (Stones Throw, 2000)
Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline (Kranky, 2007)
The Thing (with Joe McPhee) - She Knows... (Smalltown Superjazz, 2002)
Power Douglas - Pentecostal Fangbread (FiveSix Media, 2008)

On Film: "Again, sentimentality plays a big part here. Picking just ten is hard. I am prone to alarming lapses of taste in films."

Bad Education [La mala educación], 2004, d. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
Brick, 2005, d. Rian Johnson, USA
Children of Men, 2006, d. Alfonso Cuarón, UK/USA/Japan
Dancer in the Dark, 2000, d. Lars von Trier, Denmark/Netherlands/Germany/France/USA/UK/Sweden/Finland/Iceland/Norway
Eastern Promises, 2007, d. David Cronenberg, UK/Canada
O Fantasma, 2000, d. João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal
Mulholland Drive, 2001, d. David Lynch, France/USA
Notre musique, 2004, d. Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland
Pan's Labyrinth [El laberinto del Fauno], 2006, d. Guillermo del Toro, Mexico/Spain/USA
The Proposition, 2005, d. John Hillcoat, Australia/UK
The Raspberry Reich, 2004, d. Bruce LaBruce, Germany/Canada
The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001, d. Wes Anderson, USA
Strange Circus, 2005, d. Sion Sono, Japan
There Will Be Blood, 2007, d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA
Waltz with Bashir, 2008, d. Ari Folman, Israel/Germany/France/USA

My favorite time of year: John Waters' Top 10 of 2009

Not only does the end of each year bring me to want to relive my favorite Christmas movie (sorry Arnaud Desplechin, Bruce Willis), but it also marks the time when John Waters provides his Top 10 films of the year for Artforum. Last year his #1 was a tie between Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Christophe Honoré's Love Songs [Les chansons d'amour], both of which made my list too although there were quite a few of you who weren't as impressed. This year, it's Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export. The real joy of his lists though is the sentence or two that accompany the films. You can read it all at the link above, but the two highlights for me were Antichrist ("If Ingmar Bergman had committed suicide, gone to hell, and come back to earth to direct an exploitation/art film for drive-ins, this is the movie he would have made.") and In the Loop ("A smart, mean, foulmouthed British satire about the struggle for global power that asks the all-important question: How do you debate the invasion of Iraq if your gums start to bleed in the middle of your presentation?"). Ha!

1. Import/Export, d. Ulrich Seidl
2. Antichrist, d. Lars von Trier
3. In the Loop, d. Armando Iannucci
4. World's Greatest Dad, d. Bobcat Goldthwait (hello, Shakes the Clown!)
5. Brüno, d. Larry Charles
6. Lorna's Silence [Le silence de Lorna], d. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
7. Broken Embraces [Los abrazos rotos], d. Pedro Almodóvar
8. The Baader Meinhof Complex [Der Baader Meinhof Komplex], d. Uli Edel
9. Whatever Works, d. Woody Allen
10. The Headless Woman [La mujer sin cabeza], d. Lucrecia Martel

Millennium Mambo, Part 3

More on the Best of the Decade list round-up from Mike D'Angelo and the Skandies, which was actually posted earlier this month (and which I thought I had already mentioned, but... I guess not) and from Glenn Kenny. D'Angelo and the Skandies listed 20 films and 20 performances, with Lars von Trier's Dogville and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood topping the respective lists. First, the films:

01. Dogville, 2003, d. Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/UK/France/Germany/Norway/Finland/Netherlands, Lionsgate
02. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004, d. Michel Gondry, USA, Focus Features
03. In the Mood for Love, 2000, d. Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong/China/France, USA Films/Criterion
04. Mulholland Drive, 2001, d. David Lynch, USA/France, Universal Studios
05. There Will Be Blood, 2007, d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, Paramount Vantage/Miramax
06. The New World, 2005, d. Terrence Malick, USA/UK, New Line
07. Memento, 2000, d. Christopher Nolan, USA, Newmarket Films
08. 25th Hour, 2002, d. Spike Lee, USA, Touchstone
09. Yi yi: A One and Two, 2000, d. Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, Fox Lorber/Criterion
10. No Country for Old Men, 2007, d. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, USA, Paramount Vantage/Miramax
11. Before Sunset, 2004, d. Richard Linklater, USA, Warner Independent
12. Silent Light [Stellet licht], 2007, d. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, Palisades Tartan
13. Kill Bill, Volume 1, 2003, d. Quentin Tarantino, USA, Miramax
14. Werckmeister Harmonies [Werckmeister harmóniák], 2000, d. Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary/Italy/Germany/France, Facets
15. Irréversible, 2002, d. Gaspar Noé, France, Lionsgate
16. Zodiac, 2007, d. David Fincher, USA, Paramount
17. Ghost World, 2001, d. Terry Zwigoff, USA/UK/Germany, United Artists
18. The Man Who Wasn't There, 2001, d. Joel Coen, USA/UK, USA Films
19. Trouble Every Day, 2001, d. Claire Denis, France/Germany/Japan, Lot 47 Films
20. Gerry, 2002, d. Gus Van Sant, USA, Miramax

And the performances...

01. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
02. Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
03. Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive
04. Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake
05. Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher [La pianiste]
06. Summer Phoenix, Esther Kahn
07. Björk, Dancer in the Dark
08. Laura Dern, Inland Empire
09. Mathieu Amalric, Kings and Queen [Rois et reine]
10. Daniel Day-Lewis, Gangs of New York
11. Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
12. Christian Bale, American Psycho
13. Billy Bob Thornton, The Man Who Wasn't There
14. Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
15. Laura Linney, You Can Count on Me
16. Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
17. Q'orianka Kilcher, The New World
18. Julianne Moore, Far from Heaven
19. Peter Sarsgaard, Shattered Glass
20. Aurélien Recoing, Time Out [L'emploi du temps]

I don't have much to say about either list, aside from... Summer Phoenix? Really? Above Björk? Well, not just above Björk, but on the list altogether. I remember her lead performance in Arnaud Desplechin's English-language Esther Kahn to lack quite a bit. I'm still planning on revisiting that one before the year ends, so I'll let you know then. And I've complained enough about Ghost World; unless it starts showing up a lot more often, I'm keeping mum.

Glenn Kenny's list covers his "Seventy Greatest Films of the Decade," in alphabetical order from A.I. to Zodiac. Of the nice surprises on the list: Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (which I don't think was a bit of personal bias, despite the fact that he played one of Sasha Grey's johns), Azazel Jacobs' The GoodTimesKid, Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman, Brad Bird's The Incredibles, Clint Eastwood's Invictus (which he can't talk about yet... but this inclusion isn't stirring any interest in me as Gran Torino is also on his list), Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar, Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day, Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. I spotted a few other Best of the Decade lists floating around, but most of them were deplorable, so I'm not going to waste posting/linking to them.

I also meant to thank Eric over at IonCinema for first directing me toward the TIFF list I posted yesterday, and please do check out out Blake Williams' blog, who also included TIFF's picks for the 1990s, which was topped with Víctor Erice's The Dream of Life [El sol del membrillo], still without a DVD release in the US, and included my favorite first-time viewing of a not-2000-era film in 2009, Olivier Assayas' L'eau froide. Thanks guys. Now, on to some writing of my own...

The Decade List: Antichrist (2009)

Antichrist – dir. Lars von Trier

What words could I possibly add to the ones already given to the most notorious film of 2009? Greeted with what those of us not in attendance can only imagine as a fury of loud, mixed reactions at Cannes in May, I begin to wonder if anyone seeing it after that premiere screening could really get the full effect of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. While some people might be better off knowing about the more salacious aspects of the film before seeing it, I don’t count myself among them. Fueled by an unfortunate curiosity, I couldn’t help but read the various reports from Cannes, all of which expressed in detail the “finer” aspects of Antichrist, so when I finally got my chance to see the film, how could I pretend I didn’t know what lied ahead?

The experience of seeing a film without a single notion of what to expect is an enviable one, especially when considering a film like Antichrist. But, while the real “doozies” hardly even registered, I witnessed something strange and powerful around those elements, a film that certainly was, but never felt like, the film I had read about. With the right spin, the plot specifics of Antichrist could (and did) sound like a two-hour-long fuck-you from von Trier, from its biblical parallels to its dedication to the late Andrei Tarkovsky. But what I saw wasn’t that.

For its first hour, Antichrist unfolds like one, seemingly endless panic attack, made all the more unsettling and human by Charlotte Gainsbourg’s staggering performance. Stricken by the unimaginable guilt that she (or more specifically, her own sexuality) was responsible for the death of her child, Gainsbourg, the “She” to Willem Dafoe’s “He,” suffers a devastating paralysis, leading her husband to aid her in confronting the underlying fears triggering this guilt.

Perhaps the boldest aspect of Antichrist is the way von Trier takes his loudest criticism (misogyny) and magnifies it. Even his detractors should admit one of the director’s finest gifts is his ability to elicit brilliant performances from his actors, even if his methods have raised some eyebrows after his onset spats with Björk, Nicole Kidman and John C. Reilly have been made public. Gainsbourg’s performance, which won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, is what levels the magnification, allowing some of the dubious proceedings to haunt even if they happen to revile at the same time.

I’m not sure how Antichrist brought von Trier out of a serious bout of depression or if pushing the misogynistic claims to their limit succeeds at destabilizing them. I’m not really sure about a lot of things about Antichrist, aside from the fact that it worked for me, with all its idiosyncrasies. Antichrist opens in select theatres in the United States today and bows on IFC On Demand Wednesday, the 28th.

With: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle
Country of Origin: Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy/Poland
US Distributor: IFC Films

Premiere: 18 May 2009 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 25 September 2009 (Austin Fantastic Fest)

Awards: Best Actress – Charlotte Gainsbourg (Cannes Film Festival)

Vice Magazine interviews Lars von Trier

Leave it to Vice to conduct my favorite interview thusfar with our old pal Lars von Trier. Henrik Saltzstein gets some great shit out of LvT: complications with Willem Dafoe's dick double, pill-popping, Björk writing a letter to Nicole Kidman telling her not to do Dogville, gardening and the woes of having liberal parents. For more fun, check out the rest of Vice's Film Issue, with a cover by Christopher Doyle and interviews with Werner Herzog, Spike Jonze, the Kuchar brothers, Doyle, Anthony Dod Mantle, Ross McElwee, Gaspar Noé, Dario Argento, Jack Bond, Terry Gilliam, Les Blank and a photospread of Natasha Lyonne (??) by Richard Kern (!!).