The year of "remember when they made that?" movies

Nostalgia has been coming on strong in 2023, and I'm not just talking about movies like Barbie, The Super Mario Brothers Movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and all the other revivals of familiar IP.

This is also a year where we can't get enough of -- or at the very least, they can't make enough of -- movies that look at a product or cultural craze of the past and how it came to be. 

I've just seen the fourth such movie of its kind last night.

The Beanie Bubble is just the latest to drop this particular template on us, the first to be about an actual toy. The others have been about:

- A basketball shoe (Air)

- A phone that can send emails (BlackBerry)

- A highly addictive video game (Tetris).

I'd be inclined to say the returns are diminishing, except that the first of these I saw was the one I liked the least (Tetris). Air and BlackBerry are currently in my top ten for the year, and The Beanie Bubble now lands somewhere in between.

I suppose Barbie is even a variation on this sort of movie, given that it does include an albeit highly fantastical version of Mattel, the company that makes the world's most famous doll.

(Speaking of famous dolls, I think we should now expect a movie on the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, and possibly Furbees.)

We should probably be getting sicker of this trend than we actually are, which points up how generally durable it is. We have an apparently inexhaustible appetite to have the cultural fascinations of our earlier years projected back to us on screen, beyond the obvious ways the movies have always done this with their constant sequels and remakes. We at least profess to be interested in how the thing we love came to be.

This trend is, of course, not new this year. Without doing an exhaustive survey of past examples, movies like The Social Network, the various Steve Jobs movies and even something like the McDonald's origin story The Founder have all been previous successful examples. They all center on something we know and love, while creating the opportunity for a Goodfellas-style narrator to talk about how they were making money hand over fist and it was going to their heads, and giving a screenwriter leeway to imagine juicy conversations that took place behind closed doors.

But however popular this form may have always been, it's coming on like gangbusters in 2023. And we're only 60 percent of the way through the year, so there could be more. (Movie titles creep up on me a lot more these days than they used to. So if there's a movie about the Easy Bake Oven later this year, I won't be surprised.) 

As for The Beanie Bubble in particular ... I did like it reasonably well (3.5 stars), but template fatigue may have begun setting in a bit. Also it seems like the film could have been 25% more unhinged, given the opening statement that "There are parts of the truth you just can't make up. The rest, we did." I wanted a little more of this movie to beggar belief like that text promised it would.

That said, I am really glad to see Kristin Gore -- Al's daughter and a former Futurama writer -- make good with both her first screenwriting credit since the disastrous David O. Russell film Accidental Love in 2015 (shared with Zac Bissonnette), and her first directing credit overall (shared with Damian Kulash). (That she had to share both with a man is a funny reality for a film about a soured partnership between the characters played by Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks.) Gore comes back admirably from a flop for which she presumably bears only a small percentage of the responsibility. 

Each new movie is better than the one before

When you don't start out with a really solid contender early on in the viewing year -- at least a likely candidate for your eventual top ten -- you'll find that your favorite movie of the year keeps changing, at a sort of comical rate that calls into question the honor bestowed on each of the previous temporary holders of the #1 spot.

Without a Turning Red (my eventual #3 of 2022) or an Everything Everywhere All at Once (my eventual #4 of 2022) there to stabilize the early rankings, things end up kind of like they have so far this year.

My longest reigning #1 of 2023, as you would know from this post, was Shotgun Wedding, which was my #1 from when I saw it on the 2nd of February until April 1st, a reign of 58 days. 

The very same night I posted that, though, I saw M3GAN, which easily supplanted it. M3GAN held on to the top slot for exactly 11 days.

That's when I saw The Magician's Elephant on vacation in Vietnam, and though at the time I liked it more than M3GAN, I'm suspecting they will ultimately swap relative positions by year's end. M3GAN has stuck with me, The Magician's Elephant hasn't -- though of course I do still think it's quite good.

The Magician's Elephant had a bit longer to get used to its throne, wearing the crown from April 12th to May 20th, a span of 38 days. That's when I saw Ben Affleck's Air, and really enjoyed it, easily naming it my new favorite of a so-far fairly disappointing year.

Air barely had time to blink in the top spot, though, because I was taken aback by the German language World War II western Blood & Gold on Netflix, which I saw just nine days later. This was also the first film of 2023 that I gave 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, and considering that it took until May 29th to do it, that's very long by my standards. 

Now finally we have the latest occupant of the penthouse, BlackBerry, which I saw Thursday night -- drawing the curtain on Blood & Gold's 17-day reign.

It occurred to me that something additionally interesting/significant is that since M3GAN first dethroned Shotgun Wedding, I have not see a film that was better than Shotgun Wedding but worse than whatever the current #1 was. So it's either the best I've seen, or middling. So that means my current rankings are:

1. BlackBerry
2. Blood & Gold
3. Air
4. The Magician's Elephant
5. M3GAN
6. Shotgun Wedding

I don't expect this to continue and it certainly can't continue forever, but it's an interesting pattern that has two-and-a-half months of history in its favor. 

So just what was so good about BlackBerry, the second film this year to dramatize the technical and legal challenges involved in a new techie obsession?

Well for starters, it's what the first film, AppleTV's Tetris, should have been. Have a look here if you want to get into the weeds of why I think that film is ultimately a failure, However, if you'd like the simplified version, I'll say that Tetris got the era and its associated nostalgia right, but it completely lost us with a serpentine plot that involved as many reversals as five episodes of Silicon Valley but without our ability to grasp the stakes of those reversals from moment to moment.

BlackBerry, which charts the rise and fall of the first phone where you could send email, effortlessly explains what's going on from moment to moment, focusing on only a small handful of characters and a small handful of narrative developments at a time. It's amazing how much easier it is to appreciate era-specific nostalgia if you are oriented within the plot. 

Matt Johnson may quickly be becoming one of my favorite unheralded directors. If you don't recognize the name, he's also an actor in his films The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. I liked both of those movies waaaay more than I ever guessed I would, slapping 4.5 stars on the former and four on the latter. BlackBerry gets him back up into the 4.5-star range, and it might have been higher if Johnson had sustained the crack-me-up humor from the film's first 45 minutes. The story wouldn't have allowed it, and that's not the film's fault, but let's just say that in this cinematic desert where we're parched for good comedy, this film's first half delivered like few films have for me in recent years.

Johnson's got a DIY style that kind of looks like he's trying to make a mockumentary, and if memory serves, both of the previous films are technically in that genre. This isn't meant to be a mockumentary but it maintains the same half-grainy look of something being done on the cheap. If you think that's an insult, think again. Johnson's style actually requires a high degree of veracity from his actors to match its apparent authenticity, and Johnson's cast complies.

This is the first film where Johnson has worked with actors you actually recognize, who include Jay Baruchel, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes and Michael Ironside. But it was another actor I didn't recognize who really blew me away: Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO brought in by the nerds at Research in Motion to kick the ass that they couldn't kick. If I watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia I would know who this is, and when I see other pictures of him I do recognize him from other places I've seen him. Playing bald in this film, though, made the actor totally disappear into the role, and his performance as a shark who gets results was by far the film's most memorable and interesting character.

I should not say "by far" because Baruchel and Johnson are both great and both key to much of the film's opening humor. Baruchel, reminding me a bit of Justin Long here, has some great line deliveries as Mike Lazaridis, the genius programmer who invented the BlackBerry and formed the company with his best friend Doug Fremin (Johnson). A man whose confidence is no match for his intellect, he's Jim Balsillie's spiritual opposite -- and eventually someone corrupted by his proximity to his fellow co-CEO. Johnson, meanwhile, wears a variety of different t-shirts celebrating nerd culture throughout, the one who doesn't want to lose his personality and will fight to keep things as they were, while also to grow the company according to their principles -- but is also the most disposable of the three in terms of the company's future trajectory, which becomes a sticking point.

Speaking of nerd culture, there's some great shout-outs here. The room full of genius programmers at Research in Motion -- who will remind you of similar groups of guys in movies like The Social Network -- have a movie night ritual, and we see them all quoting the best lines from Raiders of the Lost Ark and They Live.

I probably shouldn't give you too more because I really want you to go see this. 

It's my #1 movie of the year ... at least until something better comes along.

In about 26.6 days, if the average holds. Or much sooner if we go only on recent trends.

The Amazon day/night Air/Plane double feature

As soon as I saw that Amazon was carrying both Air and Plane, and in fact advertising them right next to each other on their home page, two words came to mind:

"Double feature."

Now, I'm too sleepy these days to pull off a classic double feature, where you watch the movies more or less consecutively, with 20 minutes or less between them. I usually fall asleep at some point during even one movie that I watch after dinner. (Thursday night was the extreme example: I fell asleep in the middle of Ridley Scott's 94-minute Legend (1985) for such a long time that I actually had to finish it on Friday night. That was no commentary on the movie, which I found even more enthralling on my second viewing than my first.)

It being a Saturday, though, I could watch one movie during "quiet time" (the pre-dinner screen time for my kids) and one in the post-dinner time slot. And because my younger son has unofficial domain over the living room during quiet time, the garage on the projector was my chosen viewing location.

Movies about sports are better than sports movies

It may not surprise you to learn that Ben Affleck's Air feels reminiscent of Bennett Miller's Moneyball, considering that both are more about the business of sports than a sport itself. Both feature off-field dealings between eccentric characters who are happy enough to berate each other with foul language if it will help sell their point. 

And both, it turns out, are really terrific.

Air doesn't rise to the level of Moneyball, to be sure, and it's also considerably less of a sports movie, seeing as how its only game images are real archival footage of Michael Jordan. But boy was it a joy to watch. It's got a great cast, exceptional dialogue and enviable economy of storytelling. And it's just plain fun.

Unlike most sports movies.

That's right, I said it: Movies about sports are better than sports movies.

I love being in the world of sports, but I really don't care that much for a sporting event, or a series of sporting events, to be carried out on screen in front of me. Oh, there are certainly the exceptions -- Major League, for example, is one of the movies it would offend me least to watch once a week for the rest of my life. Generally speaking, though, give me a movie in the world of sports rather than a sports movie any day of the week.

The reasons are pretty clear, and I've gone through them before. For movies that are fiction, I simply don't believe that the crazy comeback that screenwriter concocted would actually happen. Real sports comebacks are amazing precisely because they did happen. For non-fiction films, sometimes that recreation can be cool to watch, but I'd usually just rather watch a tape of the actual game.

But I can rub elbows with sports in a movie like Air or Moneyball without having to suspend disbelief and judge a screenwriter's success at writing some buzzer beater that I don't believe really happened. 

And what a bunch of fun sports adjacent characters to rub elbows with. Affleck as Phil Knight, Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, Jason Bateman as the lesser known marketing guy, Chris Tucker as another guy at the company -- no I really don't think it's relevant for me to look up their names or titles right now -- they were just a great bunch to spend two hours with. To say nothing of Viola Davis as Jordan's mother Deloris.

What I thought was really impressive is that they got such good dialogue and such a good script without having to have an Aaron Sorkin in their corner. Air was written by a guy named Alex Convery, and this is his very first credit.

Gerard Butler can be in good movies, too

I was all ready to throw Plane on the pile of terrible Gerard Butler misfires, of which there are so many that it becomes impossible even to count them. I mean, the title alone suggests some sort of surrender by the studio and/or screenwriters.

But then I kind of enjoyed the hell out of it.

Things I really liked:

1) The plane losing altitude (not a spoiler, because come on) and trying to land was harrowing. I'm sure I've seen 200 plane crashes in movies, but this one put me into the moment better than most. Kudos, Jean-Francois Richet -- an actual good director, I am reminded as I now see that he directed Blood Father, which I really liked. 

2) Butler behaves like a pilot, not an action hero. If you've seen the trailer you know Butler et al mix it up with some bad men in this movie, and yes, Butler carries multiple guns at different points. But the movie remembers that this is an airline pilot, not a commando. He does have an intense physical struggle, but I'm willing to believe a fit 50-year-old man could indeed prevail in such a situation. I don't believe he could pick up a gun for the first time and start picking off foes with it, and to its credit, this movie avoids him having to do that -- almost entirely I think.

3) I actually believed from moment to moment where the story went. It's a wild story to be sure, but I never doubted that the latest twist would/could happen. 

Given that Butler is coming off truly terrible movies like Geostorm and Last Seen Alive, and I was not the fan of Greenland that some people were, this has to be seen as a real mini-comeback for him.

Air was an easy four-star rating for me on Letterboxd, as it has again jumped to the front of the line of the films I've seen in the weak-so-far year of 2023. My initial instinct was to give Plane the same -- I know, I know. But in fact, the "I know, I know" is my guilt talking, my idea that Butler is irredeemably terrible and if I really liked one of his films, it must be a mistake on my part. 

Who wants guilt to be a factor in the experience you had watching a movie? So instead of 3.5 stars, I gave this one four stars as well.

And that's a pretty damn good double feature.