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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Salon's critics pick the year's finest films -- from the modest "Before Sunset" to the operatic "House of Flying Daggers" to the magical "A Very Long Engagement" to the triumphantly weird "Incredibles" and "SpongeBob."
Dec 24, 2004 | Stephanie Zacharek's 10 Best Films
The compilation of the 10-best list is the hardest chore of the year, not because it isn't a pleasure to look back on the movies that were the most delightful or affecting but because the final list never feels as definitive as it should. The things we love about movies are far too slippery for lists. Javier Bardem's face, so beautifully chiseled and yet a thorny argument against the tyranny of joie de vivre, in "The Sea Inside," for example: It's a face that could constitute a whole category in itself.
No character made me laugh harder than Edna Mode, the dictatorial fashion designer in "The Incredibles" -- as actors, cartoon characters get no respect. And a picture like Catherine Breillat's "Anatomy of Hell," flawed and difficult, has lingered with me longer than other movies I've seen that I love and admire more. How do you explain that? You don't. You simply make a list, which is, at best, a valiant attempt to fold the greatest number of intangibles into a measly handful of discrete, numbered items.
1) "Before Sunset" -- Director Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reconnect nine years later to show us what kind of lives Celine and Jesse went on to lead after their one-night love affair in "Before Sunrise." "Before Sunset" is so beautifully written, and so simply constructed, that it could easily fool you into thinking it's inconsequential. But this evocative, haunting romance (in addition to being very funny) is adult enough to recognize that disappointment is not only a fact of adult life but also, sometimes, a component of love. There have been bigger movies made about smaller things. This one is modest, fine-grained and close to perfect.
2) "House of Flying Daggers" -- Zhang Yimou's lush adventure-romance is a martial-arts movie that owes more to Bizet or Puccini than to Bruce Lee: It's operatic and blissfully enveloping. And the lead actors -- Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau -- all have the charisma of old-fashioned movie stars. "House of Flying Daggers" seduces with color, sound and movement. No movie this year made such effective and wide-ranging use of the sensual vocabulary of moviemaking.
3) "Hotel Rwanda" -- There are certain movies that, with equal parts skill and, yes, manipulation, get you thinking about what kind of a person you are, and ways in which you might have failed people around you. Based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered more than 1,200 Hutus and Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan massacre, Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" -- beautifully constructed and directed, with a career-defining performance by Don Cheadle -- is one of those pictures. "The Passion of the Christ" was the movie most alleged Christians were hyped up about this year, probably because it allowed them to feel self-congratulatory about their willingness to wallow in their savior's suffering. But "Hotel Rwanda" is the picture that really captures the essence of Judeo-Christian values: It takes the measure of our compassion for our fellow human beings, and demands that we hold ourselves accountable for the things we might have done and didn't.
4) "Last Life in the Universe" -- Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang's spun-sideways love story has the element of surprise working for it. A handsome librarian (Asano Tadanobu) falls for a young mystery woman, but it's that woman's sister (Sinitta Boonyasak) who ultimately holds the most mystery of all. "Last Life in the Universe" is stunning to look at, evocative and passionate in its abstract beauty. And it reminds us that gangsters are people too.
5) "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" -- Mike Hodges' movies -- "Get Carter," "Croupier" and this chilly, superbly constructed little noir -- are among the coldest ever made. But no other director can make you feel so much for characters who are essentially unlikable.
6) "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" -- The first true Harry Potter movie -- in other words, the first to capture not only the books' sense of longing but their understanding of the way magic underlies the mundane, instead of just prancing fancifully at a far remove from it. Alfonso Cuarón has made one of the most masterfully conceived and shot fantasy films of all time, precisely because it looks so un-fantastical. Cuarón -- who was born in Mexico City -- is highly attuned to that quintessentially English characteristic: understatement. The colors of "The Prisoner of Azkaban" are muted and intense: smoky grays, misty browns and brilliant greens. These are the types of colors that don't reach out to us -- we need to come to them. And that's how "The Prisoner of Azkaban" works its most powerful magic.
7) "The Incredibles" and "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie" -- Of course, it's cheating to squeeze two movies into one category. But SpongeBob, the undersea hedonist who wants to soak up every pleasure life has to offer, wouldn't force himself to choose, so why should I? Weirdly, some critics have taken "The Incredibles" to task, calling it an Ayn Rand-y fable that extols the superiority of the megatalented over the merely ordinary. Oddly enough -- or not, given how cracked I think the Ayn Rand reading is -- I saw "The Incredibles" as a rallying cry for the cultivation and preservation of individuality in an overhomogenized society. (And not just so you can lord your superpowers over the hoi polloi, either. How do the anti-"Incredibles" types explain the way Dash throws the race at the end of the movie? Also: Director Brad Bird knew he'd found the voice for the character of Violet when he heard Sarah Vowell on that bastion of objectivist propaganda, NPR's "This American Life.") And then there's SpongeBob: Are we supposed to see him as an aggressive capitalist who wants it all -- the great job, the walk-in closet full of cardboard pants, the precariously tall ice-cream sundaes? The real lesson he imparts, if there has to be one (and there doesn't, unless you're a killjoy), is that it takes more than a seaweed mustache to make you a man.
8) "Hellboy" -- Like most stories based on comic books, "Hellboy," in which Ron Perlman plays a hulking, beer-guzzling, butt-kicking, red-skinned demon with the tenderest of hearts, has a deeply moral underpinning. But director Guillermo del Toro is less interested in your standard-issue battle between good and evil than he is in exploring the nooks and crannies of human vulnerability. Having superpowers doesn't mean you can escape pain -- in fact, it may mean you're destined to suffer some things more acutely. "Hellboy" is a superhero movie with soul.
9) "The Aviator" -- Like Eeyore with his empty hunny pot and his busted birthday balloon, I kept taking this off the list, then putting it back on, then taking it off. But ultimately, it felt wrong to put it anywhere else. Martin Scorsese's Paul Bunyan-style tall tale about the shadowy mythological beast known as Howard Hughes -- those mere mortals who glimpsed him describe him as a fearless flying creature with the talons of an eagle -- is superior Hollywood entertainment. It's also a three-hour movie that doesn't even pretend to be an epic, and how rare is that these days?
10) "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" -- Ecstatically silly entertainment, made by a director (Danny Leiner) who recognizes the durability of the road movie (as well as the inherent charm of observant Jewish stoners). And from now on, whenever you see a teen comedy, you'll have a new game to play: "Spot the Nonwhite Sidekick Tucked In to Show How Progressive a Filmmaker Is." Leiner has changed the rules, so deftly that people almost didn't notice.
Honorable mentions: And now, with the toughest part of list making behind us, the fun begins. Here are the also-rans, many of which might easily have found their way onto the list above. These are pictures that, taken together, reflect the sheer damned variety that the movies still give us, year in and year out, even when we start to wonder if maybe we've seen it all: Tsai Ming-Liang's "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," Alejandro Amenábar's "The Sea Inside," Catherine Breillat's "Anatomy of Hell," Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia's "End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones," George Hickenlooper's "Mayor of the Sunset Strip," Taylor Hackford's "Ray," John Waters' "A Dirty Shame," Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny," Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," Jean-Paul Rappeneau's "Bon Voyage," Charles Stone III's "Mr. 3000," Richard Loncraine's "Wimbledon," Ondi Timoner's "DiG!" Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's "Infernal Affairs," Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni's "The Story of the Weeping Camel," Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason's "The Hunting of the President," Richard Eyre's "Stage Beauty," István Szabó's "Being Julia," Joshua Marston's "Maria Full of Grace."
