Six Favorite Movies of 2018

It’s been my annual tradition to write a year-end post about my five favorite movies of the year, but for my latest post looking back on the films that I saw in 2018, I’ve decided to expand it just a bit to include six movies this time. I definitely feel like I enjoyed more movies overall this year, and 2018’s cinematic fare to me was slightly higher quality. I still think there’s some connection to the worldwide political turbulence that we’ve witnessed recently, partly because art is our most powerful way of pushing back against all of that, as well as tuning it out on some level, in order to focus on more important things that speak to our common humanity and the stories that unite us. That’s one thing movies are supposed to do: build bridges between people and cultures to help make our lives more complete.

My favorite film of 2018 was English director Andrew Haigh’s moving and original road movie Lean on Pete, which he adapted from Willy Vlautin’s 2010 young adult novel. I totally loved Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend when I saw it back then, and I really vibed with the gay men and smart dialogue that he presented in that movie; Haigh and I are the exact same age, so when I’m watching his films, it’s like we speak a similar interior language as gay men from a certain generation. Although there’s no gay storyline in Lean on Pete, Haigh’s sensitivity in representing the itinerant life of a teenage boy named Charley (played by the extraordinary Charlie Plummer) who’s abruptly cut adrift from his family and society — while also finding solace alongside an end-of-the-line quarterhorse called Lean on Pete that becomes Charley’s reliable companion — spoke directly to me on deep and multiple levels. For whatever it’s worth, no film this year made me cry as hard as Lean on Pete. I was so emotionally shaken when I left the cinema that I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to drive myself back home after the movie, though I made it back just fine.

I wouldn’t want to give away too many of the details in Lean on Pete, so instead I’ll mention some individual aspects of the film that still stand out in my memory. Several scenes are classic and indelible, such as a scene in a roadside diner where Charley is forced to make a life-or-death decision, as well as the scenes in which Charley walks and talks quietly to Lean on Pete as the two make their way across arid desert landscapes. It’s a picaresque story, so Charley also meets some memorable characters along the way: a cruel yet paternal horse wrangler (Steve Buscemi), a kind and sisterly jockey (Chloë Sevigny), and a disturbed young veteran (Steve Zahn). The artful, widescreen cinematography of Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, who’s often working with a muted palette of magic-hour pastels in the film, leaves a profound and lingering impression from one chapter of Charley’s journey to the next.

Another movie about a boy and his horse that I loved nearly as much as Lean on Pete was Chloé Zhao’s spare and patiently calibrated film The Rider. The director has mentioned that about half of the film is “true” in the sense of documenting a young South Dakota bull rider/horse trainer and his family of Native American ancestry, while the other half of the film is scripted and “fictional.” The young man, who is recovering from a serious head injury after being thrown to the ground in a riding accident, is played with remarkable candor and restraint by amateur actor Brady Jandreau, in one of the very best cinematic performances of its kind. Jandreau inhabits his character Brady Blackburn’s predicament entirely believably because he lived it. He’s also beautiful to watch throughout the film, as fluid and magnetic when he’s breaking in a wild colt as he is when his sister places small gold stars all over his chest while he sleeps.

If Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film Roma doesn’t win this year’s Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, then I’ll probably never watch the Oscars again because Roma is as accomplished as Fellini’s finest movies. A personal remembrance of Cuarón’s childhood in Mexico City and Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, also Oscar-worthy), the character based on a maid who raised him and his siblings, Roma is a truly monumental film, both in its cinematic scope and in its secure place in the history of movies about memory. Filmed in grayscale black-and-white, the movie poetically and seamlessly constellates its imagery in ways that burrow far into thematic meaning and interconnectedness. Water rinses across a tiled stone driveway throughout the opening credits, but we’re not aware until later that the film’s focus will become the very housekeeper who’s washing that driveway down. We see an airplane fly overhead in the reflection of that water, too, an image that will re-appear at the end of the film in a neat circle, one that also suggests the need for escape, as well as the imminent arrival of the age of globalization. Cleo’s own background as a Mexican villager, which is integrated in quieter rather than overt ways, is a touchstone for the grim legacy of colonization, a legacy that echoes throughout other tragic upheavals that occur later in film.

After reading the abysmal reviews of Lars von Trier’s new film The House That Jack Built, I’d never have predicted that the movie would end up on this list. Masquerading as a mock-drama that shocked audiences and prompted walkouts at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film is actually more of a darkly perceptive comedy that follows the over-the-top escapades of a serial killer, portrayed by Matt Dillon in a performance so consummate that he can basically just retire now. The seemingly mundane and brutal surface of the movie might deceive most viewers into missing the film's ambitious allegorical underlayers. Lars von Trier has discussed, provocatively, that the main character Jack is closer to himself than any other male character from his films, suggesting that the movie is actually an examination of the role of the artist in society, even an examination of Lars von Trier’s own body of work. I think the only way to really “get” the film is to be an artist who’s willing to forego human comforts like love and family in favor of art itself. The movie descends into Dante’s Inferno in the end, with Jack’s Dante following Bruno Ganz’s Virgil as they proceed through carefully stylized circles of hell. It’s the most exciting final half-hour of any movie that I saw this year.

For my review of Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel in my coverage of this year’s New Hampshire Film Festival, I already wrote most of what I needed to say about that fantastic film. Its many rich characterizations and its dialogue have continued to haunt me, however, over the past two months since I saw the movie. What I’ve realized since then is just how invested the director is in resurrecting his youthful experiences through those particular characters. What did it mean as a gay man back in 1993, under the threat of potentially losing one’s friends and lovers to AIDS, to want to have a child with a female friend and raise him in tandem? And what did it mean for gay and bisexual men of that generation to want to love anyone at all, in the midst of so much widespread loss? Which parts of that love were actualized, and which parts of that love remained only imagined?

Finally, as a kind of wildcard bonus, my favorite feel-good movie of the year was Travis Knight’s Bumblebee, the only Transformers movie I’ve seen. Sure, there’s enough standard action-sequence mayhem in Bumblebee to appease the fans of those films, with John Cena’s character on a military mission to track down the rogue autobot B-127, who’s been hiding out as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle in the family garage of Charlie — a kind-hearted tomboy winningly portrayed by Hailee Steinfeld — after Charlie discovered Bumblebee in a junkyard and revived him by accident. Set in 1987, my favorite year in pop music, Bumblebee features hits by everyone from Steve Winwood to Sammy Hagar to Nu Shooz, and snippets of many other excellent songs cleverly punctuate the soundtrack. The movie’s bittersweet tone recalls Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and the ’80s Ally Sheedy-starring classic Short Circuit, so the nostalgia is built right into the plot. All of the films that I love best from that era never hesitated to uplift the audience and make the full range of human emotions worth experiencing, and Bumblebee wonderfully recreates and pays tribute to that same form of cinematic generosity. As Hailee Steinfeld sings in her awesome end-credits track, Bumblebee brought me back to life.

18th Annual New Hampshire Film Festival (October 11th - 14th, 2018)

This weekend was my first time attending the New Hampshire Film Festival, which was held at a diverse array of venues in the oceanfront city of Portsmouth. In a year when the political climate here in the United States has felt totally unstable, to say the least, two of the documentaries that I watched in the festival stood out for their intense and absorbing themes of social justice, and I also really loved one of the narrative foreign feature films that I saw in the festival. While both of the documentaries were made in similar styles that were fairly procedural, the serious depth of their powerful and urgent social messages felt so close to the surface that the injustice of the situations presented in them enraged me immediately. Although it’s hard to sit in a theater while feeling overwhelmed by our country’s glaring blind spots, the heroic individuals featured in both documentaries who are working to change things helped to redeem that feeling.

Capturing the Flag, directed by Anne de Mare, focuses on the very timely issue of voter suppression during the 2016 presidential election, when candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump faced off against one another. The film follows and reflects on a group of volunteers — friends and attorneys Laverne Berry and Steven Miller, along with Claire Wright, a recent U.S. citizen who immigrated from South Africa — as they worked to assist voters at the polling locations in North Carolina's Cumberland County on the day of the 2016 election. The film uncovers first-hand how large numbers of African-American and Latino voters were disenfranchised by the voting system and denied their right to vote because their names had been removed from voter registration rosters, or their addresses had been changed to place them in different voting districts. Early in the film, Steven Miller speaks movingly about the fragility of democracy in relation to his ancestors who had died in the Holocaust, and how easy it is for democratic systems to be dismantled and tossed aside by corrupt individuals in positions of power.

Berry, Miller, and Wright stationed themselves in front of separate polling buildings on election day, in order to ask the voters entering the polling stations to let them know if they encountered any problems while trying to cast their votes. At one polling station in North Carolina, over 1,200 people showed up to vote on election day in 2016, but shockingly, only 598 of them were able to cast their votes. When this statistic was revealed on screen late in the film, the entire audience watching the movie at the Portsmouth Music Hall gasped collectively. As election night wound down and the bewildering results of the election began to become clear (including the breaking news report that the state of North Carolina had gone to Trump), all three of the volunteers seemed to lose their sense of faith in a system that could appoint such a malign force to its highest governmental position, yet they all still stressed the importance of continuing their grassroots work to fight that corruption at every future opportunity.

I was equally impressed with the figures in Stephanie Wang-Breal’s documentary Blowin’ Up, which traces the struggles of women arrested for prostitution in Queens, New York, as they face the criminal justice system as victims of human trafficking. The film begins as a woman named Kandie explains that “blowin’ up” means making the decision to leave your pimp, the man who’s controlling your finances, your actions, and your entire life. She mentions that she would often earn over $1,200 on some nights, and that none of the money would be hers to keep, only meals from McDonald’s. In a tragic way, I feel like that’s an analogy for the entire capitalist system itself; as Karl Marx famously described, the secret of profit and wealth in capitalist societies is that workers are systematically underpaid and oppressed by those who exploit their labor. Many of the women arrested who are interviewed in the movie explain that they were trying to work their way out of crushing debt and other financial hardships. A number of women who appear in the film are immigrants from Asian countries who had arrived here with nothing and took jobs working in massage parlors, as a way to have food and shelter, and to try to help their families survive.

To counter these grim realities, Wang-Breal introduces a wide range of remarkable, diligent women working in the criminal justice system — from social workers to attorneys to judges like the Honorable Toko Serita — who have been successful in reforming how prostitution cases are handled in Queens, shifting the courts gradually from a system of diversion and punishment to one that focuses instead on intervention and rehabilitation. Why would a police officer or detective arrange to meet a sex worker at a hotel in order to entrap the woman and make an easy arrest, one legal representative asks, rather than investigating and attempting to intervene? One approach to rehabilitating some women in the community who’d been charged with prostitution was to connect them with an Asian women’s center. For me, the film’s most powerful footage included conversations between one of the arrested women and the director of the women’s center. When she asks the client if she feels that working as a prostitute had violated her human rights, they discuss how everyone should have the right to survive, the right not to be hurt, and the right to be informed. Blowin’ Up offers the viewer an interior, ground-level view of social justice and change related to all of these crucial human-rights issues.

As an admirer of the French director and screenwriter Christophe Honoré’s 2007 threesome-centered musical film Love Songs (Les Chansons d’Amour), I was very excited to see his new gay-themed Parisian movie Sorry Angel (Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite), which is set in 1993, the year that I was halfway through college and just beginning to come out as gay myself. As a gay man who came of age in the 1980’s and early ’90s, I remember how the specter of HIV and AIDS lingered everywhere by the time 1993 arrived, shadowing every mood and thought and interaction with a sense of remote doom, whether you talked about it openly or not. All of this made watching the absolute wealth of true-to-life details in Sorry Angel feel like I’d lived through something historical, a time in gay life that can now legitimately be seen as history, even though I often felt like I’d have no history as a gay man at that time, as if any real future had already been foreclosed to me and to all of us young gay men back then. Despite having taught a college-level queer history course for nearly twenty years now, I was surprised to feel my own historical memories rising up through the layers of Christophe Honoré’s beautifully made and carefully modulated new film.

Sorry Angel is an ensemble movie that has the feel of an engrossing novel. That makes sense because its 39-year-old central character, Jacques Tondelli (played by Pierre Deladonchamps, who was so memorable in 2013’s Stranger by the Lake), is himself a novelist. Cruisingly, he meets a 22-year-old bisexual university student from Brittany who’s named Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), while the two are watching Jane Campion's The Piano at a movie theatre and wind up sitting beside each other, and then they haltingly move on to having sex and dating, all of the wonderful things that I recall quite well from 1993. During one of their early conversations (and these dialogue-based scenes in the film are among the best that I’ve encountered over the past several years), Arthur asks Jacques, “What do you do in life?” to which Jacques responds, “I head for ruin,” and then, after a beat: “I’m a writer.” Later, Jacques also gives some lessons in literary history to Arthur over the phone — on Whitman and Rimbaud, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman — during which Arthur even takes notes … and in the middle of a taking a break from a hot hookup with one of his cute friends who’s his own age, no less.

Jacques, who is HIV-positive, sometimes lives with his young son, Louis (Tristan Farge), nicknamed Loulou, whom he had with a close female friend, Isabelle (Sophie Letourneur). Occasionally, Jacques shares his apartment with his friend and ex-lover, Marco (Thomas Gonzalez), who’s now living with full-blown AIDS and slipping downhill fast. The relationship between Jacques and Marco is an honest and heartbreaking one; a bathtub scene between the two, after which Marco admits, “I hurt too much to be in love with anyone,” is sure to become a classic of gay cinema. The same could be said of a much later scene between Jacques, Arthur, and their older gay friend Mathieu (Denis Podalydès), as they dance and drink in the living room, have a long and drunken late-night conversation, then end up humorously in bed together.

Although in this scene Arthur delivers a pointed monologue that comes off sounding a little scripted (as if Christophe Honoré is speaking, rather than the character), and although some of the HIV/AIDS plot elements in the film feel a bit too familiar at times, Sorry Angel is a realistically nuanced and deeply human movie that was also an arrow to the heart for me. I was psyched to hear such inspired and unexpected song choices from the late ’80s and early ’90s intelligently placed throughout the film’s soundtrack, from Cocteau Twins’ “I Wear Your Ring” during Jacques’ and Arthur’s gorgeous, blue-lit initial sex scene, to Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls” during one of Arthur’s fun hookups on the side, to Cowboy Junkies’ slow-burning rendition of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” at one of the movie’s pivotal emotional moments. I also can’t understate my own emotional response to this film. During a scene in the final half-hour, when Arthur does an innocent striptease for Jacques at the foot of his hospital bed, then climbs in beside him and says, “We could make a good life together,” I suddenly started to cry, and I continued crying right through to the end of the film.