Favorite Movies of 2016

I'm running a little behind this year, thanks to a combination of factors that most prominently features my own laziness. So apologies for that. Otherwise, I don't have a lot to say here. Here they are, my favorite movies of 2016, per usual beholden to my usual caveats that 1. "2016" means movies I saw during the calendar year that saw an American theatrical release during the calendar year, and 2. the reliably ludicrous and outdated roll-out model for major releases like La La Land has prevented me from seeing movies I definitely would have otherwise (like La La Land—I'm a little pissed that Knoxville didn't get La La Land soon enough to make this list; can you tell?).

Also, as always, this list was hard to trim down to a neat 10, but either because of an unusual glut of fantastic film in 2016 or just an unusual preciseness in my own watching habits, this year was particularly hard. I could have easily made a top 20 and still dismayed at leaving some on the cutting room floor. But such is the artificially inflicted pain of list-making.

Okay, I'll get on with the list now. Don't forget to tell me your own favorite movies, since this is nowhere near a comprehensive list of good 2016 cinema.

[As with my best 2016 music list, I'm linking to my original reviews for the films, provided I reviewed them. Unlike the music list, I'm writing short blurbs, too. It looked too bare without them.]

Favorite Movies

1. Green Room

It's not like a vicious conflict between urban leftists and rural fascists is in anyway relevant to this year. Nope. Can't see a connection there. Let's say there were a connection, though. This movie might be pretty brilliant, and not just for political posturing; it's the tightest thriller I've seen in years and a phenomenal piece of character drama, to boot. Every death is a blow.

[Read the original review here]

2. The Edge of Seventeen

I can't hype this movie enough. Steinfeld is Oscar-worthy. The characters are miles more human than those in most ostensibly adult-oriented movies. The depiction of adolescent obnoxiousness as an off-shoot of personal tragedy is spot-on. The stakes are perfect. I originally said I should wait for the theatrical high to wear off. Well, it has, and I'll say it still: this is one of the best coming-of-age movies of all time.

[Read original review here]

3. The Nice Guys

Nothing complicated going on here. This movie just makes me laugh very, very hard. Crowe and Gosling make a wonderful odd couple, and Gosling in particular shows a great capacity for physical comedy. It's so funny.

[Read original review here]

4. Kubo and the Two Strings

In a cultural moment that many have come to declare "post-facts," Kubo's message of the ability for story to override reality for both good and evil feels even more incendiary than it would have already. Even better, the animation is breathtaking.

[Read original review here]

5. Lemonade

Yes, I'm counting it as a movie. An awesome movie.

[Read original review here]

6. Moonlight

It's a structural experiment, sure, and a treatise on identity. But in practice, neither of those rather lofty aims end up feeling any loftier than the sand under these characters' feet. The drama of this movie's three vignettes is both profound and grittily tangible.

[Read original review here]

7. Hell or High Water

This movie hits its climax and then just keeps going. Normally, I'd reckon that as a fatal flaw; with a film as whip-smart as this one, though, it's what ends up making it great.

[Read original review here]

8. Eye in the Sky

The only way you'll have a tenser time in a movie this year is if you watch my #1. It's not a "fun" movie, not with its pained ambivalence on drone warfare, but it's a riveting one nonetheless.

[Read original review here]

9. Moana

Moana has a deeper bench of songs than any Disney movie in 20 years, and that's just one of its many pleasures. Really, the whole package is just so sweet.

[Read original review here]

10. Hush

Its "home invasion, but what if she was deaf?" premise should be gimmicky. But the execution is borderline brilliant. My review said that this would be fighting The Witch for the best horror movie of 2016, and, well, look who made the list.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Other Best Horror Movie: The Witch—But seriously, The Witch is great, and I give it major kudos for committing to the Puritan language and nutso creepy ending.

Best Additional Evidence That This Was Just a Fantastic Year for Horror: Lights Out, Don't Breathe, et al—There were so many good horror movies this year, y'all.

Is It a Movie or a Miniseries? I Don't Know or Care Because It's Incredible: O.J.: Made in America—If I were more confident that this searing dissection of American celebrity and racial politics is a proper movie, it would rest easily at the #1 spot on the list. Instead, here it sits, with nothing to show for its excellence except my full-throated recommendation, regardless of the medium it belongs with.

Best Evolution from Old Fuddy-Duddy: Knight of Cups—Terrence Malick isn't exactly in dire need of update, but after the waifish To the Wonder, this high-concept urban-spiritual tale feels fresh and vital.

Best Same Old, Same Old from Old Fuddy Duddy: Café Society—Look, by this point, you know what you're in for with a Woody Allen movie and whether or not you're going to be into that territory. Me, I'm still loving all the incisive iterations of his stable of pet themes when he's able to craft movies as aching and gorgeous as this one.

Best Portrayal of People I Would Never Be Inclined to Give the Time of Day to in Real Life: Everybody Wants Some!!—Spending two hours with a group of athletes jumping from college party to college party as they try to impress ladies with their cleverness in an attempt to get laid sounds like "Michael O'Malley Repellent: The Movie." But lo and behold, we're instead graced with a funny and compassionate two hours that paints some of the most enjoyably idiosyncratic characters of the year. Willoughby for life!

Best Worst Cringe: Weiner—The most compelling tragedy of this riveting, excruciating documentary is not any of the many scandals that Anthony Weiner invites the camera to record but rather the knowledge that all us 2016 viewers bring to the table, which is that even these scandals aren't the last of the Weiner shenanigans!

Best Poignancy via Farting Corpse: Swiss Army Man—It really is poignant. And it really does feature a farting corpse (not even the most ridiculous this corpse does [cue Jurassic Park theme]).

Best Religious Work: Hail, Caesar!—By this time, I hope the characterization of the Coen brothers as nihilistic snarksters has been long put to rest, and if it hasn't, here comes Hail, Caesar! to try to tuck it in once more. A silly, sardonic movie, to be sure, but once that, like Inside Llewyn Davis and A Serious Man and No Country for Old Men and several more before it, is imbued with a sincere and even desperate quest for meaning within the universe.

Second-Best Religious Work: The Innocents—The Innocents is, honestly, a better movie overall than Hail, Caesar! But it's not better at being religious, settling on more humanist pursuits than the more sublimely focused Coens are. But it's still very good, compelling stuff.

Most in Need of Political Clarity: Captain America: Civil War—In theory, this is a movie about ideologies. But it does so little to flesh out the battling ideas of Captain America and Iron Man that it remains a movie about fists. We do get that kickin' airport fight scene, though, so it's not all a loss.

Best Eyeball: The Neon Demon—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Eyeball, Runner Up: The Lobster—You'll know it when you don't see it.

The "I Can't Believe I Haven't Talked About This Movie in This Post Yet" Award: Arrival—So very good. So very exploitative of linguistic theory. And here it is at the bottom of this post.

Best Non-2016 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2016: Malcolm X—My original review gets at it best, but I haven't been so profoundly shaken by a movie since... well, I guess since I saw Make Way for Tomorrow last year.

Gotta stop sometime, so I might as well stop here. But I do so reluctantly! 10 Cloverfield Lane, Louder Than Bombs, Rogue One, Finding Dory, both Werner Herzog docs, Imperium, The Shallows, Love & Friendship, and like a bazillion other good-to-great movies from 2016 are still left unacknowledged. 2016 was a super solid cinematic year, and I'm sure all y'all out there have your own favorites that lie similarly neglected. So chime in! I'd love to hear from everyone.

Until next time!

Mini-Reviews for May 2 - May 22, 2016 (aka "Sorry for the delay!")

Due to a lot of end-of-semester craziness and some personal stuff, it's been two weeks since I've been able to write one of these review posts. I don't know if anyone hangs on these posts or waits up at night for them or anything, but if someone does, I'm sorry! Hopefully this extra-long post makes up for the delay.

Movies

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
The title leads you to believe that this is a Looney Tunes movie, and it's certainly anarchic and self-referential enough to earn that moniker. But what this movie really is is a salute to Warner Bros. history in general, which makes it way more fun than a Chuck-Jones-less Looney Tunes movie was ever going to be. It's sometimes trying too hard, and not all the jokes land. But it's got an Animaniacs-esque love of movie history, and it's hard to begrudge that. Grade: B+

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
It's one of the funniest American movies of the past few decades. It's also got that irritating, show-stopping meta-commentary by Robert Downey Jr.'s character, which doesn't stop it from being one of the funniest American movies of recent years. But it is something extra that just kind of drives me up the wall—we get it, movies are artificial. The core of this movie is just aces, though; bonus points to Michelle Monaghan for breathing life into her wafer-thin girl friday. Grade: A-

The Descent (2005)
Why aren't more horror movies set in caves? Caves are terrifying! Especially when, as is the subtext in this movie, the cave leads to Hell itself. It's a spooky, unsettling undercurrent that's made all the more spooky and unsettling by the masterful control of lighting. The lighting really is the MVP here; if I had to guess, I'd say that a full 25 percent of the film is entirely dark, while a not inconsiderable fraction of the movie's remainder is composed of shots with only a corner of the frame lit. It's wonderfully effective and creates the neat effect of making the audience as blind as the unfortunate cavers who star in the film, but what sets the lighting into truly incredible territory is the scenes lit by the cavers' various flares and glowsticks, casting the cave walls in fire-red and sickly green monochrome. It's without question one of the best-directed horror movies of the new millennium, and were it not for the relatively forgettable cast of characters (my one strike against the movie), we'd be dealing with an all-time classic here. Grade: A-

American Ultra (2015)
This movie thinks it's a lot more entertaining than it is, obsessed with its own presumed cleverness and ironic juxtaposition of tones. There are actually two really fantastic performances in here, one from Jesse Eisenberg and the other from Kristen Stewart, and the ending credits are, improbably, cool. All of which makes it even more of a shame that the movie surrounding those bright spots is such a bore. Grade: C

Steve Jobs (2015)
The cracker-jack Sorkin dialogue and inventive, stage-like structure (each of the three "acts" center around a long scene that focuses on a single product launch in Jobs' career) make this one of the best biopics in years—probably since Spielberg's Lincoln. That is, until it completely and catastrophically flubs the landing on one of the most astoundingly ill-conceived endings I've ever seen in a movie. There's a moment (I won't spoil it, but you'll know it once the final ten minutes slap you in the face) when the movie jumps from being a razor-sharp study of the compromises of genius to a weirdly beatific, tender mushfest, and it's awful. That said, 95 percent of the best biopic in years is still 95 percent of the best biopic in years. Cut your losses, I suppose. Grade: B

The Nice Guys (2016)
This will likely be the funniest movie of 2016—funny enough that it pretty much doesn't matter that the trailer revealed most of the best jokes. Of course, if you've been paying attention to the career of Shane Black, this should come as no surprise; unfortunately for me, I haven't been paying attention to Shane Black until just earlier this week when I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so I'm in the kind of dopey-eyed position of being surprised that The Nice Guys is every bit as funny—nay, funnier—than its trailer promised. I can't overstate how much the winning cast plays a hand in this success: Ryan Gosling in particular displays a proficiency with timing and physical comedy that makes this probably my favorite performance of his career. There's a lot of Robert Downey Jr.'s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang performance in him here, which is good. In fact, there's a lot of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in general here, which is mostly good but also comes with its own baggage: as in the earlier film, there's a troubling glibness surrounding the mistreatment of women, and the plot and writing in general hews closely enough to Black's wheelhouse that there's a definitely been-there-done-thatness to the whole movie that makes it just a tad less fresh than it might be in a vacuum. But still. This is great fun. Grade: A-

Television

Better Call Saul, Season 2 (2016) 
It's a slight step down from the first season, if only because the debut's sickening feeling of discovery made the tragedy of Jimmy's world all the deeper, but a slight step down from one of the best seasons of television in recent years still makes for very, very good television. This season is all about teasing out more complex varieties of the same basic conflicts from the first season, though in more heightened situations—as Jimmy works his way up the legal-world ladder, he faces again and again those same questions: the tension between what's right and what's right for his career, the gulf between what people deserve and what people get, all of which culminates in a riveting, tense showdown between Jimmy and his brother that reveals, yet again, that the great tragedy of the show is Jimmy's love for his brother. Also (and slightly unrelated): Kim Wexler is probably my favorite character on TV right now. Grade: A-


Books

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King (2010)
I liked Reality Boy, the other A. S. King I've read, alright, but Please Ignore Vera Dietz is head and shoulders above that novel. It's got the same stellar command of voice and humor that gave Reality Boy its readability, but the dysfunction is dialed down just a bit, which makes room for a bit more tender (though still not exactly cuddly) character interplay, especially between Vera and her father. There are also the surreal touches, like the from-the-grave narration of "the dead kid," which serve alternatingly as flashback devices and little tone poems, and it adds tons of texture to the story. A broken heart lives at the center of this book—torn apart by lost friendships and death—and it's genuinely moving to see it pieced back together. Grade: A-

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King (1999)
It's not absolutely top-notch Stephen King, but it does present King in a very readable mode. The '90s were a decade of experimentation for King, where he starts moving toward new storytelling structures and types, and while Tom Gordon isn't as experimental as something like Hearts in Atlantis, the wilderness survival genre is relatively fresh ground for King, and he tills it well, serving up something not unlike Hatchet crossed with Lovecraft. Not everything works: I'm not sure the narrative voice is sufficiently different from the average King protagonist to justify it being that of an 8-year-old. But as a whole package, it's good. Grade: B



Music

David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
I'd heard this album already, but it wasn't until I bought it that I really listened to it in-depth. The Man Who Sold the World finds Bowie at this fascinating crossroads in his career, stuck between his space-oddity progginess and his fun-house-mirror pop star sensibilities. There's at least one alternate universe where Bowie went on become the fifth member of Van der Graaf Generator, and arguably, the reason why Hunky Dory is so important is that it established that Bowie wouldn't do that. This is fantastic stuff, both as this sort of fascinating "what if" and also, with classics like "All the Madmen" and the title track, as the beginning of Bowie's golden years. Grade: A-

Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith - A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (2016)

I bought this album because I like Iyer (his 2015 record was one of my favorite of last year), but this is much more Wadada Smith's show. Iyer's piano lays down minimalist soundscapes for Wadada's trumpet to swoop and shriek over, and the results are spacious and thoughtful. A few songs are a little skeletal, which sometimes works for atmospherics but elsewhere just feels kind of underbaked. But on the whole, Cosmic Rhythm is an immersive, moody jazz record, the kind best played late at night. Grade: B+