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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Charles Taylor's 10 Best Films
"Lost in Translation" (directed by Sofia Coppola). Coppola is so adept at catching the reverberations of evanescent moods that she can make the most intimate moment in this romance across time zones the one where Bill Murray clasps the foot of the sleeping Scarlett Johansson. "Lost in Translation" uses contemporary borderlessness as a metaphor for the emotional state of the movie's two chaste lovers, Murray and Johansson, as they wander the corridors of a Tokyo hotel. In outline, it sounds like one of the anomie fests that made people swoon over Antonioni and Resnais. It's more like a dreamy version of a classic romantic comedy about the modern predicament of feeling like you're everywhere and nowhere. The faces of Johansson and Murray (in the performance of his life) are so eloquent that they demonstrate how, for actors, words are a last resort.
"In America" (directed by Jim Sheridan). Set in a Hell's Kitchen tenement, Sheridan's autobiographical story of an Irish family reeling from the loss of a child is both tender and robust. In the face of the fierce emotion that powers the movie, sentimentality doesn't stand a chance. Instead of exhausting your capacity to feel, Sheridan keeps deepening it. The performances by the astonishing Samantha Morton, Paddy Considine, the wonderful newcomers Sarah and Emma Bolger, and Djimon Hounsou all radiate with an emotional commitment that matches Sheridan's. "In America" sweeps you into its rough, loving embrace and then puts you back in the world, safe and sound, telling you the life waiting outside the theater is a gift.
"Spellbound" (directed by Jeffrey Blitz). This splendid documentary about the National Spelling Bee is not only moving and funny but also about as suspenseful as a movie can get. Blitz gives us acute mini-portraits of eight contestants, some of whom -- like Ashely, the African-American girl from Washington, D.C., who gets done up in her finest to compete -- you can't help but fall in love with. Perhaps the moment that sums up the movie's essential decency is when a born-again preacher prays for the success of one kid, a member of his congregation, but asks the Lord to remind him that being a good person is more important. That's how Blitz is able to make the Bee almost unbearably exciting while making the losers seem anything but.
"The Good Thief" Neil Jordan's best movie, this sensuous, elegant remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's "Bob le Flambeur" is looser, freer, hipper than the original. Jordan replaces Melville's hardboiled romantic fatalism with the story of a battered gambler who regains his harmony with a lifetime of taking risks. The movie is warm and mellow but with a kick. There's a playful springiness that keeps any hint of hardboiled sogginess at bay. As Bob, Nick Nolte is a magnificent wreck, an image of battered masculinity that is far more beautiful than any preserved and mellowed good looks could ever be. As the young prostitute who becomes Bob's good-luck charm, the charming Russian actress Nutsa Kukhianidze makes her way through the movie like a languid breeze.
"Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (directed by Peter Jackson). The conclusion to the Tolkien cycle reveals that the film is not a trilogy but one gigantic movie. This, the last third, plays upon all the emotions we've developed for the characters, echoing moments from the first two installments and enriching their emotional depth. The entire cast rises to the occasion, particularly Sean Astin, Andy Serkis, Viggo Mortensen, and the weirdly talented Miranda Otto. You watch this picture marveling not just at what's on-screen but also at Jackson's ability to sustain it so beautifully. It's one of the great achievements in fantasy filmmaking. Savor it -- because as soon as it's over you're hit by the melancholy realization that there won't be another one to look forward to next year.
"To Be and to Have" (directed by Nicolas Philibert). This documentary about a year in the life of a one-room French schoolhouse is a portrait of the teacher as artist, and about teaching as a form of love. Extraordinarily evocative, the movie brings back emotions you may have forgotten you ever had, the wonder of learning letters and numbers and, later, being able to form sentences. In its finest moments, when George Lopez comforts a student whose father is sick or encourages a painfully shy girl, the movie is a masterpiece of empathy.
"The Company" Robert Altman's film about the work and lives of a ballet company (Chicago's Joffrey Ballet) features some of the most beautiful dance numbers ever put on film (including a Lar Lubovitch pas de deux danced by Neve Campbell and Domingo Rubio to "My Funny Valentine"). The flip side of Altman's tortured "Vincent and Theo," which was about the agony of making art, "The Company" is about the joy of discovering the amazements you're capable of. Altman, still making great movies in his '70s, finds affinity with these young dancers who have only a short time to practice their art. He's managed to defy time. "The Company" is lighter than air and yet it seems to contain everything Altman has learned about making movies.
"School of Rock" (directed by Richard Linklater). A classic American movie comedy. Jack Black throws everything he has at the role of a substitute teacher turning his class into a rock band and, somehow, manages not to exhaust either himself or the audience. Richard Linklater pulls off the feat of making a completely accessible mainstream comedy while staying true to himself. "School of Rock" is pure pleasure, and the joy on of the faces of the kids as they strut their stuff is the year's sweetest payoff.
"Masked and Anonymous" (directed by Larry Charles). Directors of jazz movies have long gotten away with shoddy structure by claiming they were aping the improvisatory nature of jazz. Larry Charles' rambling film starring Bob Dylan as a once-famous singer released from prison to play a benefit for America's elected dictator works exactly like a Dylan song, which is to say it's oblique, bleak, funny, prophetic and stirring -- and critics reacted as though they'd never heard a Dylan record in their lives. The movie received this year's most uniformly dunderheaded reviews, which were shocking not only for their inability to see what Charles and Dylan were up to, but for their overt hostility to a filmmaker who tried something unusual -- which only made the movie's vision of art reduced to fodder for the dominant polity all the more pointed. Dylan fulfills exactly the same function he does in his songs: not a participant but an observer, meeting all sorts of characters, listening to their tall tales, rants, threats, jokes and warnings. Among the images of a third-world America coming apart, a moment of unexpected peace: Dylan and his band singing "Dixie," which becomes a love song to a lost republic that may exist only in the country's unrealized aspirations.
"demonlover" (directed by Olivier Assayas). This meditation on the seductions of technology is a mixture of folly and brilliance that goes willfully off the rails. Even at its most lucid, the movie's ideas can seem both shallow and paranoid. And the film is still one of the most vital pieces of moviemaking in recent memory, telling us more about the tenor of this moment than perhaps we're ready to acknowledge. Assayas takes the measure of a borderless, transient world in which the Internet, globalization, and corporate mergers and takeovers have obliterated any sense of continuity or personal loyalty. The movie is exhilarating and made to rob your sleep. As the corporate spy who is both ahead of and behind the game at every turn, Connie Nielsen gives a performance that is both icy and shockingly raw, composed and on the constant verge of lyrical hysteria.
Honorable Mention (in alphabetical order): Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's "American Splendor"; Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa"; John Malkovich's "The Dancer Upstairs"; F. Gary Gray's "Italian Job"; Aki Kaurismäki's "Man Without a Past"; Peter Weir's "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World"; Christopher Guest's "Mighty Wind"; Patty Jenkins' "Monster"; Carma Hinton, Geremie R. Barmé and Richard Gordon's "Morning Sun"; Carl Franklin's "Out of Time"; Seijun Suzuki's "Pistol Opera"; Tom McCarthy's "Station Agent"; Jacques Perrin's "Winged Migration."
The Miramax Award for the Annual Holiday Prestige Turd: "Cold Mountain"
The Emperor's New Clothes Award: "Elephant"
