Split Infinitives

For nos. 50-21, go here

20. Krisha

When you grow up in a family with a lot of drunks, you tend to treat the holidays like secret warfare. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt. Trey Edward Shults must think in a similar fashion, given that he loaded this tense, menacing family drama — his debut — with several relatives and loosely inverts his own life story into this portrait of Krisha, an estranged matriarch who reemerges for a Thanksgiving gathering that goes to pot. Had a few quivers of recognition during this, when the whiskey takes over an uncle or a parent and the night turns from friendly small talk to contentious, instigating banter, to outright yelling to Christ, someone pulled the tablecloth and all the food onto the ground in a rage. How to make a pill-popping, wine-guzzling mom seem like Cthulhu? Low angles, slow motion, ominous score, crushing silence, quickening pans. It’s all from a familiar playbook, minus the zombies and the vampires. I look forward to Shults’ follow up, an actual horror movie, with great anticipation.

19. Don’t Think Twice / 18. La La Land

How precious! A twin bill about people who like to put on a show. I think these movies could borrow a little bit from one another — some of Don’t Think Twice’s empathy for partnerships and some of La La Land’s commitment to [jazz hands] singin’. One needs more dazzle, the other needs more sense. They share a funny failure in convincing the audience how talented its protagonists are — Mike Birbiglia’s improv troupe isn’t terribly funny and Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone can’t much sing. And there are moments in each when I have no idea why characters do the things they do — human frailty is one thing, but plot device is another. (Does Emma Stone’s character not understand how touring works?) Nevertheless, I will always tolerate and usually dig the solipsism that goes into creative people eyeballing the power of creativity. When La La Land wins Best Picture in February, we can all wring our hands about the portrayal of LA or the reediness in Ryan Gosling’s voice. Until then, enjoy.

48. Don’t Breathe / 34. The Conjuring 2 / 17. The Witch

Horror as grotesque, horror as commercial vehicle, horror as personal statement. Which is which? It’s not as clear as it seems. Don’t Breathe is the most patently ill-making of the three, what with its turkey-basting pearl-clutcher moment; The Conjuring is the easiest to be cynical about, a sequel to a successful mid-tier would-be franchise; and The Witch looks and sounds like haughty prestige. But all of these movies were hits at the box office, all of them were both more disgusting and safer than one might expect, and all three explain why it’s easier to get a horror movie made in 2016 than virtually any other kind of movie. Chris did a nice job of explaining that here. None of these would enter any horror pantheon, but they’ve got technique in spades.

16. Hell or High Water

I guess this is about Trump’s America? That’s what people keep telling me. Whatever. The real bank robbers don’t live on dilapidated Texas farms.

15. Sully / 14. Hail Caesar

I love old guys who don’t have to try very hard to be great. This is probably the 9th best film made by Clint Eastwood as a director and the 13th best made by the Coens, but good enough to sit so high on this list. Would that it t'were so simple.

13. The Lobster

Let’s say the first half of this is a comedy and the second half is a war movie. Has anyone ever pulled that combination off? Yorgos Lanthimos, a Greek filmmaker making his first English-language movie, has a knack for the absurd, a nice touch with deadpan dialogue, and a way with actors that make them all seem like sad turtles. See this movie with a partner then get into a fight about it over dinner.

12. Silence

To Martin Scorsese, this is G_d. On the other side of that exchange is a towering, beautiful, self-lacerating testimony to how being raised Catholic fucks with you. I was there with Scorsese for most of it. I can admire the effort, intelligence, know-how, and profundity it takes to make a movie like this, for what will likely be a limited audience. I can’t quarrel with artists that want to express themselves unencumbered. I’ll never watch it again.

11. The Nice Guys

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then Shane Black is crazy like a fox. I don’t know how many times he can pair up an odd couple and send them off in Los Angeles hijinks and pretend like we didn’t see this in ‘87 and '91 and '04. Doesn’t matter. Playing the hits has its own rewards.

10. Manchester by the Sea

I don’t have some sweeping defense. It’s not terribly cinematic and its creator is a writer first. It’s modest. But there are three scenes that stole time. It’s OK if this movie doesn’t solve the world’s problems.

9. Weiner

Same here. I often think about whether co-director Josh Kriegman told Anthony Weiner that he had landed on a definitive vision of political vanity and pride-before-the-fall self-belief before the public saw his movie. Kriegman and his partner Elyse Steinberg convinced Weiner to make a film about Weiner’s attempt to re-enter politics with the former congressman’s understanding that it would be a redemption story. Obviously, things changed. What transpires falls squarely in the fake-it-so-real camp. That Weiner resonated as a figure of political import even after this movie is more proof that 2016 was bad Sorkinese from start to finish.

8. 20th Century Women

Single moms are important mysteries to young boys. As a teenager, I was awful to my mother and sought arguments buttressed by logic (“But isn’t better it if I drink at home than at a stranger’s home?”) with no care for her feelings. I have no idea where the impulse comes from, and I regret it, though I’m glad it happened. I witnessed enough breakdowns to have a little more empathy for the ones in my own adult life. Surrounded by women, the Jamie character in Mike Mills’ movie at first seems like the protagonist and then quickly becomes the inciting incident, more of a thing to be discussed than a character to be understood — this is a useful way of considering all teenagers boys. All the actresses here should be handed golden stuff. Also: Billy Crudup (a wily bastard in Jackie, too) should get to do whatever he wants in movies.

7. Arrival

Like if Hollywood got really drunk and gave its car keys to a French mime and told him to go make Independence Day. Denis Villeneuve has the quan.

6. De Palma

Here’s a nice example of how to make a conversation with an old man the most interesting thing you’ll see for months at a time. Noah Baumbach makes scratchy, urbane city-dwelling dramedies (he does it well) but you’d never know he has such wonderful access to the profane glory of Brian De Palma’s work. He and co-director Jake Paltrow treat De Palma like Mozart here, letting him revel in his own intelligence, sigh his way through failure, ably gossip about colleagues, pitch the undramatic technique of filmmaking with a fervor, and dismiss moments of emotional crisis with a soft lament. I fall asleep watching this movie at least once a week. It really calms me.

5. Everybody Wants Some!!

Just about the best sports movie since Friday Night Lights. It’s like going to dinner with an old friend who tells good stories about his time in college.

4. Moonlight / 3. Green Room

The light and the dark comes at you all at once. Draw whatever meaning you want from this fresh hell and this sunbeam colliding.

2. OJ: Made in America

I was fortunate enough to see this as a work-in-progress in October 2015, when Ezra Edelman was still looking for branches to prune and I was still an employee of ESPN. We watched it in a small group, mostly comprised of executives overseeing the film. After it was over, I was asked to share a few thoughts and spoke with Ezra, who was tentative and self-critical. It was evident that what I’d seen, even in a slightly more primal form, was a major work of journalism, documentary, cultural criticism, and social synthesis. I was completely bowled over and became a quick evangelist for the movie. That Ezra was vaguely unsure and so open to my thoughts, to so many people’s thoughts in that environment, was one of the more impressive experiences I’ve had around a creative leader. He really wanted his film to be special, important, correct, thoughtful, and seen. He had given himself to it in a way that influenced how I’ve given myself to what I’m working on right now. It’s hard to accept criticism, let alone ask for it, beg for it. Ezra was wide open. No surprise he landed on something so unique and powerful.

1. A Bigger Splash

Director Luca Guadagnino’s graduate thesis was on the films of Jonathan Demme, who makes movies about ramshackles families, bound by blood or otherwise. So you can see where Guadagnino gets off. But unlike Demme, Guadagnino is a sensualist — he wants to see bodies pulsing, elongating in the sun, swimming in the mud pools, thrashing against each other, wrestling, dancing, screaming, singing, smearing, dressed impeccably. This movie — about a Bowie-esque female rock star on vacation with her lover in Pantelleria — quickly becomes a story of incestuous lust, jealousy among friends, the bonds forged by former lovers, the limits of luxury, and the power of “Emotional Rescue.” For the life of me I can’t understand why critics have not been raising this movie above their heads like Simba, declaring the birth of a new lion king. Guadagnino is so special, so rapturous and unafraid of the pretense and the romance needed to make different, beautiful things. It’s inspiring! His next movie is a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which is one of my favorite films by another of my favorite lunatic filmmakers, Dario Argento. There’s no reason to remake that movie, about an all-girls boarding school that doubles as a coven, but since Guadagnino is in, I’m in. I have a feeling it’ll sit near the top of this list in the new year, assuming we are still watching movies and breathing air. See you then, in this space, in 12 months.

***

And, as always, with apologies to the following movies that I am eager to see, but have not yet had the chance:

Always Shine, Pete’s Dragon, Deepwater Horizon, The Handmaiden, Zero Days, Sunset Song, The Childhood of a Leader, Train to Busan, The Accountant, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Queen of Katwe, The Love Witch, Cameraperson, Little Sister, The Wailing, The Edge of Seventeen, Hacksaw Ridge, Tickled, Certain Women, Christine, Fire at Sea, Elle, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Moana, Allied, Things to Come, A Monster Calls, Passengers, Julieta, Hidden Figures, Live By Night, Toni Erdmann, Paterson

This year, I spent more time writing about movies than ever. Someday, I’ll spend as much time writing about them as watching them. But I’m still playing catch-up, trying to build a library inside my mind (and my home) for reasons I’m never quite sure about. Is it comprehension? Definition? Obsession? Routinization? Fun?

In any case, I have once again compiled a list of the movies I saw this year that I liked best. I present no guidelines here other than I took something away from these movies, more than the other 100 released in 2016 that I saw. Keeping up is difficult, and while I have enjoyed writing more about them, I continue to observe daily film writers with a kind of awe. It’s hard work, ascribing meaning to what could easily be deemed meaningless. If you care about movies, still, you accept the transporting, political, all-consuming qualities they imbue. No matter how many above-average FX television programs I get in in 2017, I’ll continue to seek out the movie experience.

Here are the lists from years past: 2011 I 2012 I 2013 Pt. 1, Pt. 2 I 2014 Pt. 1, Pt. 2 I 2015 Pt. 1, Pt. 2 

And now, this year.

50. The Neon Demon

As much an indictment on a strange year at the movies as an ode to aesthetics, Nicolas Winding Refn finally lost a lot of fanboys like me with this overweening and desperately beautiful horror movie about the death in vanity and the vanity in death. Ho-hum, another message to Los Angeles from the dead letter office. But I still like how Refn paints and I can feel choices everywhere. All movies are built upon choices, but many of them are made in a hurry and some are executed by people just trying to do their job. Refn is obsessed with precision, buffing his movies to sheen. He’s an auteur any control freak can love.

49. Rules Don’t Apply

I wrote a bit about why this movie didn’t connect with audiences last month, but didn’t spend too much time unpacking this Frankenstein monster. There’s a lot happening here, and given that Beatty, like Refn, is a notorious controller of execution, it’s funny that this thing is so sloppy. Still, lots to like. Questions of faith hung like lanterns over so many movies this year, and even this Hollywood trifle uses God, sex, and fealty as central themes. I particularly like the notion of sex, not money, as the power cube of Los Angeles and celebrity. Sensing a theme here?

48. We’ll get there

47. Southbound

Just a teeth-gritting, bone-sawing horror anthology — these sorts of movies have become passé in recent years, but this has viscera you can’t get out in the wash. There are six horror movies on this list, and several more that could be classified as such, under the right circumstances. But while I wouldn’t say it was a banner year for the genre, Southbound — cheap, dirty, and lean — is emblematic of the continued utility of the genre as distracting tool and emotional receptacle. It was a good year to scream and wince.

46. Finding Dory

Here’s some truth: I’ve only seen one hour of this movie with the sound on. I caught the final 40 minutes as silent film on the back of an airplane seat, as the sound malfunctioned traveling through a bout of turbulence. It didn’t matter. Praising Pixar is like analyzing the San Antonio Spurs — we all know their tricks but the opposition is helpless against them. I tend to think about the studio the way I think about BBS in the ’70s or RKO in the ’30s — it feels more surprising when they miss than when they hit. But recent years have revealed cracks in the façade and an overindulgence in the sequel. The originals have been plagued by managerial problems and Disney’s traditional animation group has begun to thrive under the leadership of former Pixar paterfamilias John Lasseter. (One of its movies ranks higher on this list.) Still, there are weird, winning moments here. This is corporate welfare I can support.

45. Oasis: Supersonic / 44. Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall

These two movies — modest in execution, grand in the telling — capture why mythos can be as important as music. Spike Lee’s vision of adolescent MJ through the break point of Off the Wall is a sweet, surging, sometimes analytical understanding of immeasurable talent and the right circumstances. A talking head doc is the least ambitious form, but when the raw text is this rich, you don’t need much more. As for Oasis, well, at least we didn’t lose the Gallaghers in 2016. I caught this one with two of my closest friends, one an Oasis fan, the other deeply opposed. We wandered out into the screening room parking lot nattering on about the band’s value for almost an hour. Oasis: Supersonic did its job.

43. Deadpool

Nihilism seemed so fun in March!

42. Everything Is Copy

Because I am shallow, I tend to respond to documentaries built around personalities, not notions or struggles. I do watch and engage with those — for the first hour of Ava DuVernay’s 13^th, I was enraptured. But I like celebrity and ego and the dissection of artistic pursuit best. Building a doc around Nora Ephron is fulfilling prophecy — I suspect she would have liked this mostly soft-focus portrayal of her life made by her son, Jacob, because it covers triumph and failure, but with emphasis on the success, and a turtleneck pulled up over the failures. I like Ephron’s movies and like her writing, even though it is the patient zero for a particular and boring form of personal essay that has become increasingly pervasive in modern media. Ultimately, this is a kind thing for a son to do for his mom.

41. Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping

The joke eventually gets old, but this movie has something no other studio comedy had in 2016: persistence. It never stops (sorry), never breaks character, never taps out. The movie it reminded me of most is Wayne’s World 2, which similarly committed to a bad premise built around the music industry, larded it with famous people, and finally got sort of ridiculous by the end. But I like Wayne’s World 2, and watched it dozens of times on HBO as a teenager. If this were a different decade with different consumptive models, I would watch Pop Star over and over again, too.

40. Nocturnal Animals

What a mess! Points for Going For It, I suppose. I heard Tom Ford talk about his second feature recently, and he routinely raised Alfred Hitchcock as an influence, which is evident in all the doubling, deception, and high anxiety that runs through this. None of the mystique though.

The supremely dismissive have described this movie as “Amy Adams reads a novel in bed,” and I like that joke. That’s also essentially the plot summary of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and we never squeal about that narrative device, also superfluous. Then again, TPB didn’t have Nocturnal Animals opening sequence. Similar to my affection for The Counselor, which operated as a kind of high-toned Fuck You for cocktail party Cormac McCarthy fans, this movie takes the elegance and austerity associated with Ford’s directorial debut A Single Man and drags it through the desert in its underwear. One note: given how entertaining, over-the-top, and outstanding Michael Sheen, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Laura Linney are in this movie, there should be a special dispensation to the directors of the world to make one Fuck It Performance movie every year.

39. Kubo and the Two Strings

I have to admit that I couldn’t understand the plot of this dizzying, gorgeous stop-motion animation feature from the undefeated Laika Entertainment. In that way, it reminded me of some of the Shaw Brothers martial arts movies I really like, which meld metaphysical fight sequences with seriocomic family drama. I can’t imagine trying to explain this movie to a child, let alone how it got funded. No matter. Smoke a joint and check it out.

38. We’ll get there

37. Captain America: Civil War

In defense of Marvel … I’m already tired. I have come to enjoy the chemistry among the Avengers actors, and unlike the recent installments of Avengers, Captain America, and Iron Man movies, this one doesn’t quite put the world in the balance in the same way as its predecessors. And because of that, and because its big fight scene takes place at an airport hangar with no civilian casualties, I found a little more light in my heart when it ended. What can I say at this point, it was fun watching Spider-Man and Ant-Man doing battle. I’m just a human man-boy!

36. Love & Friendship

As I said, I’m just a human man-boy, helpless against the forces of Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny gossiping to one another in a period Whit Stillman movie. This is The Avengers for people who shop at the MOMA Design Store.

35. Sing Street

Why are the only good movies about people putting a band together set in Ireland? This is like The Avengers for people who have seen The Commitments at least 12 times and have an uncle named Eammon. OK, that’s a bit much. I do not come from a terribly musical Irish family, but I have always been endeared to the winsome, full-hearted Irish spirit of music. It’s my biggest sentimentality, which is at war with my sense of reserve and controlled Catholic impulses. My step-mother’s grandmother insisted upon singing “Danny Boy” at weddings and funerals, and while that sounds mortifying, it was a plucky thing to see in the real world. She did not give a fuck what people thought of her voice or her performance or your sense of dignity. I admired that while cringing through it. That’s sort of how I feel about John Carney’s movie.

34. We’ll get there

33. American Honey

Also, a mess! But unlike Tom Ford’s movie, Andrea Arnold’s road-trip saga with a band of merry miscreants has no form, no framing device, no desire to stick to narrative function. It goes goes goes, free of GPS. Is it rude to call it “impressionistic”? Sasha Lane, in her first film, and Shia LaBeouf, who is a legend, have maniac chemistry. When they are clutching one another, they look like the only two animals that have ever lived. Riley Keough, as the Griselda Blanco of the door-to-door magazine racket, is a stone killer. And I really hope that young, lost teens hustling for money spend all their time listening to ILoveMakonnen, late-period E-40, and Migos, as the young stars of this movie do through the movie. That would make me feel better about the country’s youth. This slushing, shimmering, quivering movie feels forged outside of 2016, even if the visions of working-class people — a truck driver, a cadre of oil workers — and their connection to these aimless kids is even more resonant in retrospect. At one point, Lane’s character, Star, finds herself in a rough-hewn driver’s semi, listening to Bruce Springsteen’s cover of “Dream Baby Dream” and for a second it seems like things are about to go bad. Then they start singing together, and the scene rides out, before Star gets to her destination and hops out. Arnold thinks we’ll all get along, I think.

32. Kate Plays Christine / 31. The Invitation

More horror. Kate Plays Christine is a looking-glass doc-drama hybrid that follows the actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to portray Christine Chubbuck, a Florida newscaster who committed suicide on the air in the ’70s and partially inspired Network. This movie, which tries to do a handstand at the bottom of a swimming pool, wants to show the terror of suicide, the difficulty of inhabiting real people on screen, the gross insularity of acting, the uncaring nature of other people, the Florida Man nature of Florida, the price of gun death, the expanse of the documentary form, and a lot more. Robert Greene’s movie is a sprawl and leaves a lot of meat on the bone. I gazed at it more than liking it, but it has a lot to say. I feel the opposite about Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, which held me in a chokehold for its running time and then thwacked me with a great, visually loaded ending. But it doesn’t really stand up to inquisition and I have found its “The world is a cult!” theme a bit unnerving and condescending. Post-election there’s a lot of hay to be made of its themes, but that feels too pat for a movie that is initially bound by the dissolution of a marriage and the threadbare ties that keep some friendships — especially LA friendships — in place. All that said, as a vision of awkward, mildly terrifying Los Angeles dinner parties, this movie has no equal.

30. The Light Between Oceans

I wrote about this movie earlier this fall, and have been slightly confused by the mild response it received. It feels very much in keeping with old-fashioned American epics — expansive visuals, remote locale, movie star parts, beauty undercut by tragedy, a successful literary adaptation, etc. etc. But people didn’t want it.

29. The Shallows

Jaume Collet-Serra has never made an unentertaining film. Don’t @ me.

28. Zootopia

Here’s where Lasseter’s influence creeps on Pixar. Ten years ago, the prospect of Disney proper lapping Pixar and making a noir thriller that doubles as an examination of tolerance that is also one of the most deftly animated “talking anthropomorphized animals” movies in recent years would have been unlikely. But something that started with the video game synergy of Wreck-It Ralph in 2012, transformed the scale of Disney Studios Animation with Frozen, modernized fully with Big Hero 6, and ultimately achieved a moment of cultural profundity with Moana, crested artistically with this movie, which has more wit and ingenuity than most adult thrillers.

27. Loving / 26. Jackie

There are different ways to handle history. I had a nice long chat about Jackie recently over dinner with friends, and the takeaway was clear: this felt both too charitable and unnecessarily uncharitable to the sphinxlike Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — the historicity seemed more essential to the telling than the person. But the engine is Natalie Portman’s absurdly committed, sometimes unfortunate, sometimes rapturous performance. It’s quite a stew, all noise and swirls and thrashing confessions. Loving — the story of the interracial couple that took their right to a legal union all the way to the Supreme Court —is by contrast quiet, mannered, serious, and, at times, something close to dull. It feels more true. I’m not sure if that matters. I prefer the manic and the reckless in this case.

25. Sausage Party

When they tell you that movies are dead, tell them that there’s an R-rated animated one produced by a billionaire heiress that uses supermarket groceries as a metaphor for war-torn nations, the sexual revolution, and the rise of recreational drug use, while doubling as a repository for dick jokes. This movie is not a triumph of execution but it is a triumph of the human will to be ridiculous.

24. HyperNormalisation

Speaking of the human will to be ridiculous. This movie has reeled up and down this list over the past few weeks as we plunge deeper into the strangest moment of American life in some time. What Adam Curtis does — intellectual pastiche set against academic structuralism — is make movies that sadden and scare people. It works. HyperNormalisation, his most recent 165-minute project for the BBC, forges connections between Syria, Libya, Donald Trump, Soviet history, U.S. political policy, the death of the hippie ideal, the rise of Silicon Valley, and all of the narrow gaps in between. Some of it is specious, some of it is darkly true. Whether Trump’s escape from a looming debt to a high-rolling Japanese gambler explains his pivot from real estate mogul to branding success story to American president is impossible to know. But it’s compelling to consider.

This has been a year of big arrival in the American consciousness for Curtis, and liking his movies has shifted from hipster liberal-panic outré interest to something slightly more mainstream and Chapo Trap House-ish. The bourgeois implications are glorious to behold. Even scarier than this movie is what Curtis has to say to Jonathan Lethem in this recent feature in the New York Times Magazine. It’s all of the lessons from the film with none of the script-written pretense. Just sheer intelligent (boring) terror.

23. 10 Cloverfield Lane

This would make a nice double feature with HyperNormalisation. After you watch it, you can burrow yourself deep into the Earth in an air-sealed panic dungeon. These movies are much harder to make work than they look, and, forgiving the truly “Bad episode of The Twilight Zone with a big budget” ending, this one does a nice job of convincing the viewer of a lot of its magic.

22. Little Men

Ira Sachs is our most sincere chronicler of the pain of a particular strain of New York life. I don’t miss living there at all, which his films insist on reminding me. Here’s what I wrote about the movie in August. 

There is no angst like “They’re raising the rent” angst. This movie is part of a New York City diptych from director Ira Sachs that examines the changing face of neighborhoods and what happens to displaced middle-class people. Two years ago, he made Love Is Strange, a film about a gay couple whose lives are disrupted when they’re forced to leave their home. Little Men is seen through the eyes of two preteen boys, one the son of a recently transplanted actor-and-psychotherapist couple who have moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, the other the son of a struggling dress shop owner. The boys become friends, only to be caught between the machinations of their parents. Sachs makes modest, quietly crushing movies, observant about life’s awkward tragedies and unsolvable crises — he’s empathetic to all of his characters. In each of them — but particularly the last two — resolutions are impossible, because, well, life is impossible.

38. Patriots Day / 21. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Does it matter if you know what happens? I don’t want to be callow by comparing the awful tragedy of the Boston marathon bombing to the low-stakes fantasy of a Star Wars spinoff. But they share a commonality in storytelling, which is, we know where this is going, and still we watch. Rogue One is a monster that need not be explained, though I wrote about it here, and I’m sorry for the in-joke headline which I had to clarify for several family members over the holiday. 

Patriots Day hasn’t quite permeated the consciousness yet, in part because the movie hasn’t gone wide and in part because it is a flawed and slightly discomfiting portrayal of crypto-fascist government investigation, and I think that makes some people uncomfortable, while others quite happy. (There were some awkward and loud cheers during the screening I attended.) I’m curious to see if it becomes the new American Sniper. Both of these movies are well made and entertaining, so to speak, and you can feel the shock of death and explosions in them. Both have the chance to be financially successful. Both may feel slightly more significant in six months.

20. Crimson Peak

Somewhere along the way, this movie stops being a mannered romance between Mia Wasikowska and Tom Hiddleston’s characters, and it stops being Guillermo Del Toro straining against himself to make his gothic romance more romance and less gothic. It stops being a ghost story and it stops being a thriller. Somewhere along the way, it becomes #ChastainSeason. Alison Willmore nailed it here — the last third of this movie becomes a platform for Jessica Chastain to shed her solemnity and take a big ole’ bite of ham. She becomes Joan Crawford and Faye Dunaway and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns  — and it is thrilling. Chastain has always had a hold on me, but she often plays credulous, wide-eyed women, on a quest, bound and determined to achieve some unconquerable goal. This is a mad-eyed inversion — in the last fifth of Crimson Peak her eyebrows become pitchforks, her porcelain skin turns blood-red, and her previously coiled mane unfurls and whips like a flag in the wind. This movie was billed as GDT’s “ultimate masterpiece” and it is most assuredly not that, but it does feature the most deranged performance he’s ever gotten — even more than any of the porkchops preening around his hacky-but-fun FX series The Strain.

19. Straight Outta Compton
39. Love & Mercy
48. Danny Collins

Does it matter if a fictional music biopic feels more real than the true-to-life stories? These three movies aspire to history. When the protagonists are portrayed in the act of inspiration – recording music, writing songs, emotional epiphanies dawning — these movies sing. But their veracity is wooze-inducing. They make you ask a lot of questions. Did Eazy-E, DJ Yella, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, and Jerry Heller really sit around the campfire to listen in horror as Ice Cube’s “No Vaseline” blared over the speakers? Where are Carl Wilson and Van Dyke Parks throughout the moments of creative fertility (and subsequent pain) in Brian Wilson’s life? Why is Al Pacino playing a Neil Diamond surrogate? There are no clean lines in the lives of famous people. They’re messy, inconsistent, and unholy. These movies — all flawed — at least seem to recognize that. It’s important that people know the truth about their heroes, but I’m not so sure it’s the responsibility of estate-sanctioned movies to be that bastion of truth. No one really wants to look at themselves that clearly. That’s why we have scolding “fact-check” blog posts when movies like these are released.

18. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

There’s about 400 things wrong with this movie. But I’m here for Kylo Ren.

17. The Martian

Ridley Scott has been whinging between bloviating, overbaked prestige films (Exodus: Gods and Kings; Prometheus; Robin Hood) and slick, oddball genre fare (The Counselor; Body of Lies; Matchstick Men) for the better part of his career. The Martian is the first time he’s truly split his atom — it’s a talky, rollicking, sci-fi crowd-pleaser and a galactic, spiritual, self-serious space opera. My theory is that Drew Goddard gets a great deal of credit. The screenwriter behind Cabin in the Woods, who learned at the feet of Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams (and doesn’t get enough credit for being the other guy who fixed World War Z, alongside Damon Lindelof) has shown himself to be capable of recreating that optimistic Amblin Entertainment feeling while also nodding just enough to not alienate the cynical bastards who know exactly what Amblin movie you’re ripping off. (Me, I guess.)

16. The End of the Tour

While I was aghast at the final moments of this movie, in which Jesse Eisenberg’s David Lipsky is seen solemnly reading from his book before a packed bookstore, there were so many chilling moments of self-loathing rendered in the interviewer-interviewee dynamic here that I’d be willing to forgive any aggrandizement. Is this the ultimate rendition of David Foster Wallace? I don’t care. Like all of James Ponsoldt’s movies, there is a warmth emanating from the edges of every scene, like observing a yule log from a distance. I have all the books on my shelf, and if I want that person, I can get him anytime I like. DFW might have been significantly different to those who knew him, but this oafish, aching character has a power all his own.

15. Best of Enemies

It’s good to have an adversary. Sometimes they know they’re the enemy, and sometimes they don’t. I have a few. Is it you? I’ll never tell. What’s fascinating about Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley’s showdown is that their lives seemed to be building towards the 10 debates captured and dissected in this film, building towards the literal representation of their rivalry. Their hatred is so pure that even in the face of great showmanship, you’ll feel the blood boiling under their skin. That’s not a refined notion, pure animus, but it’s so rewarding to see played out in this fashion – two frisky cats trying to knock each other off a fence. The more you learn about Vidal and Buckley – titanically accomplished, peerlessly elitist, unceasingly petty men – the more you see the tragedy in their squaring off. There was another sharp doc on Vidal’s life a couple years – few cared about that movie as much as this one. Everyone likes a good fight.

14. Phoenix

Easily the most gripping, devastating ending to a movie this year. It’s crushing seen even out of context, if you’d prefer. But don’t do that. Watch it all.

13. Creed

Meek Mill won?

12. Inside Out

I’m now in the phase of my life where I’m evangelizing for Pixar movies to my nephews and they don’t really care at all. Which means 1.) They’re getting older 2.) I’m staying the same age. Does it mean anything else? I wonder what the recruitment for new creators is like at Pixar these days. Does the rotation stay largely the same in the upper echelon, in an effort to perfectly maintain that effortless seeming but clearly exhaustive and manicured Pixar feeling? Who is the youngest member of the inner circle? Is it possible that at some point Pixar will become less relevant to kids than it is to the adults who have been on board since Toy Story? Have we already reached that point? No matter.

11. The Big Short

Cut out all the of the interstitial cutesiness from this movie. Out with the MTV-style smashcuts, the Ludacris video, the Margot Robbie in a jacuzzi explaining collateralized debt obligations, the shots of glistening Coke cans, NASA rockets launching into the atmosphere, bodies moving down Wall St. at warp speed, Hank Paulsen sweating through his Brooks Brothers shirt. Cut it all out. Make this a sheer financial melodrama, with five leads — Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Christian Bale, John Magaro, and Finn Wittrock. Does that movie still work? It still works. I suspect it might work better, though I laughed along with all the whimsy. On the one hand, I appreciate the ingenuity Adam McKay throws in his adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book — you get the impression he relishes the challenge of explaining the details of the subprime crisis to a bunch of people who showed up for a Brad Pitt movie. On the other hand, I wonder if McKay, an outspoken and often incensed progressive, is miserable having to employ his keen eye for absurdism rather than something a little more straightforward and sober. The dramatic moments here work just as well as that moment when Selena Gomez shows up. Maybe McKay will get to find out next time around.

10. Spotlight

I hate to be grouse-y about the first entry in the top 10, but the further I get from this captivating but workmanlike drama, the worse I feel about it. Recency bias is a mother.

9. Wild Tales

This, on the other hand, has not aged a breath since I saw it in April. Possibly the most purely enjoyable anthology movie since 2007’s Trick ‘r Treat. Maybe since Twilight Zone: The Movie? New York Stories? Amores Perros? Creepshow? (They should make more anthology movies.) I’d love to see what writer-director Damián Szifron could do if teamed up with Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker.

8. Sicario

It’s all here.

7. Carol

The thing about making something physically beautiful – all surface – is that most surfaces are hideous. It takes great skill and feeling. Carol is a great deal of surface, and bloodless at times. Bret Easton Ellis dismissed it as “Todd Haynes yet again playing with his dolls in his dollhouse …” That resonated and yet still it worked. Maybe that’s because it’s not a good idea to be fully in league with BEE. Or maybe it’s because Cate Blanchett and Rooney (the lesser) Mara lock into each other with a longing that might otherwise seem preposterous. And while Haynes does feel entrenched – trapped, even – in the past, and consumed by seeming austere and painterly, he never seems to be teaching a lesson. This is purely a love story, a generational story. For the author of the novel upon which it’s based, Patricia Highsmith, it was a kind of morbid wish fulfillment exercise, after she observed an elegant, attractive woman in the department store in which she worked. For Haynes, it feels more naturalistic, less dreamlike. Like his telling of a close friend’s May-December romance. It doesn’t mean much, but it means everything.

6. Amy
37. What Happened, Miss Simone?

There are two sides of the same coin in these movies. Winehouse’s performance of “Back to Black” — her first? — in a studio with Mark Ronson is the heartbreaking beginning and ending of her life. Pain, offhandedly delivered; easy poetry, thunderously sold. “You have to remember what his neck smelt like… you have to remember all of it,” she mumbles about writing the song, about her Blake, before starting in. She barely moves in the telephone booth vocal studio, leaning down to look at her lyrics occasionally, while Ronson recalls a simple dynamo before the fall. Winehouse sings, a capella, then with a track, then without again. She delivers the most painful of torch songs, then smiles, and cheekily remarks, “Oh, it’s a bit upsetting at the end, isn’t it?” about her own composition. Then she ambles out of that telephone booth, whistles a little ditty, grabs her notebook, and barely touches Ronson’s hand as she makes her way into the engineering room. That woman, breezy and impervious to pain, is never seen again. The movie essentially crashes down after that, her life a flash flood of drugs, insecurity, success, and loss of control. But I can never escape this scene. I watch it at least once a month. Is it too much to say she’s the most overwhelming talent of the 21st century? Amy Winehouse seems very far away now, and this movie has a way of reminding us how cruel we were about her when things were not going well. There’s Jay Leno cracking wise on her in his monologue. There’s a swell of paparazzi haranguing her. There’s a disastrous festival performance captured on camera. People were awful about Amy, and then she died. What kind of fuckery was that?

Nina Simone was similarly unbound, having lost of control of her mind, her zen, and sometimes her talent at the end of her career. This documentary is less formalized than Amy, which uses a smart framing device (only audio interviews) but a rigid Behind the Music structure. What Happened, Miss Simone is more impressionistic. The interviews are fewer and less essential to understanding Simone. Winehouse has, basically, four songs you need to hear to understand her. I feel as though I hear a new and mighty Nina Simone song every week. (Here’s one.) She was on the order of Dylan or Miles Davis in the constellation of American musicians – but also an interpreter of other people’s work, from Cole Porter to Pete Seeger. As the world burns and identity politics takes over more mindspace now than it has in decades, there is an essential piece missing from the movements — an artistic bellwether. Simone was that in 1965 — fearlessly outspoken, but personally tortured. This movie never seeks to resolve, only honor.

5. Ex Machina

On that note, is it OK to love something that you think may be less intellectually examined than you’d hope? Ex Machina, which is set in a Scandinavian forest fortress straight out of my soberest dreams, is like a living clean line; it’s as though an Ellsworth Kelly came to life. All that organized thought; all that even tone; all that straight straightness. Artificial intelligence requires this kind of clarity – it needs an objective truth, a programmatic key. That is the protagonist’s mission, to be the control in a grand experiment of humanity. It’s a movie that is told only in the context of straight white men, and that has proven somewhat divisive. Despite the meticulousness and the astounding beauty of the production design and oh man, that waterfall, there’s something regressive about this movie that looks to the future. Perhaps the filmmaker’s lesson is that even great thinkers are shackled by their desires; that fatherhood collides with sexuality; that to own a woman with no operating soul is the only solution for hateful men. We can posit whatever we want to be at peace with loving something. I know that when I revisited Ex Machina I was as rapt, as glued as the first time.

4. Mad Max: Fury Road

Only saw it once, at the Vista in Silver Lake, which is perhaps the best big screen in LA. I’ll probably never see it again. No need. It was perfect that way.

3. Anomalisa
2. The Hateful Eight

How strange and perfect that two movies written and directed by men with main characters who evince no empathy for women of any stripe both turn on simple, awkward, beautiful musical performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh? To say more would spoil everything. But I guess I’ll do a little of it. Anomalisa is about the dog whistle of life, when you come across someone whose tone only you can hear — it’s savvy about blocking out everything else in favor of going with what you feel, even at the cost of personal madness. The same is sort of true for The Hateful Eight, which is about a bunch of people who are quite sure of themselves and of what is right. Like the protagonist in Anomalisa, who is at least depressed and probably experiencing a psychotic episode, the many scoundrels of Hateful see a world turned against them. A Civil War general on the wrong end of unconditional surrender. A young sheriff with no spurs. A black bounty hunter in the wilderness of America. A white bounty hunter chained to one freak after another. A hooked criminal getting kicked around by her captor. A gang seeking vengeance. Even the worst people you know are the heroes of their own life.

1. Mistress America
27. While We’re Young

Last year, I placed Whiplash at no. 1 and wrote histrionically about the thudding repetition of life – over and over everyday in an effort to succeed at what you’ve pledged. Life’s so hard because it’s the same. Careful what you wish for, dumbass! This year, that thudding repetition was replaced by uncertainty, doubt, confusion, backbiting, frustration, corporate presumptuousness, and general physical discomfort. It got so bad I just up and decided to drive across half of the country in the middle of the summer. (I saw bears and hot springs and old friends and I slept in a tent.) With some distance from that moment, and a little solace, I find myself over-identifying phases of life at every turn. Am I getting old or just anxious about being older? Books take on greater meaning than they ought to. James Salter died and so I read Light Years and looked way too deeply into that book. William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days became a lament for a lost life of adventure. I’m rummaging through Bruce Jay Friedman’s About Harry Towns and wow maybe don’t read that if you live in Los Angeles. Mistress America and While We’re Young — Noah Baumbach’s 2015 diptych about accepting the aging process – had a similar effect on me. At first, they seemed to cast unease onto this phase — childless, career-driven, independent, happy but wondering why, seeking peace while understanding its impossibility. These are Baumbach and Gerwig’s characters – smart to a fault, financially stable-ish, desperate to let you know how self-aware they are, which is the first sign of a lack of self-awareness. Is it a good thing to identify with these people? To be aware that the generation underneath is coming hard, fast, and with no guilt about making you look foolish? Or is it better to laugh at Greta Gerwig and Ben Stiller from a distance, to tut-tut while firing up another rental on Apple TV? I am tortured by these movies and I love them. Greta Gerwig’s character in Mistress America identifies as a creative person, but she has no real talent. Ben Stiller’s character in While We’re Young is talented, but he can’t get out of his own way. In Baumbach’s world, Ad-Rock is a boring dad, Kylo Ren is a social media huckster, Lola Kirke is dowdy, and NYC dance studios create routines to 2Pac’s “Hit 'Em Up.” Are these farces or docudrama? Gerwig, and the anxiety her youth induces in Baumbach, appears to have been the best thing that has happened to him creatively since his parent’s divorce. (Baumbach’s partner before Gerwig, of course, was Jennifer Jason Leigh. Life is a circle.) I’m happy Gerwig and Baumbach met. But what can you really take away from these movies? Three things, maybe. Go forward, try harder, beware the snakes in the grass, especially when they’re you.

This is the fifth year that I’m writing this. I have completely lost sight of why I do it. At first, in 2011, it was to kill time on a flight. The following year it was to process and justify a move to Los Angeles. In 2013, I could feel myself looking to it as a coping mechanism – finding ways to deal with death, professional displacement, and not having a place to put half-baked ideas.  Last year, I started feeling like people were expecting it. That was nice. It doesn’t clarify the hours spent watching the 144 films from 2015 that I saw this year. (Nine in the past four days!) But it’s something. Five years ago, I listed my 20 favorite. 25 a year later. Then 30 the next. And 50 last year. We’ll do 50 again. According to my running Google Document, I have 45 more to see from the year. (I haven’t seen Bridge of Spies yet, and I’m having a tough time forgiving myself for that. On the other hand, the movie was released on my last day at Grantland, and, well, I had other things on my mind.)

So here we go. Once more unto the breach.

50. Junun

When The Master topped my list in 2012 and Inherent Vice rolled in at no. 2 last year, I wrote something snide, haughty, and defensive. This is the my guy! I wanted everyone to know, as if that mattered. Junun – which is less than an hour long, shot on digital video, and tracks the making of an album by the Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, and the Indian troupe Rajasthan Express – is not the sort of thing that demands fealty. Not quite a lark but by no means tossed off, this is how you cleanse your palate. PTA uses a drone to capture birds in flight, he spins his camera like a dervish to show the expanse of the Rajasthan Express, he pokes in on quiet moments between Greenwood and the longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. The moments here are big and small and mostly about process and atmosphere and collaboration. There are no cutaway testimonials or title cards. It was released on a boutique streaming service called MUBI. We waited five years between There Will Be Blood and The Master. Since, we’ve gotten three movies from in three-and-a-half years. Would I care about it as much if Paul Thomas Anderson’s name were not attached? I know myself well enough to know that I would not. But I can only think in context.

49. Chi-Raq

This isn’t the only movie Spike released this year, though it’s the more high-profile of the two. In February, the Kickstarter-funded Da Sweet Blood of Jesus made its way into theaters and then out shortly thereafter. Ostensibly a remake of the ‘70s black vampire saga Ganja and Hess, DSBOFJ is a sick and visceral and biblical effort. Its a movie with no pulse; undead. Chi-Raq is in a different kind of tradition, based on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata as a mirroring tool for modern-day Chicago, it’s not so much an accurate reflection of life in Chicago as it is a burlesque. It’s imperfect, too; broad and not as clever as it hopes. But unlike his crowd-funding bloodsuck, Chi-Raq is an artistic explosion – to say it is his most exciting, unpredictable, and inspired movie since Inside Man is to state the obvious. But it has more in common with Bamboozled and He Got Game — operatic, intentionally overblown farces that have aged pretty well when you consider them not as true-to-life reflections of the TV industry or hip-hop or amateur athletics in America but as Greek tragedy. Just like Chi-Raq. If I shut my eyes hard enough, I can see the “Let’s Revisit Spike Lee’s Lost Masterpiece” blog posts in 2025.

48. Look for it in part two.

47. The Mend

A classic “Oh, what’s this?” Netflix find. Director John Magary’s first full-length film is woozy, unstructured, and incredibly wise about the shorthand between brothers, even those with little in common other than blood. Josh Lucas is disgusting and splendid in this.

46. See below.

45. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
44. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Proof that you can love two things diametrically and intellectually opposed to one another. In July, we compiled a Tom Cruise Week to celebrate the release on M:I - RN. It was fun, but a “B-” as theme weeks go. Throughout, there was some internal consternation and doubt about the validity of the project, given the fact that Tom Cruise, perhaps, has aided in the destruction of many people’s lives and the dissolution of their families. I’m not resolved about that. Alex Gibney’s adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s stunning book is like chugging Robitussin – at first it heals and then it just hurts, and then you pass out. Rogue Nation is sort of the opposite, all high swoops and derring do and Rebecca Ferguson scissoring men to death. What fun. I think we can have both.

43. Dope
42. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

It must be horrible to be a teenager now. These movies, overpraised but affecting Sundance darlings, feel like men in their 30s processing present-day high school concerns. There’s a dissonance. Three kids from Inglewood consumed by Rakim? Two kids in Pittsburgh parodying Bergman films? These are things people do when they escape the emotional consciousness of high school — when they evacuate the anxiety and class warfare. Precociousness only goes so far.

41. It Follows
40. Spring

Probably the worst year for horror films that I can remember. It Follows is an exception. I prefer David Robert Mitchell’s similarly gauzy first look at teen life, 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, a movie that might have topped my list that year if I’d been inclined to make one. (I was too busy putting Taylor Swift in a well.) This will do. And unlike the two above, this movie does convey one perceptive thing about teen life — it is scary to fuck! It’s fun and it is a quest, but people work awfully hard to warn you about the side effects. Parents, teachers, PSAs, Saved By the Bell, et al. You can get pregnant. You can contract a disease. You can endure pain. You can complicate love. And you can get haunted by an inescapable, indestructible STD demon. I am so excited about being 33 years old.

Spring is about all of this and with an additional advisory: watch out if you meet a cute girl while backpacking in Europe after college, she might be an ancient lobster-octopus-ghoul.

39. Look for it in part two.

38. Kingsman: The Secret Service

Some of the movies on this list didn’t make it because they are great works of art. Sometimes if you can steal my imagination for five minutes you make the cut. There’s a scene in this movie in which Colin Firth — genteel, courteous Colin Firth – annihilates a horde of mind-controlled white supremacists in a church set to “Free Bird.” This isn’t complicated.

37. Look for it in part two.

36. An Honest Liar

In college, I had a wonderful professor of media studies who primarily cared about debunking the mass media as a construct. Marshall McLuhan, Robert McChesney, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn – these were the people we studied. The only non-journalist or public intellectual we spent a great deal of time studying was a man named James “The Amazing” Randi. He was a magician and professional debunker. Fifteen years later, Randi found himself in the news for fascinating reasons — his life had turned in on itself. To have spent huge parts of a semester analyzing and examining the man who dedicated his life to exposing Uri Geller was a wholly unique exposure to the concept of critical thinking. College = it works!

35. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of the worst films ever made. But it’s not as wrenching as watching Richard Stanley, a kind of post-punk James Cameron, have the movie ripped from his hands. This documentary exhumes Stanley’s pain and then shines a light on how much worse it got after he was removed from the film by New Line. The documentary Listen to Me Marlon is the de rigueur Hollywood Brando doc being praised this year — this one worked better for me.

34. Mississippi Grind
33. Slow West

All praise due to Ben Mendelsohn, who I will write about as often as I can. He’s an angel. Big thanks to Mark Lisanti for 2015’s very best blog post.

32. The Look of Silence

Nothing too pithy. This, like its wide-lens predecessor The Act of Killing, is shattering and absurd documentary filmmaking.

31. Clouds of Sils Maria

The ineffable struggle of facing down young people who don’t care about what you are or what you’ve done. They’re right to do so — you are meaningless. Unless you can connect with them on a material level, in which case, they’ll probably turn over their loyalty and minds. I go through this with my 11-year-old sister, my young nieces and nephews, my younger colleagues. This movie is clever about that dynamic — an aging actress is confronted by this in her servile assistant and her young movie star foil. Her past looms like a fog, her future is imperceptible, way up. Just be nice to people and maybe they’ll trust you.

30. Brooklyn

Like Saoirse Ronan’s character in this unfussy, unspectacular but lovely movie, my paternal grandmother was an independent Irish woman living in Brownstone Brooklyn in the early 1950s. She was a Depression baby who lived through World War II. Her family was in Europe. Her husband was in Brooklyn. She was demure and polite. Selfless in the way that grandmothers, at least the ones I know, often are. She was something of a cipher to me – eager to know about whatever new job I had or how things were going for Ilene at work. She wanted success for us. Happiness, too, but it was important that we were excelling – to have more than her and more than my parents. That’s good luck, to get unselfish relatives. But she was reluctant to share much about her interior life. She was grandmotherly, but unknowable. Two years ago, I wrote about watching her interact with my father after dementia had taken hold – she couldn’t recognize her own son. It was impossible to bear. She died in September, just weeks into her 93rd year. She would have loved this movie.

29. Room
46. Queen of Earth

Isolation.

28. The Diary of a Teenage Girl

I suppose what I wrote about It Follows applies to this movie, too. Sex is confounding as a kid — this is one of the most open portrayals of a young woman going through the terror and elation that is played for laughs as often as melodrama for young men. If I’d seen this as a teenager, I’d have Bel Powley pencil sketches all over my room. She’s transfixing.

27. Look for it in part two.

26. Results

I used to think Andrew Bujalski was a joke. I’m more excited for his next film than anyone on this list. Read Wesley Morris.

25. American Ultra

I think this got an unfair shake because it was written and aggressively touted by professional troll Max Landis. I like Nima Nourizadeh’s music video by way of MDMA direction. I like Topher Grace finally living up to his shitheel aura. I like Walton Goggins as a toothless, cackling maniac named simply “Laugher.” I like Connie Britton in the CIA. I like Kristen Stewart in love. I like Jesse Eisenberg in anything. I even like Landis’s no-shit-sherlock premise: Wouldn’t it be funny if the government activated a trained killing machine living in secret as a stoner convenience store clerk? I guess it’s sort of funny. But more than that, it’s fun.

24. The Gift

There’s a high school theme emerging here. What’s really going on in Joel Edgerton’s nifty, gnarled debut feature isn’t clear at first. Psychological drama? American bourgeois critique? Dog murder mystery? It’s really none of those. But it is unnerving. I love that this nasty little movie made a lot of money at the box office. We deserve it.

23. Lost River

22. Steve Jobs

Earns it with the Fassbender-Daniels flashback-inside-a-flashback showdown in the second act. So much talk has revolved around Sorkin here, but this is Danny Boyle’s movie, too. I’m glad he made this and not David Fincher.

21. World of Tomorrow

Don Hertzfeldt is a master of emotional suspense. You can call this a short or animation or science fiction or futurism. Just watch it. It’ll hold you.

I was sitting in my office, it was after 8pm. Not unusual. I was assembling a package that would commemorate the recent death of Michael Jackson. (A ranking of his 100 best songs; sober essays about his complicated, maddening legacy; a deep look at how his family lived now; etc.) We’d just wrapped a photo shoot featuring Kobe Bryant and Lil Wayne, clutching the Larry O’Brien Trophy together — they would be the cover stars of Vibe’s annual Juice issue, our biggest of the year. This was always a tense time, and it was my third Juice issue. I was stressed, inhaling a burger and fries from a miserable diner around the way from the offices we’d recently located to in the financial district. (2008 was a fascinating time to move one’s office to Wall St.; unrelated: I’ve eaten approximately six burgers total since that night.) There were only four other people in the office that night, so I could hear my boss Danyel say to her assistant down the hall, in a manner that was not unfamiliar to me, “Go get Fenn.” Shirea came to my door, asked me to head down to Danyel’s corner office. I was already standing by the time Shirea arrived, and briskly walked down to see my editor-in-chief. I was wearing an orange thermal shirt. Like a gallumping pumpkin. Strident, young, dumb.

Danyel was a terrifying figure — as unafraid of the frank conversation as anyone I’ve known. Brilliant, too — she knew magazines, and rap, and storytelling, and gossip, and media, and so much about writing. She is the model for the editor-in-chief who can write you under the table. Novels, prize-winning profiles, criticism with the sharpness of ninja stars. It’s an aspirational style of editor-in-chief-ing that was more uncommon seven years ago than it is now. If your copy wasn’t good enough, she might look at you and say, “Fenn, c’mon. You know.” And you knew. I loved working for Danyel, despite the anarchy of late-period capitalism rap journalism. It was difficult trying to fill in the gaps of an idea that seemed so vital in, say, 1999. By 2007, it was becoming harder and harder to convince the world that it needed Vibe. We made a good magazine, but we also made mistakes. We put Plies on the cover once. (And it was a good issue.) But we also put Barack Obama on the cover many, many months before he became the presumptive Democratic candidate. We expanded the purview of music coverage and executed redesigns and said goodbye to crucial staffers and welcomed many other great ones. We wanted to be honest. We failed a lot.

So I came to see Danyel at 8pm or so, as I had on so many nights, and her expression was different. Blank, but broken. My colleague Ben was already in the room, sullen. “It’s done, Fenn,” Danyel said. “They’re closing it.” Tears in her eyes now.

Vibe was folding, immediately, because it’s a magazine, and that’s what they do. They start and they end, unless you’re lucky or lousy. We would tell the staff at 10am the next morning, all 40 or so people. (It’s always 40 or so people working at these things.) Mostly people under 30. I was 26, the Music Editor of a music magazine, not because I’d earned it but because the market forces compelled a child to hold that position. (My irreplaceable mentor left, I filled in.) I went home and told my fiancee, who would be my wife three months later. I told the small clutch of friends I trusted. I sat staring at a hole in the fence of my dilapidated backyard for at least two hours, in the dark, trying to figure out which feature I’d assigned that might have killed this enterprise once and for all. (“What if we’d targeted Rihanna for July 2007 instead of 50 Cent?”) The next morning, Danyel told those people, bravely and with more tears, that it was a wrap. The economy is cruel. The game is cold. We are over.

There was no answer for that. Heads fell, cubicles packed, and by 2pm, we vanished from that office forever. It’s not quite a fever dream — more like a waking nightmare with no end point. Vibe was powerful, especially in its halcyon days, the ones that made me want to be there in the first place. It became legendary, though its’ sheen has faded from memory. I never tasted glory there, though I tried so hard, with an incredible and inspired group of people to recreate it. Chasing ghosts.

When it folded, I was unmoored — desperate to replace the churn, the responsibility, the latent panic of making a publication. This work is meaningless, unless you do it, in which case, it’s more meaningful than anything barring your family.

***

Grantland was like Vibe in that it was the most important thing I’ll ever do, until the next thing. We yearn to crystallize the moment. Eulogies are a beautiful vehicle for emotion we can’t reconcile in our day-to-day. I worked even harder for Grantland than I did for Vibe. That’s not a value judgment on the experience, but it is a reality of contemporary media and what we perceived to be our mission. The people who worked at Grantland were profound talents. Astronomical. Also, kind. The biggest challenge you’ll find in this line of work is not “Ugh, this piece is a mess, let’s start over.” It’s “This first draft seems sort of perfect, is there actually anything wrong with it?” And the people that I worked with who were capable of the Impeccable First Draft were not arrogant about that — they were open-minded, thoughtful, engaged, desperate to improve. That’s a blessed professional environment. Grantland was an extraordinary circumstance, no matter your opinion. Supported by corporate largesse, until it wasn’t. Praised in that uniquely transient way, until it wasn’t. Glorious for the people who worked there, except when they were operating on 4 hours sleep with a bad attitude in a planning meeting. (Me.)

Grantland changed irrevocably in May, and that’s important for me to emphasize. Bill Simmons was a weathervane, and the tropical storms that consumed the region after his departure were unpredictable and unnerving. What happened to Grantland yesterday is the product of cosmically upsetting corporate maneuvering and I hate that, as I’ve hated it forever. It’s a reality, and the stuff of “On to the next one.” You get a chance, you make your chance, you go forward; you get heartbroken, you start again, because this feels valuable. What differentiated this experience for me, aside from my yearning to be close to something so eminently great, was that it lived up. We failed less. And even then, it was impermanent. I’m most grateful to the people who made it, and also to the people who cared about it. To everyone who concern-trolled the people who worked at the site about its goals, its budget or its traffic, I hope you’re stoked? We always did as well as we could.

The people who were connected to Grantland have my love and respect. Strident, young, dumb, and great.