Best of 2018 (Movies and TV)

Here's the list and if this intro is shorter than usual, just note that there's less and less to write about as far as unity of direction and theme in cinema as a whole, the line is so spread out thanks to streaming there's almost no way to get the whole picture. Titles proliferate faster than any one critic may see. The working professional (i.e. currently paid) critics get the screeners for the Oscar bids or go to press screenings, but for the rest of us, if we're no longer getting paid to see them, why would we even want to? Those of us with the right Hendrixian 'experience' prefer films that take the trappings of genre and twist them all up in to groovy, psychedelic tie-dye twists that then become a steep Eisentstein-Rosencrantz bridge deep into the heavy mystic. As Jim once sang, blowsy and belting: "tell all the people that you see: follow me.... follow me down!" OK Nation, world, let's goooo.

#1: (a Nic Cage Tie): 

MANDY

Dir Panos Cosmatos

Saturated in a druggy wash of deep reds and dark blacks there's so much beauty in every composition of this sludge rock vengeance masterpiece as to deserve a painted mirror you might win on the Seaside Heights boardwalk back in 1983, when you're an impressionable 14 year-old so every Frazetta cover blazes with aliveness. 1983 is also when this set, and deep in some magical forest deep in the Shadow Mountains... Cage is a lumberjack living in a very groovy pad with his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Happy as could be, they live as any of us might, eating dinner while agog in front of the TV, telling weird Erik Estrada knock-knock jokes, and rowing out to the center of the glassy lake out back --perfectly in tune and in trippy love, all captured in dreamy dissolves. Naturally a bunch of crazy acidhead Manson-esque Jesus freaks show up and... well... soon enough Nic has plenty of reason to go on a bizarro drug-fueled killing spree.



Throughout Cosmatos detours into sludgy canvasses of deep red and black, which if it's your favorite color combination as it is mine, you will love this sludgy film. In one of countless great choices, Cosmatos foregoes the usual heavy metal or hard rock classic soundtrack, aside from an unforgettable opening title set to "Starless and Bible Black" by King Crimson. The great, dearly departed Johan Johannson score lays a deep abstract Carpenter carpet underneath the wildness, occasionally going over the deep end as when Red (Cage) samples the jar of Black Rider grey jelly, a kind of super psycho-meth that hits him as instantly and crazily as any ever. As with Cosmatos' iconic debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, your familiarity with 70s-80s Canadian horror and sci-fi films, novels and heavy metal album covers, and mind-bending drugs isn't needed, but it sure helps. Add Cage at his wildest, and badass behavior from both him and Mandy in the face of pure evil and this movie leaps right over the... two moons?! This movie, I tell ya. The whole revenge of one simple man with chainsaw skills on a one-man druggie vendetta against Manson-esque Jesus freaks (and their demon allies) may not be terribly new, but what Cosmatos does is far more ballsy than just adding dour self-importance of social messaging, he brings in the supernatural in a way more holistic and connected than, say, Lynch does in Twin Peaks; The Return. And best of all, does the slow weird meaning-tentacled abstraction of strong psychedelic drugs better than any other working director today, x 2
(see full review: Acid-Etched Damascus)

MOM AND DAD

Dir. Brian Taylor

There's an ingeniously simple, savage, disturbing premise to this wild satire that basically sends a cold shot of Drano-laced meth up the IV tube that's been keeping suburban tract home 2.5 children family bliss/stasis stabilized with cheap corn sugar glucose nigh these 70 odd years (since the dawn of the suburbs at the close of WW2). Tapping into a kind of unspoken universal American rage but reversing the flow (instead of protecting children from harm, etc.) Nicolas Cage is letter perfect as the weirdo dad, and Selma Blair is a whole extra book of revelations as the spin class nervous breakdown mom and it's always nice when Lance Henriksen shows up, giving everyone--even crazy Cage--a lesson in balls-out crazy lunge-for-the-jug style acting. Best is the real-time single 24-hour time frame of events, the way--as in  the roots of what's going on are never overtly spelled out (beginning with the super weird early and confusing evacuation of school). I haven't enjoyed a movie this much since, well, ever. Mr. Bill's unruly industrial clatter/whoosh score keeps everything rolling with seven layers of ominous adrenalin. Director Brian Taylor is the nutcase who gave us Crank and Crank 2: High-Voltage in case you're wondering how he got so good at lunatic real-time mayhem and blacker-than-the-anti-sun comedy. He and Nic Cage were made for each other, as they already proved in the 2012 guilty pleasure Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance!   I mean, just look at Cage in the pic there, have you ever seen a man crazier? He's right up there with Toni Collette in Hereditary as far as new high water mark level of nuts, which, in our Trumpian post-wasteland, I think more than sums up the tenor of the time.

3. HEREDITARY

Dir. Ari Aster

Successfully goes where others of this decade have only tried, namely to the whole "is there a difference between inherited bi-polar manic depression, and literal matriarchal conspiracies of witches?" split. There's room for both answers in all the best films on the subject, like Rosemary's Baby, and even the ones that are only partly successful (House of the Devil, The Witch, Lords of Salem). The subject--when examined right--treads so close to the line where acute perception--reality stripped of its facade--becomes paranoid schizophrenic insanity that it's very easy to forget which side of it you're on at any given times.  Living with a person suffering from such a problem, always teetering over the edge, is truly unnerving. Thanks to a terrifyingly vivid performance by Toni Collette (the most tragically scary mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook) we get just how tragic and extra-deep that rabbit hole vortex goes.

It's funny to read all the backlash from critics, after hearing it compared it to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby (I think it's actually better than the former). The other backlash, from the public, is based on how traumatized they are by seeing certain people of certain ages having certain bad things happen to them onscreen. The set-up for Hereditary's big early-inning shock is so subtle and deflective we feel the way audiences must have felt the first time seeing Psycho.

The weird thing is that none of this stuff seems at all gratuitous or even sadistic - it's all leading to a certain place and every chill is earned. This is no 90 minute thrill ride but a solid legitimately rich character study that marks the crossroads between mental illness's effects on families and the way paranoia about witchcraft and life after death exacerbates these effects. Is devil worship a system created out of our brain's compulsive need to find hidden systems and motivations that explain away the random events of nature and our tiny place in it? Or has a life of being manipulated by Satanic forces have permanently warped even our most mundane collective conceptions of reality? Rosemary's Baby explored these same questions but, as that film's dream sequence reminded us, it left a whole ocean unexplored, with enough unsounded depth to make a dozen such voyages as full of terrifying epiphany and 'take-away' madness as the first.

Best of all is the ways Aster clearly gets what's wrong with modern horror films--the overly detailed horror make-ups and unearned shocks with bombastic mickey mouse music cues--and eliminates it all. Watching Halloween again for the first time in a few years I especially noticed that, during the whole extended climax, the single note ominous repeating 'dun... dun.... dun..." during the closet upstairs sequence is preceded by a whole downstairs thing with no music whatsoever! The silence is more terrifying than any movie could be, and I wondered how overbearing a modern orchestral score would have made that sequence, feeling all our fear for us like a micro-managing den mother. The climax of Hereditary is right up there and a reminder of the effectiveness of silence as well as music: Colin Stetson's score underlies this with weird eerie drones, sparing but unremitting --other horror film composers should take a mighty heed. (see also: Hereditary Witchcraft Reader)

4. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Dir. Orson Welles (w/ Peter Bogdanovich)

Thanks to the more decisive, less debilitatingly brilliant mind of long-time Welles' friend and biographer, director Peter Bogdanovich, and state-of-the-art digital remastering, the last unfinished Welles film about the last day in the life of a Wellesian director working on his last, unfinished film is finally.... well, finished. What makes it even more meta is that Peter Bogdanovich plays such a key character in the film, as more or less himself, and he finished it, with John Huston filling in for Orson. Together they seem to be working through the angles of male friendship, biographer-subject, father-son, remora-shark, fan-hero, and apostle-Christ --which suits the unique nature of the finished product so well it seems like fate--like the ultimate metatextual Welles flourish, as if he knew the film couldn't be finished until long enough after he died that Bogdanovich could use digital means to clean-up the film stock and have the chutzpah to tackle such a mammoth project. It may be Bogdanovich's best film as well as one of Welles's, with film quality and sound are so good it's hard to imagine this wasn't all filmed a few months ago -it's actually better than new, even, since it's on film - and every frame is lovingly color-saturated or otherwise cleaned up to the point it all shines better than any new dime. As the Welles-like director, Huston is another great meta-choice, for he--like Welles--was a raconteur genius working outside/inside the system. And when he discusses having boxed with Hemingway etc we know we're getting a fair dose of himself (for Welles never boxed, obviously). And it's no easy feat to play a high-functioning alcoholic at a party surrounded by sycophants and needy technicians wondering what they're getting paid for and when they will be, over years and years when it's all set in one night. So fractured it's set to the rhythms of a crowded moveable feast party like few I've seen, sustaining itself at a glib raconteur height Altman only reached a few times in his whole oeuvre. Especially as Huston gets progressively drunker and more belligerent, it transcends narrative and dating in a way that makes similar films--8 1/2 for example, seem horribly mawkish and antiquated.

As in that film, we realize much of a director's life is spent being hounded by underlings--writers, make-up artists, personal assistants, young girl intern/eye candy/drink getters, and sycophants galore, all wanting to either get on or stay on his good side and/or payroll. Swirling in and around a 70th birthday party that involves screening the director's unfinished, very artsy and psychedelic late 60s hippie movie (the kind of thing neither Welles nor Huston would ever do, presumably) on the one hand, and the movie itself on the other (and for the end, a fatal intersection of the two), The Other Side is a relentless attention grabber, full of blink-and-miss clever edits, guns, mannequins, and retorts zippy enough that by the time you untangle their genius, three more have passed you by.

The film-within-the-film is harder to peg. Certainly it's definitive Welles--with deep focus Dali-esque compositions reminiscent of passages in Welles' Othello but--especially during the psychedelic stretch of film that finds the heroine in a deserted train station in the desert, then a rainy street at night, a psychedelic rock club bathroom, and subsequent getting it on in a car in the rain with no music but the sound of the wipers and the clack of her bead neckless against her breasts as she gyrated atop this beautiful but similarly mute boy. With all the brilliant, lovingly restored colors, the sequence, lasting well over 15 minutes, is a marvel all its own evoking, of all things, Amer's co-directors Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani with its intelligently arranged sequence of open-ended surrealist imagery.ich in rich Suspiria colors. With its tail of a beautiful blank looking boy feebly following a Cher-like Native American woman--unsmiling and dead-eyed throughout--the dour mood of dream-like student film art-for-art's sake seems to be almost mocking Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, yet is so rife with Welles' signature expressionist style it kind of takes off anyway. We certainly can't blame Welles for wanting 'in' on this new type of Age of Aquarius expressionism, since he invented some of it.

Taken all in all, Wind is one of the biggest, best surprises of the decade. It fulfills the promise so many 'last films' never seem to do, ala Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again . Since Welles isn't around to second guess and overthink it into endless abstraction, it's a real gift to cinema that someone who 'gets' Welles and knew him and respected his notes almost slavishly, yet is a talent in his own right, was there to pick up the million pieces and finish what may be one of the best 70s movies of the 21st century. Though again, not unlike most of Welles' work, the overall effect seldom transcends its maker's larger-than-life male ego. The hall of mirrors climax of Lady from Shanghai is again the definitive Welles' image, albeit with him firing at himself firing at himself, self-love and epiphanic realization of that love's hollowness revolving in an endless reverse ouroboros. Doesn't matter, though - his gun never misses and his puking bite is never totally fatal. He even lets a few female characters make their comments. A bitchy lady critic (played with gusto by Susan Strasberg) get in some cruel barbs before someone punches her out. Auteurs will be boys, after all. Hey, speaking of boys...

5. THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

Surreal and strange in ways that evoke erotic deconstructions like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve, but in an homage to a kind of Haynes-Jarman rough trade queerness with a dash of Maddin and, and of course, Clockwork Orange,  this surreal fable concerns a gang of unruly violent boys (all played by girls in drag) forced into a Captains Courageous kind of youth rehabilitation program cure after they brutalize their literature teacher (once a voodoo-like spirit of violent destruction overtakes them during a masked drunken performance art version of the opening three witches scene of  Macbeth). After a brutal period at sea, collared to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the captain's whim, they wind up on a  mysterious island with sexually active vegetation, the ever-present smell of oysters ("the whole island is an oyster") that has strange hormonal magic, including the ability to make boys grow breasts, and watch as their penises fall off into the relentless surf. Drinking milky manna from phallic tubers and screwing flytrap style flower monsters, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango may well and goodly be conjured here, with the overall effect transcending anything so mundane as tawdriness, or morality.

And while they may be girls, these kids are still badasses, though, soon joining forces with a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Elina Löwensohn [Nadja]), sexually devouring and killing randy sailors. Or something. Touching Lord of the Flies meets The Blue Lagoon kind of castaway weirdness, this is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies and volcano penises erupting into bubbling crevasses. What does it all mean? You know damned well: when surrealism sets sail, the wind that blows the ship forward is the gas bag exhalation of meaning dying in its conformist straitjacket back on shore. When French women put on male drag, they swagger and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, it's really something. Shot in startling black and white with forays into surreal 16mm color, this exercise in gender bending psychosexual surrealism is a breath of fresh island air, salty with sex, oysters, and horny vegetation, the sequences at sea are great too - not sure how they did it, but its some of the best stormy ocean, (non-CGI) floundering ship work I've seen in a long time. (in French with English subtitles) - See full review: Isles of Lowensohn

6. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Dir. Boots Riley

A fresh new African American voice, pitched somewhere between the social surrealism of Michel Gondry, the urban agency of Spike Lee, and the savage middle class satire of Jody Hill, Boots Riley announces "I am here" with a truly weird and engaging feature debut. In some weird alternate LA, slacker Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) intends to pay rent on his uncle's garage apt. as soon as he gets a job. He's got a cute girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson)-- an artist/activist who works spinning a sign on the street, but who aims at something better, so Cassius better pull himself out of his slacker spiral before she moves on. Working largely on commission as a telemarketer, Cassius flounders until he's counseled by a wise cubicle neighbor (Danny Glover) on finding his 'white boy voice' - which means he's soon dubbed by David Cross and moving up the ladder, selling arms and slave labor but making so much money he can't complain, even as he sells out his former co-workers, now unionizing. Meanwhile there's a controversial work camp arrangement heavily advertised as an options to the struggle, one where all bills are paid, needs are met, and you live where you work, eat and sleep all in the same place - though apparently once the Wal-Mart-ish sheen is stripped off, it's slavery. From there it only gets weirder including a WTF moment so insane I can't spoil it (it wasn't spoiled for me, I won't do it for you). You're bound to laugh at least once, nervously, and come away with new ways of asking the right questions so wrongly they don't even need an answer.

7. ZAMA
Dir. Lucretia Martel

As serenely brutal and sexually hostile as an Ilsa film stretched to slow motion (sans Dyanne Thorne), Martel's adaption of a popular Argentine historical novel stars Daniel Jiminez Cacho as the sexually-frustrated magistrate of a sweltering Spanish outpost in South America in the late 1600s. Desperate to return to civilization and his family but needing the approval of an almost entirely absent governor/treasurer, Zama spends his day hearing complaints that underly the horrifying systemic brutality and oppression of the enslaved caste of natives, trying to keep his libido under control (he refuses to 'lower' himself with one of the eminently available local native girls), and inevitably feeling himself dragged as if by magnetic force towards the horny wife of the treasurer, said treasurer being one of the few men whose good word might get him transferred. Better go careful, Zama! Enterprising slaves are ever watching and listening at keyholes as the only racially acceptable woman in town trots out heady bottles of rum, her crooked powdered wig and corseted bosom wobbling with boozy heat. Meanwhile rumors of a rapist bandit sneaking into the village during the afternoons finally drives Zama to form a posse and head into the jungles.

Borrowing elements of Herzog's kind of deep focus documentary-style canvas approach to the ambivalence of the jungle while ladling on her own masterful ability to index an array of characters moving and parrying at cross-purposes inside a frame, Martel takes on gorgeous tracking shots through room after room of fascinating, heat-ravaged tableaus. Ever trying and failing to conquer the natural world and their own inner urges, the 'civilized' Spaniards literally fall to pieces. Tarkovsky-esque--disoriented sound design amps the paranoia, thrusting us up against Zama's nose as he navigates clustered hallways where tall powdered wings wave like unsteady ship prows atop heat-drunk heads, native slaves stand around in silent opprobrium, the in-between caste does their chores, and by the time one's decoded the meaning of what's going on, the chance to do anything about it is long past. Brilliant, but withering, and without any of the maternal comfort offered by some Martel's previous films, Zama is a dish as potent and pungent as a punch in the head with an soaked sock full of sea-slimed emeralds. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

8. ROMA

Dir Alfonso Cuaron

Clearly a letter of love and gratitude to Cuaron's maid/nanny while growing up, a reverie of life in a big family in Mexico City circa 1971 actually functions together with Zama as an almost sequel (even the names are familiar, neither has any music --relying instead on a tapestry of diegetic sound--and Martel made a similar film to Roma in her feature debut, La Cienega) - showing the result of all that Spanish colonization in the 1600s. Here it is a mere 180 or so years later, Native South Americans aren't enslaved anymore, but rather work as servants to the more European-blooded upper middle class or else scrabble around in the outskirt slum areas. The mostly silent maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is much loved by the children and the mom even though she seldom cleans up after the dog (it clearly needs to be walked more often), so there's piles of shit all over the driveway. She winds up pregnant (the boyfriend disappears as soon as he hears) and eventually finds a sort of peace in the arms of a household where the men run off and abandon and their women and children. Told mostly in long slow pans, the shots are amazing. The standout: an extended sequence of the grandmother and maid trying to buy a crib at a furniture store while a full-blown bloodbath riot goes on outside (ala the car attack in his Children of Men), leading to her water breaking; their attempt to get to the hospital in the thick of tear gas and traffic and climaxing in a genius over-crowded public hospital (where the deadbeat husband happens to work as a doctor). It's topped later in an amazing glide shot that follows Cleo from the beach out into the deep deep water to rescue the kids nearly swept out to sea in rough tides over the holiday. From far up the beach all the way out to the whirling depths without the slightest tremor in the camera, there's not even salt spray on the lens. It's beyond amazing. Every inch of the screen is used for masterful compositions, the incredible extended sequences, and invisible acting, make this one a real winner despite the 'have your cake and critique the power structure that made someone else bake it for you' subtext. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

9. EIGHTH GRADE

Dir Bo Burnham 

Lots of angst and pain in this torturously awkward film. Set in the last days of junior high school as experienced by a typically awkward girl, it posits the terrors we all felt as children in the horrible 'body changes' portion of childhood (that we tend to block from our memories as if some brutal assault). With this film they come flooding back, and we learn since we escaped the self-consciousness has been amped to eleven thanks to the proliferation of smartphone technology. Now, every awkward attempt at socialization shall be preserved and disseminated amidst a teen's peers faster than you can even regret what you just said. The one advantage: even with no hits you can pretend you're sort-of famous. First-time feature director Bo Burnham (see his comedy specials on Netflix, please!) keeps the acne-ridden face of our frumpy heroine front and center, forcing us into a kind of aesthetic corner, a self-conscious nightmare prison. It all climaxes in a horrifyingly tense backseat seduction attempt that will be truly illuminating to a lot of men. It's all illuminating, but in the end all it perhaps does is remind us why we blocked those memories out, making us wonder if Bo's a sadist or just trying for a unique catharsis. It succeeds in both counts, but I never want to see it again.

10. INFINITY WAR

Dir. Anthony and Joe Russo

Speaking of unaccountable dread, this WAR was so epic it gave me an anxiety attack and I had to stop watching (on Blu-ray) and go to bed, where I dreamt of it. The idea that a power could come along and beat all the superheroes in a massive fight was too much to bear in my sensitive state. And yet, as a proponent of population control I couldn't argue with the logic of the ruthless intergalactic monster played so well by the great Josh Brolin as the villainous Thanos. Our world especially could use a good 'halving' to the overpopulation levels we had during the time of Soylent Green, when we were only at 3 1/2 billion and worried that, if left unchecked, our population growth would kill the planet. Now, of course, it's already too late. So no one--Thanos aside--even brings it up. Leave it to Marvel and their sympathetic villains, to point out the elephants choking up every available free space in the room. But that's not even the reason this rocks so hard. On earth and in space, the wit and energy flow nonstop, the battles so ingeniously staged, the mood so dire, so much at stake, that it's hard to find a single dead spot, I mean aside from the soapy, tiresome Vision and Scarlet Witch romance (just writing that sentence I hear Juliette Binoche laughing derisively behind me) and the buzzkilling Pepper Potts-Stark inter-helmet 'be careful' moments. The rest of the time, the action and wit overlap in genius doses -- the superheroes all working as such a quick, focused team that it's jaw-dropping. The pick for most critics as the best Marvel this year was Black Panther, and while it was great and with a potent social message, it it got a little too 'real' and some of the banter seemed a tad too chipper. No, I think the best one was actually Ant Man and the Wasp. Call me crazy, but they're all winners! They'll stand the test of time, and constant reruns. Unlike the depressing Eighth Grade, I'm looking forward to seeing this one again, albeit in bits and pieces, safely broken up by commercials on FX, and FXX, especially after the second part is released so I can rest, presumably, and get down from the stark, terrifying cliff we're left hanging from.

11. HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

Dir. John Cameron Mitchell

Philophile director John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) turns Neil Gaiman's graphic novella into a punk rock sci-fi odyssey about the healing glory of love and music (surprise!). Alex Sharp stars as Enn, an insecure punk rock fanzine artist growing up in 70s Thatcher-period England. Brave when it come to plastering ugly stickers around his drab Coyden hometown, he's shy as hell when it comes to girls. "They're not from another planet!" counsels the more confident alpha in his little posse of mates. When the lads crash the wrong post-gig house party, they find themselves partying with a color-coded latex-wearing hive mind collective that pretty much proves that adage wrong. Self-organized according to a chakra-style energy scale, engaged in super weird dances and ceremonies, they'd weird the boys in Enn's crew out, except this is the 70s, mate, and this may be some new wave fad. Meanwhile, upstairs, doe-eyed Zann (Elle Fanning) wants to get out and actually explore something of this grotty new world that the rest of them are only passing by on a worlds tour. She wants to get off the bus and go native, so she runs off with Enn into the Croyden night. Thanks to Mitchell's gifts with setting mood, and the stars' own chemistry, we feel their connection. Their time together is magical... even in Croyden!

After Zann catches the eye of local punk den mother Bodacia (Nicole Kidman in a silver wig) things get even more intense. Played with her Aussie badass roots exposed to the core, Nicole Kidman gives us a throaty ferocity we haven't seen from her in years. She'd make it worth seeing all by herself but other highlights come raining down like stardust: The song Enn and Zann sing on her club stage evolves and leads them to a full blown mystical encounter replete with swirling cosmic forces. And if you've kind of hated yourself for being reduced to tears by Hedwig's "Origin of Love" back in the 90s, you'll be glad that this one ("Eat Me Alive") just gives us deep punk rock chills, with a foray into Ziggy cosmic wonderment instead - with the blazing energy so well visualized you'll feel like you're getting off on good ecstasy at the best punk rock show of your teenage life. And like ecstasy and punk, its sense of love transcends dichotomies like sex/death, fear/desire: it's the love that has no opposite, and Mitchell--like few others--knows where the sweet spot it.

That's Mitchell's big gift to the world, but he has another too, music (or are they the same?): his you-are-there camera and sound mixes really capture the live punk rock basement club event momentum. You can hear the instruments echoing off the low cavernous ceiling of the club, yet it's all vivid and electric and immediate. It's maybe the best-mixed live punk music I've ever heard --raw and immediate, powerful and yet low-fi, both celestial and punk rock earth. I'm not sure, but I think Mitchell may have just redeemed the entirety of the long-sold-out punk rock movement with this one film, and I think Ziggy would like it as much as Iggy  - and isn't that the whole Mitchell mission? Accomplished. 

TeleVision

--

1. THE SHIVERING TRUTH

Created by Vernon Chatman
(Adult Swim)

Adult Swim continues their descent into the void with this mind-bending claymation spectacular from the demented mind of Vernon Chatman (Wonder Showzen). Following a kind of Rod Serling-meets-the "in a world" movie trailer voiceover narrator, we go on a bizarre free associative trip into the looking glass with the result being like the entire run of The Twilight Zone all compressed into 15 minute windows, liberally dosed with weird sex, violence, and Cronenbergian new flesh appendage removal, the "yes -and" improv-style relentless compounding lunacy of it all has reduced me to rolling on the ground convulsing with laughter like I haven't done sober ever. There's no going back after this. It's so out there it makes pretenders to the throne of strange wilt and fold. Accept it.

 2. BABYLON BERLIN

Created by Tom Twyker, et al

(Netflix)

Germany's big budget TV series revolves around the "first female police detective" in Weimar Berlin, a time between the two world wars, when Berlin, mired in economic depression, became an art, sex and crime mecca. Prostitution, homosexuality, drug addiction, pornography (silent era), and a decadent cross-dressing night club chanteuse master criminal white Russian equals the dusky TV series equivalent of a great, trashy, page-turning massive paperback of sexy historical fiction. If it eventually runs out of time without winding up in any profound way, well, is history any different? I like that the male-female crime-solving team of prostitute/party girl (Liv Lisa Fries) and drug-addicted police detective (Volker Bruch) become close without sex, and that the National Socialist party is only--at the very end--just starting make a brownshirt ruckus. The plot concerns, among other things, the planned assassination of a Treaty of Versailles-adhering politician and a train car full of gold fought over by an array of sordid but fascinating characters, commies, and causes, but the take-aways are the details along the way, like the rollicking song ("Zu aush, Zu Staub") that acts as the club's big theme. It's all done with great style and atmosphere, complex, hearty performances, and excellence all around. Acidemically, it's great to see a girl whose love of champagne and dabbling in prostitution doesn't mar her self-esteem and lead to tired self-sacrifice like it would in the states even during pre-code times, and a genuinely complex (neither good nor all-the-way) villain in the portly red-faced corrupt cop Bruno (Peter Kurth) partner. (in German with English subtitles)

 --

3. MANIAC

Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga / Created by Patric Somerville

(Netflix)

One of the first shows since Rick and Morty to seamlessly integrate psychotherapy into science fiction, this alternate reality sci-fi dramedy (?) stars Jonah Hill and Emma Stone as participants in a looney drug-AI trial, meeting and becoming good friends during deep dream realities managed by an artificial intelligence that takes their hang-ups and repressions and builds scenarios that will help them process and move on. Or something. As with the above Sorry to Bother You, it's set in an alternate reality and occurs largely at a big retrofuturist pharmaceutical corporation during a week-long drug trial / sleep over. They together or alternately move through adventures ranging from LOTR elvin sojurns, mobster dramas, white trash lemur reclamation, and high end through-the-looking glass bending of the light between dreams and virtual reality.

With great lighting and deep human insight as well as tapping into that great sleep-over feel (as participants are in this cool 70s-modular deep bunker within a giant pharmaceutical corporation for an entire week) it evokes 60s-70s vintage sci-fi films (and modern retrofuturist wonders like Beyond the Black Rainbow). The only wrong notes are the terrible name (there's already a downbeat 1980 horror movie by the same name, its remake, and at least one other movie or TV show also called Maniac!) and Dan Romer's opportunity-squandering score, for he passes over the modular synths and analog Moogs (imagine the seat-rumbling analog insanity Sionoa Caves or Tom Raybould could have brought to this!) in favor of the same alterna-twee folksy nonsense that's been warning men away from rom-coms since Garden State. Justin Theroux and Sonoya Mizumo are a great team as the brainy scientists who put the whole thing together, and try to fix it when it all falls apart. Sally Field is Theroux's Dr. Phil-like daytime TV therapist mom, called in to relate to the AI when it starts to go rogue. Considering the rumor that the show itself got its start through a computer program reading and assembling elements of the most watched Netflix shows, it's mad meta. Don't even worry about where it's headed or why, just note the similarity to films like John Dies at the End and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and know that's a good thing.

4. THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA

Created/developed: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
(Netflix)

Aided by a stunning cast this gorgeously wicked show is one of the first to make full use of the modern HD widescreen TV as its primary frame, filling every corner of the screen with sumptuous dark detail. The story is one of the ubiquitous teen fantasies --the 'there's a magical society operating right under our townie mortal noses and if we meet the right friends or hit the right birthday--we'll get to join and leave suburban tedium behind' trip. I spent the season hoping Sabrina would sign the book of the devil and be damned forever yet bestowed with countless evil powers since her smarmy mortal half was a drag. Unfortunately she lets herself be dragged down, as so many girls in real life are who are destined for bigger and better things, by love for some doomed luddite townie named Harvey--the fantasy equivalent of not going to college because your dumb boyfriend didn't get accepted. Still, it all works because though aimed at younger viewings there are ample killings and exclamations like "Thank Satan you're all right!" by worried aunts. As for the adults, all very fine with a real full-blooded stand-out in the evil Michelle Gomez (aka "The Master" in later seasons of Dr. Who) as Satan's henchwoman, so relishes her own wickedness we practically are inhaled through the screen in her torrent of marvelous evil.

5. BIG MOUTH

by Nick Krohl and John Mulaney
(season 2 - Netflix)

Amazingly instructive as well as relentlessly horrifying, there's abundant wit and compassion in this hilarious animated examination of those 'special changes' that demarcate puberty. Nick Krohl and John Mulaney once again star, with Jordan Peele doing the voice of the irrepressible ghost of Duke Ellington. This time there's a special "Planned Parenthood" episode, a drug episode and great new characters like the Depression Kitty and, most memorably, the Shame Wizard makes his debut and never leaves. Voiced with real slippery charm by David Thewlis, his undermining all the children with deep age-appropriate insecurity becomes the runaway scene stealer of the season. The snippy gay aesthete kid also finds a bit of a guide in a chance encounter with a Fierstein-ish neighbor at an bachelor apartment complex (Broh! He even vapes). All the good stuff more than makes up for the sleazier aspects like the eternally horny Jay and his talking sex pillow's rivalry with a downstairs couch cushion.

Yeesh, is that how I'm going to end this year round-up, talking about Jay's cushions?

Change of Subject: How about a shout-out to:

 FORGED IN FIRE 

(History Channel)

The best reality series on TV, a re-exhumation of the Iron John power that men sorely need and women inherently gravitate to (host Will Willis is the mancrush of his era). It fills a starved-for-positive male images nation with hope. Tapping into the riddle of steel has never seemed more accessible and vital. Even if no one is going to move into metalsmithing after watching it, we need this show's wild man archetypal power. Hurrah. We may be saved, after all. If you're listening guys: more ballistics dummies and fewer animal carcasses, please!

---

SOUNDTRACK COLLECTION:

SEE ALSO:
BEST OF 2017

BEST OF 2016
BEST OF 2015

BEST OF 2014

BEST OF 2013

BEST OF 2012

BEST OF 2011

BEST OF 2010

BEST OF 2009

BEST OF 2008

BEST OF 2007

BEST OF 2006

BEST OF 2004 (popmatters)

Best of the -00s: (2000-2010)

+

Last Year's Masks: THE PURGE, THOR: THE DARK WORLD + ABSENTIA

Mainstream movies have become mash-ups now, their big budgets making an original thought too risky to have except in the abstract. So THE PURGE is HUNGER GAMES + HALLOWEEN divided by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT + HOSTEL = a dystopian future that uses a mischief night-style no rules (no cops) bloody free-for-all as an excuse for wiping out the homeless, bringing population levels under control, boosting sales of home security systems, settling old grudges and/or hunting 'the most dangerous game.'  It shares HOSTEL's grim nihilistic world view that all humans are really homicidal sadists at heart, and only the rich liberals get to sit it out behind steel shutters. So far so good, but like so many good premises before it, PURGE never dares to side with the violent. It has to all boil down to a rich white noble yuppie family with a poor sweaty black man duct taped to a chair, which then leads to moralistic hand-wringing as to whether surrender him to the masked yuppie marauders outside who had him all trussed up like a pinata before he escaped down their rich street hollering for help and convincing Ethan Hawke's typically naive liberal son to open the shutters for him. The masked yuppies are pissed and so camp out on Hawke's porch demanding their man. Now, that might sound cool but why do they need to wear masks at all on a night murder is legal? And why don't they just hunt down someone else, instead of wasting precious 'Purge' hours wandering around outside like a mix of Whit Stillman preppies and the British drunks in STRAW DOGS, dressed in ur-creepy masks lifted from THE STRANGERS. And finally you're like oh brother, can't we FF to the final bloodletting? (We did).

In other words, despite a novel premise it just falls back on trite civics lessons, it all but ends with the cast wagging their fingers at you for allegedly enjoying the carnage. But unlike say FUNNY GAMES there's nothing at play behind the bourgeois pose, so the wife is a hot, willowy shoulder length hair brunette thing (Leana Headey) in perfectly-fitting white slacks that compliment her perfectly round long-stemmed burgundy wine glass, like she was ordered out of a West Elm catalog, and of course the dad is Ethan Hawke--say no more (only Linklater seems to know how to wake him)--and the nerdy liberal likes to build robot cameras on wheels, so you just know those things are going to come through in a climactic moment later on. There are some nice touches like people putting blue flowers on their porches in honor of the Purge (a kind of Christmas tree for state-sanctioned murder!) and good use of 'tick-tock momentum,' but the shots of masked figures standing silently in the dark backgrounds are by now cliche, and the plot's over-reliance on Voight-Kampf empathy test double fake-out machina climaxery is groan-inducing. FEAR tread a similar climactic territory and bravely stepped outside itself to kick gonzo bananas ass, and that movie was ten times better for the presence of Mark Wahlberg playing up the animus core of the sexual anxiety dread of it all. That film was bright enough to realize the villain needs to be the star. He only gets one night a year to make it work, and so this one night he's the fucking star not you, Ethan!! RAARRGHGHH!

And that's the kind of animus dread the film needs. If, for example, one of the liberal family members had been all keen to do some killing of their own, there might be some counter-currents to the lefty posturing; but there aren't, and sp the only character worth a damn is the main villain played with eerie grace by Rhys Wakefield (he's Australian, no surprise considering his Heath Ledger-ish psycho flair) and he's shut out of the house for most of the film, because you know, the film presumes we'd rather hang with dad than run amok on mischief night. And the idea that Hawke could outslug him in the finale is offensive.

Like so many 'weaker' versions of this story, THE PURGE confuses 'true' morality with hippie do-goodism. Ethan Hawke and writer-director James DeMonaco are trying to make an EL DORADO to go with their RIO BRAVO that was their ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake. Dude, you ain't never gonna touch the Carpenter or the Hawks! Carpenter's 1978 original ASSAULT was made on no money but oh, that awesome electronic score, and the realization of true morality, which is a code expressed between people via cigarettes and dwindling shell supplies not finger-wagging and hand-wringing. Dududadah... DUHdududadah... Dududdadah... DaDududaha.

THE PURGE has earned $64 million so far and cost a mere three, and so a sequel is naturally in the works. The only reason I even rented it was I'd gotten it mixed up with YOU'RE NEXT... and that's why you never let a stranger in your house (without first looking him up on imdb).

Then there's the thing with the new THOR movie, THE DARK WORLD (2013). I was excited to see Natalie Portman again because she and Chris Hemsworth had such great chemistry in the first film, but both seem drenched in bronzer, much older than the two years since the last film, and hungover. That leaves Kat Dennings to supply all the human complexity and witty patter and she steals all her scenes, deftly avoiding the bronzer's brush and committee rewrite overthink in the process. The other saving grace in DARK: the complex arc of fraternal bonding and jealousy between trickster archetype Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and adoptive brother Thor. If Hemsworth's Nordic god lacks a lot of the Valhalla character arcing he had under Kenneth Branagh's wing in the first installment (he's now weened of brashness), Hiddleston's Loki is still a fully complex and unrepentant, with extra depth awarded as he's allowed to have loved his mother and be full of equal anguish to Thor after she dies). A sublime mixture of Sex Pistols swagger and Royal Shakespeare posh, Hiddleston wakes Hemsworth from his CGI slumber in their big fraternal moments together.

Alas, Dennings and Hiddleston aren't around nearly enough and a lot of the rest of it seems coasting on fumes it stole from other films' exhaust pipes. Portman especially, clad in steampunk-meets-Renaissance Faire ensembles, posed against pretty, off-world skies and burnished gleaming CGI furniture from the Maxfield Parrish collection, looks like she's just beamed over from Lucas' Star Wars outtakes as a favor. One of the things that makes Marvel movies great is they usually don't open up with long elaborate prefaces about far-away armies battling the forces of darkness like we're supposed to be instantly invested in all that overly familiar backstory scrolling. That's the kind of thing Uwe Boll or George Lucas or Paul W.S. Anderson do, not Marvel... until now.

I'm not blaming anyone for the dull sameness --acting in all that blue screen must be like wading through a swamp. In the first film (it made my 2011 top ten!), director Kenneth Branagh kept the Shakespeare underpinnings alive and resonant below the manly muscles and CGI, but two dudes; Alan Taylor and James Gunn direct this one and together they bury those underpinnings deeper than even the zombie bard himself could reach.

That said, I've been a big fan of these Marvel films overall, the last THOR and most X-MEN (all but #3) especially, reward multiple viewings and never take themselves too seriously or lose their focus on both mythic / political / and personal levels, and keep their heroes and villains in shades of grey (unlike DC's dry civics lesson lecturing and vigilante headlines). Marvel scripts are often things of beauty, boiling vast prequels of exposition down to a few droll quips and no one is all the way hero or villain - the good guys have flaws: narcissism, drinking, insecurity, anger issues, passive aggressive relationship avoidance, and the bad guys have soft spots, stray rays of compassion, fraternal history and charisma --often all that separates them is one or two choices made along the way, the selfish vs. altruistic, a hard choice any of us could fail to make given the circumstances.

That said, THOR: THE DARK WORLD lapses into DC self-importance and narrative-deadening, with exposition of almost DA VINCI CODE-levels, and the whole aesthetic of the 'Dark Elves' looks like the filmmakers think fantasy franchises are there to combine and pilfer from rather than be inspired by. These 'elves' drive vertical tie-fighters and look like Klingon Mordor Palpatine Voldemorts with albino ponytails and masks that make them welcome at THE PURGE. Asgard looks so much like the Emerald City or Mongo in the 1980 FLASH GORDON that when it's zippy force field goes up you just know that shit must be intentional.  Still, the first THOR was made by people who understood how the mythic and personal were the same at the same time, all the time, whereas this film doesn't know what personal experience means, only what happens in other movies. Even Asgard looks different, there's less gravity-defying double sided flat earth wonder --in favor of an elaborate activated charcoal-look, as if everything was strategically petrified and bronzed. Weaponized, with trimmings, rather than in the first film, when it was merely wondrous.

From top: Emerald City, Asgard, Mongo

These "Dark Elves" only have one saving grace: their nihilistic devotion to wiping out all life in all seven dimensions, a noble pursuit reminding me a lot of how I feel when I'm super cranky and hung over and trying to take a nap while kids scream outside my window and trucks back up beep beep beep beep and car alarms go off all up and down 7th Avenue for no reason. Oh to know that some power might just shut it all down, forever. But unless you really make that clear, that kind of cranky motivation, why bother? The motivation for wanting eternal darkness has to be something we can understand, why should we consider these elves anything other than pixels or their cause anything but trite groupthink backstory? Branagh let whole scenes unfold in the first film, start to end: the men went out drinking; SHIELD got in everyone's way trying to understand and control what was going on; there were diners and a sense of place and time. Here we understand less than SHIELD did in the first film, but at least they cared. Where are they now? Why aren't they concerned with time dilation? Does ABC keeps them too busy?

Luckily there is a great finale, involving a big battle that rages across numerous dimensions and planets via holes in the aligned realms, wherein gravity disappears or fluctuates --and all the ancient monuments turn out to have been built during this same alignment to point the way to when it would happen again! Dude, that's some ancient alien shit, explaining how all these megalithic stones were moved without electricity, but they gloss right over it. Onto the big finale! It's rushed and too pleased with its CGI landscapes and steampunk landing gears and red glowing forge grenades, but the final seven plane battle is so tight that I was, there in that overly-heated theater, for just a moment, brought giddily back to the Jack Kirby-drawn and Stan Lee-scripted brain-melters of the Silver Age. And even bad Marvel is better than most. They can't all be directed by Joss Whedon, Kenneth Branagh, Jon Favreau, Bryan Singer or J.J. Abrams. Can they?

From top: Prometheus, Dark World, Potter, Absentia

Speaking of dark worlds, ABSENTIA (2010): Katie Parker and Courtney Bell are two adult but still young sisters, one of whom is pregnant in the process of declaring her husband dead after seven long years in the titular legal limbo; the younger one (Parker) comes to help with the pregnancy, this after some trouble with drugs and now she's allegedly clean. She jogs in the morning and on her route goes through a mysterious tunnel near their apartment that makes her think of Billy Goats Gruff. Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, but the movie gets the lack of visible monster right, so the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post, and just listening to the great rapport between the sisters from the TV behind me lured me in. I was alone in the apartmetn and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously dug deep into my ancient fears, the way only BLAIR WITCH could do before.

There is a certain type of person who sees a ghost, a demon, or an alien and thinks they saw a ghost --they freak out and maybe even call the cops like cops can do anything -- and there's a type of person who, like me, sees a ghost and presumes he's hallucinating. I might have seen a dozen real ghosts, demons, aliens by now and just cited acid flashbacks, a bad flu, lack of sleep or too much of it (as in my well-documented 1991 demon visitation), and this idea is well-used in ABSENTIA: this pregnant wife's therapist has her believing that seeing her missing husband everywhere is just a sign of stress, borne of waiting out the necessary seven years in the missing person file before he can be declared legally dead so she can move on with her life. So even though we see him standing behind the shrink, and we see her see him, she pretends not to see him, presuming it a hallucination, etc. Meanwhile the sister thinks maybe there's some fifth-dimensional portal that troll insect monsters are coming through and abducting humans, but the cops can't write that up in their report, so you must be on drugs... again!

The fear of the unknown plus the excellent termite detail in the sisterly rapport missing from most interactions in DARK WORLD or THE PURGE or any other 'unknown'-courting film combine to deliver a slow simmer anxiety and Parker has this great ease with her body language and slow dawning beauty. You barely notice her at first and then suddenly wham, you're in love with her. ABSENTIA the film is the same way; it doesn't really ape any other horror movie, doesn't hold onto the familiar handrails of its genre like THE PURGE or THE DARK WORLD do. The small human scale, naturalistic low-key lighting, solid sisterly rapport, the trips to lawyer offices that underscore the legal system's inability to protect the present from the darkness, it all snaps shut behind us, leaving only a vaguely ominous two-chord score and such a successful, intense expression of the less-is-more argument it gave me a chill right down to the bone.

 I was so unnerved after the end, in fact, that once it was over I had to race through my dark living room to turn on the lights and pop in one of my 'safety net' movies, in this case my always-nearby DVD of the 1957 classic, THE BEGINNING OF THE END, to get some feeling of reassuring closure. Nothing says you're safe and sound quite like watching Peter Graves empty a tommy gun at rear-projected grasshopper. In 50's monster movies, at least, seeing is never the same as believing, and thank God.