I very much believe it is the duty of a true film fan to look around on a regular basis and make sure that the films you’re consuming represent a variety of voices. It is, obviously, one of the reasons I write this column. In that spirit, I actively encourage every person reading this right now to make sure that this week, you watch at least one film by a woman. I’m going to make it very easy on you and make a list of great options available on Netflix Instant Watch right now! (Of course, there are many more amazing women-directed films available online, whether on Netflix’s rotating selection or for purchase on iTunes or Amazon or what have you. I look forward to making more lists like this in the future.)

1. I’ll Take You There: the quirky indie comedy

Though it preceded the definition of the loathsome “manic pixie dream girl” stock character by a good six years, the late Adrienne Shelley’s film manages to skewer that very concept. Ally Sheedy’s character could have been someone’s real MPDG, but instead she runs into a guy who’s so depressed with his own life that before she can inspire him to be better, his very negativity and cruelty shatter her and send her into a spiral where she’ll need some magic of her own to be resurrected. With Shelley’s usual unpredictability, oddball adventures ensue.

2. Down to the Bone: the gritty indie drama

In 2004, before she really came to everyone’s attention with her amazing film Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik told another story of an economically struggling woman portrayed by an actress on the verge of a skyrocketing career. In Down to the Bone, Vera Farmiga stars as a wife and mother who’s also battling a cocaine addiction. And the way Granik builds her story creates the best, most un-melodramatic character study of an addict I’ve ever seen. Granik respects her characters as individuals rather than archetypes, and it’s one of the things that makes her a stunning filmmaker.

3. Daguerréotypes: the off-beat documentary

Lately, I just want to keep talking about how amazing Agnès Varda is. I keep bringing her up, whether here on the MacGuffin, on my personal blog, or on my Twitter feed. None of her films are quite like any of the others, and her background as a photographer combined with her storytelling ability makes for engrossing film experiences. In the mid-1970s, she turned her camera on her own Paris neighborhood. When I take my own first trip to Paris in a couple of months, I’m tempted to find the neighborhood in question and explore it. But I know that so much will have changed…Varda’s worries for her community, displayed here, will have come true.

4. Children of a Lesser God: the award-winning drama you’ve maybe never bothered to watch

Though Randa Haines’s Children of a Lesser God in some ways has not aged well, in that mid-1980s huge emotional drama kind of way, nothing can take away from Marlee Matlin’s Oscar-winning performance. I love that this film explores the life of a woman who is truly angry; though it does do it through her romantic relationship with a man, William Hurt is so deft in his role that it works without offense. Haines manages to keep scenes moving in such a way that the viewer doesn’t much question Hurt speaking aloud to a character who is deaf, and Matlin is truly entrancing. What a talent, and what a shame that more roles aren’t tailored for her.

5. The Trouble With Angels: the family classic

Besides being a fine actress, particularly in Golden Age comedies, Ida Lupino made a name for herself as a director when few women could do so. Her 1966 film starring Hayley Mills as a scheming student at a boarding school run by nuns was a childhood favorite of mine that holds up well into adulthood. (I still sometimes use the film’s signature line: “I’ve got the most scathingly brilliant idea!”) The sublime Rosalind Russell is the Mother Superior dealing with all the hijinks at hand, and she anchors the action whenever it threatens to get too crazy. Overall, it’s a very fine family film that continues to be fun in the same way Mills’s The Parent Trap is, as a solid crowd-pleaser for audiences of mixed generations.

Besides those five films, here are another five that I’ve actually praised on this site before, that are now available to stream via your magic Netflix machine: Ava DuVernay’s I Will Follow, a well-acted and emotionally effective indie drama; Miranda July’s The Future, a surreal dramedy that was one of the very best films of 2011; Grace Lee’s American Zombie, one of the more creative faux-documentaries I’ve seen; Jane Campion’s marvel The Piano, recently on the Sight & Sound full 250-film poll (but too low, far too low); and Susanne Bier’s crushing After the Wedding, which I will never stop championing as one of the greatest films of the 2000s.

I think Top 10 lists are fun. Many critics write beleaguered sorts of “I don’t really want to be doing this and it’s stupid and rankings are meaningless” disclaimers at the beginning of their lists. Ugh. Look, it should go without saying that any list (or review) is a reflection of the writer’s personality and their un-duplicate-able individual experience. If you’ve read the rest of my writing this year, you will not be shocked by my list. What I’d like to say before I dive in I don’t consider to be a disclaimer, but just necessary context: the films I didn’t/couldn’t see that are on my mind anyway.

Top 5 films of 2011 I didn’t/couldn’t see:

5. Hugo (my own failure entirely)
4. Melancholia (ditto in the extreme…I could have gone yesterday but I watched Sherlock on Netflix instead because it was stormy outside)
3. A Separation (no screenings in Seattle yet)
2. Pariah (same)
1. We Need to Talk About Kevin (same; and you can believe me that I’ll have plenty to say about this film in due time when it finally fucking opens)

Now! My Second Annual Top Ten. Thanks for reading.

10. Beginners
written and directed by Mike Mills

Ewan McGregor was in another film this year, which I saw at SIFF and loved, that hasn’t been officially released yet: the apocalyptic romance Perfect Sense. With that film and Beginners, I remembered what a phenomenal actor he can be. Pair him with Mélanie Laurent, my intense girl-crush of the present, and I was primed to be invested in their characters’ story. Mills gives each an uncommon but compelling issue to deal with (McGregor’s Oliver has just seen his elderly father come out, live an honest life for a few years, then die—a situation based on Mills’s real life; Laurent’s Anna is a jet-setting actress who cannot reconcile her circumstances with building committed relationships). Their first clicking conversation during silly Halloween festivities is the sort that I as a single person fantasize about with every party attended. Their problems afterward are real. Mills does a wonderful job with the story, told in a quirky fashion with flashbacks to Oliver’s father’s coming out (Christopher Plummer is lovely in the role) and with interludes of Oliver wondering how his melancholy life now compares to his parents’ when they were young. A charming film.

9. Weekend
written and directed by Andrew Haigh

Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New) end up going home together after circling each other until last call at the bar. After a pleasant, supposed one-night stand, morning conversation turns deeper, unveiling potential for something more. But, since neither went into the encounter searching for a boyfriend, and other circumstances may complicate matters, they have a brief window of time to decide what they mean to each other. This British indie is a film of conversations, funny and bold ones that take the characters seriously and showcase actors who prove that you don’t need to be loud or acrobatic for wordplay to perfectly play off of a scene partner. The film can be described as “small”; what is experienced by the characters cannot.

(Cont.)

Brandi interviews Miranda July, writer/director/actress of The Future, which screened at SIFF.

This segment is also available on Stitcher, iTunes, and Zune. The audio version can be downloaded directly from here.

When I step back and think about it, many films don’t present a believable world of consequences. There are too many moments when an eloquent speech can undo wrongs that have been done, convincing another to bestow a second (or third, or…) chance that’s otherwise unearned. Too many endings come together only because that’s what the audience wants to see. In her new film The Future, which opens in Seattle today, writer-director Miranda July shows that she can distill a story into an arc without having all of its elements come together in this overly tidy way. She understands fallout. And her approach lets the viewer come away with more to think about for it.

July also stars in the film as Sophie, a children’s dance teacher who doesn’t much seem to like children, or teaching, and maybe only likes dance because a creative type is supposed to have some preferred medium of expression. Sophie lives with her boyfriend Jason (Hamish Linklater) who works from home as the voice on the other end of the IT help line. They seem to have a good relationship; we see that they feel comfortable being weird around each other, in the best way possible, doing things like playfully pretending to be frozen in time. Each goes along with the other’s quirks. They love each other, and they like each other, too.

Unfortunately, even solid things can be shaken by enough pressure, and Sophie and Jason let themselves succumb to the most unavoidable of pressures: getting older. It all starts with a decision to adopt a stray cat. The cat needs medical care, so the pair must wait 30 days until it comes home with them. This waiting period somehow quickly takes on an intense amount of significance: their last period of time before committing to caring for this creature—an action that, in a bizarre bit of a domino symbolism, for them represents the beginning of the end of their lives. At age 35.

With only 30 days left to embrace life, Sophie and Jason quit their jobs and start looking for signs. Letting the universe make your choices for you can lead to some interesting things, and they each find people who might not have otherwise been of any significance to them seeming to represent something important. But exploring new avenues can mean danger for what you’re leaving behind. With these individual experiences taking on such meaning, Sophie and Jason see their own connection changing.

This all sounds very dramatic, but the film has many great moments of comedy, and dips into the fantastical as well. We know that the paranoia that Sophie and Jason feel about the “impending” end of their lives is silly, and the film is full of clever, almost-satirical bites of dialogue that let us laugh, but always while still taking the characters seriously. And then there’s the cat… Between watching this couple’s misadventures, we also flash back to the cat that waits for them, called Paw-Paw. Seeing only two front paws in a cage, one wrapped in bandages, we hear the cat’s inner monologue, wondering if these people will really return. It’s weird, and it worked for me. July doesn’t shy away from absurdity. She also demonstrates that absurdity can be real and serious and humorous all at once, like life, like our own inner monologues.

Truly, I’m not usually a sucker for quirky fare. But I am a Miranda July fan. She writes the offbeat with a grounded, observant tone that I find engrossing. Her characters are oddballs only in that they do and say out in the open the things most of us keep to ourselves. July’s short stories also often have a vague element of fantasy in them, and with The Future she shows that she can bring that juxtaposition into film successfully. Besides the interludes with Paw-Paw, the film plays with the passage of time, until a climactic moment when all rules of physics mean nothing compared to the will of a bursting heart. Forays into magical realism in the middle of a dramedy about a relationship are obviously risky business, but this isn’t a meandering, because-I-can interlude. July tackles putting messy, abstract feelings on screen by letting the overwhelming power these feelings can wield seep into the physical world, changing its rules. It’s beautiful, and she and Linklater play the emotions perfectly.

The story July tells here, in all its detailed specificity, retains a universal element that sticks with the viewer afterward. We’ve all had an experience where something that feels like a fresh, present wound to us is somehow only part of the past to the other involved party. We’ve all gone down a “what if” path only to end up wondering why we did. We’ve all felt older than our years. And certainly, we’ve all panicked about the unknown of the future. Whatever lessons we learn, most of us will probably keep doing so. If it leads to works like this, I’m okay with that.

Final Grade: A

If there’s one thing I hope I’ve done with this column so far, it’s show that though the overall percentages may be very skewed toward male filmmakers, there are many, many interesting projects out there being made by women. The numbers are getting better all the time, too—for this list of my five anticipated projects, I really had a hard time narrowing things down. Creating excitement and buzz for these films before they’re released is almost as important as seeing them when they are, so if I can contribute to that just a little bit, I’ll be a happier person.

With that, here’s the list:

5. Lamb of God, written and directed by Diablo Cody

Described in a press release as a story about a young religious woman who loses her faith, then finds it again on a detour to Vegas, this will be the first film where Cody directs her own script. One of the things I like so much about her is that she tries many different kinds of stories, but always with a female character at the center of things. I very much like the idea of her stretching out into directing, staying in charge of her own written voice. (I won’t say the same about her involvement with the next installment in the Evil Dead franchise, and that’s because, no matter how great her contributions might be, no good can come of it for her. Haters will only hate.) This one is still very early in the production process, but I’ll be extremely interested to hear who’s cast in the main role.

4. Friends With Kids, written and directed by Jennifer Westfeldt

Originally on my list of films I was most looking forward to in 2011, this one has been pushed back to sometime in 2012. Jennifer Westfeldt is a solid writer and actress, especially in the film from which most people probably know her best, Kissing Jessica Stein. This is her directorial debut, and it’s chock full of great people: Jon Hamm (her real-life partner, the lucky lady), Adam Scott, half the cast of Bridesmaids… The story revolves around two friends who decide that having a child seems to ruin romantic relationships, so they should have one with each other, and pursue romance separately. Just a wild guess that hijinks ensue. Any comedy with a woman as the driving force is a welcome sight for me, and I hope this one ends up being as intelligent as the list of contributors hints at.

3. Vamps, written and directed by Amy Heckerling

Do we need more vampire stories? Maybe not. But you guys know what a huge, huge fan of Clueless I am. Since then, Heckerling’s career hasn’t lived up to that level. But Vamps will reunite her with Alicia Silverstone, also too often absent from big projects in recent years. She and Krysten Ritter are modern day women living in New York City, who just happen to be vampires. Ok, the premise sounds a bit groan-worthy…but also, Wallace Shawn plays a character named Dr. Van Helsing! I want it to be good so bad, you guys. Don’t judge.

2. Thin Ice, written by Jill Sprecher and Karen Sprecher, directed by Jill Sprecher

Originally titled “The Convincer,” this film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, but does not have a wide release date yet. It was recently acquired by ATO Pictures (hence the, in my opinion, ill-advised title change), so a release date announcement is expected soon. The film stars Billy Crudup, Greg Kinnear, Lea Thompson (awesome, where has she been?) and Alan Arkin, and seems to be a sort of dark-comedy-thriller, with Kinnear as an insurance agent who tries to con Arkin, and Crudup as an associate who complicates things. I’m a fan of the previous collaboration of the Sprecher sisters, the bold ensemble film Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001). They could put a great spin on the talky-thriller genre.

(Cont.)

Spencer and John look at the cinematic history of the X-Men franchise, preview the indie films coming out this summer, and give their DVD picks of the week.

For his DVD pick, John selected the powerful war drama, Platoon. Spencer chose the Criterion release of the Charlie Chaplin classic, The Great Dictator (DVD/Blu-ray)

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