Best movies seen in 2022

I got a copy of Shuna's Journey.  Same as the last two times I made this kind of post: this is not an exhaustive list, it's a list of the best movies I saw that I felt prepared to say something about and hadn't already said anything about.  The best movies I saw this year that I haven't said anything about are The Reckless Moment, Poisson d'Avril, and Bush Mama.  As for movies that came out this year, I would say this was a year for 3-out-of-5-star movies, to put it in brief, though I was a big fan of Mad God, The Orbital Children, Crimes of the Future, and The Fabelmans.

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (2022)

This is one of the funniest films of the year.  A lot of the best gags are about just how ridiculous the characters of this universe look when they're around things that should be normal.  Dr. Hedo, the genius scientist who builds a new Cell, eats Oreos.  Bulma asks Shenron for cosmetic surgery.  Videl asks Piccolo to pick up her and Gohan's 3-year-old daughter Pan from school, offering to buy him a stuffed animal in return.  This leads Piccolo down a path of enlisting Pan in a harebrained scheme to get Gohan to return from his academic research to the battlefield.

In addition to the new Cell, Dr. Hedo builds two more enemies introduced in this film, the androids Gamma 1 and Gamma 2.  They're designed to look like old-fashioned anime superheroes, wearing double-breasted jackets with giant buttons and wielding bulbous laser pistols.  Cyborg 009 started in 1961, so it was retro even when Dragon Ball first came out.  The Gammas' look comes from Dr. Hedo's childlike excitement about superheroes, which an organized crime syndicate exploits.  He builds the Gammas after they convince him that he needs to become a hero and use his genius to help them protect the Earth from the "dangerous aliens" Gohan and Piccolo.  This film excels because it's a great comedy and action film, not because it's some kind of thematically deep text, but it still has a more considered take on what the image of a superhero means than most comic book movies that release now.

if.... (1968)

Some parts of this are surreal, but other parts feel real simply because they would have to be: they feel like something you couldn't make up, something that could only have been discovered from experiencing the real strangeness of people and history.  The school where this film takes place is ancient and English, married to the church and the military and pushing rituals from both.  The students are adolescent boys living lives that swing like a pendulum between occasions of harsh discipline and occasions for hard play and self-expression.  There are posters, magazine cutouts, and photos of Che and Mao plastered all over the walls in the narrow spaces where the boys are left to their own devices.

When the three rebellious upperclassmen get punished one by one by the house whips, their reaction to the punishment follows from their earlier discussions of exercises in "asceticism."  The first enters, gets beaten, then when he comes out moves his body restlessly, jumping and punching the air, trying to let the pain energize him.  He wants to work the ability to take punishment into his self-expression.  But in response, the whips scale up the violence, trying to push their brave faces to the breaking point.

Everyone responds differently to the mixed messages they receive: they are told they have duties to God and country, but also told boys will be boys and need to unleash their creative energies, but also how homoeroticism is all at once a joke, a taboo, and a desire.  Things we recognize as vestiges of masculinity and tradition have become attached into unwieldy, contradictory sets of principles, having contorted over generations of trying to bridle the unruliness of teens and preteens. 

 

The Killing Floor (1984) 

Is there a better made-for-TV movie?  Penda's Fen and The Company of Strangers are as good, but nothing else comes to mind.  Imagine turning on PBS and catching this.  This is a film about two black workers from Mississippi who move to Chicago during World War I, seeking employment in the meatpacking industry.  When the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America Union asks the black workers at the slaughterhouse to join, there is division: some of the black workers are apprehensive about aggravating the bosses, and some don't trust their white coworkers, having already experienced racism in the workplace.

The story explores a tangle of intertwined conflicts pertaining not only to the nature of the labor-capital relationship, but to the nature of cities.  The meatpacking businessmen benefit from racism because it undermines the union's ability to get the whole mass of potential labor to cooperate.  A few people within the union find themselves burdened with the Herculean effort of curbing racism in their ranks.  In a city divided into factional neighborhoods based on national origin and race, it becomes easy to foment racism, and the businessmen take advantage of moments when violence escalates.  And within the black community, we witness ambiguous confrontations between pro-union and anti-union members as they simultaneously work to help each other survive and blame each other for their situation.

Amid this highly complex tension, we see occasional acts of great generosity, met sometimes with acceptance and sometimes with rejection, but always with hesitation.  The film leaves us longing for the joy we catch brief glimpses of at the beginning, when we see the "promised land" the black community has created for itself in Chicago and two main characters' excitement at securing jobs and fantasizing about the future. 

This was the first feature film by director Bill Duke.  The ambiguity of the characters' intentions, their mistrust, and their need to respond to seemingly insurmountable forces working against them are things this film shares in common with Duke's neonoir Deep Cover, a film which is equally great but otherwise completely different.

Modern Love Tokyo: He's Playing Our Song (2022)

There's a moment here that seems almost like bait for Naoko Yamada auteurists: the main character crouches under a piano and starts sketching the leg of the person playing it.  Those who have gone looking for stylistic idiosyncrasies in Yamada's work have noted her tendency to show only fragments of the character's bodies and her furtive placement of the (fictional) camera.  She often shoots only the lower legs of characters, employing both of these devices.  They play a role in evoking an experience of peering longingly out at the world surrounding you, with it not being obvious whether you are seen in return.  

What sets this apart is its alternation between depicting the main character's adult life and high school life, and periods in between, much like Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday.  Much of Yamada's work falls into the same genre as many anime and other Japanese films, one that depicts youth as a window of opportunity to explore, to develop interests and relationships that aren't bound by productive logic.  But her style emphasizes also the flakiness of youth and the potential for loss.  The story of He's Playing Our Song closely resembles some that Yamada has put to the screen, but begins at a point in time after that window of opportunity already seems to have closed.  This late start compared to Yamada's other films is why it helps that this one, out of all of them, is (mostly) based on a true story.

Red Desert (1964) 

Like many of Antonioni's films, one senses despondence in Red Desert.  Monica Vitti's Giuliana is a depressive person wandering around from place to place without accomplishing much, after all.  Most of the film takes place in a world full of freighters, fog, factories with all kinds of machinery jutting out from them, and pools of industrial waste.  There are occasionally vivid colors, but for the most part things are dull.  But in one scene, Giuliana tells her son a story, and the film surprises us with a pristine natural environment.  In her story, a girl is swimming at a beach of bright sun and vivid shades of blue when she starts to hear singing.  The singing comes from the sea itself and the rock formations all around the beach.  

Before and after we see this and hear the beautiful voice of the beach, there are times when strange sounds seem to emanate from the film's industrial environments.  The industrial landscape may have its own song, its own inner life, just one we can't understand yet.  It is not necessarily just despoliation.  There is mystery holding the despondence in check.  Giuliana herself never quite certain as to why she feels the way she does. 

Other characters are less depressed, but don't strike us as especially perceptive.  In one scene, they gleefully tear apart the walls and furniture of a shack they're all staying in just to get firewood, a move that is almost too on-the-nose in a film so obviously about the impact of industry on the environment.  

Antonioni did not see this film as a condemnation of industrial modernity, which he believed was something that could be beautiful.  What this film captures is a distinction between people with different perceptual abilities.  On the one hand, Giuliana can see that things are changing, that there is a new type of life implied by the industrial landscape, but doesn't fully understand yet how to bring out the beauty in it, and becomes alienated and paralyzed.  On the other hand, there are the people around her, who tear down the walls of their shelter and seek to travel to foreign lands.  They are more active than Giuliana in trying to cure their discomfort, but less perceptive of its causes, of how profoundly the world around them is changing and the possibility that they will be complicit in their own destruction.

The Ties that Bind (1984) 

This film is a record of Su Friedrich interviewing her mother Lore about her life in Germany during the years 1920-1950.  She and her family were critical during the Nazis during their rise to power and until the end of World War II.  The interviews play out as narration over a montage of old photos, original imagery, and examples of Nazi symbolism.  The symbolism is the only direct experience we share with the disembodied narration, and seeing symbols in this context helps us understand what they really are: things that are meant to connect you to something else through an aesthetic response.  They provoke our imaginations, invite us into their idealized pictures of life.  We hear about how Lore and her family rejected those images.  We understand the seriousness of this more when we can experience part of the aesthetic inundation they had to deal with.  It calls on us to feel intruded upon and to examine ourselves.

The film wants us in a critical mindset because its has another purpose besides elucidating Lore's experience.  It seeks to remind us that fascism persists in both Germany and the United States.  Friedrich shows us headlines from the 1980s about a discovery of Nazi propaganda circulating in West Germany, and how it was originally printed in Nebraska by members of the National Socialist Party of America.  

Friedrich asks her mother if she knew about the concentration camps.  Lore says she didn't, but thinking about it clearly disturbs her.  Friedrich also expresses frustration with the Allies' decision not to bomb the railways leading to the camps.  The pain this film evokes is not just the pain of how Lore's adolescence and young adulthood were disrupted, but the pain of looking back and wondering if you could have done more.  And it sees Reagan's America as a place that seriously raises that concern.

 

Utamaro and His Five Women (1946)

The film opens with an enraged samurai looking for the 18th century artist Kitagawa Utamaro.  The samurai is an acolyte of the Kano school, the dominant school of artistic thought.  Utamaro has made disparaging remarks about it, and the samurai wants to duel him.  Utamaro proposes a painting contest instead.  After losing the contest, the samurai abandons the Kano school to become Utamaro's disciple.  

The hallmarks of Mizoguchi's cinema are present: in sites of social activity, the film captures the different places the characters occupy and the ways they move through deep, detailed sets.  But in private, on roads, beside rivers, and in forests, there is intimacy and a weakened perception of hierarchy, and nature is depicted as both beautiful and indifferent. 

Utamaro and his circle's devotion to art as a way of life, strong enough that a painting contest compels them as much as a duel to the death, have little use for the petty formalities of the world around them.  Despite his provocative remarks, Utamaro generally doesn't set out to cause a commotion.  But due to the prestige of art, the women he paints gain some prestige of their own. At least in the art scene Utamaro occupies, they live with a freedom their society had not previously afforded them.  Peter Labuza notes a scene in this film that shows us something akin to a line of chorus girls, and suggests that it looks more like something out of a Busby Berkeley film than what we normally see in Mizoguchi's films or his most frequently discussed influences.  

Chaos breaks out when Utamaro is forbidden from making art after offending the government.  Again, art has the force of a duel to the death and the power to reshape society.  Cut it off, and it makes perfect sense that both personal and political conflicts escalate to the point of violence.