Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

Vivarium is so getting that exemption

It's still early in the decade, but increasingly less so with every passing moment.

We've all just started watching movies from the fifth release year of the 2020s, which means there are only five more to go. The fact that most of us have seen only a handful of 2024 movies is what allows us to still think of this as the early part of the decade. A year from now, we will be officially midway. If the 20s were our age rather than an agreed upon convention for denoting the passage of time, first established more than 2,000 years ago based on the birth year of a person who claimed to be the son of God, we'd be calling ourselves in our mid-20s already.

And for an obsessive list maker like me, it causes me to ponder the paucity of serious contenders for my #1 movie of the 2020s. 

It makes for a very interesting contrast with the 2010s. At this same juncture last decade, four of my eventual top five movies of the decade had already been released, and all four of my top four. Only my #5, Tanna, still had its release on the horizon, in the year ending in 6 (2016). Three of the top four were all from the very first year of the decade (2010). 

I can't see the movies of the early 2020s dominating in this same fashion, unless it is going to be a really weak rest of the decade. I've named a #1 film in each of the first four years and I've loved those films, but each time I've anointed one of them, I've recognized that it was not a serious candidate to finish the decade at #1 -- and my secret hope was that none of these four titles would actually penetrate my top ten. They were the best of their year but of course that's all relative.

This is where Vivarium comes in.

I rewatched Vivarium on Friday night for the first time since 2020, having set myself the goal of scrolling until I found a heretofore undetermined title for my Friday night viewing. It didn't take long on Amazon Prime to see Lorcan Finnegan's film pop up and decide it was time for my third viewing. 

Vivarium was, technically speaking, my #3 movie of 2019. This was because I saw it at MIFF in 2019, well in advance of the rest of the viewing public, who saw it on its wide release in 2020 or sometime after that on video. But I gave it five stars without hesitation, and if I had just seen it in 2020 like everyone else, there would have been no doubt of its appropriateness to be ranked alongside all my other 2020 films. In fact, I feel pretty confident that it would have been my #1 movie of 2020, ahead of I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (Though how interesting would that have been as a 1-2 punch of noodle fryers.)

And as I thought about it, I thought Vivarium might actually have taken each of the next three #1s as well, if it had been released in those years. As I write this, I don't actually know whether Vivarium is ranked above or below those movies on my Flickchart, so let's find out right now in real time. I'll list each as a hypothetical duel based on the rankings they already have, rather than making this decision as though it were a live Flickchart duel, and you'll see which one is higher when I present the result: 

Vivarium vs. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Ending Things wins, 182 to 355
Vivarium vs. Our Friend - Our Friend wins, 209 to 355
Vivarium vs. The Whale - The Whale wins, 227 to 355
Vivarium vs. Skinamarink - Vivarium wins, 355 to 408

Not a very conclusive result in what I was hoping to prove, since Vivarium is only fourth ranked out of these five films. 

But I think this does indicate an interesting subconscious bias on my part. I believe the first three #1s of the decade were added to my Flickchart after I had already crowned them the best of their year, meaning I was inclined toward a confirmation bias and to elevate these films into comparatively august positions on my chart. Skinamarink was, if memory serves, the only of these movies to be ranked before it was officially named the best of its year.

In any case, if these movies came up against each other organically, I could see myself picking Vivarium in any of the four duels -- especially now that my third viewing reminded me how great it is. The film may have suffered a mild setback in my personal feelings during that second viewing, in which I think I forced my wife to watch it with me, as that was something I did in 2020 a lot more than I do now. When she inevitably didn't like it as much as I did, I think it made me a little more critical of it.

No such problem on this viewing. I was audibly laughing at twisted absurdities and saying things like "Oh my God," especially anything and everything related to that bizarre little kid. Not really a kid, as Jesse Eisenberg points out at one point, with a resigned sense of loathing: "That's not a boy." In fact, one of my big takeaways about Vivarium on this viewing -- and we might go into mild spoiler territory here -- is that the things that are observing our two protagonists may not be aliens, but rather, AI. That likely wouldn't have been what Finnegan was thinking in 2019, but today, it seems like an obvious conclusion to reach. The ways they get this "boy" wrong are very similar to the way an AI creates humans with extra fingers. This gives the film a whole creepy new interpretation that the director mightn't have even considered, which is one of the things good art is capable of doing. 

I won't go into too many more details about the movie itself because the purpose of this post is not to synopsize Vivarium or specifically to try to get you to see it, if you have not already.

What is the purpose of this post, if I can finally get to it?

It's to remind myself that I did not initially consider Vivarium eligible for the best of the 2020s. Like Agora the decade before it -- a film with a 2009 release year in its native country, but that I didn't see and rank until 2010 -- Vivarium had slipped into that crack between decades, not quite a 2019 movie but not quite a 2020 movie, and because I compiled my best of the 2010s list after I saw it, I felt like it had missed out on its one and only shot.

Now, I think there's a plausible reason to reconsider it -- to call it a 2020 movie even though it is listed on my 2019 lists, and is definitively associated with that release year by my own rules for determining such things. 

You may recall, though it's more likely that you do not, that I considered the Vivarium question in my post for the best of the 2010s. Unlike the other three movies that narrowly missed consideration due to similar release year ambiguities -- Agora, Mother and Mr. Nobody -- Vivarium was the only film that missed because of a future release ambiguity (post 2019), not a past release ambiguity (pre 2010). Here is what I wrote about it:

"The last is a film that had only festival premieres in 2019, including MIFF where I saw it, but for most of the world will be a 2020 film, meaning I have decided to consider it for the next decade even though I have already ranked it in my 2019 year-end list. We'll see how I handle the release year in parenthesis dilemma ten years from now." 

Well there you go. Just as I didn't check my Flickchart rankings before starting this post, I obviously didn't read this previous post, or remember what I had concluded from it, before I started writing either. 

So I had already made the decision that Vivarium could not slip through the cracks between decades, that it would be considered as part of the 2020s, despite the aforementioned disconnect between putting a 2019 release year in parentheses whenever I mention the film, and then including it for a consideration in a decade whose other movies start with a 2 rather than a 1.

Well, maybe not whenever I mention it. As you will see if you are reading this post relatively soon after I've written it, I have decide to challenge my own sense of the rules by listing the release year of Vivarium as 2020 in my "most recently revisited" section in the right margin. It is an ephemeral choice, as it will be gone as soon as I rewatch three more films, but I do it symbolically, out of recognition that, indeed, I am making the decision -- or rather, reinforcing a previously made decision -- to grant an exemption to Vivarium for consideration as part of the best of the 2020s.

Because who wants to get to decade's end and have a top ten bereft of the sorts of movies that decorated that most elite tier last decade? Here is a reminder of those titles:

10. Under the Skin
9. First Reformed
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter
7. Inside Out
6. Like Father, Like Son
5. Tanna
4. The Social Network
3. Rabbit Hole
2. Spring Breakers
1. Tangled

As of right now, all of those movies are better than any of my 2020 contenders, Vivarium included. (And if Vivarium does make my top ten of the 2020s, that'll mean two straight top tens for Eisenberg, star of The Social Network.)

Here's hoping the 2020s will be a backloaded decade. 

King Darren: The Whale

This concludes my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six films from Darren Aronofsky, in the year after the film I'm watching this month, The Whale, made him the first director to top my year-end list on two different occasions.

My second viewing of The Whale was both the viewing in this series I was looking forward to most and the one that worried me most. 

The trepidation resulted from the fact that the praise for this film was by no means unanimous. Yes Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for this role, but many critics disliked it, for reasons ranging from it being fatphobic (I disagree with that) to it being too tied to its origins as a play (I can see that) to it being highly melodramatic (I can see that too, but in the best sense of that word).

On a personal level, I wondered if my emotional reaction to watching the movie last December -- I cried on four or five different occasions -- had crippled my critical faculties, and boosted this movie beyond the level of adoration that was warranted. 

It was actually a rather cut-and-dried case, in that moment. Darren Aronofsky's primary competition was Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling, a film that had even more detractors than Aronofsky's film. Despite my also being enthralled by that movie, the haters had more time to get under my skin since I saw it two months earlier. The films in my third and fourth positions (Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once) had no real shot at leap-frogging these two.

But whether I had justly chosen The Whale as my #1 movie of 2022 or not, I knew there were red flags about it, including the notion that some people found it fatphobic. When a movie may be biased against an entire demographic group, and I still name it my #1, I have to ask myself if I am failing to recognize a core insensitivity that makes people in that demographic group actively hate it.

There was also a bit of pressure on this second viewing. Way back at the start of the year, when I was watching Pi or Requiem for a Dream and it came up with my wife that I intended to finish with The Whale, she said she would watch it with me. Since I always like to show my wife my favorite movie of the year, I was sort of looking forward to this all year.

But then when December actually rolled around, she found the weight of all the end-of-year activities too exhausting, and it seemed likely that she would opt out of his verbal commitment. My wife is down to maybe only ten to 20 movies a year as it is, and spending nearly two hours with a man who is eating himself to death probably did not seem like her idea of how to spend the holidays. 

We're down in Tasmania right now visiting my mother-in-law, and I calculated that Wednesday night was the best time for me to watch it, to make sure I did actually get it in before the calendar ticked over to January. As it happened, not three minutes into the movie, she saw I was watching it and settled herself on the couch of the place we're staying, not knowing how much she would fit in but willing to give it the old college try.

This hadn't worked during our last high-pressure (for me anyway) viewing, which was Skinamarink at Halloween time. As that movie is one of my favorites of 2023, and as it is scary as hell, I had hoped my wife would find it a good Halloween-themed viewing. Instead, she gave up after about 45 minutes -- which is more than some people would give that movie.

I'm glad to say my wife made it the whole way through The Whale, and got a little teary at the end. However, she couldn't give it her full endorsement, saying she wasn't sure exactly what she had thought of it. I guess that's better than the people who hated it outright.

For me, I could tell the viewing wasn't going as well for me this time as the first time. I felt being stuck in Charlie's apartment more than I had the first time, which is kind of the point of the movie but also something that can exhaust a viewer for the wrong reasons. My viewing circumstances were decidedly different this time: on holiday, after a few beers, whereas a year ago I'd attended a morning screening. 

The other pressure was self-inflicted. When I revisit a movie where I cried the first time, I'm always curious to see if the reaction will be the same the second time. In a way, tears are like laughter, as both result from being taken off guard by something the movie is doing, for very different reasons. Just as I don't expect to laugh as hard at a movie on my second time watching it, I don't expect to cry as hard. But if I didn't cry at all during The Whale, what would I be left with?

Although the tears did not flow freely, I did get moist on a couple occasions, which maybe was as much as I could have reasonably hoped. The Whale had a tough act to follow, as my previous year's #1, the cancer family drama Our Friend, actually caused me to cry more on the second viewing than the first. That's basically unprecedented, and unfair to The Whale.

The scene that still got me the most was between Charlie and his ex, played by Samantha Morton. The script prepares you for her to be a boozy asshole, so on both viewings I was utterly taken aback by her emotional generosity in her one powerhouse scene. Like every character in this movie, she's a real person, not a one-dimensional sinner or saint. And the way she refers to the man who stole Charlie away from her, calling him "your friend" with this touch of sentiment and possibly even love, just broke my heart. 

There were scenes that I felt were a little stagey, a little on-the-nose, where I was wrapped up enough in everything not to notice those aspects the first time. Overall, though, if I'd had it to do again, I still would have slotted this ahead of Don't Worry Darling last year. It's still a powerhouse movie with an incredible central performance, and excellent performances around it.

And on the subject of its fatphobia or lack thereof ... I ultimately come down to this conclusion: If you are ever going to make a movie about a morbidly obese man, you are going to get accusations that the film is repulsed by him. So either the choice is never to make a movie about such a character, or to go beneath the knee jerk reaction and decide to grapple with what the film is actually doing. The film is obviously concerned for Charlie, but not because he "looks gross." It's because the condition of his body is most likely going to kill him, and because it's a reaction to a depression that results both from things he could control and things he could not control. I said it at the time and I say it still: This is a movie about a person, not a body. 

Interestingly, though, it may be no better than my third or fourth favorite Aronofsky movie. I'd definitely place Requiem for a Dream and mother! ahead of it, the latter benefitting from repeat viewings after finishing at #15 in 2017, and the former remaining a singular nightmarish vision of addiction that finished at #13 in 2000. And then don't forget the film that actually won Aronofsky his coveted #1 ranking in 2008, The Wrestler, which remains steady in my appraisals each time I watch it.

In other words, four of Aronofsky's eight feature films are movies I absolutely cherish, with Black Swan and Pi both staking a strong claim to my affections. 

That makes Darren a king in this or any year. 

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?

Selling Brendan Fraser without showing Brendan Fraser

The marketing for The Whale has been a challenge, which is probably not unexpected.

When you're advertising, you usually want to cater to your reader's/viewer's most basic needs and desires. It's why they choose video stills from the trailer that are the most likely to show something vaguely erotic, even in a movie that is not sexy in the slightest. I wrote about that tendency here. 

I don't think there's probably a single image in The Whale that has the chance to get a heterosexual male all hot and bothered, even when taken totally out of context. But if you can't show anything sexy, at least try to show something that isn't sexy's exact opposite. At least that's the computation the marketing department for a studio -- or in this case, a movie theater chain -- would make.

I get why advertisers don't want to show a picture of Brendan Fraser's Charlie in this film. Charlie weighs about 600 pounds, and there's no angle that doesn't reveal that fact about him. Never mind that Darren Aronofsky's whole movie is designed to make us sympathize with Charlie, challenging our regrettable instincts toward fatphobia to show us the depths of this person's soul, rather than just the surface of this person's body. If the marketing department thinks a picture of Charlie's face -- which, you would agree, is the image you'd extract from the film if you wanted to truly demonstrate what it's about -- will inhibit ticket sales, they won't include it.

Which is why this still, in an advertisement for the movie playing at Hoyts, includes an image of ... Ty Simpkins.

Was Ty Simpkins considered the sexiest thing in The Whale? If you were going sheerly by normal advertising logic, you'd probably go with Sadie Sink, who is young and is generally considered to be conventionally attractive. She's also arguably the film's second most important character, though Charlie has dynamics with a couple characters that are central to the story depending on the angle from which you're analyzing it.

So on the one hand, I guess it's a win that they didn't just go with the most obvious approach of weaponizing the apparent sex appeal of Sadie Sink. On the other, Ty Simpkins? Least essential character in the film, I would argue, though of course all five characters we spend time with make the film exactly the emotional powerhouse it is.

The really troubling inconsistency here is that the ad's copy is specifically selling Brendan Fraser. It starts out with the words "The Brenaissance is upon us!" Which I think is a pretty lively way to market the movie. It rolls off the tongue better than "McConaissance," or however they spelled it when Matthew McConaughey stopped doing romantic comedies. 

But it creates quite a disconnect with the image we see. Yes Fraser undergoes quite the transformation in The Whale, but not even the best actor in the world can play 33 years younger without some sort of significant digital assistance. (Could they really be trying to convince readers this is Fraser? Certainly not.)

And I just don't think The Whale is really a bait-and-switch movie. The title itself is not going to attract anyone outside of marine biologists and Moby Dick enthusiasts, and certainly most people with any inkling to see it must know the premise of the movie. Or at least the sort of person at its center.

And it's not Ty Simpkins.

The tear factor

For a couple years now, I've been using the third day after posting my list to do a sort of macro analysis of my tendencies as a viewer, inspired by my new #1. And yes, I found an angle I thought was pretty interesting this year too. (I thought I might have done something like this previously on this blog, but I couldn't find anything when I searched.)

One thing that's been -- not bothering me, but eating away at me just a little bit -- is the role my emotional response played in my naming The Whale my best of 2022. Crying in a movie is certainly an indication that it's doing something for/to you, but it may just be proof of successful emotional manipulation, not laudatory filmmaking. You can cry at a movie that doesn't have much in the way of technique, and sometimes you can hate yourself after the fact for crying.

"Manipulation" is a problematic word when it comes to movies. It is almost always a critique when you say that something or someone "manipulated" you, but I kind of feel like manipulation is the goal of any filmmaker -- any artist, really. If you're an artist, the job entails taking someone who may not ordinarily be inclined to see the world the way you do, and using the skills at your disposal to manipulate them into this new perspective -- or so you hope. Anyway, I think there's a difference between using techniques that could be described as manipulation, and the act of being manipulative. 

I didn't get to see The Whale a second time before selecting it as my #1, to see how much more it may have been than the emotional impact it had on me, and indeed, whether it needed to be any more than that to be a contender. 

But I did get to do this last year, when I selected Our Friend as my #1 movie -- another film that might not be considered technically accomplished, deriving its power purely from the emotions it generated in me. (Though with The Whale, you could certainly argue that Brendan Fraser's makeup and fat suit are a technical achievement worth acknowledging, though obviously not at a level that factors in to best of the year considerations.) Our Friend may have only made me cry more on my second viewing than it did on my first, so that viewing confirmed it was my slam dunk #1.

But why are tears such an influencing factor for us? Surely crying is not a desired outcome every time we go to the movies. I suspect some people might have been disappointed if they ended up crying during Top Gun: Maverick. (Though maybe some people actually did cry, since most Hollywood movies try to tug at your heartstrings at least a little.)

I'm not going explore today why crying at the movies is so fundamentally gratifying -- there are probably both pat and profound answers to this, but also the answers are pretty obvious. We want art to make us feel, and crying is probably the most genuine and involuntary expression of that feeling.

Instead, I'm interested in how many of my past #1s were movies where I cried. 

Because there's one thing a movie where you cry usually does for you: it sets the experience apart from your other viewings. I suppose how much it sets it apart is a function of how easily you cry. For me, I feel myself getting emotional enough to potentially cry, if I pushed it, in about ten movies a year. In half of those at most are there actual waterworks. (I'm not going to do the math, but I did feel tears welling up in four other movies in this year's top ten. None broke through like in The Whale.)

Now let's see how many waterworks there were in my past #1s:

1996 - Looking for Richard - Did not cry
1997 - Titanic - Cried
1998 - Happiness - Did not cry
1999 - Run Lola Run - Did not cry (though I've written subsequently about getting teary when I watch it now)
2000 - Hamlet - Did not cry
2001 - Gosford Park - Did not cry
2002 - Adaptation - Did not cry
2003 - Lost in Translation - Did not cry
2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Did not cry
2005 - Hustle & Flow - Did not cry
2006 - Children of Men - Did not cry
2007 - There Will Be Blood - Did not cry
2008 - The Wrestler - Did not cry
2009 - Moon - Did not cry
2010 - 127 Hours - Cried
2011 - A Separation - Did not cry
2012 - Ruby Sparks - Did not cry
2013 - Beyond the Hills - Did not cry
2014 - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - Did not cry
2015 - Inside Out - Cried
2016 - Toni Erdmann - Cried
2017 - A Ghost Story - Cried
2018 - First Reformed - Did not cry
2019 - Parasite - Did not cry
2020 - I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Did not cry
2021 - Our Friend - Cried
2022 - The Whale - Cried

Well these results are quite interesting, and they may reflect changes in me as a viewer, changes in what I'm looking for in a movie, as I've grown older.

I never would have guessed, before doing this exercise, that I didn't shed a tear in 13 of the first 14 movies I named #1. That's hugely statistically significant.

And it's not like I hadn't recognized how a good cry impacts my experience of a movie. I was a wet mess during my Titanic viewing and that was only my second #1 ever.

Then a dozen straight years without shedding a single tear. Not one.

Oh I likely cried in other movies those years. I'm not a monster. But having cried did not artificially boost the movie, or at least not enough to take out a movie ahead of it that had other things that spoke to me more. 

And it's not like I didn't name any movies #1 that might have made someone cry. I could envision someone having that reaction to Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine or The Wrestler, just to name three. I just didn't happen to cry in them, though they obviously affected me deeply. 

When my tear ducts began leaking at the end of 127 Hours, though, maybe it reminded me of the way a good cry purifies you at the end of a truly engrossing movie experience. I'm wondering if that's what boosted this one to #1, even though history has elevated three other movies from that year (Tangled, Rabbit Hole and The Social Network) ahead of it. Those movies all finished in my top four for the decade, while 127 Hours settled for a still very impressive 17th.

But it wasn't just the tears in 127 Hours that sealed the deal, because I also cried in Tangled and Rabbit Hole. Rabbit Hole was only barely in my top ten that year, though obviously my opinion of it has skyrocketed since.

But maybe this whole "crying in your #1 movie" thing was still new to me and I didn't know how to properly calculate its impact on me. And it wasn't ready to stay just yet. From 2011 to 2014, my next four #1s featured no tears. 

Then the floodgates opened with Inside Out and they haven't really closed since. My three #1s from 2015 to 2017 all provoked tears, culminating in a totally surprise bout of weeping at the final shot of A Ghost Story. After three more dry years, I've cried again the past two.

Overall that's still only seven times crying in a #1 movie, out of 27 total #1s. But that's six in the last 13, nearly half.

There's a theory that when you become a parent, you are more in touch with your emotions than you were previously. That seems hard to believe on the one hand, since there are a lot of really emotional teenagers and twentysomethings out there. 

I think it's that the sorts of things that make you cry change. Whereas once you were crying over being dumped, now art strikes you with the ways it presents the fragility of life, the ways people show each other unexpected emotional generosity, that sort of thing. And I also think you are more likely to cry out of joy when you're older. I reckon that what some people call "spectacle tears" -- an involuntary emotional reaction to just seeing something big and wondrous on screen -- also do not blossom until you're older and wiser.

Well, the parent theory really resonates with me. See, my first son was born in 2010, just three months before I saw 127 Hours. Since then, my favorite film of the year has made me cry almost half the time.

I do want to continue to have dry years though.

I like to think that in the coming years, my mind will still be blown by some kind of speculative sci-fi, or a movie with outrageous technique, or a script so clever that its sheer brilliance has to be rewarded. I don't want to be the person who is always giving my #1 to a movie about a woman dying of cancer or a man who is trying to reconnect with his daughter before he succumbs to heart disease.

I guess maybe the best possible #1 is a speculative science fiction film with outrageous technique that has the best script I've ever witnessed -- and also makes me cry.

The start of each year is a time of endless cinematic optimism, and maybe the film I've just described will be my #1 of 2023.

2022: A whale of a year

I'm back in sync with the Oscars.

After two straight years where the pandemic screwed up the unveiling of the Oscar nominations, they're back to January this year -- in fact, dropped just a few minutes ago -- and that means my friend and I who do this together are back to finalizing our lists when the Oscar nominations are announced, as we had been doing for nearly 25 years prior to the last two.

Of course, the January 24th unveiling of the nominations (January 25th in Australia) is still a week later than the arbitrary date we chose last year, meaning that we have again both set personal records. He's up over 370 -- and this from a guy I had write a guess post ten years ago when he had reached the then-astonishing record total of 212.

My record is modest compared to his, but still impressive by my standards, considering that it is indeed the most I've ever ranked: 175 films, which is five higher than last year's record of 170. 

I still want to contract in the future, not expand, but as I've written about previously, the streamers are making it harder and harder for me to do that. The more legitimate talent they attract to making or appearing in their movies, the more I need to make time to see them, while still including eccentric personal choices I've ferreted out or seen at MIFF -- and of course all the big tentpoles that drive the public conversation. 

With so many titles ranked this year, it's good to remind you that just because I've ranked a movie lower than 100, it doesn't mean I didn't like it. In fact, there are films I gave 3.5 stars on Letterboxd that couldn't crack my top 100 -- in part because some three-star films finished ahead of them, due to the quirky nature of this process. So if a film you really liked is in triple digits, just remember that I'm grading on a curve here, and I may have liked it just fine as well.

And as always seems to be the case, there are enough weird personal choices in my top ten to make me wonder if I'm doing this whole thing correctly. Sure I've got my critical favorites like I do every year, but the films in my top two spots in particular seem to have controversy attached to them, controversy that caused some critics and audiences to out and out dislike them. I do have my supporters for these choices, but a large quantity of cinephiles might be looking at me askance as they read them.

But before you read them, here are some you won't be reading about, what I've determined are the five most prominent titles I either didn't or couldn't see in time for my deadline ... though the "couldn't" group is smaller than it's ever been, given the quantity of high-profile releases that were available to me in some capacity prior to January 24th, whether that's a theatrical release here in Australia, an advanced screening, or a U.S. rental.

5. I Wanna Dance With Somebody - I like Whitney Houston. I had access to see this film. But yet another standard-seeming biopic ... I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for it.

4. Bones and All - I intend to see every Luca Guadagnino film, but this one, released a few months ago, just got lost in the shuffle, and I wasn't willing to buy it for $19.99. 

3. Women Talking - With two previous Sarah Polley films making my top ten, I hated not to find this one, but it just isn't available to me anywhere yet. 

2. Broker - This only got released a few weeks ago in the U.S., so even with my love of Hirokazu Kore-eda, there was just no way for me to catch this. I wasn't even going to consider it part of 2022, but then I heard it mentioned on a year-end podcast, so I guess I need to include it as a regret here rather than kicking it forward to 2023.

1. Weird - A spiritual successor to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story that was free to any American who wanted it was just not available in Australia, because Roku Channel is not available in Australia. Boo. 

Okay here we go with my top ten:

10. Dual - As I mentioned in this post, movies involving clones have been really working for me lately, with one making my top ten last year as well. But just being about clones would not be enough to elevate Riley Stearns' third feature this high, after I really liked Faults (#20 of 2015) but didn't care for The Art of Self-Defense (#110 of 2019). It's the deadpan humor that really does it for me here, which is funny because almost the exact same tone didn't work for me in Self-Defense -- maybe the deliveries of Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul are just superior. In an age largely devoid of comedies, this was some of the hardest I laughed in 2022, though under it all there's a real sort of existential dread and sorrow that combines with the humor to make this a movie that really sticks with you. The premise is that a terminally ill Gillan goes into full remission, but she's already commissioned a clone to replace her and live out the rest of her life. When both can't exist simultaneously, society has determined they must duel to the death. It's a big idea executed with humor that I've already lauded several times now, and Dual has one of my favorite final shots of the year. (Plus the scene in this photo, which I won't spoil.) That's certainly all the ingredients you need to squeak into my top ten.

9. Athena - If I judged movies on technical merits alone, Athena would be my #1 movie of the year. Simply put, this story of a citizen uprising against the police in a French housing project has some of the craziest cinematography I've ever seen in a movie, and I've seen Children of Men. It's not nearly the only example, but let's take the opening 11-minute unbroken take. It starts at a press conference in a police station that gets quickly put to an end by a Molatov cocktail, then descends into the basement of the police station, continues out in a stolen police truck that travels several kilometers away (with the camera viewing from inside as well as from another vehicle) before ending up at the titular housing project, where it is set aloft on a drone to look back on the housing project and splash the title. Romain Gavras is the director here, but the team of dedicated camera operators -- whose thrilling mission was captured in a 37-minute making of documentary, also on Netflix -- deserve special mention, particularly DP Matias Boucard. The story of three brothers torn apart in the wake of the death of a fourth at the hands of police is stirring stuff as well, but maybe not stirring enough for me personally to vault it any higher in my top ten. But for a tense 90 minutes in a cauldron of righteous indignation, you can't do much better than this. 

8. Beast - Baltasar Kormakur first got my attention as more than just a Euro action hack with Everest in 2015, but then took a step backward with Adrift in 2018. For some reason, this rather unassuming man vs. lion movie that was released at the pivot point between the summer movie season and the fall movie season was the thing that pushed him over the top, into the director of a top ten film. One of my favorite genres is the movie where average people try to get themselves out of messed up situations, and Beast delivers big time in this regard. Idris Elba plays a father showing his daughters their mother's homeland, and has to keep them safe from a marauding lion while stuck in a crashed SUV, with only his injured friend (Sharlto Copley) knowing anything about the landscape or the lion. The combination of terror and courage these characters produce feels real at every turn, and Kormakur stages an exciting series of close scrapes and desperate gambits to try to resolve the situation with everyone intact. Sometimes the most satisfying movies are just a tight collection of thrilling set pieces underpinned by relatable themes of trying to keep your children safe. Beast didn't need more than that to crack my top ten. 

7. Elvis - Yes I'm a Baz apologist. I'm not a native Australian so there's no bias there, though I sometimes think the bias against this native son is stronger than the love for him. I just like what the man does. Give me his cinematic jazz hands any day of the week. I liked Elvis enough, despite not naturally being a huge Elvis fan, that I didn't even mind Tom Hanks' performance. I also didn't let the legitimate concerns about Presley's problematic and indebted relationship with the Black community, particularly as depicted here, sidetrack me. I just really like the kaleidoscopic explosion of exuberance that is this movie, grounded by a central performance that is possibly the best combination of Elvis impersonation and essence distillation that has ever been seen. Austin Butler deserves all the accolades he's been getting, and Hanks doesn't deserve the Golden Raspberry nomination he probably just got (I don't know for sure, since I wrote this a few weeks ago upon deciding the movie was a safe enough lock for my top ten). I enjoy this sort of grand narrative design, one that reminds me of my favorite Luhrmann film, Moulin Rouge!, one of two previous Luhrmann films (along with The Great Gatsby) to end its year ranked at #15. Probably my new second favorite Luhrmann, Elvis is his first top ten. 

6. Prey - It's so boring to praise an unexpected hit by saying "Who would have thought that ...," but I guess I'm boring sometimes: "Who would have thought that the fifth movie in the Predator franchise -- seventh if you include the Alien vs. Predator films -- could make my top ten of the year?" I've actually only seen the original and its sequel, but you don't need to see any of the previous movies when this one is set approximately 250 years before they were. I thought the idea of a predator facing off against a tribe of Comanches sounded pretty cool, but I've been burned by similar mashups before (Cowboys vs. Aliens). I had no idea how seriously director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison would take the assignment, so much so that they actually produced a Comanche language version of the film. (I've seen Prey twice, but the second was to show it to my wife, so I'll save the Comanche version for the inevitable third.) The film gets the 1719 American Plains just right, every respectful detail about this tribe feeling spot on, at times even recalling something like The Revenant. Top it all off with a terrific heroine who also qualifies as one of this year's best introductions of new talent -- Amber Midthunder, who shares a spitfire attitude and a determined stare with Aubrey Plaza -- and you've got one of 2022's tightest and most fun movies, with no guilty aftertaste. 

5. The Banshees of Inisherin - No 2022 movie had I heard discussed more extensively before seeing it than The Banshees of Inisherin. With all the talking I'd heard on several podcasts, it seemed impossible I could still be taken off guard by it -- a necessary component to the cinema we love. Well, I suppose a great film still registers as such even after you know a fair bit about it, and that was my experience with Martin McDonagh's second film to make my top ten after In Bruges. The clipped witticisms of the Irish -- or funny ways of saying things they might not have intended to be funny -- got me off to a good start with the movie, even knowing it would turn a lot darker as it went. And darker it turns, with the very landscape starting to feel post-apocalyptic, occupied only by the ghosts of a promise long gone. As my #1 of 2013, Beyond the Hills, proved, I really like a movie that functions as an extended metaphor for a bad breakup. Like Colin Farrell's Padraic, you ball your fists in impotent frustration as the person who loved you yesterday has decided to shun you entirely today. And when that happens, you just never know what the consequences might be. Banshees explores those consequences, extracting from them a blistering emotional truth even when they seem like things that operate primarily as metaphor and might never actually happen. 

4. Everything Everywhere All at Once - The second Daniels film to make my top ten after Swiss Army Man, EEAAO never spent any time atop my 2022 rankings, even though I saw it back in March. I saw it about five days after my #3 on this list, and their relative positions never switched. But there has always been an argument that this was the film of the year, bursting as it is with so much oddness, so much creative vitality, so many memorable performances, so many laughs, and just so much pure cinematic gusto. I'll admit that all that gusto did leave me exhausted at certain points, so I never entertained any realistic notion that Everything would climb all the way to #1. But it does prove that Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have an absolutely unique cinematic vision, and also a gift for using actors as we would never expect. In Swiss Army Man it was the erstwhile Harry Potter as a farting corpse, and here it's Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis in all their various incarnations -- not to mention unearthing Ke Huy Quan for the comeback we never knew we wanted. If I spent this short amount of space talking about specific things I loved about the movie, I'd be wasting both of our time because you've seen it and you know. (I'll limit myself to one: hot dog fingers.) So instead I'll just say that this may have been the biggest blast I had in a movie theater in 2022. 

3. Turning Red - When I watched Turning Red earlier in the year, I didn't imagine it would finish so high in my top ten. It's probably only just narrowly in my top half of Pixar films. But that just goes to show how excellent a well-made Pixar film really is -- and in a year in which we also had Lightyear, it's a reminder not to take excellent Pixar films for granted. Turning Red benefits from a specificity of time (early 2000s), place (Toronto), character (a teenager from a family of Chinese immigrants) and theme (the metaphor of blossoming into womanhood by becoming a large red panda). While some trolls found that specificity an alienating turnoff, it invigorated me. (And I wasn't one bit grossed out by an extended menstruation metaphor, which also bothered some people.) I love how Domee Shi's film has no relationship to established IP, and how eccentric it got to be. (The focus on boy bands and the influence of anime were both spot on.) And like all of Pixar's classics, the film's final stages put that lump in my throat that brought home the totality of what I had been experiencing. An accumulation of sweet details and nice moments pays off in a truly satisfying climax that's both epic in scale and gentle in its emotional imprint. I think I might have just described what makes a good movie. 

2. Don't Worry Darling - I'm glad that one of the year's most talked about films -- for the wrong reasons -- didn't end up as my #1. Lots of podcast chatter and a second viewing revealed to me the film's imperfections from a story perspective. But I can't and won't forget that when I first saw Olivia Wilde's film, it left me feeling I'd be satisfied if it finished the year as my best. If visuals were the primary artistic merit you were judging, there's no doubt Don't Worry Darling delivers like few other films this year, from its immaculate 1950s production design to the camerawork of Matthew Libatique. But the much-derided story is what actually does it for me -- in addition to the always spectacular work of Florence Pugh, of course. I won't go into detail for those who still haven't seen it, but if you reduce the movie to a critique of [current right-wing movement] or a ripoff of [classic science fiction film] then you miss the ultimately moving analysis of the roles each person plays in a partnership, and what they can and will do to provide for the other -- even when it's woefully misguided as a result of unclear thinking inspired by emotional spiraling. As a husband who has often gotten it wrong about how best to be a partner to my own wife, I got huge resonance from these themes -- and the fact that it also takes a big swing on the concept side is a bonus, even if that swing does not always make perfect contact. 

1. The Whale - It's regrettable when you have to start a blurb about your favorite movie of the year with a defense. But not long after I saw, and was shattered by, The Whale, I learned that some people -- and maybe not a small number of people -- consider Darren Aronofsky's film to be fatphobic. I can't dispute that perception if it's real to them, but to me, this is a case of radical humanism by Aronofsky, one that is knowingly in conversation with our latent instinct to be fatphobic, with the intention of utterly exploding it. As I wrote in my not-yet-published review -- the movie doesn't release here until next week, but I was fortunate enough to attend a screening in December -- this is not a movie about a morbidly obese man, but rather a gay man, a lover of literature, a father who unwittingly abandoned his daughter and his ex-wife after falling in love. This is one of the most intense character portraits I've seen in ages, centered on a truly astonishing comeback performance from Brendan Fraser, but one that wouldn't work so well without the brilliance of the supporting cast, who deserve to be named here: Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Samantha Morton and Ty Simpkins. If this film "manipulated" me, it did it in the ways I want any movie to do it, in the pursuit of the best possible use of Roger Ebert's famed empathy machine. All I can tell you is that I blubbered like a baby multiple times in this film; yes, I was crying ugly. I left the theater quivering, so whatever Aronofsky was doing, it worked on me like gangbusters. And in an accomplishment I will certainly talk about further in the coming days, after The Wrestler in 2008, Aronfosky becomes the very first director to have directed two films I've named my best of the year. 

And before we get to the full list, here are my five worst:

171. Last Seen Alive - If you're hoping for Gerard Butler to make a Colin Farrell-like comeback into critical acclaim, Last Seen Alive is the sort of film that convinces you to stop dreaming. It's a shittily made revenge fantasy film where a man has to save his kidnapped wife from various hick miscreants. Yes, I also thought they stopped making this sort of film.

172. Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Did there really have to be another limp retread of this material with some half-hearted social media age messaging thrown in? This movie was bleak and glum and boring and completely uninspired, not to mention totally ridiculous. 

173. Pinocchio - I usually eat up whatever Robert Zemeckis does. Not this time. This was downright painful to watch, seeming even worse if you waited a couple months and saw Guillermo del Toro's invigorating take on the material. This has disturbing visual effects and the true worst Tom Hanks performance of the year, making his Elvis turn seem Oscar worthy.

174. The Sky is Everywhere - Josephine Decker, how could you miscalculate so totally? This movie farts colors and flowers and twee whimsey at you for the better part of two hours, all in the name of a coming of age grieving story that hits its points about grief repeatedly and with a sledgehammer. I've never seen so many unlikeable characters in a movie that's supposed to be sprightly and magical. 

175. Moonfall - The joke is that Roland Emmerich makes the worst movie of the year every time he makes a movie, but I've supported some of those more typical movies (2012) as well as his big artistic swings (Anonymous). He's well and truly lived down to his reputation with this one, one of the more absurd disaster movie concepts ever committed to film, with a cast of likable actors looking completely lethargic, and everyone charged with saving the world separated from one another by only a single degree. Every moment is terrible, and there isn't even good destruction to distract us.

Okay here's all 175. Do some eye warmups before you start if you think that will help.

1. The Whale

2. Don't Worry Darling

3. Turning Red

4. Everything Everywhere All at Once

5. The Banshees of Inisherin

6. Prey

7. Elvis

8. Beast

9. Athena

10. Dual

11. She Said

12. The Lost King

13. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

14. Nope

15. RRR

16. The Sea Beast

17. Aftersun

18. Spirited

19. Till

20. Emergency

21. Look Both Ways

22. Wendell & Wild

23. Causeway

24. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

25. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

26. Bodies Bodies Bodies

27. Triangle of Sadness

28. Fire Island

29. After Yang

30. Kimi

31. The Eternal Daughter

32. Avatar: The Way of Water

33. The Wonder

34. Fire of Love

35. Hatching

36. Bros

37. White Noise

38. I Love My Dad

39. The Bubble

40. I Want You Back

41. The Black Phone

42. Thirteen Lives

43. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

44. Hit the Road

45. Vengeance

46. Moonage Daydream

47. Muru

48. Luck

49. Flux Gourmet

50. Bigbug

51. Windfall

52. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

53. Happening

54. Descendant

55. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

56. Our Father

57. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

58. "Sr."

59. Persuasion

60. Emily the Criminal

61. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

62. Ticket to Paradise

63. My Sunny Maad

64. Fresh

65. Fall

66. Lady Chatterley's Lover

67. All Quiet on the Western Front

68. Emancipation

69. Incredible But True

70. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

71. Three Thousand Years of Longing

72. God's Creatures

73. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile

74. X

75. We're All Going to the World's Fair

76. Death on the Nile

77. Is That Black Enough for You?!?

78. Barbarian

79. Studio 666

80. Top Gun: Maverick

81. Raymond & Ray

82. The Batman

83. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

84. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

85. Senior Year

86. Samaritan

87. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers

88. Tar

89. The People We Hate at the Wedding

90. The Greatest Beer Run Ever

91. Smile

92. Plan 75

93. Scream

94. The Curse of Bridge Hollow

95. Master

96. The Stranger

97. Spiderhead

98. Sharp Stick

99. The Silent Twins

100. Inu-oh

101. Morbius

102. Men

103. Hustle

104. The Tinder Swindler

105. Day Shift

106. Choose or Die

107. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania

108. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

109. Crimes of the Future

110. A Christmas Story Christmas

111. The Menu

112. My Best Friend's Exorcism

113. Sundown

114. Vortex

115. Enola Holmes 2

116. Nanny

117. Cha Cha Real Smooth

118. The Adam Project

119. The Lost City

120. Decision to Leave

121. Neptune Frost

122. Armageddon Time

123. Poker Face

124. Stutz

125. Troll

126. The Gray Man

127. Strange World

128. The Woman King

129. Babylon

130. Hocus Pocus 2

131. Watcher

132. Gold

133. Everything in Between

134. The Weekend Away

135. Lou

136. The Good Nurse

137. Do Revenge

138. Blonde

139. Ambulance

140. All the Old Knives

141. Where the Crawdads Sing

142. Thor: Love and Thunder

143. The Man From Toronto

144. Father Stu

145. The Bad Guys

146. Lightyear

147. The Fabelmans

148. You Won't Be Alone

149. Marry Me

150. Umma

151. Firestarter

152. Amsterdam

153. Jurassic World: Dominion

154. Uncharted

155. The Perfumier

156. See How They Run

157. The Northman

158. Sissy

159. On the Count of Three

160. Deep Water

161. Stars at Noon

162. Asking For It

163. Luckiest Girl Alive

164. A Madea Homecoming

165. Home Team

166. Violent Night

167. Not Okay

168. Me Time

169. Metal Lords

170. Sonic the Hedgehog 2

171. Last Seen Alive

172. Texas Chainsaw Massacre

173. Pinocchio

174. The Sky is Everywhere

175. Moonfall

And finishing with ten movies I thought required clarification at the spot where I ranked them, so you don't say "What???" and "Huh???" and "Are you crazy???" (You can just think it instead.) "Wait Vance, I thought it was only five movies last year?" It was, but everything was bigger in 2022. 

39. The Bubble - I know this is generally disliked and just scored Judd Apatow a Razzie nomination for worst director, but I laughed a lot. 

43. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On - I know, right? I felt myself urging myself to love it more, but you can't urge love.

78. Barbarian - Everyone told me to love this but there were just too many holes in it for me to give it my full embrace.

80. Top Gun: Maverick - Planes go vroom. A little of that goes a long way for me.

88. Tar - I actually tried to get in a second viewing before my listed closed, but I just couldn't justify another $6.99 rental, on top of my original $19.99 rental, just to not get what all the fuss was about a second time.

101. Morbius - I am very slow to the realization that everyone thinks this movie is awful. I enjoyed it well enough.

111. The Menu - A lot to like at the start, but in the end, this did not tell me anything I didn't already know, or that Pig didn't tell me last year.

120. Decision to Leave - Movies should never appear to be ending 45 minutes before they actually end.

129. Babylon - I could like this more on a second viewing, but will I ever make the time?

147. The Fabelmans - I'm sorry, it just really didn't work for me, and Michelle Williams was awful.

That's enough to digest for now. Leave comments please. Tell me how The Fabelmans was your favorite movie of the year and Don't Worry Darling was your least favorite. Let's fight, in that productive way cinephiles fight to draw the best out of each other.