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#22 3-Iron

Just for the thrill


3-Iron is Kim Ki-duk's take on the bergening genre Wong Kar Wai sent into popular cinema with Chungking Express- stories of lonely, new adults who find their place in the world through the secretive tampering of other people's possesions.  While Kar Wai's contributions to this cannon are both the most realized, Kim Ki-duk's 2004 picture is more useful than 2001's Amelie.
Fantasy film's prior to the 1990's consistantly make the characters of the film retreat, or fall into the film's fantasy trope (Wizard of Oz, Celine and Julie Go Boating).  Now characters from these fantasy films come to live in the real-life.  Or rather characters who have seen too many fanstasy pictures are forced to live on their own. Therefore, they act as if they themselves are being filmed- which they are.  The director's camera acts like the camera the characters imagine there themselves- the camera of their fantasies. They act as if they know the excitement of the film is about to begin, and respond to it, not in a manner to benefit themselves but rahter to further the film.  These characters sneak into other people's homes, the fear of being caught is half put-on, becaus they know the act of being exposed is the next step in furthering their story. 
Kim Ki-duk is able to manage this with minimal cuteness.  Amelie is cute with no romance, but 3-Iron is a romance able to sacrifice its adorablitly for the luster of the relationship.  Instead of nymphially, stalking prospective lovers and then playing with their belongings, Ki-duk's character seeks out belongings for the traces of humans.  When his nightly excursions find him witness to a man beating his wife, he steals the girl and continues to play the games he played before finding a love.  This is the true sadness of all of these films.  Not that the characters are alone and unwilling to interact with the object of their desire, but because the characters believe themselves to be so charming that their desired one would enjoy their scheming.  They are movies about people who are oblivious to what makes them worth spending time with. 

22. 3 - Iron (2004)

Ki-Duk KIM


“We are away on a three-day vacation.”

3 - Iron opens with a shot of a Grecian marble visible through a mesh net. As the scene fades in, from off screen come golf balls, striking the net directly in front of the female statue. As the netting ripples with each ricocheting blow, one is reminded of movie theaters in which the curtains open only after the previews have begun to be projected. The initial images sway and distort until at last the screen itself is revealed. Kim has established a marvelous cinematic metaphor for the screen onto which the movies he so clearly loves are projected. Of course the beautiful, sacred object would be behind the film—great directors since the inception of the cinema have been great because of their ability to keep the holy object just off screen, just beyond the action the audience so astutely follows. Contemporary visual art can be said to be obsessed with deconstructing the pedestal—the very function that elevates art to its untouchable status. What better way for contemporary directors to address film than by assailing the screen with golf balls?

This is essentially what Kim’s 3 - Iron does, attacking the fundamental principles that make film work. One of the most purely cinematic films to be released this decade, it forces the audience to appreciate the degree to which perception and observation are central to the function of film at large: In the first seven and a half minutes there isn’t a single character who speaks on screen. Rather, the place of dialogue is taken by endless cycles of voyeurism that provide the movie’s focus. Not only does the audience get access to the hidden details of a suburban family’s home, they are also privilege to the private routine of the man who infiltrates that home. Only, the cycle isn’t complete yet, as a battered woman (Sun-hwa) will manage to secretly observe the break-in artist (Tae-suk) as he makes his way through her private belongings. The apex of this dizzying exchange of voyeurism occurs when Sun-hwa observes Tae-suk, naked, masturbating in her bathtub to a collection of nude photos of her. As a pair of voyeurs/paranoids, they maintain a relationship through the exchange of attempts at privacy and revealed secrets. Vacillating between symbolic director and audience, they mirror each other in their (in)ability to keep things from view. The tell-tale signs of her domestic abuse fade away just in time for him to receive identical bruises and cuts from the fists of a boxer who catches them in his home.

This cinematic exchange of view and object is what is at stake, even when murder and adultery are substituted as stand-ins within the film’s narrative structure. Like Chaplin and Keaton before them, the characters refuse to speak, and once placed under the strictest confinements of legal observation, Tae-suk perfects the art of not being seen—that is, essentially, to be wherever the audience is not looking. In so doing, he has performed the final and most impossible act: wandering behind the screen and into the realm of the fantasmatic object that awaits him there. A place where golf balls do not spin impotently around trees, fall gracelessly from their impact with the screen, or substitute for bullets in a movie where guns are mere child’s toys. What exists in the beyond of 3 - Iron is the sexual relation where the obstacle is never absent—the film that does not end.

#23 Let the Right One In (2008) Tomas Alfredson

Small Kiss

Let the Right One In, more than This is England or Rodger Dodger (two films I like a lot), is able to express school-yard angst and growing pains at a heightened level because it does not commit to a realm of ultra-real or believability.

Thanks to its vampire trope, Let the Right One In, grants itself the wiggle room it takes to make a great picture. Through its broadness of scope, this film, unlike most all coming of age films, presents itself with pride and confidence, whereas, typically, this genre suffers the same wilty-ness and apprehension of their center characters.

Let the Right One In doesn't bother lying to its audience, it doesn't attempt to convince anyone that the characters you like and watch the most are any more decent than the characters who live in the fringes of the film. The bullies we see at the start of the film, the villains, are only people who are gifted or beautiful or themselves bullied enough to enact violence on others. And when our hero befriends a vampire who is multitudes more dangerous than the bullies, she pays them back with a massacre.

Let the Right One In understands the cycle of victimhood and knows that a picked-on adolescent doesn't just want the bullies to stop hassling him/her, he/she really want them all to pay with their lives. Violence begets more violence. The entire vampire genre is built on this platform, but by in large it is taken for granted. Vampire films focuss on whether or not the vampire should sire her love into immortality, Let the Right One In explores the sadness of this never being an option.

23. Inland Empire (2006)

David LYNCH


"She has torn a hole into her intestine from her vagina."

When David Lynch describes where the inspiration for the Polish portion of Inland Empire came from, he tells the story of “five or six” Polish men getting out of a car in front of his property. He goes on: “They invited me over there and I asked them …, because I heard there were factories, … if they could get me into factories so that I could photograph, and if they could get me nude women at night to photograph.”

The infuriating aspect of most David Lynch interviews is the amount of subterfuge that goes into his answer to the simplest questions. Whether or not you believe in transcendental meditation is secondary to the fact that David Lynch sells his life as if it were actually a David Lynch film and vice versa. Why are there suddenly five or six Polish men piling out of a car in front of Laura Dern’s house? David Lynch wants you to believe it’s because shit like this happens all the time.

And, in a certain light, I see what he means. Sure, a living room full of Russian whores doing the locomotion is probably a foreign experience to most of us—but once you’ve experienced the scene (or a similar one in Blue Velvet where a buxom lady go-go dances on top of a car while Dennis Hopper beats the shit out of Kyle McLoughlin) you can’t deny the ubiquitous undercurrent of aggression that resonates in the seemingly harmless pop music: Phil Spector killed his wife, Joe Jackson beat his kids, Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, etc., etc.

Perhaps the movie is disjointed. Perhaps it is a collection of scenes that themselves bear almost no narrative consistency. The systematic element of the film, then, is on the level of the imaginary—where a kid logic of sex, violence, and sexual violence bends and distorts the desire that pushes the characters through multiple plots of deceit, adultery, and (of course) “brutal fucking murder.” The rabbits may never betray what the truth behind their repeated statement “I have a secret” is, but we can all probably hazard a guess.

#24 A Serious Man (2009) The Coen Brothers

Where the stress falls

At the decade's start, never would I have predicted the Coen brothers' great second act of their career. The duo were previously suckers for the easy joke- the broad humor, but they're now passing on the gags of their youth and tempering their films. None of the characters in Serious Man are caricatures, they, instead, are all believably frustrating which makes the torment of Larry Gopnik all the more heart-wrenchingly normal, and deadened and, therefore, authentic.
Even the one emotional breakthrough in the film, between Larry and his brother, is stuck somewhere between dream-state and real-life. Larry’s experience starts in the real but moves into a terrible nightmare, calling into question the validity of the sincere uproar and reflection, as his subconscious shields the event with a twist of its own. Every other instance in which Larry is able to break out of the tempered drollery of his stifling defeat is done in fantasy- the lash out at Sy Lieberman, the sex scene with his neighbor- are all fictions of Larry’s slumber in order to create a guilt that makes his life livable.

24. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Paul Thomas ANDERSON

"I'm sorry I forgot to shave."

Two American directors were being talked about at the beginning of the decade as saviors of American cinema. Both were initially lauded for tense psycho-dramas. Both received significant backlash for popular, supposedly experimental films. One successfully sold us John C. Reilly. One unsuccessfully sold us Jared Leto. They ended the decade by directing There Will be Blood and The Wrestler, two films that just missed Best Picture Oscars, and (SPOILER ALERT!) two films that do not appear on my list.

If I had to narrow my criticism of Darren Aronofsky down to one sentence (and that sentence could not contain the words Fountain or Robocop), it might be: “he’s never made a film like Punch Drunk Love.” Even though the film had a 25 million dollar budget, it still strikes me—in the context of Anderson’s work—as similar to accidental films such as Chungking Express and The Conversation; movies made in the middle of epic works by Kar Wai and Coppola, respectively. Even before Barry falls afoul of the phone-sex scandal around which the majority of the plot operates, he races back and forth through his warehouse office with sincere conviction—as if to convince a skeptical audience that in spite of appearances the movie is going somewhere.

Yet the film is not about going anywhere, not even to Hawaii with frequent flier miles collected from pudding lids (“you can go places with pudding,” Barry quips at one point). The film is about preparing to be seen in a universe where you are always already seen. When Barry nervously feels out a conversation with Lena in a diner, trying to determine whether or not to tell her about his brobdignagian pudding-based consumer strategy, the tension is not in how she will take this potentially crazy news. We’ve already watched her follow Barry around the supermarket, pricing various products—we know that she knows. Rather, the tension is the dramatic irony of Barry having not yet realized he is already seen, has already been spotted.

When our protagonist finally finds his way to the Mattress King, a surprisingly charismatic dirtball played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the sex line huckster is sitting in a dressing room getting a haircut. No one in this film is ready for the scene they have been asked to star in. The audience awaits, impervious, almost immune today to the sensation of having seen something they were never intended to.