My Top 10 Favorite Films 2017

What can I say? The country has gone to the dogs. Half of the country made clear that they are racists and the government loudly declared that they don't care about the poor people. It's been a miserable year. If anything, it was cinema that got me through the tough and ugly times. It showed me that there is much humanity and beauty in the world still. Even though I watched much less films this year, the quality of the films were nothing short of amazing.

I have to say on record that I am more than happy about cable TV and streaming services chipping away at the dominance of theater going experience and blurring the line among different formats. Cinema should be a democratic experience and accessible. I say this while I can, since Net Neutrality is gone. :sad: But cinema has been alive and well this year. Viva le Cinema!

1. Twin Peaks: The return - David Lynch, Mark Frost

Soon as the Showtime's 18 part Twin Peaks revival ended at the end of the Summer on Showtime, it was evident to me that I would't see anything that'd come close to being as cinematically audacious as this. The thought of labeling it for either TV series or a film never crossed my mind. Twin Peaks: The Return is without a doubt, the highlight of cinema of this year period (if not of all time), all 18 hours of it.

2. Zama - Lucrecia Martel

As far as visual aural experiences go, there is no director working today whose greatness comes close to that of Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. Her mastery comes to full fruition in searching for El Dorado story of Don Diego de Zama, a historical epic. Beautifully contextualized and richly textured, Zama is an amazing films to watch on the big screen.

3. Sleep Has Her House - Scott Barley

Talk about immersive cinema experience, look no further than Scott Barley's Sleep Has Her House. It's his otherworldly beauty of the Scottish Highlands at night and soundscape that pull you in. But however grand and beautiful his images are, there is a familiarity and coziness to them. In Barley's world, an inner-scape and an outer-scape are one in the same. It's his ability to internalize his surroundings that is truly remarkable. Darkness can be a scary and frightening place. Embarking on SHHH might conjure up the image of a Saturn eating his own offspring at first. But once you take a leap and plunge into his shadowy, slowly moving images, the beautiful, mysterious yet familiar darkness envelops you and sucks you in. There is an ebbs and flows to SHHH, like a piece of fine music, like a taste of complex whiskey. It's truly one of a kind experience.

*My interview with Scott Barley

4. By the Time It Gets Dark - Anocha Suwichakornpong

The film might sound too precious on paper - those too self-aware films in love with themselves. But the result of layers of these slightly connected vignettes and visual metaphors are anything but. Images are democratic- whether it's a trashy, seemingly inconsequential pop culture, the serious historical reenactments, Buddhist temple, disco tech and pixelated visual noise have the same value. It's a very Dostoevskian concept- like a tobacco leaves and fungi, to give them meaning and purpose, these layers Suwichakornpong presents will need to sit and rot. I am just amazed by her wisdom and skills to convey this kind of complicated thoughts through film medium.

5.Personal Shopper - Olivier Assayas

Assayas operates on his top form with his muse Kristen Stewart in their second collaboration. He uses her nonchalance, youth and this time vulnerability as a grieving young woman unsure of her judgment and emotion. Personal Shopper is a lucid, flowing, deliciously addictive concoction.

*My Interview with Olivier Assayas

6. Phantom Thread - Paul Thomas Anderson

Beautifully crafted, Anderson makes a film about a woman going to extreme measures to be part of the man she loves and he finally accepting it - there is something endearing and sexy about that, even though there is no sex scene in the film.

7. The Florida Project - Sean Baker

Sean Baker, a director of much praised iphone shot movie Tangerine, digs deeper into the flip side of American Dream with The Florida Project, starring kids and featuring the lives of kids on Route 192, under the shadow of Disney World. As with Tangerine, Baker uses mostly untrained non-actors to portray people on the skid and just have them run with the materials they were given. The result is stunning work of authenticity, brimming with humor, heartache and much humanism. In the end, we know it's a make-believe and that everything is going to be all right. But the final moment of the film, taking place in the real Magic Kingdom, shot on shaky iphone, really got me emotionally. It is, shall we say, pure magic.

8. Dawson City: Frozen Time - Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison draws fascinating paralleling histories of American prospecting days and early development of film industry and the results are quite explosive. Morrison, known for his disintegrating found footage images, creates hugely entertaining film that is both artful and informative.

9. Wormwood -Errol Morris

With his journalistic candor, Errol Morris meticulously digs into America's ugly past. A 6-part series on Netflix serves the subject right for the seasoned documentarian to be much more expansive and rigorous. It is one of the most inventive, refreshing cinema events of the year.

*My interview with Actor Christian Camargo

10. Félicité - Alain Gomis

Félicité is a melding of many conflicting elements. There are documentary like naturalism mixed in with recurring beautiful dream sequence in the woods in near darkness. There is local music (featuring the Kasai Allstars) rubbing shoulders with Kinshasa Symphonic Orchestra playing classical pieces by Arvo Pärt. Félicité's strong willed, modern woman meets Tabu's womanizer and drunkard. They accept each other and continue their amicable relationship. Structurally daring, beautifully down to earth but not gritty, Alain Gomis' gentle touch stands out as the biggest discovery of talent in my book.

*My interview with Alain Gomis

And the rest...

Visages Villages - Agnes Varda

Un beau soleil intérieur - Claire Denis

On the Beach at Night Alone - Hong Sangsoo

The Shape of Water - Guillermo Del Toro

The Other Side of Hope - Aki Kaurismaki

Lady Macbeth - William Oldroyd
*My interview with William Oldroyd

Beach Rats - Eliza Hittman

Thelma - Joachim Trier

A Quiet Passion - Terence Davies
*My interview with Terence Davies

Frantz - François Ozon
*My interview with Director François Ozon

Digging for Cinema Gold

Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) - Morrison

Bill Morrison, known for his beautiful, textural found footage films (Decasia, Miner's Hymns) accompanied by talented contemporary musicians' work (Philip Glass, Jóhann Jóhannsson, John Adams, Richard Einhorn, just to name a few), out-does himself with a mesmerizing, hugely entertaining new film Dawson City: Frozen Time.

It tells a truly fascinating bit of cinema history involving the Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th century in Dawson City, deep in the Yukon Territory. The two-hour film is filled to the brim with rich historical details which can be almost too much for a single viewing. Dawson City, with its clever, carefully constructed paralleling narratives of the prospecting and cinema, accompanied by wealth of archival and found footage, achieves something far greater than a historical documentary or an experimental art-house film ever can.

Dawson City starts with a prologue Morrison's appearance in some sport jock TV spot being asked about 1919 World Series footage. This is the year of the infamous "Black Sox" scandal where 8 of Chicago White Sox players took money from the East Coast gambling establishments to throw the game.

We move back to 1979, while digging for foundation behind Diamond Tooth Gerthie's Gambling Hole in Dawson City, townsfolk discovered hundreds of film reels buried under the permafrost. Local conservators and museum curators got a hold of these treasures which turn out to be rare silent films, 372 of them, thought to be lost forever.

Then it moves on to 'Film was born an explosive' segment, explaining the early silent films were shot on cotton based nitrate film stock which was highly combustible until the industry switched over in 1949 to a safer, acetate based stock.

And the credit starts to roll.

So how does these figure into the film? Beautifully. They all fit into the narrative of digging for gold leading to uncovering cinema gold.

California gold rush fever pushed prospectors further up the uncharted northern territories. After some found gold up in Yukon in 1895, many prospectors made a perilous journey to the land where the Klondike River meets the Yukon River. A lot of them perished or turned back along the way. The place was called Tr’ocheck and belongs to native Hän speaking people. Things changed quickly and the natives were forced down the river into a settlement. The newly arrived (re)named it Dawson City.

It grew and grew and by 1916, the peak of gold mining, the population of the city reached 30,000. The city built a large recreation center, called D.A.A.A., equipped with a swimming pool and doubled as a hockey link in winter, a library and a movie theater, hosting traveling moving picture show tropes.

As it was common in those early days where everything was built on woods, Dawson City burned down to the ground every year for first 9 years and had to be rebuilt. And nitrate films no doubt contributed to numerous fires.

As the gold mining lost its luster and the city grew smaller, so did the need for the reel entertainment. And because Dawson City was the last stop on the Hollywood film distribution route, for economical reasons, movie studios didn't want the film back by carrier. The duty of keeping them fell on a bank clerk who in turn kept them in the basement of a library first. But after they ignited and caused the fire, one of the bank managers decided to bury them in the now abandoned and drained D.A.A.A. swimming pool few blocks away.

Many more film reels were discarded indiscriminately, into the Yukon River and burned in a bonfire, according to the bank clerk's journal. But 372 survived, frozen under the permafrost all those years, preserving the nitrate negatives while all other known copies disintegrated over time.

Combining beautiful still pictures of prospectors from glass negatives by Eric Hegg which were also recovered in the 70s and those found silent films heavily damaged by elements over the years and archival footage and hypnotic music by Alex Somers, a musician known for producing Sigur Rós albums, Morrison concocts an engaging, entertaining art film that doubles as an intriguing slice of history of Americana.

For instance, we get to know that American old money came from the Gold Rush related businesses: Frederick Trump (Donald Trump's grandfather) made his family fortune by setting up brothels along the prospecting trails and the Guggenheim family bought the mining lands and created Yukon Consolidated Gold Company.

Many of the 'Dawson City Find' films and newsreels are featured throughout, often matching the historical events of the time - 1919 World Series, the rise of American Socialist Movement, Industrial Workers of the World, WW1, and so on.

Morrison also has fun with thematically and physically matching scenes from these damaged but remarkably preserved beautiful looking films. Some of the notable titles are: The Stolen Paradise, The Half Breed, The Social Buccaneers, The Salamander, The Unpardonable Sin and The Recoil.

Looking through all these buried treasures for the first time, Morrison must've been a happy camper. He does a fine job assembling these, weaving them into a hugely entertaining, concise historical narrative. Dawson City: Frozen Time is one of the best films of the year.