In my mad dash to get a Best of the Decade list out before...well, the end of the decade, I realize some serious flaws in my decisions. Mainly though, the change comes because early this month, I saw a film that stood far and above any other offer of the past ten years....so, trying this again:
ORIGINAL:
"11"-Almost Famous
10-Rachel Getting Married
9-Collateral
8-Million Dollar Baby
7- There Will Be Blood
6-Atonement
5-A Priarie Home Companion
4. LOTR trilogy
3. Gangs of New York
2. Moulin Rouge!
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Brokeback Mountain
NEWBIES:
11. REPLACEMENT: THE WRESTLER. Above all, movies should be human. They should treat their characters with understanding, as flawed human beings drawn toward light and darkness instead of stereotypes who side with either black or white. This simple, indelible hour-and-forty-minutes tells the tale of Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke, in a career-capping tour de force), a burnt out wrestler who still beats other men to bloody pulp to feel alive, but whose strange, less-casual-than-it-seems relationship with an aging stripper (Marisa Tomei), has the potential to save his soul. Screenwriter Robert Siegel and director Darren Aronofsky have created a quietly devastating portrait of a man and woman who, for a fleeting moment, break free of their glass cases of self-imposed loneliness and feel the warmth of human connection shine upon them like the sun. We are moved when they find happiness oncemore, and something inside us tears as we see them lose sight of it all over again. A brutally honest piece of work that relates its story with deep understanding and rough-hewn beauty. I find myself crying during those final minutes every time.
3. REPLACEMENT: KILL BILL SAGA. The past decade saw the maturation of the cinema's token man-child. In this film (for it is truly ONE FILM), and his "Inlgourious Basterds", Tarantino digs deeper, emotionally and psychologically, than he ever did in his stylish, wham-bam 90's pictures-not that I have anything against those. For me, this, the B-movie-gone-big story of a bride (Uma Thurman), out to strike down those who gunned down her and her unborn child at her wedding, is his greatest achievement, a blood-soaked work of sound and fury that finds him in peak form and total control of even the tiniest nuance. Rumor has it this one was initially created as a project QT could use to woo Thurman. Whether or not that's what its started out as, it became so much more. The pulp-perfect dialogue is here, sprinkled with pop culture references that feel less forced and more relevant than those in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. The typical aural hodgepodge of surfer rock, Morricone, and alt-pop has never worked better. Lenser Robert Richardson exhausts his bag of tricks, shooting overexposed, in moody black and white, in Sergio sepia; the film is a joy to look at. Performances are all knockouts; Tarantino always brings out the best in his actors, and Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Lucy Liu, and Vivica Fox all astound, though these films really belong to David Carradine as the title character and instigator of the aforementioned massacre; his world-weary wit and quiet fury give these stories unexpected spiritual and emotional heft, all the more reason to miss this entertainment legend. The action scenes play like gangbusters, and pulsate with the hot blood of ingenuity; Tarantino's done quickie shoot-outs and torture scenes, but here, as Thurman's pissed-off Bride takes out scores of Yakuza hard-cases with nothing but a Hanzo sword and balls of steel, we at least get the glourious experience of seeing the man go full-on kung-fu. But what sets this saga apart from the everyday boom-boom-pow pack is it's intelligence; there's a keen insightfulness at work that sneaks up on you. Tarantino's advancing his characters stories while simultaneously examining their souls, providing us glimpses into the troubled psyches of cold-blooded mercenaries whose biggest regret is that they can't outrun their conscience, and oh, what a fascinating experience it is to what it catch up with them. "That girl deserves her revenge", says Madsen's Budd, "and we all deserve to die". Damn straight. Find me another action movie that breaks your heart and busts your gut, or just sit back, shut up and take this one in.
1. REPLACEMENT (YOU READ THAT RIGHT): Synecdoche, New York
You haven't heard of it. Maybe you read some of the scathing reviews heaped upon it by skeptics. Or you've seen the DVD cover, with it's cryptic panorama of a blimp slicing through the skyline of an eerily empty metropolis. But you probably haven't had the opportunity to get lost in Charlie Kaufman's fantastic fever dream of a film, a poignant modern-day tragedy that draws its oomph from its sheer emotional power. "Synecdoche" is the tale of a man who, in the process of attempting to understand his life, forgets to live it; who, in his desperate quest to assign meaning to his existence, robs himself of that which means most to him. This man is Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Pushing forty, his body decaying, his mind immersed in his work, his personal life a wreckage, he comes up with a gonzo-crazy-brilliant idea; he will create a life-size replica of his native New York, and populate with it with actors portraying real-life people he knows, so that he may understand them, and thus fix his fractured world. But understanding still eludes him; not only can he not make sense of the people in his life, he finds that he can't break through to the actors he's hired. So he hires actors to play his actors. When this fails, he hires actors to play the actors who are playing his real-life acquaintances, then actors to play THOSE actors, and so on and so forth until his dreamworld turns into a vast, overcrowded nightmare, a hotbed of unfulfilled longing and confusion where fact and fiction spill over into each other with disturbing results. If it weren't such a transporting drama, it would've made a damn good horror film, huh? Just a thought. Since it's a film about the art of performance, nothing less than a once-in-a-lifetime cast would've done. Good thing Kaufman's got one. This is the kind of film where, just as you've pegged your favorite character, a new one comes along to pull the rug out. You're drawn into the struggle of Caden's wife, Adele (Catherine The Goddess Keener), fighting to reconcile her artistic fantasies with her matriarchal realities; but then you meet Samantha Morton's endearingly nutty Hazel, Caden's Girl That Got Away and long for her presence, not just because she's a beacon of light in a pitch-black story but because we ache for these two to be together; but wait, when Caden gets married again, we get hooked into the stormy, strange currents sent out by his second wife, Claire (Michelle Williams, the best brooder the movies have given us in a while); but ho, there! What about that actor Caden hires to play himself (a wonderfully creepy discovery named Tom Noonan)? Or the brittle old stage warhorse (Dianne Wiest) who's hired to playing a cleaning lady but ends up bringing about a sort of mini-apocalypse? Those is a massive cast, and each one understands their character completely, and conveys that understanding. It's the kind of movie the SAG Ensemble Cast Award is made for; good thing they were too dumb to even nominate it. Then, there's Hoffman, who likely gives the performance of his career here; best to not describe it and just let you see it for yourself. Also topping his considerable best work is composer Jon Brion, long underrated. His score is a wonder, one that doesn't cotton to the ear at first but slowly becomes an integral part of the film's greatness. He creates a touching motif of yearning for Caden and Hazel, whips up a Phillip Glass-y piece of wonky wonderment to accompany the acting-experiment scenes, and, together with Kaufman, offers us a gorgeous, deeply affecting theme song, "Little Person". It is a crime it did not win an Oscar, as it is among the best original songs ever written for the screen. Still, this is ultimately Kaufman's film; he wrote it, and directed it. Other than Schindler's List and, to a lesser degree, the Lord of the Rings films, this is the most ambitious work of visual art created in my lifetime. But Kaufman never sacrifices intimacy along the way. He's that rare screenwriter who knows exactly what his characters should say: when Caden says "My heart aches so much for you", audiences weep because it's the perfect thing for him to say, while screenwriters sob because they know there were a thousand other WRONG things to say, and somehow, by some small miracle, Kaufman picked just the right one. As a director, he moves the piece along with a riveting economy; not one scene carries filmic flab. He also smartly avoids "money shots", keeping the visual language simple and our eyes on the characters. It's truly a challenge to believe this is a debut directorial work; however, one gets the feeling this one was brewing in Kaufman's mind for quite some time-I'd love to pull a "Being John Malkovich" and look inside THAT cranium. Back to what the movies about: living life, not examining it. The movie is often hated on because of its random outbursts of violence and disease, of grief and agony. Random, my ass. The point is not the suddeness of these things; it is that they happen, sometimes painfully. The point is not that Caden is stricken with a string of nasty diseases throughout the film; it;s that his body is decaying, and he's making the wrong choice regarding what to do with the time left to him. The point is not that people in this film mourn loss, thought they certainly do; it's that, more than anything, they're that they were too busy burying themselves in deadening intellectual practices to have any real connection with the deceased persons in the first place, and its that lack of a relationship that they mourn above all. Kaufman exhorts us to live our life to the fullest and focus on people, not ideas by brilliantly showing us the flipside; the emotionally devastating story of a man whose desire to understand cripples his ability to love, and damns him to a life of perpetual loneliness. That is the key to this film. I'll admit there's a mystery or two I still haven't solved; I don't know why Caden cries during a specific moment, and those random TV ads have me flummoxed. But, the point of this film isn't total comprehension (try that with any of Kaufman's works and get ready for a helluva migraine) ; take in the basics, understand that there are some aspects here that only the makers of the movie will understand, and do your best to open your mind to something unique, brutal, and visionary. You may hate it. You may love it. You won't know till you see it.
NEW LIST:
ORIGINAL:
"11"-The Wrestler
10-Rachel Getting Married
9-Collateral
8-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Brokeback Mountain
7- There Will Be Blood
6-Atonement
5-A Priarie Home Companion
4. LOTR trilogy
3. Kill Bill trilogy
2. Moulin Rouge!
1. Synecdoche, New York
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