1988 all over again

The movie that first comes to my mind when looking back at 1988 is Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, a story seemingly springing from the director’s own life in Liverpool where he was born in 1945, the youngest of ten kids where he would face a blend of love, abuse, loss of faith, and the always lingering question of identity. The past doesn’t ever leave, it dawdles like a ghost and Davies knows better than just about anyone how to conjure it up, and I suppose that for this reason above all else that it deserves a spot atop. The entire endeavor feels like memories coming to life, disjointed recollections vividly rebuilt with a true care and regard for detail and feeling. There is something in the way he stages and revives these memories, the use of music, sung by the cast, especially makes for beautiful scene after beautiful scene, though it wouldn’t be Davies if not for a cruel patriarchal ogre at the center of the action. I should note that I viewed in on youtube with a full screen and headphones a few years back, thus a proper viewing would be ideal.

Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ considers Jesus as a diety unsure of his purpose and completely oblivious to the pitfalls of morality, specifically how good intentions don’t always lead to benevolent outcomes. Behold Lazarus, disoriented and terrified to be led back from death to life. Schrader and Scorsese view morality similarly to Bunuel, where good deeds are stalked by something diabolical lurking in the shadows. Jesus is seen finally as a man teetering between two extremes, tortured by his vocation and therefore the surrogate we deserve, even if he is ultimately triumphant in death. Similarly, I teeter in my reactions to this movie, which is monumental but always elusive for me.

What else and why? First, Claude Chabrol’s portrait of Vichy France, specifically the life and Tribunal sanctioned death of Marie-Louise Giraud. First viewing was a bust, 1am on TCM about two weeks after my son was born. Maybe I was too tired or maybe I didn’t want to confront the polar opposite of infant life. The second viewing felt like watching an entirely different movie, touchy subjects aside, I feel Chabrol takes a very detached high road and thus lets the irony of Giraud’s fate sink in a little more.  John Carpenter’s They Live imagines a world in which aliens use a giant ray to alter our perception of all things, especially the growing chasm between the affluent and the homeless and starving. This leaves only Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David to go mutineer and kick their fucking asses back to Mars (or wherever these ugly bastards come from).

Kzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing examine two of the ten big ones from mount Sinai. Thou shalt not kill. Sounds like a solid commandment. Who is the thou? First, it’s Jacek, a young man tortured by the death of his sister in which he believes himself to be exceedingly complicit. He kills a taxi driver creep, brutally (the scene itself is as ugly as they come), and then the state returns the favor in a scene of equal brutality. Once again, the notion of justice is touched upon with a somewhat objective view. On one hand, we are privy to a hideous act of violence that results in someone’s death, albeit a guy who may or may not be a dangerous person himself. But to then be saddled with the reality that this one action can result in a hanging, especially given the complications surrounding the circumstance, I imagine that most of us will at least think about the ramifications. Or maybe not. In A Short Film About Love, peeping Tomek spends his nights staring at Magda, unbeknownst to her. From this, Kieślowski somehow manages to make a case for love, at first unrequited but later reciprocated, and more importantly contemplated. This love is the polemical kind that most will find very hard to empathize with. I did.

I’ll let Miyazaki do the talking: “My Neighbor Totoro aims to be a happy and heartwarming film, a film that lets the audience go home with pleasant, glad feelings. Lovers will feel each other to be more precious, parents will fondly recall their childhoods, and children will start exploring the thickets behind shrines and climbing trees to try to find a Totoro. This is the kind of film I want to make.” Mission accomplished. The beauty here is in the master’s devotion to everyday routines both natural and communal, Miyazaki’s refusal to let things get swept away by fairy tale grandeur. I distinctly remembering this and Bela Tarr’s The Wreckmeister Harmonies being the first two films that Dean actually held his interest, which is not my way of being a snob, I just seized the opportunity to catch up on some blindspots while this little ball of fun looked around at things enquiringly and mystified.

For a very different look at quotidian existence, specifically trying not to starve to death during the declining days of WWII where American bombers napalmed the Japanese countryside (Kobe in this movie) killing many and leaving more homeless and hungry, check out friendly Ghibli rival Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. Here we bear witness to 13 year old Seita and his 5 year old sister Setsuko’s slow crawl towards starvation and death after their mother is vaporized. It’s sad! Another very sad animated film = The Land Before Time. I’ll never forget the heartache of Little Foot left alone to find the Great Valley after the death of his mother. To this day that sorrow sticks with me, I get the Pavlovian weeps whenever I hear James Horner’s The Whispering Wind. I’ll never forget the following year when my mother was rushed to the hospital with a brain aneurysm and a very slim chance of survival. She lived, but there was a solid three week span in which it was probable that she wasn’t going to make it. I couldn’t wrap my little brain around it. While my mother was recovering, my first grade teacher played this movie in class and I ran out of the room crying. I re-watched it this year the day after I realized Lou was probably going to die and cried again. There is something about this movie that seems fit for tragedy.

Robert Zemeckis had the guts and wherewithal to bring Disney (Mickey, Dumbo, Donald, Pinnochio), WB (Daffy, Bugs, Yosemite Sam, Porky), and Fleisher’s Betty Boop together for a dark and nasty noir classic. Toons are exploited and segregated, Toontown is a ghetto where toons are left to die in Judge Doom’s dip when they step even slightly out of line. Not only is it our titular hero’s sacred looney duty to stop him from demolishing his beloved shantytown and turning it into a freeway a la  Robert Towne, but also to prove his innocence. For many years I had only seen a cut version of my father taped it off television and left out virtually every scene with Jessica Rabbit. What the fuck?  

Don’t forget John v Hans in the fortified Nakatomi Plaza, where Bruce’s emotional climax comes at the sight and recognition of none other than Carl Winslow rather than his wife, which is kinda the heart and soul of the movie. How about Raymond v Rex, which delivers one of the most psychologically terrifying and depressing finales in movie history not only because Raymond gets to spend his final hour and change trapped in a coffin but because he knows that his beloved fiancée went out the same horrible way, a fate beyond what he probably could ever comprehend. And it’s futile to try and articulate the euphoria I experience whilst watching Frank Dreblin do just about anything. Leslie Nielson is my hero.

Top Ten 0f 1988 in alphabetical order:

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies)

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata)

My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki)

The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad (David Zucker)

A Short Film About Love/A Short Film About Killing (Kzysztof Kieślowski)

Story of Women (Claude Chabrol)

They Live! (John Carpenter)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis)

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodovar)

Honorable Mentions in roughly preferential order: The Last Temptation of Christ, Ariel, Die Hard, As Tears Go By, The Vanishing, The Land Before Time, The Thin Blue Line, Monkey Shines, Cop, Alice, Dead Ringers, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, Bird.

Not for me: The Blob, A Cry in the Dark, Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Lair of the White Worm, Mississippi Burning, Rain Man, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Willow, The Bear.  

Like or Respect (*s indicating that I haven’t seen it since I was young): Above the Law, Big Top Pee Wee, Bloodsport, Bull Durham, Coming to America, Critters 2: The Main Course, Beetlejuice, Hairspray, Child’s Play, Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, The Dead Pool,  Ernest Saves Christmas, The Fox and the Hound, A Fish Called Wanda, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, License to Drive, Mac and Me, Maniac Cop, Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Oliver and Company, Pound Puppies and the Legend of the of Big Paw, Pumpkinhead.

Didn’t pay due attention to: The Horse Thief 

Didn’t see: Paperhouse, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Akira, Big, Chocolat, Cinema Paradiso, Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Eighth Happiness, Far North, Heathers, Lady in White, Married to the Mob, Miracle Mile, Salaam Bombay, Police Story 2, Zombi 3, High Hopes. 

Phantom Thread

What a gift to be on your back, helpless and in need of care. Of course, it means you are in pain and immobile. These are the “dangers of falling in love” but also the dangers of letting your ego run amok. Mr. Woodcock knows not what he does or, more importantly, how he does it. One of the first impressions we get is of a man who acts like a three-year-old, and I say this not to libel the guy but to speak to my own experience of walking on eggshells during the hallowed breakfast routine. His lady friend offers him a pastry and he turns it down, quite patronizingly, complaining about its texture similar to how my daughter Flora complains about the soggy cereal that she lets sit. It’s one of many mercurial mood swings that seem to spring from interruptions. Whether he’s aware of it or not, Reynolds is being rude and perhaps his lofty place in the 1950s postwar London couture scene has him convinced that this disposition is a merited roost from which to stare down at the world. That he despises distraction isn’t wrong in and of itself and if I’m being honest, much of his vocational predilections hit a little to close to home. There is something truly monstrous about the way artists/authors/musicians/directors innately neglect the people who have the most personal investment in their well-being. It’s not exclusive to gender, but being pumped with testosterone doesn’t help. Just the other day I was watching Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery when Tara sat next to me and started to ask me questions about what I was watching. I nearly went Woodcock on the poor lady.

Reynolds meets Alma, a war survivor and immigrant whose history is only implied only through facial cues. Facial cues are the heart and soul of this movie, which doesn’t lack for lavish gestures both of the directorial and thespian varieties (this is a PTA movie). Much has been made of the fact that this is supposedly Daniel Day Lewis’ final movie (and what a magnificent and measured way to leave us) but to fail to appreciate the work done by Leslie Manville and Vicky Krieps would be silly. Anyway, the Alma/Reynolds affair begins with games and power structures as you would expect in that particular day and age. One takes it on the chin while the other floats through life oblivious to etiquette, not of the bourgeois variety, but the way a man of his stature addresses and treats those of a very different caste. He’s not the dictatorial prick you see typically see in films like these, but his superciliousness is almost worse. Alma puts up with it for a while, but after a very existent and hilarious fight she takes matters into her own hands. I won’t spoil it, but it involves a fungal bit of tough love/reawakening.

If the movie were content to settle on this rebirth it’d be great but it’s the backsliding and ultimate acceptance on the part of Reynolds that really got to me. Truth is, you fight and make up. Usually during this squabbling, you see something truly awful in yourself that needs fixing. Then you begin to let those foibles crawl back into your monthly, weekly, and daily customs. We could all be so lucky as to have an Alma in our lives to “feed” us when we need to be fed. We all need to get sick from time to time. To see this power dynamic shift is a thing of beauty. It’s the death of pride and the birth of understanding.

*also, it’s as carefully composed as you would expect. Those lilac socks, the lavender bowtie, and the mauve car really were a feast for my eyeballs.

*my personal favorite scene was towards the end where the doctor was checking Reynolds and he darts a batshit look at Alma.

*  I get the Rebecca comparisons, though comparing Cyril to Mrs. Danvers is lazy and disrespectful to perhaps the only character who tries to add some stability to a house built on pandemonium.

* Sure, Johnny Greenwood deserves props for the score but let’s give some love to whoever chose to add Quebec’s own Oscar “the Maharaja” Peterson’s My Foolish Heart or My Ship, Daydream by the Duke, and Dolly Suite Op 56:1 Berceuse by Gabril Faure, Katia Labeque, and Marielle Labeque to the mix.  

1990

A lot of objectors to Goodfellas, and other Scorsese movies, seem to fixate on whether the actions onscreen are held liable enough to corroborate and reinforce their held values. I find its viciousness a genuine strength. The nastier I feel the better. What was once a brisk and funny piece of unceasing directorial flair, an ostensibly commemorative movie about the lure of hoodlum routine, turns irretrievably dark once poor little Spider gets popped for an infraction as silly and trivial as wounding tiny dick Tommy’s inflated ego. Tommy, a once endearing psychopath, is now an object of scorn and a man whose comeuppance we craved. It’s not simply that Scorsese has the decency to show these goon’s obligatory downfall, it’s that these men start to become the sniveling rats that they once hated so much. They lived long enough to witness themselves/each other change into wretched losers and traitors. Scorsese would bear witness to a lot of similar riffraff growing up on Elizabeth between East Houston and Prince. My own father had a similar experience with wise-guy sodality, and the confusion felt upon realizing his father’s friends were criminals. His godfather was a racketeer and killer, my grandfather’s friend from the homeland. He remembers having pillow fights with him, wrestling, and playing baseball in his aunt Mary’s backyard. His was privy to only one side of a very complicated and wicked man, a side advantageous at that time and place. His chameleonic nature was part of his survival. My father only learned of this man’s transgressions later in life and I’ve always sensed that he had a conflicted respect despite actions that were very easy to castigate. It’s the deception that makes Goodfellas such a singular entry in an already rich subgenre. I don’t mind heaping praise on this movie, one of my favorites without question.  

Goodfellas was the only movie in this strong year that I didn’t have a hard time ranking. It’s a vapid chore; false (I will change my mind about the order as soon as I look at it again) and needlessly taxing. How can you compare Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan to Ron Underwood’s Tremors? I can’t. They are both great for very different reasons. Ron Underwood’s Tremors was my son’s favorite movie at the age of three. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he watched it upwards of forty times in the span of a year. That’s probably a low estimate. I saw it once when I was in fourth grade, at my friend Brett Rathbone’s house. I also looked at Penthouse and drank beer there. My son saw it because the television was accidentally left on AMC during and after his nap. We came downstairs and witnessed a toddler completely horrified and enthralled. When we tried to turn the channel he started screaming. It reminded me of my former self, watching AMC’s Monster-Vision at my grandmother’s house. I’ll never forget the horrifying radiation victim’s from Eugene Lourie’s The Giant Behemoth (1959) or Peter Cushing hiding out in a cave and witnessing the existence of the eponymous Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957). It was also thanks to an unsupervised AMC station being left on that I saw Michael Carreras’ The Lost Continent (1968), where a tramp steamer full of degenerates accidentally discovers the hellish landmass full of prehistoric beasts and evil Spanish conquistadors. My point being that it was Dean’s destiny to stumble upon a monster fixation that will both scare and infatuate for many years to come. Tremors isn’t merely a bygone creature-feature, it’s a solid comedy and one of two great Fred Ward performances in 1990.  

On that note, I will add that I was very glad to have had an opportunity to watch Miami Blues, Trust, and An Angel at my Table for the first time. All three of these sparked an interest in directors that either had been off my radar or that I had seemed to underappreciate.

1.      Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)

2.      Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)

3.      A Bullet in the Head (John Woo)

4.      Tremors (Ron Underwood)

5.      Miami Blues (George Armitage)

6.      Close-Up (Abbas Kiorostami)

7.      Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante)

8.      Trust (Hal Hartley)

9.      White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood)

10.  Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar Wai)

Honorable Mentions: Miller’s Crossing (Coens), Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton), Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven), Back to the Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis), Wild at Heart (David Lynch), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Steve Barron), Cry-Baby (John Waters), Nightbreed (Clive Barker), King of New York (Abel Ferrara), Life is Sweet (Mike Leigh), An Angel at my Table (Jane Campion), Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismaki), A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer), To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett).

You can’t argue with that bunch.

On the fence/enjoyed/respected: Godfather III, Dick Tracy, La Femme Nikita (Luc Besson), Darkman (Sam Raimi), The Exorcist 3, Frankenhooker.

No way: Leather:, Texas Chainsaw 3,

Kid picks: Kindegarten Cop, Dick Tracy, Home Alone, The Witches, Predator 2, Problem Child, Arachnophobia, Child’s Play 2, House Party, The Rescuers Down Under, Marked for Death, Another 48 Hours, Ducktales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, Narrow Margin, Ernest Goes to Jail, Delta Force 2, Graveyard Shift, Maniac Cop 2, Ghost Dad,

Haven’t seen: Joe Versus the Volcano, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Hardware, Dreams, Mo’ Better Blues, The Grifters, The Guardian, The Field, Vincent and Theo, Boiling Point, Dr. M, Nouvelle Vague, Archangel.

Lanthimos, Morrison, and Malick

The majority of Dawson City: Frozen Time has the sonic ambiance of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven mated with Takk on loop. For the most part, it works wonders exalting the steady flow of information accompanied by pictures and footage dug up or found, seemingly by the grace of God. Sometimes it felt smothering (to me), like studio time ran out for the musicians, thus requiring Bill Morrison and Alex Somers to recycle the same string arrangement just to quash some white noise. This is the only complaint I have, which is to say that I think this is one of the good ones. It tells the story of the titular Yukon city whose population and notoriety fluctuated based on the lust and need for its local resources. It’s tragic and I’m not sure exactly how or why. Dawson was the final destination of hundreds of silent film prints, most sunken at the bottom of the Yukon River, the rest dug up and at least partially restored. It’s not as simple as this, though. A lot of Morrison’s film is about the restoration but so much of it is about loss, be it to nitrate’s flammable properties or just time doing its thing. See it.

I’m depressed that critics are so quick to dismiss and demand directors be sent to pasture. Fuck that, and fuck you. You will never toil over anything half as much as these men and women, as you sit comfy with such misguided brio. Again, fuck you. Terrence Malick has cut his teeth long enough and hard enough to do whatever the fuck he wants and it just so happens that he’s making movies unique enough to be considered an affront to dwindling attention spans all over our cinematic wasteland. This is not to say that I necessarily carry his water. In fact, I found Song to Song a tough sit, not because of its pace nor its length but rather its dialogue, which I found mostly unfortunate, but that’s me and I don’t measure up. I’m not saying you can’t hate it, I’m saying that you can’t dismiss it outright. I’m also saying that by suggesting that he’s spent, you’re suggesting that artists have an expiration date based on your own subjective views on quality, which are probably bullshit.

I’m not so sure that I’ll ever give Yorgos Lanthimos another shot. He insists that he is incapable of doing anything “straight-forward” which sounds a lot like a man admitting that he’s sheepishly trussed to a gimmick. He’s perfectly content to be the scalawag, the pebble in the shoe to bougie patron pushovers who fall prey to his cheap baiting. The problem isn’t that he’s without talent, nor that he’s eagerly playing the cat toying with the prudish mouse, it’s that he has absolutely nothing to say about anything. It’s a lose/lose scenario for those who react to the scenes boobytrapped to elicit disgust. Disliking his work or having any sort of moral reaction to his puckish onscreen incitements only makes him stronger. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer he toys loosely with the mythology of his homeland, specifically that of Princess Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, who is offered up to the sacrificial slab to appease an angry goddess. The goddess here is a 16 year old boy named Martin, whose father dies under Collin Farrell’s surgical knife. The guilt therein is never truly established, though it is implied that he may have had “two drinks” before the procedure. The crime certainly doesn’t fit the punishment, but Lanthimos is not concerned with justice as much as he’s smitten with cruelty. Thus, the only atonement will be the sacrifice of a family member. As Farrell’s kids fall mysteriously ill, Martin’s empty threats become a very real and urgent certainty. You can probably guess where it goes from there. You probably predicted that the dialogue is delivered in Lanthimos’ signature dry tone. You probably guessed that there would be several scenes of taboo sexual behavior. You might not guess that this story somehow manages to be stretched maliciously to a two hour running time. All of it, though occasionally elevated by its poised aesthetic bluster, feels like a lazy means to a mean end. The punchline, which is played simultaneously for laughs and devastation, might have worked if Lanthimos wasn’t dangling the lives of caricatures and metaphorical cyphers (as opposed to humans) in front of us. I don’t mind being punished or teased, but his apparent aversion to straight-forwardness, aka his supercilious perch high above the genre he’s aping, will continue to render him worthless to my square tastes.    

2015

Jeff and I were talking recently about the many problems of canonization, specifically that nagging thought that sticks to the back of my brain when watching something/anything with the expectation that it could possibly occupy a spot on some forthcoming trivial list. That prospect is just another wall built up between me and the movie itself, locking me inside my own head at intermittent moments throughout. I’m thinking when I should be seeing, hearing, and feeling. It’s like watching a movie with a noisy/opinionated audience, except that audience is me. It’s hard enough for some to pay attention to a movie with phones constantly beckoning or with free time itself being a dwindling resource. But here we are, too deep to turn back.

All of that being said, I think Hard to be a God could be/needs to be much higher on my list but I saw it under extremely distracting circumstances. I was tending to the numerous demands of a newborn girl, which made for some eagerness on my part. I broke it up into four viewings, which is a flat injustice to something so inimitable and otherworldly. Like Mad Max, it simply could not be duplicated. It comes from a very specific filthy place, where ideas are constantly materialized and not a moment is wasted on useless exposition or anodyne filler. I doubt we will see the likes of either anytime soon. Hard to be a God is not a movie I’m eager to reenter, less because of the spit, shit, and misery than the running time, but I clearly owe it another more lucid go. I had a similar experience with In Jackson Heights and About Elly, all movies that our local Art Mission Theater wouldn’t dream of showing.

I paid money to see seven of the ten, all assiduously viewed on a big screen with the exception of Heaven Knows What. I saw that one in my basement with my euphoric mother in law. That goes for all of my honorable mentions with the exception of five titles. My #1 has stayed put since I saw it, oddly enough with my friend Hunter with whom I share very little commonality when it comes to cineaste predilections. For instance, he declared The Revenant his favorite of the year for reasons that I frankly understood but couldn’t abide. We both agreed on Timbuktu. Sissako’s juggling of tenor threatened to come apart and it nearly does in its final moments, only to seamlessly bookend this tale of maladroit terrorists and the families they destroy. I’m not sure I’ve been as wrecked by any single scene in the last few years as the one where Kidane chooses to bow in the direction of his wife and daughter, a brave and pure gesture and a spit directly into the mouth of intimidation and death itself. I also cried during Inside Out, Creed, and The Good Dinosaur. I saw Blackhat extremely stoned with Mike O’D.

I sat next to a couple during The Hateful Eight and around the halfway point she whispered “get me the fuck out of here” which tbh I completely understand. I hope Tarantino injects some of his undervalued benevolence in his next movie. Part of what I love about the guy is his joy for filmmaking and all of the people, places, influences, etc. that make it so special and important to him. He’s a far less interesting provocateur, at least these days. Roth made two films that one could argue were deliberately/gleefully abhorrent. I don’t know. I enjoyed the hell out of both and I think part of that stems from his diminished reputation. It’s a good thing. He’s making movies like he has nothing to gain or lose. The Good Dinosaur is underrated, mostly because critics were too hung up on its assembled Frankenstein plot structure. I thought it landed everything it needed to and I’d take it 100% of the time over something like The Revenant, which is similar in structure, kinda. I have little or nothing to say about Bridge of Spies, except that I think it’s the best thing he’s done since 2005. I don’t want to dwell too much on the negative, but I left a lot of the critically adored films with a meh. I’m not sure why, maybe I’ll try and tackle that in a post this week. Probably not.

2015 B*$:

1.       Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)

2.       Heaven Knows What (Sadfies)

3.       Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

4.       About Elly (Asghar Farhadi)

5.       Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)

6.       Creed (Ryan Coogler)

7.       In Jackson Heights (Frederick Weisman)

8.       Inside Out (Pete Docter)

9.       Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)

10.   Blackhat (Michael Mann)

Honorable beloved mentions: The Hateful Eight, Carol, Sicario, The Good Dinosaur, Mistress America, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Magic Mike XXL, Bone Tomahawk, Girlhood, The Mend, Buzzard, The Green Inferno, Knock Knock, Run All Night.

Not for me, my fault: Anomolisa, Spotlight, Ex Machina, The Assassin, Room, Tangerine, It Follows, Phoenix, Clouds of Sils Maria, While We’re Young, Jauja, Eden, Queen of Earth, Results, Jurassic World, Unfriended, Black Mass, The Visit (minus that scene under porch), Krampus, The Revenant.

Didn’t see: Brooklyn, Son of Saul, 45 Years, Arabian Nights, Embrace the Serpent, Irrational Man, Spy, Ricki and the Flash.

I liked these to varying degrees but their presence of an honorable mentions list feels as though it cheapens the aforementioned movie’s worth: Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Amy, The Walk, Crimson Peak, The Man From UNCLE, The Lobster, Horse Money, Amour Fou, Vacation, Goosebumps.

2016 and desperation

Brawl in Cell Block 99 descends deeper and deeper into a circumstantial and corporeal hellscape as our main goon creeps closer and closer to his objective, which will leave him in no better off physically. The carnage follows in step as acts of violence become increasingly catastrophic. It belongs to a very short list of movies that have stuck with me from 2017 (All These Sleepless Nights, Logan Lucky, A Quiet Passion, and mother! too). I also haven’t been able to shake the final scene/closing credits of Good Time, a similar stroll through an infernal cityscape where desperation plays such a large role in behavior. The acts of violence here are far less graphic but much more appalling because the acts are done unto the innocent. These poor few are in the wrong place, or line of work, at the wrong time. It also features the best portrayal of a person with developmental disabilities I’ve ever seen. Here are my favorite movies from last year.

Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang Soo)

Everybody Wants Some (Richard Linklater)

Silence (Martin Scorsese)

Love and Friendship (Whitt Stillman)

Allied (Robert Zemeckis)

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

The Wailing (Hong-jin Na)

O.J. Simpson: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)

The Other Side (Roberto Minervini)

Sunset Song (Terence Davies)

I also have varying degrees of love and respect in my heart for:

No Home Movie, The Love Witch, Things to Come, Manchester By the Sea, The Witch, Hail Caesar, Knight of Cups, Hush, The Shallows, Sully, Certain Women, Gimme Danger, Cemetery of Splendor, and Train to Busan.

I liked The BFG, Arrival, The Handmaiden, Midnight Special, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Those haven’t stuck with me however. Against any conceivable taste or better judgment, I enjoyed Don’t Breathe and that last Purge movie.

I failed to see The Mermaid, Demon, Aquarius, The Illinois Parables, and Happy Hour.

power and abuse

PR rules everything around me. This is a sad but true reality, at least in the music world, and part of me wonders how long this has been going on. There is a current local "DIY" soap opera unveiling on thee ole FB that's far more entertaining than anything I've seen lately. Part of the very public brawl involves a certain canny band's ability to play the PR game and bend the public's will to their favor at the potential cost of another band’s reputation. They know just how to get their name in all of the right places, how to tease their albums' release song by song, how to book and ride another bigger band's dick and leech their fans along the way, and how to flash their easily inherited political beliefs in the public eye so that they always come out on top when someone calls them out on their bullshit. The shit-storm they have summoned has kicked up some intense one-sided dialogue, an echo chamber for a very angry group of men who shoot ignorantly from the hip. Sadly, the conversation has led to very serious and unsavory issues that the aforementioned PR maestros are now shrinking away from in light of said allegations' likely fabrication. One band's inability or unwillingness to play along, it seems, has put a very large target on their back and allegations are hard to shake. None of this has anything to do with the movies so I'll try and segue.

Basically, being involved in such a zealous and stern "DIY" community has me wondering about the so-called validity of it all, at least on a universal level. I love the idea of artists staying strong and true in the midst of this rigged system of pay-to-be-played arm twisting. Of course all open displays of idealistic integrity make one susceptible to a harsher standard. But is this idea limited to music? Do we make exceptions for bands that are actually good? Are we supposed to hold film to the same standard? I'm no absolutist so I say do whatever the fuck you feel, all while having a surplus of hatred towards the notion that syndicates are so crooked, lame, and lazy that they only accept things set before them by an overpaid/mouth-breathing/barnacle publicist who could truly give a tinker's damn about the art form they peddle. Seriously, fuck these chumps and Trojan horse they rode in on. This is the same media Ouroboros that gave a certain very powerful man his current position as his brain rots along with what little ability his dumb ass had to reason with.

With all of this being said, I have to admire some who know how to play the game well. Take the new version of Stephen King's IT as an example. It was destined to succeed via its namesake alone, but its marketing campaign all but guaranteed its current reign. All the heavies involved knew just how to bring this story to a modern audience and it had a lot to do with riding the hysteria of Stranger Things and its nostalgia fetish. The movie itself chronicles a group of young tormented dorks as they face a relentless fusillade of outside maltreatment. The world, according to King, is predatory by nature and small kids take the brunt by default. The prey here face an extreme and embellished form of harassment from their bigger peers, Munchausen by proxy from a sweaty, blotchy, and all around grotesque matriarch, neglect from grieving parents, being surrounded by death, molestation, etc. To quote Lillian Gish from Night of the Hunter, “this world is so hard on little things.”

To top off the misfortunes, we have Pennywise (a very uneven and often infuriating performance), a clown that eats kids, especially the ill-fated ones with a sufficient stockpile of fear and loneliness. It’s a worn-out kernel of wisdom that fear is a form of power, one that the horror genre has tossed around to varying degrees of success. Pennywise might as well be Freddy with all the puns and wisecracks in ample supply. In all honesty, It isn’t especially scary though Andy Muschietti has a way of making an audience distrust even the safest environments by making every scene a means to a jump-scare. It gets old. Also, I’m not particularly scared of clowns so the mere sight of Pennywise didn’t conjure up some wicked childhood trauma.  

I personally found the heart of IT to be the crushing weight of loss as seen and felt by Bill in the aftermath of the death of his little brother, Georgie. Everything else, with certain flourishes of the Beverly/father situation being the exception, felt like a thematic caricature, the most overblown renditions of childhood trauma imaginable. I guess I don’t mind it when characters lack dimension but it’s hard to have skin in the game when the enveloping world is so overblown and Muschietti and crew don’t have enough faith in camp to stay afloat. And look at the treatment of the bully, himself a victim of some irrefutably severe abuse. For a much better examination of abuse, also from King, check out Gerald’s Game, a similarly assured populist product that eventually commits and morphs into a movie about mistreatment itself.

Steven Spielberg may have been the king of PR, with so many of his greatest successes being sold as potential failures. Bruce’s mechanical blip set what could have/would have been just another B-movie with bad effects into the realm of Hitchcock and Hawks. Close Encounters supposedly was one of those “all-in/betting the farm” blockbusters for Columbia. The same goes for the black and white Schindler’s List and the CGI Jurassic Park, both released successfully in 1993. He clearly curates his legacy, and why the fuck not? Like most anyone else, I’ve crawled through the apostate chapter of my Spielberg transfiguration. I grew up a fan, unknowingly because I didn’t know what a director was. I remember working at Barnes and Noble with a now prominent/respected (justifiably) member of the NYC film critic circle. He would continuously sing the praises of tried and true cinephile golden calves whilst using our main man Steven as the mainstream antithesis. I didn’t have the poise to resist so I fell in. Now here we are, both returning to the altar to worship the king of populist art. And make no mistake, it’s art. The new doc is nothing new and certainly a hagiography of the most shameless order, but basking in this master’s freakishly pristine compositions is worth the worn-out familiarity.

Still….. fuck PR and the horse it rode in on.