What a year. Is this the one where time broke? Critics best of are divided and prejudiced by what amongst the zillion new movies out in all media including screen, they can absorb. Whether a movie is from 2014 because it was at Cannes but not released to you until 2015, can you add it as best of 2015 and who gives a fuck? I hate introductions to best of lists where the critic is all chummy and presumptive of your indulgence like he's or she's still writing for fucking Salon. Ah hell....
1. IT FOLLOWS
Dir. David Thomas Mitchell
Dir. David Cronenberg
This lurid, slow-burn haunted Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, ghosts manifesting as younger than their daughters, and egomaniacal stars with even more egomaniacal life coaches, could only come from an indie auteur outside the system but fluid within it, i.e. a Canadian, i.e. Cronenberg. With his pathological aversion to whimsy, he ensures the ghosts are a logical manifestation for a land where actor are all youth-obsessed narcissists trained in the art of letting their imagination get the better of them. In the same year's Clouds of Sils Maria, Binoche is playing an aging Marlene Dietrich remaking The Blue Angel as a butch Emil Jannings heading back to class to sulk after her younger wife hooks up with the strongman but in Maps, the better option to growing old and irrelevant is finally presented: burn the whole fucking cabaret to the ground. (full review)
3. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
Dir. George Miller
The weird gold patina of the action in the promos made it seem like much CGI about nothing, especially if you loved the Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) as an alienated kid, but didn't really like the first (with its then "American" dubbed soundtrack) or third (too grotesque). But Miller's fourth film takes the big truck chase climax of the The Road Warrior and stretches it two hours into the void and is full of sunbleached women, Nordic mutants and crazy vehicles. It left some critics shellshocked but most were like me, their socks blown off so far they drifted in astral winds. I have a feeling it's going to make a lot of alienated kids very happy for centuries to come.
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It's hard to make new friends as an adult these days--it takes effort. And that goes double for couples, which is why it's often up to their children. For my parents it was through the Jaycees they met all their swinging couples and my brother and it being the 70s, I remember staying up and greeting the sunrise with another family, all nine of us, where everyone loved everyone else, that was magical stuff. Where did that go? Have I become a night owl in love with staying up to sunrise because of those memories? Even the 70s had a hard time capturing that giddy high. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice skipped the kids part, and there's The Ice Storm skipped the love part, and there's Radley Metzger's Score! and its predecessor Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? skipped both, but The Overnight gets it oh-so right, launching it into a kind of in a weird class all its own. What works so well in this film is the spontaneity of it, the actors are all excellent, and the truths and acceptances fly fast and furious. I generally avoid anything with the name Duplass associated with it, for personal reasons that really have nothing to do with them themselves, but this film is so good --with great well nuanced performances by Taylor Schilling and Adam Scott in the 'normal' couple role, and Judith Godrèche and Jason Schwartzman as the more liberated couple, in a beautiful house with an array of fabulous artsy rooms, including as we learn, separate bedrooms. The whiskey gets poured, the clothes are shed, the bong is brought out, the kids lulled to sleep, and the chips begin to fall where they may. Whether or not you experienced any nights like this yourself, either as the child or the drugged out adult, you can't help but appreciate the way inhibitions are shed when truths come out rather than vice versa, and one doesn't merely fall back on old knee-jerk circle the wagons denial and evasion, then liberation of inhibitions lead to all sorts of confessions and bonding, the bullshit all cut through in great strides. Capturing the magic of that is like lightning in a bottle, which is why this film is so very much electric.
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So seek it wherever 70mm is shown, and understand something about why ammunition is such a great Xmas gift out here in the West, why I support the John Milius brand of seemingly self-contradicting pro-gun liberalism. Quentin knows, and shows too how the difference between murder and justifiable homicide/self defense sometimes hangs by a split second and making sure your opponent has a gun in hand or a price on his head when you blow him out of his boots. Real evil exists in the world, and when you're out in the wilderness there's no 911, the thin blue line has to be drawn on the spot, in the bloody snow, by a boot with the toe shot off. A lot of leftists forget that. So God bless the dying Warren Beatty to the tune of Leonard Cohen; and bless the dying Jason Robards as the railroad track is laid past his bleeding body. Sometimes men with six shooters waving warrants and presidential letters like flags are all that separate us from the eternal tyranny of chaos. When they fight for justice not for some half-assed notion of truth and the American way, or merely money, but because they have seen, lived with, and been, the bloody chaotic alternative, and a deep core of empathy and fairness has emerged in their guts like an egg fertilized with the dying screams of slaughtered soldiers, Native Americans, settlers, women and children. Well, ain't that America, you and me, once the smoke clears?
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4. THE OVERNIGHT
Dir. Patrick Brice
5. THE HAIGHTFUL EIGHT
Dir Quentin Tarantino
Everyone here at my Arizona-dwelling NRA member brother's house got ammo, holsters, and/or gun cleaner in their stocking today (this is written Xmas day 2015) but all I wanted was this film, for our Xmas day seeing DJANGO three years ago had rocketed me into a higher time zone. And a bullet-riddled 70mm roadshow advance limited release "road show" screening of H8TEFUL was playing right next door in Tempe. It's colder here in Arizona than it is in my home of New York right now so I dig that his 8th film is set in the mountains over on the border between Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming in an all in a white out blizzard inside and around a well-lighted all-purpose bar/stagecoach rest stop with a thunderously sly Morricone score riding below it like two ponies of Col. Rutledge's brandy. The 70mm and the blizzard environment keeps the breathtaking vistas blurred the way they are in real life when darkness falls early through thick Battle of the Bulge (also shot on 70mm) clouds, and keeps the indoor fires so vivid and analog perfect they could warm your tootsies just by moving a few rows closer. Tarantino's out to fuck with our conceptions of 'rooting for' characters, and to even throw our PC feminist ire under the bus so that we cheer seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh get her teeth knocked out for using the N-word. I hope her ferocity is recognized at Oscar time and this boosts her profile the way Jackie Brown boosted Pam Grier. The rest of the cast is letter perfect too, with Channing Tatum in a slight but mesmerizing performance that would make him a star if he wasn't already. gets better with every small role and this one's pretty damn small (he don't even show up til after intermission) and Jennifer Jason Leigh is a great, . Samuel Jackson is a Bass Reeves-y bounty hunter with a yen for goading Confederate generals into reaching for their guns and--well surprise, surprise--Walter Goggins finally showing what we all knew was there, the maniacal Tarantino oomph that separates character actor from bona fide badass.So seek it wherever 70mm is shown, and understand something about why ammunition is such a great Xmas gift out here in the West, why I support the John Milius brand of seemingly self-contradicting pro-gun liberalism. Quentin knows, and shows too how the difference between murder and justifiable homicide/self defense sometimes hangs by a split second and making sure your opponent has a gun in hand or a price on his head when you blow him out of his boots. Real evil exists in the world, and when you're out in the wilderness there's no 911, the thin blue line has to be drawn on the spot, in the bloody snow, by a boot with the toe shot off. A lot of leftists forget that. So God bless the dying Warren Beatty to the tune of Leonard Cohen; and bless the dying Jason Robards as the railroad track is laid past his bleeding body. Sometimes men with six shooters waving warrants and presidential letters like flags are all that separate us from the eternal tyranny of chaos. When they fight for justice not for some half-assed notion of truth and the American way, or merely money, but because they have seen, lived with, and been, the bloody chaotic alternative, and a deep core of empathy and fairness has emerged in their guts like an egg fertilized with the dying screams of slaughtered soldiers, Native Americans, settlers, women and children. Well, ain't that America, you and me, once the smoke clears?
6. THE CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
Dir Olivia Assayas
With its trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve axis, playing versions of themselves and each other with interlapping age gaps accounted for with the same weird mix of back-stabbing and tough love with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by older employers into the abyss of self-awareness and ambition. While certainly great material for the actresses to layer up in, almost accidentally summing up and illustrating the artist's great instinct for self-sabotage, his fascination with watching his/her life/work burn up in the car fire of doomed love. This time it comes from the discussion between Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) about Maria's character in the play within the film, Maria's Lars Von Trier/Fassbinder nihilistic interpretation vs. Val's interpretation of Maria's interpretation as an easy rationalization that excuses self-pity, creating a false image of youth based on one's own rose-tinted memories to shield the character's own stunted maturation, of embracing a different social role as one wave in the "seas of gray hair." Kristen Stewart steals the show as Val, handling her personal assistant duties with startling cool, knowing just how to rile or soothe or otherwise push Maria's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers without ever seeming to break her cool detached stride or get mad at her incessantly ringing cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz is the rising star playing the younger part in the play; Valentine takes Maria to see the latest superhero movie which Moretz stars in, and Maria's mocking laughter gradually comes between them.
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Here's a second great film by hot young second generation Iranian American woman. And If you've lived in NYC in your 20s and dated around with a lot of wild drinking, drugging hip girls in run down apartments, shared your ups and downs and yadda yadda, then you can tell when someone filming that scene knows what they're talking about. FRANCES HA? No, I don't believe girls this vapid could survive five minutes in NYC. But BROAD CITY yes, no doubt. Those girls are the shit. And then there's this great film, the way it constantly checks itself through blunt conversation from backsliding into Iranian-American cliche, all the cliche in fact I was dreading, includng the white pride in opening up to a foreign culture at wedding, with colorful garb and dancing, or the stern old world parents that don't get their Americanized daughters bisexuality (the dad puts his foot down, mom says "I'll talk to him" or something). None of that. Here the dad is great, a mellow chill guy totally at ease moving his daughter into filthy artsy flats full of strange roommates. Mom can't quite acknowledge the coming out, as if she's literally deaf to it, but that's natural; the dialogue and Park Slope vibe (where I live - fuck that fucked up co-op on President and 7th) is spot on. Nor is the film hung up on sexual deviance and lurid over-the-toppness the way GIRLS is, though I like GIRLS and it's certainly true. But those girls I would never hang out with in real life - while the girl played so stunningly here is so alive and believable; she makes no attempt to become a type for another type to bounce off against, avoiding nearly every indie pitfall or pratfall through the kind of cut the crap honesty I hadn't seen since last year's sterling OBVIOUS CHLD or IN A WORLD...
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(From Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories): Scientists tend to forget the way our sensorially-decoded paradigm is limited to human perception of self and their myopia makes them paranoid, like fundamentalist Christians seeing heretics in the cobwebs of their attics. If a Christian has sleep paralysis, the being looming above him would be perceived as Satan; if he had being reading David Icke, the being would be a reptilian alien; a gnostic scholar would see an archon; a UFO scholar, a flock of greys come for an abduction. Doesn't mean they're not seeing something, or that it's just "the very painting of their fear." It means they're seeing things as they really are, fluid, void of permanence, subject to our sensory decoding and all its prejudicial whims.
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Finally we have a mockumentary as good as This is Spinal Tap, a Funny or Die joint with the NZ crew behind the late great Flight of the Conchords, it's a richly photographed, laugh-packed low key vampire roommate comedy that I'll admit sounded pretty cashed, played and same old shit sort of thing on paper, but the details include a basement dwelling Nosferatu roommate, and the great Jermaine Clement as the deep voiced Vlad the Impaler type and the flatline human in the group, Stu, a rival posse of werewolves, and the amount of blood and killing presented almost matter of factly (rather than the usual cop-outs by squeamish execs worried blood and comedy don't mix). All in all a well worth repeat-viewing future cult masterwork, as timeless as the centuries-old vampires themselves, or This is Spinal Tap.
7. INHERENT VICE
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Who knows what would have been the result if Welles made a 70s stoner detective film. Would it have been INHERENT VICE, or is there just no character titanic enough within the story to hold his interest? In the end, that may be the thing. There's no core or center to VICE, no 'hurrah' moment like the pool party in BOOGIE or the "I'm the antichrist" climax of BLOOD. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a scrawny shell of a thing, a short wiry little weirdo whose hipster disaffect on talk shows is alienating and less clever than he thinks. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart in similar roles, or even Dick Powell or big Jeff Bridges (or his father, Lloyd Bridges, for that matter). As for VICE's detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but trying to explain the plot to my underwhelmed GF, all I could do is relate the anecdote about Hawks calling Raymond Chandler from the BIG SLEEP set to ask who actually killed Owen Taylor and Chandler not knowing the answer either. It doesn't matter. I've seen BIG SLEEP a dozen times at least, and I'm almost ready to blame Joe Brody, but Joe's saying he just sapped him for the incriminating picture from the back of the head of Krishna, So don't even draw the connections, baby. Just soak in Eric Roberts' brilliant monologue that rips the guts out of capitalism with an LSD trowel and reveals nothing but jewelry-coated vultures beneath the black enamel topsoil, the breathing aurae of cinematographer Robert Elswit, spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor; the great clothes and cars like some old album come to life, Phoenix a little monkey wiggling free of his angel dust entrapment cuffs and every drug you have ever done shivering to your DNA surfaces. You're home, if you're like me, in this murky mythic din of countercurrent flashbacks. Every time you smoked angel dust it was because some dirtbag laced his joint and didn't tell you til it was too late. You were only an infant but you well remember the morning when every TV channel showed only the streaky continuous feed of astronauts bouncing around the moon in molasses air, like they were underwater, the audio just transmitted astronaut chatter and space interference, hour after hour, the usual old science fiction movies of the morning pre-empted, their futuristic fiction now outmoded into ancient fact."(MO)
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At last there's an Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in "Bad City," actually amidst the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. A place where rock anthems are still and forever relevant, it's forever the 80s, all while Madonna stares out from her poster and the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. "The first western Iranian vampire movie" has a startling doppelganger effect in Sheila Vand's similarity to the film's writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, as she's an amazing character, a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed women in Iran's repressive milieu, wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's, she preys mainly on male predators, waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way. Even with his blood rich in ecstasy, though, after a costume rave, our girl holds off indulging, instead engaging in a slow motion moment, beautifully set to a madly whirling disco ball and White Lies'"Death," a perfect song to bring them together as it builds slowly from just another click track into emotional sweep and grandeur all the more special for seeming to come so guileless and true, the Let the Right OneInverse of Sixteen Candles.
8.a. A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE
Dir. Anna Lily Amirpour
8.b. APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR
Dir. Desiree Akhavan
Dir. Desiree Akhavan
Here's a second great film by hot young second generation Iranian American woman. And If you've lived in NYC in your 20s and dated around with a lot of wild drinking, drugging hip girls in run down apartments, shared your ups and downs and yadda yadda, then you can tell when someone filming that scene knows what they're talking about. FRANCES HA? No, I don't believe girls this vapid could survive five minutes in NYC. But BROAD CITY yes, no doubt. Those girls are the shit. And then there's this great film, the way it constantly checks itself through blunt conversation from backsliding into Iranian-American cliche, all the cliche in fact I was dreading, includng the white pride in opening up to a foreign culture at wedding, with colorful garb and dancing, or the stern old world parents that don't get their Americanized daughters bisexuality (the dad puts his foot down, mom says "I'll talk to him" or something). None of that. Here the dad is great, a mellow chill guy totally at ease moving his daughter into filthy artsy flats full of strange roommates. Mom can't quite acknowledge the coming out, as if she's literally deaf to it, but that's natural; the dialogue and Park Slope vibe (where I live - fuck that fucked up co-op on President and 7th) is spot on. Nor is the film hung up on sexual deviance and lurid over-the-toppness the way GIRLS is, though I like GIRLS and it's certainly true. But those girls I would never hang out with in real life - while the girl played so stunningly here is so alive and believable; she makes no attempt to become a type for another type to bounce off against, avoiding nearly every indie pitfall or pratfall through the kind of cut the crap honesty I hadn't seen since last year's sterling OBVIOUS CHLD or IN A WORLD...
9. THE NIGHTMARE
Dir. Rodney Ascher
10. WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
Dir. Jermaine Clement, Taika Watita
Finally we have a mockumentary as good as This is Spinal Tap, a Funny or Die joint with the NZ crew behind the late great Flight of the Conchords, it's a richly photographed, laugh-packed low key vampire roommate comedy that I'll admit sounded pretty cashed, played and same old shit sort of thing on paper, but the details include a basement dwelling Nosferatu roommate, and the great Jermaine Clement as the deep voiced Vlad the Impaler type and the flatline human in the group, Stu, a rival posse of werewolves, and the amount of blood and killing presented almost matter of factly (rather than the usual cop-outs by squeamish execs worried blood and comedy don't mix). All in all a well worth repeat-viewing future cult masterwork, as timeless as the centuries-old vampires themselves, or This is Spinal Tap.