Week Of Janiuary 3, 2007 - Wed / Fri

January 3 , 2007

The Top Ten

10. District B-13 - This is Pierre Morel's first film as a director after moving from Steadicam to Camera Op to Director of Photography for Team Besson. And already, it is one of the most stolen from films of the new millennium, the entire opening chase of Casino Royale sucked right out of Morel's use of Pakour. This film is simply pure movie muscle, with a great bad guy in Luc Besson's co-screenwriter Bibi Naceri, a smoking sexy fatal femme in Dany Verissimo, and action, action, m-f-in' action!

Check that brain at the door because your lungs will need all the oxygen they can get.

9. Letters from Iwo Jima - Clint Eastwood's magnificently intimate, quite, beautiful portrait of men waiting to die shows all the restraint of the Japanese, who are almost as emotionally interior as Mr. Eastwood himself. A film as clear in its focus and spirit as Flags of Our Fathers was ambiguous, Letters manages to be pure Hollywood with a fairly simple conceit of a man of power paralleling a grunt, yet pulses with the death that the unavoidable death of most of these men imposes.

8. The Dead Girl - Karen Moncrieff is; a) a great talent, b) the kind of person that people will kill for, c) someone who explores the darkness without fear, d) all of the above.

There hasn't been a showcase for actresses like this in a long, long time. But it is more than that. It is an exploration of a variety of lives of quiet desperation in which, in each segment, the quiet is replaced by a decisive decision. Some of the decisions are good, others bad, one deadly. But they are all searching and all beyond our long-held and obvious expectations. In the process, Moncrieff gets career-changing work out of Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, Mary Beth Hurt, and Piper Laurie and more great work out of every member of her ensemble, including Marcia Gay Harden, Toni Collette, and Giovanni Ribisi. It's not a fun Saturday night date movie, but it is a profound movie experience.

7. Pan's Labyrinth - Guillermo Del Toro is turning out to the Mexican New Wave director with a heart so big that he weaves childhood fears into movie gold. This film is the second film in the Spanish Civil War supernatural trilogy. The first, The Devil's Backbone, also made my Top Ten after it premiered in 2001. Pan's is not quite as good as Backbone and not quite as dark, but it reminds us once again of just how talented this guy is and how serious minded he is underneath his throbbing genre heart.

Both Del Toro and his pal Alfonso Cuaron worked Gilliam territory this year, but Del Toro's effort was a greater success because its sense of a world gone awry was based on simple human needs and never became so involved with production design and camera work that it lost touch with the child. It is a classic example of less is more. Del Toro's moments are visually simple, but loaded with iconic characters and feelings that say more than the thrill of the chase can ever bring. It is similar to Time Bandits, which is Gilliam's least visually complex film, yet one of his very best and most complete. But Del Toro's film is superior even to than classic in that it takes us closer to the pain of the soul.

6. Dreamgirls - Bill Condon does it as well as can be done in this film musical that has true movie-stopping numbers from both Jennifer Hudson and Beyonce Knowles, am undeniable reminder of the greatness of Eddie Murphy, a generously smarmy performance by Jamie Foxx, the fun of a smooth score that has terrific songs that grow on you on multiple listens. In fact, Dreamgirls is one of those movies that just gets better as you see it repeated times, my experience being that I now find myself surprised by just how much stuff I enjoy is coming right around the corner. I also noticed that the second half of the film, after "And I Am Telling You…" moves like a runaway freight train with very little fat. The film suffers, actually, from having so many high octane moments that people get exhausted before it is over. But who complains about too much of a good thing?

The show, as reconceived by Bill Condon, is really about the rise and fall of the most challenged member of the Dreams, Effie White. She is the elder sister, the seduced one who gives the man who will make and break her access, the one who changes and grows up long after she should have, and the one who we want to see get her due in the end. Condon also gave Deena, the "Diana Ross" character, a third act turn that allows her a conscience the stage show never did.

Critics seem to want it to be a dark Fosse-esque film, but its not. However, it is easily the best Broadway adaptation since Fosse's Cabaret.

5. Deliver Us From Evil - Amy Berg, who happens to be an old friend of mine, shocked me and pretty much every audience that has seen this film with the first on-screen exploration of the mind of a real pedophile priest, Oliver "Ollie" O'Grady. And while he gave her his deeply bent sense of truth, she framed him in a way that made him the most horrifying screen character since Hannibal Lechter.

To O'Grady's singular appearance, Berg adds the stories of some of the victims of O'Grady, now grown up. The most powerful story is that of a family that treated O'Grady like family and lost not only the innocence and trust of their daughter, but the power of faith that was so very important to them. Add to that, a look at the efforts of the church to cover up these events, moving O'Grady to another parish every time he got caught molesting a child without warning anyone that a dangerous man was on his way, followed by a legal cover-up… well, it's overwhelming. The best documentary of 2006… even if a friend did make it.

4. The Departed - I love Scorsese. And I love movie movies. So when Magic Marty finally stopped chasing Oscar with Harvey Scissorhands chasing him and then without the fin that a Howard Hughes movie could have been and got back to a movie that was FUN, I was thrilled. I went back the next day. And then again. And again. The Departed is a joyous, action filled, moralistic, immoral, funky, raunchy, story of two kid cops who are paralleling one another. One comes from a family of criminals and can only be a cop by pretending to be one himself. And the other is godfathered by a criminal who he serves by pretending to be serious about being a cop.

And while those two create a strong center for the film, what I love most about the movie are the supporting touches. Wahlberg: "Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe fuck yourself." Baldwin: "Patriot Act, Patriot Act! I love it, I love it, I love it!" Gurdeep Singh: "You keep calling me Babu, it's 'Singh' motherfucker!" Wahlberg: "You may play a tough guy for your gangster friends, but you don't get nothing past me, you lace-curtain Irish fucking pussy!" Nicholson: "When I was growing up, they would say you could become cops or criminals. But what I'm saying is this. When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?" Joseph Riccobene: "I thought you were supposed to go into shock! I'm not in shock! It fuckin hurts!" Ray Winstone: "I'm the one who tells you who can hit and who you can't hit." Nicholson: "Let's not cry over some spilled guineas."

I mean… this is just world class shit talking. Love it.

3. The Proposition - John Hillcoat hadn't made a movie in nine years. Screenwriter Nick Cave is a musician by trade. So how did these two gather a gang of sensational actors and make one of the movies of the year (that almost no one saw, by the way)? I don't know. All I know is that it is a western in the Australian outback with the soul of a poet and the brutality of men desperately fighting to hang on to what they know is not theirs confronted by men who are evil on paper, but represent the fierce truth of nature.

The Proposition of the title is made by the Captain (Ray Winstone) charged with settling the territory to the outlaw Charles Burns (Guy Pearce). Bring in your vicious outlaw brother (Danny Huston) and you and your mentally challenged brother (Richard Wilson) will go free. Refuse and you and your "innocent" brother will hang. Charles is more willing than you would expect. He understands how dangerous his brother is. But when the men settling the territory prove to be equally dangerous, if not more so, all bets are off.

This film, part pulp, part poetry, tops The Departed because it is, in so many ways, so profound. It is fun, but it is deep and the thoughts linger. Absolutely brilliant movie.

2. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - The funniest movie of the last decade. A central performance worthy of comparison to any of the comedy greats, from Chaplin to Tati. And a film that somehow manages to spread its net so broadly that the mirror it holds up to society can capture the light (the truth) in different ways for different people without any of the opinions being wrong.

When the film first emerged, there was talk that it might be rewarded with screenplay awards. Little did critics know that a film that feels completely improvised has the following writing credits:
Screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Peter Baynham & Dan Mazer. Story by Sacha Baron Cohen & Peter Baynham & Anthony Hines & Todd Phillips.

Hmmm…

What is so compelling about this film is that none of the easy tags laid on its broad shoulders is really fair in and of itself. We do see the hatred of others reflected in the innocence of the Borat character. But we also see a mean streak in a character who really believes in his own unassailable logic. The film abuses Kazakhs. But their ability to smile through the joke suggests that they are a kind people. In the end, examining the line of what is silly and what is hateful is an important examination. No everyone wants to do that. But how can that be wrong?

And did I mention that audiences laughed harder at this film than any film in a long, long, long time? Not only is this why we go to the movies, but it is why we go to the movies in auditoriums filled with strangers. There is no more profound shared film experience than the feel of lust, horror, passion or, indeed, laughter.

Wawaweewa!

1. Little Children - Todd Field's second film is a snapshot of an entire generation; fear, loathing, lust, ambivalence, loss, hope, resilience, self-delusion, and finally, the loss of innocence, no matter how outwardly worldly we little children might seem.

Little Children is probably the most difficult film of the year to tell someone about. There is an affair at the center of the story, but it's not a story about an affair. There is a sex offender whose story is told, but it is not in any way about sex offenses. There are children all about, but this is not a story about young children, it is a story about the childhood simplicity that still lingers in adults, the yearning to have the simple joys that we all think we remember so vividly.

Field not only gets a career best performance out of Kate Winslet, but remarkable, notable work from Phyllis Somerville, Jackie Earle Haley, and Noah Emmerich. Jennifer Connelly is there in support, dead center perfect in a very challenging role as The Perfect Woman who we have to both root against and, in the end, sympathize with. And Patrick Wilson scores with the most difficult part, as a guy who isn't much of a man, though he is the walking gangly perfection known as The Prom King.

The screenplay, by Field and novelist Tom Perrotta, danced across a tightrope of endless dangers, any misstep threatening major ugliness. But they made daring decisions, like a Frontline narrator over parts of the film, and a great deal of black humor, with surgical precision. And when words stop, images say it all, whether "it" is sexy or funny or horrible or sad or all too human.

Little Children is the best film of 2006 because it gets to heart of what all the best movies are after, with its clean, simple, challenging script. Who are we? Who do we hope to be? What is the truth of how we see ourselves and how others see us?

And in the end, we hope that we can grow up, even if that might lead to a future we can't control with answers we don't want. But that is the hard reality of being a grown up. You deal with it. You honor those you love. You try your best to do what's right. And life keeps rolling along.

Back to part one

E Me.