Below you'll find my list of the movies that blew my mind this past year, regardless of their release dates.
I envy the critics who see everything the minute it comes out, but I'm delirious with pleasure when I discover a favorite new treat that was released fifty years ago.
I don't envy all the Hollywood crap the pros had to sit through this year. Has there been a worse year for studio pictures in living memory?
What meant the most to me were movies and television that went beyond anything printed words, still photography, or the sound of the human voice could do on its own. I fell in love with films that I never would have chosen by subject, but which seduced me into the most wayward and unexpected infatuations.
There's one film I haven't seen yet this year that I want to see right away: Milk. It's not playing in my podunk town yet! Gus Van Sant is already on my love list, though, with Paranoid Park.
Who did you love this year, on small or large screens?
The Furies - link
They don't make spitfire heroines in the movies anymore, and they certainly broke the mold with Barbara Stanwyck. She makes Scarlett O'Hara look like a slacker, in this Western family saga where Walter Huston plays his last role as Stanwyck's patriarch, matching her tooth for tooth.
The Counterfeiters - link
I like a good Nazi intrigue story as much as anyone, and I thought I'd heard and seen all the crazy stories that came out of the war. But this one! It's like the Third Reich's Miller's Daughter: a master counterfeiter is locked in a room and told to produce the perfect American dollar bill... millions of them... in order to save his life, as well as those of his printing press compatriots.
Louisiana Story - link
This clip is insufficient... it shows a little dialog for linguistic interest, but that's not why you'd watch this film with your mouth hanging open. It's about a boy who goes out in a paddle canoe to the swamp to hunt alligator with his pet racoon... and the best parts have no dialog at all. The photography of the Bayou is unearthly, spellbinding. A trance state of America that may not exist at all anymore.
Two Lane Blacktop - link
How did I miss this the first time around? This is the best film I've seen in years, and its subject would normally hold no interest to me: streetcar racing and wagering down the highways of America.
But that's not what this story is really about. Take the fellow you'll see talking below: every story out of his mouth is a lie. And yes, later on you'll see James Taylor, as mean and sexy as a rattlesnake gut. This is a film about a state of mind in America just before all the wheels came off.
30 Rock - link
I discovered this show like millions, in the wake of our love affair with Tina Fey. But now I wonder if I really love her more than anyone else, and if she would believe me and become my best friend forever. She writes this show, stars in it, and inspires her co-stars... as in the following tour de force:
The Dark Knight - link
The only big-studio movie worth seeing all year, and yes, I say that with in a tear in my eye to the James Bond franchise, which has laid a tragic egg.
With Dark Knight, I expected nothing, and had the bad taste of the press exploiting Heath's death lingering in my mind. But never mind all that. Ledger, Bale, and frankly, the WRITERS of this film, transformed a comic book into the violent philosophical debate of our age.
Mad Men - link
I am in agony since the season ended... my Sundays are shot. Yes, of course I want to fuck Don Draper... I want to fuck everyone in this entire script. And their wardrobes. Seriously, though, who woulda guessed this would be the most feminist prime time soap ever to air on television?
The Killing - link
I didn't know Stanley Kubrick made a film noir crime caper movie until someone told me about this little gem, starring the endlessly fascinating Sterling Hayden— plus Elisha Cook, who you'll remember from The Maltese Falcon.
The Darjeeling Limited - link
Amtrak should give Wes Anderson a golden calf, because it's this film that set me on the rails, and I've never gone back to the tarmac. Of course the soundtrack is priceless, like all Anderson films, but I love every quirk and still moment of this paen to sibling rivalry.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - link
If you suggest to anyone that they watch a movie about an illegal abortion adventure in the Eastern bloc, who would raise their hand? No one. That's why I can only tell you that it is the best independently-produced film of the year, and it doesn't matter what you think of the subject's "entertainment" value. More intimately, 4M3W2D depicts a test of friendship between two women that I've never seen on screen, but I know all too well. Therein lies the real shocker.
Paranoid Park - link
Gus Van Sant is the Leonardo da Vinci-like portrait saint of the beauty of the adolescent male— no one else has ever captured the same carnal and exquisite angst. Blank-faced boys, we have stared into your soul and your scrotum now. Yes, PP is also a murder mystery, and a skater drama, but that's just this year's shell.
Lady Chatterley - link
I saw this movie reluctantly, like a sex critic sent to her room. The trailer is "twee," and I'm sorry I have no other tidbit to offer.
I expected the absolute worst, and was stunned to find myself enjoying the Frenchwoman director—Pascale Ferran's— rendition in a way I never would have found in D.H. Lawrence's book. Yes, it is intensely erotic— more so than a hundred sex films I've seen before it— and it will also make you cry. It is also so beautiful you will be tempted to walk into a forest yourself to see if you can find the location.
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