Tuesday, December 11, 2018

My favorite revival and film society screenings of 2018

The history of film from the late 1800s through 2017 is so much more interesting than any single year. Duh. So, before I post my favorite movies of 2018 (that post is coming in a few weeks), here are my favorite older films I got to see on the big screen in 2018, mostly thanks to the Austin Film Society and its wonderful cinema, which I hope remains open until the earth extinguishes our mostly terrible species. It's a great place. The list is alphabetical because everything's in flux all the time, so how the hell do I know what my number four favorite revival screening of 2018 is? Come on now.

FAVORITES

Olivier Assayas retrospective: Paris Awakens (1991) and Cold Water (1994)
Sadly two of Assayas' hardest-to-see films thanks to distribution and rights issues, Paris Awakens and Cold Water share a finely detailed, deeply empathetic but unsentimental understanding of the vague, foreboding, prickly space between adolescence and adulthood and how young people find themselves in trouble. I love Assayas' unconventional beats, jumps, and transitions between scenes.

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)
A pre-Code gem, full of wild but earned tonal changes, gorgeous shot compositions, and one of the all-time great Barbara Stanwyck performances in a still-modern story of one woman making our sexually exploitative world work in her favor instead of against her.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974)
I finally got to see my favorite Peckinpah on the big screen this year, and I'm pleased to say it still looks as grimy and dusty and fucked up in its restored, full-screen glory as it did on muddy VHS. Warren Oates, a severed head in a bag, lots of trouble. Oh yeah. A last gasp film noir? A modern western? A grindhouse movie? A tragic romance? An action thriller? Yes but also nah. It's a lot stranger, tougher, and more personal than that. Maybe a fictional autobiography of an artist's eye or maybe that's a pompous way to describe it. Whatever it is, hook it to my veins.

Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme, 1974)
Demme's first film as director was a women-in-prison exploitation drive-in movie for Roger Corman that required a certain amount of violence and nudity but otherwise provided Demme a lot of freedom. Even in these modest beginnings, Caged Heat showcases what made Demme such a great filmmaker and such a sad one to lose last year in his unassuming but sophisticated visual style and pacing, his focus on a whole community's ecosystem without neglecting the individual members or making one person more important than another, his sense of humor and playfulness, and his reverence for film history without getting bogged down in look-how-cool-I-am pop-cult referentiality.

The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, 1971)
The story of a fucked-up family (but all families are fucked up), told almost entirely through wedding and funeral ceremonies over the course of several years, Oshima's '71 epic kicks his blend of heavy drama, absurd comedy, psychosexual perversity, death-haunted melancholy, and healthy disrespect for nationalism, social norms, traditionalism, and status quo politics up to operatic levels. It's kinda-sorta his Godfather, his "This Be the Verse," and his "Fall of the House of Usher." 

Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
Finally got to see my favorite (alongside Stranger than Paradise) Jarmusch film on the big screen, thanks to a beautiful restoration that coincidentally screened the same week its cinematographer Robby Muller died, in a lovely accidental memorial. Jarmusch's western is a weird, violent, hallucinatory condemnation of white American greed and depravity with a non-condescending attitude toward its indigenous characters, a poetic meditation on death and dying, and a road movie without the road, with a polarizing (and, in my opinion, essential) Neil Young score and Muller's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography.

D.O.A. (Lech Kowalski, 1980)
One of a handful of great punk documentaries, D.O.A. is a living map of late '70s British (and a little bit of American) punk rock culture, with the Sex Pistols' mostly disastrous tour of the southwestern United States at its center. Kowalski's side trips from the main story include American audiences' reactions to the Pistols, the Sid and Nancy trainwreck, live footage of some of the best British punk bands (plus Cleveland's Dead Boys), local London no-hopers Terry and the Idiots and their sweet, misguided leader, and anti-punk politicians and moral crusaders, who seem to have stepped straight out of a Monty Python sketch but are decidedly not in on the joke.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective: Love Is Colder than Death (1969), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (1972/73), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)
The word "genius" is often tossed around to excuse the horrible behavior of talented old white guys, but Fassbinder was one of the few filmmakers I have no reservations about calling a genius. He was no stranger to horrible behavior, and his personal life was a flaming wreck, but he delivered one deathless masterpiece after another at an alarmingly frightening pace until a drug overdose killed him at the age of 37 in 1982. My climate change despair has shifted from mourning human life (we have our moments but are an invasive, cancerous species the world will be much better without) to mourning all the poor cats and dogs and great works of art that are going down with us. Someday, no more copies of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant will exist and that's a bigger tragedy than any of us biting the dust. It was the greatest part of my year, cinematically speaking, to revisit these films on the big screen, but the real revelation was the previously unavailable five-part television mini-series about the contrast between work life and home life, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day, which is shockingly warm and optimistic while maintaining his complex formal composition. In most of his other work, Fassbinder sees society (and I mean all society) as a crushing force destroying individual happiness. He has great empathy for almost all his characters, but he doesn't see any way out of being either the exploiter or the exploited in any situation involving more than one person. His characters crush or get crushed, are needy and weak or cruel and strong (though this cruelty is also a weakness). His most intense films are pyramid schemes of cruelty with the abuse trickling down from the top, his characters taking their own exploitation out on others even weaker or destroying themselves so they won't hurt anyone else. (I should point out to anyone who hasn't seen a Fassbinder film that his movies are also extremely funny and sexy and unusual and full of unforgettable images, he shoots the greatest bar scenes, and his troupe of regulars are some of the best actors you'll ever see, so none of these films are a slog to get through even though the point of view is extremely bleak.) Without ignoring life's imbalanced power dynamics or its toughness, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day is about people who truly care about each other and help each other. The family, romantic relationships, and work life are all seen more positively than in any other Fassbinder film I can recall. It's almost utopian, this idea that people can work together to improve each other's lives and the collective health of society. We really can do this, we just won't. Whatever caused this warmth in Fassbinder, it didn't last, but it hung around long enough to give him another masterpiece, including my favorite wedding reception scene ever.

Gonightclubbing Presents: Songs & Stories (Emily Armstrong & Pat Ivers, 1977-80)
Armstrong and Ivers worked in New York City public access as video editors and camera operators in the '70s and '80s, and they shot hundreds of hours of videotape footage of the downtown music scene. (They're still best friends and have lived in the same New York apartment building since the '70s.) This anthology collection of their late '70s work includes performances from Richard Hell & The Voidoids, Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, Lounge Lizards, Bad Brains, The Erasers, Dead Boys, and Divine, among others. Armstrong and Ivers are always re-editing the footage together, adding and taking away different performances, so the film is never in a fixed state. If they visit your city, go see it in whatever form it's currently occupying.

Bette Gordon retrospective: Michigan Avenue (1974, co-directed with James Benning), I-94 (1974, co-directed with James Benning), The United States of America (1975, co-directed with James Benning), Empty Suitcases (1980), Variety (1983), and Luminous Motion (1998)
Bette Gordon should be better known. Working in both experimental and narrative film, she really gets the rhythms and weirdness and mundanity and sexism of American life in ways you don't see in many mainstream or independent movies. Her work has been marginalized and damned with faint praise by mainstream critics, which happens to a lot of women directors, but this series gave me a chance to see several of her films for the first time. I liked them all, though Luminous Motion is a bit of a mixed bag (mostly thanks to source material I wasn't too fond of), but the two in particular that made me bug out in awe were Variety and The United States of America. United States is the pinnacle of the collaborative films Gordon made with her then-boyfriend James Benning, a great experimental filmmaker in his own right. The two drove cross-country in the mid-'70s and rigged a camera to a wooden pedestal in the back seat to capture the backs of both their heads, the steering wheel, and the entire front windshield. The film edits the trip down to 27 minutes as the couple alternates driving through the varied landscapes and weather of this large, beautiful, ugly, weird, occasionally banal country to a soundtrack of nationwide '70s radio, FM and AM, large and small markets, up and down the dial. Hard rock, disco, country, soul, news reports, farm reports, religious proselytizing, political talk radio, advertisements, and heavy rotation of Minnie Riperton's "Loving You" spill out from the speakers as Gordon and Benning drive down the highway. I knew three minutes in that this was already destined to be one of my favorite films. It's one of the truest and strangest portraits of what it's like to live (and drive) in America. Variety (co-written by Kathy Acker) marked Gordon's move from experimental shorts to full-length narrative features, but it retains her adventurous spirit and the feeling that anything could happen or that any image could appear. Variety looks to me now like one of the greatest '80s films in its mix of character study, film noir, downtown New York hangout, waking dream, and exploration of film-as-voyeurism, while showing what it's like to be a woman at work surrounded by men and also taking a complex but mostly positive view of sexual desire and fantasy. The story of a financially strapped woman who takes a job at the ticket booth of a porn theater, Variety never goes where you expect it to and is beguiling, mysterious, and exciting. Both these films are still with me, months later.

Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947)
An ultra-strange, pitch-black noir that sits alongside A Face in the Crowd and Elmer Gantry in its clear-eyed take on the American grift (always more real than the American dream), Nightmare Alley moves from the carnival to the nightclub to high society pseudo-religion to the gutter and back to the carnival in a story of an ambitious striver with no ethics working his way up the ladder in the mentalist/spiritualist racket. The movie has at least one scene too many (in my opinion, the last one), but that's just a nitpick. Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell are the highlights of a strong ensemble. 


Noroit (Jacques Rivette, 1976)
Rivette, like Fassbinder, is on my short list of genius filmmakers, and Noroit, an extremely loose adaptation of Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, is one of his strangest and most pleasurably baffling films. Bernadette Lafont plays Giulia, the vinyl-pantsuit clad leader of a ruthless gang of pirates. After her brother is killed by Giulia, Geraldine Chaplin's Morag plays the long revenge game by infiltrating the pirates' island compound, becoming Giulia's bodyguard, and tearing things apart from the inside. Noroit continually messes with form, identity, and narrative, including a film score played by onscreen musicians who follow the characters around and soundtrack their movements, and appears to make its own rules for what it is and how to watch it as it goes, which is the kind of movie experience I love the most.

Personal Problems (Bill Gunn, 1980)
Bill Gunn (see Bette Gordon above) should also be better known. A writer, actor, and filmmaker who worked in theater, movies, and television, Gunn wrote the screenplay for Hal Ashby's first (and, in my opinion, greatest) film as director, The Landlord, one of the smartest and funniest comedies about the intersections and separations between black and white American life, and wrote and directed the complex, offbeat, art-horror vampire film Ganja & Hess. Gunn, who died in 1989, also directed this incredible two-part miniseries in 1980, which finally saw a belated big-screen and DVD/Blu-Ray release in 2018. Personal Problems, which Gunn and co-creator Ishmael Reed described as an "experimental soap opera," started as a late-'70s throwback to the radio plays of the pre-television years for New York public radio. Reed wrote the script with some input from Gunn, Gunn directed the voice actors. (Please correct me if I have any of this wrong. There is some conflicting information out there.) The project continued to intrigue Gunn, who wanted to turn it into an ongoing television series for PBS. Using some of Reed's characters from the radio play, Gunn directed a large ensemble of talented black artists from the New York theater, music, and literature scenes (including Reed, in a small but memorable part), combining his own writing with the improvisational skills of his cast. He filmed the two-part, four-hour pilot on videotape and presented it to PBS, who rejected it as a series and only aired the pilot in two markets, New York and San Francisco. That was mostly that until this year. This is a major rediscovery and a masterpiece. The videotape is rough and home-movie quality, but Gunn uses the primitive technology to create both an intimate realism and a hallucinatory, dreamy feeling. He has a great eye, and he notices so many quiet, usually unseen moments. Most films and TV shows about black life that get past the mostly white gatekeepers on the business side of art and entertainment tend to focus on heroes, victims, and/or historical figures, the extraordinary, the stereotypical, and the symbolic, but Gunn presented black characters that were regular, everyday, contemporary people with jobs and lives and relationships and families and regular problems and complexities and nuances and idiosyncrasies, which shouldn't be so unusual but unfortunately is. OK, I'm starting to get too white-guy-just-found-out-about-racism-and-lectures-world here, and nobody needs that. With a remarkable performance from Vertamae Grosvenor at its center (and some beautiful work from Sam Waymon, Nina Simone's brother and bandleader and a great musician and fascinating actor in his own right), Personal Problems is full of life and art, and PBS really fucked up by not airing it everywhere and by not turning it into a series. I'm glad people have the chance to see it now. Don't pass it by.

Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)
A quintessential film noir. Gorgeous and gritty black and white. A conflicted antihero. Men and women in trouble. Double and triple crosses. A sleazy, menacing villain. A love triangle. Light and shadows and people on the run. A couple of personal sacrifices that may be too little, too late. A fatal yet romantic worldview. Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Marsha Hunt, John Ireland, and Raymond Burr. A taxidermied bear. Okay, that one's a bit of a curveball. Mann has such a tightly constructed, elegant visual style with lots of complex but un-show-offy shot compositions. Raw Deal provides all the expected pleasures of noir, but it also feels personal and emotionally invested, and Mann is a master of the expressively claustrophobic frame.

The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931)
Speaking of elegant, The Smiling Lieutenant is as beautifully composed and constructed as you'd expect from Lubitsch. One of a handful of early '30s musical comedies Lubitsch made with Maurice Chevalier (all good-to-great), this pre-Code love triangle between Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Miriam Hopkins is funny, sexy, ridiculous, sophisticated, and goofy, and has a pretty complex pro-and-con take on tradition and routine, lust and desire, and freedom versus obligation.

Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981)
Walter Hill is near the top of my list of great American action directors, especially in his mid-'70s-to-mid-'80s peak. Flavoring the tough-guy action movie with classic Hollywood and European art film influences and surprising moments of vulnerability, Hill also populates his work with some of the best character actors in the business. I'm a big fan of Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, and Streets of Fire, but I hadn't yet seen Southern Comfort until the Austin Film Society's mini-Hill retrospective, which they gave the gloriously stupid/brilliant title "Hill on Earth." (I love them for that. And for many other reasons.) A post-Deliverance take on townies vs. hillbillies, Southern Comfort sees a group of arrogant, boneheaded National Guardsmen get on the bad side of some bad motherfucker Cajuns in the Louisiana swamp in the winter after stealing some of their canoes. With a winning pair of leads from Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine, the movie is tense and brutal and most of the twists and turns are genuinely unexpected, while the unusual closing scenes find a weird visual poetry.

Sun Don't Shine (Amy Seimetz, 2012)
Seimetz is a Renaissance woman of independent film (and the occasional Hollywood project) who works as a writer, producer, editor, costume designer, actor, and director. Though her directing work has mostly been on television (The Girlfriend Experience, Atlanta), I fervently hope her sole feature as director, Sun Don't Shine, will be followed by many more. Sun Don't Shine, which she also wrote, went under my radar in 2012, but a one-night revival at the film society this year knocked me out. Seimetz has such a natural, unusual structural rhythm in her storytelling and characters. I was always uneasy and always in awe. Taking the familiar lovers-on-the-run trope and contorting it into something strange and new, Seimetz created a pair of characters I'd never seen on screen before. I wasn't ready for it to end even as its ending immediately became one of my favorite scenes of the year, 2012 or 2018 or anytime in between. Take your pick.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires, 1970)
A creepy, surrealist fairy tale from the tail end of the Czech New Wave, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a marvel of dream logic and imaginatively beautiful imagery and a wild take on a girl's transition from childhood to adolescence. It's also, alongside Ginger Snaps, one of the great horror films about puberty.

Agnes Varda revival screenings: La Pointe Courte (1955), One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), and Mur Murs (1981)
No two Agnes Varda films are alike, but they share a warm empathy for people and their physical environments without any bullshit sentimentalizing or sugarcoating of hard truths, and they share her amazing eye, which notices all kinds of details most of us miss. La Pointe Courte, her debut film, is about both a small French fishing village and a conflicted young couple within it, with Varda moving back and forth between the macro and the micro and the intersections between. One Sings, the Other Doesn't is a feminist musical about the enduring friendship between two women, one a free-spirited artist and musician, the other a practical working-class single mother, over the course of several years and life changes large and small. Mur murs is a document of Los Angeles murals and the artists who paint them, as well as a historical snapshot of a cross-section of Los Angeles neighborhoods in the early '80s. (Whether it was even on Varda's mind or not, the film also reveals how little of the character and personality of the city ever appears in the thousands of Hollywood films shot there.) All three of these films are filled with life.

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Wanda is one of the dozen or so movies I've seen on the big screen twice, and one of my favorite pieces of art in any medium, and I don't have a clue how to write about it. It's such a singular experience that any blather I type ain't gonna cut it. Here's a little blather anyway. Loden wrote, directed, and stars as the title character, a woman in Pennsylvania coal-mining country who has had enough of her limiting, confining role as wife and mother. She leaves her husband and family to just drift, letting chance, accident, and movement decide her fate. Wanda is one of the damnedest, most complex characters I've ever seen, and I catch myself wondering what happened to her as if she were a person I knew and not a fictional character. Wanda is such a specific, unique creation, a unity of opposites, that she (and the film as a whole) resists interpretation. Wanda is Wanda, and it's not anything else. Sadly, Wanda was Loden's only feature as director (she also made a few short films), thanks to a few later projects falling through and industry sexism and her complicated marriage to Elia Kazan and her early death from cancer at the age of 48, but she did more in one film than most directors do in a lifetime.

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (Matt Wolf, 2008)
Despite its fairly conventional talking-head approach, this documentary about the life and music of Arthur Russell is a beautiful portrait of the man, his short but full life, and his incredible music. I also loved how the film puts Russell's music on a pedestal but keeps Russell off it, revealing him as the complex, messy, flawed, lovable, funny, selfish, shy, real person he was instead of the hero worship propaganda too many music docs peddle. The film also gives deserved credit to the people around Russell, especially his boyfriend Tom Lee, a tireless advocate for Russell's art who kept a roof over their heads and food on the table and worked a day job so Russell could make music. Lee was also responsible for maintaining Russell's copious unreleased recordings and getting so much of this beautiful, unfairly neglected music released in the last couple decades. People like Lee are too often unsung heroes, footnotes in the histories of the great artists, but Wild Combination finds room for these stories, too.

HONORABLE MENTIONS 
 
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)
The Rite (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Cinematic movement, or some people I like watching this summer

Movies and music are a form of meditation for me when I'm anxious, and the hellish political present has made me extraordinarily anxious. To return to the dead horse I've beaten on all three of my blogs, I'm not a lyrics guy or a plot/story guy. Doesn't mean I don't appreciate a good lyric or a good story. It just means that I think of music as sound and film as image and all art as the aesthetic organization of space. One thing I don't know how to talk about much is film acting, even though I love the possibilities and varieties of it. Film acting that connects with me is not just about embodying a character in an emotionally and/or aesthetically honest way or being vulnerable or real. It's also about movement and presence and how that movement clicks (or doesn't) with what the film is doing visually. Some people are just inherently cinematic in the way they move, and I love watching those people. I don't know how to explain this clearly, and these still images only give you a hint of what I mean, but I love how the following actors move, walk, sit, stand, and inhabit the physical space of their bodies in the following movies and miniseries I have been watching and/or rewatching this summer in between fighting off the constant panic and soul death of life in these United States:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Love Is Colder than Death (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Lakeith Stanfield in Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)
Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto in Out 1 (Jacques Rivette)
Naomi Watts and Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch & Mark Frost)
Isabelle Huppert in Mrs. Hyde (Serge Bozon)

Wednesday, July 04, 2018

Robby Müller 1940-2018

Robby Müller was the cinematographer on some of my favorite movies of the last 50 years. He had vascular dementia, a particularly cruel thing to strike someone who had spent his life putting beautiful things in the world, which caused his retirement in the mid-2000s, but he leaves behind an amazing body of work. Some recommendations below:

The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wim Wenders)
Can: The Documentary (Peter Przygodda)
The Scarlet Letter (Wim Wenders)
Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders)
Wrong Move (Wim Wenders)
Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders)
The American Friend (Wim Wenders)
Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich)
Repo Man (Alex Cox)
Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin)
Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch)
Barfly (Barbet Schroeder)
The Believers (John Schlesinger) (a pretty ridiculous movie, but Müller makes it look great)
Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch)
Korczak (Andrzej Wajda)
Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders)
Mad Dog and Glory (John McNaughton)
When Pigs Fly (Sara Driver)
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch)
Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier)
24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom)
Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch) (the segment with Steve Buscemi, Joie Lee, and Cinqué Lee)

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

My favorite movies of 2017 etc.

I'm exhausted by the present human nightmare, but I'm also eternally grateful for all the good, great, and interestingly bad art that reached me this year. In that spirit of gratefulness, I present my favorite movies of 2017. The rules: Movies on my list had to open in my city of residence (Austin, TX) between January 1 and December 31, 2017, and I had to see them on a big screen. I occasionally break the big screen part of the rule when something is too damn good. I break it this year. These are highly subjective, personal choices, so I use the word "favorite" instead of "best." I prefer movies that are a strange combination of music, photography, painting, theater, dream, and accidental time capsule (I'm using the loosest, broadest application of most of the nouns in this sentence). I like a good story, but I don't require one, and I hate movies that are just professionally photographed storytelling with no visual point of view. I'm more interested in a film's rhythm, structure, form, look, use of light and shadow, performance style or styles, approach to character, atmosphere, marginal detail, and POV, and its mysterious, ineffable qualities than its story, plot, events, etc., but I'm also a hopeless amateur when it comes to writing about these things. Let's get to it. All these movies are talking to each other in my head.
(alphabetical by title, not ranked in some preferential order that changes daily anyway)

The B-Side (Errol Morris)/Faces Places (Agnes Varda & JR)
I'm putting these two documentary/essay films together because they share so much: a friendship between a filmmaker and a photographer, the use of large-scale portrait photography as an artistic medium, artists interacting and collaborating with community members, the bittersweet conclusion of a life's work, the public and private value of artistic creation, a style that seems slight on the surface but reveals depths, and the absence of two famous friends (the late Allen Ginsberg in The B-Side, the estranged Jean-Luc Godard in Faces Places). Morris's B-Side is his warmest film, and a departure from the darkly unsettled, eccentric investigations into crime, war, conspiracy, delusion, paranoia (both justified and unjustified), and the origins of the universe that populate his other documentaries (especially his other 2017 project, the Netflix miniseries Wormwood). A tour through the personal archives of his longtime friend, Boston-based 20x24 Polaroid photographer Elsa Dorfman, The B-Side catches her at the end of her chosen medium's days. The large-scale Polaroid cameras and film are being discontinued, and Dorfman is looking back at a lifetime's work and telling the story of that work and that lifetime to Morris's camera. In Faces Places, filmmaker Agnes Varda travels across France with her friend JR, an artist who creates public installations by pasting huge photographs on buildings, homes, rock formations, train cars, and other surfaces. Varda, who is 89, and JR, 33, visit several rural villages, talking to the people who live there while Varda films and JR takes pictures and pastes them up with the help of his crew (a photogenic goat also gets his portrait turned into an installation). Varda's eyesight is beginning to fail, and she says this may be her last film, but she's one of the liveliest 89-year-olds going (follow her on Instagram -- it's worth it), and her teasing, bickering, playful friendship with the millennial JR finds her in the role of both surrogate grandmother and schoolyard chum. Both films are light-touch celebrations of human connection streaked with melancholy and loss.
  
Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)
A blend of historical documentary, personal essay, and avant-garde experimentation, Morrison's subject here is the 1978 discovery of hundreds of silent film reels in the Canadian Yukon that had been buried in a disused swimming pool, covered in ice, and converted into a hockey rink in 1929. Morrison's film has no talking head interviews (with a few brief exceptions) or narrator, just on-screen text giving historical background, clips from the silent films (many partially damaged, creating beautifully odd visual patterns that Morrison explored in greater detail in his film Decasia, an expressive dream-collage of melting, damaged, and/or disintegrating silent film clips), historical footage, and home movies. The result is a movie about early film distribution, human settlement in the early 20th century, the gold rush, film preservation and decay, what gets saved and what gets lost in the recording of history, changing ideas about what we value and why, and the fragile impermanence of everything. Also, shit was constantly catching on fire, exploding, and/or burning to the ground in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra)
With a visual style that looks and feels like European Renaissance paintings brought to life (the expressive portrait-like closeups of the faces of people and dogs are especially striking), Serra's film explores the final days of King Louis XIV and the servants, courtiers, and doctors ministering to his needs as he slowly slips away. I think it's also about the end of cinema, or maybe just the end of a particular kind of cinema (the classical European art film). The tone is at once mournful, matter-of-fact, and determined to bury the dead and move on. Legendary French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud is the perfect choice for the French king, and he's able to use the full weight of his gravitas, history, charisma, humor, and grouchiness here (Louis became king at age 5, while Leaud was 14 when Truffaut picked him to play the lead in The 400 Blows, dramatically kicking off an acting career that's never stopped). I was already absorbed in the world of the film when the final scene and its last line of dialogue made me rethink my interpretation. One of my favorite movie endings of the year.
    
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck)
Peck's essay film uses as its foundation James Baldwin's unfinished memoir Remember This House, in which Baldwin examines the psychological toll of being black in the United States, a country that preaches freedom and equality but practices white supremacy, through his friendships with three assassinated civil rights leaders and activists -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Peck skillfully and expressively combines footage of Baldwin, scenes from Hollywood and independent movies from the past century of film, archival materials, news reports, advertisements, home movies, talk show clips, and various other images while Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin's words. The images Peck uses complement Baldwin's writing, comment on it, place it in both historic and modern contexts, and make up a kind of psychic collage of one artist reacting to another without distorting Baldwin's message or style.

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
I wasn't even planning on seeing this movie in the theater, getting the impression from the trailer that it would be a reasonably enjoyable but overly familiar American coming-of-age Sundance-style indie flick without much visual interest. Wanting to kill a few hours in the outside world while my wife hosted a book club at our home (I hadn't read the book yet and, being a depressive and irritable loner with social anxiety, am not much of a book club enthusiast), I took a chance on it and was immediately rewarded. Yes, Gerwig's film covers a lot of familiar teenage terrain, but she has a distinctive point of view as a filmmaker and writer, and I love how the personalities of her characters blend so seamlessly with the structure and pace of her narrative style. She lets moments linger or cuts them off abruptly. She knows when to let her characters talk and when to let the audience catch silent moments. She has an instinctive ability to convey important information, character traits, and punchlines with a well-placed image. The movie is naturalistic and rooted in everyday experience but has a stylized, cinematic rhythm in its movement from scene to scene. This is such a well-constructed, uncontrived movie that makes the "mumblecore" dudes who put Gerwig in her first film roles look even sloppier and lazier.
As an addendum to this paragraph, here is a quote of Gerwig's I really loved from the recent New York Times interview with her: "I have a soft spot for the experience of watching films in a movie theater. I’m essentially stealing this from Walter Murch’s afterword to In the Blink of an Eye, but I think that being in a movie theater puts you in a place of both collective experience and vulnerability that is impossible to achieve at home. I’m paraphrasing, but he said something close to this: Going to the movies always starts with one person saying to another 'Let's go out.' And that means that you are willingly taking yourself out of your comfort zone and allowing yourself the possibility of transformation. I like that, and even if it is something that is swimming against the current, I think I’m just going to keep at it. I’m a good swimmer."
 
Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)
Paterson is a quietly utopian salute to poetry, artists with day jobs, community, and the impulse to create. The character of Laura is an idealized male fantasy who never quite coheres into a three-dimensional person despite a warm and empathetic performance from Golshifteh Farahani, but there's a magic to the rest of the film, which finds art, beauty, and comedy in the rhythms of the daily routine and each person's (and one dog's) place in it.  

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)
My favorite Assayas film since 1996's Irma Vep, Personal Shopper is the damnedest ghost story I've seen and one of the most perceptive, empathetic, and unsentimental films about isolation, voyeurism, the 21st century, being in an audience, and living with grief. Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, an American living in Paris and working as a personal shopper for a famous fashion designer who's a bit of a monster. Maureen's twin brother recently died from a heart condition, and she is waiting in Paris for a sign from him. (He had settled in Paris in the last years of his life.) This reads like a soap opera on paper, but the film is a quieter, stranger, more unsettling proposition entirely. I don't believe in mediums, but I did for these two hours.

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson) (70mm version)
Another eccentric marvel of continuous visual invention and expressive performance from Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread is, to my eyes, his second masterpiece in a row (following 2014's Inherent Vice). (In addition to the 70mm print, the film has been distributed in 35mm and digital versions.) I love all eight of his movies and every frame contained inside them (even when they threaten to break out of his control), and his work just keeps getting deeper and stranger. He's grown from the precociously talented young man in thrall to Scorsese and Altman (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia) to an original and scarily gifted creator of personal, slippery, and delightfully odd art objects influenced by a deeper library of films and human experience (Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread). In Phantom Thread, Anderson finds an exquisitely lovely and unsettling visual palette (with lots of gorgeous dissolves and earned closeups) and a rhythmic, music-like structure to backdrop his dark, suspenseful, and comedic (often all at once) romance about master dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress who becomes his muse, romantic partner, collaborator, rival, foil, and uneasy equal, not necessarily in that order or even one at a time. (It's also my favorite of Jonny Greenwood's four film scores for Anderson.) Day-Lewis, who can be a BIG and domineering presence onscreen, gives a subtle, complex, and layered performance that understands how ridiculous men are (I winced a few times at the recognition of my own character flaws), and Krieps is even better, mysterious and strange and open and sympathetic and capable of conveying three or four different emotions at once with just a glance. Mike Leigh regular Lesley Manville plays Woodcock's sister and constant presence Cyril, and guess what? She's incredible, too. This is a goddamn power trio. I hate movies that have no visual reason to exist, that tell instead of show. There are no perfunctory shots or uncinematic moments in Phantom Thread, a film that knows how strange, difficult, and comic the preservation of love can be.

A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
In his exploration of the life of Emily Dickinson, Terence Davies takes that most artistically bankrupt and grindingly formulaic of movie genres, the celebrity bio-pic, and turns it into his most radical film since Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. (He also angered many Dickinson scholars by playing loose with the facts.) Davies is a poet of images and film structure and uses Dickinson's life as the material for his own artistic obsessions, creating a style here that incorporates both deliberately stiff, artificially stylized shot compositions and line readings and a more relaxed and natural realism, broken up by dreamy, wordless impressionistic sequences in the film's second half. The actors nail the tricky tone, especially Cynthia Nixon in the lead. Unlike the Hollywood Wikipedia sameness of most film biographies, this one turns an artist's life into a piece of art.
  
Rat Film (Theo Anthony)
A documentary/essay film/art experiment hybrid, Rat Film is a little Chris Marker, a little Werner Herzog, a whole lot of its own thing, and one of those oddball films that shoves you in the deep end and makes you teach yourself how to watch it. Anthony uses the rat population of Baltimore and the history of the city's efforts to contain the rats as an entry point for an ambitious, strange, and politically righteous examination of how human beings try to control and organize the spaces they live in, with a particular emphasis on racial and economic segregation in cities. Anthony's film takes a lot of chances and covers a lot of ground in its relatively short running time, and is a comic, tragic, angry, curious, and deeply weird gem with an unsettling electronic score by Dan Deacon. 

The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)
Guillermo del Toro's love of monsters always takes me right back to the monster-loving little boy inside the beaten-up-by-life man currently framing my skeleton-suit in ways that bypass the cheapness of nostalgia and get closer to the primal origins of my imagination. In The Shape of Water, del Toro puts his own spin on the Beauty and the Beast story, incorporating elements from Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, '40s and '50s Hollywood musicals, Cold War spy thrillers, and the long literary history of tragic romance in the story of a mute cleaning woman who falls in love with a part-man/part-fish monster held captive in the government lab where she works. He also tells his story with an adult sexual frankness that was not part of my childhood imagination-world (at least until Hurricane Puberty made destructive, confusing landfall), as well as a healthy disrespect for the alpha-male dick-swinging and power-tripping that is too often seen as heroic in fantastical films. Del Toro fills his amphibious tale with as many shades of green as there were reds in his previous film, the sorely underrated ghost story Crimson Peak, as well as a cast of actors I thoroughly enjoy watching, including Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, and Michael Stuhlbarg.

Silence (Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese followed up one of his loudest, flashiest, most profanely funny films (The Wolf of Wall Street) with this somber meditation on religious faith. Both films are late-career high points (a devil-and-angel double bill of a lifetime's seductive push/pull obsessions) that, despite their lengthy running times, feel leaner and closer in spirit to peak Scorsese than most of his fascinating but bloated-with-prestige 2000s output. Once I got past my initial resistance to Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson playing 17th-century Portuguese Jesuits (the accents are shaky but the physicality and emotion of the performances more than make up for it), I was enthralled. With the exception of the astonishing opening scene and a few scattered moments, Scorsese tempers his usual visual bravura with a quieter expressiveness that calls to mind Rossellini's postwar neorealist films and the long-take, deep-focus use of confined space in Mizoguchi's late-'30s and '40s melodramas. Highfalutin' comparisons, yes, but mostly deserved.

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)
Bouncing unpredictably but dexterously between heavy drama and absurdist comedy, Toni Erdmann understands the difficulties, deep connections, and weirdnesses that share cramped space in the relationships between parents and adult children and also gets how deeply strange this late stage of capitalism has become. Winfried (Peter Simonischek) is a bohemian music teacher with a penchant for elaborate and bizarre practical jokes who reinserts himself in the life of his workaholic business consultant daughter Ines (Sandra Huller) after his beloved dog dies, much to her exasperation. The audience is knocked loose of its normal movie expectations, and allegiances to and sympathies for the father and daughter are always in flux. Movie posters are constantly promising "a wild ride" without delivering. This is a wild ride.

Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
My favorite movie/TV show/elemental force/living room art installation of the year. I can't even begin to express the therapeutic relief of these four months of Sunday nights in the middle of year one of the Trump regime. I needed to see these images and be in this world/worlds. I usually wait at least a year to re-watch anything, but I kept going back, two, three, four times, each time finding new things to see and hear and finding and losing more of myself in the shared dream/nightmare. No diminishing returns or empty nostalgia here, just a mysterious object eating its own borders and expanding the imaginatively possible.
Earlier in the year, I wrote this: "Twin Peaks: The Return is a lot of things. An 18-hour movie, a TV mini-series, the third season of a television show separated from its second season by a quarter of a century, a sequel to a TV show, a sequel to a movie, an answer record to the first TV series in the vein of Kitty Wells' 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,' a dream-synthesis of everything David Lynch has ever done, a love letter to frequent collaborators, and a piece of a larger mythology encompassing the show, the prequel film, the outtakes from the film, books, and websites.Twin Peaks: The Return is about a lot of things. Aging, mortality, the passage of time, the seductive lure and terrible cost of nostalgia, TV and film and how we watch them, the show itself and how we watch it, the characters and the actors who play them, dreams, nightmares, electricity, fragmentation of identity, alternate timelines, survivor's guilt, the lingering effects of trauma, the complementary coexistence of cruelty and kindness and how both will always be here. Mostly, though, it's about Laura Palmer, even when she's not there."
I should also point out that Mark Frost co-wrote every episode with Lynch. He gets left out of the praise too often and is an integral part of whatever this new Twin Peaks is (an electrical adaptor plugging waking life to dreams???).  

Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes)
Suffering from poor distribution and promotion and unenthusiastic reviews, Wonderstruck is too good for the imagination-starved, experience-shrinking present. Granted, Haynes' latest was hard to market or describe. It's a family movie about kids, but it's also a meditatively paced art film for cinephiles and book and museum junkies, and it jumps back and forth between black-and-white silence and color-filled sound in ways that make more emotional than narrative sense until the story and its connections between the characters make themselves known near the halfway point. Still, I'd like to think more people would have seen it if they'd had more of a chance. A film of continuous visual pleasures, Wonderstruck alternates between the adventures of two hearing-impaired children (a girl in 1920s Hoboken, New Jersey and a boy in 1970s small-town Minnesota) who run away from home and end up in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The film doesn't hang together as elegantly as Haynes' last movie, Carol, but I didn't mind. I like imperfection, and I like how much Haynes pushes himself into new, ambitious terrain with each film he directs. Other things about Wonderstruck to love: the actors do a beautiful job in parts large and small, Ed Lachman continues to prove he's one of the best living cinematographers and rises to the challenge of capturing the look and light of a black-and-white silent film from the '20s and a color film from the '70s while making both approaches part of a unified whole, Carter Burwell delivers another unusually perceptive score, and the songs Haynes uses by David Bowie, Sweet, Esther Phillips, Rose Royce, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, Deodato, and the Langley Schools Music Project are perfectly placed.

Honorable mentions
Blade of the Immortal (Takashi Miike)
Miike is so prolific that this is the third or fourth time I've seen one of his films marketed as "Miike's 100th movie." Whatever number Blade of the Immortal is, it's an exciting, atmospheric, supernatural samurai movie with great villains and fight scenes, but it outstays its welcome by about 30 minutes. Turns out, I can get tired of seeing limbs hacked off. (I'm a sensitive guy who hates the violence humans are capable of in the real world, and I hate my own quick temper, but I enjoy cartoonish super-violence on the screen. I find decapitations especially funny. I can't defend it.)

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch)
Lucky feels like a throwback to the heyday of character-based American independent films of the '80s and '90s, for good and ill. The weaknesses (a screenplay that's both over- and underwritten, characters with forced quirks and contrived eccentricities, a sentimental streak) of that era are all here, but most of the charm is, too. The first film directed by great character actor John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, Zodiac), Lucky is the last film to star Harry Dean Stanton, and that reason alone is worth giving it a whirl. In addition to Stanton's always delightful presence (and the singing of a Mexican ballad), the film has an unusual small-town Arizona desert setting, there's something interesting to look at in most of the shots, and the rest of the cast gets at least one fine moment. That cast includes Ed Begley, Jr., Beth Grant, Barry Shabaka Henley, Ron Livingston, and David Lynch as a dandy missing his pet tortoise, who ran away. (By the way, John Carroll Lynch and David Lynch are not related.)

Special problems
The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour)
I was a big fan of Amirpour's first film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, but The Bad Batch disappointed me. A few shots made me gasp in admiration, but I thought the bulk of the film was dumb, pointless, derivative, and full of actors with narrow ranges forced to do things they were not good at doing.   

Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow)
Kathryn Bigelow is a great director, and Detroit is a visually accomplished, viscerally present film. All its stores, homes, apartments, hotel rooms, lobbies, streets, theaters, police stations, and churches feel like lived-in spaces. Every bead of sweat feels earned, not applied in a makeup chair. The 1960s period detail looks authentic and vibrant, not overdone and glossy like in most Hollywood period pieces. None of this saves Detroit. The problem with this movie is that well-intentioned white people think they're telling a story about the black American experience and instead are unintentionally revealing their own ingrained prejudices. I'm not calling Kathryn Bigelow a racist. I'm just saying this country is so fucking racist that we're all damaged. Detroit has a white director, a white screenwriter, and a white cinematographer, and the net effect is a technically accomplished film that is sharply and unflinchingly critical of police brutality while simultaneously portraying its black characters as indistinguishable martyr-vessels of collective pain, angry mobs, or anonymous party-goers, not complex people with distinct lives and personalities of their own. Only a few black characters are given (forced, cliched) stories, dialogue, and character traits, and the cinematography treats black skin as a homogeneous single entity instead of a variety of shades and tones.

Downsizing (Alexander Payne)
This is a lovable, ambitious mess in the vein of other lovable, ambitious messes like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Southland Tales, Velvet Goldmine, New York, New York, etc. Payne's sci-fi/fantasy/comedy/drama/polemic attempts to say a lot about where we're at as a country and a planet, and it succeeds, fails, and baffles in almost equal amounts. Christoph Waltz, Udo Kier, and Hong Chau are especially good. I know we all wish Matt Damon would shut up, but he does make a good schlubby average Joe necessary for the film's structure. My favorite dumb Film Twitter criticism of this movie is that it rips off Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which is a bit like saying Blade 2 rips off Love at First Bite.

Free Fire (Ben Wheatley)
Wheatley's least interesting film is a fun but derivative warehouse-deal-gone-bad shoot-'em-up with a lot of likable actors and dark humor and stylish shots. I had a good time, but my memories of the film evaporated by sundown. Wheatley is a madly ambitious director, so maybe this is just a fun little flexing of muscles between more substantial projects. Maybe I'm just tired of guns.

Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater)
A solid, entertaining movie that is the squarest and least idiosyncratic thing Linklater's done since the Bad News Bears remake. The trio of leads (Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Steve Carell) have great chemistry, and I liked spending a few hours with them (Carell is especially good, Cranston can get a little hammy but it works with his character), but this film hits all the expected beats in conventional ways. Linklater's films are usually looser and less plotted. This one seems closer to the sensibility of his co-writer Darryl Ponicsan (whose novel the film is based on). Last Flag Flying feels like an Oscar-winning film from the late '80s/early '90s, and I mean that as a compliment and a criticism.

Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
Malick has made the same film four times in a row now (following Knight of Cups, To the Wonder, and The Tree of Life), and I still don't know whether I'm one of those rubes who rioted during Stravinsky's premiere of Rite of Spring or whether my irritation with three and one-fourth of these four films (I like The Tree of Life, with the exception of the Sean Penn scenes) is justified. Is late-period Malick a revolution in film narrative that I'll finally recognize when I get some distance from the 2010s, or is it a formless, shapeless folly from a once-great artist, full of twirling infantilized women, boring brooding men, ponderous pop-philosophy voice-overs, and ever-diminishing returns? Shit, I don't know, but right now, I don't particularly care for it. This is probably the most personally interesting for me of the post-Tree films because it was shot over a number of years in the city I live in (Austin, TX), and it uses the rock music scene as backdrop, though Malick seems to have no real affinity for or understanding of rock outside of big festivals (though I like how he films festival crowds). (This lack of affinity does lead to my favorite part of the movie, an unhinged Val Kilmer performing with Black Lips for no good reason, chainsawing an amp in half and throwing a bucket of sand on the crowd while yelling, "I got some uranium! I bought it off my mom!" No Understander of Rock and/or Roll would have let an improvising Val Kilmer near any band twenty years younger than him, but I'm glad Malick made this bonkers call. I wish the whole movie was Val Kilmer shouting about uranium in front of millennial buzz bands.) Patti Smith has a supporting role, and Iggy Pop, John Lydon, Big Freedia, Lykke Li, etc., have cameos (if you've ever seen Days of Heaven and thought, "I wonder what this guy could do with Anthony Kiedis," your prayers have been answered). Like his other recent films, its primary use to me is as a historical document of urban and suburban geography, architecture, and the organization of living spaces in the 2010s, and I enjoyed seeing the Austin streets, businesses, and neighborhoods I've spent time in as well as the rich people condos I will never spend time in (fuck, they're gross). Rooney Mara is better at delivering Malick's voice-overs than any of his recent actors, but she's supposed to be a rock star in the film (maybe -- every character is fuzzy and thin in recent Malick) and she looks profoundly uncomfortable and unnatural holding a guitar and being onstage. And all the twirling and wrestling and jumping on beds and crawling on floors in these movies. What is it? Some weird fetish? I don't know women who twirl and crawl if they're not playing with children, but Malick sure seems to think women between the ages of 18 and 45 spend most of their free time twirling, twirling, twirling in skirts, wrestling on beds, and crawling around like mountain lions on the floors of expensive condos.

Stronger (David Gordon Green)
No more and no less than a well-made mainstream drama that lacks the weirdness and personality of most of David Gordon Green's body of work. (Also, I'm sick of movies about loudmouthed but goodhearted Boston jock bros and their loud friends and family, though this is probably the best one of those.) A substantial improvement on his last film, Our Brand Is Crisis, but not as interesting as the rest of Green's filmography, Stronger is at its best when exploring the mental and physical cost of wanting to live a normal life while forced to be a symbol of heroism and survival by your country, your city, and the media.

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