Skip to main content

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 5 Films I Missed in 2020

 


                Given the peculiar nature of this year’s run of movies, neither a traditional “Best Films of 2020” nor a traditional “Most Anticipated Films of 2021” feel appropriate. Instead, I’m going to do something in between: A spotlight of movies that I was looking forward to in 2020 that have now been bumped into a 2021 release date. There are other films set to release in 2021 that I have on my radar (most of them simply premiering later in 2021 than originally planed), but here are five films that I missed this year in 2020.

This installment of Professor’s Picks is partway between a memorial and a forecast. Weep with me, celebrate with me, whichever jives with your inner truth. Anyways . . . five movies long eager to graduate from my list of anticipated movies.

 

1. A Quiet Place: Part II

March 20, 2020  April 23, 2021 September 17, 2021 May 28, 2021

Admittedly, I am kind of cheating with this one. The original March release date actually passed with little ceremony for me as I wasn’t yet on the Quiet Place train. I wouldn’t even see the original 2018 film until a few months into quarantine season. (What can I say? Horror films are a harder sell for me.) Eventually the universe corrected itself, and I found myself dying to see what happens next for the Abbot family.

                This sequel takes place shortly after the events of the first film when the Abbot family must abandon the home that has kept them safe and brave the outside world. Krasinski, who returns to direct the sequel, has shared that where the first film was more a study of family, this sequel is interested in community and how far you will go to help your neighbor.

There’s a lot to be said about how A Quiet Place innovates many conventions and ideologies of the horror genre (hm, someone should write an essay about that . . .) and this follow-up has every opportunity to continue in that tradition.



2. In the Heights

June 26, 2020  June 11, 2021

My reverence for the musical genre is well-documented on this blog. It’s so rare that we see Hollywood spend their dollars on a musical (it’s even rarer to see one led by a minority cast), and just as often as not, the results range from passable to Cats.

I myself am familiar with the source musical mostly by reputation, having only listened to one song in fulness (I prefer to experience a soundtrack for the first time in its narrative context). But I understand In the Heights takes place in a New York district where opportunities are low but community is rich. This is a contrast to La La Land or most musicals where the setting is the red carpeted streets of LA. When the music doesn't come from the sparkle of Hollywood tinsel, it can only come from the story itself. From what we've seen so far, this offering seems to understand that. The trailer displayed an array of snapshots of a vibrant, kinetic, lyrical world where, indeed, the streets themselves are made of music. (Why aren't there more dance numbers in swimming pools?) Maybe Hollywood won’t drop the golden egg this time.


 

3. The Tomorrow War

December 25, 2020 July 23, 2021

                The Tomorrow War was originally going to be Paramount gifting us a summer movie for Christmas, now it gets to be just a straight summer movie.

                Originally titled "Ghost Draft," this blockbuster imagines a future war between mankind and an alien threat. So overwhelming is the invasion that the future enlists the help of the past, drawing in our main character (Chris Pratt, also a producer on this film) from our time to fight in this war. The cast is rounded out by a vast ensemble, enlisting Yvonne Strahovski, JK Simmons, Seychelle Gabriel, Keith Powers, and Mary Lynn Rajskub, among others.

                As someone who wants the signature films of the 2020s to amount to more than just remakes and spin-offs of films of the 1990s, I try to take special interest whenever studios gamble on a non-franchise project. The medium’s creative-lifeblood obviously hinges on more than the returns of any single film, but in a post-coronavirus landscape where major studios like Warner Bros and Disney are actively shifting their model to favor streaming over theaters, the success of an original property like The Tomorrow War should be of special interest to all of us. Can Chris Pratt save the future of humanity? And theaters? We’ll have to wait until this summer to find out.

(EDIT: Okay, maybe I spoke too soon.)

 

4. BIOS

October 2, 2020 April 16, 2021 August 13, 2021

                First announced in October 2017, the film follows “a robot that lives on a post-apocalyptic earth. Built to protect the life of his dying creator’s beloved dog, it learns about love, friendship, and the meaning of human life.” Tom Hanks’ casting as the robot’s inventor was announced alongside the synopsis. The cast is rounded out by Caleb Landry-Jones as the robot with Skeet Ullrich, Samira Wiley, and others.

While few plot details have been revealed, the logline proves tantalizing. The desolation of a post-apocalyptic setting seems a stark contrast to the pathos inherent in a story about a robot learning to care for another living thing. I imagine the final product as something between Children of Men and The Art of Racing in the Rain. There are all sorts of directions the filmmakers could go with that, and I’m eager to see any of them.

 

5. Raya and the Last Dragon

November 25, 2020 March 5, 2021 

   I set my movie calendar by Disney and Pixar titles the way most audiences do with Marvel or Star Wars films, but in between the company’s conquest over the last few years their animated offerings have gotten lost in the shuffle. Walt Disney Animation Studios hasn’t released a non-franchise film since Moana back in 2016. (Imagine a four-year wait between Frozen and Big Hero 6.) Raya and the Last Dragon brings an end to that drought.

                Drawing inspiration from southeast-Asian cultures, Raya and the Last Dragon tells the story of a young warrior (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran) on a quest to find Sisu, the last dragon (voiced by Awkwafina), who holds the key to restoring peace to her divided kingdom.

                Raya won’t be the studio’s next musical (audiences will have to wait until Disney’s November offering, Encanto, for that) but the genre does catch my interest. The movie has been billed as a kung-fu adventure film a la House of Flying Daggers set against a fantastical backdrop that animation so effortlessly provides. Disney’s marketing campaign has yet to start, but so far all signs point to Raya being Disney’s next animated champion.


 

One of the hardest things about 2020 for me has been the waiting. The waiting, the waiting, the waiting. We're not quite out of the woods yet, but we may only have to wait a little longer. Whatever we've missed out on these last several months, we can take some consolation that there are good times still to be had. Raise a glass to 2021.

 --The Professor


Honorable Mentions: Jungle Cruise, Black Widow, West Side Story, The Batman, Death on the Nile, The Woman in the Window, Sound of Freedom

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Question

    I spend a lot of effort in this space trying to champion the musical genre as the peak of cinematic achievement.  And so it sometimes surprises my associates to find out that, no, I wasn't at all raised in a household that particularly favored musicals. I wasn't the kid who went out for the annual school musical or anything. My environment wasn't exactly hostile toward these things, but it actually did very little to nurture my study of the genre.  Cinderella (1950)      I obviously had exposure through things like the Disney animated musicals, which absolutely had a profound effect on the larger musical genre . But I didn’t see The Sound of Music until high school, and I didn’t see Singin’ in the Rain until college.      Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , though, it was just always there. And so I guess that's really where I got infected. I'm referring to the 1954 musical directed by Stanley Donen with music by Gene de Paul ,...

Lamb: The Controversy of Vulnerability

In a landscape where the court of public opinion is ruled by sensationalism, where there is a reward for snap judgments and “thumbs down” reactions, it is imperative that we continue to train ourselves in the art of nuance and ambiguity. Some things aren’t easily classified as one thing or another, as good or bad, and they reveal limitations within our individual and collective perspective. This life and its overlapping matrices create more pressure points and junctions than we can hope to avoid. And so, we expose ourselves to contradictions not to desensitize ourselves or become permissive, but to add texture to our definitions.  Which brings me today’s subject,  Lamb, a 2015 independent film directed by Ross Partridge. Based on the novel by Bonnie Nadzam, the film finds a despondent 47-year-old man, David Lamb (played by Partridge himself), who strikes up a friendship with a neglected 11-year-old girl named Tommie (Oona Laurence). Their relationship is a sort of ac...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Making Room for Classic Movies

Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?”      When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.”  My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …”  Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws     In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...

REVIEW: Superman

      I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.      The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.      And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later.  I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.     I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

REVIEW: Lilo & Stitch

       By now the system errors of Disney's live-action remake matrix are well codified. These outputs tend to have pacing that feels like it was okayed by a chain store manager trying to lower the quarterly statement. They also show weird deference to very specific gags from their animated source yet don't bother to ask whether they fit well in the photorealistic world of live-action. And combing through the screenplay, you always seem to get snagged on certain lines of dialogue that someone must have thought belonged in a children's movie ("Being gross is against galactic regulation!").      These are all present in this  summer's live-action reinvention of "Lilo & Stitch." But mercifully, this remake allows itself to go off-script here and there. The result may be one of the stronger Disney remakes ... whatever that's worth.     The 2002 animated masterpiece by Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders (who voices the little blue alien in b...

REVIEW: Artemis Fowl

Fans of Eion Colfer's teen fantasy book, Artemis Fowl, have no doubt been eyeing this movie adaptation with some unrest in between all the shuffling of release dates and strict secrecy pertaining to the movie's plot and development. A beacon of hope amidst this was the assurance of Kenneth Brannagh's proficiency as a director. Unfortunately, Brannagh just appears complicit to this movie's ultimate dive-bombing. Brannagh remains one of my favorite directors currently working, some of my favorite works of his (such as his 2015 reimagining of Cinderella) even came from under the Disney banner, so I can only imagine what must have happened to Brannagh that caused him to forget how to competently direct a film. The film follows 12-year-old super genius, Artemis Fowl, (Ferdia Shaw) son of controversial public figure, Artemis Fowl Sr. (Colin Farrell) the only person for whom Artemis has any respect. When his father mysteriously disappears and Artemis receives a sinister ransom...

Year in Review: 2020

January 1st, 2020 was one of the most stressful days of my life. For weeks, January 2nd had been marked in red ink as the premiere date for this weird new project. My first three essays for my new blog were all spruced and pruned and ready for exhibition. I had spent months eyeing this date from a comfortable, hypothetical distance. Hanging over the precipice was giving me vertigo. It's not like I wasn't used to writing about film. This is more or less what I did for three years working for a film degree. Goodness, I have notebooks as far back as 5 th  grade full of writings about favorite films--I've technically been doing this for a long time. But this is the first time I’ve shared my work with the public. And when you're writing for an audience, you feel transparent. Naked. But I took a step into the oblivion anyway, and this blog has been a labor of love for me over the last year. Easily one of the best decisions I've ever made. If you're interested Some i...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...