Listing the best pictures of any given year is tricky business. End of the year lists are like elbows - everybody's got two. The guilds and academies and societies of mutual admiration often screw it all up. They have a depressing tendency to promote pictures that champion content over form - Michael Clayton. They praise pictures that pander rather than provoke - Atonement. And year after year we see some director getting props for reigning in his stylistic tendencies and playing ball with the mainstream - the Coens' No Country For Old Men (last year it was Scorsese for The Departed).

Here's my list of what movies excelled as cinematic works:

1. Grindhouse

There was absolutely, positively no more engaging or rewarding a movie going experience last year than Quentin Tarantino's and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse. I have rarely, if ever, been in a theater where the audience laughed, cheered, jumped, screamed, applauded and basically partied so unashamedly as they did during the three hour running time of Grindhouse. It was like being at a sporting event.

Too bad there wasn't a pogo stick handy. That would have been awesome.

Rodriguez's inspired Planet Terror is the distillation of great cinematic filmmaking, in the most exploitive tradition of Russ Meyer and Lloyd Kaufman. Tarantino's Death Proof is an exercise in genre blending and bending, alternating between the writer-director's trademark dialogue exchanges and his increasingly masterful suspense sequences.
The trailers that open and divide the two movies are also outrageously well done. This is not simply great movie-making. Grindhouse, just by the nature of how it is structured, is nothing less than history-making.

2. There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is devastating. It is immediately a classic, just like the mainstream critics have been saying. And here is why: It is decidedly not the product of current box office trends or popularity. Too the contrary, There Will Be Blood is so thoroughly the work of a single individual's vision, it seems to exist somewhere outside of contemporary cinema, alongside other massive auteurist works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather or The Searchers.
The popular view is that Daniel Day-Lewis makes this picture what it is. Day-Lewis' work is undeniable. But knowing Anderson's powerful facility for working with actors, I have no doubt he could have a made the picture just as effective with John C. Reilly in the Plainview role. Hell, he could have swapped Paul Dano and Day-Lewis's roles and made this thing what it is. This is not an actor's picture. This is a director's picture, through and through.

There Will Be Blood will endure because it is a profound commentary on America, and what it is to be American, which is, essentially, what it is to be a son of a bitch with out-sized dreams and aspirations.

3. The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

Julian Schnabel makes films through the eyes of a painter. And he likes his canvases to be bigger than big. He likes them humongous.

In The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Schnabel turns the camera against the viewer and against the protagonist. He uses the camera as a means of limiting, of constraining, of trapping and oppressing and denying. Schnabel's Diving Bell is something like an education in cinematic technique, for as Schnabel's lead character tries to adjust to a world where his only means of communication is the blink of an eye, the audience is shown ways in which composition, editing, focus and sound all come together to create a unified picture, a world within the frame, a world limited in space.

Where most films strive to make the form of filmmaking transparent, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly succeeds because Schnabel unites the protagonist and the viewer in a psychological suture, using film form rather than literary form as the means to the end, an achievement that is nothing less than glacial in size, as the end titles suggest.

Posted in Moviegasm by TVgasm Staff at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Last Comment: sutterkane on Feb 6, 2008 12:11 PM.