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Ten or twelve or whatever movies of 2018
Feb. 19th, 2019 07:21 pm
Speaking of my favourite movies of the 21st century reminds me that I never got around to trying to list ten movies I saw in 2018. Lately, because for a while I kept noticing it on Netflix and wondering what it is and then remembering oh it's that, whenever I try to think of what movies I saw (in theatres, although, one of these years, if Netflix eats away at much more of the movie business--and I really wish filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese would quit hastening the demise of cinema by working for Netflix--I'm going to have to re-frame the list) in 2018 the first one I think of is (1) Annihilation, which wins my AI (as in Spielberg) award for the movie that made my face hurt the most from scrunching it up at the godawful silliness of it all.
Then there's (2) The Square, which I doubt I would've ever seen if Howard hadn't raved about it, and (3) Foxtrot, which I definitely would never have seen if Howard hadn't recommended not seeing it because it's too upsetting. Foxtrot is a magnificent and magnificently human tragedy, and I wish now that I had written something about it at the time so I would remember it better; I imagine that if I were making a top 10 it would be #1. (The Square, well, it has some points to make and it makes them. It does have that ape-guy scene, which I guess is a thing you can talk about if you want to talk about that kind of thing, and of course I do sometimes want to talk about that kind of thing. Elizabeth Moss is probably the best thing in the movie, which, well. The main character has got himself in a Jerry Lundegaard kinda situation, which obviously is a thing I generally like, except that Fargo doesn't work if Jerry Lundegaard isn't a sympathetic character. Actually, seeing The Square was most notable for the fact that it was the last time we were in Picton and I left my gloves there.)
#2 would probably be (4) First Reformed, which I just remembered now, which is funny because I finished reading the book of Job earlier today and was thinking about writing something about that, which would have involved mentioning First Reformed, which (like The Tree of Life) quotes from it. What I had been thinking of writing about First Reformed at the time I saw it was something about how I liked it a lot despite my sense of it (mainly in that its deficiencies were in the area of unsubtlety) having been quite unlike what I subsequently heard the director (Paul Schrader) saying in an interview he was trying to do.
(5) Loveless would make three of the five movies I can remember so far primarily in languages other than English. I don't remember anything in particular of Loveless beyond what you'd find in a capsule description of it, apart from a, uh, symbolic scene of someone on a treadmill, and that it's about as dismal as you'd expect.
Looking back through my calendar now the first thing I'm reminded of is (6) Suspiria (and (6.5) Suspiria, which, I guess I'm not counting "repertory"), which, how could I forget that, since it led to my second trip of the year to the emergency room for an ECG after passing out (in the washroom of the theatre; a while after staggering out to the lobby and collapsing into a chair a girl a few chairs over said to me, "Too much for you too, eh?", which, as it turns out I don't really have a better explanation--although we did go see it again without my passing out). The new Suspiria started gaining fast on Annihilation for the AI award in its last couple of (helpfully numbered) acts, but until then it does a pretty great job of being stylish as hell in a completely different way (flat grey vs. lurid red) from the also-stylish-as-hell original. The thing I was going to say about it at the time was something about a zinger it makes about the psychoanalyst not believing the woman, which I remember being tied in to Nazi Germany in some way I thought was neat at the time but I'm not sure I can fully reconstruct (but goes something like this: x says there are monsters and you think she's just crazy, but you should've known better because you lived through the monsters (which I think is maybe not explicitly stated in the movie)--which I guess I thought was neat because it runs a my-father-is-a-snowman literally-unbelievable-thing-is-true case up against a real piece of you-wouldn't-think-it-possible-if-it-hadn't-really-happened history--and one might wonder, and maybe one is meant to wonder, what to make of our own present historical real or fake emergencies in relation to that). More generally, a remarkable thing about it to me is that in contrast to the German setting's being of no particular significance to the original, the remake (helping itself by moving the dance school to Berlin) makes every possible political connection. In the '70s you could set a movie in Germany without bringing up politics at all, but in the 2010s you can't set a movie in '70s Germany without bringing in Nazis, the Berlin Wall, and the Baader-Meinhoff gang, and pitting the Germans against the French while you're at it.
Speaking of our own historical emergencies, the last movie we saw before the Suspirias was (7) Anthropocene, which is a hugely disappointing mishmash (although it would be hard for any film like it to seem like anything but a pale imitation of Koyaanisqatsi), especially so since it was co-directed by Edward Burtynksy, who is the only photographer I know of whose photography has ever really interested me as art.
Sometime before that I got drunk enough while eating pickled eggs in Kingston to somehow think that seeing (8) Beautiful Boy was a good idea. I was of course badly mistaken. (It is kind of funny though to think of it like this is like Breaking Bad[1] if you took everything good out of it.)
We went to see (9) Mandy on B.'s birthday mostly because B. has a friend named Mandi. I don't really remember anything about it except that people die in a fire and Andrea Riseborough has long black hair and looks pretty far out. I'd actually completely forgotten until I looked it up just now that Nicolas Cage is in it.
Going back to last spring, before our long summer movie vacation, we saw (10) You Were Never Really Here, which I remember being super-trippy, and I remember really liking its blurring of various realities and non-realities, and I also remember thinking that Joaquin Phoenix is probably the guy now that Daniel Day Lewis is (supposedly) retired, but I don't remember a thing specifically about it.
And that reminds me that in November we saw (11) The Sisters Brothers right around the same time we watched The Ballad of Buster Scraggs on the Netflix, and The Sisters Brothers, like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is, while decent enough, a movie that suffers by comparison to an imagined version of itself done by the Coen brothers. As a story of tragic comeuppances it's kinda humdrum, but John C. Reilly is great and the ending redeems the whole thing. (Oddly, the other day I came across some notes from EPTC in 2014 and saw that I had written down "The Sisters Brothers (?)", with no elaboration or explanatory context, during a guy's talk, which I had utterly forgotten about. And just now it occurred to me that I might have a copy of the paper, since I was involved in running the conference that year, and so I do, and it turns out the paper is framed on both ends by scenes from the novel. At the end it talks about the novel's ending, which is apparently the same as the movie's--it's about the brothers' re-orienting their senses of self when they go back home after a long odyssey through a world of mortal make-believe. Put like that it sounds funnily like Eyes Wide Shut. Anyway, I can see why I wrote down the title.)
And going way back to last January, I'm surprised to see that we saw (12) The Shape of Water in 2018 and not 2017. The Shape of Water is one of those movies that can't possibly be as good as you hope it might be but is pretty good anyway. And it seems like I will remember for the rest of my life that there are two kinds of men in the world: men who wash their hands after they go to the bathroom, and men who wash their hands before.
[ETA Feb. 25: you'd think that mentioning (13) Phantom Thread in relation to The Favourite would've reminded me of Phantom Thread, except that, as with The Shape of Water, we saw Phantom Thread in the part of 2018 that now seems like 2017. Despite finding Phantom Thread disappointingly slight as the supposed last collaboration between PTA and DDL, I wouldn't be against seeing it again--unpleasant though it is, it's a usefully touchstoney portrait of a perfectly functional toxic relationship--I suppose you could say, a relationship between two toxic people who are doing the best they can with what they are. You'd also think I would've remembered (14) Won't You Be My Neighbor?, seeing as I said quite a bit about it at the time. And the last forgotten film, apart from whatever films I am still forgetting having forgotten, is the likewise interrogative (15) Can You Ever Forgive Me? This movie is probably useful for any kids out there who may still be growing up, like I did, under the delusion that thinking you're going to be a writer when you grow up is any more reasonable than thinking you're going to be a major league baseball player.]
[ETA Feb. 27: Forgotten films I was still forgetting having forgotten, I was reminded yesterday, include (16) Game Night, which means we did in fact see at least one movie (in addition to the Doctor Who premiere) at a Cineplex in 2018 (during the winter of the ubiquitous Jesse Plemons). I think this movie was made because Jason Bateman wanted to make a feature-length J. Walter Weatherman episode. All I really remember is that glass tables were acting weird, which, somebody had to point that out.]
[1] Which we watched last winter, and which I really ought to have said a thing about by now before it gets too far away.
--
Currently under my porch: -11.1. Currently at Havelock: -16.7. High today at Peterborough: -5.6. My temperature sensor at the back of my shed quit last month after about five months in operation, which makes it by far the longest-lived outdoor temperature sensor of the three I have had. The anemometer on it still works, so it's back up there, and I got a new temperature sensor and put it under the porch, thinking that under the porch would be a good mix of sheltered from the sun and exposed to the air, but it turns out that it's more exposed to the sun than I thought, and the porch apparently traps heat from the house and/or ground at night--the only times it has seemed to give about the right temperature have been early in the morning. So it's going to have to move somewhere soon.
Then there's (2) The Square, which I doubt I would've ever seen if Howard hadn't raved about it, and (3) Foxtrot, which I definitely would never have seen if Howard hadn't recommended not seeing it because it's too upsetting. Foxtrot is a magnificent and magnificently human tragedy, and I wish now that I had written something about it at the time so I would remember it better; I imagine that if I were making a top 10 it would be #1. (The Square, well, it has some points to make and it makes them. It does have that ape-guy scene, which I guess is a thing you can talk about if you want to talk about that kind of thing, and of course I do sometimes want to talk about that kind of thing. Elizabeth Moss is probably the best thing in the movie, which, well. The main character has got himself in a Jerry Lundegaard kinda situation, which obviously is a thing I generally like, except that Fargo doesn't work if Jerry Lundegaard isn't a sympathetic character. Actually, seeing The Square was most notable for the fact that it was the last time we were in Picton and I left my gloves there.)
#2 would probably be (4) First Reformed, which I just remembered now, which is funny because I finished reading the book of Job earlier today and was thinking about writing something about that, which would have involved mentioning First Reformed, which (like The Tree of Life) quotes from it. What I had been thinking of writing about First Reformed at the time I saw it was something about how I liked it a lot despite my sense of it (mainly in that its deficiencies were in the area of unsubtlety) having been quite unlike what I subsequently heard the director (Paul Schrader) saying in an interview he was trying to do.
(5) Loveless would make three of the five movies I can remember so far primarily in languages other than English. I don't remember anything in particular of Loveless beyond what you'd find in a capsule description of it, apart from a, uh, symbolic scene of someone on a treadmill, and that it's about as dismal as you'd expect.
Looking back through my calendar now the first thing I'm reminded of is (6) Suspiria (and (6.5) Suspiria, which, I guess I'm not counting "repertory"), which, how could I forget that, since it led to my second trip of the year to the emergency room for an ECG after passing out (in the washroom of the theatre; a while after staggering out to the lobby and collapsing into a chair a girl a few chairs over said to me, "Too much for you too, eh?", which, as it turns out I don't really have a better explanation--although we did go see it again without my passing out). The new Suspiria started gaining fast on Annihilation for the AI award in its last couple of (helpfully numbered) acts, but until then it does a pretty great job of being stylish as hell in a completely different way (flat grey vs. lurid red) from the also-stylish-as-hell original. The thing I was going to say about it at the time was something about a zinger it makes about the psychoanalyst not believing the woman, which I remember being tied in to Nazi Germany in some way I thought was neat at the time but I'm not sure I can fully reconstruct (but goes something like this: x says there are monsters and you think she's just crazy, but you should've known better because you lived through the monsters (which I think is maybe not explicitly stated in the movie)--which I guess I thought was neat because it runs a my-father-is-a-snowman literally-unbelievable-thing-is-true case up against a real piece of you-wouldn't-think-it-possible-if-it-hadn't-really-happened history--and one might wonder, and maybe one is meant to wonder, what to make of our own present historical real or fake emergencies in relation to that). More generally, a remarkable thing about it to me is that in contrast to the German setting's being of no particular significance to the original, the remake (helping itself by moving the dance school to Berlin) makes every possible political connection. In the '70s you could set a movie in Germany without bringing up politics at all, but in the 2010s you can't set a movie in '70s Germany without bringing in Nazis, the Berlin Wall, and the Baader-Meinhoff gang, and pitting the Germans against the French while you're at it.
Speaking of our own historical emergencies, the last movie we saw before the Suspirias was (7) Anthropocene, which is a hugely disappointing mishmash (although it would be hard for any film like it to seem like anything but a pale imitation of Koyaanisqatsi), especially so since it was co-directed by Edward Burtynksy, who is the only photographer I know of whose photography has ever really interested me as art.
Sometime before that I got drunk enough while eating pickled eggs in Kingston to somehow think that seeing (8) Beautiful Boy was a good idea. I was of course badly mistaken. (It is kind of funny though to think of it like this is like Breaking Bad[1] if you took everything good out of it.)
We went to see (9) Mandy on B.'s birthday mostly because B. has a friend named Mandi. I don't really remember anything about it except that people die in a fire and Andrea Riseborough has long black hair and looks pretty far out. I'd actually completely forgotten until I looked it up just now that Nicolas Cage is in it.
Going back to last spring, before our long summer movie vacation, we saw (10) You Were Never Really Here, which I remember being super-trippy, and I remember really liking its blurring of various realities and non-realities, and I also remember thinking that Joaquin Phoenix is probably the guy now that Daniel Day Lewis is (supposedly) retired, but I don't remember a thing specifically about it.
And that reminds me that in November we saw (11) The Sisters Brothers right around the same time we watched The Ballad of Buster Scraggs on the Netflix, and The Sisters Brothers, like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is, while decent enough, a movie that suffers by comparison to an imagined version of itself done by the Coen brothers. As a story of tragic comeuppances it's kinda humdrum, but John C. Reilly is great and the ending redeems the whole thing. (Oddly, the other day I came across some notes from EPTC in 2014 and saw that I had written down "The Sisters Brothers (?)", with no elaboration or explanatory context, during a guy's talk, which I had utterly forgotten about. And just now it occurred to me that I might have a copy of the paper, since I was involved in running the conference that year, and so I do, and it turns out the paper is framed on both ends by scenes from the novel. At the end it talks about the novel's ending, which is apparently the same as the movie's--it's about the brothers' re-orienting their senses of self when they go back home after a long odyssey through a world of mortal make-believe. Put like that it sounds funnily like Eyes Wide Shut. Anyway, I can see why I wrote down the title.)
And going way back to last January, I'm surprised to see that we saw (12) The Shape of Water in 2018 and not 2017. The Shape of Water is one of those movies that can't possibly be as good as you hope it might be but is pretty good anyway. And it seems like I will remember for the rest of my life that there are two kinds of men in the world: men who wash their hands after they go to the bathroom, and men who wash their hands before.
[ETA Feb. 25: you'd think that mentioning (13) Phantom Thread in relation to The Favourite would've reminded me of Phantom Thread, except that, as with The Shape of Water, we saw Phantom Thread in the part of 2018 that now seems like 2017. Despite finding Phantom Thread disappointingly slight as the supposed last collaboration between PTA and DDL, I wouldn't be against seeing it again--unpleasant though it is, it's a usefully touchstoney portrait of a perfectly functional toxic relationship--I suppose you could say, a relationship between two toxic people who are doing the best they can with what they are. You'd also think I would've remembered (14) Won't You Be My Neighbor?, seeing as I said quite a bit about it at the time. And the last forgotten film, apart from whatever films I am still forgetting having forgotten, is the likewise interrogative (15) Can You Ever Forgive Me? This movie is probably useful for any kids out there who may still be growing up, like I did, under the delusion that thinking you're going to be a writer when you grow up is any more reasonable than thinking you're going to be a major league baseball player.]
[ETA Feb. 27: Forgotten films I was still forgetting having forgotten, I was reminded yesterday, include (16) Game Night, which means we did in fact see at least one movie (in addition to the Doctor Who premiere) at a Cineplex in 2018 (during the winter of the ubiquitous Jesse Plemons). I think this movie was made because Jason Bateman wanted to make a feature-length J. Walter Weatherman episode. All I really remember is that glass tables were acting weird, which, somebody had to point that out.]
[1] Which we watched last winter, and which I really ought to have said a thing about by now before it gets too far away.
--
Currently under my porch: -11.1. Currently at Havelock: -16.7. High today at Peterborough: -5.6. My temperature sensor at the back of my shed quit last month after about five months in operation, which makes it by far the longest-lived outdoor temperature sensor of the three I have had. The anemometer on it still works, so it's back up there, and I got a new temperature sensor and put it under the porch, thinking that under the porch would be a good mix of sheltered from the sun and exposed to the air, but it turns out that it's more exposed to the sun than I thought, and the porch apparently traps heat from the house and/or ground at night--the only times it has seemed to give about the right temperature have been early in the morning. So it's going to have to move somewhere soon.
