#genre fuckery at it’s finest

[thebrainofmae]

Fat Ham is an insanely good play on so many levels but the thing that really makes me go insane about it is the way it manages to so brilliantly and successfully take Hamlet, one of the most famous tragedies of all time, and give it a happy ending simply by having the characters say “I know what play we’re in, I know what the audience is expecting, but actually I don’t owe them shit and I’m not gonna do this.”

The last fucking line (before the little epilogue) is juicy (hamlet) turning to the audience and saying “Well…I hope you don’t mind if we carry on.”

I mean !

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior’s Top 25 of 2019

This was such a good year for movies. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The amount of good or great movies and the amount of variety among the better movies made it hard to know where to cut off my annual top 25 and to which movies to give “Honorable Mentions” instead. As has always been the case, I make an effort to see the better movies two or sometimes even three times before deciding where they place, and that was the case with most of the movies below.

There have been quite a few years where I haven’t rewarded a single movie a 10 out of 10, and this year, there are FOUR! Even so, 2019 will forever be known as the year I started to appreciate and even love the music of Elton John and George Michael, although only one of those movies made my list.  Just a reminder that this is a list of my favorite movies of the year and it’s based solely on my own opinion. If you don’t like one of the movies on my list that’s fine – it’s your prerogative – but if there’s something you may have missed and you check it out based on inclusion here and you like it, then please let me know!

Also, if you just want to peruse everything that I wrote this year, you can find all of it at my Weekend Warrior Blog.

25. Wild Rose (NEON)

I’d be remiss if I ignored this wonderful film directed by Tom Harper that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2018 but finally was released this year. It stars Jessie Buckley as a Glaswegian country singer, a single mother freshly released from prison who just can’t get her act together, even though she is a terrific singer with a real passion for country music.  Buckley is such a revelation in the role, and I just loved the songs written for the movie, and I’m not even remotely a fan of country music. (So I guess that’s a third type of music I began to appreciate this year.)

24. Fighting with my Family (U.A. Releasing)

Another terrific and nearly forgotten film this year was this wrestling biopic about WWE superstar Paige, as played by Florence Pugh (she’s gotta be this year’s actor of the year, right?). Written and directed by Stephen Merchant and co-produced by Dwayne Johnson, Paige’s story really is pretty fantastic, as you follow her trying to make her way in the WWE where she’s nothing like the other women wrestlers. The movie was warm and funny and not at all what you’d expect from a WWE Films movie, but it’s definitely the studio’s finest work to date.

MY REVIEW

23. Plus One (RLJE Films)

One of the nicer surprises out of Tribeca this year was this twist on the rom-com by filmmakers Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer, starring Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine as two best friends who decide to attend all their weddings together to act as wingmen to help each other hook up. It’s a plan that works out well at first but starts to falter once they realize they might have feelings for each other. It’s classic rom-com territory but the movie is hilarious (Erskine is an absolute gem!) and you’re on board even when it goes to somewhat predicable places. (Some of the wedding speeches given by Jon Bass, Beck Bennett are particularly funny.) This is a movie that I’m bummed I haven’t had a chance to see a second or third time, as I’m sure it might be higher up on my year end list if I had.

22. Spider-Man: Far from Home (Sony)

You can’t argue when the fans are right but when Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios came on board to produce Spider-Man: Homecoming, it actually was pretty good and you had to have confidence they could make a sequel just as good or better. There was a lot to love about this one including the decision to take Spider-Man out of New York, which makes sense when you realize all the space-faring he’d been doing in Infinity War and Endgame. Then there was Jake Gyllenhaal as “Mysterio,” a fun and twisty take on the classic Spider-Man villain that also allowed director Jon Watts to play with some of the ideas introduced in Avengers: Endgame, while also giving Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury more to do than he has in many movies. I can’t wait to see what Tom Holland’s Spider-Man gets up to next!

MY REVIEW

21. One Cut of the Dead (Shudder)

The Japanese META zombie movie that’s been winding its way through the genre festival circuit for most of the past year, it’s an amazing bit of mind-fuckery where you think it’s merely about a zombie attack on a low budget movie but as we learn after the first 30 minutes, there’s a lot more going on than what seems… and that’s about all I can say, because it’s the kind of movie that’s more amazing when you go in not knowing what’s happening. And yet, you probably should know that there’s a lot more going on since the first 30 minutes on their own aren’t very good.

20. The Irishman (Netflix)

Don’t get me wrong. I really liked and appreciated Martin Scorsese’s reunion with De Niro and Pesci, as well as their pairing with Al Pacino to tell the story of the man responsible for the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, but just not as much as other movies. Granted, Scorsese continues to be one of the best filmmakers working today but it did feel like he and De Niro were returning to familiar and popular territory to try to claim back their cinematic throne. I guess it worked, because The Irishman is a great film, and heck, I’d watch it a thousand more times on Netflix if I didn’t have other things to watch.

MY REVIEW

19. Little Women (Sony)

I just wrote about Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott last week, and I’m probably more surprised by most about how how much I loved this movie, maybe even more than Lady Bird. Those performances by Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Timothée Chalamet just makes this film so wonderful at times and heartbreaking at others. It’s always been a great story but Gerwig found an original way into it that made it a wonderful follow-up to Lady Bird.

18. Sword of Trust (IFC Films)

I’ve been a Lynn Shelton stan for a number of years now, mostly from Your Sister’s Sister, but I generally like much of her work, whether it’s all improvised like that one and Humpday, or scripted like her pairing with Jay Duplass for Outside In. This one was really special, as it paired her with her Glow star Marc Maron and a trio of really great actors to bounce off of, including Jillian Bell and Michaela Watkins (from the almost equally great Brittany Runs a Marathon), as well as Jon Bass. The interaction and improvisation between these four actors as they deal with a sword from the Civil War with a controversial past makes this one of Shelton’s more entertaining movies, deserving of its placement in my year-end list.

Thoughts from My Column

17. Good Boys (Universal)

You’ll notice that I have quite a few comedies on my Top 25 this year, and that shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone who has read my reviews over the years. I love comedies and I love to laugh, and this high concept comedy about three 6thgraders, one of them played by Jacob Tremblay, just cracked me up so much. No surprise that it’s from the mega-comedy-kings Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who produced this movie from the team of Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, who are best known for “The Office” and a number of not-so-great comedy hits like Bad Teacher. Like Booksmart (see below), this one involved a fairly simple all-in-day quest by the three main characters but it led to some absolutely hilarious situations. Totally reminded me of myself when I was their age. Can’t wait to see what Brady Noon and Keith L. Williams get up to next as they’re amazing.

16. Late Night (Amazon)

While Mindy Kaling’s feature film might have come out of the whole SJW virtue signaling movements that surfaced post-Trump, her movie loosely, based on her own experiences working on the staff at a late night show, was a beautifully insightful look into the business. It starred Emma Thompson as veteran late night host Katherine Newbury, who is forced into diversifying her writing crew by hiring the less-than-experienced Molly (Kaling’s character). Over the next few months, Molly tries to make her way through the ins and outs of writing for late night, dealing with sexism and even some racism, even from Newbury.  Unlike the recent Bombshell, this is a comedy and both Kaling and Thompson were both terrific, to the point that it was a bummer that Amazon decided not to give this any sort of awards push by sending out screeners with some of their other movies.

MY REVIEW

15. Peterloo (Amazon)

While I’ve been a fan of filmmaker Mike Leigh almost as long as I’ve been writing about movies, I always seem to be in the minority when I’m not as into some of the movies my fellow critics love (like Mr. Turner), but this amazing movie about the political climate of England in the 16thCentury and the violence spurred on by a peaceful protest is an amazing bit of writing/directing by the British master. This is another movie that I wish got a lot more attention because the writing and cast were so good, and it just seemed to come and go without much fanfare. A real shame.

MY REVIEW

14. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Sony)

I probably won’t have too much to add about Tarantino’s movie beyond my earlier review, but this is a movie that I liked quite a bit the first time and even more the second time I saw it.  It’s just a fun portrait of Hollywood in 1969 through the eyes of a filmmaker who was six years old at the time. The performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie drove this film about what it was like trying to make a living as an actor in the climate of the late ‘60s with peace and love… and brutal murder in the form of the Manson Family. And yet, Tarantino found a way to give the Sharon Tate story a happy ending. Go figure.

MY REVIEW

13. Pain and Glory (Sony Pictures Classics)

Pedro Amodovar has been a bit hit or miss in recent years, so seeing him reunite with his regulars Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz to write his best (and possibly most personal?) screenplay to date made Pain and Gloryone of the year’s nice surprises. Despite doing a lot of questionable movies in recent years, Banderas once again proved his worth as an actor, giving a performance as a has-been director that hopefully will get him his very first Oscar nomination.

12. First Love (Go West USA)

Another filmmaker whose work I’ve loved but who has also made some real dogs is Japan’s Takashi Miike. His latest take on the crime genre ended up being one of his best movies in twenty years. It may even be better than Audition, which celebrated its 20thanniversary this year. It’s a simple story of a young Japanese boxer who encounters a young woman who has been sold into sex slavery, but in helping her to escape, they get caught up in a gang war that includes some of the craziest characters to ever appear in a Miike movie. But as the title says, this is a love story more than anything, and that helped Miike prove that he has not gone soft, but still knows what it means to be human.

11. The Two Popes (Netflix)

I just wrote about this dramatic two-hander, written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God), last week, after putting it off for far too long. (It’s hard to get inspired to write reviews of movies when you’re not being paid to do so, let me tell you.) It’s an amazing film about the relationship between Popes Benedict and Francis, as played by Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. While you wonder how McCarten researched a movie between two very private public figures, neither of whom have written about this meeting, this is another great film from Netflix this year that’s proving that the studio is not going away and it’s going to produce quality films as great as the big boys.

10. Avengers: Endgame (Marvel Studios)

It shouldn’t be too big a surprise that a Marvel movie has made my top 10, as there have been others, like last year’s Ant Man and the Wasp, Iron Man, Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy. Oddly, only one of the three Russo Brothers movies made my list – Captain America: The Winter Soldier – but with Avengers: Endgame, they managed to create a culmination of everything that’s come before but also made a Marvel movie that is the most like the Avengers comics I love, even to the point of having various members going off on their own missions. I’ve seen this movie three or four times now, and I still love some of the big moments like Captain America stating, “Avengers Assemble!” (finally) and this more than made up for Infinity War, which was good but not great.

9. Waves (A24)

A rather late addition to my year’s best is the new movie from Trey Edward Schutts, which delivered another amazing performance by Kelvin Harrison, Jr, who was also fantastic as the little-seen drama, Luce. The energy Schutts gives the movie with the use of music is fantastic, but it’s just an interesting character portrait that halfway through, throws you for a major loop before switching gears to follow the characters played by Lucas Hedges and the equally talented Taylor Russell. And then on top of that, you have Sterling K. Brown giving a moving performance as Harrison and Russell’s characters, who just doesn’t know how to deal with what’s going on with his family. There have been some great teen coming-of-age dramas over the years but Waves is one for the ages.

8. Book Smart (UA Releasing)

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut has been compared both favorably (and sometimes unfavorably) to a female Superbad, but I think a better comparison would be a modern-day Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Like Good Boys, it was a single night movie where two best friends (Beanie Feldstein, Kaitly Dever) decide to spend their last night in high school rebelling against their overly studios nature by going out to a party and have fun. What happens to them and the crazy characters they interact with makes this one of the funniest movies of the year. What was really amazing, besides the entire cast, was that I could watch this movie and see stuff that would have happened in my own high school days (which was more in the Ridgemont High days), and to see that high school just doesn’t change despite the technology and all the different standards and morals that come along.  Wilde is one filmmaker who I can’t wait to see what she does next and same for her entire cast. I’ve been saying since seeing this that I’d love to see Wilde do another movie with the exact same cast, all of them playing different characters, as I think we’ll see that these actors can do anything.

7. Yesterday (Universal)

Here’s a surprise for you all, but again, if you realize how many Danny Boyle movies have been in my top 10 over the years, you’ll know what a big fan I am of the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Teaming him with Richard Curtis for a high concept comedy where the world has forgotten the Beatles’ music and a young busker named Jack (Himesh Patel) who remembers them starts to make a career for himself by claiming the music as his own. I loved the lead, but it was especially his friendship/romance with Lily James’ Ellie Appleton that made me love this movie enough to put it in my top 10.

6. Marriage Story (Netflix)

While I really appreciated Noah Baumbach’s latest movie quite a bit when I first saw it at the New York Film Festival back in September, it was my rewatch on Netflix more recently that really made me appreciate what Baumbach has accomplished after nearly twenty years making movies. Granted, the movie might be seen as a bit of a downer, but you know what? Sometimes, I have to even out all the laughs and humor with something more serious.  Having a friend who went through a (far less litigious) divorce with a small child, I couldn’t help but thinking how much worse it could have been. As much as this was about Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson’s characters and the change in their relationship, it was a good lesson in how ugly things can get when lawyers get involved with Baumbach having a powerful trio in Laura Dern, Ray Liotta and the wonderful Alan Alda in those roles. This created a beautiful bookend to Baumbach’s earlier film The Squid and The Whale, based on his parents’ divorce, but this didn’t seem autobiographical as much as it showed the work of a mature filmmaker who has created his most personal and best work.

5. Knives Out (Lionsgate)

Speaking of dysfunctional family relationships, Rian Johnson’s look at the death of a wealthy mystery author’s (played by Christopher Plummer) and how his greedy family might be responsible, as investigated by Daniel Craig’s “gentleman detective” Benoit Blanc and the author’s maid, played by Ana de Armas. Besides putting a clever a spin on the ensemble whodunnit typified by the work of Agatha Christie and others, the movie was insanely funny thanks to the cast assembled by Johnson, which was literally an all-star team doing some of their funniest work. Really, there wasn’t a weak link in delivering Johnson’s best screenplay to date, and I look forward to seeing if we’ll get another movie in this realm. As with most of the movies in my Top 10, this is a movie I could see repeatedly and get more out of each time.

MY REVIEW

4. Rocketman  (Paramount)

And here it is, the Elton John movie that made me a fan of Elton John’s music after nearly 40 years of mostly shunning it. What director Dexter Fletcher and star Taron Egerton did in telling John’s story though his music, essentially creating an original jukebox musical on screen was the perfect way to frame the music and story. A lot of people compared this to last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody– which I also liked, mind you – but however much work Fletcher did to finish that movie after Bryan Singer’s firing, this was clearly something he had a clear vision of from beginning to end. This is one of the few movies I’ve seen this year three times, and I’ve been going down the Elton John rabbit hole of music ever since.

MY REVIEW

3. Ford v Ferrari (20thCentury Fox)

When I reviewed James Mangold’s Le Mans racing movie, starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, back in October, I gave it a 9.5/10, and then I saw it again in IMAX and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I took off half a point. The movie is just about perfect.  This is such a great story and the way the action is framed by the relationship between the former’s Ken Miles and the latter’s Carol Shellby with all the other players in the mix just made the movie one that was extremely watchable. And boy, those racing scenes! I haven’t seen action that exciting in years and that includes some of the best recent action movies, including Baby Driver and some of the “Fast and Furious” movies.

MY REVIEW

2. 1917 (Universal)

This was almost my #1 because it’s such a masterful achievement in all aspects of filmmaking that it also earned a rare 10 out of 10. Granted, I’ve been a Sam Mendes fan for many, many years, and he probably has had a few movies in my top 25 over the years, most notably with his second film, The Road to Perdition, which was actually my #1 movie that year. I’ve generally followed Mendes’ career with interest with only one or two movies just not working for me, but with just eight movies in 20 years, it’s amazing that it took that long for Mendes to be back in the Oscar conversation after winning for American Beauty. Frankly, I think this is unequivocally one of the best movies of the year between the screenplay, co-written with Kristy Wilson-Cairns, and the performances by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, making it a movie that’s a wonder to marvel at how they achieved such a powerful cinematic experience to behold.

MY REVIEW

1b. The Biggest Little Farm  (NEON)

As with every year, I like to pick one documentary as my favorite and best of the year, but instead of deciding where it fares among the narrative features, I just make it a tie for #1. My favorite doc of the year was John Chester’s movie about show he and his wife Molly decided to move out to a farm and try to get it work fiscally despite tons of issues, some they could control, others they couldn’t. While I also liked Apollo 11, and I’m sure that will win the Oscar, the way Chester told this story was done in such a wonderful way that it was far more enjoyable and entertaining than most docs. (And as you know, I do LOVE docs!)

1a. The Farewell (A24)

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed me on Twitter, where Lulu Wang’s China-set dramedy has been my profile picture almost since I first saw it in June – I’ve seen it three more times since then, each then having the same emotional reaction. Based on a story from Wang’s own life, it stars Awkwafina as Billi a poor starving New York artist who travels to China when she learns her Nana (the terrific Chinese veteran actor Shuzhen Zhao) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her family has decided not to tell Nana that she may be dying, but they all return to Mainland China under the guise of a wedding for Billi’s cousin, but she knows the truth and has to skirt around while trying to spend possibly her last time with her beloved Nana. The movie was emotional but also quite amusing and entertaining, really showing what life in China is like in a way that was far more personal and human than last year’s Crazy Rich Asians i.e. that was more fantasy than this movie’s reality.

Some More Thoughts

Honorable Mentions: Motherless Brooklyn, Les Miserables, Honey Boy, Long Shot, Toy Story 4, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (As I said above, it was tough to leave a couple of these out of my top 25.)

Top 12 Docs

Not going to write too much about all of these but this was a pretty fantastic year for docs, and if you have a chance to watch any of the below, I would jump on it, especially since some of them barely got a theatrical release.

1. The Biggest Little Farm

2. Apollo 11

3. The Cave

4. WRESTLE

5. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

6. Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love

7. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

8. 63 Up

9. Agnès on Varda

10. One Child Nation

11. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy

12. Love, Antosha

I used to do a TERRIBLE 25 as a separate thing, but this year, I’m just going to list six movies, although a few of these I saw so long ago, I barely remember why they sucked so bad.

In fact, Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s REPLICAS was one of the first movies released in 2019 picked up by Entertainment Studios from TIFF the year before. It’s funny how much love Keanu Reeves got this year for John Wick: Chapter Three and other stuff, but everyone seemed to completely forget that he started the year with this stupid high concept sci-fi thriller about a man obsessed with bringing his family back from the dead.

Also, not many people saw Joe Chappelle’s AN ACCEPTABLE LOSS, which opened just a week after Replicas, but it was a political thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Tika Sumpter that was so poorly written and so boring that I felt bad for Sumpter, who was giving her all.

I probably have said as much as much about Tom Hooper’s CATS as I plan to – you can read my review over at The Beat– but it’s also the most recent of this year’s bad movies, so it’s the freshest on my mind on how awful it was. I’m not going to pile on any further.

It’s been a while since I saw Tim Story’s SHAFT sequel/reboot, and as excited I was to see Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Roundtree back in the role, it’s Jessie T. Usher’s presence as John Shaft, Jr, meant to be the main running gag of the action-comedy that made it one of the worst movies of the year.

Another remake that really didn’t need to happen was this Neil Marshall remake of HELLBOY, and sure, maybe I was a bit biased, having loved Guillermo del Toro’s movies, particularly Hellboy: The Golden Army, but this just wasn’t a good movie as hard as it seemed to try. (You can read my review of that here.)

And yet, that wasn’t even the worst movie of the year. No, that would be Rob Zombie’s 3 FROM HELL, a movie so abhorrible that I couldn’t believe what I was watching. I called it the “worst movie of the year” back in September, and that sentiment didn’t change.

Before we wrap things up, here are some of my favorite records of the year. You may have heard of a few of them. Maybe not others? Most of them should be on Spotify.

1. Smiley’s Friends - In the Sixth Sense

2. Kevin So - S.O.U.L.

3. Pixies - Beyond the Eire

4. The Alarm - Sigma

5. Silversun Pickups - Widow’s Weeds

Best concert of the year? Easy one. Dave Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets with my buddy Jonathan Baylis when former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters shows up to perform one of the classic Pink Floyd songs! Possibly one of the best concert moments of the last couple decades!

That’s it for 2019... onto 2020!