Four Riveting Legislative Procedurals

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra, 1939

A fantasy and an allegory, to be sure, but that's what Capra was best at. The film ripples with the masculine, hardball atmosphere of the Senate. Control of the media equals control of the message, and thus public opinion, and thus and finally, the work of government itself. Also worth seeing, but mostly as a curiosity, is Tom Laughlin's remake, Billy Jack Goes to Washington. Capra's film is, per the blog post title, simply riveting, whereas Laughlin's is rather limpidly-paced; Laughlin's Billy Jack is hardly the guiltless, guileless innocent that makes Capra's allegory work so well; Laughlin also unwisely injects a lot of real-world politics (and, as he does in seemingly every film, the ghastly spectre of sexual violence) into a story that's frankly not built to support them.

Advise and Consent, Preminger, 1962

Pretty much everyone in this scandalicious film is trying to hide a secret, and pretty much everyone is "guilty" of whatever they're accused of/blackmailed for. But I don't think the thrust of the film is that all politicians are dirty-- just that they're all human. The one-time communist isn't some insidious, unamerican threat to our democracy-- he's a man that made some mistakes. The homosexual-turned-self-righteous-family-man isn't a hypocrite or pervert, but a tortured soul that's afforded a high degree of tragic, moving sympathy. Like the next film on my little list, but in a very different way, it emphasizes that politics is a very personal business, driven and shaped by an individual's history and personality.

1776, Hunt, 1972

There's a twenty-five minute stretch in this musical where there's no music, in which the "obnoxious and disliked" John Adams vigorously argues in favour of American independence. More than any other film, it really captures the drama of political debate and oratory. The film also provides an in-depth look at the necessity of compromising a principle in favour of getting something accomplished: a Declaration of Independence without any mention of slavery might be a flawed document, but it's one that's going to be signed. It puts an incredible emphasis on how personalities-- a wish to stay anonymous, a desire to be well-liked, arrogance, and a sense of honour and duty-- impact political decisions more than static talking points. (Or they did, at any rate.) It communicates a sense of real fragility and danger that's been lost by the time we get to Trumbull, and it deeply humanizes its founders with more than a little salty humour. And, yes, it does all this with some really great songs.

Amazing Grace, Apted, 2006

The odd man out in our quartet, Amazing Grace is not a great film. It's still a fairly good one, in that veddy British tradition-of-quality costume-drama kind of way: it's well-mounted but doesn't have the verve of, say, The Young Victoria; the performances are strong but nothing idiosyncratic or particularly remarkable; the story is uplifting in the most generic way possible but there's no pressing need for it to be told. It sounds like I'm slagging it, but I'm not; I have a taste for the genre and style, and you probably know if you share it. If you do, you'll find some decent, arguably riveting, if slightly castrated, parliamentary manoeuvring, culminating in a bit of underhanded legislating, albeit for a good cause.

Watch OPEN FIVE free starting October 21.

Kentucker Audley's Open Five-- which I wrote about briefly, along with Audley's breezy, delightful Team Picture and prickly, challenging Holy Land, here-- will be available online for free and for a limited time over at his website starting October 21. Like all his features, it's slender and poetic and hard-to-put-into-words and worth your time.

Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY.

(Many, many, many thanks to Tony Dayoub for the screen captures.)

I've often expressed my admiration for Sleeping Beauty, extolling it as one of the greatest animated films of all time, and certainly the greatest thing that Walt Disney's studio ever produced. This is an opinion that's often been met with befuddlement: people don't "get" my "Sleeping Beauty thing", and they wonder how on Earth could anyone champion this film above all others? Frankly, I'm about as befuddled: I can't imagine anyone not liking it. It is animation, and thus cinema, at its pinnacle.

To start with, there's the aspect ratio: 2.55:1, wider than wide. Every composition emphasizes the very horizontal-ness of the frame, whether it's tracking movement from left to right--


-- or creating moods both romantic and gloomy via the use of negative space--



-- or staging some of the most thrilling action sequences to ever be animated.




Notice how Maleficent and her flames move diagonally across the frame, pushing Prince Philip into one corner or the other. It's still very much a horizontal composition, but the injection of the vertical adds a sense of danger. Vertical movement in the film's widescreen world is upsetting and tumultuous; it's no coincidence that this frame of the post-spindle Briar Rose, intended to shock, is fundamentally vertical:


Whereas this more peaceful frame finds her horizontal:


Horizontal, but also somewhat flat. It is, to my eye, an appealing flatness, one that reoccurs through-out the film and gives it the stylized, illuminated manuscript vibe that I also find incredibly, breathtakingly, astonishingly beautiful.


And there are some who will grant me the film's formal pleasures, even go as far as to admit that it's eye-popping, but that the film lacks for "heart" or that's it is pretty but lifeless, empty. Not up to par, they say, with the True Classics. And, again, I can't really see what they're talking about; this is a film that's absolutely bursting with life.

This, after all, is the only Disney film with a charming prince who had any kind of identifiable personality. Watch the scene with Phillip and Samson again and tell me that he's just another handsome, stuffed-shirt cipher like the rest. Maleficent, for her part, is a villain with real teeth, tall and black and imperious, dripping with sadistic sarcasm and cruel menace. The climax is the liveliest that Disney's got, and also the scariest-- "Now you shall deal with me, oh prince, and all the powers of Hell!" is a line that still gives me chills down my spine.

The three fairies do their part to provide comic relief, though for me the real chuckles come from the two kings, a servant, and a bottle of wine. That scene is as loose and gangly and joyous as the hand-washing and "The Silly Song" sequences in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (classic Disney at its best always having ample room for long digressions where nothing much actually happens). And like the best of the Disney canon, the story unfolds not in bite-sized little montages and unit-like scenes but in longer sequences that possess a real sense of flow and that allow the characters to interact with one another. The illusion of life, in this case perfected with a formal elegance and stylistic flavour that none of the other Disney films ever attempted to match. That's not to slag the other great Disney films-- count me as an ardent fan of the studio's earliest features-- but rather to point out that they all have a certain look, a certain feel, in common, yet there's nothing that looks or feels like Sleeping Beauty.

It's funny, thrilling, sad, dark, stylized, daring, slender, austere, loose, and gorgeous. A masterpiece of cinema both in terms of visual splendor and storytelling. The last truly great Disney film, the absolute peak of American hand-drawn animation.

Erik Mauck's STRAIGHT TO THE BONE.

(Disclosure: I became a "Facebook Friend" of Mr. Mauck's shortly after seeing his picture.)



Straight To the Bone is one of the most satisfying pictures, indie or studio, American or foreign, that I've seen this year. It bears some formal similarities to the casual shaky-cam oh-my-god-look-how-real-it-is school that's started to metastasize in American independent films, but it's more patient with its characters and their moment-to-moment interactions without getting lazy or dull, because it is also more attentive. The dialogue and plot, while very much improvised, is at the same time tremendously focused and direct: people don't waste a lot of time talking around things in Straight To the Bone, but rather discuss them frankly, openly, honestly, articulately, perhaps even didactically, but always in an adult way, cutting-- well, straight to the bone.

If the great thematic burden of many independent films is post-collegiate apprehension about the future, Straight To the Bone registers the profound disappoint that sets in when you realize you haven't made the life you wanted for yourself. In this way, the film-- despite some amusing moments-- is not a comedy. It's not a bauble or a trifle; it does not indulge the antics of the arrestedly-developed and well-intentioned but rather insists that actions (and inactions) have consequences. It's a heavy film, weighty, serious-minded, as thick and densely-packed as other American indies are light and loose.

It is a major work, and I suggest you see it as soon as you are able.

Carter poster.

I made this poster for Ryan Balas's film Carter.

Three Galvanic Films.

There are films you like, films you love obsessively, films that you come back to again and again-- and then there are the films that make you feel like John Keats when he took that first look at Chapman's Homer. These galvanic films are immeasurably important on a deeply personal level, and I wrote a bit about one of those films, Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, yesterday.

In that spirit, I thought it might be nice to tell you about three other films, of the select and elite few, that resonated with Tom deeply as both a viewer and an artist. Here, then, in roughly the order I discovered them, is a personal look at my galvanic films.
As I wrote over at Hammer To Nail last year, Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack was, for better or worse, the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. More than that, it was the first film in which I was intensely aware of the director, of cinema being a potentially personal and idiosyncratic art form. This awareness didn't come out of any profound appreciation of his style, but of the sheer messiness of the film, the way, as I said in that Hammer To Nail piece, you can almost see the slightly-smudged tape holding the film strip together. There was something appealing and charming about its hand-made-ness, about its lack of polish, and it's that same vibe we try to capture with the deliberately "doubled-up" noisy sound of Son of a Seahorse, and that same film's hand-made animatronics (by Steampunk Legend Jake Hildebrandt).

Before I saw Olivier's Henry V, I had little use for pageantry in films. I was one of those twits who went into a film looking for the "meaning"-- that is, a neatly-encapsulate theme or thesis-- and disdained any digression therefrom. There was no film, I was convinced, that couldn't be twenty minutes shorter. What an idiot I was!

After Henry V held me in its spell, I was able to appreciate aesthetic beauty in its own right, art for its own sake, able to enjoy films moment-to-moment as an experience rather than hovering over it like it was some kind of exercise. While this aesthetic sense-- so vital to appreciating film as an art, and art, period!-- is one that was developed more exquisitely by other films, particularly those of Powell & Pressburger, this is the film that first showed me what I had been missing in all the intervening years.

I feel so much pity for those poor souls (several of them film critics) who never had a film that did to them what Henry V did to me.
Ivan Passer's Born To Win, with its whiplash tonal shifts, loose clothesline of a plot, and unique structure (more on that in just a moment) feels like it's just barely being held together by George Segal's dynamo of a performance. But that's just the point: Segal's world is coming apart at the seams, and his scheming hairdresser junkie is acutely aware that he's living on borrowed time.

Structurally, the film unfolds in movements-- ten or twenty minute blocks of scenes dealing with this aspect, than that one, rather than the intercut-all-the-various-characters-and-threads school that's long been the norm. It's something that I like a lot about Passer's film, something that we've very consciously done in our own work.

The Feminism of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

I've seen Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West about, oh, a dozen times now, most recently two days before my birthday in the company of nine friends who had never seen it before. Of those nine, five liked it and four were, well, not quite so enamored, likely turned off by its eccentric structure and length.

Anyone who's seen Son of a Seahorse can no doubt attest to that's picture peculiar structure and sense of time, and I'm not being pretentious when I say that our little character comedy was deeply influenced by Leone's film. Indeed, it's one of those films that changed my entire perspective on cinema, changed my conception of what films are and can be. Understand, I'm not saying that it was merely a good or even great film, but that I'm talking about something more galvanic: it fundamentally changed me as a human being, and I can only think of about a dozen or so films that have done that.

And because it's such an important film for me, and because its treatment of time, space, and story structure is something I find consistently astonishing, I sometimes forget that one of the other things that sets it apart from Leone's other westerns is that it is in many ways a feminist film.

This will surprise those who argue that spaghetti westerns are inherently misogynistic: But wait, they say, what about, oh, the aborted half-rape scene with Charles Bronson? What about the skeezy sex scene with Henry Fonda? What about the way she's forced into selling her home, the way in which she's completely dependent on and victimized by these men of violence? Cardinale's character is in many ways a pawn, bandied about and caught in the middle.

The film depicts a world in which women had few options and no power; isn't that, then, the very thing feminism seeks to correct? It registers with great empathy her desperation to stay alive; it shares in her frustrated impotence. The film, through her eyes, shows us what is terrible and frightening about violence. Compare this to Leone's earlier westerns. They might not make the always-named man-with-no-name a hero, but because he is, by dint of his sheer awesome bad-assery, the character to which our sympathies are most aligned, his violence isn't particularly scary.

Compare this with Bronson-- the closest thing to an Eastwood character the film has. The character has two moments of absolute brutality: the aforementioned stripping and almost-rape of Cardinale and the savage torture-- much tsk-tsk'd by Alex Cox in his, er, idiosyncratic spaghetti western book 1,000 Ways To Die-- of the dude in suspenders.

If the Eastwood characters of the Dollars trilogy had committed actions like these, it would have killed our sympathies for the character. He would cease to be a bad-ass and start to be a truly reprehensible monster (a slippery slope that I'm finding to be explored quite interestingly, by-the-by, in the PS3 game God of War III). And that would have killed those films. Not that, to be clear, I need or prefer the lollipop of likability in my protagonists, but because the Dollars films in particular (unlike the more meditative Once Upon a Time) are entertainments, dealing in delightful and exquisite surface pleasures first and substance second.

If Once Upon a Time in the West is more substantial, it's because our sympathies, our point-of-view, are most closely aligned with Cardinale. It's really her film, and we regard the men in it, from Fonda to Bronson, through her eyes; we view their violence through her eyes. Just as the male gaze is often present in films even when there isn't a male present to do the gazing, this female gaze-- terrified, trapped, bristling against her place in life and wanting better-- is present even in scenes, like the family massacre or the torture of the man in suspenders, when Cardinale is nowhere to be seen.

Cardinale's presence in the film is what allows the violence to hit us harder and deeper, and what allows us to experience a kind of emotional journey that Leone's earlier epic cartoons-- no matter how pleasurable and iconic those assured masterpieces are-- just weren't capable of.

Three Films By Kentucker Audley

I find it difficult to write about Kentucker Audley's films,
not because I have nothing to say,
but because I don't have words for it.

These slender sixty-minute features
feel strangely timeless,
languid and elliptical in the same breath,
making no points, but simply observing,
simply observing.

These three films are distinct:
Team Picture, a comedy,
Open Five, thick with Memphis,
Holy Land, as prickly as its "hero",
experimental and profane and smoking too much
and yet and yes, holy.

But all three also blend together.
But all three also are Audley's.

They remind me of the only poet worth a damn,
they remind me of William Carlos Williams
and his wheelbarrow of rain water
and his so sweet and so cold plums.

Concrete, brief, bold, naive, fresh, true:
image and sound, voice and body,
time and moment,
without addition
without imposition
yet also not without author:
the films are very much his,
the films are very much him.

For a filmmaker like myself
who analyzes and argues,
(and overanalyzes and overargues)
it's a magic trick I can't untangle
one I can't break down into wires and handkerchiefs
one I regard with burning envy.

Four Things I Noticed About HATARI!

Somehow, Tom had gone his entire life without ever seeing Hatari!, the 1962 Howard Hawks film, something which his Mary, who had seen the film several times, remedied this evening. It's a remarkable film, one that I look forward to seeing many, many times in the future. But four things stuck out during this first viewing, those being:

-- How episodic the film is. While each scene and sequence definitely exists in the context of the others, you don't get the sense of some arbitrary over-arching thing or some sort of threat; there's no headlong rush towards some kind of final confrontation. The film ends when the hunting season ends. There's a lot of attention to process, and I wonder how many procedurals, police and otherwise, would benefit from a more episodic structure.

-- Also, how languid the film is. It's two-and-a-half hours, takes its time, is unhurried. It reminds me of something Capra once said about It Happened One Night, which had opened as a flop both critically and commercially before slowly building word-of-mouth: "People found the film longer than usual and, surprise, funnier, much funnier than usual. But, biggest surprise of all, they could remember in detail a good deal of what went on in the film and they found that everybody else did and that it was great fun talking about this and that scene. And let's go see it again and take the Johnsons." I think films that are longer than usual are funnier, more exciting, and more memorable than usual because they are long. The extra time gives you more of a sense of the characters, of the setting, gives you a greater feel for the work.

-- That said, there are some characters that I'd like to have a little less time with. After the first ninety minutes or so, Red Buttons start to wear awfully thin.

-- And somewhere around the ninety minute mark, the film transforms from lots-of-manly-action plus comedy to lots-of-comedy plus manly action, and, the gratingness of Red Buttons aside, I had no problem with this shift. In fact, it felt right, and part of that I think has to do with qualities number one and two-- how episodic and long the film is. Those qualities give the film the freedom to shift gears, to build in another direction. It's not merely a matter of "mixing" genres, of shoehorning one into another, but of shifting them smoothly, of creating enough room for something else.

Princeton Holt's COOKIES AND CREAM.

Princeton Holt, a New-York-based director with whom I am acquainted via twitter, recently announced that his debut feature, Cookies and Cream, has been picked up by Celebrity Video Distribution. It'll be hitting DVD this July, and you might want to consider picking it up; a few words follow to try and sway you in that direction.

According to its synopsis, the film is about " a racially-mixed single mother who maintains an adult entertainment gig to take care of her daughter and herself", which sounds pretty salacious. What's most remarkable about the film is that it exhibits a tremendous amount of distance and restraint. By this, I'm not merely referring to the lack of nudity, sex scenes, and (for the most part) dirty talk-- though those decisions are interesting, commendable, and greatly undercut any nascent hints of tabloid sensationalism. What I'm talking about instead is formal distance and directorial restraint.

Holt seldom strives for effect or tries to punch it up. It's mock-verite/gonzo porn opening aside, there's thankfully very little of the deliberately ugly shaky-cam aesthetic that's infested the current American independent cinema. As I've written elsewhere, the shaky-cam approach is a schizoid one because it untethers its subjects from the everyday reality it so desperately wants to capture, presenting us not with people and bodies moving through time and space but with fractions of faces, headless slivers jittering about.

Cookies and Cream, in contrast, presents us with people, often head-to-toe, listening to and observing them patiently. Holt is so patient, in fact, and so confident that his characters will reward the viewer's patience, that he sometimes apes one of Woody Allen's best tricks by staging parts of his dialogue scenes with the actors out of the camera's range. Consider two frames from this minutes-long shot:


In the second frame you can see the two characters, but in the first, it seems empty, like one of Ozu's pillow shots (which were, of course, never truly empty). The two characters are in fact in the tunnel under the bridge, and as they talk with one another, they slowly worm their way out of it, slowly come into view, dots turning into people. Another director would have cut it much closer. A bad director might have framed the same shot but not given us characters worth looking for or dialogue worth listening to.

Holt's method suits his character. Carmen is played by Jace Nicole with a business-like distance and icy remove. She didn't fall into this career, I don't think, but rather planned on it with mercenary objectivity, counted out exactly how many days and how much money she'd need to do in order to create the life she wants for her daughter. This daughter, tellingly, is not on screen until almost the last scene in the picture. While you can pick up on Carmen's motivation fairly early on, by withholding the daughter's presence the film keeps us at the proper distance, keeps us interested in Carmen instead of merely rooting for her.

Because we never see her in any kind of sex act, there's really nothing carnal about this porn star: we don't get the mask, the persona. Or, rather, we get a different sort of mask and persona, as Carmen is always guarded, always wary of other people. There's a telling, painful moment in which she flinches when the man she's dating touches her face: gentle, intimate, warm. These aren't qualities she responds to. Even when she's talking to her daughter, when she explains to her that everything that she's doing is for her, it's presented logically, as an argument, as something intellectual instead of something emotional.

That last phrase could be used to describe the film as a whole, but with the caveat that there's a certain sadness that the film can register even if Carmen can't. And if this sounds like your cup of tea-- and I would say for the most part that it was mine-- you might want to keep an eye out for it this July. That's not to say that it's a perfect film-- for one thing, every time a character utters the film's tagline ("the show must go on") it manages to carry less resonance-- but it's an interesting and a promising one, a deliberately thoughtful film from a deliberately thoughtful director.

DVDs You Should Buy (Besides Ours)

The second-most-asked question I've gotten since I've started reviewing indie and self-distributed films (the first being, would you review mine?*) is "How do I see it?" And the answer pretty much varies from film-to-film, though folks in Pittsburgh might want to check out Indies for Indies, a weekly screening series curated by Lucas McNelly that kicked off last week with Amir Motlagh's whale.

I reviewed an earlier cut of whale, one which its director says has been improved upon by at least "44%" in its final version, last year. It's now available for purchase in various formats ranging in price from $4 to $14.

I reviewed Ryan Andrew Balas's film Carter, and interviewed the director. The film is again available to view for free online, and a DVD edition is available for $10.

I loved Josh Bernhard's The Lionshare and it made my best of the decade list. It, too, is available online and for purchase.

[*-- And the answer is, yes, of course! Send me an e-mail at milos_parker at yahoo dot com. However, I'm currently working my way through a backlog of screeners and I always view a film at least twice before writing a review. So bear in mind it's going to take awhile-- probably two or three months in most cases. And, yes, as someone who's more-or-less in the same boat with our own films, I know exactly how frustrating that can be. Sorry.]

Lucas McNelly's BLANC DE BLANC

There's a scene fairly early in Lucas McNelly's Blanc de Blanc, in which one character makes dinner for another. The chef goes by the name of David and is a stranger to the diner, Jude. He ended up crashing on her couch the night before, was still there when she went for work, and is still there when she returns home. Still there, in her house, and cooking her dinner. It's an invasion of her space and her person that's at once creepy but well-meaning (he felt bad about crashing), a dichotomy of which David is simultaneously ignorant but also acutely, painfully (self)-aware. It's within the fuzzy spaces between these seeming opposites-- creepy and well-intentioned, ignorant and aware, dangerous and romantic-- that the film's central mystery lies: can this man be trusted? Who is he, really?

The film gives us theories and possibilities: David is an innocent amnesiac, or David is on the run from his past and wants a fresh start, or David is actually perpetrating a cruel and manipulative game on Jude, though we don't know why or to what end. None of these really takes precedence over the other, none of these are ever officially denied or validated in the film, though a careful second viewing will reveal what I think is a pivotal clue in the film's first few minutes, one that's led me to formulate my own theory. The mystery is never definitely answered to the audience's satisfaction, which is part of what makes the film so very satisfying.

It is, in short, a true mystery film, the same way that Turn of the Screw is a truer mystery story than, say, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The only reason to come back to Ackroyd after the first reading has exhausted its novelty is to see the clues pointing to its famous twist; the same is true of a lot of so-called mystery films. I shudder to think of anyone watching Orphan once, let alone a second or third time. But by denying catharsis and explanation, by hinting at a twist that's never revealed, Blanc de Blanc constructs a mystery with real staying power.

It's also a lot of fun, playing jazz with various genre elements. There's a locked box, a golden macguffin without a key. Or consider the bald smoking man who follows Jude around and insists that David is in fact a man named Archie. He's almost a caricature of menace, ever-so-slightly-fey, always accompanied by musical cues that would feel at home in a more conventional thriller but here creates a sense of comic danger, of riffing. The music intrudes on the film, and underlines his intrusion into their lives.

It's helped in that regard by the film's smart, bifurcated structure. Roughly the first half-hour could be described as a sort of deconstruction of romcoms, which have always gotten their traction from the notion that obsessive, stalker-like behaviour is romantic. The creepiness is underlined but often in a comedic way: Jude horrified as one of her friends insists that this total stranger crash on her sofa, Jude surprised to find David cooking her dinner.

When Jude texts her brother, asking him to check up on her, it's not done with furtive shaky close-ups of a cell phone screen but, in a snazzy little bit of style that also appeared in Joe Swanberg's LOL, with subtitles, distancing us from the danger.

The scene with the brother that follows is also comic in tone, with said brother serving as a sort of mouth-piece to the audience's own desire to throttle the passive Jude for letting herself get into this situation. The tone of these performances and dashes of style don't push the potential creepiness from our minds, but it does neuter it for awhile, making Jude and David's eventual hook-up believable and a more than a little sweet.

Their love scene is filmed in a long take and done in silhouettes, and the music McNelly uses is lover's-languid and rhythmic, purposefully slowing time down to a crawl and giving us time to reflect. It's a stylish, smart, and perfect use of music.

I can't say that, however, for all the music in the film, as I personally think there's a little too much of it. Almost every scene has music underneath it or uses music as a transition. Many filmmakers think that music will liven up a dead scene or speed up the "feel" of the film; neither are true. In fact, music slows a film down, especially in dialogue scenes, because its rhythm is at odds with the rhythm of the film-- the cutting, the dialogue, the emotion.

McNelly's film doesn't have any bad scenes or dead weight, doesn't need to be "sped up" and thus slowed down; I think if he had less music, it would make those stylish uses of music-- the opening, the love scene, the scenes with the smoking man-- much more effective. He's a good enough filmmaker that the film doesn't need the crutch of a wall-to-wall score.

Good enough, in fact, that the film is still very, very good, perhaps even great; good enough that the film still works and the transition from romance to thriller is at once acutely noticed and seamless. It's stylish, fun, mysterious-- and, above all, highly recommended.

Bluth Blogging: The Land Before Time

I have vivid memories of The Land Before Time scaring the shit out of me when I was six years old. The vicious Sharp Tooth (his flaring nostrils and hideous eye), the quakes that split the earth down its seams, the darkened sky, the deathly tar-pits, the just-plain-desolation of the dry, leafless landscape, the threat of starvation, the fragility of childhood friendship, and, finally, Littlefoot's aching loneliness. All scary, heady, and ultimately invigorating stuff when you're six years old.

It was easily the most foreboding animated film of my childhood, and growing up through the years I was beyond disgusted by the twelve insipidly happy-go-lucky musical sequels that followed it. I quickly discovered that Don Bluth had nothing to do with those films, of course, but I had to wonder: did the people responsible for those unholy twelve have any idea what made the original tick? Well, no, of course not.

What's surprising, though, is that the original's two producers, Spielberg and Lucas, might not have understood it, either. Deep cuts were made in both production and post (which helps to explain the film's abbreviated 65 minute run-time). The T-Rex attack scenes were truncated because they were too frightening; some sequences that put the young dinosaurs in peril were eliminated; screams that were too scary were changed to "more suitable" ones.

In fact, Spielberg and Lucas almost removed the death of Littlefoot's mother. This is the inciting incident, the death that not only starts the plot moving but out-and-out defines Littlefoot's character. Without the scene, there is no movie. Indeed, Littlefoot spends so much time mourning his mother that cutting both her death and his tears would probably leave about thirty or forty minutes of film.

It also makes the threat of Sharp Tooth toothless; he's scary because he kills Littlefoot's mother, not because he's a T-Rex (for, as any six year old would tell you, all dinosaurs, but especially a T-Rex, are not scary but "awesome"). The triumph of Littlefoot and company over their carnivorous foe is a triumph because Littlefoot is avenging the death of his mother. And we feel his pain not because she simply died, as Bambi's mother did, but because she died saving his life, rushing into battle with a foe over which she knew she could not win. She died because she loved him; in his mind and in many ways, that makes it his fault. His guilt and pain is palpable.

And though my twenty-seven year old self thinks that there are perhaps too many shots of Littlefoot with tears spilling out of his big ol' emo eyes, I still found the film to be frightening and his mother's martyrdom to be moving. And the fact that those aspects still work despite the best efforts of Spielberg and Lucas is a testament to both Bluth's artistic skill and tenacity.

There are parts that don't work as well for me; at a certain point, the moodiness and awe give way to a lot of annoying supporting character schtick, the sort of "zany" material that the creators of Rufio and Jar Jar no doubt wish there had been more of (and that the creators of The Land Before Time numbers two through thirteen made up for that perceived deficiency in droves). And yet those three comic relief characters (Petrie, Ducky, and Spike) are used pretty well in charting the dynamics of the group and the struggle between Littlefoot and Cera for leadership. The scene in which these three begin the night snuggled next to Cera but slowly migrate to Littlefoot, leaving Cera shivering and alone, until she, too, nudges her way into the pile effectively captures the insecurities and smug satisfactions of childhood.

Looking at the film now, I can feel the compromises Bluth had to make rather acutely; it doesn't have the same sense of flow, mastery, and answered ambition that The Secret of NIMH had. NIMH, in Bluth's own estimation, was the film where there was the least interference. While Spielberg might not have micro-managed as much when it came to An American Tail, the story was also the sort of harmless pap for children that Spielberg was interested in making. Trying to tell this particular story with those particular benefactors was perhaps doomed from the start.

Still, because the film doesn't quite "come together" as a whole, the film's ability to plug into the myriad and deep, unnamable fears of childhood has a smuggled-out, outsider-art sort of quality. And though it's no NIMH, neither is it any of its blasted sequels, nor Hook. Pyrrhic though it may be, I think Bluth was the victor in his battle with his producers.

It would, however, be his last until 1997's Anastasia. The five films he made in the interim were box office disappointments and received decidedly mixed (if not out-and-out terrible) reviews. The first of these, All Dogs Go To Heaven, is also the subject of the final (and most disappointing) installment of this series. See you then.

Bluth Blogging: An American Tail

Don Bluth and his team left Disney because the mouse had stopped taking risks, becoming stagnant and content to churn out one uninspired, safe, friendly, marketable, instantly forgettable feature after another. As we discussed in our last exciting episode, The Secret of NIMH was in many ways a direct challenge to what Disney animation had become; NIMH was idiosyncratic, intelligent, dark, unafraid to scare (and thrill) with its moody atmosphere and exciting set pieces. As an artistic achievement, it still holds up nearly thirty years later.

It was also barely-released, resulting in a less than stellar box office return. But it attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg, who produced Bluth's next film and ensured it got the distribution (and the box office) it deserved. That film was An American Tail, and while there were elements that were comparatively risky-- the film is, after all, a picaresque journey through nineteenth-century New York, centering on the travails of the very Jewish Mousekewitz family-- it lacks the ambition, atmosphere, and artistic achievement of its predecessor. In many ways, from its basic lost-child-looking-for-parents plot to its reliance on musical numbers in lieu of personalities, it plays it very, very safe. In this viewer's opinion, it is (and it really hurts to say this) not very far from the sort of animated film that Bluth was trying to get away from.

Compare the comic relief characters played by the inimitable Dom Deluise in The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail: NIMH's Jeremy the crow is a clumsy, helpful, would-be ladies man, whereas Tail's mouse-friendly cat Tiger is a more-than-blatant imitation of Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion, a road that was already well-trodden by Snagglepuss. NIMH gives Jeremy the time to develop his unique and charming personality over the course of the film; Tiger's screen time is extremely brief.

And that would not be a problem if Tiger was intended to be just another part of Fievel Mousekewitz's journey, like the Boss Tweed-like Honest John or the wealthy Gussie Mausheimer. But Tiger becomes integral to the film's plot, freeing Fievel from his cage (mere moments after they've been introduced) and assisting the other mice in their later search for him; Tiger is intended to be Fievel's bosom buddy, a fact that is rather unconvincingly lampshaded in one of the film's musical numbers. Listen carefully to the opening musical cue, which apes one of the cues from a Bert Lahr number in The Wizard of Oz:

Now, I'm not going to grouse here or be overwhelmingly negative; the song is certainly catchy, and indeed, all the songs are (the songs in, say, All Dogs Go To Heaven, which we'll be discussing in our fourth installment, eh, not so much). And I certainly have to give Bluth and company props for allowing the child characters to sing in slightly-faltering child voices, a choice that's even more apparent (and moving) in the film's famous "Somewhere Out There" number.

It's smart, artistic choices like that that elevate the film above and beyond its contemporary competition. And it's not every film that comments obliquely on the loss of identity inherent in the immigrant experience, made most explicit in the way Fievel is renamed Filly and his sister Tanya, Tillie. For what it is, the film certainly works, but that thing that it is is awfully ordinary when compared to the more idiosyncratic Secret of NIMH.

As I detailed in some, er, detail last time, NIMH was able to sustain suspense and terror for extended and often breathtaking sequences. There are moments in An American Tail that flirt with that terror-- consider, for example, Fievel finding himself working in a sweatshop. Here is a sequence that is positively ripe with phantasmagorical possibilities, possibilities that are denied when the film cuts immediately from the sweatshop's introduction to Fievel making good his escape. All the cats in this film put together can't equal the dread inspired by NIMH's old cat Dragon, he who made a widow of Mrs. Brisby; these cats have already been neutered (or spayed) by a musical number.

And, sure, it's a damn catchy number! (Me and the missus, being both of us ailurophiles, also consider it a form of hate speech, but that's neither here nor there.) But by making the death-by-feline "fun", it also makes them no real threat at all, simply a cartoonish plot device to be swatted aside by another cartoonish plot device. The film does not threaten or confuse, but assures us through-out, with each chorus or zany character, that everything's going to be just fine, that there's really nothing at stake.

It's the sort of thing that entertains children but is frankly slow-going for adults, and I'm sure some of you are saying, well, then what are you complaining about? But I keep coming back to C. S. Lewis and his essay "On Three Ways of Writing For Children". The whole of it is well worth reading and serves as a nice all-purpose debunker of those who think children's entertainments should be less than those of adults. But specifically there is this:

Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can't bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us -find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.

And also this:

And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.

In his next film, and to his credit, Bluth is not afraid to make us afraid, and lonely, and ballooned with a terrible grief. Unfortunately, Spielberg (and Lucas) were afraid to do just that, and the compromised work that survived is the topic of our next discussion. See you then.

Bluth Blogging: The Secret of NIMH

I have fond but ever-so-vague memories of the four films Don Bluth directed in the 1980s-- The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven. These four films, the last three of which I saw in the theater at ages four, six, and seven, respectively-- The Secret of NIMH having come out a week after I did, I first encountered it on a television set-- formed what probably seemed like an unstoppable chain of hits that came undone with 1991's Rock-a-Doodle. I haven't seen any of these films since at least the early nineties-- or, rather, I hadn't seen them again... until now.

I decided to revisit them partially for the purely mercenary reason that, having resolved to film-blog on a more regular basis, I need to have something to film-blog about, and partially for the purely personal reason that I wonder how well these films hold up to those fond if vague memories.

In general, I remember the films being darker than other animated films, and by darker I don't necessarily mean "scary", though The Land Before Time did frighten the bejeebus out of the six-year-old who saw it, but that they weren't dominated by bright, goofy colours. They seemed in a surreal way to be more "realistic" and less reassuring. I left those movies feeling certain that the things on the screen could happen; I felt no such verisimilitude when I waddled (pigeon-toed and unsatisfied) out of Oliver and Company. The Bluth films felt more like "real" films, the sorts of films that adults watched, and being that I was a strangely solemn little boy that desperately wanted to be taken very seriously indeed, that aspect appealed to me. I liked that there was something at stake. I never worried about the characters or the outcome in the Disney films of the period.

Bluth himself was unhappy with the mollycoddling, banal nature of those late-period pre-"Renaissance" Disney films, which is why he left the House of Mouse in the first place. Before their resignation, Bluth had spearheaded several attempts to change the direction of a company that saw its films as products to exploit, made as cheaply and as quickly (and as safely) as possible. It was that old court case, Art v. Commerce, all over again. When Bluth left, taking nearly twenty percent of Disney's animators with him, a staff meeting was held that reportedly began with the words, "Now that the cancer has been removed..."

The first feature Bluth and his fellow expatriates made was about as far from safe as possible. At its heart, The Secret of NIMH is about a widow fighting desperately to save the life of her sick child. So sick, he cannot be moved, for the chill might kill him. But moving day is near; the farmer's tractor will surely crush the home and the sick child that lays within it. Those are the stakes, my friends: a meek and frightened mother-mouse moving heaven and earth to save her son.

Mortality is central to the film and is emphasized by a series of frightening set pieces, chief among them being the sequence in which Mrs. Brisby seeks the council of the Great Owl. This is a potentially dangerous individual for a mouse to seek out; her not-entirely unfounded fears of being devoured are underscored by the hostile landscape surrounding the owl's tree.

Even more daunting, however, is the prospect of entering the Great Owl's tree. Shadows stretch out from its gaping maw, cobwebs hanging like curtains. Note the dynamic contrast between the shadows and the violent orange of the sky; if it had been a dark-blue starry night sky behind Mrs. Brisby and Jeremy, it wouldn't work, the contrast wouldn't be as striking.

"Film is flow," I'm inordinately fond of saying. Too many films, and animated films especially, are too quick to cut to the chase, to the action, to the sensation; as such, there's no sense of flow (I'm looking squarely at you, Transformers: The Movie). Bluth understands flow and pacing; he's unafraid to luxuriate in this murky atmosphere, to follow Mrs. Brisby as she makes her way through the cobwebbed darkness.

When a shock is required, such as the discovery of this pile of tiny corpses--

-- it emphasizes her vulnerability, her potential as prey, and thus her fears. It's not coming at the expense of the atmosphere, or even paying it off; it's part of the atmosphere, of the tapestry, of the flow. The same can be said for the sequence of shots that follow, which introduce a predatory spider that sneaks up on Mrs. Brisby, glaring at her with its alien red eyes and drooling from its hairy, pincered mouth.






Again, this isn't just a cheap shock, but a deeper and more frightening one. That thing was going to eat Mrs. Brisby, and it just died, it was just squished, all yellow ooze and twitching legs. If that spider is vulnerable, how much more vulnerable is the mouse it was about to eat? How much more vulnerable is the tiny mouse who lies in the bed, threatened both by pneumonia and the farmer's tractor, two forces over which poor Mrs. Brisby seemingly has no power?

Each frightening set piece emphasizes Brisby's mortality/physical vulnerability, often in visual/tactile ways: for example, she's basically stripped naked before she attempts to drug the monstrous cat, Dragon; trying to escape from a cage, she cuts her arm and bleeds. And by emphasizing that mortality, Bluth and company emphasize her son's mortality, and thus her fear, her motivation, her love. If she fails, he dies.

This all comes to a head in the film's finale. As the rats of NIMH move Mrs. Brisby's home intact to a safe place, her four children, including sick Timmy, sequestered within, the ropes are cut by the dastardly Jenner, intent on squashing Nicodemus, the only obstacle to his lust for power. And, sickeningly, the plan carries off with a hitch; Nicodemus is squashed by the house, the effort to move it is thwarted. The bad guys won.

There of course follows a dynamic sword fight, the most exciting animated action sequence since Prince Phillip took on "all the powers of Hell" in Sleeping Beauty, and the badniks are punished. But Nicodemus stays dead: death is final and no one is safe. And so when the house starts to sink in the mud, and when, despite all their best efforts, Mrs. Brisby and the rats cannot stop it from doing so, there is the very real chance that her children will drown, a possibility that is ominously underscored when the home is submerged completely in the mud, and the rats pull the frantic Mrs. Brisby away from it, restraining her.


It's a moment of real terror, and even the somewhat hallucinogenic ending, in which Mrs. Brisby uses the magic amulet to telekinetically raise the house out of the mud, does not mitigate its power. I wouldn't call it a deus ex machina, because a deus ex machina by definition does not flow from within the story but is rather imposed on it. Because the whole film is about her fear, her feelings of powerlessness, and her love for the child, it makes perfect sense for that love to prevail in the end, in the moment when she is the most fearful, the moment where she seems to be the most powerless.

Best of Decade Addendum: James Cameron's AVATAR

The problem with making a Best of the Decade list before the decade is over is that something really spectacular might just blow your socks off in the interim. The sock-blower in question is James Cameron's Avatar.

To be brief, it is brilliant filmmaking. Its action is coherent and exhilaratingly staged in an era where Le Cinema Du Blockbustré thrives on incoherence and meaningless stimulation. Cameron takes his time in setting up and telling his story, with each set piece coming out of that story instead of being shoehorned into it. Its computer-generated creations are not there simply to impress us, but to move us; its use of 3-D, that gimmickiest of gimmicks, is not gimmicky at all but, dare I say, artistic. It does not throw a bunch of shit at us, taking us out of the film, but rather gives the image layers of depth, bringing us deeper into it.

Glenn Kenny, in his review for the Auteurs, likened it to the work of Jack Kirby:

What I really love about Cameron’s sci-fi work is that it baldly reveals that one of his key visual influences is comics pioneer Jack Kirby, he of the galactic concepts, massive double-truck panoramas, and the craziest kineticism that was ever contained within none-moving frames, that is, comic book panels. Watching the camera pans going over the desolate planet landscape filling up with defense machinery in Aliens was like looking at a trademark Kirby two-page post splash vision come to life. It wasn’t just the composition and the larger than life humans; it was the hypertrophied design of the weapons and the air, land, and sometimes sea craft. A crazy, violent universe...[Avatar] works best as an insanely expanded Kirby-esque cinematic spectacle.

And this is a case where I agree with Glenn; I totally see (and definitely dig) the Kirby influence. The weird shapes of the flora and the fauna, the sometimes impractical craziness of, say, a trial of manhood that involves first jumping from one flying mountain to the root hanging precariously from another and shimmying up said root. I've written before about how Kirby often finds the sublime in the ridiculous, and Cameron does this in Avatar, tossing more ideas on the screen than most action directors have in their entire oeuvres. It's two-and-a-half hours jam-packed with exhilarating ideas, ideas that come together with a vengeance in the film's final act, especially with the introduction of a most unusual cavalry.

If someone tells you that the film devolves into mindless action in its last hour, they are wrong. If someone says the film has no ideas, no center, no originality, don't listen to them. Rather, feel sorry for those who have closed themselves off to spectacle, who can't appreciate or enjoy bombast at its most gorgeous and astonishing-- those people have cast off an entire and perfectly valid tradition of cinema, becoming like certain academics who can only celebrate the messy and the obscure, who are afraid to embrace something "popular" because it makes them seem less refined.

As for the putative political content, which caused quite a stir at Kenny's site a week or so back, I got to say that I don't think the film should be approached as an allegory for the most recent war in Iraq; while many of the men working for the assuredly Evil Corporation are former marines, they're no more members of the United States Armed Forces than the colonial marines in Cameron's Aliens. (And it's not like the Iraq War was waged for oil. No, no matter what your friend's protest sign says, that wasn't actually the case.) A better analogue for the Na'vi, if you must have one, would be the American Indians; the film is somewhat like Inglourious Basterds in that it provides a new (better?) ending to the whole sad saga: cinema trumping history.

But even that is a bad fit, in that, again, it's not a government but a private company that's waging this war for profit, not American soldiers but mercenaries. (Which does bring to mind the atrocities of that hated Octopus, Chiquita Brands International, nee the United Fruit Company...)

Carter for free online!

Ryan Andrew Balas (who I interviewed here) has made his film Carter (which I reviewed here) available for free online until January 1, 2010. So, go ahead and give it a watch while it's still available.

In the spirit of giving for Christmas, Balas is also asking that people consider donating to the charity "Musicians on Call"; if you've got the resources to do so, why not consider shooting a few dollars their way?

Rejected Poster for Son of a Seahorse

Tom's Favourite Films of the Last Ten Years

It's been an exemplary decade for cinema, and the occasion has been commemorated with various "best of the decade" lists all over the internet. I'm even contributing to one at Hammer To Nail; said list is dedicated to films made under a certain budgetary threshold, in keeping with the site's mission to promote ambitious independent filmmaking.

I'm not going to limit this list, my own personal list, by budget-- it's been a great ten years for both scrappy indies and big-budget studio films. What follows are my favourite films of the last ten years, unranked but divided into categories of my own choosing. These aren't the only worthy or even great films that came out in that period; just my absolute favourites, the films to which I am addicted.

I tend to be more awed by mastery than ambition (though of course it is impossible to have the first without the other), so a number of wonderful, imperfect, experimental films that I loved didn't make it on the list. I loved WALL-E's opening act but found the last half wanting; films like Ryan Balas's Carter and Amir Motlagh's whale do interesting and compelling things, with certain sequences that I would classify as brilliant, but for me they fell just short of the sort of cinematic nirvana induced by the titles that follow.

Films which I own on DVD are indicated with an asterisk; those who know me and are feeling generous this Christmas can help fill those gaps, if you like.

The Andersons
*Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson. My favourite kind of rom-com: one that says that no matter how screwed up you are, there's someone out there to love you. Giddy and nerve-wracking: a film that feels like falling in love.

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson. Tough, dark, surreally entertaining. Like his Boogie Nights, it's funny and sad and terrifying all at once; when Plainview snarls that his son is just a "bastard in a basket", you can see the heart breaking underneath all the anger and hate.

*The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson. A film teeming with beauty and surprises, from the gorgeous Henry Sellick fish to the pirate attack. The deadpanniest of his six deadpan masterpieces, and one of the warmest and most spontaneous as well.
The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson. Heart-on-sleeve: the most emotionally direct and earnest of Anderson's dialogue can be found here, along with the chanciest sequence he's attempted since Richie Tenenbaum's beard-trim and suicide attempt. Part of the fun of auteurism is tuning into a director's frequency so that you might better appreciate the nuances of one work or another; this one requires a great deal more tuning, and thus contains bountiful pleasures for the director's fans, yet is more likely to alienate his detractors. This is probably the film that made me a full-blown Anderson apologist (in the "defender-of", not "sorry-for", meaning of the word).

The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson. A sad children's film-- something there should be more of-- with a clear sense of real danger. The stylish framing and dry humour treats children, and their entertainments, as the equal of adults, never talking down to them; the colour, zip-and-zest storytelling, and "just-so" tactile qualities appeal to the wee ones and old arty-farts alike and in equal measure.

Spectacles

*Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese. Perfect enough for me, even with Cameron Diaz gumming up the works. Daniel Day-Lewis knocks it out of the park, Leonardo DiCaprio remains a compelling screen presence, and Scorsese & Schoonmaker pull off an impressive trick: the pacing and ordering of the film follows what is important to the characters, which is why the historical Draft Riots, so often derided by the film's critics as coming out of nowhere, indeed come out of nowhere. Coming out of nowhere is the point; these characters and their melodrama are squashed by history.
The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan. This is, frankly, what Batman should be: dark, serious, compelling, heroic, morally ambiguous, complex. A thrilling entertainment, with strong performances all around. A thinking man's action picture, which is so very rare these days. Or at all, really. A popcorn movie for the ages.

Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi. And this is what Spider-Man should be: funny, serious, stressed-out, a colourful villain, acrobatic fight scenes, the struggle to do the right thing. The Subway Train Jesus sequence is vastly superior to the first film's "You mess with one New Yorker, you mess with all of us!", and the mastery of various tones and threads is pitch-perfect here where the third film is famously shoddy. One of the better superhero spectacles.

*Munich, Steven Spielberg. This is Spielberg at the top of his game; this is the director who gave us Jaws and Close Encounters, not the schmaltz machine that inflicted us with E.T., Hook, or The Terminal. He's been slowly working his way back with tough-minded but occasionally creaky films like A.I., Minority Report, and War of the Worlds. Munich is the pinnacle of this late-career progression, and it has me more excited about the director and his work than I've been in years.
Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino used to make films about pop culture (cf. the various riffs in his first three films) and now he makes films that are pop culture; he's no longer talking about the influence of Leone and others, but showing it. After the film, I was euphoric for hours, and I said to my Mary: "This must be what it's like to be high." I don't remember the last time I came out of a theater that satisfied, and that sure that the film I saw was a balls-out, no-bones-about-it masterpiece.

*Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro. A fantasy film with a real sense of menace that's too often missing from the "dark" films of, say, Tim Burton. Inventive, stylish, and terrifying. Like the director's The Devil's Backbone, the scary part is what the people do to each other, not the ghosts and goblins and creepy-crawlies.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee. An elegant kung-fu epic. Perhaps too elegant-- I like my wuxia to have a pulse-- but there's something beautiful about those slow, sad, treetop-swaying combatants.

Hero, Zhang Yimou. Like Crouching Tiger, it's an elegant, beautiful kung-fu film, and like Crouching Tiger, it works. It is a collection of stories, overlapping and contradicting but never confusing; taken together, it's as stunning an examination of the power and plurality of myth as any other.

*Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir. What I remember about this film, and what brings me back to it time and again, more-so than the sweep of its action, is the chemistry between its two principles. Bettany and Crowe play off each other beautifully, bringing the characterizations and the relationships from O'Brien's novels to glorious life. My only regret is that this wasn't the first of many adaptations, but the first and only.

Romances
*The Illusionist, Neil Burger. For my money, better than The Prestige, or any of the twisty "everything-you-knew-was-wrong" films that have come out through the years. And it's better because Giamatti isn't terrified or shocked by the big surprise, but rather delighted. I'd much rather be delighted than have the rug pulled out from underneath me. Burger is a great talent, and his first film, the Kennedy assassination mockumentary Interview with the Assassin, is worth checking out. And as someone who hates mockumentaries and the perpetuation of the Kennedy conspiracy myth, that should tell you something.

Amelie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Still a very fine bauble.

Procedurals

*The Company, Robert Altman. I'd rank this with The Red Shoes as one of the best films about not just ballet but about the artistic process. Probably the master's last great film, working with a perfectly blended ensemble that doesn't devolve into the Overacting Olympics you sometimes get with his "quirkier" films.

Zodiac, David Fincher. I never thought Fincher would top Fight Club (especially after the merely-okay Panic Room), but he did, and how. The often quoted line is that it's like being stuck in a filing cabinet, and for a details nut like me, it was nirvana. Steeped in minutiae, thick with atmosphere.
Into Great Silence, Philip Groning. "Two and half hours of monks, doing monk stuff." Nothing more, nothing less. Probably the boldest, and most successful, experiment in film form and especially time. Tarkovsky wished he had directed a film like this. (And, if you know the high esteem in which I hold Tarkovsky, you know that this is not an insult to the late master but merely praise of the new one.)

Image-Making
*Bamboozled, Spike Lee. An examination of where we've been and where we're going, and of the subjectivity of history. It's a film that looks both at the awfulness of minstrel shows and at the real technical skill and talent required of its performers; it grapples with the legacy of black actors working in old Hollywood instead of dismissing or apologizing for them outright.

Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood. A look at the truth behind the Iwo Jima photo's mythology, a look at the necessity of that mythology, and a study in what that dichotomy can do to those being lionized. His most multifaceted and complex film, on par with Ford's Liberty Valence.

*The Queen, Stephen Frears. A stunning behind-the-scenes look at how a public image is constructed, complemented by a great Helen Mirren performance.

Shattered Glass, Billy Ray. A compelling, fact-based story, thrillingly told. When we got out of the theater, a little old lady who had been in the show with us approached us to ask if we remembered the director's name, because she wanted to keep an eye on him. Anyone who can get that performance out of Hayden Christensen is worth keeping an eye on.

Animation
*Ratatouille, Brad Bird. Likely the best and most stylish animated film since Sleeping Beauty. Gorgeous, sumptuous, full of small and wondrous details; a surprisingly literate script bursting with verve and surprises. At its heart, an examination of a self-centered, difficult genius-artist who never learns any life lessons or sees the error of his ways. Refreshingly free of moralism.

Existential Comedies
*I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell. No relation. Ebert once said of this film that it "may be the first movie that can exist without an audience between the projector and the screen. It falls in its own forest, and hears itself." And I have to say, I have no idea what he's talking about: the film is absolutely hilarious, full of lines that my wife and I repeat in our daily lives.

Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman. One of the most tactile meditations on death and decay I've ever seen. Psychologically complex, incredibly funny, defiantly surreal, formally audacious-- and still it touches the heart. When that old man and that old woman have at last got each other, and they go to sleep in that burning house, it is beyond touching, beyond romantic. And the blow that comes next is truly, deeply, crushing.

*Napoleon Dynamite, Jared Hess. Oh, I'm just a big populist softy at heart, randomly asking people to give me their tots and bragging about my many skills. On the arty-farty side of things, I greatly enjoy the film's complete lack of traditional plot or narrative momentum.

Horror
Jesus Camp, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. Seriously, the scariest movie I've ever seen. And I'm not talking in an intellectual, religious, or political way. This film is viscerally frightening, and those poor screwed-up kids crying their eyes out and confessing their sins are scarier than any homicidal orphans or Japanese girls with hair in their eyes.

Scrappy Lil' Indies, Distributed Division
Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski. (Disclosure: I consider Andrew a friend.) A film that gets deeper and funnier with every viewing. The long "parties" digression is not really a digression at all but the heart of the film. I could have easily categorized this one under "image-making", concerned as it is with gender, self-identity, and the way we present ourselves to others.

*LOL, Joe Swanberg. (Disclosure: I am credited in this film, though my footage didn't make the cut. I also consider Joe a friend, and he was kind enough to be in one of my own films, Son of a Seahorse-- thus ensuring the rest of the cast is only four degrees away in the Kevin Bacon game.) Less a study of technology than of male psychology. Strong performances from all the leads and interesting stylistic choices (look at the silent film style intertitles for e-mails, or Greta Gerwig's completely-through-sound-and-still-photo performance) abound. It's a film that I can watch compulsively, sometimes consuming just a few minutes at a time. It doesn't quite hit the emotional depth of the better scenes in Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs, but I think for sheer cohesive mastery, LOL is a stronger film.

*Scrapple, Jay and Mark Duplass. This short film, included on the DVD of the Duplass Brothers feature The Puffy Chair, is one of the most bracing shorts I've ever seen. Too many short films are cute or clever, or play like severely truncated and poorly-paced features; this one has the emotional depth of a feature while remaining a well-structured short.

Scrappy Lil' Indies, Self-Distro Division
*The Lionshare, Josh Bernhard. A multifaceted examination of how culture is created and disseminated and notions of ownership, all packed into a tight and sprightly sixty-five minutes. Entertaining, maturely stylish, ambitious without ever overreaching. The filmmaker has made the film available for free. It's worth your time*Press Start, Ed Glaser. A spoof film? Yes, a spoof film, one that targets a particular audience-- people who grew up with video games and are well-versed in the culture and tropes thereof-- with gusto, authority, and sincerity. Probably of no interest to the uninitiated, but it inspires my devotion all the more for that. A funny film, presented on a DVD packed with extras. Glaser has also released the remakesploitation classic Turkish Rambo under the title Rampage. Show your support for this funny, self-financed guy by ordering both.*Son of a Seahorse, Mary and Tom Russell. Of course I'm putting my own film on my list. First of all, no one else is going to. Secondly, it is one of my favourite films. Of the six features I've made in the last decade, it's the one that's going to last-- mark my words. Or, better yet, buy a copy. Every $15 copy we sell on Amazon nets us $3.34, so you'll be directly supporting independent film.