Top 10 of 2006: #8-#7

8. Volver. Aside from the five outstanding performances (I've singled out Penélope Cruz and Blanca Portillo, but kudos also to Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, and Yohana Cobo, as well as the more peripheral characters), I loved Volver for what it refused to become. There's a murder that fails to turn the film into a suspense film, a parent back from the dead who isn't interested in turning it into a ghost story, and a hunky film producer who can't edge his way into a romantic comedy; instead, it's a comedy-drama about women interacting with each other, via family and neighborhood relationships. It doesn't want to be any more than that, which makes it so refreshing: to see mature, engaging, well-written female characters who don't rely on men. Maybe it's more a comment on the sorry state of mainstream Hollywood film, but Volver's refusal to be about men was like a bolt of lightning. It's perfect in its own small, self-assured way.

7. Peep "TV" Show. As the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, Hasegawa, a professional voyeur in Tokyo, installs hidden cameras in people's houses and broadcasts the footage on a website called Peep TV Show, sharing space with footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and narratives of the hijackers. Moé, a "gothic Lolita," is intrigued by the site and joins him in his search for the "real" (or, after they start charging monthly service fees, REAL). In this shotgun-style (and at times incoherent) examination of post-9/11 angst, public grief, surveillance society, and the role of technology in simultaneously separating people and drawing them together, director Yutaka Tsuchiya uses guerilla-style video techniques to question our role as the voyeuristic audience. What we're seeing constantly shifts meaning as the "identities" of the cameras are revealed: webcams, hidden cameras, security cameras, still photos, and the filmmaker's supposedly invisible camera ebb and flow in prominence, and the characters' disconcerting tendency to stare into the lens blurs the line between performance and, for lack of a better word, "reality" (or at least the reality inside the film). Posted by mike, March 17, 2007 10:03 AM