The best films of the new millenium (so far)

See the Prelude to know what this is all about.

My list is broken up into three tiers, and doesn’t add up to 100. Ranking within the tiers is pretty flexible, but generally runs from good to great.

Tier Three movies are solid, but missing some magical element of story or presentation that makes them merely excellent. Tier Two movies are artistically ambitious, have sympathy for their characters and plenty of respect for the intelligence of the audience. Tier One movies succeed because of their imagination. They have something novel and exciting to express, and they’re doing it in a way that’s unique to film. The best movies, in my book, lead to better questions or understanding about the nature of being alive.

I have fewer and fewer comments as I approach the top of the list, as writing about a good film can be (to steal a phrase) like dancing about architecture.

Tier Three

Pacific Rim – I can’t apologize for loving this stupid, loud and sappy movie.

Michael Clayton – Tilda Swinton is so good at twitchy, George Clooney so good at steady.

Lincoln – From time to time I wallow in the affection this movie has for its subject.

Almost Famous – can’t we all go back and come of age like this?

Royal Tenenbaums – Still the only Gwenyth Paltrow movie where she’s a net positive

Burn After Reading – “You are not ideological?”

Owning Mahowny – Tough to decide between including this or Doubt.

Finding Nemo – Its status in the Pixar hierarchy has fallen since Finding Dory came out.
Speaking of which, here’s my ranking of Pixar’s efforts:

Good Dinosaur (pretty forgettable)
Brave
Bug’s Life
Ratatouille
Up (stellar first 10 minutes, then WTF…?!?)
Finding Dory
Toy Stories (1, 2 and 3 are more or less interchangeable to me)
Wall-E
Finding Nemo
Incredibles
Monsters Inc
Inside Out

 Mad Max:Fury Road –A thrilling action movie with a big imagination and crunchily satisfying stunts. I include it here partly to annoy Erik, partly as an excuse to heap praise on Charlize Theron.

Gosford Park

Brooklyn

Take Shelter

Spotlight

Tier Two

Inception

I’d like to mention three terrific shorts from Pixar: La Luna, Sanjay’s Super Team and Piper. And because it’s on the same level, Paperman.

Monster

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

True Grit

Tree of Life – The beginning of Terrence Malick’s flabby phase? After the unbearable preview for To the Wonder came out I was knocked back on my heels, and undertook a dark-night-of-the-soul reexamination of Tree of Life. Barely a year later, the preview for Knight of Cups had me in full retreat. “Maybe the anguished hungering for larger truths in Tree of Life is just pretentious noodling?” Verdict: The legacies of New World and his earlier films are safe. This one… I’m not so sure. Even having said all that, this movie is still in Tier Two.

Seraphine – another movie I have Erik to thank for

The Straight Story – It’s my list. If I want to include a G-rated Disney-produced David Lynch movie even though it was released in 1999, I darn well will, doggone it. Mulholland Drive was a tangled, crazy film, and it probably deserves a spot here. But I’d rather give the attention to Alvin Straight and this wonderful, understated story.

Summer Hours – My never-ending thanks go to Erik for inviting me to see this movie at SIFF long ago. A thousand Uncle Bonmees can’t erase that good deed.

Precious

Dancer in the Dark

Pan’s Labyrinth

Brokeback Mountain

Blue Jasmine

The Pianist

Requiem for a Dream

Punch Drunk Love – I can forgive Adam Sandler for a lot because of this movie. Not enough, mind you. But a lot.

Tier One

The Master

The Wrestler

Black Swan

Melancholia

Grand Budapest Hotel

Fantastic Mr. Fox

The New World

Let the Right One In

Carol

Spirited Away

Inside Out – the only Pixar movie in Tier 1. It succeeds with me for its charitable view of our frailty and for reminding us to embrace sadness as a natural, necessary, part of life.

A Serious Man

Happy-Go-Lucky

House With a Turret – This was a random choice at SIFF that ended up being one of my most memorable movie experiences. Chances are high that I’ll never meet anyone else who’s seen it. It’s terribly sad (with  a silver lining of hope) and shot in gorgeous, icy black and white.

Synecdoche, NY – One of the few on the list that I own on DVD. I’ve watched it several times, and it only gets more intriguing.

There Will Be Blood

Prelude: The best films of the new millenium

The BBC strongarmed 100+ critics into naming their favorite movies of the new millennium. Just kidding, of course: critics love making lists. Erik has weighed in, as has Jordan, and now it’s my turn.

First, a few words about the movies that I actively disliked, and would pull down from their plush, ill-gotten thrones.

A.I. – I thought we all agreed this was a disaster?

Wolf of Wall Street – Scorsese has reached a turning point for me; I can’t assume he’ll make a good movie. I turned off Hugo after ~20 minutes or so; I don’t have much patience for cutesy kid stuff. The breathless, shallow, violent Shutter Island preview was forced on me at least five times, sufficient to guarantee I’d remember to avoid it. I skipped The Departed for the violence, too. The Aviator was sprawling dullsville with the exception of Cate Blanchett. WWS was at least 45 minutes too long and the star learns almost nothing meaningful about life. Neither does the audience. We aren’t shown this sad downward spiral in a gripping or memorable way – think Requiem for a Dream or The Wrestler.

Inglorious Basterds – I turned against Tarantino (and certain kinds of violent films in general) after the second time I saw Pulp Fiction. He’s a clever filmmaker and such a sharp writer, but he has an ugliness and hatred for man at his core. After the praise heaped on IB, I gave it a chance, but he hasn’t changed a bit. I’ll be interested to see his films again after he converts to Jainism.

Uncle Bonmee… — Poor Erik innocently suggested this movie, since most critics adored it. Amateurish, boring and nonsensical, but it wasn’t Erik’s fault!

Oldboy – Loved by critics, humped by fans, but it’s a disgusting invention: its only craft is in cruelty, its only art is in supercharging our already overactive thirst for revenge.

Social Network and Zodiac – I sat through the first and turned off the second after about 30 minutes. Someday I could make a special post about why I dislike everything David Fincher’s ever done, but I probably can’t be arsed. Short answer: he has no sympathy for his characters and no interest in anything but fear, alienation and conflict.

Click yonder to view my favorites of the third millennium.

 

 

The Prestige

“You want to be fooled.”

Yes.

And it’s incumbent upon the artist to not indulge the viewer in that craven desire of the aspirant. For each of us — viewers, customers, aspirants, hungerers, aspirants, watchers, “consumers”, users — each of us want to be fooled. The artist — the Artist, if you will — has a duty to not feed that base hunger, but to give higher gifts — Truth, Beauty, etc. — and to let the viewer walk away enriched, not debased.

Tonight I watched The Prestige, a movie that any number of reputable sources sang of in sweet tones. And I admit that my craving for the mellifluent blessings of art raised my expectations (given C. Nolan’s other offerings) higher than is safe.

Pro tip: Don’t walk into a movie with high expectations. No matter the temptation… whether it be an heretofore unseen Bresson or the 15th in a unbroken series of successes by your soulmate director, enter the showing with stony cold neutrality…in 5 years, even in 5 minutes after the credits roll, you’ll know if the artist grasped what they are reaching for.

And allow me show you a chart of my impressions of the movie as the evening dragged on:

At around the one hour mark, I could tell we were solidly in “are you shitting me” territory, but with the assistance of Senor Empty Tequila Bottle and Senor Harshly Used Other Tequila Bottle, I soldiered on.

And although director Christopher Nolan has delivered films that required a suspension of all things belief (see Inception, see Interstellar), in those films I say he used his creative freedom judiciously. In the first few minutes of a film, the viewer must demand great things of an artist: “I am giving you license with my imagination. The keys are yours. Drive carefully… or drive wildly, it’s your responsibility. But you have to be showing me that you are doing more than showing off.” In triple-backflip clockwork nonsense like The Prestige, the audience has to believe that the showing off is in service of some Truth that is large enough, grand enough and meaningful enough that whatever cinematic/narrative laws got broken along the way are forgivable. We have to be given gifts that make us not regret the sanity we sign away.

Now I’ll freely admit that the last 10 minutes of the movie are a blur for me. Was it a quintuple bank shot, or merely a quadruple bank shot? In movies like this, I stop caring whether Clever Jackass #1 is outwitting Clever Jackass #2, or vice versa. For more examples of this crime, see So Many Films By David Mamet. But it’s a shoddy misuse of the attentions of your audience. Don’t just be clever, Artist. Be true.

But before I sign off in disgust, let me show the mathematical inspiration for my chart above, along the lines of sin(x^2):

This is closer to the intent of my sketch above, without the strongly disapproving negative slope. At some point, the rate of oscillations between Hope that the director is going somewhere Good and the Fear that the viewer is about to be disappointed simply gets too intense. One’s welcoming heart is too sorely abused, and the Artist has worn out his or her welcome. This is where the aspirant asks him or herself: “Do I really care whether it’s Angier or Borden who wins? Or are they both annoying as shit?”

And am I well and truly sick of Michael Caine in yet another phone-it-in performance, or what? JESUS.

 

 

 

Let us pause to marvel at a felicitous Papal construction

So, the Pope is retiring, and you think you might be the man or woman to wear the subcinctorium? Take a quick peek at the full text of his resignation letter, and ask yourself if you’d be able to craft such a curious set of phrases. It’s not the highest barrier to entry, but it’s going to be one of the questions the committee will ask, in light of Benedict’s trend-setting premature depopage maneuver*: can you write your own “I’m quitting” letter that upholds — nay, deepens — the mystery of the Catholic church and its accompanying aedificium?

 So, let’s take a quick look at the highlights:

“…my strengths…are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

“…in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter…”

“…a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.”

“…I ask pardon for all my defects.”

“…and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude…”

Easily half of you lot wouldn’t even know to capitalize “Conclave”, so you’re right out. Better luck next Papal vacancy, as they say in the biz!

* We might well ask: Was Benedict inspired by Palin’s self-removal from the Holy See of the Alaskan Governorship?

 

A young, slender thing is making eyes at you

After perhaps a year of effort, my pal Amy Leigh Morgan, doyen of the Fairy Tale Factory, has come out with a darling collection of fairy tales, including one by your very own Uncle Vinny. I urge you to get your webbed feet on a copy post haste, ducklings, not because my story is All That, but because 2 of the 6 stories are devoutly to be admired and well worth your $8 — even cheaper if you get the Kindle version, but…. oy vey, Kindle.

Some of you may remember my little story of Tor and Twillabee from when I posted a version of it long ago. Well, now it’s been all gussied up with actual copyediting, a lovely illustration by the untrammelable Diana Sudyka, and book design by my secret love-interest David Adam Edelstein. Aren’t you curious to see how that li’l nipper growed up? I thought you might be!

So click here to order! I profit not a whit from this enterprise, but you’ll be helping Amy break even. And in the world of literature, that’s Something.

Nabokov translates Pushkin

After reading Anna Karenina last year, and a few Tolstoy short stories, and making another run at The Brothers Karamazov, it was time to admit I had a Russian fixation. These frissons usually don’t last long, but they leave marks. For example, there came the stinging awareness that all these Russian titans I idolize in turn idolized Pushkin, and I didn’t know a whit about him. I’m ignorant of an uncountable number of things in life, but sometimes I feel more swinish in my intellectual poverty than others. And so I set out to read Eugene Onegin, widely considered his best work.

Cherished ducklings, there are many places on the web for y’all to read about Vladimir Nabokov and his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, so I’ll try to be brief. If this whets your appetite, maybe you’ll read more elsewhere, or (let’s hope!) go read the whole thing yourself.

For now, I’ll just say that it’s written in a complicated rhyming and metrical format: “iambic tetrameter”, AbAbCCddEffEgg, where the capital letters are feminine rhymes and the lowercase are masculine ones. We don’t have gendered rhymes in English, but Nabokov wrote a short poem to give us a feel for the rhythm:

What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O Pushkin, for my stratagem.
I travelled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose–
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up your damsel’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake;
I find another man’s mistake;
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task: a poet’s patience
And scholiastic passion blent —
Done droppings on your monument.

Nabokov believed that it was a near-hopeless task to force a translation of something as sublime as Onegin to rhyme. It was hard enough to express the meaning in another language, and so he set himself the task of translating the poem into prose, hoping that future generations of translators might at least start from this solid foundation.

I’m not especially fond of rhyming poetry. It’s an impressive feat to concoct something that rhymes and is meaningful, but the sing-songery grates after a while. So maybe it’s not surprising that I loved Nabokov’s version of Onegin. By stripping away the fancy fretwork – and clearly stating up front that something inexpressible had been lost – he could focus entirely on capturing Pushkin’s tone without feeling guilty.

He takes a moment here and there to disparage the rotten translators who had come before him:

The four “English” “metrical” “translations” mentioned in my notes and unfortunately available to students are…Spalding, Deutsch, Elton and Radin/Patrick.

And was Nabokov successful? Did his translation improve upon those who came before, or enable better work from those who followed him? I’m unqualified to judge as a Russian speaker, but I know what I like, so I thought it would be a fun project to do a side-by-side comparison between Deutsch (1943), Nabokov (1964) and Johnston (1977). I’ll be looking at two passages that I adored when I first read them in Nabokov.

Chapter 2, stanza 38, lines 4-14:

Deutsch ’43:
Alas! by God’s strange will we must
Behold each generation flourish,
And watch life’s furrows briefly nourish
The perishable human crop,
Which ripens fairly, but to drop;
And where one falls, another surges…
The race of men recks nothing, save
Its reckless growth; into the grave
The grandfathers it promptly urges.
Our time will come when it is due,
Our grandchildren evict us, too.

Nabokov ’64:
Alas! Upon life’s furrows,
In a brief harvest, generations
By Providence’s secret will
Rise, ripen and must fall;
Others come in their wake…
Thus our frivolous race
Waxes, is in commotion, seethes,
And tombward crowds its ancestors.
Our time likewise will come, will come,
And one fine day our grandsons
Out of the world will crowd us too.

Johnston ‘77:
Alas! The generations must,
as fate’s mysterious purpose burrows,
reap a brief harvest on their furrows;
they rise and ripen and fall dead:
others will follow where they tread…
and thus our race, so fluctuating,
grows, surges, boils, for lack of room
presses its forebears to the tomb.
We too shall find our hour is waiting;
it will be our descendants who
out of this world will crowd us too.

Chapter 8, st. 11, lines 1-8:

Deutsch ‘43:
But oh, how deeply we must rue it,
That youth was given us in vain,
That we were hourly faithless to it,
And that it cheated us again;
That our bright pristine hopes grew battered,
Our freshest dreams grew sear, and scattered,
Like leaves that in wet autumn stray,
Wind-tossed, and all too soon decay.

Nabokov ’64:
But it is sad to think that to no purpose
youth was given us,
that we betrayed it every hour,
that it duped us;
that our best wishes,
that our fresh dreamings,
in quick succession have decayed
like leaves in putrid autumn.

Johnston ’77:
Alas, our youth was what we made it,
something to fritter and to burn,
when hourly we ourselves betrayed it,
and it deceived us in return;
when our sublimest aspiration,
and all our fresh imagination,
swiftly decayed beyond recall
like foliage in the rotting fall.

Maybe you’ll agree with me that it’s a shame to lose “Thus our frivolous race / Waxes, is in commotion, seethes, / And tombward crowds its ancestors.” for the sake of rhyming. Line by line, the meaning is corrupted. Johnston says youth decieved us in return because it rhymes with burn, not because that’s what Pushkin intended; the “secret will” of Providence in Nabokov becomes a burrowing mysterious purpose of “fate”…because “furrow” had to have a rhyme somewhere.

I’m firmly on the side of Nabokov. I’m not smart enough to be sure that Johnston benefited from it, but at least his version seems less cliched than Deutsch’s.

I’ll stop harping on the translation issues – I’ve surely lost all my readers but Lolarusa at this point – but I wanted to also say what a pleasure it is to read Pushkin. Even though there are many places where I had to hop furiously back and forth from the text to Nabokov’s extended commentary to figure out what the heck was going on, there are also long passages that are perfectly clear and delightful. He has a breezy, familiar style, with plenty of lovable and self-conscious discursions. That said, the core story of Onegin – girl flirts with boy, boy rejects girl, girl marries fancy general, boy regrets and pursues girl, girl rejects boy – is as heart-rending as anything you’ll read. Plus, there’s the fascinating story of Onegin’s duel with his hapless friend Lenski, the aftermath of which includes this:

‘Mongst the hills disposed in a half circle,
let us go thither where a rill,
winding, by way of a green meadow, runs
through a lime bosquet to the river.
The nightingale, spring’s lover, there
sings all night; the cinnamon rose blooms,
and the gurgle of the fount is heard.
There a tombstone is seen
in the shade of two old-aged pines.
The scripture to the stranger says:
“Here lies Vladimir Lenski,
who early died the death of the courageous,
in such a year, at such an age.
Repose, boy poet!”

On the inclined bough of a pine,
time was, the early breeze
above that humble urn
swayed a mysterious wreath;
time was, during late leisures,
two girl companions hither used to come;
and, by the moon, upon the grave,
embraced, they wept;
but now…the drear memorial is
forgot. The wonted trail to it,
weed-choked. No wreath is on the bough.
Alone, beneath it, gray and debile,
the herdsman as before keeps singing
and plaiting his poor footgear.

My poor Lenski! Pining away,
she did not weep for long.
Alas! The young fiancee
is to her woe untrue.
Another fascinated her attention,
another her suffering managed
to lull with love’s flattery:
an uhlan knew how to captivate her,
an uhlan by her soul is loved;
and lo! With him already at the altar
she modestly beneath the bridal crown
stands with bent head,
fire in her lowered eyes,
a light smile on her lips.

I should say that many scholars were enraged by Nabokov’s pretensions, and thought he did far more harm than good by skipping the rhymes. There, I said it. Now screw’em.

Zhang Daqian fakes it beautifully

Kevin Drum got to talking about forgeries the other day, which led me to discover the marvelous Zhang Daqian. He was a forger who was so talented he became famous in his own right.

This image is especially toothsome:

More wonderments at the link.

Me and the Torii School

Hello, my winsome and patent-leather-clad ducklings!

It’s a new year, and I’m poking my head out to wish you well and share a few forgotten treasures from the dusty corners of the art world. A few weeks back my friend Patricia was getting rid of some old art books, and I snapped up a few. Not enough, it turns out; now I’m regretting not taking them all.

But at any rate, here’s what I found.

This is “DANCER”, attributed to Torii Kiyonobu I, and is my favorite of the lot. Not much is known about Torii, but it seems that he learned to paint and print from his father, and that together they produced art for the Kabuki theaters: signs, backdrops, etc. Yes, I’m still fixated on kabuki after all these years.

Pop! Goes the Vinny

Hello my long-lost ducklings!

Back in May I classified my blog as super-secret, so that nobody could get to it. Not even the President. My rationale was privacy-related, but futile. These days, everyone knows who everyone else is, and what they’re doing. At all times. Especially those of us who tread carelessly down the flowered path laid by Facebook and the Google.

Anyway, I’m back! And I may be posting a few things from time to time, which I hope you’ll read.

Here, for example, is a list of words I’ve had to look up online:

gravid
orlop
stertorous
tunny
spaetzle
bora
fowling pieces
corroborant
witling
weend
gaberlunzie
feckit
thrawn
tasset
fauld
culet
preterition
buffa
pastern
farinaceous
skep
directly <– not the first definition that comes to mind, mind you
mudra
perianth
extrorse
epitatic
albescent
protasis
dekate
yokel
churl
meretricious

I've since forgotten what almost all of these mean. Perhaps in a future post I'll chat about the cool ones…?

Cheese it! It’s the FUZZ.

I’ve known for a while that people Googling my name could eventually find this blog, but I just shrugged it off. I’m only half-heartedly committed to internet privacy, after all. But still, the anonymity I used to enjoy was nice, and I think I’ll go dark for a while. I’ll probably blog elsewhere, and try to be a bit more circumspect about it. If you’re a regular reader and want to be kept informed, just send me an email at unclevinny@gmail.com, I’ll put you in the loop.

As always, I have a few things I’d like to write about, but have been slow to get to ’em. Someday I will, really!