Gerald Cooperberg
02-01-2010, 11:28 PM
Well, I decided to eschew the customary year-end categorical list making this time around and go instead with a summary of some of the scenes that affected me most deeply from this year's films. Isn't that why we go to the movies, after all? For those few, immersive moments in which we totally lose ourselves in what we're watching? That stick with us when the other details of the stories have faded away? Anyway, here are fifteen of mine, presented in roughly the order they occur throughout the respective films they appear in. There are some mild spoilers here, I suppose, but nothing too bad. Feel free to play along and add some of your own (and add some pictures to make Smokey happy if you can).
"Au Revoir, Shoshanna!", Inglourious Basterds - On the surface, it seems unlikely that one of the summer's most breathless, action-packed blockbusters would begin with a twenty-minute, slow-building, dialogue-heavy scene almost entirely in French, but that's exactly what happens as we're introduced to the year's most memorable character, Christoph Waltz's insipid Nazi officer Hans Landa ("The Jew Hunter") in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Landa slowly, smilingly breaks down a French farmer as he tries to divine the whereabouts of a Jewish family rumored to be in the area and turns the simple act of drinking a glass of milk into something excruciatingly repulsive.
M. Merde Takes Tokyo, Tokyo! - Michel Gondry's opening segment of the anthology film Tokyo! takes an agreeably bizarre turn, but the Leos Carax-directed second movement goes off like a bomb. Akira Ifukube's score music from Godzilla blares on the soundtrack as Denis Levant, inexplicably made up as some kind of grotesque leprechaun, crawls out from a manhole and proceeds to terrorize passersby in a bravura, hilarious unbroken take. I won't spoil the details, but suffice to say that it's the most exhilarating, funny ten minutes in any movie all year.
George Wakes Up, A Single Man - "Waking up begins with saying am and now," Colin Firth's George whispers in narration as we seeing him lying, unable to move, in bed. George's longtime partner has been recently killed in an auto accident, leaving him bereaved and with little motivation to live. Still, he wills himself upward and begins the slow, painfully meaningless process of preparing for the day and "becoming George". Firth navigates this routine with a precise tone and movement that illustrates a man both tired of the world and with too much dignity to present it with anything other than a carefully assembled façade. He communicates through these small habitual tasks not only the incredible depths of the character's sorrow but all of his accumulated life up to this point. It's a performance that's unparalleled this year (yes, even by a rascally, roadworn country singer, in my estimation).
"Rivers of Babylon", Tulpan - In the words of Entertainment Weekly, "If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this." In the film's opening scene, the protagonist interviews with the parents of his would-be future wife, regaling them with tales of his exploits in the Kazakh Navy as his brother-in-law and buffoonish best friend look on expectantly. Afterward, the sailor and his friend jubilantly rock out in their dune buggy as Boney M's "Rivers of Babylon" blares on the radio, intoxicated with the wind in their faces and the promise of new love... that is until the brother-in-law delivers the devastating news: the marriage is off-- the bride won't go for it. She feels that her suitor's ears are too big.
Car Bomb at the U.N., The Hurt Locker - The scene that precedes it contains some of The Hurt Locker's best moments, when we suddenly realize the oh-****-is-he-really-going-to-do-that M.O. of Jeremy Renner's squad leader or it's revealed that the first bomb he defuses is merely one terminus of a many-headed hydra, but nothing matches the prolonged suspense of the sequence set outside the United Nations headquarters. Renner works feverishly to find the trigger of a car bomb as his fellow soldiers begin to notice more and more unsettling observers watching them and we wait nauseatingly for the other shoe to drop. Oh, and the car was just on fire in 100-plus-degree desert heat. The scene pushes the tone to one of alarming uncomfortability, a mood that's sustained through much of the rest of the film.
Ponyo's Tsunami, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea - All of Hayao Miyazaki's talents are on display in this glorious scene in his latest animated masterpiece, a loose adaptation of Disney's take on The Little Mermaid. In the Disney version, the heroine gambled her soul to become human and live with her fairy-tale prince. Here, Ponyo (half girl, half fish) conjures a tsunami to carry her to the seaside home of a little boy, Sosuke, that she's become infatuated with. The scene contains elements of wonder, suspense, and morality along with its dazzling visuals. The tsunami rises up out of the ocean, capsizing ships and battering the coastal town with heavy rain as Sosuke's mother rushes to drive them home from the nursing home where she works before the roads get flooded. Sosuke stares out the car window in fascination as Ponyo rides the crest of anthropomorphic waves, transforming from a fish to a birdlike creature to a little girl as strange and ancient sea creatures are dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. The viewer is held breathless both at the giddy wonder that Ponyo creates and the real danger as the car darts through narrow mountain roads and across a lift bridge. Miyazaki masterfully balances the wonder of the boundless willfulness of children and the natural world with the indescriminate destructiveness essential to the nature of both.
Desperate Measures, Lorna's Silence - It isn't clear what Albanian immigrant Lorna's feeling are towards pitiful Claudy, a heroin addict struggling to get clean and her spouse in a sham marriage designed to gain her EU citizenship. Her associate who set up the marriage intends to off Claudy in a staged overdose, widowing Lorna and freeing her to marry another prospective immigrant and earning both of them a cash payment, but Lorna lobbies him to let her try to obtain a divorce instead. Does she feel some affection for Claudy or does she just find unneccessary death morally reprehensible? Is she trying to distance herself from any fallout from the crime of a murder? Or is she running some other scheme entirely? Nothing is particularly clarified in the movie's most startling scene, in which Lorna enters their shared apartment to find Claudy with his dealer. She throws the dealer out as Claudy sobs at her feet, then locks them both in, flinging the key out the window. Then she wordlessly, almost violently strips naked and offers her body to Claudy, the only thing more powerful than a hit. Lorna's face is almost impossible to read but it's an obvious desperate act of sacrifice-- for whose benefit it isn't entirely clear-- which renders later events in the film all the more casually heartbreaking.
Taming the Banshee, Avatar - Much has been made of the imagery in James Cameron's fantasy epic, but too often that imagery is weighed down by a leaden and earnest script. That is, except for this scene, in which Cameron finally allows his characters to indulge in pure wonderment as Jake Sully bonds with a dragon-like creature in its aerie and then soars against a backdrop of majestic cliffs and swirling groups of dragons. Liberated from any need to advance the plot, the movie wallows in the pure thrill of flight and unlimited imagination.
A Change of Plans, 35 Shots of Rum - Over the course of 35 Shots of Rum, we're introduced to its four main characters: taciturn immigrant train conductor Lionel, his college-age daughter Joséphine, their mysterious and brooding upstairs neighbor Noé, and world-weary cabbie Gabrielle, who carries a torch for Lionel. All four appear in the same scene for the first time in the film's centerpiece, ostensibly piling into Gabrielle's cab to go to a concert together. When the car breaks down in the pouring rain, an alternate course for the evening is plotted. The group ducks into a café about to close and Lionel sweet-talks the female owner into staying open for them. The friends drink and talk into the night, food is served, music is played, and they dance. As the Commodores' "Nightshift" shimmers from the jukebox, Noé and Joséphine share a tentative kiss and the camera shows Lionel staring at them in a moment of paralysis. Then he breaks the gaze, stands, and pulls in the café owner in as his own partner as we see Gabrielle frozen in a stare of her own. After that, as they say, everything changes.
Punishment, The White Ribbon - Early in The White Ribbon, a father pronounces a harsh punishment of 10 lashes each with a cane for a relatively minor transgression committed by his six children. We don't see that sentence meted out until several scenes later, but when we do, it's almost unbearable. Throughout the film, director Michael Haneke often leaves scenes earlier or later than we expect him to, contributing to a feeling of disorientation around the story's central mysteries. That technique is used extremely effectively in this scene, when we see the father and his children through a doorway. The father instructs the oldest son to fetch his cane, and the camera follows the boy down the hall, slowly and deliberately, as he goes to another room to get the cane and the anticipation builds. Then the boy returns with the instrument of his punishment, closes the door, and Haneke continues to linger on that shot for what seems like an eternity, as the static image of the closed door almost seems to throb-- and our imagination along with it.
Rathskellar Rendezvous, Inglourious Basterds - Yes, it's the only film mentioned twice on my list, but this tension-filled scene is as worthy of citation as the first one. Several of Lt. Aldo Raine's titular Basterds arrive for a meeting with a German informant in a basement tavern, only to find a gathering of SS soldiers drunkenly celebrating the birth of one's first son. The Basterds, posing as German officers themselves, are reluctantly drawn into the festivities and a smothering apprehension builds under the surface of the gaiety. The tables turn numerous times as the lengthy scene unfolds and takes several turns into the unexpected, first with the appearance of the soldiers' commanding officer and then through a parlor game that includes a surprising tangent into cultural analysis of the film King Kong.
"His Soul is Still Dancing", Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans - SPOILERS: Werner Herzog's esoteric direction and Nicolas Cage's unhinged lead performance combine to create many memorably weird moments throughout the film, but none are as giddily surreal as this one, late in the film, when Cage turns the tables on a would-be extortionist. After his thuggish cohorts gun down the man, Cage seems to drift into an alternate reality, intoning "shoot him again... his soul is still dancing." Herzog then pans to show just that, the bloody corpse dreamily gyrating and pinwheeling to a zydeco rhythm.
Away to Miami, Away We Go - I'm always a sucker for films that are structured as odysseys into darkness, whether it's a journey up the river as in Apocalypse Now or the changing of seasons like Rushmore. Likewise, Away We Go depicts expectant parents Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski journeying to different cities in search of a new home, encountering more and more complex examples of difficult parenting scenarios as they go. In the early scenes, bad parenting is played for broad laughs, but by the final, devastating stop in Miami, the apparent challenges of raising children in an indifferent world become more nuanced and complicated. Paul Schneider turns in a quiet, scene-stealing performance as a recently single father trying to navigate the struggles that come with his new and unexpected role. The scene between Schneider and Krasinski at a kitchen table is amazing in the way that it appears to muddy but actually clarifies Krasinski's fears about becoming a father himself.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Psychopath, Bronson - Throughout multiple episodes, it seems that Tom Hardy's Charlie Bronson ("England's Most Dangerous Prisoner") has no greater aim than to get himself into a confrontation, strip naked, and engage in an all-out brawl. This late scene is particularly enjoyable as a prison art-class instructor thinks he has tamed Bronson by teaching him to express himself through painting and excitedly wants to show off his reformed pupil to the authorities. What follows is a brazenly pagan hostage situation that involves the teacher himself becoming an object of art, while Bronson covers himself in black and gold warpaint and sings operatically as he waits for the inevitable melée to come bursting through the door.
One Day This Will Be Yours, Summer Hours - Largely a talky exploration of a family's attempt to sort out how to respect the legacy of their past while also freeing themselves of the burdens of it-- and on the strange value of things-- Summer Hours finds transcendence in its two bookending scenes. In the opening, family matriarch Edith Scob presides over a gathering of all her children and grandchildren, and it seems that only she realizes (or is willing to admit) that it will be her last. The rest of the film is spent with her children struggling with the complex issue of how to divest themselves of her estate and her possessions while still respecting her legacy and staying connected themselves. The end at first almost seems like an afterthought but ends up a beautiful grace-note as a little-seen-to-that-point granddaughter throws a party at the now-vacant country house. Director Oliver Assayas' camera swoops through the assembled youth in a long unbroken take and eventually follows the granddaughter out to the lush grounds, where she's escaped with a beau, as she gazes back at the house from a distance and bids it a rueful but detached farewell.
-Coop
"Au Revoir, Shoshanna!", Inglourious Basterds - On the surface, it seems unlikely that one of the summer's most breathless, action-packed blockbusters would begin with a twenty-minute, slow-building, dialogue-heavy scene almost entirely in French, but that's exactly what happens as we're introduced to the year's most memorable character, Christoph Waltz's insipid Nazi officer Hans Landa ("The Jew Hunter") in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Landa slowly, smilingly breaks down a French farmer as he tries to divine the whereabouts of a Jewish family rumored to be in the area and turns the simple act of drinking a glass of milk into something excruciatingly repulsive.
M. Merde Takes Tokyo, Tokyo! - Michel Gondry's opening segment of the anthology film Tokyo! takes an agreeably bizarre turn, but the Leos Carax-directed second movement goes off like a bomb. Akira Ifukube's score music from Godzilla blares on the soundtrack as Denis Levant, inexplicably made up as some kind of grotesque leprechaun, crawls out from a manhole and proceeds to terrorize passersby in a bravura, hilarious unbroken take. I won't spoil the details, but suffice to say that it's the most exhilarating, funny ten minutes in any movie all year.
George Wakes Up, A Single Man - "Waking up begins with saying am and now," Colin Firth's George whispers in narration as we seeing him lying, unable to move, in bed. George's longtime partner has been recently killed in an auto accident, leaving him bereaved and with little motivation to live. Still, he wills himself upward and begins the slow, painfully meaningless process of preparing for the day and "becoming George". Firth navigates this routine with a precise tone and movement that illustrates a man both tired of the world and with too much dignity to present it with anything other than a carefully assembled façade. He communicates through these small habitual tasks not only the incredible depths of the character's sorrow but all of his accumulated life up to this point. It's a performance that's unparalleled this year (yes, even by a rascally, roadworn country singer, in my estimation).
"Rivers of Babylon", Tulpan - In the words of Entertainment Weekly, "If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this." In the film's opening scene, the protagonist interviews with the parents of his would-be future wife, regaling them with tales of his exploits in the Kazakh Navy as his brother-in-law and buffoonish best friend look on expectantly. Afterward, the sailor and his friend jubilantly rock out in their dune buggy as Boney M's "Rivers of Babylon" blares on the radio, intoxicated with the wind in their faces and the promise of new love... that is until the brother-in-law delivers the devastating news: the marriage is off-- the bride won't go for it. She feels that her suitor's ears are too big.
Car Bomb at the U.N., The Hurt Locker - The scene that precedes it contains some of The Hurt Locker's best moments, when we suddenly realize the oh-****-is-he-really-going-to-do-that M.O. of Jeremy Renner's squad leader or it's revealed that the first bomb he defuses is merely one terminus of a many-headed hydra, but nothing matches the prolonged suspense of the sequence set outside the United Nations headquarters. Renner works feverishly to find the trigger of a car bomb as his fellow soldiers begin to notice more and more unsettling observers watching them and we wait nauseatingly for the other shoe to drop. Oh, and the car was just on fire in 100-plus-degree desert heat. The scene pushes the tone to one of alarming uncomfortability, a mood that's sustained through much of the rest of the film.
Ponyo's Tsunami, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea - All of Hayao Miyazaki's talents are on display in this glorious scene in his latest animated masterpiece, a loose adaptation of Disney's take on The Little Mermaid. In the Disney version, the heroine gambled her soul to become human and live with her fairy-tale prince. Here, Ponyo (half girl, half fish) conjures a tsunami to carry her to the seaside home of a little boy, Sosuke, that she's become infatuated with. The scene contains elements of wonder, suspense, and morality along with its dazzling visuals. The tsunami rises up out of the ocean, capsizing ships and battering the coastal town with heavy rain as Sosuke's mother rushes to drive them home from the nursing home where she works before the roads get flooded. Sosuke stares out the car window in fascination as Ponyo rides the crest of anthropomorphic waves, transforming from a fish to a birdlike creature to a little girl as strange and ancient sea creatures are dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. The viewer is held breathless both at the giddy wonder that Ponyo creates and the real danger as the car darts through narrow mountain roads and across a lift bridge. Miyazaki masterfully balances the wonder of the boundless willfulness of children and the natural world with the indescriminate destructiveness essential to the nature of both.
Desperate Measures, Lorna's Silence - It isn't clear what Albanian immigrant Lorna's feeling are towards pitiful Claudy, a heroin addict struggling to get clean and her spouse in a sham marriage designed to gain her EU citizenship. Her associate who set up the marriage intends to off Claudy in a staged overdose, widowing Lorna and freeing her to marry another prospective immigrant and earning both of them a cash payment, but Lorna lobbies him to let her try to obtain a divorce instead. Does she feel some affection for Claudy or does she just find unneccessary death morally reprehensible? Is she trying to distance herself from any fallout from the crime of a murder? Or is she running some other scheme entirely? Nothing is particularly clarified in the movie's most startling scene, in which Lorna enters their shared apartment to find Claudy with his dealer. She throws the dealer out as Claudy sobs at her feet, then locks them both in, flinging the key out the window. Then she wordlessly, almost violently strips naked and offers her body to Claudy, the only thing more powerful than a hit. Lorna's face is almost impossible to read but it's an obvious desperate act of sacrifice-- for whose benefit it isn't entirely clear-- which renders later events in the film all the more casually heartbreaking.
Taming the Banshee, Avatar - Much has been made of the imagery in James Cameron's fantasy epic, but too often that imagery is weighed down by a leaden and earnest script. That is, except for this scene, in which Cameron finally allows his characters to indulge in pure wonderment as Jake Sully bonds with a dragon-like creature in its aerie and then soars against a backdrop of majestic cliffs and swirling groups of dragons. Liberated from any need to advance the plot, the movie wallows in the pure thrill of flight and unlimited imagination.
A Change of Plans, 35 Shots of Rum - Over the course of 35 Shots of Rum, we're introduced to its four main characters: taciturn immigrant train conductor Lionel, his college-age daughter Joséphine, their mysterious and brooding upstairs neighbor Noé, and world-weary cabbie Gabrielle, who carries a torch for Lionel. All four appear in the same scene for the first time in the film's centerpiece, ostensibly piling into Gabrielle's cab to go to a concert together. When the car breaks down in the pouring rain, an alternate course for the evening is plotted. The group ducks into a café about to close and Lionel sweet-talks the female owner into staying open for them. The friends drink and talk into the night, food is served, music is played, and they dance. As the Commodores' "Nightshift" shimmers from the jukebox, Noé and Joséphine share a tentative kiss and the camera shows Lionel staring at them in a moment of paralysis. Then he breaks the gaze, stands, and pulls in the café owner in as his own partner as we see Gabrielle frozen in a stare of her own. After that, as they say, everything changes.
Punishment, The White Ribbon - Early in The White Ribbon, a father pronounces a harsh punishment of 10 lashes each with a cane for a relatively minor transgression committed by his six children. We don't see that sentence meted out until several scenes later, but when we do, it's almost unbearable. Throughout the film, director Michael Haneke often leaves scenes earlier or later than we expect him to, contributing to a feeling of disorientation around the story's central mysteries. That technique is used extremely effectively in this scene, when we see the father and his children through a doorway. The father instructs the oldest son to fetch his cane, and the camera follows the boy down the hall, slowly and deliberately, as he goes to another room to get the cane and the anticipation builds. Then the boy returns with the instrument of his punishment, closes the door, and Haneke continues to linger on that shot for what seems like an eternity, as the static image of the closed door almost seems to throb-- and our imagination along with it.
Rathskellar Rendezvous, Inglourious Basterds - Yes, it's the only film mentioned twice on my list, but this tension-filled scene is as worthy of citation as the first one. Several of Lt. Aldo Raine's titular Basterds arrive for a meeting with a German informant in a basement tavern, only to find a gathering of SS soldiers drunkenly celebrating the birth of one's first son. The Basterds, posing as German officers themselves, are reluctantly drawn into the festivities and a smothering apprehension builds under the surface of the gaiety. The tables turn numerous times as the lengthy scene unfolds and takes several turns into the unexpected, first with the appearance of the soldiers' commanding officer and then through a parlor game that includes a surprising tangent into cultural analysis of the film King Kong.
"His Soul is Still Dancing", Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans - SPOILERS: Werner Herzog's esoteric direction and Nicolas Cage's unhinged lead performance combine to create many memorably weird moments throughout the film, but none are as giddily surreal as this one, late in the film, when Cage turns the tables on a would-be extortionist. After his thuggish cohorts gun down the man, Cage seems to drift into an alternate reality, intoning "shoot him again... his soul is still dancing." Herzog then pans to show just that, the bloody corpse dreamily gyrating and pinwheeling to a zydeco rhythm.
Away to Miami, Away We Go - I'm always a sucker for films that are structured as odysseys into darkness, whether it's a journey up the river as in Apocalypse Now or the changing of seasons like Rushmore. Likewise, Away We Go depicts expectant parents Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski journeying to different cities in search of a new home, encountering more and more complex examples of difficult parenting scenarios as they go. In the early scenes, bad parenting is played for broad laughs, but by the final, devastating stop in Miami, the apparent challenges of raising children in an indifferent world become more nuanced and complicated. Paul Schneider turns in a quiet, scene-stealing performance as a recently single father trying to navigate the struggles that come with his new and unexpected role. The scene between Schneider and Krasinski at a kitchen table is amazing in the way that it appears to muddy but actually clarifies Krasinski's fears about becoming a father himself.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Psychopath, Bronson - Throughout multiple episodes, it seems that Tom Hardy's Charlie Bronson ("England's Most Dangerous Prisoner") has no greater aim than to get himself into a confrontation, strip naked, and engage in an all-out brawl. This late scene is particularly enjoyable as a prison art-class instructor thinks he has tamed Bronson by teaching him to express himself through painting and excitedly wants to show off his reformed pupil to the authorities. What follows is a brazenly pagan hostage situation that involves the teacher himself becoming an object of art, while Bronson covers himself in black and gold warpaint and sings operatically as he waits for the inevitable melée to come bursting through the door.
One Day This Will Be Yours, Summer Hours - Largely a talky exploration of a family's attempt to sort out how to respect the legacy of their past while also freeing themselves of the burdens of it-- and on the strange value of things-- Summer Hours finds transcendence in its two bookending scenes. In the opening, family matriarch Edith Scob presides over a gathering of all her children and grandchildren, and it seems that only she realizes (or is willing to admit) that it will be her last. The rest of the film is spent with her children struggling with the complex issue of how to divest themselves of her estate and her possessions while still respecting her legacy and staying connected themselves. The end at first almost seems like an afterthought but ends up a beautiful grace-note as a little-seen-to-that-point granddaughter throws a party at the now-vacant country house. Director Oliver Assayas' camera swoops through the assembled youth in a long unbroken take and eventually follows the granddaughter out to the lush grounds, where she's escaped with a beau, as she gazes back at the house from a distance and bids it a rueful but detached farewell.
-Coop