...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.

Attention-Directing for Berlin and SXSW 2010

The 2010 Berlin International Film Festival begins tomorrow, and unfortunately I'm not going. I did, however, look through the complete line-up to find some of the more exciting films playing this year. One can only hope Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans and Baumbach's wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, is better than Margot, but we'll see...

Jud Süß - Film ohne Gewissen, a biopic of the actor Ferdinand Marian, is the latest from German director Oskar Roehler (Agnes and His Brothers), starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Martina Gedeck. Belgian directors Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern (Aaltra, Louise-Michel) return with their dryly humorous blend of comedy with Mammuth, which stars Gérard Depardieu (with long, golden hair), Isabelle Adjani, Yolande Moreau and Anna Mouglalis.

Four years after she won the Golden Bear for the film Grbavica, Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić comes to the Berlinale with On the Path [Na putu] about a couple in an unhappy relationship. Yoji Yamada’s (The Twilight Samurai) About Her Brother concerns a family who take over the family pharmaceutical business after the patriarch dies.

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener (Walking & Talking, Friends with Money) once again teams up with actress Catherine Keener for Please Give, a comedy about a husband and wife who own a furniture store. Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet and Oliver Platt also star. Please Give premiered at Sundance. A director I often confuse with Holofcener, Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon), will also be in Berlin with her latest, The Kids Are All Right, with Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo.

Always the envelope-pusher (though seldom with good results), Michael Winterbottom adapts a novel by Jim Thompson (The Grifters, This World, Then the Fireworks) into the graphically violent The Killer Inside Me, starring Casey Affleck and (groan) Kate Hudson and (double groan) Jessica Alba. IFC picked up the US rights to this after it premiered at Sundance. Kristen Stewart plays a teenage stripper/runaway in music video director Jake Scott’s (Plunkett & Macleane) Welcome to the Rileys. Also starring James Gandolfni and Melissa Leo.

Hong Kong filmmaker Scud offers the second part of his unnamed trilogy, Amphetamine, which began with Permanent Residence last year. If you’re curious, take a look at the bizarre lengths some Wikipedia user has gone to in describing the nudity in Permanent Residence. Sample: “As the Chinese actors' full-frontal nudity and unobscured private parts are shown many times, both Sean Li's and Osman Hung's glans penises (penis heads) are visible in every full-frontal nude scene (whether in a room, on a beach, water-platform, shower, etc), revealing that they have both been fully circumcised.”

Both Sébastien Lifshitz and Anahí Berneri are previous Teddy winners (for Wild Side and Un año sin amor respectively), and they both will be presenting their latest films, Plein sud [Going South] and Por tu culpa [It’s Your Fault], in the Panorama section. German queer filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, Teddy winner in 1990 for Die Aids-Trilogie, will bring the sequel to his Überleben in New York, New York Memories, to Berlin this year.

Canadian director John Greyson has won 3 Teddys, for his feature Pissoir, his short The Making of Monsters and his documentary Fig Trees; his short Covered, an experimental film paying tribute to the organizers of the ill-fated Queer Sarajevo Festival in 2008, will play at Berlin this year. Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, who won a Teddy Jury Prize for The Adventures of Félix [Drôle de Félix] in 2000, will premiere their latest, Family Tree [L’arbre et la fôret], to Berlin after winning the Prix Jean Vigo. Family Tree stars Guy Marchand, Françoise Fabian, Yannick Renier and Sabrina Seyvecou.

2010 is already a busy year for James Franco. After a hilarious guest role on 30 Rock last month, he is playing Allen Ginsberg in Howl from directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Paragraph 175), which also stars Jon Hamm (another former 30 Rock guest star), Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, David Strathairn, Treat Wiliams, Bob Balaban and Alessandro Nivola. Howl premiered at Sundance and will screen in the Competition section, while two shorts directed by Franco, Herbert White and The Feast of Stephen (the former starring Michael Shannon), will play in the Panorama section.

More 30 Rock connections (it’s all I’ve cared to think about lately): Cheyenne Jackson is featured in Crayton Robey’s documentary Making the Boys, about the legacy of the play The Boys in the Band which was made into a film by William Friedkin. Making the Boys premiered at Outfest last year. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman) directs a thriller entitled The Owls in which she and actress Guinevere Turner play aging lesbians.

The latest from Finnish director Aleksi Salmenperä (Producing Adults), Bad Family [Paha perhe], sounds wonderfully naughty. A brother and sister meet again as teenagers after their parents separate and fall in love. Following the German, New York and Tel Aviv editions of the series, Fucking Different: São Paulo is an omnibus of queer shorts from a group of young Brazilian filmmakers.

Postcard to Daddy is a highly personal documentary by Michael Stock, director/star of Prince in Hell, addressing his own molestation by his father as a child. Sadly underrated director Ira Sachs (Married Life, The Delta) will present his short, Last Address, this year, which is dedicated to the many, many NYC artists we’ve lost to the AIDS virus.

German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (Marseilles, Nachmittag) will debut her latest, Orly, in the Forum section. Bruno Todeschini and Natacha Régnier co-star in the German/French production. Constantin Popescu, one of the directors of Tales from the Golden Age, will make his feature debut with Portait of the Fighter As a Young Man [Portretul luptătorului la tinereţe], which follows a Romanian group of anti-Communists hiding in the Carpathian Mountains.

Hanna Schygulla will receive an Honorary Golden Bear for her contributions to both German and international cinema. Schygulla will also present four films she directed: Ein Traumprotokoll, Hanna Hannah, Moi et mon double and Alicia Bustamente. In addition to the films she directed, four of her most memorable performances will also play: Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven [Auf der anderen Seite], Marco Ferreri’s The Story of Piera [Storia di Piera] for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes and two collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lili Marleen and Rio das Mortes.

Other new films: Submarino, d. Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration); Shekarchi [The Hunter], d. Rafi Pitts (It’s Winter); Loose Cannons [Mine vaganti], d. Ferzan Ozpetek (Steam: The Turkish Bath, Saturn in Opposition), w. Riccardo Scamarcio.

The South by Southwest [SXSW] Film Festival also announced its line-up. The film portion of the festival begins on 12 March and runs until the 20th, while the music portion, arguably the raison d’être of the fest, begins on the 17th and goes to the 21st.

The Duplass brothers’ Cyrus, starring John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, Marisa Tomei (with an awful haircut) and Jonah Hill, is among the Headliners, as well as the U.S. premieres of two Sony Pictures Classics titles, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs [Micmacs à tire-larigot] and Aaron Schneider’s Get Low. Mr. Nice, a biopic of criminal Howard Marks, directed by Bernard Rose (The Kreutzer Sonata, the Anna Karenina adaptation with Sophie Marceau), is also a part of the Headliners and stars Rhys Ifans, Chloë Sevigny, David Thewlis, Luis Tosar, Christian McKay and (!) Ken Russell.

Sevigny also stars in Barry Munday, co-starring Patrick Wilson, Mae Whitman (Anne Veal from Arrested Development), Judy Greer (Kitty Sanchez from Arrested Development), Malcolm McDowell, Cybill Shepherd, Jean Smart, Billy Dee Williams and Colin Hanks. James Franco will redirect his party to Austin, Texas to premiere his documentary Saturday Night which looks at all the behind-the-scenes action of Saturday Night Live. Carla Gugino plays a retired porn actress in her boyfriend Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx; also with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Timothy Olyphant, Malin Akerman, Alicia Silverstone (!), Justin Kirk and Marley Shelton.

Easily the most exciting thing playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival is the new film from Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City), entitled Cold Weather. Cold Weather again stars Cris Lankenau of Quiet City and sounds vaguely thriller-ish. It’ll be the one I’m keeping my eye on. The other title that has me enticed is Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara’s documentary on Stephin Merritt called Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields. The doc is ten years in the making (starting around the time of 69 Love Songs, I’d imagine). The Magnetic Fields’ new album, Realism, is also pretty outstanding if you haven’t picked it up yet.

Other films playing that premiered elsewhere: Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart [L’épine dans le cœur], Bryan Poyser’s Lovers of Hate, Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown, Dagur Kári’s The Good Heart, Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män som hatar kvinnor], Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones, Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats and Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine.

New Films from Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, Sébastien Lifshitz, Anahí Berneri, Jan Hřebejk, Michael Stock, Others at Berlinale '10

Twenty-five titles were announced for the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival yesterday in the Main Programme, Panorama Special and Panorama Dokumente. The previous announcement included new films from Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese and Jasmila Žbanić. This round of titles includes films from Sébastien Lifshitz which I've mentioned several times previously, Anahí Berneri (Un año sin amor), Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (Jeanne et le garçon formidable, Côte d'Azur), Mat Whitecross (The Road to Guantanamo, The Shock Doctrine), Peter Kern (Gossenkind), E.J. Yong (Untold Scandal), Miguel Albaladejo (Cachorro), Michael Stock (Prinz in Hölleland), Reha Erdam (Times and Winds), Lucy Walker (Devil's Playground), Jan Hřebejk (Divided We Fall) and Scud (City Without Baseball, Permanent Residence). The titles are listed below.

- The Actresses, d. E.J. Yong, South Korea
- Alle meine Stehaufmädchen: Von Frauen, die sich was trauen [All My Tumbler Girls or All About Women Who Dare To...], d. Lothar Lambert, Germany
- Amphetamine, d. Scud, Hong Kong/China
- L'arbre et le forêt [Family Tree], d. Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, France
- Beautiful Darling: The Life And Times Of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar, d. James Rasin, USA
- Besouro, d. João Daniel Tikhomiroff, Brazil
- Blutsfreundschaft [Initiation], d. Peter Kern, Austria/Germany
- Gay Days, d. Yair Qedar, Israel
- Golden Slumber, d. Yoshihiro Nakamura, Japan
- Just Another Love Story, d. Kaushik Ganguly, Rituparno Ghosh, India
- Kawasakiho růže [Kawasaki's Rose], d. Jan Hřebejk, Czech Repblic
- Kosmos, d. Reha Erdam, Turkey/Bulgaria
- Making the Boys, d. Crayton Robey, USA
- El mal ajeno, d. Óskar Santos Gómez, Spain
- The Man Who Sold the World, d. Swel Noury, Imad Noury, Morocco
- Nacidas para sufrir [Born to Suffer], d. Miguel Albaladejo, Spain
- Parade, d. Isao Yukisada, Japan
- Phobidilia, d. Doran Paz, Yoav Paz, Israel
- Plein sud [Going South], d. Sébastien Lifshitz, France
- Por tu culpa [It's Your Fault], d. Anahí Berneri, Argentina/France
- Postcard to Daddy, d. Michael Stock, Germany
- Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, d. Mat Whitecross, UK
- Son of Babylon, d. Mohamed Al-Daradji, Iraq/UK/France/United Arab Emirates/Netherlands/Egypt/Palestine
- Waste Land, d. Lucy Walker, UK/Brazil
- Wiegenlieder [Lullaby], d. Tamara Trampe, Johann Feindt, Germany

Can I Eternal Sunshine 2009, or Do I have to like the movie for that to work?

As 2009 slips away, sadly it has been chosen that I will be spending the evening at home, reliving the few moments worth salvaging before I Eternal Sunshine the year completely. It is just about that time for me to post something really maudlin that I'll regret later (and never end up taking down). But before I do so, I'll post some (hopefully) fascinating miscellany.

My entry to The Auteurs' Notebook's year-end writers' poll went up yesterday, alongside Andrew Grant, Glenn Kenny, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Evan Davis, Gabe Klinger, Dave McDougall, David Cairns and Ben Simington's choices for our 2009 fantasy double features (of a first-run theatrical release and an older film we happened to have seen in the past 12 months). Mine covers 2 Olivier Assayas films (though I guess technically, I saw L'heure d'été in 2008, it was in the final two weeks of the year...). Glenn's beautiful screencap of Sheryl Lee as the Good Witch in Wild at Heart has become my current desktop pattern.

Cahiers du Cinéma posted their annual 10 Best of the year and continued to prove to us Yankees how much the French love Clint Eastwood (no, not for Invictus but Gran Torino; Invictus will surely make the 2010 list). Alain Resnais' Wild Grass [Les herbes folles] was their #1 (Sony Pictures Classics' website still doesn't have an official date for its release in the States), and the pleasant surprise of the list was seeing Alain Guiraudie's Le roi de l'évasion [The King of Escape] make it. One of the (many) regrets I have in regard to the final Decade List posting was that I didn't get around to rewatching Guiraudie's Ce vieux rêve qui bouge or Pas de repos pour les braves and left them off the 100 (though I'm pretty sure they should have been there).

So the Decade List posting... thanks to everyone for the nice comments. Aside from a clerical error in posting the two Abel Ferrara films in the wrong positions (Go Go Tales should be at 55, Mary at 76), I'm happy (enough) with the way things lined up, and I will be working on a "defense" if you will for my #1 within the next couple weeks. Anyway, to those of you who sent me your list, they will be posted by the end of next week, and if you're still working on yours, don't take the posting of my list as the curtain drop for the 00's nonsense...

...and though there's a purposeful hesitancy in the way I've spoken of the project in the more recent posts, I'm still possibly considering trying the previous decade on for size for 2010... but that depends on a number of factors, not least of which coming up with a (clever) name for it and determining the amount of time I will have to dedicate to it (it would really be better if I didn't have all the time, actually, as being gainfully employed and/or leaving the Midwest sound much more appealing).

2010 looks to be your year if you happen to be a Blu-ray player owning, French-speaking cinephile, as a number of really exciting releases have already been announced by Gaumont on high-definition format:

- Danton, 1983, d. Andrzej Wajda, 9 February
- La nuit de Varennes, 1982, d. Ettore Scola, 9 February, w. Marcello Mastroianni, Hanna Schygulla, Harvey Keitel
- Le silence de la mer, 1949, d. Jean-Pierre Melville, 25 March
- Un condamné à mort s'est échappé [A Man Escaped], 1956, d. Robert Bresson, 25 March
- Les maudits [The Damned], 1947, d. René Clément, 20 May
- Le général della Rovere, 1959, d. Roberto Rossellini, 20 May
- La peau [La pelle / The Skin], 1981, d. Liliana Cavani, 15 June, w. Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Burt Lancaster
- Le rouge et le noir [The Red and the White], 1954, d. Claude Autant-Lara, 15 June, w. Danielle Darrieux

All of the films will also be released on DVD on the same date, some for the first time in France, as far as I can tell. Also in France, though not exactly exciting, the film I've been blabbing about all year, Sébastien Lifshitz's Plein sud, opens today, to almost exclusively damning reviews... Though I will reserve judgment for when I do see it, I was hoping the weariness I felt after watching the blasé trailer and noticing it wasn't announced for any of the autumn film festivals was unwarranted...

And finally, I never got around to posting a 2009 music list for the Decade List, which is fine as I generally only made those for my own benefit, and while I had planned on doing some sort of "the 25 '00 albums that did the most to shape me into the cynic I am today" list... it's looking less likely. I have, however, collected 50 of my favorite singles from 2009. I looked past the disappointment I felt in (a lot of) the particular albums and selected the tracks that left their mark on me in some way. I had planned the list to only include one song per artist, but the thing ran out of steam around 43, so instead of nixing three, I tossed a couple alternate choices from the albums I did happen to like a lot this year (Fever Ray, A Woman A Man Walked By, Logos). So if my plan to Eternal Sunshine all of 2009 actually works, I guess I won't have to look far to play catch up in the music world (though my ability to discern which of the 50 aren't really good songs and don't belong has vanished today). I could post an mp3 link at some point, but I haven't the energy at the moment. It looks like I'm finished rambling, and it doesn't look as dejected as I thought I might. That's good, right? Bonne année à tous.

01. Annie - My Love Is Better [Don't Stop]
02. Fever Ray - Keep the Streets Empty for Me [Fever Ray]
03. The xx - Crystalised [xx]
04. PJ Harvey & John Parish - Pig Will Not [A Woman A Man Walked By]
05. The Hidden Cameras - Walk On [Origin: Orphan]
06. Japandroids - Sovereignty [Post-Nothing]
07. Bat for Lashes - Sleep Alone [Two Suns] (yes, the album version is much better)
08. Röyksopp (featuring Karin Dreijer Andersson) - This Must Be It [Junior]
09. Dizzee Rascal featuring Calvin Harris and Chrome - Dance wiv Me [Tongue 'N Cheek]
10. No Age - You're a Target [Losing Feeling EP]
11. Junior Boys - Parallel Lines [Begone Dull Care]
12. St. Vincent - The Party [Actor]
13. Atlas Sound featuring Laetitia Sadier - Quick Canal [Logos]
14. Vivian Girls - Before I Start to Cry [Everything Goes Wrong]
15. Whitney Houston - Million Dollar Bill [I Look to You]
16. Phoenix - Fences [Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix]
17. Sally Shapiro - Dying in Africa [My Guilty Pleasure]
18. Jay-Z - D.O.A. (Death of Auto-tune) [The Blueprint 3]
19. The Radio Dept. - David [David EP]
20. Peaches - Talk to Me [I Feel Cream]
21. The Legends - You Won [Over and Over]
22. Little Boots - Stuck on Repeat [Hands]
23. Passion Pit - The Reeling [Manners]
24. The Juan Maclean - Happy House [The Future Will Come] (the 12-minute version is much better)
25. Alcoholic Faith Mission - Gently [421 Wythe Avenue] (The song I would have chosen from this album doesn't seem to be available streaming anywhere)
26. Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM [IRM]
27. Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is the Move [Bitte Orca]
28. Animal Collective - Bluish [Merriweather Post Pavilion]
29. Depeche Mode - Wrong [Sounds of the Universe]
30. Girls - Lust for Life [Album]
31. Deerhunter - Disappearing Ink [Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP]
32. Ciara featuring Justin Timberlake - Love Sex Magic [Fantasy Ride]
33. Bon Iver - Blood Bank [Blood Bank EP]
34. Beirut - The Concubine [March of the Zapotec / Rainpeople Holland EP]
35. Bill Callahan - Jim Cain [Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle]
36. Peter Bjorn and John - I'm Losing My Mind [Living Things]
37. Miike Snow - Animal [Miike Snow]
38. Antony Hegarty and Bryce Dessner - I Was Young When I Left Home [Dark Was the Night]
39. Grizzly Bear - Foreground [Veckatimest]
40. ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - The Far Pavilions [The Century of Self]
41. The Decemberists - Sleepless [Dark Was the Night] (The only song I've ever liked by them, well at least 70% liked)
42. Fuck Buttons - Surf Sport [Tarot Sport] (The album version... exceedingly better)
43. Matt & Kim - Daylight [Grand]
44. Piano Magic - The Nightmare Goes On [Ovation]
45. Yeasayer - Tightrope [Dark Was the Night]
46. Atlas Sound - Shelia [Logos]
47. Annie - Anthonio [All Night]
48. Fever Ray - If I Had a Heart [Fever Ray] (my favorite music video of 2009)
49. Serge Gainsbourg featuring Jane Birkin - L'hôtel particulier [Histoire de Melody Nelson] (Obviously, this isn't new, but as the album was released for the first time in the US this year, and I needed to fill the 50)
50. PJ Harvey and John Parish - Cracks in the Canvas [A Woman A Man Walked By] (this isn't the 2nd best song off the album, but it's the perfect close and part of what keeps me wanting more)

The Decade List: Wild Side (2004)

Wild Side – dir. Sébastien Lifshitz

With the great Agnès Godard working as the director of photography, Sébastien Lifshitz’s second narrative feature Wild Side invites the very easy comparisons to the cinema of Claire Denis. Lifshitz’s allusions to Denis aren’t simply visual, however. Following Presque rien and Les corps ouverts, Lifshitz has mastered the art of the elliptical narrative, a trait often met with disdain after it become all-too-common in the ‘90s as well as the best tool for directors to dish out cheap “surprises.” For both Denis and Lifshitz, the elliptical narrative provides something genuine; the gaps and shifts in time are poetic decisions, not mischievous ones.

Nearly the entire “story” of Presque rien lies outside of its frame, never truly explaining the specifics of its central character’s mental state or how his summer romance fell apart. Like Presque rien, Wild Side is framed around what most people would qualify as a significant moment in Stéphanie’s (Stéphanie Michelini) life. For Mathieu (Jérémie Elkaïm) in Presque rien, it was his “first love;” for Stéphanie, it’s the return home to care for her dying mother (Josiane Stoléru). Lifshitz only uses these scenarios as reference points; neither leads to sudsy bits of melodrama. They almost begin to function as anti-melodramas, films that adopt the foundation of the genre while consciously evading its dramatic signifiers. The focal points of Lifshitz’s films exist in their aftermath of those evaded criterions, something that beautifully mirrors the way he defines his characters through their unarticulated emotional wounds.

Alongside the Denis associations, there are hints of Ingmar Bergman’s middle period work, when the director became obsessed with faces and the truths that hide within them. For Bergman, those faces belonged to brilliant actors he had worked with for the better part of his career. In Wild Side, Lifshitz used a cast comprised mostly of non-actors, aside from the late Yasmine Belmadi (who made his acting debut in Les corps ouverts) and Stoléru, predominantly a theatre actress. It’s uninteresting to ponder how much of reality there is to be found in the characters of Stéphanie and Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine) than to simply admire the depth and history conveyed through their faces.

More than just faces though, Wild Side, which obviously takes its name from the famous Lou Reed song, is about the body and the mysteries within them. Opening with a collage of medium close-ups of Stéphanie’s naked body on a bed. Shots of her back, her legs, her ass and eventually her cock provoke the underlying question in Wild Side. Following the opening montage, we see Stéphanie at a nightclub where Antony Hegarty, the transgendered lead-singer of Antony and the Johnsons, performing the song “I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy,” ending with another question, this time explicitly uttered in the form of song, “Are you a boy, or are you a girl?” Hegarty stares at Stéphanie as he sings this bit, though gender identification is only a small facet of the question Lifshitz asks in Wild Side.

Composed of a functional ménage à trois between Stéphanie, who sells her body for a living, Russian immigrant Mikhail who speaks very little French and Djamel (Belmadi), a young prostitute of French/Arab descent, the characters in Wild Side search for the answer through their broken blood relations, in their physical make-up and the changes it has gone through, natural or otherwise, and in each other. Mikhail and Djamel can barely communicate with each other due to language barriers, while Stéphanie and Mikhail’s outlet for verbal interaction is in English, their second language. These limitations offer the biggest clue to their introspective quests, as well as providing something of a correlation to Lifshitz’s cinematic world, one defined best by its implicit beauty.

With: Stéphanie Michelini, Edouard Nikitine, Yasmine Belmadi, Josiane Stoléru, Benoît Verhaert, Christophe Sermet, Fabrice Rodriguez, Amine Adjina, Corentin Carinos, Perrine Stevenard, Antony Hegarty
Screenplay: Stéphane Bouquet, Sébastien Lifshitz
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Music: Jocelyn Pook
Country of Origin: France/Belgium/UK
US Distributor: Wellspring

Premiere: 8 February 2004 (Berlin International Film Festival)
US Premiere: 16 May 2004 (Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival)

Awards: Teddy: Best Feature Film, Manfred Salzgeber Award (Berlin International Film Festival); Special Jury Award – Sébastien Lifshitz (Gijón International Film Festival); Grand Jury Award: Outstanding International Narrative Feature (L.A. Outfest); New Director’s Showcase Award (Seattle International Film Festival)

Poster for Sébastien Lifshitz's latest Plein sud

French distribution company Ad Vitam just released the official poster for the latest from Sébastien Lifshitz, entitled Plein sud, or in English literally Due South. The film opens nationally on 30 December, after being pushed from August, and will likely make an appearance at the Berlinale in February; Lifshitz's previous film Wild Side won the Teddy for Best Narrative Feature in 2004. The film stars Yannick Renier (Nue propriété), Léa Seydoux (La belle personne), Théo Frilet (Nés '68), Pierre Perrier (Chacun sa nuit) and Nicole Garcia (Duelle) and features a score by John Parrish, Jocelyn Pook and Marie Modiano. I'm probably one of eight people ecstatic about a new film from Lifshitz, but maybe if I mention him enough on here, I can convert a couple more.

Goodbye, Picture This!

Picture This! Entertainment has closed their doors, something I've suspected was about to happen for a while. Over the summer, they announced their first release in a long while with Jiří Chlumský's Broken Promise [Nedodržaný sľub], which Slovakia recently named their Foreign Oscar submission for 2010, but according to IndieWire, they've filed for bankruptcy. While I've always frowned at the graphic layout of their DVD covers and website, they have brought a number of significant films to the US, including Sébastien Lifshitz's Come Undone [Presque rien], Claude Miller's Class Trip [La classe de neige], João Pedro Rodrigues' O Fantasma and Brillante Mendoza's The Masseur.