Top Movies of 2022: No. 12 - Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story

12. Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, dir. Ti West

No horror director had a better 2022 than Ti West. He did not make just one great movie this year, he made two. Both of his movies in his new franchise were in New Zealand during the pandemic, both starred Mia Goth, and both were set in the same primary location. We rarely see this kind of efficiency in a theatrical release, to just reuse the same sets and maybe even the same man-eating gator. It feels very old Hollywood or the classic B-movie Roger Corman method of economical production. That is all very appropriate considering how much West's duology traffics in nostalgia.

The first of these movies, X, is an Honorable Mention on this Best Movies of 2022. Set in 1979, X is loving tribute to two genres that were just blossoming that decade: those being Golden Age of Porn and the Golden Age of Slashers. Because after all, we think of the X rating as bawdy, it is the last letter of a very powerful three-letter word, but it was originally intended for all kinds of adult-material. The Evil Dead was infamously rated X and that is only pornographic in its use of goopy slime effects. X is imagining what if Debbie Does Dallas were interrupted by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

One of the gimmicks of X is its star, Mia Goth, playing two roles. One is the Final Girl, Maxine, performed by Goth as her current beautiful young age. The other is Pearl, the psycho-biddy psycho-killer, played by Goth in many pounds of thick old age make-up. (It is a better make-up effect than it sounds, to the movie's credit.) Because of this dual role, West and Goth were able to make a prequel about their killer's origins, which came out a few months after X. X was a lot of fun, a really solid slasher that proudly spits on the moral guardians of the Seventies, who still decades-later deserve to be spat on. However, Pearl, the movie seemingly made as a bonus feature, is far superior. It is a much darker and more interesting experience.

Where X was about the rise of our modern idea of B-cinema, Pearl is about the rise of motion pictures themselves. It is set in 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, a time where you feared going out to the cinema without a face mask (unimaginable in our times, of course). Pearl, a young woman trapped at home in her small Texas farm, dreams of her husband's return from World War I. She also dreams of being a shining star in 'the pictures'. We're right at the beginning of Hollywood becoming the dominant cultural force of the 20th century. This is when Hollywood could be imagined as purely wholesome, before even the first big actor scandals and first conservative backlashes. If you have nowhere else to be, the movies are the perfect escape.

On top of that, Pearl's projectionist friend (David Corsenswet), has a 1915 stag film hidden away in his bunk. Even back 100 years ago, some people old enough to be your grandparent's grandparents were humping away on the roadside on camera. Nothing is as new as we believe it to be. This is yet another path for Pearl. However, Pearl has no future on the big screen or secret underground projections. Her future is here, on the farm, to be nothing and nobody, while her terrified parents try to contain her, and she is very angry about it.

Mia Goth's performance as Pearl is an amalgamation of a many different film icons. Sometimes she's as sweet and innocent as Judy Garland. Pearl is technicolor pastiche on the Wizard of Oz, complete with a scarecrow hanging on the bright sunny all-American cornfields. But then, Pearl is pouring her repressed sexual energy onto the strawman, to remind us there there is no Emerald City at the end of this yellow brick road. Our heroine transforms from Cinderella to Norman Bates. She's Annie Wilkes who thinks she is Carrie White. As long as her dreams are only dreams, the whole world is going to suffer.

More than anything, Pearl is a triumphant display of acting. No actor accomplished more acting in a movie in 2022 than Mia Goth did in Pearl. There's a song and dance number inside her mind. There's a fearless soliloquy that she delivers to her poor, trapped sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) that goes on for many minutes without a cut. The end credits play over Mia Goth's face stuck in a Joker-esque grimace, that she sustains unblinking for nearly five minutes, until her face is covered in tears and snot. Pearl is constantly demanding that the world recognize her as a star. She'll never get there, but Mia Goth, she is a star.

A lot of movies in 2022 were these tragically earnest attempts to sell their audiences on the power of cinema. This all felt to me increasingly desperate as the medium continues to decline in total viewers. Damien Chazelle's Babylon might have been the worst of them, wasting all of its material on a Whiggish view of cinematic history as this grand arc from the silent era to Avatar. Sorry, none of that works on me. If you're going to be this painfully saccharine, at least throw some irony in there. Have some more depth. Give us a spectacular gross-out murder like Pearl does so often. If the medium is so nakedly desperate to be loved, don't just tell us a story about how great it is. No, use that desperation. Tell us a story about somebody truly desperate to be seen and recognized. And then if you refuse her, she'll set you on fire or feed you to her gator.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 13 - After Yang

13. After Yang, dir. Kogonada

SciFi fiction can simply dispense with the old question of "are robots human?" You can just move on, it's a settled debate, the answer has to be "yes". If you're drawing hard prejudiced lines around humanity you're being... well, really shitty. There's too many real people in this world on the margins of what their society to start creating fictional humanoids to dismiss. After Yang is not interested in the people-ness of its title character. That is a given. Everybody in the film sees him as a person, or are quickly swayed to the other side. The few characters on the other side of that debate are irrelevant to the story, very elegantly passed over and ignored. Like many forms of awfulness, it is best simply not to make time for it.

After Yang is set in a near-future that, compared to many visions of the future, seems rather pleasant, if even enlightened. The central family is mixed both racially and biomechanically, having purchased Yang (Justin H. Min) in order to guide their adopted Chinese daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) with her cultural heritage. Her parents, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) are extremely not Asian and do not want to imprint their backgrounds onto their daughter/. They hope she can be a more-rounded person. However, as lovely as that goal is, they still purchased a man. No matter how much he seems enjoy his life and his given task, this is slavery.

We do not get much context to the world of After Yang. You're free to theory-craft the greater implications of the world beyond Yang's family. Richard Brody interpreted this future as a secretly dystopian slice of "techno-fascism" when he wrote about the film for the New Yorker. I'm not sure there really is anything so blatantly sinister hiding behind the softness kindness of this world. Everybody lives in pristine ultra-modernist glass boxes, they get to ride around in self-driving cars that have gardens in place of their controls, and while money is a concern, Jake is still flexible enough to pursue an emotionally fulfilling job of selling exotic tea. The family takes part in a synchronized dance competition during the opening credits, which is a very fun bit of musical energy that the movie needed. But is this a cruel bit of Verhoeven irony? I see less of Starship Troopers or The Running Man as much as dancing is just fun. 

However, even if you imagine this future as having no façade, being really as peaceful as it seems, it still treats its technosapiens as commodities with warranties that you can buy second-hand from shady shops downtown. At no point does After Yang shy away from the dark implications of its premise. Yang questions whether he is allowed to fear his death. Even further, he wonders whether a synthetic being such as himself is truly "Chinese". At best he is a true brother and son to his family, at worst, he's a trite collection of trivia and feel-good lessons without context. He feels especially false when he tries a mundane metaphor of two trees grafted together for Mika as a symbol of her mixed family. When the given example does not quite line up properly, he repeats it again, clearly reading from some pre-programmed speech. Eventually we learn that Yang does have an inner life, he has friends outside the family, he has a past he's kept secret, and seemed happy with his place. But the family only really gains this context after Yang already is effectively dead, and only after going through his harddrive to find his memories. Jake and Kyra see him first as a broken babysitter/tech product, it takes time before they really grasp all that's gone.

These are all uncomfortable SciFi questions much more interesting than just humanity. The meaning of race, questions of free will. But also, without the genre trappings, After Yang would still have a lot to recommend about it. This is one of the best films about grief of 2022.

Grief is painful process, but also, it can be celebratory. You are losing somebody, but you're appreciating them in ways you never could when they were still here. Jake spends most of the movie unwilling to admit to his family how bad Yang's condition is. Upon losing a loved one, we must go through our vast memory banks of that person, to ponder who they were, what we're losing, what it all meant, if it meant anything. In spite of the grotesque nature of his existence, Yang was loved.

After Yang has this fascinating cinematic trick where all of Yang's memories echo. We get two different takes for the lines in the scenes, shown one after another. This is an interesting technique, I've never seen a movie do something like this before. The echo makes the memory feel bigger, like not just a scene but a connection. I believe we are seeing both Yang's memory of the scene, and also the memory of Jake or Kyra at the same time. It plays out the same, always with there's subtle differences, as no two people can see the world the same way. Every moment in time is shaded by our minds in our own unique way. In After Yang, one of those unique ways does go away forever, but it is never forgotten.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 14 - Crimes of the Future

14. Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg

I left Crimes of the Future with a loud, booming thought in my head: "THAT'S IT?" Thoughts like "wait, it's over?" or "what was the point of that?" are not the kinds of ringing endorsement that make a movie in my Top 15. Thinking for too long is a wasteful use of time these days. Who has the room in their lives for delayed satisfaction? We need to be accomplishing grand feats of consumption and creation every five minutes, after all. I demand my movies shower me with meaning and enlightenment no later than 9 PM sharp. But sometimes a movie just lingers. You never quite stop thinking about it. The lack of solid lines of closure is a quality in of itself.

Crimes of the Future is the first new David Cronenberg movie in nearly a decade. He is not going easy on his audiences in his old age. His latest work has all the makings of a traditional SciFi noir plot. It opens on a shocking act of murder. The film is full of shady men in coats whispering of conspiracies. There's an imaginative future set in a trash pile coastal city where humans have evolved some form of immunity to pain and infection. All of society is one endless piece of grotesque body horror performance art. It seems several forces are fighting for control of the direction of our species.

But then almost none of it matters in Crimes of the Future. All the conspiracy trappings do not really go anywhere. There's no final climax, no real villain, and there are not nearly as many crimes as the title promises. You have dozens of characters to keep track of, yet that is rarely worth the trouble because most of them do not really need to be here. After a horrifying opening of infanticide, the awful transgression everybody is so worried over is just an issue of diet. So again, I have to ask: that's it?

Yeah, maybe that is it. Maybe a movie can just be a weird hang with horny oddballs.

Kristen Stewart is doing something really interesting with her character Timlin, a government bureaucrat tasked with logging the many new organs that people are generating. She plays her character with this almost-cartoony nerd-girl affectation. It's a great performance, but Timlin is mostly irrelevant. I do not remember what role she actually played in the end. But nobody would dare cut her from the movie. Crimes of the Future is less a story and more the backstory for all the lore you'd need to run a tabletop RPG campaign with all these ideas. Why not have a sexually constipated secretary drool over our hero's mutations?

Cronenberg is well-known for his fetishes and imagery, which Crimes of the Future does supply: nobody else has made a movie featuring a writhing bone chair that somehow helps you digest breakfast, or a dancing man covered in ears. While his vibes are best-remembered for their use in horror films (The Fly, Videodrome, etc.), he also just has a lot on his mind beyond simply grossing the squares out. His most recent movies were Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars, two works of social satire that were in no way horror, just musings on the unnatural state of late-capitalism. Here in Crimes of the Future, we spend our time in a dark Riviera landscape reeking of humidity and garbage. It seems like an awful dead-end for our kind, yet it may also be a kind of paradise. Our heroes, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul (Viggo Mortensen) can be in love in a non-sexual way, performing their art their way. The freaks have won.

Crimes of the Future is also an effective metaphor for the act of artistic creation. Our "hero" (in scare quotes because I cannot remember what he does that's actually heroic in a traditional sense), Saul, is beset by these tumor-like organs growing all through his body. He uses these mutations as his performance art, as Caprice surgically removes them before various onlookers. Saul is a respected master of his craft, whose painful secretions are both a blessing and a curse. He must find a way to process the growths in his soul, and why not have them be art? And I know this feeling, I've written stories that certainly feel like getting painful lumps removed from my soul. Peter Strickland's equally strange film Flux Gourmet imagined art as flatulence, I believe tumors are the more accurate metaphor. Passing gas is easy, art is not just a by-product. No, it's cutting yourself to pieces and hoping your audience likes what they see.

Top Movies of 2022: No. 15 - Cyrano

15. Cyrano, dir. Joe Wright

I do worry: "am I only putting Cyrano on the Top 15 because nobody else liked or even saw this movie?" Then I start getting in my feelings about my integrity and biases, and whatever. Enough of that nonsense. The truth is: I feel bad for you all that you missed this. In Cyrano, there is a sequence of bakers in the morning kneading dough that's one of the most sensual visual metaphors of the year. Blunt and clumsy as all heck, sure, you cannot miss the point on the movie's mind, but it is effective. For proving that baking is sexy, Cyrano has to make the list.

And looking into my heart of hearts, Peter Dinklage's sad puppy dog face face trying to smile while holding back tears absolutely belongs in a celebration of 2022 in film. 

Cyrano is an adaptation of a 1897 play by Edmond Rostand, which has inspired countless films, operas, and even plenty of other musicals. I've never seen any of them, so maybe this is the best version of tale, maybe it is the very worst. The 2022 film musical makes an enormous change to the story by shrinking its title character. Traditionally Cyrano has an enormous nose which creates his anxieties, but in this version, he has dwarfism. Despite being a heroic figure in this 17th century French town who can win duels both by sword and by anachronistic rap battles, Peter Dinklage's Cyrano believes he can never be physically appropriate for the love of his childhood friend, Roxanne (Haley Bennett). This leads him to become a mentor of a dashingly handsome young soldier, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who also loves Roxanne. This is a great love triangle dynamic, where one part of the trio is unwittingly the conduit for the romance between the other two. Any physical conquest is offset by emotional cuckoldry.

Now, I will admit that a lot of the Joe Wright take on Cyrano is edging dangerously close to being very lame. It is a costume period piece melodrama and also a musical, and Cyrano will not apologize for being any of those things. From the color blind casting to the very scenes themselves, realism is not a concern here. Joe Wright could not resist having boys in full foppish costume dancing merrily in Sicilian ruins. The music is not even all that great, to be honest. The rock band, The National, did a fine job conjuring the emotions of the characters in song, but very few audience members were humming the tunes on the way home.

Still, the romance on display in Cyrano is hard to resist. It is not cool, but it is beautiful. The primary trio of Dinklage, Bennett, and Harrison Jr. are all great. Dinklage can be the most dashing man in town but also the Saddest of Sad Boys. Haley Bennett is bringing real heat to a movie that would otherwise be painfully dry. You even have Ben Mendelsohn playing the usual Ben Mendelsohn role, as unpleasantly aristocratic as ever.

There is one scene that won Cyrano a place on this list and that would be the nighttime balcony scene. This is a classic opera construction, where the older man feeds the inept suitor his lines to the beautiful maiden upstairs. You expect the scene to go one way, with Christian and Roxanne somehow closer despite the physical distance between them. But then, Cyrano, from behind a wall, suddenly steals the scene, pushing Christian aside to sing with his own voice. I love this because it reveals so much. Christian discovers this is not his story. Cyrano finds an honesty in the darkness he could not give in the light. Roxanne is enraptured by the formless man before her, both Cyrano and Christian at the same time.

Dinklage has a hell of a baritone too, that doesn't hurt.

Top 15 Movies of 2022 - Master Post

Preamble:

I have a Best Movie of 2022 in mind already. This list is still not 100% concrete in my mind, a lot of things might rise and fall in stock as I begin to write about them. But absolutely there is a No. 1 and I have not doubted that it would be No. 1 for the entire year since I've seen that flick. (You can probably guess what it is - it isn't hard - the movie in question is very obviously A Thing I Would Love.) However, whatever I pick is largely irrelevant, because I am just me, a ting bubble of sea of greater film discourse. There already are a couple true Movies of the Year which are beyond little ol' me and my little ol' opinions. Much larger forces have crowned the winners, and before I write my part, let me confront the other winners.

If I were to be democratic about this, the definitive winning Movie of 2022 would be either Avatar: The Way of Water or Top Gun: Maverick, which together made over three billion dollars worldwide. Those are simply unfathomable numbers for us mortals for whom $10,000 is a life-changing about of money. Interestingly, both were long-awaited sequels to legacy properties, sequels to movies coming from the recklessly jingoistic Reagan era or in response to the recklessly jingoistic War on Terror. (There's a lot of money to be made from irresponsible imperialism, on either side, turns out.) They're both passion projects born from the egos of supermen. Top Gun 2 was pushed by Tom Cruise, one of the last remaining true movie stars, a person whose name alone still has bankable marquee value. Avatar 2 was created by James Cameron, the greatest of the auteur blockbuster creators, and one of the few left that can bully film studios, rather than the other way around. 

What do Tom Cruise and James Cameron have in common? They're both dinosaurs, already instinct. There are no replacements waiting in the wings for either of them. Do you think Miles Teller will ever be the next Tom Cruise? Sounds unlikely to me. Do you think any director will be able to tell the MCU not to pollute their films with cameos for god knows what? No. If you're not Jim Cameron, you do what you're told.

Personally I saw both Avatar 2 and Top Gun 2 on their opening weekends, in the biggest theaters I could find, with all the various bells and whistles and extra dimensions and frame rates and whatever else. They are the rare kind of movie I can find a crowd to go with and make an "event". That just doesn't happen very often anymore. I contributed about $100 to that over three billion box office (and rising!) figure, do not question my patriotism when it comes to the blockbuster experience. So what did I think of either one of them?

Well... um... They're fine. They're okay. I guess... Spoilers: neither are making the Top 15.

For both of them, I have about a sentence to actually say: "It's the same movie as the first one, just older." I'm not uninteresting in the experience, I love loud, artistically non-complex things, I like roller coasters. But what am I supposed to do with either of them? They're total rehashes, nostalgic for things I was not terribly nostalgic for to begin with. I'm glad Tom Cruise can still market a movie by promising a bonkers stunt. "I'm Tommy Cruisville and this is big-ass cliff motorcycle jump!!" I'm happy James Cameron gets to swim around with his crab mechs and sexy mermaid aliens. I do not begrudge either of them. Also, this is not sustainable, either financially or emotionally.

Meanwhile, on the other extreme, a new Greatest Movie of All Time just dropped. BFI's Sight and Sound Top 100 list updated itself for this decade, and the new No. 1, replacing previous "best movies ever", Vertigo and Citizen Kane, is Chantal Akerman's 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Which obviously is not a 2022 movie, and thus will not make the list. But I find it is an interesting comparison point. Sight and Sound polled filmmakers, critics, writers, academics, and their idea of the greatest movie possible was an extremely slow, extremely quiet, almost plotless art film. Meanwhile, audiences in 2022 wanted the loudest, fastest, most spectacular, most violent experiences possible.

Now, admittedly, this methodology has flaws. Do audiences really think Big Movie No. 2 is the greatest time to be had at the movies or are they simply choosing from a limited menu? You just voted a few months ago, how many of you are really happy with your Congressmen you chose? Many audiences do not have access to anything like Jeanne Dielman and are emotionally incapable of processing what that movie is doing. They simply do not have the tools to access that movie's grammar, and I am not claiming any superiority here. I watched Jeanne Dielman this fall after the Sight and Sound list dropped. It was one of the most unpleasant film experiences I've ever had. It was three hours of a woman doing chores in disturbing solitude and quiet, depicting an unimaginably oppressive lifestyle. I got freaked out when this woman kept turning the lights off in every room, how can you live like that?? I don't even make my bed in the morning.

There is, however, something of a strategic choice being made here. In response to the increasing fantastical carnage in pop culture, critics and filmmakers have picked something mundane and real in direct opposition. There will never be a race of space aliens fighting extractive capitalism with sea dragons, but there probably were women in your life doing tons of labor quietly and as expected by society, selflessly, as in having no self. Jeanne Dielman is not a character in her movie which we, the audience, have access to, she's a body that performs tasks. It's a blunt, miserable truth, in stark juxtaposition to dreams of men flying out to space or San Diego to finally be appreciated for their manliness.

However, the critics and filmmakers represent an industry that has profited deeply from training audiences to want more explosions and more baroque nonsense. Sure, on an "objective" scale, a film showing a handsome man bombing Iran in a jet plane is a more "fun" or "interesting" experience than your daily routine of making coffee. But also, "fun" and "interesting" are themselves marketing terms which represent trained behavior and limited access to thought. Are you sure you're the one who decided what was "cool"?

Sadly, I find myself in early 2023 as the miserable centrist. I never want to see Jeanne Dielman again, it is a movie I can respect and ponder, it is a fascinating work of art, but I'd rather chores at home because I at least I can play some music or listen to the podcast. Concentrating that hard on a nice lady shining her boy's shows gave me a headache. But also, I'm not out here starving for Avatar 3 either. All that silliness just did not bring up many interesting questions - and the 3D frame rate business gave me a big headache.

However, maybe there's a place in between. Maybe there's a movie that be both one of the most incredible experiences on screen in terms of output of raw wonder and imagination, but can also speak truthfully of the neglected and exploited labor that makes society run? Can we be both incredibly loud and incredibly honest?

Maybe such a movie is going to be my Movie of the Year. Who knows? But that's spoiler talk. For now, the links to the Top 15 are below, will be updated daily.

Some Notes:

I'm going to be releasing these reviews day by day instead of in one huge lump. I'm pretty far behind on the schedules I leave for myself (had a family emergency which stole a week), so one short review a day is more practical than killing myself to write thousands of words in one sloppy, unwieldy mass. But more importantly, these End of the Year recaps keep growing in scale and ambition. I fear at some point I'll spend an entire year just recapping the previous year. So making it a more manageable operation is better, I feel.

So for the rest of January, it's Movie of the Year stuff. And running concurrently, there will be Game of the Year stuff, which will get its own Master Post and its own naval gazing intro.

In order to qualify for this list, the movie in question must have been released to wide audiences, either theatrically or streaming, in the United States sometime in the year 2022. So you might see a movie from many critics' 2021 lists, you might see films that will make other people's 2023 lists. Access is not universal. I did see about 70 movies in 2022, so I did not see everything, but I think I saw everything I needed to. Feel free to be furious that I skipped The Fabelmans.

One other programming note: I am returning to a Top 15 for this list. No more Top 20s, maybe ever. This also helps because 2022 had fewer movies I felt were truly great. I flirted with shortening this down to a Top 10 but that did not feel honest. I am not sure what that means about the overall state of the industry and what was released. I do not think 2022 was a considerably worse year than 2023, but also everything still feels weird in the film-world. Just weird in new ways every year.

Anyway, I am going quite long again, so let's get into it... starting tomorrow:

15. Cyrano, dir. Joe Wright

14. Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg

13. After Yang, dir. Kogonada

12. Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, dir. Ti West

11. Women Talking, dir. Sarah Polley

 

10. Triangle of Sadness, dir. Ruben Östlund

 

9. Inu-Oh, dir. Masaaki Yuasa

8. Nope, dir. Jordan Peele

7. Mad God, dir. Phil Tippett

6. Decision to Leave, dir. Park Chan-wook

5. Tár, dir. Todd Field

4. RRR. dir. S. S. Rajamouli

3. Turning Red, dir. Domee Shi

2. The Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels

Honorable Mentions and Extras