My favourite films of 2018

For me, 2018 was a year where my favourite movies were overwhelmingly comedies or action flicks. While there were many pure dramas I enjoyed this year - two just barely missed the list, and one would be very high if I ranked the top 10 - I was much more interested by those movies which combined surface pleasures with something deeper. I'd prefer not to make a big point of it: most likely, it had more to do with my own tastes than with any reaction to politics or even the kind of movies which were critical darlings in prior years.

What I am glad for, though, is that it allowed a lot more diversity in my top 10. Half of these films feature non-white leads, and almost half were made by non-white directors. This was a year where prestige pictures like Widows and pop phenomena like Crazy Rich Asians represented people who might not have occupied as much of the cultural landscape in the past, and I can only see this as a positive development. A more inclusive cinema at the most public level could get us one step closer to a more inclusive society.

Regardless, here's my own list of the movies that I liked most this year, and here's to more great movies in 2019.

Honourable mentions for 2018

In just over one week, I'm going to be publishing my list of my favourite movies of last year. But I think this year I'll also do something different and give special attention to various films which, despite not getting my highest recommendations, deserve extra mention. Too often, interesting movies are looked over for being imperfect, and I think that's unfair. Opinion is subjective, and limiting the film conversation only to the most beloved of movies does them a disservice. So rather than rattling off an extensive list of movies I loved but cut from my top 10, here's a sort of third place trophy for the flawed movies that defined this year for me just as much as the great ones.

Movie review: "Mandy"

THROND'S CHOICE
directed by Panos Cosmatos
written by Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn

For several years now, Nicolas Cage has been largely banished from mainstream cinema. Since 2013's Joe and excepting the occasional Paul Schrader joint, the Oscar-winning, internet-beloved actor has been largely relegated to direct-to-video dreck, and low-budget trifles. Recently, however, that's begun to change, with Mom and Dad receiving a cult following out of TIFF 2017, and Teen Titans Go! To the Movies casting him as none other than Superman himself.

But neither of those movies has accumulated as much momentum as Mandy, Panos Cosmatos's mesmerizing, intensely stylized, frequently absurd evocation of both B-movie pulp and prog-rock grandiosity. Cosmatos blends self-serious, droning aesthetic experimentation with pandering machismo, creating a hallucinatory, genuinely transporting landscape all in the service of watching Nic Cage kill biker lizardmen and druggie cultists. This film's perverse blend of highbrow stylings and lowbrow content marks it as perfect cult film material.

Movie review: "Crazy Rich Asians"

dir. by Jon M. Chu
written by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim
A lot of the conversation around Crazy Rich Asians surrounds its cast, which is comprised almost exclusively of Asian actors. And indeed, this kind of representation is rare enough that it's worth commemorating, as Asians are so often underrepresented on the silver screen. I'm not qualified to fully discuss the significance of this film's casting, but I can say that it's a very funny, well-executed rom-com which, while covering a lot of familiar territory, finds some strong emotional grounding for its luxurious aesthetic, finding pathos through the specificity of the upper-class Asian experience.

Crazy Rich Asians never really transcends itself or steps out of the predictable, but its all-out charm offensive is irresistible, even in spite of some clunkier moments.  Films like this show Hollywood discovering that shifting the cultural context can give a fresh twist to its usual formulas, and this particular context provides two additional benefits: aside from the aforementioned Asian representation, it also gives the film an excuse to wallow in luxury porn and travelogue-style montages. All of that could have overwhelmed the film, but the story at its core is strong enough to overcome and even complement all those expensive trappings.

Movie review: "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

dir. by Ron Howard
writ. by Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan
One of the key themes of December's Star Wars: The Last Jedi was that obsessing over the past is futile, and yet, Disney has seen fit to fill the gaps in its yearly release schedule not with intriguing new stories from disparate corners of the galaxy, but with yet more prequels which tell stories we already know about. Solo: A Star Wars Story, despite having its fair share of new characters, is a worse offender than Rogue One, as it insistently strings together explanations for nearly every aspect of Han Solo's persona in the original trilogy, while including at least a minor reference to every single piece of backstory which had been mentioned in those original movies.

That doesn't leave Solo with much room to take significant risks within its own story, so thankfully it instead takes on an upbeat tone and a breezy pace, diverging from grim foreboding of Rogue One in favour of a lightweight caper, albeit at the expense of the novelty and unique style of the earlier film. But if Solo contains few of Rogue One's strengths, it also fixes its primary weakness with a far more memorable cast of characters, and the action at the very least remains imaginative and exciting even if it's far less stylish than other recent Star Wars entries. Solo is the most disposable of the recent Star Wars films, but as a fluffy summer blockbuster, it is more than satisfactory.

What I saw at the 2018 Calgary Underground Film Festival: Part 1

April's Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF) is much more genre-oriented than the larger September festival, and in turn also has fewer showings on fewer screens. As a result, there were not nearly as many significant festival hits, although there were a handful of major headliners. This year, I went as far as to buy the Festival Pass, which allowed me to see a wide range of movies, including some minor local pictures. Here, I will quickly discuss the films I saw, starting with the six I viewed on weekdays.

Capsule reviews: March 2018

Republished Letterboxd capsules I wrote in March 2018. 

Movie review: "Thoroughbreds"

THROND'S CHOICE
dir./writ. by Corey Finley
Feature film debuts are a hard business. Acclimatizing to hour-plus filmmaking can be a hard process for many filmmakers, and while some directors like Jordan Peele hit the ground running, others take a bit longer to find their footing. Corey Finley, not unlike Peele, has prior experience in another medium, in this case theatre, and this goes some distance to explaining the unpredictability and novelty of Thoroughbreds, his first work as a filmmaker. The film is a showy exercise, heavy on concept and light on thematic heft, but Finley's writing talent shines through in the film's tightly-wound thrills and razor-sharp dark humour.

What makes Finley's debut so astonishing, though, is that, despite never making a film before, he has matched his exciting narrative with a strong formal style. So many first-time filmmakers can only dream of making something this confident and distinct, and yet Finley seems as comfortable with the form as if he had been making movies for years, merging his great script with an off-kilter, unnerving aesthetic which colours even the most mundane of events. So sharp is his formal control that it elaborates and elevates the already exhilarating content of his script, and if this film is any indication, Finley should find cinema a good fit for his talents.

Movie review: "Mute"

dir. by Duncan Jones
written by Michael Robert Johnson and Duncan Jones
Duncan Jones has, allegedly, been trying to get Mute made for some decade and a half. Presented as a sequel of sorts to his excellent 2009 sci-fi film Moon, this new film represents Jones's return to science fiction after the critical failure of his video game adaptation Warcraft. Given the pedigree of Jones's previous work, it's not hard to expect that this would show him regaining his footing after that brief stumble, but it's also a relatively safe career move. That it was Netflix who ultimately distributed it could indicate that it was too challenging for the traditional studios, but it could also simply indicate that the project wasn't coming together.

Netflix's willingness to let filmmakers do whatever they like allows for ambitious projects to gain a mainstream pedigree, but it also means they have a low standard of quality. In Jones's case, there's a reason the major studios wouldn't touch this: if Mute is a passion project, it's hard to see where the passion is directed, as this is a droning, persistently generic neo-noir project, and while it's admirably committed to its scattershot ideas, those ideas are overwhelmingly derivative, gracelessly grafting a Blade Runner ripoff aesthetic to a tediously creaky mystery. The downfall of Netflix's approach, it would appear, is that there's nobody to tell a filmmaker when their efforts just aren't working.