THE BEST OF 2012: THE TOP 5

#5 Holy Motors (dir. Leos Carax):

Wiry French character actor Denis Lavant has been on my radar ever since his impressive contribution to Claire Denis' masterpiece Beau Travail.  His work in Holy Motors, overseen by long time collaborator/director Leos Carax, has yielded one of his best performance to date, as well as what might be the oddest film since David Lynch last made a feature (count 'em, six long years ago).  Lavant plays Monsieur Oscar, an actor of sorts driven around Paris as he prepares to play various roles in the back of white limousine.  At the end of each stage of his journey, Oscar emerges an entirely different beast, ranging from a cold killer to a bag lady, a deranged caveman, and beyond.  

Throughout Holy Motors, there are clues and reflexive statements aligning the seemingly random journey to a larger commentary on film as a technologically-based medium going through what is either a growth spurt or the beginnings of a death rattle.  At the same time, one can easily read the same cues as a statement on identity.  Carax has designed a film that is open to competing interpretations and even enjoyable if no attempts at analysis are made at all.  Has there been a more interesting and weird use of motion capture technology this year (or ever)?  I think not.  To quote a woman who saw the same screening I attended: "can anybody explain to me what THAT was about?"

Holy Motors is currently still in theaters.  Hit up Mr. Movie Times for details of when and where.


#4 The Master (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson):

Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't usually swim in the shallow end of the pool when it comes to story.  But with The Master, he's produced a film that barely seems interested in its own plot, choosing to devote excessive amounts of time to being present with its characters while slowly abandoning thread after thread of story they inhabit.  Luckily, Anderson's provided the audience with two of the more interesting characters he's ever drawn in Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).  The static created between these two men says more about what The Master truly is than any piece of exposition or connect-the-dots plotting ever could.  They are the story.

Read my review of The Master here.

The Master is scheduled for release on DVD & Blu-ray on February 26th.


#3 Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold):

Here's the rare costume drama that never feels stodgy in the least.  Still, Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights may test the patience of many viewers with its stubborn (or is it thrilling?) insistence on depicting a world without modern distractions.  However, those willing to wait it out 'til the bitter end will be amply rewarded with an exquisitely rendered take on timeless themes found both within and outside of the source material.  Wuthering Heights only furthers the suspicion that Arnold will eventually be counted as one of our greatest filmmakers.
 
Read my review of Wuthering Heights here.

Wuthering Heights is currently unavailable on DVD & Blu-ray in Region 1.  It will presumably be release on home video sometime in 2013 in the U.S.


#2 5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi):

Back in April, I wrote that, "I don't think I've seen a more affecting documentary this year than Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi's 5 Broken Cameras."  It's still true.  There hasn't been a week all year that I haven't thought about this film at least once.  I could say a lot more about it, but, really, everyone should just watch it instead.

Read my review of 5 Broken Cameras here.

5 Broken Cameras is scheduled for release on DVD on January 15th.


#1 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan):

I viewed Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia just before it screened at last year's Portland International Film Festival.  I knew that night that there was little chance that I'd encounter another film that could top it in 2012, despite there being ten months left in the year.  When writing about it later, I hinted that the plot of the movie is a diversion from what the film is actually about.  Most films about a search for a body at night wouldn't stray far from the urgency of that charge.  Ceylan's film turns the floodlights directly on the men carrying out the search.   

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia tells us more about those men than anything related to the crime being investigated.  A completely original, utterly patient, and truly satisfying tale.  It's a stone-cold masterpiece; one for the ages.

 

Read my review of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia here. 

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is currently available on DVD & Blu-ray and can be streamed via Netflix.

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WUTHERING HEIGHTS: THE SMELL OF THE EARTH, THE WARMTH OF THEIR BODIES

It's safe to say that Emily Brontë's famed 1847 novel Wuthering Heights has seen more that its fair share of screen adaptations; IMDb lists fifteen such entries .  Somehow, I'd only seen the 1939 William Wyler version with Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, and David Niven, a rather flowery, stiff affair that carries the strong whiff of being based on important literature.  That early version tells the story, but little else is conveyed by its capable performers and workmanship-like production.

When it was announced some time back that Andrea Arnold's next film would be a new take on Wuthering Heights, it seemed an odd fit.  Her work on Fish Tank and Red Road had shown her to be one of the most promising contemporary directors on the British scene, garnering positive comparisons to the social realist cinema of Ken Loach.  But how, exactly, would the application of her most lauded techniques--the use of handheld cameras, wide-open, dialogue-free spaces, and an emphasis on the environments in which her characters live--work when set against a 19th century period piece?  Incredibly well, it turns out.

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights isn't like most period pieces.  If there's a comparison to be had, it's with Jane Campion's last feature, the magnificently composed Bright Star.  Both pieces shed the sterility so often associated with costume dramas, dirtying up the clothing worn by the characters and allowing period dialogue to flow from the actors mouths in an organic manner that communicates both its basis in reality and its meaning.  It's an approach that offers a sense of life to what might otherwise come off as nothing more than filmed theater.

As with her prior projects, Arnold's take on this material engages deeply with issues of class and gender.  She's also recast Brontë's Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as the younger version, James Howson as the elder one) as Afro-Carribbean, adding a telling analysis of racial inequity via Heathcliff's struggle to seen by his adopted family and loved openly by his Catherine (Shannon Beer as an adolescent, Kaya Scodelario as an adult).

None of these concerns are forced, as Arnold integrates everything into a film that quietly watches over the lives of these people, observing their emotional lives and circumstances, rather than placing the audience into a formally set stage where the actors project performative representations of lives lived.  Arnold slowly paints these characters in additive strokes that cumulatively forms the framework for her retelling of the story.

Highly supportive to this bold vision is the work of cinematographer Robbie Ryan who has crafted the best version of the visual style they've been exploring during his long-running collaboration with Arnold.  Ryan's camera imparts the chill of the landscape, the smell of the earth, and the warmth (and great lack thereof) of the bodies that roam these spaces.  When Heathcliff sorrowfully lies back in the pouring rain, there's a sense of danger and urgency promoted by the imagery that's palpable to the senses.

Fish Tank was the best film I saw in 2010.  Wuthering Heights is among a handful of titles from 2012 that I expect to be thinking about and revisiting for years to come.  Andrea Arnold is more than just a promising talent; she may be the best working director out there.  Wuthering Heights, like all of her films thus far, isn't fashioned for those expecting quick thrills, easy explanations, or happy endings, but it is a great work of art made at a time where, more and more, art films seem to be falling out of fashion.  My advice: resist giving in to your reservations about slow cinema, period dramas, and art films.  Wuthering Heights may not be for everyone, but to my own set of aesthetic sensibilities, it's exactly the kind of cinema that I want to see when I go to the movies.

Highly recommended.

Wuthering Heights begins its run at Cinema 21 on Friday, October 12th.  More info available here.

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PIFF 35 Preview: SNOWTOWN

In the overall realm of indie drama, there's the gritty stuff and then there's Snowtown, an Australian feature that makes darkly-themed masterpieces like Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank seem almost lighthearted in comparison.  First time director Justin Kurzel shows an unflinching resolve to tell his story without compromises; a choice that means that many people will not make it all the way to the end of his debut film.  For what it's worth, it's an incredibly well-crafted but, ultimately, bleak and disturbing picture.

Let's quickly go over the details: Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) lives with his mother, Elizabeth (Louise Harris), and his brothers in a run down hovel.  Not long after Elizabeth unwisely leaves her boys in the care of a neighborhood pedophile, she begins a relationship with John (Daniel Henshall), whose unhealthy obsession with retribution against sex offenders is an early indicator of his own violent dysfunction.  John and Jamie rapidly hit a dynamic that mimics a father-son relationship, promising Jamie a respite from his otherwise bleak existence, that is, until John places a gun in his hand, demanding that he become an accomplice in the first of many unthinkable tasks.

Snowtown is based on the true story of John Bunting, a notorious Australian serial killer, whose extreme hatred for homosexuals and pedophiles led him to perpetrate a series of crimes known as the Snowtown murders.  Although it's focused on Bunting's crimes, the story is relayed almost entirely from Jamie's perspective, which means the viewer is given just the contours of Bunting's malevolence at first, providing a Hitchcockian tension to the film that, once the threat has been fully substantiated, fills the audience with fearful apprehension about what lies ahead.

It's also worth noting the overall aesthetic at play here.  I mentioned Fish Tank at the beginning of the review.  Like that film, Snowtown draws heavily from Ken Loach's strategies for social realist storytelling, handheld camerawork mingles with an undressed sense of poverty-stricken places and the disenfranchised people who occupy them.

Because Kurzel's film is about a serial killer, the overall result of the realist approach couldn't be farther from other movies dealing with the same phenomenon; unlike Hollywood blockbusters about serial killers, this film doesn't romanticize or glorify its monster.  Contrasted with examples of the genre like American Psycho or Natural Born Killers, Snowtown is truly capable of inspiring a horrified recoil in the viewer, especially in those willing to stick with it and ponder the unmitigated evil being depicted here.

It's an incredibly potent and self-assured debut film, exceptionally nihilistic in its worldview and containing hypnotic, career-making performances from both Pittaway and Henshall.  It's also one of the darkest films I've ever seen at a festival, presenting sequences involving incest, pedophilia, torture, murder, animal abuse, etc.  Consider yourself warned.

Snowtown will screen for the public at the Lloyd Mall 6 on Feb. 24th at 6:30pm and at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 25th at 8:30pm. 

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Exceptional films from years past

I've spent a lot of time this week writing about the films that are about to play at this year's Portland International Film Fest.  Here's a short list of some of the best films I've caught at the annual fest (mind you, I've only been living in PDX for about 6 years now):

The Bothersome Man dir. Jens Lien from Norway:

Silent Light dir. Carlos Reygadas from Mexico:

Lights in the Dusk dir. Aki Kaurismäki from Finland:

The Edge of Heaven dir. Fatih Akin from Germany:

The Visitor dir. Thomas McCarthy from the United States:

Taxidermia dir. György Pálfi from Hungary:

Shotgun Stories dir. Jeff Nichols from the United States:

Afghan Muscles dir. Andreas Dalsgaard from Denmark:

Red Road dir. Andrea Arnold from England:

Fish Tank dir. Andrea Arnold from England:

Chronicle of an Escape dir. Adrián Caetano from Argentina:

Forever dir. Heddy Honigmann from the Netherlands: