I'm not sure which acquisition this year was the most personally transformative, my Mini Cooper or my DVD player; but whereas purchasing my own set of wheels has made life more efficient in many ways, absorbing older releases on DVD instead of VHS has definitely made watching movies more time-consuming than ever, thanks to all the extras I have to explore.
Of course, to announce a list of the year's best DVDs is misleading, as that particular format is now evaluated by industrial critics (like myself) for all the material with which the feature film is bundled, and to continue describing these as the Ten Best Videos sounds hopelessly anachronistic. The advances of the digital age are complicating things for those of us uneager to disseminate an unwieldly-sounding "Best Films Not Seen In A Theater," and so you will note above the new all-encompassing classification for those films whose initial release predated 2004, but whose merits have stood the test of time and deserve mention.
And who do we have to thank for enlivening to no small degree my solitary nights before my TV screen? In past years it was Facets' rent-by-mail service that regularly brought obscure classics to my door, but 2004 belonged instead to Netflix, whose sizeable catalog and utterly user-friendly packaging have at last made trips to the video store seem unreasonably laborious. Only a few of the masterworks listed below were therefore viewed on videocassette, and in the following years I expect none of them will be; and for the insufferably scrupulous, be advised that none of these were pirated copies.
As usual, they are listed in the order seen over the course of the year. And as only three films made a flawless impression in 2004 (all British, strangely), I'll also be including nine also-rans that barely fell short of unimpeachability. Until the day I finally tire of my thirteen-inch TV (my sole remaining relic from my low-tech early life) and beyond, Make Mine Netflix.
The Perfect:
Pity the increasingly numerous children stuck in essentially parentless circumstances who await the day they can escape into adulthood; the desperate decisions they often make in their loveless adolescence could jeopardize the independence they've forever longed for. Winner of Best Script at Cannes in 2002, this gritty British production tracks the ironic path of Liam (Martin Compston), whose codependent mother is soon to be released from prison after taking the fall for her drug-dealer boyfriend, a repellent bloke with which Liam has had to live ever since. Determined to make a better life for himself and his ma on the cusp of his sixteenth birthday, Liam plots to buy a trailer on the outskirts of their Scottish town, but the only way to earn quick cash is by going down the same illicit route as the men he despises - and it turns out he's really good at it. The typically social-minded Ken Loach weaves a spellbinding tale intricately charting the plausible course by which one boy risks becoming like the very scoundrels he's been trying to escape, the events thankfully subtitled to help us navigate the impenetrable local dialect.
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Here's a decidedly more romantic view of Scotland, this time among the Hebrides, and fashioned by no less than the Archers, two of the best moviemakers ever to grace the business. Banker's daughter Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), headstrong in that uniquely forties manner, is traveling north to the Island of Mull to marry an older, wealthier gentleman simply to improve her station. Predictably uncooperative British weather strands her only one island away, and she passes the days in the agreeable company of naval officer Torquil McNeil (Roger Livesey), who introduces her to the local charms while on leave from the war. I Know Where I'm Going! may be your standard love triangle, but writer/director/producers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger favor setting over story this time around, and they sprinkle this delicious picture with macabre Scottish curses and overeager fox hunters and life-threatening ocean whirlpools and phone booths oddly planted next to waterfalls, and afterwards you won't have been the first to add the Hebrides to your list of prospective vacation destinations. (And if you can't find this one at your local video store, trust me - any Archers production will prove equally enthralling.)
How does one stomach the historical fact that an entire Protestant denomination was created just because a king couldn't keep it in his pants? For starters, we got an amazing film out of the whole mess: adapted from Robert Bolt's equally accomplished stage play, Seasons maps the internal struggles of the sixteenth-century statesman Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), whose resolute Catholicism could not condone King Henry VIII's plan to circumvent the need for a papal marital annulment by splitting the nation off to form the Church of England. To watch a man stick to his ideals in the face of deleterious political and personal criticism must almost always belong to the world of fiction, of course, but More was indeed executed for refusing to deny the ultimate authority of the Vatican, and whatever your opinions of the Catholic Church these days More's unbending faith will prove humbling. With an exceptionally articulate script by Bolt and Constance Willis, under the direction of Fred Zinnemann, and featuring the likes of Orson Welles, John Hurt, Susannah York, Robert Shaw, and (once again) Wendy Hiller, Seasons won just about every award under the sun in 1966 and 1967, and forty years later it would probably, and rightly, do the same.
The Near-Perfect:
Never will I question the tastes of my friend Lorraine, whose advice I finally followed in grabbing this Best Foreign Language Film Oscar®-winner off the shelf. The tears flowed freely by the closing credits, Caroline Link's able direction and script proving thoroughly immersive and departing from the usual angles of World War II dramas. A Jewish family flees the Nazis by emigrating to colonial Kenya of all places, and assimilation to their new environment does not come easy. It appears the marriage between lawyer Walter (Merab Ninidze) and socialite Jettel (Juliane Koehler) was far from prepared for rural life, the husband's grueling physical labors overseeing British-owned farmland and the wife's sudden lack of a glamorous nocturnal scene adding additional strain. While this matrimonial portrait is probably painfully honest, we can be glad their daughter Regina (the adorable Lea Kurka) is shielded from their petty arguments, as she has the family cook Owour (Sidede Onyulo) to introduce her to local culture every day, and she grows to love her new homeland much quicker than her parents. We're treated to breathtaking cinematography as Regina is sent off to boarding school and enters adolescence (played as a teen by Karoline Eckertz) unsure if the war back in Europe will ever end, but by the time they're free to return to Germany they've embraced even the (convincingly digital) locust plagues as a natural part of their life.
Ho-hum, you might think, a Shakespeare adaptation from sixty years ago, but the oldies are still among the besties, especially when you witness the unique blend of the theatrical and the on-location at play here. Director, producer, co-screenwriter, and star Laurence Olivier begins Henry V as though this were one of the original performances at the Globe Theatre, complete with improvisations, crowd feedback, and backstage frenzies, and then slowly expands the action to more realistic settings, until the final battle in 1415 between England and France plays out widescreen upon a bloody and flag-festooned countryside. Olivier played the title character like Shakespeare still mattered in the contemporary world, and as the whole production was intended to boost morale for an England at war with the Continent once more, its energy and spectacular visuals proved how the ancient playwright's relevance still endured. A hit both at the box office and at awards season when it was released both domestically and abroad, Henry V features a rousing Technicolor palette and a very creative use of limited wartime resources. Think Kenneth Branagh is the last word on celluloid Shakespeare? Think again.
Imagine if the half-million kids who swarmed upon Catskills-nestled Bethel, New York in August of 1969 had taken up arms and demanded some serious regime change to bring their brothers back from Vietnam. This four-hour Oscar®-winning concert documentary is subtitled Three Days of Peace and Music, though, and instead remains a monumental record of countercultural expression and of a mind-boggling procession of musical legends. (Ready to feel old? It was here that Carlos Santana got his big break.) We've all probably already caught footage from this film whenever TV broadcasts reference the event, but to take in the whole director's cut (the original version, one hour shorter, inexplicably excluded Janis Joplin) provides an invaluable peek into the youthful exuberance of folks who are probably now your parents' age. Director Michael Wadleigh dispersed his cameramen all over the premises as the throng romped about naked, endured food shortages and endless rainstorms, and impressed the locals with their general equanimity. And not for a second will you fail to enjoy the live performances by Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, The Who, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat, Credence Clearwater Revival, Sly and the Family Stone, and so forth, all of whom effectively make today's pop performers look like refugees from the Titicut Follies.
You know you've seen too many movies when you recognize the Raj Kapoor film from the fifties the Chinese audience is watching in one scene. And how odd that a remote Chinese theater in the 1980's should screen such a film, but there's no shortage of oddities in this cinematic equivalent to TV's defunct "Sports Night." Director and screenwriter Jia Zhang Ke's concocted a comedy in which we're never sure when to laugh, following the meandering fortunes of a theatrical troupe only slightly more artistic than Waiting for Guffman's motley bunch. While the Fenyang Peasant Culture Group was originally limited to performing propaganda pieces for the rural masses (think Rushmore's blunt productions for an equivalent aesthetic), the arrival of the Cultural Revolution frees them to embrace more Western styles and material, and the resultant identity crisis transforms them into…the All-Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band? In between we're handed some very static moments of hipster posturing, uncertain romances, oppressive brick-built towns, and some surprising cross-cultural insights, like how unmarried Chinese couples still couldn't live together only twenty years ago. You may feel a bit adrift without a laugh track, but it's all so genuinely pitiable it comes full circle to hilarious.
I'd previously seen the first two installments of this ten-part Polish TV series by the late master Krysztof Kieslowski, and as little irks me more than unfinished business, watching the final eight episodes loomed high on my To-Do List. And how gratifying to discover that the whole collection holds up nicely, each roughly one-hour segment exploring one of the Ten Commandments as they are applied or ignored by the various inhabitants of a Warsaw high-rise. We get romantic agonies and obsessions, familial intrigues and swindles, hate and forgiveness, meditations on capital punishment, mild ethnical transgressions and full-blown crimes, none of which end nice and neat, as real life would insist. How surprising that these scenarios were co-authored by Kieslowski, a resolute agnostic, but even the godless are ever searching for a set of values by which to live, and why not start with some of the oldest?
This one didn't make the list only because the opening scene features a naked Russell Crowe washing his horse in a pond, although that certainly qualifies as a strong opener. All the parts fit together just right in this adaptation of Australian writer Alan Marshall's memoirs, recounting his childhood in the turn-of-the-century rural outback coping with a pair of polio-enfeebled legs, and admiring to no end Crowe's East Driscoll, a masterful and solitary horse tamer and breeder who whizzes by Alan's window late at night atop his lightning-fast stallion. Alan also nurses a crush for Charlotte Rampling's Grace McAlister, a woman of considerable wealth who's tired of her snobbish husband, and who dives into a clandestine affair with East. Hammers is told largely from Alan's point of view, but alternates between the world of kids and that of the grown-ups, the former filled with the first stirrings of hormones and the early itchings to write, the latter constantly surprising Alan with adulterous preachers, addled old ladies, and a persistent class consciousness. Central to the drama is Alan's determination to learn how to ride, his agonizing sessions pulling himself atop a saddle mounted to a fence, and his father's buried disappointment that his son can never inherit the distinctly Aussie able-bodied machismo. But becoming a man can take many different paths, and director/scripter Ann Turner's remarkably mature treatment is never sugarcoated, which elevates Hammers from solid to exceptional.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai (1999)
A follower of the Hagakure in the service of aging Italian mobsters: it's an intriguing premise, to say the least, and in Jim Jarmusch's hands (another of the many combination writer/directors on this year's list) it's a collision of cultures that generates both farce and pathos. The mafiosi, increasingly falling into disrepute in this Jersey-ish burg as they all surpass retirement age, order a hit on Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) when one of their daughters witnesses his latest hired assassination; after his secret hideaway is violated and his beloved passenger pigeons are killed, Ghost Dog declares war on those for whom he previously worked, except for the one don among them who saved his life years ago. The film is divided into chapters, each section beginning with a quotation from the Hagakure, the most important excerpt advising all samurai to live each day as though it were their last. This is the attitude with which the Droopy-Dog-faced Whitaker faces his nemeses, a cast of matchless character actors only Jarmusch could assemble. Despite Ghost Dog's lethal trajectory, the comedy flows freely, not least when Whitaker phlegmatically shoots his boss in the arm as ordered, and when a policewoman becomes a casualty during this warfare: "She wanted to be equal? Now she's equal."
For his latest documentary, Errol Morris chose an éminence grise that's heavy on the éminence: formerly a Harvard instructor, a lieutenant colonel in World War II, president of the Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and President of the World Bank, each individual hat Robert Strange McNamara has worn in the public and private sectors would be a satisfactory career apex for anyone. To a generation earlier than my own, though, McNamara represents the U.S.' needless escalation of the Vietnam War in the sixties, a move he himself described as "terribly wrong" in his 1995 memoir. That monograph listed eleven distinct failures of the administrations in which he served regarding Vietnam, and Fog is essentially an extension of that book, sitting the voluble McNamara before the camera with Morris encouraging his incisive retrospection. From the invention of seat belts to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the science of efficient firebombing to the diplomatic engagement of foreign cultures, Morris expounds on still-relevant topics with a demeanor both heartfelt and resolute. Morris may seem at times to be seeking from his subject a more explicit apology for Vietnam's excesses, but this film is already sufficiently instructive; and if even this clearly gifted man can confess to an imperfect track record that resulted in massive loss of life, successive White House Cabinets might think twice before claiming to have all the answers.
The style is all the substance you need in the first of a two-part adventure courtesy of the erstwhile filmmaking team of Fritz Lang (direction) and Thea von Harbou (script). Returning to Germany after a long and contentious expatriate career in Hollywood, Lang pulled out all the stops for this sumptuous cross-cultural epic in which every scene is designed to dazzle one way or another. From Debra Paget's skimpy wardrobe to the gilded palace of Maharaja Walther Reyer, from Eschnapur's mysterious caverns to the fearsome tiger itself, not a deutsche mark was wasted to bring to life the trials of Harald Berger's capable architect, hired by the Maharaja to construct a hospital, but suddenly at odds with his patron for the love of Paget's temple dancer and caught in the middle of escalating political intrigues. The script's largely a series of excuses to install the cast in yet another extravagant set piece, and it's fundamentally absurd that the entire Indian nation should be fluent in German, but who's complaining? Eastmancolor™ was rarely put to such good use, and this oft-maligned production deserves rescue from obscurity. (The second film, The Indian Tomb, plods a bit, but after the cliffhanger at the end of Tiger, you might as well enjoy both halves - especially to catch sight of the spray-on gold bikini Paget sports when trying to charm the giant cobra!)
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