Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Charles Taylor's 10 Best Films
1) "House of Flying Daggers" and "Hero" -- The delayed release of Zhang Yimou's 2002 "Hero" meant we got two martial-arts dreamscapes from him in the same year and watched in astonishment as "House of Flying Daggers" made the earlier "Hero" seem like a warm-up. Thrilling adventures, mournful and rapturous, ravishing to look at, they are also, taken together, a testament to the power of movie stars to bewitch us. The greatest movie stars in the world right now come from Asia, and at times these films play as an ode to the charisma of Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Jet Li, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Maggie Cheung (whose close-ups contain as much mystery as any screen presence since Garbo) and especially Zhang Ziyi. A sprite who commands the camera (and the director's real-life love) Ziyi is regarded by Yimou here with the tenderness and awe and yearning directors reserve for their most cherished muses. Not only is Yimou the filmmaker putting wonders on the screen in these films, he's a spectator watching in rapt amazement with us.
2) "The Dreamers" -- In 2004, one movie spoke to the true believers in the audience, reaffirming their passionate devotion to the Holy Trinity. Of course I mean Bernardo Bertolucci's voluptuous celebration of sex, movies and politics. Working from Gilbert Adair's novel, which updated Jean Cocteau's "Les enfants terribles" to May 1968 Paris, Bertolucci, in his most playful film, captured both the expansive freedom and the insulation of a moment that proclaimed "All power to the imagination." Bertolucci isn't out to mourn a generation's lost revolutionary fervor but, rather, to proffer a valentine to his comrades on the barricades. And he is graceful and generous enough to disdain the "you had to have been there" elitism with which subsequent generations have been belittled by '60s veterans. He sees the beauty and reckless daring of his long-ago colleagues in his trio of young leads (Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel and the fabulous Eva Green). You have to wonder if the critics from that era who dismissed the film recognized in it the cinephilia they once possessed but have since decided will no longer get them anywhere. As one friend of mine put it, if you don't love "The Dreamers," you don't deserve movies.
3) "Before Sunset" -- Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy risk a sequel to the 1995 "Before Sunrise," one of the most exquisite romantic films ever made. What they get is a note-perfect 80-minute conversation from the two once-and-future lovers that acknowledges adult disappointment without giving in to cynicism or bitterness. If movie acting is measured by how open actors are to each other and how they exist in the moment, then what Hawke and Delpy achieve here is perfection.
4) "Last Life in the Universe"-- Working in various countries, Asian directors are delivering something approaching the excitement and sense of discovery that the nouvelle vague filmmakers gave French film in the '60s. One of two contemporary Thai directors on this list, Pen-ek Ratanaruang made what is perhaps the year's most dreamlike picture. Shot by master cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who also shot "Hero," "Last Life" is a sort of deadpan screwball comedy in which a lost man (Asano Tadanobu) is brought back to life by a kooky young girl (Sinitta Boonyasak). Only he's not really lost and she's not really a kook. Pen-ek doesn't use the conventions of screwball comedy here as much as he evokes its melancholy ghost. The tone is one of retreat from the messiness of life and finally acceptance of that messiness as the very essence of life. Seemingly light as air, the film achieves real emotional weight, and leaves an aura that stays with you.
5) "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" -- A rainy night in Taipei, Taiwan, a closing movie house showing its final feature, a few scattered customers watching (or not watching) King Hu's 1966 martial-arts classic "Dragon Gate Inn." Those are the elements of Tsai Ming-Liang's aching, lovely elegy to moviegoing itself. Tsai sees movie theaters as haunted houses, where the ghosts of all who have graced the screen are more real than the transitory audience, the clubfooted ticket taker, the projectionist she is silently in love with, the unlucky young man cruising the theater's Byzantine byways. The images may even be more real than the two aged stars of the King Hu film who sit among the sparse patrons, watching their younger selves on the screen. Their presence is a poetic and painful demonstration of the glory and tyranny of the movies: their ability to outlive us all.
6) "Ray" -- Taylor Hackford's beautifully directed biopic didn't make the conventions of the genre seem fresh, but he showed the conviction and emotional punch that they can still have in the right hands. Like the art of the man it pays tribute to, Hackford's movie aims for the biggest audience it can. That's where it finds its voice, its expansiveness, its faith in popular art as democracy in action. Hackford does superb work with the actors. Jamie Foxx's incarnation of Ray gets the familiar gestures so right you can miss that Foxx works from the inside out. And since black actresses still continue to be underrepresented in Hollywood, there's a special joy in the great quartet this movie gives us -- Kerry Washington, Aunjanue Ellis, Regina King and, as Ray's mother, fierce, heartbreaking newcomer Sharon Warren. In a year when many of us felt alienated from our own country, "Ray" let us feel the omnivorous inclusiveness that is America at its best. No mainstream movie was as emotionally satisfying.
7) "A Very Long Engagement" -- Jean-Pierre Jeunet's insanely, wonderfully complicated World War I tale (superior to Sebastien Japrisot's novel) has the intricacy and homemade charm of a mechanical toy from the turn of the 20th century. The film is a mystery of what happened to a group of French soldiers tried for treason, a love story about a woman's refusal to believe that her fiancé is dead, an antiwar melodrama and, more than anything, a demonstration of a narrative's power to wrap us in its clutches. The fine cast includes Audrey Tautou (leaving the adorable shtick behind), Ticky Holgado, Tchéky Karyo, Denis Lavant, Elina Lowensohn and Jodie Foster. The film is like a tunnel back to a fully realized world, and Jeunet is the magician who takes us there.
8) "Hotel Rwanda" -- Terry George's shattering film of the 1994 genocide, the West's cowardly indifference and the hotel manager who saved more than 1,200 of his countrymen from execution is an example of what can be accomplished by a principled filmmaker using real events as raw material. The movie has a blunt, outraged immediacy that harks back to the muckraking Warner Bros. melodramas of the '30s. In his first starring role, Don Cheadle is superb as a man who holds onto this sense of decency amid the derangement of everyday life.
9) "Blissfully Yours" -- Thirty-four-year-old Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the truest sensualists to emerge in movies in recent years. This 2002 film, released theatrically in the United States this year, makes you feel as if life itself is unfolding on the screen, each moment indefinably precious. As its two lovers escape into the forest setting, prosaic, dreary everyday life is transformed by the promise of freedom. All through the film the happiness of those moments when the world is held at bay coalesces, dissolves and is found again. As an expression of the fragility of perfect moments, this is the closest movies may ever get to Manet's painting "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe."
10) "13 Going on 30" -- As an awkward teenage girl whose birthday wish turns her into the sophisticated career woman she longs to be (at least on the outside) Jennifer Garner gives the kind of performance that made earlier movie audiences fall in love with Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and, before that, Marion Davies. The script's conventional ending eventually lets Garner down, but director Gary Winick does everything he can to provide some luster. And it's Garner's show, anyway. Executing one deft bit of physical comedy after another, she manages to embody the movie's sweet-spiritedness, poke gentle fun at her heroine's teenage enthusiasms and evoke some real pathos for the moment when we suspect we're leaving those enthusiasms behind. Garner's performance is a charmer, a long-sustained expression of wide-eyed aplomb.
Honorable mentions: Jean-Claude Brisseau's "Secret Things," Mike Hodges' "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," George Hickenlooper's "Mayor of the Sunset Strip," Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's "Infernal Affairs," Alfonso Cuarón's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny," Catherine Breillat's "Sex Is Comedy" and "Anatomy of Hell," Charles Stone III's "Mr. 3000," Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy," Jean-Paul Rappeneau's "Bon Voyage," Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni's "The Story of the Weeping Camel," Alejandro Amenábar's "The Sea Inside," Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason's "The Hunting of the President," Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia's "End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones," Danny Leiner's "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," Richard Eyre's "Stage Beauty," Ondi Timoner's "DiG!"
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