Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

MIFF: Not the next Tanna, but close

The 2016 film Tanna was not something I saw at MIFF, but I tend to lump it in together with the Melbourne festival experience on the whole. That's because I helped select it to play at the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival (HRAFF) during my two years acting as one of the curators for that festival. Plus the directors are Australian, even if the story they tell is set in Vanuatu among tribal people living in the traditional ways. I love Tanna so much that I've seen it four times and it was my #5 movie of the entire decade. 

When having to cancel my second MIFF film on Saturday required me to pick a second film on Wednesday night, which then ultimately got changed to Friday night due to the soccer, I reverse-engineered a reason for my interest in Ramata-Toulaye Sy's Banel & Adama, set in Senegal. Given I could tell (from the title and the synopsis) that it was a love story, likely a tragic love story, set among people living in the traditional ways, I hoped it might be the next Tanna.

It got closer than I ever thought it would.

I went into the city to work for the second Friday in a row, both for MIFF reasons, though this time it would be only the one movie, unlike the three I'd caught the previous Friday. After a very slow day at work (which I'll mention in a post I've written but not yet published), I got my steps in by walking up to North Melbourne to buy these bike lights I like from a bike shop there. Alas, upon arrival, I found the place swept away, presumably by the pandemic. It was actually the second venerable institution I passed, the other being a kitchen appliance store, that had shuttered sometime in recent history. We've bounced back, healthwise, enough from the pandemic that I tend to forget that its economic repercussions are still rearing their heads.

I still had time to go to my favorite Indian restaurant for a quick dinner before reporting to the Capitol Theatre for the 6 p.m. show.

The Capitol was really the experience I was trying to capture when I first signed up for the cancelled Saturday night movie Mercy Road, and when I selected Banel & Adama for Wednesday. Fortunately, the latter's Friday show was also at the Capitol, so it looks like I was destined to in fact visit this theater in 2023.

Why is the Capitol so great? Well, I've shown you the picture below, or some variation, before, but it was ages ago, so I might as well post again the picture I took last night:

They shut the colors off once the movie starts, but it's really the crazy architecture of the ceiling that I find so pleasing. It's a bold art deco design that you just don't see around anymore, and it makes the Capitol a desirable MIFF destination regardless of what movie is playing.

And this was quite a good one.

Banel & Adama is, quite astonishingly, Sy's filmmaking debut. She was present for the screening, and it prompted me to finally stay for my first Q&A of the festival, despite having an opportunity to do so at almost all of my previous screenings.

Banel (Khady Mane) is a young woman in a Senegalese village who is desperately in love with her husband, Adama (Mamadou Diallo), the son of the deceased tribal chief. It's Adama's birthright to become the next chieftain, but he's only 19 years old and another tribal elder has been serving the function while he comes of age. Adama rejects this opportunity, partially out of a genuine desire not to do the job but partly because Banel wants him all to herself. She's got an idea that they will move out of the village and live in an abandoned house that is buried in sand. If they have the initiative to dig the house out, they can live there -- but the locals all worry that the house is cursed. And Adama's rejection of the chieftainship may be making the curse worse, because the village is in severe drought and the cattle begin dying.

I won't talk too much more about the direction this goes, but it deviates from the Tanna template in a number of ways that make it a pretty imperfect comparison. Just because two films are both set in tribal communities and involve romances does not make them worth stacking up next to each other, though I don't think you're going to blame me if one reminded me of the other on the surface. We movie people are wired to see such similarities in determining our potential interest in any given film. 

However, this movie's direction appealed to a different side of my cinephile brain, one that responds to portrayals of psychological disturbance and approaching apocalypse. Sy is extraordinarily gifted in all the aspects required of a filmmaker, from framing to visual camera distortions to sound design -- to say nothing of her ability to get adequate performances out of her novice actors. I say "adequate" because only one or two roles require much range, one of which is Mane in the title role, who gives a truly accomplished performance for a first-timer. The film even required light use of visual effects and other practical effects with some degree of difficulty. 

The accomplishment of Banel & Adama is as impressive as it is because it both comes from a part of the world where we don't see a lot of cinema, and is from someone who is directing her first feature. She did go to film school, as I learned in the Q&A afterward, and I believe she also grew up in France, so it's not like she's just some local Senegalese phenom who picked up a camera one day and started filming.

The totality of this experience was one of feeling immersed in all the tools of cinema, and it's a good reminder not to disregard cinema from particular corners of the world due to a regrettable assumption that they're going to be unsophisticated in some way. 

The Q&A moderator didn't select my question from among the ones sent in to her on Slido -- this is the first MIFF where they've used that technology rather than a roving MIFF volunteer with a microphone -- but I loved listening to Sy talk, and was sympathetically amused to hear her final answer to the question of what comes next for her. She's been on the festival circuit since the film debuted at Cannes, so she laughed and said she just wanted to get some sleep. 

Tonight is my final MIFF movie in the theater, before MIFF shifts online for a final week involving a limited selection of the festival's films. 

Best of the 2010s

If you're wondering what the hell the art is for this post, well, I'll tell you.

I've decided I'm tired of giving away the farm with the poster that accompanies a momentous post like the one you are about to read.

In early 2010, when I revealed my best of the 2000s on this blog, I led with a poster of Donnie Darko. It was a well-earned congratulations for Darko, but it had the effect of removing any suspense from the list I was about to reveal. In fact, having already given it away, I listed the movies from 1st to 25th, rather than a countdown, as is more customary.

Well, I've developed more of a flair for the dramatic since then.

I still give away my #1 of a particular year with the poster, as I did earlier this week with Parasite, but at least for the decade, you won't know my choice until the very end. Which is good, because it's a weird choice, at least by most people's standards, and I want to delay you falling out of your chair by at least a few minutes.

In fact, I think the whole list might be a bit weird. There are certainly some solid critical and popular favorites in there, but there are plenty of eccentric choices, and then just the ones that flew under most people's radars, and are special only to me. But I think that's exactly what a list like this should be. If you only go with the most critically lauded choices, that's a bit boring, and is probably not consistent with your actual favorites. If you only go with popular choices, then you are too populist, and again, that's probably not the real you. It's the eccentric and under the radar choices that are the lifeblood of a list like this. They wormed their way from screenplay to production to post production to market and into my heart. They spoke to me specifically in a way that they didn't speak to others, and that's the magic of cinema. I wouldn't have it any other way.

And so yes, in just a moment, I will begin counting down my top 25 films of the decade from #25 to #1. Why 25? Because it's what I did last time. And because I'm going in the reverse order from last time, I will start with shorter blurbs and save the longer blurbs for my top ten, which I think will be a bit goofy from a typographical standpoint, but is consistent with their greater importance to me. Stay tuned tomorrow for the post that goes behind the scenes on the 18-month project it took me to get to this point.

Just a side note: There are several films on this list that debuted at a film festival one, or in one case even two, years before they became available in general release. Therefore, not all the release years you see here will line up with what you might find on IMDB. For English language films, I have used the year in which the movie became available to me. For foreign language films, I have used the year in which it was released in its native country, which may not be the same year I ranked it. In any case, it's a system that makes sense to me.

Okay, let's get this thing started.

But first, an explanation of that poster art.

This is a hybrid of the posters for Daybreakers, the film released on the first wide release date of 2010, and Clemency, the film released on the last wide release date of 2019. So in effect, the first movie of the decade and the last.

Or it could just be that my #1 movie of the decade is Daybrency, a movie about a death row prison warden who has the solemn duty of executing vampires.

Since it isn't, here are my actual top 25, starting with ...

25. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma) - As I only saw this movie for the first time two weeks ago, it seems miraculous I'd allow it onto my top 25, so #25 is a fitting spot for it, even though that may ultimately be too low. It probably goes without saying that it's also the only film on this list I've seen only once. But once was enough to have Celine Sciamma's film seared into my brain in the most beautiful way possible. It's one of this decade's most involving love stories in one of the decade's most gorgeous settings, and it has a lot to say (quite unobtrusively) about feminism and the relationship between artist and subject. As with a number of films yet to come on this list, it also deals movingly with the melancholy impermanence of things, especially things we love. I can't wait to see it again.

24. BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee) - BlacKkKlansman has its detractors, but they can shut up. You don't take on as much as Spike Lee takes on here without making a few missteps, but they pale in comparison to what Lee gets right. Lee uses his trademark techniques to give us a version of himself at his very best, from the dolly shots he's been doing since the 1980s, to using humor to deflate tension, to the carnival-esque exaggerations he believes are necessary to make his points. Yet there is also something consummately mature about BKKK, be it Lee's approach to the more realistic scenes or his conspicuous desire to be inclusive -- even the police, some of the greatest enemies of African-Americans of the last decade, get a fair shake here. But just when you think Lee has made a feel-good, Hollywood-ending good time, he punches us between the eyes with the strident reminder that racism is still out there, and as pernicious as ever.

23. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen) - Coming into this year, I considered the Coens' best movie since Fargo and my #3 of 2013 to be a real contender for my top ten of the decade. Unfortunately, you never know which viewing of a beloved movie will underwhelm you slightly, and that was the case with my fourth viewing of Llewyn Davis last month. The previous three were pretty great, though, keeping it barely in my top 25. The Coens revisit the story of Odysseus in a way much more satisfying to me than O Brother Where Art Thou?, as this Oscar Isaac-led odyssey is a masterwork of misanthropy and missed opportunity. Llewyn Davis is not a bad guy, not at his core, but he is blind to what the universe can offer him due to a combination of pride, displacement and mourning. Therefore, he ends up with pretty much nothing. It's beautifully shot by Bruno Delbonnel and poignant in an acerbic way that only the Coens have really mastered.

22. Red State (2011, Kevin Smith) - I didn't think there was much chance that my #2 of 2011 would make this shortlist, given how the cinephile population disrespects its director and mostly fails to consider this movie an exception to his general output. That kind of thing rubs off on you. But when I rewatched Red State this year, I was reminded again why I escalated it to such heights, specifically the performances Smith gets and the innovative camera usage, particularly for him. Religious extremism has rarely been as scary as it is under Michael Parks' Abin Cooper, and I'm still hearing, echoing in my mind, the unnerving way he pronounces the word "godlessness." It's a document full of surprises, both from its narrative and from its director, and it's a vital one.

21. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) - I fully expected Birdman backlash to knock my #1 movie of 2014 (and the only best picture winner on this list) out of my top 25. But that's why I rewatched my contenders this year. I kind of fell in love with Birdman all over again on my October rewatch, and it wasn't just the still-jaw-dropping technique. The writing is great here, the acting is great here, and the concept is really great -- an exploration of feelings of mounting irrelevance and failure, tinged with special effects that only make the central gimmick trickier, and also deepen the film's existential themes. Riggan Thomson may be the type of rich white man whose problems are no longer our primary focus in 2020, but that doesn't mean he's not a person. Birdman examines his personhood from every conceivable angle.

20. Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - It was probably inevitable that my second viewing of the 162-minute Toni Erdmann, the second longest movie on this list and my #1 of 2016, would not be as great as my first, because the first was one of my two best theater experiences of the decade (along with my #7). But I can't forget the way I/we laughed like gassed up lunatics, in the funniest scene of the decade, and that only two minutes after the end of this scene, probably still suffering the physical after effects of the laughter, I was moved to tears. Maren Ade's film has it all and probably more than that in the affecting story of a professional woman and her kooky dad, who is trying desperately to connect with her by publicly trolling her, wearing a wig and false teeth. They were supposed to make an American remake, but I hope that never happens, because Toni Erdmann is pretty much perfect as is.

19. What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel) - This may be the most unassuming movie to make my best of the decade, though it does have some competition from a couple titles in my top ten. There's not any special technique to McGehee and Siegel's film nor themes we haven't seen elsewhere, just superlative filmmaking and acting all around, and a story that touches you in the best possible way. Young actress Onata Aprile may actually be the film's special technique as she gives a performance that is both understated yet perfectly emoted, as she's passed around first between her father and her mother, then between the estranged new partners of both parents, who are the real parents of this story. Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan are believably toxic and self-absorbed in their own ways, but the film really belongs to Alexander Skarsgard and Joanna Vaderham, consistently giving a good name to people who just try to do the right thing. What Maisie Knew is one of my favorite right things of the decade.

18. Zootopia (2016, Byron Howard & Rich Moore) - Every time I doubt the potency of Zootopia, I see it again, and I say "Oh yeah, right." I'm not sure how Disney pulled off an animated movie designed for children that is both stupendously entertaining and as politically vital as this; in fact, it is so pointed in its progressive good intentions that you could almost call it strident. But "strident" suggests something that is unpleasant to experience, and Zootopia is the opposite, having something for everyone, even getting through to those who align themselves with the side of the political aisle that supports oppressing minorities and caging immigrants. The metaphor of predators and prey living together happily in a sort of utopia is the type of agenda that brings chills to my spine, but as executed here, also tears to my eyes and laughter to my lungs.

17. 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle) - My #1 movie of 2010 has since been bested by several other films from that year, very high up on this list, as you will soon see. But I still have a soft spot for Boyle's thrillingly creative way of documenting a man's five-plus day struggle with his hand stuck between two rocks in a remote canyon in Utah, a real-life scenario that prompted him to do something to his own body most of us could never imagine having the nerve and resolve to do, even to save our own lives. Any sense of stasis and claustrophobia you'd think this subject might engender is exploded by all the visual tricks, fantasy sequences and other cinematic derring-do Boyle had accumulated to that point of his career, all culminating in an enormously satisfying emotional payoff. James Franco does the rest.

16. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins) - This is the only film in my top 25 that I didn't see in time to rank in its given year (though I did see it in the theater); not only that, I also only just saw it this past year, making its rapid ascent up my list of favorites all the more impressive. My first viewing in February told me it was a contender, but the second was when I just sat awash in the beauty -- and yes, sorrow -- that Jenkins captures on screen. There may have been no more urgent cinematic yawp this decade that feels less self-righteous and lessony. It's just a forthright look at the joys and indignities that African-American families have experienced for decades, through the lens of gifted storytellers, and from the mouths of one of the decade's best acting ensembles. Beale Street may not be able to talk, but fortunately, Barry Jenkins can.

15. A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) - Farhadi may have had the greatest decade of any director, as three of his films were in legitimate consideration for my top 25. A Separation, my #1 of 2011, bested The Past and Everyone Knows but forms a trio with them in Farhadi's career-long exploration of the way the low-level disputes between families and neighbors can play out as intricate social mysteries. That's maybe too reductive a description of what Farhadi is doing, but there's no doubting his skill at doing it, and A Separation is his most exquisitely detailed and painful example of how life can unravel through miscommunications and microaggressions that get blown out of proportion. Specifically here, he examines how marriages can fail even when everyone wants to compromise. To watch A Separation is to be in its thrall.

14. Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater) - And five years later, Boyhood finally wins the battle with Birdman. I may have been more wowed by the latter's flashier technique in 2014, but Linklater's 12-years-in-the-making critical darling is probably the more daring cinematic experiment, one that pays rich dividends. (It also makes him one of two directors, along with the director of my #11, to have a movie appear both this decade and last.) The coming of age of Mason Evans Jr. hits a cinematic sweet spot for me that has been present in many a past favorite, which I described in this post as the "uncontrollable slippage of time." Although there are plenty of moments that explore this theme, in terms of sheer tugging at my emotional heartstrings, there's no better 1-2 punch than Mason's mom painting over her kids' height measurements as if it were nothing, followed by Mason's bestie trying to keep up on his bike as the family rides out of town, never to be seen again. Such is life.

13. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-hoo) - I only just blurbed about Parasite earlier this week when I named it my #1 of 2019. But I could never be all blurbed out on a film with this many angles and this much depth. Why it's not only my best film of the year but also one of the best of the decade is that it has a little something for everyone, but not in some pandering, safe-for-the-multiplexes way. Bong's film entertains, educates and excavates in equal measure, that last somewhat literally as it explores the way those who are metaphorically buried in society try to assert their own prerogatives and entitlements. They are both victims and victimizers, as are the rich family who may only be nice (and only superficially) because they can afford to be. None of us are going to come to good ends if we can't figure out how to better share the dividends a prosperous world has to offer.

12. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery) - So #MeToo rascal Casey Affleck is in this. So what. He spends most of his time hidden from view in the decade's best film about people in sheets since Django Unchained. All kidding aside, I did not see this as Affleck's story of loss, dislocation, purgatory, and yes, the uncontrollable slippage of time. I saw it as any person's, as every person's. The sheet has a way of neutering and democratizing the protagonist so you can project yourself onto its blank slate, a feat I accomplished incredibly well my first time (my #1 movie of 2017), not quite so well the second, and then incredibly well again the third. That averages out to #12 of the decade for this spooky, thought-provoking, emotionally rich and existentially expansive realization of something that might have originated as a joke. A Ghost Story is anything but. It's the type of heady mindbender that dominated my list last decade, but was in regrettably short supply this time around.

11. Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu) - Beyond the Hills is the only 2012 film to make this list, but I ranked it in the year it became available in English-speaking countries (2013), making it the only film since Run Lola Run in 1999 to be #1 in a year other than that of its initial release. This ranking also makes Mungiu one of only two directors (along with Richard Linklater) to make this list both this decade and last (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). But let's not waste all the available space on trivia. Beyond the Hills is the most painful breakup movie of the decade, which is strange, because it's actually a movie about a young lesbian who may need to have the devil exorcised from her in a Romanian convent -- or so the nuns and priest think when they just can't figure out anything else. Mungiu is a master of mis en scene and the slow-burning unraveling of good intentions.

And now presenting my top ten, now with Slightly Longer Blurbs!

10. Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer) - Under the Skin is the Forgetting Sarah Marshall of this decade. If that seems like a weird comp, let me explain. Marshall pulled off the nifty feat of being #18 of both the year it was released and the decade, which meant that in only two years, its importance increased to me in leaps and bounds. Under the Skin has had longer to make the ascent, but it was "only" #10 of the year it was released before landing at #10 for the decade. I just kept watching Under the Skin -- four times in total -- and each time became more amazed by its indelible weirdness. Stephen Metcalf of The Slate Culture Gabfest openly wondered if it was just a "nothingburger," something undeniably interesting to consume that has no thematic protein. I don't pretend to know what Glazer was saying for sure in this movie, and I suspect he wouldn't want to ascribe one definitive meaning, but it's clear he's presenting for us notions related to understanding the peculiarities of the human race as though it were being viewed by an alien. That is pretty much literally what is happening, but there's so much more going on here, accompanied by Micah Levy's unforgettable score and some of the most brilliant and technically accomplished abstract filmmaking of the decade (I still don't know how they filmed that motorcycle at high speed from behind). Even as an alien, Scarlett Johansson is the ultimate viewer surrogate, making us look at ourselves -- what we love, what we hate, how we treat people -- like few other films.

9. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader) - In the rewatching I did for this list, I rewatched First Reformed in November of 2018 -- and then again in October of 2019. That second rewatch was not because I doubted anything about my #1 movie of 2018, but just for pleasure -- a particularly telling comment when rewatch slots were at a premium in finalizing this list. The least likely director to make this list (other than maybe my #22), Paul Schrader delivered something that kept me rigid in my seat with engagement and thrills. "Thrills" are not a word you would typically use for something Schrader himself characterized as "slow cinema," but I found the way this film addressed the tug-of-war between hope and hopelessness that exists in any person to be thrilling indeed. It's a battle waged both by the environmentalist and the man of God, and Ethan Hawke plays both in this film, a pastor of a small church who has his eyes opened to the way we are destroying our world, and implicitly, to the way God is failing to save us from that. This mostly realistic film has a couple wild flights of fancy that just cement First Reformed as a perfect way we can use the tools of cinema to augment truth. On a personal note, it reminded me of my dad, who has taken on environmentalism with a vengeance in the past two decades, and before that served as facilities manager for an 18th century church not unlike Ernst Toller's. His own brave struggle against hopelessness is the only way we can continue to fight the good environmental fight.

8. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017, Osgood Perkins) - And a horror movie makes my top ten of the decade. Not just any horror movie, but maybe the only horror movie of this decade that truly wormed itself inside me and wouldn't leave, maybe the only horror movie of this decade that gave me as many chills on my third viewing as it did on my first. (And as it's the only horror movie of the decade that I watched three times, that's saying something in and of itself.) For reasons that seem very unsatisfactory, this film is known as February in certain markets, Australia included, but that title just doesn't have the same knack for expressing the depths of Osgood Perkins' terrifying portrayal of devil possession on the wintry grounds of an all-girls boarding school. Shot in a throwback 70s style that became popular this decade, The Blackcoat's Daughter follows a revelatory Keirnan Shipka as she starts acting stranger as a result of ... well, something she can see out of the corner of her eye, just over the shoulder of whoever she's talking to. We see what this thing is, eventually, and we also see what it inspires her to do. The movie is cold and dark and spooky as hell, featuring indistinct voices on the other end of telephone lines, and furnaces that are the sites of profane prayer rituals. It's a distinct enough treasure in today's film landscape to be worthy of my highest decade-end honors.

7. Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter) - In a great decade for animation, it may be no surprise that my highest ranked #1 movie of the year is a Pixar movie. (But, it may be a surprise that my highest ranked #1 is only #7 for the decade -- I guess you really can't be sure what's going to endure with you when you first see it.) Like a couple other films in my top ten I have yet to discuss, Inside Out left me sobbing in the theater, an especially embarrassing outcome considering that my family was sitting there watching with me. But it was that communal experience -- the theater was full with similar families on a special preview screening -- that helped make this as indelible an experience as it was. When we weren't crying, we were in hysterics, as Inside Out is the family film that truly has everything: heart, humor, emotional maturity, cute characters, a high concept, and also one of the most profound considerations of how the human brain works that you are likely to see on film, all the more incredible for the fact that it can be consumed quite intuitively by a child. My youngest son was not with us -- he was only 18 months old -- but the four-year-old had no trouble groking what was going on here, and even had his own insightful comments about it afterward. Inside Out has not remained at quite the same stratospheric level for me on two subsequent viewings, but that was probably inevitable as there is literally no place for a film like this to go but down. For all the reasons listed above, it remains one of the most outstanding accomplishments of this, or one might say any, decade.

6. Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda) - So much for not liking a movie if you watch it under less than ideal circumstances. I was recovering from having a tooth pulled when I watched the movie that introduced me to Hirokazu Kore-eda, the prolific filmmaker who made several other great films this decade, including Shoplifters. I watched it on my laptop while lying in bed. But the waterworks produced by this film had nothing to do with the agony in my teeth. Kore-eda makes perhaps the most high concept of his many humanist family dramas, presenting us with the impossible scenario of two families who discover that they have been raising each others' sons for the past seven years as a result of a mix-up at the hospital. Do they switch back, or not? A story that sounds like it has its roots in an outrageous and tawdry tabloid scandal is perhaps the most thought-provoking movie on parenting of the entire decade, wrestling as it does with themes of nature vs. nurture, biological blood ties vs. practical family ties, and simply right vs. wrong. I don't know that I can think of a tighter or more perfect script from this past decade, as there's nary a wasted scene, and nary a line of dialogue that doesn't in some way advance the unimaginable dilemma at the film's core. Kore-eda established himself as the modern Ozu this past decade, and this is his greatest achievement.

5. Tanna (2016, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean) - If I needed one single justification for watching a hundred human rights movies, most of them documentaries, over the course of two years for the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), then Tanna is it. Upon queuing it up for viewing one night in August of 2016, I looked at it as no different from my other "HRAFF homework," perhaps even slightly more warily, as I considered movies about native peoples to be very well-intentioned but to contain limited upside. Boy was I wrong about that. Two hours later, I was bawling like a baby and quivering with a mind newly opened about the possibility of me loving a film like this. By the following May I had already seen it three times, the last two utterly of my own choosing, and the last one on the big screen at the festival itself. I was overjoyed when it was nominated as best foreign language film the January before that May, and though I don't recommend it to just anyone, I have already made several converts. (Side note: My wife also receives a thank you in the film, as she sat on the board that approved some additional funding for the film.) Tanna is quite simply my favorite love story of the decade, though it's weirdly a heterosexual love story that's standing in for a gay one. Wawa (Marie Wawa) and Dain (Mungau Dain) can't marry each other because she is arranged to be married to a man from another tribe, to keep the peace between them. Being able to love who you want, in a way that seems like it mirrors the fight for gay marriage, is one of the many beautiful dreams this beautiful film strives for.

4. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) - This is probably the movie in my top ten that will make the most other top tens, or has made them, since most of those posted a couple weeks ago. But there's a reason for that. Among David Fincher's many well-oiled machines, this may be my favorite. The story of the rise of Mark Zuckerberg himself may not be inherently interesting, but the story of the rise of social media should be an enduring document for decades to come, especially when told by a storyteller with the prodigious gifts of Fincher. Assisted by probably my favorite score of the decade from my favorite musician (Trent Reznor), Fincher gives us a blow-by-blow origin story of the dominant new communication modality of our times, a he-said/he-said/sometimes-she-said account of ambition and betrayal, told with the whip-smart writing of Aaron Sorkin and performances to match. Jesse Eisenberg offers us a sociopath who also reminds us of every insecure misfit we know, himself a slave to the very phenomenon of FOMO that he would single-handedly cultivate -- or steal, if you believe the Winklevai. And it all grew out of a lonely walk back to Harvard from the bar where he'd just been dumped by his girlfriend for being too much of an ass, scored to Reznor's "Hand Covers Bruise." It may have been the most impactful bruise of the 21st century.

3. Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell) - While my #2 and #1 spots on this list were pretty etched in stone coming in, with only the order uncertain, my #3 was totally wide open, allowing a recent rewatch to really sway me one way or another. I was surprised that this viewing swayed me to only my 7th ranked movie of 2010, Rabbit Hole. Surprised because it's a movie about grief, and I have been fortunate never to have had to grieve someone who was very close to me or taken long before their time. That's the prospect facing Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as they recover (eight months later) from their young son having been hit by a car. David Lindsay-Abaire's adaptation of his own play was also an incredibly surprising choice for Mitchell after he'd directed the sensationalist films Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. But he was the right director to get painfully honest and precise performances from Eckhart and Kidman, not to mention a wonderful supporting cast that includes Sandra Oh, Dianne Wiest and Miles Teller -- the last of whom plays the shell-shocked teenager who was behind the wheel, who writes himself a comic book about alternate dimensions to try to wish himself out of the events of this one. This is a humanistic masterpiece that provides truth in its every moment, and it left me a shattered, snotty wreck even on my third viewing of it, even though I was in a vacation house in Hawaii and I knew everything that was going to happen. Rabbit Hole is that good.

2. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) - How did a movie I gave only four stars out of five when I first saw it, and was only the #7 film of its year, climb all the way up to my #2 of the decade, with a real shot at #1? Repeat viewings. In fact, six total viewings, tying it for the most this decade with my #1 movie (and in three fewer years). With each new exposure to Harmony Korine's collage-like ode to the linked ideas of celebration, belongingness, aggression and misspent youth, I became a little more fascinated and entranced by the achievement. It's also the best cinematic encapsulation I've seen of the melancholy of staying at a party too long, specifically, and of things ending, generally. Some people whose jaws are now dropping at this choice will have mistaken this for some kind of T&A-inspired bit of disposable youth culture garbage, but I feel sorry for them, because they have not seen (or heard, thanks to Skrillex and Cliff Martinez) the real Spring Breakers. It probably takes at least one viewing to figure out what you've really got here, as indicated by my original four-star rating, but it's so much -- a non-judgmental insight into various different people trying to find and understand themselves in a Southern Florida that represents, for them, a sort of utopia. Even if that utopia involves guns, drugs and gold teeth in the form of one of the decade's great characters, James Franco's Alien, who at his core is just as uncertain and scared as any of us.

1. Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard) - If you had told me my #1 movie of the decade would be an animated film, I would have been very surprised -- until I realized that Toy Story would have been my #2 movie of the 1990s, and very close to overtaking Pulp Fiction. When it came down to a choice between this and my #2, who were the only two serious contenders for this top spot (and are just as diametrically opposed as Toy Story and Pulp Fiction), the deciding factor was the sense of ownership. I feel like Tangled is mine, and there is probably no movie I recommend to people from this past decade with more of a sense that I am its personal ambassador. That's because I was the first person I knew who saw Tangled, on the day of its release on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2010, after having just written a snarky post about the movie's stupid title earlier in the day. That set the stage for me to be overwhelmed by the degree to which it surpassed my expectations, probably by more of a margin than any other film in the decade. I laughed -- for a full minute in the case of Flynn's line just before the above image. I cried -- multiple times near the end. And the rest of the time, chills were never far from the surface. All three things still occurred on my sixth viewing two weeks ago, tying with my #2 for the most viewings this decade. (Oh, and as a sign of my fierce loyalty in the ongoing Tangled vs. Frozen debate, I didn't even see Frozen II.) As a final bit of evidence, I've written about Tangled more than any other single film on this blog, tagging it 11 times in posts not including this one, one more than Avatar (so maybe that's not saying as much as I thought). Simply put, there is no film from the 2010s I cherish more than I cherish Tangled, and that's why it is my #1.

Did you fall out of your chair? If so, are you okay?

Here's the complete list together in one shot, followed by honorable mentions.

25. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma)
24. BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee)
23. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen)
22. Red State (2011, Kevin Smith)
21. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
20. Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade)
19. What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)
18. Zootopia (2016, Byron Howard & Rich Moore)
17. 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle)
16. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins)
15. A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi)
14. Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)
13. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho)
12. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery)
11. Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu)
10. Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer)
9. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader)
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017, Osgood Perkins)
7. Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter)
6. Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
5. Tanna (2016, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean)
4. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher)
3. Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell)
2. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine)
1. Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard)

Honorable mentions (listed alphabetically): Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater), The Breadwinner (2017, Nora Twomey), Hell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie), The Last Five Years (2015, Richard LaGravenese), mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky), Other People (2016, Chris Kelly), Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris), The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson), Tangerine (2015, Sean Baker), Whiplash (2014, Damien Chazelle)

Near misses

Before I go, I want to quickly highlight four films that would have been contenders if not for shenanigans related to their releases that prompted me to disqualify them. The first two were films released in 2009 in their home country, but which I saw and ranked with my 2010 films. My personal system involves categorizing them with their foreign release year, so I had to leave them off -- I can't have a "2009, [Director's Name]" in parenthesis after a title on a best of the 2010s list. Third is a movie that had festival debuts in 2009, a very small release in 2010 and then a wider release in 2013. This I might have justified including, but ultimately ruled against it out of confusion how best to handle it. The last is a film that had only festival premieres in 2019, including MIFF where I saw it, but for most of the world will be a 2020 film, meaning I have decided to consider it for the next decade even though I have already ranked it in my 2019 year-end list. We'll see how I handle the release year in parenthesis dilemma ten years from now.

1) Agora (2009, Alejandro Amenabar) - Amenabar's story of 4th century Egyptian philosopher Hyapatia (Rachel Weisz) is a sword-and-sandal epic unlike any other, as it grapples with science vs. religion during the ascendancy of Christianity in a way that is thought-provoking and moving. I saw it twice in the theater and I'm sure it would have made my top 25.

2) Mother (2009, Bong Joon-ho) - My favorite Bong film before Parasite, Mother represents an early version of Bong's trademark balancing of humor and tragedy in a story of a mentally challenged teenager, his fiercely protective mother and a murdered girl. It's filmmaking at its finest.

3) Mr. Nobody (2009, Jaco van Dormael) - This head-tripper sci-fi flashback movie in which a 118-year-old man (Jared Leto) remembers various versions of his past life is truly a singular vision. I only saw it once but I gave it five stars on Letterboxd without hesitation.

4) Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - Another head-tripper about a couple (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) dealing with the bizarre circumstances they find themselves in after touring a house in one of those cookie cutter planned communities. I can't wait for the rest of the world to see this.

Please comment, share your own top ten, whatever -- just please engage with me on this. Ends of decades don't come along every day. They don't come along every week, or month, or year, or dec -- okay scratch that last one.

But as a sign of how rarely they come along, the next time I write one of these lists, I will be 56 years old. Yikes.

Engage with me now before I'm an old man.

Tanna: This year's Creed

I'll explain that potentially confounding title in a moment, but first:

Fucking Tanna.

Excuse my language, but that's all I could say in December, after my second viewing of Australia's first best foreign language Oscar nominee: "Fucking Tanna." And if that needs explaining, I'm not mad at Tanna. Far from it. In fact, it had so reduced me, emotionally, that the only way I could think to describe its impact on me was to call out its pernicious effectiveness as an example of a medium designed to manipulate us -- in the best sense of that word -- via a slow shake of the head and a seemingly incongruous expletive.

You've heard of Tanna by now, if you follow the Oscars, but you certainly wouldn't have heard about it last August, when I first watched it, or last December, when I confirmed its lofty spot in my year-end rankings with a rewatch. So Friday night's viewing was the third one, as it took its rightful spot in the lineup of this year's Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), which I helped curate. A rightful spot we were determined to deny it because the movie is already available on DVD and digital rental, a reality that made us less likely to sell tickets to it.

Or so we thought in September. But as the months went along and it ultimately got an Oscar nomination, we thrust it back into contention, and there it was in the program. And it turns out our optimism was justified. Last night's showing was not a sellout, but it was damn near close, and the co-director, Bentley Dean, appeared afterward for a Q&A, coming across as thoughtful, gracious and funny. I shook his hand afterward, in part because my wife was talking to him -- she had helped approve some funding for Tanna in her job with the Victorian film body, and was in fact thanked in the credits. Which was the cherry on the top of her first viewing last night, the other cherry being that she loved it (almost) as much as I do.

So what does this movie have to do with Creed?

I'll tell you.

1) Both were my #2 ranked movie of their respective years, consecutive years as it happens.

2) Both were movies I gave five stars on Letterboxd.

3) Both were movies I saw three times before a year had passed since my first viewing.

4) In both cases, I saw them a third time before I saw the only movie that bested them, my #1 of the year, a second time. Last year I saw Inside Out for a second time only a few days after my third Creed viewing. I have yet to see Toni Erdmann a second time, though I'm not currently expecting to see it tomorrow, to complete the parallel.

5) The dates of the viewings even align in a sort of weird way. Although the first viewings were not aligned, date-wise (August vs. November), my second viewings of each movie came only a few weeks apart (Creed on November 30th, Tanna on December 15th), and the third viewings were only a month apart on the calendars of their respective years -- exactly a month apart, in fact (Creed on June 12th of last year, Tanna on May 12th of this year).

6) And I'm not going to even talk about the shared skin color of the stars of both films because that's really not relevant, and the cultures of the people in question are as different as they could be. The only reason I'm even not talking about it, as it were, is because I can't avoid the allure of even superficial similarities when making this type of side-by-side comparison.

There's even a funny way the films are inversely related, in terms of my own experience watching them. In the case of Creed, I saw it the first two times in the theater before seeing it a third on video (for my wife's first time). It was the opposite with Tanna, as I did not see it in the theater until the third viewing -- which was also my wife's first time.

And I don't know if it was because of that theatrical setting for my third viewing, but here's the part where my experience with the two films diverges. While I was conscious of my appreciation of Creed dropping just a tick on the third viewing, it was the opposite with Tanna. I feel like each viewing of this beautiful, touching, magnificent film is giving me a little more than the one before it, which is crazy, because I gave it five stars after the first viewing. Simply put, I spent most of my Friday Tanna viewing tingling with the same goosebumps I lamented not getting in this post.

Funnily enough, there's also a Tanna connection to that post I just linked to, discussing the thrills I'm not getting from movies that rely too heavily on CG (Goosebumps being the example in that post). You wouldn't expect CG to be a word that would come anywhere near a movie set on the island of Vanuatu and enacted by the natives in a recreation of a story from their own history. But in the Q&A afterward, it somehow came up that a very small amount of computer graphics was indeed necessary. There's a scene in the film where two tribes exchange kava and pigs to symbolize a peace treaty between them, but apparently, they did not finish filming before someone thought they were done and roasted one of the pigs. So, yes indeed, a pig was inserted digitally.

Could have fooled me.

So here's hoping this little additional dose of Tanna-related PR will bring more eyeballs to this phenomenal achievement.

See it. Love it.

If you do the former, you won't be able to help doing the latter.

Oscars alignment

There are years when my own year-end list has been heavily aligned with the Oscars, as when my #1 Birdman won best picture in 2014, when my #1 A Separation won best foreign language film in 2011, and when my #1 Inside Out won best animated feature last year.

Rarely do all three types of alignment occur in the same year.

That's what's happening this year, when my top five movies of the year are all nominated for three of the four awards that honor an entire feature length film (and not one of its specific collaborators). The only category I missed is one on which I pretty much always miss: best documentary feature. (I've only seen two of the nominees, and didn't have either of them ranked higher than 58th.) Seven of my top ten films are actually nominated in one of the three remaining such categories, with only Swiss Army Man (#6), Other People (#7) and The Purge: Election Year (#9) missing out. (Though how The Purge didn't get nominated for best costume design is beyond me. I jest.)

The category I've got the most skin in this year has to be best foreign language feature, as my top two movies of 2016 -- Toni Erdmann and Tanna (pictured) -- are both nominated in that category. Tanna was a true surprise -- it was a movie no one I talked films with had even heard of when I first saw it, and only one or two have subsequently seen. (And one of those is a guy who makes a point of watching all the nominated films every year. Yeah, he's crazy.) It stands no chance of winning, of course, but that's because my #1 movie is perhaps the evening's biggest shoe-in not named Casey Affleck.

And then my #3 film, Zootopia, is a best animated feature nominee, and the current frontrunner according to fivethirtyeight.com. (And yes, I somehow decided to return to that website despite considering it painfully emblematic of our collective deception about the 2016 presidential election, and irrationally blaming Nate Silver for Donald Trump's victory.)

As discussed yesterday, my favorite best picture nominee is my #4, Hell or High Water, which does not figure to win. But there's a good chance that my #5 film, La La Land, will win best picture, as we all seem to be in for a couple more sessions of soul-searching and hand-wringing about what we value when it comes to the movies we choose to represent the best and brightest of the medium. (Would I rank La La Land lower than #5 if I were doing it today? Probably.)

So there's a very real chance that the best foreign language film, the best animated film and best picture will all come from my top five movies of the year.

Is this something to be excited about, or is it further concerning evidence of my own conventionality?

It's hard to say. Toni Erdmann and Zootopia both seem to be fairly unconventional choices to be great films, Erdmann for any number of reasons and Zootopia because social commentary in children's movies runs the risk of being terminally didactic when it's as ambitious as what we see in Zootopia. So I guess I don't need to eulogize my own iconoclastic streak just yet.

Still, it seems fairly certain that my #1 film will be recognized at the Oscars for the third straight year. Means in 2017 I really need to go back to more eccentric choices for #1s like I had in 2012 and 2013, when neither Ruby Sparks nor Beyond the Hills even made the lists of prominent Oscar snubs.

But I still don't figure I'll be watching the Oscars any more attentively than I usually do, in part because my enthusiasm for the actual ceremony has been on the decline for probably a decade now (the nominations remain the most interesting part for me), and in part because I won't have someone to watch it with for the first time in as long as I can remember. I'll still make a series of fairly uninformed choices on a ballot, just out of habit, but not having someone sitting next to me, checking off correct choices and putting a red X through incorrect ones, will be a bit sad.

I don't know how my wife can't watch if only to see the barbs thrown at Trump. The Oscars may pale in comparison to real-world events, perhaps more than ever this year, but even if we don't need an evening of Hollywood glitz and glamour, we could always use more barbs thrown at Trump.