New World Order
In eager anticipation of the upcoming
Vancouver International Film Festival and the Fall movie season, Teresa and I decided to take a good, hard look at what's right with contemporary world cinema. In other words--right--we made another list. This time around, we put our heads together to come up with our picks for the best filmmakers working today, and below is the resulting, consensus top ten. Of course,
our individual top 25's looked a little different--neither of our top choices (Godard on my list, Lynch on Teresa's) made the other's list and our respective enthusiasm for Spielberg, Kiarostami, and Denis (me) and K. Kurosawa, Tsukamoto, and Kon (her) didn't quite gel either--but we nevertheless stand by the ten brilliant men (Catherine Breillat, incidentally, was the only
auteur that we both voted for that didn't make the master list) that we managed to agree on. At the same time, we're sure that there are plenty of superlative-worthy names with whom we simply aren't sufficiently familiar at present. And, hey, it speaks volumes about the robust health of contemporary film culture that directors as good as (for starters) Jim Jarmusch, Lucretia Martel, the Dardenne brothers, Lars von Trier, Mira Nair, Charles Burnett, and Paul Thomas Anderson somehow failed to crack either of our preliminary shortlists.
10. Michael Mann More than Anderson (P.T. or Wes) or De Palma or even Scorsese, Michael Mann has a preternatural understanding of American pop. On the nocturnal L.A. streets of
Collateral, in the claustrophobic Big Tobacco office spaces of
The Insider, gliding across ocean waves from Miami to Havana in
Miami Vice, the tough, elusive, sometimes radical spirit of American pop is a living, breathing force within Mann’s meticulously crafted aesthetic. When De Niro and Pacino square off near the end of
Heat, Mann clearly gets that it’s not just a couple of aging movie stars playing cops-and-robbers (as it might well have played in inferior directorial hands): it’s nothing less than the culmination of a couple decades’ worth of meaning in American movie culture.[Josh]
09. Paul Verhoeven Like Cronenberg, his most recent film shows maturity by leaps and bounds—hell, miles even.
Black Book was a perfectly pitched WW2 saga to end all WW2 sagas. Suddenly, a sexy Jewish spy girl’s story was the most important thing going on—screw the wider scopes of
Schindler’s List of
The Pianist—and Verhoeven even managed to add blowjobs and pube-dying to the mix, without ever seeming disrespectful. He also literally dumped a barrel of crap on his leading lady, and she still came out as a kick-ass, empowered feminist role model. You can’t do that without being a master. Or, as Sarah Palin might say, a maverick. Hence, his well deserved position on our list. [Teresa]
08. David Cronenberg Now quite far removed from his cruder,
Videodrome and
The Fly (or, God forbid,
Naked Lunch) days, Cronenberg is poised to stand respectably alongside Coppola, De Palma and Friedkin as commercial-friendly older filmmakers that can still pack in enough edge to draw the college crowd. While one of Canada’s few internationally known directors is possibly toning it down as a means of gunning for that ever elusive Academy Award, our man seems to know the difference between selling out and artistic maturation. That’s a rare and valuable commodity that we should hang onto. [Teresa]
07. Tsai Ming-liang Tsai Ming-liang was probably that cool, brilliant dude in art school that the teacher was always praising and you were always cursing under your breath. The man can frame a shot like the greatest of ‘em, and make you believe there’s genuine emotion and conflict in that same frame, alongside the pretty colors and silhouettes. A force to be reckoned with, even his go-to actor is experiencing Mr. Ripley syndrome in the face of his mad skills. So far everything he touches turns to gold (or “sold,” to borrow a clever turn-of-phrase from one of our local realtors), and he can do no wrong. Also, a gay guy not afraid to film hetero porn scenes but still throw in a man dancing in a penis costume a few scenes later? We should all be as ingeniously ballsy. [Teresa]
06. Hou Hsiao-hsien There’s seemingly effortless mastery – and then there’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, who, feature after feature for the past two and a half decades, has forged the most uniformly impressive oeuvre this side of…well, this side of Hou’s hero, Yasujiro Ozu. Like Ozu, Hou’s films are flawless marriages of form with theme and content, as distinct and accomplished in style as they are understated and sublimely naturalistic. Where, say, Wong or Tsai frame their experiments front and center, Hou takes risks that are no less bold yet seamlessly integrates his inventions into the fabric of his intimate narratives. Had Ozu been alive to view
Café Lumiere (or, for that matter,
Three Times,
Flowers of Shanghai,
The Puppetmaster, or any other Hou masterpiece), he’d no doubt be proud and impressed. [Josh]
05. Jia Zhang-ke Jia Zhang-ke isn’t just the filmmaking world’s greatest talent under 40 (a distinction he holds by a fairly massive margin); he might just be the finest cine-artist Mainland China has ever produced. He can do epic historical pageant (
Platform). He can do coming-of-age drama (
Unknown Pleasures). He can do wistful romantic longing, meditative sociopolitical snapshot, and subtle surrealism
all in the same movie (
Still Life). He can offer up a compelling, multi-faceted portrait of the most complicated mega-country on the planet by shooting a documentary on clothing (
Useless). It’s high time we recognize that Jia can do absolutely anything (and almost everything better than most of his contemporaries). [Josh]
04. Bela Tarr Bela Tarr makes long, glacially paced, relatively plotless films that exemplify the phrase “not for all tastes.” There, we said it—now, how about we focus instead on Tarr’s ferocious, pitch-black sense of humor? Or his uncommonly firm grasp of history, politics, religion, and their constant, embedded presence in our day-to-day lives? Or, if we must focus on butt-numbing runtimes and eternal static shots, let’s consider Tarr’s unique knack for exploiting the slow-build’s dramatic potential. Think, for a moment, of
Werckmeister Harmonies’ stunning conclusion -- and then take a rather longer moment to appreciate how every frame that preceded it led us there and contributed to its indelible effect. [Josh]
03. Olivier Assayas Ambition went a long way for me when selecting my 25 directors—and thus Assayas ended up much higher than I would have expected. With sleek, unplaceable, international aesthetics—often centering around sex, drugs, and double (sometimes triple) crossing femme fatales—permeating the bulk of his work, Assayas has won me over on sheer escapist enjoyment. I
enjoy spending two hours in his seedy underbellies every chance I get. While his cinematographer(s) should be praised to high heaven, the acting and clunkily philosophical dialogue also comes together magically each time out. As Tyra once well-meaningly told a model on her mammothly successful reality show: “your awkwardness works for you.” As you can guess, the same can and should be said of Assayas and his films. The trailers for his latest,
Summer Hours, seem altogether dissimilar; airy and not at all menacing. We’ll see if this works for him, as well. I’m not too worried. [Teresa]
02. Wong Kar Wai Wong’s position on our list is a touch surprising given we both whole-heartedly found
My Blueberry Nights an irredeemable waste of both talent and time. The trend of wondering about the merit of his past (master)pieces because of it, though, is unfair at best. Just because Norah and Jude stunk up the screen mightily, doesn’t mean Maggie and Tony were flukes or Christopher Doyle’s uncanny eye for swooning beauty was the real reason we fawned over the likes of
In the Mood for Love or
Fallen Angels. I suspect Wong was fascinated by America, and probably should have actually spent some time there before lensing a down-home road trip tale set in the heart of it. We all make mistakes. It don’t mean he can’t poignantly pull at your heartstrings while feeding your sophisticated cinema quota like no one else. Here’s to hoping he returns to Hong Kong with lessons learned. [Teresa]
01. Terrence Malick On the one hand, Terrence Malick has only directed four features between 1973 and the present. On the other hand, all four -- from 1973’s
Badlands to 2005’s
The New World, with 1978’s
Days of Heaven (my personal favorite and one of my three or four favorite movies ever) and 1998’s
The Thin Red Line sandwiched very comfortably in between – are legitimate masterworks. Name another living filmmaker (or, for that matter, one deceased) with a perfect career batting average, and we’ll reconsider our consensus number one. Adjectives like “lyrical,” “gorgeous,” and “mysterious” are tossed around pretty liberally by rapt cinephiles, including yours truly; Malick remains the genuine article, a singular filmic poet who has quietly revolutionized a medium typically titled more toward prose yet capable of true transcendence. He’s the Walt Whitman of American cinema, or perhaps the T.S. Eliot. Either way, let’s cross our fingers that he delivers that fifth film sooner rather than later. [Josh]
