2021’s Ten Best Films: 8 & 7

Freelancing feels like I'm playing a video-game and there is a slight delay between the controller and the action onscreen. Like I'm pushing, pushing, pushing and, eventually, at some indeterminate point, I get paid or get more work or receive vindication that my choices toward instability were the right ones. I don't know how millennials will age in the gig economy. How will I ever retire?  Will a new pandemic rip away my life as I grow old and become less valuable to society by the day? How will I purchase teeth? I have too many ideas to execute and a ticking clock nags-- quickened by the fear of early onset dementia that I watched slowly shrink my father's brain for sixteen years. I like my work life but is it built to last? Am I built to last? 

8. Titane (dir. Julia Ducournau)

At one point while watching Titane I started laughing a deep, guttural laugh that only slapstick can bring. But, in this case, it was a gory, nasty, bone-crunching Tarantino-esque style slapstick that made me disgusted with myself. Titane is a gripping body horror train wreck where ideas slowly collide and bounce off of one another but never really cohere into a deep understanding or meaning. But I think that’s what makes it so good: life is not always a clean interpretable event— even one’s sense of self can be a fluid, moving, organic, crowd-sourced thing. The film’s convoluted detachment captures all of the free floating anxiety in every combustible engine that is the human heart and mind, reminding just how tenuous, confusing and scary all relationships truly are. The most terrifying parts of the film, though, were also the least gruesome, like how one quick selfie can make you the property of another, how a person is one viral media news story away from belonging to the public at large. 

7. Test Pattern (dir. Shatara Michelle Ford)

TW: Sexual assault. Renesha is roofied at a local bar while out with a friend. Her boyfriend seeks justice. The two travel throughout Austin, Texas trying to find a rape kit, and understanding. The protagonists chase a sense of elusive normalcy paralleled by their initial love-story, providing simultaneous narratives that show the before and after scenarios of a life-altering event. The two storylines also develop the characters with a sense of familiarity, inviting an audience into their lives like new found friends. Even though the film plays in genres (a thriller, a tale of justice, a love story), it avoids the possible pitfalls of cliches instead becoming a story about people living in a society that isn’t made for the complexity of human emotion and experience. On top of the story, the film’s craft shows a pointed balance as the audio exists in the service of the narrative, not the other way around, creating a super tense atmosphere and heightening all senses.