Carol Kane was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Louise Fletcher won that year for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Can't argue with that one.
Not strange or necessarily forgotten, Joan Micklin Silver‘s sweet 1975 melodrama, Hester Street,is a decidedly small film, but one that is pretty much perfect. A black-and-white melodrama set in the Jewish immigrant quarters of Manhattan in the 1890s, the film tells the tale of immigrant Jake (Steven Keats), who has been in America for five years and is not looking forward to the arrival of his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), who is finally joining him. Jake has worked hard to rapidly assimilate himself, eschewing Old World behavior and becoming a “Yankee” with a taste for American woman. Wide-eyed Gitl brings with her the conservative, ethnic ways that her husband now disdains.
The unhappy domestic situation unfolds like a Shakespearean comedy, with everyone heading for the ending they deserve. The fable-like film sparkles as it journeys to its conclusion, and 35 years later the film is still the career high point for all involved. (Available for rent via Netflix and other outlets.)
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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Night Moves (1975)
Spacek and Duvall are drawn together in the desert.
This incredibly odd 1977 film is a surreal masterpiece that Luis Buñuel would have been proud to call his own. Torn from Robert Altman’s dreams and set in the California desert, 3 Women is the discombobulating story of a girl named Pinky (Sissy Spacek) who goes to work in a nursing home and becomes very attached to fellow nurse Millie (Shelley Duvall). The story of the relationship is a tortured one, filled with paranoia, accusation and obsession, which slowly melts into a brilliant reveal.
It’s impossible to stress the degree of difficulty that Altman assumed in creating a feature-length film that operates with the eccentricities of the dream stage. He was capable of aiming high and falling into the abyss; Quintet may be the worst movie ever made by a genius-level director. But 3Women is a masterwork unlike anything else Altman ever directed. (Available for rent on Netfilx and other outlets.)
Arthur Penn’s 1975 crime thriller, Night Moves, isn’t Gene Hackman’s finest film of the ’70s, but that isn’t any sort of an an insult considering he starred in The Conversation, both French Connection movies and other decade-defining films.
Hackman is Los Angeles private eye Harry Moesby, a former pro football player stuck in a broken marriage and dealing with a mid-life crisis, as he attempts to locate the missing daughter of a former Hollywood glamor girl. The case takes him to Key West where he meets an assortment of eccentric locals while untangling the knotty mystery–and running headlong into his own mortality.
Hackman was the perfect actor for an America crawling out of the Vietnam morass: a tough guy gradually realizing the limits of his virility. He brilliantly depicts Moesby’s internal struggle, right down to the film’s wonderfully open-ended conclusion.•
Even though it’s ultimately not the full-bodied triumph that it might have been, there is much to recommend Duncan Jones’ small-scale, engrossing 2009 sci-fi feature, Moon.
In his debut, Jones tells the story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), an employee of Lunar, a company that has solved the global energy crisis by harnessing the power of sunlight as it reflects off the moon.
Sam is nearly at the end of a three-year hitch at a mining station on the moon, and is getting antsy about being away from his wife and daughter and being all alone. Of course, he isn’t completely alone.
There’s a HAL-ish computer that speaks in deadpan (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and there’s a clone of Sam that appears one day without warning. Adding to Sam’s headaches are his deteriorating health and faltering space equipment. He has to figure out what’s going on and get his tin can back home.
Writer-director Jones is David Bowie’s son, and Moon owes a debt to ’70s sci-fi films like The Man Who Fell to Earth, a starring vehicle for his dad. While the story isn’t quite developed enough, Moon succeeds because of Rockwell’s magnificent performance(s), and Jones’ gifts for mood, visual design and ability to express a sense of dread that echoes our fears in an age when almost anything seems possible. And the genre pic also works well as a parable about the endlessness and redundancy of warfare.
Documentarian Ondi Timoner is no stranger to volcanic egos, having chronicled a couple of feuding rock bands in her excellent 2004 doc,Dig!But even she couldn’t have been completely prepared for the unrestrained and unstable hubris that was Web 1.0 entrepreneur Josh Harris, when she was asked to film his exhibitionistic Manhattan commune during the final month of December 1999. That project and others perpetrated by Harris are the subject of the fascinatingly repellent doc We Live in Public.
The poster child for the extreme excess of Silicon Alley in the late ’90s, Harris was a misanthrope with a sadistic streak who cashed in a couple of early web businesses for the disposable income to hatch disturbing “art projects” that investigated his personal issues with voyeurism, exhibitionism and mind control.
The first one, called “Quiet: We Live in Public,” housed 100 volunteers in a Manhattan bunker that was filled with free food, a firing range with a massive cache of weapons and ubiquitous surveillance cameras to capture every last instant of the participants’ lives. People had sex, showered, went to the bathroom and sat for humiliating interrogations before the lenses. Harris was no Warhol but he created a Warholian police state, until the NYPD shut down an increasingly ugly scene.
Harris followed up this wacky project with other similar ones, until he had burned through tens of millions of dollars and disappeared himself from the public eye (and his creditors). Before his retreat, he foresaw the increasing invasiveness and exhibitionism of our media-drenched world: social networking web sites, the explosion of reality TV and the information-collecting of search engines.
But getting there first isn’t necessarily a distinction worth having, since he behaved like a creep when he arrived. Surveillance can no doubt alter human behavior, but you have to believe Harris is no charmer even when no one’s watching.•
Michael Sheen screams for mercy as an embattled soccer manager Brian Clough.
In the past few years, Michael Sheen has played Tony Blair (three times!), David Frost and now, in The Damned United, football coach Brian Clough, making a habit of portraying hyper-ambitious Brits who are determined to push their luck until it turns bad.
Director Tom Hooper’s film investigates the tumultuous 44-day period in 1974 when Clough assumed the position of manager of the fabled Leeds United club, stepping into the shoes of his hated rival, Don Revie. But it also looks at about a dozen years of backstory that saw Clough use his unending hunger for success and big mouth to go from nobody to somebody to nobody he ever wanted to be.
Sheen is brilliant as a man determined to do great things–and then undo them–and Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney deliver excellent supporting performances, working from an economical, insightful script by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon). Jimmy Breslin once opined that if you want to tell a great sports story you have to go into the loser’s locker room, and The Damned United does that with distinction.
Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek is down in the dump in "Examined Life."
Following up the heady burst of fun that was her 2005 documentary Zizek!, filmmaker Astra Taylor keeps one foot planted firmly on campus with Examined Life. an interesting investiagtion into the minds of eight diverse academics.
While these thinkers are all superstars behind the ivy, they don’t all translate equally well to this format. For some reason, Hardt scolds himself for discussing the possibility of revolution while he’s in Central Park, as if it were an exclusive piece of land instead of a public venue that has served people from every economic strata. That park is one the egalitarian accomplishments of our society, not a place of aristocratic shame as he seems to believe. Others like Singer, Butler and Žižek make far more interesting points.
It would appear that the director had a little bit more time and money for her new film than she did for Zizek!, and she uses it well, showing off a strong sense of composition that was impossible to display with the breakneck schedule of her first feature. Taylor is growing as a filmmaker, and even though she might not be a hard-nosed interviewer as of yet, she knows how to provoke thought.
Michael Fassbender is wholly convincing as IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
The British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen brings a painterly meticulousness to the bracing 2008 drama, Hunger. The movie tells the story of IRA member Bobby Sands, who died at 27 during a hunger strike that protested the treatment of Irish political prisoners in Britain’s Prison Maze.
Much of the film traces the largely wordless degradations and punishments administered to IRA members. These scenes build to a tense centerpiece in which a disapproving priest engages in an extended conversation with Sands (Michael Fassbender) about his planned hunger strike.
The effects of the deprivations on Sands’ body are depicted with grueling verisimilitude, as he becomes a bloody, emaciated Christ figure stretched upon a symbolic cross. Fassbender matches McQueen’s artistry with an excellent performance, and their creation is as enthralling to watch as it is difficult to stomach.
I laugh because I just thought of a new and ingenious means of psychological torture.
For years, I lazily accepted the notion that director Alfred Hitchcock was underrated by the media as merely a purveyor of spine-tingling melodrama, someone thought of as an entertainer of the masses but not an artist. I assumed that the campaigning of his greatest admirer, Francois Truffaut, helped revise the opinion of Hitch as someone worthy of high praise.
There may be some truth to that, but people definitely knew how great Hitchcock was long before the ’60s. Case in point is a 1939 article in Life magazine, “Alfred Hichcock: England’s Biggest and Best Director Goes to Hollywood.” The piece looks at the esteemed English director’s move to California to begin a brilliant second act to his career.
The article was written by Geoffrey T. Hellman, who was best known as a legendary New Yorker writer but also simultaneously served as associate editor at Life for a couple of years in the ’30s. Hellman’s papers are housed at NYU. An excerpt from the colorful piece, which looks at how Hitchcock’s devious need to cause discomfort carried over from the big screen into his personal life:
“In private life, Hitchcock’s astringent outlook enables him to take an enormous, if deadpan, satisfaction in the distress of his friends and acquaintances, especially in situations induced by himself. Although his flair for practical jokes has suffered a setback in Hollywood, where the novelty of his surroundings and the constant sun seem to have cramped his style, he is beginning to feel more at home, and judging from his past record it is only a question of time until he gives Louie B. Mayer the hot foot. He once offered an English property man a pound for the privilege of handcuffing him overnight, and just before snapping on the manacles gave the victim a drink into which he had slipped a strong laxative. Hitchcock has a sense of values and gave the fellow a 100% bonus the following morning because of the unusual humor of the circumstances.”
Beautiful Isabella checks out a ripe gourd with dad.
Stunt journalism didn’t always have a bad name, not when George Plimpton was trying to quarterback an NFL team or become an extra in a David Lean epic. But over the last decade it’s become an increasingly high-concept field concerned more with sales pitches than truly interesting experiences.
Manhattan writer Colin Beavan entered this dubious landscape when he decided to turn a year-long experiment in extreme eco-consciousness into a blog, a book and ultimately this movie (directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein). Beaven, wife Michelle Conlin (a Businessweek journalist) and their two-year-old daughter spent a year without TV, motorized transportation, electricity, air conditioning, elevators and many other modern conveniences that damage the environment. Beaven gets his book deal and plenty of attention (much of it negative), but at least in the film version the focus isn’t on being green but on the dynamics of his marriage.
Beavan is keenly aware what is happening when he tells his wife he thinks discussing their private lives on camera will turn the film into a reality-show spectacle. But spectacle is all they really have. As the initially reluctant Conlin begins to warm to the austerity of her passive-aggressive husband’s scheme, you have to wonder if it’s marital love driving her or the Stockholm syndrome.
Beavan and Conlin aren’t bad people who should be made sport of because they went without toilet paper for awhile. But it’s difficult to take much of this carefully calibrated publicity stunt very seriously.
Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson’s You, the Living, with a title inspired by a Goethe poem, isn’t on the same level as his 2000 visionary breakthrough, Songs from the Second Floor, even though it has many of the same hallmarks.
Andersson isn’t interested in being a storyteller in any traditional sense, eschewing plot in favor of wide-angle shots of exaggerated scenes human despair and existential angst, which are funny for their relentless frankness. In You, the Living, some of these scenes involve a tuba player, a prostitute, an angry barber and a variety of other sad sacks. These characters often speak directly to the camera and are forthright about their uncomfortable struggles with the bleak absurdity of life. And that absurdity is above the surface not below it in the filmmaker’s work.
Andersson, who spent 25 years directing TV commercials, is driven to precision in each shot like someone used to trying to express his ideas in thirty-second spots. His elaborate sets, his aggressively working-class wardrobes, his offbeat casting and his unique sense of cinematography create a style that’s all his own. Even when everything doesn’t completely congeal as in this film, any Andersson work is still worth watching for the sad and strange beauty of many of the scenes.
Halt at once! For I am obese, slightly xenophobic and in possession of a stick.
A midnight movie that’s good any time of the day, comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto’s insanely surreal 2007 mockumentary, Big Man Japan, chronicles the sad middle-age years of the titular superhero, who has lost the love of a once-adoring nation. Most of the time the hero is known as Daisato (played by Matsumoto), a long-haired slacker who’s been dumped by his wife and has to care for his senile grandfather. But with the application of electrodes to his nipples, he inflates to elephantine proportions and battles monsters that look like mutant Ron Mueck sculptures come to life.
The problem is, the Japanese people are bored by his act and think he’s more trouble than he’s worth. In its own way, the movie is a paean to the larger-than-life myths and legends that have been diminished by the Information Age. But mostly it’s about a 200-foot sumo wrestler with a billy club battling the Strangler, the Stink Monster and the Evil Stare Monster, each a more wonderfully bizarre creation than the last. During the climactic battle, something amazingly strange and wholly disorienting occurs. It’s completely crazy and a fitting conclusion. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
I'm not a doctor, but I believe that man is breaking into a cold sweat.
A perfect complement to Leon Gast’s great boxing documentary, When We Were Kings, Soul Power chronicles the titanic 1974 fight’s companion music festival in Zaire, which coupled great African musicians with excellent African-American artists. Director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte tries to make some hay from the behind-the-scenes drama that occurs when the prizefight is delayed and the concert is briefly imperiled, but name me a huge music fest from that era that didn’t have logistical problems (Isle of Wight) or far worse (Altamont). The real story here is the performances (a pensive Bill Withers, an expansive Miriam Makeba, the ever-professional Spinners) and the racial pride that fueled the performances. The biggest stars of all, as expected, are Muhammad Ali on the microphone and James Brown on stage, both still in their primes. When Ali delivers his sermons on race in America and James Brown does his splits, Soul Power is powerful excitement.
Death, guilt and regret permeate the oeuvre of Korean director Park Chan-wook, so the vampire genre he investigates in Thirst fits him like a custom-made coffin. Park, who earned a spot on Afflictor’s Top 20 Films of the Aughts list with Oldboy, tells the story of priest Sang-hyeon (Song Kango-ho) who becomes a vampire while somehow surviving a volunteer medical experiment that should have killed him. When he’s not busying sucking down spare platelets at the local hospital, the holy man hooks up with the very unbalanced Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), a waifish woman with a seemingly tortured family history. And she’s likely to only get worse–far worse–if she should somehow become a vampire.
Thirst is probably too many things, careering from horror film to romance to dark comedy to erotica to psychodrama with dizzying speed. And the movie has its misogynistic side, fearing a female planet even more than one inhabited by vampires. But Park has the undeniable knack for creating a sense of ruefulness like no other contemporary filmmaker, and he maintains an impressive miasma of mourning right down to the sad, pitch-perfect conclusion.
James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy are administration officials trying to keep the peace.
British TV director Armando Ianucci, the steady hand behind Steve Coogan’s masterful Alan Partidge shows, presents this warring room comedy about U.K. and U.S. government functionaries working feverishly as the two nations prepare to invade an unnamed Middle Eastern country. In the Loop may not be a visionary satire of Strangelovian proportions, but it’s brisk, abrasive fun.
The President and the Prime Minister are never present onscreen as their cabinet members, advisers and assistants scurry about trying to start or stop a war (that may not exactly be justified) before an all-important U.N. resolution vote is to be taken. Ego trips and personal relationships are omnipresent, helping to form policy that may result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The excellent cast with James Gandolfini, Mimi Kennedy, David Rasche, Anna Chlumsky, Tom Hollander, Toby Wright, Coogan and a host of others never misses a beat. But it’s Peter Capaldi, who’s worked for Ianucci in the TV series The Thick of It, who shines the most, tearing through every scene as a rage-filled British official with a brilliant, vicious insult for everyone in his path. He is relentlessly funny as is In the Loop, right down to the closing credits with a great joke about I ♥ Huckabees.
Hopper and "Easy Rider" cohort Jack Nicholson at the 1990 Academy Awards.
Filing for divorce from what’s described as your deathbed might seem like an odd thing to do, but it likely doesn’t even rank very high on the list of the most unusual things Dennis Hopper has done in his life. In 1970, the actor-director-artist did something that’s present somewhere on that list: He decided to use the good will from his 1969 surprise hit Easy Rider (which cost $350,000 and raked in tens of millions) and head to the backlands of Peru on Universal’s dime to make an almost indescribable film (ultimately titled The Last Movie), which would become one of the most tortured productions in Hollywood studio history. It had only a brief release and nearly ended Hopper’s career. Well, that and the drug abuse. The artist never fully recovered from the debacle of The Last Movie until his brilliantly perverse turn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986.
Luckily, Life magazine dispatched the excellent reporter Brad Darrach to profile Hopper during the volatile production. The resulting article is called The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes. An excerpt from the beginning of the article:
“Peru has painfully learned to live with earthquakes, avalanches, tidal waves, jaguars and poisonous snakes. But Dennis Hopper was something else. When the director of Easy Rider arrived in Lima several months ago, a reporter from La Prensa asked his opinion of marijuana (illegal in Peru) and ‘homosexualism.’ Taking a long reflective pull on an odd-looking cigarette, Dennis said he thought everybody should ‘do his thing’ and allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy.’ No remotely comparable statement had ever appeared in a Peruvian newspaper. The clergy screamed, the ruling junta’s colonels howled. Within 24 hours the government had denounced the article and issued a decree repealing freedom of the press.
Dennis Hopper was undisturbed. Furor trails him like a pet anaconda. At 34, he is known as a sullen renegade who talks revolution, settles arguments with karate, goes to bed in groups and has taken trips on everything you can swallow or shoot.”
If it hadn’t won the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Yojiro Takita’s Departures would merely be another manipulative, predictable drama desperate to pound viewers over the head with convenient life lessons. But once it was announced as the owner of a golden statuette, it became the latest indictment on how hit-or-miss Academy voters can be.
The film centers on Daigo (Masahiro Motoki), a young concert cellist of dubious proficiency who must find an alternative career when his orchestra goes bankrupt. One answered advertisement later, he has become a seriously unsteady funeral services employee, preparing dead bodies for their final reward. Dressing corpses is upsetting for Daigo and no less a source of consternation for his adoring wife (Ryoko Hirosue). Teaching him the trade is a philosophical father figure (Tsutomu Yamakazi). Along the way we learn about life, death, love, plot contrivances and how the screenplay for what’s essentially a gentle, well-intentioned movie can wear out the most patient filmgoer. Perhaps the greatest lesson of all is that it’s still possible put one over on Academy voters.
The new China rises above its citizens in "24 City."
There’s probably no contemporary director who is telling the story of his or her nation as well as Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke. Zhangke, who made the Afflictor Top 20 Films of the Aughts list with his visionary 2004 drama The World, has the distinct advantage of living in one of the most fascinating places on Earth at a time of great upheaval, but his storytelling chops, his eye for composition and his stellar work with actors would serve him well anywhere.
24 City isn’t a sprawling, large-scale masterwork like The World, but it similarly examines the ramifications of the Chinese government forging forward with rapid cultural modernization. The current transformation may be a lot less bloody than Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but it’s no less discombobulating to the people
The title refers to the name of a five-star hotel that is to replace Factory 420, a real aeronautics complex in the Chengdu province that has been home to hundreds of people for decades. 420 wasn’t just a place to punch a clock; it was a full-blown community with grade schools, cinemas and basketball courts. Against the background of their community being demolished, former workers are interviewed about their memories of their lives there.
These interviews are a mixture of documentary-like Q&As with actual workers and fictional inquiries with actors portraying workers. This odd blend of fiction and nonfiction helps Zhangke create the unsettling affect he seeks. And despite China being like no other place on the planet right now, these reminiscences have a universal feel, perhaps because whether they’re state-sponsored or not, unexpected upheavals are a part of all our lives.
Patton Oswalt as a small man who roots for Giants.
Robert Siegel follows up The Wrestler with this dark comedy about an obsessive football fan, making the screenwriter a patron saint of sorts for emotionally stunted men who can’t express their feelings unless they’re in the presence of organized violence. Siegel also debuts as a director with Big Fan, in which 36-year-old Staten Island parking attendant Paul Aufiero (played perfectly by Patton Oswalt) subsists on a steady diet of sugared drinks, comfort food and nonstop adoration for the New York Giants. Paul’s meager life is thrown into disarray when a chance meeting with his greatest football hero leads to him being brutally beaten by his idol.
The character of Paul, someone who can’t even measure up to the mundane standards of the everyman, isn’t without antecedents. He’s Marty Piletti, but not looking for love. He’s Travis Bickle, but not out for blood. He’s Rupert Pupkin, but without the career goals. He’s just really a very powerless man who lives vicariously through the giants (and Giants) he feels he can never be.
The film, leavened only slightly in the latter stages, is another example of Siegel’s abundant talent and a good reason to fast-track Oswalt into a slew of dramatic roles.
The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have created a number of miracles in the social-realist tradition since their feature debut, La Promesse, in 1996 and Lorna’s Silence is the latest example. In this drama, an Albanian woman (played wonderfully by Arta Dobroshi) has gained citizenship in Belgium through a sham marriage to a junkie. But when the criminals she’s involved with want to off the addict so that she can marry a Russian man also seeking citizenship, Lorna’s life turns from hopeful to heart-wrenching.
Many of the elements of the movie would have been pure melodrama in other less-skilled hands. But the Dardennes have made a quintet of films and they’ve yet to produce a single false scene. Some critics have started to carp that the brothers are treading too much over familiar territory in their work. But if the Dardennes aren’t changing as much as some other directors, perhaps its because they are the rare ones who were born whole.
Watching the ball drop in Times Square, as many of us recently did, always makes me think of one of my favorite films, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. The brilliant 1956 crime story doesn’t have any key scenes that take place on New Year’s Eve, but it has one that’s set right near the New Amsterdam Theatre where the ball drops, in a dingy chess club of yore called the Flea House. For much of its existence (which began during the Great Depression), you could rent a chess board at the dive for 10 cents an hour. Elder chess master Bill Hook recalls the Flea House in Hooked on Chess: A Memoir. Jeremy Silman, an expert on the game, writes about Hook’s book on his site:
“Much of Hook’s twenties and early thirties were spent in abject poverty in New York City. His health precluded steady work and his painting hadn’t taken off but Hook had one good thing that kept him going. Known by different names at different times — The New York Chess and Checker Club, Fischer’s, Fursa’s and finally the Flea House, the game playing establishment on 42nd street near Times Square was a home away from home for many lost souls. Hooked on Chess has many stories of the characters that passed through this 24-hour New York City institution that ran from the Depression until the early 1970s. Some of the strongest players in the United States like George Treysman and Abe Kupchik were regulars when Hook first started going, but there were also plenty of weak players and odds games for various stakes were always being contested. According to Hooked on Chess, it was the clientele who created the special atmosphere. Certainly it was not the mismatched furniture or smoked stained walls that did. The tables that chess, bridge and various games were played on were frequently covered in a pile of ashes and it was not uncommon to see people sleeping at night in the club. Hook gives a lengthy and moving testimonial to the many people he met daily at the club.”
When acclaimed artist Vanessa Beecroft splatters blood red paint over 30 topless female models who lie sprawled on a canvas, she weds Pollock’s drip-paint method to a genocide motif. It’s disturbing to see, but the models are adults and they will shower the paint off and a provocative sort of large-scale human sculpture has been created. But when Beecroft impetuously decides to adopt twins she encounters during a photo shoot in the Sudan, art meets life in a disturbing way that can’t just be washed away.
Pietra Brettkelly discomfiting documentary, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, doggedly traces Beecroft’s African adoption odyssey. The children are living in an orphanage, but they have a father and extended family. Authorities are understandably wary of this intense white woman with serious depression and OCD issues who wants to adopt the twins and move them to New York. Beecroft gives the family thousand-dollar bills as incentive to let her take the children, and this money allows the clan to bring the boys home and raise them in a healthy environment. But Beecroft doesn’t seem to notice that she could be more helpful to the children with small cash gifts to their relatives because her mission has more to do with her dubious needs than the twins’ real ones.
When Beecroft’s exasperated husband acknowledges that his wife is obsessed with the controversial adoptions of African children by Angelina Jolie and Madonna, a revulsion sets in. And since Beecroft travels extensively and often has others raising her birth children, you just feel happy that her spouse isn’t going along with the adoption plans. Brettkelly’s film isn’t easy to watch, but it’s an insightful documentary that stubbornly paints an extreme psychological portrait.
From Maren Ade to Terry Zwigoff, there are close to 100 directors who did exceptional work over the past decade yet don’t have a film on Affllictor’s Top 20 Films of the Aughts list. But the difficult paring-down process is complete. In alphabetical order, here are the lucky devils who made the grade:
A girl too wary of commitment meets a boy too given to believing that true love conquers all in Marc Webb’s bittersweet Los Angeles-set 2009 romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer.
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, young royalty of indie cinema, play the couple in question, who meet while working for a greeting card company. The buoyant film shifts back-and-forth to different moments of their tortured 500-day relationship. Deschanel is Summer, wry to the core and phobic about being someone’s girlfriend. Gordon-Levitt is Tom, a lapsed architecture student too in love with Summer to see dark clouds gathering. Because their relationship is presented non-chronologically, a scene in which they watch The Graduate together doesn’t deliver its full emotional impact until later on. That passage feels as mysterious and painful as falling out of love.
The inventive script from Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber is too busy and restless for its own good at times, but it is full of personality and warmth. For every voiceover or quirky touch that isn’t necessary, there are impromptu joyous scenes, like the dance sequence to a Hall & Oates tune that works wonderfully. The film may not make your dreams come true, but it feels true.
Maria Onetto actually has a head. The title's just a metaphor.
Psychological horror that is subtle and engrossing, The Headless Woman is just the latest reason why Argentine director Lucretia Martel, earlier of La Ciegna and The Holy Girl, is a major force in contemporary cinema.
In The Headless Woman, Veronica (Maria Onetto) is a bourgeois woman who hits something–a dog? a person?–while driving on a lonely dirt road. She also hit her head on the steering wheel and proceeds to the ER, though she mentions nothing of a possible victim to anyone. When she finally breaks down and tells her overprotective husband that she fears she may have killed someone, he makes sure every trace that could tie her to a possible murder vanishes.
Instead of feeling relieved, Veronica is disquieted by how easy it for her to be disappeared from life. And all the while, her interactions with family and friends expose the frustrations and disappointments hidden within her well-appointed life. Onetto is marvelous as a woman not sure if she is plagued by nightmares or reality. And the slow burn she displays right down to the quietly devastating conclusion is masterful.
