(Edith Scob and Juliette Binoche, Summer Hours.)
My list for the ten best films theatrically released in 2009. I also include where I first saw the film.
1. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France), Cannes market 2008. I started raving about this film as soon as I saw it in the market last year at Cannes. A friend asked if it was his best film. It’s right there, with Cold Water, his breakthrough work. It’s his most pastoral film, his liquid style creating a series of striking observational portraits and family dynamics. In the heartbreaking conclusion, itself an echo of the great party sequence from Cold Water, the beautiful young daughter (Alice de Lencquesaing) instinctively realizes the heartbreaking transience of the family estate, about to be sold off, and she begins to cry. Magnetic, personal, sublime. Criterion is set to bring it out on DVD. Here’s my two-part piece and interview on Assayas.
2. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania), Cannes, Un Certain Regard 2009. An excerpt of my review that was published in the winter calendar of the Music Box Theatre, in Chicago:
“Romanian cinema continues to astonish.
Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young police officer, is pressured by his superiors to coordinate a sting operation to discover the drug supplier of three young high school students, two boys and a girl, he has been watching under surveillance.
The spare beauty and wonder is how Porumboiu develops an escalating tension and dramatic insight out of the officer’s reluctance to follow those orders, believing the harsh drug laws are obsolete.
The writing is Beckettian as Porumboiu creates scenes and actions in which literally, nothing happens. The movie has long stretches with little or no dialogue. Porumboiu has a great feel for uncomfortable silences and how people avoid talking about what’s really on their minds. That exaggerated sense of anxiousness is central to so much of Eastern European art and culture.
In Romanian films, the environment is studded with a pitch black, ironic and cruel humor. (In these worlds, you laugh so hard that you cry.)”
3. Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea), Berlin competition, 2008. My interview with Hong.
4. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, US), Chicago press screening, April 20. It’s Jarmusch’s most misunderstood film. It’s right there with his seminal works, Stranger than Paradise and Dead Man. Industrialist: “How the fuck did you get in here?” Hero: “I used my imagination.”
5. The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel, Argentina), Cannes competition, 2008. Read my original review here.
6. Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel, France), Cannes competition, 2008. With Christmas Tale, Che, Waltz with Bashir, The Class and the Martel and Garrel films, Cannes 2008 appears in retrospect even stronger now than before. Garrel’s trademark romantic fatalism is now steeped in the surreal and incandescent, the images worthy of Cocteau. The three central actors (Louis Garrel, Laura Smet, Clementine Podaitz) are sensational. Here’s more on Garrel and his poetic art.
(Louis Garrel, Clementine Podaitz, Fronter of Dawn.)
7. Sugar (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, US), Sundance dramatic competition, 2008. This is the review I wrote for Screen out of Sundance last year:
“In a word, Sugar is extraordinary. The second feature of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden deepens the promise and talent they exhibited on their debut Half Nelson. A singular examination of sports, class and the American social fabric refracted through the perspective of a gifted young Dominican baseball player, Sugar has a novelistic density and formal precision that immediately marks these very talented directors as major figures of American cinema.
On Half Nelson, Fleck had the director's credit, and he and Boden wrote the screenplay. Here they share writing and directing credit, and their achievement is clearly the leading contender for Sundance grand jury prize. The movie has almost no antecedent in recent US movies. The subject is baseball, specifically chronicling the adventures, emotion and achievements of a mercurial and gifted young pitching prospect named Miguel Santos (Soto).
HBO Films financed the somewhat unorthodox project and they are also selling the film. The movie certainly represents a challenge, but the high technical achievement, the amazing quality and authenticity of the mostly non-professional actors and the emotionally resonant material is bound to strike a chord. The US distributor also has the unique opportunity to synchronize the film's theatrical release through both sports and entertainment media platforms.
The small Caribbean island of the Dominican Republican has produced some of the best baseball talent in Major League Baseball, marking it a highly coveted recruiting zone for US baseball teams. In the US system, top prospects are signed and developed in 'minor leagues', like the kind Shelton wrote about. Structurally, the movie is shaped in three movements, opening in the small village where Sugar is discovered by an US scout and then flown to Arizona, where his play merits him being sent to the Kansas City minor team in rural Iowa.
There he lives with his sponsors (Whitney and Bull) and works hard to assimilate. Culturally isolated and socially trapped, he tries vainly to fit in though his lack of English makes even the smallest of acts maddeningly difficult. Lonely he struggles to find some emotional connections off the field, most prominently the pretty granddaughter (Porterfield) of his sponsors. She awkwardly rejects his romantic interest, further leaving him adrift.
Making matters worse, his performance on the field, aggravated by an injury, begins to suffer. In the high stakes world of minor league baseball, players that don't perform often are subject to being cut, or losing their jobs, the situation that engulfs Sugar's best friend (Rufino). The arrival of another Dominican pitcher (Garcia) whose play overshadows Sugar occasions the movie's final movement.
Martin Scorsese once called Raging Bull a “documentary with actors.” Sugar feels very similar. Boden and Fleck's documentary background enlivens the material. They illustrate the cultural and social milieu Sugar is part of, particularly the role of evangelical religion.
In one remarkable camera movement, they stage a long tracking shot that follows Sugar move through a series of intertwined bars and adjacent rooms that provides a haunting reminder of his acute dislocation and emotional removal from his surroundings. It allows a strong, direct byway to imagine his situation that helps colour and understand his behaviour.
The two talented film-makers constantly subvert expectation, allowing situation, character and study to develop organically and naturally. They are also excellent in miniature, allowing small, sharply drawn characters to share the stage with their protagonist. Soto is a baseball player. His lack of technical training provides a bracing immediacy and ability to understand his frustrations, anger, excitement and profound sense of discovery. All of it makes Sugar a transporting experience.”
8. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, US), Toronto, 2008. My joint interview with Bigelow, writer Mark Boal and lead actor Jeremy Renner.
9. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, US), Chicago press screening, November 4. I’m not crazy about the works of Wes Anderson. Rushmore remains his most significant achievement. Bottle Rocket had some inspired moments, but it was also cool and inert. I was bothered intensely by the racial politics and noblesse oblige of Royal Tenenbaums. The Joseph Cornell-like box art compositions of Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited, but there are too much dithering and dead space in the frame to build into something substantial. From the beguiling open set piece of the new film, the sinuous left to right tracking shot of his two “foxes,” adroitly using the clothesline to surreptitiously bypass the guardsmen, I was mostly enthralled.
10. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, US), Toronto Film festival, Sept. 11. My piece that ran in Stop Smiling about the new work by the Coens.
Other movies I liked:
Adventureland
Afterschool
The Baader Meinhof Complex
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
The Beaches of Agnes
Beeswax
Big Fan
Bright Star
Dare
District 9
Drag Me to Hell
Duplicity
Everlasting Moments
Every Little Step
Fighting
Flame & Citron
Gigante
The Girlfriend Experience
Goodbye Solo
The Hangover
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I’m Gonna Explode
The Informant!
In the Electric Mist (Tavernier's cut)
In the Loop
Invictus
Jerichow
Julia
Katyn
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
Lorna’s Silence
Me and Orson Welles
Munyurangabo
Of Time and the City
Public Enemies
Revanche
The Sun
Tetro
35 Shots of Rum
Three Monkeys
Treeless Mountain
Tulpan
24 City
Unmade Beds
Up
We Live in Public
Whatever Works
Whip It
The White Ribbon
i think "the hangover" is on my top ten of 2009 :) but your top 10 are great!
Posted by: thomiik | 10/24/2010 at 12:08 PM