Best of 2016

A dirty super dude/mutant lying back in a speeding garbage truck: is there a more apt image for the year? Considering all the other BLACK MIRROR stuff going on America shouldn't be too surprised it's having a "Waldo Moment." In fact, we should have seen it coming. The one movie I was sure I'd love, THE NEON DEMON, well, I did not and vice versa. So I, like the nation, need to go back over the facts and see where we went wrong - somewhere along the way we collectively drove around that signpost up ahead, through the looking glass, above the clouds / beyond the rain. Even the Satanists are worried for humanity now, as fake news leads the same brand of paranoid telephone game hysteria that gave us Salem 1693.


It's a year where little moments made the big horrible picture more easily avoidable and just as it did in the early 80s when my generation was STRANGER THINGS age, comic books stepped in like a whole new kind of truth, or rather a very old kind, i.e. myth. Marvel and finally even DC delivered great shit that might devolve into climaxes that are really little more than CGI brain freezes, as engaging and urgent as an empty Space Port 80s arcade would be now to my adult senses, i.e. not at all, it hardly mattered. There were enough genuine crazy moments and calling out on bullshit impossible through any other format, that once again superheroes became literature, speaking truths far too deep for anything as ridden with petty agendas as the news. It's the future, money doesn't fill the seats and stuff so carefully calibrated for class and awards import makes not a bit of sense or weight either. I can imagine JACKIE being sooo great, but who really cares, unless it's to perhaps make the point that our martyring of JFK and horror over Trump the next are really just two reflections of the same eddy in the same empty, persona-crafting swamp. Coming back from the holidays with our red-blue state divides drawn along the dinner centerpiece, things should be coming very clear.... we're not fooling anyone by thinking we're above the shit line. We're all crazy Americans looking for an image to follow around like a flag waving bull.

Final thought: At what point does a drawing stir out empathy, become something real, something we're invested in. Watching movies these days it's hard to grasp the point, of making villains so hissable, as if we have to keep pretending the people we hate are dying, like kids crashing their Mattel toy cars together because they're mad at their parents. Harmless, even cathartic, but when we let it go beyond that, it's dangerous. The media is trying to convince half the country the other half is a punching bag with a demon's face on it (BLACK MIRROR, season 3), that bashing it is as cathartic as those Mattel cars. Honey, there are people in those cars! Put them down, sport, and go take bitch lessons. 

If Terry Southern were writing superhero movies they would certainly reflect the cheeky youth of today's unique PC-hipster vulgarity instead of his own sex-obsessed, patriarchally presumptive, eternal anti-authoritarian (political) satire on male vanity--which seems archaic if allowed to linger too long (i.e. after the first brilliant half of CANDY). That shit wouldn't fly today, but the kind of humor in DEADPOOL on the other hand is so pop culture obsessed it doesn't need shit jokes or self-loathing to get its laughs at a mile-a-minute, nor will it ever date, anymore than TWENTIETH CENTURY has dated with all its CAMILLE and W. Somerset Maugham references. The frenzied control of GOODFELLAS runs headlong into the zoom zoom zippee that's one part Billy Eichner, one part Wolverine when he was still a badass (the first two X-MEN films), Robert Downey Jr. in IRON MAN if he was less of a tech geek playboy and more of a sarcastic mercenary who'd rather slow jam to Wham!, play skeeball, start fights at his merc watering hole and beat up stalkers--and all of the EXPENDABLES flame-circumcised down into a helium and mocha jave whippet. Reynolds whose voice indicates he's never smoked a cigarette or even been near an open flame is another of the great macho fey icons to come prancing down the pike, fearlessly flouting his mastery of all the pfff-sounds in the Ikea catalogue --the Fluer or Schnoruere. The right kind of deep voice is important to me but if a straight brother's gonna own his girliness I can totally get behind that. With Mr. Pool here, you can call him a girl and we wont be offended, but with that PC innateness comes an unwillingness to turn one's back on the puerile (how often does dialogue in a masterpiece include mentioning of tea-bagging) and with a confidence in this one franchise at least it's okay to shoot the villain point blank in the head after you have him at your mercy.

For that and myriad other reasons my artsier reader might bemoan this choice but this film is a great big messy obscene masterpiece of the sort that's so voraciously outside the box and fresh you can smell the dirt - the filthy dust that box has been buried in nigh under 540 years. See it as I did,  while waiting for CRT scan test results after being initially diagnosed with COPD, and barely able to breathe, wondering if your clock is now speeding up, death looming fast, and then suffering the horrible withdrawal from smoking that accompanies such fear like an electric amp, so stretches of being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and then subjected to a horrific airless vacuum tube torture chamber where you slowly suffocate but the machine keeps giving you just enough to keep you from passing out or falling asleep. I knew Mr. Pool understood, and that helped.

When people really are from the place their characters are, they don't need to make the characters 'normal' in the way privileged clueless screenwriters cloud their dialogue in sanctification of the common man, like Barton Fink or Sullivan (the characters, not the films), or any of the Commie rats in the below Coen film. When lesser writers do these chamber piece red state bank robber brother-bonding odysseys they get hung up on big messy Oscar-bait drinking scenes, what's 'real,' man vs. the hardship blah blah. Here it's the way the bank robbing pair of brothers--specially the older, wilder jailbird one (Ben Foster), constantly surprises us with where he's going. We also have the laconic near-retired sheriff and his Navajo deputy, and all the lawyers and bank tellers and waitresses in between, all have the feeling of being where they are--where the flat endless horizon-line is a kind of TV, where everyone trains their eyes instead of their cell phones; when they stare at each other waiting for one or the other to make a move for their gun at the very end, it's that same view - the landscape is as the enemy - the laconic sheriff by Jeff Bridges isn't just facing a foe, but retirement, he doesn't even have a wife to tell his dreams to. The acting matches the writing; Chris Pine more than lives up to the Chris Pine promise -- moving so deep into character you'd swear he was found by a roaming casting director hitchhiking through Arlington.

As any story by David Sidaris illustrates, if you want to see a complex, cool, badass hilarious woman, look to the mom of an openly gay humorist. Here, fusing genuinely transgressive hilarity with emotional gut-punch cancer mortality-facing, it's SNL writer Kelly's autobiographical tale of the last days with his. The performances have a lightning-in-the-bottle immediacy where you don't just see and hear him and his family members, but hear how each others' voice and style have influenced one another during formative pasts and the pokey but relentless way those traits re-manifest during stressful reunion --the kind of acting that takes genius and the time to rehearse natural rhythms. Molly Shannon's performance is jaw-droppingly immense, and there's a break-out WTF turn with child actor JJ Totah as a preteen fashion designer who leaves any visible distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine, clear in the dust. This is wrenching emotional comedy for people who hate all that manipulative twelve-hanky sentimental self-righteous bourgeois intellectual Tennenbaum bullshit. If it wasn't, I wouldn't list this at all, let alone third.


This was a weird year in ways even closer to home than the news, the workplace - or rather mine, or higher academia in general which is undergoing another of its groupthink overreach oversight micro-managing anal-retentive freak-outs (the last one being in the early 90s). This Marvel entry is perhaps the first to really look at submission of power to checks and balances/authority honestly, seeing the utter impossibility of complete lateral fairness and pulling the trigger anyway, sure there's tremors on the horizon of trouble and back-watching, but bottom line we're miles away from the smarmy dialectic of authority as evil and compromised vs. a kind of saintly hot-rod confabulated conformist anticonformity. Both sides are right / both sides murder. I give up / why can't they?



My problem with all that is I'm firmly in the old iconoclast tradition - I hate being told I no longer have the ability to tell a hawk from a hacksaw because I'm not qualified since I didn't get a masters in Hacksaw-Hawk Differentiation, an emerging field. And yet I also respect the need others might have to try and hem me in and create some abiding set of rules and measurements. When both sides are working with respect to the other's import, the trailblazer doing what he's told can't be or shouldn't be done because he feels it's right, and the organizer of a common consensus that tries to take everyone's side into account, we have a functioning democracy. The old gunfighters can be either like Jason Robards in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, or Merlin in EXCALIBUR, helping ensure their own obsolescence as the Taoist way of things, or fight it like the Wild Bunch, blaze of glorying it out.

Why CIVIL WAR is so brilliant is that it forces us as viewers to choose a side, and making both feel wrong. The brilliant casting includes William Hurt as the general voted by the UN to helm 'the Sokovia Accords" - created after the huge ruckus of devastation caused by the Avengers' battle with Ultron (in the last Avengers movie). And then there's the show-stopper fight at the airport--easily the funniest, best battle yet because really we root for both sides-- a knockdown brawl between Iron Man, Winter Soldier and Steve Rodgers is full of twists. There are no winners or victory dances, just declarations of fealty beyond borders or association.

I saw this Xmas Day while out of my gourd and it was the perfect topper to a fucked up day - letting the beasts out to fight bigger beasts i.e. the perfect movie to use as a jump-off from sanity, hopping onto the madness around you in blind abandon. Unlike so many attempts to be genuinely insane in the DC-verse, the Joker (a fine enhancement on threads of lunacy begun with the Heath, Jordan Catelano sprays on the "Witness Me" chrome mouth and the lime rickey green and electric pink frame shudders and throbs with him -- the celluloid always about to burst into flames. You got Viola Davis channeling some cross between the Grim Reaper and Bernie Mac, one of the great gender-bent performances of the year, alongside JJ Totah, and some genuinely druggy albeit incoherent rainforest spirit amok anima in the subway strangeness. It doesn't ever all the way gel but it's the first movie to use the hyper-ADD guitar pick edit effect with any genuine creative moxy. Even if the story leaves me behind I got no problem with that -- it becomes like a giddy party where you're just starting to realize you've had wayyyy-y-y-y- to much ayahuasca. The insanity given off by Margot Robbie would be enough to propel this many-tentacled wonder onto this list, but Jordan Catalano shows such a real grasp of druggy psycho flair as the Joker you can sense Crispin Glover turning pale and calling his agent in a blind, screaming panic. Jai Courtney finally gets to use his Aussie accent and there's even a reptilian, a cholo, A masked Japanese sword girl, and Scott Eastwood's finest hour. Even Will Smith's daughter issue is well-handled. This movie got muddled reviews but watching it I could feel the same giddy tang of violence and genuine druggy insight into masculinity, love and character-building (shot between drinks or drinks between shots) that it could be part of a trilogy with Ayers' other masterpieces TRAINING DAY and FURY. If y'all let it.

Science says this movie came out last year - but it came to cable this year, bro. And that's where the fuckin' world saw it, bro. No one wanted to see yet another goddamned movie about border drug traffickers and the whites that try to bust them but only scratch the surface, their sagas intercut with some doe-eyed humanity tale of a corrupt cop lookin' out for his family is all, in rooms with no paintings on the walls, just picaresque cracks and layered bullet holes like tree rings. But if it springs up on you halfway through while idly surfing, then mister - what the fuck, shit's way better than we were led to believe by a defeatist talk show promo run. They should have instead of trying to shoehorn human interest blah-blah had played up the eerie artistry at work, the refreshingly ominous and abstract use of sound, the way Jóhann Jóhannsson's droning ominous synthesizer casts an intoxicating pall over the proceedings, as if the bottom is slowly dropping out at all times in an endless elevator to Hell that opens out onto the sky.

The plot's a fusion of ZERO DARK THIRTY (procedural thread following, woman thread follower), that Black Market movie of Wilders ("peep aroun' ze corner"), FOREIGN AFFAIR with bean counter task force virgin Jean Arthur investigating the FUBAR situation and trying to be uncorrupted; and TRAFFIC (Benicio del Toro, kids playing sports ending). Fuckin' both del Toro and del John Brolin are so tight, I'll even forgive it the side thread with the good dad soccer-with-his-son corrupt cop who gets caught in the throw-down. The drive-thru into Mexico with the armored trucks to pick up a local drug higher-up on the chain, deep into the heart of the cartel beast, so to speak, with bodies hanging from bridges overhead, was one of the most chilling descent/odysseys since the opening of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS back in 1991. As the moral compass Emily Blunt whispers through the whole movie like a lover trying not to wake her kids, gamely avoiding make-up or flattering angles. There hasn't been so few non-lupine smiles ever, so little shouting - and the idea of a cop hitman hunk on the cowboy hitman payroll makes him the second evilest cowboy bar pickup after that date rapist in THELMA AND LOUISE.

Dir. The Duffer Brothers