It's Up! The Inaugural Onion A.V. Club Film Poll!

And here it is.

Congrats to Steve (with three entries!) and Greg for getting quoted. I think that's pretty damn cool. (And I fully expect to be reading Steve's blurbs in the Village Voice film poll one day.)

Here's my ballot and comments:

1. A History of Violence: The biggest clue to Tom Stall’s identity isn’t how he smoothly dispatches the two hoodlums at the beginning, but the cold way he puts a bullet into the back of the head of his incapacitated attacker. That no one (including me) notices this the first time speaks to the subtlety of Cronenberg’s critique and how inured we are to cinema’s history of violence.

2. The Devil’s Rejects: It looks like a grindhouse flick, feels like a grindhouse flick, and probably smells like a grindhouse flick. But behind the façade of this seemingly-inconsequential horror movie is the best articulation of my personal post-9/11 malaise: the crazies on both sides are in control and the rest of us are roadkill. And yet, Rob Zombie does something amazing – he gives us the self-righteous torture the Rejects “deserve” and asks us point-blank, “Does this make you feel better?” To his credit, it doesn’t.

3. Funny Ha Ha: Technically a 2003 film, but it played in Seattle this year, so I’m counting it. An astonishing debut feature from Andrew Bujalski, it’s the only film I’ve seen that really captures twenty-something ennui, complete with inarticulate longing and noncommittal commitments. If you’ve ever passive-aggressively stomped out a would-be suitor with trumped-up melancholy (or have been on the receiving end of such behavior), then it’s a goddamn documentary; if, on the other hand, the prevalence of “like” and “um” seems like a stylistic contrivance (or you actually, y’know, got shit done in your twenties), then go somewhere else.

4. Grizzly Man: This would’ve been fascinating enough if Herzog simply strung together Timothy Treadwell’s videos and provided the occasional contextual remark. Instead, Herzog interrogates Treadwell’s naif philosophy, debating it, judging it, through voiceover and (staged?) interviews with the people who knew Treadwell. While he ultimately finds Treadwell’s doe-eyed Urisdaephilia lacking, he’s able to find worth in his filmmaking, despite how the two are intimately connected.

5. Munich: Spielberg delivers the most mature film of his career since “Schindler’s List”, a terrific thriller and excellent treatise on the price of vengeance, and people bitch about the usual suspects: daddy issues, foregrounding of the theme, a somnambulant Eric Bana. (Well, maybe that last one’s deserved – wherefore art thou, Chopper?) Truth is, if this very European film was credited to a French or Polish genius, there’d be nary a peep.