Top Ten Films of 2009

On my front it was a year of much trauma, come-down, humility-by-necessity, recovery, an ongoing project involving getting right (and right-sized) w/ the God of Spinoza, and ultimately a significant geographical move from the Canadian prairie from which I was spawned to the California desert where I am currently biding my time before the next significant move of the chess pieces whose tactical manipulation on the board of the given in regards to which I have never possessed much cunning. Because much of my time has been spent in hospitals, psychiatric wards, and in and around a particularly well-know recovery center (named after a first lady), I saw significantly fewer films than would naturally suit my yen, not having been able to attend nary a single film festival (quelle horreur!). Much of the cinema of 2009 that I have missed, however, I will be catching up w/ in January during the 2010 Palm Spring International Film Festival, hopefully signifying a better year forthcoming all around in this regard (as well, bien sûr, as in others). The films I did see constituted a meager assemblage of odds and ends indeed, bespeaking a year most memorable for the disappointing offerings of a number of top-line cineastes. New works by Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Jim Jarmusch managed to curry favor from a good portion of the critics who assessed them, but certainly not from this humble cinephile. Jarmusch's The Limits of Control was particularly execrable (making that two in a row pieces of nice looking shit from him!), compensating for an absurdly thrown-together narrative jigsaw jazz improv (adding up to little more than a glib apology for art over commerce) w/ gorgeous cinematography from Cristopher Doyle and a hipster-cred avant-metal soundtrack from Boris, Sunn O))), and Earth. The Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, was just as much a goof as its fuck-you-to-spell-check of a title, and joins the overstuffed and undercooked Kill Bill diptych as a film that feels like an indulgent collection of scenes in search of a topology, so movie mad and in love w/ its own possibilities that it forgets to make good on them – and this after his hanging-out-w/-girlfriends Death Proof, a masterpiece of form, fun, and concision. The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man was amongst their best directed films but felt too often like an awkward attempt to adapt a non-existent collection of vaguely interrelated short stories into a coherent film, adding as it does in its balefully scattershot manner to the already overstuffed canon of the self-hating Jewish kvetching genre, one of the least winning in American popular culture. And its use of dream sequences was so tremendously irritating one couldn’t help but feel like their oft commented upon contempt for their characters (which only ever struck me as applying to the titular character of Barton Fink, a dude who is never really forgiven for his self-righteous shallowness in a film that I love anyway) was finally being turned upon their audience. The other film that disappointed me based on my high expectations for it, but which works significantly better in any regard than the three previously mentioned disappointments, was Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. Mann continues to frustrate me by making the best looking HD films on earth (here practically reinventing how night looks on the screen), w/ the very best action set-pieces, but continually getting so tripped up in narrative and characterization where he resorts to endless cliché, overemphasis, and has a tendency to truck in hamfisted improbabilities. It is becoming progressively clear that he will most likely be unable to make another film equal to the extraordinary Miami Vice. Finally there were the two films based on children's books by exciting and idiosyncratic American independent heroes par excellence. While I liked both Where the Wild Things Are and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I found that both of them ultimately seemed like exactly what I was expecting. Again, I feel a tad disappointed, though the fault here may primarily lie w/ myself.

These various considerations aside, there were a number of truly wonderful films that I managed to catch this year. The following constitutes the crème de la crème. I am not entirely sure that the films that comprise my top ten have all that much thematically in common. If they do, it probably has something to do, first and foremost, w/ the construction of discourses on masculinity and their problematicization in relation to various sociocultural indicators (though this clearly doesn’t apply to my choice for #1). What they all have in common w/ absolute certainty though, is that they each seemed to come into my life in the exact right place at the exact right time in order that they made that particular space and time implicitly belong to them. They are each a cinematic postcard from 2009. Their insights and particular intensities will always belong to that year and to my experience of it. I am, of course, grateful to each, and would recommend them to pretty much anyone who might ask. To be eligible for the list the only requirement is that the film had to be released theatrically somewhere in North America during 2009, which explains the four films technically from 2008.

10. Tyson

James Toback’s interactive documentary portrait of the famed and half-deranged, half-philosophic prize fighter is a quintessential American story of rags-to-riches tenacity, Sophocles-style hubris, recovery from addiction, and a truly unique ongoing oratorical manipulation of the English language. Listening to Tyson talk is almost as staggering as the life being expounded upon. An extremely sensitive product of poverty and abuse, he is tremendously volatile and at the same time uniquely vulnerable. Tyson’s ruminations shape Toback’s visually fragmented, jittering speed-of-thought film. At once tragedy and high comedy, Tyson must be seen to be believed. Though the man’s version of his transgressions and morally questionable actions is never held up to any critical distanciation, the film doesn’t pretend to be historiography. It is rather an intimate, queasily bumptious portrait that isn’t interested in humanizing so much as facilitating, even when the man shoots himself in the foot or betrays inconsistencies or troubling internal dynamics. There is something heroic about Tyson, and something too sad for words. None of it is easy or necessarily classifiable. That the daughter we see him w/, whom he clearly cherishes, was subsequently to die in an unfortunate accident does nothing to quell this powerful sensation of a man who cannot escape his tragic tendency for retraumatization. And I can think of no better film to see whilst in rehab (!).

9. The Hurt Locker

A film about war, homosociality, and the intoxication of high-tension living, The Hurt Locker is the least judgmental and most involving fiction film to yet focus on the war in Iraq. Following three members of a bomb disposal unit through their highly fraught tour of duty, the film is truly radial in its distillation of its men-only world w/ its fault lines of race, class, and temperament as a locus of sexual tension and destructive pleasure. War is both a drug and an equalizer. It makes an entire population a potential enemy. Suddenly nothing is innocent, everybody is a threat. Some people get off on the adrenaline, others get dragged under. That peacetime domestic family life is the real fear for group leader William James (amusingly named, no?) betrays where the real horror lies. Some are so hungry for war that it’s no small wonder that the species has such a hard time extricating itself from its insidious delights. Our pleasure as viewers is part of an alarming appetite that Kathryn Bigelow’s flawlessly calibrated film makes absolutely no bones about.

8. Encarnação do Demônio / Embodiment of Evil

The return of Coffin Joe is a cinematic happening way too long in the making, given glorious life in director/star José Mojica Marins’s unexpected and giddily exuberant addendum to the series that made him famous in the world of Latin American genre cinema. Zé do Caixão (a.k.a. Coffin Joe) is released after forty years in jail (it’s been about that long since the character last properly graced our screens). Returning to the transformed-for-the-worse favelas of contemporary Sao Paulo, filled w/ drugs, prostitution, and newly institutionalized police brutality, Joe is a force of evil anachronistically outdated, but still eager to find ideal female candidates to bear his demonic Nietzschean offspring. With the help of Bruno (Rui Resende), a retarded hunchbacked grave digger, he quickly picks up where he left off, hindered by a one-eyed cop, whom he deformed in an earlier outing, and a psychotic flagellant priest, Joe sets about collecting and torturing lots of extremely attractive women whilst pontificating on the nature of evil, eternal life, and transcendent pleasures of the flesh and its ritual mortification (think Nietzsche by way of Bataille by way of Count Dracula). He also acts like a pussy and engages in girlish histrionics. The hilarity of Joe, Bruno, and their campily over-the-top adversaries going about gory business in the contemporary world makes for extreme anarchic fun at the joyous expense of good taste. A playfully transgressive cinematic happening for the happily sick, the filmmakers and their cast occupying the real world of contemporary Brazil like sneaky old squatters exiled from some baroque traveling carnival.

7. The Box

The Box, a film that takes off from memories of Richard Kelly’s own childhood (the father has the same job w/ NASA that his dad had), embodies surrealist father André Breton’s notion of “pure psychic automatism” in its free-associative death-dream trip, it’s characters seeming to scuba dive through its berserker set-pieces as in an aquarium that is the frame. There is no freewill in dream as in life – only the nauseating, floating inevitable. The Box, a film about apocalypse like Kelly’s two preceding films, working out Lacan’s hypothesis that a letter always arrives at its destination in a way quite unlike any other film I have ever seen, ends w/ an extreme tenderness for all its incendiary bleakness: a death-embrace of mutual affirmation and stunted acquiescence, husband and wife intimately cooperating in the not-at-all-intimate succumbing of the whole world to the pathogen from which it can only be delivered by surrendering to total inevitable collapse. Though its narrative engine is asleep at the wheel (the film, dream-like and filtered through the child’s complicated frame of reference, fundamentally abiding by oldschool surrealist tenants), the machinery of apocalypse is no less systematically consummated for its basis in a kind of monstrous catatonia. The Box will remain, in its twilit zone of mid-seventies digital-era-dawning art-direction (Donnie Darko style), one of the most messed-up and memorable films of 2009.

6. Bakjwi / Thirst

While many films about vampires have focused on themes of contamination and addiction, none in memory has pursued the latter theme so extensively into the darkly comic realms of codependency run amok as Chan-wook Park's sexy, conceptually exhaustive pop-art opus Thirst. An immaculately designed contraption blocked out cleanly in three specifically delineated acts, the film details the secularization and sexualization of infected priest Sang-hyeon (Kang-ho Song), as he falls in love and then progressively into a state of elastic bondage w/ headstrong domestically enslaved young sexpot Tae-ju (the ethereal and potent Ok-bin Kim), the two of them transforming from careful managers of their addiction to people catastrophically out of control and violently at odds. It is a film, then, about two junkies in love who stay that way well after the love has turned as sick and as compromised as they themselves are. Its sexual politics are not so much self-generatively misogynistic (the female the equivalent of Eve, leading our male protagonist intuitively and amorally down the garden path to oblivion) as it is part of a critique of power polarities and gender roles in a Korean society that babies its men and represses female expressivity. Although we start the film relating to Sang-hyeon, the end leaves us sharing in Tae-ju’s apocalyptic anguish as the two lovers commit ritual suicide by sunlight. Withdrawing junkies really hate the sun. Even more than we worshipers at the altar of cinema!

5. Tulpan

Sergei Dvortsevoy’s slight comic fable about an awkward big-eared ex-soldier named Asa who, returning from active duty to the barren Hunger Steppe of southern Kazakhstan to hopefully start his own farm, hopes to marry the only eligible woman in the barely populated region (the unseen Tulpan of the title), is the surprise feel-good comic triumph of the year. Shot w/ roving pans and intimate handheld tracking shots by erstwhile documentary filmmaker Dvortsevoy, Tulpan takes on the impression of a cheerfully dissolute fable shot on the fly atop a strange, barren planet not entirely unlike our own, where camel, sheep, and human compete for resources and attention, and occasionally a water truck will drive past blaring “Rivers of Babylon.” W/ so little at their disposal, the filmmakers wisely make structuring absences the meat of the matter, and focus lovingly on the day-to-day drama of small lives played out on a canvas of sublime distances and gaping horizons. Dvortsevoy makes his films by living w/ his subjects for a lengthy period before shooting begins (on film instead of the more obvious choice of video, considering the removed-from-civilization conditions in which he shoots), which means that Tulpan feels very much like a film at home w/ these subjects and their struggles. This is ethnography taken to the level of epic poem. It is beautiful, funny, and moving.

4. Chi bi / Red Cliff

Dialectical-materialist history-as-parcels-of-action-and-reaction action fest Red Cliff was easily, until Avatar, the meat and potatoes cinematic spectacle-qua-spectacle entertainment of the year; a dialectical materialist network topology of object and human relations lurching forward w/ pinwheel precision, balancing epic macro and sensual micro, in its adaptation of 14th century Chinese urtext Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Shorn of half the length of the original two-part-and-nearly-five-hour Chinese release – the biggest budget film in Chinese history, as well as surpassing Titanic as that nation’s all time highest domestic grosser – John Woo’s stridently cut new version, prepared for the world beyond Asia, doesn’t seem to bowdlerize the original text so much as simply blast through it DJ style, quickening the piledriving web of intersections, scratching out new headrush breakbeats against the grain of the film’s own internal rhythms, intensifying flows instead of breaking them off. It is rare to see such a massive vision coalesce in the form of such an exited and exhaustive drawing inward – such a total, utter inhalation – of forces, resources, image-images, sound-images, action-images, from the smallest element up to the most awesome. It is so much of the world and of the flesh, in all of its flounce and bounce, that yr heart cannot help but beat along to its. Red Cliff is a blood machine. It pours it fucking everywhere. It pumps it w/ evenhanded control of the nerve meter. It works just so. And it’s a massive little adrenal treasure and a hell of a movie-movie fix.

3. Avatar

Clearly and without reservation the cinematic event of the year, Avatar did not simply live up to expectations as a cultural event and block busting megaspectacle, it managed to cultivate a new cinematographic ontology by equating its central conceit, avatars on an alien planet as the byproduct of genetic hybridization w/ their human agents who control their actions from sensory deprivation tanks on a nearby space station, w/ the immersion of its viewers, sitting back in our theater seats as our sensory-motor equipment is permitted access to the world within the spectacle both before us in one sense and all around us in another. It is clear to even the most cynical viewers, unmoved or even moved to crack wise by the film’s determinedly earnest investment in spirituality and ecology (such people will get out of life the exact nothing that they put in to it anyway), that Avatar is a sign of things to come in the image culture and marks some sort of quintessential moment in the expression of the possibilities of spectacle and its applications in an evolving landscape. I need to see it a couple more times before I write about it at any length. A sure sign that it is here to stay.

2. Bright Star

Jane Campion’s most restrained and carefully modulated film is also to my mind her greatest by far. She is a filmmaker who has long sought to shock and arouse, and what both shocks and arouses here, in her gorgeous and moving love story about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, is that she has found new and understated ways, free of cliché or affectation, to show love, devotion, and inspiration – tricky things all to visualize. This is a sublime work of steady-handed impressionism, at times even invoking the romantic Bresson of Quatre nuits d'un rêveur and the decorous lilting pageantry of a subdued Max Ophüls. Campion’s two actors, Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, give luminous, quietly enervated performances that stir you up without seizing you w/ abrupt indiscretion. They lack gumption or knowing. They are singularly incandescent and guileless, and they grow in the viewer as they do on each other. I fell in love watching this film, reliving the precise litany of sensations, from trepidation to transcendence, that this falling occasions. Bright Star in no mere biopic. It is a love story, pure and simple. A portrait of ascension. A celestial poem of cosmic grace.

1. La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris

In Frederick Wiseman magisterial La danse, a work of pure cinematic pleasure, the art of dance is not just thrown into contrast w/ the bureaucracy and consumer capitalist machinations that it requires in order to exist at all, but the smoothed, infinitely opened out spaces where the dancing is done – both the mirror-walled rehearsal spaces that reflect infinitely redoubled illusory reflections outward, and the actual stages w/ their purplish-blue spotlights terminating at a black horizon – suggest plateaus that all this under-rigging supports in the same way money, human labor, and the Lehman Brothers support it. The bodies of these incredible young people, boys and girls (like w/ most great films, I was steadfastly bisexual for the duration), are framed in such a way that we almost never see them reflected in the mirrors when they are rehearsing. They are singular and they command the attention of our entire sensory-motor apparatus. The brain and nervous system dance w/ them. In a way that is somewhat similar to kung fu movies, dancers remind us of Spinoza’s supposition that we are not yet aware of what a body is capable. Dancers are masochist, practicing a kind of bondage. What they do to their bodies to transcend what is thought of as the body, its utilitarian implementation, is staggering, and to see what they do, these beautiful, tormented bodies, atop these opened-out planes, is to witness something as primordial and elemental as the flickering of a flame. Dance is a Heracletean drug. The process of hypnotizing ourselves watching these dancers is similar to the effect produced by the pulsing, silently musical, morphological handpainted films of structuralists like McLaren (whose non-handpainted Pas de deux probably remains the most beautiful dance film ever) and Stan Brakhage w/ the added component of these sexually charged bodies, commingling bodies, bodies that will grow old and die. Wiseman’s formally exquisite documentary is one of the most gorgeous and ineluctably transcendent films I have seen in a very long time. Its beauty and precision were unmatched by anything I witnessed in 2009 by a not insubstantial margin.