Top 10 Favorite Films of 2018
I hate being this guy. I really do. But I don’t think 2018 was a particularly great year for movies.
I know I said the same thing last time, and if you look at the list of releases this year, there’s actually a lot of great stuff. Marvel released some of their best movies to date with Infinity War, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Black Panther. (The latter of which came pretty damn close to making my list.) There were a lot of strong indie releases throughout the year, the Oscar shit’s been decent, there’s been lots of daring foreign films and a plethora of incredibly cool and imaginative documentaries. Hell, even one or two of the movies streaming services put out this year weren’t total shit. (One of which we’ll be talking about in just a second.)
But I tend to measure the years in art by my level of vigor, and though there were plenty of great movies in 2018, I find it hard to summon a whole lot of passion for most of them. Too many good movies. Not enough great ones.
Part of it might be my snobbery. Part of it might be that I’ve seen too many movies and it’s becoming harder for shit to resonate with me. Part of it might be that I’m a bit of a closed off person to begin with.
But I don’t think it’s a defect in my personality so much as some years stand out more than others, and this year happened to be an off one for me. Hey. It happens. Hopefully 2019 will be incredible. But maybe it won’t be, and that’s alright too. Maybe I should stop quantifying by the year anyway, and just like things when I like them.
However, when I finished putting this list together, I looked at it and smiled. Because you know what? These movies are awesome.
Maybe it wasn’t that bad a year after all.
HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW!!!
Runner-up: Roma
In an odd way, Roma was one of the most frustrating experiences of the year for me. It’s not because I ever thought it was “bad” or anything like that. It’s because I left the theater feeling oddly cold about it, and for the longest time, I didn’t know why.
(Note: I saw it for the first time in a theater a week or two before it went on Netflix. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend you do the same. Sometimes, it’s nice to live in LA.)
I banged my head against the problem for the longest time. I thought about the magnificent scope of the movie. I thought about how every frame of the movie is so astoundingly beautiful that I would happily pay a lot of money to see them in an exhibition. I thought about the breathtaking amount of detail in every shot and Yalitza Aparicio’s performance and the slow understated manner in which the story plays out and so many other elements that make Roma the deservedly loved film it is.
And the more I thought about these elements, the angrier I became. Not at the movie, but at myself. Roma has “film of the year” written all over it, and if one were to go as far as to say that this is their favorite movie of all time, I wouldn’t be mad. But I couldn’t click with it, and it was driving me insane.
Then I watched it again when it went up on Netflix and it suddenly hit me: I was thinking about every aspect of Roma except for one: Cleo, our protagonist.
Roma is basically one of the best put together films you may ever see. Every shot is so loaded with detail and attention that you forgot that the movie wasn’t actually shot in the early ‘70s. But for me, so much energy is put into Cleo’s surroundings and everything happening around her that it often feels like the movie forgets about Cleo herself, and it doesn’t dive deep enough into how she feels or what she thinks.
If you’re the kind of viewer who can easily project yourself and your imagination onto anybody on screen, you probably feel different. I, unfortunately, am not one of those people. I’m thick. I need more engagement with the people I’m supposed to latch onto, and for me, Roma didn’t provide enough.
Come the Oscars, I’ll be rooting for Roma to sweep. It deserves it. It deserves all the love and attention it gets, and it deserves more. I’ve seen Roma three times now, and I respect the absolute hell out of this movie. I just wish, with all my heart, that I love it to the extent that I still want to.
10. Free Solo
Meet enough artists and you’ll eventually meet one or two who feel like their art has been compromised because they have a family or a relationship.
It’s not an attitude I expect most people would understand. Society, particularly here in America, drills into your head from the moment you’re born that you should probably get married and have a kid. But artists are made different. Those who are dedicated to their craft put every fiber of their being into the work, thus the priorities of artists tend to differ from those of many “typical” Americans.
It’s how artists are, and if you mess with their formula, they may see it as things going downhill. It just so happens that “mess with the formula” in this case means, “Introduce different emotional baggage into their lives that changes who they are and render them incapable of making their art the way they were making it before.”
Most artists devote their passion to writing or painting or sculpting or whatever their art may be. Alex Honnold’s passion happens to be climbing massive mountains without any harnesses or safety equipment or anything that could potentially save his life.
Thus a dilemma: When change happens in the life of an artist, when they get married or start a new relationship or have a kid or whatever and they have to start considering other people’s feelings and needs, their art may suffer. However, there’s still a chance to do it differently and make it work. Maybe even make it better. And they’ll still be alive. If Alex Honnold is, say, climbing a 3200 ft. mountain wall without any safety equipment and his thoughts turn to the feelings of his endlessly patient girlfriend Sanni or the crew filming him, he may lose focus, fall, and die a horrible death.
So yes, Alex is a little closed off.
In a way, he has to be. Or he might die. This is the dilemma Free Solo spends most of its runtime exploring. It does a brilliant job making you understand the costs, physically, mentally, and emotionally, of pursuing a life like the one Alex leads for everyone around him. Friends. Family. Girlfriends. There’s even a scene or two of the film crew contemplating the morality of filming the climb at all.
But mostly, it focuses on the costs for Alex himself. There’s a scene where they stick him in an MRI machine and try to provoke his amygdala, the part of his brain that feels fear. (They fail.) Before he enters the machine, he has to fill out a written questionnaire. One of those questions is whether or not he’s ever felt depression. He doesn’t know how to answer. For me at least, it’s not hard to see why. You choose to climb mountains with no safety gear, there are consequences.
And it’s because of this that, in a weird way, I would’ve been just as satisfied if he chose not to do the climb. But he does.
Also, there’s a part where HE CLIMBS A FUCKING MOUNTAIN WITH NO SAFETY GEAR AND IT’S AMAZING!!!
9. Burning
Burning is the most challenging movie on this list. Hell, for most people, it’s probably the most challenging movie that’s come around in a long time. It’s nearly three hours, it’s slow as molasses, and the payoff (so to speak) doesn’t happen until the very last scene. But if you’re willing to give Burning a shot, I’d take it. Because I think this movie’s cool as hell.
I told myself I wasn’t going to run down plot as much as I did in previous top ten lists. But in this case, it’s necessary. The one sentence IMDb description and the Wikipedia summaries miss many key nuances and don’t do it justice. So here’s an overly simplistic plot summary of my own:
Poor boy who lives on a farm outside of Seoul reconnects with girl from his town. Boy and girl bond. She tells him that she’s going on her dream trip to Africa, and he agrees to come by and feed her cat. The two have sex and she leaves. Boy pops in and feeds her cats as promised, and it’s clear boy has developed strong feelings for girl. Girl returns from her trip and reveals that she’s befriended a rich guy who lives in Gangnam, and their relationship has clearly progressed passed wherever she and boy were at before she left. One night, while the three smoke weed on boy’s farm and girl steps out for a second, rich guys says that on occasion, he likes to drive out to the country and burn people’s greenhouses to the ground. Shortly thereafter, girl disappears. Rich guy says he hasn’t seen her and that she’s left. But boy suspects rich guy is responsible.
Read that description again, or any description. You may have noticed something missing: Why does boy suspect rich guy? Sure, rich guy says some suspicious shit and he behaves, in certain lights, like an asshole. But all the clues are circumstantial, and everything has an explanation. He says he burns down greenhouses, and the he’s going to do so again near boy’s farm. But there’s no evidence that he actually does it, or that he’s ever done it. Later, boy finds some of girl’s stuff in rich guy’s luxurious apartment, including a watch boy gave her in the beginning of the movie. Does this mean he killed her, or did she simply leave some stuff behind? When girl does a majestic dance she learned in Africa, boy is entranced. But then he looks over at rich guy, who yawns. Does that make him a murderer, or was he just succumbing to an involuntary bodily function?
The point isn’t whether or not rich guy did it. The point is that boy thinks he did, and thus so does the audience because we’re seeing the story through boy’s eyes. This is a movie after all, so obviously girl will wind up with boy, and rich guy is merely an obstacle. Right? So rich guy had to have done it. Right?
Well, here’s the thing, and again IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPOILERS STOP READING NOW: Boy never finds girl. Instead, the movie ends with boy calling rich guy out to a secluded spot, stabbing rich guy to death, putting rich guy’s body and his own newly bloody clothes into rich guy’s car, lighting the car on fire, and driving off naked.
And it’s here where it suddenly occurs to us that in a way, boy was just as suspicious and asshole-y as rich guy all along. While girl’s in Africa, he feeds her cat, but he also masturbates in her apartment. On a few occasions, he says some pretty shitty things to girl, including basically calling her a whore. Boy spends much of his time after girl disappears stalking rich guy, never once suspecting or considering other options, such as the possibility that she simply left because she never liked him as much as he liked her. At no point did they discuss whether or not they are or should be in a monogamous relationship. Yet in boy’s mind, rich guy took girl away from boy, so rich guy must pay. Facts be damned.
To me, Burning is not only about male entitlement, but a closer examination of conventional story wisdom. “Boy meets girl, but rich guy gets in the way” is well worn territory. But look a little closer, and there’s always important nuance that falls to the wayside because the audience demands satisfaction, and we tend to attach ourselves to our protagonists a little too quickly.
Boy’s name is Lee Jong-su. Girl’s name is Shin Hae-mi. Rich guy’s name is simply Ben. He doesn’t get a full name like the other two. To Jong-Su, Ben doesn’t need nuance. Ben is simply the guy he thinks took Hae-mi away. He could be anyone. But Hae-mi is a human being. She belongs to nobody. Maybe if Jong-su asked Ben what his full name was, and maybe if Jong-su weren’t such an asshole maybe Ben would still be alive. Maybe we, the audience, would want to ask similar questions.
8. The Tale
I was terrified of watching this movie.
All I knew about it was that it was the debut fictional film of documentarian Jennifer Fox, and that it was an autobiographical account of her childhood rape and sexual abuse. I didn’t know the nuances or the specifics, but I was scared anyway. Of course, rape is a dark and difficult subject. But most of my fears had to do with the damage depictions of rape have done before. Watch some of those Game of Thrones scenes. Watch many a shitty direct-to-VHS movie from the ‘80s or ‘90s. Hell, watch a lot of Hollywood depictions of rape. Most of the time, it’s tasteless, it’s cheap, and it’s depressingly tired.
What the solution is, I don’t know. It’s easy to say, “Don’t make art about rape.” But I don’t think that can be or should be a possibility. I also don’t think there’s a simple answer, nor will there ever be one. But there’s a way to do it and a way not to, and what fits into which category will change from person to person.
For my money, The Tale is probably the best possible scenario when it comes to films that depict or address rape.
It’s not just that it’s autobiographical, and thus there’s more trust in the director and writer to be tasteful. It’s how it’s careful about what it says and what it doesn’t. Specifically, The Tale never rubs your nose in the misery or the violence. In fact, Jennifer Fox lives a pretty enviable life on the surface. She’s in her 40s, she teaches film and makes documentaries, and she seems to be in a healthy relationship with her fiancé Martin. She seems, relatively speaking, happy. However, we will soon learn that the reason she’s able to live like this is because what happened to her never really sunk in, and she’s been repressing some serious trauma.
The details are best left unspoiled and best left for yourself to understand. Suffice to say that The Tale is less about the act of rape itself and more in the discovery that you were taken advantage of and raped in the first place. About which parts we repress and which parts we don’t, and why. Mostly, it’s about how such an event forces you to think about how you define yourself.
When Jennifer finally accepts the truth about what happened, the struggle isn’t in trying to live a “normal” life again. The struggle is trying not to let herself be defined by her past. To fight the urge to label herself as just a “victim.” She’s so much more than that.
So yes, The Tale is as devastating as it sounds. But it’s devastating in a subtle and respectful way, and if you feel so inclined, I encourage you to watch it. Because it’s not the story of a victim. It’s the story of a fully formed, fully defined human being named Jennifer.
7. mid90s
Hey, remember earlier in the year when I talked your ear off about hangout movies? mid90s is pretty much a perfectly executed version of one of those. It grounds us in a setting, which in this case, is the skateboard culture of Los Angeles in the ‘90s. It provides a story of transformation, which in this case, involves our protagonist Stevie going from a friendless runt whose only knowledge of the world comes from his abusive older brother to the actual relationships he forms with the kids at the skate shop. And finally, it gives us stakes: The possible desolation of his new friend group, and his access to this whole new world he’s discovered.
You can basically read the hangout movie thing again and apply all the mid90s related nouns. That said, there’s two aspects of it I would like to spend this section gushing over.
Let’s start with the smaller of of the two: I cannot tell you how nice it felt to watch a movie that does right by hip hop. In so many tv shows and movies, you only hear hip hop when it comes time to signify that we’re in the “bad” area of town or it’s time for the white protagonists in a comedy film to do something “bad” or Killmonger takes the throne in Wakanda. (Okay, that last one was actually pretty fucking cool. Man, Black Panther should be on this list.) Hip hop is often used, but rarely by those who love it.
In Dart Adams’s fantastic article, “Why Doesn’t Hip Hop Have A “High Fidelity” Or An “Almost Famous” Yet?”, the topic of which should be fairly obvious, he briefly mentions the movie Brown Sugar. In it, he says, “When you watch Brown Sugar at no point do you get the feeling that the main characters really ate, lived, breathed Hip Hop.” They certainly do in mid90s. The sweeping worshipping shots of Ian’s collection of hip hop CDs and self-recorded Stretch & Bobbito tapes. The perfectly selected “Put In On” playing in the background when Stevie tries his first cigarette. “Passin’ Me By” providing the final spiritual uplift as the movie closes with Fourth Grade’s video, as well as a perfect summation of all the film’s themes.
No, mid90s isn’t the hip hop High Fidelity. But Jonah Hill clearly gives a shit about hip hop. I’ll take it.
The other, arguably more important aspect is how well mid90s nails friendships. Specifically, the friend dynamics of kids in middle and high school. Stevie’s first friend in the group is Ruben, a kid close to Stevie’s age with a buzzcut who’s a dead ringer for a lot of the kids I had passing friendships with in summer camp and stuff like that. Ruben introduces Stevie to the rest of the group, then almost immediately becomes resentful when the rest of the group takes a shine to him.
I was on both ends of this dynamic in my childhood. I also completely forgot about those moments. Then I saw this movie, and they all came flooding back to me. Maybe Jonah Hill has a better memory than I do. But I prefer to think that he wanted to nail it, and put a lot of thought and energy into capturing what friendship meant back then and how it works when you’re too young to understand that not all friendships last and things change.
But despite that melancholy, mid90s was one of the funnest experiences I had in a movie theater in 2018. It’s funny, it’s charming, and no, it’s not nostalgia porn. It’s nostalgic. But it’s not nostalgic specifically for the ‘90s so much as childhood in general, just like most coming-of-age stories and hangout movies. I also think it’s quietly one of the best edited movies of the year, and I hope Jonah Hill writes and directs more.
6. Annihilation
So here’s what happened: I wrote a long thing about Annihilation. I wrote about grief and encountering tragedy and devastation and randomness and conflict, and about how those things change who you are and how you see others. I also wrote about how gorgeous I think this movie is, and while I griped about a structuring thing or two I didn’t like (the interview format, basically), I concluded that it didn’t matter because of the overwhelming sense of direction and dread, how purposeful and effective it was, and how it was nice to see a (relatively speaking) big budget sci-fi movie that treated it’s audience with respect and didn’t have a “2” at the end of it.
Then I realized that I accidentally copied about 75% of what Dan Olsen says in his video about Annihilation on his channel Folding Ideas. I also realized that he said it about several trillion times better than I did, and I felt like a massive fraud who shouldn’t be writing about things on the internet. Here’s that video. It says everything I wanted to say about Annihilation and it’s great:
So instead I’ll talk about another aspect I didn’t like: The ubiquity of a certain 2018 character that made its first appearance in Annihilation. You know who I’m talking about. The highest rated character in focus group testing this year, the mutated bear whose vocalizations happen to be the dying screams of its victims. Or Screaming Bear, as he’s known in my head.
Look, marketing people. I get it. When I was a child, Pokémon was the biggest thing on the planet. So I’m used to the marketing strategy of “Let’s take a cute character and throw it on fucking everything. Lunchboxes, vitamins, cleaning products, toilet paper, whatever.” Or at least I thought I was used to it, because I saw Screaming Bear on so many things that I’m starting to dream about it. Screaming Bear duct tape. Screaming Bear halloween costumes. A pair of Beats by Dre headphones with Screaming Bear on both sides.
One day I was taking a shared Lyft to downtown. Besides the driver, there were two passengers in the back. (I had strategically taken the front seat early, as I try to do with all shared Lyft rides.) All three of them had Screaming Bear phone cases. At one point, one of the passenger’s phones rang and it turns out she had a Screaming Bear ringtone. Custom ringtones. In 2018. People are still doing it apparently.
It’s a shame that this is all I can think about when it comes to this movie, because Annihilation was one of the richest movies I saw 2018. It’s a hard film to comprehend when you first see it, but it has a way of burrowing into your head and staying there. Ultimately, it’s a movie about confronting the bizarre unexplainable terrifying things that happen to us, and how we emerge from the wreckage. Go to the front page of your preferred news site or your social media feed. That sickening feeling in your gut? That’s Annihilation.
But Jesus Christ… enough with the fucking bear already.
5. Minding the Gap
The premise of the most applauded documentaries are usually easy to explain. Just this year, we had Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Were I to try to get you to watch this movie (which, by the way, you should), I’d merely say, “It’s about the career, life, and impact of Mr. Rogers.” “Ah,” you’d think, “I understand that.” And you could say the same about most true crime documentaries or similarly lauded documentaries. Amy is about the life of Amy Winehouse. The Jinx is an investigation into suspected murderer Robert Durst. The Fog of War is an extended in-depth interview with Robert McNamara and Hoop Dreams follows two kids in inner-city Chicago for eight years.
Of course, there are exceptions. (Whattup The Act of Killing and Exit Through the Gift Shop!) And of course, these movies have much more depth and nuance than my little once sentence descriptions would imply. But the larger point is that documentaries tend to lend themselves to easily defined premises. There’s an event or a person or a place. Go make a thing about that murder or that former secretary of defense or those kids in Chicago.
Some of the descriptions of Minding the Gap would you lead you to believe that it’s a documentary about skateboarding. (The fact that two of the films on my list are about skateboarding is coincidental. I had a kind of skateboarding phase, but it never went beyond the Tony Hawk games and Tech Decks. I never owned my own board.) For example, the one sentence Wikipedia description (currently) reads, “Minding the Gap is a 2018 documentary film directed by Bing Liu, chronicling the lives and friendships of three young men growing up in Rockford, Illinois, united by their love of skateboarding.”
Indeed, on the surface, Minding the Gap is about Bing Liu and his friends Kiere and Zack. All grew up together, all bonded over skateboarding, and the documentary, on the surface, shows Bing returning to Rockford and catching up with his old buddies. Some are still involved in skateboarding, some aren’t, and all lead substantially different lives than the ones they led when they were kids.
In reality, if I had to put it as simply as possible, Minding the Gap is about domestic violence.
Rockford, you see, has an abuse problem. A bad one. I can’t pretend to know why this problem crops up in certain towns and places more so than others, but one could easily turn to the usual suspects: The despair that comes when economic and job prospects are low, racial tensions are high, and cycles of societal and domestic abuse are allowed to continue.
All three of the film’s subjects saw their fair share of violence in their homes when they were kids. And all three found comfort and non-toxic kinship in skateboarding. It’s what kept them together so long.
But now they’re all men. Bing was lucky enough to make it out and get film work. But things didn’t work out so fortunately for Kiere and Zack, both of whom work dead end jobs and one of whom has a failed dream or two in skating. This isn’t to say things are completely hopeless, especially for Kiere. But Zack winds up in a volatile relationship and ends up having a baby. Slowly, we watch Zack, who was a bright fun kid, turn into everything he hated as a man. And he doesn’t seem to know it. Or maybe he does. Either way, it’s hard to tell which is more heartbreaking.
Minding the Gap may sound bleak. And it is at parts. But it also feels spirited in a way a lot of documentaries don’t. There are moments of laughter and levity that feel infectious. And the skateboarding footage Bing shoots. How alive it feels. If I didn’t understand the appeal of skateboarding already, then I certainly do now.
4. The Favourite
I’ve wanted something like The Favourite to exist for a very very long time. Basically the anti-costume drama.
It’s not that I have necessarily have a problem with historical period pieces or royal palace intrigue movies or Jane Austen adaptations. They can be fantastic if done well. Hell, I’m one of those Kubrick fans who defends Barry Lyndon.
But the closer these type of movies stick to the conventions of the genre, the pithy passive aggression, the emphasis on maintaining a stately demeanor, the manners, the class warfare, the more they ring false to me. I have a bit of a “glass is half empty” streak, and in my mind, I’ve always doubted that this is how people in these eras actually behaved. I have no factual basis to make that claim, and in a way, I’m not talking about historical accuracy. I’m talking about how far these types of movies seem to think these societies were evolved. That people had moved past, for example, calling you a “cunt.”
Enter The Favourite, a costume drama were the word “cunt” is tossed around so casually that it basically loses all impact by the end of the movie. A movie where contempt isn’t buried under layers of wit, but worn on each other’s sleeves. A movie where the people behave like I always imagined they did, maybe not in a literal sense, but more as a reflection of who they were deep down in their souls.
We could make an exceptionally long list of every genre convention The Favourite weaponizes against the audience. There are no tender soft-spoken gentlemen. There are no polite exchanges. There are ballroom dances and social gatherings of aristocrats, but the ballroom dances are basically the Georgian version of drunken frat parties and the social gatherings revolve around ridiculous duck races and throwing fruit at naked palace servants.
But the genre convention The Favourite so brilliantly deconstructs is the social climbing.
Many costume dramas deal in issues of class. A young peasant girl scandalously attracts the affections of a charming man of the gentry. A poor servant slowly climbs the ranks after taking a job in a rich household, or maybe even the royal palace itself. Something happens and wealthy family loses all their fortunes, so the daughters have to marry up the social food chain. Usually, there’s a reason these protagonists want to climb the latter. Love or ideals or the simple desire to have more money in a time where life didn’t last as long.
But if you’ve spent any time around people in a big industry, be it Hollywood or politics or whatever, you know that’s now how it works. Plenty of people are good at making connections and staying in touch, but when push comes to shove, many have no real worth or skill. They’re just good at existing and talking.
Sarah Churchill is a nasty person, but at least she has value and a worldview. And more importantly, she gives a shit. Abigail Hill, on the other hand, doesn’t. She only wants power for power’s sake, and she doesn’t actually care about the politics or the people. In fact, she probably doesn’t know a single thing about either.
Yet Abigail “wins.” Thank god for social climbing, right?
3. Eighth Grade
The most terrified I felt watching a movie in 2018 wasn’t from any of the scenes in A Quiet Place. It wasn’t any levitating corpses in Hereditary. It wasn’t the practical stunt work in Mission: Impossible or the screaming bear in Annihilation or even Alex’s climb in Free Solo. (Though that last one came close.)
The actual scariest scene of 2018 for me was the scene in Eighth Grade where Kayla stands in her bathing suit staring out at the popular girl’s birthday party and trying to summon the nerve to join them.
Sure, it’s a scene that partially hits me because of my own insecurities. Put it this way: You won’t catch me at the beach with my shirt off at any point in this century. (Though to be fair, some of that has to do with me hating the application of sunscreen, as well as a family history of skin cancer.) But it’s more than that. After all, most people have some sort of discomfort with their body, though some have it worse than others. That shouldn’t mean that I should be scared shitless of what’s going to happen to Kayla once she steps through those sliding doors.
Equally as true, we’ve been building to this moment for a while. Kayla spends a lot of her time going through the social media accounts of the “popular” kids and trying to adjust her behavior to be more like them. Going to this party is her most socially daring move yet.
But the real reason this scene is so terrifying, I think, is because Eighth Grade knows you’ve seen these kinds of movies before, and you know precisely what could happen. And it doesn’t help that Kayla is one of the most likable characters of the year and I didn’t want anything to happen to her as she was the fictional character I rooted for the hardest in 2018.
Now granted, the kids in Eighth Grade are not as cartoonishly shitty as they are in many high school movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Nobody’s being shoved into a locker and things never really enter the realm of outright bullying. (Or at least not by her fellow eighth grade classmates) But it’s this same grounded portrayal of middle school that also heightens the tension. Any potential cruelty could be worse in a certain sense, because now we have the internet, and any humiliation can be revisited and relived over and over and over again.
At best, most of her classmates don’t care about her existence, and at worst, they don’t want her around. And if there’s one thing Hollywood portrayals of school make abundantly clear, it’s that on the road to coolness, you’re going to stumble. A lot. So really, as she steps forth into the party, anything could happen. And I was squirming into the deepest corner of my seat in the theater.
However, this intertextual treatment of school movies is also what makes it so powerful and charming. Most of these movies get you to believe that, as far as all this school shit is concerned, everything will eventually work out. In Eighth Grade, things don’t really go as planned for Kayla. And, as the movie communicates effectively, that’s alright too.
Kayla’s reward isn’t higher social status. It’s the knowledge that people who don’t respect her or care for her aren’t worth her time. In a way, that’s much more rewarding.
2. The Death of Stalin
Armondo Iannucci and his team have a certain gift. And no, I’m not talking about the profanity, although they’re clearly gifted in that department as well. I’m talking about a certain trick they can pull off that most people can’t seem to master, and I don’t know how they do it.
The first time I saw it was in In The Loop. Most of the story events revolve around dumb media gaffes, petty bureaucracy, and stupid people behaving stupidly, and it’s all so irreverent that you forget that you’re really watching a movie about the build-up to a war in the Middle East. Then POTUS vetoes tariffs on Chinese imports (keep in mind, this movie came out in 2009), and everyone has to rush to the UN to try to start or prevent a war. Suddenly the stakes skyrocket, and while things stay relatively funny, there’s a tension that wasn’t there before. “Oh,” the audience thinks, “People are going to die because of all this.”
I saw it again in “Spinners and Losers,” the second of two specials that bridged the gap between seasons two and three of The Thick of It. At the end of the first special, the Prime Minister resigns, setting forth a nightmare of backroom deals, jockeying, and inner-office politicking the likes of which hadn’t been seen on the show as of yet. At some point, the enormity of the bullshit and spin is too much for Glenn Cullen, the oldest and most irrelevant member of the fictional Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, and he has a meltdown. “I’m a human being and all this is my life! And it’s collapsing in front of me!” shouts Glenn. And it’s not played for jokes. It’s a genuine moment. Of course, mere minutes later, his colleagues are making fun of him. But in the moment, things got real.
In case you haven’t caught on, the trick I’m talking about is their ability to shift tone at a moment’s notice and somehow make it work. One moment you’re watching a dark comedy. Then, suddenly, you’re watching something that’s just dark. We’ve actually talked about this trick before.
The Death of Stalin is, by a pretty wide margin, the darkest thing Iannucci has made. It is, at its heart, a slapstick comedy about fascism where cruelty, tyranny, and murder are occasionally played for jokes. At some point, I remember thinking to myself, “There’s no way they can pull that trick again.” After all, How do you take something that’s already riding the line between a harrowing look at dictatorships and comedy, suck out all the comedy, and still make it watchable?
The answer: You arrest Lavrentiy Beria, force Malenkov to sign off on it, find him guilty of treason and rape in a kangaroo court, then drag him outside, shoot him in the head, and burn the body.
It’s not that Beria deserved better. He didn’t. One need only look at the section names of his Wikipedia page to know why. It’s also not only the way it’s presented. Any shred of comedy is tossed to the side as Khrushchev reads Beria’s sentence and Beria screams bloody murder and begs for his life.
It’s the knowledge that all this has happened before to people who weren’t as nakedly evil as Beria, and that all of it is going to happen again. After they kill Beria and exile Svetlana Stalina to Vienna, Khrushchev tells Kaganovich, “Now we can turn the corner.” “Yeah,” says Kaganovich, “Put all the bloodshed behind us.” Then we cut back to Khrushchev, who immediately says, “I’m worried about Malenkov though.”
It’s not played for jokes. It’s played for omens.
By the way, The Death of Stalin is the funniest movie I saw all year.
1. If Beale Street Could Talk
I like writing about stuff I like more than stuff I don’t.
Writing about stuff I like means I get to revisit said stuff and spend some time with it. “Hey,” I think, “I’m in the mood to watch Call Me By Your Name again. Let’s write an article about hangout movies.” It also makes me feel better about myself. Whenever I write a something about a thing I don’t like, I always feel like I’m going to be perceived as some snarky internet asshole, and by writing about stuff I like, I don’t fall into that hole.
But here’s the catch: Writing about stuff I like is harder. It’s not that I’m a contrarian or that I hate the world. It’s for more technical and admittedly anal reasons. Nine times out of ten, when I write about a thing I like, in my head, it’s basically a boring checklist of things I liked about the stuff, and if I throw in enough verbiage, maybe you won’t notice that I wrote a glorified listicle. And besides, negativity creates natural conflict, and if there’s something to contrast, there’s inherently something to write about.
So here I am, self-tasked to write about If Beale Street Could Talk, my favorite movie of the year. I could go on for hours and hours and pages and pages about every little corner of this movie, and how much I loved all of it.
Okay, I didn’t love two scenes that involve the use of historical photographs because I thought they were a little heavy handed. There. That’s it. That’s everything I didn’t like.
Other than that, I could tell you about W, X, Y, and Z about why this movie’s incredible. But then I’m running into my own trap, and when I write about something I’m passionate about, I want to convey that passion rather than go on autopilot.
So yeah, I love everything about this movie. Except those photos, which honestly weren’t that big a deal. And hey, those photos were pretty damn beautiful in their own right.
I may not be going into detail and it might sound like I’m stalling. And I am. And that may lead you to believe that I don’t have anything to say about this movie, and thus I don’t have as much passion for it as it may seem. On the contrary, I knew this was my favorite movie of the year well before it was halfway done, and the first thing I did when I got home was buy the soundtrack and read every word I could find about it.
The problem is that once I start talking about one aspect, then I’ll want to talk about another, and another, and another, and another, and pretty soon, things spiral out of control. I know because this is my fourth time trying to write this section.
This is a movie that successfully does everything, and more importantly, it’s a movie that’s successfully about everything. Plenty of movies try to encapsulate the themes of an entire era or the struggles of entire people and just generally try to be about everything. Most fail. The story spirals out of control or it runs into the paradox of trying to be about everything, but successfully being about nothing.
Beale Street is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that manages to truly be about everything. Class. Race. Love. Violence. Religion. Justice. Institutions. Everything.
In the end, it’s all because James Baldwin created a story that encompasses everything. It’s about Fonny and Tish, two people who love each other and are about to start a family. But they also happen to be black in America during a time where every institutional power wanted them gone. and Fonny is framed for a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed. So Tish, who will soon give birth to their child, and her family, do everything they can to clear his name. That involves raising money through legal and illegal means. That involves confronting shitty long held institutions. That involves an examination of how this woman and her family would up in this situation in the first place. Or more specifically, who and what put them there.
It’s a movie about everything, and I love everything about it. I’m getting repetitive now. I’m going to go buy the book and fall in love with it all over again.
Honorable Mentions
The Avengers: Infinity War
Bad Times at the El Royale
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Beautiful Boy
BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther
Blindspotting
Blockers
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
First Man
First Reformed
Lean on Pete
The Old Man & The Gun
Ralph Breaks the Internet
The Rider
Shirkers
Shoplifters
Sorry to Bother You
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Support the Girls
Tully
Widows
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Will See Someday
Bisbee ‘17
Capernaum
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Happy as Lazzaro
Madeline's Madeline
Monrovia, Indiana
The Other Side of the Wind
Private Life
Searching
There’s probably a lot more.
