Things almost ended in 2020

In 2020, Charlie Kaufman was thinking of ending things -- but so were we all.

That's not to say we were suicidal, but then again, that's only one of the many possible things Kaufman's movie might be about. We may not have been thinking of ending things in that sense, but we were definitely thinking of things ending -- most notably, the lives of people we loved.

For some cinephiles, things did end in 2020. Some lost their lives to COVID, but in less extreme examples, there were other kinds of endings. The end of cinemas as we know them -- predicted though not yet confirmed -- was a major loss for many of us in 2020, something we grappled with more than we may have wanted to admit, when there were so many more significant life-and-death worries, freedom-and-oppression worries, worries about whether we'd have enough money to put food on the table for our families.

But there were also new beginnings.

For whatever else went wrong in 2020, one thing went right: Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. If Donald Trump had won four more years, maybe more of us would have thought about ending things for ourselves -- especially the minorities, both racial and gender, who figured to further suffer under his orange thumb.

But we stood up and collectively voted Trump out, and he could take 2020 with him on his way out the door.

Bad years have a way of birthing good ones, or at least, good things, if you look at it right. I'm not sure if 2021 will be a good year, but I am comforted about the possibility when I compare 2020 to another election year, 2004. That may not have been a bad year for you, but it was for me. I never thought of ending things of course, but it was one of a handful of the worst years of my life. I spent a lot of the year struggling to get back together with an ex-girlfriend, and also hoping John Kerry would unseat George W. Bush. 

Neither of those things happened, but you what did happen in 2004, right near the end? My Boston Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918, and I met my future wife about a week before Christmas. Instead of being one of my worst years, maybe 2004 was one of my best.

I hope the good things that happened at the end of 2020 will bring us out of it strong, so we can start to put it behind us. Today, though, I look back -- back on a year that was pretty darn good at the movies, considering all the obstacles to the movies and to the larger world around them.

Performers of the year

If you had a really good year, you get mentioned below. If you had a really bad year, you get mentioned below. If you had a mixed bag or only made one movie, you don't get mentioned. 

Three who had a good year 

Chadwick Boseman - How could this be a good year for Chadwick Boseman, when it was undoubtedly his worst? I mean, isn't the year you die a pretty terrible year no matter how you slice it? Performance-wise, though, Boseman was at his best in 2020; in among all the many sad things about his early passing at age 43 from colon cancer, it's sad he didn't live to see or hear the praise for his work in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (#17). By some measures this is the best performance he ever gave, as headstrong and ambitious trumpeter Levee Brown, who butts heads with the titular Ma Rainey in search of improving both the quality and appeal of the music they make together. I didn't figure I would give this movie more than grudging respect before I saw it, as movies that are this beholden to their stage roots often don't feel to me like fully realized cinematic entities. But the confined staging of Ma Rainey only enhances its many still-relevant themes, and gives Boseman a hothouse atmosphere to strut his stuff -- both as a very confident character, and an actor with boundless capacity, capable of not one, not two, but three big emotional scenes that explain the character's divisive nature. A posthumous Oscar may be in the offing for Boseman. Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods (#55) was the last film whose praise Boseman lived to see, and it got a ton of it, though not necessarily for Boseman himself. Back in June, we had the luxury of not yet knowing what Boseman had known himself for some time: that he was at death's door. In retrospect, his work as the young soldier who never made it out of Vietnam -- like the actor himself, taken before his time -- assumes a sort of angelic quality, though one grounded by Boseman's always superlative technique. I'm sorry this is the last time I'll be able to honor Boseman in "three who had a good year"; given his merits as an actor, it could have happened a dozen more times.

Dan Stevens - For a long time I have been giving Dan Stevens a hard time for quitting Downton Abbey to pursue a movie career. I considered him a modern-day David Caruso, leaving behind a sure thing in search of something illusory that never transpired. Well it may have taken him eight years, but "never" has finally arrived. Things paid off for Stevens big time in 2020, with a pair of roles that couldn't have been more different. He showed off some heretofore underappreciated comedic chops (and a funny Russian accent) in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (#11), in which he plays a feather-haired singer with an operatic voice, who I might have called macho if he were not hiding the pretty unsecret secret that he's gay. Most scripts would have played up the character's boastfulness and sinister intentions, but Alexander Lemtov is only that guy if you don't look very closely at him. He's actually sort of the secret hero of the piece, bringing out the best in Rachel McAdams' Sigrit while actually not wanting to steal her away from Lars (Will Ferrell), her love interest -- or if so, only to help her out professionally. Then in Dave Franco's The Rental (#27), Stevens shifts gears to play an architect who goes away for the weekend with his wife and another couple, stumbling into dangerous territory when he yields to his attraction to the other woman, who is also his colleague. Her boyfriend is his brother. Yes, it's pretty complicated, which is the most horrifying part of a film that only becomes structured as a traditional horror when it nears its climax. Unlike Lemtov, he does steal somebody's woman, but it's not something he means or wants to do -- he's just beset by human frailties that have the potential to turn an idyllic weekend at a seaside rental property into something truly nightmarish. Stevens may not have become the household name both he and David Caruso wanted, but if he keeps making ensemble turns like these, he'll continue to justify his Downton departure. 

Phylicia Rashad - Phylicia Rashad ends up on this list not because all the movies she made in 2020 were great -- Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace, which I liked well enough when it was the second 2020 movie I saw, did not hold up in my memory and ended up in triple digits at #107. Rather, it's because she had an unusually busy year -- it's rare to see an actor credited with four features in a single year -- and because each movie was better than the one before it. A Fall From Grace was the first of two villainous roles Rashad played this year, a sign in and of itself of an actor's range, and the second one hit significantly higher on my chart at #71, that being the Jason Blum-produced Black Box. Despite his typical financial constraints, which were certainly on display here, the movie ended up being a tight little mind-bending thriller, one in which she plays an experimental doctor of dubious intent. (The fact that she played both those roles without us initially being aware of the character's sinister nature is a real credit to her.) But her year didn't really take off until the end, albeit in two smaller roles. The first was Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (#25), in which she plays a woman reading to her grandchildren the story that is unfolding before us. (There may be more to her character than that, but I won't spoil it, even if you wouldn't likely watch this now until next Christmas.) The second was Soul (#4), in which she voices the main character's mother, around whom several of the film's more emotional moments revolve. I've enjoyed Rashad's work since she came back on my radar in Creed, where I will never forget some of the choices she makes for that character, and I'm glad to finally be able to formally acknowledge her strong overall body of work on this blog. 

Honorable mentions: Alison Brie (The Rental, Promising Young Woman, Horse Girl), Bill Burr (The King of Staten Island, The Mandalorian), Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Trial of the Chicago 7), Keegan-Michael Key (Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, The Prom)

Three who had a bad year

Edgar Ramirez - Edgar Ramirez didn't make bad choices this year; he just made bad movies. In other words, I support his interest in Wasp Network (#133), The Last Days of American Crime (#124) and Resistance (#117), they just turned out to be a lot less than they looked on the page. The biggest disappointment, also the lowest in my year-end rankings, has to be Wasp Network, director Olivier Assayas' latest Carlos-style look behind the scenes of illegal operations involving Latin Americans. Assayas should be really experienced with this sort of thing, yet this narrative is all over the place, jumping around in time periods that all have one thing in common: Nothing that would interest anyone is happening in any of them. Ramirez is one of the boring people, a pilot, to which nothing is happening. Again, not a bad idea to bring a graphic novel about the last heist before criminals become physically unable to commit crimes without their brains being zapped, but The Last Days of American Crime comes up short on the execution, with only Michael Pitt making it at all worthwhile. Poor Ramirez, he was only in Resistance for about five minutes at the beginning, but he still gets dinged for a movie that shows us what Marcel Marceau was up to in his days before miming, when he was a resistance fighter in World War II. It's the best of the three but it's terribly bland, which makes it a good match for Ramirez, an actor whose charisma has never grabbed me, maybe because he doesn't have much to begin with. He could have skated by previously, but in 2020, he made three movies that drew our attention to it. (He's a dead ringer for a friend of mine from certain angles, though, and for this he deserves some love.)

Betty Gilpin - Betty Gilpin is actually one of my favorite acting discoveries of the past few years. There's a scene I regularly think about from the first season of GLOW, where she's a mess of tears and mascara at a party, and she cuts through all the bullshit of the way sadness is usually portrayed by actors and actresses. Unfortunately, her 2020 was just sad. It would be hard to believe Coffee & Kareem (#140) didn't represent her low point of the year, at least in terms of her performance if not the quality of the film, but then along came The Grudge (#146), which nestled itself in my bottom five and never dislodged. First the ridiculous performance. In Coffee & Kareem, she plays a hothead detective whose head just gets hotter the longer the movie runs, so much that she's erupting out of the normal performance range well before the climax. This is a scenery-chewing turn where the character shoots a pistol wildly in the air at least once, but really, I think more like four or five times. Gilpin's work is either the best or the worst thing in the movie; conventionally it would be the latter, but at least Gilpin commits to the absurdity of the whole thing. She gives a far more traditionally modulated performance in The Grudge, where she gets a demerit just for being part of the ensemble of what is a truly terrible horror remake, and horror film in general. I'm not even going to get into what makes The Grudge so lame, in part because I've blocked most of it out, but jumping around in time and between storylines is just one of the film's glaring flaws. Wasting an actress like Gilpin is another. I never ended up seeing her third film of the year, The Hunt, but since it's about hunting people, it was at least tone deaf if not actually bad. (As a matter of fact, the tone deafness got it delayed from its potential 2019 release after a number of high-profile shootings.)

Bobby Cannavale - The third choice on this list came down to two different performers (the other lands in my dishonorable mentions), but I had to go with Bobby Cannavale because it gave me the opportunity to pontificate on how much I hated The Jesus Rolls (#147). Now I have to come clean and say I would have been off to a bad start anyway with this movie because I don't really appreciate the film from which it spun off, The Big Lebowski -- at least not like I'm supposed to appreciate it. But this lethargic, pointless attempt to ride the undeniable charisma of John Turturro as Jesus Quintana just sits there for 85 minutes, making us forget Jesus was even charismatic in the original Coen brothers movie. There's barely any bowling, and the plot, such as it is, takes Turturro and Cannavale on a sort of fits and starts road trip around god knows where, I don't even remember. Just a total waste of time, and the otherwise likeable Cannavale signed off on it. But if it were just that lone bad choice he probably could have stayed shrouded in anonymity in 2020, at least in terms of my year-end jeers. Instead he co-starred in Superintelligence (#129), which seems like a total paycheck grab and not the type of movie the actor has been making for the last 20 years of his career. He's actually very pleasant in this Melissa McCarthy vehicle -- likeable, you might say -- but it's such a nothing role, and really, a nothing movie, that his on-screen persona is not enough for it to seem like a positive for him. All you need to do is look at its #129 ranking and you know it was no good. (Because hey, my opinion is the only one that counts here, right?) 

Dishonorable mentions: Joey King (The Lie, The Kissing Booth 2), Kumail Nanjiani (The Lovebirds, Dolittle), Rob Schneider (The Wrong Missy, Hubie Halloween), Jackie Sandler (The Wrong Missy, Hubie Halloween)

Incidentally, this is the second straight year Nanjiani has made my dishonorable mentions. Better step it up in 2021 Kumail.

The year I regularly disappointed a very nice publicist

I mentioned in my "looking back on 2020" post from two weeks ago that I watched a lot of screeners this year -- and that they mostly weren't very good.

The harder part about that was that the publicist who sent me most of them, a woman I will call Deirdre to preserve her privacy, is very good -- and very nice.

Her company seemed to be in charge of Australian distribution -- whether theatrical or VOD -- of every movie that came out this year that starred people I knew, but where I had otherwise never heard of the movie itself.

And, as you might guess, most of them were not so great. 

The funny thing is, most of them were not so bad either. I gave most of them between a four and a six on ReelGood's ten-point ratings scale. Still, a maximum of six on a ten-point scale can't be what Deirdre was looking for.

It looks even worse when you actually check my year-end rankings. The highest film that Deirdre distributed on my chart was Becky at #29, but I didn't actually review that, giving it over to my horror writer to write up his thoughts -- not because I couldn't have reviewed it (I'd watched it about two months earlier through U.S. iTunes), but because I was really busy the week it finally hit Australian theaters. There was a similar situation for The Assistant, a strong #35 for me, which I don't totally count because I did not actually get a screener from her for this -- I already had it rented from U.S. iTunes since it came out much later in the year in Australia. So the eight I gave the film was likely much appreciated, but I would have reviewed the film whether she brought it to my attention or not.

I did give an eight to Les Miserables (#32), which was also from her company. So that was the one time I really came through for her, a movie she steered my way that got a high rating from me. Still, I already knew about that one because it was the film that earned France's spot among the 2019 Oscar nominations instead of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I likely would have sought that one out on my own as well. 

After that you have to go all the way down to 23 Walks at #85 to find the next movie on my year-end list that I felt positively about, and this was a romance about senior dog lovers -- not something I expected to like at all. You can just keep following the list down from there: Burden (#106), Dreambuilders (#108), Spree (#112), The Secrets We Keep (#115), Dogs Don't Wear Pants (#116), Resistance (#117), On the Rocks (#128), A Christmas Gift from Bob (#135) and Endings, Beginnings (#138). 

Deirdre should at least be relieved that none of her films made my bottom ten.

Not having ever had a "relationship" with a publicist before, I find it interesting how you develop familiarity with them just from an email exchange every couple weeks, and subsequently feel bad about dissing their movies. I mean, they have to know that this is the game, that you can't expect critics to love or even like the movies you send to them. But you, as the receiver of these screeners, also hope things will even out over time, and that you can legitimately like a movie they send rather than just throwing them a bone by giving them a five when the movie might really deserve a four.

Of course, our site actually did hand out an eight to three of the movies she was promoting, so I guess I needn't beat myself up about this any further.

It occurs to me that if you were so inclined, you could piece together who this distributor is based on the titles I've mentioned. Oh well. I can't always protect the innocent on this site. And anyway, I've told you how great I think Deirdre is. She's a feather in this distributor's cap, even if some of the movies it distributed in 2020 were not.

A documentary bounty

On the strength of a good year for documentaries last year, I chose to delve into the history of classic documentaries as my monthly viewing series in 2020. Then 2020 was an even better year for documentaries. 

Three documentaries -- Disclosure (#5), Feels Good Man (#6) and Time (#8) -- made my top ten of the year, and the 2020 documentary that may have been the most astonishing achievement, My Octopus Teacher, finished just outside the top ten at #12. If I'd thought about it just a little more after the fact, or if I'd not seen a couple great movies near the end of my viewing year that displaced it, it could have easily been the fourth documentary in my top ten.

I don't know if I've ever had more than one documentary in my top ten before now. A quick stroll through the 25-year history of my year-end lists disproves this, but it's only happened once, when both The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and Sicko made the cut in 2007. Before now, only 11 documentaries total had made my top ten since 1996, which includes droughts without any from 1997 to 2001 and 2014 to 2018. 

Whether this is a sign of things to come, or just a pandemic blip that was related to the content available this year, remains to be seen. 

Music moment of the year

Of all the things that might have made me cry in 2020, and for all the possible reasons, I never expected a Will Ferrell comedy to be one of them. But that's what happened during the emotional, not to mention chronological, centerpiece of Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.

At about the halfway point of the movie, there's a break from the story designed for little other reason than to celebrate the contest itself. What it also celebrated was diversity, in a way that just walloped me.

Sigrit (Rachel McAdams) and Lars (Ferrell) are attending a party at the Scottish mansion owned by Lemtov (Dan Stevens), and a buzz starts to ripple through the crowd. It's the start of a "song-along," which we soon realize is a large improvisational group song where anyone present is invited to join in. And join in they do.

As the mash-up morphs from Cher's "Believe" to Madonna's "Ray of Light" to ABBA's "Waterloo" to Celine Dion's "Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi" to Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling," former real-life Eurovision contestants, including some winners, come out of the woodwork to join the cast we've already been introduced to. In fact, they do most of the heavy lifting while our cast are supporting players for this one scene.

Not only is this just an exquisite amalgam of joyous popular music, but the people singing it are their own exquisite amalgam. The song is kicked off by a Black contestant, Swede Jon Lundvik, as a promising start. But as things progress, two gender fluid singers, France's Bilal Hassani and the bearded Conchita Wurst from Ukraine, join in. Before all is said and done, they'll hand off to Netta, the Israeli 2018 winner, whose face and body size defy the very norms of pop stardom. 

As the camera swirls around capturing all of this, I'm filled with chills that eventually have no other way to exit my body than through my tear ducts. I was just overwhelmed by the way a popular movie wholeheartedly embraced people of all shapes and sizes and colors and gender identities, reminded in that same moment that it's still such a rarity. Director David Dobkin et al had no way of knowing we would need it so much in late June of 2020, but this was an ode to diversity that many of us clung to for dear life, a symbolic reason to hope in a year full of so much pain.

Now, not for a moment do I believe something like this song-along would actually be possible. As much as I believe musicians are capable of great improvisation, there's no way two dozen performers could sprout up and take each others' leads on a perfect flowing mash-up of great songs, which even features a violinist at one point. It's about as plausible as a sudden song and dance number in an MGM musical.

But I don't watch movies for plausibility. I watch them to be transported into a stratosphere of the possibilities of the human spirit, and that's what the Eurovision Song Contest song-along did for me. 

Ten great non-2020 movies

Every year in this post I like to give a shout out to movies I discovered and loved that weren't released in the year just completed. This is the ten best of those, in alphabetical order:

Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch) - The black and white Jarmusch western that everyone loves and that has evaded me for years has no longer evaded me. And I love it too. 

Dreams (1990, Akira Kurosawa) - I was particularly glad I finished what I started here, as this is as elegiac and meditative and beautiful as it gets. Kurosawa never lost that touch, even in his sixth decade of making movies.

For All Mankind (1989, Al Reinert) - The final movie in Audient Authentic really put the capper on a series that saw three films make this ten best list. The sky was the limit for this compilation of footage from all the Apollo missions that went to the moon.

Gimme Shelter (1970, Albert & David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin) - I'm not a particular Stones fan, but the way these filmmakers moved in and out of their subject matter, a cross between a snake and a fly on the wall, is music non-fiction filmmaking at its very best.

Jezebel (1938, William Wyler) - I'm not sure why this Bette Davis vehicle stuck with me so much, but its pandemic setting likely put it over the top for me. It's like Gone With the Wind with yellow fever. 

Look Who's Back (2015, David Wnendt) - This satirical German comedy about Hitler waking up in present day and rising to power again knocked my socks off, even though I saw it months before I knew how sadly #2020 its themes would be. 

Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov) - Some person whose opinion I trust once told me how incredibly boring this was. Yeah, I suppose it is boring if you disregard all the sights, all the movement, all the revolutionary camera setups and all the groundbreaking editing innovations. 

Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson) - Informally the movie I was most embarrassed about never having seen, Mary Poppins entered my watched list in glorious fashion this past July, when I saw it in actual cinema, just before everything closed for our second wave of the virus. Classic sights and songs. 

Pride & Prejudice (2005, Joe Wright) - I finally read Jane Austen's book just so I could watch this movie for a viewing challenge. Both experiences were exceedingly rich and joyous.

Waves (2019, Trey Edward Schults) - The most recent great Florida film, seen through the eyes of the upwardly mobile Black middle class. Its colors are as searing as its themes and emotions. 

2020 by the numbers

In past "by the numbers" sections, I have broken down movies seen for the first time in theaters vs. movies seen for the first time on DVD/streaming. It's not so simple as that anymore, especially since I didn't watch a single new movie on DVD this year.
Here is the breakdown of what I did watch by source - Netflix (47), iTunes rental (35), theater (21), screener (15), Amazon Prime (12), MIFF (10), Stan (4), Apple TV+ (3), Disney+ (2).
Movies by star rating - 5 stars (2), 4.5 stars (17), 4 stars (26), 3.5 stars (36), 3 stars (29), 2.5 stars (15), 2 stars (9), 1.5 stars (6), 1 star (7), 0.5 stars (2)
Percentage of films given at least three stars, indicating a postive rating - 74%
Total new movies watched in the calendar year - 276
Total rewatches - 81
2020 movies watched more than once - 3 (I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Antebellum)

Five amazing things in 2020 movies

1) That shot in The Vast of Night. If you saw it, you know the one I'm talking about. It's a steadicam shot that goes from handheld to car to drone to pulley system to helicopter, or so it seems, not necessarily in that order. It's as out of this world as the subject matter of the film.

2) The entirety of My Octopus Teacher. How this guy got so much footage of what is apparently the same octopus as it lives and bonds with him and fights for its life, all while having sufficient breath to keep the camera running, I may never understand. 

3) That shot of the line of police in True History of the Kelly Gang, appearing like a wall of terminator robots shining their lights on the gang below, in the perfect encapsulation of this film's memorable out-of-time aesthetic. 

4) The use of the mask in Possessor. Probably the scariest horror moment of the year, in a film that was otherwise too disjointed and oddly structured to be truly satisfying. 

5) The opening "Themyscira Olympics" sequence in Wonder Woman 1984. The movie may not have been very good, but I'll always have that. 

Another name for ...

Palm Springs is ... Love Wedding Repeat
#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump is ... The Burnt Orange Heresy
Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics is ... Horse Girl
Another Round is ... Uncorked
The Trouble With Being Born is ... How to Build a Girl
Capone is ... Fatman
Enola Holmes is ... Promising Young Woman
Blow the Man Down is ... Swallow
Rebecca is ... Becky

And finishing with ...

Quick hits

This section usually has a bunch of stuff related to the Oscar nominations. Obviously we can't do that this year. Let's see how we go.

Highest ranked film I first saw on streaming - I'm Thinking of Ending Things (#1)
Highest ranked film I first saw in the theater - The Furnace (#21)
Director who won me back - Judd Apatow (The King of Staten Island) 
Director who lost me - Sofia Coppola (On the Rocks)
Breakout actress - Jessie Buckley (I'm Thinking of Ending Things)
Breakout actress honorable mention - Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm)
Breakout actor - Pete Davidson (The King of Staten Island)
Breakout actor honorable mention - Maciej Musialowski (The Hater) 
Most unexpected performance - Kevin James as a Neo-Nazi (Becky)
Most expected performance - David Spade as a sarcastic dweeb (The Wrong Missy)
Movie I should have loved but didn't - Wolfwalkers (#102)
Movie I shouldn't have loved but did - Bill & Ted Face the Music (#19)
Best Netflix movie - I'm Thinking of Ending Things (#1)
Worst Netflix movie - Hubie Halloween (#149)
Movie that got better the more I thought about it - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (#17)
Movie that got worse the more I thought about it - Mank (#39)
Most overrated by critics - Nomadland (#82)
Most underrated by critics - Antebellum (#24)
Best sequel - Bill & Ted Face the Music (#19)
Worst sequel - The Kissing Booth 2 (#136)
Dumbest smart movie - Superintelligence (#129)
Smartest dumb movie - Bill & Ted Face the Music (#19)
Best use of Tom Holland - Onward (#9)
Worst use of Tom Holland - The Devil All the Time (#142)
Best colorful movie about music - Eurovision Song Contest (#11)
Worst colorful movie about music - Trolls World Tour (#121)
Most prolific - Jason Blum (Black Box, Evil Eye, The Lie, Nocturne)
Least prolific - Marvel ( ... )
Best practical jokes - Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (#23)
Worst practical jokes - Impractical Jokers: The Movie (#141)
Most #2020 movie - The Platform (#10)
Movie that most should have come out five years ago - The Social Dilemma (#103)
Movie that most should have come out 25 years ago - Hubie Halloween (#149)

Ten thousand words later you can take a rest. 

I'll be back tomorrow with a final 2020 wrap-up post, my annual portmanteaus post, a favorite of yours and mine. (Or at least mine.)