40. I feel like this should be a top 40 list - you can’t really make a list of anything end (or start, in this case) on 39. I did see more than 40 movies this year, but several of them were older movies, so I’m going to use this spot to talk about the Best Picture movies for 2018 that aren’t on this list, and why they aren’t on the list. The Post - looks good, just haven’t gotten around to it. Get Out - top 5 movie for me last year. I’m so glad it was nominated. Call Me by Your Name - looks boring, and also a movie where an older man has a sexual relationship with a high school student feels a little too rapey for me to enjoy. Phantom Thread - this looks super boring. Even if I was on a long plane flight and there were no other movies being shown, I would probably just stick with my book. And that’s it - all the other nominees are ones that I saw, and for the most part, liked. So on to the list!
39. Knight of Cups There was a time when Terrence Malick made great movies. Thin Red Line is a beautiful movie. Tree of Life was a polarizing movie that some people loved (including me) and a lot of people hated. He’s gotten to the point where his movies now are a caricature of his previous work. I feel like if I had a big enough budget I could make a pretty decent Terrence Malick film. Hire a bunch of beautiful people and shoot lingering shots of them standing in beautiful scenery, while they narrate something wistful but slightly confusing off screen. Characters would walk away and look back over their shoulder, their hand reaching out as if to take the hand of the viewer. There would be shots of a person’s back while they walk through tall grass, arms extended. There would be some shots of beautiful people looking out over the ocean. If I made that movie, even without any kind of plot, it would be better than Knight of Cups. Knight of Cups has Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale and Natalie Portman and a bunch of other good actors in it, and I watched most of it and had no idea what the movie was actually about. It’s the worst kind of bad movie - the kind of bad movie that thinks it is a good movie, when it is, in fact, a really bad movie.
38. Song to Song Also by Terrence Malick, and not quite as bad in the sense that I could at least follow what was going on in the movie, but I just didn’t like it. The movie is set in the shadow of the South by Southwest music festival, and involves a love triangle of sorts (Actually it’s a love square. There are 4 people involved. Why is it always a love triangle, but not a love square? In the official description of the movie they call it two intersecting love triangles, which sounds better than saying a love square, but feels kind of like cheating. I’m going to call it a love square.) I didn’t care about any of the characters, and really the only reason I watched these two movies is that I liked Malick’s earlier work so much.
37. John Wick 2 I’ve heard a lot of people like these movies, so I finally broke down and decided to watch one of them. There’s no real plot in this one, just a bunch of people talking about how great John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is at killing people, and then a bunch of scenes of John Wick killing people. I didn’t bother watching the whole thing.
36. Fences This movie is based on a play that’s supposed to be great. The star of the movie is Denzel Washington, who is also great. The movie is not great. The premise is that Denzel Washington plays a former professional baseball player that was denied a chance to play major league baseball because of segregation. As a result, he is bitter and makes life miserable for everyone around him. I kept hoping for some kind of redemptive arc, some reason that I should like or root for his character, but it never came. Of course that doesn’t mean the movie has to be bad, but none of the other characters resonated with me, and Washington’s character wasn’t exactly enjoyable to watch as he ruins the life of everyone around him. The scenes also just felt like they were part of a play, rather than a movie, and it didn’t seem to fit together well.
35. Good Time I watched this movie because I saw it pop up in a few critics’ end-of-year favorite lists. Robert Pattinson plays a small time thief with a mentally challenged younger brother. He decides they are going to pull a bank robbery to make some money. From that point on, everything goes wrong. The younger brother gets caught, so he spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out how to get his brother out of Rikers Island. The escape doesn’t go well. The problem with this movie is that to enjoy watching something, you usually have to feel somewhat invested in the characters or care about them in some way, even if they are flawed. I hated every character in the movie by the end. To his credit, Robert Pattinson has come a long way from his Twilight days. He isn’t afraid to take on gritty roles, and is a legitimate actor now.
34. Morgan A corporation has created an artificial being that looks and acts like a teenage girl. She is locked in a secret facility so they can study her without risk of her escaping. They run into some troubles when her teenage angst involves her going haywire and snapping people’s necks. Rooney Mara is brought in by the corporation to help assess the situation, and it turns out she’s also capable of snapping necks. It wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t good, either.
33. Mother! This movie is flat-out crazy. Some critics liked it, and some people said they did too, but there’s no way someone could actually enjoy watching it. Interesting? Maybe. Thought-provoking? Perhaps. But it’s not enjoyable to watch. Jennifer Lawrence plays the wife of Javier Bardem. They live in a peaceful country home. Then Ed Harris, and then Michelle Pfeiffer, and then their kids, and then all kinds of people start showing up. By the last third of the movie it is so off the rails that it no longer has any basis in reality. Clearly the movie is a metaphor for something. Some reviews I read said they thought it was about how we were destroying the Earth, but I don’t think that’s it. I did have some ideas, and I’d be curious to hear what other people thought the movie was about. But if you haven’t already seen it, don’t bother.
32. War for the Planet of the Apes I liked the earlier Planet of the Apes movies. In fact I watched the two earlier ones in this trilogy with my son because we were looking forward to this coming out. I ended up being pretty disappointed. I thought the first two succeeded at being blockbusters but still being intelligent enough that you didn’t feel like you had to turn your brain off, but with this one you had to turn your brain off. It wasn’t totally un-enjoyable as a dumb summer movie, but it didn’t succeed on any other level.
31. Despicable Me 3 Mildly amusing sequel. My kids liked it. I thought it was fine.
30. Kong Skull Island If you’re going to a movie called Kong Skull Island you know that there will probably be a lot of explosions, action, and giant creatures. And there are. It is exactly as good as you would expect when you watch the preview for it.
29. In the Heart of the Sea This was a pretty mediocre movie, but the book it’s based on is great, so I’m going to plug the book. It’s written by Nathaniel Philbrick, who has written a number of interesting historical books on everything from Custer’s last stand to the American Revolution to the Mayflower. In the Heart of the Sea is probably my favorite of his books. It’s the story of the sinking of the whale ship Essex, which inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. It’s an incredible story of survival at sea, and I highly recommend it. I can’t say the same for the movie. Its directed by Ron Howard, and stars Thor (or at least the guy that plays him) and has a solid cast. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s melodramatic when it should have just let the story speak for itself, and the dialogue feels pretty cliched. It’s decent, but in the hands of a director with a different vision, it could’ve been great.
28. The Florida Project Now we’ve reached the part of the list where all of the movies are pretty interesting. But interesting doesn’t necessarily mean I liked watching it. In fact, I kind of hated this movie, even though a lot of people I’ve talked to thought it was great. It’s set in an apartment complex in Florida that’s in the shadow of Disney World, but the world it’s set in couldn’t be any more different. The movie follows a six-year old girl that is left on her own most of the time by her mother. I think what some people liked about the movie is that it shows the subtle ways that people look out for each other in the midst of poverty and less than ideal circumstances. For me, it was too hard to watch a story that seemed not all that different from the stories of some of the kids we’ve taken care of in foster care over the years, and it left me feeling upset and hopeless.
27. The Salesman The Salesman is an Iranian movie that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017. The backdrop of the film is a community production of the play The Death of a Salesman. A local teacher and his wife are involved in the production, and one day when the husband is at rehearsal, the wife is assaulted in their new apartment. The husband sets out to find the perpetrator, and things get complicated. It’s slow paced, and definitely not a feel-good movie, but it’s complex and interesting throughout.
26. Coco This was a great kids movie. Pixar always makes great kids movies. Good story, good animation, good music, full of heart. Good times.
25. Darkest Hour In 1940, Winston Churchill has just been named prime minister of Britain, and is facing an impossible challenge. The Nazis have started to exert their power, and Churchill must decide if it is in Britain’s best interests to stand down and negotiate with the Germans as things become increasingly bleak, or to stand and fight. The movie has its moments, but overall it’s a bit boring. It’s worth watching simply to see the performance of Gary Oldman, who won best actor for his portrayal. This is one of those performances where the makeup and acting are so convincing that if I didn’t know it was him, I wouldn’t have known it was him. It’s interesting that two movies about this same moment in history were released this year, and the other is closer to the top of my list.
24. The Shape of Water I have to admit I’m surprised this won Best Picture, because it’s a pretty strange movie. Set in the Cold War era, it is the story of a mute woman that works in a top-secret government facility where they have captured a mysterious fish-man. The woman eventually befriends the fish-man, and becomes determined to set him free. Michael Shannon plays a comically evil bad guy that captured the fish-man and is determined to figure out it’s secrets or kill it trying. Guillermo Del Toro is an interesting and talented director, but I’ll always feel like Pan’s Labyrinth, not The Shape of Water was his true masterpiece.
23. Avengers: Infinity War If you haven’t seen this yet, skip to the next movie, because at the end of this blurb, I’m going to talk about what happens at the end of the movie. Infinity War has just about every superhero ever in it. At times that is kind of fun, like when The Guardians of the Galaxy are hanging out with Thor. At times, it just feels like a little too much. I think I’ve reached the point of saturation with superhero movies. There are now so many that I can’t really keep each of them separate in my mind. The things that seem exciting in a superhero movie seem a lot more exciting when you are 15 or 25 than when you are 45. I have a couple more superhero movies on this list, but there are others that I didn’t bother seeing (like the new Thor movie) even though they got good reviews, because I’ve just gotten tired of watching superhero movies. And then there are the issues with the end of this movie. For one thing, the movie is about 2 ½ hours long, and then it just ends. It’s one of those where it’s only half of the story, and they’ll probably release the next one next year and make a billion dollars, and I’ll probably go see it even though I won’t really be that excited. And also, about all those characters dying at the end. I thought that was stupid. If you’re going to have people die, have them actually die. But we all know that none of them really are going to stay dead, because there are sequels to those characters’ movies that are already being filmed, and we also all know that there’s no way they’d kill off all those characters and not be able to make more money with them in the future. So I’m sure it’s going to be something involving the reality stone or the time stone, but we all know they aren’t staying dead, so it seems kind of cheap to say they all died. And I just spent half a page talking about a movie I only sort of liked.
22. A Wrinkle in Time This movie got mixed reviews, and I think if I had seen it by myself, I might not have been that into it. But watching it with my daughters, one of whom I’ve read the Madeleine L’Engle trilogy with, made for a pretty great movie experience. It strays a bit from the book, but it is still a fun story with powerful female characters, and my daughters thought it was fantastic.
21. Jungle If there was a jungle survival movie that came out every year, I would be pretty happy. Two of my all-time favorite movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Apocalypse Now fit into this genre, even though they are very different films. Last year the Lost City of Z came out, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. In this one, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) plays an Israeli backpacker who sets off with a guide on a trek through the Bolivian jungle. Things don’t go as planned. Things never go as planned in the jungle, which is part of what makes jungle movies fun.
20. The Infiltrator In this movie, Brian Cranston plays a US customs agent that goes undercover to infiltrate Pablo Escobar’s cartel. He eventually ends up working his way to the top of the organization as he becomes more and more involved in the finances of the cartel. It’s a fascinating true story, even if the movie is a bit slow at times. Cranston is terrific, and it was an unexpectedly enjoyable watch.
18. Wonder Woman As far as superhero movies go, this was a good one. But as I mentioned before, I’m feeling a bit burned out on superhero movies, which is why I didn’t have it ranked higher (says the person who has a superhero movie in his top 5 for the year). Gal Gadot was pretty spectacular in this role, and made an ok movie a good one almost single-handedly.
17. Patriots Day It feels like there have been about 10 different movies about recent events directed by Peter Berg (Macalester College, class of ‘84) starring Mark Wahlberg. He plays a soldier in Afghanistan in Lone Survivor. He plays an oil rig worker in Deepwater Horizon. And here he plays a cop during the Boston Marathon bombing. Ok, so it’s only three movies, but it still feels like they’ve teamed up a bunch lately for the same type of movie. None of them are movies that will get nominated for Best Picture, but all of them move at a pretty good clip, and get you invested in the story. Mark Wahlberg has an everyman persona about him that makes it easy to root for him. I thought this was a pretty riveting story, and it brought you back to what it felt like during the couple days that the bombing happened and the bombers were still on the loose.
16. Detroit I’m not sure why more people didn’t see this movie. It’s directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who has made some pretty great movies, including Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. It’s got an excellent cast, and feels very timely. It’s based on a true story about riots in Detroit in the 1960’s, and an incident during the riots where white police respond to possible gunshots at a hotel, and end up beating and killing a couple of the black guests at the hotel, even though no gun is ever found. I thought it was well done, even if it leaves you feeling frustrated and angry.
15. Blade Runner 2049 I had such high hopes for this movie, because I consider the original Blade Runner a classic science fiction film. It stars Ryan Gosling. It’s got Harrison Ford playing an older version of the Deckard character. It’s directed by Dennis Villeneuve who directed Arrival and Sicario which are two of the top 20 movies this decade. It looks and sounds great. It has some great scenes, and great parts. But it just didn’t add up to a great movie for me. For one, it felt too long, at nearly 3 hours. And it had some parts that just didn’t work - had they cut every scene involving Jared Leto the movie would have been 20% better. So even though it is smart and visually amazing, and I was looking forward to it more than anything that wasn’t a Star Wars movie, it was just solid, but not great.
14. Logan Lucky This is a Steven Soderbergh heist movie. It stars Adam Driver and Channing Tatum as down-on-their-luck brothers that don’t seem very bright. They decide to try to pull off the heist with the help of James Bond (Daniel Craig), a safe-cracking explosives expert who happens to be in jail. The best kind of heist movies are a lot of fun, and Logan Lucky is a lot of fun. For me it was a perfect go in with low expectations and end up loving it type movie.
13. Columbus A movie about architecture should not be very entertaining, but this is a movie that’s (mostly) about architecture, and it’s great. The plot of the movie isn’t anything groundbreaking. A man comes back to his hometown of Columbus, Indiana, because his father, a well known architect has fallen into a coma. While he’s there he meets a young woman that is passionate about the architecture of her hometown, but instead of pursuing her dreams she’s stuck looking after her mother who is a recovering addict. It’s a beautiful movie in every sense of the word. Almost every scene in the movie feels like if you paused the playback, it would make a great photograph. The pace is slow, and there is nothing dramatic at any point. But it is beautiful and poignant, and it’s a movie a lot more people should see.
12. The Big Sick The Big Sick is the true story of how comedian Kumail Nanjiani met his wife and fell in love with her and broke up with her as they dealt with their cultures clashing, then got back together while she was in a coma. That maybe doesn’t sound like a great premise for a movie, but if you’ve seen anything Nanjiani has been in, you know he’s hilarious and charming and easy to root for. Holly Hunter and Ray Romano are surprisingly wonderful as her parents, and it’s a funny but touching story of a family that is going through a hard time, but comes together to support each other. That kind of sounds like the summary of a Hallmark Channel movie, but trust me, it’s not, and it’s really good.
11. Jumanji This was my most pleasant surprise movie of the year. When I saw the preview I thought it looked kind of stupid, and the original Jumanji isn’t all that great. But then I kept hearing people say it was really good, so I took all my kids to see it, and we loved it. I thought it was easily the funniest movie of the year. The Rock, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart are all really funny and this was way more fun than it had any right to be.
10. Stranger Things, Season 2 It’s kind of cheating to put a TV show on this list, but I usually do it with one or two shows I really enjoyed every year. This year Stranger Things was actually the only TV show I watched. I’ve pretty much lost all time (and interest) in watching TV shows. But I’ll make an exception for Stranger Things. I didn’t think there’d be any way Season 2 would be good - part of what I liked about Season 1 was that it wrapped up nicely and felt like a pretty self-contained story. So what a pleasant surprise to have Season 2 be so strong. There were a few new characters like Max and Bob, and the immortal Billy, but most episodes it didn’t feel like the typical sequel where they have to introduce a ton of new characters and ridiculous plot twists to keep it interesting. I think what I like about both seasons is that the setting perfectly nails the era I grew up in, but doesn’t rely on that as a crutch. It’s got good storytelling, good action, and lots of likeable characters that are easy to root for. Sometimes a good movie (or TV show) is as simple as that.
9. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The previews make this seem like this is a serious movie about a woman (Frances McDormand) who is seeking justice for her murdered daughter by putting up billboards calling out the local sheriff for not doing more in the case. And it has plenty of serious moments, but it’s really more of a dark comedy than it is a drama. A lot of people thought it should have won best picture, and I wouldn’t go that far, but it certainly deserved to be nominated. McDormand and Sam Rockwell both won Oscars for their performances, and Woody Harrelson is great too. It also contains one of my favorite scenes from any movie this year, where Sam Rockwell, a bigoted cop, is reading a letter about how he needs to find love to become a better detective, while McDormand has set fire to the building. It’s the seminal moment in the film, and sets the tone for the redemption that comes in the last act of the movie. Even though it wasn’t what I expected, it’s a terrific movie.
8. Wind River Jeremy Renner plays a Fish and Wildlife tracker, who teams up with FBI agent Elizabeth Olson to try to solve the murder of a Native American woman found naked and frozen to death in the mountains of Wyoming. The characters are well-developed, the story is tight, the acting is good, and it’s just about a perfect murder-mystery movie. It was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who wrote Hell or High Water last year and Sicario the year before that, and is on one heck of a run of helping make excellent, gritty, movies.
7. The Last Jedi I had pretty much reserved the top spot on this list for The Last Jedi, since I’ve had Star Wars movies at the top each of the last two years. And it was a ton of fun. I loved seeing old Luke Skywalker. I really like Rey as the main character. And the throne room fight was my favorite movie fight scene this year, and is on the list of the best Star Wars fights ever. But there were also some things I didn’t like, and I left the theater feeling a little disappointed. For one, there were a bunch of stupid creatures. Those little Porgs were stupid. That giant beast that Luke was milking was reaalllly stupid. Those other frog-like creatures on the island with Luke were stupid. Those giant creatures they raced on on the casino planet were stupid. Even if none of them were Jar-Jar Binks level egregious, that’s still a lot of stupid creatures for one movie. That whole casino planet scene was just a waste - the movie would have been better off without that whole plot thread. And I really didn’t like how Luke was able to project himself and battle from a different planet at the end. Based on every Star Wars movie that’s come before, I’m pretty sure you can’t do that kind of thing with the Force. Also, Adam Driver should not be a main character in a Star Wars movie. I’m not saying his acting is bad, but there are certain people, such as Ryan Reynolds, or Adam Driver, and especially Tom Cruise, that just don’t belong in Star Wars movies. Despite all these things, it is a Star Wars movie, and I love Star Wars movies, so it is in the top 10.
6. Isle of Dogs I sort of feel the same way about Wes Anderson movies that I do about Terrence Malick movies (from the very bottom of this list), in the sense that I know what they’re going to be like, and the types of characters they’re going to have, and the types of things those characters will do, and even the type of music they’ll have. But I still love every one of them. They have a charm and a wit and lovability to them that I enjoy every single time. This particular one is an animated movie about an island where dogs from Japan are sent when a dog flu breaks out and people want to get rid of all dogs. And it’s about a boy that sets out to find his dog, and teams up with a group of dogs already on the island to track him down. And it’s charming and witty and lovable.
5. Baby Driver I get excited for a movie with a good chase scene, and this whole movie is basically a series of chase scenes. Baby is played by Ansel Elgort (what a pretentious sounding name - I don’t think I would enjoy hanging out with someone named Ansel Elgort) who is a getaway driver for a group of criminals. He has a constant ringing in his ears from a childhood accident, so he drowns it out by always listening to music on his IPod. Which means that every chase scene in the movie is perfectly choreographed to the music, and the music is pretty fantastic, which makes the chase scenes pretty fantastic, and makes the movie pretty fantastic too.
4. Dunkirk Dunkirk tells the incredible story of the evacuation of British soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk, France when they were surrounded by German troops during WW2. The story alone would make for a great war movie, but it’s directed by Christopher Nolan, who is one of the most creative and visually compelling directors making movies today, and in his hands it is truly spectacular to watch.
3. Black Panther After bashing superhero movies for most of this list, I ended up putting Black Panther in my top 5. Maybe that’s because Black Panther felt like a lot more than a typical superhero movie. It created its own world but felt more important than a superhero or sci-fi movie usually does. I thought it was the best superhero movie since the Dark Knight movies. Also, shout out to the character of Okoye, played by Danai Gurira (Macalester College, class of 2001).
2. Solo: A Star Wars Story I’m not sure why this movie has been mostly a flop at the theaters, at least compared to the other Star Wars movies. I think part of it was the timing - it felt like too soon after The Last Jedi, and as funny as it sounds, I think there wasn’t time to build up the anticipation we usually have for Star Wars movies. I think it also had some negative buzz around the fact that they changed directors mid-filming, and re-shot a bunch of scenes. I think that led people to think it was a mess. I thought it was great. Well, great isn’t the right word, in the sense that it was a great work of art, but it was great fun. I enjoyed seeing the origin of Han and Chewy’s friendship. I loved young Lando. I thought it had the same gritty feel that Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and the first couple movies had, but the prequels lacked. I thought the train heist scene was great. I loved watching young Han find his path as a pilot, and make the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs. And I thought it fit really nicely alongside the main films, just like Rogue One did. It was the most fun I had at a movie this year.
1. Lady Bird Lady Bird is kind of a perfect movie. As a high school teacher, I have a soft spot for movies in a high school setting, and I’m a fan of the coming-of-age genre in general. Lady Bird is about as good as it gets in that genre, and it will be up there with Boyhood as one of my top movies for the entire decade. Saoirise Ronan is perfect as Lady Bird, a high school senior at a Catholic school in Sacramento. She is so full of life and angst and passion and confusion about her family - basically, a high school student. Every character in this movie is well-fleshed out, and is treated with a gentleness that makes you care for them deeply, from Lady Bird to her friends to her parents and brother to the priests and nuns at the Catholic school to the popular kids that have their own issues they are dealing with. It’s a beautiful film, and I knew about halfway through that I was watching what would be my favorite movie of the year.
Older movies that I watched again this year
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Both are fairly recent, watched them with my son before we saw the fairly disappointing sequel last summer. I enjoyed these two quite a bit more. Smart blockbuster movies.
Insomnia It’s always good to watch a couple of Christopher Nolan movies every year. This is a pretty standard murder-mystery movie, but it’s got a good cast (Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hillary Swank) and like everything else he makes, it’s really interesting to watch.
Rogue One It’s always good to watch a couple of Star Wars movies every year. This was my favorite movie when it came out last year, and the kids and I all watched it on a cold winter day. Star Wars is the best.
La La Land Another one of my favorites from last year, this was on HBO late one night when I couldn’t fall asleep and I got sucked in. I still can’t believe I love a musical this much.
The Matrix An all-time sci-fi classic. Watched it with my son this year for the first time. It’s still great.
Comments
Post a Comment