Category Archives: blogs

The Father of Invention

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Back when video rental epoch was at its peak – moments before the DVD revolution would burn briefly as a gold standard of home cinema until becoming a punchline of technological obsolescence – each VHS hire came laden with a litany of previews that would play before (and occasionally after) the feature presentation.

Impatient fools with no lust or capacity for the breadth of experiences that life has to offer would fast-forward through these trailers, but those of us who understood the natural rhythms of visual entertainment were as committed to them as we were the film that was about to play. These were mini-features, entire works delivered with the speed of a Matrix upload; a glimpse into what could have been if we’d just lingered a little longer in the THRILLER or FOREIGN sections.

Some of these trailers seemed to be ubiquitous. No matter which film you’d just borrowed, be it a PG romantic comedy or an R rated gore-fest, they all seemed to open with the same run of previews; only the running order changed. In the late 1990s, no matter which genre you had opted for, the movie gods were certain that you would want to know all about 1996’s Fly Away Home.

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The Best Films of 2021

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Okay, I’m back on the writeups. It likely won’t last.

But first, the caveats.

Among the very best things I saw this year were Derek Delgaudio’s In and Of Itself and Bo Burnham’s Inside, but even in a list that meshes fiction and documentary, it still felt wrong to rank a filmed stage performance and a piece of performance art against a clearly-defined artform that’s on a whole other evolutionary track. It’s okay, I don’t really know what that means either. I think maybe I just didn’t feel like it.

This list was compiled with the usual hand-wringing, hair-pulling, and hand-pulling that always accompanies these things. The lower the stakes, the harder it is. My best-of fails to include a number of titles I spent most of the year convinced would come out on top: Baba Yar. Context is yet another tremendous work from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa who has long-since perfected the art of the observational, narration-free documentary, and this one ranks up there with Austerlitz, The Event, or his masterpiece Maidan. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos, and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch were also excruciating near-misses. At the start of the year, I told a number of people that if Regina King’s astonishing One Night In Miami somehow got edged out of the top ten, it would mean 2021 would turn out to be a pretty great year for film. Guess what.

Release date rigmarole and general distraction meant I couldn’t see the likes of C’Mon C’Mon, The Lost Daughter, Drive My Car, Parallel Mothers, and a number of other popular 2021 titles that seem entirely up my alley. At some point early in the year, I happened to catch up on the 2020 fantasy Wendy from Beasts of the Southern Wild director Ben Zeitlin, a film I adored with such ferocity, I almost included here out of belligerence. But then, that would be breaking the incomprehensible and seemingly arbitrary rules I’ve set up for myself as to what may and may not be included. Don’t try to make sense of it, just know that the system works. Continue reading →