My Year in Film, 2019
It’s Oscar Day. Here’s my take:
Best (Scripted) Picture:
The Beach Bum
Midsommar
The Lighthouse
Uncut Gems
Under the Silver Lake
My Decade in Film could have doubled as My Decade in Intense AF. So when I looked at the movies of 2019 that I most liked, it kind of felt like a palette cleanser. These are genre films; they are made at least as much for entertainment as for Exploring Great Themes of Human Existence. I might be lightening up!
My Favorite Scripted Movie of the year was The Lighthouse. A minimalist story by a maximalist filmmaker, The Lighthouse is inspired by folklore, silent film, Greek myth, Ingmar Bergman films, and perhaps a little Shakespeare. It completely takes you in its world, and into the heads of its heroes as they descend into madness.
Uncut Gems was my second favorite movie of the year and Midsommar was my third favorite. Both have been recognized as instant classics — appropriately. If you like movies that have you hanging on the edge of your seat from start to finish, you’ll love these two.
You might have thought Matthew McConaughey was all id, all the time. In The Beach Bum, you get McConaughey double-distilled. The Beach Bum is a lame title based on a loose connection to a historial figure, and it probably hurt the commercial prospects of this, the funniest movie of the year. The Beach Bum is strikingly out of touch with the moment, and I don’t think that is a coincidence. Like Kanye West, director Harmony Korine is the type of pure artist who absorbs contemporary culture, processes it in his own peculiar unpredictable way, and ejaculates fever dreams for the rest of us to enjoy or to be bewildered by or to marvel at. Moondog (McConaughey) lives a life of over-the-top male fantasy. He is goodhearted but wholly selfish, his desires constantly and wholly satiated. Briefly, the plot turns serious, and you wonder if Moondog will have to reckon with his hedonistic ways. It’s a feint. This is a very silly movie that is meant to be watched while high. Good vibes return. Into the mystic, indeed.
Favorite Lead Performance of the Year
Brad Pitt in Ad Astra
Deragh Campbell in Anne at 13,000 Feet
Mel Gibson in Dragged Across Concrete
Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse
Scarlett Johannsen in Marriage Story
Andrew Garfield in Under the Silver Lake
Kacey Rohl in White Lie
Willem Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a character for the ages, in The Lighthouse. This cranky, pipe-chewing lighthouse keeper (a wiki!) was my Favorite Performance of the Year. Owen Gleiberman of Variety: “Dafoe digs so deep into this walking cliché that he transforms him, before our eyes, into an intricate and layered character.”
Andrew Garfield somehow tethers Under the Silver Lake’s crazy plot to the earth while his character flies off in every random direction he can find.
Mel Gibson is like a new actor in Dragged Across Concrete: dark and angry, with a new physicality — strong but heavy, as if his personal struggles are a physical burden. (Which they probably are.)
Favorite Supporting Performance
Jonah Hill in The Beach Bum
Laura Dern in Marriage Story
Moises Arias in Monos
Eric Bogosian in Uncut Gems
Centered on an outrageous character with all the charm that one of Hollywood’s most charming leading men can muster, The Beach Bum is a perfect movie for supporting performances. Isla Fisher and Snoop Dogg don’t fall into the background, but are ultimately good-hearted foils. On the other hand, sections of the film handed off to Zac Efron and Martin Lawrence practically derail the whole enterprise. But Jonah Hill, who plays Moondog’s literary agent Lewis as a badly warped Louisiana gentleman (is there any other kind?), takes over his scenes and McConaughey practically stands back in awe. It was my Favorite Supporting Performance of the Year.
Laura Dern and Eric Bogosian, in Marriage Story and Uncut Gems, play serious hard-asses with softness around the edges (a lot and a little, respectively). Laura Dern brings animus and compassion; Bogosian brings menace and exasperation; neither combination is often, if ever, seen on film, and each actor gave us entertaining but wholly believable characters.
Favorite Documentary
Diego Maradona
Everybody’s Everything
Knock Down the House
Leaving Neverland
Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements
Diego Maradona was my Favorite Documentary of the year. Maradona was a singularly fascinating athlete. Built like a butt plug in a sport full of lean, fleet men, he dominated the world’s most popular sport for a decade, most of that time on the second-tier Italian club Napoli. It’s a fascinating portrait of a poor boy who became a rich man who alternately embraced his vices and used them to excuse his general horribleness. Maradona melded with a city that could match his bravado and was desperate for something positive. He melded with a city that could match his bravado and was desperate for something positive. As with (Ayrton) Senna and Amy (Winehouse), director Asif Kapadia composes a biopic entirely out of historical footage. Even the voiceovers come entirely from historical interviews. This simple technique requires a deft touch, and Kapadia has made three classics in three attempts. He is quickly establishing himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers of his generation. Supplemented by hundreds of hours of previously unseen footage, Diego Maradona makes you feel like you’re there, and being with Diego Maradona in Napoli in the 1980s would have been fucking nuts.
Knock Down the House follows Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and three other women as they make first time runs for the House of Representatives in 2018. This movie has two of the best things a documentary can have: a wildly charismatic subject and “you were filming when that happened!?” moments. After bursting out of Sundance (an extremely AOC-friendly environment), the movie didn’t really enter the zeitgest. I presume that’s because AOC is so polarizing, and that’s a shame. I don’t share all of her views, but this is great filmmaking and her story is incredibly inspiring. A bartender/server inspired by heartfelt beliefs runs against one of the most entrenched members of Congress then ends up on Capitol Hill with a huge national following — all over the course of filming. The other three women candidates are upstaged — how could they not be? — but this would have been a solid doc even if those three made up the entire film. Knock Down the House is on Netflix and you really should watch it, regardless of your politics.
I hadn’t heard of the rapper Lil Peep until he died of an overdose. When I saw his image, I was entranced. To me, he was the new generation gap personified (it’s kind of amazing how far facial tattoos have come since 2017). Post-millennials are not as large of a cohort as millenials, but they have grown up entirely in the post-9/11, iPhone, social media world. They are a break from the past, and while I don’t how it will happen, or even if it will be more for good or for bad, I feel sure we’ll see more change through them than any generation since the 1960s. Don’t sleep on that shit cause it’s coming.
Everybody’s Everything is Peep’s story. In some ways, it is very now and very generational; in other ways, it is a classic story of youth, searching, and rebellion. Peep was an awkward kid who found himself through music; who desperately sought connection in a created community; who became famous and had no idea how to handle it. The movie follows the bio-doc conventions fairly closely, but has an unusual artistic bent that works. Beyond its magnetic subject, Everybody’s Everything has three big advantages. First, Peep’s rise was so rapid and his fame so brief that the filmmakers were able to interview seemingly everyone significant in his life while their memories were fresh. Second — and this is the future of documentary — his life was very well-documented. Third, Peep’s grandfather, retired Harvard professor John Womack Jr., gracefully orates his own letters to Peep giving the movie a wise, beautiful and heartbreaking backbone.
Yeah, you don’t want to see Leaving Neverland, the story of two of Michael Jackson’s victims. I get it. But damn, it is a hell of a film. If you’ve ever said the words “believe victims,” you have to see it. If you’ve really questioned believing Michael Jackson’s great sins, you have to see it, too. The victims are adults now, and while their tales are harrowing, they are not at all sensationalized or exploited. Leaving Neverland has a simple strategy: let someone (two people, in this case) tell their story in detail. The fact that their stories take place within the massive weirdness of the Michael Jackson phenomenon makes it not just educational and touching, but fascinating.
Moonlight Sonata joins This Way of Life and Old Partner as unknown masterpiece documentaries that touched my heart by expanding my understanding of family. It’s available on HBO.
Two More Features and Two More Docs That I Loved
Ad Astra
The Dawn Wall
Edge of Democracy
Marriage Story
If you liked Free Solo (and you did; everybody did); you’ll like The Dawn Wall, which is on Netflix. The story and the characters are like 90% as engaging, and that’s pretty high praise.
Brad Pitt may very well win best supporting actor for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood tonight. His best performance of the year — in my mind, the best performance of his career — came in Ad Astra. Wearing its 2001 influence on its sleeve, Ad Astra is a visually beautiful movie, and one with some epic action sequences. It is distracting when Tommy Lee Jones appears in the film’s weak last quarter, but that is a credit to the immersiveness of the film’s first 90 minutes. Ad Astra has one of Rotten Tomatoes’ biggest gaps ever between critics, who loved it, and the audience who hated it. This is a reliable sign that I will dig it.
Scenes of the Year
The moment that “Beamer Boy”s beat drops in Everybody’s Everything
The Lighthouse’s “seaman’s curse”
“Being Alive” in Marriage Story
Scarlett Johannsen’s first meeting with Laura Dern in Marriage Story
The Ättestupa in Midsommar
Sam meets The Songwriter in Under the Silver Lake
Katie and Jen at the radio station in White Lie
The Ättestupa is my favorite Scene of the Year. It is unforgettable tension, tension and release. It transitions Midsommar into its act two, suddenly driving forward both the plot and the protagonist. Here is an interview with director Ari Aster about the scene, which you obviously shouldn’t read until you’ve seen the movie.
The Lighthouse’s “seaman’s curse” is definitely my second favorite scene of the year. Unlike the Ättestupa, there isn’t a build up. You seem to be watching just another scene in the movie — perhaps it even feels like a lull — until it builds and builds into a pyre of intensity and hilarity. Both times I saw it in the theatre, I could hear people reacting from all directions around me.
I was very lucky to see an early festival screening of Marriage Story in a very large theatre with the director, superstar producer, superstar editor and most of the cast in attendance. Both of the scenes I “nominate” got ovations when they happened, which just about doubles the number of times I’ve seen mid-movie ovations in my life.
“Beamer Boy” isn’t really a scene — it’s just a lo-fi clip from a house party. Lil Peep is living in an artist collective of sorts, sharing a room with a dozen other people even though he’s already kind of famous. Peep is without a stage, in the middle of a room surrounded by friends and party people. “Beamer Boy,” probably his most accessible track (certainly my favorite), builds up slowly. Then the verse drops and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the joy, community, and release of music communicated like that, outside of being there.
Movies That Friends Made
Colewell: For thirty-five years, Nora Pancowski (Karen Allen) has been the postmaster of Colewell, Pennsylvania. When the USPS decides to close her office, she must choose whether to relocate for a new position or face retirement. (available on pay platforms like iTunes)
Red Penguins tells a story of capitalism and opportunism run amok — complete with gangsters, strippers and live bears serving beer on a hockey rink in Moscow. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the famed Red Army hockey team formed a joint-venture that showed anything was possible in the new Russia. Eccentric marketing whiz Steve Warshaw is sent to Russia and tasked to transform the team into the greatest show in Moscow. He takes the viewer on a bizarre journey highlighting a pivotal moment in U.S. Russian relations in a lawless era when oligarchs made their fortunes and murders went unsolved. (not currently available to watch)
Softness of Bodies: Charlotte is an American poet living in Berlin struggling to find recognition for her work. After discovering she is a finalist for a prestigious poetry grant, she jumps at the chance to legitimize her life, racing to complete a prize-winning poem while dealing with a complicated relationship, a rival poet, the return of an ex-lover, and a dangerous case of kleptomania. (available on FlixFling)
Spice It Up is a tongue-in-cheek odyssey about the discouraging obstacles encountered by independent filmmakers. Film student Rene (Jennifer Hardy), struggling to complete her thesis project — a piece of straight-faced, GoPro-shot absurdity about seven female friends who try to enlist in the Canadian army after they fail to graduate from high school — finds her work dismissed or ignored by everyone she shares it with. Jumping between the ensemble-based film-within-a-film about friendship and teamwork, and the framing story of the lonely plight of its creator, Spice It Up cleverly aligns these parallel narratives to create a sly satire of institutionalized Canadiana. (not currently available)
The Rise of Jordan Peterson: A rare, intimate glimpse into the life and mind of Jordan Peterson, the academic and best-selling author who captured the world’s attention with his criticisms of political correctness and his philosophy on discovering personal meaning. The Rise of Jordan Peterson intimately traces the transformative period of Peterson’s life while visiting rare moments with his family, friends and foes who share their own versions of the Jordan Peterson story. (available on hoopla and pay platforms like iTunes)
White Lie centers on Katie (Kacey Rohl), a young woman who has become a literal poster child on her university campus: recently diagnosed with cancer, she’s the focal point of an online funding campaign for both herself and other cancer-related causes. The only problem is, it’s all built on a lie: Katie isn’t sick, and never has been. And as her story slowly begins to unravel, she disastrously decides to double down, unable to give up the real-life fantasy world she’s constructed for herself. (I produced this! It’s not available yet but follow Istic Illic on Facebook and you will surely know when it is.)
Movies I Liked A Lot
Apollo 11
Anne at 13,000 Feet
A Hidden Life
Blow the Man Down
The Climb
Dragged Across Concrete
Honey Boy
Honeyland
I Love You, Now Die
Jezebel
Jo Jo Rabbit
Killing Patient Zero
Monos
Parasite
Shadow
The Lion King
The Two Popes
Waves
XY Chelsea
With the obvious exception of sequels, “universes,” etc, I view a film on the merits of what happens on the screen. Honey Boy is an exception. Shia Lebeouf wrote the movie, and he plays the role of his own father, and this adds layers of poignancy and realism. His portrayal is ruthless: the father is a deadbeat, radically insecure and deeply abusive. I was disappointed to see the closing credits give the impression that the movie was somehow a love letter to that father when no redemption has been depicted in the narrative. Perhaps it was a letter of forgiveness, but if I were Shia Lebeouf’s dad, I’d sure as hell have preferred nothing to this.
If Honey Boy’s core plot line was the entire movie, it would have been amongst my top of the year. Lucas Hedges plays the son later in life as a damaged and out of control young man, and these “after” scenes are interspersed throughout the narrative. Hedges is quite good, as always, but the more the movie goes on, the less the young man he plays connects to his character as a young boy, as played by Noah Jupe. Jupe’s character develops wisdom and acceptance (and his acting talent) over the course of the film, slowly becoming the man of the family. Honey Boy ultimately comes across as the story of a survivor, interspersed with an extended epilogue about a non-survivor. The movie doesn’t reconcile Lebeouf’s brutally honest self-portrait with its desire to provide an inspirational character through Jupe.
XY Chelsea is a documentary about Chelsea (neé Bradley) Manning, the military whistleblower, in her first months out of prison. It is a truly odd document of a genuinely historical figure. I am very curious how it will be seen in 20 or 50 years. It’s on Showtime and Crave.
I am the only person above the age of six who saw the new Lion King but didn’t see the original. I mean, I haven’t done a scientific study, but I must be, right? From this unique perspective, the new movie stands up really well! Pot helped! Seriously, it is obviously a good story with great characters or the original wouldn’t be a classic. The digital effects are hands-down the best I have ever seen. It genuinely looks like an episode of Planet Earth — not just realistic, but awe-inspiring. It wins my Favorite Special Effects.
As beautiful as The Lion King is, my favorite visual experience of 2019 was Zhang Yimou’s Shadow. Almost every aspect of the production design was a shade of grey or black. The color of flesh and occasional reds are digital saturated, and they pop from the screen. Shadow wins my Favorite Cinematography ahead of A Hidden Life (what Meryl Streep is to cast, Mallick’s cinematographers are to crew…just nominate them every time), Honeyland, The Lighthouse (high contrast black and white with an almost square aspect ratio), and Midsommar (a horror movie shot in bright daylight at a flowery spring festival).
Movies I Liked
1917
The Art of Self Defense
Booksmart
Framing John DeLorean
Initials S.G.
The Irishman
Joker
Midnight Family
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
One Child Nation
Queen and Slim
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
Shella Record: A Reggae Mystery
Sword of Trust
The Lost Okoroshi
It’s hard to articulate why I was never fully inside Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. It seems like something I would love. Tarantino needs an empowered editor or even an executive who just stays on his shit. His self-indulgence brings his movies down a level. The tribute to and reclamation of Sharon Tate, though, was strikingly original and moving, and the depiction of 1969 Hollywood was incredibly well-realized. It wins my Favorite Production Design, a category in which I include all of sets, costumes, and make-up. Runners up are Ad Astra, Midsommar, The Lighthouse, and Shadow.
Joker is an effective homage to early Scorsese with a great lead performance, but it’s supposed to be the origin story of a criminal genius. Arthur Fleck shows no sign of genius whatsoever. He’s more Forrest Gump than the Joker. Good movie, but it is weird to me that no one seems to care about this.
People seem to fall into two camps on The Irishman. Some think it was boring and way too long; others think it was a masterpiece of great depth. I feel the opposite of both. I was entertained the whole way through, but I basically found it weightless. The theme, I guess, is that when evil people get old, they might regret that people don’t love them. Perhaps it was just that DeNiro can’t pull it off anymore? If you cared about his character 24 hours after you saw the movie, feel free to help me out. On the plus side, I loved the gentle grandpa version of Joe Pesci, and the killing of Jimmy Hoffa was an incredible expression of banality. The famous de-aging effects, though, are a disaster. It wasn’t just that I was distracted by the “uncanny valley” (although I was); I couldn’t follow the story’s timeline. Was Pesci supposed to be much older than DeNiro? I really don’t know. I also find it bizarre that Scorsese discarded the haunting and trenchant title I Heard You Paint Houses for the boring The Irishman. Suspending disbelief on Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro being 30 years old was tough enough. Why underline that you are pretending the two most Italian actors in Hollywood history are Irish?
Speaking of Scorsese, the value of creating fake characters and incidents in Rolling Thunder Revue was lost on me. I am a Dylanophile; I know that he made up stuff about his life in interviews. That doesn’t make it a good idea for a documentary. I guess the idea that an underage Sharon Stone toured with Dylan in the ’70s would kind of be funny if you personally knew Sharon Stone. The idea that a fake politician from a 30 year old HBO miniseries was there, too — just how inside do you have to be to find that funny? But the concert scenes…they are so thunderous that I considered making it one of my top docs of the year. And Joni Mitchell’s performances stand up with the best musical moments of Dont Look Back, my favorite documentary. Rolling Thunder, like all the movies in this “Movies That I Liked” category, is worth the watch.
Movies Worth Watching if You Are Interested
Between Two Ferns: The Movie
FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
Infiltrators
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
The Long Walk
Pasolini
Color Out of Space
Deadwood: The Movie
The Dirt
Velvet Buzzsaw
Kind of Boring Movies
Her Smell
Last Breath
Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love
Wasp Network
Stockholm
Movies I Did Not Like
Fausto
High Life
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
The Antenna
Us
The flipside of my surprising “year of genre” (scroll up 4,000 words) was that no new experimental or structurally ambitious movies really moved me. I recommend Monos, which was art house if not “deep art house,” but Fausto, High Life, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, each of which received intermittent rapturous praise, left me cold. Pasolini was interesting but didn’t excite me, and The Long Walk should be paying royalties to Joe Weerasethakul.
Jordan Peele’s Ugh. I mean, Us. Jam-packed with half-baked ideas, Us is a movie totally confused about the value of text vs subtext — a monument to geek-Easter Egg culture that people took as being deeply insightful about America. Bret Easton Ellis’s take kind of nails it:
“Us is not scary, it’s central situation and metaphor is kind of dumb, the whole thing is clumsily handled, there’s nothing at stake because of the central metaphor, and the movie uneasily mixes non-laughs, soft satire, killings that aren’t particularly well done, and horror clichés, all wrapped in a woke sense of self-importance. You can only stare at the screen in frustration mixed with a kind of lulled fascination at the number of people who took this thing seriously.”
Oh, how Star Wars collapsed over the last two years! The post-Lucas Star Wars era had started so promising! Episode 7 was more of a reboot/remake than a sequel, but I liked the new characters, I liked the way they used the old characters, and most of all, they had captured what Star Wars was supposed to feel like! I liked Episode 8 even more. Many of the fanboys’ complaints were legitimate, but after Episode 7’s pandering to nostalgia, the series needed a shake-up. 8 developed the two central characters in meaningful ways, had creative battle scenes, and the theme of “anyone can use the Force” redeemed the hated prequels.
Then Solo came, and it was bad, but it was also a one-off, so I didn’t care too much. The Rise of Skywalker was EPISODE NINE. George Lucas said this was a nine-episode series in the 1970s, and here it was — the final movie. Forty years of anticipation and, I mean, I wonder how many readers have already skipped to the next paragraph. JJ Abrams and Disney lost the thread so quickly and obviously that by the time the movie came out, few people cared about it. Critics graded it on the same curve as a new Transformers or Fast and Furious movie, assuming that there will be nothing novel or of depth.
Rise of Skywalker is without new ideas, without interesting sequences…there’s just nothing to hold on to. A portion of the movie is dedicated to categorical reversals of Episode 8 plot points — it does this so explicitly as to be comical. It beggars belief that the people at Disney/Lucasfilm decided to make a single story as three movies with no plan going in, yet that is clearly what happened. The transparently desperate move of bringing the Emperor — the primary antagonist of the first six movies — back from the dead, did little but spotlight how pointless the entire trilogy was. At the end, part of me thought, “But wait, won’t he just come back from the dead again?” Most of me didn’t care anymore.
My Least Favorite Movie of 2019
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
Jesse Pinkman post-Breaking Bad was a singularly bad character to build a movie upon. At the end of the TV show, he has escaped and we are happy for him. At the end of El Camino, Jesse has completed that same escape, and we’re happy for him, but maybe not quite as happy for him, because he’s alone. But we actually knew that before, so the plot didn’t advance at all. God knows it was not entertaining enough to justify two-plus hours, so what exactly are we left with?
Insult to injury: the characters are noticeably older than they were at the end of Breaking Bad, literally the day before the movie is supposed to be taking place. Top it off with the fact that the original series aired was filmed over six years but only took two years in its fictional timeline, and El Camino has actors who are playing characters with who they have 12-15 years seniority. Maybe they should have used that Irishman de-aging thing.
Not Actually Movies
Well, I hate to end on that sort of down note, so here are two more movie-like experiences I had in 2019.
First, Fleabag, which won the best comedy and lots of other awards at the Grammys. The thing is that a season of Fleabag is less than three hours long. The two seasons are basically two movies. Two hilarious, touching, brilliantly original movies.
Second, the band Massive Attack toured this year supporting the 20th anniversary of their classic album Mezzanine. Never artists who liked being in the spotlight, the band played mostly in the literal dark while a new set of short films by eccentric genius documentarian Adam Curtis played on large screens throughout the stage. If you love Adam Curtis, damn, you really should have made it to that show! It was almost an entire new movie worth of material. If you don’t know Adam Curtis, start anywhere. All his movies are what they are; he is a director with a singular, consistent, fascinating vision.
