2006 - TOP TEN
Before choosing my Top Ten films for the year, I took a look back at some of my picks from the past. I was amazed at how many have lost their sheen while some that did not make the cut seem amazingly better today like David Lynch’s “The Straight Story.” My pick for best film in 2000 was a small indie called “Two Family House.” I still stand by that choice. It continues to move me in unexpected ways with every viewing. “United 93” is the only film from this year that continues to haunt me, so it is my pick for Best Film of the Year.
1 - UNITED 93 - Director
Paul Greengrass’ verite style of
filmmaking made me feel like an eyewitness to history. “United 93” grabs you by
the scruff of the neck and drags you through the headquarters of the air
traffic controllers, and into the heads of the Civil and Military authorities
who are ill prepared for the unprecedented attack on America on 9/11. Many of
the real life people who were there play themselves to make sure the filmmakers
got it right. Their presence adds an authenticity that few movies ever hope to
achieve. “United 93” is a blow by blow re-enactment of the events told through the prism of their
experience in real time from the moment the passengers prepare to board the
plane until its descent onto the rural outskirts of Shanksville, Pa. The
terrorists are given equal time and presented just as their victims first
perceived them - as fellow travelers. It’s impossible to know exactly how the
terrorists took over the airplane but it was not impossible for the filmmakers
to create a time line based on the phone calls the average citizens made to
their loved ones from the doomed Boeing 747. As imagined, the final half hour
of “United 93” is unbearably real. The movie makes no bones about the blunders
in
2 - THE QUEEN - Helen Mirren is the epitome of stoic reserve as Queen Elizabeth II who is forced by circumstance and history to recognize her short sighted view of an ever changing world, put her personal feelings aside and salve the wounds of a nation grieving over the death of Princess Diana. Michael Sheen matches Mirren scene for scene as the newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who walks the fine line between loyal subject and man of the people whose popularity grows exponentially when he declares Diana a ‘Princess of the People.’
Director Stephen Frears seamlessly blends archival footage of Diana, her funeral, and the public’s heartfelt displays of affection with the drama that takes place behind the closed doors of the monarchy. Diana is looked upon by most of the royal family as an ingrate whose divorce from Prince Charles made her an outsider. The Queen wants to grieve in her own way for her grandchildren, hiding them away from the cries for a public funeral with all the pomp and circumstance of royalty. Queen Elizabeth is also a political animal who becomes painfully aware of her need to identify herself with her nation’s sorrow.
Mirren turns in a multi dimensional performance as an emotionally conflicted woman who keeps a tight rein on her feelings as she has been trained to do since birth. She is torn between her self image as mother and grandmother and her sovereign image as a matriarch to her people.
3 - VOLVER - “Volver” means coming back. Well! Writer/director Pedro Almodovar IS back with another masterwork that expresses his own particular view of the world with his mordant sense of humor in tact. Almodovar mixes mirth with elements of incest and murder, whimsy and mystery and make it all feel like a part of every day life. Just what this fan has come to expect. This time Almodvar explores the lives of three generations of women through the experiences of Raimunda a mother doing whatever needs to be done to protect her daughter while trying to come to terms with the emotional baggage she has inherited from her mother.
Penelope Cruz plays Raimunda whose husband is on the dole. He puts the make on their teen daughter Paula (Yohanna Cobo) after revealing he is not her natural father. They struggle. Paula stabs him in self defense. He dies. Raimunda comes home and decides to hide the body in a freezer in a restaurant she has promised to show a prospective buyer on behalf of the owner who had to leave town. Raimunda has a chance to make some money feeding feed a film crew at the restaurant. Her decision turns into a lucrative business venture with her husband’s body still in the freezer. And that’s just for starters.
“Volver” actually opens in the small town of La Mancha where Raimuda partakes in a weekly ritual honoring deceased loved ones at the local cemetery. It is rumored that her mother haunts the home of her now deceased Aunt. The Aunt’s neighbor is haunted - figuratively - by the past. Her mother disappeared around the same time Raimunda’s father and mother were said to have died in a fire. The shifting relationships between these women, alive and dead and in one case - alive again - map out the roadway to the movie’s heart and soul.
Neighbors with culinary gifts help Raimunda achieve a new found independence as a restauranteur. She has her sister to help with her daughter, and unbeknownst to her - at first - a mother resurrected from the dead whose presence raises more questions about the past than it answers. The mother helps Raimunda’s sister (Lola Duenes) in her illegal hairdressing business, entertains her granddaughter, and pays penance for her sins by acting as a patron saint to the living. Secrets are revealed, lies are exposed and sins are forgiven. The mother’s newfound presence in her granddaughter’s and daughters’ lives brings closure to the past and renewal for the future. “Volver” ends with an unspoken air of spirituality that places all the women in Raimunda’s universe in a state of grace.
4 - PAN’S LABYRINTH - A young girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), lays on a pillow of stone, blood trickling down the side of her face. A soothing voice speaks of a long lost princess who dared leave a kingdom without lies or pain to enter a human world where sunshine and light blinded her to the past and erased her memory. The king longs for his daughter to return perhaps in another body in another time.
So begins “Pan’s Labyrinth” with Buddha-like prescience presenting the reality of the human world as a dream, hinting at the transmigration of a lost soul looking for its final resting place.
The time is 1944. The place Franco’s Spain. The revolution has been crushed. Small bands of partisans still roam the countryside. Ofelia, and her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gill) are en route to an isolated rural outpost. Their car comes to a rest. Ofelia is attracted to a flying insect. She follows it to an otherworldly stone statue with a hollow space where an eye should be. Ofelia finds the missing part and fits it into place. The insect tracks Ofelia to her new home where she is immediately reprimanded for her bad manners by her stepfather, the cruel and sadistic Captain Vidal. He is more interested in the welfare of her mother, whom he expects to bear him a son.
The insect reappears once again, beckoning, then leading Ofelia to a maze behind the house. Vidal’s housekeeper (Marible Verdu) warns her not to go in. Ofelia could get lost. Later the insect leads her toward an underground labyrinth. Ofelia descends like Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the rabbit hole.
The flying creature morphs into a pixie that leads Ofelia to Pan, a horned faun. He tells her she is told she is really the long lost Princess Moanna. To reclaim her place in the kingdom of immortals she must prove she has not been tainted by her mortality. Ofelia will have to perform three tasks revealed to her from a magical book given to her Pan. .
Director Guillermo del Toro creates two coexisting worlds, one seemingly from the imagination of Ofelia and the other - the human world - where Captain Vidal rules with an iron fist. Duty dictates he must rid the hills of the partisans. There is no room in his life for the mischievous behavior of an inquisitive girl. Ofelia, like his men, must learn her place
There are monsters that are equally as frightening in the two worlds created by director Guillermo del Toro. Only the human one is contaminated by evil where humiliation and torture is meted out in the thirst for power and domination by Captain Vidal. He seeks his immortality through his male offspring, yet unborn. In the land of the faun, life, like a child’s imagination, is eternal. If Ofelia should succumbs to her own self interest Pan and his fantastical world will cease to exist. When Ofelia partakes of a forbidden fruit in her netherworld it is the equivalent of Eve biting the apple. A creature with external eyes is like the serpent looking to destroy her for her sin. Yet, just as man is given a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of God, Ofelia is given a second chance to reach the kingdom of her lost soul by countering the evil of her stepfather. The path she takes and the hardships she endures lead back to the opening scene of “Pan’s Labyrinth.” The circle of life and the afterlife become one and the same.
Guillermo del Toro expertly blends Ofelia’s alternate reality with that of the human world in a magnificent scene with a mandrake root that acts like a live voodoo doll representing the fetus of Ofelia’s unborn sibling. If it suffers, so will the fetus and if it dies,,, The story in the human world is about Vidal’s obsessive campaign to rub out the partisans and those who would thwart him. He sees his unfettered duty as his legacy with his yet unborn son to honor it. But that son would also be Ofelia’s bother. Vidal’s housekeeper, Mercedes, is the guardian angel who will unexpectedly help Ofelia fulfill her calling and become the guardian of her legacy.
There are so many elements at play in “Pan’s Labyrinth” it’s hard to categorize them. It is equally part war story, fable, religious allegory, fantasy, myth and more all rolled into one. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a cinematic feast to savor again and again. .
5 - DAYS OF GLORY (Fr, title “Indigienes”) - Think “Saving Private Ryan” with its searing images and the WWI epic “Gallipoli” with the British High Command sending Australian soldiers to certain death instead of their countrymen under the cliffs at Gallipoli. The WWII epic “Days of Glory” wastes no time in making the same point when a French commander orders a company of Algerian grunts to take the high ground against heavily fortified hill top bunkers on the Italian front. The surviving raw recruits find their courage there. The native French soldiers get the credit. The North African soldiers continue to fight the Nazis because they are French citizens under French rule. They express feelings for a homeland they have never seen hoping to reap the benefits of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite.
“Days of Glory” focuses on four men who are asked time and again to put their lives on the front line. Time and again their accomplishments go unrecognized. They are shorted rations, cheated out of leave time and passed over for promotion. One is a crack shot whose value in combat forgives a multitude of sins. Another has the audacity to fall in love with a French woman once in France.. The smallest and seemingly least threatening is the first to put a knife to a man’s throat if he so much as attempts to dishonor him. . Uneducated and unread, he reveres the top Sergeant who saved him, who later rejects him when a photo is discovered that hint’s at the Sergeant’s true heritage. The last is a natural leader who educates himself in the Army’s rules and regulations and dares to challenge his superiors only to be rebuked.
The great ensemble cast of “Days of Glory” portray men of flesh and blood with all the same wants and needs of any soldier. As Muslims, they make their signs to Allah with the same simplicity as Christians who ask for God’s blessing with the sign of the cross in moments of crisis. These simple gestures identify simple men who express themselves simply but with a profound dignity.
The structure of “Days of Glory” is similar to “Saving Private Ryan” with its strong visceral imagery and closing scene of a combat veteran visiting the graves of his fallen brethren. Both have full scale assaults that leave little to the imagination and a final combat scene that pits man against machine. “Days of Glory” has everything “Saving Private Ryan” has and more - a deeper emotional context that grows out of the indignities and injustices suffered by the Algerian recruits. The final insult, as the opening of the movie suggests, and the post script indicates, is that the Algerian soldiers who gave of themselves so willingly in WWII, many of whom were still living in France after the war, were stripped of their pensions when Algeria won its independence from France.
Like its predecessors “Days of Glory” is an exciting, and suspenseful experience. It is also thought provoking in a way few war films have been before and deserves a place in the pantheon of Great War Films
6 - THE DEPARTED - Director Martin Scorsese returns to the ‘mean streets’ that brought him critical acclaim again and again in movies like “Goodfellas” (1990), “Raging Bull” (1980) and - Yes! - “Mean Streets” (1973). The one constant in all these movies is the Mob: the masterminds behind the big heists, the Capos who fixed the pro fights, and the made guys who kept an eye on the young wannabes. The fight game may not be part of Scorsese’s new movie but high tech thievery and new blood play a major part in this story of two cops - one honest, the other corrupt - whose destinies are bound by their neighborhood ties to a fearsome Irish gang.
“The Departed” turns into a cat and mouse game with lives and careers hanging in the balance from the top of the police hierarchy down to the bottom rung of crime Kingpin Costello’s crew. Screenwriter William Monahan and Scorsese bounce these relationships off each other like atoms in a reactor. You never know how one will play out against the other but you know one of them - or maybe both - will go nuclear and explode under pressure.
Bred on the streets of Boston, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan is the cop who goes undercover sacrificing his identity unaware of the imminent cost to his psyche. Matt Damon is Colin Sullivan, the mole in the police department whose loyalty to his silent benefactor, Costello, is predicated on his survival instinct. Vera Farmiga plays Costigan’s shrink who, coincidentally, succumbs to Sullivan’s charms. On the surface, this set up seems contrived, but instead of playing these scenes for the obvious - the threat of discovery - they are used as building blocks to create flesh and blood characters with a genuine emotional complexity that is just as riveting as the action.
The brilliant supporting players provide the mortar that cements the carefully structured and complex plotting together. Each and every performance is as rewarding as the leads. Martin Sheen is Captain Queenan, the head of the undercover investigative unit. Mark Wahlberg is Sergeant Digman, the hard nosed assistant whose aggression, bad manners, and foul mouth are tools to test the mettle of anyone who thinks that have what it takes to work undercover. He’s the Devil’s Advocate to Queenan’s fatherly image. Alec Baldwin is Captain Ellerby, the local police chief who has made Costello his number one priority. He is entertainingly blunt, disarming, and offensive. Ray Winstone plays the one man Costello can trust. His periodic acts of arson, torture and murder are carried out as if they were daily chores at the office. Jack Nicholson tops the cast as the alternately funny, shrewd, calculating and predatory Frank Costello. He is not above offing his own men in the name of self preservation.
“The Departed” was based on “Infernal Affairs,” a Honk Kong action/thriller from 2002. A change in milieu to the hard edged streets of Boston puts a spin on the story that makes it uniquely Scorsesian. The acclaimed director has taken the homage that “Infernal Affairs” represents to the American gangster genre and reclaimed it as his own. My only reservation about the adaptation is the lengthy ‘Mexican’ standoff at the end of the film. Yet! Despite this one step backwards, “The Departed” should stand out as an apotheosis for gangster films yet to come.
7 - THE ILLUSIONIST - A long lost love, class rivalry, and revenge is at the heart of “The Illusionist.” It begins like a classic novel with a young boy and girl as playmates, separated by class and circumstance just as their affection for each other is ready to take root. The boy grows up to become the mysterious Eisenhein, a master magician whose growing celebrity soon becomes a threat to the monarchy in turn of the century Vienna. The girl, Sophie, is groomed to become the wife of Rudolf, the Crown Prince of Austria, heir to the throne.
Rudolf attempts to expose the trickery of Eisenheim’s illusions at a command performance only to have his ego bruised and his relationship with Sophie compromised. To save face, he must destroy Eisenheim. He orders his chief of police to carry out his will. “The Illusionist” takes on the aura of a suspense thriller with Eisenman using his gifts, a dose of spiritualism and illusions from the Orient to confound his nemesis.
Edward Norton is mesmerizing as the enigmatic Eisenheim. Paul Giamatti is the police inspector modeled after the character of Jalvert in “Les Miserables” but without his malicious soul. Jessica Biel fills the bill as the love interest while Rufus Sewell is the Crown Prince of Austria who makes everybody’s life miserable. “The Illusionist” is a class act full of mystery and mayhem witn plenty of movie magic to spare.
8 - V FOR VENDETTA - “V for Vendetta” is based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd written during the Parliamentary reign of Margaret Thatcher in England. The Wachowskys Brothers, the creators of “The Matrix” trilogy, took the basic premise and changed it enough to reflect aspects of contemporary America’s geopolitical character. They wrote the script. Their protégé, James McTeigue directed the movie.
Taking his cue from history, V dons a mask resembling anarchist Guy Fawkes who attempted to blow up British Parliament in 1605. He embarks on the same path to bring down a futuristic English government that rules through fear, intimidation and control of the media. He’s a one man guerilla army seeking converts by intercepting TV signals to broadcast his message. V hopes to inspire the people to rise up against the government. He pins his hopes on Evey (Natalie Portman) to succeed him when he recuses the young impressionable woman from the clutches of the thought police. V brings her to his lair, breaks her spirit and rebuilds her character by putting her through the same torturous ordeal that made him who he is. A back story reveals his country’s rise as a world power and his victimization in a totalitarian experiment gone wrong.
V’s world is an inversion of Orwell’s 1984 with leaders espousing a Christian nation living under a crucible of blood. John Hurt, who played the victim in the 1984 version of the novel, is the complete opposite here as the supreme leader Chancellor Sutler. Stephen Rea is the detective whose moral compass slowly veers him in the opposite direction of the party line. Hugo Weaving is astonishing expressing everything about V through nuance, vocal inflection, and physical grace.
“V for Vendetta” is a rip roaring tale whose many set pieces hark back to some classic moments in films like “The Mask of Zorro,” “Spartacus,” and the most obvious -“The Phantom of the Opera.” The movie is top loaded with special effects , eye popping imagery and visual tableaus but it’s the humanity of its characters, both good and evil, that stayed with me long after the movie was over
9 - BLOOD DIAMOND - Solomon Vandy (Djimon Houson), a fisherman on the coast of Sierra Leone speaks to his young son about his hopes for the boy’s future. They return home just as their village is raided by a rebel force of mostly boy soldiers who kill indiscriminately. Vandy’s wife and daughter get away but he is separated from his son. The men are rounded up. Some have their hands chopped off. Others, like Vandy, are enslaved to work the diamond rich rivers deep within the country. Scenes of Vandy at the river are inter-cut with a human rights conference on the plight of Africans victimized by the warring factions who deal in conflict diamonds.
In a few rapid fire scenes Director Ed Zwick sets the stage for “Blood Diamond”’s rousing tale of a country torn apart by greed, bloodlust, and the world’s insatiable appetite for diamonds. Something Vandy knows little about. He doesn’t understand how anyone could equate the value of a life - many lives - to the value of a single stone. Captive, Vandy works, watches and waits.
In another part of Sierra Leone, soldier of fortune Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is caught trying to smuggle diamonds across the border.
Vandy finds a blood diamond - so called because of its sheer size and all the blood that could be shed to possess it. Without warning the work camp is raided by government forces. Vandy manages to bury the diamond on the perimeter of the river. The rebel leader, Captain Poison, catches up to him. Both men taken prisoner and put in the same jail as Archer. Poison’s rants about Vandy and the diamond fill all the prisoners’ ears. Archer wants it. It would be his ticket out of Africa to a new life - a long life. Archer is freed. He uses his connections to free Vandy. Archer knows Vandy will never be able to sell the stone not unlike the fisherman in John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” who is ignorant of how the world works outside his village. Archer hounds him. He swears he will help Vandy find his family - but the diamond comes first. They form an uneasy alliance built on mutual mistrust.
Enter Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connolly), a journalist looking for evidence to connect the atrocities in Sierra Leone to the international diamond market. She finds Archer charismatic. He finds her useful. Archer trades information for her help. Maddy has access to the refugee camps. She can help find Vandy’s family. All three venture into the interior each with their own agenda, each dependent on the other for survival.
“Blood Diamond” is a solid action movie with heroes and villains, and others not so easy to categorize. Archer learned the tools of his trade in the military. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry. He can slit a man’s throat or lock and load and shoot a man in the blink of an eye. Tactics and logic rule his every move. Vandy’s actions are dictated by emotions. They are always in conflict with Archer’s survival instincts. Maddy yearns to get evidence for her story from. Her prodding doesn’t work, but her attempt to understand him might. Maddy’s bluntness, tenacity, and sincerity appeals to Archer. She is still careful not to compromise her professionalism. Once they push forward into the interior Maddy comes to appreciate his innate ability to sense and deal with danger. That danger comes in many guises from Captain Poison played with ferocious conviction by David Harewood, the mercenary Colonel Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo), the epitome of menacing elan who hides his thirst for power and diamonds behind a veil of patriotism, and the conscripted prepubescent rebels who watch the roads and guard the bridges.
“Blood Diamond” is unflinching in its depiction of violence. It is meant to shock and it does; but it is never gratuitous - growing organically out of each situation - pushing the story forward. Yet with all the blood that’s spilled, there is nothing quite as chilling as watching a boy given drugs to control him - to make him feel invincible and turn him into a killing machine. It makes every seemingly incomprehensible inhumane act up to that point believable. It drives the message of the movie home in that one succinct moment. To my mind, all the action scenes - and there are plenty of them - lead to and spring from that one scene. The ultimate message of “Blood Diamond” is not just the human rights issues it raises but that the future of a nation is in the hands of today’s children. Ed Zwick and screenwriter rightly end the movie, not with a character defining moment for Archer on a mountain top in Sierra Leone, but with a father standing tall before the world as a role model to his son to bear witness against those responsible for the carnage in his country.
10 - APOCALYPTO - Say what you will about Mel Gibson, as actor, writer, producer or as a human being, the guy knows how to make movies. He pushes “Apocalypto” forward with more action than words and eye popping spectacle that stirs the senses. He claims he made up this story about a tribe taken captive in the rainforests of Mexico to be human sacrifices in an ancient Aztec city; but it’s hard to imagine that his imagination was not fired up by the interest in the ancient indigent cultures south of the border that has been so much in vogue over the last few years on the educational cable stations.
“Apocalypto works best as a first rate adventure film with the ancient rain forest as a central character that defines the nature of its inhabitants. It supplies the villagers with their basic needs - water to drink, the fruit from its trees and game to hunt. The people can be gentle, loving, generous to outsiders, and practical jokers amongst themselves. They take pride in their resourcefulness. But they are ill prepared for the barbaric horde that raids their village.
The movie follows one hunter - Jaguar Paw - from his attempt to hide his family, through his capture and humiliation at the hands of his captors toward the unknown. He and his brethren are dragged through the rainforest, up the mountains, across the gorges and down into a dreary colorless city built from mud and mortar. The people are starving from a drought. They demand human sacrifice to appease the gods. Heads roll, blood flows and the crowds cheer.
Jaguar Paw is saved at the sacrificial altar by a sign from the gods - a solar eclipse. The rest of “Apocalypto” is a chase film right out of “The Most Dangerous Game,” a short story that has been reincarnated for the screen numerous times. Jaguar Paw is given a chance to escape from his captors if he can out run, out maneuver and outwit his pursuers. Meanwhile Jag’s pregnant wife and child are hidden in a dry well, threatened by the elements. Will he get back in time to save them? Will the hunters become the hunted? And if he escapes where will he go? Part of the answer lies in a prophesy that foretells the pursuit of a jaguar and the next swarm of invaders that will follow.
The final scene announces the encroachment of yet another civilization even more foreign to Jaguar Paw than the one he escaped from. If spectacle were all it would be easy to write “Apocalyto” off, but Gibson’s crowning achievement is to contrast a way of life that is rooted in nature against man made institutions, religious and civil, which are destined to crumble and fall under the weight of time and history.
Copyright 2007