Jobs were changed, things got busy, and the viewing is still on
its way up since the ultimate low in 2009. It was the year I experienced Satantango. Discovered Roy Andersson and his connecting windows.
The year Mr. Nolan comforted me with his tale of domesticity. So yeah, with no
further ado let us begin the wrapping proceedings.
14. Cloud Atlas (Dir: Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Andy
Wachowski)
Big melodramatic and theatrical in its tone, and utterly
cinematic in the way it causes a grand symphony of periods separated through
time, often resulting in making the moment in the future to be some kind of
“cause” for the “effect” in the past, Cloud
Atlas is a film of utter sincerity. Its politics, surely myopic,
celebrating the individual is for dummies, and yet it is magical in its
celebrations of grand gestures. Its confluence of tones, from suspense to
tragic to melodramatic to slapstick is something I shall always treasure. I
have a thing for films wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
13. Talaash (Dir: Reema Kagti) (Read review)
A film with several issues, both in filmmaking and otherwise,
and yet that seems to be more significant than good in our present atmosphere
of overblown macho-bravado. The detective, the moustache, the mystery, the lost
son, the wife, the woman, all of them neat archetypes telling one thing and one
thing only – that control is an illusion. Ms. Kagti causes a thorough
deconstruction, not as criticism but as therapy.
12. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists (Dir: Brian
Knappenberger)
The beauty here is in the fact that there exists a film that
tells the story of a bunch of folks who were users of 4chan. Its
very existence is the validity of cultural respect and recognition accorded to
a bunch of guys, who in any other time period in history would’ve grown on to become members of the
regular groups within our society. Its existence and narration charts the
journey from loneliness to nerdiness to uniqueness to acceptance to coolness. And
with the revolution bug of 2012 on its side, its journey from general coolness
to historical validity is complete. The anonymous have affected history.
It could very well have been the story of Trekkies, or comic
book fans, or Wikileaks, or any group within our society culturally looked down
upon. Makes for a great double-bill with Premium
Rush.
11. Everybody in our Family (Dir: Radu Jude)
An incredibly tough movie to sit through, especially with the
knowledge of a near-and-dear one facing a similar crisis of patriarchal
control. Here is a picture of the modern urban genteel man, defined by his
posters and his DVD collections, utterly helpless against his woman and cutting
an even more pathetic picture than in Blue
Valentine. Probably the year’s most psychological film, in the way it
observes human interaction and causes an explosion out of them. Borderline
horror. Thus a comedy.
10. Django Unchained (Dir.: Quentin Tarantino)
Outside of Mr. Nolan’s The
Dark Knight Rises Quentin Tarantino offers the year’s most formally
ambitious and thematic stunner as far as American cinema is concerned. Refusing
to confuse history for legends and vice-versa, this film starts off from a
fundamentally disadvantageous position than its predecessor and attempts to
chart a rather shocking piece of genre coup d’état. Mr. Tarantino had history
and cinematic history both tangibly and intangibly on his side in Inglorious Basterds, but here, he takes
his deep knowledge of the inherent structuralism of familiar genres and tries
to overwrite the most American of all of them – the western – with the southern,
thereby rewriting the very representation of history. This, in a time, when
much of our cinema is quite content in making legends and myths out of history
(Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter), and what results, until that Altman-esque dinner setting, where
Mr. Tarantino once again proves there’re only a handful of filmmakers out there
who can pack a whole narrative arc into one single setting and still retain the
inherent themes. That is until the cop-out of an ending, where the film and the
filmmaker fall prey to themselves.
9. Samsara (Dir: Ron Fricke)
Volcanic eruptions. A little baby asleep, as if it were a still
picture of him. The fossilized body of an old man. Tutankhamen. The face of
Buddha. The face of a little girl performing the Balinese dance. A land of
temples. Desert. Mt. Nemrut. Sand mandala. A house filled with sand. Mursi
tribeswoman holding a machine-gun. An American family posing with a
machine-gun. Mursi tribeswoman holding her child. A tattooed man holding his
child. The lines that run on the rocks in the Monument Valley. The lines that
run because of the roads and the traffic in a city. Sex dolls. Geishas. Slums.
Prisons. Schools. Buddhist temples. DMZ. The Israeli Palestine barrier. Mr.
Fricke abstracts all of these, and unites them, and us. We’re all here,
together, urban or rural or tribal or the west or the east, in our desire to
create immortal artifacts. It is a humbling experience, and at the end the
Buddhist monks look at that sand mandala and wipe it off. They collect the
sand, all its colors indistinguishable, and we’re left with the image of the
desert. A deeply meditative film best experience at 4 a.m.
8. Celluloid Man (Dir: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur)
In terms of his contribution to the history of our cinema, Mr. P.K. Nair’s story is the one superhero
film that is absolutely essential viewing. Here is a man who literally owned nearly film we made, touched them,
lived them, and remembered them. He caused their preservation, and thereby the
preservation of our history. But that isn’t the most fascinating aspect of Mr.
Dungarpur’s film. We speak to his daughter, about how he was never at home,
about how the mother came to be both the parents, and I imagine the nature of
the family dynamic. And about the gender dynamic. The question is, could there
ever be a female archivist completely sacrificed to the art? It is a necessary
question when we begin to understand the representation of our history and the
hands who wrote it.
7. Nameless Gangster (Dir: Jong-bin Yun)
The story of the most un-cinematic of archetypes, of the greedy
nepotistic citizen driven by self-preservation in a capitalistic society, i.e.
us, neither driven by the rules of the cops nor the criminals, is something of
a triumph amongst the performances of the year. Mr. Jong-bin Yun creates an
epic out of this culture, precisely depicting what Hardt and Negri call a “pastiche
of values and practices, and probably making a case for the family, more than
the corporation or the nation, being the most corrupt form of the common.
Eric Packer is a system. Much like religion, or psychoanalysis,
it is a system to rein in predictability into this world. The limousine is a
cinematic screen in its computer/laptop window avatar, reducing/abstracting
everything to data and information. He has all the questions and the answers to
which are reduced to patterns. Or interpretations. A verifiable meta-body. A
concept dealing in concepts. The limousine and Eric within in, described in
Jungian terms, are the Self and the Ego, and the financial system defined
around the way the ego assimilating everything around it as data. As reason
without emotion. Until the Yuan crashes. Mr. Cronenberg’s finest film since A History of Violence.
5. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Dir: Alain Resnais)
In a way, this is Cloud
Atlas by way of Resnais, and where that film simply offers the same
interpretation for different texts, You
Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, through the personality of its actors, through its
mise-en-scene, through its double-circular structure of an audience of actors
watching amateurs inspired by those actors, provides for interpretations of
differing emotional gradients. There is that space-time continuum that is
wholly his, where dreams and the subconscious and the real and the fantastical
all interact with each other, on this stage that is not merely theatrical or
cinematic but spiritual. Much like Jean Cocteau’s Le testament d'Orphée, it is a filmmaker reflecting back at his own
work and his chosen art with an eye towards immortality, and between this, Holy Motors and Cosmopolis one might be looking at the holy triptych of cinema as
far as 2012 is concerned.
4. The Imposter (Dir.: Bart Layton)
Mr. Layton’s film is pure cinema. Every edit, every dissolve
here is a cause pure cognitive manipulation. Its double-layered structure is
essentially slippery, an impostor itself, a genre film disguised as a
documentary. Daringly mixing the boundaries between fiction and documentary and
the associated ethics in this age of Zero
Dark Thirty, where anything based on a true story asks us to consider it as
a document of history, The Imposter
blatantly betrays our complacence and asks of us to consider every choice a
filmmaker makes, and thus question every document. It is, quite undeniably, the
most skillful use of standard narrative devices this year, and has the
strongest shot of being labeled the best directed
film of the year.
Here’s a film deeply personal, and a journey which I might tell
my grandchildren about. From Batman
Begins, where I was somewhat of a Travis Bickle living alone in Chennai, to
The Dark Knight where I would harbor
fantasies of meeting God and dream of higher purposes (borderline sociopathic
tendencies) to 2012, where I was married for two years. Completely
domesticated. Anthony Mann somehow captured my existence in the closing frame
of Winchester ’73. And never would I
have expected for Mr. Nolan to go where he went his final film on the Batman,
trivializing/elevating him into a symbol and telling the story of Bruce Wayne,
and making me realize that it was not Batman who should be on my t-shirt, but
that I should be wearing t-shirts made by US Polo Assn. or Van Huesen, or
anything that would make me a dignified part of society. Mr. Nolan’s film
comforts me, while the one below disturbs that comfort.
2. Holy Motors (Dir: Leos Carax)
The Bordens’ trick was on the stage. Robert Angier’s trick was
below it, locked inside a water cell, invisible to the audience. The Bordens
represented Keaton, or Chaplin. Angier, I guess, was Andy Serkis. And
irrespective of where the trick existed, the physicality of the act remains. Be
it Maya Deren’s camera over Chao-Li Chi, or the little sensors spread around
Mr. Levant here, the violence and the beauty of motion are just as
gracef…….well, not really. Mr. Levant’s Oscar is something of a relic of a bygone
era where there existed a dynamic of illusion between the spectator and the
actor. Although the illusion, in this age of Youtube where everyone could be a
filmmaker putting on an act and thus an actor, is still present, the dynamic
might be radically different. Or absent. Especially when you come to believe
we’re all living inside a movie. And if we’re, which I think it is very much
the case, Holy Motors is cinema. And
Denis Levant is Holy Motors.
1. The Grey (Dir: Joe Carnahan)
In probably the most instinctive and inspired editing choice,
Mr. Carnahan decides to have his camera point at the sky as Mr. Neeson’s John
Ottway cries out at God in utter desperation and demands of him to make an
appearance. It is as if the camera dares God to come, it is a moment where we
are no longer a passive audience, and we expect something to emerge. Some
movement. Any movement. A bird probably. A sign if you can call it. Nothing
happens. In that dark auditorium, I confess, I was shattered. It is the kind of
shot I could write pages about, and what it means within Mr. Carnahan’s world.
It isn’t a simple question of God existing or not, but the question of God
within the context of our mortality. Performing a thorough deconstruction of
not merely Liam Neeson but every know-it-all leading man guiding a bunch of
“common” people, The Grey tries to
snatch the photographic image and hence the memory from its preoccupation with
the feminine and into the world of male bonding. Ottway kneels there folding his palms and worships the wallets. If you know me, you know how much I
value that.
So yeah, the Grumbach
this year shall go to a movie that, like those films of the 50s and 60s, is destined
to be genre favorite among guys played innumerable times on television, and
which shall inspire a whole generation of filmmakers.
Applause!!!
Movies to be Watched:
Tabu (Miguel Gomes), Paradise:
Liebe (Ulrich Seidl), Beyond the
Hills (Cristian Mungiu), Differently
Molussia (Nicolas Rey), Reality
(Matteo Garrone), Leviathan (Lucien
Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paraval), Student
(Darezhan Omirbayev), Laurence Anyways
(Xavier Dolan).
It’s kinda late I guess, but I feel now I can wish you all a
Happy New Year 2013.
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