Picking
the best movies of the year is always a difficult affair. Well, picking the
best movie, singular, isn’t so bad, or even the best handful, but beyond that?
Top ten lists can be kind of painful. Because, really, if you’ve seen enough
films to care about listing the ten best, there are so many you’ll leave off. There’s
also the weird sense of obligation to making a statement like this – you need
to try to pick the right films, or at the very least avoid picking the wrong
ones, or at least that’s the impression you could get. Unless you’ve managed to
do a real bang-up job of isolating yourself from mass opinions, this is going
to factor in somehow. Maybe you bumped off a stranger, more personal choice
from your top ten to make room for some widely-admired, sophisticated bit of
cinema that you could respect even if you didn’t really love it. And if you do
that, the whole process becomes constrained and impersonal – it just becomes a
list of ten “important” or “must-see” films of the year. That’s not what I’m
trying to do here. I want to name the films that I thought the most of this
year, somewhere between the films I thought were well-crafted and the ones that
struck me personally. I can’t claim to be able to objectively rank
films in order of artistic merit, but I can talk about this past year in cinema
in terms of what seemed the most engaging, most interesting of the bunch. I
will, however, need a few more slots than ten.
A word on
how I’m going to organize this: I’ve taken what I believe to be the 20 best
films of the year and arranged them in order of preference, as you do. From
there, I separated them into chunks of five, each of which will be given a blog
post over the next few weeks. The films in these chunks of five will be listed
alphabetically, both because I like alphabetical order and because I don’t
trust myself to agree with the order I’ve put them in later, but I do feel
comfortable with the segments. Easy enough.
To start,
though, these are a few films I liked from the past year that didn’t quite make
it onto my top 20, because you’ve been very patient over the course of this
kind of pedantic blog post and I like an excuse to talk about movies:
American
Hustle
directed
by David O. Russell
starring
Christian Bale, Amy Adams
Some of
you may be shocked right now, since I take whatever chance I get to lay into
this movie. The truth is, I did like
it. At its best, it’s fast-paced, funny, frantic in that particular Flirting With Disaster way that Russell
does so well, and, as they say, just a good ol’ time at the movies. The acting
is the real highlight of the film, though. Bale and Adams, among the most
reliable of today’s big stars, put in great work as the con artist couple, Jennifer
Lawrence steals scenes in the best way, Bradley Cooper and Louis C.K. make up
probably the funniest screen duo this year, and Robert DeNiro in one scene
outdoes everything else he’s done in the past decade or so. Say what you want
about Russell, but he pulls great performances out of his cast every time. If
only the rest of the movie was as polished…
Gimme
the Loot
directed
by Adam Leon
starring
Tashiana Washington, Ty Hickson
A
mumblecore film that’s not about navel-gazing, comfortably middle-class White
people – that has to count for something by itself, right? It’s a simple story:
two kids trying to pull together a few hundred dollars so they can get into
Shea- er, Citi Field and tag the Mets Apple. What’s really important is the
interaction between the two leads, playing a very natural and true-to-life
non-couple with ambition but no real plan. They drive the energy of a film
that’s just filled with life, from the incidental, unimportant conversations
between Malcolm and Sophia on their way from place to place, to the crowd
scenes where everyone on screen seems to have something else on their minds.
It’s a funny movie, with a kind of candid, casual humor that’s usually so hard
to realistically capture in a film – the kind of spontaneous jokes you’d
overhear in a park. It’s a small film that uses its limited, intimate setting
to its advantage.
Only
God Forgives
directed
by Nicolas Winding Refn
starring
Ryan Gosling, Vithaya Pansringarm, Kristen Scott Thomas
This was
not a well-liked film, and I do get why. Right off the heels of the really
excellent Drive, people expected
another film in the same vein – a tightly wound, subversive, artfully executed
thriller-of-sorts. Instead, they got Refn in full Valhalla Rising mode, amped up all the way. Everything about this
film is stylized to hell and back – the obtuse primary-colored lighting, the
minimal dialogue, the glacial pacing, the sheer violence of it all. The
juxtaposition of grindhouse-tier schlock and arthouse-style formalism is disturbing
and disorienting, giving the film a sort of fever-dream quality. It’s a really
pretty film about really ugly stuff, is what I’m saying. There are a lot of
little pleasures in the film, though, from Kristen Scot Thomas’s disdainfully
profane performance to the wonderfully hazy score by Cliff Martinez to
wondering where Vithaya Pansringarm pulled his sword from (there’s nothing on
his back!), but you have to plow through one hellishly bristly film to
appreciate them.
Philomena
directed
by Stephen Frears
starring
Judi Dench, Steve Coogan
In stark
contrast to the above, this is just a pleasant little movie. Cute, even. It’s
your usual light, fluffy piece of Oscar bait: emotionally manipulative,
generally inoffensive, tied up with a warm, fuzzy ending that makes you leave
the theater with a smile on your face. Usually these movies are incredibly boring,
but this one does pretty well. Steve Coogan offers a lightly acerbic bite to
Sixsmith, and Judi Dench, as should be expected, nails the cute old Irish woman
part as Philomena. This isn’t heavy cinema by any measure; even for all of its
talk of social significance (which the subject matter does have) it’s probably
among the most inconsequential films I’ve seen all year. But that’s fine. It
has a nice sense of humor and a good grasp of pathos, the chemistry between
Coogan and Dench works well, and there are some pretty satisfying climactic
bits. It transcends its bland Oscar bait trappings.
The
World’s End
directed
by Edgar Wright
starring
Simon Pegg, Nick Frost
Ah, the Three
Flavours Cornetto trilogy. Some of the funniest, most visual inventive comedies
in the past decade. Admittedly, The World’s
End is the weakest of the three in my mind, but it’s good cinema anyway. It
certainly has the most elaborate conceit of the three, involving relatively
intricate character building early on, and then peaking with a fairly distinct moral
and some real dramatic heft, where the first two would follow genre constructs
all the way through, building to an extended action sequence before ending with
a gag (or several). I think the structure of the former two lends itself better
to Wright’s style of comedy, but that’s just my take. On the other hand,
though, there’s a great bathroom fight scene which might top any other action
scene Wright’s done. So you have emotional payoff and well-executed slapstick. Not a bad mix at all.
Also, to
anyone who’s wondering why I waited until late January to start writing this,
all I gotta say is that the Oscars aren’t even until March, so I’m still coming
out on top here.
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