2017 Wrap-Up

Alright, I’ve put this off long enough. I don’t want to linger any longer on a movie year that frankly felt so standstill and depressingly ordinary that I was very close to declaring the third season of Twin Peaks the best movie of 2017 and that is very pointedly not a movie.

But I may as well not linger on the numerous unimpressive and occasional bad of 2017 and celebrate the glimmers of wonder and hope of 2017.

Well, I can gripe a little bit.

BEST TITLE

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

WORST TITLE (and a funny story attached)

I was going to the library last summer in the self-checkout cause I’m thinking I’m enough in the mood to review it, but there was apparently an issue that demanded I take it to the front desk and I’d be fucking damned if I fucking lose my librarian’s respect when I walk over and check out a movie called The Bye Bye Man.

BEST LINE

“Piss off, ghost!” -Korg (Taika Waititi) in Thor: Ragnarok (Written by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost)

WORST LINE

“Fairy lives don’t matter today.” -Officer Daryl Ward (Will Smith) in Bright (Written by Max Landis)

WORST CRIME OF SHORTENING A TITLE

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is already a damn long title, but bruh Laureline’s name should be right up there next to him. This some John Carter shit.

BEST TRAILER

Guy, it used “Black Skinhead” better than The Wolf of Wall Street‘s trailer and has plenty of reds and blues for days, yo this was so exciting.

WORST TRAILER

It’s like it’s trying to sell itself as the “dark gritty reboot of God’s Not Dead” because that’s what the kids are into. Yeah, we got punches and shadows and shit. I’m dying, yo.

BEST POSTER

Alien: Covenant‘s orgy poster. Whatever else can be said about Covenant (and I’ve said more than a bit against it), it is designed nightmarishly well and sexual twisting and writhing of the violence witnessed in this poster gets right to the core of what makes Alien and H.R. Giger the sort of visual works they are (not to mention the painterly element of the monochrome presentation and the lighting).

WORST POSTER

Ready Player One‘s poster one. What the fuck did they do to that boy’s leg?

OTHER WORST POSTER

I forgot about this fuck-up job.

BEST SONG THAT TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN FOR A MOVIE BUT WASN’T

I understand Tonya Harding’s personal grievance with Sufjan Stevens’ song named after and about her, but it’s such a florid description of the figure skating form and a subtle criticism of celebrity culture and the phenomenon arc we go from praise to hate that I’m kind of disappointed the makers of I, Tonya didn’t jump on that song as an angle for them. Even if it doesn’t really fit the old-school rock schema of that movie’s needle drops.

Hell, it’s better than both of the songs Stevens wrote for an actual movie.

BEST SONG

And yet still “Visions of Gideon”, in its relentless melancholic power, provides a heavy appeal to the heart dragging long after leaving the theater and reminding one of any heartbreak they’ve had to endure in learning that a former lover has moved on. Nothing against “Mystery of Love” (which is also fantastic), but it’s really crazy to me that this was the song from Call Me by Your Name that got the snub.

And I mean, this is just by the song in a vacuum. Added to the final shot of the movie like it did, it is devastating.

BEST MUSICAL MOMENT/”NEEDLE DROP”

This is pretty damn tough to decide in a year between Atomic Blonde, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Happy Death Day, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 but it’s also painfully obvious which one I’m gonna go for when there’s a movie that literally is about music energizing our lead character’s actions.

WORST MUSICAL MOMENT

Who the fuck is responsible for letting Audra McDonald begin the final reprise of “Beauty and the Beast” at the end of that fiendish fucking remake and then having her interrupted by Emma Thompson’s warbling blender version of an Angela Lansbury impression? That’s some fucking disrespect to a legend, yo.

WORST NEEDLE DROP

We have a whole Kong movie full of a grab bag of Vietnam cliché songs to desperately ape (pun intended) Apocalypse Now and yet the real disappointment is that First They Killed My Father is a great movie and should know better than to indulge in it from their very first (and only) misstep in the opening montage with “Sympathy for the Devil”.

BEST USE OF JOHN DENVER

Not to put doubt on the sincerity of any other movie’s usage of John Denver’s music in 2017 (especially not Okja or Kingsman: The Golden Circle), but I must say that Farrah Mackenzie singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” for her pageant in honor of her dad and getting the entire proud parents of Charlotte to sing along with her was the only usage of Denver’s music in a movie that actually moved me.

BEST STEPHEN KING FILM

Another thing we’ve seen around these parts regularly – though I do have my particular gaps here, namely 1922 due to my allergies to Thomas Jane – and yet easily the best crafted of the bunch is the one that didn’t really get to have a theatrical release. Gerald’s Game had a role that gave itself over to the long overdue-in-recognition Carla Gugino exploring abuse and trauma and the small-scale interiority of the horror was something Mike Flanagan definitely knew his way around (in fact, the film feels weakest leaving the very house Gugino’s Jessie is trapped in).

BEST CREATURE

I told my sister that Okja the super-pig reminds me of our dog, Bruno, in her floppy ears and soft snout and interminable appetite and total area destroying clumsiness and his belly fat. She thinks I’m wrong and that our dog looks like Dobby the House-Elf from Harry Potter. I don’t give a fuck, Okja still wins this round.

Big up to the cats of Kedi, though.

BEST SURPRISE
Am I gonna say The Boss Baby? Yeah, I’m gonna say The Boss Baby. It was smarter and funnier than it had any right to be with such a premise and somehow didn’t wallow in Dreamworks Animation’s worst tendencies, challenging it to aim higher in its animation styles. It deserved that Oscar nomination, fuck you.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT

You’d have to tell me that Rian Johnson was personally involved in the death of my grandmother to make me not excited for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. A Rian Johnson Star Wars movie is a total dream come true, one of the most inventive American storytellers of the living.

And the movie we got wasn’t only uninventive, it made a point of calling attention to how uninventive it was – the lack of development in the plot, the sudden reliance on a plot full of idiot characters, the repeating of arcs some characters already went through except, as Han Solo once said, “so it’s bigger!” Anything in the script not involving Luke or Rey is a frustrating mess or waste of time. The one bit of solace being in how Johnson used his anime enthusiasm to craft some busy setpieces and dynamic images, but he still has that with one hand behind his back considering it is the bar-none worst special effects in the entire franchise.

BEST POPCORN MOVIE

Speaking of y’all being really wrong about The Boss Baby, you’re all also really fucking wrong about the overwhelming spacey spectacular eye candy adventure of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Stars.

BEST SPACE OPERA

I’m fucking serious about Valerian, y’all.

GUILTIEST PLEASURE

There is practically nothing good about The Greatest Showman, least of all its overproduced pop numbers or the juggling of several different plot intentions it can’t carry entirely in its hand. But goddamn, it’s got heart and passion and joie de vivre and I’m down with that way too much in any musical, good or bad.

MOST LIKELY TO BECOME A CULT CLASSIC

The Bad Batch covers itself in nothing but world-building and attitude – no less than Amirpour’s superior debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – and while that strains the hell out of two hours, to the right sort of niche viewer that sort of material could be catnip.

I just don’t think I’m that viewer (or will ever be) as long as Jason Momoa’s Cuban impression makes me mad.

BEST CAMEO

There’s an abundancy of surprisingly great cameos from 2017, I’ll give it that much. Given how I’m uncertain whether or not a certain appearance in John Wick: Chapter 2 truly gets to qualify since it was heavily featured in the marketing, let me take this moment to say something NICE about Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Veronica Ngo practically stars in the first 20 minutes of the movie – an isolated and desperate story of bravery and sacrifice in the midst of war and it’s the most resonant performance with barely a word leaving her lips.

WORST CAMEO

Will Oldham being THAT FUCKING GUY at a party, but also being THAT FUCKING GUY for A Ghost Story, overelaborating on the very themes the movie has already done a great job communicating without him (also not happy with the idea that Casey Affleck may have been in the same room as Ke$ha).

CAMEO THAT WAS EASILY THE BEST PART OF A BAD MOVIE

I regret that I was so done with The Disaster Artist‘s bullshit that I left the theater the second the credits started and thus could only see Tommy Wiseau’s post-credits appearance AFTER the movie. Because maybe it was something to do with them both being over-labored anti-talents trying very hard to take control of the scene and move it somewhere (Tommy evidently wants more screentime and to make his character have a closer relationship), but they both make fascinating scene partners who gave that moment more energy than all the “let’s robotically recreate scenes from The Room” that otherwise energized the movie.

MOVIE I MOST WISH I COULD HAVE SEEN IN AN INSTALLATION

How the fuck does Miami, home of ArtBasel in the US, not have an actual installation of Manifesto? Had to see it in a theater like any other pleb.

BEST SCENE

There was no more gripping a moment in any film in 2017 than Kristen Stewart texting back and forth with an unknown entity in Personal Shopper in a casually invasive way towards her, especially in the heart-pounding hotel room sequence.

Shout out to Jeffrey Wells’ dumb ass for asking for an answer to who it was at the Cannes Press Conference.

WORST SCENE

“Somebody stop this fucking subway, I swear to God”, me during the subway scene of Darkest Hour where Winston Churchill listens to a little girl give him his “fight in the shores” speech and treats the black passenger with so much more respect than Churchill probably would have thought he deserved.

SECTION FOR THE APPRECIATION OF LAURA DERN AND NICOLE KIDMAN

The title says it all. Dern and Kidman have gone hella above and beyond killing it in 2017 in their respective filmographies, frequently giving interesting or at least grounded performances in the likes of The Last Jedi, Downsizing, and Twin Peaks: The Return in Dern’s case – Twin Peaks potentially is the best performance of her career – and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Beguiled, and Top of the Lake in Kidman’s case.

And I haven’t even seen Big Little Lies, with both of them, yet.

5 WORST MOVIES OF 2017

1. The Emoji Movie
2. The Bye Bye Man
3. Tom and Jerry Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
4. The Book of Henry
5. Beauty and the Beast

Listen, I don’t wanna say no more about these movies. I’m astonished they fucking exist enough without having spend more energy on them.

And now… let’s really wrap this up with my favorite movies of the 2017…

25 HONORABLE MENTIONS
Not necessarily movies that would find their way into my top ten, but ones that I really enjoyed and probably wouldn’t hesitate in recommending to folks depending on what they’re looking for.

Atomic Blonde – Cold War nihilism turned punk rock
The Beguiled – surpasses the original as an isolated tale of malaise turned curdled
The Big Sick – an effortlessly amiable cast of characters guiding us through a sympathetically stressful moment.
The Boss Baby – Dreamworks Animation breaking away from their house style to augment and illustrate the imaginations of young boys and their anxieties about sibling responsibilities.
The Breadwinner – A serious concern about the stifling patriarchy and wartorn fatigue of the Middle East handled delicately enough to function as children’s fable.
Coco – Pixar still maintains it knows just how to manipulate the fuck out of your tearducts, whether with a warm story of memory and loss or an inhumanly gorgeous ghost metropolis lit by warm oranges.
Contemporary Color – David Byrne’s still got it.
A Cure for Wellness – I wish trash would be this pretty.
Happy Death Day – Jessica Rothe made this better than it should be and she’s gonna fix movies forever.
Félicité – Gomis crafts a giant nightmare around a lovely performance.
In This Corner of the World – Katabuchi sneaks a broken dream within the visual language of a war tragedy.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Lanthimos gets meaner than he’s ever been before.
Logan Lucky – Homegrown small-town heist moviemaking.
Lost in Paris – Physical comedy of the purest form.
Okja – Bong’s on the same old living political cartoons he loves making.
The Ornithologist – sexy man vs. wild
Marjorie Prime – Black Mirror now on stage.
Mary and the Witch’s Flower – Studio Ponoc promises to live up to the reputation of its predecessor through an exciting anti-chosen one narrative.
A Quiet Passion – Terrence Davies makes Emily Dickinson answer to death with dry wit.
Raw – Sexual awakening is bloody messy.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – I’m fucking serious about this.
The Villainess – Makes the double crossing spy work of Atomic Blonde look like desk work.
The Void – Small-scale locked house style horror turned to fear of the unknown.
War for the Planet of the Apes – All the emotions the prequel trilogy worked to gather in its audience brought to a jailbreak climax.
Wonder Woman – The DCEU gets it together and does not become less interesting for it.

AND MY TOP 10

10. First They Killed My Father (dir. Angelina Jolie, Cambodia/USA)

Angelina Jolie and company stream together like a river pieces of memories of Loung Ung watching her home country Cambodia fall apart. A human being in the middle of such an affecting and transforming moment bravely reliving their experiences (Ung was the co-writer) is already interesting to me, but the decision to firmly plant itself in her perspective towards and thereby looking at it from an undivorced upper angle of a child.

I don’t know, it’s Oscarbait but it is my kind of Oscarbait, so very conscious about its craft and letting it work for the material.

9. Blade of the Immortal (dir. Miike Takashi, Japan)

Japanese legend Miike Takashi made it to the big 100 of his feature films and he pays that off by hearkening back to both his identity when he’s at his most restrained and silently revisionist about the state of the jidaigeki picture (as some of his recent works showed interest in, such as 13 Assassins and Hara-Kiri, both of them remakes… this one adapted from a graphic novel) in a relationship surprisingly earned when it could have easily dipped into shallow cliché AND the unhinged ridiculous gorehound Miike happily taking advantage of the material’s comic book roots to bring out cartoonesque fight choreography and weapons, most especially in the gleeful gushiness of the film’s bloodworms and how it allows Miike to constantly subject the game Kimura Takuya to constant dismemberment.

The result is Miike’s reflection on genre, tradition (both in Japanese history and filmmaking), and his own output. He picked his 100th for a reason.

8. Mudbound (dir. Dee Rees, USA)

It’s like a new Great American Novel for this decade, Dee Rees expanding the scope of her storytelling ambitions and nailing her observations in a way few directors can accomplish. I don’t remember if I’ve said it before on this site but at this point, Rees can and should be able to make whatever movie she wants now that she’s proven her versatility in themes and film vocabulary. And I certainly can’t let that alone without acknowledging the dedicated cast at the center of this film, all of them so lived-in within their characters as to know they’re each the star of the movie but measured well enough to give the scene to certain arrangements and perspectives.

7. Phantom Thread (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

Alas, Anderson has given us another one of his stuffy films of my often boredom and yet Phantom Thread is not that. It’s not just gleefully ravishing for a narrative hungry boy such as myself, it’s hilarious to boot with three world-class performances right there at the center of it all. A fine final note for Daniel Day-Lewis playing a petulant manchild completely collapsing in front of the transformation of Vicky Krieps from essentially one role at the beginning to another.

And you noticed how I praised this very obviously “crafted” picture without talking one bit about its aesthetic? You must know how the phantom cinematography and sound design gives such visual tactility to the one-of-a-kind costumes by Mark Bridges, you can practically feel it in your cheek and lull yourself to the score.

6. The Human Surge (dir. Eduardo Williams, Argentina/Brazil/Portugal)

Even when it’s very obvious where Williams is going with all these observations about industrialization and the media’s distancing of humanity, the movie is in no rush or urgency about what it’s saying because it wants to say those things right. Nor does he take a straight line to that observation, taking detours on how the different societies The Human Surge focuses on respond to this dramatic imposing of modernization in their lives and its inability to totally remove the issues before it.

5. John Wick: Chapter Two (dir. Chad Stahelski, USA)

When I first watched it, I was looking for something similar to the first John Wick – emotionally direct movie that was. I was disappointed because I was looking for something different.

Now, it’s very clear between this, Atomic Blonde, and the first John Wick that the 87Eleven Action Design folk have actually found different storytelling usages of violence and aggression to communicate shockingly distinct dramatic cores. And John Wick Chapter 2 finds its way at the top of the three because it’s just so sleek and slick, I love looking at it just as much as I love watching the universe it’s in grow further internationally.

(I should not be as excited for Deadpool 2 as I am).

4. Personal Shopper (dir. Olivier Assayas, France/Germany/Czech Republic)

Speaking of style expressing emptiness of character, Personal Shopper is a lot more complex and significantly less shallow than John Wick but nevertheless it taps into the same issue: a person’s complete inability to deal with loss. And Assayas is impressively on the pulse of today’s young culture and what about our mentality makes grief so tough to process.

This same sort of self-stifling attitude leads to Assayas’ smart subversion of our expectations of genre within the film – a movie that very clearly wants us to want it to be a ghost story and refuses – and that sort of challenging usage of film conventions to pull the rug out from under us while succeeding at keeping us on edge just reminds me why I love Assayas in the first place.

3. The Girl Without Hands (dir. Sèbastien Laudenbach, France)

A one-man show basically, accomplishing that with a minimalistic style to begin with that it gets to cover itself on by using computers and yet it still remains one of the most visually impressive works I’ve seen all year, completely redefining the concept of space and color while knowing well enough how to use both of these just enough that the viewer doesn’t have to work to recognize characters or moods. Brilliant experimentation to kick off on an olden fairy tale with.

I literally waited until I had the Blu-Ray of this movie arrive on my doorstep to write this list because no way did I feel complete without it and it did not disappoint.

2. Faces Places (dir. Agnés Varda & JR, France)

A two-person film that feels totally collaborative with JR’s engaging and good-natured art style making up the base for Varda’s own self-musings about all the things we expect her to muse on: life, community, age… her own coming death, all things she’s better to speak on than most other filmmakers. And that collaboration only would get to spark if the two people in the middle of it were already in the middle of a very genuine and heartwarming friendship, one that spills over onto the work and takes over the film giving us a third act that melts away every ounce of cynicism in me from the year.

1. Twin Peaks: The Return (dir. David Lynch, USA)

1. World of Tomorrow – Episode 2: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (dir. Don Hertzfeldt, USA)

You really want to talk about structure and visuals and artist’s identities informing the mood and narrative? Don Hertzfeldt possibly doesn’t have a ne plus ultra in his career, given how Episode 2 builds on the sort of exploring with digital animation for his primitivism that he engaged in with Episode 1 back in 2015 and we have some of the most persuasive imagery-as-emotion you can get from 2017. Or anti-imagery in fact, with its backgrounds fracturing and breaking apart, characters glitching as they pronounce slow amnesia or pain, and frustrating vortexes that aren’t the least bit subtle about mental conflict or anxiety and yet totally affecting. It’s completely funny like all other Hertzfeldt but its also distressing stuff…

… and then beautiful catharsis comes in the forms of new shapes and bright colors and a soundtrack drop that compels us to dance along with its characters.

Let me put it this way, it was the last movie I saw of the year, changed the absolute game, and I watched it no less than 7 fucking times during my vimeo rental of it. I’m probably not done with it by a damn sight.

But I am done with 2017 now, bring on the new fucking year.

Ah, What a Day for Inisfree!

One of the undiluted pleasures of cinema to me is its transportive value, especially when the sense of setting is so powerful a movie makes me absolutely dream of one day finding and living in the place it takes place in. The Irish town of Inisfree, where the 1952 romance The Quiet Man, is not a real place except in the dreams of the filmmaker* but the Irish counties of Mayo and Galway where it was shot certainly are real and The Quiet Man certainly made me desire to one day witness the beautiful lush seemingly endless landscapes of brilliant lively greens in every possible shade met by an unblemished cool blue sky as cinematographer Winton Hoch captured in loud Technicolor. Nor of his serene and wonderfully sleepy view of the streets and churches and fishing holes and all the other domesticities of the town proper, designed and shot with a rustic adoration and intimate amiability.

Yep, you’d have to expect whoever the hell directed a movie that lays its eyes on the Irish lands with clear-eyed endearment with the island. One might even suspect that director to be Irish himself and would be pretty right that there is Irish in the blood of a man who swears his name to be Sean Aloysius O’Fearna or O’Feeney, though we better know him as the All-American director of mostly John Wayne Western vehicles, Mr. John Ford. Which would make it no surprise as well that he brought along Wayne to star this particular film, as the American returning to his birthplace Sean Thornton. What brings Thornton to his old family farm is matter screenwriter Frank S. Nugent leaves to mystery for most of the movie, but in a remarkably unstressed way that doesn’t stop it from striking the film as such an easy comic work where Thornton tries to adapt to the new culture he’s now living within, standing out in his being played by John Wayne, an actor as broadly American from his amused observations to his tall but slightly lazy gait about a land he hasn’t travelled since he was a child.

Absolutely soon as Thornton steps foot into the green glades of his new home, he’s rapt with attention at the young woman wearing cool blue shirt to offset her blazing red hair and skirt shepherding the sheep and who takes immediate moves to avert his gaze. We later learn her to be Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) and even without Thornton’s courting of her, Mary Kate’s eldest brother and the man of the Danaher house Squire “Red” Will (Victor McLaglen, another Ford collaborator who gives a performance as red-faced and sputtering in its mask as in his Oscar-winning turn in The Informer) has his own grievance to hold against Thornton. Squire Danaher had his eyes on White O’Morn, the cottage of Thornton’s birthright residing right in view of the Danaher house, for purchase. Thornton’s return and easy friendship with every town in contrast to Red’s tolerated but undangerous antagony makes it sure quick for Thornton to take back his spot.

Tradition favors the way that Squire Danaher imposes between Thornton and Mary Kate unless Thornton takes up his fists to defend the honor of their courtship and yet Thornton refuses to indulge in that sort of violence, for reasons related to his escape to Ireland. The movie is generous to two separate points of view: the reasons of Thornton’s refusal to fight Squire Danaher are completely understandable and so the issue is not that Thornton refuses to fight a man, but that he doesn’t seem to take Mary Kate’s dignity seriously enough to fight for it in anyway, particularly once they’re married and her brother refuses to the dowry.

This is the least of the places where The Quiet Man could afford Mary Kate some dignity. Nothing really knocks off O’Hara’s proud and fiery approach the character as a woman of her own strong wills, but we may as well identify now that The Quiet Man‘s gender politics are more than a bit regressive when there’s the matter of how one of the movie’s famous kisses is essentially by force. And yet, I can’t help my male privilege showing by getting intoxicated and swooned by how the power of that kiss, not just because of Wayne and O’Hara’s posture as she collapses in his strong arms, but the force within the wind itself blasting into the room from the open doors and windows, threatening to extinguish any flames except their own body heat, practically pushing the two of them together. It’s only one moment of the high-charged eroticism in that restrained 50s visual vocabulary that gives the The Quiet Man the excitement it demands (and it’s not even my favorite – rainy scenes and cemetery scenes are my personal catnip and that particular kiss also has the benefit of not being as manhandling, just so much more tender) and I think that O’Hara and Wayne are able to accomplish that is what makes me move past what is understandably non-preferable material.

And nothing really gets me past the fact that the movie has an extended sequence in the third act where the butt of the joke is “John Wayne drags Maureen O’Hara uncomfortably across a field”. It’s my least favorite moment in the whole film. And yet The Quiet Man doesn’t find Mary Kate contemptible and finds her grievances with Sean’s lack of action the most valid thing, finding her victory even in that dragging scene when it culminates with Sean and the Squire go head-to-head and insisting that the way of life in Inisfree is certainly more pleasant and preferable and possibly even more dignified to Sean’s rigid Americanism.

And what a brilliant fight that is, extended and exaggerated and full of barreling throws and close-ups of Wayne and McLaglen’s faces taking a wallop and wondering what just happened, rolling in lakes and hay and grassy hills. The traveling manner of the fight and the way that practically every single male figure in the vicinity has to involve themselves and exclaim and cheer (including a very wonderful moment involving a man on his very deathbed) just piles on the good humor and nature of this conflict so much so we can’t imagine Sean and the Squire coming out of this with any more bad feelings for each other.

Early in the film, the Widow Tillane (Mildred Natwick) who sells Sean his home mutters “Inisfree is far from heaven”, but Ford absolutely does not believe that and spends the whole movie proving her wrong with a joyous eye for picturesque locations with sequences indicating the idyllic aspect of living in this Island, like a rousing horse race on the shores of Lettergesh or the quiet fishing hole which the easy-going Father Lonergan (Ward Bond, another Ford mainstay) could be found praying for a bite, all blanketed by Victor Young’s arrangement of Irish airs and bouncy slights. And the cast populates it all in unsubtle Irish caricatures full of personality and bouyancy in joy, most of all in the small impish and grinning Barry Fitzgerald’s turn as jaunting car driver Michaeleen “Óg” Flynn. Nothing about the high-spirited sense of humor feels spiteful, it’s just in service to accenting how colorful this community Ford and Nugent and company wanted to erect as a grand collection of all the things that make Ireland great in their eyes.

That’s what animates The Quiet Man, nothing but love from Ford. Love for a people and a land that Ford is aware he comes from turning over into love for a place and characters that he invented, thereby making that love impossibly infectious to leave the movie without. Every inch of Ford’s directorial ability is spent trying to turn Inisfree into a complete wonderland of color and wind, earning him his fourth (and last) Best Director Oscar and making two hours in the most low-key lovely place feel like such a rush that I can’t wait for the next time I go back.

*There IS an island called Innisfree but it’s not the same place.

Ocean Man

There’s gonna be something weird about finally writing about The Shape of Water after it had won its Oscar, as though I’m raining on somebody else’s celebration since I don’t have much happy things to say. But, I plan to eventually review every Best Picture winner and I need to get this out of eventually. And I may as well be happy that Guillermo Del Toro, decidedly one of my favorite filmmakers working today, is finally receiving the recognition he deserves. It’s just not for a movie I have much love for and I’d argue it’s his most ordinary movie yet, which is a hell of a claim for a Gill-Man romance.

Besides Terry Gilliam, nobody stacks up rejected projects like Del Toro. The man collects them like Pokémon. And while the scrapping of Silent Hills and At the Mountains of Madness certainly hurt more, the hurt for his proposed romantic Creature from the Black Lagoon remake is still searing right there in my heart, so when the trailer for The Shape of Water came out earlier in 2017, I was pretty much giddier for the project than I’ve ever been for a Guillermo Del Toro film in my life. And then when it was announced at the Venice Film Festival that it won the Golden Lion, I was even more sold than I’ve ever been. “They gave their top prize to the movie where Sally Hawkins fucks the gill-man?!” I exclaimed to my friend in excitement when I found out.

So, when I walked out of the movie nowhere near as ecstatic as the folks I saw the movie with, it may very well be a part of my expectations not exactly being met (FULL DISCLOSURE: It may also be that I was suffering a numbing amount of after-work migraines in the film and chose unwisely to join them at a 10:10 pm screening), but I hope I can express well enough – against the tide of praise – why The Shape of Water only occurs to me as fine rather than great. I mean, fine should not be the way I feel after I got my romantic Creature from the Black Lagoon remake that I’ve been wanting for so damn long.

Except I only got it after sitting through an hour of Guillermo Del Toro’s Crash. I mean, it’s a significantly better version of Crash as directed and co-written by an actual talent and it’s theses about race and society are not as patronizing as Paul Haggis’. But they’re arguably as shallow and distanced, with little interiority afforded by Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s screenplay to some characters (ie. Octavia Spencer once again having to do the heavylifting for his character with a pretty much one-sided portrayal of a dead marriage displayed 90% via monologue) and used mostly as just more window-dressing to setting the film in the racially, gender-wise, and diplomatically messy time of America on the verge of the Civil Rights. And while the argument could be made that The Shape of Water is in the end not really about these observations, it doesn’t really assuage me when Del Toro and Taylor devote more screentime to these surface level themes than the “fish-fucking” that people like to praise the movie for. And I know Del Toro is intelligent enough to work with these concepts.

That’s a lot of talking about the script without actually establishing what The Shape of Water‘s story is. The straightforward premise of The Shape of Water is how Elisa Esposito (Hawkins, a Mike Leigh alum who I’m always ecstatic to see in movies), a mute janitor for the US government-contracted Occam Laboratories, witnesses them bringing in a mysterious monster (Doug Jones, Del Toro’s reliable monster man) at the height of the Cold War insisting its danger and the potentials of winning the space race from studying the creature. And how after a time, Esposito and the Asset (as it is referred to in the film and credits) come to fall in love to the point that when the authority on the research of the Asset, Col. Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon playing an unchallenging part he can do in his sleep, though that doesn’t detract from how far he excels at it), eventually orders its death for dissection, Elisa and her friends craft up a plan to rescue and release the Asset.

It’s pretty much fairytale stuff here and Del Toro is more than aware of that in Paul D. Austerberry’s production design of the early 1960s as a drowned-in green caricature of urban and domestic ghosts left over from the likes of American Graffiti – which feels like the least creative design of Del Toro’s career since Hellboy, frankly mundane and even within the transparently sinister laboratories and the unglamorous period settings – or in the very calm and paternal delivery of the narration like lulling somebody to sleep by Richard Jenkins’ character, Elisa’s best friend and closeted advertising artist Giles (who is both the best performance in the film and the most shaded of all the characters arguably, given his very own subplot in regards to an infatuation he has and the depression brought about by the state of his career).

And yet The Shape of Water takes its sweet time trying to correct its course on tone between self-conscious social commentary, government thriller, monster movie, or broad romance and Del Toro for the first time can’t perform this function without every scene transition feeling thudded and sudden (including a huge gap in the developing relationship between Elisa and The Asset that feels rushed because of how overstuffed the social commentary makes The Shape of Water), which is why it’s no surprise that when the movie finally dedicates itself fully to thriller once Elisa and her friends decide to take action for The Asset’s survival. It’s much more focused and tighter at that point and even does more to earn the swooning final beat of the whole film than any of the slightness that inhabited the first half of the movie.

That The Shape of Water catches its footing the more it progresses as a narrative is a good portion of why it doesn’t distress me as much that I came away kind of disappointed. There are more than a few inspired elements within the film even before I feel it sticks the landing, like Alexandre Desplat’s tender score inputting delicate passions and vulnerabilities to underscore the characters’ living situations, the way that Giles is an unabashed movie fanatic which can’t help feeling informed by how much of a cinephile Del Toro is (sure, it’s part of what makes the movie overstuffed but it at least feels… real), and of course to say nothing of the wonderful texture and sleekness (slimy but not disgusting) of the monster suit Jones dons as The Asset, living and breathing and moving on its own terms and brought to life even further by post-production effects that surge lights through its body to shape a divinity into the creature and make him fascinating and scene-stealing with big round cutesy eyes to sell it as… well, a fish out of water while Jones moves with apprehensiveness and curiosity at the world around him.

It’s not a total loss, that’s just a fact. But I’d rather had a wholly great film like Del Toro has often given me than a halfway good movie. Still in the end, Del Toro will be ok and will hardly care what I think about the movie that got him two Oscars, the success of which probably ensures less adversity in his developing projects as he had faced all throughout his career. And he’s had more than enough great movies not to lose an ounce of good will from me just on account of The Shape of Water. Most of all, there’s no real context by which I could claim Del Toro was really… uninspired. The man loves making movies and feels like everything he makes comes from a labor of love. Just sometimes that doesn’t result in something every single one of his fans dig and that’s a-ok. We could do worse with our passion projects sometimes*.

*I say as I side-eye Mute.

Capsules – The Oscar Nominees I Haven’t Come Around to Reviewing

So… in the immediate future is definitely The Shape of Water (now that it fa sho won) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (ideally leading up to that Han Solo movie nobody asked for) but in the meanwhile there are definitely some of the other Oscar nominees that I totally have words for but don’t feel like writing a whole review for because it’s fucking March and the only 2018 movie I reviewed so far is fucking Maze Runner. I gotta move on (and get my Year-End post in soon)

I’m sure there’s eventually going to be a context where I can provide full reviews for most of these movies (like I will not die before reviewing every Spielberg movie for example), but in the meantime… here’s my capsule thoughts on particular Oscar nominees:

Call Me by Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy/USA/Brazil/France)

It’s cut like hell. Like, “I need to use up different takes of the same shot and so lemme try to paste them together with this cross for 3 seconds” hell. OK, got that out of the way.

It’s also no less sensual a film than any of Guadagnino’s other pictures, aided by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s soft humid summer photography and the relaxed staging of every character to malaise us enough that gives us patience through the slow simmer of the central romance and follows up by making every moment of extreme passion feel like a punctuation to a wonderfully lazy summer film. Definitely in the upper tier of the Best Picture nominees.

I am not at all qualified to talk about the age gap controversy.

Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig, USA)

An explicit lesson in how movies can totally not be for me, like independent coming-of-age movies with ordinary aesthetical decisions usually are, and still be a fine movie without any real deficit to its existence. I’d definitely the lion’s share of that credit to the cast and their ability to live-in the characters Gerwig drafts out of her clearly autobiographical script. I’m especially annoyed Metcalf had to lose against Janney (Manville moreso but she didn’t really have a chance and Metcalf had such a good shot and gave such a great performance).

Also fuck Kyle and also Julie is fucking MVP.

Phantom Thread (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

(This one I kind of want to write a full-length review for soon, but if I can’t find the time…)

I’m still kind of shocked that Paul Thomas Anderson made one of the few movies here I was rooting hella for during the Oscars, but it does help that he has three superlative possibly career-best (albeit Krieps is just starting) performances at the center of it and he developed… actually no, I don’t wanna say he developed a sense of humor because his movies kind of always had that, but Phantom Thread‘s sense of humor is so much more on my wavelength than anything else he made. It’s probably not better than There Will Be Blood, but I wonder if it’s not better-made if you understand what I’m saying: it’s a movie so self-consciously aware of its own craft and the payoff is that the craft is in and of itself impressive. Such would have to be the case when your art is about artists.

The Post (dir. Steven Spielberg, USA)

I think we can all agree that Spielberg got to a point where he stopped trying with every project he made and just made movies because it’s the only way he can breathe, but even when he’s absolutely not giving a real damn about the project except as something to keep him busy in the middle of the damn video game movie, The Post is still mostly tight.

I mean, mostly.

And like Lady Bird, it also has a cast that is so much more dedicated than the script asks them too, including Bob Odenkirk starring in his own personal little thriller within the movie and Meryl Streep giving her best performance in a long time drowning in expectations and uncertainties.

I, Tonya (dir. Craig Gillespie, USA)

This industry isn’t really doing right by Margot Robbie when she’s able to knock out performances like this often for whatever slumming picture she’s in (and I, Tonya is absolutely not slumming… Gillespie has seen Goodfellas and gotten all the right lessons from it) and she’s still not Le Movie Star right here right now.

All the Money in the World (dir. Ridley Scott, USA)

This movie was not worth salvaging but at least we got another great Christopher Plummer performance out of it.

The Disaster Artist (dir. James Franco, USA)

That this was ever in consideration for the big Oscars still makes my brain hurt. It has such contradictory problems: it’s devoted to providing a dumbass “follow your dreams” narrative for a man who is a monster that the movie isn’t nearly as incisive and indicting towards yet still wants to treat as a fucking alien for cheap giggles. It’s sloppy in the way only a filmmaker like Franco who thinks himself a higher artist than he actually is could make.

It’s also self-congratulatory in every unbearable manner, especially in the fact that it only exists to show off James Franco’s bland Tommy Wiseau impression.

Coco (dir. Lee Unkrich, USA)

Like Spielberg, there definitely came a point where Pixar stopped trying and like Spielberg, they’re still kind of nailing it. Coco isn’t necessarily revelatory in any narrative sense, but it’s still effective as tearjerker (especially since I saw it days after my grandmother passed away) and eyewatering as spectacle based in festive oranges and blues.

Plus, hey, it’s fantastic to me how positive about death the movie is as a result of its respect for Mexican culture. And I don’t need to mention the positives of Latin representation, which makes me very very happy Coco won its Oscar.

Darkest Hour (dir. Joe Wright, UK/USA)

Hahahahahaha who the fuck thought this Seth MacFarlane workplace comedy was a good fucking movie? Is it just because Bruno Delbonnel can never not make movies look so fucking gorgeous?

Predictions for the 90th Academy Awards

You know how it is, let’s do this.

BEST PICTURE

• Call Me by Your Name
• Darkest Hour
• Dunkirk
• Get Out
• Lady Bird
• Phantom Thread
• The Post
• The Shape of Water
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

PREDICTION: The Shape of Water
MY PICK: Phantom Thread

There’s still talk of it being a five-horse race or something and I just don’t see it happening at all. The only two horses I see battling in this is Shape of Water and Three Billboards, with the momentum highly in Shape of Water‘s failure while Billboards is tripped up by its lack of Director nomination. The only possible thing in Shape of Water‘s way at this point is the blunt fact that it’s a movie about fucking a fish, but c’mon… my mom loves the fish-fucking movie. My mom is not the sort of person who’d love a fish-fucking movie. The fish-fucking movie is taking it.

BEST DIRECTOR

• Paul Thomas Anderson – Phantom Thread
• Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
• Jordan Peele – Get Out

PREDICTION: Guillermo Del Toro
MY PICK: Paul Thomas Anderson

If I had time-travelled four years into the past to let past me know that I was going to be rooting for Paul Thomas Anderson to win over Guillermo Del Toro, Past Me would have shot Future Me thinking he was an imposter. And yet here we are and while Del Toro is possibly my least favorite entry in this slate (I’m honestly not too fond of Gerwig’s direction myself), I’m still more than ready to see a filmmaker I adore who has an open heart for cinema win his Oscar. I’ll pretend it’s for The Devil’s Backbone or Cronos instead, but just because he made one movie I’m not a fan of doesn’t mean I stop being a Del Toro fan by any means.

BEST ACTRESS

• Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
• Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
• Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
• Meryl Streep – The Post

PREDICTION AND MY PICK: Frances McDormand

Have we ever had another Oscar Season where every single one of the categories felt as locked as they do here? I mean, the Actor category is a bit shaky but I’ll get to that in a moment. Meanwhile, Frances is on her way to a second Oscar and boy would it have been great to see her give Casey Affleck an earful if he hadn’t chickened out.

BEST ACTOR

• Timothée Chalamet – Call Me by Your Name
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
• Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
• Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
• Denzel Washington – Roman J. Israel, Esq.

PREDICTION: Gary Oldman
MY PICK: Having not seen Washington’s performance, I’m going with Daniel Day-Lewis. I’m also giving longing looks to Kaluuya.

So, do we think the Oscars give a damn enough about Oldman being a dick to not give him his career Oscar? I don’t.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• Mary J. Blige – Mudbound
• Allison Janney – I, Tonya
• Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
• Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
• Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water

PREDICTION: Allison Janney
MY PICK: Lesley Manville

*shrug* I can see Metcalf maybe inching in, but Janney seems set on that award.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
• Woody Harrelson – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Richard Jenkins – The Shape of Water
• Christopher Plummer – All the Money in the World
• Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

PREDICTION: Same Rockwell
MY PICK: Willem Dafoe

*shrug* lock.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• Guillermo Del Toro & Vanessa Taylor – The Shape of Water
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon – The Big Sick
• Jordan Peele – Get Out
• Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

PREDICTION: Martin McDonagh
MY PICK: Jordan Peele

This is kind of anybody’s call. But I can’t see Three Billboards only winning acting Oscars, even if this is possibly the only place we can also expect Gerwig and Peele to take things home.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

• Scott Frank, James Mangold, & Michael Green – Logan
• James Ivory – Call Me by Your Name
• Scott Nuestadter & Michael H. Weber – The Disaster Artist
• Dee Rees & Virgil Williams – Mudbound
• Aaron Sorkin – Molly’s Game

PREDICTION: James Ivory
MY PICK: Dee Rees & Virgil Williams

The one best Picture nominee here versus a not-that-well-celebrated Sorkin and three other nominees just lucky to be there? I mean, come on.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

• The Boss Baby
• The Breadwinner
• Coco
• Ferdinand
• Loving Vincent

PREDICTION: Coco
MY PICK: Loving Vincent

L-O-C-K.

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM

• A Fantastic Woman (Chile)
• The Insult (Lebanon)
• Loveless (Russia)
• On Body and Soul (Hungary)
• The Square (Sweden)

PREDICTION: A Fantastic Woman
I have no pick because I saw less than half of these movies.

It would probably feel like an insult to invite the star of A Fantastic Woman to present without giving her the aware in consideration of the distance she’s traveling and the politics. It’s also just the most beloved of the nominees by a lot. I could see The Square – with its Palme d’Or mileage – taking it, but pls no.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

• Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
• Faces Places
• Icarus
• Last Men in Aleppo
• Strong Island

PREDICTION: Faces Places
MY PICK: Faces Places

I have too much hope and maybe my head is just so much in the sand, but like… Faces Places is so likable. The only weird thing is the idea of her winning an Honorary Oscar AND a competitive Oscar in the same ceremony, but I dream for the best nominee in the whole ceremony.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• Roger Deakins – Blade Runner 2049
• Bruno Delbonnel – Darkest Hour
• Hoyte van Hoytema – Dunkirk
• Dan Laustsen – The Shape of Water
• Rachel Morrison – Mudbound

PREDICTION: Dan Laustsen
MY PICK: Bruno Delbonnel

This feels a lot more open game than you’d expect, which should be promising to Deakins except he’s also Deakins and he’s going up against three Best Picture nominees. I picked the one certain to win Best Picture just to pad its numbers up a bit even though I’m not convinced it ain’t the worst looking of these nominees.

BEST PREDICTION DESIGN

• Paul Denham Austerberry, Shane Vieau, & Jeff Melvin – The Shape of Water
• Nathan Crowley & Gary Fettis – Dunkirk
• Dennis Gassner & Alessandra Querzola – Blade Runner 2049
• Sarah Greenwood & Katie Spencer – Beauty and the Beast
• Sarah Greenwood & Katie Spencer – Darkest Hour

PREDICTION: Paul Austerberry, Shane Vieau, & Jeff Melvin
MY PICK: Dennis Gassner & Alessandra Querzola

The Shape of Water gotta rolling up them Oscars like Pokémon if it wanna win the big boy awards. Gotta flex.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

• Consolata Boyle – Victoria & Abdul
• Mark Bridges – Phantom Thread
• Jacqueline Durran – Beauty and the Beast
• Jacqueline Durran – Darkest Hour
• Luis Sequera – The Shape of Water

PREDICTION: Mark Bridges
MY PICK: Mark Bridges

I’m going by the logic that the Academy has eyes, but they did fucking nominate Beauty and the Beast.

BEST FILM EDITING

• Jon Gregory – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Paul Machliss & Jonathan Amos – Baby Driver
• Tatiana S. Riegel – I, Tonya
• Lee Smith – Dunkirk
• Sidney Wolinsky – The Shape of Water

PREDICTION: Lee Smith
MY PICK: Paul Machliss & Jonathan Amos

War film that’s also a Best Picture nominee and an structural experiment? It’s pretty damn obvious.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

• Carter Burwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Alexandre Desplat – The Shape of Water
• Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread
• John Williams – Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• Hans Zimmer – Dunkirk

PREDICTION: Alexandre Desplat
MY PICK: Alexandre Desplat

I still throw up a bit in my mouth looking at this slate and so I had to pick one of the two nominees that don’t give me hives to maintain my sanity.

BEST MAKEUP & HAIR

• Darkest Hour
• Victoria & Abdul
• Wonder

PREDICTION: Darkest Hour
MY PICK: I’m good, fam.

LOOK AT DOSE JOWLZ… LOOK AT DE WAY OLDMAN SHAKES EM WHEN HE BARKS.

BEST SOUND MIXING

• Baby Driver
• Blade Runner 2049
• Dunkirk
• The Shape of Water
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi

PREDICTION: Dunkirk
MY PICK: Dunkirk

BEST SOUND EDITING

• Baby Driver
• Blade Runner 2049
• Dunkirk
• The Shape of Water
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi

PREDICTION: Dunkirk
MY PICK: Dunkirk

War! Huh! Yeah! What is it good for? Sounding real fucking good!

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

• Blade Runner 2049
• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
• Kong: Skull Island
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• War for the Planet of the Apes

PREDICTION: Blade Runner 2049
MY PICK: War for the Planet of the Apes

Man, this is way impossible to take a shot at and I’m just really hoping Star Wars doesn’t get it because if there’s a reason The Last Jedi disappointed me, it’s in the effects.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

• “Mighty River” – Mudbound
• “Mystery of Love” – Call Me by Your Name
• “Remember Me” – Coco
• “Stand Up for Something” – Marshall
• “This Is Me” – The Greatest Showman

PREDICTION: “Remember Me”
MY PICK: I’m good, fam.

“This Is Me” is kind of treated as a joke, isn’t it? It’s the only one that can possibly knock off Coco, but I’ve never heard somebody say something nice about that song.

BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT

• Dekalb Elementary
• The Eleven O’Clock
• My Nephew Emmett
• The Silent Child
• Watu Wote/All of Us

PREDICTION: Dekalb Elementary

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

• Dear Basketball
• Garden Party
• Lou
• Negative Space
• Revolting Rhymes

PREDICTION: Negative Space

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

• Edith+Eddie
• Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405
• Heroin(e)
• Knife Skills
• Traffic Stop

PREDICTION: Heroin(e)

As always, I am approaching the short films from an angle of “I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT I’M DOING”. I just picked Dekalb and Heroin(e) out of “Importance” as a rubric. I mean, Traffic Stop could still clear that rubric too but from what I heard, it doesn’t have much else going for it, so…

We Are Two People in One Body. Nanas of the Old and the Force of the New.

Being the first feature film directed by an African-American woman that was theatrically distributed in the United States – a release as regrettably recent as 1991 – should be the kind of milestone that ensures a director’s subsequent commercial success and a mainstay in cinema history and yet here we are and I didn’t even know the name of UCLA graduate Julie Dash until literally a year ago, despite a familiarity with the L.A. Rebellion cinema movement for several years and having actually seen and vividly remembered one of her movies from a high school viewing – the underrated television movie The Rosa Parks Story with Angela Bassett. And while there are plenty of great filmmakers I’m unfamiliar with and personal anecdotes is no real method to measure the popularity of an artist, the fact that Dash has been almost entirely relegated to television work since Daughters of the Dust‘s premiered at Sundance 17 years ago and won a very much deserved Best Cinematography award at that same festival for Arthur Jafa is frustrating.

Maybe Dash likes working in TV, maybe she can’t find the actual funding for the cinematic projects she wants to do. It’s a goddamn shame either way that she doesn’t return very much to the big screen or that her works are generally hard to find, because Daughters of the Dust is one of the most arresting cinematic experiences in all my life of movie-watching. Every syllable of its language – in terms of mood, in dialogue, in terms of structure – there’s very little I’ve seen like it. The movie’s closest sibling to me is Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé in how they both seem to exude these intoxicating atmospheres from lush settings to a manner where it makes the film feel so organic and yet they’re both still worlds AND cultures apart.

The culture at the center of Daughters of the Dust is the Lowcountry-based Gullah community, isolated descendants of African slaves developing their own creole language and dialect while mixing in Western dress and housing with the traditions and religion of their West African backgrounds, deep in the forests of lonely islands. I don’t know how much of the mainland formal dress of the characters in Daughters of the Dust is specific only to our subjects, the Peazant family off the coast of Georgia in Ibo Landing, but it is undeniably part of what gives the film such a heightened fantastical atmosphere that we have such a small functioning community cut off from the rest of the world in its rusticity and how fluidly it could mix in with the Caribbean spiritualism that is highly in practice from the primary matriarch of the film Nana (Cora Lee Day).

You see why the dresses and suits and the technological modern elements brought by photographer Mr. Snead (Tommy Hicks) would possibly be seeping into the lifestyle of the Peazants and the rest of the Gullah people in this film is because of how most of them intend to leave Ibo and move into mainland America and adopt modern lifestyles, leaving behind the Gullah way. There are those, such as the traditional Nana or the young smitten Iona (Bahni Turpin), who object to the concept of leaving behind the site or ways. And in many a manner, alongside the florid elegant costumes – given wonderful aged tactility by Arline Burks Gant – and Mr. Snead’s enthusiastic explanation of the science behind his work, there are signs that Western culture has already intruded into Ibo Landing’s Gullah community, such as the return of the Christian Viola (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) and the liberal Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), both of them having already made a life outside of Ibo Landing within the cities and both of them clearly at odds with each other. Mary herself brings along her outsider lover Trula (Trula Hoosier), disrupting the isolationism status of the island. And there is also the recent rape of Eula (Alva Rogers) by a white man, which evidently resulted in a pregnancy that distresses her marriage to Eli (Adisa Anderson). There’s already been intrusions in this community that urges their leaving behind their cultural identity for a world that doesn’t care about them or to remember them, responded to by an all-too-impeccable cast. There’s already a fear that their history with slavery has injected homogeneity and disenfranchisement, even when they’re far away from the white man’s clutches.

In fact, Dash and editors Amy Carey & Joseph Burton do something really radical with the structure of all this sprawling internal family drama, which is to first establish these tales told in patches with no specific point of view from which we observe this family’s final gathering before the migration up north splits them apart except Eula’s future daughter (Kay-Lynn Warren), playing a much more direct reflection of these events than something like Linda Manz in Days of Heaven and at some points having her present in these settings impossibly. The effect is simple yet powerful: we’re essentially resurrecting a memory, maybe an oral history being passed down by the daughter to generations. It feels present, it feels absolutely vivid thanks to Jafa’s beautiful awareness of how to dry the tones in the slowly dying community yet ramp up the inky blues and reds and oranges of the coastline as in to look forward to what’s beyond the horizon rather than the cracked graveyards and humble abodes of the characters (there is also some brilliant character-based color design in some of the rooms, painterly and revealing).

It’s a story being told in a manner that is aware of the future for its characters to the point that it’s already sort of living in that future. And it doubles up on that temporal bending with Dash inputting the actual history of the Gullah people’s development and escape from slavery, especially the historical mass suicide of 1803 and what kind of sacrifices were made for the land that the Peazants are decidedly leaving behind. This contextualization, despite the history of Ibo Landing, isn’t entirely melancholic. It’s resigned but it’s also relaxed, essentially a movie you don’t really watch for the plot but sink into this world knowing that it’s going to leave soon and wanting to savor every last image and moment you can remain inside of it. Dash clearly has an overwhelming amount of love for the Gullah culture, it being a part of her father’s background and thus informing her existence and it shows in the detail with which she evokes so many different histories into this free-wheeling experiment attempting to translate the oral storytelling language of Gullah into cinema.

It’s not a perfect film, wearing both the modest budget and dating of the production in the 90s on its sleeve involuntarily. Jafa in particular, for all his experimenting with the imagery gives it so much character (and it’s never not a gorgeous movie), also has some false notes with slow-motion and deliberately fuzzy distortion. But these are minor quibbles compared to the way that Daughters of the Dust challenges the viewer with storytelling that Dash’s future career ensures we’re probably never going to witness again and rewards that viewer with the dreamiest island environments and humanly messy conflicts one could be privy to before bidding the Peazants farewell from their home and us from the film’s living and breathing remembrances.