Top 20 Discoveries of 2014

Bulk of my cinematic exploration came early this year: there was always dependable Rendez-vous with French Cinema series of course, providing me with my #2 pick of the year, Love Battles, then there was the best film series I've ever been part of in a long time, the first inaugural Art of the Real, presented by FSLC. The series encapsulated everything I was interested in cinema now - blurring the boundaries between film and reality, fired up by people at Havard Film Ethnography Lab (Leviathan, Manakamana, Iron Ministry). Then there was annual New York African Film Festival which fueled my interest in African films. Needless to say, It's been a very good year for films.

Top 20 in order watched:

Drowning by Numbers (1988) - Greenaway


Another Sky (1954) - Lambert


Still of the Night - (1982) - Benton


Le Notti di Cabiria (1957) - Fellini


Under the Sun of Satan (1987) - Pialat


US Go Home (1994) - Denis


Libera Me (1993) - Cavalier


Touki Bouki (1973) - Mambéty


Yeelen (1987) - Cissé


Sinbad (1971) - Huszárik


Phaedra (1962) - Dassin


Goodbye Again (1961) - Litvak


Koumiko Mystery (1967) - Marker


L'Avventura (1960) - Antonioni


Détective (1985) - Godard


Rendez-vous (1985) - Techiné


The Public Woman (1984) - Zulawski


Strayed (2003) - Techiné


Buffet Froid (1979) - Blier


Viola (2012) - Piñeiro

New Oldboy

Oldboy (2013) - Lee

It has to be said that I wasn't a fan of Park Chan-wook's 2003 original. But over the years, Park's gaudy, operatic, elaborate set pieces has grown on me and I began to appreciate his bombastic, deviant, glitzy, over the top creations. His Oldboy, based on Japanese Manga of the same name, catapulted Korean Cinema on the map and the rest is history. What attracted people in the west to it was Park's kinetic, visceral filmmaking which was totally unique and fresh. Thrown in was the edgy, taboo subject that compelled and disgusted many. After Hollywood's long production rigmarole of the remake which Spielberg and Will Smith were once attached, it finally happened after 10 years since the original came out without much fan fare. Way too late for Hollywood standards. It's not hard to guess why they thought Spike Lee was the one for the job- still considered edgy compared to other run of the mill Hollywood directors. It's useless to talk about how Lee's Oldboy measure up to original, because Park is nothing but a visual stylist. So does it work as an entertaining movie? The answer is yes, yes it does.

It's not shot by shot remake. Lee does away with the original's hokey 'they are all under the spell of this powerful hypnotism' thing. Josh Brolin is great as a terrible family man unjustly trapped in a hotel room for twenty years by a prep school classmate who blames him for his family's demise. Elizabeth Olsen is a volunteer worker with a heart of gold who can't stop falling for this brutish killing machine with dark past. Sharlto Copley plays a European billionaire who wants Brolin's character to pay what he lost. The rest is, well, you know...

Lee doesn't go for the same route as Park had with the original. Lee's Oldboy is NOT Van Zant's Psycho. But it's an expertly done, lean thriller with affecting performances. Lee knows how to make an R rated movie and goes for it. The famous all in on take fight scene with a hammer pretty well duplicated and it's a pleasure to see Brolin wielding a hammer against the lot. But it must take place in Canada because no one has a gun. And THANK GOD it wasn't directed by Spielberg or any other lesser Hollywood hacks. I mean, it's an adaptation of a manga for god's sake. All of you who dismissed this film upon arrival last year (yours truly included), do me a favor and give it a try. You will be mildly surprised.

Numb and Lonely

Night Train (2007)- Diao










Wu (Liu Dan) is a lonely bailiff/executioner whose heart is hardened by seeing many miserable cases of poor women down in their luck being persecuted by heartless court system. She takes a train to the city to attend mass matchmaking ballroom dances and meetings fruitlessly. After executing one of these miserable woman who was accused of murder (they still use bullet to the head, can't afford drugs), the woman's non-emotive factory worker husband (Qi Dao) starts following Wu, with an intention of killing her. As the fate would have it, when they finally meet, their attraction is mutual. They carry on their brief, fatalistic relationship.

Some seriously underexposed cinematography, use of long lenses and cold colors make Night Train's setting - a expansive, snowy industrial city even more inhuman. But it's also amazingly gorgeous. The film has a lot of elements borrowed from Kieslowski - the slutty neighbor, weighted, fateful encounters, down to Liu Dan's short hair. And the opening reminds you of Olmi's ballroom opening of I Fidanzati. Diao's China is a dark place though, inhabited by numb yet lonely people. Compared to Black Coal, Thin Ice, Night Train feels a little sophomoric, but nonetheless great.

Power vs Virtue

King Lear (1987) - Godard











"Instead of King Lear having three daughters, Cordelia has three fathers - a writer, writer playing the role of the writer and myself, the director" quips Godard in a gravelly voice. The writer in this case is Norman Mailer. He says he can only do King Lear as a gangster film. Thus Lear becomes Don Learo. Learo is sniveling Burgess Meredith and Cordelia is Molly Ringwald. The setting is Nyon, a lakeside Swiss town. Chernobyl happened and wiped out the whole civilization. Movies and art are lost. The 'image' needs to be reinvented. A Shakespeare's descendent (theater director Peter Sellars), is trying to rediscover all the great plays of his ancestor and he finds an inspiration from the old man (Meredith) and his young daughter (Ringwald). In the meantime Prof. Pluggy (videowire dreadlocked Godard, gruffing in English from the side of his mouth and sounds like as if Meredith had a stroke, plays basically a cultural shaman) with his young minions, Edgar (Leos Carax) and Virginia (Julie Delpy), is trying to create the image with the help of sound (multiple voiceovers, waves, seagulls overlapping and interrupting dialog). Sound is important because it relates to the silence of Cordelia. There is a parallel rediscovering 'movie' and 'art'.

Godard juxtaposes old men's penchant for young beautiful girls, from Renoir the painter to Renoir the director with King Lear, the powerful, dying, demented and Cordelia, the young, virtuous but untender and a bloody bedsheet, suggesting incest (hence the appearance of Woody Allen at the end or pure coincidence?). The words are cheap and Cordelia doesn't wear her heart on her tongue. He also comments on the doomsday scenarios (Chernobyl just a year before) and dominant video technology vs film - there is a scene where a reel of film discarded in the forest being rescued by Carax. It's less cinematic and messier than his other 80s films and a little jarring to hear everyone speaking English in this Godard's first and only English feature, but his playfulness is there and the choice of 80s teenqueen Ringwald as Cordelia makes a lot of sense here.

Top 10 Performances of 2014

Most memorable of the bunch, not necessarily in order

Sara Forestier in Mes séances de lutte/Love Battles


Isabelle Huppert in Abus de faiblesse/Abuse of Weakness


Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria


Tony Servillo - La Grande Bellezza/The Great Beauty


Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria


Liao Fan in Black Coal, Thin Ice


Michael Fassbender in Frank


Patricia Arquette in Boyhood


Agata Trzebuchowska in Ida


Emmanuelle Devos in Arrête ou je continue/If You Don't I Will