Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

In the arbitrary spirit of the calendar year,
a list of 10 movies, which change on any given day ...

Before Sunset, Richard Linklater. "Oooh, baby..."

Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood. Hilary Swank's smiles and combinations.

Sideways, Alexander Payne. The grapes of rats. Paul Giamatti is a marvel as a balding, ill-goateed, woozly-drinky self-doubting scrivener of the genre of many a movie reviewer, yet he hits apt notes of both cockroach self-loathing and observant grace: thinking he's disappointed in the world when he's always let himself down.

Moolaadé, Ousmane Sembene. Pluck, pageantry, hope.

Tarnation, Jonathan Cauoette. Depersonalization and documentary: a sliver inside one man's mind.

The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles. Cultural imperialism is a two way street.

I'll Sleep When I'd Dead, Mike Hodges. Spare, unsparing. The reek of gunpowder, spent; lives, too.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry. Free-disassociation.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen. Inventing the city.

Distant, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Lonely, lovely, smoky, dusky, dismal Istanbul.

Plus 15 more ...

Collateral, Michael Mann. Mann in cities: the topography of male patterns.

Bad Education, Pedro Almodovar. El deseo, si.

Spartan, David Mamet. Stiff-dicked ramrod rectitude: formal diction flows with the cussed writer's customary carborundum rat-a-tat-tat. Mamet's stage directions in his screenplays are written ALL CAPS and with profuse, staccato punctuation. This is how Kilmer's bitten-off speech patterns would look: "You. Mother. Fucker!" Mamet's men walk the walk and bark the bark. Everybody's a sharpie: "Shall I tell you what's going to happen when we find you out?"

Red Lights, Cedric Kahn. Be careful what you wish on those you love.

Last Life in the Universe, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Yves Klein blue? Chris Doyle blue.

The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo. Men? Self-pity? Self-loathing? That's our Vinnie.

Control Room, Jehane Noujaim.

House of Flying Daggers/Hero, Zhang Yimou.

Infernal Affairs, Wai Keung Lau, Siu Fai Mak. HK bliss: learning from Johnny To and Michael Mann.

Primer, Shane Carruth. What do inventors think about in that shed out back?

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, Sam Fuller. A shaggy dog and white whale all in one: auteurism at its woolliest, most gregarious and likeable.

Enduring Love, Roger Michel. Beware letting others define you. Beautifully shot and edited contribution to the stalker genre.

Vera Drake, Mike Leigh. A bracing, gloomy dumbshow of post-war, wit-rationed, still-Fogged London: images like grainy Caravaggio scrubbed raw with carbolic soap, a chilling, chilly impression of fifty years ago and five minutes from now.

The Village (Shyamalan). Out of the woods and into the frying pan: love the isolationism allegory despite the now-tired don't-give-away-the-ending philosophy.

I vote "present"

The Aviator; Birth; Dogville; I (heart) Huckabees; Kill Bill Vol. 2; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; the Passion of the Christ; Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; The Sea Inside.

My favorite moment

Birth. Jonathan Glazer's chamber drama plays at one viewing as an epic put-on, Buñuel-meets-Bergman-meets etc., but there's a magnificent short interred at the very, very end, the final, sustained shot, a shot-sequence the intense emotion and physicality of which one wishes there had been a different hour-and-a-half preceding it: The final image is majestic, unforgettable: it is an exquisite, extended sequence shot of unbearable emotion spent at the verge of crashing, greasy-gray surf on cloudiest day, a barefoot bride in tears, torn by memory, her howls silent against the relentless amniotic pound of wide waters. Yum.

Movies I've missed so far but could make a festival from

Café Lumiere (Hou); Chain (Cohen); Cinevardaphoto (Varda); Cowards Bend the Knee (Maddin); Flight of the Phoenix (Moore); Forest for the Trees (Ade); The Holy Girl (Martel); The Intruder (Denis); Kings & Queens (Desplechin); Look at me (Jaoui); Los Muertos (Alonso); Mondovino (Nossiter); 9 Songs (Winterbottom); Nobody Knows (Kore-ade); Notre Musique (Godard); Saraband (Bergman); This So-called Disaster (Almereyda); Triple Agent (Rohmer); Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul); 2046 (Wong); Woman is the Future of Man (Hong)

And 45 more from 2004:

A Very Long Engagement (Jeunet). Toys!

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (McKay). "I love lamp! I love carpet."

Blissfully Yours (Weerasethakul). The humid and fecund jungle.

The Blondes (Los rubios) (Carri). Inventing the present.

Bright Leaves (McElwee). Legacy and wit.

Closer (Nichols). "Like heaven!" Clive Owen got a rare preparatory gift for this role, which he employs with a sweet fierceness: having played Dan on the London stage, his Larry is superlatively adept at deboning his on-screen rival: he's got an unmatched sense memory of the weaknesses of the cur he once inhabited six nights a week.

The Corporation (Abbott, Achbar, Bakan).

Crimson Gold (Panahi). A stellar example of an Iranian filmmaker casting nonactors.

DiG! (Timoner). No egos in rock, nosirree.

A Dirty Shame (Waters). I would have liked this when I was 10; it's likeably boneheaded now.

The Door in the Floor (Williams). Donna Murphy, as exquisite on screen as onstage. And Jeff Bridges...

The Dreamers (Bertolucci). When does a director become a production designer? (Even if an excellent one.)

End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (Fields, Gramaglia). Gabba-gabba, oh my.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore). Was it all really just a dream?

Friday Night Lights (Berg). Teen viscera.

Garden State (Braff). "You gotta hear this one song. It'll change your life."

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai). Cine-feel-ya.

Greendale (Young). Making it up as he sings along.

Weapons of Mass Deception (Schechter). No one has a monopoly on outrage.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (Leiner). Shameless enough.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuaron). Moody kids!

Hotel Rwanda (George). Don Cheadle: negotiator.

Incident at Loch Ness (Penn). Werner Herzog: Funny.

The Incredibles (Bird). In the family way: testing all sorts of gravity.

Kinsey (Condon). Sex is funny, sex is serious. Bill Condon manages to sustain a sense of the play that comes with sex, tease and joy, seldom noted in contemporary movies, sexuality as something that liberates and elevates rather than deranges or leads to fixation.

Maria Full of Grace (Marston). And Catalina Sandino Morena is, too.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Sinofsky, Berlinger). Ego has its limits.

Oasis (Lee). Love knows no boundaries.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (Greenwald). Why say it? Is anyone in mainstream journalism?

Overnight (Montana, Smith). Boondock taint.

The Return (Vozvraschecheniya) (Zvyagintsev). Haunting debut; patrimony on the open road.

Saved! (Dannelly) Saintly Jena Malone leads a capable cast in a comedy about... faith?

Secret Things (Brisseau). Dizzy, lurid, sexy, terrific.

Shaun of the Dead (Wright). Zomromcom? Why not.

Since Otar Left (Bertucelli). Three generations of women: one cauldron of conflict.

Spanglish (Brooks) Brooks' latest plushly budgeted parallel process to that of Wong Kar-wai produces a confined capsule of a certain sort of moneyed neurosis on Los Angeles' Westside. Spanglish is the cramped sort of craft that seems the apotheosis of studio "safeness," mistaking photographic scrupulousness for some diagrammatic notion of "authenticity." The ruthlessly specific delivery of inspired comic lines is swaddled, or smothered, by the rudimentary build-outs of uninspired compositions. Brooks thinks he's made a social X-ray from the chance meeting and the equally fabulously rich Adam Sandler had on the sands of Malibu's Carbon Beach, where both have extra homes. But there are moments; however illogical her character, Cloris Leachmen is a hoot and the wonderful Tea Leoni's up for being hated, too: a criminal virtue. Then there's the Thomas Keller-confected grilled cheese so lovingly lit by John Seale that you can sense the savor and the textures; it reminds me of Paul Kahan's classic endive salad.

Spider-Man 2 (Raimi). Amazing what a couple hundred million dollars and few hundred terabytes of render-farm can imagine. A first kiss (sans mask) further delayed in a warm, readily franchiseable Soho café by a few tons of car gimbaling behind ones' heads through a pretty picture window-it's Raimi's humbling freeway of a metaphor for post-teen hormonal insurgency.

The Story of the Weeping Camel (Davaa, Forlorni). Worth the tears.

Super Size Me (Spurlock). Lovin' it.

13 Going on 30 (Winick). Get Jennifer Garner a script!

Time of the Wolf (Haneke). Apocalypse and how.

Undertow (Green). Freeze-frames and startled faces.

We Don't Live Here Anymore (Curran). The confinement of offices and living rooms and bedrooms in the Pacific Northwest: a worthy boozy chamber drama lost in time.

Young Adam (Mackenzie). Guilt-sex-guilt-grime-guilt.

Reissues

The Leopard (Visconti)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)

Best Undistributed Films

Checkpoint, Yoav Shamir
Take Out, Sean Baker
The Corner, Nathaniel Geary
Something to Remind Me, Christian Petzold
Gambling, Gods & LSD, Peter Mettler
Kings of the Sky, Deborah Stratman

January 7, 2004

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