The Year in Film

As much as a number of my colleagues seem to be convinced that 2005 was a great year for film-going, I remain somewhat unimpressed by the quality of new work which I saw during the previous twelve months. To say this is not to imply that there was a dearth of films worthy of mention as one of the year's best: I was reasonably satisfied with the quality of all ten films I mentioned for my Senses of Cinema ten best list which I submitted a couple of weeks ago, even before I saw an eleventh which I feel definitely deserves mention (which I will in my 'top 11' to follow). However, it is my belief that there has been noticeably few all-time great films released in the past three or four years. Put another way, I would say of the half-dozen or so best films that have been made since the conclusion of the 90s, only one was made after 2001 (and that was 2002's Russian Ark). And concerning these masterpieces -- Yi Yi, Werckmeister Harmonies, The House of Mirth, In the Mood for Love, I'm Going Home, Mulholland Drive, Spirited Away, Russian Ark -- I'm not sure any (save the first) would rate with the half dozen or so best films of the previous decade, which were in a few cases were made by the same directors (Edward Yang, Bela Tarr, Wong Kar-wai, Manoel de Oliveira) who had made clearly superior films during the prior ten years.

All of this is to wonder whether we are beginning to find ourselves between generations of great filmmakers -- as we did, I would submit in the late 70s and early 80s before the Asian new wave which was ushered in by such talents as Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tian Zhunagzhuang, John Woo, Takeshi Kitano and Hayao Miyazaki. Perhaps my number one will prove to be the first great film by one of the next generation's greatest artists, Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Perhaps Lisandro Alonso and his Argentine cinema will become this decade's [early] Abbas Kiarostami and Iran? Perhaps Lucile Hadzihalilovic will experience a peak comparable to Jane Campion's in the early to mid 90s? Hopefully, 2005 will prove ultimately to be the beginning of something new, not the trough that seems from its final days.

Here they are, the eleven best films of 2005 (1-10 in order of preference, plus an 11th not in order):

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 04)
2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 04)
The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 04)
Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 04)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
L'Enfant (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 04)
13 Lakes (James Benning, 04)

And the eleventh that I saw after my initial submission of the list:
Caché (Michael Haneke)

(For more detailed analyses of the best of these, see my annual annotated 'ten best' lists with a 2005 version to follow sometime next year.)


Then again, it was less the above films that truly rewarded my love of film this year than it was the rarely-screened silent, classical & post-classical Japanese pictures I saw as part of "The Beauty of the Everyday: Japan's Shochiku Company at 110," "Early Autumn: Masterworks of Japanese Cinema from the National Film Center, Tokyo," "The IFC Center's Weekend Classics," and "Naruse: The Unknown Master." For this cinephile, 2005 was the year of classical Japanese film in New York. It is only fitting that the best of these celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this past year.

Here are fifteen of the best:

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 55)
Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka, 37)
Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 69)
Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Naruse, 35)
Sound of the Mountain (Naruse, 54)
Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 36)
Scattered Clouds (Naruse, 67)
Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 60)
The Whole Family Works (Naruse, 39)
Ornamental Hairpin (Shimizu, 41)
Flowing (Naruse, 56)
Every Night Dreams (Naruse, 33)
Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi, 48)
Our Neighbor Miss Yae (Yasujiro Shimazu, 34)
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Shimizu, 33)

New Film: Brokeback Mountain & The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Over the past two days, Ang Lee's gay-themed western, Brokeback Mountain, has been named the year's best picture and Lee best director by both the New York and the Los Angeles film critics circles. Add to these honors record-setting box office (per-screen for a live action film) and the only thing that appears to stand between 'Brokeback and an Academy 'best picture' statuette seems to be a giant ape. If Lee's film therefore seems to represent the latest blue-state victory in America's on-going culture wars, it is a success predicated upon the [well-groomed] middle-brow sensibilities of America's urban tastemakers. Not so much a film for the masses, Ang Lee sets his sights on the mass of elites for whom prohibitions on gay marriage smack of being today's equivalent of Jim Crow.

This is to neither praise nor damn Brokeback Mountain, even if much of Lee's support would seem commensurate with the film's political stance. The quality (or lack, as in this instance) of Lee's film rests in its negotiation of the terms of its generic origins. This is to say that Brokeback Mountain's ultimate failures can be traced to its inadequate engagements with the western and queer cinema. To the first, in particular, it is worth observing that Brokeback Mountain fails to employ landscape in any fashion other than for its ability to give two lovers cover for their illicit affair. In this way, Lee eschews the pictorial and iconographic values of the western landscape in exchange for narrative expedience. While this alone does not preclude 'Brokeback from taking its place among the canon of westerns -- Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks) for instance uses a similarly indescript space as per the director's programmatic artlessness -- Lee combines this visual imperviousness with a glibness towards the geographic West manifesting itself in Anne Hathaway's teased hair and her Texas farm implement magnate father's insistences that a young boy must watch football if he is going to ever grow up to become a man. All of this is to say that Mr. Lee shows no affection for the setting of his film.

However, lest it be said that Brokeback Mountain is not fundamentally a western, as apparently the director has claimed, Lee does hold to the basic homo-social structure of the genre (at least for the film's first half). Indeed, 'Brokeback proceeds according to the suggestion that the ties of fraternity which play such a defining role in the history of the genre are irreducibly possessed of a latent homosexuality. In so doing, Lee does not so much revise his genre of choice as underscore its political deficiencies (just as Far From Heaven [Todd Haynes, 2002] indicates a need to revise Sirk which frankly I don't see). Ultimately, it is easy to see why Lee decided to make a film in a genre for which he has little regard in a geographical location he likes even less: because it allows him to score easy points with his middle-brow crowd; this is a film made to make those that agree with it feel morally superior.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers red-state safe, mass entertainment in a richly sketched, lovingly-crafted space which is already well-known to millions of young readers. As a former reader of the 'Chronicles myself, let me attest to the justice that Adamson has done to Lewis' children's classic. Indeed, I would use that last word, "classic," or better yet instant children's classic, to describe the results of Adamson's adaptation. One can imagine that this version of the beloved first volume will introduce future generations to Lewis' stories, while giving its many readers the satisfaction of seeing Lewis' world come to CGI life.

Of course, The Chronicles of Narnia are no less imbued with a perspective than is Lee's film; nevertheless, Lewis' (and now Adamson's) Christian allegory allows its viewer a space that is absent in Brokeback Mountain. Surely there is Aslan, the Christ-figure, who dies for the sins of the young Edmund (in betraying his siblings for the fleeting pleasures of Turkish Delight) before rising again to liberate the people of Narnia from eternal winter; and certainly there is the faith of young Lucy which offers a prototype for Christian faith. Yet, there is also the pagan iconography of Lewis' and Adamson's world and its unmistakable critique of fascism (its World War II setting, Narnia's secret police force) which allow for separate readings -- quite unlike Lee's propagandic denunciation of society.

Yes, those with a penchant for the Christian faith will see Aslan's suffering servant as a propitiation for the children's and possibly their own sins, while those without will encounter a narrative filled with wonder and magic -- quite literally. Part of this magic, to be sure, rests in the performances that Adamson summons from Tilda Swinton (there will never be a more perfect White Witch) and the children, particularly Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie. Indeed, it is the wonder and the pathos of her performance that truly sustains Adamson's Narnia -- a wonder shared by anyone who has fancied themselves to be Lucy or Susan or Peter or even Edmund.

It is curious then that it is in Lewis' tale that we find characters who are flawed but whom ultimately attain redemption, and not in Lee's very grown up piece of Oscar-baiting, where no enlightened member of the audience is to blame. It is society itself, and one which is comfortably distant (in time and space) from its New York and Los Angeles advocates, which is at fault; would that they would have just allow these two men to be happy together -- and would that we might do the same today. To take my cue from Lewis and not Lee, let me just ask which is closer to the truth: is everyone else to blame or sometimes are we ourselves at fault? And if society was as we would like it, would the attainment of happiness be a simple matter of knowing ourselves?

New Film: The Ice Harvest

Entering the final month of 2005, it has suddenly become clear to me just how atrocious this past eleven months have been for new American cinema. Aside from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's masterful A History of Violence and German madman Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, it seems reasonable to me that the modest virtues of Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest may just make it the second or third runner-up on what is thus far a dismal list (save us Brokeback Mountain and The New World). Indeed, it is only the former that will figure on my year end's top ten list, not that that says anything for the relative quality of Hollywood. For 2002, for instance, I would not include a single American-financed film among my ten best (though again there is a Cronenberg film, Spider) even if I could name perhaps a half dozen very good films which I prefer to everything but A History of Violence and Grizzly Man this season. The point in this is that one, much of the best of world cinema happens outside the U.S.; and two, usually we fare quite a bit better -- Hollywood-wise -- than we have in 2005.

So, yes, if you've confined yourself to Hollywood pictures this year, by choice or circumstance, you most likely have convinced yourself that there are no good movies out there... and largely, you're correct.
However, as I have said, there are modest virtues to be witnessed in the John Cusack-Billy Bob Thorton headliner, The Ice Harvest, which opened nationwide last week to below average reviews and an indifferent public -- judging by the poor box office. What critics and audiences have missed in passing over the über-cruel comedy cum neo-noir is this year's most extravagant reinterpretation of genre, in this case the Christmas film, even if the Ramis-helmer may at times seem like Bad Santa (2003) redux or a Coen Brothers retread.

In the Groundhog Day director's favor, however, is what might be judged to be the fuller reversal of genre (even if it can't equal Bad Santa's wicked pleasures) and the more generous picture, as it avoids the condescension of the Coen's, however nihilistic Ramis' perspective may be. The point is that The Ice Harvest operates according to a spatial logic that catalogues those places that Christmas movies tend to elide -- bars, strip-clubs... okay, lots of strip-clubs, etc. -- and a set of details that seem to cut against the holiday's mythical grain, be it Oliver Platt's Christmas Eve binge-drinking and subsequent purging, Thorton's porn video and even the (freezing) rainstorm itself, which Ramis snidely and economically introduces during the opening credit sequence with a few drops falling on a nativity Christ child. These are people and places which exist -- on Christmas just as they do anytime else -- but typically have no place in your typical Christmas movie... and rightfully so, one could argue.

Nevertheless, Ramis' Bad Santa set-up (which is surely the epochal film in this sub-subgenre) gives way to a Fargo (1996) or A Simple Plan (1998) without the accents -- or more importantly, given that we are talking about Witchita and not Minneapolis, the snow.
Consequently, Ramis reminds us of his postmodern street-cred by giving us another generic mash-up, just as he presaged Pulp Fiction a decade earlier with his experimental Groundhog Day-time structure. Still, it is less the director's adept generic/tonal shift than it is the cohesiveness of his heterocosm that marks The Ice Harvest as noteworthy new Hollywood cinema. The very fact that The Ice Harvest engages our sense of narrative expectation, let alone the rigor of its conceit, provides its anomaly in the wasteland that has been 2005.