With The Dark Knight Rises in theaters, what better time to examine the film that, after Memento, proved to Warner Bros thatChristopher Nolan could handle a larger budget and an A-list cast. In remaking a sly, subversive Norwegian neo-noir, Nolan offered a glimpse into the good and bad he would bring to spectacle cinema over the next decade. True to his hard-to-summarize nature, Nolan at once simplifies the psychological and moral miasma of the original while adding various touches that make his more streamlined, narrative-centric version more ambitious an overview of guilt. I know of no one else who can simplify his way into some form of depth, which may be why I cannot dismiss Nolan as I think I should. Nevertheless, I prefer the rawer, harsher original.
My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.
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Showing posts with label Features. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Features. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 1
Friday, July 20
Charles Chaplin's 11 Features
[The following is an entry in the monthly Favorite Directors Blogathon. A master list of my choices for all 12 filmmakers (with links updated as they are posted) can be found here.]
It is all to easy to undervalue Charles Chaplin, something that can be seen even in some early reviews for this site. His camera style, primitive even by the standards of the silent era, offers few thrills for the aesthetically minded. His infamous sentimentality becomes the focal point of critical distrust and a convenient excuse to attack a sacred cow. And as a comic, he lacks the technical dazzle of Keaton, the epic audacity of Lloyd, often suffering when placed in (meaningless) competition with his peers.
And yet, the Tramp endures. Chaplin may not be, as Shaw once said, the only genius to come out of the movies, but he was certainly the first, and still the greatest. Repeated viewing reveals his basic camerawork as a means of prioritizing his perfectionist set design, which often lends itself both to gags and insights into those who move within it. More importantly, Chaplin cedes attention to the acting which, in contrast to Chaplin's reputation as a shameless manipulator, is among the earliest examples of carefully composed naturalism in cinema. And unlike the other silent clowns (save Laurel and Hardy, whose use of slapstick as a form of silent dialogue somewhat future-proofed them), Chaplin weathered the transition to talkies superbly, however reluctantly and belatedly he made the switch. His sound features also double as clarifications and critiques of his silent Tramp figure, the more forthright political and autobiographical content not an intrusion but merely a more visible display of what was always there. Because of this sustained level of quality, all 11 of Chaplin's features rate a mention, and most of them a place in any canon. As for which are all-time masterpieces and which must settle for the faint praise of "merely" masterful, read on:
11. The Circus (1928)
Pound for pound, this may be Chaplin's funniest feature. Why then, should it be at the bottom? For one thing, it shows off the least ambition of any of Chaplin's full-length films, content to remain in a single area and to play harmless jokes that do not even stretch the possibilities of circus performance, much less comment upon it. For another, the relative lack of sentiment cited by some as the film's greatest virtue is wrong. The Circus doesn't lack sentiment, it woefully misapplies it. True, Chaplin does not put much pathos into The Circus, but what is there is lazy, arbitrary and almost self-parodic. The mistreatment of the ringleader's daughter marks a sub-Dickensian misstep for an artist who elsewhere made himself Dickens' equal, and it is amusing that those who pooh-pooh Chaplin's sentiment tend to favor this, the worst example of it. Nevertheless, the slapstick bits mark the highpoint of Chaplin's physical comedy, from the marvelous early chase through a funhouse (complete with an extended hall of mirrors bit that forecasts the finale of The Lady from Shanghai) to all the acrobatic stunts in the circus, which Chaplin handles with precision while also giving the impression that the Tramp is doing it all by freak accident.
10. The Kid (1921)
Chaplin's first directed feature shows off the filmmaker's talents at their rawest. Its setup is thin, and its emotions exist at the surface, a bundle of nerve endings exposed to the wind. The climactic chase, of the Tramp ambling over rooftops to catch up to the truck taking his adoptive urchin to an orphanage, is one of Chaplin's most basic yet most thrilling setpieces and an early showcase for the emotional power of cinema. Elsewhere, Chaplin is buoyed by Jackie Coogan, who gives one of the great child performances. Their rapport is natural, harmonious, and hilarious. If the climax points toward Chaplin's later, more refined emotional peaks, the underplayed comedy between Chaplin and Coogan also points toward the great strides the director would later make with even subtler acting. Also a treat for the sly recurring gag of the father and son's con game, effectively creating work for themselves through mischief (a joke repeated more benignly in The Gold Rush and far, far more viciously in Monsieur Verdoux).
9. Modern Times (1936)
Nearly a decade after The Jazz Singer hit theaters, Chaplin was still clinging stubbornly to the silent form, and Modern Times deftly combines his anxieties over sociopolitical realities in the Depression (a period he largely sat out despite presaging it with his Tramp character) with his fear of obsolescence as a filmmaker. These dual fears converge best in the early, iconic image of the Tramp being passed through the inside of industrial machinery as just another cog or, conversely, as a strip of film through a projector. Either way, Chaplin is being used and spit out unceremoniously, and the combination of populist zeal and self-pity is never matched anywhere else in the film. Then again, even this glorious scene feels like a tacked-on bit from City Lights, which said in the throwaway gag of the politicians' tinny squawking everything Modern Times wants to say in 90 minutes.
8. A Woman of Paris (1923)
Chaplin suffered his first flop when he stayed completely behind the camera for this 1923 drama about a woman unable to be with her lover because of his parents' disapproval, a separation that eventually turns her into the sort of person they always considered her. This grim staging of self-fulfilling prejudice marks a tremendous leap in storytelling ability for Chaplin, and Edna Purviance, his friend, ex-lover and trusted colleague, gives a nuanced, layered performance that may not have impressed audiences but was a watershed for other filmmakers. Chaplin, though depressed by the poor commercial reception, did not forget what it taught him, and his later features all benefit from the subtlety and depth he explored in this downbeat work.
7. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
Chaplin's final feature is also the one that most routinely comes in for a beating, uniting the casual admirers and die-hard fans in dismissal. Yet this much-maligned piece, featuring Marlon Brando at his most modulated and manipulated and Sophia Loren as, essentially, the Tramp, is a beautiful farewell for the artist (the mise-en-scène is among Chaplin's most vibrant) and his most purely comedic work since Modern Times. But to call it a return to form—his or anyone else's—would be inaccurate. As Richard Brody has said, Chaplin revises his interpretation of slapstick to be the result of "efforts to conform to bourgeois propriety." That shows a fundamental growth on Chaplin's part even at the end—this is at least the second major thematic overhaul of his love of physical comedy in his career. It also, when one considers how similarly Tati employed slapstick in that year's Playtime, proves that Chaplin, who turned to both color and widescreen for the first time, was modern to the last frame.
6. The Great Dictator (1940)
Chaplin belatedly moved into sound, but he made up for it by presciently slamming Hitler and America's reluctance to enter the war. Though Chaplin typically structures his films as a series of vignettes, The Great Dictator displays a command of narrative progression integral to the satirical effect of the film. By starting in World War I, Chaplin grounds the film in historical and atmospheric tones, establishing the circumstances that might see a figure like Hynkel/Hitler come to power before slowly but surely deflating the iconic figure and revealing him to be a fool. Playing two roles, Chaplin teases a Prince and the Pauper scenario throughout, but he only delivers on it at the end when the audience has had time to consider the implications of a Jewish barber passing for the Hitler stand-in. And that much-contested final speech delivered by the barber-as-Hynkel (and really, as everyone admits, just as Chaplin) may be didactic, but one should note that Chaplin's rant against hatred extends beyond German anti-Semitism and comes rather closer to home.
5. Limelight (1952)
At face value, Chaplin's most self-pitying work, the tale of a has-been superstar trying to have one last bite of the cherry before fading away. To be sure, the climax of Chaplin and Buster Keaton performing a glorious travesty of a show-stopper, is as devastating as it is thrilling, a reminder of what and who we as a people allowed ourselves to forget. Yet the rich layer of irony under everything lends even the most heartbreaking moments an air of defiance. In embodying an outdated, miserable clown, Chaplin paradoxically rejuvenates himself, and when Calvero goes out the way he wanted, he does not represent Chaplin's own departure but the expulsion of all the things that could weigh him down. Granted, he only made two more films after this, but Chaplin freed himself with Limelight.
4. A King in New York (1957)
A King in New York builds off the deceptive self-justification of Limelight, swapping the departing (or departed, rather) for the returning, defaced royal who suffers further indignities back in America. But really, the "return" merely sets the stage for Chaplin's own counterattack, an attack on contemporary American culture dated in some spots and disturbingly timeless in others. His gags at the expense of teen music and CinemaScope do smack of age and disconnect, but his jabs at a country in thrall to paranoia find solid traction. Chaplin's own son, Michael, even gives Jackie Coogan a run for his money in terms of great child performances, playing a radical child who parodies Chaplin's tendencies for preaching by annoyingly spouting off Marxist rhetoric without provocation. But he also makes for one of Chaplin's most vicious, agonizing scenes when the lad returns late in the film having sold out and named names to protect his parents, shuffling around as if lobotomized and barely able to inhale without breaking into fresh sobs of self-loathing. The only counterpoint to such darkness is Chaplin's slapstick, presented as a weapon against fascistic thought control in America as it was for the same in Germany in The Great Dictator.
3. City Lights (1931)
God knows I love me some Pre-Code films, but compare their contemporary look and feel to the "obsolete" City Lights and tell me which is more timeless. From the aforementioned sound joke to the depiction of a millionaire's suicidal depression as almost a luxury compared to what the Tramp and the blind girl go through on a daily basis, Chaplin hints at the more barbed nature of films to come. But this also marks the apex of his sweetness on film, with Chaplin's interactions with Virginia Cherrill painstakingly romantic despite, and even because of, the Tramp's occasional lapse of peevishness. Then there's the finale, perhaps the greatest in cinema, a masterfully acted swell of apprehension and loving hope that could cause flash flooding from the onslaught of tears it elicits.
2. The Gold Rush (1925)
Mixing the raw sentiment of The Kid with the subtle dramatic refinement of A Woman in Paris, The Gold Rush attains such a mastery of emotional control that the routine hilarity of its gags is almost a secondary pleasure. But to consider one without the other would rob the film of its immaculate construction, with every gag—no matter how separate from the narrative at hand—joined seamlessly to the rest of the film as soon as it concludes. Everyone remembers the reverie of the roll dance, that most delicate of physical gags. But how many recall that immediately after this wonderful moment, Chaplin crushes the Tramp back to reality with the realization of abandonment and loneliness? No Chaplin film so fluidly offers character depth without losing a second of pace.
1. Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
Chaplin’s postwar satire bowed to intense critical savagery and commercial failure, yet none of his films has aged so well. A vicious attack on capitalistic values, Verdoux inverts the Tramp’s inner sweetness and outward defeat into a heinous Bluebeard figure who marries and kills rich widows to take their money. Verdoux’s self-justification takes capitalism to its dark extremity, but James Agee was right to note the effectiveness with which Chaplin also crafts a psychological portrait of a man who relies so completely on his wife’s love to absolve him that the loss of that relationship is doubly devastating for tearing the veil from his eyes. Verdoux's speech to the judgmental crowd at his trial, in which he notes the way that higher numbers always "sanctify" in murder and that they shall all meet him again someday in a hot place, reaches such levels of acidic bile as have never been replicated in American film. Next to this, Dr. Strangelove is as sociopolitically explosive as a Judd Apatow movie.
It is all to easy to undervalue Charles Chaplin, something that can be seen even in some early reviews for this site. His camera style, primitive even by the standards of the silent era, offers few thrills for the aesthetically minded. His infamous sentimentality becomes the focal point of critical distrust and a convenient excuse to attack a sacred cow. And as a comic, he lacks the technical dazzle of Keaton, the epic audacity of Lloyd, often suffering when placed in (meaningless) competition with his peers.
And yet, the Tramp endures. Chaplin may not be, as Shaw once said, the only genius to come out of the movies, but he was certainly the first, and still the greatest. Repeated viewing reveals his basic camerawork as a means of prioritizing his perfectionist set design, which often lends itself both to gags and insights into those who move within it. More importantly, Chaplin cedes attention to the acting which, in contrast to Chaplin's reputation as a shameless manipulator, is among the earliest examples of carefully composed naturalism in cinema. And unlike the other silent clowns (save Laurel and Hardy, whose use of slapstick as a form of silent dialogue somewhat future-proofed them), Chaplin weathered the transition to talkies superbly, however reluctantly and belatedly he made the switch. His sound features also double as clarifications and critiques of his silent Tramp figure, the more forthright political and autobiographical content not an intrusion but merely a more visible display of what was always there. Because of this sustained level of quality, all 11 of Chaplin's features rate a mention, and most of them a place in any canon. As for which are all-time masterpieces and which must settle for the faint praise of "merely" masterful, read on:
11. The Circus (1928)
Pound for pound, this may be Chaplin's funniest feature. Why then, should it be at the bottom? For one thing, it shows off the least ambition of any of Chaplin's full-length films, content to remain in a single area and to play harmless jokes that do not even stretch the possibilities of circus performance, much less comment upon it. For another, the relative lack of sentiment cited by some as the film's greatest virtue is wrong. The Circus doesn't lack sentiment, it woefully misapplies it. True, Chaplin does not put much pathos into The Circus, but what is there is lazy, arbitrary and almost self-parodic. The mistreatment of the ringleader's daughter marks a sub-Dickensian misstep for an artist who elsewhere made himself Dickens' equal, and it is amusing that those who pooh-pooh Chaplin's sentiment tend to favor this, the worst example of it. Nevertheless, the slapstick bits mark the highpoint of Chaplin's physical comedy, from the marvelous early chase through a funhouse (complete with an extended hall of mirrors bit that forecasts the finale of The Lady from Shanghai) to all the acrobatic stunts in the circus, which Chaplin handles with precision while also giving the impression that the Tramp is doing it all by freak accident.
10. The Kid (1921)
Chaplin's first directed feature shows off the filmmaker's talents at their rawest. Its setup is thin, and its emotions exist at the surface, a bundle of nerve endings exposed to the wind. The climactic chase, of the Tramp ambling over rooftops to catch up to the truck taking his adoptive urchin to an orphanage, is one of Chaplin's most basic yet most thrilling setpieces and an early showcase for the emotional power of cinema. Elsewhere, Chaplin is buoyed by Jackie Coogan, who gives one of the great child performances. Their rapport is natural, harmonious, and hilarious. If the climax points toward Chaplin's later, more refined emotional peaks, the underplayed comedy between Chaplin and Coogan also points toward the great strides the director would later make with even subtler acting. Also a treat for the sly recurring gag of the father and son's con game, effectively creating work for themselves through mischief (a joke repeated more benignly in The Gold Rush and far, far more viciously in Monsieur Verdoux).
9. Modern Times (1936)
Nearly a decade after The Jazz Singer hit theaters, Chaplin was still clinging stubbornly to the silent form, and Modern Times deftly combines his anxieties over sociopolitical realities in the Depression (a period he largely sat out despite presaging it with his Tramp character) with his fear of obsolescence as a filmmaker. These dual fears converge best in the early, iconic image of the Tramp being passed through the inside of industrial machinery as just another cog or, conversely, as a strip of film through a projector. Either way, Chaplin is being used and spit out unceremoniously, and the combination of populist zeal and self-pity is never matched anywhere else in the film. Then again, even this glorious scene feels like a tacked-on bit from City Lights, which said in the throwaway gag of the politicians' tinny squawking everything Modern Times wants to say in 90 minutes.
8. A Woman of Paris (1923)
Chaplin suffered his first flop when he stayed completely behind the camera for this 1923 drama about a woman unable to be with her lover because of his parents' disapproval, a separation that eventually turns her into the sort of person they always considered her. This grim staging of self-fulfilling prejudice marks a tremendous leap in storytelling ability for Chaplin, and Edna Purviance, his friend, ex-lover and trusted colleague, gives a nuanced, layered performance that may not have impressed audiences but was a watershed for other filmmakers. Chaplin, though depressed by the poor commercial reception, did not forget what it taught him, and his later features all benefit from the subtlety and depth he explored in this downbeat work.
7. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
Chaplin's final feature is also the one that most routinely comes in for a beating, uniting the casual admirers and die-hard fans in dismissal. Yet this much-maligned piece, featuring Marlon Brando at his most modulated and manipulated and Sophia Loren as, essentially, the Tramp, is a beautiful farewell for the artist (the mise-en-scène is among Chaplin's most vibrant) and his most purely comedic work since Modern Times. But to call it a return to form—his or anyone else's—would be inaccurate. As Richard Brody has said, Chaplin revises his interpretation of slapstick to be the result of "efforts to conform to bourgeois propriety." That shows a fundamental growth on Chaplin's part even at the end—this is at least the second major thematic overhaul of his love of physical comedy in his career. It also, when one considers how similarly Tati employed slapstick in that year's Playtime, proves that Chaplin, who turned to both color and widescreen for the first time, was modern to the last frame.
6. The Great Dictator (1940)
Chaplin belatedly moved into sound, but he made up for it by presciently slamming Hitler and America's reluctance to enter the war. Though Chaplin typically structures his films as a series of vignettes, The Great Dictator displays a command of narrative progression integral to the satirical effect of the film. By starting in World War I, Chaplin grounds the film in historical and atmospheric tones, establishing the circumstances that might see a figure like Hynkel/Hitler come to power before slowly but surely deflating the iconic figure and revealing him to be a fool. Playing two roles, Chaplin teases a Prince and the Pauper scenario throughout, but he only delivers on it at the end when the audience has had time to consider the implications of a Jewish barber passing for the Hitler stand-in. And that much-contested final speech delivered by the barber-as-Hynkel (and really, as everyone admits, just as Chaplin) may be didactic, but one should note that Chaplin's rant against hatred extends beyond German anti-Semitism and comes rather closer to home.
5. Limelight (1952)
At face value, Chaplin's most self-pitying work, the tale of a has-been superstar trying to have one last bite of the cherry before fading away. To be sure, the climax of Chaplin and Buster Keaton performing a glorious travesty of a show-stopper, is as devastating as it is thrilling, a reminder of what and who we as a people allowed ourselves to forget. Yet the rich layer of irony under everything lends even the most heartbreaking moments an air of defiance. In embodying an outdated, miserable clown, Chaplin paradoxically rejuvenates himself, and when Calvero goes out the way he wanted, he does not represent Chaplin's own departure but the expulsion of all the things that could weigh him down. Granted, he only made two more films after this, but Chaplin freed himself with Limelight.
4. A King in New York (1957)
A King in New York builds off the deceptive self-justification of Limelight, swapping the departing (or departed, rather) for the returning, defaced royal who suffers further indignities back in America. But really, the "return" merely sets the stage for Chaplin's own counterattack, an attack on contemporary American culture dated in some spots and disturbingly timeless in others. His gags at the expense of teen music and CinemaScope do smack of age and disconnect, but his jabs at a country in thrall to paranoia find solid traction. Chaplin's own son, Michael, even gives Jackie Coogan a run for his money in terms of great child performances, playing a radical child who parodies Chaplin's tendencies for preaching by annoyingly spouting off Marxist rhetoric without provocation. But he also makes for one of Chaplin's most vicious, agonizing scenes when the lad returns late in the film having sold out and named names to protect his parents, shuffling around as if lobotomized and barely able to inhale without breaking into fresh sobs of self-loathing. The only counterpoint to such darkness is Chaplin's slapstick, presented as a weapon against fascistic thought control in America as it was for the same in Germany in The Great Dictator.
3. City Lights (1931)
God knows I love me some Pre-Code films, but compare their contemporary look and feel to the "obsolete" City Lights and tell me which is more timeless. From the aforementioned sound joke to the depiction of a millionaire's suicidal depression as almost a luxury compared to what the Tramp and the blind girl go through on a daily basis, Chaplin hints at the more barbed nature of films to come. But this also marks the apex of his sweetness on film, with Chaplin's interactions with Virginia Cherrill painstakingly romantic despite, and even because of, the Tramp's occasional lapse of peevishness. Then there's the finale, perhaps the greatest in cinema, a masterfully acted swell of apprehension and loving hope that could cause flash flooding from the onslaught of tears it elicits.
2. The Gold Rush (1925)
Mixing the raw sentiment of The Kid with the subtle dramatic refinement of A Woman in Paris, The Gold Rush attains such a mastery of emotional control that the routine hilarity of its gags is almost a secondary pleasure. But to consider one without the other would rob the film of its immaculate construction, with every gag—no matter how separate from the narrative at hand—joined seamlessly to the rest of the film as soon as it concludes. Everyone remembers the reverie of the roll dance, that most delicate of physical gags. But how many recall that immediately after this wonderful moment, Chaplin crushes the Tramp back to reality with the realization of abandonment and loneliness? No Chaplin film so fluidly offers character depth without losing a second of pace.
1. Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
Chaplin’s postwar satire bowed to intense critical savagery and commercial failure, yet none of his films has aged so well. A vicious attack on capitalistic values, Verdoux inverts the Tramp’s inner sweetness and outward defeat into a heinous Bluebeard figure who marries and kills rich widows to take their money. Verdoux’s self-justification takes capitalism to its dark extremity, but James Agee was right to note the effectiveness with which Chaplin also crafts a psychological portrait of a man who relies so completely on his wife’s love to absolve him that the loss of that relationship is doubly devastating for tearing the veil from his eyes. Verdoux's speech to the judgmental crowd at his trial, in which he notes the way that higher numbers always "sanctify" in murder and that they shall all meet him again someday in a hot place, reaches such levels of acidic bile as have never been replicated in American film. Next to this, Dr. Strangelove is as sociopolitically explosive as a Judd Apatow movie.
Wednesday, July 18
Favorite Directors Blogathon
My blogging buddy Carson Lund recently told me about a meme started by Loren Rosson that highlights a favorite director each month and ranks his or her best work. Given that I already had a good 10 or so documents on my computer keeping track of rankings for some of my favorite filmmakers, I did not require much incentive to throw my own hat in the ring. Loren (and, I think, Carson) are covering their 12 favorite directors, but I might take a slightly different tack. Many of my top 12 would overlap with both Loren's and Carson's choices, and while it would be fun to compare what floats our particular boats with certain filmmakers, I'd rather spotlight a few other choices I love just as much as, say, Malick or Kubrick. There will still be some shared choices (I think all three of us will cover David Lynch), but this way it won't all just be the same picks.
Anyway, here's my list:
July: Charles Chaplin (The Full 11 Features)
August: Steven Soderbergh (Top 10)
September: Tony Scott (Top 10) [NOTE: I've bumped Roman Polanski to pay tribute to Tony Scott. Polanski list to come later]
October: David Lynch (Top 10), Roman Polanski (Top 10)
November: Martin Scorsese (Top 10)
December: Michael Powell (Top 10)
January: Howard Hawks (Top 10)
February: Abbas Kiarostami (Top 10)
March: Jean-Luc Godard (Top 20, maybe 25)
April: Claire Denis (Top 10)
May: Eric Rohmer (Top 15)
June: Ozu Yasujiro (Top 15)
Anyway, here's my list:
July: Charles Chaplin (The Full 11 Features)
August: Steven Soderbergh (Top 10)
September: Tony Scott (Top 10) [NOTE: I've bumped Roman Polanski to pay tribute to Tony Scott. Polanski list to come later]
October: David Lynch (Top 10), Roman Polanski (Top 10)
November: Martin Scorsese (Top 10)
December: Michael Powell (Top 10)
January: Howard Hawks (Top 10)
February: Abbas Kiarostami (Top 10)
March: Jean-Luc Godard (Top 20, maybe 25)
April: Claire Denis (Top 10)
May: Eric Rohmer (Top 15)
June: Ozu Yasujiro (Top 15)
Monday, January 2
Blind Spots 2012
So, various bloggers I read and like have decided to address various, wait for it, blind spots in their movie viewing in 2012. I consider much of my blog writing an attempt to fill various gaps in knowledge, but I love a good writing meme, and considering how many "must-sees" end up falling through the cracks as I get distracted with other things, perhaps listing 12 here (one per month) will at least commit me to watching some of the movies I tell myself I must see with all haste.
Actress [a.k.a. Centre Stage] (Stanely Kwan, 1992)
I love me some Maggie Cheung, and this film sports what, as far as I've seen, is her most lauded performance. Based on the tragically short life of '30s Chinese film star Ruan Lingyu (whose own seminal film The Goddess I also need to see), Actress got plenty of plaudits, the most prominent of which was Jonathan Rosenbaum listing it among the best films of the '90s.
L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)
A) It's Robert Bresson, thus necessitating I see it. B) It's on damn near every serious list of the best films of the '80s, a decade I'm still slowly mapping, cinema-wise.
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
I believe it was on Twitter that the Self-Styled Siren (probably the best film writer in the country at the moment) argued for the underrating of William Wyler, furthermore arguing that this movie was the best Best Picture winner ever. I think she meant that literally, but I also got the sense she was speaking in terms of the mental image of a Best Picture winner, a.k.a. a typically middlebrow, easily digestible affair. But if the Siren sees artistry in it, you can be damn sure it's there, and I love the handful of Wylers I've seen.
Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
Comparisons to Kubrick and a celebrated score by my favorite modern film composer, Alexandre Desplat. I have neglected this for far too long.
Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Supposedly one of the most unsettling films ever made. Given my preference for horror in the Repulsion vein of disruption and disturbance over jump scares, Nic Roeg's movie should be for me.
Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)
This has just been a major oversight I've sought to correct for a while. Murnau was perhaps the first poet of the cinema, and I've been looking forward to completing my gaps in his filmography.
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
Another film starring Maggie Cheung, this one by one of my favorite modern directors, Olivier Assayas, and drawing its subject matter at least partially from the director of the next film on my list...
Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916)
I've only seen short films by Feuillade and found them to be incredible, the perfect balance between Méliès' fantasy and the Lumières' flat documentation. I'd therefore like to check out one of his serials, and I think I'll start with this one, though Les Vampires and the Fantômas series are also priorities.
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)
Davies Distant Voices, Still Lives is a masterpiece, and this sequel seems to get about as much praise. I figured I'd watch this in anticipation of Davies' new film, The Deep Blue Sea, which toured the festival circuit last year but has yet to get wider release in the States.
Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
The only von Sternberg/Dietrich collaboration I've seen is The Blue Angel, but I have it on good authority from several that this commercially unavailable pairing brings out the best in both of them. Considering how great The Blue Angel is, I can't wait.
Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
I am deeply ashamed to admit I've never seen any Minnelli film, a problem I hope to rectify in the coming days with my new Blu-Ray of his Meet Me in St. Louis. But while the rest of his acclaimed musicals are also on my to-watch list, I must finally stop neglecting to see this drama, praised to the high heavens by damn near everyone I know and follow who's seen it.
There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
Douglas Sirk, maker of hyperstylized Technicolor films, also made equally artistic black and white films, or so I'm told of his four monochrome features. I can't remember where I saw a rave for this but it made me more eager to watch it than even Sirk's Faulkner adaptation The Tarnished Angels, which I may also get around to this year.
Saturday, December 31
2011: The Year in Review
The last year-end post, I swear. Last year I did a similar round-up separate to my best-of list, but this year I had even more reason to hand out "awards" for various accomplishments. I joined the Online Film Critics Society in October, and just last week I sent in my first ballot for their awards. Since I had all that written down, why not post it here along with other final mentions I wanted to make to close out this excellent year in film? Besides, this year has been so wonderful that I'm almost reluctant to let it go without one last good celebration. So without further ado, the awards:
Best Director
Terrence Malick, Tree of Life
Reaching the apotheosis of his fragmentary, personal and universal side, Malick moves beyond Emerson into the realm of Joyce, finding a mix between the microcosmic and universal that shouldn't work (and doesn't, for many) but makes for the most deeply felt experience I can recall at the movies. Malick folds time and space onto his humble Texan family, at once emphasizing their unremarkable perpetuation of eternal cycles and their own variations and decorations that make them singular among the other links of this chain.
Runners-up
Raul Ruiz, Mysteries of Lisbon
Apicatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Kelly Reichardt, Meek's Cutoff
Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In
Best Actor
Peyman Moaadi, A Separation
Simultaneously selfish and selfless, defiant but quietly despairing, Peyman Moaadi is frustrating and heartbreaking as the estranged husband trying to care for his daughter and Alzheimer's-ridden father. But his self-righteousness slowly fizzles as he inadvertently brings more stress and potential ruin upon his splintered family. Moaadi never loses the character even as Nader moves the story into darker, more complex moral realms, and when he sins, he does so with wrenching believability. Much of the film relies on him, and Moaadi pulls it off flawlessly.
Runners-up
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
George Clooney, The Descendants
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Hunter McCracken- The Tree of Life
Best Actress
Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
Capturing depression better than practically anyone I've ever seen on the screen, Kirsten Dunst's bravura performance in Melancholia is the endothermic opposite of the usual von Trier heroine. Where his other leads suffer, she seems to inflict suffering, not in the grisly and loony way of Gainsbourg's She in Antichrist but in a cosmic sense. The chickens come home to roost for the world that so viciously tore down previous protagonists, as Dunst's powerfully detached, numbed woe brings about the planet's destruction. Payback's a bitch, and Dunst is subtly terrifying as she presides over the apocalypse with a silent approval for the end of days.
Runners-up
Mia Wasikowska, Jane Eyre
Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Michelle Williams, Meek's Cutoff
Best Supporting Actor
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
There are huge gaps in my familiarity with Christopher Plummer's filmography, but this is the brightest and most touching role I've seen him take. And what a performance it is: seen in the protagonist's flashbacks, Plummer's newly out dad is alive and energetic even as we mostly see him in hospitals. Having hid his real self behind a wall of emotional remove, Hal basically has to live his denied life in the four years between his confession and his death, and Plummer grounds the man's newfound joie de vivre in a half-spoken past of deep pain and misguided decisions. His son, who remembers only an almost professionally loving man, cannot comprehend his dad's sudden sweetness, but that doesn't stop him from being completely devastated by Hal's death. Hell, I was too.
Runners-up
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Albert Brooks, Drive
Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life
Patton Oswalt, Young Adult
Best Supporting Actress
Elena Anaya, The Skin I Live In
Even without the film's twist, Elena Anaya gives a powerful performance as a compliant prisoner of a madman. Once the full truth is revealed, however, Anaya becomes the crux of the film's gender politics and its ingenious statements on the way gender roles have been socially ingrained into our biology. Anaya is as mysterious and affecting after the reveal as she was before, and she helps The Skin I Live In become one of Almodóvar's best.
Runners-up
Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life
Hayley Atwell, Captain America, The First Avenger
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Rose Byrne, Bridesmaids
Best Ensemble
The Descendants
Alexander Payne's film is not only stacked with great actors, they each get a moment to shine as friends, family, and even a few enemies filter through a hectic time in Matt King's life. The leads are superb, with Clooney giving his best performance to date and Shailene Woodley offering up one of the best youth performances in years, but the supporting cast rises to meet them at every turn. I can't discuss Judy Greer's performance without spoiling it entirely, but she is but one of many fantastic side-players, along with Beau Bridges' Dude-esque burnout with a buried edge and Robert Forster's father-in-law, who deals with his grief in anger. I can't help but love a film that knows the value of a good set of character actors.
Runners-up
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Bridesmaids
Best Screenplay
A Separation
There's no way to summarize Asghar Farhadi's A Separation without leaving out a massive part of its essence. To call it a marital drama misses how quickly it becomes a more complicated legal narrative, which also omits certain twists and turns that deepen it. And to call it a social critique of Iran is accurate but limiting, leaving out the universal truths of humanity it explores. No one in this film is fully pitiable, but neither are they loathsome. These characters are the most absorbing and compelling of the year, all thanks to Farhadi's script.
Worst Screenplay
Green Lantern
My head says Red State, with its belligerent but directionless tweet-ready screeds, but my heart calls out for Green Lantern, which proves that comic-book writing is clearly much harder than some snobs think. Four (four!) writers worked on this abhorrent mess and demonstrated an incompetence with the material that borders on willful disrespect. Unable to conceive of the dramatic possibilities of a man so fearless he is stubborn, they rewrite him as a smarmy coward who fall into heroism solely through plot holes. How can Hal Jordan quit the Lantern Corps before he's even finished training but keep the ring? Why does an eons-old rule about the ring seeking out the fearless suddenly change to the ring simply believing in someone to become fearless after a while, like some supportive chum? And why does the script have Hal beg the Guardians to let him defend his planet when no one has even remotely objected to this? Not a damn thing in this horrid screenplay makes sense, even with its own internal logic.
Best Editing
Film Socialisme
It actually wasn't easy to vote for Godard given the competition. Terrence Malick's battery of editors made outright tone poetry of the director's usual over-coverage, while Carlos Madaleno and Valeria Sarmiento made Raul Rúiz's 266-minute epic as fleet as a blockbuster. But no other film was as intellectually provocative and dense as Film Socialisme, and the editing serves as the foundation for its various dialectics and visual puns. Godard does not simply treat editing as a means of progressing or even just juxtaposing, and he generated a puzzle to be mulled over for years with his work here.
Runners-up
The Tree of Life
Mysteries of Lisbon
Worst Editing
Red State
Not only is the linking of the shots a prime example of the worst kind of "realism" action, the overall pace is so erratic that the film never establishes itself before its sudden upending. The film has no remote sense of pace, slamming on the brakes instantly for a monologue that was, amazingly, even longer in earlier cuts and should have been trimmed more. Smith's film suffers enough from its muddled messaging, but the editing only makes everything worse.
Best Score
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Not as instantly classic as Reznor and Ross' Social Network soundtrack, this bleak soundscape is nevertheless head and shoulders above a generally weak year for scores (I was surprised that none of Alexandre Desplat's scores won me over as they usually do). Where both Williams' and Bource's compositions were giddy, ebullient throwbacks, this all-too-modern digital howl was as cold and static as ice. This has the effect of generating not even dread but a simple numbness that affects the extremities like a bitter winter day. Impressively, the pair totally avoid rehashing their previous work, and indeed this score is less thriller-like, despite the film's subject matter, than The Social Network's. God only knows how long they can keep this up, but for the moment, no one can touch Reznor and Ross.
Runners-up
John Williams, The Adventures of Tintin
Basement Jaxx, Attack the Block
Cliff Martinez, Drive
Most undervalued player
Oscar Isaac, Sucker Punch and Drive
As the villain in Zack Snyder's unbearable sub-feminist romp, Isaac actually did a great job of capturing oily misogyny and power-hungry masculinity as Blue, creating a more concrete and tactile sense of danger and menace than Snyder's huge but weightless CGI sequences. In Drive, he was even better. The second his character comes on-screen, freshly released from prison, a dread rises in the throat that he will be the bog-standard bad father and obstacle in the budding romance between Driver and Irene. But Isaac sidesteps that pitfall by making Standard into a decent, loving man who got mixed up in the wrong crowd and is now desperate to protect his family. In what may be that film's most touching scene, he describes meeting Irene and falling in love, speaking with wistfulness, a twinge of humor, and a lot of regret that creates a character's whole life in just a few minutes.
Best Heroes
1. Ameena Matthews, The Interrupters
In a film about real-life heroism, none emerge more iconic than Ameena Matthews. The daughter of a notorious gang leader and an ex-con like all the rest of the interrupters, Matthews is not some ivory tower do-gooder merely looking to help out. She has been the people she castigates and lectures, and she can speak to them with a familiarity that is unforced because it is genuine. As witty and maternal as she is forceful and passionate, Matthews is one of the most compelling figures to appear before Steve James' camera, and the director does not want for dramatically captivating subjects.
2. Moses, Attack the Block
Introduced as a common ghetto thug robbing equally poor people, Moses seems an unlikely choice to be one of the most inspiring action heroes of the year. But when aliens threaten to tear apart his already run-down hood, the young man fights back hard for his community, clearing getting out aggression on all the other things that kept him and others down for so long. John Boyega's hard face is still lined with just enough baby fat to make him convincingly naïve, but then, no one expected the first Moses to deliver anyone from harm, either.
3. Peggy Carter, Captain America: The First Avenger
With Natalie Portman's astrophysicist in Thor turning into a drooling, jelly-legged schoolgirl at the sight of Chris Hemsworth's abs, I had no hope for any engaging blockbuster heroine this year. Then along came Peggy Carter to right so many of Marvel Studios' wrongs. Attracted to Steve Rogers' sweetness as much as his super-soldier bod, Carter can nevertheless get along perfectly well without him. Strong, hard-willed, and human, she is not only one of the most complex female characters to appear in a superhero film but one of the most complex characters, period. There was much to love about Captain America, really the only summer blockbuster that worked, but nothing in it was half so good as Peggy.
4. George Smiley, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
George Smiley handles his enemies with elegantly inelegant practicality, gauging their weaknesses and finding the path of greatest ease and efficiency to taking care of the problem. Oldman is so still he could double for the coat rack, nor does he raise his voice in the explosive outbursts we've come to expect from the actor. Looking like an accountant more than a tuxedo-wearing, lady-bedding Bond figure, Smiley is carefully modeled to be unremarkable, but it seems as if even those close to him have been sucked in by the persona, and the loneliness he feels as a cuckolded and forcibly retired old horse gives his investigation of British intelligence an air of wounded betrayal. But even with his preoccupations, he still proves deftly able to corral a group to hunt down the traitor among them, and if there is no joy in Alfredson's film, there is a sad sort of satisfaction in seeing Smiley prevail.
5. Marcel Marx, Le Havre
It takes a talent of Aki Kaurismäki's level to make something original and genuinely poignant out of a selfish white man who learns responsibility through helping a disenfranchised black child. But damned if Marcel Marx isn't one of the freshest characters in some time, so removed from the insistent messaging of these sorts of movies by Kaurismäki's deadpan that the viewer has a rare chance to simply see a human being help another one. Oh, the political commentary is overt, but the handling of it is graceful and naturalistic, more so even than the similarly complex reading of like material with Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor. André Wilms enduring puckishness ensures that Marcel remains funny and peevish, but his ability to ingratiate himself upon others only makes his consideration
Best Villains
1. Loki, Thor
Cunning, deadly, and the only truly Shakespearean element of Kenneth Branagh's Thor, Loki single-handedly elevated that film from an elaborate commercial for Bod Body Spray into something occasionally compelling. Tom Hiddleston makes an instant, breakout impression as the god of tricks, his heartbreaking feelings of neglect and not belonging keenly felt on Hiddleston's boyish but wracked face. Less brutish than the other Marvel villains thus far assembled in their run-ups, Loki works instead through intellect and sedition. It's no wonder Joss Whedon would want him to square against the Avengers instead of some giant, lunkheaded killing machine.
2. Robert Ledgard, The Skin I Live In
In his own way, Ledgard messes with an audience's sympathy regarding rape and loss more than Lisbeth Salander. Almodóvar's melodramatic horror constantly redraws the lines with revealing flashbacks, shifting attitudes for the character from revulsion to empathy. Eventually, however, the full scope of his insanity is revealed, turning an unbalanced man into a mad scientist who brings about one of the most transgressive films about gender politics ever made.
3. Bernie Rose, Drive
With the exception of the protagonist, every character in Drive carries huge gulfs of baggage and half-spoken backstory that makes them frighteningly tactile. Well, none is more tangible (or frightening) than Bernie Rose, played by Albert Brooks in a performance that is at once easy playing against type and something far more sinister. Brooks, as I said in a chat under my original review, plays a shlock movie producer-cum-gangster like a Jewish mother, always vaguely exasperated by "having" to kill someone and complaining about the mess. Smart enough to avoid trouble, he's also the last person with whom you want to get in too deep.
4. Lord Shen, Kung Fu Panda 2
Voiced with insane hubris and frenzy by Gary Oldman, Lord Shen is also so fluidly animated as to be scary in his grace. Hollowed out by soulless ambition, Shen is almost as tragic as Po, even as the same events that make the heroic panda's life sad were initiated by the evil peacock. Occasionally reflective, mostly power-hungry and occasionally even a bit funny, Shen was a huge step up from the previous Kung Fu Panda's villain, so good the writers could hang a much deeper, yet more action-packed, story on his cannon-obsessed feathers.
5. Chad, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
A riotous inversion of the usual hillbilly horror movies, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil cast not a pair of cabin-dwelling good ol' boys as terrorizers of pretty young things but the kind souls who find themselves misunderstood by prejudiced and judgmental kids. Leading them is Chad, a twisted sadist with an axe to grind against rednecks who will sacrifice all of his friends to kill these two hapless fellas. It's a superb twist, and one that only gets crazier as more of Chad's background is revealed.
Best Catchphrase
"Rhinoceros!" Salvador Dalí, Midnight in Paris
Best Use of 3D That Finally Made the Technology Palatable Just When It Was Thankfully Dying
Hugo
Most Welcome Surprise
Warrior
Besides Attack the Block, of which I heard only vague hype before getting passes to a free screening, the film that blew me away with the least amount of pre-viewing interest was Warrior. Sports movies aren't my bag, a sports movie about the new fad of mixed martial arts fighting even less. But Warrior will soon go down as one of the best the genre has to offer, a Greek tragedy on steroids that complicates the audience's sympathies and stages its fight scenes with brutal precision that feels triumphant and abhorrent in equal measure. Buoyed by three excellent performances, Warrior is also the most unexpected actor's showcase of the year.
Biggest Disappointment
Shame
A great many of the year's big awards-baiting films failed to win me over, but none tackled more complex themes than Steve McQueen's Shame. The film addressed psychic wounds, confused desires, and the social stigma of a natural function that turns something beautiful and pleasurable into a sinful act (even when viewed secularly). But the disservice the film does to this material makes it more disappointing than the more ho-hum letdowns of, say, The Artist or Martha Marcy May Marlene. But not even Fassbender's mesmerizing, frightening performance by a man consumed by his demons can add much texture to McQueen's overly fussy direction, which recalls not so much the modern alienation of his hero Antonioni so much as the fatuous, emptily erotic fashion shoots of that director's protagonist in Blow-Up.
Best Scene
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: opening credits
David Fincher's opening credits are so varied and well-crafted that Matthew Zoller Seitz did a fantastic series of video essays on them last year. I hope he sets aside the time to do one for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo when it comes to home video, as it may be Fincher's best. Like the sequences for Se7en (which generated a sickly, unstable atmosphere of recorded murders) and The Social Network (which indirectly toured the landmarks of America's creation myth in Boston), the hyperedited animation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's opening sets the tone, plot, and themes for the rest of the film. USB cables entwine characters into an embrace that asphyxiates them with the forced proximity, while penetrative and groping actions speak to the misogynistic elements to arise. Some might fairly criticize Fincher's film for being overlong, but he proves here that he has the story down in under three minutes.
Runners-up
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: dealing with the mole
Drive: elevator beating
Adventures of Tintin: Bagghar chase
Take Shelter: shelter climax
Worst Scene
That agonizing, comically self-absorbed close-up during the world's slowest, mostly unintentionally hilarious rendition of "New York, New York" in Shame.
Best Part of a Bad Film
The bromance in Paul
It's weird to celebrate the defining aspect of a film without liking the movie as a whole. But if Paul never congealed into a working, fully engaging picture, the hetero-life mate chemistry between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is so strong that I couldn't be mad at the film for fizzling. And even though Seth Rogen occasionally made me laugh as the titular alien, I often found myself wishing I could just keep watching these geeky oafs bumbling around America without the awkward extraterrestrial comic-thriller tacked on.
Worst Part of a Good Film
The opening narration of The Descendants
The Peaks and Troughs Award for Same-Year Quality Gaps
Gary Oldman, Red Riding Hood and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Breakout Stars
Jessica Chastain: The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Help, every third film released in 2011
Michael Fassbender: Shame, A Dangerous Method, Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class
Tom Hiddleston: Thor, Midnight in Paris, War Horse
Most Inspiring Critical Impact
#teammargaret
Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed and -litigated follow-up to 2000's You Can Count on Me came out for barely a few weeks in Atlanta, at which time I was stuck in Auburn and unable to see it. My regret was only compounded by its near-total disappearance from discussion until a small band of film writers started trumpeting its merits and pushing for the film to have a more reasonable distribution to other critics. Though Fox Searchlight seems almost opposed to supporting its own film in any way (those lawsuits must be acrimonious indeed), the efforts of these impassioned people on Twitter got the film screenings it otherwise never would have seen. Almost certainly the most visible example of the lingering power of film criticism to effect some kind of influence, it is also a great demonstration of the supposedly cynical and bilious profession's capacity for celebration and championing of unsung art.
Best Poster
The Ides of March
Runners-up
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
13 Assassins
Tyrannosaur
Midnight in Paris
Best Film That Would Have Been on My Best-Of List Had I Not Seen It Last Year
Certified Copy
Abbas Kiarostami's cryptic, witty comedy-drama was far and away my favorite film of 2010, and seeing it on a big screen this year only deepened its many layers. Even in this much better year for film, it would have appeared at number 2, had I waited to count it among U.S. release dates. One of the best works by perhaps the world's greatest living filmmaker, Certified Copy is as dense as his self-reflexive '90s work even as it is one of the director's most accessible films, and I hope that rumor of Criterion's unwillingness to release it on home video is just that.
Best previously released film I saw for the first time in 2011
Love Exposure
Sion Sono's sui generis collision of extremities and pop culture is at turns gonzo, repellent, high comic and remarkably affecting. The fleetest film to stretch well beyond the three-hour mark since Seven Samurai, Love Exposure uses its wild setpieces, beyond-Buñuel religious satire, gore and fixation on erections to capture something approaching the teenage experience of modern, desensitized youth and the deep yearning beneath the façade. It's offensive and bewildering, but also brilliant and beautiful. One of the great works of the previous decade.
Most Anticipated Films of 2012
This is Not a Film; Kill List; The Raid; Django Unchained; The Turin Horse; Moonrise Kingdom; The Avengers; The Master; The End; The Deep Blue Sea
Best Director
Terrence Malick, Tree of Life
Reaching the apotheosis of his fragmentary, personal and universal side, Malick moves beyond Emerson into the realm of Joyce, finding a mix between the microcosmic and universal that shouldn't work (and doesn't, for many) but makes for the most deeply felt experience I can recall at the movies. Malick folds time and space onto his humble Texan family, at once emphasizing their unremarkable perpetuation of eternal cycles and their own variations and decorations that make them singular among the other links of this chain.
Runners-up
Raul Ruiz, Mysteries of Lisbon
Apicatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Kelly Reichardt, Meek's Cutoff
Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In
Best Actor
Peyman Moaadi, A Separation
Simultaneously selfish and selfless, defiant but quietly despairing, Peyman Moaadi is frustrating and heartbreaking as the estranged husband trying to care for his daughter and Alzheimer's-ridden father. But his self-righteousness slowly fizzles as he inadvertently brings more stress and potential ruin upon his splintered family. Moaadi never loses the character even as Nader moves the story into darker, more complex moral realms, and when he sins, he does so with wrenching believability. Much of the film relies on him, and Moaadi pulls it off flawlessly.
Runners-up
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
George Clooney, The Descendants
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Hunter McCracken- The Tree of Life
Best Actress
Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
Capturing depression better than practically anyone I've ever seen on the screen, Kirsten Dunst's bravura performance in Melancholia is the endothermic opposite of the usual von Trier heroine. Where his other leads suffer, she seems to inflict suffering, not in the grisly and loony way of Gainsbourg's She in Antichrist but in a cosmic sense. The chickens come home to roost for the world that so viciously tore down previous protagonists, as Dunst's powerfully detached, numbed woe brings about the planet's destruction. Payback's a bitch, and Dunst is subtly terrifying as she presides over the apocalypse with a silent approval for the end of days.
Runners-up
Mia Wasikowska, Jane Eyre
Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Michelle Williams, Meek's Cutoff
Best Supporting Actor
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
There are huge gaps in my familiarity with Christopher Plummer's filmography, but this is the brightest and most touching role I've seen him take. And what a performance it is: seen in the protagonist's flashbacks, Plummer's newly out dad is alive and energetic even as we mostly see him in hospitals. Having hid his real self behind a wall of emotional remove, Hal basically has to live his denied life in the four years between his confession and his death, and Plummer grounds the man's newfound joie de vivre in a half-spoken past of deep pain and misguided decisions. His son, who remembers only an almost professionally loving man, cannot comprehend his dad's sudden sweetness, but that doesn't stop him from being completely devastated by Hal's death. Hell, I was too.
Runners-up
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Albert Brooks, Drive
Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life
Patton Oswalt, Young Adult
Best Supporting Actress
Elena Anaya, The Skin I Live In
Even without the film's twist, Elena Anaya gives a powerful performance as a compliant prisoner of a madman. Once the full truth is revealed, however, Anaya becomes the crux of the film's gender politics and its ingenious statements on the way gender roles have been socially ingrained into our biology. Anaya is as mysterious and affecting after the reveal as she was before, and she helps The Skin I Live In become one of Almodóvar's best.
Runners-up
Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life
Hayley Atwell, Captain America, The First Avenger
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Rose Byrne, Bridesmaids
Best Ensemble
The Descendants
Alexander Payne's film is not only stacked with great actors, they each get a moment to shine as friends, family, and even a few enemies filter through a hectic time in Matt King's life. The leads are superb, with Clooney giving his best performance to date and Shailene Woodley offering up one of the best youth performances in years, but the supporting cast rises to meet them at every turn. I can't discuss Judy Greer's performance without spoiling it entirely, but she is but one of many fantastic side-players, along with Beau Bridges' Dude-esque burnout with a buried edge and Robert Forster's father-in-law, who deals with his grief in anger. I can't help but love a film that knows the value of a good set of character actors.
Runners-up
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Bridesmaids
Best Screenplay
A Separation
There's no way to summarize Asghar Farhadi's A Separation without leaving out a massive part of its essence. To call it a marital drama misses how quickly it becomes a more complicated legal narrative, which also omits certain twists and turns that deepen it. And to call it a social critique of Iran is accurate but limiting, leaving out the universal truths of humanity it explores. No one in this film is fully pitiable, but neither are they loathsome. These characters are the most absorbing and compelling of the year, all thanks to Farhadi's script.
Worst Screenplay
Green Lantern
My head says Red State, with its belligerent but directionless tweet-ready screeds, but my heart calls out for Green Lantern, which proves that comic-book writing is clearly much harder than some snobs think. Four (four!) writers worked on this abhorrent mess and demonstrated an incompetence with the material that borders on willful disrespect. Unable to conceive of the dramatic possibilities of a man so fearless he is stubborn, they rewrite him as a smarmy coward who fall into heroism solely through plot holes. How can Hal Jordan quit the Lantern Corps before he's even finished training but keep the ring? Why does an eons-old rule about the ring seeking out the fearless suddenly change to the ring simply believing in someone to become fearless after a while, like some supportive chum? And why does the script have Hal beg the Guardians to let him defend his planet when no one has even remotely objected to this? Not a damn thing in this horrid screenplay makes sense, even with its own internal logic.
Best Editing
Film Socialisme
It actually wasn't easy to vote for Godard given the competition. Terrence Malick's battery of editors made outright tone poetry of the director's usual over-coverage, while Carlos Madaleno and Valeria Sarmiento made Raul Rúiz's 266-minute epic as fleet as a blockbuster. But no other film was as intellectually provocative and dense as Film Socialisme, and the editing serves as the foundation for its various dialectics and visual puns. Godard does not simply treat editing as a means of progressing or even just juxtaposing, and he generated a puzzle to be mulled over for years with his work here.
Runners-up
The Tree of Life
Mysteries of Lisbon
Worst Editing
Red State
Not only is the linking of the shots a prime example of the worst kind of "realism" action, the overall pace is so erratic that the film never establishes itself before its sudden upending. The film has no remote sense of pace, slamming on the brakes instantly for a monologue that was, amazingly, even longer in earlier cuts and should have been trimmed more. Smith's film suffers enough from its muddled messaging, but the editing only makes everything worse.
Best Score
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Not as instantly classic as Reznor and Ross' Social Network soundtrack, this bleak soundscape is nevertheless head and shoulders above a generally weak year for scores (I was surprised that none of Alexandre Desplat's scores won me over as they usually do). Where both Williams' and Bource's compositions were giddy, ebullient throwbacks, this all-too-modern digital howl was as cold and static as ice. This has the effect of generating not even dread but a simple numbness that affects the extremities like a bitter winter day. Impressively, the pair totally avoid rehashing their previous work, and indeed this score is less thriller-like, despite the film's subject matter, than The Social Network's. God only knows how long they can keep this up, but for the moment, no one can touch Reznor and Ross.
Runners-up
John Williams, The Adventures of Tintin
Basement Jaxx, Attack the Block
Cliff Martinez, Drive
Most undervalued player
Oscar Isaac, Sucker Punch and Drive
As the villain in Zack Snyder's unbearable sub-feminist romp, Isaac actually did a great job of capturing oily misogyny and power-hungry masculinity as Blue, creating a more concrete and tactile sense of danger and menace than Snyder's huge but weightless CGI sequences. In Drive, he was even better. The second his character comes on-screen, freshly released from prison, a dread rises in the throat that he will be the bog-standard bad father and obstacle in the budding romance between Driver and Irene. But Isaac sidesteps that pitfall by making Standard into a decent, loving man who got mixed up in the wrong crowd and is now desperate to protect his family. In what may be that film's most touching scene, he describes meeting Irene and falling in love, speaking with wistfulness, a twinge of humor, and a lot of regret that creates a character's whole life in just a few minutes.
Best Heroes
1. Ameena Matthews, The Interrupters
In a film about real-life heroism, none emerge more iconic than Ameena Matthews. The daughter of a notorious gang leader and an ex-con like all the rest of the interrupters, Matthews is not some ivory tower do-gooder merely looking to help out. She has been the people she castigates and lectures, and she can speak to them with a familiarity that is unforced because it is genuine. As witty and maternal as she is forceful and passionate, Matthews is one of the most compelling figures to appear before Steve James' camera, and the director does not want for dramatically captivating subjects.
2. Moses, Attack the Block
Introduced as a common ghetto thug robbing equally poor people, Moses seems an unlikely choice to be one of the most inspiring action heroes of the year. But when aliens threaten to tear apart his already run-down hood, the young man fights back hard for his community, clearing getting out aggression on all the other things that kept him and others down for so long. John Boyega's hard face is still lined with just enough baby fat to make him convincingly naïve, but then, no one expected the first Moses to deliver anyone from harm, either.
3. Peggy Carter, Captain America: The First Avenger
With Natalie Portman's astrophysicist in Thor turning into a drooling, jelly-legged schoolgirl at the sight of Chris Hemsworth's abs, I had no hope for any engaging blockbuster heroine this year. Then along came Peggy Carter to right so many of Marvel Studios' wrongs. Attracted to Steve Rogers' sweetness as much as his super-soldier bod, Carter can nevertheless get along perfectly well without him. Strong, hard-willed, and human, she is not only one of the most complex female characters to appear in a superhero film but one of the most complex characters, period. There was much to love about Captain America, really the only summer blockbuster that worked, but nothing in it was half so good as Peggy.
4. George Smiley, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
George Smiley handles his enemies with elegantly inelegant practicality, gauging their weaknesses and finding the path of greatest ease and efficiency to taking care of the problem. Oldman is so still he could double for the coat rack, nor does he raise his voice in the explosive outbursts we've come to expect from the actor. Looking like an accountant more than a tuxedo-wearing, lady-bedding Bond figure, Smiley is carefully modeled to be unremarkable, but it seems as if even those close to him have been sucked in by the persona, and the loneliness he feels as a cuckolded and forcibly retired old horse gives his investigation of British intelligence an air of wounded betrayal. But even with his preoccupations, he still proves deftly able to corral a group to hunt down the traitor among them, and if there is no joy in Alfredson's film, there is a sad sort of satisfaction in seeing Smiley prevail.
5. Marcel Marx, Le Havre
It takes a talent of Aki Kaurismäki's level to make something original and genuinely poignant out of a selfish white man who learns responsibility through helping a disenfranchised black child. But damned if Marcel Marx isn't one of the freshest characters in some time, so removed from the insistent messaging of these sorts of movies by Kaurismäki's deadpan that the viewer has a rare chance to simply see a human being help another one. Oh, the political commentary is overt, but the handling of it is graceful and naturalistic, more so even than the similarly complex reading of like material with Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor. André Wilms enduring puckishness ensures that Marcel remains funny and peevish, but his ability to ingratiate himself upon others only makes his consideration
Best Villains
1. Loki, Thor
Cunning, deadly, and the only truly Shakespearean element of Kenneth Branagh's Thor, Loki single-handedly elevated that film from an elaborate commercial for Bod Body Spray into something occasionally compelling. Tom Hiddleston makes an instant, breakout impression as the god of tricks, his heartbreaking feelings of neglect and not belonging keenly felt on Hiddleston's boyish but wracked face. Less brutish than the other Marvel villains thus far assembled in their run-ups, Loki works instead through intellect and sedition. It's no wonder Joss Whedon would want him to square against the Avengers instead of some giant, lunkheaded killing machine.
2. Robert Ledgard, The Skin I Live In
In his own way, Ledgard messes with an audience's sympathy regarding rape and loss more than Lisbeth Salander. Almodóvar's melodramatic horror constantly redraws the lines with revealing flashbacks, shifting attitudes for the character from revulsion to empathy. Eventually, however, the full scope of his insanity is revealed, turning an unbalanced man into a mad scientist who brings about one of the most transgressive films about gender politics ever made.
3. Bernie Rose, Drive
With the exception of the protagonist, every character in Drive carries huge gulfs of baggage and half-spoken backstory that makes them frighteningly tactile. Well, none is more tangible (or frightening) than Bernie Rose, played by Albert Brooks in a performance that is at once easy playing against type and something far more sinister. Brooks, as I said in a chat under my original review, plays a shlock movie producer-cum-gangster like a Jewish mother, always vaguely exasperated by "having" to kill someone and complaining about the mess. Smart enough to avoid trouble, he's also the last person with whom you want to get in too deep.
4. Lord Shen, Kung Fu Panda 2
Voiced with insane hubris and frenzy by Gary Oldman, Lord Shen is also so fluidly animated as to be scary in his grace. Hollowed out by soulless ambition, Shen is almost as tragic as Po, even as the same events that make the heroic panda's life sad were initiated by the evil peacock. Occasionally reflective, mostly power-hungry and occasionally even a bit funny, Shen was a huge step up from the previous Kung Fu Panda's villain, so good the writers could hang a much deeper, yet more action-packed, story on his cannon-obsessed feathers.
5. Chad, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
A riotous inversion of the usual hillbilly horror movies, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil cast not a pair of cabin-dwelling good ol' boys as terrorizers of pretty young things but the kind souls who find themselves misunderstood by prejudiced and judgmental kids. Leading them is Chad, a twisted sadist with an axe to grind against rednecks who will sacrifice all of his friends to kill these two hapless fellas. It's a superb twist, and one that only gets crazier as more of Chad's background is revealed.
Best Catchphrase
"Rhinoceros!" Salvador Dalí, Midnight in Paris
Best Use of 3D That Finally Made the Technology Palatable Just When It Was Thankfully Dying
Hugo
Most Welcome Surprise
Warrior
Besides Attack the Block, of which I heard only vague hype before getting passes to a free screening, the film that blew me away with the least amount of pre-viewing interest was Warrior. Sports movies aren't my bag, a sports movie about the new fad of mixed martial arts fighting even less. But Warrior will soon go down as one of the best the genre has to offer, a Greek tragedy on steroids that complicates the audience's sympathies and stages its fight scenes with brutal precision that feels triumphant and abhorrent in equal measure. Buoyed by three excellent performances, Warrior is also the most unexpected actor's showcase of the year.
Biggest Disappointment
Shame
A great many of the year's big awards-baiting films failed to win me over, but none tackled more complex themes than Steve McQueen's Shame. The film addressed psychic wounds, confused desires, and the social stigma of a natural function that turns something beautiful and pleasurable into a sinful act (even when viewed secularly). But the disservice the film does to this material makes it more disappointing than the more ho-hum letdowns of, say, The Artist or Martha Marcy May Marlene. But not even Fassbender's mesmerizing, frightening performance by a man consumed by his demons can add much texture to McQueen's overly fussy direction, which recalls not so much the modern alienation of his hero Antonioni so much as the fatuous, emptily erotic fashion shoots of that director's protagonist in Blow-Up.
Best Scene
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: opening credits
David Fincher's opening credits are so varied and well-crafted that Matthew Zoller Seitz did a fantastic series of video essays on them last year. I hope he sets aside the time to do one for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo when it comes to home video, as it may be Fincher's best. Like the sequences for Se7en (which generated a sickly, unstable atmosphere of recorded murders) and The Social Network (which indirectly toured the landmarks of America's creation myth in Boston), the hyperedited animation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's opening sets the tone, plot, and themes for the rest of the film. USB cables entwine characters into an embrace that asphyxiates them with the forced proximity, while penetrative and groping actions speak to the misogynistic elements to arise. Some might fairly criticize Fincher's film for being overlong, but he proves here that he has the story down in under three minutes.
Runners-up
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: dealing with the mole
Drive: elevator beating
Adventures of Tintin: Bagghar chase
Take Shelter: shelter climax
Worst Scene
That agonizing, comically self-absorbed close-up during the world's slowest, mostly unintentionally hilarious rendition of "New York, New York" in Shame.
Best Part of a Bad Film
The bromance in Paul
It's weird to celebrate the defining aspect of a film without liking the movie as a whole. But if Paul never congealed into a working, fully engaging picture, the hetero-life mate chemistry between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is so strong that I couldn't be mad at the film for fizzling. And even though Seth Rogen occasionally made me laugh as the titular alien, I often found myself wishing I could just keep watching these geeky oafs bumbling around America without the awkward extraterrestrial comic-thriller tacked on.
Worst Part of a Good Film
The opening narration of The Descendants
The Peaks and Troughs Award for Same-Year Quality Gaps
Gary Oldman, Red Riding Hood and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Breakout Stars
Jessica Chastain: The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Help, every third film released in 2011
Michael Fassbender: Shame, A Dangerous Method, Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class
Tom Hiddleston: Thor, Midnight in Paris, War Horse
Most Inspiring Critical Impact
#teammargaret
Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed and -litigated follow-up to 2000's You Can Count on Me came out for barely a few weeks in Atlanta, at which time I was stuck in Auburn and unable to see it. My regret was only compounded by its near-total disappearance from discussion until a small band of film writers started trumpeting its merits and pushing for the film to have a more reasonable distribution to other critics. Though Fox Searchlight seems almost opposed to supporting its own film in any way (those lawsuits must be acrimonious indeed), the efforts of these impassioned people on Twitter got the film screenings it otherwise never would have seen. Almost certainly the most visible example of the lingering power of film criticism to effect some kind of influence, it is also a great demonstration of the supposedly cynical and bilious profession's capacity for celebration and championing of unsung art.
Best Poster
The Ides of March
Runners-up
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
13 Assassins
Tyrannosaur
Midnight in Paris
Best Film That Would Have Been on My Best-Of List Had I Not Seen It Last Year
Certified Copy
Abbas Kiarostami's cryptic, witty comedy-drama was far and away my favorite film of 2010, and seeing it on a big screen this year only deepened its many layers. Even in this much better year for film, it would have appeared at number 2, had I waited to count it among U.S. release dates. One of the best works by perhaps the world's greatest living filmmaker, Certified Copy is as dense as his self-reflexive '90s work even as it is one of the director's most accessible films, and I hope that rumor of Criterion's unwillingness to release it on home video is just that.
Best previously released film I saw for the first time in 2011
Love Exposure
Sion Sono's sui generis collision of extremities and pop culture is at turns gonzo, repellent, high comic and remarkably affecting. The fleetest film to stretch well beyond the three-hour mark since Seven Samurai, Love Exposure uses its wild setpieces, beyond-Buñuel religious satire, gore and fixation on erections to capture something approaching the teenage experience of modern, desensitized youth and the deep yearning beneath the façade. It's offensive and bewildering, but also brilliant and beautiful. One of the great works of the previous decade.
Most Anticipated Films of 2012
This is Not a Film; Kill List; The Raid; Django Unchained; The Turin Horse; Moonrise Kingdom; The Avengers; The Master; The End; The Deep Blue Sea
Wednesday, December 28
Books I Read in 2011
I fell shamefully behind on reading when I went to college, first overburdened by an engineering course load then spending so much time writing stories for journalism assignments or delving deeper and deeper into film to tend to my literary interests. This year I vowed to get back into the groove and challenged myself to read 40 books before New Year's. Just last week, I succeeded. For the most part, I read a lot of great books over the year, so I thought I'd share some brief thoughts for them after the jump.
1. The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy — Bill Carter
Less dramatically intense and straightforward than The Late Shift—in part because of the more diverse late-night field that now exists and because so much of the central conflict occurred on television and in constantly updated Internet stories—New York Times television writer Bill Carter’s investigative look at the latest fiasco at NBC is nevertheless well-researched and narratively assured. Perhaps a bit too unwilling to lay blame at anyone’s feet, Carter points out the surprising ties that bind Conan and Leno, from their mutual sense of company loyalty and work ethic to their worship of the Tonight Show franchise and overriding desire to be a part of its legacy.
Carter presents the issue of the Tonight Show as the product of so many compounded mistakes that no one, not even Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker, can be held responsible for the resultant train wreck. But even setting aside my own Team Coco bias, it seems as if that tangled web was primarily woven by NBC executives and Leno, but the depth of Carter’s reporting ensures one cannot stay mad at anyone for a series of decisions made in the attempt to please everyone. But those in entertainment should know you’ll never be able to make everyone happy, and as much of a White Person Problem as this whole saga is, I continue to marvel at how gripping the story can be.
2. Absalom! Absalom! — William Faulkner
William Faulkner’s writing is hilarious, poignant, allegorical, immediate and, quite often, borderline infuriating. It took me three goes with this novel before I finally understood the truth: stop trying to figure it out. Yes, Absalom! Absalom! is allegorical and symbolic, but it works by letting its endlessly overlapping and conflicting histories add up to an emotional, even semi-spiritual, portrait of the post-Reconstruction South. The “truth” of Quentin Compson’s assembled chronology of the Sutpen clan is irrelevant: what matters is just what the contradictions say about them, and of Compson, and of the entire Southern sensibility. Most importantly, though, it speaks to the desperation of the soul, that terrible need in all of us to know ourselves, to know and make our place.
Faulkner’s structure is breathtaking: you cannot even call it ouroboric because that would imply a circular movement. This is less the sight of the snake eating its own tail than the excreted remains of self-consumed serpent. Nearly everything one needs to know is located in the first chapter, but different perspectives encroach, all of them adding, at least, characters’ subjective interpretations and, at most, their freewheeling speculation. There’s Rosa Coldfield’s ingrained hatred casting nightmarish shadows over Thomas Sutpen, Mr. Compson speaking more analytically but also reverently, Sutpen’s own words passed through several generations of lips or, most hilariously, Shreve’s conjecture, an outgrowth of his intense fascination with the corkscrewing story as well as his fed-up attempts to get to the damn point (rarely has a character served as a better stand-in for the audience). And at the center of it all is Quentin, so discombobulated by the Sutpen legacy and what it means to him that he’d eventually throw himself off a bridge, though in true Faulkner fashion, he’d technically already done that.
There are few things more gratifying than wrestling with an accepted masterpiece until you find that when you stop trying to appreciate it, it’s a damn sight easier to love it. It’s till a challenge, but I couldn’t put it down, finally enthralled by Faulkner’s most towering work, even if I still prefer Light in August.
3. Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy
Review here.
4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
Huck Finn is a serio-comic masterpiece, one of a handful of books in any language to truly contain a laugh a page, but also that rare comedy that can step outside itself in horrifying moments of clarity that do not derail the comedy even as they deepen the text. I remember disliking the final chapters when I read this my freshman year of high school, utterly failing to see Twain’s intention: by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, he completely changes our view on that erstwhile protagonist by divorcing us critically from antics that now seem less precocious than sociopathic and deranged. Furthermore, Tom contrasts the absurdity of romanticism with the meaningful drama of Huck’s realism.
I re-read this over the latest censorship fuss to plague the novel, and as ever I remain in the camp arguing it should never be altered. Twain knew exactly what he was doing using that word, and it makes his satire all the more lastingly piercing.
5. Silence — Shusaku Endo
With Martin Scorsese finally on-track to adapt this long-gestating project, I decided to give the source material a go. I discovered two things: 1) It's obvious why Scorsese would want to film it, what with its themes of religious doubt and suffering lining up neatly with his own preoccupations and 2) As good as the book is, there is room for improvement. Endo's writing segues awkwardly from an epistolary collection of writings from his protagonist, Rodrigues, to limited third-person, a shift that would work better in film where perspective can more smoothly change. By the same token, Endo's direct but resonant prose contains an undeniable power.
The best art dealing with faith is made by those grappling with belief. Endo's priest hero heads to Japan unable to comprehend the rampant apostasy of the recently converted and even a few European priests, despite the reports of horrid, unimaginable torture placed upon them. Once he arrives, however, the unforgiving attitude of the ruling daimyo toward Christians, and even the harsh terrain, confront the zealous missionary with the first resistance to religion he's ever experienced, and all he can notice after a time is the deafening silence of God in response to atrocity. But Endo, who presents Japan as a nation inhospitable to the vision of a Christian God, intriguingly reveals his own unique (and culturally Japanese) take on God/Jesus as a being that sufferers with his followers instead of simply looking down from above. A fascinating, moving book that will certainly rank as one of my favorite artistic endeavors to wrestle with faith
6. The Awakening — Kate Chopin
Read for my American literature class. Before it was assigned, I’d never even heard of the book, or Chopin, despite her groundbreaking influence on my favorite Southern writers. Though her writing only flirts with the stream-of-consciousness Gothic qualities that Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner would later perfect, you can still see the germinating seed here. Still, the novel itself is a bit dry, restrained by its Victorian sentiment of freeing a woman solely by having her act like the selfish, lustful image of man and not by truly probing femininity and gender rebellion. I enjoyed it more as a tongue-in-cheek version of a horror story (Egads! A woman declaring independence!) than as an examination of what it means to be a woman, but that may have been Chopin’s intent all along.
7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
Having read only the tiniest excerpts of Joyce in high school, I figured it was high time to dive into that most celebrated (and feared) of 20th century writers. Despite the lengthy annotations (nothing compared to his two biggest works, which contain hundreds of pages of notes), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man alerted me quickly to the rhythm of Joyce’s prose, a bouncy livelihood which more than compensated for his dense lingual experimentation. Given the novel’s focus on a young man who finds himself through his talent and rejects what he considers the banalities of the world, I’m surprised this doesn’t get mentioned alongside The Catcher in the Rye more often, but Joyce goes far deeper than Salinger ever dared, not only conveying Stephen’s growth through the narrative but the text itself. The book starts with a children’s tale using children’s words, and it ends with a well-articulating, radical artistic manifesto (an expression of one’s thoughts made more literal in the epistolary last chapter). Some might accuse Stephen of arrogance, but Joyce is simply refusing to apologize for presenting a truth: an artist, a true artistic genius, must step outside normalcy to better create. Political and religious imagery runs through the book, but Stephen rejects both to pursue creation.
There’s simply too much here to spotlight, but I would like to register just a snippet of Joyce’s gift for wordplay: Stephen Dedalus, a combination of the first Christian martyr and the mythological architect of the labyrinth in Crete, a dichotomy Joyce circles around throughout. Stephen’s father’s name is Simon, and when Stephen has a rush of spiritual shame that leads to a brief dalliance with Catholic living he briefly considers using money to atone for his sin, thus making him guilty of simony. And I cannot quite put into words why I am so affected by one of the last passages in the book, written in the terse bullet-form of a journal entry but full of meaning, as it addresses the genuine humility underneath some "know-it-alls": “Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.” I find this passage as beautiful as the novel’s most flowery runs, and there are many. A masterpiece.
8. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky
A terrifying outpouring of bile that at every turn reveals the unutterable sadness beneath the unnamed narrator's screeds. So short it barely constitutes a novella, Notes from Underground nevertheless troubles me more than nearly any other work of art. But its cathartic honesty only makes it more necessary; writing it probably kept Dostoevsky from killing someone.
9. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
Few things in life are more delightful than sitting back and watching Jane Austen work her magic with the English language.
10. Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton
God, this might be even more awkwardly anti-human than the special-effects bonanza movie.
11. Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 — Paul Tingen
Tingen makes some weird diversions into talk of Zen Buddhism, and he is occasionally too eager to use all of the notes he collected (every journalist knows you never use all your research) but otherwise his meticulous cataloguing and interviewing adds invaluable insight into the neglected and even mocked late-career of an American icon. I love Electric Miles, and some of the revelations here only made me appreciate Miles' daring sonic explorations even more.
12. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë
HATED this in high school, couldn't put it down this time. I still don't quite cotton to its almost emo romance, of two insular people basically retreating from the rest of the world to live their Gothic life, but the mash-up of social romance with Gothic horror is not only entertaining but often riotous. Brontë gets in a number of fantastic jabs.
13. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 — Hunter S. Thompson
One of my all-time favorites, densely involved in the minutiae of political wheeling and dealing to the point that it can be hard to follow, yet so ingeniously scribbled by Thompson that it is compulsively page-turning. I reread it all the time, and you can be damn sure I'll be breaking it out in this upcoming election season, which promises to be an outright farce .
14. The Dirt — Motlëy Crüe
I've never hated the members of a band so thoroughly, nor have I ever been so unable to put down a book. The confessions here are demented and disgusting, but the occasional moment of clarity of the addict makes for harrowing self-evaluations. Vince Neil's self-loathing over his fatality-inducing drunken driving is particularly brutal in its honesty. A trashy read, but a revealing one.
15. Ulysses — James Joyce
Life-altering. My collection of posts for each chapter can be accessed here.
16. Leviathan — Scott Westerfeld
Intriguing take on steampunk that also explores a what-if? history re: Darwinian theory and genetic engineering. Shame it's a YA novel, as the story constantly moves away from its fascinating world to focus on clichéd storytelling elements further restricted by the age of the intended audience.
17. The Sirens of Titan — Kurt Vonnegut
One of Vonnegut's best. Surreal and silly, but often so piercing it hurts. Up there with Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle for me.
18. Swamplandia! — Karen Russell
Half of this book is a masterpiece. The magic realist chapters with the daughter make prose poetry out of banal, even ugly, tracts of land. Sadly, the stuff with the brother rates as dimestore anti-capitalist satire, and a garish plot-twist that launches the final act is a predictable and cheap ploy for shock. It's a shame; Swamplandia! started out as one of the most lyrical, intoxicating reads of recent years, only to end up an all too typical disappointment.
19. The Great Terror: A Reassessment — Robert Conquest
Review here.
20. Hitch 22 — Christopher Hitchens
Even his damn memoir is combative. I still can't really write about Hitch yet. Maybe I'll try if and when I get through that massive final collection of essays.
21. The Lost World — Michael Crichton
If Spielberg's poorly aged Jurassic Park is nevertheless an improvement over Crichton's original, it's hard to say who came out worse with their respective sequels. Spielberg's Lost World is a soulless, pedestrian waste of time and perhaps the director's worst film. Crichton's book may be even worse, a lethargic trudge through a pointless plot that exists only to posit how the dinosaurs went extinct. Because we were all on pins and needles to hear what Crichton thought about that.
22. What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years — Ricky Riccardi
Riccardi can be a bit too defensive of Armstrong and defend some questionable career decisions, but his book is as vital as Tingen's on Miles' late career. He makes a compelling case for the artistry, even the barrier breaking of Satchmo's mainstream success, and it sent me scrambling to save up the cash for the new 10-CD collection of Armstrong's post-Hot Fives & Sevens career. It's sad how many supposed music lovers seem to think that Armstrong's legacy stops after those short years near the start of his professional life.
23. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton
Succeeds at capturing the rule-ordered social world of the setting that the pain of forbidden love never quite breaks through. I actually prefer Scorsese's film of the work.
24. Dubliners — James Joyce
A suffocating portrait of Dublin, but one that also finds meaning and occasionally even beauty in the characters trapped by Ireland's necrotic past. "The Dead" is, of course, a masterpiece, but I'm still captivated by most of the stories, which can be so cynical, yet so human. It's an inexplicably attained balance, and it's no wonder Jennifer Egan recently failed so badly at writing a postmodern Dubliners for America (more on that later).
25. Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger
I never took to Salinger in high school, but I should give him another try now that I'm no longer around people who are, like, TOTALLY inspired by Holden Caulfield. This bifurcated novella was a refreshing reentry into the late author's work, a slightly precious but intensely moving account of genius children in serious danger of falling into incurable waste as young adults. Its short length gives the work a brevity that gets to the heart of the story quickly without sacrificing style.
26. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of the most psychologically rich novels ever written. Whole pages of neurotic word soup pass without so much as a single paragraph break, but I never once got tired of Dostoevky's epic. Overwhelming in the best sense, Karamazov covers so much ground that only a book like Ulysses, which chased profundity by running in the opposite direction, to minute observation over cosmic melodrama, could find something else to say about the human condition in its wake. The "Grand Inquisitor" chapter is one of the most incisive, brutal things I've ever read.
27. The Help — Kathryn Stockett
An insipid bit of revisionist nonsense that allows a white woman to kind-of, sort-of, not-at-all address her own upbringing by a black maid. But Stockett is so invested in learning that she was actually loved by her own help that she won't let anything in the book that even hints at the possibility that a black woman forced to neglect her own children might only not love a white baby but could utterly resent it. Stockett even talked to former maids who expressed this view while conducting research, but funnily enough that didn't make it in the novel. And why should it? Her deceptive structure only gives the impression of telling black women's stories.
28. Light in August — William Faulkner
I had to wash The Help out of my mouth with a book by a white person that actually gets racism right. Faulkner's novel is a harrowing reckoning of the South's racial past, its shuddered waves of shame and self-repulsion more suffocating even than his works on the South's broader issues with self-identity and lack thereof. My favorite Faulkner.
29. Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold
Keeps all the good bits from Plato and leaves out that whole "censor and punish the artists" chestnut. I still think there's a limiting view to Arnold's philosophy, but this a nice stepping stone to more engaging (to me) philosophers like Levinas.
30. Twilight of the Idols — Friedrich Nietzsche
I love Nietzsche. He's so easy to misconstrue that I'm afraid to even say what I think he believes on any topic, but he is so witty and combative that his philosophy is fantastically readable. As something of a self-summary of intent, Twilight of the Idols is accessible even by his standards, and I loved his thoughts on religion.
31. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
As I recall, Lolita was the one Stanley Kubrick film I didn't like, and I was reluctant to delve even into its lauded source material for fear of its potential romanticization of a repellent affair. Happily, Nabokov's playful prose subtly undermines its rhapsodic narrator, carefully making clear that Humbert's self-justification is just that, and that his perceived romance with a girl wise beyond her years is actually a psychologically scarring event that tears down that old-young pairing that runs through literary history. I toed the water with this at first, but I emerged as ready to sing its praises as the host of more qualified literary critics.
32. Elective Affinities — Goethe
Too odd for me to even go into. Not entirely sure what the book is saying beyond the idea of human chemistry being as irreversible and natural as elemental chemistry, but then maybe that's the whole point. I was intrigued throughout, but I don't necessarily know that I enjoyed it.
33. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited — Robin Wood
This critical assessment, split between Wood's original edition and a revised evaluation not only of other Hitchcock films but his own previous writing, is indispensable. Wood's knowledge of various critical theories and his ability to fluidly connect them to practical, demonstrable examples not only deepens our understanding of one of the great directors but also makes complex academic theories more palatable and cogent to a layman like me. This book makes me want to be a better critic, and I think that reading it while taking a class on critical theory helped me understand some of the writers I was reading in that class so much better.
34. A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan
I should have a full review up for this on another site sometime in January, but for now I'll just say that Egan's sub-Joycean stylistic exercises left me underwhelmed, and her characters were so crudely drawn that I could not believe anyone could see any humanity in this work. As social critique, it is laughably clueless, and as literary experimentation, it is infuriatingly safe.
35. Images: My Life in Film — Ingmar Bergman
A surprisingly bouncy read that offered enjoyable insights from the director into his own work, and not always positive self-assessments. Naturally, the autocritique lacks the more layered study a detached critic could bring, but Bergman is sufficiently candid that Images is never just a parade of compliments and self-justification.
36. James Joyce — Richard Ellmann
Review here.
37. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
I'm going to make a habit of reading this every few years. I first read it in high school and found it funny. Now, I couldn't make it past a page without laughing, even as the more traumatized segments of sheer horror affected me more profoundly. Christopher Hitchens once advised readers to "stay on good terms with your inner Yossarian," and I have a better idea as to why after rereading this all-too-sane farce on the sheer madness of war and the bureaucracy that carefully orders that madness into official insanity.
38. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings — ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi
I had a hell of a hard time understanding Levinas at first, even compared to my normal difficulty with philosophy. Yet once he clicked, I found I delighted in his thoughts more than just about any other thinker, his beliefs on our innate ethical responsibility to others the most affirming philosophy I've ever heard. There are still huge gaps even in this introductory collection of essays I found impenetrable, but I was not only stimulated by what I understood but utterly moved.
39. Mirroring People — Marco Iacoboni
My critical theory professor gave us this final read as, I suspect, his idea of a reward for getting through various philosophical essays over the semester. Whatever the reason, this fleet, intelligent but layman-targeted explanation of mirror neurons was a great read, and one that offered empirical biological data to support Levinas' assertions of ethics. The notion that we are neurologically predisposed to engage in mimetic and empathetic behavior is exciting, not merely for its revelations of human communication but its implications for treatment of disorders like autism.
40. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson
I touched on my feelings on this book with my review of David Fincher's adaptation of it (which not merely surpasses the Swedish version but improves on this source material). Larsson broaches so many interesting ideas but constantly pulls back to rant about the state of investigative journalism, even using an extraneous act after the mystery climax to settle Mikael's scores. Furthermore, Lisbeth Salander, so tragically seen as some kind of feminist action heroine, is so blatantly the fetishized projection of this male author that I couldn't help but feel embarrassed at times. Still engagingly page-turning enough to keep me going, but I was amazed that someone managed to make a near-great film out of this, given what a near-abysmal novel it is.
1. The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy — Bill Carter
Less dramatically intense and straightforward than The Late Shift—in part because of the more diverse late-night field that now exists and because so much of the central conflict occurred on television and in constantly updated Internet stories—New York Times television writer Bill Carter’s investigative look at the latest fiasco at NBC is nevertheless well-researched and narratively assured. Perhaps a bit too unwilling to lay blame at anyone’s feet, Carter points out the surprising ties that bind Conan and Leno, from their mutual sense of company loyalty and work ethic to their worship of the Tonight Show franchise and overriding desire to be a part of its legacy.
Carter presents the issue of the Tonight Show as the product of so many compounded mistakes that no one, not even Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker, can be held responsible for the resultant train wreck. But even setting aside my own Team Coco bias, it seems as if that tangled web was primarily woven by NBC executives and Leno, but the depth of Carter’s reporting ensures one cannot stay mad at anyone for a series of decisions made in the attempt to please everyone. But those in entertainment should know you’ll never be able to make everyone happy, and as much of a White Person Problem as this whole saga is, I continue to marvel at how gripping the story can be.
2. Absalom! Absalom! — William Faulkner
William Faulkner’s writing is hilarious, poignant, allegorical, immediate and, quite often, borderline infuriating. It took me three goes with this novel before I finally understood the truth: stop trying to figure it out. Yes, Absalom! Absalom! is allegorical and symbolic, but it works by letting its endlessly overlapping and conflicting histories add up to an emotional, even semi-spiritual, portrait of the post-Reconstruction South. The “truth” of Quentin Compson’s assembled chronology of the Sutpen clan is irrelevant: what matters is just what the contradictions say about them, and of Compson, and of the entire Southern sensibility. Most importantly, though, it speaks to the desperation of the soul, that terrible need in all of us to know ourselves, to know and make our place.
Faulkner’s structure is breathtaking: you cannot even call it ouroboric because that would imply a circular movement. This is less the sight of the snake eating its own tail than the excreted remains of self-consumed serpent. Nearly everything one needs to know is located in the first chapter, but different perspectives encroach, all of them adding, at least, characters’ subjective interpretations and, at most, their freewheeling speculation. There’s Rosa Coldfield’s ingrained hatred casting nightmarish shadows over Thomas Sutpen, Mr. Compson speaking more analytically but also reverently, Sutpen’s own words passed through several generations of lips or, most hilariously, Shreve’s conjecture, an outgrowth of his intense fascination with the corkscrewing story as well as his fed-up attempts to get to the damn point (rarely has a character served as a better stand-in for the audience). And at the center of it all is Quentin, so discombobulated by the Sutpen legacy and what it means to him that he’d eventually throw himself off a bridge, though in true Faulkner fashion, he’d technically already done that.
There are few things more gratifying than wrestling with an accepted masterpiece until you find that when you stop trying to appreciate it, it’s a damn sight easier to love it. It’s till a challenge, but I couldn’t put it down, finally enthralled by Faulkner’s most towering work, even if I still prefer Light in August.
3. Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy
Review here.
4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
Huck Finn is a serio-comic masterpiece, one of a handful of books in any language to truly contain a laugh a page, but also that rare comedy that can step outside itself in horrifying moments of clarity that do not derail the comedy even as they deepen the text. I remember disliking the final chapters when I read this my freshman year of high school, utterly failing to see Twain’s intention: by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, he completely changes our view on that erstwhile protagonist by divorcing us critically from antics that now seem less precocious than sociopathic and deranged. Furthermore, Tom contrasts the absurdity of romanticism with the meaningful drama of Huck’s realism.
I re-read this over the latest censorship fuss to plague the novel, and as ever I remain in the camp arguing it should never be altered. Twain knew exactly what he was doing using that word, and it makes his satire all the more lastingly piercing.
5. Silence — Shusaku Endo
With Martin Scorsese finally on-track to adapt this long-gestating project, I decided to give the source material a go. I discovered two things: 1) It's obvious why Scorsese would want to film it, what with its themes of religious doubt and suffering lining up neatly with his own preoccupations and 2) As good as the book is, there is room for improvement. Endo's writing segues awkwardly from an epistolary collection of writings from his protagonist, Rodrigues, to limited third-person, a shift that would work better in film where perspective can more smoothly change. By the same token, Endo's direct but resonant prose contains an undeniable power.
The best art dealing with faith is made by those grappling with belief. Endo's priest hero heads to Japan unable to comprehend the rampant apostasy of the recently converted and even a few European priests, despite the reports of horrid, unimaginable torture placed upon them. Once he arrives, however, the unforgiving attitude of the ruling daimyo toward Christians, and even the harsh terrain, confront the zealous missionary with the first resistance to religion he's ever experienced, and all he can notice after a time is the deafening silence of God in response to atrocity. But Endo, who presents Japan as a nation inhospitable to the vision of a Christian God, intriguingly reveals his own unique (and culturally Japanese) take on God/Jesus as a being that sufferers with his followers instead of simply looking down from above. A fascinating, moving book that will certainly rank as one of my favorite artistic endeavors to wrestle with faith
6. The Awakening — Kate Chopin
Read for my American literature class. Before it was assigned, I’d never even heard of the book, or Chopin, despite her groundbreaking influence on my favorite Southern writers. Though her writing only flirts with the stream-of-consciousness Gothic qualities that Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner would later perfect, you can still see the germinating seed here. Still, the novel itself is a bit dry, restrained by its Victorian sentiment of freeing a woman solely by having her act like the selfish, lustful image of man and not by truly probing femininity and gender rebellion. I enjoyed it more as a tongue-in-cheek version of a horror story (Egads! A woman declaring independence!) than as an examination of what it means to be a woman, but that may have been Chopin’s intent all along.
7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
Having read only the tiniest excerpts of Joyce in high school, I figured it was high time to dive into that most celebrated (and feared) of 20th century writers. Despite the lengthy annotations (nothing compared to his two biggest works, which contain hundreds of pages of notes), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man alerted me quickly to the rhythm of Joyce’s prose, a bouncy livelihood which more than compensated for his dense lingual experimentation. Given the novel’s focus on a young man who finds himself through his talent and rejects what he considers the banalities of the world, I’m surprised this doesn’t get mentioned alongside The Catcher in the Rye more often, but Joyce goes far deeper than Salinger ever dared, not only conveying Stephen’s growth through the narrative but the text itself. The book starts with a children’s tale using children’s words, and it ends with a well-articulating, radical artistic manifesto (an expression of one’s thoughts made more literal in the epistolary last chapter). Some might accuse Stephen of arrogance, but Joyce is simply refusing to apologize for presenting a truth: an artist, a true artistic genius, must step outside normalcy to better create. Political and religious imagery runs through the book, but Stephen rejects both to pursue creation.
There’s simply too much here to spotlight, but I would like to register just a snippet of Joyce’s gift for wordplay: Stephen Dedalus, a combination of the first Christian martyr and the mythological architect of the labyrinth in Crete, a dichotomy Joyce circles around throughout. Stephen’s father’s name is Simon, and when Stephen has a rush of spiritual shame that leads to a brief dalliance with Catholic living he briefly considers using money to atone for his sin, thus making him guilty of simony. And I cannot quite put into words why I am so affected by one of the last passages in the book, written in the terse bullet-form of a journal entry but full of meaning, as it addresses the genuine humility underneath some "know-it-alls": “Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.” I find this passage as beautiful as the novel’s most flowery runs, and there are many. A masterpiece.
8. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky
A terrifying outpouring of bile that at every turn reveals the unutterable sadness beneath the unnamed narrator's screeds. So short it barely constitutes a novella, Notes from Underground nevertheless troubles me more than nearly any other work of art. But its cathartic honesty only makes it more necessary; writing it probably kept Dostoevsky from killing someone.
9. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
Few things in life are more delightful than sitting back and watching Jane Austen work her magic with the English language.
10. Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton
God, this might be even more awkwardly anti-human than the special-effects bonanza movie.
11. Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 — Paul Tingen
Tingen makes some weird diversions into talk of Zen Buddhism, and he is occasionally too eager to use all of the notes he collected (every journalist knows you never use all your research) but otherwise his meticulous cataloguing and interviewing adds invaluable insight into the neglected and even mocked late-career of an American icon. I love Electric Miles, and some of the revelations here only made me appreciate Miles' daring sonic explorations even more.
12. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë
HATED this in high school, couldn't put it down this time. I still don't quite cotton to its almost emo romance, of two insular people basically retreating from the rest of the world to live their Gothic life, but the mash-up of social romance with Gothic horror is not only entertaining but often riotous. Brontë gets in a number of fantastic jabs.
13. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 — Hunter S. Thompson
One of my all-time favorites, densely involved in the minutiae of political wheeling and dealing to the point that it can be hard to follow, yet so ingeniously scribbled by Thompson that it is compulsively page-turning. I reread it all the time, and you can be damn sure I'll be breaking it out in this upcoming election season, which promises to be an outright farce .
14. The Dirt — Motlëy Crüe
I've never hated the members of a band so thoroughly, nor have I ever been so unable to put down a book. The confessions here are demented and disgusting, but the occasional moment of clarity of the addict makes for harrowing self-evaluations. Vince Neil's self-loathing over his fatality-inducing drunken driving is particularly brutal in its honesty. A trashy read, but a revealing one.
15. Ulysses — James Joyce
Life-altering. My collection of posts for each chapter can be accessed here.
16. Leviathan — Scott Westerfeld
Intriguing take on steampunk that also explores a what-if? history re: Darwinian theory and genetic engineering. Shame it's a YA novel, as the story constantly moves away from its fascinating world to focus on clichéd storytelling elements further restricted by the age of the intended audience.
17. The Sirens of Titan — Kurt Vonnegut
One of Vonnegut's best. Surreal and silly, but often so piercing it hurts. Up there with Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle for me.
18. Swamplandia! — Karen Russell
Half of this book is a masterpiece. The magic realist chapters with the daughter make prose poetry out of banal, even ugly, tracts of land. Sadly, the stuff with the brother rates as dimestore anti-capitalist satire, and a garish plot-twist that launches the final act is a predictable and cheap ploy for shock. It's a shame; Swamplandia! started out as one of the most lyrical, intoxicating reads of recent years, only to end up an all too typical disappointment.
19. The Great Terror: A Reassessment — Robert Conquest
Review here.
20. Hitch 22 — Christopher Hitchens
Even his damn memoir is combative. I still can't really write about Hitch yet. Maybe I'll try if and when I get through that massive final collection of essays.
21. The Lost World — Michael Crichton
If Spielberg's poorly aged Jurassic Park is nevertheless an improvement over Crichton's original, it's hard to say who came out worse with their respective sequels. Spielberg's Lost World is a soulless, pedestrian waste of time and perhaps the director's worst film. Crichton's book may be even worse, a lethargic trudge through a pointless plot that exists only to posit how the dinosaurs went extinct. Because we were all on pins and needles to hear what Crichton thought about that.
22. What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years — Ricky Riccardi
Riccardi can be a bit too defensive of Armstrong and defend some questionable career decisions, but his book is as vital as Tingen's on Miles' late career. He makes a compelling case for the artistry, even the barrier breaking of Satchmo's mainstream success, and it sent me scrambling to save up the cash for the new 10-CD collection of Armstrong's post-Hot Fives & Sevens career. It's sad how many supposed music lovers seem to think that Armstrong's legacy stops after those short years near the start of his professional life.
23. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton
Succeeds at capturing the rule-ordered social world of the setting that the pain of forbidden love never quite breaks through. I actually prefer Scorsese's film of the work.
24. Dubliners — James Joyce
A suffocating portrait of Dublin, but one that also finds meaning and occasionally even beauty in the characters trapped by Ireland's necrotic past. "The Dead" is, of course, a masterpiece, but I'm still captivated by most of the stories, which can be so cynical, yet so human. It's an inexplicably attained balance, and it's no wonder Jennifer Egan recently failed so badly at writing a postmodern Dubliners for America (more on that later).
25. Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger
I never took to Salinger in high school, but I should give him another try now that I'm no longer around people who are, like, TOTALLY inspired by Holden Caulfield. This bifurcated novella was a refreshing reentry into the late author's work, a slightly precious but intensely moving account of genius children in serious danger of falling into incurable waste as young adults. Its short length gives the work a brevity that gets to the heart of the story quickly without sacrificing style.
26. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of the most psychologically rich novels ever written. Whole pages of neurotic word soup pass without so much as a single paragraph break, but I never once got tired of Dostoevky's epic. Overwhelming in the best sense, Karamazov covers so much ground that only a book like Ulysses, which chased profundity by running in the opposite direction, to minute observation over cosmic melodrama, could find something else to say about the human condition in its wake. The "Grand Inquisitor" chapter is one of the most incisive, brutal things I've ever read.
27. The Help — Kathryn Stockett
An insipid bit of revisionist nonsense that allows a white woman to kind-of, sort-of, not-at-all address her own upbringing by a black maid. But Stockett is so invested in learning that she was actually loved by her own help that she won't let anything in the book that even hints at the possibility that a black woman forced to neglect her own children might only not love a white baby but could utterly resent it. Stockett even talked to former maids who expressed this view while conducting research, but funnily enough that didn't make it in the novel. And why should it? Her deceptive structure only gives the impression of telling black women's stories.
28. Light in August — William Faulkner
I had to wash The Help out of my mouth with a book by a white person that actually gets racism right. Faulkner's novel is a harrowing reckoning of the South's racial past, its shuddered waves of shame and self-repulsion more suffocating even than his works on the South's broader issues with self-identity and lack thereof. My favorite Faulkner.
29. Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold
Keeps all the good bits from Plato and leaves out that whole "censor and punish the artists" chestnut. I still think there's a limiting view to Arnold's philosophy, but this a nice stepping stone to more engaging (to me) philosophers like Levinas.
30. Twilight of the Idols — Friedrich Nietzsche
I love Nietzsche. He's so easy to misconstrue that I'm afraid to even say what I think he believes on any topic, but he is so witty and combative that his philosophy is fantastically readable. As something of a self-summary of intent, Twilight of the Idols is accessible even by his standards, and I loved his thoughts on religion.
31. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
As I recall, Lolita was the one Stanley Kubrick film I didn't like, and I was reluctant to delve even into its lauded source material for fear of its potential romanticization of a repellent affair. Happily, Nabokov's playful prose subtly undermines its rhapsodic narrator, carefully making clear that Humbert's self-justification is just that, and that his perceived romance with a girl wise beyond her years is actually a psychologically scarring event that tears down that old-young pairing that runs through literary history. I toed the water with this at first, but I emerged as ready to sing its praises as the host of more qualified literary critics.
32. Elective Affinities — Goethe
Too odd for me to even go into. Not entirely sure what the book is saying beyond the idea of human chemistry being as irreversible and natural as elemental chemistry, but then maybe that's the whole point. I was intrigued throughout, but I don't necessarily know that I enjoyed it.
33. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited — Robin Wood
This critical assessment, split between Wood's original edition and a revised evaluation not only of other Hitchcock films but his own previous writing, is indispensable. Wood's knowledge of various critical theories and his ability to fluidly connect them to practical, demonstrable examples not only deepens our understanding of one of the great directors but also makes complex academic theories more palatable and cogent to a layman like me. This book makes me want to be a better critic, and I think that reading it while taking a class on critical theory helped me understand some of the writers I was reading in that class so much better.
34. A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan
I should have a full review up for this on another site sometime in January, but for now I'll just say that Egan's sub-Joycean stylistic exercises left me underwhelmed, and her characters were so crudely drawn that I could not believe anyone could see any humanity in this work. As social critique, it is laughably clueless, and as literary experimentation, it is infuriatingly safe.
35. Images: My Life in Film — Ingmar Bergman
A surprisingly bouncy read that offered enjoyable insights from the director into his own work, and not always positive self-assessments. Naturally, the autocritique lacks the more layered study a detached critic could bring, but Bergman is sufficiently candid that Images is never just a parade of compliments and self-justification.
36. James Joyce — Richard Ellmann
Review here.
37. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
I'm going to make a habit of reading this every few years. I first read it in high school and found it funny. Now, I couldn't make it past a page without laughing, even as the more traumatized segments of sheer horror affected me more profoundly. Christopher Hitchens once advised readers to "stay on good terms with your inner Yossarian," and I have a better idea as to why after rereading this all-too-sane farce on the sheer madness of war and the bureaucracy that carefully orders that madness into official insanity.
38. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings — ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi
I had a hell of a hard time understanding Levinas at first, even compared to my normal difficulty with philosophy. Yet once he clicked, I found I delighted in his thoughts more than just about any other thinker, his beliefs on our innate ethical responsibility to others the most affirming philosophy I've ever heard. There are still huge gaps even in this introductory collection of essays I found impenetrable, but I was not only stimulated by what I understood but utterly moved.
39. Mirroring People — Marco Iacoboni
My critical theory professor gave us this final read as, I suspect, his idea of a reward for getting through various philosophical essays over the semester. Whatever the reason, this fleet, intelligent but layman-targeted explanation of mirror neurons was a great read, and one that offered empirical biological data to support Levinas' assertions of ethics. The notion that we are neurologically predisposed to engage in mimetic and empathetic behavior is exciting, not merely for its revelations of human communication but its implications for treatment of disorders like autism.
40. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson
I touched on my feelings on this book with my review of David Fincher's adaptation of it (which not merely surpasses the Swedish version but improves on this source material). Larsson broaches so many interesting ideas but constantly pulls back to rant about the state of investigative journalism, even using an extraneous act after the mystery climax to settle Mikael's scores. Furthermore, Lisbeth Salander, so tragically seen as some kind of feminist action heroine, is so blatantly the fetishized projection of this male author that I couldn't help but feel embarrassed at times. Still engagingly page-turning enough to keep me going, but I was amazed that someone managed to make a near-great film out of this, given what a near-abysmal novel it is.
