Best of 2019: Part 1 (52-42)

Prologue

Keeping this to a basic introduction, it's the least favourite to my favourite that premiered in the United Kingdom in 2019. Theatrical releases but also streaming and premieres only on physical media like DVDs and Blu Ray, which opens the floodgates for me to films as far back as 2017.

This is significant as MUBI is an unofficial sponsor of this list as on the top and bottom of the list are countless films, feature and short length, populate this list.

I intended the cut off point to be the 1st January 2019, consisting of films, shorts, one mini-series, and an unfinished film from 1979 released in 2019. [One animated TV series that finish a narrative in just one season will get an honourable mention in a later part. Whilst I am against separating television from cinema, annoyingly sites like Letterboxd don't include them, making it a nightmare to keep a list together] As someone who doesn't hold these formats as separate to each other, just part of "motion images" which happen to have their own rules and forms that vary, they all qualify for the list.

In terms of the year for me, reaching my thirties, the biggest aspect of this era was honestly streaming's impact on cinema when a major auteur like Martin Scorsese is a Netflix exclusive. It is a strange era, in a sense that streaming is a poisoned chalice even with its virtues. For the virtuous nature of MUBI, who make hard to see films available if temporary, the delusion of streaming offering more choice and being more permanent is an issue. A) There is probably more choice of Cinema Paradiso, a British company who are still renting out DVDs by post in this time who offer me almost everything long after print since the medium started. B) Licensing is temporary, so a work you the reader might like may be pulled off the web. A lack of democracy in this art form is still there, even if aspects like The Irishman being able to be seen at the cinema, and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma (2018) getting picked up by Criterion, offer hope that we preserve this work.

Some titles on here, tragically, will be difficult for me to ever see again, because the United Kingdom's film distribution industry is letting great titles fall in the cracks of obscurity, only appearing on streaming or never. Brexit - a spectre that is haunting England if the Scottish ditch us - is not going to help, whether one voted to stay in Europe or leave, because as the year as proved, the politics around this for me made every side look bad and showed how much of a mess politics can be. If the Irish border is a nightmare, than the British cinema industry may have to negotiate around how European cinema is going to be licensed again with new rulings unless plans were hopefully implemented beforehand. 

Other issues? Ethics, as Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox raises concerns as they are sat on a back catalogue arguably more richer and utter at odds with a lot of their ideals, and how they are getting way too much foothold in cinema, especially as they'll probably effect the type of films Fox make if they still can. Environmental issues, which the penny has dropped on this year barring to the most closed minded; it will eventually drip down into how we make, screen and preserve cinema too.

Also how we actually show films is an issue for me personally - Bi Gan's Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) is a film that, in its many idiosyncrasies, switches to 3D halfway through, a title that even in a cultural metropolis like Sheffield where I saw it was only available in 2D.

This is pertinent for me as, whilst that was a distinct example I will get into later in this series, especially with my eyes cast back to the entire 2010s a lot of potentially great cinema and motion images are not necessarily conventional narratives. They are peculiar; they are art installations tragically impossible to see if you are living in a small working class town as I do; they have formats like Bi Gan's film which are cumbersome due to a lack of coordination of how to access this work properly outside of great film and art institutions a fair distance from me. Mariano Llinás' La Flor for example, which got a UK theatrical release, is another difficult film to handle in our homogenised cinematically restrictive market, just for the fact it's over fourteen hours long. Unless it's put for streaming, or a cost effective TV box set-like release is done, that experience is going to be a nightmare for someone like myself to actually see.

This includes what can be seen and at what cost. I only realised this year, late, the existence of Vue Cinema and that they charge five English pounds, which is insanely cheap for me and allows me to take a greatest risk in terms of seeing mainstream films. Most people where I come from however will probably illegally download films from the cinema even if they could afford it, the peril of cinema being merely a product rather than a democratic form of communication it should be. That needs to be rectified, especially as I found some of the best films of this list were not conventional experiences.

One director, aptly this particular director by the name of Raul Ruiz, made a film long past his mortality as a ghost; his films, alongside two others, were old unfinished cinema finally made available to the outside world in different ways, which as a trio bring about a more positive aspect of this era that, as we dig into the past, even the work prints are potentially worth screening as cinema.

Of the ones I wished I saw there were quite a few directors - Carlos Reygadas, Masaki Yuasa, Jim Jarmusch etc, whilst I would've have gladly witnessed Midsommar even if it made me want to bash my head in a wall. Others - Terence Malick, Bong Jong Ho, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Lighthouse etcetera - are going to be 2020 releases here. Actress Mati Diop's Atlantics was snapped up as a Netflix exclusive and, missing it in the cinema, the Portuguese oddity Diamantino has inexplicably not had anything but streaming on the BFI Player, both of which are issues I take with the streaming era in that, to see everything if you can't see it at the cinema, you are going to end up with large costs as a result paying for subscriptions rather than the cost of a DVD or Blu Ray, even a downloaded file off iTunes.

As for the future, we shall see. The current world comes off as a misery outside of cinema, but considering human history, the worst has always existed. And like the unpredictable nature of the 2010s, things could drastically change to a positive simply if current trends are found wanting or fail miserably due to human folly.

Cinema is going to be interesting though. Will physical releases stay in existence, or will the streaming bubble eventually burst and the flaws are exposed? Who on Earth from the current general of newer filmmakers will become auteurs fully in the new decade, and will we find dividends and reward in the progression in "minority" filmmakers to the point that term is an insult to them? Whilst I find that being progressive is not enough to make a good film, it's actually the best sign of hope in the real world and the reel world that car adverts now have gay characters without that being the point of the advert, that Get Out (2017) is a significant film, and major superhero films are being made by female and non-white filmmakers. I wish there was more unpredictable cinema, but when I can look forward to The Lighthouse, A Hidden Life, and films I will only learn of next year, my only complaint is not enough of it is getting a release over here.

Now onto the first part....

52. Lords of Chaos (2018) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

I knew in my heart this biopic of the infamous beginning of the Norwegian band Mayhem - a band who helped innovate the genre of black metal but had members kill themselves or murder others (including band members) before they released their debut album De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. I forgot, like Jonas Åkerlund's Small Apartments (2012), how the director could be so bland. This is a tedious film, even dragging Sigur Ros in the mire by having them inexplicably score this. It feels like a film made by an outsider of heavy metal who wants to make it look bad, more of a true crime story that plays it all as lurid and incompetent, whilst also being utterly empty in how it never deals with the history of black metal, and skimming over huge details of this morally problematic band history which are troubling. How a former drummer for Bathory, who helped inspire the black metal bands, makes it worse.

51. Faust (2018) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

I love MUBI as a streaming service, but picking up a lot of festival work that rarely is seen, I have become more suspicious of obscure work like this, Faust a very dull mood piece. This is worse because the narration is of a great film - urban myths and folktales intermingling, be it how turtles on an island are being disturbed by human created influence to the woman who has two graves - but none of the digitally shot scenes in a tropical environment fit in the slightest.

50. Renzo Piano, an Architect for Santander (2018) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

Another MUBI festival film, in this case a documentary of the titular architect, which shows that unfortunately a lot of modern documentary techniques, and the reliance on talking heads, can lead to a lack of profoundness and innovation but a film I have entirely forgotten any details of in hindsight. At least with the older era, like BBC documentaries from the far past, there filmmaking had a more idiosyncratic style that would bring energy to a subject like this.

49. Bride of the Werewolf (2019) [UK Streaming Premiere]

If you are going to study the entirety of cinema, you should delve into micro budget cinema. Whilst it is the home of innovation, it's also a home to an acquired taste in genre cinema I have grown to love - where the acting varies, the resources are scarce, but when it works, it works for its audience. Mark Polonia, with his late twin brother John, is also a big name in this type of cinema making films together in the eighties like the infamous Splatter Farm (1987). Bride of the Werewolf is however not a good film even on this fun level I have grown to accept. There is a charm in a film posing its locations in Eastern Europe, when its clearly set in middle America with no one trying an accent, and the werewolf being an actor in a cheap werewolf costume, but it suffers from trying to copy a trope I hate in old horror films. This is meant to be inspired by the likes of Paul Naschy, thinking exposition dialogue in meant to be fun in itself. It isn't, and baring a single sequence of a mummy going on a rampage into the corridor of an erotic dance club, never actually into it, this is not a great example from a director I feel a respect to investigate his older works of, nor this type of amateur but utterly hard earned type of cinema which sweats blood, sweat and tears to make something for people like me to enjoy.

48. Dumbo (2019) [Worldwide Theatrical Premiere]

Dumbo was the only film in Disney's live action remake cycle I wanted to see, entirely due to it being directed by Tim Burton, but it's also an example of when an auteur can be subsumed by the work if the movie is clearly a product first. Moments shine - Michael Keaton is a godsend when he appears, and there are some beautiful sequences throughout - but Dumbo is a predictable story. The CGI elephants look ugly, and there's a perversity to this anti-corporation story coming from a corporation, just at the time of this film's release having been in the purchase of 21st Century Fox. As a result, I have no interest in any of the others.

47. Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019) [British TV Premiere]

My hopes were probably too high for this being more of peculiar political cash in at a tumultuous time in Brexit politics in early 2019. However considering there are two legitimately good scenes, this tale of political strategist Dominic Cummings should've been more. One scene of an ordinary older woman, brought in for a survey, breaking down and unloading all the factors, the lack of control she feels, that probably led to so much reactive voting for authorities figures let alone Brexit in the world. The other a one take of hurried Remain campaign Craig Oliver, trying to communicate with other politicians over the phone in his own kitchen whilst trying to just prepare fish fingers, chips and peas for his daughters and their friends, the line between an ordinary working man and politician exposed in a way we rarely think about these figures.

The rest of the film is bland however, be it the stunt casting of actors to play the likes of Boris Johnson to the film skimming over a lot of the chaotic history of Brexit which could've been an epic of moral complexity in the end. It came off instead a chance to see Benedict Cumberbatch swear and match the real life headlines, the likes of which have become more complicated now at the end of the year, as Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and the Conservatives won a huge number of seats in December. Its look half hearted in hindsight as a study of this, the tale needing to be returned to in the future, preferably not a patriotic peace of propaganda but a farce where every side looked bad as it was.

46. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

I feel disappointed having to put Barry Jenkins' film this far down the list. To its testament, wanting to try to unpick this I read James Baldwin's original novel of an African American woman trying to clear her jailed husband's name, only to consider my issues with the filmic adaptation is that the tone was entirely off. Prominently this is felt, and the moment I had doubts with the film beforehand, in the immense conflict of words between her family and his, a barrage of obscenities and spiked language that on the page has a black humour to it but an intensity, but comes off as a deleted scene in a John Waters film in the performances, which miss the tone completely. It feels like a film that wants to be profound, but notably the inclusions entirely of the film, more overtly political in an era where African Americans have become more active in the likes of Black Lives Matter, but comes off heavy handed when the source material is a calmer, steelier piece.

45. Season of the Devil (2018) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

Another film I am sad to include here, as Lav Diaz is responsible for Norte, The End of History (2013), one of the most respectable films of the decade. Diaz's Achilles Heel for me however is his obsession with long lengths, to which considering his films are usually the minimum of eight hours plus, makes Season of the Devil slight at only over four. It feels padded, an anti-musical dealing with the horrors of the Marcos Dictatorship in the late seventies, and unbearably nihilistic to the point of being off-putting rather than a scream of rage at the horrors of the era, all whilst with the sense that whilst Norte deserved its length, this film could've just been under two and gotten the point more sharply. With his single shot takes and monochrome aesthetics, Diaz has all the potential, but baring Norte I have struggled with how languid and frankly indulgent his films can be even when he has good moments that startle even here.

44. Fugue (2018) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

Agnieszka Smoczyńska caught peoples' attentions with her musical horror oddity The Lure (2015), a film I will need to get to, but Fugue is a very predictable and merely average film for me. The tale of a woman who returns to who former family with amnesia, it never felt like a film that was going to really take a risk, only in a taste for a frankness in the human body I have to admire but little else.

43. Madeline’s Madeline (2018) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]
Sadly this is just a film that completely left me despite its virtues, a moral drama in which a young girl with mental health issues joins a theatrical trope only for its leader to be suspiciously using her own life far too much for the comfort of everyone else. Not as surreal as I was expecting, but really I could've appreciated it more if it had left a greater emotional effect on me, only a little in the end resolution, a mass rebellious dramatic performance with animal masks, and everything else not. 

42. Our House (2017) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

As a graduation film, I have hope from this Yui Kiyohara, a Kiyoshi Kurosawa protégée, could take the best parts of this project, a curious anti-haunted house tale of two stories of women seemingly overlapped in the same house, and cut out the dead weight. I will have likely annoyed a few readers with having some films at the bottom of this list, but in this case, everyone has to start somewhere and I have hope Kiyohara will improve from here as, to end this part on an optimistic note, there is definitely enough her to wait upon with excitement if she makes more films.

To Be Continued....