My 2017 At The Movies

In 2017, I saw 125 movies on the big screen. That breaks down to a movie every 2.9 days. This is, I am quite certain, the most times I've ever gone to the movies in the course of the year. I'm pretty happy about that.

Of course, in the real world, 2017 has been a horrific year. God help us all, it's been the year of Trump, a year of daily outrages both petty (the bizarre spectacle of the White House spokesman transparently lying about inauguration size) and monumental (the travel ban, the stolen seat on the Supreme Court, the plutocratic tax bill, Charlottesville). And, under it all, there has been the steadily building of pressure of the Russia investigation.

So it's been a good year to seek solace at the movies, not just because the world has given us so many reasons to seek solace, but because it's been a great year for the movies themselves.

There's a prevailing notion that the movies themselves are in dire trouble--that the act of going to a theater to see a film is something that won't last much longer. The most oft-cited reasons for this decline are changing viewing patterns among younger moviegoers, the rise of ticket prices, the popularity of streaming, and the ever increasing consolidation of the industry itself. As someone who loves going to the movies, I worry about these things, too, but I take a lot of comfort in the robust nature of filmgoing that I witnessed over the last 12 months.

The most emotionally explosive movie I saw this year came early, Raoul Peck's I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, the James Baldwin essay film that went into wide release in February. The film has the power of a great Baldwin essay, fierce and honest and brilliant. You could feel an electrical current ripple through the screening I attended. In terms of sheer impact, I'm sure I didn't see a better film this year.

At the other end of the spectrum, when I saw Patty Jenkins's WONDER WOMAN, I got to ride along on a wave of pure joy. The film is, of all things, old fashioned--an epic, romantic, funny, exciting adventure yarn. It was the best popcorn movie I saw this year.

I got to see other films where the crowds were brimming with excitement. I thought IT was okay, but I can tell you that the crowd of mostly teenage moviegoers I saw it with had a blast. GET OUT, which is one part serious social commentary and one part pure popcorn flick, was another film that blew the roof off the theater where I saw it.

Smaller films had a fantastic year. When people saw that movies are going downhill, that they don't make 'em like they used to, I have to respond that I just don't see it that way. I see a lot good movies. I saw A LOT of great movies this year, and small productions by serious filmmakers are as good as they've ever been. 

THE FLORIDA PROJECT, from director Sean Baker, is a masterpiece about a young girl living in poverty on the outskirts of the Disney's sunshine state empire. It is a hilarious and heartbreaking film, a work of cinematic art. A very different film-- though a film cut from something of the same cloth--is the thriller GOOD TIME from Benny and Josh Safdie. This was the best crime film of the year, pure exhilarating neo-noir filmmaking.

Of course, a huge part of my filmgoing life is consumed by classic film retrospectives. Chicago is rich with venues for the classic film geek: the Music Box Theater, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Doc Films and the Chicago Film Society showings at NEIU. I've had nothing less than an extraordinary year at the movies. I've gotten to enjoy old favorites like WRITTEN ON THE WIND, UGETSU, BLOOD SIMPLE, DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, A PLACE IN THE SUN and so many others. Even more exciting, though, are the new discoveries I've made. A classic film geek's job is never done, so I got to catch up with some films that I'd either never seen before or films that I hadn't seen in decades. These films included PANIQUE, LEON MORIN - PRIEST, WHEN YOU GET THIS LETTER, GIRLFRIENDS, TIME TO DIE, and CANYON PASSAGE. This was the year I got to see one of my favorite films (1979's neo-noir HARDCORE) on the big screen for the first time, and it's the year I discovered an old film (the 1946 melodrama TO EACH HIS OWN) that instantly became one of my favorites. 

I could go on, but the point is already clear: it was great year at the movies.

I'll close with a couple of lists. My top movie experiences new and retro.

New Releases
1. I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (technically 2016)
1. THE FLORIDA PROJECT
2. GOOD TIME
3. LADY BIRD
4. NOVITIATE
5. WONDER WOMAN
6. ATOMIC BLONDE
7. BLADE RUNNER 2049
8. THE DISASTER ARTIST
9. GET OUT
10. THE SHAPE OF WATER        

Retrospective and Classic Films 
(This is not a ranking of how "great" these films are--in other words I could just put CHINATOWN down as the best movie I saw all year and be done with it--but rather this is a ranking of my experiences at the movies. This is a list of the great experiences I had at the movies this year.)
1. TO EACH HIS OWN (1946) Chicago Film Society showing at NEIU
2. OPEN SECRET (1948) Gene Siskel Film Center
3. WORKING GIRLS (1931) CFS showing at NEIU
4. HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) Music Box Theater
5. IXCANUL (2015) GSFS
6. DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD (1954) Noir City Chicago at MBT
7. A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951) Doc Films
8. COOL HAND LUKE (1968) MBT
9. LEON MORIN, PRIEST (1961) GSFC
10. WENDY AND LUCY (2008) DF
And the honorary mentions would include the collections of Buster Keaton Shorts (1918-1921) I saw at a boisterous showing at the Music Box, and the packed showing of LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997) at Noir City Chicago (hosted by Eddie Muller and James Ellroy), just shortly before the Kevin Spacey scandal broke, making me one of the last people to see that movie in a state of relative innocence.

All in all, 2017 was a great year at the pictures. Here's to 2018.

LA JETEE (1963)

From my new piece on LA JETEE: 

Few short films have had as long a life as the 1963 French sci-fi classic La Jetée. Simply surviving and accruing a cult following over the years is a large accomplishment for a 28-minute film, but what makes this accomplishment all the more impressive is that the film itself would seem—at least on paper—to be a challenge to most viewers. It is a film told almost entirely in still photographs. It has no stars. It has no dialog. It has no action, of course, because it has no movement. Oh, and it has a bleak, hopeless ending.

And yet, La Jetée is one of those movies that pulls in viewers from the start...

To read the rest, check out my essay over at Tor.com

The Bride Wore Black (1968)

I'm almost always underwhelmed by the films of the French New Wave. That's a dangerous thing for a cineaste to admit, but I'm only reporting the truth of my experience. One approaches these movies with the knowledge that they revitalized cinema, that they were made for movie geeks by movie geeks, that they shattered taboos and changed the way movies were made. And yet I don't really love any film of the New Wave, and my appreciation for Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, and even Chabrol is mostly academic. (Although, interestingly enough, I do love films by Melville and Malle, two directors loosely associated with the movement.) I can study a New Wave film, but I can't seem to love one.

This is even true of the films of good old Francois Truffaut. For many people, Truffaut is one of the patron saints of cinema--an engaging, intelligent writer and critic, maker of some of the most acclaimed films of the New Wave movement (The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim). He was one of the early champions of film noir, and Shoot The Piano Player, his adaptation of Goodis' Down There was an important contribution to the rediscovery of the great forgotten writer.

One could say the same for The Bride Wore Black, an adaption of the novel by Cornell Woolrich (writing under the name William Irish) perhaps the most underrated crime writer in American history. The film stars Jeanne Moreau as a widow working her way through the men who murdered her husband. One by one she knocks them off, in increasingly complicated ways. Quentin Tarantino has stated that he didn't see the film before he made Kill Bill, but, consciously or not, he did lift some things from Truffaut.

The Bride Wore Black isn't a bad film--I particularly like the last ten minutes or so--but watching it recently on the big screen (at the AFI's Truffaut retrospective) I was struck again by my lack of enthusiasm for New Wave attempts at noir. There's something clinical about this film, an overly intellectual approach to the material that saps it of suspense or excitement. Moreau's first murder is filmed in a montage that strikes my eye as simply sloppy. The second murder is done in a coldly efficient long take, but the third murder (death by hall closet) seems hokey and takes forever.

On this last point--the amount of time Moreau takes in carrying out her revenge--I'd like to say another word. As a fan of long movies, I have no problem with a director stretching out moments or scenes or sequences for effect. Bring on the long takes, I say. But the stumbling block of a film like The Bride Wore Black is that as a member of the audience I'm incredulous at the planning of the heroine. Moreau's fourth murder--the killing of the artist--involves a plan that drags on and on for no discernible reason. Perhaps it's the boorish American in me, but I say if you're going to kill someone, then get on with it. (And as long as I'm being boorish, at forty years old in 1968 Moreau was too old for the role. She tells us that she and her husband had been in love since they were small children and never once looked at anyone else--so did they really wait so long to get married or is she supposed to be playing a much younger woman?)

The French New Wave was a great thing for cinema, especially American cinema. The writers and directors who came out of the movement were devoted fans of American filmmakers like Hawks, Hitchcock and Ford. They helped bring attention to Orson Welles at a time when American critics had written him off. And they reclaimed the crimes films of the forties and fifties, championed unknown directors like Edgar G. Ulmer and forgotten stars like Lizabeth Scott and Charles McGraw, and christened the genre Film Noir. God bless the French. But there is a certain tension missing from a film like The Bride Wore Black. Perhaps this is because noir is the result of a distinctly American tension--the balance between optimism and pessimism, a grim fatalism that descends on the thwarted romantic idealist.

Here's the trailer for the film.