FILMOGRAPHY

I despise excellence.

So said the fake Alejandro Adams Twitter account that upstaged the real me for ten days or so last summer, largely by quoting sometimes ill-advised tweets I’d lobbed in haste over a year before and had long since forgotten. “I despise excellence” is a more or less fitting surtitle for my top ten of 2010 list, in as much as I hated the following films:

The Social Network
Carlos
Dogtooth
Four Lions
Another Year
Black Swan
I Am Love
White Material
Amer
Everyone Else
Inception
Cyrus
Greenberg
Enter the Void
The Town
I’m Still Here
Vincere
Lebanon
The Kids Are All Right
Biutiful
True Grit

De gustibus non disputandum est, they say. Why the armor of Latin? So its ancientness will settle the matter. But we argue about taste because we have a sense — or maybe only poets do — that aesthetics — and by extension taste — is a moral thing. Thus these lists are not sport but a sanctified performance.

My Ten:

10. Etienne!

This is an appropriate place to mention that I’m adhering to the rules that confer credibility to lists of this kind: I’m talking only about films that had some manner of US theatrical release in 2010. This restriction illegitimizes festival fare, unfortunately. Etienne! screened at Cinema by the Bay 09 (my third feature Babnik screened as part of this SFFS program in November) but it wasn’t until September of 2010, nearly a year later, that it had a one-week booking at reRun in Brooklyn. Etienne! feels like one of those films you might have encountered at a festival between 1987 and 1991 — which makes you ask yourself whether it’s trying to feel like that, doing a ironic impersonation, oozing some rancid hipster fetish. But like Exit through the Gift Shop, Etienne! functions as a dialectic — the tension between this ethos and that ethos forges a third ethos, rather an anti-ethos, a taker of no sides. The ultimate intention of this work is inscrutable, maybe even to the author. The premise is posited sincerely yet prodded ironically — its maker is also its undoer; YouTube parodists will find nothing to scavenge. It sounds like a game — as many said of Exit through the Gift Shop — but it doesn’t matter which way is up, really. If it’s a postmodern puzzle, nothing is gained by solving it. Indeed, some may titter at Etienne! over their cans of PBR, but the shots of our chubby, mustachioed, ethnically-indeterminate hero huffing his bike over San Francisco hills with his cancer-stricken hamster lapping up air from its basket are emotionally exhilarating. Irony, we see you and raise you.

9. I Love You Phillip Morris

Four Lions denies its characters humanity for seventy minutes, then concedes in its final twenty. By the time pathos arrives, it’s way too late. The bumbling terrorist routine is rat-a-tatted at us until it feels like the film itself is an act of terrorism. This is the TV writer’s Sysiphean curse: writing the same joke over and over in order to create familiarity without escalation or payoff. I Love You Phillip Morris knows what Four Lions doesn’t, apparently — that there are only so many ways you can laugh at sensitive subjects like terrorism and homosexuality. And so Phillip Morris wisely provides its object of derision with an escape hatch. How about the scene where Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor slowdance in their prison cell while their neighbor is beaten by guards for piping out the song Carrey’s quasi-real-life sociopath has bartered for? We hear the off-screen mantra “My word is my muthafuckin bond” as the batons fall loudly on his thick body. Who’s laughing now? Here and there, when its montages aren’t too busy brilliantly skewering other montages, Phillip Morris is a striking and convincing tale of amour fou. With its vast irreverence, this film relieves the pressure some of us have felt since Philadelphia was an Oscar-winner with a song by Bruce Springsteen — that mid-nineties apotheosis of gay suffering is struck down mightily as Carrey’s character fakes the symptoms of AIDS in order to slip out of prison for the dozenth time. (Am I making you uncomfortable? Try watching the film.) And who hasn’t missed the broadest iteration of Mr. Carrey? This film gives us Ace Ventura “living high on the gay hog.” The resemblance of I Love You Phillip Morris to Chameleon Street is regrettable as that earlier, better film deserves far more recognition than it gets — another deliciously subversive comedy.

8. Lovers of Hate / Audrey the Trainwreck

These two micro-budget films contain trace elements of mumblecore, as both were made by fringedwellers of that movement. Audrey’s Frank V. Ross (never leave out the “V” or you’ll hear from him) made the best film of the first wave of mumblecore (Quietly On By) and he continues to out-do his brethren, though I’m sure they’ll tell you it’s not a competition. Lovers of Hate nobly makes the most of a single location — a “compound” film, I call it (I’ve made two myself). This one goes through the motions during its setup, but once its three characters are stuck in that house, the film’s unique brand of tension never lets up. There’s a lot in here about masculinity and what’s left of it in our culture. Can a cuckold recover his dignity or satisfactorily extract revenge through elaborate passive-aggressive games? No, but boy is it cathartic to watch him try. Audrey stars the pliable, reliable Anthony J. Baker (call me a fan) as a guy who, against all odds, uses a microwave, does laundry and gets to work more or less on time. There’s some online dating. Inventive sidebars abound, but Ross isn’t trying to be cute in a 500 Days of Summer way. Little things mount and people suddenly feel cornered. Ross can make small-stakes confrontations and fallings-out register more deeply than they should. He’s uncannily observant and quite good at telling you things about yourself that you probably should have known already. He’s like “Your elbow hurts when you move your arm like this, right?” and you’re like “…How did you know…?”

7. Tangled

Look, smarty-pants critics like Michael Sicinski, Richard von Busack and Adrian Curry (Pedro Costa made his favorite film of the year) admitted to liking this Disney-does-Rapunzel cartoon. As a New Yorker critic said, “There are no unnecessary pop references here, just fluid, graceful storytelling.” I parry with this information because I know how incredulous you are right now. Surely How To Train Your Dragon was better than Tangled, you say. Maybe in some ways. But Tangled takes a step backward in the most refreshing way — Mandy Moore voices Rapunzel without once referring to a Mandy Moore concert for instance. So that barnacle-like buildup of meta crud is on the wane, or Tangled is a lovely aberration. Either way, admiring a film’s throwbackiness is not the same as enjoying it. But I assure you that the songs, the one-liners, the sight gags and the supporting characters (particularly Maximus) are as entertaining as anything this worn out studio has done. I’ve seen this film in 3D seven times. I’ll see if it holds up in 2D and get back to you.

6. Somewhere

There are instances of my forgiving a film its massive flaws because it does a few things so right that they seem to have been bestowed by God. I didn’t get Lost in Translation at all. I think I got Marie Antionette but I was mostly so-what about it. Somewhere is too obvious in a lot of ways. Coppola’s emo leanings seep into the edge of the frame, coloring moments that want to seem as if they’re presented with a European yawn — she’s unimpressed by everything she depicts and thoroughly seduced by it at the same time. Fanning isn’t what I want in this film, even if Dorff is everything and more. The opening shot is like arm wrestling with someone who slams your hand to the table before you’re ready. The slow zoom on the plaster mask drying may be the best shot in any American film this year. Shot qua shot. A shot that risks being vapid, being about nothing. Maybe it is about nothing. Maybe the whole film is about nothing. Nowhere is somewhere, after all. Like I said, emo is in here. But so is the bit where a father apologizes to his daughter while a helicopter drowns out his impuissant voice. Uncomprehending, she smiles at him as she climbs into a car that will take her away for a while. They’ll go on together. Intermittently.

5. Le Amiche

Minor Antonioni? No such thing. If you think this guy was an unfeeling bastard more concerned with composition than people, FUCK YOU. I mean, watch Le Amiche and see if you still feel that way. (Thanks for inventing cinema, you unassuming badass.)

4. Exit through the Gift Shop

Marwencol is one kind of documentary, Inside Job is another. Exit through the Gift Shop joins F for Fake as…something else entirely. Banksy’s “street art” is known to exist only as a result of this so-called documentary — there is no hard evidence that his “pieces” ever actually appeared in any public place, despite the allegations of this film. Which I happen to have written and directed in 2005.

3. Jackass 3D + DBOX

The opening extravaganza. The finale. And about a third of what’s in between. All hail DBOX.

2. Alamar

I wrote about this elsewhere. Which is too bad. I’d like to answer its profound silences with profound silence.

1. Secret Sunshine / Mother

Those Koreans are a goddamn genius. Secret Sunshine is the film A Serious Man wanted to be — though it ends with something like Christian uplift instead of Jewish downpush. These films feature two of the best roles for women anywhere, ever. I wept.

Yep.