A Weak Year for Cinema, but Here are the Most Memorable of 2009

Top 10 Most Memorable Films of 2009, in no particular order:

- Inglorious Basterds
- Away We Go
- The Hurt Locker
- The Brothers Bloom
- An Education
- Two Lovers
- Summer Hours
- 500 Days of Summer
- This is It

And from the ones I still haven't seen, but my gut feeling tells me they would make the most memorable list (well, the competition is not that stiff in 2009, so it's sufficient to put out a decent, somewhat thought provoking film, to stand out in the pack):

- Where the Wild Things Are: because it brought us all back to childhood, even the Euros and non-Americans who never ever read the book as bedtime reading during childhood
- Antichrist: because it tests your tolerance for the most abstract and head turning self mutilation and violence
- Bright Star: because it marks the return of the glorious Jane Campion and a return to romanticism and poetry
- Broken Embraces: because it is the director-muse definitional movie
- Up in the Air: timely, Clooney and addressing an increasingly pressing issue of the human kind: lack of real connectivity among people
- Up

War is a Drug: Kathryn Bigelow's Raw and Intense "The Hurt Locker" (2009)

WAR IS A DRUG.

I missed you, Tarantino. His beautifully violent return with "Inglorious Basterds" (2009)

How masterful. Gory, addictive, attractive, artistic, fast, emotional, cinematic. He did it again. And this time, I doubted him. I sort of read the incoming reviews, first from Cannes, then mostly from the American press which was somewhat unreasonably so, too harsh on the historical reflection and immaturity aspect of the movie. Went in without expectations. Oh, but what a ride.
Didn't even notice it was 2.5 hours. Christopher Waltz and Melanie Laurent are stunners. Chris Waltz, we read it everywhere, how skillful and entertaining he is at delivering the perfect, logically evil SS. But Melanie! Only in one of the final scenes, in the projection room, when she cannot control her tears, prior to bringing down the cinema (sorry for the spoilers, but all of you should have already seen it, twice by now), it hit me that it is the Melanie I loved in "Je vais bien, ne t'en fais pas". Glorious depiction of a tormented yet determined soul. And her final act of revenge, up there on the big screen, black and white, brings back the good old Uma Kill Bill memories (her opening shot, and car driving revenge plot).Genius. And the perfectly crafted intellectually probing dialogues that intensify just before the massacre...

Trying hard to live an unscripted life in "The Brothers Bloom" (2009)

Yummy. Delightful. Con story. Travel around the world (including Montenegro) story. Friendships, brotherhood and love. Acts and pretense and the real pain. It's hard to go wrong when you mix a refreshingly humorous and sweet as a pie Rachel Weisz, a life tricking Mark Ruffalo and a modestly charming Adrien Brody. This is one of those movies that becomes better and better with each watch and is especially good as a background movie at home, as it often attracts your attention to something you haven't noticed in the first run. "This isn't an adventure story"; " But what are you talking about? IT TOTAAAALLY IS". It is what you want it to be. So is life. Almost. Most memorable scene is Weisz's storytelling of her childhood, where reality is not how you see it or live it, or how you tell it, to yourself. "The trick to not feeling cheated is to learn how to cheat". And then appropriately, the ending gloriously confirms: "We are gonna live, like we're telling the best story in the whole world."

How to preserve a factory of family memories: Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours" (2009)

A family summer house is a factory of memories. Those hours in June, July, August when the familia comes together, once a year, are usually the most vivid, most memorable and sometimes most hurtful hours in the year. These hours define the way the past year was and determine what we should aim for in the year ahead. They are engraved in our minds, they are painted on our pictures. For me personally, the summer hours are much more defining then the resolutions we sometimes aim to take on December 31 each year. They cannot compare to the busy times during the year, to the office life, to the travels that take us to exotic lands but not to our summer house. Very appropriately, I write this entry in my summer house, overlooking the Adriatic Sea (exact location purposely not disclosed) and am brought back to think again about Assayas' latest french family drama "Summer Hours". The plot is fairly simple: a decent sized family meets every summer at a charming french maison de campagne, the grandmother is the family keeper, the glue that holds everyone together and also the keeper of all the secrets, the first generation (her children) is composed of two brothers and one sister (a blonde Juliette Binoche), all living at three corners of the world at this time (Asia, France, USA). They all meet every year. Sit around the table, open presents, celebrate birthdays, laugh, frustrate each other, chase the new generation kids around the lawn. There is one scene that sticks, it's the scene where the three siblings, together with their families and kids (only the sister is still unmarried) leave the house, in a hurried manner, noise everywhere. And once the cars move further away and the goodbye waves have been made, there is this great beauty you see around the family garden, yet with only the grandmother to live in it. Silence and green beauty and walking up the stairs alone after the children have gone. "The past, and the present's (dis) connection to it, is the central concern of Assayas's family drama". The mother, sensing that there is a generation turnaround ahead, pulls aside Frederic, the only sibling still living in France, to have the unpleasant conversation about the family estate and the destiny of the precious pieces of art. Seems that he hurts the most, first because he cannot keep the house that means more to him than the other siblings, and second because he lives every moment with a stronger connection to the past that he is going to have to cultivate in Musee d'Orsay. Here, I will borrow Roger Ebert's words to describe one of the essenses of this picture: "What happens is that the film builds its emotional power by stealth, indirectly, refusing to be a tearjerker, always realistic, and yet observing how very sad it is to see a large part of your life disappear. " And the end, with an open landscape, with a member of the young, new generation almost dancing in the air, jumping through stone walls,....well, it makes you think about the revolutions of family life...

Tribeca Film Fest: Between Belgrade & New York and a Moscow shooting scene

So my TFF experience this year was very true to my roots - the Balkans and the Russians. First movie, "Here and There", Darko Lungulov's narrative whose main topic is so very familiar to me. Here and there, New York and Belgrade, Belgrade and New York. Very short summary: A "man with the van", Branko (Branislav Trifunovic), pays a middle-aged has been musician who is currently too depressed to get out of bed, to go to Belgrade, Serbia, marry his girlfriend and bring her back on a fiance visa. So there, familiar areas emerge even in the pitch line: Belgrade - my hometown, New York - my other hometown, visa - my lovely hurdles...well, yeah that's kind of where it ends as I have not been very much immersed in jazz slow style musician circles or immigrant movers and shakers. Loved: David Thorton (also Cindy Lauper's husband and that's why she miraculously agreed to play a cameo in a Serbian movie) and Mirjana Karanovic are superb, delicious in their silent pain of what life has brought them, yet still allowing the fire to ignite, even just a little bit. Loved: the music score, the older streets of Belgrade, the back and forth between quick life in New York and slow, yet not relaxing life in Belgrade. Loved: Branislav Trifunovic, mainly because of his resemblance to Sergej. Not so much: the Belgrade post-war sentimentalism and no new, modern angle of Belgrade. Yet again we had to pass through Kneza Milosa to see the physical damages of the '99 Nato bombing. It apparently takes 10 years to renovate a building. but renovations haven't even started, because of reasons like this. So that in this type of movie or any media or tourist visit, the city can proudly display its wounds - over and over again. How constructive to country healing is that? So yes, filmmakers from the region, please give us a new angle of Belgrade, even a new angle on the war....Enough said on that topic. Congrats for the best New York narrative award.


The other movie I saw is called "Newsmakers" (Russian, 2009), Anders Banke's remake of Johnnie To's Breaking News. First, I tend to lose respect for remakes unless there is a really good reason there should be one. Especially if the remake is from a movie in the same generation. Even though the movie cannot be categorized as good or even decent by any means, for some reason I found the actual watching experience quite entertaining. Mainly because of two non-trivial achievements by the director and cast: (1) The shooting scenes, including the opening one in the middle of Moscow are mind-blowing. Literally. Cannot stop watching. (2) The gansters are hot and sharp and make you want to be around them. Especially during the unrealistic dinner scene with the hostages. And that's all.
Out of all big festivals, Tribeca seems to seek out or select (whichever way it is) movies from the Balkan region more than other festivals. So watching two, including one award winning one, was very appropriate and satisfying. Still on my list: Rudo y Cursi, The Fixer, The Good Guy, Partly Private, American Casino, The Girlfriend Experience, Only When I Dance...

Broken hearts with a taste of blueberry pie...Wong Kar Wai's cinematic candy: "My Blueberry Nights" (2007)

Love and memory, loss and identity, departures and returns. All blurred with neon lights, closed spaces, vast open spaces. Wong Kar Wai, a cinematic master at spontaneous, unscripted filmmaking that breathes from the screen as if it's a balm for your heart. Ok, yes, perhaps this is too sentimental of a description for a director's style, but Wong Kar Wai's films are seductive, nostalgic, powerful.

My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar Wai's first English-language feature and first film set in the USA, is based on a short film about two people meeting in a diner. Simple, right? Well, not so much. The blurred, freeze-then-slow motion sequences, the noises of doors closing and opening, trains leaving and passing, all of the cinematic accessories point to a complicated identity and a torn heart. This is a story of Elisabeth, a broken-hearted girl who looks for sweet comfort in a blueberry pie. There is always leftover blueberry pie at the end of night, but rarely you can find apple pie or chocolate desserts. “Nothing wrong with the blueberry pie it’s just that people make other choices, no one wants it”.

Elisabeth keeps coming back to a small Soho coffee house (although we don’t see any of the characteristically New York screen shots, other than a passing yellow cab) owned by Jeremy (Jude Law). Acting a bit wiser, perhaps because his break-up is not so recent, or because he often sees broken-hearts walk into his coffee shop and even documents them in a jar full of keys that will never be re-used. As he tells Elisabeth the story of a couple to be married that split and she asks what happened, Jeremy responds: “Life happened. Things happened. Time happened.” And the opening and closing song, “This is just how it goes” reminds us of just letting go….As those doors are closed, even if we have the physical keys. Fittingly, the coffee shop is called “Kljuc” – Russian for keys. And also fittingly that it is Russian as the Slavs are often known experts at soul searching, suffering and Dostoyevski-esque split character developments.

There is nothing that the road can’t heal. “How do you say goodbye to someone you can’t imagine living without? I didn’t say goodbye, I didn’t say anything. I just walked away.” So Elisabeth embarks on a road trip across America. Untypical of American road trips, she goes alone. But she sends postcards, updates about her emotional state, to no other than Jeremy. She just needs somebody to express herself to, she is not looking for communication, for feedback, for his response. She just wants someone who can listen to her. First stop: Memphis, Tennessee. Two jobs, so that she has less time to think about him. In Memphis, where we hear a lots and lots of blues, we find the story of Arnie and his ex-wife Sue Lynne (the ever so sensual Rachel Weisz). And here I borrow a line from a fellow film critic: “As in his other films, Wong examines relationships that remain stubbornly difficult for both people, and the impossibility of being free of emotional bonds, set against a soundtrack featuring Otis Redding singing "Try a Little Tenderness".”. Next stop: Nevada. Here, we find the daredevil untrusting gambling loving Leslie (Natalie Portman). As the landscape widens from small closed restaurant sequences to vast Nevada roads fields, Elisabeth starts healing. Leslie, just like Elisabeth, seeks an escape and in a way “uses” Elisabeth to go where she cannot go alone (her dad’s death bed).

Wong Kar Wai said that this film is ultimately about letting go. Such a difficult decision, letting go of something, but it has to be done. And so our heroine does at the end of her sweet journey. At the end she knows what she wants and she comes back to reclaim her kiss. And so Wai gives us one of the best, tastiest and most symmetric screen kisses on film.

Unemployment, anyone? Flashback to italian neorealism and the vital importance of a bike - The Bicycle Thief (1948)

Vittorio De Sica's 1948 classic about a poor family in Rome's post-World War depression era embodies the truth, difficulty and desperation of ordinary people struggling to survive. The main symbol of survival and hope is the bicycle.

Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is lucky to have gotten a job as a "poster boy", but to take this job he must own a bicycle. To buy a bicycle, him and his wife sell their bed sheets. Their happiness, joy and free spirit on the bicycle as he puts up Rita Hayworth posters, is short-lasting. To be exact, it lasts one day. The same day his bicycle is stolen and the De Sica's tale becomes a tale of desperation and chase. Antonio and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) desperately look for the bike, street after street.

In one of my favorite scenes, Antonio tried to forget his troubles - for just a moment. After offering his son to pause the hunt for the bicycle thief and go for some pizza (with the very little leftover cash), he says: "Why should I kill myself worrying when I'll end up just as dead?". "Let's forget everything. We'll get drunk!""We'll eat and be happy for now". And as they enter the loud and lively restaurant, knowing that this is not and will never be their daily life, they try to forget, really forget. "There's a cure for everything except death". As his son proudly eats his spaggeti, while constantly looking behind towards a boy of his same age who is eating these kinds of meals daily....

Reality comes back quickly, even during the meal. "See why we must find it? Otherwise, we don't eat. "

At the same time, this tale is one of family bonds. In moments where the father is scared that it might have been Bruno who was found under the bridge, you can feel that the chase for the resources and the job embodied by the bike flees his mind and his focus is only on his son's survival. Similarly, at the end of the film, Bruno rescues his father from being taken to the police station for a true act of desperation of steeling another bike. No words are spoken, but the screen and the actors' faces speak - it would be unbearable to break the son and the father. "It is a painful realization for the protagonist's son, Bruno, that his father is human and not the super hero that he considers his father to be."