Read My Best of the Decade!

1998 through 2007
Post Reply
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10747
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Post by Sabin »

http://www.inreviewonline.com/inrevie....11.html

Thank you, FF. My reviews of The Royal Tenenbaums and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are my favorite things

#6 -- THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson)

Wes Anderson built the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his thirty-first year. Over the next decade, he attempted to relocate it to the high seas, to India, and when, those failed, to a stop-motion underground habitrail. Can you blame him? Speaking as a significant fan of The Life Aquatic…, The Darjeeling Limited, and Fantastic Mr. Fox (fine films, all), it has become almost impossible to discuss the merits of The Royal Tenenbaums in importance to the decade without likening it – and in effect him – as a wayward Tenenbaums-savant of his own creation. His output expanded in scope and confidence exponentially from Bottle Rocket to Rushmore and to critical mass with The Royal Tenenbaums, it is becoming ever apparent that he will spend much of his career remodeling that glorious house on Archer Avenue with various pastiches.

What is so striking about The Royal Tenenbaums is that it is simultaneously the work of an artist struggling to reach his potential and yet hitting it out of the ballpark. Deadpan delivery would become standard boilerplate by the point Bill Murray was cast as Steve Zissou, but in The Royal Tenenbaums there is something messier about it and as exhilarating as Mordachai’s flight to the strains of “Hey, Jude”. Every subsequent viewing yields a new MVP. At first, it is impossible to turn away from Gene Hackman’s autumnal career tour de force, then you fall under the emo-sway of Paltrow and Wilson’s unrequited pas-de-deux, and now I find the middle-aged courtship of Danny Glover’s Henry Sherman and Anjelica Huston’s Etheline impossibly moving. Drunk on Welles, Salinger, and B-sides, Wes Anderson has created a family unit always in status, always there for us to return to with riches manifold and ever baring.



#3 -- ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry)

You work a clerk position on the 7½th floor of a non-descript building. You push aside a file cabinet and tumble into the mind’s eye of a ripe vessel. Is the world you see a lilting dream-life of benevolent mysteries, of kindred spirits awaiting celebration and the rejuvenation of the soul? Or is it a byzantine maze of ironic hardships, a Kafka-esque drudge fraught with distance and misunderstandings, the only respite found in masturbation? Film is singular. Filmmaking is collaborative. A bringing of Who’s and What’s to the table. I know very little about Sven Nykvest but there’s little doubt in my mind of the sort of common ground between he and Bergman, a veritable Swede & Sweder of Nordic wit. There are few figures I could think less aligned for communion than Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. Love, death, dreams…I have to believe that the manner in which they prepare a bowl of cereal is seismically different, with Gondry taking frequent breaks to color the walls with crayons while Kaufman pauses mid-milk pour to cry in a corner. Charlie Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a cautionary fable about two lovers who erase each other from their memories for decades on end, subsequently losing years of their lives. Michel Gondry wanted a hipster La Ronde of love dying to be reborn. Charlie Kaufman sees abstract oblivion, whereas Michel Gondry sees forgiveness in the merry loop.

If the gulf between creators is as wide as that between Björk and Brecht, so too is that wedged between Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski, who epitomize the facebook generation’s need for validation by way of amendment and erasure. The Aughties have been defined as much by mass interconnectedness as individual anonymity. Twitter, tumbler, facebook…peddlers of snark and innocuous minutiae all. In an age of incessant networking, do we truly connect? Ostensibly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place some time after “Rain Dogs”, but it reads as the love story of the decade. Joel’s sketchbook musings are not so unlike status updates, as much as Clementine’s shifts in hair color announce a change in profile or result in a google search of who does have that plum job of naming hair dyes? The Proposal be damned, Eternal Sunshine… made it cool to fall in love with a movie and in a movie again. Every few years, a movie comes along that quenches some generational thirst for romantic fulfillment, but – Chasing Amy, When Harry Met Sally…, etc. — they’re almost never this good. The exception may be Annie Hall; and whereas Woody Allen’s epic features a protagonist too static to change with his paramour, Michel Gondry’s film presents a world so plugged-in to salacious conveniences that they’re not given the chance to even remember they exist.

And yet, still they meet in Montauk. Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman – and, because this is perhaps the most collaborative great films of the decade, Jon Brion, Ellen Kuras, ELO, and, playfully inverting their personas, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet – believe that the heart perseveres the whims of the mind. In a sublimely powerful gesture, the love shared by Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski transcends technology allowing them to reconnect in person, and, in spite of all evidence presented that they are not combatable, their moments shared in person suggest a rollercoaster too enticing for any of us to let pass. Message: get the hell off-line! Okay? Okay. Change your heart…
"How's the despair?"
Franz Ferdinand
Adjunct
Posts: 1457
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2004 3:22 pm
Location: Calgary, Alberta
Contact:

Post by Franz Ferdinand »

I think the list is great, and the reviews are generous. The top 20 closely resembles something I might have come up with, but there are so many movies I've never heard of, I hope to seek them out.

GREAT review of "The Royal Tenenbaums" Sabin!




Edited By Franz Ferdinand on 1266634200
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10747
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Post by Sabin »

Check out more of the Decade in Review, including my reviews of Before Sunset AND Spirited Away. Also: SOMEBODY FUCKING COMMENT!

http://www.inreviewonline.com/inreviewonline/Decade_100_Films_-_8.html




#32 -- BEFORE SUNSET (Richard Linklater)

He’s a beatnik novelist playing daycare with his wife. She’s an environmental activist with a habit of playing training wheels for a parade of man-boys. They’re still a little too perfect for this world, but, deep into their thirties, they’re caught up in a whirlwind of compromise and knocked up with a decade of infatuation. If Before Sunrise is so adorable you can’t wait for it to be over so you can catch a train right now, then Before Sunset is goddamn magical in its belief of conversation as life-changer. The stakes in the former are idyllic, while the stakes in the latter feel nothing less than the rest of your life. It’s a movie of former-romantics who think their former selves are starry-eyed idiots – but would give an arm and a leg for one more minute. And it ends trapped in ember, as fearful of blinking and missing a moment as Before Sunrise left its angelic surrogates bleary-eyed and exhausted, on a train throttling forward to this moment. “Just in time…”


#31 -- SPIRITED AWAY (Hayao Miyazaki)

Even the notion of threat in his films is vaguely benevolent. Those of us acolyte to the works of Hayao Miyazaki extol the gorgeous hand-drawn animation and ramshackle narrative rhythms, but there is a humanism to every oddball creature populating his worlds that to watch one of his films is tantamount to putting on an afghan by the fire. None more so than Spirited Away, which doesn’t really have villains to speak of, just unpleasant cogs in the extraordinary machine that maintains an otherworldly bathhouse. Centering around a scrawny little girl whose parents gorge themselves into literal pigs, Spirited Away plays like a streamlined, and almost stream-of-consciousness precursor to Pan’s Labyrinth, and the purer fantasy. If only live-action fantasies could bolster enough courage to allow for such a sustained sense of discovery and invention without feeling the need to hedge their bets. Just around the corner there are other worlds that coincide with ours, and all it takes to fall off the planet is a little push and an open mind. Spirited Away plays like his greatest bliss-out.
"How's the despair?"
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10747
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Post by Sabin »

The decade continues onward...!

#88 -- A CHRISTMAS TALE (Arnaud Desplechin)

The epilogue of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream likens its raucous players to offending shadows, whereas Arnaud Desplechin begins with shadow-draped puppets show prologue capable of reducing a viewer to tears before its players are introduced. While its very easy to extrapolate from Desplechin’s positively vitriolic portraits of family life that the had some kind of special upbringing, his pressure-cooked masterpiece evokes Shakespeare’s raucous fantasia in its collision of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, astray over a Christmas of obligation and flights of fancy in both text and execution. There is a fearlessness to the filmmaking of Arnaud Desplechin lost on those intolerant to novelistic seams. The litmus test appears to be Desplechin’s willingness to fade during individual shots to create a living memory of a moment as watched. It’s not only in texture. One of the running themes of his career has been blurring the lines of status. Most memorably, a cancer-ridden mother and a black sheep son share a cigarette and catch up like old lovers. Only in a Desplechin film can mother and son reveal to each other that they never loved one another to begin with, and do so with a civility rarely seen west of the Atlantic.



#79 -- THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (Peter Jackson)

Allow me to break from proper review format for a moment: it’s my fault that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is on this list. Tears in a bucket, haters. For the first time since Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson has made a truly great film and one that stands atop the admittedly intoxicating shoulders of The Fellowship of the Ring. Whereas its older brother deserves a lion’s share of praise for its instant classic mythmaking, The Two Towers trades a sense of spiritual rebirth for cries for war, an intense cross-cutting narrative quite simply full of the best stuff in the series: Gandalf’s prologue plunge, Elrond’s fever-dream prophecy of Aarogorn’s death, a glorious rain-soaked climactic battle, and Golum, Golum. Golum. We live in age of cinematic smoke and mirrors, of CGI-overkill and skull-fuckery; and recall how easy it was and still is to accept Gollum as a living, breathing thing. Beyond mere craftsmanship, this entire odyssey, this sprawling epic of intimate nightmare logic, takes an emotional cue from Andy Serkis’ demented performance. You can have your mood-setting seduction of The Fellowship of the Ring or that sprawling epilogual creampie that is The Return of the King. Full of wall-to-wall set-pieces, The Two Towers is all hard-fucking, the middle child that could kick your ass!



#69 -- ESTHER KAHN (Arnaud Desplechin)

“The gestures of people always meant more to her than their words; they seemed to have a secret meaning of their own.” So reads a passage from Arthur Symons’ Spiritual Adventures, a portion of which Esther Kahn is based. As played by Summer Phoenix, Esther Kahn is an out-of-time puppet forever regarding the design of herself and others with disdain and praise often at the same time. Arnaud Desplechin understands acting as reacting, so whether or not Esther IS a great actress (itself a subjective query) is immaterial to the process in which she fills her shell with sand, and how she is perceived by others; and aiding in this fascinating narrative is the performance by human alien Summer Phoenix with a distance and curiosity such that we truly don’t know. As relentlessly fascinating it is a probe into the nature of acting, Esther Kahn is also one of the most intoxicating aesthetic experiences of the decade as Desplechin’s freewheeling filmic techniques marries a classicism of period immersion to create something both vintage and beguilingly new.



#67 -- A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (Steven Spielberg)

After pioneering the blockbuster and ballasting his artistry with Oscars, Artificial Intelligence remains the lone masterpiece in Steven Spielberg’s fascinating journeyman decade, one largely devoted to people running for answers (Minority Report), duty (Munich), safety (War of the Worlds) or living fantasy (Catch Me If You Can). Interesting then that his two worst films, The Terminal and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, represent two very different brands of stuck. After being banished from the antiseptically idyllic suburbia that ushered his programming, David runs the gamut of the aforementioned targets, the film playfully leap-frogging over myriad genres, every line of the script laced with potential queries unlike anything Spielberg has demonstrated prior as a director or writer. A work of Biblical science fiction, A.I. suggests that God is to us as we are to our mechanical progeny and will one day be viewed with as much [mistaken] reverence. Artificial Intelligence stands as a sticking place so audaciously prophetic that it’s almost fitting that its conclusion was met with the blasphemous snickering of the masses. After decades of tinkering on movies like Geppetto, making them bigger, faster, stronger, he arrives at Artificial Intelligence and has contributed something to film.



#65 -- REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (Darren Aronofsky)

Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is an opera of routine. Every device in Aronofsky’s repertoire is used to detail routine, equating life to minutiae. Is it art or is it overload? Like Natural Born Killers, Requiem for a Dream’s very existence has been debated to death, a work of mesmerizing masochism. Pretenders be damned, the triumph of Aronofsky is how he succeeds in validating the one push it takes to fall off the edge. What begins as a portrayal of two idyllic public communities (one middle-aged, tanning in the sun; the other twentysomething, shooting up in lairs), soon devolves into personal hells as dignity becomes privatized by addiction. If Requiem is remembered for something aside from visual stylization, it’s how far Ellen Burstyn falls off the planet Earth. Requiem for a Dream presents a quartet of undesirables amidst 21st Century Breakdown, but the arc of Sara Goldfarb is a heartbreaking indictment of the age we live in, how casually hope is peddled, vanity is exploited, and belief in shocked, amputated, vomited, ejaculated – and how with the right fix, we can learn to death with it.
"How's the despair?"
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10747
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Post by Sabin »

Here is my review of Almost Famous: Untitled as an Honorable Mention.


Almost Famous: Untitled (Cameron Crowe)

Released to largely indifferent audiences in the fall of 2000, Almost Famous played like a jet-lagged evocation of runaway youth watched from the outside of a fish bowl. Released on DVD with all the trimmings, Untitled is like a glorious B-Side, an epic too indulgently detail-orient to play in theaters but so clearly the work of Crowe’s career. This is not a case of added footage revealing genius of filmmaking in any way, shape, or form. Although Billy Wilder may never excuse such a tangential work of puppy dog sincerity, there must have been a scrapped outline of his coming-of-age as a Berlin taxi dancer that we will sadly never see. Crowe’s is on the screen; and at a certain point, we go to the movies to experience something we will never forget. Who wouldn’t want to peace out with a groupie and kick it with the band on Rolling Stone’s dime? I studied for my finals like a good boy and where did that get me? I’m writing about how Cameron Crowe lost his virginity. Well, played sir. And all the more so on DVD.
"How's the despair?"
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10747
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Post by Sabin »

I participated in a Best of the Decade poll and I wrote a series of reviews for my friend at In Reviews Online. Check them out! My first review of an Honorable Mention for Almost Famous.

http://web.me.com/inrevie...._1.html
"How's the despair?"
Post Reply

Return to “The 8th Decade”