2017 top 10 + some notes

I'm starting 2018 off strong with this week-late abandoned post. The write-ups are uneven and trail off. But I like to reframe this as an exercise in self-love. I'm ready to move on. 2017 was a strange year for films and my connection to them. I saw just under 50 works that qualify (Chicago release dates), but very little grabbed me. I'm hesitant to jump on the 2017-was-a-bad-year-for-cinema bandwagon as I was unable to see many of the major films (24 Frames, Before We Vanish, Alive in France, The Day After, Lover for a Day, Faces Places). But 2017 was the year of Twin Peaks: The Return and that alone warrants celebration.

There was, however, a newly emergent criterion for selecting my top films (apart from honestly cataloging what moved me) and that was influence. Most of my top 10 can be understood as films I grappled with and tried to learn from in terms of technique and philosophy. What took hold was a mental and emotional tinkering with how these films were made and an awe with the freedom with which these filmmakers expressed and explored ideas and sentiments. 2017 was the year I finally had the cash to throw down for a new computer, specifically an editing machine for video work. It was a rocky year for projects. I was attached to a documentary about queer people that became overwhelmed with "development hell" as we called it in film school, but I have some interesting music video work coming up in 2018 that I'm excited about. I'm also slowly moving forward on some personal projects and managed to brush away the cobwebs with a competition short (it's here if you're interested). This short enabled me to test the boundaries of my machine while operating under external parameters and deadlines. While I'm not wholly satisfied with the end result, I am thrilled to have seen something to completion (a real feat while also dissertating and teaching!). I also assisted my dear friend in a short (where I also have a cameo!) that was a blast to make and which can be watched here.

This is all to say that my top 10 of the year were films that I lived and breathed, watched and re-watched, and took inspiration from.

1. Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, Mark Frost)

I can’t recall where I read that Herman Melville created an entire cosmos with Moby Dick. To borrow this to describe the expansive tapestry of Twin Peaks: The Return is not to compare Lynch to Melville or to suggest comparisons to a “cinematic universe” but rather to highlight the spectrum of human existence that is given space to breathe within the work itself. There is of course mythology and mystery and an amalgamation of slapstick and film noir genres. The tones and textures and styles alone make The Return compelling for its breadth of strangeness. But the cosmos contained within is startlingly human. Moments of grief, longing, reconciliation, and romantic touch exist beyond the momentness of their duration. They are as important for Lynch and Frost as whatever the narrative “good stuff” might be, the big reveals, the climaxes. The lives of the townie regulars Ed, Norma, Nadine, and Dr. Amp are the good stuff. Their lives matter beyond their narrative function and this is one of the most radical aspects of Lynch and Frost’s creation. Not to compare this versus that, but so much of television is a complex and complicated clockwork, with each shot, figure, and line a cog unto itself. Too often this amounts to little more than dramatic Rube Goldberg devices working toward a shocking cliffhanger. The Return is queer by comparison: messy, meandering, and meaningless when it needs to be. Dare I say it: just like life?

A multi-dimensional struggle of good and evil, swirling around the vortex of Dale Cooper’s hubris—his arrogance and continual re-traumatizing of Laura Palmer—intersects with gods and monsters, spirits and special humans attuned to these frequencies. Yet the emotional states of gas-station attendants, waitresses, and trailer park managers share an equal stake in the fabric of existence. The odyssey of Dale Cooper as two halves that are both one is entrenched in this human world of baby boomers seeking redemption and millennials trapped in the nightmare inheritance of their parents. Both figures delicately establish systems of power and support over the journey of the running time. Evil Cooper is tapped in to information networks, criminal organizations, blackmail, threats, and violence. Dougie bumbles. Kindly, pleasantly, like the ultimate manifestation of mindfulness, no past and no future just unadulterated pleasure at movement and the moment. His gentleness and childlike naivete brings together a powerful group of allies and friends and lovers. Reunited, Dale Cooper draws on both: the sinister implications of the FBI networks and the trust and affection of television friendships. It is a tragedy doomed to failure.

Part of the pleasures of The Return is watching Lynch and Frost play with the work they’ve established, the actors who remain, the traces of the world they left behind. A refusal to recreate or retread where they’ve already been, they mold and adapt and experiment with everything available to them and what emerges is the work of a collaborative team that is truly free. Unrestrained artistic freedom is not what I’m praising here—many an established filmmaker churns out shit once they’ve overcome their material impediments. Rather, Lynch and Frost are planted in the framework and limitations of current day long-form prestige television and the elements of the Twin Peaks world. It is through their playfulness and experimentation within these limits that they arrive at a form of cinematic freedom that is truly rare.

2. Mrs. Fang (Wang Bing) + 3. Piazza Vittorio (Abel Ferrara)

Two small documentaries that bare a distinct personal touch, not because they are the products of autuerist heavyweights Wang Bing and Abel Ferrara, but because one can feel the movement of their fingers on the digital camera as it captures the unfurling passage of time in front of them. Mrs. Fang and Piazza Vittorio are first drafts of a poem scribbled on a napkin compared to the larger films of 2017, but in their delicate, meandering spirit they become profound humanist declarations.

Wang Bing accelerates time with a single cut only to freeze it, break it open, and observe the atomistic movements within. The deterioration of Mrs. Fang’s health from two shots of her standing, walking, smiling, mumbling something to herself to her emaciated, skeletal body in its death throes in a small home. Her dying body becomes the fulcrum of a swirling movement around it, recalling for me Edvard Munch’s Death in the Sickroom. Her final days are marked by the endless observations of infinitesimal transformations of her body. The family can see them, but the viewer cannot. The meanderings of Bing’s camera—and the strangeness of his montage—unfurl a small, humble treatise on existence, not unlike a haiku. A simple conceit—that life goes on—takes on a magnanimous certitude in the intimacy of this film. Plans for daily life and plans for death are discussed over the din of cellphones and television. The operations of survival and the culture that emerge from them are allowed the same amount of space—and duration—as the dying form of Mrs. Fang. The repeated sequences of fishing render the complexities of living into the simplest series of actions: hunting for food and preparing of food.

In Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die”, the great melancholic pioneer of the essay considers the consequences of hiding death from daily life. We bury it away, cover it up, speak in hushed tones, and perform our grief in prescribed ways. Instead, one should consider bringing death to the table, to the living rooms, to the everyday fabric of daily life. For we all die and death is the ur-transformation of all the transient fluctuations of existence. Mrs. Fang is not a documentary about a person dying—what a crass and repulsive categorization!—but a work of philosophy on the interconnections of death with existence.

Piazza Vittorio is quite literally a film made from wandering. A personal exploration of a specific place in a specific time that branches into countless directions from the faces, stories, and experiences Ferrara encounters. What better way to capture the pains of globalization, neoliberalism, migrations, post-colonialism, and a fomenting nationalism than by staying in one place! It is the people and their stories that paint the pictures of national and global transformation and no amount of globe-trotting and moving graphs would allow such intimate and surprising discoveries as those collected in this single square.

The use of a singular archival source emphasizes the distance between that old world, a fascist world, that now is uttered in the racist ramblings of old Italians who feel they’ve been robbed of their homogeneity. Ferrara captures a moment of transformation—like freezing a moving target just to get a peek. This world is in flux and its figures, those who live and work and sleep on the streets of the Piazza Vittorio, are attached to its past, working through its present, or imagining its future. Ferrara captures survival, the hustle, and those attuned to the moment. The film echoes an uncertain future that promises both a harmonious transformation as well a regressive violence.

4. The Lego Batman Movie (Chris McKay)

One of the queerest American films I've seen in ages. And not just because of the innuendo between Batman and Joker, which I'd argue is more than surface level innuendo here. The reversal of hate to literally mean love is one of the most interesting aspects of this layered film. The emphasis on families of choice and the refusal to have actual villains radically upends what Batman too often becomes in both films and comics: a brutal enforcer of the status quo. Nolan's iteration is a succinct depiction of this type of Batman, but the comic, even when questioning Batman as a fascist figure, too often defends him as righteous. The Lego Batman Movie transforms visual history and cultural reference into the very texture of its building blocks, and not just in a post-modern sense of coolness or irony or endless references, but rather it crafts a universe of networked information that figures swim through The parts of plastic and the data attach and detach from the figures, who themselves are far more symbiotic than the genre of superhero films typically allows. The entire work is a single breathing mass that forms endless constellations built from shared DNA: both Lego pieces and 20th century popular culture. This film embodies what Lev Manovich described as the poetic principles of New Media: constantly transforming, fracturing, mutating, duplicating, all while figures struggle against their own incoherence in a sea of transformation.

My initial classification of this film as queer centers on its tender and sophisticated approach to trauma. The care and attention given to trauma, trauma responses, and communal recuperation are, honestly, breathtaking. Not only is The Lego Batman Movie gorgeous and fluid, but one of the most complex renderings of individual trauma that American cinema is possible capable of. The desire to reintegrate Batman as symbol of traumatic isolation into a layered community of friends, family, and erotic partners is so well done and completely undermines an entire genre built upon the conflict of binary opposites.

5. Spell Reel (Felipa César)

It's not merely a response to Sans Soleil but a radical reclamation of it's archival footage. What stands out is the reverent approach to celluloid materiality and digital manipulation. A film of contexts and re-contextualization, of deterioration and archive theory. To touch is to transform. To archive is a political act.

6. From Nine to Nine (Neil Bahadur)

Watch it here. Bahadur's debut feature is angry and engaged. I've never seen such precise depiction of poverty existing within neoliberal landscapes of commerce. It uses every DIY technique at it's disposal. While the influence of Godard is present in the aggressive displays of praxis, it is Luc Moullet that is conjured for me and his manifesto of a cinema of poverty as a truly radical act. I cannot wait to see what Bahadur does next.

7. On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong Sang-soo)

Sang-soo reminds of me Ozu in that I am emotionally invested in every frame while I am watching a particular film, but in the days that pass it becomes a singular body of work wherein I cannot quite distinguish the individual films until I sit down to watch them again. They become a vast universe in my memory of them. This moved me and Sang-soo's editing is always simultaneously delicate and violent. I can't recall specifics right now.

8. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)

Gerwig's debut is a masterpiece of depicting the passage of time and the distance of time through editing. Joys and ecstasies and pain and boredom all get put into their place by the relentless march of time. On a personal note, Laurie Metcalf's performance (and Gerwig's writing) of her mother was so similar to my own mother at times that I had panic attacks in the theater. I typically despise these types of indie films that many define as quirky, but this one hooked me.

9. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (Paul W.S. Anderson)

To be honest, this was not what I was expecting or even what I wanted. How can a director follow up two of your all-time favorite films (Resident Evil Retribution and Pompeii)? The "trinity of bitches" climax is among the greatest moments in Anderson's career and the use of a new editor makes this a unique entry into his body of work. I wrote some initial thoughts here that I still stand by (link). 

10. Wasteland no.1: Ardent Verdant (Jodie Mack)

The most tactile filmmaker working today. Light becomes movement, grain becomes depth. An entire universe expands from still, unmoving images. This is my first Mack and I'm already chomping at the bit to see everything she's made.

the next ten

11. Star Wars The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson)

12. Justice League (Zack Snyder + Joss Whedon)

13. Girls Trip (Malcolm D. Lee)

14. Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins)

15. Sandy Wexler (Steven Brill)

16. Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)

17. Blade of the Immortal (Takashi Miike)

18. A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski)

19. Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay)

20. Atomic Blonde (David Leitch)