2015 Year in Review – 10-1

10. Blackhat

Okay I know, but please, bear with me.  So it’s essentially a globetrotting cyber-thriller about a hacker determined to sabotage water pumps, but the plot (which I do actually find interesting) is incidental to the style, as is Michael Mann’s want these days.  The opening, featuring a CGI run through a computer terminal and down and down and down, sets the predominant theme of where the digital meets the physical.  As convincing as the scenes where various characters go through lines and lines of code to determine authorship, it’s really about someone leaving prison and walking onto a sunny tarmac, or the way a completely expected romance happens unexpectedly quickly, with the emphasis on physical touch while the ‘getting to know each other’ exposition is treated with ellipses. 

2015 Year in Revew – 20-11

20. Queen of Earth

If the pretentious, writerly aspects of Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip weren’t to your taste (as they were to mine, somewhat predictably), then Queen of Earth might be a welcome shift into a different kind of pretension.  Taking on the relatively low key psychological horror of a woman going mad genre, Elisabeth Moss (the highlight of Philip) walks the tight wire of over-and-under playing someone coming undone.  Katherine Waterston also proves herself more than capable with deliciously ambiguous deliveries that further question the mental state of Moss’ Catherine while laying out the unspoken depths and, more importantly, longevity of their friendship.  The most surprising aspect is Perry’s visual style, which makes great use of the spaces in the lake house with eerie, sometimes subtle (and sometimes not) framings that blur the line between head space and physical space.  A late turn into overt Polanski-aping can be forgiven, then, considering just how well constructed and deeply understood Queen of Earth and its genre are, especially when it initially seemed like an afterthought of a film given the relative bigness of Philip.

2015 Year End Review – Intro and Honourable Mentions

I did not do an end of year list last year.  There were several attempts, and probably three initial drafts and even a finalized rundown of the top 20, but due to work and social commitments I never found the time to sit down and write it out.  The same could be said for everything to do with this blog this year, which was sparsely updated at the beginning of the year and not even touched for a majority of the rest.  Part of the problem was my increasing knowledge of other lists, which came out earlier and earlier and, crucially, before I had a chance to see a lot of the big contenders given release schedules and the early access privilege of critics on the studio mailing lists.  Whereas there was a time I felt I should wait until February to really have a go at it, I had been doing it earlier and earlier through sheer list fatigue.  It was also the case that so many lists were so similar that the only difference was the placement of the top five.  This isn’t always the case, of course, but there’s enough broad consensus on the top thirty or so films of the year that it would almost be more interesting to go through the main contenders and explain why I wouldn’t have chosen some of them.  So my list felt eerily similar to everyone else’s and there was just nothing I felt I could say that was unique without boldly pandering to some minor films that nobody saw that I thought might have been “pretty good” and thought I’d outlandishly rep for hard, like putting Beyond the Lights in the top 3 or something.