2000s: The Decade's Best

Looking over this decades films, I can instantly remember where I was, and at what point in my life I was at, when I saw these films. The 1990s was when I fell in love with films. The 2000s was when I transitioned to film-lover to filmmaker. A very important decade for me and I saw many beautiful, amazing films that encouraged and challenged me along the way.

Like all the annual lists I compile, this one is by no means comprehensive. I like to include in each lists films I have not seen because that influences my choices. (I have to keep myself honest, it wouldn't be right for me to list Tropical Malady as one of the decades best when I haven't seen it.) It's to hard to numerically order these films, so I've listed them in alpha order. I set aside the first ten as the ones I would distinguish as my top ten of the decade, but in alpha order.

Brokeback Mountain — at the U.S premiere in Telluride Film Festival
Children of Men — probably at the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley
Dancer in the Dark — DVD at my Mom's House as I finished High School in Riverside
The Dark Knight — IMAX Metreon in San Francisco, went to the early screening and still got bad seats
Hunger — Kreuzberg, Germany summer 2009
In the Mood for Love — MRC Library, basement floor at Moffitt Library at UC Berkeley
The New World — probably at Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley
Paranoid Park — Indie Fest in San Francisco
There Will Be Blood — Special Screening at Castro Theatre in San Francisco
Three Times — Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley when I worked for the San Francisco International Film Festival

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — Sheridan Opera House, Telluride. I sat in the balcony with a metal pole in the middle of the screen for the entire film
A Serious Man — The Landmark on Pico and Westwood
About Schmidt — somewhere in Orange County when I was attending UC Irvine
Cache — Sheridan Opera House, part of the Telluride's student symposium
Everlasting Moments — it was the final screening for that year at Telluride completely packed. A friend squeezed Judy and I into the projection booth and we watched the film from there.
George Washington – Watched this one on DVD at my apartment in Oakland
Life During Wartime — U.S premiere at Telluride
The Lives of Others — Special screening at Embarcadero in San Francisco
Magnolia – Mission Grove Cinemas in Riverside
Memento – Canyon Springs Cinema, where I used to work at after highschool
Mulholland Drive – Special preview screening at UC Irvine
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Punch Drunk Love — A theatre in Fashion Island, I think, in Newport Beach
The Pianist
The Royal Tennenbaums – Canyon Springs Cinema, Moreno Valley
Still Life – Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
United 93 – Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley
Workingman's Death – Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Japantown, San Francisco
Y tu Mama Tambien
YiYi – DVD at my apartment in Los Angeles
Zodiac – Embarcadero Cinemas in San Francisco

Films of the 2000s

2009
1. Hunger
2. Life During Wartime
3. A Serious Man
4. The White Ribbon
5. The Headless Woman
6. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
7. Fish Tank
8. The Baader Meinhoff Complex
9. Up and Inglorious Basterds (tie)
10. Star Trek
11. Anvil: The Story of Anvil
12. Gigante
13. Nine
14. Where the Wild Things Are
15. Avatars

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
Invictus
Up in the Air
A Single Man
Red Cliff
Police, Adjective
The Hangover
Funny People
Summer Hours
Of Time and the City
Medicine for Meloncholy
Precious
District 9
Broken Embraces
Goodbye Solo
Sugar
La Danse
Tyson
The Beaches of Agnes
Crazy Heart
35 Shots of Rum
The Messenger
__________________________

2008
1. The Dark Knight and Paranoid Park (tie)
2. Everlasting Moments
3. The Wrestler
4. Ashes of Time Redux
5. Revolutionary Road
6. I've Loved You for so Long
7. Tulpan
8. Wall-e
9. The Flight of the Red Balloon
10. Standard Operating Procedures
11. The Class
12. Milk
13. Che
14. Gomorrah
15. Synodeche, New York

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
You, The Living
Frozen River
My Winnepeg
Revanche
Hunger
Racheal's Getting Married
Happy Go-Lucky
Snow Angels
Vicky Christina Barcelona
Mad Detective
Mongol
A Christmas Tale
24 City
Shine a Light
Let the Right One In
Man on a Wire
Frost/Nixon
The Reader
Changling
Doubt
Gran Torino
Stranded
Australia
_______________________

2007
1.There Will Be Blood
2.4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
3.Zodiac
3.Atonement
4.The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
6.Control
7.Hana
8.Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
9.The Way I Spent the End of the World
10.Grindhouse
11.No Country for Old Men
12.American Gangster
13.I'm Not There
14.Charlie Wilson's War
15.Eastern Promises
16.The Bourne Ultimatum
17.Boarding Gate
18.Blind Mountain
19.Jar City
20.No End in Sight
21.The Darjeeling Limited
22.Silent Light
23.Lust, Caution

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Kite Runner
Rendition
Sweeny Todd
The Savages
Margot at the Wedding
Juno
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma
Once
The Host
_______________________

2006
1.United 93
2.Children of Men
3.The Lives of Others
4.Three Times and Workingman's Death (tie)
5.Still Life
6.Army of Shadows
7.Little Children
8.Le Pont des Arts
9.I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
10.When the Levees Broke
11.Colossal Youth
12.Syndromes of a Century
13.The Prestige
14.Borat
15.Pan's Labyrinth
_____________________

2005
1.The New World
2.Brokeback Mountain
3.Cache
4.The Constant Gardener
5.The Squid and the Whale
6.King Kong
7.No Direction Home
8.The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
9.Howl's Moving Castle
10.L'efant

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
BrokenFlowers
Darwin's Nightmare
The Best of Youth
__________________________

2004
1.Sideways
2.Cafe Lumiere
3.Closer
4.Nobody Knows
5.Kill Bill vol 2
6.Old Boy
7.The Aviator
8.The Life Aquatic
9.The Brown Bunny
10.Los Muertos
11.Woman is the Future of Man

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Time of the Wolf
The World
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Tropical Malady
__________________________

2003
1.City of God
2.Elephant
3.Irreversible
4.The Hulk
5.The Fog of War
6.Kill Bill
7.Japon
8.Lost in Translation
9.The Weather Underground
10.All the Real Girls

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Master and Commander
Man on the Train
The Man Without a Past
The Triplets of Belleville
Seabiscuit
Raising Victor Vargas
The Son
_____________________

2002
1.Y tu mama tambien
2.About Schmidt
3.Punch Drunk Love
4.Minority Report
5.The Pianist
6.Talk to Her
7.Millenium Mambo
8.Bloody Sunday

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
Solaris
In America
Igby Goes Down
AutoFocus
24 Hour Party People
Unknown Pleasures
The Man Without a Past
Spider
The Son
To Be and to Have
demonlover
Ichi the Killer
The Fast Runner
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
____________________________

2001
1.The Royal Tennenbaums
2.Mulholland Drive
3.Black Hawk Down
4.Spirited Away
5.In the Bedroom
6.The Piano Teacher
7.The Pledge
8.The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
9.Captain's Corelli's Mandolin
10.Ali

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
What Time is it There?
__________________________

2000
1.In the Mood for Love
2.Dancer in the Dark
3.Magnolia
4.George Washington
5.Memento
6.Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
7.Toy Story 2
8.YiYi
9.Flowers of Shanghai
10.O Brother, Where Art Thou?
11.Amores Perros
12.Almost Famous
13.Castaway
14.Best in Show
15.American Psycho
16.Ratcatcher

Films I haven not seen in no particular order:
Beau Travail
The Wind Will Carry Us
The House of Mirth
You Can Count on Me
Humanite
Werkmeister Harmonies
The Gleaners and I
Platform
Mysterious Object at Noon
Pola X
The Heart of the World
The Circle
The Road Home
A Time of Drunken Horses
Songs from the Second Floor

Hysterical

November 15, 2009

Books of The Times

Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family. In fact, the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for McCain aides’ disparaging comments about her in the wake of the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunder-headed — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insists, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

Some of Ms. Palin’s loudest complaints in this volume are directed at the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, ironically enough, was one of the aides to most forcefully make the case for putting her on the ticket in the first place, arguing to his boss, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book “The Battle for America,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine that neither Mr. Schmidt nor Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, apparently saw Ms. Palin’s “lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability,” and that Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot, saw the idea of upending the chessboard as a maverick kind of move.

All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

In “Going Rogue,” Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks, “hockey Mom” ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics — “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes, “to the extent that most Americans did.” And she argues that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”

A CNN poll taken last month indicates that 7 out of 10 Americans now think Ms. Palin is not qualified to be president, and even as ardent a conservative as Charles Krauthammer lamented in September 2008 “the paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.”

Yet, Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate and Ms. Palin’s own surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot (she writes that it felt “like a natural progression”) underscore just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.

Indeed Ms. Palin suggests that she and her husband, Todd, are ideally qualified to represent the Joe Six Packs of the world because they are Joe Six Packs themselves. “We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she writes in “Going Rogue.” “We know what it’s like to work union jobs, to be blue-collar, white-collar, to have our kids in public schools. We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

“Going Rogue” (written with an assist from Lynn Vincent, the editor of World, an evangelical magazine) is part cagey spin job, part earnest autobiography, part payback hit job. And its most compelling sections deal not with politics, but with Ms. Palin’s life in Alaska and her family. Despite an annoying tendency to gratuitously drop the names of lots of writers and philosophers — in the course of this book, she quotes or alludes to Pascal, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Paine, Pearl S. Buck, Mark Twain and Melville — she does a lively job of conveying the frontier feel of the 49th state, where television broadcasts were tape-delayed in her youth and they shopped for clothes “via mail order through the Sears catalog,” where “we don’t have big league professional sports teams or many celebrities (except famous dog mushers),” and so regard politics as a local sport.

The self-portrait created in these pages recalls the early profiles of Ms. Palin that appeared in the wake of her debut on the national stage: a frontierswoman who knows how to field dress a moose; a feisty gal with lots of moxie and pep; a former beauty queen with a George W. Bush-like aptitude for mangling the English language (the first paragraph of the book contains the phrase “I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier”). She talks about juggling motherhood with politics, and gives a moving account of learning that her son Trig would be born with Down syndrome.

She recalls her initial feeling — “I don’t think I could handle that” — and her “sudden understanding of why people would grasp at a quick ‘solution,’ a way to make the ‘problem’ just go away,” though her own pro-life stance would deny women the choice of having an abortion.

Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

Just as Ms. Palin’s planned book tour resembles a campaign rollout — complete with a bus tour and pit stops in battleground states — so the second half of this book often reads like a calculated attempt to position the author for 2012. She tries to compare herself to Ronald Reagan, by repeatedly invoking his name and record. She talks about being “a Commonsense Conservative” and worrying about the national deficit. And she attempts to explain, rationalize or refute controversial incidents and allegations that emerged during the 2008 race.

She says she “never sought to ban any books” as mayor of Wasilla, and in fact has always had a “special passion for reading.” She suggests that the $150,000-plus designer clothes were the campaign’s idea, that she and her family are actually frugal coupon clippers who shop at Costco. And she says she was manipulated into doing that famous series of Katie Couric interviews (which would do much to cement an image of her as an easily caricatured ignoramus) by Nicolle Wallace, a communications aide for the campaign, and that Ms. Couric just seemed to want “to frame a ‘gotcha’ moment.”

Along the way, Ms. Palin acknowledges that she is a busy, “got to go-go-go” sort of person — and for an average hockey mom, pretty ambitious. “As every Iditarod musher knows,” she writes of the famous Alaska dog-sled race, “if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”

Scary!

Kind of relieved I didn't enroll.

AFI, serving the cineastes of the world

American Film Institute's annual showcase of domestic and international movies opens this week despite financial pressures.

By John Horn

October 25, 2009

It was launched in the Rose Garden by President Lyndon B. Johnson to advance and preserve the art of the moving image. For decades, the American Film Institute thrived doing just that. Now, like almost every other nonprofit organization knocked sideways by the recession, AFI finds itself having to script its own comeback story.

Much of AFI's campus near Griffith Park has neither air conditioning nor heating. AFI's last televised Top 100 show lost more than $1 million, and the cable ratings for its Life Achievement Award are plunging. An ambitious, encyclopedic AFI directory of American movies still has four decades of films to catalog, and government support for the project has dried up.

If any organization needs to unwind in a movie theater for an hour or two, it's AFI -- and from Friday through Nov. 7, the institute can do just that with its annual AFI Fest, primarily playing at Grauman's Chinese Theater and Mann Chinese 6 theaters in Hollywood.

Unlike many other leading film festivals, AFI Fest, now in its 23rd year, is not interested in an onslaught of glitzy, star-filled premieres. Film distributors and sales agents do not converge on the festival to strike rich deals as they do at Sundance, Toronto and Cannes. And while AFI Fest (which is co-sponsored by The Times) has a handful of gala screenings -- Tom Ford's "A Single Man," Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" and Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" -- most of the festival's tickets were given away for free this year, with almost all screenings filling up just a few hours after tickets became available online.

"It was inspired by the times," says Bob Gazzale, AFI's president and chief executive officer. "If you can't look to the American Film Institute to open the doors to a movie theater, I'm not sure who you can look to." Gazzale says much of the lost revenue from ticket sales will be covered by underwriting from sponsor Audi. That said, the festival has reduced the number of features it is showing from 98 a year ago to 67 this year, and AFI Fest movies will be shown only once instead of enjoying multiple screenings.

"We wanted to figure out how we could get people excited about a celebration of film," says Rose Kuo, AFI Fest's artistic director. "The AFI has a mission to celebrate film artists. This is completely in line with that."

The festival is filled with some of the most acclaimed films from this year's more prominent film festivals, making for a weeklong primer in the best of world cinema.

AFI Fest's schedule includes Germany's "The White Ribbon" (winner of Cannes' Palm d'Or); the U.S. film "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" (Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Toronto and Sundance audience awards); Spain and Peru's "The Milk of Sorrow" (winner of Berlin's Golden Bear prize); Germany's "Everyone Else" (Berlin's Silver Bear prize); Iran's "About Elly"(Berlin's best director trophy); and China's "City of Life and Death" (San Sebastian's Golden Seashell award).

"Many of our audience members work in the industry, but a surprising number of them haven't seen these films," Kuo says of her programming philosophy. "We approached this as a survey of the year's most significant films. If you're going to make a Top 10 list, you have to see these movies."

While the town's other leading festival, summer's Los Angeles Film Festival, mixes high-profile studio films ("Public Enemies") with sometimes obscure independent dramas and documentaries ("Paper Man," "Bananas"), AFI Fest favors world cinema. "I think the city benefits from different festivals with different agendas spread out through the year," says Robert Koehler, the festival's programming director. "Our focus leans much more toward the international."

It's among the few distinctions between the annual festival and the heavily Americanist institute.

Since its founding in 1967, the AFI has focused its energies on three distinct but sometimes overlapping endeavors: preserving the nation's film heritage, training the next generation of filmmakers at its Los Angeles film school, and recognizing and celebrating U.S. film excellence through annual awards, tributes, screenings and festivals.

The AFI campus, adjacent to Griffith Park, has been home to some of the industry's most prominent filmmakers. AFI Conservatory (as the two-year film school is known) alumni include directors Ed Zwick ("Defiance"), Terrence Malick ("The Thin Red Line") and David Lynch ("Blue Velvet"); screenwriters Paul Schrader ("Taxi Driver"), Scott Frank ("Get Shorty") and Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich"); and producers Steve Golin ("Babel"), Marshall Herskovitz ("Blood Diamond") and Mark Waters ("(500) Days of Summer").

Even though the film school tuition (including housing and film production costs) tops $70,000 a year, the campus, which also houses AFI's administrative offices, needs millions in deferred maintenance and capital improvements. Many offices are oppressively hot in the summer and bone-chillingly frigid in the winter. Current staff members complain that the electrical system is so antiquated (the campus was formerly Immaculate Heart College) they can't run portable heaters and coffee makers at the same time without blowing a fuse.

While the 40-year-old conservatory is still among the nation's top film schools, even some AFI faculty members say it may no longer be considered in the same league (and certainly does not attract as many multimillion-dollar gifts) as similar M.F.A. programs at USC and UCLA. At the same time, Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts has poured a fortune into its new Orange County campus and may soon be a much closer AFI rival.

Gazzale and Nancy Harris, AFI's chief operating officer, concede that the campus needs work. "There will be a significant capital investment in this building," Gazzale says, noting that some work already has begun and that AFI's final, $500,000 payment on buying the campus will be made next year, freeing up some buildings and grounds capital. "We have work to do, and we're doing it."

In a potentially troublesome development, the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges has deferred its accreditation of the conservatory. Gazzale and Harris say they are confident the school will receive WASC's endorsement soon when it better understands the quality of AFI's students and their work after a WASC visit to AFI in November.

Gazzale says that even if AFI's air conditioning, soundproofing and electrical system is dodgy, its filmmaking tools -- such as cameras and editing bays -- are not.

"The equipment [the students] work on is the finest in the business," he says. Harris says Chapman "may have a better infrastructure and building" but adds that "I'd love to put our fellows up against theirs any day."

Not long after Gazzale replaced Jean Firstenberg in AFI's top spot in November 2007, AFI reorganized its staff to trim its payroll and eliminate redundancies. Last summer and fall, AFI eliminated 22 full-time positions while adding 10 new positions, for a total of 130 full-time employees (Firstenberg remains a consultant, earning $72,000 a year).

One of the hardest-hit departments was the AFI catalog. Having recently lost a two-year, $300,000 pledge for the catalog from the National Endowment for the Humanities, AFI eliminated five catalog positions, three of which were full time. Catalog executive editor and project director Patricia Hanson recently retired, but the AFI is looking to replace her, Gazzale and Harris say.

The catalog, started in 1968, represents a remarkable undertaking with a devoted fan base -- a 50,000-entry compendium of not only the detailed credits for every American feature since 1893, but also a repository of plot summaries and scholarly histories of those movies. Having once had as many as 11 researchers and editors, the catalog now has a full-time staff (counting Hanson's position) of three, currently finishing their review of films from 1975.

Over the next year, AFI will explore building an association of scholars (who may or may not be paid) to work on the catalog. "We want to build an academic network and say, 'Help us fulfill this promise,' " Gazzale says. "And the editing staff will grow." Plans call to add five full-time research assistants next year.

Although AFI's annual "Life Achievement Award" has moved from the popular USA Network to the lower-profile TV Land, it remains the institute's largest annual fundraiser. Thanks to donations and an unspecified license fee, the 2007 show, which honored Al Pacino, netted AFI about $2 million, while 2008's tribute to Warren Beatty brought in about $1.7 million, says Bruce Neiner, AFI's chief financial officer. July's tribute to Michael Douglas, which made around $1.6 million, was seen in about 500,000 households, a steep decline from previous years, and a collapse from 2002's honoring of Tom Hanks, seen in some 2.9 million households.

Because General Motors pulled out as a sponsor of the best-in-multiple-genres roundup "AFI's 10 Top 10," part of "AFI's 100 Years . . ." series, that 2008 CBS broadcast lost more than $1.1 million, Neiner says. AFI's annual revenues were $27.6 million in the 2007-08 fiscal year, the most recent figures available.

Tom Pollock, the former Universal Studios head who is vice chair of AFI's board of trustees, says that in difficult economic conditions AFI has fared better than several local arts organizations, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which suspended (then temporarily relaunched) its film screening program. While there have been AFI layoffs and pay freezes, he says, "Luckily, we haven't yet had to do any serious program cutting."

Pollock says that while AFI's endowment needs to grow by $50 million or more, the institute's most trying times are behind it.

"AFI is still a great organization," he says. "It's just struggling like everybody else in this economy. But it will come through with flying colors."

Cracks in the Future

By BOB HERBERT

New York Times Op-Ed Columnist

Berkeley, Calif.

While the U.S. has struggled with enormous problems over the past several years, there has been at least one consistent bright spot. Its system of higher education has remained the finest in the world.

Now there are ominous cracks appearing in that cornerstone of American civilization. Exhibit A is the University of California, Berkeley, the finest public university in the world and undoubtedly one of the two or three best universities in the United States, public or private.

More of Berkeley’s undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.’s than those at any other university in the country. The school is among the nation’s leaders in producing winners of the Nobel Prize. An extraordinary amount of cutting-edge research in a wide variety of critically important fields, including energy and the biological sciences, is taking place here.

While I was roaming the campus, talking to students, professors and administrators, word came that scientists had put together a full analysis and a fairly complete fossilized skeleton of Ardi, who is known to her closest living associates as Ardipithecus ramidus. At 4.4 million years of age, this four-foot tall, tree-climbing wonder is now the oldest known human ancestor.

Give Berkeley credit. The school’s Tim White, a paleoanthropologist, led the international team that worked for years on this project, an invaluable advance in human knowledge and understanding.

So it’s dismaying to realize that the grandeur of Berkeley (and the remarkable success of the University of California system, of which Berkeley is the flagship) is being jeopardized by shortsighted politicians and California’s colossally dysfunctional budget processes.

Berkeley is caught in a full-blown budget crisis with nothing much in the way of upside in sight. The school is trying to cope with what the chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, described as a “severe and rapid loss in funding” from the state, which has shortchanged Berkeley’s budget nearly $150 million this year, and cut more than $800 million from the higher education system as a whole.

This is like waving goodbye to the futures of untold numbers of students. Chancellor Birgeneau denounced the state’s action as “a completely irresponsible disinvestment in the future of its public universities.”

(The chancellor was being kind. Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes watching the chaos of California politicians trying to deal with fiscal and budgetary matters would consider “completely irresponsible” to be the mildest of possible characterizations.)

Berkeley is laying off staffers, reducing faculty through attrition and cutting pay. Student fees will no doubt have to be raised, and the fear is that if the financial crisis continues unabated it will be difficult to retain and recruit the world-class scholars who do so much to make the school so special.

Chancellor Birgeneau said he is optimistic that Berkeley will be able to maintain its greatness and continue to thrive, but he told me candidly in an interview, “It’s hard to see when we are going to get back to a situation where we can start rewarding people properly.”

We should all care about this because Berkeley is an enormous and enormously unique national asset. As a public university it offers large numbers of outstanding students from economically difficult backgrounds the same exceptionally high-quality education that is available at the finest private universities.

Something wonderful is going on when a school that is ranked among those at the very top in the nation and the world is also a school in which more than a third of the 25,000 undergraduates qualify for federal Pell grants, which means their family incomes are less than $45,000 a year. More than 4,000 students at Berkeley are from families where the annual income is $20,000 or less.

More than a third are the first in their families to attend a four-year college.

Berkeley is aggressively pursuing alternative funding sources. The danger is that as public support for the school declines, it will lose more and more of its public character. Substantially higher fees for incoming students would be the norm, and more and more students from out of state and out of the country (who can afford to pay the full freight of their education) would be recruited.

This would most likely hurt students from middle-class families more than poorer ones. Those kids are caught between the less well-off, who are helped by a variety of financial aid programs, and the wealthy students, whose families have no problem paying for a first-class college education.

The problems at Berkeley are particularly acute because of the state’s drastic reduction of support. But colleges and universities across the country — public and private — are struggling because of the prolonged economic crisis and the pressure on state budgets. It will say a great deal about what kind of nation we’ve become if we let these most valuable assets slip into a period of decline.

Final Two Days

Sunday, September 6 Seminar in Elks Park on "The Challenge of Portraying Complex Heroines on Screen." Speakers included Michael Lerner, Lone Sherfig, moderator Annette Insdorf, M. von Trotta and Brenda Blethyn

Monday, September 7 Labor Day Picnic Seminar on "The Edge of Humor." Speakers included moderator Anne Thompson, George Gittoes, Nicholas Cage, Jason Reitman and Paul Schnieder

On Sunday I woke up to catch the 8:30 screening of Haneke’s The White Ribbon, probably tied with Life During Wartime for the best film I’ve seen at the festival. It is a black and white film set in a German village prior to the first world war that has a more classical style compared to his other work. There’s no one else who depicts brutality, both visual and emotional, the way Haneke does. The White Ribbon is an excellent film, however I prefer his films that deal with contemporary life. For me those films provoke more thought and offer more insights. Afterwards I caught a few minutes of “The Challenges of Portraying Complex Heroines on Screen” seminar at Elks Park.

After work I went to see Samson and Delilah, the film that won the Camera d’Or at this years Cannes.

I hated it.

Not the way you hate an amateurish film that gives you a headache, but the way you hate a film that is a complete indulgence of a craft-less filmmaker. It has its merits. Great cinematography. The film is seamless, there aren’t any framing or editing mistakes that throw you out of the film. The problem is that I was never drawn into the story and then the film just dragged on and on. Kind of like the interweaving or nonlinear narrative films of the late nineties, these meditative almost-plotless films with non-actors are becoming a huge tiresome fad. When the hell did everyone think they can be Bresson. All these filmmakers are attempting to out due each other by taking this style of filmmaking to a new extreme. Samson and Delilah does so by presenting two aboriginal teenagers who rarely, almost never, speak. For some reason they don’t even speak their native aboriginal language. Many critics see this as one of the films strengths, it’s main virtue. I see it as a huge deficiency on the part of the director who clearly cannot write dialogue and I think the film suffers enormously from it. The story just doesn’t work. My main issue is with Delilah, who is set up as an independent, responsible, creative thinking teenage girl, which I thought was great and made me like her immediately. But when she runs off with Samson, who is her complete opposite, she inexplicably stays devoted to him after two horrendous violent episodes that leave her near death; and Samson does nothing to prevent or offer any help. (By the way, these two horrendous episodes are completely contrived; I don’t see how these two things could befall the same girl. It’s excessive and ridiculous. Absurd really.) The fact that she goes back to him is in complete conflict with the type of girl she is set up to be. What’s even more frustrating is that when she returns, she doesn’t even say anything because the whole ploy of the film is that these two characters don’t speak. What she went through demands an exchange, some kind of communication.

Then the film’s music was horrible, with the exception of the opening scene. It uses “When the money runs out” in the most cliché, sentimental way imaginable. In the end, the film simply wasn’t for me. This might be the film for those who like Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lance Hammer and even Carlos Reygadas, but not necessarily Bresson (who was brilliant.) It's interesting. There's an interview with Haneke in the Film Watch where names Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar as the film that changed his life. He says it "remains for me the most precious of all cinematic jewels. No other film has ever made my heart and head spin like this one. " Scott Foundas states that the influence of Bresson manifests itself in Haneke's work in many ways, but most of all in the way his films ask a "great many more questions than they answer about motives of human behavoir." I feel Haneke saw Bresson's films and acknowledge the great questions you can ask with films, others saw his films and acknowledged a cheap, economical way to make a film.

Samson and Delilah left me in a bad mood. I almost decided not to see Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank as I originally planned because I knew it would have a similar style as Samson and Delilah, but I went anyways. It was the first film by Andrea Arnold I had ever scene. It was good. I laughed to myself as the film went on because in some ways it is a ghetto version of An Education. Fish Tank is almost entirely hand held, shot on full frame 16mm. The cinematography is amazing, each frame could be its own perfect still image. The director must have been referencing photographers like Nan Goldin or Ryan McGinley. Michael Fassebender has a great role in the film. It’s a great depiction of a teenage girl, almost as if Dawn Wiener grew up in urban England.

I then rushed over the Gondola to see sneak preview of the newest Herzog film My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done? Herzog flew in from Venice to present the film along with two additional shorts. The first I don’t remember the title to but it was shot somewhere in Africa. The other was a short film by Ramin Bahrani titled “Plastic Bag” that Herzog narrates, playing the role of the plastic bag. I tried my best to stay awake for My Son, My Son. I really wanted to watch it because I think Michael Shannon is amazing. But I must of passed out during the opening sequence and then became conscious again at the closing credits. That happens to me every now and then. Oh well.

The final morning of the Festival, I debated between seeing the Viggo Mortensen tribute and the Daisan No Kagemusha: The Third Shadow Warrior, another Alexander Payne selection. I decided on the Mortensen tribute because the Third Shadow Warrior was screening all the way in Mountain Village. Additionally, I became a little exhausted of watching a film based on the rarity of it’s print. If you walk away from a film only being able to say “Well I’ll never be able to see that again,” it wasn’t really worth it and it’s a lame way to comfort yourself. I am guilty of that all the time. (I thrive off of the idea or potential of a film being amazing, it works out some of the time.) While watching his clip reel at the Viggo Tribute, I had totally forgot he was in Carlito’s Way, and he’s amazing in it. It really struck me how accomplished of an actor he is. His onstage interview was great, he mostly shared stories about his son and how he got involved in acting. When the interview concluded, John Hillcoat’s The Road was screened. The film was getting a lot of bad reviews from it’s premiere at Venice. I haven’t read them, but I think they might be right. I read the novel a couple years ago (which I enjoyed, but it's not McCarthy’s best) and for some reason the filmmakers decided to have the father narrate the story, which wasn’t how the book was told. I found it a little weird because I know that the father dies at the end, so it struck me as not the best approach (It worked in Sunset Blvd and Casino). The film has excessive flashbacks, the novel didn’t have as many. It is a very brutal story, but it seems like they made things more brutal than what they needed to be. Like the birth of the son. There’s a flashback of Chalize Theron standing up and screaming for her life during childbirth. It seemed a bit excessive and artificial. Since I knew the story and wasn’t that interested in how the film worked out, I left early to make it to the Labor Day Picnic at Town Park.

At the Picnic there was a seminar moderated by Anne Thompson titled “The Edge of Humor.” Speakers included George Gittoes, Nicholas Cage, Jason Reitman and Paul Schneider. These seminars are rarely informative as far as the topic goes, but they are great for personal anecdotes of the speakers.

The TBAs for Monday disappointed me. I put off seeing A Prophet to see the other films, hoping it would screen on the last day of the fest. It wasn’t and most of the films selected for TBAs I had already seen. So I went to the Great Expectations program of short films by non-student filmmakers. It’s always a big gamble to attend these screenings and this one didn’t pay off. The only notable short was called The Door, a film by an Irish filmmaker shot in the Ukraine concerning the effects of Chernobyl. The rest ranged from mediocre to horrible.

I didn’t want my Festival to end with the shorts program so I went to the outdoor screening of Jane Champion’s Bright Star. I withstood the cold weather as long as I could and enjoyed what I saw, but I gave in as the evening went on and the night grew colder.

In comparison to past Festivals, this year’s Telluride was my least favorite. I think overall 2009 is not the strongest year for films. The films I chose to attend (I felt) were safe bets as far as quality, but almost all of them under whelmed me. I’m still interested in seeing A Prophet, Farewell, The Last Station, The Miscreants of Taliwood, Vincere, Vision and Window. Hopefully they will be distributed. Unfortunately my work shifts coincided with most of the revival screenings, if I’m lucky I’ll be in the right place at the right time to see them. Back to Los Angeles. There’s a long list of September screenings I am eager to see there.

Interview

In front of the Palm Theatre, Telluride, CO, Thursday, September 3

Friends from San Francisco asked me to do a brief interview regarding my job at Telluride. My interview and others are here at SF360.org.