As the year started winding down and my Top Ten list began to solidify, and all of the professional writers with bylines and email addresses listed their favorites of 2015, I realized that I’m on basically the same page as everyone. Most of the titles in my Top Ten list have already been acclaimed and discussed.
So I’m taking a different approach this year. Instead of pushing the movies you already know to watch (or already have, quite likely), I’m going to discuss the next tier of movies I saw this year, numbers 11-20. The idea being that these were strong, fascinating movies that don’t come with the onus of “everyone better like this, or else.” After all, what in the world can I, a playwright with no professional movie or film criticism experience, say about Mad Max: Fury Road that hasn’t already been articulated thoroughly (for a few thousand words on why it’s my top movie of the year, might I suggest doing a Google Image search for Mad Max: Fury Road)?
I’ll share my Top Ten at the end, then throw in some TV, to boot.*
Honorable Mention: 7 Days in Hell (dir. Jake Szymanski)
I’m withholding this from my actual list, as it is 42min long and was never theatrically released. But I’ve watched this movie more than anything else in 2015, it is a comic delight, and, considering I’ve previously claimed this movie should be taught in writing classes, I felt I should bring it up. The jokes come at a breakneck pace and the performances are a joy (Andy Samberg and Kit Harington are excellent as the bad boy of tennis and the dopey prodigy, but the stand-out is Michael Sheen as a greasy William F. Buckley rip-off who smells like fire, “because I rage inside, like a furnace.”) The movie demonstrates such originality in its storytelling and satire of the sports doc medium, that I’ll keep returning to it time and time again (or until HBO removes it from streaming).
20. Phoenix (dir. Christian Petzhold)
Okay, I’m not starting this concept very well, as Phoenix made its way onto many Top Ten lists. But for some reason, this painful, romantic tale of a disfigured Holocaust survivor (Nina Hoss) trying to reach her husband who believes her to be dead didn’t land on me the way it did for many critics. They point to a powerhouse finale (I won’t spoil it, as it’s a great ending, and beautifully done), but an ending I expected, which may have softened the blow. Regardless, this is a very special romance, unique in its delicate handling of a relationship draped in large, potent grief.
19. Entertainment (dir. Rick Alverson)
A more muted follow-up to Alverson’s explosion of entitled sloth that is The Comedy, Entertainment follows hack comedian Neil Hamburger (Gregg Turkington) as he tours his act as a slimy, offensive, easily aggrieved lounge comedian (this is Turkington’s actual act, for anyone just learning the name Neil Hamburger). His malaise is a private one, but he ladles self-loathing all over himself, just like the pounds of hair product he applies before taking the stage. Tye Sheridan is mysteriously cast as his touring buddy, an energetic clown (Sheridan does good work, but I have no idea how they sat down to cast this movie and landed on him). Hamburger’s act is an act of alienation, but how to reconcile artistic alienation with the human need for connection? For Hamburger, it’s playing tourist at half-baked tourist traps, like an airplane graveyard.
18. Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker)
This Holidays in Hollywood farce with heart focuses on two dear friends. One is fresh out of jail and desperate to find her man who she hears is seeing another woman, and the other just wants to drag her friend to a bar so that she can perform. You may think that “trans sex workers running along Santa Monica Blvd., getting in fights, ruining marriages, and smoking crack in bathrooms” would be some dour shit, but these are buoyant, resilient people, and the friendship at the center is so rock-solid and rich with love that it becomes a delightful and raucous holiday treat.
17. Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry)
If you’re the kind of person who watched Mad Men and thought, “I’d really like to see Elisabeth Moss lose all control at a lakehouse,” then have I got the movie for you. After a bad break-up, Moss visits an old friend (Katherine Waterston) to have a relaxing weekend at Waterston’s lakehouse. But Waterston has her own life (including a boyfriend in Patrick Fugit, who was a very nice boy in Almost Famous and Saved!, but who is not a nice boy here), and can’t handle Moss’ baggage any longer. Without a support system, Moss goes full Cassavetes until she is a scream come to life, clinging to anything and running from everything.
16. Chi-Raq (dir. Spike Lee)
Spike Lee took a long look at the gun epidemic in the United States, especially as it relates to black communities, and went, “I need to adapt a Greek comedy.” Based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Lee brings forth a terrible, emotional plague and imbues it with bawdy humor, musical interludes, and the color and stylization that Lee excels at. Is it a little on the nose, sure. But most arguments against guns boil down to “These things are used for extreme bodily harm, why would you willingly own or use one,” alongside images of massacres and bodies in the streets, so subtly is not necessary. Lee doles out the not-so-subtle comedy, all in verse, usually in the form of genital euphemisms as the women of a ravaged Chicago put a moratorium on sex until their men give up their guns. But Lee makes room for the rest, like the not-so-subtle image of Jennifer Hudson (who’s own mother, brother, and nephew were shot dead at her mother’s Chicago home 7 years ago) cleaning her baby girl’s blood from the asphalt.
15. Creed (dir. Ryan Coogler)
In many ways, Creed simply apes the formula of the already-formulaic Rocky series. In many ways, there’s so much more going on. Hell, the movie is a metaphor for itself. A young guy (Michael B. Jordan) lives in the shadow of a father he can’t reach, Apollo Creed. While he has the talents, he has to find Rocky Balboa himself and pave his own way without depending on the name that got him there. But the name is ever present, and Creed is beholden to its namesake and uses that judiciously. Much has been made about the use of the Rocky music, but my favorite callback is pictured above. The boxer, all in grey, runs through Philly, but he’s not being chased by running kids, he’s being cheered on by 12 O’Clock Boys on dirt bikes, and a traditional, orchestral score isn’t playing, it’s some Meek Mill. A loving movie, dependent and aware of history, but proud of its own identity.
14. Spring (dirs. Justin Benson, Aaron Scott Moorhead)
A young American man, his home life in shambles, runs to Europe for a bit of freeing frivolity. Either a set-up for a horror movie or some life-affirming romance. But what if it’s both? He meets a woman with a mutual attraction and a secret she refuses to share or overcome. The movie shows a romance as it often can be, necessary and grotesque. There’s a brutality and passion between these strangers, and while it’s a tad reductive to compare “sad man” with “woman with otherworldly problems,” the movie never loses balance, and keeps an awareness of its sweetness, while never denying the sweetness to the audience.
13. Best of Enemies (dirs. Morgan Neville, Robert Gordon)
We are in a special sort of hell right now where none of the major news organizations are any help at all. They fill airports with more screeching than the landing airplanes and are echo chambers of hate and idiocy. And that all started when ABC decided, during the 1968 Presidential Conventions to have professional thinkers, liberal Gore Vidal and conservative William F. Buckley snipe at each other. The two ostensibly debated the convention issues, including the use of police force at the Democratic Concention in Chicago, but in reality, the attacks were personal. These men held their own intelligence above anything else, and to have some affluenza-afflicted fascist or some haughty homosexual question that intelligence was an insult of the highest degree. The two men are a delight to watch, even under the specter of the modern state of discourse. ABC pitted these men together for the ratings, until they both lose their cools.
12. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (dir. Roy Andersson)
Swedish Roy Andersson loves his tragicomic existential crises. This series of scenes and vignettes has no through line beyond the shared burden of the world we have built. War keeps encroaching on bars and restaurants, meals get ruined, and toy salesmen keep crying and living in dormitories. And boy is it hilarious. Scenes are meticulously set and everybody has a ghastly look about them. And, really, the movie argues, what else is new?
11. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (dir. Marielle Heller)
This movie was sold and packaged as a sister to twee coming-of-agers like Juno, but there’s a darkness those movies avoid that this one stands itself upon. Set in freewheeling San Francisco in the early 70s, Diary features all the trappings of a COA tale, the confidence, the excitement, the fall for hubris, but comes in the context of “unsupervised behavior is damaging.” Bel Powley’s Minnie has her first sexual relationship with her mom’s much older boyfriend, but she fails to see his vulnerability and weaknesses as human, and attempts to take control of her burgeoning knowledge of adulthood. But she has no guidance in this world. This is the same world, after all, that allowed popular musician John Phillips to repeatedly drug and rape his young daughter. California dreamin’, indeed. This is the same sort of twitchy false paradise chronicled by Joan Didion in Slouching Toward Bethlelem, and Minnie falls face-first into this paradise. She experiences the trappings of adulthood, but can never negotiate what is reality and what is play.
And now, the rest:
10. 45 Years (dir. Andrew Haigh)
9. Steve Jobs (dir. Danny Boyle)
8. Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland)
7. Slow West (dir. John Maclean)
6. Carol (dir. Todd Haynes)
5. Spotlight (dir. Tom McCarthy)
4. Sicario (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
3. Inside Out (dirs. Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen)
2. The Look of Silence (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer)
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller)
And now, some TV shows I watched and liked (unranked, as I did not watch enough shows to really assess the year):
Fargo (FX)
Mr. Robot (USA)
Mad Men (AMC)
The Jinx (HBO)
Making a Murderer (Netflix)**
Nathan for You (Comedy Central)
Review (Comedy Central)
Veep (HBO)
Master of None (Netflix)
Bojack Horseman (Netflix)
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix)
Parks & Recreation (NBC)
Broad City (Comedy Central)
You’re the Worst (FX)
Wet, Hot, American Summer (Netflix)
Bob’s Burgers (FOX)
Rick & Morty (Adult Swim)
Louie (FX)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
Game of Thrones (HBO)
Girls (HBO)
*Late December releases I haven’t seen: Anomalisa, Hateful Eight, The Revenant, and Son of Saul.
**I finished this show yesterday. It made me very sad, and I do not wish to discuss it.
Hendel Off The Handle 