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2008 Year
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Underappreciated
Films & Doc of the Year / Top Ten
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by Nathaniel R
December 31st, 2009
"Overrated" and "Underrated" are loaded statements when it comes to the critical and popular reception of movies. They suggest a false notion that there exists an easily cited consensus but depending on who you read and where you get your information consensus may vary. Which means it isn't consensus. Confusing.
"Underappreciated", my preferred appellation, has its limits too. It suggests that one can't include films with decent to huge box office so for this year's...
Underappreciated / Rental Suggestions
I'm spotlighting films that almost no one saw (along with their gross to prove it). They're not perfect but still worth a look.
#5 [Ludivine Sagnier Double Feature]
Love Songs (March 21st, IFC) $104,567
A Girl Cut in Two (Aug 15th, IFC) $409,658
Every year the picture seems to get darker for foreign films in the States with less and less of the them catching on. The relatively few that did catch on this year like Tell No One, Mongol, I've Loved You So Long, Roman de Gare (my review) won miniscule grosses compared to their counterparts from even relatively recent years. You can be hailed 'one of the best of the year' from abundant media outlets, as Flight of the Red Balloon and A Christmas Tale were, without breaking a million in theatrical. Only one subtitled pic cracked 8 figures this year in Stateside release (the sentimental mother/son drama Under the Same Moon (my review) and just barely at that with a $12 million gross. When is another Amelie or Pan's Labyrinth coming? Do Netflix and other DVD mailing sites make foreign flicks so much easier to access that theatrical distribution is beside the point? Listen, I'm not complaining about the easy access. Good riddance to the days when we all had to make do with a tiny foreign shelf at Blockbuster.This is a roundabout way of saying I wish more people had seen or will now see Christophe Honoré's frankly bizarre Love Songs, in which our luscious fickle Ludivine juggles two lovers before disaster strikes, and Claude Chabrol's nasty-tempered A Girl Cut in Two in which she juggles two lovers before disaster strikes. Surprise bonus points: the films are nothing alike! I wish more people had seen both because they're eminently discussable for their merits, failures and cinematic eccentricities.
#4 Turn The River (May 9th, Screen Media) $5,149
Is there anything better than watching an actress stretch, carry a film, and succeed in selling an interesting character? If you share my love of actressing, you could do a lot worse than Turn the River. Famke Jannsen sweats and hustles through former co-star Chris Eigemann's directorial debut like a true pro. She has more ideas about her character -- a pool shark with child custody problems -- than some of the A-List actresses in this year's Oscar pool. Famke, who I interviewed at the IIFF, is mostly famous for less-challenging achievements like seducing James Bond and surviving X-Men: The Last Stand, but she can obviously do more. I don't know how she missed an Indie Spirit nomination this year (it's the type of true indie film you'd think they were created to honor) and I don't know how Hollywood keeps missing a not-unknown looker who can also act up a storm.
#3 Ciao (Dec 5th, Regent Releasing) $10,723 and still in theaters
Once upon a time in a faraway land known as the early 90s there was a movement known as the New Queer Cinema wherein filmmakers like Todd Haynes and Greg Arakki (among others) were shaking things up in art houses with challenging exciting movies. In its place now are ashes. If you live near a theater with a taste for gay fare you've probably noticed that the movies available are more concerned with abs and cheap laughs than in-your-face politics or cinematic history. Today's gay films tend to be one of three things: sex comedies, rent boy dramas, or wish-fulfillment romances -- almost all of which are about 20-something men. This climate alone makes Ciao, from writer/director Yen Tan and writer/co-star Allesandra Calza, unusually refreshing since it's none of those things. Ciao tells the unfamiliar story of a grieving 30-something gay man who discovers that his late best friend had arranged to meet an Italian man for a weekend to see if their online sparks would transfer into real life love. It's a quiet study of grief, and you've seen that before, but it's also a contemporary snapshot of that awkward place where virtual relationships meet real ones. Considering how much of life is lived online it's odd that so few movies have yet to engage with the topic in any meaningful way. Ciao isn't a fast moving picture and like many low budget indies, it needs more visual ideas than it has but it's refreshing and welcome all the same. Ciao gets a lot of mileage from its attentive care to its simple plot. It builds unexpected momentum until its emotional climax, a video performance, which is smartly uninterrupted and moving.
#2Elegy (Aug 8th, Samuel Goldwyn) $3,581,642
Aging and mortality were on the minds of movie makers this year. The Wrestler, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Synecdoche New York were three critical pinpoint movies that obsessed over our crumbling human infrastructure. Death, disease, aging, failure and fatigue are universal human struggles. None of us get out alive. Unfortunately lost in the critical shuffle was Isabel Coixet's similarly themed and superbly acted adaptation of Phillip Roth's The Dying Animal. The movie is about an aging lothario (Ben Kingsley) and the women he refuses to really know (Penélope Cruz and Patricia Clarkson). It's closest movie counterpart in 2008 was probably Synecdoche, New York since they both deal with the double edge of self-loathing and self-regard and circle an intellectual man who beds and emotionally damages multiple women. Elegy is less ambitious but it's a better film primarily because it never loses itself in the wormhole of its own navel. It keeps a sharp and observing eye on the bigger picture. And on a shallow note: it's a lot easier to buy Ben Kingsley's groomed sexual confidence attracting the likes of Penélope Cruz and Patricia Clarkson than it is to buy Phillip Seymour Hoffman's self-hating, frequently visibly ill schlub bedding the likes of Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener and Samantha Morton.
#1 The Fall (May 9th, Roadside Attractions) $2,260,557
I realize that music videos and commercials are a lucrative prospect for directors but can someone please subsidize Tarsem as a filmmaker so he can tear himself away from them more often? His second feature concerns a despairing silent film actor (Lee Pace) and a little broken-armed girl who befriends him. The movie is confined to a hospital in LA and the imaginations of the man and girl as they bond over a deeply silly revenge story starring bandits with mystical powers. The conceit is a bit precious and maybe overworked, too. What's most remarkable and least remarked upon is that Tarsem doesn't confine his visual imagination to the fantasy realm as so many auteurs do when they use tell these story within story films. In similarly framed films like Big Fish, The Princess Bride or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button you can almost feel the director's comparative boredom whenever he's shooting the real world at bedside. Not this time. The hospital sequences are visually rich too, and even more emotionally interesting. Tarsem also pulls a performance from Romanian child Cantica Untaru (probably 7 or 8 years old during the filming) that is so natural you feel like she couldn't have possibly been aware of the camera. Bonus points: The delightful ending is completely mad with movie love. We relate.
Special Citation
Documentary of the Year
Surely by now you've heard of or seen Man on Wire, the gripping fun documentary on Philippe Petit, France's infamous wire walker, and his history making 1970s exploits. He walked on a wire strung between NYC's twin towers. The documentary went on to a clean sweep of critics awards for Best Documentary in the last month. Oscar might be next. Critics' awards sweeps aren't as rare as globally famous tightrope walks but in this case it feels like quite an extraordinary accomplishment. It's what one might call a "light" documentary and light movies don't usually have such sturdy awards pull. Especially when there's an even better "heavier" option available. I thoroughly enjoyed Man on Wire but there's really no contest for me. Trouble The Water, the story of rapper Kimberly, her husband and Hurricane Katrina is the documentary of the year. Its a bracing, complicated and superbly rendered documentary.
excerpt from my review @ Zoom-In:
The knowledge that the Ninth Ward is about to be hit by a merciless force of nature informs the drama and looms like a shadow... One mother, still standing outside, remarks “I’m gonna do the storm. I’m gonna do it out” She says it as casually as one might decide to call out sick for work in inclement weather.
The camcorder footage of the storm, including chilling images of the family trapped in the attic as their house fills up with water lasts for only about 20 minutes but Trouble in Water has more than a natural disaster on its mind. The next hour of the film, no longer exclusively filmed by the rapper but presumably the actual documentary’s directors (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin) and their production team, sees Kimberly, her husband and their surviving neighbors facing even greater and more enduring storms. Let’s call them Hurricane FEMA, Hurricane Bush, and Hurricane Poverty… and leave the rest of the film for you to discover since you must see it.
It bears repeating, you must see it.
continue on to
Honorable Mentions & Top Ten List
