I'm a weeper. Crying at the movies comes so naturally to me, I do not my trust my tears. I have been moved to tears at good movies as much as I have cried at calculated, mediocre movies. My tear glands are that gullible, yes. But the rest of me knows the difference. Good movies do not just make me weep, they also leave me shaken, as if a couple of my organs have changed positions. Some stay on my mind for a long time, others make me want to watch them a second time. Here's my list of the year's best:
1. A History Of Violence
2. Sympathy For Lady Vengeance
3. The Hidden Blade
4. 3-Iron
5. The Wayward Cloud
5 1/3. King Kong
5 2/3. The Hand
6. Ydessa, The Bears And Etc
1. I don't know what it says about me that the top three are either violent, about vengeance or both. But David Cronenberg's A History Of Violence - a taut turn-on of a movie in which a gentle, married guy (Viggo Mortensen) may or may not have had a homicidal past - was so powerful, I didn't know how to tell other people about its power. The most I could manage was, "It's very good. Viggo's very good..." It's very, very good. Mr Mortensen's very, very good.
2. When revenge is your name and your game, you are a person who insists on living in the past. So it makes perfectly poetic sense that in Park Chan Wook's Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, a would-be avenging angel calls a meeting in a classroom with the parents of children who were murdered by her enemy, they get a class debate going on how to kill the murderer and after the deed is done, they sheepishly pose for a class photograph.
3. Yamada Yoji's The Hidden Blade has, for my money, the most quietly astounding assassination scene of the year.
4. The next two belong on my dream double bill of silent love stories. In Kim Ki Duk's 3-Iron, a wordless, homeless man roams Seoul with a woman he has rescued from her abusive spouse, occupying the homes of people who are away on trips, never speaking - ghostlike. From broken appliances to prized golf clubs, objects are as much a part of the movie as people. But by focusing on the physical, Mr Kim somehow finds the metaphysical.
5. In Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, a porn actor and his love traipse through Taipei silently, joyously. They don't speak but they do lip-sync and dance in musical montages.
5 1/3. Peter Jackson's King Kong, in which an ape falls wordlessly for a human actress, might have made it a triple bill. But two-thirds of the movie are too noisy, too Jurassic Park...
5 2/3. Clothes are sex, they truly are. In Wong Kar Wai's exquisite, erotic short, The Hand, tailor meets girl, tailor doesn't get girl but tailor gets to dress girl up.
6. Agnes Varda's new short, Ydessa, The Bears And Etc, is a provocative, playful piece about a bizarre art exhibition which consists of thousands of photographs of people with teddy bears. Girls with bears. Boys with bears. Naked women with bears. Nazi men with bears. Boys pointing toy guns at bears. Et cetera. Armed with a camera and a curious mind, Ms Varda, 77, is having some serious fun as she explores the deceptively innocent display of photographs. She's my heroine.
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