The Great Movie Conquest of 2022

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - June

I'll acknowledge I didn't get to dive as deeply as I'd hoped this month with my chosen theme. Part of that was poor planning, part of that is I'm discovering in realtime the limits of devoting one month to one performer's body of work, particularly when that performer is still alive. The performer in question is, of course, the effervescent Amy Adams.

Like most of my generation, I came to know Adams through her performance as Giselle in Enchanted. Her fantastic work in this role helped cement her as the doe-eyed naivete too pure for this world. Much of her work prior to her breakout role (Catch Me if You Can, Junebug, etc.) circled a similar note, as did many of her roles in the years immediately following (Doubt, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, etc.).

In the last decade or so, though, Adams has enjoyed more mature and grounded roles, as seen with movies like Nocturnal Animals or Arrival. Part of my conquest this month was to try to identify a specific turning point in her career.

It was around 2013, with Man of Steel and American Hustle, that I first started to notice Adams going for more mature roles, and so that's kind of where I assume she made the jump. But I'm finding there are films that complicate that hypothesis.

2010 had Adams as a world-weary bartender opposite Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter. Even as early as 2008, one year after her turn as Giselle, she featured in Sunshine Cleaning as a woman who spontaneously decides to start a biohazard clean-up business, and already she was starting to work outside that perfect portrait of wholesomeness. At the start of the film, Adams' character is having an affair with a married man, and she's also shown to be somewhat judgmental and condemning to her wayward sister (played by Emily Blunt). Even fresh out of her turn as a modern Disney Princess, Adams showed great ability in touching on other aspects of the human experience.

But of course, that's always been her secret weapon. Her performance in Enchanted wouldn't have been worth remarking on if she didn't have the ability to portray a literal 2D character with depth. She showed us that even something like "innocence" could signal a character with a complex inner life. Though she became more well-known for "weightier" roles later on (I'm especially interested to see how her evolution informs her approach to Giselle when she returns to the role in "Disenchanted" this fall), maturity has always been a part of her repertoire.

Elsewhere on this month's roundup, June month saw two more movie reviews from me. The first was for Jurassic World: Dominion, and the second was from Elvis. Both movies represent two different factions of film that are often viewed as opposing. "Dominion" is the culminating offering of one of the most successful franchises of all time while "Elvis" is an auteur-driven biopic Oscar hopeful. I know a lot of audiences view these as two separate masters that man cannot serve equally, but here at Films and Feelings, we don't abide by such fallacies. Both were really enjoyable experiences.

I was lucky to come across Robert Redford's directorial debut, Ordinary People. This film, which took home the best picture of the year Oscar, follows a family grieving the loss of their eldest son. Even knowing the territory, I wasn't prepared for how vulnerable the film made me feel, and I've already given it a second viewing.

The votes for next month's theme are in, and I will spend July watching epic fantasy from the 1970s and 80s. I chose this time period specifically because it barely predates the age of CGI. Fantasy during this time looked and felt different than what we know today, and the results are endlessly fascinating.

Anyways, we are now halfway through 2022, and I am finally halfway through this fool's errand. I'd say I'm starting to get to that place where I look forward to not having to scramble for a new movie each day, but honestly I've been there since like Mid-March. (It's fine. I only have to do this 184 more times.)

By this point, I'm starting to ask myself how many of these movies I'm ever going to see again. Or even, how many of these I'm ever going to think of again. Odds are, very few of them. And this only further begs the question, what is the point, then, of all the countless films I'm consuming that are destined for me oblivion?

I'll be honest, I do not have an answer for this.

--The Professor

If July were just wall-to-wall with 9 and 10 star films, that'd be GREAT ...

June's Harvest

Big Eyes (2014)

The Omega Man (1971)

The Lure (2015)

Ordinary People (1980)
The Letter (1940)

Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

Network (1976)

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Boys' Night Out (1962)

Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

The Two Mrs. Carrols (1947)

High and Low (1963)

The Fighter (2010)

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)

Limitless (2011)

The Scarlet Letter (1926)

Office Space (1999)

Marathon Man (1976)

The Wings of Eagles (1957)
Loving (2016)

Black Gold (1947)

Ghost World (2001)

Golem (1920)

Elvis (2022)

Too Late for Tears (1949)

The River (1951)

The Big Sick (2017)

That Hamilton Woman (1941)

Enemy of the State (1998)

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

Comments

REVIEW: WICKED

Historically, the process of musical-film adaptation has been scored on retention --how much of the story did the adaptation gods permit to be carried over into the new medium? Which singing lines had to be tethered to spoken dialogue? Which character got landed with stunt casting? Which scenes weren't actually as bad as you feared they'd be? Well, Jon M. Chu's adaptation of the Broadway zeitgeist, Wicked , could possibly be the first to evaluated on what the story gained in transition. The story imagines the history of Elphaba, a green-skinned girl living in Oz who will one day become the famous Wicked Witch of the West. Long before Dorothy dropped in, she was a student at Shiz University, where her story would cross with many who come to shape her life--most significantly, Galinda, the future Good Witch of the North. Before their infamous rivalry, they both wanted the same thing, to gain favor with the Wonderful...

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 ...

REVIEW: MOANA 2

Way back in 2016 , Moana's quest to return The Heart of Te Fiti ran perfectly parallel to both Moana's own sense of unrest and her community's need to return to their voyaging roots, motivations that were all intrinsic--and also very well-established in that first act. The opposing forces were also clear--not just in the presence of lava monsters or killer coconuts, but in the attitudes she faced from her overprotective father and her swaggering demigod sidekick. Her ultimate discovery, that the island she was trying to restore and the monster she had to thwart were one and the same, was likewise an organic extension of her inherent compassion and discernment. That first film understood the basic chemistry of the adventure narrative, and how it sang when thoughtfully applied to the Disney aesthetic, so they don't really have an excuse for bungling the mixture this time around. For a film determined to fit in as many charac...

REVIEW: Belfast

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the world needs more black and white movies. The latest to answer the call is Kenneth Branagh with his semi-autobiographical film, Belfast . The film follows Buddy, the audience-insert character, as he grows up in the streets of Belfast, Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though Buddy and his family thrive on these familiar streets, communal turmoil leads to organized violence that throws Buddy's life into disarray. What's a family to do? On the one hand, the father recognizes that a warzone is no place for a family. But to the mother, even the turmoil of her community's civil war feels safer than the world out there. Memory feels safer than maturation. As these films often go, the plot is drifting and episodic yet always manages to hold one's focus. Unbrushed authenticity is a hard thing to put to film, and a film aiming for just that always walks a fine line betwe...

REVIEW: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Some die-hard fans of the franchise may have to correct me, but I don't remember Mario having a solid backstory. Or any backstory. I'm pretty sure he just emerged fully grown from a sewer pipe one day and started chucking turtle shells at mushrooms for fun. I remember, for example, that Mario and Luigi are canonically brothers, yet there's little opportunity in the video games to explore anything like a relationship between them. That's domain better trod by film. And this weekend's feature film adaptation from Illumination does succeed in carving out character, personality, and history for all the players on the board. The fact that Mario and Luigi are brothers isn't just a way to excuse their nearly identical apparel. Their relationship is the foundation for Mario's quest. Even more impressive is that the film reaches its degree of texture with its characters without cramming in exposition overload. This is one ar...

REVIEW: Cyrano

The modern push for the movie musical tends to favor a modern sound--songs with undertones of rap or rock. It must have taken director Joe Wright a special kind of tenacity, then, to throw his heart and soul into a musical project (itself a bold undertaking) that surrenders to pure classicalism with his new film Cyrano . Whatever his thought process, it's hard to argue with the results. With its heavenly design, vulnerable performances, and gorgeous musical numbers, the last musical offering of 2021 (or perhaps the first of 2022) is endlessly enchanting. Cyrano de Bergerac's small stature makes him easy prey for the scorn and ridicule of the high-class Victorian society, but there has yet to be a foe that he could not disarm with his sharp mind and even sharper tongue. The person who could ever truly reject him is Roxanne, his childhood friend for whom he harbors love of the most romantic variety. Too afraid to court Roxanne himself, he chooses to use the han...

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: Samaritan

It's only in a landscape like today's, one where the superhero myth is so deeply intwined in the pop culture fabric, that a deconstructionist superhero movie like Samaritan could feel warranted. There's no shortage of contemporary examples from which to learn. This makes the film's ultimate stumble all the more mysterious and all the more disappointing. The film's premise gives it every chance to be a thoughtful piece within the superhero craze and independent of it. Here's a story about a boy lacking a strong male role model just hovering above poverty and wondering where the heroes have gone. All the while, his community teeters on disarray and anarchy as the powers that be neglect the larger population. It's the kind of world where no one's expecting a hero, but the hopeful among us sure are hoping for one. Thirteen-year-old Sam thinks he's found the answer to his prayers in his aged neighbor, Joe. After witnessing a few displays ...

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...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 7 Best Songs Written for (Non-Musical) Film

This being a blog about film, I generally keep my observations focused on movies, but today we're going to expand the menu just a little. Most of the stuff I write here, I write with some film music playing in the background, usually a film score or a Broadway cast recording (right now I'm on a bit of a Raul Esparza kick, everyone deserves to hear his rendition of "Come to Your Senses" from this year's Miscast concert). I've been doing this for a while, yet I only recently had the idea to actually write about some of the songs that inform my writing process. The songs I can never get out of my head. To keep things mostly on-brand, I'm going to be writing about music that features in films, preferably songs written for their respective movies. Just to make things interesting (and to keep the door open for a future installment ... maybe ) I'm choosing to restrict the songs listed here to those written for non-musical films, and I'm cho...

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