Films of 2016

2016 in movies, a bit late, though not as bad as last year, and it does let me get some some films in that are taking a while to get to the theaters. I did not have a great year going to the movies - it's a trend that's been building, and one I suspect is going to get a lot worse next year (for reasons maybe to be discussed.) The last couple years have been underwhelming film years - not bad, exactly; there are plenty of enjoyable films, but not as many transcendent ones, it seems. And the transcendent experiences sometimes seem to come from some detail in the film, some resonance, more than from the quality of the film itself. Maybe. Looking at what I saw - there are some fine films on there: plenty of pleasure, all the way down the list - and a few moments that brought back all the joys of the movies. I think I enjoyed this year's bunch of films more than I thought I did...

Whether that's so or now, I have done a terrible job of writing about films. I haven't written a thing about new films in a couple years - not a word last year. (Barely anything the 2 years before that.) Not much about old films either - unless it's for someone else (thank god for Polls!) Anyway: let me try to make up for that, with a few lines about these films - at least the top 10. And so without further ado -

Released in 2016:

1. Paterson - Beautiful and enthralling, based on the wonders of the everyday world - William Carlos Williams its obvious guiding saint - rooted in the world, and the way the world filters into one man's mind. Full of imagery - twins, writers and artists, performances, lovers - doubles and puns and internal rhymes. With nods to other films - Nagase at the end (from Mystery Train), Method Man rapping, Gilman and Hayward talking on the bus about Gaetano Breschi, the anarchist weaver who shot the king of Italy.

2. Certain Women - sharp ensemble piece, three stories almost entwined. Things happen, though nothing too dramatic, and even if something dramatic does happen, it does so quietly, almost apologetically; full of silences and looks; people working; people thinking. Beautiful film with a stellar cast.

3. Silence - best Scorsese film in 2 decades. Intense and driven, and carried by superb performances by all concerned. (Tadanabo Asano's character - weak, constantly betraying, trampling the cross and informing, and constantly coming back, begging for absolution - might be the most interesting.) A very interesting historical film as well - giving voice to the Japanese, in a fascinating tangle - a film by Americans of a novel by a Japanese about Portuguese priests...

4. 20th Century Women - Handsome clever film about a middle aged single mother trying to raise her son - another film bursting with brilliant performances: Bening and Gerwig and Crudup and Faning and Zumann the kid - Bening at the center, but first among many greats.

5. Love and Friendship - Whit Stillman adapting Austen directly, early, obscure Austen - which he describes on the DVD as an Oscar Wilde play written by Jane Austen. Kate Beckinsale is front and center - one of Stillman's monsters, the kind of character Chris Eigenman used to play - completely self-absorbed and likable anyway, you can't turn away, she's so brazen at what she does, always both completely honest and completely false. With a very cool ending, everyone getting what they want - including Lady Susan, who appears to have landed in the middle of a perfectly successful threesome...

6. Loving - Story of the Lovings, whose marriage and lawsuit ended miscegenation laws in the United States. Seen through the couple's eyes, his and hers, with their complimentary virtues, their love. It is beautiful, quiet, building tension without anything really overt happening - the fear and their ability to live around the fear, the way Edgerton squirms around the sheriff, the way they fight back. Not that it's needed, but more proof that Jeff Nichols is one of the great contemporary directors.

7. The Witch - A man is banished from his New England town in the early 17th century. He takes his family into the woods and carves out a farm there alone - but things are not well. The baby disappears - secrets and lies are revealed through the family's misfortune, and they all start going mad. Accusations fly - who is the witch? is Black Phillip the devil? A cool, brooding little film, tight and gripping - family disfunction, religious lunacy, the dangers of the frontier, madness and hormones, all add up to disaster of biblical proportions.

8. Mountains May Depart - Story in three parts: 1999 - a worker and a rising capitalist chase the same girl, until she chooses the money; 2014- the son visits his mother, whose long since divorced the capitalist; 2025 - the son, in Australia, as alienated from his father as his mother, has an affair with an older woman (Sylvia Change, so thus believable)... Melodrama of sorts, a story of misery and loss, a death as the main emotional foundation, with failed love affairs and children who don't talk to their parents the content. Everyone suffers - the rich guy ends up a pathetic loser, collecting guns in Melbourne; the worker - probably dead; the girl alone with her dog - which comes off as rather a triumph, in this context.

9. Elle - tour de force for Isabelle Huppert, who plays a rich woman, owns a video game company, and is raped to open the film - but reacts with a kind of cool numbness that we soon realize is her natural state. The story works in the backstory - her father was a mass murderer, who dragged her into his crimes, making her infamous, creating her shell. She never quite comes out - never quite becomes clear to us - stays strange throughout, as is her way.

10. Moonlight - film in three parts about a black boy/man in Miami (and Atlanta) - Chiron/Little/Black. He's a quiet sensitive boy who runs a gauntlet of trouble for it - called faggot at 9, beaten for it as a teenager, and crusting it over in street hardness as an adult. Revolves around three scenes at the ocean - learning to swim with Juan, a drug dealer who becomes his friend; smoking a joint and experimenting with sex with a friend as a teenager; then talking to the same friend, now a cook, at his house by the ocean as adults. Beautifully shot, acted with grace by the whole cast - handsome, very moving film.

11. Our Little Sister
12. Midnight Special
13. Fireworks Wednesday
14. My Golden Days
15. Little Men
16. Lo and Behold
17. Hail Caesar
18. Things to Come
19. Too Late
20. Jackie
21. The Handmaiden
22. A Bigger Splash
23. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
24. Manchester By the Sea
25. Krisha

Made in 2016 - an interesting list, because most of the best films released were in fact new last year. Usually you get a lot of the best foreign films from the year before showing up sometime in the first 2-3 months of the new year. ast year didn't have as much of that - or I didn't see them...

1. Paterson
2. Certain Women
3. Silence
4. 20th Century Women
5. Love and Friendship
6. Loving
7. Elle
8. Moonlight
9. Midnight Special
10. Little Men

And the annual look back a year - 2015. What I posted at the beginning of 2016:

1. The Look of Silence
2. The Forbidden Room
3. The Assassin
4. Tangerine
5. The Wolfpack
6. Taxi
7. Youth
8. Carol
9. The Big Short
10. Diary of a Teenaged Girl

And how it looks now - not much changed to be honest:

1. The Look of Silence
2. The Forbidden Room
3. The Assassin
4. Tangerine
5. The Wolfpack
6. Taxi
7. The Witch
8. Mountains May Depart
9. Our Little Sister
10. Carol

Best Films of 2015

I am much later getting this posted than usual. I usually try to force myself to do it right at the beginning of the year - but there are always films coming out in January that should be under consideration, so it's always tempting to wait a bit. And when you wait a couple days to get Carol in, it's easier to wait another week for Revenant, and another for Son of Saul - and before you know it, it's February. And then your copy of Out 1 arrives, and that is what you do for a week or two. And yes, I know, I'm lazy. But here we are.

Was it a good year for film? Not bad. Lots of good films - maybe not so much obviously magnificent. I've felt that way the last couple years - no lack of enjoyable, intelligent films - but not as many that jump out to grab you. Maybe it's me - maybe it's the industry, turning into television, where even the good stuff gets flattened out somehow. Changes in technology and distribution and viewing habits and the critical environment all might be leading to a world of smaller feeling, more modest films. It feels like it's been that way for a while - I'm not sure there are any films from the 2010s that would make a top 10 of the 2000s. I don't know. This is the kind of thing that can shift very quickly - something can click, and a host of films I thought were nice and accomplished could look like masterpieces. I can't separate perception from what I am perceiving here. And I know this can follow my viewing habits - and I have become rather complaisant about seeing films, not chasing down titles in every special series the way I have. That can change too. So leave it. It's not like it's a bad thing - a world of reliably enjoyable and moving films is not a world to complain about.

And so? the films, cut a couple ways. First - things released in 2015, whatever their age:

1. Winter Sleep
2. The Look of Silence
3. The Forbidden Room
4. The Assassin
5. Phoenix
6. Adieu au Langage
7. Tangerine
8. The Clouds of Sils Maria
9. About Elly
10. The Wolfpack
11. Taxi
12. Jauju
13. Youth
14. Carol
15. The Big Short
16. Diary of a Teenaged Girl
17. Son of Saul
18. The Tribe
19. The Revenant
20. Bridge of Spies
21. Mustang
22. What We Do In the Shadows
23. The Hateful 8
24. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
25. Grandma

Made in 2015 - a first cut:

1. The Look of Silence
2. The Forbidden Room
3. The Assassin
4. Tangerine
5. The Wolfpack
6. Taxi
7. Youth
8. Carol
9. The Big Short
10. Diary of a Teenaged Girl

And to take the chance to look back a year - what about 2014? This is what I posted at the end of the year:

1. Boyhood
2. Grand Budapest Hotel
3. The Babadook
4. Inherent Vice
5. The Rover
6. Love is Strange
7. Mr. Turner
8. Citizenfour
9. Force Majeure
10. Cavalry

And this is the tally now:

1. Boyhood
2. Winter Sleep
3. Grand Budapest Hotel
4. Phoenix
5. Babadook
6. Adieu au Langage
7. Inherent Vice
8. Clouds of Sils Maria
9. Leviathan
10. The Rover
11. Mr. Turner
12. Love is Strange
13. Juaju
14. Two Days, One Night
15. Citizen Four
16. Actress
17. Force Majeure
18. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
19. The Tribe
20. What We Do In the Shadows
21. Don't think I've Forgotten
22. Cavalry
23. Selma
24. 20,000 Days on Earth
25. 99 Homes

Friday! 2015 Random Ten

Well? It's Friday - the holiday season is coming up on us - a week from now is Christmas - the next week or so will probably ber very hectic. Not that it will show on this blog, which has become a sparsely populated place. And here I almost forgot to post something for the one routine I have managed to (mostly) preserve, the Friday Music post... But I didn't forget! So now, before heading off to see MacBeth - here's some music. Today's Random Ten will be drawn from records released this year - I didn't get a lot, but I bought some - sadly, the usual array of collection of nostalgia and obscurities I tend to listen to these days. I see one band on this particular list that didn't exist in the 1990s (maybe 2 - when did Arcade Fire come out? or, maybe Chris Thiele?) And 4, I think, that existed in the 70s. well - that's life. At least I am still tossing a few pennies a year into the music industry.... here you go:

1. Sleater Kiney - Bury our Friends
2. Gang of Four - Isle of Dogs
3. Yo La Tengo - Rickety
4. Prince (featuring Lianna La Havas) - Mr. Nelson
5. Rocket From the Tombs - Hawk full of Soul
6. Punch Brothers - Prelude
7. Will Butler - Finish What I started
8. Screaming Females - Ripe
9. Mercury Rev - Central Park East
10. The Pop Group - Shadow Child

Video? The only actual young group on the list - Screaming Females:



And some Sleater Kinney:



And finally - let's go for some full on nostalgia - here's the current version of RFTT playing Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo:

Halftime Film Report

I know I have become an awfully lazy blogger - lucky to get a list of autogenerated songs up every week, and that one long essay a month... Maybe an anniversary will wake me up, but those have faded, what with the Civil War over... Sad sad.

I haven't had a movie post up in forever - without external stimulation, I don't know if I'd have gotten one out this year. Of course that might help suggest why I have been such a slug here - I took a class in the spring, which as it happened did involve a pretty substantial Eisenstein paper. The Russians did rather finish me off for a while - at least that's what I hope happened. There's a decent post version of that Eisenstein paper somewhere - it might surface eventually...

For now though, I just want to get a hand in. I used to do this more often - knock off a Best So Far list about halfway through the year. Been a while since I have done that - three years in fact. Sad. But as a way of getting a hand back in, it'l do. So without too much ado - here are the 10 best films I have seen, in something like a real release this year:

1. Winter Sleep
2. Adieu au Langage
3. About Elly
4. Clouds of Sils Maria
5. The Wolfpack
6. Juaja
7. What we Do in the Shadows
8. The King and the Mockingbird
9. Amy
10. Results

And a much smaller list - best films I have seen dated 2015 - it's too early to do much of this: most of the films that I see in theazters the first half of any year are older, catching up on all last year's international films. (Thgough this year has been a bit ridiculous in that - The King and the Mockingbird? even About Elly is 6 years old. And if I wanted to really cheat, I could include Rebels of the Neon God, which is getting what I think is its first American theatrical run. I've seen it already, though, some years back at the MFA, so that's a bit too much for me. But I might as well post something from this year - since I have only seen 12 films dated 2015 (I think) - well - might as well rank them all. Very heavy on the documentaries...

1. The Wolfpack
2. Amy
3. Results
4. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
5. Iris
6. While We're Young
7. I'll see You in My Dreams
8. I am Big Bird
9. When Marnie Was There
10. Slow West
11. Mad Max Fury Road
12. Danny Collins

Actually - nothing bad - I enjoyed those all the way down (with occasional reservations). So not bad really.

I may even try to get some reviews up in the coming weeks - always a hope.

Film Posts 2014 Onwards

Later getting this up than usual - and rather slow so far posting anything. But I do find it useful to have an index of what I have posted... That is this.

UPDATE 2015: I have not been posting as much movie material as I had been - so this year's posts are going on to last year's index. Which didn't have a whole lot...

Update 2017: I have neglected this post, but more than that, neglected the blog. I think the last review I wrote was in August 2015 - things have been very quiet here at the listening ear...

Occasional Pieces & Longer Pieces:

2/3/2014: Philip Seymour Hoffman obituary
7/14/2014: Bastille Day with Jacques Rivette.

4/3/2015: Manoel de Oliveira obituary.
5/14/2015: Link to Film Preservation Blogathon.

1/4/2016: Edward Copeland obituary
1/30/2016: Jacques Rivette Obituary
9/2/2016: Allan Fish Obituary (and Gene Wilder)

For WITD Countdowns:

8/20/2014: Chikamatsu Monogatari for the Wonders in the Dark Romance Countdown.
9/5/2014: Love Me Tonight, for the romance countdown.
9/23/2014: The Shop Around the Corner, also for the countdown.

7/9/2015: Let The Right One In - part of the Childhood Films countdown at Wonders in the Dark. Cross-posted.
9/7/2015: Germany Year Zero (posted here 9/15), also posted at Wonders in the Dark, part of the Childhood Films Countdown
9/15/2015: Ivan's Childhood, also at Wonders in the Dark, from their Childhood Films Countdown.

7/12/2016: Plan 9 From Outer Space for WITD's Science Fiction Countdown.
8/13/2016: Things to Come, for WITD
8/18/2016: Island of Lost Souls, for WITD; 8/19/2016 - Musical Follow up to the same.
10/5/2016: Alphaville for WITD

Polls, Lists, Memes, and so on:

1/2/2014: 2013 Lists
3/1/2014: Oscar comments and my picks for categories

1/17/2015: Best of 2014.
2/22/2015: Oscars and categories.
7/13/2015: Halftime Report
10/27/2015: Mr Dadier Back to School Quiz
10/31/2015: Halloween Quiz.

2/14/2016: Best of 2015

Reviews:

2/10/2014: Inside Llewyn Davis
11/9/2014: Citizenfour reviewed, and comments on the Berlin Wall.

2/2/2015: Roundup: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; Princes Kaguya; Inherent Vice; r. Turner; Two Days One Night; Selma; Duke of Burgundy;
8/5/2015: Summer Films - big roundup: Don't Think I have Forgotten; Look of Silence; Do I Sound Gay?; Tangerine; Mr. Holmes; Amy; Big Game; Testament of Youth.