IT'S A WRAP: MOVIES of 2019

For whatever reason, I fell behind on my movie viewing in 2019. I missed a lot of the most lauded mainstream movies, and I'm still too cranky to settle for watching big movies that barely appear in theaters at all on a home screen.


However, among the often small, weird and/or esoteric movies I did see, I have a few favorites. I wasn't quite able to stretch my list into the traditional Top Ten, and I certainly can't claim that these were in any way the Best of 2019. But if you're looking for something to stream on a cold winter's night, here are a few suggestions!


(FUN FACT: Five out of my eight favorites were directed by women! Wouldn't it be nice to see any of them appear among this year's Oscar nominees when they're announced tomorrow? If only. . . )



PAIN AND GLORY Pedro Almodovar directs this wonderful, semi-autobiographical movie about a Spanish filmmaker, looking back on his own life and career, and the people and events that shaped and inspired him. It's my favorite movie of the year! It may not look like much plot-wise, but the experience of watching this movie unfold onscreen is rapturous. And star Antonio Banderas is riveting in every single frame — you can’t take your eyes off him!

 
YESTERDAY In Danny Boyle's audacious what-if movie, The Beatles have disappeared from the collective memory of everyone except a struggling singer-songwriter named Jack (an engaging Himesh Patel) who finds himself poised to plunder their entire song catalogue. Detractors complain the movie misunderstands what made the Beatles popular, claiming as false “meritocracy” the notion that the songwriting would be hugely successful on its own, separated from the context of the band’s individual personalities and their era.

But here's why I (still) believe in Yesterday: It's not that the songs themselves are supposed to be the best ever written (although you could certainly make a case for some of them), but that there are so many of them, in so many diverse styles, that Jack is able to produce on the spot. The movie creates its own context for Jack’s popularity, a modest young person of color who produces song after song after song, seemingly out of the blue. That’s how he captures the public imagination — in much the same way the working-class lads from industrial Liverpool did with their cheeky attitude and funny haircuts, once upon a time. Boyle turns it into a sly morality play about fame, honor, and sacrifice, with a 4/4 beat and a larky sense of fun.

HARRIET Maybe the times have finally caught up to the amazing life of Harriet Tubman, a real-life superhero who fought for justice and won major victories in her lifelong battle to end slavery in the American South. An escaped slave herself, she led many others to freedom in the North, via the Underground Railroad, armed with little more than raw courage, and a flintlock pistol. Filmmaker Kasi Lemmons explores the woman behind the historical footnote, played with bristly moral conviction by Cynthia Erivo.

SWORD OF TRUST An aging hipster confronts the dark heart of extreme Southern yahooism in Lynn Shelton's very funny culture-clash comedy. Marc Maron is all dry wit and scruffy sarcasm as a pawn shop owner tasked to sell a Civil War sword that supposedly "proves" the Confederacy won the war. The twisty little surprises of the plot are delicious to discover along the way, and the sharp, funny conversations (largely improvised) had me laughing out loud.

THE MUSTANG Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre spins a tale of wild horses, regret, and redemption set in a high-security prison complex out in the middle of the Nevada desert. As part of their rehab, certain inmates are chosen to break and train wild mustangs for auction, and Matthias Schoenaerts delivers a towering, if taciturn performance (it's all in his eyes) as a prisoner who learns tenderness by bonding with his animal.

RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS Unusual enough as a progressive in Texas, smart, savagely funny political journalist Molly Ivins stood six feet tall. Not gifted with conventional proportions, she felt entitled to hold outsized opinions expressed with outsized gusto. There's plenty to laugh at — and get riled up over — in this Janice Engel documentary, celebrating all the hell Ivins raised as a pioneering woman in a world and profession run by good ole boys. Through documentary footage, Ivins tells much of her own story in her own words, and it's the particular zing of her voice that makes this movie so irresistible.

WAVES This gripping domestic drama from Trey Edward Shults encompasses euphoria, tragedy, and every conceivable emotion in between depicting a middle-class black family in South Florida sliding in and out of crisis. Some incidents seem torn from screaming headlines, yet Shults humanizes everything with careful attention to the personal relationships that guide our lives — between parents and children, between siblings, and between couples, both young and long-established.

LITTLE WOMEN In her entertaining, feminist update of the beloved novel, filmmaker Greta Gerwig combines the adventures of Louisa May Alcott's fictional March sisters with the journey of Alcott herself in getting her story published. Through Alcott's surrogate, Jo (Saoirse Ronan, who is absolutely wonderful), Gerwig inserts the author's early writing career and her tribulations with her patronizing male publisher. Timothée Chalamet is coltish, handsome, and mischievous as Laurie, and if the elliptical time frame becomes confusing toward the end, the movie exudes exuberant and heartfelt goodwill, building to a satisfying girl-power crescendo that surely would have pleased Alcott herself.

FLIGHT PLAN

Teen yearns to spread her wings in wry, warm-hearted Lady Bird

Okay, I didn't have high hopes for Lady Bird. From the trailer, it looked like it was going to feature one of those indie heroines who's supposed to be adorably quirky, but is really just tiresome — the kind of character so often played by Greta Gerwig (in movies like Damsel In Distress, or Frances Ha).

Knowing that Gerwig wrote and directed this movie only intensified my dread.

But, surprise! With Lady Bird, Gerwig delivers a wry but warm-hearted portrait of family, home, and dreams in modern America. The family in question is not dysfunctional in any clichéd movie comedy way, but Gerwig captures the gulf of potential calamity in the fractious relationship between a high-school senior (Saoirse Ronan) and her loving, but harried mom (Laurie Metcalf).

As in most mother-daughter relationships, one false move or the wrong word might set either one of them off as they try to navigate the mine field of what they think or feel, and their ability (or not) to express it.

Ronan and Metcalf: Driving through the minefield

The movie begins with a quote from Joan Didion: "Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent Christmas in Sacramento."

Ronan plays Christine, who calls herself "Lady Bird," and is facing her senior year at a Catholic girls school in the suburbs of the state capital.

She has few scholastic ambitions, but she's eager to leave the nest and fledge, preferably to a college on the East Coast "where culture is." Unlike Sacramento, which she calls "the Midwest of California."

The plot is episodic as the school year scrolls by. But Gerwig's most trenchant observations concern issues as eternal a time itself — the elliptical orbits of friendship; separating the reality of sex from its romantic mythology; the often fraught, but fiercely devoted relations between parents and children.
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