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 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)

Comments

Fine, I Will Review The Percy Jackson Show (again)

I have wondered if I was the only one who thought that "Sea of Monsters" was the weakest of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians pentalogy, but I have seen my reading echoed by other book loyalists. This second installment is perhaps penalized partially because it marks several major junctions in the larger series. This is, for example, the part of the series where the scope of the adventure really starts to enlarge. We know going in that there's an angry, deceased titan out to destroy Olympus, and that he's amassing an army, and so we need a sense that this threat is growing stronger. But this also marks a turning point in how series author, Rick Riordan, chooses to develop his main character. And so, season 2 of the Disney+ television adaptation faces similar crossroads. Season 3 of this show is already filming as we speak, so its immediate future is already spoken for, as far as production goes. But stylistically, this second seas...

REVIEW: MERCY

Everyone who was despairing that Star-Lord and Taser-Face never got their showdown, your moment in the sun has come. In MERCY , out this weekend, future Los Angeles has adopted a justice system in which criminals are weighed before an AI judge. Those on trial are allowed the full disposal of public surveillance and digital footprints in order to clear their name within a 90-minute timeframe. And this is the situation in which recovering alcoholic and policeman, Chris Raven, (Chris Pratt) find himself as he is charged with the murder of his wife, and he is left to make his case before the commanding Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) or face execution. The movie's buoyed up by a respectable ensemble cast, including Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Kylie Rogers, Jeff Piere, and Chris Sullivan. Pratt and Ferguson are both up to the task, but we've also seen more memorable work from both of them. The movie knows ...

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Coming into Mickey 17 having not read the source material by Edward Ashton, I can easily see why this movie spoke to the sensibilities of Bong Joon Ho, particularly in the wake of his historic Academy Award win five years ago. Published in 2022, it feels like Ashton could have been doing his Oscars homework when he conceived of the story--a sort of mashup of Parasite , Aliens , and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times . Desperate to escape planet earth, Mickey applies for a special assignment as an "expendable," a person whose sole requirement is to perform tasks too dangerous for normal consideration--the kind that absolutely arise in an outer space voyage to colonize other planets. It is expected that Mickey expire during his line of duty, but never fear. The computer has all his data and can simply reproduce him in the lab the next day for his next assignment. Rinse and repeat. It's a system that we are assured cannot fail ... until of course it does. I'll admit my ...

REVIEW: West Side Story

Slight spoiler, the first shot of Steven Spielberg's West Side Story adaptation opens on a pile of rubble, a crumbled building wrecked to make way for new development. I amusedly wondered if this was maybe an accidental metaphor, a comment on this new adaptation of the stage show supplanting the legendary film version in 1961. There's not a lot about the 2021 film adaptation that deviates largely from the blueprint of the 1961 film or the stage musical on which it is based. That blueprint, of course, being the romance between two teenagers on opposite ends of a gang rivalry in 1950s New York. A few songs get swapped around, the casting is more appropriate, but there's no gimmick. We have to assume, then, that at the end of the day, Spielberg just wanted to try his hand at remaking a childhood favorite. Filmmakers, take note. Follow Spielberg's example. When revisiting an old text, you don't need a gimmick. Good taste is enough. ...

The Belle Complex

As Disney fandom increasingly moves toward the mainstream, the discussions and questions that travel around the community become increasingly nuanced and diverse. Is the true color of Aurora's dress blue or pink? Is it more fun to sit in the back or the front on Big Thunder Mountain? Is the company's continued emphasis on producing content for Disney+ negatively impacting not only their output but the landscape for theatrical release as a whole? However, on two things, the fandom is eternally united. First, Gargoyles was a masterpiece in television storytelling and should have experienced a much longer run than it did. Second, Belle's prom dress in the 2017 remake was just insulting. While overwhelmingly successful at the box office, the 2017 adaptation is also a bruise for many in the Disney community. Even right out the gate, the film came under fire for a myriad of factors: the auto-tuned soundtrack, Ewan McGregor's flimsy accent, the distracting plot ...

REVIEW: SCARLET

There isn't a story on the books that can't somehow trace its genealogy to the works of William Shakespeare. Such is the nature of inspiration and archetype. But the latest film from anime auteur, Mamoru Hosoda, is almost an adaptation of, rather than a homage to, Shakespeare's Hamlet , carrying over character names and even a few iconic lines. Yet it's not what Scarlet borrows from Shakespeare that gives the story its weight, but what it adds--and I'm not just talking about the giant thunder dragon in the sky. The Prince of Denmark in this story is reimagined as Princess Scarlet. This film sees her failing in her quest to avenge her father and being doomed to wander in some sort of desolate afterlife. Her only consolation is the idea that she might find her treacherous uncle somewhere in this wasteland and see her vengeance fulfilled in this world. But her quest sees her crossing paths with someone else, a medic from a ...

REVIEW: ZOOTOPIA 2

Any follow-up to the 2016 masterpiece, Zootopia , is going to be disadvantaged. Cinema was still a year ahead of Jordan Peele's "Get Out" when Disney released one of the most articulate explanations of race, allyship, and accountability ever put to film. Now that everyone knows how good, even "timely," a Disney pic can be, how do you surprise everyone a second time? The insights in this sequel won't spur any new chapters in your sociology 101 textbook. Though honestly, neither was the deflection of white saviourship that novel back in 2016. We more or less knew how racial profiling and biases played out in the landscape. What surprised many of us (and validated the rest of us) was the idea that these ideas could be articulated so eloquently in a children's film. It seems that the studio tried the same thing here with Zootopia 2 that it did with Frozen II six years ago. I think a lot of people wanted that m...

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...

A Patch of Blue: Sidney Poitier, Representation, and The Virtue of Choice

Way, way back (about this time last year), I premiered my piece on the responsibility that younger viewers have to engage with older cinema --specifically the films of old Hollywood. There was a lot of ground that I wanted to cover in that essay--literally an entire era of filmmaking--so most of my talking points had to be concise, which is not how most writers prefer to discuss a thing for which they have passion enough to design and maintain their own blog. There is a bounty of discussion when it comes to film history and the people who made it. Today I'd like to take the opportunity to dig a little deeper into one such island: that of legendary actor and trailblazer, Sidney Poitier. Dwandalyn Reece, curator of the performing arts at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, described Poitier , “He fully inhabits both sides of that personality, or those tensions, of being a Black person i...

REVIEW: Disenchanted

Once Upon a Time, Disney's Enchanted reminded us that deep down inside, even the most cynical of us was pining for a fairy-tale. In those days, a musical rom-com featuring hand-drawn animation and overtly referencing films of the Disney animated catalog actually felt novel, even daring. But today is a different climate. Disney fairy-tales are unambiguously a popular presence in modern pop culture. They are regularly referenced, discussed, and abused both by their parent company and the public at large. Any sequel to such a film wouldn't have the same opportunity to feel revelatory or groundbreaking. But this proves to be an inadequate defense for this movie's shortcomings. Turns out, you can sing about fairy-tales for two hours without earnestly exploring what makes them so special to begin with. I say shortcomings deliberately because there's not a lot that's actively wrong with this movie. Almost everything about this movie could have worked if it had been pr...

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