Best of 2016 Film Poll Pimping Poll/Details!

[caley]

I kept meaning to do more with this but here is my pimping post

THE BEST

Arrival: A great sci-fi film with Amy Adams as a linguist charged with communicating with some alien visitors.  Beautiful cinematography and score, and a mesmerizing lead performance from Adams.

Gleason: Man, this film is so GOOD.  Steve Gleason was an undersized NFL player for a few years, who retired then was diagnosed at just 34 with ALS.  Three months after his diagnosis, his wife gets pregnant, so Gleason decides to record an ongoing video diary to a son he will never be able to actually converse with.  It's devastatingly sad, with moments of surprising humor, and it's deeply moving, and it's, ulimately, joyful.  It's really a spectacularly good, but hard watch, as Gleason and his wife never shy away from the awfulness of the disease, or how hard it is to look after/live with it.  I highly recommend it.

Knight of Cups: It's Terrence Malick.  Of course I'm going to love it.  Hard to describe this one, it's basically about Christian Bale as a popular Hollywood screenwriter searching for meaning in his life, but it's basically plotless and the bulk of the film is just Bale walking around with various actresses improvising dialogue with beautiful Malick scenery cut in.

Loving: A really low-key film about the Loving couple, who were married and subsequently arrested in 1950s Virginia for being an interracial couple.  It sounds like obvious Oscar-bait, but this being directed by Jeff Nichols ('Mud', 'Take Shelter'), he's less interested in stirring speeches, courtroom battles and characters being viciously attacked, and more in the humanity of its two leads and their unquestionable love and devotion to each other.   Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga are amazing in as the two leads.

Midnight Special: Nichols' other film this year is one of my favourites.  About a father's quest to protect his special son.  It's wonderful.  Chock full of great actors - Michael Shannon, Kristen Dunst, Sam Shepard, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver, and Jaeden Lieberher - with some amazing effects and a really moving score.  It's part John Carpenter, part Nichols' other Southern gothic films, and part action film.  Never hits a wrong note.

Valley of Love: A great little French film with Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu playing well-known French actors who meet up in Death Valley, California near the anniversary of their son's suicide.  Using a haunting Charles Ives track as the basis for its score, the two set out to meet their late son's wishes, while discussing their lives and futures.  Huppert and Depardieu are spectacular, two of my favourite performances of the year, and it looks amazing, and there's a wonderful bit of magic realism thrown in for good measure.

THE NEXT LEVEL

 

Green Room: Intense as all get-out flick starring the late Anton Yelchin as a member of a punk rock group looking to score some extra money by playing at a skinhead bar than witnesses something that puts them at odds with the skinheads and their cold-blooded ruthless leader (An incredible turn by Patrick Stewart).  It's violent, it's bleak, and it's good.

Hardcore Henry: I loved this, though your mileage might vary depending on your tolerance for shaky-cam and violence.  It's a first-person POV action flick about Henry, a cybernetically-enchanced man trying to get his wife back from the evil, superpower Akan.  It's fast-paced, fun, and the stunts are just ridiculous.

Hello My Name is Doris: Fun little comedy with Sally Field as an introverted hoarder who comes out her shell after falling for a much younger man at work.  Funny, moving, and it's one of those movies that just doesn't make any false steps.

Into the Inferno: Werner Herzog directed this Netflix documentary about volcanoes, but it being Herzog, he doesn't stick there.  It starts with him talking about and filming volcanoes, then he ends up at a so-called 'Chicken Church' in Indonesia, then they get into discussing theories about an eruption bottle-necking human evolution so they travel to Ethiopia and film some guys hunting for fossils, then end up in North Korea at one point, ostensibly to talk about volcanoes, but ends up filming more the day-to-day goings-on in the shadow-y state.  It's funny, it's mindblowing (The footage from the Kraffts of active volcanoes is probably the most stunning volcano footage I've ever seen!), and it gives you lots to think about it.  I'm very close to putting it into the first category.

The Nice Guys: Ryan Gosling/Russell Crowe vehicle about private investigator and enforcer getting mixed up in a murder mystery in 1970s Los Angeles.  It's directed by Shane Black ('Kiss Kiss Bang Bang', 'Iron Man 3', 'The Long Kiss Goodnight'), so you know there's going to be lots of banter.  Funny, fun film with great chemistry between Gosling and Crowe.

 

[caley]

Here is the other stuff

ALSO GOOD

The BFG: Steven Spielberg adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book about a friendly giant who crosses path with an orphan.  Wonderful effects and a great motion-capture performance by Mark Rylance.

Captain America: Civil War: The last Captain America is one of my fave superhero movies period, so I went into this with high hopes that weren't quite met, but it was still an entertaining watch.

Deadpool: It's funny, it's violent, and it's probably the best use of Ryan Reynolds in his career, save maybe 'Just Friends', where he's allowed to just go with his terrific comedic timing and ridiculous charisma.  Oscar-worthy?  I dunno about that...

Elvis & Nixon: With Kevin Spacey as Richard Nixon and Michael Shannon as Elvis, this is basically a comedy about the meeting between the two.  It's barely enough plot to sustain an entire film and everything is basically a guess as to what actually happened, but Spacey and Shannon are so magnificently bizarre in their performances that it makes it worth a watch.

Hail, Caesar!: Oddball Coen Brothers comedy about the golden age of Hollywood.  There's probably lots of stuff that flew over my head and would hit home more if I was more of an old-timey movie nut, but Channing Tatum and Alden Ehrenreich's performances were really great and funny.

High-Rise: A lot of this flew WAY over my head, but it's a spectacularly weird little watch about a dystopian future (past?!) where the residents of a state-of-the-art high-rise building find their society crumbling as the building itself begins to do so.  Funny, weird, and worth a watch.

The Lobster: One of the straight-up WEIRDEST films I've ever seen.  Colin Farrell plays a guy in a near-future/alternate reality whose wife leaves him.  Seeing as its illegal to be single, he goes to a hotel where he is given 45 days to meet a compatible match or he will be changed into an animal of his choosing (Our title is his choice).  While there he will go on "dates" (kind of), meet fellow men looking for "love" and go on hunts for loners in the woods.  It's bizarrely, dryly dead-pan funny, surprisingly moving in parts, and just straight-up weird.  So, yeah.

Mascots:  Christopher Guest-directed Netflix mockumentary about the world of mascots is pretty great and funny.  With a film full of goofy mascots and goofy routines and the like, there's a conversation in the middle where a bunch of people discuss whether "squaw" is an offensive term that is one of the most apt and hilarious moments on film this entire year.

The Mermaid: This Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle) directed film is now the highest-grossing film in China.  It's a silly, goofy little comedy about a billionaire industrialist who is destroying the habitat of a group of mermaids who decide to send their prettiest mermaid on a mission to seduce and kill him.  At times, it tries to be an environmental parable but then pulls back from it.  But it's silly, goofy fun.  Not ashamed to say I laughed out loud a few times.  

The Seventh Fire: Depressingly bleak documentary about two men on a reservation in Minnesota.  One is a career criminal who is facing down an extended prison sentence while the other talks about making a break and leaving the reservation but seems to be on track to follow his elder's path.  Some absolutely stunning cinematography in this one but it's a real downer.

Zootopia: Funny little animated flick about an animal-populated metropolis that's about accepting and celebrating one another's differences.  And the sloth DMV scene is an all-timer.

 

Ehhhh...

 

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice: This was all right.  It's way too long, Jesse Eisenberg as Joker is a brutal miscasting of the highest order, and Superman is made to look like such a dope that by the time he figures things out, he's kind of lost his empathy from the audience.  But the effects are pretty spectacular, Ben Affleck is good as Batman, and Gal Godot makes a pretty decent Wonder Woman.  It won't make my list but I think it's better than the negative press it garnered.

The Bronze: Melissa Rauch of 'The Big Bang Theory' fame co-wrote and stars in this one about a spoiled bronze medal-winning gymnast who has coasted for years off her achievement and is coaxed into coaching a young gymnast for money.  The best parts of this one are the scenes with Rauch's foul-mouthed gymnast and her meek father played by Gary Cole.  It's quite foul-mouthed, has a pretty unbelievably quick redemption arc and the ending's a little pat, but it's occasionally quite funny.

A Hologram For the King: The first half of this one is excellent, with Tom Hanks as businessman who travels to Saudi Arabia in an attempt to sell a hologram-based IT service to the king.  It's a lot like 'Lost in Translation' in the Middle East with lots of screw-ups and confusion and Hanks wandering around being lost and some neat little visual flair.  But the second half abandons almost everything set up in the first half in order to shoehorn in a half-hearted standard romance and it stumbles to an unsatisfying pat ending

Jane Got Her Gun: This is one of those films that FEELS like it was written and conceived of differently, than got altered in post-production based off of audience reactions because the ending just feels completely unwarranted after what came before.  It's still an interesting little Western with Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton and Ewan McGregor but it's not essential viewing.

Neighbors 2: Man, am I tired of comedy sequels where the original is fun, spontaneous-feeling and funny being followed up with what is essentially the same movie (Hangover, Horrible Bosses etc.).  Like, I have no problem with borrowing the same essential plot and cast and than finding ways to make new jokes (22 Jump Street was at least as good, if not better than the original, and while using the same plot structure, it used it as ways to mock what they were doing, as well as have new jokes/set-ups) but when it is the same movie, right down to using the same joke-types (Air bags! Again!) it quickly becomes tiresome.  Which is a shame, because there IS interesting stuff here, such as the whole thing about fraternities and sororities and the sexism inherent in the way they're set up.  Maybe more galling is that they waste the majority of the talented cast; they have the REALLY funny idea of making Jerrod Carmichael a police officer ("I don't know why I have to wear a body cam, it's not like I'm going to shoot myself!") and only put him in two scenes, or Rose Byrne, who basically stole the film out from under everyone in the first one, is relegated to the background most of the time and not nearly as funny, or the great Sam Richardson who is also barely in it.  Plus, it barely crawls to its 92 minute runtime (Actually it's probably more like 86 with the credits), almost like it was the season premier of 'Neighbors: The TV Series'.  I dunno, watching the gag reel/line-o-rama makes it look like they had a lot of fun filming it, it's too bad that fun rarely shows up onscreen.

Popstar: Never Stop Stopping: Man, the first half of this is basically a flawless satire of pop music with Andy Samberg playing a Justin Bieberseque pop star whose constant dominance of the charts and popular culture begins to stumble after a series of poor decisions (Like striking a deal with an appliance company to play his songs reminiscent of U2's album being uploaded to iPhones).  But, in the second half, the movie seems to forget that Samberg's character isn't a real person and doesn't need a redemption arc, it's much funnier to seem him be obtuse and fail.

Suicide Squad: I didn't think this was THAT bad.  I mean, it's worth a watch for Margot Robbie's performance alone which I think was almost on par with some of the better superhero performances of the last decade (Heath Ledger etc.).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: You know I actually didn't MIND the first film but this one...  They actually make a really good-looking Krang that's the right amount of new and authentic, but having him voiced by Brad Garrett seems like the worst possible idea.  Also, as my brother pointed out, when you have characters talk about being tired of living in the shadows and not being noticed, then have them drive a great big super-powered flaming garbarge truck you're kind of throwing out conflicting themes.

True Memoirs of an International Assassin: Kevin James vehicle where he plays a spy-book author who can't get his work published until a shady publisher puts it into the non-fiction section which leads to his kidnapping as people think he's a legendary assassin.  It's not bad, I laughed a few times.

 

[Lacelle]

Have you watched Manchester By The Sea, Christine or Closet Monster? Those are my top 3 for the year.

[caley]

None of them! lol 'Manchester' just showed up chez nous but am finding myself reluctant to drive out in the snow to watch it.  'Christine' came nowhere near us.  Had never heard of 'Closet Monster' (Which is funny because it's Canadian, you would think I would have, but I find Canada fairly reluctant to watch/promote its own films.

Also, I have films to add to the above list, but I haven't finished typing up my thoughts.  But everyone should  watch Blue Jay

[caley]

And the rest of 2016 stuff I've seen

The Best

Blue Jay: I loved this.  So much.  A man (Mark Duplass) runs across his high-school sweetheart (Sarah Paulson) in a store and the two spend the rest of the day getting re-acquainted.  It can be quite funny, touching, and amusing, but it's also, ultimately, crushingly sad, too.  I like the way they balanced footage of the houses crumbling, falling into a state of disrepair, of their hometown with the unspoken pain of them realizing it represented their relationship.  Duplass and Paulson are incredible here.  One of my very favourites.

Don't Think Twice: I enjoyed this, and that is with the caveat that I pretty much DETEST improv comedy (Like, I enjoy improving on film like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' etc. but onstage it just ANNOYS me).  It's about an critically-regarded improv troop who have had some successful ex-members that continues to limp along when two of its members (Keegan Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs) are asked to audition for an SNL-type show.  Director Mike Birbiglia's really good at capturing all the angles of this one: from the depression of those who are left behind to the alienation the successful ones face.  It was also nice to see Key play a role with dramatic elements, because he's actually REAL good at it.

Hunt For the Wilderpeople: One of my favourites of the year.  A young sullen teen is taken in by a foster family, but eventually ends up on the run with his adopted father/uncle-by-name.  Together the duo become sort of national heroes as they try to survive in the New Zealand bush, avoiding the authorities while at odds with each other.  It's directed by Taikka Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows) so rather than being some trite, coming-of-age story, it's this crazy odd-couple comedy that is consistently hilarious from beginning to end.

Weiner: This was a surprise to me.  It's about disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and his campaign for mayor of New York City.  The less you go into this one knowing, the better it will be but it's a fascinating look at a really great politician who would probably do a really good job if only he could have gotten his personal issues under control.

Also Good

Lo and Behold: Reveries of The Connected World: A second 2016Werner Herzog documentary, this time about the history of the internet and teh way it has inserted itself essentially into our lives.  It's a little dense, with the early going so heavy on explanation and theory that it almost loses the viewer, but if you stick with it there's lots of good old Herzog weirdness: robot football players, a community with no internet, Elon Musk's difficulty being interviewed, banjo-playing and chilling footage from Hurricane Sandy.

Queen Mimi: Crazy little documentary about a woman who lives in a laundromat and the way she affects the lives of everyone around here, including celebrities like Zach Galifianakis and Renee Zellweger.  Her whole life story is basically beyond belief, and every time you think you know her entire story, a little bit more unfolds.  Interesting.

Ehhh...

City of Gold: This is a critically-acclaimed documentary about food writer Jonthan Gold but I think it's probably not that interesting if you're not a HUGE fan of food writing, Gold or Los Angeles.  There's some interesting stuff here and there, but a lot of it is just footage of LA while Gold talks about places he's eaten and I becomes a little tiresome if you're unlikely to be in LA any time in the near future.

Demolition: Weirdo Jake Gyllenhaal film about a man "grieving" for his deceased wife who stumbles around trying to figure out if he missed her or not and if he needs to move on or not.  Gyllenhaal is excellent, but I really didn't buy the initial conceit of him writing to a vending machine company and telling them his life story only for a woman at the vending machine company to write him back.  Also, there's one scene where he comes across a bullied teen with a gun that feels GROSSLY irresponsible to me.

Ghostbusters: If you strip away the controversy about this one (How it became the target of right-wingers who voted it down as the worst trailer in history and cyber-bullied star Leslie Jones.  Or also how it's been built up as a paragon of feminism), you're left with an okay, fairly entertaining flick.  The effects are wonderful, and it's fairly funny in parts (I know everyone though Kate MacKinnon stole the film but I found her character way too hammy and overly wacky, like every scene featuring her has her doing saying something or chewing the background scenery to a distracting degree.  Personally, I though the funniest moments were Liam Hemsworth as a terrible receptionist with Melissa McCarthy's reactions to his ineptness being particularly great) but not a really well-developed plot or interesting villains.  So, it's all right, probably worth a watch, probably not a vote.

The Other Side: This movie really affected me in a negative way.  Like, it's wonderfully filmed, with an unflinching eye to what it's filming, but what it's showing is so deeply TROUBLING at times that it really bothered me and took me four different viewings to get through a 90 minute film.  It follows around some poor people around Louisiana: making meth, making out, stealing, complaining about Obama, working, taking metch, and shooting stuff.  The most remarked-upon scene is where the guy we follow around most is shown injecting a stripper with drugs, only for the camera to pan around and show us that she's very, very pregnant.  That scene really bothered me, as did the one where a bunch of shirtless old drunk, stoned men stand around blathering about nothing in particular until one of them, under the guise of being playful, carelessly flips a chair with a young girl in it over making her cry, then him being too drunk to properly lift the chair back up and comfort her.  It's a beautifully-filmed movie about an ugly subject.

X-Men: Apocalypse: This isn't bad.  I had high expectations because Apocalypse was always one of my favourite X-Men characters and it was a little weird to see him as a sad-face little blue guy.  I felt that the most impressive he looked/felt was in the psychic battle in Professor X's head near the end of the film because that's when he looked/felt powerful.  But it was an all right flick, entertaining.

Awful
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates: This was the drizzling shits, in all honesty.  I'm not sure I laughed once, in all honesty.  And the cast is amazing: Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Stephen Root, Sam Richardson, and Kumail Nanjiani.  But it's still shockingly uninteresting.  I know their big selling point was that 'Girls can be as raunchy as men!' but it doesn't matter when it's just so bad. 

[caley]

Keanu: Was much funnier than I was expecting.  The trailer looked like a kind of one-joke premise (One they had already basically done on 'Key & Peele') but there were enough surprises (Two GREAT cameos) and general silliness (Keegan Michael Key being proud of the gangers for communicating in the middle of a gunfight, the whole George Michael stuff) to keep it fun.  I liked it. 

Plus any movie that gives you this is worthwhile

[S.K.o.S.]

Here are five that haven't been mentioned yet and will make my top 20.

Goat: Fraternity hazing drama that manages to balance being harrowing with being believable.  Also boasts the best James Franco cameo since Spring Breakers.

Jackie: Liked this way, way more than I expected to.  I'd seen praise for the score and Portman's performance - it was the dialogue that did it for me.  Jackie does an interview where she repeatedly tells the journalist not to print what she's saying, and that plants the seed that we never knew her true feelings and this movie will show them to us.  If you're on board with that, then pretty much every line she speaks is shocking.

The Phenom: A young baseball pitcher whose career is going off the rails meets with a sports psychologist and tries to unpack his troubled relationship with his father.  The guy who played Young Neil in Scott Pilgrim surprisingly holds his own in multiple one-on-one scenes opposite Paul Giamatti and Ethan Hawke.  Unusual approach for a sports movie, kind of looking in on this guy at various moments throughout his journey, and if I'm remembering right, we almost never actually see him on the mound.

Tickled: Documentary about "competitive tickling" videos that have a sinister side.  Enjoyably goofy to start off, indulging in some fun gotcha journalism, but when it's time to get serious, the payoff delivers and will make you struggle to believe that this actually happened.

War Dogs: Did you like Wolf On Wall Street?  Well this is like that, except people actually act like rational human beings most of the time and it's not a massively bloated three hours long.

[Chaos]

Here are a couple of recent viewings with my short Letterboxd thoughts:

Sully: People competently doing their jobs is one of the toughest feats to display on film without overbearing the film without self-importance or an over-injection of melodrama. Sully is not without melodrama, but it never feels terribly overwrought. Also, no one is better at portraying figures such as Captain Sully quite like Tom Hanks who continues to prove to be an American Treasure for acting.

Kubo and the Two Strings: One of the most beautiful non-Disney/Pixar American animated films you will ever see. I wrote on Facebook that Kubo and the Two Strings was a coherent, cohesive representation of a JRPG story. I'm not sure there is a better way to explain this film's experience. See this one before you finalize your end of 2016 film lists!

[jaedmc]

Kubo is incredible filmmaking. Totally eradicates the myth of redemptive violence, and does so in a beautiful way. It was amazing listening to the audience and kids were like "Woah, wait, after all that, this is the solution? That's cool."

[caley]

Watched 

The Intervention: Clea DuVall wrote, directed and starred in this comedy(ish) film about 4 couples in their 30s reuniting in order to have an intervention for the one couple's marriage.  It's chalk full of people I like: DuVall, Melaine Lynskey (*Sigh* Melanie Lynskey!), Alia Shawkat and Ben Schwartz.  There's nothing really mold-breaking or original about the film, but, still, it's worth a watch.

Swiss Army Man: Might just be my film of the year.  Paul Dano stars as Hank, a man stuck on a deserted island about to take his own life, when a corpse, Manny, (Daniel Radcliffe) washes up on the beach.  Hank and Manny become friends (Don't ask), and Hank  uses Manny's talents for flatulence (Again don't ask), among other things, to try to make his way back to society.  It's deeply weird, surprisingly touching, and full of wonder and awe.  I loved the way they weaved the score into the action, with characters singing along to it, or starting it.  I really loved this insane little movie.

[caley]

Man The Neon Demon is quite the movie.  Even if you're a little put-off by the subject matter or the absolutely abrupt turn of the events in the last quarter of the film, you can't help but admire what a beautiful-looking film it was.  I turned all the lights in the house off and watched it in the dark and the early nightclub scene, in particular was absolutely mesmerizing.

[S.K.o.S.]

8 minutes ago, caley said:

Man The Neon Demon is quite the movie.  Even if you're a little put-off by the subject matter or the absolutely abrupt turn of the events in the last quarter of the film, you can't help but admire what a beautiful-looking film it was.  I turned all the lights in the house off and watched it in the dark and the early nightclub scene, in particular was absolutely mesmerizing.

I saw it in a theatre, but I remember thinking a downloaded copy that cut some corners on video compression would not do it justice at all.  Even that bright red text over the fading colors in the opening credits could end up looking like garbage.

[caley]

Yup.  I should probably eventually invest in a blu-ray copy (I watched in HD on our cable's on-demand service).  Also, Keanu Reeves was great in this, as was Elle Fanning whom I'm baffled doesn't get talked about more as she's always really good.

[The Z]

Is the deadline still tomorrow?

If it is, I'll send one in, but if it isn't I'll watch a few more.

[caley]

It's a soft deadline.  I won't be tabulating anything over the weekend at the least, so feel free to take the weekend to watch stuff (Same with anyone who submitted a ballot, feel free to watch more stuff and add to your list and send me a re-ordered list after the weekend).  I'd really hoped to catch 'Moonlight' or 'Hell or High Water' before the deadline.  

I see 'Moonlight' is coming to DVD on the 28th...should I extend the deadline to allow more people to see it?

[CSC]

It's a tough spot between the All Time Poll going on and March Madness looming.  So very easy for this to get lost. 

I'm in the same boat as Z - I'm perfectly fine with my Top 10 and could at least send in a list that I'm pretty happy with at any point - but of course I wouldn't mind having a bit more time to see a few more things. 

[Paco]

I sent in a revised Top 20.

Check yo messages

[caley]

I have received it, just have yet to answer because I'm a bastard.