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.