My Top 10 Films of 2015

2015 was a particularly strange year for movies. Critics and fanboys lost their minds for George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a movie I thought was laudable as a piece of action filmmaking, but certainly not a new standard for the genre. Likewise, the year’s end brought in a wave of earnest prestige pictures that are sure to be forgotten once the awards campaigns have come to an end--*cough* I’m looking at you “Spotlight.” When looking back at my personal top-10 of last year, I find a strange mix of films that range wildly in genre, size and scope.

10 – Steve Jobs – Aaron Sorkin returns to familiar territory with his screenplay about Macintosh maestro Steve Jobs. For some, this might have come too close to the tone and characterizations depicted in his admittedly stronger screenplay for David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” but Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jeff Daniels and Seth Rogan internalize Sorkin’s dense, walk-and-talk dialogue confidently and Danny Boyle’s serviceable direction showcases this oddly-structured biopic with a sense of urgency.

09 – Tangerine – Sean Baker’s micro-budget indie, shot entirely on a modified iPhone5, is one of the most vital films to come out of the festival circuit in years. This comedy chronicles a wacky night of misadventure between two transgendered prostitutes who work out of a janky donut hut on Hollywood Boulevard. Though the situations and setting of this very-specific world might sound like the usual set-up for a naval-gazing cautionary tale, Baker injects immediacy and levity into the film and refuses to let the characters feel sorry for themselves.

08 – The Martian – This has to be on my list on the basis of that it's the least problematic Ridley Scott movie since 2000’s “Gladiator.” Matt Damon carries this “Call of the Wild” on Mars story with a good sense of comedic timing and relatability. Along with the 70s disco soundtrack, it’s the optimistic celebration of intelligence and science found in Drew Goddard’s adapted screenplay that culminates into an idiosyncratic and likeable sensibility--not often found in much of Scott’s recent work.

07 – Dope – Three nerds who attend a high-school in south-central Los Angeles are on the run from both the police and the gangs, when one of them accidentally gets the group involved in a drug ring while fumbling to impress a girl. This teen comedy/heist-movie highbred is full of contagious energy and an adventurous spirit towards the well-worn tropes it gladly subverts. The familiar teen-movie themes of trying to fit in are translated into interesting discussions of racial identity and class, as this movie depicts the difficulties of wanting to excel and stand-out within  urban communities.

06 – Room – Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room” explores the human condition and the power of childhood imagination through the dark tale of a women who fights for her son’s safety and innocents while forced to raise him within the woodshed of a deranged kidnapper. Abrahamson explores this enclosed space like a science fiction reality, slowly revealing to the audience more devastating truths as we learn the finer details through the perspective of Jacob Tremblay’s child protagonist. Brie Larson also gives a heartbreaking performance as the young mother.

05 – It Follows – This tribute to 80s minimalist horror takes the absurd premise of an evil entity that follows a person after he or she has slept with the last carrier of the curse and shoots it with such competency and atmosphere that the viewer is forced to think about the deeper connotations of its fantasy rules. The film’s soundtrack and the artful use of subject camera infuses every scene with palpable terror.

4 – Sicario – Speaking of subtly brooding thrillers, Denis Villeneuve’s boarder-noir “Sicario” stretches the movie’s narrative tightrope as much as it can and holds the tension in place for it's entire run-time as we descend into the film's criminal hell-scape. Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benecio Del Toro all give career-best performances and Roger Deakin’s cinematography brings him back to the southwest desolation of 2007’s “No Country for Old Men.”

3 – Ex Machina – Alex Garland’s directorial debut delivers on the promise of his visionary screenwriting on projects such as “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine.” Here he explores the psychology and philosophic ramifications of developing artificial intelligence with a minimal chamber thriller starring Oscar Isaac as a lonely, billionaire tech-genius and Domhnall Gleeson as an unassuming coder, tasked with testing the self-awareness of the world’s first living machine,  who's played wonderfully by Alicia Vikander.

2 – Inside Out – Pixar has a history of breaking hearts with their tender family fare, but it’s difficult to be prepared for just how genuine and vulnerable “Inside Out” is. The mechanics of the narrative, following the anthropomorphized emotions within the mind of a 12 year old girl, are surprisingly complicated and multifaceted, but “Up” writer/director Peat Doctor never loses sight of the raw, emotional core of his story within a story. More importantly, this film reminds us that big-budget Hollywood product can be thoughtful and nuanced and doesn't need to pander to the lowest common denominator to have a wide appeal.

1 – The Tribe – I saw this Ukrainian drama within the first few months of 2015 and knew by its end that it was unlikely that I would see a better film within the remainder of the year. Miroslav Slaboshpitsky depicts a boarding-school for the deaf as a lawless wasteland, where survival of fittest is the only sense of order established between groups of unsupervised teenagers. It’s difficult to describe the power of the wordless apocalyptic world Slaboshpitsky creates, but it’s the nervous tension generated between the shock of what we are seeing and the deliberate patience in which it’s shot that makes for one of the most vital pieces of visceral cinema of 2015.

Honorable Mentions:

Creed, Beasts of No Nation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, What We Do In The Shadows,  Kingsmen: The Secret Service and Carol 

Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about the best and worst films of the year on this episode of the Jabber and the Drone podcast.

Ex Machina review

              Alex Garland began as a novelist as whose jacked-up, modernized brand of genre pulp caught the eye of British director Danny Boyle. After Boyle had screenwriter and long-time collaborator John Hodge adapt Garland’s book “The Beach” into a script, he began to work with Garland exclusively.   This would define the director’s pivotal second wind of his career—elevating and reinventing geeky filmic traditions such as the zombie horror “28 Days Later” and the space-travel thriller “Sunshine.” In his new sci-fi psychodrama “Ex Machina,” Garland is set on his own for the first time as both writer and director.  It’s evident that his obsession with subverting tired genres while reveling in fan-bait fetishism is very much still intact, but what’s surprising is his comfort and confidence behind the camera.

             Somewhere in the not-too-distant future internet coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a lottery to spend a week with the creator of the world’s most widely used search engine; a deceptively casual, hard-drinking engineer named Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Upon arrival Nathan informs Caleb that as a temporary guest he will only be given access to a limited number of rooms in his remotely located superlab/stylishly modern stainless steel bachelor pad. To his surprise he finds out that his purpose isn’t to analyze things as a computer engineer or as a code theorist, but to rationalize data as a living, breathing, emotional human being. Turns out, Nathan has created a form of sentient artificial intelligence in the form of Eva (Alicia Vikander), and needs the shy programmer to test the believability of her independent thought with a series of personalized interviews.

            Garland sets up the story by winding the key on the back of the jack in the box and letting it play out in slow, simmering anticipation. By having only three principal characters, in which they rarely share a scene together, there’s a stripped-down minimalism expressed that recalls the icy chill of Kubrickian isolation. Cinematographer Rob Hardy shoots much of the film in long, centered wide shots and the movie’s sparse sound design and set decoration brings to mind the tense atmosphere’s of films like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Shining.” That said, given the movie’s sterile visual approach, Garland’s screenplay allows for a number of cleverly-written passages where the two male leads converse in long dialogues that inform their characters, delivers necessary exposition, while simultaneously complimenting the atmospheric tension with naturalistic humor.

            Oscar Isaac’s matter-of-fact line-delivery effectively conveys a tragic King Midas who uses a false sense of charisma to conceal his character’s profound loneliness and antisocial perversities.  But even with his flaws transparent, Isaac infuses the performance with unpredictable electricity. As the softly feminine android Eva Vikander has the most difficult and most thankless job in the movie. Here she has to subtly play a curious but intense intelligence that’s learning every day, computing her bourgeoning emotional truth, without revealing too much about her knowledge and still remaining vulnerable and submissive to her creator.

            Much of the film deals in complicated gender dynamics. In one of the movie’s best scenes, Caleb and Nathan discuss the purpose of installing a gender and sexuality within Eva, and how those same binaries are either installed or indoctrinated into naturally bred humans. Therefore, as a test-model Eva’s ability to pass Caleb’s Turing tests reflects not only on her success at humanity but also her femininity. The fact that two men are deciding what it is to be a convincing woman raises a lot of interesting philosophic and sociological points about systemic patriarchy, especially as the film concludes.

           If I knock “Ex Machina” for anything it’s that the impact of the film’s many reveals is softened if you have any familiarity with this style of Phillip K. Dick influenced science fiction. “Blade Runner” looms large over this story and the questions of what makes a person human isn’t much further developed past Riddley Scott’s take on the subject in 1982. This, however, does not take away from the sheer filmmaking competence and the moody brilliance on display, and even if I had a good idea where things were headed I still had great time getting there.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2015