Rolling Thunder - 1977

Immersed in Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, and like everything he's done since KILL BILL No. 2, it's mostly self-congratulation, needs to be cut by 35% and features moments of extraordinary perception, insight and humor.

His chapter-long rave about ROLLING THUNDER reminded me how much I liked it when I saw it sometime last century. Had to order a Region 2 DVD - couldn't find it streaming anywhere.

You will find this hard to believe, I know, but Tarantino understates wildly (for once in his life); ROLLING THUNDER is a masterpiece.

As T noted, Schrader's monosyllabic screenplay perfectly meshes with director John Flynn's minimal style. Flynn could really stage a shoot-out and always used them to further express character, as only the best action directors can. The performances are pitch-perfect and vested in the physical, since nobody says much.

Tommy Lee Jones, catatonic for most of the story, transforms into a balletic athlete when he gets to kill people. Linda Haynes, as Tarantino writes, is perfect in tone and body language; she's the true star. Maybe Haynes was too convincing as a redneck waitress to get cast in other roles; sadly, she was only in 14 films.

And this is Devane's least insufferable acting ever. He actually turns it down from 11. For once.

Each scene, each word of dialogue, leads to the inevitable finale. Such a pleasure to watch a film so vested in structure, cutting, pace, rhythm and cheap thrills.

One example: Devane tells Jones he found the men he's been hunting. He doesn't have to say it out loud, but he wants Jones to help him kill them. Jones says: "I'll get my gear." That's it.

Today, fucking Antone Fuqua or his equivalent would hold a long closeup on Jones as his face changed into hardened resolve and after three more beats than necessary, Jones would deliver the line like he was reciting Homer. In Flynn's version, Jones speaks with his back to the camera! And it slays.

Docked half a star for the unbearable dumbass cornpone song played over the opening and closing credits. I can't fathom whom the songwriter had to be fucking to get his complete violation of tone and gestalt tacked onto the film.

The 14 Best Films of 2015 – Genre Kicks, Artfilm & Agitprop

Kurt Russell brings the humanity

Not much of a year for Big Entertainment or Big Sincerity. Spotlight, Trust and The Martian proved to be nothing more than – in the immortal words of Ice Cube describing Boyz 'n the Hood  –“After-school specials with cussin.’” The Revenant, the film I most looked forward to, turned out to be worse than a snow-covered macho grunt-fest; it’s a boring snow-covered macho grunt-fest. Form without content – that’s ‘decadence, right? And long an issue with Hollywood tentpoles. This year’s disillusion – each year brings its own –stems from decadence-creep crawling from tentpoles to supposedly more personal, if still large-scale, expressions. 2015’s best, save one, aren’t tentpoles. They’re willfully idiosyncratic visions of genre kicks, artfilm, agitprop or all three at once. 

1) BONE TOMAHAWK – How did first-time writer/director S. Craig Zahler enable Kurt Russell’s most human, nuanced performance since…ever? How did he see that Patrick Wilson has layers? Zahler’s wild ideas have no business in a Western but belong here. He vests in genre conventions, demonstrates the depth and worth of those conventions, then transcends them while smashing them into neurons. His screenplay’s witty and self-aware but never self-conscious or precious. Stars and bit players work in balance and each makes clear the necessity of the other. Zahler’s technique seems at first raw and slightly amateurish, but slowly reveals the breadth of his sophistication, which Zahler (kinda) conceals because he might feel full of shit if he didn’t. The film grants increasing pleasure the more you know its references but never makes knowing its references key to enjoyment. The story offers soaring joie de vivre, but mercilessly, pitilessly remembers the brutal mortality beneath. Plus, the invaluable Richard Jenkins, character actor supreme.

Richard Jenkins - nobody does it better

2) VICTORIA – Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy of tight, naturalist, low-budget, mean-spirited street-Noirs are among the smartest, most thrilling thrillers. Clearly influenced by Refn, Sebastian Schipper – writer/director of this tight, naturalist, low-budget, weirdly hopeful street-Noir – had the courage or idiocy to shoot his 134-minute romance/caper in one unbroken take, one unbroken shot that wanders Berlin's demimonde in the wee hours. That unbroken shot proves neither stunt nor gimmick. Schipper’s amphetamine narrative drive and hood-rat street-dialogue make you forget it’s happening. At the same time, that one shot brings the story alive as a signal episode in Victoria’s life – like a cherished memory or dream. Like Refn, Schipper’s a cineaste and tells his story in pure cinema. The performances never falter; the suspense never lets up. Victoria is what a thriller should be: gritty, tough, hilarious, bumbling, romantic and almost escapist. Because, really, who in a street-Noir ever escapes?

Laia Costa wanders the demimonde3) BLACK COAL, THIN ICE  – The homicide cop hero of this quirky, blood-drenched, yearning Neorealist Chinese policier believes he’s the last feeling being in a universe of bureaucratic indifference and small-time corruption. Too bad for him his precious feelings prove a liability in today’s meatgrinder China. The unrequited love he pursues – in his monosyllabic, existentially crushed way – will only ruin him. Director Yi’nan Diao got his Dreiserian portrait of the wreckage of working-class lives past the censors by pretending that social context is background, not the whole point of the exercise. Shot in haunting pastels, Black Coal evokes the Korean policier masterpiece Memories of Murder. Like Memories, it’s an economic critique, a study of ordinary folks chiseling out daily survival and a classic of murky suspense.

4) THE GETT – Why divorce is so expensive? Because it’s worth it!

5) CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA – What an incongruous commercial success: a drama with hardly any apparent drama about sophisticated people splitting hairs over their art. Olivier Assayas’ most watchable pictures – Carlos, Summer Hours – don’t meander. His most heartfelt films do. The intuitive camera, the jarring cutting, the untied narrative threads, the schematic plot and the even more schematic play-within-the-film should push you away. But Assayas’ camera and edits follow states of mind – not action. They nourish narrative purpose and emotional tension. Assayas’ off-kilter compositions illuminate the tiniest, most potent exchanges – every shot, cut, word and gesture bears meaning and the dialogue rewards attention. Assayas draws an extraordinary performance from Juliet Binoche. She emerges from her career-long veil of beauty and testiness to show genuine unease and kindness. Kristen Stewart’s a revelation. So present, true to each moment, charismatic – a shockingly subtle actress and a movie star.

6) EX MACHINA – Any movie bearing this gift belongs in the Top Ten: http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a624000/watch-oscar-isaacs-incredible-ex-machina-dance-scene/

7) MAD MAX FURY ROAD – The year’s best long-form commercial for a video game. Maybe one day someone will acknowledge underground comix master Spain Rodriguez’ early ‘70’s Route Zero as the prime source for so many Mad Max ideas and bitchin’ cars…http://www.lastgasp.com/d/4224/subvert-3

8) MERU – Mountain climbers aren’t necessarily insane; they just do insane things. Then they come home and try to be people. And that can prove harder than bagging a knife-edge 22,000-foot peak in the back of the back of the beyond of Pakistan. The surprisingly touching aspect of this ingenuous, homemade saga derives from the contrast between the climbers’ embrace of their insane urges in the wild and their brief, laden moments of self-preserving rationality at home. The most human, immediate and true climbing movie ever made. Mind-blowingly gorgeous and insane.

9) THE TRIBE – Global capitalism is one harsh toke. The underclass never bonds against oppression and eats its own with gusto. The more desperate the circumstances, the more everyone’s social/human value derives from how the powerful can exploit them. Love offers no redemption; vengeance offers plenty. Newcomer Miroslav Slaboshpitsky presents a fully realized, unwavering fable – deadpan camera, instinctive performances, metronomic cutting, compelling subculture and unspeakable degradation.

10) IT FOLLOWS – Yes, the fantastic aspect proved inconsistent and violated its own rules. But the notion of culpability transferred from person to person by indulging in the slightest human connection, that shit’s all too real.

11) BLACK SEA – As our new Michael Caine, Jude Law proves the truth of Barry Gibbs’ assertion that “You can’t pander insincerely.” Like Caine, Law shifts from blockbuster to low-rent genre without a trace of condescension. Like Caine, he plays far more compelling and unhinged characters when he’s free from having to act classy – as Law proved in Dom Hemingway. Like Caine, Law never mails it in. And, like Caine, Law likes nothing more than to mock himself or go berserk with rage or both. Despite several less-than-credible plot points, Black Sea is a submarine movie – the absolute bestest kind of movie there is. Law makes it shine.

Today's Michael Caine

12) WHITE GOD – Ki engedte ki a kutyákat?

13) SON OF A GUN – Violent, workmanlike, 1970’s-style, unselfconscious Aussie crimesploitation. When Ewan McGregor gives a shit, few match his charisma.

14) THE SALVATION/SLOW WEST – The art-Western returns and not even Tarantino can stop it.

The Hateful 8  – The Most Disappointing Film of 2015 

As Lester Bangs wrote of a certain album, Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful 8 is “stupid with none of the virtues of stupidity.” It’s dispiriting – because I love his movies so – to see him so vest in such a C+  idea.

Pauline Kael said that Godard’s genius did not run to making masterpieces; Tarantino’s seems to. There’s little middle ground in his oeuvre: fucking amazing or self-indulgent crap – that’s his range.

Remember, this is the one filmmaker in America under no limits – absolutely no artistic or financial pressure. Tarantino can make any film he wants any way he wants and find eager backing and distribution. And this puny exercise in what he mistakes for épater la bourgeoisie is the best he can do with that rare, precious license?

 Tarantino’s films – good and bad – delight in surface without a glimmer of narrative, character or visual metaphor. All that breathtaking style and not a molecule of content. Only his exacting stylistic rigor gives Tarantino’s great films depth. Without rigor, what remains are his base urges. Foremost is the urge to always go too far. The Hateful 8 delights in going too far, and goes nowhere at all.

His cramming genre conventions full of steroids – like shooting a so-called Western that’s 90% interiors in 70MM and crowing about it – leaves me as numb as if I sat through Transformers III or Titanic or Pearl Harbor. Tarantino’s last two films left me numb. Everything prior granted me exhilaration. Has Tarantino gone numb himself? Can he feel anything without jacking up the Grand Guignol to 11?

English novelist Margaret Drabble writes about characters who prefer the numbness of depression to the sharp pangs of anxiety. Sound drama always provokes anxiety, especially for the creator. Creating art means not knowing what’s going to happen and living with that uncertainty. If the creator can no longer stand the anxiety of creating, he or she no longer creates drama. All 2015’s best films were profoundly unpredictable – I mean, I figured Charlize Theron would survive Fury Road, but that was about it. When the writer knows before he or she starts writing what every character will do or say, the resulting work is always schematic, forced, Dead On Arrival. It becomes, like The Hateful 8 or The Revenant, a showcase for the director as puppeteer. Characters never speak or act like living beings; they’re only illustrations of the director’s ideas, notions and themes. There is no uncertainty, no drama, no depth. This is why movies today can be impressive and even entertaining, but remain empty and unsatisfying.*

I’ve long considered Tarantino a genius adolescent – an 8^th grader at heart. His glee for obscure film references, transgressive speech, graphic violence and cheesy soundtracks all speak to a stunted consciousness. But now it’s time to regard his work as expressing a fully formed artist, for good or ill. Tarnation’s puerile machismo’s not adolescent – he hasn’t and will never outgrow it.** It’s purely American, a thoughtless shorthand that obviates any profound questions or comedy underlying Tarantino’s joyous bloodletting and woman-lynching. Hateful 8’s gory slapstick is as sophisticated as adult Tarantino gets. There’s something permanently unflowered in the dude – he ain’t gonna mature.

* Thanks Greg Burk of metaljazz.com

** Thanks Sarahjane Blum

KISS ME DEADLY CRITERION DVD

A bull looking for a china shop. Courtesy Criterion ProductionsMike Hammer, as portrayed by Ralph Meeker, is Noir’s ultimate blunt object. For Mike, thinking causes confusion, but action always provides a solution, no matter how destructive. If Mike can’t punch it, break it, drive it, sell it, shoot it or fuck it, he’s not interested; Mike’s a pure American male.

Robert Aldrich’s direction and A.I. Bezzerides’ screenplay transposes Mickey Spillane’s private eye to the screen as brutal, simple-minded, heedless and atavistic, driven by an American’s adolescent fixation with girls, gizmos and guns. Mike enjoys himself, but his antics exact a high price: the end of the world.

Careening home in his sports car one night, Hammer almost mows down a desperate hitchhiker. She’s escaped from a nearby asylum, but not for long. Her pursuers run Mike’s car off the road and leave him to die in the wreckage. Half-conscious, he hears the screaming hitchhiker being tortured to death. With the help of his dedicated - if masochistic - secretary, Vilma, Mike tracks down the killers. Unknown gangsters plant bombs in his car; strange women offer themselves; a sinister secret is somehow contained in a too-warm, glowing, growling leather-bound box: the ‘Great Whatsit’ that everyone kills to attain, and the inspiration for the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The story tears along. Aldrich distracts us, and Hammer, from his violent quest with cool cars, sharp suits, stellar babes and bachelor-pad oddities, like a primitive reel-to-reel phone answering machine.

Meeker’s character’s an amoral pig, which he freely admits. His contempt for the world is genuine and crippling. His personality makes him unfit for any profession but private eye. That is, he’s lazy, sadistic, likes spying on people and feels morally superior. And in this universe, Hammer’s the hero.

The repellent, charming destructive energy that fuels Hammer is reflected in the world around him. Everyone grabs what they want with no sense of consequences. Because Aldrich, like Hammer, is neither a poet nor a deep thinker  - like Hammer, he’s a hard-ass, if occasionally discursive, problem-solver - Kiss Me is unusually satisfying as both a tough-minded, cautionary sleigh-ride of thrills and a cold-hearted metaphor for the breakdown of society.

With her androgynous haircut, languorous sexuality, little-girl voice and constantly shifting loyalties, GabyGaby at her most lucid. Courtesy Criterion Productions Rodgers provides a fitting coda to fifteen years of duplicitous Noir femmes fatale. She incarnates a singular, dissolute, randomly horny and utterly relaxed ruthlessness. Her identity changes according to the company she keeps, her social role alters as her ambition takes root, her ambitions grow as she learns the extent of her sexual power and her sexual power breeds suicidal megalomania. If Gaby Rodgers herself - Gaby the person, not her character - was in fact neither insane nor distracted to the point of schizophrenia, then her performance is one for the ages.

This is a very different entertainment than the A-picture, Hollywood slickness of Double Indemnity or The Killers.  In most noir, the hero’s loss of innocent is represented as a loss of faith, a calamitous acquiring of cynicism springing from tragic death, broken hearts or dashed expectations. Hammer never had any faith to begin with; he’s just a nasty guy. His comeuppance consists of learning how just how ruthless, brutal, greedy and destructive his enemies can be. And all this time he thought he was the toughest monkey in the urban jungle...

 It’s an alienated, debased portrait, and a visceral prophesy. Robert Aldrich’s nihilism is boundless; he’s determined not only to kill everyone in the story, but also to bring an end to the romanticization of cynicism, violence and self-made morality that comprises Noir. He succeeds as Sam Pecinpah did with The Wild Bunch, by so raising the stakes that no one could possibly follow.

            Criterion’s extras include a short, revealing excerpt from a documentary about screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, who also wrote Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground. Bezzerides says flat out that the speed with which he wrote the screenplay reflects the depth of his contempt for the novel. Bezzerides chucked Spillane’s ideas and changed everything from the locale to the McGuffin. Director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), hilariously deadpan as ever, also trashes the book and Spillane’s aggressive simple-mindedness. Spillane – who sold 24 million Mike Hammer books in the early ‘50’s alone - appears in the Bezzerides’ documentary to express his baffled distaste for the film. Unsurprisingly, he has no clue how utterly he’s been outmaneuvered and rendered obsolete. Bezzerides and Aldrich found the themes of Spillane’s novel repulsive, and Kiss Me – shot in 22 days! - is their savage rejoinder. Criterion also includes a self-serving doc on Spillane, who is nothing if not self-serving. After watching considerably more sophisticated men trash him, Spillane’s confidence in his own Neanderthal vision and methods ought to be a little sad. In fact, just like the film, it’s funny as hell.

© 2011 David N Meyer

DEPTH IN A DECADE OF DISTRACTION: THE TWENTY BEST FILMS OF THE OUGHTSS

The best films of the last ten years resisted the distraction or distractedness which seems to be the decade’s signature. Remarkably, directors created and audiences found films that required and rewarded concentration. Everybody knows so much now, so much of form, technique, method and intention. Film fanatics curate their own private museum of DVDs or downloads, and seeing a favorite or intriguing film five times is no big deal. As a result, we’ve become connoisseurs of fragments. We YouTube sex scenes, punch lines, iconic speeches (“Say hello to my little fren’!”), car chases, classic moments. We accept that most films don’t succeed in their entirety, but might have a moment here or there worth remembering. But moments are not drama.

Films that function as complete aesthetic and dramatic entities are rarities. Anybody who watches only the car chases in Deathproof or the seduction scenes inMulholland Drive might subsequently defend both movies without recognizing the level of their own detachment. In the light of Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy proclaiming the death of the epic novel, and the ever-increasing brain-reduction we all suffer under the unrelenting barrage of schlockbusters (which, like, totally have their virtues!) it’s a relief to see understated, resonant, layered films find distribution and audiences. And inspiring to see films of moral, narrative or technical complexity thrive in the mainstream.

The best films of the decade revealed truth in the first viewing, and grew not only richer, but more entertaining with repeat visits. While their highlights offer plenty of kicks, if that’s what you’re after, the narrative method remains cinematic—story-telling modes that cannot be replicated in fiction or theatre, and were made to be observed in a big dark room in the company of strangers. The best films of the 2000s dealt in archetypal themes, and harkened to the community campfire that no amount of Netflix On Demand can replace.

I fucking hope.

Number 20 is a catch-all, a decade’s worth of Bruno Dumont (Twentynine Palms ’03; Flandres ’06; Hadewijch ’09) and Michael Haneke (La Pianist ’01; The Time of the Wolf ’03; Caché ’05, Funny Games {US re-make} ’07; The White Ribbon’09). Neither director can escape his signature concerns enough to make a film that escapes the constraints those concerns impose. Their excessive mannerism draws you in, but keeps you from immersing. It’s an academic standoff—admirable, but frustrating.

Dumont and Haneke strive to be so damn adult, with their furrowed brows and tortured psyches, but Number 19, Madagascar (USA—2005—Eric Darnell/Tom McGrath) revels in being juvenile. It’s just amped up enough, reliant on wit rather than gags, gave adults their portion with hidden Twilight Zone references and never turned oppressive with messages or lessons learned.

Number 18, Morvern Callar (UK - 2002—Lynne Ramsay) features a heroine determined to learn no lessons of any kind. Incarnating a new British youth, she stumbles from one sensation—one New Drug—to the next, morals-free and lucky as hell. With its air of aimlessness without longing—a shocking rejection of the key teen movie trope—and a rotting body in the living room, Movern seemed less somehow on first viewing, but its mood, its atmosphere—poisonous, recognizable and true—linger and grow in the mind.

Number 17, Spirited Away / Sen to Chihiro no kamikakush ( Japan- 2001—Hayao Miyazaki) provides (along with all of Miyazaki’s ouvre), the poetic mysteries we crave; the suggestion that all perceptible phenomena exists only as the signs and wonders of a hidden world. Miyazaki’s Michael Powell-like use of color to express emotion and the odd inevitability of his pacing, grants his animation a profundity, an emotional pull, in the form of the unspoken yearning that his young protagonists never manage to fulfill and his adult audience recognizes only too clearly.

While Miyazaki employs the most spare dialogue, director Rian Johnson joyously immerses US teenagers in the linguistic convolutions, the relentless iambic pentameter, of the hysterical period of film noir and, of course, Shakespeare (orDeadwood). In Number 16, Brick (USA- 2005) Johnson creates a singular noir milieu, comprised of lethal terror and the high-school social melee. This accurately presents the high school social melee for what it is: deadly, nuanced, ridiculous, and inescapable.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa had a productive and worthy decade (Bright Future ’03; Ghost Cop ’04; Loft ’05; Shriek ’06; Tokyo Sonata ’08) to say the least and Number 15Pulse/Kairo (Japan—2001), best showcases his gifs: quotidian locations made beautiful by Godard-like composition, an eerily matter-of-fact presentation of the greatest horror, hypnotic pacing, absolutely unexplained allegories and solution-free resolutions: endings guaranteeing that everything that has gone wrong will, in the future, only go worse.

"Can daddy please have the heroin?" Pusher II

Number 14 Red Riding: 1974 ( UK—Julian Jarrold—2009) / 1980 (UK—James Marsh—2009) are British made for TV movies released theatrically stateside, thus raising of the question: how many films this decade were better than The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men or The Shield?Answer: damn few as far as character development, distinctive dialogue style or ensemble casting. The best of the Red Riding trilogy is almost Pusher (see below) lite: brutal, spare, unexplained, and colloquial. But Red Riding ventures further into melodrama, so it’s only the second best killer/thriller film series of the last ten years. Only.

Number 13, Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) (France—Cédric Klapisch—2002) brings us to the trend of the decade, which I’m required by statute to discover. In the 00s, an underground railroad of (mostly) foreign thrillers, noirs and genre pictures developed, offering a complex, insightful presentation of the human dilemma usually associated with more self-consciously arty and less commercial fare. Like Ni pour, these thrillers mix showcased plotting with cynical characterizations, class/race consciousness, Jean-Pierre Melville-ian locations and wicked idiomatic dialogue. Ni pour goes even further by doing the impossible: it creates an entirely new idea of the femme fatale, and how she got to be one. In that, it’s the most feminist film on this list.

A new world—ours—in which every act or aspect of life is measured only in its worth as barter, as currency, is depicted in Number 12, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days/ 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (Romania—Cristian Mungiu—2007). This purely transactional appraisal applies to abortion, sex, hotel rooms, cars, clothes, a handshake, a rape or a passport. The nightmare of negotiating unending government beauracracy and personal betrayal is shot in a fluid, agile, style. Mungui eschews cuts—he employs lengthy single-shot scenes that underscore how all the characters are in the same mess together, be they supposed supportive life-long allies or mutually antagonistic one-deal-only partners. His unsparing eye and tough-ass compassion mark Mungui one of the most promising new directors.

There ain’t no new Tarkovsky, and there ain’t gonna be. But the emerging filmmakers of China—some whose films are shown in their homeland, some whose never will be and some who go to jail because they are—share Tarkovsky’s preference for endless slow shots that reveal so much reality they render it fantastic, for allowing mise-en-scene to provide all the context or explanation we’re going to get and for moments that combine heartbreaking bittersweet awareness of life with the promise that, while life will remain bleak, a fleeting instant of connection gives it meaning. Number 11, Still Life/Sanxia haoren (China—Zhang Ke Jia—2006) Still Life brings rigorous beauty, documentary-like presentation of concerns that exist only in the 21st Century and—again that word—clear-eyed compassion.

If Number 10, The New World (USA—2005—Terrence Malick) suffers, it’s only in comparison to Malick’s incomparable Thin Red Line. When the spell of Malick’s sublime tableaux weakens, his processes become suddenly visible, and we fall out of the story. That happens no more than twice, and no other director can employ cinema to replicate the dream-state with the poetry of Malick. In his role as the American Ozu, Malick captures the ungraspable essence of the natural world; dude loves himself some wildlife. Plus, he makes Christian Bale seem not only not sinister, but kind-hearted. And only a genius could accomplish that.

The most credible adult love story of the decade, and Ben Kingsley as the most enjoyable, unforgettable villain, make Number 9, Sexy Beast (UK—Jonathan Glazer—2000) rise so far above genre it invents a new one. Referencing 1970sPerformance without once evoking it, Beast showcases rich self-dramatizing characters, nasty brutal humor and Ian McShane being all McShanian ’n’ terrifying. Charming, blood-soaked, deeply perverse and self-consciously proud,Beast kicked off a newfound malevolent exuberance in British gangsterdom.

Number 8, Triplets of Bellville/Les triplettes de Belleville (France—Sylvain Chomet—2003) conceals so much heartache, class commentary, mother love, innovative visual genius and Tati-like gags under it’s comfy blanket of astonishing charm and likeability. Featuring pretty much the most accurately rendered dog—and the best dog-dreams—in movie history.

“It all ends in tears; these arrangements usually do,” the villain tells our hero, a post-mod, post-noir coke wholesaler who, like every sensible noir protagonist, views the world with deep-seated but never acknowledged dread. Daniel Craig gives Number 7 Layer cake (UK—Matthew Vaughn—2004) its glamorous focus, but it’s the note-perfect character actors and laconic self-mocking dialogue that provide the depth. The visual and narrative rigor, the lack of decoration or of plot explanation (or of subtitles for them Limey accents) raise this would-be entertainment to the level of all great noir: the tragic certainty that each Faustian bargain ends in tears.

            "Close the fucking curtains!" Let The Right One In

As we sink beneath a tidal wave of cheesy vampire-derived nonsense determined to leach any mystery, romance or tragedy from that arena,Number 6 Let the Right One In/Låt den rätte komma in (Sweden—Tomas Alfredson—2008) reminds how compelling an archetype—and what sort of identity and moral questions—the mythology can still raise. Instead of wallowing in soft-core, Right One asks the tough questions about the forming of sexuality, the limits of friendship and loyalty, the exploitative nature of love and how character may or may not determine fate. A delicate, evolved love story, awash in blood, told with grace and a fiendish sense of consequences.

Dane Nicholas Winding Refn wrote and directed Pusher, a neo-realist street thriller, a masterpiece of concision. He never thought he’d make another. Then poor fiscal planning, two more underappreciated pictures (including Bleeder, which, if it came out in this decade, would sure as hell be on this list), forced him to the edge of bankruptcy. To save himself, Refn made two sequels to his original thriller, one right after another. And so Number 5, Pusher 2: “With Blood on My Hands” (2004) / Pusher 3: “I’m the Angel of Death” (Denmark – 2005) showcases what tight visual grammar, propulsive narrative momentum, an ear for the street and a realpolitik awareness of the new immigrant realities in Europe can produce. Unlike the desperate men in his pitiless urban dope-dealing, whore-mongering, business partner-disemboweling universe, Refn did his best work in the most dire circumstances.

Less dire, more familiar circumstances lend Number 4, Linda Linda Linda(Japan—Nobuhiro Yamashita—2005) its unlikely heartfelt emotion.; Four girls in a Japanese high school have to learn the immortal Blue Hearts Japanese punk anthem “Linda Linda Linda” and play it at their school’s talent show. In this quiet little masterpiece, a New Yorker short story kind of tale, the drama derives from the nuance. And, not so much like a New Yorker story, from a kick-ass rock and roll finale.

Help Me Eros/Bang bang wo ai shen (Taiwan—Kang-sheng Lee—2007),Number 3 creates a seemingly new visual language, a modern narrative echoing the crushingly modern, homicidally indifferent city of its setting. Told in simply framed, hallucinatory one-shot tableaux rich in color, modern street scenes, and repressed emotion, Lee presents a vision of our distractedness, a study in technologically induced alienation and failed groping after love, or any human connection. Immersed in all this banal reality, Lee finds the only possible narrative solution: magic.

"I laugh sometimes myself."

Number 2, No Country For Old Men (USA—Joel & Ethan Coen—2007) remains watchable, rewarding, irritating, funny, compelling and tragic. Is it a capitalist critique (as my eighth or ninth viewing suggests), a Beckettian riot of English as only Americans can mangle it and/or the end of the West(ern)? The Coen’s obsession with American idiosyncrasy as expressed in regional mannerism here serves rather than mocks their characters, and that makes this the most adult of their films. That and the unbeatable source material.

"It's your decade, Bill."

Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003)/ Kill Bill Vol. 2(USA—Quentin Tarantino—2004), the undisputed Number 1, as deranged and fragmented as our age, a cartoon for adults, the most daring and original style-piece of the decade, with all that bloodshed just to make us smile. Tarantino’s ability to synthesize Asian cinema tropes and render them American predicts the cinema to come. His deep distractedness, and that ability to synthesize, makes him—like it or not—the very model of a contemporary filmmaker. That, and that QT has inexhaustible ideas and not a millimeter of depth. Yet nobody matches his technique, not with actors, the camera, sound design, soundtracks, multi-media formats or editing. Thomas Keller, the chef behind the famously sublime restaurants French Laundry and Per Se, reportedly believes that our palate stops tasting after three bites. So his meals are made of millions of tiny portions, each discrete, but all adding up to a complex and orchestrated whole. That’s Tarantino’s method, relying on his jittery sensibility and connoisseur’s knowledge to reject any realist tendencies in narrative: he is—and allows us to be—the ultimate escapists.

Best Retrospectives & Re-Releases
Thank you Film Forum, BAM, MoMA, 
Anthology Film Archives and the Japan Center:

Sailor Suit & Machine Gun/ Sêrâ-fuku to kikanjû (Japan—1981—Shinji Somai)
Chelsea Girls  (USA—1966—Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her/ 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’el (France—1967—Jean-luc Godard)
Shohei Imamura Retrospective 
In A Lonely Place (USA—1950—Nicholas Ray)
Fallen Idol (UK—1948—Carol Reed)
Human Condition/ Ningen no jôken (Japan—1959/’61—Masaki Kobayashi)
Celine & Julie Go Boating/ Céline et Julie vont en bateau(France—1974—Jacques Rivette)
The Red Shoes (UK -1948—Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger)
Brighton Rock (UK—1947—John Boulting)