My Top-10 Films of 2016

2016 has been strange and surprising for all of us, and that’s also reflected in the films that came out last year. Many of the most anticipated blockbusters either underperformed or failed on arrival (“Assassins Creed,” “Independence Day: Resurgence,” “Alice: Through the Looking Glass”), while the R-rated superhero farce “Deadpool” and a Winona Ryder starring, eight-episode Netflix miniseries about Dungeons and Dragons and parallel universes captured America’s imagination.

My favorite movies of the year seem to fill the cracks between Hollywood’s biggest wins and biggest losses, mostly showcasing talented filmmakers that remind us that the most standard genre paradigms still hold true if realized with filmic discipline and a passion for the subject matter.

10 – Tickled – New Zealand documentarian David Farrier falls down the rabbit hole of online competitive tickle-torture, and what started as an assignment to highlight a wacky sub-culture, descends into a lurid story about power, control, money, and online extortion. Doing for the internet what “Psycho” did for showers, this documentary takes wild and unexpected left turns and reveals itself to be one of the most tense and uncomfortable movie watching experiences of 2016.

09 – The Lobster – Colin Ferrell plays a lonely man who checks himself into an isolated single’s retreat to find a life-partner. Once there, he agrees with the management that if he’s unable to find a suitable mate he will forced to live his next life as a lobster. Yorgos Lanthimos' surrealist dark comedy gleefully queers the heterosexual experience and satirizes the arbitrary nature of human social constructs.

08 – The Neon Demon – It took me a few days to untangle the movie's meaning and discern the intentional camp of Nicholas Winding Refn’s fashion-industry horror story. Like a modern and perverse take on the Little Red Riding hood fairy-tale, refracted through the prism of expressive, euro-styled exploitation thrillers and sleazy camp-classics such as “Valley of the Dolls” and “Showgirls,” “The Neon Demon” never lets you comfortably judge the movie based on its genre expectations.

07 – Hell or High Water – It’s been a while since we’ve had a really great, down-and-dirty cops and robbers flick. “Hell or High Water”—2016’s top grossing indie release—is the type of thinking-man’s man-movie that we didn’t know we were craving. Chris Pine and Ben Foster play West-Texas bank-robbing brothers who’re out to steal from the same institution’s that took their fathers land after the Great Recession. Jeff Bridges plays the cowboy detective hot on their trail. Think “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” meets “Thelma & Louise.”

06 – Midnight Special – Jeff Nichols shows off his love for Spielberg’s sci-fi dramas like “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” with a paranoid fantasy about a young boy with special abilities who’s running from the government,
 while trying to communicate with beings from another world. The film’s brooding tone and eerie, atmospheric imagery is emotionally grounded by terrific performances from Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver and child actor Jaeden Lieberher.

05 – La La Land – Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling sing and dance their way through Damien Chazelle’s archetypal boy-meets-girl musical, which uses the gloss of the Hollywood tradition to argue for the uncertainty of cinema’s future.

04 – Don’t Breathe – Horror movies can talk about today’s issues with insightful allegory, or they follow the footsteps of Hitchcock’s methods of audience manipulation and take us on a jolting thrill-ride. Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” chooses the latter and gracefully treads the water of the home-invasion thriller with suspenseful and well-crafted set-pieces.

03 – 13^th – Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary deconstructs the legal language of the 13^th amendment which ended slavery only to pave the path for America’s prison-industrial complex. Racial divisions have been written into our very constitution and DuVernay carefully traces every civil-rights set-back to the passing of the 13^th, showing us that our own justice system has replaced the plantation owners of yesteryear.

02 – Moonlight – What separated this film from the other character-driven, austere drama’s that sweep awards season, is its experimental and lyrical cinematic language. Barry Jenkins tells the story of a young black teen who grows up in poverty while he learns to repress his own sexual confusion, reminding us that ‘It Gets Better’ doesn’t always apply to every social situation. Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Mahershala Ali all turn in fragile and deeply effecting performances as a boy who is forced to hide his emotional truth to survive his day-to day existence.

01 – The Witch – Robert Eggers’ folktale about a settler family in the 1600s who’re oppressed by a darkness from within their New England backwoods property sunk its teeth into me as early as February of last year and it still hasn’t let go. The craft and detail that went into this modest production serves to highlight the film’s allegorical concerns about faith, sin, doubt, evil, and perception. Everything from the performances by the mostly-unknown cast, the dark and striking cinematography and the thoroughly bleak presentation of the subject matter left me without a single thing to fault to find in this thoughtful and transcendent art-house horror. 

Honorable Mentions:
Star Trek Beyond, Arrival, Eddie the Eagle, Everybody Wants Some, The Nice Guys, Kubo and the Two Strings, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about  out year-end lists.

The Neon Demon review

Danish filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn (“Drive,” “Bronson,” “Pusher”) is an exciting and daring stylist who’s equally confounding and frustrating as a visual storyteller. Like many auteurs in the post-modern era, he wears his influences on his sleeve and uses pastiche as a way of creating new meaning from old genre tropes. His latest film “The Neon Demon” combines the dreamy nature of euro-trash, exploitation horror with the camp sensibility of a  Hollywood rise and fall drama.

Because of their surface interests in shock and attitude, horror and camp have always been kissing cousins and both have often shared a lot of space on the cult-movies racks of the now-extinct video stores, but here Refn isn’t satisfied with simply achieving approval as a cult curiosity, he also wishes to be taken seriously as an artist and a visionary. Perhaps it’s the way the film vibrates between the boarders of shock, camp and art-house experimentation that prevents it/saves it from conveniently being excepted as any of the above, while also never settling on an appeal those different tones might provide.

Elle fanning plays the lead as a Jesse, a young runaway trying make it as a model in Los Angeles. Because of innocent youth and her effortless beauty, she’s quickly signed to a top agency where she catches the attention of Jenna Malone as a make-up artist named Ruby and two viciously completive models named Gigi (Bella Heathcoat) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). As Jesse begins to slowly come out of her shell and her naivety is—supernaturally? —transformed into spotlight bravado, her urban-fairytale surroundings creep in closer and closer, becoming more hostile as the movie progresses.

Though the story is quite traditional, Refn’s take on the material is anything but. The movie opens on a slow moving tableau of Jesse who appears murdered and blood soaked. This reveals itself to be stylish photoshoot in which our heroine is trying to put together a portfolio. Given the eventual trajectory of the plot, this also mirrors the staged beauty and ornate artificiality of the film itself and the genre it’s participating in. Refn challenges the notion of style over substance—a critical dart often thrown in his direction—by embracing a world and a set of characters in which style is substance. At one point a hacky fashion designer tells our protagonist “Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing,” and with that philosophy in mind, this movie couldn’t be more aesthetically satisfying. Every frame is meticulously designed with dramatic lighting schemes that paints the world in fluorescent reds and pinks and turquoise. Even Jesse’s seedy Pasadena hotel room is designed and arranged within an inch of its life. This, along with Cliff Martinez’s synthy score that harkens back to the work of 1980s Tangerine Dream, all helps to create a sleepy, slow-motion nightmare.

There’s a lot to soak in here and much to appreciate on an aesthetic level and as a horror movie the flick meets its splatter quota with a third act that dares to go to exceedingly disturbing and twisted places, but the pacing is sometimes a bit too deliberate and the tension it needs to maintain as a psychological thriller is intermittently relaxed for the sake of bathing in the hallucinatory scenery.

“The Neon Demon” feels like an experiment in genre that was never quite resolved before it hit the screen, but it never lacks something to look at, something the laugh at, or something that will make you genuinely wince and squirm. For all its flaws and awkward handling of the narrative, this is undeniably active cinema at work and Refn’s clarity of vision shouldn’t be ignored in favor of the comfort of conventionality.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Neon Demon."