Scott's Top Ten Films of 2018

There was a lot of great Scotttent -a clumsy portmanteau- on BP this year, culminating in a top ten that I'm thus far only 2/10 on.  But I am down for any film that puts Isabelle Huppert in a horrible hat!  Unless they do that in GRETA because there is no way in hell I'm seeing GRETA it looks like scariest movie ever made.

FIRST REFORMED dir. Paul Schrader (2018)

Starkly beautiful yet somehow shot in Brooklyn and Queens.

Ethan Hawke's character, Ernst Toller, was named after a German activist playwright who was briefly the president of the unrecognized Bavarian Soviet Republic.  The dialogue is reminiscent of an Arthur Miller play. The politics on ecodespair pretty much align with my own (after college courses rather than internet research) so the final act tends far more towards comedy for me than it seems for most. I have a hunch Schrader, while earnestly intending this as a wake-up call à la mother! he also would like to posit that much male anger and self-righteous violence is the inability to recognize plain old loneliness and try to remedy that first.  Triage your emotional burdens people!  But work backwards, instead of shrapnel out of the lungs, eat a bowl of soup and call your mom. 

THE FAVOURITE dir. Yorgos Lanthimos (2018)

a gorgeous tragedy, a leavened heaviness, pumpernickel topped with caviar and crème fraîche

Favorite Television of 2018

10. Westworld
9. Crashing
8. Barry
7. Killing Eve
6. Silicon Valley

5. Last Week Tonight
4. The Romanoffs
3. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
2. GLOW
1. Atlanta

I definitely have some catching up to do, but this is the year where I officially got over TV and would rather watch a movie nine nights out of ten.

Did anyone out there finish Arrested Development?

ONLY TO SLEEP by Lawrence Osborne (2018)

A very well regarded travel writer and novelist gives Marlowe his last ride, raising him from Baja stupor and setting him on a manhunt for a ghost, only to find a woman worth pursuing through a Mexico of magic and danger. Marlowe was always a masochist, always a chin-first boxer and smartass of the highest order, and when his habits catch up to him, reduce him to a tequila-soaked has-been, we see that he's always been chasing a skirt, but it is one particular skirt, the red one that's always vanishing just around the corner.