I seriously considered abandoning, or at least completely changing, this viewing list tradition of mine--between the pandemic, the general shift to streaming services, and the power of so much great television out there, shouldn't I just being thinking in terms of, say, "the 10 best things I watched on a screen in 2020"? Maybe. But in the end, despite "The Queen's Gambit," "Cobra Kai," and my delightful, months-long journey through every episode of the original series of "Star Trek" (plus the animated series, and the fan-made"Star Trek Continues" as well!), I decided to stick with just the 10 best self-contained cinematic productions I watched this year, wherever or however I watched them. As usual, this is stuff I watched this calendar year; the actual release dates are irrelevant. By title, in alphabetical order:
My movie-watching year was filled with documentaries, as this list reveals, but none really operated on me like films--as opposed to, say, straightforward cinematic documents, which is really all that even those most creative documentaries ever aspire to be--The Act of Killing did. It's very hard to sum up briefly what this audacious, offensive, utterly compelling film did, but basically: the movies creators, in profiling a handful of the now mostly elderly suriving perpetrators of a genocidal massacre of suspected communists (but mostly just thousands--possibly hundreds of thousands, possibly millions--of folks these self-identifying "gangsters" didn't like) in Indonesia 50 years ago, end up giving these mostly unrepentant villains the opportunity to dramatize their killings on film, and they jump at it, using all sorts of Hollywood genre tropes (Westerns, musicals, and yes, of course, gangster movies) along the way. Is this post-colonial exploitation? Is this a quasi-snuff film? So many unsettling questions. All I can say is, in their crude re-creations and celebrations--often bordering on comic self-parody--of their own past, the subjects of this documentary left a cinematic record that will haunt me for years.
I'm not a Spike Lee completist by any means, but I've seen enough of his movies to call Da 5 Bloods one of his very best, up there with Malcolm X or 25th Hour. Like both of those films--and really, like every Spike Lee movie I've ever seen--Da 5 Bloods--has an uncontrolled quality to it, with Lee playing around with all sorts of genre tropes and tonal shifts without the kind of discipline that, for example, the equally playful and bloody-minded Quentin Tarantino brings to his movies. But in place of that, Lee has a sense of moral purpose which the functionally amoral Tarantino pretty much entirely lacks. In this movie, making use of the wonderfully hoary tale of former soldiers going back to the battlefield to reclaim the remains of their fallen comrade (plus some handily buried gold!), Lee weaves a compelling war story into a film also about the place of the Vietnam War in the African-American experience, psychological trauma, Western imperialism, fathers and sons, and much more. Like the best filmmakers, even when you were certain of every betrayal, every landmine explosion, every tearful reunion, they all still appeared on the screen as brilliantly new. The best pure movie I saw all year.
Alex Honnold, the focus of Free Solo, a movie that captures in dizzing, sometimes terrifying detail his record-setting free solo (that is: no equipment, no partners, just his hands and limbs) climb of El Capitan, is basically a physical and psychological freak of nature, someone physically and mentally capable of impossible climbs and probably almost nothing else. Some have commented to me that Honnold's borderline inhuman character compromises the documentary's effectiveness; they prefer, for example, Dawn Wall, which records an arguably even greater physical feat of rock climbing by climbers like Tommy Caldwell (who appears in Free Solo as an advisor to Honnold) who have much more human and dramatic arcs to follow. Well, tastes differ. For my part, while the latter documentary impressed, the former simply scared me to death, in a good way, and I tip my hat to it, and to Honnold, for that.
Lady Bird was a total delight, and an unexpected one. I'd heard good things about it from friends and others, and after we watched Greta Gerwig's Little Women (which I liked a lot, but didn't love as much as I do the charming 1994 adaptation), we thought we'd give her earlier movie a try, even though the plot description didn't seem like much. What a revelation! There really isn't a single original moment in this film; it does exactly what you would expect a young woman's coming-of-age story to do, insofar as parents and friends and romance and sex and her own internal growth are concerned. All the John Hughes tropes are there. And yet, every single scene--thanks to the acting, the dialogue, and dozens of tiny but consequential plot choices--rang true. Once again: genre movie conventions endure because they work--or at least can be made to work when presented and acted out on film well, and in this wonderful tale, they do their job of entertaining and moving the audience (or at least me) with seamless skill.
I didn't know what to expect going into Last Black Man in San Francisco; it just seemed like such a striking idea for a movie: a young African-American man trying to reclaim--with great passion but without any legal cause--a beautiful old San Francisco house that he has tied up in his memory with his whole sense of family, identity, community, and direction in life. That's a lot of emotional complexity to get onto the screen, but the filmmakers pull it off, thanks to a lot of achingly beautiful cinematography, and a lot of subtle performances which enabled us viewers to see and hear a lot more than just what was said and shone. Not for everyone--it's a slow, painterly film--but absolutely worth the investment to see this quaint, quotidian story of a directionless but firely young person made gorgeous and large.
Matewan is a movie I should have watched years, decades, ago, but only got around to this year, as part of a film series I put together for a class I was teaching on radical politics (and which was, of course, completely upended by the pandemic). The respect which director John Sayles's movies hold is deserved; the man takes his time to produce intelligent, grounded stories that stand the test of time, and this nearly 35-year old film certainly does. Watching this story of mine owners in 1920s West Virginia suppressing unionization, first by attempting to turn white and black and immigrant laborers against each other, and later by direct violence, obviously plays upon different associations in our heads than it would have in 1987 when it was first released, but it's not some free-floating liberal signifier. This is a concrete tale, with the locals and the hillbillies and the hired detectives, the unexpected heroes and hidden villians and confused bystanders, all acting in entirely believable ways. A great cinematic invocation of some tragic, necessary history.
I'm not really sure how Me and Orson Welles ended up on my Netflix list; the description sounded somewhat interesting, I guess, but I knew basically nothing about it when it arrived, and thus I came to the movie without any expectations. Formally a kind of rom-com, it follows a young, callow, rich kid who--with a combination of real talent, artistic desperation, and what we would recognize today as elite privilege--manages to catch the eye of Orson Welles in 1937 New York City and land a role in his infamous Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar, and along the way has romantic adventures and learns about growing up. The casting is brilliantly smart, the dialog wonderfully expressive, and the set design simply terrific--but for all that, 90 minutes into the movie I just thought I was watching something charmingly well-made, not great. Then director Richard Linklater recreates, as the film's narrative climax, some of the scenes of Welles's Caesar, of which there are only sketches and a few staged photographs as evidence of what it looked like. And it floored me. I know Julius Caesar pretty well, but man...the assassination of Caesar, and the murder of Cinna, gripped me as only the best live theater ever can. A good movie, but every theater fan needs to watch it just to see those wonderful, concluding scenes.
Parasite is everything everyone was saying it was last year: a shockingly blunt story of class conflict, an unsettling tale of shifting ethical burders, a showcase of brilliantly etched character moments, and a visually sumptuous depiction of wealth and poverty and the routines of life lived by those who inhabit both realms in South Korea today. Plus it's a mystery story, and a dark comedy, and almost a caper flick too. Bong Joon-ho's expertly recreated 1980s South Korea in Memories of Murder was one of my favorite films of 2013, and his sci-fi and horror flicks Snowpiercer and The Host have been great, off-beat productions as well. Going forward, he's definitely one to watch.
Paterson is definitely the oddest film on this list; quiet and subtle and plain, spending a couple of days accompanying a bus-driving, poetry-writing former Marine through his banal routines might seem like an almost experimental art film. The original poetry which flows across Paterson's mind and the screen is a beautiful device, and often provided a fascinating counter-point to the quotidian scenes they are super-imposed upon, but through prosaic encounters, daily ups and downs, and dramatic conflicts that end practically before they begin, it didn't seem to me to be adding up to anything significant. Then, at the movie's end, we are given a dramatic intervention by...what? One of the Twelve Muses? One of the Three Nephites? An angel? Who knows. All I can say is that, suddenly, Paterson's poetry matters--to him, to his world, to the movie itself--in a way it hadn't before, but also in a way that I wouldn't have appreciated if I hadn't watched all the quiet dailyness which had come before. A great accomplishment.
I stared this entry talking about how many documentary films I watched this year, and I end on the same note. Whatever combination of changes which streaming services, the wide availability of professional-level filmiing and editing technology, and just the zeitgeist of the moment has wrought upon us, one of the more pleasant results is that there is simply tons of pretty excellent movies out there documenting and recreating moments of our shared artistic and pop cultural history. No, such documentaries aren't aspiring to do anything as important as The Act of Killing or as thrilling as Free Solo, but dammit, learning all about the Funk Brothers in the wonderful Standing in the Shadows of Motown, or all about the making of the cult favorite Galaxy Quest in the actually moving Never Surrender was simply awesome, and anyone who says otherwise was either never a geek or is lying to you. Of all of the dozens of such musical and movie and cultural documents I watched this year, my award for the best has to go to What We Left Behind, a simply terrific and deeply loving tribute to--as well as an incisive exploration of--the strangest stepchild of the Star Trek family, "Deep Space Nine." I don't deny my bias; "DS9" is one of those few television shows that I can honestly say changed my life, or at least changed the way I thought about my relationship to art and story-telling and fandom and whatever fandom may choose to care about (and, given that "DS9," during its seven-year run, took on a huge range of topics, that range of care-via-fandom was often huge!). In What We Left Behind many of those topics are addressed, sometimes with praise, sometimes with regret, and always with honesty. Plus, some of the conceits of the documentary are just delicious fun, like getting the old writers together to hash out an entirely hypothetical (OR IS IT?) reboot of the show, 20 years on, or having the irreplacable Nathan Robinson, channeling Garak, his mysterious spy character from the show, show up every once in a while to provide snarky meta-commentary on the documentary itself. A wonderful work of cinema? Obviously not. But one of the best two hours I spent watching something all year? Oh yeah, absolutely.
