Switching to Weebly

Okay. I've fucking had it. Blogger sucks balls.

So I'm moving this blog over to Weebly. Check it out:

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Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Coen Brothers' movies tend to spring from two very distinct wells of inspiration. You have the bleak, existential, miserablist Coens (A Serious Man, No Country For Old Men, Inside Llewyn Davis) and the zany, madcap Coens (O Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty) who take their cues more from screwball-comedy maestro Preston Sturges than from someone like Martin Scorsese or Ingmar Bergman.

Most fall on a spectrum between those two poles, and often enough their best films (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, Barton Fink) are nestled in the sweet spot that exists dead center between them. The one unifying element in all of their movies is their worship for but utter lack of reverence toward classic movie tropes, which they love to employ and then turn inside out with reckless abandon.

Their new film, Hail, Caesar!, lives pretty comfortably on the screwball side. For a Coen Brothers' film it's surprisingly gentle. The Coens are often accused of harboring a deep contempt for their characters, and in movies like Burn After Reading and Barton Fink it's hard to argue against that. But, as ridiculous as everyone is in Hail, Caesar!, the filmmakers' abiding affection shines through. Even the worst characters here are pretty lovable.

The movie is also a lot more direct about its influences. Set in the 1940s and focusing on a day in the life of a studio "fixer" named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), Hail, Caesar! is sort of the sunnier flip side to Barton Fink's much more vicious take on old Hollywood. Rather than rub our noses in the muck, in Hail, Caesar! the Coens would much rather give us a friendly wink and a nudge. This is a movie that's in love with movies.

Eddie is a devout Catholic, and they have a lot of fun turning him into a sort of dimestore Christ figure. He suffers gamely for the sins of his industry, helping a caustic starlet (Scarlett Johansson) cover up an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, guiding a dimwitted singing cowboy (Alden Ehrenreich) who the studio insists on casting in a stuffy drawing-room melodrama, fending off a pair of malicious twin-sister gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton, having a lot of fun), asking a quartet of religious leaders for theological guidance on a script ("The chariot race seemed a little fakey to me," offers the Orthodox patriarch), and — most dramatically — attempting to pay off a mysterious cadre called The Future who have kidnapped one of the studio's biggest stars (George Clooney) for, as it turns out, a pretty asinine reason. 

The Coens use this loose narrative framework to recreate scenes from a number of classic Hollywood movies, including Busby Berkeley musicals like Million Dollar Mermaid, Gene Autry singing westerns, and massive Biblical epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. They're clearly having the time of their lives skewering some of the more, shall we say, dated elements (the terrible matte paintings and awkward stunts are fantastic), but you can also tell how much they love this shit. The highlight is a Footlight Parade-inspired dance number featuring a tap-dancing Channing Tatum, which moves from silly and cheeky to not-so-subtly homoerotic before it's done.

Hail, Caesar! is packed full of jokes (my favorite is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it gag involving an itchy foot) and movie references both obvious and obscure (one of the minor character's names is a pretty arbitrary callback to Vertigo). The Coens have also seemingly called all their actor friends and invited them over to play. We get a bunch of funny glorified cameos from Jonah Hill, Christopher Lambert, Ralph Fiennes, Frances McDormand, and even Fischer Stevens. I guess John Goodman must have had the flu that day. 

You get the sense that everyone was having a blast here, which is not always the case in Coen movies. There's a looseness to the performances that I don't generally associate with their films. Brolin has probably the least fun role, but he provides an anchor for all the ridiculousness swirling around him. Clooney lovingly roasts his own movie-star image and proves once again that he's one of the most underrated comic actors out there. Swinton is both monstrous and hilarious. Johansson's role is pretty one-note, but she plays that note brilliantly. The standouts are Tatum (the less said the better) and relative newcomer Ehrenreich, who steals every scene he's in and is obviously a star in the making. 

This movie is a lot of fun, even if it's basically cotton candy. It doesn't pack the punch you tend to expect from these guys, and I'm going to guess it won't have a lot of staying power in relation to their masterpieces. It's pretty much mid-level Coens. But even mid-level Coens tends to be better than 90 percent of the rest of what's out there.

The Green Inferno (2015)

"Justine, this is good news. If he's telling the truth, then those bulldozers will tear these motherfuckers to shreds."

This is an actual line of dialogue in Eli Roth's The Green Inferno, spoken by one of our white main characters about the villainous (and entirely fictional) cannibal natives of the Peruvian Amazon.

To be absolutely clear, the character (whose name I can't remember because I don't think Roth ever bothered to tell us) is setting up the film's central premise — for our (again: white) protagonists to survive, we must root for the destruction of the Amazon and the violent death of the natives who live within it.

That's what this movie's about. For real.

I finally watched The Green Inferno after sort of purposefully avoiding it for months. But it kept popping up on Amazon feed and, unfortunately, curiosity got the best of me. I really wish it hadn't.

I'm not going to mince words here: The Green Inferno is a racist movie. In fact, it's a viciously, gleefully racist movie. We're talking Birth of a Nation-level racist. It's the sort of movie I'm actually stunned anyone was willing to fund or distribute.

Do I think Eli Roth is a vicious, gleeful racist? I don't know the guy personally, but no, probably not. But I've known a million Eli Roths in my day — dudebro, snickering heavy metal guys with the emotional and intellectual depth of the scrum of dirty water at the bottom of a kitchen sink. Guys who just love being offensive for the hell of it, who say things like "cunt" and "faggot" in mixed company because they like to see people squirm. And if you call them out for it, you're a pussy (or, in today's parlance, an "SJW"). Basically, guys like Phil Anselmo. And I get it. Hell, I used to kind of be that guy myself. 

As Buzzfeed's Allison Wilmore says in her review of The Green Inferno and Roth's other 2015 film, Knock Knock: 

"The Green Inferno, which is about college activists who have a run-in with cannibals, aims to be horrifying. Knock Knock, which is about two women wreaking havoc on a married man, aspires to be titillating. But more than anything, both persistently, persuasively angle to make you angry. They’re bad faith arguments expanded to feature length and served up with a you mad, bro? smirk. Roth, having reached the limits of splatter as a way to provoke, seems to have settled on something new: trolling."

She continues: 

"Their goading feels unpleasantly familiar, because it recalls internet griping about 'SJWs' and women lying about sexual assault. Whatever Roth claims, these movies sure feel like they’re catering to the grimmest parts of 4chan and Reddit, and that’s more nauseating to see onscreen than the most graphic of violence."

The Green Inferno is a riff on Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, considered by many to be the meanest horror film ever made (I've seen it, and I wouldn't exactly argue with that assessment). The movie centers on Justine (Lorenza Izzo, who also happens to be Roth's wife, and who is actually pretty good here), a college freshman drawn (because of a boy) into the world of college activism. Within two weeks, she's off with a group of barely sketched stereotypes to the Peruvian jungle so that they can all chain themselves to a bunch of bulldozers and stop the death or displacement of an isolated jungle tribe. Then their plane crashes, and the once-privileged "slacktivists" proceed to get horrifically killed and eaten by the very same tribe they were there to save.

Yes, The Green Inferno is offensive, but I don't want to give you the impression that that's the only thing wrong with it. It's also a deeply stupid movie, where the characters continuously do stupid, incomprehensible things like not take off their bright yellow jumpsuits while trying to hide from the cannibal natives in the jungle. It's a movie where the sight of a bunch of children laughing while a young woman almost literally shits her guts out is meant to be funny. Roth hasn't met a cliché he doesn't like, and the characters only ever rise above their respective types when they start behaving in weird, motiveless ways so he can advance what I guess is supposed to serve as his plot.

And it's not a particularly scary movie. The carnage would be laughable if it wasn't so boring. I was eating a cold pizza while watching it, and not once did my gorge rise. The only remotely cringe-inducing moments for me involved bugs, and that's only because I'm arachnophobic. The rest of it's just inane and unbelievably fake. I didn't buy one second of the violence. A guy's eyes get gouged out with sticks? Yawn. A woman cuts off a dude's tongue and eats it? Pass the popcorn.

Oh yeah, and if I haven't quite sold you yet, there's some really clumsily telegraphed female genital mutilation. By the time it actually occurs, it felt like Roth was simply ticking things off his checklist.

But let's get back to how this movie is really, horribly, stupefyingly racist. A few critics, including New York Magazine's David Edelstein, have tried to defend it by arguing that there's some sort of social commentary in here somewhere. Even my beloved Stephen King liked it. I'm not sure what movie they saw, but it sure as hell isn't the one I watched. Whatever commentary Roth might have been trying to make is completely undone by the incomprehensible nature of the film's message. It wallows in centuries-old primitivist stereotypes before absurdly trying to let itself off the hook at the end with a tacked-on speech about how bad racism is, or something. Is this movie about the futility of social-justice activism? I guess maybe? Or is it about the savage colonial exploitation of the Amazon? Could be, maybe, a little bit? Is it about how brown people are pretty scary and really actually just want to eat you? That's getting closer to the mark. Or is it about how awesome it is when that one fat dude's head gets cut off and then the tattooed lesbo gets skinned alive, but how it's kind of a bummer because we never got to see her tits? Now you're getting there. 

Horror fiction, by its very nature, depends on tapping into some very primal and irrational fears — the so-called "reptile brain" psychologists and neuroscientists like to talk about. As someone who writes horror myself, I think there's an inherent value in tapping into those fears. It's not just the proverbial "rollercoaster" ride so many critics talk about, but something rather deeper, more visceral, and much more necessary than that. It's like lancing a boil or draining the pus out of an infected wound — not always pleasant or pretty, but really goddamn important if you want to live.

But the problem for the horror writer (or filmmaker) is that these reptile-brain fears are also the source of some of our worst, most destructive impulses as a species. One of those basic fears is the fear of the other, or the alien — which can encompass everything from insects and arachnids, to space aliens, to Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster, to (frankly) people of ethnicities and cultures different from our own. This fear of the other is the primal, animal source of human bigotry.

I think horror is at its best when it drags these fears out into the open and forces us to examine them in unexpected ways. Horror fiction can become truly great when it twists the irrational in on itself to make a fundamentally rational point. Stephen King's The Stand has some interesting things to say about the dangers of unchecked technological progress. Scream has a valid point to make about violence and mass media. Roth himself actually made some shrewd observations about the post-9/11 American mental state in Hostel. Hell, even Cannibal Holocaust — as gross and exploitive as it is — yields a few smart and provocative ideas about gross exploitation. 

I'm not saying I want all our horror movies to come with bumper-sticker slogans, or that horror as a genre shouldn't be violent or confrontational. There are plenty of writers (Jack Ketchum) and filmmakers (James Watkins) I respect who've made entire careers of that. The difference is that their work isn't completely asinine. It's a fine line between dealing with our basest fears in a real and honest way and simply wallowing in them. That's what Roth wants us to do in The Green Inferno. While the white and/or American characters never really rise above caricature, the cannibal natives aren't even characters at all. Nothing about the tribe or its rituals makes any sense outside of dumb movie logic. They are an almost literally mindless horde that wants nothing more than to eat us alive. They're classic zombies, except instead of being dead they're brown.  

The Green Inferno is a racist movie because it taps deeply into our primal fear of the other and has absolutely nothing to say about it. Rather than give us anything approaching any sort of commentary on the subject, Roth just wants to gross us out and high-five himself while he does so. And he can't even get that part right.

Most anticipated of 2016

I've never done a "most anticipated" list before, but 2015 was so great — from the first Faith No More record in 18 years, to the best Stephen King novel since the 90s, to the consistently excellent film and television — that I'm finding myself much more excited about what's coming up than I have been in a really long time. So here are a few of the things I'm looking forward to the most in 2016.

Books

The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin (May 24)

The final installment in Cronin's The Passage trilogy of post-apocalyptic vampire novels (comprising 2010's The Passage and 2012's The Twelve), this book will conclude what, for my money, is the best horror/sci-fi series to come along in a very long time. Owing much to Stephen King's The Stand and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Cronin's vision is nevertheless distinct enough to make it stand apart, and the world and characters he creates are vivid and complex. The overall tone is one of deep melancholy that should make newer readers think of a more bent version of The Walking Dead. 

A lot of fans (myself included) were a bit underwhelmed by The Twelve (although, on a second read, I have to say it was a lot better than I remembered), so it'll be interesting to see if Cronin can stick the landing here.

Runner Up:

End of Watch by Stephen King (June 7)

Another conclusion to a trilogy, King's End of Watch is the follow-up to the pretty good Mr. Mercedes (2014) and the excellent Finders Keepers (2015). This series is a bit of a departure for King, who's working in a self-consciously John D. McDonald-influenced hard-boiled crime framework here. Mr. Mercedes showed a bit of strain, probably because of his unfamiliarity with creating this type of story, but in Finders Keepers he found his stride and wrote his best book in well over a decade.

The ending of Finders Keepers hints that End of Watch might stray back towards his supernatural horror roots, however, so I'm curious to see what he does with the likely genre mashup.

Movies

The Witch (February 19)

Coming out of last year's Sundance, the level of buzz surrounding the debut film by Robert Eggers has been insane. And, if the above trailer is any indication, this promises to be one of the scariest fucking movies in the history of ever. The most difficult part of this for me is managing my expectations. Luckily we don't have to wait much longer.

 Runner Up:

 Green Room (April 15)

Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin was an imperfect but wildly ambitious debut, and Green Room looks to take that movie's savage ethic and positively square it. All I know is that it's about members of a punk band from Portland who inadvertently agree to perform at a white supremacist gathering, where they witness a brutal crime and then have to fight to survive.

Just the concept alone is enough to grab my interest, but the fact that it's Saulnier makes it a must-see.

Music

Deftones, Gore (April 8)

Looking at what's scheduled, there isn't a whole lot coming out in the music world that really grabbed my attention. But I'll always check out a new Deftones record; for me, they're one of the only 90s nü-metal bands to survive with their artistic integrity intact.

Runner Up:

Anthrax, For All Kings (February 26)

I'm enjoying this throw-backy Anthrax that we've been getting since the return of Joey Belladonna. I can't say the above-linked song is among their best work, but I'm willing to give the album as a whole a chance.

2nd Runner Up:

Untitled new Metallica album (TBA)

I'm quite convinced that this album, whatever it is, will suck a hairy dog ball. But I'm still enough of an old-school thrash guy that I can't ignore a new record by these guys. We'll see, I guess.

3rd Runner Up:

P.J. Harvey, The Hope Six Demolition Project (April 15)

Harvey's work is always great and she hasn't put out a record since 2011, so I'll definitely be excited the day this one drops.

Television

Daredevil Season 2 (Netflix)

I don't really care about the whole Marvel universe thing, and I've only ever been mildly interested in the movies. But the work they're doing on Netflix with Daredevil and Jessica Jones has been excellent. Both series have more in common with gritty cable fare like Sons of Anarchy or Banshee than they do with The Avengers, and the fact that they're bringing in the Punisher (John Bernthal) has me almost giddy with excitement. Frank Castle is really the only comic-book character I ever followed with any regularity, and I've been dying to see someone do a solid screen take on him since Dolph Lundgren mumbled his way through the dismal 1989 movie. I'm looking forward to the upcoming Luke Cage and Iron Fist series' as well.

Runner Up:

Vinyl (HBO)

Everything about this — from the subject matter and setting to the talent involved to the network it's on — tells me that Vinyl is going to be awesome. In fact, they would almost have to go out of their way to screw this one up.

Of course, after the dismal second season of True Detective, HBO has proven that that is entirely possible.

Intruders (2016)

It's my first new review of 2016 and things are already off to a pretty good start. Adam Schindler's indie flick Intruders isn't amazing by any means, but it's a super fun horror thriller that fully embraces its B-movie roots. It's not The Babadook or It Follows, but it'll do... at least until The Witch finally comes out next month.

Anna (Beth Reisgraf) is an agoraphobe who, after her brother (Timothy T. McKinney) dies from pancreatic cancer, suddenly finds herself alone. She's terrified to go outside, but so desperate for human connection that she impulsively offers a pile of money to Dan (played with genuine charm by Rory Culkin), a Meals-On-Wheels delivery driver who clearly has a bit of a crush on the weird blond lady in the big spooky house.

This ill-conceived act of kindness comes back to haunt Anna, however. Unable to go to the funeral, she finds herself under siege when a trio of would-be burglars (Jack Kesy, Joshua Mikel, and a legitimately scary Martin Starr) — assuming she wouldn't be home — breaks in to try to find the money.

This is as standard a setup for a home-invasion thriller as you could possibly imagine. Add in a diabetic Kristen Stewart and we're basically looking at a cheapo version of Panic Room.

But the movie takes a pretty wild twist at the halfway point, and it just gets weirder from there. Anna and her late brother, as it turns out, aren't quite what they appear to be.

The movie isn't particularly scary, but Schindler knows how to get a solid reaction from the audience. There are a few good, wince-inducing body-horror moments (several involve a dislocated kneecap), and some of the plot twists provide genuine surprises. It grows into a fun puzzle box of a movie, half Home Alone and half Saw but without all the blood. Unfortunately, it kind of runs out of steam in the final third, as the script resorts to some clunky "as-you-know-Bob" exposition before limping into a pretty rote climax.

Still, there's enough here to recommend. The performances are all good in that kind of vaguely over-acty direct-to-video style that you expect in these kinds of movies. Starr is by far the best, using his laid-back, monotone persona to create a sense of real menace.

This is far from the best horror film you're likely to see this year, and I think Schindler probably has a much better movie in him down the line. Still, if you're looking for an entertaining slab of B-movie weirdness, you could do a lot worse than this one.

Phil Anselmo, Robb Flynn, and racism in metal

It was 1999, right at the apex of my love for extreme metal, when my friend Ryan and I went up to Fort Collins, CO, to see a festival of death metal bands both small and large called "Hatefest '99."

I've told the story jokingly over the years as my "break up with death metal" story; how we were crammed into a tiny bar that smelled like the ass-end of a wet dog, how every single shitty local band in Colorado seemed to be there but couldn't bother putting on anything other than sweatpants, how it was supposed to be fifteen bands in fifteen hours but we gave up around hour 10 when one of the shitty local bands got on stage and the lead singer proclaimed "This first song is about FUCKING! The SHIT! Of the DEAD!!!!!"

Makes for a good, funny story. The sad truth, though, is that I had checked out about an hour earlier when one of my absolute favorite local metal bands, Immortal Dominion, took to the stage and the floor completely cleared out. All the sweaty dudebros who had been moshing to terrible sub-Mortician death noise five minutes before evidently decided that this was their cue to go to the bar to get a drink. I saw the sneering looks on their faces as they did so and I immediately knew why.

The lead singer of Immortal Dominion was black.

Now maybe I'm reading more into what happened than is necessary, but I really don't think so. It's not like black musicians are unheard of in the metal world (see Living Colour, Bad Brains, Stuck Mojo, God Forbid,  etc.). And it's not like these musicians are never accepted, even in the extreme metal scene, just as a few women and even gay men have been accepted. But let's not kid ourselves; even in its most mainstream iterations, heavy metal tends to be the province of straight, hyper-masculine, regressive-minded white dudes.

Once we move into the extreme genres, this becomes even more true. Casual racism stops just being accepted and starts being celebrated. And rank homophobia is not even questioned. Gaahl, the former lead singer of black-metal band Gorgoroth (see the above link), is an example of some of the weird tensions you find at the margins — he's a gay man who performs in a genre often associated with neo-Nazism, and has himself said some reprehensible things about Jews and minorities. An imperfect hero at best.

Heavy metal has historically just not been a place all that friendly to progressive ideas.

This new flap about Phil Anselmo at Dimefest has brought all these issues to the forefront again, and has rocked me back on my heels and made me question how long I can stick as a fan. Here's the thing: I love Pantera. I love Down even more. Just as I love Emperor, whose original drummer was imprisoned for murdering a gay man. Just as I used to love W.A.S.P., whose guitarist moved to France to get away from all the black people.

Heavy metal is supposed to be in your face. It's supposed to be offensive. But does it have to be stupid, hateful, and boneheaded? Do these things automatically go hand in hand?

I used to say of course not.

Now I simply don't know.

These are things all liberal-minded metal fans need to be asking themselves right now. We don't like to talk about it because it's embarrassing. But frankly we should be embarrassed. How long are we going to put up with the racism, sexism and homophobia that have so long defined the scene and the music we love? How long are we going to keep shrugging our shoulders when a Phil Anselmo drunkenly spouts off about "white power" or a floor-full of fans turns their back and shuns a great band like Immortal Dominion? How long are we going to let the sneering beardo assholes shouting about "political correctness" drown the rest of us out? What are we supposed to do, if not give up on the music that, for most of us, is in our blood?

Here's what we do. We do what Robb Flynn of Machine Head did when he called out Anselmo in an 11-minute YouTube video. We do what MetalSucks did when they wrote an editorial denouncing Anselmo and all the fans (including me, including themselves) who have simply averted their eyes out of deference for his position in the metal world.

We stop making excuses. We stop pretending like it's not a big deal.

We start calling racist assholes exactly what they are. And we stop supporting them.

Flynn, MetalSucks, and all the other more progressive fans I've been seeing chime in on message boards and Facebook threads give me a lot of hope. And even Anselmo just apologized (disingenuous though it seems). There's finally some real pushback happening, which is exactly what the scene needs to stay alive.

But there's still a long, long way to go.

Top 20 Movies of 2015 (with omissions)

As usual, I have to put out the caveat that there are a number of movies I didn't manage to see this year before putting this list together. The biggest blind spots for me at the moment are The Big Short, Chi-Raq, 45 Years, Dope and Carol. Hopefully I'll get a chance to catch up with those before too long.

That said, 2015 was a pretty incredible year for movies... maybe the best since 1999 (American Beauty, Fight Club, etc.) So incredible, in fact, that I wasn't able to boil my list down to my usual top 10.

So, without further adieu, here are my top 20 films of 2015.

20. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)

This one probably sat higher on my list a couple weeks ago, but as is the case with most Tarantino movies it seems to have lost a little luster the more I've thought about it. Still, it's his most ferocious film in years, and the locked-room claustrophobia harkens back nicely to his best work, Reservoir Dogs.

19. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)

 

This French-Mauritanian film tells the story of the fabled Malian city after it fell under occupation by a militant Islamist group in 2012. For dealing with such heavy subject matter, it's a much gentler movie than you might imagine. The Jihadists and city dwellers alike are presented as human and with heart, and the violence is kept to a minimum. This light touch only makes the ultimate tragic arc of the story all that much more disquieting.

18. The Revenant (Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu)

Leonardo DiCaprio is just okay in this film, and it doesn't have nearly as much narrative depth as a lot of critics are giving it credit for. But it's one of the most powerfully immersive experiences you're likely to have in the theater at least since Gravity, and Tom Hardy's complicated and understated performance as villain John Fitzgerald elevates the film beyond the strict survivalist/revenge movie construction the script confines it to.

17. White God (Kornél Mundruczó)

On its surface, this weird, imperfect, but stunningly ambitious Hungarian film tells the simple and heartfelt story of a young girl trying to reunite with her lost dog. But this isn't a family film; there are way too many throats being ripped out for that. Mundruczó's White God is sort of like The Incredible Journey by way of Cujo and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It's a little obvious with its message, but the twin performances by Zsófia Psotta as 13-year-old Lili and "Body" as loving companion/Ché-style revolutionary Hagen make this one of the most affecting movies of the year. If you're a dog lover like me, that simple and elegant final shot is going to hit you right in all the feels. 

16. Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg)

 

This is your typical Cronenberg film in the sense that not a lot happens on the surface, and yet you feel a compelling need to take a shower afterwards. At once a tightly controlled character study and a vicious satire, this is right up there with Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust as one of the meanest movies about Hollywood that has ever been made. When it takes a sudden turn into the nightmarish and surreal at the end, somehow in Cronenberg's hand it all makes sense.

15. Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)

Austrian director Veronica Franz is continuing to prove (along with The Babadook's Jennifer Kent and Honeymoon's Leigh Janiak) that right now it's the women who are making the scariest films. Along with co-director Severin Fiala, Franz makes Goodnight Mommy a quiet, slow-burn of a horror movie. But Franz and Severin fill it with some of the most disturbing imagery you've never wanted to see. This one will stick with you for days.

14. Room (Lenny Abrahamson)

Lenny Abrahamson's (Frank) adaptation of the amazing 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue can't quite measure up to the source material, but that's not for any lack of talent or trying. The movie tells the story of a young woman named Joy (Brie Larson) who is held hostage for years in a  backyard shed by a mysterious kidnapper we know only as Old Nick. Forced to bear Nick's child, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), Joy makes the decision to tell her son that there is no world beyond the walls of "Room." This comes back to bite her when she must convince Jack to help the two them escape. The novel was told entirely from Jack's perspective, a narrative luxury that Abrahamson doesn't have at his disposal here. Yet, Abrahamson does an admirable job of hewing close to the novel, and he manages to capture its delicate balance of despair and hope. Larson and Tremblay both give show-stopping performances.

13. Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray)

Gray's film can't quite transcend its essential nature as a musical biopic (how could it?), but it's still a remarkable and remarkably entertaining depiction of the rise of seminal gangsta rap group N.W.A. The film manages to be stylish and edgy without being obtrusive, but what Gray and his cast (O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Aldis Hodge, Neil Brown Jr., and Paul Giamatti) do best is capture the subtle nuances of the group's personal dynamic, along with their at-times fraught relationship with manager Jerry Heller (Giamatti). This movie doesn't reinvent the wheel, and it may pull its punches on a few of the uglier details (particularly in regards to the group's treatment of women), but it tells a damn good story that's as vital today as it was nearly 30 years ago.

12. The Martian (Ridley Scott)

This movie's personal to me in a way that none of the other films on this list are. For one thing, the writer/producer is Drew Goddard, a guy I went to high school with (no I'm not dropping names; we barely knew each other). For another, Drew made it clear during a Q&A that he sees this as essentially being about our home town. Adapted from Andy Weir's thoroughly entertaining novel, The Martian is an unabashed love letter to science and scientists. Rather than wallow in the bleakness of most non Star Wars/Star Trek sci-fi, it's a funny, warm, and hopeful declaration of what smart people can do when they put their heads together, even over a distance of 250 million miles.

11. Inside Out (Pete Docter)

I don't have a lot to say about this movie that hasn't already been said, other than to re-iterate that it's just one more example of Pixar's unmatched ability to craft a raucous, funny kid's movie that also manages to be a pretty sensitive and deep examination of the human condition. I don't manage to see all of Pixar's films, but for me it's their best since WALL•E. 

10. Spy (Paul Feig)

The best use of Melissa McCarthy since Feig's Bridesmaids, Spy is the most laugh-out-loud big Hollywood comedy of the year (Trainwreck was good, but it was rather too impressed with itself). I never thought a movie could possibly make me a Jason Statham fan, but he turns his persona on its head and delivers one of the funniest performances I've seen in a while. McCarthy, for her part, manages to display a sense of genuine pathos I didn't know she had in her. I had no expectations for this film, so it's probably my biggest surprise of the year. It's big dumb fun but still manages to have a few smart things to say about workplace gender relations, without beating you over the head with it.

9. Sicario (Denis Villeneuve)

Montreal filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners) is one of the most exciting talents to emerge in a long time, and Sicario is probably his best film yet. A French-Canadian love child of David Fincher and David Cronenberg, Villeneuve make movies that are pretty standard on-the-surface genre exercises that nevertheless manage to get under your skin in some pretty profound ways. You might think from the trailer that Sicario is just one more drug-cartel action thriller, but that's selling Villeneuve's vision way short. This movie is quietly terrifying and psychologically scarring in ways I can't even describe. Just watch it.

8. Beasts of No Nation (Cary Fukunaga)

There has been some understandable pushback on this film, seeing as how it's a bleak African story told mostly by American and British filmmakers (see Timbuktu for the real deal). But Cary Fukunaga (True Detective, Sin Nombre) is a thoughtful and visionary auteur, and star Idris Elba is one of the best actors in the world. And that all comes before we even get to the remarkable central performance by Ghanaian actor Abraham Attah as Agu, a young African boy who watches his family get murdered before finding himself pulled into the clutches of a vicious warlord (Elba) with a deep need for child soldiers. Beasts of no Nation is both sensitive and stark, lyrical and brutal, and it unfolds almost surrealistically, like Apocalypse Now but with a more brittle edge. It's not an easy sit, but it's well worth it.

7. Tangerine (Sean Baker)

When you hear that Baker's indie film is about transgender prostitutes on the streets of LA, and that it was shot on an iPhone 5, you'd be forgiven for wanting to dismiss it as pretentious, just-out-of-film-school pablum. But you'd be wrong. For one thing, this movie is fucking funny. Baker's approach — both with the camera and with the narrative itself — leans more toward playful than really edgy, which makes the genuine moments of darkness land with that much more force. But central to the film's success are Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, as the aforementioned prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandria. Their performances are outlandish, nuanced, fiercely funny and full of genuine heart. This movie goes down so easy it's like a banana/blueberry smoothie, and the quiet but devastating final shot of the two of them together will make you laugh and cry at the same time. And, for what it's worth, Baker manages to make the iPhone footage look amazing.

6. What We Do in the Shadows (Taika Waititi)

This New Zealand comedy by the Flight of the Conchords guys is destined to join my own personal pantheon of most rewatchable/quotable cult comedies of all time, right up there with Shaun of the Dead, Ghostbusters and The Big Lebowski. I haven't laughed this hard in a long, long time. A mock-documentary that's sort of The Real World by way of Anne Rice (with the best joke over about a sandwich), there is not one false step in the entire film. Just when you think it can't get any funnier, it does. Seriously, you might actually rupture something. No description of this film can do it any sort of justice; you just have to see it for yourself. I promise that you'll thank me.

5. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)

This movie is a total throwback to the 80s horror movies that I grew up with and love, but it also manages to do what it does better than most of those films. The concept and setup here is so simple it almost sounds like a joke; after having sex with her new boyfriend, a teenage girl (Maika Monroe) finds herself stalked by a malevolent being that can only be passed on to another person through coitus. But what Mitchell does with this idea is stunning. The movie taps into basic, reptile-brain fears like no movie I've seen since maybe John Carpenter's The Thing. Yeah, the logic doesn't entirely hold up... but maybe that's kind of the point.

4. Ex Machina (Alex Garland)

Only in a year this good could a movie like Alex Garland's debut feature Ex Machina come in fourth on my list. This is exactly the type of movie I want to make. The film could almost be a stage play, but the anchoring performances by Domnhall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander — as (respectively) a computer geek bought in by a probably insane dot-com mogul to perform the Turing artificial intelligence test on a beautiful robot — are almost unreal in how good they are, and the production design and cinematography keep it firmly cinematic. Helped along by Garland's (the writer behind novels like The Tesseract and movies like 28 Days Later) expertly crafted screenplay and surprisingly assured direction, the quiet pressure this film puts on its audience becomes almost unbearable before it's over. It's also perhaps the most disturbing examination of the male gaze ever put on film. The best sci-fi debut since Duncan Jones's Moon. 

3. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

Based upon my love of George Miller's The Road Warrior and the expectations set by Mad Max: Fury Road's incredible trailer, I went into this film thinking there was no way it could do anything but disappoint me. Instead, it exceeded my wildest expectations. Well into his 70s, Miller managed to make one of the most thrilling action movies of all time while keeping it firmly rooted in the franchise's B-movie roots. This is the Mad Max movie we've all been wanting to see since we were kids. And, yes, it's a feminist film — gleefully and unapologetically so in a way we should not only respect but celebrate.

2. Creed (Ryan Coogler)

The 1976 film Rocky is an undisputed classic that was followed by a string of fun but ultimately inconsequential sequels. So it would make sense that Creed would be just more of the same. Instead, Sylvester Stallone made the brilliant decision to hand the reigns of the franchise over to one of the most exciting filmmakers of the moment, Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) and let him have his way with it. Coogler focuses not on Rocky but instead on Adonis Creed (a quietly affecting Michael B. Jordan), son of legendary champion Apollo Creed. The aging Rocky is relegated to the Mickey (Burgess Meredith) role here. Creed is at once completely fresh and a powerful callback to the original film, both in its narrative but also its joyous spirit. It's a perfect bookend to the franchise, and is the rare sequel that actually makes the original a better film. When you're talking about a movie like Rocky, that's really saying something.

1. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)

I'm going to make a bold statement here: Tom McCarthy's Spotlight is every bit as good as Alan Pakula's classic All the President's Men (1976), the movie whose legacy looms largest over it. I happened to live in Boston at the tail-end of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal depicted in this film, so it hit home for me in a pretty real way. But beyond that tenuous personal connection, Spotlight is to print journalism what The Martian is to science: a loving reminder of how important these institutions can be. Spotlight is a classic procedural, and it depicts the grind of squeezing out a great piece of investigative journalism while never feeling like a grind itself. The film honors the importance of its subject by never moralizing or talking down to its audience. The performances — Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Leiv Schreiber, John Slattery, Mark Ruffalo, Stanley Tucci — are uniformly masterful, but Schreiber is my favorite as caustic Boston Globe editor Marty Baron. The role could have been reduced to cliché — in fact, McCarthy deftly sets us up to expect it, only to pull the rug right out from under us. In Schreiber's hands, Baron is a quietly powerful force, the outsider needed to rip the scab off an entrenched community's festering wound. It's one of the more unheralded performances of the year, but should not be ignored. 

Still Reeling: David Bowie Just Died and I Can't Even Deal With It

It was just announced a couple hours ago on the official David Bowie Facebook page that everyone's favorite rock & roll extraterrestrial has died.

You can read more at The Hollywood Reporter, including a fairly extensive biography of the icon. Here's the statement from the family:

"January 10 2016 - David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family's privacy during their time of grief."

UPDATE: David Bowie's last release, Lazarus, was a 'parting gift' for fans in carefully planned finale

David Bowie is probably my fifth-favorite musician of all time, right up there with Faith No More, Pink Floyd, The Clash, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. He's always been a part of my life — from when I was a little kid and I stole my brother's Bowie poster because I thought he looked cool, right up to these past few days as I've listened with euphoric levels of glee to his latest release, Blackstar. He seemed like Mount Rushmore, or the Golden Gate Bridge — a musical monolith, as precise in his artfulness as he was stolid and apparently eternal.

My fandom for the Thin White Duke has ebbed and flowed over the years, hitting a peak somewhere around 1991-1992 when I was in my weirdo 70s music phase (that's also when I fell in love with Frank Zappa), and probably sinking to its lowest point around 1997-1998, when I was all caught up in the whole death metal thing. Over the last fifteen years or so his music has steadily wormed its way back into my soul. The man was an absolute genius. There will be never be another like him.

As sad as I am over this news, I'm so grateful that he was able to give us Blackstar before he passed. It's his best, most adventurous album in years, and it's a genuine inspiration that he managed to remain so vital and boundary-pushing right up to the end.

I don't have a whole lot more to say about this. I'm still trying to process. But I know I want to celebrate him and his genius, so in no particular order here are my 10 favorite David Bowie songs:

Lazarus (2016)

Let's start with his most recent. Blackstar, written and performed with some of the world's best jazz musicians, is a truly amazing achievement — particularly now that we know it was made while he was dying. The single "Lazarus" was originally written for a new off-Broadway musical that was inspired by his 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. It's the best track on an already brilliant record, and in retrospect it seems obvious that it was planned to be his swan song. I can't think of a better one.

I'm not going to have much to say about the rest of these. Just enjoy them.

Heroes (1977)

Station to Station (1976)

The Hearts Filthy Lesson (1995)

Even when I moved away from Bowie for awhile, I took this song with me.

Life on Mars (1971)

Just so goddamned pretty.

Suffragette City (1972)

Where Are We Now? (2013)

Bowie as an older man reflecting on his memories of Berlin. So beautiful and melancholy. It's actually a little too painful to listen to this song right now.

Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (1983)

This song got re-popularized after Tarantino used it in Inglorious Basterds, but I'll always remember it as the only good thing about Paul Schrader's terrible remake of Cat People, Val Lewton's 1942 horror classic.

Queen Bitch (1971)

Ziggy Stardust (1972)

Keep in mind I'm not arguing these are the definitive 10 best Bowie songs. These are just my favorites, the ones I enjoy the most, and this list could change at any time depending on my mood. There are so many others I could talk about — "Space Oddity," "Fame," "Starman," "Changes," "Diamond Dogs," "Rebel Rebel," "Golden Years," "Modern Love," "Sound and Vision," "TVC15," "The Jean Genie," "Young Americans," "All the Young Dudes," and on and on and on and on. The list is almost literally endless.

R.I.P.