Before we get too entrenched in the new year, a recap: 2009 was the richest year for US American movies since 1999, when my imagination was captured by ‘Magnolia’, the anti-war film was reinvented with ‘Three Kings’, Michael Mann made his best film so far in ‘The Insider’, ‘The Matrix’ set the bar for church youth group metaphor-talks for the next decade, in a foreign interlude ‘La Vie Revee des Anges’, ‘Holy Smoke’, ‘All About my Mother’, and ‘Lovers of the Arctic Circle’ inspired conversations about love, chance, depression and religion, Cronenberg’s ‘eXistenZ’ reminded me why his work is so vital and never disappointing in its exploration of the meaning of the human body, ‘Star Wars Episode 1’ became a cultural benchmark, if not a good movie, ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ elated, John Sayles astonished me with ‘Limbo’s exercise in explaining how being human means to be, first and perhaps only, a storyteller, ‘The Red Violin’ confounded, ‘Arlington Road’ appeared to prophesy America’s doom unless it comes to term with its own shadow, and life went on….
The rest of that year produced ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, ‘The Iron Giant’, ‘Dick’, ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Mystery Men’, ‘Bowfinger’, ‘American Beauty’, ‘The Limey’, ‘Fight Club’, ‘The Straight Story’, ‘Bringing out the Dead’, ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘American Movie’, ‘The End of the Affair’, ‘Sweet and Lowdown’, ‘Cradle Will Rock’, ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, and ‘Any Given Sunday’. Seems like a substantial year for US American cinema, especially in what swam up the mainstream.
Ten years later, 2009 has produced another rich harvest, the memory of which, on this last day of the year rises into reflections on Youssou N’Dour’s anthemic call, at the beginning of Elizabeth Chai Versalihis’ ‘I Bring What I Love’ to the young people of Africa, tears streaming down his face, asking his people to be guided by their own vision to unshackle themselves from the dependency fostered by sentimentalized Western views of the continent…
through
the first section of ‘Up’, which I saw a few weeks before my own wedding in May, the most glorious animation and design fused with a powerfully resonant story: the arc of a love affair, beginning in childhood, and reaching a crisis with the death of one party; whole films have dedicated to this arc, of course; ‘Up’ manages to make you believe it in five minutes; the whole rest of the movie is about what happens next, and how love always outlasts its object…
and into
the first half hour of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which manages to invoke the memory of Lee van Cleef, the ‘Hills are Alive’ sequence in ‘The Sound of Music’; and even the face of Stanley Kubrick. Beyond that, it provides the most credible reason in cinema history for a French and German character to speak English to each other; announces the arrival of a fantastic actor – Christoph Waltz – on international screens; and declares Tarantino’s intention to make Nazi violence look even worse than it has ever done by the very absurdity of its portrayal in his film. A film, by the way, that I think unlikely to be understood until our culture’s obsession with violence as entertainment is seen for what it seems to be: an indulgence that already costs us too much…
Along the way, I’ve been captivated watching the following stories:
Depressed guy falls in love with both Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw; they both love him back.
Old-young guy friends try to heal their boredom by failing to have sex with each other but film the foreplay.
Old guy talks about the pictures he took; one of which ended the War in Vietnam.
Old guy runs Italy into the ground.
Old guy and young guy drive around in a taxi.
Guy lives on the moon.
Old guy saves dolphins and annoys the Japanese government.
Middle-to-older aged guys play loud music; get big in Japan.
Young guy enjoys bomb disposal; can’t choose between cereals.
Middle-aged comedian manages not to die on stage or in real life…
There have been moments that uplifted, challenged, confounded and moved.
Such as…
Every part of ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ when the narrating voices contradict each other.
The breakfast provided for the prison officer in ‘Hunger’, capturing the harsh and broken reality of northern Irish life through the 70s and 80s, and making a character who otherwise might be automatised into a recognizably human figure.
When ‘Il Divo’s Andreotti returns to his home village to hand out gifts like a satanic Santa, arms moving from the elbows, eyes unblinking; the lines between generosity and bribery so subtly blurred in a film that seems to turn one man’s life into a comprehensive social history of post-war Italy.
Joaquin Phoenix and Elias Koteas saying everything and nothing while Gwyneth Paltrow leaves the table in the restaurant scene in ‘Two Lovers’. Only one of them belongs there.
Pretty much anything in ‘Tetro’ – the most physically beautiful film of 2009; but especially the scene at the hospital community, and any time Klaus Maria Brandauer appears.
The party in ‘Humpday’ – there’s something about it that makes me want to go there; there’s something about it that makes me want to stay in bed.
The converstion between Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann in which they re-affirm their love for each other; he’s never been more believable.
The woman who stumbles into shot when Krystof Zanussi is being interviewed in ‘Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky’; like a refugee from a Fellini set. Dmitry Trakovsky’s genius is to keep filming – he knows that’s what Tarkovsky would do too.
Eddie Adams walking to his office as the linking sections of ‘An Unlikely Weapon’ – an artist damaged by what he saw, trying to make sense of it and give something back.
The choreographed dance in (500) Days of Summer; wherein a man dances to celebrate something that he thinks is miraculous, without realizing his partner rates it much lower.
Solo searching for William’s other taxi in the Winston-Salem night; Ramin Bahrani utterly avoids the cliché of a chase scene; to the point where the ‘coincidence’ of finding the other car appears nothing less than exactly what would happen in real life…
Brian Blade Drums the Hallelujah Train
And then we have climaxes.
As in:
Moon: When Sam emulates Dave Bowman’s ultimate trip, but instead of experiencing terror, he’s whopping and hollering like a child on a rollercoaster; the most delightful homage to Kubrick I think I’ve seen.
The moment when Ric O’Barry interrupts a lie by wearing a television in ‘The Cove’.
The last section of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which appears to be pushing the audience to face what we might prefer to ignore: that when we watch violence as entertainment, we may be complicit in its real world analogue. (This section begins with an extraordinary image of a woman in a red dress [of the kind that Rita Hayworth used to be sewn into], smoking a cigarette, framed against the window of a cinema projector; the fact that said window seems to have been imported from the Emperor’s decompression chamber in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, and that the music that accompanies the scene was written by David Bowie 38 years after the events depicted in the film took place in Tarantino’s imagination only serves to heighten the sense of both the universality of the film’s point, and the fact that ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is the most aesthetically rich and philosophically profound film released so far this year.)
The climax of ‘Mary and Max’, the astonishing Sundance opener that sadly still doesn’t have a US release date; one of the most honest unbroken vision of how life ends, and life goes on that I’ve seen in a movie.
The ‘Gojira’ exclamation at the end of ‘Anvil’ – the only heavy metal documentary that will make you cry; with admiration for the titanic struggle of these guys to do what they do best, and the vicarious pleasure one takes from imagining that the life of a film blogger might one day be as exciting as playing for free to an audience of 12 in a Prague basement club.
The very last image of ‘The Hurt Locker’ – revealing violence-inspired adrenaline as an addiction that will not be ended without the wisdom of old men like Clint.
The coruscating static camera throughout the end credits of ‘In the Loop’, observing the business-as-usual scene in the UK civil service, bureaucrats wandering in a formal haze, as if they haven’t just legitimized a war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people, dilute the moral credibility of their own nation, and make the world less safe than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Sun Ra Arkestra in Concert
Having said all this, the experiences that felt most ‘cinematic’ to me didn’t take place at the movies. It was at two gigs in North Carolina where I felt most like I was in the presence of cinematic genius: sitting under the ministry of the Sun Ra Arkestra, heavy horns pounding out anointing; followed swiftly by Pastor Brady Blade and Daniel Lanois’ astonishing ‘Hallelujah Train’ concert. And a close second came ‘Lawrence of Arabia’s funny sense of fun on my semi-annual trip to see him at the movies; the sacking of the town in ‘Andrei Rublev’, which I saw for the first time at Nashville’s wonderful Belcourt Theatre; watching ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ on Blu-Ray; getting to see ‘The Black Hole’, the first film I ever saw, on a cinema screen marking thirty years since my first trip to the movies, and re-visiting River Phoenix’s performance in ‘My Own Private Idaho’, which might be the best piece of screen acting I saw all year.
For now, that’s the backdrop.
Later this week: my list of the ten best films of 2009. There will probably be eighteen films on that list.
And then, the year we make contact.
