A Visual Guide to the Credit Sequence of Robert Altman's The Player

Like Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, a film self-consciously referenced a number of times throughout, Robert Altman's The Player lays all of its thematic preoccupations and metafictional wizardy bare in its opening credit sequence, a several-minute long, expertly choreographed tracking shot around a fictional Hollywood studio lot. Just as he's acknowledging the classical, novel tendency for a film to boast one spectacular, technically overwhelming shot amidst an otherwise traditional mise-en-scene, Altman's also proving to offer his film's most vital gifts there, shoving the keys to understanding the picture down the audience's collective throat before it has even formally started. This is not to say that the film proper is without its substance, but only that its substance is a mere expansion of what is telegraphed in this marvelous credit sequence. Altman does not load his Hollywood satire with any new inquiries once its thriller plot has begun, but rather elucidates and makes palatable the concerns he has already addressed so succinctly. In a word, the credit sequence of The Player is the very core of the film, a triumphant, self-contained short film in its own right that says about as much as needs to be said from a cynic's standpoint about the current money-hungry state of the Hollywood movie business.




The first thing we see is a uniquely implicit clue towards the film's metafictional nature, its self-reflexive commentary on movies and the movie business. First revealing what is presumably the background of a movie set with a clapper detailing the production specs of The Player itself held up in front of it, the camera then pulls back to place this image inside the frame of an office door within which everyday business dealings are occurring. This is when we see the standard, expected text overlay "A Robert Altman Film", even when we've already seen Altman's name sketched on the clapper. This duplication of stimuli suggests that both the film proper and the film(s) within a film (or rather, the deeply self-conscious thriller plot) are overseen by Altman, that there is nothing that gets by the director, the ultimate designer.



After the camera completes its graceful exit from the office entrance, it swoops into the air to reveal the entire studio parking lot. A sound-stage in the background relays the studio's cheeky, vague motto ("MOVIES: Now more than ever!"), which forever looms over the industry professionals like the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. It's a perplexing credo given the fact that the majority opinion among the staff seems to be that the Golden Age was ultimately the era of creative prosperity (so why are more necessary?), and also because if movies are needed in the present more than ever, this implies that the quantity of movies must skyrocket, in turn suggesting that the quality of movies must plummet.



Altman is quick to introduce his classicist figure, a well-dressed man so enamored with the magic of Hitchcock and Welles and so disenchanted by the pitfalls of modern filmmaking practices that he becomes a caricature of regressive thinkers and a foil to the characters at the opposite end of the spectrum, the ignorant, productive studio execs who will do anything to make a quick buck from more and more product regardless of its artistic merit. These types of individuals, Altman suggests, are as much a part of the spiritual vacuum of Hollywood as the dumbfounded forward-thinkers, both stubborn in their refusal to gather a comprehensive understanding of film culture. Furthermore, the man's entire dialogue cleverly comments on Altman's own method; the anger towards MTV-style hyperactivity and the celebration of the virtuosic tendencies of Touch of Evil both mirror Altman's extended take.



The shot alternates between frenetic movement outdoors to static peeks inside, capturing the hullabaloo of anticipation and activity surrounding the offices and the relative repose of the script pitches, where eager screenwriters spit out summaries of their spec screenplays to generally disinterested execs. A recurring tendency among the wannabes is to claim sweeping parallels with older successes, as if to imply that their ideas will offer as much commercial dependability. Funnily enough, the producers regularly seem to buy into it, failing, at least publicly, to acknowledge the vapidity of their claims. In a telling touch, Altman places classic film posters in the backgrounds of these shots as a reminder of the treasures of the past, seemingly ignored when juxtaposed against the mindless commercialization of the present (as portrayed in this film).




Altman zeroes in on a postcard dropped by the mailboy in a minor accident: "Your Hollywood is dead," it reads. Though these recurring cards prove to spring from a tangible source within the actual narrative, it's tempting to call them transmissions from outside of the film, that is to say, from Altman.



More evidence of the hapless linkage to previously profitable efforts - the perpetual recyclability of Hollywood.



The suave classical Hollywood figure returns, but this time Altman's using his dialogue as a vehicle for his own veiled, wink-wink self-critique, as if he's acknowledging that up until this point The Player's "story [is]n't any good", like Hitchcock's Rope, but that it sure can offer technical spectacle. So while Altman is railing against the industry he must submit to, he's also turning the camera inward, suggesting that rather than being consumed by his own perceived genius, he's genuinely self-effacing. The film is just that throughout, a carefully modulated balance between a rigorous metafictional satire and the self-conscious realization of a thoughtful director stepping violently on his own turf.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) A Film by Stephen Spielberg

(This is a belated contribution to the Spielberg Blogathon hosted by Ryan Kelly of Medfly Quarantine and Adam Zanzie of Icebox Movies. I tend to always fall behind on these things, but, hey, I've been away for a week and a half.)

During the pivotal “Flesh Fair” sequence of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. a human makes a remark about the film’s central character, the robot boy David (Haley Joel Osment): “they say originality without purpose is a white elephant.” Well-read cinephiles will recognize this as a paraphrase of the words of seminal American critic Manny Farber, who discussed the superiority of "termite art" (economical, raw, B-grade work) to "white elephant art" (overwrought, condescending, slick studio product masquerading as original work with grand statements). Because the line arrives in a scene that is likely the closest the director ever came to provocative self-referentiality (artificiality is destroyed willy-nilly, analogous to Spielberg's perceived destruction of his own commercialized artifice), and because David "survives" beyond the initial threats of extermination, it can be inferred that Spielberg is consciously attempting to position A.I. in opposition to the so-called "white elephant art", to make a case for his film as something greater than sheer invention and spectacle. It's a rather interesting bit of self-assurance for a film that constantly seems to be at odds with itself, committing equally to both sappy Hollywood sentimentality and penetrating inquiries into the nature and future of the human race, commercialism, and the all-consuming desire for love.

Frankly, A.I. possesses qualities of the termite and the elephant: on the one hand, there is the haphazard, messy presentation in service of a scatterbrained script that bursts with potentially intriguing ideas, and on the other, there is the superficial slickness, the empty-headed spectacle, and the ultimately watered-down substance. The tension makes for an experience that is profoundly aggravating during the fact and somewhat of a growing curiosity after. The aggravation met its pinnacle for me in the much-discussed "double ending" of the film, in which Spielberg almost concludes with a succinct and affecting summation of the film's thematic preoccupations only to burst into an outrageously didactic and less satisfying coda. One of the most revelatory images in all of Spielberg's career is that of David in his sunken futuristic cargo staring straight ahead at a glowing blue fairy while trapped inside a Coney Island Ferris wheel. Not only is it visually thrilling but it also presents a rather penetrating and accurate insight into the state of the human race: we are constantly looking ahead to our goals, believing in the unreachable, and even if we are trapped in a fundamental way, unable to fully enlighten ourselves, it doesn't make the experience of searching any less fulfilling. Never mind Spielberg's irksome tendency to dilute the simple power of his images in this scene (David's stuffed bear sidekick's reiteration of "we're trapped") and in the scene directly prior (William Hurt's spelling out of this very philosophy) - this is thoughtful filmmaking at a blockbuster level.

But, just as Spielberg's omniscient camera is performing a grandiose movement away from the spectacle, gradually dwarfing the protagonist as his themes suggest, a cloying narration intrudes, immediately suffocating what was otherwise a pretty magical moment. The voice presenting the information is of the most sappy and sentimental variety, and although one could argue this as an extension and reflection of David's fascination with a childhood narrative (his search for his mother is structured around Pinocchio's quest to be a real boy), it's nonetheless an incoherent and tonally disjunctive element, coming across as gently destructive to the mood instead of thematically satisfying. What follows is even more problematic: an extensive wish fulfillment sequence that is - with its soft lighting and decidedly artificial sets - stylized less like the dreamy reintegration of motherly love it is clearly intended to be and more like a creepy, phony commercial overemphasizing the Oedipal complex. It's a deeply bizarre denouement (complete with voyeuristic Mecha robots) whose last narrated line - "and for the first time in his life, he went to that place where dreams are born" - is among the vaguest, most superficial and faux-philosophical pieces of bullshit I've ever heard.



These are the kinds of ping pong matches the film endures between its great and abysmal moments throughout, a never-ending sense of contradiction that tears at the heart of the material even as it enriches it in rare instances. The film's in great need of an emotional shift after its drawn-out first act in which David gets acquainted with and is ultimately abandoned by his first "family", a married couple grieving about the cryogenic freezing of their seemingly incurable son (Jake Thomas), yet it still manages to feel jolting when the tragic, harrowing, and, quite frankly, overacted separation of David and his "mother" Monica (Frances O'Connor) suddenly transitions into the hysterical introductory sequences of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a charismatic and thoroughly sentient Mecha working with more sexualized mojo than anyone in his over-saturated field. A.I.'s jarring shifts in style and tone contribute to the overall episodic quality of the film, and more often than not feel slapdash rather than fluid and assured, attributable to the kind of false "renewal" of viewer interest Spielberg seems to think he has to indulge in to maintain a wide audience.

Perhaps this is all inevitable given the dual authorial nature of the project. Half the time one senses Spielberg dutifully paying homage to Stanley Kubrick - who conceived the initial story idea before his death - with some of the darkest and most cerebral scenes he's ever shot (the scene that strands David at the bottom of the pool while a group of people try to resuscitate a human, or the moment when David realizes in his creator's office that he's just one in a mass of commercially duplicated figurines) and the other half of the time Spielberg spends watering down his chilly implications with cutesy subplots and juvenile spectacle (the cartoon Robin Williams thing is the most gratuitous standout). To lazily proclaim that A.I. makes a daring statement about what it means to be human is disingenuous, because it doesn't fully engage with its own philosophical insights, doesn't naturally gyrate between darkness and optimism. It almost has a lot to say, but because Spielberg doesn't seem fully convinced, it has a tendency to fall back into phoniness. Yet at the same time, a sloppy, ambitious, half-realized A.I. is more intriguing than the standard Hollywood fare, and in its own way occupies an uncharted middle ground between the termite and the elephant.

The New World (2004) A Film by Terrence Malick

That a philosopher could come to cinema and make films that not only revel in the dexterity of their ideas but also swoon in a symphony of earthbound emotion is a fascinating thing, and this dynamic between sensations and concepts seems to owe a great deal to the magic of Terrence Malick’s work. Rarely does a massive production extract its backbone not from storytelling and literature but from pure visual art like The New World does. If Malick’s early films supplemented their iconically simple stories with digressive poeticism, The New World is the first film built almost solely around the director’s trademark sensuality, his penchant for creating visual abstractions within an onslaught of gorgeous imagery. At its most avant-garde, it's a work created virtually without scenes, a prolonged montage analogous to the function of poetry, where impressions are generated in a fleeting manner and ultimately add up to something larger than the sum of the parts. Working in this manner allows Malick to whip up unlikely juxtapositions of images that wouldn’t fit into a traditional dramatic structure, the kind of formula Malick could easily embrace with his material but which he decidedly avoids.

Detractors of Malick's increasing disillusionment with traditional narrative tactics have found his work to be nothing more than a succession of lovely pictures strewn together, arguing that such willy-nilly aesthetic masturbation is disrespectful to the time-worn tales of the British takeover of America and the love story of Pocahontas and John Smith. But what Malick's really doing here, even further than his creation of a deceptively slapdash but essentially brilliant rhythmic construction, is breathe cosmic life into a story that has, historically, always been treated as anything but cosmic, only temporally and culturally specific. Malick's tilting the turbulent saga, viewing it from a universal angle that does not judge, philander, or editorialize. In a word, he's trying to make this story about everything. The film compellingly covers a variety of sociological issues from colonialism to assimilation to tribal faithfulness to the violent clash of civilizations only to consistently pull back and remind us that it's all negligible, that we're all humans, that we'll all eventually die, and that ultimately it is the Earth - the planet that fossilizes our experiences - that survives.

If this sounds like a rather bleak and unfair philosophy of life to cobble a film around, it's actually deeply romantic and generous in Malick's hands (not to mention that if you can't get by this inevitable realization and accept Malick's airy understanding of it, then everything's going to be pretty bleak and unfair anyway). The New World privileges nothing over anything else, treating the whole assembly of elements to the same loving, attentive eye, a notion manifested in the tremendous democracy that has been plastered into the film's construction. In the inaugural meeting of the Native Americans and the British (who approach American land in a glorious opening sequence that alternates between the guileless point of view of the tribesmen and the impetuous approach of British ships), Malick shows their hesitant physical contact in a prolonged moment of documentary-like immediacy. Abruptly after, the voice of John Smith (Colin Farrell) is heard on the soundtrack, reiterating the mysterious awe of these first exotic encounters, which is followed by non-narrative images of the water surrounding the land, trees, birds, and flowing grass. This introduces a universal balancing act Malick is working hard to sustain throughout the film: the separate planes of physical experience, individuality and subjectivity, and nature that run on different tracks throughout the timeline of life. Equal emphasis is given to each, no matter how much these forces are allowed the freedom to inexorably compete with and even contradict each other.



What this sequence also underlines is Malick's commentary on the reductiveness of words in dealing with the intangible mystery of actual experience. Throughout the film, various characters - Smith, Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), and Pocahontas' late English husband John Rolfe (Christian Bale) - contribute reflective voice-overs to Malick's ever-expanding gallery of subjective consciousnesses, ruminating on the state of their romantic, political, and philosophical affairs, but they're continuously trumped by the physical world itself, the complexity and nuance of human expression that cannot be done justice to by words. When Farrell puckers his cheekbone during a hug with Pocahontas, or when Kilcher slowly raises her head up to her husband after informing him that she must return to her other "husband" just before Malick's strategic cut to black, the wealth of unspoken emotions are too complicated to parse out. Malick understands this, but simultaneously he's not including the various subjective voices just to prove them fundamentally "wrong". They're all parts of a larger cosmic whole, and his films necessitate this collision between individual forces and the more monolithic forces of civilizations and nature in order to substantiate their thematic goals. There are even rare and special moments - as when Pocahontas' voice-over mysteriously merges with her diegetic accompaniment - when subjectivity and experience are harmoniously interlocked, suggesting that something intangible can, if only temporarily, make these tracks run parallel.

Malick's incorporating visual codes throughout to further emphasize this democracy of existence. Repeated images abound: majestic tracking shots across the water, the land silhouetted against a pastel sky seemingly at magic hour; hands in various poses and with varying degrees of symbolic import (Malick likes hands as much as Bresson); figures standing within a darkened interior observing the bright outdoors; multiple iterations of water flowing both naturally and in service of rituals; birds darting across the sky in a solitary swoop or in packs, eloquently serving as metaphors for the flight of the individual away from the collective. All of it serves to indicate how objects and settings both change and don't change across time, how they may take on slight external fluctuations but remain spiritually the same. It's also as if there's a codependency of behavior that goes unacknowledged, a fundamental reliance on, say, the raising of one's hands to the sky (which Pocahontas does in ecstatic harmony with nature and John Smith does to reach for the light as a prisoner) or the soaking of one's face in water that transcends cultural associations.

In its soundtrack, The New World also teems with life, refusing to play up one aspect over another and collecting the sonic world in its entirety. Casual viewers often observe how the voices in Malick's films - and this is something he shares with Mann and Kar-Wai - are abnormally "quiet" by the standard of conventional sound editing. Furthermore, words variably come across as garbled or incomplete, comparable to how sentences have a tendency to be mumbled in real life. There seems to be little attempt to polish the edges of the dialogue, and contributing to the near imperceptibility is Malick's heightening of the aural ambience of the space (nature sounds, birdsong) as well as the extra-diegetic components of the soundtrack (music, voice-over). With all these elements playing in tandem, it exudes the sense of multiple consciousnesses (human and otherwise) competing for consideration, a notion that is in sync with the film's themes of geographic and cultural ownership as well as the general turbulence of the plot's progression.



Of course, these are all conscious aesthetic choices by Malick that dictate the distinctive tone of the film; it is not representative of an amateurish inability to decide what to prioritize. And there are indeed ample instances within the film when Malick eases off the panoptic mise-en-scene, treating the audience to rapturous streams of imagery that alleviate the need to be an active viewer and approach a more meditative, observational plane. Consider, for instance, the three occurrences of Wagner's Das Rheingold, “Thus, We Begin in the Greenish Twilight of the Rhine," a triumphant brass and strings piece that is constantly sustaining a level of escalating anticipation, with the violins dipping and rising and never quite reaching the expected catharsis. Each time it plays on the soundtrack it registers a pivotal moment in the story - the arrival of the settlers, the simultaneously growing and rupturing relationship of John Smith and Pocahontas, the new life of an assimilated Pocahontas - and is accompanied by a montage of ecstatic imagery. It suggests a perpetuity of life, which is supported by Malick's womb-like water imagery in the opening shots of the film and his downplaying of events (Pocahontas' death) that would likely be made tragic in another film. After Pocahontas dies, shots of her joyous gallivanting in her royal garden are coupled with images of outstretched trees and flowing streams - the boundless continuation of nature. It's one of the most uplifting endings to a film I've ever seen.

As suggested by the enigmatic appearance of a warrior in tribal paint beside Pocahontas' deathbed in England, no cultural upheaval can remove the permanent impact of one's ancestry. And this is what Malick is getting at, expressively and passionately, with The New World, that there are large, mythic forces that shape the individual and survive beyond their life. It's a transcendent view of the order of the universe, one that does not mock or belittle individual lives but properly places them in their respective contexts. Malick has found a fittingly sublime cinematic expression of this theme. I realize I've done very little plot synopsizing here, if any, but it's only because the film's rewards are decidedly elsewhere, wound up in the magical flow of non-narrative imagery. The New World's one of the most underrated works of popular art from the past decade, and it's packed with invention. There's a great chance this is the only the first in a series of posts about it that will gradually try to unveil its complex, unexpected mystery.

My Favorite Films of 2010

(Disclaimer: See below for revised list.)


Here's my very personal list of my favorite films of the year, limited as it is to what I could practically get access to. Unfortunately, I don't live near any major festivals, so I miss out on a great deal of smaller foreign films that struggle for distribution. But I've kept up my reading this year, and I stay pretty up-to-date, so I know exactly what I'm interested in seeing. Furthermore, I just plain missed some of the bigger theatrical releases, which is pretty upsetting (especially considering how I probably won't ever have a chance to see Unstoppable on a big screen again unless the growing legion of young Tony Scott scholars band together enough to support some future theatrical retrospective of his work). At the bottom of the list, you will find an unwieldy pile of films I missed out on this year that likely would have had a shot at the list. They're also films that I will actively keep an eye out for in 2011. Feel free to converse, dissent, and direct me to your own lists. Happy new year!

1. Shutter Island



Upon its release earlier this year, Shutter Island was a hotly debated beast, a work so aggressively divisive that fatigued critics and bloggers seemed to forget about it. But it remains a triumphant return to personal filmmaking for Martin Scorsese, an immensely moving work of art disguised as a chaotic blockbuster. To say that it's a classic Scorsese film is to say three things: it's a film about the emotional limits of a man, about the multiple landscapes (historical, social, geographic, and otherwise) of America, and about cinema. Rarely does a big Hollywood film push so many self-reflexive cinephiliac buttons - referencing Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, Kubrick, even Tarkovsky - and maintain a core of complex emotionality, a feature that stands in seeming opposition to the film's deliberately lurid, overwrought qualities. We can only hope Shutter Island marks the beginning of a creative renaissance for Scorsese at this late stage in his career.

2. White Material



Let's be honest: saying Claire Denis is on a roll is like saying the Empire State Building is getting exponentially taller. It's not; it's always been the same towering height, hundreds and hundreds of feet above other buildings. Sure, Denis keeps tinkering with her mastery, refining and taming it, but there aren't any seismic spikes in the quality of her output. White Material is another example of her consistency, a film so expertly subtle that its somewhat pat political undertow - a heated critique of European privilege and colonialism - never becomes sermonizing. Denis has never been this firm and comparatively settled in her storytelling (besides maybe last year's 35 Shots of Rum), but it certainly helps that the internal rhymes of the film are no less layered and complex, the various recurring objects at once more emphasized and ambiguous. And Isabelle Huppert looks and feels great.

3. Enter the Void



Maybe it's rather punishing, pretty redundant, and emotionally one-note (yeah, it's all of those things), but Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void colossally ambitious trip-out picture represents the hardest any director rubbed elbows with the boundaries of the cinematic medium this year. It's a truly overwhelming film, absolutely bursting with visual and sonic innovation and tantalizing alternatives to conventional narration. No other film this year achieves such an immersive, palpable first-person perspective, even as it redefines this perspective cosmically when its central character dies early on, becoming a free-floating, omniscient spirit, an idea Noé literalizes with stunning craftsmanship. If cinema can be taken first as an experiential, visual medium, Enter the Void offers persuasive evidence of it, and it's also Noé's most watchable (it's even fun at times) film yet.

4. The American



One senses George Clooney may have settled into his own acting groove too assuredly in recent years, that he's been comfortable in one too many condescending patriarchal roles and that maybe audiences are growing rather exhausted by his smug, hyper-handsome persona. Interestingly enough, Anton Corbjin's excellent The American both exploits his familiar strengths and subverts them. As a solo gun dealer working in dangerous uncharted European territory, Clooney's character requires a tough, self-assured exterior even as it masks complex emotional conflicts within. Rarely is Clooney this vulnerable and this suave at the same time, especially in so few words. The American is the first no-nonsense art film released in Hollywood to so pointedly recall the great European masters like Antonioni and Bergman since Lost in Translation, and it's a profoundly complete character study from a guy who has previously shown a knack for music videos, not the kind of ruminative psychological thriller he produces here.

5. Carlos



(I'm only speaking of the 2 1/2 hour theatrical cut here. Does that count?) Olivier Assayas' latest is a film so daunting and jam-packed that I couldn't even think of how to begin writing about it. But to say this is not to say that it's bogged down by gratuitous detail or exhibitionist grandeur; rather, its impressive globe-trotting, linguistic versatility, and jaw-dropping interplay between grand set pieces and intimate moments coalesce into a film that feels unexpectedly fleet and nimble, so sure of its own scope that the abbreviated cut just begs for more. I'm fairly certain that a five-hour cut that expands upon the gradual downfall of revolutionary-cum-terrorist-for-hire Carlos the Jackal (Édgar Ramírez, in perhaps the most committed male performance of the year) and his increasing dislocation from any tangible ideology would only enhance the power already inherent in the theatrical edit. As I saw it, Carlos is a tease, but it's a gloriously engrossing, insightful, and energetic one at that, the kind of film that continues a tradition of epic, historically acute, and virtuoso biographical filmmaking.

6. The Anchorage



Though it was made in 2006, C.W. Winter's college thesis film with Swedish photographer Anders Edstrom, The Anchorage, wasn't released until this year, and release still remains a nebulous word for a film that only toured universities, niche cinematheques, and small festivals in major cities for a night or two here and there. Regardless of public exposure, it's a lovingly crafted, open film that desires to be seen, preferably on the big screen where its minute attention to atmosphere can be fully savored. In a year that didn't offer many visible artifacts of contemplative cinema (curiously coinciding with the debate earlier this year that took place on the web over this very trend), Winter and Edstrom pick up where Alonso and Ming-Liang left off last year, delivering a sumptuous forest retreat that understands less is more.

7. The Social Network



Every time I start to think The Social Network has slowly fallen from my graces since its October release, I vividly recall the experience of the film and remember that it's a pretty solid work after all. It's far from David Fincher's wildest or most multi-faceted, but it churns like a perfect machine, dishing out stimulating entertainment and astute commentaries on male power hierarchies in equal measure. I'm still wary of Fincher's embrace of traditionalism over the myriad of very contemporary themes laid at his door by the material, as if he had prematurely chosen to make his Citizen Kane before even knowing what his film would be about. But at best, The Social Network succeeds in a fundamental way that movies should: it represents a slick interlocking of various artistic forces - the cool direction of Fincher, the uppity performance of Jesse Eisenberg, the propulsive score of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the linguistic dexterity of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

8. Ne Change Rien



Ne Change Rien is not an easy film to evaluate, precisely because it hardly feels like a film. It's such a diffuse mashup (some would say abandonment) of documentary and fiction strictures as well as cinematographic techniques that it almost ceases to bear any resemblance to cinema and that which is cinematic. Of course, that's Pedro Costa's way, and he has less interest in recycling what we've already experienced than in forming new experiences, new worlds in which to luxuriate and to roam. The film, a portrait of singer/actor Jeanne Balibar, is by turns frustrating and transcendent, and eventually it's a breakdown of the barrier the screen creates between the audience and the subject of the film. Costa is judicious in his observation of Balibar, letting her play out her various rehearsal strategies in their tedious and incredible entirety, never shying away. That it ultimately feels like a trance film must have something to say about modern perceptions of reality, because who would expect the towering duration and endless stasis to be bedfellows of the hypnotizing, mysterious emotions Costa's work evokes?

9. True Grit



If the Coen brothers keep making films as agreeable and plainly enjoyable as True Grit, I'm fairly confident I'd never have to raise an eyebrow at their work again. To be sure, this would mean they'd be failing to break any new ground whatsoever, but it would at least be a testament to their strengths as entertainers. True Grit is a classical Western with classical values and moral ambiguities in which none of the characters - except for the young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) - seem to give a shit. They're being ushered down a path, swilling booze or lamenting lost opportunities in the process, and the Coens find ample humor in it.

10. Fish Tank



Were it not for Andrea Arnold's casual poeticism, her firm handling of mood shifts, and the foul-mouthed verisimilitude of the performers, Fish Tank would be a very by-the-numbers piece of British social realism. As it is, it's almost that, but there's enough penetrating insight into the psychosexual maturation of the lead character Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis) to prevent it from being so. This is not merely grotesque miserabilism; Arnold has an almost magic realist sensibility that renders some fantastically sensual moments, many of which have to do with the ambiguities in the role of Jarvis' opposite performer (Michael Fassbender, the two of whom share amazing chemistry). Is he a surrogate father for Mia, necessary purely as a guardian, or is he closer to a companion, and thus indicative of sexual temptation? The tension makes for arresting drama. (I still plan to write at length about this one.)

Honorable Mentions: Greenberg, Winter’s Bone, Daddy Longlegs



REVISED LIST (as of 12/27/12)

1. Le Quattro Volte (Frammartino, Italy)
2. Shutter Island
3. White Material
4. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, Iran)
5. The Strange Case of Angelica (Oliveira, Portugal)
6. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, Thailand)
7. Meek's Cutoff
8. Film Socialisme
9. Bluebeard
10. Dogtooth (Lanthimos, Greece)



Honorable Mentions: Enter the Void, The American, Carlos, The Social Network, The Anchorage, Ne Change Rien, Cold Weather, True Grit, Fish Tank, Another Year, Greenberg, Winter's Bone, Daddy Longlegs, Blue Valentine, Heartbeats.



Films I missed and have yet to see:
36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Another Year
Aurora
Bluebeard
Certified Copy
Dogtooth
The Expendables
Film Socialisme
How to Train Your Dragon
The Kids are All Right
Life During Wartime
Machete
Meek’s Cutoff
Mother
My Joy
Mysteries of Lisbon
Our Beloved Month of August
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Somewhere
Strange Case of Angelica
Temptation of St. Tony
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Unstoppable
Wild Grass

True Grit (2010) A Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

The Coen brothers haven't so much pushed their boundaries in recent years as they have cycled through the various genres they have tinkered with throughout their career, as if making a conscious decision to hone in and perfect their distinctive approaches to each. There was the philosophical chase movie No Country for Old Men, the witty slapstick Burn After Reading, and the apocalyptic black comedy A Serious Man, all of which contain echoes of previous works like Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Barton Fink but purify their approach. Their new film, True Grit, embraces the Western - a genre that inflects almost all of their work in one way or another - and streamlines it an almost absurd extent. It's a straight-and-arrow revenge movie set in wild Arkansas that's uncompromisingly, even stubbornly, traditional. They have taken the most basic ingredients of a revenge plot - a killer, an avenger, and a pursuit - and have refused to complicate them, resulting in a film that's an utter joy to watch even if it fails to deliver the nuances and ambiguities of, say, No Country.

Jeff Bridges returns to the Coens as Rooster Cogburn, an irresponsible U.S. Marshal who's as much of an unintelligible drunkard as he is a ruthless killer, two facets of his personality made pretty clear in an early scene in a smoky courtroom where, ludicrously, he mumbles half-answers to a a judge's incessant questions. It's a role that may outlast even his earlier turn as The Dude in The Big Lebowski in terms of the sheer abundance of memorable moments when his snarl, his gait, and his plain demeanor provoke hilarity. Hell, with all his inebriated antics (the pinnacle being a hilariously cocky attempt to shoot down falling cornbread), Bridges is probably 95% of the reason why True Grit is as unexpectedly funny as it is. But the emotional core of the film is Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a potentially pre-pubescent girl who nonetheless harbors all of the respectable qualities Rooster lacks; she's well-spoken, resourceful, and intensely devoted to locating Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the killer of her father who has since dispersed into the Indian Nations.

The first twenty to thirty minutes of the film are rather meandering exposition, a time when the Coens' penchant for circular, fluffy dialogue comes to the fore and ultimately when the mechanics of their storytelling are made transparent (one particular scene in which Mattie argues with the owner of her father's horse seems designed solely to illuminate the main character's perseverance, and, conveniently, the brothers' wit too). Fittingly, it's not until the story navigates away from civilization and into uncharted territory that it opens itself up and features its greatest scenes, where both Mattie's naive confidence and Rooster's patriarchal abilities are challenged. Truth be told, Rooster's not prepared - and doesn't want to be prepared - to supervise the safety of a young girl in the barbaric Indian Nations, but Mattie's merciless drive to see to the death of her father's murderer causes her to overthrow Rooster's wish for a solo mission. What's more, a laughably conceited Texas Ranger (a grizzled, mustachioed Matt Damon) named LaBoeuf (phonetically "LaBeef") joins the hunt for Chaney, in his case for a reward back in Texas. Uniting the three is bloodlust, even if the rewards reaped are purely monetary or, in Mattie's case, a familial retribution that is much deeper. The film doesn't contain any drastic thematic "lessons", but certainly among the subtler, more suggestive undercurrents is the extent to which any of their "reasons" for the punishment of Chaney are truly justifiable, whether legally, morally, or ideologically.



When the Coens visually introduce the older Mattie at the end of the film - as opposed to her sonic introduction via voice-over in the moody opening shot - the suggestion, as she trudges off into a bleak emptiness in the final shot, is that violent revenge is incapable of producing long-term satisfaction. This notion is echoed by the structure of the plot, which pits Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf in a long, challenging, and seemingly never-ending pursuit and finally renders the actual scene of revenge in a rather brusque, "unsatisfying" manner. As if to immediately trigger this idea, the Coens barely reveal the dead body of Chaney when he is shot with a rifle, focusing instead on the small Mattie as she is hurled backwards by the force of the gun into a cavernous hole in the ground where a pack of snakes emerge from the torso of a skeleton. It's like a punishment delivered from on high, while Rooster's subsequent cutting and sucking from her hand where a snake bit it (which removes the farcical quality of an earlier, similar scene of Rooster violently pulling out LaBoeuf's tooth) seems to have an almost cosmic sense of karma. True Grit's concluding twenty minutes possess an iconic mournfulness missing from the rest of the film, climaxing in a poetic collage of superimpositions of Rooster carrying Mattie home on a fatigued horse that obliquely recalls F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.

What also becomes clear in this slow finale is an unusual anomaly for the Coens: the feeling of them trying to wrap things up triumphantly, to make the film as "complete" as possible in a dramatic sense. Rooster's reversal of character from nihilistic prick to unexpectedly empathetic hero is something like the story of the Coens' metamorphosis for this film, shaking off the chaos, discursiveness, and deliberate storytelling decrescendos that mark most of their work to deliver a clean tale that feels more died-in-the-wool than wholly postmodern. Of course, there are still the Coen tics (the stray absurdity of a stubby outlaw who makes animal noises or a cowboy garbed in bearskin), but one sense them fully embracing the shaggy traditionalism of their source novel and the previous cinematic adaptation (Henry Hathaway's 1969 John Wayne vehicle). Although it contains the typically earthy cinematography of Roger Deakins and the gently manipulative musical score of Carter Burwell (which incorporates a melody from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter), there's at least one (or two, if you don't consider the Coens of a piece) seismic tilt(s) in the artistic patina here, and it plays in the film's favor. True Grit is one of the Coens' most compassionate and pristine works, and it captures its time and place with authentic poignancy.

Fanny and Alexander (1982) A Film by Ingmar Bergman

Fanny and Alexander represents Ingmar Bergman's most pointed and personal evocation of the crisis of faith he witnessed in his youth, and ultimately, throughout his entire life. Bertil Guve plays his screen surrogate Alexander Ekdahl, an impressionable and naive child who nonetheless refuses to conform to one manner of thinking in regards to a whole host of beguiling curiosities from death and the afterlife to religion and reality. Instead, he greets these mysteries with a mix of hostility and confusion, preferring to let his imagination lead him where it will. The opening shot frames his head within the small puppet theater he has been playing with in the baroque Ekdahl home, a familiar Bergman image that immediately signals the fictional world he loves to get lost in and the coexistence of life and the theater. For the Ekdahls, the kind of massive and boisterous family one might see in a Fellini film, the theater is everything, a "little world" that is both a lucrative family business as well as a way to escape from and deal with "harsh world outside", as deemed by the patriarch Oscar (Allan Edwall), a short, sentimental guy with a groomed mustache. Anyone remotely familiar with Bergman, a lifelong theater director, will recognize this as his own viewpoint, making it the fundamental philosophical backbone of what is very likely his most outwardly personal film.

This sense of Bergman letting loose with his most intimate experiences is deeply evident in the sensuous, evocative first section of the film at the Ekdahl family Christmas, which plays like an outpouring of fond memories and recollected sensations. Here, the film's origins as a five-hour television miniseries is most conspicuous as it slackens the emphasis on Alexander to spend ample time bouncing around between different vignettes, giving family members seemingly insignificant to the central narrative extensive dialogues, such as the tender reconnection (partly attributed to refills of cognac) of grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren) and her past lover and local Jewish merchant Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), or the hysterical lovemaking of family friend Maj (Pernilla August) and the charmingly forward Uncle Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle). On paper, the abundant detailing of the family's interrelationships might seem like fluffy exposition, but Bergman renders it all so lovingly, mixing moments of vulgar humor (Uncle Carl's (Börje Ahlstedt) exhibition of flatulence for the children) with stone-cold seriousness. In service of all the Christmas Eve merrymaking, Bergman's camera is uncharacteristically energized, panning rapidly to follow Gustav Adolf as he runs into the dinner room with a flaming bowl of punch or the family as they prance in single file line throughout the various rooms of the house, chanting a yuletide carol.

Also in abundance in these early scenes is the color red, which overpowers the supplementary greens, golds, and browns that fill out the ravishing palette. Bergman has remarked on how his employment of red was meant to call back to his own childhood, where red, the shade of blood and the devil, seemed to augment his fear of death at every corner. Interestingly enough, the implications of red are coiled up in both death and immense joyfulness, clearly spread throughout the decorated rooms to suggest warmth and love but also provoking Alexander's fears and hallucinations, such as when he envisions an indoor statue moving. This notion is supported later on when Emilie (Ewa Fröling), Alexander's loving but ill-advised mother, dons a bright red dress in a scene in which both the family reunites and the ghost of Emilie's overbearing second husband haunts Alexander. Even in the company of Bergman's atypically lavish set design, the presence of red in moments like these announces itself as something malign amidst all the cheery, celebratory decoration.



This symbolically loaded color scheme, though intermingled with the bad and the good, serves as a creative wellspring for the young Alexander, an idea that is contrasted by the stark, pale, and lifelike features evident when the film shifts its narrative and emotional register towards the ends of the first half. Alexander's father dies abruptly from a heart attack he experiences during a rehearsal at the town theater, a sudden tragedy that packs the film's strongest emotional wallop. At the funeral, while marching down the aisle with his sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin), Alexander spurts curse words seemingly to take his mind off the pain, but is forced to face the crushing blow firsthand when awoken in the night by Emilie's devastated screaming. Bergman shoots this voyeuristic moment in a point-of-view shot through the door of Oscar's room, revealing only his deceased father's face jutting above the bed frame and the harsh sounds of his mother's emotional apex. It's a terrifyingly powerful scene that underlines the processes of watching and listening that define Alexander's coming-of-age as well as his desire to create elaborate fictions within his own mind, and in some instances, fictions that escape into real life.

Not long after, Emilie has remarried to Bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö), an ascetic Lutheran priest who recalls the father of Bergman's own harsh religious upbringing. And it's also not long after their marriage and the subsequent "new beginning" for both Emilie and her children that the film more closely resembles Bergman's great bleak chamber pieces, documenting the descent of the family into full-fledged oppression in the face of the demanding Bishop and his appropriately strict sisters. Alexander and Fanny immediately sense the danger in the coldly calculated and forbidding architecture of their new home, where empty gray rooms offer space for supposed religious contemplation. They voice the concerns to Emilie, who at first writes them off, telling Alexander not to "play Hamlet" and that she is "not Queen Gertrude", that their "kind stepfather isn't the King of Denmark", and that they're not in the "Elsinore Castle." This intertextual reference is, incidentally, almost exactly what the family has gotten themselves into, as Bergman emphasizes the florid theatricality of it all with thunderstorms that compliment the growing menace in the household, the scenario veering closer and closer to something out of Gothic horror. He never lets it get histrionic though, grounding the more baroque touches in long strokes of patient dialogue and cutaways to the rest of the Ekdahls worrying about Emilie and the children in their respective homes. What's more, Malmsjö is a terrifically palpable villain, lending every deep breath and lumbering step forward a sense of dictatorial purpose; the scene in which he castigates Alexander for lying about a vision he had regarding his step-father's murder of his past wife and children is a magnificently paced punishment, one of the most harrowing evocations in Bergman's career of his lingering theme of humiliation.



Fanny and Alexander often times possesses the dark charm of a fairy tale in its portrayal of Alexander's maturation, and nowhere is this more evident than in the subsequent chapter of the film when the children are rescued by Isak Jacobi and brought to his nephew Aron's (Mats Bergman) puppet warehouse, a strange and labyrinthine space that seems to morph to the movements of Alexander's subconscious. In the rescue scene, the film's most peculiar moment occurs. When Isak hides the children in a hope chest he is purchasing from Bishop Vergeron, the Bishop grows angrily suspicious and sprints upstairs to find the children still lying on the floor of their room. Whether it's Isak's hallucination, the Bishop's hallucination, or a manifestation of one of Alexander's fictions - and thus whether or not Alexander ever even experiences the puppet warehouse - is left tantalizingly ambiguous by Bergman, echoing the film's final lines, taken from Strindberg, about the flimsiness of reality. Whatever the case, the puppet segment is sublime, definitely one of the dreamiest scenes Bergman ever shot. Set to the recurring melody of an eerie harpsichord, the film cross-cuts between Alexander's middle-of-the-night wanderings - where the ghost of Oscar revisits him, Aron uses puppets to scare him into thinking he sees the enigma of God, and Aron's creepy, soothsaying brother Ismael (played by a female, Stina Ekblad) voices ominously irrational lessons to him - and the scene of the Bishop's death, which involves a sedative from Emilie and an inopportune fire in the house.

That Bergman, even at such a late stage in his career, remained so profoundly ambivalent towards the nature of God and reality and represented this in the questioning figure of Alexander, is a testament to his enduring artistic ambition. What's most resonant about this gorgeous, moving, transcendent film is the self-referential quality of its artistic transmutation, the way Bergman is so exposed about making art out of pain, misery, and confusion, about how something positive can emerge from something so seemingly negative. If one takes much of the film as the subjective visions of Alexander - and boy are they beautifully stylized visions, attributed to some of the greatest cinematography of Sven Nykvist's career - it is evident that an inner artist is beckoning forth from within an introspective, damaged individual. And perhaps his art will evolve with the same expert precision and penetrating insight that Bergman's did, coalescing into a grand statement that's as alternately tender and mournful as Fanny and Alexander.

My Favorite Albums of 2010

As with any list, I can hardly claim this to be all-encompassing, as it focuses primarily on the genres of most interest to me (alternative/indie rock, folk, minimalist, ambient). I've also included a handful of 2009 albums, and in one instance, a selection from 2008, making this less a definitive year-end music list than a personal collection of various albums that made an impact on me throughout the year. Without further ado, here's the list.


1. The Walkmen - Lisbon

The Walkmen return with their breeziest, most stripped-down album yet. Hamilton’s voice is at its most relaxed and triumphant, and the songwriting is simple and timeless. It seems that the more the band strips away from their already spare sound, the more resonant their music becomes. Standouts like "Blue as Your Blood", "Juveniles", "Woe is Me", and "While I Shovel the Snow" demonstrate impeccable craftsmanship even as they downsize with the most basic ingredients of rock'n'roll (guitar, bass, drums, organ). No other album this year grew so intensely in my affections; I’ve listened to it over 50 times. It’s a shame that The Walkmen are so consistently ignored by music outlets, presumably just because they don’t pander to fleeting trends.


2. Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt

Another example of a sadly neglected album with huge, iconic power in spite of its modest ingredients (a guitar and a voice, for the most part). Kristian Mattson’s folk songs have the gift of being universal, like the best of Bob Dylan and Dock Boggs, and intensely singular, marked by Mattson’s expressive growl and virtuosic finger-picking.


3. Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People

I don’t care much about how this is formally called an “EP”. Aside from the gargantuan length, it’s more complete and varied than most conventional full-lengths. The title track is an incredible marathon with about as many hooks as you could hope for in a great pop song, and an equal number of avant-garde orchestrations. It’s infectious music, alternating from the big and bold to the deliciously intimate (“Owl and the Tanager”), and it’s a greater joy than Sufjan’s other release this year, The Age of Adz.


4. DM Stith - Heavy Ghost (2009)

There’s two voices of D.M Stith on Heavy Ghost: an eerily intimate, nakedly produced one that suggests someone whispering in your ear and a ghostly, propulsive one that swerves around in the background. They are constantly competing in his elaborate songs, which range from hobbling folk waltzes (“Pity Dance”) to darkly beautiful piano numbers (“Braid of Voices”). How I missed this in 2009 is a mystery to me.


5. Dr. Dog - Shame Shame

Such a consistent rock band. There’s nothing extraordinarily inventive here; just a collection of contagious pop songs. It’s also the band’s most high-fidelity album, which gives new clarity to their nuanced textures.


6. David Sylvian - Manafon (2009)

I love how Sylvian’s bellowing, expressive voice is laid bare by the intensely minimalist contributions of his collaborators. Manafon quickly settles into a Zen-like state with its first slow-burner (“Small Metal Gods”) and never ceases. Sylvian’s elaborate and enigmatic stories are supplied shape and emotional support by the hushed static, the unexpected violin swells, and the various acoustic clicks and pops across the album.


7. Jonsi - Go

There’s not much contemporary pop rock that sounds quite like Jonsi. Even though his first solo album incorporates orchestrations by ubiquitous indie composer Nico Muhly, the youthful, energized sound is unlike anything the two have ever done. The dynamic range of this record – from euphoria bursts like “Boy Lilikoi” to loose epics like “Grow Till Tall” – is astounding. What’s more, it was the most overwhelming concert experience I had this year.


8. Sam Amidon - I See the Sign

Sam Amidon’s previous album All is Well is undoubtedly one of the greatest folk records of the decade, so it’s perhaps inevitable that I See the Sign had tough ground to follow. To his credit, Amidon doesn’t try to rehash the same method. Instead of the elegant simplicity of All is Well’s chord structures and instrumentation, the Connecticut native excavates more discordant experimental sounds and unexpected time signatures, lending unique auras to the ageless Appalachian folk songs he reinterprets. If there has ever been an opener that more pointedly announces a different direction than the bizarre murder shuffle of “How Come That Blood”, then I’m not aware of it. I See the Sign, albeit in its own distinct way, is almost as affecting and lovely as its predecessor, and that’s no small feat.


9. The National - High Violet

High Violet is bigger, bolder, and less pensive than 2007’s excellent Boxer, but it worms its way into your brain with a similarly lasting impact. Aside from the colossal misstep that is “Terrible Love”, the veteran Brooklyn quintet spare none of their melancholy beauty, and Matt Berninger’s sardonically pained lyrics are at their most enigmatic.


10. She and Him - Volume Two

I’m clearly a big fan of music that sounds timeless, that refuses to get swept up in current trends and resists short-term interest. As such, the second album from She (Zooey Deschanel) and Him (M. Ward) doesn’t leap at you. The songs mostly sound like something you’ve ever heard before (and in many instances they are, given the duo’s propensity for covers), but they have instant, timeworn appeal, and they are filled to the brim with subtle instrumentation and clever production ideas courtesy of Ward. Moreover, Deschanel’s voice has really matured, capable of sounding as rich as Patsy Cline but still retaining a child-like self-awareness with all those “hmms”, hiccups, and giggles.


11. The Caretaker - Persistent Repetition of Phrases (2008)

Ghosts of 1920’s ballroom music obscured by the thick crackle and pop of static. These are ambient dreamscapes to get lost in for hours, a kind of impressionistic music that summons up the best and most mysterious of mental pictures.


12. Amiina - Puzzle

Amiina’s first album since 2007’s Kurr fortunately keeps their signature sound intact, but they’ve added some decidedly modern flourishes to their primarily organic instrumentation. The brooding opening track, “Asinn”, doused in anticipation, utilizes electronic beats that gradually swell into a clashing acoustic kit. This is all married perfectly to their typical base of bells, violins, accordions, and other various acoustic gadgets. The overall effect recalls Icelandic natives Mum, but Amiina retains their own distinctive lullabies.


13. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

The persistent thematic ambition of Arcade Fire is what separates them from most big indie acts. Even if The Suburbs suffers occasionally from being overlong, generic, and redundant, the standout tracks (“Ready to Start”, “Rococo”, “We Used to Wait”), which dutifully capture suburban angst and nostalgia, keep things interesting. And something tells me we have to savor what might be their last engaging effort before an impending sellout.


14. Norberto Lobo - Pata Lenta (2009)

Norberto Lobo is a Portuguese acoustic virtuoso who spends his time on both six and twelve string guitars, never ceasing to amaze with the sheer technical brilliance on display. Pata Lenta showcases Lobo as a writer of dazzling instrumental pieces that take unexpected left turns and a pure avant-gardist, using the acoustic in unconventional ways to create haunting atonal textures.


15. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz

I’m still skeptical of how comfortably Sufjan’s tender voice sits atop these bombastic electronic symphonies, but The Age of Adz has definitely grown on me in recent listens. One has to respect his ambition and his desire to challenge himself artistically. I tend to vacillate between thinking the album needs more moments of quiet repose (“Now That I’m Older” being the one soaring exception) and realizing it may not be necessary given the amount of delicate folk songs he’s already treated us to in his career. In a word, this is the most problematic great album I have on here.


16. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is thick with dread and otherworldly force, conjuring up a variety of different musical styles in the process from screaming prog-rock to quiet blues to Lynchian noise. Sometimes it’s not as cohesive or tight as one would hope, which has supposedly been a spot of continuous trouble for frontman Michael Gira, but it holds on with a wealth of creative ideas and a general atmosphere of anxiety and gloom.


17. Timber Timbre - S/T (2009)

This Canadian blues act is fascinatingly minimalist on their self-titled third album, restraining their delivery to guitar, organ, piano, and subdued drums. It’s as if each instrument has been performed as quietly and infrequently as possible so that only the beating of a tom or the wheeze of a sustained organ punctuates the silence. Taylor Kirk’s eccentric voice helps articulate the emotions only hinted at by the music.


18. Of Montreal - False Priest

Kevin Barnes embraces the funkiest R&B side of his musical personality, unafraid to look goofy or regressive even as he invigorates ridiculous retro flourishes like call-and-response vocals and beefy 80’s synths. False Priest is a more enjoyable album than 2008’s Skeletal Lamping, which covered similar ground, and it features the band’s most anthemic tune in a long time (“Sex Karma”). Also, one senses Barnes frequently voicing deep-seated and resolutely serious opinions from beneath all the silliness, a notion that is made explicit in the final agnostic screed of “You Do Mutilate?”.


19. First Aid Kit - The Big Black and Blue” (2009)

When these two Swedish sisters can fully shake off their obvious Fleet Foxes idolatry, I think they’re capable of records they can call their own. They’ve got the shtick down pat though, and there are certainly glimpses of greatness on their first LP.


20. The Black Keys - Brothers

I much prefer their raw early records, but The Black Keys have certainly embraced their growing rock-star status in admirably exciting ways, introducing new sounds to their bluesy foundation and higher fidelity production. Individually, the songs on Brothers are as full of attitude as anything they’ve ever done, but as a whole, the album stumbles with too many mid-tempo grooves, making the long running time really feel excessive. But they did release the most entertaining music videos of the year.

(Numbers 21-28 refer to albums I have only recently begun listening to and am therefore incapable of providing an appropriate encapsulation. Given more time though, I'm sure they'd make the list.)

21. Mount Eerie - Wind’s Poem (2009)
22. Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
23. Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights
24. Dirty Projectors + Bjork - Mount Wittenberg Orca
25. Hildur Gudnadottir – Without Sinking (2009)
26. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me
27. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
28. Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises

Also worth noting: my own band, Old Abram Brown, released our second album this year. It's called Restless Ghosts, and it's available for purchase here.