Any given year in the artistic calendar is earmarked with how much the filmmaking media channelizes and showcases our immediate truth beyond our own externalities. Well to put it very honestly, 2019 found bright minds tune into the collective darkness of our environment with a focus on those who understood that paying lip service at the altar of defeated hope will be bogus and simply refuting our everyday trysts with all sorts of disasters big and small. Cue the return of new seasons of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and BIG LITTLE LIES and the smog filled battle royale of GAME OF THRONES' final stretch. Or the surprising blend of renewed beginnings and danger for Jesse Pinkman in EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE. In short, amorality was a conduit for the soul.
The fact that most of the works that this writer found accessible and riveting enough to make it to the most defining ones of this year were backed by streaming giants is an abiding statement in itself . Hence the independent paradigm of creating the truth beyond an illusory, cursory reading of life triumphed. It was a period where hope was earned after spells of great soul searching and humour wrought from deep wells of loneliness ( as in the case of the sterling properties of Amazon Prime's FLEABAG and THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL)
So here instead of calling these the best of the year, I will reframe by saying that the following works all reflected the sign of our times. They were beholden to our immediate culture and proved beyond a doubt that we needed these moments of sustained truths more than anything else.
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AMERICAN SON (NETFLIX)
This NETFLIX original retained the claustrophobic nature of its source play starring the same cast as this.
At the cost of being too didactic and verbose or even breathlessly wordy to some critics, it initiated a timeless discourse on race relations which was of the moment and its concerns stemmed from the grist of centuries' worth of internalized abuse. Kerry Washington was the mother on tenterhooks relaying every parent's worst fears and spotlighting the evil of gun violence and police brutality against minorities while Eugene Lee was her counterpart who had more alarming truths to disseminate as a 'non-white' police officer handling this delicate case.
Steven Pasquale and Jeremy Jordan round out the other side of things. What makes AMERICAN SON implosive is that each word and by extension conversation reveals the unintentional manner in which racial imprints have been handed down to us, making us inadequate to separate right from wrong so that unutterable sentiments resting on the tip of our tongues come out at the most inopportune moments . Sparing not an iota of flawed human endeavours and prejudices, AMERICAN SON ends with the obvious shock to the system as death becomes another haunting postscript for our times.
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MARRIAGE STORY ( NETFLIX)
Watching this much loved feature by NOAH BAUMBACH from the comforts of my drawing room, I warmed up to its balanced portrait of two soulmates, with the popular he/she montage of what they like about each other opening it , who fall into a mid - life crisis of opposing forces and opt for a divorce. It tracks the downward spiral with sensitivity and compassion without the burden of those standardized 'big' moments for lending it an extreme earnest center.
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A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .
Non-FictionI have often wondered about the very curdled natures of our opinions so much so that the perch of imagination simply becomes a bystanding abstraction and real thoughts of genuine merit slip between the fingers. That is a human tendency, to beat arou...
