10. Monster House
Occasionally a genre film will so thoroughly break from conventions that one cannot help but take notice. Leave it to Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, creators of Scud: Disposable Assassin, Channel 101, and Heat Vision & Jack to craft such a film out of a tired, boring genre like the animated kids film. Recalling the kids-in-peril adventures from the 1980s like The Goonies or Flight of the Navigator, Monster House returns us to a point in time where films entertained children by scaring them. It’s a dangerous world out there, but the recent movies for children have attempted to obscure it and shelter children within an ultra-safe fantasy land. Harmon and Schrab are products of a media culture which never once backed down from the unpleasantness of the world outside, and they both realize that kids want to know about that world. The catharsis within films for children comes not from characters reacting to a utopia, but rather from those characters surmounting the difficulties of a harsh and unforgiving reality. Every kid knows that life is hard, and they want their heroes to tell them it’s possible to rise above. Monster House returns us to that grand tradition, pitting its adolescent protagonists against impossible odds, and letting them work their own way out of them. It’s what films for kids should be.9. Rocky Balboa
Defying all odds, Rocky once again goes the distance in a big way, erasing any bad memories of Rocky V that any of us may have still been harboring. The film works because it’s not a carbon copy of the Rocky formula we’ve come to know. Instead of focusing on a bad guy like Ivan Drago or Clubber Lang, it’s Rocky’s fears and regrets that drive the action. This is an old man’s picture, the story of what happens after the good times have gone and the glory has faded. Only an icon like Stallone could have delivered this film with the necessary weight that the story deserves, tying it to the Balboa we’ve seen move through five previous movies. After several films of over-the-top sprawl, Rocky returns to its original moral: life doesn’t end like a fairy tale. All that we can ask is that we surmount life’s trials, and come out of them with respect for ourselves. In conveying that message, in showing that even a man haunted by the ghosts of his past can regain his dignity, Rocky Balboa is an unmitigated triumph.
8. Wordplay
Like Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom, both of which made my list in previous years, Wordplay is a competitor’s documentary. It brings us the kind of visceral thrill that any sort of fabricated effects picture can’t, pitting real people against each other in arcane contests that should not be half as entertaining as they are. Focused on word puzzles, specifically the New York Times Crossword, Wordplay brings excitement and vitality to these challenges that do not exist in the printed page.
The first half, interviewing everyone from Jon Stewart to President Clinton, crafts a wonderful explanation as to why these puzzles are so addictive, while the second brings us to a competition where the greatest puzzle-solvers on Earth finish crosswords in record time. The film is pure documentary at its finest, and also a great template for the inspirational sports film. You’ll probably find yourself trying to beat the puzzle masters to solving the hardest clues in the film, and you’ll probably be wrong. That’s just it, though; despite its rather mundane subject matter, the film gets you to pick favorites and cheer along with its word mavens. I can’t think of a greater success for a documentary than that.
7. Idiocracy
There’s no doubt about it: 20th Century Fox totally pussied out. Why else would most of America only get to see this film five months after its initial release in six (six!) theaters? It’s because this is the most all-encompassing satire ever made. It doesn’t single out the tobacco industry, like Thank You for Smoking, or just go after intolerant honkeys like Borat: Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakstan. No, Idiocracy hates all of you, and makes no bones about stating it over and over again. One-man band Mike Judge thinks every person in America is a lazy, ignorant, stupid slob, and he’s none too happy about that. Judge theorizes that, on our current trend, America will become a place that waters its crops with Gatorade, holds childrens’ parties at a restaurant called “Buttfuckers,” and watches a television program entitled OW! My Balls! This is the intellectual nightmare scenario that Luke Wilson, playing appropriately the world’s most average man, is thrust into, and for eighty glorious minutes we can indulge in the insane sight gags and rambunctious drivel that spews forth from the mouths of the dumbasses who inhabit the world of 2505. It’s absolutely terrifying, because this future is incredibly plausible. It’s also very funny. And if you don’t love it, then your shit’s retarded, and you talk like a fag.
6. Thank You for Smoking
Do you want to know why this film did so well on the independent circuit? It had nothing to do with artistry, starpower, or message. It was a hit because this picture has balls the size of Wisconsin. After so many films end up pulling their punches and wimping out with a socially acceptable ending, it was refreshing to see a film which was unbelievably mean from beginning to end. Some characters don’t have any soft edges, and back in the studio era these were often called heroes. Nick Naylor is human scum, but it doesn’t make him any more unrepentantly nasty than Sam Spade or Rhett Butler. Audiences go to movies to see something new and exciting, and then live it vicariously through the characters. If a film pulls the rug out from under the audience and changes what the characters are all about, then the overall impact of the film is cheapened. There is no such thing as the third-act repentance in Thank You for Smoking, and the film reaches a coherent and thoughtful end by never reaching for one. It’s honest in its convictions, and more than willing to kick the audience around in search of a good time.
5. The Fountain
Years after the project was originally announced, The Fountain limped into theaters with a new lead actor and a severely diminished budget, after which it promptly disappeared. This short theatrical run with hopefully one day be regarded as one of cinema’s greatest crimes; The Fountain deserves to be seen in the biggest theater possible.
Darren Aronofsky has proven that he has total control over his aesthetic and storytelling abilities, crafting a beautiful and original film. It is also one of the few true science-fiction pictures to make its way into theaters in recent years, joining Serenity and Solaris in advancing sci-fi themes into filmic constructs. The storyline, bouncing the viewer between three time periods and three startlingly different performances by Hugh Jackman, echoes the best works of mid-fifties science fiction in its concept. Each of Jackman’s characters are struggling with the possibility of eternal life in one fashion or another, and the reoccurring motifs in each time period reflect this eternity. Every inanimate object exists within each of the three stories in one form or another, drawing visual clues about the way that each of these characters are intertwined. There is no twist ending to this tale, because the twists are spread all around the picture. At ninety-six minutes, the film seems like more of an epic than the three-hour major behemoths, because Aronofsky knows how to pack more information into a single frame than most of his peers. The picture is dense, complicated, and mesmerizing. I expect that I will be returning to it many times over the years.4. The Illusionist
Like some strange relic from the past, The Illusionist is the film that F.W. Murnau would have made if he had survived the car crash in 1931. Heavily based in the tenets of German Expressionism, the film is gorgeous and astonishing, looking completely different that any work that has made it to theaters since the end of World War II. Cinematographer Dick Pope, who has garnered an Oscar nomination for his work here, uses the iris control system which was retired when Fritz Lang fled Germany, and which became an evolutionary dead-end when the jump was made to Technicolor.
The fact that Pope was able to find a way for this to work in a full-color environment is astonishing, and should revitalize this school of cinematography. He was not the only one reaching back into the past, as each of the main performances channels a great actor of Hollywood’s golden age. Imagine this film made in 1936, with Robert Donat and Claude Rains replacing Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, and you will get an idea of the feel of these performances. This is not a slight towards the actors, all of whom exceed their previous career high points (especially Jessica Biel, who needs a better agent), nor is it any kind of criticism. It is brought up here only to demonstrate that this film deosn’t feel like it belongs in this era. This should be a movie that students have poured over for decades, picking the scenes apart and wondering exactly why it works. Instead, we receive it now, having to play years of catchup. No matter the decade in which it was released, The Illusionist is grand entertainment, clear and consise where The Prestige, a near-identical film in plot and tone, was muddled and overblown. More films could learn from its example, returning to early age of movies to figure out what really works.
3. Stranger than Fiction
Meanwhile, somewhere in between fact and fiction, a less-than-extraordinary man named Harold Crick is attempting to avoid a death which is swift, merciless, and meant to immortalize someone totally other. Harold, you see, is a character in a novel, and he is heading towards what’s referred to as an “imminent demise.” The problem here is that Harold is also very real, and he has just broken out of his mundane life and figured out his reasons for living. He’s trying to be extraordinary, but the last step in that process is blocked by the writer, a woman who is also fumbling towards historical legitimacy. What happens when the paths of these two individuals cross, and they find that one path to greatness will most obviously result in a languishing obscurity for the other? Working like some kind of demented cousin of this year’s Robert Altman entry, Fiction takes a quicker route to solving the central problem of that film: no one is going to be told to remember you, so you must write the legacy for yourself. Live for now, love who you want to, and do what you have to in order to secure your place in history. If you think you know how the story must end, then think again. An inspiring and constantly inventive tale, Fiction is also filled to the brim with great performances.
2. A Prairie Home Companion
Robert Altman, a man of tenacious will and uncompromising vision, made thoroughly unconventional films. He went in the public’s mind from classic (MASH) to forgotten (Quintet) to utterly disastrous (Popeye). It really didn’t matter how his films were received, though, because there would always be another one in a year or two to completely redefine what we thought about the man. Unlike the other auteurs who left their mark upon every project they touched, Altman never let his camera and style rule over the material, instead letting the subject dictate where his camera was going. He was fond of the tracking shots, of ensemble casts, of overlapping dialogue, and these traits served his final film well.
A fictionalized look behind the scenes of Garrison Keillor’s fantastic radio program, A Prairie Home Companion is in many respects the quintessential Altman film. A microcosm of interesting people in incredible situations, Keillor’s script is full of meandering conversations which at first appear to go nowhere before reaching a moment of epiphany that rivals any big-budget explosion or overreaching plot twist. Every character is interesting, and we’d be glad to follow any of them through their own film. The performances, too, not only recall Altman’s classic Nashville but also demonstrate the director’s fascination with the captured moment. These are unique performances, one time only, and the director feels it is duty to record them for posterity. The most fascinating thing about the film, though, is the central theme of death that encompasses the narrative: the broadcast is going off the air, a performer has croaked backstage, and a woman who claims to be the Angel of Death continually shows up at the theater. One line of dialogue resonates through all of these points: “I don’t want people to have to be told to remember me.” At its core, A Prairie Home Companion is all about what is left of us after we die. Have we led a life worth remembering? All of us can hope so, but there is no way to dictate how we are memorialized after death. When we are gone, all that is left of us are the works we complete and the memories our friends and neighbors carry with them. We do not write our own eulogies; all we can hope to do is achieve our goals, to do so thorough a job with our life’s work that the world cannot help but look back and take notice of our place in society. At the end of one of the most storied careers in film history, Robert Altman had undoubtedly achieved that. No one will have to be told to remember him.
1. Children of Men
Every once in a while we are privy to a film which actually daring. Now, I’m not referring to the milquetoast Hollywood daring which permeates every award season (Saving Private Ryan, Crash, Pleasantville, Million Dollar Baby, and about a thousand others), but rather a quiet daring which, while unassuming, completely annihilates the way we think about film. It’s happened once more with Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron’s reworking of P.D. James’ novel. Children is to film what Let It Bleed was to the rock album or Hill Street Blues was to television, as it presents a soaring and confrontational alternative of the accepted conventions of the genre. Cuaron’s vision of a dying world is remarkably assured, planned unto the last detail and presented in a style which is choreographed within an inch of its life. Take, for example, the action scenes: in a move which is sure to be imitated ad infinitum for the next five years, Cuaron presents these sequences in one fluid shot, never once allowing for a change in perspective to break the tension. The whole film follows this style, building upon building for its entire running time, giving the movie the sensation of a ninety-minute panic attack. Even if one knows the ending going in, and I would suggest going into the theater knowing as little as possible, the desperation of the surroundings forces the viewer into a hypnotic state of shock, gripping at the edge of the seat and praying that everything’s going to turn out all right. Time may allow me to write about the film at length, providing this forum with a more complex rendering of my thoughts instead of the jumbled words which preceded. Right now, though, I can only pay the highest compliment possible to Children of Men: I believed. Not one thought was paid to plot contrivances, stylistic flourishes, or performance mannerisms. As far as I was concerned, these were real people in real trouble. I left the theater in a daze, still enveloped by the world of the film and nearly worn out by the ride on which I had been taken. Perfectly conceived and executed, Children of Men is great beyond reason.
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