The Year in Review

Jim Ridley

10. “Window Water Baby Moving,” from By Brakhage (Criterion DVD) Stan Brakhage’s death this year from cancer robbed film of one of its boldest explorers and ended a five-decade body of experimental filmmaking so protean, visionary and massive that it’s hard to find an entry point. Unless you happen upon a big-screen retrospective in some other city, start with Criterion’s staggering two-disc overview, of which this 12-minute 1959 short recording the birth of his first child is a highlight.

9. Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantic (Dirtnap Records) Last summer, a friend told me about this great Portland, Ore., band he’d seen a few months back that sounded like the long-lost children of the New York Dolls and the Buzzcocks. When I went to buy the CD at Grimey’s, someone said that just days before, three of the four members had been killed in a van wreck. The news was sad enough then. After hearing the record, it was heartbreaking.

8. McCoy Tyner, April 24 at the Belcourt The hardest-rocking show in Nashville this year, courtesy of a 65-year-old jazz pianist in an electrifying trio. Please, more shows here for rising jazz stars and legends of Tyner’s caliber.

7. Atom Egoyan, Oct. 30 at Wilson Hall, Vanderbilt Even for those who hadn’t seen Ararat, the Canadian filmmaker’s complex meditation on the still disputed Armenian genocide at Turkish hands, his talk about the representation of history and the confrontation of denial was brilliant and far-ranging. Even livelier was the incendiary post-film discussion, where unusually informed debate raged among Nashvillians of Turkish and Armenian descent. Question: Where were all the representatives of Nashville’s film community, who apparently couldn’t drive across town to meet one of the most important directors working today?

6. Stardust Drive-In opening weekend, Aug. 29, Watertown Not even a concession stand running at half-strength or a film projected upside-down could dampen the sellout crowd’s excitement as “The Star-Spangled Banner” crackled from car radios. My little girl sat watching Finding Nemo in a red plastic deck chair, clutching an Alien Glow Pop and a tub of popcorn bigger than she.

5. Olivier Assayas interview, Cinema Scope magazine In a robust conversation, the French filmmaker (Demonlover) addresses the movies’ evasion of the present, the ways electronic media have affected filmmaking and film watching, and the purpose of writing about movies, among too many other pertinent topics to list. Apart from J. Hoberman’s book The Dream Life (an Odessa Steps montage of accelerating cinematic and political upheaval in the ’60s) and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s spirited appraisal of the overlooked Looney Tunes: Back in Action in the Chicago Reader, the single most engaging piece of film criticism I read all year.

4. Billy Bob Thornton Not just Bad Santa’s surly MVP, but one of the most consistently natural, unaffected and interesting actors working in movies today. In small parts, he’s a seasoning that’s often tastier than the main course. He hijacked Intolerable Cruelty for a few welcome minutes as a billionaire doofus, and when I saw Love Actually, the very sight of him made the audience cheer. Also noted with pleasure: Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell in Old School, pretty much everyone in Mystic River, and Renee Zellweger in Cold Mountain, doing the Walter Brennan role better than anybody since Walter Brennan.

3. Jean-Louis Costes, Nov. 18 at Shirley Street Station Unpublicized at the promoter’s request—no sense distracting the cops with unfaked sex acts and purposeful nudity in the middle of a strip-club zone—this French performance artist’s sacrificial-rite musical The Holy Virgin Cult deployed shock theater with genuine artistry, vaudevillian energy and a slaughterhouse stocked with sacred cattle. An actor and musician who’s appeared in the most controversial French films of the past decade, Irréversible and Baise-Moi, Costes refused to allow the local audience its usual arms-folded comfort zone of indifference. He and his two collaborators charged naked into the small but astonished crowd, wielding raw chickens and a blow-up Madonna leaking fluid from every orifice. And the result, for once, was excitement and engagement instead of mere consumption. While the rest of the city slept, 30 people sat in a David Lynch psycho-lounge watching two naked men smear each other with chocolate syrup. You snooze, you lose.

2. Kill Bill Vol. 1 Celluloid crack.