ROAD TRIP: a review of "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things"

"I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS"
Based upon the novel by Iain Reid
Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman
***1/2 (three and a half stars)
RATED R 

"...We're just two lost souls 
Swimming in a fishbowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here..."
-music and lyrics by Roger Waters
Pink Floyd "Wish You Were Here"

At this stage, it is becoming even more difficult to offer a review of a Charlie Kaufman experience. 

From his spectacularly audacious full arrival to our cinematic consciousness with Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" (1999) and "Adaptation" (2002), Kaufman proved himself to  being an unapologetically, unrepentantly inventive writer, whose restlessly idiosyncratic stories defied categorization and presented cinematic universes unlike anything else we had seen with its regards to their rabbit hole journeys into our the multi-levels of our mental states, collective consciousnesses, personalities, and identities. And they were astoundingly comical as t hey turned what we felt the movies could be inside out and back again.  

With Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless" (2004), Kaufman extended his reach into a larger and poignant emotional territory as he utilized the format of a break-up story combined with his mind bending aesthetic to explore the notions of the necessity of painful memoires being as essential as the pleasurable memories, as they each serve their crucial roles in building up the completeness of our personalities and possibly, our souls. Through its purity of originality and empathy, it was the finest love story of that cinematic decade for me. 

Yet, the pinnacle was undoubtedly "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. One of my top ten favorites films of its decade, Kaufman delivered an unforgettable  masterpiece, of which I will delve into a tad more later in this posting. That being said, what I will offer at this time is that it was a film that boldly confronted our darkest worries and concerns in a fashion that forced viewers to think a bout the very concepts and themes that we rarely ever wish to think about due to their inherently disturbing, unsettling nature yet we need to in order to understand what it means to live and to die.

Since that period in Charlie Kaufman's career, his work has arrived more sporadically and while so welcomed when it does choose to arrive, it is a challenge as the work in question has grown only more confounding while also beginning to carry a certain weight of familiarity. With "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things," his first film in five years and his adaptation on the Iain Reid novel, Charlie Kaufman has realized a work that is no less original, demanding, challenging and as inscrutable as his previous efforts. But there is a degree of "been there-done that" to the proceedings, which, in pure Kaufman-esque fashion, may precisely exist as a knowing part of the overall design, which would then add an extra layer. 

"I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" stars as an unnamed young woman (Jessie Buckley) who is in the throes of wondering the concept of the film's title with regards to her boyfriend of a few short weeks named Jake (Jesse Plemons). As she ponders the potential demise of their relationship, she has accepted Jake's invitation to take a trip out of town to his parents' (David Thewlis and Toni Collette) farm for dinner. 

That is essentially the plot of the film and it certainly sounds simple. But, with anything that possesses Charlie Kaufman's name, we should expect to receive something that is not in the least bit simplistic. What Kaufman has delivered with "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" is another voyage deep into the recesses of our consciousness and sub consciousness, where our notions of individuality, personality, and identity exist, congeal and collide. It is a disturbing world where it feels like our private, and unspoken thoughts feel as if they can be overheard. Personality shifts spin upon a dime. Memories intertwine and blur, refusing to unwind and distinguish themselves from each other. Characters age forwards and backwards without warning. Disembodied voices are heard, as well as mysterious phone calls are received. And the full, open revelations of one's truest self, whether by oneself or via the words of another who knows you just as intimately, feel as intensely threatening as the a trap door in the floor just waiting to take you by surprise and swallow you whole. 

The film is divided into three (or possibly four) distinct sections: the long, snowy car drive to the farm, the night at the farm, the longer, snowier drive back home and a final detour or two where the film takes a swan dive into the surreal and the mournful. Throughout the entirety of the film, Kaufman, working seamlessly with Cinematographer Lukaasz Zal, Composer Jay Wadley and Editor Robert Frazen, establishes a constant state of unease, which then builds into dread and confusion, which then builds into a sense of realization, tragedy and funhouse mirror finality, all the while evoking the tone of a dream drifting closer and closer to nightmare. 

"I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" exists on such shifting sand that it is a miracle that any of the performances are effective at all and absolutely every one of them are excellent. Jessie Buckley exudes a superior grasp of the confounding proceedings, even as precarious as they are. David Thewlis and Toni Collette even moreso, as they each represent the passage of time, history and family dynamics. 

Yet, it is indeed Jesse Plemons, who resembles somewhat of a cross between Matt Damon and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who just astonishes in the role of Jake, a taciturn figure who is simultaneously steadfast and impossible to fully pin down. Plemons elicits timidity and shyness, earnestness and eagerness just as easily as a certain arrogance and insensitivity, intelligence, romanticism, optimism and darkness, and fully packaged in a character that is warm enough to understand why our unnamed heroine would date him but sinister enough to make us want to yowl at the screen, warning her to run away. 

As schizophrenic as all of this may sound, and actually is, Kaufman ensures the film itself advances with a consistently ominous atmosphere that suggests that nagging voice inside of our brains that alerts or torments us whenever we reach a certain fork in the road, that feeling we get that tells us to look over our shoulders for any oncoming danger even when we'd rather not, the pit in the stomach feeling that may reveal itself after we cross any emotional red lights. "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" exists at the precise point of decision/indecision and Charlie Kaufman is meticulously perceptive with the myriad of thoughts and viewpoints, both real and imagined, that arrive in those moments when the future is close enough to touch and the past is just that far behind. 

And even so, what it is all about?

Undeniably, it would be a given to think that anyone who views "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" would be left scratching their heads at best. Even further, I would not be surprised if some viewers would stop watching entirely due to its impenetrable nature and escalating voyage into the surreal. Well, and without delving into really any of the film's trajectories and specific sequences, here are the feelings the film inspired and therefore, left me with...

To me, Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking Of Ending things" is a meditation on loneliness, regret, loss, delusions and ruminations upon choices not taken due to crippling self-confidence and the sense of self-loathing produced. It is a film where we are ensconced within the psychological terrain and trappings of interior spaces (a car, a house) and in turn, we, and the characters, are surrounded by history, memories, fears and ghosts of the very people that inhabited those spaces. The location of Jake's parents' farm house in fraught with the baggage of the lives that once existed within it, with the various rooms in the home housing the very crucial moments and experiences that ultimately give birth, evolution and death to the life of the environment itself. 

And then, from locations, Kaufman takes us back into the self as he illustrates how the iconography of our lives are all built upwards from the various elements of pop and art culture that speak to us, and we ultimately we consume and attach to our growing personas, all of which invents our individualized perceptions of self. Kaufman extends even deeper as he shows how our personalities and personas are also influenced and created by every single person that has contributed to our lives, and so, we in turn for everyone else. Family, friends, acquaintances, influential members of our respective communities and even further than that, this includes everyone who literally does not exist in the material world. Characters from fiction, certainly. The perceptions that we invent about people, most definitely.  

With "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things," show tunes, the film reviews of Pauline Kael and the final sequence of Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind" (2001) carry an equal weight to farm animal tragedies, a Dairy Queen-esque ice cream shop, custodian uniforms in the laundry and the death stares from the eternal disdain of pretty high school girls. Personalities and identities shift and alter to the degree that we are forced to question if what we are viewing is a duet or a monologue. And if it is either, is it external or internal? Is it taking place in a snap of a moment or over the full duration of a life? The heavy mental lifting is entirely up to us.

And even so, we have all been here before.

For me, the film trajectory of Charlie Kaufman has possessed a fully idiosyncratic evolution. Certainly, as we were wholly unfamiliar with a creative voice like his, the early films represented a certain excitement as it was a voice so foreign. We could view precisely how "Being John Malkovich" led to "Adaptation," built upwards to "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind" and then, reaching the pinnacle with "Synecdoche, New York." As  I have previously written upon this site, I once had a friend who worked at a local, and now defunct video store, who loved "Synecdoche, New York" so completely and felt it to exhibit such perfection and completeness that he wished that Charlie Kaufman did not ever make another film again...for where else could he venture as he seemingly said EVERYTHING in that film? 

Since "Synecdoche, New York," Kaufman has only helmed two films, the animated "Anomalisa" (2015) and the film I am writing about at this time. In some ways, Kaufman has perhaps proved my old video store clerk friend correct. In a sense, there is absolutely nothing here in "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" that we have not seen before...and to that end, even better. This is not to say that there is anything necessarily wrong with this new film, especially as I am giving it high praise overall. But, there is something lacking in the cumulative effect that has not happened in previous Kaufman movies. The earlier films are unforgettable. "Synecdoche, New York," in particular, is profoundly, devastatingly haunting. "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things," however, I haven't thought about terribly much at all since having seen it and I doubt that I would even revisit it. Not for any lack of quality but solely due to the impression I have that, again, Kaufman has travelled this road many times before and now it is decidedly less compelling.

All of Charlie Kaufman's cinematic efforts built up to "Synecdoche, New York" and now, everything after currently lives within that film's shadow. Even so, this sense of deterioration is baked fully into the Charlie Kaufman cake, so to speak, as all of his film to various degrees speak directly to the quandary of living and the disappointment that arrives with aging and mortality, regardless of the clichés we all tell ourselves in order to just keep placing one foot in front of the other as we constantly devise ways to justify our existence. 

Charlie Kaufman more than understands this existential crisis and therefore, weaves it directly into the narrative and now, even into his life as an artist, where his grasp of his gifts will one day leave him due to anything from lack of inspiration to mortality. And so, being as perceptive as he clearly is, it almost makes his films critic-proof, as any perceived shortcomings from viewers feel less like criticisms and more like acknowledgements of the inevitable. 

Yes, indeed a talent like Charlie Kaufman's has more than earned and deserves our celebration, due to his creativity and utter refusal to dumb even one iota down to fit into the masses' collective lowest common denominator leanings. But, there is indeed a fine line between labyrinthine storytelling and thumbing through a copy of the American Psychiatric Association's DMS 5 manual and attaching the traces of a plot to a disorder. Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" is an enigma, often magnetic in its power while also keeping us just this far out of reach. 

SAVAGE CINEMA REVISITS: "THE SECRET CINEMA" (1966)

"THE SECRET CINEMA"

A Paranoid Fantasy
Written and Directed by Paul Bartel

Dedicated to Liz Sellers, the one who found what was once so long lost... 

I remember when I first saw Peter Weir's "The Truman Show" (1998), his wonderful satirical, science fiction tinged, psychological thriller about an ordinary man named Truman (a terrific Jim Carrey), living a seemingly ordinary life yet unbeknownst to him, his entire life has been a manufactured product, scripted, directed and broadcast to the nation on television. In addition to marveling at the film, which may have been one of my personal favorites of that cinematic year, what I remember the most was a very distant movie memory that I had long forgotten but was undeniably triggered by Weir's film.

I could not remember the title of the film in my memory. Not even one word of it. But I had this vague recollection of a film about a woman who discovers that she is being covertly filmed, with sequences of her life being screened in a movie theater without her knowledge. I vividly remembered where I had seen such a movie as it was a short feature that occasionally aired between feature films on the long defunct Chicago area pay TV channel called "ON TV," a pay service that existed in lieu of cable television as the city of Chicago during those years in the early 1980's had not been wired for that television technology.

Anyhow, it was a film that I had always stumbled upon as it was never in the schedule. It always took me by surprise, and I consistently found myself captivated by its sheer strangeness. And so, as mysteriously as it entered my life, it vanished from ON TV, and well...life happened and I never saw it again or even thought about it until seeing "The Truman Show." From that point, the mysterious movie lingered deeply within my sub-consciousness, emerging here and there as a "Hey...what was that movie I saw?" moment in time that would evaporate as randomly as it appeared.   

Until last week...

Once again, and with no knowledge of how the memory had once again been prompted, I recalled the mysterious movie and this time, I was sitting at the very computer at which I am currently writing to you. I did a few minor Google searches with key words and came up with nothing. Before heading to bed, I wrote a quick Facebook post, primarily directed towards my Chicago friend with whom I grew up, if they had any recollections. 

By morning, my friend, the amazing Liz Sellers, whom I have known since childhood, had the answer...

"The Secret Cinema."

After reading her message, I quickly looked up the title, and then the film itself upon You Tube and yes indeed...the memories and the movie all flooded back perfectly, in all of its strangeness of vision and execution. And now, having made a full reunion, but now seeing it through adult eyes and within an extremely turbulent 21st century context, it is amazing how the power of this short not only remains and has reverberated through time, it has only increased in its deliverance of the surreal. So much so, that it feels to serve as a societal warning rather than the paranoid fantasy of which it describes itself.

"The Secret Cinema" stars Amy Vane as Jane, the film's hapless ingenue, who works as a secretary who, as the film begins, is constantly being sexually harassed by her boss, the portly Mr. Troppogrosso (Gordon Felio). Upon relinquishing herself of that humiliation, Jane quickly faces another as her boyfriend Dick (Phillip Carson) dumps her proclaiming that he never loved her and furthermore, his only love is (cryptically stated)...the movies. 

The following day, a plot to return Jane to Dick's good favors is hatched by her best friend Helen (Connie Ellison) who suggests that Jane accept a date with the "jet setty" Mr. Troppogrosso to a local discotheque that Dick frequents as a means to ultimately make him jealous, thus inspiring him to want Jane back. As Jane mulls over this prospect, and also endures a stressful lunch date with her Mother (Estelle Omens), Jane is subjected to strange moments and disturbing clues that something out of her control is amiss, from discarded tickets stubs to whisperings of a secret movie being screened starring a "dumb girl" who has no idea that she is being filmed who continuously says "dumb, funny things." 

All of the seemingly disparate elements come together as Jane gradually discovers the truth about her increasingly surreal world in which she is the star and unsuspecting victim.

Paul Bartels' "The Secret Cinema," first and foremost, is precisely as it is self-described: a paranoid fantasy in which the life of Jane ventures through the looking glass into a new reality that calls everything she once knew to be true and valid utterly false. While Bartels has made a playful film, its overall sinister nature combined with its whimsy and satire makes it an even ore unsettling tale this shy of something we might view upon "The Twilight Zone." 

There is not a moment, during which Jane, and therefore, we in the audience, are not thrown off balance, and that even incudes when we may be privy to information that Jane is not, simply because Bartels is playing with our own sense of reality just as his characters are playing with Jane's.

From the film noir-ish black and white Cinematography by Fred Wellington, the boisterous film score which veers from Chaplin-esque whimsy to darkly melodramatic, scenes that feature disembodied laughter, the appearance of Mimi Randolph who surfaces in three different roles (as a waitress, movie theater ticket seller, and a nurse, respectively) to lightly antagonize an otherwise clueless Jane, the slightly out-of-sync dubbing of voices to their visual images, moments of betrayal from trusted sources and not one but two twist endings, Bartels creates an experience that feels like a fever dream edging just this close to paralyzing nightmare. And yet, "The Secret Cinema" remains a comedy, just funny enough to keep you chuckling throughout so as to not otherwise feel as if you have fallen into a David Lynch film.  

To achieve this level of a cinematic balancing act so effectively is first-rate, most especially one that is just shy of being only 30 minutes in duration. Seeing this film now as an adult, I was amazed to realize that I remained as captivated as I remember being when I was a pre-teen. It is a creepy kind of film, albeit an inviting one with an unsettling feeling was appropriately paramount and magnetic--you really can't turn away from it. 

But seeing it now through adult eyes made me take note of Paul Bartels' subversive tactics, as he sneakily sprinkles elements (homosexuality and sexual fetishes, for instance) into the film without making major announcements, which also contributes to the film's overall dream-like nature and our own precarious self-perceptions about our own sense of self-worth, acceptance popularity and unending fear of rejection or being forever placed upon the outside looking inwards to our own lives. 

Which leads us to the increased power of "The Secret Cinema" and its themes of surveillance and the battle between our real and virtual lives within our social media driven 21st century. The sense of fantasy at work in the film circa 1966 has steadily advanced towards a larger reality in 2020, as so much of our lives are played out virtually as much as realistically, if not moreso as we are constantly cultivating our on-line personas, no matter how "real" we are wishing that we are presenting ourselves.

 

With the prevalence of our camera phones and our need to document and therefore, present and re-contextualize our lives visually, it is as if we have willingly ventured into the television and movie screens creating our continuous "reality shows" unlike Jane, who is valiantly attempting to keep herself in one reality rather than having it splintered into several for consumption and ultimately, judgment. 

This quandary certainly sets up a new and ever sifting balance of power and control for who is really controlling the image and who has the power to create the personas and lives lived, whether real or virtual? 

Who knows how far Paul Bartels envisioned our lives in front of and behind camera lenses would travel, if at all, back in 1966. Yet, with his character of Jane, it could be pondered that he may have worried a bit about how far, as a culture, would we venture for entertainment and acceptance and how much of ourselves would we be willing to have taken, or even give away, just to see ourselves at all larger than life.    

Or I am just over thinking all of this and I should take it at face value and just be happy with the fact that I have reunited with a movie that has gently haunted me for decades. I sincerely invite you to look up the film, which is still available upon You Tube in its entirety, and screen it for yourselves. 

And when you do immerse yourself in Jane's odyssey, let me know what you thought when you emerge on the other side.

SAVAGE CINEMA TIME CAPSULE: TOP 50 FAVORITE MOVIES FROM 2010-2019: THE TOP TEN!!

Finally!!! 

This installment, the final section of my series compiling my top 50- favorite films (plus a few extra) from the decade of 2010-2019, is at long last at its conclusion as I will now bring you my personal Top Ten! I honestly did not intend to have this series, which I began in the Spring, to have extended itself for this lengthy duration of time. But, with time, as it relates to life during COVID-19, becoming more elastic than normal to say the least, the months passed by in a flash and here we are in November. So, ensuring that the word did not turn to 2021 before I knew it, I am prioritizing this completion.

As always, these are just my opinions and I will post where you may find the full, complete review for each film. Are you ready?

10. "THE SOCIAL NETWORK" DIRECTED BY DAVID FINCHER (2010)
First of all, this is not a film about Facebook. David Fincher's increasingly prescient film that surrounds itself around the creation of Facebook is a film about inspiration, innovation and imagination as well as it is a film about class warfare, race and racism, toxic masculinity, lost innocence, and the pursuit and wielding of emerging power, as filtered through the persona of Mark Zuckerberg (a brilliantly serpentine Jesse Eisenberg) during his Harvard set college years.

Secondly, this is a movie about Facebook, or rather the technological sea change that birthed our still increasing and simultaneous devotion and repulsion of the social media landscape. Structured as a hybrid between a series of Rashomon styled court depositions and Orson Wells "Citizen Kane" (1941), Fincher, aided superbly by Aaron Sorkin's whirlwind, mammoth screenplay and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' debut and Oscar winning film score, cultivates what amounts to a societal warning. To think, the idea of a virtual means to connect and re-connect with other human beings yet was actually created as a means to humiliate women does seem to serve our cultural quandary exceedingly well. The battle between our real and virtual lives and the toll it has taken upon our social core is nothing less than a plea for us to not relinquish our sense of humanity in favor of the instant, yet fleeting, gratification of synthetic rewards and our ensuing addiction to those rewards for what good is feigning inter-connectivity at the expense of our own souls? 

This film is a powerful, still prophetic dark epic about our primal need for acceptance, validation, approval, understanding and empathy...and the lengths to which we will venture to attain it. By forcing us to confront our own instincts with his portrait of Zuckerberg, Fincher never lets us off of the hook.    

(Originally reviewed October 2010)

9. "BLACK SWAN" DIRECTED BY DARREN ARONOFSKY (2010)

In her undeniably deserved Oscar winning performance, Natalie Portman raised her own creative bar by taking herself and all of us on a swan dive into Hell in this astounding psychological thriller set within the unforgiving dance world of professional Ballet Theater. 

As the aging dancer Nina Sayers, who in her desire to attain the coveted dual role of "The Swan Princess/The Black Swan" in her company's production of "Swan Lake," we witness an obsessive quest for ultimate perfection and all inherent confrontations towards realizing her dreams. From the jealous wrath of her peers, the pleasing of her imposing and sexually lascivious Choreographer (an excellent Vincent Cassell), intense competition and fear of replacement from a new dancer (a magnetic Mila Kunis) who exudes greater confidence and sexual energy, the suffocating presence of her Mother and failed former dancer (Barbara Hershey) and the punishing physical demands of her chosen profession and art. Yet, even all of that does not compare to the demons in her mind and her splintering psyche as she desperately attempts to "let go" and tap into her darkest tendencies in order to fully embody the role of "The Black Swan." 
  

Aronosfky has unleashed a superior, hallucinogenic experience, filled with labyrinthine visual and aural juxtapositions, most notably, the motif of mirrors, to insert us directly inside of Nina's fragile mind, allowing us to see and hear only what she experiences and the effect is harrowing. But his cinematic touches would not be enough if not for the performance of Natalie Portman who does indeed "let go" (in a way she previously hadn't, to my perceptions), to the degree that she delivered nothing less than the opera for our nightmares. 

(Originally reviewed January 2011)

8. "SORRY TO BOTHER YOU" DIRECTED BY BOOTS RILEY (2018)

One of the decade's most fearless, incendiary and nearly unclassifiable films was Writer/Director Boots Riley's debut feature, a dense, disturbing satire that fused elements of comedy, science fiction/horror and magical realism together weaving the dark spell of a cinematic bad dream from which our film's hero is unable to awake.

The odyssey of Cassius Green (the terrific Lakeith Stanfield), during which he discovers his "White voice" in order to propel himself up the telemarketing corporate ladder, hurls him and the audience into a tale that openly confronts the brutal dehumanization of capitalism and cultural appropriation, the subjugation and abuse of workers and of the act of passivity itself, which threatens to leave one trapped within a world they never made. Yet, for all of the deadly serious commentary, it is a playful film (although one packed with razor blades), that delivers wildly colorful and inventive perspectives with color schemes, costume design, cinematography, music as well as with the performances and Riley's unrepentant storytelling which flies face first into a surreal plot development that you will either fully accept or not (I thought it was ingenious) with a madhouse fury.

"Sorry To Bother You" is a film overflowing with vehement surprises that batter and bruise and is also a testament to the unfiltered creativity, imagination and originality that we so rarely even see anymore in our cinematic landscape of sequels, prequels, remakes and theme park rides masquerading as movies. Boots Riley's staggering confidence and tenacity produced a film experience unlike most and to which at the screening I attended, inspired one patron to loudly announce once the film concluded, an incredulous "JE-SUS!!" and I myself stood in the theater hallway afterwards wondering just what in the hell I had even seen! 

(Originally reviewed July 2018)

7.  "SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD"  DIRECTED BY LORENE SCAFARIA (2012)

Essentially ignored upon its initial release (it played in my city for two short weeks before it completely vanished), this beautiful, aching, existential apocalyptic comedy, in which a 70 mile wide asteroid is headed for a direct hit to planet Earth ensuring the world's annihilation in three weeks was, and remains, one of the decade's most striking, heartbreaking and memorable films I saw, despite it being so sadly undervalued.

Starring a wonderful Steve Carrell (demonstrating a depth reminiscent to William Hurt or Jack Lemmon) and a dazzling Keira Knightley (fully liberated from period dramas) as neighbors, previously unfamiliar to each other, who join forces to navigate their final 21 days on Earth together (he to re-connect with a lost love, she to somehow find a plane back to her family in England) showcased Lorene Scafaria's masterful sense of tone and empathy via a knife's edge of concepts and styles from satire, thriller, poetry and romantic comedy in a superbly unpredictable fashion while helming a story aiming for a horrifically predictable conclusion. 

I absolutely loved how Scafaria never let the audience off of the hook, so to speak. As her luxurious dialogue, sumptuous character development, building romance between our leading characters and often outrageous humor makes for an invitingly congenial experience, she upends you over and again with shocking  yet skillful tonal shifts that always remind you that the world will come to an end and there is no getting out of it, keeping us all off balance as we, from characters to viewers, ponder existence and mortality. 

"Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World," while often being a grim comedy of manners, is ultimately a warm experience that eloquently presents in a realistic fashion of what humanity ight look like is faced with is impending end. Hedonism, violence, despair and survivalism are as present as people still showing up for work and continuing to mow their lawns (one of the film's finest and most poignant images) for no other reason that we are just programmed to live our lives, makes Scafaria's vision so, well...life affirming. And the film's final moments, where two people finding the significance in each other and themselves just as the universe is set to render them and all living things insignificant is unforgettable.

And even more, I will never hear Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' "The Guy Is In Love With You" or The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" in the same way ever again.     

(Originally reviewed July 2012)

6. "DJANGO UNCHAINED"  DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO (2012)

One of our most original, innovative and unrepentantly fearless filmmakers emerged with possibly his most audacious project, and unquestionably, the one with his most openly presented moral outrage.

Quentin Tarantino's three hour epic chronicling the odyssey of the titular Django (a titanic Jamie Foxx) from slave to bounty hunter to slave emancipator as he attempts to find and free his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the plantation compound of Candyland as owned and operated by Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), was an outstanding masterpiece of cinematic revisionist history and genre splicing as he magnificently merged the slave narrative, Spaghetti Westerns, 1970's Blaxploitation films, a condemnation of the Hollywood slave opera and even German folktales into a sumptuously filmed and exceedingly, peerlessly written and constructed experience.

For all of the razzle dazzle, Tarantino ensures that the most important, crucial element of the film remains painfully intact, the unforgivable inhumanity of slavery. Unlike most Hollywood filmmakers who are afraid to get their hands dirty or are fearful of making potential audiences uncomfortable, Quentin Tarantino, by contrast, takes us to the wall in all of slavery's brutality, from abusive language to sadistic deeds, culminating in the full, complete and punishing catharsis of Django's unrelenting retribution. 

Yes, much of what we experience within a film like this one is cinematic fantasy but it is wrapped in the reprehensible realities of what slavery was, the African-American Holocaust. where the painfulness and deliverance operated at its most primal. And to that end, Quentin Tarantino utilized the truth of our nation's original sin, and again proved why he is one of most original cinematic storytellers.  

(Originally reviewed December 2012)

5. "GET OUT"  DIRECTED BY JORDAN PEELE (2017)

A film so ingenious that I was stunned that it had not been made sooner, and now that it has been made, it has invented its own cinematic line in the sand, influencing all that will arrive afterwards.

Jordan Peele's masterful debut, in which a young, Black photographer (a richly haunted Daniel Kaluuya) travels to visit the parents of his White girlfriend to terrifying results, completely upended and re-invented the horror genre by unapologetically making the nightmare of "post racial"/post Obama 21st century Americans as filtered through the Black experience the engine in which our story, and therefore, the horror developed and existed, making this film even more potent three years after its original release.

After multiple viewings, I am still amazed and slack jawed at how brilliantly Peele realized and controlled his vision, even when the film flies into its viciously surreal final third. For he never lets his eye off of the cinematic ball, so to speak. That the nightmare of "Get Out" is the nightmare African-Americans face each and every single day living in White America to varying degrees from the prevalence of daily micro-aggressions and undeserved suspicions which rightfully create paranoia to the rise of overt and rampant racism of police brutality and open-season styled hunting and murders of Black people by Whites who "feel threatened," all of which exacerbates the fear, incites the necessity for resistance and/or the submergence into "The Sunken Place" (itself a term now added to our lexicon when discussing race in reality as much as it is in pop culture). 

Jordan Peele's "Get Out" is an honest and unmercifully creative work that fearlessly confronts White privilege, cultural appropriation, enslavement, eradication and emancipation with rapacious satire and the very moral outrage and catharsis that fully validates the on-going racial trauma that exists for Black people in White society.          

(Originally reviewed March 2017)

4. "THE LOBSTER"  DIRECTED BY YORGOS LANTHIMOS (2016)

Breathing the same rarefied cinematic air as the likes of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (1985) and Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), Yorgos Lanthimos' debut English language feature film is a work of palpable existential quicksand filtered through a dystopian future that feels like a Wes Anderson film as filtered through the eyes of Stanley Kubrick. It is one of the decade's most singular, downright original films of which the response will not capture anything within the middleground. You will go with it or you just won't and Lanthimos is resolute and defiant in his unforgiving vision. 

The story, set in an undetermined future during which single people are deemed to check into the Kafka-esque location known only as The Hotel and are given a duration of 45 days to find a lifetime romantic partner or otherwise be transformed into an animal, is a brutal satire about loneliness and the societal constructs of single vs. married people. Lanthimos gives us a world where bisexuality is no longer a viable sexual choice, masturbation is illegal, relationships are forged through matching physical ailments and not through honest attraction and emotinal connections, and singledom for males represents a life doomed to die alone after choking upon a meal while for women, it means they are destined to being raped solely because they have not become attached to the right man.

Colin Farrell elicits one of his most committed performances as a newly unmarried man forced to check into The Hotel and experience an odyssey that will propel him through his current lodgings, a stint with a band of renegades known as "The Loners," the threat of the Orwellian landscape The City and an emotionally white knuckle conclusion where he confronts whether love is truly blind. Lanthimos envisions his film through a nightmare logic as visualized through meticulously designed and framed visual perspectives, repetitive classical music that only grows increasingly sinister, cold and detached atmospherics...and somehow, it is a comedy.

A comedy where the honesty and fragility of the emotional human experience has been drowned in the bathtub.       

(Originally reviewed June 2016)

3. "MELANCHOLIA"  DIRECTED BY LARS VON TRIER (2011)

And this is how the world ends...

The second film upon this list to envision our annihilation is one of the decade's furthest reaching films and for me, serves as a dark twin to the film that will sit just one notch above this one. Lars' Von Trier's devastating masterpiece, which is divided into two distinct halves, stars Kirsten Dunst, in one of her gravest, bristling performances as a woman, undone by crippling depression, destroys her own oppressively opulent wedding and afterwards, takes up a convalescence at her sister's (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Meanwhile, a newly discovered blue planet named Melancholia is on course towards Earth for a presumably wondrous astronomical event, when it is actually doomed to obliviate our planet. 

From the apocalyptic imagery of the eight minute, Wagner scored prologue, to the chilling performances, the terrifying thriller aspect of the film's second half as Melancholia approaches, and the final scenes which left me in stunned silence, Lars Von Trier's nihilistic and empathetic exploration of the human experience and humanity's downfall can be taken both at face value or fully as a metaphor for the excruciating, planet crushing pain of depression, where the end of all existence may indeed bring on a calming effect of sweet relief.

Absolutely unforgettable. 

(Originally reviewed December 2011)

2. "THE TREE OF LIFE"  DIRECTED BY TERENCE MALICK  (2011)

Terrence Malick's esoteric, elegant exploration of essentially life, the universe and well...everything was a majestic work of art with a capital "A," "R," "T," yet it was also simultaneously primal in its sheer profundity. 

While the bulk of the film centers around the birth, evolution, tension and destruction of a Texas family in the 1950's, which Malick covers with piercing intimacy and poetic grace notes, he surrounds that personal story with an imagining of the beginning and end of the universe itself, complete with intergalactic extravagances and prehistoric musings starring dinosaurs. Yes, this film was certainly confusing and confounding to many viewers. But trust me, what I really believe Malick has accomplished was to utilize the the story of the universe and the story of the family to showcase the inter-connectivity that exists between all living things over all of time itself, making "The Tree Of Life" a film about the life cycle--meaning EVERY story of EVERY living organism.

Where Brad Pitt, as the patriarch, gave a performance of towering command and Jessica Chastain elicited supreme grace in her ethereal and nearly wordless performance as the matriarch, the true star of the film is Terrence Malick's cinematic palate which delivered a resplendent, rapturous work of sound and vision from its first frame to its last, where every image could exist as a still photograph, and streaks of sunlight look and feel like the hand of God.  

Mysterious and mystical, obtuse, cryptic and demanding of some seriously heavy mental lifting, "The Tree Of Life" is not a film where you can be remotely passive. It is a film designed to engage you with pondering the meaning of it all and Malick's vision is enthralling. 

(Originally reviewed June 2011)

1. "BOYHOOD"  DIRECTED BY RICHARD LINKLATER (2014)

Exactly like how Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" (2000) sat at the very top of my list for my favorite films of the decade from 2000-2009, the placement of this film at the very top of this list was my easiest choice of all. In fact, I knew right away and I juts had to work myself backwards as the ambition, majesty and sheer heart of this completely unique film experience stood taller than all others over these past ten years. 

Filmed in piecemeal over a period of twelve years, Richard Linklater's finest cinematic achievement in his illustrious and idiosyncratic career, exists essentially without a plot as we follow the life and times of Mason (exquisitely portrayed by Ellar Coltrane), from perhaps age 6 to all the way until his arrival at college, directly alongside his Mother (Patricia Arquette), sarcastic sister (Lorelei Linklater), and his Father (Ethan Hawke), long estranged from the family. Over three fully mesmerizing hours, the film follows the introspective Mason as he finds his way with his family, his friends, his loves, his experimentations, his expressions, his future and hoe he begins to interact with and view the world in which he co-exists.

Never at any point is there a moment that feels prefabricated or engineered. There is no hyperbole or manufactured drama. There are even no signals to the audience as to what year it happens to be for Mason, making the film flow like the passage of time itself. And of course, as previously stated, there is no real plot, as within our own real lives, our experiences are not scripted and designed to adhere to a pre-conceived follow through. It is a masterful achievement that Linklater has given to us as he asks of us to ruminate over the paths of our own lives just as we regard Mason's--and for those of you who happen to be parents, I believe the experience of watching this film must be something nearly inexplicable as you will be able to regard yourselves and your children along with Mason.

To that end, Linklater's "Boyhood" could have also been easily called, "Childhood," "Girlhood," "Motherhood," "Fatherhood," "Manhood" or "Womanhood" as absolutely ANY viewer from ANY walk of life can view this film and regard the passage of time over all of the film's characters, and therefore, Linklater truly has re-invented what it means when a film can be a "slice of life" to the point where the experience becomes relatively cosmic.

Philosophical, languid, engaging, overflowing with empathy, wisdom, a miraculous sense of time travel and a final moment that completely encapsulates the bittersweetness of simultaneous beginnings and endings, this film is a monument of absolute, transcendent truth and beauty because Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" is a film about what it means to be alive. 
(Originally reviewed August 2014)

SAVAGE CINEMA'S COMING ATTRACTIONS FOR NOVEMBER 2020

This is the only thing that matters right now.

November 3, 2020.

See you on the other side...