It
has been awhile, and at the end of the holiday season no less! Gone with the festivities,
the days off, and the indigestion, but at the very least, there was plenty of
time to catch up with some of the great films released over the year. Well,
hypothetically speaking. The big downside this year was that so many films like
Phantom Thread, Call Me By Your Name, The
Post, and Paddington 2, are not
reaching Orlando until well into January, which is disappointing. What’s the
point of even having an end of doing a top list or retrospective when release
dates are this arbitrary, and where’s my Paddington
2!? Granted, this problem is
nothing new as every year so many great films get little or sometimes no chance
to screen here in Florida. So as a fun experiment, instead of catching up on
the 2017 releases, I spent much of my holiday catching up with some of the films
I missed in 2016 and review those instead.
Kelly
Reichardt’s Certain Women is a
beautifully measured anthology about the lives of… certain women who live
around a small town in Montana. This includes Laura Dern; an insurance lawyer
who deals with a lost cause, Michelle Williams; a mom building a house, and
newcomer Lily Gladstone; a horse wrangler that is smitten with a teacher (played
by Kristen Stewart). Kelly Reichardt directs the film in a manner similar to
Andrei Tarkovsky and Jane Campion; the film is slow, nuanced, but every moment
onscreen is engrossing and rich with empathy. The repetition of viewing
Gladstone spreading hay, grooming her horses, every day reveals not only the
hard work needed to do her job but also the loneliness of it all. Reichardt
finds poetry and tragedy within the daily routines of her characters with an
entrancing grace.
Furthermore,
and this may sound like a backhanded compliment, but Certain Women is one of the most vividly brown films that I have
ever seen. Montana in this film is a decaying autumn of a state with its
rundown hotels, muddy snowfields, and dirty leather jackets. Everything hints
at a world on the cusp of dying out but Reichardt finds beauty in people
striving to live on the land.
Things to Come
When
a film examine topics like philosophy, divorce, and parental death, it is easy
for a story to fall into a pit of despairing melodrama, thankfully Things to Come—which goes for the whole
trifecta—does not. The film is about a philosophy professor named Nathalie
(Isabelle Huppert), who suffers through a couple major tragedies, but the film
is less about the external conflict and more about her embracing the absurdity
of it all. Director Mia Hansen Løve finds great humor and pathos in clumsy
moments like when Nathalie fishes out a reusable grocery bag after accidentally
throwing it away with a bouquet of flowers, in a fit of rage. It is hard to
think straight on a bad day, but Nathalie is not so hopeless as to throw away a
decent bag. This leads to Nathalie finding solace in her philosophy and begins moving
on. So what if she is alone? At least she is free and healthy. It almost makes
too much sense that Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie, she always performs with
such understated boldness and wit; it is like the character and actor are cut
from the same cloth. Huppert carries the viewer through this film with
unmatched confidence and by the time the plot reaches the lush fresh
countryside, everything clicks together, and one is at peace.
The Love Witch
A
Technicolor horror throwback about a witch who finds, loves, and destroys her suitors
with love magic? Sign me the heck up! Like a Powell and Pressburger film if the
duo went on a binge on Hammer horror films and mushrooms; The Love Witch is delightfully a mad showcase of style and an
unflinching feminist tale of finding power in femininity. Director, writer,
editor, set decorator, and costume designer Anna Biller made one of the most singular
and excitingly auteur films of 2016, if not the decade. Double-bill this with Daisies that party will be talk of the
week.
Cameraperson
A
boxing match, postwar Bosnia, a midwife assisting birth, a mother with Alzheimer’s
disease, these are among the many, many moments documented by Kirsten Johnson
in her sweeping and personal collage documentary. The film itself is a
revealing anthology of people living through conflicts of various forms but
what makes Cameraperson so unique is
how revealing it is of the person behind the camera. The bulk of this film is
made of unedited clips from dozens of documentaries (i.e Citizenfour, The Oath,
and Derrida) photographed by Kirsten
Johnson and throughout the film we hear her work behind the camera. We hear her
talking to her directors about coverage, her reaction to a kid talking about their
eye injury, and sometimes she is alone, outside in the cold, and the only way
to know she is there is when she sneezes. With these simple details, it subtly reveals
the physical, psychological, and ethical tolls Johnson goes through on a routine
basis and also why this job is so important for her. It sounds like a dull
avant-garde piece, and while it certainly is avant-garde, but dull it is
definitely not. Do not let this film slip away.
The Wailing
Set
to some ominous music, The Wailing
begins with a verse from Luke 24:37-39 “See my hands and my feet, that it is I
myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you
see that I have” and it only gets cheerier from there. The movie proper begins
like a dark comedy as Jong-goo, a shlubby small-town cop, ineptly deals with villagers
who are infected with a rabid zombie-like disease. It is hilarious, but it
stops playing like director Na Hong-jin’s pseudo-sequel to Shaun of The Dead once Jong-goo’s daughter gets infected. The plot
does not merely take a sharp turn so much as it evolves into one of the most blasphemous
horror epics since The Exorcist. The Wailing is a lot to take in, brutal in
every sense of the word and it haunts long after it ends.
Sing Street
Lets
end on a high note with the other
instant classic musical of 2016. Sing
Street is an adorable coming of age tale about a boy who in an effort to
impress a girl starts a new wave band so that they can make a music video. But
much to everyone’s excitement and horror, the band is actually pretty good. In
fact, they are kind of amazing. They are so unreal that it could only work in
cinema. Set in the 80s, Sing Street
plays very much like that decade’s many jukebox dance-film/musicals like Dirty Dancing and Footloose, but has the tremendous advantage of having original
songs that transcend their pretense as a throwback. Sing Street teases many 80s trends, a running gag of how the band
dresses up like specific one-hit wonders whilst the bandleader talks about
being original is hilarious, but this films has nary a cynical bone inside
itself. Sing Street is shamelessly
nostalgic, shamelessly romantic, shamelessly crass, but who cares? This film is
the dance party that the 80s deserves. So check it out!
So
there you have it. Hopefully something in here peaks your interest and maybe by
February I will have something that resembles a top-10 film list for 2017.
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