Review: BLACK SWAN

Director Darren Aronofsky (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE WRESTLER) is not a subtle filmmaker.  His films often feel like they're pounding, pounding, pounding their audience into submission, with deliciously all-too-human horror that confronts the viewer in such a way that forces them to either love the film or hate it.  There's really no in-between for an Aronofsky film.  His body of work could probably best be described as typically divisive.  His latest effort, the psychodrama BLACK SWAN, is no different.  The thriller, starring Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers, a ballerina up for the role of the Swan Queen in SWAN LAKE, a production under the control of hard-line artistic director Thomas (a brilliant Vincent Cassel), starts by recalling countless earlier ballet-centric films, notably THE RED SHOES - a film which can't help but be invoked by the mere mention of a powerful ballet director and a struggling dancer - and ends with notes of body horror, psychological melt-down and the destructive impulse that drives its obsessed central character toward perfection and destruction.

Nina strives for perfection as a dancer, and is selected for the role because the White Swan should be a technically perfected part, but Thomas still has his doubts about her turn as the Black Swan, who he envisions as a bit more loose and wild than Nina ever allows herself to be.  Enter the rivalry of another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), much more sensual than Nina's perfected technique would ever allow.  Nina may lose her part, Lily and Thomas may be conspiring against her, and she may or may not be transforming, quite literally, into some horrific thing.  Aronofsky has utilized the thematics of the ballet SWAN LAKE to create a real-world mirroring of its central conceit: two sides of the same coin, dooming one another, and only because they are one and the same, and it works perfectly as a horror film.

Something tells me, though, that this may end up becoming a major issue, as horror can most certainly be used as a derogatory term when it comes to the world of ballet.  It's a largely insular culture, with its aficionados holding strong aesthetic opinions of good and bad that comes with the territory (all artistic and critical communities are the same in this regard), and I don't think they'll be too pleased with the actual presentation of ballet in the film (indeed, James Wolcott's review makes this point for me).  It's a backdrop, and not the show, and even Natalie Portman's year of training for the role doesn't really make much sense considering Aronofsky's film (and the horror/thriller genre in general) is more concerned with intimacy and brooding intensity - a point the film's many close-ups of Portman's gaunt face and leaner, more bruised and calloused frame hammers home more efficiently than any medium shot of the dancing going on around them ever could.  In reality, the close-ups of her body never had to be the real Portman, but, just as it did with Mickey Rourke's scarred torso in THE WRESTLER, the fact that it is only serves to add to the visceral impact the shots have in conveying the physical impracticalities of such a demanding lifestyle on a biological level, let alone the strain it can have on the psyche.

Given the obsession the film has with Nina's strictly-governed and routine-driven existence becoming unraveled by her awakening to her own desires and her growing sensual self-awareness, there is naturally a strong sexual element to the relationships Nina forms with both Thomas and Lily, with each offering some new and thrilling experience that could end up dooming her chances at being a successful dancer.  This sexual awakening is accompanied with both horror and pitch black comedy.  Thomas, perhaps unprofessionally, but with a point nonetheless, in an attempt to drive the point home to Nina, who just can't stop being perfect, asks a male dancer point-blank, "would you fuck this girl?"  In another scene Nina wakes up and starts to masturbate, and just as she reaches arousal, with her back arched and her stomach down, she looks over and sees her mother sleeping in a chair next to her bed.  These scenes serve to shock us and make us laugh uncomfortably.  They are uncomfortable scenes in a film filled with discomforting thoughts and uncomfortable relationships that shed light on the whole absurdity of the assumptions various characters make about one another, specifically concerning sexual desires and inclinations.  Even the assumptions made about Lily are horrifying to hear coming out of Nina's mouth - especially when we find out the truth behind the night in question.  They may as well all be losing their minds.

In many ways, BLACK SWAN is a culmination of Aronofsky's body of work to date, one in which his primary concerns of psychological and physical trauma are perfectly married into a perfect vehicle.  THE WRESTLER with more darkness, or REQUIEM FOR A DREAM with more sympathetic identification.  And, like his much-criticized but underrated work THE FOUNTAIN, he is again here obsessed with doubles, and features many a fantastic shot by frequent collaborator Matthew Libatique that features multiple mirror images of Nina.  The motif is blunt, much like the parallels between the story of the ballet SWAN LAKE and the film, but it hits and it sticks, and it has stayed with me since I first saw the credits roll all the way back in September.  This is Aronofsky's masterpiece.

I feel like I haven't successfully conveyed anything about the supporting actors or their roles, but I also don't feel that it's necessarily important that I do.  As fantastic as Barbara Hershey is as the domineering ex-ballerina mother (an important stock character in ballet films), or as much fun as Winona Ryder is as the aging ex-lead ballerina whom Nina is replacing, the film is really only concerned with Nina.  Even Lily and Thomas are extensions of the almost entirely subjective view we are provided by Aronofsky as a window into this story.  We feel for Nina because she is a classical tragic figure, marching toward an end as inevitable as any the rest of us can expect, albeit one with a much better soundtrack.

Essential Listening 01 - "Where The Wild Roses Grow"

note: I originally wrote the following article for the website SceneSC.com for an (at the time) ongoing column in which I would discuss songs and artists I loved and spotlight the intermingling of music and imagery.  The column never really came to fruition, so I'll be reproducing the unused articles here so they may see the light of day.

I think my Facebook friends are already tired of me going on and on (and on and on) about just how good this song and video are, and about the perfection of the duet by Cave and Minogue, from subject matter to its final execution, but dammit, I just can’t get enough.  This song is something like a religious experience - best experienced by yourself and then shared with others continuously throughout the rest of your life.

In the mid-90s, Cave came up with the idea of doing a full album of murder ballads, which had been a staple on every Bad Seeds album since From Her To Eternity in 1983.  Originally conceived as a joke - a sort of over-the-top “obvious” record, meant to be taken ironically - the resulting release is nonetheless a treasure trove of material.  In addition to this haunting and oddly romantic song, there’s also the rambunctious barnburner “The Curse of Millhaven” and the devastating, violent and explicit reinterpretation of the essential murder ballad, “Stagger Lee”.  But I digress.

“Where the Wild Roses Grow” is the song that makes the album, linking all of the songs together with Cave’s usual semi-crooner persona from this era in his career, the romantic who only sees heartbreak and loss around every corner.  Telling the story of a courtship that ends with the man killing his beloved by the riverside after determining she was too beautiful to ever grow old (and also from the point of view of the confused spirit of the deceased, Elisa Day), the song treads some truly disturbing ground, mostly because it’s such a damned gorgeous composition.

As a fan of both Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, the sheer logic of them recording together has never quite made sense (I could do a whole other bit on Kylie album “Fever”, but that’s another beast altogether).  But apparently, they had a thing for one another.  There’s a rather amazing little short edited together over on YouTube that tells the story of this pairing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFezNxypDK4), and it’s fascinating just to hear the pair of them discuss the song and its legacy.  I highly recommend it.  

But back to the task at hand.  Cave and Minogue’s vocal delivery, surely some of the most amazing to exist in all pop music, is perfection; lightning in a bottle.  It’s awful and beautiful and romantic and ugly in only the way a Nick Cave song can be.  That this album of songs about ugliness, greed, lust and, yes, murder is a prelude to the heartbreaking and tender follow-up The Boatman’s Call is evident in this very song.

And then there’s the video, which is based on painter John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia”, depicting the scene in Hamlet when Ophelia drowns herself in a river.  In the video, of course, Cave is constantly kneeling over his deceased love while she lay in the spot where the wild roses grow.  Visually, it’s all soft-focus photography on the gorgeous Minogue, and harsh shadow for the murdering Cave.  It sends shivers down my spine constantly.

The Life Of The Mind

All of this INCEPTION talk has been enlightening and refreshing, and not just in a Facebook status update "that movie blew my mind" sort of way.  I'm still a bit on the fence about it, personally, and though I do have some small problems with it, I tend to fall much more squarely on the side of having liked it.  The story of a dream heist is too good for me to pass up, given my interests in crime dramas and my own concerns with the nature of memories and how they shape our lives and those of other people.  Despite whether or not I like the film or not, the discussion surrounding it justifies its existence on some level, even if you, like many others, find talking about the movie more fun and enlightening than actually watching the film itself.

Of course, as a natural outgrowth of all of this, I've gone back again and again to thinking about dreams and reality and the nature of cinema altogether.  As many blogger, commentators, and others have pointed out, a movie is not entirely unlike a dream, in that you enter a fantasy world, usually via a surrogate's experience, and exist within the imagination of the filmmaker for the time you're watching the movie.  It's a point the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg have made over and over again in their films.  Below is a brief discussion a few of my favorite films concerned with reality, dreams, perception and memory.  (Oddly enough, BARTON FINK doesn't make it in here.  I just liked using that reference as a title.)

TOTAL RECALL (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
Arnold Schwarzenneger plays Quaid, a regular guy who dreams of taking a trip to Mars - where he may or may not have been before.  In order to get there, he opts for an implant in his brain that will give him the memories of his amazing, romantic, spy-themed vacation.  During the course of the procedure, something goes wrong, and he awakens suddenly with very concrete memories of a huge conspiracy that has gone down, and has been covered up by having his brain wiped.  All of the pieces begin to fall into place, and before long, we're transported to Mars for real (maybe), and Quaid begins to lay waste to his enemies as he unravels their dirty deeds one by one and helps the "mutants" of the colony reclaim their humanity and rights.  Adapted fairly loosely from a Phillip K. Dick story, TOTAL RECALL has aged remarkably well, mostly thanks to pulp-auteur Paul Verhoeven, who infused the story with enough stunning visuals and ridiculous adventure (and that camp humor that anchors all of his films) to make the film stay fresh through repeat viewings.  The movie is fairly non-commital as to which parts of it are fantasy and which are reality - the potential is there for several different interpretations - and that's one of its many charms.  The dreams in TOTAL RECALL are also structured pretty literally, if they're dreams at all, and though they're fantastic images, there's nothing really hallucinatory about them as they're all based in some sort of physical reality that is easily interpreted as only being slightly outside the realm of possibility.  In other words, the dreams are normal science-fiction worlds.  Verhoeven is less interested in the perceptions of reality, though, than he is in examining the effects of memory on these perceptions (a common trait among all the best dream films.)

MULHOLLAND DR. (David Lynch, 2001)
In one of the great fractured mind performances ever put on film, Naomi Watts plays Betty / Diane - a mash-up of two personalities, real and imagined - an aspiring actress freshly arrived to Hollywood to live out her dream of becoming a star.  Lynch is not a director to shy away from surreal imagery and unexplainable and disturbing themes.  His films are maybe best described as being the aesthetic kin to fever dreams, most definitely in the cases of ERASERHEAD and LOST HIGHWAY.  To this day I am still freaked out by the oddly creepy homeless man behind the dumpster of Winkies, a typical diner, and the build-up that leads to his reveal.  That sequence begins with a discussion of dreams, and a fear of a particular nightmare becoming reality, in which Dan (played by Patrick Fischler, who is well-known to television fans from his stints on LOST, MAD MEN and dozens of guest spots on other shows) finds a monster behind the dumpster that kills him.  I won't give away what does happen, but there is indeed a monster to be found, and its relevance in the reality of Watts' character later in the film is as puzzling and mystical as it is profound and, in some ways, moving.

WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE (Wes Craven, 1994)
The NIGHTMARE films have always had a firm grasp on the wild and weird world of dream and nightmare imagery, even as they had varying degrees of success at making those worlds interesting, fresh and scary for the intended audience.  In NEW NIGHTMARE, original director and series creator Wes Craven returns for the first time in a decade to the characters and the world he forged in the seriously creepy and remarkably dark A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.  Heather Langenkamp returns as herself as Nancy in a story that sees the child-murderer and, at this point, demonic Freddy Krueger attempting to break through from the celluloid world of dreams into the real world by attacking his oldest nemesis Nancy, who is, of course, Heather.  If all of this seems too convoluted to worry about, don't worry, it's not, though describing it to someone could induce headaches in all parties involved.  This is one of the most fun meta-excursions into films about films about dreams and all that jazz.  Robert Englund has some of his best lines as the character, and the 'reality'-based make-up for Krueger is truly frightening.  I wish they had just followed this film up (with Craven behind the scenes) instead of rebooting it into a soul-less, humor-less excursion into boredom and wasting a solid performance by Jackie Earle Haley as the new face of the franchise.

SHERLOCK JR. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
The portion of this film in which Keaton, playing a projectionist in a movie theater, falls asleep while showing a film and dream himself into the movies themselves is inarguably one of the most famous movie sequences ever, silent or sound era.  Never lacking in imagination, Keaton's dream world flashes from the film he is screening to a crowded city street, to the mountain ranges of the West, and then to the African plains as he is surrounded by Lions.  This may be one of the first such instances drawing the parallel between the nature of dreams and the nature of film itself, though it's certainly not the only silent-era film to do so.  There are more amazing evocations of dreams in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU, and Carl Th. Dreyer's early sound film VAMPYR, which features proto-Lynchian imagery and disjointed editing techniques to specifically and subtly cause an uneasiness in the viewer.

"Somebody's Got To Pay": POINT BLANK (1967)

This amazing, complex, sexy, cool, smoldering, passionate crime film marks the equally cool and amazing Lee Marvin’s first turn as a big star (after his Oscar for CAT BALLOU in 1966, he was granted virtually total control over this production), as well as British director extraordinaire John Boorman’s (DELIVERANCE, EXCALIBUR, ZARDOZ) first film in the U.S.  And - as if I haven’t already said as much - it’s the most amazing film Marvin ever made.

It was made right in the transition period between Classical and “New” Hollywood, and it has a lot in common stylistically with another very complex and psychologically oriented movie made in the same year by another Brit: John Schlesinger’s MIDNIGHT COWBOY.  What makes this time so special is that it represents a time when the past was linked to the present, and was not the radical break it’s often depicted as.  In fact, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray had begun this project of slowly changing the language and style of film over a decade before POINT BLANK, with styles and subjects that were quite striking and provocative for their time, but which remained rooted firmly in the practical filmmaking of the Classical period.

What I intend to make note of here is that actors like Marvin, and directors like Boorman, continued to make New Hollywood’s realism and grittiness more possible by preparing audiences with improvements and slight variations on the language that their predecessors had already begun.  Films like POINT BLANK, THE DIRTY DOZEN, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, and THE GRADUATE paved the way for the rise of directors like Scorsese, Ashby, Coppola, Spielberg and many others who were to irrevocably change American cinema forever, bringing it kicking and screaming into its modern incarnation.

Getting back to the film, POINT BLANK features Lee Marvin as master criminal Walker as he traces the steps through a seedy organization to get the $93,000 owed him by his partner after a double-cross that left him for dead.  Efficiently and brutally, Walker makes his way to the top, using any and every trick he knows, and never giving a damn.  His goal is simple, and it doesn’t matter who he uses or kills to achieve it.  It’s Lee’s natural demeanor and devil-may-care attitude, as well as his deadly serious performance, that makes the character and the film what it is.  It’s a perfect marriage of star and vehicle.

The first scene introduces us in a flashback sequence to the events that Walker is recalling, which serves to attach the audience to his motive, and to his interpretation of what happened to him and why he’s been left for dead.  It’s an articulate (filmically speaking) sequence that gives us a glimpse into the head of the character that no one else gets.  To everyone in the film, he’s just a stubborn old man who’s going through all this for nothing, and who will most likely die because of it.  Really, he’s doing it because he’s a professional, and he doesn’t compromise his principles and the outcome of the job he took, which was to obtain half of the score.  And yeah, it may also be that he’s stubborn.

During one of many confrontations about the cash owed to him, Walker is asked by Brewster what he really wants.  "I...I really want my money," he answers.  What's interesting here is the slight hesitation in getting what he "really" wants out of his mouth.  The film has shown us that he's interested in a lot of things, namely having his comfortable life with a wife he undoubtedly loved and was hurt by.  Other than small instances like this, he never shows any emotion about it.  It's the question that causes him to stop just for a moment and really consider what it is he wants...and then he knows it's impossible and goes right back to the money.

In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Marvin has brought his (now dead) wife’s sister with him to wait on and confront Brewster, one of the top bosses about getting his money in the guy’s own house.  The film is filled with all sorts of sexual tension, particularly between his wife, who betrayed him at the film’s beginning, and Angie Dickinson's Chris (the sister).  It’s a relationship of convenience as much as anything else, but Walker finally sends her over the edge in this scene, and she smacks him repeatedly, across the face, beating his chest and, frankly, just hitting the shit out of him until she just gives up.  Marvin makes no show of emotion.  He lets her hit him, and then just goes on doing what he’s there to do.  That’s the movie, and the character right there, all summed up in his resolution to get what he wants no matter what, and to ignore everyone he has to go through to get it.

I guess what makes me endlessly fascinated with POINT BLANK is its singularity as a psychological crime film, which has been emulated and toyed with ever since as a genre unto itself.  And that it came well before Robert Altman’s slightly post-modern interpretation of Philip Marlowe and Noir in THE LONG GOODBYE.  It takes Marvin’s Walker and puts him at the center of everything; the audience identifies with him at every turn because they know something about him and his relationships that no one else in the movie does - that they hurt him and that he’s really quite wounded on the inside.  But he never shows it.  To do so would compromise his mission.  That’s something Walker doesn’t do.

American Crime Fiction: Why Writer/Creator Jason Aaron's SCALPED Is The Best Comic Out There

The two things that American authors and filmmakers can be said to have created outright are the Western, and modern crime fiction.  They're both styles and mythologies packed into the very fiber of our country's very existence.  There's something gritty and raw and romantic and completely whacked in our national identity, and it has led to the creation of two of the most readily identifiable genres in the world, complete with their own logic, their own mysteries, their complete independence from European romantic fiction of any kind, apart from maybe the Victorian era (and the utter inability for anyone to come to real satisfaction with their relationships in those books - take Newland Archer in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE as an example), but that's neither here nor there.  The Western and the crime drama are the mythologies of the United States, a country that was forged from the grit and determination and the testicular fortitude to tell the rest of the world to jog on.  And it's a damned brilliant mythology; one that requires constant attention and revision and humility and pride.

Late in 2008, I picked up the first volume of DC/Vertigo's SCALPED, "Indian Country", and was blown away.  It was by far the grittiest, most thrilling and outrageous crime fiction since Garth Ennis's legendary PREACHER and PUNISHER runs, and better yet, it existed on its own terms, incorporating distinctly American (and distinctly Native) mythologies, real-world problems and - along with Ed Brubaker's CRIMINAL - reinvigorated American comic creators in a landscape populated on every front by Brits.  This first story arch, which introduces the central character of Dashiell Bad Horse and many, many subplots, is masterful in its scope and execution, and each further arch just gets better and better.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Jason Aaron's SCALPED, a multi-genre mash-up of the cowboy mythos, espionage thriller, crime drama and a healthy dose of social awareness (and amazingly detailed research and depictions of life in the modern Native American community), is the best damned book anywhere, comic or otherwise.  Seriously.  It's envigorating to read, and has kept me up many a night re-reading my favorite little bits, particularly early on in the "Casino Boogie" story arch that tells the tale of a horrendous crime from four separate viewpoints, each getting its own single issue to work within.

A fair chunk of why SCALPED's incredibly detailed and carefully researched Native American narrative works, even when introducing heavy mysticism and ultraviolence into the fold, is the dusty down-to-Earth artwork by R.M. Guera and a stable of distinct but complimentary guest artists.  The Rez (a Lakota reservation in the Dakotas) and its many, societally neglected inhabitants portrayed in the book live and breathe because of the urgency, vibrancy and alternately, as called for, dark and bright pop-infused art.

There are currently five trade-paperback volumes of the series in print, with a sixth collection coming in May, and I seriously can't wait to see what else Aaron has in store.  The plotting and characterizations are convoluted enough for a Raymond Chandler story, with enough grit and gristle to fill many a tome by Elmore Leonard (in Western or crime mode).  It's invigorating to read such an effortless title, and to read about the neglected and often forgotten original inhabitants of this land in such a realistic, and thoroughly modern American setting is a bit startling.  It brings modern dilemmas they have as a minority to light while also highlighting their willingness to survive.  In the fifth volume, there is a brief opening that runs up a history of the Lakotas through the battle of Little Big Horn to present day, and is accompanied by narration about their survival being almost in defiance of history and of this nation's invaders.  It's quite powerful.

What differentiates this book from the thousands of others out there, comic or otherwise, and what makes it by far the best book on stands, is the multi-faceted plot and the deft aplomb with which it is handled by Aaron.  He juggles a large cast of characters, all backed up by individual and very different personalities, and all based on what has to be vast amounts of historical research.  It really is like getting a current affairs and history class lesson on American Indians from issue to issue.  And that in and of itself is enough to make it noteworthy.  SCALPED takes the American mythos and turns it on its head, not just in one of the prominent American genres, but in both of the most prominent ones, and completely becomes something all its own, and wholly American that even the best British comics creators couldn't have conceived.

If any of this interests you as a reader (and it should), then you should definitely give the book a shot.  The first volume is only ten bucks, and is well worth it.  Hell, get a friend to split it with you and read it for five.  Just buy it; you'll be hooked.  That's the best compliment I can give it, and the only compliment that really matters anyway.

This Road Really Is Lonesome: A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957)

Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is an upstart that moves to the big time, becoming the most powerful voice on radio to the most powerful figure on television, able to sway the masses for or against anything he wishes with not much more than a wink and a smile.  He has no personal beliefs, only contempt for anything and everyone who isn't Lonesome Rhodes.  He's a scoundrel, a cheat and, by the end of it all, he's washed up, madness slowly taking over.

Elia Kazan and Budd Schulburg's scathing commentary on the dangers of mass media and particularly charismatic but absolutely bat-shit crazy personalities' abilities to exploit that media, is as timely today as it ever was.  Not only is the film itself an omen of things to come - notably the rise of 24-hour news networks and the triumph of "commentary" over actual journalism - but the character of Lonesome is uncannily like some of the personalities of a lot of "news" shows.  And he makes boatloads of cash like some of them, too.

In the middle of the film, it looks like Rhodes is going to marry his agent, Marcia (the fantastic Patricia Neal), but instead he brings home a new bride (Lee Remick) from a visit back to his hometown that won a baton twirling contest.  The scene in which Rhodes slowly becomes enamored with the incredibly young twirler - who is only 16 at the time of their marriage - is disturbing in the development of the character because of his constant leering and visible lusting after the young girl.  Amazingly, she's just as into him, glaring right back the entire time in that lustful way that most teenagers get at one time or another.  It's creep-tastic!

It's amazing to me that Griffith, whose portrayal of Rhodes is a highlight of screen acting,  committed so wholeheartedly to such a loathsome character and then did a complete 180 to make and star in THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.  As good as he is on television, here he's pure fire, and I was unable to take my eyes off him.  He's a revelation, by god, in a role that should have been career-defining, but has only recently been given any attention whatsoever.  Only in America would such a piece of work be virtually forgotten by audiences for over thirty years.

A FACE IN THE CROWD also features my personal favorite hang-dog, Walter Matthau, in full glory as television writer "Vanderbilt '44", as Rhodes derisively calls him, being a representative of the elite that Lonesome purports to have nothing but disdain for, yet longs for the status of.  Matthau gets the last stinging word in, though, charting the total fall of Rhodes's celebrity and even giving him a last round of (canned) applause.  If only things had changed at all since 1957.

In A Really Red State: RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975)

I just can't escape this movie - it burns white-hot in my mind just like the first time I saw it.  It's a lightning rod of a flick, a film that separates two stages of my watching life (a designation few films share with it): things seen before, and things seen since. Unwittingly, I have succumbed to its power.

When I think of Warren Oates and Peter Fonda witnessing the satanic ritual that will endanger their lives from their campsite in the woods, it still gives me a chill, a rarity among those magical 70s horror films that I've become so familiar with, and even rarer still that it completely holds up to this very day.  When they slowly realize they've been spotted, and flee in their motor home only to be pursued by the cultists, it's horrifying, exhilirating, enthralling and just a wee bit gleefully hokey, in that way the best of these genre films can be.

And that's just the beginning.

Oates and Fonda (and their wives, the fantastic Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) are pursued throughout small-town Texas, encountering members of the cult at every turn and in every strata of society.  This is classic horror movie stuff, and it gets my rocks off.  And I haven't even mentioned the crazy 70s road movie part of it all yet; a genre with which both Fonda and Oates are synonymous with.  Let's not forget this is RACE WITH THE DEVIL, after all.

The chase scenes, in which the boys must fend off assailants as they attempt to board the RV, attack them with guns and sharp objects, and sometimes threaten to run them off the road (successfully, finally), are thrilling and suspenseful.  True to form, the movie also starts out with a couple of stressless dirtbike/motorcycle sequences for good measure - to please the real gear-heads in the audience, no doubt.  If there's one flaw in all of this, it's there is no scene in which Fonda is pursued while on his bike.  That would be movie heaven.

The ending is also ballsy, even if reminiscent of other endings from the time - a freeze frame that allows us to assume the worst as the RV (and the heroes inside it) is surrounded by the flames that signaled the beginning of the first sacrificial ceremony.  And it's satisfying.  And unexpected.  And still horrifying.

Watching RACE WITH THE DEVIL, I realized how life-changing movies could be all over again.  I've loved Oates forever (especially as GTO in Monte Hellman's superb TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and as the title character in over-looked gem COCKFIGHTER), but he was pitch-perfect for me here, and I re-learned the many charms an actor like that posesses for a viewer.  Like film critic Kim Morgan's other rough-guy heroes (among them both Oates and Lee Marvin, another similar screen-love of mine to hers), Oates plays to his physical strengths, which are definitely not those of a matinee idol.  He's all real, all tough, and all American male.  And despite co-billing, Fonda's a supporter.  This is truly Oates's show.

And what a show, guys.  What a show.

(For Kim Morgan's brief write-up on RACE WITH THE DEVIL as well as a bit about Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY and how amazing The Runaways are, check out her piece at Sunset Gun).

SHUTTER ISLAND's Bizarre Sense of Unease and the Critical Reaction

 

The critical discourse on Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND has been fairly silent, with a lot of time spent arguing on whether or not the positive attention lavished upon it would be if it weren't a Scorsese picture.  Or, better yet, if the "twist" ending makes the film good or bad.  What a ridiculous way to discuss a film that has such an intimate knowledge of cinema history and classical technique.  And that isn't a "twist" guys, it's a logical outgrowth of the film you just watched, and you should really stop trying to out-guess the movie and think you're smarter than it.  It's not a competition, it's a movie - a brilliant one.

The film is a masterpiece of mood, perception and intensity, with one image leading into the next, and setting up all the information one would need to make connections, but with a very subtle slight of hand.  From the very first shots of the film, with the rear-projection stylization setting up the artifice of the situation, to Mark Ruffalo's fumbling with getting the gun holster off his belt - because he never used one before, get it? - and on through the very obvious set-ups with side characters and their encounters with Teddy, the audience is being hinted at and shown that the only possible outcome is the one that happens.

 

This first dream hints at virtually everything to come, from the blood to the water, to the ashes falling around them - it's all in Teddy's head.

I am utterly convinced at this point that there are shots in this film that serve to shake the audience, to make them experience an uneasiness, adding to the film's almost unbearable suspense in places.  While some of these could be dismissed as continuity errors, it happens so often and in such strange ways that it just seems implausible there would be so many of them.  Maybe it's just easier for an audience to dismiss something as a mistake rather than something purposefully manipulating them much like the Surrealist and Expressionist movements did.  Maybe Scorsese is asking too much of his audience to know something about these films.  For my money, there's a whole lot of Carl Theodor Dreyer's VAMPYR in SHUTTER ISLAND.

The main problem seems to be that people feel like the movie owes them something, when really its payoff is perfectly adequate and even appropriate.  The film isn't building up to some great revelation or cathartic release, but toward Teddy's understanding of the situation he has found himself in.  And it's all supported very early on in the film, and consistently evoked throughout by images that confound, contradict and disprove everything we think we might know.  For anyone who hasn't seen SHUTTER ISLAND yet, this is the point you may want to stop reading, because I'm going to get really in-depth about the whole ordeal.

Teddy Daniels is Andrew Laeddis.  That's the big twist.  I don't know why people are pissed about this, since it's pretty obvious the whole entire time he's on the island that everything's a big giant lie meant to send him over the edge into a realization about something that happened to him in his past and where he is at this point - a common theme found in all of Scorsese's films.  Ostensibly, Teddy is on the island to investigate the disappearance of one of the patients, accompanied by a new partner, Chuck.  Soon, things begin to unravel a bit, and doubts are cast on everyone on the island, even his partner.

 

Teddy and Chuck "arrive" at Shutter Island.  Note the very obvious screen-projection, hearkening back to classical Hollywood, but also hinting at the artificiality of Teddy's situation.

 Apart from all of the hints in his perceived reality, there's the dream sequences, which beckon us to think about the images we are seeing, and which very often contradict everything we've been told about his history, as well as the very thing we've just seen happen, and which also set up the bizarre things that begin to happen when Teddy is fully awake.

Take the interrogation scene in the cafeteria, which is not a dream, where a female patient scribbles the words "RUN" on his notepad.  The patient asks if she could have a glass of water and is given one.  Immediately thereafter, she drinks the water, but the first shot of it is odd, showing her pantomime drinking the water, and then the next showing her picking the glass up and drinking the water.  The pantomimed shot is barely noticeable, except that you do notice it after it's happened, and you're not quite sure you've just seen it.  That's the connection I made with VAMPYR, and it happens very often in SHUTTER ISLAND: a simple sequence or even a single shot that doesn't quite make logical sense, used to evoke dread and uneasiness.

 

In VAMPYR (1932), the protagonist drifts in and out of dreams, his nightmares reflecting reality and serving to cause dread in the audience.

 The shot I found most fascinating in this regard, and also the most telling given the circumstances of Teddy's identity and the actual chain of events that led him to be a patient on the island, and likewise for going crazy and creating a delusion to protect himself from the horrible reality of what happened, happens during one of his dreams.  In his final delusion, before we get the whole memory in its actual form, Teddy imagines the escaped woman he's been searching for covered in blood, with her children at her feet.  She asks him to help her take them to the lake to go swimming, which he does.  The shot of him carrying the children to the lake is almost innocuous, seemingly inconsequential stuff, until you realize it's in reverse.  Teddy is walking backward from the lake, in effect removing them from the water instead of setting them in it, which is the next shot - with him in the water with the children.  The shot is effective two-fold, and this is really where I started to think about VAMPYR.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 film is a movie that explicitly blurs the lines between dreams and reality, and which continually uses non-continuity shots to evoke a sense of fear and uneasiness.  During one of the many dreams in the film, there is a shot of a shadow pitching hay, and though shown a few times, it's not entirely clear what's going on.  For one, the shot looks odd, and it isn't until repeats of the shot that it's noticeably backward, with the hay coming from off-screen, landing on the pitchfork, and then being placed on the ground.  It is, in effect, the same idea behind the shot of Teddy Daniels in SHUTTER ISLAND moving backward away from the lake with the children.  You don't know what's odd about it, but it's there, and you know it wasn't quite right.  There are many more parallels one could make between the two films, but for the sake of this article, we'll stick right here.

 

A fever dream becomes more and more intangible and surreal as the sequence grows and leads to Teddy taking the kids out for a swim.

Aside from that surrealist usage of these "phantom" shots that seemingly are there just to provoke, this shot also mirrors the reality of the situation Teddy is dreaming about, when he in fact removes his three children from the lake after their mother has drowned them.  His memory and dream of this event must show the action like that because it's how it actually played out, which also explains the other "inaccuracies" in his dreams versus what he says happened to his wife - her bleeding from the stomach, being soaking wet, etc.  The films shows us all of this before its revealed, and then it all makes perfect sense.  Without a skillful hand guiding the way - and I feel like this is editor Thelma Schoonmaker's show as much as Scorsese's - this could have been a very plodding, generically designed movie that didn't embrace the bizarre qualities of earlier Hollywood drama and International cinema.

So, given its logical setup and delivery, why then the outcry by the audience against SHUTTER ISLAND?  And where are the critics to defend it when people had similar problems with structure and subversion of expectations in Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS?  Right now, hey're too obsessed with whether or not the artifice is justified, or whether or not Scorsese can be forgiven for the "twist", instead of discussing how the film arrives at its conclusion or the many ways in which it really evokes a classical Hollywood that many people completely overlook in today's criticism.  In the depths of my bones, I know Scorsese has created a late-period masterpiece that will become better appreciated over time, and once everyone gets over its stupid marketing as a twist movie and how shocked they should or shouldn't be, I hope the discourse becomes much greater over this movie.  I'll be contributing again soon.

Best of the Decade, addendum

So, of course twenty-five is a ridiculous number of films and shows to pick out of a ten year span.  And, of course there were many that I debated putting on the list up 'til the very last second.  In simple numerical order, without assigning "better than" status, here are twenty-five "almosts":

1) A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT
2) THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN
3) HEAVEN
4) HELLBOY
5) THE DEVIL'S REJECTS
6) BIG FISH
7) HELVETICA
8) BROKEN FLOWERS
9) SPIRITED AWAY
10) WALL-E
11) BLOW
12) CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
13) PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
14) ALL THE REAL GIRLS
15) MATCH POINT
16) VOLVER
17) PAN'S LABYRINTH
18) GOODBYE, LENIN!
19) ANTICHRIST
20) THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS
21) WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES
22) THE DEPARTED
23) A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
24) THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX
25) ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Best of the Decade, part III

So here you go, the last five of the official twenty-five picks for Best of the Decade.  It's been fun trying to compile this list, and I hope you've had fun reading it and thinking about it.  Please leave comments and discuss if you'd like; I'm always interested in another person's views, and I hope that you'll indulge me by attempting to breach that authorial wall with me that for whatever reason I have set up with the actual readers of the blog.  This should be slightly more communal.  In any case, here they are...let the hate/discussion/love begin:

THERE WILL BE BLOOD
I can't really think of a movie in the last decade that I found so quietly moving and disturbing at the same time, that affected me personally on a level as deep and terrifying, as THERE WILL BE BLOOD.  Director Paul Thomas Anderson's epic character study is a film that works its way slowly into your mind, beginning with a masterful 15 minutes, which treks Daniel in the very beginning of his career, through the discovery of his son, that contains no dialogue, and is, for all intents and purposes, a silent film in and of itself.  And really, if the rest of the film's 2 hours and 45 minutes had no dialogue, it wouldn't make that much of a difference, either.  Sure, we'd lose out on the "I drink your milkshake!" fun that everyone had after the movie came out, but the film would still contain beautiful images and fierce performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, and that wonderful score by Johnny Greenwood would still be there, too.  But, thankfully there is dialogue, and we are treated to Daniel's diatribes against "people," his discussions with restaurant patrons who are staring at his table, his amazing "I'm an Oil Man" speech, and all of Paul Dano's spot-on evangelical theatrics, and that last line, declaring the end of it all - literally everything, film included - would not carry such significance.  This is a towering achievement for American cinema.  It's a film that deserves to be seen again and again, and I'm happy to oblige.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS
In a decade that saw Quentin Tarantino's directorial output more than double, it's no surprise that I should choose two of his films for my list, not only because he's one of my favorite directors, but also because he is consistently entertaining, thought-provoking and batshit insane.  In the same vein of KILL BILL and the highly underrated DEATH PROOF, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is a quintessential Tarantino hodgepodge of ideas, images half-remembered from grindhouse flicks, hilarious dialogue, and memorable characters placed within a pure-cinema milieu to create a wholly fascinating, singular piece of work.  Christoph Waltz as Nazi villain Hans Landa, "The Jew Hunter," is a revelation, and Brad Pitt is hilarious and über-macho as Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of the Basterds, an all-Jewish squad sent behind enemy lines to terrorize and wipe out the Nazi threat.  Only in a Tarantino re-telling of World War II would cinema play such a triumphant and vital role, with the main characters aside from Raine, being involved in one way or another with film making or exhibition.  Indeed, the final showdown, a ballsy rewriting of historical fact, takes place inside a theatre, and engages the audience on both sides of the screen by implicating them in the action, removing, with the giant head of vengeance (the Jewish owner of the theatre) laughing as the place burns down around them.

SPARTAN
David Mamet's thriller about the missing daughter of a high-level government official (it's the President; don't tell anybody) is an amazing piece of work that still gives me an adrenaline rush every time I watch it.  Largely overlooked upon its release in 2004, SPARTAN is slowly growing in reputation, either by simple recommendation, or because those who kinda, sorta liked it back then are giving it another go as the years pass by.  Regardless of all of that critical reception crap, though, the movie is engaging, cryptic, and trusting of an audience that all too often gets talked down to by the Hollywood system, as if we can only understand things that are spelled out for us to the tiniest detail.  While that may be true to a certain extent, and with certain audiences, Mamet's gift with SPARTAN is that the film easily appeals to a wide variety of demographics, with its high-caliber performances by Val Kilmer and William H. Macy, its staccato Mamet dialogue repeating phrases and exclamations that create a sort of poetry within the film, and its wonderful camerawork.  It's a spy thriller unlike any I've ever seen, its characters grounded in reality unlike the many action flicks that get passed off in theatrical release every year.  It's no James Bond at all, and maybe it's an anti-spy thriller.  It's brilliant, whatever it is.

THE DESCENT
The past decade was surprisingly good for horror fans, offering several noteworthy and absolutely horrific excursions into the genre, including the exploitation revisionism of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, and the return to horror-comedy in Sam Raimi's DRAG ME TO HELL.  None, however, were so brilliantly concocted, plotted, and genuinely blood-curdling as Neil Marshall's British film THE DESCENT.  The film is a claustrophobic nightmare, as it follows a group of female friends on a cave exploration trip in the Appalachian mountains a year after one of them loses her family in a horrible tragedy.  They end up squeezing through small passages in order to reach larger chambers, eventually becoming trapped deep within the cave system.  It's terrifying, uneasy, and chilling, and then the monsters show up.  I think what I found so appealing about the film is its sure hand at what it was doing, setting up its characters as people who the audience can actually care about, putting them into an already horrific situation, and then upping the ante once the darkness starts to set in as they try to find their way out.  All horror films at their heart are steeped in this sort of Freudian return to the womb scenario, but none tap into it quite so literally and unabashadly, or so well.  THE DESCENT's biggest surprise is that it plays on a lot of different fears, and when its lead character is 'reborn', whether in the American ending or the original ending, it is a genuine release, both for character and audience.

THE WIRE
For five seasons, David Simon's drama chronicling the investigations of the Baltimore Police Department and the many, many, many characters on either side of the cases is one of the best television shows ever, and that's not coming from me lightly, especially since the past decade has seen a revitalization of the medium, most of the fiction shows on cable stations (WEEDS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, MAD MEN, DEXTER, DEADWOOD) are outstanding examples of how to write and execute fully fleshed-out characters, plotlines with nuance and finesse.  What makes THE WIRE special, though, is that it really culminates around the end of its third season to make a point of every single person, no matter what they have done or how they have done it, is neither completely good or bad, while asking serious questions about the way our society functions in order to praise some, and condemn others.  Is the entire world corrupt at some tiny, minute level, or are we all redeemable because we are inherently good but sometimes get caught up in machinations of the society's circumstances at large?  On top of that, each character is important, gets thoroughly examined, and receives a proper denouement in a final episode that not only brings everything to a close, but further postulates on the possible outcomes of the things that culminated by that time.  It's a stunning achievement, worth every single minute it was on screen, and rewards multiple viewings with its endlessly fantastic character work, utilizing actors, non-actors, real gang members from Baltimore, real cops, and virtually no familiar faces - though Richard Belzer's Detective Munch showing up in the end was sublime and completely appropriate, even with its being a stunt.  THE WIRE is one of those perfect shows, where everything that happens means something, and everything matters to the viewer.  It's just...perfect.

Best of the Decade, part II

Continuing on with my Best of the Decade list, here is Part II, which features ten more of my twenty-five picks.  Again, these are in no order, other than random.

DEADWOOD
I know, I know; DEADWOOD is a television show.  I don't care.  For three seasons (2004-2006), creator David Milch's drama was one of the most daring things on television, featuring great writing, intriguing plotlines and one hell of an ensemble cast.  Ian McShane is unforgettable as Al Swearengen, and it's his character that really sells much of the show.  He's a wheeler-dealer, a businessman first and a scoundrel second - ruthless, cunning, and terrifying.  Among my favorite moments are the introduction of Ellsworth (the fantastic Jim Beaver) uttering the lines, "I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you beholden to no human cocksucker," and the sub-plot season 3 involving Dan Dority and Captain Turner's rivalry.  It's a shame that HBO cancelled DEADWOOD before everything could wrap up properly, but the lingering, poignant ending of the final episode is just as fitting for a drama that was based as much in real history as the larger-than-life storytelling of the Old West itself.

OLDBOY
Park Chan-Wook's revenge masterpiece is as much about the quest for vengeance as what it actually means to finally have it.  Shocking, original and entirely without fear, this is the strongest offering from a particularly talented director whose national cinema had somewhat of a renaissance in the 2000s (THE HOST, among others, easily qualifies as essential viewing).  Featuring a highly choreographed fight in a cramped hallway as the protagonist Oh Dae-Su must combat his way through a ton of attackers with a clawed hammer, the film's appeal stretches well beyond the blood and guts of the revenge tale, focusing on the human side of the once-captive Dae-Su as much as anything else, and what he eventually brings on himself.

GRIZZLY MAN
Werner Herzog's documentary was compiled from the tapes of Timothy Treadwell, a bear enthusiast who took a yearly trek to live with and study bears in their natural habitat, and whose obsession ultimately led to his death at the paws of one of his beloved grizzlies.  Maybe Treadwell was a man who got too close for his own good, forgetting that he was dealing with truly wild animals who merely tolerated his presence because it wasn't too intrusive.  Maybe he wanted to die in such a way; it doesn't seem like he would mind that much, they're only doing what bears do, after all.  But Herzog doesn't let the film stay that simple, infusing it as he does everything with the sense that there could never have been a different outcome for a man so obsessed with something.  As in his fiction films, and his other documentaries, Herzog is obsessed with others who are obsessed, and cannot stop from endlessly being fascinated with such indivuals.  In the midst of all that obsession, however, there is a quiet, emotional and very sweet film about a man who really could not help the way he was or the things he truly cared about.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
The moment I first knew that Wes Anderson's third film would live up to expectations was the opening sequence, framed like a storybook, narrated by Alec Baldwin, and outlining the downfall of the Tenenbaum kids, who had once all shown such potential, but who had all, through varying circumstances, reached a lull at roughly the same time and decide the best thing to do would be to move back into their home, just like their absentee father Royal, in the hopes that it might revitalize them and make them care once again.  The Tenenbaums are crushed people, but they truly do care about one another at the end of the day.  The film is fussy and fidgety, but the characters are what Anderson is all about, and he really nails a homerun with Margot, a playwright with writer's block who really can't stand her husband, a sublime Bill Murray, and who can't even let anyone know that she smokes.  Arresting, dry humor really make this film a thing of pure beauty, and the music selection is phenomenal.  The highlight is Royal's outing with his grandkids, set to Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard."

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
This startling documentary penetrates the façade of the United States terror suspect detention protocalls as it follows the story of a taxi driver who was picked up off the road and sent to prison for years without formal charges or any means of proving that he didn't belong there, mostly because suspects were stripped of their rights completely and subjected to anything their captors could think of.  Alongside this story of completely fucked-up proportions, the film chronicles the war on terror, the effect it has had on the U.S.'s international image and relationships, and exposes the fragile cracks in our own freedoms that have been setup by our government post-9/11.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD
"You've got red on you."  What starts out as a boring day quickly becomes one in which z------ are terrorizing the neighborhood in the very first Rom-Zom-Com, which is how stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and director Edgar Wright, describe their little homage to Romero and all things Zed-word related.  Absolutely hilarious, but also perfectly serviceable as a gorefest, SHAUN OF THE DEAD is one of those miraculous coming-togethers of material and talent that only come along once in a blue moon.    The cast is brilliant, featuring many many wonderful BBC actors that really haven't broken here in the U.S., and maybe that's for the best.  Still, an amazing, entertaining film that is wholly original...in its own way, of course.

KILL BILL, vol. 1
Quentin Tarantino's energetic excursion into martial-arts spaghetti-Western territory is a splatter-filled revenge tale that's so epic, it took two films to do it.  Though I really love the second film, too, the first half is so much fun that it's hard for me not to like it slightly more.  Plus, Uma Thurman (really stuntwoman Zöe Bell) kicks a whole lot of ass in the teahouse segment, just before serving up Lucy Liu for shashimi dinner.  It's the perfect action movie with really interesting characters and a highly reverential treatment for material that used to not get a second look from serious cineastes.  Thankfully, Tarantino isn't afraid to go with his obsessions, for better or worse, because often times I find them just as thrilling in that mind of his as he does.

BATMAN BEGINS
After a decade, finally someone made a good Batman film.  While most would say THE DARK KNIGHT is the definitive take on the character, I think that the first film Christopher Nolan directed is just as intriguing and striking, if only because it attempts to understand the origins of what Batman is before setting him up for a fall and a confusing set of circumstances in the second film that calls into question everything he thinks he stands for.  There is a lot of time spent with Bruce Wayne in this first outing, which is sorely lacking from THE DARK KNIGHT, which tends to focus more on the iconic nature of what Batman has become.  The reason BATMAN BEGINS is better is that there could not possibly be a sequel like THE DARK KNIGHT if this didn't exist to set it up.

OBSERVE AND REPORT
My favorite film of 2009, and a really really dark portrait of a psychotic person off their meds, Jody Hill's exhilirating, take-no-prisoners brand of comedy exhibited in OBSERVE AND REPORT is the stuff cinema needs to survive.  While certainly not for everyone, this Seth Rogen vehicle is much more than the dumb characters comedy many were expecting, and it knocked a lot of people right on their asses.  Misunderstood, possibly, but definitely praised by those who 'got it', this is a fantastically funny flick (yeah, I did it) that I have watched several times in the past few months, and it keeps getting better.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's revisionist Western is a masterclass in technique, storytelling and just about everything else.  Roger Deakins's cinematography is flawless, and the shot composition really makes the most out of the striking Texas landscapes.  Anton Chigurh is a figure of mythic proportions, flitting in and out of the scene almost like a vapor or a mist, bringing Hell with him wherever he goes.  As he tracks Llewelyn and the money missing from a botched drug deal, he compulsively offers nearly everyone he crosses paths with the straight-up 50/50 chance at life or death that they share every single day, with a flip of a coin and a pressurized unit designed for killing livestock.  The Coens won the Best Director Oscar for this film, but even if they hadn't, they'd still get my vote for two of the very best filmmakers in the world.

Best of the Decade, part I

It's a dubious task attempting to come up with a list of the best films from the past decade.  How does one go ahead with such a crazy endeavor and not go insane trying to pick just ten films?  Well, I didn't pick ten - I chose to go with 25.  And the way I did it is to just pick the ones I loved the most, and which I think everyone would be better in some way from having seen, whether or not you share my opinion on them or not.  So, without further ado, here are ten of the twenty-five I have picked, complete with my feeble attempts to explain why I chose them.  They are in no order whatsoever, because that would just be too much.

ZODIAC
David Fincher's masterpiece is one of the crowning achievements of American cinema in the last decade, without a doubt.  Part police procedural, part newspaper investigation (a la ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN), and part character study, ZODIAC is a methodical recounting of the thirty year manhunt for the serial killer named Zodiac who was never caught, and whose identity may well never be known.  Drawn largely from the book by Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhall in the film, and various other police and newspaper documents, the film relies heavily on factual evidence, and even when you're sure who the killer is, there's no way to know beyond a reasonable doubt.  Utilizing a cool and detached style, Fincher subverts genre expectations, and instead of simply retreading the waters he'd already explored in SE7EN, creates a powerful study of the effect a serial killer has across many different lives and occupations, from police, to reporters, to personal obsessions that destroy families.  The film also features a wonderful performance by Robert Downey, Jr., and the use of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" at the beginning of the film is one of the most striking combinations of song and picture imaginable.  I'll never get it out of my head.

THE INCREDIBLES
By far the best superhero movie to appear in cinemas in the Oughts is Brad Bird's THE INCREDIBLES, an animated film that follows a family of supers-in-hiding following the outlawed use of superpowers due to lawsuits and other such nonsense on the parts of those rescued as well as the supervillians.  After a thrilling set-up with Mr. Incredible and FroZone taking out a baddie, the film jumps to present day, where the Parrs are just ordinary, everyday folk; boring, predictable and routine, but happy to have one another all the same.  Mr. Incredible/Bob Parr, however, gets his kicks by going out at night and stopping small-time crooks and vandals, and gets himself and his family caught up in a plot hatched by an evil genius from long ago.  The film's animation is gorgeous, and really reinvigorated the action/adventure genre for children - I seriously doubt without THE INCREDIBLES that UP would have come along quite so quickly - and was also a part of the decade's renewed obsession with superheroes.  It's thrilling, gorgeous to look at (check out the water effects once the team makes it into action), and truly touching and hilarious.  Coming from Brad Bird, or Pixar, who also have some other serious contenders for "best of" mentions - WALL-E, RATATOUILLE - that's not really such a suprise.  As far as animation is concerned, this really was their hey-day.

THE PROPOSITION
John Hillcoat's Western, set in the Australian Outback of the 1880s, is a gorgeously photographed sucker-punch.  From a screenplay by Nick Cave - my vote for the best multi-format storyteller of our time - the film tells the tale of three outlaw brothers who have committed horrendous acts throughout the territory, and the 'civilized' society that is trying to bring them to justice and tame the wild impulses of a country still in its infancy.  The film is exceedingly violent, sharing the same obsessions with murder and violent struggle that Cave often sings about, but it isn't a glorification of bloodletting.  If anything, the violence of THE PROPOSITION is some of the most sickeningly realistic ever put on screen, from makeup to sound effects.  Featuring a ferocious performance by Danny Huston as the psychotic older brother that Guy Pearce has been charged to kill, and a great turn by Ray Winstone and Emily Watson as Captain and Mrs. Stanley trying to remain civilized in a land that is not, this one is fantastic.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
Haunting and poetic, frightening, chilling, and somehow sweet and loving; LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is the vampire movie that I never thought I'd see, especially in a world obsessed with sparkling nonsense and shirtless "werewolves."  But here it is anyway, in all its subtle, magical glory, existing in defiance of expectation, and providing a resonating experience not soon forgotten.  The film tells the story of a young boy who befriends a young girl in his apartment complex, and they soon become good friends, despite the fact that the girl is a vampire.  Where this goes and what happens, I won't spoil for you, but the scenes on the monkey bars are some of the most complex and beautiful scenes I've seen in a long time.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL
Of all the Apatow-written/produced/etc. comedies to come out this decade (and there have been many great ones), this is my absolute favorite, if only because the screenplay by actor Jason Segel manages to be hilarious, truthful and sweet in all the right ways and finds that perfect balance between sophisticated comedy and "low-brow" nerd-dom the Apatow brand is known for.  Literally every character has a best line, and Russell Brand is perfect as egotistically self-absorbed rock star Aldous Snow.  I can't really explain why I loved it so much, but for me, it gets better with each viewing, and the fact that I still laugh-out-loud at many of the jokes proves its staying power.

DOWNFALL
This German film from 2004 may be the most accurate portrayal of the last days of the Third Reich ever to see celluloid.  Bruno Ganz is chilling in his portrayal of Hitler, showing just enough of the humanity in the monster to make him a compelling character, but never attempting to justify him or make him sympathetic.  Told from the perspective of one of his secretaries that stayed with what was left of the government in the Berlin bunker where most of them died, it is a glance inside what it would have been like to be in the throes of such a charismatic sociopath.  At the time this film came out, I was working toward my BA in History at the University of South Carolina, studying the propaganda of the Reich and its roots in World War I and early German folklore.  My professor, Robert Herzstein, actually chuckled during the film to see Ganz hiding the feeble hand that Hitler kept behind his back much of the time, and had nothing but praise for the film's attempts at accuracy.  Aside from that, the movie is a portrait of a time and place and people that will never be fully known.  It is an often overlooked film from the past decade for unknown reasons.

EASTERN PROMISES
When I left the theater after seeing this film, I felt like I had run a marathon.  It's a complex, intense work from director David Cronenberg and star Viggo Mortensen, both of whom are clearly at the peak of their abilities.  Following a power struggle within the Russian mob of London, the film may seem an odd choice for a filmmaker usually prone to express fears about 'otherness', but if you look a bit deeper, you can see that Cronenberg's obsessions with forced change and fear of one's own body / abilities are all there.  The bath house scene is definitely the most memorable, with a fully nude Mortensen taking on several men in a fight to the death as they attempt to execute him.  It's horrific, bloody, and wonderfully choreographed and shot.  This is suspense.  This is a thriller in the truest sense of the word.

IRON MAN
The past decade was definitely one for superheroes and origins, but IRON MAN deftly manipulated the formula by presenting us with Tony Stark, a man who is middle-aged, an alcoholic, and incredibly quick-witted.  The banter between Robert Downey, Jr. and anyone else is one of the main draws here, as Downey's swagger and confidence are embellishments based on his once drug-addled past.  IRON MAN gives us a superhero who isn't all good, who has flaws and likes to have a good time, and who discovers his purpose in the pursuit of justice.  It's a thrill ride, and it features spectacular special effects, but that's no reason it can't stand with the big boys.  It brings out the wanna-be hero in all of us, and there's nothing at all wrong with that.  This has always been what Marvel's particular brand of superhero is about, but it has never been so perfectly developed on screen as in IRON MAN.

GANGS OF NEW YORK
Even though he won his Oscar for THE DEPARTED, I think GANGS OF NEW YORK was Martin Scorsese's best film from the past ten years, if for no other reason than its sheer ambition, and that it gave us one of the most iconic characters of American cinema: Bill the Butcher.  Set against the backdrop of the Civil War draft riots, GANGS OF NEW YORK follows a lot of characters over a long period of time that saw difficult and violent growth for the city that never sleeps - the period when it started to realize its potential and left utter lawlessness behind in favor of greater prosperity (much like the Australia in THE PROPOSITION).  From the opening brawl in the streets of the Five Points that introduces many of the characters and sets the story in motion to the final blows in the riot-filled streets of a ravaged city, the film is filled with great images that create a real sense of a time and place that really did once exist, but which has now been almost forgotten even in the history books.

BLACK SNAKE MOAN
Writer/director Craig Brewer's film is an amazing exercise in pulpy, engaging and extremely cinematic storytelling, allowing image, music, and character to blend together seamlessly in a thoroughly entertaining film.  Samuel L. Jackson's broken down bluesman, Lazarus, is a revelation for an actor who has come dangerously close to self-parody, and Christina Ricci's portrayal of nymphomaniac Rae who must be cured by Lazarus - by being chained to his radiator so that he can break her loose of the devil's grip no less - is erotic, sympathetic and very funny.  The iconic opening sequence, much like in Brewer's HUSTLE AND FLOW, is a simple font for the title, over a single shot of Rae flipping off a tractor.  It's a no-frills approach that really lends itself to the sort of pulp-ridden tale that has been concocted, and when the soundtrack cranks up in the last half of the film, with Sam Jackson himself playing a version of "Stagger Lee" in a sweat-drenched blues bar, it's just like heaven.