A Toast to 2020

Loyal frustrated followers might recall that back in January, in the early days of 2019, which still felt a lot like 2018 to me, which felt oddly akin to 2017, and so on, I made one New Year’s Resolution and one New Year’s resolution only — that was, to rewatch “Once Upon a Time in the West.” And loyal frustrated followers might recall that back in July, I copped to having dithered away 203 days without watching “Once Upon a Time in the West”, leaving a mere 162 days to see my resolution through. It is 162 days later. As you might suspect by this point in the post, I have not watched “Once Upon a Time in the West”, a resolution failure which, frankly, feels apropos for 2019. Because, honestly, time here in America during the ongoing reign of King Big Brain I has essentially stopped even if it also feels endless.

And so, as we enter the New Year (the New Decade), and as the war between Millennials and Boomers rages on, I’m going back to my Gen X roots; nothing matters and nothing’s changing, who are we kidding; I’m making no resolutions. It’s 2020, here’s to “a plague of pustulant boils upon all their scurvid asses.”

Ranking the 11 Best Star Wars Sartorial Choices

The plan had been to put up my Films of the Decade on Friday and then shutter the blog for the rest of the holiday season, until the momentous annual Random Awards on New Year’s Day. However, this weekend marked the release of “The Rise of Skywalker” (The Last STAR WARS Movie...Until the Next One). That does not mean I saw “The Rise of Skywalker.” No, no, no. I like to wait a few weeks to see any new “Star Wars” so all the opposing tribes, fans and critics and critics accused of being haters and actual haters and snarky agnostics, can exhaust their hot take ammunition before I slide in, when no one’s listening anymore, with my take. But. Late Friday afternoon, loyal frustrated follower Rory, texted me the following: “The Star Wars saga is over, so it’s time for you to rank all the best sartorial choices in all 11 movies!” Indeed, everyone else is ranking all 11 movies now that the “Star Wars” saga is over (until it isn’t) and so why on blogging earth is Cinema Romantico here if not to respond from a sartorial point-of-view. Duty, I realized, called. (I did, however, slightly amend my friend’s request to simply rank the best 11 sartorial choices among all the movies because, well, you’ll see. See you in the New Year.)

Ranking the 11 Best Star Wars Sartorial Choices

11. A New Hope Star Wars – Tantive IV Rebel Troopers

I have always loved these rags because their cheap all-purpose aesthetic not only suggests insurgency finances as bargain bin but evokes the indie roots of that very first film.

10. Return of the Jedi – Leia, Camouflage

Princess cum General Leia Organa has more important things to worry about than walking the runway, granted, but she would have been the first person in this galaxy or in a galaxy far, far away to own the runway by walking it in camo.

9. The Force Awakens – Rey, Going-To-Find-Luke Getup

I like this getup because it essentially suggests that Rey is taking the same design as her Jakku Scavenger duds and then spiffing them up to begin Jedi Training. You know, like when a Track & Field athlete starts recording Olympic-quality times and finally gets sponsorship from Nike. 

8. Return of the Jedi – Luke, All Black

I already broke down Luke’s Jedi look in my separate post ranking his character’s sartorial choices, of course, but I had not seen this photo. And if fashion is as much about confidence and presentation as it is about clothes, hoo boy, Luke Skywalker was never more a la mode. Here the one black glove comes across not as a necessity but a choice, and a bold one at that, recasting himself less as a mystical knight than a Coruscant pop star.

7. The Last Jedi – Oscar Isaac, Jacket

To quote the Cuban Embassy Dude noticing Cosmo Kramer’s striking outerwear: “I *like* that jacket.”

6. Solo: A Star Wars Story – Lando, Tie

The shirt, yes, fine, solid, but the tie ties everything together by hanging loose, summarizing Lando Calrissian as a man who can get look good while kicking back.

5. Empire Strikes Back – Leia, Hoth Gear

Refuse to eschew fashion for functionality with this quilted vest and these wedge heel boots, making you equally at home trekking the frigid frozen plains of Hoth or in repose on the slopes of Alderaan’s Triplehorn Mountains.

4. Attack of the Clones – Padmé, Tatooine Leisure Wear

This proves, once and for all, that, with just a little effort, people, you can dress stylishly in the far Outer Rim.

3. A New Hope Star Wars – Han Solo’s Vest

Self-evidently seminal.

2. Empire Strikes Back – Lando, Baron Administrator Ensemble

A cool blue with a gold-lined cape doesn't mix business and pleasure but makes them one and the same so that you can go straight from the Cloud City Council meeting to the club without losing a step.

1. Attack of the Clones – Padmé’s Jumpsuit

Now I know that technically speaking “Attack of the Clones”, being a prequel and all, comes before “Empire Strikes Back” in the “Star Wars” universe, meaning a pseudo logical argument might say that Leia’s Hoth outfit was inspired by Padmé’s jumpsuit. But here, in our real reality, we know “Attack of the Clones” came after “Empire Strikes Back” which means it’s the other way around. And so, Padmé’s jumpsuit becomes akin to all these teenagers I see running around these days duplicating and expanding Alicia Silverstone’s [Chef’s Kiss] look from the Cryin’ video. I mean, I’ve never seen “Attack of the Clones” but holy shit. Making this list was revelatory for me. I don’t know where Padmé stands in the character canon with the “Star Wars” faithful, and I know this movie’s reception was lukewarm, but whatever. Padmé Amidala, it turns out, is a goddamn icon.

Films of the Decade

This was intended to be ten films. Then I decided to make it a dozen films before ultimately deciding I had no desire or reason (haven’t you heard, lists are pointless) to cut one. So, these are thirteen films of the decade. And that’s what they are. These are not the “best” films of the decade – God, no, not in any way, shape, or form. But neither are these my “favorite” films of the decade. That’s not to suggest I didn’t love them – I absolutely loved them – or that I didn’t enjoy them, which is to say I was merely impressed by them. I was impressed by them – SO MUCH – but I also enjoyed them, greatly. They are my favorites. But just calling them my favorites is not quite right. All I know is this: these were the films that stayed with me the longest, that I thought about the most, that best did, I think, what movies can and are supposed to do.

A couple notes: These films are not ranked, just in alphabetical order. No 2019 films were included if only because a list like this requires time and distance and, obviously, I’ve not gotten enough of either with any films from this year.

Films of the Decade

Cold Weather, Aaron Katz (2011)

“Cold Weather” was nominally director/writer/editor Aaron Katz’s first foray into genre filmmaking though its subdued shape-shifting was more evocative of something anti-genre, like if Richard Linklater channeled Robert Altman, or something. True to Katz’s Mumblecore roots, “Cold Weather” begins as an assortment of alternating awkward and lyrical moments between a brother, Doug (Cris Lankenau), and a sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), who have are sort of rekindling their relationship as roommates. Gradually, though, as other characters are introduced, it morphs into a DIY detective story, giving the would-be forensic scientist Doug an opportunity to eschew his aimless air and find his calling even as, amidst so many whodunit details, Katz keeps focus on how Doug and Gail navigate this bizarre turn in their life, and how it affects them, so that the mystery and its attendant answer, without us even necessarily realizing it as it’s happening, becomes something else entirely, summarized in the simple yet mind-blowing final shot. Of Anne Tyler’s novel “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant”, Nick Hornby wrote that he understood “every artistic decision, every impulse...(t)his is what I would sound like, if I ever I were to find a voice.” “Cold Weather” is what I would sound like if I were to find a voice.

Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater (2016)

Only a movie so tightly controlled could play so loose, a testament to writer/director Richard Linklater, as well as editor Sandra Adair, who craft a nearly flawless ode to the last lazy weekend before the new start of a freshman’s first semester at college. The film airdrops us into an extremely specific setting, that of ferocious male bonding, where ball busting is the native tongue and learning to give as good as you get is necessary for survival. Though do not presume that “Everybody Wants Some!!” is merely the latest visit to the frequent white male movie milieu. On the contrary, for all the machismo, this becomes an exploration of other cultural environments on campus, with the band’s good-hearted leader, Finn (Glen Powell), establishing himself as their semi-scholarly tour guide, espousing the necessity of opening one’s mind as he leads incursions into campus bars and parties where jockstraps are not the norm. Indeed, if “Everybody Wants Some!!” can be as crude as any campus comedy, it is never feebleminded, a sneak attack of sincerity and wisdom that acts its age.

Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon (2012)

We lost Jonathan Demme this decade, which I mention not just because Demme officially “presented” writer/director Adam Leon’s teeny-tiny indie about a pair of teenage of graffiti artists – Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) – but because “Gimme the Loot” possessed a generosity of spirit akin to Demme’s. If “Gimme the Loot” was mostly filmed in the Bronx, the same location of a certain scene that kicked up a lot of social media dust in 2019, culled from a movie that became famous for its cynical worldview, Leon’s movie forewent such cynicism. If Malcolm and Sofia’s attempts to infiltrate Citi Field to tag, in graffiti lingo, the infamous Home Run Apple becomes something of a MacGuffin, it also does not, evincing ideas of petty crime and race and class along the way, rendering explicit the difficulty Malcom and Sofia have in scraping up just $500 bucks to pay someone to get them into the Mets’ stadium in the first place. And if there is authenticity to the proceedings, it stems from the propulsive energy of the place, captured in Leon’s guerilla filmmaking, an effusive joy of living that manifests itself in the trash-talking performances of Hickson and Washington and how their characters don’t fall in love, per se, but realize how they feel about one another nonetheless, the kind of effortless humanism that undoubtedly did Demme proud.

Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh (2017)

“Logan Lucky” is a heist picture and the film’s own rendering, free from a traditional studio with actors working for scale, felt like a kind of heist too, director Steven Soderbergh delivering us a mid-budget genre picture that Hollywood has mostly forsaken for would-be blockbuster tentpoles. And even if “Logan Lucky” involves taking from the rich to give to the poor, robbing a corporate so and so (who might be British but whose constant gum-chewing reminded me of Jean Reno chewing gum in “Godzilla” to pose as a dumb American), emitting myriad notes of topicality along the way, this is no exercise in solemnity, forgoing kitchen sink realism to cut loose, letting oft-grim actors like Daniel Craig and Hilary Swank have fun. When Craig’s character, Joe Bang, stops for a beer mid-heist, it’s a throwaway and the movie in capsule. As LeeAnn Rimes belts out “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a NASCAR track, Joe Bang tosses back a cold one, crystallizing an America that “Logan Lucky” never condescends to, paying devout respect to where he comes from even as he steals a few moments for self-care.

Meek's Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt (2010)

In its frequent long takes detailing the painstaking efforts of an 1845 wagon train fording rivers and descending canyons, as well as its impressive devotion to naturalistic nighttime lighting in a pre-electricity landscape, not to mention how the buckskins and brawny voice of the group’s leader (Bruce Greenwood) are gradually unmasked as laughable hokum belying a directionless idiot, Kelly Reichardt’s magnum opus is sort of Showing How It Really Was. And yet, the further this wagon train goes without really going anywhere at all, the more the verité of “Meek’s Cutoff” gives way to the hauntingly metaphysical. That squared off aspect ratio ineffably closes in on the characters, making them feel as if they are wandering in a cosmic tunnel, the indelible closing lines rerouting Manifest Destiny from the Pacific to some inexplicable American abyss.

Mistress America, Noah Baumbach (2015)

Mistress America” suggests a screwball version of “The Great Gatsby” in so much as Noah Baumbach’s verbally witty, visually nimble, and robustly edited tour de force focuses on a self-invented socialite, Brooke Cardenas (Greta Gerwig). Prone toward self-regarding romanticizing rather than self-actualizing, she's seen here through the eyes of Tracy (Lola Kirke), her future stepsister and aspiring writer, whom Brooke essentially adopts as her understudy to the manifestation of the American dream. That ideal is one Baumbach gleefully deconstructs, exhibiting its illusory nature in the willful fantasies of Brooke even as the film’s multitudinous moments of joy render the dubious myth irresistible. It’s a paradox that Baumbach and Gerwig, who co-wrote the script, are content to serve as the film’s ultimate truth, one embodied in Gerwig’s incredible livewire performance. If her character is often unlikable, Gerwig herself is not, employing a fount of bullish charisma that barrels past its foundation of lies to make us believe, as she does, and against all the odds, that some orgiastic future still beckons. As caustic as she is charming as she is clueless, Gerwig earns the title of Mistress America. (I will not be making a post to officially declare my favorite twenty-tens performance but pssssst.....it’s Gerwig’s.)

Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson (2012)

Wes Anderson draws together his prominent themes of adults mourning for the innocence of childhood and children oblivious to their innocence and yearning for adulthood and then filters them through a variation of the Noah’s Flood parable. Here, on the fictional island of New Penzance, Anderson’s familiar, fastidious aesthetic belies institutions – family, marriage, the Khaki Scouts – with crumbling foundations, illustrating why two precocious kids, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), go to such extravagant lengths to flee them. And yet, there emerges a belief in institutions anyway, or least their inherent meaning, glimpsed in the best movie wedding of the twenty-tens which, to quote the officiant, isn’t even legally binding, not that it matters, true as it is in their hearts. And unlike Noah’s Flood, the impending New Penzance storm does not wipe away the people but leaves them behind. It’s up to us.

Museum Hours, Jem Cohen (2012)

It is tempting to compare director Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” to “Before Sunrise’ given that it involves two strangers – a museum security guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer), and a Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), visiting a sick relative – unexpectedly bonding in Vienna. Yet even if “Before Sunrise” was interrogative, about two people getting to know each other, the characters were telling their stories and expressing their anxieties and passions and ideas whereas “Museum Hours” is more about examining and engaging with the world around them. Cohen gives this life through the setting, yes, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where we frequently hear Johann considering paintings and considering the people considering paintings. Yet gradually the distinctions between the gallery and the outside world are erased, like juxtaposing a busy street with sounds of a museum audio guide, lyrically invoking the idea that the surrounding world is worthy of emotional and aesthetic appraisal too. And while the lines are blurred, they never fall away completely, the characters and their relationship reminding us of life’s transitory nature, as if Cohen has managed, of all things, to bring a Monet still life to life and then let us watch it slip away.

Oslo, August 31st, Joachim Trier (2011)

The expository title of Joachim Trier’s Norwegian film makes clear the movie takes place over the course of one day, August 31st, as Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) is released from a drug rehab clinic for 24 hours to take a job interview, with the hope of reintegrating into society, and see some friends. If his addiction in conjunction with the timeframe suggest the movie is put on a clock to tragedy, Trier is not really wondering When Will He Relapse? as Why Wouldn’t He? But if that sounds like a mere miserabilist set up, “Oslo August 31st”, without ignoring its character’s precarious emotional plight, underlined in just how evasive he remains – to his friends and to us – despite us spending the entire film in his company, proves strangely lyrical. The title suggests the last day of summer, when all our best laid plans have become fuzzy in the rearview as fall beckons, another cold hard winter right around the corner, an elegiac sensation embodied in the images, like the puff of a fire extinguisher under a night sky. The movie is not indifferent to the world’s beauty, in other words, and neither is Anders, though as the sort of two-part conclusion makes clear, that beauty, for him, is nevertheless not enough.

Paterson, Jim Jarmusch (2016)

Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver who’s a poet on the side – or, perhaps, paraphrasing the above “Moonrise Kingdom”, he’s a poet who’s a bus driver on the side – who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, home of the celebrated poet William Carlos Williams. That’s why the name and setting are not mere narrative coincidence but a kind of narrative rhyme, evocative of how writer/director Jim Jarmusch isn’t exactly making a movie about poetry but a movie that itself is poetry. Indeed, the almost preternaturally placid Driver exists in a state that you might mistake for aloof if he, in concert with what Jarmusch’s camera sees, quietly communicates how the character is totally in touch with the whole world around him, forever taking mental notes. And if ennui, that dangerous word, is often mined as material for ostensibly gritty, melancholy indies, here it become something beautiful, Paterson’s daily routine rendered not as drudgery but fuel for creativity, la raison d'être.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010)

In “Somewhere”, a man changes his outlook on life. That’s it. That’s the movie. Ah, but never in the twenty-tens was the old Roger Ebert adage that it’s not what a movie is about but how it’s about it lived out with as much moving flourish as in Sofia Coppola’s fourth feature film. It’s not so much in the narrative details, of which there are few anyway, as it is how Coppola subtly captures the shifts in mood and tone between a fictional movie star named Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) in isolation and then in the company of his daughter (Elle Fanning), taking similar moments of repose and altering them ever so slightly, like variations in light. A scene where dad watches daughter’s ice-skating routine is shown from afar, mostly over his shoulder, allowing us to virtually see as his perspective shifts, the fog lifting so he can see clearly now. And in doing so, Coppola is inviting us to do as Johnny does, see “Somewhere” as it is, recognize and accept its deliberate pace. Once you do, what might first seem monotonous, ignites.

Zama, Lucrecia Martel (2018)

The 1956 Antonio di Benedetto novel on which “Zama” is based takes place, by all accounts, entirely within the fraying mind of its main character, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a Spanish magistrate assigned to remote South American colony. And director Lucrecia Martel brings that interior notion to life not through typical tools like voiceover but in the indelible, eccentric framing, like the opening shot where his full regalia imparts how he views himself in his own mind even if his distance in the shot and unremarkable landscape surrounding him expose his own inflated ego. Indeed, he is both an arrogant beneficiary of colonialism and the butt of its bureaucratic joke, repeatedly thwarted in the most insulting and innocuous ways in his attempt to receive a transfer, finally opting to lead a chase for a mystical bandit, almost as if he’s trying to fashion himself the adventurous ending he thinks he is deserved. Alas, the natural world, evoked throughout in the film’s eerie sound design, essentially swallows him up, the closing moments and its accompanying slack key guitar comically, cruelly suggesting a colonialist as an idiot tourist.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (2012)

Famously recounting America’s herculean efforts to find and kill Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, “Zero Dark Thirty”, while a marvel of editing and dramatizing information, engendered significant controversy for its factual accuracy and depiction of torture. I’m not here to relitigate that case, or even defend Kathryn Bigelow’s film from such accusations, but contend that its blatant failure to interrogate the ethics and purpose of torture in the name of going for straight-forward, gung-ho revenge rather, to paraphrase the critic David Thomson referencing “The Deer Hunter’s” own historical errors, proved its point. That’s why the movie ends conspicuously not with catharsis but with CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) sitting alone in the enormous and otherwise empty bay of that military plane, asked where she wants to go and having no response, Chastain’s hollow expression cracking “Zero Dark Thirty” wide open by reframing everything preceding it as a road to nowhere.

Moments that Made the Movies in the Twenty-Tens

On my friend Ryan McNeil’s movie-loving podcast of his movie-loving blog The Matinee, where I have guested a couple times, he likes to ask people what one souvenir, so to speak, they would take away from whatever new release was just discussed. Well, a decade is a lot bigger then just one movie. So here are fourteen total cinematic souvenirs I’m taking with me from the twenty-tens.

Sicario. Convoy to Juarez. 

The critic Adam Nayman, in an admittedly less than favorable review, deemed “Sicario” as akin to riding shotgun for America’s War on Drugs. And that’s essentially what Emily Blunt’s character, Kate, is doing when an American convoy of black SUVs crosses the border into Juarez. The entire sequence, though, feels less like a metaphorical crossing over than a nihilistic descent, the mood set by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s crunching, cacophonous score, the first notes truly feeling as they are pulling us under. And despite the spatial precision of the black SUVs snaking their way down the interstate, director Denis Villeneuve keeps us off balance, switching between aerial shots that seem to make us omniscient and ground level shots where anything could happen. And if the scene is all about tension, and building to a sudden release of it, Villeneuve also knows that movies are about, more than anything else, the human face, and so he returns to the face of Kate throughout, the bellwether of this scene (and of the movie). There was no better face at the movies in the twenty-tens.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout. HALO jump.

The moment when Tom Cruise’s IMF Agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt performs a low parachute opening HALO jump over Paris does not creep up on you because once Ethan and his CIA accomplice August Walker (Henry Cavill) are standing in the cargo bay of that plane, you know what’s coming given all the pre-release hoopla about Cruise performing his own stunt. And yet, once the alarm sounds indicating that it’s time to jump and the music on the soundtrack drops, sending your stomach dropping with it, and Ethan makes the great leap, the movie sweeps you along and sweeps production notes right out the door. And though the jump was wonderful, what provides the extra push over the cliff, turning it up to 11, is that their landing spot is the Grand Palais where they will change into some natty duds and infiltrate a party, meaning they – and I still, not even a year and half later, can’t get over this – HALO jumping into the club. I said it before, I’ll say it again, I’ll keep it saying it forever: it is the kind of joie de vivre we should demand from more of our movies. And it is the kind of joie de vivre that defined both “Fallout” and “Rogue Nation”, perhaps the twin peaks of pop movie-making this decade.

Paddington 2. Home Invasion.

If breaking into someone’s home only to have that someone unexpectedly return mid break-in leading to hijinks is absolutely nothing new it has never been rendered with spirited wit equal to “Paddington 2” when Mrs. (Sally Hawkins) and Mr. Brown’s (Hugh Bonneville) bout of breaking and entering is foiled by the requisite villain Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant). And if “Paddington 2” is all about learning to get by with a little help from your friends, emblemized in Phoenix as a vain actor insistent on one-man shows, then this scene lives out the film’s truth, the ensemble working together to take some familiar sheet music and make it soar.

Creed. Max’s Steaks.

“Creed” was a good movie for a lot of reasons, and the scene where boxer Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) and his emergent love interest, the singer Bianca (Tessa Thompson), bond over proper cheese steaks was a good scene for a lot of reasons too, evincing a real sense of place through that place’s food. And if this moment, in its location, in the laid back vibe of the actors, in their plain-spoken dialogue belying so much pain, suggests something akin to an indie, it simultaneously evokes vintage Hollywood in so much as the self-evidently sensational chemistry of Thompson and Jordan, the intoxicating intermeshing rhythm of their exchange, makes the scene as much about their cooperative movie star magnetism as the characters so that, like any Movie, and all that the capital ‘M’ entails, for a moment, you wish you were at Max’s eating cheese steaks too.

Spy. Miranda Hart.

We all want a good cup of coffee, we all want affordable health insurance that will not actively kill us, and we all want a few movie lines we can take with us into the afterlife, like Pharaohs and their belongings. And here, on the cusp of the twenty-twenties, I realize the one line I most want to bring with me from the twenty-tens is Melissa McCarthy in “Spy” being admonished by Miranda Hart: “I don’t condone this sexy yet reckless behavior!”

Salt. Semi-trucks.

“You, my friend, have a mole in your group.” This is what a CIA counterintelligence agent (Chiwetel Ejifor) says to a CIA agent (Liev Schreiber), a line that is not in any way funny out of context but that made me laugh as hard as anything in the twenty-tens because of what it directly follows. It directly follows Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), a super duper sleeper Russian spy (remember the innocence of 2010!), hurling herself off a freeway overpass onto a semi-truck, and then jumping from that semi to another one, and then from THAT semi to ANOTHER one, the trucks getting progressively smaller, like she’s an Olympic diver trying to hit more and more complicated dives with less and less splash. And even if “Salt” is about that spy turning coat and then turning coat again, with a whole lotta yada yada in-between, it’s mostly about Angelina Jolie doing stuff and us watching her do stuff, like jumping onto semi-trucks. It’s why they call them Motion Pictures.

Wonder Woman. No Man’s Land.

The impetus of this scene is a charge on a German platoon to liberate a village, illustrating the film’s nimbleness at continually segueing from big battles to smaller moments, the latter crucially underlining what’s at stake in the former. To get there, however, Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) and her crack team, including Capt. Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), must cross the frightening width between trenches, “No Man’s Land”, as Steve explains it, a hopeless endeavor, he continues, that they would be wise not to even attempt. It’s a bout of mansplaining, really, one which Diana ignores, and thank God too because the ensuing scene, in which she emerges from the trench, the music seemingly carrying her, and spurs the attack, is such an astonishing jolt of pure cinema my eyes got misty. If so many movies in recent years, comic book or otherwise, have rendered untold faceless extras as mere collateral damage in the name of special effects, in this bravura sequence the faceless extras become the point as Diana refuses to write off their lives.

This is the End. Emma Watson.

The twenty-tens at the movies, whether we are discussing the movies themselves or the movie industry, was defined by the MeToo movement, Hollywood’s long, long overdue reckoning with its rampant misogyny and sexual malpractice. And though “This is the End” was directed by guys, and though it mostly featured just guys, including one who has been accused by several women of sexual assault, and was very much a guys movie, through and through, about a bunch of famous dudes playing themselves holed up in Los Angeles during what turns out to be nothing less the apocalypse, it both knowingly and inadvertently skewers Male Hollywood’s tendency not to have any idea what to do with female characters. Because when Emma Watson shows up as herself midway through wielding an axe, it suggests the guys writing the movie didn’t know any way to write her other than as Badass Lady. And they especially didn’t know what to do with her after that, which is why, when she goes to get some rest, they have an argument deliberately broaching uncomfortable territory and rather than deal with what that might mean in a broader context, panic and write her right back out of the movie.

Jurassic World. Margarita Guy.

Though “Jurassic World”, the 2015 box office champion, beating out “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in a real blockbuster Battle Royale, created a whole new dinosaur from scratch, the Indominus Rex, an inadvertent dinosauria representation of sequel-itis, what will stand the test of time isn’t Indominus Rex but Margarita Guy. He’s an extra who, when the eponymous theme park inevitably falls under attack from the beasts caged within, makes time to grab his margaritas when fleeing. He was played by none other than Jimmy Buffett, actual owner of Margaritaville, one of which is attached to the movie’s Jurassic World, a little joke that’s nominally supposed to neutralize the obvious corporate tie-in. And if it deftly illustrates where Hollywood movies are headed, if they aren’t there already, with corporate sponsors having as much creative control as, uh, the creators, the immediate proliferation of Margarita Guy memes across the Interwebs in the wake of the movie’s release embodied something else. From the endlessly recycled GIF of Leo as Jay Gatsby in 2013 offering a toast, a fundamental misunderstanding of the story’s inherent darkness, to just the other weekend when “Marriage Story” was released via Netflix and turned Twitter less into a conversation about the film’s aesthetics than an unrelenting opportunity for screenshots cum wacky, wacky GIFs, the future of the movie in the streaming age might well be cherry-picking images and then disseminating them as memes, stripping them of their original meaning and transforming them into fodder for social media comedy.

First Reformed. Ending.

In cribbing from Bergman’s “Winter Light”, Paul Schrader made a parable for our times by filtering the crisis of faith of a small town Reverend (Ethan Hawke) through the climate crisis as his attempts to help a conscious-stricken parishioner cause him to think about going full-fledged eco-terrorist. If that sounds melodramatic, Schrader’s presentation is much more straight-forward…until the end, that is, when so much pragmatism erupts into something like ecstatic ambiguity. That ambiguity, though, was not Schrader hedging. If the end defies explanation, well, that’s only because it’s an honest to goodness miracle.

Spring Breakers. Opening.

It shouldn’t work, this prologue, which is pure smut, a montage of drunken, leering, barely clad kids on the beach. Director Harmony Korine, though, pulls it off, not least by choosing the title track to the second EP by EDM wonderboy Skrillex, “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”, to accentuate the brief sequence. Robert Christgau, the self-appointed Dean of Rock Critics, compared the song’s indelible groaning synthesizers to “doom dybbuks.” Dybbuks, in Jewish mythology, are believed to be the dislocated souls of the dead, which is to say Korine is painting these performative degenerate spring breakers as doom dybbuks themselves, signifying how a scene’s musical cue can transform a horrendous sight into a heavenly one.

Land Ho! Dinner.

In “Land Ho!”, two retirees, Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) and Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson, who passed away in 2018), take a trip to Iceland to, as Mitch himself says, tongue partially in cheek, get their groove back, when they meet up with two young women, Ellen (Karrie Crouse) and Janet (Elizabeth McKee), for dinner, you’d be forgiven for thinking events are on the verge of taking a puerile turn. But as they do throughout, co-directors Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens subvert our expectations, transforming this into an honest, rhythmic getting-to-know-you give and take, the framing, maintaining intimacy by forgoing wide frames to simply cut between the four characters, all conveyed through a handheld camera that isn’t jittery, exactly, more enlivened, characters not on edge but in tune, the moment when the aged, spurred on by the youth’s mid-scene discursive monologue on Jewish Mysticism, reject the superficial reality embodied in the bittersweet acceptance of faded youth and tap into a divine energy rumbling just underneath.

Phantom Thread. Daniel Day-Lewis Ordering Breakfast.

We lost Daniel Day-Lewis in the twenty-tens. I mean, we didn’t lose him, of course. He didn’t die, he merely retired, but still. This is DDL, man. This is like when Hagler hung up his gloves and never came back. What do we do? What can we do? Let’s listen to him put in that breakfast order one more time.

Mistress America. “Welcome to The Great White Way!”

The American Dream probably was never much more than a huckster’s slogan to begin with considering that F. Scott Fitzgerald was taking it apart way back in 1925. Yet its myth survives because for so much cynicism inundating culture we nonetheless remain inherently romantic, the dueling notions at play in Brooke Cardenas (Greta Gerwig), protagonist of Noah Baumbach's “Mistress America.” She is introduced descending the staircase at the TKTS stand in Times Square, arms spread wide to greet her soon-to-be sorta protégé , exclaiming in the manner of a New World tour guide “Welcome to The Great White Way!” Alas, she’s misjudged the number of stairs and with several still to go is forced to wobbly maintain her starlet facade. And she does. She never relents; she never gives up on the persona; she will grin and bear it in the face of all obstacles. And in that moment, in Gerwig’s immaculate visage, we see The American Dream itself laid bare. She’s wholly sincere; she’s also full of shit.

Some Movie Shots from the Twenty-Tens that I Loved