25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #24 - CHILDREN OF MEN

24. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006)

Using an Eastern European long take aesthetic, a Mexican director situates a British novelist’s science fiction tale about an African refugee -- whose pregnancy is humanity’s first in almost two decades – within the contexts of U.S. anti-immigration fervor and War on Terror atrocities. That Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is terrifically entertaining without sacrificing an inch of its political breadth is something of a miracle. In collaboration with the great director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot Malick’s The New World), Cuaron uses a series of frenzied long takes to create a zippy cousin to Bela Tarr’s forsaken glacial drifts, but it could be said both are charting historical degradation of a sort. In Cuaron's film, a gun-phobic former radical, the droll Clive Owen, escorts the planet's lone fertile human (the race's sterility is never explained, though numerous potential culprits populate the narrative) through a looking glass of squalid immigrant detention and urban warfare in an effort to get her unborn child to The Human Project, a team of scientists hoping to repopulate the dying earth. It’s an art film and an action picture: a nightmarish chase picture set in a barren future of nearly unremitting xenophobia, war, paranoia and fascism. Cuaron should be forgiven an occasionally condescending approach to both race and radicalism and applauded for an attempt at drawing parallels between domestic (immigration law, class conflicts) and foreign policies (the war on terror, preemptive strikes). Aesthetically, Children of Men boasts the greatest, most haunting sci-fi production design and photography since Blade Runner. Despite its prognosticated bleakness, the film is anything but cynical: after a decade of apocalyptic action films in which humanity must survive its own ravages, Cuaron’s vision is the only one that elects to preserve earnestly the hope that not only will human bodies weather future cataclysm, but that a shared sense of Humanity might as well.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #25 - TONY MANERO

25. Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (2008)

I wrote a thorough analysis of the film here, but it bears repeating that Larrain's synthesis of surreal gallows humor, carefully wrought handheld cinematography and an unnerving central performance made it the most harrowing, revelatory film seen on American screens in 2009. The story of a murderous John Travolta impersonator in Pinochet-era Chile, the director's second feature secures his place as one of the decade's most brilliantly perceptive discoveries. Inexcusably absent from most lists of this year's best films, Tony Manero is likely to simmer (or perhaps fester) in the recesses of the arthouse imagination in the years to come, eventually overtaking 2009's relatively pallid contenders for immortality such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up in the Air, Precious and District 9. Larrain is a poet of the shared historical world; by neither pandering to nor betraying his status as an artist, he captures a horrifically familiar hierarchy of art, sexuality and politics while obeying the imperative of his unique sensibilities. Only the great films refuse disloyalty to audiences and themselves equally.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: AN INTRODUCTION

Each year, almost every “Most” or “Best-Of….” round-up begins with a missive in defense of list-making as a critical activity.  Often this precedes a defense of the arrived-at final number of included titles: Is 50 too many? Why not 65 or 33? What’s so ontologically magical about the number 10? For lists concerning decades, what immediately follows is a sheepish acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of decades, centuries, millenia, etc. as useful parameters for discussing the relative merits of artwork, events or persons.  My own belief is that as arbitrary as these numbers may be, we’ve agreed (more or less) that they ought to mean something and they’ve thus come to mean quite a bit.  This is shaky tautology to be sure, but as far as this chronicler is concerned, a decade is a worthwhile chunk of time to look at, largely because we’ve come to believe it so.  If, in the course of life, we think of ourselves as constructing and participating in 10-year increments, then these increments should reflect the value of this intention by virtue of their tendencies and idiosyncrasies.  It’s a suitable, if permeable, temporal boundary that defines our lives and our shared history to a large extent.  Our willful submission makes this possible, and defensiveness on the subject is largely pointless and self-defeating.   

As I haven’t seen a fraction of this year’s important films, I’ll forgo a list of 2009’s best titles.  I am much more familiar with the decade’s key works, and feel justified in posting a list of films made between 2000 and 2009 that might conceivably be considered “the best,” “my favorite,” or, to abandon brevity in favor of description, “the most artistically revelatory and/or profound.” In a word, they are “worthy” films. That is to say they’re worthy of being discussed and remembered as representatives of their time. I stop short of using “significant” as a criterion so that I can indulge the films I love rather than the films I feel I ought to think about or respect or otherwise consider independently from my mind’s pleasure center.  As several critics have claimed, Miami Vice and Avatar heralded separate but equal technical sea changes for Hollywood and are therefore worthy of “best-of” consideration. For me, however, Vice and Avatar are each little more than high-gloss junk and I’d just soon as soon leave them off of a list that feels excruciatingly brief, even at 25 entries.  

The number 25 represents nothing more than a suitably round number for such a list, but one sizable enough to preclude unbearably painful omissions.  Limiting myself to 10 was maddening, resulting in a list far too meager to encapsulate a decade.  Using 100 feels appropriate only when considering a century, the symmetry irresistible.  Even 50 felt excessive or indecisive.  A few critics, especially those publishing on the internet, have, after happily casting off the pretty number mandate, chosen to stop whenever they felt all worthy films had been discussed.  To each his own, but I find the pleasure in these endeavors is the selection and ranking process.  A final tally of 25 ensures both a painful selection process and a spaciousness befitting ten years’ time.