Monster in the mirror

I blame Trump.
I blame Weinstein.
I blame this nagging cold.
I blame advancing age.

Why the hell have I been so lax about blogging this year? Even this year-end, best-of post, though I'm backdating it to late New Year's Eve, is actually being composed on the first morning of the new year.

But at least it's being composed, which is more than I can say about posts for Darkest Hour, Downsizing, and All the Money in the World, all of which I saw over the holiday break, and about each of which I'll have something to say if you ask me at the Elvis's Birthday party next week. Which is to say I'm not seeing fewer movies, I'm not thinking about them less, I'm not enjoying them any less. It's just to say that the sitting down at the computer part, always something a chore (made more so by my compulsion to link to performers' IMDb pages and to mention all the first-looks at trailers) has this year (well, last year) tilted the sloth scale with guilt-producing frequency.

Not that I have any illusions about letting down a vast "you." This, like everything else in the universe, has always been almost exclusively about me: I see so many films that I completely forget some of them, even down to the essential "Did I like Your Name.? And remind me: why the period in the title?" (Yes, very much; it's complicated.) So I'd like to keep on keeping on, but how to overcome the ennui?

The obvious Jan. 1 response would be a new year's resolution, but somehow forcing myself to do something I find tedious doesn't sound like the way to renew genuine enthusiasm. Limiting links to those that people (i.e., I) might actually find useful: that's a plan, I think. And forgoing the impulse to waste time blurbing the trailer for every new crap film that I'd never intentionally waste time on in any other fashion? Yeah: maybe Trailers becomes Noteworthy Trailers.

No promises; a year from now we may be sitting here in the ruins, the smell of cordite and burned cheese thick in the air. We'll see.

And now on to the reason we're (ahem) up so late on New Year's Eve, to reprise the movies that got my attention in 2017, some of them even enough to make me blog them . . .

• January--As always, catch-up month, with 20th Century Women making a bid for me to rework the 2016 top ten list.
• February--Forushande (The salesman), a searing tale of love, faith, and violation, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar but wasn't released in the U.S. until this year, so I'm claiming it as top 10 eligible; the poetic Paterson, though, is undeniably a 2016 leftover, though a tasty one. Damn, I had forgotten that I Am Not Your Negro, the James Baldwin documentary, was also a December 2016 release, else it would have been on the list without a doubt. Fortunately, another very different stunner about being someone else's Negro came to town right after, and that one will be on the list, near or at the top.
• March--In a bit of a blah month (Personal Shopper disappointed me, e.g.), my favorite film was probably Kedi: cats (including one named Psikopat) in Istanbul.
• April--Frantz, a postwar melodrama, makes us think we know where it's going, then pulls the rug out from under us. Similarly, the anime Kimi no na wa. (Your name.) flirts with every cliché of time travel and soulmates yet delivers something fresh and moving. Then days later, the manifestly goofy--tragically goofy--Colossal works the time-space-big freakin' monsters continuum some more.
• May--Bacalaureat, a Romanian father-daughter story of moral compromise and guilt, painfully complex. Let's make room for one of those liked-it-way-more-than-I-expected-tos: Richard Gere in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. Wait, and another: Tracy Letts and Debra Winger in the gratifyingly grown-up The Lovers. And from Israel, a silly comic premise turned profound and beautiful: Laavor et hakir (The wedding plan).
• June--This seems to be when I started getting blog-sloppy. For example I never posted for Wonder Woman, even though it was one of my favorites of the summer, a brilliant treatment (brilliantly and often wordlessly performed by Gal Gadot) of the stranger in a strange land, until the obligatory final act dumb battle to save the world. Fortunately, though, I did post for a film I'd since forgotten just how much I liked: It Comes at Night, not to be confused with It or It Follows (though a triple feature of the 3 could deprive you of sleep for a month and of sex for, like, ever).
• July--The Big Sick is right in my sweet spot: smart (largely autobiographical) writing, makes bigotry as funny as it is dangerous, makes me laugh, makes me cry, has two generations of my favorite actors in Holly Hunter and Zoe Kazan.
• August--A Ghost Story is just that, but unlike any other you've seen. Detroit has gotten a lot of blowback, but it left me nearly paralyzed in my theater seat, and that has to count for something. Brigsby Bear is Dogtooth in English, with a Napoleon Dynamite vibe, only lots better. Ingrid Goes West is unremittingly ugly, and stunning.
• September--Failed to blog it (It), but good golly, I couldn't forget It even if I wanted to, and not just because clowns are creepy, though duh. Followed by another I'm glad I did blog, to remind me how much I liked it, or at least was wowed by: the horror omnibus mother! And then the non-occult horror of meth and Modernism in the Midwest: Columbus.
• October--Visages Villages (Faces places) is a buddy picture like none you've seen, by and with Agnès Varda. Ex Libris, Frederick Wiseman's loving 3½-hour stalk of the New York Public Library is another I didn't blog, but I remember saying, as I left the theater, "Best movie ever." Whoa, really: I also didn't blog (October is clearly when the blog went completely to hell) The Florida Project, so I guess I should point out here that, my daughter's wrongheaded demurral notwithstanding, Brooklynn Prince gives the best juvenile performance in a film since . . . I dunno, Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine, maybe?
• November--Speaking of remarkable performances by young actors, Millicent Simmonds in Wonderstruck, which is itself mostly wonderful. Lots of people were disappointed by Yorgos Lanthimos's latest weird film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer; not me, but it was a damn tough watch. And then there was Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig's near-perfect directorial debut.
• December--The rare Holocaust film that pokes nerves not already numb from decades of prodding: 1945. And the film that should have waited another week before coming to town so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie: Guillermo del Toro's haunting interspecies romance The Shape of Water.

So I end up with an unusually American list, the foreign films starting the year in the middle of the pack and getting pushed progressively lower: apologies to Visages Villages, to Bacalaureat, and to Frantz, among several others foreign and domestic. It was a very good year, and on my list perhaps even more competition than usual between "best" and "favorite." But here's what the list feels like:

• 10. 1945
• 9. The Big Sick
• 8. Lady Bird
• 7. The Florida Project
• 6. Columbus
• 5. A Ghost Story
• 4. Ex Libris
• 3. Get Out
• 2. The Shape of Water
• 1. It Comes at Night

More then

Lost in spaceyness

I have been alerted to two unforgivable omissions from my New Year's Eve discussion of my favorite films of 2016. My Mets, music, and movies buddy Jon, aka JK, aka DJ Spike Ning, took me to task for not giving La La Land even a nod, never mind omitting it from my top ten. Mind you, he did take me to task for the latter: Jon is the closest I've ever had to a kid brother, so when he said "surely you've taught me such that [a film that provided such pure pleasure] would also appear in your top 10," he had me. Jeez, if I've taught my pseudo-kid brother something, I should stand by it, right? So for now, let's slide LLL into the 7 slot I'd left vacant in anticipation of Paterson, Hidden Figures, or 20th Century Women demanding a place at the table. Of course, that would probably be only a temporary solution even if . . .

My Yale U Press and movies buddy Tom Breen hadn't, en route to his radio show on which Arnold Gorlick and I were to join him to talk about the year's notable films (see below), mentioned Kelly Reichardt's beautiful, funny, sad triptych of injustice, privilege, and unrequited love Certain Women, with Oscar-worthy performances by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristin Stewart, and Lily Gladstone (buzz suggests that Stewart will get a nomination). I believe I literally lurched to a halt on the sidewalk: it was the real-life equivalent of that nightmare where you sit down to take a final exam and suddenly realize that you've done nothing to prepare.

Yes, of course that was one of my favorite films of the year, but I'd overlooked it while making my list because I never got around to blogging it. I blame my daughter, whose 40th birthday was a psychological disruption, as well you might imagine (oh, and I also flew to Illinois for the party, which put me behind in several of my quotidian obsessions), and the Cubs, who, even though not my team, demanded more postseason attention from me than I've given any team not based in Flushing in decades. It's certainly not my fault.

Anyway, that needs to slot in at about 5; sorry, Sausage Party, you're going to heaven. At least take heart that Weiner remains on my list. At least until I've seen the 3 films mentioned at the end of the first paragraph above (one of which I saw today, in fact).

Garble speaks

Despite my embarrassingly inarticulate performance last year, Tom Breen asked me again to join him and Madison Arts Cinema boss Arnold Gorlick on his WNHH radio show Deep Focus to talk about last year's best films. Last year I posted the link with some hesitation, and much embarrassment. This year, I'm much less embarrassed. If you want to listen to me and 2 more perceptive critics talk for an hour, click the link above; you may want to return to Tom weekly.

Boyhood

Best-of time again, and again this year Tom Breen, Arnold Gorlick, and I will be sharing our lists on Tom's radio show on WNHH--Thursday, and streamable thereafter. My goal this year is to reduce my "uh"s by half.

But that's next year; while a few minutes are left in 2016, let's do this.

• January was pretty much 2015 catch-up, though some goodies, especially The Revenant and Anomalisa.
• In February, I liked the Coens' Hail Caesar! more than most did, Deadpool was smartass funny superhero stuff, the Scandinavian-seeming The Witch was the year's first entry in the horror renaissance, and one more 2015 Oscar straggler, Son of Saul.
• Funny, a couple of weeks ago I was thinking the momentum of the aforementioned horror renaissance was slowing, but 10 Cloverfield Lane was a second already. The first new-to-America film that might end up on the list is Marguerite, which is infinitely better that Florence Foster Jenkins, the American telling of the same true story later in the year, even though that one had Meryl Streep going for it. The month also brought my first Manhattan trip, which included the trippy-in-every-way A Space Program.
• Busy year for my favorite young filmmaker I'm not related to, Jeff Nichols, and Midnight Special is also one of two films (Arrival the other) this year that made me feel the awe and wonder that Close Encounters never has.
• Hold my feet to the fire and ask the best film I saw in a thin May, I guess I'd claim Francophonia.
• An absurd June contender: The Lobster, by Yorgos Lanthimos. And I guess this too, a documentary I've thought about more than all but a few features in this political clusterfuck of a year: Weiner. And the neo-screwball Maggie's Plan, on, what, my only trip this year to the Cine 1-2-3-4?
• The brilliant and warmhearted New Zealand comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople came back to town late in the year; is it angling for Oscar? Technically, I don't think Kiwi is a foreign language. Jesus! I compared Café Society favorably in some respects to Annie Hall! And Captain Fantastic wowed me with fantastic acting from a bunch of kids. A fine July
• Early August, The Land, a tough The Wire-esque look at part of a World Series city that Commissioner Manfred would prefer to have hidden. The anarchic yet serious in its theological probing Sausage Party probably made me laugh more than anything else this year.
• There are still September movies I haven't blogged: I blame the ghastly The Light between Oceans for sapping my energy.
• "Hard-edged gem" is how I described Chronic, the best of October, Tim Roth as a caregiver for the dying.
• And then in early November came the painfully beautiful Moonlight, which set the bar for best of the year. The documentary Peter and the Farm is a tone poem about both the small farm and mental illness that almost sneaked in and out of town unnoticed. Nichols returns with the story of the interracial Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving.
• OK, December: can anything beat Moonlight? Not Manchester by the Sea, but Kenneth Lonergan's surprisingly comic tragedy of guilt and regret gives it a good run. Oh, right: yet another fine, quirky horror film: The Eyes of My Mother. Penultimate Manhattan trip had two goodies: 13th, Ava DuVernay's documentary about the stubborn evolution of lynching by other means, and the real horror classic of the year, the originally creepy The Autopsy of Jane Doe. And finally, a great play and a pretty good movie, Fences.

The envelope, please? But wait . . . let's hold a slot open for Paterson or Hidden Figures or 20th Century Women.

10. Sausage Party

9. Hunt for the Wilderpeople

8. The Autopsy of Jane Doe

7. TK

6. Weiner

5. The Lobster

4. 13th

3. Captain Fantastic

2. Manchester by the Sea

1. Moonlight

Undiscovered country

The Revenant

Crit

Oh, sure, you think you're having a hard time, 'cause you're nice and cozy in the horse carcass you've scooped the entrails out of when the dripping from the melting icicles on the tall pines above wakes you before the alarm goes off. But let me ask you: how many grizzly claw- and toothmarks can you count on your body? How recently have you seen your son stabbed to death by the guy who then proceeds to bury you alive? How many raw fish and bison organs have you had to eat just to stay (barely) alive? I'm guessing Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, doing more and better acting per line of dialogue than he has ever done before) has you beat, and he still has a lot of abuse left to take after the equine sleeping bag scene.

About 14 months ago, I was being disappointed by Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, which, if memory serves, did pretty well on Oscar night. Well, I could happily see this take home a half-dozen or more statuettes--best pic, best adapted screenplay, best director, best actor, best supporting actor (Tom Hardy as the villainously pragmatic Fitzgerald), best cinematography, best sound . . . much as I hate the e-word, it's hard to talk about this film without calling it a revenge epic, a survival epic, an epic of the West. This is the film Tarantino might have made if he hadn't had to stop every couple of minutes to play with himself.

Had I seen it two weeks ago, my top ten list would look different at the top; the only question is whether it would have been at the very top, and there's something warped even having a discussion that includes both this and Inside Out. And speaking of top ten lists, my friend and colleague Tom Breen invited me to come on his excellent radio show Deep Focus, along with longtime Madison Art Cinema owner and curator (and long-ago manager of the late lamented York Square Theatre, until the idiot owners drove him away) Arnold Gorlick to share our thoughts on the best of 2015. Uh, I, uh, don't speak, uh, in public much, and it shows, but if you can stand my poor delivery, you can also listen to the much more articulate Tom and Arnold by clicking here.

Trailer

• Deadpool--A spoofier-than-most Marvel comic spinoff.

Girlhood

An experiment this year: because I'm hoping to be able to work out and get to an 11:20 screening of The Danish Girl, and because I can't pop the Veuve Clicquot until midnight, I'm doing my best-of sober. I know it sounds crazy, but let's reserve judgment. Oh, and this year the 2014 pictures that didn't get to town until 2015 aren't eligible for my top 10.

And before we get down to that order of business, let me share with you my new year's resolution, which is cinematically based. Some films I'm going to see more or less regardless of reviews, and some I'm going to skip barring universal critical enthusiasm. But inevitably, a lot of films end up on the fence over the course of the year--and precisely because I see so many films, most of those films fall on the "no" side. So my resolution is simply this: if a film is iffy, I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt if it has a female writer and/or director, or if it has a female protagonist who doesn't wear spandex and fight supervillains. Because my daughter is a filmmaker, and women are still getting short shrift in Hollywood.
OK, remind me: what happened on the screen way back in . . .

• January? Well, nothing, according to my new rules, though this is when I got to see the squirmily excellent American Sniper and the sorta kinda disappointing Inherent Vice.
• As always, February is the cinematic dead of winter, though another excellent 2014 film came to town, Timbuktu.
• A March sing-out to The Last Five Years, a brave operatic experiment in depicting the life and death of love. Following late in the month was It Follows, the latest document in support of my contention that we are living in a golden age of horror films.
• The first 2015 film that absolutely blew my mind was White God, a sort of canine Spartacus. A very good film however it was made, and a stunning accomplishment when the logistical challenges are factored in. Special mention in April to Ex Machina, a good film but a film much more interesting than good. Huh! I'd forgotten how much I liked Clouds of Sils Maria; does that mean that it didn't grab me as tightly as I thought or simply that I'm in my 60s? Maybe it just means that baseball had started by this time.
• Haven't mentioned a documentary yet, have I? In May, Iris, about the stylish nonagenarian Iris Apfel. And then it was early summer so we got an adrenaline movie, but an excellent one, with a thrilling testosterone-estrogen cocktail, Mad Max: Fury Road.
• In June I was stunned by how much I loved two pictures I expected to like, both of which work largely via looking under the hood: Love & Mercy (the hood of Pet Sounds) and Inside Out (the hood of an adolescent). In between I saw the bizarre and affecting documentary The Wolfpack, about brothers sheltered by their immigrant father from the Lower East Side into adulthood. Dope was no Dear White People, but it worked a similar neighborhood well.
• Two in one day in July, very different and yet oddly related: the excruciating vampire documentary Amy, about the people who sucked Amy Winehouse dry, and the incontinently hilarious Trainwreck.
• In August the creepy Vertigo-esque Phoenix. And then, squirmy and wonderful, The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
• A thin September, the most notable film of which was the German (Austrian?) creeper Goodnight Mommy. By this time I was shifting into Mets postseason mode.
• And in October, I was pretty much all Mets all the time. Bridge of Spies drew my attention away the most effectively.
• The star of post-World Series November was the heroic journalism film Spotlight, though I still wish the Boston Globe had given its investigative team a more lively name so that this film could have had ditto.
• And finally, the month of Oscar (oh, dammit, I'm not gonna insert the little trademark bug--let the Academy come after me if they think they're bad enough!) hunger, except that I didn't really see much Oscar bait. The mostly unloved Chi-Raq is a mess, but a thrilling one. The Big Short is a cousin of Spotlight, and while it's not as excellent, it does have Margot Robbie in a bubble bath. And finally, a mystery about marriage, 45 Years.

So . . . ? Purely subjective, not necessarily the best, but my favorites:

10. Trainwreck
9. It Follows
8. Love & Mercy
7. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
6. Amy
5. Clouds of Sils Maria
4. Spotlight
3. White God
2. 45 Years
1. Inside Out

Happy new year!

Popup book

As I rule I'm doing this on New Year's Eve, which means I don't have to go to work tomorrow, which (along with the bourbon) makes me nice and unstressed. This time, though, I'm doing it at cocktail hour on the last day of the winter break, so I'm already thinking about when to stop for dinner to ensure that I get to bed early enough to be well rested for the one-day workweek and the pile of work I need to accomplish therein.

So if I knock off and don't post until the 2nd, don't hate me. Well, don't hate me for that, anyway. Same rules as in recent years: I just kinda meander back through my posts; some call it impressionistic, some call it lazy.

But first . . .

Top five 2014 films I'm eager to see in 2015:

1. Inherent Vice
2. Selma
3. Mr. Turner
4. Ida
5. Listen Up Philip

And so . . .

• January is when I finally got to see Her, which if not ultimately my favorite 2013 film, was right up there. The Rocket was an unanticipated treasure.
• Traditionally sterile February brought Gloria, which made at least one best-of list, though not mine.
• March was The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes is more. Oh, and the dark and creepy Enemy, which for my money is the better dark and creepy Jake Gyllenhaal flick this year.
• April, aka the cruelest month in Malaysian martial arts/cop/action flicks, brought the excruciating Berandal (The raid 2). Also Under the Skin, which I will always pair with Her: in a span of a few months, one of the most beautiful women in the movies, also possessed of one of the sexiest voices, had one role in which the visual was absent and another in which the aural is minimized, and she gave two of the best performances of my 2014 in those two films.
• In one day in May, I saw the astonishingly high-concept Locke and my second-favorite vampire flick of the year, Only Lovers Left Alive.
• June was mostly World Cup, duh, but I did see The Fault in Our Stars, the second teen film starring Shailene Woodley that has grabbed me (2013's The Spectacular Now being the other). And in a very different brain segment, La danza de la realidad (The dance of reality) by Alejandro "wtf?" Jodorowsky.

Excuse me: I need to refresh my drink, but it's not 6 yet, so I may be able to finish tonight.

I'm back; this part of the program is brought to you by Jim Beam (long story).

• Snowpiercer? Seriously? Yes, and July, with the Cup having some off days as it wound down, opens with a mass transit bang. Then La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in fur), which was excellent, but a couple of months later Scary Normal star Laura Anne Welle got the role at the Station Theatre in Urbana, making me queasily glad that I wouldn't be around to see her so scantily dressed in this, no matter how good I'm sure she'd be.
• Boyhood, in August, is the first 2014 film I'm 100% confident in calling great, Richard Linklater's masterpiece, which is tall cotton. Get on Up, which I expected to be a routine biopic, surprised me.
• Why on earth did I go to only 4 films in September? Why none is worth mention here is a different question.
• October's Gone Girl may actually be the most morally reprehensible film of 2014, but it's certainly one the films that inspired the more worthwhile conversation. Pride, one of the year's best? Nah, but one of the most lovable! Dear White People--hey, based on how much it made me feel, this may just be my #1 for the year!
• November: Ordinarily I don't put negatives in here, but Birdman? Yeah, good flick, but genius? Top ten? Not on my watch. And Interstellar? Ditto. Whiplash, on the other hand--extreme dissent from my YUP author David Thomson notwithstanding--ripped my drum kit. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, on (can this be true?) my first M4 of the year, moved me, as  did Citizenfour.
• December: I watched it on DVD, but the beauty of the 21st century is that Vi är bäst! (We are the best!) is still a 2014 film, one of the best. The same rules apply to Frank, though I confess it didn't move me as much. The fucking Babadook, on the other hand, scared the fucking shit out of me in a way that no film has done in a long, long time. Also, The Homesman seems to me an underrated great film. And Top Five a nearly great Woody Allen film.

So, top 10? Well, pending the 5 that I cited at the start, let's say:

1. Dear White People
2. Boyhood
3. Gone Girl
4. The Babadook
5. Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Locke
7. Under the Skin
8. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
9. Only Lovers Left Alive
10. Vi är bäst!

George Washington Bridge? Who does that?

Another year in the can, my 60th, more than half of them as a serious-in-need-of-intervention cinejunkie. At my age, I can be honest with you: this exercise is mainly just to remind me what I've liked this year. You're welcome to join me, but I'm not sure why you would.

January is, of course, traditionally a wasteland enlivened only by late arrivals of the year-end Oscar® fodder--but of course by my rules (year of my first screening is all that matters), those are eligible for lauding and listing. My first notable, in fact, was a 2010 release from Greece, the delightfully quirky Attenberg. Highlight of my first (of only 2) M4 was Barbara, love and betrayal in East Germany.

February began my devotion to Michael Apted's amazing "up" series: no reviews for the shorter 7 & 14 installments, but something (typically lots) to say about the features at ages 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and (new in 2013) 56. I called Amour "the best film of 2012 that I'm aware of." Soderbergh went out with a bang, not a whimper with the Hitchcockian Side Effects.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is probably not a great movie, but I have a real soft spot for the Herzog doc. And it was the best new thing I saw for most of March, until a trippy downtown double feature of Like Someone in Love and John Dies at the End. Highlight of the 2nd and last M4 was the sexual repression-via-exorcism Romanian film După dealuri (Beyond the hills).

April began with the discovery of Leo McCarey's 1937 Depression riff on King Lear, Make Way for Tomorrow. Habemus papam (We have a pope) was a gentle delight, like Bartleby the pope. Mud, late in the month, was, I guess, the first 2013 studio film of the year about which I got really excited--with another 19-century American hook, this to Huck Finn.

In May, Baz did Gatsby, and I was mostly wowed.

June brought the best is-it-a-documentary? of the year, Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell. Then the International Festival of Arts & Ideas brought Spike Lee and his moving-in-unexpected-ways 1997 doc about the Birmingham church bombings, 4 Little Girls. Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was gorgeous in black & white. Céline & Jesse came back again, wonderfully, painfully, and, of course, verbally, in Before Midnight.

Scarcely saw anything in July, but a colleague and I agree that Fruitvale Station and Michael B. Jordan's performance therein got robbed, award-nominations-wise.

Initial enthusiasm for Blue Jasmine seems to have dissipated; August is not the time for serious grown-up movies. It's a good time for smart teen movies, though, and The Spectacular Now is one of the best ever. In a World . . . made us want to see lots more of Lake Bell, and then that New York cover came out, and damned if we didn't!

Saw a bunch of stuff in September, but only Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said really made an impression. Damn, but we'll miss the big guy.

October: Captain Phillips: remarkable and unbearable.

November: 12 Years a Slave: remarkable and unbearable. All Is Lost: again; this one evokes another Am Lit classic, The Open Boat.

Reliable December goodies. In Nebraska, Alexander Payne goes to Oz. In American Hustle, David O. Russell goes to the '70s and Jennifer Lawrence takes a hilarious holiday from Panem. And in Inside Llewyn Davis, Ethan and Joel go to the Village in the '60s.

Shall I rate? I suppose it would go something like . . .

9. Mud
8. Beyond the Hills
7. Before Midnight
6. All Is Lost
5. Nebraska
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
3. Stories We Tell
2. 12 Years a Slave
1. American Hustle

Pretty conventional, huh? Best 2012 leftover: Amour. Best weird: John Dies at the End. Oh, and one more thing: the balcony is closed.

May I have the envelope, please . . .

OK, let's start with the easy: my three favorite movies of the year, without any question, were Moonrise Kingdom (for sheer feel-good smiles), Ruby Sparks (for a stunningly tough and smart dissection of romantic narrative), and Cloud Atlas (for audacious and mostly successful ambition).

But if you're asking "best," that's probably Lincoln--which, I hasten to add, is also enormously entertaining, but I use the b-word because it is also so much much of what the movies can do big, to engage head and heart and soul. Unless, of course, The Master--about which I exited the theater of such mixed minds that I didn't even include it last night--is the best for the same reason.

To those four-plus, I'll add six more that moved me or wowed me or tickled me for a top ten or eleven, the ordering alphabetical, the criteria floating:

• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Cloud Atlas
• Damsels in Distress
• Django Unchained
• Footnote
• Holy Motors
• Lincoln
• The Master (maybe)
• Moonrise Kingdom
• Ruby Sparks
• A Separation

The D was silent

I begin this 90 minutes before the new year comes to my time zone, and I don't expect to finish before I break for the split of Veuve Clicquot, but the rules are the same as the past two years: I'm just going to sift through the past 365 days' first-time screenings, no matter when released, and hang the notables on the wall, perhaps for some sort of numeric judgment, perhaps not . . .

January, typically, was notable only for a leftover from the previous year, but A Separation was one hell of a leftover; remind me: did it win the foreign-film Oscar®? Even if not, it wins my award for best Iranian film I've seen in any year.

February began with the breathtaking dance performance-cum-documentary Pina--also a 2011 Oscar® nomination (and yes, I just checked: A Separation won foreign). The coming-of-age, coming-out-in-a-middle-class-African-American-community Pariah is an excellent film with an awful trailer.

OK, I know I didn't spend the whole year being impressed only by art-house and/or foreign films, but the first best of March was the Albanian revenge feud drama The Forgiveness of Blood. OK, here, honorable mention for a studio film, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a minor gem with a meaty part for sexygenarian Susan Sarandon. Enough slumming, though: from Israel comes Footnote, academic Aristotelian tragedy. And from Japan, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: father, sons, beautiful and delicious fish.

In April, a couple of very different films that wouldn't be on this list under old rules: Temple Grandin, a 2010 HBO film about the autistic pioneer in humane treatment of livestock, featuring a mindboggling performance by Claire Danes; and Attack the Block (2011), maybe the best of several very good schlocky sci-fi flicks in recent years. Back to the art house for Boy, your standard coming-of-Maori-age story. Then, at home, having been cheated out of it on an M4, Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's crime-and-punishment documentary. Damsels in Distress: pure goofy pleasure from Whit Stillman.

Brit Marling is the highlight of a slow May as a creepy-beautiful messiah in Sound of My Voice, which she also cowrote.

In June, I was mostly distracted, but when I came home, Wes Anderson's magical Moonrise Kingdom was waiting for me.

Speaking of magic, Beasts of the Southern Wild is magical realism for us who don't much care for magical realism. But even with the June asterisk, this is three consecutive months with just one notable each.

August brought Ruby Sparks, which you'd expect from the poster and the trailer to be a smart but safe romcom. Well, there's nothing safe about it, and I'm not even sure if the "com" is accurate--maybe the best surprise of the year. But that's 4 straight one-notable months.

Hope Springs in September (well, not for Mets fans, but let's not talk about that), which I may overrate because it surprised me by not being schlocky. Chicken with Plums, heartbreaking beauty from Marjane Satrapi. Hello I Must Be Going I filed under expected-to-like-but-not-this-much. And then I saw the rough cut of Scary Normal, but let's save that for 2013.

October, Pitch Perfect, one of the funniest films of the year; my daughter has passed along the book on which it's based, with annotations by her & my son-in-law, and I look forward to reading and commenting on that in the new year. Searching for Sugar Man may be the most implausible music documentary I'll ever see, and I mean that in a good way. "Argo fuck yourself!" Cloud Atlas is a flawed, magnificent adaptation of what is probably my favorite novel of the millennium to date.

November takes Flight, which morphs from action entertainment into moral ambiguity, with Denzel. But for moral ambiguity, it can't hold a runway flare to The Flat, a documentary about an Israeli couple and their friend in the SS and his wife. Holy Motors is one of the trippiest trips of the year, and (dammit, Jennie Tonic, I've given you plenty of time to find this out for yourself) its soundtrack includes the #1 pleasant stunner of the year: Sparks, "How You Getting Home?" Yes, dammit, a Bond flick: Skyfall. And then a Spielberg one: Lincoln is pure magnificence.

In December, Anna Karenina didn't quite hit me like a runaway train, but I was prepared to dislike it, and it made that impossible. This Is 40 is all but great. Django Unchained is great, bloody great.

And that's the year, and it's 4 minutes to midnight in Illinois, so instead of figuring out a top however many now, I think I'll call my favorite filmmaker and return to the question in daylight.

After midnight

A whore and a horse invited me to a final screening of 2011, but they'll have to be content with being my first 2 of 2012, if that. It feels as if it was a disappointing year at the movies, but I haven't started going back over my posts, so I guess we'll confirm or deny that together. One good thing: I got back to Manhattan a couple of times, and if neither M was one for the ages, it felt good paying $12.50 at IFC and getting falafel and bird's nest in the evening gap. The vast majority of my New York time in recent years has been spent in Queens, and I don't regret that (obviously, or I'd stop going to so many Mets games), but in what's more or less a zero-sum game, that means a cinematic loss.

On the other hand, so many films that back in the day would not have been available except in Manhattan (or on Netflix) now come Relatively Cheap and Incredibly Close, so it's a positive zero sum.

Anyway, I rather like the way I did last year's roundup, when I "propose[d] to judge only films of whatever age that I saw for the first time in 2010 about which I expect someday to say, as codgerdom eats ever more of my brain, 'They don't make 'em like that anymore!'" so let's do the same, except for an annual increment. I'll say before we start that Midnight in Paris was my favorite film of the year (interesting in light of my final paragraph of my 2010 roundup), though probably not the one I'd call the best. That would be . . . Melancholia, maybe? Let's see . . .

Started the year with a Netflix stream of a film I was a fool to miss when it was in the theaters, discovering that Up is just as good as everyone said and more It's a Wonderful Life-ish than anyone had told me. A very different sort of wonderful came from Blue Valentine; I'm currently waiting for hernia surgery, and the kick that film provided produced that sort of feeling. Next a wonderful disc double feature, in lieu of M#, of Fatih Akin's Im Juli and the doucumentarish film embrace of the best L.A. punk band ever, X: The Unheard Music. While we're at it, let's raise one more glass to Pete Postlethwaite.

February: Cedar Rapids was neither great nor particularly memorable, but it gave me some of my best cinematic fun of the year.

A wonderful double feature during the traditional dead zone of March: the Inception-ish The Adjustment Bureau and the trippliy allusive animated Western Rango. In También la lluvia we got some good unabashed lefty anti-imperialism, and then in Copie confirme, a good talky French existential mystery. Even more surprising, a convincing and moving portrait of human virtue, Des hommes et des dieux.

Into April, and Cary Fukunaga's literate and incisive adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring the suddenly ubiquitous (not that there's anything wrong with that!) Mia Wasikowska. A very different sort of young woman on her own, Hanna, was a very pleasant surprise, putting me in mind a bit of Lola rennt. Best thing I can say about Bill Cunningham New York I've already said: "One of those films on a subject in which I have no interest but which I couldn't have enjoyed more if it were about a jazz-playing, fiction-writing baseball star." Meek's Cutoff was Seinfeld without the laughs: a show about nothing.

My only regret about Cave of Forgotten Dreams was that I didn't get to see Werner Herzog's documentary about paleolithic cave art in 3D. Incendies: a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Seriously? Not until June did Midnight in Paris open here? Meaning that even though my copy came in the mail a few days ago,  if I adhere to my guidelines, I have to wait 5 months to screen it again and see whether it's as delightful as I thought the first time? Anyway, that's it for a two-month stretch during which I had fewer posts than a typical month. (And this June is going to be thin, too, since I'll be helping to make a movie!)

The Guard another in the category of far-from-great-but-great-fun. And that's it for August, so 2 candidates for the summer months.

[Excuse me: notwithstanding the time & date attached to this, it just became 2012, so I had to take a little break to open my Widder C & establish that, yes, I still like her a lot. Yes, that's right: I'm ringing in the new year by blogging. Pathetic.]

September: Not sure Contagion was one of the year's best, but it may have been the scariest, and that counts for something. Higher Ground: Vera Farmiga directs, smartly.

October is, of course, baseball's second-most-sacred month, and Moneyball may be one of the half-dozen or so best baseball movies ever, not that the competition is AL East-ish. And what would late October be without something to scare the bejesus out of us? Take Shelter gives us none; my favorite of Jessica Chastain's 15 movies this year.

A little too late (in New Haven, anyway) for a Halloween creepout came Almodóvar's La piel que habito. And then, from another of my favorite very foreign directors, von Trier's Melancholia, for my money a more interesting cosmic mindfuck than The Tree of Life. And then there's one of my favorite very unforeign directors, Alexander Payne, and The Descendants; I'm already impatient for his next film; I figure 2015. And of the 7 films I saw in 2 trips to Manhattan this year, the weird punkish noir Rid of Me was my favorite.

And because it came out in December, I was thinking of the misanthropic Young Adult as a great double feature with Bad Santa, but Rid of Me would make a nice parley too. Finally, I won't say a word about The Artist.

But let's do a list, not anything as murky as "best," but a top 5 films I expect to return to:

1. Midnight in Paris
2. The Artist
3. Take Shelter
4. Moneyball
5. Higher Ground

In the meantime, happy 2011, happier 2012.

Sphinx?

Never mind the countdown night before last, now we're down to the last few hours of an 11-day break from the demands of gainful employment and gainless diet, and so I pour my last bourbon for a while and contemplate cinema 2010. Yes, there are as always things I've thus far been deprived of, by geography and M4-deferring poverty, that I expect would contend for the "Best of" list if anyone were paying me to see everything by year's end, but nobody is, and so this year I propose to judge only films of whatever age that I saw for the first time in 2010 about which I expect someday to say, as codgerdom eats ever more of my brain, "They don't make 'em like that anymore!"

Of course, codgerdom already has a foothold--or a canehold, if not yet a walker-leg-hold--I'm 57 now, as old as my father was when I became a father (I was the youngest, so he was already a grandfather several times over; but I collected my 2nd grandchild this year). As I've whined before, I was cinematically deprived as a small-town child, so I don't really have the treasured-films-of-childhood collection of the cinephile who grew up in a city with first-run theaters. I guess the film I saw most often as a (Catholic; duh) child was The Sound of Music, released the year I turned 12. (Coincidentally, the eldest von Trapp girl, named not Leisl but Agathe, died Tuesday, 16 going on 98.) So count backward from now to 1965, and then an equal number of years backward from then, and you see that when I was a kid, 28-year-old Mary Pickford starring as Pollyanna was equally ancient history as 30-year-old Julie Andrews starring as Maria von Trapp is now. Except, of course, that the algorithm of ancientness has become so accelerated, even more so (I hope, I pray) than my own ancientness, that you might as well say Pollyanna and S of M are now equally ancient, which means I'm eating my own ancient tail, or something.

So what's my point? Have you not been paying attention? Have you forgotten that you're dealing with a bourbon-consuming senescent? It's your job, not mine, to determine my point. It's my job to tell you what I've dug (it's a generational term; you might find it in Urban Dictionary) in the past 1/57th of my life. What can I remember without going back over the year's blogging? Inception, for sure--but was it sound and fury signifying a miscast role for Juno? True Grit, but I just saw it a few days ago, and I just saw the 1969 version a few days before that, so how much credit is due? Toy Story 3, but I'm a grandfather and a sentimentalist, so there may have to be a Boehner discount for those tears. Cairo Time, but . . . well, you know.

So, let's sift through the year . . .

January, first (of, what, 2?) Manhattan trip produced 2 amazers, Sweetgrass and Fish Tank, the former a perfect example of why people who don't live near Manhattan and who don't take my recommendations (or the recommendations of someone similarly warped) just don't get as much out of the movies as the movies have to give; the latter a sad-bastard flick for the ages.

February, the leftover White Ribbon, quite simply one of the most excruciatingly wonderful awful films I've ever suffered. I'll pretty much see anything Michael Haneke wants to show me, even knowing that I'll hate it 30-40% of the time.

March, 2008's A Woman in Berlin, about which I seem to have used the unusual adjective "miraculous." Also the brutally amazing Red Riding trilogy. And Un Prophète, which seems to have blown me away even more than the Haneke. Incidentally, I seem to have used the headline "An education" 3 times in 2010, all in tribute to the Carey Mulligan film, of course.

April started with a concert stunner whose existence I had been unaware of, The T.A.M.I. Show, from 1964, and I'm going to keep telling people from my generation about it until you've all seen it, dammit! A few days later I finally saw F. W. Murnau's 1927 Sunrise; oh, my--the best of an very good M4, maybe the last one ever (oh, that way madness lies!). And can it really be that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and both sequels all came to America in one year? Well, this is the one that remains worth seeing.

May: Terribly Happy: from my wispy review of this Danish flick: "the best Coen brothers film I've ever seen that wasn't made by the Coen brothers"; 'nuff sed. And The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentine (Argentinian?) Best Foreign Film winner of 2009. But Nicole Holofcener's Please Give made it worthwhile to see an American movie this month, too.

June: hey, it's my bully pulpit, so sue me for giving another plug to Leading Ladies, still looking for distribution. Though even as a loving father I must confess that the best film I saw that month was 1987's Wings of Desire. And then there was the astonishing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone--like it, loved her.

July? I'm crying already, just typing in Toy Story 3. And my brain's hurting already, just typing in Inception. Who the hell won the World Cup final anyway? It wasn't France, I know that, but they have this to boast of: Wild Grass.

The Happiness of August was Life During Wartime. And speaking of life during wartime, Steven Soderbergh's 2008 Che is worth a 4-hour look if you're an unreconstructed lefty. But I think I'm just gonna come right out and say my favorite film of the year is the quiet, understated symphony of sexual tension Cairo Time. OK?

September was Mesrine, whose star Vincent Cassel I didn't recognize as the starfucker/starmaker of Black Swan until it was pointed out to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Don't hate me 'cause I'm popular: The Social Network is one of the best films of the year, notwithstanding its accessibility. And to salvage my art house cred, let's put Howl in here too. But what's Halloween month without a creeper, even if Let Me In gets in only as a pointer to the Swedish original?

November: OK, I'd seen Metropolis before, but not this Metropolis. Stunning. As is, in a much squirmier way, 127 Hours.

December: I don't think it's any secret that I digs me some mumblecore. So: Plastic Furniture. Nor that I loves me some Coen. So: True Grit.

And so, if I never tell you what I think about any more movies, we'll always have Paris. And Cairo. OK?

All about me, 2009

In the past I've done more or less conventional annual "best of" lists, have even updated them as films from 200N finally made it to New Haven in 200N+1, but I never really enjoyed it much. Yeah, I know: it's not for my enjoyment. But still.

Anyway, I got so tired of it that last year I blew it off altogether, but this year I'm back, but what I'm doing is just highlighting some things I saw in 2009 in whatever categories seem to make sense. Call 'em DVD-rental recommendations, I guess.

Gutchecks

Entre les Murs
Gomorra
Hunger
Politist, Adjectiv
Precious
Tyson
Vals Im Bashir

Angrymakers

Capitalism: A Love Story
The Cove
Food, Inc.
The Yes Men Fix the World

Shock and/or awe

Avatar
Every Little Step
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
La Danse
Moon
Tetro

Oddballs

Anvil: The Story of Anvil
District 9
The Informant!
In the Loop
Panique au village
Ricky
The September Issue
Where the Wild Things Are
World's Greatest Dad

Love hurts

An Education
Duplicity
(500) Days of Summer
Fantastic Mr. Fox
La Graine et le mulet
L'Heure d'été
Paris
Sita Sings the Blues
Up in the Air

Scurvy

A lot of popcorn hulls under the gum since my last post, since which . . .

Tilda wins

The most genuine moment and the best acceptance-speech joke both came early Sunday night when Tilda Swinton surprised everyone, not least herself, by winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I (well, Dave Kerr--but in this case, I would have on my own) had picked Cate Blanchett and also actually thought hers the best performance (not necessarily the same thing, of course), but Swinton's look of absolute shock at the announcement (sincere? Hey, she's a great actor, but nobody's that good) made it impossible not to be happy for somebody who has had a long, outstanding, mostly under-the-radar career. And who knew she could be funny, too? Never mind that she was just recycling Clooney's own self-deprecating joke; when you're an accepting an Oscar, originality is a bonus, but no one should demand it.

Orange loses

I have made my last traffic-defying walk along Marsh Hill Road while talking on the cell to my son-in-law: Showcase Orange will close after Sunday's shows. This, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks, and it sucks less for me than for the area's Indian community, because for the past year or two, Orange has routinely devoted one of its eight screens to a film from the Subcontinent. Will the Post Mall DeLux 14 give 1/14 of its screens to 1/6 of the world's population. Yeah, right.

But as sad as the closing is for Indian-Connecticutan filmgoers, let's face it: it's really all about me. What does this mean to the most important film audience in my life? Just tabulated my visits to Orange in 2007: only 11 trips for a total of 14 films, and none since 3 November. Still, among those 14 films were Children of Men, Once, A Mighty Heart, Sicko, Into the Wild, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and No End in Sight--I probably wouldn't have missed any of those, but that would mean 7 films I saw via Netflix would still be sitting in my queue.

So what happens now? I can think of a range of possibilities; let's start with the worst:

• The Criterion, which has since its opening as an arthouse gradually moved toward a more mainstream theater, decides that with the one competing venue within fifteen miles for quieter, more thoughtful films gone, there's no reason not to push even harder toward Hollywood schlock. (I should point out that a key to my low number of visits to Orange in recent years has been a significant programming overlap between Orange and the Crit.) This would, in technical terms, suck donkey dicks.

I don't really think that will happen, though. More likely:

• The Crit will stay the course, but so will the other National Amusements theaters in Greater New Haven, in Milford and North Haven. Those venues generally show the same slate of films, and all the blockbusters go there. If they don't pick up the Orange slack, then I guess I'll be Netflixing another 6-12 films a year that simply don't come to town, or seeing them in Manhattan, at the cost of other even more obscure stuff I might be seeing. This would suck slightly less than the suckiness outlined just above, and seems pretty likely.

But maybe I'm being too pessimistic. Maybe:

• The two remaining Nationals will break their programming lockstep and one or both will pick up the Orange slack; this would be a Good Thing. Or . . .
• Better yet, the Cine 1-2-3-4, which has in recent months shown I'm Not There simultaneously with Orange and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days exclusively in Greater N.H., will seize the opportunity to run more exclusives. Given the new bus route that takes me practically to the front door, this would be a Very Good Thing. Or . . .
• The Criterion could pick up the Orange slack and rebound toward its arthouse origin. I don't expect it, but that would be an Excellent Thing.

Until we find out, join me in raising a toast to Showcase Orange, 1994-2008 in its current location; not sure how long it spent on the other side of I-95.

Blab sez* (2nd lede, writethru)

The best of 2007

Still a handful of 2007s† to go--including all the Oscar-nominated foreigns. But given what I've heard about the foreign noms, this may in fact be final. You can still check out my original lists, but this one reflects only one addition from the 1st lede, writethru, and the only bump is from one list to another.

True lies

Drama, English language

1. No Country for Old Men (the toughest call in years)
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Michael Clayton
4. I'm Not There
5. In the Valley of Elah
6. Away from Her
7. Sweeney Todd
8. Atonement
9. This Is England
10. The Savages

True truths

Documentaries

1. No End in Sight
2. In the Shadow of the Moon
3. The 11th Hour
4. Sicko
5. Pete Seeger: The Power of Music
6. Die Große Stille (Into great silence)
7. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
8. Gypsy Caravan
9. What Would Jesus Buy
10. Helvetica
    

Greek to me

Foreign language

1. Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The diving bell and the butterfly; France)
2. La Faute è Fidel (Blame it on Fidel; France)
3. El Orfanato (The orphanage; Spain)
4. 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile (4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days)
5. Persepolis (France)
6. Direktøren for det hele (The boss of it all; Denmark)
7. Shi gan (Time; South Korea)
8. Nuovomondo (The golden door; Italy)
9. Cama adentro (Live-in maid; Argentina)
10. Se, jie (Lust, caution; Taiwan)

Under the radar

Stuff that grabbed me by not playing by the rules. Unranked except that the first one did indeed grab me harder than the rest--harder than many of those in the other lists, in fact.

• Wristcutters: A Love Story
• Brand upon the Brain
• Colma: The Musical
• Day Night Day Night
• Dnevnoy dozor (Daywatch; Russia)
• Gwoemul (The host; South Korea)
• Nyocker! (The district; Hungary)
• Paprika (Japan)
• Romance & Cigarettes
• Southland Tales
  

Life is too short

Need I explain? In fact, need I even give each one a separate line, like it's something special, in a good way? Dan in Real Life, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Goya's Ghosts, In the Land of Women, Lions for Lambs, Mr. Brooks, The Nanny Diaries, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Reign over Me.

*with apologies to Jon, who sed first

†based on NYC opening