This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year AND DECADE in Cinema" -- 2019

the effing BAFTAs? life is short

Banderas running the table in the critics' awards and then getting snubbed by SAG and BAFTA sets him up nicely to be this year's Ethan Hawke.

I don't know how one remembers 'snubs' a year later unless one is a trophy workhorse like Jeff Wells

I don't know how one gives one shit about baseball stats, so we're even.

I don't give a shit about baseball awards, so we're uneven again

I can live with that.

Now kiss

we both kiss you, Three Stooges style

nyuk nyuk nyuk

was Eve Harrington one of the stooges

Curly Eve

Nomi Malone slapping everyone itt

*stabbing

https://media2.giphy.com/media/3o85xwpCu3LWa4kz8A/source.gif

Dennis Lim tries to sort out the decade:

Presenting his work at a film at Lincoln Center retrospective in 2018, Christian Petzold railed against a type of festival film he described as “the lemon-tree movie.” This would, as Petzold derisively imagines it, involve two lovers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, their star-crossed romance represented by a lemon tree situated right on the Gaza-Israel border. (He may have had in mind an actual Israeli movie called Lemon Tree, which has a somewhat different plot but uses similar botanical symbolism.) Anyone who has sampled even a sliver of contemporary world cinema will recognize this species of “subject movie,” to use Petzold’s term. These are films that are relentlessly about something: laden with sociopolitical import, allowing for a touch of lyricism but very little ambiguity, and bearing the telltale traces of the screenwriting workshop.

Petzold’s example gets at a rarely spoken truth about the film-industrial complex. While distinctive work is emerging all the time, especially on the margins, and therefore easy to overlook, many of the institutions that determine what gets made and shown still function as forces of homogenization, from film schools to the funding bodies and development labs that are sometimes attached to the very festivals that serve as showcases for the end results of this often highly professionalized process. Ours is an age of fatiguing overload but also of numbing sameness: too many movies, too many festivals, too many reviews, too many opinions, too many lists, too many hot takes and think pieces that turn complicated issues into cultural talking points and empty posturing—all of which amount not to a lively discourse but a reinforcement of conventional wisdom (or worse)....

The brave new world of digital streaming promises instant access, but choice is a pernicious myth when entire swathes of cinema are conveniently forgotten or actively suppressed (as is happening with Disney’s continued withholding of 20th Century Fox titles from repertory theaters). Everything is market-tested, only for us to be told that what people want is more of the same. The late-capitalist logic is seamless: what we get is not, as advertised, plenitude, but its precise opposite, a narrowing of options to an algorithmically determined menu and a simultaneous impression that no other options exist.

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-termites-return-dennis-lim-best-of-the-decade/

https://media.giphy.com/media/l0G18fHgs241OUyxW/giphy.gif

Also ...

http://filmcomment.com/best-films-of-the-decade/

The fact that that top 5 gets followed by that 6-10 is astonishing ... specifically that #1, which awesome but I wouldn't have predicted that to get this decade's Mulholland Drive slot.

namechecks Martin Eden as a fave......my man xps

I've seen all ten on that list, don't dislike any, but am crazy about 3 or 4 tops.

surprised to see Zama at the top spot as well but I'm not mad about it

same

Lol, that top ten kinda plays out like a normal American zine top ten, but turned on it's head :)

Exactly! (I'd have been a little less surprised had it been Toni Erdmann that came out on top.)

RE: Lemon Tree fetishism, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 'Wild Pear Tree" might be my favorite film of the year but it sort of acknowledges the trope and plays with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po0vls18Koc

well Toni Erdmann is the arthouse 'hit' of the top 5, right? The other four filmmakers are defiantly sui generis. xp

I think The Master might've benefited from the tragic resonance of PS Hoffman's death, as Akerman's film echoes strongly after hers.

DGA nominates zero women:

Directors Guild (DGA) nominations:

Bong Joon Ho
Sam Mendes
Martin Scorsese
Quentin Tarantino
Taika Waititi

— Erik Anderson (@awards_watch) January 7, 2020

and a Jojo Rabbit honor to shit in the punchbowl?

of course they honored sam MENdes

Bong, Mendes, Scorsese and Tarantino are fait accompli for the oscars at this point; i'm wondering if they're gonna be shamed into Gerwig for #5.

Producers Guild:

1917
Ford v. Ferrari
The Irishman
JoJo Rabbit
Joker
Knives Out
Little Women
Marriage Story
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
Parasite

amazing how this fucking year deflated our pleasant arthouse decade once again

i'm beginning to retroactively hate Parasite

anyway i'll be intrigued to see #11-25 in the Film Comment '10s list when i get the magazine, esp if Inherent Vice is there

Every FC top ten maker is in my top twenty except the Carax.

I think The Master might've benefited from the tragic resonance of PS Hoffman's death, as Akerman's film echoes strongly after hers.

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, January 7, 2020 2:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM. His last great performance, and iirc, he relapsed at the wrap party.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/adam-sandler-confronts-film-critics-mean-nyfcc-1202201523/

Oh my god Joe Pesci is currently on his 20th word pic.twitter.com/fMlqz5Lcsy

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) January 8, 2020

Banderas, off to Spain in the morning, won the crowd over by being honest: “I am tired of campaigning,” he said. “I am not a politician. I am an actor!”

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/nyfcc-bong-joon-ho-oscar-rock-star-tarantino-confronts-film-critics-1202201531/

The rest of the Film Comment top 50 is now posted and the Boyhood/Social Network skew is definitely a minority bloc.

I like that top 50 overall

I got the issue; as usu, the individual lists are more interesting.

Both Molly Haskell and Hoberman have Charlie Says and OUaTiHollywood in their top tens of '19.

OU812iHollywood

The only one of FC's decade 50 I haven't seen is Roma. Criterion coming Feb 11. (I expect to be underwhelmed)

Per Letterboxd, my most watched filmmaker of 2019 was Abel Ferrara; most watched actor, Doris Day. (Respectively due to MoMA retrospective and death.)

I just saw Transit again, almost a year to the day of my first screening. My heart was in my throat. How quickly the times line up with our aesthetic preferences.

xp

Jack Mercer and Dave Fleischer for me, thanks to all those Popeye shorts I logged.

Do you like Franz Rogowski, Alfred? I love him.

Glad you came around on the Petzold, Alfred!

Do you like Franz Rogowski, Alfred? I love him.

― Good taste, bit Victorian but who isn't? (jed_),

I do enough to vote him as a finalist in the Florida Film Critics Award for Best Actor, and, yeah, he's cute in a whey-faced Joaquin Phoenix way.

I missed, for reasons too stupid to go into here, a crucial plot point in Transit and was therefore completely baffled by it and had no idea what was happening. I still enjoyed it though.

No Joker to be found...

https://filmmakermagazine.com/108819-the-2019-village-voice-film-poll-reconstructed/#.Xh4z2Kl7lBw