73. Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
It’s easier to immerse yourself in a movie with interesting characters when they are played with actors you don’t recognize. That’s especially the case in this Danish film and with the very convincing Swedish Noomi Rapace in the title role. I was carried away by this surprisingly violent and disturbing story. (That it’s part of a trilogy and in Swedish is called “Millenium: Men Who Hate Women” says a lot) The film looks great, the acting is convincing, and it’s full of full of odd twists. It’s long, but all the better to sink into this claustrophobic world of deceit, corruption, and a constellation of very flawed individuals.
Like the film ‘Insomnia’ it will probably be remade in an English speaking version for no discernible reason, so see this first.

70. Benny’s Video (1992) (Michael Heneke)
That this was done 18 years ago is testament to Heneke’s long search for moral clarity. A boy murders a young girl and catches the whole thing on his elaborate home video recording set up. He shows it to has parents, whose first questions are; “Did anybody see this?” rather than ‘get thee to a nuthouse’. You can anticipate elements of Cache, White Ribbon, Music Teacher and others in this slow and disturbing story. It also anticipates the onset of the ubiquitous world of YouTube visuals and perhaps suggests (for parents, in particular) it’s time for greater commitment to a moral point of view that we don’t all descend into a numb and passive society of watchers. The ending is a shocker.

71. 1408 (2007 w/John Cusak)
This was recommended as being really strange and disturbing. It’s about a paranormal researcher who checks into a haunted hotel room. Based on a Steven King story, it’s a fun idea – the horrific and the mundane a la King – Cusak commits himself game-fully. But anything can happen in this wacky haunted hallucination of a hotel room – and it does – so after a while the characters might as well be shouting “BOO!”. There are some creepy and some creative moments, but it adds up to silly. And it goes on and on. I found myself admiring the pluck of the actors who commit themselves to these kind of endless unlikelihoods.

69. Daddy Longlegs (Josh and Benny Safdie)
Not the 1955 Fred Astaire movie by a long shot. Done mostly handheld and very New York with Ronald Bronstein as a less than responsible dad who wants to make the two weeks he gets with his two little boys as fun and memorable as possible. But the guy is a mess. I found Bronstein’s own film Frownland, another Brooklyn improv style ‘mumblecorps’ (sort of), enormously unpleasant, but his disarray as an actor and his terrific improv skills work perfectly here.
The film is, as Ray Carney called it, ‘exploratory’. The Safdie brothers are working out issues with their own father on whom this is based. It’s somewhat of a Rorschach test for parenting. Some are really put off by certain behaviors in the dad (myself included) others feel the love this dad has for his boys, and that trumps his irresponsibility. Either way the film sets up a really authentic looking and deeply felt test of audience empathy. It’s a unique, compelling, and accomplished independent film by two very talented brothers.