Best of 2019: Part 2 (41-31)

Link to the first part HERE.

41. Knives Out (2019) [World Theatrical Premiere]

Mystery stories have never really appealed to me because, once a mystery has been solved and there is no other reason to return to a tale, it's pointless for me for it to exist. The reason the likes of Sherlock Holmes became such a cultural legacy in my eyes was never the mysteries but because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote interesting characters and memorable events even if the clues were spoilt.

Knives Out in reality isn't a film that really stands out once its mystery is solved, a film I'm surprised has garnered so much praise as it has because it is just okay. The aspect which is meant to be more profound, the politics, are utterly unsubtle and are a detriment to this playful world, with pleasures such as its aesthetic and Daniel Craig's earnest attempt to meld a Colonel Sanders /Foghorn Leghorn accent to a curious detective. The politics are entirely, in a tale about a legendary mystery writer being murdered, about the hidden racisms and greed of his surviving family and the plight an immigrant maid played by Ana de Armas has to deal with especially when the will is read out. Armas' character, to be brutally honest, is written for me really entirely about being a minority figure in terms of characterisation, rather than a character who just happens to be from a minority and is still  complex figure, having to put up with the racism especially when the likes of Michael Shannon arch over her ominously halfway through. That distinction really sets up the big issue and my confusion with Knives Out's acclaimed - Rian Johnson is a good ideas man but he's surface level with the material, not expanding upon it in more vivid and creative ways.

40. Us (2019) [World Theatrical Premiere]

Jordan Peele's second film could've reached higher up this list if the ending hadn't been so anti-climatic for me. I'll divide this segment into two paragraphs, the next with full spoilers. Here, I'll just say that for three-quarters of the length, this horror film about an African American middle class family being attacked by doppelgangers, as said doppelgangers rampage in the community on mass, has a curious and compelling blend of sci-fi conspiracy ideas, full blown supernatural horror and a damn good wherewithal when to sometimes drop in a joke, like when NWA's Fuck the Police makes an audio cameo. I think the film's political message isn't as profound as many might suspect, but horror can play with obvious ideas but grow them out in weird and grotesque views, so the idea of the folklore of the doppelganger becoming a parable of the under classes has a gleaming edge, especially as the lead characters they are attacking are African American themselves, well off figures attacked at their summer homes, rather than a white family as is usually depicted in American horror films. The perverse parody of an "arms across the world" American campaign for peace from the eighties is itself one of the better satires Us has - a reminder that not everything is clearly hunky dory in American culture decades later. Sadly, the film by its denouement doesn't become more ambitious and really push this premise to its strangest potential, let alone a greater intellectual one, by resolving it all too cleanly.

[Major Spoilers Onwards] 

I feel the film doesn't have a good enough third act to make this work thought. It looks like it's about to and in the best of ways. Underground escalators into a secret corridor filled world of the doppelgangers, found at a carnival attraction and thus evoking Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973), populated by an inexplicable amount of rabbits as it raising a torch to Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite (2019) from the same year. Unfortunately what happens, as I have found in a lot of films of any genre, is that it lacks the confidence to jump gleefully into a more ambitious film, thinking Lupita Nyong fighting herself to the death is enough when, for myself, considering how good her performance is there would've been a much better film, a great one, if Jordon Peele were willingly to go on even for just ten more minutes plus into an entirely different ending. Even an entirely different genre considering the film before, evoking conspiracy theories as much as horror, if need be as the film hinted at enticing little ideas. Sadly it didn't and I was left wanting.

39. The Wild Frontier (2017) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

This is a particular heartbreaker to include so low as its co-director Nicolas Klotz is also the director of The Heartbeat Detector (2007), one of the most criminally under seen films of the 2000s. The Wild Frontier has its heart worthily on its sleeve, a documentary on the refugee camp in Calais in France which documents its end from the perspective of the refugees' lives. It's also three and a half hours long, and at times extremely unfocused, so any morally righteousness in the film and good moments are lost in less than perfect structure.

38. Border (2018) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

Border is just okay. Like Let the Right One In (2008), another John Ajvide Lindqvist adaptation, the source work offers a fascinating spin on mythology, in this case envisioning that trolls exist, following a female troll named Tina who was raised as a human being and became a talented border guard due to her senses. The story has enough of fascination - a complex romance, a very dark (but tonally well handled) tale of a paedophilia ring, a out of nowhere but brilliant gender subversion - but the film itself is just well made and not particularly distinct.

37. One Cut of the Dead (2017) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

Another film that is okay, though to Shinichiro Ueda's credit, his surprise Japanese box office hit does have an inspired storyline twist. I was quite bored by the first part, a one take zombie story, only for the film to eventually make that entirely worthwhile by suddenly negating the horror genre entirely but becoming a comedy farce about making a horror film and everything going wrong. This could easily climb in expectation, but the buzz and acclaimed the film had also proved its undoing, as while I thought it became a sweet and funny film, One Cut of the Dead is just alright in a list of much more ambitious and strange films, even if very flawed, from here on.

36. Too Old to Die Young (2019) [Amazon Prime Premiere]

If ever there was a work on this list, here a mini-series, which let itself down when it could've literally changed a director's career into something even greater, Nicolas Windin Refn's nihilistic slow cinema crime tale was it. Unfortunately, the moment the first major character is killed off glibly, Too Old to Die Young falls into the childish style and nihilism that has plagued his other work, alongside a problematic take on vigilantism which, even if it's clearly from a left wing perspective and targeted at fictional paedophiles, isn't defendable still especially when it's played seriously.

Which is a shame as I admire Nicolas Windin Refn - in fact byNWR, his streaming site, is an admirable achievement even if their catalogue isn't to everyone's liking, becoming a prized catalogue I need to properly invest more time in. And when I say Too Old to Die Young could've been spectacular, half or three quarters of this series was some of the best work Refn has done, offering a new weirder side to him which still had neon cold and death, but was wacky and deliberately confounding viewers. The s l o w n e s s of scenes. The police staging the crucifixion of Christ to celebrate a member leaving, as a truly odd opening scene to an episode. A balance between the violence and its darkness that was careful at first, and the various odd aspects including explicit supernatural details creeping in with Jean Malone's organiser of vigilantes and a living female urban legend, defender of women against men. Refn, with co-writer and co-creator Ed Brubaker, even managed to make a drug baron sympathetic, Episode 2 the best episode as within Mexico it details the slow illness and death of a drug lord, that doesn't hide he was likely a monster, but in his rambling tales of seeing Pele played football/soccer as a child gives humanity to him still.

When Refn succeeds, his work is weird and disturbing, but I have always held Fear X (2003), his notorious box office failure, as his best film from what I saw because it had a human emotional core which melded with the weirdness of the tone, something Too Old To Die Young promised only with significantly more violence and even slower to an almost trance like state. It tragically didn't follow through on that promise.

35. Cold Pursuit (2019) [World Theatrical Premiere]

Cold Pursuit was doomed when Liam Neeson did a certain interview early in 2019 with The Independent. The exactly details of the anecdote, when listened to, are Neeson looking back to a horrible side of himself where he admitted racist bias to black men after a female friend of his was raped, an incident he is ashamed of in a very difficult series of circumstances and in exposing a dark side of himself, looking back, that are completely abhorrent. I don't want to drag this blog post down into politics, but the controversy, whether you think of the actor, does both raise a question of a) what secret prejudices people can have that never come up to the surface except in extreme circumstances, caused as much by our upbringings and environments as it is deliberate behaviours, and b) the complexity particularly as the interview quote itself when heard is one entirely from remorse and regret from the actor, a confession in a lot of ways with a frankness which was inevitably going to cause this controversy because of how shocking the side he revealed of his youth was. Our inability to deal with these issues in their full complexity is just as problematic as the rise of racist language in our current culture, and while most cases of digging up old Twitter posts, a rare case of someone confessing his guilt having as much shock as it did means a long way to go is ahead in terms of dealing with these issues.

The film itself, when separated, is itself a much more complicated film considering Neeson's history in tedious renege films like Taken (2008). A remake of the director's own Norwegian film, probably the aspect that has stuck with me still, and shows this side in this dark comedy where Neeson's revenger is a hapless figure at first, is that everyone person who is killed gets their name, date of birth and death, and their religious beliefs (by symbols) shown on a black screen, which is sickly hilarious but eventually develops a mourning darkness to the joke. Details like this, or the evil villain having a subplot as still being a father, add a level of complexity I had to admire alongside its dark humour and the snowbound setting It's not a perfect film, but I could see myself returning to Cold Pursuit in the sense that, alongside the broad humour and tone of the Coen Brothers, this more complex view of this subject matter is far more compelling.

34. Pity (2018) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

This Greek New Weird film, co-written by Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Efthymis Filippou, was more highly regarded by me earlier in the year, and there is a lot to find compelling sick humoured tale of a man literally addicted to sadness and misery. I think though it was in bad luck to be up against films which took much more risks from here on. A lot of it won me over, the auteurism as much found in Filippou and his penmanship especially in the dark little moments, like the lead sabotaging a piano out of spite of happy music or trying tear gas on himself to cry.

It's also a film you'd have had on DVD in the United Kingdom from the likes of Artificial Eye in the 2000s. Sadly this is the case that I cannot really rewatch Pity to see if it was worth the glowing review of mine, as whilst it could be available on streaming, the day in the future you are reading this might show that might not be the case.

33. Joker (2019) [World Theatrical Premiere]

Joker is the film that at first seemed to be the superhero film that was going to ascend to a greater level than other films of the current decade I had seen, deserving its abrupt win of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, only to chicken out.

For half this film, Joker is something potentially profound following an ill man who is left abandoned by society and becomes a nihilistic psychopath along the way, one whose cribbing of Martin Scorsese was just a leaping pad for a film even emotionally touching as it was disturbing, as we even see in his fantasies of being on Robert De Niro's talk show, the lead who'd become the Joker is just a sad man who wishes only to be something, an idea which becomes toxic by a series of events and bad choices. The fact that this is a major DC Comics character wasn't an issue as superheroes have a plasticity which allow multiple versions to exist, and Joaquin Phoenix is as good a figure as you could get to flesh out this character in this unique spin. Moments of moral ambiguity and even sick humour stood out, succeeding.

Then the film plays it safe for the finale, a bland conclusion which leaves a film of what-ifs and a surprise that Todd Phillips' movie is as highly regarded as it has become when its another example of a production whose initial promise is squandered in the end.

32. Shakti (2019) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

MUBI's retrospectives of directors can be some of the most rewarding even in cases where a director is tragically difficult to see the work of, as if the case of Argentinean director Martín Rejtman, who was a huge influence on the modern wave of Argentinean cinema in the 2000s getting off the ground so is immediately someone to admire before you get to the films. His work is mainly deadpan comedy - a gem like The Magic Gloves (2003), which follows various characters such as two depressed people who trade pills to an ill advised investment in the titular gloves when it suddenly starts snowing in Argentina, shows his style perfectly alongside his little idiosyncrasies, including one of my favourite aspects of him in how he makes a lot of jokes about heavy metal which I find hilarious as a metal head myself, be it a female character in Silvia Prieto (1999) being part of an odd avant-garde metal band who makes bird noises instead of singing, or The Magic Gloves which has the funniest and repeating of a man who constantly wants to show people a tape of metal on his loud sound system which could blow peoples' heads off.

Shakti is more subdued, more of a drama with lightness about a young man who has to accept the passing of his grandmother, connecting to a young woman whose potential romance with was strayed originally when she realised the food he had left in fridge was the last thing his grandmother baked. Shakti is also only a short, which makes the film sadly difficult to sell, but it manages to tell a full and fascinating story in such a small amount of time, including the fact that our protagonist comes from a Jewish background, which is not explicit to the plot but of interest in seeing food preparation and customs, the type of food cooked a major part of the plot as mentioned. It is rewarding, and only Rejtman becoming better known would be more pleasing to me as MUBI did a great service streaming these films.

31. Islands (2017) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

Between this short film and Knife + Heart (2018), Yann Gonzalez has my attention as, a while since his curious film You and the Night (2013), he's returned and shown this fascinating side of being an LGBT filmmaker who is dedicated in subverting and manipulating genre tropes especially in terms of sexuality. Like a sensual hypnotic dream, less plot driven, Islands shows it hands when a killer jumps in on a male and female couple in the bedroom, looking like the sexier younger brother of Dr Freudstein from Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery (1981), only to be won over to engage in a bisexual threesome, his deformed face drastically contrasted by explicit sex an immediate challenge to ideas of the body and beauty.

The short continues from this, and is significantly more explicit in its sexuality than the feature length films of his I have seen, with a young woman almost sleepwalking through a park where gay couplings are taking place, the pansexual nature of the material where male and female bodies are gazed over and are participants compelling as the aesthetic. Oh, and that Oneohtrix Point is the person creating the soundtrack for this is a poignant choice, the dreaminess of the film as encapsulated by that score as the visuals.

To Be Continued...