| marcs 10 drama |
        Top Ten of the Decade, Part Six: Drama
I think I might have tired myself out on the 4,000-word behemoth that was Top Ten, Part Five: Horror. So I’m just going to cut to the chase with these drama picks. They are all amazing, and are worth watching, and aptly describe the decade.
The Almost Made-Its: Oldboy, Wind that Shakes the Barley, Gomorrah,
Dir: Martin Scorcese
Scorcese’s oft-nominated, nary-awarded Gangs of New York was robbed of every prize it didn’t win, sans screenplay. Art direction, costume design, editing, director and cinematography (though a posthumous award to Conrad L. Hall was certainly expected) all should have been given to this monster of a movie. Everything about it is incredible, save for the merely decent storyline. What the story does offer, however, is an incredible third-act reversal. Instead of focusing on the feud that had been building for an entire generation, the action flips to the civil war and the draft riots. Because lets face it, when those events happened, no one gave a crap about little familial feuds any longer. A daring narrative shift, especially in such a long film, the move pays off fully, but sometimes not until the second viewing. Not to mention, Scorcese built an entire town in Italy to recreate mid-19th-century New York City. This movie’s awesome.
Dir: Cristian Mungiu
Romania’s hardly known for its big-screen, Oscar-winning blockbusters. But with Mungiu’s <i>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days</i> you wouldn’t have guessed. This little film-that-could plays out exactly as planned, and draws you into the very long weekend of a girl seeking an illegal abortion for her friend in mid-eighties Romania. Long shots dominate this picture and immerse you in the dour streets and mired mood. Though the film offers few surprises, it’s the unabashed realism that truly makes the film resonant. There’s something extremely haunting about the film’s final line: “Let’s never talk of this again.” Because let’s face it, they are doomed to talk about it over and over and over again, like the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. But just like that albatross-laden tale, it’s one worth repeating.
Dir: Shion Sono
Shion Sono’s Love Exposure could be the one film on this list I live to regret. I saw it once, won’t be able to see it again for a while, and if the sound-editing was any indication, it was clearly unfinished. But I don’t care. When I watched this 4 ½-hour movie from the director of Suicide Club, I was blown away. A serious epic about a devout Christian boy, Yu, who aims to become the world’s greatest panty photographer is spellbinding. The film’s tone is all over the board, from melodramatic, to hyper Japanese-goofy, even to ultra-gore (bring me another film that qualifies as a drama showing a daughter chopping off her father’s boner, only to have to spray a fountain of blood across the room and all over her has she smiles and laughs). And yet, Sono somehow makes it just about all of it work.
When Yu’s mother dies, his priest father has a bit of a breakdown and forces Yu to confess sins daily. Yu, at a loss for what to confess, starts committing sins so he can make his father happy by confessing. His father’s happiness becomes and obsession and Yu quickly becomes addicting to sinning. This leads to Yu’s torrid career in the up-skirt photography world. After that, it just gets crazy.
Sono’s allegory on religion, rebellion, and what defines love is almost transcendent in its clarity. A film that stands alone in almost every respect, Love Exposure is an experience not to be missed.
Dir: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
The Lives of Others, a film about a Stasi agent who falls in love with the artists under his surveillance, has a storyline with disaster written all over it. This film is gorgeous from start to finish. The color palette and costuming is profoundly good, and the dialogue rarely breaches into the easily breachable category of “over-dramatic”. Though I still don’t think this deserved the foreign-language Oscar over del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, I can’t really fault anyone for giving a film like this accolades. Hell, I’m doing it right now, aren’t I?
Dir: Wong Kar-Wai
Everyone likens Wong Kar-Wai’s films to jazz compositions; and they’re all right. This film, more so than any of his others (even 2046, on my Sci-Fi/Fantasy list) flows so naturally, you’d forget you were watching a movie at all if it weren’t so much prettier than your life. Another period piece (actually, it looks like most of the films on this list are period pieces), this one set in 1960s Hong Kong, the film tells of a budding, possibly platonic love affair between neighbors, each unhappily married and alone. What the film lacks in plot originality, it more than gain back in genuineness. As In the Mood for Love glides and soars along, the plot seems merely one aspect of understanding these characters’ lives. And that’s the best part of a great movie; the explanation rarely includes a plot synopsis.
Dir: Edward Yang And that same line applies as well to the next film, Yi Yi. Little more than a glimpse into a Taiwanese family’s life and how NJ, the father is able to deal with the everyday happenings of aging adulthood. This film is everything it needs to be and nothing it doesn’t.
Yi Yi begins when NJ’s mother lapses into a coma, and she becomes our cipher from which to view the everyone else in the family: NJ, his wife, his brother, his teenage daughter, and the nine-year-old, Taiwanese version of Macaulay Culkin. They tell (or don’t tell) their lives to Grandma, and give us a compass on how to view their actions. Without moral indictments, Edward Yang views his modern, urban subjects with a distanced beauty – not unlike Ozu. Yi Yi is strong and weak exactly when it should be. Yi Yi is a give-and-take when we need both the give and the take.
Dir: David Lynch
After five foreign-language films in a row, lets take a quick trip to Hollywood for David Lynch’s perfectly crafted <i>Mulholland Drive</i>. Released right at the beginning of the puzzle-thriller craze, this film is a puzzle that doesn’t care whether or not you unlock it. And most of its viewers felt the same way. It’s most likely because Lynch can re-create a dream so realistically, it doesn’t require context outside of itself. And that, to me, is the true brilliance and craftsmanship of the film. It does have a perfectly cogent and understandable plot, a purposefully over-the-top melodrama played out through the lens of Hollywood culture, but it doesn’t matter. If you don’t “get it” or whatever people like to say, the film isn’t any worse for it. This surrealistic masterwork from Hollywood’s current surrealistic master is a flighty lead balloon – how it stays afloat, I’ll never know – and yet it does. Oh, and Robert Forster is awesome.
Dir: Michael Haneke
Haneke’s second film on my multiple lists is arguably more successful than the first (2007’s Funny Games). Caché is a movie about our responsibilities to others, regardless of their origins and how we own our guilt. I don’t want to say much about the story, but when a French television personality is hounded by voyeuristic tapes of his home, discovering the culprit will likely uncover more than he’s willing to have shown. An allegory about French-Algerian relations, the film asks us which responsibilities are ours to own, and which are not. A deceptive question, with a deceptive answer. This film describes perfectly an entire decade of questioning responsibilities, whether they be French, Algerian, or American.
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
Speaking of American responsibilities, P.T. Anderson’s haunting There Will Be Blood is a stark portrait of the freedom of American individualism. Aided by Daniel Day-Lewis’ two-hour John Huston impression, the film encapsulates a time in American history where anything was possible, as long as you have the cutthroat drive to kill everyone else in your way – and especially if you’re able to make it look like suicides. And the lack of responsibility these monolithic personalities were required to have. Anderson has created a repertoire of amazing, powerful films, mostly unrecognized by the Academy. It was satisfying when the Academy’s view of the state of the art actually came close to coinciding with my own. Though with my number one film, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Dir: David Fincher
Zodiac, originally slated as a 2006 Oscar-bait film, was pushed back to early 2007 due to David Fincher’s insistence on having final cut of this very long film. As Paramount expected, a March release destroyed any momentum Zodiac could have had, and the critical response followed in kind. People said the film was plodding, tortuous, and obsessive. Funny, those seem like the exact qualities Fincher was trying to express. Audiences went into the film expecting an action thriller, ala Dirty Harry, and were dismayed when they got a two-and-a-half-hour tale of botched police procedure. Funny, that’s sounds like exactly what happened in real life. Because of Fincher’s OCD and his own obsession with the mythos of San Francisco’s mid-sixties Zodiac killer, he took painstaking effort to recreate everything about the era, from the skyline down to the mood, and it worked brilliantly. His effort shows through in every shot, every cut, and every scene. This film is the work of an auteur, a fanatical auteur; and it sad that the Academy only recognizes his fanaticism when it’s on a crappy film like the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I can watch this film every day of the year; and when it comes to dramas, that’s quite the compliment.
I hope you all enjoyed these long, long lists. I enjoyed making them. |
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