Doug's Favorite Movies of 2016

La La Land
Rogue One
Arrival
Hell or High Water
Everybody Wants Some!!
Hail Caesar!
10 Cloverfield Lane

La La Land

Inevitably, there will be backlash. There’s always a backlash. I was part of the backlash bandwagon for Birdman. People don’t want to see other people be happy. I get that. The funny thing is: La La Land doesn’t care what you think. La La Land requires no context. La La Land is not a reaction to the downward spiral of morale in the U.S. or a rejoinder to the grimness of Spotlight. La La Land is a brightly-burning candle in a vacuum. It’s delightful, it’s innovative, it’s funny, and it’s heartbreaking. It deserves every Oscar it wins. “But I don’t like musicals!” People will say. That’s fine. La La Land doesn’t need their oxygen. It will burn brightly on its own.

Jackie

Despite being way too short to play Jackie, Natalie Portman mines extreme emotional depths to portray the famous grieving widow. But no amount of perfectly-accented, blue-blooded scenery-chewing can make up for the fact that there’s just not that much of a plot here. Jackie plans the funeral a little bit, then wanders around in the house a bit, and then wanders around in the garden a bit, all with the accompaniment of the depressing monotone piano score. It’s all very maudlin, even if, as people say, it’s a treatise of feminism.

Rogue One

**  May the SPOILERS be with you! **

“Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit.”

Remember when the fake Robert McKee said that to the fake Charlie Kauffman in Adaptation? That’s how it feels to watch Rogue One. Unlike the JJ Abrams directed The Force Awakens, which doesn’t really end because we know that it’s a franchise and for some reason Disney and Lucasfilm don’t trust us to come back for the next movie, so they have to end everything on a cliffhanger like it’s an episode of Lost, Rogue One ENDS. And we already know how it’s supposed to end! It’s been completely forecast and foreshadowed. It’s the opening crawl of Star Wars! And yet, it still ends beautifully and tragically.  No sequels here. It’s all over for some of these people, but they go out more heroically then almost anybody else in Star Wars, and that is extremely satisfying. So the beginning is sort of a mess. There are a million unanswered questions, there seems to be scenes missing, and at times I felt like I had walked into the movie halfway through without a clear introduction to some of the characters. You ask yourself, “Who the hell are these people?”

But they wowed me at the end and that makes it worth the price of the ticket and a bucket of popcorn.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me!”

Lion

Well-acted but depressing true story about a dumb kid who gets lost in India. Super, super depressing.