a crazy year to say the least. film-wise, i think this was a good year for me, as they always are. i was lucky enough to have received a karagarga invite from a very generous friend, which will surely aid me moving forward in finding those hard-to-find flicks. additionally, while i didn’t get to see anything from NYC this year, i had a great time finding new sorts of films i like – a newfound passion for shaw bros, sov horror, and schizo-core cinema. here are the best films that i saw in the calendar year for the first time.
while i’ve never really categorized myself as a noteworthy fan of powell & pressburger, i had heard great things about The Thief of Bagdad for a while now, and this year on a whim decided to finally get around to it. i’m glad i did; it ends up being this sort of marvelous dream movie, soaked in some of the most glorious technicolor that money could buy, and with no lack of imagination throughout the entire (admittedly bloated) runtime. whitewashed through and through, but, as is often the case, not to an extent particularly more egregious than the average picture today. it’s surreal to imagine that such high budget ventures were once as dreamy and nightmarish as this.
other than a stream for The Book of Life a few years ago, i had somehow managed to dodge seeing any hal hartley films until this year, where i finally saw Trust. given his idiosyncrasies, i was a bit hesitant on whether or not something with this dodgy of a love story (of sorts) could really be handled well, yet this culminates in moments of such beauty and tenderness that i was surprised that it was made by a relative newbie. i think more than anything i’ve been gravitating towards these more narratively simple tales of kindness, and this one (which even explicitly defines love within its text) was perfect for being in this mode of thought.
relatively obscure soviet/post-soviet director vladimir kobrin seemed to mostly dabble in academic surrealism, an area of film that i can usually tolerate to a point but i usually wouldn’t call it my thing. his short from 2000, Gravidance, is the exception; plays more like a vintage youtube poop with eastern bloc sensibilities and a style of humor that seems entirely impossible for someone born after 1990 to have. one of the funniest things i have ever seen!
my exposure to the towering masterpiece that is Dawn Breaking in 2020 left me excited to check out more work by its director, yang fudong. this mostly ended in fruitless, anonymously directed arthouse fare – a commercial for prada, a decent fifth generation piece, maybe some snippets of some installations here and there, but nothing i would recommend to anyone other than completists. then finally, at last, i saw his 7 minute short from 2005, The Half Hitching Post, which is up there with the greatest of tscherkassky as the most haunting 7 minute movie i’ve ever seen. just an unparalleled amount of dread, alien mystery, like antonioni taken to the extreme. feels a bit unfair to put something that you can watch while you microwave a potato on here among the features but it’s really something incredible.
one of the developments that i’ve been getting into with films in 2021 is, to put it bluntly, schizo-core. paranoia, /x/-posting, inscrutable narratives, the whole nine yards. and i think the best film that i saw which exemplified the power of these types of esoteric productions is (once-pink floyd music video director?) peter whitehead’s Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. a mouthy, confusing title in preparation for a mouthy, confusing movie; one that i could spend untold amounts of time yapping about. told almost entirely in narration and interviews, filmed entirely in lo-fi video around where the director lived, seemingly made up on the spot, it tells the plot of spies/lesbians/sisters/revolutionaries both named maria, who also have something to do with The Third Man, and fail in their tasks of overthrowing global capitalism. clearly made by someone who was experiencing an end-of-life burst of wanting to get something out to the world, it’s always compelling even in its most abstract and, frankly, tragic moments. nothing else like it.
a few years back i was enraptured with iwai’s A Bride for Rip Van Winkle and, as is typical for me, i went several years without seeing any of his other material (unless you count the extended cut of that movie – side note, it’s not really worth it). in 2021, i finally took the plunge and watched some more of his work, and found that his 2011 mumblecore film Vampire was exactly what i was looking for. iwai’s films are filled with an abundance of tenderness for characters who, often, don’t even particularly earn or deserve this tenderness, but it’s through the fictitious narratives of his cinema that he’s able to explore them through this lens. this film – his only in english, as far as i know – features light genre elements and some early 2010s web zaniness, but otherwise stays in its lane as an extremely well-done and emotional drama of sorts.
i wrote earlier this year about the many joys i’ve found in sov horror, but allow me to reiterate a bit and note that brian paulin’s Cryptic Plasm is a minor masterpiece. oftentimes feeling like an outsider approach to cinema, someone raised on john carpenter and things that wanted to be john carpenter with the acting and cinematography of a grimy 2008 youtube webseries and the practical gore effects of positively eldlitchian origin. doesn’t get much slimier than this; really if you want to dive straight into the more genre side of sov horror, this is for you – and the last quarter will probably destroy you, as all great films do.
through the years i’ve sporadically checked out work from probably eternally underrated madman frederick wiseman, and i’ve generally liked what i’ve seen. this year i had one that really clicked with me, and that was In Jackson Heights, a mostly direct cinema documentary about the titular area. i adore this – it’s a film which patiently attempts to document a few short scenes out of the limitless subcultures of the area, and even by the time the three hour spectacle has finished, you’re left realizing that it could not possibly encompass much more than a minute percentage of this area, and then you realize that that part of NYC is only a small part of the world and so on. really special stuff, glad i finally got to it (and hopefully to more wiseman still in 2022).
the first movie i saw after the covid outbreak in theaters ended up being one of the best movies i saw all year, and this was Bacurau. i actually hadn’t planned on checking this one out, due to most descriptions making it sound like a meshing of tarantino (someone i am not particularly interested in thesedays) and revisionist westerns (ditto). it’s funny because, well, that IS what the film is like. and let me me be the first to tell you that a movie like that can end up being great. but i think what puts this flick over the top is its moments of genuine weird-ness, outlandish breaks and structure, ways that deviates ever-so-slightly from the revenge fantasy we’re all wanting to see, before inevitably bubbling over and ceding to those desires. and i love that there’s the joke about whether or not sao paolo residents are white – finally, some humor for us on facebook who are exposed to nazbol retvrn types on a daily basis.
well, with those chronologically out of the way, here are the five best films i saw in 2021:
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Snyder, 2021): i’ve called myself a snyder fan for just about as long as i was really watching movies. i think his films oftentimes deal with unusual themes of being in the presence of godliness, the burden of having those responsibilities, the necessity for empathy and tenderness, and the encouragement to seriously question and reason out what is “good” and what is “bad.” it’s kind of funny, because i would assume that these would be the building blocks of any number of superhero films, but i don’t think anyone works that better than snyder, and i don’t think any of his films are as good as this one. an overlong, bittersweet movie about loving your friends.
Limbo (Krause, 1999): takes the most horrifying, evil imagery and sounds of david lynch’s filmography, strips them of their suburban charm, and vomits out one of the most paranoid and spectral films out there. no idea how some of this was captured – feels like you’re lost in the backrooms and being stalked by someone you can only describe as humanlike but with very little beyond that. it’s very welcome to have a woman’s voice in such a male-dominated subgenre of horror like this, where the fear is vindicated by abstract vignettes and trauma versus the, shall we say, more crude takes that these video films can take on. maybe the most evil film that grandrieux never made.
Crying Freeman (Gans, 1995): there’s a lot of airy, dreamy genre films from the 90s, and some of them are really cool and some of them are really boring, but there are none quite as successful as this one. if you’ve heard Running Up that Hill, you know how the song starts – with this otherworldly synth that makes you feel like you’re dying or dead or transcending or something like this. and that’s how this film made me feel, like i was dying. a beautiful picture and finally what i was looking for from this post-new age-y part of film history.
In the Dark (Holmes, 2000): again, don’t want to repeat myself from the sov post toooo much, but this is really just incredible work firing on all cylinders here. absolutely some of the best looking bw aesthetics this side of the 60s, has this totally eerie evil attitude that’s rife with (very earned) schizo energy, really just so much to love – and that’s only about the look of the thing. the writing is aces, seems like the platonic ideal of what an uber lo-fi horror like this should be, and a lot of this is due to the unnaturally strong characterization of the leads. i really hope that holmes manages to make more films at some point, because this is something very special and it’s doing that in ways that could very easily branch out to other subdivisions of horror, or even other genres altogether.
Lady in the Water (Shyamalan, 2006): if i haven’t made it abundantly clear by now, something i have always valued in films (and particularly in the last year) are films made with some kind of tangible tenderness, love, caring, something that makes me feel like there’s a layer of the characters that is part of you and is part of them. and i don’t know of many movies with more love than this movie. the score and paul giamatti are doing a lot of work in making this function, but it’s just such a beautiful and heart-wrenching piece, yet it somehow loops around and becomes both a “dudes hanging out” movie and a “the accident wasn’t your fault” movie, which are, in my understanding, the only two types of movies ever made. but yes, to but it mildly, this is life changing material – makes you want to be a better and kinder person.
core enforcer 