This year, I noticed that several of my favorite movies had something in common. The main characters struggled against tough odds, but those odds didn’t just haphazardly show up. The characters decided to go out and achieve difficult, even impossible tasks, for no other reason than it was in their heart to do so. I hope more screenplays are written this way. Here are ten movies I especially liked, in no particular order, except maybe they have been grouped together by theme or the ones I really liked were farther down. Oh, and I tagged the movies I saw twice in the theater with this symbol <*>. There’s plenty of movies I wanted to see but didn’t catch this year, so for me to spend the time to watch one movie more than once indicates that I saw something especially noteworthy in it.
My Favorite Movies of the Year.
High-Rise - I couldn’t recommend this for everyone. Maybe not to _any_one. But I once mentioned that I’d love to see Neal Stephenson’s The Big U adapted into a movie, to witness what should be a refined society collapse into chaos and barbarism. (Like the TV show Community did in some of their better episodes.) Well, this is that movie, except it’s not an '80s American University, it’s a '70s English apartment complex. The BEST way to view this movie is while squinting through a monocle, sipping from a brandy snifter, and occasionally uttering morsels of delighted criticism, e.g. “my, this wickedly satirical examination of Heathish or perhaps Thatcherite class warfare is delicious!” and “pass the brie and the tea, and isn’t this Hiddleston chap marvelous as he plays the bourgeoisie against the proletariat? Or is he trapped betwixt them?” and “Dash it, these chaps have missed the apocalypse entirely, have they not, and now they’re living in post-apocalyptic society? Eat the purebred instead of eat the rich, indeed. I say.” and “Brutalist architecture breeds brutal behavior.” The best way to determine if you would like this movie is if you already hear yourself murmuring these things or wouldn’t mind if you did. Plus, holy shit, Portishead came back from whatever dimension where they’ve been protecting Earth by battling eldritch horrors…to cover ABBA’s “S.O.S”. Which is a perfect song choice, band choice, and covering band choice for this movie, but that’s another post. I wouldn’t want society to collapse, in general, but I had a lot of fun watching this mutant microcosm collapsing.
Arrival - Pretty smart science fiction plus Amy Adams. I intentionally came into the movie as blind as possible, and recommend that for anyone who wants to see it. I’m not saying there’s a Shamalyan-style twist at the end, but if there is, it’s grounded in the concept of the strange visitor or visitors to the planet. I’m also not saying I thought this movie was perfect. There’s something about the direction of the two movies I’ve seen by Denis Villeneuve (this and Sicario) I don’t like. Sometimes it’s how he decides his scenes should begin and end (so maybe I should blame the screenwriter and editor as well). Sometimes I don’t like how the focus is on someone’s back instead of whatever he or she is looking at (so maybe I should blame the focus puller). Sometimes I don’t like how he portrays military men as typically noble and competent but occasionally incredibly weak-willed, shallow, and/or quick to embrace violence as both the answer to a question and the reason to question an answer. But despite that, I liked this movie. It was the old fashioned kind of sci-fi story where the protagonist has to solve a riddle to gain knowledge past the ken of modern man. In this case, the ink is sometimes mightier than the sword.
Don’t Think Twice - The thing about improv comedy is that it doesn’t take much to get into it, and it can make you famous. The other thing about it is that it sucks up your life and you will almost certainly never get famous at it. Like so many movies this year, Don’t Think Twice features another suicide squad. The improv group calling themselves “The Commune” is right at the cusp of success…or of packing it in. Their leader, Mike Birbiglia, playing a slightly more-veiled autobiographical version of himself than in his last movie, Sleepwalk With Me, runs the group with just enough personal charisma to convince some lowly acolytes to sleep with him. He and his underlings are all talented, funny, and devoted to each other. They’ve known each other long enough to know their secrets and weaknesses. This means they know each other well enough to really jam in the knives, but why would they? They’re a group, a troupe. Two of them, Keegan-Michael Key of “Key and Peele” and Gillian Jacobs of “Community” and “Love” are in a relationship, and the group is so tightly knit that this relationship feels like Lannister love. The group meets its greatest challenge after entropy when one–but only one–of their number grabs the brass-plated diamond-encrusted uranium ring. An acting shot on the iconic late night sketch show, Not-Saturday Night Live. The rest of the Commune is consumed with jealousy and support. The movie plays on from there. The cast is great, both the actors that were known to me (Kate Micucci is adorable as always) and unknown (which is kind of the point, I guess. They were great, yet they’ll never headline a movie). Some of the humor is actually funny, which is a bonus in a movie about improv comedy. I liked watching their struggle for fame and fortune, even though that search may be fruitless, if the journey is more important than the destination, or maybe that’s what the losers tell themselves.
Oh, and this movie’s title had very little to do with the Dylan classic, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. That song is one of the world’s greatest kiss-offs. This movie featured an instrumental of the song over the end credits, but probably has more to do with the idea that in improv, you don’t think more than once (if that), you just perform.
Zootopia <*> Neil Gaiman once wrote an essay about good fiction where he underlined and italicized the passage: “there is room for things to mean more than they literally mean.” He wasn’t talking about metaphor or allegory–though they have their place in the writer’s toolbox. Zootopia follows this philosophy. Its premise is pretty simple. Cartoon bunny works hard to be a cop in a city of cartoon critters. It’s tough for her because she’s small and squishy. But she preserveres and takes down bad guys both obvious and hidden, and manages to make friends with natural enemies. It’s also about more than that. It’s about crime and punishment, and cops v. robbers, and race—oh, heck, is it ever about race relations, though it isn’t quite as simple as Prey versus Predators are actually White Americans versus Black Americans or vice versa—and urban versus rural living, and choosing between u/zoo/dys/topias, and good policework and bad policework, and safety vs. freedom, and communities awkwardly living together cheek by jowl. But, you know, for kids. It’s not preachy, and it doesn’t profess simple answers for difficult problems. On top of that, the cartoon bunny had oodles of chemistry with the cartoon fox, who jumps from rival to foil to partner without feeling forced. The Zootopia in question is wonderfully realized, a shining city on a hill for all mammal-kind, with fascinating differences between the relative scales of its citizens that made Fellowship of the Ring’s Bree look like a shabby little backwater on the edge of a fallen kingdom. Even the structure of the screenplay is marvelously sophisticated, with a third act that builds on the successes and failures of the previous two.
Kubo and the Two Strings - This is the hero’s journey without all the nonsense about the hero rejecting whether he wanted to go on a journey for most of the movie. Kubo is a warrior, a musician, and a magician. He also happens to be a little kid living in the remnants of a tragic backstory. He goes on an incredible adventure, and it’s all portrayed by jaw-dropping stop-motion animation. To say more would give away its secrets.
Hail, Caesar <*> I could watch this fictional version of Eddie Mannix spinning plates and juggling chainsaws, making straight the way of his movie studio, for episode after episode, season after season. This episodic movie was a good day in his life, a good day in the Golden Age of Hollywood, back when the star system and the studio system still worked, the government kept their mitts off the process (within mutual tolerances), where war wasn’t closing off markets or endangering stars, and dreams were manufactured following the precepts of Henry Ford. I know this one had a mixed reception on the forum and out there in the real world. Everyone has a different conception of what a “good Coen movie” and a “lesser Coen movie” is. I frequently read this labeled as Lesser Coens. Well, pshaw. This is very high in my personal Coen ranking. I don’t know if I’d necessarily compare Mannix’s toils and struggles to a Christ-like Passion. But I loved his march up and down a metaphorical Calvary anyway, and the old-timey studio universe, the recreations of those now-unfashionable movie genres like the singin’ cowboy Western or the choreographed swimming pool musical, the sumptuous Technicolor, the dialogue which casually delves into issues like faith (and faiths) and love and politico-economic systems and art and commerce. In one sense, none of the movie matters, all this effort is merely so the studio can keep outputting output. But like the Lockheed flunky says, it’s all make-believe, when compared to the H-bomb and work and actual religion. Or is it? Within the movie were classic scenes like the completely out-of-his-depth Hobie trying his darndest to please his overbred director, and a set PA asking the actor portraying son of God, Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, whether he was a principal [actor] or an extra. “I think I’m a principal,” the guy whose character’s name is in the subtitle of the movie they’re making replies. If this is lesser Coens, I wish they could all be lesser Coens.
Doctor Strange <*> I really like the costumed superhero entries when they strive to be visually creative. Even Thor 2: Something About Elves? had a crackling climax which brought it up in my eyes to More Than Tolerable. Doctor Strange, the movie, borrows heavily from Inception and the Matrix to present battlefields where cities fracture into Mandlebrot sets and space-time is a mere suggestion. I probably didn’t need to see this in the theater twice, but my optic nerves thanked me. Doctor Strange, the character, took to his origin story and the mastery of magic with a speed that made me roll my eyes. If this were a more grounded and realistic story about, y’know, magic being a real thing that people can learn to use, Strange would take a lifetime, not an act, to get good. But this is a superhero movie, and Strange is a superhero above mere magicians. His antagonists have a reasonable plan—to stop death forever—and his chief rival gets in some good lines. The good doctor even comes up with a creative zinger, paid for with a worthy sacrifice, to defeat the deity of Space Communism. I can’t wait to see the next installment, where Dr. Strange battles the Operative from the Serenity movie.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - If last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a story about how friendship could save worlds — and sure, wasn’t it? — this movie was how sacrifice could save worlds. As an entry in the Star Wars universe, it’s a resounding success. I was also pleased, having just watched “Monsters” before seeing Rogue One, that Gareth Edwards can turn in a perfectly fine movie if someone else writes a script first. The characters in this Suicide Squadaren’t very well developed, but then this is the mere two-hour ten-minute Magnificent Seven (1960). That movie coasted on star power compared to the character development they could fit into a three-hour twenty-eight minute Seven Samurai…and even in Kurasawa’s epic, the sword-swingers didn’t get much more developed than Old Guy, Young Kid, Cheerful Guy, Funny Guy, Guy Who Is Really Good With A Sword But Not Emotionally Demonstrative, Crazy Guy Who Isn’t Technically A Samurai At All, and…someone else. Assassin-Bot Guy? Here we had Young Relative, Young Terrorist, Brain-melted Turncoat Untrusted but Trustworthy Pilot, Blind Martial Arts Master Like Friar Tuck If Friar Tuck Was Blind, His Dear Friend And Human Seeing-Eye Dog with a Kegerator on his back and Plasma Rifle on his Front, Sardonic Multi-use Droid, and Forest Whitaker as Himself. Anyway, the stakes are high, our heroes show a few twinges of villainy (as there are nearly no comforts in their line of work, and mercy can be a luxury they can’t afford), any successes come with an extremely dear price tag, and a final land/air/space battle rips up the screen. I hope our Gary Whitta found that the final product met or exceeded his original dream. I literally was shocked, dumbfounded, slack-jawed on several occasions while watching the movie.
I just wish that stupid door in the archive stayed open or closed. One or the other. Maybe they need to get a droid up there to fix it.
La La Land - Great songs, great musical numbers. Characters were adorable. If there was anything that took me away from thinking it was the best movie of the year, it was a few subplots that bogged the characters down in mundanity. As long as those kids were twirling through an abstract world of color and sonic bliss, of L.A. dressed in a coat of potential energy and magic, I was transported.
Sing Street - Great songs, great musical numbers. Characters were adorable. If there was anything that took me away from thinking it was the best movie of the year, it was a few subplots that bogged the characters down in mundane family squabbles. As long as the kids were jamming through an abstract world of color and sonic bliss, of '80s Dublin dressed in a coat of potential energy and magic, I was transported.
I saw these movies too. They were fine. They are runners-up, I suppose. I saw other movies too but they weren’t quite fine.
Deadpool. Swear words are funny.
Captain America: Civil War. Nice fight scene.
Moana. Not bad. Rousing adventure.
The Nice Guys. Funny violence. Great production. Not quite up there with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but I’m glad Shane Black made the attempt. Keith David definitely ought to continue in front of the camera and/or microphone.
Finding Dory. A sine wave of laughter and misty eyes.
Florence Foster Jenkins. Meryl Streep does that acting shit with her eyes again.
X-Men: Apocalypse. Not bad. I liked how the subtitular villain loved to play dress-up with his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Ghostbusters: Answer The Call. Funny, and much funnier once I accepted in my heart and mind that this wasn’t a sequel and that’s why no one cared about crossing the streams or remembered the previous spectral incursions into Manhattan. Could have been better; I’ll check out the inevitable sequel.
Star Trek Beyond. Not bad. The cast is really settling into their franchise roles. I liked the beautiful starbase/space city Yorktown, even though it didn’t have any precedent or similarities to other Star Trek timelines. If they never make another movie with this cast (not counting Anton, RIP), that will be a shame, but life goes on.
Have Yet to See But I Hear Great Things; Maybe If I Saw Them They Would Bump Out My Top Ten:
[details=Summary]The Birth Of A Nation
Fences
Martin Scorsese’s Silence
The VVitch
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!
10 Cloverfield Lane
Hardcore Henry
Green Room
The Jungle Book & Pete’s Dragon
Queen of Katwe & Hidden Numbers
Keanu
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Hell or High Water
Moonlight
The Edge of Seventeen
Manchester By The Sea
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find 'Em
Nocturnal Animals
The Founder
Passengers
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Toni Erdman
The Handmaiden
American Honey
Swiss Army Man
The Lobster[/details]