Welcome to the Cory C.O.R.N.E.R. (critical observation regarding neo-entertainment, respectfully), a time where your resident know-it-all cinephile, a multi-time Scene-It champion and only slightly-annoying dinner guest, shares his thoughts on whatever movie-ness needs to be movie’d.
Always remember these three things: Porgs are friends, not food; Iron Man 2 is better than you remember; The Breakfast Club didn’t even eat any actual breakfast.
As we enter into a season of golden vistas and prestige films, there are a few 2019 films that we just can’t forget to consider ourselves here at High Five: The Website, so let’s roll up our sleeves and try to advocate for some pre-Oscar season films to be remembered as the year’s about to dwindle down.
We’ll exclude the obviously great stuff like Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Avenges: Endgame, Us, Toy Story 4 and the third John Wick movie, if only because we’re guessing you’ve seen those films before.
The Last Black Man In San Francisco
Filmmaker Joe Talbott showed considerable talent with his debut feature, a lyrical journey into a changing city and one of its residents who refused to let a gentrified future take away his civic pride.
Actor Jimmie Falls provides both the story that sparked the screenplay and a laser-focused, impassioned performance as a fictionalized version of himself, with Jonathan Majors astounding as his devoted best friend and moral compass. Emile Mosseri’s score is one of the year’s finest and most rigorous.
Talbott’s film is abundantly alive and angry, a homily of hellfire and hope. You’ll be stirred to action after you watch this just like you’ll be inspired to run down the streets of your hometown with pride. It’s just about as good of a debut a young director can have.
The Farewell
A film primed for an exciting awards run this year and 2019’s Sundance darling, Lulu Wang’s autobiographical tale of how her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis returned her to her childhood home in China and forced her to confront the gaps in her understanding of her family and their Eastern practices.
Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzen’s adoring chemistry together and Wang’s lingering romanticism of such acute familial conflicts in industrial areas ring true. It’s such an uncompromising vision if only because it’s so authentic, a stark recollection of memories so exact and scattered they can’t help but paint a full picture. It’s an emotional journey, for certain, but one without barriers. We’ve all been there in an abstract way with our families, even if the actual story might seem a bit removed from Western customs.
It’s an excellent film, and like The Last Black Man in San Francisco, another great title for A24 to add to its repertoire. Wang shows such promise as a filmmaker, and her film will stick with you long after you see it. It’s too true not to.
Greta
In what could have been another tired tale of obsession, Neil Jordan’s latest is an alluring, deadly dive into such a fascinating story of how a twentysomething (Chloë Grace Moretz) falls into the life of a lonely woman (Isabelle Huppert) whose purse she finds on a subway.
The film both avoids and embraces both the camp of its material and its genre trappings with aplomb, weaving such a fine web of manipulation and desperation with rachets of oddity so wonderfully out of place you wonder how they got in there in the first place.
Moretz and Huppert go back-and-forth like fencers and bless Jordan for going all on making such an artful, fluid film so trashy and fun. It’s a macabre marriage between something creepy and combustible, how brazen entitlement, free of empathy, can be a heck of a thing to overcome.
