Sam's Best of the 2000s

1. You Can Count On Me (2000)

This is a wonderful character-driven story of two siblings in their 30s who are emotionally scarred from the accidental death of their parents during their childhood. This movie was my first introduction to Mark Ruffalo. He is an excellent actor, who gives thoughtful and compelling performances, even when in the dopiest romantic comedy or the silliest thriller. But this is still his best role, full of pain and humor and heart. I think Laura Linney has the same mannerisms and line-deliveries in all of her roles, but she is very good in this film as she tries to put up a front of complete control while her life is in chaos. The Culkin factory spit out another little boy for this movie, Rory, and he is strong as Linney’s son.

2. Memento (2000)

I am a huge fan of films that play with narrative structure, and I remember the excitement of watching this film for the first time. Christopher Nolan did a great job of making the audience an active participant in deciphering the story, interweaving the forward moving phone conversation with the reverse-progressing narrative. Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliono are clearly having fun with their roles.

3. Donnie Darko (2001)

An exceptional first feature from writer/director Richard Kelly. There is a disturbing atmosphere that pervades the world of the film. The movie remains mysterious while providing humor, drama, and science fiction. Jake Gyllenhaal carries the story as the hyper-cerebral Donnie, and his performance ranges from timid to an insanity reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”.

4. Punch Drunk Love (2002)

Romantic comedies are so often stale and predictable, yet this film by Paul Thomas Anderson is anything but. A primary reason is that Anderson clearly cares so much about his characters, creating his conflict and attraction from their psychology and not from superficial situational episodes. Also, there is so much for the senses to take in. The visual structure is highly controlled. Sound is made crucial to propel the story forward as well as inform the audience about the state of the characters. Adam Sandler is surprising in his restraint, Emily Watson is great as an assertive yet vulnerable romantic interest, but Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the show.

5. 25th Hour (2002)

Spike Lee is probably still best know for “Do the Right Thing”, and thought of by many as a heavy-handed filmmaker regarding race. But when race is not the central focus of the story, I think Lee is actually freed up to be more playful and entertaining. This film has the premise of a man who is going through his few remaining free hours before going to prison. Lee makes this situation relatable, and the dread is tangible. Ed Norton is a favorite actor, and this is a great role for him. Philip Seymour Hoffman again gives a great performance, and his mostly dialogue-free scene where he tries to seduce his teenage student to Cyamande’s song “Bra” is the best in the film.

6. 28 Days Later (2003)

After “The Beach”, there was every reason to be nervous to see writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle reunite. But “28 Days Later” grabs you early on and keeps you on edge. Cillian Murphy is a charismatic and believable protagonist. The visuals of a completely empty London are beautiful and disturbing. And making the zombies fast moving was a great decision. The movie completely shifts gears with the soldiers who were promised women, but I enjoyed the complication for the team of survivors.

7. Collateral (2004)

A textbook high-concept movie, with a hit man commandeering a taxi and its driver so he can carry out a string of murders. This is one of my favorite recent popcorn movies, and also one of my favorite screen depictions of Los Angeles. The city looks both menacing and beautiful. There are fresh performances from both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. Mark Ruffalo has a nice small role against type as a smooth and confident detective.

8. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

I don’t think all the self-conscious storytelling works, but I admire and enjoy the playfulness of this film nevertheless. Robert Downey Jr. is one of the greatest living actors, and he has so much fun with this role. Shane Black’s script is smart and funny, as well as joyfully overloaded with plot as homage to Raymond Chandler. This movie is intelligent, sexy, humorous, suspenseful, and exciting.

9. United 93 (2006)

I was really worried about this film. I had trouble imagining how a mainstream film addressing 9/11 would not be painfully sentimental or simplistic in structuring its narrative. What floored me most about this film is the quality of the ensemble cast, that all the characters are well rounded and realistic. There are no simple good or bad guys, and there are many examples of heroism as well as tragic errors in judgment. Paul Greengrass makes the entire film not only compelling but suspenseful, which is especially impressive because of how the audience already knows so much of the story before the picture begins.

10. Beerfest (2006)

This movie is hilarious. It gets funnier every time you see it. Best seen with a group of friends, and it doesn’t hurt to have a beer or two as well.

Edward's Best of the 2000s

I'm happy to join in! I've given my ten below, plus I've selected three male and three female performances from the decade which I think are especially noteworthy. Happy to do other lists as well - I've been trying to come up with top tens for each decade recently, so I'd be happy to share!

One of Andrew's is on my list too - Before Sunset - and I really liked the part of The Five Obstructions which I've seen (about the first thirty mins.) so I must see the rest of it. I didn't think much of Battle Royale, actually - I remember thinking that it was a film which could use a remake: I felt it wasted its premise. Admittedly I've only seen it once, and it was a few years ago, so maybe I'd like it better this time. I agree about Children of Men's dazzling long takes, and I think if I see it a second time I'll be able to absorb more of the characterisations. And though I have yet to see Happy Accidents, you won't get a complaint about Marisa Tomei out of me!

Here are my ten:

1. Wonder Boys (2000)

This is a very warm and witty film about a university lecturer, Grady Tripp, and the various crises, personal and professional, which he has to deal with over the course of a weekend at his college. Michael Douglas's performance as Grady is charming and loveable in its shambolic humanity. Perhaps it's all wrapped up a little too neatly, but along the way we get lots of insights into the way writers write, and it's great to see a film which finds non-angry things to say about the educational system. Lovely cinematography, too - cold and snowy - a colourful supporting cast of likeable actors and excellent use of Bob Dylan's music, especially 'Not Dark Yet' and the song he wrote for this movie, 'Things Have Changed'.

2. Our Lady of the Assassins (2000)

This is Barbet Schroeder's adaptation of Fernardo Vallejo's sardonic novel about a middle-aged writer falling in love with a young gang member in violence-stricken Medellín. The filmmaking is elegant, the script verbose, the actors awkward but ingratiating, and the situation rests on a knife-edge - their lives are in constant danger, and yet the film manages to make of their relationship an unashamed cross-generational homosexual love affair. Schroeder is one of the most worldly directors working.

3. Moulin Rouge! (2001)

I wanted to have a music on the list, and this is, I guess, the best one of the decade (to date). The first half hour is too hyper, but if you get as far as the moment where Ewan McGregor bursts into 'Your Song', you'll probably be hooked from there onwards. Richard Roxburgh has been overlooked in all the fuss, but he gives a very affecting performance as the loathsome Duke. And Baz Luhrmann has the courage to make a movie about love itself.

4. Mulholland Drive (2001)

A young wanna-be actress arrives in Hollywood and falls victim to its relentless dehumanising machine. And David Lynch makes it as odd and absorbing as you'd expect. This is a film which has its own dreamy momentum and which takes you along for its ride. Its very fascinating structure, born of its origins as an aborted TV pilot, leaves certain plot lines dangling or underdeveloped - the hitman's botched jobs, the film director (underrated Justin Theroux) at the mercy of his financiers - but don't listen to the people who say it doesn't make sense; it does, thanks to Lynch's commitment to emotional, rather than narrative, coherence.

5. Dark Water (2002)

Hideo Nakata, the director of Ring, here delivers another adaptation of a Koji Suzuki story, and it's another blood-curdler. But what makes this one of the best horror films is not just its nerve-jangling twists and shocks but the emotional undercurrent, which is made explicit in the film's moving coda. This is a movie about motherhood, and what a mother will sacrifice to protect her child. Intense and atmospheric, this shows yet again Nakata's deceptive style - it seems as if nothing much is going on but all the while he is pulling you further and further in.

6. Le Fils (2002)

A carpenter (Olivier Gourmet) at a reform school for delinquent teenagers becomes obsessed with his new pupil, who has in the past done untold damage. I believe this to be Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's best film to date and one of the very best films of recent times. It's a perfect example of style and content in unison, the camera darting around after Olivier Gourmet as he grapples with the moral decision of what to do in a near-impossible situation.

7. The Pianist (2002)

Roman Polanski's drama set in Warsaw during World War II was, as everybody knows, a very personal project for him. For this reason, it's the restraint which impresses the most - and this leads to some very chilling and sobering depictions of Nazi brutality. Stylistically not a ground-breaking film, it is a work which puts across its points with patience and lucidity.

8. Peter Pan (2003)

This is a very flawed adaptation of the famous story, but I rate it as one of the best of this decade because when it works, it works wonders. It contains some of the most original special effects I've seen recently, and James Newton Howard's music positively soars. I love the flight to Neverland, the night-time forest sequence, and especially the ending. Director P. J. Hogan always makes heavily flawed films (Muriel's Wedding, My Best Friend's Wedding) but he can nonetheless hit the heights. I've never been interested in the Peter Pan story, but this film is well worth seeing, and grows with repeated viewings - because the flaws recede.

9. Before Sunset (2004)

I agree with Andrew's take on this. I was very concerned when they announced it, because the first film had worked and I didn't want them to ruin things with a sequel. Well, this one works even better, and dramatises that eternal conundrum: what if we had got together with the one that got away? There are exquisite long takes of people communicating with each other as they walk the streets of Paris in real time.

10. Match Point (2005)

This is Woody Allen's best film since Everyone Says I Love You. People said that it was a change of pace for Woody - it's set in London, it's a thriller - but they were forgetting how well organised and powerful his best films are, and how this continues in that vein. It's a modern morality tale, deliberately stylised so as to convey its weighty themes - hence Jonathan Rhys Meyers' rather abstract performance - and although it's got its flaws, it is fluid, it looks fabulous, and it ends on a most cautionary note.

Here are my choices for outstanding male and female performances of the decade (three each, again in chronological order):

Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys

OK, I am a Michael Douglas fan. I always like him and his flawed white man act - Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Falling Down, Disclosure... but here, he is simply loveable as the respected lecturer and author going through all manner of mid-life crises over a single weekend. Whether talking to the police while wearing his ex-wife's pink dressing gown or stuffing a dead dog into the boot of his car, Douglas makes the character one to root for.

Olivier Gourmet in Le Fils

His performance works so well, it bears out the Dardenne brothers' claim that they wrote it only with him in mind. This is a towering achievement of outer appearance and inner revelation. And, incidentally, it is one of the best 'teacher' roles in the movies.

Maurice Bénichou in Caché

He has only a small role, as the nondescript French-Algerian man accused of sending threatening videos and letters to Daniel Auteuil's character, the complacent middle-class success story with the murky past. But Bénichou's sadness, his slumped shoulders, his end-of-the-line lack of energy, simply seem so real. If you've seen Caché, you may not easily forget Benichou's scenes or what happens to his character.

Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand

Rampling plays a woman who is left bereft when her husband disappears while they are on holiday by the coast in France. What happened to him? And what does a middle-aged woman do when the man she has shared her life with is no longer there? It's heartbreaking to watch the character working this all out, and Rampling does it superbly.

Laura Elena Harring in Mulholland Drive

Harring plays an actress who gets amnesia after being involved in a car accident on the eponymous road. Naomi Watts' young starlet helps her search for her identity, and then falls in love with her. Watts is wonderful in the movie too, but she had the slightly easier role - more emoting to do - whereas Harring had to be desirable and remote, and later a heartbreaker, and her performance works perfectly within David Lynch's sensual puzzle.

Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher

Intense, tortured - we really feel pity and sympathy for Huppert's pent-up music teacher who can only express her desires through masochism. That's two performances of my six from Michael Haneke films!

Andrew's Best of the 2000s

This is a list of my ten favorite films from this decade. I drew it up a while ago during a moment of boredom and then I forgot about it. Having just rediscovered it in the bowels of my laptop, I figured there was no better place to poop it out than onto this blog. If it succeeds in eliciting alternative lists, I might be motivated to do the same for the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, etc... Anyway, here's the list, in chronological order:

1. Battle Royale (2000)
   This was veteran Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s last completed film before his death. Given its subject matter – a class of school kids are sent by the authorities to a deserted island and have to kill one another until only one remains – it’s not surprising that the film never found a US distributor with the guts to release it theatrically. It is an intense, suspenseful, satiric, subversive, and truly surprising movie, and it enters into the kind of unsafe territory where all of the characters are totally vulnerable.
   
   
2. Happy Accidents (2000)
   A romantic comedy with Marisa Tomei? Am I crazy? Perhaps… but I thought this film was one of the most original romantic comedies I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of like The Terminator without Arnold and the body count. Marisa Tomei plays a New Yorker who has had a string of bad relationships; Vincent D’Onofrio plays an eccentric who claims to be from the future. Is he yet another loser boyfriend, or is he telling the truth? Happy Accidents has a very compelling, quirky tone, and the science-fiction plot provides a fascinating allegory for exploring the ways in which couples negotiate each other’s differences and defects. Plus, Anthony Michael Hall plays himself in the best celebrity cameo since Tom Jones crooned his way into Mars Attacks.
   
   
3. Together (2000)
   Lukas Moodysson is one of the most interesting figures in European cinema right now, a real provocateur in the ways Lars von Trier would like to be. This film shows a gentler side of Moodysson: a nostalgic ensemble piece about life on a Swedish commune in the 1970s. The film seems almost effortless in the way it weaves storylines together and makes care deeply for the dozen or so richly drawn characters. Also, no film is ever likely to put ABBA tunes to such good use … unless Larry Clark gets his hands on “Does Your Mother Know?”.
   
   
4. The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)
   One of seven films made by Japanese director Takashi Miike in 2001, this zombie-musical-family-melodrama-black-comedy with claymation interludes plays like The Sound of Music meets The Evil Dead meets Nick Park meets crazy Japanese TV show. It was also Miike’s family film for the holidays! It’s a wild ride and tells the bad-luck story of a family that opens a mountain inn where the guests just keep dying, and it’s unlike anything an American studio would ever make.
   
   
5. Waking Life (2001)
   Richard Linklater’s first foray into rotoscoped animation is still his best. The drifting, aimlessness of the narrative is perfectly suited to its existential probing of life-as-a-dream, and I love how the “academic” tone of the first half slowly transforms into something more ominous and nightmarish in the second half. The animation technique – drawing over live-action video – is also perfected suited to the film’s plot and themes, as it is simultaneously both grounded in and removed from reality. A Scanner Darkly – Linklater’s Kid A – is almost as good and uses this animation style to different, but equally sublime, ends.
   
   
6. 11'09"01 - September 11 (2002)
   Eleven different directors from around the world each were given the same budget and complete creative freedom to make a film about September 11th. All the films had to be 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame long. Coming so soon after the attacks, the isolationist US was in no mood to hear a diverse set of global voices and this film never got a proper release in the States. It’s a genuine shame, as the visibility then of more works like this might have helped prevent what is happening now. Some segments deal directly with 9/11, others are more allegorical. The ones that have stuck with me the most are Ken Loach’s comparison of 9/11 with another 9/11, the US-sponsored coup in Chile in 1973, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s structuralist audio collage, featuring a mostly black screen punctuated by flash images of people jumping from the towers that were omitted by most news coverage.
   
   
7. The Five Obstructions (2003)
   In the 1960s, Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth made a short film called The Perfect Human, a spoof anthropological film in which shots of sixties hipsters doing mundane things are treated like a nature documentary. Lars von Trier was one of Leth’s students, and in this film, as a form of therapy for his mentor, he challenges Leth to remake The Perfect Human five times. The catch is that von Trier will provide a set of “obstructions” each time, to limit/direct how Leth proceeds with each remake. What proceeds is a fascinating chess match: von Trier wants Leth to make something “less perfect and more human,” and deliberately gives him obstructions designed to sabotage the remakes; Leth in turn tries to outwit von Trier by turning the obstructions into strengths. A flawlessly conceived and truly inspirational film.
   
   
8. Before Sunset (2004)
   A second Linklater film for the list. At first glance, clocking in at a mere 82 minutes, this film seems like a slight, unassuming sequel to Before Sunrise. But it’s a film that sticks with you. Not only is it a finely nuanced take on dealing with being a thirtysomething, it also serves to add layer and texture to the original film, placing Celine and Jesse’s first encounter in the context of them being in their early twenties at the time. Shot in near-plotless real time, Before Sunset allows its characters and themes time to slowly emerge and develop, and it is the closest of Linklater’s films to the quietly devastating work of Eric Rohmer.
   
   
9. The White Diamond (2004)
   Around the same time that Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man came out to great acclaim, this other Herzog documentary slinked its way, almost unnoticed, straight to video. I think it's the better of the two, although I can see why the more sensational story of Grizzly Man got more attention. The White Diamond follows airship engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington on a trip to the jungles of Guyana, where he hopes to fly a craft he's designed over the tree tops. He's a classic Herzog protagonist – a driven, manic, obsessive dreamer dealing with past tragedy – and what makes the film work so well is how Herzog contrasts Dorrington with Marc Anthony Yhap, a lovable, mellow, slightly melancholic local from Guyana – the exact opposite of Dorrington.
   
   
10. Children of Men (2006)
    This one didn't grab me when I first saw it. I think the abundant Christian motifs turned me off a little bit, and the film is so extraordinary in its use of long takes that the sheer technical wizardry threw me out of the drama. Seeing it again on DVD, the brilliance of the film hit me. It's in the best tradition of political science fiction: a nightmarish vision of the future doubling as a commentary on post 9/11 society. It cements Clive Owen's position as a great, complex leading man. It does what any movie featuring Julianne Moore should do: kills her off early. And it has a terrific use of progessive rock: King Crimson's mellotron is the perfect soundtrack for a near-apocalyptic future London. Also, as IMDb reminded me, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Sergio Martino's 1983 post-apocalyptic cheesefest 2019: After the Fall of New York ... proving that the best steal from the best!
    

Body Double (1984)

The previously reviewed Nighthawks was one of a few bargain bin DVDs that I recently purchased. Another was Body Double, which was directed by the master of Hitchcock rip-offs, Brian De Palma, and is basically Vertigo meets Rear Window, with a lot of T&A. It's all about a claustrophobic actor (Craig Wasson) who witnesses a murder while peeping on a neighbor. It was a pretty controversial film at the time, because of the levels of sexuality and violence – and because De Palma had originally hired a porn actress for the role that was eventually filled by Melanie Griffith – but it also serves as a reminder of how nudity used to be much more present in mainstream films. It's rare these days to see casual nudity in big budget movies; if there is any, a point is usually made of it.

I first saw Body Double some time in the nineties, and thought it was terrible. In fact, I thought it was the worst De Palma film I had seen at that point. (This was before he made Mission to Mars.) But it kind of stuck in my memory as something I ought to revisit at some point.

Watching it again, I now think it is a masterpiece. It's just a really uncompromising film: either you are on its wavelength or you aren't. There's a litmus test moment in the middle of the film when De Palma restages the swirling, 360˚ camera move that Hitchcock used in Vertigo for a very sinister, extended kissing scene between James Stewart and Kim Novak. De Palma pushes his version of the scene to a place way beyond camp, and you'll either laugh at it or laugh with it. In fact, the whole movie is a really good litmus test for your tolerance of Brian De Palma: pretty much all of his obsessions (voyeurism, psycho-sexuality, identity, autobiography) and all of his cinematic techniques (ambitious long takes, suspense set-pieces, meta-cinematic trickery) are present.

For me, I think the biggest difference in watching Body Double again is that I have since become a huge fan of giallo cinema – a genre of flamboyantly stylish Hitchcockian thrillers with a distinctly European flavor that were popular in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. There are a only handful of American movies that I can think of that have the look, feel and attitude of the giallo film. Basic Instinct is one, as are a number of De Palma films, such as Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double and Femme Fatale. Most of the innovations of the Italian giallo film only made it into American cinema, in diluted form, as slasher movies. De Palma was often accused of making slasher films himself, a charge he pokes a lot of fun at in both Blow Out (which opens by tricking audiences into thinking they are watching a crappy slasher film) and Body Double (in which Dennis Franz plays a caricature of De Palma as a hack horror director). It's a shame more American directors didn't work in the giallo format; horror cinema of the last twenty years might have been a lot more interesting.

Nighthawks (1981)

Last night I saw Nighthawks again, an early-80s cop thriller starring Sylvester Stallone. The plot is about a pair of New York undercover cops (Stallone and Lando Calrissian) who are enlisted to help stop the rogue terrorist Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer). It's an interesting film as a time capsule piece on how the threat of terrorism was dramatized in the Reagan era.

What I found most interesting, however, is the amount of focus placed on the impotence of the Stallone character. Most action heroes are men/women of action; Stallone's Deke DaSilva spends the whole movie pretty much just passively reacting and is unable to take the shot that would kill Wulfgar – he says he didn't get into the police business to kill people. Add to this the fact that his wife has left him because he didn't pay her enough attention; he has nerdy glasses and a nerdy beard; he begins and ends the film in women's clothing; and he spends much of the rest of the film wearing cardigans and tank tops. (Stallone never strips down to show off the physique on which he built his career.) Before becoming a cop, we learn that DaSilva had been a Vietnam war hero with 52 kills to his name, suggesting that that experience had totally scarred him ... and making DaSilva an interesting precursor to John Rambo, who Stallone would play the following year in First Blood.

I often think that action thrillers these days are filled pretty boys pretending to be larger than life heroes: Ben Affleck, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, Paul Walker, Maaaatt Daaaamon. There doesn't seem to be many, or any, leading men left who have the weight of experience or the presence of tough guy actors like Lee Marvin, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Clint Eastwood, Warren Oates, or even Stallone. The narratives that have been built up around these older actors in the popular consciousness is that they were Real Men, symbols of American brawn and masculinity. But it's interesting how frequently they played broken, vulnerable, and impotent. Their cool factor, I guess, is that they each had a persona of being guys that had nothing to prove to anyone but themselves, which gave them room to explore and subvert American myths of masculinity – a subject that Hollywood action cinema has always been about. I'm not sure I could say the same thing about the current crop of action stars.

The Ultimate Debate: The Top 100 Films You Have Never Heard Of

This is a long-standing pursuit of mine, somehow listing the top 100 obscure films of all time. This thread is intended to initiate a debate on the subject. First, the ground rules. 1. The average person on the street should not recognize any title on this list; 2. Titles do not just magically appear on this list, they must be fought for via argument/debate of its merits. Once titles are nominated and placed on the list, they are to be ranked in terms of their merits. I also suggest that the appropriate subgenres are represented.

I will start things off by nominating some films.

1. Q-The Winged Serpent: Larry Cohen still writes films, but in the 70s and 80s he was the Jack-of-all-Trades behind many films that may end up on this list (Bone, It's Alive, The Stuff, God Told Me To, etc.). Q is special for a number of reasons. It's cast includes David Carridine, Richard Roundtree, Candy Clard, and Michael Moriarty, who delivers an unbelievable performance as small-time cook Jimmy Quinn. Moriarty's performance includes an unbelievable audition as a lounge pianist in which we first hear his improvised tune, "Evil Dream". Of course, there's the serpent which is a claymation spectacle to behold as it decapitates window washers, swoops down on bathing beauties, and ultimately protects its nest in a scene remeniscent of King Kong's climax.

2. Putney Swope: Robert Downey Sr.'s blaxploitation masterpiece doesn't boast the most heralded cast (Arnold Johnson, Anonio Fargas, Allen Garfield, and a cameo by Mel Brooks), but it remains an excellent political satire, attacking an endless array of subjects: Madison Avenue, black radicalism, the President of the USA, political correctness, etc. 1969 was a year in which many great films were made, but Swope almost always goes unrecognized. Putney Swope, the name of the title character, is a black man who mistankingly becomes the head of a major advertising agency on Madison Avenue. He decides that he wont rock the boat, but sink it, producing a number of highly controvercial but effective commercials.

That's all for now. Please feel free to debate the merits of these choices and/or contribute your own titles to the top 100 films you have never heard of.

Paris, je t'aime (2006)

Any anthology film comprised of 18 short films from as many different filmmakers is bound to be hit or miss. Paris je t'aime is no exception, although the good does outweigh the bad. It's worth seeing, and if you like it I'd also recommend Paris vu par, an obvious inspiration made in the 1960s by a group of French New Wave directors.

Watching 18 films in a row was a little bit of an endurance test. The film, however, is tailor made for YouTube, so I've included links to YouTube rips of the various shorts...

The weakest shorts, in my opinion, were: Wes Craven's "Père-Lachaise", Nobuhiro Suwa's "Place des Victoires", Vincenzo Natali's "Quartier de la Madeleine", Olivier Assayas' "Quartier des Enfants Rouges", and Joel & Ethan Coen's "Tuileries". Christopher Doyle's "Port de Choisy" was also a bit of a misfire, but it was so beautifully shot and so extraordinarily peculiar that it has stuck in my memory.

I thought the strongest entries were the ones that were either simple and sweet or structurally and formally ambitious...

Alfonso Cuarón's "Parc Monceau" was very effective in its simplicity. It mostly just revolves around a conversation between two people (one of whom is Nick Nolte) and was shot in a single long take (continuing Cuarón's experimentation of the long take in Children of Men). The film does the best job of all the films at eavesdropping on a slice of Parisian life, and it has a few unexpected surprises up its sleeve.

Sylvain Chomet's "Tour Eiffel" does the remarkable job of making mimes endearing and lovable, and it has a visual style all of its own.

Gérard Depardieu's "Quartier Latin" is both a love letter to Paris and a love letter to acting. It stars two of Cassavete's favorite actors, Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, as an old couple going through a divorce who meet at a Parisian bar. The chemistry and sense of history between the two is sizzling.

Oliver Schmitz's "Place des Fêtes" has a playful and ambitious flashback structure and feels like a perfectly conceived short film: it has the structure and tragedy of a film noir, but its tone is breezy, sweet and romantic.

Tom Tykwer's "Faubourg Saint-Denis" was one of my two favorite films, and was structurally and formally the most daring. It's about a romance between an actress (Natalie Portman) and a blind guy (Melchior Beslon), and it creates even more of an adrenaline rush than Run Lola Run. Few short films are so densely packed with images, ideas, and emotions.

Alexander Payne's "14ème Arrondissement" was my other favorite. It best captured the essence of "Paris, je t'aime" in its story of a lonely, middle aged, working class Denver woman coming to Paris on vacation. I particularly liked how Payne paid homage to Jean-Paul Sartre and subtly riffed on Sartre's existential novel Nausea. The film is structured around a voiceover that reads aloud (in rudimentary French) the woman's diary entry, mimicking the diary style of Nausea; but Payne inverts the moment of existential despair in Sartre's novel by replaying it as a moment of quiet transcendence as the woman sits on a bench and takes Paris in.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

As action movies go, Live Free or Die Hard (a.k.a. Die Hard 4.0) is a pretty enjoyable ride. The thrills are plentiful and the stunts are pretty well staged: I particularly enjoyed John McClane's use of a fire hydrant to take out a helicopter.

As a Die Hard movie, however, I found it lacking. It feels almost arbitrary that this should be a Die Hard film. Bruce Willis has made a lot of similar movies over the past decade, and any of them could have been turned into a Die Hard film with as much authenticity as this one. Take 16 Blocks, for example, change Willis' character name to John McClane, and you would have a much more interesting and faithful continuation of the series than Live Free or Die Hard.

There are a number of ways that Live Free or Die Hard loses the essence of the Die Hard series. First, location is always a character in the Die Hard series. All the previous Die Hard films are built around McClane battling against and being resourceful with a clearly defined space: in the original Die Hard, it is a building; in Die Hard 2, an airport; in Die Hard with a Vengeance, it is Manhattan. The building is a character; the airport is a character; Manhattan is a character. This use of space marked the Die Hard series as an heir to the disaster movies of the 1970s that used location in a similar way, such as The Towering Inferno (a building), Airport (an airport), and Earthquake (a city). It is also the reason why Die Hard is often referred to as the greatest action movie of all time, because it so thoroughly understood how the use of space and location is fundamental to what makes action cinema work: put simply, action is about characters moving through space and overcoming obstacles. The first two Die Hard films approached this by placing McClane in confined spaces at a single location; Die Hard with a Vengeance flipped the formula on its head and made McClane's challenge be the entire island of Manhattan. In all three films, McClane has to continually be resourceful as he improvises solutions to problems of space. It is for this reason that Die Hard redefined action cinema, with most action movies in its wake being described as "Die Hard on a _______". Live Free or Die Hard continues the disaster movie tradition, but it really misses the target as far as the use of location is concerned. To be honest, I can't remember where most of the movie took place. In this sense, the disaster movie influences of Live Free or Die Hard are not from the 1970s, but from the post-9/11 era, and it feels much more like an episode of 24 than a Die Hard film, where the battle is against time, and space is virtual, sprawling and multiplicitous.

Another key way that Live Free or Die Hard loses the essence of the Die Hard series is in the John McClane character. When the original Die Hard came out, it marked a new kind of action movie for the era. Action cinema of the 1980s had been dominated by the muscle-bound supermen portrayed by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, and by skilled martial artists like Chuck Norris and Jean Claude Van Damme. Prior to Die Hard, Bruce Willis was known as a wisecracking comedy actor, gaining stardom on TV's Moonlighting and transitioning into film with comedies like Blind Date. The transitional year for action cinema was 1988: the comedian Bruce Willis moved into action with Die Hard, while action hero Schwarzenegger moved into comedy with Twins. The careers of both actors were changed forever, and action cinema had a new kind of hero: the vulnerable average Joe with everyday problems and an ordinary physique, who does the best he can and is not afraid to express emotion. The John McClane of the first three Die Hard films is the Bruce Springsteen of action cinema, tapping into the same American spirit of blue collar working men who've got a lot of personal baggage, but also enough pluck to make good. He's always a little behind the times and thinks that progress peaked with frozen pizza; he's a scrappy Jersey boy who always has to draw on good old fashioned cowboy methods to overcome sophisticated techno-terrorists.

Live Free or Die Hard keeps McClane's Jersey boy wisecracks, but he's become a complete cartoon character. Gone is the vulnerable McClane who cries about his wife while he pulls glass from his bare feet; in his place is a guy who can drive cars through buildings and swing from the tails of fighter jets. I think this reflects the baggage Willis now brings to the role: he's now known more as an action hero than a comedian; he's become the Stallone-like cartoon hero that the original Die Hard sought to displace. He also has an annoying sidekick. In the first two Die Hard films, McClane mostly had to work alone; in Die Hard with a Vengeance he was teamed up with Samuel L. Jackson, a layman with no real special skills, who has as many challenges in fighting the bad guys as McClane. His new sidekick in Live Free or Die Hard is a computer geek. On paper, this might have seemed like a good idea, teaming McClane up with his opposite. In other words, just as Willis and Jackson made a great odd couple in Die Hard with a Vengeance, so too would Willis and the Mac Guy. But doing this completely undermines what made the earlier films work so well: i.e., having the odds so heavily stacked against cowboy McClane as he battles techno-savvy bad guys. It could have been a great premise: McClane has to figure out how to fight cyber-terrorists using his old school techniques. But every time McClane hits any such obstacles, the computer geek steps in with some technobabble and gets them out of the jam. Take the scene with the smart car, for example. What would have been better: Luddite McClane having to figure out how to start a car that is cyber-protected from thieves; or an extended, unfunny comedy scene in which the computer geek steps in and teaches McClane how things are done in the modern era? From a dramatic point-of-view, a single change would have rescued the screenwriters from this structural problem: nix the computer geek; have McClane work alone.

Having said all of this, I would still watch the film again. I did enjoy it while it lasted, but it's soured in my memory. A second viewing might remind me what I liked about it.

Evan Almighty (2007)

So the message of the film is that, in the face of global climate change, we should listen to the crazy politician whose decisions are based on conversations he's had with God.

Thanks, but no thanks.

God awful.

Sicko (2007)

I found Sicko to be a very uneven film. For the most part, I thought it was simplistic and underwhelming, but there was an aspect of the movie that was also quite subtle and compelling.

By lionizing the socialized health care systems in Canada, France and the UK, Michael Moore didn't really paint a convincing, real world picture of the alternatives to the US model. My own personal experiences with the NHS in England match up pretty closely with how it is portrayed in the movie, and I agree with Moore's opinion that the UK system far surpasses that of the US, but I also know that the NHS is not without fault. Showing some of the downsides of his examples of socialized medicine would not have diminished Moore's argument. On the contrary, it would have made the argument richer and more convincing, and would have better informed audiences about the real issues of the debate. Instead, Moore goes more for the gut, with an approach that favors an emotional punch. I think this is both his weakness and his strength.

It's his weakness because it makes it easy for the right to dismiss him and focus solely on his biases (even though he has no obligation to be fair and balanced). It makes him an easy target, where a strike against Michael Moore is also a strike against socialized medicine. I think it's also his strength, however, because he's doing what the mainstream news media in the US does – that is, taking complicated political situations and turning them into simple emotional ones – but he's redirecting this strategy towards conclusions that are much more progressive than you would ever see in the mainstream media. In other words, while Sicko comes across as an emotionally charged catalogue of HMO horror stories that are designed to get your blood boiling, it ultimately wants you to consider a larger and more complicated set of issues about the role of a social democracy in the United States.

Moore did a similar trick with Bowling for Columbine, which used a sprawling look at American gun culture as a way into its main theme: how the US population is controlled and manipulated through the installation of fear. If Marilyn Manson was the unlikely mouthpiece for Moore's theme in Bowling for Columbine, in Sicko it is British MP Tony Benn. Benn's discussion of the ways in which democracies use the mechanisms of power to diminish solidarity among the people is the core of the movie, and all of Moore's stunts and emotional manipulations in Sicko are working toward making us experience that feeling of solidarity. The feeling of solidarity and of duty towards the rest of society is something that is deeply embedded in the British character: as Benn notes in the movie, there would have been a revolution if Tony Blair had tried to abolish the NHS. Moore is arguing that the same feelings of duty and solidarity are intrinsic to Americans too. The difference is that the US government wields its power over the mechanisms of democracy in a very different and much more sinister way.

Watermelon Man (1970)

I thought I'd start this blog off on the right foot with a review of a movie I recently watched for the first time: Melvin Van Peebles' first Hollywood movie, Watermelon Man.

Made a year before Van Peebles kick-started the blaxploitation era with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the film is all about a middle-class white racist who, one morning, wakes up black. Van Peebles did not come up with the premise - it had been floating around Columbia Pictures for a while - but he made one crucial change. It had originally been conceived as a vehicle for someone like Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon: i.e., a white actor who would play much of the film in blackface. Noting that the character is only white for about ten minutes of the movie, Van Peebles argued that he should be played by a black actor who would start the film in whiteface. Therein lies the genius of Watermelon Man: the whole film has Godfrey Cambridge (a black actor) presenting a merciless caricature of whiteness, whilst simultaneously growing into a figure of socially-conscious and militant blackness.

At first, I found van Peebles' direction a little off-putting, with it veering too much into broad farce for my liking. Then things started to get a little stranger, and closer to the discordant jazz style of Sweet Sweetback. I then realized that the farce was all a put-on, and that Van Peebles had been mocking the style of middle-class white suburban sitcoms – in much the same way Godfrey Cambridge's performance was satirizing middle-class whiteness. As the film progresses, Van Peebles increasingly interrupts the whitebread sitcom style with experimental use of jarring editing rhythms and a contrapuntal soundtrack that draws on African-American styles. These interruptions mirror the growing acceptance by the main character of his blackness, and his move towards direct action in the civil rights movement that he couldn't have cared less about at the start of the film.

Columbia Pictures apparently liked the movie, but Van Peebles walked away from them to make Sweet Sweetback independently. On the surface, Sweet Sweetback seems the far more uncompromising film – both aesthetically and politically – and it has had much more longevity and cultural impact as a result, but Watermelon Man should not be overlooked, and is in its own way just as subversive. I highly recommend it, preferably as a double feature with Putney Swope.