An Adieu to 2023

“They don’t make movies like they used to…” is a common refrain from you’ll hear from dorks like me who measure time by Friday release schedules. But that’s not true anymore! They did make movies like they used to, at least in 2023. The best movies released in 2023 were great movies, which is most important, but they were also movies seen by normal people, and were also – for the most part – recognized by the Academy Awards. This was the norm in the 90s and parts of the 2000s and finally happened again. When Oppenheimer wins Best Picture tonight (oh yeah, if you didn’t know, Oppenheimer is going to win Best Picture tonight around 1030pm) it’ll be the first winner since Lord of the Rings to be one of the top 10 grossing movies of the year. And it’s not just popular, it’s legitimately a great movie, a surefire instant classic.

I’m burdened with a compulsion to keep watching films yet unseen, so only about 10% of the 300 movies I watch a year are rewatches. But I suspect I’ll make time over the next decade to rewatch several from this past year. I’ve already seen 3 of the year’s top films twice and plan to watch most of the Best Picture 10 again with my wife, Rachel, over the next few months.

So what should we expect for the Oscars tonight? It was the year of Barbenheimer and that’s how the nominations played out. But Barbie will be politely clapping from the audience while the Oppenheimers are going to get their steps in going to-and-fro the stage all night. Oppenheimer will win 7-9 Oscars, which sounds sort of dull but it’s hard to deny any individual achievement. Even where Oppie is not my first choice, it’s never less than third. (I have a person bias against awarding historical recreations for production design and costumes and for biopic performances as a whole, for instance). Barbie fans will be disappointed, for sure, but 7 months ago just getting nominated was seen as a major achievement for a movie like Barbie. And it still is. And if it’s not, they can wipe away their tears with thousand dollar bills.

A lot of races are locked up. There are 20 feature film categories and 3 short film categories and I feel good about 17 of them. Animated short, doc short, production design, costumes, visual effects could different ways. And the most exciting race of the night is Best Actress. Lily Gladstone is the slight favorite (in a film I didn’t care for, Killers of the Flower Moon). I’ll be pulling heavily for Emma Stone (in a film I love, the very strange Poor Things). It’s hard to discuss this race without sounding either racist or patronizing, so I’ll move on!

Ten movies were nominated for Best Picture and nine* of them range from very good to great. It’s a cool slate of nominees, with the top 2 grossing movies of the year, two foreign films, and a couple of comedies included. My top film of the year, Past Lives, has absolutely zero chance of winning, so it’s okay if your favorite film of the year doesn’t either. *the 10th film nominated was the extremely disappointing Maestro.

So here are my final and formal predictions. Please don’t bet on this. [Circled are my predictions, starred are my personal votes if I was given one]

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 – MCU: Too Big to Succeed

Like most successful businesses since the dawn of capitalism, Marvel has become hyper fixated on growth. Once a few movies broke a billion dollars at the box office, now every movie needs to be a homerun. Bigger stakes, bigger explosions, bigger ensembles, more explosions, more jokes, more CGI. More films, more TV. Bigger and more. More and bigger.

In 2012, part of the fun of the buildup to The Avengers was excitedly wondering, “how is all of this going to fit together?” That was a legitimate question because all of the initial films were relatively standalone. Tony in Iron Man and Bruce in Incredible Hulk lived in our world, but their own parts of our world. The stakes of those films essentially were, “is my boss/father-in-law going to kill me because I’m super?” Now, 30 films or whatever in, the world is no longer our own, it’s the MCU, a world where half the world’s population disappeared for 5 years and came back and where a Nazi hacker group unleashed everyone’s data and where a giant statue appeared in the ocean and where aliens attacked New York City and where Norse Gods are real and magic is real and so on.

The world is so much not our world that each new movie has to remind us what happened before. And they have to tell us what is happening next. The movie can’t just be the movie; it’s also a backdoor pilot to a TV show you may or may not watch and a sequel to 7 different movies over the past 15 years.

And since each subsequent movie has to be bigger, even successors to the good ones like Guardians 1 have to add new characters to the ensemble and give them each their own little arcs. Which is how we end up with a 2.5 hour Guardians 3. (Which is fine, a story should be exactly as long as it takes to tell). The Guardians are no longer 5 well thought out characters, there’s like 12 of them. More. And they all need to be part of the story, so there’s more arcs. More. And all those arcs have to tie up together (that’s just how stories are told), so the climax is now even bigger. Bigger and more.

And this wouldn’t be a big deal if I actually wanted more. But most of the new members of the team were not part of the original fivesome for a reason. The best part of the team has always been Rocket and for some reason he’s unconscious for most of the film. So instead of spending time with the best character we spend time with bad characters like Nebula and Kraglin and one-note characters like Drax and Mantis (they each have one joke and Gunn tells that joke like a dad supervising a sleepover).

This movie isn’t bad by any means. In fact, it’s probably the strongest film Marvel has put out since Shang Chi (in my opinion; dumber minds disagree). People who love the first two will certainly like or love this entry. It still has the same strengths as the best Marvel films with the same faults as the worst. But a CGI explosion and scream fest amped up to 11 numbs the senses to the point I barely registered the strong emotional beats of the Rocket story that probably should be the highlight of this entire Marvel Phase. Fortunately, Gunn’s pull with the studio was able to limit the amount of Easter eggs/acknowledgements/winks that the rest of the phase feels emboldened to; winks that only serve to please fans who get validation from recognizing something.

Those fans will like the inclusion of this still despite the fact I’m mocking them.

Regardless, basically all of the current Marvel films are bogged down with being sequels and stepping stones to the next thing all at the same time, wasting scenes and dialogue catching viewers up and preparing them for what is next, problems the original Iron Man was free from, save for an at-the-time fun post-credits scene teasing the future. And with G3, Gunn took this as a closing chapter, so the story also has to be a fond farewell to the characters, adding even more baggage to an already full plane. Where the MCU films used to be tight, well-oiled machines, they’ve become Howl’s Moving Castle. It gets where it’s going, but is a plodding monstrosity on its way there.

One good thing: the running “bad dog” bit.

One bad thing: whatever the hell Will Poulter’s character was.

69/100. Nice.

Please stop making these movies for like 5 years. Let us miss them for 10 seconds.

Oscars – 2023 Edition

The last time I wrote was approximately 1 year ago this week about the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is appropriate because tonight is the Oscars for films from 2022 and everyone in the world including me is predicting a very big night for EEAAO.

And well deserved. I didn’t write much since last March for various reasons, including laziness, but also because nothing else all year struck me as strongly as EEAAO, so I never felt compelled to write. Plenty of movies I liked, but not enough to spill some virtual ink over. And I’m trying to be less negative. Do people really want to go to an amateur blog to hear me talk about why Morbius and Death on the Nile are bad movies that you shouldn’t watch? I doubt it. I’ve now seen 115 films from 2022 and Everything Everywhere is far and away my favorite film of the year. It’ll deserve every award it wins and maybe a few it doesn’t. The only other nominated film I loved and will continue to love is the very hard to discern Tar. I could have written about Tar if I wasn’t an idiot and had anything worthwhile to say about it.

As for the rest of the movies nominated? They’re fine. Good parts, bad parts, mostly films that only people like me will remember in a few years time. After Everything and Tar, the floor falls out fast. Nothing nominated for Best Picture is egregious this year. If EEAAO doesn’t win, I’ll be disappointed (it’ll safely be on my decade end list of top films I’m sure) but Fabelmans and Banshees of Inisherin would each be far better than the worst films awarded over the years. Top Gun 2 winning would be a joke and All Quiet would be a boring choice, seeing as an adaptation of that book won the main award almost a hundred years ago. Do we need to do it again?

So here’s my official set of predictions highlighted in pink and the little check marks showing my personal preference. Let’s hope for a good show.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) – What if Edgar Wright made The Matrix?

Starring Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, written/directed by The Daniels of Swiss Army Man fame.

I don’t always know what people mean when they say they want to watch something “fun” as I find the simple act of watching a new movie to be fun. But I have a feeling that this over-the-top, balls-to-the-wall action comedy will satisfy nearly every possible definition and thirst for fun. The movie takes a few minutes to get going as it sets the stage for Evelyn’s normal life is like, but once the concept of the multiverse is introduced, the movie is a relentless barrage of creativity.

I’m in a informal movie group where I suspect no one actually likes me but I’m endlessly fascinated by the odd films and genres they like. A common ingredient they all like and I rarely do is homage and and an appreciation of tropes. While most movies about exploiting a genre are made for 12 dollars and with even less brain cells, Everything Everywhere does homage and stereotype busting perfectly. The story is about a Chinese/American family that does a lot of the things pop culture likes to show Chinese families in America doing. They run a laundromat, they complain about disappointing children, they don’t fully trust non-Asian people. And once Evelyn is given the opportunity to address some of these problems, the solutions sometimes by reaching into other stereotypes. She learns martial arts. Her husband becomes an electronics expert. What makes this embracing of stereotypes so refreshing is that the film and its filmmakers are acknowledging that some aspects of these tropes can be true (there’s absolutely nothing wrong or unusual about Chinese immigrants running a family owned laundromat for instance) it also pokes fun at some of the others. Of course Evelyn doesn’t know martial arts. Why would she? So it’s both recognizable and creative when Evelyn has to reach through the multiverse to learn how to fight or how to be a Cantonese movie-star. They don’t make the references to show they know the references, they use the references to enrich the story they’re telling.

The screenplay and filmmaking is brilliant beyond this understanding of the characters’ culture. With flashes of other worlds, we quickly see several images to let us know what all might be out there. And then as the story goes, several of these images are brought back into the story as the characters need some skill or item. The worldbuilding leads right back into the plot, not wasting anything they’ve thought up. I often was surprised at some innocuous item returning for an outrageous gag and even when I fully saw something coming, the execution of the callback is so perfect that I found myself cackling like a maniac in my theater seat. Action movies often get repetitive and boring. The way the Daniels set up their action scenes never gets boring because it’s all so clever and/or ridiculous.

The screenplay is smart in another way. This movie seems like a lot when someone explains the basic premise to you (which I haven’t even tried. You should just blindly go into this one. You won’t disappointed). And the way this multiverse works is unique and could be confusing. The Daniels keep balance with this confusing, messy sci-fi by making the central emotional beats super simple. This is a mother trying to save her relationships with her daughter, her husband and her father simultaneously while working to keep her struggling business afloat. This all is nothing you haven’t seen before. Normally I’d be a little disappointed with how basic these character dynamics are, but everything around this family more than makes up for it.

SLIGHT SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH. While I did find the husband-wife and mother-daughter arcs quite moving, I was very struck with one aspect of how Evelyn’s story was presented. This movie is clearly in the vein of The Matrix, and this version of Evelyn is The One. Where normal “The Ones” are uniquely the best and most skilled person possible. What makes this Evelyn The One is the opposite: she’s so untalented at literally everything that she is a blank slate. Only someone with absolutely no skills can have skill after skill transferred to her psyche in such a short period of time with no ill effects. Evelyn isn’t their savior because she’s better, she’s the savior because she’s the worst version of herself. At every step of her life, she took the wrong step. I don’t often struggle with my self-esteem but do wonder else life might have held for me if I took different paths. What a fantasy to be told that my lack of accomplishments will be what saves us all. (And of course, by the end of the film, Evelyn comes to realize that she’s not a complete failure, success just looks different than she thought she wanted it to.) END SPOILER PARAGRAPH.

Possibly the most impressive aspect of this extremely impressive movie is Ke Huy Quan. If this was the first movie you ever saw, you’d walk out assuming Ke Huy Quan has been a superstar actor for the past 30 years. Jackie Chan and Brad Pitt rolled up into one megastar. Like everyone else, I hadn’t seen him in anything since Temple of Doom or Goonies and hadn’t thought about him either. Now in EEaaO, he jumps so quickly back and forth between different versions of himself so smoothly that I started to forget it was the same actor playing each version. I’ve seen Michelle Yeoh nail role after role for years, so I wasn’t surprised by anything she did as I’ve seen her play each type of this character before. But Ke Huy Quan absolutely blew me away by being first the dorky-yet-fun dad, then the smooth acrobat, and then nerdy retrofuture computer guy. And then suddenly he’s transplanted straight from In the Mood for Love like he’s been doing his whole life. Absolutely incredible.

I could say so much more about this movie as I haven’t even touched on the rocks or the hotdogs or the racoon. All of which are different types of amazing.

Right now, this is easily my favorite film of the year and I won’t be upset if it stays that way. I already want to see it again and can’t wait for everyone else I know to see it, too.

85/100 (this is a great score for me)

March movie roundup: Batman, Fresh, Adam Project, Deep Water, X, Windfall and Turning Red

A lot of new releases out this past month. Streaming is killing the movie theater business but also allows for me to see so much so quickly. So I’m not complaining in the moment; I’ll just look back in 10 years and bemoan Hulu and Netflix making it so easy for me to stay home.

It was also the Oscars last weekend. I watched 6 other 2021 releases just in time for the big night, where -other than Dune- basically nothing I wanted to win actually won. I didn’t write about CODA last year because I didn’t have anything to say. I thought it was a cute, near forgettable movie that few people would see and less people would remember. Good for them getting that win. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s on Apple TV+ and is universally enjoyed. Power of the Dog should have won instead.

So what new releases did I watch in March? Let’s see:

The Batman (2022)

Seen in theater, starring Robert Pattinson.

I wrote 1,000 words on this one. I quite liked it. 79/100.

Fresh (2022)

Seen on Hulu, starring Daisy Edgar Jones and Sebastian Stan.

This is one of those movies that if you think you’re going to watch it, you should just watch it. The main things that are worth talking about are all things best discovered as the movie unfolds. It’s a fresh take on the dangers and difficulties of modern dating and finding out too late what the guy you’re seeing is into.

68/100.

The Adam Project (2022)

Seen on Netflix. Starring Ryan Reynolds, a child, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ruffalo.

It’s a sci-fi action comedy that makes some lazy attempts being thought provoking and some slightly above lazy attempts at family drama. The sci-fi is fun until it isn’t and the special effects are terrible from start to finish. The whole movie rides on the audience enjoying how much this child actor act like Ryan Reynolds, who has made his career being an adult who pretends to be a child actor. Do you think I enjoyed the double Ryan Reynolds ride?

64/100 and that’s being generous.

Windfall (2022)

Seen on Netflix. Starring Jason Segel, Jesse Plemons, and Lily Collins.

This almost-thriller is almost thrilling and constantly sits on the line between being boring and engaging. I mostly stayed engaged because the movie kept hinting that it was about to get good. And then it ends. The movie is almost about class divides and how the people who have “made it” can still be seen as less-than. It’s almost about how the elites are people too and maybe they should be more sympathetic to the everyman. But it’s most a well-shot Almost with great actors almost doing something worth watching. It felt like the screenwriter/director had a strong 35 page script and decided to make a 92 minute movie out of it.

62/100.

Deep Water (2022)

Seen on Hulu. Directed by Adrian Lyne, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas.

Nominally an erotic thriller. It certainly has its sexuality and a crime-mystery plot. And I actually love the central dynamic between the couple. She openly and shamelessly has affairs that he is well aware of. He passive-aggressively acknowledges the arrangement, sometimes to humorous effect. But the movie goes off the rails midway through, mostly because it reveals the murderer too quickly. The air goes out of the tires fast at that point. What happens with this information is a lot less exciting than the thrill of the audience wondering. Plus, the story is touched with some bizarre features like a snail farm that seem like they will be important but end up being confusing texture.

65/100?

X (2022)

Seen in theater. Directed by Ti West, starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Kid Cudi and Brittany Snow.

Horror is super hit or miss for me. Often it’s simply not scary, which isn’t a deal breaker, but if it’s not scary and kinda dumb at the same time, then what’s the point? I found this movie very scary. The director clearly knows and loves the history of horror films and I appreciate that he winks at the random nudity/sexuality in older slashers by making these characters/victims directly filming pornography. The nudity is not a diversion from the plot, it is directly due to the plot. And the exploration of sexual repression and frustration was very thoughtfully woven into the story. Probably my favorite pure horror movie in a few years.

77/100

Turning Red (2022)

Seen on Disney+. New Pixar.

I’m a sucker for coming-of-age stories and most Pixar films, so this was right up my alley. This is about a group of 13 year olds in 2002 and in 2002 I was 13, making this super relatable. The fake pop band and pop songs are great and I like the lore behind the red pandas. The story also does 2 interesting things with the genres this hits. First, the lead character is borderline annoying but the story isn’t about her being annoying or how that negatively affects her social life. Instead, she acknowledges and embraces who she is. And after a few minutes, you realize she’s not actually annoying, she’s just an active and chatty 13 year old. And second (and SPOILER for the resolution of this film I recommend): normally with movies like this that are about a young person grappling with their heritage, the emotional climax is them finally accepting their history. And here, it’s the opposite. Her family wants her to go against their family inheritance of turning into a magical panda, but our lead loves this part of who she and her family is and chooses to embrace the panda and live with it. The story nicely goes into another wrinkle by having the rest of her family understand where she’s coming from but still decide to hide their pandas away. A refreshing and thoughtfully written ending.

73/100.

So good month all around. I hope horror fans check out X. I’ll be back next month.

Oscars Predictions 2022: The Good, the Bad and the Belfast

The 2022 Oscars, celebrating movies from 2021, airs this Sunday on ABC, which seems ridiculous because we’re already 23% of the way through 2022. The Oscars should be the week before the Super Bowl, when there’s no NFL on and the previous year’s films are still fresh on people’s minds. After all, it’s possible I’ve already seen a couple of films that might be nominated for next year’s ceremony.

This is a decent crop of nominees, as far as the Academy goes. Quality aside, it’s not all stuffy prestige dramas up for awards. There’s an epic sci-fi, a sports movie, musicals, a comedy, and multiple foreign films. Of course there’s also several biopics, a remake of a prior Best Picture winner, a Shakespeare adaptation and movies about how important the director’s childhood was. So it’s still the Oscars. A little for me, a little for them. But mostly I’m happy with the nominations because Dune, the best movie of 2021 was nominated not only for Best Picture, but for 10 total awards. And there’s a little quirk about me that is relevant to this Oscar season: when there’s a movie I really like in a genre I generally hate, then I often love that movie. There was La La Land 5 years ago and this year there is The Power of the Dog, likely my favorite Western ever made (which isn’t saying much, because most Westerns are boring boring boring). So anything Dune or PotD win will be a good, enduring win. And any loss Belfast suffers will be a good loss, as it’s possibly the worst film nominated for Best Picture in the last decade.

Acting wise, it’s a mixed bag. A general rule of thumb for me is that original performances should win over people imitating a real life person. The more famous the real life person was, the less I care about the performance. Learning to talk like Lucille Ball isn’t as impressive as creating a brand new 27 year old girl having an existential crisis and bringing her to life. So with one exception, I will be rooting for original characters over makeup imitations this weekend. There are a couple of career-achievement wins expected and I won’t be upset to see Will Smith and Jessica Chastain onstage. I also wouldn’t personally be voting for either of them. Sadly, my personal favorite performance in each category were not nominated, which will dampen the sting at least. (Alana Haim, Simon Rex, Ruth Negga, and Mike Faist).

If you follow the precursors (which you don’t), a lot of the 23 categories are fairly predictable. This year is a bit exciting in that Best Picture is a tight race. It will almost certainly be either CODA or Power of the Dog, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Belfast win and a couple others could somehow find themselves getting votes due to the slightly confusing preferential ballot used for this one category. I confidently expect Dune to get the most wins of the night (5), so the smallest (and dumbest) part of me thinks it has a shot.

I don’t know what to expect of the show itself as a show. They are awarding 8 of the 23 categories before the TV show starts and are supposedly airing their speeches during the regular broadcast. This isn’t a great move and I doubt it will feel like they really won an Oscar at the Oscars, as they all deserve. But the producers want the show to be less than 3 hours, so we’ll see. Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes are hosting this year, which is information I don’t mind but this also barely triggers a response for me. I hope they’re good, but I don’t really care. I’m watching to see the speeches.

Here’s how’d I rank the Best Picture nominees, in order of my preference:

1. Dune
2. The Power of the Dog
3. Licorice Pizza
4. King Richard
5. Drive My Car
6. CODA
7. Don’t Look Up
8. West Side Story
9. Nightmare Alley
10. Belfast

Now onto the winners. I’ve seen every movie nominated, so I could write a novella about each category, but I’ll settle for marking in red my prediction and in blue to the right with my personal vote, if I had one.

The Batman (2022) – This time he’s serious

Starring Robert Pattinson, et al. Written/directed by Matt Reeves

Seen in theater opening weekend

It’s impossible to review The Batman as a movie; it can only be analyzed as yet another Batman movie. It’s great if you love Batman or don’t have standards. More Batman is more Batman. And it’s fun in the way it’s fun (for me and my wife at least) to compare the endless adaptations of Dracula and A Christmas Carol. More Dracula is more Dracula. But it’s also a bit exhausting and distracting because when I see the Penguin I see Colin Farrell but I also see a ghost version of Danny Devito waddling around next to him like a ghost racer in Mario Kart. When Robert Pattinson growls that he’s Vengeance, I’m both thrilled because it’s a cool line delivered well and curious if he’s doing a Christian Bale impression. I’m watching the movie along with every previous Bruce Wayne right in my mind. The last thing I should be doing while watching a new movie is thinking about an old movie. Or 10 old movies in this case. This conundrum makes it that I’m unlikely to hate the experience of watching a new Batfilm due to curiosity in comparison but I’m also possibly incapable of loving the film because I walk into the theater knowing so so much about the character and the world and all the ways the story has been told before.

My immediate response to Batman ’22 was that it’s a breath of fresh air in that for once Batman is actually being a detective. The film barely constitutes being an action film, it’s more of a detective film with a few action scenes. But that’s only a fresh take within the world of Batmen movies. It’s still Batman and Penguin and Riddler and Gordon and Gotham and Falcone and Alfred. He’s still rich and a vigilante and an orphan and consumed with childhood trauma. So maybe more of a breath of air conditioned air.

This isn’t to say I didn’t like the film. Because I do. (Of the 7 films I’ve seen thus far from 2022, it sits comfortably at #1). The cast is great across the board. Pattinson is good at everything but being a vampire, so no surprises there. He brings an impressive vulnerability to the character, impressive because he’s wearing the cowl for 80% of the film so you can see only his eyes and lips in most scenes. Zoe Kravitz is the MVP, one of two characters allowed to enjoy being in this film, the other being Farrell, who absolutely nails being a gross head henchman who makes sense being called the Penguin without looking like a cartoon character (no offense to Davito who is amazing in his turn as the character in a much differently toned film). I have to imagine that the producers were dying to have James Gandolfini play the part but realized too late he’s been dead for several years, so they cast an A-lister who looks nothing like Gandolfini and covered him in prosthetics to make him fit the part. Jeffrey Wright and Andy Serkis aren’t given much to do but do it well anyway. And John Turturro and Paul Dano bring a lot of life to their well known characters. Beyond the acting, the movie also looks great, primarily with thoughtful production design that makes Gotham look like a bizarro New York/Chicago that isn’t either New York or Chicago. I don’t know where this Gotham is but I believe it exists and once was a cool place to go on vacation when you’re 22.

Since I can only view this film through the lense of 35 years of major Batmen movies, I have no idea what new viewers will think of it. If they haven’t seen The Dark Knight they won’t care that this one is somehow even darker and broodier. They might not care to learn it’s not corny like Batman & Robin or a jumbled mess like Batman v. Superman. But they might care that the movie is 3 hours long and absolutely not fun. There’s no jokes, no light moments (or really any light at all). There are a few action scenes but nothing to make you stand up and cheer and high five the guy next to you (do people do that?).

Tonally, the movie feels like instead of hiring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman in Se7en called Batman in to help him stop this serial killer. There are a lot of crime scenes and conversations with stressed out police officers. And there are a lot of long shots of dark corners where the camera is making you squirm in worry there might be something there you just barely can’t see. I wouldn’t be surprised if some casual viewers thought the movie was borderline too scary at moments, which is another wrinkle to the oft-told story that I appreciated.

Now The Batman is quite long, which isn’t automatically a good or bad thing. A movie should be as long as it takes to tell the story correctly. And this movie definitely uses the runtime. No plot points are rushed, no characters glossed over. And the screenwriters did a good job with how they structured it because there are no subplots that could be cut to shorten the film. The Catwoman story and Penguin story and Alfred story and Falcone story are all integral to the final climax. If any one of them were cut, the ending wouldn’t really make sense. (This is how all movies should work).

Overall, the movie is strong. There’s a forced cameo near the end that is the only actually bad part of a film that otherwise has no real lows. The action scenes that are present are all pretty good without ever hitting truly great. So despite its runtime, I never grew tired of the film. And while I never want more sequels, I know that I’ll be there when the inevitable follow-up eventually comes out. And I’ll be confident that it’ll be pretty good too.

79/100

If you liked this, you might like Se7en, Zodiac, or Oldboy (Korean version, not American). And of course, there’s the best comic book film ever made, Batman Begins.

February Roundup: Oscar catch-up

Once Oscar nominations come out, as they did at the beginning of the month, I spend a lot of my time catching up with the movies I missed throughout the year and the late releases I’ve just now been legally able to see. And of course, regular, non-Oscar movies also keep rolling out. So this month I ended up watching 26 total movies, 5 in theater, with 8 of the movies being rewatches (mostly with a [struggling] weekly film discussion group I’m in). I would have gone to the theater more, but alas, I caught Covid.

This should all be fairly spoiler-free, unless otherwise noted:

Moonfall

New disaster film by Roland Emmerich, seen in theater.

This is a movie about the moon going out of orbit, why that’s bad, and one bad idea on how to fix it. All the problems this movie has, and it’s mostly comprised of problems, would be irradiated if this was tonally a straight comedy. This might be the worst movie every single actor in it has ever made. And it’s certainly the worst performance they’ve all given. That said, a couple of the set pieces are legitimately cool, especially one’s concerning what they call a “gravity wave.” Does the gravity wave make sense? In the moment, you won’t care, because it rules.

57/100

Parallel Mothers

Spanish film from Pedro Almodovar, starring Penelope Cruz.

The central plotline about two very different women who become friends while giving birth at the same time is constantly gripping as the film becomes a borderline thriller. Penelope Cruz is absolutely magnetic. If you are considering watching this, I would advise going in as blind as possible as the story takes a fascinating and thought provoking turn midway through that should be experienced and considered at the same time the characters are forced to grapple with what is happening. While the B plot is super interesting on its own, and possibly too important a subject to be the backdrop of this story alone, it sometimes took away from the considerably more engaging A plot about the mothers and their children.

77/100

I Want You Back

Romantic comedy on Amazon Prime starring Jenny Slate and Charlie Day.

Romantic comedies have a bad reputation because people assume they’re not going to be very funny and the story will be derivative and or hokey. Fortunately, I Want You Back presents itself as a counterargument to both criticisms. Slate and Day have excellent chemistry with each other (basically the only real requirement for a successful rom-com) and while the plot gets a bit ridiculous, the characters in the story know and acknowledge how ridiculous every ridiculous thing is.

70/100

Jackass Forever

It’s Jackass 4. Seen in theater.

If you’ve seen any previous Jackass entry, you know what this is. The fun isn’t as much in the stunts/bits (which too often lean into gross and uncomfortable instead of funny or exciting) as in the joy the friends have doing this together. Most of the old cast is back and the new cast blends in with no problems. Is it a movie or just a series of bizarre pranks? I personally prefer the smaller, simpler bits to the more elaborate and disgusting ones. For the rest of my life I will lose my mind when I see a video of someone getting hit in the face by a giant hand.

68/100

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

A sequel/reboot of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On Netflix.

This is basically the exact opposite of the original film. It looks sharp, the gore is extreme, its themes are overt, and it is very very stupid.Whatever you do, do not think about the story or the characters or their actions. Not even for a second. Because you know the screenplay didn’t. I didn’t mind watching it. I will never think about it ever again.

55/100.

The Worst Person in the World

Norwegian film by Joachim Trier, starring Renate Reinsve. In theater.

Not what I expected so I’m still processing this one. Almost a romantic comedy with a touch of magical realism and a hefty splash of drama. I loved the first half and everything Julie does, for better or worse. A great depiction of ambition without motivation or direction and what it’s like to still be growing up at 30. Despite its title, Julie isn’t an unambiguously terrible person. She’s flawed and complicated. And as the movie progresses, we see that she’s not the only one. At some point, we’re all the worst person in the world in someone else’s eyes. The last third gets a lot heavier than I wanted and I’m not sure what I think of how it plays out. I do know that I will keep thinking about it.

76/100

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

Bhutanese film by Pawo Choyning Dorji. In theater.

I admit I only saw this because it was nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars. It has a dumb title and looked a bit corny. And now that I’ve seen it I still think it has a dumb title and is a bit corny. An uninspired young teacher aspires to be an international singer but is sent to remote Lunana to teach a group of eager, under-privileged children. Once the plot gets going, you know exactly how the story is going to play out but it is very sweet watching it happen anyway. I don’t know much (or anything) about Bhutan, let alone the remote parts of the country, but boy do the mountains look beautiful. The dumbest part of my brain almost thinks it might be worth an 8 day hike to spend a week there. (The rest of my dumb brain knows that would literally kill me). If this was in English, I imagine a lot of families would love snuggling together on the couch watching this and picturing having a yak in their own classroom.

70/100.

I have 6 more feature films and 15 shorts to watch and I’ll have seen everything nominated for the Oscars this year. Only a couple of them should be tricky, then making time for the shorts. Wish me luck, I don’t need it.

January roundup: Scream, A Hero, Macbeth, Drive My Car, The Fallout

January is sometimes called Dumpuary, where movies not expected to entice audiences or critics get dumped between Oscar season and Spring blockbuster season. With the dawn and dominance of streaming, Dumpuary doesn’t really exist anymore. A few late breaking Oscar contenders have finally hit wide-release and a couple of prestige-less films were released that are still worth watching. I could and should do a full 1,500 word review of each of them but I know I won’t so I won’t even pretend I might.

No spoilers, if that concerns you:

A Hero (2021)

Iranian film by Asghar Farhadi. Streaming on Amazon Prime.

Farhadi is a master at putting us into a nuanced yet ultra realistic social situation and then slowly letting the situation unravel before us, exposing how complex and frustrating human interactions can be. You don’t need to know much about Iran to get invested in this film or the characters. The film starts out introducing us to our lead and seeing him struggle between helping himself/his family and doing the right thing and then being countered by another man who refuses to see the good in him. We immediately identify with the lead and dislike the Refuter. But as the movie progresses, we learn more and more about the history between the two men and we start to sympathize with the Refuter. He didn’t do anything wrong, why is he being painted as the bad guy? But Farhadi writes and directs so expertly that we never lose our sympathy for the lead. Just like he is, we are now stuck with the unfortunate truth that sometimes the situation is just bad. It’s no ones fault exactly and solutions don’t come easy.

81/100

I recommend this pretty easily to any and everyone. I also hope people check out Farhadi’s masterpiece A Separation.

Scream (2022)

A “requel” of the Scream franchise. It’s really Scream 5. In theaters.

The original Scream is a legitimate great movie; it’s also a miracle it’s good at all. In every alternate timeline, the movie is worse. So it’s not surprising that the sequels are all a bit worse and any greatness within stems from the quality and ingenuity from the 1996 original. I like all the Screams for the same reasons and dislike all the sequels for the same reasons, and this entry is no different. The mystery is fun, the kills are fun, and the self-awareness of the characters is endlessly enjoyable. However, this movie is just a touch too meta for my taste. The returning characters are occasionally used well (primarily and shockingly David Arquette) but are more often awkwardly forced into a story that doesn’t need them. The new cast are all good enough to carry the movie on their own and I hope the movie does well enough to help them all get cast in more things for me to see. And [no spoilers, don’t worry], I appreciate the “reveal” and the “point” of the mystery a lot and suspect a lot of who the movie is mocking won’t realize they’re the ones being mocked.

I was wrong on who the killer was, then I was right, then wrong again, then right again.

69/100

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

New film by a Coen Brother, starring Denzel Washington and Francis MacDormand. On Apple+.

The main tragedy is that so many talented people wasted their time making yet another straightforward Shakespeare adaptation. Same period, same costumes, same delicious dialogue. The movie has an overly simple set design but top-tier cinematography to make up for it and the acting is good because the actors are good and the story is good because the story is the story. So if you’re in the mood for straightforward Shakespeare, this might be the best one to seek out. But after 400 years, I’d personally prefer the best directors, cinematographers and actors of their generation try something a little fresher.

71/100. The Witches are incredible in this.

Drive My Car (2021)

Japanese film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Current frontrunner for Best International Feature and critical darling. In theater.

Honestly, I might be too dumb for this movie. I absolutely love the premise of a depressed artist working through his emotions by staging a play where every actor speaks a different language and can’t understand what anyone else is saying. I thoroughly enjoyed the (very very long) story but yet found myself a little underwhelmed by the emotional climax. The rest of the movie is so almost objectively great that I assume it is me who missed something and not the movie that missed showing me something. It’s possible a working understanding of Chekov would be beneficial.

78/100

The Fallout (2022)

Debut film by Megan Park, starring Jenna Ortega. HBO Max.

It’s nice when a movie comes out of nowhere, settles itself onto my favorite streamer and then turns out to be a good film. Anticipation is fun, but a good movie is better.

This movie explores a situation I read about too regularly but try not to think about at all. What happens to the survivors of a school shooting afterwards? You know that it will be a harrowing, bonding experience, but I had never thought about how it might be a bonding experience for people who were not previously friends. And there’s no “right” way to grieve and it would be understandable for everyone to grieve in their own way, even if those separate paths are at odds with each other. Would a popular kid use this tragedy to retreat into solitude? Would a wallflower use this tragedy to find their voice? Are both those options okay? It’s just a shame we even need to think about any of this.

I found myself regularly thinking, “wow this is nailing how kids talk to each other” but I know that I have no idea if that’s true. But the way this was portrayed certainly feels authentic.

72/100

I saw only two 2022 releases this month and both star Jenna Ortega. Good for her.

2021 in Review: The characters were great, the films were okay.

There was a 3 week period in mid-2021 where I truly thought the pandemic was in our rearview. I saw like 6 movies in theater without wearing a mask. I look forward to doing that again one day in 2023 or 2024, maybe.

2020 was a wild and disappointing year (obviously) but for our purposes it was disappointing because so many movies got postponed. There were still plenty of movies I look back fondly on but I had high high hopes for the ones that got away. And 2021 came and I wish most of them had gotten away again. An extra year of post-production did not make some of these mega blockbusters undumb or unboring. And I didn’t leave the theater unannoyed.

Like most years, my favorite films of the year are smaller movies. What really stood out this time around were the films with complicated lead characters of the type I’ve never seen before. They’re mostly in films that I would struggle to recommend to most people due their subject matter or the tone of their film. But their characters are so fascinating that I often lost interest in the story around them and only wanted to see what they would do next. Simon Rex in Red Rocket is possibly the first extremely charming extreme dirtbag I’ve seen lead a film. Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter is super frustrating but also is (what I can only assume) a commonly occuring person in real life: a talented woman who absolutely hates being a mother. I sympathized with almost everything she felt while disagreeing with almost everything she did. And then Alana Haim in the unfortunately problematic Licorice Pizza absolutely blew me away. A 25-year-old disheartened by the grind and dullness of adulthood trying to make herself feel better and important by hitching herself to an overly confident and ambitious teenager. She flips back and forth between anger, intrigue and boredom so quickly yet seamlessly, keeping the character constantly exciting and believable.

And then of course there’s Dune, my favorite movie of the past 2 years. I saw it twice in IMAX and once more at home on HBO Max. It’s incredible. A great adaptation of an even better book and a great movie on it’s own. I don’t care for sequels but I’ll think about Dune Part II at least once a week for the next 21 months.

Quick stats:

280 movies watched. 41 in theater (hardly any before April when I got my second shot). 50 rewatches. 95 from 2021 (a few more after the new year). I mostly watched at home, as most people do, and most of it was on HBO Max (69), then Netflix (45), then Amazon Prime (25). If you love movies and don’t have HBO Max, you’re seriously missing out. Average movie score: 70.19/100. Highest ranked watch of the year: There Will Be Blood (98). Lowest ranked: Wild Mountain Thyme (20).

Superlatives:

Actress: Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza). Runner-up: Kristen Stewart (Spencer).

Actor: Simon Rex (Red Rocket). Runner-up: Andrew Garfield (Tick, Tick…BOOM!). [unless we count Judas and the Black Messiah, which was up for Oscars last year.]

Supporting Actress: Ruth Negga (Passing). Runner-up: Rebecca Ferguson (Dune).

Supporting Actor: Mike Faist (West Side Story). Runner-up: Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog).

Director: Denis Villeneuve (Dune).

Original Screenplay: Red Rocket.

Adapted Screenplay: The Power of the Dog.

Favorite Scene: Ornithopter escape (Dune).

I definitely won’t look back on 2021 fondly as a whole. And after Dune and The Green Knight, I wonder how often I’ll back on 2021 films at all.*

*I have yet to see most significant animated, documentary, and foreign language films.