Worst of the year: Suicide Squad (side note: woof.)
Purposeful omissions: Captain America: Civil War, Hush, Finding Dory, Midnight Special
Honorable mentions: War Dogs, Deadpool, The Neon Demon, Hello My Name is Doris, Jungle Book
VIP honorable mentions that probably should have made the list: Zootopia, The Nice Guys
C'mon Joe really??! Zootopia and The Nice Guys don't make the list?? Anyways, here it is.
10. Creative Control
I can totally see why some people dislike this movie. There are parts of it that I don't like. The protagonist is a manchild (check) creative type (check) in hipster Brooklyn (check-check) who can't take responsibility (check) for his plethora of mostly first-world issues (check). So the skeleton of this movie looks like a lot of other movies that I've grown pretty tired of, but there's more going on here. The main character David is an ad executive who is given a new product (augmented reality glasses a la Google Glass) to design a campaign for. The glasses begin to cause him trouble because he can basically re-write his life to better suit his tastes, mostly by pretending his best friend's girlfriend loves him, instead of having to deal with his actual problems. A drug addiction storyline is probably unnecessary, but I absolutely loved all of the stuff involving the glasses. The real world is about to have to deal with some of these big questions that new technology will introduce, and I'm glad to see movies that are beginning to explore these near-future concepts. Plus I'm a sucker for the mostly colorless, hyper-modern design of the film. The thing looks good.
9. Everybody Wants Some!!!
Really, this entry should be a two-way tie with The Nice Guys. In both, a seasoned (white guy who mostly makes white-guy movies) director adds an entry to their already impressive list of movies that I love. In The Nice Guys, Shane Black revisits his wonderful frenemy action-comedy genre, this time using Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling to great effect. In Everybody Wants Some!!!, Richard Linklater makes a "spiritual sequel" to Dazed and Confused following a just-arrived college freshman as he moves into the baseball house. Both are pretty great, but EWS!!! gets the edge because, as usual, Linklater has made me nostalgic. The boys in this movie are idiots (and often quite sexist) but they ride by on an earnest desire to have fun, impress their friends, and get the girl(s). It probably helps that Linklater makes these movies as period pieces in the 70s and 80s; a lot of the hazing, underage drinking, and sexual advances would not be tolerated so well today, and they shouldn't be. But when I watch these movies my nostalgia gland flares up for these (nonexistent) halcyon times and I can't help but have a lot of fun. Frat hard, bros.
8. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
The Lonely Island boys are back with a new set of incredible songs presented in a perfect satire of the modern pop music scene. This movie is about dicks, literally and figuratively, and it's damned funny. While the number of cameos verges on gratuitous, the movie is heavy on jokes and most of them land. You pretty much know what you're in for by now with Andy Samberg and company: raunchy, absurd gags and ingeniously catchy songs. Often about dicks. Take it or leave it.
7. Sing Street
Hot on the heels of Popstar is another musical, Sing Street, from the guy who made Once and Begin Again (side note: all of these movies are about musicians who write music, not everyday people who randomly break out into nondiegetic show tunes in the middle of the street. For that, you'll probably have to wait until La La Land). Anyways, Sing Street is a lovely coming of age movie about a kid who starts a band to impress a girl. Heard that one before? Like so many movies on this list, this one is all about the execution and damn are these songs good. The kids in the band are riffing on their favorite 80s musicians, so the songs have an (intentionally) derivative quality, but in this context that isn't a bad thing. The songs sound familiar and by the end of the movie you can almost sing along. By the time you've listened to the soundtrack an additional 40 times like I have, you'll definitely be able to sing along. Bottom line: the movie is enjoyable enough and the songs are brilliant. P.S. There's an older brother character who knocks a monologue out of the park so keep an eye on that actor, Jack Reynor. He's got a shlubby Chris Pratt-esque likability.
6. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Director Taika Waititi is on a blazingly hot hot streak. Fresh off last year's hilarious What We Do In The Shadows and before gearing up for next year's intergalactic buddy comedy Thor Ragnorak, Waititi managed to sneak in the quirky little Hunt for the Wilderpeople. This movie, about a troubled foster child and his reluctant adopted father as they evade authorities in New Zealand's bush, is as heartwarming as it is funny as it is bizarre. Sam Neill and his beard are at the top of their game. So is newcomer Julian Dennison playing Ricky Baker, the bad boy who needs a loving family, however nontraditional it might be. While the actual hunt goes on a tad longer than necessary, this movie is a unique, fun adventure with a solid emotional core.
5. The Witch
The Witch aka The VVitch is the horror movie that everybody is talking about. It's 2016's version of It Follows or The Babadook. Does it live up to the hype? I'd say that depends on what you go in looking for. This movie has less jump scares than the other two I just named, but that definitely isn't a bad thing. This one is all about atmosphere: depressing, starving, sickly 16th century New England. Not Salem, mind you, but just some backwoods location where a family has decided to build a small farm and try to sustain themselves. The dialect and costumes are completely convincing and engrossing. Even without a supernatural element this would be a bleak and tense setting for a film. With that element the movie becomes haunting. I need to see it again before I say anything definitive, but this is definitely one of the better horror movies of the twenty-teens. Don't sleep on this one, or probably after seeing it.
4. Tickled
There's very little I can say about the HBO documentary Tickled without spoiling the experience. The basic premise is this: documentary filmmaker David Farrier (who specializes in eccentric subjects) finds an online video of a supposed "competitive tickling match" in which a group of athletic guys tickle one shirtless athletic guy who is tied down. The video interests Farrier who tries to reach out to the media company who produced the video. He immediately starts getting attacked by this company with litigious threats (and offensive slurs, and more) who tell him to cease and desist or face expensive legal consequences. Needless to say, this only intrigues him and his team more so they being to look into the shadowy organization bankrolling these bizarre videos. I won't say any more than that, except that if that doesn't sound like a meaty enough premise, let me assure you that it is. The rabbit hole is very deep. And evil. And obsessed with tickling. I'm shivering just thinking about it.
3. 10 Cloverfield Lane
What is this movie, and where did it come from? A sneaky, out-of-nowhere sort-of-sequel to a shakicam monster movie that came out in 2008... intended to be made by Damien Chazelle... starring John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Before you even start to talk about the crazy-awesome premise, this movie has some 'splainin to do. *Googles furiously* Okay it turns out that Damien Chazelle was working on a movie about a girl trapped with a weirdo in his survivalist bunker when he (Chazelle) got the call to go work on his dream project, Whiplash. So Bad Robot decided to turn the movie into a "spiritual sequel" (since when is that a thing?) to Cloverfield despite sharing no characters, storylines, or even filmmaking techniques. It doesn't sound like the greatest idea, but somehow it really really works. John Goodman is terrific as the 'is-he-good-or-is-he-bad' survivalist, and really sells the tagline "Monsters come in many forms." It's a tense little bottle movie that may or may not kick off a whole franchise of one-off sci-fi films in the so-called Clover-verse. This one is better than the original (which was pretty good!) so I hope they keep on churning them out, continuity be damned.
2. The Lobster
Many of the movies on this list stick to pretty tried and true formulas: boy tries to get girl, supernatural entity terrorizes family, etc. That is not the case with this movie by Yorgos Lanthimos. The Lobster takes place in a universe where single people are turned into an animal of their choosing if they aren't able to find a new mate within 45 days. Our hero David (played by the perfectly doughy Colin Farrell) is left by his wife and decides to become a lobster. This movie is described on Wikipedia as an absurdist dystopian dramedy, only so they wouldn't have to make up an entirely new genre for it. Whatever type of movie you want to categorize it as, it's great. The performances are excellent, the satire surrounding the various tropes of both single people and couples is biting, and the look and sound of the movie are both top-notch. The only complaint I have is that for such a strong concept the resolution isn't totally cathartic, but I can forgive that because I truly enjoyed the bizarro ride. Also, let Colin Farrell play more understated characters! He is perfectly pathetic here in his best work since In Bruges. Don't put him in Daredevil and True Detective, give him subtlety, give him nuance, and let him shine.
1. Green Room
Balls to the wall doesn't begin to describe this movie. In his follow-up to Blue Ruin (also terrific, by the way), director Jeremy Saulnier puts a punk band in a rural neo-Nazi bar where they accidentally witness a murder. Believe it or not, the Nazi outfit (and they are a tightly run outfit, not just a ragtag crew) doesn't take kindly to witnesses. The rest of the movie is a bloody, brutal game of cat and mouse. Everything about this movie spoke to me, from the spectacle to the tone to the pacing and of course, the casting. I'd be remiss to not mention the late Anton Yelchin in one of his last amazing character roles, and the brilliance of having Patrick Stewart play the leader of the Nazis is pretty unrivaled. The stakes are high in this one and the violence is gruesome; people are injured or killed with just about every weapon you can think of. Timid stomachs should go elsewhere to get their kicks. But for those who can take it, this is about as much fun as I've had in a theater since I saw The Raid. Call it action, call it thriller, call it what you want- it's a hell of a wild ride.
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