Best of 2024

Best I Can Come Up With For The Year List

Too much life going on, had an extremely limited viewing selection this year, a more mainstream list than I’d like. In ascending order, the best of what I saw:

Furiousa: a Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)

Book of genesis

George Miller's Furiosa may bill itself as a 'Mad Max Saga' but don't be fooled: it's less an action epic than an origin fable, a myth made in the telling. Where Fury Road was a hurtling bristling juggernaut of armor and wheels smashing everything in its way, Furiosa is more like a decades-long odyssey, of a woman seeking revenge, her home, and finally herself.  

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022)

I dream of Djinnie

George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing isn't exactly an action extravaganza like Mad Max: Fury Road-- but then Miller isn't exactly an action filmmaker, or isn't only an action filmmaker. He's done medical dramas (Lorenzo's Oil), children's films (Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet), bizarre literary adaptations (The Witches of Eastwick); he's done arguably the best episode of The Twilight Zone ever filmed (a remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"). His forays into fantasy and horror are at least as interesting for the distinct ways they handle special effects (Babe: Pig in the City looks and feels like Maurice Sendak high on mushrooms) as for what they have to say (the fantasy and especially the horror genre being arguably better at addressing our anxieties than mere action flicks). 

The good if not great films of 2015

The good if not great films of 2015

Participated in two End-of-the-Year surveys: Film Comment's and Sight and Sound's, the latter having the advantage of making every voter's list (mine included) available online. 

Two titles that impressed me the most--Aleksei German's Hard to be a God and Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya were released in their respective countries in 2013, on DVD in the USA in 2015; they're included in my 2014 tally. 

Good as the following may be I really haven't found anything that engaged and moved me as much as those two masters' final works (one died, the other retired)--hence my title.

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) and the arguably greatest film ever made

Hell hath no Furi
 
In the beginning was the word.

And the word was Max. 

And Max's creator--George Miller, MD--cut his first feature film on a kitchen table. 

And the film was a hit, all frantic action and blaring trumpets and bug-eyed skulls hurtling at the big screen.

A bigger-budgeted sequel was done, with postapocalyptic dune buggies chasing a spike-crowned Mack truck, to the strains of Brian May's mythmaking music.

And Miller saw that it was good--maybe great. Definitely better than anything infidel Steven Spielberg has made, is making, will ever make.

Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006)

It's ambitious, a hell of a lot more ambitious than any animated movie I've seen this year (and I think I've seen more than anyone should be asked to see ), but I appreciate the fact that it's not just about finding love and acceptance within one's family or community (well, partly about that) but about the survival of an entire species. I wouldn't say it actually hits the mark, but it does come closer than any recent English-language animated film I can think of towards the sweep and scale of Miyazaki's late films (Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997) comes to mind).

And there's a grandeur to Miller's filmmaking that's startling, if you're used to the kind of icebound animation found in the Ice Age movies, or the Discovery-Channel look of March of the Penguins--here, every glacier and mountain is intricately realized, from snow-drowned foot to rocky crest, every ice storm vividly evoked (there's this  shot of icy vapor rushing over a ridge that's amazing, like a jet stream the size of the Amazon). Nightmarishly high ice pinnacles, vertiginously deep chasms, endless subzero desolation--it's an intriguing mix of the real and the hyperreal.

Better yet, the penguins might look cuddly at first sight, but there's little cuteness to their personalities--they can be every bit as hidebound with tradition or xenophobically racist or thrilled by sexual attraction as we are; one penguin's languorous waddle practically challenges the more hotblooded among us to tackle her and wrestle her down to the frozen floor.

The predators are unapologetically presented: malevolent seagulls, ferocious leopard seals, monstrous killer whales--this is not the benign nature seen in kiddie cartoons; if no one actually dies, you get the impression that it wasn't for lack of serious trying. One particularly hideous hunter (usually depicted as cute and obedient in almost any other nature flick) stares at the desperately fleeing penguin: you look into his terrifyingly lifeless black eyes (positioned above row upon row of great gnashing teeth) and you see--a reflection. Suddenly you feel you have an insight into their point of view, realize that their desire to eat the wobbly bags of tasty blubber is as desperate if not more so. If the birds manage to escape it's one more opportunity at survival lost, and a long, lonely time being hungry until the next opportunity pads along...

There are considerable flaws--the film is an unholy fusion of 'cutesy kiddie animation' and 'dark parable on ecological disaster,' and the stitches show. Frankly I can do without the former, but as Miller learned in Babe: Pig in the City (1998) (which was a commercial if not (in my opinion, at least) artistic disaster) one cannot have a consistent artistic vision and boxoffice success in the same production.

I like it; I like the risks it takes, the way it's willing to stretch credulity to make a point, even a  bizarrely absurd one--the neck ornament hanging round a penguin's neck, for example, which later becomes as onerous and strangling as any symbolic albatross; or the surreal feel of sitting in a zoo habitat (Is that the horizon or a cleverly painted facsimile?)--isn't it ironic that what's meant to comfort an animal might only serve to confuse him? Or the way the mysterious Others finally present themselves, as ghostly images lurking behind thick glass. The finale might be a tad optimistic, but given what comes before it's not overwhelmingly, fatally so, I think. The film seriously shakes up one's idea of what an American animated film should look like, feel like, be about.