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December 30, 2008

Ones To Remember

I began a piece some time ago called 'I Am So Proud Of You (with a detour through Synecdoche),' in which I planned to detail the ways in which Don Hertzfedlt has, with the second installment of the trilogy he began with Everything Will Be OK, achieved exactly what Caden Cotard spends his life pursuing in Charlie Kaufman's own desperately compounded fable. But, just a few paragraphs in, I put the ideas on the back burner and left the country, and traveling was followed by a great amount of busy work, and so it is that this would-be-essay languished on the vine. All that remains is this: I Am So Proud Of You is, I think, as good a pick as any for film of the year. Certainly as good as Synecdoche, NY, and just as full of grand and complex thoughts about life and death and bodily fluids and years rapidly advancing, coming to ends and beginnings, back and forth, over and over, until one slips indistinguishably into the next.

Shining like pinpoints in my own elapsed miasma is that holy triumvirate that held my sense of cinematic inspiration above the water: those would be Mr. Lonely, Silent Light and Flight Of The Red Balloon, all of which I wrote about here, here, and here, and all of which are about as good as great gets. And Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, which I exclude from that grouping simply because it doesn't look like it fits in the same sentence. If any one of those had been the only film I saw this year, I couldn't complain.

But since that wasn't the case, I can say that I also loved letting myself go to various degrees in The Fall, The Strangers, The Dark Knight, Iron Man. And then there was a whole raft of amazing little movies that not enough people saw and which, more and more frequently, are being made by filmmakers who I count as good friends. Yeast, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, Present Company, Goliath, Nights And Weekends, The Adventure. I don't feel entirely comfortable qualifying them, and I imagine the lines there are just going to keep blurring.

But casting all these aside for a moment, as I might as well do because the ones worth keeping will find their own way back, the very best movie I saw this year was Two Lane Blacktop. When i saw it on the big screen earlier this year, I wrote: "I mean, shoot, I know there are better movies out there but I'll be darned if I can think of any of them right now, so maybe there actually aren't."

Six months later and I still can't think of any.

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Stay tuned...I've got one more thing to put here before this year is out.

Posted by David Lowery at December 30, 2008 9:36 PM