In honor of everybody's favorite weekly reviewer (who shall remain nameless), I thought we ought to have our own orgy of contrarianism, full of personal attacks and unqualified statements. And who better to kick it off than yours truly?
Barbe bleue and
Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl are BETTER THAN
Inception. Stories within stories have been around as long as there have been stories, but Catherine Breillat and Manoel de Oliveira are modest and playful where Christopher Nolan is portentous and humorless. Breillat and de Oliveira also know things about mise en scène that Nolan never bothered to learn.
Last Train Home is BETTER THAN
I Am Love. When it comes to stories about familial turmoil and globalization, I much prefer Lixin Fan's moving documentary about Chinese migrant laborers to Luca Guadagnino's half-baked Visconti ripoff.
The Misfortunates is BETTER THAN
The American. Felix van Groenineg's raucous loser comedy affirmed American pop culture's ability to bridge cultures, while Anton Corbijn's Euro-trash thriller used anti-Americanism as a political tease. The sheer pleasure that van Groenineg's characters take in Roy Orbison's music is the perfect antidote to Corbijn's joyless
Le Samouraï ripoff, in which the chilly style drains whatever fun there might have been from the ridiculous and predictable story: We're not meant to enjoy the film so much as admire it from a distance for its "perfection."
The Trotsky is BETTER THAN
Shutter Island. Both of these movies are about characters with identity issues, but where Martin Scorsese's ahistorical period neo-noir argues that nothing is real--not even the horror of the concentration camps, which are exploited as a sexy turn on and then forgotten--Jacob Tierny's spirited teen comedy has the audacity to suggest that the life of Leon Trotsky is still relevant to today.
Women Without Men is BETTER THAN
Everyone Else,
The Kids Are All Right,
Please Give, and
Winter's Bone. Shirin Neshat's debut feature--a magic-realist network narrative set against the backdrop of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état--has received far less attention than these other films directed by women, but it has more chutzpah than all of them put together.