Hurts So Good

Books: A Little Life

Once in a great while I'll read a book that is so good, I'll stand up in my apartment and say out loud "SOOOOOO GOOOOOOOD" like I'm some kind of demon being showered in virgin's blood.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara's 720 page doorstop of a novel, is such a book. Reading it was an ecstatic experience for me. It's a very intense, emotionally hardcore book, but written so well that it grips your heart and slithers into your brain.

A Little Life is the story of four college friends who move to New York City and begin to pursue their careers. They are: Malcolm Irvine, the biracial son of wealthy parents, who works at a fancy architecture firm; JB Marion, a temperamental, gay artist who acts like a spoiled baby at times because he was raised by his overly accommodating mother, aunts, and grandmother; Willem Ragnarsson, an aspiring actor with dead parents who is as kind and gentle as he is handsome; and Jude St. Francis, a law student who eventually becomes a vicious litigator. Jude was abandoned near a dumpster at birth and raised in a monastery. He remains closed off about his past, even to his closest friends, and suffers mysterious pains and ailments.

Although the book follows all four friends into mid-life, A Little Life is Jude's story. From the get-go it's clear that something went terribly wrong in Jude's childhood, but Yanagihara reveals the extent of the horrorshow of his life slowly and tantalizingly. The reader finds out he cuts himself. That he's never had a girlfriend or boyfriend. That the agonizing pains he experiences in his back and legs stem from a "car injury" (note, not an "accident", an "injury"). Because Jude is so taciturn around his friends, Yanagihara makes the reader feel like they're being let in on a secret--a terrible series of secrets. And she does a cruel thing as well: she makes the reader feel an enormous connection to the characters, and to Jude in particular, so that when all is revealed, his pain is your pain. Much like his friends who are loyal to Jude for decades, the reader feels helpless, angry, and frustrated at Jude's stubborn insistence that his past will haunt and cripple him until his death. I can't speak for other readers, but I felt like I had fallen in love with him by the end of the book.

Some readers won't like this. A Little Life has been described as "excessive" and "tragedy porn", and I see exactly where that sentiment is coming from. The sufferings heaped on Jude are so constant and awful, that the book seems almost Biblical or Shakespearean. A Little Life is undoubtedly about pain and the repercussions of abuse...but it's also about hope and grace and friendship. More details on this later.

Despite the heaviness of its plot, A Little Life is staggeringly beautiful and unique in its vision of the world. I was drawn to book from the first moment I saw its cover:

When I first saw it, beckoning me from a table in Barnes & Noble, I thought the cover image was of woman. I drew closer and saw that it's actually a picture of a young man. It seems clear that he is in some kind of emotional agony or pain. In fact, the cover shot is titled "Orgasmic Man" and is a photograph by Peter Hujar, who did a series in the late 1960's of men's faces while they...well, you know. What you're looking at here is not the face of a man at a nadir of pain, but rather at a zenith of pleasure. But who could really tell the difference? And that's what makes both the cover of the book, and the story inside the book so compelling--the story examines both extremities in life: a childhood of abuse that leads to a lifetime of emotional and physical pain, paired with explorations of love and friendship and hope so sweet that it almost feels painful. The two extremes are so intimately entangled that it's hard to differentiate them in the end.

Plot spoilers below! I'm not kidding!



It's not hard to guess at the generalities of Jude's past, but the almost baroque intensity of his abuse is shocking. He is sexually and physically abused by the monks who raised him. He is then abducted by one of the monks, Brother Luke, and taken on a cross-country trip where Luke allows him to be raped by men for money. Interestingly, in his memories, Jude refers to these men as "clients", not rapists or abusers, which makes sense given Jude's internalizing of what happened to him. He grows up thinking, as Brother Luke tells him, "You were born for this." He believes he was born to be used and that he deserves all the pain he receives.

Jude is rescued at age 12, only to be sent to a home for boys where he is further sexually and physically abused. He escapes and hitchhikes (using his body as payment, naturally) across the country until he is kidnapped and held captive by yet another adult man who tortures him and attempts to kill him, which results in a spinal injury that a doctor describes as an "insult to the body". It is only then that Jude St. Francis, age 15, is actually rescued by a social worker and sent to college at 16, where he meets Willem, Malcolm, and JB...and he begins to try to distance himself from the horrors of his childhood.

And then, despite his strangeness, his inability to discuss his past, his self-hatred, Jude is shown unconditional love by many friends throughout the rest of his life. In his adulthood, he is legally adopted by his mentor from law school, Harold, and Harold's wife. He is surrounded by friends and is considered almost scarily competent at his job. In perhaps the most surprising turn of events, his decades-long friendship with Willem shifts into something more as he and Willem enter their late-40's. I suspect some readers will call bullshit on this, as Willem is essentially heterosexual until he, conveniently, and almost by sheer force of will, falls in love with Jude.

The fluid sexuality of the characters in A Little Life, as well as the unrealistic cruelties and love shown to Jude, in addition to the fact that the story seems to take place in a continuous present day (the book covers five decades, but there are no indications of what year it is. Computers exist when Jude is a child, suggesting that the end of the book happens around 2050), mark the book as existing somewhere outside of our current reality. I referred to the suffering in the book as "Biblical", and indeed other reviews have described the novel as "mythic", or even possibly set in an alternate reality. I don't think Yanagihara intended the book to be speculative fiction, but I do think that--not unlike the world created by director Peter Strickland in my favorite movie of 2015--she created her own version of reality in the service of telling this story.

And like Strickland's Duke of Burgundy, which takes place in a world without men, A Little Life is almost entirely free of women. There are female characters--the social worker who rescues 15 year old Jude is a woman; Jude's adopted father Harold has a wife, Julia; and there are various female friends and girlfriends who enter and exit the story. But the number of lines spoken by women in this 720 page book probably amounts to less than 10 pages. But I don't believe this authorial choice is sexist or misogynist. I believe Yanagihara stripped women completely out of the picture in order to focus on what it means for men to love other men, as friends or as something else. And also to focus on the ways in which men destroy other men, as Jude is systematically dismantled by the endless series of men who beat and rape him.

Whether Yanagihara's insights into male love and male hate are accurate or not, I can't say. But I love the relationship she creates for Jude and Willem--the friendship that is *more* than friendship, but is not a traditional romance either (especially since Jude can't stomach sex, and he and Willem have an affectionate, but ultimately celibate relationship). It did make me wonder: are there men out there who have friendships like this? Women are at least given the freedom to be openly affectionate with one another. When I visit my best friend, we sleep in the same bed together and think nothing of it. We say "I love you" to each other and mean it. Do men who don't identify as gay have this? And what would the world be like if they did?

/End spoilers


A Little Life is like no other book I've read before. It seized my heart and then took a scalpel to it, slowly, painfully, and elegantly tearing it apart. As I mentioned above, extremes of love and pain are explored in A Little Life, yet it doesn't feel cheap or melodramatic or inauthentic--at least not to me. In fact, the characters felt so real, that it was hard to accept that the book had to end and there would be no more fussy Malcolm, or bitchy JB, or gentle Willem, or tortured Jude. Those 720 pages are all there is, and it's just not enough for me.

Grade: A+

Captain Snark

Movies: Deadpool

Deadpool knows that the way to this movie-lover's heart is through profane language and raunchy jokes about pegging (Google it. Not on your work computer).

I've never much been one for superhero movies, although between Jessica Jones on Netflix and Tim Miller's irreverent, fourth-wall breaking Deadpool in theatres, I'm realizing that there IS a place for me--someone who couldn't give a hoot about fight scenes and shit blowing up--in the vast superhero genre.

I like my heroes morally compromised. I don't want no goody two-shoes muscle man in a cape going around pulling kittens out of trees. I want my heroes to be hard-drinking, no bullshit, sarcastic, tortured, promiscuous smart asses. And Deadpool (as well as the above-mentioned Jones, which I shall review later) delivers.

Ryan Reynolds--the subject of a recent clickbait article on Jezebel where the author feels that much like Gretchen Weiner's use of the term "fetch", we should just stop trying to make Reynolds happen--plays Wade Wilson, an amoral mercenary who does things like rough up stalkers and other baddies for money and dates a beautiful, intelligent stripper (this is still a Hollywood fantasy after all). Things are going pretty well for Wade...until it is revealed that his extremely hot, jacked body is actually riddled with cancer.

Desperate to save his own life, he seeks out an experimental treatment that will supposedly not only cure his cancer, but give him incredible powers. The "treatment facility" ("torture dungeon" is really a more fitting description) is overseen by a sadistic man named Ajax whose goal is not to create superheroes, but super-slaves: people with amazing abilities who are so broken after endless rounds of torture that they become his obedient servants. Ajax promises to wipe the wiseass sense of humor out of Wade, who replies, "We'll see about that."

Ajax's methods do indeed bring out the powers in Wade--by the end of his "treatment", Wade is now indestructible. He cannot be killed. Cut off his hand and it grows back. Shoot him in the ass and the wound heals instantly. An unfortunate side effect is that Wade looks hideous--like he has third degree burns all over his body. He is convinced that his girlfriend, Vanessa, will never want to be with him again given his gruesome visage.

It's pretty cool that male body insecurities play a huge role in the plot of this film.

Now going by the name Deadpool, with a tight costume to show off his still quite amazing ass, Wade focuses his energies on finding Ajax and taking revenge. And unlike other superheroes who are morally averse to killing, Deadpool has no such code of honor, leaving a bloody trail behind him on his quest to find his tormentor.

Although some may find it tiring, the best thing about this film is its irreverent (I love that word) sense of humor. With apologies (or not) to the Jezebel article above, Reynolds is actually the perfect actor for this role. He is hilarious and sexy in a glib, wink-wink kind of way. Also, although the movie only hints at it, Deadpool is actually pansexual, which means he's into women, men, and all manner of people in between and outside of the gender spectrum. Reynolds portrays him as a flirt who cracks jokes about how his off switch is near his prostate--"Or is that the on switch?". But it's pretty cool to see such a fluidly sexual, over-the-top character, especially in a genre that is closely tied to traditional depictions of masculinity.

Deadpool was extremely entertaining and fun. Paired with last summer's Mad Max: Fury Road, it's yet another example of a genre film breaking the mold and achieving a level of innovation that's frankly fucking refreshing after a thousand dumb Marvel movies.

Grade: A-

And his costume makes him look like he's wearing nothing at all...nothing at all...nothing at all...
 
  

All of Them Witches

Movies: The Witch

It is scary to think about America's roots...how much of it is based in hysterical religious fanaticism. To read an American history textbook is to read a horror story itself: genocide, slavery, hangings, conquering, brute force...all alongside progression, bravery, a thirst for freedom. America is a land of bifurcated people: lust for money, power, and sex, but held fast by a deep-seated history of Christianity that demands we reject pleasure and desire and sin. We didn't need Orwell's 1984 to teach us the concept of "double-think" because we live it every day, and always have.

We're a fucked up bunch, y'all. Which makes Robert Eggers' freshman film The Witch (subtitled A New England Folktale) such a keen horror story that looks into the heart of early America's religious fundamentalism and paranoia.

The film takes place in 1630, 60 years before the events at Salem, Massachusetts. A family of puritans is cast out from their small plantation village and seeks a new home near the foreboding woods. William, the patriarch of the family, is convinced they'll have a better life away from what he considers to be the "false Christians" at the plantation. His wife, Katherine, is unconvinced. They have five children: eldest daughter Thomasin (played by wide-eyed newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy), son Caleb, younger twins Mercy and Jonas, and baby Samuel. When Samuel disappears one day during a game of peek-a-boo with Thomasin, the family is torn apart by grief...and an increasing sense of terror about the woods around them.

The Witch is not a typical horror movie. There aren't many jump scares or gory special effects. The film is dedicated to historical accuracy, not just in clothing and scenery, but in dialogue, and it's difficult to understand half of what the characters are saying. They're speaking English as it was spoke 380 years ago, with "thines" and "thous" aplenty, which makes them sound at times as if they're speaking a different language entirely.

While the film makes good on its promise of supernatural hijinks, the real horror is the paranoia the family falls into after Samuel the baby is gone and Caleb falls ill after being lost in the woods overnight. Mercy and Jonas accuse Thomasin of being a witch, and instead of thinking that the 7 year old twins are clearly making believe, William and Katherine believe them instantly...forcing Thomasin to defend herself and even accuse Mercy of witchcraft. To me, the ease with which people took the accusations of children seriously was the most chilling part of the film, especially knowing that this is precisely what happened at Salem decades later, leading to the deaths of innocent people.

But another aspect of The Witch is its feminist subtext. Being a Puritan must have been hellish. In addition to the struggle of carving out a life in the wilderness, the Puritans lived lives of guilt and fear--fear of an angry God and of eternal damnation. Being a Puritan woman was especially difficult, given that women were considered by nature evil during this time (a far cry from Victorian America's view of women as pure, gentle "angels of the home"). Thomasin faces the brunt of religiously-based misogyny in this film and is a symbolic stand-in for both the girls who accused others of being witches in Salem and the accused themselves.

Did witchery really happen at Salem, or throughout Europe during the witch hunts? Did women truly dance naked with the Devil? I personally don't believe so, but if you were a woman during these eras--repressed to the point of insanity, wouldn't you want to act out by seizing on the floor, by screaming and accusing others, by taking your clothes off and running through the woods? I know I would. When acting insane is the only escape, then insane we act. Part of the pleasure of doing things you were raised not to do--have sex, drink, vote for Green Party candidates--is the ability to throw "virtue" back in the face of whoever taught it to you. And the girls of Salem did exactly that.

The Witch is both a fictional, supernatural horror film and a metaphor for America itself: a land and a people that pride independence, perseverance, wanderlust, and hard work...but also a deep-seated fear of pleasure, of sex, of women, and a need to control all these things, even if it means burning them at the stake.

Grade: B-

Man Vs. Nature

Movies: The Revenant

It's very likely that you've already heard all there is to hear about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's The Revenant and formed an opinion about it. This review probably won't offer many surprises. Simply put, The Revenant is overly long and somewhat boring. It has beautiful scenery and a compelling, solid performance by Leonardo DiCaprio that will inevitably land him a Best Actor Oscar this year, not so much for this particular performance, but for all the amazing work he's done since, well, What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

Some people were blown away by The Revenant, but I thought it was simply good. For one thing, the 156 minute running time is unnecessary. 20-30 minutes could have easily been shaved off the film and it would still be the exact same film. Secondly, I have to say that Leo's character, real-life fur-trapper Hugh Glass, is not all that interesting. Certainly, Glass's story is mind-blowing: he was mauled by a bear during a hunting expedition and left for dead by Fitzgerald and Bridger, two men commanded to watch over him. He survived the mauling and pursued the men for 200 miles. The film adds the (fictional?) plot line of Fitzgerald (played by Tom Hardy) killing Glass's half-Pawnee son, Hawk, which gives Glass extra motivation to survive. But apart from watching Leo's Glass hang on to life by the skin of his teeth, there's not a lot of...depth here.

On the other hand, Hardy gives an interesting and entertaining performance as Fitzgerald. He's the villain of the movie (second only to cruel Mother Nature, of course) but more incredibly self-centered than evil. My favorite scenes were hands down the ones with Hardy, as he manipulates the Bridger (Will Poulter) into leaving Glass for dead and teaches the young man some rather hard knocks of life.

Glass faces so many challenges that it's difficult to believe. After surviving the bear attack (which is a GREAT scene by the way), he avoids starving by eating marrow out of dead bison bones. He nearly drowns in a river. He is chased by Native Americans on horseback. He rides that same horse OVER A CLIFF, survives, and uses the dead horse's carcass as a sleeping bag of sorts so that he doesn't freeze to death. Now, I haven't read anything other than the Wikipedia article on Hugh Glass, but holy shit I don't know if I believe the guy rode a horse over a cliff and lived. In any case, I literally laughed out loud in the theatre when that happened because it seemed so ridiculous to me.

Leo wheezes and grunts as he toils and suffers through his journey. Apparently, he did a lot of suffering for the film in real life, working in freezing conditions and eating raw meat. He definitely committed to it and deserves all the awards he gets. Leo is known for his intensity onscreen, though I prefer movies where he has more than 10 lines of dialogue.

Ultimately, The Revenant is exactly what most people will expect it to be: a brutal film that juxtaposes the extreme beauty of nature with its extreme not-giving-a-shit about human life and comfort. The main thing I took away from The Revenant is that nature is a bitch that wants you to die. And when you're out in the wilderness, lost and injured as Glass was, you're just part of the food chain.

Grade: B-

Amazon Prime/Netflix Binge: Pt. 2

Movies: Goodnight Mommy, The Overnight, Locke

After a weekend trapped indoors, I have some interesting movies to review.

Goodnight Mommy

Woof. This was a freaky movie. Directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy is an Austrian horror film that layers the dread on thickly. Susanne Wuest plays a woman recovering from a car accident. She is released from the hospital and returns home, where her twin boys, Lukas and Elias (played by real life twins Lukas and Elias Schwarz) await. They are understandably freaked out by the bandages obscuring her entire face, and become more suspicious of her when she ignores Lukas completely, only setting out one dinner for Elias.

The twins begin to seriously suspect that this woman is an imposter and is not their mother at all.

*Spoilers*

Goading each other on, the twins eventually tie their mother to her bed, and using torture methods that seem quite appropriate for 9 year old boys (a magnifying glass, floss, super glue...) try to get the woman to either prove to them that she's their mother, or confess that she isn't.

*/spoilers*

The last third of the film is incredibly intense and horrifying, but it's also a bit of a relief after the slow build up of tension in the first two-thirds. Some reviews have argued that Goodnight Mommy is one of the scariest movies ever made, but I found it more unnerving than anything else. The scariest thing about this movie is that the "monster" in Goodnight Mommy isn't a serial killer or a boogey man hiding under the bed, but the disintegrating relationship between a mother and her children.

Grade: B

***

The Overnight

It's hard to fit Patrick Brice's indie movie The Overnight into one category or genre. It's both a sex comedy and a relationship drama. It's both intriguingly kinky and cringe-worthy. But it's definitely memorable.

Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling play Alex and Emily, a married couple in their early 30's with a young son. They have just moved from Seattle to Los Angeles and are trying to make new friends. While taking their son to the playground, they're approached by Kurt (Jason Schwartzman, who's pretty much perfect in this role), a hipster-dad type who also has a young son. Kurt chats them up and invites them over for pizza night with him and his wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche). Alex and Emily are impressed by Kurt and Charlotte's artsy-bohemian lifestyle, and when Kurt and Charlotte suggest putting the boys to bed so that the adults can continue to have fun, they readily agree.

What's so great about The Overnight is that you can see what's coming a mile away (especially when Kurt brings out a giant bong, and then suggests the foursome skinny dip in their pool), but it still manages to surprise you by making sharp turns in directions you can't see coming at all. Yes, it's clear that Kurt and Charlotte were hoping for some sexy action when they invited the much more uptight Emily and Alex over, but exactly *what* they want is not what you might think.

I have to hand it to the actors: they are all in for this crazy ride, especially Scott, who typically plays nice, vanilla dudes. Halfway through the film, his character Alex reveals a deep shame he's been carrying around his whole life, and it's both eye-rollingly silly and deeply moving.

The Overnight can be uneven at times, swerving from silly to sexy and back again, but it's a LOT of fun and, hey, it's streaming on Netflix. Why don't you check it out? You know you're curious.

Grade: B+

***

Locke

Locke has a compelling premise, but is ultimately not as substantial or satisfying as I thought it'd be. It's like the movie equivalent of a bacon and peanut butter sandwich: you think, "now there's an intriguing idea!" but after you eat it, you're just like, "well, that was different, but a regular peanut butter and jelly sandwich would have been better."

Locke is a movie where a guy, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), drives around for an hour and a half making phone calls and trying to put to rights a few things he has majorly fucked up. Literally, that is the movie. A guy in a car making phone calls.

I'm going to put a Spoiler warning here in case you don't want to know any of the details of these phone calls before you see it.

We come to learn that Ivan Locke is a construction manager and it's the night before a *huge* job--a concrete pour that Locke is supposed to supervise. Only thing is, he can't be there because a woman he had a one night stand with is giving birth to his (two month premature) baby in London. Locke has decided that since no one else is there to be with her, he will. So he calls one of his underlings to supervise the pour for him. Said underling understandably freaks the fuck out.

Meanwhile, Locke is planning to tell his wife about this blessed turn of events over the fucking phone as he is driving to see the birth of his, well, not love child...wine and loneliness child, I suppose. Locke seems to have convinced himself that he's doing the right thing by dropping this fucking nuclear bomb on his wife over the phone. So there's that.

So, basically, this dude is juggling calls from wife, mistress, guy he's the boss of, and his own boss for the entire film, trying to stay in calm control while his life falls apart around him. He also occasionally talks to his "dad"--the empty backseat---berating the presumably dead old coot and telling him exactly how different a man he, Locke, will be. Unlike dear old dad, Locke will take responsibility for his actions!

It sounds pretty hackneyed, but it's actually not a bad movie. Locke really does make you pay attention, especially since it's an entirely dialogue based film. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, really? The film seems to want to be a redemption movie: Locke is doing the right thing by telling his wife of his indiscretion, skipping the most important job of his career, and being there for the woman who is giving birth to his kid. But it also seems to suggest that he made the decision to do these things at the last possible minute/on a whim, suggesting that he hasn't actually learned anything or redeemed himself so much as just made a spontaneous, potentially career-and-marriage destroying move. Are we supposed to see Locke as a hero, or a guy trying to do his best? Because he's seems more like a fuckwit to me.

Tom Hardy is great in it though.

Grade: C

2015: The Best and the Rest

Movies: Best of

Hello, dear readers! 2015 was a superb year for film, and my top 11 list (10 plus one to grow on) include a wide range of genres. From subversive action films to tender love stories, from extreme violence to gentle lovemaking, it's all here!

With one exception: I have yet to see The Revenant. I wanted to wait to make this list until I saw Leo get mauled by a bear, but now that I'm buried under a ton of snow along with everyone else east of the Mississippi River, who the fuck knows when I'll be able to see it. Plus, it's practically tradition for me to miss one big Oscar bait movie before making my Best Of list--last year it was Birdman and the year before it was Zero Dark Thirty. I promise I will watch and review The Revenant, but sadly it will not be on this list.

Two of the films on this list are a bit sneaky, since they were *initially* released in 2014, but did not receive a release in the United States until 2015. But both of them are so good they clawed their way onto this list...and into my heart.

So please enjoy, The Best (and the Rest) of 2015!

***

11) The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Based on the graphic novel/memoir by Phoebe Gloeckner, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is an uncomfortable, very brave film that showcases the sexual awakening of 15 year old Minnie Goetze (played with wide-eyed beauty and a fuck you attitude by Bel Powley). Minnie is a creative, extremely smart young lady who begins to sleep with her mom's boyfriend, the 30 year old Monroe (Alexander Skarsgaard, perfectly cast as a handsome man with VERY flexible morals).

The film walks a razor thin line between honoring Minnie's self-determination while never celebrating what is obviously an unequal relationship between her and Monroe. So, Minnie is not raped or forced by Monroe--but it is never suggested that their relationship is OK.

What I liked most about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that it focuses on Minnie's point of view. She is the main character and her choices, wise and unwise, are what this movie is about. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Minnie is not a victim, but the fact that she's sleeping with an older man is not eroticized either. The experience is not about HIM or any male viewers, it's about HER and the collective experiences of young women who struggle and gasp their way into womanhood on their own terms.


10) Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I had zero intention of seeing this movie when it first came out. I'm just not a Star Wars person. Never have been. But I ended up going and having a fucking great time. The Force Awakens may not be as emotionally complicated as the films I usually enjoy, but it's very fun and entertaining.

And I'm not going to lie: a mega blockbuster in a very old skool genre featuring a woman and a black man as the leads just makes me want to lick up some tasty tasty misogynist and racist tears. I'm sitting here like Mr. Burns going excellent, excellent at the dismay of racist and sexist dick weasels everywhere. And yes, people were actually mad about the diverse casting choices, although they are small minority of fools.

But I also really dug Han Solo's trademark snark, Adam Driver as emo Kylo Ren, and cute lil BB8. The Force Awakens is just a fun, pleasurable time at the movies.

9) Spotlight 

This intellectual drama has an ensemble cast where no one actor tries to upstage any of the others. Like the actual journalists on the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe who investigated and broke the story of rampant sexual abuse among Boston priests, the actors work together for the greater good.

Spotlight has emotional depth without being cloying. It also doesn't play into easy stereotypes about heroes and villains, pointing out that otherwise good people can and do ignore evil that is right under their nose. Think of Joe Paterno of Penn State. *He* didn't rape kids, but he knew it was going on and didn't do enough to stop it. Likewise, Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew of allegations of child abuse within the Catholic priesthood in his town. But instead of addressing the issue head-on, he simply shuffled the abusive priests around, thus affirming their criminal behavior.

It's ironic that in a country that is sometimes exceedingly protective of children (arresting parents for letting their kids play in the park alone, for example), so many people for the sake of maintaining a snow white faith in their church allowed the most devastating thing that could happen to a child occur again and again. My (perhaps biased?) beliefs--that people will allow unimaginable depravity in the name of religion/conformity/maintaining of a hierarchy--certainly were confirmed by the story behind this film. But my faith that human compassion and goodness ultimately wins out was also confirmed. Spotlight is an excellent film that shows how average people just doing their job can make all the difference in the world.

8) Room

I'm seeing a pattern among the films I enjoyed in 2015: sad and/or devastating, yet hopeful. Even some of the most depressing or violent movies I saw this year had flickers of hope and redemption. And this is especially true for Room. Based on the heartbreaking novel by Emma Donoghue (who also wrote the screenplay), Room is about a woman, Joy, who was kidnapped when she was about 17 and kept in a locked shed for 7 years. She has a 5 year old son, Jack, the product of near nightly rapes by her captor, "Old Nick". Joy has allowed Jack to believe that the entire universe is their little room, but he's getting to an age where cracks begin to form in this innocence-preserving fantasy. And that's when Joy decides to figure out a way to escape.

Room rests heavily on the shoulders of Brie Larson, who allows the character of Joy to be depressed and angry--not a "perfect victim"--and Jacob Tremblay, an amazing child actor. Room is as far away as one can get from the stereotypical "Lifetime movies" which cram complex and difficult subject matter into a clean narrative. Since half of Room takes place outside the titular room, once Joy and Jack make it out alive, the part where there should be a "happy ending" is actually the beginning of another struggle for Joy and Jack (Joy especially) as they reintegrate back into society.

Room is a tough movie, and I can only imagine it's tougher for people with children. But it also celebrates to bonds between mother and child and the life-affirming love one can bring the other.

7) What We Do in the Shadows

This is one of the "sneaky" movies I mentioned above that was released in 2014, but not in the US until 2015. But goddamn, this movie is so hilarious it had to make it onto my list. It was hands down the funniest movie I saw this year.

What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary that follows the day to day life of four vampires who are roommates in modern day New Zealand. They have to deal with issues such as divvying up household chores, picking up dinner (i.e. people they meet at clubs), and avoiding vampire hunters.

Directed by Jermaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi, the film is very quick-witted and sharp. It pokes generous fun at the tropes of vampire movies and books, such as when Viago (played by Waititi) says "I think we like to drink virgin's blood because it sounds cool", or the flamboyant Deacon (Jonny Brugh) explains, "When you becomes a vampire, you become very sexy."

What We Do in the Shadows is the perfect film for those who absolutely hated Twilight and its ilk, as well as for those who miss Flight of the Conchords.

6) The Hateful Eight 

As a Quentin Tarantino fan, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I saw The Hateful Eight. Another one of Tarantino's homages to western films, The Hateful Eight is nearly three hours long and takes place primarily in one room. It features a cast of characters so...well...hateful, I'm pretty sure the devil wouldn't allow them into hell. It features grandiose speeches and turns of phrase, as well as violence and cruelty out the wazoo. And damn if it wasn't a whole lot of fun!

Lead by Kurt Russell in an over the top performance as John "The Hangman" Ruth, on his way to Red Rock, Wyoming, to bring a lady criminal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice, The Hateful Eight is very character and dialogue driven. The plot is pretty simple: eight strangers are forced by a blizzard to hunker down in Minnie's Haberdashery. Mistrust and tension run rampant, and it's not long before the violence begins.

Many people will find The Hateful Eight a little too hateful, and I don't blame them. But to me, Tarantino, for all his personal foibles, has always been a master storyteller who has a way of making you laugh in the face of humanity's darkest impulses.

5) It Follows

Perhaps the most original horror film I've seen in years, It Follows is infused with a sense of dread. The film takes place in the suburbs of Detroit in a decade that doesn't exist. What I mean by this is that there are CRT televisions and polaroid cameras that suggest the mid-1980's, as well as strange mobile devices that suggest post-2015. But the time period is irrelevant.

Jay, a young woman in her late teens, has sex with Hugh, a slightly older guy from out of town. After they fuck in his car, Hugh reveals a terrible secret to her: he has passed along a curse. A supernatural being, which can take the form of anybody, from a close friend to an old lady, will follow Jay at a walking pace until it catches and kills her. In a literal sense, she can run but can't hide. And the only way to get rid of the curse is to sleep with someone else. BUT if that someone else is caught and killed by the thing, the curse reverts back to Jay, and then to Hugh, all the way back to the very beginning.

This is all the information we get in It Follows, but it's plenty. Because this thing walks at a steady pace, the film plays with our sense of what and who is safe. We constantly scan the screen for the thing (and, trust me, the first time someone in real life walks steadily in your direction after you see this movie, you will be unnerved). Just like Paranormal Activity used camera work to create a tense and paranoid atmosphere, so does It Follows, using tricks, such as rotating the camera 365 degrees multiple times to allow us a glimpse of what might or might not be this thing, slowly getting closer and closer.

By taking some cliched horror tropes (people who have sex in horror movies die) and turning them on their head, director David Robert Mitchell's crafts a fresh and distinctly unique tale of teens in peril.

4) Brooklyn

Unlike many of the films on this list, Brooklyn is nearly 100% sweetness and light, but in a genuine and comforting way. Based on the novel by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn is about a young, Irish girl, Eilis (played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan) who travels to America to get a job and an education in the early 1950's. She falls in love with a young, Italian man, Tony (Emory Cohen) who woos her with a gentle, blue-collar, masculine sweetness. But when Eilis receives bad news from home, she has to travel back to Ireland, and the pressure to stay there is overwhelming.

While Brooklyn features a love triangle (Eilis is wooed by a wealthy, handsome Irish man when she returns home), it's less about which boy she will choose and more about which version of "home" she will choose: the comfort and familiarity of the Emerald Isle, or the excitement and freedom of the Big Apple. Eilis finds herself at a fork in the road of her life: which future will she choose?

There are a lot of great movies on this list, and obviously I didn't rank Brooklyn as my pick for "the best"; but it really stuck with me in a way that many of the other films didn't. It's so rare to find a gentle film that's not also saccharin. As much as I love violent, depraved films (see The Hateful Eight), I also love movies that tap into the kind, calm, loving side of humanity. Brooklyn is old-fashioned, but not in a prudish way. It's a period piece that taps into the timeless struggles about love, growing up, and finding independence that people faced both back then and today.

3) Carol

Directed by Todd Haynes, Carol is nothing less than a masterpiece. Haynes has built his career on making films that are queer-friendly and also gorgeous. Check out Velvet Goldmine or Far From Heaven for proof.

But Carol might be his most deliberate, controlled, and emotionally intricate film yet. Gone is the flashiness of Velvet Goldmine and the melodrama of Far From Heaven, and what is left is a cinematically beautiful love story of two women in the early 1950's.

Based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, Carol is about an older, wealthy woman (Cate Blanchett, never more classically beautiful with depths of sadness under her perfect lipstick) who falls for a younger shopgirl, Therese (Rooney Mara, channeling Audrey Hepburn). But Carol is in the middle of a divorce and custody battle with her husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), who is using access to their daughter to try and control Carol. Carol is forced not just to choose between a relationship with Therese and seeing her daughter, but between living a life that is untrue and being herself, yet suffering for it.

I care a lot about gay rights, although I'm not gay myself. Carol is a film that speaks to me because it makes every effort to humanize gay women during a time when being gay was seen as a mental illness and a crime. I wrote in my review of the movie of the tendency for anti-gay rights people to find ways, large and small, to ignore the humanity of gay people and to see love between gay people as somehow fundamentally different than love between straight people. It simply is not different, and Carol reveals this through the many small gestures and intimate moments shared by the two leads.

2) Mad Max: Fury Road

More than any movie this year, Mad Max upended my expectations. In fact, it sent my expectations tits over ass if you will. At this point, fucking everyone from your grandma to your 10 year old nephew knows about Mad Max: Fury Road and how its mix of kinetic energy, apocalyptic-steampunk costuming, and feminist subtext (or maybe just text, period) exploded our ideas of what an "action movie" could be. Mad Max is proof that action movies don't have to be tedious macho dick-swinging contests! Praise the risen Lord!

Although the title is "Mad Max", the film should really be titled "Furious Furiosa and Mad Max" since the two share main character status (with Furiosa probably edging out Max by a smidgen). Max, played with a low growl by Tom Hardy, spends the first third of the film tied to the front of a car as a "blood bag" for Nux (Nicolas Holt), a war boy of the Citadel. The war boys are chasing Furiosa (Charlize Theron) though the desert, as she has gone rogue and smuggled five of Immortan Joe's (the despot of the Citadel) prized wives out of the Citadel.

The entire movie is one long car chase. But it is the most amazing car chase you will ever see in your life. Like A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max: Fury Road is filmed in English, but has a unique dialect and turns of phrase. Things aren't "good", they're "shiny". There's a Shakespearean element to this film and its unique world-building.

And, also, just like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mad Max: Fury Road made misogynists cry because there was a strong female lead character in a film within a very masculine genre. And y'all know how I love my films served with a side of schadenfreude from my enemies. The tears of the "Men's Rights Activists" are shiny! And Chrome!

1) The Duke of Burgundy

And here's the other sneaky film, that was released in January 2015 and thus made it onto this list by a hair. But The Duke of Burgundy is...how do I put it? Transcendent. Beautiful. Different. It is everything I've wanted in a movie: beauty, sex, visuals, music. It's a work of fucking art. And for all the films I saw this year and loved (and there were many of them), The Duke of Burgundy is a film I will not forget.

Directed by Peter Strickland, The Duke of Burgundy takes place somewhere at sometime in a world that doesn't really exist. It looks vaguely European and vaguely 1960's-ish, but it's world that doesn't have men or children in it, only women mid 20's and older. I think Stickland's goal in setting this film in such a world was to purposefully strip away the idea of gender so that the audience could focus on the relationship between two women, Evelyn and Cynthia, with no stereotypes or frames of reference to get in the way.

Evelyn and Cynthia have a BDSM relationship, in which Evelyn is the submissive and Cynthia the dominant. Cynthia wears an expression of harsh dismissiveness as she coldly commands Evelyn to scrub her floors and wash her underwear, only to inevitably find a small error and punish Evelyn in humiliating ways. But, as we get deeper into the plot, we realize that Evelyn is designing the scripts for Cynthia to follow and it is Cynthia who feels out of place in her role as tough mistress.

Not unlike Carol, or, for that matter, Room, The Duke of Burgundy is a film about a relationship between two people, and the sacrifices one makes for love. Interestingly, The Duke of Burgundy is not salacious at all, despite being about a sadomasochistic relationship. There's no nudity and very little sex. It's not all that different from Secretary, another BDSM love story, in that rituals play a huge role in the characters' lives. But it delves more deeply and, in my opinion, realistically into what it could mean to meet your partner in the middle.

Not to mention to mind-explodingly beautiful soundtrack, visuals, and costumes.

The Duke of Burgundy feels so personal to me. Like falling in love, it's not about finding hundreds of lovers, it's about finding one that fits. In this way, I'm glad that not many people will seek out and watch this movie, because on some level I feel like it belongs to me.

***

Worst movie I saw this year:

It's a tie! Fifty Shades of Grey and Trumbo were both tedious and boring. Fifty Shades had the added bonus of being offensive and rape-y, but it was also sexier than Trumbo. Both films also win an award for shittiest performance: Jamie Dornan in a dead-eyed, wooden performance as Christian Grey in Fifty Shades and Louis C.K. in a "what the fuck is Louis C.K. doing in this movie" performance as Arlen Hird in Trumbo.

I think I gave Fifty Shades an even "C" and Trumbo a "C+" in my original reviews, though I'd probably downgrade Trumbo to a "C". My grading scale is a bit skewed in that anything under a "B" essentially means I didn't care for it, since my reviews skew positive. I did see some "D" movies this year on Netflix, but I'll stick with the stuff I actually paid to see in the theater as the worst.

Other notable films and my brief opinions on them:

Magic Mike XXL: Not as good as the first one, but still weirdly feminist; Joe Manganiello's dance number involving a bondage swing = best scene of the year.

The Martian: Not as good as everyone thought it was; great soundtrack tho.

Trainwreck: Movie I watched most often while drunk this year.

The Danish Girl: So-so movie; Eddie Redmayne is fucking hot even though he looks, as a friend pointed out, like Kermit the Frog.

Love and Mercy: John Cusack was weird in this movie; great soundtrack; Beach Boys forever!


That's all, folks! Join me in 2016 for more movies!

A Lonely Life

Movies: Anomalisa

My enjoyment of this strange film, directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman, was heightened by a review I read of it ahead of time that explained more deeply what the film was all about. I'll discuss that below, but first I'll give a basic overview of the plot for those who want to see it with a relatively blank slate.

Anomalisa is about a man, Michael Stone (David Thewlis), who travels to a hotel in Cinncinati, Ohio to give a presentation on good customer service. He appears to depressed and simply going through the motions. He has a vague plan to meet up with an ex-girlfriend (although he's married). The audience catches on sooner or later that something is off about all the people Michael interacts with. In fact, they all have the same voice (Tom Noonan)--both men and women, including Michael's son and wife.

Did I forget to mention that the characters are stop-motion puppets? This is an important fact.

So Michael is slogging through his weekend, when he hears a voice in the hallway outside his hotel room. It's a woman's voice, and an unremarkable one, but it's different. Michael near about has a heart attack as he races down the hall to find out who this voice belongs to. Turns out, it belongs to Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is at the hotel with her friend to see Michael speak about customer service.

Wife and son be damned, Michael falls as far deep in love as someone can within two minutes of meeting someone else. He is convinced that something is *different* about Lisa, and she pulls him right out of his funk. The world is a beautiful place again.

Ok, I'm going to talk about some potential spoilers below, so if you want to see this movie as blankly as possible, stop reading and rest assured that Anomalisa is a beautiful, though melancholy film. If you're a fan of Charlie Kaufman's work you probably know what you're in for: Anomalisa shares the soul of his other films (as writer), such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

***

But, as I said, my appreciation was heightened by knowing a little more about what this film might mean, simply beyond its exploration of the human desire to seek novelty.

Michael stays in a hotel called the Fregoli. There is a medical disorder called "Fregoli's delusion" in which the sufferer believes that different people around him/her are in fact the same person, but disguised. As I mentioned above, all the puppets in this film are voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan, except for Michael and Lisa. All the other puppets also have the same flat eyes. Whether Michael is supposed to actually be suffering from this disorder, or if the film is simply a metaphor, is never explained...but I felt more compassion for Michael knowing about Fregoli's delusion and empathizing with how terrifying and/or isolating it must be to think that everyone around you is exactly the same. It made me sympathize with him when he plans, within hours of knowing Lisa, to leave his wife and child for her.

But the film does not have a happy ending, at least not for Michael. After a heartfelt night spent with Lisa (yes, there is puppet sex), Michael realizes that her voice is starting to change...she's becoming like the rest of them. He returns home, depressed once again. But Lisa has changed. Thinking of herself as unremarkable--even ugly--the time she spent with Michael, who practically worshipped her, has changed her outlook on life and herself. This distinct mixture of happiness and sadness is practically a trademark of Kaufman--think about the ending of Being John Malkovich, which finds deep sadness for the main protagonist, but happiness for some of the other characters. Or think of Eternal Sunshine, which has, for my money, one of the greatest and truest endings of a love story: when Clementine and Joel *know* they will grow to resent each other and, literally, say "Ok".

Anomalisa is like these other films--truly different without coming off as gimmicky. And truly poignant--i.e. too sad to be happy, but too hopeful to be devastating. It's a complicated film, and though it doesn't have the rewatchability factor that other Kaufman films have, it was well worth the ride.

Grade: A-