HERE'S THE LIST:
1. Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
2. Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
3. Thirst (Park Chan-wook)
4. The Secret of the Grain (Abdel Kechiche) and 35 Shots of Rum
(Claire Denis)
5. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
6. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)
7. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) and The Messenger (Oren Moverman)
8. Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman (Eric Bricker)
9. Up in the Air (Jason Reitman)
10. Funny People (Judd Apatow)
HERE ARE SOME REASONS WHY:
It's not just because Quentin Tarantino took all the things he does best, like manipulating language and referencing old movies and messing up time, to whole new levels of accomplishment. He also used those gifts to make "Inglorious Basterds" the most subversive war movie of them all.
And hellaciously good fun, too. But it's a mark of Quentin's masterful audacity that he had fans happily quoting Brad Pitt's redneckisms for weeks after totally ignoring their expectations of an action-packed "Dirty Dozen" with Jews.
Sure, there was some sick and flashy violence, and the final conflagration boasted a satisfyingly high body count. But there were no real combat scenes. And the movie was mostly all talk. Brilliant, revealing talk, about how war makes all who participate a bastard, how Germans could rightly reference America's own genocidal episodes (slavery, the Indian wars) without excusing their own racist madness, about how cinema works and works us over.
That last observation is really the bulwark for the film's firebomb treatise: Don't believe anything you see in a war movie. By going so over the top in it's crowd-pleasing, "artistic license" way with history, "Inglorious Basterds ' suggests that all war films are some kind of propaganda, whether they were made under Joseph Goebbels or by Howard Hawks or William Wellman. Or, for that matter, by Kon Ichikawa or Oliver Stone. War is by nature too emotional a matter for any filmmaker - whether hawk or dove, on our side or theirs - to approach with real objectivity. And their financial backers wouldn't appreciate the full, ugly truth, either; after all, while "Platoon" was criticizing everything Stone could think of about Vietnam, weren't those jungle firefights either?
Tarantino understands that the old adage, "truth is the first casualty of war," is only magnified by that incomparable lying machine, the movie camera.
The director's all-consuming passion for cinema hasn't prevented him from keeping his eyes wide open in this instance. In fact, it enhances the truly radical argument he makes every step of the film's unpredictable, voluble way. "Basterds'" stylistic homages and film references are sublime delights for the movie geek, but they also turn easy relationships audiences have developed with these things sideways - much like the film intends to do with our tendency to nod solemnly (while hoping for some good bloody action) at any picture that claims to tell us something real about war.
Some examples: The opening sequence has been rightly praised, and inevitably criticized in some quarters, for staging the Holocaust like a Spaghetti Western. Beats wrongheaded works such as "The Reader" and "Boy in the Striped Pajamas" that turned the crime into German family tragedies, but some folks will never see that. Anyway, the real stylistic coup in that first chapter is an old Hitchcock trick - show the audience something the people on screen don't know about - is turned into a very Quentin verbal one, simply by having SS superstar Hans Landa politely switch the farmhouse conversation from French to English, knowing that the Jews hiding beneath the floorboards won't understand as he coerces their protector into giving them up.
Landa also revels in his ability to think like his prey and how that makes him such an effective hunter, characteristics he'll later deny as he connives to save his own hide. Don't believe anything a movie character tells you, no matter how well-written and sparklingly delivered, is one of several lessons Landa has to teach us.
Speech also trips up Archie Hicox, the British film critic turned undercover operative, when his perfect German is made suspect by its unplaceable dialect in the basement tavern scene. This is where not only speech but Tarantino's vast knowledge of pop culture really come into play. In the earlier Paris sequence, he showed us how the German mountain movie genre contributed to a world-beating societal delusion, but the trivia game here lets us know what Karl May's Western novels and films like "King Kong" taught our enemies about the "real" America. Still, it's the Anglo reviewer's erroneous assumptions that lead to blood, and he pays for his mistaken reading with his genitals.
View that as a funny bit of contempt toward critics. I did, but I also saw it representing the moviegoer's tendency to believe too much of what they see on screen, and not getting the real picture before it's too late.
The same can be said of the film's entire Nazi high command. They're too bedazzled by the prospect of a glamorous premiere - of a film Goebbels made that looks just like one of the ones patriotic Hollywood pumped out during World War II - to see what's really coming. By the time Shosanna's Giant Face reads them the riot act, they're trapped.
Which leads us to "Inglorious Basterds'" most controversial function, that of a Jewish revenge fantasy. Debate the moral implications of it all you want, but I'll take these Nazi-terrorizers any day over the doomed, often one-dimensional victims of most Holocaust movies. Quentin even plays with the bizarre, primarily Hollywood tendency to give primacy to righteous gentiles and Satanically charismatic fascists over Jews in such pictures. Landa and the Basterds' hillbilly leader Aldo Raine have all the best lines, Turncoat Bridget von Hammersmark gets the movie star treatment in makeup, wardrobe and juicy situations, and Wehrmacht hero-turned-actor Fredrick Zoller plays the part of the decent average German - for awhile.
But it is massacre survivor Shosanna and the American Jews who make the ultimate sacrifices - and have a sheer blast doing it - that take out their worst mortal enemies. It never actually happened, but tell me: has there ever been a more satisfying turn of events in the history of Holocaust cinema?
They're not the ones who win the war though, and that's where "Inglorious Basterds" is at its most outrageously bold. It's Hans Landa, the top Nazi operative in France, who ensures Allied victory. He doesn't entirely get away with his self-serving chicanery (Aldo sees to that) but by becoming the biggest bastard of them all, Landa epitomizes what it takes to prevail against a formidable enemy. That's something every honest warrior knows, but few filmmakers have dared to acknowledge.
Now, just a few final words about the deceptively upfront Aldo. Why does this proud Southern cracker hate haters so much? The key is in his claim to some Indian blood. He's from the Smokey Mountains, and a Tennessee boy like Tarantino would know that means that Indian ancestry is likely Cherokee. There would be Raine family stories about relatives lost on the Trail of Tears, arguably the closest thing our nation's come to perpetrating its own Holocaust. I'm betting those never-explained rope burns on Aldo's neck are the result of being a white man who couldn't abide segregation in the Jim Crow South and tried to do something about it - and there were some of those, probably raised in families that had good reasons to deplore prejudice.
If "Inglorious Basterds" rubbed you the wrong way, well, Quentin clearly made a conscious choice to make it abrasive, I don't see how it can be accused of just being a film nerd's snarky attempt at tackling a serious subject. Tarantino certainly plays around with the material, and even his own approach to it (the lobby scene at the premiere mostly goofs around with the multilingual ideas he so cunningly works out elsewhere). But a deep thoughtfulness informs how every outlandish step and character get worked out all through "Inglorious Basterds." If you think Quentin's just a clever punk, fine, I'm not going to change your mind. But he's here to show us how we've been punked by a whole, historic genre of films.
At a time when our freshly Peace-prized president is talking troop buildups and exit dates out of both sides of his mouth, I can't think of any more valuable goal for a movie than to show us how to be skeptical of everything we hear. And see.
It's also something to keep in my mind while you're grooving on all of that dragons vs. helicopters stuff in the "movie that will change the way you look at movies," "Avatar." Plus ca change, baby, as our militarily unreliable but cinematically hip friends in France might say.
Interestingly enough, "Basterds" blew the doors off of war movies in the same year that films about our current, perhaps never-ending war on terror finally matured.
A garrulous British film, "In the Loop," hilariously laid out an incomprehensible web of deception between London and Washington that seems an awful lot like the one that got us into much of this mess. It's the most cynical satire of its kind since the Cold War "Dr. Strangelove," and even more than "Basterds," it's all talk. Doubletalk, how it's used, what's really behind it - for a reportedly post-literate film culture, 2009 sure was a great year for words.
Our current generation of soldiers finally got as honest a shake as conventional movies can give them with "The Hurt Locker" and "The Messenger," too (we'll leave the bone-headed, Vietnamish melodrama "Brothers" out of this conversation). The volunteer military may not be all that different from conscripted forces of the past, but Kathryn Bigelow's slightly overrated tour of an adrenalin-fueled Baghdad bomb-defusing squad nailed the crucial difference. "Hurt Locker" captured the highs of danger and bravery quite evocatively, without condescending to its subjects by turning them into damaged or deranged casualties.
The Messenger's casualty notification officers are damaged, physically and emotionally, in ways that soldiers have always been. But something about the sensitive, also beautifully spoken way in which co-writer and director Oren Moverman has them and the grieving widows, parents and children they bring bad news behave feels right most of the time. Maybe it's just another example of the Fog of War Movies, but I'd like to think that Moverman, who's seen combat in the Israel Defense Force, has a more honest - and honorable - agenda than most.
The fifth war movie on my top 12 list is "The White Ribbon" which, on its gray monochrome surface, is not really a war movie at all. Yes, World War I begins late in the narrative. But the story is set deep (really deep) inside northern Germany, a country that was never invaded during that conflict but lost the war anyway. It's about a small, pious and well-ordered community that, forced to cope with a little disorder, lays down the already not insubstantial law. The town's children can't help but notice this, recognize the hypocrisy at work and rebel in their properly brought-up ways against it. But they also internalize the dominant mindset, and you know where that led.
Michael Haneke proved that intelligent films about the German character in the first half of the 20th Century need not be simple-mindedly humanistic nor excuses for monstrousness. He's arguably the first director since Fassbinder to pull it off. Loved what ya did, Quentin, but we still need smart, serious films about this stuff. Always will.
Would it be glib to segue from the war theme now into the battle of the sexes? Yeah, it would. So let's just say that the two most striking films about men and women this year were pretty f-ing frightening.
Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," far more widely reviled than "Basterds" as some kind of sick joke, was hardly a put-on. I think it's Trier's deepest, darkest inquiry into his favorite subject, misogyny. What Charlotte Gainsbourg's grief-maddened wife and Willem Dafoe's rationally controlling husband do to each other is horrific. But Trier works it all out as the result not just of sexually related trauma, but of centuries of gynophobia, mutated down from church-sanctioned witch burnings to modern notions of normal psychology. Trier seems to think nature is also a culprit, and an unhinged woman some manifestation of chaos. But then he would, being a man, albeit one of the few who's ever been willing to confront his fears in such an unadulterated, public and artistic way. Maybe it'll help.
The Korean vampiress played by Kim Ok-vin in "Thirst" is another nasty piece of work, but more obviously oppressed until she's empowered by her bloodsucking Catholic priest lover (Song Kang-ho). He's kind of conflicted, as you might imagine. She pretty quickly sees the potential her new abilities give her to get back at those who done her wrong, and revels in her enhanced capacity for cruelty. But living death doesn't mean eternal happiness, even if she thinks she's finally found Mr. Right. Nor does it mean escape from guilt.
Vapid as those "Twilight" movies are, their popularity has now helped two outstanding foreign vampire films in a row (last year it was Swedish import "Let the Right One In") to get a foothold in American theaters. Doubt that many Twihards could handle Park Chan-wook's persuasive, withering take on undead romance. But it would certainly expand their imaginations, no matter how much they dislike it.
Gentler, more relatable takes on relationships popped up in other fine films of 2009, like the lovely and observant ethnic family pieces "The Secret of the Grain" and "35 Shots of Rum" from France, and Hollywood's two most bracing comedies-with-some-drama, "Up in the Air" and "Funny People." We need less combative love from movies, too, especially when they don't lie (and these four don't, much) about that making it any easier.
And we need movies to remind us of the glories of art, as no film did better this year than the architecture and photography documentary "Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman." To somewhat tortuously wrap this thing up, let's note that a lot of the great Modern designers celebrated in the film fled the Third Reich to settle and build their masterpieces in Southern California.
War, then, led to great creative work. Like, sometimes, with the movies. I can't deny that's true. How much truth there is in any of it, though, must be carefully examined.
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