Gone MIFFing

That's a dozen MIFFs for me.

The Melbourne International Film Festival has existed in many forms for me over the years. There was the tentative first year in 2014, when I saw only four films. There was the late-teens peak when I saw as many as 13. There were the COVID years, when MIFF existed purely in streaming form. And there was the year in 2022 when I was out of the country for the entirety of the theatrical screenings, but got back in time for the streaming portion.

This year, I'm going out of the country again, but not until the last weekend. So the defining trait of this year's may be that I'm seeing all of my film's within the first week of the festival, jamming in seven films in seven days on four nights, spaced out a night apart from each other, beginning tonight.

In theory, I could keep seeing films right up until the night before we leave on August 22nd. But my wife would not like that.

That's no shade on her. We are going to Europe for six weeks, and the last week before we leave is a sacred time during which we must do nothing but fret about the enormity of the undertaking ahead of us.

Okay that sounds like I am throwing her under the bus again. But I get it. If I'm out on the town in the days leading up to our departure, she will inevitably have to do tasks herself that I should be helping with. 

As it turns out it doesn't matter, as there isn't all that much I want to see in this year's festival anyway, and nothing that I'm not able to see because of the time it's playing.

It's been a pattern with MIFF, or maybe just with me. Am I less in-the-know about new films coming out? Maybe a little. I'm less of a movie forward thinker than I used to be. 

But you've probably heard me wax nostalgic specifically about the year 2016, when two directors I loved (Asghar Farhadi and Cristian Mungiu) had new films playing, and I saw my favorite film of the year in Toni Erdmann. Perhaps especially important in my nostalgia is that these were all foreign language films, and in recent years, the "international" portion of the Melbourne International Film Festival has fallen off a bit, simply because I'm either not seeing these names to the same extent, or I'm seeing names but they don't mean anything to me.

I think there was a sweet spot in our larger cinematic landscape, about a decade ago, when foreign directors achieved a visibility such that we knew their names, and their films were also distributed with a prominence that made them a big part of the general discussion among cinephiles.

I'm just not seeing that to the same extent. I pride myself on the fact that I have periodically named a foreign language film my #1 of the year -- only five times overall, but still -- but it's now been since 2019, and I fret about the likelihood of it happening again any time soon, due to a combination of the relative paucity of these name directors and the likelihood of getting their films within the necessary year to rank them.

It's not my biggest gap without a foreign language film as my #1. There were 12 years between naming Run Lola Run my #1 of 1999 (despite a 1998 German release) and naming A Separation my #1 of 2011. In fact, coincidentally, you could pack my entire MIFF career, consisting of more than a hundred films (see this post), into that gap. 

But A Separation kicked off a period of prosperity with #1 foreign language films, as it happened again in 2013, in 2016 and in 2019. This also coincides with my time in Australia and my time going to MIFF, and MIFF once demonstrably contributed in that I wouldn't have seen Toni Erdmann in time if not for the festival. (MIFF gave me another #1, First Reformed, in 2018, but they only speak English in that one.)

I'm getting a little off track of the original point of the post.

Which is: Tonight it all starts, and I'm seeing seven films that are all slightly above shrug-worthy in my anticipation for seeing them. It is what it is.

However, I will say that three of them are foreign language films, if I remember correctly, starting with the first one tonight. I don't see a future #1 in any of them, but you never know.

I mean, that's why you watch the movies, right? 

A good time of the year for context viewings

I sometimes wonder why I bother to maintain my movie list where I keep track of the movies I've seen on a particular calendar date. Instead of explaining that further, let me just show you an example of what I'm talking about:

November 28 = 18

In Love and War (2005), Keane (2007), The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2008), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009), Jonah Hex (2010), Mother (2009) (2010), Death Race 2000 (2011), CQ (2011), Bronson (2013), Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015), Say Something (2015), The Overnight (2015), Home (2015), I Was Born, But … (2016), The Children Act (2018), Palm Springs (2020), The Water Diviner (2022), The Old Oak (2023)

"Obsessiveness" is the only reason I usually need, but yesterday I got another reminder of its practical usage -- practical, at least, in terms of identifying coincidences.

(Oh, and as a key for deciphering the example above -- the bolded title is the best movie I've seen on that particular date, which in this case is Bong Joon Ho's Mother. And yes, I don't remember the circumstances, but I did apparently see four movies on November 28, 2015.)

Last night I watched The Old Oak, which has been billed as the final film from Ken Loach. That's not because he's dead and they aren't sure if there's a hidden movie out there that may still emerge to complete his filmography. It's because in a rare move for a director, Loach is willingly retiring at age 87. Usually, directors either stop making movies because they die, or because people stop selecting them as a viable option to tell stories people care about. 

In order to give myself some additional context about his career before writing my review -- since I had, improbably, seen only a single other Ken Loach film (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) -- on Monday I watched his 2016 Palme d'Or winner I, Daniel Blake. I was probably overdue for a viewing of this anyway, since I remember being annoyed, at least retroactively, that this movie prevented Toni Erdmann from presumably winning the Palme d'Or. (And again Toni Erdmann rears its head organically on my blog.) Because I hadn't yet seen Toni Erdmann at the time I heard the Palme d'Or winner announced, had only absorbed some of hype about it, I was a lot more annoyed at Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman, which nabbed the Oscar I thought Erdmann deserved.

Anyway, doing this sort of context viewing for a review is rare. Given all the other viewing priorities I have, watching one movie in order to write one review is hard enough, let alone investing nearly four hours of movies for that one review. 

In fact, I think the last time I did it was almost on this very same date last year, in order to review a movie far less potentially important than The Old Oak.

You'll notice on the list above that on November 28, 2022, I watched Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner. 

Why did I do that at a time of the year when I should be ramping up for my big end-of-year blowout by watching only current year movies?

Well, because I was reviewing his new directorial effort Poker Face, and I thought I would benefit from some prior knowledge of Crowe as a director -- maybe especially on an Australian review site. 

As it turned out, and as I could have probably guessed at the time, Poker Face was an instant cinematic footnote, perhaps especially because it was immediately overshadowed by Rian Johnson's television show of the same name starring Natasha Lyonne, which was debuting right around the same time. I didn't hate it but it was also a weirdly paced movie, with lots of build-up and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it climax. 

I did actually quite like The Water Diviner, so if I had been watching it the hopes of it providing fuel for snark in my Poker Face review, I was destined for disappointment.

With The Old Oak and I, Daniel Blake, I am more a fan of the newer film in this case. Perhaps carrying in a little of my retroactive Toni Erdmann bias, I found Blake a bit on-the-nose and didactic in its anti-bureaucracy agenda, which made caricatures of many of the government workers. I was overall favorable towards it. 

And it did provide some helpful context for my review The Old Oak, which I plan to write later today, and which brings a similar progressive/labor-positive agenda in examining a Northern England town dealing with an influx of Syrian refugees in ways both productive and not so productive. In fact, by the time you read this, the review may already be linked over to the right.

Rest in peace, Toni Erdmann

It's useful for a cinephile to periodically go through the Wikipedia page "[current year] in film," not only to check the release schedule and see what you might have missed, but also to see who died without you noticing. 

I did that just now. The random prompt was the death of an actor I didn't recognize named Peter Spellos, who actually was in one of my favorite movies of all time, Bound. This is not an in memoriam piece for Peter Spellos.

My eyebrows raised over a few I hadn't noticed as they occurred, but my face drooped when I read that a different Peter S., Peter Simonischek, had died. This happened back in May.

You may not recognize that name, but you probably recognize the face in the photo I've included here.

Indeed he played Toni Erdmann in the film of the same name, my #1 of 2016.

I had only seen Simonischek in one other film, as the attention he garnered from Toni Erdmann earned him a small role in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. As such, that would not meet my ordinary threshold for eulogizing him here. So maybe more than anything I am writing this post to suggest the value of reviewing Wikipedia's film-related deaths in any given year.  

But I am also more saddened by this than I would be by the death of most other actors I had seen in only two films. And it has something to do with the perfect mixture of whimsy and melancholy that Simonischek poured into the titular trickster, who's actually a softie who just wants to connect better with his daughter. Although Simonischek was 76 when he died, which is not exactly young, I didn't feel like the man I saw in that movie just seven years ago was this close to death's door.

Also I suppose I have had Toni Erdmann on the brain a bit lately as I know that the movie's other co-star, Sandra Huller, appears in one of this year's most acclaimed films, Anatomy of a Fall. Which had me thinking how I wanted to make sure I saw that film, even beyond the fact that it is acclaimed, just because Huller is in it.

And that got me thinking how we come to feel as though the people in our favorite movies are sort of "our own," especially if they are a favorite not widely shared. I think anyone who saw Toni Erdmann thought it was excellent, but I think a lot of people didn't see it, and even many of those who did would not have named it their #1 of that year. I did, so both Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller "belong" to me in a way that others of you out there may understand, even if it is not about these two in particular.

Maybe when I see Anatomy of a Fall, I will raise a toast to the woman on screen and the man who played her father in one of the more moving portraits of a complicated father-daughter relationship I've ever seen on film.

The sneaky three-timer, and other Hamlet rewatch thoughts

I haven't written about many of the previous #1s I'm watching this year as I've actually watched them, but Hamlet, my #1 of 2000, rose to that level for a couple reasons. If you're keeping track at home, it's the 16th of an eventual 26 I am rewatching before I rank them all at the end of the year, and it's probably the last before I leave on my 3.5-week trip to America a week from now. It also happens to be the next one that will get mentioned in my August monthly post reviewing my 2000 film rankings.

As I've been revisiting these movies I have previously crowned with my top yearly honors, I've also been reminded of the full size of the casts, some larger than others. You don't get a lot of other actors in, say, 127 Hours, but Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Hamlet with its all-star cast provides plenty of familiar faces -- and chances to see who might appear in multiple films I've named #1. That's another obsession of mine, each year trying to figure out who I can add to the two-timers list. My longest term obsession is seeing if the same director will score two different #1s, but that hasn't happened yet. 

Hamlet has two actors I already knew of who had appeared in another top film for me, those being Bill Murray, who also appears in Lost in Translation, and Ethan Hawke, who also appears in First Reformed. Last night I added a third, and for him, it's also a third #1 -- even if you can only barely count what he does here as "appearing in" the film.

You probably recognize Casey Affleck from the photo above, "playing" Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway in the original play, who has his sights set on vengeance for the death of his own father, which gives him something in common with the title character. In the play, if memory serves, he only barely appears at the end, never having factored into the drama before then except as an everpresent looming threat.

Well, he doesn't appear on screen at all in Almereyda's film, but he does appear in this photo on this news telecast, the last shot of the film, and possibly one other at the beginning, though I didn't recognize it as Affleck if he did. (By the way, that's Robert MacNeil of The MacNeil-Lehrer Report.) 

The reason this is significant is that just last year Affleck punched his card into this exclusive fraternity with his second #1, as Our Friend added to A Ghost Story to accomplish the rarefied feat. This "appearance" in Hamlet means he's at three, which, if I remember correctly, ties him with only one other person, that being Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'm Thinking of Ending Things).

Is it a bit cheeky to count this? Sure. Affleck probably didn't even need to be on set. He only needed to give them permission to use a photo of him. It seems strange that they even used him, since he was only 24 and not yet widely known -- though his credits before this do include Good Will Hunting, To Die For and 200 Cigarettes among others. Tellingly, though, his role in American Pie the year before was uncredited, and only three years earlier in Chasing Amy he's billed as "Little Kid." Must have been a specific reason they used him, some connection in the cast, but a quick search of the internet did not yield it. (Though that search did remind me that Fortinbras appears in a few other photos, on a magazine cover and in a newspaper article I think -- I must have not been paying attention or thought it looked like him.)

One final note about Fortinbras: It's an avatar I have sometimes used, because it is roughly the Latin version of my own last name, Armstrong. 

Another behind-the-camera two-timer

There are doubtless collaborators who don't appear on the screen -- at all -- who worked on more than one of my #1s. Was the key grip on The Wrestler also the key grip on Moon? Undoubtedly.

The only ones of those in the past I've noticed are for screenwriting (the aforementioned Kaufman) and cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot both Children of Men and Birdman, my #1s of 2006 and 2014). These are the sorts of core behind-the-scenes contributors who achieve renown for the way their art transcends the anonymity of most of the names that appear in the credits. They're the kind of people who become known among casual cinephiles, whose work becomes a factor in getting you pumped up for a particular project. 

Well, you can add the music department to that. 

As I was watching the closing credits of Hamlet -- more on them in a moment -- I noticed that Carter Burwell did the music. If you're the sort of casual cinephile who doesn't recognize that name, Burwell has worked on most of the Coens' projects -- most significantly, in my mind, having composed the delightful bluegrass theme "Way Out There" from my beloved Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time. You know, the one with the hillbilly yodeling. 

He hasn't made it to my #1 spot working with the Coens -- they've never had a #1, though in retrospect Fargo would be my #1 of 1996, the first year I started doing this, instead of Looking for Richard, another Shakespeare movie. But he did get there through another movie: Adaptation. 

I didn't realize this until I went hunting through IMDB, sure that he would have scored some other #1 of mine but not being sure which one it was. There you go.

Speaking of music ...

The lingering impression of the closing credits music

In 2000, I remember really liking Hamlet as I was watching it ... and then being taken to another place by the music over the closing credits. 

The song is called "Greentone" by Accelera Deck, and because I can, I thought I'd include the song here so you can get a sense of the apocalyptic vibe that had such an impact on me:

The industrial percussive quality of this song makes it so ominous. It's like wandering the corridors of Hell.

I don't really know if I would have chosen another movie as my #1 without "Greentone." Probably not. But the music, such a perfect soundtrack for savoring what I just watched, made it a certainty.

And it's not the only time this has happened with a #1 movie of mine.

There may be others, but the one that jumps to mind is the closing credits of Toni Erdmann. I was already in a state of melancholy contemplation when that movie came to its close after two hours and 40 minutes, but then I heard the opening strains of The Cure's "Plainsong" start to play. Transportation city.

Here's that one:

Yep. I was helpless to consider any other movie my #1.

Does this make a lot of sense? No it doesn't. But there's certainly something to be said for the last audio impression a movie makes on you. I happen to know that the usage of Sia's "Waving Goodbye" over the end of The Neon Demon has a major impact on my thoughts on that film. Just this week, I was taken to another headspace by Birdy's "Quietly Yours" at the end of the brand new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion, which alone prompted me to elevate it a half-star. (Realizing after the fact that this song alone had been responsible for turning a 3.5 into a 4, and that some other critics had complaints about the movie that resonated with me, I demoted it back to 3.5 before publishing my review, which you can find here.)

So, memo to anyone out there who's making a movie: If you want me to slobber all over your work, just stick the audio landing and we'll be good.

Baby Blum

While scouring this film's credits on IMDB for this post, I notice another something really weird. If I thought Casey Affleck was too young to be thrust into the sort of significance his character has in this movie, what about the movie being produced by a zygote Jason Blum?

Blum was actually 31 by the time Hamlet was released, but the sort of industry-dominating career he would forge was just a twinkle in his eye back then. In fact, he's listed as an executive producer, which can be a sort of ceremonious credit, not necessarily someone who did the hard yards. However, it's only the fourth of what is now 217 credits on IMDB. The others are on a short and a feature I've never seen, though his debut is pretty impressive: In 1995 he was listed as an associate producer on Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, another film I dearly love.

                                                             ************

Okay, speaking of ceremonious things, this is a pretty good halfway point post for my 2022 #1 rewatches project. It's more than halfway, which gives it something in common with the baseball season, also currently in its break for the all-star game -- a break point that occurs more than halfway through the season. 

This post is not just about Hamlet, as I have name-checked -- let me see -- 14 other former #1s in this post. I'm eager to see how I go with my final ten titles, to be resumed after August 20th, and how I end up ranking these 26 dear favorites. 

COVID Film Festival: Days Two and Three

I've kept up the pace of four movies per day on each of my past two days in COVID isolation in my garage, though I guess yesterday I did not feel up for writing a separate post to recap day two.

Actually, if I'm being honest, I think I was just having too much fun between watching baseball and watching movies to take a writing break.

Yes, my health has improved with each day, and in fact, I'm going to try to work today. I say "try" because my boss has already told me to work as long as I can and then stop. Since I can control exactly how much I work -- I have no meetings today that I'm aware of, and no one usually calls me -- I can probably work a full day as long as it's sort of a slack day.

But no matter what happens, I will probably continue my isolation in the garage for at least a day or two longer. My wife has a big thing she has to do on Sunday and needs to keep testing negative until then, even if I have probably now passed the point where I'm still contagious.

I've chosen the poster for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which I am reviewing, as a good way to encapsulate the eight movies I've watched in the past two days, three of which were new to me and five of which were revisits. It has indeed felt a bit like spinning the wheel to see what comes up next, even though there has been a clear reason behind more than half the movies I chose. Hamaguchi's follow-up to Drive My Car -- which was actually released before that movie in most parts of the world -- is an anthology of three 40-minute stories, and indeed, that's a good metaphor for any film festival, whether it's one of a person's own choosing or one that has been thrust upon that person by illness.

I won't go on at length about these films but I will give you a little taste of my thoughts on all eight.

All the Avatar I ever needed

For the number of times I have tagged Avatar on this blog -- this is now the 11th time overall, making it one of my most tagged movies -- you'd think I'd have seen the movie more than once. 

But no, Tuesday afternoon's viewing of the James Cameron magnum opus -- my second straight day leading off with a Cameron movie -- was the first time I'd gone back to it since I saw it on one of the world's largest IMAX screens in Sydney in December of 2009. Australia wasn't my country of residence then, but rather, a travel destination.

And it confirmed that I only needed to see it that one time, plus do not need the half-dozen sequels it sounds like they are planning to make.

It made a good contrast with Titanic, which kicked off the festival. Even at 30 minutes longer than Avatar, Titanic breezed by in comparison. The things I expected to do for Titanic -- pause it for breaks, only half-watch while I did other things on my computer -- were the things I did for Avatar instead. I guess that's the difference between caring about the characters and the story and not caring about those things. 

Avatar still looked cool, but with 12+ years more of digital innovation since then, it no longer seems like a unicorn. Fantasy worlds are credibly conjured for us all the time now, so much so that they have left us feeling blase. 

I reckon I missed the immersiveness of the 3D, which was certainly a big part of the positive things I took away from the movie the first time. Left with altogether too much time to think about only its story, you're not left with all that much.

One funny thing I did want to point out. I started watching Avatar on my work computer, with my personal computer serving as my distraction from the movie. (I did have my attention on most of it, for those thinking I didn't get it a proper chance.) Weirdly, the on-screen subtitles -- as in, embedded into the movie -- were not in English. I couldn't say for sure what language they were, but my best guess was Dutch. It didn't matter all that much because a) it's never too hard to figure out what the Na'vi are saying in the context of what's occurring on screen, b) it's interesting to have it feel additionally foreign, as a non-speaker would, and c) who cares anyway. But I did find it funny.

Halfway through, I had to switch which computer was playing which role, and now, for some reason, the subtitles corrected themselves to English. No idea what the difference is between Disney+ on those two computers, and a little light googling got me nowhere so I just moved on.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is here to stay

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was first introduced to me when a film podcaster I listen to, Scott Tobias, placed it in his top ten of last year, even though it seems as though many/most other critics didn't see it. Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's other 2021 movie, was his #1, but Wheel came in somewhere around a very respectable #6.

Even though it's an hour shorter than Car, I was still viewing it as something of a chore to tackle while sick. But I made a commitment to review it in time for its Australian release date, which is today, long before I knew I would get COVID. And my screener was only good until Saturday anyway, so I'd have to watch it at some point while I still called these garage walls my home.

Well, the nice thing about Hamaguchi movies is that they are straightforward. Not emotionally, mind you -- the emotions in a Hamaguchi movie are perplexing even though always truthful -- but in terms of story, he's not hard to follow. You could argue that just reading subtitles while sick is something that takes too much effort, but I obviously don't think that as I have now done it three times in this festival, including Kin-dza-dza on Monday and one you are about to read about in a minute.

And damn if this guy doesn't have a unique perspective on the human heart and all the unexpected ways it will react to any stimulus out there. 

Because I've got a review going up today -- look to the right within the next few hours if you want to see it -- I won't go on too much more about the movie here. But let's just say that it's a worthy companion to Drive My Car. Like that movie, it increases in emotional intensity as it goes -- not in this case because a single narrative is becoming more and more touching, but because the three narratives are organized in a sequence to accomplish the same thing. 

Especially since his own work has been in a little bit of decline, Hirokazu Kore-eda is going to have to make some room for Hamaguchi among my favorite working Japanese filmmakers.

Tucker and Dale vs. COVID

Eli Craig's Tucker and Dale vs. Evil was my first attempt to use laughter as the best medicine. It was my third time overall watching the horror comedy, first since 2013.

I still appreciated the movie that cracked my top ten of the year it was released, but let's just say there were not any belly laughs forthcoming -- probably just as well as they could have led to coughing fits.

I don't suppose you generally do laugh very hard on subsequent viewings of comedies, though you are definitely supposed to get that knowing dopey grin that takes the place of laughter when that element of surprise is gone. I didn't have that as much, though I did still chuckle over some of the absurd deaths of the college kids trying to attack the titular hicks that they think are attacking them.

Because I've still got five more of these to go, I'll just keep going.

Exploring the elephant in the room for gay people

Because Tuesday was also time for another documentary alternate Tuesday -- I've been watching a documentary every two weeks since last August -- I had lined up Baraka, the spiritual sequel to Koyaanisqatsi, for a viewing to finish off the night. Or thought I had. Turns out it's not streaming on any of my services, nor even rentable via iTunes -- which doesn't matter anyway since iTunes rentals don't play on my projector. 

So instead I went for a movie whose existence I had only just been reminded of while browsing through my streaming service Stan earlier that day: Do I Sound Gay?

The movie is exactly what the title would suggest. It explores the little-discussed -- among polite company anyway -- phenomenon of the "gay voice," which identifies male gays to heterosexuals and other gay people just by the inflections of their voice. The filmmaker, David Thorpe, has decided he loathes his own "gay voice," and while studying the history of this and interviewing gay icons such as George Takei and David Sedaris, he also undergoes speech therapy to try to sound more straight. 

As you would expect, the film is oozing with self-loathing -- the very sort of self-loathing that has prevented many homosexuals from acknowledging their sexuality to the world in the first place. Fortunately, that doesn't make it downbeat either. Thorpe has fun with the topic while also going in depth with his research, all while bringing the thing in at only 80-some minutes. An absolute must watch for people who enjoy documentaries that focus on something specific that is actually important and provocative -- not something specific like which chicken is the best chicken at the chicken show.

My most unconventional #1 movie?

I started off bright and early Wednesday morning, the first day when I didn't have a baseball or basketball game dictating my early morning viewing. So at a little after 7, I was already watching Toni Erdmann with my eggs, toast and coffee.

As you will recall, I'm rewatching my #1 movies in 2022 with the aim toward ranking them at the end of the year. I'd been spacing them out at about two-week intervals, but watched my #1 of 2016 only two days after my #1 of 1997 (Titanic). Since Toni Erdmann is another long one, I decided I couldn't pass up the opportunity of being a captive audience in my garage and not trying to squeeze in all two hours and 40 minutes one night before bed. Besides, if I get a bit ahead on my pace, I can take three weeks off in July and August when I'm in America.

As with Titanic, I thought I might kind of half-watch this, since it would be my third time overall and I probably didn't need to catch every moment. As it turned out, as with Titanic, I wanted to catch every moment. I care about Ines and Winifred the way I care about Jack and Rose, and the way I don't care about Jake Sully.

Even as I was really enjoying the movie -- more than on my second viewing, I think -- it occurred to me how unusual it is for a person who is usually a believer in the three-act structure and other narrative conventions of particular genres. This is a comedy -- for the most part -- and yet it runs closer to three hours than two. And I suppose that it is a collection of set pieces perhaps more than a straight narrative, maybe it's own Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy within one movie. That doesn't prevent it from building in emotional power until that big hug at the end, which gets me every time.

The other screenwriting rule Toni Erdmann breaks is the one that says that every scene must clearly contribute to the thrust of the story. There should be no fat you can lift out. Maren Ade's film arguably has quite a lot of fat -- the hotel tryst between Ines and Tim, for example -- but it all sort of contributes to our overall perspective of the characters. Maybe then this is not fat, because maybe Toni Erdmann is the sort of story for which the idea of narrative fat is a non-starter. And maybe that's why I like it so much. 

Metal turds

I decided I didn't want to fully fall behind on 2022 movies, so I watched the most recent higher-profile Netflix movie I hadn't seen, Metal Lords.

Because it stars teenagers who are into heavy metal, I imagined it would skew too much on the kiddie side of things, with the metal theme being fairly quaint and more an aspirational element for younger viewers.

Nope. This thing is laden with profanity throughout. As just one example, the band's name is Skullfucker.

Glad I didn't start watching with my younger son when he made a mummy-approved visit just before I was planning to start watching.

It's also laden with bad filmmaking and overall lameness. I didn't like the actors, the story is all over the place, and the conclusions it reaches are pretty specious.

On to the next one.

Too many times down the same Road

If having seen Avatar only once qualified as mildly surprising, it's probably much more surprising that I'd only seen Mad Max: Fury Road once. It's something I'd been meaning to correct for some time now, but it was never "the right night." A random number generator ensured that this would finally be the right night, as it beat out two other choices, which may come up as this festival continues, it if does: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Sin City, which would be the second time for both of those as well.

The reason I'd seen it only once is more similar to the reason I'd see Avatar only once than I'd like to admit. I liked it, but not nearly as much as most people seemed to.

Like Avatar, it's really cool to look at it and I'm really impressed by the achievement. Don't get it twisted -- this is a better movie than Avatar.

But like Avatar, the story doesn't really do it for me, and I can trace that back to one fatal narrative decision: Having gotten to an end point they were expecting to reach and not found it there, the characters just turn back around and go back the way they came. This makes the series of vehicle chases through the desert seem even more monotonous than they already seemed. 

If you don't find this narrative choice to be a problem for you, let me put it to you this way. What if Dorothy and company got to Oz, and instead of clicking her heels to get back to Kansas, she had to reverse her order through the gauntlet of challenges she'd faced along the yellow brick road? Would that be satisfying?

It would not be, and this is one of the reasons -- in addition to some bad dialogue -- why Mad Max: Fury Road is not nearly as satisfying as it should be.

And also, you know what? I don't care that much about either Max or Furiosa. 

There, I said it. 

(Don't stress, it still gets four stars from me just for degree of difficulty.)

Re-watching something old

The final "obligation" of these past two days was to re-watch something older. I watch favorite movies from the last 30 years all the time, but it seems a lot more rare that I dig back older than that. 

So I purposefully set out to find something on my Kanopy account that would qualify, and Herk Harvey's cult classic from 1962, Carnival of Souls, was the winner. (Its 77-minute running time helped that decision.)

Carnival of Souls beat out Wild Strawberries, The Great Dictator and The Wages of Fear for the honor, the latter largely because it's more than twice the length. This search gave me some targets for future options in the festival, except watching Carnival of Souls expended my April credits on Kanopy -- which I think is the first time that has ever happened.

Well, I was really happy with this choice. 

I first watched this low-budget horror in 2013 when I was doing my Flickchart Road Trip series on the Flickchart blog, watching one movie set in each of the 50 states. This was the option for Utah and it lined right up with Halloween.

Well, it really stuck with me and I enjoyed the hell out of watching it last night. It's super creepy and the central performance by Candace Hilligoss is indelible. She's just got such an interesting face.

And since my own credits are expended after writing about eight movies, I'll stop there.

Although I'm working today, I plan to start watching movies again after the end of the workday, though I will certainly decrease by at least one movie per day -- and possibly two, depending on length.

And one day, I will actually leave this garage for reasons other than slinking out for urgent food, toilet and personal hygiene needs.

MIFF: Calling all chiropractors

I didn't realize how truly diabolical the seats are in the Comedy Theatre until I saw a really long movie there.

I've made little comments on my blog throughout MIFF about this venue and its uncomfortable seats, which are probably the only drawback of an otherwise gorgeous classic theater. But so far I'd been pretty lucky. Of the four other features I'd seen there this year, The Killing of a Sacred Deer was the longest at two hours, while the shortest, Fantastic Planet, was a mere 72 minutes. And with Deer, that was an engrossing two hours, never mind that I had the privilege of sitting in the isolation of my own one-seat row.

By contrast, the 142 minutes of Ruben Ostlund's The Square nearly killed me.

I was on the end of something like the sixth row, otherwise quite a good seat in this theater. Arriving uncharacteristically early, a full 15 minutes before showtime, won me that seat.

But by the 70-minute mark or so -- knowing I was only halfway through -- I longed for that luxurious single seat in the front row.

I was constantly grinding my neck back and forth, extending my arms way above my head, cracking the bone just below my right wrist the way someone would crack knuckles, and scanning the theater to see if there was possibly a better seat for me somewhere. The film was surprisingly not sold out, surprising as The Square won the Palme d'Or at Cannes three months ago. But from my vantage point, I could not see anything more advantageous, and especially not across to the other side of the theater where my Deer seat may have been empty and waiting for me. Instead, I just silently grumbled as I tried to avoid intermingling my legs with the old man sitting next to me, who suffered in a similar silence.

How much was The Square responsible for the experience I was having? It's hard to say. This is a pretty entertaining movie that had a number of scenes that really made me laugh, not to mention a few that made me think. But it's also a bit of a discombobulated mess, full of plot strands with no resolution and ideas that often come off as half-baked. Two likable English-speaking stars, Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West, are kind of lost in this messy shuffle, exemplifying both the half-baked ideas and the plot strands without resolution. I can see why a body like Cannes awarded it the top prize, but I can also see why this movie won't work for everybody, and why not quite fully working for me combined with the torture devices they call seats to make the whole thing a bit of an endurance test.

I should say that The Square does a lot right. In fact, it reminded me in rather significant ways of some films I consider the best of the decade so far. It's got the same interest in interpersonal dynamics across social classes as A Separation, including some of that film's themes about our responsibilities to each other. The square of the title is, literally, a physical symbol of our social contract, executed in the form of a modern art exhibit at a Stockholm museum. And in form and structure it probably most closely resembles my #1 of last year, Toni Erdmann, another very long multi-lingual comedy from a European director, sharing that film's reliance on bizarre set pieces for much of its humor. There's even some of the absurdism of a director I've already indirectly referenced in this piece, Yorgos Lanthimos.

But it made me think long and hard about how much of a role the circumstances of the viewing play in our enjoyment of a film. Take Erdmann, for example. That movie is a further 20 minutes longer than The Square, but last year's MIFF programmers had the good sense to schedule it at the Forum, which has far better seating -- in fact, seating good enough that I don't really notice it one way or another. It was not a chore to watch a 160-minute movie at the Forum. What if I'd had to watch Toni Erdmann at the Comedy Theatre? Instead of it being my #1 of last year, might it have been my #30? The Square doesn't pack Erdmann's emotional wallop, so I don't think the reverse will be true, that a movie that will probably be somewhere around #30 (if not lower) might have been #1 under different circumstances. But it does make a person wonder.

If the 142 minutes in those seats weren't long enough, there was a delay in getting things started, plus I was seated a bit earlier than usual as a result of my earlier arrival. Then a further delay came on behalf of the director himself. From a beach in Greece, Ostlund recorded a selfie video to greet us at the festival. What at first I thought was a charming and nicely personal idea -- he was there flitting around with a daughter who must have been about 12 -- quickly grew tiresome as he started prattling on about the theme of the movie and why he made it. It must have gone on for three minutes. Thirty seconds would have been about right. It ended up feeling a bit like a preview of the way his movie would sort of prattle on about nothing.

Again, don't get me wrong, it's a good movie. I think I must just not be quite on Ostlund's wavelength. I didn't like Force Majeure as much as most people seemed to, and that figures to be my destiny on The Square as well. Both got 3.5 stars from me.

Though without feeling like someone was cramming me inside a box for more than two hours, who knows, maybe it would have gotten a four.

On the way out, as I was pushing my way down the sidewalk with a bit of the mad panic of a person finally free from a claustrophobic space, a woman in line for the next movie called out to me. She wanted to know if I wanted to go, because they had an extra ticket.

It was all I could do to keep from laughing at her.

Okay, I am DONE with the Comedy Theatre for 2017. And almost done with MIFF. Just two more screenings on Saturday to wrap things up.

And oh yeah, I thought I should tell you -- even though the movie ran long and I was in serious danger of missing the start, I never like to miss an easy opportunity to squeeze in another movie. So I beat feet to the closest regular cinema, just two blocks away, in time for a screening of The Dark Tower. It was the perfect contrast to the experience I'd just had. There were only two other people there (on opening night!) and the seats were large and luxurious.

The movie sucked, but as a purely physical experience of indulgent freedom for my appendages, it's one I won't soon forget.

Imperfect Erdmann

You know you love a movie when you pick up the double-sided promotional brochure available at the movie theater ... six months after you saw the movie. Not just one, but a handful of them, in case the others get damaged. (I saw my favorite movie of 2016 at MIFF in August, and it's only just opening at Cinema Nova tomorrow.)

But Toni Erdmann is not a perfect film ... as this brochure represents in a humorous and unintentional visual fashion.

Okay, first the brochure. Here, check it out.

Someone at Madman, the Australian distributor, failed to properly proofread this before they made several thousand copies of it. As you can see, the last name of the lead actress, Sandra Huller, didn't have enough room to complete and was continued on the (not present) next line. Never mind that they probably shouldn't even be using a format that allows for words to be broken up between two lines, as that will never be necessary on such a brochure. Simply looking it over would have prevented the error.

But it got me thinking of the larger issue of whether our favorite movies are always movies we consider to be "perfect."

I did give Toni Erdmann five stars on Letterboxd, one of only three films from 2016 I bestowed with such an honor (one of which didn't quite end up making my top ten of the year, actually). Five stars does seem to suggest perfection.

But you know what?

As little as I say that I felt the length of Toni Erdmann, I did -- once or twice. I distinctly remember a portion, probably around the hour forty-five minute mark, when I asked myself if Maren Ade could have tightened up the movie and still given us the same transcendent experience we were getting. Also, the scene people often cite as a standout for them -- when the aforementioned Ms. "Hul" sings Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" -- does comparatively little for me. You'd think that if I ranked a movie as my #1 of the year, everything would be clicking all the time.

There's something about the messiness of Toni Erdmann, though, that makes it perfect even in its imperfection. Or maybe it's that a two-hour-and-forty-minute German comedy with melancholy overtones could never aspire to perfection, by its very nature. Its imperfections are our imperfections, the imperfections of life. The flaws we see in ourselves are mirrored back to us by a movie like Toni Erdmann. But so are our strengths.

One thing I doubt will be perfect: the American remake. Tony Berman, or whatever they call it, will likely have little of what makes Ade's film special and a lot of what makes Hollywood films generic. It'll be shorter, no doubt, but the soul will likely be absent. It'll be a more "perfect" version of the story by having its imperfections ironed out, its running time shrunken to a tidy 100 minutes. But what we love about Toni Erdmann will likely be gone.

However, there is news of note just breaking today: Jack Nicholson appears to be coming out of retirement in order to play Peter Simonischek's role. I can certainly see that, and I can certainly see it working.

Then again, Nicholson will be 80 by the time filming starts (he turns that on April 22nd) so it remains to be seen how much he has left. That makes him only a decade older than Simonischek ... but that's a pretty important decade when you're an octogenarian.

2016 unmasked

I'll make one prediction to you right now: This is the last year I set a new personal record for movies ranked.

In 2017, I won't have a round trip to the U.S. on which to watch nine movies (not to mention four more on domestic flights), and it's undecided whether I'll be vetting films for HRAFF again.

But for now, I'm in my own personal record books once again.

Netflix's 13th was actually 151st, as in the 151st movie I saw fit to rank in 2016 according to my own personal and somewhat inscrutable rules for which films qualify, by this traditional deadline, when Oscar nominations are announced.

Inscrutable? All the films I saw in the theater, you'd think, except not really -- I decided that Sherpa had had a U.S. theatrical release in 2015, so my 2016 theatrical screening didn't qualify it. None of the films that didn't get U.S. or Australian theatrical releases, unless they were films I vetted for HRAFF from last year's Sundance, which I assumed would get theatrical releases at the time I watched them, even though most of them didn't. And this year I also had to allow, for the first but not last time, for films that debuted on Netflix, as that will be a legitimate reality of our viewing lives going forward.

Anyway, I ended up with 151 -- eight more than last year -- and now indeed, I think I need to go drink some Bacardi.

It was a year when there were fewer absolutely knockout films, but many of very high quality, as films I gave four stars are appearing as low down as the 60s on my list. (With some 3.5-star movies ahead of them, of course -- that's part of the messy uncertainty of this whole process). It was also a year when real-world events made us want to escape into movies like never before.

Before I get into my top ten and the complete list, I thought I'd mention a few that I regret not escaping into. Usually this list is comprised of films that weren't available to me yet because I live in Australia, but my Christmas Los Angeles trip gave me access to literally anything that was released in time to qualify for the Oscars. So this year, it was movies I ended up not seeing through choices I made not to see them when I had the chance -- all part of the sixty-seven films on my Letterboxd watchlist that I didn't get a chance to see.

Listed alphabetically:

The Edge of Seventeen (see this post)
Elle (played here for ages, never got around to it)
Fences (chances in L.A. but saw Hidden Figures instead)
The Handmaiden (played here for ages, never got around to it)
Loving (right down the street from SoCal hotel, would have had to skip out mid-afternoon on family)
Moana (repeated campaigns couldn't interest my kids)
Morris From America (lost out in a numbers game for stretch run iTunes rentals)
Silence (would have been tricky but had the chance in L.A.)
Tickled (never became available for rental and couldn't justify buying it)
The Wailing (2:40 running time killed last-minute prospective viewing)

And others I could name. The more you see, the more you regret missing, it seems.

Here are the top ten of those I did not miss:

10. Moonlight - The most acclaimed movie of the year almost didn't make my top ten. It had something to do with impossible levels of hype, but more than that, the film has (for me) a diminishing impact over the course of its three-act structure. But in the last few days I've decided not to penalize Barry Jenkins' Moonlight for what it didn't quite do for me and honor what it did. One of the most visually dynamic films of the year is also one of the most emblematic of what I want cinema to be -- a look into lives that "matter," to evoke one of this year's most powerful social movements, but that I don't often get to see on screen. It's all part of the Roger Ebert empathy machine I referenced in Sunday's post about Obama. The trio of actors who played Chiron made me love him, but none of them held a candle to Mahershala Ali, which is (spoiler alert!) one of the reasons I didn't dig the second two stories as much as the first. This is no Place Beyond the Pines, though -- it's a brilliant first act (like Pines) and only slightly less brilliant second and third (unlike Pines).

9. The Purge: Election Year - If you read this post, you are surely expecting to see this movie here. If you didn't, you're like "Wha?" There were five movies in my top ten that made me cry, but this surprise entry was the only one that reduced me to uncontrollable sobbing. That's right, the Jason Blum-produced horror movie. It was all about the fact that I saw it in the period recovering from Trump's election, and how viscerally it addressed the issues that had consumed the two sides of the political debate in 2016. A movie that would already have felt very intense just because of its flamboyant exploitation subject matter left me quivering from the sheer force of its metaphorical power. The multi-ethnic group of resistors, led by a woman, who challenge a corrupt system that's trying to become more corrupt by literally murdering the opposition ... well, it didn't feel too far off from what we were really seeing. And the expert execution of it all by James DeMonaco (I had to look up his name) left me putty in his hands. Slobbery, emotional putty. If only all genre films could marry the physical and the intellectual so fully.

8. Lion - "One more prestige awards contender in the theater before I close my list ... check." That was the procedural nonchalance with which I walked into Lion on Monday night ... and I walked out feeling kind of transported. Transported to India (for nearly the first 45 minutes!), and even transported within my own current city, where some of the ensuing action takes place. I really kind of expected this to be generic Oscar bait but it's really not -- it's much more complicated than I would have expected, taking a fierce and no-holds-barred look at its characters while still giving us a story that is no less inspiring. The way an incredible Sunny Pawar is cast off by random occurrence into a large and terrifying world left me speechless, and the fact that director Garth Davis stays with him for what feels like (but doesn't feel like) an eternity was an essential component to making this such an immersive experience. And Nicole Kidman ... Jesus. Recency bias may be playing a factor here, but I don't want that to detract from the terrific Lion.

7. Other People - Movies about family members suffering from The Big C are as common as disease movies get, and you'd think we would have drained that well long ago. If we did, Chris Kelly's Other People fills it back up with fresh tears. Okay, that was cheesy. But this movie did choke me up on multiple occasions as it follows a gay twentysomething (Jesse Plemons) during the year between his mother's cancer diagnosis and her death. (Which we know about from the opening scene, so that's not a spoiler.) In addition to doing the cancer progression points very well -- Molly Shannon is quietly heartbreaking -- I love how gay forward this film is, as it includes two other gay characters (Plemons' boyfriend and a platonic friend) as well as a boy barely into his teens who has already come out as trans. The movie is about being gay to some extent, but more than that it's about trying to send your mother off into the great beyond with the knowledge that you're doing okay -- even if you're really not. Moving stuff. 

6. Swiss Army Man - Who knows the heights this movie might have reached in my top ten if it weren't for something about that ending leaving me flat. And who knows if I'd had the chance to watch it again before the end of the year to determine if I were just wrong about that ending. But I was suspended in a state of sensory wonder and a kind of ecstasy for the first two-thirds of this splendidly weird movie, and that counts for a lot -- my sixth favorite film of the year. Paul Dano returns to my top ten for the second straight year and sixth time overall (twice in 2012), and Daniel Radcliffe keeps proving that Harry Potter didn't continue to define him. Twenty sixteen was the year a corpse taught us how to live and love (and use his farts as aquatic propulsion), and for that we have the wonderful Daniels, Kwan and Scheinert, to thank.

5. La La Land - Yes, it's just as delightful as everyone says it is. Which you probably already know, since you've surely seen it as well. Even seeing it after most you, long after you had hyped it to within an inch of its life, was not able to squash the joy I felt watching it. My feelings for La La Land enabled its writer-director, Damien Chazelle, to function as this year's only director ever to appear in my top ten before (2014, Whiplash)*. I don't know that I can contribute anything original to the discussion of why this movie is so light on its feet, so to speak, and so damn charming. But I'll suggest that it allows us to revel in something we want to revel in -- a pure passion for the movies -- by giving us a delirious celebration of all the things that make the movies magic. It also reminds us why the periodic revival of the musical as a popular form is always welcome. What's more, it showcases two stars at the peak of their power to woo us. The whole movie is like one big woo, and we're smitten.

* - UPDATE: By neglecting to mention the directors in my bit on Zootopia (see below), I failed to note that both Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph) and Byron Howard (Tangled) are past top ten directors.

4. Hell or High Water - Perhaps the only "macho" movie in my top ten is Hell or High Water, a real surprise from David Mackenzie, a director who had previously left me completely cold (Young Adam, Asylum) or mid-level appreciative (Starred Up). I guess it's not a surprise from writer Taylor Sheridan, who made my top ten last year as well with Sicario. If you're looking for tired topics for a movie, you could do a lot worse than bank robbers on a spree through Texas. One of the great joys of this movie, though, is how it invigorates familiar tropes, and ends up being about something more far-reaching than its simple genre trappings appear to convey. Chris Pine also gives a performance that demonstrates how much he's really capable of. This is the movie I wanted a notable disappointment for me, No Country For Old Men, to be. It exists in the same milieu but does so much more with it, a modern-day cowboy movie with a whiff of nostalgia for simpler times, and a palpable sense of the specter of the financial crisis. Oh, and it's funny, too.

3. Zootopia - The second of my top ten to wrestle directly with our current America is Disney's most socially ambitious film in ages, possibly ever. For a while it looked like it could be the second straight animated film to top my year-end chart (after Inside Out in 2015). Now it also functions as a solemn look back on the hopes we had of a true melting pot under Hillary Clinton, but back in March it was a stunningly timely parable about the police brutality that had been escalating racial tensions in the U.S. the past few years. But Zootopia is one of those rare movies that manages to have it all ways. While it's hyper conscious of their sad tendency to racially profile, it views its police as heroes. While it makes villains of hicks in the form of a backwoods fox, it redeems that hick and makes him a central part of resolving the story's conflict. This movie really does love all the animals in its kingdom, and the permutations of that love are both touching and funny. It's cinematic utopia.

2. Tanna - And a movie you've never heard of is my 2016 runner up. Actually, you may have just heard of Tanna, as it's just secured a best foreign language Oscar nomination. I certainly hadn't heard of Tanna when I had to watch it at the end of August -- "had" because it was one of my assignments that week for the human rights film festival I'm helping curate, ultimately falling short of contention because it had already screened theatrically in Australia. What might have initially seemed like a chore quickly transformed into an immense pleasure. This story of native islanders in Vanuatu is engrossing, transportive and emotional devastating, before ending on a kind of ecstatic high. It's basically a Romeo & Juliet story where the two young lovers are in the same tribe -- but tradition dictates that Juliet must be married off to a man she doesn't know in another tribe, to keep the peace. A true story told by the natives about themselves -- with technical assistance from Australian directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, including gorgeous cinematography -- it's not only about the attempt to incorporate "love marriage" into tribal customs, but it even has a surprise thematic resonance for our current broadening acceptance of gay marriage. It crushed me, then did so again on my second viewing back in December.

1. Toni Erdmann - I knew there was something special about this movie from the way Alison Willmore described it on Filmspotting: SVU. It was her favorite film from Cannes (and ended up her favorite of the year), and the plot synopsis was given to us bemusedly, with a knowing sense of its apparent absurdity. But apparently absurd movies are often the ones most likely to challenge us -- see my #6 -- and Toni Erdmann was a challenge in all the right ways. The wrong ways would have been exhaustion over its 160-minute running time, which I never felt. The right ways are how it makes us consider what we want, how we want to go about getting it, and how we can maintain the relationships in our lives -- especially with an older generation that won't be around forever -- on the road to getting there. As anyone who has already praised this movie will tell you, it's laugh-out-loud funny at one moment -- I laughed the hardest I've laughed in five years during one ten-minute stretch -- and heartbreaking in the next. Movies you would describe that way are often schmaltzy, a Terms of Endearment or something, but Toni Erdmann replaces that schmaltz with genuine profundity. I can think of plenty of terms of endearment for this unconventional German dramedy directed by a woman (Maren Ade), my first exclusively female-directed #1 since Sofia Coppola managed that feat in 2003 with Lost in Translation (Valerie Faris co-directed Ruby Sparks in 2012). But the best is that it's my favorite of the year.

And with the good there comes the bad ... the very very bad. My five worst:

5. Special Correspondents - A shockingly lazy effort from writer-director-star Ricky Gervais in which he and Eric Bana play journalists who pretend they are in a war zone while sitting in a building across the street from their radio station. It's slapdash and has idiotic ideas about character dynamics. For all the good stuff Netflix picks up, it also picks up shit.

4. American Honey - Long, boring, incredibly self-indulgent, weirdly anti-American, and Shia LaBeouf playing a douchebag poet savior with a bad rat tail (is there any other kind?). Some people worshipped this film. I wanted to claw my eyes out.

3. Triple 9 - The worst waste of talent this side of, um, anything I can think of recently, with a nihilistic attitude toward sleazy cops, sleazy bad guys, and Kate Winslet doing an awful Russian accent as some kind of ridiculous crime boss. 999? Should have called 911. What happened, John Hillcoat?

2. Yoga Hosers - The absolute worst possible iteration of nepotism by Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp. Their daughters can't really act, but it's their fathers' fault for trying to build a movie around them using an idea that barely begins to qualify as flimsy. Dumb Canada jokes + homicidal teenagers + Nazi sausages + Ralph Garman doing celebrity impersonations = a movie that would be my worst in nearly any other year.

1. Dirty Grandpa - But not this year. Yoga Hosers, you're off the hook. I shouldn't be surprised that Robert DeNiro would sink so low, yet I am still offended that he chose this crass spring break "comedy" that loathes its characters and especially its audience. I spent this movie engaged in one long head shake that could have earned me a trip to the chiropractor.

And now the whole, big, giant thing, from #1 to #151:

1. Toni Erdmann
2. Tanna
3. Zootopia
4. Hell or High Water
5. La La Land
6. Swiss Army Man
7. Other People
8. Lion
9. The Purge: Election Year
10. Moonlight
11. Hello, My Name is Doris
12. The Red Turtle
13. Cafe Society
14. Bad Moms
15. Off the Rails
16. Snowden
17. Captain America: Civil War
18. The Invitation
19. The Neon Demon
20. Blood Father
21. A Month of Sundays
22. Paterson
23. Manchester by the Sea
24. Seoul Station
25. Everybody Wants Some!!
26. Tower
27. A United Kingdom
28. Do Not Resist
29. The Nice Guys
30. The Lure
31. Sully
32. Southside With You
33. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
34. Kate Plays Christine
35. Clown
36. Dheepan
37. Don't Think Twice
38. Rams
39. Don't Breathe
40. After the Storm
41. The Founder
42. Pete's Dragon
43. Deepwater Horizon
44. Embrace of the Serpent
45. When Two Worlds Collide
46. Nerve
47. 10 Cloverfield Lane
48. Kubo and the Two Strings
49. The Birth of a Nation
50. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
51. Chasing Asylum
52. Eye in the Sky
53. Trapped
54. Certain Women
55. Under the Shadow
56. Lamb
57. The Bad Kids
58. 13th
59. The Boss
60. The Fits
61. Cameraperson
62. The Witness
63. The Family Fang
64. Arrival
65. Green Room
66. Krisha
67. Queen of Katwe
68. Little Men
69. The Salesman
70. The Phenom
71. Jane Got a Gun
72. Sunset Song
73. Too Late
74. Holidays
75. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
76. Zoolander 2
77. Keanu
78. Love & Friendship
79. Christine
80. 13 Hours: The Secret Solders of Benghazi
81. How to be Single
82. Grimsby
83. Jackie
84. Passengers
85. Ben-Hur
86. Graduation
87. Midnight Special
88. Sing Street
89. Hidden Figures
90. Florence Foster Jenkins
91. Ghostbusters
92. Life, Animated
93. Cemetery of Splendor
94. The Shallows
95. Hooligan Sparrow
96. Synchronicity
97. Deadpool
98. Last Days in the Desert
99. The BFG
100. Under the Gun
101. Office Christmas Party
102. Finding Dory
103. Sausage Party
104. Hail, Caesar!
105. X-Men: Apocalypse
106. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
107. Holy Hell
108. The Dressmaker
109. Star Trek Beyond
110. Miles Ahead
111. Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
112. Criminal
113. Storks
114. The 5th Wave
115. Tumbledown
116. Doctor Strange
117. Dark Night
118. The Meddler
119. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
120. Hardcore Henry
121. Where to Invade Next
122. Me Before You
123. Baskin
124. The Girl on the Train
125. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
126. I, Olga Hepnarova
127. Warcraft
128. I Saw the Light
129. The Secret Life of Pets
130. High-Rise
131. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
132. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
133. Morgan
134. Central Intelligence
135. Lights Out
136. Eddie the Eagle
137. Money Monster
138. Hacksaw Ridge
139. Hush
140. Suicide Squad
141. Regression
142. Bad Santa 2
143. Mascots
144. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
145. I.T.
146. Gods of Egypt
147. Special Correspondents
148. American Honey
149. Triple 9
150. Yoga Hosers
151. Dirty Grandpa

*exhale*

Another year-end post in the books. PLEASE COMMENT. I love comments. I know you love some of my choices and hate some of my choices ... tell me so!

MIFF: Double feature #1

This post is entitled "Double feature #1" not only because it's my first-ever MIFF double feature, but because it's my first of ... let's see ... FOUR this year. That's right, I've got one coming up on Friday (tonight), the next on Saturday and the last on Wednesday. Tentatively the last, anyway. But I have one more ticket to squeeze in for a film that's as-yet undetermined, and if that happens on Tuesday then I might have FIVE double features in total.

Hey, it's how a busy father of two fits it all in.

As with my previous MIFF screening, there was a bit of pre-screening drama with this one. Maren Ade's Cannes sensation Toni Erdmann was starting at the Forum on Flinders Street at 6 p.m. -- 30 minutes earlier than films in this time slot usually start, due to its 162-minute running time (and yes, it's a comedy that runs 162 minutes). So I didn't have that much time to organize something to eat between getting off work at 5 and the movie's start time, though it was only a short walk from my work. And though the next movie -- the Czech film I, Olga Hepnarova -- was only right across the street at ACMI, I didn't know how much time I'd have to eat anything between the two screenings. (Nor could I wait until nearly 9 o'clock to eat dinner.)

And I really, really wanted Chinese food.

Despite a co-worker telling me I'd come across "10,000" Chinese holes-in-the-wall -- the kind that could get me a nice box of noodles -- on my way to the theater, this did not turn out to be true. In fact, I wove in and out of city blocks for so many fruitless minutes that not only would I have to accept something less than I was craving, but I'd barely have time to eat it.

I ended up with a cheeseburger -- in other words, the same dinner I'd had three nights earlier -- and a need to walk very briskly if I wanted to make it for the start of the movie. I had chosen the most mamoth one they had, so the thing was falling all over the place as I tried to take bites of it while walking. Not a pretty sight.

It became evident that I wasn't actually going to be able to finish it before getting to the theater. So I returned it to its paper bag along with the fries, and put them both in my backpack to smuggle in. I don't have a problem smuggling most types of food into a movie theater, but there seemed something especially greasy about doing it with a burger, especially given how nicely appointed this classic theater is. Then there was the issue of the seemingly half-dozen MIFF volunteers who were hovering right around my chosen seat near the front of the theater. I didn't know if they had been assigned the responsibility of shaming people for consuming messy food, or worse, expelling them from the theater altogether.

Long story short -- or shorter than it could have been -- I finished the burger and fries in peace and watched the movie without incident.

And what a movie. Toni Erdmann immediately insinuates itself into the year-end top ten conversation, a glorious mixture of laughs and sentiment that fully earns our every emotion. I could go on about it, but a) I'm getting behind on posting, as I saw it two days ago and I keep getting interrupted trying to write this post and b) I wrote a review of it, which is here.

I can't say the same about I, Olga Hepnarova, a gorgeously shot but dramatically inert black-and-white film about the last woman who was executed in the Czech Republic (for intentionally running down a sidewalk full of innocent people as some misguided type of vengeance for being bullied). This one was a slog. Hey, you can't win them all.

Onward and upward to double feature #2.