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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Andrew O'Hehir's 10 Best Films
"House of Fools" (directed by Andrei Konchalovsky). You'll never see another film about the Chechen conflict that has '80s pop star Bryan Adams in it. Hell, you'll never see this one. But you should. A heartbreaking and sensual near-masterpiece from Konchalovsky, an all-but-forgotten avatar of Soviet cinema's lost golden age. (He directed "Asya's Happiness," "Siberiade" and the strangely great Hollywood film "Runaway Train" -- as well as "Tango and Cash," with Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone!) This tragic and unforgettable movie would have been his triumphant comeback if, well, if it hadn't disappeared without a trace. There may or may not be a God, but he's not watching out for Konchalovsky.
"Ten" (directed by Abbas Kiarostami). Yeah, Kiarostami is the Iranian director best known in the West (which means, apparently, that some Iranians think he has sold out -- call it the Kurosawa complex). But that doesn't mean any Americans actually see his films. Shot on digital video via a fixed "dashboard cam," while a middle-class Tehran woman drives her impossible son around, bickers with her sister, picks up a religious pilgrim and then a prostitute, "Ten" is experimental even by Kiarostami's standards. It played hardly anywhere. It's a revelation.
"The Dancer Upstairs" (directed by John Malkovich). The indie-film hero's directing debut is a near-perfect marriage of political thriller and existential art film. A decent South American cop (the great Javier Bardem) serving a corrupt regime must try to find the elusive terrorist leader who has an entire nation spooked. It's partly about Peru in the era of the transcendentally evil Shining Path movement, and partly a story about the untrustworthy nature of love. The gorgeous Laura Morante is the dance teacher he falls for; the unforgettable tune on the soundtrack is Nina Simone singing Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"
"Carnage" (directed by Delphine Gleize). European art cinema continues not to die, despite all reports to the contrary. This debut feature from Gleize, a 30-year-old French director, is the story of a group of strangers all over Europe linked, in an almost religious sense, by the corpse of an Andalusian bull. It's probably the most beautiful film I saw all year. Gleize is more than anything else the spiritual heir to Luis Buñuel ("Carnage" even stars Buñuel actress Angela Molina, along with Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni), but that's just fine with me. Despite the title and the concept, this isn't a brutal or "difficult" film; it casts a cool eye on life and death but treats its large cast with a whimsy very close to tenderness. Another marvelous flick no one saw.
"The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (directed by Peter Jackson). Much as I will always love "The Fellowship of the Ring" (which, truth be told, is by far the best of Tolkien's original volumes), Jackson really did save the best for last. It's far too early to predict how these movies will age, but Jackson has clearly kicked George Lucas to the curb and created the biggest and best pop epic since Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series.
"The Matrix Reloaded" (directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski). Oh, shut up about the dancing and the dreadlocks (as well as about how great your life was in 1999). Somewhere inside, you know it was terrific -- that it opened up new possibilities the original film had never imagined. The fact that the Wachowskis had no way to follow up, and that "Revolutions" was basically a dog, doesn't change that.
"Lost in Translation" (directed by Sofia Coppola). You've read enough about this movie by now, haven't you? Emotionally and visually, it's pitch-perfect; with this one film, Sofia Coppola jumps to the head of the indie-god class. (Quentin's got to get out of the basement and return all those Hong Kong videos.) Bill Murray deserves the Oscar and might even get it; Scarlett Johansson is almost as good but won't win anything (except the, um, hearts of guys all over the world). Making a movie about Yanks in a bizarro-world foreign culture is kind of cheating, and using karaoke scenes as a shorthand for falling in love is really cheating. But somehow Coppola makes it all work; she takes the fraught topic of older-guy/younger-woman love and cooks it down to irreducible human reality. It's a miniature, but it's a wonderful miniature.
"Old School" (directed by Todd Phillips). All right, I sort of put this on the list to horrify you. But, hey, if Hollywood does one thing well it's moronic dude comedy, and frankly it's an underappreciated genre. (I'm still steamed about the bad reviews that "Saving Silverman" and "Dude, Where's My Car?" got.) Here are the facts: a) It's hysterically funny; b) it's still Will Ferrell's most blissful performance, "Elf" or not; c) it does not either glorify older men gamin' on young girls -- in fact, it does quite the opposite; and d) it's just flat-out funnier than "School of Rock," which was pretty good but in a cleaned-up, so-you-can-take-the-wife-and-kids kind of way.
"Under the Skin of the City" (directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad). This working-class family melodrama from a female Iranian director best known for her documentaries is well-made, affecting and humorous, and it will open your mind to the realities of that much-misunderstood country. Bani Etemad fearlessly takes on the subjugation of women, political corruption, and the widely despised rule of the ayatollahs, as well as the pell-mell infusion of Western capital, all while portraying the family's struggle to hold on to its house and save an abused daughter from a life of prostitution.
"Marooned in Iraq" (directed by Bahman Ghobadi). The story of George W. Bush. I kid, I kid! This isn't as starkly memorable as Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Ghobadi's previous film, "A Time for Drunken Horses," but it's a more accomplished and far more eccentric work. Among other things, it's a comedy about a group of hapless Kurdish musicians, well-known in their limited universe, who undertake a foolhardy mission to find a missing woman across the border in Iraq. They are robbed of almost everything, abducted by a local warlord, and forced to play a wedding; they encounter an empty village, presumably gassed by Saddam Hussein. And it's all pretty funny, in a grating, Three Stooges kind of way. Also, by the end, it's a heart-wrenching tale of nobility and survival, set against some of the most dramatic scenery you've ever seen.
