Skip to main content

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - January

This fool's errand is the fruition of an idea I've wanted to try out for years now but have always talked myself out of. Watching a new movie a day for one full year is a bit of a challenge for a number of reasons, not in the least of which being that I'm the kind of guy who likes to revisit favorites. As a film lover, I'm prone to expanding my circle and watching films I haven't seen before, I've just never watched a new film every day for a year. So why am I going to attempt to pull that off at all, and why am I going to attempt it now?

I've put off a yearlong commitment because it just felt like too much to bite off. One such time, actually, was right when I first premiered this blog. You know ... the start of 2020? The year where we had nothing to do but watch Netflix all day? Time makes fools of us all, I guess.

I doubt it's ever going to be easier to pull off such a feat, so why not now? 

    Mostly, though, I really just want to help enliven my study of film. There are days when I am cocky enough to consider myself a critic of some expertise--I have seen a lot of movies--but the further I wade into the waters, the more I realize that there will always be more movies for me to see. More corners of the map I have yet to unlock. There are cult classics that have shaped the way movies are made today that I haven't seen. There are hidden gems begging to find their way to the mainstream that I haven't seen. There are sources of national trauma (looking at you, The Hobbit) that I haven't seen. Forcing yourself to diversify your exposure helps develop your palette, and this is a chance for me to do that in a significant way.

Anyways, some highlights from my first month into this endeavor ... 

    I hit the theaters twice in January. First with Belle, then with Scream the next week. Scream was the rare legacy sequel that arguably surpassed the film it was honoring while Belle genuinely left me reflecting on my purpose as a film critic. There was a good two-and-a-half month span this last year where I didn't much care for any of the movies that I reviewed, so I'm grateful that I got to come up for air.

    The passing of Sidney Poitier compelled me to look more into his filmography, leading me to discover Pressure Point, a fascinating intersection between the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and America reflecting on Naziism in the nation some twenty years earlier. I'm genuinely surprised that I haven't come across this exact movie before as both topics have been thrust into the public eye in recent years in such a large way.

I feel like the world should also be aware that in 1952 Cary Grant made a film with his at the time wife, Betsy Drake, called Room for One More. I guess I'd have to research the matter more thoroughly to be sure, but this film has to be one of the earliest onscreen depictions of the foster care system. If you loved the film "Instant Family," I'd heartily recommend checking this one out.

    As recently as this week, I checked out the mini-series version of Stephen King's Salem's Lot after finishing the book this weekend. Regrettably, this adaptation did not leave me particularly impressed. It's fascinating how the film managed to translate almost all of the plot from the novel without carrying any of the personality. We're due for another film adaptation this September, and I'm praying it's much more lively than what we got here. I'm comforted remembering that the recent It movies were both leaps ahead of the 1990 miniseries based on the same novel. Perhaps we can hope for a similar jump when the new film hits theaters (I hope) this fall.

    Anyways, one-twelfth of the way into this trek, and I haven't started to burn out yet. I'm hoping that I find some new favorites with this challenge. Wish me luck. 

--The Professor


An image of The Professor bracing himself for the challenge (I'm the one in the blue)



January's Harvest:

His People (1925)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
The Mortal Storm (1940)
Begin Again (2013)
The Batman (1989)
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
The Grand Hotel (1932)
Hans Christian Andersen (1952)
Room For One More (1952)
Promising Young Woman (2020)
Braveheart (1995)
Always Be My Maybe (2019)
Delightfully Dangerous (1945)
The Cider House Rules (1999)
Belle (2021)
Pressure Point (1962)
Scream (2022)
Armageddon (1998)
The Wild Swans (1977)
Robocop (1987)
I Am Sam (2001)
Children of the Corn (1984)
Tombstone (1993)
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
The Fisher King (1991)
Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932)
All the Right Moves (1983)
Beyond the Moon (1954)
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
Salem's Lot (1979)
The Tender Bar (2021)
Labels:

Comments

  1. Mark DavisFebruary 28, 2022 at 2:32 PM

    1989' s Batman is the best of the Batman movies in my opinion. I love the reboot with Christian Bale but the Keaton/Nicholson version is the perfect balance of bleakness and cartoonishness. And of course it is, its a Tim Burton film.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s “Aladdin” in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with “Inside Out 2” and “Zootopia 2” topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely felt less valued: In May 2024, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: A Quiet Place - DAY ONE

I remember back when I reviewed A Quiet Place Part II , the thing that was on my mind a world crawling out of a global pandemic.  I now dive into Michael Sarnoski's newest take on the mythology with A Quiet Place: Day One having just this morning heard the news that a certain convicted felon is being granted immunity for his involvement in trying to overthrow democracy, and I am left wondering (not for the first time) what surviving in a world that already balances on borrowed time even means. This is more or less the mindset of the film's protagonist, Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who was already done with existing well before killer aliens started dropping out from the sky. The only things she cares about in the world are her "emotional support" cat, Frodo, and getting a taste of some proper New York pizza before this cancer takes her, alien invasion or not! While the rest of the city is running off to catch the last boat off Manhattan, she just digs deeper ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: Spider-Man - Brand New Day

      Somewhere in the multiverse, there's an opening chord of a review where I celebrate Spiderman: Brand New Day as some kind of welcome "return to basics" for the MCU, but that's not more than partially true.       This movie is a lot more straightforward than cohesive than most Marvel pics from the early stretch of the decade. Feige finally feels confident that, yes, we know that there's a multiverse, and we don't need more reminders.     But this is also not a budget Marvel movie. The film still designs an elaborate fireworks show for Peter Parker to dance around. There is also definite signaling for future Marvel adventures. Sadie Sink's stealth role in this movie (a sizzling introduction into the MCU) teases the integration of a new family of superheroes set to join the ranks of The New Avengers.      But these sneak peeks feel like just that, and unlike sloppier Marvel pics, they aren't made to bear the weight of the e...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Criminal Father Surrogate: Masculinity in A Perfect World

     I've been wanting to tackle the subject of "masculinity" in film for quite some time now, but I hadn't quite known how best to do that. There's a certain buzzword, "toxic masculinity," that especially elicits a lot of strong feelings from a lot of different angles. While a post-#MeToo world has exposed some very disturbing truths about the way masculinity has historically performed, I'm not here to roast 50% of the world population. Actually, I really want to talk about a man's capacity for good. Ted Lasso (2020)      There’s certainly a lot of discussion to be had for newer media celebrating men for possessing attributes not historically coded as "manly." But what's even more fascinating to me are the attempts to bridge the gap between traditional masculinity and new age expectations--to reframe an older vision of manhood within our modern context.       Which brings me to Clint Eastwood’s 1993 film, A Perfect World.   ...
1 comment
Read more

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case.  I am referring of course to the western film. See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life support, and maybe one day we’ll get the  Wicked  movie Universal has been promising us for fifteen years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like  No Country for Old Men,  which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns  of old.  Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion.              Professors Susan Kord and El...
1 comment
Read more

Thawing Disney's Frozen Heart

  As a millennial Disney fan and film student in utero, I often thought about what it would have been like to be there when Aladdin or The Little Mermaid , or even “Snow White” or The Jungle Book , premiered to the culture. It’s one thing to grow up and realize you have a piece of film history with you here in your living room. It’s another to get to watch the culture transform as it engages for the first time with something  And I have this envy for a great many cinematic works. Like, what I would give to go back to 1946 and tell those losers who dismissed It's a Wonderful Life how they had no idea what they were sleeping on. But the Disney canon’s place within the culture is also specific. Their commitment to delivering hopeful stories to an audience that believes itself beyond such frailties as faith or kindness is unparalleled, and that makes their contributions worth studying and celebrating. And so I didn’t take it for granted during that period in late 2013/early ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: The End of Oak Street

      There's something vaguely Spielberg about The End of Oak Street , and I don't really even mean the dinosaurs, which look quite a bit different from the CG masterworks of the seminal '93 film.      The Platts are a conventional American family living in 1980s suburbia who are caught in a bizarre time anomaly that sends their entire neighborhood back to the prehistoric age.  What follows plays like a more visceral rendition of '95 Jumanji . There's a very PG13 level of blood onscreen. But most of the anxiety derives from just how unceremoniously the dinosaurs are seen snacking on the neighbors.  Without ever feeling like it's trying to outsmart the audience, the film drives home the idea that, yeah, if your street was sucked into a wormhole, the dinos would get you too--and probably without even needing to try hard.      Among many other things, the movie is a masterclass in filmmaking tension. Amidst a stampede of gigantic fang...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

     Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in.      We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...
1 comment
Read more