Ah, 2019. The Year of the Pig on the Chinese Zodiac, and the year Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. Things were a lot more exciting out there in the world than they were in my little town. Oh, Panther Pictures did things, but we were sure a boring corner of Hollywood Land. Nevertheless, it was a massively productive year in entertainment. I'm glad I only really try to keep up with actual feature films.
Speaking of that, coming back around to Awards Season has been sort of sudden. I mean, I just did this, right? I have more important things to attend to, like pre-production on the latest short film on the docket. But I still love the movies, and I still love the validation of strangers, so Eric Player the award-winning filmmaker is here again with his favorite flavors of ice cream. Read the 2016 disclaimer on these, if you must.
So--until the other guys say theirs longer and louder than Panther Pictures ever could--here are my pics for the #TenBest films of 2019. #PPLLCTenBest2019 #TenBest2019
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Conscious or not, much of how we react to others has to do with how we feel about our parents. “Don’t you talk about my mama!” … and so on. Ford vs. Ferrari is the story of a friendship between two very talented car guys, the relationship of one of those men to himself, his son, and his own demons, and—obviously—super cool race cars. Finally, the entire movie is pushed through based upon Henry Ford's relationship to his father and grandfather, both dead. When Ford makes a bid to buy Ferrari, Enzo Ferrari rejects him with comments about his cars, his employees, and a comparison of Henry Ford The 2nd to his father. Guess what bothered him the most? With that one insult, Ford authorized an entire “money is no object” program with car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles. The object? To make a better race car than Ferrari, and beat him at the Le Mans race in France. When Shelby takes Ford out in the GT 40 he has built, Ford breaks down and cries. At first the audience thinks he is crying because he’s been scared shirtless, but in fact he is crying because his father never lived to experience what he just did. It’s a profound, and moving, quiet moment. In a film full of fast cars, fantastic loud noises and very cool crashes, the nuts and bolts are the relationships.
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In 2016, I listed The Angry Birds Movie as one of my Ten Best Films of the year. It’s true. I must have been the only guy who did, because Jason Sudeikis retweeted the list. This year, I wanted to add Angry Birds Movie 2, I really did. Well, I watched it, and what is also true is that it was NOT as good a sequel as the Toy Story franchise makes. Toy Story 4 just might be the last film in the series (*snicker*), but—of the sequels—it is definitely the best. Every time a Toy Story film closes, it feels like all the plotlines have been strapped down and there is nothing more to say. And every time, the team at Pixar find something more. This time, it could be just as over as it ever was, and that is extremely okay. Woody’s journey about who he is as a toy—the through-line of each movie—feels complete now, and not a moment in all four of them was wasted space. Bravo Woody and Bo, Bravo Buzz and Jesse. Bravo Sporky. See you all next time.
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Dark Waters shares its name with at least three horror movies, and a paperback about the Titanic. Honestly that was the first thing I noticed about it when watching the trailer, I really didn't think about the subject matter. But the more time went on the more I wanted to see it. However, since it was limited to a mostly arthouse run, I didn't think I'd get to. Then a little ritual known as Thanksgiving came around and I found myself in a city that was actually showing it. It establishes a point of view right away, engaging you on a personal level in the way this kind of story needs to, through the eyes of the main character. After living in the chemicals industry as sort of an abstraction, Robert Bilott starts caring when members of his family become involved. Through him we latch onto the story, and for the same reasons: this could happen any of us, and if the science behind the film is sound (appears to be), then in a way, it has.
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Basically an Israeli Argo. Except this time it's Ethiopian Jewish refugees, and the agents sneaking them out are Israeli, not (just) the CIA. Captain America plays an Israeli agent. Roll that around in your tongue a few times. Considering our foreign policy it seems like the perfect fit. The movie tells the true story of the evacuation of native Jews during civil unrest in Ethiopia in 1979. Civil unrest is putting it mildly. These are real people and real suffering, faithfully told. I won't give the details here because it is intense and kind of disturbing, but it's a great film. Perhaps a few too many F words in it--honestly I can't believe that Israeli agents are that fluent in American cursing--but if the movie had any real problems, they were technical ones. Problems of the sort that a lot of low budget films have these days: Being shot on a digital camera, it basically looks like a car commercial. It's always frustrating seeing any film that could have looked 20 times better if the cinematographer had only applied a simple Adobe Camera Filter to the whole thing. But the distraction didn't last and I enjoyed rooting for the good guys. In large part because this all really happened. It's the kind of thing we should reflect on now and then: How good we have it, how bleak the world often is beyond us, and how maybe life would be a little bit better if the comfortable ones reached out to those in need.
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There's an old documentary from the 70s where they interview Alfred Hitchcock and cover his career. It's mostly him sitting in front of his desk and drawling about his films, and his inspirations for making them. It's a good movie. In it, he talks about his theory of suspense. He calls it the Bomb Theory. Essentially, it is that real suspense is achieved by knowing what's going on, rather than by not knowing. Nobody cares about a bomb threat they haven't heard. Knives Out understands this. Writer and Director Rian Johnson really internalized that theory, and came up with a cracking good yarn. This is a movie that interviews and squirms and flashes back with the best of them. However, we know exactly what happened within the first 20 minutes. Most of today's police detectives have the answer to who did what in the last 10, but this approach is way is better. And considering where the story is going, it is also more interesting. I love the performances in this. The actors that I knew, and there are a lot of them, but also and especially the few I didn't know. Particularly Ana de Arma, playing the nurse at the center of it all. It is nice to watch a guileless character that isn't stomped on. Also, mainly as a side note, I get the feeling that Daniel Craig has been doing these American movies in the last few years simply for the fun of exercising his accents. He's getting very good. Just ask Chris Evans.
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It's been over a hundred years since The Great War, and many films are starting to reflect on it again. Yet while today's audience may expect (at best) a rehash of All Quiet on the Western Front, the movie to really compare it to is Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Both that and this film are vivid enough to make you smell the mud. 1917 is a story of trying to get a vital message from headquarters to the field. In doing so, it has an impressive ability to relate small stories and small deeds to the greater madness of World War I. In the straightforward story, Sam Mendez finds hope in a piece of history that was a crucible of despair. I'm sure it comes from his connection to this particular tale. The actions of one person make a difference, in ways that surprise no one as much as they do the person making the difference.
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The Last Black Man In San Francisco
"I should have told you the truth, but it just felt so good." Joe Talbot has made a film that is essentially about nostalgia for something that we never had in the first place. We are all familiar with the theme of looking back on our lives with roses coloring our eyes, and all of us do it. I'm pretty sure high school was not the way I remember it. For Jimmie Fails (played by a young actor named Jimmie Fails) that past is represented by a house he is restoring; a restoration taking place against the will of the current owners. But to paraphrase a character in the story, "Nobody ever owns anything." As Jimmie tells it, the house he is fixated on was built by his grandfather; taking care of it is just what he does. When the current residents catch him painting their window trims, he leaves, but tells them, "Water those plants in the backyard, or I'll do it myself." The image of an actor being booed off the stage with produce is terribly fitting, for Jimmie is living through a stage play of his own that he doesn't want to close. And when those current residents move out, his best friend Montgomery supports him in all his projects regarding the "family home." Eventually, they too collide over the history of the home, during an ACTUAL stage play, and Jimmie has to finally come to terms with why he does what he does. "People aren't only one thing," he says to Montgomery, and the past isn't either.
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That was me up there. I've been through a divorce. I'm also happily married. The pain of Charlie in trying to salvage something of his child during a process he couldn't understand and couldn't control, was definitely the roughest moment for me. And all the platitudes he was told, the same ones I once heard, about "time is on your side" and "it will get better" and "your son will have his own opinions someday," only amounted to society getting him used to the idea of skipping his son's life between 8 and 18. That stung. All in all, it moved me in a way a movie hasn't in a long time. A couple of the true pieces were the lawyer working out her own issues through Nicole, and the milquetoast lawyer for Charlie who was really nice but ineffective. I cried four times, but probably not the same four times as you will.
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Nazis and comedy may not seem like the right combination unless you're Mel Brooks, but that's the genius of who Taika Waititi is. He takes a subject that hasn't been tackled like this in 20, possibly 50, years (or you know since the last Tarantino movie) and fills it with heart, humor, and just a pinch of serious drama. What else would you expect from the man who made Hunt For The Wilderpeople, which is about a foster child getting lost, and Thor Ragnarok, which took a property that was extremely self-serious (in its own pseudo-Shakespearean way, not a Nazi way) and found the fun in it. I'm more than tickled to put a movie directed by such a man on my 10 best list three years running. I'm sure a zillion critics and wannabe filmmakers feel this way, but he makes the kind of movies I'd like to think I would make if I had his canvas. He communicates the ideas in his stories so profoundly and universally and ridiculously. JoJo is a scared little boy who finds out the world he's in is not as simple as he thought it was. So JoJo is all of us.
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I thought I'd seen everything there was to see, or at least understood everything there was to understand, about America's moon landing. I've seen all the Tom Hanks stuff, read most of the speculative fiction, seen all of the news reel documentaries. My dad had an old LaserDisc of archival footage from the final trip, Apollo 17. In those days you watched one show over and over, and I watched that one a lot. Heck, I even have an old 45rpm vinyl record with astronaut radio transmissions on it. So I wasn't expecting to be captivated by such an old subject. But of course I should have expected nothing less; the trip to the moon is the most spectacular thing human beings have done, ever. When it comes to technological achievements anyway. This was a full-scale movie, with special effects and gripping dialogue, only pieced together in documentary form. I've been sort of disenchanted or shall I say disinterested in space travel for a few years now. A bunch of robots are interesting but not emotionally captivating. I'm captivated again. We should go back to the moon as soon as we can, and I'd like to come.
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Honorable Mentions:
You gotta give props to the capper on a 20-something-movies franchise.
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
It doesn't come out for three more weeks, but I mean, you gotta right? You just gotta. Besides, it will probably be good.
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And there they are. my pics for the best (American) movies of 2019. I'll probably change my mind, but what's done is done.
As always, Eric C. Player is an independently poor filmmaker, and the president of Panther Pictures, LLC, which he is shuttering in 2020 thanks to California's lovely new Uber laws. He is a father, fan, storyteller, "Picker," substitute teacher* and a graduate of BYU & Chapman University film schools. His films have played in theaters all across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and movies to which he was a contributing writer or producer are available on Netflix and Amazon. He has written and produced film and video content for nearly twenty-five years, and has been writing Chapter-Fiction since the sixth grade. His 2016 short, Moment of Anger, received multiple honors including Best Short and Best Director at the Road House International Short Film Festival 2016 in Santa Monica, California. his 2018 short UndercoverUp garnered a "Best Ensemble" nod from the Top Shorts Film Festival. Eric C. Player on Imdb.
*High School and Elementary School. No interest in Middle School.
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