Five Favorite Films of 2016

If lists of our favorite things are like tiny blueprints of our personalities, then my favorite films of 2016 certainly indicate a good deal about me. All five movies that I’ve selected to write about below, in looking back on all the films that I saw this past year, are quiet and fairly independent; with a couple of exceptions, they’re films that relatively few people watched at cinemas. Accordingly, the cinema itself, as digital technology becomes more and more widespread, seems less and less like the place where movies will eventually be housed with each year that passes. If that’s indeed the case someday, I can’t overstate how much I’ll miss the particular experience of filmgoing and its significant place in the culture.

Because they intersected so perfectly at the crossroads of movies and music, I loved John Carney’s two previous films, Once and Begin Again, so I anticipated enjoying his latest film Sing Street equally as much. What I didn’t foresee was just how deeply his new movie would resonate with me. This is mostly due to its ’80s throwback sensibilities, as well as its superbly crafted musical numbers, which were composed by Gary Clark, who scored an international hit called “Mary's Prayer” all the way back in 1987 with his band Danny Wilson. The title Sing Street is a clever play on Dublin’s Synge Street, as in Synge Street Christian Brothers School, where the film’s protagonist, Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), is a student and aspiring musician from a working-class family.

Conor puts together a rag-tag band mostly to impress Raphina (Lucy Boynton), an older girl who catches his eye while standing across the street from his school. What follows is the closest any director has come to matching the late John Hughes’ classic mid-’80s teen comedies, a feat that many, many directors before have tried and failed to fully achieve. The reason why Carney succeeds, in addition to the wonderful performances of the young cast that he’s assembled, is a matter of tone, that bittersweet balance of sentimentality and authentic emotion, tempered by nostalgic longing.

While the growing romantic relationship between Conor and Raphina seems central on the film’s surface, it’s almost equally focused on the relationship between Conor and his older brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), an earnest deadbeat who kindles and guides Conor’s offbeat artistic interests and ambitions. This culminates in one of most moving, visionary endings of any narrative feature from the past year, powerfully accompanied by Adam Levine’s gorgeous song “Go Now.” Several other songs in the film, and the scenes in which they appear, are indelibly catchy and memorable, especially “Up,” “A Beautiful Sea,” “To Find You,” and the phenomenal “Drive It Like You Stole It.”

The complete opposite of Sing Street in its contained, downbeat energy, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea concerns another working-class family, this time in an oceanside town on the north shore of Massachusetts. The film is masterfully constructed from an extended series of flashbacks that often shift abruptly in ways that rely on the formidable strength of the screenwriting and the audience’s intelligence. Having seen the film in New York on Thanksgiving, I admired how its exploration of family dynamics over time felt genuine in its representations of dysfunction; it refuses to offer any simple resolutions.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck, who should win the Oscar for Best Actor) is a repairman for several apartment buildings just outside of Boston. He’s called back to his hometown when his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) dies from heart failure. Joe expects Lee to care for his teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges), a task that Lee’s not fully ready to accept as an uncle, though he does accept it in his own distinct, low-key way, the same way that Lee does everything else. We find out only gradually why Lee is so low-profile and hesitant to return to his hometown, where he’s considered somewhat of a pariah.

Three or four scenes in this film are destined to become classics in cinematic history. This is partly due to Lonergan’s finely wrought script, which moves in ways that make his actors bravely ride along on his lines, as well as the complexity of the film’s performances. In a pivotal scene that takes place in a police station, Affleck navigates the thinnest margin of dialogue while the camera bears directly down on him. Michelle Williams, as Lee’s ex-wife Randi, matches him moment for moment during the film’s overwhelming emotional climax. The power of Manchester by the Sea is that of restraint which comes cascading down after waiting for most of the movie.

To be honest, I’m surprised that Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! was nearly as enjoyable for me as his previous film, Boyhood, especially considering that they’re such different movies. Set in 1980 at a Texas university the weekend before a new school year begins, Everybody Wants Some!! takes place mostly in the frat house and nightclubs frequented by a fun and rowdy bunch of college baseball players, and a little bit on the baseball field during the team’s first batting practice of the season later in the film. At the center of the story is freshman arrival Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner), and the assortment of guys that surrounds him could not be hotter or more hilarious. Just how much fun did the people in charge of hair and costumes have while getting these actors coiffed and all dressed up? Quite a lot, apparently.

Imagine revisiting your college sports years and precisely revising every friend and memory, and that’s pretty much what Richard Linklater has done here. The jokes come quick as lightning, and the actors inhabit their wildly comedic roles as robustly as in any drama. Giving a rundown of each character’s “type” would belittle how smart the performances are, and it would also ruin the sweetness of discovery for anybody reading this who goes on to watch the film for the first time. Some viewers (and some hardcore Linklater fans) have complained that the film meanders too much, dull and plotless. But having a plot isn’t really the point. The story is in the characters themselves, an approach that’s quite true to life. Things don’t happen to us as much as people happen to us. Then things do or don’t happen to those people.

What happens amongst the people in this movie is one long, steady stream of competitive one-upmanship. Whether it’s ping-pong, video games, indoor basketball, darts, or knuckle flicking, these guys openly admit that they have to be the winners at everything they do, the kind of things that I remember doing with my older brother as a kid growing up in Ohio. John Waters has said that this is the gayest movie made by a straight director this past year, and he’s totally right about that. The guys chatter non-stop about cocks and butts, accompanied by plenty of playfully homoerotic narcissism as they all check out their own in the mirror, then go diving into a creek wearing only their jockstraps. Also, seeing McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin, a former baseball player himself) in his at-bat stance as he splits baseballs in half by swinging an axe at them remains my favorite movie image of 2016.

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a movie that I knew I would love from the very first moment I read about it several months ago. Adam Driver plays the title character, a bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, and reads William Carlos Williams’ poetry book Paterson, among other 20th-century American poets like Frank O’Hara. Paterson is also a poet himself. He jots down lines from poems in a notebook before his shift most mornings, he thinks through and revises poems in his mind while he’s driving on his bus route, and he keeps a writing routine in a small book-nook below the basement stairs in the boxy little home that he shares with his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). Laura might be described as having an inspiringly persistent creative streak. She paints designs all around the inside of their house each day, including on the cupcakes that she bakes to sell at the local weekly outdoor market.

Paterson is grounded in routines. It proceeds sequentially through the days of the week and the routines of each day, methodically and touchingly. We become familiar with the things that make Paterson and Laura (and their English bulldog, Marvin) content. But even though there’s a certain enchantment to be found in those familiar routines, that’s only the topmost layer of the movie. The strangeness just underneath it is what sets the whole film and its characters afloat. For instance, after Laura tells Paterson early in the movie about a dream in which she gave birth to twins, Paterson starts seeing pairs of twins everywhere he goes, an unsettling pattern that continues throughout the movie yet is mysteriously never explained or resolved.

When I first heard that Oklahoma-born New York poet Ron Padgett had written Paterson’s poems for the film, I knew that it would be exactly the right fit. Ron Padgett’s continually colloquial, laidback language translates seamlessly into Paterson’s own poems, which we hear read by Adam Driver with a halting resonance as they appear in handwritten script on the screen. The poems are consistent with the rest of Paterson’s world and the even balance of things that make him happy: overhearing passengers’ conversations on the bus when he’s driving, taking Marvin out for his ritual walk at night, stopping in for a beer at his favorite neighborhood bar. He’s like the famous Passaic River waterfalls in Paterson that he loves to sit silently before and watch, always flowing down gently and quietly, never changing shape or pace. Likewise, the relaxed pace and rhythm of Paterson are the film’s most distinctive features, and they’re totally Jarmusch’s own.

Jim Jarmusch also happened to be the executive producer of my favorite documentary of this past year, Aaron Brookner’s Uncle Howard, a rich and sensitive portrait of his late uncle, the filmmaker Howard Brookner, a gay man who died of AIDS in 1989. I already wrote about that film in greater detail in my annual review of the Provincetown International Film Festival back in June, and now I’ve seen the movie three times in total. Its depiction of Howard Brookner’s life, persona, and achievement in the three films that he completed in his short lifetime continue to linger with me at the start of 2017, just as the words of the film’s closing song by The Pretenders, “Hymn to Her,” still echo in my mind now: “They will keep on speaking your name / Some things change / Some stay the same.”

18th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2016)

Before a film screening halfway through this year’s Provincetown International Film Festival, one of the festival’s programmers who was introducing the film was happy to let the audience know that it would be a light movie, and she also mentioned that filmgoers at the festival sometimes ask why so many movies in the festival feel sad or dark. I thought it was great to hear this acknowledged, and I’m also someone who’s quite glad that the films in the festival are often sad and dark because the world itself is often sad and dark. While escapism at the cinema clearly has its advantages, good films tend to reflect our culture and society directly, facing difficult truths head-on and bravely exploring the more intractable or mysterious aspects of human experience. Almost all of the seventeen films that I saw in this year’s festival fit that description, and I’m grateful for it.

I was fortunate to have already seen my favorite film from this year’s festival, Aaron Brookner’s moving documentary Uncle Howard, at the Wicked Queer film festival in Boston just a few months ago. I absolutely loved the movie then, and it definitely rewarded me further on a second viewing, giving me a chance to notice lots of clever interconnections that hadn’t been apparent to me during my first viewing. Last summer here on my blog, I reviewed Smash Cut, Brad Gooch’s terrific memoir about the same subject, the late filmmaker Howard Brookner, Gooch’s boyfriend of ten years who died of AIDS in 1989, just before his 35th birthday. This documentary about Howard’s life and times was produced by Jim Jarmusch, a film school classmate of Howard’s at NYU and the sound man on Brookner’s first film, a mid-’80s documentary about William Burroughs. But what makes Uncle Howard so special is the personal perspective bestowed upon the film’s subject by its director, Howard Brookner’s nephew Aaron.

We see plenty of footage of Aaron as a little boy in the film, growing up with his uncle Howard and beginning to idolize him over time. Howard’s early death made him enigmatic to Aaron, understandably, a huge loss to be pursued and a kind of puzzle to be solved. One striking image late in the film shows the adult Aaron pacing around a large circle of all of the archival artifacts that he’s collected from his uncle’s life: photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, reels of film. The movie’s ultimate message is that memory is the only thing that really makes our stories, along with someone’s willingness either to preserve the memories or piece them back together again. Uncle Howard is pretty much the most gorgeous re-assemblage imaginable, and its closing scene, composed of perfectly selected and placed found footage, is my favorite ending of any movie so far this year.

The documentary that I’d been anticipating most in the festival, David Farrier’s and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled, certainly did not disappoint. Farrier, a bisexual journalist in New Zealand, has made a career of finding offbeat slice-of-life and human interest stories, and Tickled began when he came across “competitive endurance tickling” fetish videos online, which feature cute athletic guys tickling each other fully or partially clothed. Of course, these videos have a massive following among tickling enthusiasts as a kind of very soft-core pornography. Though it seems like those videos will be the focus of the movie, the tickle torture turns out to be just a lure into a much deeper exploration of power, money, and control, all via harassment and humiliation of the videos’ participants at the distant hands of a manipulative quasi-genius whose identity remains a secret until nearly the end of the film. Farrier’s masterful shift of tone into truly suspenseful territory is what makes this film so watchable.

Farrier himself quickly becomes the target of homophobic taunting and harassment just after he discovers and contacts the makers of the tickling videos, produced by a nebulous entity called Jane O’Brien Media. The documentary’s filmmakers gradually learn that Jane herself doesn’t exist at all but is merely an avatar in a long line of assumed identities for a mastermind with an addiction to hot (and financially vulnerable) young guys tickling each other, as well as a relentlessly vindictive streak whenever he’s even slightly crossed by anyone in his path. The psychological motivations behind these behaviors surface briefly late in the movie, and its one weakness might be that Farrier gives us only a sad glimpse into our antagonist’s childhood, yet isn’t really able to explore it further. Nevertheless, the rest of the film gathers its suspenseful energy from delving as deep as it does into the darker side of human (or inhuman) nature. Farrier’s courage and tenacity in pursuing the story to its twisted end are highly commendable.

Another film that I was quite excited to see in the festival was Tim Kirkman’s Lazy Eye, my favorite narrative feature in this year’s festival. I reviewed Kirkman’s earlier film Loggerheads here on my blog several years ago, and that film remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Like Loggerheads, Lazy Eye also quietly follows a gay storyline, this time in a finely crafted two-hander that’s solidly built from its resonant screenplay and dialogue. Dean, an artist turned graphic designer, lives in Los Angeles and owns a weekend home in the desert near Joshua Tree. One night he receives an out-of-the-blue email from Alex, with whom he was romantically involved 15 years earlier when both men were living in New York City, until Alex disappeared from Dean’s life without a single word of explanation.

Reluctantly (and not so reluctantly from a sexual standpoint), Dean invites Alex to join him for a reunion weekend out in the desert. The tension escalates and wanes in ways that I won’t divulge here, though I can say that I related to the two men’s situation on an immediate and sometimes heartbreaking level. I think most gay men have lived through the kind of relationship and loss of a relationship that Dean and Alex share; Kirkman’s ear and eye are attuned to every small detail, in a way that’s reminiscent of Andrew Haigh’s wonderful film Weekend from a few years ago. I think Lazy Eye speaks to my own generation of gay men just as well as Weekend did, perhaps even more fittingly in our current era of gay marriage. What do we lose if we opt out of that new social privilege? Will our memories of former boyfriends and potential husbands transform over time into a long line of regrets, and if so, then what should we do with those regrets?

Long Way North, an animated feature film by Rémi Chayé, was just as emotionally affecting as Lazy Eye, but in completely different ways. The movie, voiced in English, has the look of beautifully hand-drawn Japanese anime in the tradition of Studio Ghibli. Set in the late 19th-century, the story follows a 15-year-old Russian girl, Sasha, whose grandfather is an Arctic explorer who doesn’t return home from his latest expedition. His great ambition was to plant the first Russian flag at the North Pole, so Sasha is able to figure out by studying Arctic maps that he left behind what her grandfather’s approximate location might have been when he went missing.

The rest of the film is a gripping adventure tale, one that could convincingly be told only through the medium of animation. The climate of the Arctic is too inhospitable and treacherous for a live-action film crew to take on, and since CGI is basically animation anyway, why not just go with a full-on animated feature? The film’s payoff is in its extended action sequences: the Russian ship breaking its way through Arctic ice, nearly running aground, the sailors digging and blasting through the entrapping sheets of the frozen sea with dynamite, triggering an avalanche that even further endangers their ship. These scenes and images escalate the genre of animated film to a new and different level. I found myself anxiously shouting “No!” aloud at least twice during that segment of the movie, something I’m certain that I’ve never done before while viewing a cartoon. It’s best to leave the film’s ending undescribed here; I will say, however, that the movie’s climax and resolution are elegantly conveyed, while also remaining understated and Zen-like, despite Sasha’s intensely dramatic circumstances.

One of the documentaries that tied for the HBO Audience Award at this year’s festival, Jonah Markowitz’s and Tracy Wares’ Political Animals, is also well-worth mentioning. The film traces the careers of four lesbian legislators in the state of California: Sheila Kuehl, Carole Midgen, Christine Kehoe, and Jackie Goldberg. Collectively, these women were on the vanguard of gay rights and totally ahead of their time, boldly and tirelessly advocating for legal protections for LGBTQ students in public schools, as well as passing early domestic partnership bills. It addition to compiling compelling footage of their impassioned and movingly personal arguments presented before often homophobic and pro-religion fellow legislators, the film is also an informative vehicle for demonstrating how the legislative process actually works. We watch as bills fail to pass by being as little as one vote short of a majority, and then we see how these women change their uncooperative colleagues’ minds by presenting skillful logic in the context of our evolving culture, just as leaders of the civil rights movement courageously did in previous decades. I teach a course called Sexuality and Social Change at the university where I work, and I will definitely plan to show this film in class when I offer the course in future semesters.

Finally, I really enjoyed one short film in the festival, which screened alongside Uncle Howard, Brandon Cordeiro’s poignantly nostalgic ribbons. Cordeiro is a young filmmaker who was raised in Provincetown, so watching his 8-minute short at this particular film festival, in a town that I’ve visited frequently for many years, made it even more special. Based on one of Brandon’s own memories of his mother taking him to an oceanside AIDS memorial at the beach in Provincetown back in 1997, the short sweetly recreates a young boy’s (and future gay man’s) entirely innocent response to the social tragedy of the AIDS crisis, while also providing a snapshot of the LGBTQ community’s wide-ranging strength at a particularly painful and devastating point in our history. The title image of long, colorful ribbons streaming in the wind on the beach, inscribed with handwritten tributes to loved ones lost to AIDS, has been a feature of the annual Swim for Life fundraising event in Provincetown since its inception; just as memorable is Cordeiro’s luminous rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game” at the end of the film, sung by the director himself.

At the ceremony for honorees, Excellence in Acting Award recipient (and lesbian icon) Cynthia Nixon gave a heartfelt acceptance speech, in which she spoke of how much she’d loved her first visit to Provincetown to attend this year’s festival. She also mentioned what a relief it was to be in such a peaceful, accepting place after last week’s tragic shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, and lamented that such a catastrophe could still befall us now. Her closing words about Provincetown and this pivotal moment in LGBTQ history will be my closing words, too, because they’re abundantly evident in the films that I’ve chosen to review: “How good it is to be here, and to see how far we’ve come.”