50 Great Films of the 00s: 40-31

50-41 here. No links this time, on account of bandwidth constraints. Anyhow:

40. Infernal Affairs

Maybe it’s because I don’t much like Leonardo DiCaprio, or maybe it’s because I’m a film snob, but I much preferred the original Chinese Infernal Affairs to the American remake The Departed. Most likely, though it’s due to the “first met is best” effect that I’ve noticed elsewhere. Given two works of art, one a remake or adaptation of the other, I tend to prefer the first one I meet, regardless of whether it’s the original or the remake/adaptation. So I prefer the adaptation of Oldboy to the original manga, or the manga adaptation of Welcome to the NHK to the original novel, or in the case at hand, Infernal Affairs to the Departed, because those were the first ones I met. In any event, Infernal Affairs was an improbably stylish thriller that rose above its somewhat dopey plot through force of sheer pulpish conviction.

39. The Wind That Shakes the Barley

I’ve talked here before about spinach art: works that are good for you but no fun. For years I avoided the films of director Ken Loach, figuring that they must be spinach of the highest order. Socially committed films on “issues” (mixed-race romance: Ae Fond Kiss; workplace conditions in the construction industry: Riff-Raff; etc.)? Films where characters engage in passionate debate about the merits of various forms of socialism (Land and Freedom)? Yeccch — this despite our sharing much the same political outlook, I might add. So it was with great surprise that I learned, once I finally bothered to test my knee-jerk reaction, that Loach’s films were funny, good-natured and compassionate and were indeed films first, civics lessons second. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was no exception despite its heavy subject matter (the start of the troubles in Ireland) and, I’ll admit it, I totally have a man-crush on lead Cillian Murphy.

38. Volver

Pedro Almodovar is another writer/director I came to late. He’s the sort of film-maker who often gets called “flamboyant” and “colourful”. With good reason; he is flamboyant and colourful. He’s also one of the few major figures in world cinema who is deeply concerned with women — what they’re like, what they like, how they live life. Volver is typical of his oeuvre in this respect and reminded me more than a little of Gilbert Hernandez, for its mixture of the mundane with the supernatural, telenovela flourish with novelistic emotion and above all the women: strong, wise, foolish, human.

37. Lost in Translation

It became fashionable for a while to bash Sofia Coppola and this film in particular. Okay, its deployment of Japanese culture veers into “Aren’t these wacky Easterners funny?” territory. But if you can put that aside — a big if for some — this is still a fine film about alienation and dislocation. Indeed, I’d say it captured better than any other film I’ve ever seen the sense of dislocation and placelessness of being an innocent (or not-so innocent) abroad, and the aching need for an emotional connection with the familiar. No doubt it helped that I saw it at a pretty receptive time in my own life: as a twenty-six year-old graduate student in the States, alone and friendless and far, far from loved ones. But there’s more than enough about the film to put it on this list regardless: two strong lead performances — honestly, has Scarlett Johansson been remotely as good in anything else? — dreamy cinematography; and brilliant sound design by Richard Beggs.

36. Fear and Trembling

Speaking of East-West encounters and those wacky Japanese, there’s always this French curio, also from 2003 and also chronicling the meeting between a Western ingenue and Japanese culture. This time the ingenue is French and the culture she meets is specifically corporate culture. The title is from Kierkegaard, but it might as well have been from Sade; due to a series of cross-cultural misunderstandings, the protagonist finds her position in the Japanese office growing more and more degraded until, in a delirious scene, she wallows around and sleeps in the upturned garbage of her capitalist oppressors. That sounds like heavy, depressing stuff but the accomplishment of this remarkable little film — and it is decidedly minor in its focus, almost all of it occuring within the one office floor, concerned with the power relations between two people at its heart — is that it isn’t depressing. But nor is it played for laughs either. Instead the film walks a nimble line between outright satire and heavy-handed moralizing that makes it one of the most tonally interesting films of the decade. It’s also, despite its (cross-)cultural specificity, the best office film since The Apartment, which makes it a pretty damn good movie full stop.

35. Lilya 4-Ever

A grim bit of miserabilism from Lukas Moodysson, Lilya 4-Ever largely takes place in a generic bleak Eastern European hellhole, part of the detritus left behind by the former Soviet Union. Things only get worse once Lilya escapes to the West, as if to rebuke the one glimmer of hope offered in the first half of the film. There’s one thing audiences want from miserabilist cinema: the complete and crushing absence of hope. This movie delivers that in spades, and then some.

34. Little Otik

Jan Svenkmajer has for decades been one of the world’s greatest living animators, which is all the more remarkable given the budget constraints he must have been working under. In Svenkmajer’s world, everyday objects come miraculously alive, but the resulting vision couldn’t be further from the dancing candle and teapots of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. No, the living objects in Svenkmajer’s world don’t dance so much as writhe, and rather than being shining new friends, there’s apt to be a touch of death about them even as they writhe. Little Otik isn’t even his best film — for mine, that would be his marvellous Alice, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that manages to remember and recreate the creepiness of the original. But it’s a Svenkmajer film all right, and we’re lucky to have his creepy, insidious surrealism and stop-motion animation in any form we can get. If Dave McKean, Marcel Duchamp and Tom Waits were combined into one person, and that person were an animator, the result would be something like Svenkmajer.

33. Gomorrah

There’s a scene towards the start of this brutal organised crime exposé where two dimwitted wanna-be gangsters act out scenes from Scarface. That one scene sums up the intent of the film: to contrast the grim reality of organised crime with the Hollywood glamourised version. And at that it succeeds admirably; the crime we see in Naples is vicious and surprisingly petty. Who knew, for instance, that the mob had their fingers in sweatshops or that a sweatshop foreman selling his skills to rival sweatshops would be such a risky proposition? Gomorrah is a powerful film with a simple message, which it sells with great skill.

32. L’Enfant

The Dardenne brothers specialise in a nouveau cinéma vérité, detailing the lives of the lower classes in Belgium. Not unlike a Belgian Ken Loach, come to think of it. L’Enfant was their second film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and it stays true to their themes and style. A young couple fall pregnant and have a baby and things just get worse from there, with one bad decision after another. Cheery!

31. The Bourne trilogy

All right, I’m cheating by counting these three films as one. But the three films in the Bourne series were all written by the same screenwriter, Tony Gilroy (who would go on to direct Michael  Clayton, itself a fine film about keeping your principles in the workplace). And they all share a naturalistic visual aesthetic, plus a  sober sense of seriousness. It was that sense of seriousness that made the first film stand out, and showed you could make an action movie as adult and stripped-down as the best thriller. Would that more film-makers were paying attention.

Not so wonderful, you ask me

Showcase Presents Wonder Woman. DC, 2007. Robert Kanigher, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. $16.99, 528 pages.

Along with Will Eisner’s The Spirit and Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, the Charles Moulton/Harry Peters Wonder Woman is one of a handful of “golden age” superhero comics actually worth reprinting. They’re weird, fun, kinky and nothing if not the product of a singular vision.

Not so the adventures reprinted here, from the start of superhero comics’ “silver age”. Other Showcase volumes from the same era (late fifties/early sixties) have ample charms. Flash, Hawkman, The Atom, Adam Strange, Green Lantern: these all feature art by the likes of Murphy Anderson, Joe Kubert, Gil Kane and Carmine Infantino. The Superman volumes (Superman itself, Supergirl and Superman Family), meanwhile, have the deadpan surrealism that was the hallmark of Mort Weisinger’s tenure as editor.

There are no such charms to be found here. There’s no sign of any passion here, just a couple of cartoonists churning out material to pay the bills. Kanigher’s scripts are simply hackwork, Andru’s and Esposito’s art competent but dull.

Things are even worse if we compare this with the Moulton and Peters run on Wonder Woman. Gone is the giddy delight they brought to the material; gone, too, are their themes. So, no spanking, cosplay, horseplay, bondage, subtextual sapphism, or explorations of male-female relationships. Even Wonder Woman’s golden lasso is now just a lasso, not the lasso of truth of old, which could compel submission.

Still, at least one thing is constant between this and the earlier, better Moulton/Peters Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor is still a total douchebag.

Recommended? Not at all.

Silverfish. DC, 2008. David Lapham, Dom Ramos and Jared K. Fletcher. $17.99, 160 pages.

A low-key crime thriller, Silverfish achieves its presumably modest goals. It’s entertaining, gripping enough in the way that a thriller is supposed to be gripping. Lapham’s art is mostly unobtrusive, except in brief flashes of expressionism here and there, which culminate in a bravura sequence towards the end of the book where the antagonist’s delusions break forth into the waking world.

Recommended? If you’re in the mood for an unpretentious, solid crime comic.

50 Great Films of the 00s: 50-41

Other comics blogs have started running through their top albums or tracks of the new millennium. So I thought I’d get out ahead of the curve and do the same for film. I’d do the same for comics, except that there’s no equivalent of metacritic for comics, so it’s hard to remember which comics came out in which year — especially for the earlier years of the millennium.

This list isn’t a list of the great films of the 00s. And with a few exceptions I haven’t included films because I think they’re “important” or because they “deserve it”. Instead, it’s a largely subjective list of the films that I liked the most over the last decade. So if your favourite film isn’t on the list, that isn’t a slight against it; I probably just didn’t like it enough to count it among my favourite fifty films of the decade.

Unless your favourite film is Mulholland Drive, in which case your taste sucks and you are stupid.

There’s only one ground-rule: no two films by the same director. This makes the list more diverse than it would be otherwise, which will become quite a big deal once we get into the top 30. It’s also just fun to have to decide which Michael Bay movie, for instance, is the best — Pearl Harbour, Bad Boys II, Transformers 1 or 2?

So let’s get this started. Click on the links for trailers.

50. Far From Heaven

Todd Haynes’ film was at once a homage to, and commentary on the florid 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk. As such, it could have ended up like Gus van Sant’s frame-by-frame remake of Psycho a few years earlier, an exercise in film theory to obscure ends. After all, both Haynes and van Sant had made their names with explicitly “queer” films, and both Psycho and Far From Heaven might have seemed like grabs at reaching mass audiences. But where Psycho flopped, both critically and commercially, Far From Heaven soared. What Haynes had seen was that the respectable veneers in society and in Sirk’s films served the same purpose: to suppress emotion, the strange, the different. What he ended up making was a film at once postmodern and modern, that at the same time used the conventions of the 1950s and commented on them, a film that was about film but also race, homosexuality and the bourgeoisie.

49. Farenheit 911

One of only two documentaries on the list. This was, to put it mildly, a divisive film, about a divisive subject: the Bush presidency and its decision to go to war in Iraq. Even many people who generally agree with Moore’s politics found this film unfair and heavy-handed. Still, there’s no denying its power as a piece of agitprop, on a par with the work of Eisenstein. If, at the end of this movie, you didn’t want to organise an angry mob and impeach the president, you weren’t paying attention.

48. American Splendor

Arguably the best comic book movie of the decade — or, for that matter, ever. With a compelling lead performance by Paul Giamatti, and a whole bevy of directorial tricks, it managed to do what I would have thought impossible: give me a reason to give a damn about professional sad-sack Harvey Pekar.

47.  Sexy Beast

The first film on my list that also appears as part of Scott Tobias’ “New Cult Canon” over at the Onion AV Club, but by no means the last. It’s a tough little gangster-comedy that subverts the cliches of the genre to amusing and entertaining effect. Ray Winstone is surprisingly good as a flabby ex-con but the real star is Ben Kingsley as a foul-mouthed and single-minded psychopathic brute (which in turn was surely the basis for Ralph Fiennes in the equally refreshing gangster-comedy In Bruges).

46. In My Skin

The new millennium saw a renaissance in French film, but not just any French film. No, it was a particular type of French film — film that divided critics and made audiences squirm — a cinema of discomfort, you might call it. Marina da Van’s In My Skin was one such film; she stars, writes and directs in a remarkable film about one woman’s all-too-quick descent into obsession and madness. The cinema of discomfort specialised in scenes that are hard to watch; In My Skin has such scenes to match the best. One unflinching shot in particular, in which da Van slowly, deliberately cuts herself, is still etched in my memory, all these years later. In My Skin is as powerful a piece of body-horror as anything Cronenberg ever made.

45. The Fog of War

From leading documentarian Errol Morris came this documentary about Robert McNamara, one-time US Secretary of Defence. In that role, McNamara was the chief architect of the Vietnam war; just as he had, early in his career, masterminded the firebombing of Japanese cities in WWII. McNamara speaks with the gravity of mistakes made and lessons learned. Fog of War appeared not long after the US invasion of Iraq; much like Farenheit 911, it was hard not to see it as aimed directly at the then-current Powers That Be, even if its subject himself might disavow any such intent.

44. Let the Right One In

A clever horror film, masquerading as a sort of sweet romance about puppy love, in a novel period setting: Sweden circa 1980 or so. Apparently the screenplay toned down some of the more shocking elements from the source novel; even so, it’s nasty enough. The vampire of the film doesn’t just suck blood; she tears it from her hapless victims. There are elements of the film that suggest a sort of vampire procedural, with much care given to the basic mechanics of bloodsucking. But at the core of the film is the relationship between meek Oskar and vampire Eli, both of them damaged and alienated in their own ways.

43. Brick

Another film from the New Cult Canon, this could easily have gone wrong. It’s a tribute to the performances — with a strong lead in Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, but good efforts all round — and the direction of Rian Johnson (who also wrote) that it didn’t go wrong. In fact, it went quite right. The marriage between hard-boiled noir and high school drama is inspired: noir calls for a veneer of toughness, often covering a deeper idealism or even sentimentality, and a kind of oblique dialogue. So too does high school. That’s the film’s key insight, and it works it through admirably.

42. American Psycho

Not exactly an unfilmable novel, but certainly not an easily filmable one, what with its interludes on mainstream 80s music and the fact that the protagonist is, you know, a psychopath. But Mary Herron’s script (with Guinevere Turner) navigates this difficult territory with great skill and a surprisingly light touch, making this an effective satire of 80s corporate culture and masculinity more generally. And Christian Bale was a great choice to play the eponymous American psycho; his brooding intensity and bland good looks have never been used to greater effect.

41. Gosford Park

Robert Altman was one of the all-time great American writer-directors — and, really, one of the all-time greats full stop. This was one of his last films before his death and, at the age of 75, he showed that he could still deliver an ensemble film like nobody else. In a ridculously strong cast, Clive Owen stands out, but really the star here is Altman, with his uncanny way of manoeuvring the space between people and the way that space gets filled with words.