{"id":1203,"date":"2010-02-22T08:15:31","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T13:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/22\/films-best-of-lists\/"},"modified":"2021-06-10T10:06:42","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:06:42","slug":"films-best-of-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/22\/films-best-of-lists\/","title":{"rendered":"films (& best-of lists)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The decade isn’t really over yet: there was no “year zero,” which means that the year 2000 was the two-thousandth year of its calendar, and that this<\/em> year is the 2010th, the last of the third millennium’s first decade, not <\/em>the first of its second. But I’ve seen so many “ten best films of the decade” lists already (thanks partly to the last issue of Film Comment<\/a>, which has over a hundred of them), that I feel helplessly encouraged to throw together my own.<\/p>\n

But first, as we wind our way to the Oscars, for what it’s worth, here are my five favorite films of 2009. (There are only so many great movies made in a year, o Academy Award givers.)<\/p>\n

1. The White Ribbon<\/strong> (dir. by Michael Haneke, Germany\/Austria)<\/p>\n

2. A Single Man<\/strong> (Tom Ford, USA)<\/p>\n

3. A Serious Man<\/strong> (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA)<\/p>\n

4. Goodbye Solo <\/strong>(Ramin Bahrani, USA)<\/p>\n

5. Coraline <\/strong>(Henry Selick, USA)<\/p>\n

The White Ribbon<\/a> is a brilliantly cast, acted, photographed, and paced dissection of the social fabric of a pre-WW1 Protestant German village. But it’s also about the ecology of authority and social control that, in different permutations, underlies any social order — and about the impossibility of coming to know that ecology without a gap or question mark at the heart of the inquiry, that gap here represented by the teacher who is the not-fully-reliable narrator recounting the events years later. And while it largely conforms to Haneke’s grim, cerebral and joylessly clinical vision of humanity, there are moments of compassion and tenderness that transcend that – which is something I don’t remember from his previous films, though it’s possible I’ll forget what they were here as well. (As an antidote to that vision, I recommend seeing The Last Station<\/a>, if only because that film’s Slavic anarchist earthiness does<\/em> provide a feel for a possible alternative to repressed, authoritarian pre-war Germany.)<\/p>\n


\nOf the others, A Single Man<\/a> is beautiful: it’s well paced and mesmerizing in its structure (of flashbacks, etc.), with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore both brilliant in it. And while the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man was hardly their most popular or critically acclaimed film, I was moved by its weird Twin Cities Jewish apophatic<\/a> atheological<\/a> vision, which in retrospect probably permeates their other work as well, but here it seems more personal and more believable. Coraline was brilliantly imaginative; and Goodbye Solo just very good.<\/p>\n

Of the ten Oscar nominees, Avatar was certainly the least ignorable phenomenon (as you might have noticed here already) and the greatest contribution to the medium. Had I seen The Hurt Locker, I suspect I might be rooting for it. I’m most surprised<\/a> by District 9<\/a>‘s nomination, which gives me a little soft spot for it, despite my bewilderment.<\/p>\n

Now, in rough order, the films I judge to be the<\/p>\n

12 BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE (SO FAR)<\/b>:<\/p>\n

Talk to Her (Pedro Almod\u00f3var, Spain)<\/p>\n

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, USA)<\/p>\n

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, USA)<\/p>\n

Volver (Pedro Almod\u00f3var, Spain)<\/p>\n

Spirited Away (Hiyao Miyazaki, Japan)<\/p>\n

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)<\/p>\n

The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, Germany\/Turkey)<\/p>\n

Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Spain\/Mexico\/USA)<\/p>\n

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, Germany\/Austria)<\/p>\n

The New World (Terrence Malick, USA)<\/p>\n

21 Grams (Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, USA\/Mexico)<\/p>\n

The World (Jia Zhangke, China\/Japan\/France)<\/p>\n

Best documentaries <\/strong>(whatever that means):<\/p>\n

Man On Wire (J. Marsh, UK)<\/p>\n

Up the Yangtze (Y. Chang, Canada)<\/p>\n

Grizzly Man (W. Herzog, USA\/Germany)<\/p>\n

The Corporation (J. Abbott & M. Achbar, Canada)<\/p>\n

Why We Fight (E. Jarecki, USA)<\/p>\n

Best first film<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Up the Yangtze<\/a> — Similar in many ways to veteran Chinese director Jie Zhangke’s more artful Still Life<\/a> (Zhangke also made The World, listed above), Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang’s documentary may be, to my mind, the better film in terms of its raising questions about the largest hydroelectric megaproject in history. It’s a slow but engrossing meditation on China’s entry into the world economy, where a cruise ship full of western tourists becomes a kind of class-striated Titanic of the inevitability of change in Chinese society. Seeing the two films back to back, alongside The World and Manufactured Landscapes<\/a>, would make for a kind of artful masochist’s introduction to contemporary China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The decade isn’t really over yet: there was no “year zero,” which means that the year 2000 was the two-thousandth year of its calendar, and that this year is the 2010th, the last of the third millennium’s first decade, not the first of its second. But I’ve seen so many “ten best films of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,689354],"tags":[352,387,16862],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-image_nation","tag-film","tag-hollywood","tag-lists"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-jp","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7166,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/01\/16\/whiteheadian-films\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":0},"title":"Whiteheadian films","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 16, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Readers of this blog know that my recent book presents what's essentially a Whiteheadian (and Peircian) theory of cinema. (A\u00a0theory, not\u00a0the\u00a0theory.\u00a0And when compared to something as deeply Whiteheadian in its details as, say, Donald Sherburne's A Whiteheadian Aesthetic, mine is, at best, \"inspired by Whitehead.\") To my knowledge, it is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"download","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/01\/download.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6185,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/10\/22\/2-or-3-things-about-the-cinema-book\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":1},"title":"2 or 3 things about the cinema book","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Ecologies of the Moving Image is a book of ecophilosophy that happens to be about cinema, and about the 12-decade history of cinema at that. What makes it ecophilosophy? It is philosophy that is deeply informed both by an understanding of ecological science and an interdisciplinary appreciation for today's ecological\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_EWY1PJsPzBA\/Sy7A-os24mI\/AAAAAAAAAyI\/71YlZjgAk8M\/s400\/stalker26.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1338,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/09\/11\/psychogeographic-landscape-cinema\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":2},"title":"psychogeographic landscape cinema","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Andrew Ray over at Some Landscapes has been posting about experimental landscape films, including Chris Welsby's Wind Vane, Tree, and other \"landscape-generated landscape films\"; Sarah Turner's Perestroika; the \"Land Art for the landless\" films\/performances of Francis Al\u00ffs; and others. Catherine Grant writes about Turner's hypnotic and haunting Perestroika at filmanalytical.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"perestroika-4_420.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/09\/perestroika-4_420.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7952,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/12\/29\/emis-cinematic-materialism-a-response-to-reviews\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":3},"title":"EMI’s cinematic materialism (a response to reviews)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The latest issue\u00a0of the open-access\u00a0Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, an issue devoted to \"Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images,\" includes a review by Niall Flynn of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image. Another recent review of EMI can be found in the The Journal of Ecocriticism. And\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1125,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/23\/mars-attacks-sydney\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":4},"title":"Mars attacks Sydney!","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The photos are a bit too beautiful to resist sharing. And the stories taken from the archive of the already screened: \"like scenes from Mad Max,\" \"like waking up on Mars,\" \"like a nuclear winter morning\". . . White urban Australia's dreamtime apocalypse of being taken over by the Outback,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"sydney3.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/09\/sydney3.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1246,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/18\/the-event-or-%e2%80%98nature-at-its-finest%e2%80%99\/","url_meta":{"origin":1203,"position":5},"title":"the Event (or, \u2018nature at its finest\u2019)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Volcanic eruption films aren't plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog's 1977 film La Soufri\u00e8re, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"eruption-at-eyjafjallajokull-23.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/04\/eruption-at-eyjafjallajokull-23.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11896,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions\/11896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}