Functional doc following pre-planning through opening night of a Spring 2015 China-inspired fashion show at the Met in NYC. 95% of the interest comes from the fantastic costumes on display and in archive footage and clothing worn by celebrities to the opening ball. 4% comes from watching Wong Kar-Wai as the only Chinese participant on the board (and realizing he does other things with his time besides making movies), and the rest is from anything that anyone has to say.
Author: Brandon
Brandon's the guy who runs this site.
Nocturnal Animals (2016, Tom Ford)
It was the baby-monitor jump-scare that lost me. Intriguing backstory open before the movie changes directions, centering on Amy Adams (far less electric here than in Arrival, and given much less to do) reading the rape-murder-revenge novel written by her ex Jake Gyllenhaal, visualizing it starring him with Michael Shannon as a dying cop who doesn’t play by the rules. I suppose the ending should be cynically satisfying, as Adams becomes obsessed with the novel, contacts Jake to meet him and talk about it, and gets stood up. By that point though, who could care about Amy and Jake’s old relationship problems (she got an abortion without telling him, and dumped him for Armie Hammer) or his elaborate literature-based revenge plot, when the bulk of the movie has become the novel itself, a grimy, joyless, desert desperation story? And who can say why Adams gets so sucked in, to the point where she starts seeing jump-scare monsters inside her assistant’s baby monitor, a moment that felt so outrageously cheap that I optimistically figured it would be justified later, or at least be the beginning of a series of visions?
Also it opens with naked fat women dancing in slow-motion. And hey, here’s Love star Karl Glusman and Donnie Darko‘s Jena Malone, both of them returning from another 2016 movie I found ugly and misguided. Standard dialogue scenes were filmed in a flat and boring manner (and the movie is mostly standard dialogue scenes). Diana Dabrowska in Cinema Scope and David Ehrlich on Letterboxd both compliment the camerawork, so maybe I missed something there. At least Jake G. is very good in his role, and Shannon is always pleasant to watch.
The Love Witch (2016, Anna Biller)
One of the weirder movies in theaters last year. Meticulous art design, color, makeup and costumes, with a look referencing the glory of technicolor. Once the actors showed up speaking their dialogue methodically, carefully pronouncing every syllable, I assumed it was going to be self-consciously campy along the lines of The Editor, but I eventually got over that. I suppose it’s its own unique thing, though unlike the unique things made by Cattet & Forzani or Peter Strickland or Yorgos Lanthimos, my mind stubbornly refused to ride its feminine groove.
M. Sicinski’s online Cinema Scope review makes beautiful sense of all the pieces… after reading, I went from thinking “oh well, that was pretty good/failed experiment” to desiring to watch it again soon.
The Love Witch is so exaggerated in its twin concerns — magicks and genteel, womanly behaviour — that they come to intersect imperceptibly, even when they don’t fit together at all. (Elaine’s garish, Lovecraftian self-portraits, for example, or her mad-scientist laboratory set-up, come to seem completely of-a-piece with her wide brimmed sun hats and her pinky extension in the all-women’s tearoom) … Biller’s control over her own filmic world parallels Elaine’s witchcraft in that both are pervasive and thoroughgoing … The Love Witch does demonstrate the power that resides in matriarchal practices that are frequently scorned for their ostensible lack of seriousness.
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SEPT 2017: Watched this again, confirmed it’s a misunderstood masterpiece.
“According to the experts, men are very fragile.”
Elaine has freaked out Wayne:
All I learned from IMDB is that the libertine professor Wayne is on General Hospital, Star recently played a zombie stripper, and I should probably watch Viva, which costars Biller with this movie’s beardy warlock fellow.
The Edge of Seventeen (2016, Kelly Fremon Craig)
Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit, Begin Again) is an awkward teen who likes a guy (“bad boy” Alex Calvert), is liked by a different guy (cartoonist Hayden Szeto), hates her brother (Blake Jenner of EWS!!) and has a best friend (Haley Lu Richardson, kidnappee in Split) who starts dating the brother. So far, so typical. But the sparkling dialogue and the work by Woody Harrelson as her patient, smartass teacher should ensure this movie’s place in Teen Film Eternity, to run on cable (or streaming or whatever) for generations.
David Ehrlich’s review got our butts into the theater:
Unfolding like a symphony of small humiliations, there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel at least vaguely familiar, and there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel completely true … the scenes with the highest potential for hokeyness are the ones that Craig and her cast most relish … When shit gets heavy between Nadine and her brother, both Steinfeld and Jenner tap into a sense of depth so real that it almost seems alien to the genre.
Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins)
It’s 2017 but I’ve still got eighteen 2016 movies to catch up with. I won’t spend much time on this one since it was everybody’s favorite and there’s a ton of writing about it. Three episodes in the life of Little/Chiron/Black, played by different actors. First he finds a substitute family with Miami drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his wife (Janelle Monae), then he begins discovering his sexuality with a friend named Kevin, and finally he’s a drug dealer himself in the image of Juan. As with Certain Women, the third part is overwhelmingly great. Trevante Rhodes as the oldest Chiron gives a sensitive performance that allows his shy younger selves to slowly bleed through the gangster facade as he reconnects with Kevin.
Bonus points for “Classic Man” and the Hokusai poster, right after we rewatched Kubo over Thanksgiving, making this the fourth Hokusai-referencing movie of the year. We listened to an interview with the director discussing Chiron’s mother’s similarity to his own mother, and marveled at the fact that Naomie Harris appears in all three episodes and shot all her scenes in three days.
The Movie Year in Review, 2016
Happy New Movie Year! Here is a look back at the previous movie year.
The Lists:
Favorite 2016 Movies
Favorite Recent Movies watched in 2016
Favorite Older Movies watched in 2016
Special Screenings and HD Rewatches, 2016
Favorite Shorts of 2016
2016 Movies To Watch
Previous year lists
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Bonus List: The Year in Television
Best shows I watched this year, not counting shows I/we haven’t finished yet, and excluding some miniseries that I am counting as movies:
1. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
2. Master of None
3. Archer
4. Neon Genesis Evangelion
5. Black Mirror
6. Rick and Morty
7. Horace & Pete
8. Veep
9. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
10. BoJack Horseman
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BLIGS:
I find either top-1000 lists or large collections of annual top-ten lists very appealing, because among all the obligatory auteur favorites and consensus greats there’s plenty of room for unusual selections. And 1000 titles seems like a good canon size, a whole lifetime of film viewing for normal, non-movie-obsessed people, and can cover the entire timeline of film history. A compulsive list-o-phile, I’m always tempted to make my own top-1000 list, but stop myself because I feel like I’ve never caught up with enough of the classics – and also it’d be a lot of work, nobody would ever read it, and as soon as I watch Fanny & Alexander or The Passenger or Paterson it’ll probably change.
As recently discussed in the 10th Blogniversary post, my go-to top-1000 lists have been Jonathan Rosenbaum’s and They Shoot Pictures. I just realized there are massive movie lists online by three more of my favorite critics on their personal sites: Vadim Rizov, Mike D’Angelo and Michael Sicinski. Plus you’ve got your Sight & Sound polls, your Cahiers top-tens, Edgar Wright’s recent list, recommendations from books and magazines and all over. And I’ve started organizing and tagging these.
So, to celebrate my turning A Certain Age this year, instead of listing my favorite movies, I’ve made a composite checklist of the top 1000 unseen movies that I need to watch. Maybe if I get through these, I’ll list my own favorites. No promises.
Almost all are narrative features that I think I might be able to find on video (aiming for HD). Probably half are written and directed by white male Americans, too bad. Mostly excluded are shorts (because I’m tracking them elsewhere) and documentaries (ditto) and avant-garde features (because of availability) and everything from Africa (because we watch those on Katy’s schedule) and movies I’ve already seen and hope to rewatch and anything from the current decade.
Needed a stupid, catchy name for the list, settled on BLIGS (short for “obligatory”, acronym for “Big List I Gotta See”). Sortable list of bligs is here.
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Sally Jane Black:
“I haven’t finished watching a movie until I write about it.”
My writing has gotten worse and lazier lately, but it has been a year full of distractions… at least I’m keeping up. Here’s to a better 2017.
Favorite 2016 Movies
As always, a “2016 movie” is defined as a movie released in 2016 (or the last couple years) which I had a reasonable opportunity to see (played theaters within an hour’s drive of here, or came out on blu-ray) for the first time in 2016. So, Carol is a 2016 movie, and I guess Elle and Jackie will be 2017 movies.
The ranking of some of these is shaky. I’m not sure exactly how much I like The Handmaiden or Cosmos or Hateful Eight or Everybody Wants Some!! or a couple others until I watch them again. I was going to make a separate “great but unranked” list but I’ll just wing it because who cares.
1. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin)
2. Carol (Todd Haynes)
3. Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight)
4. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer)
5. Experimenter (Michael Almereyda)
6. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
7. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)
8. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
9. Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie)
10. Lemonade (Beyoncé Knowles)
11. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
12. Cosmos (Andrzej Zulawski)
13. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
14. Show Me a Hero (Paul Haggis)
15. Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman)
16. The Handmaiden (Chan-wook Park)
17. The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
18. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)
19. Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
20. One More Time With Feeling (Andrew Dominik)
21. Hail, Caesar! (Joel Coen)
22. Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti)
23. The Witch (Robert Eggers)
24. A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino)
25. HyperNormalisation (Adam Curtis)
26. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)
27. Office (Johnnie To)
28. Swiss Army Man (Daniels)
29. Sing Street (John Carney)
30. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee)
Runners-up:
The Edge of Seventeen (Kelly Fremon Craig)
The Invitation (2015, Karyn Kusama)
The Meddler (Lorene Scafaria)
Where to Invade Next (2015, Michael Moore)
Francofonia (2015, Aleksandr Sokurov)
Favorite Recent Movies watched in 2016
Last year I focused on movies that were five years old and made a 2010 Redux list. I tried that again this year, watched a bunch of 2011 movies that I hadn’t seen, but really was trying to catch up on recent movies in general. So instead of a 2011 Redux, here are the best things I saw from the last five years.
1. Ernest & Celestine (2012, Stéphane Aubier)
2. Song of the Sea (2014, Tomm Moore)
3. When Marnie Was There (2014, Hiromasa Yonebayashi)
It was a good year for animation at our house.
4. Night Moves (2013, Kelly Reichardt)
5. La Sapienza (2014, Eugène Green)
6. Call Me Lucky (2015, Bobcat Goldthwait)
7. Vivan las Antipodas (2011, Victor Kossakovsky)
8. Goodbye First Love (2011, Mia Hansen-Løve)
9. Killing Them Softly (2012, Andrew Dominik)
10. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (2011, Johnnie To)
11. Sicario (2015, Denis Villeneuve)
12. The Mill and the Cross (2011, Lech Majewski)
13. Life of Riley (2014, Alain Resnais)
14. The Arbor (2010, Clio Barnard)
15. The Imposter (2012, Bart Layton)
16. Norte, the End of History (2013, Lav Diaz)
17. Tom at the Farm (2013, Xavier Dolan)
18. The Color of Noise (2015, Eric Robel)
19. Bridge of Spies (2015, Steven Spielberg)
20. The Deep Blue Sea (2011, Terence Davies)
21. The Day He Arrives (2011, Hong Sang-soo)
22. Life Without Principle (2011, Johnnie To)
23. Monsieur Lazhar (2011, Philippe Falardeau)
24. The Woman (2011, Lucky McKee)
25. The Big Short (2015, Adam McKay)
Favorite Older Movies watched in 2016
Older than 2011, that is.
1. Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
2. Shirin (2008, Abbas Kiarostami)
3. The Band’s Visit (2007, Eran Kolirin)
4. An Affair to Remember (1957, Leo McCarey)
5. Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor)
6. Le Grand Amour (1968, Pierre Etaix)
7. La Ciénaga (2001, Lucrecia Martel)
8. Summer Wars (2009, Mamoru Hosoda)
9. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998, Julio Medem)
10. Pit and the Pendulum (1961, Roger Corman)
11. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)
12. Targets (1968, Peter Bogdanovich)
13. Secret Sunshine (2007, Lee Chang-dong)
14. Rosetta (1999, Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
15. Innocence (2004, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)
16. Bend of the River (1952, Anthony Mann)
17. Ponyo (2008, Hayao Miyazaki)
18. Hyènes (1992, Djibril Diop Mambety)
19. Black Christmas (1974, Bob Clark)
20. Whispering Pages (1993, Aleksandr Sokurov)