The style and substance of 2024

I didn't expect to set a ranking record in 2024.

Usually when you set a personal record on something -- say, a high score on a video game -- you have to have an exceptional go at it. You have to try really hard and narrowly avoid defeat on multiple occasions. The previous record was your record because it was hard to topple, but if you can get just the right set of circumstances to go your way, you can topple it.

Well, I never did anything like that in 2024. I never watched a stupid number of movies in a short time to try to goose my totals and get myself up into the range of setting a record. In fact, I was not conscious of any changes in my routine whatsoever. I guess the previous record was not so stalwart after all.

There are, however, two viable explanations for how I was able to surpass my previous record of 175 movies ranked, set in 2022, without a specific effort to do so:

1) I took four round-trip plane flights in 2024, two within my most recent trip, and two of them greater than eight hours in duration each way. I'm not sure if the first one really counts toward this effort, though, because it was back in April, when I doubt there were many if any movies from 2024 yet available on the plane. (Actually, I just checked, and I did watch Mean Girls on one of these flights.)

2) I rewatched a lot fewer movies in 2024 than I usually do. Those viewing hours have to go somewhere, and it's not like I'm going to allocate them to some non-screen-watching activity, now am I? And I don't do a lot of TV. 

This is not a record I wanted to set. As you may recall in the past, I've fretted about setting new viewing records, because I worry what it says about me and how I'm spending my finite time on this earth.

But as I was noticing the record was in range, I didn't shy away from it. In fact, I sort of leaned into it, in that there were a couple days in the past week where I watched two movies, up from my average of one per day. 

I guess I thought: "Well, I'm going to set the record anyway, why not set it in style?"

And also I thought: "There were a lot of good movies this year, and there are still more, always more, I need to see." 

In the end, I only eclipsed the total by two, ending up at 177. Which means that if I had only watched one movie on the days within the past week where I watched two, I wouldn't have beaten the record.

But who wants to tie a record, or come up short by one? Better to just set the new record and hope that it lasts for a decade. 

Before we get into talking about those movies, I need to get some business out of the way:

Here are the five films I'm most sorry about not appearing on this list. I feel a similar (low) level of disappointment for all of them, so don't read too much into the order. 

5. September 5 - In theory this was released in LA and New York before the end of December, but I didn't see it on any of my searches of local theaters when I was in LA.
4. Queer - This was lost when I skipped going in Maine last month, wanting to earn points with my wife for not insisting on going to the movies while visiting my own family. 
3. The End - I've had Joshua Oppenheimer's movie on my Letterboxd watchlist for like three years in a row, but it came out with such a whimper that I didn't even notice it as being one of my LA viewing options until near the end of that trip. Even there it was only playing at one single-screen theater.
2. Sing Sing - Yesterday I posted that this was going to be my final movie of 2024. It wasn't. I would have worked out my schedule to see this if I had realized earlier it was opening yesterday in Australia. 
1. Nightbitch - Love Marielle Heller, but her movie was only available on Hulu in the U.S. and I couldn't figure out how to make that work at our AirBnB.

Here are five other prominent films that I could have seen but just didn't:

5. Moana 2 - The timing meant I'd have to see it in the theater at a busy time of year in order to rank it, and I wasn't an ecstatic fan of the first so I just didn't make the time.
4. Mufasa: The Lion King - The comments for the other Disney movie at #5 can basically be copied and pasted here. 
3. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - Kong: Skull Island made my top ten in 2017. That feels like a long time ago. 
2. Kraven: The Hunter - This had been on my watchlist since I thought it was supposed to come out last year, but it also came out at a difficult time of the year, and there just wasn't time.
1. Heretic - The most surprised not to have seen. Another critic reviewed it on ReelGood, so I didn't prioritize it in the theater, and then it never came down from that premium $19.99 rental price before my deadline. 

And finally, two movies I might have seen but intentionally skipped:

2. The Apprentice - I just didn't want to/couldn't watch a movie that made Donald Trump a sympathetic character. Even a small modicum of sympathy was too much. Not this close to the election.
1. Joker: Folie a Deux - I don't take a lot of stands on movies by not seeing them, but I was annoyed enough by the original Joker, and heard enough bad about this one, that I just decided not to reward the right-wingish Todd Phillips with any of my attention. 

Okay, now to highlight my top ten before revealing my whole list.

10. Nickel Boys - I have more a suspicion of the greatness of RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys than I have a certainty of it. The reason for my uncertainty lies in the circumstances of my viewing: jammed into a trip to Los Angeles, starting at nearly 11 p.m. after trailers, and following margaritas at dinner. Ross' film is the sort of demanding tone poem, which burns with indignation beneath its abstractions, that benefits from more ideal viewing conditions. Neither, however, can I dismiss what I saw before me: a story told from the perspective of two young Black men at the hands of a system of pernicious racial discrimination, at a reform school where they receive vastly different treatment from their white counterparts. Because the perspective is very specifically theirs -- all shots in the movie are POV shots from one of the two of them -- and not an omniscient perspective, it lacks the heavy-handedness that may seem part and parcel to this approach. Instead, this is the ultimate example of showing rather than telling, and the things Ross shows us are not limited to the characters' literal observations of the world around them, as they also include bits of ephemera from the time period, such as shots from space and other details that establish the time and place. I have never seen a movie quite like this, and even though I feel like I only half saw it, I think Nickel Boys is probably the most marvelous sort of challenge even under the best of circumstances. It also contains probably my favorite final shot of the year, one that contains an unlimited quantity of hope, much of it in direct contradiction to what we've just witnessed. I look forward to grappling with it again when my margarita count is zero. 

9. The Brutalist - The Brutalist is my most likely 2024 film to end up on my top ten of the decade, even though it is at "only" #9 this year. It has such fantastic materials -- materials being a primary subject of this architecture-themed film -- that it should endure very well in my memory, and in potential repeat viewings. (Though probably not a lot of repeat viewings, given the 3 hour and 35-minute running time.) In fact, the film I was most inclined to compare it to was There Will Be Blood, my #1 of 2007 and my #8 of the 2000s. In the first half of Brady Corbet's film, I was sure I was making way for a new #1 of 2024, and even started imagining what clever pun I would use in the subject of this post. ("A brutal 2024"? Would have been appropriate for a year where we elected Trump.) But I didn't appreciate the second half at the same level, maybe because of some bits that I thought were narrative non-starters -- or maybe it was the extra ten minutes tacked on to the intermission, as discussed here. Anyway, there's some exquisitely thrilling, epic filmmaking here from a director I would never have guessed capable of it (I was not a fan of Vox Lux), and Adrien Brody's performance in the lead role is outstanding. The Brutalist is the kind of vision you live in, and its long running time enables that. From that striking shot near the beginning of the upside down Statue of Liberty, Corbet announces the boldness of his intentions, and never lets up on that boldness. Given that we did elect Trump this year, that image may also be the year's most symbolic. 

8. Dune: Part Two - Every time I thought about sticking Dune: Part Two behind another film in this vicinity on my list, which would endanger its spot in my top ten, I thought about how the second Dune movie has parts that are undeniably dramatically flat. But then I'd think about the sheer grandeur and scope of Denis Villeneuve's epic filmmaking, and I'd know that it belonged on this hallowed ground, matching the feat of the first Dune and even increasing its spot in the rankings by one. (That's not comparing apples to apples in terms of the rest of the movies in those years, though.) This actually makes Villeneuve only the third four-timer in my top ten after he also achieved the feat with Sicario and Enemy. The sequel is of a piece with the original in everything except the part of the story that's covered, which I find more interesting in the first half of Frank Herbert's novel and in the first movie. But I might be even more impressed by the technique here, as I think of dozens of individual images and moments (the silently flying villains in jetpacks, Paul Atreides finally standing on the back of the worm) and just how spellbound I was. The latter scene even pushed me to the verge of spectacle tears, wrapped up in my favorite use of a Hans Zimmer score in some time. Add in the black and white Harkonnen homeworld and you've got a series that can give me as many sequels as it wants, because I know each new one will creatively stimulate its director, and in turn that director's audience. 

7. Civil War - Alex Garland made what seemed like the most timely and potentially prescient movie of 2024, and then the American people did the rest in allowing it to come true. Thankfully, due to the general sense of decorum of progressive voters, the worst possibilities depicted in Civil War have not yet come to pass, but this movie does create a frightening template of what the future could hold if Donald Trump is just the beginning of a form of inflated political rhetoric that could well last for decades. The director's always intense filmmaking style just gets a jolt of additional anxiety out of the sheer plausibility of what we're seeing here. And though some people considered this a bug not a feature, his unwillingness to clearly take a side in the fight -- there are indications where he stands if you look for them -- just makes it all the more effective a cautionary tale for whoever needs to see it. (Though unfortunately, not an effective enough cautionary tale for the election to go the other way.) Kirsten Dunst is a force to be reckoned with here, but the others who fill out the cast -- particularly fellow journalists played by Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Wagner Moura, but also supporting players like Jesse Plemons and Nick Offerman -- put personal faces on the ideas. A series of tense set pieces culminates in a climax of such apocalyptic sound and fury that I was basically left speechless, and knew this was going to make my top ten even with some minor complaints and nitpicks. (Oh yeah, and I loved the soundtrack.)

6. The People's Joker - I have never seen a movie like The People's Joker because there has never been a movie like The People's Joker. Anyone who has ever flagrantly used the trademarked intellectual property of a giant corporate behemoth has paid the price in terms of risk to their personal fortune long before the art in question ever saw the light of day. Vera Drew's film, on the other hand, not only made it to places people could see it despite Warner Brothers' unsurprising objection to depicting Batman as a predator who grooms young men, and many other Batman characters as gay or trans -- when she shouldn't have been able to use their likenesses at all -- but many critics hailed it as a triumphant cinematic experience, which it surely is. Drew's story of coming out as trans is told through these iconic figures set against DIY Gotham city backdrops that were shot in little distinct locations during the pandemic, and it's both a very funny and a very moving experience. Warner Brothers smartly loosened its grip on the legal apparatus that could have sunk The People's Joker, as someone somewhere had the good sense to acknowledge this obvious parody existed for the most earnest reasons possible, and does more good for their brand than harm. We are all reflections of what we see in our culture, and imagine ourselves limited to those options. But when someone reaches for more than what they were told they could have, and uses classic comic book characters to get her there, it does good for us all -- either in coping with our own similar issues, or better empathizing with others who find themselves in Drew's shoes.

5. The Coffee Table - There is no way to talk about The Coffee Table, and yet you have to talk about The Coffee Table, especially if you are naming it your fifth favorite film of the year. The reason you can't talk about The Coffee Table is that knowing what it's about ruins that important surprise, even though that surprise comes fairly early in the proceedings. There are also reasons why what it's about might prevent people from even watching it in the first place. Allow me just to say that Spanish director Caye Casas' film starts with an argument between a new father and mother over the purchase of a coffee table that he likes but she doesn't, which she has agreed to let him buy because he considers it his only contribution to their decor. The piece has gold nude sculptures as legs, but at least they are done in a sort of art deco style? In any case, this purchase leads to an unimaginable sequence of events where we in the audience are privy to certain information that only one other character knows, and the exquisite tension between what this character knows and what the others don't, but inevitably soon will, is both nearly intolerable and wickedly humorous in the darkest way you can imagine. No less than Stephen King has called this the darkest movie he's ever seen, but we are starting to get close to spoiler territory so I will veer off this track. All you need to know is that I have never seen a movie quite like this and I knew right away I was glad a) that such an original social drama? black comedy? what exactly is this? exists, but also b) that it is the only one of its kind. We don't need another Coffee Table, but this Coffee Table is a feat to behold that will not be forgotten by anyone who sees it. 

4. Emilia Perez - Every time I hear someone write or talk about Jacques Audiard's film, I also hear them drop the word "controversial." I haven't yet dug into what's considered most controversial and from what perspective. If it's controversial from a right-wing perspective, I don't want to hear it. If someone takes offense at the tone-deaf sex change operation number, or anything else that doesn't quite translate the trans experience, I get it. However, I think everything else about this film is marvelous, and it's part of a collection of films in my top ten whose likes I have never seen before. A musical about a Mexican drug lord who wants to live as a woman, in part to protect himself and his family, and in part because he's always seen himself as a woman? Make that she? And from Audiard, a consummately realistic director who makes serious social dramas about criminally adjacent people? Who's ever seen anything like that before? I was wowed by Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez giving great performances in the language of their heritage -- as I wrote about here -- but this movie really belongs to trans actress Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays both Emilia and her predecessor, Juan "Manitas" Del Monte. I really liked the songs and the energy of the project, to say nothing of the delicious narrative complications that develop after Emilia makes her decision. But it was when I realized it had me emotionally -- during that final scene between Emilia and Gomez's character -- that I knew this was one of my favorites of the year. 

3. Grand Theft Hamlet - And that makes four movies in a row that were completely and totally something I had never seen before. The highlight of my 2024 MIFF was this documentary, of sorts, in which two struggling British actors (Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen) were playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto during COVID, and then wondered if they could make the game universe effectively a stage where they could ply their trade, even if for practice and personal connection only. In the course of trying to put on Hamlet, they collected other interested gamers from the international community -- acting experience preferred but not essential. Crane and Pinny Grylls' film takes place entirely within the game, as we hear their audio while we see their avatars attempt to stage a full run through, without getting blown away an inordinate number of times by other gamers who have no idea what they're up to. If it sounds funny, it is -- hilariously so at times. If it sounds poignant, it also is, as Oosterveen in particular is struggling with the isolation and the recent loss of his last living relative, leaving him desperate for a project that may be falling apart in front of him. The standards of profundity are met and exceeded on numerous occasions, with the small ticker of deaths of other characters in the game universe appearing at the bottom, a haunting echo of real-world pandemic mortality. Who would have ever guessed video game characters spouting soliloquys could contain so many of the different reasons we go to the movies. 

2. Wicked - Having zero exposure to this musical before seeing the movie -- I had heard "Defying Gravity" before, but no exposure beyond that -- was surely key to why I loved Wicked as much as I did. But more than that, it is just a perfectly executed cinematic gem with popular appeal and real substance, one that defiantly opposed the conventional wisdom to stage a musical within a single film, and came out leaving us waiting in anticipation for the conclusion of the story later this year. Although I have chosen a picture of the stellar Cynthia Erivo to accompany this blurb, and there is every reason to consider this her movie, I was most gobsmacked by the exquisite comedic fitness of Ariana Grande, a pop star I had spent the last decade utterly dismissing. Grande's background in acting was not known to me, and she therefore left me speechless at the fleetness and humor of her performance. The two together in that scene at the dance left me crying for one of the few times at the movies this year, and the only time in the theater, but the more dominant impression of this film is how it sent my spirits soaring with every impeccably staged number, and with that sweet spot between production design and digital effects that stop short of overwhelming the story. Wicked reminded me that I am, indeed, a fan of the movie musical at my core, but it's just so rare to find one carried off as successfully as this one. Jon M. Chu has now made my top ten twice as a director after Crazy Rich Asians, and because I forgot he also directed the less-successful In the Heights, I was equally gobsmacked about his capabilities as I was by those of Grande. One of only two five-star movies for me in 2024. 

1. The Substance - If Tom Cruise had Renee Zellweger at hello, Coralie Fargeat's The Substance had me from its virtuoso opening scene, involving the startling God's eye view of the lifecycle of Elizabeth Sparkle's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and then it proceeded to deliver me to the promised land for the remainder of the movie. Among its many miracles is that there are essentially three characters with any lines of spoken dialogue (and two of them are the same person), yet it runs for 2 hours and 20 minutes and never for a moment feels boring. Fargeat impressed with her style in Revenge, but who knew this masterwork of a satire of Hollywood, replete with significant quantities of body horror, was beating within her chest. The Substance is not only the most visually distinctive film of 2024, it also provides an incredible showcase for its three leads, specifically Demi Moore in a role that may one day be considered the finest work of her career. The Substance also finally brought me around to Margaret Qualley, for whom less dialogue is more, and reminded me of the grotesqueries in the arsenal of another actor whose last name begins with Q (Dennis Quaid). I have to acknowledge that some people found this movie anti-feminist rather than feminist, and have other issues with it like whether Fargeat's camera leers too much at Qualley or if it's just hitting the same note over and over. For me, her point was not to make a movie with a message so easy to dissect as "women good, men/Hollywood bad," and The Substance provides evidence to suggest all parties are complicit in the paradigm that requires aging actresses to submit their bodies to all manner of artificial adjustments, as likely to disfigure them as to convince us they're still "young." The truth is, when a movie spins my head this much with its technique and its wicked sense of humor, I don't care what the themes are because I'm just swept along in its visionary tide. I spent a couple months hoping a movie would come along to eclipse The Substance, then about a month feeling there was little chance I'd see something better. I didn't, and I embrace this #1 as I do any other. 

And lest they think they've escaped my elaborations on their significant lack of merit, here is my bottom five:

173. Mary - I'm not sure how I hoped a biblical story of the events surrounding Jesus' birth would be brought to the screen, but I can tell you this wasn't it. Complete with silly action scenes and a performance from Anthony Hopkins as Herod that leaves broken bits of chewed scenery in its wake. 

174. The Wages of Fear - Seeing this title in my bottom five of any list is enough to knock me off my chair, but usually this title would make me think of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 version that I watched again in 2023 and dearly love. Going forward, I hope it almost never makes me of Julien Leclercq's inert 2024 remake, as lacking in tension as it is in soul. 

175. Imaginary - Mainstream horror movies, especially those from Blumhouse, are almost always passable and usually no worse than forgettable. Actually, I do sort of forget why I disliked Imaginary so much, but I think it happened around the time they went into that alternate dimension inside the house -- not something I would have expected or wanted from a movie about imaginary friends coming to life.

176. Space Cadet - I'm sorry, I just don't buy that a prospective candidate for the NASA astronaut program, who wears ridiculous clothing and calls everyone "dude," would a) be able to fake her way into the program and keep it secret despite her obvious mismatch with all the other candidates, or b) ever ever, and I mean EVER, walk in space. (Spoiler alert.) 

177. Longlegs - How do I hate thee, Longlegs? Let me count the ways. A friend of mine wrote a blurb on the Flickchart Blog year-end post in which she described the charm of Oz Perkins' movie as arising from its total preposterousness and failure to make sense in any given moment. I agree with those observations about the film but not with the idea that it leaves the film with any charm. Like, whatsoever. 

And here's the whole list!

1. The Substance
2. Wicked
3. Grand Theft Hamlet
4. Emilia Perez

5. The Coffee Table

6. The People's Joker

7. Civil War

8. Dune: Part Two

9. The Brutalist

10. Nickel Boys

11. The Bikeriders

12. It's What's Inside

13. Strange Darling

14. Conclave

15. Unfrosted

16. Frida

17. A Different Man

18. Love Lies Bleeding

19. Rebel Ridge

20. All We Imagine as Light

21. Daughters

22. Juror #2

23. Omni Loop

24. Problemista

25. Better Man

26. Anora

27. Suncoast

28. Ultraman: Rising

29. Will & Harper

30. Alien: Romulus

31. Here

32. Black Barbie

33. Hit Man

34. Kneecap

35. The Idea of You

36. Babes

37. Piece by Piece

38. Harold and the Purple Crayon

39. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

40. Goodrich

41. I Saw the TV Glow

42. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

43. Io Capitano

44. Joy

45. The Greatest Night in Pop

46. Thelma

47. The Critic

48. Ricky Stanicky

49. My Old Ass

50. The Dead Don't Hurt

51. Monkey Man

52. Road House

53. Mother, Couch!

54. Oddity

55. Free Time

56. Tuesday

57. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

58. A Quiet Place: Day One

59. Speak No Evil

60. Inside Out 2

61. Immaculate

62. Brats

63. Wolfs

64. The Outrun

65. Saturday Night

66. Woman of the Hour

67. Nosferatu

68. How to Have Sex

69. The Deliverance

70. Red One

71. Orion and the Dark

72. Survive

73. The Underdoggs

74. It Ends With Us

75. We Grown Now

76. Fancy Dance

77. Sasquatch Sunset

78. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

79. Force of Nature: The Dry 2

80. Skywalkers: A Love Story

81. Good One

82. Transformers One

83. Matt and Mara

84. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

85. Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution

86. House of Spoils

87. Turtles All the Way Down

88. Jackpot!

89. A Real Pain

90. Red Rooms

91. Don't Move

92. Deadpool & Wolverine

93. Scoop

94. Damsel

95. Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver

96. The Instigators

97. Late Night With the Devil

98. Blink Twice

99. Hundreds of Beavers

100. Challengers

101. The Platform 2

102. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

103. Sting

104. Sonic the Hedgehog 3

105. I.S.S.

106. Just a Farmer

107. The Piano Lesson

108. We Live in Time

109. Lift

110. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

111. Slingshot

112. Time Cut

113. MaXXXine

114. Under Paris

115. The Fall Guy

116. Hot Frosty

117. Kinds of Kindness

118. AfrAId

119. The Wild Robot

120. Back to Black

121. Bob Marley: One Love

122. You'll Never Find Me

123. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

124. Shirley

125. Kill Me If You Dare

126. Trap

127. September Says

128. A Complete Unknown

129. Fly Me to the Moon

130. The Crow

131. The Kitchen

132. Am I OK?

133. Lee

134. A Family Affair

135. Role Play

136. Our Little Secret

137. Night Swim

138. The Exorcism

139. The Beautiful Game

140. Twisters

141. Atlas

142. Birdeater

143. Gladiator II

144. Salem's Lot

145. Borderlands

146. The 4:30 Movie

147. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

148. His Three Daughters

149. This is Me ... Now: A Love Story

150. The Balconettes

151. IF

152. Megalopolis

153. Upgraded

154. Tarot

155. Uglies

156. Arcadian

157. Mean Girls

158. Drive-Away Dolls

159. Trigger Warning

160. La Cocina

161. Blitz

162. Summer Camp

163. Argylle

164. Irish Wish

165. Spaceman

166. Madame Web

167. Mothers' Instinct

168. Brothers

169. Carry-On

170. The Watchers

171. Hellboy: The Crooked Man

172. Janet Planet

173. Mary

174. The Wages of Fear

175. Imaginary

176. Space Cadet

177. Longlegs

And finishing with ten more movies whose placement required a little more elaboration, I thought:

15. Unfrosted - There was a moment in this that made me laugh harder than I have at a movie in a couple years, and I thought that was worth top 15.

26. Anora - Is it wrong to say the middle dragged, the characters were not developed enough and the ending left me feeling bummed, but not in a good way?

31. Here - I think I gave extra points just for the gimmick.

41. I Saw the TV Glow - I will always remember being haunted by images from this film ... and wondering why Jane Schoenbrun could not stick the landing.

60. Inside Out 2 - I don't know, I just wasn't feeling it. No pun intended.

78. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - I love this world. I don't really love this movie.

95. Rebel Moon: Part 2 - The Scargiver - It was such an improvement from the first one (my bottom-ranked movie of last year) that I had to reward it.

100. Challengers - I guess I was just exhausted at the end. 

119. The Wild Robot - Am I dead inside, or is this movie not as good as everyone says?

128. A Complete Unknown - I never had any idea how close this was to ending.

Thanks for reading. As always, comments are welcome. And be sure to come back the next two days for two more 2024 wrap-up posts ... and then an informal one on the third day. 

The Oscar nominations moved, but I'm staying put

When you are driving toward your final movie watched of a given ranking year, mapping out what days you'll watch what movies for as long as ten days out from that deadline, you develop a certain mentality of finality, of how it's all ramping up to a finish. 

So when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences needs to move its announcement of this year's Oscar nominations six days forward due to the ongoing fires in Los Angeles -- a more justified decision there never was -- it's hard, nay impossible, to shift forward with them.

Some people might say "Another six days of watching movies? Great! My 2024 list will now just be that much more complete."

Me? I'm saying "It's time to move on to something else."

And so after learning yesterday that the announcement of nominations was moved from the expected date of January 17th at 5:30 a.m. PST to the new date of January 23rd at 5:30 a.m. PST, I decided this did not change my own timeline, and I would still finish up tonight with my final movie of 2024, as first conceived when I learned of this year's nomination date several months ago. Tomorrow, I will post my list. 

Look, I'm tired. And (spoiler alert) I will already be setting a record number of movies ranked this year, even without bonus time.

This was not the only 11th hour change related to my movie rankings.

I had expected to see A Complete Unknown tonight as my final film. In fact, I already had a post written called "My final screening is an advanced screening," which will now sit forever in my drafts folder, since I never delete my unpublished drafts, leaving them as sort of a record of unfinished thoughts. 

See, A Complete Unknown does not come out in Australia until next Thursday, a fact I did not realize when I ignored the opportunity to see it in Los Angeles. I assumed it was one of the many high-profile Boxing Day releases in Australia, and that I'd have ample time to squeeze it in when my family returned from our trip to America. Then again, even if I had known about Unknown, there was very little chance I would have prioritized seeing a musician biopic over the movies I did see while I was there, The Brutalist and Nickel Boys.

So I expected the Bob Dylan biopic to go unseen by me prior to closing off my rankings, until I got invited to an advanced screening that was scheduled, lo and behold, for the 12-hour window before the Oscar nominations went live in a time zone 19 hours different from my own. I RSVP'd straight away.

Fortuitously, it would mean I finished my 2024 rankings in the same place I finished my 2015 rankings, at the glorious venue The Astor in St. Kilda, an old-fashioned movie house if ever there was one, complete with balcony. In 2016 (for the movies of 2015), that was where I saw the first of three movies that had only just been released on my final day of ranking, which was The Hateful Eight, intermission and all. I finished the epic day with Carol and The Big Short at venues increasingly closer to my house. Only Carol did not make my top 20 and The Hateful Eight made my top ten. I actually have not been back to The Astor since later that same year, when I saw a special screening of the beloved Australian film Malcolm, my wife having worked with its writer and director. 

I loved the idea of finishing at The Astor, but there was something nagging and incomplete with this plan. Despite RSVPing within a day of the invitation being sent, I had not heard back from the publicist confirming my spot. I followed up with her about five days later to be sure I was on the list, and again did not hear back. Yesterday at work I went so far as to print out the emailed invitation as well as my response to it, should my legitimacy as an invitee be questioned.

Only after getting home from work yesterday did I notice I finally had a response from her, which was to tell me that alas, the screening was at capacity, but she would add me to the waitlist.

That's lame. When you respond within 24 hours, you should be on the list, especially at a venue as large as The Astor. I was surprised it could be at capacity regardless, and I wonder if she intentionally didn't respond because she had other higher priority attendees she wanted to accommodate. After all, my site is still not one of the big players in Australian film coverage. Nonetheless, it would be hard for me to imagine that there are, oh, 500 ahead of me, though obviously a lot of those seats would be reserved for other VIPs/ticket winners etc. 

I don't expect my waitlist spot to materialize -- possibly especially after I responded stating (politely) my disappointment in the outcome -- so now I am pivoting, and it's actually to see a movie I am a lot more interested in than A Complete Unknown.

I had written off Sing Sing as a movie I had any chance of seeing before my deadline. In discussing it briefly with my friend who also ranks his movies, he told me he wouldn't be able to rank it because it had disappeared after a very brief Oscar-qualifying run. If it isn't generally available in the U.S., I figured it was one of those movies that wouldn't come out in Australia until March.

Lo and behold, it actually opened yesterday.

So I guess there is a net positive here. My wife still thinks I'm going to see A Complete Unknown tonight -- or at least to an advanced screening, since that's all I told her and she didn't ask for any clarifying details. So I'm going to use the preapproval for the time slot to go to Cinema Nova instead of The Astor, and if she asks what movie I saw, I'll just tell her the truth. After all, she didn't know this wasn't the movie I was seeing, and she does not keep track of release dates. 

And by finishing with Sing Sing at Cinema Nova, I'm finishing at the real place I concluded my viewings nine years ago, as this was the venue where I saw my final film of 2015, The Big Short. I believe only a single final film of a year has been in the theater since then, which would be Darkest Hour in 2017. 

I suppose there is still a chance the publicist comes back to me with apologies and an open-arms invitation to A Complete Unknown, and if that happens I would go, having been bent out of shape about it to her. Even though Sing Sing is now the center of my thoughts.

You'll know either way tomorrow, when I finally post my rankings of the films of 2024, all the way from best to worst. 

The busiest 75-year-old in the movie business

I don't mind telling you that the preparation for my three -- actually, four, but one of them is informal and does not involve any compiling of information -- end-of-ranking-year posts begins weeks ago. And that's how it is that I have already completed more than 90% of the writing and other compiling for those posts, just waiting until I'm officially done in two days before putting on the finishing touches.

And what I already have for these posts -- or don't have -- may, just may, guide some of my thinking on the final movies I watch.

The example in this case is my "three who had a bad year" segment of my wrap-up post that follows the day after I put up my rankings. I've already got my three, but I am still looking for one other honorable mention. I thought Bill Nighy could be that guy, just because I noticed I'd seen him in a movie I didn't like very much (The Beautiful Game), and if I also did not like Joy, one of my contenders for my third-to-last movie of the year, then he could work his way into my final honorable mention spot. (Or dishonorable mention, I should say.)

Is this a good way to go about this? Who can say.

So I also went on to IMDB, to ensure there weren't other Nighy performances in 2024 I hadn't considered in my calculations, that might either support or detract from his candidacy.

As it turns out, there were seven. 

Two of those were movies that could potentially be feathers in his cap for the dishonor. I mas middling to negative on both The Wild Robot and Role Play, the latter of which was the second movie I watched for the year all the way back in January. (Yes, I don't love The Wild Robot. We can talk about it another time.)

But then Nighy was also in five other movies I did not see, much of it also as vocal work like he did in The Wild Robot. Those titles were That Christmas, Gracie & Pedro: Pets to the Rescue, The First Omen, Dragonkeeper and 10 Lives.

Is anyone working harder in Hollywood than this man, who turned three quarters of a century old less than a month ago? More to the point, is anyone in such demand?

Obviously you can churn out vocal work at must higher rates than work that requires you in front of a camera. Still, even with those four vocal roles, there were still five of the "in person" type. (And I noticed that he is called Cardinal Lawrence in The First Omen, which is the same name as Ralph Fiennes' character in Conclave. Coincidence? I may have to look into this.)

I have always appreciated Nighy as an actor, though I can see, I have never yet written about him on this blog. And certainly, he does have one of "those voices," which explains why he's cast in so many animated films -- other than his sheer willingness to do it.

Maybe Nighy does still need to put away money for his retirement, if it ever comes, considering that he is comparatively late to becoming a household name. It strikes me that I only first became aware of the actor 22 years ago, when he was in Love Actually and when he was already 53. That's right, my entire awareness of him as an actor comes at ages when he was older than I am now.

Now of course Love Actually was not his first role -- in fact, it was his 70th, of an eventual 168 (and rapidly counting), dating all the way back to 1976. But the fact that I did not know who he was before that, when I'm the sort of guy who keeps track of this sort of thing, means he toiled in some form of obscurity for those first 27 years of his career. (It turns out, I had seen him in at least three movies before Love Actually, which are Alive and Kicking, Lucky Break and Blow Dry, though clearly he didn't make as much of an impression on me there as he did in Richard Curtis' dubiously enduring Christmas movie.)

And there can be little dispute that the use of Bill Nighy is only becoming more common as he ages. These recent years of his career may not be featuring his most prominent roles, though there can be no arguing the perceived desirability of casting him. And even in saying the roles themselves may be getting less juicy, I have to acknowledge that he received an Oscar nomination just two years ago for his work in the pretty good Living. Which, interestingly, was his first such nomination, further proving his status as a late bloomer.

So if you want a Brit who's a bit crusty and a bit superior, but ultimately has that twinkle of warmth that undercuts those traits, Bill Nighy is your guy, and it appears he will be for several more years to come. 

If you're looking for range, well, it may be wisest to look elsewhere. As just one example of how Nighy always plays variations on the same character, he has, to my knowledge, never even played an American, unlike many of his fellow countrymen and women in the acting community.

For the record, Nighy will not be getting a dishonorable mention for his "bad" 2024. I did watch Joy, and liked it quite a bit. And I attribute a significant percentage of my affection to Nighy, though Thomasin McKenzie is fabulous in it.

Of those traits I ascribe to Bill Nighy, dishonor is not one of them. 

Not looking beyond this week

Usually at this time of the year, I get visions of old movies or beloved rewatches dancing in my head, just as little children in "The Night Before Christmas" get visions of sugar plums doing the same. In other words, I cannot wait to be done with movies from the current year so I can again start watching whatever movies I damn please.

For some reason, that's not happening this year.

And from this I draw two possible conclusions:

1) I am not sick of ranking movies this year. I could go on ranking them for another month and see more than 200 movies and be perfectly fine with that. That speaks well to my overall engagement with movies at this point in time, early in the year of our lord, 2025.

2) I may be sick of ranking movies this year, but I am not particularly starved for some sort of alternative of watching old movies or movies I've already seen. In fact, I could be ready for some sort of long break. That does not speak well to my overall engagement with movies at this point in time, early in the year of our lord, 2025. 

I guess I won't know which one is the case until after I finish this up on Friday. 

The earlier deadline this year could have something to do with it. The Oscar nominations are being announced nearly a week earlier than they were last year, when they were revealed on Thursday, January 23rd. That meant I was basically already up against it in terms of the approaching end of January, having to watch a movie for two different monthly series, as well as my annual movie in celebration of Australia Day, right quick. That also meant I couldn't take more than a single night off from watching movies after I posted my list. 

This year, the amount of remaining January time is closer to two weeks. So I don't have to think ahead. 

But there should still be movies clambering their way to the top of my list of wants and needs, whether that is revisiting an old favorite or finally seeing some movie from the year 2023 or earlier that I have never seen. Events in our normal lives conspire to bring these movies to the front of our cerebral cortex. 

In 2025, there are no movies in that spot, meaning that when I do watch my first movie after Friday, the thing I watch may result from something so arbitrary as going to one of my streamers and seeing what's on.

So really, it was a bit of a straw man argument to suggest I might not be engaged with movies anymore and might be ready for a long break. I think I prefer to interpret it that I'm enjoying movies enough right now that I am not impatient to get on to the next thing, and am just appreciating the thing that's happening as it's happening.

Now, if you had asked me after I finished a sleepless night of watching five mediocre movies on one of my recent plane rides, I might have told you a different story.

My son is currently watching a movie for pleasure

One of the first indicators I might become a cinephile was all the movies I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid- to late-1980s. I won't go through those titles again, because I've done that before, and it is not particularly relevant to the current post anyway. But let's just say that I burned a hole in those VHS tapes, watching some of them upwards of ten times. And given that there were at least ten of those titles in heavy rotation, that's a lot of viewings.

We live in different times now. Children do not, to the same extent, satisfy their twin appetites for screen time and storytelling by watching movies. I should say, some children might do that. Mine do not.

Oh, they'll watch a movie with us if we put it on the schedule. The younger one enthusiastically, the older one less so. But these events are also becoming less common, in part because my wife is also less interested in them.

Except maybe there is still hope for my 11-year-old.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed he was starting to watch Spider-Man: Homecoming. When he saw me notice him starting to watch it, he kind of gave me a look like "See? I'm doing something you like doing." Though the fact that it was a newsworthy event does indicate how uncommon it is otherwise.

When I asked him if he had seen the movie before, this is when I got more encouraged. (I should be able to remember myself, but I've got two kids and sometimes I can't remember who has seen what.) "Oh yeah," he responded. "Two or three times."

Which means that yesterday, my son just felt the urge to watch Spider-Man: Homecoming, so he started to watch it. 

Hooray.

It was a similar urge that prompted me to press play on all those VHS tapes back in the 1980s. I don't know why on certain days I felt like watching, I don't know, WarGames, and on other days it was The Pirate Movie. But the point is I got those urges, and responded accordingly.

Now, things still aren't what they once were. Attention spans are much different now. I say my son is "currently" watching Spider-Man: Homecoming, even though I also said he started it yesterday. Both of these things are true. While watching, he's likely to take breaks and game for a while, or watch a YouTube video.

However, the fact that he started it yesterday and returned to it today means he sees something sacred about completing a viewing, and not just sampling a small part of a movie and moving on. There are cinephiles who do the second thing, of course, and God bless them for whatever form they want their engagement to take. But my son is taking my form of engagement, completing what he started, and that further tickles me.

What's more, this additional engagement -- even if it is in its nascent stages -- is deepening his overall engagement with the cinematic landscape. Another thing I have wondered is if today's children -- or more specifically, my children -- would ever become conversant about movie stars, knowing their names and what other films they had been in. They do know some names, such as Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black, but even some very famous names, like Tom Cruise, may cause them hesitation. 

Well, one person my younger son knows is Tom Holland, star of Spider-Man: Homecoming. He mentioned him by name earlier this month when we were at Universal Studios. So it may be that my son is choosing personal favorites among actors and intentionally choosing films starring those actors, which is another way further in to cinephilia. I just don't need him to watch Holland movies like The Devil All the Time -- not at this stage, anyway. (Given that I think that movie is shit, possibly not ever.) 

Look, I'm not going to blow this out of proportion, all evidence to the contrary in the fact that I'm writing this post. But for a guy who constantly longs for "the way things used to be," this is an encouraging development, both for me personally and for my hope about the younger generation. 

I have also been worrying lately about the way the kids are spending their summer, essentially devoting most of their time to screens except for the break we force them to take for a couple hours in the early afternoon. If my 11-year-old starts choosing to wile away his summers on movies -- the way I once did -- then that removes that stress for me as well.

Now, I just need him to start obsessively ranking his movies and watching more than 150 of them per year ... 

NOTE: Less than an hour after I published this, my son began watching Spider-Man: Far From Home. Yay. 

Plot as template

I was doing my due diligence the other day by reviewing all the options for 2024 movies available on my streamers, to see if any were the least bit enticing options to fill out the remainder of my viewing before finalizing my rankings. At a time when I'm spending a lot of money on iTunes rentals, free is good.

There were a lot of titles that would have indeed enticed me earlier in the year, when the new movie release year was exciting in and of itself because it meant I could start building my new list. Those same titles I now reject because there are more important priorities, and at this point, who wants to watch a movie that has no better hope than landing in my bottom 50 films of the year? Unless it's a glorious misfire, which has its own delights -- but for the most these are just milquetoast movies I will forget 15 minutes after watching them.

One such milquetoast movie I clicked into on Wikipedia, a Netflix original, was called Lonely Planet, an interesting enough title to bait me into the extra click. Seeing that it starred recent Oscar winner Laura Dern, I began to wonder if it might break out and claim one of my final available viewing spots for this year. 

Until I read the plot synopsis:

"The plot centers around a successful female novelist who finds love with an unlikely person in an exotic place."

Please excuse me while I stifle my giggles.

I know what you're thinking, and you're right: Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced website, and not everything you see on there is completely ready for its close-up. While that is correct in a certain sense, it is far common to find entries that are surprisingly detailed and consistently styled, even if the thing in question could not have been on Wikipedia for more than a couple weeks. The site remains, quietly and unobtrusively, one of the most miraculous miracles on the internet.

The point, though, is not who wrote the plot synopsis for Lonely Planet and what their intentions were. Clearly it is some sort of placeholder until someone who has actually seen the movie can come along and give us an actual description of what happens in this movie, with actual character names.

The point is that this is a hilariously succinct and hilariously generic template for, essentially, every romantic fantasy ever committed to film.

I do quibble, though, with how unlikely a person Liam Hemsworth is for Laura Dern. Yes he's 23 years younger than she is, and the alleged unlikelihood certainly stems from that. (Which does not make it very dissimilar to 2024 films like The Idea of You and A Family Affair, both of which I did see because they came out earlier in the year, thereby proving my personal proclivity vis-a-vis new releases that I mentioned earlier.) Still, far more interesting if the unlikely person were a 78-year-old nun or a 22-year-old Ethiopian skateboarder, if such people exist. (Now those are movies I would watch.)

The thing is, nobody will ever make a movie in which Laura Dern is paired up with those people. The people Lonely Planet is being sold to have very specific expectations for the sort of film they will click on, and they don't include habits or skateboards. 

They do, however, include female novelists, love, and exotic places. 

I'm almost inclined to watch Lonely Planet just to see if this plot synopsis accurately distills the extreme laziness behind this movie's creative impulse, or if it's actually something worth watching. After all, you'll find The Idea of You a lot higher on my 2024 rankings than you might expect. 

And who knows, maybe I could remove the placeholder and write the long-term plot synopsis myself. 

The nepo siblings who exceeded their siblings

A Real Pain is a film about the fraught relationship between cousins, whose dynamic is colored by mutual envies and resentments.

However, there's good reason to believe the material might have some real-world resonance for one of the co-leads, Kieran Culkin, with regards to not his real cousin, but his real older brother.

Without really parsing the finer details of the history I can't say this for sure, but I suspect there is no way Kieran Culkin has a career if not for the path in Hollywood paved by his older brother Macaulay, two years his senior and the breakout star of Home Alone in 1990, the year Macaulay was turning 10 and Kieran 8. They're now 44 and 42. 

Now, this may not be an entirely fair theory because Kieran was also in Home Alone. However, while that was Kieran's first role, it was Macaulay's seventh, including the prominent films Uncle Buck and Jacob's Ladder. There's little doubt that Macaulay was, initially, the star, and Kieran rode his coattails.

Nowadays, when we see Macaulay, we look at him with the sort of pity we reserve for a person whose career never really took off the way we expected it to, and whose life featured some hardships we would not wish on him. We probably shouldn't really pity him, as he has indeed continued to have professional work (though you might be hard-pressed to name it) and has also been in relationships with beautiful actresses (once Mila Kunis and now Brenda Song). Not that we should judge the success of a person's life by the attractiveness of his partners, but if we are already using the fairly superficial standard of the prominence of his professional work, that assessment is in the same qualitative boat.

Kieran? Well he's just one of the most respected actors of his age group working today, star of Succession and a number of high-profile films (including A Real Pain) that have earned him an endless number of breathless and deserved accolades from critics. And if we're remaining shallow, he's also married to a beautiful woman, she just doesn't happen to be otherwise famous.

I have to wonder what the nature is of Kieran's and Macaulay's relationship, though it might not be a simple binary dynamic since their acting family also includes the considerably younger Rory Culkin, who's only 35 and has had a successful career in his own right. I have to wonder if Macaulay is jealous of Kieran's success and is always thinking "You wouldn't be here without me," or if there are even jealousies in the other direction, in that Kieran may never have a role as iconic as Kevin McAllister no many how many awards he may one day win. 

It mirrors the shifting relationship between David and Benji Kaplan in A Real Pain, where we are never sure which one has more reason to be jealous of the other, or which one is the real "pain" referenced in a title that is already playing double duty in that it's also alluding to the exploration of their Jewish heritage in Poland, including a visit to a concentration camp. It's one of the most successful aspects of a movie that surely did not work as well for me as it did for some people.

In the title of this post I referred to "nebo siblings," plural, and sure enough, I've got more where this came from.

A few years after Macaulay Culkin's prime, one of the next biggest child stars -- in other words, child stars whose names we knew beyond "that kid from that movie" --- was Dakota Fanning, whose big breakout was harder to pinpoint, though she was everywhere in the mid-2000s. I always think of her as showcasing her abilities most memorably in War of the Worlds in 2005. 

Today? The Fanning you want to talk about is Elle, four years her sister's junior, whose craft is respected far and wide, and who seems to make only good decisions about the roles she takes. Meanwhile, Dakota is left with dubious crap like The Watchers, in which the abilities she once showed in a film with some thematic similarities, the aforementioned War of the Worlds, seem to have abandoned her entirely. 

Then you have perhaps the most prominent example of this, where the younger sibling is on the A list and her older sisters are on the D or D- list. Twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen took the world by storm as the cute youngest daughter on Full House, a role they shared because that was a smart way to ensure you had one small child who was giving you usable material on any given day you were trying to shoot. (And something about child labor laws as well.) They became some of the first influencers as we now think of them, as well as tabloid mainstays. However, their own careers in TV and movies quickly petered out, and there to replace them was younger sister Elizabeth, three years their junior, who has morphed into one of the most recognizable actresses working in Hollywood with her role in the MCU and other high-profile projects. What's more, whereas they always seemed shallow and insipid, Elizabeth is the epitome of the kind of style and grace and glamour that they surely would have aspired to for themselves.

Then you have examples of actors who have achieved similar levels of fame, but the younger one is just so much more respected, at least as an actor, than the sibling whose work gave him the chance. Ben Affleck was appearing on screen for seven years before his younger brother Casey had his first role, and though it would be difficult to say that Casey has eclipsed him in terms of fame -- that's surely not the case -- Casey is far more lauded than his older brother as an actor. And though Ben has to be happy with all he's accomplished both in front of and behind the camera -- don't forget that a film he directed won best picture -- you know he wanted Casey's accolades as a performer, which include his own statue for best actor. Ben may have actually won this one, at least in the short term, as the #metoo related accusations against Casey have relegated him to less prominent roles in recent years, despite his evident ability. He's a bit of a James Franco in that way. (Though it hasn't stopped him from appearing in two of my #1 movies in the last decade.)

If this were the sort of post where I just kept on listing all the examples I could think of, I could probably come up with more. But I think four is a good place to stop for today.

The larger topic to chew on is just what it means for these people who have been eclipsed, for their psyche as actors and for their role as a supportive family member to their sibling. I think specifically here of Dakota Fanning, who was not just a famous face (like the older Culkin and the older Olsens) but actually considered sort of a phenom for her abilities as an actor, more like a Haley Joel Osment than a Culkin or Olsens. (And Osment might be an interesting inclusion in this post if there were any evidence to suggest his younger sister Emily -- the first siblings here to cross gender lines -- had actually eclipsed him in a meaningful way.) I have to think that Dakota feels an especial resentment toward the more talented Elle, because she appears to have done less than just tread water while her sibling swam ahead, if we are looking only at her abilities within the field that made her famous. She appears to have actually lost ground -- or started drowning, if we want to keep our metaphors in the water.

All this said, all the eclipsed siblings listed here are still working in some way. Even the Olsens, who officially retired from acting nearly 15 years ago, are still successful American businesswomen in the fashion industry, not has-beens living in a ramshackle apartment in Reseda, pining away for the fame and glory that once was.

If even someone as dubious as Pamela Anderson can be getting acting accolades from the critical community, don't count out any of these older siblings from one day rising up again and re-surpassing their younger nepo siblings. 

Acting is reacting

I have appreciated the merits of Ayo Edebiri as a performer before, though it was largely in the context of the unique comedic sensibility she brought to movies like Bottoms. (I was going to say "Bottoms and [another movie title], but going back through her IMDB, I'm surprised at how few movies I've actually seen her in. I feel like she's been everywhere lately, and rightly so. To be fair, I have not yet watched any of The Bear.) 

Bernardo Britto's Omni Loop, yet another movie where characters experience the same events over and over again throughout the narrative, showed me definitively what she can do as a dramatic actress, even though it is not a traditional "dramatic" role. 

Of course, dramatic interpretations are possible in movies with heavy genre associations, like the time travel/time loop movie. What I really mean, though, is that her role supporting another good lead turn from Mary-Louise Parker could have been just a cypher who existed purely for plot function. Instead, Edebiri injects it with ten times more nuance than the part requires. Because she is such a good actress, that nuance doesn't call attention to itself. Nuance shouldn't, if accurately described as such.

I suppose there's something of an irony that Edebiri's work did call attention to itself in some way, in that I have chosen to write a post about her during an extremely busy time of my movie watching year, where the posts are stacking up on each other as they await their turn to be my one single post for the day. But we should take notice when a practitioner of the craft does it as well as Edebiri does here, the same way we should notice when a minor league baseball player gets a cup of coffee with the big league team at the end of the season and makes the most of his dozen at-bats. Of course, Edebiri is no minor leaguer -- or won't be for much longer if she ever was.

I started to notice the effectiveness of her technique during a scene that's probably more than halfway through the movie, where Parker's character gets a faraway look in her eyes after something Edebiri's character has said. The director prevents Parker's faraway look from resolving into dialogue for something on the order of five to ten seconds, and during that time, Edebiri changes the micro expressions on her face about a dozen times. Just through her eyes, her eyebrows and some slight scrunching of the facial muscles, Edebiri's Paula indicates multiple things simultaneously: 1) "What the hell is this look in your eyes?" 2) "I'm waiting to receive your next comment." 3) "This is weird, even for you." You'd have to see the scene to fully appreciate it, and I hope you do -- though I suspect you aren't likely to pick this out from the standard level of her technique in all the other scenes, which I was not specifically noticing before this one. 

You better bet I was noticing it from there. There's one moment when Paula gives more of her back story -- this has largely been the story of Parker's Zoya to this point -- and it's a long, unbroken take held on Edebiri's face. Because the things she's telling Zoya are so hard for her, involving admissions she's never made out loud and the dredging up of traumatizing childhood memories, Paula only gets going in fits and starts, her face squinting into little frowns as she has to push the words out of her mouth through sheer force of will. In even describing this the way I am, I probably make it sound like the mechanics of her performance are way too visible. Really, I just want to describe the best I can the instincts that come so easily and so naturally to this actress.

I see lots of good performances in lots of good movies, and Edebiri's is probably not so exceptional in that regard. The reason I'm writing about it is that good movies and good performances remind us of things we already knew but sometimes take for granted. Because of her function in the film, Edebiri's role as an actor is to play off the lead, and that requires a lot of reacting. And once I started noticing the choices Edebiri was making in her reactions, I couldn't take my eyes off her, even when she was not the focal point of the scene -- in fact, especially then.

Maybe it's time for me to finally watch The Bear.

The flaming wreckage of Los Angeles

It's hard to believe I was in Los Angeles less than 96 hours ago. Since then, it is has turned into a
smoking ruin. 

It usually takes a war or a tragic school shooting or something similar for me to break from my normal format and talk about non-movie events on this blog. But Los Angeles is where I lived for 12 years, and it's also the movie capital of the world, so the tie-in isn't even that strained in this case.

I don't know that what I'm writing on Thursday afternoon (Melbourne time) for a Friday morning posting (I only post once per day and I've already posted today) will already have aged into distant memory within a few days -- not because the fires will have stopped, but because what I'm writing about here will be just so much more apocalyptic by that point. Maybe I need to save "The flaming wreckage of Los Angeles" as a post title for a few days from now.

But as of right now, I'm hearing friends in the usually fire-safe San Fernando Valley, where I lived for the majority of those 12 years, talk about how the fire could in theory reach them. A few minutes ago, a friend even said, possibly without hyperbole (though he is sometimes guilty of hyperbole), that it could burn down to Hollywood Boulevard.

Makes my pursuit of finalizing my 2024 film rankings seem pretty piddly by comparison.

At this writing, only five people have died. Five people is of course too many, but given the devastation to buildings (some of them iconic, like the Will Rogers Estate, where I used to hike), it seems like a small number. Thank goodness everyone knows what's going on and few of them are so stubborn as to stay in their homes with their arms wrapped around their armoires. 

But the Los Angeles landscape -- also one of the most likely to be seen in the movies, even when the movies are not set there -- is going to look vastly different after this, with the entire psyche of the region taking a huge hit. 

And even the home I used to live in, and sold two years ago, could theoretically be in danger. 

Stay safe, everyone. Those words mean more today than they usually do.

Preventing the ossification of my top ten

The end of the calendar year does not represent the end of my movie watching from the previous year, as I allow myself until the Oscar nominations are announced (January 17th this year) before finalizing my rankings of movies from that year. But it does have a symbolic value, in that it seems to be the point where I am starting to get very comfortable with my top ten as it is. 

Too comfortable.

Based only on movies I've seen since Christmas, I have already had to kick two movies out of my top ten that I had thought (and hoped) would be there at the end of the year. (I'm not going to tell you what they are, nor the movies that replaced them.) This is not a final placement, of course, as I am still likely to shuffle movies from where I initially placed them in my in-progress list. 

But having this system of placing them as I go means that they are hardening -- ossifying, if you will -- into a certain place of elevated entitlement, before all is said and done. 

And what does this mean for all the contenders I haven't yet watched?

It's a problem. And if I suggested from the title of this post that I knew the answer, well that's not correct.

I'm including the poster for Juror #2 with this post not because it necessarily makes for an example of the problem. It's mostly because I'm writing this post today and this is what I watched last night. 

I'll divulge one spoiler by saying that Juror #2 is not going to make my top ten of 2024. However, I did have the conversation again with myself last night as I was watching it and really liking it. (Reminding myself, speaking of top tens, that the National Board of Review saw it fit to include Clint Eastwood's 117th film as one of their top ten.) 

Especially during the first half, I asked myself "Okay, how can I possibly fit Juror #2 into my top ten?"

Cooler heads prevailed by the end of the movie, and though the movie will get a quite respectable ranking on my list, it won't be in the range of this most august partition of the rankings.

The trouble is, by already knowing quite clearly what it's up against, Juror #2 -- and the approximately ten more movies I will watch before next Friday -- doesn't necessarily get the fair shake it should if it were just being watched in a vacuum.

There is an obvious solution to this, which is not to make a draft of my list at all until a day or two before my ranking deadline. That's what my friend who does this with me does, though his task is herculean compared to what mine would be, as he will rank close to 500 movies this year. And I used to do it, too, though I think only that first or second year. I know for sure I did it in 1996, not having even gotten the idea to rank my movies until the end of the year, but by 1997 I may have already switched to my current system.

I am tempted to try that one year, but I just don't think I can do it. My brain is now too old in this respect to be rewired. If I were watching movies only with a star rating in mind -- which is another thing I can't help -- I might be so accustomed to, addicted to, my usual way of doing things that I would give up the experiment by February, March at the latest.

So the real only solution I can think of is to be honest with myself. To look at the movie currently at #10 and say "Is this movie I just watched better than this?" And if it is, well, I'll do the same thing with movie #9, and so on, until I find the right spot. It's a Flickchart-style dueling method that is informally how I handle this task.

The good news is, great movies make arguments for themselves quite easily. If I love a movie, it should mean I want to elevate it relative to another movie I might not like quite as much. If I can't imagine my top ten without Movie A, it should be even harder to imagine my top ten without Movie B, which I have determined I like better. And if I don't like Movie B better than Movie A, well there's the answer there too.

I guess the answer to this is really that the movie-ranking season is long. I mean, it is as long as it can possibly be, considering that I will start ranking 2025 movies before the end of January. But it's really the endgame I'm talking about here that's long. By the end of the calendar year, I am ready to be done with this and pack it away for the year. In fact, so is my friend I mentioned earlier, who is planning on closing his list a week earlier than I do this year -- and may still get his record of 500 movies.

In short, I guess the system works, or works as well as any system would work. But it doesn't mean it doesn't cause me these quandaries that eat away at me and prompt me to write blog posts about them.

In the end, my top ten list is what I want to present to the world about the movies I loved in the previous year. I can make it do whatever I want it to do, for whatever reason I want it to do it. If I want a movie no one liked to make my top five, because I loved it and I think they're crazy for not loving it, then that is an important part of it for me. If I want to squeeze in a beloved movie that I may not love as much as its most ardent supporters, that's what my #9 and #10 spots might be for -- depending on the year.

Because though the whole list matters -- a list that will be close to, if not more than, 175 movies this year -- we all know there's something special about that top ten. It's the standard all other critics use in sharing their own thoughts about the movie year. And in my own year-end post, each of the top ten titles gets a special write-up from me, just to honor the way it was able to bring movie magic into my heart.

In just eight days, I'll know for sure which movies I'll be writing about in that way for 2024.

And if movies I haven't yet seen, but expect to see -- like A Real Pain, Conclave and A Complete Unknown -- don't end up making my top ten, you'll know that the system doesn't work ... or maybe that I just didn't care for them all that much. 

Understanding editing in 2025

Okay, let's start off with some definitions of our terms here. 

I've been reviewing movies for more than 25 years and considered myself a cinephile for the better part of a decade before that, so I don't want you to think that I don't "understand" editing. I know what's involved in editing, I know what function it serves for the film, and I can quickly and instinctively identify when the craft is done well and when it is done poorly.

What I maybe don't understand as well? What makes editing good enough that it deserves to have an Academy Award bestowed on it, especially since editing can take different forms that impress other editors -- the ones who nominate each other -- for different reasons. 

And so for my monthly series in 2025, I am going to watch 12 films that won the Oscar for best film editing, with a specific focus on the editing and what I believe distinguished it from the rest of the competition that year. (Maybe just generally and not taking into consideration the specific other nominees, but we'll see as we go.) This series will be called Understanding Editing and it will kick off later this month. 

This series will also contain a first for this blog: It'll be my first time doing a series where the films are neither all new to me nor all rewatches. I've done both of those things separately, but this time I figured I'd combine them. So that means I'll watch six movies I've already seen, and six movies I haven't seen. 

I figure this hybrid approach has benefits in terms of the improvement of my appreciation of the craft. Some movies will be movies that are brand new to me, and I can try to see if I notice right away that the editing is superlative. However, then I'll also get to see movies I already know (and love? more on that in a minute), looking at them specifically through the lens of how they were cut together.

And right now I've got another first: The first time I will list all the films I intend to watch before I start watching them. I may have done this in a bi-monthly series before, but not yet in a monthly series.

I'll go chronologically from the early days of the Oscars, alternating between movies I've seen and movies I haven't seen. And here's what it will look like:

January - Lost Horizon (1937) (unseen)
February - The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (seen previously)
March - Sergeant York (1941) (unseen)
April - The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) (seen previously)
May - King Solomon's Mines (1950) (unseen)
June - From Here to Eternity (1953) (seen previously)
July - How the West Was Won (1962) (unseen)
August - The French Connection (1971) (seen previously)
September - The Right Stuff (1983) (unseen)
October - Saving Private Ryan (1998) (seen previously)
November - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) (unseen)
December - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (seen previously)

The only thing I didn't check was whether all these are easily accessible for rental or streaming, so it's possible I'll have to switch out some titles if I can't find them.

The films I haven't seen include some titles I've been meaning to watch for ages (particularly The Right Stuff), while the films I have seen are all films I've seen only once, though they are not all personal favorites. If I selected them it means I thought there was something specifically well known about the editing that I wanted to interrogate, though some of them were more because they fit in chronologically to the schedule and because they were just movies I feel I should have seen multiple times already.

Because the films span almost exactly 75 years of Hollywood history, they will also feature significant changes in what's possible to accomplish via editing and what's considered merely very good functional editing vs. editing that calls attention to itself.

In any case, I'm looking forward to it ... which means the two other ideas I have for year-long series will have to again wait their turn, either for 2026 or for 2027.

Do not expect too much from the start of jet lag

The day we get home from America, usually disembarking the plane well before noon (it was 9:30 this time), is typically a free day in which barely anything is required of you, either physically or intellectually. You are allowed even not to unpack your bag if you don't want to, and as proof of that, at just after 6 a.m. the next morning, my bag is still sitting on our upstairs landing where I reluctantly dragged all 50 pounds of it yesterday. I mean, you at least have to get it out of the front entryway. 

My wife rarely opts for this approach. Her own method of fighting off the effects of jet lag is to do a million little jobs that seem to me like Day 3 or Day 4 jobs, but to each their own. The goal is really not to nap too much (an hour or two at the most) and then go to bed at a normal time (or as close to it as you can manage).

I decided the best way to kill some of that afternoon time was to watch Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Which was clearly expecting too much from myself. 

As you may recall if you read this post, I secured myself a copy of this movie via iTunes in the hopes of watching it on the plane from Boston to San Francisco on December 28th. Because buying it was cheaper than renting it, I now own the movie. 

I had hoped to charge my laptop during the flight in order to sustain enough battery life to watch the 163-minute movie, only maybe 37 minutes of which I could watch without the battery going dead on that four-year-old device. And there was indeed an outlet at my seat, it just didn't bring the charge symbol up on my laptop when I plugged it in. I shut the laptop off right quick, wanting to make sure that if the issue were related to the laptop itself, I'd have enough battery left to give the thing its last rites when I arrived. But of course it charged fine again in California, meaning plane charging was probably only up to snuff for smaller items like phones and tablets.

I made no other attempt to watch DNETMFTEOTW (still love this abbreviation) while in California, and now returning to Australia, suddenly I am down to my final 11 days before my rankings close. That means if I want a window of time to watch the whole thing in one sitting, I'd have to start early one weekday night, carve out some time on a weekend afternoon, or -- lightbulb going off -- watch it right now on the rule-free Return to Australia Day.

The good news was that from starting it at around 5 p.m., in the hope of finishing it before dinner, I was really giving myself the entire rest of the day before I went to bed to watch the whole thing. The bad news was that I required that entire time, meaning a hypothetical viewing of the new Wallace & Gromit movie at night would need to wait for another day. The worse news was that this is not the sort of action-packed, plot-driven movie that provides an effective defense against the body's desire to succumb to sleep, and the even worse news is that it is in Romanian. 

So without doing an in-depth analysis of this film and its merits, let's just say it was probably an even poorer decision to try to watch this while staving off delirium than it was to try to watch RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys starting at nearly 11 p.m. the other night after margaritas. And the outcome was significantly worse. 

From that 5 p.m. start time to when I picked myself up off my garage couch at about 7:30 to start making dinner for my kids, I watched about an hour and 40 minutes of the movie, and very little of it at a high quality of absorption. The first 45 minutes were probably the best, as I also ate a bag of Gardetto's Snack Mix that was intended for the plane but never got eaten. Can't return to my diet on Return to Australia Day. That's definitely a Day 2 job.

Once that snack was gone, I started taking the little ten-minute naps I take when I start watching a movie too late at night. I set a ten-minute timer on my phone and then fall deeply to sleep for a very short amount of time. Each time the timer goes off, I decide whether I can return to the movie or if I need another ten minutes. And of course every time yesterday I needed another ten minutes, though I knew what the goal was so I mostly returned to watching the movie, with the sort of poor quality absorption I mentioned earlier. 

I had indeed already had the nap you are allowed to take, and thank goodness for my job-doing wife, who capped it at two hours for me. I was very disoriented and thought it had only been one hour. But that meant that every little sleep I did now was, in theory, the sort of thing that might wreck my full night's sleep. So I had to fight it even if watching DNETMFTEOTW were not the goal. 

After our dinner and an episode of Futurama, in which my focus shifted to trying to keep my older son from ruining his night's sleep, I returned to the same comfortable couch in the garage to watch the final hour of the movie. A significantly large chunk of this hour is a single shot of a family being interviewed for a workplace safety video. Although I may have taken some of the ten-minute naps in which I pause the movie -- I can't really remember at this point -- I was more likely to just be nodding off, and each time I awoke, being surprised to see that the same shot was still going on. 

At this point, this was just a confirmation that the whole thrust of the movie was not really working for me. The reason I'd tried to find a good window of time to watch this movie, ultimately failing utterly in that regard, is that it shared things in common with two previous #1 movies for me. In length and in featuring a single working woman as its protagonist, the movie reminded me of 2016 #1 Toni Erdmann. In country of origin (and I guess also in length), the film reminded me of 2013 #1 Beyond the Hills. 

DNETMFTEOTW did not, unfortunately, work for me the way those movies did. In an excerpt from his review included in the film's Wikipedia entry, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw describes it as a "freewheeling essay-movie-slash-black-comedy," and indeed that's a good encapsulation. Sometimes a movie with that description would work for me, but in this case it did not.

In the same Wikipedia entry, I noted that the acclaim for the movie is nearly universal, meaning I'm the idiot who didn't love it the way everyone else did. However, I think I would have been that idiot even if I'd watched it wide awake in one uninterrupted sitting, so I'm not beating myself up too much for the jet lag viewing. 

We finish with two more bits of good news. One is that my long nap and my shorter naps did not impact my sleep in the slightest. I slept straight through from 10:30 until I had to relieve myself at about 3 a.m., and then slept through again until I had to relieve myself again at about 5:30. I almost never get up to go to the bathroom once during the night, let alone twice, but the sleep around that was pure and sound.

I guess the second bit of good news is sort of related to the first, which is that the "start" of jet lag referenced in the subject of this post may also be its end. Although it's too early to tell how my body will react to an first entire day back in Australia, and I do still feel the remaining vestiges of yesterday's delirium, the first hurdle of the first night's sleep has been cleared with flying colors, and that's what always worries me the most. Being awake at 2 a.m. with no feelings of realistic hope about getting back to sleep is what I fear the most from jet lag, and if it didn't happen on the first night, it doesn't seem particularly likely that it will start on the second. And hopefully that means that whatever I watch tonight will be watched with greater focus and a greater potential to be satisfying. (Will probably be my first trip to the theater to see one of the new releases I need to fit in before my deadline. Maybe Nosferatu.) 

There's also a piece of good news related to the movie itself. Since I own DNETMFTEOTW, there is every easy opportunity for me to go back and try to watch it again in the future, to see if it works better for me, to see if its long-term reputation can improve for me despite a 2024 ranking that will not be particularly elevated. In the movie, the main character played by Ilina Manolache is herself suffering from sleep deprivation as she works 16-hour days for her job collecting interview subjects for the safety video. Although that should have totally put me on her wavelength yesterday, maybe I'll be more on it when I can see things more clearly.