Here are my first 5 movies in the list.
In Michael Haneke’s another stunning work “Amour”, Georges and Anne(Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are an aging couple who have led an affluent and comfortable life for more than 50 years. Both of them are retired piano teachers, and the cozy environment at their home reflects well their cultural sophistication and professional success. When they are having a mundane conversation after attending the concert of Anne’s former pupil, we sense how much they have been close to each other.
On one day, a small but disturbing incident happens, and that is just the beginning of more pains and sufferings. Anne becomes partially paralyzed, and then her condition gets worsened as the time goes by. Georges tries hard as a devoted husband, but he becomes more helpless and desperate about the deterioration of her health condition. They sometimes have good days, but Georges cannot deny that the woman he has deeply loved is being perished right in front of his eyes
The director/writer Michael Haneke firmly focuses on this inevitable sad decline in their daily life as their world is slowly and grimly being closed upon them, and the realistic and intimate details shown on the screen are sometimes quite hurtful to watch. As the emotional anchor of the story, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva give a masterful duo performance; Riva is especially heartbreaking in one scene where Anne keeps saying one word to her husband, and Trintignant responds to her in a touching way which makes this scene devastatingly powerful.
Supported by two graceful twilight performances and handled with top-notch direction, “Amour” penetrates deep into its subject with remarkably brutal honesty and almost painful intimacy as it never withdraws itself from its uncomfortable moments. Uncompromisingly and penetratingly, it ultimately comes to us as one of the most honest and sincere dramas about a human condition at the end of our life. The result is one of the most memorable movie experiences in 2012
Sometimes movies provide the moments I understand well with empathy even though I am completely different from their characters. Among many terrific movies I have seen in this year, Joachim Trier’s “Oslo, August 31st” came particularly close to me; I admired its close and honest observation on one summer day of its troubled hero, and, though I am not a drug/alcohol addict like him, I could instantly recognize the main source of his depression.
The movie is about one depressing summer of day of a young recovering addict named Anders(Anders Danielsen Lie), who is finishing his time at the rehabilitation center outside Oslo. Regrettable and shameful about his wasted years, he wants to make a new start and leave behind his mess due to addiction, but it is not so easy for him to begin a normal life again even though he has been clean for several months.
Still confused and depressed about his current state, Anders goes to Oslo for a job interview, and we see how he spends this day. He visits his old friend. He spends some time with his friend and his friend’s family at the park nearby. He has an interview with the editor of the magazine. He goes to a restaurant for meeting his sister who is supposed to give him a key for entering his family home. He has a rest for a while before he goes to the birthday party held at a flat belonging to one of his friends.
The story is as simple as I described above, but the director Joachim Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt unfolds a rich and engrossing character study from their simple premise, and the movie honestly presents us the anxiety, frustration, and depression addicts struggle with on their tricky road to recovery. In the end, August 31st begins on the horizon and Anders remains as unhappy as before even after few “joyful” moments which may initiate another downward spiral in his scarred and fragile life, but the movie is not entirely devoid of humanism and optimism. Trier and his cinematographer Jakob Ihre look at the story and its hero and his surroundings with a remarkably calm, controlled, but intimate approach, and the movie powerfully touched somewhere deep in my mind.
“A Simple Life” is a moving human film somberly shining with the better sides of our human nature through its universal family drama. Its two main characters are not family in the strict sense, but they have been more or less than family to each other, and their life has been quietly poignant in warmth and intimacy as the inexorable fact of life is approaching to them.
They are Ah Tao(Deannie Yip) and Roger(Andy Lau). When she was very young, Ah Tao was sent from her home in China to a wealthy family in Hong Kong, and she has devoted her entire life to serving this family as a housemaid. Ah Tao has served the four generations of her master family, but most of them have gone or left Hong Kong, and now only family member in the family apartment is Roger, who works as a producer in some film company. Their daily life consists of simple routines; he wakes up, and he eats the breakfast prepared by her, and then he goes out for work. After her work is finished, she waits for him to return like a mother waiting for her son, and their day is over when he returns from his work.
When Ah Tao suddenly gets ill, their life is changed a lot, but the life keeps going on for them, and Ah Tao and Roger become more like a mother and her son rather than an employee and her employee. With the gentle performances by Deannie Yip and Andy Lau, the director Ann Hui slowly pulls us to the story while sensitively capturing the warm and humorous human interactions between her characters within the tranquil rhythm of daily life reminiscent of Yasujirō Ozu’s works, and the movie reminded me that how touching it is to see a human being responding to the kindness from the other as much as he can out of his goodness.
“Argo” is a highly entertaining movie about one improbable real-life CIA operation as unreal as a fake movie they used as a main cover. For one secret operation, the people at CIA and Hollywood carefully prepared the production of a fake film which would never be produced, and everyone in the world really believed their fantastic story – even the authorities and revolutionaries in Iran. While impressed by the script and storyboards handed to them, they do not seem to think about the implausibility of the production at all. Seriously, who the hell wants to make a film in Iran when it is going through a very tumultuous state?
This outrageous operation was conceived for rescuing the people who managed to escape to find a temporary shelter at the start of the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979. While trying to find any possible options for rescuing them, A CIA agent Tony Mendez(Ben Affleck) gets a nice idea from a SF movie his son is watching on TV. He will go to Iran as a movie producer, and he will disguise these six people as the Canadian crew who visit Iran for searching the suitable locations for their fake film. It does not sound very plausible, but there is no better plan(Mendez’s direct boss, played by Bryan Cranston, says to his superior, “This is the best bad idea we have, sir – by far.”), so they go with this seemingly implausible plan.
With the tight screenplay written by Chris Terrio, the director Ben Affleck deftly grabs us with the series of intense moments, and everything culminates into the climactic moment where Mendez and others must hurry to board a plane while trying not to be caught at the airport. The ambience of the era is recreated well through details in the film, and the movie is a compelling experience thanks to its taut and efficient storytelling peppered with the droll humor mainly provided by John Goodman and Alan Arkin as two seasoned Hollywood guys who help Mendez. While watching the movie, I was constantly agitated, and I was also amused by how a movie can affect people even if it is a fake one. These props for that fake movie look as ridiculous as, say, “Flash Gordon”(1980), but their magic does work during an unlikely moment when Iranian revolutionaries are completely persuaded by them. It is not easy to resist an illusion called movie, you know.
5. Beasts of the Southern Wild
How nice it is to encounter a little but special fantasy tale like “Beasts of the Southern Wild”. Like any excellent fantasy tales, this small film is based on the strong sense of reality filled with bountiful details to be appreciated, and it has a good story and a memorable character who carries the story with her feisty spirit. It looked alien to me at times, but I believed in its small fantasy world, and I was enchanted by its distinctive aspects as I admired its exceptional central performance.
Quvenzhané Wallis, who was 7 at the end of the production, plays Hushpuppy, a little girl living with her widower dad(Dwight Henry) in “the Bathtub”, a small fishing community located probably somewhere in the offshore bayou area of Louisiana. Mostly isolated from the world outside, the residents of the Bathtub are accustomed to being self-sufficient in their daily struggle to live, and they have good time together whenever there is a chance for that(“The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world.”).
But the big challenges are coming to the town and Hushpuppy, and she shows us that she is the little force of nature to be reckoned with. With his small budget, the director/co-writer Ben Zeitlin, who adapted Lucy Alibar’s play “Juicy and Delicious” with Alibar, did a terrific job of creating believable alternative reality where some aspects of our reality are meshed well together with magical elements. The result is a vividly shabby and beautiful vision which sometimes evokes that post-apocalyptic beauty glimpsed from the desolate SF movies, and Quvenzhané Wallis gives an unforgettable performance as an innocent, fierce, and, strong-willed little girl who is actually stronger than we initially thought. Maybe the End is eventually coming toward the Bathtub, but we know Hushpuppy will survive and move on no matter what happens. “Once there was a Hushpuppy…. “
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