2015 Film Rankings

I was fortunate enough to see twenty-six films that were released in 2015, and I was doubly fortunate in that I did not hate any of them, which was not generally the case in prior years.  In reverse order:

26. Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh - This version of the familiar fairy tale isn't bad per se, just very, very conservative in its storytelling, aesthetic choices, and gender politics.  Odd in this day and age, when we teach girls to take charge of their own futures, that we get a Cinderella who basically sits around being nice and waiting to be rescued.  But there's a richness to Cate Blanchett's portrayal of the wicked stepmother as a woman of the world who realizes that her and her daughters' destinies are limited without the financial stability of a wealthy husband, and who will take whatever steps necessary to secure it.

25. The Revenant, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu - So beautifully shot, but to what end?  If anything, it made me appreciate the brilliance of Terrence Malick all the more, as a filmmaker whose themes and ideas are worthy of Chivo Lubezki's camerawork.  Iñárritu instead wastes it on an ode to toxic masculinity at its worst.  And after the film telegraphs heavy-handed religious themes for two hours, what happens to snap Hugh Glass out of a potential moment of Christian mercy?  John Fitzgerald accuses him of raising his murdered son as a "girly little bitch."  Luckily the Judeo-Christian God sends a bunch of pagan savages to handle the dirty work of finishing off Fitzgerald and letting Iñárritu have it both ways.  Regarding DiCaprio, I am not a fan of the survivor school of acting.  Good acting should convey a range of emotions via conversation, not simply one amplified emotion via bodily suffering.

24. Anomalisa, dirs Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman - The most intentionally solipsistic film I've ever seen.  The main character literally doesn't believe other people exist, aside from the titular Lisa, who is admittedly a delight in all of her scenes.  I get the sense that Charlie Kaufman believes the alienation experienced by Michael Stone, the feeling that only you yourself are a real person, is a lot more universal than it is.

23. Magic Mike XXL, dir. Gregory Jacobs - To paraphrase Ricky Jay in Boogie Nights, the first Magic Mike is a real film. This one is more of a shameless audience approval panderization machine.  None of the most interesting characters from the first film are still around, so the minor characters have to shoulder the load, and consequently the film is mostly dancing scenes.  But what dancing scenes they are.

22. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon - I don't share in the predominant negative critique here, namely that Earl and the Dying Girl are nothing more than mechanisms to allow Greg to achieve some personal growth.  I think the film is upfront about Greg's narcissism (duh, it's right there in the title) and does the difficult tightrope walk of making him a likable character while never letting him off the hook for said narcissism.  Not a perfect tightrope walk by any means, but better than it's been accused. 

21. The End of the Tour, dir. James Ponsoldt - Movies about writers are kind of odd; it's hard to think of anything less cinematic than the process of writing.  They get around that a bit by making this a road movie, but there's nothing here that you wouldn't get from watching David Foster Wallace's Charlie Rose appearances, or you know, reading his incredible writing.

20. Spectre, dir. Sam Mendes - A pretty good Bond film, and a good capstone to the Daniel Craig run.  He's been a great Bond, and I think we're gonna miss him when he's gone.  Not nearly as hamfisted in its take on government electronic surveillance as, say, any of the Christopher Nolan Batman flicks.

19. Love & Mercy, dir. Bill Pohlad - A tale of two films.  The Paul Dano sections are outstanding, especially the soundscapes used to convey Brian Wilson's scary genius at it's apex.  The John Cusack sections are eminently forgettable.

18. Inside Out, dirs. Pete Docter & Ronnie del Carmen - Another winner from Pixar, though not quite at the level of WALL-E, Ratatouille, or all three Toy Story films.  Similar message to Inside Llewyn Davis: It's important to let yourself be sad.

17. Spotlight, dir. Tom McCarthy - A good procedural placing worthy emphasis on the importance of good journalism.  Oddly, Tom McCarthy kind of hits the mark here that the fifth season of The Wire missed, in which he was part of the cast.  Nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary here though.  For a great film that upends everything it means to be a procedural, see David Fincher's Zodiac.

16. Room, dir. Lenny Abrahamson - Brie Larson is very very good in a film that made a couple choices that I didn't care for, like the boy's voiceover.  But considering the subject matter, the film could have been an incredible difficult watch.  Instead the film emphasizes the shared love between mother and child, despite the horrors that surround them.

15. Amy, dir. Asif Kapadia - A ton of great archival material here, fashioned into a very absorbing and sad documentary.  I was never really fully aware of just how hard Amy Winehouse worked on her songwriting before she spiraled into drug addiction, so that was new for me.  Every time an Adele song bores the shit out of me, I miss Amy Winehouse anew.

14. Ex Machina, dir. Alex Garland - I didn't care much for it when I saw it, but it's grown on me.  I still think it's a tad heavy handed with the "men just want something to fuck, and women will use that to kill men" messaging.  But Oscar Isaac is great as the world's douchiest techbro, and Alicia Vikander is outstanding.  You know she'll do whatever she must to escape, but you can see her balance vulnerability, cunning, and sex in every interaction to keep that hidden from the men.  Plus this film has the year's best dance scene.

13. Clouds of Sils Maria, dir. Olivier Assayas - An odd if engaging film that never fully came together for me.  The subject matter is as drama-nerdy as it gets, with Juliette Binoche as an aging movie star deciding to return to a play that skyrocketed her to fame, but this time as the submissive older character, not the dominant youth she played years earlier.  A lot of scenes of Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart rehearsing line readings outdoors in the Alps, which you'd think would get tiresome, but c'mon, it's Juliette Binoche and the rapidly-coming-into-her-own Kristen Stewart we're talking about.  

12. Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, dir. J.J. Abrams - A return to form for the blockbuster series.  The main complaint is that Abrams has basically made a cover version, or at best a remix, of the original trilogy instead of doing anything actually original.  I don't entirely agree, I think the presence of female and person-of-color protagonists is an important change in and of itself.  And also, didn't George Lucas's prequel trilogy represent totally original and different vision of Star Wars?  Tell me, how did those turn out?

11. The Hateful Eight, dir. Quentin Tarantino - Tarantino continues to state his case for being our strongest chronicler of America's violent past.  Not necessarily a historically precise or measured version of the past, but instead our mythic and messy past, the rough, difficult, and bloody past from which our society's current nightmares still arise.  Great performances abound, especially from Samuel L. Jackson, doing his usual great work for Tarantino, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as an absolute force of nature, the howling, cussing, and spitting embodiment of America's gendered history of violence.

10. About Elly, dir. Asghar Farhadi - Not quite as stunning as A Separation, but another sharp dissection of the tragic absurdities of contemporary Iranian life.

9. Bridge of Spies, dir. Steven Spielberg - In which Spielberg carefully withholds from us the Spielberg Face until the last possible moment.  Instead we're privileged to watch Mark Rylance and Tom Hanks' incredibly calibrated performances as the most decent Soviet spy and insurance attorney, respectfully, as can possibly be imagined, which is no small feat. 

8. Creed, dir. Ryan Coogler - In which Coogler and Jordan inject much-needed vitality into a tired franchise simply by being themselves, which is to say America's most promising mainstream directing and acting talents.  Doubly fun for me as a boxing fan and Philadelphia resident.  If you enjoyed it, please see Fruitvale Station, one of my favorite films of 2013.

7. Phoenix, dir. Christian Petzold - Yes, a Holocaust film, a genre which I think yields diminishing returns at this point, but also a fascinating Hitchcock pastiche with all that that entails -- femmes fatales, false identity schemes, and obsessions which the protagonist can't fully understand in herself.  A truly stunning final scene that I will say nothing about.

6. 45 Years, dir. Andrew Haigh - Also climaxing in a stunning final scene, this film grew on me like none other this year.  The more I've digested it, the closer it gets to being a perfectly realized portrait of how even the strongest marriage involves two individuals who will always be in some way strangers.  The tragedy is that Kate realizes it too late, and Geoff not at all.

5. It Follows, dir. David Robert Mitchell - A superb horror film that reflects the full gamut of sexual anxieties of our age, touching on reputational harm, slut shaming, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, sexually transmitted infections, and plain old emotionally empty sex.  Great imagery, atmosphere, music, and sound design. 

4. Brooklyn, dir. John Crowley - If you're sensing a trend, it becomes obvious here: this year's best films are focused on women's stories.  Saoirse Ronan is a revelation as an Irish immigrant who finds herself torn between a new life and an old life.  I can't say anything about it better than Bridget Read does here, please read.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road, dir. George Miller - Even if it were a dumb action film, Mad Max: Fury Road would be amazing by dint of its production aesthetic and practical effects alone.  But astoundingly, it isn't dumb at all.  It's the rare action film with an intelligent point of view, namely the sadly-still-necessary instructive that women are not things.  And the film puts its narrative money where its mouth is, continually introducing strong female characters, while mostly muzzling and restraining the titular Max. 

2. Carol, dir. Todd Haynes - Perhaps an entirely perfect film, with writing, acting, cinematography, costuming, music, and editing all perfectly in concert and unison.  Cate Blanchett, who has never done much for me before, is utterly astounding as a woman who wears her overlapping identities (upperclass housewife, loving mother, lesbian) as so much costuming. It's also as much the story of the personal development of Rooney Mara's Therese, from a person who has things decided for her to a person who decides what she wants for herself.  In a year of great final scenes, this film may have the most thrilling.

1. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, dir. Marielle Heller - Sometimes a film will just throb with life from beginning to end; this is one of those.  A first feature for Heller, it deals with potentially devastating events with a warmth and humor that emphasize Minnie's desire to fully experience the totality of it all, to throw herself entirely into the messiness of life and love and sex and art.  It returns you to the time of sexual discovery, when you learned that your mind, your body, another's mind, another's body, all joined, were more than simply physical, more than simply spiritual, but all-encompassing in their capacity for human connection.  And it just as strongly deals with the comedown from that high, and the impossible necessity of growing as a person afterwards.  My favorite film of 2015.

The Return of Friday Night Links

Gone Guy - Drake gets the N+1 treatment.

Short Cuts - Christine Smallwood on the recent short story anthologies.  See Friday Night Links of 1/15/16 for Christian Lorentzen on the same.

Proposals Toward the End of Writing - The future's gonna be weird.

Expanded Ways of Listening - Alex Ross talks to Ben Ratliff.

When the Lights Shut Off - Kendrick get the LA Review of Books treatment.

Chicago Review of Books - Chicago gets into the whole review of books thing.

Harper's Editor-in-Chief Suddenly Fired - Grand opening, grand closing.

Leon Wieseltier on A.O. Scott - Critic fight!!

The Uncomfortable Power of Pop-Music Cruelty - The Weeknd gets the New York Mag treatment.

Death Valley Superbloom - The most alien landscape in America gets even more beautiful.

Thoughts on Anomalisa (2015), dir. Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman

It's been difficult for me to decide how I feel about Anomalisa.  The film is in many ways fascinating and features some stunning and moving scenes.  The animation is wonderfully detailed and the film has some really great jokes and comic scenes.

But the film doesn't fully work for me, and it has to do with the protagonist Michael Stone.  The film's problem is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too.  It wants us to care about Michael's happiness while presenting him as impossible to like.  He's in every scene, and it is his unique perspective that we are privy to, as it becomes clear a few minutes into the film that Michael sees all other people with the same face and hears them with the same monotonic male voice.  Here is the anonymizing aspect of our technocapitalism writ large.  That Michael is an author and lecturer on customer service (who preaches that customers need to be treated as individuals, each of whom is having a good or bad day) is a nice ironic touch.

But Michael is very, very hard to like.  Arriving in Cincinnati to deliver a talk, his interactions with airport personnel, cabdrivers, and hotel clerks are dripping with an exhausted disdain verging on hostility.  He's haunted by thoughts of a former girlfriend, Bella, whom he ghosted years earlier.  He impulsively calls her and they meet at the hotel bar; their interaction is already floundering before he pathetically asks her up to his room.  She is horrified and storms out. After drinking to excess and remembering he wanted to buy a toy for his son, he wanders into a sex toy shop and purchases a bizarre Japanese sex antique.  Up until this point, Michael has been shown as a character who cannot appreciate people as individuals; in fact, he cannot even perceive them as individuals.  The film draws this concept from the Fregoli delusion, wherein the deluded perceives all other people as the same person.  But the film struggles with inferring metaphoric universality to Michael's condition, especially after Lisa appears in the next act.  

Michael is finishing a shower when he hears voices in the hall, including a female voice.  Michael races with a maniacal zeal to get dressed and find the voice.  It ends up belonging to Lisa, a customer service professional attending his talk with her friend Emma (who speaks in the male monotone).  The three of them get drinks together, and though Emma is flirty and Lisa is shy, Michael is interested only in Lisa.  This leads to a hilariously awkward scene where he's forced to ask Lisa in front of Emma if she would like to come have a nightcap with him in his room.  Lisa can hardly understand, as she's never the one that men are attracted to. 

As has been much written, Lisa is a wonderful character, whose positive energy and oddly un-self-conscious shyness shine via Jennifer Jason Leigh's voicework.  In the great scene of the film, Lisa sings an a capella rendition of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," continuing on with the vocal coda despite Michael's premature interruption.  Here Lisa is fully herself, performing at Michael's request, but really performing for the secret joy it brings to her.  Her sex scene with Michael has been justly praised, but again, I felt the strength came from Lisa's tenderness.  By this point in the film we know that Michael already has a wife and son that he lacks connection with, and that he has already struck out miserably with Bella.   The sex scene really felt like punctuation after the singing scene. 

Michael becomes even less pleasant from here on out, as he suffers through a paranoid dream, proposes that Lisa run off with him, and suffers a professional meltdown during his customer service lecture.  In perhaps the saddest part of the film, after awaking from his dream, Michael convinces Lisa to run off with him, only to begin noticing (and pointing out) her flaws as she eats her breakfast.  Soon he is hearing the male monotone doubling Lisa's voice.  The only human connection that Michael has made in the whole film dies before our eyes, as he realizes she'll soon be like everyone else to him.

Obviously there's a valid, if extremely depressing, metaphor here for the human condition.  Attraction fades, sparks disappear, former lovers become future nobodies.  But while I felt sad for Lisa that her potentially exciting affair with Michael was not to be, I found it impossible to feel so for Michael.  After all, he'd shown no redeeming characteristics at all in the entire film.

So was this to Anomalisa's benefit or detriment?  I still haven't made up my mind.  I'm not one of those people who complains that a film had no likable characters.  Some of my favorite films are centered on incredibly difficult and alienated individuals.  Scorsese's Taxi Driver comes to mind.   Much of Taxi Driver's power lies in how it convinces the viewer to sympathize with Travis Bickle, despite his nihilism shading into psychosis.  But Bickle's unpleasantness is grounded in his humanity, and his desire for connection.  In a way, Bickle simply longs to be like everyone else.  Notice the way he gazes upon the American Bandstand dancers as Jackson Brown sings to us of loneliness.  But Michael's inability to perceive other people as individuals, and the surrendering disdain with which he treats them, gives way to the opposite feeling: that Michael simply cannot stand others.  The film presents us with his potential salvation in Lisa, then snatches it away, too good to be true.  In the end Michael goes back to his family, where's he's confronted with a personal hell: a surprise party where he cannot recognize any of his supposed friends.  He presents his son with the Japanese sex antique, horrifying his wife when semen seeps from it.  The film doesn't resolve so much as simply end, Michael stuck in his mental prison.

Friday Night Links

Missed Connections: How to Tell if “Nathan For You” Is For You - Excellent essay unpacking the mindfuckery of one of America's truly great weird shows.  
  
Adventure Time’s Kirsten Lepore on the joys and pains of stop motion animation - Fascinating interview with the director of the recent stop motion episode of one of America's other truly great weird shows.

Can Short Stories Still Shock? - Christian Lorentzen examines the state of the American short story.

 
Pazz & Jop 2015 - I've been obsessed with the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll for a good 15 years.  This year's includes a great roundtable discussion among some of the real heavies of contemporary pop music criticism, including my spirit animal, Robert Christgau.
 
The National Eater 38 - I like Bill Addison's commitment to appreciating a variety of culinary styles and presenting wider geographic diversity then you tend to see.  So many "Best Restaurant" lists are half NYC/San Fran restaurants.  There's a lot of good food out there, in a lot of places.

Why You Can't Love David Bowie and Hate on Jaden Smith - The headline is disingenuous, because of course you can love David Bowie and hate on Jaden Smith if your criteria is solely auditory.  But the essay draws smart parallels between the fashion forwardness of Bowie and Smith and the necessity of supporting those pushing boundaries.

Meat Market - I'm a pretty major Anthony Bourdain fan, so I'll be reserving judgment on his Pier 57 venture, but there's a lot of good writing here about the authenticity trap and its pernicious effects on our aesthetic culture.  I will say in Bourdain's defense that on his TV shows, he's much more knowing and perceptive in his understanding of the fluid ways the concept of authenticity has interacted with economics, migration and colonization patterns, and ingenuity and artistry in the development of cultural foodways.  The piece is not quite honest when it comes to Bourdain's shows, which have showed him unapologetically enjoying, and examining about his enjoyment of, some very inauthentic eateries (Sizzler and Jollibee come to mind). If Bourdain has a single thesis regarding authenticity, it's that authenticity is simply one aspect of the unruly and complicated cultural beast that is human cuisine and its relationship to the rest of human culture.

editor's note: In general, I'd prefer to alternate links with reviews, but I wasn't able to catch any new movies last weekend.  I should see Anomalisa this weekend, so expect a review soon, and I also plan to review the new David Bowie album.

Friday Night Links

Slate Movie Club - These guys kill it from start to finish, all 18 entries.

The Millions: Most Anticipated Books 2016 - A must read for must reads.

N+1 Year in Review - RIP Ornette Coleman (1930-2015).

ESPN's Fights of the Year - I probably would have gone with Glowacki-Huck at #1 over Vargas-Miura.  Matthysse-Provodnikov mostly notable for Provodnikov's incredible chin; for the most part, Provodnikov was too slow to catch Matthysse with anything the Argentinian couldn't handle.  Alvarez-Kirkland too one-sided to be truly great.  Still catching up on the rest.  

Diving in Blind: Here's What One Critic Learned From Her First Phish Concert - The barriers to entry are surprisingly low.

80 Books Every Person Should Read - I have read 15, which was more than I expected.  I never do very well on lists like this.  I think my best score is on Larry McCaffery's list, where I've read 25 out of 100.  

Inside the Mind (and Mouth) of America's Gutsiest Food Critic - Almost certainly America's best food critic.

Philly Jesus in the Mummers Parade - Pretty much the most Philly thing possible.

Thoughts on The Hateful Eight (2015), dir. Quentin Tarantino

Where ever you live in America, you're living on hidden truth.  That truth is that the nation of America, the land of baseball, jazz, and the Bill of Rights, owes its existence and continued success to the extermination of one people and the enslavement of another.  You can choose not to think about it, and can choose not to talk about it, but the truth is there, and you can't get away from it.  Generally, we as Americans don't like to dwell on our violent history.  We go about our lives, working, shopping, eating, sleeping; this is necessary.  But it's also necessary that major artists should force us from time to time to confront, examine, and reckon with our history. 

Over the last several years, a number of films have been released that seek to do this.  Among the more successful, I'd place Terrence Malick's The New World, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, and Ava DuVernay's Selma (in chronological order of era depicted).  But I submit that none of these filmmakers have tackled the wretched and brutal ugliness of America's bloody history as successfully or as powerfully as Quentin Tarantino has, first with Django Unchained and now with The Hateful Eight.

That Tarantino has become one of the foremost chroniclers of America's ugly history is a curious development.  For many people, Tarantino is first and foremost the director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (for instance, see the 2012 Sight and Sound Poll, where Pulp Fiction received 13 votes, Reservoir Dogs received two votes, and no other Tarantino film received more than one).  Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are brilliant films, but in a stylish, post-modern way.  As films, they contain almost no subtext in the larger world; that is to say, they make essentially no comment on either America's history or the social, political, or economic realities of the America they were made in.  The films are each basicallly a closed ecosystem, and with their digressive and circular plots, MacGuffins, and inane chatter ("the usual, mindless, boring, gettin'-to-know-you chitchat," to quote Mrs. Mia Wallace), they are essentially about nothing, in the most gloriously Seinfeldian sense. 

On the other hand, Tarantino's Westerns are definitely about something.  They are about the violence of America's past, and they are about as subtle as the cone of blood spewing from Kurt Russell's mouth in Hateful.  In a sense this is what sets them apart from the non-Tarantino films I mentioned at the outset.  All of those films try in their own way to illuminate the ugly truths of America's past.  But all of them are too well-mannered, too artistic, too clean to show the worst of it all.  In a word, they are too tasteful.  And this level of taste shields the audience from taking the full measure of America's brutal past.

Tarantino's Westerns don't have this problem.  They wallow in all that is ugly and throw it in the faces of the characters and the audience.  His gunfight scenes explode in cartoonishly exaggerated volumes of fake blood.  Profanities and racial slurs fly left and right.  The violence is racialized and sexualized, with black and female characters taking much of the worst.  Obviously movie audiences are conditioned to accept terrible acts of violence so long as they are inflicted upon villains by heroes.  The Hateful Eight refuses the audience even this refuge, making each character so despicable as to deny the audience any proxy to identify with or root for. 

I think Tarantino himself is well aware of the oppositional divide between his grindhouse Westerns and the tasteful arthouse and studio prestige historical fictions that have dominated critics' lists and award season.  Witness the Lincoln letter that winds its way through The Hateful Eight.  Fully a fiction, it cloaks the horrors of Marquis Warren's war crimes and protects him from racial violence in his life as a bounty hunter post-Civil War.  As we learn in the final scene, it is full of exactly the homespun phrasing and decency of tone we've come to expect from fictional depictions of our 16th president; that it is read aloud by two dying scoundrels, each soaked in the blood and viscera of themselves and others, is no accident.  I submit this is Tarantino aiming a broadside at works like Spielberg's aforementioned Lincoln, works that would seek to make centuries of dirty, nasty, hateful violence into sanitized tales of great men doing great things to make a great nation.