I’m late to write about my impressions of the year 2012, not because I’ve been busy but because I should be busy and somehow a sense of guilt about it prevents me from doing something as egotistical and pedestrian as writing my personal thoughts about those 366 days filed under 2012. Or perhaps I just feel that writing on my blog is just low-priority work disguised as leisure. Or perhaps I feel only twelve people will actually read this, and none of them will be any of the persons I enjoy imagining doing so.

And I’m annoyed I’m writing on my old netbook because my home computer died last weekend. Not a good moment because my PhD requires stuff done. The fucker.

But I digress. Even though it had its moments, 2012 was a shitty year. Even though I try not to mention it to my international readers, lest I be interpreted as belligerant and/or depressing, know this: the Long Depression — that is, structural socio-economical Crisis — got real here in Portugal. I’m actually lucky to have a part-time teaching job which requires me to take a PhD I’ll have to pay for. I’m lucky to be able to pay for a small studio where I can work and study, and that my parents can help with the other things I can’t afford. I’m 33, and like most of my friends my age I’m stuck with little perspectives. And the fear of unemployment and the little money due to frozen wages and rising taxation and the feeling one’s work became an auction won by the lowest bidder while empathy is rarer as selfishness, not selflessness, is generated by and feeds The Crisis, all that is on my mind as I wake up every morning. Lonely mornings. 366 of those don’t make a good year.

And why? Because of turbo-capitalism, because of Euro-banksters, and because of what can only be Northern/Central European governments’ climate envy and racism (an ugly word, I know, but how else to explain the beautifully orchestrated media campaign to convince Southern Europeans they brought this on themselves because they are lazy, when they actually work more hours for less pay, less perks and more taxes?). And obviously, because of those among ourselves (starting with our turbo-liberal — that is, Social Darwinist — government) who honestly or cynically believe such bullshit, that we must suffer for our sins, however factually unspecified those sins are. And there are lots of shit-believers, because The Crisis is actually a Cold Civil War, with external interferences and profiteering like all civil wars, therefore a Civil War indeed. Ongoing in 2013.

Fuck it.

In 2012 I fell in love; things didn’t work out but I loved!

I feel I’m a wiser person. Not always a good thing, but its own reward neverthless.

I made cool stuff: directed a film, released two shorts to the Public Domain. And I learned enough technical stuff to make my geeky self happy.

My friends were my friends and were my friends. That is incredibly important. And even though at my age it is getting difficult, I think I made new friends — and I’m not talking about Facebook.

In 2012 I watched some great, great films: Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, Miguel Gomes’ Tabu, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist and what must have been my favourite Bond movie, Sam Mendes’ Skyfall. But my two favourite movies of the year came right at the end of the year: the powerful Detachment by Tony Kaye and Leos Carax’s fantastically charming weirdfest Holy Motors. Holy Something, indeed!

2012 was also the year I rediscovered music thanks to (advertising alert) Vodafone.fm, a radio station I got in the habit of listening to while driving and manages to have a playlist that doesn’t prompt me to switch channels every other song (something we in Porto had lost in the late 1990s and I thought would never come back). Here’s a beautiful automated medley of my favourite songs of the year, courtesy of This is My Jam.

And in 2012 I read David Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. That book is a keeper.

A few hours ago I went to the movies for the first time in 2013. I watched Michael Haneke’s Amour, the 2012 Palme d’Or at Cannes and a wonderful film — one of the saddest I have ever seen. And yet another item that underscores my growing realization that being a busy person is worthless, working a lot on stuff is worthless, if you prioritize that over the people in your life, if you value the bustle above the building of relationships and friendship and love (and if you don’t want to just take it from me, go read Tim Kreidler’s The Busy Trap, who puts it a lot better than I do). I do want my PhD and I am driven to do stuff. But if I’m going to choose a future regret, between failing a deadline for a paper and failing to accept a coffee date, I know which regret I’ll choose. If this makes me a lazy Southern European, so be it: I choose love.

So we have come to this: twenty-twelve. That year.

In which the world is supposed to end (as pictured yesterday), the Mayan myth getting some traction here because the future seem pretty bleak in this old and impoverished southern European economy, a feeling opposite to the innocent optimism of the previous apocalypse, during the Y2K Belle Époque. The consensus here is there’s not much to look forward to in 2012, except for inflation, unemployement, crappy digitally-televised Olympics (the analogue TV blackout is due in a couple of weeks), emigration, government and citizens alike being dicks, a slightly higher rate of civil unrest, a slightly lower rate of meals to be had in restaurants, bond market bondage being equated with ‘freedom’: serious problems in the First World, in which percentage points, rather than orders of magnitude, mean the End.

Of course, none of this will go as planned, not even the Euro or Mayan apocalypses (apocalypsii?). So there’s no reason to bother making lists of resolutions or go about planning stuff (suggestion: listen to this). 2011 taught us that: it was the strangest year on record. I won’t even go and repeat last year’s mediocre excercise of reviewing a full 365 days as if they were a record album or a movie to be digested. But if I did, I’d rate 2011 with five stars. Despite having spent the summer in bad health, despite the precarity of my work and the freelancing troubles, despite the illnesses of close relatives and the troubles of close friends, despite the melancholy in the morning and the inadequate relationships and the heartbreaks. Despite the laziness, the many productive hours wasted on crappy computer games, the fear of being sincere in doomed romances, and all the times I didn’t even try. Because I’ll remember little of this as being 2011. What I’ll remember is the sublime, unscripted weirdness. Consider the evening of April 6th, a date I find easy to recall as it is my birthday, as a scale model for all of 2011:

While having dinner with friends in a restaurant downtown, there’s this sudden announcement the IMF is bailing out Portugal. People’s smartphones are produced out of their pockets (we had, and still have, smartphones, get it?), 3G internet used to summon the mobile webpages of newspapers, fact-checking — yes, Portugal is getting ‘help’ from the IMF (in the form of a big loan the economy — meaning us, the working people — won’t be able to pay). The girl I was seeing at the time had to wake up very early the next day and had to leave the restaurant soon after the meal was over (another crazy detail — I was seeing someone at the time), so I left the restaurant for a few minutes to walk her to her car, and as I came back to rejoin my friends I already sensed this palpable but yet-understated hysteria, as if a carnival would start to unfold later that evening. It was a very hot evening — about thirty degrees Celsius, in April! — and, as our party left the restaurant after a couple of drinks and went for further drinks in bars nearby, we all had this shared feeling of “let’s spend all our money today because we’ll all be poor tomorrow”, the drunken circularity of which you have to admire. Walking in the streets, our party wasn’t the only party not minding the sidewalks. It was a Wednesday. Later that night, I met a friend in an equaly advanced state of drunkeness at a club, and I spent a good deal of time listening to his awesome narration of the most disgusting and gory parts in A Serbian Film.

Just consider for a little while the following impressions, all co-existing in space, time and mind: a oral history of Serbian extreme gore, the IMF bailout, the heat (when I took a taxi home at about 5am, I was still in t-shirt, carrying my jacket as a twisted knot in my arm), the binge drinking. And the awareness that the Belle Époque was finally truly over, that job precarity (eg. my not having a contract despite working at the same place for seven years now) was not the past, the present, but the future as well, and that we might as well live that present evening — listening to fragmented accounts, voices like random radio chatter, of what the Finance Minister had said, if the PM had been contradicted & etecetera — and ask for a shot of Bushmills if one could still pay for it.

That day was hyperreal. Anyway, the next day it became pretty obvious things wouldn’t go as expected, either for better or for worse. People’s ways of life didn’t come to a sudden stop as the hot sun rose that morning. There are still dinners in restaurants (fewer — or far fewer) to be had, extravagant gadgets and other toys are still bought and sold, some people lost their jobs while others got raises. I have close friends who were forced to go back to their parents’, while others moved into a bigger apartments with their partners and their kids went to kindergarten. But still, the overall feeling of 2011 is indeed depressive, that injustice and overall stupidity were on the rise in this country. The expectation for 2012 is that the austerity forced from Above will do no good, and may in fact force good people into doing things they are not supposed to in a healthy society: leave the country or fight the power(s).

Then again, consider that week in November: I had been well down in the dumps, counting evey day until that Tuesday when I’d get my first paycheck of the school year. The day before, I was penniless and attending a meeting concerning a play I was going to make video for. As I search my backpack’s pockets for a scrap of paper in which to write a quick note, a 50 euro bill comes out. I had stashed it there for safety before the summer and had completely forgotten about it. I called a close friend and invited her for dinner that night. On me. I had had to share that good fortune, and taste a bit of luxury after weeks on a tight budget. The very next day, as some kind of karmic reward, my paycheck has a significant raise — which I had actually expected last year (as finishing my Master’s degree had brought me to a new carreer position), but after getting no pay increase then I became cynical about it and didn’t expect it in the current ‘austerity’ climate. Feeling pleased about myself (even if you think I’m a shallow person for letting pecuniary rewards influence my self-esteem, the truth is, they did), I invited a girl I had met a few days before to go out with me the next weekend, and she replied she’d be delighted. We started dating but things didn’t last, and we parted ways after a couple of weeks. But despite that, if I could just capture the feeling of hope, the knowing things were going to be all right and that we’d get through these troubled times, the expectant happiness, all the optimism I felt during that week in a bottle, I would take a sip of it every day.

Despite it being 2011. Despite the IMF, the troikas, the precariousness, the expensive rents, the price hikes. Despite the Arab Spring going bad. Despite the populist Eurocrats, despite the US Republicans, despite our new Prime-Minister, the old Prime-Minister, and the people who vote in hate of a candidate. Despite Islamic terrorism, despite right-wing terrorism, and the jornalists and politicians who blame both on immigrants. Despite Obama being a letdown, despite Merkel and Sarkozy. Despite the easily offended and the eagerly offended. Despite censorship. Despite the thieves, despite the police, despite the politicians who blame everything on authority and the politicians who blame eveything on the poor. Despite earthquakes, despite floods, despite the heat and the freezing cold. Despite oil, coal and gas, despite nuclear power, despite the villages flooded by dams and the birds killed by wind farms, despite solar power and the exotic materials, toxic chemicals and the energy wasted in building batteries and panels. Despite the infinitely regressive ecologists who will never be satisfied. Despite anxiety, despite fear, despite suspictions. Despite fashion, despite technolust, despite gluttony. Despite the hypocrites and despite those who are bad at simple math:

When you feel you are worth something, this all goes away. This is something all leaders and managers must know; this is something all lovers and friends must know.

For 2012, I expect the unexpected: the truly unexpected.

Ten Myths About Introverts. As an introvert myself, I definitely vouch for the article. Too often I felt part of some unrecognized minority and struggled to make myself understood. Most extroverts, like History-writing victors, seem unable to consider others might have different interests, tastes and reactions. ···

Work has led me away from the Video Editing business in the last few months, so I was a bit surprised (and then again, not) the latest version of Apple Final Cut Pro (dubbed ‘X’) is rubbish. I haven’t used it or seen it in use yet, but the reported loss of backward-compatibility and external monitoring are indeed unacceptable. So great a Fail, it’s mainstream-worthy: here’s Conan O’Brien on the subject. ···

The Resume is Dead, the Bio is King. I’d certainly hope so, but this rests on the assumption people who hire are, like, readers. The reapparance of a certain CV-optimization industry (which reeks of SEO-for-people sleaze) gives me great doubts. Rita Falcão ···

How to Land your Kid in Therapy, a great article about the perils of overprotective parenting. Being single and child-less, this is normally not the kind of thing I’d post about or read from start to finish, except that early on the author touches a very important subject: that parents (and I’d say, teachers and the educational establishment) place too much emphasis on protecting their children’s self-esteem from all facts of life; by the time these children get to college their professors and instructors (such as your humble narrator) have to deal with those overinflated ‘self-esteems’ where only a fraction is tied to real accomplishment, and the hypersensitivity to difficulty that comes with it. I’m definitely not for the ‘tough love’ parenting my own parents recall from theirs, but I found the passages about limiting choices and sometimes just letting kids pick themselves up specially spot-on. Delivereads ···

Werner Herzog reads Go the Fuck to Sleep. Not only a crazy brilliant filmmaker, Herzog also has the best male narration voice I know. Lucky bastard. ···

Almost eighteen hours into 2011, I think it’s time to finally time to look back at the last 365 days. I’m going to steal Daily Meh’s idea and rate 2010. With stars, as if it was a movie. Which it felt like, in some (not so good) ways.

The good things about living through 2010:
- Had all basic needs fulfilled: food on the table, clothes, decent housing and hot water. Plus some money for drinks and entretainments.
- Found myself surrounded by a group of friends who where kind and treated me right. No personal dramas.
- I did finish my Master’s Degree with a pretty good thesis.
- Felt pretty eager to learn most of the time: took up computer programming with renewed interest (I previously though I was pretty finished with that); while being engaged in co-directing a performing arts (another new thing).
- Enjoyed a proper holiday for the first time in years.

The bad thing I endured through 2010:
- Anxiety made its ugly appearance, with a few terrifying psychosomatic episodes.
- A persistent acute feeling of inadequacy, with consequences.
- While I don’t feel at liberty to write about the specifics, something happened that put the brakes on my post-Master expectations. I wish for once I could build something nice without anyone immediately pissing on it.
- Creative bankruptcy: I didn’t shoot a single video besides the camera/editor-for-hire stuff, didn’t write anything either (besides the thesis, that is). But still, 2010 was a good learning year, so I’ll consider this phenomenon as part of a brain tide cycle.
- A bad crop in arts and entertainment. I can’t name much in the way of outstanding movies, or plays, or music or books. I’m sure there were, but fell under the radar.

2010: (two out of five). A pretty mediocre year, then.

Machines age and cars do annoyingly so, to the point you realize calling for taxis would be cheaper than the petrol and mechanic bills, which is why that after a year of indecision I finally got myself a new car. While I’m glad to be finally getting rid of the 1995 Fiat Punto I had been driving for the last eleven years as it had become a vehicle of anxiety, I’m pretty wary of my new ride’s confort. The first time I drove my new car I felt as driving a pillow, not an Asian hatchback.

The Fiat Punto’s fuckedupness equated with a ‘raw’ driving experience, but I don’t mean this in the same way those Top Gear guys might. In retrospect, it makes me think that the soft suspension and good sound insulation of a new car make it a better ‘urban capsule’, as a friend of mine used to point out, than the rawness of a hardened suspension and squeaky noises. No wonder: new cars radiate their owners with smugness. It’s hard not to be a dick while driving a confortable couch. But still, being inside a protective cocoon that is somewhat distant from the streets underneath is a feeling that degrade as the car ages: it starts feeling less and less protective and more and more of a cart in direct contact with the asphalt. Like a very nice t-shirt that inevitably fades, an unconfortable car begets status anxiety, that might well trump the mechanical-failure anxiety.

I’m grateful for all the wisdom driving the Fiat gave me. Owning an old car was like having X-ray vision for superficiality. Here’s hoping I don’t lose it. And that the new car lasts as many years as the Punto in good working order.

Nearly ten years ago I got a Fuji MX-2700 as a birthday present. Despite its 2.3 megapixels and its fixed zoom lens it was as expensive back then as a decent laptop computer or a lower-midrange DSLR are now, not even accounting for inflation. Basically it was the most expensive present someone ever gave me, so I really made the most of it — the lackluster electrical appliance was my camera of choice for the next five years, despite my affairs with analog Yashicas and Nikons bought on eBay. Late 2005 I finally decided to give the Fuji a rest from being utterly crap, as in the meantime I was starting to get fed up with getting beter results from a BenQ toy camera that didn’t even have a viewfinder. So I got a somewhat better BenQ (how I love thy cheap electronics) for about 100 euros, and a couple years later, while at Fnac browsing a crate of items that have previously been on display at the store (therefore likely to have been abused by overeager button-pushers), got one of the worst and ugliest cameras Canon ever made for 50 euros, so I could go and hack it.

So anyway, last week I finally decided I should buy a proper digital camera. I can’t afford a good DSLR (say, a 5D Mark II?), and if I’m buying a DSLR nothing less than a fullframe sensor makes sense — anything less is a camera for wearing on weekends, impressing the clueless hipsters in the downtown cafés while making a fool of yourself in front of anyone who actually knows his optics (the people you really intended to impress). But I digress: If I can’t buy a fullframe sensor, at least I should do myself a favor and buy a lighter, smaller camera, so I thank my friend Ivo for pointing me the kind of small point-and-shoot camera a real photographer would buy: the Panasonic LX-3. Nevermind this camera is the Leica D-Lux 4 minus the logo and 300 euros. He had me sold with the f2.0 lens.

An in fact the camera feels like Quality. It has the size it should have for its abilities, unlike the junk SLRs you can get for the same price. And the way the lens is so well thought out sets it apart, a symptom of why the LX-3 is great: it can’t zoom past 60mm (35mm equiv.), but in a camera this small and (relatively) cheap, why would you want a tele (and the inherent loss of aperture, bigger body)? Are you a chromatic aberration nut? Good thinking by the Panasonic engineers there.

In a nutshell, the Panasonic is a good solid photographers’ camera. And I only wonder why are there so many crappy point-and-shoots being sold by the same 330 or so euros. Oh, because those come in pink. But nevermind those: the LX-3 is definitely highly recommended.

Having turned thirty last April, that would seem like a logical good time to look back at my life in the past ten years. Instead, I’m glad I waited until the end of 2009, for there were still very important lessons to be learned in the last eight months of the decade.

It’s a terrible cliché to say I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. In fact, I’m pretty much the same person, to an irritating degree. Self-improvement only takes you so far, and the quirks, habits and little vices are hard to get rid of. I may have become less and less and less naïve about things, more and more cynical. Considering the worldwide hopefulness of the end of the 1990s (technology will save us all! long live The New Economy!), it’s not hard to come to the conclusion weltschmerz played a role in my life in the 2000s. Not that I spent the decade watching far too much CNN or reading far too much about, say, peak oil (perhaps I did), but because of the everyday manifestation of said weltschmerz: precarity.

The 2000s were a time of disillusionment because a lot of people found out they had bought into a scam: the whole thing about finishing college, getting a decent job, marrying and having kids. Here in Portugal, what people got instead was a job market that treats creative experts as hands for hire, in which a salary is a luxury as many of your ex-classmates are willing to work for free in the vague hope of getting paid, someday. Most can’t wait for that someday. Of the twenty-something Film Studies colleagues I graduated with, only a handful got some degree of involvement with actual video production. All others had to find something else. Being a ‘veteran’ of the 2000 dotcom collapse, I couldn’t say I was surprised at my narrow prospects upon finishing my college degree. I was very lucky to get a teaching job, but my going back to Multimedia for my Master’s is my way of moving on in dire times.

At twenty, I would have never expected that ten years on I’d still be living with my mother or driving the same car. That’s what I can manage with a (low) fixed income for only a college semester out of every year. Many of my generation trick themselves into believing they’re adults via a parent-sponsored faux-independence, something I’m in no position to enjoy or have any desire to. Many others have had the good fortune of being able to move on. But many others still are caught in a jam, half-adult, half-adolescent, working on ways of getting Fortune to show herself, unable to pay rent every month until then.

My freelancing never quite taken off. Not in the years before college, not after. Despite holding myself to being good at what I do. Perhaps I’m not very good with people: something the 2000s made quite clear is that the medical/psychological community is set into diagnosing everyone with syndromes I may or may not have, as if there was this perfect and immaculate template of ‘normality’, with no room for differences among people, among personalities. Yes, I am too verbal-minded and sometimes oblivious to non-verbal cues. Also I didn’t look at people in the eye much, but when I realized this, I didn’t go after some pityable explanation and started taking some meds. Instead, I made an effort to look at you in the eye.

The decade also held a lot of lessons about friendship and behaviour. I discovered the most vague, meaningless and still dangerous word there is: ‘values’. It’s not exclusive of right-wing demagogues. It is, if not in the mouths, at least in the minds of people who are willing to meddle in the affairs of others, to judge others in a bad light. Friends don’t judge. Never ever. A friend is someone who’s There. Ten years later, many of my best friends, which I love, would be people with no values, as defined by ex-friends and enemies. I’ve learned to be intolerant of one thing and one thing only: people being inconsiderate.

Finally, here’s a lesson most people don’t take to heart, wonderfully metaphorized in that crazy May 26th 2004. Just minutes after FC Porto, the club I had supported since a kid, had won the most important trophy in club football, I attended the first ever proper screening of one of my films, a documentary called O Zero. That was a poignant reminder one shouldn’t live through the superficial, or worse, through the achievements of others. One only lives through oneself. I was proud that day. Prouder than most in the celebrating masses.

Yesterday I indulged myself into writing my longest post ever, about my favorite films of the decade. Re-reading it, I see I left out of lot of things I should have talked about. I completely negleted non-portuguese and non-american movies (I should have mentioned Cidade de Deus, Rois et Reine, The Beat My Heart Skipped, In the Mood for Love, to say just a few — perhaps someday, when I write a rigorous appreciation of 00s film). And I also forgot to mention the return, around mid-decade, of 1970s-style political/paranoia thrillers (think Syriana or Michael Clayton), perhaps because unfortunately no timeless classic is to be found among the many good films of the genre. It’s telling that the best film so far about the Iraq War (and by a large margin) is the aggressively apolitical The Hurt Locker.

But still I haven’t shut up about film. That’s not only because of my film studies. It’s harder to properly evaluate the decade’s other arts in the last day of the 2000s. I’ve read a lot, but mostly stuff written much longer ago. By taking a quick glance at my shelves, I’d be tempted to nominate Douglas Coupland’s JPod or The Gum Thief as books that capture the decade’s cynicism and disillusionment pretty well, except they are not that great as works of literature. I’d mention Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves post-modern mindfunkiness as a classic waiting to be discovered, but published in 2000 it is essentially informed by a breakdown of the 1990s slacker way of life. Then there’s also Neal Stephenson’s 2400-page novel Baroque Cycle, which chronicles the period coincident with the lifetime of Isaac Newton with a sci-fi sensibility, resulting in the most interesting literary Heavy Meal of the decade (page-wise). A shame it was followed up by Anathem, which I have no doubt in calling Disappointment of the Decade.

What about music? At the end of every year I’d make pretty weak jokes, mentioning, say, my favourite records of 1995 as my favourite records of 2005. What happened was that during the 2000s I completely ceased to care about music, not going to that many live gigs too. Or perhaps I still care about music, but not with the kind of neuroticism I had in the 1990s. Still, I think this was the decade music was finally overwhelmed by postmodernism, resulting in no new styles to speak of, perhaps because the new toys of the 1980s and 1990s (we’re talking digital) are the same old toys by now — so accessible to the point Auto-Tune became a recurring joke. But thankfully there was more to the decade that now ends besides the pitch-corrected vocals: The White Stripes, M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem and TV on the Radio became regulars on my playlists, and Radiohead, Portishead and Boards of Canada continued there with their new releases. Perhaps I listened to far too much Beirut, and Nouvelle Vague made the journey from pleasant to over-ubiquous musak, but was a nice constant in my playlists for a brief moment.

A very special mention to the portuguese act A Naifa (video). Their album Canções Subterrâneas was a perfect revision of traditional fado, incorporating electronic instruments and lyrics about being unhappy despite recycling, using public transportation and not watching television. How more contemporary can you get?

Happy New Year!

So those were my favourite films of 2009. But what about my favourite film of the 2000s? My answer is as obvious (if you have been paying attention to this blog) as it is surprising:

David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008). That’s right, my favourite film (or should I say my favourite work of moving image art to be more accurate) of the decade was a TV show, despite the fact I went to a movie theatre some seven hundred times in the last ten years, and obviously that means a lot more films if I count the stuff I caught on video or television. Hardcore cinema critics and pseudo-buffs are no doubt readying their torches and pitchforks after reading this, because they don’t understand the following: The Wire is a sixty hour movie. Not a single part of a single episode in any of its five seasons is skippable, and the overall story arc is so flawless it must be treated as a single work of art. It’s the film equivalent of the twelve hundred page novel. A bit too much to fit in an usual two hour screening, so you get to see it in small parts on television, although I’d be more than happy to pay to attend a marathon screening. The Wire defines and makes sense of the 2000s, of how turbo-capitalism conquered all — including hearts and minds — thus stripping people of their worth. What to do then? How do we cope? The Wire’s finale shows us the way character is reincarnated, what’ve seen is one among seemingly endless loops of human condition. If we change in some way — or even die —, someone will step into our shoes. People will be the same everywhere.

The value of blogging for such a long time is that I can read the my favourite film lists for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001. I love going out to watch a film in a dark room, despite all the convenient gadgets that appeared during the last decade — HDTV sets, streaming set-top boxes, Internet downloads, etc. — and my love of going to the movies makes me enjoy most of the movies I watch (I think those film critics that rarely rate anything over two stars must secretly hate their jobs). So the following is a highly subjective view of film in the 2000s, and often the context played as strong a role in my appreciation as the film itself.

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind first and foremost. I went to see it three times in a row! Who else but this frenchman to deliver a drama that blends campy sci-fi concepts and lots of film nerd trickery into coherent and naturalistic love story? And I disagree with everyone who says this is a sad movie, I’ve seen it in a period of personal distress and in fact it did help me recover.

Ghost World, The Royal Tenenbaums, Punch-Drunk Love. Terry Zwigoff, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson’s films all had a vibrant indie quirkyness that made you feel like the coolest person in the neighbourhood for watching (P. T. Anderson later directed There Will Be Blood, which I found one of the most brilliant movies ever on an intellectual level, but that’s another story). The first half of the decade was actually a great time for American independents — the brief moment in which market forces gave these authors, grown out of the 90s great age of independent film, all the resources they needed — but still before the damaging moment ’indie’ became a marketing category (probably around the time of Little Miss Sunshine’s Oscar campaign), leading to uncritically acclaimed crap such as Juno, the Benedict XVI-approved anti-abortion pamphlet disguised in Ghost World clothing. In 2006 there was, however, one quirky American indie film that stood out:

That was Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. There are few things hardly as great as entering a movie theatre knowing nothing about the film you’re about to watch (there are no known actors, no known director, having seen no trailers, read no reviews), and two hours later leaving the theatre knowing you’ve just seen one of the great films of the decade. Miranda July’s is not primarily a filmmaker, so I felt none of that carreer-defining urgency you often get from independent directors. It’s a quirky little American indie film, but it’s also fearless and careless. I like that.

And what happens when you get a veteran director to do an indie-style flick? Probably a bad idea, but Jonathan Demme was more than up to the task. A couple of days ago I praised Rachel Getting Married, but what I didn’t tell you then is that movie was also watched in a context. Like Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness which I had watched a few months before, it provided eerie moments of identification, and among the most amusing post-film discussions I ever had with a friend. But to delve into that would be something for my novel…

And what can I say about Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kerverne’s Aaltra? Comedy of the Decade, perhaps, despite being surely Most Inappropriate Film of the Decade too. Aaltra blends the offbeat with the darkest humour imaginable, and you’ll often find yourself embarrassed to be laughing (and you will) at the wheelchair-bound travelers.

Genre film, then. I’ll deal primarily with the only genre I have a degree of affinity with — science fiction. The 2000s was not a great decade for that, as everyone was busying themselves with Lord of the Rings-type fantasy and superhero adaptations. Some true science-fiction tentpoles were shockingly bad (I, Robot or Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which I won’t even bother linking), and the only good recent one - Avatar - is itself a marriage between fantasy and science-fiction, more of the former in fact than the latter. But there were a few bright spots in the bleak landscape of sci-fi nowadays (a statement I would also extend to books): Steven Spielberg did score a hit before that spectacular miss with Minority Report. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine missed the chance at becoming a great classic of the genre with that horror/slasher ending, but did deliver some of the greatest sci-fi images of the decade. Moon, directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones looks and feels like a science fiction film of the 1970s — in a great way. And then, the only timeless classic the decade brought us — a Soylent Green for the 21st century:

Alfonso Cuarón Children of Men. Not only it updates, at long last, our collective vision of futuristic nightmare, it does so in a frighteningly realistic way: of course we do not expect the implausible event of worldwide sterilty being the catalyst for doom as it is in this film, but we can too well imagine things such as raging climate change or energy crisis leading to a year 2027 pretty similar to Cuarón’s depiction. Perhaps this one too is one of the great films of the decade. All of the films I listed here so far — like the quirky indie one — are deliriously and deliciously avoidant (and I like them), but Children of Men, like The Wire, defines the noughts in a way others don’t. The Wire might be a very long essay on turbo-capitalism. Children of Men is by contrast a small cautionary tale about the Bush/Blair doctine of international relations.

This was also an interesting decade for Portuguese film. As always, the institutions are reacting very slowly to technological innovation and to a generation change, so the great Portuguese films I enjoyed watching are probably not those seen with great interest at the Film Institute or by our film critics who generally have such a narrow-minded view of authorship and le cinema they become cannibalistic fetishists, hating (not a strong enough word) far more movies than the few put out by the authors they love. And yet, these films I’m talking about have a merely incidental commercial appeal (ostensible efforts at commercially successful films in Portugal always have ended up in total artistic disaster). Therefore they somehow slipped through the cracks of the system.

João Canijo’s Noite Escura, perhaps the most academically acceptable of the lot, set a Greek tragedy in a roadside brothel. But more insteresting is the fact this was one of the first portuguese films I had ever seen that was perfectly acceptable from a technical standpoint. No more faded film stock, no more unperceptible dialogues — shit that needlessly drives people away. All of a sudden low-budgeted Portuguese films looked and sounded… okay (here’s a sigh of relief). That was 2004. The following year, Marco Martins’ Alice became an unexpected hit, and all of a sudden it seemed as if we portuguese could crank out decent, watchable films if we just learn to ignore the old cranks and their apostles, and dismiss the sleazes in for a quick buck in the film production business. Even Miguel Gomes, out of the film criticism heart of darkness that lead to pretty bad short films, cranked out a surprisingly good movie in 2008 called Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. And I’d also highlight Tiago Guedes and Frederico Serra’s Entre os Dedos, or this year’s 4 Copas by Manuel Mozos. We even had a science fiction film in this decade, and a good one! Solveig Nordlund’s Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Low Flying Aircraft.

What about moments in movies? There were perhaps too many to be interesting, but I would definitely highlight Bill Murray singing More than This in Lost in Translation, which placed Roxy Music’s song in top of my personal list of Top Songs that Are So Depressing It’s Funny. There was also another very funny moment, halfway David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Jeremy Irons’ character, a film director, is seen in a seemingly endless monologue trying to instruct his gaffer to place a light just right. I burst out laughing like a maniac during that scene, the only person laughing in a packed room full of bored people. I had spent the previous days working in Corações Plásticos. My job? Getting the gaffer to place the lights just right.

I didn’t wish for it to be a re-ocurring phenomenon, but it had happened again. Almost one year ago, I spent a weekend shooting a short film with some friends. I immediately assembled a rough-cut, did a trailer, and then let the film be buried beneath lots of other stuff. I only resumed work in editing my short a few weeks ago, but now, the much delayed The Things We Found in the Attic is ready and online for your own viewing pleasure*:

It’s a magical realist short story, perhaps the A-side to that Ultravioleta music video I directed B-side (both share the same base concept, mechanics and even some of the locals). This was as raw and as ‘indie’ as a film can be — the two sisters’ grandparents house is actually my own grandparents’ house, and the beach was actually somewhat crowded making shooting there rather jarring (lots of takes, bizarre camera positions so people wouldn’t be there and a severely reduced shotlist). Thanks again to my good friends Margarida, Inês, Marcelino and Joana for their time and their help. I love you all.

* I do recommend you click on to the film’s Vimeo page, so you can watch it in fullscreen HD.