Moments Not In Time: 2010

Inspired by the annual "Moments Out of Time" series at MSN, some of my own that didn't make their list.

Roger dumping cereal into a toilet in "Greenberg"

Michael Cera's aside justification for not wanting to hit the only female evil-ex in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World": "They're soft..."

The female prisoner drinking from an invisible cup in "Shutter Island"

Ivy and Al sheepishly prodding a baby pigeon in "The Exploding Girl"

The greatest band in the world (in the movie), The Clash at Demonhead, performing Metric's "Black Sheep" in "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"

The constant numbers and 'x's placed throughout the production design, costumes, and dialogue of "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"

The shocking shots of Barbara Hershey sleeping in "Black Swan"

A moment between a mother and daughter, one, at the end of "I Am Love"

Tilda Swinton falling in love with a man through a meal in "I Am Love"

The opening shots of Milan covered in snow in "I Am Love"

Roger staring at the dead possum in the pool, feeling his mortality while the young people around him laugh in "Greenberg"

Kathy, now older, listening to the title song she listened to as a child in "Never Let Me Go"

A young man ready to fight, ten years too late to participate in a revolution, fights anyway in "Night Catches Us"

Best Music of 2010

1. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening


What might be the last record by LCD Soundsystem is fittingly grand. It's the best record of the year, and seeing them play live a few times this year were the best shows I saw. The album ends with a song called "Home," which is appropriate since it's the most oft-repeated word in their entire catalogue, but also because that sense of desire for something you've lost pervades the whole record, if not James Murphy's whole career. If this is the end, I can't think of a better send off.


2. Spoon - Transference


The most reductive they've ever allowed their sound to be, it would be off putting if the songs weren't so consistently good. This is among the strongest stuff they've ever recorded.


3. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record


Forgiveness is as good an idea as any to promote, and as a theme it syncs perfectly with their aesthetic. It's one of their best, most focused albums.


4. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs


The first time I've warmed to any of their albums as a whole. It's a great record, personal but very large in scope. Works just as well in a stadium as it does in a bedroom.


5. Hot Chip - One Life Stand


Another great Hot Chip album, a more diverse sound. Harmonizing, honest emotion, weird synth sounds. I like it a lot.

6. Jónsi - Go


A brighter, happier version of Sigur Rós. Beautiful. Also worth seeking out is Dean Deblois' film of the acoustic version of the record, Go Quiet.



7. She & Him - Volume Two


An incredibly well produced, well performed record. The particulars of Deschanel's other career don't need to enter into the picture to appreciate it at all except that her other career surely informs her vocal performances which are, without exception, confident and emotional. It's an improvement over their very good first record, and goes well beyond pastiche.


8. MGMT - Congratulations


A record that I took a while to warm to, but when I did it was hard not to recognize the greatness. If it sounds a bit like a post-graduate study on the psychedelic, it can be forgiven by the enthusiasm in the songwriting and the dense production. Beyond that it's very enjoyable to listen to.


9. Sleigh Bells - Treats


A grower. I didn't like the EP, then I did. I didn't like this, then I did. They leave something to be desired live, and I wonder how long they can sustain as a band but for now it's great, loud, dumb pop music.


10. Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner


This came out of nowhere for me. It sounds like something I would have loved in High School. That sounds like a back-handed compliment or an insult, but it's an irresistibly charming record.


(The following artists' names are in bold, with the title of their release-if there is one-in parenthesis next to their name.)
Much of the rest of these are bands I'm probably more familiar with a small section of their work than their albums as a collective, but I also enjoyed (in some order at first and then not as much): The follow-up EP by a great live band, Twin Sister (Color Your Life), the excellent EP by DFA act Holy Ghost! (Static on the Wire), the slightly disappointing but still very good album by The Walkmen (Lisbon), the all over the place, but great in stretches album from Yeasayer (Odd Blood), the very enjoyable to listen to and see performed live stuff by The Morning Benders (Big Echo), longtime DFA DJ, first time origina...tor Shit Robot (From The Cradle To The Rave), the highly-influenced-by-Joy Division record from The Drums (The Drums), the disparate, hard to gather releases of Memoryhouse, the ridiculously catchy Swedish pop thing that Robyn (Body Talk) does, the promising EP by Tennis (Boston), I came around to portions of the much derided album by M.I.A. (Maya), the broody beer drinking thing of The National (High Violet), the egomanical, but still kinda good thing that Kanye West (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) does, the soft spoken, folky British thing that Laura Marling (I Speak Because I Can) does, the consistent output of Rufus Wainwright (All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu), the consistent output of The Roots (How I Got Over), the sure-to-improve-as-they-get-older music of Toro y Moi (Causers of This), the she's-better-in-a-live-setting-than-on-a-record recording by Nellie McKay (Home Sweet Mobile Home), the-never-as-good-as-the-first-EP of Amiina (Puzzle), the thing I'm sure I would have liked them a lot if I listened to it more of Joanna Newsom (Have One On Me) and Owen Pallett (Heartland).

I also enjoyed the various live recordings offered throughout the year, including those of LCD Soundsystem (London Sessions), LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip (Live at Alexandra Palace), Phoenix (Live in Sydney), and Arcade Fire (Live at Madison Square Garden Broadcast on YouTube).

I've assembled a number of live performances by some of the artists mentioned over here.

As always, there a lot of holes in these things, and like most people I do not solely listen to new music. The top ten represent heavy rotators for me, the rest are largely things I did not listen to a great deal, but when I did, I enjoyed. There is a playlist below with a song from every artist mentioned.

Things other people seem like but I don't get: Drake, Best Coast, Florence and the Machine, Of Montreal, Sufjan Stevens, Maximum Balloon, Chromeo.

Night Catches Us: Always Black, No Longer Panthers

Tanya Hamilton's debut feature Night Catches Us stars Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, two of my favorite working actors. They're also actors who are frequently underutilized in the films they're in. Mackie has of course been getting some great roles the past few years with Half Nelson and The Hurt Locker, but they're rarely leads in the films they're in. The film takes place in Philadelphia in 1976. Mackie and Washington are ex-Black Panthers, and Mackie has just returned from a sort of forced exile from the neighborhood after he allegedly snitched on another Panther 4 years prior. The film is very adept at connecting the politics of the time (after the Civil Rights movement, before black urban culture became mainstream) to the personal story of these characters whose lives are so well observed and filled with detail. The Roots provide a lot of the music for the film (a lot of it from their excellent new album How I Got Over), which mixes period music with more modern sounding hip hop that's greatly indebted to 70s Soul and R&B, and Black Thought even shows up in a supporting role. There's a great subplot involving a neighborhood kid increasingly frustrated by the police and angry that he missed out on the cultural revolution that people 5 or 10 years older than him participated in, slowly devolving into a militant is very strong and one of the best things in the movie. Newcomer Amir Cheatom handles the role with intensity and focus. If enough people see this, I think you could easily call it a star making role.

I like the film a great deal, and it's ultimately very powerful, but it has a characteristic I find typical of films that were developed through the Sundance Institute (which this film was in 2000, it took 9 years to get it made), which is that a lot of the rough edges of the script seem to have been smoothed over in the development process. For example, the script was original called Stringbean and Marcus. Marcus is Anthony Mackie's character, and Stringbean was presumably Kerry Washington's. In the finished film, her character's name is Patricia, but he calls her Patty, something that she's displeased by. That would make more sense if he called her Stringbean, but that's the kind of thing that can get taken out when you go through the Sundance Lab. I felt similarly about a film called Sin Nombre from last year that went through the Lab. Like that film though, I'd definitely like to see what writer and director Tanya Hamilton does next, because at the very least this film shows a lot of promise.

Recurrence is the Movie: The Films of Noah Baumbach

The following is a list of recurrent themes and details in the three most recent films by Noah Baumbach. There are spoilers for all three films.

-The Family Pet as a driving force in the story

The Squid and the Whale, the family cat's oscillation between the divorced parents' residencies causes the two characters to keep meeting, keep talking, providing a look at the dynamic, reasons for the divorce, reasons they were a couple in the first place. The cat running out of the house at the end of the film is what causes Bernard to run outside, possibly inducing the heart attack he suffers.

Margot at the Wedding, the family dog Wizard disappears near the begging of the second act, which causes fights both familial and neighborly, its return ends the second act.

Greenberg The Greenberg family dog Mahler is the most central role for a pet in Baumbach's films, is important for humanizing Roger, and brings he and Florence, his love interest, back together over and over again even when complications in the relationship arise.


-The name Greenberg

Walt's girlfriend Sophie Greenberg (Halley Feiffer) in The Squid and the Whale, Roger Greenberg in Greenberg


-A dead animal in a pool

Margot at the Wedding Claude sees a dead mouse at the bottom of the pool after he falls in

Greenberg The party stops as 20 somethings gather around a dead animal, the young people are playful, laugh about it, Roger is freaked out, can't look at it. The young people are callous and unknowing of their own mortality. Roger is obsessed and terrified by aging and death, and the confrontation with the animal's corpse is a strong physicalization of those fears.

-Karen Dalton

The vagabond songstress accompanies Margot at the Wedding's closing credits crawl, and she is mentioned explicitly in Greenberg when Roger puts it on a mix for Florence.


-Childlike, sexual, anal obsessed profanity

The Squid and the Whale Frank's father-aping outbursts "Suck my dick, ass man!"

Margot at the Wedding Claude shouting at his mother "You shit in your shoes and then you fuck them!"

Greenberg Roger shouting at his best friend "Sit on my dick asshole!"


-Masturbation

The Squid and the Whale Frank's burgeoning, supremely confused sexuality is manifested in his public masturbation, and spreading of semen around school.

Margot at the Wedding Margot upon arriving at her childhood home masturbates in her bed, Claude tells his mother near the end of the film that he masturbated in their hotel room after everyone went to sleep.


-The actress Halley Feiffer as an object of lust, agent of sexual discovery

The Squid and the Whale Walt's first real girlfriend, first sexual experience

Margot at the Wedding Claude stares at her chest, is aroused by contact with her. Malcom gazes at her, kisses her, cheating on his fiance.


-Small objects getting lodged in orifices, staying there for most of the film

The Squid and the Whale Early in the film Frank shoves a cashew up his nose, late in the film it comes out.

Margot at the Wedding Early in the film Margot gets a fly stuck inside her ear. Near the end she is still struggling to get it out.


-Last minute decisions as ends for the film

The Squid and the Whale Walt dashes out of the hospital to go confront the titular exhibit and confront his fears.

Margot at the Wedding Margot decides to chase after, wave down, and get on the bus she just put her son on.

Greenberg Roger has a panic attack in the back of his niece's car on the way to the airport and Australia, decides to get out to go take care of Florence, stop running.


-Characters not being able to swim/water as baptism

The Squid and the Whale Walt dips his head in a pond in Central Park, recalls fond memories of bath time with his Mother.

Margot at the Wedding Claude (deliberately?) falls into the pool, not knowing how to swim.

Greenberg Roger slowly enters his brother's pool, doggy paddling across with great difficulty.


-Singing

The Squid and the Whale Walt at the talent show, the stolen song.

Margot at the Wedding Claude sings Blondie into a tape recorder in private.

Greenberg Florence sings at an open mic night.


-The name Ivan

Ivan the Tennis Pro in The Squid and the Whale, the title character's former best friend in Greenberg.

-Personifying animals

Baumbach's New Yorker short story Mouse au Vin contains this line "I thought Louis was me today. Mice are so weird. They’re like humans in rodent costumes." In Greenberg Florence says she sometimes thinks the dog Mahler is really a "human in a dog costume."

Greenberg: Thoughts on Screen

Noah Baumbach is a filmmaker who repeats. I loved The Squid and the Whale and became obsessed with it a few months ago (as I tend to with certain films when I'm writing), and decided that it's basically a perfect movie, even the shots where you see 2000s cars in the '80s setting go into making it great, but that's another discussion. So anyway, I was very eagerly anticipating this new film from Baumbach even though it looked stylistically, and tonally, completely different than anything Baumbach has done, either in his first two 90s post-collegiate intellectual ennui films (Kicking & Screaming, Mr. Jealousy), his two harsh familial drama, rebound, mid-00s films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding) or his co-writing work with Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Fantastic Mr. Fox). From the trailer I was worried it seemed to contain none of the visual style Baumbach had started with The Squid and the Whale and refined with Margot at the Wedding, but even more than that I was worried by Baumbach's sudden fondness for my most hated "filmmaker," Joe Swanberg, who I will summarize for those unfamiliar as the Uwe Boll of no-budget cinema. Not only had Baumbach produced Swanberg's latest nopus (does that work?), he'd cast one of Swanberg's mainstays Greta Gerwig in a central role. I liked Gerwig in her small role in The House of the Devil, but her connection to Swanberg still soured me on her as a performer. From the trailer the film also seemed like it might be slipping into the Nancy Meyers territory of films about wealthy people with made up problems.

Having now actually seen the film (twice) and not just guessing based on advertising, I can say quite happily that none of those concerns come to pass. The film is different in many ways than Baumbach's previous films but it's also a logical evolution. Visually, it has a very striking resemblance to 1970s American cinema, like that of Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Sidney Lumet, and Peter Yates. Even more so than in Margot at the Wedding (where Baumbach first worked with Greenberg cinematographer Harris Savides), this film visually evokes a long passed period in mainstream American cinema. A period where even in the hokiest of studio genre pictures like Capricorn One, you'd find a competently shot film that has respect for the widescreen frame and knew how to use it to good effect. And unlike so many filmmakers working in a superficially similar milieu who evoke those names of the 1970s American auteurs, Baumbach's film evokes it in content, as well as form. From the frames, to the lighting, down to the way the film is processed, everything visual is rooted in an organic, utterly natural ideology. The same goes for the music from LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, which sounds reminiscent of solo Paul McCartney or the Leonard Cohen songs in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and the structure of the story, which is rooted in character and moments and diverting expectations. Baumbach is also able to resist the temptation so many filmmakers who chase that look and feeling fall into, to remove your characters story from the present and its technology and politics and pop culture. Baumbach embraces the time in which the film was made and doesn't shy away from referring to the world in a way that most people do every day.

The performances all around are so rich and full of nuance that it's hard to focus on one standout. Ben Stiller gives his best performance since Chas Tenenbaum as the title role, and makes such bold choices that I fear some audiences may be put off by it. Stiller has always been attracted to characters who don't pander to audience sympathies, even in his most outlandish comic roles, he almost never begs for the audience to like him, and in his best work he doesn't seem to care. Look back at Zoolander, an incredibly flawed film, but one with a central character who is so stupid, so ignorant, that any viewer with a 5th grade education has no choice but to feel superior to him. In most protagonists there are faults, how else are we to care for a person, but there are also redeeming character traits. They're kind, or their funny, even if they're pricks they find redemption. Stiller, it seems, is interested in pushing the audiences tolerance. In the films he's directed, his characters redemption comes at the last possible moment, and is almost immediately revoked. Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder is still a self involved, stupid prick at the end of the movie. Chas Tenenbaum is still disassociated from his family. Even as a public personality, Stiller has always given off the air that he doesn't really care what you think. It's not until this role that that tendency has been explored to such complex and engaging results. Stiller's Roger Greenberg is a misanthropic, self involved, delusional wreck. But we care about him because we can see immediately that he is so confused and lacks such basic skill for accurate introspection, that you know he can't even help himself. When he says horrible things, or shouts profanities, or is insensitive in social situations, you know it's because of this crippling problem. We also care about him because he's an exaggerated version of something that is within every thinking person, criticism, dissatisfaction, and a guard we put up to protect ourselves from pain. If we strike the first blow, it won't hurt as much as it would if we were struck first. For Greenberg, vulnerability is something that doesn't fit into his purview of life. Greenberg is so critical of people who lack self awareness, but of course he in fact has no self awareness himself. He's a walking contradiction of a human being, and it's the unraveling of his persona that partially makes the film's almost plotless nature so fascinating. For Baumbch, this is a character who has bounced around his films from the beginning in various forms, most fully in The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. Greenberg's invention is a direct combination of Frank, Walt, and Bernard from The Squid and the Whale and Margot from his follow-up film. What Ben Stiller brings to it is incalculable. His performance is so dense and psychologically complex that I felt for the very first time I was seeing something honest from him. Beyond their blind-spots, Stiller's characters always seem to contain an element of distancing irony. But there are passages in Greenberg where you completely forgot you're watching one of the biggest movie stars in the world, because you're not. You're watching a fully formed person inhabiting a space with no regards for an audience, a story, or even a camera.

It is also Greenberg's interaction with Greta Gerwig's character Florence that makes the films aimless, searching narrative so compelling. While one may argue that Greenberg is almost a stock Baumbachian character, Florence is something he's never attempted before. Florence is at heart a good person. She doesn't connive or scheme, she's almost accommodating to a fault. She's a sweet young girl who's main goal it seems is to be happy. She works as a personal assistant to Greenberg's brother, but serves the role of a nanny to the family, and even in this work she finds joy hiking with the family dog, Mahler, interacting with the Greenberg children, picking up groceries for the family. On weekends she sings at open mic nights, not because she's trying to build a career, but because it makes her happy. She goes home with a guy she meets at a gallery party a friend invited her to, because, she says, it felt good. Florence the purest of Baumbach's characters, not saddled with the education, therapy talk, or neurosis of his protagonists in the past. So when we see this decent young women so taken with this misanthropic middle aged man, we're curious and intrigued and we're allowed to view their non-romance as an interaction between people, rather than a sporting event where the audience is forced to take sides, for or against. In life, it is more complicated in that, and so it is too in Baumbach's film. Gerwig's performance is so adept at taking a character who in less assured hands could end up a low-rent Manic Pixie Dream Girl and turn her into a real person. There's an unawareness of the camera in Gerwig that I can only assume comes from her extensive work in no-budget, improvised films wherein she was likely filmed up close for long periods of time. She's used to a camera being there in situations most actresses wouldn't allow. There's a scene in Swanberg's awful Hannah Takes the Stairs where Gerwig rubs the real residue of a towel off of her nipples. Though the scene has no place in the film, and serves no dramatic purpose, it illustrates Gerwig's ability to play every scene as real, to be open to showing the realities of mundanity. It's a quality she brings to every scene in the film, whether it's her driving for long stretches, or walking the dog, or hiking with a friend, she's not concerned with looking "good" so much as she is with being truthful. It's a style of performance you don't see in films often, and when you begin to realize how much of a character Gerwig has built, the performance becomes even more impressive, and it's even more apparent how central it is to Greenberg's success. That frankness is something Swanberg exploited to mostly prurient excess, but what Baumbach does is incorporate it into scenes that would otherwise be meaningless. Those opening shots of the film, with Florence driving around Los Angeles, hold our interest because it feels like we're watching someone living, and we're allowed to drop in and observe for a moment before the "story" starts. It's fascinating, it's unique, and it's damn fine film.

One Time, I Saw A Bad Film

Jim Emerson's post "What do we mean by the 'worst' movies of 2009?" spurred me to write about the worst damn film I saw all last year, Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light. Below is an explanation for why I think it's the worst and what I mean by worst. I would include a photo, but I'd rather not have to look at one of Reygadas' images every time I come here. The following was written as a comment, so excuse the lack of structure and informality.

The worst film I saw last year was Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light."

I'd been hearing about the film for over a year, heard Scorsese, heard Ebert, and I waited to see it on film at Facets Cinematheque months after I could have seen it on my computer. I spent the entire running time uncomfortable and angry at what was being projected in front of me. Somehow, some way, a lack of perspective or any kind of expression had been confused with a meditative masterpiece. The mere depiction of nature had been confused with an immersion. What I saw was a complete exploitation of poverty, an exploitation on migrant faces and the wear that came with them. Exploitation of these performers and of the landscape they occupied. Film its self is an exploitative medium, but if you have something to convey, something to put across through that exploitation, that makes it worth it. Here there is nothing, it is a film completely devoid of any redeeming facets. Even the supposed "beauty" of the cinematography, the handheld shots of children bathing outdoors, all exploitation, as generic and without purpose as any car commercial.

I enjoy a lot of directors whose films could be described as slow. I love Ozu, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming Liang, Hou Hsiao Hsien, I am not impervious to the charms of nature lovers like Terrence Malick, I enjoy a tale or two of the forgotten people, some De Sica here, some Bresson there. I enjoy films that look good, even slick. David Gordon Green and Tarsem are favorites, but this thing has nothing that all those directors films do, a perspective and a reason to exist.

The most maddening shot I saw last year was the one in Silent Light when Reygadas (or whomever) tracks from outside a dusty gravel parking lot into an open garage, adjusting the iris as he enters and then leaves the garage. You don't see that in other films. You know why? It's lazy and most directors, even the ones least concerned with continuity or traditional film language, avoid doing it in-shot. They cut, they figure something else out, either way it never ends up in their film. But Reygadas does it in his film because he doesn't care, and he expects you not to either. After all, we're talking about a guy whose idea of great cinema is watching an erect penis slowly become flaccid, a shot he included in his previous film (which had an ugly, sexist poster around the globe).

The part that makes me so crazy is that beyond exploiting these people to try and lend some semblance of importance to his meaningless film is the glomming on of religion, death and some kind of idiotic implication of magic and death denial, and cut to a shot of tree in front of a sunset and associate it with nature and we're out.

Terrible film, and for those reasons worse than the other nine awful films I saw this year including Explicit Ills, Gigantic, Amelia, New York, I Love You, The Marc Pease Experience, The Box, Night and Day, Brothers and Year One.

Best Films of 2009

A pair of "children's films" and "documentaries" end up at either end of my top twenty-five this year. The top pair are both adaptations and expansions of beloved, slim children's literature by critically controversial directors popular with a younger cult of moviegoers, and the bottom pair a set of stylistically refined documentaries by revolutionaries in the medium. Spike Jonze's adaption of Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are and Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox both stray somewhat from their source material, but out of them create new works of art, as distinctive and ready to be loved for as long as their print counterparts have been. The documentaries challenge the notion of what a documentary is. In Moore's Godardian essay film Capitalism: A Love Story he argues passionately that the American dream, the ideal that propelled this country from the second world war to the present is bringing about its collapse. Moore's films have always been eclectic, containing comedic stunts, stories of small town families and ironic use of archival footage, but never has Moore argued more passionately and urgently as he does here. This is also the first of Moore's films to be what his others have only obliquely been, a call to action. Conversely, Frederick Wiseman's La Danse contains less overt commentary on its subject. Wiseman refines the style he's maintained since his earliest work like High School, setting the camera down in a corner of a space and watching the events unfold. Earlier in his career, this was dubbed "direct cinema," but Wiseman wisely rebuffs at the term, because the very act of making a film and the act of editing that film is its self a commentary. Sure, there are long takes in this nearly three hour film, where there is no cutting occuring, but what Wiseman focuses on and when it appears in the film gives you all the commentary needed. Without a point of view, the running time would be interminable, but because Wiseman is so adept at sequencing events and capturing them in an intriguing way, the film is engaging, and when it wants to be, moving and funny. Most of all though, it's fascinating, and the same can be said for all of the films in my list, from the Coen brothers' masterpiece A Serious Man, to the Korean-American directed no-budget Rwandan film Munyurangabo, to Steven Soderbergh's pair of digital video experimentations. There was no shortage of great cinema from around the globe this year, you just had to find it.

Special consideration for Michael Haneke's masterpiece The White Ribbon and Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum.

Another 10 (in order):
Observe and Report
Rumba
The Messenger
Two Lovers
Face (Visage)
Fish Tank
Somers Town
Funny People
Taking Woodstock
Duplicity
The International

Also (in order): Air Doll, Bruno, Frontier of The Dawn, Police, Adjective, Still Walking, Summer Hours, Hunger, Goodbye Solo, The Beaches of Agnes, Revanche, The Road, Coco Before Chanel, Invictus, The Hangover, Big Fan, Mother, Sin Nombre, Everlasting Moments, Tell Them Anything You Want, A Christmas Carol, Drag Me To Hell, Adventureland, Crazy Heart, Julie & Julia, Up in the Air, Julia, Rudo y Cursi, Avatar, and Humpday.

Others (not in order): A Single Man, Mary and Max, 500 Days of Summer, Nymph, The Boat That Rocked, The Limits of Control, The Invention of Lying, Zombieland, Whip It, Knowing, Treeless Mountain, The Brothers Bloom, Coraline, Watchmen, Gommorah, Departures, Visioneers, Whatever Works, Cold Souls, An Education, and The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Ten Worst (in order): Silent Light, Explicit Ills, Gigantic, Amelia, New York, I Love You, The Marc Pease Experience, The Box, Night and Day, Brothers and Year One.

Biggest disappointments (not in order): The Limits of Control, The Invention of Lying, Thirst, and The Soloist.

NOT YET SEEN: 35 Shots of Rum, The Headless Woman, The White Ribbon, Of Time and the City, and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

Moments Not in Time

Inspired by the annual "Moments Out of Time" series at MSN, some of my own that didn't make their list.

Max pops his head up in the tiny, beautiful city made by a moody monster in Where The Wild Things Are

Mr. Fox tells his wife Felicity that she looks like she's glowing, a cut and she actually is glowing, lit from within. "Maybe it's the lighting." Mr Fox says, in Fantastic Mr. Fox

In La Belle Personne, a brief recap of the past. Two boys in a bathroom, one grabs the other, sneaking behind a car after gym class for a clandestine kiss. Secrets revealed that unintentionally and indirectly set a tragedy into motion.

Shoshanna Dreyfus balks at a Nazi war hero, "In France we respect directors." in Inglourious Basterds

Colonel Hans Landa's eyes shift like an animal stalking its prey, noticing a figure move rapidly beneath the floor boards. "There!" in Inglourious Basterds

The Erotic Connoisseur reads his review of his q-tip heavy meeting with an escort named Chelsea, quoting Misty Beethoven, music comes in under and then the song kicks in "Everyone one's a critic..." in The Girlfriend Experience

On stage at the Paris Opera Ballet, Madea bathes herself in blood, two dead children lay. With the opportunity to get as close as anyone would want to, Frederick Wiseman's camera keeps its distance, respecting the raw emotion of the performer in La Danse

The shadows of a husband and wife dance together on the wall behind them as the husband and wife no longer can, in Rumba

"Do fish have dreams?" in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

A boy plays the piano, in Tokyo Sonata

The human Orchestra in Bright Star

The 847 area code switchover is a plot point in The Informant! (It is also my area code)

The introduction of non-diagetic music into the world of the Dardennes in Lorna's Silence

Lorna gleefully chases Claudy on his bicycle, then a sudden jump in time. Lorna's Silence

Sugar gets off a bus in New York, no strings attached in Sugar

A poet practices laying out the breadth of pain in his country for a wandering boy in Munyurangabo

The poet in Welles' Shakespeare's Julius Caesar disappears in a crowd and the audience gasps in Me and Orson Welles

Naturally, "chaos reigns" in Antichrist

A cgi-enhanced part of the male body faces the camera and yells "Bruno!" in Bruno

Two soldiers play war in a parking lot in The Messenger

A woman blacks out a window with tape, and we see every second of the process. 15 people walk out, from the screening I saw of Face (Visage)

"Let me do that again, I fucked up." Seth Rogen's accidentally brilliant narration in Observe and Report

Two tycoons paw at each other like blubbery whales in extreme slow-motion at the start of Duplicity

A young couple stops and listens to a discussion on the degradation of their city, and the movie does too, in Medicine for Melancholy

The complainer finally calls his audience out and commands them to do something, in Capitalism: A Love Story

A Less American List: The Best of the Rest of the World of the Decade

Unintentionally, my previous list of films seemed to consist solely of English language films directed by white Americans, with very few exceptions. To be fair, America does make more movies than any other country, but because so much of the best of the past decade has come from outside the borders of this often questionable land, below is a consideration of some of the best films of the decade to come from the rest of the world. If it is brief, and without mention of many great filmmakers from around the globe, I'm aware and I restate that the same rules and conditions and warnings apply here, as they did in the previous post.
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Like Tsia Ming-Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul introduced the decade to a slower, more internally rhythmic cinema than had been seen ever before. With long, slow moving takes, sometimes on inanimate objects, unexplained allegorical images, and sparse dialogue with no connection to any kind of traditional plotting, "Joe" created some of the most quietly thrilling cinema of the decade. His masterpiece Syndromes and a Century is his most brilliant work. The film was censored and then banned in his homeland of Thailand, for what the Thai government saw as perverse content. But the film, with no nudity or violence, is not perverse, it is radical. It's a new cinema, and it's one that will take time to settle into favor.

See also: Tropical Malady (2004)

Christophe Honoré

Dans Paris (2006)

The spirit of the Nouvelle Vague is alive and well inside Christophe Honoré's 2006 film Dans Paris. Starring a charismatic, Jean-Pierre Léaud-esque Louis Garrel and a convincingly depressive Romain Duris as two brothers, one energetic and full of life, one depressive and suicidal, taking place during one day (save for flashbacks) near Christmas, the film is as playful as any since the dawn of the New Wave. Speeding up scenes, direct addresses to the camera, a spontaneous burst of song, all welcome and normal in the free-floating Paris story. These techniques would be used further in his next film Love Songs, a Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque tragic love story, and to even chillier effect in his brilliant literary adaptation of high school melodrama, La Belle Personne. But this is not to say Honore has repeated himself, as it did with the new wave pioneers, the freedom to do anything in a film has focused and intensified his work, but none are as thrilling as the first strike of that freedom, Dans Paris.

See also: Love Songs (2007), La Belle Personne (2009)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Three Times (2006)

This triptych of love stories from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien is equally the most grave and unforgiving, and the most beautiful and heart-swelling depiction of romance on film this decade. Ranging from a gorgeous, tenuous 1960s tale of affection without maturity, to a gorgeous, restrained 1910s tale of love blocked by societal standards, told entirely without dialogue, a piano score providing the only sound, to a gorgeous, if harsh modern day tale of love through separation, the interference of technology and the opening of morals. Did I mention it's well shot? This is what Hsiao-Hsien had been leading up to all decade, and his follow-up film brought that same approach to France, with equally beautiful results.

See also: Millenium Mambo (2001), Café Lumière (2003), The Electric Princess House (from Chacun Son Cinéma, 2007), Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

L'Enfant (2005)

The new millennium saw the brothers Dardenne charged with following up their most critically acclaimed work, the Palme d'Or winning Rosetta. They did it by making a revenge film, The Son, but because it's a Dardenne film, none of the usual artifice of those films is included, and in the end there is no revenge that can be taken. They continued on this path for their 2005 film L'Enfant, marrying crime plots with the harsh reality of their circumstance. They introduced more artifice, but never sacrificed their following cameras, lack of scoring, and inability to ring a false note. Featuring a brilliantly callous performance from Jérémie Renier, L'Enfant earned the Dardennes their second Palme d'Or in just six years, and is the pinnacle of their powers this decade. Arguably the most influential film on American independent cinema. If their newest film Lorna's Silence, with it's use of music and occasionally locked down camera, is a harbinger for the Dardennes' next decade of work, it'll be quite a change. For now, we wait, and we follow.

See also: The Son (2002), Dans L'Obscurité (from Chacun Son Cinéma, 2007), Lorna's Silence (2009)

Wong Kar-Wai

In The Mood For Love (2002)

Wong Kar-Wai's elegiac platonic love story set in 1960s Hong Kong about two neighbors whose spouses are having an affair with one another. Developed through an arduously long shooting schedule and improvisation, this gorgeous film (shot mostly by Three Times cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bin), features some of the most indelible images of the decade. Smoke curling up towards an overhead light, one hand reaching over and grabbing the next in the darkened light of a taxicab, a woman descending into a noodle shop, her hair and hip-hugging cheongsam soaked from the rain, a metal noodle container in her hand, passing by a man with an unacknowledged secret between them. It's an intelligent, emotionally complex, and engaging tale of love and loss that is told without the aid of plot. The spiritual sequel and follow up to the film, 2046, is an interesting continuation of mood, if not an entirely successful one, or one that lands anywhere near this masterpiece. Though Kar-Wai ended the decade with his disappointing English-language debut My Blueberry Nights, that film has enough spark from his previous films to hold out hope that the maker of the best foreign film of the decade has another great one in him.

See also: 2046 (2004)

The Outlier(s)

Notre Musique, (2004) Jean-Luc Godard

After returning from the cold world of the Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Godard produced one of his best and most vital works of his post-Marxist career. This political, philosophical meditation on violence is split into Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. As affecting and demanding a work Godard has made, it was his lone bright spot in a mostly unproductive decade. Godard's next film will be his first on digital video. I guess things really are changing.

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The Best Foreign Films of the Decade:

1. In The Mood For Love (2000), written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai*

2. Three Times (2006), written by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Chu T'ien-Wen, directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

3. Syndromes and a Century (2006) written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

4. L'Enfant (2005), written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

5. Dans Paris (2006), written and directed by Christophe Honoré

*Kar-Wai's film would be somewhere in the middle of my other list, had I remembered it earlier.