I was very excited to see the American Reunion movie. I saw American Pie just after college and remembered it was quite funny.
Jim, Michelle, Oz, Heather, Stifler reunite for their high school...
Hey, the list threads lately have been pretty great guys. Figured I'd add one more.
THE CHEWER 2000'S ARTHOUSE CANON
All films from 2000 on. Indie, foreign, arthouse, all that you feel are superb pictures of any genre.
Since the "arthouse" designation is a bit ambiguous, I figured I'd limit it to movies that grossed less than $10 million domestically.
Anyway, without further ado...
1. WHITE MATERIAL
The peerless Clare Denis crafts a biting narrative about the ill-advised capitalist goals of the rich in impoverished countries. Sexy, bizarre, and tense like a Bond film. Plus, LAMBERT.
Primarily concerning a week in the life of a Songelian Police Officer named Z who works a bicycle patrol for the Seattle PD the film offers a dual narrative of Z's increasing tension at his girlfriend's camping trip with another man and the bizarre and disturbing cases which make up his police beat.
As a young muslim man working for an American Police District he finds a unique perspective on the crimes he witnesses and helps to solve, more at home solving issues than marking down paper work. But his thoughts are largely preoccupied by his imagined scenario involving his girlfriend and her camping buddy. His emotional attachment to the job is never in doubt but intellectually he's elsewhere.
The actual police beat side of the film is made up of a large series of Vignettes which detail specific crimes which are based on real recorded crimes from the Seattle PD. Whilst the crimes are never particularly disturbing the dreamlike atmosphere creates an almost Lynchian dread, the mounting madness of the crimes suggesting an apocalypse of morality.
All of this is shot beautifully with a blue tint and scored with ambient electronica (think Aphex Twin), soft rock (Modest Mouse) and classical minimalist piano helping to nurture the dream like feel and lull the audience into a waking consciousness.
Nightmarishly absurd film, with little to no dialogue, that plays out as the farcical dream of a Simpsons character. A must see for fans of surrealist cinema. Haven't seen Roy Andersson's others, would love to know if they are any good.
4. Me and You and Everyone We Know - d. Miranda July (2005)
A lot of people seemed to have developed something of a, to use the parlance of our times, hateboner for Miranda July and her debut film. Whilst I understand the issues that Me and You (because fuck you if I'm writing that title out each time) has, I don't think they torpedo the film as much as people say. There is a heavy level of artifice to the film and a certain tweeness, but I think that artifice and tweeness is completely on purpose. We're essentially dealing with characters who are so locked up inside themselves that they're almost beyond normal human interaction. The first thing that we see John Hawkes do is set fire to his hand in an attempt to impress, or at least catch the attention of, his sons and that establishes just how fractured the communication is going to be between the characters. It is what makes the film work for me and I kind of love that that fractured communication makes the ))><(( subplot kind of hilarious due to desperate the other characters are to communicate and how earnestly Robby explains what it means.
The trailer sells the premise better than I ever could. It's one of the greatest trailers ever, truth be told. Bit of a slow start, and shaky dismount, but everything in between is some of the most nerve-wracking cinema ever put to celluloid.
Kim Ki-Duk makes outstanding films. Korea is a country of burgeoning cinematic powerhouses and he is perhaps one of the most interesting directors operating there. Originally trained as an artist, Ki-Duk took his talents to the cinema screen and has been producing challenging, intense and beautiful cinema at the rate of a film a year.
Ki-Duk’s films can usually be broken into two categories, his structure films and his realist films. His earlier work is based around real people in real places, but his later work has focused on creating artificial constructs as stages. The Isle, The Bow and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring Again all employ vast constructions (floating villages, a huge sailing boat and a floating temple) to counterpoint the understated action. Breath is a mixture of these constructed elements and his earlier realist works. The story follows a house wife artist, who is drawn to the story of a prisoner who has attempted to commit suicide days before his scheduled execution. She visits him four times, and each time she uses wallpaper and a song and dance number to replicate a season before talking about death with the now mute prisoner. It’s difficult to describe how truly, monumentally, beautiful the film is, but it’s the kind of movie which reaffirms why you’re a devotee of cinema.
I can't think of many directors who can get performances more raw and realistic than Shane Meadows. He's one of the greatest actor's directors living today, and Dead Man's Shoes is his masterpiece (at least in my opinion - I'm sure many people rate This Is England higher). Not the easiest movie to watch but way worth it.
Von Tier's brilliant, cynical, & revelatory 4 hour endurance test. Tarantino famously said that had Von Trier released this as a stage play, it would've won a Pulitzer. I couldn't agree more & it should be shown & discussed in every high school classroom in the country.
Meadows' autobiographical account of his experiences as a poor kid who falls in with the wrong crowd after losing his father in the Falklands war. The kid who portrays the director gives one the finest & most naturalistic performances by a child I've ever seen. IMO, this is the best British film of the decade, if not the past 20 years.
For a horror, May isn't particularly horrific, but what it lacks in scares, it makes up for with a great sense of humour and the twisted sensibilities of Lucky Mckee - one of the few directors who seem to truly appreciate and enjoy the genre. It's one of my favourite horror movies of the aughts.
Neat bit of trivia: May was edited by a young Rian Johnson, about 2 years away from his directing debut.
Roger Ebert's best film of the decade, this movie just floors me every time I watch it. The sheer magnitude of what exists in our mind, and how we struggle to express it through art, and how it can emotionally cripple us, it's all just so very overwhelming. A beautiful picture.
16.: 'Moon' (2009). Grossed just over 5 million domestic. A film that SHOULD have been a one-trick pony that is, instead, a completely re-watchable classic.
Eric Bana went from a lame mainstream domestic TV comedian to an international method man and Hollywood star quite literally overnight. If ever one mans career owes itself completely to one role, this is it. He's amazing, my beloved Melbourne looks like a dark crims playground and the film is just the right balance of bravado, coledy and danger - like the very real Mark Chopper Reid himself.
Oh yeah, it was directed by some guy called Andrew Dominik - think he had something to do with Judas entry at no.14 if I recall...
While I have a sneaking suspicion that David Slade may end up another Bryan Singer or John Singleton - promises so much with their debut film then never live up to that promise subsequently - there's no denying the power of this little number.
One hell of a breakout role for the divine Miss Ellen Page, then combine Patrick Wilson just as his career was taking off and you have an incredible little acting two-hander. It's just a shame Slade hasn't come anywhere close to this level of filmic quality since.
If these were numbered according to quality, I'd have to insist this be number one - and I'm sorry but it'd be fisticuffs at dawn for anyone willing to challenge me on that one...
Hilarious, inspired, manic, & poignant, this is the history of the Manchester music scene 1976-1991 writ large in splatter paint celluloid legend. A masterpiece.
I hope I'm not breaking some unwritten rule here, but it seems these two are right to be paired together. There's been some great spins on noir tropes in the last decade...
26. Brick (2005)
27. Winters Bone (2010)
Both take the tropes of classic noir and give them their own very unique spins. Both work - in completely differing ways - like fucking gangbusters.
A beautiful, lean beast of a crime movie. Willing to go places you'd never expect, chock full of blindingly incredible performances, there's a reason this film was heralded as the savior of the aussie film industry last year.
Three of the four segments in this anthology are subtle sci-fi takes on the ways we relate (or don't) to each other: a busy professional couple must prove themselves worthy parents to a mechanical baby surrogate before they will be permitted to adopt a real child; an office worker suffers from dehumanizing treatment despite the fact that he is already an automaton; a dying artist resists a plan to scan his brain and render him functionally immortal. The other segment isn't sci-fi at all: "The Robot Fixer" traces a mother's grieving process as she tries to complete her comatose son's collection of Microman toys for him. It's quietly stunning. Gross: $131,029.00.
Toni Collette stars as a businesswoman who escorts a married Japanese businessman on a tour through the Australian desert. They end up having an affair & just when everything is going well, Collette is thrown into a horrifying, heartbreaking situation. Beautifully photographed & incredibly well-acted, this is a viewing experience that sticks with you for years. Gross: $4,646,000
Centered around a jaw-dropping performance by Andy Serkis, this is the ebulliently directed Pop-Art biopic of gimpy Punk/Funk legend & father, Ian Dury.
Shame on you all for taking so long to get to this one:
33. Primer - One of the few films that has ever made me go "I have to watch that again immediately" upon finishing my first viewing of it. Shot for an unbelievable $7000, it never once looks cheap. It's a triumph of skill and story over excess and flash. Brilliant in every sense of the word, I will never get tired of watching this movie. Damn it Shane Carruth, where have you gone?
I prefer this far more than Murray's other staring-off-into-the-distance romance of the era. Breaks my heart, the idea of a former lothario who is simply too late to ever put down roots. One of Jarmusch's best.
Based on a play by James Hicks, this is the glorious, tragic story of genius British pop producer Joe Meek. In the early 60s, Meek was writing for & recording a large number of bands out of his makeshift studio/apartment that sat above a purse shop. He had great international success with the song "Telstar" but was unable to claim any royalties in his lifetime. By the mid 60s, his sound was out of fashion & penniless, he committed suicide after accidentally shooting his landlady.
With a brilliant, hyper-kinetic performance by stage actor Con O'Neill at it's center, Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels actor turned director Nick Moran's debut film is a fast paced, cinematic Pop-art collage of a forgotten era of British rock.
You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.
A new director takes his first step toward greatness & makes a star out of a wonky-faced, longtime supporting player in the process. The Broccolis were watching.
41. The Woman Chaser. Technically a 1999 film, but it didn't play in the States (art-houses only) until the summer of 2000. Made just a bit over $110,000.
Patrick Warburton can keep on making cheesy sitcoms and commercials because he will always be able to point with pride to this tour-de-force performance. He's a used-car salesman and con artist who becomes obsessed with making a movie that will express his uncompromising, faintly psychotic vision. "Too bad it isn't in color."
I'm certainly guilty of this too but man, I was sure there'd be a lot more films here that I'd never seen or heard of.
42. JSA: Joint Security Area
I don't think it's understatement to say that almost all people prefer Park Chan Wook's vengeance trilogy but JSA is every bit as excellent and assured as his later films.
The gloriously fictionalized EC Comics by way of What If? telling of the making of F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.
Since the "arthouse" designation is a bit ambiguous, I figured I'd limit it to movies that grossed less than $10 million domestically.
44. City of God (2002)
Violent, exceedingly well-made film that follows the parallel lives of two young boys growing up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro (less than $8 million domestic gross). A tour de force of modern film-making.
All films from 2000 on. Indie, foreign, arthouse, all that you feel are superb pictures of any genre.
Since the "arthouse" designation is a bit ambiguous, I figured I'd limit it to movies that grossed less than $10 million domestically.
While a few of my picks have gone against this rule, I've actually been choosing the films that I've seen play at the local Art Theatre of Long Beach on 4th. Despite the fact that many of these choices have grossed more than $10m, know that they are all, quite literally, "art house" flicks.
Not so much low gross, as limited gross. This isn't a "biggest flops" list. It's tough for any film that only played one-week engagements, one theatre at a time, to break 10 million.
