Year in Review: 2024

Let me start this party by admitting ... I really dropped the ball on reviews this year, folks. Not counting my Percy Jackson response, which in practice plays more like one of my essays anyways, there was a six-month gap between reviews with Wish last November and The Fall Guy this May.

More than once during that drought, I took my notebook to the theater and came back with a page full of notes, but for various reasons I was unable to piece together anything. It didn't help also that deliveries this year were comparatively sparse, what with the strikes strangling the production line ... I will try to do better this year. (For those curious, I am also going to try to review the final season of Stranger Things, like I did with the 4th season, when it drops sometime this year. That will all depend on a lot of things, including the method by which Netflix chooses to release these episodes.)

My reviews didn't particularly favor many of the box office hits this year--you'll all have to wait before you hear my opinion on Twisters, I guess--but I do try to remain at least plugged into the pop culture discourse. After all, aside from the "Percy Jackson" show response, my biggest review was for the Wicked film adaptation.

No surprise. I had a lot invested in the success of this movie, not just as a fan of the property, but as a champion of the musical genre. My musical survey essay nearly two years ago was largely in anticipation of this film, which I knew would be a turning point for studios deciding whether or not they were going to keep throwing money at this trickiest of genres. The financial and critical success of this project, then, gives me hope that musicals might live to fight another day, and I eagerly look forward to reviewing Wicked's concluding installment this Thanksgiving.

The essay round-up this year includes:

-Reveling in the Mixed Messages of Miss Congeniality - A thematic dissection of Miss Congeniality and its seemingly contradictory representation of gender dynamics.

-The Banshees of Inisherin: The Death Knell of Male Friendship - A look at The Banshees of Inisherin as a reflection of the complexities in maintaining adult male friendship.

-Finding Nemo: The Thing About Film Criticism ... - A deep-dive into the mechanics of Pixar masterpiece, Finding Nemo, and what it means for the critical attitudes toward film as a whole and animation specifically.

-Nights of Cabiria: What IS Cinema? - A meditation on the function and purpose of the cinematic form as reflected in the 1957 Italian film, Nights of Cabiria.

-The Other Woman: Empathy isn't Easy - An exercise in understanding character likeability as seen in the 2009 independent film, The Other Woman with Natalie Portman.

-We Did Not Deserve The Lion King - A history of the production of Disney's The Lion King and a look at its unusual place within the Disney canon.

-How Guardians of the Galaxy Tricks You into Feeling Things - A retrospective of the intricate emotional dialogue underpinning James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy.

-The Power of the Dog doesn't (want to) Understand Toxic Masculinity: A History and Deconstruction of the Toxic Cowboy - ... this one's pretty self-explanatory.

-A Patch of Blue: Sidney Poitier, Representation, and the Virtue of Choice - A tribute to actor and activist, Sidney Poitier, seen through the lens of his best film, A Patch of Blue.

-Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence - A look at the landmark film in deaf representation, including its historic win for Best Leading Actress from deaf performer, Marlee Matlin.

-My Best Friend's Wedding: Deconstructing the Deconstructive Rom-Com - An exploration of the post-modern attitudes toward the rom-com genre at work in My Best Friend's Wedding.

Identifying which movies are going to earn the spotlight this time around is always half the battle, not because I am lacking for movies I feel strongly about, but because I'm always trying to decide how best to distribute my promotion across branches of the film tree that deserve it most. I'm trying to make it a regular feature to rope in discussion on movies that don't have a lot of coverage. Ideally, indie-films that didn't receive any Oscar noms.

Scarlet Street (1945)

As always, I also try to make regular forays into the world of old Hollywood and give my readers ample opportunity to engage with cinema's long legacy. There have been some developments that have given me more hope for the future of classical cinema (my discovery of TUBI, mostly), but I still feel a significant call to generate more discussion on older films, so expect more of those to come.

Additionally, I'm becoming more interested in discussing films that I think are interesting but not necessarily masterworks. Somewhere between a rave and a rant. Something like my Clash of the Titans essay a few years back. There's tremendous catharsis in writing about something on either end of the spectrum, but to do away with extremes and dial in on the intricacies of a film's delivery, that demands a very refined analytical ability. Learning to deal in the gray, in the nuance, is a key to vivid discourse. Moreover, the film discussion doesn't just live or die on the highest and lowest points. Lots of films deserve discussion.

I call it a battle to identify viable candidates, but that's generally describing the amount of brain power demanded, not the timeline by which it occurs: by mid-January of last year, I had already figured out almost every single essay I was going to write in 2024.

I had a lot of time to prep my "Thor" essay

This ... is not so uncommon. Neither have I found it to be a significant stumbling block in my creative process. I like to leave some surprises for myself, but I'm also learning not to necessarily resist this part of how I work.

I have historically, for example, been very coy about promoting my work too far in advance in order to sidestep any awkwardness that might come up if I end up having to drop a piece in production (that has happened before) that I have already publicly committed to. But this kind of thing has been very rare, which has me wondering if this practice has been so useful after all and has also inspired me to try something new this year.

Knowing that, help yourself to this peek at some highly classified information.

This year's suspects

This is also a year I've given extra thought to what a critic's job even is.

As best as I can put it, a critic ought to be someone who opens your eyes. This should be someone with a good knowledge of the medium's history and linguistics--someone who can actually tell you whether or not what a film is trying to do is novel or even noteworthy. Films are a reflection of life and the cornucopia of worldviews and perspectives that can find their way onscreen, and so ideally your critic knows a thing or two about that as well.

And the goal of criticism isn't necessarily consensus. We all bring our own values and perspective to the game. As a result, two equally qualified critics can have two conflicting reads of the same piece of media--that's part of the fun. The secret of criticism is that you don't actually have to convince anyone to change their colors. You just have to get them see new ones. I really respect film critics who pull that off.

Modern Criticism ...

These things are, of course, hard to measure, hard for writing outlets to anticipate. And so, they reward critics who are not necessarily the best thinkers, but the best at harvesting eyeballs. And so, the ecosystem ends up platforming critics who tell us what we already want to hear. This leads to incurious criticism--dialogue that does not seek to understand the text of the film, but the appetites of the people consuming it. The trouble is, this kind of criticism does not actually serve the audience, nor even the film it is examining, but rather the critic themselves.

Advances like Rotten Tomatoes scores and IMDb's rating system have also shaped the landscape. The goal of the critic becomes to anticipate where the movie's going to land and tailor your review in advance so you're not caught on the wrong end of the YouTube comments. I'm not here to bag on those sites--I especially find a lot of IMDb's features useful for both assembling my writing and my own personal uses as a casual film fan. I just think it's worth reflecting on how the ability to immediately assign a film a numerical value impacts the way films are discussed, and also whether or not there's anything proactive film lovers can do to keep audiences on their toes.

The challenges that face thoughtful film discussion have maybe never been easy, but I also don't think that contemporary film lovers ought to take that as an excuse to shirk from our responsibility to keep the conversation not just alive, but healthy as well.

--The Professor

Kolya (1996)

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The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...

REVIEW: HOPPERS

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An Earnest Defense of Passengers

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

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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 ...

The Night of the Hunter: Redefining "Childlike Innocence"

I n the early 1960s, American professor and psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg developed what is now considered to be a fundamental cornerstone of understanding humans and morality. He introduced a model by which human beings start out determining what is right and wrong based on which course of action elicits the least punishment. Successful movement through this model sees a person gradually becoming motivated by principles , not simple reward or punishment, and Kohlberg anticipated that a person did not achieve this stage until adulthood, if ever. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) This is interesting because t he media likes to cast children as vessels of uncompromised goodness that adults could only ever hope to emulate. T heir purity forms the bedrock of much of American conversation. Because the future hinges upon their innocence, efforts to preserve their unblemished state can go to any length. You can justify any number of actions as long as you are doing i...

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side. Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog, for example, was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland . Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952) Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work, Gods Like Us , “...

Silver Linings Playbook: What are Happy Endings For Anyway?

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave the following words in July of 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre: Nights of Cabiria (1957) “For me, movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.” Ebert had been reviewing films for coming on forty years when he gave that assessment. I haven’t been doing it for a tenth as long. I don’t know if I’ve really earned the right to pontificate in this same manner. But film ...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - Febuary

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