2005, a year's movies in review
(Note added at the end after the entry was posted)
2005 will be remembered as the year of feature films. The sheer brilliance in the recent years’ outpour of documentaries, with topics as diverse as the plantation history of tobacco leaves and Bush’s surrogate brains, has faded a little. But it would have been unrealistic to expect documentaries as good as My Architect, Fog of War and Tarnation to come out every year. 2005 also has had less to show with foreign films. One of the most captivating documentaries of 2005, Grizzly Man, is made by the veteran German filmmaker Werner Herzog, whose best feature films are those starring the inimitable Klaus Kinski, made in 70s and 80s. Grizzly Man can even be viewed as a subliminal tribute from Herzog to Kinski. The actor’s maddening talent, brightest at its most maniac, gave the director some of the most mesmerizing and psychologically loaded moments ever capture by camera but also made Herzog unable to make anything thrillingly sublime without Kinski. (The Indian natives who worked as extras in Aguirre: The Wrath of God volunteered to Herzog their service to kill Kinski for him). Herzog is Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man who loved bears above all else and whose bear-muse ended up also being his annihilator.
Like Godard, whose Notre musique was released in 2004, another iconic auteur, Ingmar Bergman, now in his 80s, presented his latest effort in Saraband, perhaps his swan song. But as far as the intensity level of the creative juice in 2005 goes, there is nothing approaching movies such as The Barbarian Invasions, The Time of the Wolf, or Last Life in the Universe (not to mention shockers such as The Irreversible and Demonlover). Caché, directed by the Austrian-turned French filmmaker Michael Haneke, is as drum-skin-tight as any French suspense drama. It echoes another recent French thriller, Cédric Kahn's Red Lights (Feux rouges, 2004), in its razor-chilled look at the pathology of human paranoia and domestic menace, and in typical French style the narrative ambiguity is served with a glass of merlot. Wong Kar Wei’s 2046 was rushed to Cannes in its rough-rough cut and finally smoothed out for 2005 release. This time burdened by his perfectionist demand for visual rapture, Wong overdid in 2046 what he has said very elegantly with In the Mood for Love, and the stylistically over-pregnant movie could use 30 minutes less screen time and go straight to its aesthetically ecstatic heart, ignoring the needy rest. The best foreign movie of 2005 is actually the re-release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) in its restored version now 10 crucial minutes longer (originally cut by MGM by 30 minutes, the other 20 minutes are still missing). Fateless, a Hungarian Jewish boy’s translucent, un-harassed view of the Holocaust, released in 2005 and currently being rolled out in selected theaters near you, could suffer the kind of collective audience amnesia Broken Flowers has endured in 2005 by 2006’s end, and ought to secure a place proactively. Based on Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz’s novel, it has been compared to Polanski’s The Pianist in its tale of the survival magic tested by serial mass murders and un-bullied by sentimentality. (My view on sentimentality follows an inverse law governing content and expression: in general, the more overwhelming and emotion-laden the content or subject matter, the less effective and climactic the device of sentimentality becomes).
2005 saw Tommy Lee Jones debuted as a director with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. It’s a road trip movie, and also a buddy movie that couldn’t be any more different from last year’s Sideways - in The Three Burials, Jones’s buddy is for the most part a rotting corpse. With the movie, Jones has made an artistic as well as political statement that, even though Hollywood is the hand that has generously fed his career, he can’t be bought. Riding the quiet dust to the booming conclusion, the movie is low budget and high-resolution in its border-crossing soul. Another A-list entertainer of conscience is the ever more vocal Gorge Clooney, liberal in capital L. His directorship in the McCarthy-era man-vs-the-system true story Good Night, and Good Luck and his acting role in oil-business-fueled fictional Syriana have come up as the one-two punches aimed at all that is grotesquely wrong in the world. Americans love their firearms and a good citizen’s puritanical heart can be full of repressed kinks aroused when hard-pressed. Make-up sex is probably all the more sweeter after a day’s aggression, and it’s especially true in A History of Violence. Canadian filmmaker Cronenberg has made movies from Naked Lunch to Crash (a 1996 movie, not to be confused with the drastically over-the-top Crash, a 2005 critics’ darling), about the powerful fetish car crash victims have developed for car crashes - in the exclusive and off-the-radar club, for crash victims car crashes mean both customized member-only pornography and a lifestyle - to Dead Ringers, in which two identical twins are willing to literally share everything, women, death, and all. In A History, Cronenberg entrusts a small town to telling the big things, and his skill for placing the unexpectedly candid along the emotional pressure points is shared by Ang Lee, in Brokeback Mountain, aided by a dream team whose iconoclastic players include Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry. Both are fierce writers with an ear for dialogue and a heart for the nuance in the grit.
Rodrigo García, the writer-director of Nine Lives, happens to be the firstborn son of García Márquez. The son has grown up to manifest the kind of understanding of women the father has patented in his works. As in his previous Ten Things You Can Tell by Looking at Her, Rodrigo García’s imagination and empathy are both inspired and pushed more rewardingly by women than men. Nine Lives, nine vignettes, nine women, played by such actresses as Sissy Spacek, Kathy Baker, Robin Wright Penn, is about certain moments, as in real life, that don’t always explode in your face, and yet cannot be contained by the surface. Some relationships are over before they could even start, and people spend the rest of the relationships, and sometimes the rest of their lives, just to come to terms with it. It’s quite possible to project an entire life’s trajectory with only few key moments upon which our entire subterranean knowledge is based. That’s what poetry does, with its economic use of selective moments; that’s what fiction does, with its fleshing-out of the trajectory; that’s what a film does, within the length of a feature. To do so is not to equate the process with self-fulfilling prophecy, which often picks the "key moments" willfully, less honestly to project an easy way out, the path that offers the least resistance. Significant key moments are often concealed, rejected, inaccessible, casting a long, subconscious, afflicting shadow, only to be made known in a sudden, presumption-breaking instant that we call clarity or epiphany. The women in Nine Lives are on the verge of harvesting such epiphanies, but they don’t always know, can’t always know. They walk away, or are bothered and changed. On a side note, the order of succession seems to have been in place, as Márquez's latest novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the English translation published in 2005, can be oddly unsatisfying, even as the pages are bursting with Márquez’s signature prose.
It’s a toss-up between The Squid and the Whale and Capote for a spot on my top-10 list. Philip Seymour Hoffman has bagged Capote’s mannerism and motives down to their last label and bar code, but where it leaves the buyer empty-handed is the watered-down insight of what makes Capote the great American writer he is. Charm, manipulation, ambition, frustration, guilt, cruelty, regret, those things can be found within almost any person, as is the case in the character of literature professor/failed writer in The Squid and the Whale, played exceedingly by Jeff Daniels. What about the light that makes a writer’s words shine? There are such playful, even gleeful, metaphors and childlike tenderness in Capote’s printed lines. Without his typed output, a writer’s existence can’t be justified as a writer. Without going into the belly, an attempt to recreate a beast’s roar would be reductional. Capote the movie slips when it gets too cozily detached from its source material, perhaps inevitable given the limitation of a biopic and the elephantine figure (though a hummingbird in physical size and speaking voice) it tries to tackle. As someone once said, if you want to attack a giant, you’d better kill him. So I am leaning, by couple inches, away from the whale and towards The Squid, which is based on the first-time writer-director's autobiographical material and delivered with a surefire genuineness attained firsthand.
Honorable mention but not on the list: Last Days, by Gus van Sant. After the abyss opened by Gerry and especially by Elephant, anything else from van Sant himself would probably look a little flat by comparison, no matter how bleak it is, and in this case, how Kurt Cobain-bleak it is. But van Sant has consistently shown a deep, obsessive, and transcendental feel for young, wounded male characters, real or fictional (to cite van Sant’s homosexuality as a dominant advantage would be saying Flaubert must have plagiarized a woman author for Madame Bovary), that his movie as a whole has a built-in bang not to be denied by the questionable parts.
No, I have not made up my mind about Munich.
At long last, my top-10 list, in alphabetic order:
A History of Violence
Brokeback Mountain
Broken Flowers
Caché
Fateless
Good Night, and Good Luck
Grizzly Man
Nine Lives
The Squid and the Whale
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
*Note: I thought I have seen the best movies of 2005, that was, before I saw The New World. It shows how little I knew what I was talking about. The New World, without any doubt in my mind, has to be the best movie of 2005. The movie demands a great deal from the viewer, and as a result just about blows everything else away. Terrence Malick has made only 4 feature films in his career spanning over 30 years. As the slowest, quietest working writer-director, Malick is also a visionary filmmaker of the first degree. The New World, Christ, this is what movie is all about, this is what the medium of movie can do and is supposed to do. I have not seen Days of Heaven, and as far Badlands and The Thin Red Line are concerned, there are moments of greatness the kind only to be found in the best works by directors such as Coppola (Apocalyse Now) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Even if Malick never makes a movie again in his life, The New World has officially made me a Malick's fan for life.
2005 will be remembered as the year of feature films. The sheer brilliance in the recent years’ outpour of documentaries, with topics as diverse as the plantation history of tobacco leaves and Bush’s surrogate brains, has faded a little. But it would have been unrealistic to expect documentaries as good as My Architect, Fog of War and Tarnation to come out every year. 2005 also has had less to show with foreign films. One of the most captivating documentaries of 2005, Grizzly Man, is made by the veteran German filmmaker Werner Herzog, whose best feature films are those starring the inimitable Klaus Kinski, made in 70s and 80s. Grizzly Man can even be viewed as a subliminal tribute from Herzog to Kinski. The actor’s maddening talent, brightest at its most maniac, gave the director some of the most mesmerizing and psychologically loaded moments ever capture by camera but also made Herzog unable to make anything thrillingly sublime without Kinski. (The Indian natives who worked as extras in Aguirre: The Wrath of God volunteered to Herzog their service to kill Kinski for him). Herzog is Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man who loved bears above all else and whose bear-muse ended up also being his annihilator.
Like Godard, whose Notre musique was released in 2004, another iconic auteur, Ingmar Bergman, now in his 80s, presented his latest effort in Saraband, perhaps his swan song. But as far as the intensity level of the creative juice in 2005 goes, there is nothing approaching movies such as The Barbarian Invasions, The Time of the Wolf, or Last Life in the Universe (not to mention shockers such as The Irreversible and Demonlover). Caché, directed by the Austrian-turned French filmmaker Michael Haneke, is as drum-skin-tight as any French suspense drama. It echoes another recent French thriller, Cédric Kahn's Red Lights (Feux rouges, 2004), in its razor-chilled look at the pathology of human paranoia and domestic menace, and in typical French style the narrative ambiguity is served with a glass of merlot. Wong Kar Wei’s 2046 was rushed to Cannes in its rough-rough cut and finally smoothed out for 2005 release. This time burdened by his perfectionist demand for visual rapture, Wong overdid in 2046 what he has said very elegantly with In the Mood for Love, and the stylistically over-pregnant movie could use 30 minutes less screen time and go straight to its aesthetically ecstatic heart, ignoring the needy rest. The best foreign movie of 2005 is actually the re-release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) in its restored version now 10 crucial minutes longer (originally cut by MGM by 30 minutes, the other 20 minutes are still missing). Fateless, a Hungarian Jewish boy’s translucent, un-harassed view of the Holocaust, released in 2005 and currently being rolled out in selected theaters near you, could suffer the kind of collective audience amnesia Broken Flowers has endured in 2005 by 2006’s end, and ought to secure a place proactively. Based on Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz’s novel, it has been compared to Polanski’s The Pianist in its tale of the survival magic tested by serial mass murders and un-bullied by sentimentality. (My view on sentimentality follows an inverse law governing content and expression: in general, the more overwhelming and emotion-laden the content or subject matter, the less effective and climactic the device of sentimentality becomes).
2005 saw Tommy Lee Jones debuted as a director with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. It’s a road trip movie, and also a buddy movie that couldn’t be any more different from last year’s Sideways - in The Three Burials, Jones’s buddy is for the most part a rotting corpse. With the movie, Jones has made an artistic as well as political statement that, even though Hollywood is the hand that has generously fed his career, he can’t be bought. Riding the quiet dust to the booming conclusion, the movie is low budget and high-resolution in its border-crossing soul. Another A-list entertainer of conscience is the ever more vocal Gorge Clooney, liberal in capital L. His directorship in the McCarthy-era man-vs-the-system true story Good Night, and Good Luck and his acting role in oil-business-fueled fictional Syriana have come up as the one-two punches aimed at all that is grotesquely wrong in the world. Americans love their firearms and a good citizen’s puritanical heart can be full of repressed kinks aroused when hard-pressed. Make-up sex is probably all the more sweeter after a day’s aggression, and it’s especially true in A History of Violence. Canadian filmmaker Cronenberg has made movies from Naked Lunch to Crash (a 1996 movie, not to be confused with the drastically over-the-top Crash, a 2005 critics’ darling), about the powerful fetish car crash victims have developed for car crashes - in the exclusive and off-the-radar club, for crash victims car crashes mean both customized member-only pornography and a lifestyle - to Dead Ringers, in which two identical twins are willing to literally share everything, women, death, and all. In A History, Cronenberg entrusts a small town to telling the big things, and his skill for placing the unexpectedly candid along the emotional pressure points is shared by Ang Lee, in Brokeback Mountain, aided by a dream team whose iconoclastic players include Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry. Both are fierce writers with an ear for dialogue and a heart for the nuance in the grit.
Rodrigo García, the writer-director of Nine Lives, happens to be the firstborn son of García Márquez. The son has grown up to manifest the kind of understanding of women the father has patented in his works. As in his previous Ten Things You Can Tell by Looking at Her, Rodrigo García’s imagination and empathy are both inspired and pushed more rewardingly by women than men. Nine Lives, nine vignettes, nine women, played by such actresses as Sissy Spacek, Kathy Baker, Robin Wright Penn, is about certain moments, as in real life, that don’t always explode in your face, and yet cannot be contained by the surface. Some relationships are over before they could even start, and people spend the rest of the relationships, and sometimes the rest of their lives, just to come to terms with it. It’s quite possible to project an entire life’s trajectory with only few key moments upon which our entire subterranean knowledge is based. That’s what poetry does, with its economic use of selective moments; that’s what fiction does, with its fleshing-out of the trajectory; that’s what a film does, within the length of a feature. To do so is not to equate the process with self-fulfilling prophecy, which often picks the "key moments" willfully, less honestly to project an easy way out, the path that offers the least resistance. Significant key moments are often concealed, rejected, inaccessible, casting a long, subconscious, afflicting shadow, only to be made known in a sudden, presumption-breaking instant that we call clarity or epiphany. The women in Nine Lives are on the verge of harvesting such epiphanies, but they don’t always know, can’t always know. They walk away, or are bothered and changed. On a side note, the order of succession seems to have been in place, as Márquez's latest novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the English translation published in 2005, can be oddly unsatisfying, even as the pages are bursting with Márquez’s signature prose.
It’s a toss-up between The Squid and the Whale and Capote for a spot on my top-10 list. Philip Seymour Hoffman has bagged Capote’s mannerism and motives down to their last label and bar code, but where it leaves the buyer empty-handed is the watered-down insight of what makes Capote the great American writer he is. Charm, manipulation, ambition, frustration, guilt, cruelty, regret, those things can be found within almost any person, as is the case in the character of literature professor/failed writer in The Squid and the Whale, played exceedingly by Jeff Daniels. What about the light that makes a writer’s words shine? There are such playful, even gleeful, metaphors and childlike tenderness in Capote’s printed lines. Without his typed output, a writer’s existence can’t be justified as a writer. Without going into the belly, an attempt to recreate a beast’s roar would be reductional. Capote the movie slips when it gets too cozily detached from its source material, perhaps inevitable given the limitation of a biopic and the elephantine figure (though a hummingbird in physical size and speaking voice) it tries to tackle. As someone once said, if you want to attack a giant, you’d better kill him. So I am leaning, by couple inches, away from the whale and towards The Squid, which is based on the first-time writer-director's autobiographical material and delivered with a surefire genuineness attained firsthand.
Honorable mention but not on the list: Last Days, by Gus van Sant. After the abyss opened by Gerry and especially by Elephant, anything else from van Sant himself would probably look a little flat by comparison, no matter how bleak it is, and in this case, how Kurt Cobain-bleak it is. But van Sant has consistently shown a deep, obsessive, and transcendental feel for young, wounded male characters, real or fictional (to cite van Sant’s homosexuality as a dominant advantage would be saying Flaubert must have plagiarized a woman author for Madame Bovary), that his movie as a whole has a built-in bang not to be denied by the questionable parts.
No, I have not made up my mind about Munich.
At long last, my top-10 list, in alphabetic order:
A History of Violence
Brokeback Mountain
Broken Flowers
Caché
Fateless
Good Night, and Good Luck
Grizzly Man
Nine Lives
The Squid and the Whale
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
*Note: I thought I have seen the best movies of 2005, that was, before I saw The New World. It shows how little I knew what I was talking about. The New World, without any doubt in my mind, has to be the best movie of 2005. The movie demands a great deal from the viewer, and as a result just about blows everything else away. Terrence Malick has made only 4 feature films in his career spanning over 30 years. As the slowest, quietest working writer-director, Malick is also a visionary filmmaker of the first degree. The New World, Christ, this is what movie is all about, this is what the medium of movie can do and is supposed to do. I have not seen Days of Heaven, and as far Badlands and The Thin Red Line are concerned, there are moments of greatness the kind only to be found in the best works by directors such as Coppola (Apocalyse Now) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Even if Malick never makes a movie again in his life, The New World has officially made me a Malick's fan for life.