Best Discoveries - 2015

Dream of Light (El Sol Del Membrillo) Victor Erice, 1992

Greaser's Palace Robert Downey Sr., 1972

The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie) Larisa Shepitko, 1977

The Highlands Trilogy 
(First Contact - Joe Leahy's Neighbors - Black Harvest)
 Bob Connelly & Robin Anderson, 1983 - 1989 - 1992

Long Live Death (Viva La Muerte)  &
I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (J'irai comme un cheval fou) 
     Fernando Arrabal, 1972; 1973

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter William Beaudine, 1966

Nightfall Jacques Tourneur, 1957

Walker Alex Cox, 1987

The Swimmer Frank Perry, 1968

Goltzius and the Pelican Company Peter Greenaway, 2012

Wanda Barbara Loden, 1970

Planet of the Vampires Mario Bava, 1965

The End of Time Peter Mettler, 2012

The Astro-Zombies  &
The Corpse Grinders Ted V. Mikels, 1968; 1971

The Damned Don't Cry Vincent Sherman, 1950

Roar Noel Marshall, 1981

"Jurassic World" dir. Colin Trevorrow, 2015

Luis Bunuel and Salavdor Dali famously began their influential Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou with the slice of an eyeball, while the Russian Futurist filmmaker Dziga Vertoz closed his operatic collage film Man With a Movie Camera by melding the human eye with the lens of a movie camera. The opening frames of Jurassic World confront the audience with an eyeball as well, but one that represents a very different relationship to movies than those manifesto-fueled avant-garde masterpieces of the late 1920's.  The opening optical confrontation presented by this box-office record-breaking behemoth got me thinking about the ways in which all of these films are very much invested in their sense of themselves as movies. Where Un Chien Andalou and Man With a Movie Camera are both exercises in anti-narrative, privileging non-linearity and anti-realist camera trickery over story, Jurassic World is a post-narrative film, resigned to its repetitious story elements and characterizations, and confined to having a conversation with itself, and us, about its own nature as pure cinema product. In this way, Jurassic World is a perfect gauge for how the medium of film has changed in the intervening 85+ years. It's also a perfect gauge for how the movie industry has changed since the release of the original Jurassic Park.

Like the sullen, inoffensive baby dinosaurs depicted in the film, sentenced to a life of having child after child ride them in circles, Jurassic World is a tired tourist attraction that is excessively aware of the tired gaze of its audience, but even more aware of their gullibility as consumers.  The opening scenes of the film are riddled with dialogue that seem to be desperately reassuring the audience that this entry will certainly have "more teeth," while simultaneously sounding utterly hopeless about the fact the film will have any "bite" at all. As Bryce Dallas Howard's corporate liaison Claire states early on to some potential sponsors of the park: "No one's impressed by a dinosaur anymore." What we have in this new entry is a film that looks right at the audience, states that it's a failed product, and then laughs at us for having vaulted it to untold box office success.

To be fair, like the character of young Gray (Ty Simpkins), there are a lot of people out there who, simply put, are just into dinosaurs. The history of cinema holds a long fascination with dinosaurs, from the animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), to The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), the pioneering stop-action work of Ray Harryhausen, and on through the ever-evolving CGI work of Industrial Light and Magic. Historically, the cinema has served as a magical tourist destination to witness these extinct creatures. Jurassic World conflates this idea of cinema-as-tourism in numerous ways throughout the film.

A few years before the release of the original Jurassic Park, John Urry published an influential book in tourism studies called “The Tourist Gaze” which would define our movie-going preoccupation with these giant reptiles as a Collectivist Gaze--the same type of mass, pre-packaged tourist experience depicted as the central location of the film. Tourists who flock to theme parks are central to the Collectivist Gaze--you see them running in colorful, multi-cultural, chaotic streams as the new, mutant products of this entry easily pick them off. Tourists who stray from the Collectivist path, like brothers Zach and Gray in their protective "eye-pod" deciding to go off-roading, are travelling into the realm of what Urry would call the Romantic Gazer, solitary and in search of the Authentic.

The Jurassic films of the past have allowed audiences to travel these imagined borderlands of the gaze, but Jurassic World truly falls short when it comes to discovering anything authentic. In fact, much of the film feels like it takes place in "Meta-World," with the Gen-Y dinosaur monitor Lowery (Jake Johnson) explaining how he got his Jurassic Park T-shirt on e-bay, extolling the authenticity of the original; Claire's exasperated comment about a potential "Verizon Wireless" sponsored attraction; the vigorously infused product placement involving not only the park's Margaritaville outlet, but a Jimmy Buffet-penned song on the soundtrack to boot. Once again, our sense of ourselves as consumers is a primary concern of Jurassic World, almost to an extent that would make German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht take interest, were it not so narrowly focused on capitalist gain. Brecht was a pioneer of meta-theatrical techniques who was invested in continually reminding his audience of their role as spectators, and the constructed aspects of spectacle. Brecht saw this awareness as essential to liberating audiences from the dark goals of propagandists and myth-makers after WWI. In Jurassic World, utilizing the main attraction of the theme park as an antidote to war is a theme that echoes this sentiment throughout. Yet, the film’s villain, Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), comes to a wholly uninspired end at the jaws of the raptors he has been taunting and planning to exploit throughout; ultimately, his most relevant moment comes when he kicks back in front of the monitors during the final action sequences, takes a long draw from a cine-plex-sized Jurassic World soda cup and inquires: "You recordin' this thing?”  An unsubtle reminder of the endless reproduction of these types of franchises, to be sure, but also a moment that feels like the makers of Jurassic World are just rubbing our noses in the proceedings late into the film.

With all this in mind, I want to read Jurassic World--that is, the park itself--as the current movie industry, desperate in its attempt to cross-breed any number of market-proven ideas, particularly of the recycled variety. The immersive audience experiences of the park, from the rolling gyro-scopes to the drop-down audience experience, all echo recent attempts by the industry to try and offer more immersive cinema experiences to a public that is less and less interested in going to movies. One central character to this reading is Masrani (Irrfan Kahn). Dressed in what you might call “Industry Couture,” it is perhaps no mistake that this freewheeling, helicopter-piloting stakeholder’s nationality is the largest movie-producing country in the world. His wonder at the new "Great White Hope" creation reminds us again of our spectatorship, and the state of the movie business. When Masrani first sees the creature, is he seeing the attraction, or the audience for the attraction? Claire speaks of "measuring the animal's emotional experience," to which Masrani replies: "You can see it in their eyes.” Recent marketing research tools that track exactly where the spectator's eyes are looking at any moment came to mind, as I stared again into the eyes of the mutant beast. In reverse shot, we see the look in Masrani's eyes reflect his excitement at this new advancement, and the potential profit. 

"Tomorrowland" dir. Brad Bird, 2015

Near the middle of Brad Bird's second live-action feature Tomorrowland, a melee in a sci-fi memorabilia store involving our young heroine Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) and two inexplicable geek-chic robots (Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael Key) sends more than a few artifacts from our movie-going childhood splintering across the screen. The filmmakers revel in the opportunity for multiple visual references in this sequence, as Newton places her trinket of time travel at the center of the swirling art design for Disney's 1979 feature The Black Hole, and eventually, as the conflict over the trinket ensues, a model of the iconic robot Gort from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still collapses in shambles. This cue to the audience that Tomorrowland is not exactly your grandma's thinly veiled apocalyptic warning occurs around the point that most audiences will likely experience their own narrative comprehension begin to spiral into a black hole, so to speak.

Tomorrowland is a troubled piece of storytelling that offers four or five different narrative paths, each one a bit more tonally skewed from the last. The design of the picture matches the film's hapless narrative pastiche, juxtaposing sequences that rely heavily on historical recreation in one moment (the 1964 World's Fair), and the cartoonish design of Bird's more successful animated film The Incredibles in the next (bulbous robots with Swiss Army knife appendages). All of this is wrapped in (or around) a simple tale of light vs dark, optimism vs pessimism, good wolves vs bad, yet fraught by an inability to tell it simply, or even clearly. A dedication to the “Disney Ideal” is on display from the very beginning of Bird and fellow screenwriter Damon Lindelof's script, along with tiresome homages to their Spielberg-saturated childhoods. Tomorrowland gives the impression of mature filmmakers who have culled together the references of those childhood influences, but childishly failed to heed any of the lessons on display in even the most basic of their predecessor's oeuvre. In other words, both Bird and Lindelof could have benefited here from reviewing Spielberg's first feature Duel, where a man in a car is chased by a man in a truck until he defeats both man and truck.

In the early 1980's I watched Duel numerous times on Sunday afternoons and never tired of it. To be fair, I could see that same 12 year-old “me” taking much more easily to the pleasures of Tomorrowland than the future, curmudgeonly “me” who has probably fed the "wolf of pessimism" too often for his own good, to borrow the central parable of the film. One reason for this is that Tomorrowland plays relentlessly--and rather expertly--to a child's sense of action and wonder, but at the expense of any semblance of adult patience. Yes, there's a child in me that really digs Tomorrowland, and, by film's end, an adult that can't help but admire the grandiose sense of inspiration it intends. Unfortunately, this message of inspiration is perhaps the falsest note of the entire film, channeled through the character of Casey Newton who is continually and vaguely championed as just "knowing how things work." Robertson's histrionic, goofy physiognomy doesn't help matters, nor does the hokey depiction early in the film of her character’s infant self, a regrettable scene that seemingly forces the script to turn against itself.

Perhaps the truest moment in Tomorrowland comes during one of the film's three or four finales, when our human protagonists drive robot/villain Nix (Hugh Laurie) to "monologuing" (in yet another reference to The Incredibles), as he exclaims: "You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, the algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint!" Putting the occasional pessimism of "future me" aside, I truly wish this weren't the most impactful moment of the film, because it’s certainly not the tangled mess that surrounds it: a beyond-convoluted plot involving a new army of robots covertly sneaking Tomorrowland emblems into the design files and guitar cases of potential world-shakers, who will then be transported into an extremely difficult-to-navigate immersive fantasy commercial (?) that might inspire them to alter the course of Frank Walker's generic apocalyptic predictions.

Frank Walker (George Clooney) is our exiled hero, a former citizen of Tomorrowland inexplicably forlorn over an adolescent robot named Athena (Raffey Cassidy). Athena is programmed to recruit the next great generation of innovators, and eventually brings Walker and young Newton together before ultimately sacrificing herself for the future of the human race. In this second (or third) finale involving Athena’s sacrifice, the film plays with the possibility of raising intriguing questions about human obligation in a post-human world. Unfortunately, these themes have been explored more fully in recent films such as Spike Jones' Her and Alex Garland's Ex Machina. Even within Bird's Pixar cohort, the creators of Wall-E managed to delve way more trenchantly into this thematic territory, asking perhaps the most intriguing futurist question of any animated film: What is our obligation to two robots that fall in love?

Of course, just because one film does something better than another film is no justification of a film’s success or failure. Tomorrowland certainly fails well enough on its own, and gloriously so, with an absurdly over-stuffed quality that I admire. Did I mention the scene where young Newton lights a combine tractor on fire and sends it rolling driverless toward Walker’s house? Walker’s freeze-gun? The hologram dog? Like the centerpiece memorabilia store of the film, Tomorrowland is packed floor-to-ceiling with shiny, enticing toys and trinkets. Its quality as product far outweighs its shallow sense of social change. For a film that calls toward fixing the climate crisis and various other forms of environmental and social upheaval, it seems hopelessly fixed in the stagnant mentality that Nix so eloquently describes. It’s the same mentality that the memorabilia store perpetuates, that naturalizes us toward a world of adults playing with children’s toys and paying for children’s movies, fixed in the daydream of the past while the apocalypse plays out on a loop. 

Best Films - 2014

Taking a brief look back at my "Best Films" list from the last couple of years, the best I can say is that the few films at the top--Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Leos Carax's Holy Motors--are still reliable indicators of what is invigorating and hopeful to me about the current state of movies. Here are the films that struck an ecstatic chord with me in 2014:

Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Alejandro Inarritu

The Act of Killing  Joshua Oppenheimer

Ida  Pawel Pawlikowski

Under the Skin  Jonathan Glazer

The Homesman  Tommy Lee Jones

Nightcrawler  Dan Gilroy

Enemy  Denis Villeneuve

Her  Spike Jonze

Jodorowsky’s  Dune  Frank Pavich

The Rover  David Michod

The Best of the Rest:

Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch

We Are The Best! Lukas Moodysson

Nebraska Alexander Payne

Lucy Luc Besson
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night Ana Lily Amirpour

Night Moves Kelley Reichardt

Willow Creek Bobcat Goldthwait

Locke Steven Knight

Edge of Tomorrow Doug Liman

Boyhood Richard Linklater

Frank Lenny Arahamsom

Fury David Ayer
Welcome To Me Shira Piven

Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

The Disappointments: 

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Cohen), Leviathan (Andrey Zivyagintsev),

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle), Slow West (John Maclean)

Just Terrible:

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Frances Lawrence), Saw (James Wan - 10th Anniversary Re-Release...my first "Saw movie")

ECSTATIC Shorts: "The Sinking of the Lusitania" dir. Winsor McCay, 1918

Probably best known for his 1914 landmark, rice-paper drawn animation Gertie the Dinosaur, Winsor McCay displayed his first use of animation drawn on celluloid (as in "animation cels") with The Sinking of the Lusitania.  In 1918, Lusitania was the longest running animation to date. 

What is particularly interesting here is the attempt at a dramatic "animated documentary" form.  Though we might initially think of this as an antiquated or even failed form of documentary storytelling, there are a number of significant modern documentaries that use animation as a key element of capturing and shaping history, as with Bret Morgen's Chicago 10 (2007) and Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir (2008).

Best Films - 2013

David Mamet once wrote: “It is the audience that goes to the theatre to exercise its emotion – not the actor, the audience." The opportunities for this kind of exercise were abundant this year, which was already clear back in July (check out my "2013 - So Far" post here).  As the year in cinema progressed I kept returning to this question of what "exercised" me most as a way to create a list that means something beyond simply stating what I thought stood out, but rather attempts to give form to the character of what was invigorating, surprising, challenging, or, dare I say, New at the cinema in 2013. As for Mamet's contribution, the dreadful Phil Spector is certainly more near the bottom of my list than the top. In contrast, there were a number of surprisingly engaging performances of pop culture and historical figures rendered this year, albeit in films that perhaps failed to live up to the quality of those performances: Michael Douglas as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra, Bill Murray as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson, and Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock, to name a few. All in all, it was a year of quite inspired acting that did give us a workout in the way Mamet (once upon a time) so rightly remarked: Julie Delpy in Before Midnight, Suzanne Clement in Laurence Anyways, Nicole Kidman in Stoker, Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha, Adele Exarchopoulos in La vie d'Adele (Blue is the Warmest Color), Christian Bale in American Hustle, Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine...just for starters.

Suzanne Clement in Laurence Anyways

Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine

In the year's best moments, directors took their time, allowed us to live with the characters, and allowed our thinking to unfold alongside those characters, whether it be Leonardo Dicaprio and Kyle Chandler on the yacht Naomi in The Wolf of Wall Street, or Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt in a sunlit nightclub in The Counselor. Sadly, even in a film as fraught with problems as The Counselor (prominently featuring one of the most hopeless casting errors of the year: Cameron Diaz as the car-humping Malkina) the hints of brilliance that emerge from Cormac McCarthy's risky screenplay debut are more interesting as parts of an undoubtedly broken whole than many other so-called "whole" films could claim this year. For instance, Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity was surely one of the most ecstatic visual experiences of the year (I'll even admit to a few sniffles during Bullock and Cuaron's attempt to bring new dimensions, literally, to the term "crying for your Oscar"), but I ultimately thought about it way less than I did The Counselor, in terms of both the ideas at the heart of those films and the level of craft. As with a few other films this year (12 Years a Slave, Only God Forgives, The Place Beyond the Pines...and probably some other "brooding Ryan Gosling" film I forgot I saw), there were some lessons to be learned about taking risks, and critical challenges presented to audiences that were unique to the releases of 2013.

Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives

A new category may be in order to round up this fascinating lot. The "It's Complicated" category? (I don't want to cause any confusion that it may have something to do with the films of Nancy Meyers, which surely have their own complications, though not quite at the same level of risk).  Better yet, for this particular year, lets call it "The Place Beyond the Top Ten," which would include the alluded to Derek Cianfrance follow-up to the less expansive (though more affecting) Blue Valentine (2010), as well as the aforementioned films: Ridley Scott's The Counselor, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, Cuaron's Gravity, Nicholas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives and Abdellatif Kechiche's Cannes Palme d'Or winner La vie d'Adele.  Add to that short list the disparate experimental styles of Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell and Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, and you have the beginnings of what made the conversation around film so rich this year, whether speaking of them as commercial product or critical centerpiece. Films like these were also what made the communal aspect of going to the movies so damned interesting this year, whether that manifested itself in the collective awe of falling through space, or the disgruntled comments one overhears in even the most mundane outings to the mutli-plex (after a screening of The Counselor I attended:  "I wouldn't recommend that to a DOG").  

Michael Fassbender in The Counselor

As for 12 Years a Slave, my experience of seeing it with an audience will forever color the way I read the film.  The screening was peppered with audible gasps; less in response to the depiction of brutalized slaves, and more in response to the showcase-like nature of the white acting talent that comprises the majority of the film's roles. They gasped at Fassbender.  They gasped at Pitt.  They discussed only the gray in Pitt's beard as they exited the theatre, concluding that he was, after all, "still good lookin'."  12 Years a Slave is a film that many critics have interpreted as a "breakthrough" for director McQueen, both in terms of audience and his skill as a filmmaker.  Certainly, more people are aware of McQueen and Fassbender now than ever, but 12 Years a Slave tends to alternate between moments of great power and a rather plodding attempt at storytelling, all the while haunted by the ghost of Roots. Chiwetel Ejiofor is exceptional in the film, though it's McQueen's off-kilter choices that continually threaten to weigh the picture down, as in a patiently inserted close-up late in the film of Ejiofor's character Soloman Northrup landing his gaze on the audience.  It's the kind of moment that is intended to strike with unexpected, Brechtian force, but is rendered ineffective by the overall tone and pace of the piece.  Of course, 12 Years a Slave is an important film, but somehow Django Unchained, Tarantino's Absurdist slavery-era pastiche from last year, may prove the more successful movie, communicating a stronger truth about our current relationship to race and slavery through crafting an elaborate lie than McQueen was able to do through confronting us with the truth of Northrup's tale.  Though treated like a directorial star on the rise, I've felt quite the opposite about McQueen's trajectory.  For a more artistically daring and politically potent display of his talents, I suggest his debut feature Hunger (2008) over anything he's done since.

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave

And what of La vie d'Adele?  Such a simple, unsensational love story.  It's a rare achievement of intimacy that involves two young lovers, their struggles with finding a professional foothold in the worlds of Political Activism, Art and Education, their ultimate painful break-up, and their occasional conversations about Nietzsche.  As far as the controversy is concerned, no matter how many times we've heard male directors play macho by declaring that "only what ends up on the screen matters," the film is significantly compromised if it's the product of having crossed ethical lines. Once again, it's complicated; more so because the real controversy should be how unequipped most audiences (not to mention the American ratings system) are to be confronted by such a patient, lengthy piece of Realism; an affectionate depiction of two young, intelligent women in love, making love, talking about books instead of how they're going to win a sing-off, dance-off, or some such bullshit.

La vie d'Adele

None of these films made my Top Ten.  Still, I would never claim that they're any less interesting in their success or failure than anything I did place on this year's temporary pedestal.  I know that many of these year-end lists are about exercising some grand gesture of unwavering critical authority, but I'm not going to pretend that my lists have anything to do with that.  Personally, they're a way for me to try and be honest about what I value in both art and culture, as well as an attempt to challenge my own assumptions about what is valuable in the medium, my own practices of consumption, and hopefully communicate something meaningful about those values to the reader; some unique spectre of light that takes form across a selection of films. This year, two entries seem to me different sides of the same coin; unyeilding, artful journeys into the perverted excesses of American desire.  As far from that perversion as one might hope to get, two films here document in mesmerizing fashion two extreme, remote locations and modes of living.  Yet another pair of films here embrace the "limited" video mediums of the 1980's, only to find stories more expansive and engaging than anything Soderbergh was able to suss out with his Sony RED in the year of his retirement from making films. In no particular order, here are 10 of my favorites, followed by some honorable mentions, a few disappointments, a few highly anticipated pics, and a brief lift of the rock to peek at the absolute dreck of the year:

Best Films: 2013

Spring Breakers
Harmony Korine

Berberian Sound Studio
Peter Strickland

Leviathan
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Dmitry Vasyukov, Werner Herzog

Computer Chess
Andrew Bujalski

No
Pablo Larrain

The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese

Post Tenebras Lux 
Carlos Reygadas

Upstream Color
Shane Carruth

American Hustle
David O. Russell

The Best of the Rest:  

Room 237 (Rodney Ascher), 

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)  

To the Wonder (Terrance Malick)  

Stoker (Park Chan-wook)

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

Mud (Jeff Nichols) 

Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)  

A Band Called Death (Mark Christopher Covino + Jeff Howlett)

Nicole Kidman in Stoker

The Disappointments:  

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance), World War Z (Marc Forster), 
Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg), The Wolverine (James Magold)

The "Just Terrible":  

On the Road (Walter Salles), Star Trek Into Darkness (JJ Abrams), Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez), Texas Chainsaw 3D (John Luessenhop), 
Bullet to the Head (Walter Hill), Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard)

Evil Dead

The "Just... Couldn't":  

Gangster Squad (Ruben Fleischer), The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann), 
Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass), Oz The Great and Powerful (Sam Raimi)

The Most Antcipated List:
 
Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve),  Enough Said (Nicole Holefcener), 

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer),  Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen), 

Bastards (Claire Denis),  A Touch of Sin (Zhang Ke Jia),

Nebraska (Alexander Payne),  The Grandmaster (Wong Kar Wai), 

Museum Hours (Jem Cohen),  At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman),
All is Lost (J.C. Chandor),  Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallee),
As I lay Dying (James Franco)

Inside Llewyn Davis