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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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...

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...

REVIEW: Disclosure Day

Maybe it was self-control that compelled Spielberg to build his whole movie around aliens but give the aliens themselves as little screentime as possible. (Or, for all I know, he did it on a dare.) But this is only one of the risks taken by his latest film. This first encounter picture is distanced from something like Independence Day and more toward something like 2001: A Space Odyssey --and it's even closer to something like Arrival . The film sees a cyber-security worker, Daniel Kilner (Josh O'Connor) who defects with the intent to reveal what he knows to the world: the government has had repeated, secret encounters with extraterrestrial life. He has a team of underground sympathizers, lead by Hugo Wakefield (Colmon Domingo), but he also has agent Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) out to stop the truth at any cost. Kilner's only chance getting the truth out there is in joining up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a newscast personali...

(Almost) A Love Letter to the "Percy Jackson" Movies

Maybe it's just living through a pandemic-stained world rife where each election feels like a last-ditch effort to rescue liberty from the oblivion, but I'm sometimes nostalgic for the days when the most traumatic thing in my life was a poor adaptation of a favorite book. My generation will remember the film adaptation of the popular YA fantasy book Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan with something like embarrassment, if not outright lividity. The book follows a young teen, Percy Jackson, who discovers that the gods of ancient Greece not only exist, but also sire modern day heroes. As a child of one of these gods, Percy is continually drawn into their Olympian-sized conflicts wherein he gets to prove himself every bit as much a hero as Hercules. Each installment of the five-book series reads like a theme-park ride through Greek mythology as the teens travel across the country battling ancient m...

Some Much Needed Love for Megamind

Following this year's Oscars ceremony, filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directors of The Lego Movie , penned an op-ed for Variety bemoaning the stigma around animated films. They report taking issue with Naomi Scott, one of the presenters for best animated film, saying that animated films are some of the most formative experiences a kid has, and that kids tend to watch these films over and over, further noting "I think some of the parents out there know exactly what I'm talking about." Lord and Miller seemed to take this as implying that adults can't appreciate animated films, saying "Surely no one set out to diminish animated films, but it’s high time we set out to elevate them." I didn't personally find Scott's observation that kids make their parents watch the same animated films over and over again innately demeaning--certainly not any more than Schumer joking that her toddler made he...

REVIEW: Song Sung Blue

I came into Craig Brewer's Song Sung Blue with little context for the real-life couple at the center of this movie, for Neil Diamond, or for the world of celebrity impersonators interpreters. There are no doubt subterranean connotations to the specific songs that they chose to sing at certain moments in the narrative that are lost on me. I have no doubt, though, that the intended audience will find this movie before long. But the film was still viable enough that even a relative neophyte like me could still find himself humming along to this musical drama. The film documents the real-life couple of Mike and Claire Sardina, celebrity impersonators who fall in love, marry, and form a tribute band for legendary singer, Neil Diamond. We track their relationship from its beginning through their career aspirations and the crossroads in their marriage, including a violent accident that changes their family forever. Again, I don...

REVIEW: Soul

Pixar's latest film, Soul , dropped on Disney+ Christmas day, another regrettable casualty of the virus. This time around, we follow a hopeful musician bursting with enthusiasm. Music is an oddly appropriate metaphor for the film: both certainly touch the outer rim of mankind's emotional faculty, but good luck summarizing the experience to your friends. Joe Gardner is a music teacher at a public school whose enthusiasm for music is spilling out of the walls of his classroom. Opportunity strikes Joe the same day that misfortune does, and a fatal accident lands him in a celestial plane of existence known as "The Great Before," where souls are developed and finessed before being sent to earth to experience human existence. Joe is saddled with mentoring 22, a soul sapling who has settled in The Great Before for several hundred years and has no intention of ever giving mortality a chance. But in 22, Joe sees a chance to return back to earth and fulfill his purpose if he ca...

The Notebook Has No Excuses

The thing about film is … the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Film tells us, even in a society obsessed with wealth and gain, “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.” Film warns us that the most unnatural evil lies in wait at the Overlook Hotel and peeks out when all the guests leave for the winter–and that the heart of it resides in room 237–knowing we'll trip over ourselves wanting to open that door. Film is what makes us believe that the vessel for the deepest human emotion could be contained in a cartoon clownfish taking his unhatched cartoon son and holding him in his cartoon fin and telling him he will never let anything happen to him. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Even when it tries to plant its feet aggressively in realism, film winds up being an inherently emotional realm. We feel safer to view and express all manners of passions or desires here in the space where the rules of propriety just don’t matter anymore. So a fa...

Charade: The Shortest Distance Between Two Words

It can feel hackneyed, and even a little lazy, to echo that oft-repeated sentiment that “they really just don’t make ‘em like they used to.” That kind of nostalgic wallowing has us forget that, yeah, even the old masters sometimes produced real stinkers. And it’s also not fair to the many storytellers today who, working against ever turbulent conditions, still manage to create something deeply profound and worthy of the deepest reverences … But there are absolutely times where it’s really easy to believe this anyways. Let me explain by describing my recent experience watching Argylle for the first time earlier this year. The film was designed as a spin-off from the “Kingsmen” franchise and saw poor Bryce Dallas Howard playing Elly, a reclusive spy novelist, whose life is turned upside down when a host of malicious agents converge on her demanding that she write her final book because the events in her novels have predicted real w...

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...

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