by Walter Chaw There are conundrums presented by what I do now for a day job and this moonlight I won’t quit. Let me get at that by telling you an old, old story about filmmaker Peter Hedges that is sort of current again because he’s acting in a good film out this year called Little Sister. (His son, meanwhile, co-stars in Manchester by the Sea.) When I met Mr. Hedges, it was to interview him for Pieces of April. As per my usual process, I saw and reviewed the movie first, logging it with Bill before going to meet him. The idea behind this is that I never want my work to be coloured by any personal feelings I might develop for the artist over the course of a conversation–for good or for ill. It’s not that I don’t trust myself to be fair, it’s that I don’t know how knowing someone changes the environment in my head. I will be fair, but I’m not the same person before I meet someone and after. The world essentially changes when you meet someone.
So I met Mr. Hedges and I liked him very, very much. I thought he was smart. I thought he was fun. I thought he was well-intentioned. I really didn’t like his movie. When the review was published, Mr. Hedges complained to the publicists, telling them that I had told him I liked the film. I offered to play the tape of our complete conversation for them to prove that I had not. They didn’t require I do that; instead, I was quietly taken off the list of people who could interview their clients. I never regretted it. I do regret that I hurt Mr. Hedges.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that meeting people makes it difficult for me to review their work. I struggle with this a lot. Probably I’ll get over it. It’s harder now, because I meet a lot more people than I used to but in a different capacity. As a journalist, I never asked for pictures or autographs. (OK, once–it was Charlie Kaufman. Oh, and I got a photo of me with Francis Ford Coppola, but I wasn’t interviewing him–and I’m weak.) As an exhibitor, I act often as a fan first. I don’t have a great many friends in the industry, though I do have one or two I consider to be dear. One of them is Scott Derrickson. He made a big movie this year called Doctor Strange, and I watched it and I loved it and I didn’t review it. But I want to spare a few words for it here.
Doctor Strange came out the weekend before the election. It’s about an individual who sacrifices himself–literally and repeatedly, in a time loop–to save the world. It’s a Superman movie, essentially, where the figure who disrupts natural law is driven by absolute altruism. We need Scott’s Superman. Scott, he’s just a guy, you know, but when I needed someone the most three years ago, there was my wife and there was Scott. He had no motive to be there for me. There was nothing in it for him. He took time out of his life and he talked with me. The world essentially changes when someone who doesn’t have to, takes time for you.
Doctor Strange is about someone discovering there’s a greater world than this, that it’s not all about him. Because I know Scott a little bit, it made absolute sense to me that he would make this film. Dr. Strange and his mentor, The Ancient One, create an enemy from a friend in their playing fast and loose with the Universe. The picture, even as it erases a great calamity, creates another. There are true consequences to the betrayal of faith. Several of 2016’s films address this. Not many pay it off so honourably: No one is above the Law. Doctor Strange is almost Brechtian in its simplicity; it’s the first superhero movie directly influenced by Kierkegaard. What I mean to say is that it’s curious that more people aren’t talking about how interesting it is, instead focusing on the special effects and the casting of Swinton over some Asian. Any Asian. It will be branded by this for a couple of years before it’s critically revisited for its prescience and hope. Maybe it won’t take that long.
The term “fake news” has gained currency lately. It has its roots in the modern journalism of thinkpieces and clickbait. If the title is salacious enough, it will earn clicks. It’s the acceptable form of trolling. It happens now because there are so few paying jobs left for journos that many write on spec, for money gleaned from sponsors when you “click through” to their sites and from the volume of hits that will tally up your bounty in ha’pennies. This causes problems. It changes the way we see the world. One of the most popular–and the most popularly-derided–forms of clickbait last year was to announce that film is dead. What’s most frustrating is that someone says this every year. Every. Year. Tarantino said it at Cannes in 2014. Scorsese said it recently. Godard’s said it a few times. It’s not even an imaginative, original provocation.
This is my response to it. I was not able to narrow my Top 10 of 2016 list down from 50. It seems the wrong time not to proclaim an abundance of love, anyhow. 2016 was an exceptional year for film. To save Bill brain damage, I’m going to do ten groups of five films and discuss them in a general way. That’s how they’re ranked.
I want to say, too, that the best films of 2016 are split evenly between grief and reflection, and raging against the dying of the light. Hindsight being what it is, a Trump presidency and the global rise of fascism aren’t surprising. The roots of our hopelessness are in these films. The seeds are there too, though, of the shape that rebellion will take in the next four years. Our horror genre is in the midst of a golden age. It’s about to be extraordinary. Anyway, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is Hillary. David Ayer’s Suicide Squad is Trump. One is disappointing and groundbreaking in the safest possible way (and why aren’t there any Asian people in a movie whose heroes work above a Chinese restaurant?); the other is a hate crime people came out in droves to witness. Outrage is selective, see? Welcome to the brave new world.
Ready? Here we go.
Honourable Mention: Under the Shadow, Men Go to Battle, I Am Not Your Negro, Gleason, The Mermaid, Chevalier, Weiner, Little Sister, A Bigger Splash, Moonlight, Krisha, Gods of Egypt, Certain Women, Louder Than Bombs
Dishonourable Mention: La La Land, Fences
Notably Missed: Elle, Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience/Life’s Journey
| 10. |
The Edge of Seventeen
Don’t Breathe
Blue Jay
Embrace of the Serpent
Tickled
| 9. |
Zootopia
Things to Come
Midnight Special
Love & Friendship
Neruda
| 8. |
Kubo and the Two Strings
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
10 Cloverfield Lane
Everybody Wants Some!!
The Childhood of a Leader
| 7. |
Rogue One
13th
Sunset Song
Right Now, Wrong Then
Creepy
| 6. |
Toni Erdmann
Loving
High Rise
The Shallows
O.J.: Made in America
Of all the things to die in 2016, truth was the biggest. It was replaced by feeling. We are living in Immanuel Kant’s nightmare. When those fuckwits in San Bernardino shot up an office, NBC news immediately paid some landlord $1000 to enter the apartment of one of the perpetrators. During this live-on-TV scoop, they essentially doxxed his mother-in-law by broadcasting her passport. This was not journalism. The perps were also not immigrants. They were radicalized by “poison on the Internet.” When another fuckwit recently shot off a few rounds in the pizzeria where Hillary Clinton was selling fetuses or something, he, too, revealed that he had recently gone online and done a little reading.
What happened in San Bernardino was barely investigated in the press. What there was instead was our incoming President using the catchphrase “San Bernardino” to talk about why we shouldn’t allow war refugees into the United States, which has as much relationship to San Bernardino as the country we chose to invade as retaliation for 9/11 had to 9/11. You see how this works? Let’s watch Irreversible again and notice, this time, how the guy they gruesomely murder in revenge is not the same guy who gruesomely committed rape. The truth doesn’t matter, alas–horror, fear, perception is reality. This isn’t criticism, it’s observation that things are now only as they always were. If we believe in science and reason, that is the real. If we believe in spirits and signs, that is the real. It’s easy to be flip about the Dark Ages, but the Dark Ages lasted around 1000 years.
So the first 25 films on this list are a lot like the next 25. They’re about the end of the world in one way or another: how we can’t get along because when you talk your reality is predicated on faith, and when I respond, I’m trying to appeal to reason. It’s like you attempting to warn me that your neighbour is a pod, and me telling you that the guy you’re voting for has never once told the truth about anything. Maybe it’s too late for me. Maybe it’s too late for you. The world is changing. Perception is reality. The Age of Reason is fading. It had a good run.
| 5. |
The Lobster
Arrival
The Fits
Swiss Army Man
The Neon Demon
| 4. |
Cameraperson
Mountains May Depart
The Nice Guys
After the Storm
The Handmaiden
| 3. |
The Wailing
American Honey
31
Hail, Caesar!
The Witch
Clarifying notes: Cameraperson is poetry–the same kind as Mountains May Depart. They are told in visual stanzas and their sum is overwhelming. The Nice Guys is nasty neo-noir that has as its happy ending one alcoholic buying his friend, who’s been on the wagon, another round. The bad guys win in a big way; noir, indeed. The Wailing is that, too. A true telling of The Exorcist in which a parent is entirely helpless when presented with the task of protecting his child. The Handmaiden? Beautiful clockwork. American Honey? In the tradition of Near Dark, where a nomadic band of social lampreys struggles to exist. I think back frequently to the scene with the three cowboys and the pool and the howl. Compare it to The Witch and the conversation we’re having with traditions and traditional relationships, feelings and facts, belief and science, the night and the day.
Finally, The Neon Demon, one of the most vilified and divisive movies of the year, is a brilliant, wry consideration of how men objectify women. Sometimes to literal, not just metaphorical, death. I was interested in how certain reviewers called it misogynistic, then paused to note how beautiful the women looked. It is, along with The Lobster, trenchant and uncomfortable satire. No less so the brutal evisceration of corporate-speak in Toni Erdmann: its misogyny, and its glorious embrace of team-building exercises. For real, meaningful provocation, though, there’s no one like Rob Zombie, whose 31 confirms that he’s one of the true chroniclers of our cultural disintegration. There’s a Nazi in it, before the rest of us understood completely that Nazis were a normalized thing again in our society. We should probably listen to what he has to say, no matter how hard it is to endure.
| 2. |
Knight of Cups
Jackie
Green Room
20th Century Women
Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
| 1. |
Silence
Manchester by the Sea
February
The Red Turtle (La tortue rouge)
Paterson
Knight of Cups is a dulcet adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress. Pair it with Manchester by the Sea. Jackie and February (soon to get a sanctioned release as The Blackcoat’s Daughter) explore grief and representation in haunted undertones. They’re astonishing, both, for their technical acuity and formal excellence. The Red Turtle is gorgeous animation that speaks of shame, family, and legacy in a story of survival at first dire, then expansive and universal. There’s a scene where parents allow a child to “drown”–but he doesn’t. And then, years later, he goes away to find the rest of the world. Silence is Scorsese’s completion of a loose trilogy started with The Last Temptation of Christ and continuing with Kundun that ends in this career summation. The Green Room is the finest explication of the punk sensibility in decades, via a young woman who’s more punk than any of the heroes–or villains–posing as such. 20th Century Women is just beautifully observed. It’s the kind of movie we used to think Cameron Crowe made, but really he never did. The Justin Timberlake concert video directed by Jonathan Demme is all of the joy and craft that people are ascribing to the frankly bad La La Land, topped off with a diversity cherry that’s as simple and joyous as the crew assembled for Rogue One. It embodies the promise of the Obama presidency. The best movie of the year, though? Paterson. Which is about a poet. Who loves his girlfriend better than most anyone has loved anything. He loves his modest life, too. Paterson is a roadmap for survival for these next four years. With a shelf already full, I went out and bought another composition book the very next day.
