"Welcome to Hell"

The legacy of the HM Prison Pentridge in Victoria, Australia is one of torment. In the 70s and 80s, things got so bad that the government had to step in and investigate the complaints of violent treatment from the staff, but that just made things worse. From the notoriously fierce guards, tellingly nicknamed "The Bash," to the creation of the Jika Jika solitary ward, every development was one more piece of bloody puzzle leading to the prison being shut down and bulldozed in the 90s. But not before it was immortalized in two different Australian independent productions, linked by more than ellipses in their titles. John Hillcoat, later director of The Proposition, The Road and Lawless, fired the first shot with Ghosts...of the Civil Dead, a dystopian dramatization of a prison's increasing hostility to its inmates, scored, co-written and starring in a minor but terrifying role Nick Cave. The management of a fictional prison want federal money to build a new, more severe facility, but need justification. So begins a campaign of oppression, winding up prisoners to induce violent behavior in order to prompt reprisals and keeping guards miserable and in the dark to make them more prone to take out their frustrations on the prisoners. Where does it end? Though based on a novel and framed as a piece of sci-fi, it stings like the truth. Hillcoat's film leaps through time, skipping to new lows like a hardcore kid skipping tracks on a Jesus Lizard album, dank corridors bridging the gap between the horrendous fiction and reality. Several narrators, some unreliable, tell the story of the growing harshness which comes across the prison like a heatwave. Hillcoat's camera is still as can be, moving only when the point of view changes from predator to prey, finding his inmates half in shadow and filth, unable to recognize themselves under conditions that start bad and get worse. They're the poisoned blood of a body losing a fight to infection. When Cave's appearance kicks off the final act, his bone-shaking rasp and preacher's cadence like the voice of cruelty itself, it's the final straw. The community on either side of the bars disintegrates. Cave appears like a bigot poltergeist and both the tired inmates and increasingly stressed guards finally know that their fates are out of their hand. Though as always, fate has the last laugh. 

Alkinos Tsilimidos' Everynight....everynight came next, and is based on a play detailing the circumstances of one Christopher Dale Flannery, a real inmate, and his stay in the maximum security H Division of the HM Prison. The HM and its horrific conditions flipped a switch in Flannery's brain and after his release he became a famous hitman dubbed Mr. Rent-a-Kill. Tsilimidos' film tries to determine what went on that forced the government to intercede on behalf of prisoners and what Flannery experienced that turned him from a petty crook into a murderer and spares no detail. Opening with the sound of nails being pounded by a hammer, the first lines are spoken by a guard who could scarcely look more like a buzzard. "On the Cross, Bryant. Get on the fucking cross, Bryant." So begins a suitably biblical regiment of torture, as Flannery's stand-in undergoes one humiliation after another including a beating and rape on his first night. Tsilimidos keeps his camera (in grainy black & white) inches from his the faces of his subjects, mocking Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, whirling around the dank prison like a drunken angel, or maybe just a lost bird. The body is broken and violated and the spirit cut to ribbons as degradations mount. Like the Irish prisoners of Hunger, the men of Everynight rail and scream against their captors, violence always on the tips of every finger and tongue. They find strength in not giving the guards what they want, resigning from their system one at a time. Both films can only guess what really went on in Australia's prisons, but they have a visceral understanding of systemic malevolence. Their dueling depictions of the annihilation of the individual feel like institutional passion plays. 

These films (along with Romper Stomper) represented the changing of the guard in Australian cinema. Throughout the 70s and 80s, the line between commercial and artistic cinema was drawn in steel, but it started to melt in the 90s. The grammar of the grindhouse and the arthouse mixed like blood and skag. Ghosts  looks like it was shot on the set of a bad action movie and appears to have been a model for Philip Brophy's clinically icky Bodymelt, giving one the impression that antiestablishment art didn't yet have a place in the mainstream and had to linger in the marshy, disreputable dark until they could be claimed. Crassness and violence would eventually define important movies as much as it had marked the underground cinema of the first decade of the new wave. From the needle of these early experiments dribbled the first hint that the country could come to terms with its ugliest traumas through its art. Soon the makers of The Tracker, Chopper, Wolf Creek, Samson & Delilah, Van Dieman's Land & Snowtown would dip their brushes in the same blood and start painting their own masterpieces.

The Oscar Race

Over the last few weeks, since the Golden Globes nominations, it seems everyone is talking about how great a year it’s been for black filmmakers and actors. The year 2013 saw a great many commercial successes geared towards and helmed by African Americans. This in itself wasn’t news, but these films were accompanied by a number of critically favorable and sometimes downright prestigious films also about and/or by African Americans (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Fruitvale Station, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, 12 Years a Slave). This started a discussion going into the Academy Awards that this may be the year for African Americans in film. And while I really do hate raining on a parade, I’m going to.

For starters, look at the three African Americans actors nominated for Academy Awards this year. We’ve got two slaves and a Somali pirate. Sure, the presence of three African American actors in the nomination pool is good, considering how overwhelmingly white the Oscars traditionally are, but it paints a sad picture of what kind of roles will get you noticed by the Academy.

And then there’s Steve McQueen, nominated for best director. McQueen is the third Black director ever nominated for an Oscar. He’s a fine director and his picture, 12 Years a Slave, is worthy of the high praise it has received. But it deserves mentioning that his first film, Hunger, was sensational (and about white people). Both it and his follow up, Shame (also about white people), were entirely ignored by the Academy. But the moment McQueen makes a film about slavery, he’s suddenly the man of the hour.

I find myself fondly looking back at 2010, when Katherine Bigelow became the first woman to win the award Best Director for The Hurt Locker (and as the cherry on top she also took home Best Picture). While there was so much talk about her breaking the glass ceiling for women in film (though, it seems no other women has since been allowed within 100 feet of the Best Director award), what’s often overlooked is the material she won with.

Bigelow made a war film, one of the most predominately male genres in the industry. And she did it again with Zero Dark Thirty three years later. I think the idea that only women should make films about women and only men should make films about men and only Asians should make films about Asians to be poppycock. The art of acting comes down to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. The art of directing is all about constructing an illusion. The very nature of narrative film is artifice.

Bigelow spat in the face of those assumptions. By snatching the war film mantle from her male predecessors, she showed the world that Hollywood is not a boys’ club anymore. The question is, if McQueen wins, will he be making a similar statement about race? I don’t think so. At best, it's says, “If at first you don’t get noticed, make a film about slavery.” At worst, it says, “These are the films we, as black artists, get to make.” And I really don’t want that to be true.

There are so many things wrong with the Academy Awards that ragging on them is picking low-hanging fruit, and I’m in no way saying they shouldn’t have nominated 12 Years a Slave. But, just because there are (gasp) four black people at the Oscars, doesn’t mean you can go around patting yourself on the back and tooting the horn of racial equality. 

An angel...drowned in tears

Maybe it's because he came from the godless no man's land of video installation art, which most critics view with the same contempt that Graham Chapman's King Arthur holds for Camelot, but no one I've read ever seems to talk about Steve McQueen's influences as a filmmaker. People are quick to reference other films on the subjects he tackles (addiction, slavery), but no one I've read has delved into how he came by his technique, at least not in the cinematic tradition. Having seen most of his stunning gallery work, it's easy enough to say that he just figured out in small doses how he wanted to show the world. Certainly one could look at Giardini, his half-hour split-screen effort that covers a neighborhood and its silent occupants over the course of a few quiet days, as a test-run for Shame's microscopic investigation of a man's routine, upset by intrusion and leading to self-destruction. The name most frequently dropped in discussions of 12 Years A Slave is Spielberg; Schindler's List, Amistad and The Color Purple are easy points of comparison but I don't think the two Steves have much in common as directors. In order to figure out where McQueen's roots are planted, look back further to his earliest short films. Look at the dark drawing room wrestling match in Bear, or the dreary countryside all around the stonefaced director in Deadpan. It's the same countryside that Michael Reeves and Piers Haggard used to haunt. The wrestling match may be in slow-motion and narrative-less, but it's quite clearly an re-staging of the centerpiece of Ken Russell's Women In Love. He and Russell share a fascination with the body and everything it can endure. Not to mention they're both fearless.

This is an English tradition from which McQueen's patience seemed to displace him. After all, the camera's movement is all but invisible when it does show up in Hunger, Shame and 12 Years, and Reeves and his generation could barely sit still. Russell in particular redefined where a camera could go and how fast it could get there. But you don't have to squint to see Michael Reeves in McQueen's cinema. The IRA soldiers of Hunger look an awful lot like the bored mods of The Sorcerers, notably Ian Ogilvy, who haunts the city at night like Michael Fassbender in Shame. The monster-under-the-surface theme propels both Shame, The Sorcerers and The She Creature. Most importantly, there's an awful lot that connects 12 Years A Slave to Reeves' magnum opus Witchfinder General. 

Witchfinder General has an interesting reputation. I think it's thought of mainly as a horror film and having Vincent Price at his most sincerely evil would appear to validate that, but it's something different. Looking explicitly at the practice of burning innocents as witches to keep religious authority on its pedestal, Witchfinder General or The Conquerer Worm as it was called in the US, is one of the harshest looks at English history ever filmed. Matthew Hopkins, played by Price, was a real figure who killed something like 300 women in his lifetime. Here he stands in for the worst traditions of the English government; scholars have pointed out there was little accuracy in Reeves' depiction of Hopkins practices but that's hardly the point. Reeves was more interested in the feeling of truth. After all, being burnt alive hurts, trial or no trial. Reeves' depictions of the hangings, beheadings, burnings and drownings are still unbearably cruel today. The mass drowning in particular still curdles my blood. Reeves managed to tone down Vincent Price and get one of his iciest performances as the deceiving Hopkins; I don't think he ever bested his work here. Reeves never directed another film and this is justly the film he's best remembered for; it kicked off a wave of politically charged witch-burning films in the 70s that acted as mirrors to the modern era's repressive status quo. That sound familiar?

12 Years A Slave takes a very similar approach to its era and subject matter and is also based on a book, though it's much more closely adheres to provable fact than Witchfinder General. Solomon Northrup's book of the same name is based on his experiences as a kidnapped slave, an invaluable document that means the script already has the authenticity missing from Witchfinder General, but the important thing is the overlap in execution. Sometimes it's simple; a few beautiful shots of the countryside, of the indifference of nature which goes on being splendid no matter what man does to it, to break up the horror of humanity. But more often it's rougher than that. Reeves and McQueen want to put you inches from the whippings and brandings, to remove any chance of ironic distance. The events are in the past, but the pain should be present-tense. Reeves fought a very public battle with censors over the violence in Witchfinder General because he needed it to tell the story, the same way McQueen spares no whipmark and lets the weeping and wailing of bereaved mothers go on through multiple scenes. The horrors of Reeves' first two films were big and colorful; if he was pushing the envelope in Witchfinder it wasn't just to get a rise out of thrill-seeking audiences. He was trying to be honest and make English audiences realize what had happened to its people before things had become 'civilized.' Perhaps sensing that that particular story had been told, set his sights on a chapter in dire need of revisiting. McQueen can't help but render things beautifully but like Reeves his direction never feels less than totally honest. They went back in time to tell stories, not indulge their muse. Shame and The Sorcerers represent their respective artistic ids, untethered and pure. The scene of Karloff eavesdropping on the young couple swimming has the same cold sensuousness as Fassbender renting a room to try out 'normal' sex with a co-worker. An aside: Ian Ogilvy and Karloff represent both sides of Fassbender's psyche in Shame. Ogilvy slowly falls under the spell of Karloff's witchcraft and can't control his body. Fassbender wants to behave normally and rid himself of his vices but they hold him down and make him act against his best interest; he can see his idealized self just out of his grasp but can't reach it without self-destructing.

Both Reeves and McQueen shoot faces with rhyming clarity but also know when to cut away. They know precisely how much to show and how to get away with it. Both films have conflicting moments where the male hero is tortured by proxy, using a female intermediary at the hands of the sadistic overseer. In Witchfinder, Hopkins kidnaps young lovers played by Ogilvy and Hilary Heath, who've caught onto his witch-kiling scheme to stay above the law. In order to harm Ogilvy and get him to confess to bogus witchcraft so he can be 'legally' executed, Hopkins stabs Heath in the back repeatedly with a thin needle, a sight I have to watch through my fingers. In 12 Years, Fassbender's drunk slave owner Epps wants to punish the woman he loves, one of his slaves, and himself while he's at it but makes Solomon whip the girl on his behalf to make sure he isn't the one who walks away with the most damage to his mental health or pride. Solomon knows that Patsey would rather be whipped by a friend than by her master and rapist but he's been able to keep a certain remove from himself and his captors. Epps wants to remove it and break Solomon just as Hopkins wants to force a confession from the young soldier. The pain is only symbolic as both Hopkins and Epps both know that they're going to inflict the damage one way or another. They want pain to mean something because it's how they relate to the world. It's what keeps the illusion of their power alive. Also noteworthy is that in both films, our heroes are allowed to have revenge against their tormentors (Chiwetel Ejiofor whipping the overseer played by Paul Dano, Ogilvy overpowering Price with an ax), but it's fleeting and unsatisfactory. Anything more than that would be to cheat the past and have their heroes sink to a place where audiences can't follow them. The most memorable torture follows each; Solomon's day spent hanging from a tree, only his toes keeping him alive, and Ogilvy's screaming incoherently at being robbed of real vengeance, which would have truly put him on Hopkins' level. Ogilvy's impotent ravings are some of the most psychologically damaging sounds you'll ever hear. Just try and scrape them off your brainpan. Their almost as rough as the weeping mother in 12 Years.

McQueen also has a very important precedent in the work of Reeves' American counterpart, Curtis Harrington. Like McQueen, Harrington got his start making avant-garde short films that heavily influenced the feature films he'd make in the 60s and 70s. They essentially approached features from inverse angles. Harrington went from shorts to work-for-hire, turning sci-fi potboilers into Kenneth Anger-inspired (the two were good friends) pop-art subterfuge. His first assignment for American International Pictures were reshoots to turn a russian sci-fi film called Planet of Storms into Voyage To A Prehistoric Planet. My favourite addition involves Basil Rathbone being forcefed life-giving pills from his robot doctor in the middle of an interplanetary storm. This was the first clue that Harrington was in no way an ordinary director. McQueen worked the other way around, independent financing and picking stories he can organically apply his style. What they have in common is aesthetic control. They've each produced a handful of tableaux that I'll never be able to forget that lift their films above more ordinary takes on the same subject. Put Queen of Blood, Harrington's second sci-fi thriller, next to Space Probe Taurus, They Came from Beyond Space or one of Antonio Margheriti's Gamma One films, all roughly of the same vintage, and Harrington's strengths as a director stick out like a sixth finger. Similarly, place McQueen's Hunger next to Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father and McQueen emerges as an artist interested in appealing to more than just our love of a compelling story and/or our consciousness. Harrington and McQueen both share an interest in psychosexual tension and power structures, specifically social ones. Games, Harrington's third film, bears marked thematic similarities to the ground covered in the Epps section of 12 Years, and the brother-sister relationship in Shame, though Harrington's playing with a loaded deck and for much lower stakes.

The work that Harrington got out of Dennis Hopper is not dissimilar to what McQueen has been able to get out of Michael Fassbender. The cocksure but sensitive sailor in Night Tide feels like a cousin to the Fassbender persona, like his quietness, his indecision, his compassion to a fault raised the three characters Fassbender plays in the McQueen films. Both actors sense an opportunity to grow while in the hands of artists they knew and trusted. In Queen of Blood one can see Hopper working out his own method; so much broils under the surface. Similarly Fassbender couldn't quite keep his southern accent together for all of Ridley Scott's The Counselor, but really makes the effort to maintain a consistent dialect in 12 Years A Slave as the monstrous but clearly conflicted Epps.  Harrington and McQueen both had to keep a number of plates spinning and clearly had less interest in designing the life out of the performances, especially when dealing with the likes of Hopper, Fassbender, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Basil Rathbone and Brad Pitt, respectively. They let their actors breathe and find their own way through complicated and/or well-worn character types. They've gone the trouble of producing the most visually awesome versions of the stories being told (Slave narrative, sci-fi/horror) so it wouldn't do to hamstring their performers. Queen of Blood is perhaps Harrington's most sumptuous production, every shot art directed to look quite unlike anything ever attempted in American popular cinema. It most resembles Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, another AIP production from the year before, but Harrington has such a bizarre, ethereal approach to his set-pieces that the whole thing floats by. Bava's compositions are sturdy as a pair of steel-toed boots, keeping the central mystery grounded the whole time. Harrington aims for the stratosphere and unsurprisingly flies right through it. McQueen's dramatic structure takes a similar tack. We know how long Solomon is kept in bondage, but McQueen hops around the timeline, focusing on the most important and harrowing representations of his experience. Like Harrington's astronauts, we float through Solomon's nightmare (McQueen's camera only occassionally feels as rooted to any particular spot as, say, Bava's) always a few feet above or below Solomon and often a far enough distance away that he can track a lengthy action scene without breaking continuity. Take for instance the scenes where Epps takes his aggression out on Solomon when he can't bring himself to harm Patsey. He chases Solomon around and through a pig enclosure, and McQueen stands back, letting us know exactly how far away from each other they are. It's distant but keeps the scene from feeling exceptional - this is what Solomon dealt with every day. Chasing him with the camera would have felt like undo emphasis. It also keeps it as dirty and absurd as it would have been, with both men sliding around in mud and being separated by the woman of the house like children. And so we drift from scene to scene, preserving the illusion of 12 Years passing without fretting over lost time. Harrington's approach to the deaths of major characters has the same sense of gliding. These things happen. He also loses a lot of time in the many months spent traveling to Mars' moon Phobos in Queen of Blood, but you never notice or mind because the journey is so full of his unique design. There's a mountain of difference between the two approaches, but they produce the same effect; integrity of momentum preserved by acute, confident visuals. When both filmmakers pause that motion and present us with firmly composed looks at the people who occupy their worlds, the effect is devastating. For a moment, a masterpiece painted just for us. They litter Queen of Blood, but the best of them lies in 12 Years when Solomon and a host of other slaves have just disembarked from a steamship. They sit in differently colored, dirty, faded clothes, their faces masks of exhaust and pain. 

These connections aren't intended as keys to the McQueen puzzle, indeed 12 Years A Slave could hardly be a work that stands more firmly on its own terms. But placing him in context has helped me like him as a person, as well as an artist. I can imagine his journey from installation virtuoso to internationally lauded filmmaker with unprecedented access to an international dream cast. I love the work that Reeves and Harrington did in the 60s and 70s, but I think I like them more because I know about their lives and the artists they were indebted to: Harrington owed much to his peer Kenneth Anger while Reeves found Don Siegel at his home to tell him he thought he was the greatest director alive. This puts more life into their films for me and the chill one gets from watching Shame or 12 Years A Slave can be warmed by knowing McQueen is part of a long tradition of artists who did great work as feature directors. I for one can't wait to see what he does next. After their third films Harrington turned increasingly to TV movies and Reeves passed away, far too young. I can't wait to see what McQueen does next. Might I suggest he follow in Reeves and Harrington's footsteps and give horror a chance?

Oscar Corrections 2009

Hi there. I know I'm in the middle of a dozen different recurring pieces around here, but the Academy Awards were this Sunday and as usual they got everything fucking wrong. Not that I'm not glad that The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar, that made my night, but there were quite simply much better films out there that got no attention, or were relegated to miniscule categories they didn't stand a chance in. So, let's see just who got snubbed this year, shall we?

Best Foreign Language Film 

I'd like to state once and for all what a stupid, backwards idea it is that we have to draw lines down language barriers. Most of the films I saw this or any year that I consider to be the best are in other languages. It's fucking stupid and insulting that we have to put up with racist claptrap like The Blind Side receiving best picture nominations when there are movies like Gomorrah and Let The Right One In getting completely ignored. Il Divo, Gomorrah, Beaches of Agnes, Vincere, Red Cliff, Lorna's Silence, White Ribbon, A Prophet, Mother, Flame and Citron, Summer Hours, The Headless Woman, Tony Manero, Broken Embraces, Mesrine, Tulpan, Just Another Love Story, Thirst, The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and Police, Adjective were all stellar. Better than Avatar. Better than The Blind Side. Better, most of them, than The Hurt Locker. 

Best Film Editing

I would say that this award should have gone to Julian Clarke for District 9 because of the film's brilliant use of mixed media, but there were so many expertly edited films this year. Star Trek, Thirst, 35 Shots, The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Not Quite Hollywood, The International, The Baader Meinhoff Complex, Bronson, Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Escapist and Bright Star are just some of the terrifically edited films this year. 

Best Sound Mixing/Editing

I'll be honest and say that I'm not an astute audio student so I've lumped the editing and mixing together. I give it to Drag Me To Hell but runners-up Terminator: Salvation (the only accolade it deserves), The House of the Devil, Star Trek and District 9 all sounded thrilling as well.

Best Original Score

This is quite a tough one actually but I'm going to have to go with Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi's beautiful score for A Single Man. The film's hypnotic and lilting melodies matched the elegiac epiphanies of the film's hero. A close second would be Nick Cave & Warren Ellis' simple yet gorgeous score for The Road. Whether through terrifying dissonance or calming violin and piano arrangements, Cave and Ellis prove themselves masters of tone and understatement. Carlo Crivelli's score for Vincere is a similarly close third place, with its vibrant string melodies as quirky and irascible as its hero. Adrian Younge's serious score for the pastiche film Black Dynamite is not just a great piece of work, but also the result of a lot of love and research and deserves more credit than its gotten. And Hans Zimmer's score for Sherlock Holmes was really something, too. 

Best Visual Effects

Yeah, I could give this to Avatar but that requires no creativity. Drag Me To Hell had some fun lo-fi effects; Star Trek looked great, thanks in large part to J.J. Abrams love of lens flares; the quidditch scenes in Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince were the best they've ever been; District 9's visual effects were pretty much flawless from start to end; Where The Wild Things Are made more likable characters out of CG-fied puppets than everyone in Avatar combined; The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus looked pretty stellar at times and The Road managed to conceal it's CG excellently. 

Best Cinematography

Hands down Anthony Dod Mantle for Antichrist. He may never best his work in this film, indeed only the work of Roger Deakins and Emmanuel Lubezki compares. From the unspeakably brilliant black-and-white opening to the Japanese painterly quality of the forest images in Charlotte Gainsbourg's dreams, Mantle's images are almost too beautiful for words. Though he most assuredly did the year's best work it's a great sign that there were so many others with almost comparable photography. Javier Aguirresarobe turned The Road from great to masterpiece quality, translating prose to landscapes; Sean Bobbit found the beauty in the aching tragedy of Steve McQueen's Hunger; Martin Ruhe's work on the moribund The Countess was wonderful; Eliot Rockett captured the look of the early 80s perfectly in House of the Devil; Roger Deakins brings it once again in A Serious Man; Daniele Cipri's lush cinematography brought out the deep crimson hue of Vincere's story; Kyung-Pyo Hong's greyscale photography and technical prowess got to the heart of Bong-Joon Ho's Mother; Eduard Grau deserves much praise for his innovative style in A Single Man (his camerawork was nearly half the reason the movie worked so well); Lance Acord brought tranquility to Where The Wild Things Are; Larry Smith found the artistic side of the thoroughly mad Bronson; Christian Berger's beautiful black-and-white compositions were another character in The White Ribbon and Philipp Blaubach's work on The Escapist was equal parts grit and gothic. All in all, a great year for cinematography.

Best Costume Design

At first I gave it to The Countess but after reviewing Bright Star I've come to see that it really is a superb achievement. Fanny Brawne's gowns are always brilliant and exquisite. Janet Patterson not only designed the costumes, but also did a good deal of the physical production design. And so for that, she gets the award. Pierre-Yves Gayraud did a remarkable job on The Countess, one of many successfully costumed-costume dramas this year. Arianne Phillips for A Single Man, Moidele Bickel for The White Ribbon, Tim Yip for Red Cliff, Mary Zophres for A Serious Man, Choi Eui-Yeong and Yu-Jin Gweon for The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Bina Daigeler for The Limits of Control, Sandy Powell for The Young Victoria, Manon Rasmussen, Margrethe Rasmussen and Rikke Simonsen for Flame and Citron and of course Robin Fitzgerald for House of the Devil, all made splendid showings for themselves.

Best Art Direction

Well I give it up to Brendan Rankin for his art direction on Hunger, a film that is both a political treatise and an unflinching work of art. Briseide Siciliano for Vincere is a close second. And Irene O'Brien's work on the aptly titled The Escapist, Jane Levick for Bronson, Ian Phillips for A Single Man, Astrid Poeschke's work on The Countess, David Hindle and Christian Huband for Bright Star, Seong-Hie Ryu's design for Thirst and the half-dozen guys who worked on Where The Wild Things Are were also brilliant.

Best Animated Feature

As strict animation goes, it's definitely Coraline because Henry Selick utilized the form in a totally immersive and gripping fashion. I very much liked Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox but they weren't nearly as innovative or beautiful to simply stare at. 

Best Supporting Actress

Allow me first to say that splitting actors down gender lines is kind of archaic and needs to stop. I get that it allows equal attention to both actors and actresses but it also implies that there is a fundamental difference between the way men and women approach roles and we really ought to get past making distinctions like this. That said best supporting actress is without doubt Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince. She has maybe five minutes of screentime in a two hour plus film and steals the whole movie. The same can be said of Marion Cotillard who owns both Public Enemies and that fucking terrible Nine. She's lovely, talented and radiant but neither film meets her half-way. Alia Shawkat proves herself capable of being feisty and intelligent in the little-loved Amreeka (a sober break from her much-loved turn as Maebe on the much-loved Arrested Development). Finally Aryana Engineer is the heart and soul of the heartless and soulless Orphan as the youg deaf-mute Max. Engineer, an actual deaf-mute, does and says more with a look than most of her co-stars (shit, she acts circles around Vera Farmiga) and comes off as the only sympathetic character. She is absolutely brilliant and gives star Isabelle Fuhrman stiff competition for best young actress in the film.

Best Supporting Actor

This is tough. The best supporting turns were largely comedic and it's always tough quantifying such things. I'll give it to Karl Urban, cause he's had it coming for many, many years and his Bones not only made Star Trek but proved there is no end to his range as an actor. Beside him are the ever-dour Mads Mikkelson, showing his sympathetic side in Flame and Citron, Paul Schneider as the impossible Charles Brown in Bright Star, Larry Fessenden in the part he was born to play in I Sell The Dead and Justin Long as the lovably hapless boyfriend in Drag Me To Hell.

Best Documentary Feature

If I wasn't going to give it best picture I'd give this to Beaches of Agnes. You know what, I'm still going to give it to Beaches of Agnes. It's a film about a life but also but why cinema is the most permanent and intimate artform and how it has come to embody the lives of its proponents. A gorgeous and heartbreaking look at many lives touched by film. Fred Wiseman's La Danse was unjustly overlooked by the academy, as was Not Quite Hollywood! both charming looks into an artform. 

Best Adapted Screenplay

Tony Burgess adapted his own novel Pontypool Changes Everything for Bruce McDonald's film Pontypool and made it into one of the most intelligent and excitingly literate horror films of the last decade. Behind him is Chan-Wook Park and Seo-Gyeong for there loose interpretation of Zola's Thérèse Raquin, Thirst. Tom Ford and David Scearce turned Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man into a much more purposeful and insightful work. Dave Eggars and Spike Jonze turned a beloved (and very short) children's book into a totally engaging and harrowing examination of childhood.

Best Original Screenplay

A Serious Man. There's just no question. Joel and Ethan Coen's latest film is one of their best and it starts with their uproarious screenplay. Try keeping a straight face when you think of Sy Ableman from now on; it's impossible. If that went over your head, see the movie, then you'll see what I mean. Not only is it funny and acerbic, it's also totally unpredictable and fresh. Michael Haneke's uber-tense The White Ribbon is also a brilliantly written work, unfolding like a classical piece of literature. Robert Siegel's Big Fan shifts from claustrophobic to hilarious a the drop of a Giants hat and often doesn't know where the line between them lies - the film is thus satisfying complex despite a very simple premise. Glenn McQuaid's tribute to all things horrific I Sell The Dead is a loving and charming work, as is Scott Sanders, Michael Jai White and Byron Minns' script for their blaxploitation send-up Black Dynamite. 

Best Actress

Let me reiterate: we shouldn't be making gender distinctions. But this is a corrective, and if I don't stick to some kind of rule then it would just be chaos! Giovanna Mezzogiorno wins this year for Marco Bellocchio's Vincere. Her portrayal of an increasingly mad Ida Dalser, Mussolini's forgotten mistress, is sympathetic and enthralling. As her sensuous energy gives way to a touching resilience, you can feel every second of her pain as her identity is taken from her. Runners-up: Isabelle Fuhrman for her fearlessly playing a psychopathic twelve year old with secrets worth murdering for in the B-tastic Orphan. Abbie Cornish as the outwardly frail, inwardly strong Fanny Brawne in Bright Star who is a thrillingly alive alternative to most teenage heroines. Ok-Bin Kim as the cutest murderous in history in Thirst. Alison Lohman as a feisty former farm queen in Drag Me To Hell gleefully owning every Bruce Campbell-esque blow to the head and histrionic shout at the devil. The heartbreaking Hye-Ja Kim as the titular Mother in Bong Joon-Ho's tribute to David Lynch, family and noir. Arta Dobroshi in the Dardenne brother's nightmarish Lorna's Silence. María Onetto as the hero of The Headless Woman, who had not only a head but a great deal of hair...and one of the most blistering performances of the year; she hardly says anything but she communicates so much.

Best Actor

Tom Hardy gets it this year for his outlandish turn as the unbeatable hero of Bronson. As Britian's most pugnacious prisoner, Hardy is like one big muscle, impossible to get a grip on and always menacing and impressive. Whether singing in solitary or battling all the guards in England in the nude, Hardy through his whole being into the performance and he's captivating from start to finish. Runners-up: Viggo Mortensen at his most touchingly human in The Road. Sam Rockwell as the increasingly tired and homesick Sam Bell in Moon. Michael Stuhlgard as the patently befuddled hero of A Serious Man. Sharlto Copley as the unluckiest man in the universe in District 9. Jeremy Renner as the war-hungry James in The Hurt Locker. Toni Servillo deserves accolades, whether its as the vampiric Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo or the unflappable Franco in Gomorrah isn't important. He's terrific as both. Colin Firth is pain personified in A Single Man and misery looks great on him. Christian McKay gives the best Welles in years in Richard Linklater's Me And Orson Welles. Michael Jai White owns every bit of overwrought dialogue with his perfectly hammy performance as Black Dynamite. And if we could give actor awards to voice talents then surely James Gandolfini and Ed Asner would get oscars for their roles in Where The Wild Things Are and Up, respectively.

Best Director

Steve McQueen wins hands down for his feature debut Hunger. Forcing us into a myriad of uncomfortable situations so that we might consider the impossibility of fighting a war with no front lines. From his unflinching long takes (including the notorious 17 minute conversation) to his impeccable sense of visuals and timing, McQueen proved himself a worthy champion of the arthouse after years spent making video installations for galleries around the world. Hunger is a work of art and McQueen an artist. Close behind him or perhaps tied with him is Agnes Varda for The Beaches of Agnes who shows us the importance of every strip of film and how she has lived through films, something that has stuck with me. Matteo Garrone proves himself not only an ardent cinephile but one of the greatest directors of actors on the planet with Gomorrah. Ti West, director of House of the Devil and Nicholas Winding Refn, the crazed auteur behind Bronson, follow. There are of course many more: John Woo's lyrical Red Cliff showed him once again in charge of his artform. Bong Joon-Ho rebounded from the mediocre The Host with the blindingly weird and darkly wonderful Mother. Rupert Wyatt did a stellar job turning hopelessness into adventure with The Escapist. Joel and Ethan Coen deliver the perfectly orchestrated A Serious Man and Jane Campion handled Bright Star with seasoned touch. And of course John Hillcoat adapted one of my favorite books into one of my new favorite films.

Best Picture

Well as you may have guessed I'm a bit divided on this. Hunger is undeniably affecting, Beaches of Agnes inspiring and touching, Vincere beautifully haunting, Gomorrah as terrifying as the real thing, Bright Star romantic and tragic, House of the Devil intelligent and bone-chilling, A Serious Man wildly hysterical and poetically handled, A Single Man life-affirming in its thrilling-yet-morbid conceit. The best film of the year is in there somewhere. Or maybe you know what it is and I haven't mentioned it (if not, do let us know!). Maybe there's no way to quantify such a thing. Regardless, it's been a good year.

Life and how to Die

I realized in my lists that one or more of these films needed qualification. I'm thinking specifically of my life-affirming films section. For years the notion of a movie that I was told, from the ads and promotional material and from the recommendations of friends I couldn't believe had actually seen the movies, was going to make me think about life differently. When I walked out of whatever movie it was, my life was going to be affirmed, whatever the fuck vague-ass thing that's supposed to mean. Seriously, there's nothing I hate more, especially today, of a consensus about a film's power to change lives. Lives, plural, cannot be changed all by the same repeated set of tragic/quirky circumstances that lead to the same heartwarming conclusion. The only thing more insulting than the idea that one film is going to have the same impact on everyone who sees it is the list of films who generally get stuck with the label 'life-affirming.' Think back to every movie that promised to change your life for the better. The ones that spring immediately to mind (Simon Birch, My Dog Skip, Pay It Forward) not only failed to change my life, but they also failed to not annoy the shit out of me. The one thing most of these falsely comforting movies have in common is that they all resolutely cheat you out of a real confrontation with death. Each has death in it, but the way in which they handle the subject is so nauseatingly earnest that it verges on pornographic. To address death is not enough and to treat it as the most profound thing in the life of a family (community, fictitious mob of candle-wielding followers, what have you...) is cheap. What of the survivors in the minutes that follow? The hours? Entire days with nothing to think of but what they've lost and what awaits them? That even in death they won't see those they've lost again. Death is a huge deal to everyone, that's why people have religious beliefs, but where movies supposedly about life fail is to treat that concern as anything other than internal and individual, to treat it as a spring board for discussion and box-office receipts. The reason I bring this up is to talk mostly about one of the movies toward the top of my Life movies list. Oh, and if I list a movie below and you haven't seen it, don't read on because I'm going to spoil it for you.

A Single Man
by Tom Ford

I knew as soon as it was done that it had an obvious kin-ship with the others on the list and then I started thinking about why it's so. Why should relative tragedies like A Single Man or The Diving Bell & The Butterfly be the ones that make us (me and a few other people I've spoken to about the films) appreciate life when they are ostensibly about death? Well I think it's because they're ostensibly about death. Diving Bell gives us life through one eye in the last months of its mind's life. Jean-Dominique Bauby knew he was nearing the end of his life but more importantly he knew that if he were ever to enjoy himself again, he would have to adapt to the shit hand he'd been dealt. Suddenly every detail becomes imperative, every second becomes crucial, every memory precious as gold. It took his death sentence to both see everything new as beautiful and everything he'd lived as really quite special and fulfilling. Stephen Soderbergh's Guerrilla or the second half of Che has a similar attitude towards death. In what amounts to no more than a minute of the film's 135 minute running time, Che, disguised for his trip to Bolivia, says goodbye to his children and then a wordless goodbye to his wife. Soderbergh does not make us privy to Che's inner-monologue (making Che almost certainly the first war film with a purposely objective view of its heroes) so we do not know what he thinks when in the end he is shot and killed, but I wouldn't hesitate to think it was the few seconds sitting wordlessly with his head pressed against his wife's. Soderbergh frames his death from his subject's point-of-view, the closest we get to being in his head, so that we can experience the man's passing first-hand. It is a grave and shocking moment that forces us to confront our own mortality and what must have been going through his head as he closed his eyes for the last time. It also takes about as long as the scene on the couch with Mrs. Guevara. But rather than tell us (Soderbergh 'just tells' us nothing), we are forced to think about his journey and our own.

Steve McQueen's Hunger (a film I might just have to start referring to with possessive adjectives, so frequently do I profess my love for it) goes the extra step in Bobby Sands, the movie's subject's death-throes. In much the same way as Soderbergh, McQueen sets up the dying moments of Bobby Sands in a piece of dialogue with almost no more importance than any of those surrounding it but when it appears just before Sands' death, it is clear that it does have importance for Sands. We are allowed in his head to see a vision of paradise before the nothingness takes hold of him. Sands spent his life as a violent, murderous revolutionary, yet McQueen posits (rightly, in my opinion) that what would come back to him, and to us, are little moments of personal significance. The memory Sands relives is one that means something to him - a personal victory and a time of sublime realization - and nothing of his struggle. Sands' life, though hardly as extraordinary, was certainly as colorful as Guevara's and that their deaths are the conclusions to their respective bio-pics is crucial. Suddenly every detail of the Maze prison becomes important because these are the last walls he'll see. And where should a boy like to be if he is to die in prison? Outside, free, a boy, innocent, the sun going down. Though the moment doesn't sound particularly heavenly, it is in its simplicity, it's every detail shining through like the last rays of the descending sun, that it becomes transcendent. Our lives probably don't flash before our eyes (Soderbergh and McQueen are in agreement here) because the cruelty of it is too sudden to be defended against. If we have time to approach it, we'll probably deny it out of fear or stubbornness. Sands is lucky enough to be visited by one final memory, a pleasant one. Guevara probably wasn't so lucky - he and Sands both lived in hellish environs before their deaths. With the memories of loved ones or incredible times in their heads Bauby and Sands pass easier than Guevara, whose head we're never privileged enough to see into. Soderbergh's ending is the most practical and thus the hardest but not the saddest of the three. Bauby has what he'll be leaving behind right in front of him so it's the most tragic when his world goes dark. Sands made a choice to die and though he attempts to escape his self-imposed death sentence in his final moments, his death isn't so tragic as Bauby's because McQueen's film is about fighting what's been given to you. Sands fights incarceration by killing himself and only fights death by putting himself out of the prison walls before it comes for him. Guevara fights death itself by swearing at his executioner. The tragedy is how unfair it is that this man, who we've lived with for the last several hours (if you've watched the whole movie, which you should have), who is so extraordinary, should be killed in so brutal and short a fashion. He was meant for more.

In A Single Man the end of life is the film's conceit, but really that's not what it's about. Based on Christopher Isherwood's novel, the story is simple enough: George Falconer, a middle-aged gay English professor loses his lover of 16 years Jim and decides to kill himself rather than fight the loneliness that's been plaguing him for another day. The film is set in the 1960s, which is important for a few reasons. Firstly it allows director Tom Ford to recreate a chic Los Angeles neighborhood in splendid and lush detail, and second it allows us to consider mortality and legacy from a time itself long dead. The details of George's day are simple and with good reason: He wakes, he eats breakfast, he teaches a class, talks to a flirtatious male student, takes all his money out of his safe-deposit box, chats up a young, Spanish hustler, sees an old-flame, a woman, goes out to buy a bottle of scotch before he kills himself but runs into the male student, they go swimming naked, then go back to George's house, they talk and appear ready to have sex but George passes out before they do so, then just after deciding not to kill himself succumbs to a heart-attack. Like Diving Bell, the movie is told through new observations and a few carefully chosen flash-backs but A Single Man is fueled by a sense of dramatic irony, that we know, because George puts a pistol in his briefcase, that he is planning to kill himself, though he never out and says it. So as we follow him throughout the day we see him really taking in, really relishing every detail of his otherwise very ordinary existence. Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau hit upon an ingenious strategy to render their protagonist's mindset. In fact considering this is Ford's first film, the way he utilizes his camera is really quite impressive (though I understand he is a rather talented photographer, so I suppose it's not wholly unprecedented, but still...) George (played with wonderfully dry candour and tragic poise by Colin Firth) is usually framed in a dour grey, his surroundings apparently just as sad as he is. When George sees something that pleases him or engages someone and appreciates them (verbally or internally) and it brings him out of his depressed state of mind, the colors come alive too. Suddenly he's not grey and brown, but beautiful amber and flush reds and awash in heavenly hair-light. It's a brilliant technique and coupled with Firth's observations the viewer can't help but be staggered. Tom Ford makes George and us appreciate the little things.

A word about Ford. Ford is apparently a designer of some repute but such is my ignorance of that world I had never heard of him. Most commentators are wont to bring up his background as if to explain away the film's look and feel. I want to say first of all that one's background doesn't preclude you from being able to enter into any kind of discourse or a change of mediums with lessened success. Critics are the first to treat film like something sacred that bad directors or those who don't take it seriously are defacing when they throw their two-cents in. If you can make a movie as powerful as A Single Man it doesn't matter where you came from. Second of all, I do find it pretty interesting that Ford's background in fashion apparently led to some of the film's more striking visuals. Could anyone else have presented George's home (a thing of Sirkian beauty, the house I've wanted to live in since I was a boy) with such crushing simplicity and effectiveness? Well if they could, they haven't, so I'll have no disparaging talk about Mr. Ford's background. Until you people make a film as good as this, I think I'll take my movies from directors and leave prohibitive guidelines or pre-existing prejudices at the door. In fact, A Single Man makes perfect sense coming from Ford, because it cuts to the core of the things that surround us and what matters by the end isn't the stunning house or beautiful clothes we dress ourselves in, it's when we're naked and alone that it's people and our memories of people that matter.

What A Single Man does rather beautifully is to basically approach two different ends while pursuing the same thesis, that we don't appreciate life quite as much as we ought to and that surviving is the hardest thing to do. It's there everyday but when we take the time to tell people how beautifully they really look, we get strange looks because it's not expected, least of all in the conservative early 60s (free love hadn't yet arrived, though the threat of Elvis' hips do get lip service from professor Falconer). The style and design recalls Mad Men (as does an apparent cameo by Jon Hamm as Jim's brother) and the music strikes a terrific balance between the period and timelessness. Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi's music is a heart-breaking entity unto itself and taken with Grau's camerawork, the lovely performances and Ford's all-seeing directorial eye, the movie is pretty flawless. There are moments in the film that make A Single Man not just a vital film, but also a key piece of motion picture history. Take the scene in which Umebayashi's variation on Bernard Herrmann's "Scotty Tails Madeleine" from Vertigo plays while George and the hustler/James Dean look-alike talk about Spain and broken dreams in front of the gorgeous blue Psycho poster in the grocery store parking lot. It's like a dream come true. One thing that is rather interesting and I don't know if this is Ford's meticulousness as a designer and director, but I found it very hard to find even the dreary scenes between each of Falconer's epiphanies to be anything less than gorgeous. More than once I was put in mind of L'Eclisse, which considering the importance of fascinating architectures and vast interiors to Antonioni's film is no mean feat. But I digress. George is in pain because Jim has died and left him alone - it takes the decision to follow him for George to realize that there is beauty all around him. Knowing he'll soon know nothing of it, he allows the scenery, the beautiful hustler and the cute boy in his English class enchant him. He does whatever seems a good idea because though he has resigned himself to death I think he's looking more for a reason not to. Even though reliving the memories he has of Jim seem designed to make him tighten his grip on life. Ford wants us to see that though George is careening towards a destiny he chose, he is open to life's little charms. He also comes to see the impact he has on the world he admires. When he visits his friend Charlotte (Julianne Moore, who I believe owns the rights to the 1960s because she seems to appear in every film that explores the underbelly of that decade. Don't get me wrong, she's excellent in these roles, and in this film particularly - who knew her posh English accent was so good? - but I do find it funny that no one makes a film about the sadness of the 60s middle class without asking her along) he sees that her happiness depends on him and though she has selfish motivations for doing so, cares for him deeply. Moore is pretty thrilling and nearly steals the movie with her maybe twenty minutes of screeentime. It is here that the film takes its most intriguing detour. As in L'Eclisse and countless other films about and during the early 60s, there is a break to dance. George and Charley dance to Booker T. & The MGs after dinner and like Marcello Mastroianni in La Notti Bianche, George abandons himself for a beautiful few seconds and I think it's here that he decides not to go through with his plan. Ford confirmed my thesis when we see the contents of George's troubled mind just before the end and we're given a flash of this scene. The scene is beautiful, not just in composition and photography, but in its showing George as willing to embarrass himself for his friend until it's no longer anything he has any self-consciousness about. This scene and George's last memory of Jim are the film's most beautiful moments - though the last conversation with Kenny the English student comes close.

Charlotte and George argue about George's inability to love her as more than a friend, but ultimately return to memories and in this become friends again. He leaves her in a haze of memory and promises to see her soon - the one place they can both hide is the past, though they know they need to escape it. Charlotte wants to use George as an escape, a new future, but George wants to believe she'll be fine without him given his plan. She is fragile and has been eternally good and patient with him and probably wouldn't survive his loss - it's a problem that could maybe be solved but not in the few hours he's allotted for himself. Their encounter takes it out of him - he needs scotch but he's out. He runs to the bar where he first met Jim, the most important thing in his life, and here he meets Kenny. Kenny had flirted with him and tried to enchant his professor earlier in the day; even bought him a colorful pencil sharpener, which George produces when they sit down to a glass of scotch each. "Enjoy the little things,” he says, placing it on the table. The film's thesis made concrete. Ford seems to be letting us know that someone as sly and sensual as George here couldn't leave behind a world he seems to know all the secrets of. They swim naked, George cuts himself somehow, and they wander back to George's home nearly naked. Here, in the firelight, is the beauty of two people together. George and Kenny never kiss or make love, but they hint at the possibility. George drinks himself quietly to sleep and wakes up a few minutes later. His flashback of his and Jim's last meaningful conversation is both a little too naked and terrifying in its frankness. Jim and George sit together reading, discussing plans, the neighbors, the upcoming trip, which will claim Jim's life. It's in the banality, the well-meaning back-and-forth, the freedom to read what they want, to love each other (to live in such a gorgeous house) to be, to exist, to do nothing with their days, that is most beautiful. Jim knows it and says so, sending ripples into George's future; it's why he has such trouble surviving, because Jim is gone. He gave so much of himself to the idea that he would be able to spend evenings with Jim, reading quietly and now he has to live past perfection. I think it's plainly those words that made George walk through his last day making sure to let every sensation knock him over with its very being. One fire-lit scene gives way to another and George finally sees what Jim meant for him - not to give up, but to find beauty in everything, to let the world in. Jim was able to find it in their simply existing in the same space, their lives wonderfully entwined. To leave it all behind would be to prove the love of his life wrong, which is the last thing George wants to do.

He burns his "read after my death" letters and prepares for another day but the only problem is how could another day be as precious as this. Jim is still gone but more importantly he lived today like it was his last, believing it was, how could tomorrow measure up? We only get one of these, Ford seems to say. By the time any of us thinks to live like George does, to find beauty in the everyday it is of course too late. Jean-Dominique Bauby, Bobby Sands, Che Guevara and George Falconer - the odd, fictitious man out - all see too late that life has all we're looking for. Jim steps out of his memory and kisses George's softly, as if to say that he had earned this gesture, that he had done all that Jim could have hoped for. His kiss and the last memory both resemble scenes in Solaris another rumination on love, death and loss. George's memory, something unreal and floating in his mind, and his dance with Charlotte both bring to mind the scenes of Kris and Hari floating above their bed in Solaris. They are out of time and out of place - memories come to life, like George's. When Jim steps out and becomes concrete for a moment, it has the same impact as Kris' final goodbye in Tarkovsky's sci-fi epic - they must escape the past to understand what it meant to them. George had learned and lived for his love, fulfilled his wish in death, and lived beautifully, even if only for a day. He finally learned what Jim meant that last night by the fire, reading together, living the same life. He learned to embrace life. His reward: one last memory, one final moment with Jim after the most beautiful day he had ever lived, the one he really been alive for. If he had seen it during Jim's lifetime, his death wouldn't have come so hard for George. Jim needed to die for George to see what Jim saw when he looked around the living room that night.

I'm a young person as I write this and though it’s safe to assume I do have a long life ahead of me, thoughts of dying are inescapable. I've been obsessed with death for much longer than is healthy or recommended for kids, but I don't guess I can help it. I do know that the times I'm in no danger of thinking about it are when I'm with people, specifically people I love. It seems every few months I see a movie that makes me take a long hard look at how I live (Time of the Wolf, Synecdoche, NY, Let The Right One In, The Road) and I encounter movies that always promise to do that and fail to by design. Yet this year especially seemed to produce an uncanny amount of films about how precious life is. No one else has changed - we're still ruining the earth and keeping marriage illegal, aren't we? I guess it would make sense for me to not change, to keep on, to not appreciate what I have until I die like the heroes of so many of my beloved films. But for once I feel like maybe I'm living like I should. I can't say I don't waste time - whole days, even - but I feel as if I get why movies like A Single Man are so absolutely necessary and profound and why they have the effect they do on me. There is no changing that it must happen or that I'm not wild about the idea, but I can see now (thanks in large part to films - call me what you will but it has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?) that shying away from it isn't the answer. It's time to start letting the little things become big things only when they promise happiness. I know that I have to let life and all its wonders wash over me. I'm lucky enough to be able to thank my friends for being that to me and letting me find meaning in their kindness and being able to take nice feelings away from their successes. I know I only have so much time and that I have to admire them and everything else I encounter before one of us disappears. This is why I watch films and why I want to make films - it might be meaningless, but there is so much to be loved and enjoyed that I would be stupid not to try to both see and capture it all. It's also why I take so much comfort in being able to spend time with some people, because I can just enjoy the best parts of the world by being with them. I may not be climbing the Himalayas or taking pictures of myself in front of the Eiffel Tower, but the beauty of people is the same everywhere. I don't have to go anywhere to know that - I don't even have to watch a film, though that won't stop me.

Best Films of 2009

Well, as things go, this wasn't a particularly good year for film. By which I mean the stuff that made it to first-run theatres tended to suck out loud; not all of it but, you know, most of it. In fact even the stuff that was a little left of center which critics fawned over (Inglorious Basterds, say) left me cold. This was a year of directorial titans giving it their all. Modern art house giants Ang Lee, Stephen Soderbergh, Park Chan-Wook, Tom Tykwer, Lars Von Trier, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson all gave us their latest opuses alongside old favorites Marco Bellocchio, Alain Resnais, Agnés Varda, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann. Granted there are a few films I still haven't seen that will have to be appraised with next year's crew. Resnais Les Herbes Folles remains tantalizingly out of reach and I've yet to find a theatre near Doylestown, PA showing either The Lovely Bones, A Single Man or The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Though I will say that despite my complaints there were a lot of very interesting movies that found their way to me, in fact I count 61+ in all that I really enjoyed. I'm going to focus on twenty specifically that were a cut above the rest and then I'll list the others below. Oh, and they go in ascending order, so I Sell The Dead is #20 and so on; it looks a little confusing, sorry. I'll get into specific things when the Oscars come around and fuck everything up. Until then, these are just the best, most satisfying over-all films I saw this year.

I Sell The Dead

by Glenn McQuaid

The first of two entries by my favorite production house, Glass Eye Pix, I Sell The Dead is a knowing pastiche of a number of different eras of horror cinema that never tries to do anything but entertain you. Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden (in the role he was born to play) are resurrection men with a long and storied career. Monaghan spins many a yarn to priest Ron Perlman while waiting for his turn at the gallows and a lot of tongue-in-cheek horror clichés are sent up beautifully. McQuaid's direction and writing are efficient, knowing and lovingly carried off. He works around a small budget with panache and makes sure that the focus remains on our love and fixation on the horror genre. His hilarious treatments of vampires, zombies and aliens are just as winning as his nods to die-hards like when he ends the film with this most charming bit of post-modern tribute "A good cast is worth repeating;" as are viewings of the movie.

Black Dynamite

by Scott Sanders

This year saw a number of great pastiche films and I have to say that Scott Sanders' Black Dynamite has the most research (and fun) evident in its every scene. Sanders and star Michael Jai-White clearly did their homework as to what usually lights up the blaxploitation films of the 1970s and used nearly every cliché in the book to hilarious ends. There are poorly edited pursuits on foot, kung-fu set to brass and wah-wah guitar, a posh hideaway staffed with girls, a pimp council, a criminal conspiracy led by whitey that goes straight to the top (and I mean the very top) and of course lots and lots of gettin' it on. Black Dynamite, like Shaft, Black Sampson, Dolemite, Slaughter, Savage and Sweet Sweetback before him knows when to kick ass and when to tap it - a crass joke, sure, but that's this movie's knowingly goofy mentality. It takes a real connoisseur of blaxploitation films to get the importance of the scenes of Black Dynamite dressed up to go to the park after he's 'cleaned up the streets'. Everything from the clean blue shirt to the hitherto unseen suburban setting is pure 70s cutaway and that it could have fallen out of Coffy or Foxy Brown is really what measures Black Dynamite's success. I hadn't laughed so hard in months.

Drag Me To Hell

by Sam Raimi

One of the only things as good as being scared to death is being able to laugh at yourself for being scared. Drag Me To Hell, Sam Raimi's first proper horror film in 22 years, is full of winking terror. Even as he presents obvious scares, he outmaneuvers us by making them still more terrifying and cruel than we imagined. The story of a girl trying outwit a gypsy's curse is blackly hilarious as the terror intensifies by the minute providing classic jump-out-of-your-chair moments the likes of which rival the best moments from Raimi's first two Evil Dead films. Wonderfully cheesy performances from Dileep Rao, Justin Long, Reggie Lee, David Paymer and Lorna Raver compliment feisty farm girl Alison Lohman's hilarious lead performance. It's a rare horror film where knowing the outcome and seeing the semi-cheesy set-pieces before they happen just makes for a more endearing viewing, like a joy-buzzer, but instead of getting a mild shock, a giant horned goat demon jumps out of a closet...wait, that doesn't make sense...

Lorna's Silence

by Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Though sadly this is my first film by the brothers Dardenne, I understand that they're aces at this sort of thing. This sort of thing is painfully honest portrayals of lower class relationships and the pain of needing other people who take and take and take. Lorna has married a drug addict so that she can get Belgian citizenship. Once she's done that she'll try and get rid of him (her mob connection wants to kill him) so that she can then turn around and do the same to gangsters. Arta Dobroshi as Lorna and Jérémie Renier as her drug-addled sham husband Claudy are achingly good as they use each other to achieve new lows. When Dobroshi bashes her head into a hospital wall to make a case for abuse that isn't happening it's just about the most tragic thing you'll ever see. To fill that one moment (and it looks like she's really hurting herself) with so much sombre tension is no small feat. Lorna's Silence is a story full of humanity that happens to focus on the injustices that greet those with dreams. Like the best of Ken Loach, the Dardennes have taken a sad story, someone you pass on the street but don't give a second thought to and given it the full breadth of understanding everybody deserves.

Where The Wild Things Are*

by Spike Jonze

Like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spike Jonze's beautiful children's film isn't strictly for kids. Unlike Fantastic Mr. Fox, kids shouldn't really have any trouble understanding all of it. This is because Jonze managed to create not only a beautifully winding narrative but he managed to replicate the mindset of a child. The tone shifts are set to the rhythm of a child's mood swings and the non-sequiturs (my favorite involving a dog) are all skillfully played reminders that the movie takes place in a child's psyche. At a time when Avatar is bringing critics and nerds alike to their knees, I think it particularly appropriate to have a film whose main characters are gigantic puppets with CG faces that act circles around everyone in James Cameron's film. Jonze manages to wring an insane amount of pathos from disembodied voices (James Gandolfini deserves an oscar) issuing from giant teddy bears. Best of all is the doubly heart-breaking ending. Like another film on this list, Where The Wild Things Are knows the one surefire way to make me cry: a kid, an adult and an almost silent scene of tenderness and understanding that fills the room with warmth.

*Basho's Pick

Revanche

by Götz Spielmann

Whatever your preference cinematically, fantasy, romantic comedy, horror, western, there is an objective truth to be found in direction. You may enjoy broad comedy or slapstick or a campy slasher film but one must see that those films are not truthful, they speak a language that has nothing in common with reality. Revanche is how it is. It is an honest film even though it presents artifice and 'superficial' action; everything rings true. For a film with as promising a title as Revanche (Revenge) Götz Spielmann's portrait of a man driven by guilt and hatred is surprisingly placid for much of its running time (albeit tense). Johannes Krisch is Alex (whoever said he's inexplicably mesmerizing was absolutely right. Something about him screams 'likeable' even as he acts like a heel) who has a plan to get him and his prostitute girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko in a similarly subtly awesome performance) out of their financial trouble. He tries to rob a bank but thanks to rookie cop Robert things don't go as planned. Alex holes up at his grandfather's farm contemplating revenge but discovers that maybe he isn't such a scoundrel after all. It's a complicated look at a not-so-complicated situation that becomes all the more fascinating as things level out. I think the strength ofRevanche is indefinable; I can't say exactly why I love any particular aspect, but I know I do. The film, like Alex's life, just unfolds and we have to make of it what we will; it's an honest look at a dishonest world.

Red Cliff

by John Woo

Told like a folk tale with a huge budget, John Woo's epic Red Cliff is a return to form even as it blows his previous work away. Not since his Hong Kong action days has he been this good and the reference to Hard Boiled at the start of the film tells me that he knows he's on fire. The Battle of Red Cliff is a famous Chinese battle fought in the year 208 and Woo renders it gorgeously (though his CG effects occasionally fail him). Red Cliff is about the art of the epic and the unbridled masculinity that usually carries it. Unlike, say, The Two Towers or Letters From Iwo Jima, the focus is on romanticizing nature and the love between people. The reason given for why the battle is ultimately fought is over a woman and unlike many on screen wives, she takes the offensive out of love for her husband. The reason that one side prevails isn't because they love their country more or have some convoluted notion of honor or patriotism, its through devotion to each other and to an understanding and love of the land and reading into every clue the earth gives them. It's a blast to watch and though, yes, there is a good deal of violence, Woo does get to the tragedy of just that. This is not violence for the sake of it because every death is a loss and we are made to feel it.

The White Ribbon

by Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a troubling and tense experience but ultimately rewarding. To see that Haneke's methods have matured and that he can both indict society and craft a classically beautiful movie capable of producing many kinds of stunned silence is worth any horror he has in store. A school teacher remembers a particularly harrowing chapter in his life in which unspeakable things started happening to pillars of his small village community. This isn't the first out-and-out mystery that Haneke's written but unlike Caché the answer isn't the thing that preoccupies us. As it becomes clearer who's actually behind the acts we want less and less to do with it because their targets become more sympathetic. The final clue is one of the more unnerving things you're likely to see even though so little actually happens. The White Ribbon plays like Cormac McCarthy's Our Town and is unsettling in the utmost but the quiet moments that break up the tension are so wonderfully underplayed that you come away feeling better than you have any right to. watching Christian Friedel's school teacher courting Eva (played with awkward charm by Leonie Benesch) is a little strange at first but very ends up being very sweet, and that Haneke can find both terror and loveliness (necessary when families are on trial) is a new direction for him.

Mother

by Bong Joon-Ho

Bong Joon-Ho is a terrific director with gonzo personal baggage. Taking the oddball dynamic of The Host and the subject matter of Memories of Murder, his previous two films, Mother is David Lynch weirdness and subtext given the rhythmic quality he's become dependable for. From Kyung-Pyo Hung's dusky cinematography to the lovingly applied technique (I don't think anyone's quite so in love with what a camera can do as Bong Joon-Ho. His tracking shots and POVs are awesome) Mother is like a theory textbook paraphrased by someone at Cahiers du Cinema. Taking familiar routes to unfamiliar territories there is enough at play for casual observers to see Hitchcock, Twin Peaks & Blue Velvet, Takashi Miike, Insomnia and other unsettling crime stories but there is a clear voice dictating the proceedings. I may not like everything that happens in Joon-Ho's films but I love the distinctness of his vision and that despite the tangents it goes on Mother's message is quite touching and the characters ultra-compelling. Mother is one of the most engaging (while simultaneously jarring) films of the year and it stops at nothing to deliver its message: we'll stop at nothing to save the ones we love.

Il Divo

by Paolo Sorrentino

Or as I like to call it, the film that Guy Ritchie wishes he had made. Il Divo is one of the most flashy and stylish movies ever made but for once that isn't the kiss of death. Rocketing from hyper-kinetic society bashes to rumbling horse races to quiet church interiors at four in the morning, Il Divo tells the story of Giulio Andreotti one of Italy's most corrupt and sinister Prime Ministers or political figures of any kind. As a companion piece to Matteo Garrone'sGomorrah (see below), Il Divo illustrates that not only is Italy one of the most dangerous places in the world to be poor but politicians and journalists are just as susceptible to crooked practices and murder as working class 40 somethings and teenagers. Caring less about verisimilitude than Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino spins a tangled web of intrigue about the facts and myths around Andreotti during his famously hellacious reign. Toni Servillo gives an unsettlingly unreadable performance, half Noseratu, half Hirohito, and he remains the unchanging face as Sorrentino turns up the crazy and calls the truth into question, by the end the only thing certain is that Il Divo is wild as hell.

Bronson

by Nicholas Winding Refn

It should stand as some testament to this film's power that I wrote a nearly twelve page essay on it the day after I saw it. No one read it but no matter, Bronson is about violence and our fixation on violence as a people. Using the body of Tom Hardy playing Charles Bronson née Michael Peterson, Britains' most famous convict, director Nicholas Winding Refn creates a world focused on and propelled by violence and our acceptance and indeed reverence for it. The film brims over with stylistic brio that matches Hardy's energetic performance punch for punch. To root for Bronson is to root for Tom Hardy is to root for Refn pulling the strings it to root for the movie and the success of charismatic trailblazers doing what they do best. A Clockwork Orange done right.

The Escapist

by Rupert Wyatt

Like a classic man's story a la John Sturges or Howard Hawks, Rupert Wyatt's The Escapist has a lot of hard-boiled conventions and one bitchin' conceit that isn't clear until the very end. You realize then that you haven't just been watching one of the more exhilarating prison break films on record but also a film as smart as it is taut. Brian Cox is Frank Perry who's settled into a life sentence until he hears that his only daughter is in trouble. Now he wants out so he can help her get off her drug addiction and out of her troubles. He turns to his cellmate Liam Cunningham and down-and-out cons Seu Jorge, Dominic Cooper and Joseph Fiennes for help breaking free from bondage, each of them delivering terrifically natural performances. Standing in there way is deranged informant Damian Lewis, playing the polar opposite of his Major Winters character from Band of Brothers, who has designs on Cooper's timid inmate Lacey and of course the prison itself. Art director Irene O'Brien and production designer Jim Furlong created an awesome prison underbelly, a gothic labyrinth that rivals David Fincher's in Alien³, another underrated English film driven by character actors. A dark and beautiful film with a grim and tough story but a starry-eyed philosophy; a crime film with ambition.

Bright Star

by Jane Campion

Maybe I'm just totally susceptible to this kind of story but I think Bright Star is actually one of the most devastating love stories ever told. John Keats and Frances Brawne's romance only lasted long enough for him to propose to her before he fell ill and died. Jane Campion's shows us love in good times and bad, in sickly pallor (cold and dull brown interiors) and good health (brilliant pastel summer landscapes). Abbie Cornish works on so many levels; her unbalanced teenaged worldview and moodswings are carried off tremendously. Her physical presence is also a refreshing departure from English and American starlets. Aside from Paul Schnieder who's performance as the Scotsman Charles Brown is just as good, she's the most captivating in a very capable cast. That Cornish's Brawne feels like a real person is one of the movie's greatest successes and it makes her heartbreak all the more effecting. A film that gets to the root of young love's problems, that there are older and in some ways wiser people over your shoulder who don't take you seriously. Not only does Brawne have to fight just to see and be near Keats, she has to beg and plead for everyone to validate her feelings. It's the saddest kind of love story but it's worth the struggle to understand how greatly she felt for him. Their final scene together is tragic and stunning and like all of Bright Star makes you feel for impossible love.

The Road

by John Hillcoat

I think the difference between the two kinds of filmgoers can be tested with films like The Road. If you hate it or can't understand it, you're in one camp, if you enjoyed it, you're in the other. Needless to say I loved The Road and found it poignant, hopeful and overall a tremendous experience. I love post-apocalyptic movies, I love movies that relish in depictions of dead natural occurrences, I love movies about family that do not take obvious routes at showing their connections and love. The Road, on top of looking gorgeous, featuring an amazing sound design, a terrific score by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, has a myriad of excellent performances that ensure the film's realism in spite of its premise. John Hillcoat manages to fill in the gaps between McCarthy's prose with haunting visuals and quiet moments that illustrate the distance between people, even those linked by blood. It says the same thing that the novel does but in a purely cinematic form, never relying too heavily on the words of the source novel but always remaining true to its spirit.

Vincere

by Marco Bellocchio

Since his debut film Fists In The Pockets in 1965, Marco Bellocchio has been persona non grata in his home country. Picking apart the political and social problems and contradictions that have defined modern Italian life, Bellocchio has been an outspoken critic for his entire working life and he has never compromised. Going back 50 years from his last political film Good Morning, Night about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, Bellocchio turns his attention to Ida Dalser, one of Mussolini's mistresses, and the illegitimate son she named for his father. Played with rapacious determination and fascinating, ferocious sexuality by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Ida Dalser has more of her freedom stripped from her and soon her quest shifts from demanding that her husband recognize her to being allowed to ever see her son again. Though her struggle can be read as allegory, it's hard not to see it as the destruction of fascism from within. The Italian politics of the day were based around hatred and superiority but they cannot afford humanity in their own lives because fascists were fundamentally imperfect but had to pretend to godlike status. Dalser is the tragic castaway of human skin when Mussolini relinquished reality for a life of fiction and power and murder. Set to Carlo Crivelli's driving score, flush with bold colours and frames that could be art deco paintings thanks to Danielle Cipri's cinematography, Vincere is a rich and sumptuous work.

The House of the Devil

by Ti West

Samantha is in need of money and though babysitting for the Ulman's smells like trouble she can't say no to the $400 Mr. Ulman offers her for one night's work. Even after he admits that he and his wife don't actually have children and that it's his mother that the hapless sophomore will be watching, she agrees. Now she'll spend the rest of the night regretting she ever answered the babysitting ad. Ti West's most recent entry into the Glass Eye canon, The House of the Devil is a stunning recreation of 1980s horror films. Everything from the look to the music to the costumes is a pitch-perfect reproduction of old fashioned production values. For every film that purports to deliver old-school horror, The House of the Devil is the only one I've seen that actually delivers. Not only is it a hyper-real reproduction of any number of slasher films from thirty years ago, it is also a better and altogether more effective film than any of those movies ever managed to be. Ti West has become a master at using a small budget to his advantage and House of the Devil is his masterpiece.

A Serious Man

by Joel & Ethan Coen

Though I was concerned, that this would be another Burn After Reading and all the early buzz comparing this film to Barton Fink was not encouraging. I like every other Coen Brothers movie and that wasn't what I wanted to hear. In point of fact this is much closer to a less whimsical Hudsucker Proxy. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik whose life gets worse by the minute. His wife is leaving him for famous windbag Sy Ableman, his kids hate him, his brother's using up his money and good credit with the community, one of his students is threatening to blackmail him, the list goes on. Each scene is progressively funnier and Stuhlbarg sells his ridiculous unluck with such wonderfully twitchy energy that even as his life goes further and further into the toilet, you enjoy yourself more and more, like an episode of Arrested Development stretched to feature length and given a great period setting. The message is delivered in the prologue, an episode involving a dybbuk played by Fyvush Finkel. A man brings home a demon and he's worried about being courteous to it; she's worried that it means they're cursed. Weirdly it's the least experienced of three rabbis that Stuhlbarg visits in search of answers who gets it right: you just need a little perspective. "Just look at the Parking Lot!"

Gomorrah

by Matteo Garrone

If Revanche is a film that depicts people in an honest and involving light, Gomorrah is like a slap in the face through the screen; a wake-up call. Between Roberto Saviano's book of the same name which gave the film it's five story framework and Matteo Garrone's stunning movie there is enough evidence to indict almost every corporation on earth for murder. In order to truly communicate the savagery of Saviano's work and of what really goes on in Naples, Garrone let the stories tell themselves. The performances are either pitch-perfect or they aren't performances; I've never seen an ensemble cast portray fuck ups quite so convincingly. The combined effect of Garrone's roving camera and the naturalistic performances makes it seem as if we're eavesdropping on some of the most heavy and horrifying things on the planet earth. There is never a moment's doubt watching Gomorrah that what you're seeing is real and that we should be afraid that the food we're eating didn't pass through Naples first. Though Garrone employs beautifully orchestrated plan-séquences and Marco Onorato's cinematography is frankly amazing in spite of what it captures, there isn't a self-indulgent moment to be found. It's only at the end of the film when the small print tells us that it's all real does it occur to you that everything you just saw was a movie; an incredible achievement.

The Beaches of Agnès

by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda is one of cinema's most important figures; she was one of the first successful female directors, an important forerunner of the French New Wave, one of the most experiment-oriented filmmakers to date, and just over-all her films are marvelous. The Beaches of Agnès is a tell-all that never seems indulgent or egotistical, a beautiful tribute to the people who have shaped Varda's life and to the power of film. Varda's lucious waltz through her past, noting every little detail, is one that engages you with its humour and sadness. It's impossible not to feel for Varda as she weeps over her late husband, the great Jacques Demy and shares the footage she took just days before he died of AIDS. It's also never anything but a loving and honest portrait of a touched and incredible life. Beaches shows that not only has Varda lived well but she remains just as capable a filmmaker as she was in 1957 when she made her stunning Cléo de 5 à 7 or 1965 when she made Le Bonheur one of the most interesting and beautiful films of all time. The Beaches of Agnès is a film that adds to a prolific life while looking back on it; wildly inventive, touching, sensual, lovely, a film as beautiful as any.

And the best film of the year...

Hunger

by Steve McQueen

I may find in a few months when Hunger gets a Criterion DVD of its own that maybe I was wrong. Maybe it isn't one of the most intense films ever made, maybe it was just me, that I was in the right frame of mind, tired, alone, cold and hungry. I remember waiting for Hunger for months; it was all I could think about. Then it was out, at a theatre not a few subway stops from the apartment I was staying in at the time. I saw it, stayed until the end credits, stumbled back to the apartment wordlessly. Before I got there I had sworn off eating anything living, promised that nothing should ever suffer on my behalf again. The story isn't easy to understand at first glance: guards and prisoners in the Maze prison in 1981 fight bitterly. It's not easy to sympathize with either. Bobby Sands discusses a proposed hunger strike with his priest and then goes ahead with it, dying 66 days later. Steve McQueen turns suffering and filth into poetry; I could heap hyperbole onto it until my fingers gave out but you really need to just see it. I'll just say that I'd never reacted that way to any film in my life.

And The Rest...

21. Flame and Citron
22. Summer Hours
23. The Headless Woman
24. Zombieland
25. Moon
26. Tony Manero
27. Fantastic Mr. Fox
28. The Young Victoria
29. Brothers Bloom
30. The Hurt Locker
31. District 9
32. La Danse de la Paris Opera Ballet
33. Baader Meinhoff Complex
34. Broken Embraces
35. Up 

36. The Limits of Control
37. Pontypool
38. Sherlock Holmes
39. Big Fan
40. Star Trek
41. Coraline
42. Mesrine Parts 1 & 2
43. Tetro

44. Everlasting Moments
45. Thirst

46. Antichrist

47. Just Another Love Story

48. Tulpan

49. The Informant/Girlfriend Experience

50. The Good, The Bad, The Weird

51. In The Loop

52. Me & Orson Welles

53. Police, Adjective

54. 35 Shots

55. Three Monkeys

56. The Age of Stupid

57. The International

58. Public Enemies

59. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince

60. Not Quite Hollywood!