2007: The color of the moon

10. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

The stakes are trivial. Two emotionally-stunted adults compete for the world record in an antiquated arcade game. Yet underneath the retro-nostalgia of a subculture that might as well have been frozen in carbonite for the last 20 years, is an insightful exploration of the politics of objective score keeping and the institutions that legitimate and gain legitimacy from them. One could almost read this documentary as a proxy indictment of the steroid scandal in America's other favorite pastime. In the end, King of Kong is a immense crowd-pleaser because it follows the great archetypal sports narrative of the underdog. And, of course, due to the striking characters (e.g. Billy "No matter what I say, it draws controversy. It's sort of like the abortion issue." Mitchell). The filmmakers must have known they hit cinematic pay dirt when a person who goes by the name Mr. Awesome vocalized the documentary's ultimate maxim: Don't get chumpatized. Amen.


9. Persepolis

Like its precocious main character, Persepolis is occasionally awkward and ungainly (the frame story is left curiously unfinished), but both more than make up for it with sheer charm and exuberance. Satrapi's warts and all autobiographical approach is disarming, and manages to cover a substantial amount of history without feeling overly didactic. More importantly, it provides a human and relatable face to an area of the world that is still largely foreign to Western audiences.


8. Grindhouse

The film audiences forgot to see and time will surely forget. Tarantino and Rodriquez have crafted the Zaireeka of the cinema -- a movie that needs to be watched socially to be fully enjoyed. Well, I haven't done any scientific studies, but surely it is half as fun alone. Perhaps it is fitting then that the Weinstein brothers cleaved this double-feature into two separate and irreconcilable DVDs, because if anything, Grindhouse is a 191 minute celebration of the theatrical experience, sticky floors and all. If you missed out, be sure to check YouTube for the pitch-perfect trailers that acted as intermission between the two main features. [Also a special shout-out to my childhood idol Michael Biehn.]


7. Superbad

LMAO. In the battle between the Judd Apatow comedy rhizomes, Superbad edged out Knocked Up in LPMs (there really needs to be a movie of Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd just hanging out for two hours) and emotional resonance. But mostly because McLovin is pure comedy gold: a joke that was funny in the trailer, hilarious during the movie, and still amusing every time I think about it.


6. I'm Not There

I would like to think that Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read can apply to texts of all sorts, even cinematic ones, because to hear of Todd Haynes's deconstructive biopic is to have an opinion on it. Which is part of its subversive brilliance: when it was announced Cate Blanchett, among others, was playing Bob Dylan, the rather obtuse and academic premise was immediately self-evident. And unlike Control, which, in typical Corbijn fashion, bleached out all colo(u)r and particularity to fashion a bloodless archetypal love story (note how the critics who confess they know nothing about Joy Division are the ones singing the praises), I'm Not There is both playfully irreverent and deeply respectful. A shame there wasn't a cameo by Soy Bomb.


5. Blackbook


4. The Lives of Others

The fourth selection on my list may raise a few eyebrows as it won last year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film. As far as I am concerned, if it wasn't released in the United States, it is fair game (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days will thus have to wait). I have paired The Lives of Others and Blackbook together not only because both movies are anchored by the brilliant Sebastian Koch (who is coincidentally married to Blackbook's breathtaking Carice van Houten), but also because they take contrasting approaches to congruent time-periods.

As critics have noted, The Lives of Others is less about the historical realities of the Stassi, than about those illusive transcendental qualities that make us human. The Sonata for a Good Man is a synecdoche of that inner sanctum that cannot be destroyed by systematic oppression and surveillance; it is the ying to 1984's wire cage of rats yang. And although it may not pass the test of post-totalitarian verisimilitude, The Lives of Others succeeds as a riveting and emotionally devastating humanist drama.

Blackbook, in contrast, harbors no such fantasies. It is an unblinking deconstruction of the myth of Dutch resistance in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Verhoeven (yes, of Starship Troopers fame) subversively drapes the film in the visual and auditory cues of classic Hollywood cinema, which constantly thwarts our romantic expectations of the traditional WWII epic. And while The Lives of Others ends on a rather perfunctory (and very European) note, Blackbook is bookended by a devastating frame-story that offers no convenient narrative resolution to the perpetual cycle of violence.


3. There Will Be Blood

I know quite a few people who are convinced There Will Be Blood is one of the truly great masterpieces of American cinema. I can see where they are coming from: the narrative focus of the film (quite like that of its central character) is so obsessive and myopically driven that to fall under its spell is to be completely enraptured. For the rest of us, it is impossible not to admire the career turn P.T. Anderson has undertaken. In this claustrophobic and archly pessimistic boxing match between industrial capitalism and religious evangelicalism (or maybe I should say between the preacher of evangelical capitalism and the organizer of industrial religion), only the farcically theatrical ending bears Anderson's stamp -- a bizarre kubuki play of themes and revelations which might ultimately be too cryptic for its own good.


2. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Timely versus timelessness is a false dichotomy in art, but I did consider it as a possible criterion for trying to solve the riddle of how to rank these last two movies. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a miracle of contradictions. How can a film about the horrifying and isolating condition "locked-in syndrome" feel so gloriously alive and universal to the human condition? For the first part of the movie, the audience's perspective is limited to that of Jean-Dominique Bauby. It is disorienting and discomforting (the scene in which a doctor sews shut one Bauby's eyes is the most terrifying cinematic moment of the year), but oddly beautiful as the frame is awash in blurry expressionistic colors as Bauby struggles to focus. The answer then lies somewhere in the tension between the simple, yet profound, twin metaphors of the title: in that miraculous space where the fragile tissue that is human consciousness presides.


1. No Country For Old Men

In the year war movies bombed at the box office, a bizarre yet impossibly compelling film meditated on America's roots in violence. Vietnam casts an oblique but long shadow over No Country For Old Men - civilians playing soldier at home - but, the menace and the threat seems to go much deeper than mere historical circumstance. To something primordial and prelapsarian.

In a way, No Country For Old Men has to be watched twice. It is far too easy on first viewing to get caught up on trivial plot points (e.g. who ends up with the money) or to buy into the mistaken narrative assumption that Llewelyn Moss is the central character (which would cause the movie to feel emotionally incomplete). On second viewing, it is much easier to let the suspenseful chase sequences cede into the background, and focus on the moral center of the film Ed Tom Bell. Through him, and the amazing Tommy Lee Jones, we hear Cormac McCarthy's weary prose. Of a man trying to comprehend an ultimately inscrutable evil (how do you even get your head around the name Anton Chigurh), and of being thrown, without choice, into a world beyond our control and that will remain after we are gone (Heideggerian thrownness). The last lines of dialogue in the film are haunting, but it is the opening monologue that sets the tone of the film and deserves to be read and re-read:

"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job - not to be glorious. But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it, but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

In the end, that might be the ultimate aphorism of pragmatic American frontier psychology (or, better yet, the American psychological frontier). That in the end, all you can do in an ambivalent moral world is just to try your best to get a tourniquet around it.