Ow, my brain hurts. So, let's just get these out of the way, shall we? In the annual Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll, announced just before Christmas, 94 critics (including me) came up with 160 nominations for best films of 2009 -- and voted in a bunch of other categories, too, including Best Film of the Decade ("Mulholland Dr."). [My decade favorites are here.]
Meanwhile, Film Comment polled another big batch o' crix (a lot of the same ones, in fact) and came up with a somewhat different 20 Best of 2009 list -- and 150 Best Films of the Decade (topped by... "Mulholland Dr."). Just for fun, let us compare the two groups' Top Dozen for both year and decade:
Village Voice/LA Weekly 2009 Poll:
1. "The Hurt Locker" (Kathryn Bigelow, USA)
2. "Summer Hours" (Olivier Assayas, France)
3. "A Serious Man" (Joel & Ethan Coen, USA)
4. "Inglourious Basterds" (Quentin Tarantino, USA)
5. "35 Shots of Rum" (Claire Denis, France)
6. "The Headless Woman" (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina)
7. "Police Adjective" (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
8. "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (Wes Anderson, USA)
9. "Two Lovers" (James Gray, USA)
10. "Up" (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson, USA)
11. "The White Ribbon" (Michael Haneke, Austria)
12. "Still Walking" (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)
1. "The Hurt Locker"
2. "The Headless Woman"
3. "Summer Hours"
4. "35 Shots of Rum"
5. "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
6. "Police, Adjective"
7. "Inglourious Basterds"
8. "A Serious Man"
9. "The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, France)
10. "Lorna's Silence" (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
11. "24 City" (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong/Japan)
12. "The White Ribbon"
Village Voice/LA Weekly Decade Poll
NOTE: Each critic voted for only one film.
1. "Mulholland Dr." (David Lynch, USA, 2001)
2. (tie) "In the Mood for Love" (Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 2000)
"25th Hour" (Spike Lee, USA, 2002)
4. (tie) "La Commune (Paris, 1871)" (Peter Watkins, France, 2000)
"Zodiac" (David Fincher, USA, 2007)
"Yi Yi" (Edward Yang, China, 2000)
7. (tie) "Dogville" (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 2003)
"The New World" (Terrence Malick, USA, 2005)
"There Will Be Blood" (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2007)
"The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005)
11. (tie) "Syndromes and a Century" (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2006)
"Spirited Away" (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan 2001)
"Children of Men" (Alfonso Cuarón, Japan/UK/USA, 2006)
"A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2001)
"No Country for Old Men" (Joel & Ethan Coen, USA, 2007)
1. "Mulholland Dr."
2. "In the Mood for Love"
3. "Yi Yi"
4. "Syndromes and a Century"
5. "There Will Be Blood"
6. "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"
7. "A History of Violence" David Cronenberg, Canada/USA, 2005)
8. "Tropical Malady" (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2004)
9. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (Cristi Mungiu, Romania, 2007)
10. "The New World"
11. "Platform" (Jia Zhangke, Hong Kong, 2000)
12. "Zodiac"
Sad year-end news: Esteemed Village Voice critic J. Hoberman finally jumped the Armond White in his 2009 wrap-up, with this Rule of Nazi-violating sentence about "Inglourious Basterds" (#9 among his favorites of the year), upon which he declined to elaborate: "It's also amoral and a bit obnoxious, but I'll take Tarantino's essentially generous 'Jewish porn' (as one participant crassly put it) any day over the mean-spirited 'Nazi porn' (yes) of 'A Serious Man.' "
So... does that mean anything at all? As Glenn Kenny once wrote of White: "I don't want to know what you think it means, what you infer it means when you put it through your own personal White [or Hoberman] decoder ring, no; I want to know what the words in the sentence as they are actually written actually mean."
Like most of what it characterized as "hate speech," those loaded words (Nazi plus porn!) weren't likely intended to mean much of anything in particular. Just a little hate-slap at anybody who found something to value in "A Serious Man."
25 Comments
Unlike most writers who have a dedication to mon juste, White values the total opposite. Sad to see Hoberman wearing the same vest.
I'm pleasantly surprised, by the way, to see "A History of Violence" on Film Comment's decade poll. I can't say the same about "There Will Be Blood." I have revisited that film twice since it came out, and it gets progressively worse.
So much to talk about here (did you have to load the "A Serious Man" reference in this post - now everyone'll talk about that, dang it.)
I'm most interested in the Film Comment Decade List. It was such a crushing disappointment to me to discover about five years ago that my taste was not unique at all but rather was simply in synch with the Film Comment/Village Voice crowd. The pattern holds.
I had two films by Jia Zhangke in my Top 10. I see they have 3 of his films in their Top 27. Odd that what I think is the least of his celebrated films, Platform, finished ahead of Still Life and The World but anyway the point is made.. Jia Zhangke is the filmmaker of the 2000s! Am I being hyperbolic? Let me rephrase. Jia Zhangke is the filmmaker of the decade, and so is Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2 in The top 10, 4 overall)! And so is Guy Maddin even though they screwed up and only got one of his films in there.
I betcha Colossal Youth (my favorite of the 2000s) would have finished higher if more people had seen it. And it's coming out on DVD in 3 months. Yay.
There's really not a whole lot on that list I disagree with strongly which is pretty surprising for such a lengthy list.
Darn it, I wanted be more unique. I'm so jealous of Armond White.
Dissapointing about Hoberman.
I have revisited There Will Be Blood 3 times, and it has gotten better, worse, and better again. I still have yet to hear a compelling argument against the film. Individual sections, scenes, performances...sure. But nothing I've read against it even came close to speaking to its essence.
I like a fair amount of the films on the decade lists, but I am struck by how dull they are. God help me if I were stuck with Film Comment's list...a lot of sameness there. I was pleasantly surprised by A.I. making onto the Voice's list, though it only took two votes.
Surely he means that the film is a fetishized, caricatured (and negative) portrayal of Jewishness?
I can't say I agree, it was one of my fave films this year, but I can see someone making that criticism of it who didn't like it.
EDIT: Also, what I also meant to say is - the film is basically 90+ minutes of watching a Jew suffer - somebody could definitely call that 'Nazi porn' if they wanted to belittle the movie.
JE: Makes me wonder: Does that mean somebody like Hoberman thinks that "Borat" is "Uzbekistani porn"? It shows the suffering and misadventures of a Jew-phobic Kazakh...
I don't know if Hoberman is Jewish, but to describe A Serious Man as Nazi porn is not only extremely offensive, but I would go so far as to say that it's anti-Semitic. It's anti-Semitic, because while A Serious Man doesn't treat its characters very well (although I think it's simply because the Coens have never treated many of their characters very well), to compare it to Nazi porn (whatever that is) shows a complete lack of understanding about The Holocaust and reduces that incomparably horrific event; to a Coen Brothers film.
Oh, and Inglorious Basterds is not Jewish porn!!!
Not sure what is meant by 'Nazi porn' either, but I think 'Triumph of the Will' would (yes) be Nazi-porn. Maybe 'Werewolf Women of the SS' as well? Haven't seen 'A Serious Man' yet, but Coen bros. and Coen bros., so its likely good.
JE: Yes, when I encounter the term "Nazi porn" (and I don't, very often), I think of something more like the X-rated "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" (1975).
I don't see a problem with Hoberman's comment. He's just taking a crass comment and inverting it to apply it to another movie, thereby stating that A Serious Man is the opposite of Inglorious Basterds in its treatment and outlook on Jews.
Either that, or he's talking about some long lost Eva Braun porno called Ein Ernster Mann, and not the Coen brothers movie at all.
Hoberman's comments almost make me wonder about how even the most respected critics actually view movies in a way that is remarkably shallow.
I really don't know what exactly "Basterds" or "A Serious Man" have in common outside of Jewish characters. To use one to denigrate the other is perplexing, as if they're is only one acceptable way of portraying Jewish people. As if a movie expressing doubt about religion should be shamed while another that shows a Jew machine-gunning Hitler in the face is on the "right side".
Of all the accusations leveled at "A Serious Man", I do find it odd that they take the Coens to task for poking fun at Jews. Well, who haven't they poked fun at? You didn't see former hippies getting mad at how they portrayed The Dude in "Lebowski" as a lazy and shiftless person. What I get from this whole debate is the bizarre notion that religion is beyond criticism from outsiders or its own believers. For me, nothing and nobody is beyond scrutiny. To think about truth and humanity beyond religion doesn't make the Coens self-hating Jews.
I generally think film critics this past year have embarrassed themselves when stepping out of their cocoons to discuss matters of race, religion and financial hardship in film. It does often reveal them to not have an understanding of how life works outside of a movie theater.
Interesting, I've revisited There Will Be Blood two or three times as well, and it gets progressively better--and I thought it was a masterpiece after the first viewing. Absolutely the right choice for a decade poll.
Where's White's "Better than" list for this year? I can't wait.
White's list is up-- and is shockingly credible to the point of being downright dull.
The Hoberman comment is in tune with a boatload of nitwits who have had their fellings hurt by a unique film that ends, for them at least, inexplicably. There is a group that really hates this movie. Hobermans comment is antisemitic because it suggests that Jewish people are too delicate to portray in a satire. I just am amazed at the idiots who hate this movie so much...
No love for the Mariah Carey's picture, "Glitter" (Hall, United States, 2001)?
hmmm...methinks someone is an elitist...
Any list that includes Mulholland Drive loses all credibility with me. And some are even topped by it? I've never seen a bigger case of critical circle jerking.
Like everything David Lynch creates, Mulholland isn't about anything, it's just him throwing random crap out there, trying to be mysterious and make it seem like there's something there that the audience can't grasp. It's a trick that I can see working on acidheads, but critics?
I finally saw Pan's Labyrinth recently. It might be my top movie of the 00's. Every note of the film is just perfect. A lot of my favorite movies have weak points yet I love them anyway (Tarantino flicks, for example), but Pan's Labyrinth has not one I can think off, except maybe that a some of the special effects involving blood were cheesy. That's it. Other than that it's flawless.
Having utter crap like Mulholland Drive over actual great movies like Pan's Labyrinth is a crime against film. Crime. Against. Film.
I take it you don't like (or haven't seen) Persona?
Mulholland Dr. draws a connection between performance art and the dream world and the inherent identity crises they bring. For the structure of cinema is often fragmented like a dream, and audiences do a lot of "filling in the gaps." Mulholland Dr. takes this a step further and makes it abundantly clear we're in an amorphous reality like a dream. One of the first shots is the camera approaching a pillow. Going to sleep is analogous to being put under the spell of a movie.
I'd say dreams are pretty confusing. Reality is constantly breaking itself down and reforming in new ways. People change names, faces, identities. It's all maddening and I hold Mulholland Dr. in high regard because of its uncompromising rendition of this mindset. It's simultaneously one of the most pleasurable, terrifying, unsettling, and fascinating pictures I've seen, I think in part because it understands the connection between cinema and dreams.
It was Mr. Eli Roth who enthusiastically described "Inglourious Basterds" as (not "Jewish porn" but) "kosher porn." Get it?! Roth was, to be sure, making a joke in intentionally dubious taste, but it is an (honest? callow? calculated? funny? disgusting?) interesting joke: he was admitted that he took a very personal and visceral satisfaction in watching and making the film. Mr. Hoberman's volley/swipe-at-J.&E. Coen shows him getting a bit tripped up in the net, but I concur with other commenters who guess that he meant "If the violence done to Nazis in 'Basterds' is thrilling to Jews, that is preferable to the hate and misery heaped on Jews in 'A Serious Man', which might appeal only to anti-Semites."
Obviously that is not a universal reading of "A Serious Man". And we might, say, admire both films without choosing either-or — I know I do. But it's a snide hand-wave dismissal that ought to be unpacked further or deleted, and allows the critic to use ironic-quotation-marked offensive language with the built-in defense that he was riffing on something stupid Eli Roth said. It is disappointing coming from Hoberman, who, I don't believe has a habit of writing like that. I'm also not going to feign any excess indignation, though it was an insensitive, sensationalistic miscalculation.
Personally, I'm gonna stick with Porn-Porn.
JE: I'm glad you remember the Eli Roth remark, which I quoted here when "Basterds" was released theatrically. Roth said that he, as a Jew, got off on the spectacular slaughter of Nazis in his pal QT's film, but I think he was also riffing on the term "torture porn," with which he is so often associated. Also, Roth directed "Nation's Pride," the Nazi war-hero propaganda film within the film... which elicits excited howls of delight from the ranking Reichsters in the audience, and which, consequently, might well be labeled... "Nazi porn."
A Serious Man is inspired by the book of Job, so for any critic to attack it because 'the hate and misery heaped .....might appeal only to anti-Semites.' is absurd. You may as well attack the Bible.
The thing that annoys me about calling A Serious Man Nazi porn or calling the Coens self-hating Jews (a term which I really hate anyway) is that it leads to the impression that there are 'good' and 'bad' Jews, and there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways about practising Judaism. It's nonsence. There's no rule saying that Hoberman had to like A Serious Man (personally I'm not a huge fan of it), but I don't think he has the right to imply that the Coens are on the side of the Nazies or that they are self-hating Jews or whatever else simply because they approach their Judaism differently.
In a "please read me, I need hits" effort, here's a link to my Top 100 of the Decade:
http://www.dvdtown.com/news/christopher-long-top-50-films-of-the-2000s/7273
An extraordinary amount of crossover with the Film Comment list. As I said before, I wish it were not so. But at least I found room for 20 documentaries which is usually about 20 more than most of these lists usually include. The overwhelming bias towards feature films is, in my opinion, the biggest shortcoming on most of these compilation lists.
We need to see more short films receive the canonization treatment too.
I think that A Serious Man would have been a much more powerful film if the acting was not so cartoonish...the film to me is a total failure of tone and overly self-conscious directorial style which had the unfortunate result of pushing everything towards caricture.It's not a matter of negative or postive portraits of Jewry...it's a matter of an overinflated directorial reputation and using actors as inorganic pawns for a sylistic reputation that in being overpraised by crtics becomes it's own worst artistic enemy. Rod Stieger in The Pawnbroker is something the Coen Brothers could never appraoach, because they have no capacity to create it without irony.
Yeah, well, y'know...
An IMDb user comment re: Pan's Labyrinth:
I get annoyed at movies that preach one thing and are themselves another.
The story here has two components, a real and [a] fantasy thread. The real world thread is simple. By that I mean there are no dramatic complications at all. The characters are theatrical cartoons. The situation starts out brutally and stays that way without any arc, development, evolution. [This thread] is in fact a formula movie...and one that follows a formula that is based on strict, strict boundaries. One would...almost believe it to be written by "The Captain," the bad guy here.
It marches. [It's] unambiguous. [It's] final and brutal in its morality, just as the Captian is. There are only good and bad people and the bad are not only very, very bad but they get their [just desserts]. Justice isn't nuanced here. In fact nothing at all is.
I suppose people celebrate it for its fantasy thread. Yes, the effects are good. Yes the creepy eyeless man was creepy. Yes the Tinkerbells were Tinkerbelly. But is this in any way better than "Dark Crystal," which was similarly banal in its cosmology?
Look, I'm one of the ones who get depressed at things like "The Matrix," but [even] if [it] lack[ed]...imagination, [its] copying was deep, complex, manylayered. [Pan's Labyrinth] is something that Franco would have written, and little fascist parents would have trotted to, because [it's] all about absolutes and the inability of humans to be rich, subtle, varied beings. The best we can do, is be "innocent."
I often can see some good in any film. But not this one. The world is too close to intolerant extremism as it is. Don't feed it by supporting this.
Mmm, perfect, indeed. Now Mulholland Dr. on the other hand...
Well, no, actually: It's entirely a fairy tale (all in one world) about a girl who, as part of growing up, is called upon to act on her own judgement -- as difficult as that is -- even when it means disobeying adult authority and bringing about terrible consequences. It does not follow a clean, unambiguous formula (or moral lesson), nor is it divided into "fantasy" and "reality." Here's my first take on it: http://j.mp/7pm8iq . And here's a look at the opening shot, which sets up the world in which the movie takes place: http://j.mp/6gd1EK
Actually, my comment was intended as a direct reply to T.Z. above. For some reason it didn't come out that way. Maybe the "preview" function interferes with the "reply" function. Or something.
Anyway, I didn't mean to pick a fight with you, Jim ... just pointing out the absurdity of calling one film a bunch of "random crap" while referring to another, perhaps equally slippery film "perfect".
Yes, I think the world/reality of PL has to be viewed as singular because otherwise del Toro's handling of the "real" and "fantasy" elements is so slipshod that the whole thing falls apart. (Which is probably what tripped this particular IMDb commentator's bullshit detector...)
The Dark Knight film, for sheer enjoyment value and, yes, philosophical insight, kicks most of those films in the ass...And yes, I've seen There Will Be Blood, Inglorious Basterds, and quite a few of those other movies, so I know what the hell I'm talking about. I find it strange how groups of critics always seem to pick the same bunch of boring films all the time--with no room left in their august opinions to choose one damned film that all their esteemed friends have also not chosen (at least Roger Ebert threw in My Winnipeg and some others that won't put me to sleep). And as for that turkey who called Mulholland Dr. "random crap"--do films have to make perfectly boring sense to you for them to be credible? Most films, in the vast ho-hum majority, strive to make perfect credible sense to the whole of the world...Appreciate films that try to show you something that you haven't seen before. If you can't appreciate the unusual, tune in to House on TV, grab a bottle of beer, and kick back in inane turpitude!
For this year movie? I like the movie avatar..
Very great movie. I was amazed with the special effect. Great Director,,,,,, James Cameron.... Job Well Done.
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