Every 2015 Film I've seen Ranked 1-30, Part I

Here is the ranking of the first 30 films I have seen in 2015 (Bottom Half can be found here):

1. Spotlight, dir. Thomas McCarthy, starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Rachel McAdams, Brian D’Arcy James, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci- The critical consensus is that this film is the shit and I won’t disagree. It’s kinetic, does a great job of deepening its characters with little or no exposition, has a solid amount of world-building and has all that profound social significance you expect from an Oscar front-runner without being preachy. Did I mention it’s about journalism and I’m a journalist? I love that its best picture win is raising at least some degree of awareness that high-quality journalism adds up to something.

2. The Martian, dir. Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Kate Mara, Kristen Wiig-A fun science-fiction film that doesn’t skimp on the science or the action. Matt Damon got his third Oscar nomination for this film but it’s more the way the character is written that deserves the credit. Damon’s character exists in a haunting isolation that he faces with a thin veneer of optimistic plunk and the fact that his struggle can hold your attention so well is a testament to the writing. The action is smartly divided between Mars’ sole resident, his ship mates in space, and mission control on Earth and the latter two settings are populated with all sorts of gems including Kristen Wiig, Donald Glover, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Jessica Chastain, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. 

3. Joy, dir. David O Russell, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini, Edgar Ramirez, Virginia Madsen-I don’t know if my head would agree that this is the third best film of the year, but it just worked for me emotionally. Made in the same history-as-a-loose-guideline-for-my-actors-whims spirit as “American Hustle,” Joy caters to the strengths of its players (particularly, Bradley Cooper’s manic confidence) but is more grounded in a narrative of the struggle to make it in a dog-eat-dog world. As with Spotlight and journalism, the film does a good job of world-building with inventions and QVC. I also like that the film is unapologetic of showing how bad Joy’s family is and doesn’t treat it as something that needs to be resolved in a bow at the end. Edgar Ramirez has a breakout performance here.

4. Star Wars VII, dir. George Lucas, starring Daisey Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Oscar Isaac, Donmhall Gleeson-For this viewer, Star Wars’s biggest achievement was convincing me that it had a reason to exist. Return of the Jedi wrapped things up in such an uber-happy ending that I couldn’t see a possible reason for continuing the story except more money. J.J. Abrams’s version was transformative on that front. Not only did it achieve the task of investing me in a story I considered closed but it was about as good as a film could be. 

5. Big Short, dir. Adam McKay, starring Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Jeremy Strong, Melissa Leo, Marissa Tomei, Brad Pitt-The comic genius behind the immortal line “I love lamp” has an Oscar. What a year it’s been for Adam McKay: He used to be known primarily as a skilled comic writer who found his way to some studio money, and now he’s being courted by Democatic presidential candidates for an endorsement. Big Short contains a pretty sharp ensemble with at least two highly memorable characters and contains the kind of comic bounce that protégé Tina Fey (yep, Adam McKay technically recruited Fey to SNL) and others use on TV: Supercuts, cutaways, and flashbacks keep the story moving.

6. Inside Out, voices Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Diane Lane-One of Pixar’s best and most original film in years. Few films really explore an outside topic so well (Inception and dreams comes to mind) that they serve such a pedagogical purpose which is important for a kids’ movie. The comedy and adventure are pretty masterfully done here. It’s an example of Pixar in its groove.

7. Mustang, dir. Deniz Erguven-I actually reviewed this one and you can read it here. In short, I described it as a hellish version of Little House on the Prairie. Following five orphaned sisters under a house arrest imposed by their conservative uncle in small-town Turkey, the film’s technicality recalls Terrence Malick for the ethereal exploration of the present or Jonothan Demme’s more small-scale stuff with a focus on found moments of joy. At the same time, it’s a pretty scary look at restrictive societies.

8. Everest, starring Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Emily Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Kelly, Kiera Knightley, Robin Wright-Not a popular film but, hey, you can’t win them all. I had the added benefits of watching this film in 3D AND of not really knowing that it was a disaster film. Perhaps, that’s why the heartbreak of the climbers not making it down resonated so much with me. Some complained that the film was too ambitious with its large ensemble, but there was a lot in Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Jon Hawkes and Emily Watson’s characters to keep their fates engaging. Like Inside Out and child psychology or Love and Mercy and the Beach Boys, this is a film that had me rushing to the library (or the internet or whatever) to learn all I could and become an Everest-phile.

9. Man from Uncle, dir. Guy Ritchie, starring Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander,  Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Groth -Whether it was awards juggernaut Mad Max: Fury Road,  Jurassic Park tearing up the box office, or Star Wars VII realizing the dreams of fanboys and fangirls, there was an aura of credibility to tentpole films this year. My pick for best action film is this slick spy homage from action auteur Guy Richie. Like his last masterwork, Sherlock Holmes, he creates a distinct time and place: The luxury and extravagance of mid-century Italy (scenery porn galore! Even the shots of meals alone will make your mouth water) with an undercurrent of Cold War paranoia. The film’s buddy chemistry between the two leads and the girl is playful (with the appropriate level of homoerotic satire) and Alicia Vikander is an odd mix of Aurdrey Hepburnesque cuteness and playfully lethal in a way that works.

10. Love and Mercy, starring John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti, Bill Camp, Erin Drake, written by Oren Moverman, Michael Lerner-Like Everest, this is a film that turned me onto something new. I’m embarrassed to say that I previously only knew of the Beach Boys as the group of famous musicians who would randomly pop in on the Tanner residence when Full House needed a ratings boost. The film’s split narrative device can be wobbly at times and there are more than a few awkward  moments (the Brian and Melinda courtship comes off as strange to say the least) but the film brings it on the emotional front. The four principals in the cast each carry very heavy material: Paul Giamatti channels some pretty epic villainy, Elizabeth Banks makes a very awkward courting process on paper work and unleashes a killer instinct in later scenes, John Cusack impresses with quiet moments, and Paul Dano steals the show by selling the genius and the emotional breakdown of a young Brian Wilson

11. Trumbo, dir. Jay Roach, starring Bryan Cranston, Elle Fanning, Louis CK, Diane Lane, Michael Stuhlbarg, John Goodman-As a sucker for Hollywood history, it’s hard to resist watching actors of today doing their best impressions of Hollywood royalty. It’s a solid story dragged down by Bryan Cranston’s slightly cartoonish take and half-hearted attempts to infuse the material with a comic tone (though Stephen Root and John Goodman pull off the funny quite well). It’s an important film that successfully avoids being overly preachy.

12. Our Brand is Crisis dir. David Gordon Greene, starring Sandra Bullock, Anthony Mackie, Joaquim de Almeida, Billy Bob Thornton, Zoe Kazan, Ann Dowd, Scoot McNairy- An underlooked political drama about the rivalry between two ace political strategists (Sandra Bullock channeling a slightly darker version of her frazzled but endearing rom-com persona and Billy Bob Thornton channeling James Carville) working different sides of a Bolivian election. With a supporting cast that includes Scoot McNairy (he with the name that’s extremely easy to misspell), Zoe Kazan and Ann Dowd, the film boasts an enjoyable camaraderie and this is easily one of Sandra Bullock’s best performances. Like Trumbo, it successfully threads the needle of thought-provoking without being overly preachy, even if the resolution is slightly less profound than it thinks it is. Bonus points if you’ve recently been to Bolivia (i.e. me!)

13. Mad Max: Fury Road dir. George Miller, starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Bryne, Rosie Huntington-Whitely-In light of the fact that putting such a popular film somewhere in the middle of the queue will draw complaints, it seems preferable here to pre-emptively answer the question “why isn’t this in your top five?’ and it would be even better if I had a good answer to that question. The things that are praised- the exploration of society’s male-female dichotomy and the can’t-be-faked special effects – are things I agree with on all counts but I don’t necessarily think the special effects or the gender explorations of other films are particularly lacking. I also think that Imortan Joe and his goons could have used just a tad more subtlety. Still, this certainly was something unique and different and the narrative worked whole-heartedly.

14. Sicario, dir. Denis Villeneuve, starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Dan Kaluuya-I’ve wanted to see a good Mexican border/drug cartel film for a while, but aside from a great performance by Emily Blunt, this isn’t that film. It felt slightly more like a slightly tired entry of the gangster genre than something profound and new.  I prefer the series “The Bridge” which is truly all that and a bag of chips and while I can’t personally recommend Stephen Soderberg’s “Traffic” (I’ve inexplicably never seen it),  it sounds like a great film. “Sicario” is still a pretty good film and I can’t say enough good things about Emily Blunt, but I just don’t think it’s THE film.

15. Hot Tub Time Machine 2, starring Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Adam Scott, Gillian Jacobs, Kumail Nanjiani-I can’t imagine there are more than half a dozen people on the entire planet who bothered writing up a comprehensive ranking of their greatest films from 2015 and ranked Hot Tub Time Machine 2 ahead of Bridge of Spies. I realize this got negative reviews for crude and dumb characters, but there is a lot dumber and cruder stuff out there (Adam Sandler, Johnny Knoxville, Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy, “Entourage the Movie”, the “Dumb and Dumber” Series, etc, etc., etc.). Yes, these characters are idiots but there’s a comic rhythm to their shared idiocy that hit the sweet spot for me and the naiveté of Adam Scott’s character made him a great straight man and contrast to the trio. I read this film as a trippier version of Back to the Future with a higher level of Murphy’s Law-infused stupidity.

Are the Oscar Best Picture Picks Duds? Defending the Academy

As long as there are movie fans and those movie fans have access to the internet, you will always hear complaining that the Oscars get it wrong. I'm not sure if it's a non-conformist streak in my character or a love for playing devil's advocate, but I often like to take the opposite point of view that by golly, those Oscars often get it right like no one else!

One thing people need to acknowledge by the very nature of its large membership, a voting  body like AMPAS will naturally veer more towards some kind of consensus with few extremes. If you put the 1,000 most vocal critics of the Oscars in a room and asked them to vote for their Best Pictures of the year, I would bet money that their most idiosyncratic choices would cancel each other out and you would be left with the commonalities like The Martian, The Revenant, and Spotlight. 

When we look at the main criticisms leveled at the Academy, the same contradictory criticisms often pop up: They either don't reflect the views of the public, or they don't acknowledge the more experimental fare below-the-radar. Otherwise, everyone points to a few bad choices over the years and just uses that as proof that the Academy is terrible.

Personally, I think the Best Picture nominees in the past few years do a good job of balancing populist picks, artier films, ambitious experimental stuff, and straight genre stuff that's done well. I wouldn't want them to go too indie because I feel like films should resonate with the public and even if the best film by critics' views was something that screened for two weeks in Toronto and Tribeca, it's not something the public will enjoy being a part of on Oscar night.

So here's my expanded case:

For the Populists:

• Avatar is the highest grossing film ever and it got nominated, and ET, Exorcist, Sound of Music, Godfather, and Titanic were all box office record breakers of some sort.
• Nominees Rain Man, Forrest Gump, ET, Saving Private Ryan, Avatar, Toy Story 3 and American Sniper were all the top grossing film of their year
• Nominees Martian, American Sniper, Gravity, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, The Help, True Grit, Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Inception, District 9, Up, Blind Side, Avatar, and Ingloruious Basterds all won their opening weekends in the 10-picture era
• Among others that haven't made any of those lists list Mad Max: Fury Road, Spielberg's films (War Horse, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies), Wolf of Wall Street, The Artist, and The Fighter have all been crowd-pleasers

For the art house crowd:

• Films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amor, District 9, Brooklyn, Winter's Bone and Room were all films that had very, very little chance at finding a widespread audience before Awards Season boosted them.
• Nearly every popular visionary film director out there: Michelle Haneke, Wes Anderson, Thomas McCarthy, Richard Linklater, Steve McQueen, Kathryn Bigelow, Lisa Cholodenko, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers (4 times) and Neil Blokamp have all gotten a turn at the bat with Best Picture nominations. A few years ago, you could have said, some of the more interesting film directors like Wes Anderson or Alfonso Cuaron or Richard Linklater have never been nominated. But no longer.
• Last year, you two films that had never been done before stylistically in Boyhood and Birdman and this year Revenant and Room were both stylistically very original.

For the socially-conscious crowd:

• Six films in the expanded BP era-Selma, Precious, Help, 12 Years a Slave, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Blind Side- have had black narratives and black casts and the majority of those have had a black director. Each of those black directors got a major boost that allowed them greater creative freedom on their next projects.  While one can conceded that  Blind Side might be geared toward glorification of the white protagonist in the story at expense of the black protagonist, that is not the case with the other five films. I would also argue that Blind Side does teach us  something about the black experience. After all, Michael Oher (the film's subject) is a real person.
• Another nominee, Life of Pi, tells a story set in another 3rd world region: South Asia.
• Three of this year's eight films feature a woman protagonist
• Spotlight is about a struggle against the ultimate patriarchal society. Big Short is about the uneven distribution of wealth and economically disadvantaged.
• Last year, we had a film about a physically disabled person, a film about a gay person, a film with a black theme, and a film about a broken family
• The year before, we had a feminist film (Philomena), a film about transgender righs (DBC), a film with a black narrative, an action film with a female protagonist (Gravity), a film taking place in the 3rd world with an illuminating look of the struggles of people in the Global South (Captain Phillips), and another film about the effects of the rich on the financially disadvantaged (Wolf of Wall Street)
• Of the last six Oscar-winning directors, one has been a woman, four have come from a non-English speaking country, one has been East Asian, two have been Mexican

Some capsule reviews of 2008

I haven't reviewed as many pictures this year so allow me to hammer out a few mini-reviews for you:
Baby Mama, directed by no one of importance*, written by Tina Fey and Michael McCullers: I just saw this on DVD and I'd rank this up there with For Your Consideration, The Ladykillers, 10000 BC, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and Barry Levinson's Man of the Year as having among the lowest ratios between level of satisfaction and level of anticipation. Sometimes a reliable brand, be it Christopher Guest, the Coen Brothers, Roland Emmerich, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Barry Levinson, or in this case Tina Fey let you down. On 30 Rock, Tina Fey writes comedy with such dexterity and precision, that scripts to her show should be used as textbooks to aspiring TV writers because she layers her scripts every kind of comedy imaginable: screwball comedy, anarchic comedy, satire, parody, character-based comedy, rapid-fire-blink-and-you-miss-it dialogue, straight-man-funny-man comedy, self-conscious comedy, etc.

With all this in mind, it's near impossible to think that Tina Fey with so many weapons in her arsenal can miss the mark and fail to produce laughter out of us. Baby Mama, however, is a watered-down version of Tina Fey's brilliance. The only truly brilliant comedic creation was courtesy of Steve Martin who plays an incredibly pretentious health nut. The film is supposed to be anchored by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey's buddy comedy antics but the laughs in that area kind of few and far-between with a pretty by-the-book romance between Fey and Greg Kinnear. If Tina Fey is so boldly endeavoring to reinvent the buddy comedy with cross-gender appeal by inserting females in the lead, couldn't we do without a schmaltzy romance?

Slumdog Millionaire: I loved it, but I had no idea that the rest of the critical community would embrace it so, so it is an added thrill to see this film be embraced by The National Board of Review named it film of the year. The rags-to-riches myth that defined the American spirit is transplanted to India (and how ironic that it's an American game show he's playing on). The format of having him answer questions that correspond to his life is mostly just a gimmick to attract people to the story, and by no means a substitute for the story itself, which has so much to offer. For one thing, it's such a tremendous sensory experience, you're just entranced visually but you can almost feel, smell, and taste what the streets of India are like as well. Part of movies is about escapism in a very literal sense. Movies that take you to faraway lands in the spirit of David Lean, John Huston or Douglas Fairbanks (although, to be fair, the latter probably used a lot of sound stages)and I can only think of a couple exceptions for films in this decade that have transported me to another place. Another thing is that this is just a very romantic film. Obviously, there's a lot of killing and misery in the story to make this the date movie of the year, but this boy is willing to do anything for this girl and as a tribute to the actor, he does it in convincing fashion.

Step Brothers: There's a difference between Step Brothers and Baby Mama. Step Brothers is not up to par with the best work of the Will Ferrell-Adam McKay writing team, but it is not like Baby Mama in the sense that it has made me lost faith in the brand. Many critics seem to not know the difference. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made 7 films together. Would critics have given this film a bigger pass if Will Ferrell and John C Reiley's film were called Talladega Nights II? What I'm getting it is I thought this film was plenty funny and certainly inventive enough. In fact, I stayed in the theater and watched it twice. The big stars of the film are not John C Reilly and Will Ferrell but Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins for holding down straight faces and being convincing as a loving dad and a loving mom of such silly characters. You could insert the characters played by Jenkins and Steenburgen into something like Cheaper by the Dozen or Gilmore Girls and it would still pretty much work.

*The director is Michael McCullers, who also wrote the Austin Powers films, but I don't want to bombard my readers with too much frivolous knowledge. Some directors are important to know and some aren't. The auteur of Baby Mama is Tina Fey.

Downfall of comedy I: Where it stands today

In response to an interesting question: What's a good "stupid" comedy?

I'm going to assume by "stupid" the person mean films that don't have the respect of critics or film academics. The truth, however, is that comedy usually doesn't get the respect of critics as much.

Although comedy is an integral part of movies and a respectable genres, you have to think that comedy isn't as well-respected as it used to be by the critical community, or not a lot of it anyway. Successful comedies today include:
-Indie hits like Little Mrs. Sunshine and Lost in Translation,
-Dramedies with good scripts and good dialogue by the likes of Alexander Payne, James L Brooks or Charlie Kaufman. It's no small coincidence that these guys win screenwriting rewards at the Oscars
-The Coen Brothers seem to be an outliar among comedic directors and that they seem to be put into a class well above other comic filmmakers by film critics. They're film scholars who are well-versed in film history (as if someone like Mel Brooks or Vince Vaughn isn't?) and it usually impresses the film critics that their movies are usually innovative in their technical aspects or clever uses of refences to past films (i.e. Man Who Wasn't There is based on film-noir, Intolerable Cruelty is based on screwball comedies, and Big Lebowski is based on The Big Sleep). A lot of casual movie fans like the Coen brothers too and have given them a large cult following. The reputation of the Coen brothers is continually being inflated through a mutual enthusiasm between the critics and the casual movie fans that "well, we at least agree on something on the comedy front."
-I could also see the critical community being split between many other comic autuers who would have had more critical respect if the comic genre itself was more respected such as Kevin Smith, Adam McKay, and Judd Apatow (and there might be some other examples in here). Kevin Smith has gotten some good reviews by Ebert and Roeper but I doubt more serious outlets like Sight & Sound or Premiere Magazines would give him the time of day on their review columns.

Comedy used to be equally viable in film achievement on every level back in the day. Columbia Studios became a major power player through the success of the pure comedy, "It Happened One Night" from 1935 which won the oscar that year. Screwball comedies dominated cinema in the 1930's and 1940's and Billy Wilder forged a great career out of comedies. What I find interesting is Mel Brooks' career and how it figures into that transition (which I'll cover in the next post)