I watched 151 films in 2016 that I had never seen before. Some of them were brand new, such as Richard Linklater's latest slice of life Everybody Wants Some!!. Some were older and more restrained in their use punctuation, such as Guess Who's Coming To Dinner — which, pleasantly, I could not possibly imagine being made today with a straight face. Then again, I did watch it before November 8.
As is now usual — having started in 2012 — I kept a ranked list of all these films I watched for the first time. Within at least three days of seeing a film I would put it in the list and it would remain there, fixed and forever. I do allow myself to change it if I see it again, but I think it's important to keep this strict rule. Otherwise, you know you can reshuffle come December 31 and so you don't feel a need to be brutally honest with yourself. I saw Rogue One twice, and it dropped from third place to ninth, for example. Meanwhile, I think Captain America: Civil War is far too high, but did not watch it a second time and so it remained in place.
Sorry, I should stop talking about this list like you know it very well. Because you don't. So here it is:
My wonderful friend Ross also ranks films like I do, and his results can be found here. We agree that Arrival is tippity top, but strongly disagree about the merits of Ben Wheatley's High-Rise. He's also wrong about Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
Somehow I hit 151, ten more than last year, even though I'm sure I said at the start of 2016 that I'd like to see fewer films and read more books. Blame the Cineworld card, I suppose — there's nothing like £17 coming out of your bank account every month to make you feel like you need to get value out of it.
And, indeed, releases from 2016 dominate the list. Only three of the top 10 were seen at home (not The Iron Giant, though, because I luckily caught that on a Movies For Juniors screenings one slightly hungover Saturday morning). But The Secret Life of Pets, Suicide Squad and London Has Fallen show that cinema trips were not all well-received, so while I saw a lot of them they are not, perhaps, any better than any other given year. I just had more access to them. You can see by the graph of decades that I did not choose to watch many old films and that is why they are solely lacking in the top tiers of the list. I don't think I'm biased against older films (Fail-Safe, a 50s nuclear panic thriller, comes in at #15) but perhaps my selections prove otherwise.
People often say that cinema has "run out of ideas" when a remake or sequel is hitting the headlines and I usually like to tell them they're wrong. Cinema has always cannibalised other sources, hasn't it? The well-regarded Scarface is a remake, which most people don't realise, and even Die Hard has its basis in a novel. But check out my top ten, which are a diverse bunch (although without necessarily much diversity, and most focus on male leads).
Of these ten great films, only two are not adaptations of some kind. Everybody Wants Some!! may be based on Linklater's own youth, but it is wholly original, at least as a creative work. And Synecdoche, New York is the dazzlingly original work of Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman's other film in this list, Anomalisa, is an adaptation of his own play from 2005. The Iron Giant, The Girl With All The Gifts and Hard To Be A God are based on novels, Arrival is adapted from a short story, Rogue One is a prequel, Creed is a sequel and Whiplash... well, you could say Whiplash is original. It's based on a short film that was made from the beginnings of the feature film's screenplay, made to attract investment for the full-length piece. Because of this, the Academy nominated it for "Best Adapted Screenplay" at the Oscars, not "Best Original Screenplay". Seems like a good rule of thumb to follow their lead.
Not that unoriginal stories are any guarantor of success. While the Marvel films of the year put in good showings, every DC-based movie failed to break into the top half. Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad have all been thoroughly pored over by critics and while Steel showed promise, the grim tedium of its successor and the joyless irritation of the self-consciously wacky Squad have made me swear off the rest of this franchise. Illegally downloading movies is obviously bad and clearly I do not do that or recommend doing it, but if you want to feel up-to-speed with DC's movies it's hard to see why you wouldn't illegal grab them. You certainly wouldn't want to give them money, hoping the film is good, because that will only encourage them. Make them learn from their mistakes.
That, by the way, is how we end up with steaming shitheaps like London Has Fallen. Everyone who saw Olympus Has Fallen and paid to do so back when it came out may have gone for some brainless entertainment. I wouldn't begrudge them that, and it fits the bit well enough even the patriotism borders on the devotion of North Koreans (who, ironically enough, are the bad guys). So the studio thought they were onto a winner and churned out a sequel, hoping for repeat business. And that is how, in the spring/summer of 2016, the most xenophobic movie I think I've ever seen came to trouble British cinemas.
It is spectacularly cheaply made, London Has Fallen, thus allowing those bankrolling it to reap even greater profits if the same number of people who saw Olympus turn up. Maybe even more, encouraged by their friends' enthusiasm for the original! How cheap are we talking? London is actually played by Bulgaria, and most shots of the capital are clearly stock footage that matches none of the filming done for the movie. There is a scene in which Gerard Butler talks to Morgan Freeman, except they have clearly never been in the same room and in Butler's shots the back of Freeman's head appears to be played a terrible wig on some poor intern's head. Cheap in another sense is the movie's racism, which manifests in the most uncomfortable Britain First fever dream you can imagine. It turns out most of the London police force are bad guys, at least the ones with brown skin are. That's right — they've taken "our" jobs and they were really terrorists! I bet Farage ruined his trousers with glee when this played in his local cinema. No doubt Thomas Mair would have approved of Butler's line, as he knifes a terrorist, "Go back to Fuckheadistan or wherever you're from."
But while Gerry Butles might be a dick, at least he doesn't wave his own about on screen to fend off terrorists. (He does make a joke about the President hiding in a closet, though, because the possibility of somebody being gay is just inherently hysterical in the apocalyptically narrow worldview of a character who can't even drink water without yelling: "I'm thirsty as fuck!")
Plenty of penises did, however, grace the cinema screen this year. It is strange, from an objective standpoint, that female nudity is as frequent in films when male nudity is not. That’s not to say cinema is without wangs — we’ve all seen Shame and Forgetting Sarah Marshall would indeed lose some of its power if we were more used to movie manhood — but it's a notable lack sometimes. The Sessions, for example, features a whole scene where a man must get comfortable looking at his lovestick, and it's framed in such an awkward way to make sure the audience don’t get a glimpse.
But is this trend changing? I thought it might have been in January 2016, after seeing three films that month that had, at some point, an on-screen penis. So I set about tracking any more that I saw and so far the count comes up to 14 films released in the UK in 2016 with a penis in them. An average of one every month! I don't actually know what conclusions to draw from this — are actors less concerned with baring all? Has society reached a point where the objectification of male figures is becoming as widely accepted as that of the female form? Is there a conscious effort to do so, or has it happened organically? And sure, one of the dicks belongs to a puppet, but it's still a dick. Théo & Hugo is a slightly different case, given that it's a gay love story that begins with a solid 20 minutes of an exclusively male homosexual orgy in a sex club. But the fact that it has the freedom to just do that, and not be a film only shown in weird cinemas and dodgy websites, suggests that penises are becoming a lot more acceptable in films.
So if it's more sequels or more genitalia, roll on 2017...
