Consuming 2019's final resources

Another year, another 146 movies through my eyeballs and into my brain.

The Oscar nominations have just been announced -- or are about to be, depending on when I actually click the "Publish" button on this post -- so that means, per a tradition that dates back more than 20 years, it's time for me to come clean about what I loved and what I didn't love in 2019.

My 146 movies is five short of my all-time record, but I had nine fewer days to watch movies this year before the Oscar nominations were announced. Having not one, but two international flights to America this year got me within striking distance, but I was never going to realistically shoot for that record. I'm surprised I got even this close.

I have to admit, I thought 2019 was not shaping up to be a very strong year at the movies. When I recorded this podcast -- which I am now happy to promote as something you should listen to -- I said as much, and thought my top five did not include exclusively movies I loved unreservedly.

Well, since that recording, two new movies have entered my top five, and three my top ten. That's more like it. (And on a side note, darn it that the world demands end-of-year opinions before I'm fully ready to give them!)

It's no 2010 or 2013 -- great years whose praises you will see sung later this week on this blog -- but 2019 ended up being pretty darn cool in the end. Not a bad way for a decade to go out.

But before we get to my top ten, my bottom five and the whole darn list, here's the five movies I most regret not being able to see in time to rank them, because they were not yet accessible to me in Australia:

5) Bombshell
4) Harriet
3) A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
2) Waves
1) Uncut Gems

Uncut Gems teased me because it is being distributed by Netflix internationally -- but not until the end of this month.

Okay!

10. Jojo Rabbit - There are two different types of people who dislike Jojo Rabbit: 1) The people who are offended by what it's trying to do, and 2) The people who just don't think it does it very well. Their criticisms were in my mind as I allowed this to eke into my top ten. But then I thought, "It only matters what I think." And I think Jojo Rabbit made me laugh more than almost any film this year, without cheapening its tricky agenda to criticize fascism while also making Adolf Hitler a figure of fun. If anyone could pull it off, it was Taika Waititi -- both as an actor and a director. He's fast becoming one of my favorite filmmakers after two films I cherish this past decade, What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok, and he finishes off the decade with his first entry into my top ten, in what I thought was supposed to be a modest palette cleanser between Thor movies. Instead Waititi offered a thoughtful and sometimes hilarious look at a time when German citizens made bad choices because they didn't understand they were following a monster, and the redemption of one of those citizens, the ten-year-old boy of the title. That he has Hitler as an imaginary friend is a good way of encapsulating the hero worship people, especially young people, can feel toward someone who has been wrongly introduced to them as worthy of that worship, which has a particularly powerful modern-day resonance. Jojo's maturation into a person who would not only help a Jewish girl survive in his crawlspace, but tell Hitler to go fuck himself, is a journey I want to watch any day. Waititi's sort of Wes Anderson stylings (a positive, not a negative for me) and engaging performances across the board, particularly Scarlett Johansson and Thomasin Mckenzie, just make this all the more top ten worthy. (Read my full review here.)

9. I Lost My Body - Animation keeps up its streak of five straight years with a movie in my top ten with this quirky yet profound French movie I saw at MIFF. Yes, it's about a severed hand trying to find its way back to its owner. Yes, that conceit is sometimes played for laughs, though of the extremely tasteful variety. (Who said the French only laugh at broad things like Jerry Lewis?) More often, this is an existential contemplation of the journeys we all go on in life, whether we are a severed hand or the owner of that hand. It's really a parallel story of the two of them, as that owner is an early twentysomething named Naoufel, a pizza deliveryman who was orphaned when he was younger and now lives with his uncle. He meets and falls in love with a girl entirely through a conversation he has with her over an intercom while stuck in her lobby, delivering her a pizza that's very late. The story covers a bunch of twists and turns and also contains flashbacks to his youth, before his parents died. It considers themes of fate vs. free will and also our need to connect with others. I watched Jeremy Clapin's film in a happy place that only non-traditional animated fare can deliver to us, as it's increasingly rare for the resources involved in animated movies to be earmarked for a story aimed at adults. Then again, my kids could watch this and I think they might really like it, though we'd have to get the (gasp!) English language dub.

8. Avengers: Endgame - And an MCU movie finally makes it into my top ten. After direct competitors (Wonder Woman) and tangential properties (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) found spots here the two previous years, the MCU gets a kind of "career achievement award" in 2019. That's not to say I don't love this movie -- I do -- but I may love Infinity War and Thor: Ragnarok just a little bit more, only they had to settle for spots just outside the top ten in more competitive years overall. Anyway, this was a fitting conclusion to all the movies since Iron Man, but what I love about it is not really the conclusion. I knew I was in the presence of something unique for its kind in the first hour of Avengers: Endgame, which takes the time to slow down and ponder just how glum a superhero would feel if he or she failed to prevent half of life in the universe from being extinguished. It's this quirky first hour, which includes an interaction with Thanos that has a truly surprising outcome, that ingratiated me to the crowning achievement of the best directing tandem to happen to the MCU (the Russo brothers). The middle portion involving time travel is also a gas, showcasing the film's great sense for comedy (Paul Rudd really shines as Ant-Man). And even though the final third is more typically a bombastic climax that we often feel like we need to decry -- with good reason -- it contains some really satisfying emotional moments that include permanent resolutions to certain character storylines. In sum, the three hours breeze by, and I think this is 2019's most impressive achievement purely from a logistical standpoint, as it gathers together a million unwieldy story threads and wraps them all up in reasonable ways. So Captain Marvel didn't have much to do. You take the bad with the good in a film like Avengers: Endgame, because there's just so much more good. (Read my full review here.)

7. Hail Satan? - At last, the first documentary in my top ten since Stories We Tell in 2013. That's a crazy stretch of time without any representation from non-fiction films, one that, perhaps not coincidentally, also coincides with my time vetting human rights documentaries for the Human Rights and Arts Film Festival. The one that broke the drought is also, strangely enough, about human rights, but you would never guess that from the title. As it turns out, people who describe themselves as Satanists -- a label that often prompts them to hide their identity, alas -- have a series of tenets of their belief system, which basically boil down to pragmatic ways to treat other people with respect and fairness. In fact, their politics most closely align with progressive politics, which is why Penny Lane's film explores as its narrative core the group's campaign against the displaying of the Ten Commandments on government property in various American states, mostly in the south. Or rather, in keeping consistent with their mischievous approach to political action, they are okay with the Ten Commandments appearing as long as they can also display a statue of their own religious idol, the goat-headed embodiment of Satan known as Baphomet. The sincerity of convictions that place them in the crosshairs of Christian extremists is moving at times. Given what they stand for and how closely it aligns with my own philosophies about the world, I left this movie ready to sign up. (Read my full review here.)

6. Her Smell - The combination of Alex Ross Perry and Elisabeth Moss produces toxic masterworks. They were the writer-director and actor who brought me my #10 movie of 2015, Queen of Earth, and they go even higher in 2019 with another movie of oppressive interiority. Her Smell follows the Hole-like band Something She and its Courtney Love-like lead singer, Becky Something, played by Moss in full-on bitch tornado mode. She rips through bandmates and well-wishers and ex-husbands and anyone who would dare look at her sideways in a series of scenes set in dingy backstage locales, as she and her band attempt to launch a comeback some ten to 20 years after their heyday. Even though I haven't seen this movie, I have to imagine Moss' performance is something like the way John Cassavetes directed Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. She brings a kind of unhinged ferocity that is scary to watch, one fueled by drug addiction, paranoia, insecurity, megalomania, and a basic loathing of anyone and anything that gets in her way. To underscore this, Perry employs a sound design that is the audio equivalent of insanity, using hums and static and distant underwater noises to show us exactly how her mind is working, or failing to work. Fortunately, her deliverance from this hell is something as beautiful to behold as its lead-up is disturbing. May these two continue to make movies together for years to come.

5. Birds of Passage - I almost didn't go see Birds of Passage because it had played at MIFF more than a year before I actually saw it. But it didn't have its wide release until the following year, both in Australia and America, so it being on my radar forever didn't mean it didn't legitimately belong in this ranking year. I was also tossing up whether to see this or The Souvenir, I believe it was, knowing that the other might not get seen at all -- and indeed, I did not end up seeing The Souvenir. Well, obviously I'm glad it all fell into place because I was exposed to a five-star film about the corruption of native Colombians via their involvement in the drug trade, and the decades-spanning war with other cartels that resulted. This isn't normally the type of subject matter I gravitate toward -- I have yet to watch an episode of Narcos -- but when the filmmaking is this great, it almost doesn't matter what the subject matter is. Directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra wowed me a couple years ago with Embrace of the Serpent, but they blew that achievement out of the water with this one. It combines the spiritual of the native ways of the Wayuu people, as seen in the image above, with the very earthbound realities of moving product and claiming territory, often with bloodshed. Needless to say, none of it ends up in a happy place. But getting there is the kind of happiness that any cinephile strives for -- the one that springs from consuming cinema at its finest. (Read my full review here.)

4. Little Women - There may be no movie on my top ten that I thought would have any less business being there than Little Women. Lady Bird was only a four-star experience for me, and Greta Gerwig's screen persona has steadily begun to grate on me over the years. Then you have the fact that adaptations of classic novels tend to be fairly rote experiences with a high floor but also a low ceiling. All of those expectations were upended, not unlike a bowl of popcorn in this movie's most delightful spontaneous moment, by this scintillating cinematic experience, which reaps considerable fruit from Gerwig's bold decision to tell the story non-chronologically. Although it has been adapted for the screen 18 times in various forms, this was actually my first exposure to the story of the March family and its four precocious girls, and after seeing this one, I'm not sure I want to expose myself to any others. Every one of Gerwig's choices works, from revealing the climactic rejection of a marriage proposal at the very beginning of the story, to interweaving scenes of the girls' childhood in a way that mimics the experience of cataloguing the memories of our own lives. Then you've got maybe 2019's best acting ensemble, led (in my personal view) by Florence Pugh, who truly plays the different ages of the family's most problematic sister, Amy. And all the while Gerwig achieves her goal of extracting the story's feminist underpinnings without coming close to alienating viewers who don't agree with her (pretty much all the men are portrayed sympathetically). With a first two features that are the envy of any director out there, the next stop for Gerwig may be the stratosphere. (Read my full review here.)

3. Vivarium - Vivarium may be a victim of bad timing. It spent a couple months at the top of my cumulative rankings before a) I saw my #1 movie for a second time, and b) I decided I couldn’t justify having a #1 movie that almost no critics will be considering as part of 2019. I watched this glorious mind-bender at MIFF in August, certain or at least hopeful that others would get to appreciate it before the year was out, but even at this writing it still only has firm 2020 release dates in Russia, UK and Italy, between the months of March and May. (Plus only this one still photo available online.) But because I don’t push movies seen in one year ahead to the next ranking year except in very rare circumstances (like an advanced screening late in the year), Vivarium has to settle for being #3, having subsequently been surpassed by my #2. Which is probably just as well, because movies this viscerally thrilling and intellectually captivating may not work as well on the second viewing. Lorcan Finnegan’s two-hander is a fantastic jolt of weird as it serves up science fiction in the form of a satire of domesticity. Any laughs produced are of the grim variety, as this is a bleak look at what happens to two people when they … well, I won’t even get into what happens to them, or why, or how – in part because it’s best for you to find out for yourself, but in part because I don’t really know the answers to those questions myself. I will say that Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots – who also starred together in the far-less-successful 2019 film The Art of Self-Defense – sell the frustration and desperation of their scenario with palpable commitment. Also that they are occasionally joined by a third person, whose identity and whose composite of tics and other traits are the weirdest of this film’s many weird elements. “Weird” is most assuredly a compliment in my book, and I can’t wait to see this movie again when it gets a proper release, so the thrill of its unique vision can wash over me again.

2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire - The last film I saw in the previous decade was also nearly my favorite of that decade's last year. An early release on New Year's Eve enabled me to sneak out to the theater, and I was rewarded with a thunderbolt of romance, emotion and creative beauty. It's probably good I didn't see it at night, because it took me ten or 15 minutes to really get on this movie's wavelength, and at night, that could have led to premature grogginess and tuning out. But as I started to understand and appreciate what this film would be doing, it jumped forward for me in leaps and bounds, from thinking "This may be one of the best films of the year" to thinking "This may be one of the best films of the decade." Presumably drawing inspiration from her own relationship with star Adele Haenel, which ended amicably prior to filming, director Celine Sciamma has given us a truly gorgeous meditation on the impermanence of things and the paradoxical desire to freeze them in a moment, as one does with a painting. It is feminist in a way that is almost casual, as it contains nary a moment approaching a screed against men, who are in fact almost not present on screen at all. They are notable by their absence, as the film's two main characters (occasionally joined by a third) live in a sort of paradise of equality during this short time when they are without their patriarchal overlords, or the woman who is their proxy (Haenel's character's mother). In this splendid coastal Eden of late 18th century Brittany, love blossoms, but it, too, is necessarily impermanent, if only because that describes all things in this world. The film also has plenty of thoughts on the creative process and the relationship between the artist and her subject. Portrait of a Lady on Fire contains multitudes. (Read my full review here.)

1. Parasite - And here we have two firsts: 1) My first #1 movie from the continent of Asia, and 2) My first #1 movie that I did not give five stars on Letterboxd when I first saw it. Why I was not at first willing to go higher than 4.5 stars on the consensus best movie of the year, perhaps the first time I've aligned myself so totally with the larger critical community since There Will Be Blood in 2007, remains a bit of a mystery to me. Was seeing it in June too early in the year? Did I have my qualms about the denouement? All doubts were washed away on my second viewing -- on a plane, of all places -- in which I took in Parasite pretty much in a constant state of chills, just because it's so damn good. Rarely has a film so completely switched tone and genre at the midway point and still been as thrilling a success as this. When you do that, you're much more likely to end up with Hancock than with Parasite. From the heist opening to the Hitchcock-in-a-funhouse-mirror second half, the movie remains simultaneously fun and thought-provoking, leaving you in a constant state of surprise and readjustment, and forever unprepared for the ways its importance is creeping up on you. Maybe the niftiest trick Bong Joon-ho pulls off is constantly recalibrating who you are rooting for, or perhaps never letting you root for any of them, while also never failing to demonstrate the ways these characters display a humanity and a callousness that are both relatable. Not only has Bong clearly surpassed Park Chan-wook as South Korea's greatest cinematic export, he's surpassed most directors, period, in the type of unpredictable excitement he brings to any new film, with a craft to match. Through both its themes and its sheer entertainment value, Parasite is the best film of the year. (Read my full review here.)

The five worst

These are my five worst movies of the year, ranked #142 through 146 on the actual chart, but counted down from 5 to 1 to make them easier to read.

5. The Angry Birds Movie 2 - Maybe my problem was not seeing the first one. I'd say I sat there stone-faced throughout the running time of Angry Birds 2, but that would mean disregarding my heavy sighs and eye-rolling. I was astonished to hear the general critical consensus that this is "actually pretty good," because I had only one experience in the theater this year (we'll get to that in a minute) that was more torturous. The absolute waste of talents like Bill Hader, Tiffany Hadish, Awkwafina, Jason Sudeikis, Maya Rudolph, Sterling K. Brown and Peter Dinklage (and the list goes on from there) just deepened the disappointment.

4. Unicorn Store - I guess I don't really like movies where a community supports the delusions of a delusional person (see also Lars and the Real Girl, Brigsby Bear and Welcome to Marwen), because I thought this was pretty much a disaster. Brie Larson -- playing a person in a real world -- believes she's going to get a unicorn? It's as much of a twee misfire as it sounds, and Larson gets further points deducted for being the producer-director. It's also, strangely, a reunion of her and Captain Marvel co-star Samuel L. Jackson under far less fortuitous circumstances.

3. The Beach Bum - Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum share a director, a cinematographer, an approach to assembling a film and even a geographical location, so why is it that I love the former and loathe the latter? I suspect it has something to do with Matthew McConaughey as the most insufferable character I have met at the movies in a couple years, Moondog, a stoner poet who literally does nothing but float from one Florida location to another on a grinning wave of inebriation. That sounds like a fun life, but it's not a fun thing to watch.

2. Stuber - Stupid. No more words are really needed to describe this fiasco, except phrases like "waste of talent" and "waste of celluloid" also come to mind. Indeed I do like Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista in most of their projects, and Betty Gilpin (in a smaller role) is the best part of Glow, but together this is just a trainwreck of a would-be buddy comedy that fails to deliver on a premise that seems promising from the trailers, but is idiotic when actually parsed out in the movie itself. You'll want to delete the Uber app from your phone.

1. Cats - "I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats." That statement could describe any movie I saw in 2019, because every movie I saw in 2019 was better than Cats.

Okay! Whole list time:

1. Parasite
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
3. Vivarium
4. Little Women
5. Birds of Passage
6. Her Smell
7. Hail Satan?
8. Avengers: Endgame
9. I Lost My Body
10. Jojo Rabbit
11. The Perfection
12. The Australian Dream
13. Apollo 11
14. Dolemite is My Name
15. 1917
16. Hustlers
17. Ford v. Ferrari
18. Diane
19. Fyre
20. Marriage Story
21. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
22. The Laundromat
23. Midsommar
24. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
25. Us
26. The Nightingale
27. Brightburn
28. Fighting With My Family
29. Always Be My Maybe
30. Terminator: Dark Fate
31. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
32. The Farewell
33. The King
34. Knock Down the House
35. Klaus
36. Mystify: Michael Hutchence
37. Deerskin
38. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
39. Jumanji: The Next Level
40. The Third Wife
41. Yesterday
42. Sword of Trust
43. The Lighthouse
44. The Upside
45. Good Boys
46. Rocketman
47. The Kid Who Would Be King
48. Toy Story 4
49. Velvet Buzzsaw
50. Homecoming: A Film by Beyonce
51. High Life
52. Brittany Runs a Marathon
53. Pain and Glory
54. The Day Shall Come
55. Paddleton
56. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
57. The Two Popes
58. American Factory
59. Shadow
60. Booksmart
61. It Chapter Two
62. The Irishman
63. Captain Marvel
64. Kursk
65. Extra Ordinary
66. Shazam!
67. Late Night
68. Ready or Not
69. Matthias & Maxime
70. Abominable
71. Child's Play
72. Aladdin
73. Atlantics
74. Arctic
75. Tolkien
76. Five Feet Apart
77. Doctor Sleep
78. Hotel Mumbai
79. Triple Frontier
80. All is True
81. Crawl
82. The White Crow
83. Murder Mystery
84. Knives Out
85. Ash is Purest White
86. Alita: Battle Angel
87. Downton Abbey
88. Under the Silver Lake
89. The Hustle
90. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot
91. Burning Cane
92. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
93. Fast Color
94. In the Tall Grass
95. A Dog's Way Home
96. Head Count
97. Spider-Man: Far From Home
98. Little
99. The Lion King
100. Cold Pursuit
101. In Fabric
102. Wonder Park
103. Gloria Bell
104. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
105. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
106. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
107. The Lodge
108. Escape Room
109. What Men Want
110. The Art of Self-Defense
111. Abducted in Plain Sight
112. Wine Country
113. Honeyland
114. The Good Liar
115. Top End Wedding
116. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
117. Joker
118. Long Shot
119. Missing Link
120. Ma
121. A Vigilante
122. Zombieland: Double Tap
123. Ophelia
124. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes & Shaw
125. Last Christmas
126. The Addams Family
127. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
128. X-Men: Dark Phoenix
129. Isn't It Romantic?
130. Baby
131. Hellboy
132. The Curse of La Llorona
133. After
134. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
135. High Flying Bird
136. Men in Black: International
137. The Dead Don't Die
138. Pet Sematary
139. Serenity
140. Ad Astra
141. Dumbo
142. The Angry Birds Movie 2
143. Unicorn Store
144. The Beach Bum
145. Stuber
146. Cats

And to continue a recent tradition, five titles I thought I needed to isolate for further explanation:

20. Marriage Story - If Noah Baumbach had found just a little bit more balance, this could have been a top ten contender.

62. The Irishman - Impressive aspects, but a slog overall.

84. Knives Out - Yes, you read that right.

117. Joker - After watching this movie, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. I became sure one way or another pretty darn quick.

140. Ad Astra - Just no.

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK. I want comments.

Please?