By The Pondering Cosmo Film Desk December 26, 2089
As the calendar turns to a new year and a new decade, rarely has the future been so uncertain. You don’t need to hear any more about the rising political tensions across the solar system, the economic chaos ravaging Earth as key resources dry up, or the terror that has engulfed Southeast Asia as they are pummeled by a battalion of kamikaze pigeons. On a front much closer to our line of work, the movies also often seem to be on life support. The major studios have forsaken artistry entirely to produce a series of lifeless pictures dictated by a method they keep locked behind closed doors, and those artists who remain struggle to have their work break through a mountain of advertisements and propaganda. Nevertheless, we at the Pondering Cosmo Film Desk have still found reasons to be hopeful about the future of cinema in the form of scattered gems amidst the slog of, well, everything else. We have gathered these gems throughout the year and now deliver them to you as a best-of list. We have worked together and also argued and passionately fought, whether through arm wrestling or a Sudoku competition, to refine the list to ten films, unranked and presented in alphabetical order.
The always-reliable Rex Asparaghous has adapted this bestselling book relaying a firsthand experience of the Argus missions, and turned it into a spiritual successor to the great existentialist films of old. But framed against the infinite emptiness of outer space, the desperation and meaninglessness hangs so much heavier. An ensemble cast composed of fresh and familiar faces alike carries a mostly eventless film into a deep meditation on faith, meaning, and our insignificance in the universe. Rarely have I seen a film make absolute silence so maddeningly deafening. – Pavita Millimuff
The Leopard
One of the year’s smartest, most well-crafted films is this biopic of Floyd McCutchen, pioneer of animal transmogrification implants. Covering the span of about ten years, the film traces McCutchen’s evolution on multiple levels: one as he tests and develops animal transmogrification implants to turn himself into the title leopard, which he cites as always having been his preferred physical form, the other as he also devolves into an increasingly base, aggressive, angry person, mirroring his physical transformation. Anchored by a career-best performance from Kevin Serendipitousness Kevin, the film trades in razor-sharp technical dialogue and tracks closely the process of invention without ever becoming lost in it. The film leads us to the animal nature we have buried within and forces us to consider whether we ought to let it out. – Pavita Millimuff
Lights
This is the film for which I fought unceasingly for weeks to get on this list, and for which my colleagues doubt my sanity for having defended so much. Yes, this is a two-hour film consisting entirely of eight static shots of various light sources – a streetlight, a lantern, the sun, etc. – with no dialogue, characters, or plot. Yes, I do think it is one of the best films of the year. The film draws from a long history of the avant-garde, from Ralph Steiner to Stan Brakhage to James Benning to XX-Staple, and crafts a culmination of all their ideas that derives from the mundane, from the overlooked, immeasurable beauty as the lights turn from mere flame or filament into the divine itself. Watch the film with patience and an open mind, let it all wash over you, and you will find it a near-religious experience. – Z.P. Kibbleworth
Nantucket Nightmares
The year’s most innovative horror film came from the always talented yet oft-overlooked mind of Enrique Zahnheim, who has the craft of delivering unique scares down to a science. With Nantucket Nightmares, though, he turns to the psychedelic and the surreal in a pseudo-anthology of the grotesque nightmares the yearlong residents of the title island all have one cold winter’s night. Watching the film, it is hard to know which is more unsettling: the dreamworld that fuses together Dali and Lovecraft, or the brutal frigid setting it posits as its closest thing to waking life. The film stacks innovative sequence after innovative sequence in a seven-course meal of horror, and caps it all off with what has to be the year’s most bizarre and breathtaking ending. – Ambrose Vok
Plague of Frogs
If you didn’t hear about this film when it was released this past May, the idea is very simple: this is a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal starring the Muppets. And somehow it not only works, it shines. One would think that the long monologues about the absence of God spoken by the Max Von Sydow character in the original film would fall totally flat when delivered by Kermit the Frog. One would be wrong. The film manages to create the Muppet equivalents of the dread and angst present in Bergman’s film while elevating its joyous episodes. It is a film both funny and heartfelt, which pays homage to a cinematic masterpiece while doing something entirely its own. Further proof that Hollywood desperately needs more Muppets. – Ambrose Vok
The Poutine Whisperers
Rarely do we see a director as acclaimed as Kendra Rinkenspoon deviate so drastically from their known brand, yet that is what Ms. Rinkenspoon does with The Poutine Whisperers. In place of her usual lavish historical epic, we have a modern-day story of three women running an elaborate con in Ottawa by spreading a hoax of the food supply being possessed by salsa demons and presenting themselves as the exorcists. In place of high drama we have a rampant absurdism, in place of striking widescreen cinematography we have a subtler yet fiendishly clever camera, in place of grand spectacle we have a character-driven pulp plot. This film is surely not what any of us were expecting from one of today’s great epic filmmakers, but might be something even better: a true surprise demonstrating versatile talent. – Z.P. Kibbleworth
Splatter
Ogg Minsciewicz has breathed new life into action cinema with a film that takes the concept of action as ballet to its fullest realization. As the title suggests, there is quite a lot of blood in the film, but it is used more as an aesthetic device used to make the frame pop, like strokes on a Jackson Pollock painting, than as a symbol of violence. Death and gore become not just indulgently delightful, satisfying our primal thirsts, but visually dazzling, speaking to the possibility of action cinema transcending into high art. Nevertheless, the film does not forget to be entertaining, mixing plenty of brutality, thrills, and humor in with its abstract symphonies of blood and sinew. The result is a film sensually scrumptious. – Z.P. Kibbleworth
Steppe-Mother
This year’s Palme d’Or winner undoubtedly deserved the award, as director Amin Batbayar delivers a beautiful yet harrowing picture of the gradual death of his home country Mongolia. The story of a rural family whose younger generations migrate to burgeoning cities, leaving the elders alone on their ancestral plains, the film executes a quiet drama that enamors itself with quotidian practices and mourns their disappearance. Its cinematography, exclusively using natural light, is dazzling. The ensemble performance is riveting, and standing out particularly is Nina Ganzorig as the family’s matriarch. As films get more noisy and busy and our focus turns to outer worlds, a film like this, made with the skill of the old masters and bringing our attention to the ways of life we are abandoning, becomes a necessity. – Z.P. Kibbleworth
If the film industries of Earth are stuck in the mud, then cinema’s best hope lies in the artists on other planets. A flame of hope was finally lit with the arrival of Uluvu’aroiya and the emergence of Venus as a potential source of great new artists. Malaya Bubbi’s directorial debut brings a bold new style of lush color, unending music pervading all aspects of the film, and a relaxed cheerfulness that serves as a needed antidote to the stress faced by your everyday Orbiter. My hope is that in time, we will look back on Uluvu’aroiya not just as a great movie in its own right, but as the beginning of a groundbreaking movement to shape the course of cinematic history. – Pavita Millimuff
Yankee Titfuggs’ Hannukah Abortion Rumpus
Need I say more? – Ambrose Vok
The Pondering Cosmo Film Desk 