Category Archives: Ray Lawrence

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (75-61)

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As I said before, I realised after posting the first installment of this list that I had missed off some films, and decided to pay homage to those movies in the intros. I’m annoyed at not including Christopher McQuarrie’s Way of the Gun as it’s a very impressive directorial debut that vanished after release and is only now starting to attract any attention years later.

Not enough attention, though. If you’ve not seen it and feel like watching a really uncompromising crime thriller that occupies a middle ground between Walter Hill’s  Johnny Handsome and Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, then this is the movie for you. Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe play two scumbag criminals who kidnap a pregnant woman and end up bringing down a world of pain on themselves. It’s a gratifyingly dark movie, one of those movies made with the input of some well trained combat veterans (like Mamet’s Spartan and Michael Mann’s Heat) which is reflected in some tight and well-thought-out setpieces. It also features some superbly choreographed gunfights and one of the best opening scenes of the decade. I like this movie well enough to really regret missing it out, but if I were to include it now I would have to remove another movie from the list and I can’t really do that. If I were doing it over again, Way of the Gun would be definitely be included, and quite high up too.

Okay, remember the rules. Nothing from 2009 because blah blah and yes, some movies are a little lower than you would expect but I only saw them once and don’t feel familiar enough with them to assess them correctly, so I’m going with first impressions. Got that? Good.

75. Red Road

The feature debut of Andrea Arnold is one of the smartest thrillers to come out of Britain in decades. A sly commentary on the UK’s obsession with CCTV as well as being a gripping tale of revenge, the movie comes into its own with a surprising redemptive finale. Kudos also to Kate Dickie, who plays haunted protagonist Jackie with equal parts sensitivity and menace.

74. Speed Racer

Widely loathed by audiences and critics everywhere, the Wachowski’s put their reputations on the line with the boldest cross-format adaptation ever. Making the visual conventions and storytelling shortcuts of anime into vividly coloured flesh, Speed Racer offers the most consistently mindblowing visual assault of recent times, while the enthusiastic cast provide the heart. A pure triumph. Shut it, haters.

73. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

It might be an impossibility to make a starring vehicle for John C. Reilly — complete with songs — that could fail. Certainly this was not a financial success, but in time a cult will gather around Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow’s faux-biopic, and it will get its due for its perfect use of the genre’s conventions against itself. (Check out John Michael Higgins’ expression at 3:02. Genius.)

72. A Scanner Darkly

Perhaps the definitive Philip K. Dick adaptation, perfectly capturing his absurdist prose and paranoid, reality-denying worldview. Richard Linklater found the ideal vehicle for the unworldly rotoscoping animation that Bob Sabiston utilised so brilliantly in the also-impressive Waking Life (another contender for this list). Perfectly cast and beautifully animated, A Scanner Darkly humanises Dick’s abstract musings, something that his other interpreters have struggled with.

71. Spirited Away

Hayao Miyazaki’s hallucinatory childrens’ tale has the nightmarish morality lessons of Disney’s Pinocchio, and the matter-of-fact oddness of Lewis Carroll. By turning the real world upside down and creating a dreamland governed by rules and laws that have only a distorted relation to our own, Miyazaki has created a hazy fable for the ages.

70. The Wrestler

For much of its running time Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Robert D. Siegel’s tight screenplay looks like a standard comeback tale, but by the end we see what it really is: a tragedy about a man whose inability to adapt to the world around him dooms him. The final image is heartbreaking, iconic, and unforgettable. It also features what might be the comeback performance of the decade from a never-better Mickey Rourke.

69. Sideways

Alexander Payne’s delicate tale of friendship took critics by storm but in the most memorable Academy Award snub in recent memory, Paul Giamatti’s performance was not even nominated for an honour. For shame. His depiction of a man attempting to fend off the pain of life through booze and defensive snobbery is heartbreaking, his redemption quiet but moving.

68. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

One of the most underrated SF movies of the decade, Mamoru Oshii’s meditation on transhumanity may have fewer wow moments than his original adaptation of Shirow Masamune’s manga, but it follows the same themes into deeper holes. It’s easy to get happily lost in them.

67. Spider

Funding problems almost shut production down on this adaptation of Patrick McGrath’s novel, but it made it to cinemas, to an indifferent audience. Ralph Fiennes gives the performance of a lifetime in an exaggerated nightmare world of poverty, insanity, murder and grime. Cronenberg’s emotionally claustrophobic vision lingers long after the credits roll.

66. Iron Man

Possibly the most ambitious film project since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Marvel Studios’ attempt to create a complete onscreen universe a la the 616 got off to a terrific start last year. The Incredible Hulk was fun, but Iron Man was a near-total success. Light, exciting, and endlessly entertaining, it also propelled Robert Downey Jr. to the superstardom he has always deserved.

65. The King of Kong

Forget superhero movies. One of the decades greatest showdowns was between gaming enthusiasts Billy Mitchell and Steve Weibe. The roles of hero and villain were delineated so completely that Seth Gordon didn’t even need to meddle with the events through editing. We instantly knew who to root for, and who to hiss. I’d feel sorry for Billy Mitchell after news leaked of booing and hissing during convention screenings, but I don’t think he cares. He’s very successful, after all.

64. Spider-Man 2

Sam Raimi made a great origin film for Spidey, and then built upon that success to deliver a crowd-pleasing action epic, skillfully constructed for maximum emotional impact. For such a hectic film, praise is due to Raimi for making the quiet character revelations as memorable as the incredible setpieces. And when I say incredible setpieces, I’m thinking of the best superhero/supervillain fight yet committed to film:

63. Lantana

Ray Lawrence again, adapting Andrew Bovell’s play about the emotional turmoil affecting a policeman and the people around him. I’m ashamed to admit that my favourite part of this unmissable movie is not the sensitive direction, the thought-provoking screenplay, or the uniformly brilliant performances, but that Anthony LaPaglia’s character is called Leon Zat. What a name.

62. Redbelt

David Mamet’s best work is often about men and their self-aggrandising hostility towards each other. That gruffness is greatly softened here by the casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry, a man whose reflective stillness and sense of honour sets him apart. Mamet expertly tightens the screws on his hero until he explodes with righteous fury in a finale of enormous emotional power.

61. Lost in Translation

After the inevitable backlash against Sofia Coppola’s semi-autobiographical tale of connection in a strange land, it’s easy to forget everything that made it work so well. It occupies a kind of netherworld between comedy and tragedy, reality and movie exaggeration, at once dreamlike and bluntly mundane. And oh my, that glorious soundtrack…

Ah, that worked out a lot better. WordPress worked fine. It was just Microsoft and their insistent Windows updates that nearly ruined it all. More tomorrow…

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (90-76)

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As I said in my previous post, this list has been kinda rushed, due to initial reservations about the project. This has meant that I’ve missed some great movies off, and now that I’m committed to doing the list, these movies have to remain excluded so that I don’t invalidate the previous part of the list. Oh, it’s all so confusing! I shall endeavour to cover those missed movies as I go along.

Actually, my decision to leave off Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s US remake The Ring is because I can never decide which version is my favourite. I go back and forth on this one a lot. Nakata is better at generating an atmosphere of dread, and was the guy who kickstarted the popularity of the J-Horror genre. Nevertheless, Verbinski’s version is stronger than it has any right to be — partially because Naomi Watts is so good in it — and his interpretation of the dreaded video and the effect it has on its victims is more unsettling. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. The first time you see a victim slumped inside a closet, it’ll put the fear of God into you, it’s so horrifying. Unable to decide which version should be included, I chickened out and didn’t put either in. Terrible cowardice, really. Consider both movies “included”, in a sub-category or in some list-tesseract or something.

Anyway, here are the next 15 films in the list. As before, some of these movies are a little low because I’ve only seen them once and never really got to grips with them the way other people have. As my experience of them is limited I cannot figure out if this is because I don’t like them as much as everyone else or my initial opinion was adversely affected by the chatter surrounding them. In time, they may move up or down, but for now, as this is a snapshot of my opinion now, this is where they stay. Again, there are no movies from 2009 on here. I need some distance from them to know if they would qualify. Even the year’s worth of leeway I’ve given myself is not enough. While compiling this list The Dark Knight (my favourite movie of 2009)  has jumped up and down the high end of the list several times. I won’t be able to make a firm decision on that for a while. And so, with those caveats, here are numbers 90-76.

90. Spartan

Before co-creating The Unit with Shawn Ryan, David Mamet made this, a clenched fist pretending to be a movie. Val Kilmer is brutally effective as a man doing a job no one wants him to do, spitting Mamet’s truncated, macho dialogue with withering and riveting intensity. A manly, manly movie.

89. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut

The TV show still cranks out occasional classic episodes (Red Sleigh Down, Cartoon Wars, Imaginationland), but the big screen expansion of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s satirical universe might still be its finest hour. Brilliantly making fun of censors, prudes, and warmongers, it even manages to give us some of the best showtunes of the decade.

88. Curse of the Golden Flower

Critics seemed baffled by the lack of martial arts action in Zhang Yimou’s courtly drama, but who needs it? There’s enough intrigue, betrayal, madness and riotous colour here to fuel a dozen movies. Just for Gong Li’s incredible performance, this movie demands reappraisal, and that’s before we get to the ninja action and Chow Yun-Fat in Furious-Anger-mode.

87. Syriana

It’s a toss-up between this and Traffic for inclusion on this list. Stephen Gaghan’s complex multi-strand exploration of how our demand for oil affects all our lives does have a weak sub-plot featuring Jeffrey Wright, but that’s better than the ill-judged Michael Douglas thread in Soderbergh’s movie. Both are great, but Syriana – with its thrilling final act – just edges it. (Consider Traffic no. 107.)

86. The Matrix Reloaded

The Wachowski Siblings managed to alienate the majority of their fans by attempting to expand the initial Matrix movie beyond its resonant but uncomplicated monomythic plot. Though the franchise ran out of steam in the third installment, for the length of this hallucinogenic movie it still seemed like they were telling the best story ever told. Plus, you know, Morpheus used a katana.

85. Hot Fuzz

Enormously entertaining on first viewing, Edgar Wright’s pitch-perfect homage to hyper-aggressive US cop movies gets better with every rewatch. The effort put into its intricate plotting is a joy to behold, and the casting could not be more impressive. A Who’s Who of British character actors having the time of their lives = film heaven.

84. Jindabyne

Taking the same starting point as one of the threads from Altman’s Short Cuts (Raymond Carver’s short story So Much Water So Close to Home), Ray Lawrence spins a tale of marital discord and touches on themes of racial and gender politics with a deft hand. Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney give two of their most complex performances.

83. Once

The most grounded, unspectacular musical ever made, John Carney’s tale of two musicians making music amid the urban isolation of Dublin won the hearts of audiences across the world. Its ambitions were slight, but Hansard and Irglová’s gorgeous music gave Once an emotional heft that dwarfed almost everything else released that year.

82. The Hunted

Before Bourne, there was this William Friedkin-helmed cat-and-mouse actioner, pared down to the bone in much the same way as Walter Hill’s action classics. Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro are near-silent killing machines destined to fight to the death, with all other considerations ignored. Easily Friedkin’s best film since The Exorcist.

81. The Orphanage

Conjuring the same atmosphere of impending dread as Robert Wise and Jack Clayton did with classic ghost movies The Haunting and The Innocents, Juan Antonio Bayona’s directorial debut managed to provide chilling scares and heartbreaking tragedy in equal measure.

80. The Constant Gardener

On the surface Fernando Meirelles’ environmental thriller was just another tale of corporate intrigue, but Rachel Weisz’s Oscar-winning performance — and Ralph Fiennes’ superb turn as her bereaved husband — turned it into something more interesting and melancholic: a meditation on how love can ruin a life once the object of adoration has gone.

79. [Rec]

Of all the camcorder horror movies of this decade, perhaps the most successful was Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s claustrophobic virus-zombie effort. Though less wide-ranging than Cloverfield, Blair Witch, or the thematically similar 28 Days/Years Later movies, it did one thing better than all of them: it was scary throughout, and utterly terrifying at the end.

78. No Country For Old Men

The Coens hewed so close to their source material that it would have been hard to mess it up, but even so, their direction was exemplary, conjuring up numerous exhausting setpieces and an iconic representation of chaotic evil from Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. It managed something you would think impossible: improving on the work of Cormac McCarthy.

77. There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson deserves plaudits for taking such overwhelming thematic material and boiling it down into a tale of how greed can ruin one man’s soul. What makes Daniel Day Lewis’ work as Daniel Plainview so special is not the pyrotechnics, but the hint that by the end of his life he is so lost that he doesn’t care. It’s as chilling as a horror movie plot.

76. The Darjeeling Limited

A trek across India by three estranged brothers tested the patience of many viewers, either by presenting a view of American obliviousness abroad that lacked necessary satirical pointers, or by relying on too many Andersonian tics. To this viewer, the jokes, the narrative gameplaying, and Robert Yeoman’s gorgeous photography, were enough.

Okay, that was a bit less overwrought. More to come, if WordPress will ever stop crashing. ::grumble grumble::