Top ten lists are stupid, but they happen and someone ought
write about the need to catalogue, rank, and canonize the things and what good
it ultimately does for the artform itself. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s
pointless. With a year faded into the ether, it’s easier to silence the hype.
Some of these were revisited recently, some caught up with. The rest were just
hazy recollections, but somehow they stuck around this long and for that I give
them big kisses.
Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch): Sometimes they come
back. They have been coming back like baby bunnies lately. Most of the time
they are just spit out and wrinkled; hitting all the same beats and rhythms
that earned them a place in some foggy version of our hallowed nostalgia heap.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, in my mind, was a ten-tape box set ever
present at various punk houses across America, usually on a shelf right about
my head as I tried to sleep on a hardwood floor in my neon lightning bolt
sleeping bag. My family wasn’t much of a T.V. show family and I very much doubt
that if they were that I would have been permitted to see it in the early
nineties. Eventually I caught up with the show, thankfully well before the hip
Netflix hype faze, therefore I had a proceeding investment in old friends like
Bob, Laura, Coop, Lucy, James, Hawk, the Log Lady, Agent Phillip Jefferies
(once David Bowie and now a giant steaming tea kettle), etc. While its nice to
catch up with the ole gang, it’s maybe nicer to spend so much time with Dougie
Jones as he acclimates to the bizarre rituals of middle-class suburban Vegas existence.
Sometimes I think we don’t realize how often we are laughing with Lynch and his
characters rather than at them. It’s rare to see something this funny and
moving shift instantly to bleak and inquisitive about these mortal coils that
we will all shuffle off someday. It swears allegiance to no set register,
happily shifting gears without a warning shot, keeping us always on our toes.
It doesn’t simply rest on the lazy laurels of fanboy service maintenance.
Episode eight is perfectly content to be a great film unto itself. It has become
customary for these unending returns to wreak of our shared communal acceptance
of mediocrity if it’s rolled up in a husk of wistful nods to something being
born and conceived before burrowing deep into our minds and hearts. This feels
like a fetus, looking up at its mom asking “what year is it?”
Goodtime (Sadfies): Connie spends most this movie racing
against the clock to release his developmentally disabled brother Nick from the
notorious clutches of Rikers detainment system. Sounds heartwarming, but it
couldn’t be further from. Connie as played by Robert Pattison, in a performance
worthy of its hype, is a wily and callous opportunist, willing to destroy
anyone standing in his path. As is often the case, one man’s journey to
betterment seals another’s pain and sorrow and the Sadfie’s don’t offer
clemency as a moral respite nor a form of consolation or contrition. Everything
from the camera’s physicality to the words that characters choose sound fresh
and mapped out with regards to who these people might really be on the streets.
At its core Good Time is a futile race to a nonexistent freedom; the upshot of
desperation. We all know that Connie won’t get away and we know that he
shouldn’t, and somehow, we are wrought to root against our better moral and
logical judgment. As for the unlucky people he uses to get what he wants; it’s sickening,
and it should be. The scenes specifically dealing with Nick are especially
precise. We have seen plenty of bombastic Hollywood elucidations of individuals
with developmental disabilities but this one rings truer to me. The final scene
was among the best that I’ve seen in any film in years.
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman):
It’s been said before, but somehow Wiseman makes the seemingly mundane vital
and captivating. Without uttering a single word and by simply beholding and
forming mounds of material, he makes the case for the importance of information
and harmony. It’s not just about the fortification of this crucial union
between public and private, it’s about development and how we spread knowledge
like a plague to quell the swelling insanity.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson): Sometimes love
requires a push, a nudge, or kick to correct our self-serving trajectory. I
know I need to get knocked off my perch from time to time. It’s rare to be
truly surprised where a story ends up. I’ve seen enough variations on the jerk dude
falling back down to earth, but poisonous mushrooms weren’t the emancipators I
had anticipated. Given how meticulous this director tends to be, I must tip my
hat to the timing here. I was just about to write the entire thing off
(impatience and distrust on my part) when the “twist” arrives. The fact that he
was able to pull the exact same trick twice with even more efficiency the
second time around is pretty impressive.
Downsizing (Alexander Payne): Payne’s oeuvre spends a lot of
time with men entering and maneuvering sudden crossroads. He hasn’t ever
attempted something so big and bold as Downsizing, though the overall stencil
remains the same. This time we follow Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) from
overpopulated and unsustainable world that we all know from a very accustomed
vantage point to the same world but smaller (5 inches according to Wikipedia).
A large part of the initial suspense lies in Paul and his wife (Kristen Wig)
investigating and thus wrestling with the titular irreversible process. Once
it’s done and Paul is left alone, he’s left wondering what we all tend to
wonder; what’s it all about and how we can make it seem/feel meaningful? From
there we meet the best cast of eccentric (to normies like Paul) companions in
recent memory. Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier play a pair of tiny hedonists who
supply their community with the good stuff, while Hong Chau steals the show as
a Vietnamese dissident forced to downsize as political punishment, an action
that nearly cost her life and claimed the lives of everyone with her. Paul’s
overwhelming sense of insignificance is exploited for good and eventually he
sees the light in a finale that isn’t afraid of the foreseeable charges of
mawkishness. The concept itself calls for a steady visual hand, the specifics
are carefully and engagingly mapped out, and Payne doesn’t shrink away from his
overall message here despite facing a cynical throng constantly diagnosing
intention.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Craig Zahler): Zahler’s worlds are
hellscapes that erupt into attentive and unadorned scenes of tough violence.
He’s an impenitent genre guy and I hope that he can enjoy his success without
being tantalized and diluted by the inevitable amplified budget. If I’m being
completely honest, sometimes these movies drag on too long and talk too much,
but that’s a small price to pay for this guy’s pristine renunciation of our
communal good nature. In Zahler’s stories, his protagonists beat men into mush,
men who are bound to a systematic moral decay driven by greed and lust.
Humanity is the devil.
mother! (Darren Aronofsky): It’s lame but I guess it might
be useful to note that I haven’t wholeheartedly liked a single movie by
Aronofsky. While his talent isn’t lost on me, his bold style has always felt at
odds with his normie narrative duties. I know its something well beyond my
comprehension, begging rich people to fund your movie, but his movies always
seem compromised by the time he gets to where he’s going, either that or they
just plain didn’t do it for me. This time around he finally went for it, and
its imperfections are far more interesting than any tidying up he’s done in the
past. For starters, he lures the viewer in by flashing little chards of lucid
plot right before hurdling us further and further into complete disorder. For a
better look at how I felt around the time of seeing this you can read this: https://musabran.blogspot.com/2017/09/mother.html
I’m out of steam. Look:
1.
Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
2.
Good Time (Josh and Benny Sadfie)
3.
Downsizing (Alexander Payne)
4.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
5.
Ex Libris (Frederick Wiseman)
6.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)
7.
mother! (Darren Aronofsky)
8.
All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)
9.
Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)
10.
Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina)
Honorable: The Florida Project, Faces/Places, A Quiet
Passion, Get Out, The Lost City of Z,
Girls Trip, The Merowytz Stories, Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Purgatory: Spiderman: Homecoming, Lady Bird, Personal
Shopper, Okja, A Ghost Story, Wind River, Leatherface, Blade Runner, Monster
Truck, Song to Song, Stronger, Thor: Ragnorak, The Last Jedi,
No: Wonder Woman, The Big Sick, The Work, Split, A Cure for
Wellness, Logan, Beauty and the Beast, Kong: Skull Island, Raw, Baby Driver,
The Belko Experiment, Power Rangers, Life, Alien: Covenant, It Comes At Night,
Rough Night, 47 Meters Down, The Beguiled, The Bad Batch, Dunkirk, Atomic
Blond, 3 Billboards, It, I Tonya, Jeepers Creepers 3, Happy Death Day, The
Foreigner, The Snowman, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Call Me by Your Name, The
Shape of Water, Jumanji 2, The Post, Hostiles.
I didn’t/I couldn’t:
BPM, Mudbound, Loveless, The Other Side of Hope, The Square (I saw half of it),
Columbus, The Human Surge, On the Beach Alone at Night, Staying Vertical,
Wonderstruck, Kedi, The Death of Louis XIV.
