This year, I've had the distinct feeling that this blog is winding down. Even by the tiny numbers I would usually get, my readership has been especially small this year, going from 3-4 dozen per post to now 1-2 dozen, and I don't get as many comments (either on social media or on the blog site itself) as I used to. I've never been in it with the intent to gain a huge audience, but perhaps the waning readership is indicative of my own waning interest in this project. Life as a teacher plus father of two is pretty full right now, and I'm having less and less time (and energy) to devote to doing my Prog series, incidental non-review posts, summer projects, and even just non-movie write-ups in the weekly reviews posts, essentially turning the blog into just an outlet for me to repost my Letterboxd reviews, which makes me wonder what the use is of maintaining this site as well as my Letterboxd account. Furthermore, one email subscription option after another has fallen through, which means that the small circle of people who follow this through email alerts haven't been able to get updates in a while, and I'm not even sure if they're reading anymore.
I'm not ending the blog—not right now, anyway. But I do think that the blog's end is probably on the horizon. I'm not sad about it; this year marks a whole decade of this blog, and that's a good run. My life in 2023 is monumentally different from my life in 2013, and while a lot of those differences have made my life better, it's getting to the point where they've made it less conducive to blogging. If/when I decide to end this blog, it'll be a with a sense of satisfaction and finality on my part. I'm happy to have maintained this site for as long as I have.
Anyway, all of this is a long, mostly unrelated preamble to my annual favorite movies list, but it felt appropriate to have this kind of state-of-the-union in a space where I usually put year-end reflections. Here's the list, though. As always, I didn't get a chance to see everything, and not everything I wanted to see came to Knoxville, etc. But as of this writing, here's my favorites of 2022!
Favorite Movies
1. The Fabelmans
2022 has been marked by a few films that stick out for their old-school technical craft (and I do mean that as shade toward the majority of Hollywood releases, which are less technically competent than the output of any era of Hollywood I can think of), but among the Top Guns and Avatars, this one rises to the top of that already rarefied crew by being suffused with fascinating, knotty self-critique. A late-career home run from our boy Steve.
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I hope Jordan Peele continues to make weird, ungainly, mad-scientist-brained movies until the theaters collapse.
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Real "makes ya think" cinema of the highest order. Cate Blanchett gives the performance of her career.
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Robert Eggers goes full pulp with this viking revenge saga, but Eggers is fundamentally incapable of not being a little nerdy weirdo, so it's also got the shaman Willem Dafoe stuff, which is what truly elevates this.
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The funniest bummer of the year.
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The most conventionally exciting movie Steven Soderbergh's made in a while, and I do love a good bit of conventional excitement. There have been a lot of paranoid, claustrophobic thrillers this year, many of them good, but this one's my favorite.
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Speaking of conventional excitement: who doesn't want to see a bunch of British colonizers get devoured by an army of jungle animals? Just good, clean family entertainment.
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It's been marketed as a horror movie, and there are a few spooky things about it. But mostly it's a reflection of what digital life is like. Do you spend too much time online? You might feel seen by this movie.
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This was a weirdly good year for stop-motion films released on Netflix, and this was without a doubt the best of them. I can't believe it's taken this long for Guillermo del Toro to make a stop-motion movie.
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Cronenberg doing his thing. "Surgery is the new sex" is the movie quote of the year, maybe?
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Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting
Honorable Mention: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande—A lovely little movie about a woman exploring her sexuality as she approaches old age. I didn't hear many people talking about this movie except for the (fair) critiques about how it deals with sex work, but it really is nice.
Best Action: Avatar: The Way of Water—Of the two "its last act is one big action setpiece, and it's the best part of the movie by far" films released this year, Avatar absolutely eats Top Gun's lunch.
Stop-Motion Film Released on Netflix Runner-Up: Wendell and Wild—The truly strange, bursting-at-the-seams brainchild of Henry Selick and Jordan Peele. Glad there's still room, at least in the streaming ecosystem, for weirdos like these fellas.
Jordan Peele Makes a Weird, Ungainly, Mad-Scientist-Brained Movie Runner-Up: Wendell and Wild—See above. Good year for Netflix animation; good year for Jordan Peele.
"Here's Another Good Animated Movie Released on Netflix, WTF Is Happening" Award: Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood—Richard Linklater rotoscopes his childhood, and the results are a fun little boomer dream.
Look, I Just Need to List Out a Couple More Good Animated Movies Released on Netflix This Year, Because It's Unbelievable to Me How Many There Were: My Father's Dragon and The House—Netflix has always been a secret bastion of interesting animation, but my god, they outdid themselves this year.
Pixar Corner: Turning Red—Maybe the most unfairly treated movie of the year, what between the disingenuous conservative moral panic and Disney's unceremonious dumping of it on Disney+. Release your best movies in theaters, you goons!
"What Are Some Other Paranoid, Claustrophobic Thrillers?" Award: Barbarian—Dances all over the "is this a horror movie or a thriller?" line, but whatever this is, I had a great time with it. A couple months later, and I'm still thinking about Justin Long singing "Riki Tiki Tavi."
"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: X / Pearl—Seriously, what a year for Mia Goth. Easily the best thing about Ti West's duo (soon to be turned trilogy) of horror pastiche.
Unexpectedly Hilarious Award: The Batman—I dunno, I laughed a lot here. Colin Farrell in particular is very funny, but also, I just think the "The" in the title is funny.
"Never Dully with Sully" Award: Bones and All—People seem somewhat divided on Mark Rylance's performance here as the doddering Southern gentleman cannibal, but I thought he was great. One of the interesting tensions in Bones and All is the way it is constantly teetering on the edge of being something much goofier and pulpier than it presents itself as, and Rylance is a key part of complicating that balancing act.
Best Joke: Everything Everywhere All at Once—I just laughed so stupidly hard every time this movie wrapped back around to Raccacoonie.
Best Ending Credits: White Noise—I wish my grocery store played LCD Soundsystem over the PA.
Worst Movie of the Year: Lightyear—A completely cynical piece of trash and the more dire signs of Disney/Pixar's decline yet. Thank goodness we also got Turning Red this year, or the thought of Pixar's future would be unbearably bleak.
Best Non-2022 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2022: The Long Day Closes—Aching, personal filmmaking. Terence Davies at his absolute best.
Reading your blog is still part of my Sunday routine every week. I don't see TV commercials the way I used to, so I often have no idea a movie is coming out (or what that movie is) until I read it here. Like "The Fabelmans"-- I hadn't heard one word about that, and I had no idea it was Spielberg. That makes me feel like some kind of idiot or hermit, but it is somehow my reality haha. Anyway, I totally would respect the decision to scale back or stop entirely, given your difficult full time job teaching and the (wonderful) demands of having two young kids, but I would also miss reading every week. Hope y'all are doing well!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you're still reading! I don't think you're an idiot--I've noticed that film advertising has recently gotten pretty bad in terms of their ability to broadly message basic information like "here are familiar names associated with this movie" and "here's when this movie is coming out." I'm glad I can fill in those gaps for you, haha. Hope y'all are doing well, too!
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