The year of "remember when they made that?" movies

Nostalgia has been coming on strong in 2023, and I'm not just talking about movies like Barbie, The Super Mario Brothers Movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and all the other revivals of familiar IP.

This is also a year where we can't get enough of -- or at the very least, they can't make enough of -- movies that look at a product or cultural craze of the past and how it came to be. 

I've just seen the fourth such movie of its kind last night.

The Beanie Bubble is just the latest to drop this particular template on us, the first to be about an actual toy. The others have been about:

- A basketball shoe (Air)

- A phone that can send emails (BlackBerry)

- A highly addictive video game (Tetris).

I'd be inclined to say the returns are diminishing, except that the first of these I saw was the one I liked the least (Tetris). Air and BlackBerry are currently in my top ten for the year, and The Beanie Bubble now lands somewhere in between.

I suppose Barbie is even a variation on this sort of movie, given that it does include an albeit highly fantastical version of Mattel, the company that makes the world's most famous doll.

(Speaking of famous dolls, I think we should now expect a movie on the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, and possibly Furbees.)

We should probably be getting sicker of this trend than we actually are, which points up how generally durable it is. We have an apparently inexhaustible appetite to have the cultural fascinations of our earlier years projected back to us on screen, beyond the obvious ways the movies have always done this with their constant sequels and remakes. We at least profess to be interested in how the thing we love came to be.

This trend is, of course, not new this year. Without doing an exhaustive survey of past examples, movies like The Social Network, the various Steve Jobs movies and even something like the McDonald's origin story The Founder have all been previous successful examples. They all center on something we know and love, while creating the opportunity for a Goodfellas-style narrator to talk about how they were making money hand over fist and it was going to their heads, and giving a screenwriter leeway to imagine juicy conversations that took place behind closed doors.

But however popular this form may have always been, it's coming on like gangbusters in 2023. And we're only 60 percent of the way through the year, so there could be more. (Movie titles creep up on me a lot more these days than they used to. So if there's a movie about the Easy Bake Oven later this year, I won't be surprised.) 

As for The Beanie Bubble in particular ... I did like it reasonably well (3.5 stars), but template fatigue may have begun setting in a bit. Also it seems like the film could have been 25% more unhinged, given the opening statement that "There are parts of the truth you just can't make up. The rest, we did." I wanted a little more of this movie to beggar belief like that text promised it would.

That said, I am really glad to see Kristin Gore -- Al's daughter and a former Futurama writer -- make good with both her first screenwriting credit since the disastrous David O. Russell film Accidental Love in 2015 (shared with Zac Bissonnette), and her first directing credit overall (shared with Damian Kulash). (That she had to share both with a man is a funny reality for a film about a soured partnership between the characters played by Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks.) Gore comes back admirably from a flop for which she presumably bears only a small percentage of the responsibility. 

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.