Knives Out will not save us

This year has been kind of ho-humming along, hasn’t it?

We’re just about two weeks from learning the Golden Globe nominations for 2019, and really, I have no idea what’s going to be nominated. There have been a dearth of 2019 films that have really moved the needle, critically, which may be one of the reasons Parasite has been so overwhelmingly embraced. (Another: It’s really fucking good.)

However, Thanksgiving creates another new opportunity for a wave of prestige pictures to inject some life into the pre-awards seasons buzz.

Alas, I don’t think Knives Out will be one of them.

I got in a surprise viewing of Rian Johnson’s new film Sunday night. In my first excursion to the cinema in nine days, I had expected to have to settle for Ford v. Ferrari, which I do want to see despite now missing my second or third opportunity to see it, depending on how you count those opportunities. But then I noticed that there were random preview screening of Knives Out playing at Cinema Nova, a few days before it is officially released on Thursday. Why wait until Thursday for something I can have tonight?

It’s … fine.

It might be better than that. But it’s not what I would have expected from a “disruptor” like Johnson, who may have cemented that reputation via Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but has been kind of doing that his whole career. In my review (which you can read here), I called that “cleverness.”

Perhaps my disappointment stemmed from realizing I had placed a lot of hopes in this movie to prop up what feels like kind of a sagging movie year. I didn’t think it was going to be a best picture nominee or anything (or that this would even be an expectation for a film like this), but I did hope it would add something kind of incisive and game-changing into the movie year.

Alas, no.

My current top ten has plenty of movies I really like, and some of those peeking in from the outside would be movies I’d be happy to anoint in that hallowed group. But with little more than six weeks until I close my 2019 rankings, I’m not seeing a lot of really tough challengers to those films currently holding those spots.

Will it be Netflix, maybe, that saves us?

There are two big Netflix releases in the next two weeks that have the potential to really shake things up. In fact, I considered seeing both The Irishman and Marriage Story during the aforementioned nine-day theatrical drought, in their limited theatrical runs. Somehow I ended up seeing nothing instead, and will now wait for both to debut on the streaming service.

And while I do have high hopes for both films, I haven’t really loved a Scorsese film since The Departed, and Noah Baumbach is in the midst of a particular string of failures for me. While most people seemed to find him in peak form for The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), I really disliked that film.

So, maybe my current top ten is close to what it will end up being.

The good news is that before the Oscar nominations are announced on January 13^th, which is when I will close my list, I do expect to see 30+ more 2019 films from various pockets of the cinematic landscape. The final viewing push often yields a few surprise entries into my top ten, movies I had no idea I would love, or in some cases, movies I didn’t even know existed for very long before I saw them.

The good news for the rest of you is that most people seem to love Knives Out. It’s got an 85 on Metacritic, with only one mixed review and no negative ones.

Maybe they weren’t looking for Knives Out to save us, I like I was. So maybe if you go in with that mindset, it’ll save you.