Asking what films I've seen recently is a good way to wipe my brain clean. Once, in a job interview where it was clear the answer would determine my fate, all I could come up with was Calendar Girls, which would have been a poor choice even as a recent release, which it was not. Tabulation is not a strong suit. Rubrics wear me out. A recent report on people with brains like databases with total recall made me itch, and yet the chemistry made sense: An abundance of adrenaline caused ordinary events to imprint in their memories the way only extraordinary events -- or even amazing shots, bravura scenes, and other bits of movie magic -- do for the rest of us.
In sifting through the year in movies I tried an experiment in passivity, and tracked the films that came back to me in moments. In no particular order, these are the films -- and in some cases the moments -- that sped up my heart, slowed down my mind, and found a place to live in my imagination beyond 2010.
Sweetgrass
A total, circuit-breaking meltdown occurs deep into Sweetgrass, the deceptively languid, almost wordless chronicle of a pastoral ritual in Montana. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor follow several shepherds and their enormous flock of sheep along a 150-mile itinerary, and at one point the difficulty of the task starts to get to one of them. After almost an hour of sweet nothings and coos for his flock, the unseen shepherd lets loose a string of profanity so prolonged and innovative that it moves past mildly shocking into strangely affecting. The sheep, held in long shot, just keep going; life hasn't changed much for them in many centuries, which is part of the film's methodical, zen appeal. And yet it was about to: Sweetgrass documents the end of an era that seems simpler mostly from a distance, as that fed-up, cursing shepherd confirms.
Inside Job
The opening shot in Sweetgrass -- of a sheep chowing on a bunch of grass at length before turning its marvelously diffident gaze to the camera -- is one of the year's best. Aside from leaving no doubt about whether a sheep might contain multitudes, the shot establishes subtleties of tone, theme, and form with ingenious simplicity. The opening of Inside Job, a sort of worldly counterpart to Sweetgrass, did something similar with its opening sequence -- a brash, glittery, urbane cruise through slickest Manhattan set to Peter Gabriel's ironic 80's anthem, "Big Time." Much to my delight, Charles Ferguson lets the entire song play, perhaps as a pre-emptive salve for the dejecting debrief of the financial crisis and its villains to come. It's necessary viewing in the vein of so much pedagogic modern documentary, and yet the queasy exhilaration of that opening balances Inside Job with a blast of style.
Black Swan
The only thing better than a clutch opening is a killer final shot. For me they can mitigate a disproportionate number of reservations about the film that came before. On first viewing I had one toe-shoe out the door throughout Black Swan. It wasn't until that ultimate, breathless swan dive that I climbed in completely and then pitched off the high board right behind damaged, demented Nina (Natalie Portman). It was corny, it was crazy, it was crusted with cliché, and I don't care. Darren Aronofsky pulled off a minor miracle finding an ending for his film that managed to galvanize its themes and threads without closing off any of their interpretive possibilities.
The Ghost Writer
Some films suggest themselves foremost as textures, and for me Roman Polanski's latest political thriller is silky silk silk silk. Its story of a young writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to ghost the memoirs of a British former Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) with a clouded reputation is perfectly tailored into ripples and stretches -- some luxurious and lax, some pulled taut, but all so smoothly of a piece you could sigh with a kind of sartorial pleasure.
I Am Love
Another -- and more obviously -- sensual gambit pays off for La Tilda and Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Where Polanski derives his palpable cool from pure cinema storytelling (a strategy that culminates in that devastating, dark, elusive final shot), Guadagnino seems to want to burrow past the flesh of his main character, a kept Russian matriarch in Milan, and suggest what's happening beneath her skin. Impressionistic in the extreme, it grafts arty first-person flourishes onto a fiercely classical, melodramatic portrait of infidelity and betrayal. Both Polanski and Guadagnino go a little ga-ga for Hitchcock in their respective films, to different effect but similarly strikingly similar advantage. The sequence following Swinton as she follows the tentative object of her obsession through the streets, shops, and alleys of an Italian town makes pure and disorienting desire as visceral as a killer case of Vertigo.
The Social Network
A peerlessly smooth ride with superb suspension, The Social Network is one of the few films this year that I remember chiefly for its capacity to transport me from the world that requires me to remember things. For that alone I was thrilled by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's précis of the making of Facebook and its founder; for a film about almost absurdly recent history, it sure felt like an old-fashioned yarn. Tightly wound and brilliantly crafted, I admired the film more for its solutions to small, stubborn filmmaking problems than I did its engagement with big themes, which is negligible. Ironically, without the centrifugal, absorbing force of Jesse Eisenberg as the fascinating but formidable void at the film's heart, I think that lack would be more keenly felt.
127 Hours
For a film about one of the most godawful things you can imagine happening, 127 Hours is surprisingly painless. Faint praise perhaps, but Danny Boyle climbs so deep inside the experience of Aron Ralston (James Franco), a climber who becomes trapped in crevasse and must amputate his own arm to survive, that he generates an energy that seems to operate above the horror of the situation. As a character Aron is drawn roughly enough to accommodate ample, empathic mapping -- he's a young man of arrogant, deflective independence, with delusions of omnipotence -- but Franco infuses him with a singular tenderness and personality. The final scene, in which he is reduced to wretched vulnerability and struggles to scream the words he seems to have been avoiding all his life -- help me -- is a brilliant example of theme, style, and story working together to pretty much topple you over.
Tiny Furniture/Greenberg
Misanthropes had an equal opportunity year, and combined these two films impressed upon me the difficulty of rendering we-all-know-this-person character studies with sui generis style. Lena Dunham's coyly autobiographical post-grad thesis infused a portrait of aimlessness and anomie with an authority rare not just for her age but for the sub-genre. We're most accustomed to men claiming this kind of territory for themselves, and yet with Greenberg Noah Baumbach refused to romanticize his title character, or make his problems any bigger -- or any smaller -- than they actually were. Both are triumphs of small-scale storytelling, which is to say they marshal some pretty painful specificity to access a larger truth.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
A street artist and stuntster whose persona is defined by the absence of persona, Banksy went through the art world looking glass a few years ago when his iconoclastic work became part of the excess he was skewering. He responded by making one of the debut films of the year: Exit Through The Gift Shop is a testament to his ambivalence about success and a perfectly calibrated response to the inquisitive furor surrounding his mystique. That his aesthetic is easily appropriated is part of Gift Shop's mordant self-reflexivity; anyone can do it, and anyone does. Having satisfied the old "But is it art?" cranks--for better and worse--"Who is Banksy?" is now the main question bound up in the artist's work. The director teases out that question by appearing in the film as a hooded cipher with a distorted voice before offering his heart-of-the-matter reply: Who isn't?
(Adapted from an Artist of the Year piece for City Pages.)
Other notables: Splice, True Grit, Carlos, Bluebeard, Youth in Revolt, Chloe, Dogtooth.