Each new movie is better than the one before

When you don't start out with a really solid contender early on in the viewing year -- at least a likely candidate for your eventual top ten -- you'll find that your favorite movie of the year keeps changing, at a sort of comical rate that calls into question the honor bestowed on each of the previous temporary holders of the #1 spot.

Without a Turning Red (my eventual #3 of 2022) or an Everything Everywhere All at Once (my eventual #4 of 2022) there to stabilize the early rankings, things end up kind of like they have so far this year.

My longest reigning #1 of 2023, as you would know from this post, was Shotgun Wedding, which was my #1 from when I saw it on the 2nd of February until April 1st, a reign of 58 days. 

The very same night I posted that, though, I saw M3GAN, which easily supplanted it. M3GAN held on to the top slot for exactly 11 days.

That's when I saw The Magician's Elephant on vacation in Vietnam, and though at the time I liked it more than M3GAN, I'm suspecting they will ultimately swap relative positions by year's end. M3GAN has stuck with me, The Magician's Elephant hasn't -- though of course I do still think it's quite good.

The Magician's Elephant had a bit longer to get used to its throne, wearing the crown from April 12th to May 20th, a span of 38 days. That's when I saw Ben Affleck's Air, and really enjoyed it, easily naming it my new favorite of a so-far fairly disappointing year.

Air barely had time to blink in the top spot, though, because I was taken aback by the German language World War II western Blood & Gold on Netflix, which I saw just nine days later. This was also the first film of 2023 that I gave 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, and considering that it took until May 29th to do it, that's very long by my standards. 

Now finally we have the latest occupant of the penthouse, BlackBerry, which I saw Thursday night -- drawing the curtain on Blood & Gold's 17-day reign.

It occurred to me that something additionally interesting/significant is that since M3GAN first dethroned Shotgun Wedding, I have not see a film that was better than Shotgun Wedding but worse than whatever the current #1 was. So it's either the best I've seen, or middling. So that means my current rankings are:

1. BlackBerry
2. Blood & Gold
3. Air
4. The Magician's Elephant
5. M3GAN
6. Shotgun Wedding

I don't expect this to continue and it certainly can't continue forever, but it's an interesting pattern that has two-and-a-half months of history in its favor. 

So just what was so good about BlackBerry, the second film this year to dramatize the technical and legal challenges involved in a new techie obsession?

Well for starters, it's what the first film, AppleTV's Tetris, should have been. Have a look here if you want to get into the weeds of why I think that film is ultimately a failure, However, if you'd like the simplified version, I'll say that Tetris got the era and its associated nostalgia right, but it completely lost us with a serpentine plot that involved as many reversals as five episodes of Silicon Valley but without our ability to grasp the stakes of those reversals from moment to moment.

BlackBerry, which charts the rise and fall of the first phone where you could send email, effortlessly explains what's going on from moment to moment, focusing on only a small handful of characters and a small handful of narrative developments at a time. It's amazing how much easier it is to appreciate era-specific nostalgia if you are oriented within the plot. 

Matt Johnson may quickly be becoming one of my favorite unheralded directors. If you don't recognize the name, he's also an actor in his films The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. I liked both of those movies waaaay more than I ever guessed I would, slapping 4.5 stars on the former and four on the latter. BlackBerry gets him back up into the 4.5-star range, and it might have been higher if Johnson had sustained the crack-me-up humor from the film's first 45 minutes. The story wouldn't have allowed it, and that's not the film's fault, but let's just say that in this cinematic desert where we're parched for good comedy, this film's first half delivered like few films have for me in recent years.

Johnson's got a DIY style that kind of looks like he's trying to make a mockumentary, and if memory serves, both of the previous films are technically in that genre. This isn't meant to be a mockumentary but it maintains the same half-grainy look of something being done on the cheap. If you think that's an insult, think again. Johnson's style actually requires a high degree of veracity from his actors to match its apparent authenticity, and Johnson's cast complies.

This is the first film where Johnson has worked with actors you actually recognize, who include Jay Baruchel, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes and Michael Ironside. But it was another actor I didn't recognize who really blew me away: Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO brought in by the nerds at Research in Motion to kick the ass that they couldn't kick. If I watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia I would know who this is, and when I see other pictures of him I do recognize him from other places I've seen him. Playing bald in this film, though, made the actor totally disappear into the role, and his performance as a shark who gets results was by far the film's most memorable and interesting character.

I should not say "by far" because Baruchel and Johnson are both great and both key to much of the film's opening humor. Baruchel, reminding me a bit of Justin Long here, has some great line deliveries as Mike Lazaridis, the genius programmer who invented the BlackBerry and formed the company with his best friend Doug Fremin (Johnson). A man whose confidence is no match for his intellect, he's Jim Balsillie's spiritual opposite -- and eventually someone corrupted by his proximity to his fellow co-CEO. Johnson, meanwhile, wears a variety of different t-shirts celebrating nerd culture throughout, the one who doesn't want to lose his personality and will fight to keep things as they were, while also to grow the company according to their principles -- but is also the most disposable of the three in terms of the company's future trajectory, which becomes a sticking point.

Speaking of nerd culture, there's some great shout-outs here. The room full of genius programmers at Research in Motion -- who will remind you of similar groups of guys in movies like The Social Network -- have a movie night ritual, and we see them all quoting the best lines from Raiders of the Lost Ark and They Live.

I probably shouldn't give you too more because I really want you to go see this. 

It's my #1 movie of the year ... at least until something better comes along.

In about 26.6 days, if the average holds. Or much sooner if we go only on recent trends.

It's April and Shotgun Wedding is still my #1 of 2023

April Fool's! 

No, sadly -- not April Fool's.

I don't want to spoil anything for my year-end rankings released next January (ha ha) but we've just slid into the fourth month of the calendar year -- here in Australia anyway -- and I'm still looking at the Amazon original Shotgun Wedding as my favorite movie of the year.

"But in April you've only seen like eight movies from the current year, right Vance?"

It's twice that. Which is actually probably a little low for this time of year.

But out of 16 movies seen, shouldn't I be able to find at least one four-star movie?

I actually got close with Shotgun Wedding, the second 2023 movie I watched. I felt enough of a surge of enjoyment watching Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel try to save their wedding party from kidnappers on an island in the Pacific that I considered whether it got all the way into four-star range. Ultimately, cooler heads and a sense of critical self-respect prevailed, and I gave it only 3.5 on Letterboxd.

But the memory of that enjoyment, plus the inferior quality of the next 14 2023 movies I've watched, has meant that it hasn't had any serious challengers for the top spot. 

Let's not blow things out of perspective here. I'm technically in the fourth month of the year, but I haven't watched any movies in April yet, and more than half of January is lost to finishing up the movies from the previous year. So we're really talking less than two-and-a-half months of watching movies from the new year.

But what I'm really saying is that I've never not had a really strong movie sitting atop my rankings even at this early juncture. By this time last year I had already seen both Everything Everywhere All at Once, the eventual best picture winner, and Turning Red, which finished one spot ahead of EEAAO at #3 for the year for me. And though my #1 movie on April 1st last year did end up in my top three for the year, I'd be surprised if Shotgun Wedding cracks the top 30.

It could, if the movie year continues on at this pace.

I've only seen one movie I really disliked -- the Netflix rom com Your Place or Mine -- but I've seen a ton of mediocrity, and sequelitis has already hit pretty hard early in 2023. Without having even seen the latest Scream or John Wick, a quarter of my 2023 films are still sequels: Creed III, Magic Mike's Last Dance, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Shazam: Fury of the Gods. None of those struck me as memorably as I would have liked, a particular disappointment given my fondness for the first Creed and the second Ant-Man.

Then you've got movies totally original in concept, and dripping with promise, that didn't do a lot for me, like Cocaine Bear. Outside of a few sequences, that movie disappointed me like I could never have anticipated.

I think the real issue is that we haven't gotten anything yet from someone I would characterize as a real auteur. April will change that, at least on the American release schedule if not here in Australia. A couple films that missed 2022 release dates, Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up and Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid -- which also missed its 2022 title, Disappointment Blvd. -- are due to debut this month, though the missing of those release dates does not exude a tremendous amount of promise for their potential. Then I only just realized that David Lowery is the director of Disney's new Peter Pan & Wendy, and though I certainly don't need the umpteenth adaptation of a story that has already been adapted to death, the fact that it's directed by a guy who directed one of my past #1s (A Ghost Story) does feel promising at least. (His previous work with Disney, Pete's Dragon, was a real success. I guess he can only make Disney movies about guys named Pete.)

So I guess what I'm saying is, "It gets better," or at least it should. Don't bail on the year after only 70 days.

I do think, though, that a certain malaise has started to settle into the movies, the sort of thing that may have recently made A.O. Scott decide to stop being a film critic. After seeing and feeling underwhelmed by Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves -- a really quite competent piece of popular entertainment that still left me with a middling reaction -- I considered for a moment writing a post called "Every movie is the same as every other movie." 

Sometimes that feels more true than others.