WHATEVER HAPPENS, REMEMBER TO HAVE FUN
Although I've previously made two different lists for indieWIRE and the VILLAGE
VOICE, this is my final, definitive 2003 top 10 list.
Best advertising slogan Lions Gate should have used for IRREVERSIBLE: “In
a world where everything is going backwards, only love is irreversible.”
This year, humanism and nihilism existed side by side on movie screens and,
consequently, on my top 10 list. (Granted, that may say more about my taste
or personality than the zeitgeist.) Watching DOGVILLE, 21 GRAMS, MYSTIC RIVER
and KILL BILL, VOL. 1, I kept thinking back to IRREVERSIBLE. It was
rather depressing to see a critical pileup on a film of such accomplished
style and moral urgency. I’m not kidding about the latter point: its deconstruction
of macho revenge fantasies held plenty of political relevance on the eve of
Gulf War II. But you’d never know that from reading reviews that dwelled upon
Gaspar Noe’s silly statements in the press kit or made mistakes about a character’s
sexual orientation. Nor would you realize that the final flickering shot
holds out the possibility of transcendence before birth or after death.
To think that its haters could have spent that time serving the gay
community by making Carson Kressley dartboards! (For some reason, it was
much better
received
on-line
than by professional critics.) The notion that revenge is a dish best not
served at all may be a trite “moral,” but Clint Eastwood drew some of the
best reviews of his career for saying the same thing. As for the issue of
homophobia, the fistfuckers at the Rectum ultimately come off looking better
than the straight guys. After all, the director places himself among them,
jerking his CGI erection. They’ve found a way to harmlessly ritualize
the violence that Noe sees as integral to masculinity. For some critics,
implicating gay men - admittedly, strongly implicating them - in a
general critique of machismo equals making the most homophobic film ever
made.
Speaking of Topic H, it popped up in some surprising places. JEEPERS CREEPERS
2 turned the generally heterocentric teen pic on its head. Its crew
of cheerleaders keep all their clothes on, while the buff, barely legal
boys doff their shirts at their first opportunity - when not discussing gayness
during public urination sessions. FATHER AND SON and STUCK ON YOU tied for
the gay incest subtext prize, although Alexander Sokurov’s disavowal of any
homoerotic undertones to his film’s (extremely hot) scenes of nude cuddling
may give him the edge. DREAMCATCHER may be a symptom of homosexual panic,
but its cocktail of Freudian hysteria defied simple categorization. You’ve
got to love a film in which a “shit weasel”, resembling a vagina dentata,
bites a guy on the dick while he’s pissing. (At least I do.) Did either director
Lawrence Kasdan or screenwriter William Goldman intend any of this immensely
entertaining, jaw-droppingly ridiculous trash to be taken seriously?
ELEPHANT pissed off nearly as many people as IRREVERSIBLE, although
not always the same bunch. Admittedly, the film is shallow. Deliberately
so. It doesn’t pretend to know why Columbine happened. The “clues” it offers
are red herrings. The violent video game played by one of the killers is an
in-joke, based on GERRY. They do watch a Hitler documentary, but it’s essentially
background noise, no indication they care about Nazi ideology. Instead, van
Sant’s project is more akin to Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, which also
ends with an inexplicable murder. ELEPHANT tracks life in high school, with
its roster of small, livable annoyances and injustices, at the point where
the facade of normalcy starts breaking down.
This year’s other major Columbine-inspired film, ZERO DAY offers plenty
of character development but even fewer ready answers than ELEPHANT. Instead,
it performs the necessary task of humanizing its killers, while implicating
the audience as we get caught up in their charm. (The final shutout, shown
from the point of view of security cameras, is even more excruciating to watch
than the last third of ELEPHANT.) They’re an articulate duo, so insistent
that they weren’t influenced by video games, music, movies or books that they
burn most of their possessions. Subtly, the film does suggest a factor that
may have contributed to the killings and certainly contributed to the decision
to make a video diary: the possibility of posthumous celebrity. Both here
and in the real-life hostage saga BUS 174, self-destructive people decide
to make a public statement by taking others down with them, inflicting their
pain on a whole community which may have caused it.
In LOST IN TRANSLATION, something really did get lost. Formally, the film
is engaged with world cinema: Sofia Coppola’s direction owes a great deal
to Claire Denis and Wong Kar-wai. It’s practically a sister to FRIDAY NIGHT.
However, Denis describes a city she knows and loves. Coppola chooses one she
doesn’t know very well, finds amusingly weird and inscrutable and uses it
as a backdrop. I wouldn’t call her snark racist, since it settles on both
American and Japanese targets. (I can only imagine the Jerry Lewis jokes in
a Parisian version.) All the same, it’s a hip version of Ugly American bluster.
Please lip Coppola’s stockings.
Turning away from such xenophobia, New York rep programs like “FILM COMMENT
selects” and Subway Cinema’s Asian festival filled in the holes left
by distributors. If Kazakh director Darizhan Omirbaev was Iranian or Chinese,
one of his films would probably have been released here by now, but on the
map of world cinema, he may as well be working in a black hole. THE ROAD,
a witty depiction of a filmmaker and his active fantasy life, suggested 8
1/2 reimagined by Elia Suleiman or Abbas Kiarostami. RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE
MATCH GIRL, a Korean would-be blockbuster turned film maudit, beat THE MATRIX
REBLOATED at its own game, offering an optimistic alternative to techno-dystopias.
Typically brutal but atypically sober, Takashi Miike’s GRAVEYARD OF HONOR
depicted a one-man dystopia. Skin diseases aside, BLISSFULLY YOURS, which
will supposedly get released this year, offered a tender glimpse of fleeting
pleasure. The late John Frankenheimer’s made-for-HBO PATH FOR WAR showcased
excellent work by Michael Gambon (as LBJ) and Alec Baldwin (as Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara), serving as a fictional counterpoint to Errol
Morris’ THE FOG OF WAR. You can decide for yourself whether Baldwin
or the real McNamara gives a better performance.
Following dozens of think pieces about the documentary’s rise in popularity
written this year, I may as well chime in. If RIVERS AND TIDES and WINGED
MIGRATION are the kind of films that benefited from this new interest, it’s
a Pyrrhic victory. (SPELLBOUND, which deals with immigration as much
as spelling bees, underwhelmed me as well.) They offered a deluxe version
of the kind of middlebrow nature-porn and art appreciation you can get for
free on PBS. Such docs pander to the audience that thinks the Discovery Channel
is automatically superior to WILD BOYZ..
Meanwhile, the year’s best documentaries acknowledged the media as
an inescapable part of our reality. BUS 174 and CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS’s
derivations from fictional storytelling didn’t always work in their favor
- the belated revelation that Arnold Friedman’s brother is gay feels like
a particularly cheap shot - but their stories were more gripping and
complex than all but the best screenplays. Even more to the point, they describe
the world we live in - the same one that produced the cyber-fantasias of demonlover,
RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL and THE MATRIX trilogy - rather than
one we can (or would like to) escape to.
Top 10 list:
1. THE SON (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
2. RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL (Jang Sun-woo, South
Korea)
3. BLISSFULLY YOURS (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
4. IRREVERSIBLE (Gaspar Noe, France)
5. GRAVEYARD OF HONOR (Takashi Miike, Japan)
6. BUS 174 (Jose Padilha, Brazil)
7, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (Andrew Jarecki)
8. ZERO DAY (Ben Coccio)
9. BAD SANTA (Terry Zwigoff)
10. ELEPHANT (Gus van Sant)
Runners-up: DIVINE INTERVENTION
(Elia Suleiman, Palestine), FRIDAY NIGHT (Claire Denis, France), GUARDIAN
OF THE FRONTIER (Maja Weiss, Slovenia), AN INJURY TO ONE (Travis Wilkerson),
PATH TO WAR (John Frankenheimer), PISTOL OPERA (Suzuki Seijun, Japan),
THE ROAD (Darizhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan), SCHOOL OF ROCK (Richard Linklater),
TEN (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran), THEY SAY (Michele Smith)
Shorts: THE GALILLEAN SATELLITES (Courtney
Hoskins), GUEST ROOM (Skander Halim, Canada), HURT (Mark Romanek), LIKE ALL
BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE (Michele Smith)