The Year in Movies – 2016

2016 was not an excellent year for this blog. It’s not because I didn’t see many movies that I loved – on the contrary, I saw some of the greatest movies of my life, and a fair volume of them – but, due to a growing number of more pressing priorities, my duties on The Back Row were neglected, and I didn’t get the chance to share those elated experiences here.

Just about everyone else on the planet has already released their round-ups of 2016, and I’ve had a look at each of the movie pundits’ choices for the top films of the year. The results have fortified my conviction that the best thing for cinematic tastes to be is unruly and uninhibited. What one first notices looking through these lists is that many films are being hailed in London and New York that we haven’t had the faintest whiff of yet in South Africa; this is just a distribution and scheduling discrepancy. But what one notices next is that, besides a few differences in ranking and an oddball choice here and there, pundits and mainstream media critics are making all the same choices for their favourite films, and those choices converge closer and closer each year. One is led to believe that many critics are just as susceptible to hype as mass audiences are, only their hype is generated at film festivals and press conferences, instead of being stoked by trailers and supplementary merchandising.

What struck me while I surveyed these consensus choices on the masses of lists and polls (which I’ve compiled for you at the bottom of this post) is that the objects of this hype so rarely align with what I would consider commendable artistic achievements. Few lists contain more than a single film that I loved, and many don’t contain even one. It’s not a huge surprise to me; I read the reviews of my favourite movies throughout the year as I saw them, and saw quite quickly that the movies in which one viewer locates rapture and daring, many others find only confusion and obscurity. What I consider the greatest film of 2016 – Terrence Malick’s Hollywood reverie Knight of Cups – was designated “rotten” on the website Rotten Tomatoes (as useless a cultural phenomenon as any website could be) with a score of 45%, and Woody Allen’s crime comedy Irrational Man scored 44%. In terms of mainstream movie releases, not many people went to see either of those two films, and not many that did loved them. This in itself doesn’t discourage me – Malick and Allen have long been working in ways that don’t rely on commercial success and critical adulation, and their careers will continue without hindrance – but it is dismaying to see how many people think a movie must be good just because of the number and stations of others who say that it is. True appreciation of the cinema, just as success in the various realms of one’s life, depends on your capacity for imagination and independence of thought.

Sunlit Gardens

“Irrational Man” and “Flowers”

Image: blogs.indiewire.com

The European Film Festival, which is a collection of European films currently playing at Ster Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau theatres, is a useful enough opportunity for South African moviegoers to be exposed to the contemporary cinema of Europe, and an equally useful opportunity to find that the fact that something is foreign, subtitled, subdued in tone, or literary in temperament does not denote its artistic pedigree or intellectual superiority to our usual bright and brash, American English-language stock comedies and thrillers. What matters in cinema is less how composed and refined a film can be, and more how much life and with what depth and breadth of experience and ideas a filmmaker can imbue it.

On Friday, in a programme of our own devising, a friend and I went to see Woody Allen’s new film, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, named Irrational Man and taking on the breeziest and most enchantingly sun-lit tone, followed by Earl Grey tea and a screening of Flowers, a Spanish entry in the European Film Festival, in Basque and with English subtitles, and considerably more naturalistic and solemn. The sun lit the small Spanish town just as much as it did the small New England haven, but with far more organic, prosaic, and inert a glare.

True Tales

“Joy” and “Spotlight”

In 1991 Joy Mangano sold her first commercial design, the Miracle Mop, through infomercials on the home shopping network QVC. In 1994 David O. Russell released his first commercial feature film, Spanking the Monkey. The initial experience of a work is hardly ever meant to be an allegorical reading – even Orwell intended for readers to enjoy Animal Farm first as a story about talking barnyard creatures, and only afterwards as an allegory for Stalinist Russia – but after seeing (and, one hopes, immensely enjoying) Joy, the new film by Russell based on the life of Mangano, viewers can very easily fill in for themselves the connections and parallels between the life and experiences of Mangano that Russell depicts, and the ones he himself underwent around the same time. And it works only to make the entire endeavour even more rewarding.

Joy stars Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano, and though I have no idea whether she fits the bills of appearance and manner for the real-life woman, such considerations are secondary to the exhilarating dramatic and emotional intensity that she imparts in the role. It seems to be the performance that Lawrence has unintentionally been training for, for years. She arrives in the film bearing the tenacity and self-reliance of Katniss Everdeen, the emotional precariousness (such as she then could muster) of Tiffany Maxwell, the unfuckwithable-ness of Rosalyn Rosenfeld, and the slight air of a superior and detached shape-shifting mutant. She adds to this everything else she’s learned, both in her private and her public life, inside and out of fictional roles, and is guided by Russell towards the most full-bodied, challenging, and exultant work she’s ever given. But, after all, she’s playing the character which, I suspect, lies closest to her writer-director’s heart.