Up the Yangtze, The Edge of Heaven, Burn After Reading
Don’t ask me to pick between the following flicks, which tie for my #8 slot.
8. Up the Yangtze
The recently concluded Beijing Olympics allowed China to show the rest of the world how they they’ve adapted and prepared for life in the 21st century. But as Yung Chang’s insightful documentary shows, the country’s quick march towards modernization has left many of its citizens behind. Traveling up China’s famed Yangtze river to the site of the Three Gorges Dam, one of the world’s biggest and most controversial engineering projects, Chang focuses on two young employees of a tourist ship, who are both trying to take advantage of the new economic boom. One is an arrogant college-aged boy raised in an atmosphere of comfort and privilege and the other is a teenage girl whose poverty-stricken family is being displaced from their home on the banks of the Yangtze by the dam project. If you’re at all interested in learning more about the world’s next big superpower–and considering this country’s current economic climate, how can you not be?–Up the Yangtze is essential viewing.
The Edge of Heaven
German/Turkish director Fatih Akin is quickly emerging as one of contemporary cinema’s best storytellers. Like his previous film, 2004′s richly complex love story Head-On, The Edge of Heaven is a sprawling tale involving a large cast of characters whose lives end up connecting in unexpected ways. Just when you think you’ve figured out exactly where the narrative is going, Akin throws a curveball that forces you to re-evaluate everything you’ve seen up to that point. But these plot twists never feel cheap or exploitative; instead, they deepen the drama and keep you glued to your seat, eager to see where the film will take you next.
Burn After Reading
In their typically perverse fashion, the Coen Brothers follow up the overly serious (and, for my money, overly praised) Oscar-winning chase movie No Country for Old Men with one of the loosest, silliest and most enjoyable pictures of their careers and the closest I’ve seen a pair of American filmmakers come to producing a classic screwball farce in a long while. A hilarious send-up of grim spy movies like the Jason Bourne series and Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies as well as the country’s post-9/11 climate of paranoia, Burn After Reading is overflowing with instantly quotable bits of dialogue (“I thought you might be worried about the security…of your shit,” “Appearances can be deceptive”) and endearingly goofy performances from an all-star ensemble that includes Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and J.K. Simmons, who delivers the best closing line of any movie this year. I know this will be heretical in some quarters, but as far as I’m concerned, Burn After Reading is a better, funnier movie than the Coen’s beloved Big Lebowski.
