44. Hungry (Steve McQueen) Like Five Minutes of Heaven the human cost of the Irish conflict
43. Red, White, and Blue
42. Grindhouse
41. Mother (Madeo – Joon-ho Bong)
40. L’Affaire Farewell
39. Greenberg
38. Vincere
37. The Green Zone (Paul Greengrass)
Disguised as a spy-ish thriller, Matt Damon and the director use the chase and suspense elements of their Bourne movies to tell a fictional story that uses very real facts about the scam that was called Shock and Awe. It’s blatant what they’re doing: we get the exciting Greengrass hand held style, and are reminded how we, American public, were duped about WMD’s at the enormous expense to both Iraq and to our own armed forces. It’s sad and inevitable how the lives of small people, not only don’t add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but are at the mercy historical forces about which we can do nothing. A sobering reminder of the Bush legacy, and of why Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their ilk can sit back and laugh at the blood on their hands.

34. Crazy Heart
Most admirable as a well developed Indie product. A relaxed and committed performance form Bridges, whose Oscar comes from a lifetime of these parts and for singing good. 30% too much cliche, but every 5 years a good singing actor plays a breaking down musician and it’s always fun. See my review for the faux sequel above.

33. Reykjavik-Rotterdam (Iceland-Óskar Jónasson)
A blend of the ‘one last job’ caper, with neatly placed humor, a snappy pace, lots of double crossing, and a layer of family drama. Baltasar Kormákur has a Colin Farell vibe which ennobles the otherwise hapless Kristófer – an parolee forced by desperate circumstances into once last smuggling job aboard a freighter from – you got it – Reykjavik-Rotterdam and back. Antics and violence ensue, but you don’t have to keep track of the usual ‘caper’ details and it moves at a swift clip between the ship, where Kristófer’s ex-buddies are helping with the task and fighting off the skeptical captain, and the shore, where his wife is being threatened by her dastardly ex-boyfriend. Kormákur could be an international star and is already a successful director in Iceland. He also owns the rights and is in to the sequel already underway featuring Mark Wahlberg. That’s not bad casting for this part, but the screening I saw is obviously to attract interest in the original before it’s packaged up with fancier locations, big stars, and no subtitles. But get this one while you can.

32. A Prophet (French-Jacques Audiard)
This is one tough movie. Tahar Rahim is just amazing as he evolves from a naive prisoner to clever street smart errand boy during his ‘work release’. Complex interplay of gang and Corsicans and Muslim politics that I would need explained, but that doesn’t detract from strong realistic filmmaking. 150 minutes flies by. So different from the director’s film The Venus Beauty Institute and worthy of that Academy nomination.

31. Ghost Writer (Polanski)
The director is in his paranoid thriller mode. It’s set on the Vineyard as duplicated somewhere in Germany, so that’s fun for us Bay Staters. The pivotal suspense scene by GPS is an interesting device and the film is full of odd, quirky, dry moments like that. As for it feeling a little off center – bike rides in the rain, a reappearing Asian deck sweeper, befuddling story details – it’s not so much that plot points are confusing, as they are laid out to be discovered, possibly not even noticed on a first viewing, and are constructed to keep us unsettled. Details may be McGuffins, they maybe significant, they may simply appear sinister. It’s a network of paranoid situations and moments, like The Tenant as a conspiracy drama. Of course, in the movie, as with Polanski’s life, the paranoia is actual and merciless.

30. Memories of Murder (2003 Korean: 살인의 추억)
At the Harvard Film Archives with director Bong Joon-hoat in attendance. To be continued…

29. The Cove
James Bond meets Flipper meets Greenpeace. This is really good, and will probably win the Academy Award. Interesting, disturbing, exciting, really well told, and beautifully shot. The last moments are alarming, literally. I joined their Tweet campaign then and there.

28. Mid-August Dinner (Pranzo di ferragosto)
To help pay some debts, Gianni, an unemployed, single, middle aged man, agrees to look after four very old women for a night. Antics DO NOT ensue, as you might expect, but friendship food, and joy. The director, Gianni Di Gregorio, wrote it, acted in it, used his own apartment, based it on an incident in his own life, and then and cast the women from hundreds of non-professionals. The result is a unique and brilliant short story of a film.
It was pointed out, by Britt Smith, that August 15 is Feast of the Assumption, and that in religious mythology Mary “having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory”. The old women in this movie are also ascending to heaven without death, and the movie glories in the blessings and quirks of old age. If you love your mother, Italy, or Italian movies – see it!

27. A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux)
Even though he claims not to be an experimental filmmaker, Grandrieux creates film where sound and touch are equal to visual sense with alternately shimmering, frightening cinematography and a claustrophobic hand-held camera. He is considered one of the great new French directors from whom there are really interesting films being made (Francois Ozon, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont) so it is worth investigating. Grandrieux is the most challenging for me. He also has influences from Robert Bresson, Fassbinder, Stan Brakhage, and painters as well.
He claims narrative is unimportant. “I understand the wonderful Hollywood movies where you know everything that will happen, so why bother” is his attitude. He is in search of something deeper, more mystical, more physical. It will either fascinate you or give you a headache. There are about 20 lines of dialogue, not including screams and shouts. The story is something about an isolated family in a family living in the frozen Alps, with an epileptic logger brother and his sister who are coming of age in inappropriate ways.

26. Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux) The director’s earlier, more violent and disturbing film. Basically about Jean (Marc Barbé), a man that has many sexual encounters with women, but ends up killing them. Among other things, the film apples the following ideas from Gilles Deleuze. Here’s primer on that (gleaned from Wikipedia and embellished) which, if you see the film, helps to understand what Grandrieux is doing:
Perception-Image
This resembles the point of view shot of film theory, but that shot can sometimes be the point of view of characters, sometime floating free, the anonymous, unidentified viewpoint of the camera. He calls this camera consciousness.
Three different types of perception:
solid perception (normal human perception),
liquid perception (where images flow together) and
gaseous perception (the pure vision of the non-human eye). This is objective vision of the world before man. Dziga Vertov’s images aspire to pure machine vision. Experimental cinema also reaches for this pure perception.
The affection-image
“The affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face…”
Closeup = Face. A face can be a real face or not. All faces are affection-images.
The action-image
Large Form and the Small Form.
Large Form is defined as “there are gaps waiting to be filled (documentary film, Film Noir, the Western,the historical film). Deleuze attributes the large form to Method Acting where the audiences fills in the psychology of the character because that character has been has been embodied by the performer.
Small Form defined “the actions create the situation”.