A-List: Top 10 Movies of 2015
By J. Don Birnam
December 30, 2015
9. The End of the Tour
Mostly overlooked by critics, the End of the Tour features Jesse Eisenberg as the reporter David Lipsky, looking back on his interview of famed writer David Foster Wallace, played by a wonderful Jason Segel. The movie focuses on the at times tense but ultimately respectful relationship that forms between the two men, despite Lipsky’s overall resistance and skepticism to Wallace’s life-affirming platitudes. Throughout the interviews, Eisenberg comes to discover that, despite his fame, Wallace is deeply conflicted and insecure about his own works and existence. It may sound superficially trite, but it is pulled off magnificently by an exacting script that hits the right notes about the importance of certain things in life (such as internal peace and happiness) and is buoyed by two nuanced performances. While you may find yourself thinking that many of its supposed explorations of humanity, friendship, success, and the meaning of life are all things you’ve heard before, you will surely somehow identify with the ways in which these anxieties affect the characters of this infinitely thoughtful movie.
8. The Big Short
I’ve always been a fan of movies that can pull off something complicated like, in this case, explaining the housing crisis in an audience-friendly way. And I’m a big fan of movies about the excesses of American corporate culture, such as The Wolf of Wall Street. The Big Short combines these two in a slapstick dramedy that tells a compelling story, features strong if showy performances, and keeps the audience gripped the entire time. As I wrote last week, The Big Short is an incredibly urgent movie that tries to lessen the urgency of its messages by throwing its hands up into a comedic “I give up” gesture. It compellingly walks through how and why our economic, societal, and political structures were set up to bring about the endlessly greedy speculative gambling that almost destroyed the entire World’s economy.
The directing efforts of Adam McKay (of Anchorman fame) may well be panned as the movie’s disjointed element, but disjointed is what a movie about untethered avarice needs. There are no good guys in The Big Short - there are only cleverer guys and, oh, ironically, we root for them, even though they, too, will profit from misery. If you look closely, then, the movie is not just about the housing crisis and not just about good vs. bad guys, it’s about how much of that all of us are, no matter what we may think about ourselves in the first place.
7. Tangerine
The indie critically acclaimed Tangerine is the seventh spot. The movie focuses on two transgendered call girls and a closeted Armenian client of theirs and their movements in Los Angeles over Christmas Eve. The lead is played by real-life transgendered actress Kitana Kiki-Rodriguez, who embraces the role with an honesty that, honestly, Laverne Cox could only wish. She is looking for revenge after she discovers that her pimp, who was also her boyfriend, had cheated on her while she had recently been imprisoned. Her friend, played by a sincere Mya Taylor, helps at times along the way.
Through their eyes, we see an honest portrayal of the lives of an until now mostly forgotten segment of the population, without traveling through the plot twists one has come to expect from these themes. Spoilers: this movie, about a black transsexual hooker, does not end with her death. The facile emotional manipulation gives way to the much more harrowing circumstance of the actual difficulties that individuals in her situation face. You do feel stereotypically bad for the closeted Armenian, but there is some magnetism to all the characters that is difficult to pinpoint - be it thanks to the purposefully churlish acting, the surprisingly steady directing (despite the movie being filmed entirely on an iPhone), or the excessive use of sound to draw the audience into the bombastic nature of the characters’ lives.
I have read elsewhere that Tangerine is the movie of 2015 that most “wears its heart on its sleeve,” and I agree. What’s more, it works in doing so, which is much more than we can say about most sentimental pictures. This is, at bottom, a sentimental movie about hopelessly flawed but impossibly lovable characters.
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