Best of 2016 Power Ranking

It’s difficult in a small city to catch up with some of the more talked about movies from any given year. Some don’t get wide releases until early the next year. Some never do. Some end up in our theatres long after their release date after they have generated more buzz or have been nominated for Oscars. It seems that to see all the best movies of the year you have to be a professional critic in a big city. But even then it can be difficult. And so any top of 2016 list from the occasional movie blogger in Medicine Hat, Alberta will be lacking, at least until the first couple months of 2017. So I thought I would do it power rankings style, adjusting the list as I catch up with some of the better movies of the year.

Notably absent so far, and which I hope to catch up on as soon as possible, are: Hell or High Water (no real excuse here - it came to our theatres, and it’s available to stream on iTunes. I’ll get to it soon), Lion, Jackie, Fences, Moonlight, Paterson, Silence, Loving (and a few other one-word titles, I’m sure), and Nocturnal Animals. So I hope to be back regularly as I catch up with these.

Right now I have a top 12 for some reason. That’s just how it worked out. I don’t know if I’ll bump some as I add some or just draw out the list. Stay tuned.

Now, without further ado.

1. La La Land

I don’t think I have a particular fondness for musicals (and have downright hated some - I remember turning off the Phantom of the Opera halfway through, but then realized after 20 minutes that I had nothing else to do and so put it back on and finished it), and I was never a theatre person. But La La Land is such an exuberant joyride of fun, humor, happiness, lights and colour, song and dance, that it would melt the heart of the coldest Grinch. Director Damien Chazelle (of Whiplash fame - and I don’t know anyone who didn’t love Whiplash) did everything just right. It’s easy for certain elements of a musical to become overbearing - it can be too cheesy, too musical, even too joyful - but everything is here balanced perfectly and it’s a fun ride.

2. Manchester by the Sea

Manchester by the Sea is in many ways the opposite of La La Land. It’s about grief and sadness and how sometimes things just aren’t ok and never will be. That sounds like a depressing recipe, but the movie explores those issues with such empathy and true feeling - and a surprising amount of humor - that it makes you feel more alive and not less so. It’s a true exploration of human emotion and behavior in the face of unspeakable tragedy. And it is put together brilliantly. It’s affecting, real-life drama - haunting and sad in a way that feels true but not overbearing. It explores deep human emotion without drowning in it. And with emotions this deep, that is difficult to do.

Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams are spectacular in it. The movie will win many awards, and it’s as close to a masterpiece of human drama as anything I’ve seen for a long time.

3. The Witch

I wrote about The Witch, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Krisha here. They survived from my (sort of) half-year list to be among my favorites of the year..

4. Hunt for the Wilderpeople

5. Moana

I guess I do like musicals. It’s hard not to when they’re done this well. Moana follows the typical Disney formula, but is richer and more textured than usual, with vibrant visuals, fully-developed characters, and music that rivals any of the Disney classics. The music in Moana was done by Lin-Manuel Miranda, of the broadway hit Hamilton and I guess there’s a reason anyone who follows pop culture in any way can’t escape Hamilton this year. I haven’t seen it or listened to its music, but it’s apparently spectacular. And you can tell in Moana. There usually comes a point in even the best animated movies where the movie loses me and I just want all the chaos to wrap up already. That didn’t happen in Moana. It’s more than a good animated movie - it’s a great movie on its own.

6. Rams

This one is more obscure. There is some debate about whether Rams is a 2015 or a 2016 movie (it was released in Iceland in 2015 and the US and Canada in 2016), but since this list has absolutely no consequence whatsoever and I saw it in 2016, it’s making my list.

Rams would be a good introduction for anyone hesitant about foreign films. It’s an Icelandic film, in that language, and takes place in a remote sheep farming community in rural Iceland. The plot is as powerful and touching as it is unique (I don’t think there are many other movies about Icelandic sheep farming). It tells the story of a dying way of life and the dying love between brothers (starring everyone’s two favorite actors, Sigurður Sigurjónsson and Theódór Júlíusson, who are actually both excellent). The movie goes in unexpected places as the two hardheaded brothers clash while their way of life clashes with the inevitable. But it’s the love of that way of life that brings the only warmth to their frozen Icelandic wilderness. Give it a chance. It’s on Netflix.

7. Arrival

Arrival is intelligent, thinking-person’s sci-fi that shares elements of first-contact (benevolent) alien movies like Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the complex and imaginative plot of movies like Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Interstellar. It lacks the large-scale spectacle of those movies, but masters the intimate, scaled-down tension in a style that is all its own. Director Denis Villeneuve has been developing that style in his last few movies (especially in last year’s Sicario), and seeing it applied to a big-budget genre movie is exciting and promising for the prospects of non-franchise mainstream movies.

It’s more than just aliens and complicated ideas. There are genuine existential questions and real human emotions, as the immensity of the event of extraterrestrial visitation is brought down to the scale of one woman (played by Amy Adams) and her personal crisis.

8. Sully

Sully is simple and understated, like its hero. It’s a portrait of a solid man doing a solid job. There are few bells and whistles in the movie about a man who lived his life and did his job with few bells or whistles. It’s a movie about competence in the face of crisis. And it’s not just Tom Hanks as Chesley Sullenberger, but the whole crew. Their composure and their performance of their duties under pressure is impressive, if at times almost chilling (“Heads down, stay down!”). It’s a movie that shouldn’t be exciting, but it is. Its repeated computer simulations shouldn’t be thrilling, but they are. And he shouldn’t have been able to land that plane, but he did. It’s solid craftsmanship about solid craftsmanship.

9. Everybody Wants Some!!

10. 10 Cloverfield Lane

I wrote about 10 Cloverfield Lane here - and I still think John Goodman deserves Oscar attention.

11. Krisha

12. Hacksaw Ridge

Hacksaw Ridge is made of two movies. One is about integrity, commitment to personal beliefs and principles, passivism, charity, kindness, and the love for fellow man. The other involves gruesome, brutal, war violence, staged in as well-assembled and breathtaking a way as any action movie ever, and it is genuinely thrilling and downright cool. Combining the two movies, however, is problematic and borderline distasteful. But there is no denying that each is excellent. Desmond Doss’ story of heroism deserves to be told and is told in a touching and inspiring way. And the war action is spectacular. But the combination muddles the important message the movie could have been telling. As it is, it says that violence should be avoided at all costs, while also showing that it is downright awesome.

VIDEO: Best movies of 2016

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2016: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN from David Ehrlich on Vimeo.

I always enjoy David Ehrlich's best of the year videos, though I don't always agree with his choices and end up not seeing a large portion of the movies he includes. But I enjoy how he puts these videos together. I'll have my own best of 2016 post up soon.

Top 5 Movies of 2016 so far

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.