Once again, AUDITOIRE's year-end tradition of ranking the best there is in world cinema regardless of era, style or origin, is here at last. AUDITOIRE believes the best way to account a year with cinema is by ranking his best film experiences for this year. So here it goes, my bottom 5!
La Fille du Rer (The Girl on the Train, 2009) is film by French director Andre Techine about a girl who fakes a hate crime. One thing AUDITOIRE likes about this film is the prosaic framing with intertitles similar to the films of Jean-Luc Godard of the 1960s. It remains a tantalizing piece of work about modern France and its youth. Emilie Dequenne's performance struck both the animosity of her character and also its arbitrariness. It's quixotic form makes Techine one of the most exiting directors of contemporary French cinema.
In UP (2009), there is an observable symmetry between filmic elements: young and old, bright and dark, happiness and melancholy, freedom and restraint. Inspired by many icons in film history, UP is a conglomeration of visual quotations from old movies hidden within its mise-en-scene. It has inputs from films like the silent, The Lost World (1925) to Lamorrise's The Red Balloon (1956) to L'Avventura (1960) it is one of the most underrated masterpiece animated films Disney released in years.
Toy Story 3 (2010) stretched the whole franchise of Toy Story from its great and humble beginnings to a moneymaking business investing on melodramatic conflicts like abandonment, rejection and betrayal. However, it has innovations in terms of complexity. As with other Toy Stories, this has the most expanded mise-en-scene: from Andy's house we are introduced to a kid's school, to a garbage dump-site and to the house of another kid. This increases the technical complexity of the film because it introduces more characters and different look of the mise-en-scene, hence more animation skills needed, which is hard by the way. So to the PIXAR animators who painstakingly pieced together this film, kudos! Have a Merry Christmas to you all!
Sa'yo Lamang (2010) is Laurice Guillen's tortuous drama which I wanted to escape at first viewing. While everyone else cries besides me during one of Lorna's seizure's, I was laughing because it looks like The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). Anyway, the film's main character played by Bea Alonso is an eye-opener for me. Bea has a great potential as an actress and she showed it with intensity and control in this film. Her portrayal as Dianne Alvero is one of most unforgettable performance of a Filipina actress I have seen this year. She finally knows the craft but needs more direction and mastery.
The Holy Mountain (1973) introduced me to the notorious film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky. After watching this one I was hooked with the strangeness of Jorodowsky's inputs. It's one of the most refreshing films I've seen this year. It is build upon a lot of visual codes, excesses and pictorial overloads similar to what Godard did in Film Socialisme (2010) but in a rigid fashion. The film is explores the absurdity of religion, and like many other religion, it self-reflexivity is satisfied by destroying the fourth wall at the end of the film. Did you know that Khavn dela Cruz's style is similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky's?
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