Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
auf wiedersehen: elegy for a trash opera
paris blues
the kids are so not alright
Monday, April 26, 2010
the 2-billion dollar picture
Friday, April 23, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
judge a book by its cover
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
hello my friend, hello my friend, hello my friend, yes it's me!!!
song-and-dance
moon update #2
Monday, April 19, 2010
top 25 of the aughties
well i've dug pretty deep to find my list of the top 25 films that i think made the biggest impression on both the film world and my personal outlook in life, a few of them fairy tales by those indie darlings. yet even though there was more shit than gold in cinema from 2000-2009, a decent amount of beauty was produced for me to still believe in film as one of the most important art forms of all-time. enjoy and if you don't, remember this is what i think, not you (:
25. requiem for a dream (2000)
so frightening it could easily be considered "horror," it tells the story of four addicts (jared leto, marlon wayans, ellen burstyn, and jennifer connelly) stuck in their cosmically stoned ways in a pre-millennial new york on the brink of disaster. though their drugs vary in content and type, their experiences are anything but chic thanks to darren aronofsky's ode to trippy-as-fuck 70s freak-outs and a riotous score that evokes beethoven under sedation. you will never look at a refrigerator or an infomercial the same ever again.
24. the devil wears prada (2006)
as one can toss this off as fluff, this is one of the most hilarious comedies in recent history that doesn't involve someone falling off a building or violently crashing their car. taking its cues from old-fashioned business screwballs of the 40's and 50's (but more aptly billy wilder's amazing 1960 jack lemmon vehicle the apartment), it follows anne hathaway as an ambitious reporter incidentally working for a fashion magazine giant and even more gigantic bitch of a boss played masterfully by meryl streep. though the more she gets into the trendy terrains of galas and fashion week, the more she finds herself adapting to a world once seemingly superficial and so much more detrimental. almost typical uglyduckling/beautifulswan but surpasses completely with an in-depth look into the clothing industry and sharp dialogue that makes you smirk rather than burst.
23. american gangster (2007)
this would probably not be on my list if it weren't for denzel washington's amazing performance as 60's/70's era harlem heroin kingpin frank lucas. harsh, cold, and deceptively intelligent, he channels the drug dealer with ease and permits us to applaud his danger and destruction as much as we would applaud any "nice guy" in another movie. in fact the "nice guy" in this movie, an overly horny cop played by russell crowe, also gains respect but in his inability to keep his life together. in the end, the film plays like a masterful 21st century-made period piece but with a wave of western-style melancholia that only mood-expert ridley scott could achieve.
22. eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004)
michel gondry's fable on modern romance flipped the switch off hollywood's hazardous romantic comedy epidemic that stemmed from the late 80's and was helmed largely by kate hudson and katherine heigl in the last decade. what made this film so amazing was not only its new wave techniqiues but its insular vacuum on american desires and fantasies, focusing on a lovelorn man (jim carrey) who wants nothing more than to forget the hazily charming relationship he shared with a free spirit queen (kate winslet) and goes to a memory-erasing clinic just to do so. this is a peculiar film: scenes are told in psychedelic flashbacks, beds appear in snow, people who erased their memories want them back, but that is the loveliness of it. very few stories about relationships are done so delicately and yet so imaginatively, it almost hurts to watch.
21. dark knight (2006)
a lot has been made of this film. yes it was the last in which we saw heath ledger act his ass off as the maniacal joker, but it's not just that. a instantly classic neo-noir, this film takes superhero drama and elevates it to a high art. continuing where begins left off, we follow bruce wayne (christian bale) as he deals with the eccentricities of the joker who is terrorizing gotham like no other and the incoming transformation of politician harvey dent (aaron eckhart) into two-face. with allegories to america's own metropolitan fears of smoking corporate buildings, the lines of heroes and villains are blurred like never before, reinventing the action film in the process and making michael bay's latest explosive confection look like wiley coyote.
20. precious (2009)
the closest example to modern neorealism that i can think of, lee daniels's ghetto nightmare gives a slice-of-life look like at an overweight, twice-pregnant, and colossally mistreated 16-year-old girl in 1987 new york. gabourey sidibe embodies the depressed teenager as she tries to reassemble her life and stray away from the pains mostly given by her remote-clicking mother (mo'nique), finding salvation in school and a bit of humor in her classmates. many say we "all" know people like precious which may be true, but what is most striking about this film is that it completely eliminates all sense of hope in favor of stark reality, a reality that it is not afraid in the least of alienating those who cannot accept it and those who find it utterly unbelievable, which of course it is anything but.
19. gerry (2002)
two gen-x slackers (matt damon and casey affleck) get lost in the desert looking for "the thing" in gus van sant's environmental ghost story. with more narrative focused on the vast surroundings of a landscape covered in dust and wind, the film is a gentle tone poem to the existentialism of being lost than the literal terror of it. though the relationship is ambiguous at best, as time goes by faster, we watch their dependency turn into reliance, leading to a frozen sequence of thunderous noise that resembles a dehydrated lovers' quarrel.
18. inglourious basterds (2009)
brad pitt as a southern rebel leader. eli roth as an ex-baseball player turned fabled murder-beast. the introduction of christoph waltz as an s.s. asshole. only quentin tarantino could create a historical revisionist piece without it fading into camp or parody. focusing on the revenge ignited by the young shoshanna (melanie laurent) whose family was murdered by waltz and the misdaventures of a gang of jewish-american-born nazi scalpers, the film mixes tarantino's typical pop cultural-laced dialogue with a kick of glory war movies to create a world that may have never existed but in which feels as if it did at some point.
17. inland empire (2006)
david lynch is probably the most artistic american director who can still get away with doing things without creative compromise. with this modern masterpiece, he threw away the use of film stock and began using digital video, putting together a film that looks as if it were made by an overexcited tween with their first camera, drenched in a bath of postwar hitchcock. shot with a script that changed daily, the film moves around dizzily to convey the story of a doomed actress (laura dern) on a doomed set of a doomed movie, trapped in a doomed relationship (and affair) in a doomed time. no one said los angeles was easy.
16. the king is alive (2000)
although i only saw this film not too long ago, it's basic structure of shakespeare mixed with the techniques of a reality show fascinated me. it follows a group of privileged westerners stuck in the african desert and who decide to put on "king lear" to make the time pass by. yet as they choose their characters and begin to learn their lines, they slowly start to become them in ways that strip off the psyches of those far too used to bottled water and air conditioning. part of the dogme95 renegade film queue, this quiet film evokes pain, suffering, and longing like hardly anything i've ever seen.
15. ghost world (2001)
this was the film that birthed millions of cynical millennial mall rats and brought ironic dead-end suburban culture into the mainstream. almost as kitschy as the decor and style of the settings and characters in it, it is the best example of what happens after you graduate high school and find out that there is no beautiful life waiting set for you at the end of the diploma. as the awesomely cool enid (thora birch) bags z's in summer school, her best friend rebecca (scarjo) works at a starbucks rip-off and starts an adult life, forever altering the once-close bond between these two friends. to escape her own boredom, enid starts a thing with a vinyl-collecting misanthrope (steve buscemi) only to realize that it won't save the volcanic direction of her life. bittersweet to the highest power, this film is probably the best teen film of the past decade and so far of the 21st century.
14. lost in translation (2003)
the rich-girl wife (scarjo, again) of a fashion photog gazes outside of her luxury-hotel room hoping to find some meaning in post-global japan in this indie classic. what meaning she eventually finds is through the equally-confused has-been actor (bill murray) who is filming a whisky commercial even though he'd prefer to be doing a play somewhere. in a very bacall-bogie style, the two entertain each other through smiles and wit only to know later that they will not be able to live as happily ever after as they would like. sofia coppola combines her obsession with european arthouse and the ever-changing dreamscape of femininity, allowing us to glimpse at this most interesting union if only for a couple of hours.
13. thirteen (2003)
probably just as influential to a subculture of self-mutiliating teenagers as juno may seem now to a subculture of teen moms, this film takes one straight-a's 7th grader and turns her year upside down. tracy freeland (evan rachel wood) is enthralled by the resident thong-clad cool slutbag (nikki reed) and steals a credit card to ensure her entry into the navel-pierced bad girls club, a membership that begins to wear thin after her grades crash and she begins cutting herself hardcore, with her recovering alky mom (holly hunter) waiting too long to notice what's happening to her daughter. very afterschool, but with the grainy handheld cinematography, it is easy to take it for what it really is: a painfully honest portrait of modern young teens as they navigate their identities in a culture inundated by sex and shock.
12. kill bill vol 1 & 2 (2003-2004)
ultraviolent, ultrablended, and ultrapop are the only things that can describe the revenge epic that is the embodiment of the millennial film. with its borrowing from dozens of known and unknown sources, it follows a totally-preggos bride-to-be (uma thurman) scorned and left for dead by her ex-lover/boss bill (the late, great david carradine), who assembled his gang of deadly assassins to do the dirty work. but when the bride wakes up after a coma, she goes on a murder spree, characteristically tallying off names after she savagely murders them in a manner not unlike old-school exploitation. yet while the murders lead the first volume, it is the second one that allows us a better understanding of who these people are and what their world consists of covering a range of themes from family, motherhood, and marriage to superheroes, dreams, and happiness. together, both volumes create tarantino's true masterpiece.
11. brick (2005)
if raymond chandler fucked john hughes, this would be their bundle of joy. unlike most teen films of the past decade, the neo-noir set around a suburban high school doesn't shit on its audience and expect them to appreciate it. instead it invites us into a seedier side of the cafeteria that has nothing to do with gun-toting goth kids but with a ruling class of students whose manipulative power struggle has slipped under its fingers in the wake of the death of a drug-addict and the ex-girlfriend of a gum-chewing gumshoe (joseph gordon levitt). as he unveils the secrets hiding beyond the football field, he is continually rebuffed and harassed by teenage gangsters who want nothing more than for him to keep his mouth shut. and molly ringwald thought SHE had it hard?
10. mean girls (2004)
though not the best teen film of the aughties, it still remains the most popular and the most influential. where the 90's generation had clueless, those in high school and entering in later had this bonafide millennial phenomenon that turned tina fey into a comedy superstar, lindsay lohan from disney darling to tabloid trainwreck, and established the ridiculous "fetch" as a de facto slang term whether in jest or utter seriousness. focusing on african-raised cady's (lohan) journey through the wilds of the american high school system, the movie allows us to view our obscene culture of wealth and labels in a terrifyingly comedic manner via the plastics (rachel mcadams, amanda seyfried, and lacey chabert), the stylish incarnates of the three witches from "macbeth" who transform lohan into a major bitch. though it was designed to eliminate social clique taboos, the film began its own plastics carbon copies, complete with leather minis and basic-colored pumps, a fashion statement that is just as important as clueless's knee socks and furry animal backpacks. even 6 years after its premiere, the film endures as a template of trendsetting cinema and pitch-perfect satire.
9. wild tigers i have known (2007)
bizarro fable about a disillusioned 13-year-old logan (malcolm stumpf) discovering himself by adorning wigs and phonesexing in a disguised voice. his best friend is obsessed with being cool and making moronic lists to live up to while his mother (fairuza balk) is a callous woman clearly burnt out from a not-so-desirable past. in the midst of this, logan forms a very unlikely friendship with the dreamily "in" 8th grader rodeo (like the beverly hills shopping lane) as a tiger roams their school premises. the first full-length film by 28-year-old cam archer is not a perfect one but that is a main reason why i adore it. not only does it finally portray a young boy awakening to his sexuality but it does it in a way that is neither patronizing nor gratuitous. what is served is a display of experimental art-school basics with a brush of david lynch surrealism that underscores adolescent worries and pains through tie-dyed bugs crawling across the screen like prisoners gnawing their way from seclusion.
8. atl (2006)
this postmodern "hood" film is not like its predecessors. where most films dealing with black youth solely focus on the dangers within their environments, here the dangers take a backseat and allow the joy of being young to take the forefront. following the hopes and dreams of two siblings (t.i. and his younger bro, evan ross) through educational ennui and working weekends, we are taken into their close-knit group of friends who ready themselves for a life-altering skating competition while on a seemingly endless search for girls and a fortuitous future. in many ways this color-fusioned, hyperstylized piece is beyond "hood" and straight into beach party zone, but any of its cliches are easily overlooked due to the incredible performances by its mostly young and unknown cast who are so honest and believable, you wish you knew who they were. and in a way, maybe you already do.
7. friends with money (2006)
money is something americans like to have but hate to discuss in public. yet when it's you and your friends, the tongues drop and they don't stop until someone feels better about not being the other person. this self-absorption is taken to the height in nicole holofcener's third film which focuses on a group of successful, married west l.a. women (joan cusack, frances mcdormand, and catherine keener) who all are glad that they are not olivia (jennifer aniston), their much poorer, more needy friend who cleans houses and dates losers. what is brilliant about this is that it's set up as a cheap chick flick but is filmed in handheld indieness and actually ten times more miserable than assumed upon first-glance, challenging us to understand how it feels to notice your face sagging or how "loving" to shop at old navy can be seen as a bad thing to certain people. this mirror on bush-era millennial society says more about who we are and where we are going than any political campaign out there.
6. the royal tenenbaums (2001)
wes anderson's only genuinely "perfect" film, this immensely stylish family dramedy focuses on the tenenbaum clan, a family of overachievers who have no idea what to do after their fame and stars have faded. they are incidentally brought together by their crooked father (gene hackman) after he lies about dying because he misses his children, forcing them to move back into their large victorian abode and face heavy tension that has been building for decades. inspired by cartoons, j.d. salinger and orson welles, this is the hipster's hipster's film with a soundtrack chock-filled with folk and postpunk, characters who dress in the same outfit the entire film, and an alec baldwin narration that reminds one of warm bedtime stories on a cold, rainy night.
5. margot at the wedding (2007)
even though most people praise that other aughties movie done by noah baumbach, this was clearly the darker, less-contrived of the two, starring his brilliant wife jennifer jason leigh and the aussie screen goddess nicole kidman as two new england sisters who claim to be "best friends" yet haven't seen each other in years. brought together for the younger sister's unconventional wedding on their parents' old property, the two are tested by each other's neuroses and those surrounding them, including jack black's pretentiously dimwitted husband/father-to-be and the underrated teen growing pains done proper by the young zane paris. quiet in the style of french influences and shot in grainy naturalistic hues of brown, reds, and greens, this film is not so much about dysfunctional families as it is about people who know what they want yet do not know how to say it.
4. george washington (2000)
five north carolinian kids on the brink of growing up experience an accident and try to cover it up in this debut film by david gordon green. with long cinescope frames that evoke the most classic of hollywood and sun-stroken lens that scream "malick," he captures the sadness of small-town life in gorgeous haziness as the kids scramble around old junkyards, braiding each other's hair, and professing beliefs in true love. the title does not refer to our nation's forefather but the 12-year-old george who puts on a cape and declares himself a hero, an act that symbolizes both the liberties of being ourselves but most importantly, the liberties of being human. i dare you not to fall in love with this gem.
3. bobbycrush (2003)
at only 10 minutes, this is the shortest on the list though its effect is immense. another sexually-confused bizarro from cam archer, this film focuses on the verboten crush that bobby has on his best friend dylan. choppily shot on digital film and alternately passing off as a busby berkeley confection from mars, it is psychologically denser than wild tigers i have known, which it shares many similarities with, and is far more playful mixing in music video interludes and low-fi dream sequences to convey a disoriented portrait of rhythmic lust. never have i felt more at home.
2. the new world (2005)
terrence malick blew the lid off of america's most well-known legacy and gave it back to us in almost real-time. focusing on the early days of british colonization with the relationship of pocahontas (q'orianka kilcher) and john smith (colin farrell) at the emotional center, this passionate love letter to nature and our country's roots avoids melodrama and goes straight for the truth. although many of us were raised on disney's politically-correct fantasy, malick strips the song-and-dance and muddles his camera through stalks of grass, deep forests, and alluring lakes, using the surroundings as a defining presence just as he has with his human characters. it is almost like we are watching the events unfold in front of us for the first time and what we want to do most is to warn those of their outcome. however, that is the tragedy of history and that is the beauty of this film.
1. marie antoinette (2006)
maybe it is because of the setting. maybe it is because of the music. maybe it is because of the allegory to modern youth or modern america. maybe it is because of sofia coppola. though there are many reasons why i adore this film, i believe the main reason is because it is the prime example of what creative vision and artistic freedom can produce. sofia coppola knew what she was doing after pleasing the world with her existential drama lost in translation by re-imagining the last queen of france as a shopaholic valley girl. portraying the angst-ridden marie-antoinette, kirsten dunst proves herself once again as an actress of extreme caliber going from the naive age of 14 to the motherly-responsible age of 30 with gentle ease. rounded off by other well-known hollywood insiders (jason schwartzman as king louis, molly shannon as a scheming tante, and asia argento as a tasteless mistress to name a few) and complete with 1980's new wave and goth rock, montages of wagging playing cards, converse sneakers, and party scenes to end all party scenes, this film lives up to its standards as a period film filtered into our pop consciousness, creating a genre of its own in the process. if there is any film that truly speaks to those obsessed with ipods, chanel, and tabloid culture, this is their gospel and me, well call me a devoted follower.
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