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More 'Mulholland Drive' Love from Film Comment
Filed under: Lists, Best/Worst
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive earned some more love as the best film of the decade (2000-2009) this week as Film Comment published the results of a poll of critics, film enthusiasts and filmmakers the world over. This choice matches the results of the recent IndieWire poll, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Lynch's film was released in 2001 and received a single Oscar nomination, for Best Director. Lynch lost to Ron Howard, whose A Beautiful Mind, incidentally, has not turned up anywhere on any of these polls.
The Best of the Decade: Breakthroughs
Filed under: Fandom, Lists, Best/Worst
After a month of Cinematical expertly digging through one genre after another and nailing down the best entries in each one during the last decade, it seemed like there was an important cache of contributions that might not get the recognition they deserved: breakthrough performances or films. Such a designation crosses the boundaries of genre, sometimes happens in a film less deserving of praise, or otherwise finds itself overlooked. But after poring over the list of so many thousands of movies made in the last ten years, I've put together a svelte collection of superlative contributions which I believe qualify as the breakthroughs of the decade.
(It should be noted that we aren't pretending that these actors and filmmakers never made movies before the ones we're celebrating here. Rather, these are the moments in their career that they crossed over and introduced themselves in a way that audiences could no longer ignore.)
Jeffrey's List: The Best Films of 2009
Filed under: Lists, Best/Worst
I'm not sure it was a good movie year, but it was definitely an unusual one. We had a gourmet smorgasbord of animated films all year long, as well as a high number of excellent films directed by women. Then there were the war movies, a genre I usually can't stand for its preachy seriousness. But this year there were at least two flat-out masterpieces, not to mention the best period battle epic in decades. (Meanwhile, it seems as if the sci-fi genre has taken over for the war genre.) There was even one breathtaking example of another of my most hated genres, the costume movie. In all, it was a year to challenge the conventions, even if the conventions still continued to make the most money. But above all, 2009 was unusual...
Following is my list of ten best, in ranked order. For fun, I'm including one or two "runners-up" along with each choice, making up a kind of artistic or thematic double- or triple-feature.
(See the full list after the jump.)
The Best of the Decade: Indies
Filed under: Drama, Gay & Lesbian, Independent, Lists, Best/Worst, Cinematical Indie
"I know it when I see it."--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in reference to the definition of obscenity, 1964.
The past decade has seen an explosion in the number of films proudly identified -- either by the filmmakers themselves, marketing campaigns, or members of the press -- as "independent." But what makes an "independent" film independent, anyway? Is it the source of financing or is it the artistry? Or is it a combination of elements?
I've wrestled with this question for weeks, through at least one blown deadline, and keep coming back to Justice Stewart's definition: "I know it when I see it." Not that I'm an expert; in fact, one of the greatest frustrations of the past ten years has been the difficulty I've had in keeping up with all the films whose independence is defined by their artistry -- the closest to a definition that I can come. Over the decade I've worked in various capacities with several different film festivals and I've also covered a number of festivals as a working member of the press. So I've had the opportunity to see hundreds of indie films. And it's still not enough.
Setting aside all the decade's great documentaries, ably covered by Christopher Campbell, and all the wondrous foreign-language films, well captured by Jeffrey M. Anderson, we're left with thousands of English-language indies. (Sundance says they had 1,058 (?!) feature-length submissions for their dramatic competition this year.) Obviously, the biggest challenge is to see a reasonable amount of films. And unless you've been lucky enough to spend all your time watching movies, and traveling to a multitude of film festivals and markets, you only see a tiny percentage of what's been made.
Girls on Film: Female Feats in 2009
Filed under: Best/Worst, Girls on Film
While it seems like just a blink since we rang in the last New Year, 2009 is almost over. It was a speedy blur of 365 days, but it was also a year that boasted some pretty great moments for women in cinema.
I played with the idea of doing a Best Of for 2009 -- relishing in all of Hollywood's great moments for the female set -- but I tend to shy away from "Best." It's too subjective, too easy to forget something notable, and too hard to be definitive unless you rarely sleep and spend every waking moment watching all of the year's movies and reading film news.
Next, I flirted with the idea of sharing a handful of my favorite moments/aspects of 2009, but every bullet point I wrote would get edited and changed for another, and it kept evolving over and over again until I realized that trying to boil this year down to a slight list is an utter impossibility.
There's just too much to talk about, and too much that overlaps for anything but some stream-of-consciousness prose mixed with year-end love.
The Best of the Decade: Remakes
Filed under: Fandom, Remakes and Sequels, Lists, Best/Worst
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Talking about remakes is tough. On the one hand, as a film lover the ideal scenario is that remakes should be an endangered species; that filmmakers will spend their time and money investing in new ideas instead of rehashing other people's dreams. On the other hand, some film's are worth remaking because, A) the original didn't fulfill its potential in the first place, or B) the story is strong enough to tell over and over.
When it comes down to talking about the quality of a remake, things get even tougher. Take this Best Remakes of the Decade list, for example. Just because a film finds itself on said list doesn't mean it is inherently better than the original film, just that I think it's a fine film in its own right that happens to have the label "remake" attached to it. In compiling this Top 10 - which is numbered, but not ranked in any kind of order - I came to realize that whether or not a remake is better than the original film, the element that almost always divides a Best from a Worst is the cast. Again and again I found myself wanting to type the words "great cast" without realizing that was the make-or-break quality for most of the titles below.
But before we get to the Top 10, I'd like to tip my hat to a handful of contenders that didn't make it to varsity: The Ring, Zatoichi, The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left, The Italian Job, War of the Worlds, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nine, The Ladykillers, and Bedazzled.
The Best of the Decade: Family Films (Live Action)
Filed under: Family Films, Lists, Best/Worst
When our managing editor assigned me to list the Best Family Films of the Decade, I thought, "Woohoo! There's Ratatouille, Coraline, and --" then he added, "No animated films. We've got another list for those." I wilted. Do you know how hard it is to talk about films that are suitable for children but also fun for adults, and not include animation? I kept accidentally sneaking them on the list and then reminding myself that, no, Persepolis is in fact animated, and so is everything by Hayao Miyazaki. Gaaaaah.
But once I started looking at my video shelf, and the reviews I've written, ten great "family friendly" films from the 2000s weren't that difficult to find. I did have to determine what qualifies as "family friendly." Just because a movie is about a family doesn't mean it qualifies -- there went The Royal Tenenbaums and World's Greatest Dad. (Kidding. Sort of.) MPAA ratings didn't help much; I'm more willing to include a PG-13 movie where a mom and daughter talk seriously about sex than a PG-rated Disney film with decapitation and stabbing scenes, for example.
So you have to use your better judgment when deciding which films are appropriate for which kids. Some of the movies on this list are fine to watch with a family of any age; some are more suitable for older children. All of them are fun for anyone to watch; I didn't include movies that kids love but adults find annoying. These are all movies I personally like.
Weinberg's Top 20 of 2009
Filed under: Lists, Best/Worst
Let's keep this quick and easy. You've probably seen twelve dozen year-end "best of 2009" lists, but this one is mine! No rambling commentary, no goofy synopses, just 20 films from the past 12 months that I liked the best. (These are listed alphabetically.)
(500) Days of Summer -- There are tons of romance-intensive films that are funny, familiar, and/or heartbreaking, but here's one that tackles one of the pricklier situations: when one partner is clearly "more into" the relationship than the other. Leads Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel provide pitch-perfect performances, and the screenplay is a surprisingly insightful mixture of warmth, intelligence, reality and fantasy. I saw this one way back in January and it still stands as one of my very favorite films of the year.
Avatar -- Whether or not it becomes the "game-changer" that the hype machine promised is none of my concern. All I know is that, without fail, the equation of {Cameron + sci-fi + action} is always something worth watching. And in the case of this futuristic tale of supreme culture clash, there's simply too much to enjoy to focus on the nitpicks. Epic in scale and full of great little details, it may not be James Cameron's best film, but this director's B+ is most directors' fondest dream.
The Best of the Decade: Sequels
Filed under: Fandom, Remakes and Sequels, Lists, Best/Worst
Oh, the dreaded sequel. For a while, it was the loathed S-word -- an inevitable drop in quality, almost always revealing an increasing degree of cinematic laziness. But then came the aughts. Not only did we find the S-word replaced with the dreaded R-word (remake/reboot ... take your pick), but we also got a slice of something good. This decade brought some impressive sequels that challenged the well-established notion that continuing a story and revisiting beloved characters would be a bad thing. And now, as the decade wraps up, it's time to rank them.
Compiling the best sequels of the decade is not the most harrowing task out there. My fellow writers have that honor, shuffling through hundreds of films to pick out a few mere handfuls, but the sequel list does elicit questions. For example: What do you do when you desperately want a comedy sequel to be on the list, but you really don't like the best choice of the bunch? Should you consider the film's box office success? What about installments in a series? There's so much to consider...
What follows are the best and most successful sequels and series installments (they must have love here!) that the aughts have brought us. Of course, this is the opinion of one mere writer, so dig in, and as always, be sure to comment with your own picks.
Todd's Top 10 of 2009
Filed under: Fandom, Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Best/Worst
It's absolutely true that 2009 was a great year for movies, but I'm not altogether sure that 2009 was a year for great movies. The difference, some might argue, is negligible, since there probably shouldn't be any sort of division between smarter and more substantive fare and populist entertainment. In a year like, say, 2008, that might have been true, at least where its biggest blockbuster, The Dark Knight, was concerned. But in '09, it seemed like about five people saw the "serious" movies, while everyone else was watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
That said, the value of being entertained isn't necessarily less than that of being enlightened or inspired, and box office success isn't automatically antithetical to quality. (I actually kind of liked Revenge of the Fallen, after all.) Ultimately, however, making a Top Ten list for 2009 has seemed like a more ambiguously-defined process than in previous years, because I realize that many of the movies I enjoyed were not the most meaningful or deep, and ones I admired or respected were not always the ones that readily thrilled or excited. As such, here's a list of my top ten favorite films of the year, arranged in deliberate but basically arbitrary order. By all means discuss, debate, and disagree, but I'd love it if I could get folks to see even one or two of these that they haven't already, even if it's to fortify their arguments why I'm wrong.
Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams Reunite for 'Mission Impossible 4'
'Big Top Pee-Wee': The Original Benicio Del Toro Wolfman
Spin-ematical: New on DVD and Blu-ray for 2/9
Watch This: Brilliant Oscar-Nominated Short 'Logorama'
Chris Nolan to Lead 'Superman' Reboot!?
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