Night Is Short, Walk On Girl 2017

From Cageian phantasmagoria & 18th-century mischief to a world-weary Western and a stolen Singaporean road movie
Once upon a time, Derek Smith wrote: “2017 was a year endured rather than lived.” But all due respect to the past, because here we are creeping into this new 2019 and things are so much better than we thought they’d be!

True, the year probably felt like 37 years or whatever removed from Rick Deckard’s squared-off tie and malfunctioning memory. And truth be told, the political crisis unfolding in the gray hallways might seem more honest if it resembled the light-starved, gnarled noir of Blade Runner. At least Schwarzenegger and The Running Man promised that 2019’s only choice would be “hard time or prime time,” even if its presentation of a neon capital, corporate-owned world seemed, you know, subtle. And for all the (dead) kids in cages and bodies bleeding out on street corners here and abroad, Michael Bay and The Island had a perfectly-drooped Buscemi diagnosing our humanist crisis: “I mean, you’re not human. I mean, you’re human, but you’re not real. You’re not a real person, like me.”

A lot of people were told they weren’t humans in 2018. This isn’t a writerly evasion or poetic epithet designed to elicit righteous ire/compel you to read another year-end list. Because what else could you call the concentrated attempt by some humans to discourage the freedoms of other humans? Our narrative didn’t turn science-fiction to let us off the hook: these non-humans weren’t clones or replicants or estranged Atlantean denizens returning to claim their kingly right. They just weren’t human enough (or the right kind of human) to matter in the eyes of louder, more powerful humans. All of our past’s proposed images of our worst futures pale in comparison to this denial of basic humanity that we see out our windows.

It is unsurprising, then, that cinema, our most volatile cultural mirror, began to show the stretch and strain in its images of our species. But what is surprising is that cinema in 2018 retained nuance and compassion as it mediated the cruelties and depravities of its age. Unlike this slab of prose, movies in 2018 moved beyond mediating good and evil in simple, monolithic terms. They attempted to sketch the boundaries of real freedom in an unjust world (BlaKkKlansman). They investigated, more acutely than ever before, the responsibilities of what it meant to keep (Shirkers) and tell (Madeline’s Madeline) another human’s story (If Beale Street Could Talk), especially in remembrance (Roma). They presented distorted genealogies (Hereditary) and fisheye-lens histories (The Favourite) to track the human body’s motion (Suspiria) in and out of comradeship (Support the Girls) and trauma (Burning). In 2018, we hurled our betrayed humanities up against foreign corpses (Zama), scorched country (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), alien twins (Annihilation), and incongruent voices (Sorry to Bother You). We began to see, in everything, something like a way through the darkness. Why else keep watching the past (The Other Side of the Wind) if not to plot something we’d never imagined before (The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl)?

Our moving images in 2018 proposed that real love (Eighth Grade) and genuine care (Lazzaro Felice) could stretch impossibly across time to add up to a life steeped in both nuance and compassion (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). Our love would not look the same (Leave No Trace) nor could it resound in strictly-feasible tones (Mandy), but we would recognize its absence; we could see that sometimes humanness looks like something we’ve never seen before (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse).

More than anything, as one derelict theory proposed, “Through the negative you could see the real, inner, demonic quality of the light.” In laying the responsibilities of the filmmaker and artist at the feet of a murderer, The House That Jack Built came perilously close to endorsing our worst demons. Those demons shook and raged and hissed at us, urging us to give in to despair and make a world in their image. How did we let it stand? Thomas Merton was a central figure in a figurative, feral lens for our year, and he wrote that “despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.” To levy our humanity so close to inhumanness, suggesting that our better angels are distortions, is dangerous. To know, as these 25 films know, that there can be nothing without despair until there is love is to actually be human. To look, as we did, through our ruinous year and resist the despairs of all our oppressors and lowest urges, to shout, in image and montage and light and shadow, that this is how I deny you is to attain, beyond our humanity and into the future, a new kind of prayer. –FRANK FALISI

Source: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/favorite-25-films-2018

As listed by Otavio Uga at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmeREWd_mMQ
Organized by genre:
1-8 - Action / Adventure
9-16 - Animation
17-24 - Comedy
25-32 - Documentary
33-40 - Drama
41-48 - Foreign drama
49-56 - Suspense
57-64 - Horror

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