Blaxploitaudient: Shaft

This is the first in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation films I haven't seen.

I'm seeing the name of this series in the subject of a post for the first time, and I don't love it. But, I feel like I've committed to it, and hey, it's only 12 months, ha ha. 

Actually, the series title is appropriate because this is a blog that likes portmanteaus. You know that. "Blaxploitation" is already a portmanteau of "black" and "exploitation," and this just adds a third segment to the portmanteau. If two is good, three is even better.

When I chose Shaft for the debut of Blaxploitaudient, though, I didn't know it was also going to be a Richard Roundtree Memorial Viewing.

When I'm watching movies, I'm not on my phone, but I do sometimes like to look up the ages of the actors. It's a little game. I guess how old they are and I see how close I am to being right. The number of times I am dead on is pretty remarkable. 

When Shaft started, I guessed that Richard Roundtree was 84. It turns out, I was off by three years -- but also, he died three months ago at age 81.

It was news I missed at the time. I'm not sure I would have done anything on the blog to note his passing. Shaft is easily his most prominent work, and I hadn't seen it until Monday night. I wasn't likely going to write an in memoriam piece for his bunch of small supporting roles in features ranging from Brick to Se7en to Boat Trip. But I did always enjoy his presence, so I would have felt sorrow on October 24th, hearing he had passed from pancreatic cancer. Instead, I feel sorrow now.

The viewing of Shaft allowed me to appreciate where it all began for Roundtree, on the day I learned it had all ended for him.

Gordon Parks knew what he was doing when he cast Roundtree as John Shaft. The charisma radiates off the screen, and that's only partly because Isaac Hayes' iconic theme song has done some of the work to make the man larger than life.

That opening, with the theme song, was indeed my favorite part of the movie, just because that song is so great. But this is a pretty sturdy film overall, perhaps not quite what I was expecting in terms of size and scope -- but that's because Shaft wasn't conceived as some game changer, at least I don't think it was. Obviously a huge hit, it has come to achieve significant prominence in our culture over the years, such that it has already been remade twice (both times starring Samuel L. Jackson). However, at its core, this is a low-budget film from the early 1970s, and sometimes it shows.

For example, there's at least one exterior scene where the sound is really bad. I guess they decided to mic it up live rather than doing dubbing in post, and while I do appreciate the greater seamlessness of that choice, the dialogue in that scene sounds tinny and far away. 

But is this a substantive criticism of Shaft? No it is not. And I make it only because it helped remind me just what sort of underdogs these films were.

This is a pretty tight narrative by the loose standards of movies about private eyes. With only very few small tangents, the film deals with Shaft's case to find the kidnapped daughter of a mover and shaker in the Harlem criminal scene, with the great name of Bumpy. (That's Moses Gunn.) The police are also hip to things related to the case, though because of Bumpy's status in the criminal underworld, he can't formally go through them. That's why he has Shaft.

It occurred to me that this was an interesting watch in the wake of my viewing of Charlie's Country last week, which I wrote about in my last post. Shaft has a similar relationship to the police that Charlie has in that movie, someone they lean on when it's convenient for them and abuse when they think they can get away with it. Charlie gets the last laugh sometimes in that movie, but Shaft gets the last laugh a lot more here -- as that is literally how the movie ends, on his laughter after hanging up a pay phone on the detective who is his most frequent contact on that side of the law. 

And so it is worth transitioning into a discussion of race. What I found clever about Shaft is that race is everpresent without being a constant topic of conversation. With a world more than 50 years less progressive than it is today, clearly Shaft has a significant lack of privilege relative to the white characters. But they aren't all dropping n-words on him left and right, and even the relatively few uses of that word are more about him ("I'm looking for an n-word named John Shaft") then at him ("Hey n-word!"). He understands how to live in this world without making more than a few snide comments here and there, and gives back as good as he gets. He doesn't feel disempowered by this world, which is probably one of the reasons he was such an aspirational figure to the Black culture at large in 1971.

There's some good staging here, too. A couple of shootouts are more than decent, and the film ends on a particularly high note in that regard, as Shaft and the "army" he recruits (for $10,000 a head of Bumpy's money) put together a plan whose details aren't evident until Parks springs them on us in a great minute-long sequence in which it all comes to fruition. A thrilling way to end a very solid movie.

One thing I did notice, though, was that there was a small part of me that figured Shaft was monogamous. "He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman." Indeed we are introduced to "his woman" early on, and though it seems like they are a mutually dedicated pair who challenge each other, Shaft is not faithful to her. Later on in the movie he sleeps with a white woman, one of those few tangents that has no bearing on the narrative that I can see. However, I suppose this just makes him a bit more like James Bond -- who was getting his final (authorized) turn from Sean Connery that same year in Diamonds Are Forever.

Haven't chosen the movie for next month ... though with it being Black History Month, perhaps I need to hold myself to a standard of picking just the right thing, with a little extra empowerment thrown in for good measure. 

A country that should belong to Charlie but doesn't

Since 2022 -- not a long track record, but you gotta start somewhere -- I have had a tradition of watching a movie featuring indigenous Australians on Australia Day, which remains January 26th despite the increasing heat that has been placed on this Euro-centric holiday.

January 26th was the day the First Fleet arrived in 1788. For many white Australians and immigrants from some countries who want to bask in the glow of white Australians, this is cause for celebration, because otherwise they wouldn't be here. For many indigenous Australians, it is a painful reminder of a history of death and marginalization that began that day. They call it Invasion Day -- because otherwise those others wouldn't be here.

The awareness of the hurtful associations of the day have grown to the point where this year, I was given the option of taking another day of my choosing as the paid holiday. I took January 26th because it worked best with my family's plans and because I don't really feel like I, as BOTH a white Australian (resident, anyway) AND an immigrant from another country, really have the right to make any sort of gesture of protest on this front.

My gesture of protest, I suppose, is showing some random numbers cruncher out there that I am watching a movie about indigenous Australians on Australian Day.

In fact, this would have been one of my final days to easily watch Charlie's Country, Rolf de Heer's 2013 film, since it's leaving Netflix on January 31st, and I'm not finding it available any other places. It follows Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) in 2022 and Stephen Johnson's High Ground (2020) in 2023. 

The viewing felt even more pregnant with meaning in 2024, since it came approximately three months after the failure of a national referendum regarding indigenous Australians. It was a campaign my wife worked on tirelessly, and even though I can't vote in Australia, I volunteered a few hours on it as well. The idea was largely symbolic. First of all, the idea was to recognize in the constitution that indigenous peoples were the first Australians. Second was to create a group called The Voice, which would be a panel of indigenous Australians who would advise the Australian government on matters relating to indigenous people. The government did not have to heed this advice; it just had to hear it. Well, even that was too much. The Yes position lost to the No position, rather handily, as a bunch of racist Australians all worried this would mean an indigenous person was going to come kick them out of their house. (I'm sure some people felt they had more nuanced and justifiable reasons for voting no, but that's not something I feel like acknowledging today. The truth is, the prime minister may have pushed this referendum through too quickly, with the average Australian not having enough time or benefitting from enough of a public awareness campaign to understand what it would mean for them to vote yes.)

I'm not sure I could have found a movie that more perfectly encapsulated the themes of rage and sorrow associated with Invasion Day than Charlie's Country, especially the year after the failure of this referendum. To boot, it stars indigenous acting treasure David Gulpilil, who we lost in 2021 -- and who actually starred in Walkabout 42 years before this, when he was only a teenager. 

Gulpilil plays Charlie, a well-known figure in a Northern Territory community outside Darwin. Charlie is generous with the money he receives through government assistance, leaving quantities of bills in front of certain people who need them, which seems to be such a regular occurrence that they don't even really gesture to thank him for it. He's also a use to the local police, whom he helps track suspects -- though in the one example we see in the movie, it's because he's actually an associate of the low-level drug dealers the police are seeking, so he knows exactly where they went. Charlie and his friend get a laugh out of that one.

No, Charlie isn't a traitor to friends like these drug dealers, because they aren't really his friends. They're just another pair of white people who play nice with Charlie because they want something from him, like the police. Besides, they charged too much for their weed.

It's taken a life's accumulation to get to this point, but in his 50s -- Gulpilil himself was almost 60 when the film was made -- Charlie is feeling the need for a mini rebellion against these whites who have moved into his community, laid claim to Aboriginal land, and trusted that he'd always be a good doggie. There are a couple incidents that have pushed him over the top. For one, the police confiscate the guns he and his friend used to hunt -- Charlie's is an illegally modified shotgun, but either gun comes without a license, and the "friendly" local police see it as an opportunity to remind Charlie who's boss. When Charlie then makes a spear to hunt, they consider that a "dangerous weapon" and take that too. 

Things start to escalate from there, but because Charlie's Country exists within the realm of realism, they don't need to spill over into melodrama to put across the point that Charlie has had enough, and that even a mini rebellion is enough to put him in his place for a lot longer than the slap on the wrist he got for the modified shotgun.

One of the things this film tackles is the thing whites brought to Australia beyond the toxic nature of their own presence: alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Alcohol has destroyed the lives of indigenous peoples, both in Australia and elsewhere in the world (like the United States), such that in some parts of Australia, individual indigenous peoples are banned from the purchase of alcohol, while in some whole large regions, specifically in the Northern Territory, it is just not made available for sale at all -- even to tourists. A glass of wine at dinner might be available in certain scenarios, but you can't go to the bottle shop, as they call it here, and buy any, due to the deleterious effects it has had on the whole community. We know this because we visited the NT in 2018 and had an effectively dry holiday. We're going there again in April. 

Charlie is actually a bit of a rarity in that he is allowed to buy alcohol, but he is not allowed to share it with others or else he may be subject to a fine or jailing. I'm not really sure how this all works, but the implication is that all indigenous adults start with a clean slate, and then an alcohol-related citation from the police causes you to become banned -- and that most indigenous adults are banned, which is a real commentary on just how pervasive this. Without spoiling the movie, it's around this topic that things really blow up for Charlie eventually.

But then you can't discount the influence of tobacco or drugs either. Although marijuana is the only drug shown here and though it plays a minor role in the proceedings, tobacco has had a major impact on Charlie's life, in that smoking has caused him to have lung issues, possibly even lung cancer, though we aren't sure of the severity of it. 

Gulpilil is magnificent here, and as I was watching this movie, I was thinking on the recent deaths of both Gulpilil and Jack Charles (known affectionately as Uncle Jack Charles), and how it has left a void in Australia's indigenous acting icons space. Probably the most recognizable indigenous actor now is Baykali Ganambarr, who starred in Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, though there are also indigenous actors who are less instantly recognizable as such because they have enough white heritage to blur the tools we use for making such identifications.

In an era of legitimate questions about who is allowed to tell whose story, Rolf de Heer continues to position himself as a credible advocate for indigenous people, who tells their story from as close to their perspective as possible while still being white himself. De Heer has been establishing his bonafides his whole career. In 2002 he directed possibly my favorite film with indigenous subject matter, The Tracker, in which Gulpilil plays the title character. A few years later he made Ten Canoes, which follows indigenous characters living in the traditional ways in the NT. Then in 2022, I only just learned, there was The Survival of Kindness, which also has indigenous subject matter -- and could be a good candidate for an Australia Day viewing next year.

I could probably continue to offer insight on this great movie, but I've been bombarding you with content in my end of year posts, so I just want to finish with one interesting connection that Charlie's Country has to my own life.

Even though Charlie is beloved among his companions and is, generally speaking, accorded a certain respect that other "blackfellas" do not get, we see him longing for his glory days. Specifically, he thinks back to when he danced for the queen at the opening of the Sydney Opera House. And though this does not exactly mirror Gulpilil's personal experience, Gulpilil did dance at the Opera House a year after the opening in 1974.

You may remember, because I've had occasion to talk about it recently, that I was also there on the day the Sydney Opera House was dedicated by the queen, in spirit anyway -- because I was being born that day in Boston.

For a person who doesn't belong in Australia at all, here only by marriage, that made me feel included not only in the way most white Australians feel on Australia Day, but even in the experience of one Black Australian. It's a little something I can say I share with Charlie, and he might even agree.

Horror's long and steady road to #1

One reason I was actively looking for some movie to supplant Skinamarink as my #1 of 2023 was a bias against horror movies.

Not a bias against what I wish horror was. A bias against the low ceiling of what horror, in my own personal experience, has any realistic potential of being. 

Don't confuse what I'm saying. I love horror. In fact, if you told me that a movie was guaranteed to scare me to death -- I guess not literally -- I would probably stop what I'm writing mid-sentence and go watch it. I'd be so excited to feel that rare feeling of being utterly chilled by something -- possibly the rarest feeling we get at the movies -- that I wouldn't want to wait a moment longer.

(Okay, maybe until it was dark out.)

Because that so rarely happens, I never imagined horror would have any chance to finish at the top of the heap in any year, what with at least 150 other movies competing for that same spot. 

In fact, any genre film has a tough row to hoe in that regard. Because you are making such a statement with a #1 movie, usually it has to tick a lot of different boxes to get there. Most of my #1s have been a mixture of a couple genres, or in a genre that is not consider a genre, in the sense of our term "genre film." For example, a drama is not a genre film. A horror movie is. 

But maybe I should have expected horror to make this big leap at some point, because it's gotten close in the past. Today, in my final piece about 2023 movies (I think), as I reflect on possibly my unlikeliest #1 movie of all time, I want to consider just how close.

So I'm going to go back all the way to 1996, when this whole thing started, to see what my highest-ranked horror movie was each year, and whether it had any realistic chance of scaling the heights that Skinamarink just scaled. I'll also tell you how many horror movies I ranked each year, just to get a sense of how my relationship with horror has changed over the years.

Also: For a movie to count as horror, IMDB has to include horror as one of the maximum three genres that are listed for each movie. 

1996 - The Craft (#33 out of 43, 22%) - And we're off to an inauspicious start. The Craft wasn't only the highest horror movie I ranked that year, it was the only horror movie I ranked -- and I think it was really more of a coming-of-age movie than a horror movie. But horror is indeed the third genre listed on IMDB after "drama" and "fantasy." This gives you an indication of the fact that I didn't, at first, flock to horror. It took time and I had to develop my skills. 1 horror movie seen (2% of total). 

1997 - Scream 2 (#22 out of 39, 44%) - Getting slightly better, up to three horror movies for the year. The explanation why the original Scream did not appear in my 1996 rankings is that I didn't see it until after my ranking deadline, which must have meant I saw Scream 2 fairly soon after that. And then didn't see another Scream movie until two years ago when they rebooted it. 3 horror movies seen (8% of total).

1998 - None. Wow. Were horror movies that bad or was I just that unlikely to seek them out? For the record, that's 58 movies without a single horror movie. 0 horror movies seen (0% of total).

1999 - The Blair Witch Project (#8 out of 57, 86%). Was this the moment it was all unlocked for me? First top ten horror, and still one of my all-time most memorable trips to the movie theater. I suspect that if I had had more courage, I would have ranked this higher. Sleepy Hollow and The Sixth Sense also made my top 20 at 12th and 14th, respectively, though today The Sixth Sense would be top ranked out of those three. Oddly, they were the only three. 3 horror movies seen (5% of total).

2000 - American Psycho (#16 out of 58, 72%). I will have to accept IMDB's definition of this as a horror movie. It's a horror movie that crosses several genres if it's a horror movie at all, which is what I said earlier in this piece I might need for a #1. Though this was not all that close to being #1. (Interestingly, The Cell came one spot later, and today it is close to the top of all my horror rankings on Flickchart -- though again this straddles several genres.)  4 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2001 - From Hell (#35 out of 73, 48%). I was getting desperate for my first horror so I checked IMDB and yes, they think this is horror. Fine. But I think I'm going in the wrong direction here. Only three and one of them is Scary Movie 2. So much for 1999 unlocking things. 3 horror movies seen (4% of total).

2002 - Resident Evil (#59 out of 80, 26%). I'm not sure what to make of all this. 1 horror movie seen (1% of total).

Maybe I should have started this exercise more recently.

I'll keep plugging away.

2003 - 28 Days Later (#16 out of 58, 72%). Rebounding a little bit here with a sigh of relief. 4 horror movies seen (7% of total). 

2004 - Shaun of the Dead (#17 out of 59, 71%). A classic that would be higher today compared with the rest of these movies. In fact, when I reranked them according to my current rankings on Flickchart in this post, it was my 7th overall from 2004. 3 horror movies seen (5% of total).

2005 - Constantine (#43 out of 73, 42%). Why did I start this exercise again? At least the total is getting decent ... -ish. 5 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2006 - Night Watch (#17 out of 77, 78%). This stylish Russian vampire movie from Timur Bekmambetov has the makings of a contender, but when I tried to watch it a few years ago without the stylized subtitles being available, I found myself stopped before the movie was even two minutes old. Most total horror so far and highest percent of total. 6 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2007 - I Am Legend (#10 out of 82, 88%). Second top ten, even if horror is only the third genre listed for this on IMDB and certainly not the first that comes to mind for me. Last place this year was also a horror (Captivity). Hey, look at that total grow! 8 horror movies seen (10% of total). 

2008 - Let the Right One In (#4 out of 87, 95%). Most credible bid yet and a movie I still cherish 15 years later. Cloverfield was also in my top ten and that is also considered a horror. Plus: double digits! 10 horror movies seen (11% of total). 

2009 - Zombieland (#14 out of 113, 88%). It's mostly comedy but there's some good horror. Finally over 100 movies watched (never to drop back below), nine of which were horror. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2010 - The Human Centipede (#14 out of 109, 87%). Still love it. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2011 - Red State (#2 out of 121, 98%). Well this is the closest any movie has gotten, I can already tell you that without doing the other 11 years. Horror may be a stretch as a genre for this, but I wouldn't have looked it up if I hadn't thought it was a possibility. Take Shelter at #3, tied for the second best bid, is also a bit of a stretch as a horror. And Tucker and Dale vs. Evil at #10 made three in my top ten. I'm sensing a real change here ... 8 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2012 - The Cabin in the Woods (#17 out of 119, 86%). It's encouraging how well some of these choices hold up, even if they were not realistic contenders for the top spot. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2013 - Berberian Sound Studio (#5 out of 128, 96%). Another really credible run, especially by percentage, but I can tell you this wouldn't have had made it that year. Highest total yet by number. 11 horror movies seen (9% of total).

2014 - Enemy (#9 out of 136, 93%). To think this finished one ahead of Under the Skin, which was my #10 of the whole decade five years later. Still a pretty good movie I think. Big jump forward in numbers! 15 horror movies seen (11% of total).

2016 - The Nightmare (#18 out of 143, 87%). I can say for certain that this is my highest ranked horror documentary ever -- and possibly the only one I've ever seen. It's actually scary! 15 horror movies seen (10% of total).

2017 - The Blackcoat's Daughter (#3 out of 145, 98%). This is the title I really think of when I think of horror movies that almost made it. It got five stars and was my highest ranked horror movie of the whole decade, coming in at #8 overall. Not too shabby. Another new record in quantity and percentage. (For a moment I thought my #1, A Ghost Story, might have been classified as a horror, blowing the whole theme of this post out of the water. Fortunately, its three genres are drama, fantasy and mystery.) 18 horror movies seen (12% of total).

2018 - Climax (#5 out of 149, 97%). It's certainly horrifying, I just wasn't sure IMDB would classify it as such. Another 18 here. 18 horror movies seen (12% of total).

2019 - Vivarium (#3 out of 146, 98%). Another movie with multiple genres, Vivarium certainly has some horror images you can't get out of your head. As with The Blackcoat's Daughter, I gave this five stars -- the only two on this list that got that many, other than Skinamarink. And blowing past 20 in easily the highest by total number and by percentage. 23 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2020 - The Platform (#10 out of 149, 93%). That's a top ten movie in four straight years now. With more to come I think. 17 horror movies seen (11% of total). 

2021 - Saint Maud (#8 out of 170, 95%). I've already watched this again and am thinking of it as an early contender for my top 25 of the decade. That's five in a row. And approaching 30 total horrors ranked, though not quite a record percentage. 28 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2022 - Nope (#14 out of 175, 92%). Not quite a sixth straight top ten for horror, but a very respectable showing nonetheless. All year I have been desperate to show this to my wife and she's never in the mood. 28 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2023 - Skinamarink (#1 out of 168, 100%). And we finally get there. But let's still see how many total I saw: 23 horror movies seen (14% of total). 

So what does all this reader unfriendly numbers crunching tell us?

Well it shows how far I've come as a horror fan in 27 years. Back from my meager beginnings when I saw one or zero horror movies a year, and the top one could be ranked as low as 59th with as low as a 26th percentile in that year's rankings, now it's been more than a decade since I've ranked fewer than 15 horror movies, and nearly 20 years since my top-ranked horror movie was outside my top 20. I've ranked as many as 28 horror movies in a single year, representing as high as 16% of my total viewings.

Of course, part of this can be explained by my huge increase in the number of movies I've ranked over the years, with as few as 39 back in the 1990s to as high as 175 in 2022. While that has a clear impact on the total number of horror movies ranked, you can't argue with the great equalizer: the percentile of the top-ranked horror movie out of all the movies ranked that year. While only one top finisher in the 1990s exceeded the 50th percentile (though other lower movies also exceeded it that year), you have to go back to 2016 to find a top horror movie that did not break the 90th percentile of my rankings.

This also includes 12 top ten finishes for horror in those 27 years. Wait, that's only 12 years where the highest ranked horror was a top ten. There were some years where more than one movie classifiable as horror, and as many as three in at least one year, finished in my top ten. So it's actually closer to 20 top ten finishes for horror movies in those 27 years.

Maybe I was too quick to talk about the low ceiling for what horror could possibly accomplish at the beginning of this piece.

All this is to say is that although it was a long time coming, there were definite indicators that this day would eventually arrive.

What genre is next to claim its first #1? Action? (I may already have one of those.) Musical? (Don't think I have one yet.) Torture porn? (Okay now we're getting ridiculous.)

Before I leave you and I leave 2023 behind until it's time to start talking about the Oscars telecast, I did want to give you a final word about Skinamarink in particular -- which functions as a final validation of horror's first #1.

There was another reason why Skinamarink was very unlikely to claim this spot in my 2023 rankings, and it has to do with the mood I was in when I started watching it.

Just a few minutes before I started watching back on June 22nd, I made a very insensitive remark to my wife. I didn't belittle her, I didn't make fun of her, I didn't undermine her or anything like that. But I did make a comment about a sensitive topic that I should have known was timed incorrectly, if there was ever any good timing for it at all. I tried to apologize but she was furious. I knew I had to give her time to recover, and nothing I said would immediately fix it, but the exchange left me shaken.

And then I started watching Skinamarink.

I should have been totally distracted and failed to get on this movie's wavelength, especially with its slow start that arguably never gets any less slow. Instead, I just got sucked into its world and basically had chills going down my spine for 50% of the running time.

You could say that having had an "argument" -- not really an argument in the sense that I said something insensitive and she stormed out of the room -- only put me in a more perfectly vulnerable headspace for Skinamarink. What greater horror can there be than your wife leaving you? (Which would of course be the catastrophist's worry about the worst possible consequences of such an exchange.)

But I don't know if that holds water. I think what's more likely is that thinking about this exchange would prevent me from paying attention to what was happening in the movie, which in this case is not much, so there's not a lot to grab onto -- at least at the start. I'd be rewinding and rewinding and wondering if I weren't just better off giving this a proper chance on another night.

Nope. I sat there rigid with fear, and it left an indelible impression that carried Skinamarink all the way to the top.

2023 in portmanteaus

It's time once again for everyone's favorite Audient post of the year! And by "everyone" I mean "me."

Each year since 2014 I have been smashing together the titles of two movies from the year just completed to make a new movie ... and trying to stop myself from making a picture to go along with each one. Hey, that makes this the tenth annual! 

Here's the milestone anniversary batch:

Are You There God? It's Me, Mario. - An Italian plumber asks for divine assistance when he's called to unplug a toilet clogged with sanitary napkins.  

Talk to M3GAN - When Australian teenagers clasp a disembodied hand and give a special command, they become possessed by a murderous cartwheeling doll who sings Sia songs. 

Paint Hustlers - Bob Ross comes under investigation by the feds when he begins prescribing his paintings of happy trees and bushes as medication for cancer patients. 

Bird Box Barbie - Barbie and Ken finally make it out into the real world, only to immediately commit suicide because they didn't blindfold themselves. 

Maestro Gardener - It's the ultimate twist when noted Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein reveals he has a back full of Neo Nazi tattoos. 

John Wonka - An unkillable hitman finds sanctuary from the assassins chasing him when he's taken in by Oompa Loompas.

Rye Plane - Two charming Londoners walk and talk their way into subduing the mercenaries who have taken hostages from a plane crash. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destinyad - Diana Nyad travels through time to when she was young enough to swim from Cuba to Miami. 

Napoleonka - After a humiliating defeat, Napoleon Bonaparte gets back in the game by selling salt waterloo taffy. 

Poor Thieves - A bard, a barbarian, a paladin and a tiefling druid learn about furious jumping. 

Dumbgeons & Dragons - A bunch of nerds get together to drive up the stock of a games company that specializes in 13-sided dice. 

Fast Lives - Dom Toretto is torn between his family and the family he could have had if he'd never emigrated from Seoul. 

Asterix City - French icons Asterix and Obelix fumble their way into a stargazer convention in the American southwest, explaining they are only illegal aliens, not actual aliens. 

You Hurt My Renfeelings - Dracula's familiar gets depressed after overhearing that his boss doesn't like the way he selects his victims. 

You People Hurt My Feelings - Despondent after her husband confesses to a mutual friend that he doesn't like her book, Julia Louis-Dreyfus turns to making racist microaggressions. 

El Condemeter - After killing everyone on the ship carrying him to England, Dracula goes undercover as a Chilean dictator. 

The Pope's Exortetris - Russell Crowe is called to free the soul of a boy possessed by his obsession with fitting falling blocks into complete rows. 

The Popenheimer - Russell Crowe is called to free the soul of a boy possessed by his obsession with creating a weapon that will blow up the world. 

Polite Society of the Snow - Oh the rugby players still eat each other, but they do it wearing a nice dinner jacket and using a fancy fork. 

Killers of the Rebel Moon - The Motherworld attempts to marry into a farming planet in order to steal its grain rights.

Ninjamarink - Two kids find their house haunted by mask-wearing turtles with katana swords. 

Scream Scenario - Pretty much the second half of Dream Scenario. 

Cocaine Bear is Afraid - You would be too if you'd just ingested several bricks of a white powder that made you act like Robin Williams. 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumay December - Julianne Moore has an affair with a little boy. So little, in fact, that she frequently can't remember where she put him. 

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mission Impossible - Tom Cruise is disinvited from his best friend's bat mitzvah, drives his motorcycle off a cliff in a fit of depression. 

Barbenheiming movies back to relevance in 2023

Films are not going away any time soon.

The greatest example of that may be that my friend Sterling, who does the same year-end ranking exercise that I do, saw a career best 436 movies and yet still had at least a dozen that he considered regrets.

I suppose the other example is Barbenheimer.

I didn't particularly write about this phenomenon on my blog -- twice all told, I think, and they were both within the first few days of the films' simultaneous release. I didn't actually review these movie on ReelGood either, since my most regular contributor handled Oppenheimer, and his partner and her writing partner (both women) reviewed Barbie. (Fortunately for them but unfortunately for me, the Oppenheimer reviewer and the Barbie co-reviewer just had a baby, so I may be handling a significantly higher percentage of reviewing duties in 2024.)

But it does seem like these movies did something even more than what Top Gun: Maverick did in 2022. That phenomenon confirmed something that was probably obvious: a huge blockbuster franchise with one of the world's biggest stars can still sell a lot of tickets. What Barbenheimer did was show that movies that wouldn't necessarily attract this sort of attention on their own can be hyped and packaged in such a way to remind us why we all love going to the movies. The fact that they were both among the year's most universally acclaimed didn't hurt.

The other thing was that Barbenheimer was something new, especially invigorating since cinema is an old format no matter how you gussy it up with new technology -- which may be as much miss as it is hit anyway. (Witness things like 4DX try to catch on, and you'll know that gimmicks can only take you so far.)

It was a canny marketing strategy that recognized these films inherently contradictory nature as a result of their coincidentally planned release dates, and capitalized on that by setting in motion a mild battle of the sexes. Men were supposed to flock to Oppenheimer, women to Barbie. Why not see both and decide for yourself?

People did. Boy did they. Often wearing costumes. 

The interesting thing for me personally, in terms of my list, was that the two movies stuck to each other like the Lego brick stuck to Emmett's back with krazy glue in The Lego Movie. They seemed so close in quality in my mind, with Barbie only enjoying an infinitesimal advantage, that I could never insert another movie in between them as I continued to add bricks to my own building of 2023 rankings. If only going on their individual quality as movies, had they not been paired together in the culture, they might have ended up at least ten spots apart just due to the randomness in how I parse small differences in the qualities of movies. Instead, I was also unable to escape how the Barbenheimer phenomenon played upon my brain.

And as they continue to cross the finish line hand in hand, both earned Oscar nominations for best picture on Tuesday.

The cautionary word about all this, if we try to apply the general optimism to the future outlook of movies, is that the phenomenon is almost certainly not repeatable, at least not at this level. I heard recently that someone tried to do it with the release of two other films in the autumn, one of which was Saw X, though I can't remember the other because Wikipedia does not show anything else released on that date that would make that sort of counterintuitive pairing. Obviously that one didn't work out.

But if you choose to look only at the sense of buzz Barbenheimer created and how it lingered in the culture, you can take that as an openness to other phenomena regarding attending movies in the theater that we may not have even thought of yet. Twenty twenty-three showed us the appetite was there. Now we just need to figure out how to feed it.

Best (and worst) performers of the year

This is the annual section devoted to three people who appeared in multiple movies I liked and no movies I didn't like ... and then the reverse for the ensuing "three who had a bad year" section. So it's problematic and excludes some good candidates on the basis of one outlier, or simply not enough work. And I had a harder time than usual with it this year. So, advanced warning about cheating, have too little diversity, etc. ... it was just one of these years where the people who appeared in a lot of things were mostly all over the place in terms of how their films worked for me. What are you going to do. 

Three who had a good year

Matt Damon - Although I'm still not happy with some of Matt Damon's public gaffes, including the whole bit where he essentially admitted he'd only recently stopped using a hurtful gay slur starting with the word F, I can't deny that he was in two of my favorite movies of 2023, and was an essential component to both. The highest ranked was Air (#19), a true delight from director (and Damon buddy) Ben Affleck, which told twin underdog stories: the best basketball player of all time and the biggest shoe company of all time. That's a joke -- at least Air takes place before either was either -- but it's a testament to Affleck's filmmaking that he actually does put us in these board rooms and back offices at Nike headquarters and make us feel the stakes of it all, and root for an outcome we already know occurred. Damon's pudgy hero Sonny Vaccaro really does feel like a man with it all on the line and also with the sort of likable pluck that really makes you pull for him. Less than ten spots lower on my chart comes Oppenheimer (#26), in which Damon plays a guy we can actually relate to in amongst all the eggheads. Again he uses his easy charm and likability as Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, who is an officer with the Army Corps of Engineers and has to take a lot of what's told to him on faith because he doesn't have the science to know if it's all going to work. He's a great viewer surrogate, as astonished at what he's seeing as we are. Maybe it's the real Damon's gaffes and flaws that make him easier to identify with in that everyman role he does so well -- or maybe it's just that he's a fellow Boston guy like me. 

Florence Pugh - I debated on whether to add Florence Pugh here because a) she only just made this list four years ago in 2019 and b) unlike Damon, she isn't essential to the success of Oppenheimer, in which I thought her supporting role actually sidetracked the main thrust of the narrative. So what am I going to spend the rest of this post writing about? Her work in A Good Person (#6), of course. Pugh took what might have been a mediocre bit of melodrama and turned it into something moving and profound. She didn't do this alone, of course -- Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon and Chinaza Uche were by her side, and Zach Braff's contributions to the film were pretty damn impressive for a guy who has been sort of turned away from Hollywood. Pugh, though, can make tears well up in her eyes on command. But she doesn't have to play the role of a woman responsible for the deaths of two people, because she was looking at her phone while driving, only through such obvious gestures as crying. The character becomes addicted to pain medication while recovering from her own injuries, and Pugh does high and strung out well, too. Then there's just the fact that she's wrung out, even in her best moments only a shell of the bright young woman she was before all this, who now can't get out of sweatpants and is low-level cranky for much of the time. When Pugh wins an Oscar one day it will be richly deserved. And oh yeah, she was also in Oppenheimer, which I liked quite a bit. If you want more of an explanation for why she appears here, the combined ranking for her two films is lower (lower being a good thing in this case) than the combined ranking of any other performer in 2023 who had as big a role as she did in more than one film. (There's one who beats her but he's only a very small supporting character in one of his films. He gets his due in the honorable mentions.)

Wes Anderson - Adding Wes Anderson is a cheat. I'm well aware of that. If I don't count shorts among my movie rankings, I shouldn't count them in this section either. So let's at least delay further reference to the cheat for a few moments. For starters, Anderson hasn't had a film ranked as high as Asteroid City (#8) since Rushmore was my #4 movie of 1998, and that was in a year that I ranked only 58 films. Factoring in inflation, they're very similar rankings. This was an especially strong feat considering that I've been trending toward burning out on Anderson, as The French Dispatch took several movies' worth of built-up good will and trashed it in one fell swoop. Asteroid City just reeled me in completely and never let go. But perhaps the more impressive feat was the four (!) short films he directed for Netflix, Roald Dahl adaptations each: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, Ratcatcher and Poison. Impressive because four more individual bursts of Anderson whimsy in the same year as Asteroid City could have been overkill, especially for a viewer who had been teetering on the edge of burnout, but somehow just increased my renewed love affair with the man's core artistic sensibilities. I haven't written about these movies on my blog but each was beguiling to me in some way, with truly gymnastic verbal performances and feats of exquisite mark hitting from a half-dozen performers essaying multiple roles. Just imagine if he'd envisioned them or pitched them to Netflix as a feature film with four individual stories, like Anderson's own Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Then Anderson's great year wouldn't even have required any cheating. 

Honorable mentions: Willem Dafoe (Asteroid City, Poor Things), Emerald Fennell (Barbie, Saltburn), Nicolas Cage (Dream Scenario, Renfield)

Three who had a bad year

Jillian Bell - There was a time a couple years ago when Jillian Bell could have steered her career toward independent film. Sure she'd first been exposed to us in Seth Rogen movies, but in 2019 she played an overweight alcoholic who determines to get her life back on track in Brittany Runs a Marathon. Alas, that fleeting moment in time has been utterly snuffed out. It seems that every bad comedy in 2023 had Jillian Bell as a common denominator. The least offensive of these was a brief appearance in Charlie Day's Hollywood satire Fool's Paradise (#147), in wish she has a minute-long cameo as some kind of shaman. It didn't make the movie any better but it didn't make it any worse. But it gets a lot worse for Bell as she claims the indignity of appearing in two of my bottom ten movies of the year, a dishonor she has all to herself. The "better" of these two is Candy Cane Lane (#161), a truly rancid Eddie Murphy Christmas vehicle in which Bell plays an evil elf who puts a curse on Murphy's character. She's called Pepper, and she mugs in ways that are both naughty and annoying. In a movie that suffocates you with its excess Christmas ornamentation, she's one of the most suffocating. Fewer things were more unpleasant to sit through in 2023 than the utterly lifeless sequel to the surprisingly charming 2019 Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston vehicle Murder Mystery. To be honest, I blocked out so much of what happens in Murder Mystery 2 (#164) that I don't even remember what Bell's role was in it. (The Wikipedia plot synopsis comically refers to her just as "Susan" on first reference without explaining who Susan is.) I just remember her sinking lower and lower in my estimation with every line of dialogue. As her titular character, Brittany, once realized, Bell needs to get her life back on track. 

Ben Whishaw - I have been a fan of Ben Whishaw since I first "discovered" him in my beloved Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I use the quotation marks to joke that without my love of that movie, the world would never have known who he was. But it's true that since I adopted that film early and with an intensity matched by few others, I think of Whishaw as one of "my guys." Well, "my guy" let me down this year. Perhaps because there was so much back and forth before I could finally see Passages (#141), I had little patience for anything that annoyed me, and there was a lot in this movie that did. Most of that boiled down to the noxious character played by Franz Rogowski, who I'd been told I wouldn't like on a podcast, and that could not have been a more accurate assessment of my feelings toward this shithead. Why is this Whishaw's fault? Well, he plays one of two characters who is inexplicably obsessed with Rogowski's character, a pretentious director who messes with the heads of Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos by stepping out on his lover with a woman. Ira Sachs, who directed one of my favorite gay love stories of all time in Love is Strange, directs a bad one here, and Whishaw seems like a simpering fool with too much capacity for forgiveness of the real creep he's involved with. Whishaw would have avoided this dishonor except he was also in my third least favorite movie of the year, Bad Behaviour (#166), in which he plays a fatuous self-help guru who inexplicably flees the retreat he's running after an act of violence by the main character, played by Jennifer Connelly. I just found this movie incredibly mean-spirited and it left me feeling shitty. I guess if I were Ben Whishaw I'd want to run out in the middle of the movie too. 

Jeremy Allen White - And here is my cheat on the negative side. Jeremy Allen White, breakout star of the TV show The Bear (which I still have not seen), was in two movies in 2023, and one of them was (narrowly) in the top half of my rankings. But he was SO BAD in these two movies that this is where my mind went when I was looking for a third choice that I actually wanted to write about. Or rather, so poorly used, leading to what seemed like awkward performances just because they capitalized so little on his evident charisma. The film he was in that I liked was Fingernails (#75), a slight miss at an attempt to make an Eternal Sunshine-style contemplation of love in the age of analog technology that helps determine whether you are in love with your partner by analyzing a fingernail torn from your body. Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed are the leads, but JAW (like that acronym) plays Buckley's boyfriend, who has already passed the mutual fingernail test with her, thereby confirming they are an appropriate match and should continue their relationship. The point is that this information has allowed him to become complacent, but did they have to do so little with this character that the performer barely even registers? They should prescribe his performance for insomnia. The casting director of Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw (#125) must have had the same thought: "Hey, let's cast this upcoming star but get exactly zero out of him by giving him one of the least interesting parts." In a movie I actively disliked, JAW (there's that acronym again) plays the last of the four brothers in a family of cursed wrestlers to enter the narrative, and the one with the fewest lines, even though he's in the movie for longer than some of the others. The camera should love this guy, but it was almost as though Durkin was actively pointing it elsewhere and asking him not to speak. Is this White's fault? Probably not. Does it make it a bad year? Yes. 

Dishonorable mentions: Chris Evans (Pain Hustlers, Ghosted), Bill Burr (Leo, Old Dads), Julie Hagerty (Somebody I Used to Know, The Out-Laws), Charlie Day (Fool's Paradise, The Super Mario Bros. Movie)

The year my kids stopped liking movies

The thing I've tended to think about, as I look back on 2023, is how often I was by myself in the movie theater this year.

To be clear, I'm almost always by myself. My wife and I rarely have movie date nights and I only had one 2023 viewing with a friend at MIFF. It's been this way for probably 15 years and no, I don't think I'm a loser for sitting in movie theaters by myself constantly. I'm just a film critic who has to see movies right when they come out, and I just skip being slowed down from that requirement by trying to make it a social experience.

I did, though, use to go to the movies a half dozen times each year with my kids -- sometimes together, sometimes separately. 

This year, I didn't see a solo movie with either of them after June, and a superhero movie was the last straw in both cases. 

First it was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (#65) with my older son. My younger son likely would have gone except he was trying to wait to go with his friends after they had to take a raincheck. He never went but did later see it later on the plane. Although my older son liked going out at night and getting a pizza at the theater, the movie itself left us both a bit befuddled, due both to its multiverse complexity and its ungainly length. Any other suggestions to see something else later in the year were mildly rebuffed.

Eighteen days later, I took the younger one, who was only nine at the time, to see The Flash (#35). Although I really liked this movie when I eventually completed the viewing (as you can tell by the ranking), its intensity, both in terms of its themes and its high-impact sound and visuals, made my son feel sick, and we needed to leave. We didn't take another trip to the movies, just the two of us, again in 2023.

The specific experiences of these two movies are probably more symbolic than the viewings themselves having turned my kids off to going to the movies. The reality is, they are much more interested in YouTube and video games than feature-length stories where they can get treats and sit in a darkened theater. Getting treats is not such a novelty that they need to agree to go to the movies with me to get them. So they aren't the driver of going to the movies, and if a particular movie doesn't come along that totally grabs them, they'll never ask on their own.

Both are probably also in a transitional period in terms of subject matter. My younger one doesn't care about things like Wish, which I listed as a regret in yesterday's post, and will still watch movies aimed at children, but only if they are a bit aspirational in terms of the content that's appropriate for him. My older one may be dropping movies entirely, but if not, at least he definitely wants them to be in a more adult genre if he does agree to go. Even so, you may remember that he recently turned down the opportunity to see my first movie of 2024, a horror movie in Night Swim.

As a cinephile, I do bemoan this a bit. Of course I want my kids to follow in my footsteps. Of course this means they probably won't. At least my older son loves basketball and my younger son loves board games.

And at least I take solace from the fact that we had a great experience on my younger son's birthday on January 1st, when we went as a whole family to see Next Goal Wins (#27) and loved it -- especially him because he's a soccer fan, but we all felt really enthusiastic about the movie. 

Maybe I won't be using my kids to watch animated movies I want to see quite so much in the future, if at all. Maybe I'll have fewer one-on-one movie dates with either of them.

But if I can just keep them occasionally exposing themselves to movies, who knows which one will cause the obsession with this art form to click for them. 

Year of the year: 1970

Did someone say turning 50 also turns you into a nostalgic old softie? Even if it isn't your exact nostalgia?

In 2023, 1970 wasn't just the year my current home was built, which I suppose creates an additional fondness in me. No, it was also the exact year in which two of my top ten movies were set.

Not 1969. Not 1971. 1970.

I saw both of the films within the space of the long Christmas weekend, too, which made me wonder if the universe was trying to tell me something.

First it was The Holdovers (#10), which I saw three days before Christmas. Alexander Payne's film, which many have said feels like a Hal Ashby movie made in that era, takes place at Christmastime 53 years ago. The time period is significant primarily because the U.S. is still involved in Vietnam, where the character Mary, played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph, lost a son earlier that year. The characters played by Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa comfort her, in their way, as the three develop a bond that just helps them get through that lonely, wintry holiday season.

Then on Christmas itself I watched Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which quickly became my #2 movie of the year, a position it did not surrender. This is the summery rather than the wintry part of 1970, as the movie starts off with these lovely images of the main character enjoying summer camp, placing us in the movie's capable hands and never dropping us. The immaculately created nostalgia is almost like a drug in Kelly Fremon Craig's movie.

As I mentioned in yesterday's piece, I wasn't actually born until three years later. But enough of what was great in 1970 still felt familiar to me when I was a child later in the decade, and two filmmakers delivered this feeling to me with devastating efficiency in 2023. 

Welcome to the two-timers club ... to a song?

If you thought a little horror movie like Skinamarink, from a first-time feature director with no known (or even visible) stars among the cast, couldn't possibly share a component with one of my previous #1 films ... well, you'd be right. But there's an asterisk to that.

Although this is never made explicit, the title is, of course, partially a nod to that popular kids song, which Wikipedia says is either called "Skidamarink" or "Skinnamarink." You know, "Skinnamarink a dinky dink, skinnamarink a doo. I ... love ... you." At the very least, Kyle Edward Ball is leaning into our memory of that song, even though it's not clear what connection his movie has to it.

Well, that song also factors memorably into the climax of my #1 film of 2012, Ruby Sparks.

In case you can't remember Ruby Sparks very well, the title character sings this nonsense song in the final scene when she's kind of short-circuiting, as Calvin cruelly types actions out on his typewriter, knowing she is hidebound to immediately fulfill them. It's certainly a form of emotional violence toward her if not one of actual physical violence. And it's extremely effective.

In fact -- before this year, anyway -- if I heard the word "Skinnamarink" (let's go with the spelling that is closer to the title of the movie) come up in any context, most likely hearing the song somewhere, I thought of the end of that movie.

Of course, my #1 of 2023 will probably supplant that association -- if only because the connection is so much more explicit. 

Best non-2023

These are the best ten movies I watched in 2023 that were not released in 2023, in alphabetical order.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - My first Fassbinder did not disappoint with this complex look at class, race, aging and relationships at a fraught time in West Germany. 

The Balcony Movie (2021, Pawel Lozinski) - One of my few highlights in a lean first year on MUBI was this profound documentary that consists only of a filmmaker interviewing passersby walking below his second-floor Warsaw apartment. 

Braindead a.k.a. Dead Alive (1992, Peter Jackson) - Inconsistent titling on this blog aside, this practical effects horror extravaganza tickled me pink during my October of horror comedies. 

Day for Night (1973, Francois Truffaut) - Confusing the works of Truffaut and Godard as I sometimes do, I thought this might be a ponderous Godard film, but instead, it's a really enjoyable Altman-style Truffaut film taking place on the set of a movie.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies) - Davies died in 2023, but not before I saw this formally unforgettable portrait of working class British mourning loved ones and singing in pubs. 

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961, Stanley Kramer) - One of only two movies I gave five stars in 2023, this courtroom drama blew me away with its performances and with the significance of its desire to grapple with the Nazi banality of evil. 

Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz) - Mildred Pierce is the one of these movies I remember least well, but I remember quite well enjoying the portrayal of the characters and particularly the bleakness of its view of human beings and their venal tendencies. 

Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow) - The sole survivor of my Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro series captured a Tangerine Dream-style 80s vibe that was only improved by the presence of vampires.

Pearl (2022, Ti West) - I didn't prioritize this the previous year, scoffing a bit at the old person makeup used on Mia Goth in X, but this is a different sort of horror movie completely, and a career-best Goth may still be holding the final shot's expression of insanity.

The Voices (2014, Marjane Satrapi) - This story of Ryan Reynolds as an accidental serial killer startled me with its mix of tones and its creative derring do, building on the promise Satrapi showed in Persepolis. 

Stats

Movies by star rating on Letterboxd: 5 stars (1), 4.5 stars (18), 4 stars (33), 3.5 stars (37), 3 stars (31), 2.5 stars (19), 2 stars (16), 1.5 stars (10), 1 star (1), 0.5 stars (2)

For some reason this year I didn't notice giving out the same number of 3.5 stars as I usually do ... and then it led the list again like it always does. I gave out 50% more 3 stars this year than I did last year, though, from 20 up to 31, and that was with seven fewer movies overall. Once again either end of the spectrum is hardly represented at all, which I think is as it should be. 

Movies by source - Theater (43) (3 by advanced screening), Netflix (41), iTunes rental (33), Amazon Prime (14), Disney+ (9), AppleTV+ (7), MIFF theatrical (7), MIFF streaming (4), Airplane (3), Stan (3), Screener (2), Kanopy (1), Amazon rental (1). This is almost exactly the same breakdown as last year except I took fewer airplane flights.

Total new movies watched in the calendar year: 259
Total rewatches: 52 (hey, one per week)
2023 movies watched more than once: 2 (Skinamarink, BlackBerry)

Discoveries 

Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Charles Melton, May December
Sunny Sandler, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
Ayo Edibiri, Bottoms

Another name for ...

Showing Up is ... Art Talent Show
Somebody I Used to Know is ... Ghosted
A Million Miles Away is ... Leave the World Behind
M3GAN is ... Robots
Killers of the Flower Moon is ... Bad Behaviour
Skinamarink is ... We Have a Ghost
Flora and Son is ... The Mother

Opposites

Dream Scenario ... Reality
A Good Person ... Monster
The Burial ... Evil Dead Rise
The Flash ... Still
Longest Third Date ... Shotgun Wedding
No Hard Feelings ... You Hurt My Feelings

Lightning Round

Highest ranked best picture nominee: The Holdovers (#10)
Lowest ranked best picture nominee: Maestro (#132)
Best picture nominees I didn't see: American Fiction, The Zone of Interest 
Most surprised I loved: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (#21)
Most surprised I did not love: Theater Camp (#143)
Worst performance by a best actor: Brendan Fraser, Killers of the Flower Moon
Best performance by a non-actor: Marshawn Lynch, Bottoms
Actor who didn't deserve an Oscar nomination: Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Actor who deserved an Oscar nomination but didn't get one: (tie) Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers /Charles Melton, May December
Actress who didn't deserve an Oscar nomination: Carey Mulligan, Maestro
Actress who deserved an Oscar nomination but didn't get one: Natalie Portman, May December
Movie that wasn't about what I thought it would be about (good): Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (#31)
Movie that wasn't about what I thought it would be about (bad): Beau is Afraid (#144)
Most common word in title: Strays (Strays/The Strays)
Least common word in title: Skinamarink (Skinamarink)
Best movie with a minuscule budget: Skinamarink (#1)
Worst movie with a big budget: Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (#168)
Best reboot: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (#21)
Worst reboot: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (#156)
Best Christmas movie that didn't need to be about Christmas: Family Switch (#99)
Worst Christmas movie that didn't need to be about Christmas: Genie (#165)
Most surprising director: Zach Braff, A Good Person (#6)
Least surprising director: Zack Snyder, Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (#168)
Best live action Disney: Peter Pan & Wendy (#37)
Worst live action Disney: The Little Mermaid (#129)
Best Marvel movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. (#92)
Worst Marvel movie: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (#157)
Marvel movie I didn't see: The Marvels
Studio it was a bad year for: Marvel

I was going to try to keep that lightning round going a little longer with some categories I've used in the past -- I've even added them in a spreadsheet so it's easier for me to find them each year -- but honestly, I'm too tired and I just can't be bothered.

One more formal 2023 wrap-up post tomorrow with my annual portmanteaus post, and then one more informal post about my #1 movie on Saturday. And THEN I will really move on. 

The skinny on 2023

When I first envisioned the subject for this post, it wasn't just a play on words about the title of my #1 movie. (Sorry, by tradition, I spoil that up front, though you can still be surprised by the ranking of my other 167 films.)

No, I was also convinced this year would be really skinny by the standards of my recent output, especially compared to my record-setting 175 movies ranked last year, which I referred to as "a whale of a year" -- also of course a play on words with last year's #1.

Twenty twenty-three ended up being skinnier, but not by a huge amount. The 168 I watched this year are only seven fewer than last year, though they're also two fewer than the number I saw in 2021, which at least makes this my skinniest year since 2020. (When I ranked only 149. Thanks COVID.)

When I thought I was going to see more like 160 movies at most, that was an intentional choice in reaction to thinking 2023 was a pretty bad year for movies. In reality, it was just a backloaded year. Every year is backloaded, a friend of mine pointed out, but 2023 seemed even more so, as a full half of my top ten are movies I've seen roughly within the past six weeks. That's sort of in alignment with the strategy to release awards contenders at the end of the year, but sort of not, as two of those five were movies released earlier in the year, that I only caught on video since the start of December. 

It's still a bit of an unusual year as it has produced possibly my least accessible #1 movie ever, though more on that in a moment. If there were ever any danger of me slouching toward the mainstream as I get older -- remember I turned 50 in 2023 -- then this choice seems to put that discussion to rest, at least for now. 

And I was glad to see that as the year got into its final weeks, I fed my movie need as intensely as I always do, turning an underwhelming movie year into one that had a lot of really good movies and some really tough omissions from my top ten.

But before we get to that top ten and then the rest, let me start by offering up ten movies you won't find on this list, in two different categories. One is movies I could have seen but didn't, and one is regrets that just weren't available to me. Let's take the first first:

Top five unlikely omissions, in order of how unlikely they are not to be on my list:

5. Thanksgiving - I was certainly interested in seeing Eli Roth's expansion of his Grindhouse trailer into feature length, but it only came down from the $19.99 premium rental price on the very day I'm posting this.

4. The Blue Beetle - I usually end up seeing all the superhero movies. This year I didn't, which brings us to ...

3. The Marvels - I would have seen this if Disney had made it available for free on Disney+ now rather than a few weeks from now, but I finally needed a theatrical break from Marvel movies, and this is the first I'm not ranking in the year of its release since Thor: The Dark World.

2. Wish - More Disney. What can I say, I don't have children young enough to want to see this anymore, and it just didn't make my adult list of priorities.

1. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One - I wanted to skip one of the big action movies, but ended up seeing John Wick 4 and Fast X for free on streaming. The M:I movies haven't really done it for me since Ghost Protocol, and that was 13 years ago. 

Now, five I would have seen if they had been available, increasing in level of regret from 5 to 1:

5. The Color Purple - A musical version of the classic Alice Walker novel? Intriguing. 
4. Fallen Leaves - Aki Kaurismaki is usually a middling pleasure at most for me, but I understand this could be his best.

3. American Fiction - Love Jeffrey Wright. Not available here yet.
2. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt - Oops. I only just noticed this actually is now available for $5.99 rental, when it's too late. I'll still include it. 

1. The Zone of Interest - It'll be a shame not to include this after Jonathan Glazer's last film made my top ten of the whole decade, but it doesn't come out here for another month.

Okay! You've been waiting long enough. Let's start with my top ten:

10. The Holdovers - When I was first really becoming a cinephile, Alexander Payne was one of two directors I considered "my guys," the other being David O. Russell. Payne hit my top ten with three consecutive films: Election, About Schmidt and Sideways. It's taken him nearly 20 years to get back, so welcome back, Mr. Payne. Payne's regular misfires since then are a thing of the past, as he's extracted incredible warmth from the surface cold of this film I was fortunate to squeeze in before Christmas (for my only $19.99 premium rental of 2023). The Holdovers takes place over a lonely, snowy Christmas in 1970, featuring three people who would like to be anywhere else than with each other, on the campus of a prestigious New England boarding school. Becoming something of an old softie now that he's in his 60s, Payne layers humanism and decency atop his usual acerbic wit, concocting an emotionally potent slice of nostalgia in which sad and angry people learn to provide each other the basic necessities needed for their mutual survival. Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa and Da'Vine Joy Randolph are by turns funny and contemplative and just plain real. If this is the most conventional film Payne has made, let's have more please, and maybe we'll see him here again in a couple years. 

9. May December - Todd Haynes' latest could have fallen victim to the differing distribution deals between countries. Instead of being available on my couch via the comfort of Netflix, as it was since December 1st for those living in America, the movie doesn't even hit Australian theaters for another ten days. Fortunately, I saw May December at an advanced screening, and it claimed one of the last spots in my top ten, awarding Haynes his first top ten in his tenth feature (six of which I've seen). My second favorite Haynes (Safe) is also a collaboration with Julianne Moore, and his first collaboration with Natalie Portman brings out the best in both of these increasingly selective, Oscar-winning actresses. A lisp is often a bad choice for an actor, but don't tell that to Moore, who uses this speech impediment as a crucial tool to bringing to life Gracie Atherton-Yoo, the woman made famous a quarter century earlier when she slept with a 14-year-old boy and ended up having three children with him. Barely keeping it together in a different way is the actress played by Portman, Elizabeth Berry, who descends on Gracie's life to study her for an upcoming portrayal, but has her own twisted psychology that regularly pokes through. In fact, the most centered (and most heartbreaking) is the boy himself, grown awkwardly into a man in his late 30s, played by Charles Melton in a role that really puts him on the map. Haynes is master of multiple tones as he both has devilish fun with these characters, a point emphasized by the melodramatic score, and takes their plight seriously, as we can see in the confused agony just below the surface of Melton's face. Few directors have it both ways like Todd Haynes.

8. Asteroid City - And the seesaw Wes Anderson has been riding his entire career goes back up again. After basically loathing The French Dispatch (#151 of 2021), I find myself in love with another Anderson project, as I seem to do every other film. This typically dense and probably needlessly ambitious structure is Anderson's fourth visit to my top ten and first since Fantastic Mr. Fox, which ties him with Joel Coen and the aforementioned Alexander Payne (just this year) for the most top ten finishes for any director. However, the fact that it is fundamentally no less fussy than The French Dispatch -- which was about a former career of mine, journalism, no less -- just means that it's the little details in an Anderson film that win you over or drive you away. And they all won me over here, from the performances (specifically those by Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman) to the set design (can I live in that tiny southwest town for the rest of my life?) to the comedy (the appearance of the alien was not the only time I cracked up) to the pathos at the core of the best Anderson films (the off-screen loss of Schwartzman's wife put me in mind of The Royal Tenenbaums). The fact that I love this film as much as I do, without its outer narrative layer (the black and white TV show about the making of the play) really registering with me, is saying something. 

7. Blood & Gold - While the Nazi revenge fantasy on everyone's lips in 2023 seemed to be Sisu, Blood & Gold was the one I stumbled over on Netflix and ended up loving. I won't get too into why Sisu's one note quickly tired me, and instead spend time on the higher entertainment value of a film structured as an old-fashioned western, where a Jewish town must be liberated from the oppression of a group of Nazis making their last stand rather than a group of bandits in black bandanas. The man with no name type is a German deserter who escaped the hangman's noose, and he teams up with a war widow whose brother is mentally challenged. The filmmaking by Peter Thorwarth gave me a sort of early Tarantino thrill, complete with a wit and kineticism in every fight scene and an overall high level of confidence on camera movements. In fact, if you told me Blood & Gold existed in the same universe as Inglourious Basterds, I'd believe you. The German language film gives us a delectable old school villain in the sadistic SS commander played by Florian Schmidtke, and watching these characters arcs play out, which include of course his comeuppance, had all the satisfactions of an old Saturday matinee. This fulfills my annual quotient for "a top ten movie you haven't heard of, but should have."

6. A Good Person - Florence Pugh is a regular on my top ten list. This marks her third appearance out of only 12 films I've ever seen. But this is a first for director Zach Braff, whom I think we all wrote off years ago. In 2004, Garden State was on the outside of my top ten looking in, but it accumulated backlash quickly, as though the book were written on Braff as an incurable romantic with pretentious indie sensibilities and a fetish for twee manic mixie dream girls. Imagine how impressed I was by the incredible maturity of A Good Person, which I'd been avoiding all year (despite the presence of Pugh) because I thought I'd heard somewhere that it was bad. I sat there at full attention during a period of exhausted December viewing in which I was falling asleep during every other movie I saw, taking in not only Pugh and long-time favorite Molly Shannon, but Morgan Freeman in a performance I had no idea he was still capable of giving as he has moved into the second half of his 80s. This sober look at tragedy, depression and addiction has the chance to play out like a movie we've seen on screen a thousand times before, but doesn't due to the sure hand of Braff. Pugh can play the frayed edges of her emotional spectrum better than anyone out there, and Freeman has his feet solidly planted in this role after some wobbly other performances from the past few years, both emotionally generous and wickedly resentful at various points of the plot. A Good Person is honest and true and extremely well written -- also by Braff. 

5. BlackBerry - When I finally see a Matt Johnson movie in the year in which it was released, this is what happens. I've been a big fan of the director's found footage-style filmmaking since I first saw The Dirties, and with BlackBerry, the guy who kind of seems like a geek who learned how to make movies has graduated to a widespread critical embrace. Johnson also co-stars in BlackBerry with Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton, the latter giving one of my absolute favorite performances of the year, and in a year in which we were practically smothered by movies that recounted how certain famous products came into existence, BlackBerry stood out for its unique style and for its ability to perfectly capture its era. There are few movies at which I laughed harder in 2023 than the first half of BlackBerry, though of course, given the eventual nosedive of the technology into obsolescence, those good times can't last. But then the sobering comedown is compelling in its own right. I've never been a fan of Howerton's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so I was completely taken aback by the bald-headed businessman he plays here, able to spin marketing gold (with a little creative and illegal accounting) out of the product devised by Baruchel and Johnson's Research in Motion, all while unleashing streams of expletives and while smashing pay phones against their chassis, metaphorically or otherwise. If you think you've seen this character before, you haven't seen Howerton do it. It's one of only two 2023 films I watched twice. 

4. Monster - I know it -- I'm a sucker for Hirokazu Koreeda. This is actually only the second of his films to make my top ten, though Shoplifters narrowly missed in 2018 (#11). The fact that Monster got almost as high as the #2-ranked 2014 film Like Father, Like Son, which is comfortably in my top 100 on Flickchart, is more an indication of the lesser competition than anything else. And because not a lot of people saw this, and therefore it hasn't been in year-end podcast conversations, I haven't done a lot of thinking about it since I saw it at MIFF. But in the midst of that viewing, I was wondering if it might have enough to overtake my then #1. It didn't, but that doesn't mean this Rashomon-style story of miscommunications and incomplete truths involving bullying at a Japanese school -- between students, but also between a teacher and a student -- isn't another superbly crafted slice of humanism by Koreeda, one that keeps revealing itself further over its running time as perspectives shift from one character to the next. There's also a touching "it gets better" message embedded within all the social drama. I'm not sure how Koreeda makes a movie every year and remains at such a high level. Finally sitting down with his film that came out too late in 2022 for me to rank it, Broker, is one of the most anticipated high points of finishing up my 2023 viewings and returning to watching whatever I want. I always want to watch Hirokazu Koreeda. 

3. All of Us Strangers - You'd think a movie that so thoroughly ensconces you in a world of memory, loss and loneliness, to the extent that it becomes and stays untethered from the real world, would become exhausting and tedious early on in its runtime. Someone who'd make such a movie might also tend to go heavy-handed and beat us over the head until it becomes an exercise in woe and empty solipsism. Andrew Haigh dodges every possible pitfall in All of Us Strangers, the film where his stand-in -- Andrew Scott in one of the year's best acting performances -- slides deep into the premise of the script he's writing, and starts visiting his childhood home to see his parents, who have been frozen at their age when they died in a car accident 25 years ago. The film doesn't suggest Adam has been struggling with this trauma that entire time, but that the headspace that comes with writing this script has left him almost drowning in emotions he had set aside, and considering how this early loss and his struggles as a gay man have dictated his intimacy with others. It's a similar thematic space as another recent Paul Mescal film, Aftersun from 2022, though this one had a far more intense emotional impact on me. Rarely have you seen an actor deliver underplayed emotions so devastatingly as Scott does here, as Haigh's dialogue does the other half of the work in giving us a true portrait that enriches us with the depth of its humanity. If not for some slight misgivings I have about the third act, which have primarily to do with unbearable melancholy about how the story plays out, this might have been my #1 of 2023. 

2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. - I wasn't the same age as the characters in Kelly Fremon Craig's follow-up to The Edge of Seventeen until about 14 years after this film was set. But there's something about well-done nostalgia that puts you in a place of immense cinematic comfort, even if it is not exactly your own nostalgia. I felt transported to the 1970 of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., and even to a different gender. Great cinema puts you in the shoes of its characters whether they are shoes that are a close size to your normal shoes or quite different, and in this film, I felt the struggles of young girls wondering when they were going to get their period and what bra size they needed as if they were my own. The film embraces you with its sense of warmth, and rides two wonderful performances: Abby Ryder Fortson in what I hope is a star-making turn as the title character, who wears her emotions on her sleeve despite trying to impress her friends with how grown up she is, and Rachel McAdams as her mother, who has the movie's most heart-breaking arc as a woman who was abandoned by her own parents because she married a Jewish man (Benny Safdie). That the film deals earnestly with spiritual yearnings and reckonings, in a year in which a war is being fought over religious differences, just adds meat to what felt like a dessert from start to finish -- and not just because I watched it on Christmas day. 

1. Skinamarink - If I told you that my #1 movie takes place all inside a single house, exclusively at night, featuring characters whose faces you never see clearly, and dialogue difficult enough to understand that they've provided subtitles, you would have not only thought me a liar, but you would have asked if such a thing could even be properly described as a movie. But here we are. Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink is the king of 2023 based on its absolutely chilling effectiveness plunging you into a nightmare seemingly without end. If you have ever woken up late at night with the TV no longer playing what you were watching, and thought that the quiet and the low light of the canted angles of your living room portended terrifying things from the everyday objects in your view, that is basically this whole movie. It's slow cinema to the extreme, and it played so poorly for some audiences that every screening featured walk-outs. But for those who got on this film's wavelength and could never leave, the experience was an all-encompassing, full-body sense of a nightmare from which there was no escape. In the horror genre, that is incredibly hard to accomplish. Skinamarink ends up here despite the fact that I have never had a horror movie top my year-end rankings, and that I spent the final six months of the year actively rooting for something more conventionally #1-worthy to supersede it. Nothing did, and I watched Skinamarink a second time just to confirm it still gave me that certain buzz that no other 2023 film provided: the feeling that it could be the best of the year. So is Skinamarink a "real" #1, or is it a default choice because I never found anything that seemed more like the right answer? Does it matter? The fact remains that no other 2023 film succeeded more perfectly in doing what it set out to do; no other saw through its unique vision to the very last frame. That's as good a description as any for a #1 movie of the year. 

And now, because you can't have the good without the bad, the five worst movies I saw in 2023:

164. Murder Mystery 2 - Have you forgotten the surprising dose of delight you got from the original Murder Mystery in 2019? If you watched this limp, lifeless, inert and unfunny sequel, that memory is certainly now gone if it wasn't already. Shame shame, Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. 

165. Genie - I had hoped the days of Melissa McCarthy delivering just absolute garbage were over. Nope.

166. Bad Behaviour - The extra U is for ugly, unfunny and uncomfortable. This is probably the lowest I have ever ranked a film I saw at MIFF, and even a star I adore as much as Jennifer Connelly could not correct the course of this misanthropic movie about a former child actor at a wellness retreat. 

167. The Out-Laws - Adam Devine came THIS CLOSE to becoming a two-time loser after Game Over Man! was my lowest ranked of 2018, but this insipid and idiotic movie about a guy whose new in-laws are world-class bank robbers got beaten out in the endgame by another Netflix movie, the fourth of this year's bottom five ...

168. Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire - ... and it only took Zack Snyder left to his worst and most unchecked indulgences to do it. Movies have gotten competent enough, in general, that you never see actual continuity errors or botched editing anymore. This awful Star Wars ripoff is riddled with them, and rounded out with terrible performances and laughable world building. And sci-fi finishes last three years in a row after The Matrix Resurrections and Moonfall. 

And here's the whole list!

1. Skinamarink
2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
3. All of Us Strangers
4. Monster
5. BlackBerry
6. A Good Person
7. Blood & Gold
8. Asteroid City
9. May December
10. The Holdovers
11. Anatomy of a Fall
12. Poor Things
13. No One Will Save You
14. Dream Scenario
15. Society of the Snow
16. Kill Boksoon
17. Banel & Adama
18. Elemental
19. Air
20. Killers of the Flower Moon
21. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
22. Past Lives

23. Polite Society
24. M3GAN
25. Barbie
26. Oppenheimer
27. Next Goal Wins
28. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
29. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
30. The Artifice Girl
31. Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose
32. The Blue Caftan
33. Saltburn
34. Reality
35. The Flash
36. Bottoms
37. Peter Pan & Wendy
38. Nimona
39. Swallowed
40. The Magician's Elephant
41. R.M.N.
42. The Old Oak
43. Rye Lane
44. The Face of the Jellyfish
45. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
46. Plane
47. Master Gardener
48. Shotgun Wedding
49. Wham!
50. Still
51. Reptile
52. Nyad
53. Carmen
54. Art Talent Show
55. Longest Third Date
56. Leave the World Behind
57. Wonka
58. Extraction 2
59. American Symphony
60. The Royal Hotel
61. Ferrari
62. Infinity Pool
63. Enys Men
64. Biosphere
65. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
66. Renfield
67. 80 for Brady
68. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
69. Strays
70. The Conference
71. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
72. You Hurt My Feelings
73. Jung_E
74. Creed III

75. Fingernails

76. Good Grief
77. Gran Turismo

78. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

79. The Strays

80. Joy Ride

81. No Hard Feelings

82. Champions

83. A Million Miles Away

84. The Burial

85. Flora and Son

86. Napoleon

87. Sisu

88. Dumb Money

89. Shazam! Fury of the Gods

90. Priscilla

91. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

92. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

93. Anselm

94. Chevalier

95. Sorcery

96. Nowhere

97. The Beanie Bubble

98. Evil Dead Rise

99. Family Switch

100. The Pope's Exorcist

101. Magic Mike's Last Dance

102. Robots

103. Bird Box Barcelona

104. Haunted Mansion

105. Fast X

106. Rustin

107. The Killer

108. Cassandro

109. Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom

110. Fair Play

111. We Have a Ghost

112. You People

113. They Cloned Tyrone

114. A Haunting in Venice

115. Daliland

116. The Boy and the Heron

117. Tetris

118. The Wrath of Becky

119. Knock at the Cabin

120. Boston Strangler

121. 65

122. Mercy Road

123. John Wick: Chapter 4

124. Mister Organ

125. The Iron Claw

126. El Conde

127. Sanctuary

128. Leo

129. The Little Mermaid

130. The Boogeyman

131. Cocaine Bear

132. Maestro

133. The Creator

134. Linoleum

135. Run Rabbit Run

136. Pain Hustlers

137. Alice, Darling

138. It Lives Inside

139. The Mother

140. Somebody I Used to Know

141. Passages

142. Foe

143. Theater Camp

144. Beau is Afraid

145. Showing Up

146. Paint

147. Fool's Paradise

148. Talk to Me

149. Shut Eye

150. Mafia Mamma

151. The Portable Door

152. Ghosted

153. Scream VI

154. White Men Can't Jump

155. Die Hart

156. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

157. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

158. Hypnotic

159. Old Dads

160. The Super Mario Bros. Movie

161. Candy Cane Lane

162. Cat Person

163. Your Place or Mine

164. Murder Mystery 2

165. Genie

166. Bad Behaviour

167. The Out-Laws

168. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

If that's not enough for you, how about ten more movies where I feel like I need to include a quick word of clarification/defense about where I've placed them:

22. Past Lives - I wanted to like it more and was so close to liking it more. This is still a good ranking.

28. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah - For once, Adam Sandler made the right move by casting his family.

65. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Nothing but love for this franchise, but this was too long and convoluted.

67. 80 for Brady - And this is not just because the New England Patriots are my football team. I thought this was really charming.

90. Priscilla - Sofia, don't worry, I still love you.

107. The Killer - David Fincher has had better days.

116. The Boy and the Heron - Befuddled me, and not in a good way, and the whimper of the very ending is a strange choice on which to end Miyazaki's career. 

131. Cocaine Bear - The best idea of the year without the execution to match.

143. Theater Camp - Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you're wrong. Unfunny. 

148. Talk to Me - I don't know why everyone thought this was great. 

As always, I welcome comments, but more than anything, thank you for reading.