Year in Review: 2021

It's a common truism in film discussion that sequels can never really live up to the original. Many have bemoaned the lack of ambition inherent in franchise follow-ups, but I am going to go out on a limb and declare that I'm relieved that the sequel to 2020 took things a little easier.

I guess that this year was also a sort of sequel for Films and Feelings. Was this a better year for my blog? I hope so. It was certainly a busy one. This harvest of essays, totaling thirteen, included the following:

-"A Quiet Place: Scaredy-Cats Taking Back the Horror Movie" An essay contextualizing "A Quiet Place" within the larger horror genre, drawing attention to the film's many deviations from the genre's template.

-"Toy Story 4: Pixar's Tribute to Regression" A rant about the creative and philosophical laziness inherent in "Toy Story 4."

-"The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Clash of the Titans" A retrospective on how studio meddling sabotaged the 2010 remake of "Clash of the Titans."

-"Do I Actually Hate the Disney Remakes?' A User's Guide" An interrogation of the most common complaints against the Disney live-action remakes.

-"Systemic Heartbreak in From Here to Eternity" A study of what the adaptation process of "From Here to Eternity" reveals about society's feelings toward growth on an individual and institutional level.

-"The Many Fathers of Harry Potter" A study of the contributions each director made to the Harry Potter movies.

-"Mamma Mia: Musicals Deserve Better" A rant about "Mamma Mia" as a reflection of the uphill battle musicals face in being taken seriously.

-"No, Disney Didn't Ruin Kipling's The Jungle Book" A case study of the scholarly resistance Disney often faces for adapting pre-existing texts, featuring their animated film version of "The Jungle Book."

-"Superhero Fatigue" A response to elitist dismissal of the modern renaissance of superhero movies.

-"The Paradox of The Graduate" A reflection on "The Graduate" and its contradictory place within film discourse, especially as an item of rebellious 1960s film.

-"Wicked vs Maleficent" A comparison between "Maleficent" and "Wicked," with a special focus on how either text critiques both society and the film it is adapted from.

-"My Criminal Father Surrogate: Masculinity in A Perfect World" A reading of Clint Eastwood's 1993 film, "A Perfect World," that focuses on society's insecurities surrounding masculinity and fatherhood.

-"How Disney Liberated the Musical Genre" A tribute to the Disney animated musical's impact on musical films.

These all represent hours of meditating, writing, researching, second-guessing, and revising. A LOT of revising. Singling out a favorite is impossible: I'll just say that the essay I'm proudest of is always the one I just finished.

My biggest new essay from this year was my Toy Story 4 rant while my biggest piece over all was my review of The Tomorrow War. A surprising number of essays also had quite a bit of carry-over from last year. (To the kindly soul who keeps going back to my "Eternal Sunshine" essay, I hope you're out there living your best life.) That little piece of information is actually particularly comforting to me. It's nice to know that your passion project has some longevity.

Meanwhile, my review count has exploded this year (seventeen reviews in 2021) now that studios are finally releasing movies again. Owing to my desire to support my local movie theater, I foresee that my reviews will continue to favor those released theatrically, but I think movies released on streaming will continue to find their way onto this blog.

I also remember confessing last year that I wasn't sure about how often I would put out more "Professor's Picks" posts. This year I'm confessing that, even with that incredibly low bar, I still ended up not producing nearly as many as I'd anticipated. It's sad, especially since I've recently started to appreciate how they allow me to discuss film in a fuller capacity, and I hope to do better this year. (Which shouldn't be too hard.)

A teaser for my next essay. Any guesses?

Looking forward, I've already blocked out the dates for when I want to have all my pieces up in 2022, and have even marked some of the topics I want to hit this year. The first of such essays is projected for February 15.

Yes, you read that correctly, I made the decision to skip January's essay this year. This owing in large part to the extraordinary amount of content I had to write last month, and also I just needed to come up for air. Following that gap, though, expect my essays to come at my regular monthly interval.

Rust and Bone (2012)

There are still some corners of the film world that I haven't explored very thoroughly yet. In addition to engaging more with classic cinema, I also want to try spotlighting more international and indie films. I think commentary on the mainstream is fun, and even important in a lot of ways, but I also want to acknowledge cinema in all of its breadth and scope.

We've known for a long time that the attention of the masses tends to cluster around specific islands of film. Just so, the rate at which audiences are diverting more attention to fewer projects alarms even the most sour of commentators, and a part of me hopes that I can help diversify our interests. I want this to be a space where we not only look at favorite films, but also perhaps discover new favorites as well.

Thanks everyone for all the support. I hope to be doing this for a long time.

--The Professor

Final reminder that In the Heights was the best thing we got from 2021

Comments

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: Five Lessons Hollywood Ought to Learn from the Success of WICKED

That which has teased studios since the freak success of La La Land and The Greatest Showman has finally come to pass: Hollywood has finally launched a successful musical. Or rather, they've launched two. The musical is sort of like the golden idol at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark . It's valuable beyond imagination--but only if you know just how to retrieve it. There have been specific periods where the musical has yielded tremendous rewards for Hollywood, but for the greater part of the lifespan of feature-filmmaking, studios have been punished for reaching beyond their means. Yet after ages of dormancy, t he years leading up to the Wicked movies were lined with musicals, more than we'd seen in the previous decade. A few of them were quite well crafted. Others were ... learning experiences. None really became what we'd call "mainstream." But Wicked and Wicked: For Good have both seen rare success. I'm publishing ...

Elemental: Savoring Pixar's Fading Light

I’ve only been doing this writing thing for a short while. But in that space, I have been surprised at many of the developments I’ve gotten to witness unfolding in the popular film landscape. It was only five years ago, for example, that superhero movies were still thought to be unstoppable. Here in 2025, though, we know better. But the wheels coming off the Marvel machine accompanied a shift in their whole method of production and distribution, and it didn’t take long for the natural consequences to catch up with them as verifiable issues started appearing in their films. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) No. The development that has most surprised me has been critics and their slow-motion break-up with Pixar. The only way I know how to describe what I’ve seen over the last five years … imagine that your roommate has been stuck for a long time dating a girl who was obviously bad for him, and after he finally breaks up with her he gets back into the dating ring. All the girls he takes out ...

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...

Year in Review: 2025

So, I guess I’ll start out by saying that … I wasn’t kidding last year when I said I was gonna do better with reviews, folks. This is the first time in three years that my review count landed in the double digits, and I reached that benchmark barely past the year’s halfway point. My total this year landed at 19. This breaks my previous record of 17 from 2021 and also outpaces the total haul from 2024 and 2023 combined. Once again, " WICKED " pulled through as the biggest contributor this year, and I wouldn't have had that any other way. These last two years of active anticipation have been some of the most gratifying I've ever had as a person who feels investment in moving pictures. I'm even more excited, though, for this duology to be folded into film history: that thing I really love writing about. I will always regret not reviewing The Holdovers (2023) In the past, I have let myself get away with checki...

Saying Goodbye to Stranger Things

There's a quote from critic Mark Caro that I think about a lot. I shared it back when I did my critical survey of Pixar movies . Writing about Finding Nemo , Caro wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 2003 , "Classic film eras tend to get recognized in retrospect while we take for granted timeless works passing before our eyes. So let's pause to appreciate what's been going on at Pixar Animation Studios." I think that captures the aspirations of all active-minded media consumers. Or at least, it ought to. "This good thing won't last forever, so savor it before the sun goes down." Modern Times (1936) But this is also a very hard mindset to access in an online culture that is always seeking to stamp labels and scores on a thing before we shove it on the conveyor belt and move on to the next parcel. It's something I have been thinking about for the last year or so as the completion of the Stranger ...

REVIEW: ZOOTOPIA 2

Any follow-up to the 2016 masterpiece, Zootopia , is going to be disadvantaged. Cinema was still a year ahead of Jordan Peele's "Get Out" when Disney released one of the most articulate explanations of race, allyship, and accountability ever put to film. Now that everyone knows how good, even "timely," a Disney pic can be, how do you surprise everyone a second time? The insights in this sequel won't spur any new chapters in your sociology 101 textbook. Though honestly, neither was the deflection of white saviourship that novel back in 2016. We more or less knew how racial profiling and biases played out in the landscape. What surprised many of us (and validated the rest of us) was the idea that these ideas could be articulated so eloquently in a children's film. It seems that the studio tried the same thing here with Zootopia 2 that it did with Frozen II six years ago. I think a lot of people wanted that m...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence

So ... you all remember how I was really annoyed by The Power of the Dog ? Despite being an early prediction for the big trophy, I found that attempt rather shallow and self-congratulatory. I am more than perfectly fine that the Best Picture award went to the much better CODA . I thought it was much more enjoyable as a piece of film, and unlike The Power of the Dog , it did showed honest interest in the community it was reporting to champion. In the case of CODA , that was, of course, the deaf community. But it's actually not CODA I want to talk about in detail at this time. That movie's milestones exist along a timeline that extends ... further back than I can track today, but at least as far back as March 30, 1987, when Marlee Matlin became the first deaf actor to receive an Academy Award for her performance in Children of a Lesser God . Randa Haines’ 1986 film centers on the romance between a hearing man and a deaf woman a...

Edward G. Robinson: Patron Saint of Forgotten Men

I want to start off this essay by talking about one of my go-to movie stars, Chris Pratt. My first exposure to him was at the end of my freshmen summer term when he landed as Peter Quill/Star Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy , a film I very much enjoyed, as you all know. (I would also see The Lego Movie for the first time around here). And by the time he was up for Jurassic World the next summer, I was up to date with my Parks and Recreation viewing, and the world had accepted him as a household name. Like a lot of celebrities who came into prominence in the wake of social media, part of Pratt’s strengths lies in his supreme accessibility. But where someone like Ryan Reynolds found his market as being this cynical son-of-a-gun, Pratt’s appeal was his complete lack of pretense. His sincerity. Whe...

REVIEW: MERCY

Everyone who was despairing that Star-Lord and Taser-Face never got their showdown, your moment in the sun has come. In MERCY , out this weekend, future Los Angeles has adopted a justice system in which criminals are weighed before an AI judge. Those on trial are allowed the full disposal of public surveillance and digital footprints in order to clear their name within a 90-minute timeframe. And this is the situation in which recovering alcoholic and policeman, Chris Raven, (Chris Pratt) find himself as he is charged with the murder of his wife, and he is left to make his case before the commanding Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) or face execution. The movie's buoyed up by a respectable ensemble cast, including Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Kylie Rogers, Jeff Piere, and Chris Sullivan. Pratt and Ferguson are both up to the task, but we've also seen more memorable work from both of them. The movie knows ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog