Films of the Decade – Part VII: No.5 – No.1

Part I is drinking your milkshake over here.

Part II is frying up a slice of fried gold here.

Part III is talking some jive like you’ve never heard here.

Part IV wants you to accept the mystery here.

Part V asks how can a train be lost? It’s on rails here.

And Part VI wishes it could quit you right here.

What, no Amelie? (too cutesy) No Elephant? (too obtuse) No Team America: World Police (too cowardly – Alec Baldwin a bigger global threat than Donald Rumsfeld?) There Will Be Blood sounds more like a threat than a suggestion for a missing selection. Still, as I mentioned way back at the beginning, the only way to do these lists is to choose the films that most affected you personally, not those that might affect your credentials professionally. And I hope there’s still plenty of films in here that share a special place in many other people’s hearts, and those that they might now discover as a result. Happy viewing. And see you in ten…

5)            BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

Dir: Ang Lee  Scr: Diana Ossana & Larry McMurtry

Stars: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams

John Wayne would presumably be spinning in his grave, which is just another good reason to celebrate what, for me, was the decade’s greatest forbidden love story. Ang Lee’s fascination with repressed, self-denying passion achieved its creative peak adapting E. Annie Proulx’s acclaimed short story about two lovelorn gay cowboys (actually sheep-herders). Too fussy and tasteful for those who presumably wanted Heath Ledger to lube up Jake Gyllenhaal with tobacco spit in looming close-up, it’s easy to forget just how subversive Brokeback Mountain’s use of Western imagery is. This isn’t sweet, opera-loving Tom Hanks suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia; these are two virile, taciturn, horse-riding cowboys (OK, sheepherders), the ultimate signifiers of American masculinity, suddenly riding, well, you get the drift.

If Brokeback were only about sexually political point scoring, it would have soon faded from view. It resonates because, though dealing with homosexuality, its tragedy is a more universal, human one: the inability to live openly and express our truest desires. It’s that rarity where all creative elements coalesce and synergise: Gyllenhaal and especially the late Ledger’s clenched, soul-baring performances, Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry’s spare, sensitive screenplay, plaintive Gustavo Santoalla theme ‘The Wings’ and of course, Lee’s expressive imagery – Ledger’s Ennis silhouetted against 4^th of July fireworks; and the final shot of a dead lover’s checked shirt literally placed gently back in the closet, the unforgiving Montana wilderness visible through the adjacent grubby trailer window; a tragic reminder of the harsh reality of modern America’s cultural landscape.

Brokeback Mountain Clip: Reunion Kiss

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L.I.E (2001)

Dir: Michael Cuesta  Scr: Cuesta, Gerald Cuesta & Stephen M. Ryder

Stars: Paul Dano, Brian Cox, Billy Kay

The title stands for Long Island Expressway, that snaking suburban conduit, but the other reading is equally apparent, as Paul Dano’s numbed teenager struggles with a recently killed mother, absent father and reconciling his confused sexuality by cruising and breaking and entering. After a botched robbery, he gets embroiled with an avuncular ex-Marine and pederast named Big John (Cox) – and that’s where Michael Cuesta’s provocative story, while never shying away from taboo material, veers into totally unexpected, empathic terrain. Featuring an unsettling, criminally unsung, career-best performance from Cox, this is American indie filmmaking at its most daring and surprising.

L.I.E Trailer:

4)            THE INCREDIBLES (2004)

Dir & Scr: Brad Bird

Voices: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson

This decade’s vogue for onscreen superheroes – given the dearth on offer in real-life – produced some quality entries: Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2, The Dark Knight (first sequels, shorn of all origin exposition, are usually superior). But the ‘superest’ of them all isn’t based on an existing comic-book series; it doesn’t even feature live-action or, voices aside, real people. And yet the billions of pixels that make up Brad Bird’s The Incredibles feel more alive than any superhero movie ever made. Bird is Pixar’s maverick, a volatile talent (The Iron Giant) to push the studio’s established ‘Brain Trust’, for ever-higher standards. Indeed, his two Pixar movies to date, this and Ratatouille, are all about celebrating excellence and not letting politically correct tokenism triumph. In that respect, Bird’s film more than lives up to its name.

Set in a retro-60s, Bond-esque world, it’s the story of a family of ‘supers’, once national heroes and now driven underground by public disapproval, seeking to recapture their youth, identity – and family connection. It’s how these two strands brilliantly play out in tandem (powers that reflect each person’s character – Elastigirl / Mum’s flexibility, shy teenage daughter Violet’s invisibility, etc) that gives the film its dramatic momentum, while the inventive slapstick, adrenalized action and witty humour, notably movie-hijacking fashionista Edna Mole (voiced by Bird himself), send entertainment levels rocketing. Genuinely cinematic (the clever mock-documentary opening), admirably adult and a celebration of all that can make us super humans, if not superhuman. With or without capes, dahling.

The Incredibles Clip: “No Capes!”

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FEMME FATALE (2002)

Dir & Scr: Brian DePalma

Stars: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote

If a superhero alias is often about conjuring escape from one’s mundane daily life then Brian DePalma’s gleefully lurid exploitation thriller is the super-villain wish fulfilment movie by way of Alfred Hitchcock. Starring leggy, mischievous Rebecca Romijn(-nee Stamos) in a rare lead role that proves she should be offered more, what first seems like a DePalma goof-off, a chance for him to practise slinky steadicam moves in glamorous locations (see the opening Cannes Film Festival heist), slowly uncoils itself to reveal a densely-packed mosaic on split identity, thwarted desires and, of course, moviemaking itself. Classily trashy, deceptively sophisticated, playfully profound.

Femme Fatale Trailer:

3)       Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN

Dir: Alfonso Cuarón  Scr: Alfonso Cuarón & Carlos Cuarón

Stars: Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna

Two horny pothead teenagers ditch their girlfriends, hit on a lonely, sexy older woman and head out on a road trip to a legendary, possibly fictional, beach. Imagine the mainstream Hollywood version: gross-out gags, surfing slapstick, misogyny and Ashton Kutcher. Now contrast that with everything Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning movie achieves. It’s a sex comedy that’s incredibly raunchy and outrageously funny. It’s a coming-of-age buddy movie that provides all the genre’s bickering pleasures of discovery but totally upends its central duo (screw “bromance” subtext, let’s get it on!). And it’s an incisive portrait of Mexico itself, cannily posited by the Cuarón brothers screenplay as an awkward teenager of a country undergoing its own growing pains, detailed in a series of omniscient, third-person narrated asides on a turbulent, class-riven, death-tinged society, to which the boys are naturally oblivious.

If the last description sounds dry and academic, it sells the film horribly short. I can’t remember a more authentic, tumultuous view of adolescence, throbbing with the dumb, hormone-fuelled bravado of youth (fabulously played by real-life best friends Luna and Bernal). Verdú’s amazing Luisa is no mere teenage fantasy, rather the duo’s necessary, wiser, sadder guide with her own troubled reasons for tagging along. Luminously lit by ace cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and with a sledgehammer of an ending that, as in all great films, in retrospect seems inevitable, Y Tu Mamá’s not only the crest of the New Mexican Wave that swept through turn-of-the-century world cinema, it’s simply a vibrant, vital modern classic.

Y Tu Mamá También Trailer:

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4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS (2007)

Dir & Scr: Cristian Mungiu

Stars: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov

Cannes 2007’s unsung entry that swept all before it and put Romanian cinema firmly on the map, Cristian Mungiu’s 4…3…2 is one of the tensest ‘non-thrillers’ (i.e. no gunplay, chases or car crashes) ever made. Of course the act of procuring an abortion in the Ceausescu dictatorship was a kind of mission impossible in itself, and Mungiu’s unflinching camera follows two friends’ fraught attempts to do the covert deed. Extended takes inexorably increase the pressure, smartly reflecting last-gasp Iron Curtain paranoia, while Anamaria Marinca’s mesmeric presence is the pure gauge of a thousand flickering shifts in desperation, fear, even hope.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days Trailer:

2)            MULHOLLAND DR. (2001)

Dir & Scr: David Lynch

Stars: Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Justin Theroux

More than Eraserhead, more than Blue Velvet, this is David Lynch’s enduring work of art; a summation of everything wild at heart and weird on top that ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ has given to film. That it was salvaged from a failed TV pilot is even more remarkable, but then narrative coherence is of little interest to Lynch. As Dennis Hopper quoted Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet, “in dreams I walk with you” and Lynch is our guide through an oneiric phantasmagoria that comes as close as anyone ever has to conjuring up a true cinematic dreamscape. I can’t think of a film – notably the key, spine-chilling ‘Club Silencio’ scene, with Rebekah Del Rio’s Spanish-language version of Orbison’s ‘Crying’ – that’s enveloped my waking life more.

Posing as a film noir mystery, the subject – I believe – is Hollywood’s propensity to chew people, particularly women, up and spit them out, with Naomi Watts’ sunny starlet Betty mixing with Laura Elena Harring’s mysterious amnesiac; meanwhile, tyro film director Justin Theroux is being menaced by cryptic heavies and a malevolent, dumpster-dwelling bogeyman is causing people to drop dead. Studded with Lynch’s absurdist humour, it’s the second half, where the film folds in on itself and the nightmare really begins, that Lynch’s hothouse genius flourishes. The hypnotic, erotic foreboding, held together by Watts’ incandescent, shape-shifting performance, reaches its feverish crescendo – only to slip away, like the most fleeting of reveries. Thankfully, Mulholland Dr. is ours to keep, to decipher, to haunt forever. Sweet dreams.

Mulholland Dr. Trailer:

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SERENITY (2005)

Dir & Scr: Joss Whedon

Stars: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk

Hard to imagine two more diametrically-opposed films than sinister Mulholland Dr. and Joss Whedon’s amiable space Western, other than both prove the power of an obdurate auteur who can reshape his vision when TV cancels it. Refashioned from his messed-around Firefly series, Whedon served up the decade’s most enjoyable big screen sci-fi, brilliantly orientating newcomers (I hadn’t seen Firefly yet felt instantly up-to-speed), as well as serving a wry, self-reflexive commentary on his own show’s survival (“can’t stop the signal”) and springing some fatal (for the cast) plot twists. And why isn’t dashing Nathan Fillion yet Hollywood’s new Harrison Ford?

Serenity Trailer:

1)            ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Dir: Michel Gondry  Scr: Charlie Kaufman

Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst

Forgive the name-dropping but recently I was fortunate enough to visit Japan to interview master animator Hayao Miyazaki. The trip also included a chat with his long-time producer Toshio Suzuki, who recounted a holiday the two had taken to the Isle of Aran. Observing a beautiful moonlit landscape, Suzuki took a photo, much to Miyazaki’s annoyance, who told him angrily: “I’m trying to remember the scene; don’t disturb me!” He then added that a sheepish Miyazaki came back to him months later when trying to recall the scene for a drawing, saying “Didn’t you take a photo? Can I see it? I forgot parts…”

Memory is like that. A subjective guide to our pasts, the point where imagination and objective recall merge or even clash. Albert Camus’ famous epithet, that we are the sum of our choices, could easily be amended to read what we believe we are is the sum of our memories – a convenient get-out clause for those incidents we casually elide, embellish or flat out reassemble in our heads. It’s why I’ve always felt that Alzheimer’s is the cruellest of aging conditions, stealing one’s most intimate, precious treasures piece by piece. And it’s why Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s magnificent Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, to me, the most dazzling, resonant, heartbreaking and wise film I’ve seen in the past ten years.

Kaufman, with his lineage of mind-bending modernist texts like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (see this countdown’s No.17), usually takes the lion’s share of praise for the film’s ingenious narrative switches, rare for a ‘mere’ screenwriter. And while the brilliance of his conceit – disgruntled lovers can have memories of their exes surgically removed once the relationship has foundered – is unarguable, Gondry, with his defiantly lo-fi take on Kaufman’s sci-fi high-concept, playful, handmade visual trickery and spontaneous, fleet-footed touch, beautifully dovetails with the surreal material.

The results are not only enthralling (how does Gondry keep shuffling his streets, locations, characters?), they keep his actors – a never-better Carrey, an ebullient, excellent Winslet and crack supporting cast – upfront and central: their faces, their voices, their often desperate, foolhardy actions – you know, the things you remember. And so it’s apt that film, that definitive recording (embalming?) apparatus, is the medium to capture both the memories and their casually terrifying elimination, courtesy of Kaufman’s Lacuna, Inc.

A screwball tragedy for the new millennium, Eternal Sunshine reconfigures that most devalued of modern genres, the romantic comedy, where every new offering tries to come up with increasingly outrageous premises – She’s the wedding planner! He’s her stalker! One of them’s a ghost! – entirely misses the intimacy and investment required to make relationships work; and the honesty to examine why they go wrong. This beautifully bittersweet love letter to love itself understands that not only is it better to have lost in love than never to have loved at all, the recollections of the pain and joy of the whole damn thing are what ultimately sustain, even define us. Truly unforgettable.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Trailer:

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TARNATION (2003)

Dir & Scr: Johnathan Caouette

Stars: Johnathan Caouette, Renee Leblanc, Adolph Davis

An auto-biopic some twenty years in the making, Johnathan Caouette’s astounding chronicle Tarnation is an entire repository of filmed memories, from childhood Super 8 to the latest iMac-edited DV footage. Caouette, just 31 on the film’s release, doesn’t merely want to never forget his chequered upbringing and fragile relationship with mentally-ill mother Renee; he wants, no, needs to transform it into some kind of performance art – and by God, does he. Incessantly creative (answering machine messages, stills, Dolly Parton clips), savagely raw, it’s the vanguard and likely peak of noughties’ confessional DIY filmmaking; both Caouette’s evidence and means of survival.

Tarnation Trailer: