"La_Sirenita" <***@hotmail.com> escribió en el mensaje
ARTFORUM
JOHN WATERS
1. Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette) The best movie of the year. A scarily
original underground documentary about a boy (the director) who saves his
own life with a video camera. A truly sensational debut.
2. Baadasssss! (Mario Van Peebles) Not since Ed Wood has there been a film
that captures the "making of a movie" with such a first-hand knowledge and
love of showmanship.
3. The Mother (Roger Michell) A recently widowed grandmother turns horny and
has a secret affair with her daughter's much younger, loutish boyfriend.
Gerontophilia never seemed so exciting.
4. Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar) Even the Catholic Church and child abuse
can be joyous in Almodóvar's hands. Isn't Pedro simply the greatest director
in the world?
5. The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo) All that beautiful scenery behind the
bug-splattered windshield is sheer genius. I wish I'd seen the longer
version.
6. The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci) Everybody always looks sexy in a
left-wing riot. Maybe they're even sexier when they stay home instead and
have threesomes. Especially with a sound track this great.
7. Kill Bill, Volume 2 (Quentin Tarantino) Being buried alive with Uma and
Quentin was the thrill ride of the season. Coolest end-credits of the
decade.
8. The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin) A maddeningly arty musical
that will haunt your memory, even if you hated the movie. Maddin puts the
capital A in Auteur.
9. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around
Paris and talk. That's it. The only romantic comedy I've ever loved.
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry) Jim Carrey used to
look like Tex Watson's mug shot, but in this film he's the handsomest man in
Hollywood. Most Artforum readers will want to have sex with him.
John Waters just released A John Waters Christmas on New Line Records.
AMY TAUBIN
1. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) Fragile, passionate, exquisitely
wrought, Linklater's modern epistemology of love is a perfect movie.
2. The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller) The posthumous restoration of Fuller's
semiautobiographical World War II picture is "termite art," but on an epic
scale.
3. Infernal Affairs trilogy (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak) An identity-blasted
Hong Kong cops-and-gangsters saga that combines the glamour and moral
conundrums of Jean-Pierre Melville's policiers with the tragic weight of The
Godfather.
4. A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira) Angry and despairing, it's one of
those great late works in which the artist puts aside ego and aesthetic
concerns because he has nothing left to lose.
5. Primer (Shane Carruth) The most exciting first feature by a US director
since Richard Kelly's similarly time-warped Donnie Darko.
6. Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin) Hockey players and hairdressers,
silent comedy and shadow-drenched '30s horror flicks collide in a
deliriously creepy castration fantasy.
7. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien) HHH pays tribute to Ozu in a wondrously
radiant film that, rather than mimicking the master, finds the ways he might
have been compelled by the face and pace of contemporary Tokyo.
8. Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore) Apparently it changed Hollywood's
attitude toward documentaries more than it did voters' minds. Either way,
it's one for the history books.
9. Arna's Children (Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel) Khamis's mother,
a former Zionist, organized a Palestinian children's theater troupe in
Jenin. After her death, he seeks out her pupils. A despairing, completely
partisan film.
10. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky) Four
angry metalheads in the equivalent of marriage counseling is a template for
a generation recognizing that remaining an adolescent when you turn forty is
a problem.
Amy Taubin is a contributing editor of Film Comment and Sight and Sound.
JAMES QUANDT
1. The World (Jia Zhang-ke) Baudrillard goes to Beijing. In Jia's sad,
encompassing vision of the new China, all is fake, forgery, or
facsimile-except the desire to escape.
2. Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard) Godard's Dantean triptych spills us into
the abyss of the last century and suggests we will live forever with its
slaughterous legacy.
3. 10e Chambre, Instants d'audiences (Raymond Depardon) The French
photographer turns the proceedings of a Paris courtroom into a Balzacian
fresco; funny and flinch-making.
4. Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (Rodney Graham) A massive, clattery, '50s Italian
projector produces soundless imagery of another vintage machine: a '30s
German typewriter on whose keyboard sifts and settles a fine white powder.
Flour? Crematoria residuum? The ashes of time? In any case, a slow snow of
oblivion.
5. Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien) Ironically, as Ozu's influence on Hou
moves from inadvertent to blatant in this lovely homage, it also becomes
more oblique, assimilated.
6. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) A Thai gay animist fable
paralleling two love stories in which the hunter and the hunted yearn for
mergence.
7. Vento di terra (Vincenzo Marra) A modest, moving Neapolitan update on
Rocco and His Brothers; the accumulation of misfortune and grief would be
too much to bear were it not for the film's clenched precision.
8. La Blessure (Nicolas Klotz) This bruising, lucid portrait of African
immigrants in Paris is truly bouleversant.
9. The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller) Fuller's butchered swan song, lovingly
reconstructed by Richard Schickel, now finds its antiheroic twin in Nicholas
Ray's recently restored Bitter Victory.
10. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos) The Greek master's best
film in over a decade returns to the brumous, bloody terrain and Brechtian
mode of The Travelling Players.
James Quandt is senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto.
CHRISSIE ILES
1. Five (Abbas Kiarostami) The contemplative stillness of Kiarostami's
five-part masterpiece reveals the rhythms of the Caspian seashore through
slowly observed details.
2. Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard) In Godard's divine tragedy, Paradise is
guarded by the US Marines: Empire knows no bounds.
3. ( ) (Morgan Fisher) ( ) frees insert shots from classic Hollywood movies
from their marginalized role as the connective tissue of cinematic narrative
and promotes them to an egalitarian conceptual role.
4. Michelangelo Eye to Eye (Michelangelo Antonioni) The director stands in
front of his namesake's statue of Moses. As if confronting his own and our
mortality, his gaze onto Michelangelo's mastery recalls our own cinematic
gaze onto his.
5. Not Yet (Jim O'Rourke) O'Rourke's first film deconstructs panning shots
from Blow Out, layering electronic tones and film loops into a harmonic
composition of gradual abstraction.
6. The Uncles (Tacita Dean) Fragments of remembered experience become
indivisible from the elusive past of cinema.
7. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (George Butler) A clear
rebuttal to the distortions of Kerry's war record in Vietnam, Butler's
documentary was a beacon in the otherwise murky preelection political mire.
8. Memory Bucket (Jeremy Deller) An outsider's portrait of Texas, seen
through the other end of the telescope. Highly charged locations intercut
with bats flocking out of a cave at sunset proffer a jolting contrast
between the natural beauty of America's Lone Star State and its reputation
as the red heartland.
9. Top Spot (Tracey Emin) The British artist interviews six teenage girls
whose stories echo aspects of her own traumatic youth in Margate, a seedy
seaside town in the south of England.
10. Luke (Bruce Conner) A reworking of Super-8 footage the filmmaker shot in
1967, Conner's study of a day on the set of Cool Hand Luke shows cast and
crew both in front of and behind the camera.
Chrissie Iles is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
JONATHAN ROMNEY
1. Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic) The debut discovery of the year-an
eerie, hermetic world inhabited by prepubescent girls, with echoes of
Buñuel, Balthus, Borowczyk, and Angela Carter, yet totally, audaciously
original.
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry) Who would have
thought that Alain Resnais would be reincarnated in the byzantine
convolutions of a Franco-American essay in romantic slapstick?
3. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang) A beautiful, tender, farcical
farewell to cinema from a Taiwanese melancholic with a peerless eye for
elegant perspectives and rain-dripping interiors.
4. 5 x 2 (François Ozon) French cinema's eternal enfant terrible turned
compellingly adult with his anatomy of a marriage, as harrowing as any
domestic drama outside Bergman.
5. The Consequences of Love (Paolo Sorrentino) A Mafia intrigue with a
difference, as if shot by Antonioni and scripted by Pirandello. Lead actor
Toni Servillo's glacial way with a lifted eyebrow could disconcert John
Malkovich.
6. Five (Abbas Kiarostami) Five single-take essays in lyrical minimalism, of
a sort that might seem routine in gallery video but that worked like a
small, silent bomb in the context of Cannes.
7. Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette) Reality cinema as gruelling therapy,
Caouette's "my crazy family" confessional is painful viewing but a moving,
sometimes weirdly entertaining tour de force. You only pray that it doesn't
start a trend.
8. Aaltra (Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine) The best fun I've had in the
cinema all year? This gloriously malicious Belgian disability road comedy.
See it to believe it.
9. The Incredibles (Brad Bird) Further proof that the only consistent
aesthetic research in Hollywood comes from the Pixar studio. An exhilarating
workout for the eyes.
10. Collateral (Michael Mann) A routine genre outing that leapt to another
plane thanks to Mann's pioneering use of high-definition video, resulting in
a luminous essay on Los Angeles.
Jonathan Romney is a film critic for the Independent on Sunday and author of
Atom Egoyan (BFI Publications, 2003).
Un saludo.
Santi.