Some more reporting from the land of the moving image:

My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-wai’s first film to use the English language, though it makes rather better use of his favorite language of all—the language of love. Except for the unusually coarse image, the film has a seductive surface—everything seems to be lit by neon lights, traffic lights, candlelight. It’s a film to get lost in. Lawrence Block collaborated on the screenplay, and it resembles a good short story—lightly plotted, but rich in detail. Wong’s game plan is to cast a moody spell based entirely on shared experience. If you’ve ever been kicked in the groin by love, you will empathize with these characters. With Jude Law, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Rachelle Weisz, David Strathairn, and, in a particularly arresting cameo, Cat Power.

I’m biding my time until my review of Expelled hits the ‘net. Until then, here’s something to break the silence.

I recently discovered a website called YMDb (your movie database), which appears to be nothing more than a massive collection of favorite movie lists from users around the world. Anybody can join, so I quickly logged my top twenty. It’s fun, and it’s free!

Choosing favorites can be as painful as passing a kidney stone, but it’s also a healthful exercise in decision-making, and sometimes you discover things about yourself in the process. Here are my current choices, culled mostly from memory and subject to change at a moment’s notice.

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Playing catch-up…

Cloverfield is a rare occurrence—a witty monster movie. The tropes are stale (skyscraper-sized amphibious creature runs amok in NYC), but the presentation is fresh (story told through the lens of a single video camera). The credited director, Matt Reeves, displays a cruel showmanship, destroying members of his tiny cast just as soon as we get to like them. Social commentary is wisely kept to a minimum (nothing spoils a Saturday matinee like a Sunday sermon), although the sight of buildings crumbling to dust will seem horribly familiar to any inhabitant of the 21st century. In this respect, the movie resembles a nightmare with an unshakable context.

Mad Money, a comic caper about three disparate, desperate women who plot to pocket cruddy currency scheduled for destruction, is like a female Ocean's Eleven, without the Soderbergh glitz. Surprisingly watchable, it draws its charm from the chemistry between its three larcenous ladies (Diane Keaton the spoiled rich gal, now facing bankruptcy; Queen Latifah the struggling single mom; and Katie Holmes, the bubble-headed trailer-dweller). Fluffy, but forgettable.

City of Men is a follow-up to the critically lauded City of God, the 2002 Brazilian film that earned Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography, and inspired a new kind of gangster aesthetic. Its critical and commercial success spawned a television series called City of Men, which ran four seasons and in turn produced City of Men, the movie.

When City of God was released in the U.S. in January of 2003, it became something of a phenomenon. The dazzlingly confident techniques employed by director Fernando Meirelles and the gritty, ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling proved a volatile combination. Paulo Morelli, who also wrote and directed several episodes of the television series, repeats this formula almost exactly, but the freshness is gone, and the movie suffers from a sense of déjà vu.

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George A. Romero’s fifth zombie movie (in order: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead) is a stinging piece of self-reflexive cinema when it’s not piling on the gore. Which frankly isn’t often. Joining the ranks of the most violent films ever to receive a major commercial release (as were Night of the…Dawn of the…Day of the…etc.), Romero revels too hedonistically in a procession of imaginative deaths, including a death-by-scythe that has to be seen to be disbelieved. But Romero was never one to take zombies at face value, and they are deployed once more as pawns in a wildly pessimistic endgame. The question is not, “Will man be saved?” but “Is man worth saving?” 

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Come Oscar night, The Counterfeiters will probably take the Best Foreign Language Film category, not necessarily because it’s the worthiest of last year’s crop, but because the subject (survival in a concentration camp) continues to haunt film audiences to this day. I hope I don’t sound too callous when I say that Oscar voters tend to lavish attention on Holocaust stories while worthier films with less weighty themes get overlooked. This year’s most infuriating case in point: Cristian Mungiu’s intense, aesthetically daring 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film that has both craft and high seriousness to recommend it. Why was this masterpiece forgotten when ballots were handed in?

Never mind…

The Counterfeiters is a compelling WWII survival story that follows Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), an infamous Jewish forger, through a series of morally compromising situations. Captured by Nazis and put to work in a Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he and a handful of select inmates are ordered, in exchange for soft beds and square meals, to manufacture English bank notes for the purpose of flooding and destabilizing the British economy. Based on actual events (the plan was known as Operation Bernhard), the film succeeds in rattling the emotions with relatively few wartime clichés. The fidgety handheld camerawork employed by director Stefan Ruzowitzky is a mixed blessing, sometimes zeroing in on key passages, sometimes distracting with its impatient zooms. Markovics, sleepy-eyed and crooked-nosed, is an unusual and arresting protagonist, and Devid Striesow, as the supervising Nazi, is frigidly, smilingly believable.

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A new year, a clean slate. Ready or not, here I come…

Cassandra’s Dream is Woody Allen’s third film—after Match Point and Scoop—made in England, and the change of scenery continues to bolster his uncommonly lengthy career. A noose-tightening thriller of enviable power, the film is perhaps best enjoyed by those already predisposed to Woody’s peculiar brand of philosophical depression. One of the few directors in Hollywood stillmaking overtly moral tales, Allen seems obsessively fixated on the workings of chance, fate, and destiny in a world he perceives to be cruel and chaotic. (“Life is nothing if not totally ironic,” one character whines.) It would be a mistake to automatically congratulate him for treading these waters, since what the film boils down to is nothing new, but one can at least admire the steadfast commitment to the task at hand.

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A critic without a Top Ten list is like a ship without an anchor…

The most extraordinary new film I saw last year was Into Great Silence, Philip Gröning’s singular documentary about a hermetic order of Carthusian monks. With serene assurance, Gröning’s camera records these silent emissaries of God as they go about their daily routines (practicing liturgies, chopping wood, making clothes), silently waiting for God to make Himself known to them. At nearly three hours, it’s a Spartan test of nerves (my screening had several walkouts), but the film’s contemplative pace and trance-like imagery work their spell—you come out of it feeling refreshed and re-sensitized. Boasting some of the most spectral imagery of the year, this is the kind of film that needs to be seen in a theater…or perhaps not at all.

No Country for Old Men marks Joel and Ethan Coen’s first foray into literary adaptation, and they’ve found a kindred spirit in Southern author Cormac McCarthy. As always, the Coens display a thrilling technical command of filmmaking, but it’s the bottled-up sadness of Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff that finally gets to you—were it not for his curtain-closing speech (beautifully written and performed), the film would surely get sucked into a vortex of despair. He survives, like the Marge Gunderson character from Fargo, as a symbol of goodness in a crumbling universe. (Javier Bardem’s psycho killer, dispatching his victims with a compressed-air gun, embodies the foul wind of death.) This is bloody, bone-weary work, full of desolate imagery and cryptic elisions, but it emanates from a genuine moral center, and, I think, avoids trendy nihilism.

Rescue Dawn is Werner Herzog’s second attempt at telling the harrowing true story of Dieter Dengler, the German-American Navy pilot shot down during the early days of Vietnam. It serves as a corrective to the notion that war movies are only meant for political attitudinizing. Generously humane and free of postmodern irony, this mesmerizing POW escape film is so attuned to the suffering of its main character (played with goofy charm by the excellent Christian Bale), it nearly sustains interest as a Christian allegory. It’s also a stirring portrait of male friendship, a suffocatingly atmospheric jungle survival tale, and a weird meditation on the relationship between man and nature.

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A tardy recommendation for the holidays…

John Huston’s 1987 film The Dead is a neglected gem that begs to be rediscovered, never having made the jump to DVD. It’s a somber choice for such a jovial holiday, but one that may flatter the more pensive viewer. Like many works of art, its qualities tend to impress gradually, long after the end credits have rolled. 

Lifted from a short story by James Joyce from his legendary Dubliners anthology, the film gives a fly-on-the-wall account of an Irish Christmas party circa 1904. Among the attendees are Gretta (Anjelica Huston) and Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), the latter of whom serves as a sort of narrator. In true Irish fashion, they sing, dance, recite poetry, consume a splendid-looking meal, drink gallons of whiskey, and make passionate conversation. The combination of good drink and Irish hospitality leads to many anecdotes and reminiscences. As director, Huston shows serene confidence during these scenes, fluidly cutting back and forth between conversations, more concerned with painting a portrait than telling a story. Slowly, the guests file out into the snowy night, leaving behind another memory. And then, suddenly, an epiphany happens. I won’t give it away here, except to say that it provides the protagonist with a moment of clarity, and changes the entire focus of the story.

Why is this a great Christmas movie? For starters, few films capture the moods and textures of a cozy holiday gathering so vividly. Fred Murphy’s delicately faded cinematography is transporting, effortlessly evoking turn-of-the-century Dublin. The film fully embraces its literary roots and yet it remains genuinely cinematic—the kind of movie where looks and gestures speak louder than words. Several volumes of poetry reside in the faces of its cast (especially that of Cathleen Delaney, who plays Gabriel’s spinster aunt), and the final scene, taken almost verbatim from Joyce’s story, is sublime.

As the title suggests, Huston’s film eventually turns its attention to the remembrance of those departed. In doing so, it takes the long view of life. When John Huston embarked on the project, he knew he was dying of emphysema. He passed away shortly after completing shooting. Life imitates art.

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One of my favorite pieces of filmmaking this year is just that—a piece of film. It’s Martin Scorsese’s The Key to Reserva, a supremely clever homage to Alfred Hitchcock, the acknowledged Master of Suspense.

This nine-minute film-within-a-film begins, in pseudodocumentary style, as Scorsese conveys an exciting new discovery. Three-and-a-half pages of an unrealized Hitchcock project have been found, presumably in a neglected corner of some studio vault, after decades of obscurity. Scorsese’s brilliant idea: to “preserve” the film by shooting the script as Hitchcock himself would have done.

“It’s one thing to preserve a film that has been made,” Scorsese declares. “It’s another to preserve a film that has not been made.”

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