Top 10 Films of 2019 for Me, my opinion, only mine, please don't be offended, it's just a list.

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 31, 2019

2019 has not been the best year in cinema but thankfully through all the discombobulation of political scandals, fake news and the overly sensitive, perpetually offended, online culture, there have been some damn great films that came out this year.  Some........

There were a number of films this year I missed for one reason or another.  There were films that I past on because I was either not interested or it looked dumb and not worth my time and money.  Hobbs and Shaw as an example.  There were a number of films I did get sucked into and was either expecting to be disappointed or hoping I wouldn't be.  Rambo: Last Blood and Pet Sematary are examples of unfortunate disappointments.

We had Terminator: Dark Fate this year and despite my initial apprehension, it actually wasn't too bad, it wasn't great, but it was a major step up from the absolute mess that is Terminator Genisys.  Zombieland: Double Tap was a pretty fun time at the movies and wasn't a bad sequel.  Spider-Man: Far From Home was action-packed but simultaneously bland along with Captain Marvel.  That movie would have been better if its lead had an actual pulse.  See Alita: Battle Angel for a far better action-packed movie where the lead has more heart and soul, being a robot, than Captain Marvel could ever hope to have.

Glass unfortunately was a let down, especially the pointless third act.  Unbreakable and Split both were so innovative, dripping with originality only to finish off in an underwhelming third film.  Another train-wreck was Hellboy, boy did that lifeless attempt at imagination go to hell.  Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a CGI mess that ended up getting covered up in so much dark shadow that, at times, you could barely even see what was happening. 

Brightburn, where do I start?!  This attempt at showing an alternative version of the Superman mythology sounded like it might be an interesting character study.  Sadly, it was gratuitous and meaningless.  I love me a good existential movie or one that explores an inevitable 'wrong-turn' were a character goes into darkness.  Joker is a perfect example of how this can be done effectively.  Brightburn become sadistic, nihilistic and irresponsible as the poor child at its center became cruel and murderous, just flying his mother up high in the sky and dropping her...the end.

Some films I enjoyed this year at the movies, Jumanji: The Next Level, which didn't capture the magic of the first one but was never the less entertaining.  Another sequel this year that didn't capture the same magic as the first one was IT: Chapter Two.  That film lost itself in the second act for a bit but came back around in an entertaining third act.  Crawl was a little gem this year that not too many people saw.  It was a simple survive-from-the-flood, filled with deadly, chomping alligators-kind of movie that had no agenda other then to scare and entertain, and not necessarily in that order.

Dolemite is my Name was absolutely hilarious.  Eddie Murphy was as funny as any of his classic movies and he gave one hell of a performance.  Ready or Not was another gem I'm not sure too many people saw.  That deliciously murderous movie was about a young woman marrying into the wrong highbrow family and having to kill them all to get away.  So good.  US was another crazy horror film this year about surviving the night while psychos, that look just like you, try to kill you.  Cold Pursuit probably had one of the funniest villains since the first John Wick movie.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was a great improvement over the on-the-nose, propaganda mess that is The Last Jedi, don't get me started.  The Rise of Skywalker finally put a much needed nail in the Star Wars coffin.  The movie had a lot of entertaining, action-packed, CGI-saturated moments as most of the loose ends were tied off and the subtle and sometimes not so subtle, fuck-you-Last-Jedi back-hands were dealt out. "That is no way to treat a lightsaber." kind of fuck-you that JJ Abrams couldn't help himself but convey.  The result was a bitter end to a once beloved space opera.

Here are a list of my Top 10 films of the year.  As I mentioned above, there were a number of films I didn't see this year so the list below are the top ten that I enjoyed, personally, not universally, not in any concrete way, did I mention that this is 'my' list? 

10. MARRIAGE STORY

The performances are top notch in this story of a marriage coming to an end.  The film is quite raw and at sometimes hard to watch due to the heartbroken nature of it's subjects.  The film is about a separation followed by the unnecessary side of legal red tape at a great financial cost.  The film explores the technical side of divorce and the added hardships it compounds to those involved.  Their little boy who gets pulled in both directions is the real tragedy in the film.  Marriage Story felt like a Woody Allen film through and through.  Director Noah Baumbach clearly doesn't shy away from this influence.  It's probably his most Woody Allen since Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. 

9. AVENGERS: ENDGAME

Endgame is the second part of one of the most ambitious films ever made.  It does it's best at managing the plot around so many characters.  Marvel was wise to put the film's villain. Thanos at it's center.  The movie is incredibly entertaining and has a couple of heartfelt moments, especially at the end with Tony's snap.  I'm always a fan when time travel is part of a story.  It's fun when characters travel back in time and see themselves from an outside perspective.  This was done beautifully in Back to the Future 2 and it was well done here.

8. DOCTOR SLEEP

I was worried about this film because I'm such a huge fan of The Shining and Stanley Kubrick.  But Doctor Sleep actually did not disappoint.  This film had me thinking about it for days after seeing it in the theater.  Not too many films these days can hold me like that.  It was legitimately creeping and thrilling, it was filled with horror and sadness but ultimately was a story about loss and redemption, as well as sacrifice.  Also you couldn't take your eyes off of Rebecca Ferguson.  

7. FORD V FERRARI

This film was about friendship at 200 mph around a race track.  The performances by Bale and Damon are some of the year's best.  The race scenes are so incredibly thrilling that after the movie I had an appointment for a check up with my doctor, he asked me why my heartbeat was up more then usual.  I told him I just got out of the theater seeing this film.  He immediately understood.

6. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM

The first John Wick movie we got 'gun-fu', the second one we got 'car-fu', in Parabellum we got 'dog-fu'.  This movie solidifies the John Wick movies as one of  the greatest action movie trilogies of all time.  Keanu Reeves absolutely kicks ass in the role of John Wick.  The action sequences in this movie are some of the best of the series, especially the fight scenes with Halle Berry and her two dogs in them.   

5. THE BEACH BUM

This lazy ass movie will not be for everyone. The Dude in The Big Lebowski was tangled up in plot and Duke and his Attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas dragged their asses but got to Vegas to report on the race, even if it was meaningless.  Moondog in The Beach Bum may even be more tragic because he really has no where to go.  That might be okay by him, but for us as a viewer, it isn't okay.  Moondog made himself an outsider because there really isn't much worth fighting for anymore.  The Beach Bum has cosmic implications.  It's the universe looking back at us without any answers, because there weren't any there in the first place.  Moondog lives in the now along with a universe that doesn't care about him, or anyone for that matter.  Everyone around him lives for the future and that breeds hope and hope becomes disappointment, and they have now lost what it means to live in the present. 

4. AD ASTRA

Brad Pitt's calm presents in this beautiful looking film is astounding.  The space journey into darkness where Pitt's character travels to the edge of our Solar System mirrors Willard's trip up the Cambodian river to take out Coronal Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.  Ad Astra is an existential journey to discover the meaninglessness of your life.  It's the pilgrimage that the Buddha took to rid himself of all the answers life claimed to have understood.  Like Dante's spiral into the Inferno, Ad Astra explores acceptance without hope, it explores reality and saves the fantasy from corrupting logic and reason.   
  

3. THE IRISHMAN

"It is what it is."

With three of the greatest performances of the year, The Irishman appearing at all award shows when the season kicks in will be a surprise to no one.  The film is long but you'd never know it due to Scorsese's camera moving around in this gangster world, filled with, maybe not back stabbing, more like sneak up behind gunshot blasts to the face.  It's an unquestionably sorrowful film about a man so loyal, so willing to please his bosses that he's willing to shot a long time friend in the back of the head and alienate his daughter, along with a number of other people that he cares about.  The last shot of the film has to be the saddest of the year, because in the end the one thing we all fear before our death........... is loneliness. 

2. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

"You're Rick... fucking... Dalton!"

Is it Quentin Tarantino's best, no, but it's one hell of a film.  It was overly indulgent, narcissistic and a bit meandering.  There were earlier points where it seemed undecided under all the snappy dialogue but then it started to focus and man, is it worth the wait.  Tarantino made a nostalgia film in his own image, gleefully.  He is a filmmaker that isn't afraid to show us what he thinks is cool, even embarrassingly cool.  The film let's us know it's a film and not a representation of reality.  Sharon Tate gets to live and the Manson family members sent to kill her by Charlie don't get to live because fuck them.  In the end we get the fairy tale the title promises, Once Upon a Time.....

1. JOKER

"I thought my life was a tragedy, now I know... it's a comedy."  

Joker is a polarizing and a deeply divisive film causing so much fuss for such an overly sensitive audience, that there is something actually funny about that fact.  The response to the film in real life confirms what the Joker had a problem with in his fantasy life.  Joaquin Phoenix, yet again, gave everything he had into playing the gloomy man becoming the troubled clown.  This film will echo through the aliases of movie theaters, coffee houses and film study classes for years to come.  Joker has effectively been able to leap out of the screen and into our world, exposing his contempt for our toxic environment as we enter 2020's.

 








  

JOKER and the World we Live in today

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON OCTOBER 16, 2019
There will be some spoilers.

Put on a happy face

Joker was a film that itself was an agent of chaos.  The film and the character in the film were symbiotic, where one couldn't exist without the other.  They needed each other in the most beautiful poetic way, much in the same way as Travis Bickle and Martin Scorsese needed each other.  Joker was a weird film where the film was all about him and simultaneously wasn't about him at all.  The film was micro-sphere driven but had macro-sphere implications. 

A Brief History: Homo sapiens, us, have been around for about 200 thousand years, evolving for millions of years prior to that, give or take.  The agricultural revolution kicks in and us, hunters and gathers have finally found some level of stability.  Civilizations form, we agree to give up our freedom for security but at a cost.  The illusion of freedom isn't free, you have to pay to feel you are free even when you are not.  This becomes the foundation to our society, through wars and the fall of other civilizations, ours is the latest version of human beings that can and cannot get along when money is involved.

Plan and simple, Joker is about a failed system of who has and who is never allowed to have.  It's also about how we can't truly relate to other people.  We all want to believe we can, we call that being positive or optimistic, but in actuality we are in our own heads, viewing the world through our perspective and only imagining what another's life must be like.  In the end we don't know, we are not starving in Africa or a Syrian refugee.  

Arthur Fleck is a product of this failed society and that's what's pissing people off the most, because by accepting that prognosis is accepting that we live in a failed project.  All the decisions we make in our day to day lives whether sit in on corporate merger meetings or defending criminals in court or paying for our groceries at the supermarket or cold calling people trying to convince them into buying a lifelong subscription to some bible club, this structure is all we know, we are bound to it.  Joker holds a mirror up and we don't like what we see because when he is looking in a mirror we don't see him, we see ourselves.

I thought about going into the girlfriend neighbor is real or isn't or is any of this real by the end and then in my end, from what I take from the film, is it real or isn't, is missing the point.  The film is a mirror.

This film is Nietzsche's undoing everything you've been taught, it's Rimbaud's derangement of the senses, it's confronting Jung's shadow, it's Macbeth's rise to power.  Joker is the fallout of The Notes from Underground and Maldoror as well as Charles Baudelaire's Intimate Journals.  Joker is what Kierkegaard warned us about, the fear we have about our own freedom.  

Arthur lost all his support systems and fell into chaos, this isn't about condoning what Arthur/Joker became but it is a lesson to us all to touch the people in our lives.  It's about realizing when Plato said to 'be kind because everyone is fighting a battle', that he meant it.  It's not a cute saying but during his time it was meant to be understood.  That's where empathy comes in and where the system fails.  

The fact is our world has owners.  We never want to be thought of as something that is owned but we are, and are we able to get over how fucked up of a concept that even feels like, then we are able to start to peel back the layers of the onion.  Classism was a major focus in the film, are we equal, who gets to die on the Titanic and who gets away?   In the film there were all these little Joker-bots that claimed to have a cause and they were all full of shit.  Their recourse was destruction without any level of understanding of what they where even doing.

What is the point........

The Joker isn't the 'agent of chaos' he's the product of it.  Sadly he's in us all and that's why we hate him, but more importantly why we love him simultaneously is because he is us.  Our ying and yang battle is on going and within us all, so the film isn't an examination of this tortured man that evolves into this crazed joker killer.  The film is about our own fantasy.  Arthur Fleck was never the villain.  We are.

What is the point.....











The point of the film isn't to understand it.



#joker
#batman