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

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REVIEW: WICKED - For Good

I'm conflicted about how to approach this review. I know everyone has their own yellow brick road to the myth of The Wizard of Oz as a whole and the specific Broadway adaptation that brought us all here. I don't want to write this only for others who are familiar with the source material. Even so, I can't help but review this from the perspective of a fan of the Broadway show--someone who has been tracking the potential for a film adaptation since before Jon M. Chu's participation was announced for the ambitious undertaking of translating one of Broadway's most electric shows onto film. I can't help but view this from the vantage point of someone who knew just how many opportunities this had to go wrong. And it's from that vantage point that I now profess such profound relief that the gambit paid off. We truly have the " Lord of the Rings of musicals ." I'll give last year's movie the edge for having a slightly...

The Apartment: What Makes Us Human

Earlier this year, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and this summer's Superman movie, James Gunn, attributed the chaos of modern Hollywood to one simple factor. Speaking with Rolling Stone, he said , “I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.” Without the insider knowledge that a Hollywood director has, I’m still inclined to agree. While the artistic and corporative threads of filmmaking have always been in competition, watching many tentpole films of the last fifteen years or so has felt more analogous to a dentist appointment than anything I'd call entertainment, and I can almost always trace the problem to something that should have been taken care of before the cameras ever started rolling. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) ...

REVIEW: Mufasa - The Lion King

To get to the point, Disney's new origin story for The Lion King 's Mufasa fails at the ultimate directive of all prequels. By the end of the adventure, you don't actually feel like you know these guys any better. Such has been the curse for nearly Disney's live-action spin-offs/remakes of the 2010s on. Disney supposes it's enough to learn more facts or anecdotes about your favorite characters, but the interview has always been more intricate than all that. There is no catharsis nor identification for the audience during Mufasa's culminating moment of uniting the animals of The Pridelands because the momentum pushing us here has been carried by cliche, not archetype. Director Barry Jenkins' not-so-secret weapon has always been his ability to derive pathos from lyrical imagery, and he does great things with the African landscape without stepping into literal fantasy. This is much more aesthetically interestin...

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 women 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, director of...

REVIEW: The Running Man

A lot of people have wanted to discuss Edgar Wright's new The Running Man outing as "the remake" of the 1987 film (with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a very different Ben Richards). As for me, I find it more natural to think of it as "another adaptation of ..." Even so, my mind was also on action blockbusters of the 1980s watching this movie today. But my thoughts didn't linger so much on the Paul Michael Glaser film specifically so much as the general action scene of the day. The era of Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell and the he-men they brought to life. These machine-gun wielding, foul-mouthed anarchists who wanted to tear down the establishment fed a real need for men with a lot of directionless anger. This was, as it would turn out, the same era in which Stephen King first published The Running Man , telling the story of a down-on-his luck man who tries to rescue his wife and daughter from poverty by winning a telev...

Professor's Picks: 10 Disappearing Movies Still on My Watchlist

Let me introduce this piece by discussing one of my favorite movies, 1938's Le Quai des Brumes , "Port of Shadows." This ancestor to noir film sees a despondent military deserter drifting to the foggy banks of Le Havre. There, he comes across a 17-year-old runaway pursued by several malicious parties. Their chance meeting teases a new and brighter future for these two drifters, forcing even the most nihilistic of us to consider the meaning of love and purpose in a meaningless world. I saw the film for the first time for Media Arts History I, and I was absolutely transported. In a semester that offered some of the most dry, challenging films I had to watch for any class, this film was just a breath of fresh air. E verything you imagine when you think of a "French movie," even if you only know them by pop culture parodies, this was all of that. The moodiness, the melodrama, the romance, it's all there, and to such great eff...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.” Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: The Electric State

It's out with the 80s and into the 90s for Stranger Things alum Millie Bobby Brown. In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with. This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. This just a movie that wants to impart a lot. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in fo...

Toy Story 4: Pixar's Tribute to Regression

It was about this time last year that I came across the one person who actually hated Toy Story 3 . I was reading Jason Sperb’s book “Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Age of Digital Cinema” as part of my research for my essay on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu . It was in one of his chapters on the Pixar phenomenon that he shared his observation from the ending of Toy Story 3 , essentially casting the film as this nostalgia mousetrap for adults: “ If Andy lets go of his childhood nostalgia and moves on, then Toy Story fans don’t really have to , as the narrative recognition in the potential value in such an act is sufficient. Actually moving on becomes indefinitely deferred in an endless cycle of consumption (rewatching the movies, purchasing new versions of the movie, purchasing more and more Toy Story-related merchandise, rewatching them yet again with the next generat...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Do Clementine and Joel Stay Together or Not?

Maybe. The answer is maybe. Not wanting to be that guy who teases a definitive answer to a difficult question and forces you to read a ten-page essay only to cop-out with a non-committal excuse of an answer, I’m telling you up and front the answer is maybe. Though nations have long warred over this matter, the film itself does not answer once and for all whether or not Joel Barrish and Clementine Krychinzki find lasting happiness together at conclusion of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Min d. I cannot give a definitive answer as to whether Joel and Clementine’s love will last until the stars turn cold or just through the weekend. This essay cannot do that. What this essay can do is explore the in-text evidence the film gives for either ...

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