Dorothy Woodend's Top Films of the Year

So, here we are again at that certain time of year. "For Your Consideration" screeners from various film studios are piled high on my desk, award ballots must be submitted, and I am forced to reconsider the previous year all over again.

So many films, one after the other, tumbling forth in crazy profligacy. Some wag once remarked that everyone has a book inside of them, and now it seems they have a film as well.

How to even keep up with such wild abundance, especially when so much of it was kind of dreary? Many of the films touted as this year's serious awards contenders (Birdman, Into the Woods, The Grand Budapest Hotel) were weirdly disappointing. In all frankness, I am really tired of films about men in mid-life crisis, and bored with fairytales for adults.

Thankfully, there were some films that gave us something we haven't seen before.

Extraordinary moments in film, like extraordinary moments in life, are rare, but when they happen the feeling is like being slapped in the face. Tears come to your eyes and before you realize it or can control it, you're bawling like a newborn calf. This physical reaction is your body telling you something is true. It's as if someone is playing the cosmic xylophone on your vertebrae and then it comes braying out of your lungs in a strangled yelp. 

I had it happen to me a number of times this year, including one grey Sunday morning last January when I was trying to get through a bunch of films and do laundry at the same time. I put my laptop on the corner of the bed, dumped clothes in the middle and set about folding stuff. It wasn't until I realized I'd been sitting frozen with a towel in mid-fold for 20 minutes, transfixed by the story unfolding on screen, that I understood I'd stumbled upon something truly great. The film was Virunga, which is now on the short list for the Academy Awards. If you haven't seen it yet, hasten ye to Netflix.

That documentary about the fight to save one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, the east Congo home to gorillas, is high on my list of best films from this past year -- a list that ran the gamut from hilarity to horror and back again, sometimes even in the same film. Here are the rest:

We Are the Best

If you missed this film the first time round and live in Vancouver, it's playing at the Vancity Theatre again this week. For every woman who remembers the feeling of being in a girl gang, the zippy manic energy you felt when your friends had your back and you were unstoppable, this film is for you.

Director Lukas Moodysson, working from his wife's graphic novel, tells the story of a group of would-be punk rockers in early-'80s Sweden. Klara and Bobo are 13 years old, alienated and bored in bleak old Stockholm. Surrounded by ridiculous parents, fascist PE teachers, and heavy metal boys who insist on hogging the practice room at the local community centre, these girls have the world ranged against them. What is there to do but kick out the jams, motherf*kers!

All those first painful moments of youth are there: first love, first drunken debacle, and the first time you barfed on the record collection of your friend's cute older brother. The girls form a band and rehearse their one and only song "Hate the Sport" (prompted by a particularly mortifying gym class). But even as they're coming together as a band (with the help of a talented, Christian classmate), the surging drama of boys threatens to tear them apart.

Hilarious and wince-inducing for all of us who came of age in the '80s, We Are The Best jumps and shouts with mad hormonal fizz. It may remind you of the scampering craziness of running down midnight streets with your best friends at your side, whooping and screaming like mad girls. Love love love.

Force Majeure

What are they feeding filmmakers in Sweden this year? Another of this year's most interesting films also hails from the land of Abba. In Force Majeure, director Ruben Ostlund takes apart marriage and family life with the precision of a vivisectionist. It is a singularly painful pleasure.

At a French ski resort, a man named Tomas, his wife Ebba, and their two kids are supposedly enjoying five days of powdered vacation. What fun! Not really. Cool, meticulous and possessed of a strange internal power, the film cuts back and forth between ridiculous humans in their goggles and puffy coats as they make sport amidst the majestic vistas of ice and snow. Scenes of beetling snowplows that carve up and down the mountainside with lunatic speed are juxtaposed with the bland interiority of the hotel itself. However carefully groomed and managed, nature has a way of throwing humans the occasional curveball, and so it is here as well.

One sunny afternoon while the family is eating lunch on a restaurant patio, a controlled avalanche gets a little bit out of control and threatens to subsume everyone into a wall of snow. Tomas grabs his iPhone and his gloves and scampers right out of there, leaving his screaming family behind. This single act, helpfully captured on a cell phone, brings down his entire life.

Like Scenes from a Marriage, another Swedish masterpiece, Force Majeure captures the pain and the manipulation that lies underneath almost all human relationships, especially between married people. Moments of marital honesty are so horrible and funny that they may cause you to hide under the blankets and thank the heavens for the sacrament of divorce. Sometimes all it takes is one wrong move and an entire mountainside comes tumbling down on your head. But maybe you deserved it.

Obvious Child

Perhaps the first romantic comedy that has an abortion at the centre of its narrative, director Gillian Robespierre's Obvious Child feels genuinely new. The film's star, Jenny Slate, who is in turn an obnoxious pain in the ass and endearingly sweet dork, adds immeasurably to the story, in effect making it her own. Slate plays Donna, a young comic living and working in Brooklyn. By day, she labours (sort of) in a slowly dying independent bookstore. At night, she mines her own life and relationships for material for a standup act that she performs in a nosedive of a comedy club. After a routine that involves a lot of anus and fart jokes, her boyfriend dumps her for her friend, and in retaliation she gets thoroughly hammered, picks up a nice young man and has sex with him. Hello unplanned pregnancy.

The film's courage comes in treating Donna's experience with matter-of-fact honesty and humour. This is a reality for many young women, and a universe away from the glossy bullshit of Katherine Heigl/Judd Apatow films like Knocked Up. There is no debate about what Donna should do or should not do. In this, the film is something revolutionary, in that it presents a woman who knows her own mind, takes responsibility for her actions and still ends up with the cute dude at the end of the story.

Belle

A world away from gritty shitty old Brooklyn is England's green and pleasant land. Amma Asante's feature costume drama Belle recounts the little-known story of Dido Belle, a young woman of colour who helped to change the course of English history. Born in 1761, the daughter of an enslaved African woman and a British navel officer, Dido grew up in the care of her uncle, William Murray, the First Earl of Mansfield and the Lord Chief Justice of England. Dido occupies a strange halfway place in English society, too high to eat with the servants and too low to have dinner with her own family. When she and her cousin Elizabeth Murray come of age, their adoptive parents commission a portrait of the pair. The genuine article appears at the end of the film and captures, in one image, the energy and wit of the woman at the centre of the story.

Asante's film is old-fashioned in many ways, a behatted, bewigged, rustling petticoat of a film, which is both a blessing and a complexity. All of the usual English thespians (Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson) do their things, meaning they emote stiffly and enunciate clearly. But the conventions that bind the characters, lugubrious as they are, are useful in some weird way.

This is familiar turf, full of stately homes and stiff upper lips, but what makes it doubly interesting is the way in which Asante uses this form and texture to tell the story of a young woman at a time of genuine change. The film is built around real events, namely the case of Gregson versus Gilbert that helped to put a nail in the coffin of the English slave trade. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays the film's title character, is luminously beautiful and sharp as a tack. She deserves a man as principled and gorgeous as she herself. A dashing young lawyer/idealist named John Davinier (played by the toothsome Sam Reid) does the trick. Asante succeeds in making a film that works on all counts, a sumptuous period piece, a good old fashioned romance, and most importantly a major film directed by and starring a woman of colour. Weirdly enough, the fact that this aspect of the film is its most revolutionary quality should tell you something.

The Babadook 

Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, while not quite as terrifying as the pull quotes would have you believe, has stayed with me. In fact, the damn thing has wrapped itself around my waist like a determined child that will not be pried off. I find myself thinking about moments in the film that are never fully explained -- like why does the mother pull out a tooth? Is it a reference to the old wives' tale about for every child you have, you lose a tooth? Is the monster in the basement an embodiment of female rage, or suppressed grief, or both? Even watching the original short film from which the feature sprang is of little help. You turn such questions over and over, worrying away at it like a hole in your gums where a tooth used to be. This is an indication that a film has done its job, it has climbed inside you, like some inverse form of birth, and takes up permanent residence. Maybe it is best to let it settle inside the basement of your brain and lurk there in the darkness, eating worms. 

Snowpiercer 

Bong Joon-ho's science fiction epic was only barely released in theatres this past July, but picked up speed with VOD delivery. While some folk had trouble with its conceit of allegory writ large, I think Snowpiercer's ultimate intent was as political and as timely as a social justice documentary. The world is upside down, and in order to right things once more, drastic action must be taken.

Only total destruction of the old order can beget something new. It is a violent and bloody process, but singularly thrilling to witness. Only a filmmaker as crazily courageous as Bong Joon-ho would have the temerity to end the film with an image of a lone polar bear. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry when I first saw this scene, so I did both. 

Citizenfour; 1971; Private Violence; Point and Shoot

Real life is just so much stranger than any fictional film could ever be. There were so many great documentaries this year, including Johanna Hamilton's 1971, Cynthia Hill's Private Violence, and Marshall Curry's Point and Shoot, to name only a few. You can't make this stuff up, even if you tried extremely hard. Which brings us to one of the greatest films of the year.

If you haven't yet seen Laura Poitras's tour de force Citizenfour, what the hell are you waiting for? Go now! Right this very instant! The quality that most endures in this film is not only its bravery, but its restraint. There is no music to cover over the raw moments of the film. They simply are captured in all of their bare and unsparing honesty. A man tries to do what he thinks is right, with full understanding of the consequences. The filmmaker is right there with him, bearing witness to history as it unfolds. It is an extraordinary act of courage on both their parts.

We the audience must take our own place in this story (it's not quite finished yet) and try to understand what we have become and where the hell we're headed next. Maybe we'll all find out together.  

Before we bid this year a final adieu, let me take a moment to wish all you Tyee folk, far and wide, a very happy holiday, full of family, friends, food, and a few films. 

Please note our comment threads will be closed Dec. 22 to Jan. 5 to give our moderators a well-deserved break. Happy holidays, readers.