2018 Movie Favorites - Top Five

Every film in the top five this year were movies that moved me, made me think about the world differently, made me want to be a better person in some form.  Art imitates life, which has lead to some fraught cinema in the past couple years but hopefully life can also imitate art in its beauty, its kindness, or in the ways that it opens our eyes to experiences alien to our own.​

5. Won't You Be My Neighbor

​Not so much an objective lens at Fred Rogers, but a reminder of what a gift this amalgamation of goodness this man was.  In a time of segregated swimming pools and when people were throwing bleach into the water where African Americans were swimming, Mr. Rogers invited the neighborhood policeman, who happened to be African American, to dip his feet into a wading pool with him on television.  When television was starting its era of bringing terror into living rooms across the nation, Mr. Rogers created a safe place that encouraged kindness and gently challenged firmly held preconceptions.  The documentary features an early segment of the show where the puppet King Friday, the (benevolent) dictator, is erecting a wall to keep "undesirables" out of his kingdom.  Obviously some things haven't changed, but again neither has the importance of Mr. Rogers' message of kindness and worth.  Mr. Rogers' love for humanity instills a value in not only a person's self, but in their neighbor as well.  Perhaps more than any other movie this past year, Won't You Be My Neighbor made me want to be a better person.

4. Blindspotting

Blindspotting is a buddy movie that doesn't pull the punches when it comes to police violence, gentrification, and how we must both recognize and work to overcome the automatic prejudices we're unfortunately blind to.  Its premise and propulsion has you cringing from the get-go, knowing that it can't end well, and yet the surprise comes in the humor and the humanity that is laid bare by the final frame.  Miles (Rafael Casal) is a white man in a gentrifying Oakland who holds the swag of the lingo by its ruff, but still feels he has something to prove...something that at one point unfortunately results in a brawl where he attempts to prove his street cred by unleashing his fury onto someone who calls him a poser.  However, in that moment, he becomes yet another white man that imposes violence on a black man without having to worry about the consequence.  He could be seen as someone who's blind to race in that it wouldn't have mattered to him who he was beating up, except in the next scene his impotence instead reveals him as someone blind to his own privilege.  Collin (Daveed Diggs) is a sort of Superman, keeping his rage in check throughout the whole film until his pain and anger at the injustice of his life comes to a heady head in a climax that flashes red in more ways than one.

3.  Prospect

I love this movie.  This indie flick shot in the Hoh Rain Forest with costumes, set, and props handcrafted by the directors and yet completely evincing the feel of a space western set on a toxic, alien moon.  Each character comes to us fully formed, opaque as they are authentic.  Cee (Sophie Thatcher) has gotten as far as she has in life by being tough, but it's the glimpses we see of her vulnerable youth and the gradual growth of her character, somehow felt in our hearts more than our heads, that build to a surprisingly moving ending.  It's a testament to the writing that you never know what is going to come next, and yet after it happens you realize it couldn't have happened any other way.  Pedro Pascal as Ezra gristles through his lines with a delight as if he's a voiceover for a cowboy (or the narrator in Supergiant's Bastion), and really I couldn't give him a bigger compliment than that.  You're awash with Prospect's colors, or you can physically feel the drag of each labored breath that the characters make.  And you're inevitably bereft to come to the end of a story you have to let go of when emerging from the theater, surprised that you were able to exist elsewhere.

2. Burning

What can I say about this elusive movie that can properly convey how it affected me?  It's based on a Murakami short story, so there's jazz, al dente pasta, and an alienated asian man.  But Burning is so much more than that, existing primarily in the hazy blur between definite objects -- most of the key scenes are shot at beautiful dusk, Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) lives close enough to the demilitarized zone to hear the blares of North Korean propaganda, and answers are very rarely given straight, often only through elided metaphor.  Burning has hands down my favorite scene of the year, one that involves a dance at dusk that starts as a beautiful desire for more and then disintegrates into an utter lack of meaning.  For those few minutes, nothing else in the world exists.  I think it's criminal that Burning hasn't gotten more recognition this year, with its stunning cast, sophisticated script, and a story that clings like the smell of smoke settling into the fibers of your soul.  I don't know how Chang-dong Lee did it, making a movie that is even more Murakami-esque than the original source material, and yet something that's fiercely its own.  It's very much a tale of South Korea: its disparate wealth, its disaffected youth, and its simmering uncertainties and unfulfillments
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1. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

This is the first year that an animated movie has made it to my top ten (and also the first time Damien Chazelle has released a film that has not topped it -- sorry First Man​, although you had the best soundtrack by far).  It's surprising because I generally do love animations, and there's something both aesthetically and technically pleasing about a medium where you have to be aware of every single thing in each frame.  But it's been a while since an animation has made me feel as much as this one, and longer since one has made me want to see the world differently.  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a joyful feat, one that thrives on its originality and also in its familiarity.  Without hitting you over the head or trying to ram a message down your throat, it both expounds how important it is to find what makes you you while also opening our eyes to how meaningful it is to be able to look at someone else and say "I see you" and "I understand you".  It is a brilliant juggernaut of animation styles, of origin stories, and of sheer wonder.  And it's funny.  I don't know how it accomplishes all that.  There are moments you're overcome with the impossibility of what's before your eyes, and yet it's not as a spectator but as someone that is part of the experience.  It somehow makes a case for animations, for superhero movies, and for a Spider-Man movie in an overcluttered era of all three.  Go see it.  Move to the beat in your seat.  And leave the theater changed for the better.

10-6 here.

Cheers all.