Keeping tabs on my opposite

As a movie guy, I'm naturally interested in what other people are watching on planes, especially on the long flights between the U.S. and Australia. With the people sitting around me, I always get to know what sorts of movies are calling out to them over the course of the flight. 

Sometimes, of course, it's not movies at all. The woman whose screen I could see in the crack between the seats to my right was only interested in the Sex in the City sequel series And Just Like That, as any time I looked over, there was something going on with Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and the new characters in their lives. Given the unending sameness, I quickly lose interest in what such people are watching. 

The woman through the crack on the left, on the other hand, was doing me better than I do me, only with a a certain opposite quality. 

Not opposite because of the quality of what she was watching, but because of the vintage. But also because of the quality. 

Me, I always jam pack a fight with releases from the current year. That's especially the case in December, when my current year is starting to wrap up, and it's crunch time in terms of getting a lot of middling movies available on the plane -- where I won't care so much about their quality -- onto my list before I close things out for the year. 

That sometimes leaves me a bit jealous of the people who aren't doing that.

Before we even left the ground, this woman had started in on Galaxy Quest. I think I might have watched more of Galaxy Quest than the thing that was on my own screen, Tig Notaro's Am I OK?, which she co-directed with Stephanie Allynne. That's an exaggeration, of course, but Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite comedies of the last -- well, can't say quarter century now because it came out just more than 25 years ago. Though maybe I don't need to qualify that comment at all, as it is just one of my favorite comedies, full stop.

Am I OK? is not destined to become one of my favorite comedies of any time period. It isn't bad per se, but it is just so middling -- so perfectly representative of the sort of film I would/should watch on a plane -- that it was easy to very quickly stop watching every moment to glean its finer details. Being from Notaro, I would expect it to be about the main character's sexual identity, which it is. I would also expect it to be funnier, which it is not. 

After Galaxy Quest, she didn't make a perfect second decision, but then again, neither did I. While she spent her next segment of the flight on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, which got only 2.5 stars from me as a retroactive rating on Letterboxd, I was slogging my way through Annie Baker's Janet Planet, which ultimately got only 1.5 stars from me. In fact, this was the most tedious time I had with any of the five movies I watched on the flight, even when the mere task of watching another movie was starting to feel burdensome. Fortunately, I also chose this time to address a bunch of Christmas cards I was planning to mail after we landed, which made the experience far more tolerable. 

Before I finished Janet Planet, she got herself back on track in a major way with her third movie, which really made me jealous: Crazy Rich Asians. I've already seen CRA three times within the relatively short six years of its existence, and it would have been four, except I was geo-blocked from streaming it when we were in Singapore in October. That's right, it was on an Australian streaming service (Stan) which I am unable to watch when I'm not in Australia. It was funny enough to me at the time that I was going write a whole post about it, but never ended up doing so.

Crazy Rich Asians was the movie that primed me to want to visit Singapore in the first place, and to do some of the things we ultimately did on our trip, like go to the Marina Bay Sands hotel (the one with the rooftop pool on the 57th floor) and to the food hawkers place that the movie makes look like a culinary paradise, Newton Food Centre. (Never mind that at the actual Newton Food Centre, my stomach started doing somersaults and I had to use the facilities twice in only 90 minutes -- and not for #1.)

I'd wanted to watch the movie while on our trip both to point out places I'd already been and to remind myself of any new ones we hadn't done yet before we ran out of time, so watching to the left through the seat cracks gave me a chance to do a little bit of that. I was mostly curious to see how Newton Food Centre was depicted, since the real one ended up seeming more grubby to me than the one I remembered from the movie -- but indeed, they used the real one in the movie as well, and I had just romanticized it because that movie is an example of the expertise of romanticizing a city on film. I watched that scene through entirely, and only got little snippets of the rest of the film.

Meanwhile, on my own screen, I was watching what ended up being the first of three consecutive musician biopics, though I didn't realize the middle one qualified as such until I'd started watching it. That first was the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black. Ho hum. The musician biopic is the very definition of the sort of middling mainstream fare that a guy ranking all the movies he sees in a given year should watch, but little more than that. 

She was still a bit ahead of me -- I think I paused to sleep a little bit at some point, though not very long -- and she started her fourth before I started my fourth as well. Perhaps primed by seeing Michelle Yeoh in CRA, she then transitioned into Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I loved (it was my #4 of 2022) but which I haven't yet rewatched. Aside from one little detour into mediocre Tim Burton fare, this woman was making all the right moves, and my eye was especially caught by this movie with its constant quirkiness and visual invention. (Though I was also reminded how long it is, which is perhaps one of the reasons I have not yet revisited it.)

Me? At least I was now watching my best movie of the trip so far, Kneecap, which is the story of three Irish-language rappers that feels a little bit like a spiritual successor to Trainspotting. (Yes, I know that Ireland and Scotland are not the same, though I sometimes forget which accent is from which country.) The really interesting thing about Kneecap is that the real-life rappers play themselves, which was an especially strange revelation for me from the credits, since I thought I recognized two of the three of them from other movies and spent a considerable amount of time wracking my brain to remember which ones. They are supported by people obviously not playing themselves, such as Michael Fassbender.

Her fifth -- and as it turns out, final -- movie was another animated misstep. Hey, nobody's perfect. Letterboxd tells me I gave Vivo (2021) three stars, but as I was catching little bits of it, it felt more to me like the 2.5-star equivalent of Corpse Bride, with the latter certainly having more claim to endurance in the culture. 

After Vivo, she went to sleep -- for the remainder of the flight, it would appear. Which was another source of major jealousy for me. 

Watching five movies and still getting to sleep for a good four hours? She did me far better than I can ever do me. 

I also watched five movies -- more on the fifth in a moment -- but it was with less than an hour of sleep. Which, really, is not so surprising, given that our plane lifted off at 11:30 a.m., meaning I wouldn't naturally feel inclined to sleep until just when we were landing in LA. But you need more sleep than that on an international flight, if at all possible. 

The time I spent not watching movies was this sort of jagged, in-between period where I distracted myself with things like two episodes of Saturday Night Live, which I never get to watch now that I live in Australia but which my wife and I watched religiously for about the first five years of our relationship. These were consolidated 55-minute episodes that did not include the musical numbers, but did include a fair amount of mediocrity as well as a widespread failure to stifle laughter by both the guests and the regular players. 

My fifth movie felt like a grim endeavor indeed, but when else would I make the time to watch Bob Marley: One Love?

Don't get me wrong, I love Marley's music, but even if I were to watch a biopic of my favorite musician of all time (Trent Reznor) I would probably find it at least something of a chore. Then again, I hope Trent Reznor would not allow a biopic of himself to be made without some interesting artistic choices. Then again again, biopic subjects rarely get to decide how their own lives are portrayed on film, since it's more likely for them to be dead (Marley and Winehouse) than alive (Kneecap and Robbie Williams, in the brand new biopic that I really liked, Better Man). 

I gave One Love a milquetoast three stars, same as Back to Black, which seems to be reserved for movies where there is nothing really wrong, except that the musician biopic form itself tends to be very limiting. We'll see if I get a chance to see, or ultimately prioritize, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown before 2024 is out.

What I found myself wondering about this other woman was if she has good taste (60% good taste anyway) or whether she just stumbled into some very good movies. Because then the question comes up, if she had not seen these movies already, what does that say about her actual taste? Or if she was revisiting them, what does it say about her wanting to revisit Corpse Bride and Vivo? 

Maybe it was a hybrid approach, where she had already seen the three greats and was revisiting them just for her pleasure, while she wanted to hear what all the hype was about (there was no hype) for the other two animated movies.

But then again, if she was watching half new movies and half old ones -- new to her, old to the rest of the world -- then she isn't properly my opposite, now is she? 

Everything Everywhere All the Awards

If I wanted a night where my highest rated best picture nominee had a formal coronation as a modern classic, tonight was a good night to be watching the Oscars.

It was also a night to be reminded that my critical tastes are not as out of sync with other people's as I sometimes think.

You see, not only did my #4 film of the year, Everything Everywhere All at Once, take home a stunning seven Oscars -- the most for any film since Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 -- but the third most Oscars were won by my #1 film of the year, The Whale, which picked up a surprise best makeup Oscar in addition to the expected best actor win for Brendan Fraser. 

The second most? All Quiet on the Western Front with four. I ranked that only 67th for the year, but that could hardly detract from my overall satisfaction with how things played out.

And that included the ceremony itself. With Jimmy Kimmel casting a comfortable calm over the proceedings after "the incident" last year, this was a competent, enjoyable, and totally unremarkable Academy Awards.

Unremarkable, I suppose, except for the absolute dominance of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which almost made us sick of seeing the charming Daniels on stage. By collecting statue after statue over the course of the evening, EEAAO conspired with AQOTWF to entirely shut out five best picture nominees, a full half of the field: The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Tar and Triangle of Sadness. Of the remaining best picture nominees, one Oscar each was picked up by Avatar: The Way of Water (visual effects), Top Gun: Maverick (sound) and Women Talking (adapted screenplay).

Since Elvis and The Banshees of Inisherin were also in my top ten, I was a little disappointed to see them come away empty handed -- except again, see the whole "nine combined Oscars to films in my top four of 2022" and know that "disappointed" could never be the right word.

And hey, my #2 movie of the year, Don't Worry Darling, even got a mention when Kimmel asked Malala, of all people, whether Harry Styles actually spit on Chris Pine. I couldn't hear what her response was, but those who did, including Kimmel, seemed to think it was funny and/or appropriate.

I could look up what Malala said, but I'm here to give you the same sort of instant impressions I've always given you in the past, free from the reading of ten Oscar recap stories -- as though I were, in fact, writing it in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, like I usually do, rather than mid-afternoon on Monday. That's right, if you read yesterday's post, you know that I saw the Oscars live this year for the first time since moving to Australia, due being off work for the Labour Day holiday. I have enough of my own observations that I don't need to steal anyone else's, inadvertently or otherwise.

So with all the deserved kudos to Everything -- which failed to win an award in only three categories where it was nominated, those being original song, original score and costume design (with Stephanie Hsu failing to win best supporting actress but her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis winning instead) -- let's move on to the page of notes I scribbled as I was watching the ceremony on my projector in my darkened garage.

- Kimmel parachuting in. Nice memorable entrance and a unique nod to "the film that saved Hollywood," Top Gun: Maverick.

- Kimmel mentions that Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Fraser appeared in Encino Man, making this a bad night for Pauly Shore. It would be even worse when both won the Oscars for which they were nominated.

- Five Irish actors nominated for Oscars? That's a lot.

- Kimmel's Will Smith jokes are good. It came later, but I'll mention it now: When the documentary feature was about to be presented, that being the category where Smith slapped Chris Rock last year, Kimmel quipped that he hoped it "would go off without a hitch, and without Hitch." Good line. I didn't end up posting much during the ceremony -- the notable exception coming in just a moment -- but I at least thought about posting "Will Smith is currently trying to schedule a time when he can slap Jimmy Kimmel." But then I just decided not to delve into that particular controversy. (Hey, Smith has tried to repent. I'm aware of that.)

- He had a good opening monologue but I did think it went on a little long. Having the RRR dancers dance him off the stage was a nice touch.

- Dwayne Johnson is looking older than I've ever seen him look.

- It was interesting to see Ariana DeBose choke up when she read Ke Huy Quan's name. I'm not usually in favor of when presenters let their preference be known, but this was clearly unpremeditated. (Who knows, maybe the enormity of the moment would have made her choke up over any name that was in that envelope.)

- Here was my one post on Facebook while the ceremony was airing: "Yes Ke Huy Quan just thanked Chunk." Chunk, of course, is a character in The Goonies, in which Quan also appeared, and he was played by Jeff Cohen. I recognized the name, though I assume not everyone would have.

- Before we move on from Quan, I'll say that only in the past year have I learned how his name is actually pronounced. When I first learned of him in The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I always chose to pronounce his name as "Kay Hu Quan." At least I got the Quan part right. There were no pronunciation websites back then, nor do I expect most media who would have said his name at the time -- though I may not have heard any -- would have gone to great lengths to get it right. So he's always been "Kay Hu Quan" to me, but I will try to change it to "Key Way Quan" now, especially now that he's an Oscar winner and there's a good chance he is going to become instantly overexposed.

- Curtis wins best actress and delivers this good line: "I am hundreds of people." One of a number of choice lines about the collaborative medium that we would hear on this night.

- Nice touch giving David Byrne hot dog fingers in his song from EEAAO. That's a direct descendant of his famed big suit. Byrne was also the first celebrity whose age I looked up, and the first to guess exactly right before I looked it up. He's 70, and that's what I guessed he was.

- Why did the makeup winners for The Whale take so long to get up on stage?

- Samuel L. Jackson was the next age I guessed. I guessed he was 74. He is, indeed, 74. Wow I'm good at this.

- Ruth Carter wins for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever costume design, repeating her feat for the original Black Panther (and becoming the first Black woman to win two Oscars, I now see looking online. My rules are, I'm allowed to verify facts, just not steal other people's observations). Her line about her mother becoming "an ancestor" this past week was touching. Then later we learn her mother was 101 when she died. So, I guess it wasn't a surprise.

- The RRR song brought the house down, in a typical example of Bollywood's commitment to spectacle. I almost wonder if some of the voting occurred during the ceremony, as I was not expecting "Naatu Naatu" to win best original song (nor its writer to sing his acceptance speech!). But I'm glad it did as the only other two songs that probably stood a chance, from divas Lady Gaga and Rhianna, were blandly inspirational tunes with no staying power.

- Also, why the extreme close-up during your song, Gaga? It looked like she had some kind of rash on her face that they didn't cover very well with makeup.

- Women Talking winning best adapted screenplay might have been a bit of a makeup call for Sarah Polley not getting a best director nom, which was fretted about quite a bit. Although you will recall that I did end up liking that film quite a bit, its dialogue is clunky in enough parts that I don't know if a writing category was the best place for it to be honored. I did like seeing Polley, a longtime favorite of mine, giving an acceptance speech.

- I'm not sure how Walter Mirisch, who I had to google, snuck in to steal the last spot in the "in memoriam" section, when they seemed to have it all cued up for Raquel Welch. He produced In the Heat of the Night, and good for him for doing that, but it wasn't a great way to reach a climax in this sentimental tradition.

- I guessed Mindy Kaling's age wrong, but not really. I guessed she was 47, but before I looked I thought "No, she's only 43." But for some reason I counted the original guess as 47. She's actually 43.

- The editor for EEAAO, Paul Rogers, didn't really win me over with his humble brag that this was only his second film. (Also I quibble with the accuracy of that, as he shows as the credited editor on both Daniel Scheinert's The Death of Dick Long and the documentary You Can't Kill David Arquette. I suppose he was only talking about fiction films.) I know he didn't mean to say "Wow, I'm such a prodigy, I won an Oscar in only my second film" and it was really probably more like "I really didn't expect this given the relative infancy of my career," but then he made it worse by talking about how working with the cast was "the honor of his career." Yes, a career that is only two narrative features long.

- Winning as an original screenwriter -- or was it as a director? -- Daniel Kwan gives another good line about the collaborative process: "Genius emerges from the collective."

- Really glad to see Fraser win. I hope this once and for all silences everyone who didn't like The Whale and thought I was crazy for picking it as my best of the year. I know it won't.

- Michelle Yeoh, you are certainly not past your prime.

- Loved seeing Quan stand to applaud Harrison Ford as he walked on stage to give out best picture, and was reminded again how funny Harrison Ford is. Whenever you think he'd rather be smoking pot on his ranch and is only involved in entertainment for cynical reasons, he starts appearing in every other TV show and movie and giving out the final Oscar of the night. You're an old estabalishment-embracing softie, Harrison, we all know it. You can't fool us. 

- Kimmel gets off a final good line about joining Good Morning America already in progress, and exits next to a sign that reads "Number of telecasts without incident: 001." 

- In the end I did finally guess one age definitively incorrectly. I thought Kimmel was 56, but it turns out he's only 55.

So that finally closes the book on 2022. Now what do I do with the rest of my day?

A multiverse at the multiplex in 2022

Cinema's reemergence in 2022 had its most profitable example in Top Gun: Maverick, but maybe its most symbolic example in the Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once.

One of two prominent 2022 films that dealt with the multiverse, the film fully mainstreamed a pair of directors whose last film was about a farting corpse. It wasn't just a quirky movie that cinephiles needed to see. Everyone needed to see it -- and did, eventually.

Clearly that's not accurate as the movie grossed only $100 million internationally. But it caught up quite a bit on video, and those "cinema curious" people in your life -- those who usually only see the big hits, but have aspirations to broaden their own horizons -- did seek it out, and usually loved it. In fact it was sort of a revelation for them.

It was a bit of a revelation for all of us. Marvel has been teasing the concept of a multiverse for ages, even going to so far as to include the word in the title of this year's Doctor Strange sequel. It's not a conceptually difficult notion for most of us, of course, and if anyone paved the way for us collectively grappling with it in normal conversation, it was probably Marvel. The Daniels probably just benefitted from the groundwork Marvel already laid, while of course injecting it with their own brand of bracing originality.

But in reflecting on this year, I'm interested in considering the multiverse in a different way. Watching movies is, effectively, a belief in the multiverse. It's a belief that all the worlds depicted in all the movies of a given year can be simultaneously true, are emotionally true for us in the moment in which we watch them. They're all "real" for somebody out there. Like Michelle Yeoh, we visit all these worlds temporarily, two hours at a time, extracting what we need from them to make our real lives better, more informed, and more defined by empathy.

So in 2022, as audiences signalled that movies were not dead, and that the pandemic would not get us after all, they embraced not only the literal multiverse in these movies, but the symbolic multiverse that is the very act of going to the movies. In 2022, everyone was "cinema curious" again.

We start the new year hungry for more. 

Best (and worst) performers of the year

Each year in this piece I consider actors and others behind the camera -- one literally behind the camera this year -- who had multiple good movies or multiple bad ones. This doesn't mean they were better (or worse) than the best (or worst) work done this year, just that they were more prolific. These six people (and their honorable or dishonorable mentions) trended either more good or more bad than the other prolific people working in the film industry in 2022. 

Three who had a good year

Samantha Morton - Samantha Morton has long existed around the peripheries of Hollywood, appearing in big films (Minority Report) and critical favorites (Synecdoche, New York), though really only getting starring roles in independent films or films from her native England. Twenty twenty-two produced two very similar roles in that they both lasted only a single scene -- but what a scene, and what a proof of her abilities when employed in just the right way. In The Whale (#1), Morton's work as Charlie's ex-wife was the first thing to get the waterworks going for me. Her character had already been talked about a fair bit before we meet her, and we've already formed various conclusions: she's a drunk, she doesn't have her life in order, she's a shrew who won't permit her daughter to form a relationship with her own father. Morton explodes all our assumptions during a single scene in which we understand that she was hurt more than anything when Charlie left her for a man -- not specifically because it was a man, though that did complicate things for her. During this scene, in one particular line reading she gives us a moment of such overwhelming emotional generosity that it just left me in pieces, and not for the last time. In She Said (#11) she plays one of two women interviewed in relation to an incident involving Harvey Weinstein back in the 1990s, and she seems as emotionally internalized here as she is emotionally externalized in The Whale. That's obviously not a criticism of the performance; it's an indication of how difficult it was for the character to revisit these events, so much so that she just has to keep her gaze steady and her emotions under control, and baldly repeat what happened 25 years earlier. That the decision to talk to the New York Times reporters involves so much personal risk for her is another measure of the bravery she displays in this wrenching scene, made all the more profound by how little Morton yields to an instinct to be showy. The saying "there are no small parts" was made to describe Samantha Morton's 2022. 

Matthew Libatique - Has one person ever worked on both my #1 and my #2 movie of the same year? Almost certainly not, but that's what cinematographer Matthew Libatique pulled off in 2022. And it's not like The Whale (#1) and Don't Worry Darling (#2) are inherently similar projects, relying on a similar set of skills behind the camera. Don't Worry Darling is opulent and expansive by nature, taking in large desert vistas, geometrically precise neighborhoods and beautiful people in period wardrobes, intermingling with each other and the period set. The Whale, on the other hand, is cramped and claustrophobic, focusing on a man who doesn't conform to any of society's standards for beauty, staged on a single set that is a drab version of a modern apartment. Yet Libatique's camera brings both worlds so fully to life that they resonated with me like no other 2022 films. The cinematography is clearly an essential component to Darling; in fact, there's a defining moment that comes to mind whenever I think of the film, which involves the camera swooping around the sign for the community of Victory as Florence Pugh's character careens off toward Victory HQ in her convertible, followed by a phalanx of pastel vehicles. That shot doesn't sing the way it does without Olivia Wilde there to order it and Libatique there to execute it. You could argue that the camera is more of a technical necessity than an opportunity to demonstrate virtuoso technique in The Whale, an adaptation of a stage play, but then if so, why hire Libatique to do it? I bet if I rewatched The Whale I would appreciate many subtle choices being made by Darren Aronofsky and Libatique that create the conditions for this portrait to have left me a sobbing, blubbering mess. The confluence of the two projects in the same year reminds me that the movies are a consummately collaborative exercise, one in which you sublimate your own ego to the needs of the greater artistic vision. Libatique sublimated exquisitely in 2022, leaving me exalted in the process. 

Colin Farrell - Taking the third spot that almost went to Jordan Peele is Colin Farrell, and he gets there partly on quantity. Farrell made four movies that finished in the top half of my 2022 rankings, and even though one is all the way down at #82, that might be his most technically complicated. You might forget you were even watching Farrell in The Batman (#82); he played the Penguin, in case you never knew that in the first place. All that latex provides a great metaphor for the sort of chameleon Farrell has become in the past decade, ever since he left behind his years as a heartthrob Hollywood had always tried to use in the least surprising ways. (He's basically out-Matthew McConaugheying Matthew McConaughey at this point.) As we get progressively higher up my list, he played an utterly realistic cave diver in Ron Howard's surprisingly straightforward and effective dramatisation of the rescue of 12 Thai soccer players and their coach, Thirteen Lives (#42). It's a performance that requires only total realism, which almost seems like the trick itself given how easily and frequently he changes modes. In After Yang, which I tried to move higher than #29 with a second viewing, he gives us a melancholy dose of world weariness as he tries to fix his daughter's AI sibling and understand its attempted grasp at humanity. That tea speech and Werner Herzog impersonation are great. Finally we get to The Banshees of Inisherin (#5), in which Farrell is at his dim bulb best, moving us with his sorrow and frustration over Brendan Gleeson breaking up with him, without resorting to cheap sentiment. When Padraic breaks down after Colm defends him from the cop, it speaks wordless volumes about a fraternal love that is now going unreciprocated. Farrell should have a great next decade on film and I can't wait to see it. 

Honorable mentions: Jordan Peele (Nope, Wendell & Wild), Angela Bassett (Wendell & Wild, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Florence Pugh (Don't Worry Darling, The Wonder), Jenny Slate (I Want You Back, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On)

Three who had a bad year

Mark Wahlberg - Mark Wahlberg tried to do three different sorts of things in his 2022 movies, and none of them were successful. First it was the disappointing Uncharted (#154), in which he plays a character who's grizzled and battle worn in the original video game -- not just a baby faced guy like Wahlberg who happens to have turned 50 and grown a moustache. Wahlberg may not have been a big part of why the movie wasn't very good, but he didn't help things, and learning that he was once pegged to play the younger half of this buddy duo -- now played by an actual baby, Tom Holland -- certainly indicates a lack of considering all the options, if nothing else. He went for something with more prestige, maybe even hopeful of awards contention, with Father Stu (#144), in which he plays a rascally boxer criminal type who unbelievably pressures a nice religious girl into premarital sex, without the charm to back it up, before entering a seminary and ultimately getting diagnosed with a disease that leaves him paralyzed. Yes, there's a lot going on in this movie, and the fact that it didn't work for me, even though I have a friend whose father recently died after living with this disease (inclusion body myositis, or IBM) for years, really tells you how many incorrect turns it takes. Finally you have the worst of the three, Me Time (#168), in which he plays the annoyingly named Huck, opposite Kevin Hart (see my dishonorable mentions below). Huck throws wild birthday celebrations each year that are no longer compatible with Hart's new family man lifestyle. Cue the obnoxious buddy squabbling, and cue me rolling my eyes at Wahlberg for having so many misses in 2022. 

Pat Casey & Josh Miller - Two of this year's worst screenplays were written by the same two people. Pat Casey and Josh Miller actually appear in this photo in front of the poster for the original Sonic the Hedgehog movie from 2020, which I quite liked, but their follow-up left me in a state of squirming, groaning misery. I could not stand Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (#170), and if you want a good example of its utter failure as a movie, look no further than the bizarre Hawaiian wedding sub plot that they wrote when they had no idea what to do with James Marsden and Tika Sumpter. For some reason they thought it was a good idea to have Sumpter's character's sister (Natasha Rothwell) involved in a sham relationship with an undercover agent (Shemar Moore), one she believes to be real. This has nothing to do with the main story and is also typically cruel. The stuff involving actual hedgehogs was a drippy snooze, and even Jim Carrey couldn't save it. Then we can also lay the blame for Violent Night (#166) at their feet. Even if we hadn't maxed out on movies about bad Santa Clauses ten or even 20 years ago, this movie would be a poorly cast misfire that, like Sonic, can't be saved by the one person cast correctly (David Harbour as the big man himself). A shameless Die Hard ripoff that is never funny and rarely clever from an action standpoint, which is a real mystery given the involvement of David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde), Violent Night left me bored and annoyed even though I'd had a fun evening involving many beers to that point. It has cruelty in common with Sonic 2, too. So much for being ushered into the holiday season with a modicum of good cheer. If we want to go back to that nearly three-year-old photo and draw incorrectly timed conclusions from it, Miller may still be in fighting spirit. But Casey seems to know that something stinks, and maybe it's them.

Anya Taylor-Joy - It started off at the end of last year with the misfire Last Night in Soho (albeit a misfire with a good pedigree), and Anya Taylor-Joy's unsatisfying choices carried over into 2022. Both she and the other actress who was a candidate for this dishonor (see the dishonorable mentions) had three films that didn't really work for me in 2022, but the other escaped this fate by giving a certifiably good performance in one of them. For most people, The Menu (#111) qualified as a hit, but I found its conclusions obvious and easy to telegraph from a distance, taking what should have been smart commentary and rendering it pretty dull to this viewer. To her credit, Taylor-Joy was probably the best part of it. You can't say the same for Amsterdam (#152), an ensemble in the most indulgent sense of that word (the number of name actors who were cast to do nothing in this film is staggering). David O. Russell bit off way more than he could chew with this one, and one of the more obnoxious personalities put forth was by Taylor-Joy, as an aristocratic woman who looks down her nose at everyone. I wonder if this is the sort of role she's going to start playing on a regular basis, though hopefully it was just a one-off. Then I barely remember what she did or didn't do in The Northman (#157), so disappointed was I by Robert Eggers' follow-up to the extremely intriguing duo of The Witch and The Lighthouse. I doubt anyone could have made this exercise in revenge miserablism more watchable, and being watchable should have been its salvaging attribute -- even if the story were tedious and repetitive -- given Eggers' gifts as a visual stylist. Taylor-Joy is one of the brightest young talents we have, so 2022 shouldn't smudge her resume for too long.

Dishonorable mentions: Ana de Armas (Blonde, The Gray Man, Deep Water), Kevin Hart (The Man From Toronto, Me Time), John Bradley (Marry Me, Moonfall), Margot Robbie (Babylon, Amsterdam)

The year of the female protagonist

Hollywood is always talking the talk of greater representation for women in the movies, but in 2022, it also walked the walk.

The number of female directors and other key creative talent behind the camera may not have increased significantly -- that's not what I'm measuring today -- but more stories were about women than I can ever remember. And I've got the stats to prove it.

If I go through all my films and label them as having either a male protagonist (or a movie led by a handful of men), a female protagonist (or a movie led by a handful of women), or an ensemble where however many characters are split equally by gender, I get the following results:

Male protagonist = 77
Female protagonist = 60
Ensemble = 38

I must admit that when I first got the idea to write about this, I actually thought that the number of stories with a female protagonist would be more than the number with a male protagonist. I guess that just goes to show the depth of my male privilege; I think I'm seeing stories with female protagonists everywhere, but that's just because I notice them, while stories about men strike me as status quo and I don't notice them. Still, the fact that the combination of the ensemble movies with genders equally represented and stories fronted by a female protagonist far eclipse the stories about men strikes me as noteworthy progress.

I've known for a number of years that Hollywood had sort of this mentality: "If all else is equal, and the gender of the protagonist doesn't really play into the story, make it about a woman/girl rather than a man/boy. You'll get the women in the audience plus you'll steer clear of accusations that you don't pass the Bechdel test."

Now, movies with female protagonists may not pass the test created by writer Alison Bechdel anyway, and we don't use that as a metric the way we once did, even as we are getting better at passing it. And if something is done primarily out of cynicism/pragmatism -- as I am suggesting this might be -- then you'd be right to question how much progress it's actually symbolizing.

However, the end result is that more women are being presented as aspirational figures for young audience goers than ever before, and this is certain to have positive ripple effects -- maybe causing more young girls to see themselves in the movies, and to pursue careers involving cinematic storytelling of one sort or another. 

The year's best opening credits

A second viewing may not have been able to move After Yang up to where I am convinced it should probably be -- somewhere in my top 20 -- but at least I can give it some love here for how it greets us.

In a choice that is utterly out of sync with the somber tone of the rest of the movie, Kogonada decides to start things off with a hypnotic dance competition that involves all the movie's characters, even though we haven't met most of them yet. The movie is set, I don't know, maybe 60 years in the future, when families gather on a nightly basis to see how they fare in what appears to be a nationwide -- worldwide? -- game of Dance Dance Revolution, where how long you last depends on how much in sync you are with the rest of your teammates, and how many of the moves you hit. 

In addition to there being something so entrancing about watching these characters complete these dance moves, especially since most of these characters don't strike you as this sort of person, the background also changes color with each group of three through five characters who appear on screen. You kind of wish it would last the whole running time.

My only complaint is that the actual names appearing on screen prevented me from getting quite the unfettered view of them I wanted. 

All hail King Darren

I've been waiting for as long as I can remember to see if someone would ever repeat as director of a film I named #1 for the year. It was starting to seem like it would never happen, as my 26 previous #1s had been directed by 26 different people -- or actually 27, considering that there was one pair in there.

Charlie Kaufman has gotten close. As you may know from previous discussions on the matter, he's written three of my #1s. He just only happens to have been the director on one of them, and the other two were directed by two different people. 

And it's no easy task. A decent number of my #1 films have been made by relatively obscure people -- your Michael Almereyda's, your Craig Brewer's, your Gabriela Cowperthwaite's -- who have only really made one or two other movies that have even finished in the top half of my rankings, assuming I even got to them in time to rank them. And then there are the directors who have no chance to pull it off due to being -- well, deceased. (There's only one in this last category, assuming I haven't missed any news, and that's Robert Altman.)

But in 2022, Darren Aronofsky has finally done it. 

He's not the only person I'm adding to my multi-time #1s this year. His cinematographer on The Whale, Matthew Libatique -- praised earlier in this very post -- has now also joined the list, having shot Ruby Sparks in 2012. 

But we all know, by long-time cinematic convention, that the director is considered the "author" of a film, to the extent that any one person can receive such a designation in such a collaborative medium. And King Darren is the first "author" to make two films that I considered my best of the year.

(And as a bonus, he and I share the same initials.)

I'll have more to say about Mr. Aronofsky on this blog in the coming weeks. Today, I'll just bestow this unprecedented honor, and move along to the next section of this wrap-up post. 

Note: After initially publishing this post I noticed three other repeat-time #1 performers: composer Rob Simonsen, who also composed the music to last year's #1, Our Friend; Andrew Weisblum, who was also Aronofsky's editor on The Wrestler; and Mary Vernieu, who also cast The Wrestler. Well done Rob, Andrew and Mary! 

Best non-2022

The titles below are the ten best movies I saw in 2022, listed alphabetically, that were not released in 2022. 

Brothers' Nest (2018, Clayton Jacobson) - This Australian black comedy about two brothers' plan to kill their stepfather really surprised me with the directions it took, and the meaty conversations it featured in getting us there. 

Burden of Dreams (1982, Les Blank) - The documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo was everything everyone has always said it was, capturing Werner Herzog in peak madman form, pontificating about the sounds of murder among animals in the jungle. 

CODA (2021, Sian Heder) - The 2021 best picture winner had to make it on this list when I missed seeing it in time to rank it last year due to not realizing it was streaming on AppleTV+.

The Death of Dick Long (2019, Daniel Scheinert) - In a year when Daniel Scheinert was winning huge praise for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I found his previous solo film, involving a death by misadventure that the film takes quite seriously, so intriguing that I watched the first third of it again immediately after finishing. 

Fandango (1985, Kevin Reynolds) - I came across this quite unsuspectingly as a random assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, and ended up finding it a moving contemplation of the transition to adulthood among rascally college friends in the Vietnam era. 

Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski) - Early Polanski doesn't always do it for me, but this one totally did when I watched it in conjunction with 2022's Windfall, another film that deals with the uncomfortable dynamics between two men and a woman in a claustrophobic environment.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker) - The best movie in my Audient Bollywood series is also the best movie about cricket I have ever seen. Okay, it's the only movie about cricket I have ever seen. 

Ponyo (2008, Hayao Miyazaki) - Whenever I think I've already seen Miyazaki's best film, another film seems to come along to challenge that assumption. (My Neighbor Totoro still claims that honor, but this was great.) 

Pyaasa (1957, Guru Dutt) - The oldest film I watched for Audient Bollywood steadily increased in resonance throughout until I finally ended up floored by it. 

3 Idiots (2009, Rajkumar Hirani) - The Audient Bollywood film I assumed would be the most frivolous, based solely on its title and the tone I perceived that title to indicate, surprised me with its thematic depths and serious considerations of the pressures of academia. 

2022 by the numbers

Movies by star rating on Letterboxd: 5 stars (2), 4.5 stars (10), 4 stars (42), 3.5 stars (46), 3 stars (20), 2.5 stars (21), 2 stars (21), 1.5 stars (8), 1 star (3), 0.5 stars (2)

A big change I noted this year was my hesitancy to give out 4.5 stars. I dropped from 15 to 10 this year, as I checked my swing on a number of movies I would have given 4.5 stars in the past, perhaps in a largely futile effort to use more of the available range of star ratings. And the usual parabolic shape got a little messy this year as there were actually more 2.5-star and 2-star ratings this year than 3-star ratings. Overall the middle was larger as there were only a total of 17 movies in the highest two and lowest two ratings. 

Movies by source - Theater (47) (3 by advanced screening), Netflix (46), iTunes rental (31), Amazon Prime (10), Disney+ (10), Airplane (10), AppleTV+ (8), MIFF (5), Amazon Rental (3), Screener (3), Stan (2). Will this be the last year that movies in the theater exceed movies on Netflix? (I guess they did each of the past two years but those were pandemic years)

Total new movies watched in the calendar year: 285
Total rewatches: 83
2022 movies watched more than once: 3 (Don't Worry Darling, Prey, After Yang)

Another name for ...

The Man from Toronto is ... The Northman
The Sea Beast is ... The Whale
Elvis is ... The Lost King
After Yang is ... Aftersun
Sundown is ... Aftersun
Raymond & Ray is ... Our Father
"Sr." is ... I Love My Dad
Women Talking is ... She Said
Nope is ... The Sky is Everywhere
Bodies Bodies Bodies is ... Violent Night
Hit the Road is ... Decision to Leave
The Banshees of Inisherin is ... I Want You Back

Discoveries

Danielle Deadwyler, Till
Amber Midthunder, Prey
Madeleine McGraw, The Black Phone
Austin Butler, Elvis
Ram Charan, RRR

Happy returns

Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Ashley Judd, She Said
Michael Wincott, Nope
Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise

Lightning round

Highest ranked best picture nominee: Everything Everywhere All at Once (#4)
Lowest ranked best picture nominee: The Fabelmans (#147)
Best picture nominee I didn't see: Women Talking
Most surprised I loved: Prey (#6)
Most surprised I did not love: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (#43)
Director who may have won me over: Joanna Hogg, The Eternal Daughter (#31)
Director who may have driven me away: David O. Russell, Amsterdam (#152)
Worst performance by a great actor: Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
Best performance by a not so great actor: Dave Grohl, Studio 666
Best coming-of-age as a filmmaker: Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (#13)
Worst coming-of-age as a filmmaker: The Fabelmans (#147)
Best movie I didn't really want to see: Thirteen Lives (#42)
Worst movie I really wanted to see: The Northman (#157)
Best Christmas movie: Spirited (#18)
Worst Christmas movie: Violent Night (#166)
Most uses of the word Christmas in the title of a Christmas movie: A Christmas Story Christmas
Best Pixar: Turning Red (#3)
Most depressing Pixar: Lightyear (#146)
Best Pinocchio movie: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (#24)
Worst Pinocchio movie: Pinocchio (#173)
Best use of three hours of film: RRR (#15)
Worst use of three hours of film: Babylon (#129)
Best sequel: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (#25)
Worst sequel: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (#170) 
Best conclusion of a trilogy (one would assume): The Eternal Daughter (#31)
Worst conclusion of a trilogy: Jurassic World: Dominion (#153)
Worst idea to push beyond a trilogy: Thor: Love and Thunder (#142)
Best ending: Dual (#10)
Worst ending: Babylon (#129)
Most confusing ending (the very last shot, anyway): Triangle of Sadness (#27) 
Most discussed ending: Tar (#88)
Most satisfying/righteous ending: She Said (#11)
Just glad it was over: Moonfall (#175)

Thank you for reading. I have one more official 2022 reflection post (followed possibly by an unofficial reflection post) tomorrow in the form of my annual portmanteaus post. Do tune in. 

Chinese mothers should talk to their daughters, and other Everything Everywhere All at Once thoughts

I couldn't help noticing, when I watched an advanced screening of the 4.5 star Everything Everywhere All at Once on Thursday, that it bore a remarkable similarity to the most recent 2022 4.5 star movie I saw the weekend before. That would be Turning Red, Pixar's latest.

Both movies deal, using a huge amount of metaphorical and fantastic imagery, with the communication breakdown between immigrant Chinese mothers living in North America, and their more westernized daughters. 

The age of the daughters differ. Red's Meilin is supposed to be 13, while the actress playing Everything's Joy, Stephanie Hsu, is 31 years old, though Joy's age is never mentioned. 

The conflicts, though, are very similar. In both cases, the more traditional mother cannot accept her daughter's desire to step outside of the limited range of what's expected of her -- in one case a heightened interest in a boy band, in the other, because she's a lesbian. And both inherited their own strictness from the generation before, a mother in one case and a father in the other.

It's just funny to see such a similar theme explored in the same week in two very different sorts of movies that immediately became my favorite and second-favorite movies of 2022, though which is which may be something I can't truly decide for a while yet. (Plus, both could well be eclipsed by other movies as we go along.)

Here are some other thoughts from my first advanced screening since early December:

Security on patrol

As I was walking into the screening, a large bald man in a suit with a big smile said something to me, which was surely related to the confidentiality requirements during the screening -- no use of your phone, etc. I didn't hear exactly what he said but was happy enough to nod along to it, knowing it would be conditions I could agree to, much as I sign various user agreements without reading all the fine print. (Most recently on our agreement with the person who will market our home in Los Angeles. Yeesh.)

Despite his big smile and friendly demeanor, that man took the security very seriously in this movie.

Now, I'm not really sure what he was trying to prevent. Is it really a thing anymore where people try to record a movie on their phone so they can sell a bootleg copy of it later on? His militant desire not to see any phone screens light up during the movie was certainly not just to protect the undisturbed enjoyment of the other patrons. 

How militant? He walked the aisles at least a half-dozen times during the movie, a sort of hulking deterrent who didn't mind if he were providing the same sort of viewer distraction that would be provided by the peripheral sight of a mobile phone screen in use. And when one phone did go on during the movie, he walked right over to that person and snuffed it out.

Needless to say, my own phone was conspiring to run me afoul of him. 

I tend to forget during Thursday night viewings that I have an alarm that's set to go off at 6:45 to tell me to take out the garbage cans. It used to be on Sunday night at my old house, and caused the same sort of problem then.

Namely, the supremacy of the alarm is considered to be such that it powers on the phone just to let you know it's going off. There is likely a setting I could adjust so it wouldn't do this, but I haven't adjusted that setting yet, and besides, there might be situations where I'd want to preserve the battery, but I'd want the phone to power on at a designated time.

That designated time is not 30 minutes into a movie, when not only does the alarm go off and power on the phone, but while you're trying to shut the phone down again, all the other audible notifications that have been waiting while the phone was off have to chirp out to you. At least the sound of the alarm itself is a peaceful one.

As I tried in vain to power the phone back off again, I noticed the security guard eyeing me. Given how quickly he later squelched the other phone user, I was surprised my frustrated wrestling with my phone didn't draw him over. But because I didn't want to draw him over, I eventually lost the wrestling match, and instead of getting the phone to shut off again, which requires holding down a button for longer than you should need to, I hastily stuffed it in my backpack, where I hoped at least the lining of the bag would smother future noisy emissions.

So annoyed was I by this that it kind of ruined my next five minutes of the film, and for a minute I worried I wouldn't recover my equanimity. Fortunately, this movie is good enough -- and it's one of those movies that gets better, rather than worse, the longer it goes -- that my mental order was soon restored.

Ke Huy Quan returns

I can't remember, if I ever knew, why the erstwhile Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data from The Goonies gave up acting, but presumably it had something to do with him no longer being a cute young kid, and the movies no longer welcoming him after a certain point. In any case, he has no credits whatsoever between 2002 and 2021. 

Well welcome back, Ke Huy Quan.

It was lovely to see the boyish charm still present in this 50-year-old man. He's still got the same voice we remember from those movies, he's still got a ton of energy, and he still makes you smile. 

He's also sort of this film's secret weapon. Michelle Yeoh is its main weapon, and awesome secondary weapons include the aforementioned Hsu, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis as we've never seen her before. But I don't think this would be the delight it is without Quan.

Is it too late for him to cameo in the next Indiana Jones movie?

The easiest way to get me

This is not giving anything away about the movie, not anything you probably couldn't guess yourself, but I'll be vague about it anyway.

If you really want to bring me to the edge of waterworks, all you have to do is get a character to renounce their previous prejudices.

I suppose this is true in multiple spheres, but I notice it most often when a character gets over their intolerance of homosexuality, as happens in this movie.

You'd think I were gay or something, with the way I'm always pushed to and beyond the threshold between not crying and crying when a character embraces the LQBTQI person in their life. Except that I don't have to be, because cinema is that empathy machine that Roger Ebert described, where you can put yourself in the shoes of others, and vicariously experience the powerful emotion they would be feeling in that moment.

One of the most powerful instances I can think of this happening is in Kissing Jessica Stein -- which, if we're being honest, is really a heterosexual movie masquerading as a gay movie. That doesn't change the power of a moment where Tovah Feldshuh's character is comforting her daughter, played by star Jennifer Westfeldt, and her voice hitches for a moment as it becomes clear she understands something we didn't know she knew: her daughter has been seeing a woman. "I think she seems like a very nice girl," she says. 

I'm getting verklempt. Please, go talk amongst yourselves.

I don't think the moment or moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once are as profound or as smartly executed, but that just shows you what an easy target I am.

Daniels are back

This film is directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who directed a previous top ten movie for me, 2016's Swiss Army Man. I obviously loved that at the time for how far it went outside the box of our expectations, and still feel fondly toward it even though it couldn't maintain that high level for me on the second viewing.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has the same sort of rule-shattering craziness in it, and though the core questions are perhaps a bit more traditional than those in Swiss Army Man, the execution is equally joyous, colorful, surprising and hilarious. 

I realized while watching it that these guys made a movie in between, The Death of Dick Long in 2019, and I never really heard anything about it, nor noticed it playing in a theater near me. It apparently wasn't a dud, either, as Wikipedia shows the movie having a 74% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Guess I better seek that out, as any chance to luxuriate in their distinct cinematic vision is a good one. 

Never get two popcorns

I attended my first advanced screening in some time on Thursday night, first since before omicron anyway. I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, and as is my custom, I followed it up with a second movie, which was Ti West's X. I intend to write more about at least the first of these two movies on another day, but first I want to write about popcorn.

The first screening had complimentary popcorn and a drink, as is also the custom at these events. Because I thought I was running late for the 6 p.m. start -- the movie didn't start for another 20 minutes after I took my seat -- I missed that they were also serving gin in the lobby as part of a promotion. I would have certainly had some, but given that there was a second movie on the docket and I hadn't been home since I left my house at 7:30 that morning, it's probably better that I didn't.

The complimentary popcorn was a small popcorn, as is also the custom. I went through it ravenously, as apparently the two chicken skewers I'd purchased while walking up to the cinema were not dinner enough. The Coke didn't last super long either.

When the movie I ended, I had to rush to get out (more on that in a moment) in order to be sure I wouldn't miss any of the 8:30 X. Again, a miscalculation as there was another ten minutes of ads and trailers after I got in. But I also wanted some further food to sustain me for the second movie, so while I was getting my ticket at the candy bar, I opted for ... another popcorn. This time a large.

Bad decision.

I ate this one in a constant flow as well, but since it was much bigger, it took me much longer. I got down to the bottom level of it when I was struck with an overwhelming desire to stop eating it. Part of it was that I didn't have enough left of my second Coke to counter its saltiness, but part of it was realizing that I just ... couldn't ... eat ... another ... bite.

I felt okay for the rest of the movie, but once my feet got moving again when it finished just after 10:30, that was when the belching set in.

And I had to keep belching for about ten minutes to relieve the discomfort while I waited for the tram, the first of four conveyances to take me home. (Followed by a second tram, a train, and finally, my bike home from the train station.)

Even after this period of initial uncomfortable belching was done, I had smaller belches just to continue to try to settle things down there, pretty much for the rest of the hour-long trip home.

I won't be doing that again any time soon.

Sure, the first one left me wanting more. But a second one left me wanting a lot less. 

It was a costly trip to the cinema for reasons other than my guts. Because of the hurried departure from Everything Everywhere All at Once, I failed to properly check my seating area to make sure I had everything. I later determined that my AirPods had been in the breast pocket of my shirt when I'd taken it off at the start of the movie. I suppose it was possible I left them in X -- I walked out before the end of the credits there too -- but EEAaO seems the more likely culprit.

I would have noticed it in time to go back in and get them had I partaken in my usual routine, which is to start listening to something pretty much as soon as I leave the theater. But because I had now been out of the house for more than 15 hours, it was all I could do to hurry over to the tram stop to make sure I didn't narrowly miss the first of those four conveyances and have to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. Even though I had a good six minutes to wait once I got there, I was still in that thousand-yard-stare mode that left me too limp to kick off a podcast. 

I only discovered it at the train station, and then I was miles away from the theater.

I've sent them a message through the website so hopefully they will find them.

The funny thing is, just earlier that day, as I was getting on the train in the morning, I thought to myself how smart I was to always look back at where I had been sitting to make sure I hadn't left anything. I even considered trying to make a funny Facebook post about it until I decided it was just too pedestrian an observation to be worth sharing.

Lessons learned: Don't get cocky about your own genius life hacks, and definitely don't order the second popcorn.