There’s been a glimmer of feminism in many of the year’s best films. The most overtly feminist is Mustang, a fierce assault on the patriarchy of a traditional culture. But Brooklyn and Carolshare a feminist point of view. It’s no coincidence that the character that revolts in Ex Machinahas a female form. Ex Machina, Mustang and Brooklyn are are on my Best Movies of 2015.
Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie loved by critics (especially the female ones), is a rock ’em, sock’em action movie where women characters flee for their safety from male atrocities and then exact their revenge.
Testament of Youth is a biopic of the pioneering woman who leads a social movement. And from the 19th Century, there was the proto-feminist bodice ripper Far from the Madding Crowd. Chi-raq, Spike Lee’s modern inner city version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, also has women taking charge of their society.
All of these movies are primarily about women and have female leads.
Even the protagonist’s love interest (usually a thankless and peripheral role) in Creed is accomplished and only interested in embracing the title character on her own terms.
What does this mean? Not that Hollywood is now the paradigm of gender equity. Just that there were some high quality movies this year, some women-centered, with a welcome perspective.
Some viewers are going to hate, hate, hate the droll Swedish existentialist comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence, but it’s kind of a masterpiece. For most of its 101 minutes, dull Swedes sit and stand talking about dull things. It’s no secret that the Scandinavians (who The Wife refers to as “Your people”) are not the most lively bunch. Filmmaker Roy Andersson uses this trope to probe the meaning of life itself.
Salon.com critic Andrew O’Hehir has accurately described this film as “extreme-deadpan”. It is made up of vignettes filmed in static shots where people hardly move for 1-4 minutes – a looooong time. There is nothing on the walls of any of the bleak rooms. The characters converse in empty social conventions, talking about weather and such. Everyone says, “I’m happy to hear that you’re doing fine” because they can’t think of anything else to say. The highlight of their lives is when a comely young woman removes a stone from her shoe. In one bus stop discussion about what day of the week it is, we have the theme distilled: “it would be chaos” if we didn’t follow the routine. All of these people need more than a little chaos.
This is the third movie in a trilogy by Andersson. (I’ve seen and relished one of the prior films, Songs from the Second Floor). Like Pigeon, Songs is very funny, but Pigeon is more ambitious and digs deeper.
In the primary recurring thread, we follow a pair of sad sack novelty salesmen, who see their hopeless mission as “to help people have fun”. The joke is there may not be any value/fun/point to life but ESPECIALLY if you are a brooding Swede.
During the end credits, there is a final contrast, juxtaposing the unrestrained American rockabilly music set against an image of mordant Swedes.
There are absurdist episodes where 18th Century King Carl XII rides his steed into a modern Swedish cafe. (It helps to know that Carl spurned the company of women and that his defeat in the Battle of Poltava signaled the end of Swedish empire.)
And then there is a horrifyingly surreal dream sequence that illustrates the horrors of European colonialism. It is about inhumane brutality that Andersson believes still haunts Europe until forgiveness is sought; there is a reference to Sweden’s brief colonial past. This segment is less evocative (and even unnecessary) for US viewers unless we relate it to our own legacy of slavery.
Is the movie pointless? Or is the point that life is pointless? We do see some brief tender moments of a couple at a window and another in a meadow. The foe, it seems, is loneliness. We have only each other.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The Movie Gourmet doesn’t watch many horror movies, but 2015 featured some that were unusually inventive, scary and non-gory. It’s great to see young filmmakers bringing some intelligence and surprise (not just shockers) to this genre.
It Follows: Writer-director David Robert Mitchell has created a very scary horror film with an excellent soundtrack and a minimum of makeup, special effects and hardly any blood. 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a guy who then tells her that he has passed on to her a kind of supernatural infection – a monster will follow her and kill her if she doesn’t pass it on to someone else. The monster shambles along at zombie speed and takes the form of a different human being each time. It Follows is available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Unfriended: It’s the one-year anniversary of a teenage girl’s suicide, and her bullying peers convene via webcams on social media – but their computers are hijacked by an Unknown Force who starts wreaking revenge. Here’s a new one: the entire movie is compiled of the characters’ screenshots. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
The House on Pine Street: So here’s the thing with every movie ghost story – either the ghost is real or the protagonist is crazy enough to hallucinate one. The beauty of The House on Pine Street is that the story is right down the middle – ya just don’t know until the end when the story takes us definitively in one direction – and then suddenly lurches right back to the other extreme. I saw The House on Pine Street at Cinequest, and it’s now available to stream on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Deenis O’Keefe and Ann Sheridan in WOMAN ON THE RUN
My favorite movie-going experiences in 2015:
San Francisco’s Noir City film fest, with the double feature Woman on the Run and Born to Be Bad.
Cinequest, especially seeing the raucously funny Wild Tales with The Wife and friends at a packed California Theatre and seeing the exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama Corn Island on the recommendation of international film programmer Charlie Cockey.
Turner Classic Movies’ Summer of Darkness, program of film noir, which allowed me to discover two new noir favorites: 99 River Street and Witness to Murder.
The wonderful surprise of the very funny and family centric documentary Meet the Patels at a Camera Cinema Club, complete with a Skype interview with the Patel family itself.
A particularly strong program at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where I saw The End of the Tour, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Look of Silence, Listen to Me Marlon, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead and Very Semi-serious.
The Wife taking me to a luxurious screening of Spectre at the Los Gatos Theater with its black leather sofas and ottomans.
Happening to be in Spain during the first weekend of the Sevilla European Film Festival, and getting to catch Mustang with The Wife and my niece Maeve.
If you’ve been waiting all year for excellent cinema, you’re in luck. This week, I have SIXTEEN recommendations, with SIX of them on my list of Best Movies of 2015. Scroll all the way down for six bonus picks on video.
Mustang, about exuberant Turkish teenage girls challenging traditional repression. You can find Mustang in San Francisco and San Rafael, and it’s opening in San Jose on January 1.
Creed, the newest and entirely fresh chapter in the Rocky franchise; it’s about the internal struggle of three people, not just The Big Fight.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Youth, a glorious cinematic meditation on life with Michael Caine.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
Here are ten more choices. There’s something for everyone.
Legend – a true-life story and the best crime drama of 2015. Tom Hardy plays both gangster twin brothers.
Very Semi-Serious – a Must See documentary if you love the cartoons in The New Yorker. It’s showing on HBO.
Macbeth– an excellent new version of Shakespeare’s exploration of ambition. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard star.
Hitchcock/Truffaut – a Must See for serious movie fans, this insightful documentary probes documentary Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work.
Chi-Raq: Spike Lee’s plea for inner city peace with justice, AND it’s a sex comedy.
Bridge of Spies – Steven Spielberg’s Cold War espionage thriller with Tom Hanks, featuring a fantastic performance by Mark Rylance.
Trumbo – the historical drama that reflects on the personal cost of principles.
Don Verdean – a dark satire on the faux scientists embraced by the Christian Right.
Spectre – action and vengeance from a determined James Bond.
Turner Classic Movies brings us the recently restored film noir Too Late for Tears on December 29. On New Year’s Eve, TCM is presenting an entire day of the irresistible William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora in The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home and Song of the Thin Man.
And on New Year’s Day, TCM is showing the superb proto-noirM (1931), Peter Lorre stars as a serial killer who preys on children. It’s a masterpiece by master director Fritz Lang (Metropolis), who later fled the Nazis to Hollywood and made several fine film noirs in the 50s. Lorre is compelling as a man plagued with a twisted compulsion. There’s no explicit violence, but you’ve never seen a more chilling solitary balloon. The city’s criminal underclass races with the police to hunt down the monster. The climax is a most unusual courtroom scene. If you’re going to see one pre-war European film – see this one.
Peter Lorre in M
And for the Holidays, here are movies from my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far that are available to stream or to rent on DVD:
The smartest road trip movie ever, The End of the Tour. It’s available streaming from Amazon Instant, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The unforgettable coming of age dramedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. It’s available streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and now available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox.
The extraordinary Russian drama Leviathan, a searing indictment of society in post-Soviet Russia. Leviathan is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
The hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
The Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, the story of an extraordinarily gifted person’s escape from torment. Love & Mercy is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu.
The gentle, thoughtful and altogether fresh dramedy I’ll See You In My Dreams with Blythe Danner, available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Here’s an offbeat choice for a Christmas movie – the raucous and raunchy high energy comedy Tangerine is set on Christmas Eve. Of course, it’s not a family movie in that it’s appropriate for children, but it is about families by choice. Tangerine is available to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
It’s history. Now we all know that the subprime mortgage scam blew up in 2007 and brought global banking to its knees by September 2008. The supremely entertaining The Big Short takes us back to before the financial collapse, when only a few quirky smarty pants saw it coming. Director Adam McKay personalizes the crisis into an irreverent character driven drama with both whodunit and ticking bomb elements. It all adds up to an exciting, funny and anger-provoking experience.
The Big Short follows the parallel stories of the not-so-merry few who discovered the worthlessness of securities comprised of bad subprime loans. There’s a San Jose doctor-turned-fund manager (Christian Bale), a renegade Wall Street hedge fund manager (Steve Carell) and a couple of boy wonder investors in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a very unlikely bunch of prospective heroes. Bale’s doctor is so socially impervious that he seems to belong somewhere on the autism spectrum. Carell’s trader attends anger management group therapy, which is not helping him a damn bit. And the Boulder kids – well this IS their first rodeo.
The real star here is Adam McKay, whose previous work has been in low-brow comedies, most notably the Ron Burgundy movies. Remember, this is the story of guys in front of their computers figuring out the current and future values of other people’s home mortgages. McKay has turned this into an edge-of-your-seat thriller. That is remarkable.
McKay’s first challenge is helping us understand all the financial gobbledygook. McKay immediately breaks the Fourth Wall, with an opportunistic Wall Street banker (Ryan Gosling) opening the movie by speaking directly to the camera and explaining how home mortgages are securitized – and it turns out that we can understand it, after all. Throughout the film, McKay keeps interrupting the action with very funny cameos, so unexpected personalities can explain various financial instruments. I’m not going to reveal them, because much of the fun is the delightful surprise. But I will say that no one has ever explained something complicated with more clarity than a pop star, an economist and a crowd in a casino when they combine to illuminate us about the “synthetic CDO”.
As cynical and iconoclastic as they are, none of our heroes can imagine the breadth of the corruption and the scale of the impending financial meltdown. As Carell’s character digs deeper, he unearths the incentives for the bankers, insurers, rating agencies and mortgage retailers to lie and cheat and defraud – all built into the system. Carell’s face is filled with a combination of disgust and terror as he connects the dots. The Big Short opens with the Mark Twain quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” No truer words…
Carell and Bale are brilliant in The Big Short; both performances are awards-worthy. Gosling, Brad Pitt and Melissa Leo are all also excellent, as is Adepero Oduye (12 Years a Slave). I especially loved Jeremy Strong’s performance as Carell’s hyper intense right hand man. Strong has a particular gift for being memorable in historical dramas: Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Selma and as Lee Harvey Oswald in the overlooked Parkland.
Now we know that these guys were right when everyone else – including ALL the figures of authority – were saying that they were wrong. It’s an amazing story to watch.
Mustangis about five exuberant Turkish teenage girls who challenge the repression of traditional culture. It’s a triumph for writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and one of the best films of the year.
The five parentless sisters are living with their uncle and aunt on the Turkish coast “a thousand kilometers from Istanbul”. They’re a high-spirited bunch, and their rowdiness – innocent by Western standards – embarrasses their uncle. Overreacting, he tries to protect the family honor by pulling them out of school, taking away their electronics, putting them in traditional dresses (evoking the dress wear of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons) and conniving to marry them off as soon as possible. The uncle turns their home into a metaphorical prison that becomes more and more literal. The girls push back, and the stakes of the struggle get very, very high.
Our viewpoint is that of youngest sister Lale (Günes Sensoy), who is a force of nature, ever watchful (often fiercely). The poster girl for indomitability, Lale is one of the great movie characters of 2015.
Mustang is a film of distilled feminism, without any first world political correctness. These are people who want to marry or not, who they want, when they want and to have some control over their lives. They want protection from abuse. That is not a high bar, but because they are female, the traditional culture keeps these basic rights from them.
Although Mustang is set and filmed in Turkey by a Turkish writer-director, the actors are Turkish and all the dialogue is Turkish, it is technically a French movie. Director Ergüven works in France and the film was financed and produced in France. In fact, it is France’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar (over the Cannes winner Dheepan and the Vincent Lindon drama The Measure of a Man).
I happened to be in Sevilla, Spain for the first weekend of the Sevilla European Film Festival and saw Mustang there. I’ll be rooting for Mustang to win an Oscar.
In 1955, James Dean wasn’t yet an icon. East of Eden was in the can but hadn’t been released, and Dean was trying to get cast in Rebel Without a Cause. To the extent he was known in popular culture, it was as Pier Angeli’s red carpet date at movie premieres. The free-lance photographer Dennis Stock was convinced that Dean was fascinating, and Stock followed Dean around New York and to Dean’s Indiana home town. The resulting photos in LIFE magazine (one is below) were indeed iconic, and the film LIFE follows the two men in this episode.
LIFE is moderately interesting because Dean was such a character. And it’s an interesting time in cinema and we get glimpses of Angeli (Alessandra Mastronardi), Nicholas Ray, Natalie Wood, Julie Harris, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Ben Kingsley has a fun turn as Jack Warner, a mogul who has dealt with many a temperamental artist and is more than a match for any of them.
The problem with LIFE is that it’s about one of the most charismatic actors in film history. Dane DeHaan captures Dean’s mannerisms very well, and we see Dean as interesting, charming, insecure, infuriating, bratty and striving. But we don’t see him suck all of the oxygen out of the room. We don’t experience Dean’s charisma.
Now I am a big fan of Dane DeHaan, who was absolutely brilliant in Kill Your Darlings. He’s a fine, fearless and promising actor and a real original. It’s not his fault that he’s not James Dean.
Robert Pattinson plays James Stock, and his stoniness sure doesn’t help. I still don’t understand why Twilight fans find him to be so dreamy. Kelly McCreary of Grey’s Anatomy plays Eartha Kitt, the one character whose dazzling persona pierces this otherwise bland movie.
LIFE is available to stream from Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Youth is filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s glorious cinematic meditation on life. A resolutely retired composer (Michael Caine) is staying once again at a luxurious spa resort in the Swiss Alps – the kind of place where towels are folded into the figures of swans. Also at the resort are his adult daughter and assistant (Rachel Weisz), an old friend who is a film director (Harvey Keitel), a movie star (Paul Dano) and a host of other characters.
The composer meanders through his daily massages and medical check-ups, and there really isn’t what most of us would think of as a plot. But stuff happens to each of the characters, and the composer and others reflect on their lives – the accomplishments, the disappointments, the betrayals, the intense experiences of love. They contemplate what they remember and what they can’t remember. Ultimately, they consider both life’s deepest meanings and life’s pointlessness. All of this builds and kinda sneaks up on the audience.
Some stories may be best told in the form of novels or short stories or photography or ballet. Sorrentino knows that his story – as was the one in his exquisite The Great Beauty– is best suited for cinema. And Sorrentino takes full advantage of his medium. Youth is a beautiful film to watch – with the spectacular alpine landscapes and the artsy interior shots (some very Felliniesque). The music (as fitting a story about a composer) is entrancing, too; no one left my screening until the music for closing credits had ended and the house lights came back up. There are several dream (and daydream) sequences which are close to genius.
There’s a lot of wry humor in Youth – a silent couple (who have some surprises ready for the audience), an obese South American (Roly Serrano) who resembles Diego Maradona, a forlorn young escort, the pop star Paloma Faith as a vulgar version of herself and a punctiliously insistent emissary from the Queen. And then there’s Jane Fonda as an aging movie queen in grotesque makeup.
Caine, Keitel, Weisz and Dano each have wonderfully moving monologues. I also very much enjoyed the mountaineering instructor (Robert Seethaler) and the braces-wearing masseuse (Luna Mijovic).
Those who need their movies linear and tightly resolved might look elsewhere. But Youth looks great, sounds great and is superbly acted. If you settle in and let it envelop you, you won’t regret it. I’m still thinking about Youth several days after seeing it.
