15 Directors.

Mr. Paolo from Brown Okinawa Assault Incident decided to tag me in a meme and seems to have forgotten to tell me about it...
Most of you know I suck at memes because I never know what to say but this one is particularly interesting because lately I've been asked a lot who my favorite filmmakers are. I was going to eventually compile a list and Mr. Paolo just made my job easier by making me do one ASAP.
So without further ado, here are my fifteen favorite directors and my fave movie of theirs.

The Holy Trinity
Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire)
Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows)
Federico Fellini (La Strada)

The Rest of the Best
Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious)
Pier Paolo Pasolini (Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom)
Pedro Almodóvar (Volver)
Woody Allen (Annie Hall)
Lars von Trier (Dogville)
Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon)
Catherine Breillat (Brief Crossing)
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven)
Victor Fleming (Gone With the Wind)
Jane Campion (The Piano)
Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!)
Vincente Minnelli (Meet Me in St. Louis)

Are these who you expected? Any omission you think I made? Who are your fave fifteen?

(My) Best of 09: Picture.

10. Where the Wild Things Are (read my review)

You can be the biggest cynic on earth and you will still let out a big "aww" the second Karen O's enchanting score appears accompanying the studio logos which Max (Max Records) has scratched and made his own.
When seconds later we meet the hyperactive child we can't help but fall in love with his ambition to make the world his own. As he travels to the island of monsters unaware of the creatures he will meet we're reminded of times in our childhood when nothing made us afraid and life was an adventure waiting to be conquered.
How Spike Jonze made a film that penetrates the armor of childhood while examining the bittersweetness we carry on to adulthood is a wonder upon itself.
An exercise in nostalgia that still manages to refresh our days in unimaginable ways.


9. Police, Adjective (read my review)

Like Steve McQueen's "Hunger", this Romanian film might become known for a bold setpiece that has the camera fixed while three characters talk inside an office.
Police officers Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and Nelu (Ion Stoica) sit in opposing chairs while Captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) questions them about the ongoing case they've been working on.
Up to that point in the film Anghelache has only been a ghost who Cristi tries to avoid and when we meet him we understand why.
With a single sentence Anghelache shatters Cristi's idealistic methods and questions Nelu's stoicism, then in the film's most controversial moment dedicates more than ten minutes to a dictionary entry!
But then and there director Corneliu Porumboiu establishes that his film is not the pretentious nod at academia it often seems to be but a dark comedy that mocks the power language has obtained in our societies.
Its examining of the absurd however has utterly terrifying repercussions.


8. Antichrist (read my review)

Despite Lars von Trier's efforts to make "Antichrist" something everybody would squirm, cry and complain about, the film might very well be the most moving and personal work he has done to date.
Those willing to see beyond the mutilation, bloodied genitals, talking foxes, poetic deaths and medieval allegories will find themselves peeking at the psyche of a man who likes to call himself the greatest director in the world but is filled with as many doubts, insecurities and problems as the rest of us.
The obvious facade of "Antichrist" perhaps is saying that he might be all bark and no bite, but take the time to peel its layers and you will see a courageous attempt at dialogue with the divine.


7. Bright Star (read my review)

Watch how Jane Campion turns this...

"I almost wish we were butterflies
and lived but three summer days
three such days with you
I could fill with more delight
than fifty common years
could ever contain"

...into cinema.


6. The Hurt Locker (read my review)

Before it became an awards juggernaut and the center of ridiculous claims, "The Hurt Locker", like some of the best films of 2009, was a small picture that reminded us of the power that lies in genre.
Action flick expert Kathryn Bigelow refreshed our notions of the war action film as something that can be profound without losing its thrills.
In the process proving Michael Bay, Clint Eastwood, chauvinism and war mongers were all wrong.


5. Broken Embraces (read my review)

Who knew Michelangelo Antonioni's infamous tennis ball could take on the shape of Penélope Cruz? Apparently Pedro Almodóvar did and in "Broken Embraces" he uses his muse to break our hearts and open our mind's eyes to the notions of what's real and what's not.
Unlike the cold Antonioni, Pedro proves that intellectual stimulation can also be warm and affective as he frames his theories in a melodramatic plot that recalls "Notorious" and "Voyage to Italy".
The film's title is an homage to neorealism but its structure and reach couldn't be more postmodernist if they tried.


4. Vincere (read my review)

What's the best way to tell a story that deals with rumors about the life of a historical figure? To answer this question Marco Bellocchio looked back at art history and came up with three influential movements that used aesthetics to dig into larger truths.
"Vincere" therefore is a romantic melodrama inspired by silent films, expressionist opera and Eisensten-ian editing.
Bellocchio is able to keep these currents from clashing and succumbing to their own grandiosity, like a masterful conductor using a storm to make music he makes "Vincere" thunderous and big but keeps it from sinking under its own weight.


3. A Prophet (read my review)

Speaking of genre as a way to connect to more profound subjects, Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet" may look like a gritty gangster flick at first glance-and it sure works like one-but the underlying themes of racial empowerment, spiritual search and criminal coming-of-age at its center are worthy of discussing with your shrink your social worker and your priest.
But the movie is never as "Officer Krupke" specific as that description, Audiard makes the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim) mean something different to whoever's watching and while some will be inspired to call it the best thing since "The Godfather" others will be more intrigued with figuring out the theological meaning of the title cards Audiard inserts throughout the film.


2. Up (read my review)

An adventure film in the very essence of the word, Pete Docter's "Up" is another winning entry in the Pixar canon that makes the studio the most consistently brilliant factory in Hollywood or a good luck streak waiting to crash.
The creativity in this film makes it seem more like the former though, especially in the way the screenwriters and director make the oddest elements work like magic.
Beyond its obvious homages to classic cinema, Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones, "Up" owes its most precious moments to the machinations of old studio Hollywood where people seemed to sit around a desk, throw things inside a giant pot and come out with a film that had romance, drama, comedy, adventure and even room for various analytical readings.
"Up" is the rare kind of movie that still happens to have it all.


1. The White Ribbon (read my review)

If "The White Ribbon" is the year's coldest film, it-ironically- might also be the most inviting. Long gone are the days when going to the cinema was an interactive experience in which the filmmakers and the audience made the movie together.
We have grown used to sitting in the dark, munching on our pop corn and leaving all the problem solving and idea digesting to the people up on the screen and behind the camera.
Leave it to Michael Haneke to bring this sort of event back with a film that might seem like an over analytical allegory at first but also happens to be the most delicious mystery of the year.
One which we're invited to participate in because it reaches beyond the film.
The strange crimes occurring in the German village are enough to keep our brain working throughout the movie looking for clues and suspects but Haneke makes sure we also have fun on the way back home from the theater and makes us see that despite our universe being in true color, it might just be an extension of the black and white world we've just left.
The burning of that barn we saw might be that mysterious explosive that just blew an Afghan building halfway across the world and the bullying of a young disabled child might explain why certain kids grow into violent adults that solve everything with violence.
"The White Ribbon" might work as a prequel to every movie Michael Haneke has ever made but it also works as warning to the world we've yet to see.

(My) Best of 09: Director.

5. Marco Bellocchio for "Vincere" (read my review)

Italian director Marco Bellocchio has confessed he had never heard about Ida Dalser's (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) story before he embarked on writing and directing "Vincere". Watching the movie however, you get the sensation that he has always been an expert on the subject.
The way he takes Dalser's tragic story and transforms it into a metaphor for the fate of his country under fascism is an enterprise that recalls Pasolini's "Saló" and perfects what Eastwood failed to do so miserably in "Changeling".
The mastery of combining history with intimacy is rarely achieved to such levels of sublimity and the performances Bellocchio gets from his lead actors are electrifying.


4. Lars von Trier for "Antichrist" (read my review)

Whether you liked "Antichrist" or not, the one thing you can not say is that Lars von Trier doesn't know what he's doing.
From its operatic opening to its Bosch-ian interludes, the movie is defined by the overpowering visions of its creator. The mad Dane has always specialized in polarizing audiences and this might be his most controversial movie in that aspect.
Some are enthralled by his medieval horror techniques, others are disgusted by his alleged misogyny and in my case I was moved by his raw self examination.
If few people acknowledge the existence of a god through their art, less of them would hold a public quarrel with this being like von Trier.


3. Jane Campion for "Bright Star" (read my review)

Poetry is not meant to be understood, it's meant to be felt. I had read that before a million times and even tried to reason it using Edward de Bono's lateral thinking techniques.
I never truly got it until I saw "Bright Star". In the same way you burden your mind trying to crack the codes of a poem, Jane Campion probably wondered how to transport John Keats' (Ben Whishaw) life to the silver screen in a manner that would defy all biopic conventions.
She chose to do it as a visual poem. How "Bright Star" is able to tell and make us feel is owed to Campion's subtly magnificent work.
Every scene in the movie works like a verse. That they were extracted from the prose of her screenplay are only small proofs of her ability to transform the intellectual into the emotional.


2. Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker" (read my review)

Whether it's your third or second time watching "The Hurt Locker" your heart will still race and your pulse will still accelerate in the same scenes.
That is Kathryn Bigelow's extraordinary gift. She is able to encode visceral feelings into scenes we've seen a million times and as much as we deconstruct them we never know what is it exactly that she does to maintain eternal suspense.
And that's only in the action sequences! She also observes her characters and creates fascinating worlds for them which they bring into the larger universe of the movie.
Like a master juggler, Bigelow knows when to deliver exactly what we need and she's able to maintain an enigmatic mood that make the movie mean something different to whoever's watching it.


1. Michael Haneke for "The White Ribbon" (read my review)

When strange events start occurring in a small German village, the locals panic and then slowly overcome the unsolved tragedy, until a new one occurs. Then they repeat the process.
Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke once again explores the nature of violence as he's done in some of his best works like "Funny Games" and "Benny's Video".
In Palm d'Or winner "The White Ribbon" one would think he achieves some sort of epiphany but the truth is he still comes up with what might be just an hypothesis about the source of brutality in our world.
As darkly playful as ever, he is represented by a schoolteacher during one key scene in which he comes up with an unexpected suspect regarding the crimes.
"You have a sick imagination" replies another character disgusted by the repercussions the teacher's theories might have on the quiet village life.
Regardless of the not so subtle Freudian fact that Haneke is represented by a scholar, it can't be denied that few working directors muster the courage to make the kind of statements he does.
Not many artists are as fascinated by the human intellect and even less stimulate it as often as he does.

Sigh With Me.

"I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days,
three such days with you I could fill with more delight
than fifty common years could ever contain."
-John Keats

May the Best Ma...err...Wo...err...Director Win.

Last night Kathryn Bigelow won the prestigious Directors Guild of America award for her achievement in "The Hurt Locker".
Throughout the week leading to the ceremony a lot of people were torn between James Cameron for "Avatar" and Bigelow (I myself prefer Bigelow's work to Cameron).
Most of the ones who thought Bigelow would win attributed a big part of their theory around Ms. Bigelow's sexual organs.
"It's about time they reward a woman", "a woman has never won and it's time", "they'll wanna make history with a woman", "a woman needs to win this someday".
I say bullshit to all that.
Kathryn Bigelow won simply because she was the best director in the category.
This way of thinking comes off as slightly naive in a world where sexual equality is still an urban legend of sorts.
The minute "The Hurt Locker" became so popular among critics it was rare of them not to bring up Bigelow's gender as a plus.
Not only is she a woman, but she dared make a movie about men and not only that, but men at war in one of the most disastrous conflicts America has been stuck in.
She also showed them how it's done.
Many theories began to surface around how she would be recognized by awards groups because most of them would have a hard time understanding that this movie wasn't directed by a man. That isn't completely true because all of them brought up Kathryn's sex before even beginning to think about the movie.
To all of those I have to ask, what is so threatening about a woman understanding a man so well?
Why is it so incredible to believe that a woman might get the essence of war in ways Spielberg and Eastwood only wish they could?
Why is it so hard to believe that a woman would deliver one of the best action films of the decade and showed Michael Bay that action does not invalidate reason?
Before we go that far I offer you two examples: just two years ago Isabel Coixet proved she dominated Philip Roth in ways no other filmmaker ever could.
In "Elegy" she not only got one of the greatest performances Ben Kignsley's ever given, she also showed that sometimes women are the best "men" for the job.
Coixet captured all the nuances, fears and lust that a man would've thought of as personal invasion. Directing like hers' requires a sort of fearlessness and awareness that beyond the obvious there lies a bigger truth.
"Elegy" wasn't about a midlife crisis, it was about a person.
Sofia Coppola did the same for bittersweet Bob Harris in "Lost in Translation". As played by Bill Murray with charm straight out of a Preston Sturges movie, he created the ultimate version of a movie star: the one that has to come down from the firmament and acknowledge his earthiness.
Sure Coppola also fashioned a great character out of Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) but wasn't Bob the one that stuck with you the most?
In a fair world, Sofia would've won the best director Oscar, but of course the Academy had to correct the mistakes it had made two years before and reward Peter Jackson for his cumulative directorial effort in "The Lord of the Rings".
I might even add-and I know few will agree with me-that Jane Campion should've won back in 1993 for "The Piano".
Had history gone that, way not only would this whole "woman" thing be over and done with, the best nominees would've also won.
Deep inside I know that the whole "let's make history" need has been a predominant trend in the last five years or so.
How wouldn't it? When society starts falling into the kind of decay it has over the last decades, people need a reminder that change is possible, a reminder that we don't have to remain stuck in mud up to our necks.
Here is when-even for a second or two-the idea of making history gets the best in us. Content with this forced progressive mindset, society then moves into making the next "historical" even occur.
I wish that a day will come when gonads will no longer factor as ways to evaluate an individual's achievement.

Bright Star ***1/2

Director: Jane Campion
Cast: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw
Paul Schneider, Kerry Fox, Edie Martin, Thomas Sangster

While literature has always been an essential inspiration for cinema, its influence has mostly been limited to prose; for, how do you make a film about poetry?
Jane Campion solves the problem in "Bright Star", her ethereal depiction of the short lived romance between English poet John Keats (Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Cornish).
When the film begins, it's 1818 and Keats is living in Hampstead under the wing of his best friend Charles Armitage Brown (Schneider).
He has just published his first book of poetry which hasn't brought any money and has to look after his dying brother. In Hampstead he first meets Fanny, a strong willed young woman devoted to fashion. She lives with her mother (Fox) and siblings (Sangster and Martin).
At first Fanny is indifferent to Keats, but after discovering his sensitive nature she falls in love with him and they begin a secret affair that would last until his premature death at the age of 25 and remain unconsummated.
Campion treats the romance in a unique way, abstaining from stereotypical displays of affection or obviousness. Instead of recurring to corny dialogues she puts her ideas at the service of images and as seen through the lens of cinematographer Craig Fraser they become otherworldly.
Therefore "Bright Star" features scenes that bristle with aching beauty; a scene where Fanny fills her room with butterflies is gloriously fascinating instead of bizarre, while a simple moment where she lies in bed while her room's drapes are stirred by the wind achieves a kind of simple beauty that's both erotic and breathtaking.
During the film one of the characters says that poetry is about the senses-as opposed to intellect-and in such way Campion's ensemble brings raw emotions to their respective characters.
Whishaw's Keats is terribly moving and bittersweet. His tousled hair, sweet voice and meek eyes evoke the yearning of someone who knows he's not meant to last long in the mortal world. You believe someone like Whishaw could come up with some of the most beloved poems in English literature and as a romantic lead he may not be Laurence Olivier, but nobody watching the film will avoid feeling envious of the kisses he gives Fanny.
When he tells her "we've created a world of our own, attached to this world, but of our own invention" it's impossible not to sigh.
Cornish's Fanny is glorious, she isn't the typical Jane Campion female character and while the director tries to give Fanny some of the feminist qualities she has imprinted in her most famous creations, first and foremost Abbie Cornish makes Fanny someone who simply is.
A dedicated seamstress who seeks to shock society with her sartorial innovations, Cornish imprints in her qualities that surpass mere shock value, the way she wears her gowns and hats is her own rebellion.
Her interaction with Armitage (Schneider is brilliant!), with whom she has a love/hate relationship, is delicious. They bicker and insult each other and surprisingly nobody asks Fanny to tone down. Could this be a slip on the director's part or yet another example of how Fanny went against social paradigms?
With that said it's also essential to note how Cornish doesn't make Brawne a modern figure by way of anachronism. Fanny is still a nineteenth century girl trying to cope with change and her place in a society that didn't understand her or her love.
Cornish looks radiant in scenes with Whishaw and even if she often goes for the subtle, silently sarcastic side, when she has an eventual outpour of emotion she will break your heart.
With Fanny, Campion introduces the intellectual theme at the center of "Bright Star" which is nothing else than creating poetry through images and a story.
Fanny herself admits that poetry is a "strain to workout" and asks John to help her understand. But what of those who don't give a damn about poetry or understanding it?
"Bright Star" works exactly like a poem. Those who aren't interested will find it cryptic, uninteresting and impossible to understand. They might be dazzled by the imagery but will be left unmoved.
Those into poetry will relish in the way Campion juxtaposes imagery, music and dialogue. They will not need prosaic methods to evoke feeling.
Whichever side you find yourself on, the way you experience "Bright Star" will be completely unique and unforgettable.