A Work in Progress: Top 20 Films, 2000-2009, Part II

The perils of trying to name the decade’s Top 10 films too early were brought home to me last weekend after I watched the South African drama “Disgrace”.  A quite brilliant adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Booker prize winning novel, its study of gender relations, sexual politics and racial tension in the post-apartheid republic ranks with the century’s best cinema.  If I had seen it a few days earlier it may well have crept into part one of this article.

Part two lists films from number 10 through 1, in reverse order of merit.

10. “You, the Living” (Dr: Roy Andersson, Sweden, 2007).
   
     Dead pan does humour does not get funnier or more poignant than this.  Andersson’s loosely connected series of vignettes, charting depression and despair amongst Scandinavian lonely hearts, tempers the gloom with a rigorous if minimalist visual sense and a jaunty dixieland jazz score.

9. “Zodiac” (Dr: David Fincher, USA, 2007).

   The “Citizen Kane” of serial killer movies.  Fincher is less interested in solving the riddle of Zodiac’s identity than he is in creating a new dramatic form to accommodate the case’s complexities, one that examines it from a criminal, a police and a media perspective in a meticulously paced two and a half hours.

8. “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Dr: Peter Jackson, USA, 2002).

   Arguably the best of the trilogy, “The Two Towers” delivers the kind of set piece battles that appeal to the 12 year old boy inside all of us.  Well, most of us.  I’m dimly aware of a dissenting view.

7. “Dogville” (Dr: Lars Von Trier, Denmark, 2003).

   Von Trier’s oblige assault on small town American hypocrisy is shot on a bare Danish sound stage with perhaps the most international, multi-generational cast of the century.  What seems at first a weird, pretentious theatrical exercise soon convinces as wildly cinematic, Von Trier’s sweeping camerawork and John Hurt’s melodious voice-over making one forget the absence of a physical set or sympathetic characters and enjoy all the crazy Dane’s jaundiced indulgences.

6. “Hidden/Cache” (Dr: Michael Haneke, France, 2005).

   With a Palm d’Or winning feature under his belt in 2009, the Austrian born Michael Haneke rates as the decade’s premiere art house auteur.  “Hidden” is a drama about France’s dirty colonial past dressed up as a thriller, the tale of a middle class family coming apart under the strain of violent threats and mysterious video tapes.  Edge of the seat stuff from the first frame to the final, enigmatic image.

5. “There Will Be Blood” (Dr: Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2007).

    Anderson’s stunning adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!” has a tour de force opening - place, time, and character established without recourse to dialogue - and only gets better thereafter.  Daniel Day Lewis might appropriate John Huston’s accent in playing a misanthropic uber capitalist but it is a performance that goes far beyond surface appearances, touching the character’s dark, mysterious soul.  Johnny Greenwood’s score is also noteworthy.

4. “The Lives of Others” (Dr: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany, 2006).

The Soviet bloc experience is captured in all its banality in this near perfect tale of East German surveillance abuses.  A playwright and a Stasi officer, both believers in the communist ideal, become pawns in a game that has more to do with the sexual fantasies of a government minister than the triumph of the proletariat.

3. “Yi Yi” (Dr: Edward Yang, Taiwan, 2000).

Sadly this nearly three hour family saga proved to be the last completed feature by the Taiwanese master Yang, who died in 2007.  A masterpiece that touches on all aspects of middle class life, from youthful curiosity to geriatric dementia, with love, lust, despair and alienation in between. You could not ask for a richer examination of the joys and disappointments of the late capitalist age.

1= “Mulholland Drive” (Dr: David Lynch, USA, 2001).
1= “Inland Empire” (Dr: David Lynch, USA, 2006).

I find it difficult to separate these two surrealist gems.  The second is by far the more challenging, in both running time and ruddily digital look, with segues that include folk in giant rabbit suits doing the ironing.  The brilliance of Laura Dern certainly approaches that of Naomi Watts in “Drive”, both actresses excelling at playing actresses, the fantasy and nightmare of the Hollywood dream pushing Lynch to greater and greater heights.  Love or hate his work, he always delivers a unique, disconcerting experience.