10. Three Times

If Three Times fails to engage me on a personal level as much as I want it to, it nevertheless is about as formally challenging and imaginative as any cinematic vision in recent memory. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan-centric triptych of love and miscommunication has alternately been dismissed as a minor work and as an uneven appropriation of other filmmakers’ styles, but to me, the film works precisely because the three sections so intimately speak to each other, and to larger discourses present in modern film. If the first section, with its oft-repeated pop song and cozy 1960s atmospherics, recalls on a superficial level Wong Kar Wai, the associations are defeated by Hou’s evasive and elliptical structures - here romanticism is made hazy and dreamlike through deliberate pacing and precise, gliding camerawork. The final section, in which he recalls similar narrative territory he explored in his Millennium Mambo, posits like Khoo in Be With Me that the ease of modern communication technology has nevertheless provided no progress (and perhaps regression) on the ultimate problems of human communication. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s an important one, a guiding vision of the postmodern human condition by one of its most defiantly provincial filmmakers.

9. Something New

I’d hate to get all Armond White on you guys, but can we talk briefly about the marginalization of black American cinema? Let’s go to case number one - ATL. I recently got a chance to catch up with this movie, starring TI and Mykelti Williamson - it’s rather good! And I’m not surprised, given that it got fine notices from American film critics, has an intriguingly complex narrative, and well-constructed performances by talented young actors. As I usually do upon seeing a new movie, I boogied over to the film’s IMDb page soon after and found an alarming appraisal: it currently has a 3.7 out of 10 on the IMDb critical list.

Now, who knows? Maybe these 2,216 voters are genuine and really hated the movie enough to give it an average of a 3.7. But I don’t think that’s the case. I’m assuming here that most people who rated it this low did so because they, not seeing the movie (because they’re white), saw ads for a race movie starring a rapper and assumed that like You Got Served (not that bad) and Phat Girlz (maybe that bad, but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t seen it) it had to be awful, and rated it low anyway. Let’s further clarify: they actively sought out ATL’s IMDb page to rate it low.

Why am I saying all this? Because last night, raving about Sanaa Hamri’s urgently romantic and blessedly unpretentious Something New, I was reminded of this phenomenon - the sort of expectation for disaster our nation has for black cinema - when a friend insisted she had assumed the film was bad. (It was a total Crash moment - trust me.) What could have possibly led her to believe this? The trailer is witty and inviting. The reviews were fabulous, if few and far between because Focus botched the hell out of marketing this film. And the pedigree was stellar - starring Sanaa Lathan, one of the most underrated actresses of her generation, and based (very) loosely on Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. I don’t have any real solutions to this sort of thing - and I’m not even sure how much of a factor race played into this individual assessment, but when the year’s best romantic comedy can come and disappear and be presumed (despite a ton of notice to the contrary) as seemingly bad, I think there’s a major institutional (not personal) problem in how we as a nation understand race films.

Okay. Now that I’m off my soapbox, was there a more romantic film than Something New in recent memory? Gloriously colorful, with intricately drawn characters and a heady balance of comedy and tender melodrama, the film’s knowledge of the subtleties of the intersections of class, race, and gender and its insistence on constructing complex characters whose prejudices are subtle and whose dignity is profound, are among just a few of the virtues here. Far from the brutal ironies of Sirk, and yet nearly as intellectually engaging as anything melodrama’s greatest master produced, this is generous, meaningfully humanistic cinema in the vein of Renoir, Ozu, and Nair. In a word, it’s an important film - one that will likely get revived in thirty years or so on the repertory circuit and recognized in retrospect as far more genuine a view of American race relations than any other film of its time.

8. Sisters in Law

The year’s best documentary is also its gentlest. Shot and edited unobtrusively (but with an observant interest in dignity and folly), Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi’s painstakingly charted work follows a series of cases related to women’s and children’s issues through the court system of Kumba, Cameroon, where formidable female judge Beatrice Ntuba and prosecutrix (their words, not mine) Vera Ngassa are striving slowly to build women’s rights in their own small way. The film, which harkens back to the best of 60’s verite documentaries, is at heart a performance film - the ceremony of justice, rendered through long takes of prosecutorial examinations in offices and in the one-room open-air courthouse where Ntuba handles her cases. She and Ngassa chide the men, make wisecracks, comfort victims (the stories of child abuse, handled with as sensitive and unexploitational a touch as can be hoped in documentary, are especially haunting). More than just an important document on the question of womanhood in the third world, Sisters in Law is a message of hope for the future, and an engaging manifesto on personal agency in social change.

7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

The elephant in the room. A massive film, as epic in sheer heft as it is intricate and small in scope, Cristi Puiu’s unflinching look at a man’s soul slowly subsiding into an oblong mass of malfunctioning bodily systems and then into nothing at all - shape and texture but no life. Masterfully observant, frustrating, at times obnoxiously symbolic, but always at its heart human, the film is putatively about Dante Remus Lazarescu’s journey deep into hell, but is probably more the story of Luminita Gheorghiu’s Mioara, her cynicism slowly giving way to determination and despair as she watches her charge get shuffled through the Bucharest medical system. Gheorghiu’s is perhaps the performance of the year, her growing indignation to the inhuman hospital bureaucracy palpable and charged with an unbelievable life of its own.

6. Fast Food Nation

I don’t know what says more about my development as a film viewer: my suspicion that in years past I would have hated Fast Food Nation or my suspicion that in years past, I would have loved it even more. The latter because it’s one of few films in recent memory that uses a network narrative to do so much more than merely cover up weaknesses in its individual narratives (network narratives were at one time a favorite Indiewood cliche of mine). And the former because frankly, Richard Linklater’s touch on Nation is so subtle, so delicately abrasive that it might have been lost on me. Fast Food Nation is an important work of political filmmaking - yes, it begins, on the microcosmic scale, exploring personal stories in a small Colorado city that appears to be at the center of fast food culture in America. Its nauseating images of the kill floor (a sequence as potent as Elvira’s tour of the slaughterhouse in Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons), its smirking but never arrogant folding of research into narrative, culled from Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book of the same name, and its small stories of growing political awareness and the plight of undocumented workers alone make it potent expose. But it’s so much more. It’s a film about man as branded good, our economic superstructure as meatpacking plant, and our suburban homes as happy-meal boxes - inviting, filled with toys, but empty in so many other ways.

Films 5-1 will be added tomorrow.