2015

Best:

1 - SPOTLIGHT (Tom McCarthy) - For triggering me and setting me free; for nailing big city-small town Boston; for reportage, writing and cast 
2 - UNCLE JOHN (Steven Piet) - For both bleakness and incandescence, downright Shakespearean; for the gift of John (Ashton) and being a bona fide heartbreaker 
3 - BLACKHAT (Michael Mann) - For bravely cutting through pretense and expectation; for strong women, swoon-inducing scenes of adult intimacy, quotable dialogue and brief but bravura, exquisitely designed, intensely visceral, ground-zero-level bursts of violence; for a provocative, ferocious, insurgent attempt to invigorate the medium; see also #4 
4 - MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (George Miller) - For fire and blood and chrome; for redemption and resurrection; for women empowered, Junkie XL and hope; see also #3 
5 - LOVE AND MERCY (Bill Pohlad) - For illustrating the frustrating and gorgeous madness of process and the process of frustrating and gorgeous madness 
6 - STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (F. Gary Gray) - For history 
7 - THE DEAD LANDS (Toa Fraser) - For mysticism, cannibalism, knockout New Zealand vistas and a Michael Mann-ish score; for being the best film since Sayles' 1996 LONE STAR about an individual's personal quest forever altering global history 
8 - IT FOLLOWS (David Robert Mitchell) - For earnestly reenvisioning Carpenter and Craven, and for Detroit kids 
-and-
UNFRIENDED (Levan Gabriadze) - For slyly and subversively deconstructing the 'found footage' film, and for being socially relevant besides 
9 - EX MACHINA (Alex Garland) - For Kubrickian cerebral pulp, gender politics, and grrl robot power 
10 - SPY (Paul Feig) - For being the anti-ENTOURAGE in its proactive progressiveness 

Honorable Mention: 
Christopher (son of Michael) Landon's THE SCOUT'S GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, for being unpretentious retro fun (even despite zombie rape gag) 

Worst: 
MAGGIE (Henry Hobson) - For being ridiculously amateurish in both its filmmaking and self-conscious faux-pretentiousness; those interested would do better to rewatch Cronenberg's THE FLY - the film MAGGIE's makers think we're too young or too dumb to remember. 

Just a Darling

Lowbrow enough to include a closeup of an eye stabbing, highbrow enough to reference Godard, Lewis Jackson's 1980 YOU BETTER WATCH OUT! - the original title of CHRISTMAS EVIL (which I originally viewed on VHS as TERROR IN TOYLAND) - works as sophisticated satire, serious character study, coal-black comedy, vigilante film, slasher, early 80s New York time capsule, and superhero origin story. A cross between HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, it's in my All-Time Top Ten, and perhaps the film I've seen most times in my life. It also contains one of the most committed performances ever put to celluloid (by Brandon Maggart, aka Fiona Apple, Sr.), as well as one of cinema's greatest parting shots (see too Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS, the original TAKING OF PELHAM 1-2-3 and Mann's HEAT).

Be good

Survivor

That moment where she laughs off both Loomis's warnings and the tears in her eyes before going to that barn party...yeah. Clearly a survivor. Or that stunning, quiet-but-loaded character moment wherein she tosses the teddy bear she'd been clutching to crawl ever so slowly towards the mirror - towards herself...what, who does she see? And, far as I can tell, she lives on, as Michael only stabs her shoulder, and that white sheet's not over her face (listen, you stay in denial about the oxymoron that is 'gun control', I'll keep this girl alive and with a bright future as a high school guidance counselor cum uber-successful therapist and author).

She's shrill and obnoxious until a crisis arises and she saves your ass. I love Tina. She's my wallpaper. 

Tina knows

Tina will save your arrogant hide 

Bleak Beauty

 

Note: click on highlighted words for the expansive experience.

 

The first mainstream American film to fire bullet holes through the fabled myth of Giuliani's 'cleaned-up, crime-less New York' (spanning '95 to 9/11), Scott Frank's A Walk Among the Tombstones is also a bona fide spellbinder.

Neeson is Scudder is The City - tall, gaunt, scarred but still dignified, lumbering forward amongst taller, oft-dilapidated buildings (the titular tombstones), many of which will soon fall.

Indeed, the picture's pre-millennium-set policier-cum-noir-cum-horror-film surface is scale compared to broader insinuations of a world populace in perpetual peril from the most unspeakable evil (in the form of 'random' violence).

Like the seminal, subversive homegrown films of the Vietnam era (Night of the Living Dead, Last House On the Left), it starkly suggests we are never safe, anywhere, at any time, gentrification or no.

Here hope lies in a refugee's stolen moments of grace - the sound of rain on the rooftop of an empty library at night, a decent diner meal, an AA fellowship meeting, a purposeful case solved.

Or a good movie.

Surveying the sickness.

  

 Little Red Riding Hood.

 Watery graveyard, mirroring one of our endless female victim's'. 

Scott Free

Note: click on highlighted words for more info.

Pretty pictures betray brutality. Orchestrated chaos cut to Hans Zimmer. Bruckheimer bombast. Alumni include Michael Bay, Dominic Sena, Joel Schumacher – the bastard sons of Peckinpah writ capitalist. Ridley’s brother was there first – he laid template in the coke/booze/sex Don Simpson days. Excess, testosterone-infused. ADD editing. Pounding synth score. Carnage composed, gorgeously shot – angles, lenses, smoke, light.

But what Tony had that Michael missed is conscience. Current climate of superheroes, Mr. Scott still dealt in antiheroes. Flawed masculinity (The Last Boy Scout’s Joe Hallenbeck is John McClane's id, the median between John Wayne and Snake Plissken). He was as much a chronicler of the contemporary (usually American, supposedly hetero) male psyche as Scorsese, Schrader, Eastwood, or juniors PT Anderson and James Gray.

Also seldom mentioned with regard to the cinema of Mr. Scott is emotion – rage, ecstasy, grief, melancholy, regret, desire. Characters in his films love furiously, obsessively – from the ostensibly redemptive love of Creasy for Pita in Man on Fire to the fatally fanatic love of Gil for The Game in The Fan (@:45).

I skipped Top Gun (to this day), but mainlined Beverly Hills Cop II more times than a tadpole should.

The Hunger, too, bit me – Bowie, Bauhaus, New York City when it was New York Fuckin City, Ann Fuckin Magnuson, ‘Little Suzy’ Sarandon (bi alternapunk doc) bumping into ‘Little Willy’ Dafoe at that telephone booth (a decade prior to co-starring in Paul Schrader’s transformative, likewise New York-set Light Sleeper).

The Last Boy Scout and Enemy of the State had sharp, subversive scripts (by Shane Black and David Marconi, respectively), and remain underrated gems. The former – thoughtlessly maligned upon its Christmas '91 release – is still the last word on The Obsolete Hero (‘D-Fens’ should have seen the film before going on his rampage in Schumacher’s Falling Down). The latter, flippantly dismissed as ‘empty’ and ‘implausible’ action fodder fourteen years ago, slyly had our besieged heroes (including Gene Hackman, riffing on his own Harry Caul antihero from Coppola's The Conversation) ultimately playing the U.S. government against itself - and the Mafia (the final shootout sequence between these two agencies as bravura as these things come) - in the name of liberty. Both films had their cake and ate it, too.

The Fan was uncomfortably accurate, and True Romance – well, it’s been awhile.

Mr. Bay = soulless product. Mr. Scott = deceptively substantive cinematic powder kegs. Smart. Exuberant. Taken for granted. Not subtle - but then explosions of emotion never are.

No more Tony Scott, no more Tony Scott Movies ©. Alas, the work endures. Burgeons, even. He saw to that. 

Rest in chaos, Mr. Scott. 

'That one with Rebecca DeMornay...'

Excerpt from Let Me Take You Down, an hour-long piece I produced, directed, shot, edited at 17, 

about a young man pays for college by dealing drugs in the ghetto he grew up in. 

We were babies then. We were scarred but didn't know it. I wanted to make change. Or help facilitate it. Wanted to shock, cajole, incite, poke holes in your belief system. Prod you from your comfort zone. Revolution, baby. Don't be a sucker. Film was a means to an end. We don't need no stinking booms or lavs. Fuck the lights. Just gimme that camera with the gray duct tape holding the viewfinder and battery from falling off. The cast sometimes showed up high. I remember being disappointed. Got to be alert trying to stick a knife in The System's gut. A month later, the first beloved face you see in this excerpt would die of an OD. We shot during Christmas season. The blitz. Few years later, I'd see Allen Baron's Blast of Silence and it would make me smile. 

We all came at this as subversive black comedy. I believe it still works on that score. I start watching, I think, how silly. Then find myself engrossed. Which makes me smile again - not for myself, but the babies who made it. Folks have told me: 'raw', 'honest', 'intense'. A photographer friend said she thought it was about 'misplaced anger'. I'll take it. Alas, this was all before sickness and realization. Today, I lack self confidence and means. To the point of needing metaphoric crutches. And: all the folks I know in 'the industry', I don't think there's any I can call up and say, 'Let's start a fuckin revolution. Like, right now'. Tide's changed. But the need - in myself, and The Way We Live - hasn't. 

Notes: Ironically, tragically, we'd lose cast member/tech advisor Rob Spangenberg (my bff at I.S. 145 and my guardian angel) to an overdose a month after shooting. Transferred from 3rd generation VHS (that's http://wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS, kids).

Originally dedicated (in end credits) 'To all the slaves of New York...and all the non-New Yorkers - especially the whiteys', it was shot in 4 days, in Queens (underneath the #7 el and in the James Bland housing projects near Shea Stadium - now Citifield) and all over (and under) Manhattan. If nothing else, it's an accurate portrait of where and how we grew up.

I think we predated Man Bites Dog (U.S. release), which it resembles in spirit, if not quality (I was all about 'natural' sound and light then; I was a lunatic child). Also 'reality TV', which it resembles down to overactive camwork and mix of fact and fiction.

@9:30, my Abuela, on the left.

@5:50, Metropolitan Museum of Art, smuggled shot.

@1:43, my aunt.

How We Spend Our Summer Vacations

How We Spend Our Summer Vacations from Jay Blanco on Vimeo.