Michael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is the perfect storm of stereotypes, fear mongering and questionable politics in an overly stylized, testosterone-fueled, action thrill ride. Give Bay a little credit: hand him a real world war story that has become the subject of heated conspiracy theories and he’ll still find a way to pack it with explosions, unseemly blue lens flares and canted angles designed to make his beefed up soldiers look like Transformers.
Despite being called “13 Hours,” Bay’s film takes place in the few days prior to the September 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Libya. He follows six ex-Marines and Navy SEALs considered a secret security team stationed on a compound near the American ambassador’s consulate and how they took up the fight in the 13 hours of the attack.
All six soldiers are “alphas,” hulking bros who constantly flaunt their ego and all have incredible facial hair. We see them hauling monster truck tires with their shirts off or, despite being undercover, just looking boss in aviator sunglasses. One even has a tattoo of an open scar that shows he “bleeds” red, white and blue. Everyone who’s not an “alpha” just gets in the way, whether it’s their uptight, pencil pushing commanding officer, the windbag political diplomat or the CIA field agents with other priorities. They call them “tools” and “cockbags.” They tell one woman they need her eyes and ears, not her mouth. And they brag about “chubbing” one officer’s clothes, also known as rubbing their dicks on everything.
This first hour of flexing lays the groundwork for 90 minutes straight of chaotic firefights and explosions. The camera movement is violent and turbulent, the editing is frenetic, the action is impossible to track, and Bay still finds room for quippy jokes and tough guy clichés.
For a war movie, Clint Eastwood was able to deliver more visceral and coherent action in “American Sniper.” But “13 Hours” isn’t anything we haven’t already seen from Bay, if not a retread of visual motifs across all his films. He remains obsessed with slow-motion explosions and shooting domineering low angles that gives everything badass proportions. Even the quieter moments are filled with chatter and the camera unable to hold focus on just one thing at a time. Bay has no interest in simmering tension, only action.
This is all harmless fun in a mindless “Transformers” movie, but in a film about Benghazi, Bay’s apolitical treatment of the material teeters from indifferent to irresponsible. “13 Hours” doesn’t concern itself with conspiracy theories, but little Easter eggs are scattered throughout, like a vague memo suggesting there could be an attack, or one agent commenting, “Does it seem like everybody knows what’s going on here but us?” They play like after thought teasers for a more sinister government cover-up.
Movies have long gotten away with making Nazis and zombies plausible villains in whatever situation you stick them in, but Bay may have finally elevated another figure into that canon: shifty-eyed terrorists. “American Sniper” didn’t score any points with the Muslim community, but although Bay has some Arabs playing for the home team, he’s far worse in suggesting that “it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad.” And don’t forget the shot of terrorists blasting AK-47 bullet holes into an American flag!
The incredible body count the six soldiers amass is mostly bloodless, but once an American goes down Bay holds nothing back. He can truly milk a death for all its worth, and in the same way that “American Sniper” brought out the military colors in its closing moments, “13 Hours” to its credit drops the machismo and manages a gut-wrenching finale.
But Bay isn’t fooling anyone that he’s really more interested in explosions than anything. There’s no conspiracy here.
Quentin Tarantino’s 8th film is an overwritten slog.
Quentin Tarantino, a truly favorite director of mine, can be called a lot of unsavory adjectives, but I never thought “boring” could be one of them.
“The Hateful Eight,” his eighth film as he proudly boasts, is an overwritten slog. At three hours and filmed in 70mm Panavision, Tarantino has the audacity to take those cinematic tools reserved for epics and apply them to a cozy, claustrophobic character drama set in a cabin in the woods. Tarantino bottles all his despicable characters and ideas about race and gender into a room and takes forever for them to explode, then even longer to clean up his mess.
The film involves bounty hunter John “Hangman” Ruth’s intentions to collect $10,000 reward by bringing in Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) alive, a principle of his to personally see all his victims hang. Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is a former black officer in the Union Army and now full-time bounty hunter who still enjoys killing white boys who would rather see him dead. Warren hitches a ride with Ruth and former marauder, now Sherriff, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) to a haberdashery where they’ll wait out a blizzard.
This set up consumes the film’s first of three hours, a drawn out procession of formalities and mistrust in on the nose period dialogue. It’s theatrical play-acting, and Tarantino still confines all their conversation to the two walls of a cramped stagecoach. Tarantino leaves very little to subtext, with Warren, Ruth and Mannix each speaking detailed personal histories despite how much they seem to know about each other already. This is conversation for the audience, a way for Tarantino to show these allies are still at odds with one another, Mannix just a little racist and Ruth very much on edge. The mystery is Domergue, who spends the stagecoach ride with a black eye and a streak of blood down her cheek from Ruth’s blow to the head. She’s a monster, not a lady, we’re told. How much of her abuse can we endure? Tarantino is goading us, and the movie has barely started.
Waiting for them are four other travelers, each an Old West stereotype more likely drawn from cinema than from reality, as is Tarantino’s penchant. Tim Roth plays Oswaldo Mobray, complete with a thick and eloquent British accent that suggests Christoph Waltz could’ve been in mind for the part, as could’ve “Unforgiven’s” English Bob. Demian Bichir as the Mexican keeper of the haberdashery is Bob, easily a surrogate of Eli Wallach in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Bruce Dern is a grizzled and apathetic Confederate General made enraged by Warren’s taunting. And Michael Madsen is the reserved, anonymous cowboy Joe Gage, just off to visit his mother. Of course Tarantino takes the time to have Ruth and Warren reintroduce themselves to all four individually.
No one can be trusted, and Ruth warns that one or some of the remaining four could be in cahoots with Domergue. But to what degree are we invested in seeing whether this woman gets to the rope or not? We have more doubt as to whether they are innocent rather than whether they are guilty. It’s just a matter of how long Tarantino takes to arrive there, and how much we choose to tolerate along the journey. His cards are all on the table.
Or maybe not. Tarantino back tracks in a clunky, narrated aside to fill in the gaps that we didn’t see, rather than allow those twists to emerge through character or dialogue. It’s too contrived to not be exactly as Tarantino intended. We’re made to realize that this genre setting, this overly theatrical dramatizing, this will they/won’t they scenario is in service of how much he can get away with and how hateful he can make his eighth film.
Violence here serves as an exclamation point and punch line rather than a consequence or for stylish entertainment value. The Ennio Morricone score is fascinating, operatic and lovely but staged over extended sequences of Ruth’s driver walking out into the cold to use the bathroom. The N-word rankled some feathers when Tarantino used it as coloring in “Django Unchained,” but here it seems notably superfluous. And there’s not much more to be said for measured storytelling nuance when your characters start projectile vomiting blood onto a woman’s face.
“The Hateful Eight” isn’t just hateful, it’s depressing and a drag. Tarantino has used his time to say everything despicable and nothing in particular.
Ryan Coogler directs this Rocky sequel about Apollo Creed’s son.
“Rocky” is one of the finest examples of Americana ever put onto film, and “Raging Bull” is among the absolute best movies of all time. But outside of those two obvious choices, the most memorable boxing movies are the ones that go beyond just being a boxing movie. “The Fighter” plays with genre conventions by invoking family dynamics and a drug addicted brother who is more interesting than the protagonist. “Million Dollar Baby’s” final fight isn’t in a ring at all.
It’s easy to see why Ryan Coogler’s “Creed” is so rousing, and beyond swapping “Rocky’s” racial roles, it even plays with ideas of legacy and living in someone’s shadow, with Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”) smartly drawing from previous “Rocky” sequels in order to make something more meaningful and modern.
But “Creed” is still a boxing movie. A very good one, but it still has a big final showdown with an unbeatable opponent, an ego-driven, yet talented underdog of a fighter working his way up from the working class, and not to mention a training montage. How many different ways can you shoot the speed bag being pummeled and carefully worked over, or the jumping ropes moving faster and faster until they’re hurled to the ground?
Coogler from the film’s first moments frames Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) as something of a God, as is fitting with his name. His physique is hulking and hunched over in our first glimpses of him. But the strength of “Creed” lies in how Adonis has to grapple with that persona. Apollo Creed’s widow adopts him at a young age and Adonis works to hide his silver spoon upbringing; he wants to succeed not because he’s Apollo’s son or because his wealth was handed to him.
Coogler’s message is to embrace legacy while still carving one of your own. “Use the name; it’s yours,” Adonis’s girlfriend says, before he’s gifted with a pair of American flag boxing shorts that read CREED on one side and JOHNSON on the other.
Coogler also plays with cinematography in interesting ways to reimagine how a “Rocky” sequel can look. Rather than striving to reach the top of some steps, Coogler slows down time around Adonis in a ravishing look at the Americana of the urban streets, with ATVs rocketing around a sweating, menacing Adonis. There’s also a mid-movie fight that steals the show from the finale in that it’s accomplished in a single take over two rounds and several minutes. Rocky’s own personal struggles overwhelm whether we care about the final fight’s ultimate outcome, but at the very least it aims to put a pin in the idea of more “Rocky” movies.
Jordan as an actor seems extremely confident in his own skin, aware of his body and using it to get at Adonis’s brashness and ego. Like Jake Gyllenhaal in “Southpaw,” the physical transformation is not just a practical feature of the character Jordan is portraying but very much a part of Adonis’s energy. As for Stallone, the appeal of his performance is that he’s aged into the gruff, seasoned veteran role full of wisdom and discreet fatherly affection, but he’s retained Rock’s dopey charm. Whether his still garbled Philly accent is Oscar worthy is up for debate.
The foreign drama “Son of Saul” finds a way to give us yet another new look at the Holocaust, but its innovation is in finding the imminent danger in every moment of these prisoners’ lives. Director Laszlo Nemes shuttles us into the back of the head of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) and shows us things only in his immediate field of vision. There’s a palpable, hushed tension coursing through every scene, and yet it remains impossible to foresee the threat even seconds ahead.
Saul is a Sonderkommando, a Jewish prisoner of Hungarian descent forced by the Nazis to work in the Auschwitz crematoriums. In the film’s opening scene, hundreds of bodies strip naked, blurred to us as he quickly works in a haze. After the swarm of prisoners has been shuttled into the gas chamber, he immediately goes to work collecting clothes as though he’s done it a dozen times before. He’s then forced to clean the “pieces” from the killing floor and put “it” out of the way. A young boy survives the gas chamber and quickly gets snuffed out by the Nazi guard. But when the boy is delegated for an autopsy, Saul makes a deal with the doctor to give the boy a proper burial, believing the boy to be his son. “Son of Saul” follows him over two intense days as he works to find a rabbi who can bless the burial.
Saul’s determination and conviction is heart-wrenching in a movie where all the prisoners know they’re in constant danger and remain brash, defensive and only looking out for themselves. Saul however carries a defeated look on his furrowed brow, and the film tests his psychological resolve as he defies the odds and logic in order to complete this symbolic gesture. “You failed the living for the dead,” one prisoner says to him.
The film is violent and intense not strictly because of the setting but because the camera work, all done in a classical aspect ratio, is so volatile. The extended takes tethered closely to Saul’s back feel like what the gimmicky, yet virtuoso nature of “Birdman’s” cinematography could be. One scene stuns with a fiery backdrop that in the camera’s constant close-ups throws everything into intimate chaos, and the closing revolt scene is reminiscent of “Children of Men’s” warzone long take.
“Son of Saul” is a Holocaust movie unlike you’ve ever seen before, but that’s because it specifically plays with how closely you witness this horror.
Name me another music biopic that opens with a battering ram. “Straight Outta Compton’s” incredible sense of location is so strongly of the streets and of the Compton neighborhood. It knows how crazy things can get, to the point where it needs to begin with the cops bringing an army to nail some black kids doing drugs. Director F. Gary Gray places the film not in the canon of other music biopics but in the league of a racially charged masterpiece like “Boyz n the Hood” or “Friday,” which Gray also directed starring N.W.A’s Ice Cube.
The music of N.W.A. and specifically the album “Straight Outta Compton” is so charged with personality and local identity that it would be a mistake if the movie didn’t also aim for that level of knowledge about the community in which it was brought up. These kids starting out making music show some real effort in a tough upbringing, and their attitude is to rap about that reality. “Speak a little truth and people lose their minds,” the film says, and we can see how immediately crazy things can get. The words matter more than the beats, and the movie doesn’t over intellectualize their music to the point of fawning over its brilliance. It just scares the shit out of people, leaving room for some truly insane rock star moments, like a massive hotel orgy culminating in N.W.A. pulling out their massive glocks at some intruders like it was nothing.
But on a biopic level, “Straight Outta Compton” is rare in how it manages an effective, yet comprehensive story. The film starts with N.W.A. cutting their first single and goes until Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Easy-E (Jason Mitchell) had all gone their separate solo routes. With the Director’s Cut at nearly 3 hours, it takes its time fleshing out the story of all three characters individually, rather than trying to stuff subplots into the story of one. I imagine it’s how a Beatles biopic would have to be approached were anyone to ever take it on.
“Straight Outta Compton” even plays the biopic game of showy musical performances and celebrity cameos, but embedded within each of these more superfluous set pieces and attractions is a real sense of danger. The cops could be harassing the band or Suge Knight could be threatening to shoot a crewmember in the next room. Paul Giamatti is also officially the go-to guy as a sleazy, manipulative tour manager, having now played the part here, in “Rock of Ages” and “Love & Mercy.”
Music biopics are often concerned with history and personal legacy, but Gray makes “Straight Outta Compton” modern and urgent in its delivery of powerful melodrama, vital lyrics and hyper-relevant themes. This is a Movie With Attitude.
When Amy Winehouse passed away, the cruel and obvious joke of people reciting, “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no” was repeated on end. She even fit into the superstition of The 27 Club, young artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain who all died far too early in their prime. These labels put her into easy boxes, and her music and her personality was never easy to classify.
Director Asif Kapadia’s documentary “Amy” highlights the personality and the intimacy in her life’s choices, not strictly the talent or the hardships or the musical quality. As in his breakthrough documentary “Senna,” Kapadia employs only archival material and no original footage or talking heads in a masterstroke of editing. The choices he makes speak to Winehouse’s character and charm and show hidden depths in her distinctive voice.
Early on Kapadia hints at Amy’s tortured quality with dusty and grainy home movies, the pixely digital footage showing the fragmented pieces in her life. As a teen Amy is goofy, spastic and pimply, and when she finally gets some media attention she stands out in her fashion, wearing big red hoop earrings, dark hair in a messy poof, a small piercing above her lip and flaunting her big bad British teeth. Winehouse is comparable to Adele in her torch singer, jazzy and bluesy quality, not to mention their bubbly personalities, but Winehouse is notably raspier and smokier in her vocal tenor, and her attitude is a combination of edgy and sincere. Rapper Mos Def talks in the film about how Winehouse could drink anyone under the table but that she was an absolute sweetheart all the same.
Winehouse says she didn’t know what depression was because she had an outlet in her music. During a recording session for “Back in Black” Winehouse’s vocals are isolated to eerie effect, the words “black…” trailing off into the vacuum. All these little emotional teases are handled with nuance and build to the heady climax of her passing. We learn that Winehouse could’ve gone to rehab and gotten professional help “before the world wanted a piece of her.” We learn she suffered from bulimia, despite how late night comedians would make light of it. And Kapadia holds empty close-ups of her pale eyes for a scarily long time.
“Amy” is at times a harrowing documentary, but a revealing portrait of a star. That song “Rehab” still taunts her as much as it is her calling card, but “Amy” does well to explain why she said “No, no, no.”
George Miller made a movie this year that is little but a chase scene, with themes of survival, revenge and a showcase for hyper violence and cinematic spectacle. The film has virtually no story, but the nature of its editing and its use of color, movement and staging made it an exhilarating experience, brutal and devastating but also cathartic and purely entertaining.
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “The Revenant” is a similar revenge fantasy, stripped to its bones in all its animalistic nature and fury, but Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography blunts the impact. The Malick-esque way that Lubezki plays with the elements to create something spectral and naturalistic give “The Revenant” an overstated sense of importance, and watching it is hardly entertaining but dreary, disgusting and devoid of purpose.
Set in early frontier America, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a navigator part of a hunting party gathering pelts. Natives ambush the entire squadron and reduce the team from 45 people to just 10. The scene is ravishing, but immediately numbing. Arrows fly in and impale the Americans from beyond the frame, creating a sense early on that danger is not imminent but seemingly omnipresent. The mise-en-scene is cold and silvery and makes a stark backdrop for fiery streaks of arrows flying through the sky.
Lubezki has the camera dive underneath the water to witness one man being strangled to death, and we realize that despite the camera’s pivots and surveying, it’s more of a godly spectator rather than a human eye. The camera here is far less a gimmick than in Inarritu’s “Birdman,” and the way the camera is freed from a fixed axis is not unlike how Lubezki’s cinematography floated and tumbled in “Gravity.” But seeing it in this way isn’t visceral but bleak, violent, bloody and full of agony.
Glass escapes the natives only to be attacked by a bear. This scene too is an endless, torturous and dispassionate sight done in a single, unbroken shot. The bear claws and stomps on his back and whips him like a doll. It exists seemingly out of time and even ends on something of a grim punch line, a final knife in the back as Glass tumbles down a hill only for the slain bear to roll on top of him.
Miraculously, Glass survives, but just barely. Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) demands the remaining troop care for him and keep him alive as long as possible. When they’re unable to transport the wounded Glass further, Henry assigns John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) to tend to Glass and Glass’s half-breed son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) until Glass dies. Instead, Fitzgerald kills Hawk and leaves Glass for dead. “The Revenant” starts as Glass’s fight for survival against nature, a cold look at how the world is vengeful and how the wilderness governs all. But it eventually morphs into a more simplistic revenge fantasy, Glass’s quest to return from the dead and kill the man who murdered his son.
We see flashes of Glass’s past, of his native bride being slaughtered and skulls being stacked high in a mountain. Except Glass’s remaining existence is no less bleak, and his past plays as a morbid form of adding insult to injury. He survives by eating hunks of bloody, raw buffalo meat and by cutting open the guts of a horse and crawling inside its open cavity for warmth. The film’s gore is disturbing, but the subject matter itself is not the problem. “Mad Max: Fury Road” was no less shocking, and even “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” involves Luke killing an animal for warmth on the ice planet Hoth.
The difference is how Inarritu lingers on the gruesomeness and screams each shot’s importance, not for their ingenuity but their stark reality. The score pounds with thundering drums that signal each moment’s weight, and the way “The Revenant” evokes God as a theme continually burdens us with the idea that this is Glass against the world.
DiCaprio is a victim of the film’s agony, grunting and moaning his way through the entire film and crawling on the cold ground for much of it. There’s only so much of an actual performance here. Tom Hardy is more effective as the dissenting and ruthless Fitzgerald, complete with a thick, broken Americana accent and wide eyes that show his madness.
While Lubezki remains the more interesting entry point to “The Revenant,” the blame for the movie’s depressing and exhausting slog rests on Inarritu’s shoulders. Like how the film treats Glass, he does all he can to drag us through hell but little catharsis or solace to bring us back.
Oscar Punditry got absolutely toxic this time last year. “Birdman” was horribly polarizing, the reaction to “American Sniper” took a scary pulse of the nation, the snubs of David Oyelowo for “Selma” outed the Oscars as horribly white, and the loudest had to say why “Boyhood” really wasn’t that great yo.
It’s fitting then that this year’s crop of nominees is all over the place. The pundits have been outed in showing they really don’t know a damn thing. Not a single category has a frontrunner on par with a “12 Years a Slave,” and there’s no reason to think that this year’s Oscars couldn’t be equally white washed.
But if the Oscars are like the Super Bowl for movie lovers, making picks is like Fantasy Football. The critics who get steamed about the Oscars can be just as irritating as the pundits. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying the Oscars and wanting to play the horses because so long as it doesn’t disrupt your faculties to think about the movies critically, then who cares? It gets people talking about the movies, doesn’t it? And the Oscars are the only institution left capable.
These picks are quick and dirty, no more informed than anyone else’s, but we’ll see who comes out on top. After all, this year netted me two Fantasy Football titles.
Best Picture Predictions
Spotlight
The Big Short
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
The Martian
Carol
On the Bubble
Bridge of Spies
Straight Outta Compton
Room
Sicario
Inside Out
Creed
Ex Machina
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Trumbo
Should be here:
Chi-Raq
Anomalisa
“Spotlight” is the closest thing to being a front-runner, but thankfully the narrative behind it is that it’s just a really good movie. You could say this is the type of movie that a studio would’ve put out back in the ’70s but is today relegated to Open Road, an indie. If it wins, it’ll mean that there’s a demand for Hollywood to look to more movies for thinking grown-ups, but then that’s the narrative for the Oscars every year.
Getting up to anywhere near 10 nominees seems unlikely this year, and it’s a year like this that makes predicting Best Picture extremely difficult. The way to go is to think of the movies that really have that passionate fan base. Who’s going to put this movie in that number 1 slot because they want to see it get nominated? I would argue that all of the picks certainly have that. “Bridge of Spies” is one that’s showing up on a lot of lists for the reason that it’s a Spielberg film and it is quite strong and universally loved, but does anyone see it as the best of the year? “Room” has that passionate support, but it doesn’t have the universal love that “Brooklyn” does. Expect it to fall short. “Straight Outta Compton” could be the token “black” nomination and the populist nominee, but I expect the Academy to have egg on their faces again Thursday morning. Their better bet would be to try and get “Creed” or “Star Wars” nominated, but neither of those is sticking with the guilds. “Sicario” has certainly gotten a boost from the critics, but they’ve put all their weight behind “Fury Road.” If “Ex Machina” gets in, it’ll be the biggest underdog surprise in a long time, and it will deserve it.
Best Actress
Brie Larson – Room
Saoirse Ronan – Brooklyn
Cate Blanchett – Carol
Charlotte Rampling – 45 Years
Charlize Theron – Mad Max: Fury Road
On the Bubble
Jennifer Lawrence – Joy
Helen Mirren – Woman in Gold
Sarah Silverman – I Smile Back
Alicia Vikander – The Danish Girl
Should Be Here
Teyonnah Parris – Chi-Raq,
Rooney Mara – Carol
Mya Taylor – Tangerine
Emily Blunt – Sicario
It sucks that this category isn’t deeper. Not just because of the state of the industry, but because this category is its own victim of category fraud this year. Rooney Mara should be in this category, and the Academy may still decide that too, but you won’t see both Blanchett and Mara in that case, who both deserve it. If it was a man and a woman in “Carol,” they would be nominated in Best Actor and Actress, but not so in a romance about two women. Charlize Theron is the other nominee who could easily suffer from a split vote in terms of which category she’ll show up. She’s the female lead of “Mad Max,” but then the reason there’s a category question at all lies right in that movie’s title.
For those on the bubble, it’s amazing to me that the Academy can’t think of another actress beyond Jennifer Lawrence or Helen Mirren for who should be worthy at another shot for an Oscar. Sarah Silverman got a surprise nomination from the Screen Actors Guild, so she could pull off a surprise, but would it have killed anyone to see “Chi-Raq” or “Tangerine” and get some color in this race?
Best Actor
Leonardo DiCaprio – The Revenant
Matt Damon – The Martian
Bryan Cranston – Trumbo
Michael Fassbender – Steve Jobs
Michael B. Jordan – Creed
On the Bubble
Steve Carell – The Big Short
Eddie Redmayne – The Danish Girl
Johnny Depp – Black Mass
Will Smith – Concussion
Tom Hanks – Bridge of Spies
Should Be Here
Michael Caine – Youth
Michael Keaton – Spotlight
Ian McKellen – Mr. Holmes
Samuel L. Jackson – The Hateful Eight
Jacob Tremblay – Room
Abraham Attah – Beasts of No Nation
Jake Gyllenhaal – Southpaw
Tom Hardy – Mad Max: Fury Road
Channing Tatum – Magic Mike XXL
Best Actor is almost never this light. People like Michael Caine, Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen and Jake Gyllenhaal were on people’s lists early in the Oscar cycle, so why did everyone forget about them?
This is Leo’s year but only because it doesn’t seem like anyone else’s year. His win will be overdue, but his victory will be a makeup call, as Spike Lee once called it. It’s frustrating that Eddie Redmayne is in the conversation at all, solely based on the movie’s pedigree and the fact that he’s a runner-up. Hopefully the Academy will come to its senses and recognize another young rising star in Michael B. Jordan instead. If they’re really going to nominate Sylvester Stallone in Supporting, why overlook “Creed’s” lead? “Trumbo” has more support than anyone could’ve anticipated, so I expect Cranston is in. “Steve Jobs” has far less support than anyone could’ve expected, but Fassbender still seems likely even if the movie itself doesn’t.
Best Supporting Actress
Rooney Mara – Carol
Alicia Vikander – Ex Machina
Jennifer Jason Leigh – The Hateful Eight
Kristen Stewart – Clouds of Sils Maria
Kate Winslet – Steve Jobs
On the Bubble
Alicia Vikander – The Danish Girl
Rachel McAdams – Spotlight
Joan Allen – Room
Should be Here
Elizabeth Banks – Love and Mercy
Rachel Weisz – Youth
Jane Fonda – Youth
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Anomalisa
If Rooney Mara does show up in this category, expect her to win. Sadly this category isn’t that deep either, although that’s only for lack of looking. Alicia Vikander is this year’s breakout star, and although every critic’s group has recognized her for “Ex Machina” and not “The Danish Girl”, the pundits still seem to think it’s the latter movie for which she’ll get nominated. The BAFTAs gave her the right nomination, and here’s hoping the Academy does the same. Rachel McAdams and Joan Allen don’t seem like big enough roles in either of their respective movies to deserve a nod, but then stranger things have happened. Jennifer Jason Leigh is excellent in two movies this year, although in one she’s a clay puppet, so guess which one the Academy will pick. Who knows what happened to the support for “Youth” or “Love & Mercy.”
Best Supporting Actor
Mark Rylance – Bridge of Spies
Mark Ruffalo – Spotlight
Paul Dano – Love & Mercy
Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation
Christian Bale – The Big Short
On the Bubble
Sylvester Stallone – Creed
Michael Shannon – 99 Homes
Jacob Tremblay – Room
Tom Hardy – The Revenant
Should Be Here
Harvey Keitel – Youth
Jason Segel – The End of the Tour
Oscar Isaac – Ex Machina
Liev Schreiber – Spotlight
Stanley Tucci – Spotlight
Benicio Del Toro – Sicario
This year’s “Should Be Here” list is arguably better than the five who will get nominated, but they are all very good. Rylance gives as understated of work as Tom Hanks, but he’s going to be the one to get a nod. Ruffalo is consistently good in just about anything, so it’s good to see that at least someone in “Spotlight’s” stellar cast will get nominated, especially for a movie that’s considered the frontrunner. Same goes for “The Big Short,” in which you could nominate Carell, Bale or Gosling. Idris Elba seems like the most likely African American nominee in any of the acting categories, but he’s no lock. Stallone is one a lot of lists, but that’ll likely be the surprise snub of the morning.
Best Director
Thomas McCarthy – Spotlight
Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu – The Revenant
George Miller – Mad Max: Fury Road
Todd Haynes – Carol
Ridley Scott – The Martian
On the Bubble
Adam McKay – The Big Short
Denis Villeneuve – Sicario
Steven Spielberg – Bridge of Spies
F. Gary Gray – Straight Outta Compton
Quentin Tarantino – The Hateful Eight
Should Be Here
Spike Lee – Chi-raq
Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson – Anomalisa
This morning the DGA went with Adam McKay over Todd Haynes, but Haynes is definitely the auteur in this bunch, and he doesn’t have a directing nomination to his name yet. Ridley Scott has three nominations in this category, and his movie has even won Best Picture, but he never has. He’s arguably a director-for-hire on “The Martian” and thankfully didn’t screw it up, but he’s still more likely than the Academy handing another token nomination to Spielberg or Tarantino.
Best Adapted Screenplay
The Big Short
Steve Jobs
Carol
Room
The Martian
On the Bubble
Brooklyn
Trumbo
The Revenant
Anomalisa
Should Be Here
Chi-Raq
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
The End of the Tour
Good, good crop. Don’t expect too much variation here or surprises. “Anomalisa” probably would’ve fared better in the Original category, but it’s based on Kaufman’s own play, so it has to go up against some heavy-hitting adaptations, including a non-fiction book by Michael Lewis, a novel by Patricia Highsmith written by a first time screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, an Aaron Sorkin screenplay that probably should be an “original,” another screenplay written by the novelist herself (Emma Donoghue’s “Room”) and a huge best seller in Andy Weir’s “The Martian.” “Brooklyn” is another one that falls into that category of a big novel adaptation, but it’ll either be this or “Room” that makes the cut.
Best Original Screenplay
Spotlight
Inside Out
The Hateful Eight
Ex Machina
Bridge of Spies
On the Bubble
Trainwreck
Sicario
Straight Outta Compton
Should be Here
Tangerine
It Follows
In another year there’s no reason why Amy Schumer wouldn’t be in play for an Oscar, but Ex Machina will likely get that “quirky” slot this year. It’d be hard to bet against “Spotlight,” Tarantino, Pixar or the Coens, so this category seems pretty stacked as well.
Sufjan Stevens’s “Carrie & Lowell” tops the list of Best Albums of 2015.
There’s no better way to get a new perspective on a band, a sound, or a scene than a change in venue. I had a major one this year when I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles to attend grad school at USC. I got a brief taste of the LA punk scene, I hit up two LA festivals, and I absorbed the LA venues, all with their own legacy and character that’s apart from Chicago.
But one significant change of pace this year was my decision to approach my album of the year list in audio. Above you can hear me pretending to be a music critic for NPR, and in it I go through the top five albums of the year. It was a challenge to say the least, trying to be critical in a form other than text and to use songs to illustrate my point of view.
Of course I listened to more than what I could cover on that radio clip, and of course I had more to write, so below is my traditional Top 10.
Note: I apologize for the absence of Kendrick.
1) Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell
“Fuck me, I’m falling apart,” Sufjan Stevens sings on “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”, the harrowing, final line of “Carrie & Lowell’s” penultimate track. This is Stevens at his breaking point. Stevens’s guitar picking is delicate, his instrumentation is sparse, and his high-pitched falsetto is as frail as ever. And yet “Carrie & Lowell” is heavy. By far his most personal and down to Earth album, Stevens reminisces about being left in a video store by his mother Carrie when he was just 3. He’s somber in his memory of a girlfriend checking her texts while he masturbated. And he recalls how a relative pronounced his unusual first name as “Subaru”. Ever the multi-instrumentalist, the indie folk sound Stevens achieves here is highly intricate and sophisticated, despite never raising its volume to more than a whisper. Hear the weightless, pillowing keyboards on “Blue Buckets of Gold”, the shimmering tremolo guitar lifting skyward on “All of Me Wants All of You” or the tight, offbeat rhythm of “Drawn to the Blood”.
“Carrie & Lowell” is perhaps the most easily listenable record of the year, inviting, calming and trance inducing, but no less profound and devastating. For as much as Stevens is clearly falling apart, his carefully constructed reverie and ode to his parents are a sign of him putting himself back together.
2) Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy
All the influences that have come to define Titus Andronicus over their first three records, from Springsteen to Iron Maiden to The Clash, are present in full force on “The Most Lamentable Tragedy”. But if “Local Business” was just a little too traditional of a rock record how about a 29-track, 93-minute long rock opera? Titus have answered their fans’ prayers for another record as ambitious and momentous as “The Monitor”, but have fought back with an album that is deliberately sprawling, uneven and obtuse. Two entire tracks are complete silence. They deliver 28 seconds of the most rambunctious rager imaginable in “Look Alive”, then screech to a stop, then do it all again on the aptly named “Lookalike”. They reassign the name “More Perfect Union” on a 9-minute track that combines all their influences. They even make us sit through a nightmarish “Auld Lang Syne”.
And yet among them are some of the best, most celebratory, fist-pumping tunes Titus has ever delivered. Patrick Stickles packs so many scathing, self-loathing, and philosophically profound words about manic depression into tracks like “Fired Up” and “Dimed Out”, but the former sounds like it could’ve been recorded in Bruce’s “Born to Run” sessions. Guitarist Adam Reich’s solos gleam instead of distort, and they adorn songs made for chanting. Channeling equal parts Hüsker Dü and Nietzsche, it’d require a Doctorate to piece together all of the literary allusions on “The Most Lamentable Tragedy”. But however misanthropic the album’s themes, this is a sound worth celebrating.
3) Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit
The Aussie Courtney Barnett’s breakout “Double EP” had enough quirky and ponderous lyrics to make her a buzzy indie darling, but no one could’ve guessed on her debut album that she’d have this much muscle. “Sometimes I Sit…” is the best guitar pop record of the year, with a sound that’s as much Nirvana as it is Sheryl Crowe. Barnett still has a penchant for the mundane, satirical and absurd in her lyrics, sing talking in an upbeat stream of consciousness about the size of garages (“Depreston”), roadkill painted in the tar as a Jackson Pollock (“Dead Fox”) and building pyramids out of Coke cans (“Elevator Operator”). It’s all amusingly specific, her clear vocals and hooks amplified over simple, crunchy riffs or the wild, discordant tremolo solo on “Small Poppies”. Best of all, the formidable “Pedestrian at Best” is Barnett at her heaviest, most eloquent and feminist. Barnett’s vocabulary (“erroneous, harmonious, I’m hardly sanctimonious”) speaks volumes, but it’s when she sings the self-deprecating truth, “Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint”, that she stands tallest.
4) Torres – Sprinter
Singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott’s second album is called “Sprinter”, but it’s a record of many tempos and dimensions. Under the moniker Torres, Scott has made a transcendent album of personal confession, and raw, intense emotion. “Strange Hellos” is a misdirection as an opening track, starting hollow and dreary before exploding in aggressive grunge. The bone-chilling “Son, You Are No Island” has a guitar picking slowly up your spine, before Scott resounds the words “You fucked with a woman” in a nightmarish spiral. Scott grapples with her language and religion on the stately “A Proper Polish Welcome”, and she attacks a jaded hipster in her desperation to show she’s “got the sadness too”. But her sound has all the range of her lyrics; “Sprinter” is a wonderfully rounded album of hard rock, acoustic ballads and abstract electronics that earned her PJ Harvey comparisons. On “New Skin” Scott laments how tired she is at just the age of 23, but “Sprinter” is Scott at her most vibrant.
5) Tame Impala – Currents
A robotic sounding voice on Tame Impala’s “Past Life” starts talking about a mundane day at the dry cleaners until he’s stopped in his tracks by a vision of his lover from a past life. In that moment, life is breathed into that voice. Tame Impala’s breakout album “Lonerism” had remarkable, technically proficient production, but in this writer’s opinion, felt cold. “Currents”, the Australian outfit’s third album, is danceable, infectious, romantic and best of all human. The bouncy bass lines Kevin Parker adds on tracks like “The Less I Know The Better” are straight ‘70s disco grooves, and yet the sprawling lead single “Let it Happen” is contemporary and sounds like the work of a single producer, not a fully psychedelic band. “Eventually” has heavy bursts of electronic fuzz before blooming into vivid color in the chorus, a beautiful, yet melancholy, moment emblematic of the full album. “They say people never change but that’s bullshit,” Parker sings on “Yes I’m Changing”. If “Currents” is any indication, “They do.”
6) Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love
Although Sleater-Kinney has never been a stranger to wild, rambunctious, off-kilter noise rock, there’s something newly animal and exciting about the girl punk group’s reunion album “No Cities To Love”. Carrie Brownstein’s guitar scurries and slides throughout the up-tempo “A New Wave”. Corin Tucker barks out the pre-chorus to “No Anthems” and allows her voice to escalate marvelously as she sings “It’s how I learned to speak”. And Janet Weiss’s drums are absolutely bestial on the thundering closer “Fade”. Brownstein delivers the best and most effects-laden solo guitar work across an entire album this year. And the combined lyrics of Brownstein and Tucker elevate Sleater-Kinney beyond personal, feminist subject matter, singing about the harsh nature of daily routine (“Price Tag”), ambition (“Surface Envy”) and “atomic tourism” (“No Cities to Love”). “No outline will ever hold us”, Brownstein sings on “A New Wave,” and though Sleater-Kinney already have a place in history, “No Cities to Love” helps them break new ground.
7) Beach House – Depression Cherry
People continue to assume that Beach House refuses to evolve, that their dream pop sound has repeated itself on three (wait, four!) subsequent albums. But the distorted fuzz on “Sparks” or the reverberating guitar on “Levitation” would not belong on “Bloom” or “Teen Dream”. “Depression Cherry”, much like this year’s counterpart album “Thank Your Lucky Stars”, finds Beach House at darker shades, taking their ethereal sound to new realms. Alex Scally imagines one of his most elegant sliding riffs yet on “Space Song”. Victoria Legrand makes the lightly pulsing synths and drum machine on “Wildflower” near danceable. Her voice is as soothing and weightless as ever, but she’s still set on entrancing and transporting her listeners, singing on the opener, “There’s a place I want to take you…Where the unknown will surround you.”
8) CHVRCHES – Every Open Eye
Listening to Lauren Mayberry’s voice is hopeful and uplifting. She sings of her personal pain, but hearing her atop layers upon layers of synths and electronic beats can be soothing, fun and cathartic. But what’s more, she’s always overcoming obstacles in her music. “We bide our time and stay afloat”, she sings on “Keep You on My Side.” On opener “Never Ending Circles” she proposes a toast to “taking what you came for” and “running off the pain”. On single “Leave a Trace”, Mayberry can be cutting and dismissive, shunning a guy who would try to reveal the “tiny cracks of light underneath” her. And yet the song embraces her confidence with a simple clap beat and a bright keyboard that matches her pitch. Ultimately though, “Every Open Eye” isn’t just the Mayberry show, and the breakdown on “Clearest Blue” is the sort of explosive, yet upbeat melody the electronic dance floor has been missing.
9) Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear
“Save me President Jesus!” Father John Misty’s overly swelling and sincere folk rock affectations are as big as ever on “I Love You, Honeybear”, both the title track and the album in full, and the lyrics are as ridiculous in terms of taking anything he says seriously. On “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” he sings that he loves a woman who can walk all over a man like a “goddamn marching band,” then makes fun of her use of the words “literally” and “malaprops.” And though these songs are still ironic, his sound has at least graduated to the point where he has the sonic heft to support the irony, like the cascades of synths on “True Affection” or the fuzzy solo at the end of “The Ideal Husband.” But two albums in he’s made his point; as much as he’s mocking a certain type of performer, he very much is that type of performer, and we’re finally all in on the joke.
10) The Dead Weather – Dodge and Burn
I’d forgotten how surreal, experimental and noisy The Dead Weather could be. “Dodge and Burn” brings that animalism back to the forefront. Alison Mosshart is a wild woman. On “Let Me Through” she sounds like she’s out for blood, brooding “I’m a bad man, let me through”. Jack White at the drums marches in step behind her vicious “boom boom boom”, and guitarist Dean Fertita lets out a cat-like screech in a ferocious breakdown. Fertita’s penetrating reverb and tremolo on “Buzzkill(er)” is another example of the strange minimalism he’s borrowed from White. Should The Dead Weather decide to continue this supergroup, Mosshart’s closing track “Impossible Winner”, a sweeping piano rock ballad akin to something on the last Queens of the Stone Age record, suggests how this band can still find creatively weird ways to evolve.
11th Place (alphabetical)
Adele – 25
Adele could not have possibly topped “21,” but with “25” she has delivered everything that could be expected of her. “Hello” is not just another timeless classic; it’s purely an Adele song. It’s the best track on an album of Adele reckoning with growing older, both in getting her Whitney Houston moment on “When We Were Young,” trying to fit in with the present on the poppy “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” and going full on rock star in a song like “I Miss You” that could’ve easily been a Florence + The Machine number.
Alabama Shakes – Sound & Color
Brittany Howard and company have evolved their blues rock revival into a sound that combines electronics (“Sound & Color”) and barn-burning breakdowns (“Shoegaze”). Standouts “Don’t Wanna Fight” and “Gimme All Your Love” are further proof of just how fierce Howard can get.
Deafheaven – New Bermuda
The most polarizing band in black metal’s second album should hopefully soothe some of the hatred from hardcore metalheads. “New Bermuda” is far more of a traditional rock record, aggressive, chunky and speedy, but still just as weightless in its shoegazing beauty. Although not as weightless, spiritual and inspirational as “Sunbather” surprisingly was, “New Bermuda” is 46 heavy minutes without as much as the start/stop, soft/loud, fast/slow dividing lines of their debut.
Florence + The Machine – How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
“HBHBHB” is the first time Florence Welch has sounded both epic and like a rock star. While not short on the sweeping pop anthems, “Ship to Wreck”, “What Kind of Man” and “Queen of Peace” all have upbeat, stadium-filling riffs worthy of her spot as the biggest woman in rock.
Mikal Cronin – MCIII
“MCII” had strings, pianos and a lot of fuzz, but on “MCIII” Mikal Cronin strives for something entirely more sweeping and grand. Starting with the swelling orchestra on opener “Turn Around”, it’s a whole album of finales, all of them shimmering, major key rockers, with Side Two specifically arranged as something of a mini rock opera. It’s not as immediately accessible or complete a collection of pop songs as “MCII” but it grows in esteem because of how proudly it wears its ambitions on its sleeve.
My Morning Jacket – The Waterfall
As is plain as day on their album cover, My Morning Jacket’s “The Waterfall” is picturesque. “The Waterfall” is not as surreal as some of their earlier efforts, but it’s their most complete record since 2005’s “Z.” It grooves, soars, thunders and whispers, and it’s album of big sounds and “Big Decisions.”
25 Best Songs(in alphabetical order)
4th of July – Sufjan Stevens
A New Wave – Sleater-Kinney
Adventure of a Lifetime – Coldplay
Bitch Better Have My Money – Rihanna
Bored in the USA – Father John Misty
Depreston – Courtney Barnett
Dimed Out – Titus Andronicus
Don’t Wanna Fight – Alabama Shakes
Fired Up – Titus Andronicus
FourFive Seconds – Rihanna, Kanye West & Paul McCartney
Hello – Adele
Hotline Bling – Drake
I Feel Love (Every Million Miles) – The Dead Weather
Leave a Trace – CHVRCHES
Let it Happen – Tame Impala
Pedestrian at Best – Courtney Barnett
Ship to Wreck – Florence + The Machine
Should Have Known Better – Sufjan Stevens
Space Song – Beach House
Spring (Among the Living) – My Morning Jacket
Strange Encounter – Father John Misty
Strange Hellos – Torres
The Harshest Light – Torres
The Less I Know the Better – Tame Impala
Trying – Bully
20 Best Concerts
Foo Fighters – Wrigley Field
Titus Andronicus – The Roxy
Sufjan Stevens – The Chicago Theater
Kanye West – FYF Fest
Savages – FYF Fest
U2 – United Center
Courtney Barnett – Pitchfork
Father John Misty – The Wiltern
Mikal Cronin – Prairie Center for the Arts, Schaumburg, IL
It’s a weird year at the movies when the one every critic goes crazy for is “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a 30 years late sequel/reboot of an apocalyptic action movie.
But that’s the state of cinema and popular culture in 2015. We’re so accepting of the fact that TV surpasses film in the storytelling department that we’re so desperate to embrace a movie that shows its vision and style in full, spectacular display. We’re so frustrated at the lack of strong roles for women in Hollywood that we champion one that boldly declares “We Are Not Things.” And we’re so angry and eager for something more out of the movies that it takes a movie called “Fury Road” to shake us awake.
I missed out on a lot of movies that could’ve made this year’s list, but then lists should never be about completion. With the way the awards cycle has jammed every interesting movie into a two month or even two week period before the end of the year, Hollywood has made it near impossible to catch everything. All I know is that these are the films that I most wanted to talk about and get others to see.
George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is insane, a disturbed fever dream of a movie, addled and excitable to the point of delirium. Everything is accelerated. Everything is racing. “Fury Road’s” characters feed off the fire and blood of Max’s world, becoming amped at just the idea of moving forward. Through his hyper editing and frenetic tracking camera, Miller has captured adrenaline in a bottle. But for as cathartic and exciting as all of “Fury Road’s” CGI-free stunts are, watching this world of pure orange and blue is nightmarish and hypnotic. It feels so captivating because “Fury Road” is a movie pointing toward the future. What a lovely day.
“Room” is such an emotionally affecting story because it concerns the walls and spaces we build inside our mind and how we find solace within them. Happiness is not a location, but the state of mind we build for ourselves. Lenny Abrahamson’s film is very aware of these walls, of these confines, and he finds poetry and untold possibilities and confusion in glimpses of the sky and the struggle with walking down a flight of stairs. Brie Larson is a mother desperate to get her son to “connect with something” and Jacob Tremblay is the boy grappling with his own sense of reality. Despite the film’s remarkable conceit, “Room” is a universal story of motherhood, maturity and acceptance.
“Spotlight” is the best journalism movie actually about journalism. Thomas McCarthy’s film is not a thriller or caper with conspiracy, villains or suspense set pieces, but a movie of hunches, discovery, research and hard work: pure journalism. The film’s docu-realistic, testimonial quality of soft shades of blue make it a purely neutral story in both themes and aesthetics, a film obsessed with asking more questions, going deeper and finding the bigger story. As it escalates, it becomes as much a film about losing faith in religion and belief as it is uncovering the truth. The ensemble cast of Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Paul Giamatti and John Slattery absolutely hums, and in their search for the real story, “Spotlight” just keeps digging.
No film is as urgent and aggressively opinionated this year as Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq.” Staging this timely political statement against gun violence in America as a version of the Ancient Greek play “Lysistrata” is no accident. The film’s rhyming verse and colorful musical numbers make it distinctly fresh and memorable. And by introducing women’s sexuality into the story, Lee reframes the gun debate into one of gender. People are dying everyday, and you want to talk about how women behave? “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY” the film blares, and that urgency has finally taken root.
The Big Short
When did banking stop being fucking boring and start being the game of men, bros, douchebags, crooks and giant egos? Whereas “The Wolf of Wall Street” was the fantasy about American excess, “The Big Short” is the real-world story that makes those people pay, and it does it with big balls and attitude. The CDOs that led to the downfall of the housing market weren’t bad loans; they were dog shit. Don’t believe the movie? Just ask Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, and then fuck right off. Adam McKay’s film is edgy and in your face, and then it makes you feel awful for being rich and being right.
Kurt Cobain once sang, “Unless it is about me, it is now my duty to completely drain you.” Director Brett Morgen has obliged with “Montage of Heck,” a disturbing, emotionally draining, and violently edited documentary that ranks among the most daring rock-docs ever made and perhaps the only to delve this deeply into the psyche of its rock star protagonist. Morgen uses countless audio snippets, scrapbook notes and home movies of Cobain that to another director would be an un-cinematic liability, if not purely unusable. They’re transformed into surreal, artistic virtues that show Cobain’s genius and madness.
Alex Garland’s sleek sci-fi “Ex Machina” toys with our emotions. Face to face with a gorgeous robot named Ava (seductively played by breakout actress Alicia Vikander), we begin to feel the animal urges of love, desire and sexual attraction very much coded into our DNA. Are we any less programmed than the artificial intelligence we’ve designed? What makes anyone human? Garland’s film packages these profound ideas of human nature into a film that teeters from romance and beauty to suspense and conspiracy. “Ex Machina” is a finely tuned machine adept in the “micro expressions” that make us human.
Todd Haynes’s “Carol” is a movie about two people entering into separate worlds and learning to feel at home. “Carol” is lush, poetic, and ravishing, a stellar romance in which the unsaid words and thoughts seep into the movie’s background and color everything. The ‘50s setting is rich and painterly, and Rooney Mara gives off a magnetic charm as the young and innocent Therese Belivet. Along with Cate Blanchett channeling Old Hollywood movie star glamour, the pair is enchanting in this dreamy, forbidden love affair.
Anomalisa
“What is it to be human, to ache and to be alive?” The artificial nature of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion animated film “Anomalisa” makes that question far clearer. Through incredible animation that manages remarkable long takes, hilarious sight gags and intimate set dressing, “Anomalisa” is a touching portrait of loneliness and yearning. These figurines have seams, they share the same voice, and we even endure them having sex, but their artificiality makes us hyper aware to all their anomalies. We discover more deeply what it is to have flesh and blood and to be alive.
It was unrealistic to think that J.J. Abrams could deliver a masterpiece on par with “A New Hope” or “The Empire Strikes Back.” What he managed was to make a Star Wars movie. “The Force Awakens” has the spectacle, the whimsy, the humor and the campy screwball charm of the original films. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega are instant stars, Harrison Ford is so at home playing Han Solo again, and hearing John Williams’s score swell to invigorating lightsaber duels and X-Wing dog fights all over again is pure magic. In channeling the same themes of good and evil and the mythos of the Force, “The Force Awakens” has the spirit of a Star Wars classic.
The bros of “Magic Mike XXL” don’t strip because they want to bang chicks. They want to make women smile and make them feel good. “Magic Mike XXL” is a sneaky feminist statement wrapped in a stylish musical and hilarious road trip movie. Channing Tatum is an absolute star who sets it off in his woodshed and quite literally makes sparks. No one moves like he does, but as an actor he’s got a dopey, enthusiastic charm that truly makes him Magic. “Magic Mike XXL” has the scene of the year with Joe Manganiello dancing inside a gas station convenience store, and combined with Steven Soderbergh’s crisp and fluid digital cinematography behind the camera, this film has one massive package.
Pixar’s “Inside Out” develops an elaborate ecosystem and fable to help kids understand and visualize the most complicated aspects of our minds: our emotions. And perhaps more than any Pixar film, it’s the first to reach kids and adults alike on such an intimate, fundamental level of asking who we are and how we function. As we peer inside young Riley’s head, every thought and moment she feels is ripe with humor and possibility, and Director Pete Docter compliments that with daring animation and remarkable color. “Inside Out” shows that sadness as much as happiness shape what we remember, how we grow and the people we become.
Alexandra is a transgender prostitute who just doesn’t want any drama, but after she tells her friend Sin-Dee Rella that her pimp boyfriend Chester has been sleeping with “some fish” (that’s code for, the bitch has a vagina), that’s all she’s going to get. “Tangerine” is a fast-moving, spitfire buddy comedy of an indie that’s a pure riot. The film marches through the seedier, lesser seen streets of Hollywood on Christmas Eve and gives no fucks about what it finds, who they upset and, as a film about African American trans women, what norms they shake up. “Tangerine” is a blast, and though it’s the first movie ever shot entirely on an iPhone, it’s a sun-drenched spectacle.
The most impossible feat in Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” is not that a man can survive on Mars. “The Martian” is refreshingly optimistic, a movie that believes in not just the ingenuity and resourcefulness of mankind but the camaraderie and good nature. It speaks to the power of the Internet and society in the 21st Century to collectively find a solution and rally around a moment in history. It embraces science and logic, it congenially unites our interest and attention, and Matt Damon is perfect as a person we all want to root for to survive. “The Martian” is a fantasy not just for its sci-fi trappings but as a movie about positivity, something so uncommon in 2015.
Aaron Sorkin’s cleverly structured three-act biopic on the life of Steve Jobs expertly plays on the conflict within Steve Jobs’s embattled ideologies. It goes beyond the notion that great men have stepped on others to get to the top, instead reckoning with the idea that being great and being a good person can even be two sides of the same coin. “Steve Jobs” is perfectly Sorkinesque in its dialogue and drilled in performances, and Boyle handles the material like a showman, giving each stage in Jobs’s life a new colorful filter and rhythm to accentuate the corporate jargon and family melodrama. Whether Jobs was accurate to the image depicted in Sorkin’s biopic is beside the point. He captures the image of the myth and legend we’ve created.
Don Hertzfeldt only draws crude stick figures, and his animated short film is only 15 minutes long, but it contains more profound ideas on life than many films this year combined. The colorful geometric shapes create an abstract image of a future way beyond our current sense of space and time, and the absurdist prose and humor about robots writing depressed poetry on the moon show a filmmaker fully in control of his gifts. The stick figure clones of “World of Tomorrow” are beautifully apt, and they serve as a reminder that there’s something utterly human about knowing “you are alive and living and the envy of all of the dead.”
The Look of Silence
I saw “The Look of Silence” in October 2014 and didn’t put it on my best of the year list then because I knew it would come out this year. But now another calendar year has passed and I’ve missed the opportunity to see it again and reward it properly. The documentary is the successor to Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing,” but while this film is less surreal, it’s far more emotional, focusing instead on a human victim rather than the murderers. It’s a harrowing masterpiece and is easily one of the best movies of the decade.
The movie that won the Sundance Audience Prize and Grand Jury Prize quickly became one of the more polarizing, critically reviled titles of the year. They’ve labeled “Me and Earl” as narcissistic, racist, and a Wes Anderson copycat. Upon a second viewing, they have a point, but this film still has some lovely style and moments, a movie about how we learn to better appreciate others after they’re gone. See it with a crowd and see the magic behind it.
Brooklyn
“Brooklyn” is such an old fashioned instant classic it feels as though it could’ve been directed by George Stevens, Michael Curtiz or William Wyler. It’s a lovely period drama about finding home where your heart is without any added freight to bear, and Saoirse Ronan is wonderful.
The best movie about writing since “Almost Famous,” “The End of the Tour” is one of the year’s best character studies and has incredible performances from both Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg channeling intellectually what it is to be famous and fascinating.
“Where to Invade Next” is by far Michael Moore’s most optimistic film, a movie made for American audiences at how the grass is far greener on the other side of the Atlantic, and how we can make these ideas a reality back Stateside.
A better, more realistic movie about drug cartels than even “Sicario,” “Cartel Land” has the look of “Zero Dark Thirty” and the scary realization that there’s no solving the problem of these cartels.
In “It Follows,” sex is no allegory. It’s a movie about forever looking over your shoulder and of being branded with a label and an inner demon you can’t shake. It’s a new horror classic.
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Alex Gibney still goes into “Going Clear” with a pointed agenda, knowing already what he’s going to discover about Scientology, but then the results are scary. In Gibney’s mind, L. Ron Hubbard was disturbed, Tom Cruise is brainwashed, John Travolta is blackmailed, and David Miscavige is the most evil person on Earth.
Trainwreck
“Trainwreck” is a riotously funny rom-com in which the truly daring feminist achievement is in Amy Schumer simply switching the gender roles on a tried and true formula. Bonus points for Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller being amazing weirdoes.
One of the grimmest sits of the year, “Beasts of No Nation” is a brutal, bluntly violent movie about isolationism and the loss of innocence. The kids of this film are lost without clear goals or directions in their fighting, and Cary Fukunaga gets us hypnotically caught in that haze.
Steven Spielberg takes the small scale behind the scenes drama of the Cold War and plays them writ large. It’s a courtroom drama, the stuff of conversation, negotiation and debate, and yet it has all the entertaining and thrilling theatrics of any of Spielberg’s epics.
10 Best Movies I Haven’t Seen Yet: “The Revenant,” “The Hateful Eight,” “The Assassin,” “Mistress America,” “The Duke of Burgundy,” “About Elly,” “45 Years,” “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” “Son of Saul,” “Girlhood”
Michael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is the perfect storm of stereotypes, fear mongering and questionable politics in an overly stylized, testosterone-fueled, action thrill ride. Give Bay a little credit: hand him a real world war story that has become the subject of heated conspiracy theories and he’ll still find a way to pack it with explosions, unseemly blue lens flares and canted angles designed to make his beefed up soldiers look like Transformers.
Quentin Tarantino, a truly favorite director of mine, can be called a lot of unsavory adjectives, but I never thought “boring” could be one of them.
“Rocky” is one of the finest examples of Americana ever put onto film, and “Raging Bull” is among the absolute best movies of all time. But outside of those two obvious choices, the most memorable boxing movies are the ones that go beyond just being a boxing movie. “The Fighter” plays with genre conventions by invoking family dynamics and a drug addicted brother who is more interesting than the protagonist. “Million Dollar Baby’s” final fight isn’t in a ring at all.
The foreign drama “Son of Saul” finds a way to give us yet another new look at the Holocaust, but its innovation is in finding the imminent danger in every moment of these prisoners’ lives. Director Laszlo Nemes shuttles us into the back of the head of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) and shows us things only in his immediate field of vision. There’s a palpable, hushed tension coursing through every scene, and yet it remains impossible to foresee the threat even seconds ahead.
Name me another music biopic that opens with a battering ram. “Straight Outta Compton’s” incredible sense of location is so strongly of the streets and of the Compton neighborhood. It knows how crazy things can get, to the point where it needs to begin with the cops bringing an army to nail some black kids doing drugs. Director F. Gary Gray places the film not in the canon of other music biopics but in the league of a racially charged masterpiece like “Boyz n the Hood” or “Friday,” which Gray also directed starring N.W.A’s Ice Cube.
When Amy Winehouse passed away, the cruel and obvious joke of people reciting, “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no” was repeated on end. She even fit into the superstition of The 27 Club, young artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain who all died far too early in their prime. These labels put her into easy boxes, and her music and her personality was never easy to classify.
