Attention-Directing for Berlin and SXSW 2010

The 2010 Berlin International Film Festival begins tomorrow, and unfortunately I'm not going. I did, however, look through the complete line-up to find some of the more exciting films playing this year. One can only hope Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans and Baumbach's wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, is better than Margot, but we'll see...

Jud Süß - Film ohne Gewissen, a biopic of the actor Ferdinand Marian, is the latest from German director Oskar Roehler (Agnes and His Brothers), starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Martina Gedeck. Belgian directors Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern (Aaltra, Louise-Michel) return with their dryly humorous blend of comedy with Mammuth, which stars Gérard Depardieu (with long, golden hair), Isabelle Adjani, Yolande Moreau and Anna Mouglalis.

Four years after she won the Golden Bear for the film Grbavica, Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić comes to the Berlinale with On the Path [Na putu] about a couple in an unhappy relationship. Yoji Yamada’s (The Twilight Samurai) About Her Brother concerns a family who take over the family pharmaceutical business after the patriarch dies.

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener (Walking & Talking, Friends with Money) once again teams up with actress Catherine Keener for Please Give, a comedy about a husband and wife who own a furniture store. Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet and Oliver Platt also star. Please Give premiered at Sundance. A director I often confuse with Holofcener, Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon), will also be in Berlin with her latest, The Kids Are All Right, with Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo.

Always the envelope-pusher (though seldom with good results), Michael Winterbottom adapts a novel by Jim Thompson (The Grifters, This World, Then the Fireworks) into the graphically violent The Killer Inside Me, starring Casey Affleck and (groan) Kate Hudson and (double groan) Jessica Alba. IFC picked up the US rights to this after it premiered at Sundance. Kristen Stewart plays a teenage stripper/runaway in music video director Jake Scott’s (Plunkett & Macleane) Welcome to the Rileys. Also starring James Gandolfni and Melissa Leo.

Hong Kong filmmaker Scud offers the second part of his unnamed trilogy, Amphetamine, which began with Permanent Residence last year. If you’re curious, take a look at the bizarre lengths some Wikipedia user has gone to in describing the nudity in Permanent Residence. Sample: “As the Chinese actors' full-frontal nudity and unobscured private parts are shown many times, both Sean Li's and Osman Hung's glans penises (penis heads) are visible in every full-frontal nude scene (whether in a room, on a beach, water-platform, shower, etc), revealing that they have both been fully circumcised.”

Both Sébastien Lifshitz and Anahí Berneri are previous Teddy winners (for Wild Side and Un año sin amor respectively), and they both will be presenting their latest films, Plein sud [Going South] and Por tu culpa [It’s Your Fault], in the Panorama section. German queer filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, Teddy winner in 1990 for Die Aids-Trilogie, will bring the sequel to his Überleben in New York, New York Memories, to Berlin this year.

Canadian director John Greyson has won 3 Teddys, for his feature Pissoir, his short The Making of Monsters and his documentary Fig Trees; his short Covered, an experimental film paying tribute to the organizers of the ill-fated Queer Sarajevo Festival in 2008, will play at Berlin this year. Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, who won a Teddy Jury Prize for The Adventures of Félix [Drôle de Félix] in 2000, will premiere their latest, Family Tree [L’arbre et la fôret], to Berlin after winning the Prix Jean Vigo. Family Tree stars Guy Marchand, Françoise Fabian, Yannick Renier and Sabrina Seyvecou.

2010 is already a busy year for James Franco. After a hilarious guest role on 30 Rock last month, he is playing Allen Ginsberg in Howl from directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Paragraph 175), which also stars Jon Hamm (another former 30 Rock guest star), Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, David Strathairn, Treat Wiliams, Bob Balaban and Alessandro Nivola. Howl premiered at Sundance and will screen in the Competition section, while two shorts directed by Franco, Herbert White and The Feast of Stephen (the former starring Michael Shannon), will play in the Panorama section.

More 30 Rock connections (it’s all I’ve cared to think about lately): Cheyenne Jackson is featured in Crayton Robey’s documentary Making the Boys, about the legacy of the play The Boys in the Band which was made into a film by William Friedkin. Making the Boys premiered at Outfest last year. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman) directs a thriller entitled The Owls in which she and actress Guinevere Turner play aging lesbians.

The latest from Finnish director Aleksi Salmenperä (Producing Adults), Bad Family [Paha perhe], sounds wonderfully naughty. A brother and sister meet again as teenagers after their parents separate and fall in love. Following the German, New York and Tel Aviv editions of the series, Fucking Different: São Paulo is an omnibus of queer shorts from a group of young Brazilian filmmakers.

Postcard to Daddy is a highly personal documentary by Michael Stock, director/star of Prince in Hell, addressing his own molestation by his father as a child. Sadly underrated director Ira Sachs (Married Life, The Delta) will present his short, Last Address, this year, which is dedicated to the many, many NYC artists we’ve lost to the AIDS virus.

German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (Marseilles, Nachmittag) will debut her latest, Orly, in the Forum section. Bruno Todeschini and Natacha Régnier co-star in the German/French production. Constantin Popescu, one of the directors of Tales from the Golden Age, will make his feature debut with Portait of the Fighter As a Young Man [Portretul luptătorului la tinereţe], which follows a Romanian group of anti-Communists hiding in the Carpathian Mountains.

Hanna Schygulla will receive an Honorary Golden Bear for her contributions to both German and international cinema. Schygulla will also present four films she directed: Ein Traumprotokoll, Hanna Hannah, Moi et mon double and Alicia Bustamente. In addition to the films she directed, four of her most memorable performances will also play: Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven [Auf der anderen Seite], Marco Ferreri’s The Story of Piera [Storia di Piera] for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes and two collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lili Marleen and Rio das Mortes.

Other new films: Submarino, d. Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration); Shekarchi [The Hunter], d. Rafi Pitts (It’s Winter); Loose Cannons [Mine vaganti], d. Ferzan Ozpetek (Steam: The Turkish Bath, Saturn in Opposition), w. Riccardo Scamarcio.

The South by Southwest [SXSW] Film Festival also announced its line-up. The film portion of the festival begins on 12 March and runs until the 20th, while the music portion, arguably the raison d’être of the fest, begins on the 17th and goes to the 21st.

The Duplass brothers’ Cyrus, starring John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, Marisa Tomei (with an awful haircut) and Jonah Hill, is among the Headliners, as well as the U.S. premieres of two Sony Pictures Classics titles, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs [Micmacs à tire-larigot] and Aaron Schneider’s Get Low. Mr. Nice, a biopic of criminal Howard Marks, directed by Bernard Rose (The Kreutzer Sonata, the Anna Karenina adaptation with Sophie Marceau), is also a part of the Headliners and stars Rhys Ifans, Chloë Sevigny, David Thewlis, Luis Tosar, Christian McKay and (!) Ken Russell.

Sevigny also stars in Barry Munday, co-starring Patrick Wilson, Mae Whitman (Anne Veal from Arrested Development), Judy Greer (Kitty Sanchez from Arrested Development), Malcolm McDowell, Cybill Shepherd, Jean Smart, Billy Dee Williams and Colin Hanks. James Franco will redirect his party to Austin, Texas to premiere his documentary Saturday Night which looks at all the behind-the-scenes action of Saturday Night Live. Carla Gugino plays a retired porn actress in her boyfriend Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx; also with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Timothy Olyphant, Malin Akerman, Alicia Silverstone (!), Justin Kirk and Marley Shelton.

Easily the most exciting thing playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival is the new film from Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City), entitled Cold Weather. Cold Weather again stars Cris Lankenau of Quiet City and sounds vaguely thriller-ish. It’ll be the one I’m keeping my eye on. The other title that has me enticed is Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara’s documentary on Stephin Merritt called Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields. The doc is ten years in the making (starting around the time of 69 Love Songs, I’d imagine). The Magnetic Fields’ new album, Realism, is also pretty outstanding if you haven’t picked it up yet.

Other films playing that premiered elsewhere: Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart [L’épine dans le cœur], Bryan Poyser’s Lovers of Hate, Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown, Dagur Kári’s The Good Heart, Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män som hatar kvinnor], Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones, Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats and Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine.

Gettin' Gay with Kids (and Breillat and Van Sant) at Berlin

Another wave of titles have been announced for Berlin's Panorama section, including, most excitingly, a new film from Catherine Breillat entitled Barbe bleu. I was under the impression that Breillat's new film was to be a remake of her own Parfait amour! with Naomi Campbell; I really hope this project hasn't fallen through. In addition to Barbe bleu, her film Tapage nocturne [Nocturnal Uproar], starring Joe Dallesandro from 1979, will also be screening. Gus Van Sant will be there to show Milk, as well as the doc The Times of Harvey Milk. A pair of films about Quentin Crisp will also be screening in the Panorama this year: the documentary Resident Alien and The Naked Civil Servant, which stars John Hurt as Crisp. The other two films of note that were announced are the new film from Lucía Puenzo, El niño pez, which reunites her with XXY star Inés Efron, who is slowly becoming my favorite young actress and Michael Winterbottom's documentary The Shock Doctrine. Full report over at IndieWire.

May Fools

God, I totally forgot that the line-up for this year's Cannes film festival will be announced in a mere month, and The Hollywood Reporter has a line-up of possible films to make their way into this year's festival. Among the possibilities are:

- Michael Winterbottom's Geneva with Colin Firth, Catherine Keener and Hope Davis
- Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Messina (the only Jew in the cast, likely playing the Allen role) and Patricia Clarkson (you might know the film better as the one where Cruz and Johansson have a steamy lesbian sex scene)
- Two films from Steven Soderbergh, The Argentine and Guerilla, the first with Franka Potente, Benicio del Toro, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Demián Bichir, the latter with all the above plus Jordi Mollà, Benjamin Bratt, Joaquím de Almeida, and Julia Ormond
- Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist with Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, Kelly Macdonald, Peter Sarsgaard and Ned Beatty
- Anh Hung Tran's (The Vertical Ray of the Sun) I Come with the Rain with Josh Hartnett and Elias Koteas
- Fernando Meirelles' Blindness with Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Oh, Gael García Bernal and Danny Glover
- Wim Wenders' The Palermo Shooting with Milla Jovovich, Dennis Hopper, Sebastian Blomberg, Patti Smith and Lou Reed
- Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël with Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chaira Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Emmanuelle Devos and Hippolyte Girardot
- Bertrand Bonnello's De le guerre with Asia Argento, Mathieu Amalric, Guillaume Depardieu, Aurore Clément, Michel Piccoli, Elina Löwensohn and Laurent Lucas
- Barbet Schroeder's Inju with Benoît Magimel.

Sounds fucking good to me, whether these films make it into the festival or not. Oh, and via the same source, Wong Kar-wai may debut his Ashes of Time Redux, a new version of his martial arts epic. A new version? That doesn't sound like Wong! (I'm being sarcastic, see below). Anyway, I can't wait until May.

The NBR's fave "INDIE" and "SUBTITLE" movies of 07

How stupid. The National Board of Review also unveiled the best foreign-language, documentary, and "independent" (In the Valley of Elah and A Mighty Heart are "indies," but not Juno) films of the year. You may notice that the NBR showed no love for I'm Not There, Sicko, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, There Will Be Blood, or Charlie Wilson's War. Don't ask me what the fuck an independent film is these days, but here they are anyway. I also have no idea what is eligible or not... I'm pretty sure as long as the folks who vote saw it this year, it counts, as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ain't being released in the States until January. All lists are alphabetical... though I don't think they realized the "La" in La vie en rose is a damned article.

Best Foreign Films (other than winner The Diving Bell and the Butterfly):
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile] - dir. Christian Mungiu - Romania
The Band's Visit [Bikur Ha-Tizmoret] - dir. Eran Kolirin - Israel/France/USA
The Counterfeiters - dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky - Germany/Austria
La vie en rose - dir. Olivier Dahan - France
Lust, Caution -dir. Ang Lee - Taiwan/USA

Best Independent Films:
Away from Her - dir. Sarah Polley - Canada
Great World of Sound - dir. Craig Zobel - USA
Honeydripper - dir. John Sayles - USA
In the Valley of Elah - dir. Paul Haggis - USA
A Mighty Heart - dir. Michael Winterbottom - UK/USA
The Namesake - dir. Mira Nair - USA/India
Once - dir. John Carney - USA
The Savages - dir. Tamara Jenkins - USA
Starting Out in the Evening - dir. Andrew Wagner - USA
Waitress - dir. Adrienne Shelley - USA

Best Documentary Films (other than winner Body of War):
Darfur Now - dir. Ted Braun - USA
In the Shadow of the Moon - dir. David Signton - USA/UK
Nanking - dir. Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman - USA
Taxi to the Darkside - dir. Alex Gibney - USA
Toots - dir. Kristi Jacobson - USA

Y'know, I like "indie" movies...

Oh, yeah, the Independent Spirit Awards. Isn't that just a big party with John Waters or Sarah Silverman as host? I hear the stars can booze it up there, so it always makes watching a helluva lot more interesting than the sterile Academy Awards, but I always wonder what constitutes a film to be nominated and not nominated? This year, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park is up for a handful of prizes, but IFC won't be releasing it until next year. And, is A Mighty Heart really an independent film? Whatever. Also, spare your comments about the photos I chose of Adrienne Shelly and Zoe Cassavetes, nominated for their screenplays, and pictured with cameras. Also, looking at the list of cinematographers, I begin to wonder, "has there been a striking, important American director of photography in the past 20 years?" The nominees are as follows:

Best Feature

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Le scaphandre et le papillon] - dir. Julian Schnabel - France/USA
I'm Not There - dir. Todd Hayes - USA
Juno - dir. Jason Reitman - USA
A Mighty Heart - dir. Michael Winterbottom
Paranoid Park - dir. Gus Vant Sant - USA/France

Best Director

Todd Haynes - I'm Not There
Tamara Jenkins - The Savages
Jason Reitman - Juno
Julian Schnabel - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Gus Van Sant - Paranoid Park

Best First Feature

2 Days in Paris [Deux jours à Paris] - dir. Julie Delpy - France/Germany
Great World of Sound - dir. Craig Zobel - USA
The Lookout - dir. Scott Frank - USA
Rocket Science - dir. Jeffrey Blitz - USA
Vanaja - dir. Rajnesh Domalpalli - India/USA

John Cassavetes Award [for features made under $500,000]

August Evening - dir. Chris Eska - USA
Owl and the Sparrow - dir. Stephane Gauger - Vietnam/USA
The Pool - dir. Chris Smith - USA
Quiet City - dir. Aaron Katz - USA
Shotgun Stories - dir. Jeff Nichols - USA

Best Screenplay

Ronald Harwood - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Tamara Jenkins - The Savages
Fred Parnes, Andrew Wagner - Staring Out in the Evening
Adrienne Shelly - Waitress
Mike White - Year of the Dog

Best First Screenplay

Jeffrey Blitz - Rocket Science
Zoe Cassavetes - Broken English
Diablo Cody - Juno
Kelly Masterson - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
John Orloff - A Mighty Heart

Best Actress

Angelina Jolie - A Mighty Heart
Sienna Miller - Interview
Ellen Page - Juno
Parker Posey - Broken English
Tang Wei - Lust, Caution

Best Actor

Pedro Castaneda - August Evening
Don Cheadle - Talk to Me
Philip Seymour Hoffman - The Savages
Frank Langella - Staring Out in the Evening
Tony Leung - Lust, Caution

Best Supporting Actress

Cate Blanchett - I'm Not There
Anna Kenrick - Rocket Science
Jennifer Jason Leigh - Margot at the Wedding
Tamara Podemski - Four Sheets to the Wind
Marisa Tomei - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Best Supporting Actor

Chiwetel Ejiofor - Talk to Me
Marcus Carl Franklin - I'm Not There
Kene Holliday - Great World of Sound
Irrfan Khan - The Namesake
Steve Zahn - Rescue Dawn

Best Cinematography

Mott Hupfel - The Savages
Janusz Kaminski - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Milton Kam - Vanaja
Mihai Malaimare, Jr. - Youth Without Youth
Rodrigo Prieto - Lust, Caution

Best Documentary

Crazy Love - dir. Dan Klores - USA
Lake of Fire - dir. Tony Kaye - USA
Manufactured Lanscapes - dir. Jennifer Baichwal - Canada
The Monastery - fir. Pernille Rose Grønkjær - Denmark
The Prisoner; or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair - dir. Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker - Germany/USA

Best Foreign Film

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile] - dir. Cristian Mungiu - Romania
The Band's Visit [Bikur Ha-Tizmoret] - dir. Eran Kolirin - Israel
Lady Chatterley - dir. Pascale Ferran - France
Once - dir. John Carney - Ireland
Perespolis - dir. Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi - France

It's about fucking, right?

9 Songs - dir. Michael Winterbottom - 2004 - UK

Sex and cinema. So I have this fascination with the combination, hence why I've been writing lately about a bunch of what your grandpa would call nudie movies. As unsimulated sex seems to be the trend lately, thanks Catherine Breillat, 9 Songs goes all the way. Whereas The Brown Bunny, Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy, or Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) have there particular scenes, 9 Songs wins... it's an entire movie about fucking! And you may think I'm simply focusing on the sex (which is abundant), but really, that's all there is. On the DVD, there's an interview with the star Kieran O'Brien, where he talks about Michael Winterbottom pitching the project to him. O'Brien says, "he told me he wanted to make a porno, and I said that I'd love to be in it." And that's essentially what 9 Songs is: a porno. And a bad one.

The title of the film comes from the structure of the narrative. The fucking is cut between concert footage of a bunch of lame bands our two lovers are seeing. I had a discussion with a friend of mine about the usage of music in film and how, often, it puts a real time stamp on the film itself. This is blindingly true here, where Winterbottom enlisted a bunch of flash-in-the-pan bands that somehow lost their cool before the film even came stateside. I mean, did anyone really listen to the Dandy Warhols still when the film was being made, let alone when it premiered in the U.S.? I think even Spin Magazine's obsession with Franz Ferdinand had ended by then. In its defense, 9 Songs is one of the large handful of European films that found it necessary to use songs from Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain (My Summer of Love doesn't exactly count, as it mostly used renditions of one of their B-sides). And while using their music really doesn't do anything for me on film, the scene in 9 Songs set to "Horse Tears" truly fit. So... music, sex, cinema, memory. 9 Songs is told in flashbacks of a glaciologist (O'Brien) who's remembering (and giving us bad metaphors) a passionate affair he had with a young American girl (Margo Stilly). Like better films such as Presque rien or Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar, the film is a series of moments, not merely a continuous narrative depiction of their beginning and ending of an affair. This is where Winterbottom (almost) gets it right.

There are moments in the film where 9 Songs is fully alive. When Lisa teaches Matt how to dance, there's an intimacy and authenticity that isn't present during the fuck scenes. Yet, despite this, Winterbottom can't get over the fact that 9 Songs is all about fucking, a . It's even less amusing when you see that the running time is exactly 69 minutes long. Har har. 9 Songs, unlike The Brown Bunny, never really emerges further than a man's sexual fantasy; unfortunately, this fantasy comes from that of a teenage boy who thinks he's real cool, listening to The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and jerking off to Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (whom Stilly often resembles). And how interesting is that? Looking at 9 Songs, not very.

2005 Forgotten

When making my Best of 2005 list, I meant to post a list of films that I hadn't seen (whether due to my laziness or that they hadn't come to Saint Louis yet) that would have a likely shot of making the cut. They are as follows:

L'Intrus [ The Intruder ] - dir. Claire Denis
Caché - dir. Michael Haneke
Breakfast on Pluto - dir. Neil Jordan
The World - dir. Jia Zhang-ke
Paradise Now - dir. Hany Abu-Assad
Nobody Knows - dir. Hirokazu Koreeda
Transamerica - dir. Duncan Tucker (the chances of me liking this seem slim after my friend B wrote a scathing review of it here)
Café Lumière - dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
The New World - dir. Terrence Malick
Where the Truth Lies- dir. Atom Egoyan
Buongiorno, notte [ Good Morning, Night ] - dir. Marco Bellocchio
Saraband - dir. Ingmar Bergman
La Meglio gioventù [ The Best of Youth ] - dir. Marco Tullio Giordana
Rois et reine [ Kings and Queen ] - dir. Arnaud Desplechin
The Constant Gardener - dir. Fernando Meirelles
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada - dir. Tommy Lee Jones
Comme une image [ Look at Me ] - dir. Agnès Jaoui
The Squid and the Whale - dir. Noah Baumbach
Junebug - dir. Phil Morrison
Keane - dir. Lodge H. Kerrigan
King Kong - dir. Peter Jackson
Eros - dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh
Wallace & Grommit: The Curse of the Wererabbit - dir. Steve Box, Nick Park
The Aristocrats - dir. Paul Provenza
Yes - dir. Sally Potter
The Devil's Rejects - dir. Rob Zombie
The White Diamond - dir. Werner Herzog

These all seem as though they might have some shot at being on the list, though admittedly some more than others, and all seem more likely than a few others (Match Point, Capote, Munich, Good Night and Good Luck, Walk the Line, Cinderella Man) that I haven't seen. Check out this hilarious article from indieWIRE about the 11 Annoyances of 2005 and their rather sophisticated best of 2005, with Rois et reine at the top of the list.

I also forgot to mention some of the runners-up:


Walk on Water - dir. Eytan Fox - Israel/Sweden
A fascinating look into the still raging hatred between Jews and Germans, from the viewpoint of an Israeli hitman (the amazing Lior Ashkenazi, of the wonderful Late Marriage). While thematically intriguing, director Fox nearly kills his tale with leftist propaganda of homosexual tolerance.



Broken Flowers - dir. Jim Jarmusch - USA
As a long time fan of Jarmusch (and a strong hater of Coffee and Cigarettes), I had my excitements and worries about his latest offering. How could Jarmusch really make a film distinctly his with Bill Murray as his lead? Every post-Rushmore flick starring Bill Murray Redux has turned strangely into a Murray film, even under the direction of mini-auteurs Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola. And while Broken Flowers doesn't suffer the same fate, I can't help but wonder what Jarmusch was trying to do. Maybe that's one of its strengths, but I found myself scratching my head.


A History of Violence - dir. David Cronenberg - USA
Unmistakedly Cronenberg, this cold dissection of our society's obsession with violence thrilled me at points, but ultimately never haunted me the way so many of his films have done in the past.





Tony Takitani - dir. Jun Ichikawa - Japan
Really, Ishikawa should get points for making the bold attempt at adapting a Murakami story to the big-screen. And while it works on many levels, the points he gets only add up to applause for the effort.





Land of the Dead - dir. George A. Romero - USA
I wanted this to be my "trashy" top 10 pick, but as it came out in the middle of the year, I've had time for it to escape my memory. A helluva lot better than Day of the Dead, Romero successfully advances his zombies and pulls the best performance out of Dennis Hopper in a long time.




Jesus is Magic - dir. Liam Lynch - USA
We all know Sarah Silverman's funny... and Jesus is Magic is a worthy display of her comic talents and quirks. In the world of comediennes, Silverman stands tallest over the ones who are either too irritating (Kathy Griffin, Sandra Bernhard) or too heart-on-their-sleeve (Margaret Cho).





9 Songs - dir. Michael Winterbottom - UK
Known as the chameleon of British cinema with his strange ouevre of lesbian road flicks (Butterfly Kiss), neo-westerns (The Claim), rock n roll biopics (24 Hour Party People) and documentary-narratives (In This World), Winterbottom garnered his most attention here, where he attempted to fuse unsimulated sex into a nostalgic romance between a glaciologist (Kieran O'Brien) and an American student (Margo Stilley). His attempt is admirable, and there are moments where the 9 Songs is vividly alive. Yet he never gets past the gimmick: the promise of real sex set against nine musical live performances.


The Baxter - dir. Michael Showalter - USA
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I followed this up with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which I hated, that I found this to be a breath of fresh air. Coming from one-third of the Stella guys (though starring all three), The Baxter is probably a lot more subtle than you'd expect and surprisingly sweet. Michelle Williams displays a nice comic talent (and singing voice) and is far more impressive here than in Brokeback Mountain; Justin Theroux is hilarious.


The Ballad of Jack & Rose - dir. Rebecca Miller - USA
Like Walk on Water, director Miller (Personal Velocity) kills The Ballad of Jack & Rose with her leftist propaganda (oh, really, urban sprall is bad?), ruining what could have been a clever, off-the-map depiction of a motherless young girl's coming-of-age on a nearly empty island with her father (Daniel Day-Lewis) who she's sexually attracted to and her new "step mother" (Catherine Keener).



March of the Penguins [ La Marche de l'empereur ] - dir. Luc Jacquet - France
Mad Hot Ballroom - dir. Marilyn Agrelo - USA
Documentaries need be extra special for me to go wild over. I appreciate them on their own level, but I'm all about the magic and illusion of cinema. And while March of the Penguins is richy cinematic, both this and Mad Hot Ballroom recall too soon Winged Migration and Spellbound.

And the rest of the films lie somewhere in a limbo of disinterest and quiet dislike.

Izo - dir. Takashi Miike - Japan
5x2 [ Cinq fois deux ] - François Ozon - France
Lila dit ça [ Lila Says ] - dir. Ziad Doueiri - France/UK
Palindromes - dir. Todd Solondz - USA
Heights - dir. Chris Terrio - USA
Samaritan Girl [ Samaria ] - dir. Kim Ki-duk - South Korea
Primo amore - dir. Matteo Garrone - Italy
Head-On [ Gegen die Wand ] - dir. Fatih Akin - Germany/Turkey
It's All Gone Pete Tong - dir. Michael Dowse - UK/Canada
Hardcore - dir. Dennis Iliadis - Greece
Liberated Zone [ Befreite Zone ] - dir. Norbert Baumgarten - Germany
America Brown - dir. Paul Black - USA
Sin City - dir. Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino - USA
Four Brothers - dir. John Singleton - USA
Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants [ Happily Ever After ] - dir. Yvan Attal - France
The Edukators [ Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei ] - dir. Hans Weingartner - Germany


And.... best of all, I may have found my film of 2005: Grizzly Man.

As I'm taking a class now on Herzog, expect a detailed review of Grizzly Man as well as rants on some of his other works. Oh, and some day I'll remember to include Oldboy in my 2005 rants.