Movies of 2014 Part 4: My Top Twenty

No preamble, just remember that geese can be troublesome.

20) Volver (2006, Pedro Almodóvar)

Another part of my slight Almodóvar binge earlier in the year, this one was expedited after Josh put it on his top ten films of the Filmspotting era (i.e. post 2005). And I loved it.

I have a theory about Almodóvar, that not only would most of his films pass the Bechdel test with flying colours but in fact many would not pass an anti-Bechdel test, that is that two named male characters have a non-female related conversation throughout the film (Hable con Ella is a possibility but I think the females in their life feature prominently in every conversation between the two male protagonists). Volver is probably the richest example of this type of his films, dealing with several complex and interesting female characters and their relationships with each other.

Of course, being Almodóvar there’s a strong sense of the ‘wacky’ here as well, centring around the single mother figure of Raimunda and the uncanny reappearance of her mother’s ghost following her death. Her mother’s ghost is not, it seems, a haunting force but rather a benevolent and convenient one, appearing only to help those in need.

Where it goes I found very funny and very moving, driven along the way by Penélope Cruz’s powerhouse performance in the milieu she works best, Spanish melodrama. But Almodóvar shows again his flair for situational jokes that make it an enjoyable journey to take.

One note, if you haven’t seen this film, don’t read the IMDb page because I feel the plot summary listed there is kind of a massive spoiler. I got the full effect of this film going in knowing nothing.

19) Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis)

So another point of constant disagreement with my brother, I’m enjoying the vision I have right now of him reading this top 20 and choking on whatever beer he’s drinking when he sees how high this is.

This makes it into my top 20 for a simple reason: that although I struggled with the film as I watched it, it has absolutely stuck with me for the rest of the year.

A very minimalist, stream-of-consciousness style narrative tells the story of a troop of the French foreign legion in Africa led by the enigmatic Galoup (played by the equally enigmatic Denis Lavant), but ultimately it shows a portrait of a man’s mind imploding under the pressure he places on it.

It’s never made entirely clear what sorts of pressure Galoup is exerting: on the surface he’s trying to repress jealousy, there are fairly overt hints that he’s repressing racist tendencies but hidden in the subtext is a strong homoerotic repression as well.

This all comes to a head with the final sequence which is frankly one of the most gloriously incomprehensible final scenes I’ve ever seen, and it’s this more than anything that made a huge impression on me and has stuck with me. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it all but it provides the most wonderful and cathartic apogee to all the muted and ethereal action preceding it, while at the same time standing in razor-sharp juxtaposition to the film’s overall aesthetic. It’s a great work of art.

18) Shame (2011, Steve McQueen)

I definitely watched Steve McQueen’s filmography in a weird order, starting with Hunger then leaping ahead to 12 Years a Slave before leaping backwards to this sophomore effort. At the same time, it worked out well for this because I believe this is my favourite of the three.

There was actually a kind of trepidation when I approached this, because I’d heard a lot about it being sort of an ugly and confronting film to look at. That’s all true, but I also found this the least confronting of McQueen’s films so maybe there is something to be said for watching them in this order.

Michael Fassbender plays an admirable supporting turn here opposite the star of the film, Michael Fassbender’s penis. But  he is outstanding inhabiting this troubled, obsessive character and embodying his struggle.

The story is unsettling, but in a genuinely engrossing and emotionally engaging way, no doubt  helped by the spirited presence of one of the finest actors working today, Carey Mulligan as Fassbender’s penis’ owner’s sister.

Yeah, it sounds weird but I genuinely enjoyed this film. It’s fascinating, challenging drama.

17) The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

From Fassbender to Fassbinder. I knew absolutely nothing about Fassbinder except that a German bloke I used to chat to on the IMDb message boards used to revere him as one of the greatest all-time filmmakers, so I thought I’d give him a look.

My first impression was sublime. The look and feel of this wartime epic is just gorgeous, and has a similar aesthetic to your best Antonioni films.

The film was moreover a terrific bit of storytelling. It tells the story of Maria Braun, a beautiful and enterprising German woman, and her life in the final stages of World War II and trying to forge a life for herself in its wake.

Certainly in scope it puts me in mind of my number 7 film of last year, Underground, only instead of almost parodical surrealism, The Marriage of Maria Braun is characterised by a grounded sense of reality, and the drama is shot primarily through the perceptive eyes of Maria, whose ruthlessness on the surface belies a frightened vulnerability and a repressed desire for peace and happiness.

It’s a fairly obvious metaphor for the country itself (again like Underground), yet produces a very effective and powerful fable.

16) Eight Men Out (1988, John Sayles)

I’ve been recommending this film to my brother for the best part of the year, owing to how much he liked Moneyball, and I would reiterate that recommendation for anybody who enjoyed it, because this has a similar vibe of a sports film that isn’t so much about the sport itself but what goes on behind the scenes.

Telling the story of the Black Sox scandal - where the unbeatable Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 world series – the film covers all the bases (yes, pun intended… I will wait here and accept your applause before continuing) in a fair, yet provocative manner: the players’ perspective of feeling underpaid and underappreciated, the bookies looking to manipulate the odds, the coach caught in the middle. Sayles also manages to squeeze in the message that the spirit of baseball equates to the spirit of America, only he doesn’t out and out say those exact words like Kevin Costner obviously wanted to in Field of Dreams but rather introduces it as a powerful implication in the wake of this damaging scandal.

The ensemble cast, including John Cusack, John Mahoney, Michael Rooker and David Strathairn (also Charlie Sheen but let’s ignore him), puts on a fantastic show, but ultimately Sayles just does a great job of pulling the myriad elements of this puzzle together to make a really intelligent sports movie.

It’s also genuinely heartbreaking at times and stuck with me for a long time; I don’t get that impact from your standard underdogs-triumph sports movie.

15) Our Hospitality (1923, John G Blystone/Buster Keaton)

Another film I’ve been pimping all year, this was by far the standout of my early-2014 Buster Keaton binge, for a number of reasons.

The premise is charming in and of itself: Keaton is the son of a man killed as part of an ongoing violent feud between two families in the deep south. When he learns that he is has inherited property in the area, he goes to investigate and, on the journey down, falls unwittingly in love with the daughter of the opposing family. When he sets foot in her house to meet the family (and realises who they are), he learns the opposing family’s code of southern hospitality forbids them from killing him provided he remain a guest on their property.

Of course, being Keaton it would be a fairly stolid effort if it just revolved around the situational comedy of the family begrudgingly hosting their guest (which is, though, also entertaining), so he resolves to try and escape from the house, leading to all sorts of Keaton-esque hijinks, now-you-see-me-now-you-don't jokes and entertaining chase sequences.

It all builds, however, to one of the most spectacular stunt sequences outside The General, which was not only hilarious but actually thrilling and kind of mind-boggling. This whole film is just a massive amount of fun.

14) The World's End (2013, Edgar Wright)

Speaking of massive amounts of fun, this is another fine example. The third and – I think – best of Wright’s Cornetto trilogy, I completely embraced this comedy in ways I just didn’t for the previous two films, whatever the reasons.

The main reason I was completely taken in by this was, pure and simple, Simon Pegg. I’ve known that Pegg is an incredibly gifted comedic performer for a very long time (basically, since before he was cool), but I think he reaches the pinnacle of character comedy as the flippantly immature and rambunctious Gary King.

The film traverses a very similar path to the previous two films in the trilogy, in having a group of people going through the fairly mundane motions of everyday existence, blissfully oblivious to the dark forces gathering momentum around them. I found the adversaries in this film perhaps a little derivative (I mean Wright is a pastiche filmmaker, but I mean that they didn't add anything surprising), but they remain a formidable opponent to our heroes, and bring the film to a very different place in the questions they ask.

Like I said, I’m not quite sure of what held me back from fully embracing Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but looking at what I so loved about this film, I think I found the characters in Shaun of the Dead a bit lacking, and the plot setup in Hot Fuzz too slow, whereas in this the characters are all multi-dimensional comic creations and the plot just whizzes forward. I just had more fun with this than I have with any Wright-Pegg-Frost creation since Spaced.

13) The Skin I Live In (La Piel que Habito, 2011, Pedro Almodóvar)

Yes the number one film of my Almodóvar binge, I’d heard good things about this, and yet felt completely left-fielded by what it turned out to be.

Essentially Almodóvar’s foray into the horror genre of sorts, this maintains his fantastical imagination while keeping his focus firmly on questions of gender and the body politic.

Antonio Banderas is chilling as the brilliant but sinister plastic surgeon who is experimenting on a type of superior skin substitute, and really shows depths to his range that I surprisingly never picked up from The Mask of Zorro (despite the support of the Magic Taco character, from the Z to the O to the Double-R O).

Ultimately this film is just a brilliant piece of work, wildly creative in its narrative and visuals, but also cutting right to the bone in the questions it asks about appearance and identity.

12) Show People (1928, King Vidor)

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that many people reading this (Hi, Mother!) haven’t caught up with this film yet, so I’ll just say if you enjoyed The Artist a few years ago, definitely give this one a go.

Made during the glory days of silent cinema, it tells a very self-referential and self-effacing story of a small-town Georgia girl who travels to Hollywood to become a star, and coincidentally, manages to achieve it.

The relationship between Peggy Pepper and her first patron and friend, Billy Boone, forms the heart of the story, but ultimately the film lines up a fight-to-the-death between comedy and drama or, more aptly, low vs high art.

All of the satirical jokes and physical comic sequences are spot on to make this a fun piece to watch, but ultimately this surprised me because of how ahead of its time it feels. I feel like this is one of the earliest examples of Hollywood taking shots at itself, and is so obviously a big influence on The Artist (which I loved) that it deserves to be more widely seen.

11) World's Greatest Dad (2009, Bobcat Goldthwait)

**So I was going to do a major spoiler warning here but the IMDb plot description does the same thing… Still, if you haven’t seen this, do yourself a favour and watch the film before reading this or the IMDb page**

I think like many people, I heard of – and caught up with – this film in the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide this year, after which a lot of people pointed at this as one of Williams’ most rounded performances.

Not only is that true, but the film was worth catching up with for so many reasons. Firstly, I love black comedy, and this maintains absolute perfection in its tone throughout its running time. It’s not funny; in fact it’s unrelentingly bleak and depressing, but there are times when the cynicism is so absurdly inflated that the only possible response is to laugh.

Williams plays a failed writer (/teacher) called Lance, who is father to an unpleasantly antisocial teenage kid who Lance discovers is into autoerotic asphyxiation. When his son's hobby goes inevitably wrong, he decides to honour his son by whitewashing over the perverse details and turning it into a teen-angst suicide instead.

Basically it’s just one long skit of dramatic irony as the people around him become profoundly moved and affected in various ways by the version of events that Lance has created, and Lance finds himself out of his depth as the lie takes on dimensions he hadn't anticipated. This is where it gets very funny and remarkably sad at the same time.

And what really makes one sad catching up with this now is that “very funny and remarkably sad” is the perfect description of Williams himself. 

10) Caché (2005, Michael Haneke)

It took me a long time to catch up with this effort from Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke but it was evidently well worth it.

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche play a married couple who are mysteriously persecuted by an individual posting them surveillance footage shot outside their house. It’s reminiscent of Lynch’s Lost Highway in its setup, but where Lynch veers off the road into weird metaphysical Lynchean territory, Haneke presents a tightly wound and coherent moral thriller.

Auteuil is wonderfully ambivalent as a man obviously struggling with his conscience, which Haneke plays out through a variety of different sequences where he is in turn defensive, aggressive, and awkwardly repentant and deferential.

The central mystery is, of course, left mostly unanswered, although Haneke plays his little tricks with the final sequence to establish a prevalent, easy-fit theory and spark off internet debate. As seductive as the theory is, I think it’s equally seductive to think of this as a sort of nightmare parable (Lynchean in ambiguity) with no easy explanation. Either way it’s a cracking film.

9) The Fisher King (1991, Terry Gilliam)

So I finally caught up with this before Robin Williams’ death, but maybe the events surrounding it made this film climb in my estimation as I reflected back on it, and his performance in particular.

The truth is I wasn’t entirely on board with this film when I first watched it. It seemed a bit long, and Jeff Bridges felt a little miscast at times due to his characteristic nonchalance which seemed misplaced in such a heavy-lifting role.

However, it continued to resonate with increasing volume the more I looked back on it: how Williams’ manic energy is used so economically, how Mercedes Ruehl breathes such spirit and life into what could have been a stock character, how Bridges’ unrelenting impassivity becomes his greatest vulnerability.

Most of all it stuck with me how Gilliam’s typical chaotic, frenetic storytelling is used to create something truly beautiful here, as he puts on the screen little more than his own grappling with the complexities of the human mind. And that final sequence, man it makes me smile just thinking about it.

8) Chungking Express (Chung Hing Sam Lam, 1994, Kar Wai Wong)

Well, people who’ve been paying attention should have known this one was coming. It just wouldn’t be a top ten of the year without a Wong Kar Wai film somewhere in there, would it?

Funnily enough I watched this not knowing that my number 6 film of last year, Fallen Angels, was a follow-up to this film, and yet I did pick up the similar themes while I was watching it. It’s a film about lonely people and the tentative connections they make even while they wallow in their own isolation. It’s so Hong Kong.

Wong’s characteristic eye for the surreal and Christopher Doyle’s cinematography again combine in sublime ways for a lush and vivid look at the metropolis, while the film is elevated above your standard beautiful-looking film by the presence of my favourite actor Tony Leung doing his usual insouciant brooding.

As with all Wong films it will take a revisit to wrap my head fully around the scope of this film, but watching it for the first time it’s just sweet, sad and at times surprisingly hilarious.

7) Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990, Abbas Kiarostami)

And now after my discussion of Certified Copy two posts ago, we return back to Kiarostami’s native Iran and more of his characteristic meta-narrative.

This cute, funny little film plays out as a low-budget courtroom drama, telling the trail of Mr Sabzian, who conned his way into a wealthy Iranian family’s home and life pretending to be the famous Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Kiarostami keeps his camera throughout most of the film focussed on faces, and peers through the changing expressions to try and reveal motivations. The key question in this film is why? What was Mr Sabzian after, money? Or did this poor nobody just want to feel important, respected?

The really sweet thing is that even in his humiliation, Kiarostami gives Sabzian his moment in the spotlight. He’s able to argue eloquently why he meant no harm, no disrespect, he just has an incredibly close and personal relationship to the movies by and about Iranians – a theme that runs throughout Kiarostami’s early works.

There’s a certain sense of mental unbalance in him but Kiarostami treats Sabzian with the respectful fascination of any documentarian with an intriguing subject. Although this isn’t a documentary per se, like much Persian cinema it straddles that line between fictional narrative and reality footage and does so in very humanistic, interesting ways.

6) Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell)

Speaking of humanistic films, this isn’t one in any way.

This non-Archers Archers film - it’s curious to note - was released around the same time as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (actually according to IMDb this was earlier, although didn't get a US release until the following year), both dealing with unstable and malevolent people with parental issues.

What really worked for me in this film is that the atmosphere is just genuinely creepy, and the main character, with the hilariously non-descript name of Mark Lewis, is a completely unnerving, frightening person.

Where Kiarostami used his camera in Close-Up as an instrument of reverence and respect, Michael Powell here celebrates its other use, to expose and lay bare raw emotions – in this case terror.

The character of Helen, Mark’s downstairs lodger, provides the conscience and voice of reason as she tries her spirited best to befriend the lonely and deranged figure upstairs. Where the relationship goes in revealing Mark’s disturbing inner life still makes my skin crawl thinking about it.

When I think of bludgeoning horror films like, well, the Evil Dead series, it really makes me appreciate the subtle atmosphere of dread that older films like this and Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques manage to capture.

5) The Hunt (Jagten, 2012, Thomas Vinterberg)

Ah, here it is. My brother’s number 1 film of last year and his number 1 most-browbeaten recommendation all of this year. For those who don’t know my own story behind this film, I had the chance to watch this on my flight to New York in 2013, but didn’t because although I like Mads Mikkelsen it wasn’t enough of an enticement over the other movies on offer. Then I later discovered it was directed by Thomas Vinterberg and I railed for months about QANTAS’ incompetence in failing to recognise and broadcast the major selling point of this.

So, having finally caught up with it, its presence in my top 5 should be evidence enough that it managed to live up to expectations. Yes, it affected me very gravely, including the fact that I watched it in two parts during my lunch breaks of two consecutive days at work, and the second day I just had this dreadful trepidation about continuing it, because I was still so haunted from the first part.

But this is what Vinterberg does so well, at least in the now-two films of his that I’ve seen, he just yanks you out of your comfort zone into the uncomfortable chair, clamps your eyelids open and makes you watch as he applies psychological torture to his characters.

Unpleasant as the whole experience sounds, and is, he deals with very controversial but pertinent subject matter. In Jagten his subject is that of child abuse, with particular reference to the false accusation and the impact that this has on the alleged perpetrator, those around him but also the accuser themselves.

While it tends to play out in a similar narrative arc to your usual wrongly-accused drama, Vinterberg films some unforgettably surprising twists that just elevate this to another level of haunting outrage.

There are shades in this film similar to Atonement, but Atonement where the false accuser is completely innocent. In fact what makes this film so powerfully affecting is the fact that there isn’t an unsympathetic character in there. Everybody’s reactions and actions are so understandably human. And that’s what Vinterberg does best: provoking by means of holding up a mirror and showing us just how ugly we can be.

4) Weekend (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

Yes, it finally happened. A Godard film cracked my top… anything, really, well anything actually impressive. Do I finally ‘get’ him as a filmmaker? Oh my good heavens no I don’t, but this film is just too fantastic for words. So here’s some words, to describe exactly how fantastic it is:

This is a very, very weird film. There’s no particularly clear narrative, despite the fact that it follows the same two characters on their journey, there are a number of very typical Godard dutch angles, surreal dialogue muted under heavy-handed musical scores, weird lighting effects and so forth, but somehow it created an overall effect that I loved while I was watching, and an impression that stayed with me.

I do love dystopias, as most of you should know, and I also love surrealism in film, and this brings those two together in a wonderfully matter-of-fact way. There’s no reason given why the countryside is littered with abandoned, burning cars, or why people keep spontaneously breaking into belligerent fist-fights, it’s just there.

There’s an episodic feel to this which usually might be seen as a weakness but when it all contributes to a thematic mood, and it can’t detract from the narrative (since the narrative doesn’t exist), it just serves to heighten my interest.

But most importantly, some of the sequences in here are just gob-smacking. In particular, the traffic jam sequence which consists of a seven-minute-long continuous tracking shot, with constant action and frenetic movement: it’s a work of absolutely sublime art and could be a short masterpiece all by itself. It has a start, a middle and an end – and that’s really all it needs.

The film, too, has all of these elements and although it doesn’t make a conventional journey through them, it definitely makes a memorable one.

3) Raise the Red Lantern (Da Hong Deng Long Gao Gao Gua, 1991, Yimou Zhang)

Well after so much bitching in my bottom 31 about some of the choices on that Buzzfeed list, I can report that this film is at the pinnacle of the subgroup of films I watched purely due to its presence on that list.

This lush Chinese melodrama tells the story of a group of four concubine ‘sisters’ playing a cutthroat political game with their master, who decides nightly at which of his concubines’ houses he will ‘raise the red lantern’ and spend the night.

It’s all told through the eyes of the newcomer of the four, who comes with the inherent advantage of being the youngest, but suffers from an initial naivety about the dangerous game already being played within the complex.

Aside from the gorgeous look of the film, I was just captivated throughout by the taut intrigue of the drama and the complex web of political deception practiced in various ways by the sisters, in particular our protagonist as she begins to develop her cunning. At times the ritualistic practice of the household is mocked, while at others it’s a gateway for subterfuge.

This is the film that made Farewell, my Concubine such a disappointment, because although that film has a far grander vision, this film manages to say so much more within a narrow, claustrophobic setting. It’s just masterful storytelling.

2) One Day in September (1999, Kevin Macdonald)

For the second time, I have a documentary at number two on my list, and again it makes it there because of the impeccable construction of its narrative. Unlike Man on Wire, my number 2 film of 2011 though, this is far from an uplifting film experience.

The story of the hostage situation at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where a group of Palestinian terrorists broke into the compound of the Israeli Olympic contingent and held a group of athletes and team officials at gunpoint, this film plays out the situation as it happened (so much of it was captured on camera anyway) and intersperses it with a fascinating set of vox pop interviews from those closely involved.

This is a harrowing, spellbinding account of the events, and as I watched the film my initial feeling of hostility towards the perpetrators slowly grew into a flaming ball of outrage at the media, the officials involved, basically everybody who had a hand in this whole horrific mess.

To be honest, before Spielberg’s completely shit 2005 film Munich I had never heard of this hostage event, but after seeing this film, the feeling that people like me could be unaware of it for so long just further fueled my outrage.

The recent Sydney siege of course brought these events back into sharp focus as people started actually posting photos and descriptions online of what the police were doing. I simply can’t fathom how fucking unconscionably detached from reality you have to be to think this is a good idea, just like I can’t fathom how fucking unconscionably detached from reality the television crews in Munich had to be to film the top-secret police operation as it was happening and just hope that the terrorists didn’t have any of the myriad television sets they knew were in the room tuned to the news.

Kevin Macdonald, who also made the gripping 2003 documentary Touching the Void, hits an absolute home run here. Aside from just being a tense thriller, this is a provocative and challenging film document and a chilling reality check.

I don’t know, should I have a drumroll for the big reveal?

….Sigh...

1) Her (2013, Spike Jonze)

So when I saw The Wolf of Wall Street, I had no hesitation at locking in the rock-bottom slot. Probably a few days later when I watched this, it slotted very comfortably into my top spot of the year. I wasn’t as finite about it then, but I knew it would take something really very special to top this because this, in itself, is really very special. In fact when I saw it I declared that it was my film of the decade so far, and while I’ve had nearly all year to reflect on that statement I haven’t considered revising it. After all, the decade is still only four years old.

What won me over with this film was firstly, as you know, Mother, I love dystopias. But there are dystopias like, say, William Gibson’s Neuromancer or even Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar that are so far removed from the present day that they’re easy to detach from as just the realm of fantasy and imagination.

Spike Jonze here delivers an eerily uncanny future world that is so familiar as to be practically recognisable, so all of his speculations hit home every time. The feeling of detachment and isolation brought on by an overreliance on technology is territory well covered by so many internet articles I’ve read on my smartphone, but never before has it been brought to life so vividly as here.

Into this dreary drone of automatism steps the inimitable Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, a lonely guy who spends his professional life writing surrogate heartfelt letters for clients unable to express themselves to their nearest and dearest (another bit of speculative satire that rings so true).

When he plunges into an unusual relationship with a revolutionary new operating system designed to become his perfect match, Theodore discovers that profound interpersonal connection that he’s been lacking, and realises the far more important implications of that discovery.

The voice performance by Scarlett Johansson as the OS ‘Samantha’ is astoundingly good: vibrant, nuanced and human far more than any OS – and any voice-only performance – has any right to be. Her character’s narrative arc, too, is one of the most poignant and moving stories brought to life in recent memory.

I think the only real criticisms I’ve read of this film (apart from those, like the Guardian’s review, that completely missed the whole fucking point of the story) are that there were false moments or that it seemed too long. For me every moment rang true and felt necessary, and the pace was absolutely perfect. There are also some wonderfully darkly comic moments that Jonze has always excelled at but delivers to their full potential here (most notably the hilariously awkward and sad surrogate sex sequence).

Really though, I’m just an old softy, and I’m a sucker for heartfelt romance stories. Despite its unusual foundation, I genuinely think this is one of the best romance stories told in the last… I don’t know, fifty years of cinema? I would almost go back to 1953, and Roman Holiday, that’s how much I enjoyed it. This was distinctly bittersweet, but utterly moving, humanistic and uplifting.

I enjoyed it the most of any film I saw this year, but I would also not hesitate to call it the best and cleverest film I saw as well.

So with that I finally and belatedly wrap up another month of year-end lists, and can rest for 11 months before starting it all again. Enjoy 2015, Mother!