Categorical comments

My news is always old, but this is getting ridiculous.  I’ve had this final round-up in my survey of 2016 films half-written for more than half a year, as I waffled over continuing with this website or not, now that I can no longer call myself a film programmer. 

This is the answer I finally came to:  While I will no longer aspire to comprehensive coverage of the year’s best films, I will occasionally post my viewing logs to highlight particularly recommended films or tv programs, and when inspired by a film or a career worth celebrating, I may post longer essays.

To complete the survey of 2016, here I cover two separate categories, running through the best documentary and animated features of the year, starting with one that counts among the best of both.  Some of these comments will be categorical in the sense of a simple summary judgment of “thumb up” or “thumb down.”

Tower (MC-92, NFX) is a powerful and resonant retelling of the 1966 massacre at the University of Texas, which in retrospect may have initiated our era of mass shootings.  Though the film is told entirely from the perspective of those on whom the bullets rained down, we are reminded that the sniper with a high-powered rifle, on the observation deck of UT’s signature tower, was a young man who had just killed his wife and mother, and then proceeded to kill 14 people and wound 31 in 96 terror-filled minutes, before he was killed himself.  Director Keith Maitland takes retrospective interviews with survivors, bystanders, and interveners, and artfully mixes their stories with archival footage and rotoscoped re-creations of their memories, in which younger actors recite their words and reenact events, which are then animated by computer.  It sounds tricky, but comes across with conviction and depth.  The feelings the film generates are disturbing, but redeemed by the humanity of the telling.  

[P.S. The recent Las Vegas atrocity makes this film all the more relevant, and raises the question why things have only gotten worse over the past fifty years.]

In a strong year for documentaries, O.J.: Made in America (MC-96, NFX, ESPN) crossed over from tv to win the Oscar for Best Documentary, which it certainly deserved.  I commented on it inmy round-up of the yearin television, and now simply renew my strongest recommendation.

The other Oscar nominees offered strong competition, starting with two that also dove deep into America’s racial divide.  Ava DuVernay follows her powerful Selma with the even more eye-opening documentary 13^th (MC-90, NFX).  The 13^th amendment nominally ended slavery, but opened the way to slavery by other means, as this film cogently argues, weaving together themes – through history, culture, and commentary across the political spectrum – about the systematic dehumanization and exploitation of African-Americans, from lynching to mass incarceration.  Scattered facts are marshaled into a compelling case that explains way more than the simple title suggests.  This film is must viewing for anyone who confesses to a social conscience.

I Am Not Your Negro (MC-95, NFX) is less an argument than a portrait of an informed mindset, suggestive rather than convincing.  Taking its text from James Baldwin’s notes for his unfinished book about Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar – black leaders all shot dead in the Sixties, before they reached the age of forty – Raoul Peck’s film mixes Baldwin’s words, read by Samuel L. Jackson, with vintage footage of him on tv and in debate, and also of Hollywood films that he discusses as exemplifying American racial attitudes.  Speaking as someone who had his adolescent mind awakened and blown by Baldwin back in 1963, I was glad to be reminded of his greatness as a writer and social commentator, but I found this attempt to encompass his themes historically less convincing or illuminating than 13^th, though still well worth seeing.  Somewhat ironically, I was just as gripped by an hour-long interview with the director that is an extra on the DVD.

Of the other Oscar nominees, I tried several times but never made it through Fire at Sea (MC-87, NFX), with a worthy subject in the plight of African emigrants shipwrecked on an island south of Sicily, but too slow and purely observational for my taste. 

On the other hand, the feel-good alternative among the nominees, Life, Animated (MC-75, NFX), appealed to me on several levels.  It jumps off from journalist Ron Suskind’s book of the same name, about how his family managed to break down communication barriers with an autistic son, by connecting with him through dialogue from Disney animated films.  Amazingly, the clenched-fist megacorporation allowed free use of its copyrighted films for this documentary, but maybe not so amazingly, since it does promote them as family-friendly vehicles of commonality.  The portrayal of autism seems honest if incomplete, and the compilation of film clips is entertaining and relevant.

Among the other highly-rated and readily available documentaries of the year, I start with the last I watched, having to gird myself for it.  Newtown (MC-87, NFX) was, as expected, an emotionally wrenching experience; not a recounting of the horrific event itself – the killing of twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school – the film focuses intimately on several of the surviving families.  I was moved, but did not find the documentary especially artful or penetrating.

I thought Weiner (MC-84, NFX) was an outstanding probe into the sexual, and other, pathologies of the political personality, but at this point the Anthony Weiner story has been totally outrun by events, a dick pic gone viral.

With rare exceptions, I’m not a fan of true crime documentaries, so I was surprised to find Amanda Knox (MC-78, NFX) quite interesting and well-done.  Not exactly an exoneration of the young American woman accused of murder by Italian authorities, the film emerges as a piquant, self-revealing portrait of several characters, including Knox herself and the prosecutor and the journalist who pursued her for their own self-important motives.

I have to recommend The Eagle Huntress (MC-72, NFX) more highly than its Metacritic rating.  As much as its message has in common with You-Go-Girl Disney princesses, it does not come across as at all Disneyfied, though it does follow the template of many films about kids competing in sports and other contests.  Profiling a 13-year-old Mongolian girl who wishes to follow her father as a champion in festivals where grown men hunt with eagles, Otto Bell’s film is full of scenes of training and competing that make you wonder how they managed to film them, with drones and through re-enactments, but you are so swept along with the action that it hardly matters, until you inquire about its methods after the fact.  The action, the scenery, and the charming girl herself are all spectacular.

The pair of French directors who made Winged Migration return with the equally-captivating, though less acclaimed, nature documentary Seasons (MC-67, NFX), which also raises questions about how they managed to capture such scenes.  Rather than undermining the effect, when an extra on the DVD explains how rescued wild animals were trained to enact, say, a wolf pack chasing a herd of horses through the forest, so the camera could track along with them, you are amazed all over again.  All this cinematic and animal training legerdemain is put in the service of an ecological narrative that runs from the ice age through the natural depredations of humankind.  Again, the film strikes me as better than the Metacritic score.

Another film I want to single out for special commendation is Class Divide (MC-n/a, NFX, HBO).  Mark Levin’s film takes a singular perspective on the issue of growing inequality in America, namely the intersection of 10^th Avenue and 26^th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, where the High Line has fueled hypergentrification.  On one corner is a low-income housing development from the Thirties, on another is a high-end private school in a converted slaughterhouse, with tuition in excess of $40K.  It’s oh-so-hard to cross the street from poverty to unlimited opportunity, and it won’t be long till the poor are driven from the neighborhood altogether.  In a neat twist, one of the most hopeful characters is a poor but extremely bright young girl from the projects, and one of the darkest stories is a despairing preppie, but the iron laws of economics rule.  The film first appeared on HBO and so far that seems to be the only place to watch it. 

[Click through for more documentaries, plus animated films]

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (MC-76, NFX) is a characteristically quirky film from the estimably crazy Werner Herzog.  He weaves together various strands of thought on where the Internet came from and where it is leading us, along with developments in robotics and artificial intelligence.  Parts seem visionary, and parts seem ominous and even scary, all filtered with humor and passion through the Herzog personality, to make for an entertaining and thought-provoking potpourri.

If you loved Russian Ark (I didn’t), then you will want to take a look at Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia (MC-71, NFX).  Where the earlier film was a sweeping tour through the history of the Hermitage, the new film is a personal meditation on the history of the Louvre.  I watched it dutifully for possible presentation at the Clark, but since I am no longer presenting films there, I have nothing further to say about it.

For My Love, Don’t Cross That River (MC-68, NFX), a portrait of an elderly Korean couple married 75 years, I can’t say whether you will find it heart-warming or mind-numbing.  My advice is to take the link to Metacritic and watch the trailer to get the flavor of the proceedings.  If you want to see 80 more minutes of such, do so.  If not, you won’t be missing anything.  The film is not without charm and visual appeal, but does not supply sufficient context to make the couple come alive, except as icons of mutual devotion.

Now on to another category – animated features.  Both artistically and financially, 2016 was a good year for animation, starting with Oscar’s five nominees for best animated feature. 

Zootopia (MC-78, NFX) was a winner in more ways than one, winning prizes, making big money, and delivering a humorous and genuinely endearing experience.  The story follows a plucky young female rabbit who longs for a career in law enforcement.  In Zootopia, carnivore and prey have learned to get along, but still there’s never been a bunny cop, and never such a can-do go-getter.  Assigned meter maid duty, she teams up with a wily fox in pursuit of much bigger crime.  Funny, pointed, and kinetic, this is definitely a film with all-ages appeal, asking in a sophisticated way, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Moana (MC-81, NFX) was another multicultural Disney hit, with the expected plucky princess, but with much greater ethnic authenticity than usual, and a heroine with much more on her mind than finding a prince.  Plus music by Lin-Manuel Miranda!   Watch it with semi-documentary Tanna for a terrific double feature on Pacific Island culture.

Kubo and the Two Strings (MC-84, NFX) was not, as I anticipated, a Japanese anime, but an American take on a Japanese folktale, and to my surprise, my favorite animated feature of the year, with an intriguing mix of computer-generated and 3-D stop-motion puppet animation.  Its graphic style was modeled on the 20^th-century printmaker Kiyoshi Saito, who was featured in a Clark exhibition at the same time the film came out.  Too bad I didn’t get to show it then and there.

My Life as a Zucchini (MC-85, NFX) is an odd little number from Switzerland, and certainly the strangest of the Oscar nominees.  Adapted from a young-adult novel, it’s hardly for children, with its story of orphans in a group home, which begins with the title character accidentally killing his drunken mother.  The other orphans have equally horrific backstories.  The stop-motion characters are pop-eyed bobble-head puppets, which seem crude at first but ultimately capable of surprisingly real displays of emotion.  Short and to the point, the film winds up as a celebration of the solidarity and resilience of the children.

The Red Turtle (MC-86, NFX) is the loveliest of the nominees, a mostly hand-drawn animation that combines elements of Robinson Crusoe and selkie tales into a wordless parable of a solitary person’s encounter with nature.  Washed ashore after a shipwreck, a nameless man finds a way to survive on a small tropical island.  Simple and elemental, Michael Dudok de Wit’s film is fabulistic yet ravishingly real.  This is the first non-Japanese film from Studio Ghibli, and the filmmaker was recruited by Isao Takahata, the long-time partner of now retired Hayao Miyazaki.

To keep the studio going, Takahata also arranged the belated U.S. release of one of his own older films, Only Yesterday (1991, MC-90, NFX), which was extremely welcome, and lost nothing in the lapse of time.  About a single woman working in Tokyo in 1982 reliving her girlhood summer of 1966 in the country with relatives, the film weaves themes of city and country into a tale of growing up.  The “present” and “past” are rendered in two distinctive animation styles, for a visually and emotionally provocative treat.  This subtle and realistic film makes safflower farming seem as magical as fantasy.    

Ocean Waves (MC-73, NFX) was another film released from the Ghibli vault, from a junior member of the studio, and again not for kids.  It’s about a teenage triangle, psychologically acute and pleasant to watch, but not especially memorable, though it does reinforce the capacity of animation to address mature themes.

Miss Hokusai (MC-74, NFX) was lovely but disjointed.  Perhaps the story of Hokusai and his daughter is so well-known in Japan, or the originating manga so popular, that context and coherence gave way to illustrated highlights.  Especially in the wake of the Clark’s recent exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints, it was fascinating to see the genre’s favorite themes and images turned to animation.  The film is a succession of visual delights, but the story is hard to follow as it jumps around adventitiously.  Still, it’s serious about art and the artist’s life, especially the female artist, and touching in the title character’s relationship to a blind younger sister.  Definitely not for kids.

I also caught up with an Oscar nominee from the previous year, Boy and the World (MC-80, NFX), a nearly wordless phantasmagoria from Brazil, which mixes bright kinetic animation with much darker hues as a parable of industrialism, militarism, and inequality.  The Boy of the title is a stick figure, with a simple face that looks like nothing so much as an electric wall socket, just two vertical lines for features.  He goes from country to city in search of his father.  Wondrous from moment to moment, the whole did not add up for me.

Finding Dory (MC-77, NFX) is an uninspired follow-up to Finding Nemo, swimming in its wake but falling far behind in appeal, though it had the consolation of a higher gross than any other film released in 2016 (Zootopia at #7 and Moana at #12 are the only others in the top dozen that I have seen, which says something about my approach to film as “art” rather than “entertainment.”)

There, I managed to complete my survey of “last year” before it became “the previous year.”  My coverage of 2017 will be spottier, and is far from finished.  But I’m back in the swing of the film reviewing game.