CAUGHT '22

2022 is unlikely, it seems to me, to go down in history as a banner year for popular movies. But even in less auspicious years, there are always some good flicks, and some good or even great scenes or performances in movies that aren't so great overall.

Out of what I saw, here are ten movies that stood out as best for me this past year:

Nope--Jordan Peele's latest is probably the best UFO movie since Close Encounters, though it has a more sinister edge. It's wildly original, funny and creepy sci-fi/horror, yet it also carries the heroic charge of a good western.

Good Night Oppy--This documentary about the Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit has interesting information about the Red Planet, but it's really about the way the NASA nerds anthropomorphized the robots and fretted over them and cheered them on and ultimately grieved over them. In an entirely unpretentious way, the movie hints at the question of where sentience comes from. 

The Duke--This pandemic-delayed release was, I thought, perhaps the most overlooked and delightful movie of the year. Jim Broadbent is splendid as Kempton Bunton, a cab driver, factory worker and anti-television fee protestor who in 1965 confessed to stealing Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London; Helen Mirren is his fed-up wife. The direction, by the late Roger Michell, is warm, graphically lively and period-rich.

Everything Everywhere All At Once--Family drama, immigrant saga, sly comedy, martial arts actioner, Matrix-style sci-fi adventure and more are mashed-up in this freaky yarn from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert that tries to live up to its title. It's epic, intimate, silly and profound. All at once.

Thirteen Lives--Dramatizing a technically complicated rescue mission in detail, Ron Howard is in his element in this moving account of the rescue of twelve Thai kids and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in 2018. A little tough if you're claustrophobic, but a true feel-good movie.

The Whale--Brendan Fraser gives a luminous, possibly generational performance as Charlie, a morbidly obese English teacher trying to reconnect with his furious estranged daughter. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the movie is a little heavy and one-note aside from the star, but Fraser's radiance shines through the prosthetics.

Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down--Infuriating because of what Giffords lost when she was shot in 2011; inspirational because of how much she got back, and how courageously she refused to give in to despair. Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West build the movie around how central music was to Giffords' recovery.

The Fabelmans--In Steven Spielberg's loosely autobiographical coming-of-age yarn, scripted by Tony Kushner, the focus is largely on the parents, beautifully played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams. The movie isn't a grand slam, but it's fascinating, and it has the best final shot of the year.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On--This feature expansion of the 2010 viral short by Dean Fleischer-Camp, with Jenny Slate voicing the tiny title character, is sunny and hilarious, but with improbably dramatic and poignant undertones. Isabella Rossellini is exquisite as the voice of Marcel's "Nan."

The Banshees of Inisherin--Martin McDonagh's black comedy about the agonies of friendship goes so sour in its later acts that I almost didn't put it on the list. But the brilliance of the initial conception and, especially, the magnificent acting of Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon demand its inclusion.

One more list, while I'm at it; for anyone who might unfathomably be interested, here is the embarrassingly short list of books I read this year (as always, it doesn't include short stories, poems, comic books, essays, articles, reviews, automotive manuals, skywriting, menus, fortune cookie fortunes, etc etc)...

The Silent Gondoliers by William Nolan

Sucker's Portfolio by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

The Spread by Barry Malzberg

Ben by Gilbert A. Ralston

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand

YEP

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Nope--The terse title refers to the reaction that audiences often have when they're watching a horror movie, and the character is faced with investigating or confronting something scary: Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Onscreen, of course, the characters always do, and this movie is no exception.

The latest from Jordan Peele is set in Agua Dulce, a remote desert area north of L.A. (Vasquez Rocks, immortal location of countless films and TV shows including the "Arena" episode of Star Trek, is nearby). Peele's hero, once again played by Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out, is O.J., a horse wrangler for the movies who struggles to maintain the isolated ranch that's been in his family since the beginning of Hollywood. His actress/writer/singer/motorcyclist sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) works with him at times, though she can be as much an unreliable hindrance as a help.

Their father (Keith David) has recently died under weird circumstances, and gradually O.J. and Em become aware that their little corner of Agua Dulce is haunted by nothing less than a flying saucer. But while O.J.'s strong instinct is to say "nope" to exploring the matter further, Em's is to try to capture incontrovertible photographic or video evidence of the phenomenon, and she persuades her brother that it's the key to the ranch's solvency.

This basic synopsis does little justice to the richly imagined world in which Nope unfolds, however. Next door to the ranch, for instance, is "Jupiter's Claim," a western theme park run by Ricky (Steven Yeun), a former child actor and the veteran of a horrifying mishap on the set of a sitcom. O.J. has been selling off his horses to Ricky to stay afloat, but is hoping to buy them back.

Ricky's backstory is connected thematically to the main plot; Peele's persistent theme is the turbulent relationship between humans and other species, whether animal or alien. In formal terms, though, this strand is undeniably a digression. But, as with the digressions in, say, a Stephen King novel, I don't think the movie would work without it, or without Holst (Michael Wincott, growly as ever), the eccentric cameraman who agrees to help the siblings, or without Angel (Brandon Perea), the heartsick Fry's Electronics techie and UFO geek who worms his way into the project as well.

It also wouldn't work without Peele's careful, measured pacing. He teases us with a gradual accrual of creepy flourishes, even a pretty hair-raising red herring, so that when his extended big confrontation at the finale arrives, the thrills feel earned. And, like Get Out, the film is leavened with comedy--often macabre comedy--throughout.

With the help of Hoyte von Hoytema's sun-bleached pastel cinematography, Peele generates an atmosphere of preternatural Americana that inevitably recalls the work of the young Spielberg. Indeed, Nope is probably the best UFO movie since Close Encounters, though the sense of wonder is here tinged with the sinister and unwholesome.

A word should also be said for the leads. Palmer's Emerald is exuberant, exasperating and endearing. Kaluuya is strikingly laconic; his face slackening hilariously with dismay when he registers yet another setback, but remaining stoic. He spends a fair amount of his footage on horseback, and Peele showcases him like the star of a spaghetti western. In the middle of this sci-fi tale, the relatively short Kaluuya makes one of the more imposing and authoritative tall-in-the-saddle western heroes the movies have seen in quite a few years.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER 2

Opening this weekend:

 
Get Out—Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young, gifted and black art photographer in New York City, goes upstate for a weekend in the country with his white girlfriend of four months, Rose (Allison Williams), to meet the affluent parents. Dad (Bradley Whitford) is a neurosurgeon, Mom (Catherine Keener) is a hypnotherapist, creepy brother (Caleb Landry Jones) is a med student.

They seem, initially, like nice folks, a little awkward and self-conscious about Chris’s race, but well-intentioned, even compensatorily over-friendly. But small weirdnesses crop up at once, first with the mannered, inauthentic behavior of the family’s black domestic help (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) and of another black man who shows up at a party (Lakieth Stanfield), and then with other hints of the sinister.

To say much more would be to give away too much about this horror tale, written and directed by Jordan Peele (half of the comedy team of Key & Peele) in his directorial debut. Suffice to say that it’s a splendidly successful, witty shocker, in large part because Peele is disciplined about playing by the rules, using the theme of racial unease to generate terror along a wonderfully old-fashioned, Ira-Levin-ish Gothic structure.

Kaluuya, a Brit, easily pulls us into his gradually-rising paranoia and makes us root for Chris. The white actors are flawless, from the subtlety of Williams, Whitford, Keener and Stephen Root as a blind gallery owner to the ripe caricature of the unwholesome party guests. And the wide-eyed servants, with their stilted unctuousness, can raise the hairs on your neck. There’s overt comic relief, too, in the form of the ebullient LilRey Howery as Chris’s worried TSA agent pal.

Best of all, while Get Out is sincerely meant to scare, Peele still brings his comic sensibility into play here. There are well-crafted jolts and jumps, and the climactic clashes are conventionally gruesome, but the movie never loses a sense of audience-pleasing fun. Peele connects the film not only to classic horror templates but also to hardwired racial beliefs, both black and white. The plot partly hinges, for instance, on the familiar white conviction, recently displayed by our president, that all black people know each other.

Opening at Sonora Cinema at Desert Sky Mall:

You're Killing Me Susana—Eligio is a Mexico City soap actor who likes to stay out late, drink, and fool around with women from the set. One morning he wakes up to find his stunning writer wife Susana (Veronica Echegui) absent from bed and apartment. Her clothes are absent from the closet, too.

Stunned and shaken—he thought they were doing great—Eligio traces Susana to a writer's workshop at a college in Iowa. He drops everything and follows her there, where he finds her involved with a virile, silent Polish poet.

From here on, You're Killing Me Susana (Me Estas Matando Susana), directed by Roberto Sneider from a Jose Agustin novel, becomes both a romantic comedy with serious overtones and a spiky look at U.S. culture through an outsider's eyes. In both functions it's charged up by the performance of Gael Garcia Bernal—probably best known to U.S. audiences as the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries—as Eligio.

With his insolent sexual confidence and persistent (if mostly ineffectual) machismo, Eligio is the sort who can smirk at his own infidelities yet throw wailing, floor-pounding tantrums at Susana's without seeming to notice the incongruity. The breathtaking Echegui makes you see how the combination of Eligio's oppressive selfishness and his unshakable lovability could make sneaking away while he's asleep seem like the only escape.

This wry, absorbing, unpredictable movie can truly be called a comedy-drama, deftly tipping from near-farcical to poignant without losing its balance, on either side of the hyphen.