The date that shows up on the page or the earliest date when you click the link to see all the dates?
GMD Social Poll: Top Ten Films of 2015
- Thread starter CiG
- Start date
The date that shows up on the page or the earliest date when you click the link to see all the dates?
Bloopy
Active Member
Similar things could happen in the music polls - if online info on a particular album is conflicting and multiple users start wondering which year it was actually released, then it gets examined on a case by case basis. But if only one user lists an album and the conflicting info is never uncovered, it could slip on by with zero fucks given. The 2018 film poll is comparable to cases where music critics lump earlier albums into their top 10 for the year depending on when the vinyl came out or it was distributed to their continent etc.
He means the earliest date when you click the link to see all. Which is also the one the year in the heading comes from, and the only one you can search by as far as I can tell. If there has to be one standard I'd prefer it was that. RYM should always match that too, but occasionally they get their own policy wrong.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Not to be dickish, but I'm not going back and changing my list. If the ultimate decision means that some of those I included get kicked off, then just ignore them and treat it as a less-than-ten list. In the unlikely scenario that it becomes a less-than-five list, I'll redo it.
I'm not expecting or going to ask anybody to change already made lists. Any rules will be applied going forward, not here.
Well okay but that means You Were Never Really Here should be a 2017 film per its header, not 2018. Just an example of how either way things will be shaken up.
Bloopy
Active Member
My lists saved locally all consistently use IMDb year. I keep my butthole clean!
If I took the festival daters out of my '97 list I'd only have 8 left. That poll was where I realised the non-festival date thing was a headache. Out of curiosity I just tried searching IMDb for '96, but on first pass I didn't find any I've seen that got their non-festival date in '97. I search RYM as well, because although it doesn't have all the same films, I like that the search results show the English title next to the foreign one. Again, most of the results I'm wading through wouldn't help with my '97 list, but I only know that after I've double checked them on IMDb.
Funnily enough, my favourite film of '96 doesn't have a non-festival date at all. It clearly wasn't considered good enough for theatre distribution. Outcrowd taste strikes again.
If I took the festival daters out of my '97 list I'd only have 8 left. That poll was where I realised the non-festival date thing was a headache. Out of curiosity I just tried searching IMDb for '96, but on first pass I didn't find any I've seen that got their non-festival date in '97. I search RYM as well, because although it doesn't have all the same films, I like that the search results show the English title next to the foreign one. Again, most of the results I'm wading through wouldn't help with my '97 list, but I only know that after I've double checked them on IMDb.
Funnily enough, my favourite film of '96 doesn't have a non-festival date at all. It clearly wasn't considered good enough for theatre distribution. Outcrowd taste strikes again.
lol what is it?
Edit: FYI after Wainds finishes with 2018, I'll be rolling the RNG between 1960 and 1969. Should be interesting.
Last edited:
Bloopy
Active Member
Milk & Money. I saw it on free to air TV and later got the DVD via the Amazon marketplace. Not sure how legit that is as it's not locked to a region IIRC. I might eventually get around to posting a review and then seed a torrent. The IMDb reviewer who hated it and said it's either not realistic enough or not absurd enough probably found the exact reason why I like it so much. It's quirky without being slapstick absurd.
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,696
- 9,669
- 113
25) Shaun the Sheep Movie (Dir. Mark Burton, Richard Starzak)
consider the amnesia, the achingly nostalgic theme tune, the walkman spluttering and dying, characters so obsessed with the new that they only recognise the value of the old when it's (almost...) too late. this is about cinema, then; a consciously endangered film crying out to be preserved, reviving the silents' bygone audiovisual language and the cosy ramshackle textures lost to modern animation. the epilogue wisely clarifies that being a slave to tradition is no better than abandoning it.
24) SPL 2: A Time For Consequences (Dir. Cheang Pou-Sui)
a batshit, shamelessly melodramatic and straight up operatic hong kong action flick starring some of the finest martial artists currently working, driven by images and emotions and above all motion in a way that western action movies rarely are anymore, with a camera that understands how to map and accentuate the action rather than substituting for it. give me this shit over an artsy wuxia like the assassin anyday.
23) Journey to the Shore (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
many of the best films of 2015 had a fluidity to them, a disregard for boundaries, and there's no more definitive boundary than the one between life and death. less a horror than a serene romantic drama which happens to involve the walking dead, journey to the shore is a ghost story with none of the tropes; one that slowly, gently enables its protagonist to come to terms with her grief. it's meandering and near-plotless, but as ever kurosawa has a way of making his shots and ideas creep up on you.
22) Love (Dir. Gaspar Noe)
an aggressively vapid and infantile film that seems designed to be scoffed at, except that noe never tips his hand as anything other than sincere. this has led many to dismiss love as a laughable trainwreck, and while i wouldn't argue with that characterisation, i sometimes have a penchant for trainwrecks. i think what he's doing here is inhabiting the addictive, pure, ego-free experience adults usually only attain through love or drugs (he equates the two), and the ecstatic horror of being in close proximity to death and childhood, every moment consumed by desire and dependence. not the only film on this list to tread the line between high and low, the cultured and the primal.
21) Bone Tomahawk (Dir. S. Craig Zahler)
an unusually spare, character-driven 'cannibal-western' which understands the value of silences (although jenkins' distractingly literary deputy sheriff sometimes needs to shut the fuck up, as even his companions point out), of letting you soak in the fearful atmosphere and witness the mundane minutiae of this exhausting journey. the blunt, matter-of-fact finality of the violence is largely a strength, but i do wish the ending was a little bolder and more fleshed out, it always comes too sudden and easy for me.
20) The Hateful Eight (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)
for the first ninety minutes or so, the hateful eight is as fantastic as any movie that riffs on hawks and carpenter with a dynamite cast (leigh for mvp!) and annoyingly gifted director is always gonna be. somewhere between samuel l. jackson starting the first of his scenery-chewing monologues about his big black dick and the point at which a narrator chimes in for no good reason, the hateful eight goes to shit and remains shit until the final scene slightly redeems it. upon rewatch i was first baffled as to how i could've been so lukewarm previously, and then both relieved and disappointed to discover why all over again--from what i can recall, final acts have been a weakness of tarantino's for a good while now, so we'll see if once upon a time in hollywood follows that pattern. given the above, it's hard to know exactly where to place this one, so here it is.
19) Kaili Blues (Dir. Gan Bi)
few movements transcend western perspectives quite like the fundamentally buddhist slow-cinema practised by joe, tsai and now gan bi, where the past, present and future can unspool as one, memories blending into dreams into the mundane real and now. this visionary stalker-influenced debutant sculpts in time via a myriad of means, including a wandering 40-minute long-take which makes something breathlessly oneiric, nostalgic and ergo cinematic out of a present-tense naturalism which typically rejects such descriptors.
18) The Virgin Psychics (Dir. Sion Sono)
"we know they're sexy cosplayers. we don't know their numbers or if they're armed." as ever, sono wears traditionally offputting qualities like a badge of honour and insists upon their vitality in diagnosing, criticising and celebrating this retarded world we live in. on the one hand this is probably one for the sono fanboys only, but on the other hand stop not being a sono fanboy tbf.
17) Office (Dir. Johnnie To)
fuck the big short; if you want a good 2015 movie about capitalism go for this satirical corporate musical from the most elegant and creative visual craftsman in the game, with some of the best production design--and use of said production design--of any film this decade. life without principle--his other film centred around capitalism from three years earlier--is even better by virtue of superior writing, but don't sleep on this.
16) Inside Out (Dir. Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen)
by the time we get to inside out 3 and riley's working some shitty desk job before coming home to drink a bottle of wine each night only the pale husks of sadness and disgust will be left laying there in the ashpile of shattered dreams and broken promises gazing vacantly at distant happy memories before they too turn to dust. of course, based on their miserable ratings for this, most of my friends must already know how that story goes.
15) Tag (Dir. Sion Sono)
sion sono's sucker punch (by way of the happening, paprika, existenz, etc). no doubt he'd be better off thinking his movies through more instead of releasing six in a fucking year, and this one becomes increasingly retarded as the nature of its premise is revealed, but sono makes the most stirring live action animés around and his lack of stability is part of what makes him vital.
14) Too Late (Dir. Dennis Hauck)
too late sometimes gets described as the greatest of tarantino rip-offs, but tarantino was never so driven by drunken emotion. with its moping around in scuzzy strip bars, its confrontations in luxury homes and cinema-cum-boxing ring car parks, it's best categorised as a neo-noir, albeit one that's shot in just five highwire long takes, a choice that ought to be ostentatious and gimmicky but somehow completely intoxicates. it's also one of those movies that slowly turns you against its main character (not the only one on this list...), whose position as traditional masculine noir hero is complicated by the way the title of the film summarises his entire arc.
13) The Forbidden Room (Dir. Guy Maddin)
guy maddin is a singular genius on par with david lynch, and far more devoted to dream logic--or, rather, the argument that dream logic and movie logic are one and the same. the forbidden room may be his magnum opus; a fevered phantasmagoria of humorous almost-non-sequiturs which haunts the way all dreams haunt, with a gentle gnawing feeling that something's not quite right, something's misplaced or missing, and you frown as you try to remember what or why or where or who you are but it's just out of reach, and things keep happening, absurd things, until you're completely lost again, lost to the psychedelic currents of a half-remembered cinema history. it's long and overwhelming and exhausting, but i wouldn't be surprised if it's the 2015 film to which history ends up being kindest.
12) The Good Dinosaur (Dir. Peter Sohn)
finding nemo is probably my favourite pixar, and this is its spiritual successor; a subtextually rich fairy tale about learning how to embrace our fraught, fleeting existence. sohn's cameo as a disturbed triceratops is the funniest and most horrifying character in any pixar film, not to mention the nihilistic pterodactyls, the t-rex's harrowing anecdote, the acid trip, the circles in the sand and that fucking dream sequence. grave of the fireflies, the jungle book and dumbo are reference points, and like all good fairy tales it's disturbing and enrapturing, witty and wise, resurrecting the fear and wonder of childhood. kinda wish omni was still here to cosign this, but oh well i'm sure 'erecshyrinol' likes it too.
11) Right Now, Wrong Then (Dir. Hong Sang-Soo)
the problem with hong, this most auteury of all auteurs, is that his filmography has a cumulative effect that doesn't exactly lend itself to rating the films individually. each is a variation on the same setup and themes, and the more of them you see, the more they collectively take on greater meaning. this movie--or duo of movies--functions as a microcosm for his career then, with the wish-fulfilment fantasy of the second half constantly re-contextualising and being re-contextualised by the suspected reality of the first, to overwhelming emotional effect. this is a much better romantic drama than carol or 45 years or whatever, and i fucking love that this was the official trailer.
consider the amnesia, the achingly nostalgic theme tune, the walkman spluttering and dying, characters so obsessed with the new that they only recognise the value of the old when it's (almost...) too late. this is about cinema, then; a consciously endangered film crying out to be preserved, reviving the silents' bygone audiovisual language and the cosy ramshackle textures lost to modern animation. the epilogue wisely clarifies that being a slave to tradition is no better than abandoning it.
24) SPL 2: A Time For Consequences (Dir. Cheang Pou-Sui)
a batshit, shamelessly melodramatic and straight up operatic hong kong action flick starring some of the finest martial artists currently working, driven by images and emotions and above all motion in a way that western action movies rarely are anymore, with a camera that understands how to map and accentuate the action rather than substituting for it. give me this shit over an artsy wuxia like the assassin anyday.
23) Journey to the Shore (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
many of the best films of 2015 had a fluidity to them, a disregard for boundaries, and there's no more definitive boundary than the one between life and death. less a horror than a serene romantic drama which happens to involve the walking dead, journey to the shore is a ghost story with none of the tropes; one that slowly, gently enables its protagonist to come to terms with her grief. it's meandering and near-plotless, but as ever kurosawa has a way of making his shots and ideas creep up on you.
22) Love (Dir. Gaspar Noe)
an aggressively vapid and infantile film that seems designed to be scoffed at, except that noe never tips his hand as anything other than sincere. this has led many to dismiss love as a laughable trainwreck, and while i wouldn't argue with that characterisation, i sometimes have a penchant for trainwrecks. i think what he's doing here is inhabiting the addictive, pure, ego-free experience adults usually only attain through love or drugs (he equates the two), and the ecstatic horror of being in close proximity to death and childhood, every moment consumed by desire and dependence. not the only film on this list to tread the line between high and low, the cultured and the primal.
21) Bone Tomahawk (Dir. S. Craig Zahler)
an unusually spare, character-driven 'cannibal-western' which understands the value of silences (although jenkins' distractingly literary deputy sheriff sometimes needs to shut the fuck up, as even his companions point out), of letting you soak in the fearful atmosphere and witness the mundane minutiae of this exhausting journey. the blunt, matter-of-fact finality of the violence is largely a strength, but i do wish the ending was a little bolder and more fleshed out, it always comes too sudden and easy for me.
20) The Hateful Eight (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)
for the first ninety minutes or so, the hateful eight is as fantastic as any movie that riffs on hawks and carpenter with a dynamite cast (leigh for mvp!) and annoyingly gifted director is always gonna be. somewhere between samuel l. jackson starting the first of his scenery-chewing monologues about his big black dick and the point at which a narrator chimes in for no good reason, the hateful eight goes to shit and remains shit until the final scene slightly redeems it. upon rewatch i was first baffled as to how i could've been so lukewarm previously, and then both relieved and disappointed to discover why all over again--from what i can recall, final acts have been a weakness of tarantino's for a good while now, so we'll see if once upon a time in hollywood follows that pattern. given the above, it's hard to know exactly where to place this one, so here it is.
19) Kaili Blues (Dir. Gan Bi)
few movements transcend western perspectives quite like the fundamentally buddhist slow-cinema practised by joe, tsai and now gan bi, where the past, present and future can unspool as one, memories blending into dreams into the mundane real and now. this visionary stalker-influenced debutant sculpts in time via a myriad of means, including a wandering 40-minute long-take which makes something breathlessly oneiric, nostalgic and ergo cinematic out of a present-tense naturalism which typically rejects such descriptors.
18) The Virgin Psychics (Dir. Sion Sono)
"we know they're sexy cosplayers. we don't know their numbers or if they're armed." as ever, sono wears traditionally offputting qualities like a badge of honour and insists upon their vitality in diagnosing, criticising and celebrating this retarded world we live in. on the one hand this is probably one for the sono fanboys only, but on the other hand stop not being a sono fanboy tbf.
17) Office (Dir. Johnnie To)
fuck the big short; if you want a good 2015 movie about capitalism go for this satirical corporate musical from the most elegant and creative visual craftsman in the game, with some of the best production design--and use of said production design--of any film this decade. life without principle--his other film centred around capitalism from three years earlier--is even better by virtue of superior writing, but don't sleep on this.
16) Inside Out (Dir. Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen)
by the time we get to inside out 3 and riley's working some shitty desk job before coming home to drink a bottle of wine each night only the pale husks of sadness and disgust will be left laying there in the ashpile of shattered dreams and broken promises gazing vacantly at distant happy memories before they too turn to dust. of course, based on their miserable ratings for this, most of my friends must already know how that story goes.
15) Tag (Dir. Sion Sono)
sion sono's sucker punch (by way of the happening, paprika, existenz, etc). no doubt he'd be better off thinking his movies through more instead of releasing six in a fucking year, and this one becomes increasingly retarded as the nature of its premise is revealed, but sono makes the most stirring live action animés around and his lack of stability is part of what makes him vital.
14) Too Late (Dir. Dennis Hauck)
too late sometimes gets described as the greatest of tarantino rip-offs, but tarantino was never so driven by drunken emotion. with its moping around in scuzzy strip bars, its confrontations in luxury homes and cinema-cum-boxing ring car parks, it's best categorised as a neo-noir, albeit one that's shot in just five highwire long takes, a choice that ought to be ostentatious and gimmicky but somehow completely intoxicates. it's also one of those movies that slowly turns you against its main character (not the only one on this list...), whose position as traditional masculine noir hero is complicated by the way the title of the film summarises his entire arc.
13) The Forbidden Room (Dir. Guy Maddin)
guy maddin is a singular genius on par with david lynch, and far more devoted to dream logic--or, rather, the argument that dream logic and movie logic are one and the same. the forbidden room may be his magnum opus; a fevered phantasmagoria of humorous almost-non-sequiturs which haunts the way all dreams haunt, with a gentle gnawing feeling that something's not quite right, something's misplaced or missing, and you frown as you try to remember what or why or where or who you are but it's just out of reach, and things keep happening, absurd things, until you're completely lost again, lost to the psychedelic currents of a half-remembered cinema history. it's long and overwhelming and exhausting, but i wouldn't be surprised if it's the 2015 film to which history ends up being kindest.
12) The Good Dinosaur (Dir. Peter Sohn)
finding nemo is probably my favourite pixar, and this is its spiritual successor; a subtextually rich fairy tale about learning how to embrace our fraught, fleeting existence. sohn's cameo as a disturbed triceratops is the funniest and most horrifying character in any pixar film, not to mention the nihilistic pterodactyls, the t-rex's harrowing anecdote, the acid trip, the circles in the sand and that fucking dream sequence. grave of the fireflies, the jungle book and dumbo are reference points, and like all good fairy tales it's disturbing and enrapturing, witty and wise, resurrecting the fear and wonder of childhood. kinda wish omni was still here to cosign this, but oh well i'm sure 'erecshyrinol' likes it too.
11) Right Now, Wrong Then (Dir. Hong Sang-Soo)
the problem with hong, this most auteury of all auteurs, is that his filmography has a cumulative effect that doesn't exactly lend itself to rating the films individually. each is a variation on the same setup and themes, and the more of them you see, the more they collectively take on greater meaning. this movie--or duo of movies--functions as a microcosm for his career then, with the wish-fulfilment fantasy of the second half constantly re-contextualising and being re-contextualised by the suspected reality of the first, to overwhelming emotional effect. this is a much better romantic drama than carol or 45 years or whatever, and i fucking love that this was the official trailer.
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,696
- 9,669
- 113
10) Taxi (Dir. Jafar Panahi)
no other filmmaker can so deftly combine warm, playful humanism with apocalyptic cynicism, and that's not to mention his daunting formal artistry, sparkling wit, wisdom and badass courage. panahi earns those moments of didacticism--couched as they are in layers of ingeniously constructed artifice which lend remarkable urgency and vast implication to every word and image--a hell of a lot more than any critic ever earned the right to call him didactic. movies have rarely seemed so important as when this dude's behind the camera.
9) Experimenter (Dir. Michael Almereyda)
i don't think almereyda is a particularly great craftsman (in fairness, he often doesn't seem to give a fuck), but he's surely one of america's smartest contemporary filmmakers. here he uses the milgram experiments as a launching pad for a biopic of not just milgram himself but cinema too and, i would argue, the entire human race. the more conventional biopic elements, maligned in some quarters, are in this context demonstrated to be built upon the same psychological failings that milgram's experiment exposed, the perturbing point being that self-delusion underpins more aspects of our society and its art than we'd like to admit. in that respect experimenter would make a perfect double bill with oppenheimer's work, or almereyda's own hamlet.
8) Mad Max: Fury Road (Dir. George Miller)
on rewatch I have even less idea why this film is so popular, because it's stranger and more removed from conventional standards of taste than a lot of B-movies. maybe this endless conveyor belt of cynical marvel products is weighing more heavily on our collective moviegoing souls than we realise. forget the lovingly detailed and lived-in universe, wicked sense of humour, hallucinatory visuals and visceral, kinetic, amazingly choreographed set pieces... it's the tone that makes it; that messed up, twitching derangement, and the way it's fully internalised to the point of resembling some mad alien mythology even when it peddles in clichés and sentiment alongside the bizarre and grotesque. it has personality in spades, and that personality is entirely unhinged. i'd rank it even higher but it has its share of issues too: the score is too generic, the horror hallucinations are tacky, miller struggles a little with the quiet stretch in the middle, and while still wonderfully creative the final set piece is rushed and isn't quite the insane climax the film deserves. i actually like hardy's role and performance quite a lot though, contrary to CiG--i think he gets the tone miller's going for and his enforced passivity is the source of a lot of anxiety and humour.
7) The Lobster (Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
the lobster satirises first the modern perception of romantic companionship, then the overcompensating revolutionaries with whom the viewer initially identifies, becoming less of a one-sided social tract than an overarching existential tragicomedy about the arbitrary and repressive nature of all societal structures, and the individual's struggle to navigate them. it's the 'romance' to dogtooth's 'coming of age', and it's my pick for funniest film of the year.
6) Cemetery of Splendor (Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
no director is less beholden to the structures we impose on and assume of existence, broadening and liberating our perceptions through effortless audiovisual suggestion. here, he cribs his own body of work as an extension of the cultural worldview; the line between 'past' and 'present' is dissolved along with the boundaries between his films; dinosaurs and skeletons watch from the margins; death is in the air. a gentle, compassionate sadness permeates, but equally the experience is therapeutic. joe is the best; he's basically what i want all arthouse cinema to be, instead of the suffocatingly didactic, self-serious wankery it usually is.
5) Love and Peace (Dir. Sion Sono)
tokyo 2020 is a hollow dream, a shortcut to glory veiling the nation's economic hardship and destined, like most olympic games, to leave a legacy of suffering behind it. christmas deals in hollow dreams too; a corporate holiday that shits out novelties and platitudes, its mascot a sewer-dwelling alcoholic, its heartwarming, americanized hit songs sweeping memories of hiroshima under the rug. how better to express this worldview than a majestically silly xmas musical built atop sadness, rage, mental illness?
4) Anomalisa (Dir. Charlie Kaufman)
a lot of filmmakers try to bottle the horrors of being human into a couple of hours, but charlie kaufman is without peer. his neuroses make him singularly cruel and desperate, and he inhabits the experience of living and wanting and losing and fearing and failing and withdrawing in a more immediate, uncomfortable way than stuff other people make. his main character here lives in a world of customer service drones, all of whom look and sound like tom fucking noonan, and while that universe is pretty undercooked and strained, the stop-motion really drags something nightmarish and fucking depressing from it regardless (it helps that tom noonan is literal satanspawn). there's a danger that it might all be in service of nothing but mean, solipsistic satire, but the perspective-jolt of an ending suggests otherwise, placing the bulk of the accountability back on the protagonist. there's a lot to unpack (the unmissable similarities between the central female character and the sex doll, for example...), and also a lot to reject as underwritten or lazy here, but i sure seem to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
3) The Witch (Dir. Robert Eggers)
the problem with fairytales is that their tropes and themes are so embedded in cultural consciousness there's a danger of modern audiences finding them stale and overdetermined. add a portentous camera into the mix and you're setting yourself up for failure. but what the witch demonstrates is that these old stories, foundations as they are for our artistic traditions, still have a lot to give if you possess the skill and craftsmanship to unlock them, and this is a near perfect example. the period research is on point, every cog is moving in the same direction, and it's all so convincing and authentic that that scene actually works against all odds. it makes the devil terrifying again, and the absence of god desperately tragic, because it strips these concepts down to the elements and emotions that created them. barren crop fields and deep dark woods, impotent wood-chopping men and pubescent women, food and sex and family, desire and terror. it reminds that we aren't nearly as divorced from our past as we'd like to think.
2) Blackhat (Dir. Michael Mann)
blackhat is the quintessential michael mann movie, distilling all of his established tropes into something more purely, uniquely mann than ever before. the one it most resembles is miami vice, another tense (or rather, present-tense), desperately romantic genre film about individuals struggling for autonomy and connection in an increasingly depersonalised, institutionalised digital world. even moreso than with that film, he's committed to communicating his grid of themes and emotions through stormy expressionist images pushed to abstraction and sensory overload, investing the characters with so much physicality, sensuality and symbolic heft that their words barely matter.
1) Aaaaaaaah! (Dir. Steve Oram)
there isn't much separating 1 through 8 on this list. i love all of them, and they're too different to really compare anyway. the reason aaaaaaaah! ended up winning out is that it's the furthest from anything i've seen before, while also being one of the most uncomfortably familiar. it's a wholly new way of telling the same old stories. it plays in the uneasy spaces between beast and man, between instinct and culture, but also between silent film and women's dramas and macho genre movies, and like any great satire it's hard to tell where affection stops and ridicule begins. so many shitty comedies would play it too broad, while more cultured filmmakers would go too abstract or too smarmily superior, but oram (best known as the star and co-writer of wheatley's sightseers) gets the balance exactly right, and he refuses to settle on any of the easy jokes/targets or obvious paths you might expect from this exploitation premise. he gives the viewer a ton of respect throughout, never guiding us toward a particular opinion nor seeming to position himself above the characters--in fact, although it's wittily shot with a great score, the filmmaking still feels feral enough that it could be a home movie shot by one of these people themselves. for something so simple in concept it generates such rich responses in me, and the ending is the battenberg on top; it may be without exaggeration the bleakest thing i've ever seen on a movie screen, yet gloriously cathartic and relatable even so.
---------------
no other filmmaker can so deftly combine warm, playful humanism with apocalyptic cynicism, and that's not to mention his daunting formal artistry, sparkling wit, wisdom and badass courage. panahi earns those moments of didacticism--couched as they are in layers of ingeniously constructed artifice which lend remarkable urgency and vast implication to every word and image--a hell of a lot more than any critic ever earned the right to call him didactic. movies have rarely seemed so important as when this dude's behind the camera.
9) Experimenter (Dir. Michael Almereyda)
i don't think almereyda is a particularly great craftsman (in fairness, he often doesn't seem to give a fuck), but he's surely one of america's smartest contemporary filmmakers. here he uses the milgram experiments as a launching pad for a biopic of not just milgram himself but cinema too and, i would argue, the entire human race. the more conventional biopic elements, maligned in some quarters, are in this context demonstrated to be built upon the same psychological failings that milgram's experiment exposed, the perturbing point being that self-delusion underpins more aspects of our society and its art than we'd like to admit. in that respect experimenter would make a perfect double bill with oppenheimer's work, or almereyda's own hamlet.
8) Mad Max: Fury Road (Dir. George Miller)
on rewatch I have even less idea why this film is so popular, because it's stranger and more removed from conventional standards of taste than a lot of B-movies. maybe this endless conveyor belt of cynical marvel products is weighing more heavily on our collective moviegoing souls than we realise. forget the lovingly detailed and lived-in universe, wicked sense of humour, hallucinatory visuals and visceral, kinetic, amazingly choreographed set pieces... it's the tone that makes it; that messed up, twitching derangement, and the way it's fully internalised to the point of resembling some mad alien mythology even when it peddles in clichés and sentiment alongside the bizarre and grotesque. it has personality in spades, and that personality is entirely unhinged. i'd rank it even higher but it has its share of issues too: the score is too generic, the horror hallucinations are tacky, miller struggles a little with the quiet stretch in the middle, and while still wonderfully creative the final set piece is rushed and isn't quite the insane climax the film deserves. i actually like hardy's role and performance quite a lot though, contrary to CiG--i think he gets the tone miller's going for and his enforced passivity is the source of a lot of anxiety and humour.
7) The Lobster (Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
the lobster satirises first the modern perception of romantic companionship, then the overcompensating revolutionaries with whom the viewer initially identifies, becoming less of a one-sided social tract than an overarching existential tragicomedy about the arbitrary and repressive nature of all societal structures, and the individual's struggle to navigate them. it's the 'romance' to dogtooth's 'coming of age', and it's my pick for funniest film of the year.
6) Cemetery of Splendor (Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
no director is less beholden to the structures we impose on and assume of existence, broadening and liberating our perceptions through effortless audiovisual suggestion. here, he cribs his own body of work as an extension of the cultural worldview; the line between 'past' and 'present' is dissolved along with the boundaries between his films; dinosaurs and skeletons watch from the margins; death is in the air. a gentle, compassionate sadness permeates, but equally the experience is therapeutic. joe is the best; he's basically what i want all arthouse cinema to be, instead of the suffocatingly didactic, self-serious wankery it usually is.
5) Love and Peace (Dir. Sion Sono)
tokyo 2020 is a hollow dream, a shortcut to glory veiling the nation's economic hardship and destined, like most olympic games, to leave a legacy of suffering behind it. christmas deals in hollow dreams too; a corporate holiday that shits out novelties and platitudes, its mascot a sewer-dwelling alcoholic, its heartwarming, americanized hit songs sweeping memories of hiroshima under the rug. how better to express this worldview than a majestically silly xmas musical built atop sadness, rage, mental illness?
4) Anomalisa (Dir. Charlie Kaufman)
a lot of filmmakers try to bottle the horrors of being human into a couple of hours, but charlie kaufman is without peer. his neuroses make him singularly cruel and desperate, and he inhabits the experience of living and wanting and losing and fearing and failing and withdrawing in a more immediate, uncomfortable way than stuff other people make. his main character here lives in a world of customer service drones, all of whom look and sound like tom fucking noonan, and while that universe is pretty undercooked and strained, the stop-motion really drags something nightmarish and fucking depressing from it regardless (it helps that tom noonan is literal satanspawn). there's a danger that it might all be in service of nothing but mean, solipsistic satire, but the perspective-jolt of an ending suggests otherwise, placing the bulk of the accountability back on the protagonist. there's a lot to unpack (the unmissable similarities between the central female character and the sex doll, for example...), and also a lot to reject as underwritten or lazy here, but i sure seem to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
3) The Witch (Dir. Robert Eggers)
the problem with fairytales is that their tropes and themes are so embedded in cultural consciousness there's a danger of modern audiences finding them stale and overdetermined. add a portentous camera into the mix and you're setting yourself up for failure. but what the witch demonstrates is that these old stories, foundations as they are for our artistic traditions, still have a lot to give if you possess the skill and craftsmanship to unlock them, and this is a near perfect example. the period research is on point, every cog is moving in the same direction, and it's all so convincing and authentic that that scene actually works against all odds. it makes the devil terrifying again, and the absence of god desperately tragic, because it strips these concepts down to the elements and emotions that created them. barren crop fields and deep dark woods, impotent wood-chopping men and pubescent women, food and sex and family, desire and terror. it reminds that we aren't nearly as divorced from our past as we'd like to think.
2) Blackhat (Dir. Michael Mann)
blackhat is the quintessential michael mann movie, distilling all of his established tropes into something more purely, uniquely mann than ever before. the one it most resembles is miami vice, another tense (or rather, present-tense), desperately romantic genre film about individuals struggling for autonomy and connection in an increasingly depersonalised, institutionalised digital world. even moreso than with that film, he's committed to communicating his grid of themes and emotions through stormy expressionist images pushed to abstraction and sensory overload, investing the characters with so much physicality, sensuality and symbolic heft that their words barely matter.
1) Aaaaaaaah! (Dir. Steve Oram)
there isn't much separating 1 through 8 on this list. i love all of them, and they're too different to really compare anyway. the reason aaaaaaaah! ended up winning out is that it's the furthest from anything i've seen before, while also being one of the most uncomfortably familiar. it's a wholly new way of telling the same old stories. it plays in the uneasy spaces between beast and man, between instinct and culture, but also between silent film and women's dramas and macho genre movies, and like any great satire it's hard to tell where affection stops and ridicule begins. so many shitty comedies would play it too broad, while more cultured filmmakers would go too abstract or too smarmily superior, but oram (best known as the star and co-writer of wheatley's sightseers) gets the balance exactly right, and he refuses to settle on any of the easy jokes/targets or obvious paths you might expect from this exploitation premise. he gives the viewer a ton of respect throughout, never guiding us toward a particular opinion nor seeming to position himself above the characters--in fact, although it's wittily shot with a great score, the filmmaking still feels feral enough that it could be a home movie shot by one of these people themselves. for something so simple in concept it generates such rich responses in me, and the ending is the battenberg on top; it may be without exaggeration the bleakest thing i've ever seen on a movie screen, yet gloriously cathartic and relatable even so.
---------------
1. aaaaaaaah!
2. blackhat
3. the witch
4. anomalisa
5. love & peace
6. cemetery of splendor
7. the lobster
8. mad max: fury road
9. experimenter
10. taxi
2. blackhat
3. the witch
4. anomalisa
5. love & peace
6. cemetery of splendor
7. the lobster
8. mad max: fury road
9. experimenter
10. taxi
Oh cool some morning reading, and you're actually early for once. Today is going to be weird I can feel it.
Even though I complained that they made the tituar character the most boring in the movie, I think Hardy has his place in Fury Road, and in general Fury Road's characters to me work more like cogs in Miller's machine than actually dynamic individualistic characters. In my mind as I look at the whole film as an ideological analogy, Max is the passive male who says nothing and helps nobody in the face of systemic oppression.
But ultimately as an Aussie it's hard to watch a Britbong play an iconic Australian hero with an inconsistent accent. Strange because I think Hardy is a good actor, but there were many moments where his accent broke and it always bugged me.
I forgot to mention this myself, but this is true and all too common a problem with modern non-arthouse/artsy stuff.
challenge_everything
Active Member
This always annoyed me too. I bet these actors always think they're nailing the accent when actually they have no idea. Tarantino's self-cast effort in Django remains unbeatably bad though
no country for old wainds
Active Member
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TechnicalBarbarity
Poser Disposer
that's exactly how i feel when watching alot of these big shows on TV where they have brits playing Americans. I can literally tell from the second they open their mouth(like the guy from The Wire for example). The one who had me going the longest was the guy who played Will Graham on the Hannibal series. Out of nowhere he slipped and said "idear" instead of idea in an episode from S2 and i was like "how the fuck did i not catch this earlier?" ... whats even more amazing is how it actually slipped by the director, editor etc. For me having brits play American roles(unless they can completely hide their retarded pronunciations) is one of my biggest peeves and at times actually pulls me away from what im watching.
Christian Bale might be the greatest example of being fooled for me. I wonder if Americans saw through it right away though.
TechnicalBarbarity
Poser Disposer
When that whole Dark Knight behind-the-scenes rant leaked and he's screaming at everybody with a Welsh accent I was pretty surprised. At least I think that was when I discovered he was Welsh.
Edit: You a fan of Harsh Times?
challenge_everything
Active Member
I had no idea that Bale was Welsh. There you go. But it's always harder to spot a fake accent when it's not your natural idiom.
Can Americans tell that Naomi Watts, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Margot Robbie etc are putting it on?
Can Americans tell that Naomi Watts, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Margot Robbie etc are putting it on?
TechnicalBarbarity
Poser Disposer
Jackman and Watts? haha easily ... well at least i can. Havent seen anything from Margot Robbie and havent payed enough attention to Blachett to tell. I dont even remember what she sounds like
just seeing this. And no i didnt even know about it!
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