The "Mid-Year" Top Ten, #10 - #6

MOVIES.

Alright Ladies and Gentlemen, it's that time again. August is over, we're into the last four months of the year, and now (at long last), the marketing-driven enigma that is Hollywood will start that slow-ebb building to a dam-burst of quality film releases that will push its way through limited releases from now until the true end of the movie year - the 2007 Oscars. So what, you say? So it's time to put together a modest Best Of - the greatest of all Lists - for the year thus far, of course. But aren't the best movies of each year held back until the Fall? For the most part, you know it! And doesn't that mean the pickings are slim? You bet! But every year, you can count on a handful of films - small indies, odd little studio experiments, and occassionally that rarest of rare species, the good summer blockbuster - to be found amidst the endless schlock horror flicks and THX-fueled action spectaculars (such an odd term, don't you agree?) of the first eight months of the year. So without further ado, here are my picks for the best ten flicks this year released between January 1, 2006 and the up-to-the-minute present. Interested?

10. CLERKS II (dir. Kevin Smith)
*** out of ****

Kevin Smith's return to the Quick Stop, made famous in 1994's slacker-comedy for the townie set, CLERKS, is a pretty pleasant one, especially for those with a healthy respect for Smith's small town Jersey-film universe. The jokes work a fair amount of the time, the raunchiness and audacity are both welcome and used in controlled doses, and most importantly, the storylines for our returning heroes - perpetual fall guy Dante Hicks and indulgent smart-ass Randal Graves - feel natural; it doesn't seem out of place for the two to still be working in service industry jobs - in fact, it feels more appropriate than the first film's "maybe-college" ending did. Although the plot itself has a few rough patches - most notably the absurd notion that Rosario Dawson would ever be interested in the very Jersey-looking (and -sounding) Dante Hicks - the ending is not only strong for its interests within the film, it reminds us of the cultural relevance the first film had; what is out there for twenty-somethings that either couldn't or chose not to go down the bachelor's degree path? It's a good question, I think, and I'm glad Smith chooses to ask it - especially this time of year, even if the jokes that were smart twelve years ago (STAR WARS) are only a source of embarassment now (STAR WARS).

9. A SCANNER DARKLY (dir. Richard Linklater)
*** out of ****

Ah, A SCANNER DARKLY. Rarely has the convoluted nature of a film's title so accurately predicted the movie that follows it. Linklater's take on the Philip K. Dick short story makes for an excellent study of the art of adaptation, particularly as it treats the director's interpretation of Dick's dystopian view of law enforcement and its cultural concerns, but despite a handful of revelatory moments, the overall film here falls a bit flat (especially at the end). The strengths of the film that deserve fair credit lie mostly in the performances of several of the leads, most notably Robert Downey Jr., whose performance somehow slips around (or perhaps through?) a winking treatment of his own past with drug abuse to a much more moving and affective look at the strange reality of paranoia. Where this film works best is in its depiction of its titular "scanner's" home life, where he wastes time away with friends and sporadic doses of the mystery drug, "D." Linklater's decision to show the joys and pleasures of addiction in addition to the costs of drug use - most clearly expressed in a scene in which Keanu Reeve's scanner is forced to watch a friend skirt death from a monitoring station - work to question the viewer rather than lead him or her, resulting in an approach that allows us to buy SCANNER's closing dedication to "those who were punished far too severely for their crimes" much more than a more straightforward take on the original short story might have.

8. MIAMI VICE (dir. Michael Mann)
*** out of ****

I've got to say, this is a movie that disappointed me. You see, Michael Mann was the director I picked up off waivers in the Hollywood Fantasy Draft, and I've always relied heavily on him to deliver surprisingly good movies on what seem like cookie-cutter premeses. Curious about my success? See LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE INSIDER or COLLATERAL. Every time, Mann delivers the goods, at least to the point of making the movie far better than it really has any right to be. But with MIAMI VICE, perhaps I wanted to much. I went in looking for another HEAT, and instead I got another MANHUNTER (the first in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, if one wanted to know). And that isn't necessarily an all-bad thing - both films work in a specific way, but they aren't what you want, dammit - I can't put it a better way than that. MIAMI VICE has a goal: it wants to drop you deep undercover in as realistic and emotional a way as possible. But it chooses perhaps a too-real way to do that - the film opens without any credits, without a studio logo, without anything: you're in the middle of a club, looking through a crowd at Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrel, and you can't understand a word they're saying. And that doesn't change. The entire film is an exercise in picking up on a conversation, trying to slip by unnoticed, being undercover, but as clever as this strategy is, it's still a movie, for pete's sake. There's still a booming soundtrack, a series of quick-cuts to reveal the gunshot wound from the most cinematic angle possible. The movie has its moments - a shoot-out in a trailer park, a final gunfight - and there is no denying the aesthetic joy of watching Mann shoot a movie, but in the end, you need more than the circumstantial evidence this movie gives you, and although the effort is a uniformly interesting one, its just not enough to really secure the verdict I think Mann is looking for. (Take that, punny Gene Shalitt!)

7. WORLD TRADE CENTER (dir. Oliver Stone)
*** out of ****

Oh wow, I'm not sure what to say about this movie. It floored me. That I should get out of the way. I wept in the theater, I wept on my way home and if I think about the wrong scene as I'm typing here, I might break down over the keyboard. But I can also say firmly that Oliver Stone's film deserves only a small part of the credit for this reaction. As a film, WORLD TRADE CENTER manages a handful of impressive ideas, but it ties itself so closely to a format clearly designed to honor its subject without asking unsettling questions that it never really gives us any exceptional moments. It is raw, and perhaps most impressively, it uses our knowledge of the events of September 11, 2001 to establish seemingly-undirected foreshadowing; what I mean is, we don't get set-ups or visual cues to impending disaster - no "this thing's gonna collapse!" lines - but instead we are forced to watch the characters behave with absolute innocence, and that is, quite deliberately, the film's most horrible aspect. But once the Towers fall, we're left with a rescue story. That's it. We see our lost policemen in the dark, talking about each others' families, struggling to stay alive; we intercut these dark scenes with mourning wives and mothers, people waiting by telephones, rescue workers frantically searching for one thing or another they have to get right this second...but we know they will. It's not a question, there's no doubt - just as we knew the World Trade Center would get hit, that the buildings would collapse, that it was a deliberate act of international terrorism. The result is a film that teeters on individual relevance - Maggie Gylenhal's performance is a beautiful study of how to grieve for someone you don't know is dead, Nicholas Cage's reliance on his wife to stay awake and alive in the rubble is half-realized as more than a cliche - but in the end, WORLD TRADE CENTER settles for playing on the pre-existing relevance of its topic rather than its own artistic efforts. The result is a film that moves you deeply not by opening your eyes to something you haven't seen but to something you have - and have wanted to close them to ever since. Whether or not that's admirable is up for debate, but if the question is whether or not it works; for better or worse, it does.

6. PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (dir. Robert Altman)
*** out of ****

This is a simpler review. Altman's PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION is exactly what it seems to be at first glance: a charmingly simple film wrapped around the last night of a semi-fictitious radio show. What's so beautiful about this set-up comes from that appeal: the ease of Altman's script, written in part by Prairie Home mainstay, Garrison Keilor, both teases out the artifice of Keilor's radio show's "old-timey" affectation and imbues it with a much more sincere warmth. At the film's end, it's not so much that we want Tommy Lee Jones's "Axe Man" to be stopped from cancelling the show as it is that we hope he changes his mind; for all the silliness of the songs and jokes and biscuit advertisements Companion plays, its the show's community that wins our hearts - and we sincerely hope it will win his in the end, too. Of course, such a premise is right down the fairway for Altman, whose notoriety as an "ensemble director" is well known. I've wondered before (and I am wondering now) if this play on community that PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION focuses so much on is a wink to those of us in the audience who wonder if Altman is capable of doing anything else - maybe a show about an ensemble makes singular what his movies so often make plural, not unlike putting enough fish together leaves you, in the end, with a school - but then again, that man is aaawwfully crafty, and if nostalgia has taught me anything, it's that old men always have a trick (or a false set of dentures) in their pockets for any kids who spend too much time nosing about. To that extent, I'll be happy with what he has left us: a fine, sweet film about pretty downright nice people, mixed with juust enough metaphorical (and allegorical) whispering to keep your brain working on the drive home - and of course, if we're in the Midwest, that could be a long trip indeed.


THE "MID-YEAR" TOP TEN, #5 - #1 COMING SOON.