Top 3:

1. My Winnipeg
The “fjords within the fjords. . .” Guy Maddin explicates the hometown in a language he finds most truly and artfully explainable.  If any “documentary” on The History Channel were made as this movie, the consciousness of civilization may yet take a prodigious step forward.

2. Mister Lonely
A reshuffling of human symbols in the free market of signs and signifiers, a mountain lake commune of superstar impersonators, Diego Luna a wannabe Michael Jackson who is in fact the truest portrayal of Michael Jackson, visiting the island of the live dead, himself impersonating one who himself impersonates the Human Being neither male/female, white/black, young/old. Replete with close-up bloodshot-eyed Abe Lincoln in strobe-light reciting the Gettysburg Address while spinning on his finger a red white & blue basketball. . . .

3. The Wrestler
A bravura biopic in the vernacular of industrial city event halls and Jersey Dollar and decrepit winter boardwalks and strip clubs called ‘Cheeks’ and wrestling action figures and 80s heavy metal, where an “old broken down piece of meat” re-ravishes his identity on and off the mat, taking staples in his broad ram’s back for the crowd’s roar (which sounding is not the same made by the customers at the supermarket deli counter demanding potato salad). Mind’s survival instinct to the gruel and rancor of the Body, Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy/Pam engaged with her own deep reckoning, ass to the greasy crowd, a nether rung of show business enjambing selves who are losing the ability to play by it.  The moviegoing exegete would point out that twenty years ago Mickey Rourke starred with similar biomatic subtext as the title anti-hero in Johnny Handsome.

[in no order]

4. Four Nights With Anna
see Guest Screenings

5. The Dark Knight
An extravagant arabesque proof that Justice must cast itself as the enemy in order to deliver the City from its crimes. Where Batman Begins was a revelation of History, The Dark Knight is the excoriator of Morality. The Joker is played as the hero as Batman lopes among Gotham’s shadows meditating the counter-deflection of purple terrorist thunderbolts.   And “Zeus” Lister proving the People’s crisis rightward. . .

6. Pineapple Express
Mark gravely the remark that this hysterical para-macho buddy smash-up gemstone will be a culty “have-you-seen” fav within the next year or so!

7. Redbelt
Redbelt’s is the premise in which we all imagine our ethical lives take place, the dearth of opportunity to prove what is pure. To employ what one does best against forces which ineluctably break one. Mike Terry’s world is manipulated against itself, and so he manipulates his opposing world likewise (a world which is of course not without Hollywood), brawling outside the ring, and as the victor is given the redbelt.

8. Wall-E
Classic knockabout existential sci-fi, the last operable machine on a planet junked to death by technology who falls in love with his would-be assassin. A doomsday movie that stays true to its bleak premise, when a machine must teach tub o’lard humans how to be human, set against a gloriously ravished landscape that takes cue from the apocalyptic panoramas of psyche-era paperback bookcovers. And no less frightening is Fred Willard the evil technocrat!

9. Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull
The Indy team did right right by the series and played into the late 50s setting with an opening slam-bang nuclear setpiece that is self-consciously giddy and paranoid, the Indiana Jones homage to postmodernism. At the end, Mutt Jones is about to don the fedora as if the next generation taking over, but Indy is quick to grab that hat and put it back on his own head where it belongs. It cannot be said that the new James Bond movie did this.

10. / 11.  Che & Milk
Che and Milk follow men driven by human ideals surrounded by a band of activist freedom fighters, and in each movie, in each band, there is one woman. Crusader movies based on an actual personage, Milk’s guerilla territory is 1970s San Fran, Che’s is both 50s Cuba and 60s Bolivia, and both figureheads are persecuted. Milk shaves his beard and ponytail, Che grows his whiskers longer. They each die by assassination from the gun of political agents. They are similarly styled, with rich, subtle soundtracks, a commanding male lead, a picturesque backdrop, and each a period piece of a recent decade past.

Che, ever cornered deeper in the Bolivian mountains, morale and provisions capsizing, calls on the influence of Sartre and Bertand Russell to corral the discourse in his favor. In Part I, we see Che in New York commingling with diplomats among the spacious LeCorbuism of the United Nations. He makes small talk with Eugene McCarthy at a Silk District cocktail party hosted by journalista Lisa Howard.  It is an evocative flourish that Part II begins in the mode of a spy movie, Che infiltrating a distressed Third World nation in disguise - he even spends time with his family before the mission in his bald head and thick-rimmed glasses and potbelly. The movie, even at its length, is a fine-trimmed work of art, and succeeds to subvert the biopic. Che’s methods work in one environment and fail in the other, and, as Howard Hawks often does, the events are sequenced to maximize the vigorous movement of many men in clashing scenarios, out in the wilds of nature, in space, against time. After the revolution, Fidel is broadcast on TV, the angle askance a nameless screen, while Che heaves for breath under the ensnaring jungle.

Milk is the Me Decade revolutionary, brutally honest, shameless of his faults: an outgoing, magnetized personality. His lovers – whiskerando James Franco and tortured, infectiously loopy Diego Luna - dramatize Milk’s public life played out in his private.  Anita Bryant is a most formidable villain, her character shown only in site-specific footage - she is the Joker to Milk’s Batman, and so Dan White is Two-Face, the tortured do-gooder whose identity-collapse effects evil doings.

In each movie an antagonist is ghostly manifested and the grand opposition is finally spiritual. Van Sant surely was personally strategic in making his movie, to its benefit - just as Soderbergh is not vested in Che as a textbook profile.  Each moviemaker has proved they can tell a straight-up story (Drugstore Cowboy, The Limey, Sex Lies, Private Idaho), and Che and Milk can stand alone as melodramas rooted in the ideology of historical events. In this way, W. might as well have been an Adam Sandler romp.

12. Synecdoche, New York
The paranoid artist dream movie where all fears make a narrative that slips again into where it began, a re-mapping of a self’s space and time, two things death takes away, turning on its head the trope of Hollywood family/failure who makes good/inspirational genre, with zeppelins flying over the Brooklyn Bridge and grotesque physical afflictions and characters playing other characters until new characters for that character must be introduced.  Measured, textured, significantly acted, precisely designed, almost vividly edited.

RUNNERS-UP:

Step Brothers
The McKay/Ferrell/O’Reilly franchise contemporary vaudevillian domestic romporama. The opening George Bush quote propels the sociological framework for the world in which the movie takes place, as if a Twilight Zone episode. A swell hark to the clever episodic ribaldry of National Lampoon magazine.

Body Of Lies
Highly wrought and twisty to the intellect, nailing the twists and the unraveling of the “body of lies,” the action scenes are not Bauer/Bourne-ized, and the most visceral consequence is caused by a wild dogs bite, engendering rabies stomach shots. An Iraq war movie told by the ordnance of intelligence, an opening quote from W.H. Auden, capped by a new Guns ‘N’ Roses tune..

Boarding Gate
If a Vin Diesel-style 00s globetrotting thriller were made devoid of flash and glam starring hyper-abused Asia Argento - execution rooms in the back of Hong Kong warehouses, shoot-outs at prefab port terminal offices at night, drugged drinks at Hong Kong karaoke clubs, the failed revisitation of sex acts before the assassination of Michael Madsen, and a good Eno score.

1. Rubin & Ed
Howard Hesseman & Crispin Glover buddy spirit jaunt through the Cali-jurassic desert caves of sleek desolate downtown districts and Gordon Gekko-trickle down Motivational Groups, the gags funny and strange eons beyond the veneer of a midnight straight-to-cable job.

2. Where’s Poppa
The Borscht premise of a middle-age Upper West Sider living with his old crazy mother, the jokes transgressive (last scene sonny Segal mounting Momma) and mawkishly unsettling (”you the guy that raped the cop?”). An archaeologist may study it as evidence of a particular time and place on Central Park West that is continually phasing out of existence.

3. Kiss Me Deadly
A first and last word on pulp noir, a flyblown macho private-eye led to a small box that scorches you and when opened might have blown up the world, we are put in the experience of what sustains us as organic beings, the desperate breath, following a trail the end of which finds an ungodly power which destroys all matter, unleashed by a creepy, mannered, Count-like old man. Ralph Meeker pioneers a style and swagger not barely seen again until the 70s.

4. Sword of Doom
As if S. Kubrick made a samurai movie at the far, black, cold arches of space – the hero sitting in an empty room with estranged wife, drinking sake, always staring hard in the Nakadai manner at nothing but the void, dispatching his attackers at the climax rampage as if every lunge is one of isopathic Judgment.

5. Day of Wrath
Like Master Henry James produced a late medieval hellbent Scandanavian witch nouvelle.

6. Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters
see Guest Screenings

7. Cluny Brown
see Guest Screenings

8. The Long Riders
New Wave Walter Hill Western micro-epic where the riders ride long in freakish slo-mo psychedelic bandit shoot-outs tho the potboiled egomaniacs characterized as stolid self-effacing fraternaholics , lets hope raids such as this movie depicts will not be enacted on Bank Of America’s new One Bryant Park.

9. Hatari
A spectacle of chasing rhinos and buffalo on the Tanzanian plain, exemplar of the greatest of Hollywood magic, the “Danger” (Hatari in Swahili) is pleasantly and riotously offset by the soap opera twixt the zoo-hunters, and a ripsnort opener customizes the Forty-Deuce marquee night-on-the-town audience for a nearly three-hour pastiche of Howard Hawks’ filmmaking career in the guise of an imperialist African action comedy. The team are gathering animals for the San Diego zoo on the other side of the world. Perhaps this is the only job left appropriate for John Wayne’s stereotype spotlight frontiersman? Your author wishes to have seen it at the Victory Theater with a cutie bobbysocker and went for coffee and sandwiches at the Automat afterwards…

10. Chafed Elbows
Somewhere between French 1920s surrealism, sixties NYC para-dadaism and Milton Berle - Catskillsesque gags for Warholesque premises, like the man with a gangster’s drawl who approaches our hero, signs with white paint his initials on our hero’s lapel (”A.W.” of course) and calls this work “Man on Street” and gives our hero a litany of instructions to which he must violately adhere now that he has been rendered a work in the art world. And the “artist” looks like a shoddy tourist and talks like a Gambino. References to “Jesus Mekas.” A true absurd picaresque journey, where cop-killing and incest jokes are made as lightly as the jabs at the art world and Hollywood. Soundtrack of drooly ur-jazz by Hair composer.

February
Film Forum hosted “An Evening w/ Sidney Lumet,” where the director conversed with folksy and erudite film historian Foster Hirsch.  Several career highlight clips were played, and Sidney, though a bit canned with his answers, is infectiously respectable, a belabored artist of magnanimous NYC street pedigree.  Check The Verdict and Serpico and most gladly The Wiz.

At Walter Reade Theater (Lincoln Center these days very much resembling a leftover setpiece from The Wiz) Crispin Glover introduced both the crowdpleasing Americana artifact The Orkly Kid and the Southern California late-80s schtickedelic road parable Rubin and Ed. Crispin did his routine Q&A afterwards, for which your author had already sat once before, at IFC, after Crispin’s mesmerizingly disarming “Big Slide Show.”  Except for Crispin’s tale of what really happened at his infamous Letterman appearance, which he told circuitously but lucidly unskinned (after some dweeb in the audience asked about it), the Q&A was a longwinded exercise.

March
At Film Forum, your author was privileged to have screened King Kong on its 75th birthday, with an audience that included 30 members of the picturesque and homely Sons Of Kong Club, riotously applauding Kong’s both tropical and metropolitan victory.  It was as if seeing this masterwork for the first time - indeed the first time projected on the big screen.

At BAM played The Driver, part of a Walter Hill retrospective, a gritty LA action car-chase flick as if an homage to post-apocalyptic Paris, with some brief commentary by charmingly wizened film exegete Elliot Stein.

May
Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell introduced Cluny Brown at Walter Reade, part of the Jennifer Jones series, the First Couple of film criticism, prolific veterans of New York’s trade in Ideas. The hearts of all men at least once in their lives fall for a girl like Cluny, but rarely does a man ever see it come about as dashing as Charles Boyer.

August
BAM served up an Elliot Gould series, and your author made it to the Jules Feiffer 60s socio-caper Little Murders, followed by a Q&A with star Gould casually conducted by ex-Sun scrivener and A-Bones axman Bruce Bennett.  Your author accompanied to the screening legendary table tennis champion and ping-pong hustler Marty Reisman, who knew Elliot, and after the movie, at the reception, amidst the small flurry of Gouldists, these two arch-radicalists struck a dialogue in which your author happened upon participation.  Marty had always told the story of a poker game that went on for years in some stogie-nosher’s apartment in the Upper West Side in the late 60s, and that among the errant players were Walter Matthau and Elliot Gould.  On the steps outside BAM Gould was humbly asked about the adventure.  Marty provided the details, but Gould’s memory was reluctant.  “I was never good at poker,” he said.  “Because you have to bluff, and as an actor I can’t lie. . .”  And we all watch Elliot Gould movies because we all want Elliot Gould.  In Little Murders we get Elliot, an artsy depressed mook processed into a pre-war high-rise sniper along with the rest of New York City’s figurative population; plus Donald Sutherland as an East Village Plastic Inevitable minister, and Judge Lou Jacobi enunciating his Lower East Side immigrant story as if the riot act.

October
In the classically vast Ziegfeld Theater screened Four Nights With Anna, part of the New York Film Festival, with the movie’s director appearing for the Q&A, imposing and rakish artist/lumberjack Jerzy Skolimowski.  A love story between two rape victims set in the cold gray 21st century outlands of Poland, a lyric story epic in scope and not a scene or time scheme misplaced or without effect.  Afterwards, Jerzy spoke no different from the way he had made his movie move.  Before Four Nights played Pal/Secam, a short film introduced by its creator, Dmitry Povolotsky.  A sort of 1980s Russian Superbad: horny well-meaning teen invites the dark elements of experience in pursuit of his lady, and suddenly his mom’s living room is filled with creepy Moscow bums watching amateur porno.  We know our hero is desperate – we first meet him in the bathroom humping the tub drain – and we are fighting for him and his infatuation with his Bollywood glam disco video (not so unlike the same coming-of-age conceit evinced by Slumdog Millionaire).

Also part of the NYFF, at Walter Reade, Guy DeBord’s Situationalist metalogue In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, with a post-screening panel discussion: culture-wrangler Greil Marcus, the most acutely and revealingly spoken of the evening; moviemaker Oliver Assayas, impressionistic and exponential but in person not the devious chic greasemonkey who composed Boarding Gate; and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who bombastically excused himself twice during the discourse to leave the stage and go to the men’s room, in which room your author had crossed paths with Jean-Pierre only moments before the discussion began.  Jean-Pierre provided the evening’s panel with the alienated flair and aggravation of the Artist (a former collaborator with Go-Go-Godard), and the man, ostensibly, had eaten bad Chinese food earlier that evening.  In girum imus purports to give narrative life to the personal demons of civilization’s zealous dweller.  Battle scenes from old movies, docu panning shots of the cityscape, the manner in which one invents and destroys and re-invents their human environment.  The age old problem of the middle-class taking over sacred districts when social prosperity renders the bohemian life an arm of Luxury’s frankenstein.

November
Film Forum welcomed silver beard and thin bluejeans boho Les Blank, to introduce his Gap-Toothed Women and Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, and Les told the story of the the films’ origins in the way he makes his movies, a peculiar, intangible logic that follows objects and people in the real world and is wry and gainful of the audience’s trust.  The Gap Toothed Women are as revealing of themselves as is the pontificator in the giant garlic costume.

Later that night, director Charlie Ahearn hosted Wild Styles with a lauded appearance by Fab Five Freddy, and an intro screening of Ahearn’s 2005 Bongo Barbershop, where a young Tanzanian dude busting Swahili rhymes faces off with an old school NYC freestyler, both sitting in barber chairs in a “Bronx tonsorial parlor,” a cinematic event of itself, and in the New York tradition of lyric modes bygone, since riffed off, where the true rousters of the art these days are working in a microcosmic storefront under an elevated subway in the outer boroughs.

An ice cold Saturday at the New Times Square New Times Tower found the American Museum of the Moving Image hosting Jerry Lewis interviewed by louche Peter Bogdanovich, and a schpiel by Jerry on the old Times Square it was.  Jerry lashed out against rehashing he and Dean’s etiology, but Jerry annunciated the spirit of just what it was like in show business at the top of 20th Century famedom as no other has ever known it but “Elvis, Sinatra & The Beatles” - except the footage feed never ever captured it as did only the bristling crowds in line outside the Capitol Theater . . .  the Hacker’s Club of taxi drivers faring nightly their own microeconomy carting wowed post-audiences back to Bloomfield, NJ; Jerry Lewis doing impressions of Swedes doing impressions of Jerry Lewis; the cocky self-lambasting!  All in all, a perfect short story of the wayward theater industry’s surrealistic touchstone.

December
For one week Film Forum ran Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, with two nights capped by a visit from writer/director Paul Schrader.  The biopic to end all biopics in the 20th Century from where the 21st has yet to pick up.  The self-destruction of the Artist is lusciously staged by elegantly edited nouvelles in and out of the writer’s present, past and fiction.  Schrader spoke with alacrity after the movie, nary a superfluous remark, about its making and his approach to its operatic suicidal themes.  It would seem that a movie “based on a true story” should never be made otherwise.  I’m Not There tried it last year but smothered itself with capriciousness.  Mishima is as if carved by the sword which the man thrusts upon himself. . . harking the language of Bergdorf Goodman’s best window artisanship.

. . . . and though it could not properly be defined as a “screening,” your author had twosie balcony box seats for Liza’s At The Palace, and Liza cried up from the red velvet abyss ecstatic renditions of the songbook - the frowzy resounding big band blams, the charming slapstick regarding Liza’s lost footlight maneuvering, and the lady’s voice still bounding back from that night’s starblaze.  The crowd, fitfully hysterical, included Mayor Bloomberg, whom Liza introduced before launching a one o’ a kind “New York, New York.”

All tour guides in this Line of Gray must choose come the end of the year how they will begin employment in the next. It is Layoff time at 777 8th Avenue, how about a song for it!

Livin’ On The Layoff(.mp3)