The Top Ten Films (I Watched) in 2022

 The Top Ten films (I Watched) in 2022:

The terrific Romanian 2007 film 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days from Cristian Mungiu - isa film everyone in an abortion-banning state should be forced to watch over the 2 hours or so, through a series of mostly long stills, and sometimes long tracking shots in which Mungiu conveys the struggle over a few days of two college roommates in Romania, with its ridiculously strict anti-abortion laws (couldn’t happen here, could it?). 

Wim Wenders’s music-documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a totally enjoyable start to finish look at Cuban music - a project that began when the great American guitarist Ry Cooder, who’s been for many years a proponent of world music, travels to Cuba to try to connect with the great stars of traditional Cuban dance music, much of which had been performed by members of the eponymous club. 

What a nice surprise to come across the under-the-radar Best Pic nominee Coda (2022), which shocked everyone with its Best Picture Oscar: a terrific film that’s heart-warming, never soporific or gratuitous, about a teenager who works on her family fishing boat out of Gloucester while a full-time h.s. student with dreams of becoming a pro singer, with the catch that her family members all have complete deafness. 

In the Soviet WWII film Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), one of best war, or anti-war, films I’ve ever seen, we follow a young man’s induction into and armed combat and takes us through astonishing sequences of cruelty and brutality that never feel gratuitous, just horrifying. 

The Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the best ever among American films noirs - from the look of LA ca. 1938 (the setting for the plot), the fantastic hard-boiled dialog (screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by JM Cain, so how could you go wrong?), great acting by the 3 leads, each cast against type (McMurry, Stanwyck, E.G. Robinson), and a fun plot that will have you thinking all the way through,

Dino Risi’s Italian road movie, Il Sorpasso (1962), is totally watchable and fun and sad and touching. “Road Movie” doesn’t to it justice; it’s a comedy with much pathos, with two guys, strangers essentially, taking a weekend drive away from Rome and along the Coast - with Vittorio Gassman as the extrovert, risk-taking, domineering personality and the recently gone Jean-Louis Trintagnant as the timid, cautious, nerdy guy.

Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) - the title will become evident a few bits into this 60-minute program, directed by Bo Burnham - is an absolutely unique (and excellent) piece of cinema, something like an hour-long comedy sketch, sure, but also like a 60-minute one-man play and like an hour-long discussion unrehearsed and like an hour-long therapy session.

Radu Jude’s 2016 film, Scarred Hearts (the title is awkward, at least in English) is a beautiful if painful medical odyssey, as we follow a young man (early 20s) in 1935 Romania as he enters a TB asylum; the care he receives may have been adequate in its day but from our vantage looks brutal and ineffective: essentially the well-meaning doctor punctures the patient’s stomach to siphon off infectious pus - extremely painful - the puts the patient in a body cast, essentially making him immobile for months - with obvious physical (and mental) deterioration. 

John Ford’s 1939 classic, Stagecoach, is still a pleasure to watch if you can get by the racism and stereotypes that mar some of the scenes and just recognize these - the Apache warriors, the comical Hispanic-American English pronunciations - as relics from a (nearly) bygone era. In essence, the film is a version of the Canterbury Tales meets Sartre’s No Exit, as a group of 10 or so travelers, each with his/her own mission, share a coach for transport across dangerous open lands to the next fortification.

Martin Bell’s documentary Streetwise (1984) is a stunning and extraordinary film on the (mostly) teenagers living on the streets of Seattle, then, ironically, known as the “most livable city in America.” This scene is the polar opposite of the Microsoft/Starbucks Seattle culture that we know (of). Bell’s camera follows these children, all of them from broken homes or other terrible and threatening and loveless lives.

Top Ten Miniseries (I watched) in 2022

The Top Ten Miniseries (I watched) in 2022:

You won’t find a more hateful character on screen than Jean Paul (JP) Williams (played by Claes Bang) in the Irish black-comedy thriller (yes, lots of genre crossings) Bad Sisters (2022).

Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back (2021) is a monumental work of documentary and film editing - Ja 6-hour series built from hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of film and recoding of the foursome in studio (and, ultimately, on rooftop) as they spent a month developing what would be their final album, Let It Be.

Dennis Lehane’s Black Bird miniseries (2022, Apple) is one of the most successful dramatizations “based on a true story”- a terrific and harrowing look at the life of a 20-something straight-arrow seeming guy (Taron Egerton as James Keene), nabbed as an Rx dealer and sentenced to 6 years - but the FBI makes him an offer: They will have his sentence commuted if he’ll go undercover into the prison for the “criminally insane” to get info and and wrench a information from a scary guy (Paul Walter Hauser as Larry Hall) who’s in jail for the murder of a young woman.

Hostages, an HBO documentary series (2022, 4 episodes, from a team of 5 directors), is a detailed look at the Iranian revolution of the ’70s, the American complicity based on years of support for the brutal Shah, and ultimately the collapse of all social order, a vacuum filled by the charismatic Ayatollah who turns a blind eye on the mob attack of the U.S. embassy, leading to 444 days of imprisonment of embassy staff, a few Marines (or just one?), and other Americans working with the embassy.

The HBO 8-part series Julia (2022) with Sarah Lancashire predominant as the eponymous French Chef Julia Child, is a pleasant, enjoyable, approachable series that has lots of laughs, smiles of recognition from those who recall the original TV series, and its moments of darkness and struggle as well: much talk about women being pushed aside in the male-dominated world of public (and I would guess commercial) TV, some sharp debate about whether Julia’s role was supportive of or harmful to progressive women of her era (the ‘60s), and a few glimpses of a some of the hidden truths in Julia’s life.

Nanfu Wang’s terrific 6-part documentary series, Mind Over Murder (2022, HBO) tells of the conviction of a six people known as the Beatrice Six. This gives nothing away, as you will learn in the first 60 seconds or so of the first episode that the 6 were later exonerated and released from prison after some 20 years after their conviction. How and why? 

In Season 3 of My Brilliant Friend “Lenu” rises to some fame through her publications as, thanks to her spoiled intolerable husband, her marriage cracks at the seams. This series remains one of the best on-going series of the 2020s - better and more accessible, I believe, than Ferrante’s source novels. 

Hagai Levi’s re-take on Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage doesn’t quite measure up against the original, but it’s still a powerful and sometimes frightening intense, close look at a youngish (30+) Boston-area couple and how they deal directly and painfully with issues that arise over the course of their endangered marriage: pregnancy and medical abortion, infidelity, separation, sexual longing, and, in the episode closest the Bergman original, heart-felt reparation. 

The HBO series Slow Horses Season 1 (2022, James Hawes, director; based on Mark Herron novel) is a complex and emotionally draining work about a team of British agents assigned to Slough House aka Slow Horses because of their various screw-ups and misdeeds - as they try to redeem their reputations through their efforts to thwart the kidnapping of a young Muslim comedian taken by a group of right-wing extremists who plan to execute the young man.

The 2nd season of Mike White’s HBO smash The White Lotus (2022), similar to the first in its luxury hotel setting for the rich and uber-rich, this time in Sicily, despite recent quibbles about its celebration of conspicuous consumption and display and the free ride that the most obnoxious characters get at the end (no spoilers), was a lot of fun to watch from the outset, and if we hate some of the characters, which we’re supposed to and expected to, well, that’s part of the fun as well.