UW-Cinematheque Blog Posts, Part I

Since my second semester in UW-Madison's graduate film program, I have written on average two essays per semester for our Cinematheque's blog. The essays are contingent on the Cinematheque's programming, which is consistently inspired. Even though we are only at the second week of the Spring 2018 semester, I believe the essay I just had published, on Arthur Ripley's The Chase, will be my only submission this semester (master's exams to study for!). So having written five essays so far, I will link to all of them below; this is a "Part I" entry that I will surely follow up with in future semesters.

I do this partly for my own indexing purposes, as well as to present evidence to you that, while it is less frequent, yes, I am still writing film criticism. Of the five, I like my Something Wild essay the most, but I'd like to think they all are worth your time.

• On style and narrative in Arthur Ripley's THE CHASE (1946) - screening January 28, 2018
• On the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD (1986) - screening September 30, 2017
• On the distribution history and style of Billy Woodberry's BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS (1984) - screening September 15, 2017.
• On the style and politics of Straub-Huillet's MOSES AND AARON (1975) - screening April 15, 2017.
• On the darkness and thematics of Spielberg's INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) - screening March 12, 2017.

Favorite Cinema of 2017

Scroll down to view my list of 2017 favorites, plus new-to-me old movies and various acting honors (and my least favorite movies, too). Up here I will offer some thoughts on the year's cinema and my selections, instead of individual blurbs for each below.

Everett McGill in Twin Peaks: The Return

You will notice I invoke the word "cinema" this year, instead of "films" or "movies," in this list's title—very French. To me, the word "cinema," in 2018, connotes certain intentions, know-how, and competence—I see it as a qualitative term. Meaning that there are a lot of movies, but not all movies are cinema. Bullshit, you might think this formulation is, but I am seriously invested in the inverse of this line of thinking: Cinema does not have to be a movie—a single, feature-length, moving-image narrative with a theatrical premiere—either. So cinema excludes some, but it also includes, well, what? Television, for one, in addition to media from other platforms (Tim Heidecker's fake, live-streamed murder trial, anyone?). 

The reasons for this are industrial and technological, as well as—I firmly believe—auteurist. With Twin Peaks: The Return—my favorite cinema of 2017, and this decade, by a country mile—it is not controversial to call David Lynch the show's primary author. Yet it would also be a mistake to label Lynch a "showrunner" in the vein of Matthew Weiner or David Chase, who each led a writers' room. Instead, Lynch communicates his artistic sensibility through stylistic and structural means—that he directed every one of The Return's 18 hours is the crucial point of distinction. Even its most classically plot-driven hours betray startling experimental tendencies, from the juxtaposition of tones (see the John Ford-meets-grindhouse brilliance of Mr. C's arm wrestling scene in Part 13) to the commitment to duration (see Bushnell waiting by Cooper's hospital bed in Part 16). The finer details of Lynch and his collaborators' cinematography and especially sound design remained illegible upon Showtime's initial, compressed broadcasts, and only with the Blu-ray and (hopefully) circulation of DCPs will the Twin Peaks theatrical experience, pseudo or not, be realized. Regardless of how one watched it, though, Twin Peaks: The Return impressed many, and frustrated others, with its unique storytelling architecture, finding ample time for dead ends, cosmic jokes, and sequences of wordless passage. If much of The Return's acting and visual style is utterly alien to the medium of television, its structure is slightly more familiar, making its departures from editing norms intriguingly, productively uncanny.

In some of the year's other notable cinema, bold editing choices transformed countless hours of footage into art. In Faces Places, Agnès Varda's associative match cuts enrich a travelogue into a personal work of deep yet spontaneous reflection. In the year's best documentary, and my favorite 2017 "film" proper, Ex Libris, Frederick Wiseman organizes board meetings, lectures, and other dry bits of footage into the rarest kind of political art: one contingent on reality, made from bottom-up. With Song to Song, Terrence Malick—at this stage, American cinema's most acquired taste—spans emotional extremes through quick cutting. In HBO's Big Little Lies, Jean-Marc Vallée does much of the same, playing his characters (who are brilliantly performed and staged) off one another while also diving deep into their individual head spaces. 

An ingenious combination of restricted narration and accumulation elevate Marjorie Prime and The Unknown Girl into two of the most paralyzing, emotional works I have ever seen. Staying Vertical, meanwhile, spirals ever closer to some intimidating state of nature through provocative yet grounded leaps of logic and Guiraudie's signature depiction of fluid sexuality at odds with assumed identity. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman has the weight and irony of Greek tragedy, while A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies's labored yet exquisitely textured biopic of Emily Dickinson, reconciles a boisterous wit with a terrified and repressed homebody. Alexander Payne's Downsizing, also flawed, nevertheless presents American cinema's most detailed and honest story of class aspiration in ages; a work of supreme structural integrity, it slyly ties moments of uplift to corporate rhetoric. On the other hand, S. Craig Zahler's politically useless Brawl in Cell Block 99 more than gets by on its stoic and physical performances (above all, a stellar Vince Vaughn), ever-putrefying production design, and unfashionably measured pacing.

The Human Surge

The titles above I more or less expected to like—I came in with goodwill for their auteurs. Two new-to-me international figures left a strong first impression: Anocha Suwichakornpong, from Thailand, and Eduardo Williams, from Argentina, both made avant-garde, class-conscious narrative features with By the Time It Gets Dark and The Human Surge, respectively. With its three distinct acts, distinguished by continent and camera format (Super 16 for Buenos Aires, digital filmed off monitor with Super 16 for Mozambique, RED for Philippines), The Human Surge left a mark, as an especially virtuosic and enigmatic rethinking of "slow cinema" conventions.

Call Me By Your Name surprised me more than perhaps any film on this list. Luca Guadagnino's style is a bit impersonal, and he indulges in some stylistic tics that irritate: namely, three Sufjan Stevens needle drops that feel precious and telegraph too much (though further queering Sufjan is welcome in itself). But where it counts, Guadagnino, screenwriter James Ivory and the cast cut deep. The "countdown to midnight" sequence is particularly masterful—sparely designed and digressive, its evocation of hunger elicits a most unusual and effective suspense. Michael Stuhlbarg's monologue at the end is also as good as you might have heard, the rare full-stop speech that activates tacit intellectual and emotional through lines instead of closing them off. It's a comfy, fairly idle gay love story, which is itself also welcome, but the allusions to antiquity and expansive emotional register place the film's accomplishments within the finer trends of Italian narrative art (i.e., di Lampedusa's novella The Professor and the Siren, a recent discovery of mine).

If we are still discussing pleasant surprises, let me also plug Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok, the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to be included on my year-end list. Its narrative economy captured my attention, but my main reason for inclusion is quite base: I simply found it very funny. The three last movies I have yet to mention—Good Time, Phantom Thread, and The Son of Joseph—also made me laugh, but I ultimately found them moving thanks to their wholly committed performance styles and gorgeous music.

My thanks if you have read to this point; see below for my list, whose selections by now should come as no surprise. Like last year, I am copying Dan Sallitt's color-coded list format, which ranks films in descending order of red, orange, green, blue, and purple. (Red is an exceedingly rare designation for me.) And, finally, a big asterisk: 2016 festival premieres Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, Romania) and Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea) never received US theatrical release—a minor crime in a year of major ones. If they did, they would easily be included in my Top 5 below.

Geena Davis, Jon Hamm, and Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime

Favorite Cinema of 2017 (NYC One-Week Theatrical or Television)
1. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (David Lynch, USA)
2. EX LIBRIS: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
3. MARJORIE PRIME (Michael Almereyda, USA)
4. STAYING VERTICAL (Alain Guiraudie, France)
5. THE UNKNOWN GIRL (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
6. SONG TO SONG (Terrence Malick, USA)
7. BIG LITTLE LIES (Jean-Marc Vallée, USA)
8. THE HUMAN SURGE (Eduardo Williams, Argentina)
9. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/USA)
10. DOWNSIZING (Alexander Payne, USA)
11. BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (S. Craig Zahler, USA)
12. A QUIET PASSION (Terence Davies, UK)
13. GOOD TIME (Ben Safdie & Josh Safdie, USA)
14. PHANTOM THREAD (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
15. THE SALESMAN (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)
16. THOR: RAGNAROK (Taika Waititi, USA) 
17. THE SON OF JOSEPH (Eugène Green, France/Belgium)
18. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK (Anocha Suwichakornpong, Thailand)
19. FACES PLACES (Agnès Varda & JR, France) 

On Netflix: Staying Vertical, The Unknown Girl, The Son of Joseph
On Amazon Prime: Marjorie Prime, Song to Song, A Quiet Passion, Brawl in Cell Block 99, The Salesman
On Fandor: The Human Surge
On iTunes: By the Time It Gets Dark
On HBO and Showtime, respectively: Big Little Lies and Twin Peaks: The Return

Honorable Mentions: Thirst Street (Silver), Hermia & Helena (Piñiero), Wormwood (Morris), Person to Person (Defa), Logan Lucky (Soderbergh)

Favorite Short Film: Spiral Jetty (Ricky D'Ambrose)

Favorite Stand-Up Special: Norm Macdonald: Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery (On Netflix)

Three Movies I Expected to Hate But Find Myself, For Reasons I Still Don't Understand, Quite Taken With: A Ghost Story (Lowery), Kékszakállú (Solnicki), Transformers: The Last Knight (Bay)

Still Ambivalent About: The Lost City of Z (Gray), Wonderstruck (Haynes), Nocturama (Bonello)

Did Not Take To: Lady Bird, Get Out, Coco, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Mudbound,
The Post

Seriously?: The Shape of Water, Darkest Hour, Battle of the Sexes

Unambiguous Dreck I Saw for Whatever Reason: Underworld: Blood Wars, Power Rangers, Kingsman: The Golden Circle 

More Ambitious Disasters (aka Least Favorite): mother!; Wind River; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; War of the Planet of the Apes; Baby Driver; All the Money in the World 

***

Adèle Haenel and Olivier Bonnaud in The Unknown Girl

Favorite Lead Performances:

• Adèle Haenel, The Unknown Girl 
• Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, Big Little Lies
• Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return 
• Vince Vaughn, Brawl in Cell Block 99
• Lois Smith, Marjorie Prime 
• Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
• Cynthia Nixon, A Quiet Passion 
• Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps, Phantom Thread 
• Peter Saarsgard, Wormwood 
• Robert Pattinson, Good Time
• Lindsay Burdge, Thirst Street 
• Kim Min-hee, On the Beach at Night Alone 
• Haley Lu Richardson, Columbus

Cynthia Nixon and Joanna Bacon in A Quiet Passion

Favorite Supporting Performances:  

• Naomi Watts, Miguel Ferrer, Sheryl Lee, Amy Shiels, Robert Forster, Laura Dern, Matthew Lillard, Dana Ashbrook, Jim Belushi, and Catherine Coulson, Twin Peaks: The Return 
• Tim Robbins and Geena Davis, Marjorie Prime 
• Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me By Your Name
• Jennifer Ehle and Joanna Bacon, A Quiet Passion 
• Alexander Skarsgård, Robin Weigert, and Jeffrey Nordling, Big Little Lies 
• Damien Bonnard, Thirst Street (also excellent as the lead in Staying Vertical)
• Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
• Buddy Duress and Taliah Webster, Good Time 
• Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread 
• Hong Chau and Christoph Waltz, Downsizing 
• Tiffany Haddish, Girls Trip
• Jeff Goldblum, Thor: Ragnarok
• Lakeith Stanfield, War Machine 
• Mary Lee Kennedy, Ex Libris 
• Bene Coopersmith, Person to Person 
• Betty Gabriel, Get Out
• Patti Smith and Lykke Li, Song to Song 
• Fabrice Luchini, Slack Bay

***

Marlene Dietrich in Angel (1937)

15 New-t0-Me Favorites
Older movies I saw for the first time in 2017, limited to one per director. For 100 old movies I loved, see this ridiculous list on Letterboxd.

1. Angel (1937, Ernst Lubitsch, USA)
2. Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)
3. Claire's Knee (1970, Éric Rohmer, France)
4. Le Trou (1960, Jacques Becker, France)
5. *Corpus Callosum (2002, Michael Snow, Canada)
6. The Devil Is a Woman (1935, Josef von Sternberg, USA)
7. The Last Detail (1973, Hal Ashby, USA)
8. Ivan the Terrible: Parts I and II (1944 & 1958, Sergei Eisenstein, USSR)
9. The Gleaners & I (2000, Agnès Varda, France)
10. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968, Straub-Huillet, West Germany)
11. Lancelot du Lac (1974, Robert Bresson, France)
12. To Sleep With Anger (1990, Charles Burnett, USA)
13. Black Narcissus (1947, Powell & Pressburger, UK)
14. Remember My Name (1978, Alan Rudolph, USA)
15. Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan, USA)

***

And for the record: I watched 457 movies last year, the majority of them old movies. (My viewing diary, with ratings, can be viewed here.) Looking ahead, the one 2018 release I saw ahead of time was Paul Schrader's First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke. It was by far my favorite of the Telluride Film Festival, documentary-like in its cataloging of current political and economic outrages, with an ultimate metaphysical turn that knocked me out. Look for it here next year (this year?).