Writing the "Worst" list, as purging as it was, emotionally drained me; there's only so much anger one can course through their body at a time before it gets exhausting. Returning to my keyboard today, I feel a lot better, more energetic. So, with a sense of rejuvenation in tow, here's the fun part of this year-end retrospective: my top ten FAVORITE movies of 2015!
Honorable Mentions (think of this as #15-11):
- Bridge of Spies
- Dope
- Jurassic World
- Macbeth
- Crimson Peak
10) Spotlight - The night I saw
Spotlight, it was the second film in my double-feature with
Love the Coopers, and I'll put this in perspective:
Spotlight is as good as
Love the Coopers is bad.
"Spotlight" is the name of the Boston Globe's investigative team, and the movie recounts their 2001 look at the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophile priests since the '70s and '80s. As the team (played by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian D'Arcy James) investigates, they learn how entrenched the cover-up really is, as the story mutates from a local presence to an international epidemic.
No review I've read mentions director Tom McCarthy's and cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi's use of space; they'll often shoot conversations from a distance, or put the characters at the bottom of the frame and leave the rest wide open, usually with a church looming in the back. The Catholic Church's power is always felt, and even when characters converse about these highly sensitive topics in public, in a way that honestly, anyone should be able to become privy to with ease, no passerby ever does a double-take - they just keep walking. McCarthy perverts our visual understanding of what makes up a normal conversation to highlight how the Boston community's awareness of this behavior; everyone knows about these stories, but because of the Church's cultural influence in the city, especially in its lower-income neighborhoods, no one wants to speak out and undergo a stigma from the rest of the community.
The film doesn't glorify its protagonists; at one point, it highlights how, initially, the Globe buried the story in the Metro section, putting Keaton's character in a poor light. It doesn't shirk blame from anyone, not the Church, the community, the police, or the media. Ultimately, it's a combination of all these people, intertwined, that led to this institutional cover-up. As the film peels back layer by layer, I found myself disgusted; after a while, these cases feel like a virus, consuming every corner, every home, rotting a community from the inside out.
Spotlight is important for this reason: it highlights how power can lead to an overall moral degradation, and how the extent of corruption can grow, exponentially, when justice isn't sought out. This is a tense, thoughtful, important film.
9) The Big Short -
The Big Short is CNBC-meets-Schoolhouse-Rock, a populist's answer to the following questions: What the hell caused the 2008 recession, and where were the signs? The movie answers the latter: "They were always there. You never bothered to look." As for the former, I'm gonna keep this spoiler-free.
Writer-director Adam McKay soaks the world of Wall Street in pop culture, to showcase where the average person's focus was at the time. While Steve Carell fails to get it through to a stripper that she won't be able to refinance on her six mortgages, Finn Wittrock and John Magaro's characters are brushed off by stock traders, who'd rather play at the gun range than discuss the faultiness of subprime loans. In a brilliant move, the film uses celebrity cameos to teach concepts that sound scary to most, like 'collateralized debt obligations'; it gets us laymen in the know while making it easy to understand.
The film does a great job of using comedy to deal with tragedy; I can't help but chuckle as Christian Bale talks to the two Goldman Sachs reps about setting up a bet against the housing market, and they (like so many in this film) have the best "Are...are you kidding me?" looks on their faces. We know Dr. Burry is right, so for the rest of the film, we're waiting on the punchline, waiting to see these idiots get their just desserts.
However, when the bomb drops, it's not funny. It's foreshadowed by Brad Pitt's character, as he equates every percentage point of employment to the death of 40,000 people, but it's when the market crashes that the film sobers up, from hearing a giddy Ryan Gosling scream, "I'm jacked to the TITS!" (a line I hope to God people start yelling at him as he walks down the street), to watching a husband, wife, and two preschool kids reduced to living in a sedan.
Carell and Bale (in an especially top-notch performance) do inspired work, and while the star-studded cast gets in great performances, check out lesser-known actors, like Wittrock and Magaro as a young trading duo, and Jeremy Strong as one of Carell's team.
The Big Short delivers a dark chapter of American history with heart, humor, and wit. If you come out of the film as pissed and outraged as I did, good. That's how it's supposed to be.
8) It Follows - Now,
this is how you do it! After so many years of mediocre-to-downright-awful horror flicks making it to my local cineplex, I'm so glad David Robert Mitchell's
It Follows broke out of an indie hellhole into the mainstream consciousness. This is one of the most well-directed and chilling horror films of the decade, and with time, will stand tall next to films by Carpenter, Craven, and Cronenberg.
This movie relies solely on execution, because if you were to tell me a year ago that I'd honor a film about a sexually-transmitted demon stalking teenagers as one of the best films of the year, I'd punch you in the gut. But from the first trailer, with its unapologetic '80s vibe, complete with a synth-laden masterpiece of a score (shout-out to
Disasterpiece), I was hooked and hyped; subsequently, the film didn't disappoint.
Maika Monroe is great as Jay, a Detroit teen, who falls for a guy named Hugh, and they have a budding romance. However, as soon as they hook up, she wakes up under a bridge, tied to a wheelchair. Hugh begins to explain that the "thing" that's following her is passed on sexually, and will hunt her down until it either kills or Jay passes it on to someone else. The thing only walks, which feels easily avoidable, but the rub is, it's smart, and can look like anyone, even people in Jay's life. This demon preys on her psychologically, whittling down her sanity, all the while waiting for a chance to get her in a corner.
The film does a great job of using wide landscapes, that seem to stretch a mile wide, in contrast with our heroine, usually in the middle of the frame. I find myself constantly looking in the background, and the tension that hits my chest whenever I see someone walking towards Jay and her friends sent shivers up my spine. Most of the film is spent in anticipation, to the point that when the monster does appear, it hits the right level of shock and terror.
Mitchell uses the demon to comment on female sexuality and how it factors into a woman's identity. After Jay has sex with Hugh, everyone approaches her hesitantly, with caution, even though there's no way they'll get the demon chasing after them; this is Jay's fight, and ultimately, she has to confront the consequences. Throughout the movie, most of the supporting cast's conversations with Jay are specifically about sex; luckily, we get enough in the beginning to get a sense of Jay's personality, but because her sexuality is forced to the front of every conservation, she ends up becoming objectified (Hugh at one point, remarks Jay shouldn't have a problem passing it on because of her physique). Even a towel-covered Jay, in one scene, looks down at her vagina in horror, in an attempt to externalize it from herself.
It Follows highlights the psychological deterioration that can occur in someone's mind from being identified primarily through sexual terms, serving as a biting critique of the horror genre's clichéd "virgin-whore complex".
Are there technical problems and lapses of logic from our heroes? Of course, especially in the third act (seriously, a toaster?), but what works here, works so well. If you're in the mood for a chiller,
It Follows is a must-see.
7) Ex Machina - In a recent string of AI films -
Chappie, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Transendence, Her -
Ex Machina is the best, a claustrophobic thriller that analyzes the biology of being human, to the point where I unconsciously check myself to make sure I'm human, still. Domnhall Gleeson plays a good innocent, naive but in no way stupid, and Oscar Isaac delivers on eccentricity and an unhinged demeanor (blame it on the alcohol), but
Ex Machina doesn't work without Alicia Vikander as the android, Ava.
Vikander, in a word, is deliberate. In a move that'd ensure Robert Downey Jr's character from
Tropic Thunder a headache, Vikander is a human, disguised as an android, who's supposed to walk and talk like a human, but not the stilted, mechanical Bishop from
Alien way, just 15 degrees shy of full-blown human - you never go full human. She delivers a masterful performance, adapting in the slightest gradients, according to what the audience is meant to perceive about her "humanity."
The film isn't a seminar;
Ex Machina is visceral & violent, with a dark sense of humor and foreboding atmosphere, drenched in crisp, saturated colors. Equals parts Paul Verhoeven and David Cronenberg,
Ex Machina challenges and disturbs, yet leaves me with a hopeful feeling. It feels strange to say, but I'd enjoy a sequel that could explore AI interaction on a wider social plane.
6) The Martian -
The Martian does one of the most refreshing movies I've seen from sci-fi in years: it takes the piss out of space.
Botanist and last man on Mars Mark Watney (Matt Damon) doesn't have time to fixate on the fearsome majesty of the Red Planet; he's gotta grow potatoes out of poop and set up solar panels for his dune buggy (c'mon America, if a guy who perpetually lives inches away from implosion can sustain himself using solar energy, what's stopping us?)! It's this matter-of-fact, do-or-die attitude, sprinkled with healthy doses of optimism and sarcasm that sets the film apart from
Gravity and
Interstellar, and makes for Ridley Scott's best film since
Gladiator.
The Martian is always Damon's movie, but as soon as NASA gets involved, and we introduce Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Benedict Wong, the film starts to feel like a class project in middle school, where everyone's working to solve each puzzle. The solutions these characters come up with to unprecedented problems are fascinating, and do a service to the ingenuity behind Andy Weir's original novel and Drew Goddard's screenplay (an Oscar nom is all but announced). The spirit of collaboration really shines through in this film, and while the entire film isn't sunshine and rainbows (the scene where Mark performs emergency surgery on his gut comes strikingly to mind), I always leave this film with a positive feeling and a smile on my face. But maybe that's just the disco...
5) Creed - I'm going to take a brief moment here to brag, because I feel like the only one of my friends who truly believed in this film. I was ready since the first rumors. When I saw Michael B. Jordan shadowboxing in the trailer, got a taste of his physical prowess and transformation, I knew this was a must-see. When my screening ended, a week before the film's release, I knew this was one of the year's best films. 96 million dollars, a 93% "certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a Golden Globe nomination for Sylvester Stallone later, I think the rest of the world has (finally) caught up with me.
Creed and the rest of the
Rocky franchise has a way of getting me excited about movies, not in the bombast a superhero picture will bring, but in the form of escapism that seems attainable. Philadelphia has an actual statue of Rocky Balboa, and when watching Sylvester Stallone's Rocky or Michael B. Jordan's Adonis, I feel a connection to these characters, a sense of realism I rarely feel. These people are so fully realized, so well-performed, that they leap off the screen; Rocky feels like a grandfather, Adonis a cousin. Their stories and hopes stem from such an honest place - the feeling of wanting to pursue one's dream, the desperate search for a justification to continue living - that I never feel I'm in a movie.
As a boxing film, director Ryan Coogler gives the film youth, girt, and flair, and that's what we want from our genre pictures: a fresh way to tell an old story. We can talk about the "one-take fight" or the chicken-chasing, seeing Mick's gym and the almost-possessed gasp to life Adonis has after being knocked down, and these are fantastic choices made by Coogler and team, used to entertain and evoke nostalgia.
However (and I just realized this as I'm typing), my favorite shots in my favorite
Rocky movies: VI, I, and this one are the exteriors, the landscapes of the city. In some inexplicable way, this is where these movies transcend their plot, their genre trappings and husky Russians. I get an overwhelming feeling that this neighborhood, this fictional version of Philly, is sincerely alive; this is a product of filmmakers' hard work and collective visions. It's rare to come across characters who inspire you. It's even rarer to believe in them so much, that we allow ourselves the indulgence of thinking we could become them.
4) The Gift - I heard
The Gift, when first reviews were trickling out, was being compared to Hitchcock, deemed worthy of the master of suspense. I don't know if the head of marketing needed to be dunked in ice water, but the trailer didn't sell me at all. I got a laughably bad Lifetime stalker flick with a goofy villain. I certainly didn't think I'd get the scariest film of the year.
The goofy villain I initially scoffed at was Joel Edgerton's Gordon, an old high-school friend of Robyn's (Rebecca Hall) husband, Simon (Jason Bateman). I thought Gordon's blank stare and awkward demeanor was going to be ridiculous, but the film (also written and directed by Edgerton) gives off the vibe that Gordon's not all the way there from the beginning. We see him through Robyn's eyes most of the time, and what works so well is that she conveys that universal feeling with all authenticity, that moment when you get a bad vibe from someone, can't quite place your finger on it, but just know that all you want to do is leave.
Edgerton directs this film like a clock, precise and mechanical; each aspect of the film works to wind you up emotionally, and silence the theater to the point where you can only hear yourself breathe. Robyn and Simon live in a swanky California home with many large windows, she's often framed to the side with lots of blank space available, and at points, you can see Gordon in the background - he's not drawing attention to himself, but he's there. This movie, both physically and emotionally, leaves our characters bare and always scrutinized, and preys upon our fear of losing privacy.
As the film unravels, the laundry list of fears grows; the movie ramps up to a nail-biting, horrifying climax, and I really don't think I've heard so many people over 30 scream before, but I think at the core of
The Gift lies an abysmal fear: what would happen if everyone knew your dirty secrets...and you were to embrace the ugliness? Our brains tend to kick us in the teeth so often, in an attempt to keep us from swelling the ego, but I think what we often don't realize is that our brains do this in order to curb the bad thoughts, to stop us from enveloping ourselves in self-destructive behaviors and attitudes. It's so strange, in this modern world of everyday acceptance and always embracing your "inner self", that it would feel healthy to keep some of this closed off, but what
The Gift reminds us is, as the extraordinarily cheesy tagline sums up, "not every gift is welcome."
3) Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens - What can I write about
The Force Awakens that almost literally EVERYONE hasn't? Honestly, I feel it's too early to do a retrospective on what this movie means to me, because I'm still living in it!
The Force Awakens is currently $10 million away from
Avatar's domestic box-office record, landing on everyone's top ten lists (guilty), revitalizing the fan base who refuses to agree on one theory about any character, from Rey to Luke to the damn Stormtrooper with a spinning baton. The hours I've spent in restaurants while my friend Matt regurgitates every piece of knowledge he has of the extended universe are almost innumerable...and incomprehensible (hehe).
The talk of the movie as a phenomenon eclipses the conversations of its quality, which are both good and bad - I've never seen a theater experience quite so anticipated and revered as this, but it does skew the public's reaction to the film. I tried not to see any trailer on YouTube; any info on
The Force Awakens was to be discovered in-theater, which I found helped temper any ridiculous expectations.
I was ready to be transported back into the world I loved, and that's exactly what I got. Spacecraft battles, lightsabers, droids, crazy-lookin' aliens, smugglers, Stormtroopers, the Force - they're all here. I love Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo, and BB-8; there's no doubt in my mind I'll grow to love them, and my future kid will grow up learning to love them as we watch films together. I think that kind of statement is the best part about the whole thing; Star Wars is lodged in the firmament of our culture, not only in America, but worldwide. It spans races, creed, and generations, celebrating our love of boundless imagination and eye-widening storytelling. What can I say, Star Wars is back, in fine form and here to stay.
2) The Man From U.N.C.L.E. - The first time I saw
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was the most fun I've had in a theater in 2015. Talk about a film that brings you back to childhood - I felt like James Bond on an Aston Martin careening down the highway in my Camry afterwards. This is, without a doubt, my favorite spy movie. It's immaculately designed, filled to the brim with action, laugh-out-loud funny; and it revels in the joys of fantasy.
A lot of people are pointing out Finn and Poe's bromance (or potential romance, we'll have to wait till Episode VIII); I point to Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). These gentlemen are magnetic, quipping back and forth, arguing about the superiority of their nations like grade-schoolers over a baseball team, leaving Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) to step in and keep them focused on the mission. For all the chases, stunts, and fights, the movie's best enjoyment comes from the comedy, and specifically, the comedy derived from our dual leads.
Guy Ritchie is the perfect director for this; he doesn't stop for a second, always giving the audience something to look at, whether it be a joke in the background, a dynamically lit close-up of Napoleon's eyes, or a group of extras dressed in gorgeous 60's-era dresses. He consistently tries out different moves with the camera - different angles, zooms, lenses - and curates the selection so well that the end result is exhilarating. There's so much bang for your buck here, and it is all wonderfully worth it.
1) Room -
Room blindsided me. Up until December, I would've told you my favorite film of the year was
The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but 45 minutes into this film, I had a realization: not only was this my favorite movie of the year, but one of my favorites, period. It's one of those rare movies that gives me an honest appreciation of life and the inherent beauty of it and what the future holds.
Jack (Jacob Tremblay) is five years old. He lives with his mom (Brie Larson) in Room. Every day, they wake up, eat breakfast, do stretches, watch TV, and color. Jack is infinitely curious and likes to ask his mom a lot of questions, which she happily and readily answers. Jack tells us about his understanding of life: there's Room, then TV, then Space. He and his mom are real, but the people in TV are flat and made of colors. Space is seen through Skylight and full of stars. The movie tells the story of their lives from Jack's 5th birthday forward.
And honestly, that's all I can tell you.
In the spirit of discovery, and having an audience discover things for themselves, you're going to have to trust me with this and only use what I've given you. Don't worry, I've tested this with my girlfriend - it's better to go into this thing cold . What I can tell you is that Tremblay and Larson are an incredible duo with Oscar-worthy performances; there's never a moment where I forget they're not really mother and son. The script, written by the novel's author, Emma Donoghue, is masterful, loaded with passion, love, intelligence, tension, and the sincerest joy. Director Lenny Abrahamson tells it all faithfully through Jack's point of view; we experience everything through his eyes, his resilience, exuberance, frustrations, and love for his mom. He never lets Jack know more than he should for the audience's sake; we're right here with him, and Jack is a delight to spend two hours with. Two hours feels way too short.
Jack and his mom represent two sides of my sentiments towards time. His mom finds herself caught by the pains of the past, finding it difficult to move on with life. In contrast, Jack is open, always looking forward to the future and new experiences. He helps her overcome personal traumas, and likewise, I feel I should do the same.
Room is a heart-changing experience, one that broke me down and built me back up. It's a testament to the spiritual experience film can provide, in allowing us to connect with other human beings, and both the darkest and brightest parts of ourselves. It is great art, great storytelling, and my favorite movie of 2015.
Thank you all for reading; I'm the Man Without a Plan, signing off.
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi tells the story of the attack on a diplomatic U.S. compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi on Sept 11 and 12, 2012. Among the four Americans killed was the Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens. The movie follows a six-men security team as they work to protect employees of the nearby CIA annex from hordes of terrorists. 
With every movie, he gives his style a new context. In Pulp Fiction, the trunk holds Jules' and Vincent's guns, is a twist on the blue-collar worker pulling out their tools for work. In Kill Bill, the trunk holds a gagged and bloodied Sofie Fatale, the scene changing into a potential execution. With Michael Bay, the wide shot for the explosion makes the same comment every time: "Woah, that's massive!" His trademarks aren't integrated into the narrative to distinguish the storytelling.
The performances are solid; John Krasinski carries some dramatic heft, and I did enjoy Pablo Schreiber, even if some of his comedy was out of place. The main actors have chemistry, and given stronger characters, would better sell the brotherhood of war movies like this often explore. The supporting cast, sadly, is either underused or relegated to awkward comic relief, often in a scene that doesn't match, tonally.
