Thoughts on 2019 Movies

I am populating this site with some things I wrote in the past and don’t have saved anywhere convenient.

In 2019, I saw a lot of movies and had some thoughts about some of them.

I’ve kept up with movie releases this year like never before.  As of December 30, 2019, I’ve been to movies in theaters 105 times and seen 101 of the movies released in the U.S. in 2019 in theaters.  Here, in no particular order, are 36 thoughts on 43 of those movies.

1.

There have been very few times in my life that I’ve seen a new movie in the theater and been certain that it’s one of the all-time greats.  That happened this year with An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo’s first and only film, about a day in the life of a few inhabitants of a northern Chinese city.  When I really wanted to see it again but it hadn’t gotten a DVD/Blu-Ray release yet, I bought a ticket two months in advance to sit through all four hours of it again.  It feels weird to describe anything as a tight four hours, but there’s not a moment that feels like trimmable fat, including the eerie, elongated ending sequence.  I can’t count how many times this year I was watching something else and got reminded of a scene that Hu Bo had already done better—and which I hadn’t even thought too much about since watching the movie.  I read a review that described the main characters’ wish as not to feel anything, but I don’t think that’s entirely right.  They want to know the secret to everyone else’s ability not to react to the overwhelming provocations of everyday life.  The titular elephant, sitting still in a zoo in Manzhouli while people poke it with sticks, isn’t an ideal of unfeeling calm.  Instead, it has internalized the lesson that all the main characters only get on an intellectual level: that if it kicks, even once, someone will put it down.

2.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which made my top ten list, took a lot of flak because a seriously unreliable interviewee suggests that something might be the case which likely isn’t the case (feels weird to be spoiler-tagging a documentary, but here we are), as if our main role when watching a movie should be to worry about what hypothetical dumb people might take away from it.

3.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing wrong with Cold Case Hammarskjöld: it’s the kind of great that brushes up against the border with terrible.  The documentarians/investigators are weird and manipulative in extremely uncomfortable ways, and they (intentionally) embody the aesthetics of colonialism in a way that exerts a strange influence over their subjects, and it’s deeply unpleasant to watch them exert that influence.

4.

In this respect, Cold Case Hammarskjöld comes out sort of like the unscripted version of My Friend the Polish Girl, a creepy movie in the form of a documentary made by an rich American girl about a polish immigrant living in the UK.  My Friend the Polish Girl does a great job of putting you in the voyeuristic outsider’s position embodied by the fictional documentarian: like her, you want the documentary’s subject to be more interesting than she actually is, even if you wouldn’t take the steps she does to make it happen.

5.

While we’re drawing unnecessary parallels between largely unrelated movies, this has been a good year for reconciling with your abusive father.  Ewan MacGregor did it in Doctor Sleep, Matthew Rhys did it in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and Lucas Hedges did it twice (in Waves and, most impressively, in Honey Boy).

6.

Honey Boy is a movie about childhood trauma, alcoholism, and the nature of child stardom, which is to say it’s a movie about writer/co-star Shia LaBeouf.  Except, and this is what makes it work, it’s less interested in the Shia character (played as a child by an excellent child actor whose name I don’t know) and as an adult by Lucas Hedges.  Instead, the focus of the movie is on the character’s father, played by LaBeouf himself, a recovering alcoholic and all-around bad father who the main character pays to serve as his “manager” in a desperate attempt to make him stay in his life.  The movie feels introspective in a universal way, instead of self-indulgent, which given the specificity of the subject matter is a miracle.

7.

It’s also been a good year for movies that know when to keep going even though they might reasonably have stopped.  An Elephant Sitting Still wouldn’t have its four-hour runtime if it had stopped at the first opportunity.  Most notably, Les Misérables (not an adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel) could easily have cut out at a point where it would have been a straightforward story about being part of a corrupt police force, along the lines of Training Day or End of Watch.  Instead, it presses on and gives us a breathtaking final sequence where everything goes where we all wish it would.

8.

Les Misérables is also a movie that knows where to end.  It fades away on an ambiguous final shot, where we don’t know whether a character is going to follow through on what he’s gearing up to do.  At first, you might be annoyed (I was) because you want to know whether the guy does the thing or not.  But then you take a step back, and you play it out, and realize that nothing goes differently whether he does it or not.  Everything that will happen two or three steps down the road will play out exactly the same: we’ve got all the information we need to understand what this world will be going forward.

9.

On the subject of endings, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (from 2014) may have the best ending I’ve ever seen.  His follow-up, this year’s Transit, was not even remotely what I expected him to do next.  It utilizes his ability to present on screen what it looks like when the world turns out to be something completely other than what a person expected it to be, not just internally from the character’s perspective but what it looks like to the outside world.  There’s a remark attributed to Joseph Heller when an interviewer accused him of uneven quality, something to the effect of “I may not have written anything as good as Catch-22 in the last 20 years, but neither has anyone else.”  Petzold may never recapture the pure moment of startling catharsis at the end of Phoenix, but with the exception of Hu Bo I can’t think of anyone who’s come close, and Transit is a worthy successor.

10.

One of the subtle brilliances of Les Misérables is the many ways in which it makes its main character miss things that are clear (or at least visible) to the audience: not just the large-scale things (he, along with the rest of the police, treats the inhabitants of the banlieue as if they were a homogeneous group that answer like an army to a few leaders) but the little things (he either doesn’t realize that one of his fellow cops is a practicing Muslim or doesn’t realize that means the other cop isn’t going to get a beer with him).  It’s the things he misses that let the movie reach its brilliant conclusion, and make possible a stunning moment of cathartic violence against a character who our protagonists don’t see as distinct from the perpetrators.

11.

On a lighter note, 2019 gave us a large number of kids’ adventure movies with heart.  Jumanji: The Next Level might not be as good as its predecessor, but there’s something that undeniably works about Awkwafina playing Danny DeVito saying a tearful goodbye to a horse who is Danny Glover.  Dora and the Lost City of Gold wins a lot of points for just playing everything with absolute sincerity, and if I ran the awards ceremonies Isabela Moner would get a nomination for portraying a frankly inconceivable level of innocence and self-certainty.  Shazam!, though, is probably my favorite of these: it captures almost perfectly the feel of the comics I grew up on about kids finding their own family and adapting to one another’s weirdnesses when the rest of the world isn’t prepared for them.  If you loved Todd Dezago’s Impulse as a kid, Shazam! has you covered.

12.

I don’t usually like Terence Malick very much, which made it a real surprise when I emerged from A Hidden Life ready to stick it in my top 25 for the year.  It’s striking how mismarketed it is, given its status as a three hour-long prestige picture, but it’s not a World War II piece, or even really a political piece at all.  What it is (and this is obvious almost from the jump) is a passion play: the story about the trial and execution of a man for his unwillingness to renounce his positions.  What makes the movie fantastic is its willingness to engage with the futility of his resistance: characters constantly point out to Franz that his refusal to swear allegiance to Hitler won’t accomplish anything, and might even lead to the position he would have occupied being filled with a true believer who will do far worse than he would.  The movie doesn’t have a clear answer, but August Diehl plays the character with a level of visible faith that can’t help making us feel like we’re missing something that’s incredibly obvious to him.

13.

The Nightingale is an extremely well-made movie that I didn’t like.  I can’t help but wonder whether I’m missing some piece of film history that would make it make sense.  It has the feel of one of those grimdark westerns that existed to react to the glorified version of the American pioneer days sold by earlier films—but without the background of the thousands of oaters, that colonialism in Tasmania sucked doesn’t seem like a particularly interesting comment.  Is there some grand tradition of saluting the early Tasmanian settlers that this is reacting to the way, say, McCabe & Mrs. Miller reacts to its own background?

14.

I didn’t hate Cats.  I certainly didn’t love it (it’s currently sitting at 61st on my list of movies for the year, which I’m still rejiggering), but it’s far from the abomination everyone makes it out to be.  Is it a masterpiece?  Of course not, it’s Cats.  But it’s trying to do something, and it’s interesting to watch, and it nails a couple emotional beats successfully enough that I can’t really ask for more.  Plus, I genuinely like the idea of Judi Dench as the new Brian Blessed.  Can we get her as Prince[ss] Vultan next?

15.

A few movies that are just a lot of fun and I’d be remiss in not mentioning: Slaughterhouse Rulez (underdogs at a fancy British school fight monsters released by fracking); Good Boys (as close as you can get to live-action South Park without being charged with endangering your child actors); Pokemon Detective Pikachu (I’m not going to insult you by acting like you need a description); *Crawl* (alligator horror movie); The Beach Bum (Matthew McConaughey is a oldish stoner who encounters personal tragedy and remains unchanged).

16.

Parasite is everything everyone says it is.  It’s a masterpiece, it’s hilarious, it’s biting as fuck, and most of all it’s sincere on a level I honestly didn’t think Bong Joon-ho was capable of based on the snarky irony of his previous work.  That said, for all its brilliant analysis of class (and particularly of the blindness the upper classes have to the existence of the lower classes) it comes off a bit too sympathetic to the upper class perspective, with the sense of a warning or morality tale about the dangers the slums pose to the viewer’s landed life.  Its goal is to reveal the existence of its poor protagonists as a fact, not to inhabit their lives (like, say, Koreeda’s Shoplifters), which places the camera’s sympathy in the wrong place at a few key moments.

17.

I don’t know if it’s an age thing or a generational thing, but people of a certain age routinely sit through a movie without laughing at the jokes or otherwise reacting, other than making a loud “huh” of understanding at any piece of exposition.  Marriage Story was good enough that the elderly audience I saw it with were largely completely silent, too rapt to even emit the “huh”s.  One exception: the old ladies next to me started talking loudly during a climactic musical moment about their guesses as to where the song a character was singing came from.  I gave them the answer, they thanked me and were mercifully silent for the rest of the movie.

18.

After seeing my 100th movie of the year and thereby achieving an arbitrary self-imposed goal, I felt free to see movies that didn’t come from this year.  So I immediately went out to see Sátántangó, Béla Tarr’s seven hour and thirty minute movie about life in a Hungarian village.  I can’t say that it actually succeeds in justifying its runtime, but it comes about as close as anything could, including some sequences of 20 or 30 minutes that rank among the best stuff I’ve seen on film.

19.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is about universal themes of displacement and racism, but it’s also more deeply personal than I would have said it’s possible for a great movie to be.  Why does this character put on a weird performance art piece at a critical moment?  Because that’s what that character would do.

20.

Uncut Gems is a master class in how to use a revolting main character.  Like P.T. Anderson before them, the Safdie brothers understand that Adam Sandler’s comedic persona becomes a compelling dramatic figure if you take him out of the artifice of a world that accepts his selfishness.  The character is so caught up in his own obsessions that he can’t possibly believe others don’t get the importance of what he’s doing.  What makes the movie riveting is its ability to let us in on his preoccupations, to the point where we can almost be surprised when the other characters don’t have time for his bullshit.  In the final sequence, he makes a choice that can only end one way—and yet we are so caught up in his view of the world that the inevitable result comes as a surprise.

21.

In a just world, Robert Pattinson would be getting two nominations for best actor this year: one for his claustrophobic performance in The Lighthouse and one for his tender, desperate portrayal of paternal love in Claire Denis’s High Life.  High Life, a space fable about parenthood and punishment, was deeply flawed, with a climax that revolves around an awkwardly forced take on overdone soft sci-fi concepts.  But the human elements—in particular Pattinson’s interactions with his daughter, but also the various prisoners’ reactions to the horror of their punishment—build to visual and emotional peaks that few directors can manage.

22.

The Lighthouse, on the other hand, for all its pretensions to significance and artiness, simply can’t avoid being an incredibly fun movie.  No one can rage like Willem Dafoe, and no one can alternately cower and sulk like Robert Pattinson.  The Lighthouse benefits in comparison to Eggers’ previous movie, The Witch, in that its weirdness is in service of nothing other than making an extremely weird movie (instead of conveying a Deep and Important Message).  The scenes of horror from The Lighthouse will stay with you, but so will the full-on laughs at the ridiculousness of the characters’ interactions.

23.

For pure entertainment value, though, nothing this year can beat Ready or Not, a movie I went into with moderate expectations (and the Fugees stuck in my head).  The plot is nothing special—young woman marrying into rich family must attempt to avoid said family sacrificing her to a family legend of dubious provenance—but every beat in the movie is perfect, hilarious, and thrilling in a way that’s worthy of every comparison you could throw at it.  I think it’s fair to say that Knives Out—a comedic delight in its own right—suffered somewhat in my mind from comparison to the pitch-perfect portrayal of a fucked-up rich family in Ready or Not.

24.

That’s not to say that Knives Out isn’t brilliant.  The closest thing I have to a complaint is that it’s too busy being a good movie to give us an extra five minutes or so with each supporting character, each of whom is played by a star at the top of their game.  The script makes the unusual choice for a whodunit to include several plot devices that should limit our ability to be misled, but still doesn’t fail to surprise with its second, third, and fourth-act twists.  Of everyone expending post-blockbuster capital on pet projects, Rian Johnson made the best choice (unless we count Colin Trevorrow’s inexplicable decision to make my favorite terrible movie of recent memory, last year’s The Book of Henry).  Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, another use of post-Disney social clout, is certainly a delight, but isn’t willing to trust the audience to have the right emotional reactions and oversells a fair number of its dramatic moments.  

25.

Knives Out and The Book of Henry both feature Jaeden Martell, who is currently occupying the position of “the one child actor whose name I can remember.”  He didn’t do that with either of those movies, or even with It: Chapter Two (in which he plays main character, younger version of James McAvoy, and obvious Stephen King stand-in Bill Denbrough, and which I liked parts of a lot), but with Low Tide, a seedy neo-noir set among teenagers at the Jersey Shore.  So many movies misremember childhood and treat children either as pure innocents into whose lives violence is an intruder, or as party to the sort of orchestrated, rulebound violence we associate with pitchforked mobs or with the carceral state (like the bullies in It, who have a primal or supernatural drive to do physical harm to our heroes).  It was refreshing to see Low Tide recognize the peculiarly teenage brand of violence, the kind that emerges not from a desire to do violence but from not having yet reached the realization that violence is not a permitted or effective solution to one’s problems.

26.

Of every movie I saw this year, the one I was most worried I wouldn’t have the stomach for was American Dharma, Errol Morris’s feature-length interview of Steve Bannon.  Morris always brings an unexpected angle to his documentaries, and what’s most striking about this one is how—despite Bannon’s best efforts—it emerges as a portrait of him as a human being, rather than taking any real interest in his positions.  Immediately after watching the movie, I was inclined to treat that as a missed opportunity, but as time goes by I find that I’m not sure whether there’s anything to be gained by discussing/debating the issues with a man like that—it may be more intellectually profitable to look at him as a person, to see what he is and how he got that way.

27.

A lot of solid but not exceptional backward-looking reflections on the lives of gay people came out this year.  The best of these was probably Portrait of a Lady on Fire (not a good translation of the title, but the official one), which focuses on a couple weeks in which two women had a beautiful romance before one of them had to go off and get married to an unknown man.  The film’s greatest weakness is its failure to trust the audience’s intelligence, so that we’re treated to shoehorned sequences in which the characters discuss a supremely obvious point of symbolism that will be used later in the movie.

28.

A close second, Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical Pain & Glory, focuses on the back pain and opioid addiction of the writer/director’s stand-in, as he tries to reconcile himself with the open questions of his childhood and his mysterious first crush, while at the same time reconnecting with those he’s isolated himself from in his increasing fragility.  Antonio Banderas plays his emotional and physical pain with effective understatement.  His reconnection with an ex-boyfriend is one of the most striking visions I’ve seen of what people want out of such meetings, and his attempt to do a Q&A session while stoned out of their minds is one of the funniest scenes this year has to offer.

29.

Yet another entry worth mentioning in this weirdly specific category is End of the Century, also Spanish, about two men who hook up in Barcelona only to realize they know each other from 20 years earlier.  It’s sweet and evocative, and it ends with touching ambiguity about what their relationship with each other is in the present.

30.

I saw two movies this year whose titles are pronounced “loose.”  Luce was Oscar-seeking garbage that wastes what could be powerful performances from Octavia Spencer and Kelvin Harrison Jr. mouthing banal statements of what the movie is About.  Luz, on the other hand, was a delightfully weird demonic possession film anchored by a low-fi style and the firm (justified) conviction that nothing could be more entertaining that watching possessed people do the stage-manager work necessary to get the next possession underway.

31.

On the supernatural entity front, Daniel Isn’t Real, starring Hollywood hereditary peers Patrick Schwarzenegger and Miles Robbins, is one of the best horror movies I saw this year.  It focuses on the relationship between Robbins and his imaginary friend, Daniel (played by Schwarzenegger), whom he had locked away in a dollhouse as a kid.  When he has trouble in his freshman year of college, he lets Daniel out again. Daniel serves as a manifestation of his toxic masculine urges, giving him advice and license in equal measure.  The practical effects are impressive, and the story as a whole is haunting—it’s the first movie I’ve ever seen that reminded me of End of Days, but in a good way.

32.

In the broader world of horror, I didn’t like Midsommar at all.  It belongs in a weirdly common category of horror films that want to be psychologically deep and insightful (almost uniformly about women) but can’t muster up anything more interesting to say than “women be crazy.”    Given that the movie is essentially a remake of The Wicker Man, it’s hard to say what it is that Aster thought he was adding to the original beyond that insight.  It’s particularly telling that Ari Aster (the writer/director) got into a public argument with Florence Pugh over an interpretation of the ending that would paint the female character as anything other than completely aware of what she’s doing to others at the end of the film: after this and Hereditary, it’s necessary to the kind of story he wants to tell that women have certain essentially destructive drives.  (Maybe not all women, but certainly every woman Aster’s interested in having in his movies.)  The movie has some excellently shot scenes, but they don’t add up to much of anything, and it leaves you with the sense that you’ve just watched a couple hours of straight male paranoia dressed up as sympathy towards female characters.

33.

The Shed is a largely forgettable horror movie with an interesting premise: a couple of bullied kids come across a vampire living in one of their shed and stumble on the plan to use it to get revenge on their tormentors.  The movie wisely avoids any attempt at being a commentary on school shootings, but doesn’t do terribly much with its premise and leaves you wanting significantly more vampire action than you actually get.

34.

I saw Joker.  Joaquin Phoenix is an excellent actor, but he can’t save the movie from being a bad remake of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy in which a character wears a makeup and interacts with Bruce Wayne for some reason.

35.

Motherless Brooklyn was substantially better than I expected.  Edward Norton decided to reset the novel from the ‘90s to the ‘50s, apparently on the theory that if no one was going to sign off to let him do an adaptation of The Power Broker he would just do one as part of this movie.  Unfortunately, Alec Baldwin’s performance as the Robert Moses character (subtly named “Moses Randolph”) is the one weak part of an otherwise excellent piece of noir, with a soundtrack that perfectly mirror’s the main character’s disjointed speech and intrusive thoughts.

36.

I liked parts of The Irishman, but I didn’t see it as the Scorsese renaissance that everyone’s been hailing it as (not least of all because that came a few years back for me, with Silence).  The movie’s obsession with old age, and its critique of mob machismo for failing to put off the inevitable decay of all flesh, struck me as weird in light of the failure of anything else to solve the problem of aging.  It wasn’t until a couple weeks after I saw it that I realized I’d failed to grasp its unstated premise: that the heterosexual suburban marriage and family life lost to its protagonist on account of the mob stuff do, in fact, grant a kind of immortality (or at least ease the transition to oblivion).