Scattered conversations, shadow and light and primary colors, bodies and smiles sliding past each other. Look at this beautiful cavalcade. 

Here's a tall fellow, love child of Kristofferson and John Wayne, his disheveled hair cascading out so jauntily it's downright dapper. This is inebriated bedhead done right. There are bloody wounds on his face, only recently healed, but he's working his way up and down the aisle like a renegade pastor, grinning despite the blood and his gravelly voice, saying emphatically to each passenger: "God bless you. Hey. God bless you too. Oh hey there hi, God bless…." 

I call the stops out with fearless friendliness. Another man is standing alongside, watching me perform. A grin slowly forming on his face, wider and wider: he can't take it. "Yo," he finally blurts, unable to contain his enthusiasm. "Yo, I like your STYLE, bro. Keep it UP!" 

A moment later, from another: "you are too SMOOTH, muhfugguh! This bus ride' the best birthday present ever! Jus' a lil' too SMOOOOTH, unh!"

Be yourself. This is the only weapon I have. Be your good self, and offer it to others without imposing it on them.

The Earth turned today, and you could feel its joy, spilling out of all these beautiful people. Look at the spirit in their eyes. Springtime came early, not in nature, but in the heady bounce of every person's step, a careening delicacy of ebullience, washing over all. The happy were happier, and the heavier souls walked as though they weighed a little less, a mystery, gifts from somewhere far away. 

The night had a snap to it.

I've barely started, still loitering around the plaza bus stop, waiting for my shift to arrive… and here's a man with flowers bounding over. He is Mason the flower seller, I learn, and he knows me even if I don't in return; "you're the best damn driver in this whole city put together," he exclaims, unwittingly echoing The Great Gatsby.

His scruffy denim, the nine o'clock shadow, the immaculate daffodils offsetting it all… I wish I had my camera. "Normally I'd charge a love donation of one dollar, but these are free for you! Presto!" he declares, with a flourish.

Not a minute later and here's a young lady from Starbucks holding out a croissant with my name on it. Look at her big eyes, wavy hair framed by the nondescript Starbucks uniform. Everybody looks better in black. Am I really worth the trouble? Walking a croissant all the way down here, taking the effort to make sure it isn't squished? What a sweetheart. 

Another friend stepping in, with a smile representing years. My first notes from ages ago describe her as "Genessee Lady With Cool Walking Stick." I daresay we know each other a touch better now. Rainier Avenue has room for every personality type, and hers is at the upper end of generosity; tonight she brings ginger udon noodles and tofu cold noodle salad from PCC, with a message of hello from one of their staff who knows me. To say "thank you," as an indicator of the overflowing gratitude I feel, seems paltry by comparison. How can people be so kind? When I tell people this job makes me love humanity, I think they think I'm being sarcastic. Faithful reader, you know otherwise.

Mason's daffodils get passed on to the "Lovely Ladies," my term for the group that heads up to St. Mark's for the women's homeless night shelter there. I call them that with loving irony from earlier experiences, when they were always uniformly angry. Yes, I know they have plenty to be frustrated about, but their resolute commitment to bickering was something I couldn't help smiling at. It was predictable to the point of being endearing. Having them onboard is a production: regular passengers know what they're in for, as we spend light cycle after light cycle deploying the lift and situating everybody with their bags and materials. It's a zoo.

Personally, I love it. 

I don't know if it's me who's gotten better at setting the mood, or if they've mellowed, but my original appellation is starting to have non-ironic meaning. I really enjoy picking them up, and they seem to feel that now. Or maybe they're just happier in the evening than at six A.M., when they get unceremoniously booted out of St. Mark's and left on the curb for twenty minutes. Tonight I call out a handful of farewells ("thanks for hangin' out with me!") as they– half the bus, easily– mobilize to get off. "I love you all," I holler, adding to one of them, "here, you should have these flowers. It's for all you guys." They're as thrilled as I.

"You're a lovely lady," an elderly gent says to one of the Lovely Ladies, before they all left. He's no flirt; just a complimenter. "What's your name?"
"Todd," she replies. "Short for Harry."
He waits until she leaves before waxing wistfully with his friend. "She said she was sixty-five! Are you kidding me? She was beautiful."
"Women don't age like they used to." They sigh longingly at each other as I try not to giggle. A man calls out from the sidewalk, "I loved the most recent blog story!" Now it's my turn for my heart to melt….

The doors open and close and open again, and I recognize yet another grin. Last year I wrote of Tran, the scrappy Vietnamese auto mechanic, thusly: "Certain people, in the impression they make on you, overwhelm their own physical appearance with sheer magnetic force of personality. His scrappy, frankly vagrant look doesn't register nearly as much to me as his beaming disposition."

Nobody's ever given me ice cream before. "Are you sure, Tran? Thank you, gosh!"
"Don't thank me! I have another one fo' myself!" 
"Tran! You're so awesome!"
"No. You!"

It's one of those tiny Häagen-Dazs samplers. It's delectable, but… how am I supposed to eat this stuff? Good thing the roads are empty. Although I have driven up Rainier with seaweed salad and chopsticks in one hand, vainly hoping for red lights, ice cream is another matter. I struggle valiantly until Yesler Way, where I jump out to perch it atop a solar-powered garbage can, plastic mini-spoon and all.  It should go to someone with the stress-free luxury of being able to use two hands at once. "Ice cream, everybody," I bellow excitedly at shifting figures in the darkness. "Finders keepers!"

They're confused. Who is this boy, who jumps out of his bus to leave ice cream on garbage cans in Pioneer Square and yells about it? In the receding view of my mirror I notice an intrepid soul taking up the offer. I smile to myself. This vivacious pulse of flowing life is a gift, and I must keep it alive, breathe on the flame of it, that we might feel its verve a touch longer. It is worth it.

---

Too much fun for one blog post– this story continues here!

Blue sweatshirt, flat forehead. It was the last time I ever saw him, a street character I encountered not infrequently on my Rainier Avenue route; not homeless, you understand, just scruffy. I liked saying his name. He was the definition of boisterous, and he talked way too loudly, but I didn't mind. He was a sweetheart when you got right down to it, and always reacted well when I called out: "inside voice, Little Leon, inside voice!"

This morning both of us were strangers in a strange land. I can't remember why I was driving the 70 at seven A.M., and I know I'd never seen him out in Amazon tech-head land before– definitely not at the crack of dawn. What were we doing out here? Why was I out of bed? He was more of an evenings-on-Rainier type of guy. Like me. But the day was beautiful in its own quiet way, one of those cloudy Northwest mornings, the brightening grey that blurs the moments before dawn and afterward.

"Little Leon, good morning!" 

Even as I said it, I could tell something was different. His eyes were more than sober; they were shell-shocked. 

"Hey, man, what's goin' on," he mumbled, his eyes trained on an invisible distance far beyond the material. He stumbled into the front seat. On the old buses, that was right next to me, the driver. The intimacy of it felt appropriate for our conversation, though given Little Leon's volume habits, everyone in the sparsely populated interior was surely within earshot. Somberly: "hey, guess what."
"Tell me," I said.
"My mother died last night."
"I'm sorry!" 

I looked at the moistness of his eyes, two deep brown pooling wells. There was something wrong with this day, something particular that had never been wrong before. His hush following the sentence spoke louder than any scream. We're all of us going through this life for the very first time. We're beginners in this racket, and we have no experience for something so new, so large and silent and terrible. 

I'm sorry to hear it. What an enormously forgettable phrase. People who have lost know how meaningless it is. But what can you say? Sure, it's overused, but the sympathy is real. You have to say it. You want to say it, and you mean it. I did. I meant every syllable.

Little Leon, a thin-framed broken man, African-American, too early to middle age, today clad in a blue sweatshirt, blue jeans, and battered white sneakers. Survival already trumps style for many of my street-denizen friends, but for Mr. Leon today, as would be the case for any of us, fashion was especially meaningless. He sat as a man consumed entirely by the past, the present an afterthought too bitter to bear.

"Thanks, man," Little Leon said, pausing. "It's so many ways we can go."
"Gotta go with dignity."
"What?"

There's a film that's special to me– I won't spill the title because I'm giving away the ending– about a man who slowly loses everything, including his life… but not his dignity. I've always remembered that, and I voiced it now.

"We gotta go with dignity."
"Dignity, that's right. And she did, she was beautiful right up until the end. It just hurts,"
"Aaat's heavy,"
"It hurts 'cause I was uh only child."
"You and me both!"

Little Leon leaned forward. He meant every word he said.

"Hey, lemme ask you a favor, king bus driver. By the way this guy's the best king bus driver in all the whole a Metro. He's he's he's," 
"Nawwww,"
"There ain't nobody else, cause every single time he sees me, he treats me the way he would wanna be treated."
"Thanks, man. I try!"
"You do. But lissen, I got to ask you one favor."
"What's up?"
"Just, next time you see your mom, just give her a big hug, man, hug her tight. Don't matter what she's doin', she's comin' outta the bathroom, hug her anyway."
"I will. I will." 
"It hurts."
"I'm glad you got to spend time wit' her."
"Oh yeah, my mama raised me. My dad, I never met him." The raspy inflection, halfway between tears and a hard place, the plaintive voice rising, helpless: "I tell you, when I make it to those pearly gates I'ma ask him just one thing." Trying not to shake. "I'ma ask him why he was never around, why he was never there, so I coulda maybe learned something from him." His voice cracked, and cracked again.
"Oh man, Leon. I'm sorry."
"It hurts."
"Death is so huge." 
"Just hits the bottom of your soul."
"We're gonna lose everything we love in this life," I said, half to myself, gazing out at Mercer Street, reflecting as we waited out the long light.

"Well, we won't lose it, it'll just… you know, king bus driver, I saw somethin' a long time ago that I couldn't believe. I saw this guy just bawling. Just heaving, cryin' and cryin'. I said why and he said he'd just lost his wife."
"I don't blame him."
"Oh no me neither. But I didn't know grown men cried. But he was. I mean, it was his wife! Ain't no girlfriend… so that's why I'm cryin' now, I understand."
"'It's like you lose one person and the whole world seems empty,'" I replied. That's from Joan Didion. Joan Didion, Little Leon… doesn't matter what world you come from. This stuff is all the same.
"Yeah," he agreed. "Exactly. Yeah." 

He paused. He spoke. He told me he was writing a song in anticipation of the funeral, at which he planned to sing. "I ain't done with it, but the first part goes like this." 

And then he launched into it. Reader, would that you were there. A century and a half of the gospel blues tradition had existed for the purpose of building to this moment, a broken man on a city bus singing to his friend. To hear his deep, sorrow-stricken, gospel-inflected voice… this was a blues with no affectation whatsoever. It was shattering in its heartrending truthfulness. Was I really going to tell him to quiet down now? Did I care what the other commuters thought about their morning trip to work? 

Not for a second. They one day will be where he is, and we'll give them room then, too.

I couldn't help but consider myself in his shoes. "I don't know if I'll be able to handle it," I said.
"What?"
"Oh, when my my own mom passes, I's thinkin' I don't know if I'll make it."
"Well, don't rush it, man. That's pain."
"You know though," I said after another pause, "it's better than the opposite. This is better than us dying before our parents do. Ain't nothin' worse than a parent losing their only child."
"Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah."
"This is part of the cycle."

I could see he was noticeably buoyed by this idea. Mourning happens in waves: a step forward, and three back. Though they may seem as nothing more than drops of water in an ocean, every one of those incremental steps forward is a milestone. This was a step forward, and it was just what he needed then. As we came to his stop, he exclaimed, "iss a reason I ran into you this morning, king bus driver!"
"I'm so happy you got on my bus, Little Leon!"
"You're tellin' me! Love you, be safe!"
"You too!"

I watched him walk away, a man in blue, shivering in the wind. He wasn't Little Leon anymore. He was just Leon now, and his grief will be our grief, has been our grief. Do we lose everything we love in this life? We do, except we don't lose their spirit. We don't lose the good they built in us, which is the most important part. In your good actions, the grace or humor you learned from them… that's them, reaching out at life through you, with you.

Keep that goodness alive.

You have some old photos in a box someplace. Take them out and look at them. If they're more than ten years old, they're probably chromogenic prints made in a wet lab– that is to say, sheets of light-sensitive paper coated with a layer of silver halide crystals, which, upon exposure to light (through the negative of the picture in question), were burned, changing their color. This crystal-coated paper was then fed through a series of chemical baths, developing, fixing and sealing those crystals so they maintained their newly changed appearance. 

Basically, when you're looking at a wet lab print, whether it was made in a darkroom by your mom when she was a teenager, or by the kinda-cute Walgreens photo person, back when every drugstore had those big wet lab machines (that automated the darkroom process but ultimately accomplished the same thing using light and light-sensitive paper)... you're looking at something special. You're seeing silver halide crystals that have been burned by light. The areas of the picture that are black have been burned the most, and you can tell there's some sort of organic process at work here. Look at how deep that black is. 

You're looking at an original.

Now, the cute Walgreens person isn't there anymore. If only that were the biggest loss. (S)he's been replaced by a friendly machine. You put your memory card in the slot, and minutes later you get your prints. It's quick, cheap and easy. Great.

Go home and compare them to the old family photos. The easiest place to tell the difference between a wet lab print and an inkjet print is in the blacks. Remember those silver halide crystals burned by exposure to light, causing them to turn into the most impossible, deepest shade of black? Well. All the inkjet print has to compete with that is– black ink. That's just ink. It's an approximation of black. It's not a bunch of crystals burned by light. It's got nothing on the wet lab stuff. 

The other place you'll see a noticeable difference is in the flesh tones. This is more noticeable in larger prints (or on a movie theatre screen). Flesh, especially in natural light, is made up of many different color tones. Film surpasses digital in many ways, but most obviously in tonal range. Most digital cameras can delineate thousands of colors. That sounds like a lot, until you remember even the cheapest 35mm film camera can record millions of colors. 

Also, you know that a digital picture is made up of a bunch of smaller units called pixels, each of which has only one color value. You're basically looking at a bunch of squares. The number of pixels is how we determine resolution. Film, on the other hand, has no resolution equivalent. It doesn't break down into smaller units. It just is. It's an image. It's not a bunch of squares. The silver crystals on the emulsion are visible as grain, but because they're organic and thus unpredictable, they offer a living texture that adds to the picture something tactile, rather than detracting from it. This is most visible in motion picture film. Nobody can tell you digital pixelation adds something to a picture. 

You might ask what all the point of this is. That's your left brain talking. Listen to the other side of yourself. Let your intuitive response to the images breathe.

There's a difference between looking at a replica and an original. There's a difference between thousands of colors and millions of them, a difference in the deepness of those blacks and the richness of the blue in that sky. There's something like us in the organic nature of film grain. You feel it. On some level you know it, that sensation of the familiar, authentic, natural, the details, the imperfections.... 

Quite simply, it's real, and it belongs, as you do. You are not clinical, dust-free, or mass produced; your lifeblood and the things that matter to you are not quick or easy. Why then should art, described by Viola Davis as "the only profession to celebrate the act of what it means to live a life," not be the same?

---

Given the short amount of time I've been around, there's a conversation I've had a few too many times. I'll be standing at the counter of a business that's closing, talking with the owner. People just don't want this service anymore, they'll explain, as the afternoon light fades. It's quantifiably better in quality, but it costs too much to maintain. We can't keep up. We're throwing in the towel. We'll sigh together, they and I, searching for something positive in the face of this loss.

In ways difficult to pinpoint, there has been a widespread acceptance of lower quality in many areas of life. I've had this conversation with regard not just to darkrooms, film, wet labs, and chromogenic prints, but also books, shoe repair, politeness, electronics, clothing, non-electronic interaction, children's toys, washing machines, and cars. Nylon is now deliberately made weaker to stimulate continuous revenue. Its original use was for parachuting out of planes in WWII. That's how strong it used to be (don't try that with your leggings...)!

Adapt or die, I know. Take life as it comes, and make the best of it. I really do believe in these mottos, and I have to, or else I'm headed straight for curmudgeon-land. It's all a matter of perspective. Everyone probably thinks they were born twenty years too late, as I often do, forgetting that the core of life remains almost exactly the same, and forgetting the great progress in other parts of contemporary life; we get accustomed to how things were when we were children, when we did the hard work of adapting to the world around us, perhaps assuming it would stop changing so much once we reached adulthood. 

Many of the things I love were bigger presences in earlier times. Film is an example– but the world still contains film, thank goodness, and I'll keep using it until the last lab shuts down.

"Original Hits by Original Artists," the inaugural show in the new Good Arts Building downtown, interfaces with the above issues in a number of ways I'll leave you to discover. It's a show of thirty-three "totally fake" album covers, each by a different artist, and one of which is mine. My piece was printed on Fujiflex Pearl photo paper, identifiable by a faint metallic tint in the whites.

It was the last print on that paper type made in a wet lab in Washington State.

That's a big thanks to Carl at Color 1 Photo, who closed down his stellar wet lab last week after decades in the business (I was able to get 22 enormous matte prints in at the last minute, which I hope to get the chance to show you someday...). I signed up for this show because it sounded fun, and is being put on by friends who were kind enough to invite me. But it grew into something much bigger for me, more personal.

We struggle our whole lives with change; it's usually hardest when it presents itself to us as loss. That's what my piece is about, and I suppose it's fitting it's the last of its kind. If you happen to be downtown, take a minute to stop in for a snack and reflect. I will not be able to attend the show opening, except in its very last minutes.

Details below.

---
​
Original Hits by Original Artists: Fake LP Album Covers for Imaginary Bands by Real Artists!
Good Arts Building
700 1st Avenue (at Cherry St)
"Record" Release Party (opening night reception): May 4, 6p-9
On view May 4-31, as explained by the 57 Biscayne website:

"A Release Party and reception for the artists will be held First Thursday, May 4, 6:00- 9:00 p.m. followed by the Upstream Music Fest, May 11-13, when there will be actual live (if unrelated) music on site, programmed by Upstream during the run of the festival. One of a handful of free venues in the neighborhood, it will be open from 4-10PM on May 11 & 12; and 11AM-11PM on May 13. The exhibit will also be open on the last two Fridays and Saturdays in May, from 1-6PM and by appointment."

"You don't want love. You want a love experience."

Here we are at the final five. If you're wondering why there's film reviews on a bus driving blog (!)– I worked as a film critic once, in my former life living in Hollywood. Somewhere online you can probably still find articles of me bashing 300– but we don't read about that one, especially with all these lovelies to pore over....

This is the fourth & final post in this series. For those of us late to the party: Part 3 (films 6-10), Part 2 (films 11-15), & Part 1 (Nathan weirdly justifying that it's a good idea to watch Deepwater Horizon, among other honorable mentions). Without further ado!

Image courtesy A24.

5. American Honey

"Do you have any dreams?"

Directed by Andrea Arnold. With Sasha Lane, Shia LeBeouf, et al.
Synopsis: A wayward teen girl joins a band of misfit youths as they travel the midwest selling magazine subscriptions. Theatrical Trailer 1.

Sometimes a film explores a topic so definitively, with such magisterial scope and detail, that all other films on the same subject are forced to stand in its shadow. Think Schindler's List for the Holocaust, or JFK for the Kennedy assassination. Saving Private Ryan for WWII European theatre. Other films may be made on these subjects, but they are forever doomed to be subsidiary in some sense, and they need to be specific to hold their ground (Son of Saul stands as a worthy Holocaust picture in its unique approach and minutely focused subject matter, for example). 

American Honey is one of the giant pillars. It will forever stand as the end-all, be-all portrait of what it means to be young, white, poor and uneducated in the American midwest. Since the majority of America's poverty is by far rural white poverty, and the midwest is the topographic majority of America's land mass, American Honey in some ways can considered to encompass certain dominant aspects of the American condition at large.

It is monolithic in scope and simultaneously very intimate; is almost three hours; throbs with life and color and music; is more interested in watching its characters live than teaching them lessons; doesn't have a three act structure, doesn't have much of an ending, and is as rambling and directionless as its characters' lives are… if these elements intrigue you instead of turning you away, you're in for a treat. Read (way) more of my thoughts on the film here.
​

Image courtesy Shout! Factory.

4. Tale of Tales (Il Racconto dei Racconti)

"Every new life calls for a life to be lost."

Adaptations of stories in the Pentamerone (1636), the first written anthology of fairy tales. Theatrical Trailer (US).
​
Based on the oldest recorded collection of solely ofl fairy tales, Matteo Garrone's latest is a departure from the bleak masterpiece Gomorrah and its underrated follow-up, Reality. Here is a visually resplendent, fully realized world, a film of scope and richness we associate with big-budget historical studio spectaculars– except here, incredibly, no concessions to demographic pandering are made.

The best art pieces nudge us beyond our comfort zone– how else, after all, are we to expand our perception? Garrone guides us through the baroque and grotesque with sure-handed delight, involving the viewer in a series of timeworn, universal dilemmas involving kings, creatures, princesses, promises, desires, and bonds of several kinds. The stories may be dark, but possess that invigorating sense of rapture we feel when reading fairy tales. On the strength of its craft, depth and structure, this is absolutely and incontrovertibly the best serious fantasy/fairy-tale picture yet made. 
​

Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

3. Silence

"No man should interfere with another man's spirit."

Directed by Martin Scorsese. With Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson, Ciaran Hinds. 
Synopsis: A Jesuit missionary struggles with the meaning and purpose of faith during the 17th century purging of Christianity in Japan. Theatrical Trailer.

Thoughts to ponder while taking in Martin Scorsese's latest, wildly underseen new masterpiece, an adaptation of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel (the film wasn't completed until the last minute, and despite excellent reviews never found an audience nor an Oscar presence, mostly due to the lack of time needed to mount an effective marketing campaign. If you're looking for a gem that fell through the cracks, this is it):

• Watching the film through a modern lens has its limitations. In 1639 Japan and Portugal, identity in so many ways meant religious identity. Faith played a more inextricably integrated role in daily life than it does in today's modern West. You didn't entertain the dichotomy of whether or not to be religious, as we do now; you chose how to be religious, or dreamed of the opportunity to do so. To practice as you wish remains of critical importance today, but it was an even bigger deal then. In a more central fashion it meant having control over your conception of yourself as a person.

 

• Religion has too often been the history of men telling other men– and women– how to live. All the characters in this film, despite their wildly conflicting beliefs, are telling each other the same thing: "my way of thinking is right, and yours isn't." It makes sense to me that the only figure in the entire picture to support the different faith of another is female. As Mark Rylance recently said at the Oscars– women seem better than men, for whatever reason, at putting into practice the notion that opposition doesn't have to involve hatred.

 

• Contextually, it's important here to remember that Christianity used to be an underdog religion. It was started by homeless men, and took root among poor people. It was a spiritual and intellectual rebellion against existing religious hypocrisy and systems of oppression which kept the poor at the bottom. It threatened to disrupt the class system, world slavery structures and more, this idea of validating all souls as equal. It was considered dangerous. The faith has "grown" since then, in ways better and worse, and it's not for me to tell you how to think about it. We can agree that things have changed since those early days.

 

• Most people attend films about faith with a hope of seeing a confirmation of their own views, and not much more. No matter your convictions, this will be more than that. Silence is positively drenched in nuance, and involves much multiplicity in perspectives, using a spider's web structure sourced from the book. Every character's got something valuable to say. I for one am struck by how similar the Jesuit missionaries' goals are to the Japanese inquisitor's, and how little either party seems to recognize this. Your ideas will appear on screen, and others too. Ingest, cogitate, ponder and reflect. Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

 

• Alright, tech talk! While some critics felt Marty's style here was lacking, I'd argue the aesthetics are simply less flashy, as the material requires, but no less precise. Witness the gradual shift from blue tones to deep yellows over the course of the feature, matching our protagonist's shift from confidence to confusion. Note also the stark midday lighting during the harrowing central segment, highlighting both the ugly banality of evil acts as well as being a visual echo of the harsh contrasts caused by opposing views in conflict. Not every director would set a whole act to the photographic no-no of top-down noonday lighting. The visual language is mellower here, but it's still unabashed Marty: who else would offer the unexpected double take of crosscutting from Ciarán Hinds to Ciarán Hinds, offset thirty degrees?

 

• Structure talk! Scorsese's use of narration marks his most innovative employment of that oft-overused device since his 1995 Casino (which featured, among other things, dual narration by different characters of the same events, narration interrupted by onscreen action, and bizarrely, a minor character narrating for only one scene). Here, Scorsese bifurcates the first act from the second through a subtle shift in who Andrew Garfield's narration is addressed to: from a dictated letter to a colleague to an extended prayer directed at God (or the silence of the title). This is itself bookended by Ciarán Hinds, offering brief voiceovers representing different characters; complicating things is a Casino-worthy introduction of a brand new narrator in the fourth and final act, a Dutch tradesman who barely figures in the plot but whose perspective affects our interpretation of the final trajectory in subtle ways.  ​

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Image courtesy A24.

2. Moonlight

"Who is you, Chiron?"

Directed by Barry Jenkins. 
Synopsis: A quiet, introverted young man struggles with expressing himself and his sexuality in the hostile environment of Liberty City, Miami. Theatrical Trailer.

Much has already been written on this delicate, sensitive gem elsewhere. I'll be brief. One of the year's most formally sophisticated entries, it deftly uses old film lenses, narrow depth of field, unusual color correction, and refreshingly unexpected musical choices (Face it. You've never heard a major cello octet in a movie about Miami ghettos) in order to convey the experience of a largely inarticulate young man as he struggles with how to express himself and his passions.

​Films about introverts are harder to make, and lives like Chiron's have so rarely had a place in cinema before. The Best Picture win is a watershed miracle for this reason alone, on top of overcoming concerns that it's "too black," "too gay," "too small," doesn't have stars, and more; at a $1.5m budget, it's the cheapest film ever to win the top award. 

The last two scenes (diner, apartment) destroy me. The care and love as Kevin prepares the meal, his unwillingness to give up on his belief in Chiron's suppressed but beautiful character; the honest self-awareness and double meaning of Chiron's last line. If film is the great empathy-building machine of our time, this is required viewing for all Americans.
​

Image courtesy Broad Green Pictures.

1. Knight of Cups

"[B]ecause I stumbled down the road like a drunk... that doesn't mean it's the wrong one."
​
Directed by Terrence Malick. With Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, et al. 
Synopsis: A well-heeled Hollywood screenwriter searches for direction after realizing achieving his ambitions isn't the answer to happiness. Theatrical Trailer.

The ultimate extension of cinema lies beyond narrative. Film is a great medium for telling stories, but it can do much more. Actors performing well-written lines is the province of theatre. Cinema has the ability, with its preponderance of image and sound, to be far more potent. It has no need to reduce experiences to words, no burden to simplify life into discrete units. From day one it held the promise of something bigger, deeper, larger. 

The earliest films reveled in the power not of the word, of course, but of the image. Take a look at Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, the legendary 1929 film from which it's been said the origins of all stylistic innovations in cinema can be found, but which more importantly captures the vitality of life experience without the need for a plot. You don't need story. You have life, and isn't life, after all, what happens in between?

Let Knight of Cups wash over you. Don't try to figure it all out. It's bigger than that, designed to reach you on a level beyond the intellectual. The cavalcade of stunning, entirely natural light-lit images gradually cohere into something whole: a successful Hollywood screenwriter (Bale) slowly realizing that the status of material success, long his aim, has not answered his search for fulfillment. We set goals, convinced achieving them will bring the fulfillment we dream of. What do you do when you get there and discover they don't? There's something more. It was always nearby.

That delicate something is what this film is about. 

Bale wanders through L.A., as we do through life, contemplative and observant. The camera matches his ruminative inquisitiveness, careening around people and drifting through rooms and highways, seeing beauty everywhere, photographing light as a character, as though there was a silent, benevolent presence in our lives, always just around the corner, waiting. Bale's journey toward substance and purpose, and the pearls of wisdom he gains from each of his relationships, profoundly move to me, not least because the film uncannily mirrors journeys of my own in L.A.

Also particularly gratifying to me are how Malick, in previous films largely a purveyor of beauty in the natural world, shoots L.A. with just as much verve and celebration, as though its concrete expanses were no less ravishing than the quiet hills surrounding. It's all about our perspective. His L.A. is no den of purgatory, but as ever a place where beauty is visible by those with eyes to see it, where a thoughtful calm can read the signposts all around, guides toward a higher plane of being. What other filmmaker would cut from le Jardin de Luxembourg to a drive-in burger stand in Bartlesville, Oklahoma with no apparent judgment? Who would see the same beautiful light in both places? You can understand why I like this guy.

As well, the same generosity of perspective is applied to his characters. It isn't only Blanchett's doctor or Portman's affluent wife who are the arbiters of wisdom in this picture, though they might have the more apparent intellectual capacity. Look at Teresa Palmer's stripper, whose grasp of the ephemerality of substance in Hollywood is grounded and acute ("real life is so hard to find"), or Imogen Poots' aspiring starlet, who has no status or material accomplishment to her name, yet in a sentence recapitulates Bale's entire philosophical struggle. The film may take place in Hollywood, but it is not of it.

Most complaints about late-period Malick involve critics wishing the films were more comprehensible, more digestible, plot-driven… basically, more ordinary. I say revel in the differences. It's too unlike other films to be judged by their standards. You've never seen photography this dazzling, a camera this sensitive, this untethered, interior monologue this private. It's a film about the issues we all think about, but rarely speak aloud.

That's that! Thanks for reading!
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-Some of this may sound familiar: I recently raved uncontrollably about Malick's latest, Song to Song, which is the third in an informal trilogy of films, following Cups.
-Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups” Challenges Hollywood to Do Better: Richard Brody eloquently expounds on Knight of Cups, something of a lone wolf in the face of the generally dismissive reviews it received. 
-8 Reasons Why “Knight of Cups” Is Terrence Malick’s Best Film So Far 

"The people who help you, they might not be who you thought or wanted. They might just be the people who show up."

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I make this list so you don't succumb to the strange but powerful desire to rewatch Scary Movie 5. Your life is important, and so is your time. I'm doing this out of love. Friends let friends know there's films besides Children of the Corn IV and the Ghost Rider franchise which might resonate. You read the previous post, which began a list of counting down from fifteen. This is films ten through six. Don't take the numbering seriously; I can hardly bring myself to order these things. I got so excited writing about Jackie that I almost bumped it halfway up the list; then I got even more excited about 20th Century Women, as you'll tell from my wildly rhapsodic evaluation below, in disbelief that I had it at a mere #8 instead of a more appropriate #1… before realizing I just really love films, and this year was a lil' too good to be true.
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Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

10. Jackie

"I lost track somewhere, what was real, what was performance."

Directed by Pablo Larraín. With Natalie Portman, Billy Crudup, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt.
Synopsis: Jackie Kennedy struggles with how to conceive of death, life, identity and loss in the days following her husband's assassination. Teaser Trailer.
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Let's start with what the movie isn't. It's not a biopic covering a "greatest hits" parade in Jackie Kennedy's life. Nor is it a linear depiction of the assassination from Mrs. Kennedy's point of view. We know the events of her life, and we know the assassination. This is an interior portrait. It's abstract. In times of grief, we struggle to get a handle on things, and similarly here, we watch not a story but a collection of felt moments. Depth of emotion is what links the thread from scene to scene. It's why it makes sense to cut from a Life Magazine interview to Dealey Plaza to an airplane bathroom. We don't think in order, after all. When we grieve, we're not grounded in reality; we face instead a ghost, the haunting mass of an absence which pushes everything else into an elliptical periphery.

Larraín's film seeks that elliptical realm. It's a deliciously challenging watch. The Oscar-nominated score is a boldly imposing modernist classical, half dirge, half Jonny Greenwood, a stark contrast to the heavily featured Camelot musical tune; ​Larraín's use of the rare Swedish 1.66:1 aspect ratio and choice of 16mm film takes us outside of the normal "biopic"/period cinema environment. The editing reaches an apotheosis at a point when four time periods are simultaneously intercut, and we're able to follow the emotional trajectories in each situation and appreciate how they reflect against each other. It's heady stuff. I loved it. 

In a daring move, Larraín takes us inside the car during the moment of the assassination; through cinema history, all movies on the subject have always stayed outside the car, never venturing closer than the Zapruder film does. Here, the immediate and ugly banality of death is shocking all over again, though it is a death we have seen before, but now we're alongside her in the seat, and more than ever we understand this loss was most of all, for her, a violation. The American visual lexicon of that hyper-studied moment has been expanded here.

This isn't the only film about loss on my list, but it was probably the most impacting. I've been thinking a lot about grief, and Jackie is instructive in its appreciation of the value of creating narratives to understand the losses we sustain. An exchange like this could only have been written by someone with a too-close understanding of lamentation:

Stories help us understand, allow us to live with ourselves and move forward. Jackie's courage in developing a narrative, alone, is rightly the focus here. There is so much to learn about loss and selfhood by watching this picture, aside from the already fascinating explorations of Jackie's preoccupation with legacy and determination to assert herself as more than shallow. Of indescribable value to me are John Hurt's words on how we carry forward– too delicately powerful to state here out of context. Just go see the film!

Worth noting as well is the speech and manner of the characters. These are people who came of age in the forties, and their diction, air, and politeness are not of our time. People thought differently back then, and for all the great progress being made today, there are great things to be learned here too. 
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Image courtesy Vitagraph Films.

9. Aquarius

"So when you like it, it's vintage; when you don't like it, it's old. Is that right? You guys don't know what it's like to feel crazy without being crazy and that the madness is out there, don't you?"
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Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. With Sonia Braga.
Synopsis: A vibrant, strong-willed older woman fights to keep her apartment. UK Trailer.

The most exciting thing about Aquarius, and there are many, is that the film at large convincingly posits the idea that the high point of dynamic, pulsing vitality in your life can be in your mid-sixties. And not just your mid-sixties, but your mid-sixties as a widow, living alone, and on the verge of losing your home. I'm reminded of the line at the end of Herzog's Stroszek: 

Image courtesy A24.

8. 20th Century Women

"Look. Wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed."

Directed by Mike Mills. With Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig.
Synopsis: An adolescent boy growing up in 1979 Santa Barbara is shaped by the women around him. Theatrical Trailer 1.
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Some films feel like they contain the totality of life experience in a certain place and time. In its intimate specificity, this film feels universal. My first years on this earth were in Southern California, and in the mid-eighties the visual vernacular of the previous decade was still very much in evidence. Orange and brown, pencil sharpeners in the corner, waiting by the phone. The world hadn't been digitized yet. You had to be a little more proactive, a little more skilled, and a lot more patient. Life in the Twentieth century, more than now, was something you could touch. 

As adults we forget how miserable much of growing up is. Yes, children are exceptional at being happy, but the notion that they always are is a myth we oldsters have made from our fondest memories, which thankfully loom larger than the others. Recall that an enormous amount of youth is spent feeling intense longing, loneliness, and frustration. But there is such color, too, such immediacy. We hadn't distracted ourselves out of the present yet, and we knew how to feel, how look out at the world with wonder. 

Bening is a force of nature here. Her mother character, at once too young and too old for the shifting social mores around her, is elusive. We never fully know our parents, and in like fashion, Bening is right there, and though she's fully drawn, she's always just beyond our complete understanding. Elle Fanning is another highlight in the already stellar cast, and Mills advances the "mixed-media" approach he began in Beginners, this time incorporating not just stock footage and stills but text in a very pleasing way.
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20th Century Women feels like a certain place, a time I somehow feel I know well. Maybe in its carefully observed humanity every viewer will find something similar, but with my circumstances I feel especially close to the picture. It unfolds as life does– a story only in the most general sense, more a slowly coalescing accumulation of moments, the most offhand and the most pivotal, the makings of memories we didn't know would become formative.

​Like Mills' previous film Beginners, there is such wisdom in the lines here, but this times the lessons are deeper, more richly filled in. It is so far beyond your average coming of age movie ("after that summer, they would never be the same," etc etc). You walk out of this trying to remember certain lines, without the wisdom of which you would feel bereft of something.  
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Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

7. Arrival

"If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"

Directed by Denis Villeneuve. With Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker.
Synopsis: A linguist (Amy Adams) is asked to help translate communications from alien life forms. Teaser Trailer. 
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Arrival has the nerve to start off being about an alien invasion and then end up focusing instead on human emotions, motherhood, and loss. The picture is something of a miracle, developed largely outside the studio system (it was turned down by several majors who insisted the main character be turned into a man), as engaging cerebrally as emotionally.

Most large-scale films, due to their high costs, have to appeal to a broad demographic at the box office to recoup their expenses. This one is refreshing in its refusal to do so. If you give audiences dumb movies, they'll lower their intellect to match, and if you give them heady material, they'll rise to the occasion. Which is more interesting and pertinent, after all? Imaginary alien invasions, or how language shapes the way we think and understand time? What we would make of our lives if we could see them in totality? Isn't memory something like this, as concerning our journeys thus far? The answers Arrival comes up with I find deeply comforting.

Also worth noting is Villeneuve's customarily precise use of the camera. Like Fincher, he avoids handheld at all costs, instead favoring highly controlled, exacting compositions.* The use of narrow lenses for the non-linear moments, as well as the clarity of editing in the film's climax, making comprehensible some truly mind-blowing conceptual material, is impressive. Jóhann Jóhannsson's tonal score buoys the emotions without telegraphing them.

*Read here for my thoughts and breakdown on use of visuals in Villeneuve's previous film, Sicario.
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Image courtesy Amazon Studios.

6. Manchester by the Sea

"I can't beat it. I can't beat it. I'm sorry."

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan. With Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams. Winner Best Actor, Screenplay (Oscars).
Synopsis: A man attempts to keep life going while besieged by family losses both past and present. Theatrical Trailer. 

It makes sense that Lonergan and Martin Scorsese are friends. Both directors make films about people who don't change. Think for a second how rare that is in movies… and how common it is in life. Do people, at their core, ever actually change? Only from the fifties onwards did "character arcs" become prevalent in film. Now we think they're normal, even necessary. The works of these two are refreshing in many ways, but fundamentally in a manner we often can't quite nail down; this is what that elusive spark is, that feels so much more lifelike. Henry Hill and Jordan Belfort haven't learned anything by the end of their respective narratives (Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street*)… but we have, watching them. In a way it's more powerful this way. To explain (SPOILERS):

I think the great tragedy is that throughout Manchester, every single character who's close to Affleck gets to a point where they can forgive him– everyone, that is, except himself. For me this sends a message about the need to forgive ourselves which is stronger than if he actually did forgive himself within the film.

The audience completes the film by adding its missing component in our real lives– the underlined thought that we must forgive ourselves at some point, or else life is just too heavy, as it is for him. It's a risky move as a filmmaker, but who knows, it could motivate someone in the audience to change how they think in a more powerful way than if the film provided the solution for them. Here they have to come up with it by noticing its absence. That's what's uplifting– the takeaway.

*My thoughts on Wolf, which similarly takes the tack of exposing an idea through its absence to breaking point– and then, rather than the comfortable comeuppance of other rise-and-fall pictures, indemnifies in its final shot an entity we're definitely not expecting. It's less a comedy than a lament.

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Click here for the final five!

"Save what you can of your life. Don't lose it all just because you've lost a part."
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Films have the power to touch us deeply, but not just with their words. In my opinion, movies should have more than just compelling content. They should also look great. They should compel us visually in a way that enhances the material, deepens the experience. The above line means something more when paired with that image. We expect musicians to play or sing well in addition to having good ideas, and painters, beyond choosing compelling subjects to begin with, to paint those subjects in interesting ways. I'd say the same goes for films. You want an artistically stimulating whole.

All the films below are stimulating wholes. As a photographer, I obsess particularly over visuals and how they can communicate beyond the written word. Everything on this list either looks incredible (American Honey, Tale of Tales), does subtle but complicated things with blocking and staging (The Salesman, Manchester by the Sea) or achieves strange but extreme cinematographic sophistication (Jackie, Moonlight). Friends listen to me with varying degrees of patience after we get out of a film while I rhapsodically praise and analyze a film's photography, reaching uncontrollable new levels of ecstatic art-appreciation pleasure. The density of the film medium, like the mental overload of bus driving, is one of the nervy places I like to live.

Here are fifteen films from the past year which moved me, presented in reverse order. Each has something to say about human nature and how we treat each other that I find valuable. You know that films often have multiple trailers advertising them; the trailers I've chosen to link here are the ones I feel most accurately convey the true nature of the films, or what I liked about them. Without further ado (the ado mainly being in this previous post setting it all up):

Image courtesy Focus Features

15. Loving

"I know we have some enemies. But we have some friends, too."

Directed by Jeff Nichols. With Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. 
Synopsis: An intimate portrait of the first legally married interracial couple in the US. Theatrical trailer.

​It's a quiet picture, but a deeply involving one. Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, negotiating it all with dignity and human grace. The picture maximizes its use of silence (with a killer opening shot and line which has us in suspense from frame one), and manages to feel very much of its time and more specifically, place, in sensibility– no postmodern irony or hipness here. Ruth Negga's performance is revelatory. Director Nichols has the sheer nerve to take it slow, leisurely, pacing the proceedings to the key of life these two folks lived, way out there in the hinterlands.

Image courtesy The Weinstein Comapany.

14. Lion

"She carried rocks."

Directed by Garth Davis. With Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, David Wenham.
Synopsis: The true story of an adopted Indian boy searching for his biological mother. Theatrical trailer.

I didn't need the moment on digital video at the very, very end, after the film proper is over. That was not necessary for me. It diluted the impact of the scene I'd seen five minutes prior, featuring almost exactly the same material, and which I found profoundly moving.

Aside from that, however– wow. Director Davis' willingness to let the first act (where the boy Saroo is lost in Calcutta) be as long as it is, rather than merely a prologue, is a masterstroke. This is no "Hollywood grittiness," but rather the dank and festering nightmare of really being there, lost, in a huge metropolis of strangers who don't speak your language, with no safe direction to take. Rooney Mara makes the most of an underwritten role, giving it real heft. Note Davis' use of backlighting, and narrow depth of field on closeups. Powerful, tactile use of the camera, and deserving of its unexpected directing and cinematography guild nominations.

Loss is what we're continually confronted with, more and more, as we grow; I'm particularly fascinated with films that confront it, as we must. 
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Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

13. A Bigger Splash

"She's the woman of the century, and I'm talking about her soul now."

Directed by Luca Guadagnino. With Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson.
Synopsis: A rock star and filmmaker on vacation are unexpectedly interrupted by a former lover and his daughter. Theatrical trailer.

Back when this film came out, director Luca Guadagnino was talking about how there's no longer any excuse for films to look bad photographically, and I agree. To quote Roger Ebert's review of the abysmal Punisher II: War Zone: "bad movies used to look bad. Now they look great." 

​There was never an excuse for flat lighting or over-relying on medium closeups (a la television), but more than ever there's no excuse for murky, bland, uninspired cinematography. Not everything needs to be underlit mumblecore. Technology has improved to the point where a budget isn't necessary to create ravishing visuals, and Guadagnino in particular was referring to independent films. He lives up to his words here, with a colorful, buoyant, carefree, aesthetically resplendent piece about relationships from all sides– their beginnings and ends, and the necessary challenge of transforming some of them into friendships. Exciting, thought-provoking, nervy filmmaking, wrought with primary colors and emblazoned with music of all genres.

Image courtesy Lionsgate.

12. La La Land

"I'm letting life hit me until it gets tired. Then I'll hit back. It's a classic rope-a-dope."

Directed by Damien Chazelle. With Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Winner Best Director (Oscars), et al.
Synopsis: a romance about the conflict between sustaining a relationship and following one's dreams. Theatrical Teaser.

Watch the teaser linked above. Just do it. Remind yourself of everything about this magical film that is truly great and affecting, which you may have lost sight of during the awards campaign, where its status as frontrunner unfairly clouded our view of its excellence. The film will ultimately gain more from losing Best Picture than it would have from winning, in that it prevents the film from being considered overrated. Moonlight deserves the spotlight in being superior and more timely, but this one's no slouch. You can have more than one masterpiece wandering around at the same time. We can all share in the glory here.

The film is meaningful to me for its unusual corollary to events in my personal life, its taking place in my hometown of L.A., its unabashed enthusiasm for life, its prodigious filmmaking technique, and its brazen willingness to appreciate important connections in our life even if they're finite. It's all finite. We have to face that in order to be happy. More of my thoughts on the film, Los Angeles, and why they resonate for me personally here. 
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Image courtesy Amazon Studios.

11. The Salesman

"You're taking revenge."

Directed by Asghar Farhadi. With Taraneh Alidoosti, Shahab Hosseini.
Winner, Best Foreign Film (Oscars), Best Actor (Cannes), Best Screenplay (Cannes). 

Synopsis: A man performing the Willy Loman role in Death of a Salesman is faced with a real-life situation which also requires his empathy. Theatrical trailer.

Asghar Farhadi does it again. These guys. If we remember the fact that Terrence Malick is half-Persian, it's no stretch to say the best films in the world are coming from that culture and part of the world right now. As for Farhadi, his unique approach, best described as a seemingly impossible blend of family dynamics grafted onto a thriller structure, resulting in what I call "edge-of-your-seat domestic drama," is found nowhere else.

This one involves a woman who suffers an incident (never specified) at the hands of stranger, and the fallout afterwards– differing ideas on who to blame and why, the value and purpose of vengeful behavior, and the drawbacks and benefits to exercising justice in the sense of identifying wrongdoers and punishing them– versus finding ways to move on together and get along. Farhadi once said that stories used to be about the conflict between good and evil; now, they're about the conflict between the good and the good. We see all sides here. 

In details and specifics from the other side of the world, Farhadi finds the universals. In perhaps no other filmmaker's work am I more potently reminded that only the faintest slivers of language and culture separate us. The concerns here are our own concerns, and you'll be chewing over the thematics and their ramifications for days afterwards. For one of the all-time Q&A's (where did they find an audience who asks such intelligent questions?!), click here for an hour with Farhadi at UCLA, following a Salesman screening. His easygoing wisdom is something else.

Note also Farhadi's subtle dexterity in blocking, as evidenced by this short video analysis of the same in his About Elly (2009). My thoughts on that film and the interesting history of how it came to be released in the US six years after it was made here. 

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Click here for Films 6-10!