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

Some other way to prove

The Shape of Water

Crit

It's official: as I suspected I would, I regret that this didn't come to town a week later so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie, for which it would have been practically perfect. (If you're asking "Why didn't you just wait a week to go?" I wonder how you even happened onto this blog, since you obviously don't know me.)

Anyway, I want to get that "practically perfect" out of the way first, because the issue that irked me is a pretty big deal, but I don't want it to be the thing I leave you with. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) jokes with Elisa (the transcendent Sally Hawkins at her very most transcendent) throughout the film about her shiftless husband, which is a tired trope regardless of race, though not necessarily toxic, given the distancing of a potentially unreliable reporter, but when we finally meet Lou (Deney Forrest), in a brief but critical sequence, he proves to be not only stereotypically shiftless but also cowardly, both physically and morally--about the worst advertisement for African-American masculinity you could make of the only African-American male with more than a single line in the film. And I can't really see why it's necessary.

An ugly scar on the neck of a film that otherwise works on every level: as a retro monster pic, as a Cold War adventure, as a plea (notwithstanding the treatment of Lou) for tolerance and commonality (but with a sly shot at Stuckey's-style commercially manufactured homogeneity), and especially as a romance. Hawkins has a history of playing characters who fall for the wrong man; maybe the problem all along was that she was falling for the wrong species. Loving the blessedly unnamed "amphibian man" from the South American rain forest (Doug Jones, whom Guillermo del Toro has been hiding in prosthetics for his whole career, but who finally gets to dance this time!) brings a joy into her face unlike any I've seen, and it's joy that's a joy to see.

And finally: Richard Jenkins. Do I need to say any more?

Trailers

• The Post--Do you need to ask? Only if you're that guy who wandered into the blog without knowing me.
• A Quiet Place--This, though, looks like a pretty rote horror film, though the cast is great, including Millicent Simmonds, the most wondrous wonder of Wonderstruck.

Porg: the other white meat

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Crit

Yeah, OK, that was a pretty good Star Wars flick, worth a big chunk out of my day. Key intertwined takeaways are (relax, no spoilers, unless you start overthinking it right now and continue into the theater) the parentage of Rey (Daisy Ridley, still kicking ass but now being studious too) and a revelation (or articulation: I mean, we've always pretty much known this, right?) about the Force.

Trailers

• Ready Player One--Spielberg directed, so it must be smarter than the dystopic video game gimmick seems, right?
• Pacific Rim: Uprising--Let's see, I pretty much hated the first one, even though one of my favorite directors was in charge. I'm'a say probably not.

Do not forsake me

My Friend Dahmer

Crit

This portrait of the cannibalistic serial killer as a young boy is based on the memoir of a high school classmate, but it seems more like a literal-minded guess by an outsider of what must have made Dahmer Dahmer: the worst parents and the worst teachers ever, plus repression of his sexuality, plus a cadre of friends-in-the-sense-that-only-self-involved-adolescents-can-conceive-of-friendship, who, by exploiting the entertainment value of Jeff's inherent weirdness, may or may not have exacerbated it.

Not a bad film, but a surprisingly bland one.

1945

Crit

Small town, wedding day, and angst aroused by the arrival of a train--anybody else put in the mind of High Noon? It doesn't stop there, either, as the townspeople, some morally bankrupt, some just morally weak, try to repel or finesse the potential loss of the source of the town's economic comfort.

I don't want to go into too much detail because this is actually a bit of a mystery, but I will say that it's the first Holocaust (technically post-Holocaust) film I've seen in ages that has discomfited me in a completely new way. This is a film I'll be considering when I assemble my top ten list in 22 days (actually 19 days; this is a postdated post).