2014: The Year in Review, Page 2

THE PINK SMOKE'S 2014 YEAR IN FILM

PART II

Boyhood.

There is a lot of childhood left in all men, but with him, it's even more so. - Francois Truffaut on Antoine Doinel

During the 12 year span of Boyhood's production, Richard Linklater completed and released some great films (Before Sunset, A Scanner Darkly, Me and Orson Welles), a couple bad ones (Fast Food Nation, Bernie) and a few inbetween (School of Rock, Bad News Bears, Before Midnight). Also that documentary about the baseball coach, which I never saw. His prolificity alone makes it astonishing to think that he was sort of secretly working on what will probably end up being the most important film of his career in the cracks between shooting footage in an active abbatoir and rotoscoping Robert Downey, Jr. But what really defines the director's work in this decade-plus period is an undaunted willingness to challenge himself. Whether it be spurning potential demand with the success of School of Rock by sequelizing an underperforming film he made over a decade earlier, or fusing narrative and documentary in the ultimately unsatisfying Bernie, Linklater could never be accused of taking the easy path. Hence his most ambitious high wire act: to shoot a movie on 35mm film in increments over 12 years with a handful of non-contracted actors and an incomplete script, relying on a company with no specific obligation to continue funding the project. Not only did Linklater move forward without a safety net, he basically forged the rope as he was walking across it, creating new storylines and subplots based on where his actors were in their lives, what was going on in the world from one year to the next, what interested him about the project at any given time and how all that related to what he already had in the can. Even a director as seasoned as Linklater must have found that to be a tough pitch, even to himself.

The concept - to condense a boy's life between the ages of 7 and 18 into one 3-hour movie - has become the whole story. While deserving all the praise it's gotten (it's the best cinematic gimmick since "Percepto"), the stunt does threaten to overshadow the film itself, like how Herzog pulling a 320-ton steamship over a hill made for a more compelling story than that of Fitzcarraldo. It's certainly tricky to separate the film's concept from its narrative, in the same way that Nicholas Nixon and the Brown sisters is just a nice family portrait of four women once divorced from the idea of shooting the same photograph for over 40 years. But, like Nixon's series, the "snapshot" aspect of Boyhood serves the narrative rather than dominates it. Instead of compiling a patchwork of scenes to play catch-up with the characters, Linklater and long-time editor Sandra Adair designed a seamless channel of incidents and occurrences that flow in purely cinematic form. Make no mistake: Boyhood is Cocteau-level movie magic of ethereal majesty, capturing life and presenting it in a way that only film can. Linklater has made a laudable statement about how time is viewed onscreen - we don't think of Boyhood in terms of 12 years any more than we think of a movie set over a single day in terms of the 30 days it took to make it, and in assembling a cohesive whole out of the few days of footage shot every year he achieves the same effect as presenting scenes in real time in his two best films, Before Sunset and Tape: the audience is asked to engage in the structure of the work rather than simply follow an accumulation of events.

Let's focus for a minute on what Boyhood is not. Boyhood is not a coming-of-age story. Yes, Mason does very specifically "come of age," but there aren't any life lessons or epiphanic moments. We hear about weddings and funerals and births, but essential stages of development are not what Linklater is interested in. Boyhood is not a time capsule. Yes, we recognize certain sections as being set in the year that Harry Potter book came out, or Obama and McCain were in the presidential race, or social media became a way of life, however nothing is presented in a historical context, they're just what happened to be going on. Boyhood is not a universal experience. It's a popular misconception that watching Mason grow up is supposed to make viewers identify with him based on their own childhood, as if Linklater invited the audience over for coffee and sabotaged the visit by breaking out a family album. Level of intimacy is something each audience member brings to any given film, and if you had your own pair of bathroom bullies maybe that scene made you nod in appreciation, but it certainly has no intention to speaking to everyone. A lot of this misreading has to do with the kind-of-awful title,* which suggests some sort of broad universality to the film's events. For Linklater, boyhood is moving from one adult male figure to another, Mason finding himself under the thumb of shitty surrogate fathers and well-meaning yet by-degrees useless teachers, employers and extended family members. As he gets older, he gains more power over his own life, which is the full extent of familiarity we're meant to feel towards someone as close to an everyman as the person sitting behind you in the theater - "the opposite of an exceptional or extraordinary character," as Truffaut defined Antoine Doinel. Moreover, Boyhood is just as much about the changes perceived in his mother, his sister and his father, who has an awful lot of childhood left in him as well. On the same note, Boyhood is not trying to deliver a message. Reviews of the film suggest that viewers have been looking for a Big Picture, or finding a lack of a Big Picture, perhaps confusing the ambition of the project with the scope of the narrative. It's a huge idea for a movie specifically designed to be intimate.

It may seem like I'm being defensive just because people whose opinions I respect (Funderburg, Ian Loffill, Stu Steimer) aren't big fans of the film, but that's not the case. I feel like I'm speaking to Boyhood's supporters as much as its detractors. Linklater's movie is important, but it's not a bronze-it, put-it-up-on-the-shelf-so-everybody-can-see-it kind of importance. It's not self-satisfied; it is, as Marcus Pinn so rightly pointed out, like a verison of Tree of Life that offers up the culmative moments of a young man's life without the visual aide of CGI dinosaurs or heaven-on-a-beach pretensions. Taken individually it may be that many of these moments don't work (the film's hardly without its flaws), but it's wrong to dismiss the concept as an empty shell with no movie inside. Boyhood is fiercely cinematic, possibly the only film I can think of where the concept is the whole story and, from frame to frame, it's all that matters. And if the "experiment" did fail a bit, it's only in the same way that life itself can be disappointing. - John

* No offense to J.M. Coetzee and his excellent book about growing up in South Africa, whose subject is also the victim of a humiliating haircut.

Enemy.

The Double's double.

Based on a novel by Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, its action relocated to Toronto by French Candian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and finally forced into a title change by Richard Ayoade's contemporaneous Dostoevsky adaptation, Enemy is a film that fittingly only resembles itself. At first blush, the project is distressing: Villeneuve's breakthrough films (Incendies and Prisoners) are Hollywood-slick gimmick work; he appears to be a hack perfectly suited only to ruining Saramago's cerebral, heavily literary book. Setting the action within vibrant, multicultural Toronto seems at odds with the generic metropolis of the novel and the dull new title anticipates a dumbing down and overplaying of the book's more thriller-ish and sinister elements. Imagine if The Trial were retitled The Terrified Culprit or Despair to My Evil Twin. Additions to the film itself, like special effects-driven sequences concerning massive tarantulas, sound impossibly awful. But the film works - it wouldn't be crazy to suggest it's superior to Saramago's clever Borges-esque novel.

Reducing Toronto to its most cold, grey, antiseptic elements works in Villeneuve's favor; its perpetual overcast Canadian winter becomes oppressive without ever becoming a self-conscious element of the diegesis. Like the story and imagery, the effectiveness of the setting works on an almost subconscious level. In contrast to Saramago's rigorous book, all of the precise meanings slip away, moving into the shadows. There's a rigid schematic quality to the novel that Villeneuve and his endlessly resourceful lead actor Jake Gyllenhaal (playing both a dour history professor and his motorcycle-jacket lovin' doppleganger) have abandoned entirely. The pieces of the novel's plot fit together like the gears of a watch, doubling and redoubling back on itself in increasingly adroit ways, while the film flows together like a dream, vague and uncomfortable and uninterruptable.

Generally, when a film is compared to dream it's irritatingly inaccurate; most "dream sequences" behave nothing like dreams while weird, aestheticized imagery that resembles nothing from anyone's sleeping life get lazily labeled "dream-like." Enemy is different, if only for how heavily it relies on channeling a pervasive subconscious feel - it's drenched with the anxious, omnipresent sense of sexual desire that characterizes so much of one's nocturnal reveries. Enemy's the creeping dread that emanates from nowhere and threatens at any moment to become unbearable recalls nothing else but a dream. The story, to the extent that it exists, borders on unintelligibility; it's little more than a series of evocative coincidences and emotional outbursts that channel naturally into the free-flowing dread and sex in which the film drowns.

Saramago writes in The Double, "Every ordinary person is unique, truly unique" but Villeneuve's film feels like an ironic rebuttal to that point. The emotions and fears coursing through are so base and primal, so inescapable and unsettling that the film is not harmed as its characters and narrative situations slip away into almost total nothingness. When Gyllenhaal stumbles upon a giant room-filling tarantula that cowers in the corner in fear, any rational explanation for what we are witnessing and any intellectual dissection of its meaning is worthless. Enemy’s plot begins when the history professor sees a movie extra who resembles him perfectly and is deeply shaken for reasons he can't articulate. We know exactly how the professor feels in that moment because by the end of Enemy, we have felt it as well. - Chris

Stranger by the Lake.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. - Jean Genet

I don't remember doing it, but at some point I must have specifically requested the cosmos bring forth a celluloid child of Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur and William Friedkin's Cruising. Those are two of my all-time favorites, and Alain Guiraudie was able to assimilate the bright, tranquilizing paradise of Vardas' film and the louring sense of danger beneath the surface of Friedkin's gritty back alley urban world into the best and most irresistible thriller to come along in quite some time. Stranger by the Lake, with its temperate pace and lack of soundtrack beyond the natural ambience of its lakeside setting, establishes such a consistent serenity that it doubles as a tense tightrope threatening to snap at any moment. So dreamily subjective that its lapsed reality is only breached by the presence of a fuddy-duddy detective, with anonymous bodies leisurely appearing and disappearing across its frame, the film seems frozen in a fixed moment of absolute pleasure. We the audience are entranced by this tranquil getaway and its timeless seclusion, even as it becomes more apparent the longer the film remains in its idealized limbo (i.e. the entirety of its running time) that it's more of a purgatory from which its hero, not quite unreluctantly, can't escape.

To turn paradise into perdition, Guiraudie makes hero Franck's escape to his lakeside utopia maddeningly monotonous: arriving at the parking lot, walking down the trail, some sunbathing, a little swimming, a chat with the immanently approachable Henri, many of the same faces glanced in passing. Cruising the spot looking for a new Mr. Goodbar every late afternoon/early evening, Franck's quest for hasty hook-ups becomes increasingly imperative to stave off any impending ennui. Enter mustachioed Michel, an almost absurdly prototypical standard of the gay archetype (he's like the entire population of Cruising's seedy club scene sculpted into one intimidating adonis), whose callous offing of a hapless partner doesn't repel a witnessing Franck; indeed, it entices him all the more. Michel represents something wholly unpredictable, an embodiment of everything alluring in anonymous sex, of fleeting connections and sybaritic privilege, as well the perils peripherally implied. Rising from the lake at dusk like some mythic creature, his homicidal nature as unexplored as anything else about him - one of the great achievements of Guiraudie's film is that, even though we know who did it, it still feels like a mystery - Michel is both a relief from the frustrations of meaningless trysts and everything wrong with them. Franck perceives the danger and flirts with it anyway, like Sasha Hails in Ozon's See the Sea he perceives the 15-foot silurus lurking beneath the smooth, glinting surface but can't help going out into the water.

As in Le Bonheur there's something of a love triangle, with the promise/threat of domesticity with the undemanding (and ultimately suicidal) Henri simply not as tempting as a turbulent, potentially deadly relationship with powder keg Michel. On the other hand, Henri could be the eponymous stranger. He's almost as enigmatic as Michel: even though he's always perched in the same place on the shore instead of materializing from the leaves and shadows, he's always entering and exiting like a specter from a different direction than everyone else. Henri and Michel make up the year's most fascinating foils, neither of them forcing Franck into their lives but compelling him towards two entirely different fates. The movie's obvious influences are the aforementioned Friedkin, Varda and Ozon, Verhoeven's The Fourth Man, René Clément's take on Highsmith and of course Hitchcock, with potential victims constantly in and around the water with very little-to-nothing on, it's like a neverending shower scene (the ending is even reminiscent of Francis Iles' book Before the Fact, the insane conclusion of which was omitted from Hitchcock's terrible adaptation Suspicion). But with four displaced, engimatic characters in a volatile woman-free zone (the fourth being the straight inspector, straight out of a Chabrol film, who lurks like Henri and materializes as unexpectedly as Michel), there's more than a little Wages of Fear in there too - the men share open, unspoken secrets and rely on each other even as they hold each other's life in their hands. It's this weird joint dependence that keeps the film from becoming a generic suspense piece about a slasher skulking behind the bushes of a secluded cruising spot.

By the time things have gotten stranger by the lake, the sunlit bank has been spiked with a sanguine threat so thick you could swat at it and feel its treacly menace between your fingers. That said, there's not a moment that isn't painterly gorgeous, from the Bressonian sex scenes beneath the trees to the murder itself, spellbindingly prolonged in an extended long shot. That's where the film connects Le Bonheur and Cruising, the seemingly innocent, transitory transgressions that run afoul of very real consequences and the sinister exotic from which even a stranger can excavate something resembling honest human connection. As with Lav Diaz, his latest is a breakthrough hit for the prolific, underrated Guiraudie, the kind that makes you want to go out and see the rest of his films right away, despite the possibility that this might be a one-off masterstroke. - John

Only Lovers Left Alive.

I'm not here to tell you Jim Jarmusch's "vampire as scene-sters" film is great. Certainly, there are plenty of folks out there willing to make that case, but I'm not one of them. Its focus on "cool," on smoky clubs and home-recording studios and bohemian fashion remains my least favorite aspect of Jarmusch as an artist. I don't care to see the house where Jack White grew up and I don't have opinions on Stax versus Motown - insofar as "I absolutely don't care" constitutes an absence of opinioneering. There is not so much to the film beyond a detailed and accurate portrayal of a certain kind of artist/musician and their world of lay-abouts and hangers-on. It's a fine enough portrayal of a dilettante who nevertheless remains committed to art, if only because the idea of being an artist is so inimical to their very existence. As evidenced throughout his career, Jarmusch plainly likes this kind of person far more than I do and is always happy to spend time in their company.

This is a particularly low-key and inconsequential variation on Jarmusch cool, so why would I defend it so passionately? Primarily, I like to be reminded of what it's like to see the work of an artist - not the loafers of Jarmusch's film, but the filmmaker himself. Independent cinema in the U.S. has changed - "indie cinema," as it used to be called, once at least pretended to represent the visions of artists that simply couldn't be sustained by the commercial system. According to lore, after New Hollywood collapsed and Tinseltown was given over to the Adrian Lynnes and Jerry Bruckheimers of the world, the spirit of 70's experimentation emerged in the so-called "indie" scene. Filmmakers in the late 80's/early 90's like Hal Hartley, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater and Jim Jarmusch all came to represent people who cared about le cinema and wanted to put on screen the idiosyncratic, personal visions in which Hollywood explicitly had no interest.

All that changed over time, in the eternal circle of commerce, what was once independent, vital and sincere was co-opted, monetized and corporatized. When kids make an "indie film" to be auctioned off to Sony Classics or IFC or Magnolia Films or some other money-making arm of a mega-conglomerate diversified portfolio, they're auditioning to be the next Christopher Nolan or Steven Soderbergh. The idea isn't that they must make their films independently because their visions requires it, but that the best way to get to direct a superhero film or cinematically chronicle a War Amongst the Stars is to make a indie audition tape. Want an HBO show? Make your Tiny Furniture. Do one for ultra-cheap then convince Shailene Woodley to be in your next one and hopefully you're on your way to making a Seth Rogen fart-fest or bland Scorsese-aping Oscar-bait. That's fine and I don't begrudge anyone who goes that route. I guess. But it has turned a guy like Jim Jarmusch into a rare creature - where are all the men and women who would laugh in your face if you suggested they should direct Iron Man 4?

So when Jarmusch makes a film that is insistently, unflinchingly the work of Jim Jarmusch, I have to love it. He didn't make a vampire film as part of a carefully cultivated, over-arching strategy for the Jim Jarmusch Brand intended to result in his scoring a job as helmer of the next piece of hot Y.A. fiction about forbidden vampire love. Jim Jarmusch refuses to be anything but Jim Jarmusch and that's downright incredible in this era. His career is not uncommon in the context of how European and Asian auteurs conduct their careers, but in the U.S. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone else so defiantly individual. There's no one else who could have made Only Lovers Left Alive. There are few American filmmakers so willfully determined to be themselves and not buy into the system. Like the objects the vampires in films surround themselves with in his film, he's a relic with a personal meaning almost totally obscured by time. I wouldn't trade it for anything, even if living eternally with his beatnik vampires would to me represent a fate far worse than death. - Chris

Why Don't You Play In Hell?

In 2014, there was theatre (Mr. Turner), poetry (Stranger by the Lake), painting (The Tale of Princess Kaguya), dance (Boyhood), music (We Are the Best!). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Why Don't You Play in Hell?

Sion Sono's manic fever dream of a tribute to the terminal infection of movie love and insanity of movie-making is your standard story of a former pint-sized shiller for a popular toothpaste who suckers an unfortunate nerd into directing a movie financed by her yakuza dad that he's keen to have ready by the time his stab-happy spouse is released from prison in a few days despite harassment from overzealous cops and an ongoing war with a rival gang leader who's been obsessed with the toothpaste girl for 10 years and makes his henchmen dress in traditional samurai kimonos but luckily for the nerd there's a never-was gonzo cinema club called the Fuck Bombers who've only shot amateur 8mm movies over the last decade and so jump at the opportunity to make a 35mm epic of blood and romance that will sate the Movie God and become the greatest film ever made in Japan if any of them actually survive the production. Their unlikely trail to cinematic immortality is marked by such magically macabre moments as a 10-year-old gracefully skiding across a pool of blood, an involuntary make-out session involving pieces of a broken beer bottle, projectile vomiting on the wishing wall of a Shinto shrine (which simultaneously makes two wishes come true!) and eight heads sliced off in one wraparound stroke of the katana (no word on whether they end up in a duffel bag). Anyone familiar with Sono's work will recognize these scenes for their flawlessly-executed pop baroque outrageousness, but this time all the lunacy from the spooling, cutting and rolling is specific to the filmmaking process: a chaotic, freewheeling, exhausting movie that matches the chaotic, freewheeling, exhausting experience of shooting a movie.

I've never been a big fan of films about filmmaking. Beware a Holy Whore, The Player and Sex is Comedy mark low points in the filmographies of directors I greatly admire...even Contempt is far from my favorite Golden Age Godard. I'd describe myself as indifferent-to-unimpressed by such venerated movie-within-movie canon fodder as 8 1/2, Sunset Blvd. and Day for Night (the major exception being Singin' in the Rain, which would actually make a great double bill with WDYPIH?) Even something as wonderfully surreal as The Stunt Man ends up being weighed down by its own cleverness and over-the-top depictions of giant "Hollywood" productions. More recently you've got films nostalgic for the way movies used to be made and appreciated before the business side overwhelmed the artistic that come up shy of evoking the bygone collective elation they seek to celebrate: the outlaw moviemaking enthusiasm weighed down by broad parodies of popular films in Cecil B. Demented, the failed attempt at recreating the "magic" of formative movie experiences in Be Kind Rewind, the amusing-but-not-insightful portrayal of the disappointment and setbacks involved in working on an independent film production in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. 2011's Super 8, an old-fashioned monster B-picture about how great it was to make old-fashioned monster B-pictures, is so wistful towards movie-making it forgets to be a movie. WDYPIH? is the anti-Super 8. Sono understands that filmmaking isn't some transforming spiritual adventure on par with getting over your mother's tragic death - it's a traumatizing ordeal that's like finding the bodies of the four gangsters your mother mutilated with a carving knife in your own kitchen (Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths took a similar approach, but it was aimed more at the frustrations of screenwriting).

The idea all these movies share is that pure zealotism for film is rewarded by a great film; by representing said passion, the film itself - the fictional production (Chubby Rain) and the movie you're watching right now this very second (Bowfinger) - is its own reward and turns out great. Sono doesn't necessarily agree with this. While Why Don't You Play in Hell? is a rousing gumbo of Japanese genre film that mixes the jidaigeki swordplay of Kurosawa and Kobayashi and the slick yakuza bulletfests of Fukasaku and Suzuki with the antics of extreme cinema popularized by Kitano and Miike into one great overflowing pot of genuine film nerd adoration,* it also looks at film veneration as ultimately destructive. Like any great movie about obsessed artists, it asks where the line is drawn and when devotion to art becomes all-consuming. Media over-exposure and burnout ruins Fumi Nikaidô's former child star (between her domineering psycho of a father in this movie and the parents who greet her with a full gallows built for just for her in Himizu, you have to wonder what Sono thinks her real parents are like). Obsession with the televised image of jingle-happy junior Nikaidô inspires the rival boss (a hilarious Shinichi Tsutsumi) to model his gang after the sleek movie version of yakuza rather than manage them as a functioning crime syndicate. Likewise, Jun Kunimura's Boss Muto, a clueless Stanley Shriner Hoff in an immaculate white suit of a producer (needless to say, I'll always think of film budgets in terms of "breakfast," "lunch" and "dinner" from now on) pours all his power and resources into the pell mell of production hell. Even moreso, the devout crew of celluloid-seized maniacs (heightened caricatures of Sono and his early collaborators) are willing to give up everything for the opportunity to get their fingerprints on the holy canvas of cinema: the scene where head Fuck Bomber Hirata bids farewell to a potential love interest so he can go offer his life to the making of a movie might be the saddest scene of the year. These characters who've spent 10 years of their lives desperate to play in hell don't even know what's involved in manufacturing and therefore couldn't possibly come up with anything resembling a real film (a more literal translation of the title is "Why is Hell So Bad?") but it doesn't matter: as in We Are the Best!, it's the art bringing the characters together in rapturous solidarity that counts (just like Klara, Bobo & Hedvig's band never gets a name, Hirata/Muto's film never gets a title).

That the Fuck Bombers find euphoric glee in allowing movies to consume their lives is in keeping with the self-destructive obsessions of Sono's recurring characters who insert themselves into the communal nexus: they're as much a group of self-appointed pop cultural crusaders as Genesis' bowling alley gang in Suicide Club, the Zero Church in Love Exposure and the Tokyo Tribe. And like many of his films, WDYPIH? is split into chapters: the first half, when potential is high, gang wars mean something and the excitement of starting a film career is a palpable source of vitality, and the second half, when opportunities have been lost, yakuza exist solely for their theoretical "coolness" and the over-enthusiasm of the group of decade-older once-hopefuls has gone from passionate to pathetic. The latter section is a particularly tough pill for me to swallow. I think about movies pretty much every waking second but it's been 10 years since I actually directed a film, one that was never finished, and I feel like quite the Fuck Bomber myself these days. But even co-producing Funderburg's film last year, I felt that same sublime, singular high that comes from making a movie, even when it was just an ephemeral flash surrounded by hours of crushing, life-draining travails. Despite the struggle, Sono suggests, the consolidation of being a slave to cinema is that you can never lose sight of how fun and rewarding the resulting artwork can be - the only thing I can think to compare the final, drawn out fight of WDYPIH? to in terms of pure adolescent glee is the all-out brawl at the end of Big Trouble in Little China. Sono, who's made over 20 features in the last 15 years (plus some stuff for television), is a perpetual toiler in hell's cinematic sandbox whose work is a constant reminder of why we submit ourselves to its infernal anguish. - John

* It's tempting to identify rapid film maniac Don Hirata as a parody of Quentin Tarantino, that poster boy for the unrestrained id of movie-geek fetishism. But although the film ends with a sword fight orgy behind shoji screens with a character wearing Bruce Lee's yellow Game of Death jumpsuit (at Hirata's insistence), Sono has denied any such connection.

The Drop.

The Little Secret.

A usual aspect of any year-end write-up is making the case for the greatness of an overlooked film or two, but some overlooked films, such as The Drop, can only be damaged by excess of praise. The argument isn't that this is a great film or One of the Top 10 Greatest Films of Our Lord's Year 2014, but that this is something true to John Huston's promise "when you do it right, the thing happens right there up on the damn screen." Adapted from a short story written for charity that was later developed into a novel as an afterthought and imbued with the modesty implied thereof, this an unassuming film, a relatively uneventful film, one that can just barely sustain its feature length running time and contains not a single element of plot or direction that I would be tempted to describe as "original" or "inventive."

So why am I writing about it? It's a film of performances more than anything; they're a source of jagged excellence. It's gifted with actors who render the material irrelevant and, admirably, never panic at the thinness of the script and spiral into hysterics or over-dramatics. There's no heroic weight-loss/gain, no prosthetic noses, no studied accents masquerading as characterization. Tom Hardy plays a bartender with an opaque interior life and the glimpses he allows us of it churn up intrigue and fear about the whole of what lies behind his dullness. There are flashes of wisdom and sweetness leavened with grotesque practicality; his performance creates the film around it - the characterization powers the tension of the narrative, his work builds twists and shocks into the story where they would not otherwise exist. Hardy's performance teases an intense thriller out of a low-key love story and subverts a crime thriller into a kitchen sink drama about blue-collar comprise and humiliation.

He's supported by Noomi Rapace, who is making a career out of providing electrifying oddball energy to movies that would wither from overpraise: Passion, Dead Man Down, The Drop. She's vulnerable and snarling, a human version of the puppy Hardy finds discarded in her trash. She's like no other performer working right now and even if Hardy's work didn't elevate the film to a different level altogether, it worth be worth seeing The Drop just for her collection of expressions - she has an uncanny knack for subtly making her face say the opposite of what her character intends it to and redirecting the tone of a scene into unexpected territory. Like Hardy, she greets of the clichés of the piece with a low-key aggression and tenderness, banging and bending it out of shape into something it would be wrong to describe as great, but easy for the idiotic and self-satisfied to disregard.

James Gandolfini, the personification of his character's worn-out Jets jersey and carpeted basement, and Mathias Schoenaerts, imported from Belgian director Michael R. Roskam's own Bullhead, are also on hand to dent and wreck the tired, almost sleeping, generics of the story. But again, let's not overstate it: what's happening here is small. Maybe intimate is a better word. This film feels like a story that's been told to no one else, but not a secret; you're sitting alone at a bar and a moment from years ago passes into your mind. You tell the bartender about it and talk for a bit, you finish your drink and leave, that moment you hadn't thought of since it happened you won't think of ever again. A lifetime of receiving those stories is hidden within Tom Hardy in The Drop. - Chris

The Wind Rises.

Hayao Miyazaki, a titan of Japanese cinema whose colossal shadow is cast across the field of animation all around the world, decided to end his directorial career on a surprisingly quiet note. You won't find any scattering dust sprites, rampaging boar gods or anthropomorphic pig pilots in his alleged final film, but you will find more scenes of people taking the bus to work and changing slippers while lounging around a cozy summer resort than you might expect. It could be that, at age 72, he chose to fade away rather than to burn out. It may have been the desire to produce something more adult-oriented to cap off his legendary oeuvre. Or perhaps a long, somber reflection on the years leading up to Japan's involvement in World War II had something to do with the director's below-radar approach. Whatever the reason, The Wind Rises (which is about planes, in case you missed the whole radar-based analogy there) is a simple story given the same epic treatment Miyazaki brings to each of his films. The magnitude Miyazaki normally applies to explosions above floating cities and battles with giant mutant insects is here miniatured to the intense scrutiny of aluminium flaps and levers. The boundless wonder of Spirited Away's otherworldly bathhouse is curtailed into the enigma of a side glance or an unlikely encounter on an otherwise routine afternoon stroll. In other words, Miyazaki brings his unique vision down to reality, but in a way in which the commonplace becomes absolutely fascinating. And he steps out of fantasy in more ways than one: this may be his most personal film. It features an adult male protagonist, something he's only done twice before (and they were Lupin and a pig in aviator goggles), one who resembles the filmmaker both physically and through mutual burning innovation - two myopic dreamers with sights reaching further than their clunky spectacles might indicate.

Inspired by the life of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi and writer Tatsuo Hori, from whose autobiographical novel the love story is taken (also Miyazaki's father, an artist who built fighter plane parts during the war), The Wind Rises is pieced together as intricately as the radical new flying machine Jiro obsesses over. The film is a concoction of diverse artists whose work stimulates Miyazaki: the philosophy of a French poet...the tragic romance of a Japanese writer...the spirit of real-life Italian aeronautical genius Gianni Carboni...a character from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It's not hard to understand the affinity Miyazaki feels towards an artist who finds inspiration in the curves of mackerel bones - like the cat bus in Totoro, Jiro's bird-based plane design brings immaculate nature and modern technology together. And of course nature is always inherent to art. Carboni, who has informed Jiro that a virtuoso has ten years of true creativity in him, checks back later to inquire, "Ten years in the sun - did you live them well?" It's always illuminating to witness a veteran Japanese director's reflection on life as a young artist: Jiro's dreams of conversing with Caproni recall the frustrated student's meeting with Vincent Van Gogh inside the artist's painting in Kurosawa's late-career portmanteau Dreams. (There's even respect among artists within the cast. Van Gogh was played by Kurosawa's contemporary Martin Scorsese. In Wind Rises, Jiro is voiced by Hideaki Anno, director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, whose first job was animating the God Warrior's attack in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). Jiro's triumphs and tragedies mirror Miyazaki's own, and they share a common fear: that the service to which they devote their world-changing creative power will bring forth something awful.

For a film that puts wings on the dreams of artists, some of the best sequences are the most grounded. Its love subplot, with Jiro absconding with the frail Naoko as she suffers from tuberculosis, is at first disappointing as Naoko seems a standard romantic interest compared to the determined heroines of the director's greatest films. Yet by setting the story through a male perspective, Miyazaki makes Naoko as much a mystery as the phantom wind that blows her parasel into Jiro's path to initiate their affair. (And it's certainly nowhere near as snickering and one-dimensional as the love subplot in, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel.) Considering this is his first real attempt at a mature love story as a director (not including Whisper of the Heart, which he wrote), Miyazaki could not have sculpted a more charming scene than the one outside the sanatorium when Jiro courts Naoko using paper airplanes. Sadly the romance turns bittersweet as Jiro becomes more preoccupied with his one true passion, taking for granted that Naoko is something pure that will never go away. But the same wind that brought them together is the one that portends her passing, the same one that will lift the wings of the dreaded Zeros that will rain fire upon the Pacific. Like the disease slowly taking over Naoko's body, the ultimate purpose of Jiro's creation denotes the corruption of something beautiful. On the one hand, Miyazaki understands that, like the earthquake that ripples across the country like a wave leaving devastation in its wake early in the film, there are certain things no one can predict or prevent - the wind will blow and spread wild fire across the land. At the same time, he argues that Jiro's failed duty as a husband matches his apathy for how his creations will be utilized: often the pursuit of making the world a more wonderful place comes at the expense of losing everything that's good and familiar.

The various controversies that met Miyazaki's film are hardly worth mentioning; it's neither a white-washing of a weapons manufacturer or an unpatriotic view of his home country. The director's pacifism is well documented: one need only think back to the horrific visions of corrupting warfare in Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle - those may have been set in fantasy, but some blob gremlins bombing the country in Wind's opening dream sequence create an obvious connection. If Jiro Horikoshi makes it out of the movie unscathed, it's only because Miyazaki equates his dedication to creating something beautiful for the military with the efforts of himself and Studio Ghibli to produce masterpieces in the often exploitative field of Japanese animation. What unites all of Miyazaki's fliers - Lupin in his misappropriated autogyro, Nausicaä on her glider, Sheeta and Pazu on his hand-crafted aeroplane, Tombo on his hand-crafted airship and budding witch Kiki on her broom, Totoro with his umbrella, Porco Rosso in his fighter plane, Haku and Howl soaring through the sky in their aerial forms - is the drive to discover a common bond between the natural and mechanical worlds, to accomplish something so special that the wind will sweep them up as though it were always meant to happen. Of course gravity always triumphs eventually - whatever Miyazaki's retirement means for the future of Ghibli, he'll have left an everlasting impression that only a true master of exquisite hand-drawn animation can. "Ten years in the sun - did you live them well?" Miyazaki made ten movies leading up to his final bow, and I think it's safe to say he made them pretty well. - John

The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

Gold and Bamboo.

As their careers progressed, Isao Takahata ended up in the overwhelming shadow of Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki [sort of like fellow engineer Kiro Honjo to colleague Jiro Horikoshi as portrayed in The Wind Rises! -- john], so it's both a little sad and a little sweet that he finally upstaged his former protege as the man was making his final bow. The Wind Rises is a fine film (and deserving of inclusion on our list) but Kaguyahima no monogatari is an exquisite one. It's easy to feel with Miyazaki stepping down that Ghibli is dying; Takahata's film reassures us that not only is its heart still beating, but with more brimming beauty and poetry than ever. Because Miyazaki's films were by their nature so epic and virtuosic, it seems inevitable that Takahata's more idiosyncratic work would be seen as a footnote. Takahata and Miyazaki see each other as equals but apart from the surprise financial success of Pom Poko and the critical acclaim of Grave of the Fireflies, Takahata has never been granted the same spotlight and esteem.

Takahata's great virtue, though, has been his natural talent for remaining out of step. Pom Poko employs a mishmash of design styles for its gaggle of Tanuki and the episodic structure of his work like Poko, Only Yesterday and My Neighbors the Yamadas provides him an equal opportunity to mismatch several types of stories within a single film. Whatever anyone else is doing, you can rest assured Takahata will be something else entirely, usually several elses within a single film. The squiggly sketch style employed here by Takahata (as in Yamadas) creates a sharp contrast with the slick and busy, epilepsy-inducing style associated with Japanese animation. In contrast to the work of Miyazaki, whose achievements feel like the results of an army of animators and designers marshaled together, the mix of water-color inspired layouts and simple line drawings in Kaguya feels like the work of a single man who could only be Takahata; you sense the single pencil that has been put to a single sheet of paper.

Once again, Takahata has packed several films into one, using the story's origins as one of Japan's oldest folktales to his advantage and mining the elastic reality of a fairytale for a variety of moods and aesthetics. The story doesn't demand consistency or coherence and would be hurt by a too literal or rigid interpretation: a little girl found in a bamboo stalk ends up returning to her home on the moon after growing into a beautiful young woman courted by the luminaries of Japan. Early sequences are playful adventures brimming with wonder and joy, a separate section following her courtship by a bevy of princes works off of the wry humor and ironic reversals of folk storytelling, the extended denouement as she is compelled to return to the moon becomes a poetic revery. There's even plenty of broad goofball humor involving her hapless adoptive father and his failures to interpret the meaning of her mystical origins.

Appropriately, an acute sense of time and its passage can be felt in Takahata's work. In Kaguya, the passage of seasons as it cycles through its sequences creates a sense of not only the movement between the disparate individual tales of Kaguya, but the movement of life itself. A life is not a sad poetic story nor a wryly ironic one nor one brimming with wonder and joy. It is all of those things as we move through it and Takahata makes us feel their connection, as distant and intertwined as summer and winter. Takahata's work has always felt deeply exploratory and that occasionally leads to dead ends which in turn bounce him off in unexpected directions; in contrast to Miyazaki, he has never sought and achieved flawless greatness. With Takahata, it rarely feels like there's precisely a reason for his films to end, as though there's more to explore, that he could have gone even farther. It's fitting that Studio Ghibli's two giants both have films out as just one returns to the moon - the contrast explains something. The Wind Rises' modesty and inconsequentiality feels, as it should, like Miyazaki hanging up his hat. Kaguya's breathless invention and bottomless ingenuity feels Takahata is just getting started. - Chris

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