Eyes Wide Open 2015: The Year’s Best (and Worst) Movies
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About this ebook
Who has the time to waste on a bad movie?
Hundreds of new movies came to theaters in 2015. Nobody has time to see them all. To help you maximize your movie-going opportunities, critic Chris Barsanti runs down the best movies of 2015 that you should make sure to see—and those you shouldn’t bother with.
In this year’s edition of Eyes Wide Open, you’ll find:
•Dramas (The Big Short, Room, Spotlight, Clouds of Sils Maria)
•Blockbusters (Mad Max: Fury Road, Inside Out)
•Science Fiction (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ex Machina, The Martian)
•Foreign films (Mustang, About Elly)
•Indies (Experimenter, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter)
•Documentaries (Inside Jackson Heights, Amy, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck)
•Disappointments (Bridge of Spies, In the Heart of the Sea, Steve Jobs)
This guide to the year in movies also includes Best-Of lists, Honorable Mentions, DVD reviews, and the year’s best quotes.
From mega-budget blockbusters to tiny indies, Eyes Wide Open: 2015 covers it all.
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Eyes Wide Open 2015 - Chris Barsanti
EYES WIDE OPEN
2015
The Best (and Worst)
Movies of the Year
Chris Barsanti
Copyright 2016 Chris Barsanti
ISBN 9781311149053
Smashwords Editions
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Note: Versions of many of the following reviews were previously published in Film Racket, Film Journal International, Medium, and PopMatters.
* * *
For my family and friends
All the thanks in the world to my editors, collaborators, and readers, including Dawn Eyestone, Cynthia Fuchs, Roger Janecke, Kevin Lally, Christopher Null, Scott Russo, Phil Sexton, David Ter-Avanesyan, Karen Zarker, and Sarah Zupko.
* * *
Table of Contents
Introduction
The 25 Best
Honorable Mentions
The 5 Worst
DVD Reviews
Yet More Lists
The Year’s Best Lines
About the Author
* * *
INTRODUCTION
* 2015: The Return of the Reboot … Again *
Did we need to go back to Jurassic Park, watch the Avengers duke it out again, or try once more to blow up the Death Star? Clearly studios and audiences agree that the answer is yes, yes, and yes. At the end of 2015, seven of the ten top-grossing films were sequels, and one was a fairy tale (Cinderella). That means just two of the year’s most popular films were based on new ideas, and one of those was adapted from a popular book.
Inside Out became a massive hit because of its engaging hook and strong word-of-mouth. But there is still little chance that it could have reached the heights it did without the imprimatur and marketing muscle of Pixar. So we’re left with one film, The Martian, which had nothing to recommend it but the story, cast, and director. Fortunately, Ridley Scott’s fun and optimistic lost astronaut adventure deserved every bit of its success. Even better, the closed loop story leaves it relatively sequel-proof. But, never say never.
Critics have been complaining about Hollywood’s lack of originality pretty much ever since there was a Hollywood. Possibly the first feature film sequel was 1916’s now-lost The Fall of a Nation, eager to follow up on the success of the previous year’s Ku Klux Klan recruitment ad The Birth of a Nation. The business of cinema was founded on cheaply produced variations on proven formulas, as well as the success of recurring characters like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp and the Keystone Cops. It’s a logical business strategy.
Prestige pictures about historical figures and glossy romances with A-list stars were all well and good, especially for studio bosses eager to show they weren’t mere crass entertainers. But each one was a risk that the alchemy needed to make a hit film couldn’t be generated. But if Myrna Loy and William Powell were available, the studio could just knock out another Thin Man flick, guaranteeing a minimum level of return.
That penchant for recurring series dipped a bit postwar. But up through the 1970s there were still popular exceptions, from Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road to… series, and a little later the Bond and Planet of the Apes films, or for kids, the further adventures of Benji, Herbie the Love Bug, and the Bad News Bears. But after the late 1970s, when blockbusters from Star Wars to lower-end hits like Halloween and Friday the 13th spawned their own cottage industries, the sequel machine cranked up and never truly slowed down.
In the new millennium, several factors pushed this into overdrive: an Internet-fueled hype machine; larger media conglomerates leveraging vast marketing muscle; greater mainstream penetration of fan culture; the weed-like sprawl of popular adaptation-ready book series; and an ever-smaller audience willing to plunk down $15 for something new, unfamiliar, or (heaven forbid) challenging.
Last year, Birdman’s surrealist satire tweaked the dominant superhero movie aesthetic to highlight its essential pointlessness. This year, the loudest anti-blockbuster raspberry was heard in a scene from Clouds of Sils Maria. A personal assistant (Kristen Stewart) is trying to convince her grand older actress boss (Juliette Binoche) of the deeper import of the superhero flick they just watched. When the actress hears the word superpowers,
she spits out her beer in a cackle of disbelief. It’s a spit-take that cogently expresses the mindset of today’s exhausted movie-goer. They’re just trying to find something to see that won’t try to pummel them into submission with whiz-bang nonsense (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation), video-game warmaking (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2), or nostalgic repetition (Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens). It isn’t always easy.
But no matter how much the industry is tied up into pumping out blockbuster sequels that adhere to ever more rigid rules — as George Lucas wryly noted to Charlie Rose, directors under the Soviet regime had more freedom than Hollywood filmmakers, who are forced to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism
¹ — dedicated artists and savvy production companies are still finding ways to fund, film, and distribute the stories that matter. There were crusading journalist potboilers like Spotlight, heart-rending stories of struggle and survival like Room and Mustang, jaw-dropping exposes like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, and boundary-pushing science fiction like Ex Machina.
One thing we didn’t see much of, even in the indie sphere, was romance. After all, love stories aren’t easy to turn into franchises. The only love story that made a dent in the popular psyche was Fifty Shades of Grey, a consumerist S&M fantasy that began its life as a fan-fiction variation on Twilight. In a way, it was a sequel right from the start.
It remains to be seen whether even with all the great films still coming to theaters, audiences can be enticed to discover them without the benefit of a $100 million marketing budget. We live in a time when a raucous comedy like The Big Short, featuring a trio of Hollywood’s biggest male stars (Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling), and dramatically set during the most calamitous financial disaster in modern memory, will end up being seen by a fraction of the people who mobbed theaters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Because, you know, finance is boring. Or, as the film puts it: The truth is like poetry. And people fucking hate poetry.
So it makes a kind of sense that right now, one of the surest bets in Hollywood is the newest Fast and Furious entry — this year was Furious 7. That’s the one starring a pro wrestler turned actor and an actor who looks like a pro wrestler but still isn’t as good a performer as the wrestler. Outside of that series, it’s best for your blockbuster to have something with dinosaurs, at least one of the Avengers, a scrappy young heroine in a post-apocalyptic landscape who can’t decide between two romantic interests, or a black-cloaked villain with a voice-distorting mask and a red light saber.
Of course, a sure bet is a sure bet until you lose. That’s ever more the case in a year of not just highly expensive flops like Pan but this year’s newest 007 outing, Spectre. This is a film that the smartest observers would pick as a surefire commercial and critical hit. But due to the byzantine nature of the current blockbuster business — not to mention the film’s $250 million price tag — it will apparently need to make $650 million just to break even.² With numbers like that, the certainty of the industrial film sequel production line becomes more uncertain.
Thankfully, when you dig down a little further in the box office charts, you can find series films that actually brought something new to the table. After a painfully long time in development, George Miller’s fourth addition to the Mad Max series, Fury Road, could well have been just an attempt to cash in on a fondly remembered action series using new advances in special effects. But Miller delivered glorious widescreen cinematography, epic scale, perverse humor, a sincere feminist outlook that went beyond simply putting guns in the hands of female characters, and studiously old-fashioned dedication to real-life stunts instead of sloppy-looking CGI car crashes (see Furious 7 for that). It all stacked up into a rare return to form for a crafty director whose work feels almost as fresh now as it did with the original Mad Max in 1979.
Like Fury Road, which played with the previous film’s timelines and characters, Ryan Coogler’s Creed is more of a reboot than a straight sequel. Although Coogler and Aaron Covington’s script is faithful to the letter of the now-venerable Rocky series, it freely challenges many of the previous films’ assumptions about character and destiny. The film also returns the series to underdog honesty and even a semi-realistic approach to boxing that was missing from many of the more comic book sequels. Coogler’s intent focus is on the grudging two-way mentoring dynamic between a battered but still chipper Rocky (Stallone, keeping it low-key and well within his capabilities) and Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), the eager young apprentice who just happens to be the