Best of 2017: Rise of the Woman

The age of the Woman has begun and there's no going back. Have they ever? The big Halloween costume pick of 2017 was a true WONDER, directed by a woman, and the best-reviewed film ever on RT is written and directed by a real LADY, and the coolest retro-feminist counter-intuitive mindbender since swingin' 71 was about a WITCH, and produced-wrote-directed-and costume-designed by a woman. Sure, there's been some newly iconic masterpieces made by men this year, but this list will focus on woman-helmed films and shows that are badass, cuz ladies it may be your year, but better believe I'm a man writing it, yes I AM and I can't help but love you so, as long as you're not waiting for me to follow you deep into dystopian oppression. You heard me, MAIDS! In the meantime, rejoice! I, a SWM, have affirmed your right to shine. Let the alt-right trogs and trolls jeer in frustration from the belly of their mom's basement while they may, there's no stopping you now.

PS - I finally made it to Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Here it was, a mere ten minute walk from my current apartment, and I haven't been... ever. It was a moving, spiritual experience, and clearly the right year for it, as the above rant makes clear. If you're in town, go, man, go... Kali gets a plate. Emily Dickinson gets a plate. Virginia Woolf gets a plate. Tons of rad bitches getting a plate!




Neither shying away from the romantic faux pas nor the cool little moments of triumph that come with growing up artsy but confident, here's a Catholic school girl movie that avoids all the tired (albeit necessary) sexual endangerment/obsession we get with all the 'women's coming-of-age' stories (the ones written by dudes). Gerwig allows us clearly autobiographical triumphant sing-outs like the take down of the visiting anti-abortion rally speaker, the brilliant and ridiculous aspects of an after-school drama club, the disillusionment and joy of teen sex. As someone who went to public school and lost my virginity at 17 to a drama club Catholic chorine who insisted on using both a condom and vaginal foam from Planned Parenthood but who is now an anti-abortion zealot, I can vouch that this is right up there with Superstar and at any rate way better than Little Sister or one of those things that seems cobbled together from contemporary lit adult education workshops more than actual life. This feels real, and tells the story, not of some 'average' girl buffeted by the winds of change in her rocky search for the right guy to surrender her freedom to, but of a specific strong-willed young woman, not quite as mature as she acts but totally free of anything resembling a cliche'd trait, a girl for whom the most important thing is not any one boy, but her own dream of going to New York to college instead of one of her local (state-subsidized) California options, despite her domineering-but-loving mother's protests. Lovingly filmed and acted, especially by star Saoirse Ronan, with brilliant vignettes and tiny moments zipping by too fast to stop and praise in any single viewing, its keenly observed connections between family members feels both well rehearsed and totally spontaneous, lived-in, and there's some dynamite sweaters and autumnal colors. It's an amazing achievement that fulfills the halo of stoner grace I saw over Great Gerwig as far back as 2009's Baghead, where she was unfortunately burdened by her inescapable mumblecore cronies, the various Duplasses, Partridges and Swanbergs, and later the self-indulgent and myopic (lately) Noah Baumbach (much as I love Bird I can't stand five minutes of his Gerwig-starred Frances Ha). Sure, Baumbach's ghost influence is to be felt here, but this is Gerwig's Live through This, her Exile in Guyville. It's the writing on the wall outside the gates of Eden, written in the blood of uncored apples.


There's an ingenious long tracking shot about halfway through this film, that takes one's breath away: the camera trailing after Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) and her escorts as they weave through the empty wastelands of WWI France to the front line trenches, across no-man's land, and into the hail of gunfire from an occupied enemy town. Diana's never really let loose before with all her goddess strength before, but now her anger seems to double, triple her capabilities, flipping over a tank, leaping from roof to roof - we're watching someone whom we can't quite fully understand through her adoring man's haunting blue eyes--and her determination to find Aires, the God of War, who she presumes is presiding over the launch of a German poison gas factory (presided over by a creepy female gas chemist, based on the [maybe] real-life French lesbian chemist who had her formula stolen by Fraulein Doktor). The look, time, and feel indicate that perhaps the CGI crew were borrowing steampunk hard drives from Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows and Captain America the First Avenger, both of whom had--lest we forget--badass women in them, but this is a whole other thing, but it's worth noting that this is directed by a woman, and while Gadot is gorgeous all get-out, her intelligence and ferocity come first. She's a goddess, and doesn't take orders from Steve (Chris Pine), It's more like he just trails after her, the setting for her lustrous diamond and that this bothers neither Rogers the character or Pine the actor. We're so used to seeing the old devil sexism come creeping back in the subtext or in the performance (we know from The Mummy how passive-aggressive Tom Cruise would be in that role). As Pine proved in last year's Hell or High Water, he's a superb actor who knows how to support other actors' big moments rather than hog them all himself and here Gadot blazes luminous and uncensored. Hopefully, Hollywood will take notice the right way, making more female-directed, starred (and ideally written) superhero movies, and not take the wrong note, and do a Wonder Man.

It's a few years old but never released widely here, and so 2017 is its real debut, the year its Criterion Blu-ray released, showing it to everyday America for the first time, and what a gem it is, mostly. With a great look, an elaborately realized nightclub full of green and blue lighting, wove through with tracking shots dazzling enough to evoke Magnolia, Polish provac-auteur Agnieszka Smocynska delivers a knockout feature film debut. In fact, I was going to put it at #1 except for the bummer ending, which--though true to the myth on which its based (a variation of the same source material that gave us The Little Mermaid) leaves a bad feeling in the air. Considering the more progressive resolutions of Frozen and the under-appreciated Maleficent, it feels needlessly punitive, like Stalin kettubg the Warsaw uprising partisans get slaughtered near the end of WW2. Either way, it's got some great songs and a special shout out to Aqua-Man, in an early film appearance!


An endearingly-awkward mix of stiff period finery, natural/candle light photography,  wildly disparate performance styles, lack of effective musical score (oh for some eerie drones ala There will be Blood), and sloppy editing, Sofia Coppola's Beguiled is reminiscent of late 60s-70s period pieces by Francois Truffaut, where the costumes never quite seem fitted or natural - more like a dress-up masquerade shot off the cuff with no sense of art direction or framing. But hey that's all OK, Coppola has always conjured feelings of being stuck in the 60s nouvelle vague in her Merchant-Ivory-Hal Ashby hybrid style, coaxing a female-perspective novel adaptation from the raw materials of the boy's club around her, not well but wisely. Luckily, here, adapting the source novel more than the Eastwood-Siegel original film, it has what Smoczynska's Lure lacks, a strongly pro-feminist Dogville-style ending, rather than some dumb 'throw your sisterhood under the bus for patriarchally-manipulated love' sacrifice of the sort censors would have demanded in the 50s, or some 'maybe next season' promise of blood-soaked Atwoodian vengeance - it delivers the knockout blow in high time. At 90 minutes, it doesn't linger much longer than the average Corman horror movie. The moral, like some bizarro mirror to Picnic at Hanging Rock: love and sex may soothe the savage beast, but he's still plated on the ladies' table before he gets a second chance to roar. 

The title is the only bad part of this wild midnight road odyssey of amok feminine carnality, this explores a terrain similar to Scorsese's After Hours or Demme with Something Wild but with far darker streaks of high-octane black humor, as passive but handsome Chip (Mathew Gray Gubler) is roped by crazy hottie girlfriend into robbing one of her clients (of $68,000) and going on the lam. It's never that easy of course and soon Chip's on the run with a different girl, his first in hot pursuit, and it just gets darker and more darkly hilarious from there. I can't reveal any of the strangeness in advance as it's better to just roll with its crazy punches. Full of great vividly etched sex-hungry madwomen - it's got the fuel of a dozen Faster Pussycat Kill Kill viewings in its system, (another Kill at the end of the title might have helped with the weak title and poster art) and evokes Tarantino when he still had dark 90s edges. Haaga got his start writing stuff like Citizen Toxie so you know he knows how to deliver thrills far outside the morality-taste spectrum that so ensnares his fellows and despite its darkness this has a fun summery feel (it's shot on 35mm or has a great cinematographer, or both) and great work by AnnaLynne McCord as the psychotic hottie Liza and Sheila Vand (the lead in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) as the psychotic goth Monica, and Alisha Boe as the sweet but equally psychotic Violet.


Too often these days 'flash mob opinion' seems to so warp the actual film we can no longer see said film as itself, it's tainted. Hopefully not forever. In this case it's the damning label of whitewashing in the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Major, a character who started life as a Japanese anime. Too bad the admittedly-valid cause picked this one to make a stand in, as it's the most underrated and appreciated film of the year, and way shorter than Blade Runner 2050. To avoid any residual guilt over this issue while watching, see it on a Blu-ray with a Japanese dub language track and English subtitles. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo's shell will likely make all the difference, and fit the thematic subtextuality with a poetic eloquence unnoticed otherwise. At any rate, it shouldn't be such a pariah for doing what every other mainstream Hollywood film has ever done, cuz it's fuckin' amazing. (full)



The fusion of Christopher Nolan's three-tier approach (sky - three Spitfire Hurricanes shooting down the Luftwaffe), the boys trying to get back to Britain, and the captain of the small boat on his way to pick up some lads while Hans Zimmer's propulsive minimalist drum and eerie industrial drone score is like one long slow build up to mounting dread that compiles disaster upon disaster. Zimmer's score especially makes the movie cohesive, foregoing all the usual pitfalls (one shudders to think the pompous, anthemic drivel John Williams would have brought), going for a thumping relentless heartbeat industrial drones that seem to fuse with the rivets of the boat hulls and the terrible thuds of bombs and torpedoes. In a weirdly elliptical time unit around a single day-night period - the momentum is relentless tick-tocking forward with wild sights and sounds -- the thickening metallic thud of bullets and torpedoes against steel hulls, camera bobbing in the flaming oil-slicked waves while troopers swim desperately towards one torpedoed ship only to find it's already capsized from an arial bomb before they're all the way there. Nolan's eye for putting us deep in the thick of the action makes it a triumphant love for big rippling sound you can feel in your belly and above all the idea that--even in the throngs of desperate men, in hundreds of thousands of evacuees--the beach still dwarfs them all, the way flying the channel in a Sptifire is just like fishing in a vast blue mostly empty ocean, with all the few other fish shooting guns at you, and every encounter likely to be either your or someone else's very last, and the way life-or-death choices have to be made in the moment- a pilot dooming himself to capture by choosing to run out of gas on the French side in order to save a barge loaded with British and French wounded, or the way the best and worst in each of us can be brought out, organically, in the same hour, kinetically, right on top of the other--using a stretcher as an excuse to force your way through the crowded dock to get on a red cross ship, sneaking under the dock and crawling onto the hull and in on a lower level when that plan doesn't work, and then the ship is torpedoed a mile or two out from shore, and back you go, if you're lucky. All set to the tribal but austere, relentless percussion and droned of the score of the year. Nolan edits on the military ratatatat beat so well you wonder what regiment he served in. And of course, you realize something about your own self in wartime, and the way heroes are not made, or born, but shot.


When white writers and filmmakers try to voice the African-American experience we run into one of two thorny morasses at the end of two distinct paths, in the first we jubilantly fantasize--seeing being black as a kind of freedom and increase in soul power, cool, confidence, and badass gravitas (ala Tarantino) and get called racist; in the other we solemnly celebrate some idealized portrait of the noble, spiritual blackness triumphing over racism and sashaying forth into a sunnier tomorrow (ala Stanley Kramer) and get called boring (but maybe win Oscars) - in each we're objectifying and simplifying in ways that make us feel freer or self-congratulatory, positing our own sense of superiority in each instance in ways we're mostly blind to. In Get Out, Jordan Peele shows us how liberal whites look to a black eye when trying either of these strategies.  You can feel this movie coming together years ago during some similar weekends spent meeting his Italian-American girlfriend's parents for the first time, and dealing with a kind of smiling reverse-racism, where his blackness is as a flag no liberal can allow to pass unsaluted while at the same time leading to undoubted tension. So it's keenly observed, and relatively new territory, for in Get Out the trans-racial identification erupts as a side effect, not as a direct focus. This is how it should be, after all, for lasting change to take place. The conceivably objectionable idea of garden variety racism (i.e. a black man is sleeping with your hot young white daughters, doesn't that bother you?) is hardly broached at all here. We begin the film well past that, and before us loom a whole new set of hurtles. This isn't a movie about the white experience of blackness but a movie about the black experience of the white experience of blackness being experienced by affluent, liberal white people. It's that double meta-shift that makes the difference. Here the lead's blackness is not seen as some abomination or litmus test for white liberal acceptance but something far less obvious. Not unlike Ray Milland grafted to Rosie Grier in The Thing with Two Heads, the overall message is that we can't ever possibly separate, we're merged and the only way to keep our heads on our own bodies is to gang up on terrorists, or North Korea, or in my personal Maryland camping experience from the early 80s, the Goatman.

THE THING WITH 2 HEADS

We see inklings of this in the past, the bristling of the black maid in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner over serving Sidney Poitier, or even the black girlfriend and her uneasy qua antagonistic relationship to the black staff on Ray Milland's swampland estate in Frogs. As with his Comedy Central show, Key and Peele, the insight stems having a white mom and seeing the black-white divide from a perspective that's not quite all the way either one, coupled to a horror fan's familiarity with the way paranoia erupts from small, every day social occurrences and part of what makes the film so enjoyable is the lack of judgment or liberal hand-wringing for either side. With Allison Williams (light years cooler than her character on Girls) rocking what are easily the sexiest bangs since Eleanor Friedberger or Chrissie Hynde and this is first time ever where a TSA agent named Rod (Lil Rel Howery) gets to be the good guy/cavalry --a tougher, more paranoid Arbogast / Dick Hallorann / David Icke combo buddy initially assigned to just dog sit and provide phone call reassurance, he becomes the lifeline of all time, his police car and cryptic announcements about the power of the TSA making us re-evaluate that agency and our perceived indignities going though their airport checkpoints (his citing of mind control paranoid conspiracy theories is so au currant I wondered if Peele's been reading Divinorum Psychonauticus),

This movie saved my life back in January when I was in the midst of a Trump-fueled alcoholic relapse. I came to it in despair, and in my despair it found fuel for a catharsis, and lo, I was reborn in the bloody joy that's always there at the core of our fucked-up nation. No matter if it's the food co-op co-op board protesting the political affiliations of their soy distributor, or the NASCAR beer-necks running up the sails, our great American craft of madness will find some fertile breeze to blow it. And then we'll set in on fire.