Most ‘best of the year so far’ lists are released halfway
through the year. I’m doing mine now. We just survived a real dud of a summer
blockbuster season, but there have been some great movies this year. They’ve
been sprouting up here and there – sometimes it just takes a little weeding to
find them.
5. The Lobster
At one point in The
Lobster a woman tries to kill herself by jumping out of a first-floor
window. As she lays bloodied on the sidewalk her screams of agony are played as
a joke. That’s the darkness of the humor in this movie. And it is funny – the
woman had much higher windows available to her. It’s also a critique of love
and dating, as she was driven to such foolish desperation by the fact that she
was on her last day to find a mate, and if she failed she would be turned into
an animal. The botched suicide also serves our hero’s (Collin Farrell)
purposes: as compatibility is taken dead-literally, the woman he’s interested
in watches the suffering jumper with casual indifference and so he does too (he
wins her over when she fakes choking to death in a hot tub and he just watches
her sink into the water). It’s absurd and weird and darkly funny (though there
is plenty of light humor as well – the dance scene in the forest is hilarious
and no one gets killed). It’s also full of insight that I think will take more
than one viewing to totally grasp.
4. Krisha
Krisha is director Trey Edward Shults’ feature debut. The
movie cost $14,000 to make and was shot using mostly Shults’ friends and
relatives as actors. I didn’t know this before I watched it and was amazed at
how well the movie captured the reality of family gatherings. Krisha takes
place over one Thanksgiving evening. The extended family is all together –
brothers and cousins in college, great grandma makes it home, there’s a new
baby, and Krisha has come back after having been away for years. People sit and
chat, play games, watch sports, horse around, play with dogs, and it all
happens exactly as those things happen in real life. The jokes are jokes real
people make and the conversations are real conversations. Shults’ casting
choice may have been forced by his small budget, but it’s also crucial to the
movie’s success. I’ve never had a family gathering fall apart like this one
does, but I’m sure it would happen the way it happens here. There is a lot of
discomfort and awkwardness, like when something doesn’t go quite right in
someone else’s house, or like watching your friend’s parents fight. You just
want to get out of there but you have to be polite. Krisha captures that tension and the complicated and sometimes
messy details of extended family life. Shults’ next film is set to be a horror
movie and you can see that interest in Krisha.
There’s nothing scary or disturbing, but Krisha’s return, like a ghost or
an intruder in a horror film, has the disruptive effect that troubled family
members often bring home with them.
3. Everybody Wants Some!!
This movie has been described as a spiritual sequel to
199_’s Dazed and Confused. But Everybody Wants Some!! is director
Richard Linklater’s follow-up to last year’s Boyhood, the 12-years-in-the-making exploration of, well, boyhood,
and this movie is more of a continuation of that one. It follows the adventures
and misadventures of college-aged guys, in a way, picking up where Boyhood left off. These college guys are
all baseball players at the end of their boyhood facing the excitement and
anxieties of stepping towards manhood.
It’s set in the 80s and it is funny so it could easily have
fallen into the stereotypes of 80s comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, or Animal House, where there are only jocks and geeks and babes and
everyone plays their role. But here the characters are unique and complicated.
Just when you expect one to be a certain kind of guy he’ll do something that
that type of guy doesn’t do. And yet it’s also realistic, as it shows the way
guys that age act – the jokes they make, the fun they have, and even the doubts
and fears they face as they go from being big fish in small ponds to just fish.
The movie also avoids turning the guys into a bunch of unlikable jocks.
Everyone here is fun to spend time with. It also avoids structural clichés –
where things work for a while, a roadblock is hit, then everyone learns a
lesson. Life doesn’t happen like that and the movie doesn’t go that way. Life
just begins happening.
1. The Witch
1. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
I have a tie. I thought Hunt for the Wilderpeople would be a clear number one since I had such a
great time watching it. But The Witch has
left me with so much more to chew on and I can’t shake it.
It’s hard to say The
Witch isn’t a horror movie. After all, Satan is in the movie and there is
at least one witch. But it was marketed as a scary movie and people who went to it expecting that thrill of
feeling terrified went home disappointed, and I think, missing the point of the
movie (I mentioned this problem when I wrote about the Sixth Sense). The Witch is scary, but it’s a lot more
than that.
Set in New England in the 1600s, the movie tells the tale
(and really, it is a tale – the subtitle is “A New England Folktale”) of a family
exiled from their Puritan establishment when the father refuses to compromise
his beliefs. Those beliefs are the family’s main crop and its sustenance as
their corn crop is failing and there’s nothing in the woods by their isolated
house. Except that there is.
The family consists of the parents, a baby, two young twins,
a young boy, and an adolescent girl, and without spoiling anything, things
happen to each of them one by one and those things aren’t pleasant.
But the movie centers around belief. Here it is not the
charitable, all-loving Christianity, but the hard Christianity
of self-loathing, guilt, and the crushing weight of demanded perfectionism –
the gospel of inadequacy, desperate for grace and redemption. At one point the
boy recites, “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto
sin, and that continually.” And the family’s isolated and fragile circumstances
magnify this severe, punishing belief until it becomes the obsessive and almost
fanatic devotion of believers who have nothing else but their belief. So when
the terrible things start happening we wonder if they are really happening, or
if it’s the imagined terrors of the desperately devout.
The terrors from the woods gradually mutate this desperate
belief until it infects the family and tears it apart. There are frightening
and disturbing scenes, the acting is wonderful, and the period setting,
complete with accurate dialogue (watch it with subtitles), is unique and adds
to the haunting atmosphere. “What went we out into this wilderness to find?”
the father asks at the beginning. If you haven’t seen The Witch, you should find out.
Hunt for the
Wilderpeople is in many ways the opposite of The Witch. It is bright, upbeat, and full of life and humor. It tells
the story of Ricky Baker, a 13-year-old boy who has bounced around foster homes
and the child welfare system because of his various crimes that include “kicking
stuff, knocking stuff over, and spitting.” The movie begins with his arrival at
Hec and Bella’s house way out in the New Zealand wilderness. Things look good
for a while for Ricky but they take a turn and he decides to run away. Hector
quickly finds him but injures himself and the two’s delayed return is
misinterpreted and leads to a national manhunt.
The gruff-old-guy-takes-a-youngster-under-his-wing formula
has been done before, but Wilderpeople manages
the perfect balance of everything and makes it fresh and fun. Every character
is likable – even the villains, who remain villainous despite their likability.
There’s wackiness, but it’s not over-the-top or slapstick. And there are
heartwarming moments, but they’re not sappy or predictable. And it’s hilarious.
It accomplishes something rare these days that the best jokes aren’t in the
trailer. And even rarer: the best jokes from the trailer are even funnier in
context. It’s a wonderful and positive movie and one of the best times I’ve had
at a movie this year.
I didn’t mean to pick these two as my co-favorites, but it
shows the power of movies that two very different films can be so affecting and
enjoyable for such vastly different reasons.
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