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 interesting statistics about this year: Counting this piece, I have a total of 32 posts on my blog thus far. Two of these are Professors Picks, eleven of these are film reviews, and eighteen of these are essays (sixteen if you count all three segments of my Pixar series as one essay). My most popular essay is currently “We Killed Judy Garland” while my most popular overall piece is my review of this year’s Onward, which outperforms the next most popular post by nearly double and still gets regular views to this day.

So where do I go from here?

Film essays have always been the meat and bread of my workload, and they will continue to be my priority. I've marked a few films and subjects that I'd like to get around to this year, but I try not to commit to anything too far an advance. Some of my favorite projects this year have been surprises, and I want to leave room for more of those if I can. The first essays for the year, however, are already well into production. The first of these, I will promise here and now, you can expect on January 19th.

Professor's Picks have been a very recent addition to the menu. I was originally starkly reluctant to do any kind of listicle. I go to titanic lengths to not fall into clickbait antics with this blog and, full confession, I wrote off that entire genre of writing as far too lowbrow to ever have a place on this blog. It took some convincing from my editing team, but I saw an opportunity to use this mode of writing as another opportunity to creatively write about film. I'm happy to have add Professor's Picks to my business model. I don't know exactly how often I'll put out a new one, but expect to more of them in the future.

Actual notes for my review of Onward

Film reviews are going to be an interesting game this upcoming year. Given any non-pandemic year, my media diet is usually overwhelmingly composed of films released theatrically. But the last day I was in the theater was March 13, and even now as the lights appear on the horizon we still don't quite know how long until theatergoing becomes a regular activity again.

There’s no question about whether or not I will continue reviewing movies, or whether or not I will be back in the cinemas once the coast is clear. What I don’t know quite yet know is how much attention I will give to streaming movies once theaters are back on the table. I try to support the cinema as the beating heart of modern entertainment, but I also don’t want to be a purist and ignore the plethora of quality entertainment available to streaming. I'm just as curious as you to see how it all plays out.

When you’re writing for an audience, you feel more responsibility to write quality content. You want to write something that will not only be worth your reader’s time but will also maybe change him or her for the better. (Have you become a better person since reading about why we all just need to give Russell Crowe’s singing a break? Let me know in the comments.) I take this platform very seriously and hope that you guys find it half as rewarding as I do.

Thanks everyone who has followed me this far. I plan on doing this for a long time.

--The Professor

Hugo (2011)

Comments

REVIEW: HOPPERS

In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers. Let me back up ... Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting. Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...

The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

The Night of the Hunter: Redefining "Childlike Innocence"

I n the early 1960s, American professor and psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg developed what is now considered to be a fundamental cornerstone of understanding humans and morality. He introduced a model by which human beings start out determining what is right and wrong based on which course of action elicits the least punishment. Successful movement through this model sees a person gradually becoming motivated by principles , not simple reward or punishment, and Kohlberg anticipated that a person did not achieve this stage until adulthood, if ever. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) This is interesting because t he media likes to cast children as vessels of uncompromised goodness that adults could only ever hope to emulate. T heir purity forms the bedrock of much of American conversation. Because the future hinges upon their innocence, efforts to preserve their unblemished state can go to any length. You can justify any number of actions as long as you are doing i...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

My Best Friend's Wedding: Deconstructing the Deconstructive Rom-Com

Well, Wicked is doing laps around the box office, so it looks as though the Hollywood musical is saved, at least for a season, so I guess we’ll turn our attention to another neglected genre. As with something like the musical, the rom-com is one of those genres that the rising generation will always want to interrogate, to catch it on its lie. The whole thing seems to float on fabrication and promising that of which we can always be skeptical—the happy ending. This is also why they’re easy to make fun of and are made to feel second-tier after “realer” films which aren’t building a fantasy. You know? Movies like Die Hard … We could choose any number of rom-coms, but the one that I feel like diving into today is 1997’s underrated My Best Friend’s Wedding . I’m selecting it for a number of reasons. Among these is my own personal fondness for the film, and also the fact that it boasts a paltry 6.3 on IMDb despite its ...

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side. Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog, for example, was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland . Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952) Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work, Gods Like Us , “...

Silver Linings Playbook: What are Happy Endings For Anyway?

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave the following words in July of 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre: Nights of Cabiria (1957) “For me, movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.” Ebert had been reviewing films for coming on forty years when he gave that assessment. I haven’t been doing it for a tenth as long. I don’t know if I’ve really earned the right to pontificate in this same manner. But film ...

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - Febuary

Welcome back, one and all, to my latest attempt to justify being enslaved to a million different streaming services. My efforts to watch one new movie a day all year haven't worn me out yet, but we're not even past the first quarter yet. My first film of the month brought me to Baz Lurhmann's Australia , and it reminded me what a beautifully mysterious animal the feature film is. My writer's brain identified a small handful of technical issues with the film's plotting, but the emotional current of the film took me to a place that was epic, even spiritual. I don't know. When a film cuts straight to the core of your psyche, do setup and payoff even matter anymore? I think this film is fated for repeated viewings over the years as I untangle my response to this film. One of my favorite films of all time is Billy Wilder's The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. You'd think, then, that learning that the t...

REVIEW: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

The fanboy renaissance manages to reach even higher heights with the new "Super Mario Galaxy Movie." The easter eggs and cameos are back with a vengeance, and in much richer resolution than we'd have thought possible even five years ago. It's for this kind of thing that the movie will be called "wish fulfillment" for video game nerds, but I personally felt fed as an animation enthusiast. To see such caricatured designs playing on such a vivid, textured playground is a rarity. It's only when you see the bricks of a giant, fairy-tale castle splintering and disintegrating that you feel like this world has weight, consequences, and there is something about that which feels strangely validating. And as with the last movie, as with the Mario universe as a whole, the animated world's command over its own landscape lets you swim between all sorts of exotic and eclectic locales and genres at leisure. Every single cast member...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog