[Looking to broaden my knowledge (or reduce my great ignorance) on Scandinavian films (a part from Bergman and Kaurismaki!), I found this article reviewing the 30th Göteborg International Film Festival - The article gives a good overview of what was on during the festivals. I have not seen any of the movies yet - safe for the brilliant Den brysomme mannen -, so i cannot comment, but some of them are on my list. ]

[the original article appeared here]

The End of Innocence

Scandinavian Films at the 30^th Göteborg International Film Festival
26 January – 5 February 2007

by Mattias Frey 

The 30^th Göteborg International Film Festival proved why it is Scandinavia’s superior film festival. Featuring 450 films from 65 countries, the festival balanced its wide breadth with a strong concentration of new Nordic films as well as a singular chance to catch up on all 2006 Swedish premieres.

The local press was ecstatic about this year’s crop of domestic productions. Sweden’s largest daily Dagens Nyheter declared the national film crisis over. This sentiment was both correct and unfounded. The Swedish film industry was in fact never in a true crisis. Surely, with the exception of perhaps Roy Andersson’s Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000) and Lukas Moodysson’s projects, there has not been any sign that a cinéma des auteurs will emerge to assume the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Bo Widerberg. Instead, the leading Swedish films of the last 15 years have been quality genre films with an unmistakable local specificity: one direction, for example, is the large wave of milieu studies featuring immigrants, such as Josef Fares’ popular comedies Jalla! Jalla! (2000) and Kopps (2003) or the excellent Före stormen (Before the Storm, 2000) and Om jag vänder mig om (Daybreak, Björn Runge, 2003). This attitude towards national cinema — that Swedish film should tell above all stories about living in the society rather than experimenting formally — has only continued in this year’s crop.

Particular to the festival’s Swedish films is the almost exclusive thematic emphasis on teenagers and rites of initiation: this is the year of the coming-of-age flick. The most formulaic was Linas kvällsbok (Bitter Sweetheart, 2007), based on Emma Hamberg’s popular novel of the same name. In it, Lina is a self-described “completely plain, completely normal, completely uninteresting” 15 year-old girl. Steeped in Danish director Hella Joof’s sepia tones, the film chronicles in voice-over diary entries Lina’s struggles with her catty friends, getting into a good high school, and losing her virginity to a hockey-playing oaf. Unfortunately, the stylised aesthetic jars with the pimply story. The camera work is a play of shifting shallow focus and the set design has the characters meeting coincidentally under the only street lamp on the block. But what is one to make of this beauty when the dialogue is littered with menstruation, chewing tobacco and vomit jokes? Joof’s film suffers in comparison with Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love, 1998). The films share genre, demographic and almost identical leading actresses. However, Moodysson’s grittier aesthetic, more daring narrative, and social critique lay bare Linas kvällsbok as more an exercise in nostalgia.

Swedish film’s focus on teenage girls’ sexuality — and in particular their sexual exploitation — is not new. Productions such as Hip Hip Hora! (The Ketchup Effect, 2004), Fjorton suger (Fourteen Sucks, 2004) and Säg att du älskar mig (Say that You Love Me, 2006) — not to mention Moodysson’s harrowing sex-trade fable Lilja 4-ever (Lilya 4-ever, 2002) — have set the trend in recent years with graphic depictions of rape and sexual exploitation. In some sense these films show the dark after-effects of the Swedish mother generation’s sexual revolution. Nanna Huolman’s debut feature Kid Svensk (That Special Summer, 2007) could appear akin upon superficial inspection: another film narrated in voiceover about a bratty adolescent curious for her first lay. However, despite the prominent friendship and romance between young protagonist Kiri (or “Kid”) and her childhood playmate Jamppe, the film is above all a mother-daughter love story and a milieu study of the Finnish minority in Sweden. Kid lives in 1984 Göteborg with her Finnish mother, a school janitor who speaks no Swedish and longs to return to her homeland. Although Kid wins an essay contest to work at Radio Göteborg for the summer, her mother decides that they will spend the summer in Finland with family friends. The trip yields sexual romances for both mother and daughter as well as a final reconciliation between the two. Huolman relates the feeling of home(land)lessness with sensitivity and restraint. Although the narrative stays fixed to the coming-of-age mold, Kid Svensk acknowledges outside political and social pressures, spheres that Linas kvällsbok denies. In between the “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” scenes emerges a provocative work about how daughters inherit their mothers’ sexuality, not to mention a pioneer snapshot of Sweden’s largest minority group, hitherto ignored in domestic features.

Helena Bergström is best known for her roles as oversexed blonde bombshell in husband Colin Nutley’s successful genre films, e.g. Änglagård (House of Angels, 1992) or Heartbreak Hotel (2006). This year’s festival saw her debut as director with Se upp för dårarna (Mind the Gap!, 2007). The film follows Yasmin and Elin, two young Stockholmers who dream of attending the police academy. Yasmin’s father is a Turkish heart surgeon who works as a subway driver; similar to Kid’s mother in Kid Svensk, his refusal to learn Swedish and integrate into the native society provokes a conflict with his children. Elin’s family is native Swedish with deep roots in the police and military and takes a skeptical attitude toward foreign-born aspiring female cops. Bergström proves herself a competent metteur-en-scène in the vain of her husband. In fact, her style is in general fresher and sexier than Nutley’s. With a Diana Ross soundtrack and the montage treatment, Stockholm feels like New York in a mid-’80s Hollywood flick. Se upp för dårarna functions agreeably as a feel-good family film, yet one would have wished for a more challenging scenario. As it stands the film’s politics ring as universally as one might imagine (i.e. “racism and sexism are not positive values”). Yasmin, “the foreigner”, is more intelligent and speaks better Swedish than Elin and shows herself to be far more moral (the latter sleeps with the police academy teacher and lies about it to her pushover boyfriend). Bergström thereby counters only the basest prejudices of the lowest common denominator. The message to those who, like Yasmin’s father, “refuse to integrate”, emerges as “become more modern and Swedish”. Such slogans contradict the film’s initial liberal stance towards immigrants.

Foreigners are all but nonexistent in Maria Blom’s sex dramedy Fishy (2007), which premiered at the festival after being shelved since its 2001 shoot. Blom rose to renown with Masjävlar (Dalecarlians, 2004), a box-office coup about a yuppie who returns to her provincial village for her father’s 70^th birthday. Fishy was supposed to be a one-off practice feature on DV and never intended for release. This is a shame because its intimate spontaneous quality surpasses Masjävlar’s formulaic narrative. Maria Blom’s acknowledged affinity with Cameron Crowe is startling; if Masjävlar was a Swedish Elizabethtown (2005), then Fishy is Singles (1992) set in Stockholm. My Bodell is delicious in her portrayal of a promiscuous twenty-something and Dan Gustafsson exudes nonchalant charm as the dorky boy-next-door in a long-term, long-distance relationship. With an episodic form and a crack soundtrack Fishy chronicles the beginning of a friendship and its development into a love affair subject to the ironic laws of bad timing. Let’s hope that Blom’s new film due in March, Nina Frisk, takes more from this witty chamber piece than Masjävlar.

One Swedish premiere thematised the young male experience. In Hata Göteborg! (Hating Göteborg!, 2007), 19 year-old Johan spends the Helsingborg dog days playing soccer and getting into brawls alongside his scrappy pals. Somehow, though, this summer is different. The group implodes as Johan discovers – via an enlightened cousin from Göteborg – a masculinity apart from the macho slugfests. Robert Lillhonga’s sensitive drama is in many ways precisely what Swedish genre cinema needs: stories particular to the provinces and to contemporary life. His film is more substantial than, for example, this year’s guldbagge (Swedish film prize) winner Förortsungar (Kidz in da Hood, 2006). The Gustaf (son of Stellan) Skarsgård star vehicle is surely enterprising in its musical form, but there is never any cultural specificity to the School of Rock (2003) story; the children are little rascals instrumentalised for their cuteness. Hata Göteborg! always maintains a harder edge and commitment to independent cinema. Lillhonga’s work is the rougher cousin of the Swedish Oscar contribution Farväl Falkenberg (Falkenberg Farewell, 2006); the former Helsingborg drama revolves around hooligan macho culture and its aesthetic is correspondingly rough. Jesper Ganslandt’s hippie drama – also a rejection of Göteborg – is a love letter to a gentler form of masculinity that nevertheless bears a dark postscript. As one director at the festival mused, Farväl Falkenberg is Terrence Malick doing a Dogma film.

Göteborg’s best film was Darling (2007), the deserved winner of the Nordic Competition. Johan Kling’s debut feature begins with a very 1970s credit sequence and a devilish score; Stockholm at night looks like London in American Werewolf (1981). The story follows two characters whose paths cross for a moment and then diverge: Eva, an arrogant young woman from the chic Stockholm neighbourhood Östermalm’s upper class, and Bernhard, a good-willed, unemployed 61 year-old. Eva is cool and blasé. Her world exists hermetically sealed between the White Room and Spy Bar clubs on Stureplan. After she loses her job at a Gucci boutique and her mother disappears to a lover in Dubai, Eva resorts to working at McDonald’s. It is there she meets Berhard, also forced to flip burgers because his age makes him a “liability” elsewhere in Sweden’s youth-centric society. Kling’s feat pairs American Psycho’s cynical humour and Ken Loach-like social realism. This is not the unhappy marriage it might seem. Every time the Bernhard story tends toward the melodramatic, a cold burst of black comedy breaks the spell. Michelle Meadows – a media studies student with very little acting experience – excels in her role as the unreflective Eva with a whole spectrum of blank looks. Well-known character actor Michael Segerström is perfectly cast as the eternally grateful old-school Swede. Although Kling’s film could function as an overdrawn milieu study of the Stureplan set – a group who would sleep with anything in order to be rich and famous within those few square kilometers – it is above all a diagnosis of an historical break in Swedish society. For a nation fundamentally shaped by traditional Social Democratic values of solidarity and equality, today’s youth (born into universal prosperity) “rebels” with extreme narcissism and self-fetishisation. Darling unveils perfectly the subtext behind almost all of the festival’s films and the national cinema as a whole: life in Scandinavia is one big coming-of-age film.

If the Swedish films obsessed over teenagers and the loss of innocence, Iceland, the European country with the highest birthrate, presented a cinema preoccupied with parents and children — especially if one judges by Ragnar Bragason’s programmatic contributions, Foreldrar (Parents, 2007) and Börn (Children, 2006). In a land with 46 cinema screens for 300,000 residents, Bragason’s films have represented roughly one-third of Iceland’s annual features in the last two years. The twin movies share largely the same ensemble cast (including Iceland’s European Shooting Star, Gísli Örn Garðarsson), a similar black and white aesthetic, a suburban Reykjavík milieu, and the Short Cuts narrative form. Börn is the more violent of the two, casting Garðarsson as the vicious thug Gardar. After screwing up at work, Gardar attempts to re-enter the life of his estranged son. The boy’s mother, Karitas, is already locked in a bitter custody battle with her three daughters’ father. Foreldrar, which played in the Nordic Competition, was the better of the pair and revolves around three characters. Dentist Oscar has lived with his wife and her children for five years and longs for children of his own. Einar is a stockbroker with little social competence whose wife has thrown him out of the house. Katrin returns from Sweden to her son who rejects her for leaving eight years before. Börn and Foreldrar are acting-heavy pieces punctuated by long conversations (often shot through windows, store fronts, windshields, or other physical obstructions) improvised by the players: Cassavetes is a clear influence. Indeed, both ultimately succeed because of the high caliber ensemble and the plots’ unwillingness to fall into clichés. Unlike the more melodramatic examples of the parallel narrative form (i.e. Magnolia), Bragason leaves the intersubjective particularities open and ambiguous.

Rock’n'Roll Never Dies (2006) was Finland’s main attraction at the festival. Tiger is a remarkably boyish near-forty-something who lives with his parents and spends his days playing guitar and attending a creative writing class. The stories he writes for his class motivate voiceover flashbacks to his childhood. Tiger had a garage band with his pals Jack Nevada and Pumppu; his little brother Oku died of a disease that made him age very rapidly. In the present, Tiger and his parents are forced to move after the town’s saw mill closes. At the same time Tiger receives a letter from Jack Nevada, now living in America, and the metal band reunites for a last gig at a convention of Nevada’s pyramid scheme miracle cure, “Eternal Youth”. Veteran director Juha Koiranen delivers exactly what one would expect from a Finnish export: a cutesy brand of Aki Karausmäki’s laconicism with a big nod to Elling (2001). Quirky and harmless, the film should perform well abroad.

Before the first film flickered at Göteborg, critics were proclaiming the “Year of the Norwegian Movie”. It was surely a form of cultural patriotism (or inferiority complex) that led the Swedish press to lament Norway’s three entries at Cannes. Among the films vying for the Ingmar Bergman Debut Award was Norway’s entry to the Oscars, Reprise (2006). Joachim (distant relative of Lars von) Trier’s first feature revolves around the friends Philip and Erik, who each post their book manuscript to a publishing house. One is accepted and quickly crowned his generation’s best author; the other flat-out refused. Trier (who was a two-time national skateboarding champion) claims to be “represent[ing] Oslo’s cultural ghetto” with this semi-autobiographical film and the work clearly has national-cultural relevance. The narrative unfolds in a mockumentary style with voiceover narration, hand-held camera and quick montage, introducing its now perhaps post-trendy theme of contingency and chance in the manner of Sliding Doors (1998) or Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998). Trier’s direction is able and his representation proves no doubt true to the Norwegian capital’s young cultural elite. Still, the cast’s general attractiveness and slick charm might lead one to believe this is a tale about bankers rather than struggling writers. The Nordic Competition’s Norwegian entry, Den brysomme mannen (The Bothersome Man, 2006), also studies Norway’s upper-middle class, but with a slower pace unhinged from realism. In many ways of a piece with Sånger från andra våningen, Jens Lien’s feature is essentially an ethnographic/anthropological film about the mating and hunting habits in Social Democratic Norway. Forty year-old Andreas is a newcomer in a perfect city, where he quickly assumes a perfect life: job, apartment and a live-in girlfriend. Suddenly he is bewildered and irritated by this perfection and tries to kill himself — to no avail. Liens portrays Scandinavian society’s soullessness, but in a very different manner than Darling. Here the rich are less pernicious and immoral than vapid and unreflective.

The endless row of coming-of-age stories and general preoccupation with youth in the festival’s competition reveals a Scandinavian society anxious about a loss of innocence. And indeed, the Swedish national cinema is experiencing its own growing pains: in December the Swedish Film Institute announced its intention to redistribute its support money in the subsidy-heavy industry. Although the country has seen a boom in market share recently – half of the ten highest grossing films for the week of 7 February were domestic pictures, for instance – the sheer number of films produced annually (roughly half of Germany’s output, a country with nearly ten times Sweden’s population) has become cancerous. The new plan, to begin in 2007, calls for more funds to a smaller number of projects. Although some critics have named this system “Darwinism”, it might be time for the Swedish film to grow up.

Clint Eastood’s Gran Torino Trailer

Youtube link here

(for those who love Clint Eastwood, below is a good interview from the NY Times in the occasion of the release of Clint’s new film: Gran Torino

December 14, 2008

The Films Are for Him. Got That?

By BRUCE HEADLAM (NY Times)

CARMEL, Calif.

BEING introduced to Clint Eastwood is something like seeing a California redwood for the first time. The difference is that this redwood, even at the age of 78, reaches out to shake your hand with a firmness that still intimidates no matter how much time you spent preparing your grip (for the record: three days).

He arrived for the interview at the Mission Ranch restaurant here as if he owned the place, and it didn’t make any difference that, in this case, he does. He had his first legal drink in the bar while he was stationed at the nearby Army base in the late 1940s. In 1986 he bought the property and rebuilt it to his taste, with a piano bar, heart-stopping views of the ocean spray on Point Lobos and plenty of meat on the menu. Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

It’s been 20 years since Mr. Eastwood was mayor of Carmel, but clearly he’s still the king around here. Unlike the taciturn characters he plays on screen, he’s voluble, chatting and laughing with his staff with a sharpness and enthusiasm that make him seem far younger than his age. After showing me around the property, he insisted I come back that evening for a steak dinner. “We’ve got good chow,” he said. Go on: you tell him you’ve made other plans.

Mr. Eastwood’s on familiar ground in another way. It’s coming up on the Oscars, and he has two films in contention, “Changeling,” with Angelina Jolie, and his newest, “Gran Torino,” which he finished shooting only this summer and which began appearing in theaters on Friday.

In “Gran Torino” Mr. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran, retired Ford line worker and full-time bigot who stews on his porch in Detroit watching his block being taken over by Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia. When a gang pressures a teenager living next door (played by Bee Vang) into trying to steal Walt’s vintage Gran Torino, the aging veteran gets pulled reluctantly, then violently, into the lives of his neighbors.

Mr. Eastwood has already won the best actor prize for “Gran Torino” from the National Board of Review, and the Oscar talk — he has never won as an actor — is running high. He claims not to care deeply about awards. When asked whom he makes films for, Mr. Eastwood said, “You’re looking at him.” Calculated or not — those films do have a habit of showing up (sometimes unexpectedly) in prime Oscar campaigning season — that stance seems to charm the voters some 300 miles to the south in Los Angeles, who have rewarded his movies richly in the past 15 years, including two best-picture awards. Mr. Eastwood has become the George Washington of the awards season: if called, he will serve. But he doesn’t seem to believe in term limits.

“Gran Torino” is the 29th full-length movie Mr. Eastwood has directed — more than Scorsese, more even than Spielberg — so perhaps it’s an accident of memory that his name first conjures up the impression of the squinty guy on a horse. Starting in the mid-1980s he began to change some minds by pushing the boundaries of his cowboys-and-cops image with films like “Honkytonk Man” and “Tightrope,” but he said about his reputation, “If that’s how people want to pigeonhole me, that’s fine.”

If anything, his directing pace has picked up in the past five years.

The script for “Gran Torino” had been kicking around Hollywood for a while before Mr. Eastwood read it. The writer, Nick Schenk, who worked in a Ford plant years ago, based the character of Walt on the men he met there, many of them Korean War veterans. “I’d talk a lot to these guys, and they’d tell me stuff they wouldn’t tell their wife and kids,” Mr. Schenk said.

Some directors are known as an actor’s best friend. Mr. Eastwood may be the writer’s. “He didn’t change a word,” Mr. Schenk said. “That never happens.”

Mr. Eastwood said he learned his lesson after making extensive revisions on the script for “Unforgiven,” then calling up the writer, David Peoples, and announcing he was returning to the first draft. “I’m emasculating this thing,” he told Mr. Peoples.

There was one major disappointment for Mr. Schenk: the setting of “Gran Torino” was shifted from Minneapolis to Detroit, the original home of Ford and, not coincidentally, the home of 42 percent tax credits for films made there. (That helped make it easy for Warner Brothers to sign off on bankrolling the movie, something that hasn’t always been a given in the studio’s relationship with the director.)

Mr. Eastwood bought the script in February, then shot the movie over the summer at a guerrilla filmmaker’s pace, finishing in 32 days. The fast clip, Mr. Eastwood said, helped him with the Hmong members of the cast, most of whom had never acted and many of whom didn’t speak English. “I’d give them little pointers along the way, Acting 101,” he said. “And I move along at a rate that doesn’t give them too much of a chance to think.”

It also doesn’t give Mr. Eastwood too much time to worry about Hollywood. After shooting, he returned to Carmel, where he lives with his wife, Dina Ruiz, and manages his investments, including an ownership stake in the Pebble Beach golf course company. He set up a bay and worked with his two film editors in an 1862 farmhouse on the Mission property for a week or so. Between sessions he sat at the piano and picked out a score: he has written music, including full scores, for many of his films. He even sings one of his own melodies over the film’s final credits, his voice burned down to a whisper. (Mr. Eastwood himself refuses to call it singing because that conjures up memories of “Paint Your Wagon,” the misbegotten 1969 musical. “I vowed I’d never do that again,” he said.)

Like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River” before it, “Gran Torino” is a modern story that feels anachronistic. Walt’s neighborhood is every bit as bounded and knowable as the town of Lago in “High Plains Drifter,” and the confrontations with the Hmong gang members build methodically, as if in a town square. But when the film threatens to descend into a vigilante picture — the last guy who actually thought he could solve Detroit’s problems with his fists was Gordie Howe — “Gran Torino” takes some unexpected turns.

Before filming there had been gossip (again, the Internet) that Mr. Eastwood was making another “Dirty Harry” sequel. What “Gran Torino” does share with the “Dirty Harry” movies is the sheer force of its incorrectness. Walt, who stokes his resentment with cigarettes, beef jerky and Pabst Blue Ribbon, expresses his disgust for the Hmong and just about every other racial group in a steady stream of obscenities. Robert Lorenz, Eastwood’s frequent producing partner, said that what he appreciated about Mr. Schenk’s dialogue was that “he didn’t hold back.”

“It was left really raw,” he said. “It sounded like those people you know, or your uncle saying something really bad at a wedding.”

Brian Grazer, a producer of “Changeling,” sees this kind of directness as a strength. “What most interested me about Clint Eastwood as a director is the honesty and intensity he injects into the movies that he directs,” he said. “He is so confident as a director that he will allow the sometimes ugliness of life to live inside the scenes of his movies.”

For Mr. Eastwood the raw language is central to Walt’s story. “If he comes in and just befriends these people and doesn’t have any hurdles — any personal hurdles to overcome — that doesn’t make for a very interesting character,” he said. But Mr. Eastwood, who last spring had a verbal run-in with Spike Lee over the lack of black soldiers in the Eastwood film “Flags of Our Fathers,” also confesses to some sympathy for Walt’s choice of words in a way sure to irk the Hollywood types who have finally embraced him despite his libertarian politics.

“A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness,” he said. “You’re showing a guy from a different generation. Show the way he talks. The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so” — here he paused and narrowed his eyes, like Dirty Harry drawing a bead on a perp — “sensitive.”

What we admire about heroes (and villains) like the ones Mr. Eastwood used to play isn’t their sensitivity, it’s their single-mindedness: they say what they’re going to do, then do it. Whether in Spain or in San Francisco, Mr. Eastwood’s heroes were never given the “kill one to save a thousand” liberal trapdoor of other Hollywood films. The violence of the “Dirty Harry” movies seems almost quaint now, but what Harry says — “Ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” — still has the power to shock.

But if Mr. Eastwood shoulders some blame for every “Rambo” and “Die Hard” that followed, he should be given credit for looking at a more complicated transaction in the films he directs, one where people’s actions are at odds with their beliefs. What helps sell the contradiction in “Gran Torino” is Mr. Eastwood’s own physical presence. More so than any other leading man, he has been willing to play his real age. At 78 he is perhaps thinner than he once was, but in that sinewy way that reveals strength as much as diminishes it. After Walt beats up one gang member — hey, he’s still Clint Eastwood — the next scene shows him out of breath, struggling to open his front door.

To Mr. Eastwood being able to play 78 is just one of the benefits of a long career. “It’s ridiculous when you won’t play your own age,” he said. “You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.”

The other benefit is that, even after a great career in the movies, you can fashion another. “After ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ I walk down the street and everybody would whistle out” — here he sang the movie’s famous theme. “Then it became ‘Do I feel lucky?’ and ‘Make my day.’ But it’s progressed along. Whether it’s taken this turn on purpose, I can’t say.”

Walt Kowalski has a catchphrase too in “Gran Torino.” “This is what I do,” he tells the Hmong teenager before the film’s final act. “I finish things.” So does Mr. Eastwood, just not in the way anybody would have expected.

And he may not be done. There were reports — again on the Internet — that this would be his last role, a rumor he helped fuel but now says is not necessarily true.

“Somebody asked what I’d do next, and I said I didn’t know how many roles there are for 78-year-old guys,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with coming in to play the butler. But unless there’s a hurdle to get over, I’d rather just stay behind the camera.”

Posted in Interviews, Movie - Trailers Tagged: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino, Interview, new film, new york times, Official Trailer ]]> http://justbooksandmovies.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/interview-with-clint-eastwood/feed/ 0 justbooksandmovies Clint Eastwood as Kowalski http://justbooksandmovies.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/roger-eberts-the-best-films-of-2008/ http://justbooksandmovies.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/roger-eberts-the-best-films-of-2008/#comments Sun, 14 Dec 2008 13:20:39 +0000 justbooksandmovies http://justbooksandmovies.wordpress.com/?p=104 ]]>

by Roger Ebert

In these hard times, you deserve two “best films” lists for the price of one. It is therefore with joy that I list the 20 best films of 2008, in alphabetical order. I am violating the age-old custom that film critics announce the year’s 10 best films, but after years of such lists, I’ve had it. A best films list should be a celebration of wonderful films, not a chopping process. And 2008 was a great year for movies, even if many of them didn’t receive wide distribution.

Look at my 20 titles, and you tell me which 10 you would cut. Nor can I select one to stand above the others, or decide which should be No. 7 and which No. 8. I can’t evaluate films that way. Nobody can, although we all pretend to. A “best films” list, certainly. But of exactly 10, in marching order? These 20 stood out for me, and I treasure them all. If it had been 19 or 21, that would have been OK. If you must have a Top 10 List, find a coin in your pocket. Heads, the odd-numbered movies are your 10. Tails, the even-numbered.

I have composed a separate list of the year’s five best documentaries. They also may be described as “one of the year’s best.” And this year’s Special Jury Award goes to Guy Maddin’s “My Winnipeg,” which stands between truth and fiction, using the materials of the documentary to create a film completely preposterous and deeply true. Another of “the year’s best.”

* * *

“Ballast” A deep silence has fallen upon a Mississippi Delta family after the death of a husband and brother. Old wounds remain unhealed. The man’s son shuttles uneasily between two homes, trying to open communication by the wrong means. The debut cast is deeply convincing, and writer-director Lance Hammer observes them with intense empathy. No, it’s not a film about poor folks on the Delta; they own a nice little business, but are paralyzed by loneliness. At the end, we think, yes, that is what would happen, and it would happen exactly like that.

“The Band’s Visit” A police ceremonial band from Egypt, in Israel for a cultural exchange, ends up in a desert town far from anywhere and is taken on mercy by the bored, cynical residents. A long night’s journey marked with comedy, human nature, and bittersweet reality. Richly entertaining, with sympathetic performances by Sasson Gabai as the bandleader and Ronit Elkabetz as the owner of a local cafe. Written and directed by Eran Kolirin. Was at Ebertfest 2008.

“Che” The epic journey of a 20th century icon, the Argentinian physician who became a comrade of Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolu- tion and then moved to South America to support revolution there. Benicio del Toro is persuasive as the fiercely ethical firebrand, in a film that includes unusual and unfamiliar chapters in Che’s life. Steven Soderbergh’s film is 257 minutes long, but far from boring. (Opens Jan. 16)

“Chop Shop” The great emerging American director Ramin Bahrani finds a story worthy of “City of God” in a no-man’s land in the shadow of Shea Stadium, where a young boy and his sister support themselves in a sprawling, off-the-books auto repair and scrap district. Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales seem to live their roles, in a masterpiece that intimately knows its world, its people and their survival tactics. It will be featured at Ebertfest 2009.

“The Dark Knight” The best of all the Batmans, Christopher Nolan’s haunted film leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. The “comic book movie” has at last reclaimed its deep archetypal currents. With a performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker that will surely win an Oscar, a Batman (Christian Bale) who is tortured by moral puzzles and a district attorney (Aaron Eckhart) forced to make impossible choices.

“Doubt” A Catholic grade school is ruled by the grim perfectionist Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), whose draconian rule is challenged by Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman). A young nun (Amy Adams) is caught between them, as the film shows how assumptions can be doubted, and doubted again. Viola Davis, as the mother of the school’s only black student, has one significant scene, but it is long, crucial and heartbreaking. Davis goes face to face with Streep with astonishing conviction and creates reasons for doubt that may be more important than deciding the truth. John Patrick Shanley directed and adapted his Tony Award-winning play. (Opens Friday)

“The Fall” Tarsem’s film is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free fall from reality into uncharted realms. A wounded stunt-man, circa 1914, tells a story to a 4-year-old girl, and we see how she imagines it. It has vast romantic images so stunning, I had to check twice, three times, to be sure the film actually claims to have absolutely no computer-generated imagery. None? What about the Labyrinth of Despair, with no exit? The intersecting walls of zig-zagging staircases? The man who emerges from the burning tree? Filmed over four years in 28 countries. It will be at Ebertfest 2009.

“Frost/Nixon” The story of a duel between a crafty man and a persistent one. How many remember that the “lightweight” British interviewer David Frost was the one who finally persuaded Richard Nixon to say he had committed crimes in connection with Watergate and let his country down? With his own money riding on the interviews, Frost (Michael Sheen) is desperate after Nixon finesses him in the early sessions, but he pries away at Nixon’s need to confess. Frank Langella is uncanny as RMN. Ron Howard directs mercilessly. (Opens Friday)

“Frozen River” Melissa Leo should be nominated for her performance. She plays an hourly employee in a discount store, struggling to support two kids and a run-down trailer after her husband deserts her with their savings. After making an unlikely alliance with a Mohawk woman (Misty Upham) who was stealing her car, she finds herself a human trafficker, driving Chinese across the ice into the United States. A spellbinding thriller, yes, but even more a portrait of economic struggle in desperate times. Written and directed by Courtney Hunt. It will be at Ebertfest 2009.

“Happy-Go-Lucky” Here’s another nominee for best actress — Sally Hawkins, playing a cheerful schoolteacher who seems improbably upbeat until we win a glimpse into her soul. No, she’s not secretly depressed. She’s genuinely happy, but that hasn’t made her stupid or afraid. Mike Leigh’s uncanny ability to find drama in ordinary lives is used with genius, as the teacher encounters a driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) as negative as she is positive. Not a feel-good movie. Not at all. But strangely inspiring.

“Iron Man” Like “Spider-Man 2″ and “The Dark Knight,” another leap forward for the superhero movie. Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau reinvent Tony Stark as a conflicted, driven genius who has a certain plausibility, even when inundated by special effects. So successful are they that in the climactic rooftop battle between two towering men of steel, we know we’re looking almost entirely at CGI, and yet the creatures embody character and emotion. Downey hit bottom, as everyone knows. Now he has triumphantly returned.

“Milk” Sean Penn, one of our greatest actors, locks up an Oscar nomination with his performance as Harvey Milk, the first self-identified gay elected to U.S. public office. At age 40, Milk was determined to do “something different” with his life. He’s open to change. We see how the everyday experiences of this gay man politicize him, and how his instincts allow him to become a charismatic leader, while always acknowledging the sexuality that society had taught him to conceal. One of the year’s most moving films.

“Rachel Getting Married” After seeing this film, people told me, “I wanted to attend that wedding” or “I wish I’d been there.” It’s that involving. Jonathan Demme doesn’t lock down one central plot, but considers the ceremony as a wedding of close and distant family, old and new friends, many races, many ages, many lifestyles, all joined amid joyous homemade music. His camera is so observant, we feel like a guest really does feel. Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel and Anne Hathaway as her sister generate tricky sibling tension.

“The Reader” A drama taking place mostly within the mind of a postwar German who has an affair at 14 with a woman he later discovers is a war criminal. Her own secret is so shameful, she would rather face any sentence than reveal it. The film addresses the moral confusion felt in those who came after the Holocaust but whose lives were painfully twisted by it. Directed by Stephen Daldry, with David Kross as the younger protagonist, and Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes as the older ones. (Opening Dec. 25)

“Revolutionary Road” The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and his wife find hell in the suburbs. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, in two of the best performances of the year, play a young married couple who lose their dreams in the American corporate world and its assigned roles. Sam Mendes reads minds when words aren’t enough, and has every detail right — including the chain-smoking by those who find it a tiny consolation in inconsolable lives. (Opens Jan. 2)

“Shotgun Stories” You’ll have to search for it, but worth it. In a “dead-ass town,” three brothers find themselves in a feud with their four half-brothers. It’s told like a revenge tragedy, but the hero doesn’t believe the future is written by the past. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, it avoids the obvious and shows a deep understanding of the lives and minds of ordinary young people in a skirmish of the class war. The dialogue rings true, the camera is deeply observant. The film was the audience favorite at Ebertfest 2008.

“Slumdog Millionaire” Danny Boyle’s improbable union of quiz-show suspense and the harrowing life of a Mumbai orphan. Growing from a garbage pit scavenger to the potential winner of a fortune, his hero uses his wits and survival instinct to struggle against crushing handicaps. A film that finds exuberance despite the tragedy it also gives full weight to. The locations breathe with authenticity.

“Synecdoche, New York” The year’s most endlessly debated film. Screenwriter Charles Kaufman (“Adaptation,” “Being John Malkovich”), in his directing debut, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director mired in a long-running rehearsal that may be life itself. Much controversy about the identities and even genders of some of the characters, in a film that should never be seen unless you’ve already seen it at least once.

“W.” To general surprise, Oliver Stone’s biography of George W. Bush is empathetic and understanding, perhaps because Stone himself is a blueblood Ivy League graduate who could never quite win his father’s approval. Josh Brolin gives a nuanced portrayal that seems based on the known facts, showing the president as subservient to Vice President Cheney and haunted by old demons.

“WALL-E” The best science-fiction movie in years was an animated family film. WALL-E is a solar-powered trash compacting robot, left behind to clean up the waste after Man flees into orbit. Hugely entertaining, wonderfully well drawn, and, if you think about it, merciless in its critique of a global consumer culture that obsesses on intake and disregards the consequences of output.

* * *

Every year I name a winner of my Special Jury Prize, so named in honor of the “alternative first prize” given by juries at many festivals. This year (roll of the drums) the honored film is:

“My Winnipeg” Guy Maddin’s latest dispatch from inside his imagination is a “history” of his home town, which becomes a mixture of the very slightly plausible, the convincing but unlikely, the fantastical, the fevered, the absurd, the preposterous, and the nostalgic. Oddly enough, when it’s over, you have a deeper and, in a crazy way, more “real” portrait of Winnipeg than a conventional doc might have provided–and certainly a far more entertaining one. Will be at Ebertfest 2009.

Five documentaries in equal first place:

“Encounters at the End of the World” Werner Herzog moseys around to see who he will meet and what he will see at the South Pole. The population here seems made of travelers beyond our realm, all with amazing personal histories. In a spellbinding film, Herzog finds a great deal of humor, astonishing underwater creatures, permanent occupants such as seals and penguins and the possibility of a bleak global future.

“I.O.U.S.A.” A film to make sense of the current economic crisis. The U.S. national debt has doubled in the last eight years, we can’t make the payments, the world holds our mortgage, and it can’t afford for us to default. So the same unsupported currency seems to circulate one step ahead of disaster. Not a partisan film. Experts of all political persuasions look at our bookkeeping and agree it is insane.

“Man on Wire” On Aug. 7, 1974, a Frenchman named Philippe Petit, having smuggled two tons of equipment to the top of the towers of the World Trade Center, strung a wire between them, and walked back and forth eight times. The doc combines period footage and re-created scenes to explain how he did it, and mystically, why. We know he made it, so how does this film generate such suspense?

“Standard Operating Procedure” About what photographs are and how we see them, focusing on the infamous prison torture photographs from Abu Ghraib. Errol Morris’ scrutiny reveals what was really happening, and why, and how the photographs do not always show what they seem to. He introduces the name of Charles Graner, who always stayed in the shadows, but without whom there might have been no photos at all.

“Trouble the Water” A few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a young couple from the Ninth Ward named Scott and Kimberly Rivers Roberts bought a camcorder. As the rains began to fall, they began to film, even while trapped by rising waters inside their attic. Their astonishing footage, unlike any other, is incorporated by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin into a documentary that shows why Brownie was not doing a great job, not at all. This film also will be at Ebertfest 2009.

Looking back over the list, I think most moviegoers will have heard of only about 11, because distribution has reached such a dismal state. I wrote to a reader about “Shotgun Stories,” “I don’t know if it will play in your town.” She wrote back, “How about my state?” This is a time when home video, Netflix and the good movie channels come to the rescue. My theory that you should see a movie on a big screen is sound, but utopian.

[original article here]

This is one movie to watch. I will as soon as i get a chance.

Youtube Trailer here

NY Times Review:

This (New) American Life

These people know how to make animation movies

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Worth watching as well: BLU in Berlin – November 2008