Pamela Colloff and Keith Maitland, 2016
#34, 2016 Skandies
This is a documentary about the 1966 sniper attack on the University of Texas campus, the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in the U.S. prior to 1984. It presents the usual talking heads and archival footage… but the twist is that those are supplementary to the main action, as the movie is mostly a cartoon. That is, instead of just showing us a bunch of 70-year-olds talking about their memories from half a century ago, the filmmakers use rotoscoped animation and young voice actors to allow the survivors to walk us through their experiences of that day as if those horrific events were happening that very moment to their 1966 selves. The focus is on moments of heroism: the girl who ran out and lay down on hot pavement for an hour, risking her own life, in order to comfort a greviously wounded victim of the sniper and keep her talking so she wouldn’t lose consciousness and slip away; the high school boys who ran out and carried that wounded student to safety, the sniper firing all the while. The subject is still pretty slight, and the animation style is on the rough and ready side, so all in all it comes off as a well-made Youtube video. I guess that whether that is a recommendation or a criticism comes down to how much you like well-made Youtube videos!
Chesley Sullenberger, Jeffrey Zaslow, Todd Komarnicki, and Clint Eastwood, 2016
#37, 2016 Skandies
Speaking of slight—how do you make a movie out of 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson?” I can certainly see why you might want to: it was an uplifting story that captured the mood of a moment. We were in the last few days of an administration whose first year had seen hijacked planes crash into and bring down the World Trade Center, and whose last year had seen a global financial collapse centered on Wall Street. Then one morning you had a passenger jet lose both its engines to bird strikes on its takeoff from LaGuardia, and yet due to the pilot’s skill and correct decision-making under pressure, he was able to successfully land the airplane in the river, saving the lives of all 155 people on board. It seemed to offer a glimmer of hope that we too might be able to make a miraculous recovery from a decade of calamity. But the incident itself—from takeoff to “the unlikely event of a water landing”—was less than three and a half minutes. Even adding in the process of shepherding people out of the plane and onto rescue ships, how do you turn that into a feature film?
This movie’s answer is to focus on the aftermath: we begin after the action is all over, not as a mere framing sequence, but as the primary timeframe of the film. The chief conflict is not man vs. nature, but pilot Chesley Sullenberger’s attempt to convince a skeptical National Transportation Safety Board that he had made the right call in rejecting opportunities to try to land at an airport. Many involved in the real investigation, including Sullenberger himself, are on record protesting that it wasn’t remotely as prosecutorial as portrayed in the film. Maybe the filmmakers were just trying to gin up some interpersonal drama out of a situation that didn’t really have any. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that someone involved wanted to use the story of US Airways Flight 1549 as a vehicle to push the notion that we’re better off putting ourselves into the hands of a strong paternal figure, like a stoic ex-military man with a white mustache, and letting him make the calls without “regulation” and “oversight” from a bunch of namby-pamby paper-pushers. So while it was certainly absorbing to watch this recreation of the Hudson landing, the movie didn’t really sit well for me after I’d had a chance to think over what I’d just seen.
Anthony Bagarozzi and Shane Black, 2016
#49, 2016 Skandies
I watched a lot of movies like this back in the ’90s—movies like Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, Go, The Big Lebowski, and many more that piled audacious incident on top of audacious incident and gave you two solid hours of shocked laughter for your $4 matinee ticket. I haven’t seen too many since: I guess Inherent Vice was roughly the same sort of thing, but it was a weaker effort than its ’90s counterparts. This one, also set in the 1970s, comes much closer to belonging in that august company. I can’t remember the last time I burst out laughing watching a movie as often as I did watching this. I wasn’t a fan of all the violence, but nevertheless, unless it somehow gets caught at the wire, this will almost certainly be my pick of the 2016 litter.
Which gets me wondering: it’s been five years since I put together this list of movies to watch. Going into this film, I had no idea of what this was about or why the 2017 version of me elected to include it. I mean, we’re a long way from the top of the voters’ ballots—I’m not watching #38 to #48 or #50 to #57, so how did #49 make the cut? I must have seen something about it that I promptly forgot, but what? As I noted last time, several people have written in over the past few years to tell me that Arrival seemed tailor-made for me, but not only is The Nice Guys from the same neigborhood as Narcolepsy (which was basically my attempt to write an IF version of The Big Lebowski), but its lead supporting character is a precocious 13-year-old girl who made a strong enough impression on me that from here on out it will be hard to write chapters of the Photopia book without seeing her as Alley. Did one of you out there tell me that this would be the case, only for it to slip my mind five minutes later?
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