Howard Who?

Okay, so I couldn’t make it up to the standard 10 films. But I still haven’t seen much and I have a feeling two of those spots will be filled by a film I haven’t seen (Broken Flowers, Cache, Cafe Lumiere, Match Point, etc.). Now here’s the list. And just to show it’s not all just obscure, I did like Batman Begins, Sin City, Hitchhiker’s Guide, King Kong, and Wallace & Gromit. But I’ll wait to put them on the list, which is in alphabetical order.

1. The Best of Youth

So what was the best long movie of the year. No, it wasn’t King Kong’s 3 hour 7 minute running time. It was the 6 hour Best of Youth. So long you have to watch it in two parts. So good that if you’ve seen the first part, you can’t wait for the second. The first part details the ways a modest Italian family spreads out, finds love, and becomes unglued. We see this through the eyes of two brothers whose journeys in life are the romantic stuff of novels. The second part is the almost mending together of this broken family. While the end of the film ambles toward sentimentality and predictability, it is forgivable in the face of characters who’ve grown and changed organically it seems before your eyes.

2. Brokeback Mountain

Get along little doggie, gay cowboys coming through! Ang Lee consistently proves that he is able to move out of his comfort zone and into new exciting territory (not necessarily gayness, but the American west). Luckily for him, he has a cast with the same sense of adventure. And with all the talk of the gayness, few have spoken about the cowboyness. It’s the way their masculinity keeps them apart. It’s the way their failed connection to their own fathers sparks their connection to each other. And let’s not forget that behind every gay cowboy is a lovely woman getting her heart broken. I fell in love more times in this movie than in most straight movies.

3. Capote

Though not disturbing in a Saw II kind of way, Capote was disturbing from its quietness and its ultimate conclusion that true evil is not just cold blooded murder, but also the way people can exploit that murder and murderers to their own ends. Truman Capote wrote his masterpiece In Cold Blood about two young men who killed an entire family. Philip Seymour Hoffman has the performance of the year, a fine impersonation that goes deeper into the demons. The disturbing nature of the film comes from knowing that a writer needs an ending, and his work trumps all else. Most would not want to see themselves this way, but after the journalism scandals of late, it’s hard not to see how this attitude permeates our society.

4. Funny Ha Ha

It’s the small story of a young woman whose easy-going charisma attracts the general non-commital interest from the boys (not men) around her. The style of the film is a contradiction. She seems to wander in a free and boundless bachelorette existence. Conversations are wonderfully unstructured and unscripted (either that or it’s the most genius script ever to create such an illusion). It’s almost an exaggeration of the passive agressive way Generation Y talks. But the repression, sexual and emotional, around her is almost suffocating. We learn that even in the mythical debauchery of college towns, loneliness, awkwardness, and social pressures are lurking.

5. Munich

Spielberg’s deepest film to date about assassinating the group that killed 12 Israeli Olympians at the 1972 games in Munich. Just when you thought he was going to insert some lame character tick, like an arthritic hand, he doesn’t but instead tells a thought-provoking story. Tony Kushner’s dialogue, though at times dense and uneasy, provides a certain intellectual gravitas to the proceedings. It’s a gravitas Spielberg hasn’t exercised since Schindler’s List. But unlike that film’s unimpeachable proposition that one man can save lives, the bleak truth in Munich is that the murder of killers, no matter how monstrous, cannot prevent the multiplying retaliation that develops. And for once Spielberg ends a move right, without the slapped on happy ending. Instead it’s a bleak slide into human paranoia and hell. Instead it’s the moving portrait of how violence can haunt. Instead it’s a shot of the New York with two buildings that aren’t there anymore, a reminder of how Munich lives on. Beautifully shot with a feel of spontaneous urgency, it’s dark, moving, and among Spielberg’s finest (which is saying a lot).

6. Nobody Knows

A Japanese family of kids is left on its own as the mother carelessly abandons them. It sounds inevitability like movie of the week sentimentality, but it somehow steers clear of such manipulation. Just when you think someone will get kidnapped, raped, robbed etc. they are still safe but faced with the smaller dangers like hunger, lack of discipline, and need for friendship. This film taps into the universal feelings of abandonment that everyone feels, but doesn’t sugar coat it. The bitterness of such a life in equally contrasted with the sweetness of such freedoms. Kids have never seemed so brave.

7. Old Boy

So this film may be the single most disturbing film ever made this year. It’s sensational in a very literal way. The film is all about sensation, the way we touch, feel, and hurt. We follow a businessman who is locked up for 15 years and must now piece together the pieces of his shattered life. When he discovers the truth, it is shocking and unnerving to the bone. Rather than going for depth, this film is a thought experiment in human extremities (the thinking man’s Saw II) and is memorable in its bravura filmmaking style. In fact, it does answer one question in life. What would it look like for a man to swallow an octopus?

8. The World

The title of this film is ironic. The World in question is a small Beijing area amusement park that promises the world in miniature. In its gaudiness, the World Trade Towers still stand and a confused camel adorns pyramids the size of igloos. If you remember in the Truman Show when leafing through a photo book, Truman sees what seems to be photoshop versions of travel photos, this is it. But the ignorance of the outside world is contrasted with characters who must come to grips with their own smallness. Relationships are built not out of love or mutual interest, but simply as a way to avoid sliding into a social abyss. We follow a couple. The woman makes her most serious connection to a Ukrainian woman that knows no Chinese. But when they meet later, their eyes speak to each other with understanding and painful regret. The man comes close to cheating (which may be the film’s coded way of saying he did cheat) with a cosmopolitan woman whose husband lives in Paris. Together our characters watch a plane take off and wonder who could possibly afford, much less even desire, such a thing. It gives a new meaning to It’s a Small World After All.

Now, it’s your turn. Send me your top 8s, I mean, 10s. whatever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2005 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Movies, Lists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.