In Diegesis

Much has been made recently of the plot of James Cameron’s box-office smashing, visually immersive sci-fi film, “Avatar”. Many are calling it derivative. You may have heard your sister describing it as a “grown-up ‘Ferngully’” or the Oscar pundit in your local newspaper calling it a “‘Dances With Wolves’ Redux” or your girlfriend (or little cousin or any Disney-adoring loved one in your life) saying it reminded her of “Pocahauntus” or -  for that matter – your pretentious cinephile friend calling it an inferior (dumbed down, beefed up) cousin to Terrence Mallick’s “The New World”. More often than not, these descriptions are coming at you in the form of grounds for pejorative criticism, seemingly warranted by the sentiment that the quality of a cinematic experience is primarily contingent on the magnitude of uniqueness particular to the circumstance depicted in the film.

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Ousmane Sembene is referred to by some as the “father of African cinema”, but filmmaking was not his original passion. Indeed, like other pillars of the African artistic landscape such as Fela Kuti, Sembene was born a sensitive soul – a social activist at heart, not a filmmaker. Thusly, the sort of art (books as well as films) that he made was imbued with his specifically individual sensitivities and if his final film, Moolaade (2004), is any indication, Sembene’s sensitivities are powerfully – inspiringly – humanistic.

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Ballast (2008), Dir. by Lance Hammer

Can people change roles? Can an uncle become a father? A wife become a widow? A child become a thief? According to Ballast, yes and no. Watching characters’ egos in this movie expand and retract and expand again and retract again is a truly worthwhile and beautiful activity. Watching love and the goodness of humanity triumph over death and poverty in such a realistic depiction of life is a transcendant experience. And the end is perfect.

Lance Hammer, please make another movie.

Old Joy (2006), dir. by Kelly Reichardt

Picking the representatives for my love for realism was tough. The toughest choice in regard to realism was between Kelly Reichardt’s work. Her brilliant, Wendy and Lucy, from 2008 is, by my money, the strongest symbol for “neo-neo”-realism’s relevance in the modern cinematic landscape. A spiritual sequel to De Sica’s classic, Umberto D, Wendy and Lucy has all the typical trademarks of great realism: extreme poverty, a bare-bones representation of the love we have for which we choose to endure, and an ending to rock the core of the stablest of souls. It’s not on this list though. Old Joy is.

Any initial criticisms I had against the film disappeared immediately after it ended. Namely, I discovered that its politics was actually its character development and, more profoundly, its character development was actually its politics. The film takes you to a place between a scared-numb marriage (symbolic of age and the responsibilities which it connotes; the wife is pregnant) and an impoverished free spirit (same age, no future baby). By the end, the free spirit is massaging the shoulders of the marriage in a hot bath in the middle of the woods. Of course, the reason why watching films are way better than reading about them is that symbols don’t actually exist the way we write about them. People are people; they’re not inane. Tones are tones for a reason; we feel them. In this movie, two guys – old friends – get together to go on a trip. They talk, smoke pot, drink beer, drive, get lost, camp out, feel awkward. They’re not as alike as they used to be, but the thing about love in friendship is that it endures. You change, your friend changes, but you still call each other firiends. You are still, even, willing to go away with said friend, despite your differences. Reichardt’s triumph in this film is her Persona-esque depiction of love finding the oneness between two people. It’s simple, it’s hot water, it’s a massage, it’s blankness, it’s two guys and a dog in the woods, it’s freedom, it’s old joy.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Dir. by Guillermo Del Toro

My mind is hesitating at the thought of putting this movie on the list when I know that Spirited Away is coming up later. My heart, however, is saying something like “buh bum. buh bum. buh bum. Pan’s Labyrinth is a masterpiece. buh bum. buh bum…” The truth is (ha! TRUTH!) that Pan’s Labyrinth is an incredible movie. Del Toro OWNS his space (remember all those it’s-a-wall-now-it’s-a-tree-now-you’re-somewhere-else! transitions?), which means that he pretty much owns the viewer’s perception. For the length of this movie, I am (emotionally) at Del Toro’s bidding. This means that by the end of the movie, I am (probably) crying pretty hard. It’s scary, fantastic, aesthetically gorgeous and dripping with profound humanism. Unlike the girl in Spirited Away, adulthood becomes a non-option for our protagonist. The beauty of the film, though, is contradictory; its end is both tragic and liberating. Tragic, because the world sucks and people are evil. Liberating, because the world sucks and people are evil! Who WANTS to live here? Honestly, I’m asking you. The only reason I’ve made it so long is because of the joy I find in art, or humanistic aesthetics, which is exactly what Pan’s Labyrinth excels at. To watch the film is nearly to watch yourself die, because the realm of art is a giant playground and our adorable protagonist only wants to play, to fantasize. So as we indulge our own play-drives by watching this art-work, the protagonist becomes our surrogate selves into Del Toro’s vision of the evils of man and the wars that man creates. The final shots are representative of our liberation through play. The REAL tragedy is when the lights of the theatre came back on.

Interesting side-note: when the lights of the theatre DID come back on, I had to drive home through a really awful blizzard. Luckily, there were no cars around, so I called up my friend, Nathan, who was in Edinboro, PA and told him that I thought I had just seen the best movie of all time. Youth!

Mulholland Dr. (2001), Dir. by David Lynch, starring Naomi Watts & others!

This movie plays with aesthetics for the sake of tone. What’s not to like? The aeshetics are original and unique; the tone they elicit is terrifying. Perhaps its transition from the surreal, murky impression of connotative reality to the sober vision of denotative truth is not as seemless and beautiful to me as, say, Waltz with Bashir’s. That’s why this list is one based purely on taste. The critics are calling this and There will Be Blood the best films of the decade – well, why not? Were there any films more aesthetically unique? Were there any films more thematically cohesive? The meaning of this film is not as subjectively profound as many of the films which I rank above it, but the Schiller-esque freedom which it expresses is palpable. Artists are players – they play! David Lynch plays, PTA plays. And really, there is no film on this list which could concretely be called more playful than this one. It’s new, it’s frightening. If I were a critic doing the whole trying-to-be-objective job, this would be at the top of my list too. But taste is about meanings and, while this film has an incredible amount of meaning, ultimately I find that meaning must be realized for me on an emotional level, and the final third doesn’t really take me there. I enjoy the whole movie, but once the blue box gets keyed into, the dramatic realism doesn’t have the emotional heft of the earlier surrealism. But damn if the whole dang thing isn’t one of the craziest, most terrifyingly wonderful cinematic rides I’ve ever been on.

The Departed (2006), dir. by Martin Scorsese, starring you-know-who

ONE MAJOR SPOILER BELOW!

So, I saw this with my brother, the day that I turned old enough to see rated R movies in theatres. A junior in high school, I would soon be at the point where La Dolce Vita would become my favorite movie. I cherished formalist, traditional aesthetics combined with untraditional, episodic plot construction. In other words, I was seventeen and I thought I knew things about movies. The Departed forced me to concede a lot (“oh, the rat at the end, that’s not silly, that’s just playful!” “it’s not a totally inane deus ex machina – those deaths are thematically significant!”). The great thing about the movie, looking back now, is that it’s just so damn intense that its joyous, pulpy, riveting playfulness eschews objective criticism. One man’s “inane deus ex machina” is my “holy shit – the world that Scorsese has made in this movie is batshit crazy!” But whatever criticisms we all might have lobbed at it (the academy wasn’t going to give best picture to Children of Men – they’re the academy – they’re dumb! – get over it!), when Leonardo Dicaprio got shot in the f*ck*ng face, my brother and I (and everyone else in the theatre) jumped.

Flight of the Red Balloon (2008), dir. by Hsiao-hsien Hou, starring Juliette Binoche

I’ve not seen any of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s other films (for me, this is more a statement of excitement than an admission), and I should probably take this time very quickly to mention how many movies from this decade I have NOT seen – tons. There are directors who are world renowned (presumably for good reason) who I have had absolutely no exposure to. Mostly foreign, but not all. There’s an Amin Bahrani film on this list, and the film listed is the only film of his I’ve seen. I have a document on my computer which has compiled on it a list of just the movies from this past decade which I feel absolutely compelled to see, and there are well over a hundred. There are many others which I do NOT feel compelled to see, but would certainly love to, given the oppurtunity. This list of favorites, at the very least, could be called “malleable”. Truthfully, it is really just a snapshot of my tastes right now. These thirty films are films that I cherish very deeply in my heart. Many I have only seen once, but have left such an indellible emotional (mostly joyful) impression on me that even years later, I find that they have made a home in the meadow of my taste.

Such is the case with this film. When I originally made a list of my favorite movies of 2008, I really wasn’t sure where this film fit – how far above Slumdog Millionaire and how below 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. What made it especially difficult was that this film is just so damn modestly wonderful, that it doesn’t demand to be loved (unlike, say, Wall-E, Man On Wire, Let The Right One In, which all originally made it above this movie). This film is wonderfully slow. Hou’s camera behaves like no one else’s, carefully observing normal life in long shots (long both in time and in space) which pan back and forth between action, and cripes! some of the action just takes place in a small apartment. Still, no space is too small for Hou to treat with gentle care and epic scope. After I surrendered to this minimalistic-but-deliberate cinematography, I was enchanted. This film captures connotation like no other movie on this list. Check out the way the sunlight illuminates Juliette Binoche’s face on the train, or the way the young boy’s caretaker asks the boy if he wants to play on his playstation and his response, “no.” The way the red balloon floats through time and space, slow and still, magically unexplained and yet connotatively perfect, forces the adult viewer to slow down, adjust, perceive Hou’s world the way the child in the film does – that is, simply, purely aesthetically. Everything has a connotation, not just a purpose.