I wish everyone who reads this a happy new year. I just spent an extended week away from civilization to gather my wits for the year ahead. I’ve got a few post topics lined up, so prepare for more select musings on the present and future of media and film very soon.
Alex
Was 2010 a vintage year for film? Compared to 2009, from which basically only Avatar is still talked about, I guess it was. In the long run, only time will tell of course, but here are the ten films that made the biggest impression on me in all the vintageness.
Note: This list goes by German cinematic release dates. Note 2: Even though I made it into the cinema a lot this year, I still missed some titles, i.e. Enter the Void and Exit through the Gift Shop.
There are two reasons, why I chose to make this film my film of the year. One is that is truly a revolutionary and daring piece of filmmaking for reasons that The Film Doctor has pointed out. The second is that it really stuck with me emotionally in ways that Inception or The Social Network did not.
2. Inception
You can say almost nothing against this excellent film, except maybe that it’s a bit too cerebral and a bit convoluted. But, well, that’s what happens when you are making a big budget action blockbuster which at the same time serves as an intelligent investigation of the nature of dreams and our ability to delude ourselves. And right now there is only one director able to pull this off: Christopher Nolan.
3. The Social Network
It’s not the story of Facebook, I believe, but it is a very good story. As usual, Fincher succeeds in making the viewer forget just how perfectionist his filmmaking is by enveloping him in a well-told story brought across by excellent performers. That’s what makes the film so strong. It is not however, a testament of our times, I reject this reading.
4. El Secretu de sus ojos
I won’t say it was a worthy Oscar winner (because it was up against Das weiße Band), but it was a worthy nominee. I just liked this film. It was tense and gripping, it was beautifully lit and shot and it was so melodramatic in a good way, about love that transcends time and brings people to do cruel things. It just got me.
5. The Kids are all right
If I was a different kind of person I would probably have all sorts of reservations against this film, but I am not. So I liked the extremely powerful betrayal of a couple going through marriage problems – stripped of all gender prejudices you could have because both partners are women. Around the performances, however, which are easily the biggest asset of the film, there is also some well-composed pictures to look at, which rounds the film off nicely.
6. Crazy Heart
The landscapes and the dreams that surround this tale open up the canvas, the intimate performances and the music close it again. This mixture generates a film that lasts, even more because it’s a fictional story that might just be true.
7. A Single Man
Another performance-driven film that profits from the fact that it is also clothed in beautiful images. I liked the bitterness of it, combined with the technique of using shifting colour saturations to convey emotion, which is something that I hadn’t seen done in quite this way before.
8. Toy Story 3
Ignore the fact that there is a bit too much of everything in the second act of this film as it channels prison break movies of the last five decades. Toy Story 3 more than makes up for it with the emotional climax of the third act and an ending that had me shedding a few lonely tears in the cinema. A very different coming-of-age-story which brillantly finishes a trilogy fifteen years in the making.
9. The Road
It’s a film about a failed civilisation that manages to tell its story without drifting off into the romanticized apocalypse. There is no hint here of a “paradise regained” Adam-and-Eve-notion, just a harrowing sense of survival of the well-adapted. That’s what made the film for me.
10. Gainsbourg
I like innovative approaches to biopics and Gainsbourg is excellent in mixing legend and history. Once M. Gainsbourg is famous, it gets a little tedious watching his seemingly endless decay, but in the end even that felt worthwhile in order to learn how one of France’s most infamous 20th-century-figures might see himself in a movie.
Honorable Mention: Die kommenden Tage
This is not in the Top 10 because it tries to cram a little too much character drama into one film in a way that makes some of the characters unbelievable in the end. But a near-future dystopia from Germany that successfully taps into a lot of the fears which haunt our times, combined with some of the best colour photography I have seen in a German film for years, nevertheless made for a film that I often think back to. Can we please have more films with this scope in Germany?
Let’s see how 2011 will play out. Until then, I wish all my blog readers a good sense of closure for 2010 and a Happy New Year!
3D is coming at us from several angles at the moment, but has yet to prove that the medium is not the message. I take a look at five directors who drive 3D forward and try to predict what role they will play in the future of stereoscopic filmmaking.
Rise to Power: Made two of the best, action packed Science-Fiction Sequels and created some of the most memorable effects scenes in cinema history with Aliens, the Terminator films and The Abyss. Then went off and realized the highest-grossing film ever. Twice.
Claim to Fame: Almost single-handedly convinced the movie industry that 3D is worth pursuing.
Defining Characteristics: Epic epicness coupled with sentimentality of the highest degree.
Lined up: Two sequels to Avatar that will continue to explore the world he created.
The Verdict: Cameron is a force of nature. What his films lack in artistic merit, they make up for in sheer, inescapable, gripping bombast. There are no signs of this changing in the near future.
Rise to Power: Married effects, character drama and the manipulation of the space-time continuum in classics like the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump.
Claim to Fame: Pioneered and developed “perfomance capturing”, and with it digital 3D, in a series of films that were really not great but succesful enough to keep him going.
Defining Characteristics: Creates settings that eerily sit between animation and live action aesthetics with few cuts and sweeping camera moves to explore 3D.
Lined up: As producer, Mars needs Moms for Disney in which Seth Green plays his inner child. As director, Yellow Submarine, the remake of a film about a band whose latest achievement is making it onto iTunes.
The Verdict: Zemeckis has left his mark in the development of 3D but his style has become a bit predictable and even seems slightly old-fashioned compared to the general zeitgeist.
Rise to Power: After directing several commercials, he revived the American zombie film and brought a new quality of aestheticized violence to Hollywood cinema with 300 and Watchmen.
Claim to Fame: Directed an animated fantasy film about, of all things, owls, which looked stunning but suffered from an overcrowded story.
Defining Characteristics: Applies 3D to both space and time with his signature slow motion fight scenes. Seems to like the grandiose iconography of fascism.
Lined up: His first original screenplay, Sucker Punch, will be converted to 3D, while he tackles the next reboot of the most boring of all superheroes, Superman: Man of Steel.
The Verdict: One of the most challenging visual directors around, to whom 3D seems to come naturally. However, the quality of his films seems to be very dependent on that of the source material.
Rise to Power: Gave stop-motion animation its mainstream groove back by directing Tim Burton’s phantasmagoria The Nightmare before Christmas.
Claim to Fame: Coraline, a film that reads like the book on how 3D should work, especially in animation.
Defining Characteristics: Builds worlds that are slightly askew, both visually and storywise.
Lined up: Has returned to Disney/Pixar to work on more stop motion films.
The Verdict: Might produce the first film for Pixar that actually embraces 3D in its mise-en-scene.
Rise to Power: Made films about maniacs of all colours as part of Germany’s new wave in the 70s, then became one of the most leftfield directors around, creating motion pictures in every genre, form and country.
Claim to Fame: Got exclusive access to ancient French caves to film them in 3D in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Defining Characteristics: Embraces everything that fascinates him and turns it into something strange … and good.
Lined up: No word yet if there’s more 3D to come.
The Verdict: Herzog, with his oddball mentality and his talent for tearing down cinematic borders, might be one of those who leads 3D from childhood to maturity.
I am fascinated, if not obsessed with the idea that we live in the future now. Adam Rogers’s behind-the-scenes article on Tron: Legacy for “Wired” recently demonstrated this point in a way I never really thought about. But it’s true.
All those artists at Digital Domain know they’re creating Tron’s reality by creating it in reality. “We’ve achieved what the first film predicted,” [Director Joseph] Kosinski says. Jeff Bridges had to get a full-body laser scan during preproduction, an eerie hearkening to his digitization in the first movie. When he shot his scenes as Clu, the motion-capture rig he wore to translate his facial movements to Rev 4 included a visor that looked uncannily like the helmet he wore in the original. And the prospect of an unimpeachable, photorealistic avatar for Bridges ought to make the Screen Actors Guild freak out.
(read the whole Article)
It’s really a shame that the new Tron doesn’t arrive in German theaters until the end of January. It’s a film I will hopefully be blogging a lot more about soon.
Kaum vorstellbar, dass die Kinoleinwand einmal der einzige Bildschirm war, mit dem wir es zu tun hatten. Heute sind wir von Bildschirmen aller Formate umzingelt: Man trägt sie uns nach wie die Werbetafeln in den Städten, und wir tragen sie mit, in Form von Handys und I-Pods. Dennoch scheint es, als wäre das Kino, jenes Urmedium des Bildes, immer noch ein tauglicher Pionier und Innovationsmotor, der Trends etabliert, dem andere Bildmedien nachfolgen können.
Weiterlesen in epd film 12/210
I feel humbled to be able to take part in Requiem // 102, which I wrote about in detail earlier. See all the fascinating contributions on the project’s official site. Here is mine.
Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream comes with a reputation attached. Even though I had somehow managed to not see it yet before I signed up for this project, I knew from countless conversations that Requiem is 1. very disturbing, 2. cut very fast and 3. groundbreaking. While watching it, with the advantage of ten years hindsight of course, I found that it is 1. much too blatant to be disturbing and 2. not actually cut that fast in most portions (and not even that fast in the fast sequences, now that moviegoers’ brains are used to Paul Greengrass movies). I’ll try to get to 3. in the end and talk about my frame first.
The image is from minute 19 of the film and shows Jennifer Connelly’s character Marion looking at herself in her appartment’s bathroom mirror before one of the film’s famous drug montages shows the use of both heroin and cocaine. The drugs turn the desaturated gloom of this image into a triumph: The expressionless face in this frame changes to an expression of bliss, Marion slowly raising her arms while the image fades to white. In the scene before this one, Marion and Harry have decided to spend the money they make through drug dealing on a shop where she can sell her self-made clothes. The couple is not only high on drugs, they are drunk on their expected success.
The juxtaposition of the two facial expressions before and after the consumption of drugs is echoed again in the very fact that Marion is placed in front of a mirror for this scene. There are really two Marions here, the one that she sees („The most beautiful girl in the whole world“, as Harry tells her again and again) and the soon-to-become-lifeless junkie the audience recognizes.
The fact that the self-perception of the characters usually differs greatly from their actual appearance could be called one of the main thematic devices of the film. Here, Marion believes she is on her way up while it’s already pretty clear that the only way for all four main characters is down – after all, the film claims to be a requiem for their dream. Sara’s story expresses this notion even more explicitly: She believes she is looking and feeling great, while her general demeanor already has something quite harrowing about it when Harry visits her, and will collapse into complete delusion later on. Finally, Harry will believe that the wound on his arm is not actually that serious – only to have the same arm amputated in the final scenes.
Aronofsky revisits the bathroom setting, which is exclusively Marion’s domain, for two later scenes which nicely complement this one in the season triptych that structures the narrative. While the junkies are swimming in drug abundance this early in the film, the next scene featuring the bathroom has Marion in a stupor of withdrawal, knocking over furniture in search for drugs (for all his blatantness, Aronofsky resists the cliché of having her smash the mirror). The third act, of course, puts Marion in the bathroom again for one of the film’s most iconic scenes, in which she soaks in the tub and then screams into the water after she slept with Big Tim.
Marion is almost naked in this scene, wearing a bra but no panties, and glimpses of nudity like this one are probably among the reasons why the film caused such a stir at the time. Presented and lit the way it is here, of course, the exposed skin serves both as an indicator for the state of depravity that Marion is already in and as a symbol for her vulnerability.
My general feeling was that Requiem for a Dream, in accordance with its title, works very much like a piece of dramatic classical music, like an opera. Not only because its soundtrack is one of its best assets, but because it paints with such broad strokes, has such a clear-cut, symbol-laden three-act structure (Summer, Fall, Winter) and lets you expect early on that everyone will end up in a most tragic finale. The message that „Because of modern consumerism, we’re all junkies in one way or another“ is hammered home by means of the drug montages throughout the whole film. The concept might have been clever at the time (my comment on the issue of the film being groundbreaking), but I find it quite annoying in much the same way that Requiem seems unnecessesarily pessismistic in the way all characters are denied redemption – not because they’re unwilling to redeem themselves, however, but apparently because as junkies they deserve to be treated like shit by society.
When it comes to drug movies, I have to say I much prefer the three-years-older Trainspotting. It seems superior in the way it first presents you with a vibrant and funny image of being on drugs, only to punch you in the stomach with the horrors that follow. Requiem instead treats you with regular doses of foreboding, hyperbole and sentimentality – overwhelming you in much the same way a drug would do.
Mind over Meta!
