I’m never getting around to seeing Fences or Lion, so here’s…

Dwelve Into These Twelve
of 2016

1) Tower

A real life tragic event gets Waking Lifed, and it’s not only scary and horrific, but hopeful AND inspiring!

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2) I Am Not Your Negro

What it’s like to be an African-American in America (when you’re white and have no clue what it’s like).  It raises all sorts of important questions that no one is really asking, or sadly, bothering to answer

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3) Patriots Day

An event I didn’t plan on reliving ended up making me feel proud to be an American… in a time I’m ashamed to be an American

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4) 20th Century Women

It’s like listening to The Talking Heads for the very first time – WOAH!

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5) The Founder

Sometimes it takes some awful in humans to make greatness, and greasiness for us all!

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6) The Light Between Oceans

Perhaps the year’s most overlooked movie that had ‘Oscar bait’ written all over it.  You no longer have to take the bait to something that no longer is baiting you, and it’s time for you to no longer overlook this film!

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7) Bleed For This

if Miles Teller bleeds – I will come!

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8) Embrace of the Serpent

I apparently never reviewed Serpent, but you need to Embrace this film – which puts the ‘lonely’ in ‘coLONELYialism’!

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9) Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream

All things must pass – even the Lower East Side’s last remaining matzah factory, and with it, a part of Jewish culture and identity in America :( 

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10) Hell or High Water

Why choose when you can have BOTH hell AND high water!!!

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11) Sully

Dude is mad fly!

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12) Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made

These guys lived out their childhood dreams, in childhood, and finished them in their adulthood!  Fedora hats off forever to these dudes!!

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and now for the…

Honor Blackmanable Mentions

Elstree 1976 / Snowden / Rouge One / Love & Friendship / The Witch / Jackie / La La Land / Toni Erdmann / Jheronimus Bosch, Touched by the Devil / Doctor Strange / the first 2/3rds of Moonlight / Indignation / The Lobster / Me Before You / Bridget Jones’s Baby / My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2

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our annual anal movie awards – The Thighsmans – drops the Friday before the Oscars.  stay pooned!

until then, here’s the bestest films of yesterhere

2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
& 2002

I Am Not Your Negro
Race Yourselves
Official Site | Trailer & Mo
PG-13 | 95 min

The most important movie of 2016 (which is now getting a full release in 2017, so I guess that makes it the most important movie of 2017) is Raoul Peck‘s I Am Not Your Negro

YESS!!!  It’s true!!!!

One can never truly understand what it’s like to be an African-American in America (especially when you aren’t one), but I’ve never seen a more clear and concise explanation and examination than in the MUST see doc I Am Not Your Negro

I knew who James Baldwin was, but since we were never required to read his works in high school, I never bothered with him.  Silly me.  All I knew was that he had kinda buggy eyes and that my English teacher really liked his work, and I trusted her judgement (and so did Tori Amos!!!)

Negro is based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House (he died in 1987), which aimed to examine racism in America, through the vital lives, and violent deaths of his contemporaries and comrades - Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr

Knowing those men, and being a gifted (black) intellectual and writer gave Baldwin a great understanding of America and its race issues, but moving to France in the late 40s, and living in self-exile there, gave him and even more unique perspective – being able to look at America and its problems from the outside, and at a distance

The doc uses only Baldwin’s words and work – the unfinished manuscript, other writings (all spoken by a surprisingly unassuming Samuel L Jackson) along with interviews, lectures and debates caught on camera.  We get a portrait not only of America, but of the man himself.  In both ways, it works brilliantly.  It also not only works as a history lesson, but as a wake-up call about how the issue of race in America has never gone away

I Am Not Your Negro will continue to be the most important film of any year – until there is no longer an issue of race in America.  Good luck with that

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Negro is not not at a theater near jews AND white nationalists and not negros

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…