So, yeah, it's been a long time since I posted one of these. Expect my 2015 list very soon; I'll be trying very hard to catch up over Christmas break so I should be posting a new list daily until this Sunday. Enjoy!
10. Paprika
Director: Satoshi Kon
Starring: Megumi Hayashibara, Toru Fuyura, Toru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Akio Otsuka
Release Date: November 25, 2006
Running Time: 90 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Over time, Paprika has become something of a cult classic: after all, this was the last film of masterful anime director Satoshi Kon before his tragic death in 2010. In fact, even more attention has been brought to it ever since Christopher Nolan has cited it as a chief inspiration for his sci-fi epic Inception. But upon first watching Paprika, I found myself a little... well, put off. Not that the film was too jarring or weird for me. It just seemed a bit underwhelming. Like Inception, this film makes use of a device which allows people to enter other people's and actively control and interact with the dream environment. Except while in Inception the device is being used to steal the secrets of others, Paprika frames the device as an invention used by psychiatrists for therapy. A mild-mannered psychiatrist uses the device to create a dream alter-ego of herself: the bubbly, young and adventurous "Paprika". What follows from here is a mystery as it is soon found that others are using the device for evil purposes, by implanting the dreams of the insane into waking brains and thus inducing insanity (yeah, the story does involve some willing suspension of disbelief). What is set up as a good story devolves into a pretty tangled mess which jumps back and forth from the real world to the psychedelic dream world, never leaving a fine line between the two, as it slowly leads the audience to a confusing climax which is hard to make any sense of, even in the bizarre context of the story. The most interesting sights in the story could have been saved for the end, but they instead are littered throughout the midsection of the film- and as a result the ending does come off as a tad unrewarding. And while the dream sequences are entertaining, they cause the real-world segments to seem uninteresting by comparison, especially considered how the characters are, for the most part, only half-developed. There's one chronically obese character who is annoying within the film, not because he is obese, but because the film at times tries to establish him as a "serious" character, and at other times caricatures his obesity and clearly attempts to just use him as comic relief. But on the plus side, the film does have some pretty unmissable images- someone's head bursting into butterflies, a world folding over, and a parade of insanity stretching into infinity. Despite of being pretty loose around the edges, Paprika delivers an entertaining, beautiful, and mind-blowing journey into dreams like no other.
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz
Release Date: November 22, 2006
Running Time: 96 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is one of the saddest romance films I've ever seen. The film's devoted fanbase maintains its position as a landmark entry in Aronofsky's filmography, despite the mixed critical reception it received upon its release and continues to receive. And while some have responded to the film in a burst of hatred and frustration, this is most likely because it's not a film that's very easily understood on the first viewing. Like Aronofsky's other films, The Fountain largely hinges on spiritual themes. The entire film is best seen as a meditation on love, death, and rebirth, and the continuum between the three. It is a testament to the fear of death and power of love's victory over mortality- tying together the past and the future in a narrative that seems at times Hindu, at other times Buddhist, at other times Christian, and at other times some kind of new-agey blend of the three. And that's not at all a bad thing. Another commonality this piece shares with other works by Aronofsky is how it builds itself as a story centered on a sense of mystery- there's a lot of room for interpretation here, and if you don't understand it, perhaps you're not intended to. The film invites, but doesn't necessitate, repeated viewings. So what's so confusing about it? Like Intolerance or Cloud Atlas, The Fountain attempts to simultaneously communicate three separate narratives to us, taking place in different settings and time periods, but centering on the same themes. Everything here is connected in the smallest of ways- a tree in one part of the film will appear in the frost in a windowpane centuries later, a clear spherical spaceship is headed towards a star cluster observed by a present-day couple and a Spanish monk in the fifteenth century. To clarify: there are three time periods- the past (15th century conquistadors), the present (a scientist trying to cure his wife's cancer), and the future (a bald mystic in a bubble floating through space). These stories are linked not only thematically, but by the same sepia visual style and the same actors portraying the roles, hinting that either the same souls are being reincarnated throughout history, or the past and the future timelines are merely a part of a novel being written in the present day. I won't say entirely what makes this film so beautiful or so sad, because to say so would be to reveal the entire story. What I will say is that while it does stutter over its own pretense at times, that something is still conveyed here- that idea of transcendence, of one story of love and loss being universally connected to all times, past, present, and future. This idea is a powerful one, and not an old one, but The Fountain particularly, I must say, is one of the most sensitive and moving films to deal with it.
Director: Tarsem Singh
Starring: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru
Release Date: September 9, 2006
Running Time: 117 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Like The Fountain, Tarsem Singh's The Fall stands out as a film beloved by a group of devoted fans, yet undercut by a good many critics split down the middle about whether it's a masterpiece or a failure. And yet, like The Fountain, many of its criticisms are directed towards a lack of a clearly defined plot, whereas the film itself is not so much one definite story as much as it is a meditation on a certain idea, a certain feeling. That isn't to say there is no plot- that is only to say that to begin to speak of this film by talking about the story alone is to misrepresent it. This is an exploration of depression, done in the deepest and the most sensitive way such an exploration could be done. In his earlier film The Cell, Indian director Tarsem took us inside the mind of a crazed killer. Here he takes us inside the mind of a man waiting to die, as a young girl encounters a man in a hospital with a broken arm, who begins to tell her an elaborate fairy tale of love, betrayal, and revenge. For the scenery of his fairy tale world, Tarsem traveled around the globe, scouting the most beautiful locations and filming there. In an age of computer-generated special effects, this is a film which uses real scenery and as many traditional special effects as possible. Taking this into account, it's very easy to get wrapped up in the lush visual world of the fantasy story as it follows the exploits of the Indian, the ex-slave, the explosives expert, Charles Darwin, and the masked bandit as they seek their revenge against the wicked Governor Odious. But just as you get wrapped up in the story, we're whisked back to the real world, as if to remind us what's truly important: every chapter of the story is told to the small girl so that she can unwittingly steal and deliver morphine to the storyteller for his suicide attempts. Here is a film that rewards you at every turn through stunning cinematography, vivid costume design, and one heart-wrenching moment after another. I suppose what might have thrown some people off in regard to the film is the fairy-tale element: much of the film is rooted in a fantasy environment, but just because the character is telling the story to a child, doesn't mean that this film is for children. There are scenes that are gruesome, if not outright terrifying, but every violent moment is done with an imagination of a true creative genius, just as it is necessary for the film's stark and painful emotional content. If you come into it looking for a fairy tale, you will, like the small girl, find something entirely different and much more undesirable- but if you can wrestle with the spirits that this film brings forward and emerge victorious, you'll most certainly come out not only with tears of sadness, but with tears of joy as well.
Director: Martin Campbell
Starring: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench
Release Date: November 14, 2006
Running Time: 144 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
In many ways, Daniel Craig's Bond films were doing, consciously or not, what Batman Begins had, at the time, done to the Batman franchise- and in a way, they really succeeded. If only these films had been linked by the same auteur vision that Nolan projected over his trilogy. They took something that was earlier half-campy, half-serious, and gave a bold and gritty 2000's makeover, employing darker tones and psychologically tortured emotional characterizations whilst retaining the sleek sexiness and the madcap action that the franchise was already famous for. And it's hard to dispute that of the hit-or-miss films belonging to this Bond incarnation, Casino Royale is the best. Nothing screams Bond like a classy casino, and this film delivers everything you'd expect and then some. It manages to involve you in the card game without boring you with the rules, and at the same time balances out its cerebral thrills with visceral action. While most of the film takes place in the restrained, polite poker game environment, it opens with one of the most intense chase scenes you'll ever see and ends one a note as restless and cold as is only deserving of its restless and cold hero. In a series where the women come and go fairly easily, it's hard for any one Bond girl to stand out- and yet Eva Green here is unforgettable as Vesper Lynde. This is a film with real characters and high stakes- one moment, everyone is playing by the rules of the game, and the next minute, there's brutal torture. Even Le Chiffre is fairly sympathetic considering the predicament he's caught in- it's hard to talk about the film while saying so little, and yet I don't want to give away too much. All in all, Casino Royale is just as mentally and emotionally rewarding as it is visually entertaining.
Director: Guy Maddin
Starring: Isabella Rossellini, Sullivan Brown, Katherine E. Scharhon, Gretchen Krich
Release Date: September 8, 2006
Running Time: 99 minutes
Rating: 4/5
When I first saw Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! I was in a fit of ecstasy, of rapture, of panic. The film, to some degree or another, understood me. It seemed like everything that I wanted to do, that I would have done, had I the ability and the resources. Brand Upon the Brain! calls to the audience, forces one to recollect a world that is foreign on the surface and yet eerily familiar- like the true oneiric film, it employs surrealism to reassemble cultural artifacts in a hazy collage of imagery and concepts that at once seem disjointed and in harmony. This is a world of lighthouses, of mysteries, of old dusty detective novels, of orphanages and mad scientists, of secrets and marsh grass, masks and capes. The plot itself is a nightmare, both literally and structurally, as a young boy befriends a pair of harp-playing teen detectives who are investigating the orphanage inside of a lighthouse run by his parents who are revealed to be harvesting brain juice from the orphans in the search for eternal youth. Yeah. A story like this would be impossible to translate to the silver screen conventionally, and yet in a perfect marriage of form and content, of style and substance, Guy Maddin directs the film in the style of a dark and intimate silent film, borrowing from the techniques of F.W. Murnau, Georges Melies, and maybe even Fritz Lang to create a film that feels eerily old and yet moves with a frenetic energy and a sense of melodrama that only serves to transform the horror/sci-fi/mystery into a horror/sci-fi/mystery/comedy. Practically every action, every sentence, every line of dialogue is underscored with an exclamation point. "In dreams, emotions are overwhelming," says Stephane, hero of Michel Gondry's contemporary film The Science of Sleep. Hence every exaggeration in this film is necessary- we are moving through a dream where we must be overwhelmed, where every frame is saturated in fear, desire, or a mixture of the two in the most Freudian of ways. Of all the directors working today, some seem to be creating good work while others time and time again churn out something superb. But for all that I might say for Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers, never have I encountered anyone with the same level of innovation that I was able to find in this one film by Guy Maddin, who comes from Canada, of all places. If I have the good luck of stumbling onto any more of his films, you may be sure that I will devour them instantly.
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine, David Bowie
Release Date: October 20, 2006
Running Time: 130 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
The Prestige, despite having aged considerably, remains a popular choice for movie night among Christopher Nolan fans, science fiction fans, and psychological thriller fans in general. It's got one of the biggest twists of any movie I've ever seen, and yet it isn't one of the biggest talked about twists- in part because it's a twist so dependent on the characters, the environment, and the story that the film sets up. The film doesn't exist for the twist, rather the twist exists for the film- it's one of those rare instances where the execution is just as brilliant as the ideas. Watching it for the second time around is just as fun as watching for the first time around, because you notice all the foreshadowing, you notice what's going on behind the scenes, and you see all of the parallels between the magicians and the lies they spin onstage and offstage. Earlier, I compared this film to The Illusionist, talking about how they were both period films about magicians made in 2006. Also like The Illusionist, this film is about a rivalry- but not a rivalry between a magician and a prince for a woman's heart, but instead the rivalry between two magicians for the spotlight. Each tries to upstage the other's act, even going to the point of sabotaging it. And though a dark study in the degeneration of a friendship to a bitter war, The Prestige remains just as compelling as it is cold. There's something very human within this story, and yet you could get so wrapped up in the mind-bending and mind-shattering complexities of it that you could very well miss it, and it wouldn't matter. For a film that is all about secrets, The Prestige is scarcely as fun once you know all the secrets inside and out- however, it is a fine-tuned finely crafted suspenseful mystery that is bound to linger with you for quite some time.
Director: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Starring: Greg Kinnear, Steve Carrell, Toni Colette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin
Release Date: July 26, 2006
Running Time: 101 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
Little Miss Sunshine in many ways reminded me of American Beauty. It's meant to be subversive, redeeming the idea of family by completely deconstructing it through showing us one of the most dysfunctional families imaginable. It is intended to challenge our perspectives on the way life works, on the way relationships work, and inspire us to move forward- and yet, the parents of the family in this movie seem to me like the kinds of people who grew up watching American Beauty- that is, they've learned to redefine their ideas of success, but they still haven't stopped idolizing it. Therefore, the mantra the film chooses to meditate on is not success, but failure. From the start of the film, it's made clear where the focus is: the characters. There is no one hero in particular in this movie; instead, it seems like every one of these characters is given equal time in the spotlight and each one of them is equally interesting. The self-help-program-peddling dad, the "pro-honesty" mom, the lecherous grandpa, the silent teen, and the suicidal gay ex-professor uncle all cram together in a small van (which breaks down progressively over the course of the film) to transport the young daughter to a regional beauty pageant. Each of these characters is broken, in a way or another, and as I watched their lives crumble piece by piece, I was surprised to find how much humor the screenplay pulled out of misery. Little Miss Sunshine struck me immediately as a "perfect" movie, and then later on, as a film that was "too perfect". It's original, funny, inspiring, heartbreaking- but it seems the script knows all too easily where to turn to so as to produce those kinds of results. We've arrived at a point in storytelling where trope subversion has evolved into a trope of its own- I love the characters in this film, and yet I can't help but feel like as if they've been pulled from a hat, as if suddenly creating quirky, original, politically incorrect characters will guarantee a critically well-received film. And in spite of all this, I cannot deny the wonderful experience that is watching this story unfold- this is an uplifting, highly enjoyable flick with lines and personalities which more than earn their place in indie film history.
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu
Release Date: May 27, 2006
Running Time: 119 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
Do I believe Pan's Labyrinth is the greatest live-action fantasy film ever? No. How about the greatest Spanish-language film ever? No. Watching Pan's Labyrinth, I felt that I was getting a fairy tale darker than any other I had seen- but at the same time, I also felt that I wasn't quite getting the dark fairy tale that I was expecting, or, at least, the dark fairy tale that I had been led to expect by the film's excessive hype. To call Pan's Labyrinth an adult Alice in Wonderland is mistaken- for to do so, one would imply that it is about someone escaping reality to dive deep into a world of fantasy. Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, steps back and forth between the fantasy world and the real world. Half of the movie seems to be focused on showing us three dangerous tasks performed by the young Ofelia- battling against monsters, retrieving items of value. This is the magical half- the other half of the film is spent in observation of the adult world, as we observe Ofelia's evil stepfather, a fascist, fight against the rebels in the hill forests of Spain. Neither of these stories rises up over above the other in prominence- to the director and to the audience, each is to be seen as equally important. It's good to stress Pan's Labyrinth chief purpose a fairytale for adults- it is considerably more sinister than the popular stories of the watered-down Disney anthology, resembling something closer to these tales' origins within Grimm and other folklore sources. There is death in this world, there are stakes, and evil is something more than a mere desire for power- evil, as it is shown here, is sadistic, brutal, and unimaginably horrible. And as is common in the films of Guillermo del Toro, the human monsters are to be feared far more than the supernatural ones. Altogether, Pan's Labyrinth tells a very heartfelt and moving story- slamming us in the face with haunting ambiguity but rewarding us with the insurmountable beauty of its special effects, for between all of the dubious fauns and insect-like faeries in this world, the center of this story is something that is undeniably human.
Director: Martin Scorcese
Starring: Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg
Release Date: October 6, 2006
Running Time: 151 minutes
Rating: 5/5
Now I understand that The Departed is essentially an adaptation of an Asian film with the same plot; but due to the fact that I haven't seen Infernal Affairs, I will here just be talking about The Departed based on its value as a stand-alone film. The first thing that stands out to me with this one is its absolutely brilliant all-star cast. On top of its two leads Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, the film also boasts Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, and Alec Baldwin. But what is seen in this film particularly is a plot tense and winding enough to bring out the fullest and strongest of each of their abilities. DiCaprio and Damon each play double agents on different sides of the battlefront in the war on crime: one is a gangster working for the police, the other is a policeman working for a gang. The Departed is set within Boston, a city rich with both Irish-American culture and organized crime, and at the head of this story is crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), one of the most enticingly charismatic movie villains I've ever encountered. Both Frank Costello and the head of the police Sgt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) serve as father figures to the story's two leading spies, and soon both the police and Costello's gang deduce that there's a rat amongst them and it's a race to see who will be found out first. The Departed drags out its story at a perfect pace, unraveling one thread at a time, powered mainly by the dramatic buildup between actors- such stylish thrills and brutality could only be delivered so smoothly by the hand of Martin Scorsese, and this here is one of his best.
Director: Rian Johnson
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emilie de Ravin, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas
Release Date: April 7, 2006
Running Time: 109 minutes
Rating: 5/5
Anachronism is a very powerful tool. With it you can unite different time periods and accentuate their similarities by blending them together in a world that cannot be definitively recognized as either. What impresses me the most about a film like Brick is that when I heard "high school film" is mixing with "film noir" the first thing I thought was comedy. And while Brick could quite easily do this, and be an inferior but undoubtedly easier-to-make film, this film instead decides to take the harder route by playing everything straight- and in doing so, it walks a very thin line, so that high schoolers are constantly using slang words that haven't been used since the 30's and 40's and we can only just barely take them seriously- the real marvel is that you can take them seriously at all, that you can get invested. But you do get invested, and when the mystery starts unfolding, you're hooked. Now this is a film which wears its influences on its sleeve- film noir and modern-day teens lived in coexistence in the cult classic TV series Twin Peaks, but rather than taking Lynch's surrealistic approach to meshing time periods, Brick manages to embody everything that it tries to channel. To put things more clearly: this is not a high school movie pretending or trying to be film noir. This is a high school movie that is film noir, heart and soul, every hair and tendon. And by this, it becomes elevated to a certain level of rarity- it is a high school movie like no other. When I say that it is not chiefly a comedy, I don't mean to say there are no funny moments- and by all means, this is a fun film. There's a language unique to this film, a language with phrases whcih will stay with you after you leave it- "coffee and pie, ooh my", "the pin", "can't raise her", "the brass", "the ape blows or I clam", and the list goes on and on. The dialogue is too odd to be ignored, and thus the audience is seduced into becoming detectives along with high schooler Brendan Frye as he traces down leads in a seemingly endless quest for answers, in the wake of his girlfriend's mysterious death. Rather than try to deconstruct film noir tropes, the film attempts to resurrect them, and its characters fully inhabit them- all to the film's benefit, surprisingly. Noir, within brick, is not just a genre, but a mental state and an emotional state. And more than that, it's an emotional state that reaches out to us, a certain kind of pain and a certain kind of disappointment. Its characters are all beautiful and tangible, so distant and mythical that you swear you've seen them a thousand times, and for the same reason you feel you can reach out and touch them. Marvelously constructed, Brick intersperses cerebral suspense with unexpected superior action scenes, leading up to a conclusion which is, though expected to the level of being obligatory, every bit as beautiful as the first time you saw it.
-Julian Rhodes
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