2019 Movie Favorites - Top Five

Top Five. Read em and weep.

There's usually some connective tissue among the top five movies I pick for the year. Last year, they were all movies that moved me and made me think about the world differently or want to be a better person. This year, I think they're more movies about seeing beyond the surface in others and trying to understand less on personal terms and more on other's terms. Whether it's film, music, or literature...if we can engage in art that allows us to inhabit another's space -- that makes us somehow a stranger to ourselves -- then maybe we can try to understand each other a little better in this new decade. 

​5. Uncut Gems

Never have I so enjoyed a film I've been so unsettled by. The first fifteen minutes of Uncut Gems is just awful - it's an assault on your ears: a cacophony of synthesized soundtrack and yelled dialogue. And I can't remember the last time the discomfort of the theater audience was so visible to me - people were constantly shifting in their seats throughout the whole film. But something clicks for Uncut Gems after that first bit, and it becomes an adrenaline ride so potent that you want to sprint through the streets after the film comes to its explosive end. Adam Sandler's performance is a juggling and juggernautic act - you don't even like his character, but you can't help but be on the edge of your seat as you wonder holy hell...Is he actually going to pull it off? His life is a series of gambles and he thrives off the thrill of it -- he keeps chasing that high, and Uncut Gems makes us run with him. Powerful performances all around (Idina Menzel just kills), and just an unrelenting frenetic domino cascade that the Safdie brothers orchestrate perfectly. It's not a movie for everyone, but what a wild rollercoaster it is for those who can sit through it.

4. Booksmart

Okay, Booksmart had me from that first dance number Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) bust out together. Dever and Feldstein are charismatic comedic gold. That lit pool scene by director Olivia Wilde was one of my favorites of the year, accenting the whole odyssey of a night the two girls have been traversing. Have we finally found a high school graduation buddy film that doesn't involve sexual assault (hello Superbad, Can't Hardly Wait, Sixteen Candles, and SO much more)? YES but despite how progressive Amy and Molly are, they're still two high-school girls that are in an amorphous and painful stage of their lives. Booksmart asks us to look beyond the facades of those around us, where people can belong to more than one Hogwarts house, or be able to be more than one thing. It's funny, winsome, and an entirely heartwarming friendship film.

3. Transit

Is there a living filmmaker that channels Hitchcock as well as Christian Petzold does? His Phoenix is pretty much a love letter to Vertigo, and Transit plays with love, identity, and mysterious women in a way that feels displaced from our current time. Transit itself is in a setting without a discernible year. It has no technological earmarks, and its oppressive overtones could work just as well in 1940s as well as now, which is perhaps the most alarming element. The characters are literally in transit, attempting to flee Europe but stuck in a sort of purgatory. But these characters are also nebulous, toying with the past even as they try to abandon it. It's Antonioni-esque in its ellipses, but thoroughly Petzold in that last gasp of a scene.

2. The Farewell

Whether you agree with the custom or not is not the point. What's important is Billie's (a terrific Awkwafina, sorrowful and muted in turns) displacement from it. The Farewell is about Billie's distance from a Chinese culture that she finds bewildering. She's shot in pellucid blues and always given so much space in the frame, we feel that isolation with her. The Farewell, above anything else, delicately handles the discord we can feel from the cultures we were raised by. It has conflicting views of the needs of the group over the individual and how much of America is actually an American Dream (and isn't that something we wonder ourselves?). These are struggles that every immigrant and second generational faces. It's a movie that's as heartbreaking as it is funny - the familial situations that unfold as the family tries to keep the grandmother from finding out that she has cancer are on that fine line that make you either weep or cry. We may all express our love in different ways, but sometimes the best way to love someone is to relinquish ideas of wrong or right, to consider their feelings, and to try to understand where they come from.

1. Parasite

Parasite is Bong Joon Ho at his very best. The film is just technically and narratively flawless. The level of detail in the set (they built the houses of the two families!), the lighting (the different in the quality of the light between the two!), metaphorically (the stairs! The stone! The water!), and even the sound design (the sound of the car going by in the beginning to signal the "heist" part of the movie beginning!). There's not a single choice or detail that wasn't thought through. And it's Bong so of course it's going to be funny, satirically biting, and with camerawork as smooth as a baby's bottom. It's pretty much perfect as a sort of family hijinks movie until it hits the next act and then the film completely pulls the rug out from under you. The pacing is masterful. And yet, the best part of this? It's the utter pathos of the film. There is nothing more shattering than the realization for the family that no matter what they do, no matter what they scrabble at, there is simply no ascending the societal ladder. It's a devastating condemnation of our class disparity. Parasite isn't just my favorite of the year, I actually believe it just is the best film that 2019 produced.

Some honorable mentions:
Amazing Grace (I saw this on a tiny airplane screen -- please forgive me, Aretha -- and wow was it sublime), House of Hummingbird, Extreme Job, Hustlers (for J.Lo's performance alone. The Fiona Apple routine just slayed).

​10-6 of the year here.