Day: February 4, 2018

2017 Muriel Awards

Ryan Swen Lists Tags: , Leave a comment

Best Feature-Length Film

  1. On the Beach at Night Alone
  2. The Work
  3. Faces Places
  4. Princess Cyd
  5. Good Time
  6. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion
  7. The Post
  8. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
  9. 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute)
  10. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Best Lead Performance

  1. Kim Min-hee, On the Beach at Night Alone
  2. Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
  3. Rebecca Spence, Princess Cyd
  4. Vicky Krieps, Phantom Thread
  5. Cynthia Nixon, A Quiet Passion
  6. Robert Pattinson, Good Time
  7. Jessie Pinnick, Princess Cyd
  8. Kristen Stewart, Personal Shopper
  9. Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
  10. Tim Robbins, Marjorie Prime

Best Supporting Performance

  1. Hong Chau, Downsizing
  2. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute)
  3. Elizabeth Marvel, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
  4. Robert Pattinson, The Lost City of Z
  5. Tiffany Haddish, Girls Trip
  6. Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
  7. Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
  8. Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
  9. Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
  10. Lois Smith, Marjorie Prime

Best Direction

  1. Josh & Benny Safdie, Good Time
  2. Bertrand Bonello, Nocturama
  3. Eduardo Williams, The Human Surge
  4. Steven Spielberg, The Post
  5. Paul W.S. Anderson, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

Best Screenplay

  1. Hong Sang-soo, On the Beach at Night Alone
  2. Stephen Cone, Princess Cyd
  3. Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
  4. Noah Baumbach, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
  5. Matías Piñeiro, Hermia & Helena

Best Cinematography

  1. Sean Price Williams, Good Time
  2. Darius Khondji, The Lost City of Z
  3. Janusz Kaminski, The Post
  4. [no credit], Phantom Thread
  5. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Call Me by Your Name

Best Editing

  1. Nocturama
  2. Wonderstruck
  3. Ex Libris – The New York Public Library
  4. Lady Bird
  5. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Best Music

  1. Oneohtrix Point Never, Good Time
  2. Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread
  3. Carter Burwell, Wonderstruck
  4. Jon Brion, Lady Bird
  5. Bertrand Bonello, Nocturama

Best Documentary

  1. The Work
  2. Faces Places
  3. Ex Libris – The New York Public Library

Best Cinematic Moment

  1. Heartbeats, The Work
  2. Digital magic, The Florida Project
  3. Webcam transition, The Human Surge
  4. Projector breakdown, By the Time It Gets Dark
  5. Face dissolves, Félicité
  6. Photographs, A Quiet Passion
  7. Miranda’s monologue, Princess Cyd
  8. Questions with father, Hermia & Helena
  9. Dream memory, Call Me by Your Name
  10. Swan boat, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion

Best Youth Performance

  1. Millicent Simmonds, Wonderstruck
  2. Brooklynn Prince, The Florida Project
  3. Oona Laurence, The Beguiled

Best Cinematic Breakthrough

  1. Vicky Krieps
  2. Tiffany Haddish
  3. Rian Johnson
  4. Timothée Chalamet
  5. Greta Gerwig

Best Body of Work

  1. Sean Price Williams
  2. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart
  3. Robert Pattinson
  4. Buddy Duress
  5. Damien Bonnard

Best Ensemble Performance

  1. Lady Bird
  2. 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute)
  3. The Post
  4. Marjorie Prime
  5. Mudbound

Other remarks:
If it were eligible, Twin Peaks: The Return would take up most of the spots on this ballot.

10th Anniversary Award, Best Feature Film 2007

  1. Death Proof
  2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
  3. Hot Fuzz
  4. The Darjeeling Limited
  5. Persepolis

25th Anniversary Award, Best Feature Film 1992

  1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
  2. Rebels of the Neon God
  3. The Last of the Mohicans
  4. Raising Cain
  5. The Story of Qiu Ju

50th Anniversary Award, Best Feature Film 1967

  1. The Young Girls of Rochefort
  2. Dragon Inn
  3. Wavelength
  4. La Chinoise
  5. Playtime

February 2018 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Sansho the Bailiff
A man is not a human being without mercy. Even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others.

That the practitioners of these words are both empowered and powerless, torn asunder by the forces of evil in this world and yet brought back together in the most elemental ways, is the great mystery and the great beauty of this film. A fable, yes, but one with a direct conduit to the heart of human emotion.

Dragon Inn (rewatch)
Among the endless amount of perfect things that Dragon Inn does, perhaps the ending is the most telling. If the ending is abrupt, it is so because the elemental perfection of the scenario and its execution is such that there simply cannot be a continuation. The heroes ride off into the sunset, but it is almost an afterthought: what matters is the completion of the task, the visceral, punctuated triumph of motions.

Fallen Angels
Though Fallen Angels certainly has a dialogue in both narrative and production with Chungking Express, it’s important to stress just how exaggerated, how forceful so much of this film feels in comparison to even the glorious excesses of its predecessor. Especially for the almost purely sensorial opening fifteen minutes, where all narrative aside from the Wongian fundamentals of longing and disaffection is cast aside, every single shot feels nearly as revelatory as Takeshi Kaneshiro running through the blur of Hong Kong. Fallen Angels doesn’t settle down so much as overheat, but Wong running on the fumes of narrative still allows for some of the most sublime image-making I’ve witnessed. A film that feels like the Most version of itself, which means that it ranks among the Most films, for good and ill.

Woman in the Dunes
During perhaps the most primal scene among a film composed almost solely in a primordial key, the visages calling for physical titillation are concealed behind a multiplicity of masks, deliberately contrasting and jarring in their almost anachronistic qualities. In the grand sweep of surveillance on the part of both tribal masks and gas masks, an entire film’s sensibility is unlocked.

Woman in the Dunes, in its sparseness and yet its overpowering sensuality, in the perfect opacity of its central metaphor and structuring landscape, aims to capture something of both the distant past and all-too-present now; in other words, all of humanity. That it does so without ever once explicitly saying so is but the tip of its achievements.