It’s odd to look back on now that growing up I didn’t particularly care for movies at all. I had nearly every Disney musical on VHS, as I’m sure much of my generation did, and as a teenager I’d go to the theater with my friends for the event releases, but it wasn’t a passion. My passion was video games. Movies were just entertainment.
That didn’t change until 2012, when the combination of a fresh Netflix account and an amount of free time only a failing student could have prompted me to watch more TV than I ever had before or since. This was the peak of the Breaking Bad and Mad Men renaissance on streaming, back when whatever spell House of Cards and Sherlock cast to convince us they were good still held strong. Once upon a time “Netflix” was synonymous with “curated quality” and not… the exact opposite.
I made a decision to get more in tune with the cinematic zeitgeist. I turned to the best indicator of quality I could think of: the Academy Awards. (I challenge any cinephile who scoffs at the Oscars to look me in the eye and say they never had a similar phase.) I set a goal to watch all nine of the Best Picture nominees. I didn’t succeed – and still haven’t. I simply will never find the time for Silver Linings Playbook. One movie I did watch was Life of Pi, Ang Lee’s spiritual and technologically daring adaptation of the Yann Martel novel. The one-two punch of Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild stirred something in me. I finally felt in my gut that mythical magic of the movies.
By 2016 I was watching enough new releases a year that I decided to start posting a top 10 list. (2016 was also the first year I actually watched every Best Picture nominee before the ceremony.) I made it a tradition, and in a few weeks I’ll be sharing my 10th annual list. To commemorate the anniversary, I figured it’d be fun to revisit my first five lists to see how my thoughts have changed. I always qualify my lists by saying they are of the moment and instantly invalid. Here I will show what I mean by that.
Behold, publicly available for the first time since I deleted my Tumblr, my Top 10 Films of 2016 of 2016. As a reminder, I make the list before the year ends, so I often don’t have a chance to see late releases before the deadline as professional critics or LA county residents do. Hence the convoluted title.
Which movies spoke to me in 2016?
Yikes.
Let’s start with the positives. I stand by that top two, and I’m proud of myself for getting them in the correct order. People who knew me at the time might remember how obnoxious I was about La La Land. To this day, the ending of La La Land forms a small but load-bearing piece of my identity as a person.
Moonlight, though… Moonlight is a generationally important movie. To whip out an aphorism I draw on a lot: if I could force everyone in the world to watch a single movie, Moonlight would be a top candidate. Watching Moonlight makes you a better person. So it hurts that its reputation these days is entirely for the mix-up at the Oscars ceremony.
Next, to further procrastinate acknowledging the multiple Disney cartoons, I want to address the two on the list whose mere eligibility I would reconsider. O.J.: Made in America is a comprehensive eight hour documentary about O.J. Simpson released in five segments by ESPN as part of their 30 for 30 series. If you’re thinking “That sounds like a miniseries, not a movie,” then I fully agree. So does the Academy, which revised the rules after it won Best Documentary so that it wouldn’t count if released today. But since it did have Oscar buzz, I counted it as a movie… plus I think I was eager to have a documentary on the list. Miniseries were just treated differently back before streaming services made them the main form of television. For what it’s worth, I still highly recommend it.
It’s easy to dismiss stand-up specials as “not real movies” but I think there is potential for formal inventiveness if you just accept it as a genre. Adam Sandler’s two Netflix specials, 100% Fresh and Love You, come to mind. Bo Burnham has a particular millennial sensibility, a blend of absurdity as comedy with absurdity as tragedy, that I guess especially appeals to me. I wonder if all his prior work now lives in the shadow of Inside or if that’s just me and the world has already forgotten about Inside. I’ve revisited Make Happy over the years and every time I’m surprised at how hostile Bo’s stage persona was. It’s lost enough shine that it probably wouldn’t make the cut today, but that’s not a matter of its genre. I stand by its inclusion at the time. Also: Bo, where have you gone?
Quick hits:
- Every time I look at this list I think “Really? Sing Street?” and then every time I rewatch Sing Street I feel vindicated. Lovely film, excellent soundtrack, deserved an Oscar nomination if they had campaigned “Drive It Like You Stole It” instead of the dreary Adam Levine track.
- Submitting Swiss Army Man here as proof I was hip to the Daniels before it was cool.
- Hunt for the Wilderpeople: Arguably Taika Waititi’s last good movie, if you want to be rude to Thor: Ragnarok. You have to keep in mind the director of Thor: Love & Thunder and Next Goal Wins was once the director of Boy and What We Do in the Shadows.
Alright. No more avoiding it.
Zootopia is a bad movie. Zootopia is a C-tier Disney at best. It is a ends-with-a-dance-party-level lazy children’s cartoon that sleepwalks through its rote anti-racism metaphor so hard that it accidentally becomes a movie about how sometimes racial stereotypes are valid. Revisiting contemporary reviews now I’m a little surprised at how universally positive the scores were, but then I read the text and am transported back to the 2016 election. I think the bar was, understandably, lower. That plus the typical Disney quality equals 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. I wonder if we’d still have been so positive on Zootopia in a post-Paddington 2 environment.
Moana… is fine.
If I were to redo this list now, it would probably look something like this:
- Moonlight
- La La Land
- Paterson
- The Nice Guys
- Sing Street
- Silence
- The Handmaiden
- Arrival
- Hail, Caesar!
- Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
That’s an eyeball estimate. I didn’t do the whole rigamarole I usually do at the end of the year. Really goes to show how many of my favorite movies I don’t, and can’t, get to seeing within the year they release.
Next week, I’ll grade my 2017 list. It’s not better, but it’s definitely weirder!
