Salon.com > Directors of the Decade

Image of the decade: Osama and the towers

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:20:00 +0000

The image of the burning towers defined this decade. It dominated waking and sleeping life, political debates and Sunday dinners, birthday parties and weddings and funerals, for a solid year, maybe two, then lurked in the background for the rest of this decade, haunting elections and reelections, military debacles and constitutional fights. And it forced every artist in every medium to start each new piece by first asking if the work was meant to confront the image of the burning towers or deliberately avoid it (avoidance is also a response).

The image of the burning towers loomed front-and-center in antiwar documentaries, morose battlefield thrillers and home-front dramas and jingoistic “Why We Fight” military action pictures. It hid in the shadows of so-called torture porn, a genre infatuated with implacable evil and helpless fear. It was answered with revenge-themed thrillers and epic fantasies -- popcorn pictures that treated evil as a real thing, a demonic force that must be fought. It lurked between the lines of TV’s most acclaimed long-form dramas, which created whole communities and then studied the moral codes and choices of their inhabitants. And you saw it in nine years’ worth of breaking news coverage, partisan talk shows and political commercials -- many of which dealt, directly or obliquely, with the burning towers, wars fought in response to the burning towers, the relative correctness of constitutionally suspect laws passed to prevent more towers from burning. And you saw it in absentia -- in TV shows, novels and comic books, songs and video games that made a point of not acknowledging the burning towers because, for God’s sake, there had to be safe harbors somewhere.

Directors of the decade: No. 1: Charlie Kaufman & David Chase

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:31:00 +0000

David Chase, the creator of HBO's "The Sopranos," directed just two installments of the series' eight-year run, the pilot and the finale. Charlie Kaufman is mainly known as a screenwriter and has directed one theatrical feature, "Synecdoche, New York." Why are two people known mainly as writers sharing the top slot on this list of the decade's most important directors?

They're here because they spent the decade working within the same entertainment industry that otherwise prizes reassuring clichés and flashy stupidity, and produced work that was more compelling and unified than the work of all but a handful of full-time movie directors. They're here because their visions kicked down the doors of the audience's and the industry's preconceptions and showed them what's possible. They're here because their insights into human nature (not coincidentally the title of one of Kaufman's scripts) are so sharp and evocative that when we want to remember what it meant to be alive in the aughts, we'll only need to watch an episode of "The Sopranos" or a movie written by Kaufman and it will all come flooding back.

Directors of the decade: No. 2: Miyazaki & Pixar

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000

In the moments before the January 2001 New York Film Critics Circle got under way, the winner of the group's best-actor award, "Cast Away" star Tom Hanks, stood at the center of a circle of journalists and industry colleagues shaking hands and making small talk when a party guest approached, removed a microcassette recorder from his coat pocket and played a tape of his toddler-age child reciting a couple of Cowboy Woody's lines from "Toy Story 2."

"Yes, indeed," Hanks said. "I am America's babysitter."

He was only partly right. Thanks to repeat showings of the "Toy Story" films on DVD and cable, Hanks' animated alter ego has doubtless mesmerized millions of tots for untold numbers of hours. But America's true babysitter is Hanks' employer on the "Toy Story" films, Pixar, along with the other animation houses, including Disney and DreamWorks, that have competed for pieces of the family entertainment business that Pixar has dominated since "Toy Story 2" came out a decade ago.

Directors of the decade: No. 3: The Coen brothers

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Looking back over Joel and Ethan Coen's run of work this decade — an output that produced such hits, conversation pieces and headscratchers as "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "The Man Who Wasn't There," "The Ladykillers," "Intolerable Cruelty," "No Country for Old Men," "Burn After Reading" and "A Serious Man" — I'm struck not just by its diversity, ambition and sense of craft but by its sincere engagement with the most basic and important struggles in life.

Directors of the decade: No. 4: The Dardenne brothers

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:30:00 +0000

So much of modern cinema is built on visual flourishes and technological gimmicks that it's easy to forget that the most enthralling special effect of all is the sight of characters moving through space, their body language, facial expressions and mundane actions telling you what they believe and feel. The Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne — writer-directors of "The Son" (2002), "L'Enfant" ("The Child," 2005) and last year's "Lorna's Silence" (2008), believe this, and they've created a distinctive aesthetic around their conviction. They tend to tell stories about poor or working-class people. They employ long takes, existing locations, ambient sound and natural (or natural-seeming) light to connect the characters to their surroundings, and emphasize how the characters' physical environment and social conditioning shape their personalities and affect (sometimes dictate) their choices.

Directors of the decade: No. 5: Steven Spielberg

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Alfred Hitchcock plus Walt Disney equals Steven Spielberg. That equation — offered by a friend of mine who's an admirer of all three — is a decent starting place to describe the director of some of the most popular films ever made. Spielberg has Disney's business sense and uncanny knack for conjuring childlike awe and delight, plus Hitchcock's fondness for pushing visceral buttons and somehow making the experience more delightful than assaultive. But the equation doesn't adequately describe Spielberg's technical sophistication, narrative chops and uncanny popular touch, or his versatility; "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," "Minority Report," "Catch Me If You Can," "War of the Worlds," "Munich" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" are as arresting and imaginative (though not as widely satisfying, especially the last one) as his run of work in ... well, I started to write "the 1970s," until I remembered that Spielberg wasn't exactly coasting in the '80s or '90s, either.

Directors of the decade: No. 6: Michael Moore

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Michael Moore is the only documentary filmmaker besides Ken Burns the average American has heard of, and he’s more of an active presence in American life than Burns, because even when he's not making or promoting a new film, he's on TV and the Internet beating the drum for a cause or tormenting the foes of all he deems good and decent. He is a media-age phenomenon as well as a filmmaker, his presence on the pop culture radar screen a life-as-mass-media-performance-art-project in the vein of previous practitioners, some important, others merely shameless: Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Tiny Tim.

And whether you think Moore is a brave soul fighting the power or a self-aggrandizing blowhard who’s mainly selling himself, it’s clear he has a knack for insinuating himself into the head space of all sorts of people -- those who have no opinion on him, those who are glad he’s alive, and those who fantasize about pouring a vat of beef stew over his head and tossing him into a pit full of wolverines. I suspect Moore’s highly subjective, emotion-driven filmmaking and his career-long interweaving of self-promotion and self-expression (which started back in 1989 with his anti-General Motors jeremiad "Roger & Me") will one day be seen as epitomizing aspects of life in this grim, weird decade, just as Hunter S. Thompson’s song-of-myself political writing helped future generations understand the '70s.

Directors of the decade: No. 7: Steven Soderbergh

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

Steven Soderbergh has directed 17 features and produced two TV series in 10 years, often working simultaneously as director, producer, co-writer, cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard). The sheer volume of his output, coupled with his technical daring, formal playfulness and versatility, beg a number of questions. To wit:

Is Soderbergh a great director making movies in order to explore life, art and his own tangled self, or a man who struggles to find things to say in order to justify making movies? Is Soderbergh's work united by strong thematic and conceptual threads or by sheer enthusiasm? How is it possible that Soderbergh could be so prolific without turning into a hack? Can any man this fearsomely productive have anything resembling an actual life? Or is the distinction between an actual life and a filmed life more or less moot in an age of surveillance, media and society-wide navel-gazing, an age in which every corner of reality has an aspect of the virtual? And if Soderbergh were ordered by some higher power to go 12 months without picking up a camera, would he emerge a stronger, deeper and more emotionally accessible filmmaker, or be found dead of liver failure in a skid row motel, the room's TV screen endlessly replaying the DVD menu for Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt"?

Directors of the decade: No. 8: Robert Zemeckis and Wes Anderson

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:30:00 +0000

When Orson Welles first stepped onto the set of "Citizen Kane," he exclaimed, "This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!" Think about that quote the next time you happen across Robert Zemeckis' "Polar Express" or Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited." While drastically different in tone, style and story, both features are built around characters taking a spiritual journey by rail. They're about as personal and obsessive as expensive Hollywood movies can get.

And taken together, they tell us a quite a bit about the state of the auteur in the age of digital technology. Cinema, like every art form, has always had an aspect of omnipotence. Art lets man play God -- or at the very least return to a childlike state of openness that lets the imagination run free. And many of the technological changes that marked this decade in film were all about building a bigger and better train set. From the use of CGI to create fairy tale landscapes and grotesque monsters in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the "Star Wars" prequels, to David Fincher adding and subtracting years from Brad Pitt's face in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," flights of fancy don't seem so fanciful anymore.

Directors of the Decade No. 9: The sensualists

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:17:00 +0000

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in "Stagecoach," and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in "The Third Man." -- Walker Percy, "The Moviegoer" (1961)

The poignancy of that quote comes from the implication that the novel’s hero, Binx Bolling, is so alienated from his existence that films feel more real to him than life. But certain filmmakers -- I call them sensualists -- go Walker Percy one better. Through boldly expressive shots, cuts, sound cues and music, they suggest that we experience movies as moments because we experience life that way, too.

Directors of the decade: No. 10 Michael Bay

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:40:00 +0000

"Go! Go! Go!" "Incoming!" "Hit the deck!" WwwwwsshhhhhhhhSSHSHSHSHSH---KER-BLOOOOOM! "Lock and load!" 'Get some!" BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA! Bleee-OWWW! BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA! "Aim for the gas tank!" BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA! Ker-BLANG! Splut! Gooooooshhh -- KER-BLOOOOOOM! "Yeahhhh!" "Woooo-hoooo!"

What Michael Bay movie is that from?

In spirit, all of them. But to truly experience the above you'd need to read it while riding a roller coaster. The car would have to be equipped with strobe lights, sparklers, a half-dozen monkeys battering you about the head and shoulders with ping-pong paddles and a boombox blasting the "Here comes the cavalry!" orchestral stylings of Bay's court composer, Hans Zimmer. The director of "Pearl Harbor" (2001), "Bad Boys II" (2003), "The Island" (2005), "Transformers" (2007) and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (2009) doesn't make movies, he makes rides. He's the filmmaker every studio boss dreams of -- the director as adrenaline pusher. He has a facile eye, staging terrific one-off sight gags (transfusion blood stored in Coke bottles in "Pearl Harbor"; the mini-droids morphing from kitchen appliances and Sam's brief trip to robot heaven in "Transformers 2") and tossing off dozens, even hundreds of gorgeous widescreen tableaux that most filmmakers would be lucky to compose once in a career.