2015

2015

1. Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)
2. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
3. Heaven Knows What (Safdie Brothers)
4. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)
5. Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)
6. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
7. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
8. Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
9. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
10. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)

Honorable Mention:  Inside Out (Pete Docter), Carol (Todd Haynes), Sicario (Denis Villeneuve), The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu), When Marnie Was There (Hiromasa Yonebayashi), The Hallow (Corin Hardy)

No thx:  The Revenant, Spotlight, Room, The Assassin, Goodnight Mommy, Straight Outta Compton, Crimson Peak, Pitch Perfect 2, Love and Mercy, Beasts of No Nation, Ex Machina, The Gift, Spy

I don't have much to say about these films or this year other than I wish I had been writing about them as I saw them.  Hard to Be a God is the crown jewel for me.  It'll be very high up on my best films of the decade list.  It's about as ideally singular a film (and film watching experience) that I could dream of in this modern age of stagnant, rote filmmaking.  It reminds me a lot of Marketa Lazarova, a film that too few have seen but has steadily grown to be one of my all time essentials.  Both films elicit genuine awe from me.  They almost feel impossible, and I don't mean that hyperbolically.  I watch them each and honestly wonder, "how the fuck does this exist?"  It is as if relics excavated from ancient times were magically given motion or as if uncanny images were being transmitted from an alien world.  I respect more than love something like The Forbidden Room for having a distinctive vision that plays unlike most anything else around.  But you can see the brushstrokes and the artist tirelessly at work in something like The Forbidden Room; in Hard to be a God, you are swallowed by the majesty of the canvas.

2016

2016

1. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

2. The Wailing (Na Hong-jin)

3. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)

4. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)

5. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)

6. Silence (Martin Scoresese)

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

8. The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit)

9. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

10. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Love)

Honorable Mention: The Witch (Robert Eggers), The Handmaiden (Park Chan-Wok), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve), Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford), Gimme Danger (Jim Jarmusch), Hail, Caesar! (Coen Bros)

No thx:  Moonlight, Manchester By the Sea, The Lobster, Blair Witch, The Girl on the Train

Also, here's a half-formed idea I started writing about The Wailing back in the summer:

One of my favorite aspects of Macbeth, and one that never fails to unsettle me, is that it appears to posit a universe that is inherently malevolent.  At the end of the play, we are provided an illusion of moral order, as the diabolical Macbeth is finally disposed of by the good Christians Malcolm and MacDuff.  But behind this denouement of seemingly divine justice, there reigns the unchecked authority of the Witches, left to spin their nasty webs and pluck at the fates whichever cruel way they choose.  The Witches, the real villains of the play, get no moral comeuppance, no divine punishment for their machinations.  In the end, the universe of Macbeth is neither ultimately benevolent or innately indifferent but actively evil; the witches reign supreme within it.  I felt a similar way at the end of The Wailing, and without giving spoilers, those who've seen it hopefully know precisely the feeling I mean here.

mother!

I guess I’ll preface this by admitting that I’m not really a fan of mother!’s underlying biblical allegory.  I caught the gist of what ulterior mythos Aronofsky was creating for our couple and their riotous guests early on and every turn of the screw after felt maladroit.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I literally rolled my eyes at the scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s mother (i.e. mother earth, mother Mary, the eternal feminine) is asked to forgive wretched humanity by Javier Bardem’s heavenly father for killing her baby Jesus.  It felt forced/obvious.  A labyrinthian film with copious figurative threads to pull from suddenly became one bulbous rope dangling coyly before us to grab and climb so that we could be transported to its higher plane of redoubtable revelations.  This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with Aronofsky’s critique of religious fervor and environmental destruction or that I don’t share is ire.  I’m right there with him and I admire his take on our profoundly fucked up world.  However, I do feel that this grandiose allegorical relation is the one slipshod conceit in an otherwise flawlessly told phantasmagoria. 

I like mother! more as a hallucinatory physical manifestation of a relationship’s decay.  As someone who has recently lost a home I worked tirelessly to cultivate into a sanctuary for me and my loved ones, I am painfully aware of how it feels to have that home adulterated by an intruder and have your things torn away like refuse only to be rebuilt in someone else’s image after you are gone.  And as someone who has recently lost someone I loved to the point of pure blind devotion, I know the feeling of dawning horror as you realize you gave yourself entirely to a false, weary idol.  The nightmarish parade of marauders and Bardem’s indifference to Lawrence’s suffering felt all too real to me as a physical representation of a relationship’s toxic denouement.  I felt that way as my world collapsed around me and I live every day with the scars.  The unseen terror and claustrophobia Aronofsky builds in these scenes as hell unfolds around Lawrence is the best work of his career.  It’s as tightly controlled and ferociously realized as any recent filmmaking I’ve seen.

I also like how mother! critiques our dreams of autonomy and our naive pastoral fantasies.  I think most of us, consciously or not, try to turn whatever space we inhabit into an eden we can share idyllically with our loved ones, just like Lawrence’s mother.  We lock our doors to prevent intrusion, we shut our blinds to shield us from onlookers, and furnish our surroundings with things we have imbued with meaning and emotion.  Naively, we dream our home and relationship are autonomous phenomena, excluded securely as if enshrined from the terrors or degradation that may befall them.  In many ways, this is all part of a larger pastoral fantasy we yearn for, a desire we have to return to prelapsarian grace or some illusory wholeness.  But how quickly our dreams can become nightmares when we realize our idea of haven is just myth we’ve convinced ourselves is real, perhaps something we read about long ago but never actually possessed.  The horror of our true vulnerability to a fractured world probably looks something like mother!

All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down

Let's see how long we can have a go at this for...I'm gonna give it my all to keep up.  What better way to kick off the new blog than with two brutal Australian horror/thrillers from this year.

Hounds of Love (Young, 2017): There's undeniable talent here, but couldn't help but feel like a slog to get through.  I'm more than a little weary of suburban underbelly exposes like this; the idyllic community facade belying a deplorable evil behind the picket fence isn't an incisive observation at this point.  I'd say it's fairly clear to most people that evil can harbor anywhere; the true crime craze has probably killed any remnant of shock value the culture has for middle-class decay.   I did enjoy a few scenes: Vicki's decision to get into the couple's car - peppered with enough subtle detail to make the predatory pickup plausible - and a scene involving some mail where Vicki realizes her plan of escape my have fallen just short; its anxiety and heartbreak is palpable.  Also, surprisingly, I did appreciate the ending, not only because of the inclusion of Joy Division, but for actually granting us a cathartic moment without the need for a rote revenge fantasy coda.  Still, a majority of the film is devoid of mystery or insight, and once the kidnapping occurs, we are not discovering a narrative anymore but are merely left waiting to be dragged through the rape, torture, and cruelty we know will come.

Killing Ground (Power, 2017):  I found this one to be far superior to Hounds of Love, although I'd readily conceded that the latter has better formal craftsmanship.  Killing Ground isn't perfect - it makes some unnecessary missteps late on - and it's easily more brutal and violent than Hounds of Love, but it's never tasteless or gratuitous.  A particularly harsh scene, for instance, is mostly held at a removed wide shot after the worst of the abuse has occurred, leaving us to reflect on the horror without hauling us through its every grimy detail (a majority of the film's supposed brutality is left to the imagination like this).  The disjointed time contrivance is also a nice touch, as it effortlessly builds dread, mystery, and a sense of discovery - qualities I enjoy in horror movies and found lacking in Hounds of Love.  But what I liked best about Killing Ground is that it left me chewing on some of its meatier (or veggier in my case) questions.  At the heart of the film is a moral and ethical imperative towards the well-being of a child, and how each of the characters choose to react to this imperative will come to define them.  I don't think it's fair to say the film bullies its characters or emasculates them for cowardice.  But I do think it challenges them to make a moral choice under extreme duress and to face its consequences.  Who will survive and what will be left of his or her soul?