I've
been on record for quite some time thinking that the first half of
this decade will one day be considered among the finest in American
filmmaking history, up there with the New Hollywood years of the
1970s. 2015 might be the capstone. Of the 106 2015 releases I saw, at
least 40 were good. At least 20 were great. That made writing this
top 10 agonizingly difficult. That is why I did a completely separate list of 10 at the Sun Times Network, where I also work (you should
read us). But the following are the ones that most represent where my
passions were for the previous year. They are filled with myths and
expressionistic techniques, tonal blending and offbeat humor, triumph
and failure. These
films represent what the medium can do, how cinema can take you to
new places, learn new things, meet new people, love new experiences. Before we get all excited about what's coming down the road for 2016, let's take one last look back at what a transcendent year 2015 was at the movies.
[Before we get to the big ones, here are the honorable mentions that will almost certainly leave me with the dull ache of regret for leaving them off the list proper: The Duke of Burgundy, Spotlight, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Love & Mercy, The Martian, Paddington, The Wolfpack, Cop Car, Faults, Junun.]
10. Magic Mike XXL
Director:
Gregory Jacobs
Writer:
Reid Carolin
Starring:
Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer, Adam
Rodriguez, Amber Heard, Jada Pinkett Smith
Despite
Richard Linklater's promises about his upcoming Everybody
Wants Some, Magic Mike
XXL might be the real
“spiritual sequel” to Dazed
and Confused. It is about a
group of friends hanging out, getting sick of each other's crap,
trying to enjoy the moment while reminiscing about a past they cannot
get back. It is a road movie with no other goal than to have fun, to
get away, to dare friends into doing dumb things that make the group
laugh so hard they cry – hello, convenience store strip. And it's
all shot in a way that would make the German Expressionists and Orson
Welles proud – the dollar bills falling like snowflakes throughout
the mansion sequence is some of the most evocative filmmaking of the
year. Each of the old stripping buddies has classical Hollywood
musical dancing talent and it's a joy to see them bend gravity to
their will. And it's probably the single funniest movie of the year,
with all these charismatic personalities bouncing off each other in
the way that familiarity can bring out the sharpest, harshest, most
hilarious critiques of those you care about.
9. Sicario
Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Writer:
Taylor Sheridan
Starring:
Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin
People
like to feel in control of their situation, their surroundings, and
certainly the people they interact with. Power is a neat feeling, and
when you have it, you are in a place of comfort. It is largely an
illusion. Sicario is
about the way the powerful bend over backwards to keep their place,
by lying, or omission, or outright violent force. The drug war at the
Arizona-Mexico border serves as the perfect backdrop to this nearly
cosmic conflict. Emily Blunt (the rule of law and “doing the right
thing”), Benicio Del Toro (concluding personal vendettas via
alliances with the powerful), and Josh Brolin (control through
division and chaos) each represent differing points of view among
those who ostensibly have the upper hand. But, of course, that power
is fleeting and/or nonexistent in the face of cartels who seem to
have more overt, tangible control over their areas. Director Denis
Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins shoot the landscape in a
way that makes rock formations look like Rorschach tests, and the use
of sunlight (or lack thereof) in the images dovetails with the themes
and characters. It is beautiful, heart-pounding, and visceral.
8. Inside Out
Director:
Pete Docter
Writers:
Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen, Meg LaFauve, Josh Cooley
Starring:
Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Bill Hader, Lewis Black,
Mindy Kaling, Kaitlyn Dias
Inside Out is
a Pixar film that does more than tell a story with a lesson about
kindness, or friendship, or hope. It offers a roadmap on how to
achieve those things. Using humanized versions of the emotions in a
pre-teen girl's mind, it takes abstract concepts like feelings and
realizes them in literal ways. The theme about growing emotional
complexity as a person ages is illustrated with the mixing of colors
and sound design that can sometimes edge close to being discordant.
The brain is a mixed up thing, and the sooner we realize that every
memory we have comes from a place of different, perhaps even
opposing, emotions, the more ready we are to take on life.
7. Creep
Director:
Patrick Brice
Writers:
Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Starring:
Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Along
with the iPhone-shot Tangerine,
this movie showed in 2015 how transportive minimalist cinema can be.
As you can see from the credits above, Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass
are the two driving creative forces of this eternally disturbing
found-footage horror film. Brice plays an out-of-work videographer
who answers Duplass's newspaper ad to film a day-in-the-life in the
woods. Unfortunately for Brice's character, this is not anyone else's
idea of a day-in-the-life. What Brice does here is probably the most
potent use of the found-footage genre. There are character and plot
reasons for the camera to be on, which is itself nearly
revolutionary. What follows is a story of desperation, confusion,
inability to connect, borderline sweetness, mental illness, and even
some silly humor that derives from this bizarre, unnerving situation.
That combination is inherent in Peach Fuzz, possibly my favorite
character of 2015. Just see it. Be freaked out. Laugh a little. Think
about helping those with mental and emotional problems rather than
pushing them to a place of repression and luring unsuspecting
videographers to the woods for a really bad night.
6. Ex Machina
Director:
Alex Garland
Writer:
Alex Garland
Starring:
Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander
2015
was the year of Alicia Vikander, who would top any “breakout
performers of 2015” list I would do. She appeared in six movies,
four of which I saw, two of which I loved, one of which is located on
this here list. It is this one, in case you didn't catch my drift.
Here Vikander plays Ava, an artificially intelligent android
developed by Oscar Isaac's tech genius Nathan. Domhnall Gleeson's
Caleb, an employee of Nathan's company, is invited to do a Turing
Test on Ava to determine whether or not she is truly capable of
consciousness. What follows is a dread-soaked, lo-fi science fiction
marvel. Vikander displays a cunning intellect. Her quiet defiance in
the face of unfairness, and the way she goes about solving that
unfairness makes for an excellent thriller in one sense. But far more
than that, it's a tale about women and men, how men get shocked and
defensive when women do not follow their every whim. The fears of the two
men in the cast always center on a lack of control over this new
technology, and it is no accident on writer-director Alex Garland's
part – in his directorial debut – that Ava was designed as a
woman.
5. Bone Tomahawk
Director:
S. Craig Zahler
Writer:
S. Craig Zahler
Starring:
Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Lili
Simmons
Bone Tomahawk is
at turns nasty, heartening, embarrassing (for the characters),
thrilling, inspirational, pants-wettingly frightening, and
uproariously witty. In some moments it is many or all of those things
at once. At its heart, it's a “men on a mission” movie, with a
group of four woefully under-equipped men going in search of one's
kidnapped wife and their town's deputy sheriff, who were whisked away
in the night by a band of possibly supernatural cannibals who live in
the deepest parts of the American frontier. Each character is drawn,
not sketched, with fully formed and deeply relatable reasons for
every action they take. Every character has a different sense of
humor, each deployed with deft precision by first time
writer-director S. Craig Zahler, who rocketed to a position somewhere
near the top of the “I must see whatever this filmmaker does next”
list with this effort.
4. Carol
Director:
Todd Haynes
Writer:
Phyllis Nagy
Starring:
Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler
Carol is
astonishing for its gentleness. It is a movie that sells its story
via stolen glances, soft but meaningful eye contact, light brushes of
the shoulder, and a longing for a freer, more just life for its
characters, even if none of them truly know what they would do with
such a life. Todd Haynes crafts storybook images that feel both true
to the time period per our collective nostalgia for it, and totally
removed from objective reality. There is a combination of the grainy
16mm home movie appearance and a gauzy haze that warms every shot.
This is in seemingly illogical juxtaposition with the harsh winter
endured by the characters in both their physical and interior lives,
but it works in every second. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara
acknowledge the power, the elation, and the pain of this culturally
frowned-upon romance with every darting eye, every tiny twitch of the
mouth, every foot-in-mouth embarrassing utterance. They melt the soft
snowflakes of 1950s Christmastime and societal repression with their
connection.
3. Creed
Director:
Ryan Coogler
Writers:
Ryan Coogler, Aaron Covington
Starring:
Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia
Rashad
Want
to feel uplifted? Creed will
do the trick, and how. Michael B. Jordan enters as a man, playing the
illegitimate son of Rocky Balboa's former opponent and friend, Apollo
Creed. He leaves as Adonis Creed, demigod. Structurally, Creed
takes after the original Rocky
on a nearly remake level. Donnie Johnson, using his mother's last
name, is a plucky prize fighter, mostly slaying bums in low-rent
Mexican rings. He's loose and undisciplined, undoubtedly with some
talent, but probably not the type to be going pro. Of course, that's
not how it works out, and we got a soaring, vibrant piece of cinema
because of Donnie growing to accept his heritage – and his father's
last name. Director Ryan Coogler doesn't bother with the visual
template put in place by the preceding Rocky installments,
but he creates the same beautiful, winning feeling nonetheless. He
swings the fights from grim realism, with all the painful blows
landing in viscerally painful ways, to the realm of myth, and in the end lands
somewhere in between. Everything is varied visually. The performances
by every member of the cast, but particularly Jordan and Stallone as
his “uncle” and trainer, are heartwarming and truthful.
2. The Hateful Eight
Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Writer:
Quentin Tarantino
Starring:
Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins
Quentin
Tarantino does not mess around with The Hateful Eight. It
is one of the most nihilistic films I have ever seen, and maybe the
only one that has ever had me in stitches the whole way down to Hell.
Tarantino's mastery of tone reaches a new level with this snowy
western. It has some of the meanest, ugliest bits of humanity ever
put to celluloid – the 70mm presentation is something else,
especially when depicting such depravity – while filling the frame
with sight gags and dialogue that rat-a-tat-tats its way to a
blissful stupor. If it were not for this playfulness, it would be a
marathon of horridness at a three-hour runtime. Instead, it floats
along, showcasing the prejudicial vileness that has always existed –
and continues to exist to this day – in America. On one hand, the
climax suggests some prejudices can be set aside, but on the other,
it appears they can only be ignored for a time and in pursuit of
something just as terrible. But my, oh my, is it ever a blast to see
such hideous behavior.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
Director:
George Miller
Writers:
George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris
Starring:
Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
There
was no dithering on my part while making this choice. My favorite
film of 2015 was determined in May. Mad Max: Fury Road is
a spectacle of the highest order. It's a marvel of acrobatics meeting
machinery – that polecats sequence during the climax is perfection.
It's a movie that makes profound social statements in its conception
and purpose without calling overt attention to those statements –
“Who killed the world?” sprayed as graffiti on a background wall
is not particularly in-your-face. It allows its characters' actions
to speak about the world in ways more affecting than any monologue
could. It is a world where every detail has been determined whether
those details drive the story or not, and everything has a name, a
utility, a place in the world. It is a place of primary colors and heat. It
draws on the history of cinema, from the stunts of Buster Keaton to
the balanced compositions of Stanley Kubrick to the world-building of
Star Wars, but twists,
subverts, and synthesizes those things and more. It is something
wholly its own. It is great.
No comments:
Post a Comment