10 Best Films of 2016

My personal top 10

1. La La Land
2. Christine (seriously underrated by must, though I saw that you liked it on What the Flick)
3. Moonlight
4. Hell or High Water
5. Arrival
6. Everybody Wants Some
7. Imperium (Did anyone see this one?)
8. The Invitation
9. Green Room
10. Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (the most purely joyous movie-watching experience that I had this year; an animated revival of the 60’s series with the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward. Not the Batman movie we need, but certainly the one we deserve right now)

Great list Christy. It’s always a pleasure to know there is someone out there with great taste! I agree with you on La La, Moonlight, Everybody Wants Some, and still need to watch the 15th. I also personally loved Eye in the Sky, Arrival, Allied, and Sully. Kubo and SING Street I also admired, though it would be more top 25 for me.

Allow me to pitch one challenge, one curved ball, into this mix.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

A movie which isn’t mentioned above – the team behind it, will some day knock the ball out of the park, I’ve no doubt.

Sequences in the movie, were better than most that one will see in any movie, this year.

Achieved too, with economy of means.

Whoever was standing behind the camera, understood two things.

Firstly, what actors can do.

Secondly, what a camera can do.

Brought down to basics, movie making as an art form is un-mistakable.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrox, pushed an envelope.

My take, B.

Hi Christy – not sure if this would be considered 2016 or 2015 would love to hear your take on “The Fits.”

Re: The Supreme Court of Movie Criticism

Christy,

I have a quick question.

These movies all have something in common, which I think in time will appeal to folk who are only teenagers or early twenties right now. At tea break one day, we were chatting. Something came up about the soccer world cup in 1990. It turned out that some people in the workplace, didn’t remember the world cup in 1990, because they were born in 1990. This happens to us, more and more these days. Like, you look at many of the movies above. They convey to a younger generation, what the world used to be like, only a couple of decades or a little longer ago. Like, the story about the tea break conversation and the world cup – I stubbornly refuse, I think to accept that there are young adults nowadays who don’t remember the 1980’s, or even the 1990’s. But a lot of young people, with these movies, have an opportunity to take a tourist trip back to when we were young – and find out what was authentic (I won’t say ‘cool’, because some of it was gnarly), what was authentic, about the culture and the young people of several decades ago.

Here is my question.

When we were of this age, what movies did we watch back then, which fulfilled this role. I mean, growing up in the 1980’s or 1990’s – you’d be looking back to the 1960’s maybe. I don’t know, but for me some of the early Paul Newman black and white movies – did convey some of what was authentic about the young people and culture of earlier decades – when I watched those Paul Newman movies, during the 80’s and 90’s. Like a lot of what was in ‘Hud’ starring Newman, was gnarly and even ugly too – but it was authentic. It was young, edgy.

I could be wrong, but I think that is what several of the movies above manage to do – and they all do it in their own unique ways. Like, ‘Hell or High Water’, probably isn’t a movie I’d have watched unless I’d seen it on the list above. However, having watched it now, it’s set in the present day – and I listened to WTF panel discuss ‘Hell or High Water’ too. The really neat part about that movie – is not that it feels like a transition point on the way to full out ‘Mad Max’. The really cool thing about ‘Hell or High Water’, when it is viewed through the eyes of the people who was only born in 1990 – is that ‘Hell or High Water’ feels like it was based in the world that I grew up in – more of an analogy, physical world – as opposed to the world that exists today. And in a way, ‘Hell or High Water’, has that same raw, un-tamed energy rumbling underneath it’s hood, that I remember from watching those Paul Newman movies, an awful long time ago. And that’s my point, is that young people now look at this, and will get something like the experience I had watching the Newman black and white movies – when we had VCR’s and color TV’s back in the 80’s or 90’s.

There’s one of these movies that crops up almost in every generation. I mentioned Woodie Harrelson’s movie, the Hi-Lo Country, which was about post WWII and the veterans returning back from that war to rural New Mexico in the forties. There’s another movie starring Richard Gere, Miles from Home, it was released in 1988. Both of these movies, are worth watching now that they’ve become available to access via the online rental catalogues. One can access them will more ease, than having to go hunt down DVD copies etc. Someone once said here in Ireland I recall, there were early Elvis Presley movies from the 50’s I think – which had this young Elvis, who was really cutting edge, dangerous and cool. And let’s not forget of course, the whole James Dean ouvre, that is out there. Dean is someone whom the young generation now, don’t know about at all – and it’s through movies like ‘Hell or High Water’ I think, that they find a way back into those older actors – the Presley’s, the Newman’s, the Dean’s, Richard Gere, Woodie Harrelson etc.

What I’m presenting to you basically, is a different perspective to the one that WTF discussed in their review, of Hell or High Water. I’m placing it into a different framework of reference – than the Mad Max and other movies – into which Alonso and Matt placed it into. But either one, serves to do much the same thing. I preferred the more cowboy oriented stuff, than the post apocalyptic movies. A lot of the panel on WTF, actually love the Mad Max old and modern interpretations. But there is a whole other body of cinema work there too, which the panel sometimes has a blind area to. It’s like the ‘supreme court’ really. On WTF, there isn’t quite the right kind of cinematic ‘balance’ on the bench, if that makes any sense or logic. Although, every time that Ben manages to tack himself on to the very extreme left end of it – it does appear to return to a somewhat more even keel. Check out the 1988 Richard Gere movie. I must watch it again myself. All the best, B.

Re: Bad movies

It’s interesting though, that the more difficult judgement which the ‘bench’ had had to wrestle with in the last year, was Bad Santa 2. Does that tell us anything – it did split the bench, down the middle. Something got broken there, that can’t get put back together. B.

Re: Difficulty of the Film Making Process

I watched the three person panel debate about the latest Oliver Stone movie, from 15th September 2016, on WTF channel. I was fascinated by the critics take on this latest movie from Stone. In a round table recently, he had referred to older classic movie directors, and their ‘process’ of spending fifteen years sometimes to create a movie. Whereas the critics are often like birds on the wire. They all arrive together, and fly away together. Mel Gibson in the same roundtable, which was a great listen I thought, agreed with Stone in this idea that an ‘edit’ was akin to a re-write sometimes. I.e. The concept or idea, around which a film is developed can alter, as late in the process as that.

It must be exceptionally useful for younger students of movie making, to have a resource such as those which Christy and her colleagues provided now, via the media channels that exist now. I’d viewed ‘A Thin Red Line’, the movie about the Second World War, a long time ago and it was always one of my favorites. I hadn’t realized that one actor had arrived at the first screening of the movie, expected to view himself in a star role in the movie – and he had been dropped from it – cut out, and ended up on the floor of the editing room. Shocking. It’s an extreme example maybe of the point that Gibson and Stone talked about recently, in the round table.

The point that I’m getting to, I guess, is that it’s fascinating the movies that perhaps took an awful lot of effort from very experienced movie directors this year – which haven’t even made it into conversations about ‘top ten’ in movies of 2016 – not to mind, making it into a selection for the top ten. When I thought about it, Snowden was one of these notable standouts – of movies that don’t even make it into the conversation. I was delighted, via the medium of the Internet to be able to reach back to 15th of September and extract that ten minutes of review of the work of Stone (those birds on the wire, who arrive and depart as a flock I guess). I really wanted to understand what Snowden movie as a work, might have been missing, that it does not get a mention.

It was a valid criticism from Stone at least. Critics don’t get to live through the fifteen years, in the short space of the ‘two hours’. In any case, it’s always interesting to listen to both a perspective from a critic and from a creator. Because those two perspectives are equally valid in many ways. I was delighted to listen to Christy’s reference to the Steve Jobs movie of 2015 (another one of those headline movies of that year, I had forgotten about, in relation to my mention of the Herzog documentary comment above). That was, in relation to the new movie about McDonalds restaurants. The idea of movies that try to deal with ideas, and where ideas come from, who owns them, who doesn’t etc. What a good documentary is capable of doing I think – and a good reason to have a debate about ‘the best documentary’ movies in any given year – is that a good documentary can join together ideas that are contained in a lot of great movies, and make sense of it.

The movie about information technology that was reviewed on a video blog about networking security (of all places, I know, big snore), directed by the seventy two year old Werner Herzog, could be one of those movies, which gathers together ideas from many different scripts – everything from a movie such as ‘Spotlight’, to one like ‘Steve Jobs’, or even one about McDonalds. That’s the magic about documentaries. They can take quite a broad view, and it’s why I always enjoy the movie critics take on a documentary when I can listen to one – because unlike the second edition of ‘triple-X’ or heavens forbid, another ‘bad santa’ – the documentaries really do require the movie critic to put their thinking hats on.

And in a way, that brings us back to Snowden. It doesn’t make it into the conversation about great movies of 2016, and I’m looking forward to watching it when I do. But, it does leave me with the question, did the movie by Stone, encourage the audience to think at all? All best, B.