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| Hopefully I can change this next year |
It's time to end our little three parter, as a last farewell to the year that was and as greetings for the year ahead. A little belated, but out of roughly 350 films seen, here are 14 favorites from world cinema that I saw last year. Rules are: 1) can be released anytime 2018-2019 as long as I saw it in 2019, 2) favorites, not necessarily best and 3) doesn't matter where and how I saw it, a movie is a movie is a movie.
So, in rough order:
John Tawasil's
WORLD CINEMA FAVORITES 2019
14. We Are Little Zombies (Makoto Nagahisa, 2019)
Bathed in chiptune, punk rock and eclectic visual styles, Makoto Nagahisa's debut film is also a movie about the different ways we process grief. While prone to succumbing to its own flair, it is nevertheless a genuine treat to watch.
13. Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)
Out of all the films in this list, this is the film that arguably has the most fun with its premise. Patterned after an oldschool whodunit, Knives Out then turns all that on its head and uses the medium to tell an interesting story about class, neoliberalism and American society.
12. Hello World (Tomohiko Ito, 2019)
Hello World is a science fiction-flavored high school romance anime, but what sets it apart from other anime works that came out this year is its interesting matryoshka doll-like structure, worldbuilding and manipulation of reality.
11. Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018)
Woman as mother, woman as mother-earth, woman as Artemis, goddess of the wilderness. Benedikt Erlingsson's Woman at War shows Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) at odds with her own nature: the duality of her wants and needs with her desire to change the world.
10. Manta Ray (Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, 2018)
Manta Ray is a tribute to refugees all around the world; it is a story about a refugee without nation or identity, trying to gain the nation and identity of others and failing. It does not let itself get shackled into conventional cinematic forms, as it trudges without fear into strangeness, taking us along for the ride.
9. A Girl Missing (Koji Fukada, 2019)
Koji Fukada continues his cinematic exploration of Japanese society in A Girl Missing, where once again the inclusion of an intrusive force bends and stretches the notion of societal graces to its absolute limit. While not his best film, it still deserves a spot on this list.
8. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, 2019)
A western wrapped in blood-soaked psychedelia, Bacurau defies convenient explanation, though the themes of community resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism in the era of populist leaders like Bolsonaro makes this a very timely film for many nations around the world.
7. The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
Perhaps the most disturbing adaptation of Perfect Strangers ever made (I kid, and points to whoever got the reference), Eggers' reimagination of the Promethean myth is surreal and captivating in so many different ways.
6. Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (Kim Do-young, 2019)
This at times devastating portrait of a woman worn down by society and the expectations forced upon her gender is not an easy watch. It shows the little things that wear women (and also men) down in a deeply patriarchal society, and how these traumas are passed down through generations. It's a call for empathy and shared responsibility in work and child care in a society that is slowly moving towards true equality for men and women.
5. Suburban Birds (Sheng Qiu, 2019)
Sheng Qiu's mesmerizing feature debut is in my opinion the best competition film of QCinema 2019, a slow-paced, haunting treatise on the malleable landscapes of memory and physical urban spaces.
4. I Am Easy to Find (Mike Mills, 2019)
My favorite American film of 2019 is not a "cinema film;", it 's free to watch on Youtube. Yet in the space of roughly 25 minutes, it exceeds most of my experiences in the cinema this year, proving (at least to me) that a movie doesn't have to be in the theater to count. It features The National, a rock band perhaps best described as "sad white dads pining about love", yet in this film (and the album of the same name) there is a curious inclusion of female voices, and it's easy to see why.
Frontman Mike Berninger talks of the album's final track, and the film's signature song, Light Years, as a song "about just feeling distant from somebody on a different orbit – people who love each other but don’t understand each other." I Am Easy to Find is a movie and album about empathy, or at least an attempt at understanding the women closest to us, whether they be mothers, sisters or wives. In the film, a woman's entire life is shown in bits and pieces, eventually forming a picture of a complete, separate human being, full of wants, needs, hopes and dreams.
3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)
In this film, in a society and time where women are all but invisible, there are women who see, women who look, and women who are seen. As a romance, this is also a film about keeping the idea of love alive, through memory or works of art, with the latter meant to last forever.
2. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
A truly marvelous work of cinema, one that will be remembered for years to come, Parasite is Bong at what is perhaps the peak of his creative powers: a film about class divides and Korean society that is incisive, profound, thrilling and even darkly funny at times.
1. Liz and the Bluebird (Naoko Yamada, 2018)
"I wanted this movie to be like two girls dancing. The flutter of an eye, an intake of breath, hair swaying like a pendulum. Everything girls are made of, becoming music." - Naoko Yamada
A startlingly beautiful work, from its minimalist soundtrack to its Bressonian framing to the soft and delicate designwork of the late Futoshi Nishiya, my jaw dropped in awe and tears fell freely while watching this film. There's so much packed into every furtive glance, every gesture, every second of silence, multitudes seemingly borne from nothing.
It is a masterful deconstruction of the moe genre its animation company is best known for, an experimental reimagining of Sound Euphonium, and Yamada's best work yet. But with every viewing of this film from now on, there is another level of undescribable sadness: given what happened to Kyoto Animation in the past year, a film like Liz and the Bluebird may never come again.
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| Disclaimer: I am a lot fatter than this avatar lol |
And now, one last thing as we go into the new year. Present Confusion has been in existence for almost 15 years, and I've enjoyed sharing my film experiences with everybody thus far. But in the past few years, my output and turnaround has slowed down, partly due to real life stuff and the reality of aging. It's time I acknowledged what I've known for a long time: the blog is long past its prime.
That's why I won't be posting reviews as much as I used to, and I won't actively seek out every local film that comes out from now on. It's good to support the industry by watching everything, but with it comes the fact that by watching really bad films, I'm enabling them financially. I'll still be covering and reviewing whatever film festival or event comes my way, but as for the other films, I might resort to shorter capsule reviews or just focusing on certain films instead. Hopefully through this I can focus on more international films in the future.
Eventually of course, the blog will wind down and my journey through film with you all will end. Not this year, I hope, but definitely someday. I'll be sure to let you all know when I've truly thrown in the towel.
Present Confusion heads to its twilight years confident that other, younger talent will take over and cover the slew of Filipino films that come out every year in cinemas. You can find some of them in the list to my right (desktop version), and I'll be adding a lot more sites to that sidebar in the coming months.
So for 2020, I'll see you all at the movies!
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